He pushed on his hands. The handstand was not bad. Maybe he had been looking for the terrorists in the yoga class. Saliva drooled down to his nostrils. “So things get taken? So a person says a thing, who cares? These people knew the machers; these people had lunch with the big machers. The children of Daniel Coma went to the lycée, and did it matter? They come from money. Daniel comes from Murray Coma’s Furniture. So a person exaggerates. How else does one compete?”
More saliva from that p came down to Danny’s eyelid folds, which in age had begun to fold back into his eye hollows. He lifted his booted legs a little higher to the sky. A nasal clearing came wet and meandering and coagulating in Danny’s small forehead. “So I said I wrote some books. I made a start, who has the time? Do I get any thanks from that big-shot brother of mine? Did he show any appreciation that I was trying to join him?
“Nothing but criticism from him and that one. Does he help me along? No way. He asks me for a loan, a bridge loan he calls it. For what? So he and his fancy friends can get on the cover of the book review again? Daniel Coma did not flaunt his modest scribbling, if I may, the way Johnny Coma and his kind do, they flog these items, TV, radio, whores, you won’t find me doing that. Big deal so he has a website, I could have a website if I wanted, but these people.” The p again drifted the saliva in twin rivers on either side of Danny’s nose. His face was red from the handstand, the blood rushing down, the gravity.
Like many a man who used culture and art and its trappings to try and gain a foothold in a world they felt was looking down on them, Danny Coma was a man who mentioned and over-mentioned his regular normal museum visits or concerts, less as a note of his enjoyment than as a note of his being on the same playing field as the artist whose work he enjoyed. Danny made the internal mistake of thinking that the consumer of art and the producer of art were, perforce, colleagues. That he could compete with his sister-in-law, Vivienne, the internationally known photographer by telling a third party how he went to a photography exhibit.
Danny had made his heart lie.
Danny believed in fairness. Danny believed things should be fair. Danny felt this more than most folks, and he felt it so deeply, he accepted a job in which he was, legally, named as inviolate, and he was given immunity all over the world, and he felt this to be only fair. And when it turned out that this was fair and still he did not shine, he began to tell his story as a series of unfair acts against him. Danny Coma became a practiced schemer, and his mandate to lie was only fair to him. He felt agitated that his brother, Johnny, was independent and successful. It was unfair.
It did not matter that Danny had a regular salary regardless of the level of his work, or that he lived as a raja or a sri or a prince from the age of twenty-five on, or that he was guaranteed a full pension and his wife the cardiologist a full pension, plus the large cash-in-manila-envelopes she got from her Southern Cone “consulting,” or that he got a handsome insurance payday from her death over the cliff. It did not matter that he owned three homes, and had spent his life with hired help and paid staff given to him. His internal fire was green. It did not matter that none of them deemed him small. Worse: they never thought of him at all.
And in his green flames, he believed, mistakenly, that wealthy people were all surface, because he saw them as all surface, and so to compete, he competed on the surface only: naming travel spots, exercise regimes, past academic degrees. But there was no Danny in the verbal meat. He was so fearful of being himself, while auditioning to be himself, he presented even his beloved choices as a regalia of bland, using the passive voice and a stiff cleansed diction more suited to tourist brochures from departments of tourism sent out during a military dictatorship.
Does the burned-out man speak at night with ghosts? What do the ghosts whisper about things done, about things that cannot be undone now? Do the ghosts excuse acts? Do the ghosts give the torturer’s assistant a bye? Behold, the man sees spots in front of his eyes, the damn spots will not come out.
VAL PAID NO attention to Danny’s handstand. “Let us talk of truce and blood, dear Danny. What do you know about the ETA’s ceasefire of 1989, Daniel?” he asked. “The negotiated terror truces of 1989, 1996, 1998 and just this year, 2006. Did you or did you not get ETA to sign a truce in March? You know what? Every ceasefire you signed with ETA? They signed on the arrows, and began to kill again. You were their mark. The terrorists love truces. Truces are their drug, their high. A peace treaty is the jump powder up their noses. They’re so elevated by the truce, they go out again and murder.”
“Preposterous accusations. We saw daylight in San Sebastián. I took the waters at the La Perla spa on the Bay of Biscay. Gloria: fine masseuse. Never better. A kind woman’s touch.”
“Experience says liars lie,” Val said. “Experience says – Okay. Let’s switch to blood and art.” Val went over to Danny, gently took Danny’s feet down and kissed Danny on the cheek. Val sat down beside him, as if they were actors in act two of a play watched by Vivienne and Johnny. “So, then, murder in the museums. What do you know about the ice-blooded killing at the Bilbao Guggenheim, not long before it officially opened on October 19th, 1997?”
“One was,” Danny said, sitting up straight on the sandy rock floor of the open-air amphitheatre of Mosaic Canyon. “One was an invited, if I may say, VIP guest. Frank said hi.”
“You come from the same hometown, right? You and Frank Gehry?”
“Well and yes,” Danny said, surprised that Val knew Danny was from Toronto, a basic fact, and that the architect Frank Gehry was from Toronto, a basic fact. He had hidden everything, been hired to hide everything, so that even the most basic facts of his life seemed like redacted secrets someone had broken into.
“And so, correct me if I am wrong, you and Frankie baby were having yourselves a little celebratory libation, there at the opening reception, is that right?”
“Of course, it was a great and splendid day. We had achieved so much together.”
“Yet there was a murder plot at the Guggenheim to disrupt its opening to the public, Danny. Basque terrorists were planning to plant twelve grenades in Jeff Koons’ Puppy and blow up the big dog made of greens and flowers in front of the museum, and kill VIPs, including the King and Queen of Spain.”
“I heard the news that day.”
“But, help me out here, Danny. Isn’t it your job to anticipate the news? Isn’t counterterrorism professional anticipation? To stop the news before it happens. We hired you to be prepared for terror, not be a consumer of the headlines about terror.”
“If none of it had happened. How to stay the course, when blood becomes our heritage. The waters run red beside the museums, the cafés…”
“Now that you say it, dear Daniel, I have to agree with you. We have become so preoccupied with safety, we have forgotten our souls. The heart of art, you were hired to protect that, too. When the Twin Towers went down in fuselage flames, we lost so many beautiful paintings. Doesn’t that grieve you?”
“I don’t have time for grief, it is not in the job speculations.”
“Danny. There is a price to pay, if public safety does not encompass inner security. We met about this, me and your other superiors: Danny Coma had become trapped in safe styling and sandpapered images. It wasn’t always that way. We thought you’d be a tiger, out on the fringes, informal, vigilant. What happened?”
“You and my big-shot brother. Why don’t you leave me alone and stop blaming me? My hands are dry, is there some water? My wife died, I’ll have you know.”
“I do know. Suspicious circs. We let that go. She was way off the grid. Your wife went rogue on us, but you did not have to follow her.”
“That’s how much you know. Who are you anyway?”
“If you knew, I’d have to kill myself.”
“Do I see the gofer with some cleansing water for my hands?…Yes… No?... Ah, Mr. Gehry… He grew up on the same block of Cecil that my bubbie did. For all I know, his mother and my grandmother shopp
ed in Kensington together.” Danny picked up a smooth mirrored rock and threw it. Vivienne caught the shot. Danny’s face had the blank petulance you sometimes see in photos of boys age ten or eleven.
“Did you know,” Val said, “were you aware that the main mastermind behind the 1997 attempted bombing of the Guggenheim Museum is said to be hiding in Cambridge, England? Your old alma mater, plus you are an old hand at Spain. Did you know that it was Mister Basque in Cambridge who had the idea that the ETA terrorists would pose as gardeners, drive up with compost in a pickup and plant all those petunia pots in Jeff Koons’ Puppy along with remote-controlled explosives?”
“That never went ahead,” Danny said.
“Correct. You heard the news,” Val said. “But no thanks to you. Three years before the terrorists tried to blow up the Guggenheim, the leadership sent out a communiqué saying, ‘We will tiralo todo con patas arriba.’ Topsy-turvy, Danny. Paws up. Shoot everybody.”
“I don’t speak Spanish,” Danny said.
“Digame something I don’t know. So the terrorists in Bilbao set out to make good their promise. But they were stupid two ways. One, they came with their manure, their gardeners’ garb, their moss and petunias, on a Monday. But the actual gardeners building Koons’ Puppy had completed their work on the Saturday. The police knew that. So they ran the plates of the suspicious-looking gardeners’ vehicle, a Ford Transit, and found that, two, they were plates stolen from a SEAT Marbella. There was a shootout at the new museum between police and terrorists. A policeman was fatally wounded, and a massacre was avoided.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Your job.”
Val’s blood was boiling. He took incompetence personally. Vivienne was looking through the camera lens at Danny. Johnny, for his part, was shaking, with the kind of tremors and sick stomach only family can bring. He could hardly hold on to his sketching pencil, but sketch he did. Danny smirked his hidden knowledge, known to all in the open land. Johnny sketched Danny with a balloon coming out of his mouth: I WAS PROMISED.
“Here’s us,” Val said, thrusting a Polaroid Dan’s way. “That is me, Johnny and Vivienne. That is Vivienne pointing to the actual blood of the policeman on the sidewalk, at the entrance to the Bilbao Guggy. Where were you? Getting a blow job inside Richard Serra’s Snake?”
“Who said you were there?”
“I did,” Val said.
“Well, check your sources.”
They had walked that night, in Basque Bilbao, after the shootout at the Guggy, the Three Musketeers, in the exquisite shipbuilding fall dusk of rusty cordages along the inlet, the Ría del Nervión. The link between old Bilbao and Bremen and Pittsburgh was evident: it was the air of big work, and men who built the sailing vessels, big mines, big foundries; the air of a time and a place that in the States was now called the Rust Belt, but which felt alive still in Bilbao.
How they had walked that night the terrorists shot the Bilbao guard down beside Frank Gehry’s titanium rebuke to terror. They walked in that Nervión autumn dusk, in its characteristic purpling over the hills, and the water was green and old and full of ship’s hulls and algae. They walked over Santiago Calatrava’s bridge, a magnificent lit up bridge made of turquoise glass, a marvel of swoop, called the Zubizuri – the “white bridge” that Johnny called the white bird. And Vivienne took pictures of them, high above the water, subsumed by turquoise lifting into the wet night and surrounding their bodies in the pic, and the Gehry Guggy in back, shining its own wet titanium silverization in the night. Maybe the Guggy was Marilyn Monroe, as the New York Times had it, maybe it was Elizabeth Taylor, stealth and northern, in violet and green. Terror hates beauty, because beauty always outlives terror, and especially when we remember the beauty we have known, which they have smashed to smithereens. Because terror has to make noise and beauty can be quiet. Because terror has to brag, and beauty can be modest. Terror knows in its heart that it is the one nobody wants to dance with, only the losers, only the bullies who look at beauty with flames so green they would destroy it. Franco is dead, but Guernica is forever.
“These ETA terrorists, come on, Danny. They’re no more political than the old Mafia boys. You know what they say: these are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. Your pals were terrorists who never started high school, who keep killing people to get what they’ve already got.”
Danny pushed up into another handstand and walked on his hands a few inches. A bighorn sheep up on the ridge might be forgiven for wondering what humans thought, or if they had thought at all. Two of them, legs crossed, huddled under a small rock overhang in a one-foot shadow for shade. A third, walking back and forth on two feet, with a white stick in his mouth, blowing smoke. A fourth who walked on his hands. Ta-da! An ovine against the sky might wonder about the awkwardness of this species in the canyon, a sense the humans had been brought to earth and did not know it.
Val urged Danny to his feet, then took him in his arms and began a slow dance with him, whispering in his ear. “What do you know about the Spanish terrorists’ plan to come to the United States and coordinate bombings on one day, at one time, in major museums across the States?” He twirled Danny out in a slow jive move, then held him close again. “What did you know about the ETA plan to kill the King of Spain in September 2000 at the opening of the Chillida-Leku Museum in San Sebastián? What do you know about the plan to bomb the Met in New York, the Phillips in Washington, the Bass in Miami Beach, the Menil in Houston and the Getty in LA all on the same day?”
Danny looked at the massive open space he was in, as if for the first time. A fugue state can be a sly intention, then a habit of synapse. “Can anybody get a coffee around here?” he asked.
“Come on, Danny,” Val said. “What do you know about Basque terrorists flying from Spain to begin bombings all over North America? What do you know about the emails intercepted between ETA members in Bilbao and ETA members in Bayonne, regarding ticket purchases on Iberia Airlines, to fly from Spain to Guatemala, and to make their way by land up through Arizona and Texas to start ETA branches in the US? What do you know about the terrorists’ plans to come to Las Vegas and blow up major hotels this New Year’s? Come on, Danny, cough.”
Val lit another cigarette off the one still in in his mouth. He had one in each hand. “What do you know,” he asked, “about Saddam Hussein electrocuting his own soldiers by dumping them in the rivers and sending electricity through the water?”
“I have heard it was done,” Danny said.
“Do you know it was done?” Val took a puff from the right hand and then the left.
“It is a story told in the Middle East.” Danny’s eyes brightened.
“Tell me about the story.” Val sat down at Danny’s feet, giving a little haimish rub to Danny’s right Frye boot.
Danny’s back straightened. His body snapped even straighter, and his eyes lit out to a far memory. “Thank you all for coming here, today,” he said. “We welcome the usual invitees, any extras welcome, wives, grandchildren, friends on tour, gather round, the expected list and inter alia and so on.” Val wondered if Danny had gone back to the fugue-state Danny. Then Danny snapped back. “Ah, yes. Iraq. The draining of the great rivers. I understand that Saddam was hunting down the deserters from his army. They ran to the rivers so the rivers would hide them, and Saddam sent electrical wires through the water. He electrocuted his own soldiers. The waters were tortured. Of course, there was no reliable power; electricity was by no means secure – the blackouts! Then Saddam gave orders for the waters to be drained. Thousands of men lay where the ancient rivers ran. He had unearthed them at last.”
Johnny and Vivienne came over and sat down. Vivienne put her head on Johnny’s shoulder. He stroked her hair and kissed her head.
Danny saw he had a full house of three souls. He held out his right hand and spoke: “And so they said that those who lived by the crops near the water lost their economies, and so they said that the birds no longer had a home. The waterf
owl was lost without water. Saddam called it Enemy Water, and he killed his own water to get at the traitors. The sky was full of electrocuted feathers, for they killed the waterfowl, as well as the uniformed men. And now the dry riverbeds were full of corpses and unexploded mines. And they sent more electricity through the riverbed, even though all the water was gone, in case someone was hiding in the water that was not there, and some of the mines exploded, killing the corpses twice.” Danny stretched both his arms out, in grand podium style.
“And so did the dictator Saddam Hussein drain the grand biblical rivers. He called one river the River Mother of All Battles. And he called the other river the River Loyalty to the Leader.
“To save the patria, war kills the land.” Danny pointed to the dry riverbed in front of him. He bowed. Vivienne, Johnny and Val applauded. Danny bowed his head again. Which Danny was this? Was it the Danny who had started out young and fresh and sharp? Or the Danny who became the underminer, the belittler, embarrassed by sincerity?
“And what Saddam Hussein started,” Danny said, lifting his head, with moist eyes, “the fucking United States of America finished for him. They continued his work of destroying the Iraqi homeland. The great waters of the Shatt al-Arab down in the reeds and the rushes of the baby Moses, gone. South of Basra, Eden is gone. Goodbye, Eden. Gone. Blood and blood and blood. Adios, old pal. Hasta Luegito, Eden.”
Val looked at Johnny. Johnny shook his head. Is this my brother, Danny? This man seems clear, heartful. The ambition was short, the fumes were long. Vivienne took a picture of Danny, who, despite the Speedo in the cold sunshine and the old kicked-up dusty boots, showed an aligned posture and seemed a man. His body had momentarily sloughed off its sarcasm, and that changed the body’s look.
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