“You had an electromagnetic pulse,” Chris said. “Yeah. I saw that.”
The fifteen-year-old had his leg jigging. “An electromagnetic pulse,” he repeated. “That happens sometimes with earthquakes. Computers crash big-time so, like, people lose their hard drives.”
The NATO officer broke into a grin that constituted yet another change in tone.
“Plus you must’ve lost other records. In ordinary ways, ordinary for an earthquake. You had churches collapsing, and in Southern Italy, oh boy. Around here, when a church collapses, that’s maybe a whole town just, like, gone…”
“Wow, Mr. Science,” John Junior said. “I could listen to you all night.”
“Oh, excuse me, Room Temperature. Room Temperature I.Q. Excuse me, I forgot to like, connect the dots. See, with the pulse and the rest, that meant there were, like, all these people who’d lost essential documents.…”
“Hey, Velma. Connect these dots.”
Barb had put it together herself by now. The UN rep was pulling the goods from his briefcase, a sheaf of hand-sized pamphlets, and seeing those, she recalled that she’d read something about this. Maybe she’d heard about it on the good Fordham NPR. There’d been a similar crisis after the Christmas tsunami a few years back, over in Southeast Asia, and again down in New Orleans following the bad hurricane. The disaster had caught a number of victims with their pockets empty, their wallet lost somewhere along the way — without identification. The authorities had needed to go around making lists. Also they’d needed to come up with a substitute.
“Temporary papers,” Kahlberg said, nodding towards his seat-partner.
The other coat-and-tie began handing them out: staple-bound pamphlets on some sort of specialty bond, light but tough and bearing a watermark. The paper had the roughage of an old scar.
“Earthquake I.D.,” said the man from the UN.
“Temporary,” repeated the NATO officer. “But for the time being, in certain cases, a lifesaver. You have to remember that the ones who lost the most tended to be the kind of hand-to-mouth old boys we were just talking about. The refugees.”
As Barbara took her packet, couldn’t help thinking that, in this van, she was the one who needed it most. She was the one headed for a scarifying new world. The paper before her, however, wasn’t so out of the ordinary. It featured a well-scanned reproduction of her latest passport shot and long-familiar data entries: a birth-date from not quite forty-five years back, and the overformal “New York City” as place of birth. The document was like the terminology she’d just been running through her head, the therapeutic patois from the Samaritan Center; it was someone else’s fancy vocabulary for an understanding that lay deeper than that, at the connection of spine and language. Indeed the words from the Sam Center, the syndromes she’d come to know thanks to her own family therapy, and to the work she’d done screening other potential clients — these would matter to her longer than the jerryrigged booklet in her lap. The NATO officer was making further explanations, but they sounded beside the point. Getting actual replacement passports from this side of the Atlantic, Kahlberg said, would take weeks. “For the real deal, y’all need to have your signature notarized.” But there was no way Barbara would stick around Naples for weeks.
“One thing we had going for us this time,” the liaison said, “we had all the S.S.N. Jay here’s been great about that, keeping the Organization up to speed.”
Jay, sure. This paperwork too was his doing, another container labeled Mine forever, all mine. The stuff even felt like packing material.
‘You did move fast,” Jay said.
“Well, back at you, Jay. You kept us up to speed.”
The van slowed and came off the freeway. They shuddered once more onto cobblestone, the throat-clearing downshift of their combat transport echoing within the sudden steep folds of brick and plaster. The neighborhood scene, outside the broad and reinforced window, to Barbara recalled dog-day August back in Carroll Gardens. The trunks of the maples and beeches were blotchy from traffic (though here you also spotted a palm or two) and the stoops were full of troublemakers. Except tonight the real troublemaker sat in the van. As the mother folded away her Earthquake I.D., she reminded herself they were still in the first week of June. If she had the Connecticut divorce laws right, the worst would be over by the time the kids went back to school.
“Too much,” Jay shouted, over the rattle and jounce. “We’re too much for a place like this.”
It came to Barbara that he was speaking of the vehicle. She checked the children, all likewise concerned with the scene on the streets, even Paul. He’d got his head up again, and with that, the family was home. Their apartment must’ve been selected American style, right off the freeway. Barb and Jay hadn’t noticed last night, fried as they’d been from traveling. This morning they’d walked to the funiculare that had carried them down into the older city.
And tonight, they had a crowd waiting.
They had a crowd closing in, singles and twosomes and more, descending from the nearby stoops, or swinging off motorbikes and unfolding out of Fiats. Men and women, a handful of children too, nobody that caught the eye at first glance. Still, the way these folks came for the Humvee, Barb had to wonder about the thing’s telltale markings, the wide NATO seal on the front and sides. She checked what people were wearing, out there — simple day-clothes, so far as she could see. No Hezbollah-style head-wraps, no ready-to-rumble jumpsuits. Nobody was waving around any protest signs either. Rather, this mob recalled the one this morning, by no means angry but awfully free with their hands. These people seemed to caress the van, reaching for it even as the NATO driver, turtling down over the wheel, restarted the engine and at once stalled it. Everyone inside hunkered down, their new paperwork rattling.
The UN rep looked so British in his alarm, Barb realized she hadn’t noticed any accent when he’d spoken. She didn’t know who she was riding with. Meantime across the windows dirty palms and fingers spread wide. A few in the crowd palmed the windshield too, never mind what the engine was doing. They didn’t care if they got run over, this gang of strangers, with arms outstretched as if for a hug. It was yet another new signal-system for Barbara to make sense of. One old man pressed his face to the window beside her, kissing blue-black Plexiglas.
“Mary, mother of God,” she murmured.
Across from her the young soldier shifted his grip on the gun.
“No way!” she shrieked. “This isn’t a movie!”
Jay was speaking more calmly, Jay and Kahlberg both. One or the other made the point that the crowd seemed friendly. Lighten up, Barb heard, meantime, perhaps whispered in her ear. The kids…
Kahlberg touched the shoulder of the Viking in uniform. “Son,” he said, “you don’t understand. Listen, can’t you hear them?”
Hear what? The crowd wasn’t making much noise. Outside Barbara’s window, her Humvee fetishist kept repeating some phrase between each kiss, but he wasn’t nearly loud enough to be heard inside. His lips, his whole unshaven lower face, hardly moved. He didn’t look too scary, either, skinny and no longer young, white chest hairs showing beneath his half-open shirt. He only held his place at the car because a heaping earth-mother behind him blocked the way for anyone else. This woman might’ve been putting her shaggy armpits on display, reaching stiffly for the sky and mouthing some prolonged babble into the lingering evening light. But to judge from their looks, both these old people were glad about the Lulucitas’ arrival. Elsewhere too, no one was screaming, no one was chanting, no one was pounding on the NATO steel. They only kept touching and, more and more, kissing.