by John Welter
I wanted to put my lips anywhere between her eyes and neck, strenuously resisted this impulse, and whispered back, “Gardenaul called me into his office a little while ago and said he wants to hang my testicles from a lampshade in the Library of Congress. I don’t think it would match the other furnishings.”
She looked confused and stunned. “What’re you talking about?”
“Furnishings. It’s what you put in a room.”
Natelle punched me lightly in the stomach and whispered, “I think we better talk in my office, where no one can hear.”
“Well, if we can’t hear, maybe we should talk in someone else’s office,” I whispered.
She ground the toe of her shoe into my foot and said, “Come on.”
I liked how she could be so familiar with me that she could hit me in the stomach and step on my foot and still know I’d follow her, which I always would.
After Natelle closed the door to her little basement office and stared at me from about three feet away with her lovely green eyes, I realized that again we were alone together and couldn’t touch.
“So what were you doing in Gardenaul’s office?” she asked in a serious and interested tone.
“Talking about lamps.”
“Did you have anything to do with Abbas and the Spam?”
“And the cat food, too. I was a neutral observer. But Gardenaul doesn’t think so.”
“What do you mean, cat food, Doyle? What else did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. Abbas did.”
“Did what, Doyle? What in the hell aren’t you talking about?”
“Well, the truth is, I innocently walked into the kitchen last night to see if Abbas or someone would give me a snack, like they always do, and I saw Abbas opening cans of Spam.”
“Then he really did it? This is too hard to believe,” Natelle said.
“And that’s not all he really did. I didn’t actually see the cans of cat food, but Abbas told me he was going to serve cat food on crackers. He said it tastes like paté. Not very good paté, I assume.”
“My God,” Natelle said, opening her eyes wide with disbelief. “What was wrong with Abbas?”
“I don’t think anything’s wrong with him. I think he just doesn’t like the president.”
“Don’t you think Abbas will get fired?”
“It seems probable. But how did they know it was Spam? That’s what I want to know. Did someone tell them, or did they realize it while they were eating? And if so, did the prime minister lean his head discreetly toward the president and say, ‘I think lemon sauce adds an unexpected piquancy to Spam’?”
Natelle breathed in deeply and sighed, staring at me and shaking her head in an affectionate, worried way. “So what did Gardenaul say to you?”
I was looking at her lips, wondering what they’d feel like, and if I’d ever know.
“Doyle? Are you listening?”
“Gardenaul,” I said absentmindedly. “He was pissed. He said the president was pissed. I assume everyone else was pissed. I’ve always wondered what urine has to do with anger.”
“Well, are you in trouble?”
I looked briefly at the edge of Natelle’s blouse where the very tops of her breasts were pleasantly visible and forbidden.
“I don’t think I deserve to be in trouble. I’m not responsible for Abbas, and, evidently, Abbas isn’t either.”
“Well, are you going to be punished, or what?” Natelle said in an impatient but gentle way.
“Probably. Gardenaul said he wants to cut my balls off and hang them from a lampshade in the Library of Congress. I don’t think the General Services Administration would allow that.”
“What can they do? It’s not your fault Abbas fixed Spam, although I’m sure Gardenaul said you should’ve reported it before dinner was served.”
“Yeah. That seems to be the prevailing opinion. But look at the facts. The Secret Service has absolutely nothing to do with the White House chef, unless we think the chef is trying to kill somebody, and Spam with lemon sauce can’t be regarded as a weapon. So it doesn’t matter what the goddamn chef serves for dinner. But did I know the president and the prime minister would find it insulting or disrespectful or intolerable to be served Spam?”
“And cat food,” Natelle said.
“Well, they don’t know they ate cat food, so that doesn’t count. Let’s stick to the Spam only. I’m in no position to second-guess the White House chef, or to suggest menus for state dinners, or …”
“Oh, come on, Doyle. You knew they’d be offended by Spam. That’s the only reason Abbas fixed it.”
“Nuh-uh,” I said. “He served it secretly, meaning he didn’t want them to be offended. He only wanted them to be defiled. That’s different.”
Natelle put her hands over her eyes and started laughing quietly.
“You’re impossible,” she said.
“No. I’m quite possible. In fact, here I am.”
She raised her hand and touched my chest, saying, “Yes, you are here. But what I want to know is, are you in trouble or not?”
To look at her and not have her was the trouble I was in.
9
After outraging the president, infuriating the chief of staff, having a profound attack of sadness, and continuing to hide my most urgent emotions from the only woman who I wanted to know them, it seemed to me that I wasn’t living my life very well.
My head hurt. I felt exhausted and anxious, which could have been symptoms of some new and culturally fashionable disorder called chronic white guy’s syndrome, or whining fatigue syndrome. It was in the newspapers and on TV, some recently discovered disorder where white people in their mid-twenties and thirties exhibited symptoms of just generally feeling like shit all the time, although shit wasn’t the precise medical term. It had the word “syndrome” in it, so all you had to do was randomly add some adjectives or adverbs to it and there you were with a puzzling and ominous new syndrome, such as “being alive syndrome,” which was what I thought I suffered from. I could use my medical insurance to go to a doctor and say, “Every day I wake up with the same frightening condition.”
“And what’s that?”
“Consciousness.”
Even the Bible announced in its first book that the first thing you could expect in life was trouble, followed immediately by sorrow, and concluding in death. None of this would have mattered except for consciousness. That’s what Adam and Eve got when they ate the apple. So that was my disorder—being aware of my life. And when you fell into the blessed forgetfulness of sleep, it didn’t last. You had to wake up. It was odd that while the Bible said sleep was blessed, it didn’t say the same thing about being awake.
All these thoughts came to me in great and vivid disorder after I left Natelle’s office and sat with repressed agitation at our briefing for the day, where, in my injured mood, everything about my job seemed pointless and wildly extraneous, as if the existence of the entire federal government was just an annoyance. On the notepad on my lap, I started writing a list that I titled “Things That Are Wrong with My Life,” as if by listing my major flaws and problems, I might get a pathetically vague insight into how to live well.
1. Not sure how many things are wrong.
2. Is the glass half full, or half empty?
3. What glass?
4. Sometimes I drink too much.
5. Sometimes I drink just the right amount.
6.
My pen ran out of ink. In the chair next to me, Yamato was reaching inside his coat pockets and his shirt pocket and then his pants pockets to find a pen so he could take notes during the briefing.
“Do you have an extra pen?” Yamato said.
“Use this,” I said, handing him my pen.
Yamato tried writing something on his pad, then frowned at me and said, “This is out of ink.”
“I know. That’s why I don’t want it.”
Doltmeer began handing out dossiers and things about the Queen
Mother and some duchesses and other exotic species in town, who we were supposed to protect from potential assassins.
“Do you have a pen that works?” Yamato asked.
“That one works. It just doesn’t have any ink in it,” I said, fumbling through my pockets for another pen for Yamato and me, and then I cupped my hand over my notepad so Yamato couldn’t see it and I tried to resume my list of things that were wrong with my life:
6.
The sixth one was too serious. I didn’t want to write it. I was going to write what was really true, that, at age forty-one, I’d achieved a number of fairly admirable successes that by themselves meant almost nothing. Sometimes at night I drank beer to make me sleepy, to sneak me into the unconsciousness that otherwise wouldn’t come to me. I wondered whether this was depression, or just sadness, to lie hurting in the dark and starting to cry, at first resisting the need to cry, as if someone might see me when there was no one there. That was crazy, not wanting anyone to see you crying because you were so alone, and crying because you wanted someone to see you.
Some nights I’d call out Natelle’s name, like an incantation. I’d never been trained in incantations, or religion, or voodoo, or magic, but I seemed to feel innately that when I hurt the most and was almost panicked in my lonesomeness, the best thing to do was say the name of the one person who mattered.
“Natelle.”
“Natelle.”
I wanted her to come to me, as if just by lying in the dark and saying, “Natelle, Natelle,” I could make her hear me from eight or nine miles away, and she’d know with some spiritual intuition that I needed her.
But she didn’t. Quietly saying “Natelle, Natelle” didn’t travel eight miles. For a spiritual incantation like that, you needed to be right up next to her ear. And then I knew, because there was no reason to dumbly lie to myself all day, that the reason I could get so frighteningly lonesome at night and automatically think of Natelle was that, secretly, in the part of me that was always real and knew without confusion or deception what honestly mattered, I was in love with her. Being in love with someone you weren’t supposed to be in love with was like being attacked by a blessing. It was supposed to be joyous, but it made you ache worse than most normal diseases. I couldn’t go to a doctor. A doctor would just say stop loving her, and I’d say, “Kiss my ass. I don’t want to know how to make love go away. I want to know how to make it work.”
Which of course I never told Natelle, even though I desperately wished I could. Somehow, it seemed more moral for me to lie crushed down in this sorrow than to cause Natelle any sorrow by saying I’m in love with you and I wish you’d love me back. But no one had to love you back. They didn’t even have to know about it.
And so I’d succeeded in having a love affair all by myself.
It didn’t work. It gave me headaches and anxiety, as if all of this affection and desire and need that was trapped and swarming around in me kept trying to escape, usually through my head, which I assumed caused the headaches.
Late the night before, when I couldn’t sleep and I got up to have a bottle of Mexican beer and see whatever stupid shows there were on TV to keep me company against the night, there was an evangelist on TV saying that if I did everything right, I’d go to Heaven.
“I’d rather go to Natelle,” I said.
You had to die to go to Heaven. I worried that reaching Natelle would be harder.
10
The next crucial project entrusted to only the most reliable and ingenious members of the Secret Service was to think of a name for our baseball team. Yamato said we should name the team after an animal that no one had used before in baseball—the Moles.
While it did have a kind of repugnant charm to it, Widdiker said it wasn’t unique and that those stupid bastards in the CIA might think of the same name, especially since some of them probably were moles. So he suggested instead that we call our team the Burrowing Rodents. We discussed this at an imitation French restaurant downtown called Maison de Maison, where you could buy affordable French wine from Albania. Also, Widdiker said there’d be a lot of attractive women there for us to look at and never meet, although I thought looking at one woman you’d never meet was sufficient. We drank glasses of red Albanian wine and ate French croissants baked fresh that morning in Ohio, as I wrote down potential team names on the same notepad that had my unfinished list of “Things That Are Wrong With My Life.”
“If we’re going to name our team after an animal, the Burrowing Rodents is good, since I think in a game between us and the CIA, you’d want a kind of upsetting, disturbing name,” Yamato said. “After all, both the Secret Service and the CIA are associated with assassination, war, and revolution.”
“Basic American themes,” Widdiker said.
“But we need more animal names to choose from, and not any dumb ones, like the Orioles or the Tigers.”
“Can we name our team after an insect?” I said.
“Which insect?”
“The assassin bug. That’s some bug in South America. They assassinate other bugs, but not for political reasons. They eat them.”
“I don’t want to be named after an insect,” Yamato said.
“I won’t name you after an insect. I’ll keep calling you Dutch.”
“How about the Scorpions?” Widdiker asked.
“That’s good. Kind of.”
“Well, if you want to name our team after something small and repugnant, we could call ourselves the Horse Ticks,” I offered.
“Don’t write that down,” Widdiker said.
“I’m writing it down,” I said. “And also, why do we have to name our team after an animal? Why can’t we name our team after a plant?”
“What plant?”
“Blue Mold.”
“The Warthogs!” Yamato suggested. “Write that down.”
“A warthog isn’t a plant.”
“Just shut up and write it down.”
“Don’t tell me to shut up. This is my notepad. Eat me.”
“I know what. We could call ourselves the Blowfish,” Widdiker said. “Write that down.”
I shook my head and said, “You can’t just keep thinking of simple animal names, such as the Warthogs and the Blowfish, as if the name itself is sufficient. You have to modify and embellish the names, like the Slavering Warthogs. It makes it sound more refined. And you can’t just say ‘the Blowfish.’ You have to add a word, make it more impressive and thoughtful. Such as the Avenging Blowfish.”
“That’s excellent,” Widdiker said, and patted my back. “Have you ever thought of a career in public relations?”
“Maybe the public has relations, but I don’t,” I said.
“What other names can we think of?” Yamato said.
“Jackals,” Widdiker said.
“All right. And what kind of jackals?”
“The usual jackals,” Widdiker said impatiently.
“That’s a good name—the Usual Jackals.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Widdiker said, shaking his head. “I mean whatever kind of jackals you usually have. Your standard jackals.”
“I’ll write that one down, too. Your Standard Jackals. These are some neat team names.”
“Fine,” Widdiker said, meaning he was tired of trying to explain himself.
“And now we have to think of at least one plant for a team name,” I said.
“Why?” Yamato said.
“Because it’s too ordinary to just think of animal names.”
“I can’t think of a single plant that would make a good team name. Name one,” Widdiker demanded.
“Botulism.”
“That’s a plant? That’s not a plant.”
“No, but it’s caused by toxic spores, I think, which come from plants.”
“Well, if we’re going to name our team after a disease, I’d prefer something more colorful.”
“Yellow Fever?”
“I don’t like yellow.”
“Scarle
t Fever?”
“When I was a boy, I always thought it would be neat to get purple fever, since no one else had it. And then I wanted rainbow fever. Even if I was sick, I’d at least be pretty to look at,” I said.
“Can’t we stick to the subject?”
“Why’re you so cranky? Have you got a fever?”
“I think we have plenty of names to choose from,” Widdiker said. “Let’s just look at the list and decide which one we like best.”
“But what do we do after we pick one? Are we going to have the name stitched on our jerseys?” Yamato wondered.
“I don’t think we should. We don’t want the CIA to know which team we are.”
“Well then, why do we need a name?”
“So we can keep it secret.”
11
What I imagined was that, on game day, a huge and adoring crowd gathered in the bleachers we didn’t have would cheer exuberantly as we came out onto the field in our uniforms while the stadium announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a big welcome to the Avenging Blowfish!”
In reality, there was no such thing as an avenging blowfish, which made it a perfect name for a covert baseball team preparing for a game that might not exist. What I also imagined was the president standing on the pitcher’s mound to throw the ceremonial first pitch, but we wouldn’t give him the ball.
“Where’s the ball?” he’d say.
“We’ve hidden it, Mr. President.”
“And what the hell for?”
“This is spookball, Mr. President. We’ve decided to make the game more competitive by hiding the ball.”
“Well, how in the hell do you expect the game to start?”
“With a search for the ball, Mr. President.”
The president probably wouldn’t think that was funny. He didn’t think Spam was funny. The trouble from all that was just beginning, with the news that Abbas had been fired. And what for? For feeding the president something that millions of Americans ate every day, not including the cat food. As far as I knew, the cat food was still one of the better parts of the meal.