by John Welter
“Well,” she said, staring at me again. “I’d heard of unforgivable sin. I guess now we have unrecognizable sin.”
“Really? What happens when you commit an unrecognizable sin?”
“I think they take points off your driver’s license. I don’t know, Doyle. I just thought it was strange that a priest would invent the category of unrecognizable sin. So we didn’t settle that, and then he asked me if I wanted to save my marriage. I thought about this. I said, ‘Father. That would be like saving a tumor.’ We didn’t talk much after that.”
“Have you thought seriously of divorcing Gabriel?”
“The Church doesn’t recognize divorce.”
“Well. They don’t recognize divorce and they can’t recognize certain sins. Your church is having trouble recognizing things.”
“I think I will divorce Gabriel. I’ll need a lawyer. I don’t know why. Now it’s going to cost me hundreds or thousands of dollars to get out of a bad marriage. Will you help me find a lawyer?”
“Of course I will. But remember—I’m biased. I’m the one who doesn’t want you sleeping with your own husband. Does that bother you?”
“Sleeping with my husband? Yes.”
“Will you tell me something?”
“What?”
“When you had sexual fantasies, what did we do?”
“Doyle,” she said, as if she was scolding me, then she grinned. “Are you starting to get pornographic?”
“Pornographic? They were your fantasies. I just want to know what we did. Did we like it?”
“And I suppose you’ve never had sexual fantasies about me?”
“Yes. I have.”
“Well, what did we do in your fantasies?” she demanded politely. “Who was on top?”
This shocked and elated me. We’d never discussed sex before, and now we were discussing it as if we might have it.
“On top of what?” I said.
“Was I on top or were you on top?”
“Sometimes we were sideways.”
She seemed embarrassed by her own boldness and said, “Did we have dinner first?”
“Dinner? I didn’t have fantasies about food.”
“I think we better talk about this later,” she said, sighing for about two or three seconds as if we were having sex. I wanted to help. My penis was already more optimistic than it should have been.
“All right. We’ll talk about it later. I guess we should go look for lawyers in the Yellow Pages,” I said, kind of dizzily happy that we were even closer than before, as if we were on the verge of a romance that we were making sure we weren’t talking about. And now that we were closer, I still didn’t know what we were closer to. If Natelle knew, she didn’t tell me. That was the problem about being alive. Things happened secretly in people. No one ever knew it unless you told somebody. I was going to pray that Natelle be in love with me, but then I remembered that the Church wouldn’t recognize that. Maybe Natelle would. I looked at her and prayed, I wish you’d love me, and she didn’t say anything. Maybe she was praying at me, too, and I didn’t say anything. Frequently the world didn’t work, and we only acted like it did.
“This isn’t a happy way to be an adult,” Natelle said as we both stood up to walk away. “I never thought when I was a girl that one day I’d get married and then go looking for lawyers in the Yellow Pages.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Let’s not talk about it anymore. Let’s talk about something pleasant, if there’s anything pleasant left in the world. How’s your baseball team doing?”
“Oh, that. I guess you’re referring to the Avenging Blowfish,” I said as I held Natelle’s hand and wished I never had to let it go.
14
Doltmeer assigned me to protect the ambassador of the People’s Democratic Socialist Republic of Indizal, an almost imperceptible island nation off the coast of West Africa. All I knew about Indizal was that its primary export was its citizens. In size it was no bigger than Milwaukee, and it excelled only in its willingness to seek foreign aid. It wasn’t even a Third World country, but hoped, by gloomy persistence, to rise to that status. Being assigned to protect the ambassador from Indizal was an honor to be resisted.
“Am I being punished?” I asked Doltmeer.
“We have an obligation to protect all of the foreign ambassadors in this city. It won’t do you any good to brood.”
“Who am I protecting the ambassador from?”
“Assailants.”
“You mean his citizens?”
“I don’t expect you to be rude to the ambassador.”
“What’s his name?”
“I haven’t learned his name. It’s written down somewhere,” Doltmeer said, pretending to search for a piece of paper on his desk that he had no interest in finding. “You’re expected at the embassy at ten o’clock this morning.”
“What do I say? ‘I’m here to protect the ambassador. Will you tell me his name?’”
Doltmeer opened a folder on his desk and said, “Aramilo.”
“So he does have a name? This’ll make it easier to address him. Do they speak English at the embassy?”
“They speak Spanish.”
“I don’t.”
“Ambassador Aramilo speaks English. He has a degree in music from the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science.”
This was too ludicrous to accept, as if Doltmeer didn’t care if I knew anything true about my next assignment, since they were dumping me into it anyway.
“Really? He studied music at a college of textiles and science? Why should I believe that?”
“Don’t argue with me. You’re in enough trouble already.”
“Is the president still mad at me?”
“The president doesn’t even know you exist.”
“I’ll send him a postcard.”
“Don’t fuck this up, Doyle. The only assignment lower than this is looking for a new job.”
So they really were punishing me. I was going to say something clever and sardonic, but I decided the cleverest thing I could do was be quiet.
SOMETHING I thought of as I morosely drove to the Indizalian Embassy to meet with Ambassador Hobar Aramilo was that, again, I was involved in extraneous and pointless pursuit: my job. What I did, if you looked at it abstractly, was wear a suit and carry guns to protect the lives of influential people who probably didn’t deserve their influence and weren’t any more valuable than the millions of people who had no influence at all. Probably I was an egalitarian who believed that all people were equal, but my job was to protect people who were thought of as better than equal. Even the people who wrote the Constitution were aristocrats. It was kind of darkly comical that a famous American saying was that all people were created equal, when it would have been more honest to say, “All people were created equal, but you don’t have to stay that way.” Equality was something to endure until you overcame it—like being an ambassador from a third-rate country whose gross national product came from foreign aid.
I was pretty cranky when I got to the embassy, but I repressed it all, as I always did, hiding nearly all of my human impulses so I’d seem professional. As I walked through the handsome embassy, I wanted to say to everyone, “Well, I’m here to protect you stupid fuckers from the enemies you probably deserve,” but it was important to remain at my current level of trouble and not accumulate more, so I was quiet and polite and as inhuman as professionally necessary.
A fat woman who identified herself as the under-ambassador led me into Aramilo’s huge and remarkably pretty office where I saw a skinny little man who at first I thought looked like a member of a religious sect, someone who might try to sell me incense and tamper with my soul. It was the ambassador.
“I am told to expect you,” Ambassador Aramilo said in an unidentifiable accent, something like Spanish-Indian.
“Yes, sir.”
He was so small, about five feet, weighing about the same as a sixth-grader. I’d never before s
een a man of power who looked so weak. He had a grayish-black moustache, like Omar Sharif, and sort of looked like him if Omar had shrunk a lot and was bald. He wore a brilliant blue robe that, even if it was part of the national dress of Indizal, looked like a maternity gown. Aramilo had a pleasant and earnest smile, as if he might really be a nice man. He looked so frail and harmless I thought that if someone wanted to kill him, they could probably do it with a rock.
“My name is Hobar Aramilo, although why am I telling you that, since obviously you know?” Aramilo said as he shook my hand with the grip of a small boy.
“Yes, Mr. Ambassador.”
“Oh, I appreciate your formality, but you needn’t be that way in private. You’re certainly free to call me Hobar.”
“Certainly, Mr. Ambassador.”
This made Aramilo laugh, so I decided he might not be a son of a bitch.
“Please sit down,” Aramilo said in his distinct and unclassifiable accent, pointing to a big green sofa next to a window overlooking a neo-colonial gas station. “May I fix you a drink?”
A beer would’ve been nice.
“No, thank you. We’re not allowed to drink while on assignment.”
“I understand. You must remain alert and sober. I don’t. I hope you don’t mind if I fix a vodka tonic.”
“It’s not my role to mind anything. It’s your embassy.”
“Indeed, and a very agreeable one,” he said, unscrewing the top of a bottle of costly Russian vodka and pouring about two inches into a glass. He neglected to put any tonic water in it.
“So now,” Aramilo said, seated across from me in what looked like an antique chair, “since you’re here to intimately guard me from the many possible enemies who lurk somewhere and would like to overthrow my government, may I ask how familiar you are with Indizal?”
“You export rice, manganese, and diamonds, which I assume aren’t the ingredients in a casserole.”
“Well, you do know something,” he said, tipping his head back and laughing. “I don’t think manganese is suitable for cooking.”
“Tastes vary.”
“Undoubtedly. But I assure you we don’t eat metal in Indizal. Our favorite spice is curry, which we use to season chicken and fish and rice. Our national anthem is ‘Carry Us Home to the Sea,’ which I happen to have written myself. Unlike many ambassadors, I assume, I received no formal schooling in statecraft or the political sciences. I was but a penniless student studying piano for a few years in Philadelphia before returning to my home in Indizal. This was before the revolution. Do you know of that?” Aramilo said, smiling as if he’d asked too hard a question.
“The world has too many revolutions. I haven’t memorized them all, but I’ll assume yours was a good one.”
“It was, in the sense that it worked.”
“I think that’s how we measure revolutions. They’re good if you win.”
“You are perhaps teasing me,” he said in an amused but slightly wary tone.
“No. We’re not allowed to tease anyone with diplomatic immunity.”
“Oh. You seem to be a very proper Secret Service agent.”
“The properest.”
“You don’t look that conservative,” he said, as if examining my eyes or facial features.
“I’m as conservative as my employer needs me to be.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
“I’m not authorized to analyze your beliefs.”
“Most in-tresting. Most intresting,” he said, grinning and then swallowing a half-inch of vodka. “But you don’t have to remain so professionally aloof from me. While you’re assigned to ensure my safety, I think, at least in private, we can converse as one human to another, if that suits you.”
“In the Service, whatever suits us is none of our business. But if, as a condition of our professional association, you’d prefer for me to show some evidence of humanness, we’re authorized to engage in such aberrations.”
“You certainly work for an awfully rigid organization, I think.”
“I have no opinions.”
“No? Well, you should get some.”
“I have no access to opinions.”
“This is starting to get maddening. I want you to have a drink with me. Will your superiors allow you to drink if I insist on it?”
“If it will aid the atmosphere of cooperation between sovereign nations.”
“Do you like vodka?”
“If I’m requested to like it.”
“All right. Then I insist that you have a glass of vodka and like it.”
“I guess I have to. Do you have any lime?”
Thirty minutes later, while Aramilo was on his third glass of vodka without tonic, he wanted to play some songs for me on his baby grand piano.
“I should probably be out in the hallway guarding you,” I said.
“I’m not out in the hallway. You should guard me in here. Have you heard this song before?” Aramilo said excitedly, and began playing a peculiar melody as he sang:
When first I saw you in the factory hall
You reminded me of the love scene in Das Kapital.
And when we embraced in simple seduction
You put your hands on my means of production.
“I made that up myself,” Aramilo said.
“Sounds like it.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“I promise I don’t.”
“I put the economic theories of Karl Marx to music. It’s called the ‘Lumpenprole Waltz.’”
“Oh. A waltz for the dispossessed. That means you can dance to it, but you aren’t invited to the dance?”
“Ex-act-ly!”
“That’s nice. Do you know any other communist folk songs, like ‘Home, Home on the Gulag’?”
Aramilo shook his head. “And you said you weren’t allowed to tease anyone with diplomatic immunity.”
“I’m sorry. I must’ve misplaced my protocol. It might be under the couch,” I said, glancing down at the floor. “I’m not sure if you should keep playing piano. We should probably discuss your security arrangements for a while, if that’s all right.” I sipped from my second glass of vodka without tonic, realizing from my giddiness that I was only slightly drunk. “Who’s trying to kill you?”
“Someone’s trying to kill me?” Aramilo said in a slightly alarmed voice.
“If not, then why am I protecting you?”
“The PDF might want to see me dead.”
“Who’s the PDF?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“They haven’t told us. In Indizal, they commit acts of violence and terrorism against my government, and they never say who they are. It’s just PDF.”
“Could it stand for People’s Democratic Front?”
“That’s fine with me.”
“Well, I’m not asking for your approval, as if we’re recommending suitable names for a terrorist group. You know, if it’s the People’s Democratic Front against the People’s Democratic Socialist Republic of Indizal, it makes it sound like the people versus the people.”
“Yes. It would sound like that.”
“In America, we have a saying. I wish I could remember it.”
“Is it about people?”
“Yes. That’s right. The saying is, ‘You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, and when you get good at it, you’re reelected.’”
“Is that really a saying?”
“It is if you say it. But why would the PDF want to see you dead?”
“My favorite American saying is ‘If it’s broke, don’t fix it.’”
“I’ve never heard that saying before. You must be from a different part of America. Overseas, for example. Tell me … are you politically valuable enough to be shot?”
“And what’s that other American saying? I can’t think of it. It’s like, ‘We earn our money the old-fashioned way—we raise our prices.’”
“You’re not paying attention to me. How am I supposed to protect you if I have no reason to believe you’re worth being shot?”
“In Indizal, we have a saying: ‘The blowfish is tastiest that isn’t eaten.’”
“Blowfish. What a coincidence. We’ve started a covert baseball team called the Avenging Blowfish. We’ve scheduled a game against the CIA, if we can ever find out where it is. Do you play baseball in Indizal?”
“No. The ground isn’t flat enough. We have mountains.”
“Really? I didn’t think Indizal was big enough for a mountain.”
“They are little mountains.”
“You’re a young country. They’ll grow. Do you have ski resorts?”
“We have no snow.”
“No snow? Well, how the hell do you expect to attract rich American tourists to exploit your economy and make you resentful?”
“Well, we do have our own culture, you know. Have you read any of the works of our famous national writer, Gara de Sayo?”
“If I’m familiar with him, I’ve managed to not remember.”
“It was Gara de Sayo who wrote: ‘We are born with all the ignorance we need. We never run out.’”
“That’s a nice saying. It reminds me of another American saying: ‘The two things that all people have in common are ignorance and something I can’t remember.’ But Hobar, you know what?”
He leaned his head forward and said, “What?”
“If I’m supposed to protect you from your enemies, you better go get some.”
“That’s not my responsibility. Your government is paying you to find my enemies,” he said, then turned back to the piano and began playing a uniquely drunken chord.
“I know who your enemy is—the New York Times music critic.”
He ignored me and continued playing a song in which his skill was apparent but badly impaired. He was drunk, and this was my new job—to protect a high-ranking drunken pianist.
15
I was brooding, sitting back like a sullen spectator, regarding my recent misfortunes, and I decided my newest mission was to retaliate against the president. I had been relegated to guarding a high-ranking drunken pianist, and Abbas had been fired because the president was served food meant for a lower class of people: the American public. Spontaneously I envisioned a long headline in the Washington Post: “White House chef fired for Spam incident; President scorns food fit only for voters.” Someone could nail the bastard that way. Tell the press that the White House chef was fired for serving the president a food that millions of Americans eat every day. Not the cat food, of course. No one would have to know about that. Anyone would have been justified in firing Abbas for serving cat food to the president. But they didn’t know about that. They fired him for the Spam, which was the same thing as saying the president felt degraded by being made to eat like a common American. Someone could nail him good for that one. Now I only had to find that someone.