Eleanor Rigby

  Maybe it was that tiny patch of night sky I saw outside the window while speaking with Ms. Greenaway, but suddenly I’m sleepy. Good night.

  * * *

  I’m not emphasizing enough Jeremy’s worries about his visions leaving him. After he fell from the clouds and landed on my sofa, in between his fevers, we’d sing rock anthems backwards together—or we’d simply watch that wretched wasteland known as daytime TV.

  Time was a touchy subject with Jeremy. Life is finite; Jeremy’s was simply more finite than most. If nothing else, you get used to being alive.

  I sometimes think that having visions is a way of inserting yourself into the future you suspect you’re never going to have. People who see the world coming to an end are simply people who can’t imagine life after they die. If they have to go, they’re going to take the world along with them.

  All that being said, the farmers did exercise their pull on me. One afternoon I visited the library and for Jeremy borrowed books on farming. A silly notion, but one that pleased Jeremy no end. “I was always stuck with farm families, but they never put me to work that way. Funny, because farming is something I might actually enjoy doing.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. A few acres—putting seeds in the ground—watching them grow, flower, bear fruit, turn to soil come fall—I could be so happy doing just that.”

  “Would you miss the city?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “You wouldn’t find it dull?”

  “Nope. Plants make you think of next year. I think that’s why I see the farmers: they have no choice but to think of next year.”

  I confess here that farming has always baffled me—its monotony, the fact that a good farm, properly maintained, ought really never to change from one century to the next. It’s like the opposite of time travel. And imagine going to all that work, work, work, and there’s never a moral to it. No plot. No eureka! Just food production and days. And weather.

  Jeremy said, “Yup, I really want to be a farmer.”

  I kept mum, remembering William at the family’s most recent Easter dinner. He was boozed up and discussing the future career paths of his two TV-soaked rats. “Only losers make decisions when things are bad. The time to rejig your life is the time when it’s seemingly smooth. Use your brief moments of calm to leverage yourself into a next place that’s just as good.” William obviously believes suffering doesn’t make people better, only different. I disagree, but kept my mouth shut.

  * * *

  I suppose it’s morning; I’ve no idea how long I slept. What a cruel wrinkle it is to stick a jet-lagged person into a time-proof room. I suppose I’ll have to figure out the time of day based on the sugar content of the meals they insert through my door. Extra sugar means morning.

  As there’s nothing else to do, I’ll continue with my travel journal.

  Okay: landing.

  Everything seemed normal as we circled the airport. I found myself surprisingly giddy to be on the Continent again, and like most tourists arriving in Europe, I goose-necked out the windows to see the world beneath the wings. Unlike North American landscapes, European landscapes, viewed through an airplane window, resemble well-drawn maps.

  Walking up the jet ramp into the terminal, I immediately knew it was a baking hot afternoon in Frankfurt. Almost as quickly, I could tell that the terminal’s interior had minimal air conditioning to combat the heat.

  We hiked for ten minutes to Immigration, which quickly processed us. Once into the terminal proper, I asked a staffer which gate held my flight to Vienna. I was told to check the screen every fifteen minutes for updates—a computer malfunction in the morning had slowed down the airport’s control towers, and the domino effect delayed almost all subsequent flights. People who normally might not be flustered found their resolve vanishing as they fanned themselves with scuffed boarding cards and sweat-smudged copies of the International Herald Tribune. The men were growing stubble, while the women had shiny skin. It seemed as if every junior soccer team on earth was being routed through Frankfurt. Young people were sleeping in every nook and corner. It was as if the airport’s designers looked into coach class and said, “Hey! Let’s create the architectural version of this!” Shame on the airlines.

  Fortunately, I had access to the first-class lounge. Through a sleek aluminum door into a haven of refrigerated pleasures—plush furniture, silk fabric walls that loaned the space a muted silence, trays of sandwiches as might be found at a wedding, and a large, polished chrome bar. It became very easy to forget the cattle herds outside. I took a shower, put on a new blouse and tried to forget that I’d been up for almost twenty-four hours. I sat on a lovely plush sofa and nibbled at a ham sandwich from the food area. That was when I noticed all of the police and fire vehicles flooding the Tarmac. Even someone who’s spent almost no time in airports could tell that something was up. Like everybody else, visions of terrorism filled my mind.

  Wait …

  A hard-boiled egg, a chocolate cookie and a plastic cup with room-temperature coffee have arrived in my cell. Tea time?

  * * *

  So, as I was noting, the Tarmac swarmed with emergency vehicles, while an internal alarm sounded in the hallways outside the lounge. We in the lounge stood up, stared at each other as if we knew each other, and then looked to the attractive young man and woman at the lounge’s door. They were obviously unaccustomed to what was happening, and were fielding phone calls while shielding their other ear from the general din.

  German instructions boomed from speakers cocooned within the silk walls. An older couple bolted for the lounge’s door, but the two staffers at the desk blocked them, using their bodies as barricades, saying that it was safer to remain inside.

  “Let us out.” The would-be escapees were Americans, obviously retirees.

  “No. We have been instructed that you are safer here in this lounge.”

  I’m sure the word went like a nail through everybody’s brain. Safer?

  “What’s happening out there?”

  “We are not at liberty to tell you.” Even under duress, the Germans used perfect English.

  A crowd formed at the door. The first man, the American, brushed past the airline’s counter woman and opened the door just enough for us inside to witness a mass evacuation through the sliver crack in the door: squeals and charging masses of travellers running as if from a Terminator. The American man said, “Holy—” before a black leather glove came down on his carotid, while another set of gloves pushed him back into the lounge anteroom. I saw the black barrels of several rifles.

  Outside the lounge window, an Aer Lingus 767 and a LanChile craft were being evacuated using wheeled dollies and yellow inflatable slides. Strange reaction, but I thought the slides looked like fun. Mercedes vans, of which there were now nearly a hundred, were whisking people away from the vicinity of the lounge. Everything seemed to involve taking people away from where we were. The wife of the American man was hysterical and tried to break the triple-glazed windows with a blond maple chair. I went to stop her and, as I did, saw sharpshooters on the terminal’s roof.

  That was when a team of twenty men in riot police gear, armed with Kevlar shields and flanked by four German shepherds, smashed in through the lounge doors. They charged directly at me, and judo-chopped me in my own carotid artery. I fell to the floor, whereupon my hands were bound behind my back with plastic strip handcuffs. I was hog-tied and carried outside into the emptied terminal. I had no idea what any of the men were saying, but they were in German military outfits and didn’t seem in the least like terrorists. They were well organized and superbly trained.

  The whole sequence, from my first biting into my sandwich up to total evacuation of the airport and my capture, was maybe five minutes. Aside from the melodramatic judo chop to my carotid and that first minute or so that I was hog-tied, the German police or soldiers, or whatever they were, were gentlemanly. Nobody said a word as they marched me out of Terminal T
wo, abandoned travel gear everywhere—carry-on bags, baby carriers, designer shopping bags, lunches, datebooks. I remember one of those little blue carts that senior citizens ride on. It had been hastily shoved into an alcove near a currency exchange booth, bleeping away. One of the Germans went over and smacked it on the dashboard, at which point the silence in the terminal was complete.

  We marched out into the Foreign Arrivals traffic area, where there were no cars, and where the heat was crinkling the airport’s buildings into desert visions. There was no traffic noise, and there were no planes visible or audible in the sky, or any wind. We might as well have been in a Manitoba wheat field.

  I was shown into an armoured van, a soldier on each side of me and three opposite me. None of them said a word. After a few minutes of driving, someone knocked from the front and we stopped. Another soldier was added to our vehicle, and that’s when I saw the sign saying Morfelden.

  A few minutes later we pulled into a garage, where I was escorted to my solitary confinement cell. I did the math: from the ham sandwich to solitary confinement took inside of a half-hour.

  And aside from the jittery Ms. Greenaway, that’s the story of my incarceration. I was responsible for the total evacuation of one of the world’s biggest airports in the middle of the day during peak travel season. Me!

  * * *

  I’ve watched enough TV crime shows and movies to know what was coming next: a brightly lit interrogation room. One man interviewed me while five other men, their roles unknown to me, watched from their positions along the rear wall. The only thing that was different from TV or film was a platter of gingerbread cookies atop a paper doily resting on a little table.

  My interrogator was a thin man who seemed more like a psychologist than a cop or military person. I asked him his name: Mr. Schroeder. I asked him, “Are you with the government? How do I know you’re not terrorists posing as cops?”

  “You have too much imagination, Miss Dunn.”

  “I have no such thing. My life is practical. I like practical things.”

  “Do you know why you’re being detained here, Miss Dunn?”

  “No.”

  Mr. Schroeder seemed almost bored. “Miss Dunn, what do you do in Canada?”

  “I work at a place called Landover Communication Systems. I sit in an Aeron chair and spend my days pushing electrons around with a stick.”

  This baffled him, but then he understood me. “A joke?”

  “No. The joke is always on me.”

  “You were going to Vienna, Miss Dunn. May I ask why Vienna?”

  I thought about this question. To answer it correctly would mean telling him the story of my life. It would mean revealing to the world the truth about Jeremy’s father. I felt like one of those Hollywood actresses who refuses to name the father of her children. I said, “I thought Vienna would be a pretty place to go—a place very different from home.”

  “You chose it at random?”

  “Yes. No. I had my wisdom teeth removed years ago, and I watched The Sound of Music on painkillers. It really changed me.”

  “There is no need to be facetious, Miss Dunn.”

  “I’m not being facetious, Mr. Schroeder. Phone my dentist.”

  “Miss Dunn, just so you know, the Canadian government has complied with our request that we interview every person in your family, their friends and their friends’ friends. We will be interviewing your co-workers, your neighbours, and searching your apartment—with all of its documents and all of your computer files. There is nothing about you that we won’t know by the end of this.”

  “There’s nothing to know about me. My life is boring.”

  “We both know that’s not true, Miss Dunn.”

  Once they sniffed through my phone records, they’d find Herr Bayer’s call, and that would be it. I figured I might as well keep them hanging; for once, I had power. I said, “I think you’re threatening me, and I resent that. I’m a peaceful person. You tell me more about what’s happening here or I go mute on you.”

  “Did you pack your bags yourself, Miss Dunn?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Did you leave them anywhere with any one person, even if only for a minute?”

  “They asked me that at check-in in Vancouver. No.”

  “Did you fly here alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you supposed to meet with anybody on your trip to Frankfurt?”

  “No.”

  “Were you to meet with anybody in Vienna?”

  A fraction of a pause, followed by, “No.”

  “I think you’re not telling me the full story, Miss Dunn.”

  “Mr. Schroeder, you’re not telling me the full story, either.”

  “One moment, Miss Dunn.”

  I was left alone in the interrogation room. I stared at the cookies on the plate on the doily. Had the Germans now invented truth cookies? Did they think I’d be tempted because of my size? I looked away. Then I felt tired—jet lag. The dreamlike trip through the abandoned airport. The white cell. I just wanted to close my eyes.

  Mr. Schroeder came back in with two men, one of whom was dressed in North American clothing, a noticeable difference. “This is Mr. Brace. He is from your government.”

  I nodded.

  “And this is someone whose name you need not know for now. He is German.”

  Another nod.

  Mr. Brace said, “Miss Dunn, you know that you shut down the world’s seventh busiest airport?”

  “So I hear.”

  “You cost the local economy tens of millions of dollars.”

  “And?”

  “To be frank, the Germans are very pissed off with you.”

  “And me with them. I was eating a ham sandwich and wondering if I should read the complimentary copy of The Economist when suddenly they assaulted me and tied me up like a pig at a luau.” I’d just used the words ham and pig in the same sentence. Of all things, I wondered if that was politically correct, to allow so much meat in one sentence.

  “Miss Dunn, let me ask you, a week ago last Thursday, in Vancouver, were you out for a walk around, say, 5:40 in the afternoon?”

  What? My meteorite? “That’s just a meteorite in my luggage—a stupid rock. Why the hell would it send an entire airport into lockdown mode? Good Lord. It’s just a rock.”

  The two men looked at each other in a way I didn’t like.

  I said, “What—it’s against the law to carry meteorites? The earth is hit with millions of them every day. I checked on Google.”

  Mr. Brace said, “Miss Dunn, what you found wasn’t a meteorite.”

  “Oh.”

  “Miss Dunn, your meteorite is a chunk of the fuel core from an RTG, a Radioisotopic Thermoelectric Generator. It powered a Soviet-era Cosmos satellite. The unit came apart in space, and we know the trajectory of its constituent parts—across the Pacific between the Aleutian Islands and the Alaska-B.C. coast between 5:39 and 5:40. I guess we underestimated its fall.”

  “I see.”

  “German authorities found this highly radioactive core inside your bag during a standard luggage X-ray. They assumed it was a component in a dirty bomb. You can see why people might have been alarmed.”

  “Okay.” There was a silence. “Can I go now, then?”

  “Not quite. We have to have a lab confirm a spectral analysis of the fuel. It’s a formality. We want to confirm that it’s part of a batch milled in 1954 in a Soviet secret city called Arzamas-16.”

  “Fair enough.” I decided to make small talk, which always sends men running from me. “You must be relieved it wasn’t a dirty bomb, then. All you had to do was ask me what was in the suitcase. You didn’t need to put me in jail.”

  “Standard procedure, Miss Dunn.”

  We spoke of technicalities for a few minutes. I again asked if it was time to return to the prison.

  “Yes and no. I think first you’re going to want to speak with Dr. Vogel.” He introduced me to the other m
an, the German. “Dr. Vogel is an oncologist.”

  “A what?” I know what an oncologist does; I was merely shocked to hear the word.

  “Dr. Vogel specializes in radiation poisoning.”

  I stood up. “What does that have to do with anyth—?”

  Dr. Vogel motioned me down. “Please, Miss Dunn. Sit.”

  I did.

  Dr. Vogel asked me, “Miss Dunn, how did you pick the sample up from the ground?”

  “By … by hand.”

  “I see. Did you carry it for long after that?”

  “Actually, I did. It has a wonderful texture. It came from the sky. Just like that. Right in front of me. I dropped my groceries to go look at it.”

  “How long would you say, then?”

  “I played with it for a few hours, and then …”

  “And then what?”

  “I’ve been sleeping with it beneath my pillow.”

  “I see.”

  “I think I do too.”

  More silence.

  “How bad is it going to be for me, then?”

  “I should think quite bad. I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  Despite my wounding their economy, the Germans have treated me cheerfully. They also allowed me to be admitted to a real hospital, not just some slapdash prison infirmary.

  The dirty bomb story was never allowed to make the newspapers (I suspect there are many stories like this that we never hear about), but the staff knew exactly who I was, what had transpired in the terminal—and also why I was now a guest in their hospital. I felt like an urban legend sprung to life: You know, that crazy lady who thought this chunk of space junk was a meteorite. She stuck it in her luggage and shut down the world’s seventh largest airport.

  I was placed in reverse isolation—yes, into the Bubble—as a precaution. I might have been immunosuppressed; others could easily pass their germs on to me. Dr. Vogel told me that the only real way to tell how severely one has been affected by radiation is by how rapidly the symptoms arrive. My blood tests hadn’t yet come back, but if I were low on white blood cells, I’d be susceptible to opportunistic infections. I’m fortunate that immediate symptoms such as skin burns, nausea and fever hadn’t occurred. I remember during Chernobyl seeing those poor doomed helicopter pilots pouring concrete over the melted reactor. They were dead within days. The thing is, Dr. Vogel doesn’t know what, if anything, is going to happen to me. No one does. Symptoms could take months or years to occur, if ever.