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love and hate and taste and crudity and the continental drift of dying empires and the perils of success and our hopeful efforts to outwit biology. On my own vanity and creeping awareness of the inherent ambivalence of the natural law. On the societal implications of that ambivalence. On the difficulty of marriage, of any human union, on the sad wisdom of the Buddhist. On Derrida and Dante (one of whose names elicits a scolding red squiggle). On the boundary between kindness and self-preservation, between heaven and hell, between wealth and dearth, between aware and deceived. On the reach of technology. On double-edged swords. On who we really are, on the things that really scare us. On the worst thing someone could say to you.
January 12, 2009
I dream I am in Washington. I’m in the Capitol, in the statuary hall. I hear deep voices, but they echo so thickly I can’t make out the words. The echoes multiply and the voices deepen to become a churning cacophony, gnawing at itself and spawning simultaneously. The noise is insufferable: a tangible presence replacing the oxygen, a black adenoid swallowing elegant marble busts and intricate plaster moldings and, finally, my thoughts. Endless dark. And then bright white fluorescent light. I am in the Capitol, in my office, in my black leather swivel chair, behind my oak desk.
My wife appears in front of me. Her hair radiates a crimson halo. It is brighter than the day we swam in that azure cavern off Capri. She is naked and her breasts are pert and firm and her pubic hair is that same candied red. She comes towards me in silence, and I back the chair on its casters away from the desk. She kneels between my feet, unzips my pants, pulls out my flaccid penis and puts her hands behind her back. I take her by the hair and she opens her mouth. Her lips are full and smooth and red and glossy. I guide her mouth towards the tip of my penis, resting on the black wool of my suit pants. As her tongue touches the glans, she looks up and smiles and her teeth are razor sharp and her face is old and spotted and warted. Purple and crimson bruises ring her eyes, visible through her wax-paper skin. She lunges forward, and I tug her hair against it. She breaks free, swallowing my member. Her hair comes out in my hands in dull matted clumps. I wake up.
I am cold. My shirt is wet with cold sweat and sticks to my back. I sit up and put my elbows on my desk and rest my face in them, by my chin, on the heels of my palms. I rub my temples with my fore and middle fingers. I look between my hands at the agenda on my desk. The black ink swims on the white page, my head pulses. I pick up the beige telephone receiver from my desk and dial “714″. I hear a ring in the receiver speaker a second before I hear Laurie’s phone ring next door.
“Lorena Garcia.”
“Laurie, it’s me, I’m ready to go over today’s itinerary.”
”You sure?”
“Yeah, come on over.” I take off my coat and drape it behind me, over the back of my vinyl chair. I fold the right cuff of my shirt over, then fold it over again. I fold the thickened cuff one more length up my arm. The creases start to slip, the fold becomes a tangled roll of cotton-polyester blend, I push the roll just above my elbow. I repeat the process with the left sleeve. The door opens and Laurie walks in.
“Feeling better?”
“A little, yeah.”
“Ok. I went ahead and cleared your morning anyways. Armistise is gonna be your first appointment, so you’ve got a couple hours to relax. You should take it if you’re not feeling well, because you have a ribbon cutting at three, and then a police awards ceremony at 5.”
”Do I need a tux or anything for the awards?”
“No, you’re gonna be overdressed like that. We’ll lose the tie on the way over there.”
“Anything else?”
“The Union called, they want a quote on HR-765, and the woman with the hangnail on Medicare, Mrs. Delano, she wants a personal response from you, or she says she’s filing a malpractice suit.”
“Can she do that?”
“I doubt she’ll win, but she can file the claim.”
“Ok, send her a letter saying I’m sorry for her discomfort and that we uh, take very seriously all claims of malpractice by Medicare doctors and that we’re ‘looking into the matter’.” Laurie scribbles it all down on a note pad. When she goes back to her office, she’ll transcribe the note to her computer, and then send it to her BlackBerry and then e-mail it to the intern, who will write the letter to Mrs. Delano. “Is that it for the day?”
“Except for the private fundraiser tonight.”
“Shit. Do I need a tux for that?”
“No, it’s a luau theme.”
“What?”
“It was your wife’s idea. The caterers are doing a roast pig on a spit. ’Bringing home the pork’. Get it?”
“Very funny.”
“But that’s it. And you have two hours until Armistise is expecting you at the barbeque place. Anything else, or would you like me to leave you alone?
“That’s it.”
”Alright,” she says, neatening her manilla folder, “you’re sure you’re alright?”
“I’ll be ok.”
“Ok, let me know if you change your mind, if you need someone to talk to.”
“I will. Thank you. I’m alright.”
She leaves and closes the door behind her. My eyes fall on a photograph of myself and Sylvester Stallone. I lay my forehead on the cool wood of my desk and close my eyes again. My head pounds. I stand up and walk out of my office, down the hall to the men’s bathroom. I lock the door. I stand over the sink and splash water in my face, rubbing my face with the palms of my hand, slapping my face back and forth between my two hands. The faucet squeaks as I turn it off. I set my hands on the edges of the sink and lean in to the mirror for a closer look at the bags under my eyes. I feel the sink start to give as I put my weight on it, and I quickly stand up straight. I jiggle the sink. It feels like it’s attached by the pipe alone. I look in the mirror and make sure my hair is neatly parted, and I leave the bathroom. I walk through the maze of aides’ cubicles, to the elevator doors. I press the “down” button. It lights up. I press it again, jamming it into its socket, again, again.
“In a hurry, sir?” the intern asks.
“You have no idea.”
”Where are you headed?”
“The Grotta Azzurra.”
”Is that a new restaurant?”
The elevator doors open, and I get on the elevator. The elevator descends, stops, and the doors open again. I exit the elevator into the lobby. I see plastic ficus and shrubs, polyester flower petals and a fish tank. I see waiting room chairs upholstered in mauve and taupe. I walk through the lobby. I push its glass double doors open. I leave the home office.
“This is what I wanted. This is where I want to be. I am not afraid.
This is what I wanted. This is where I want to be. I am not afraid.”
I repeat it, again and again as I march. The metal treads of the tank next to me clatter and clang so I can hardly hear my mantra. My pack feels lighter than it did in training, my rifle heavier. I wish it weren’t winter. Why couldn’t we have done this last spring? ”Then I wouldn’t be here,” I think. The wind howls down the street, channeled by columns of empty buildings.
I don’t know how far we have to walk, or where we’ll be when we stop. I know I have to stay next to the tank. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. The tank is American, built like a, well… When shooting starts, I will be safest by the tank.
I think there is a pebble in my right boot. I shook my boots out and ran my hand all along the inside lining before we left. They’re tied so tightly, almost halfway up my calves, how could it have fallen in since? I must have missed it this morning. I was so sleepy, and it was still so dark, I’m lucky I remembered my rifle. My rifle. I look down at it, away from the rooftops of the empty buildings, for just a moment. It is beautiful, the precision of its machining, the ruggedness of the dusty aluminum receiver, the smooth modernity of its plastic stock, the straight, perfectly-round steel barrel… I wish my washing-machine at home was this well-made.
The washing machine leaks. I haven’t done laundry since I got married, but Rachel says it leaks and that she hates that machine, so I have to fix it, so I hate that machine. I don’t know how it leaks, where it comes from. I’ve replaced every gasket, reclamped and checked every hose, it makes no sense. After every load of laundry, there’s a puddle underneath the machine. Rachel forgets and steps in the puddle, and then she yells at me to fix the washing machine.
I exhale and see her in the wisp of steam escaping. Then I hear the sound of the earth opening and the tank is gone and I am prone in a pile of dust and rock and it is raining pieces of the empty buildings and I am deaf. I feel the earth shake again behind me and I turn and see the tank, rocking forward with the recoil of its soot blacked cannon. Another building comes raining down. Now people, running. I see screaming, but I don’t hear anything. Men with guns are taking positions in the rubble opposite, among the girls and kids running away. Positions. Shit. Little bursts of orange fire from the barrels of the men’s guns.
I scramble to my feet, concrete and sand and blood shifting under me as I do, and run ducking to the tank, to shelter. My commanding officer is waiting behind the tank already. He’s yelling at me, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. I point at my right ear and shrug. He understands and tells me in slashing hand-signals to take the alley on our right and flank the next street. I nod.
Leaning my back against the back of the tank, I slide to my left, keeping my head low. I reach the tank’s right tread, squat and turn around. I peak one eye around the tread. They’re gone. Where’d they all go? Shit. My CO looks at me and I shrug. ”Nothing.” I say. I can feel myself talking, feel the vibrations in the bones of my skull, but I don’t hear it. He repeats his slashing hand gestures and shoves me from behind the tank.
I run crouching to the alley. Once there, I move slowly, but purposefully, the sight of my rifle at my right eye, that plastic stock buried in my right shoulder. I sweep the perfectly-round barrel from side to side as my eyes trace the same pattern. I aim at the sky as I look up to check the rooftops. I lower the barrel, my eye still on the sight. I near the end of the alley and press my back up against the far wall. I creep left along the wall like this. At the corner I stop. I lean my head ever so slightly past the safety of the wall. My left eye strains at its peripheral extreme. Another empty street.
I swing the barrel of my gun around the corner. My head follows, attached at the rifle’s sight. My chest and shoulders and right hip come around the corner, exposed. I look up into a face, centered in the sight. A boy’s: wet with tears, muddy in this dust, but not crying now. In the reticule, I see the tiny muscles of his face tighten, his delicate jaw clench. I see his lips move and I hear his voice and he says, “I am not afraid.”
