by John Welter
He flinched, and stepped back a few inches.
“This is a lovely city. You and your dog should go walking through it. Pretty far from here.”
“I don’t like being threatened,” the man said.
“Then leave.”
“This is outrageous. This is un-American.”
“Foreign embassies are all un-American. Don’t argue with me. Just leave.”
“I’ll be back with a lawyer, by God.”
“Even a dumb lawyer would tell you not to come back here,” I said, watching the man and his dog walk away, and I felt a little bad about it all, having to intimidate presumably harmless people. But that was my job. As the man and the dog walked down the sidewalk, I wondered if I was just being too cautious and suspicious because of the war. It didn’t seem like anyone from the PDF would have any serious interest in killing Aramilo, unless they didn’t like Cole Porter.
The front door of the embassy opened and here came Aramilo, this tiny, almost comical-looking man in a black and red robe billowing out like he was a foreign diplomat going trick-or-treating. He looked nearly serene. I knew it wasn’t serenity. There was vodka in his tea. Sometimes I wondered if I should tell on him; tell the State Department or someone that Aramilo was almost constantly drunk. But if you expelled all the drunks from Washington, the government might collapse. I wanted some vodka myself, or a beer, to calm me down from the tension of thinking I might have to shoot someone, which was stupid. No one was going to shoot Aramilo.
There was a shot, somewhere close behind me. Fear and anxiety rushed through me as I ran up to Aramilo and knocked him down flat onto the concrete steps, where it looked like his nose smashed into the concrete and he screamed and there was another shot as I tingled with intense panic and dizziness during which I saw Natelle’s face and her eyes clearly, and I wanted to hold her as I pulled out the machine gun and spun around toward the sound of the shots, thinking I didn’t want to die, that I at least wanted to tell Natelle I loved her, and I saw, down and across the street as I aimed my machine gun in that direction and prepared to kill someone, a white man firing a pistol into an old Volkswagen. The man seemed to wobble as he stood near the Volkswagen, which didn’t seem to have anyone in it, and he fired again, into the door. Three of the embassy guards were dragging Aramilo toward the front door of the embassy. Aramilo’s nose was bleeding pretty badly, and he stared at me with horror and bewilderment. The man across the street fired again, then simply held his gun pointed at the car, like he was trying to shoot once more but he was out of bullets. He kicked the car with his shoe and yelled something, then lost his balance and fell backward into the street, dropping the gun, which landed under the car. I had no idea what he was doing. I assumed he was drunk. My panic wouldn’t go away, the horrifying sense that I could be dead and couldn’t be held by Natelle again because some lunatic drunk was shooting a parked car. Two of the guards came back outside with machine guns and aimed them at the man sitting and yelling in the street.
“I think he’s out of bullets. His gun is under the car. Did you call the police?” I said.
“Yes. They’re coming.”
“He was wobbling. He fell down. I think the fuckhead’s drunk,” I said.
“Fuckhead?” one of the guards asked. They were from Indizal and weren’t familiar with American obscenities. Possibly they thought a fuckhead was the name of a political organization. This wasn’t a good time for linguistics.
“What should we do?” one of the guards asked.
“Stay here while I go kick the fuck out of him,” I said, handing him my machine gun and walking across the street toward the man with my automatic pointed at him as he sat in the street yelling, “I fixed your car, Connie! Come down and drive it! Hey, Connie!”
The man looked confused and sullen when he saw me, as if his world was bad and I wasn’t welcome in it.
“What the fuck do you want?” he said.
I pointed my gun at his face. “Does this make you nervous?” I said.
“You a cop? You can’t shoot me,” he said contemptuously.
“Did you ever see ‘Dirty Harry’?”
He scowled at me and said, “You mean that Clint Eastwood movie where he points a .44 magnum at some man’s face? You ain’t got a .44 magnum.”
“No. This is only a nine millimeter. It won’t blow your head clean off. It’ll just blow it about three-fourths off. But I don’t mind fractions. Do you?”
There were sirens nearby, getting louder, and the man said, “You can’t shoot me in front of everyone. I know my rights. I’m entitled to a lawyer.”
“Fine. I’ll shoot you in front of your lawyer.”
“Are you crazy?” the man said apprehensively.
“Don’t use that word. My psychiatrist doesn’t like it.”
THE SECRET Service gave me a letter of commendation for breaking Aramilo’s nose. The letter praised me for acting professionally and quickly in keeping Aramilo out of the line of fire in a potentially lethal situation, although mainly what I did was cause trauma to Aramilo’s nose. He looked awful. His skin was blue and purple around his swollen nose and along the lower ridges of his eyes, which you couldn’t see completely because his nose was taped up over a nose brace. The press found out and did a brief story in the paper, mentioning the war in Indizal and saying that the “gunman” apparently had no connections with the PDF.
“Why would the PDF send someone over here to shoot a Volkswagen?” Aramilo asked the next day as he was reading the Post and sipping his daily cup of Ethiopian coffee and bourbon. He wasn’t mad at me. I apologized to him a few times anyway.
“Will you stop that?” he said in his new, nasal voice. “Better you should break my nose than someone should shoot me. But did you have to throw me down so hard?”
“I’m sorry. But we don’t practice throwing people down gently,” I said.
The biggest threat against Aramilo so far was his drinking. Every morning at eight-thirty, he had a cup of freshly brewed Ethiopian coffee, to which he added about an ounce of Wild Turkey. But no sugar. He said sugar was bad for you. With his breakfast, which usually included fresh fruit, croissants, and some exotic omelet, he had a glass of fresh orange juice with genuine Russian vodka. He refrained from drinking again until lunch, when he always had one or two vodkas with tonic, unless he was at a working lunch where no vodka was available. Then he’d have bourbon or wine. At three o’clock every afternoon he had his traditional Earl Grey tea with vodka, presumably to clear his head of any residual sobriety. At four in the afternoon, when his work was either done or had been forced on someone else on his staff, he began drinking as much vodka and tonic as he wanted while he played piano. Everyone on the staff knew he was an alcoholic, but he was an eminent alcoholic, and therefore beyond reproach. One afternoon when Aramilo fell asleep on the couch from being vodka-saturated again, and I was just looking at that pale little man who, amazingly, hadn’t destroyed himself yet, I thought that the best way for the PDF to attack him was to send him vodka. I wondered if, as a Secret Service agent sworn to use every bit of intelligence and degree of vigilance and effort to protect Aramilo from harm, I should shoot every bottle in his liquor cabinet. If I did, I’d be fired for guarding his life, although I was praised for breaking his nose.
The war in Indizal looked, so far, like a series of minor and inefficient attacks that were ineptly repelled by government troops who probably wondered why anyone would want to steal a nation so small that the Peace Corps wouldn’t go there. It was the kind of war in which the victor would be embarrassed for having won something undesired by anyone else. Although I told Aramilo that the CIA was getting daily reports on the PDF, I found out that even the CIA didn’t know what “PDF” stood for. No one did. We had a contest in the Service to invent the best meaning for PDF. People wrote down their entries and pinned them on the bulletin board at work. Some of the entries were “Please Don’t Fart,” “Palestine Dance Fraternity,” “Pink Dog Fur,” and
“People’s Democratic Fungus.”
Aramilo was a skittish, high-strung turmoil of nerves, which was how he had been before the war started anyway. Each day he asked me what the latest CIA intelligence report was, and I just calmly lied to him and made stuff up, such as, “There’s been no unusual activity.”
“Could you be more specific?” Aramilo would ask.
“The PDF seems engaged in routine acts of appalling inefficiency. Yesterday, they blew up one of their own supply routes.”
This wasn’t true, but it relieved Aramilo, who poured himself some more vodka and tonic and resumed his important political project of learning to play “Rhapsody in Blue,” by George Gershwin. I think he would have done this—I think he would have maintained his astonishing indifference to reality, his boyish self-absorption—even if he was in Indizal during the war. Someone could have come into his office in the capital and shouted, “Mr. Ambassador! We’re surrounded by tanks!” And Aramilo would have said, “I need to finish practicing ‘Porgy and Bess.’”
Working at the embassy seemed kind of harmless and amusing, but only if you thought that wasting your life was harmless and amusing. I was forty-one years old. Forty-one. When I asked myself what I had in life, the answer was me. Me wasn’t very much. I had a few friends who I didn’t see very often and who I wasn’t very close to, either because they were unmarried men I didn’t want to hang out with because the loneliness of men without women was virulent and contagious, or because they were married, or coupled, and they progressed emotionally as couples, sharing the love and sex that I assumed sustained them and which I knew nothing about. It was like they’d reached a higher level of humanness and intimacy from which I’d always be alienated.
Me wasn’t very much. Dr. Boulan tried to tell me in one of our sessions that it was quite possible to live a happy and satisfying life without sexual love. She meant well, and was right in the abstract, and was only trying to help me. When she said that, though, I found it to be a bewildering, maddening, stultifying, intolerably solicitous, condescending remark that seemed to knock the wind out of my soul and make me sigh for a few seconds as various responses crashed and tumbled in my head. I looked at her with disbelief and astonishment and said, “You mean I don’t need my penis? Maybe I should donate it to a less fortunate person in the Third World.”
She blushed. Her entire face turned the color of a pale strawberry. It looked as if she was going to laugh, but she decided against it. She obviously didn’t know what to say, and I obviously didn’t either.
“I mean,” I said, “I mean, I mean, I mean God-DAMN.”
“I wasn’t suggesting …”
“Well then, what were you suggesting? That I should be a nun? Might as well change my sex if I’m not going to have any.”
“I didn’t mean that and you know it. I only meant that for at least part of your life, possibly a few months, possibly even several years …”
“I’ve already done that, and I don’t call involuntary celibacy a good policy. I call it a misfortune.”
“Not all love has to result in an orgasm.”
“Who told you that? Some priest? Mother Theresa? You shouldn’t take sexual advice from people who don’t have sex. And I never said all love has to result in an orgasm. I just wish that SOMEtimes it would.”
“Calm down, Doyle.”
“I don’t have to calm down. I’m your patient. I’m supposed to be upset, goddamn it. And I am. I am! I mean, Jesus, when I tell you about my honest, thoroughly earnest and genuine need to love some woman who loves me—and we know such a thing is fundamentally, unavoidably, wondrously sexual—I don’t want to be told sex is optional. I don’t want to be told it’s some extraneous feature that doesn’t really matter, like you could say to me, ‘Doyle, you could live a perfectly wonderful life with just one leg.’ The point is, I’d be missing something. I am missing something. And it’s not my goddamn leg. So why was I born with a penis?”
“I think you’ve made your point.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“Actually, I think you’re very entertaining.”
“I’m sorry if I embarrassed or offended you. I won’t talk anymore. I’ll repress all of my emotions and explode in this chair. You better call a janitor.”
“When you say that ‘Me isn’t very much,’ does that mean you’re unhappy with yourself?”
“I’m not talking anymore. I told you that.”
“Yes, you are. You enjoy talking. I can tell.”
“I’m not listening, either.”
“So, Doyle, when you say you aren’t very much, what exactly does that mean?”
“It means I’m alone.”
“Could you tell me more? Explain that?”
“I don’t have anybody. I just have me. I want to give myself to somebody, and there isn’t anybody. The world is filled with millions of people who aren’t mine. Isn’t that stupid? I don’t want millions of people. I only want one. And there is nobody. Sometimes I just wish I could be a boy again, just be this six- or seven-year-old boy again, because, back then, I had no idea I was alone. I was too ignorant and innocent to know what being alone meant. I do now—it means I need to love somebody, with no guarantee, and not even any genuine hope, that it’ll work.
“I wish someone would hold me. I’d give up everything in the world, every ambition and extraneous desire, just to know someone would hold me. Sometimes I see women on the street, women in cars, women in stores, women who there’s no reason for me to ever know or see again, and I stare at their faces and look at their eyes, as if one of them will realize they want me. And of course they never do. There are times, just odd, unexpected moments in the day, when I wish that, for maybe ten or twenty seconds, a woman would hold me. And that’s all. I just wish she’d hold me and make me feel that, even though I don’t really belong in anyone’s life, someone could at least pretend I do. It wouldn’t even have to be a woman I know. Just someone who’d put her arms around me and push my head against her shoulder and then hold me for a while. Theoretically, you’re supposed to be able to live your whole life like that. I’d just be grateful for ten seconds. To have the fantasy, for ten seconds, that I mattered to somebody.”
It hurt, and I couldn’t talk anymore. Dr. Boulan didn’t say anything. I had my hand over my eyes so she wouldn’t have to see me crying. I heard her stand up and walk over in front of me, like she was going to tell me to grow up and get used to sadness, and just get out of her office and make room for someone with real sorrow. I heard her moving in front of me and then beside me. I wouldn’t look at her because I was ashamed to have told a stranger how much I hurt. She was kneeling next to me and she put her arms around me. She was soft, and she smelled like flowers. I couldn’t tell what kind. She kept one arm around my back and shoulders, and used her other hand to push my head against her shoulder. She held onto me, and I could feel her breathing. I tried to breathe in the same rhythm with her.
“Some day,” she said very quietly and slowly, “you won’t have to wait for a stranger to do this.”
“What day?” I said.
“I don’t know what day. Life usually happens without warning.”
What she did was hold me, with her softness and her strength, and we breathed together. She was the kindest stranger in my life. Maybe God was answering one of my prayers. But I’d scattered so many of them around, I couldn’t remember which one.
24
It would have been easy to assume that the Spam incident was a minor event with no lasting effect on the president, but every day in the mail, and by private express, Americans sent so many cans of Spam to the White House that the Spam had to be stored in a government warehouse. A science writer for the Washington Post estimated, without any particular reason for doing so, that if a meteor as dense as all the cans of Spam being accumulated by the White House hit Washington, the city would be vaporized. A professor of astronomy at Georgetown University said in a letter in the Post that if such a met
eor were made of Spam “it would never strike the city, but would burn up in the atmosphere and perhaps leave an unpleasant odor over North America.”
The people who made Spam remained strangely aloof from all of this and said practically nothing to the press, as if they believed in the separation of Spam and state. But they evidently read the Post and were slightly offended by the remarks from the Georgetown professor. A woman who identified herself as a public affairs officer for the luncheon-meat manufacturer said in a letter in the Post that “Spam, an American institution for more than half a century, is quite suitable for grilling or barbecuing, and, in the event that it were to be propelled through outer space and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour—which we find unlikely—it would produce a highly satisfying aroma.”
I told Natelle I was going to a pet shop to buy her a Spamster. She thought it was kind of funny, but only kind of, because her days were filled with Spam. Cans of Spam. Crates of Spam. Spam-o-grams. I thought a Spam-o-gram was where you X-rayed Spam to see if it had a tumor. Natelle said it was a telegram about Spam sent to the president. She said she worried that all this would result in a serious backlash from the pig people, meaning animal rights activists who cared about the welfare of all the pigs killed to produce Spam, and she was right to worry.
“The pig people are here,” she told me on the phone one afternoon when I was protecting Aramilo from the people who wanted to assassinate him for playing Cole Porter. I met Natelle at the White House that afternoon, and we stood on the lawn watching the pig people marching back and forth across the street carrying posters saying “Luncheon Meat is Canned Death,” and “You wouldn’t eat your dog for lunch, would you?” and “Pigs should be in a field, not a can.”
“This is all your fault,” Natelle said as we looked at the demonstrators.
“You mean the right to assemble? Thank you,” I said. “Are you mad at me?”