Shiva and Other Stories

by Barry N. Malzberg

  Reason Seven

  I PREPARE “CAPTURED SECRET DOCUMENTS.” A smattering of Russian, hints of Spanish, un peu French, some Chinese; it is not important that I be fluent in these languages as long as I can provide what might be called their flavor. The “documents” are intended to read as translations anyway, which excuses many limitations in style. They contain polemics about the need for world conquest, interspersed with statistics so dull that they must chill: feed grains, diseased chickens, pastures, coal mines, resources. The style is horrifying, but that is the agency’s problem, not my own. I merely conform to established rules. I follow format.

  This job—and I regard it solely as a job; I have no delusions of grandeur here—cost me a promising relationship recently. It is of this that I wish to speak—however hesitantly—for the files. I have been instructed to do this. Otherwise it is not to be discussed outside of context. Francine, however, was disingenuous, and me—I knew less then—I was also a little bit of a patriot and proponent (fool!) of relative openness in affairs. So I told her, more or less, what I did. It took Francine a while to grasp the context, but when she did, her reaction was one of disgust. “You’re a functionary,” she said, “a clerk. Don’t all of the lies sicken you?”

  “They are not lies. I choose to believe they reflect a higher truth in the endless battle between the Soviet bloc and the Western forces of light.”

  “We’ve heard that rationalization for half a century,” Francine said. She was really quite angry. I am doing a poor job, I sense, of conveying her outrage. (My prose is more keyed toward the smoothly bureaucratic. It is all a matter of training.) “This is crazy,” she said. “You mean you write this stuff so that when the troops come in they plant the documents and then those documents disappear from somebody’s files?”

  “Secret documents,” I pointed out. “Transcripts and writings that were supposed to have been destroyed or taken away and were instead left behind by the enemy in their headlong flight. Captured public documents would be another division.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you just sit in front of a typewriter and make up this stuff? That’s horrifying.”

  Well, perhaps it is, considered in that way; I had never done so before. I gather that I am being rather light on characterization. Characterization and her handmaiden, description, are not to be neglected in certain prose documents.

  Francine was five feet four, with a certain severity of mouth and cheekbones, perhaps a consequence of her upbringing in the mine country of Pennsylvania but more likely associated with the fact that she was a master of arts in nursing administration and had seen a good deal in her time, not the least of which was the interior of my apartment, if not my unrevealed psyche. (Me, I had seen little and had been nowhere; travel, in the viewpoint of my mentors, not being conducive to that free flow of the imagination needed to produce fine secret documents.) Breasts two, eyes blue, ass nicely formed, and so on, and I would go into further particulars of appearance and physical relationship if they were relevant under any circumstance. They are not relevant.

  “This is bizarre,” Francine said. “I’ve never heard of anything like it. Why are you telling me all this?”

  “You said you wanted a sharing relationship, Francine.”

  “But this is crazy.”

  “Crazy?” I said, and added an agency dictum. “In war nothing is crazy, and we are in deadly combat. We make up everything, yes, but only in a tight format. There’s a style sheet, there’s rigid schematization of the voicing, and there are lists of facts, all of which must be included in a certain fashion. Actually,” I emphasized, “it’s a very demanding job, fully deserving of its GS-eighteen rank, and we’re thinking about making a formal appeal for reclassification.”

  “Who are ‘we’?”

  “All of us in the branch, of course.”

  “You mean, there’s a whole little disgusting army of clerks. Of captured secret document preparers.”

  “Our official classification is informational writer,” I said, “but I wouldn’t really object to your label.”

  “Well, I object to every aspect of it,” Francine said.

  And so on and so forth. It was a difficult argument in a difficult time, and it is not, perhaps, worthwhile to extend this transcript. I have included this much only to indicate that I am well aware (so are all of us on this level) of the contempt that my occupation incites in some quarters. I am not unaware of pain, nor unacquainted with grief. Looking at this objectively (and objectivity is the grand, sad curse of the century), there is something futile in this flailing about, in this rendering crude drafts, in uncertain language, of materials that will never be read other than by a skeptical smattering of the public. There is something awful about justifying troop actions that are, perhaps, unjustifiable, led by interests who are, to some, unspeakable. But I am no politician.

  Politics and the civil service are kept separate by fiat. Insulated by the Career & Salary Plan, I minimize implication.

  Someone, after all, has to prepare the captured secret documents; reporters are persistent, the times insist upon evidence for everything, and I have learned to do my work as well as anyone could under the circumstances. Me and my army of clerks. (Army? There is none such; Francine had it wrong. There are only a dozen of us, and we are, of course, kept separate not only by area of expertise but by anonymity. My colleagues have never been identified to me. I learned we were a dozen only through captured secret documents.)

  A note on human vanity and folly: In the adjoining room of this apartment—I work and sleep in the windowed partition, do my wooing there as well—lies the library of my collected works. As every writer must have his pride and bibliography, so must I have mine. Lined up in uniform binders are the output of all my years at the agency: original drafts of documents captured in Beirut, the Antilles, Cairo, San Miguel de Allende, and other places. Most of these bear the mark of the haste and pressure under which they were written (deadlines are pressing in this business), but in every one of them will be at least a page and sometimes two of prose that I consider to bear my own personal impress, prose that sings or at least moves to a certain inner rhythm. Eighty-six knives to the oppressors, an arcing bullet for the American swine, hold the temple inviolate—this is one of my favorite phrases (unearthed by the liberating troops in Port-au-Prince). A four-year plan past folly, a hole in the tent of American domain—there is another. Most of these documents, of course, are written in a prose of the most stale and ponderously bureaucratic sort, this to grant the counsel of realism, but every now and then—as I intrude, personal voice must extrude. A man must have his pride. A man must, after all, have his individuality.

  They understand this in the agency, and as long as it does not interfere with the essentials, they have even been known to encourage this approach. There is more compassion, greater understanding within those corridors than outsiders could ever understand. This is not a dehumanizing business; it breeds great feeling.

  So that other room—my library, the collected works—is inviolate, stark but for the shelves and the thin fluorescence with which the carefully stacked binders are illuminated. It is that place (I like to feel) in which all purpose resides, a repository, I think, and an homage to larger purposes. For there are not, I have come to know, merely the six reasons cited in the Career & Salary brochure for the advantages of this employment, but a seventh reason, too. And it’s the most important of all: giving testimony, to change the face of the earth a little. All of us who would be artists, who would use the medium of words or paint or song, are driven by this need to alter, however slightly, that terrain upon which we have found ourselves. And my alteration, stacked floor to ceiling in the spackled, glowing binders that contain not only statistics but a kind of poetry . . . my alteration, it has to be understood, is very important to me; it matters, it is not trivial. I must make this clear, this is not insignificant material, not hackwork but testimony. That seventh reason portends: to make a differen
ce.

  And a difference has been made; my captured documents have given justification where such did not before exist. I have shifted the balance of popular opinion away from loathing, and I have the evidence to cite. But this is not a document of sheer exposition, as we would call it at the agency; this is a narrative of some dimension and dramatic weight. I come before you not only with a position to cite but a story to tell. And I come to explain not only Francine (although she has a part in this) but to explain much that goes past her, Francine being ultimately only a symbol. “I’m going to write to all of the newspapers,” she said toward the conclusion of the discussions to which I have already alluded. “Do you understand that? I’ll publish in the letters-to-the-editor columns, and I won’t stop there. I’ll write my congressman, I’ll send communications to action-news-drama centers. Someone will believe me. Someone will at last accept this bizarre truth: that there are roomfuls of little clerks like yourself making up captured documents to justify our disgusting adventures and equations, our rotten entrepreneuring. I’ll make them believe it, I swear I will, and it will never be the same for you again. Just you wait and see.”

  “Francine,” I said, “you are overreacting. It’s merely a job, Francine. It’s employment like any other, it can become as routine as those facets of anguish—melanoma, termination, helplessness, suffering—to which you are exposed every day in your own work. It is necessarily impersonal. You can get used to it, believe me.”

  “I’ll never become numb to it,” she said. “I’m not a clerk, not a functionary. That’s why I got the master’s; I had to get off the floor. I couldn’t look at their eyes anymore, lie to the relatives, watch them as they stared out the windows at the sun in the late autumn. I had to indulge some separation, open up distance, stop lying, find a way to get away from it. But not you, you would be there at this moment, holding their hands and telling them that remissions were common in their situation.”

  I should explain—lest Francine seem unduly unsympathetic at this point, so reprehensible that a sensible reader might ask, “Why is a person like you even involved with her anymore?”—that it was not necessarily always this way.

  On our very first date, arranged by a video-computer service, Francine and I had sexual relations and enjoyed one another enormously, and it was only after some time (and after the initiation of conversation) that matters moved to this state of relative collapse. Francine, I learned, is one of those who rejects anonymous, sustaining relationships and wants real human contact. This is terrific for arguments but not so good for sex. Agency employee or not, I am a normal American male, heterosexual to the core, thirty-four years old, driven and necessitous, and I’d rather get laid (especially anonymously) than become involved in discussions like this. I feel justified, powerfully so.

  “This is unbelievable,” she said, pointing to the binders. This argument was taking place in the library. I had made the mistake of taking her into the library. “You save all of this stuff? You’re proud of it?”

  She reached up, took a binder, opened it, and stared at it. “This is full of French,” she said, “and strange-looking letters. You know these languages?”

  “Cyrillic,” I said, “for the Russian language. This gives it authenticity. Keep on going though, you’ll find something that you can read if you just give it time.” I maintained a sense pride in my work. Even then, I only wanted a reading.

  She turned some pages. “Running dog,” she read, “imperialist swine will fall within the mark and the penitentiary of the century will not, cannot, wholly enclose them.”

  “Dominican Republic. 1988,” I said rather pompously.

  “Praise the keepers, for the keepers will set us free: know the truth, and the truth will cut our shackles.”

  “Yes.” I said. “Isn’t that good?”

  “You wrote that?”

  “Every word of it.”

  “And you’re proud of this?”

  “I’m not ashamed, Francine, if that’s what you’re asking me to say. I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  She hurled the binder on the floor. “I can’t tell you how angry this makes me,” she said. “This then, this is the face of the enemy, the liars who have turned this country into the nightmare of the century. You serve the forces of this lie, and yet you’re a clerk, just a functionary!” She reached, took another binder from the shelf, threw this down unopened. “This is terrifying,” she said. “It’s absolutely terrifying. I can’t believe that you’ve told me all this.”

  “You’re causing disorder.”

  “I’m what?”

  “You’re causing disorder, Francine, and I won’t have it. So please, I’m asking you to stop.”

  “I’m causing disorder,” she said fiercely. “Oh my—”

  “This is my library. I’m proud of it. I worked hard to put it together. My writings are here. I don’t want them disturbed, and I don’t want to argue over them anymore.”

  She opened the binder, clawed out a sheet. “This says something about steel quotas,” she said, rolled it into a ball, threw it at me. She ripped out another sheet, scanning it hurriedly.

  “I mean it. I said stop it, Francine,” I said. I felt myself beginning to flush. I knew arrhythmia would shortly follow. I am quite serious about my collected works. Some aspect of permanence and history is important to me. This is testimony. Call it evidence if you like. Call it the evidence of the century. “Please don’t do this.”

  “I’m going to dismantle your library piece by piece, you disgusting little clerk. Then I’ll call everyone I know and expose you. See if I’m afraid of the CIA.”

  “It’s not the CIA.”

  “I’m not afraid of anything!” Francine said. “You people hide in the dark, you make your little threats. But when you’re exposed, you’re nothing—”

  Who would have thought there to be so much passion in her? Three dates, three casual fucks, some dinners, a walk on the piers, one concert, an unfortunate confession, and then all of this. She had reacted as if I were an assassin.

  “It must be being surrounded by all of the dying,” I said to her, trying to be reasonable. “Yes, that would explain it, that would explain the rage. But I’m just a victim, too, Francine. I do what they tell me.”

  “That’s the great line of our age: ‘Don’t bother me, I just work here.’ ”

  She seized two binders this time and kicked one across the room. The heavy impact of her little shoe caused the reinforcement to break. Pages spewed from a height, settled unevenly on the floor like nesting birds. I endeavored up to this point—as must be clear—to be reasonable. I am a reasonable man.

  But I am afraid that at this moment I lost control of myself.

  A description of the events of the next hour or so is not necessary. That description would be too painful, albeit truly humbling, but I can say that I was brought to realize the inner, substantial truth of that which I had written in a group of documents to be found in a warehouse in Amman during the invasion of 1991: “One truly does not know the measure of the man until one has been tested by the invader. One truly does not know the running of the beast, the stalking of all the steps, until one has heard the heartbeat of the self. One never truly knows, then, until one knows, and not an instant before.”

  It was a formative experience, let me say that, also quite painful. At length I found myself at the desk of my supervisor. It was an emergency appointment, but the agency makes it clear in the Career & Salary Plan manual: Normal procedures may be overridden in case of serious difficulty. I was in serious difficulty. One must never operate conventionally in our terrain, not after what I had done. What I had done. I am afraid that I was rather out of control. I sobbed. I wrung my hands. The supervisor listened quietly to the recapitulation and coda, then made a call. “We will have operatives there immediately,” he said. “Are you sure the scene was absolutely secure?”

  “It was when I left.”

  “Stop your sniveling. You know
that won’t get you anywhere. You are positive that there were no witnesses? No one around?”

  “Yes,” I said, sighing deeply, heaving. “Yes, I am quite sure.”

  “And it was accomplished just as quietly as you say? There were no undue sounds?”

  “No, there were not.” I tried to hold back the sobbing but could not. “I did care for her,” I said. “She was very nice at the beginning. I thought we had a real relationship. I felt that I could tell her things. Maybe it was because she worked with dying people. It was only later that it got dreadful. I made a mistake.”

  “Oh, yes, you did,” the supervisor said. “Oh, yes indeed, you did.” I would engage in characterological description here, but like all of them, like me on the job, he was masked. His voice was without affect. It is important to remember that there is nothing personal in all of this. “You made a terrible, a stupid mistake,” he said, “but now you’ll know better, won’t you?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You understand why these jobs must be confidential?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, “I know that now.”

  His eyes were kindly but nonetheless cold. Impenetrable even. Something like the agency prose itself. “Yes,” I said, “I understand that now and much else.”

  “You were really quite stupid, and you will have to pay the price for that stupidity.”

  “My job?”

  The supervisor stared at me. “The job?” he said. “That’s the last thing. We wouldn’t even ask your life.”

  “I want my job.”

  “The situation, however, is manageable. It’s a little tricky, but we’ve had worse. You knew her fairly well, of course?”

  “Of course. Except that I misjudged her terribly at the end.”

  “It’s too late to think of that. Draft a statement, then.”