A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus Read Free Book Online

through handwritten notes, so that copies could be saved for their lawyers. She knew all the distortions in his penmanship that occurred when he was tired or angry, or trying to be extra careful or trying not to bereadable at all. She could even recognize, in her brief glimpse of the envelope on network television, the efforts he had made to disguise his penmanship.
    Joyce was elated: now she had him. The Justice Department was investigating anthrax hoaxes as seriously as it was investigating the real anthrax mailings, promising to prosecute them as acts of terrorism. After years of careful, relentless, hard-assed maneuvering, legal and personal, Marshall had blundered catastrophically. Forget Joyce’s wimpy, pearls-and-twin-set, eager-to-be-reasonable divorce lawyer: Marshall could deal with John Ashcroft now. Let them put him in jail. Let them send him to Guantánamo. She would keep the apartment.
    She stole a look when he returned with the dog. Marshall turned away, his complexion darkening and his cowlick flopping down around his eyes. He went to his room and shut the door. Joyce almost smiled, but then stopped to wonder if the hoax anthrax could possibly, in actual fact, have been sent by her husband. Was he capable of doing something so wrong and so criminal? She told herself yes, citing all the malicious actions he had taken against her since they had begun getting divorced, and all the deadly infighting and all the lies and slander he had broadcast to the world, but she wasn’t persuaded. Although she hated him with every cell in her body, she didn’t believe he was a bad man, not really. She had loved him once, and the memory was a little traitor sabotaging her every effort to survive this divorce. He had nursed her through a month of meningitis before they were married, bringing her wonton soup and a single red rose every night after work. At Viola’s birth he had gently lifted the girl from the bloody sheet and laid her on Joyce’s chest. But don’t forget the g ’s—was she living with a dangerous crackpot? It was true that he had always enjoyed practical jokes—the FBI would discover that he had been arrested for a fraternity prank in college—yet he had never done anything as dangerous, or as sick, as this before. Was he suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome? What had happened to him on September 11? He had never told her or anyone she knew. He had never explained how he had escaped the World Trade Center when his entire office had been destroyed. He had lost friends and colleagues. But he had said nothing. It was bottled up within him, with all the strains of the divorce war, and he had simply lost his mind. If he was capable of sending baby powder to her office as a practical joke (and perhaps he wasn’t, not really), what could he do to her and their children right here in their apartment?
    Nothing was heard from behind the door. How did he spend his hours in his shadowed bedroom? Was he putting more baby powder in envelopes or doing something worse? She had to take the children away, right now, tonight. She couldn’t risk keeping them in this apartment—but could she take them, without court permission? The lawyers were still arguing over custody terms. Any precipitous action could be used against her. She was sharply wounded by this gross unfairness—she just wanted to protect her babies! Again, for the second time that day, she had been put in an impossible position. What could she do?
    Joyce lay on her couch that night anxious and frustrated. In the morning she would be going to the FBI. She wondered if she should tell them about the envelope. It was crazy to think that you could identify someone’s handwriting from a brief glimpse of it on television. Perhaps she had been the one who had lost reason and perspective after September 11. Or perhaps not. She listened for stirrings in the bedroom, or for footsteps, or for the hissing release of poisonous gas. She pondered