The December ceremony, on the other hand, had the ambience of an Organization of Asian and African States meeting. The foreign graduate students had to go through the ceremony for the pictures to take back home, not only for their families but for their governments as well—a photograph of a scholar standing in his robes and hood next to his graduate adviser seemed a more tangible proof of completion than a faked-up piece of sheepskin. Most of them had to be out of the country within a week after finishing their degrees, so the winter ceremony also had an air of finality about it.
On the morning of Saturday, the twenty-second of December, Clyde and Maggie were in the TV room. Maggie was pulling herself up on things, clearly intending to be an early walker. Clyde was watching Iraqi schoolchildren running air-raid drills on CNN, and going through a week’s worth of mail. He found a cream-colored envelope made of nice heavy paper and opened it, expecting another wedding invitationfrom some shirttail Dhont six times removed. Instead it was an invitation from Fazoul to attend his graduation ceremony. As part of a package deal the Twister Bookstore had thrown in ten personalized invites to people renting robes and hoods from them, and Fazoul had been nice enough to put Clyde on his list.
It was a nice little bright spot in a bad month. And the business with the Iraqis was putting him through an emotional mangle. Part of the time he was anxious that he would never figure out where the Iraqis had built their facility. When he was chasing down a promising lead and began to convince himself that he had almost found them, he came face-to-face with the realization that he was very likely to die soon. He’d already made up his mind, in an abstract and theoretical way, that he would settle for that.
The notion of never seeing Maggie again was impossible to entertain when he was in the same room with her. When he was out in the station wagon by himself with a pump shotgun and a high-powered rifle resting on the seat under an old blanket, following a suspected Iraqi agent and beginning to think that he might be close, then the possibility seemed very real, and his heart pounded so hard, it almost knocked him over, and he wondered whether he would be any use when it came down to actually doing something.
In the midst of all this the notion of going to see Fazoul receive his international-business MBA lifted his spirit. Even that was bittersweet, for he knew that Fazoul’s visa ran out immediately after graduation, and that he would never see the family again after today unless they all lived through the next couple of months and then made a trip to wherever the Vakhan Turks were currently encamped.
He wrested the remote control from Maggie’s grasp, sending her into a tantrum, and switched over to the Weather Channel just in time for the Gulf weather report, which was his favorite part of the television coverage. It made him feel somehow closer to his wife. It was somehow reassuring to see the familiar high-and low-pressure symbols advancing across the Tigris-and-Euphrates region.
The phone rang, and he knew that it was Desiree. Her unit held a drawing to see who and in what order people would be able to make phone calls. “Hi, darling,” she said, and Clyde knew something was wrong. The voice had lost its snap, its confidence.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Better let me talk to my baby.”
“She’s sleeping on top of me here.”
“Let me hear her breathe.”
He put the mouthpiece as close to Maggie’s mouth as he could without waking her up. On the other end of the line he could hear Desiree beginning to come apart.
“Nice to hear from you, babe,” he said. He knew they had only three minutes.
“Honey,” her choked voice came through the ether. “Always remember, I love you.”
In the upper Midwest people generally didn’t say they loved each other unless one of them was on his orher death bed. Television provided the bizarre, alien spectacle of actors kissing total strangers as they strode onto the sets of talk and award shows. People hugging while they extended the “peace of the Lord” to each other in church drew sharp frowns. People loved each other. That was enough; it wasn’t necessary to talk about it. Desiree loved Clyde; she knew it, he knew it. They didn’t talk about it. They lived it. Clyde knew something was terribly wrong, that Desiree had learned something. That she was scared to death.
He went to the kitchen, carrying the baby on his hip, mixed up some formula, and then went back to the recliner to feed the baby and watch CNN. He almost fell asleep again and was awakened by a grumpy noise from the baby when the bottle fell from her grasp. He felt too drained to go through the motions anymore. He changed her diaper, got her stuff together, and left for the graduation ceremony, leaving her with the Dhonts.
At one fifty-five he pulled into the vast, mostly empty parking lot of the Flanagan Multipurpose Arena, which they used to call the armory until they had put a new high-tech roof on it and painted over the cinder blocks. As he approached the entrance, he spotted Ken Knightly standing there, smoking his Camel in a most serious way.