Night of the Avenging Blowfish

by John Welter

  “I know,” Yamato said with quiet sadness. “I’d have to tell her to make believe my penis was a plant. They say make-believe is important in lovemaking.”

  27

  The vague and incomplete intuition I was having, one that I’d had repeatedly throughout my life, was that people almost never did what they needed to do. Right now, as Yamato and I were driving to the office to get a Justice Department order to tap L. D. Krite’s phones, Yamato was suffering from a spontaneous and doomed affection for L. D. Krite—essentially a stranger, although nearly everyone in the world first saw their lovers the same way, as strangers. But was Yamato doing what he needed to do to find someone to love? No. He was stupidly doing his job, just like I was stupidly doing mine, when actually what I wanted to do was be with Natelle, who, if I was lucky, actually wanted to be with me, unless she secretly felt so awful about getting drunk and making love with me that she was thinking of a polite way to expel me from her life. I didn’t want to believe that. Rather, I made myself imagine she really did want to be with me, but instead she was at work, stupidly doing her job. Maybe this all came from that Biblical passage in Genesis where God said to Adam and Eve that they shall live by the sweat of their brows, as if before the Fall, people simply had love, but after the Fall, they got jobs.

  “Did you know,” I said to Yamato, who sat quietly and dejectedly beside me in the car, dwelling painfully in his aloneness, “that I just figured out the book of Genesis?”

  “That’s nice,” Yamato said.

  “Yeah, so far none of the scholars have figured it out. I did. Just now. In my spare time.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Do you want me to explain it to you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, I will. Adam and Eve lived in bliss in the Garden of Eden, and then they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and do you know how God punished them? He made them get jobs.”

  “Oh,” Yamato said.

  “That’s right. They had to live by the sweat of their brows, and what else could that mean but they got jobs? So instead of letting them loll around paradise all day, luxuriating in bliss and stuff, maybe feeling nothing but the love of God—which, frankly, I’ve always found a little too abstract for me—or the love of each other, God kicks them out of Eden and says, ‘Go get a job.’ And isn’t that what we’re doing right now?”

  Yamato didn’t answer.

  “Right,” I said. “People are born, carefully nurtured and loved, and then sent to school and transformed into fallen and wretched beings called workers. Like right now: what would you rather be doing?”

  “Hearing you be quiet.”

  “Aside from that, I think what you’d rather be doing is kissing some woman on the lips. Or maybe her breasts. That’s up to you. But really it’s not up to you at all, and you know why? Because you’re living by the sweat of your brow. I think that’s what hell is. Hell isn’t fire and limestone.”

  “Brim-stone,” Yamato said.

  “I know. Just trying to see if you’re listening.”

  “I wish I wasn’t.”

  “So right now, instead of being in love with the one person who’s in love with you, or something, do you realize what’s happening?”

  “Yes. You’re blathering.”

  “No, I’m not. The worst thing, the most painful, agonizing thing God could do to separate humans from each other, was make them get jobs. And he did it. He nailed us, Dutch. And that’s why we’re driving around doing stupid shit right now. We’re being punished by God.”

  Yamato turned his head very slowly toward me, with a morose look, and said, “Oh. Well. Now I feel better. Why don’t we just take our guns out and shoot each other in the head?”

  “Because we’d get in a wreck, Dutch.”

  That afternoon, after we’d arranged to tap L. D. Krite’s phones and thus put additional surveillance on a woman that Yamato could conceivably date or arrest, I called Natelle at the White House, but she didn’t have time to talk with me or see me, because she had to work late. When she hung up the phone, it was like a rope had been tied around my heart and tightened. I couldn’t help thinking that, on the morning she sobered up and remembered having sex with me, she had purged me from her life and hadn’t yet told me. I went to the refrigerator and got a bottle of beer and swallowed some, and swallowed some more. I knew why people became alcoholics. I looked at my walls and I looked at my furniture and I looked at the window and the pale blue sky, and it was so quiet I could hear the absence of everything I ever wanted.

  “I WAS thinking,” Yamato said in the deteriorated and dismal apartment we’d rented across the street from L. D. Krite’s office to spy on her. He sat staring out the window at cars and pedestrians going by, which was essentially all we did: watch pointless events of no consequence and eavesdrop on harmless, obscure phone calls. “You know the Clapper?” Yamato asked.

  “You mean that thing on TV commercials?” I said.

  “Yeah. The Clapper, where you plug this thing into the wall and you can turn on and off your lights or the TV or anything just by clapping your hands.”

  “What about it?”

  “I was wondering what would happen if everyone in the world hooked up their nuclear missiles to the Clapper,” Yamato said.

  “Why would they do that?” I said.

  “So they wouldn’t have to walk across the room.”

  “I see.”

  “Ultimately, the point of science and technology is to make life unnecessary.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, because Yamato needed me to say something.

  “Almost every invention we have has replaced some form of human behavior. Ideally, you’d invent something that does every-thing humans do. Then you’d buy one, turn it on, and you wouldn’t have to exist anymore.”

  “I like to exist,” I said. “I can’t remember why.”

  “Yeah,” Yamato said listlessly, looking out the window at nothing of any significance. We were assailed by boredom, the enforced wastefulness of our lives, like modern Bible characters lamenting the vanity of existence, except we didn’t have God to talk with. God quit talking with people a few thousand years ago. You’d think that, every now and then, from somewhere up in the heavens, God would just say, “Hey,” and then everyone would wonder who said it. The New York Times would print a story saying: “Theologians speculated that God said ‘Hey’ yesterday afternoon, but no one knows why.”

  Yamato looked at me thoughtfully and, as if sharing his own deep musings caused by severe boredom, he said to me, “If dogs wore bras, they’d have to wear three of them.”

  “I know,” I said, as if I’d thought of that long ago, but I hadn’t.

  “I wonder,” Yamato said, “why it is that human females only have two breasts, but other species have six.”

  “That’s an old question,” I said, “first posed by Martin Luther during the Reformation.”

  “I know,” Yamato said.

  “You’re thinking about L. D. Krite, aren’t you?”

  “She doesn’t have six breasts.”

  “No. But you’re thinking about the two she does have.”

  “You’re wrong. I’m just thinking about one of them.”

  “You’re not supposed to date suspects, Dutch.”

  “Shut up.”

  Through my headphones I heard L. D. Krite making a call. I pointed one finger at my ear for Yamato to see, and I said, “She’s making a call. Do you want me to tell her you’re thinking about one of her breasts?”

  Yamato gave me the finger.

  A man answered the phone and L. D. Krite said, “Skip. We’re doing it.”

  “For sure?” the man who might have been Skip asked.

  “For sure. I decided this morning. There’s no reason to wait anymore, no reason to keep being cautious.”

  “All right. I agree. I’m ready. When do we do it?”

  “Tomorrow, at eleven.”

  “Eleven.”

 
; And they both hung up. Yamato heard the conversation over the speaker on the tape recorder, and he and I looked at each other wonderingly, almost imploringly, as if staring at each other in our common ignorance might explain what we just heard.

  “Goddamn it! I hate this!” I said. “Why couldn’t they just plainly say here’s what we’re doing and here’s all the details? I hate surveillance! I hate it when people are secretive and covert, like we are. Bastards.”

  28

  L. D. Krite and some man we hadn’t seen before, presumably “Skip”—with whom she was going to “do it”—left the Animad office at approximately nine-thirty in the morning and got into a black Japanese sports car that Yamato and I tried to identify to the others in our surveillance group over our walkie-talkies, but we didn’t know what kind of car it was.

  “I think it’s a Honda GLC,” I said, having no idea.

  “I don’t think so,” Yamato said into the walkie-talkie. “It looks like a Nissan Centro.”

  “That’s not a car,” I said.

  “Well, maybe it’s an Isuzu Bolero,” Yamato said, naming a car we’d never heard of before.

  “Well, what goddamn kind of car is it?” agent Peffler asked over the walkie-talkie.

  “Black,” I said.

  “We think it’s a Mitsubishi Al Dente,” Yamato said.

  “Or the Infiniti ad Infinitum,” I said.

  “You guys don’t know what the fuck it is, do you?” agent Peffler said jeeringly.

  “We’re secret agents. Not car dealers,” I said, as Yamato and I got into Yamato’s silver sedan that I didn’t know the name of, and we began following the black Japanese car down the road.

  “Do you guys even know what street you’re on?” Peffler asked.

  “I don’t think that’s any of your business,” I said. I looked at Yamato and said, “You’re Japanese. What kind of car is it?”

  “I’m Japanese-American,” Yamato corrected me cheerfully. “The Japanese make thirty or forty kinds of cars. I have no idea what it is. Does anyone?”

  “I think it’s a Toyota No Comprendo,” I said over the walkie-talkie.

  “Just follow the car and be quiet,” Peffler said.

  “Upon further surveillance, I think it’s a Nissan Mons Veneris,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Yamato asked.

  “It’s that soft, comfortable spot between a woman’s legs.”

  “They named a car after that?” Yamato said dreamily as we drove on, trying to stay far enough back from the black car that we didn’t seem to be conspicuously following it. We weren’t wearing the suits that L. D. Krite had first seen us in; we both wore blue jeans and T-shirts with light windbreakers to hide our shoulder holsters. Yamato had on a Kansas City Royals cap and I wore an Oakland A’s cap, so we’d seem like ordinary Americans in the summer, except when you saw men wearing windbreakers on a hot summer day with no wind, you could assume they were hiding something, such as .357 magnums. There was no summery way to wear guns.

  L. D. Krite drove slightly above the speed limit, like almost everybody in the world, going away from downtown, away from all the government buildings, and finally out into the stupid mixture of suburbs and woods and shopping centers of what might’ve been called the wilderness of Maryland, turning at last down a side road that we knew led to a huge private warehouse where the White House was storing most of its extraordinary tonnage of Spam.

  “This is it,” Yamato said as we turned onto the side road.

  “It?” I asked.

  “It’s going down,” Yamato said. “Say that on the walkie-talkie.”

  I picked up the walkie-talkie and said, “It’s going down.”

  “What’s going down?” Peffler said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “We’re just using police jargon from the movies.”

  Yamato tapped my shoulder and said, “Tell him this: ‘The eagle has landed.’ “

  So I did. “The eagle has landed,” I said.

  “What?” Peffler said.

  “That’s what one of the astronauts said in 1969 when they landed on the moon,” Yamato explained to me.

  “Where are you guys?” Peffler said.

  “Maryland,” I said.

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “Southern Maryland. We just turned onto Crouton Road.”

  “Crofton Road,” Yamato said.

  “The warehouse?” Peffler asked.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Do you want us to bring you back some Spam?”

  “Let us know if anything happens,” Peffler said.

  As we drove slowly past a dense thicket of trees into the warehouse parking lot, we saw the black car parked near the building and no one in it or near the front door. Yamato pulled off into some grass beside the trees, where we couldn’t be seen from the warehouse, which evidently was closed on the weekend because there were no other cars in the parking lot.

  “Don’t they have night watchmen?” Yamato said.

  “It’s not night,” I said.

  “Well, good God, a warehouse this huge must have some kind of security.”

  “Dogs,” I said. “Maybe they have dogs inside.”

  “What should we do?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think they’re breaking in?”

  “Maybe. You know what would be ironic? If these animal rights people broke in and then dogs attacked them.”

  “I don’t think dogs understand irony.”

  “Should we go look for them?” Yamato said, squinting toward the warehouse.

  “I guess,” I said reluctantly. “I hate it when people do suspicious shit and we have to go look for them.”

  “Should we draw our guns?” Yamato said while we walked toward the warehouse.

  “Now you’re making it sound dangerous, goddamn it. These are animal rights activists. These are supposed to be cheerful, gentle, harmless people who help turtles cross the street.”

  “Turtles, maybe. Not us,” Yamato said. “Some animal rights activists blow up buildings, you know.”

  “I guess you don’t want to date her anymore,” I said.

  “I’m not sure I could date an herbivore. So should we draw our guns?”

  “God, I’d hate to shoot an herbivore.”

  “Just because they’re herbivores doesn’t mean they don’t have bombs or something.”

  “All right, all right. We’ll take our fucking guns out. But she really won’t like you now.”

  “I think, you know, if you arrest someone, you shouldn’t ask them out,” Yamato said.

  “That’s what Miss Manners says.”

  With our guns dangling in our hands, we snuck up to the corner of the warehouse and peeked around the building, which stretched back about three hundred yards. No one was there. We walked around the other corner and peeked around it, seeing no one.

  “Shit,” Yamato said. “Now we have to go look for them.”

  This was distressingly true, and we walked along the side of the warehouse, looking for opened doors or windows, through which we’d enter into a vast and probably dark warehouse filled with unknown things and unseen people. The window at the first office we came to was broken out. Yamato and I looked at each other for an explanation.

  “Herbivores,” I said.

  “I don’t want to crawl in there. There’s broken glass,” Yamato said.

  “Well, let’s go look for a broom,” I said, crawling through the window and into the office. Yamato crawled in behind me, whispering “Ow. Ow. Ow,” as if he were being cut by everything he touched.

  “Shut up,” I whispered.

  “I don’t like this,” Yamato whispered.

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to,” I whispered, as I slowly opened the office door slightly and looked out into the immense darkness of the warehouse. It was filled with gigantic looming things stacked fifteen or twenty feet high. The only light in the building was pale and sickly, coming in from skylights about every fifty feet in the
ceiling, producing hazy columns of light surrounded everywhere by darkness.

  “This is too gothic for me,” Yamato whispered. “Darkness and shadows. Unknown, ominous shapes outlined by an unearthly light.”

  I looked at Yamato and whispered, “That’s very eloquent. Possibly you should become an art critic. Now shut up.”

  “What’re we going to do?” Yamato whispered as we squinted into the upsetting darkness of a building the size of three football fields.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered. “But I have a plan.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s walk around until we see them.”

  Quietly and slowly we began walking into the huge rows of stacked boxes and crates rising up everywhere around us.

  “This reminds me of the Grand Canyon,” I whispered.

  “It does? I didn’t know they had warehouses in the Grand Canyon,” Yamato whispered. “What if they’re planting a bomb?”

  “I survived the Viet Cong. I don’t want to be blown up by herbivores.”

  “That’d be embarrassing.”

  “Being dead isn’t embarrassing. It’s worse than that.”

  On and on we walked, noiselessly, on the rubber soles of our adidas shoes, squinting anxiously into the hot, humid darkness, holding out our guns, which I couldn’t imagine us using. At that instant there was some noise, some odd, indistinct sound ahead of us in the dark. We stopped and listened. Maybe they’d heard us and were hiding, waiting. As stupid as it seemed for them to have guns, maybe they did. There was nothing intrinsically peaceful about people who believed everyone should abide by their brand of morality, and suddenly, there in the dark, the harmless herbivores seemed like predators. There was noise again, echoing lightly from some of the tall stacks of boxes and crates about fifty feet in front of us. It seemed like I heard whispering. Yamato and I stared at each other. He held up his index finger and shook it twice toward the sound. This was maddening. It didn’t mean anything. I held up my finger and did the same thing, then leaned toward his ear and whispered, “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I saw it in a movie,” Yamato whispered. “What should we do—sneak up on them?”