Elegy on Kinderklavier

by Arna Bontemps Hemenway

  What is Brockton Albright doing now, this moment of Abrams’ foot’s fateful lifting progress? After they’d both left the pod assignment (Abrams reassigned to actual unit attachment, Brockton having finished his contract), Albright began a very successful career as an academic and a public intellectual. He’s now in residence at the Sorbonne, Abrams believes. And Abrams thinks of him now in some Latin Quarter square, almost dusk, his thin fingers lost in his lap, his tiny cup of tea forgotten on its saucer before him. Oh, what Abrams could’ve been in life, if he’d only tried a little harder.

  But Abrams’ favorite thing to remember from his time in the pod with Brockton in Tucson is actually the rare instance of Brockton’s smile. Such a saccharine thing to willfully remember, but it holds the same relation to Abrams’ happiness (even now) as Lara Fugelsang’s smirking sneer does to Abrams’ shame. Brockton was an unexpectedly funny guy, Abrams remembers, though he never smiled at or after his own deadpan, absurdist one-liners. Abrams can’t actually remember what made Brockton smile those few times—surprise seemed to have something to do with it, and being unobserved—but Abrams can remember very clearly what it looked like. Brockton’s whole face changed, opening up, brow for once relaxing, lifting, spreading—and the impression of vulnerability flashing then across his features was so startling as to make Abrams look away. For just a second Brockton seemed just like a little boy, granted a pulse of pure, unmediated feeling.

  “Momentary joy” was the phrase that always stuck in Abrams’ mind when he thought of it. A blooming. What a thing to have seen.

  The principal legacy of the CAST pod assignment, though, these years later, now that Abrams has been attached to an actual unit in the actual Shit, is the ghosting awareness of being on the other end of the CAST technologies’ flow—of being in the midst of all the “data” that is really just the world, the village, the late afternoon, the alley. It’s stopped Abrams cold each time he’s allowed his mind to wince itself across the thought. What CAST data operator, sitting in what American hangar, was watching him now, displaced in time? That, of course, was the very worst part of that assignment: the nebulized awareness, as he worked, that the subject was being kept alive there before him for only the exact duration of Abrams’ close attention, and that, at some point—a point Abrams could feel dawning even as he opened for the first time each new Casualty Data Packet—Abrams would grow bored, and tired, and inured to the human life which he held in the circuitry of the control board before him—in the circuitry of his mind—and would allow it, finally, to expire. What finite expansion of memory and experience would he grant himself, if he found his own CDP loaded up on the screens, the cursor ticking away? And the irony, even in this moment of abandon, of there now actually being created, at this very moment, a CDP for this purpose, is not lost on Abrams, though he knows it’s not irony, really, just the remediated sadness of knowing.

  4.

  The contact plate itself is suspended, the tiny metal ridge on the underside of the plate now loosed from its delicate restraints by the pressure of Abram’s foot. Its destination—the small metal tab which will complete the electric circuit, thereby triggering the small detonation charge, which, in turn, will trigger the primary explosive (in this case, Abrams knows, probably an unexploded landmine salvaged from the Iran–Iraq war)—awaits, patiently. The contact plate has thus far been stilled in that motionless nadir of its spring-loaded inverted arc of travel but, as Abrams’ foot helplessly begins its lift (the pressure of his weight on the contact plate lessening every microsecond), the charged metal surface is now rising, heading toward its kismet of electronal reunion.

  The alley’s stole of shadow moves again, Abrams thinks. The alley is attempting to shrug it off, it seems. The reverse inertia of what is about to happen is lightening the alley before him, it seems.

  IED is really a terrible term for the device, for what this device that is agent of Abrams’ fate really is. There’s nothing “improvised” about it, first of all. There’s nothing spontaneous, extemporaneous, or accomplished without preparation there in its careful circuitry, its repurposed materiel. “Explosive” is a little better, but also fails to capture the true quantum entanglement of possibility in this alley-deposited incendiary: that is, that it could fail to go off, could not be explosive at all, ultimately. It is a possibly explosive thing, a probable explosive. This is a relatively unforgivable lingual oversight given the defiance of experience—of life itself.

  “Device,” though, is the telltale heart of the term. It marries in its etymology the essences of its Middle English, Old French, and Latin ancestors, pulling through the original sense of “desire” into “will” and even “last will,” and bringing the word to its dark end of signal with “means of division.” The IED is fate itself. Abrams was always moving toward it. It was created (he imagines some nameless scarred ghost of an insurgent bent over the basement table in perfect silence, with no morbid élan, even) for no other death than his. Time has existed in his life for no other purpose than to draw him through it, to guide him into this particular stride.

  What has he imagined he’d think of, in this moment? All that most indulgent memory of private beauty, the jetsam of his thirty years blinking in the sunlight of this planet.

  Abrams at twelve years old, on a trip to London, lost in the deserted financial district, when the clock hits noon exactly and suddenly the buildings burst with people, and he looks up, and all around him are men all wearing (thrilling, the coincidence) pastel shirts and ties, a shifting, towering forest of brightly-colored thoraces, Abrams overwhelmed with pleasure. Also as a boy, his mother calling him ABCD, instead of Abrams, for no good reason. Approaching a county fair’s carnival from a far field, the loopy, maniac music of the rides, the rich smell of funnel cake, it all reaching him before he can see anything but a sort of macula of light on the horizon. When he is older, a tour guide’s funny voice echoing around his visit of Pompeii. The grassy mountaintop campus in Sewanee, Tennessee. The shirt (long-sleeved, striped with a Creamsicle orange color) that his first girlfriend kept on the first time he ever had sex. Going to a local café late at night after a different girl’s volleyball games and drinking overly rich hot chocolate while eating artisanal pizza and pretending to be in Paris, or Rome, talking to each other about all the great sites they pretended to have seen that day. But also, the only perfect date he’s ever been on, much later, in Athens. They’d had gyros (the woman’s hair still wet from the shower) at a small corner restaurant in a very quiet neighborhood square, the dark face of the church at the square’s other end somber and still. Then they’d gone to an anonymous building, gone up the stairs to the top of it, to a rooftop showing of a terribly dubbed American movie on a screen just beside which, in the near distance, was the Acropolis, set ablaze in the sunset. At the intermission, they’d both bought strawberry-and-ices, and sipped them silently together back in their seats, in the warm night.

  5.

  What is he looking at? The maze of light made overhead by the high, mud-brick walls of the alley system. The aimless whorl of dust motes on the thick, slanted bar of brighter light in the intersection ahead. The synclinal area of darkened cloth at the back of the next man’s uniform, below the deeply umber, slickened skin of his neck.

  And there in the very last glancing collision of thought in his mind’s eye, the realization: while the sole of his boot was there on the ground, a small system of trapped spaces must’ve formed in there between the rubberized nubbins and blocks, closed off by the sudden floor of earth beneath the boot. Closed off, a labyrinth with no entrance or middle or exit: a lightless maze. It is piercing to think of this miniature, lightless maze, enclosed by the fateful fall of his foot; a maze of darkness made of the once grand miniature landscape of Abrams’ obsessive attention, itself set within the momentary beauty of the maze of light made by the high walls of the alley. But just as soon as the image (or anti-image, as it were) is formed in Abrams’ awareness comes the hounding tru
th, the stomach-pit feeling of the truth: that the perfect maze of darkness within the maze of light only existed for the brief moment of the boot’s full contact; that Abrams himself has ruined it with his boot’s lifting progress; that it was ruined from that first moment of rising heel, which let in the light; that he has realized the truth about the maze within a maze just slightly too late to truly wonder at it; that it is all, in fact, already gone.

  A Life

  The man’s body was floating face down, slowly drifting counterclockwise in the clear water of the natural pool, his dark skin glistening as if newly splashed, like he might at any moment raise his face out of the water. Sambul and Soren perched on the low stone wall, watching his lazy circling and the deeper shimmer of green light as a turtle made its sudden glide from rock to rock beneath. Sambul watched Soren, the pool’s reflection filling the white man’s overlarge sunglasses as he crouched, kneading one hand with the other, and everyone waited for him to say what they should do.

  Sambulru Moekena hadn’t been the one to discover the drowned man; instead, it had been Benny, one of the trackers, knocking nervously on Sambul’s door before first light, talking quickly about the thing he’d seen, or thought he’d seen, in the spring’s small reservoir. Sambul had asked Benny no questions, instead only waiting calmly until the sun was fully risen before going to see for himself. Standing there with nervous Benny beside him, the fog still swirling low in the brush, there hadn’t seemed to be any way Sambul could avoid going, upon his return to the compound, up to the great house and interrupting Soren at his breakfast. Soren, for his part, had seemed curious, almost excited by the prospect of such an anomaly, but now that they were there, in the presence of the body, Sambul recognized the old frustration in Soren’s posture: Soren’s annoyance with Sambul, the guides, and the world in general for presenting a problem that could not simply resolve itself.

  Soren squatted on the lip of the crumbling wall surrounding the pool. He was looking up at the distant hills whence an errant British mortar shell had arced fifty years before, landing in this spot and leaving in its crater the revelation of the spring and its cool, pooling waters. Soren told Sambul once, in a jovial mood as they drove around the grounds of the preserve, that he’d always imagined the soldiers, far from home and country, had been drinking and suffered a crisis of faith when ordered to volley a last round into the native village below, turning their artillery instead to this vast stretch of flat red dirt and brush. Sambul could remember how they had laughed together, briefly, at the thought. It had now been a long time, though, since Soren had been in such a talkative mood. As if making up his mind, Soren sighed and dropped his gaze back to the body, speaking without turning to one of the guides.

  “Can you bring him out?” he said, sounding very tired. “I need to see his hands.”

  •

  Sambul’s earliest memory of Soren Wheeler always began with the puzzle of light pieced above his head by the overlapping leaves of tea bushes as he ran crazily down the tunnels of their rows. Sambul was small enough—still no more than nine years old—to fit into the darkened miniature corridors formed by the hidden spaces between the rows of trunks, their dense tops, when viewed from the road, fitting seamlessly together in a carpet of waxy green. Running the rows was Sambul’s—and every other child’s on the tea concern—favorite thing to do, hilariously escaping the overanxious thrall of Mama Potol, the panicky woman assigned to look after the children while their mothers worked in the fields or the warehouse. The game was to slip off into the rows and race and race, exploding finally onto the dirt road that divided the fields, preferably when a group of people (sometimes foreigners, tourists or investors, but always white) was just passing by, giving them a scare before jetting across into the opposing row, howling with laughter at the pale gourds of their faces. It had been in the midst of this exact activity, in fact, that Sambul first encountered Soren Wheeler, when Sambul leapt from the rows, surprising a small family of white people, and Soren, himself only seven or eight, but taller, tried to follow as Sambul made his escape.

  Though, of course, Sambul, now separated from the day by many long years, knew this was not really the first time he had encountered Soren, knew it could not have been, for when had Sambul ever seen such a thing as the impossibly white-blond hair trailing away from the other boy’s face as he gave chase—when had Sambul ever before even seen a white person so small? Yet his memory of watching (winded and perched in a tree at the far edge of the field) the very top of the boy’s blond head crashing through the row toward him was not one of surprise, or fear.

  Sambul instead believed that what set this memory permanently in his mind was the sight of his own mother, scrambling, falling, running toward him down the hill of tea rows behind the tree, her picking bag slurring a trail of leaves into the high, brilliant sunlight around her. It was the only time Sambul ever saw anyone stop working during their shift, and that feeling—his slow realization that he’d done something wrong, that her eyes, wide with fear, were turned not toward Sambul but to the blond bobber of hair coming fast through the rows and beyond it the figures (Sambul only now thinking to look) of the white man and woman, standing frozen back on the road—was the same feeling that Sambul would associate with Soren’s presence all the way until they were teenagers: a small, tense knot of queasy excitement and shame.

  As far as Sambul could later reconstruct, this incident must have taken place shortly before Soren’s father, concerned over his young American child’s loneliness on a new continent, doubled Sambul’s mother’s pension and paid it eight years early in exchange for her allowing the Wheelers to take Sambul to live with them “for the season” at the family estate, a full day’s journey inland by car from the tea grounds. And if this was true then it could only have been a few months later that Soren’s mother, Martha Wheeler, sat Sambul down on one of the estate’s stiff living room couches and told him that his mother, retired in the small town near the tea concern, had died of untreated malaria. This was Sambul’s second memory of being a boy with Soren: Soren’s hand rubbing small circles on his back as Sambul lay on his bed and cried; Soren trying his best, saying, “Well, you’re too tall now to run the rows anyway, at least.”

  They’d lived in those years on the grounds of what Soren’s father, Danforth Wheeler, called “the lodge” and everyone else, including the Kikuyu servants and Soren’s mother, called “the estate.” The estate was a compound of buildings arranged around a great house originally built by one of the Wheelers’ forbears as an American hunting lodge and meant to rival the opulent British ones of African lore. Soren’s father had preserved the hunting and guide business, relocating and updating it into a circle of semiluxury tents and communal showers. The idea was to offer all paying guests an authentic safari experience while still allowing them to avail themselves of the estate’s well-tended grounds and the emphatically blue waters of the modern swimming pool. Beyond the compound’s electrified strands of fencing lay many square miles of bush, populated by the bountiful descendants of the wild game that had over the years drifted onto the land or been purchased from other preserves. As boys, Soren and Sambul watched Danforth Wheeler entertain groups of American hunters, watched Soren’s father bagging almost insouciantly the many kinds of impala and eland that roamed the bush and that regarded the men who had come to kill them with stolid stares. Many years later, by the time Sambul had been promoted to manager of the entire estate, Soren would ban any hunting from the land and instruct the guides to freely discharge their rifles only at the sight of poachers.

  For the first years of his life with the Wheelers though, Sambul slept in a small, narrow room exactly halfway between the cavernous lounges of the estate and the small bundle of shacks that the servants and guides occupied. Beyond the shacks were the pool and the big safari tents and, beyond that, the wilderness. Often, walking up to the great house for dinner, Sambul would encounter a particularly intrepid bush deer stilled perfectly in the middle of th
e path and the two would stand there in the near silence of the dusk, watching each other, Sambul thinking of the meandering route the animal must have taken after jumping the fence, of the way it must have walked so quietly along the pool and past the tents and shacks, just to arrive there, at Sambul’s feet.

  In Sambul’s adult memory, the subsequent years he’d spent at the estate condensed themselves mostly into the passage of several long afternoons with Soren, full of their desperate attempts to fight the heat and boredom. When later pressed by the braver and more curious of the servants, Sambul found himself capable of recalling for them other details. Sambul could remember taking his school lessons from Martha Wheeler in the mornings, for instance, in the company of Soren, a handful of the servants’ young children, and an old woman from the local village. These sessions were held in what Soren called the “solarium,” and when Sambul thought about it he found himself struck again by the way the morning light came in through the windows, backlighting the many fly-aways of Martha Wheeler’s hair into a gentle, messy corona.

  There were other things too, that came floating back: Sambul walking slowly around the rooms of the estate when the Wheelers took their annual trip to the States for the holidays, trailing his fingertips along every wall of the house; Martha returning from Nairobi every season with new athletic clothes for both Soren and Sambul, each of whom complained bitterly about the way they matched. But these things only returned to Sambul’s mind when one of the servants—their disbelieving, almost painfully curious faces raised to him late at night—gathered the nerve to ask if it was true about how he had been raised as family to the Wheelers when he was a boy. The rest of the time, watching as Soren talked animatedly to one of the tourist chaperones or trying not to watch as Soren quietly attempted to eat dinner as he sweated through his shirt with fever, Sambul thought only of those afternoons.