Elegy on Kinderklavier

by Arna Bontemps Hemenway

  •

  We didn’t find out that Douglas Reeter had been lying until late September, when my father and what was left of the unit came back. I told him at dinner all the stories Brother Reeter had told the team. I didn’t even ask if they were true, but my father just got this long look in his face and stared over at the window for a while and said, “Honey, Douglas Reeter sat at a desk in Kuwait the entire time before coming back here. It was a reward for his typing skills. We didn’t even see him.”

  It seems impossible that none of us had asked our fathers, in all those emails or calls, about Brother Reeter’s stories, but I only remember the boys leaning across those rows of bleachers, looking off up into the sky or trees or grass, listening and listening. There was a news story once the men of our town that could come back did come back. We were briefly the town with the highest casualty rate of all the places in America that had sent men to the war. It only lasted a few months, though.

  •

  In the fall cold at midnight, the group of dark bodies standing back in the fallow field that fronted my house had a specter of frozen breath hovering over it. There was Samuel’s face at my window. I followed him out without speaking.

  Three of the boys were carrying their father’s shotguns. Samuel already had his farm license, and we sat in the back of his truck, Douglas Reeter lying face down, hooded, gagged, hands bound behind his back with plastic zip-ties, between us.

  In the shack, on the tape, his eyes are wild when the boys pull off the hood, when he sees the gun. They don’t hit him. For some reason, this tape is the hardest of all of them to watch. He looks, his eyes so wide, at the shotgun that Samuel holds up to his face, but it’s not that. There is the sharp, ammoniac scent of urine. Then, the part I can never get over: you see his shoulders soften, his eyes go dull—like he’s accepting it. He closes his eyes. Samuel Lincoln pulls the trigger and there is only a click. Someone undoes Reeter’s hands, and the boys file out, leave him there. They do not beat him. They do not really even touch him.

  The tape follows the boys out, catches their faces where they stand together out in the cold, exhilarated. There is the faint sound of Reeter weeping, back in the shack.

  And I remember them there well, I remember their faces, lit by the glow of the cigarette they pass around on the tape. Truman, who will accidentally kill his girlfriend driving around after prom, when he will take a hill on a gravel road too fast and the car will flip and roll, crushing her to death but sparing him perfectly, without even a scratch. P.J., Gary, and Ralph, who will move away after graduating, getting as far as Oklahoma City, St. Louis, and Omaha, respectively; all three mechanics, if you can believe it. Hilton Hedis, who will become an overweight student football manager for the University of Kansas, before getting fired after being arrested for breaking three bones in his girlfriend’s face after a drunken fight, and finally end up with the job at the grain elevator in Cloud County. In the end only I will stay in New Jerusalem. Only I will be left around to remember.

  •

  The Old City at New Jerusalem still stands, more or less, though it’s been closed to tourists ever since a wooden cutout of a minaret fell over on a kid from Kansas City, causing him a head injury. The well-marker shack and all of the old vacation cabins at the old Hope and Grace Bible Camp were pushed down a few years ago so the church could sell the land.

  Samuel Lincoln and I dated all the way through high school, and we tried to keep it together in college—me at Pittsburg State, him at Missouri Southern—but Samuel eventually dropped out to go roughneck on an oil derrick outside Wichita Falls, though not before getting me pregnant with my beautiful daughter, who is five years old now. I don’t feel badly toward Samuel, in the end. As he got older he got eaten up by an anger even he didn’t fully understand, I don’t think. He sent along what I think must’ve been nearly the entirety of his paycheck, all the way up until the day he fell from some rigging and hit his head on a girder and died three days later in a hospital in Dallas.

  Douglas Reeter and Marly ended up buying that old house on my father’s property, and getting married. Three months after their wedding I was at college, and so I wasn’t there at my window to see Marly steal away, leaving him as he slept. Nor was I there four weeks after that, when Douglas Reeter took himself off into the woods, making sure to get clear of my father’s land, and put a bullet through the roof of his mouth.

  Nobody really knows where Marly went, how far away she got. None of us have ever heard from her again, not a single word. I’ll confess that sometimes, when the house is quiet and the light long and blue, I’ll fantasize about the phone ringing, about me picking it up to hear nothing but a familiar breathing on the other end of the line. I want to ask her where she made it to, where she ended up going, what she ended up doing. I want to ask her if she made it all the way to the real Jerusalem, what it’s like there. And I also want to tell her to come here and sit in my living room and dream up those dead boys with me again, Reeter and all. But I don’t know what story I could tell her about how things went to convince her. I don’t know what story there is that could bring her back.

  The IED

  1.

  What is he looking at? The maze of light made by the high mud-brick walls of the narrow alley that the line of men, generously spaced, are navigating. It is the early part of late afternoon, the heat subdued into a smoldering focus by a low ceiling of clouds, everything very dry. The dust from the passage of something or someone—recently? hours ago?—floats through the diffuse angle of light at the intersection of two alleyways, giving the air there a sort of grain, causing it to briefly coruscate. But that is only at the border of what Abrams is looking at as he feels the strange texture under his boot, the slight resistance of the rectangular metal contact plate.

  Though it’s not a maze of light he can really see, not completely, at the moment, just one he imagines. The part he can see is, he supposes (or was supposing in the microseconds before registering the change under his foot), only one corridor. Farther along, he can also see the beginnings of a perpendicular corridor, another alley. Together they make one small corner of the maze.

  It is enough: the narrow, dirt-floored alley, cast partially into cool shadow by the obstruction of the high walls on either side. It is almost pleasant, the quiet at the end of their patrol, the stillness of the village around them, the genial fatigue of the men, which is a kind of gladness, Abrams has always thought. And it is this moment of mindfulness—when Abrams looked up from the ground in front of his feet and noticed the alley half in shadow and the slump of the shoulders of the men in front of him at their delicate distance—which caused Abrams to look farther upward, to allow his face to continue on its vertical pivot enough to take in the sky, the light, the unparsable complex of sky and light framed in that curious way by the tops of the walls into a kind of maze. And it was exactly then that he felt the slight slip, the sudden ease of friction beneath his right boot afforded by the metal contact plate.

  Though that’s not quite right either because it implies a false parade of events, when what it is surely more accurate to say—accuracy being meaningful to Abrams—is that there was a sensory-cognition master-fade type situation going on somewhere in his cortex, the phrase maze of light fading out even as contact plate or, more simply, IED faded in. That is to say that even as maze of light was dawning on Abrams (seeming, in fact, to fall down out of the vision in order to describe it) IED was beginning its scaled march into attention, so much so that the two thoughts may be said to have been coeval.

  Neither is the irony lost on Abrams that it was a moment of actual mindfulness (and not distraction or carelessness) which possibly led him to place his foot on the small stretch of shallow dirt that hides the contact plate. He can still hear the instructor during the lengthy pre-deployment training exercises in the real alleys of the fake village in the Arizona desert. Specifically, that in order to never ever be caught unawares by the presence of an improvised explosi
ve device while on patrol in the Shit, they needed to first and foremost learn how to cultivate a state of extreme mindfulness in which each of them could stare at the ground, the dirt in front of their feet (carefully stepping only in the compressed boot shapes of dust left by the man ahead), for hours and not become zombified or otherwise rendered senseless to the small hints of micro-terrestrial disturbance that would signal the presence of a device.

  Abrams had thus far handled the weeks of their patrol assignment by allowing himself to focus so hard he lost all sense of scale. In his vision the miniature landscapes of alley dirt became actual landscapes; the ridges and mounds, the troughs, the swales, all began to loom, began to feel like life-sized features of an entire sprawling world.

  No, what Abrams and the other men actually needed was a sort of mindlessness, an absence of thought that would allow them to stare at unremarkable stretches of dust and dirt for hours at a time without developing an acute awareness of the moment, or the light, or the other men, or any of the marginalia of actual experience that is mindfulness. It now seems a strange irony that such a human moment—the maze of light, the pleasant preprandial lull of the village, the alley wearing its stole of shadow, the pleasant cutting scent of the other men’s sweat—has possibly led to Abrams’ imminent cranial evacuation by way of shrapnel moving through the tissues of his face at unimaginable speeds.

  Unbidden, the flash of memory: Mrs. Clowney (sharp-faced, gently obese English 9 teacher). She is repeating, somewhat smugly, the true definition of irony. Irony is when the audience is aware of something that the player on stage is himself unaware of.

  Unbidden, also, the related memory of Mrs. Packard, Abrams’ third-grade teacher, trying, for some reason, to impress upon the class the unthinkable speed of light. She is standing at the classroom’s light switch, flipping it on and off, which sets off tremors of giggles. Abrams raises his hand (the teacher’s face falling at another of his questions) and asks which is faster, then, the time it takes the electricity to go from the switch to the light, or the time it takes the light from the light bulb to reach their eyeballs, or the time it takes the students themselves to know that the lights are on? For a moment, Mrs. Packard, in her sturdy floral dress, goes silent, her face bled of its pride at her lesson. She clasps her hands in front of her in a way that Abrams understands on some level as a sign of vulnerability, of being hurt in some way by this child, which makes him feel really bad the rest of the day every time he looks at her, though, of course, he can’t explain why.

  Later, when he learned about it in college, Abrams couldn’t believe how slowly perceptions and conscious sensations move into our attention, outpaced often (always?) by even our own reptilian subsystems. Also in college, Abrams, long suspicious of Mrs. Clowney, ended up looking up the definition of irony, finding its root to be in , meaning “dissimulation” or “feigned ignorance,” which Abrams thought sounded more like it. His body (specifically his foot) knows before he does, but cannot bear to short-circuit his mind’s self-myth of mastery, and so must feign ignorance, must wait until the phrase IED finishes its patient fade into Abrams’ mind, maze of light still echoing in some synaptic hallway.

  2.

  But does his foot know? Is it reacting? The extraordinary efficiency of the human sole cannot be denied. Think of the things it is capable of—eloquent distribution and redistribution of weight, shifting phalangeal deployment, a notable ability to take the changing physical demands of a normal day (sprinting toward a bus stop in wooden-soled business shoes) in stride. That Abrams has become aware of the contact plate at all is in fact proof of his foot’s intelligence.

  And yet. And yet his right foot, encased in its boot, is not stopping, is not pausing in its rolling heel-then-arch-then-toe impression into the dirt. The heel strikes—it has no reason to pause. Even when the mid-sole falls, is pressed into the dirt—still no cause for hesitation. But then, finally, the ball. The hinge of the cuneiform bone (beautiful term) extending into the gentle metatarsal has predetermined Abrams’ fate. The application to the ground of the plantar fascia (horrible term) may not be stopped. And so the ball of the foot, the ball of the boot’s outsole, falls, and Abrams’ weight begins to shift onto its pad, and the strange texture beneath.

  But already Abrams’ heel is rising (has risen) from the location of its initial strike, separating itself from the dirt, and the cuneiform bone is pulling at the local terminus of the metatarsal, taking it along in its launch back into the air and light.

  This moment Abrams does truly grasp, understanding pluming up through all levels of processing—he can feel it in the arch of muscle between his shoulders. It is a kind of resignation—bodily, mentally—intuitive, but encompassing in its intuition. It is the feeling of helplessness at time passing, of the loss of experience even as it occurs.

  Abrams has been aware of various declensions of this moment his whole life—one scene which now cloud-shadows its way across his interior vision.

  He stands in an abandoned lakeside dairy, which has been repurposed for the night into an event space for his best friend’s wedding reception. He stands at the edge of the high room, a cuneiform alphabet of pipes still decorating the walls and ceiling; he stands there with Sarah, his girlfriend, who they do not know yet is sick, taking in at once the writhing organism of the dance floor, the large glass windows of what was once (he guesses) a loading bay. Beyond: train tracks, the black expanse of the lake, only a field of absence in the dark. It has been a wonderful wedding, held out of doors in the uncharacteristically brisk late August day, on a grassy knoll outside of a relative’s cabin. Beyond the pastor on the little platform there was the lake, its waters lacerated by the small, sharp edges of wind. And now: the night in the abandoned dairy, the reception. Earlier, someone passed out toy kazoos before the bride and groom arrived and when they finally entered everyone played “A Bicycle Built for Two.” Those without kazoos had sung. And now here Abrams is, standing very still. Sarah is exhausted, draped over a chair beside him. They do not know she is sick yet.

  He can feel the mass of experiential detail swelling, as he stands there, a sundae in a Styrofoam bowl from the make-your-own sundae buffet melting in his right hand. He’s waiting for the train. It has come through once, not slowing, very early in the event, right after he and Sarah arrived. The tracks, once laid for easy loading from the dairy, pass within feet of what is now the wall of glass. It is fiercely loud, piercing in its intensity. It is truly a blast of motion, so near and pervasive that one’s body seems a participant in its very direction, to the point where the explosion of dark metal (and sound) seems to be emanating from the atoms of one’s own body. For a few seconds, while your consciousness is still catching up (slow, so slow), you are the train, barreling into the nothingness of the night by some propulsion that is beyond will or intention. The waiting has become excruciating.

  The waiting has become torturous, less due to anticipation than the nagging sense that Abrams has understood the experience too late, that it is even now slipping from the grasping electricities of his memory. He will never be in this abandoned dairy again, he knows. There can be only tragic falling-offs from the first world of this night, from the train’s transcendent passage. The passage he is now waiting for, if in fact it ever comes, will be over almost even as it begins, exactly because Abrams has become aware of its singularity. It feels ridiculous to be made panicky by something so abstract and common as the passage of time, but the simple fact of it—Abrams understanding it on a muscular level—deflates the experience for Abrams even as the train does arrive, and the dancers are shattered into fear and surprise, and Abrams tries and fails to itemize his perceptions and observations and the ironies of the moment so extensively as to slow time to the point of cessation. Of course he fails, he must fail, and the rest of the night feels like a letdown, had already felt like a letdown, even before the train noise recurred.

  But Abrams’ sense of anticipatory nostalgic loss is not altogether unple
asant, in its way. He doesn’t know when he developed it, how young he was when he first understood. The relaxation that he experiences in the moment of his knowing about the contact plate beneath the ball of his right foot and that same foot’s continued motion, is—it must be said—distinctly pleasurable. Another cloud-shadow of memory darkening the screen of his mind: the sweltering parking lot in Minneapolis, some forgotten road trip with his poor, nervous mother.

  He is standing outside one of those old-fashioned Dairy Queen stands, this one planted in the middle of a gray concrete parking lot that seems to Abrams as vast as the sea. He is a little boy, and the stand, with its antiquated retro neon signage, looms above him spectacularly. His mother has let him order for himself, and in something like a fit of pleasure Abrams speaks up and asks wildly for the combination he’s noticed on the menu board, the synthesis of two of his favorite treats—a vanilla ice cream Blizzard, with (the electric quiver of joy) Nerds in it. “Nerds” being the sour, granular candy popular at the time, which came in unexpected marriages of colors, a small mountain spread in the palm of one’s hand turning into a pointillist residual portrait on one’s skin. A great deal of the pleasure for little Abrams is to be had simply in the breathless idea of such a thing: the play of the possible visual alone (the sharp, glossed color of the Nerds, implanted delicately in the creamscape of the vanilla ice cream) making his skin tingle. But also the taste—previously unthinkable—the contrast at once of the milky, cold, sweet vanilla against the eye-squintingly sour acid of the Nerds: an oral chiaroscuro never before conceived of by the staff of all other Dairy Queens Abrams has ever visited. This all not to mention the texture, the queer graininess of the ice cream with its hard secret of Nerds, the sensation carrying with it the unmistakable sense of transgression, as if eating rocks and dirt. And all of this present just in the thought, the galaxy of delight expanding rapidly, anticipatorily in Abrams’ mind and nerve centers as he orders—nervously, having to repeat it again louder for the visored teenager at the till. Abrams speaks his order again anxiously, as if a jealous deity might perhaps strike him down for requesting of the world such a thing as a Nerd-filled Blizzard, offered almost clandestinely by only this particular Dairy Queen.