Night of the Avenging Blowfish

by John Welter

  Before I could look for Abbas or talk with anyone in the kitchen, I was summoned by Doltmeer for a special meeting in his office, where, after arriving promptly and adopting a somber expression for this unpleasant occasion, I found Doltmeer feeding flies to a little garden of pitcher plants. I didn’t know he had pitcher plants. In his navy blue suit, white shirt, and yellow bowtie, Doltmeer looked strangely proper to be gently stuffing dead flies into the mouths of carnivorous plants. My impulse was to say, “What’re you doing with those fucking flies?” although I cautiously said nothing and waited for Doltmeer to acknowledge my presence and announce whatever kind of trouble he had selected for me.

  “I’d offer you a seat, but I think your visit here should remain uncomfortable,” Doltmeer said.

  Uh-oh.

  “You’re in trouble,” he said, then apparently waited for me to respond, which I wasn’t going to do. I thought there was no point in responding to the obvious. I decided to seem indifferent.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” Doltmeer asked irritably.

  “I assume you are,” I said.

  Reaching into a small brown bag for a fly, Doltmeer said, “I’m informed that because of your reckless negligence, the president and the prime minister dined on Spam.”

  “I don’t think reckless negligence had anything to do with it,” I said. “I think when the White House chef cooks food, he does it deliberately.”

  “And you’d like to blame the chef, wouldn’t you,” Doltmeer said in a slightly angry voice.

  “Blame the chef for cooking?”

  “Goddamn you, Coldiron! You were there when that bastard chef decided to serve Spam to the president, and don’t say a goddamn word about how the Secret Service isn’t responsible for the president’s food! You knew it was wrong, you knew Abbas was going to do it, you said nothing to anyone to prevent it, and it resulted in a serious embarrassment to the president.”

  The only part of the argument I didn’t like was the part where I got in trouble. I didn’t think you could say I was morally or ethically responsible for the imagined crime of serving Spam to the president. I wondered if defending myself was possible. I decided to try.

  “Spam is made of ham,” I said. “It might not be made of the finest cuts of ham, but I think when you’re talking about an animal that’s been violently killed, there’s nothing very genteel about which part you eat, anyway. Whether you eat it raw, like a hyena, or cooked and spiced, like a president, you’re still eating the same animal.”

  Doltmeer put his bag of dead flies down and said, “Good argument. Too bad I don’t give a goddamn.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t.”

  “Yes, but you had to try, and I almost admire that. Except I don’t. So don’t argue with me. Don’t try to be reasonable and correct, because I don’t care. We both know the only reason Abbas served Spam to the president was to offend him.”

  “Not really,” I said quietly and with a detached interest in the subject. “Abbas was meticulous in trying to conceal the Spam. I wasn’t there when he did it, but he told me about marinating it and breading it and topping it with fresh lemon sauce. So he didn’t want the president to know what it was. As I figured out later, he didn’t want to offend the president. He only wanted to defile him. That’s purely psychological. Like I said, it wouldn’t have made any difference if the president had eaten smoked ham or processed ham from a can. It was simple snobbishness. The offense didn’t come from the ham.”

  “Very true,” Doltmeer said in a calmer voice, as if he agreed with me and couldn’t be quite so mad at me anymore. “But I think you’re missing the point. The president is expected to be a snob. And you knew he wouldn’t like the Spam. Therefore, you’re screwed. And do you want me to tell you why?”

  “No.”

  “You’re screwed because you’ve gotten a lot of people pissed off at me. I personally don’t care if the president eats stray dogs with lemon sauce. But when I get people leaning on me because one of my goddamn agents thought it was funny to serve Spam to the president, I’m going to be as vengeful as anyone wants me to be. Do you understand? If Gardenaul wants your balls hanging from a lamp, I’ll send you to the store to buy the lamp.”

  12

  I was walking across the White House lawn after getting back from Doltmeer’s office, ready to go protect the life of a man who didn’t like me and who maybe wanted me fired, and aching to talk with Natelle because I was in love with her and she was my refuge, only I couldn’t tell her she was my refuge. So if I went to open my heart to her, I had to make sure it remained closed.

  There was an instant of dizziness as I thought about that, and something started rushing through me, like there’d been a rupture inside me, as if everything I hadn’t told anybody just silently blew up in me. My skin began to tingle and sweat as, in a vague panic, I felt again, like the first time this happened to me, that every choice I’d ever made was somehow wrong, that I didn’t belong here, that whatever I was supposed to be doing in the world had always been hidden from me and was irretrievably lost, and no direction I might go would matter right then.

  I stopped walking because there was no reason to go anywhere. The normal sense that I should be going somewhere was absent, as if I really didn’t belong anywhere, not even where I stood. Possibly I was going crazy, which at first didn’t seem much more troubling than anything else I’d gone through recently. In my college psychology class we briefly studied neurosis and psychosis, and I wondered which of the two I might be experiencing. Given a choice, I wanted neurosis. I could tell as the panic squashed in on me that I didn’t have a choice. You can’t choose your horrors. They just come. I felt frighteningly remote from everything, as if the air around me, and the massive, dark trees with glittery leaves, and even the blue, vacant sky stretched out in its vast sameness, were all suddenly alien to me, like I’d never seen the world before, and every common detail of existence was appearing to me for the first time.

  It seemed likely that I was going crazy. But having never gone crazy before, how could I recognize it? So there was just the tiniest, shortest moment, then, at the height of all this panic and unreality, when I paused to wonder, for the sake of intellectual clarity, if I was going crazy and how I’d know when I achieved it. It was like only part of me was going crazy and the rest of me was an astonished spectator.

  I rejected it. Maybe insanity was going to consume me anyway, but not with my permission. As I sweated and tingled and knew that no one in the world was waiting to see me and smile when I appeared, I closed my eyes to all this chaos and said, “No, no, no!” as if I was right at that instant when the chaos would fully come into me, and I had to tell it no. That was all I had left.

  No.

  And it began to recede, to roll back away from me, as if my refusal had stopped it, and it could only consume me if I let it. With my eyes still closed, the panic slowly left me, like a wind dying down, and the sweating and the tingling stopped, and I was exhausted, just from standing still and trying not to go crazy. It seemed as if I’d won. I was returning to normal.

  Normal wasn’t an especially good place to return to. I still felt desperately sad. I still wanted to hold Natelle, which wasn’t allowed. And whatever had just tried to scatter me into little shards of psychic debris was still in me, maybe renewing its strength for a more brutal attack. Being normal wasn’t a victory. It was just more manageable. Possibly all of this was a mystical or religious insight. I prayed not to have any more insights. Dear Jesus, if you’re showing me that every human ambition is extraneous but the giving and receiving of love, please don’t give me a nervous breakdown to show me that. I already believe it.

  Of course, I didn’t know if I was talking to Jesus or just talking to the sky. Neither one tends to answer you.

  My panic had been replaced by a deep and soothing sense of confusion, as if it was a blessing to not really realize what I’d just been through. In the Bible, when people briefly went out of their
minds and had a vision, they were called prophets. In the twentieth century, they were called mentally ill. I didn’t want to be called either.

  I wanted to tell Natelle about all this, but if I told her that one of my insights was the sorrowful absence of her in my life, she might panic.

  Panic. When all other emotions have abandoned you, panic remains loyal.

  I thought of walking into Natelle’s office and saying, “Something terrible has happened to me. I’m normal.” But of course I wouldn’t. I was wondering what to say to her, if I should say I’d just had a brief mental breakdown, or a religious insight, or just way too much sadness. All of it seemed possible, and I wanted to tell her about it. When you tell something that frightening to someone, they either back away from you instantly or they hold you.

  When I walked into Natelle’s office and tiredly smiled at her as if I were normal, she had no idea how bad normal was. She smiled back and held up a letter she’d been reading.

  “Sometimes I love answering the president’s mail. It’s so strange,” she said, and started reading the letter aloud, as if, like her, I was ready to be amused:

  Dear Mr. President:

  This is to inform you that our new organization, Women for A Sane Future, is compiling materials for an exhaustive research library to prove that the single most sinister force active in the world is testosterone. Research from respected and renowned scientists shows that the dominant cause of nearly every act of violence on every continent is the male hormone, testosterone. Accordingly, our research group is preparing detailed proposals to ask the White House and Congress to allocate urgently needed funds to be used by the Centers for Disease Control to study the effects of testosterone and recommend effective plans to eradicate this most odious compound. We hereby welcome your cooperation and opinions on our soon-to-be universal task—neutralizing the male hormone.

  Natelle looked up at me and laughed, saying, “The Centers for Disease Control? I wonder what this woman is thinking. Now that we’ve wiped out polio, men are next? Oh, good God. This would almost be hilarious if it wasn’t so ominously serious. I told you a lot of women in America are angry. This one’s really pissed off, which I can sometimes understand, after being married for two years. Sometimes I think the only reason people get married is that they’re tired of suffering alone. Is it really best to suffer in unison?”

  It seemed like she wanted me to answer that, and I said, “I guess if you can’t have simultaneous orgasms, you can at least have simultaneous pain. But I wouldn’t know. I’m simultaneously alone.”

  “Are you all right?” she asked, staring at my eyes. “You look pale.” She put the letter down and stared at me with some kind of worry or affection. I loved her for that and wouldn’t tell her, because it wasn’t the right time, and maybe never would be. People didn’t want you to love them all the time. They wanted you to love them at exactly the right time. And then they wouldn’t tell you when that was.

  “Things are awry. That’s normal,” I said, sitting in the steno chair next to Natelle.

  “What’s awry?”

  “It’s when things don’t work.”

  “I knowww that, Doyle. I mean what’s awry with you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, tell me what you think’s wrong. You really look pale. Have you got a fever? I hope it wasn’t the letter. I won’t let anybody study you at the Centers for Disease Control,” she said, putting the back of her hand against my forehead.

  I liked it when she did that. Too bad I had to have a nervous breakdown to get her to touch me.

  “You do feel a little warm. What’s wrong?”

  “I think I had a nervous breakdown for about sixty seconds.”

  “What? What’re you talking about? How could you have a nervous breakdown for sixty seconds?”

  “You don’t need one longer than that.”

  “Will you please tell me what happened?” she said in a slightly anguished voice, as if I needed new proof that she cared about me, and there it was. Also, she put her hand on top of mine, which meant more to me than I could safely explain to her. It might have been a simple gesture to her, I didn’t know. To me, it was a blessed intimacy having her hand on mine. I wondered if we were having the same emotions but we just didn’t say so. I wasn’t interested in my nervous breakdown anymore. I was interested in Natelle.

  “What happened?” she repeated.

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m not really sure. I think it was like the panic attack you told me you had one time.”

  “You panicked?”

  “I panicked a lot. It overwhelmed me. I was just walking across the grass after being told …”

  I stopped because there was too much to say.

  “After being told what?”

  “I can’t remember. Maybe now I have amnesia. That’d be great. First you have a nervous breakdown, then amnesia. Maybe I should just go home and sleep. I’d probably get insomnia, though. Then I’d stay up all night with amnesia, unable to remember why I got insomnia.”

  Natelle squeezed my hand and smiled woefully, as if I was sadly funny.

  “I feel better, now,” I said.

  “But you haven’t even told me what happened. You think you had a panic attack?”

  I shook my head yes. “I’ve had a few before, too. But this was different. It was like a panic attack with insights to explain why I panicked.”

  “You had insights? What insights?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  Natelle’s head drooped and she started laughing. “You mean you had a nervous breakdown that gave you insights you can’t remember?”

  “Nervous breakdowns aren’t funny.”

  “Yours is,” she said, laughing lightly as she leaned nearer to me to put her arms around me and rest her head against mine. The one insight that mattered the most was now holding me. I wished I could tell her that. It wasn’t time, and I began trembling a little bit and I was crying.

  “What’s wrong?” Natelle said quietly with her head next to mine, and it was like having someone you didn’t have at all.

  “You go ahead and cry,” she whispered. “I’ve got you.”

  True, but she didn’t know how completely.

  13

  I think Natelle loved me and she wasn’t going to say so. When she held me and said, “I’ve got you,” she didn’t say anything else and kept holding me for the longest time, as if it was important to soothe me and important mainly to hold onto me, not just because I wanted it, the sense of her flesh, but because she wanted the sense of mine, too. She kept her cheek pressed against mine and it seemed like she didn’t want to let me go, and I wanted to sink into her and become part of her.

  Natelle’s husband was named Gabriel. One night I prayed that Natelle would divorce Gabriel, since she’d talked about it a little bit with me. I closed my eyes and prayed, “Please let Natelle be divorced,” as if God would say, “Okay.” The difficulty in praying for a divorce was both the church wedding part and the part in the Bible that says, “Let no man put asunder what God hath joined together,” as if Natelle and Gabriel were joined together by God.

  Well, then, maybe He made a mistake. He seemed to make them all the time. There were millions of people who shouldn’t have been joined together by anybody, particularly by God. If it was ungodly to get divorced, you’d have to say the godly thing was for badly matched people to remain together in pain and despair. A divorce that worked was more holy than a marriage that didn’t, and I told that to God, as if I were His consultant. Probably He didn’t want consultants.

  But if He was really omniscient, why was He joining together so many millions of people who, after years of sorrow and anguish, would find it a joy to be put asunder? If the church wedding didn’t work, why couldn’t you have a church divorce? At the altar, the priest would say, “All right. Give him back your ring. And you give her the ring back, too.”

  And as the organist played a cheerful dirge or sonata, t
he priest would say, “I now pronounce you asunder.”

  I secretly remembered all this when Natelle decided to cheer me up and look after me by taking me with her to an art fair on the Mall down by the Smithsonian. She said, as if to explain why she wanted to go somewhere with me, that art was good for nervous breakdowns,

  “You mean to cause them?” I asked.

  She squeezed my hand and said, “People say most art comes from neurosis anyway. Let’s look at the art and see if we recognize any of our neuroses.”

  What we discovered among the rows of watercolors and paintings and sculptures was an exhibit of police sketches. Someone from the police department decided to display about three dozen charcoal sketches of suspects being sought in unsolved crimes. So in one row you could look at landscapes and abstract art, and in the police row you could look at composite drawings of fugitives. This was so ludicrous it cheered me up.

  We stopped in front of a sketch titled “Arson Suspect.”

  “It reminds me of Rembrandt,” Natelle said as she studied the drawing.

  “Rembrandt was an arsonist?” I said.

  A police officer walked up to us from a few feet away and said, “Do you recognize him?”

  “Sure. That’s Rembrandt,” I said.

  “I have no idea who it is,” Natelle said, shaking her head at me.

  “You said it reminds you of Rembrandt,” I said.

  “Is that a first name or a last name?” the cop asked.

  “Rembrandt’s dead. He’s not a likely suspect,” I said as Natelle pulled me away and said, “Stop that. I don’t think the police like you joking with them.”

  “Well, the police have no business putting on an art show anyway. If their arson suspects look like Rembrandt, they’re not drawing very well. They’ve probably got an arrest warrant out for Raphael.”

  “You seem to be in a better mood. Art must be good for you,” Natelle said, smiling.

  “You’re good for me. Art’s okay. But it wouldn’t matter to me if we were looking at rows of trash stapled onto easels. I’m just glad I got to go somewhere with you,” I said, realizing that what I’d said was possibly too honest, that it sounded like a description of love, which it was, and now what did I do?