Night of the Avenging Blowfish

by John Welter

  “Oh, I can’t remember it,” she said sadly.

  “Well, maybe that’s because you’re not Italian. You’re French. Do the French have a saying? Say one of those,” I said, trying to amuse her so she wouldn’t be so anxious.

  “But I’m not thinking of one of those,” she objected.

  “You’re not thinking of the Italian one, either. How about the Belgians? Do they have a saying?”

  “I think I’ve forgotten all the sayings of Europe,” she said.

  “Well, then, say something from yourself.”

  “All right,” she said. “I want you to come home. I’m not sure what I mean by ‘home.’ I think I mean somewhere near me. Because I miss you, and I’m scared for you. And last night. Last night …” She stopped, and was crying.

  “Natelle? What is it? Did something happen to you?” I asked, wondering if she’d been attacked. “What happened?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and was sniffling and catching her breath. “Nothing happened to me. It was you, Doyle. They told us there’d been shooting in the hotel in Indizal. They said several people were killed and injured, and they didn’t give any names and I didn’t know who was killed, or who was injured. And for a second, I imagined you were dead, because I didn’t know, and I started crying, and just put my face down on my desk and cried, because I thought you might be dead. And Theresa, who’d just gotten the report from a radio news bulletin, said no, no one from the Secret Service had been killed, but one of them was shot. And suddenly you weren’t dead, thank God, but maybe you were shot. And I didn’t know. And I kept seeing your face, smiling at me, and I imagined blood all over you and I was panicked. And no one in the Secret Service would tell us anything. I called and asked about you and they wouldn’t tell us anything. I didn’t know if you were shot or not, until you called. And it hurt me, Doyle. It really hurt me, like I hadn’t realized how important, how godawful important you are, until I imagined you lying somewhere with blood all over you. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” she said, and was crying again.

  “I’m fine, Natelle. I’m fine. I’m right here. I’ll be in the hospital for a few days and then I’ll be home to see you. I promise. I’ve missed you, too. I always do. And … I don’t know if I should tell you this.”

  “What? Tell me what?”

  “Well, it might be upsetting. It’s about something that happened after I was shot.”

  “What happened? You can’t upset me. I already am upset.”

  “Okay. I thought of you. I think. Or I dreamed. I don’t know which. It was when I was lying on the floor in the hotel kitchen, and I was bleeding and real dizzy, and my mind seemed to switch away from all the shooting, because that was too horrifying, and suddenly I was with you. We were flying my Stealth kite. Yamato called it a delusion. If it was, it was just the delusion I needed. I was in the middle of all this shooting, and I didn’t even hear it anymore. It was like I had to go to the safest place I could find, and the safest place was you. We were flying the kite, and I was holding you, and you told me not to let go. I wouldn’t do that. I’d never do that.”

  That was too honest. It was an announcement of love to someone who’d just crawled from the wreckage of love. She was quiet, like everything I’d just said to her was piercing her. I waited for her to say something, and all I heard was her breathing.

  “I don’t know if I’m the safest place to be,” she said finally. “But I’m glad you didn’t let go.”

  “Of you?” I asked.

  “I’m not talking about the kite.”

  37

  I asked immediately to go home, and they sent me to Dakar, the capital of Senegal, Africa. Agent-in-Charge Hamsted said my wounds were too severe to ship me off thousands of miles to a hospital in Washington, and they had no faith in the hospital in Indizal, so they sent me, along with Yamato to watch out for me, to the nearest reasonably decent hospital, which was in Dakar. I tried to be depressed, but they gave me morphine and antibiotics.

  “Why won’t you bastards let me be depressed?” I said as the nurse, a man, shot me up with morphine.

  “And why does he want to be depressed?” the nurse said to Yamato.

  “I think he feels it’s his right,” Yamato said.

  The nurse shook his head and handed me a paper cup with water and a big blue and white pill. “This is a sedative. Take this, and you’ll feel better.”

  “I don’t want to feel better. I want to go home,” I said.

  “You can’t go home until your wound is stabilized and you don’t have a fever like you do. Take your pill.”

  “It’s not fair to make me feel good against my will,” I said.

  “Take the pill, or I’ll simply inject a sedative into you.”

  I took the pill, but I kept trying to be depressed because I couldn’t go home and be with Natelle, who I thought would hold me and love me, although maybe she wouldn’t. Natelle herself might still be so depressed about her life that she might barely be able to smile for me; especially since I’d just been shot and now she had that knowledge to hurt her. Everything was wrong, which would have depressed me, except for the morphine and sedatives. Unwillingly, I felt good.

  “How do you feel?” Yamato said after the nurse left.

  “Wonderful, goddamn it.”

  “I’m sorry you feel wonderful. It’ll go away,” Yamato said.

  “It better,” I tried to say peevishly, but I was incapable of being peevish.

  We were there for four days. Gardenaul called me from the White House and told me how sorry he was that I’d been shot. He described my actions as heroic and admirable.

  “Someone shot me. That’s heroic?” I asked.

  “But you had enough wherewithal to shoot someone back. That’s heroic,” Gardenaul said.

  “It wasn’t heroic. I was terrified that he’d shoot me again. So I shot him.”

  Gardenaul insisted that was heroic. Heroes weren’t born. They were assigned. And Gardenaul said my slate was wiped clean. The previous “incident” involving the canned luncheon meat no one was going to name was now forgotten.

  “Thank God,” I said.

  “Or me,” Gardenaul said, reminding me that he was an accomplished son of a bitch.

  Yamato stayed in a hotel near the hospital and visited me several times a day, always bringing me a French newspaper I couldn’t read so he could hold it in front of me and say, “And the top story of the day … is something else we can’t understand.’” Plus he brought me chocolate and croissants that I wasn’t supposed to eat, but I ate them anyway. The nurse kept giving me morphine and sedatives, so I felt ecstatic for no reason. Still, I missed Natelle. It was the one sadness that narcotics couldn’t quite obliterate.

  One afternoon when Yamato and I were looking out the window at some seagulls trying to steal a fish from a pelican in flight, Yamato said he missed L. D. Krite. I said, “How can you miss her? You’ve never had her.”

  He smiled and said, “You’ve never had Natelle, and you miss her.”

  “True,” I said.

  Yamato took the lid from a little brown box he’d carried in with him and said, “Look.” He held up a pale white carving and said, “I bought this for L. D. Krite.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a dolphin carved out of whalebone.”

  “It’s pretty,” I said. “But …”

  “I know,” Yamato said, sighing and then grinning morosely. “I don’t think an animal rights activist would like a dolphin carved out of whalebone.”

  “But it is pretty,” I said, trying to cheer him up. “Maybe you could tell her it’s a dolphin carved out of a poacher.”

  “No. I saw some jade earrings she might like.”

  “Are you going to ask her out?” I said.

  Yamato opened the bottle of warm beer he’d smuggled into the room and took a big drink. He said, “It’ll probably fail. I know. But, you see … I’m just attracted to her. I’m sorry I arrested her.”

/>   “You shouldn’t talk about that on, like, your first date.”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

  “I have to try,” Yamato said. “I’m just spontaneously, naturally attracted to her. I like her. It’s not my fault. I don’t care if she committed a felony. And if I send her some earrings and she tells me to go to hell, well, I can’t help it. But I have to find out if it’s possible for her to like me. She did when we were interviewing her. Remember?”

  “Yes. She liked you.”

  Yamato looked at me seriously and said, “Do you think I’m stupid?”

  I tried to think of the right answer. Unable to think of that, I spoke anyway.

  “Anyone who feels as strongly as you do would be stupid if they didn’t try,” I said.

  Yamato breathed in deeply and sighed. “Then you don’t think I’m stupid?”

  “Oh, I know you are. But so am I.”

  He smiled at me and said, “I’ll go buy the earrings now.”

  And I was stupid, too. I lied to Dr. Boulan when I told her I didn’t think Natelle could save me. That was what I hoped for. It was painless to admit, now, in my cocoon of narcotics, that I didn’t just see Natelle as a wonderful woman who I could love and who might love me. I saw her as the center of the universe, the one being to whom I could look for all love and all hope, as if none of that was in me or in anyone else. I knew it was. But I’d turned Natelle into a religion. She was just a woman, not a church. And I didn’t even know what she was going to save me from. Being alone? Being me? I was trying to have an insight, and all I could think of was that I’d backed myself into a corner, and the corner was me.

  I was all I had. Was that so bad?

  Yes.

  No.

  I was willing to accept both answers.

  I wanted a revelation from God. I waited a few seconds. I didn’t get one.

  My arm itched. That wasn’t a revelation. It was the needle in my arm, taped onto my flesh, where the antibiotic dripped in from the big plastic bag. It made me look like an experiment. I felt like one. I got very slowly out of bed, because I was dizzy and floating, and stood up next to the metal pole with wheels on it that connected me to the plastic bag, and I took a walk down the hall. It was like I was taking the metal pole for a walk. Some visitors in the hall stared at me limping along with my hand on the metal pole.

  “We’re taking a walk, my pole and I,” I said, and almost smiled in my narcotic, mystical state. We went outside, my pole and I, onto the big sun deck, where visitors and casualties like myself could smell the ocean and watch seagulls try to steal fish from pelicans. I sat down in a white metal chair with my pole right next to me, like a friend, and the pole and I looked at the ocean. Somewhere over there was Natelle. She wasn’t going to save me. And I wasn’t going to save her. Up out of the buoyant serenity of my narcotics came a little flow of sadness, and I cried. I didn’t know who was going to save anybody, and it seemed like I should pray. I prayed, Please help us do whatever we should do, even if we don’t know what that is. Please let Natelle and I always love each other and always be friends. Please give Natelle peace, and maybe me, too. And if I have to get used to being backed into a corner that’s me, could you please put someone in the corner with me? You know who I’m talking about, too.

  It wasn’t a very good prayer, but it was what I thought of.

  My pole and I were still looking across the ocean when Yamato walked up with some jade earrings held out to me. He had at least as much pathetic hope as I did. That’s probably why I liked him.

  38

  On our long flight back to Washington, I was still a little bit feverish and my forehead felt as warm as a dinner roll. Although the jet was filled with dozens of people, I had the sense that the only reason the pilot was in the air was to get me back to Natelle. Yamato sat next to me, most of the time holding the little gift box with the earrings in it, like a mystical artifact from his heart. I had a gift box, too, with an onyx cameo showing a smiling woman, who I hoped would be Natelle. I opened the box and took out the cameo on its silver chain and said to Yamato, “This is prettier than yours.”

  Yamato shook his head no and said, “My earrings are lovelier.”

  “Oh, they’re lovely, all right. But my cameo’s more endearing.”

  “Endearing, maybe, but not as enchanting as my earrings.”

  We were two men hoping like boys that a woman would like us—would want to keep us. Like so many other people in the world, we’d always been given back. That was part of what hurt Natelle so much now, the horror of being given back. I imagined her climbing a ladder, and then the ladder vanishing.

  I was struggling through that metaphor, wondering if I was supposed to catch Natelle, or just hold her after she hit, and rock her in my arms until she caught her breath, when Yamato showed me the dinner menu.

  “Meat,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “They have meat.”

  “L. D. Krite’s a herbivore. Should I just eat vegetables?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend yet. And might never be,” he said, reading the menu and pointing his finger at Beef Tips with Noodles. “Beef,” he said. “A cow’s an herbivore. Maybe if I eat an herbivore, that’d be the first step toward becoming one.”

  “Oh, yeah. You tell that to L. D. Krite: ‘Maybe I’m not a vegetarian, but I eat them every day.’”

  “Better not,” Yamato said, looking at the gift box again. “And when I send this to her, what should I say?”

  “Well, you better not say anything. You better write something.”

  “I know that,” Yamato said, as if he’d just realized it. “But what should I write?”

  “This is a tough one. I don’t know how you express affection to someone you arrested.”

  “I was thinking of apologizing,” Yamato said wistfully.

  “That would be a good start.”

  “This is all pretty stupid, isn’t it?” Yamato said.

  “Stupid?” I wondered. “Strange, yes. But stupid? I don’t think so. Romance isn’t particularly rational to begin with. And it’s not supposed to be. It’s not like you’re supposed to have a list of thoroughly rational, defensible reasons why you like somebody. It’s what you feel. That’s all. And you merely hope they feel the same way. And that’s all you can do. Hope.”

  “I know,” Yamato said, and he was quiet, as if absorbed in hope. I looked at him in my peripheral vision and felt bad for him, because he was so much like me. We were two men halfway through our lives, still operating on the unreasoning hope of the children we once were. We were bigger, now, and had suits and guns. But still we were boys, wishing someone would find us. You always thought, even without proof, that someone was looking.

  I was going to cry, but I didn’t want Yamato to see me. I rubbed my hands over my eyes to keep from crying, and found out when my fingers touched the skin above my eyes that I was still very warm.

  “I think I still have a fever,” I said.

  “Remember what the doctor said?” Yamato asked.

  “No. He didn’t speak English.”

  “Well, the nurse said the doctor said you should see a doctor when you get home, in case you still have a fever. Do you want me to take you to a doctor when we get back?”

  “No. I want to see Natelle.”

  “She’ll just give you a different fever.”

  “She did that a long time ago.”

  IN THE cab on the way to Natelle’s apartment, I felt dizzy and lightheaded and hot and cold, which, in the traditional fashion of my peculiar thinking, reminded me of the symptoms of menopause. The cab driver kept glancing at me in her mirror, and finally said, “Are you all right?”

  “I feel a little hot and cold at the same time. Could be menopause,” I said.

  “You’re the wrong sex,” she said.

  “I was male at birth. There was nothing to be done about it.”r />
  I stared out of the car. Everything seemed unreal, as if everything around me had suddenly started moving in slow motion, as if my fever had gotten so bad that my perception was distorted. I squinted my eyes to look clearly at everything, then realized everything was moving in slow motion because we were in a traffic jam.

  “Can’t you drive on the sidewalk?” I said.

  “That’s illegal,” the cab driver said indifferently.

  “Not if you’re on official government business,” I said, taking out my wallet with my picture ID and holding it over the back seat so the driver could see it. “I’m with the Secret Service and I have urgent business. I want you to drive on the sidewalk and get around these cars.”

  “Really?” she asked in an anxious voice.

  “Really.”

  “Does this have something to do with national security?”

  “It always does. Now please drive on the sidewalk, being careful not to hit any more pedestrians than necessary.”

  She drove slowly up onto the curb, honking at pedestrians, who lurched out of our way as we drove along the sidewalk and up to the intersection, where the road was clear enough for us to get back onto the street.

  “That was a highly competent job. You can expect a letter of commendation from the White House,” I said, looking around for police cars, since the police wouldn’t commend us.

  It was dusk when the cab driver left me standing with my crutches in front of Natelle’s apartment, and, looking up at her second-story windows, I was in a cold sweat, either from blood poisoning or love. I knew blood poisoning could be cured by antibiotics. Love was untreatable.

  Hobbling quietly up the steps, I felt a constant surge of apprehension and dizziness and hope, trying to think of what I’d say when Natelle opened the door. She’d see how pale and sweaty I was.

  “I’m having menopause,” I’d say. I wished that I wasn’t so dizzy. Natelle would see me and get worried and be gentle with me, and I didn’t want her to be gentle. I wanted her to knock me to the floor and hold her mouth against mine until her breath came out my ears. I wanted her to kiss my lips and my neck and my chest, and put her hand between my legs.