Elegy on Kinderklavier

by Arna Bontemps Hemenway

  And so Abrams stands there on the concrete sea, in the sweltering heat, and looks down at his narrow cup, the red spoon stabbed into the blank territory of pleasure. Abrams feels the anxiety of the first bite spreading over his body like a very tiny horse race across his epidermis, Abrams tracing its progress from the environs of his anus up into the space below his belly button and then across the plain of his chest. He can feel his intestines spasm. He looks down into the cup and uses the spoon with its garish red to swirl the already melting contents. Shockingly, something Abrams has not foreseen: the color-coating of the Nerds, enveloped by the ice cream, has begun to bleed into the pure bed of ecru. Each individual Nerd leaves an arcing trail of hue, dissipating in intensity and, worst of all, revealing at its core a heart of whiteness, which all collectively sit on the field of ice cream like teeth thrown across an unwashed linen sheet.

  Abrams supposes that this feeling, this loosening from between his shoulders through his core and reaching finally his sphincter, is what makes men, particularly soldiers, defecate in the process of their deaths. It is a kind of peacefulness, it is true. There’s nothing particularly special or original about the pleasure of abandon, Abrams knows. Perhaps there lies within the sensation of knowing, of (literally) striding forth into the moment of his fate, some sort of masochistic desire, a sense in which Abrams’ appreciation of the maze of light and the calm fall of shadow was in fact beckoning the violence of the thing in the dirt which he cannot see. A death wish. Perhaps this is what—underneath all the paroxysms of memory—he’s really wanted. Why else can he not stop his foot, really?

  Just as he cannot stop now the memory of Lara Fugelsang, the tall, severe-faced, blonde lesbian in the philosophy seminar he’d taken back in graduate school.

  Abrams had assumed Lara was a lesbian mostly because she had a girlfriend, and a face that featured prominent, martial cheekbones. She was writing her thesis on some inherently boring, ultraspecific example of gender politics in government language usage, and her comments in seminar were always throbbing with disgust and carefully curated anger. Abrams hated her. He hated her comments. He hated gender politics in general, and especially her diluted third-wave, recherché feminism which was really, he’d always suspected, just a collection of exceedingly normal personal anxieties. He had no idea what Lara was really like, or where she’d come from. He only really knew that she’d gone to Brown.

  Abrams spent a lot of time staring at Lara in that seminar. And it was this that he hated the most about her: that the sight of her made Abrams wonder if, really, deep down, he hated women. He worried about this a lot. He did not feel that he hated women. He supported feminism, when it was not being annoyingly espoused in seminars, and generally shared the reasoning of many girls and women he’d known who hated men. He was, by all accounts, a conscientious, generous, and democratic lover. But there was the blowjob thing, which was undeniable.

  What he would eventually begin to do, every single time the seminar met, was to look at the female members of the class and imagine, especially when they began to talk, forcing his penis into each of their mouths. He needed no extended barstool monologue from Lara (though he’d heard her give a very good one on the subject) to understand the inherent misogynistic issues involved in the act of oral sex itself, let alone what it might mean about Abrams that he sat there and imagined what he did about the women in the seminar, not all of whom he hated. He didn’t hate all of them, but the exercise was especially exciting, he squirmingly admitted to himself, when it was someone he did hate, when it was Lara herself. He was consistently taken aback, somewhat horrified in the midst of his helpless reverie, by the violence implied in this carnality. He often even felt victimized by it himself. He did not want to be the kind of man who sat there and imagined—with asinine pleasure—this act. And yet he was that kind of man, apparently. Which made him think he secretly—unbeknownst even to himself—bore some vast reservoir of hatred for women. Which made him hate Lara—Lara in the specific, he defended to himself, who happened to be a woman—even more.

  But then the computer lab. The first deposits of their theses were due the next day, and Abrams and Lara were the only ones left at their workstations at 2:47 in the morning. Abrams had been reviewing leaked U.S. Government memos for his own thesis (False Narrative Constructions in Intelligence Reporting, 1976–2001), which would eventually get him the enlistment appointment with the Defense Intelligence Agency, and which in turn would lead to his job at the Combat Review Repository in Tucson (which itself would eventually lead to his attachment to this unit, in Iraq, in the dusty alley where the device of his fate awaited him). He didn’t know what Lara was working on.

  What he did know was that they were both printing off large amounts of material, and had been taking awkward turns getting up from their seats and going to the boxy printer to retrieve their documents. As the hour grew later and later, however, their papers became mixed, and they kept getting in each other’s way during simultaneous fetchings. Abrams was pretty sure Lara had twice now taken a stack of documents that belonged to her and purposefully included in her grab the documents he’d printed off, then thrown them away on the other side of the lab. He retaliated by doing the same to a packet of hers at the back of his own pile. The next three times they got up, Lara became more physical, elbowing him out of the way. On the fourth time, when she went to elbow him, Abrams shouldered into her, which she responded to by hip-checking him sideways with surprising strength, sending him caroming painfully into the corner of the table the printer stood on and then to the ground. Abrams got up quickly, the blood in his face pounding, and pushed her.

  By some tangoing struggle, Abrams ended up standing against her from behind, and pressed up against each other like that, they each suddenly and simultaneously became aware of his erection.

  Abrams was so tired and supremely confused by the erection, and the situation that gave rise to it, that he took a small step backward, his face falling, feeling both ashen and humiliated.

  “Listen, I—” he started to choke out. He was going to apologize. Lara did not turn around.

  What Lara did was bend slowly forward, bracing herself against the table, which motion reclosed the space between her ass (its shape Abrams had noticed watching her go to and from the printer, covered thinly by her light dress and tights) and the taut front of Abrams’ slacks. She looked back over her shoulder at him, her eyes flashing, almost angry, but sincere.

  “Oh, just do it already,” she said, and without really thinking Abrams undid his pants and let them drop and pushed up the soft material of her dress and pulled down her tights—she wore nothing underneath—and commenced intercourse with her, just like that.

  Even as he was doing it he was aware of the queasiness of it, the problematic nature of what was happening. There were so many things at once: Abrams had never had sex in public before; he was terrified that he was enacting some surely misogynistic male protofantasy about “turning” a lesbian by phallic force; he was also concerned that he was raping her, and he stopped cold at the thought, looking at his hands lightly grasping Lara’s narrow hips, trying to scan an objective description of the situation for any signs of resistance (was she being sarcastic? were her verbalizations now ones of pleasure or horror? was he in any way manhandling her?) but she only moved back against him more forcefully. And overlaid on everything was the childish surprise: he’d thought Lara hated him; he’d thought he hated Lara. With a shudder, and a sound from Lara, he ejaculated, and was done. They were still for a few long seconds, his heart beating wildly.

  Abrams knows, if their seminar that semester had encountered this scene in a novel, the women of the class would have had a field day tearing it down as a completely unbelievable, pathetic projection of the author’s openly misogynistic domination fantasy, and moreover would point out that it was irresponsible to put it to paper under the aegis of fiction, that it took advantage of the faux-displacement of responsibility for the scene onto the
(flawed, sexist) character, and also that it was just totally unbelievable—and Abrams would’ve agreed with all of that. But it happened! It really happened, just that way! This was part of the irony of it, he supposes, remembering how he’d backed away, softening out of her, the air in the computer lab suddenly licking at his slickened penis like cold fire. Lara had gathered herself silently, with effortless dignity, and excused herself to go to the bathroom. She’d left the building from the bathroom, and never said a word about what happened to Abrams. The ultimate irony being that even if he’d wanted to (which he did not), he could never have told anyone what had actually happened, because nobody would ever believe him. Thank god she had not performed the sex act he’d spent so many long hours imagining in seminar, Abrams thought, or there was no way he’d be able to live with himself.

  The uncomfortable but honest point of all this being that, in those moments when everything began to happen—when she’d leaned back into him, and Abrams’ mind leapt forward, already thrusting away at her pale skin—he’d been possessed by the purest instance of joy he’d ever felt. His whole body became light and airy. This seems to Abrams on some fundamental level pretty unfair to the more meaningful and substantive things in his life that he has experienced before and since, but it is, nonetheless, true.

  When it came time for them to peer-review each other’s theses, her notes were, oddly, both harsh and funny, a somewhat disturbing combination that over the years became even more so due to its tendency to inexplicably recur in other contexts around him.

  3.

  Abrams was so delighted by the last of these phrases, he didn’t even mind that it came back to him in the middle of a document dismantling (in methodical, phosphorescently intelligent terms) his first Combat Action Sustainability Tactic (or CAST) report at the DIA center in Tucson. Unrepentant lily-gilding, Abrams thought. If that’s not a perfect synecdoche for the joy to be had in life, there isn’t one.

  The evaluation was written by Brockton L. Albright, technically Abrams’ only colleague in the CAST report pod. Abrams was pretty sure the DIA had picked up Brockton on waivers from the CIA, mostly because he simply couldn’t imagine Brockton—who had the dark brown ringlets and vaguely mournful mien of an Eastern hagiological icon—ever willfully enlisting in any wing of the military. Brockton, whose interface review setup was just across the pod, spoke very, very little. Sometimes Abrams would see him coming into the cavernous space of the hangar that housed the twin geodesic domes of the interfaces, as Abrams paused behind the small organ of super-servers humming diastolically to one side. Abrams would watch him move over the polished concrete floors of the heavily air-conditioned hangar soundlessly, as if gliding.

  Abrams’ assignment was to prepare and submit CAST analyses of raw media from the field, which he displayed on the 3D viewing screens arranged in an angled cascade of triptychs around and over the desk in his interface office. Specifically, this was data focusing on the temporal environs of any American casualty that occurred in Iraq, as gathered by the many unblinking electronic eyes that the DIA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency might bring to bear.

  The most helpful of these technologies was by far the improbably named Gorgon Stare Platform (basically: a hovering bundle of very high-performing, very expensive video cameras and sensors, which sits static high above an Iraqi town when U.S. forces are operating in the area), especially when used in conjunction with the somewhat more aptly christened ARGUS system, though it was unclear if anyone at DARPA was aware of that namesake’s ultimate fate. ARGUS, that is, being the Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance system, the overall objective of which was “to increase situational awareness and understanding enabling an ability [sic] to find and fix critical events in a large area in enough time [sic] to influence events.” What these two utilities meant for Abrams was that, once he’d booted up the Casualty Data Packet for that week, he could start, stall, restart, and otherwise retard diegetic time, all while remotely controlling the focus, zoom, and direction of three-dimensional vision in order to examine any person, face, gaze, biometrical reading or sight-line in the town when someone was killed. It was such an advanced and acute technology, and was played out in 3D for so many hours on the towering, enveloping screens, that Abrams always ended up with the feeling of actually being there as the casualty event happened, over and over and over.

  What a CAST analysis or report really was, according to Brockton, who spent three weeks of painful vocal communication and social company training Abrams, was a narrativization of combat casualty data. They were to place a special emphasis on creative conjecture with the ultimate goal of using all this literally fantastic technology and data to render a written narrative of the casualty’s subjective experience of the pertinent combat event. The precipitated narrative was, presumably, to be even more telling, accurate, and useful, from a procedural standpoint, than the soldier’s actual subjective experience, were he alive to describe it. Brockton, whose reports Abrams also peer-reviewed, was very good at it. He had the right kind of obsessive attention and (much rarer) eidetic imagination for the job, and, moreover, he seemed to be well enough acquainted with the kind of quiet, continuous inner suffering necessary to become each casualty, to know both the soldier’s mind and the technology’s omniscience at once. Abrams was not so well suited to the task, he thought. What Brockton made Abrams feel about himself, basically, was that he simply wasn’t intelligent enough to be in the pod at all.

  This wasn’t Brockton’s fault. Each day, Abrams and Brockton ate lunch together at a picnic table outside of the hangar, in the falsely natural landscaping of the empty civilian industrial park. Each day they made polite if burdened conversation, and Abrams always felt like his pathetic eagerness, his desire just to listen to Brockton speak—about anything really—was writ large on their awkwardly syncopated conversational silences.

  What Abrams really wanted to do, though, in those long hours of watching Brockton’s thin fingers expertly disassembling his daily orange, was to ask him about his childhood, what he’d been like as a kid; if his father (as was Abrams’ suspicion) had died when he was young; if, a little older, he’d had a girlfriend, and what that had been like, what the girl had been like, and had they ever had sex, and if so, how, and etcetera etcetera etcetera. It was a kind of aggression, Abrams understood, his desire to know—information being a kind of domination, a kind of ownership, when it came to another person’s life. And it was probably also a more or less understandable overspill from the task they paused each day for lunch; the delving into personnel files, the scans of letters home, but also the imagining, the conjecturing. What you’re really trying to do, Brockton had explained to Abrams, in a rare moment of fluster during those weeks of training, is not just explain why the subject died but what it was about the subject’s very being—i.e., the subject’s life, training, attention—that led to the casualty event.

  The report that inspired the delightful formulation unrepentant lily-gilding was one Abrams wrote about the death of Pfc. Ferrero Rodriguez in the gentle elbow of the Tigris. Abrams doesn’t know what it was about that particular Casualty Data Packet that got to him. Maybe it was the dumb nature of the casualty, pretty much an accident, a tank parked in an inopportune place. Or maybe it was the data from the operator-facing control-board combat camera, the way Ferrero had just been sitting there at his station, how he looked around at the first strange sucking sound, then tried to brace himself at the initial shift, the tank’s sudden, listing angle. Confused, a blank-faced teenager (Was this a prank? Ferrero was thinking. Or did the tread fall off or something? Did the navigator Ash-Dog steer them into another pothole, the idiot?). Then that data-stream cutting out as the tank made its slow topple into the river.

  Or maybe it was the overhead view from the satellite, the pastoral beauty of the picture: the angle held wide, the waters of the Tigris a brilliant emerald snake in the sun. Or was it the maudlin thing, the scan of his last letter home,
which they’d stopped: just a list of things he needed his mom to send him, that he couldn’t or was too afraid to ask for from the other guys: underwear, chapstick, something called Boudreaux’s Butt Paste. Well. It didn’t really matter what it was that made Abrams say screw it, basically, and write what he wanted to write.

  He gave Pfc. Ferrero Rodriguez a good life, a better life than he’d actually had. And he used the last half of the report to describe, in increasingly florid, turgid, self-consciously rococo language, the kid’s last moments. In his report the eternity of the tank’s dorsal rotation into the water stretched on and on, creating a sort of zero-gravity type situation where Ferrero Rodriguez could watch the grease pencils and loose snacks and dirt and strands of chewing tobacco float, weightless, in the air around him, and wonder, and reflect. And so, of course, Brockton’s lightly caustic evaluation of the report had been accurate, and fair, and had happened to include the phrase unrepentant lily-gilding. This is not the truth, he’d also written. This is you being desperate for some kind of validation. But the truth was that Pfc. Ferrero Rodriguez drowned in the Tigris when the bank under his parked tank collapsed, drowned slowly, drowned knowing he was going to drown, drowned clawing desperately at the sharp metal of the blocked hatch that was now beneath his feet, drowned defecating all over himself in utter terror. And Abrams just couldn’t write that.