The eighth Trojan War Museum has no wooden horse; and I wonder if that is our biggest clue. If the museum is the horse, then we are in the hours of peace between pulling the beast inside the city walls and the city being sacked.
I am not the only one who wonders. It is why the history of the Trojan War Museums has become so important.
Some say it is Apollo again, still trying. I fear the eighth Trojan War Museum might be run by Nemesis—true mother to the Circean Helen—spirit of fate and divine retribution, the ultimate ender of arrogance.
But even so.
If history is fate, we know what will happen, don’t we?
It is rumored that the ninth Trojan War Museum has begun already; Hades is preparing it in his underworld, a museum of the dead for the dead, a museum we can all visit one day, though not before our time.
But that will not be the end.
Because finally
after the over and over
there will be the tenth Trojan War Museum.
Have you heard of ephemeralization? The process of building more and more out of less and less? The tenth Trojan War Museum will not have a building, nor any objects, nor any visitors. It will be the air we breathe. Unavoidable. Born in us like instinct. A story we already know and need never tell again.
The After War instead of the Ever After War.
The true Trojan War Museum.
What are the odds?
Now there are buttercups upon the Trojan plain.
GOOD FORTUNE
I. If you put the changeling in the fire and the changeling goes up the chimney, the human child will be returned.
When the first note was found, Gudrun Tabak took it too seriously. The police came, the hotel owners were notified, the hotel guests warned, and Gudrun slept with her vegetable knife in her fist every night, just in case.
The hotel, located some sixty miles north of Miami along the Atlantic coast, catered especially, though not solely, to birth tourists—foreigners who appreciated the U.S. Constitution enough to know that the Fourteenth Amendment granted any child born in the U.S. American citizenship. These were no crawled-under-the-fence-and-over-the-border immigrants sacrificing themselves for second-generation children; they were wealthy parents who wanted dual-citizen babies and could afford to spend months at a luxury hotel in South Florida, paying the full cost of hospitalization and so on. It was Gudrun’s job to make sure these guests, who represented a small portion of the hotel’s population but a significant percent of its profit, were satisfied.
Each day Gudrun dressed in an unofficial uniform, white shirt and black pants, lived with her phone clipped to her belt, and kept no boundary between her life and her work. Some days after too many complaints—too few babysitters, too much gluten, Florida was too hot and too wet—she would find a corner, close her eyes, and think, White shirt black pants, white shirt black pants, to calm herself. But most days she went from want to want without complaint: problem solved problem solved problem solved.
Some days it felt like a regular hotel. Other days Gudrun looked at the wing of long-term suites and felt the pulsing thoughts of a hundred and thirty-two past and present babies swaddled in their twist-turned fates.
She’d worked there nineteen years. Nineteen years and what to show? A hundred and thirty-two babies and their pampered parents. Nineteen years gone. Like a disappearance. One day she was forty-three.
THE FIRST NOTE was so vague as to be both threatening and ridiculous. “You will be found out.” Like a horoscope, something that could apply to anyone. It had been slipped under the door of a recently emptied suite and discovered by the thought-to-be-Russian housekeeper, Larisa Rusak. It could have been meant for the incoming guest, or the just-left guest, or, as most of the long-term guests speculated, put under the wrong door and meant for one of them.
It was summer in South Florida, too hot to move beyond the shaded tiki bar if you even came out of your air-conditioned room, yet gossip ran in a tight circle around the hotel. Everybody had a theory they pushed involving someone else, and a second theory they kept secret involving themselves.
Suite 210 thought she could be found out for one of three things and ranked them one to three in order of preference. Suite 211 wondered if she could have a secret so secret it wasn’t even known to her. The husband of Suite 119 had a suite for his wife and a suite for his wife’s mother and another suite for his mother, who didn’t like that his wife’s mother was there, and one last suite for his mistress, who was also having his baby. He didn’t stay more than a few days at a time himself. Any one of them could be threatening another.
Larisa Rusak, the thought-to-be-Russian housekeeper, who found the note, was actually an undercover journalist from Ukraine, investigating reports that Russians were giving birth to Russian-American citizen-babies in order to raise them in America as Russian spies. Understandably, Larisa Rusak thought the note was for her.
Gudrun, too, had her secrets: a young divorce, a few ridiculous years, a black feeling in her heart. Maybe the note was hers?
Because she was on call seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, Gudrun lived at the hotel, in a small apartment over the front office, which was its own small building. The police searched Gudrun’s apartment thoroughly after she (she!) called in the first note. They were polite about it. They found nothing of interest. They asked about David, though; they searched his apartment, too.
Probably everyone suspected David—the piece that didn’t fit.
He lived in the apartment next to Gudrun’s, which belonged to the hotel owners, who lived most of the time in Turkey.
David: Gudrun’s twenty-four-year-old nephew, who’d come into existence only four months earlier when he’d e-mailed Gudrun to ask if she was related to Balsan Tabak, who he believed to be his father.
She was.
Balsan was Gudrun’s older brother, who had been paralyzed, more than paralyzed, erased really, twenty-four years earlier, in a car accident that also killed two women. Both women were well into their eighties; it would have been easy to think the accident was their fault (their car was turned to shrapnel), but Balsan drove too fast, always. It was a joke among everyone who knew him. A joke, of all things.
At the time, Gudrun had been a sophomore at Penn, where Balsan was a star MBA student. After the accident, she stayed in Philadelphia with Balsan’s ghost while her parents moved back to Turkey with Balsan’s paralyzed body and damaged mind. America became Gudrun’s parent then, and it looked after her well enough—with its grocery stores, libraries, modest employment opportunities, and endless television programming.
In Turkey, Gudrun’s mother cut her hair brutally short; her father grew fatter and fatter and let his beard run wild. Only Balsan remained immaculate, so much devotion turned on him, as it always had been, really. Then one by one they died, first Gudrun’s father, then Balsan, then her mother. It took years, but it seemed instantaneous.
At the time of the accident, neither Gudrun nor her parents knew about Balsan’s pregnant girlfriend, who in her own grief and youth and fear never told Balsan’s family about his (her!) (their) baby. When that baby, the suddenly twenty-four-year-old David, in custody of his heretofore hidden-in-plain-sight birth certificate, decided to seek his father’s family out, he, easily enough, found Gudrun Tabak.
First there were months of e-mails, then an abrupt two-week silence, then David, along with a previously unheralded, very visibly pregnant, very visibly young woman, showed up at the hotel’s front desk. Gudrun knew immediately who he was. Balsan reborn, same age and everything.
“It’s a boy,” this new Balsan said with a wry smile.
What was the son of your nephew, Gudrun wondered absently as she stared at the pregnant girl. Your great-nephew? Grand? Layers upon layers of family suddenly. Was that what she was looking at?
“She’s my half sister,” David said.
Gudrun had never been good at hiding what she was thinking.
“Her boyf
riend’s a bastard,” David said.
Joanna, the half sister, looked at the floor.
“Okay,” Gudrun said, and that was that.
They’d been there three weeks when the first note was found.
“YOU WILL BE LUCKY and I will be rich, and one will always take care of the other,” Balsan had told Gudrun once.
“So I will be poor and you will be unlucky,” she’d said in reply. How she had laughed at the time.
Gudrun had thought her personality, a mellow but open-hearted optimism, was a set thing until the day of Balsan’s accident, when a kernel of bitterness, a baseline outrage, was inserted inside her and never left.
An ordinary accident with endless consequence.
DAVID LOOKED LIKE BALSAN, much as Gudrun remembered him; and he was curious about Balsan. He asked about Balsan, and Gudrun tried to tell him what she remembered. “He was special,” she said, though she knew it was the kind of thing people always said of the dead. But he was.
Wasn’t he?
Once in the night, as a baby, Gudrun looked out through the iron bars of her crib (wood! surely they were wood) and saw the five-year-old Balsan staring at her, an orange glow emanating all around him.
Gudrun did not mention that to David.
Balsan, the natural center to every group. Born to be elected. America’s dream.
This did not mean he was good. He’d treated their parents like easy marks, used people as portals to worlds he wanted. There’d been rumors, too, in high school: girls he’d treated badly, worse than badly. One girl especially, who left school and never came back. But Gudrun had thought Balsan would change—grow out of his shallow longings and selfish behavior into a person who would do great things. She’d thought he had changed. But then, so suddenly, his story had ended, and her long sense of incompletion began.
The ordinary consequence of an endless accident.
She should have been the one to change, done great things herself, but she hadn’t.
WHEN THE FIRST NOTE was found, it was David that the Russian/Ukrainian housekeeper/journalist brought it to.
“PLEASE DON’T SLEEP WITH THE STAFF,” Gudrun told him. “They’ll quit, or sue, or somebody will get pregnant or something.”
“I’m not sleeping with Larisa Rusak—that’s not why she did it,” David said.
But then why did she?
THE JINN ON Gudrun’s left shoulder said: Don’t Trust Him.
The jinn of her right said: You Have To.
David hadn’t given her any reason not to trust him.
It was the note that made her wonder.
“LARISA?” GUDRUN SAID, tracking the housekeeper down in a long-term suite one morning. “If you find anything else, bring it right to me, okay?”
“Of course,” Larisa Rusak said without lifting her head from the tub she was scrubbing.
She was quite a well-read housekeeper; Gudrun had noticed that. Always slipping a hotel newspaper into her bag at the end of the day. But Gudrun was used to foreign women with good educations suffering underemployment.
DAVID AND LARISA RUSAK had slept together, but only the once. So what; they wanted to.
THE RUSSIANS WEREN’T REALLY making American-citizen-baby-spies. Though it wasn’t out of the realm of future possibility.
IF YOU VIEW DEATH as a bad end, then we are all ill-fated. Could Balsan’s accident be seen as anything other than a tragedy? Would you have to believe in the Eternal Heaven, the Garden of Eden, the Promised Land, Valhalla, the Elysian Plain, Vaikuntha, Tir Na Nog, Paradise, Nirvana, Shangri-la, Canaan, Zion, Kingdom Come, and the Pearly Gates to believe it was anything but a tragedy?
Gudrun had finished college, married young, divorced soon after.
When her father died, then Balsan, then her mother, she shut the door on her heart. Except sometimes she was locked inside, warm and alive but alone, and sometimes she was locked outside, cold and stone but surrounded by people.
It is a terrible thing to fear both death and life.
“DON’T YOU WANT A FAMILY?” Gudrun’s young husband had said to her once.
“I already have a family,” she said in return.
“You mean your dead parents?” he said.
He’d meant well, really. Believe me, he did.
She should never have married him, but she wished she’d been kinder.
Some lessons must be learned over and over; some stories told more than once.
ONE DAY LARISA RUSAK left work and never came back.
II. Humans are made from clay, jinn from the fiery wind.
The second note read: If you do not pay fifty thousand dollars a year I will steal your baby and rape or kill or sell it as I wish.
It was found by the wife of a Turkish diplomat (Suite 119), and the police took her hysterics seriously. The wife paid her bill and flew back to Turkey with a baby only three days old.
A flaw in the blackmailer’s plan, David joked, but Gudrun wondered if maybe that had been the plan, to scare the woman away.
The rival hotel in Miami had long done long-term stays for plastic surgery patients, but more recently rumors had sprung up of significant quantities of extravagantly beautiful, pregnant Eastern European women poolside, rumors Gudrun easily confirmed with a trip of her own, when she stood in the blazing sun and witnessed a lineup of bikinied pregnant perfection, all wavy hair and taut belly bumps, as dreamy as a mirage.
“Maybe it was them,” David said, “stealing our business.” He had begun saying things like “our,” as if he and Gudrun (and Joanna) were partners in something.
“Could be,” Gudrun said, though she didn’t really believe it. She was rattled. Who threatened to rape a baby?
THE RIVAL HOTEL in Miami was stealing their business. Though through much more ordinary methods, like advertising and word of mouth. Birth tourism was booming. Anchor babies abounded.
The dream is to be an American, so that you can achieve the American Dream, which is to become someone better than who you were born.
So you are already dreaming the American Dream before you are an American.
Why shouldn’t these parents use their one superpower—purchasing power!—to get their children the most they could?
Too many believe that one thing must come at the cost of another.
GUDRUN COULD HAVE held dual citizenship, gotten a Turkish identity card, had a Turkish identity—why hadn’t she?
Because Turkey was the dream, ethereal and unknown. America was the opportunity, and she took it.
III. Sometimes the changeling is not the child of a fairy, but an ancient fairy come to the human world to die.
The third note read: Your firstborn belongs to me.
It was left under Gudrun’s door.
Like a curse in a fairy tale, Gudrun thought. Then she laughed; she was forty-three, after all. Too late, she thought. At least, probably.
She showed the note to David, who paled but said nothing.
“This is out of control,” Gudrun said. “I’m calling the police again.”
“No,” David said. “What do you think they’ll do other than search our rooms? Or, worse, try to shut down the hotel.”
That was a concern, of course. If they could find just one woman who’d lied on her visa forms, the police could cause a lot of trouble.
“You didn’t write it, did you?” Gudrun said.
What she meant was, Can I trust you?
“How can you even ask me that?” David said.
“Because I don’t really know you!” Gudrun said. She stepped inside her heart and slammed the door. Warm and alive and alone.
“Maybe it was Joanna’s boyfriend,” David said. “He threatened to kill her if she didn’t get an abortion.”
“Maybe you both should go then,” Gudrun said.
THE SECOND NOTE was written by the husband of the woman who received it, the Turkish diplomat. As you know, by strange coincidence—or his stupidity—his wife and his mistress were pregnant at the sa
me time, and he paid for both of them to have their babies in the U.S. The mistress was supposed to go to the rival hotel in Miami (that way the husband could travel between them), but she hadn’t because she’d found out which hotel the wife was at. The husband needed one of them to leave; he wrote the second note. The first note gave him the idea.
He got away with it. Nobody ever knew the truth, except you and me, and him.
What did the mistress think when she saw the wife’s hysterics, heard of her departure?
“What good fortune.”
Rich, lucky, how cruel we can be.
DAVID KNOCKED ON Gudrun’s door late on the night of the third note. So late that she answered holding her vegetable knife in her hand.
Prayers should be said during the day, when if-there-is-a-God is awake. Stories should be told at night, the time of dreams.
“Please don’t make us leave,” David said.
Gudrun let him in.
DAVID (AND JOANNA) had a mother (of course), who it seemed they had abandoned, leaving town without saying for where, and ignoring her calls until she stopped making them. They had every plan to get in touch with her eventually, presumably after she’d suffered enough—more, at least. She wasn’t a bad mother, really. She just hadn’t handled the news of the pregnancy very well. Though that was for her own good reasons, due to her own past history.
“BUT WHY ARE YOU HERE?” Gudrun asked David finally.
“I couldn’t wait any longer, to tell you the truth.”
“No, not right-now here, here at all, at-the-hotel here.”
David looked at her a little blankly.
“What do you want from me?” Gudrun cried out.
“I thought you could help with the baby,” he said. “Because you know about babies.”
She’d seen a hundred and thirty-two babies born, some from right there in the hospital delivery room. Each one she’d tapped on the nose while saying, “Hello, baby.” A good-luck spell of her own invention.
The Trojan War Museum Page 10