Read Due Preparations for the Plague for Free Online Page A

take the shuttle to the MBTA stop, then the Blue Line to State. They change to the Green Line, change again at Park Street, take the Red Line to Union Square.
    Lowell’s car, a slightly battered pickup with a steel hold-all across the back, is where he left it in the parking lot. He unlocks the steel coffer. Nothing missing. He puts the sports tote inside, turns the key in the padlock, changes his mind, unlocks it, takes the tote with him into the cab. “Footrest,” he says. “Pillow for your feet.”
    “What’s inside the bag, Daddy?” asks Amy, clicking her seat belt shut.
    “Just stuff. Can you do up Jason’s belt?”
    He could take one quick look, he thinks, and then, if necessary, if he deems it necessary, he could toss the blue container and its contents into a dumpster. He sits there, his hand on the ignition key, thinking. The owner of the car in the next parking space arrives and the door of his white Nissan taps the side of Lowell’s car. Is it deliberate? The Nissan driver wears a plaid shirt and has a bald patch. Lowell waits for him to leave, analyzing the plaid: vertical stripes and horizontal, green, black, gray, a thin vertical red line.
    “Daddy,” Amy says. She is pulling at her hair.
    “Right.” He starts the car. “Amy, sweetheart, don’t do that to your hair.”
    The soundtrack of Babe comes softly through the bedroom wall.
    “Excuse me,” the little pig is saying to the sheep in his gravelly-sweet voice, “but would you ladies mind …?” And then Jason’s high-pitched laughter, and Amy’s voice-over in her big-sister tone: “He thinks he’s a dog.” This must be the fourth time this weekend, but the children never tire of the video of the little pig that could.
    Outside, from the Somerville night, come the sounds of horns, brakes applied almost too late, fights, shouts, the bells of St. Anne’s on the hill. Lowell has the glazed look of a man masturbating in the cinema. He stares at the wall. His hand, inside the blue sports tote, itemizes three objects, angular, bulky, hard-edged: two thick ring binders and something unstable and irregularly shaped in a drawstring bag that could have been, that was once, a pillowcase. Lowell pulls out the pillowcase bag and stares at it. Rows of knights, with lances poised and pennants on their helmets, gallop toward each other in the lists: this was his own pillow until he was six years old and started school. At the mere touch of the worn cotton, he can smell his bedroom, feel the weight of his father sitting on the end of the bed, smell his mother’s perfume as she bends over to kiss him good night. Once upon a time , his father begins. Once upon a time, in the springtime of the world, when Persephone, the beautiful daughter of Zeus and Demeter, was gathering flowers with her maidens in the field, she was kidnapped and carried off by Hades, King of the Underworld …
    Lowell examines the pillowcase.
    Attached to the drawstring at its neck is a luggage tag, crudely lettered in black felt marker. He recognizes his father’s handwriting.
    AF 64
    Operation Black Death
Bunker Tapes & Decameron Tape
    Broadside. Blunt weapon, Lowell thinks, with a sense of having absorbed the explosion of Air France 64 in the gut. He bends forward over the sports bag and the zipper jams and the tapes refuse to be crammed back in, slithering around in their fabric casing—how many? how many are there? five? six?—clacketing, plasticking, live inside the pillowcase, miles of nylon ribbon, they are videocassettes, he can tell that through the cloth, but confessions? obscene revelations? death scenes? what? The pillowcase is damp and clammy to the touch now, revolting. He shoves the whole toxic blue bundle under his bed and paces the room. He counts slowly to ten, forward and back, breathing deep. His heartbeat is fast and erratic. Through the wall, he hears climactic music from Babe , the film nearly done. Supper, he thinks. They’ll want supper. I can’t take