Layman's Report

by Eugene Marten

  I get out, go around to the other side and grab the handle. He sticks a leg out. I take an arm: mush and bone. He takes it back angrily and grabs mine.

  “We’re supposed to pretend I’m in charge,” he says.

  I wait for a curtain to move, something, but there’s nothing.

  “You know the worst thing about being like this?” he says on the way.

  I don’t say anything.

  “You can still see yourself,” he says.

  He tells me his name but he looks like Omar Sharif. He is not alone. He is holding a black briefcase, and he shakes my hand and smiles like it’s me he’s come to see. Usually I’m just the help.

  I drop the sign in a trash can.

  He introduces the two young men with him. The yellow light flashes and luggage starts coming out of the wall. I make a move but he says, “Samir, Mustapha,” and the two young men go after it. They come back with two big suitcases and a backpack and I take them to the moving sidewalk. He seems to be in no great hurry; we stand on the right while people pass on the left. Samir and Mustapha are serious and quiet, nice-looking young men, and I suspect they don’t speak much English. We glide.

  “It’s never fast enough, is it?” he says. He is watching the people pass by.

  Outside the sidewalk stands still and the afternoon is warm, the sun high. It’s a long ways to Short-Term Parking but I’m not a cabbie and can’t use the stands. I apologize.

  “It’s nothing,” he says. “If all we wanted was convenience we would have rented a car.” I would comment on the resemblance but that would be familiar. I glance at the young men. I remember their names, but not which belongs to whom. One of them is either smiling or wincing in the glare.

  They stow the luggage in the trunk. The man who looks like Omar Sharif sits up front with me. I start up and ask where they’re staying; he says they are staying with friends. “But first,” he says, “I would ask you to do something for me.”

  He puts his briefcase on his lap and opens it. Removes a notebook and hands it to me. It’s in Arabic but I know what it says. Someone has printed it, added covers, punched and bound it with a plastic comb. The cover is black vinyl embossed with gold letters, the markings of their tongue, and it looks to have been read more than once. It shines like something holy.

  Well, I say. I’m honored.

  “This is quite a surprise,” I say.

  “I came across it at the convention in Tehran,” he says, and hands me a pen. “I’m suprised you weren’t there.”

  “I wasn’t invited.” A lot of people are listening to Rudolph these days.

  “Rudolph puzzles me,” he says. “A chemist who says you can’t prove anything with chemistry. You have stood by your findings.”

  “Well I guess my traveling days are behind me,” I say, but I’m listening to the silence in back. I wonder if it’s a Mossad silence, the last thing I won’t hear. I have rules but not against garrotes. I have a .25 in a holster rig under my seat. A little small for my taste but ideal for close quarters.

  I sign my name and for a second wish I hadn’t. It feels like a contract. I give the man who looks like Omar Sharif his pen back.

  He puts it inside his jacket and closes the briefcase. I wait. He didn’t come halfway around the world for an autograph, but he takes his time letting me in on it.

  “These friends of yours have an address?” I ask.

  “You are in a hurry?” he says.

  I tell him we have a few minutes. In Short-Term the first hour is free.

  “A few minutes is all we need,” he says. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  I turn up the air conditioning. Samir and Mustapha are no longer silent behind me. The man who looks like Omar Sharif says something brief and the conversation ends.

  “You’ll have to excuse them,” he says. “They don’t mean to be rude.”

  “No problem,” I say. I only understood two words. The rest were in the language of the man who read the statement in the video. The one with the short blade.

  Dairy Queen, they said.

  “They are young,” he says, “not men of experience. Like us.”

  Experience: do your time and pay attention. You’ll see the wheel go round.

  “They do not understand things as we do.”

  “I thought I understood some things,” I say. “Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Certain things are a question of belief,” he says. “Do you consider yourself a pragmatist?”

  “I have a healthy respect for the facts.”

  “As one always should,” he says. “You might say we have this in common.”

  “There’s always something,” I agree. I’ve never met a man I didn’t try to like. “What did you say your line of work is, by the way?”

  “I have something of a background in engineering,” he says. “Princeton. But that was quite some time ago—another life, you might say. I’ve since diverted my energy to other activities. Perhaps we’ll talk about that another time.”

  “I look forward,” I say. “You know I’ve done a little engineering myself.” Back in the day.

  “So I understand,” he says. “As a matter of fact, that’s what I want to talk to you about.”

  “I’ll try to keep up, but I’m afraid I didn’t go to Princeton.” I decide not to tell him I visited Harvard once.

  “Maybe not, but you seem to have stumbled upon something men with lab coats and degrees have missed,” he says. “I suppose there’s such a thing as being too educated.”

  I don’t stumble. I try one thing, then I try something else.

  I say, “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  “Of course you are,” he says.

  The sun is pushing hard through the windshield. I ask him if Mr. Dembo sent him.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know this Dumbo,” he says.

  “Then I take it you’re not in the market for a gallows.”

  “Where I come from the condemned are stoned.”

  “Maybe you should look into it,” I say.

  “Perhaps you don’t understand this either.”

  “I’m not sure I care to.”

  “It’s not what it might seem,” he says patiently. “The stones must be of a certain size—not too small, but not so large as to cause immediate death. A man is buried to his waist. If he can escape before being killed, he is allowed to go free.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “We leave room for God to express His will. The judgments of men are only guesswork.”

  “What if it’s a woman?”

  “A woman is buried to her neck,” he says.

  And you think our God is a mystery. “Well,” I say, and start to tell him I am working on the most advanced, civilized form of capital punishment ever devised, but he interrupts me.

  “I am only interested in your washing machines,” he says.

  I put my hands on the wheel. “Hour’s about up,” I say.

  “I hope we’re not making you nervous,” he says.

  “Not at all,” I say, and the head on the Internet winks at me.

  The man who looks like Omar Sharif says something and Mustapha or Samir shoves something into the front from the back. A bill, not a blade.

  “Keep…chains,” one of them says, and parking is no longer an issue.

  “How do you know about my work?” I say.

  “First things first,” he says. He takes something out of his wallet that isn’t money and hands it across to me.

  I didn’t know fanatics had business cards. I look at it but don’t take it. I suppose they have a Facebook page too.

  “I would like you to be reassured that we are legitimate representatives of our government,” he says. “That we are not what you may think we are.”

  “Then what?”

  I have the feeling he is going tell me they have a saying in his country. Instead he says, “Are you aware that the extradition treaty between Germany and your coun
try is being renegotiated? Perhaps your traveling days aren’t over after all.”

  “Mustapha is a great fan of your ice cream,” he says, “and has come a long way.”

  I look at the bill. I take the card. The man who looks like Omar Sharif gives me an address. I ask them to fasten their seatbelts and back out. We take the drive-thru.

  At first he doesn’t do much. Calls his friends but doesn’t see them. Starts his bike and sits on it but doesn’t drive it, and doesn’t go farther than the yard if he leaves the house. He sits in front of the computer and takes a lot of showers. Sleeps. The younger one asks him a lot of questions, wants him to play video games. The answer is “Not now,” or “Tomorrow,” and when tomorrow comes the answer will be “Not now” again. Uncles and cousins visit. They stay for a while, then they leave. He oils his mitt. He goes out into the backyard and throws a stick, then walks to the other end of the yard and throws the stick back.

  He’s here for fifteen days. His tour is over but they’ve extended him another three months. Something they do. He still has a sense of humor, but he isn’t trying to make anyone laugh. The guy next door strikes up a conversation, or tries to, then walks away shaking his head.

  After a week or so we go out to dinner at the seafood restaurant, across the street from City Hall. Just the four of us. They tell us there’s a twenty-minute wait for a table, which means it will be forty. We mill in the foyer with everyone else, next to a big glass tank filled with lobsters. Their claws are rubber-banded. I guess we’re waiting for each other. The younger one taps the glass, says, “Any last words?” and the older one reads his phone, out of uniform.

  “Don’t do that,” their mother says.

  “Does it hurt when they boil em?” the younger one asks his brother. Since he’s been in a war, he must know everything.

  “Does it hurt who?”

  The younger one points to the tank.

  “Ask Fred,” the older one says. “That’s his department.”

  “They say they scream when they go in the pot,” she says helpfully. She’s already gotten a glass of white wine, like she carries them around in her purse.

  That’s just the steam escaping from their stomachs, I say. I say I don’t eat them since the Belfast study. No one asks what that is and the younger one takes their picture with his phone. They recoil from the flash like he’s some ill-tempered minor deity.

  He looks at his brother. “Bet we’d get a table right away if you had your camo on.”

  “If I had my M-4, they probably wouldn’t charge us, either,” the older one says.

  “The dress uniforms are nice,” his mother says. “The green?”

  “I’m not a Boy Scout,” he says.

  “The other guys wear em,” his little brother says.

  “I don’t need anybody thanking me for anything.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” she says. “Maybe they’re just proud.”

  “Maybe they’re just trying to get lucky.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” the younger one says and his mother grabs his arm and loses a little wine. She puts her mouth to his ear and fills it.

  They say they can live to be a hundred years old. Perhaps indefinitely, some say.

  “Excuse me,” a woman says behind us. Stocky, a lot of makeup, spokesperson for some other family unit. She looks at the older one. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing.”

  The older one looks at her without saying anything. He looks like someone who doesn’t want to be thanked.

  “Excuse me,” she says, “but my nephew’s in the Second Armored.” Field artillery, she says. Gives him a name, locations. Hasn’t heard in a while. She thought maybe.

  “Ma’am,” the older one says after a moment, “do you know how many guys are over there?”

  “Well,” she says.

  “Well me neither, but I think you couldn’t help overhearing the wrong conversation,” he says. “I work at Blockbuster. Only action I’ve ever seen is in Platoon.”

  She looks confused. Then she says, “I’m sorry. I could have sworn.”

  “Not a problem,” he says, and he says he’s sorry too, and she looks at him like she wants to say something else but can’t think of anything, so she rejoins her family and someone calls my wife’s maiden name.

  She looks like she’s still trying to think of something.

  A young woman with an armful of menus takes us to a booth. The dining room always smells like clam chowder. The walls are made of planks and beams like the bulkhead of a hull, and there are portholes and lifesavers and the serving station is a forecastle. A waitress with copper-colored hair asks us if we’d like anything to drink. I stick with mine. She has another glass of wine and her younger son a Coke.

  “Water with lemon, please,” the older one says.

  “It’s on me, Red,” the younger one says to the waitress.

  “She has a name,” their mother says. She looks at the older one. “Are you still following baseball?”

  Out of the blue, like changing the subject when there isn’t one.

  “Who wants to hear about baseball?” the younger one says.

  “I have my reasons,” she says, maybe a little drunk. It doesn’t take much.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t tell him the good stuff,” the older one says into his menu. He makes a face. “Everything has cheese in it.”

  “I want to hear about the desert,” the younger one says. He wants to hear about armor-piercing rounds and camel spiders. He has a list.

  “The desert,” the older one says. He takes out his phone. “Desert’s hot. A hundred twenty in July.” He turns off his phone and puts it away. “And I’m still washing sand out of my butt.”

  The younger one seems pleased, it’s a start. His mother excuses herself to the restroom like she’s running for cover.

  “What’s better, a Bradley or a Hummer?” the younger one asks.

  “A Harley Sportster Sport,” the older one says.

  “Ever ride an Apache?”

  “Those things kill more of our guys than the enemy.”

  “Fifty or two-forty?”

  “Nothing like a fifty,” the older one says. “It’ll turn you into a jigsaw puzzle, a thousand pieces of meat except nobody’s ever gonna put you together…that work for you?”

  “Outstanding.”

  “I didn’t say it was never fun.”

  “Tell us about a mission,” the younger one says but there is no us, only them.

  He tells us about a mission.

  Here she comes back from the latrine.

  The younger one looks disappointed. He wants full battle rattle, not an episode of Cops.

  “Sometimes we shoot the dog,” the older one says. “Pistolwhip Grampa. You see that on Cops?”

  She sits. “I miss anything?”

  A mission, I say.

  “Nothing you can’t see on YouTube,” the younger one says.

  “It was better when it was still a war,” the older one says.

  “Well there’s only one mission as far as I’m concerned,” she says.

  “Hooah,” the older one says.

  “What about the kid in Ramadi?” the younger one says.

  “What kid?” the older one says.

  “The kid in the truck.”

  She looks nervous and asks about baseball again, takes a sip.

  “What kid in what truck?”

  “The haji,” the younger one says.

  “Don’t say that,” his brother says.

  “You guys do,” the younger one says.

  “Not all of us,” the older one says, and without dropping his voice he says, “What if someone called you a nigger?”

  “My God,” his mother says.

  The younger one corrects him: “Nigga.”

  “That’s not even a word,” she says. Then she says they’re giving away tickets at the job. “Three per person. Are you still keeping up? I thought maybe the three of you…”

/>   “I’m so there,” the younger one says. “You couldn’t get WrestleMania?” He doesn’t like sports any more than I do.

  The waitress comes with a basket of biscuits and takes our order. The older one has a question about the Admiral’s Feast. She touches his shoulder. I stick with the sirloin and ask for more coffee and she takes our menus. They seat a young couple in the next booth. One of the occupants of the tank is served at the table across the aisle—no hundredth birthday for him.

  The younger one leans over and takes a look, takes off a hat he isn’t wearing and solemnly covers his heart. “A kind and loving shellfish, a lobster’s lobster…”

  “You get your smart ass from your father,” his mother says. Someone she doesn’t talk about much. “And your nose.”

  “May he rest in pilaf.”

  She can’t help it. He only makes her laugh when she doesn’t want to. She looks at the basket, Watches her Weight. “The waitress sure is friendly.”

  “She’s doing her job,” the older one says.

  “I thought she was gonna sit in your lap, Admiral,” the younger one says.

  “Have a biscuit,” his mother says and puts the basket on his plate.

  “I tell you who’s working at Walgreens now?” she says to the older one.

  “You might have mentioned it in passing.”

  “They made her store team lead,” his mother says. “She’s taking computer campus, wants to be a paralegal. I told her you were coming home for a couple of weeks.”

  “Mentioned that in passing too, huh?”

  “It might give you something to look forward.”

  “Only one thing she can give me right now,” he says, “and it ain’t a future.”

  “The clap?” the younger one says.

  “Goddamn it,” she says. “Where do you get that?”

  “Don’t humor him,” the older one says, “that’s my job.”

  “I thought it was Fred’s job,” the younger one says, and puts a biscuit in his mouth.

  Right now Fred’s job is looking at the couple in the next booth. They haven’t spoken to each other since they arrived. Their heads are down as if in prayer, but they are pushing buttons.

  Someone is asking me something, and I say I’ll be happy to drive if they’re interested. A man comes and unfolds a stand next to the booth. The food is on a serving platter the size of another table. Mine is as bloody as they can serve it and still stay in business.