Watchlist (24 page)

Jeannette was trying to call Louie back when Captain Mangual's helmsman was knocked unconscious and he had to take over. The seas were like one cliff after another tipping at him from all directions and between crises all he could do was observe the blip of the tower on his radar screen. At seven thirty on Ellie's clock as she sat by the phone unable to respond to her son, the blip vanished. Captain Mangual abandoned the helm and knocked aside his radar operator and watched the wand as its line of light swept through two full revolutions before he grabbed the radio and shouted, “Tower 4! Tower 4!” until his executive officer grabbed his shoulders and brought him back to the situation at hand.

Betty Bakke was trying to get rid of a worried neighbor when her husband Roy was ordered to stay with the radio in case of an update about either the weather or an evacuation and so left the deck. He'd just cinched the top of his survival suit tighter for warmth when everything lurched as though the A-B side of the tower had pitched down a gigantic stairstep and everything loose or not lashed down in the room was swept into the wall. There was a high-pitched rending of metal like train or subway brakes and he impacted the door near the ceiling. And then there was another crash and he felt the shock of being underwater and the suction of the sinking platform even inside the room. The lights flashed out and in the darkness and bitter cold he rose up on waves to the ceiling, and his head surfaced into a pocket of air.

At 2:00 a.m. when Ellie's phone rang she ripped it from its cradle on its second ring. She was still in the foyer and Larry was curled at her feet wrapped in the quilt from his bed. The call didn't wake him but his mother's screaming did. When he couldn't calm her down he fled to his room and under his bed, but then scrambled out again and found their family doctor's number in the address book, and it wasn't until the doctor arrived and Ellie was sedated that all of the screaming stopped.

Jeannette was pulled out of bed by a call from her father, who told her that a New York newspaper had called him at two thirty in the morning to ask if he was aware that the Texas Tower with his son-in-law aboard had sunk. Her father sounded put out, and when she started shrieking he was so taken aback he said he'd call her again when she was more ready to talk.

Edna dreamt of a pounding on her door and woke to realize it was happening and with her housecoat on turned on her porch light to find a man who identified himself as a reporter for
Life
magazine. He wanted her reaction to the tragedy. She made him repeat what he was talking about before she told him to get off her property as a way of not collapsing right there in front of him.

T
HEY WERE ALL
still awake in the wee hours when the senior sonar operator for the destroyer
McCaffery
, part of the
Wasp
's battle group, reported rhythmic tapping noises emanating from the wreckage on the bottom, as well as what the operator said sounded to him like a human voice, and the ship's captain reported that despite the conditions and the water's depth it was attempting to send down divers and requesting all possible emergency salvage assistance. Some divers had already reached the site on the bottom but had failed to make contact in the limited time they had to search. More help was on its way from multiple shore bases, but by 0330 the tapping and the other noises had stopped.

Four days after the collapse Betty was notified that divers had found Roy's body floating on the ceiling of Captain Phelan's office. He'd been still holding the radio mike. A day after that they found the body of a technician a few miles south. A copter had spotted the yellow of his survival suit. No one else had been recovered. Six months later, on a humid night in June, Edna came in from her screened porch and took a call from a man who identified himself as a fisherman out of Montauk. The man asked if she was the Edna Kovarick whose husband had been on the Texas Tower, and she was about to hang up when he said he had something for her. He had her husband's billfold. It had been dredged up inside a giant sea scallop's shell three miles from where the tower went down. He was looking at her photograph as he talked to her.

The report by the Senate Committee on Armed Services on the Inquiry into the Collapse of Texas Tower No. 4 ran to 288 pages and ended with the acknowledgment that the tower had represented a spectacular achievement but that due to various factors it had never really approached its intended design strength, and stipulated that the committee was not so much attempting to assess blame as to follow up on the dollars that Congress had drawn from taxpayers to pay for programs such as this and others deemed vital to national defense. The committee sought to protect all individuals involved, whether contractors or service personnel, where protection was justified, and in its uncovering of the facts had, it felt, afforded a proper and necessary background against which any individual who might have charges preferred against him could be tried properly. But the report in its conclusion wanted to stress that those twenty-eight men in and out of the service who had sacrificed their lives deserved the same recognition as those who had died in combat, since it had certainly been a battle station to which they'd been assigned. And the committee wanted to make clear to one and all that those men had been patriots in every sense of the word.

Ellie read the committee's report and then took it out into the backyard with Larry and set it on fire. Jeannette read it once and stored it after that in a trunk with the rest of her husband's papers. And Edna found that every time she read it she lost her Wilbur again, and so after the fifth or sixth time she stopped.

Each of them despised herself for her own contributions to the disaster. Ellie thought that her father had turned out to be right about her selfishness, and Jeannette spent weeks remembering having ever only asked about nest eggs, and Edna told friends that someone more confident would have worried less about her husband being well-liked and more about where he was stationed. And Betty kept hearing Roy's silence on the phone after she'd shocked them both with her rage.

W
HAT THE
S
ENATE
report spared them was the last thing their husbands had seen that night while they slewed across the pitching and ice-covered platform in the rain and sleet and wind in their survival suits waiting for their rescue. While Jeannette and Edna and Betty and Ellie had sat by their phones castigating themselves for ever having entrusted their lives to other people's promises, off to the southeast of their husbands' platform as if in a silent movie the sea was rising, and one after the other their husbands had turned in that direction, confused that everything was black until they realized that they weren't seeing any crests or spray and that that was because they weren't looking high enough. And when they did look higher they saw, like a line across the sky, the thin white edge of the top of the wave. And they recognized it as the implacability that would no longer indulge their mistakes, and would sweep from them all they had ever loved.

“Prof! Good morning!” I cannot easily recall the name of this man with a raspy voice who has just greeted me but I give him a friendly wave and what I hope is a warm smile in return. Before I reach the door of my flat, I run into two more people whose greetings—even in these days—are as enthusiastic as the man's: “Prof! How you dey?” This from our Ghanaian neighbor who runs a hairdressing salon and who, after the business with the phone tower, told me that were I ever to grow my hair, he would be my personal stylist. “Our own prof! Good morning, ma!” From Njide, pregnant with her second baby. I am used to it by now, neighbors treating me like a mini celebrity, rushing to take my shopping from me, coming over to greet me, telling me their problems as if I had the power to solve them all, leaning into me as they speak as though all they had to do was touch the hem of my billowing dress and they would be healed. Frank often teased me about it, telling me that thanks to the phone tower, he was now one half of a celebrity couple.

When the cell phone tower suddenly materialized opposite our street, I told anyone who would listen that it was an interceptor, set up to connect to phones by mimicking cell phone towers and sucking up data but nobody would believe me. Rose, a woman who lived in the flat below ours, had asked me, in a rather mocking tone, if I had studied to be a spy at the same time that I was getting my degree in mathematics. Rose had laughed at her own joke and even Frank had been unable to hide his laughter. When he caught me scowling at him, he had said to Rose, “I'm sure my darling would make a wonderful spy!”

“Idleness is driving you mad, you've got nothing to do,” another neighbor said, the same man who said once that, had I been his wife, he would have made sure that I had enough babies to keep me busy.

“None of this teaching rubbish,” he said. “A wife should stay home and have babies!” Our childlessness, five years after we moved into the neighborhood a newly married couple, was a constant source of gossip. The fact that I taught mathematics at the university did not impress our neighbors. It did not help matters either that I had been discovered to use a washing machine for my laundry rather than join the other women in the courtyard sweating over huge basins of dirty laundry which they washed by hand. “What sort of a woman uses a machine to wash her husband's underwear?” Rose asked me once before I became the local celebrity. Without waiting for a response, she answered herself, “A lazy one!”

When I told Frank what the man had said about idleness causing me to run mad, Frank had simply said, “Ignore him. What does he know about all the work you put in for your students? What does he know about how all your intellectual pursuits keep you busy? He would be better off chasing money to raise his thirteen children!”

When he said this, a tenderness for him swelled up inside me and as I leaned in to kiss him, my Frank, the only man I ever dated who supported my desire not to have children, saying that he understood why anyone would want to put their career first, that he understood that not every woman wanted to be a mother, he said gravely, “Perhaps, you are reading too much sci-fi, seeing conspiracy theories everywhere. This tower thing, maybe you should drop it, eh?”

Yet two months later, the much respected
Daily Star
had written an article accusing the government of setting up fake phone towers around the city. The government had at first denied it but when irrefutable evidence was produced in the form of leaked official documents, they capitulated and apologized in long, officious sentences: “We live in dark and dangerous times. Boko Haram terrorists pose a real and significant threat to us and to our dear, beloved state. It is in the interest of security that the Enugu State government set up towers to collect information which has helped us forestall attacks and arrest would-be perpetrators . . .

“We are a democracy and we understand that the manner in which we have gone about this might appear undemocratic and for that we wish to tender our sincere apologies. We have already begun the process of disabling those towers and are working with the state security service to find new, less invasive ways to continue to safeguard our state . . .

“However, it would be inaccurate—as the report claims—to portray the state government as engaging in ‘bulk collection' of the contents of communications. What data we collect is not looked at or retained unless investigators sense a tie to terror, and only then on the authority of a judge . . .”

I
WAS VINDICATED.
The very day the news broke, Rose stood at my door with a plate of jollof rice and a crate of Maltina to “see our professor!” She looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. “You have a very intelligent wife oo,” she said to Frank, her eyes beaming as if she herself were being complimented. The neighbor with thirteen children began to bow whenever he ran into me and one of his children asked me for an autograph, giggling excitedly as I, too embarrassed to refuse, signed a sheet of paper with my name. Neighbors began to seek my opinion on everything from whether to take a loan to which political party they should vote for, shouting “Prof! How are things today?” whenever they saw me. When Frank asked me how I knew about the tower, I did not tell him about the wonderful coincidence of reading about such towers in the USA in a journal one of my colleagues at the university subscribed to just before the one opposite our house went up. Or of the voices I told Frank I no longer heard, which told me, assured me in fact, that what the government was setting up was no ordinary cell phone tower.

Those voices I have heard clearly since I was sixteen and saw my best friend, Mmeri, drown in a pool. The voices—all three of them—have always been there for as long as I can remember, subdued, hardly ever making their presence known especially after Father took me to see a nice doctor who asked me a lot of questions, made notes, and who prescribed some medicines with names I could not pronounce—but after Mmeri died, they came to the fore. One of them—the little girl's—even took on Mmeri's high-pitched stutter. When there was nobody else with whom I could share the depth of my sorrow or the fears that kept me from sleeping at night, the one with Mmeri's stutter became the hands that rocked me until the fears ebbed away. When I worried that I would not pass the entrance exams to the university, the deep male one who sounded like a priest told me I had nothing to worry about. He was right. I made it into my university of choice. When my pocket money was stolen from my purse just before I had to return to school, the female one—which I imagine for some reason as belonging to a woman with a small stomach and toned thighs—whispered in my ears that my stepsister, Ifeyinwa, had stolen it. I just walked up to Ifeyinwa and demanded that she return the money that she stole from me, and she did. I told Frank about it years later, when we started dating and Ifeyinwa tried to break us up. I did not tell him about the voice identifying the culprit but about Ifeyinwa stealing my money and being too shocked when I confronted her to deny it. Frank began calling her Ifeyinwa-the-thief behind her back. He was not fooled by her friendliness and always found an excuse not to sit and chat with her when he visited, even though he talked a lot with my brother, and with me, he never ran out of things to say. Spurned, she took to calling him Talk-like-a-woman-Frank to his face, which to her annoyance did not bother Frank much. The first time she called him that he told her he liked women too much to be insulted by the insinuation that he talked as much as women did. “It's not even an insult,” he said, “if you think about it.” That would have been enough to shut anyone up but not Ifeyinwa, who the voice with the stutter says is “as foolish as a sheep.''