Free Due Preparations for the Plague by Janette Turner Hospital Page A

angrier.
    “Let it go, Sam,” Lou says. “Let them be. Let them rest in peace.”
    “I can’t,” Samantha says.
    She wants to show the world photographs that don’t exist. Look at this, she wants to say: my mother’s eyes. These are my mother’s eyes at the moment when Matthew finally stopped crying altogether. And here is something else, she wants to say: here are the eyes of the children all around me, some time later (days later, airports later, negotiations, ultimatums, deadlines later) when we huddled together watching TV—we were crowded on makeshift cots in some vast room, I think it was a high school gym, I know it was somewhere in Germany—forty pairs of eyes, opened wide, unblinking, watching the fate of their parents on one small screen. The plane, before it turned into an underwater sun, before it branched into red and orange coral, seemed to swim in blue haze like a fish. We knew we had been dropped like tiny eggs from its belly, we were vague about when. Pow, pow , one little boy said, pointing his fingers at the screen. No one cried then. All the eyes were so dry, they prickled. There was an eerie silence in the room.
    Here is a photograph, Samantha wants to say to the world. Here is a photograph, never taken, which I would like you to see: the eyes of forty frightened children as they step off the lip of an abyss.

2. Chien Bleu
    Onstage, back in Washington, D.C., Samantha blazes with light and looks into the dark. Chien Bleu is murkily lit. This is a basement dive, thick with perfume and blues and jazz and the hot scent of illicit assignations. Chien Bleu caters to the lower levels, so to speak, but the baseness is exclusive. Inside the Washington Beltway, all sex is costly and the Chien Bleu’s cover price is high. Tables are so close that the waiters must pass between them sideways, trays held aloft. Couple by couple, even one by one, clients sift in past the bouncers. No standees are allowed. In the heat of the overhead spotlight, Samantha dabs at her forehead—she has tissues tucked into her bra—but she can feel her makeup melting on her face. She waits for the sax backstage to well up and flow over the din of conversation and she rides the wave.
    “Hi,” she says huskily, floating herself out on an arpeggio. The soft curl of attention washes back toward her.
    “I can’t sing,” she tells them, almost touching the mike with her lips. “I’m the entr’acte between musical sets.” She makes this sound like a proposition, low and sultry.
    She takes a clasp out of her hair and lets it cascade around her shoulders. She unbuttons the cuffs on her long white sleeves. (She is dressed like a schoolteacher or a librarian: prim white blouse with high collar, a plain gray skirt which is ankle-length and severe.) She gives a quick tug to each sleeve, and as each pulls away from the armhole, she discards it, tossing it into the crowd. “Ahh,” she says languidly. “That feels better.” There is a thin scatter of laughter as men reach for the floating sleeves and then a heightened attentiveness that even in the dark she can feel. She unbuttons her blouse very slowly. From backstage, a riff of cool jazz rises like mist. “No, I don’t sing,” she says. “I’m the stand-up comic.”
    In one quick move, she steps out of blouse and skirt. Underneath, she is wearing a filthy sleeveless undershirt and gray flannel long johns from a Salvation Army bin. “I’m a bag lady,” she says. “I live a few intersections from the Capitol. You know that crossover point where the property taxes plummet and there’s a kind of sea change in the type of human being you see? Someone offered me twenty bucks to strip while the trumpeter pours the spit out of his horn. Throw in a meal and a bed, I told them, and it’s a deal. So here I am.
    “Now the question is,” she murmurs into the mike, stepping down off the stage and feeling her way between the tables, “the question is: whose bed is it going to be?