by John Welter
They showed Abbas in front of his garage. “Possibly it was a mistake to serve Spam in disguise to the president, but it was a mistake I liked,” he said. “I felt, in my opinion, that the president was insulting me on television and in the newspaper to say an ordinary hot dog was better than my meals. And so I decided, hey, if the president likes processed meat, I’ll give him processed meat. I marinated it in herbs and lemon juice, and breaded it and prepared a light lemon sauce for it. Undoubtedly, it was the best Spam the president ever ate, and I was fired for it.”
“Mr. Amal,” a female reporter said, “why did you choose to publicize your apparent misfortune at the White House?”
“Apparent?” Abbas said. “I lost my job. I think that’s worse than apparent.”
“Were you trying to embarrass the president?”
“Let me offer another view. If you recall that, as I’m told, Spam is one of the most common foods of the American public, then this is what it means: I was fired for treating the president like an American.”
I wondered if I should wake up Natelle and tell her this wonderful news that would get me fired if Abbas talked too much. But she needed to sleep, to not have to think about her escape from Gabriel and her ruined life. She was asleep with three of her fingers tucked under my shirt, and I felt her ribs and part of her breast pressing onto my leg as she breathed. Even if she was only touching me in her sleep, unconsciously, I at least wanted that. I put my hand on the pillow in front of her nose to feel the warm flow of her breathing. That was all I had: a sleeping woman and her breath. It seemed like a lot.
17
Seated on an antique chair near one of the windows in Aramilo’s office, ostensibly guarding Aramilo from an imminent threat that so far had failed to be either imminent or a threat, I faced the general direction of Natelle’s office in the White House and silently prayed, Please let Natelle and me love each other for the rest of our lives, aiming this prayer toward Natelle without knowing her longitude or latitude, imagining the prayer rushing by her like an inexplicable and pleasant breeze that she’d feel around her—realizing intuitively that it was my prayer—and that she’d love me for it.
Probably not, though. She might not even be in the White House then, and my prayer would be one more hope uselessly fired off into nothing. I wasn’t sure that praying even worked. Maybe God just listened to idiots like me, and, as the prayer whooshed into God’s omniscient ears, God said: “Doesn’t interest me. Try again.” It didn’t seem like God ever granted me anything I prayed for. It wasn’t like I was praying for a new car or a washing machine. I was praying for love. Prayers didn’t get any more sacred than that, or any more pointless, either. It never worked. Sometimes I thought prayer was just talking to yourself and hoping someone else was listening. Maybe, instead of praying to God, I should pray to Natelle. At least she’d listen.
As I stared distractedly out the window, Aramilo began playing some jackass song on the piano, saying, “Do you recognize this?”
“I’m trying not to,” I said.
Aramilo smiled boyishly and began playing piano with one hand as he sipped vodka from a big glass. It seemed like that was his job as the ambassador, to stay drunk and play piano. I wished he’d be quiet.
“Would you be quiet?” I asked.
“I’m the ambassador. I don’t have to be quiet.”
I wondered how the whole world had so developed that the effects of all humanity resulted in this particular building in this particular town with me aiming my heart several miles away at a woman I only wanted to love, with little proof that this could possibly work. And instead of attending to that, which was the one thing in the world that mattered, my life was so arranged that I carried a machine gun to shoot at people who probably weren’t going to attack the ambassador from Indizal, who joyfully played songs I didn’t recognize or want to.
Playing a new song I didn’t know, Aramilo said, “Have you heard this one before?”
“No.”
I looked toward where I thought Natelle might be and I prayed, If she gets divorced, I’d like to marry her. Will anything work?
“Do you want me to show you how to play piano?”
That wasn’t what I prayed for. Maybe God decided that instead of love, I needed piano lessons.
“Sure,” I said. “And I’ll show you how to fire a machine gun.”
“Would you?” Aramilo said in a delighted voice. “I’ve always wanted to shoot a machine gun.”
“Okay. You teach me how to play a Mozart sonata, and I’ll show you how to shoot the doors off a Greyhound bus.”
“But I don’t know a Mozart sonata.”
“You’re screwed, then.”
“Oh please. I don’t want to be screwed. I could teach you how to play ‘Begin the Beguine,’ by Cole Porter,” Aramilo said hopefully.
“What’s ‘beguine’ mean?”
“‘Beguine’?”
I looked at Aramilo and said, “Well, if you’re going to begin the goddamn beguine, shouldn’t you know what a beguine is?”
“It’s just a song,” Aramilo said defensively. “I don’t know what it means. And anyway, it’s an Am-ER-ican song. You’re an American. Don’t you know what a beguine is?”
“Maybe it’s a car. You’re going on a trip and someone says ‘Okay. Someone go begin the beguine.’”
“Ha,” Aramilo said smugly. “You have no idea what a beguine is.”
“Well, if my ignorance duplicates yours, you can hardly feel superior.”
Someone knocked at the door and walked in. It was Maria, the chargé d’affaires, carrying some papers. “These are the trade agreement proposals, Mr. Aramilo,” she said. “I’ve told the senate subcommittee staff that the proposals will be ready by this afternoon, if you’ll just examine them for me, please.” Maria placed the papers on top of the piano and waited for a reply.
“What’s ‘beguine’ mean?” Aramilo asked her.
“Pardon me?” she said.
“‘Beguine,’” Aramilo said as he flipped some pages of sheet music.
Maria looked mystified and impatient. “The senators would like to begin studying the proposals tomorrow,” she said.
“Of course,” Aramilo said. “But we need to find out what ‘beguine’ means first. Just leave the papers on the piano. Do we have a dictionary?”
“I’ll confer with you this afternoon,” Maria said as she turned on her heel and walked out of the room, gently slamming the door as if giving us a lesson in being elegantly rude.
“I guess she doesn’t know what ‘beguine’ means,” I said. “I don’t think anyone does. I’ve lived in America all my life, and I never saw anyone begin a beguine.”
Aramilo walked over to the massive bookshelf he never used and said, “Here’s a dictionary.”
“What about the trade agreement?” I said. “I didn’t know Indizal had anything to trade. Do you guys have baseball cards?”
“How do you spell it?” Aramilo said, holding the dictionary open.
“‘Beguine’? I think it’s b-e-g-u-i-n-e.”
“Yes, yes.”
“Don’t tell me what it means. I want to guess. ‘Beguine’ means … I think it’s a casserole. I’m hungry. Did anyone begin the beguine yet?”
“It’s not a casserole, you fool. Look. It’s a dance,” Aramilo said.
“A dance?”
“Yes. It’s a ‘vigorous popular dance of the islands of Saint Lucia and Martinique that somewhat resembles the rhumba.’ Now will you teach me how to shoot the doors off a Greyhound bus?”
“No. You’re an ambassador. Ambassadors are supposed to play tennis, not shoot machine guns.”
“During the revolution …”
“Oh no. Not any more about the goddamn revolution. Please! Practically everybody’s had a goddamn revolution by now. What’s so fun about shooting at people, anyway? I shot at people in Vietnam and they shot at me. I don’t remember anyone saying ‘Boy, that’s fun. Shoot at me some
more.’”
“You were in Vietnam?” Aramilo said, staring at me with a surprised, serious look. He put the dictionary down and walked back over to his vodka on the piano. “You don’t look old enough to have been there.”
“I was nineteen. That’s not very old.”
Aramilo almost looked sober, now, and fascinated, staring at me with his big, dilated pupils. He seemed to sip his vodka respectfully. “Were you a patriot?” he asked.
“I was 1-A.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s an unwilling patriot,” I said, standing up to go to Aramilo’s refrigerator and get a bottle of Dutch beer. “I was drafted.”
“Drafted?”
“Conscripted. You better go get your dictionary again,” I said, walking back to my chair with a bottle of Grolsch.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to drink while guarding me.”
“I’m not guarding you. I’m on break.”
“When were you in Vietnam?”
“In 1971. We have a government agency called the Selective Service. They decide who is eligible for military service. Back then, the people who were the most eligible were designated as 1-A.”
“The best?” Aramilo wondered.
“No. You must be confusing 1-A with A-1, which is a steak sauce. That’s different. Although I wish they had declared me A-1. I’d rather have been steak sauce.”
“You still didn’t tell me what ‘draft’ means.”
“The draft means you’re fucked. If you got drafted, meaning the Selective Service had selected you to be in the Army, your friends would throw a big going-away party for you, with party hats and balloons and a big banner saying ‘We Love You. You’re Fucked.’”
“I don’t believe that part,” Aramilo said, trying to smile and still look serious.
“Well, you shouldn’t. I did have a party, but it would’ve been rude to put up a sign saying I was fucked, especially when everyone knew I was. What I remember about the party,” I said, staring at Aramilo to see if he was interested, and it looked as if he was completely serious, as well as drunk, “was that I wanted to get real drunk, and then be alone with my girlfriend and maybe make love with her before I went off to die. But I didn’t have a girlfriend. That was all screwed up. Usually when soldiers get ready to go off to war, they’re supposed to hold their wives or lovers and tell them to wait for them. But I didn’t have anyone to wait for me. So I told this girl who I knew from high school, Rachel, to wait for me. ‘But I’m not your girlfriend,’ she said. I said, ‘Well, you don’t have to do anything. Just wait for me.’ She said she would.”
Aramilo somberly sipped his vodka, perhaps sadly imagining me asking Rachel to wait for me. “Were you shot?” he said.
“Not at the going-away party. There weren’t any guns there.”
“Were you shot in Vietnam?”
“No, and I still find that surprising, when you consider how many hundreds or thousands of bullets and mortars and rockets and things were fired toward me, and not a one of them hit me. And you think, ‘Jeez these fuckers are bad shots,’ which of course isn’t the truth. I probably fired off a few hundred bullets at random, having no idea what I’d hit or if I hit anything at all. I’m sure I hit some trees. Sometimes we’d joke about that and say, ‘Those trees won’t be attacking us again.’”
“I assume this means you were in combat,” Aramilo said in a respectful voice.
“That’s what it’s called when people shoot at you. Yes. And I think, you know, I used to think, maybe a few times, after there’d been a firefight or something, and we’d been shooting randomly into the trees again, that I’d get the Congressional Medal of Gardening for killing more trees than necessary.”
“Were you ever injured?”
“Yes. Yes, I was. But I don’t like to tell that story because it requires facts.”
“Well, I won’t know if what you’re telling me is factual or not. Will you tell me?”
“Sure, I guess. We were in a firefight somewhere in Vietnam. The reason I specify ‘somewhere’ is because we had no idea where it was. Do you know what a firefight is?”
“No. I don’t know that word.”
“A firefight is when two groups of armed strangers surprise each other and spontaneously start shooting at each other, not because they’ve done anything bad, but just because they’re there. And I think that’s what war is. When you find somebody conveniently nearby, you shoot them. So that’s what we were doing. But we weren’t so much shooting each other as we were shooting at each other. We were on opposite ends of a rice paddy, just shooting and shooting and shooting, like in a movie where everybody fires their guns just to increase the noise, but there were enough trees and things to hide behind that, at least on our side, no one got hit. And then eventually we stopped shooting, both sides, not for any tactical reasons, but I think because we all realized that no one was winning and no one was losing. We were in a Mexican standoff in Vietnam. I love geography. Don’t you? Anyway, what we were doing then was sullenly hiding from each other, and, presumably, trying to think of the most rational way to kill everyone on the other side. And then I saw a huge green spider about the size of a coffee cup on my leg. I hate spiders. I fear and detest and despise spiders, especially one so big and one that’s on me. I was going to brush off the spider with my hand, but I thought it would bite my hand. I could’ve stood up to shake my leg and knock the spider off, but someone would see me and shoot me. It looked like the spider was staring at me. It kept walking up my leg, so I raised up my rifle and viciously slammed the rifle butt onto the spider. This squashed the spider and broke my knee. This also meant I could go home. Not right away, of course. We still had a firefight to resume, which we did. But eventually both sides snuck away, as if we didn’t mind being in a war as long as we weren’t being shot at. And that was the end of the war for me. I found out that you don’t have to defend the world against Communism if you break your knee. Of course, then all the other guys wanted to break their knees with their rifles. One of the officers threatened to take their rifles away. It was a fun time. About a week later, I was back home in Kansas, limping around like a war hero, with people asking if I’d been shot by the Viet Cong. And, you know, it just doesn’t sound heroic to say you defended world liberty by breaking your knee in an attempt to squash a spider. I mean, you’re not going to be invited by the American Legion or the PTA to give a speech at a dinner about how you made the world a little safer by squashing a spider. So I just told people I didn’t want to talk about it. And that’s how I helped save the world from Socialists like you. You are a Socialist, aren’t you?”
“What happened to Rachel?” Aramilo asked. “The woman who was waiting for you.”
“Oh. Rachel. I don’t know. I think she decided to wait for me somewhere where I couldn’t find her.”
18
One of the most secret things I’d ever done was go to a psychiatrist to see if my 60-second nervous breakdown meant I was crazy. Maybe it just meant I was efficient. Instead of having a nervous breakdown that lasted days or weeks, like most people, I got mine done in a minute. Although what did “crazy” mean anyway? Did it mean someone was incapable of having sustained, rational thought? If so, practically everyone in the world could be regarded as crazy, as if people went into and out of sanity several times a day, which maybe they did.
I was going to talk with Natelle about this, about going to see a psychiatrist, but I didn’t want to hurt her with new worries, right when she was hurting about as much as she could stand because of her attempted divorce, a process which was like a formal acknowledgment of a ruined life. Also, I knew that one reason, if not the main reason, I’d had my 60-second nervous breakdown and my earlier attacks of sadness seemed to be that I desperately needed to love someone, and it was Natelle. I didn’t want to tell her I loved her so much I needed psychiatric care.
So I didn’t tell her. And because I didn’t want to tell anyone else, either, there was
no way to ask anyone who a good psychiatrist might be. So I was forced to search for one at random in the Yellow Pages. There were dozens of them, as if insanity was a pretty big industry. Since I didn’t know any reason to prefer one psychiatrist I didn’t know over another one, my impulse was to pick someone whose name I liked. I picked Dr. Marilee Boulan, because her name sounded nice. Marilee. It sounded like she’d have flowers in her hair and offer me some pie she’d baked. And then she’d tell me that even if I was crazy, I was still a very nice man. “Mr. Coldiron,” she would say, “you might be as unstable as a newborn calf, but I think you’re sweet.”
She didn’t have flowers in her hair when I met her in her office. She was about my age, with short black hair, and wore silver earrings in the shape of squids. I was glad they weren’t real squids. At first I was afraid to tell her very much, as if I didn’t want her to think there was anything wrong with me. I thought that, even in front of a psychiatrist, you ought to seem sane, as if whatever was bothering you actually wasn’t very serious, so that all of a sudden you wouldn’t need to see a psychiatrist.
And then she spoke. I knew that was going to happen.
“What would you like to talk about?” she asked politely.
“Baseball,” I said.
“Are you having a problem with baseball?” she said with gentle skepticism.
“No. I have no problems with baseball, which is probably why I’d like to talk about it.”
“It’s perfectly normal to feel nervous in a psychiatrist’s office.”
“Do you?”
She smiled and said, “I sense that you’re trying to gain a degree of control, which is a good sign. It means you’re aggressive rather than passive.”
“In my job, you have to be aggressive.”