Night of the Avenging Blowfish

by John Welter

  “I don’t see why you always have to be so cranky,” Yamato said soothingly.

  “I’m not cranky. I’m sullen.”

  “Maybe you should try yoga. Have you ever tried yoga?”

  “You mean inner calm? I’m too turbulent for inner calm.”

  “Never mind. Let’s go in the kitchen and check for exploding entrées.”

  The kitchen staff was outnumbered two-to-one by bodyguards. Each of the thirteen nations represented at the conference (thirteen, another bad sign) put two of their bodyguards in the kitchen. The food was going to behave itself. But not the chef.

  “I cannot kook like this,” a middle-aged man in a chef’s outfit said peevishly when Yamato and I walked in. He carried himself with the dignity and impatience of a head chef, and I walked up to him and said, “I’m Doyle Coldiron, with the United States Secret Service. Do you have any Fritos, or Ruffles with ridges?”

  “Stay out of my way, unless you want scalding, sautéed mushrooms in your face,” the chef said.

  “I prefer my mushrooms on a plate, thank you,” I said, smiling at the other bodyguards. They didn’t say anything, and stared impassively at Yamato and me as we stepped cautiously away from the chef. I whispered to Yamato: “Watch that man. He has knives.”

  In a way, it was comically pointless to have bodyguards spying on the kitchen staff, since any of them at any time could easily sprinkle into the food some exotic herb or powder that none of us could identify and which could kill everyone at the dinner. You merely had to hope they wouldn’t do it. Of course, the presence of twenty-six men with guns was intimidating.

  Yamato and I stood near the two swinging doors separating the kitchen from the main dining room, and one of our jobs was to prevent anyone without the proper photo identification badges from going through the door.

  “We should have a secret password,” Yamato said.

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Something hard to say. Like ‘Worcestershire sauce.’”

  “Oh, that’s good. That’s good. Let’s try it.”

  We smiled and peeked through the windows of the swinging doors at all of the presidents and premiers and emirs and eminences in the dining room, and we finally saw someone coming toward us. It was a man in a tuxedo who had the proper photo ID—a hotel employee—but we wanted our fun, so when he walked through the door, Yamato said, “What’s the password?”

  He looked at us with uncertainty and said, “Password? I wasn’t told there was a password.”

  “It’s just a minor deal. Here,” Yamato said, and wrote the password on a piece of note paper and showed it to the man. “Can you say that?”

  The man read the password and said, “I’ve never been able to say that right.”

  “Try,” Yamato encouraged him.

  The man looked at the word and said, “Wor-ses-ter-shire?”

  “No,” I said. “Try again.”

  He said, “Wor-sister-cester?”

  “Ohhh, I like that, but it’s wrong,” I said.

  “It’s a good password, isn’t it?” Yamato said. “No one can say it.”

  “Well, may I come in anyway?” the man asked.

  “Just for a few minutes,” I said. “And don’t tell anyone the password.”

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “We should use that password more often,” Yamato said. “What’s another good password?”

  I thought for a few seconds and said, “Martina Navratilova.”

  “Excellent,” Yamato said. “How can you even say that?”

  “I’m not sure that I did,” I said. “But we can use both passwords for the rest of the summit. You know, walk up to some sub-assistant emir from Yemen and say, ‘Excuse me. You can’t be in here unless you say the password,’ and then show him the passwords and see if he can say ‘Worcestershire sauce’ or ‘Martina Navratilova.’”

  “They’ll hate us,” Yamato said.

  “That’s fine.”

  “I know.”

  Aside from being watchful, there was nothing to do, and Yamato and I walked over to one of the big wooden tables near the door to watch two of the chefs, or whatever the hell their titles were, butchering a freshly killed pig, slicing through flesh and bone with astonishingly sharp knives.

  “What part does the Spam come from?” I said.

  One of the chefs said something to me in French.

  “I’m from Kansas,” I said. “That’s west of France.”

  “Leave him alone, Doyle,” Yamato said, picking up a stick of celery. “I know what we need. We need some cheese for this celery. See if you can find any Cheez Whiz.”

  I was looking along the table for any evidence of cheese, when there were some smashing, crashing noises and violent screaming from the back of the kitchen. I had pulled out my gun and had it aimed toward the source of all the smashing and yelling, when there was an explosion, like a gun being fired; then came the sound of machine guns, automatic weapons, and something slammed fiercely into me, burning and stinging my left thigh. I saw whirling, vague colors, and felt the odd sensation of falling, of dizziness twisting through my head, and everything turned bright yellow and white as I lay curiously on the floor, knowing I’d been shot. I wondered if I should stop the bleeding or if I should shoot somebody. My job was to shoot somebody. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or closed, if the shooting and screaming I heard came from my recent memory or if it was still going on. It occurred to me that I was dying, that the reason everything looked yellow and white was that this was what you saw right before you died, and I didn’t want to pass into the afterlife. I wanted to feel Natelle breathing on me.

  “No!” I yelled, as if I could simply refuse death, and someone fell across my legs, a heavy man. It was the head chef. He’d tripped over my legs and was crawling under a table, while automatic weapons kept smashing and splattering things in the room. Far away, at the back door, where sunlight came through, I saw two men leaning in and out of the door to fire machine guns into the room. People were shooting back, and some of the doorway was completely torn away by bullets. I heard Yamato yelling, “Doyle! Doyle! Get out of the way!” I couldn’t crawl. I decided to shoot somebody.

  Lying on my back, I raised my gun up toward the back door, and when a man leaned in with his machine gun, I shot him. He spun backward and out of view, and my gun flew backward over my head from the recoil, so now my gun was gone. No one shot me in Vietnam, and now, in a hotel kitchen, someone had shot me. I didn’t do anything. Everything was so loud and frightening, and I was sweating, and very cold. I almost couldn’t hear anyone screaming anymore, as if they were screaming more quietly, now, and going away, and Natelle had a kite. It was transparent, and we couldn’t see it in the sky, but you could tell from the pressure on the kite string that we were flying it. I stood behind her with my arms around her, and with one hand on hers as she flew the kite, and I was drifting into her, and she into me.

  “Don’t let go,” she said. She wasn’t talking about the kite.

  Everything grew darker until there was nothing left to see but a wavering field of darkness. It sounded like someone was yelling. I wondered who it was. I wondered if I’d died, and gotten lost, and instead of going toward the light, I’d wandered into the dark, and God was yelling at me.

  “Over here! Over here, stupid!”

  I wondered why God would call me stupid. I thought God was nicer than that.

  “Stop the bleeding. Tie something around his leg,” someone said frantically. I knew this wasn’t the afterlife. I could smell gunpowder and spices. I started to fall asleep again.

  “Don’t pass out, Doyle. Try and stay awake. We’ll get you to a hospital right away. Don’t pass out,” Yamato said as he squatted beside me and someone tied something onto my leg.

  “Someone shot me,” I said. “And then Natelle and I were flying a kite.”

  “Well, that’s good, Doyle. That’s exactly the way the world should be. And don’t pass out.” />
  But I did.

  36

  A gigantic animal with the black body of a scorpion and the head of a snapping turtle was chasing me across a school playground. There were no other people there, no one to help me, and I desperately climbed the metal steps of a big slide to get away from the snapping scorpion, whose stinger was aimed right at me as I slid headfirst down the slide into the roaring vortex of a luminous, orange tornado that sucked me violently and instantly through an almost airless darkness where I couldn’t breathe, and my lungs hurt as the tornado shot me far above every visible cloud and into the bluest calm so high above the Earth that I could see the curve of the planet, and the infinite darkness beyond, where I thought God lived. And I thought God was looking at me, suspended there between rising and falling, like God was curious about me, like God was amazed that I’d gotten that far without a plane or wings or any magic, like God was wondering if I could endure this, like I was an interesting peculiarity. There was no one to catch me in that dizzying, unbalanced, frantic instant when I was weightless, and just now beginning to fall every one of those miles back onto the only place in the entire universe where all my life I’d searched and waited for someone who, even as I fell, I kept hoping at last to see. The wind closed my eyes, and it felt like someone was reaching for me. I didn’t know who it was. All my life, I never knew. The wind stopped, and when I opened my eyes to see what it would look like when I was dead, Yamato was sitting beside me in a chair, and I was in a bed I didn’t remember. I was trying to recall who I was, and who was reaching for me, and why they didn’t touch me, like a hand just out of sight. I didn’t know whose it was. Yamato smiled at me with what looked like gratitude. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t remember ever doing anything, as if I had a past but it wasn’t mine anymore. I was supposed to remember something, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I remembered waving to Natelle. I missed her. She didn’t know that. She was supposed to know that. Maybe Natelle was reaching for me. Maybe God was. Maybe I was reaching for myself. Yamato was still smiling at me, so I looked at him.

  “Can you hear me?” he said.

  “Yes.” I didn’t know why he asked that. I could always hear.

  “Do you feel better?”

  “Better than what?” I said, trying to remember something.

  “You were shot,” Yamato said. “Do you remember that?”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to think, trying to let dark, tangled slivers of things race through my head. I remembered part of it.

  “Yes. I remember that.”

  “You’re pretty doped up on morphine, now. I’m sure none of this is very clear to you, so I’ll tell you what happened, and then you can remember it if you want to. We were in the kitchen in the hotel and somebody started shooting into the kitchen with automatic rifles and machine guns, and you were shot in the leg, in your left thigh. The bullet went completely through your muscle, so you were bleeding like hell. You passed out, but before that, you took the time to shoot someone. You were lying on the floor and shot someone. We were having a goddamn firefight in a hotel kitchen, Doyle. It still scares me, like it isn’t even over, but it is. And we won. We nailed their asses. We killed six of them. They killed two chefs. I think it was the PDF. I don’t know.”

  Yamato sighed very loudly, like he was still being scared. I looked at him and said, “Now I remember. I was looking for cheese.”

  “Yeah. You walked around the table to look for cheese, and then the shooting started.”

  “I won’t look for cheese anymore.”

  Yamato laughed. He looked better now. “I don’t think that’s why the shooting started, Doyle. But I can understand why you’d never want to look for cheese again.”

  “I guess they never had the dinner,” I said, looking for the first time at the IV tube in my arm.

  “No. Nobody ate.”

  “Are they mad at us?”

  “Fuck ‘em if they are.”

  “Okay.”

  I raised my arm with the needle in it and said, “I don’t like this. Needles make me pass out.”

  “You can do that in a hospital. No one minds,” Yamato said. “How do you feel?”

  “I’m not sure. I can’t tell how I feel.”

  “It’s probably the morphine. Morphine gives you a high on top of pain. I’m sure that feels strange. Speaking of strange, right after the shooting stopped and you were lying on the floor looking all pale and woozy, you said you and Natelle were flying a kite. I think you were delirious.”

  “Delirious?” I said wonderingly, and I remembered the dream. “I don’t think that was delirium. I think it was hope.”

  “I’m sorry,” Yamato said, shaking his head apologetically. “Of course it was hope.”

  “Should I call Natelle?” I wondered. “No. Never mind. I think she wants me to leave her alone.”

  “Why would she want that?” Yamato said cautiously.

  I wasn’t sure. I said, “I”m not really in her life. I’m on the edge of it.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Yamato said. “You might not be her lover, but you know she loves you. And you’ve been shot. You’re in a goddamn hospital. Of course she’d want to talk to you. I’m going to go get you a phone, or a walkie-talkie, or some kind of goddamn radio, and you’re going to call Natelle.”

  “What’ll I say to her?”

  “What kind of stupid question is that? You’ll say ‘Hi, Natelle. This is Doyle. I’ve been shot. And how was your day?’ Say whatever the hell you feel. And stay here. I’ll be right back,” Yamato said, and left the room.

  I loved him for that, for trying to help me find Natelle. I just didn’t know if she wanted to be found. Maybe when she came back from her retreat, she’d want to stay away from all men with penises. All men had penises. It seemed like I wasn’t used to thinking. Thoughts came to me, and I wondered whose they were. I reached down between my legs to make sure my penis was still there. It was. Not that I anticipated much of a future for it.

  Yamato walked back into the room with a phone and said, “Here’s a portable phone. This is only for serious national emergencies, like calling your girlfriend. I’ll dial the White House for you. Here. And you just ask for Natelle and talk to her for a while, and I’ll go and leave you alone. I’ll be back in half an hour or something.” Yamato handed me the phone and walked out of the room. The phone was already making its peculiar long-distance noises, and a panic went through me; a rushing, dizzying flow of panic that Natelle might not be there, or she might be too busy to talk, or, as soon as she recognized my voice, she’d withdraw from me resentfully, mad that I’d violated her solitude, mad that I’d committed the sin of needing her.

  One of the operators answered the phone and I told her who I was and who I wanted to talk with, and she put me on hold. I heard the phone switch.

  “This is Natelle,” she said, sounding remote and busy and unwilling to be bothered, as if she didn’t know it was me. Or maybe she did.

  “Hi. This is Doyle. I just thought I’d call you from a foreign country. If you’re busy, I can call you later.”

  “Doyle,” she said in a suddenly serious and wondering tone, and I was afraid she was going to say she couldn’t see me anymore because she didn’t want me to be in love with her, and she’d decided that in the mountains, and would I graciously go away?

  “Doyle,” she said. “We were told there was some kind of attack last night on the hotel where the president’s staying. They said several people were killed and a Secret Service agent was shot. Who was shot?”

  “Me. They shot me in the leg. It doesn’t hurt. I think that’s because they gave me morphine. It feels like I’m floating inside my own body. It’s like …” I was going to say it was like the feeling I had when I held her one time, but that might’ve scared her, to know I’d kept that a secret, so I kept it again. My whole life was squashed inside of me. It could only come out for the one person who maybe didn’t want it to.

  Natelle was quiet. I coul
dn’t even hear her breathing. Maybe she was crying.

  “Please tell me you’re all right,” she said sadly.

  “I’m all right.”

  “Are you in a hospital?”

  “Yes. I don’t know which one. I think I passed out or slept. I don’t even know what day it is. What day is it?”

  She was crying. I started crying with her, because I wanted to hold her and I couldn’t.

  “I wish I could hold you,” I said.

  “I know,” she said, either as if she knew I loved her or as if she knew she loved me.

  “What do you know?” I asked.

  “Where were you shot?”

  “In the left thigh. It hurt pretty badly at the time, but not now.”

  “I’m so sorry, Doyle. I’m so sorry I can’t hold you now. I miss you.”

  Something stirred beneath all the morphine, an emotion that not even drugs could overpower. At first I didn’t know what it was, it was so unusual. It barely spread into me, barely advanced. Then I knew what it was. I felt happy. It didn’t even seem like my emotion, but it was in me, so it was probably mine.

  “I want you to come home, I need to see you,” Natelle said, like a thought was bumped up out of her heart by everything else she couldn’t quite say, like everything was storming in her and swirling and needing passage out, and the one thought that made it out was I need to see you.

  Just for a second or two, we were both silent, maybe each of us surprised by what she’d just said, as if we were suddenly closer than we ever were before, like every secret finally spoken made us more real to each other.

  Maybe that was mystical blather. Maybe it was a morphine dream. One other possibility was that it was true.

  “I want you to come home,” she said again.

  “Home?”

  “I need to see you. It doesn’t mean I’m in love with you, and it doesn’t mean that can’t happen. Don’t trap me into saying something.”

  “I won’t.”

  “The Italians have a saying,” she said.

  I waited for her to say it, this saying that had something to do with the outcomes of our lives.