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Other Books by this Author

ALSO BY LORRAINE ADAMS

Harbor

Title Page

Dedication

For Zoe Adams

The Infinite does not burn the eyes that are lifted to him.

EMMANUEL LEVINAS

POTOMAC   SEPTEMBER

1.   WE ARE SHADOW

She heard the air. It sounded like her Mustang on the Interstate. She’d push its tat engine hard for the on-ramp. Dash would vibrate. She’d check mirrors. Trucks were there, scaring her sideways to the shoulder. She’d strain up to speed in the slow lane, flip the blinker to join the faster ones, relax into the drive, and only then would she realize the radio was a ruffle of lost words because the windshield was whistling on high. Air that loud was normal on the ground. Here in the cockpit, it was a sign.

Solar bands, raw dawn beauty, were hours away. Clouds blocked stars. Moon was gone. As for her visor, its night vision just fine on the ground, it’d frizzed out. Green light had gloomed to black. This night, Mary had no horizon.

She checked the head-up display. It said she was at thirty-five thousand feet with her nose tilted two degrees down. So what was the noise?

She toggled up attitude detection. She was pointed to ground at seven hundred miles per hour.

They couldn’t both be right. She moved the stick. Head-up stayed; attitude changed. She was an arrow straight for earth at the speed reserved for sound.

Her forgetting hands went to the grips to eject.

Some checklist came in time to save her. Gloves: she took them off. Helmet. Second was the helmet. Wait. Should she take her helmet off? She strained. Helmet was on, wasn’t it? No. Hadn’t somebody got a face sheared because the helmet was on? Off, would something she’d forgotten to batten blind her? Faceless or blind. Faceless or blind? Blind. Helmet stayed. She pulled out the oxygen, held on to her breath. Store it, store it. Into the compartment under the seat, she shoved and locked tubes. She released the survival gear in the seat kit. That would have broken her back.

She could not find the four-line release for the chute. Fingers and palms were mumbling all over the surfaces near where the release should have been. It was here. It has been here. Here. Here. She was at twenty-five thousand feet. Belts were flapping all over her chest. She hooked. Another she pulled off, couldn’t, and tied it down instead. She tightened the Koch fittings.

If she couldn’t get the four-line to deploy she would never make it. No, sometimes you make it. The odds were just bad. You could make it. Flailing, that was the thing that could kill you.

She pulled down on the grips.

The windblast threw the helmet from her head. Her earplugs disintegrated and flew like buckshot out a shotgun. Two pens in her pocket became stilettos that scored her chin. Her wallet fired through the bottom of her G-suit, along with a water bottle that busted out of a zippered pocket—missiles both. The laces on her boots plastered into the leather; one of them got through to her ankle, making an arabesque wound. Her watch sank into her wrist until the wind whipped it, and her skin, away and into the atmosphere.

One leg was twisting out of its socket in her right hip. Tendons snapped, one, two; another held. She could not feel any of it. In minutes she saw the city below, old houses in rows, the bowed Potomac, memorial stairs lit white beside it.

There was a crash. The night editor saw it at the top of his screen. Before he could open that story, another story arrived.

The first story said inhabitants of the Watergate heard something in the Potomac like the sound of a ship running aground. The second story said a bus smashed a truck in Potomac, the Maryland suburb. An explosion heard for miles wracked this affluent enclave of the nation’s capital just after midnight. Stanley remembered how he had edited a story the night before last, removed enclave. Someone else had excised it from his copy when he was just starting, the youngest reporter of all. Back then he thought the word couldn’t be used because it sounded like “clavicle,” or collarbone, a long bone curved like the italic letter f. Some editors let enclave stand. He’d built a vocabulary without such chiffons. It was a language of straight timber.

It hadn’t made him a newsman. With more than four decades behind him, he was instead a repository, the memory of the newspaper that had judged him wanting. He knew on which Washington street one murder unfolded and another almost did, which lobbyist’s first partner was someone else’s third, how the vote on appropriations changed something in conference when someone was Speaker. He had accumulated, first on spiral-bound paper, then in steel-case Rolodexes, and later on peach index cards in oak recipe boxes, a way of finding who to ask and what had happened and where they’d been and when they’d mattered. The city-states and principalities he’d chronicled knew nothing of him, but his enlarged understanding had made him their defender. Sometimes, he felt like moat and parapet. The attackers were hyperactive reporters, seasoned editors with tin-cup recollections, the paper itself—an organism sensitive to status, especially its own, but deaf to smaller bells.

The final edition had just closed. The last papers were furling out of warehouses many highways from downtown, where he and the copy chief, the last two working, sat tilted to terminals. From his desk his colleague was distant, featureless across a shaken board of careless desks. The air conditioning, a constant in September Washington, was the one sound. Stanley wore a suit vest over a Mexican shirt. His hair was gray tufts—a sun-scuffed baseball cap was on his head.

Stanley felt as if he sat by the sea. His computer screen, where the newswires sent their stories and bulletins and advisories, was his estuary. He spent his nights judging movement on this inlet. He had become, he thought, an honest estimator of depths. To be sure, there were reporters, the best of them fearless divers; he had to admit even the most middling of them reached an underwater he only imagined. But Stanley liked to think he knew more than they. He had learned to see how the actual of the world sometimes became known, and how, most often, disappeared from told life.

He felt those losses, some he even mourned. He relished that the night editor was one of the countable few who decided what was important enough to discuss publicly. Granted, he signified only in those hours after the last edition closed and before the newsroom—the Room—came to its senses, sometime after ten in the morning. Things at night appeared different in morning; night editors were constantly corrected, and it all rushed into the infinite light stream of amending and shading that continued day-in and day-out to give shape to what the outside world called factual. His contribution was not even a fleck of light in the sun blast of that constant making and unmaking of what might be true.

He looked at his screen again. He Googled to see if blogs had it. Nothing came up but pilot video games. He switched back. Now the wire was saying there was a helicopter accident near the Watergate. A noise like a ship in a river had become a bus in a suburb, an explosion in an enclave, and now a helicopter in the Potomac. This time, “aboard were government employees.” He sent the copy chief a message—See the wire on Watergate crash? She messaged—???? Then added—No bodies. As if answering her thought, Stanley saw the wire had sent another take—“Pilot presumed dead.”

She landed in a tree. From it, Mary could see her Viper—now a fire in the river. In the Washington thrillers she had read so many of as a teenager, she would be a saucy woman. And she would not be in a tree. She would have landed in the water, clung to an outcropping of rocks after being battered by the rapids, and somehow managed to get her mirror, the one in the survival gear she had, in truth, jettisoned, and, flicking its light to the sky, been rescued by a sailor. She’d have been piloting a secret mission, but ultimately, because of dirty politicians, nosy reporters, and heart-of-gold detectives, the reader would see she was not what she seemed.

The Coast Guard was a few minutes away. There were automatic relays that brought them when an F-16 went down. She felt her face—slashed but not too deep to fix. Leg felt numb. She looked down. Her heel was where her toes should be.

For as long as she could remember, the only thing she knew was to do what frightened her the most. She was not aggressive, not technically proficient, not physically self-possessed. So she ran to the military, to the men who didn’t want her there, to the women who were nothing like her, to trials that strafed her nature. She wanted to grow out of herself. She wanted to take the coat of appearances given her by birth and burn it away by will. She had a picture of herself in her mind. All that was left of the cloth shawl of circumstance was smoke. She was a naked figure in its haze, coming out of the soft focus to let the storm come hard as it may.

The walls glowed raspberry, the woodwork gleamed cream. At the base of the broad stone mantel was a collection of frayed bellows. Nearby was a Japanese screen hand-painted with rocks and trees. There were easy chairs in celery with a brushed-silk sheen. On the rumpled linen sofa were pillows made from canary damask, a salvaged Colonial quilt, and, needlepointed on the largest pillow, in a russet explosion, a cascade of begonias. One lamp was a royally yellow Chinese jar touched with jade, on top of which sat a pleated ivory shade. For fun, there was a leopard-print ottoman finished with heavy silk-twisted fringe, some strands of which were a little too long, on purpose, to create a sumptuous sensation as they draped on an antique rug the color of dried bamboo.

The dinner party of Mabel Cannon and Don Grady had gotten as far as the first drink. The guests were people known to be known. They presumed they were on the written-about-but-not-actual A-list. It was not called the Social Register. In conversation, if spoken about at all, its peripheral aspirants thought it was called “the circuit.” These guests were lavishly parodied. Unknown to their diagnosticians, they were also people who knew they were satirized. It felt fine to them. Mockery was the living sign of envy.

Mabel had come to see that her husband was almost the last of a time past. No one else was in his rank. He had promoted his home as the place most important conversations occurred, more than in any official location. One guest, whose wife was out of town, had been attending dinner parties here since he was a somewhat young man. Yet he, a historian, had come to think of Mabel Cannon and Don Grady, who’d been so reliantly welcoming to him over the years, as not unlike the European aristocracy before the First World War. It was all crumbling around them. It would never be as it was. It had to end, it would end, and no one believed it ever could end.

But people—having faith in what they had read of power, or had seen of it onscreen, or, most often, believed through the sanction of asides describing it—still came. They averted their eyes and drank up, spoke of things that reinforced what was supposed, wore smiles, stayed late.

The conversation this night was when one war would end and another begin. Don Grady, working on a national-security book, could not speak of events as they unfolded, but only when they were completed. Interest in any event was highest when it was unknown but presumed to be knowable. That was one of the privileges of dining at Mabel Cannon and Don Grady’s: you might be able to divine, through observation of Don’s reaction to a guest’s proffered scenario, what was going on—in that worn expression—behind the scenes. Someone could then say, I was at Grady’s, and when someone said war was coming next week, Grady winced. If war came next week, this moment would be remembered and recounted, proof of Grady’s unimpeachable access to power’s highest balconies. If war did not come next week, the wince would be interpreted as his tut-tutting at the wrong many who could only guess, and badly, the future. As for Don, he was constantly bewildered and had made a profitable art out of masking his confusion. His books were best-selling. He felt despicably lucky. He acted like a bishop.

•  •  •

The copy chief said the wire was reporting casualties on the ground. The body count could be high.—fuck, she messaged Stanley, picking up her phone. Stanley turned to look at his fingernails. The cuticles were thick, and the one on his right thumb was bloody from tearing. He pressed on a flap of skin to stop himself from picking at it. He looked back at the screen. The copy chief had messaged—Adam’s coming in.

Stanley messaged—please—and dialed Adam’s number. Adam’s wife answered. “Oh, hi, Stan,” she said. Stanley had always liked the executive editor’s wife.

“Adam doesn’t need to come in,” he said quickly. There was no need to go slow; Joan grasped events. You couldn’t rile her. She taught damaged children how to hold a fork.

Just as he said the words, the copy chief was messaging—POTUS on board. President of the United States. That acronym was pretension Stanley deplored. Next—Donovan called Adam at home. Donovan, the president’s chief of staff.

“Did Donovan really call?” he asked Adam’s wife.

“Donovan? No,” she said. Her voiced sounded far away.

“Let me talk to Adam,” Stanley said.

“Hold on.”

Stanley waited. He messaged the copy chief—Donovan didn’t call. He typed—take it easy—but let it hang there without sending it.

“Stanley, you still there?” Joan asked. Stanley nodded, forgetting to speak. He had been waiting a long time for Joan to get back to him. She and Adam had been talking much longer than the time it would have taken for Joan to fetch Adam.

“He says he’ll talk to you when he gets there,” she said.

“Right,” he answered. A drama had begun. Stanley couldn’t stop it. He felt winded.

The night editor was, in the ordering of daily journalism, pitied. Stanley Belson, Adam Sanger, and Don Grady had been interns together in the summer of ′71. Adam and Don had risen; Stanley’s dinghy caught a little wind and sank. Stanley’s demise had come because he had been deemed not tough. Stanley’s eyes were blue and delicate and, more often than not, moist. He felt tears were nearby, almost always. His first days as a reporter, alongside Adam and Don, were lessons in facing that nothing mattered as much as he felt it did. Adam was his brother in this—he was not like the others they encountered, reporters or editors made of steel wool, obdurate, abrasive, and useful. Don was one of these others, but, unlike all others, his name, Grady, became a household word. It had always tickled Stanley that the ultimate ring, the outermost circle of achievement, required possessing a name as recognizable as household appliances, brands, or habits. Like Maytag or Hoover, Kleenex or Clorox, tooth brushing or napping, the celebrity was a common, almost comfortable item. Somehow it had come to pass that, in reaching the pinnacle, one entered the domesticated.

Stanley also knew that Don’s aspect had helped his role in life—eyes low on spark, paternal gravel in his voice, his expression a permanent implacability. Stanley had never ceased to be amazed at how looking the part contributed as much as meriting the position. Adam’s eyes were dry as old sand in a corner. He had a look like a crag. The only way anyone might have been able to tell his heart was in a state of pretty much perpetual torment was the way he put his chin in the air. Even that was a bad signal, because it seemed to broadcast self-righteousness. Stanley knew it for what it was. Adam was a conscientious man.

Stanley signed off—they would after all not need him, what with Adam, the White House reporter, and whoever else the copy chief had telephoned. As he got up from his chair, he realized his finger was still staunching his thumb. The pressure was too much, and he’d restarted the seep of blood along the base of the nail. He reached for a tissue on his desk. As he did, he saw that Adam had just appeared in the Room. He was walking toward Stanley. But then the White House reporter waved from the National Desk, and so did the copy chief, and so Adam raised his index finger and scrunched his eyes toward Stanley’s, saying, With you in one minute.

•  •  •

What we think we are, we’re just not,” said Mabel. It was late in the party, a glass of spilled red mopped with white napkins, the cork popping for another bottle.

“How so?” asked an editor at a weekly news magazine. His cheeks were boyish, his skin smooth, his hair—an indistinction of brown—receding. He was, if he stayed in the right company, somewhat feared.

“This is a new time,” Don said. Mabel couldn’t help considering his jaw. “Stolid” was the word for it. When she saw Don, her husband of the last twenty-two years, father of their three sons, her mind went to “jaw” and “stolid” on a conveyor belt. She wondered which words his mind automated toward when he saw her.

“There have been new times before,” the historian had to say.

“So what are we?” asked the editor, rhetorically, through his malaise. How many times could this conversation be had?

“Imperialists. I think that’s obvious to everyone. We don’t even need to talk about it.” This was from a thin woman who played second cello in a chamber ensemble. Mabel thought she was a flipper, a goose, a kumquat of a person.

“You can’t be serious,” said the woman’s husband. He was an economist.

“Partly, partly I am,” the cellist continued. “The CIA is constantly going into other countries, and people die mysteriously because of what we do.”

“You’re so caught up in the details,” her husband said, sounding too kind, as if he had wiped clean the contempt just before he got the gibe spoken. He had to be careful. He could not seem to get ready, even a little, for divorce. A golfer, he was tapping his sun-damaged fingers on a side table. They were mottled, and it wounded him to see it.

It had been too long since the historian had heard anyone with a command of the grand sweep argue the particulars. Mabel had become little more than a provocateur. She used to have thoughts he wanted to hear. He shivered. They had the air conditioning on the highest setting. They always did. It wasn’t even a hot night. It was September, just past Labor Day. His lips felt scaly. His left arm was numb.

“Every day, the paper says who is dying and how many,” said a small lawyer with an exact voice. “But it’s a trickle. Not like Vietnam.”

“A trickle,” the economist agreed. “And all volunteers. No draft.”

“Any number is too much,” said his wife.

“More would have died,” Don was saying to another conversation farther down the table. “The prisoner-of-war camps the Japanese ran during the war—I know a dear friend, a terrific woman, she and her parents were liberated. The Enola Gay was their savior.”

“Our Japanese camps—those, what that was—there was an exhibit by a son of one of the internees. Installation art. I found it powerful,” offered a guest; Mabel thought he was from Los Angeles. He couldn’t seem to get his bearings, even this late in the evening.

“Have you seen the new Holocaust museum in Berlin?” asked the cellist, sensing his constant tottering.

“It’s actually a museum of Jewish history,” said the architect. He felt better.

“Photographs of the GIs liberating the camps,” Don began.

“Remember the St. Louis,” said a smart young writer.

“Roosevelt turned away that ship with ease,” said the historian. “To very little outcry.”

“What ship?” asked the cellist.

“Four hundred thousand Africans,” said the editor, who had not heard the cellist’s question. “Our ambassador to the UN, the grandson of Holocaust victims, did nothing to stop it.”

“I saw the movie, that one about the hotel keeper,” said the architect.

“What about this, this report that came out of Sissy?” Mabel decided to ask. SSCI, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. She needed someone to tell her something about it. Her jibberjash of a column was due tomorrow. “I have calls out all over town about that report. I’m told it’s remarkable.”

“So much of the report is classified,” Don said.

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