by Chris Eaton
They made love on the floor.
And when Cohen walked in on them, he threw Chris Eaton out of his house, and vowed to destroy him.
***
Of course, none of that mattered any more. He had found the love of his life. None of it – not the end of the his perfect job, or the loss of such an enormous potential inheritance, or even the savagery of Cohen’s public attacks on his skills and identity – could shake his happiness. He had learned that you can achieve dozens of other goals, but it’s only in meeting the person you’re meant for, in finding your other half, that you become who you really are, who you were really meant to be.
The next day, he swung by Trish’s apartment and was confronted outside by security. After trying to explain things to them for nearly a half hour, one of the goons finally agreed to call up and she came downstairs to meet him in the lobby.
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“…”
“Why would I share it with you if I could have it all to myself?”
And she turned around and re-entered the elevator.
His world came crashing down around him, standing around the coffee machine talking about microwaves with some of the secretarial pool, trying to get something through Brenda’s thick skull, when they heard the hum and dismissed it as regular traffic from Reagan National, and the explosion’s concussion blast ripped the room apart and the door of the microwave actually beat him to it.
There had been studies, he’d been saying. Russians who ingested microwaved foods showed a statistically higher incidence of stomach and intestinal cancers, he’d been saying. Ingestion of microwaved foods caused a higher percentage of cancerous cells in the blood serum, he’d been saying, when he could get a word in, as well as attacking the lymphatic system. Heating prepared meats sufficiently for human consumption – were they even listening? – led to the alarming creation of the cancer-causing agent d-nitrosodiethanolamine, not to mention significant decreases in the nutritional value of most foods. Then the hum outside the Pentagon got louder. And the Boeing 757 collapsed in on itself like sausage casings against the Pentagon’s West Wall.
Brenda was the first to move. The force of the microwave door connecting with her jaw snapped her neck almost instantly. Her mandible and right maxilla were torn completely from her face, taking her right eye with them, the stench of her sinuses, rotten with cigarette smoke, splashed across the wall. Marcie (or was it Emily?) just seemed to drop to the floor, as if her soul had suddenly been ripped out through her hamstrings.
There was Marcie’s/Emily’s scream.
Then the cessation of Marcie’s/Emily’s scream because the force of the explosion had blown out his eardrums.
There was too much dust to know what was going on.
He couldn’t move.
He was alone, pinned beneath several floors worth of rubble.
The light on the microwave – was that it? – kept going red, then black, and then stayed that way.
And he supposed there were good reasons for this: a good reason why he was there at the Pentagon: sent to repair some damage to an old lectern used occasionally by Republican Presidents when addressing matters of Defense to the entire nation; a good reason why he got stuck making small talk with those two cows Brenda and Marcie, whatever that was; and a good reason why he was even in Washington in the first place. But as good as those reasons were, he didn’t feel like they were the result of anything he had done, decisions he had made. Julie had wanted to go back to school and complete her Biology degree, intent on enrolling in a dental program. And when he couldn’t find work in his chosen field, he applied for this, despite no real experience in carpentry except a brief summer job that had ended in an injury, worker’s compensation, and bad feelings all around, with a recommendation from his cousin who had already enlisted with the Army’s White House Communications Agency:
Duty Title: Carpenter; Cabinet Maker (Fabrication); Facility Manager
Rate: None
Duties: Carpenter/Cabinet Maker will be required to design, construct and repair Presidential and Vice-Presidential lecterns. Will design and build cases for both fixed and mobile secure and nonsecure electronic equipment. May design and build cases for unique shipping needs, and may be called upon to remodel office spaces, and maintain shop equipment.
It was like a dream, a figment of his imagination, like he was actually watching someone else’s life unfold, perhaps in a movie, sitting in the audience and yelling at the screen with each of the hero’s poor choices. It wasn’t the life he would have chosen, was not real, an idea that was reinforced by weekly letters from his grandmother back home, with her strange habit of placing quotation marks almost randomly around some nouns and proper names:
Have you heard from your “sister” lately?
How is life in “Washington”?
Say hello to “Julie”.
Coincidence? A coincidence involves two unrelated events that appear to be planned. But how many “unrelated events” does it take before a real pattern emerges? A purpose. Perhaps one of the more famous coincidences of American history was the death of Thomas Jefferson, not only on the 4th of July, but more specifically on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, for which he wrote the original draft. And not only did Thomas Jefferson die on the 4th of July in 1826, but so did John Adams, under whom he had once served as Vice-President. The very same day! But September 11 would eventually go down as one of the most important “coincidences” in American history. Forget the initial speculations that the date was some link to the 9-1-1 emergency number. Consider instead that 9/11 was the day that Henry Hudson discovered Manhattan in 1609. On Sept 11, 1773, Benjamin Franklin wrote: There has never been a good war, or a bad peace. And on that day in 1777, General Washington fought and lost the battle of Brandywine, representing the second greatest number of Americans to lose their lives on U.S. soil as the result of an enemy attack.
Second only to September 11, 2001.
Within months after the 2001 disasters, US forces would mobilize to advance on Afghanistan. A half-year later, against the majority wishes of the rest of the world, they declared war on Iraq. And a year after the attacks, he would find a photo of a soldier posted over there with his name, trying to hoist a makeshift New Year’s Eve ball up one of the communication towers at their base camp. Shortly after that, he would also discover, the soldier had disappeared. Missing in action, presumed dead. Through these links, these coincidences, he would start to see the bigger picture.
When they finally dug him out of the rubble, they told him he was lucky to have his offices in the third ring, or he never would have survived. As it was, he was the only one still alive in his department.
He thought to himself that it might have been better to have never been there at all.
The last thing he remembered was the face of Varda Chi, the junior Senator from California, bending over him like an angel, so beautiful and untouched, without even a speck of dust on her.
Lucky Varda.
Had the man at the collector’s shop on South Broadway been more knowledgeable about these sorts of things, there probably would have been a sharp intake of breath on his part, and with one eye closed and the other tightly gripping the loupe, he might have turned to a shelf beneath the counter, beneath the displays of French louis d’ors and napoleons, crouched like an old woman raising her skirts to pee, and returned with a tome likely covered in dust and, if the cliché really called for it, cobwebs. A puff of air, a wave of the hand, and he would have had it open to page three hundred and fourteen, or more likely something like three hundred and sixty, then working back page by page, haunted by the image of the page in his memory but not certain of its exact whereabouts until the loupe blew it up before him. There it would be, a drawing of the coin Chris Eaton had found, with a short description of how Britain’s King George III had used them as indicators of a person’s worth, at least to him, bestowing them on people he wished to provide wi
th protection, or privilege, or a message, such as the one he gave to his parliamentary emissary Sean Richard Vath (also known as Ricardo Vath, for his years in the Spanish military as a youth, training first at the Colegio Real de Guardiamarinas, then joining the campaign on Sicily in 1718, becoming a Knight of the Spanish Military [Order of Santiago] in 1737, and returning to Ireland as Minister of Foreign Affairs), who brokered an end to the Seven Years War, after which Vath was made the official Ambassador to France; and further down the page, a list of other known owners including, most perplexingly, a Swiss pirate by the name of Aar, who was thought to have been given the coin unbeknownst to George by one of the king’s favoured English noblemen, The Viscount of Rhode, who supposedly used Aar on the sly to increase his own wealth.
Most historians now surmise that Pirate Aar and Hon. Vsct. Rhode were more likely both Finnish (see the section on the Jokinens in Garwood’s The World of the Pirate), possibly even related (ref. Ron Vaschat’s Pirate Horde), and masters at changing their identity as it suited their needs; two sides of the same coin, so to speak. Both were arrested and interned in Kazan in the late-1760s for allegedly conspiring against Russia’s presence in Poland. Yet at that point Rhode was claiming to be a Hungarian Prince named Benyovsky, of which, he was also fond of joking, there were already far too many. Princes, that is. The tiny country had had so many revolutions and upheavals that anyone could rightly attest to being descended from one of its victors. He heralded himself as a descendant of both the Revays and Urbanovskys; his presence in Poland, he assured the tribunal, was purely to seek out a long-lost family relation under the name Beniowski, who had apparently left him a large sum of money; he’d been told, after no small amount of rural bribery, that he might find this dead uncle in Smolensk. Perhaps it was true. Luckily for him, the similar linguistic roots of Hungarian and Finnish made the difference in his accent undetectable by the Russian soldiers who took him in. Less likely was Aar’s story, claiming to be an Italian on holiday, giving his name as Arno and bragging that he’d never even heard of Poland. They were both supposed to stand trial as prisoners of war in the Fall of 1769, but as Austria swept into the Hungarian Szepes, attention was deferred from war to diplomacy, using Polish land as a form of political appeasement. Aar and Rhode managed to escape by land, spending several months as novices in Tibet before making off with: a gilt bronze lama; a Mongolian painting depicting the Buddha Shakyamuni flanked by two disciples; a bronze statuette of a rare standing Padmapani; and a pair of Tibetan wood carvings, one depicting the three deities of the lotus family and the other more abstract but meant to represent the space of time directly before the Buddha’s birth in Lumbini. They hoped to sell these in Macau, though the wood pieces they’d taken mostly for personal aesthetic reasons. And in Macau, the pair learned to sail from Choi Tse-Ran (who took Chinese shipbuilding from the junk era into more elegant vessels more similar to the multi-masted American schooners), eventually hitting the high seas as rice merchants and settling in Madagascar, where Aar, pretending to be a French naturalist and sportsman by the name of Ruisseau, studying the effects of isolation on evolution (specifically how the island’s early separation from the continent had preserved the lemur population), managed to practically exterminate said nuisance lemur population with a new breach-loading rifle prototype and subsequently spent some time as the island’s elected tribal Ampansacabe, or King.
Rhode, perhaps more jealous than anything, stayed on the ship.
Bestowed with separate and conflicting opportunities, their paths diverged. Rhode settled in England, claiming to be of royal German lineage and a distant cousin to King George III himself. Not many believed him, but the only important one was George III, who was already quite far into his senility and was as likely to believe the tricky Finn was the King himself from the future. The elder Jokinen grabbed the King’s ear by claiming to have solved the Longitude problem, which had been set by an Act of Parliament over half a century prior and came with a reward of twenty thousand pounds (worth well over two million today). The two of them made plans to set sail the next spring to test it, and they spent much of their time together setting and resetting the appropriate menu. George had recently purchased several new clocks and was under the delusion that he could, if he had them all perfectly synchronized, actually control time’s flow, and he ordered Jokinen around the palace to adjust them to his needs: three seconds forward; one back; four forward on the John Arnold; one forward on the Donisthorp; five back on the double-pendulumed Janvier; nine on the balance-spring Salomon Coster. Though George forgot about the sailing trip by Winter’s end, and Jokinen’s device was found only to be accurate to a degree rather than the requisite two minutes, the King still bestowed upon him his latter days title, with a private estate near Bridgewater in Somerset, and they remained close friends until George mistook him for “his true wife” and declared Charlotte an impostor. Ruisseau, on the other hand, tried to obtain support from France and the Americans to use Madagascar as a base against England. And when that didn’t work, he changed his name once more to Aar (from whose name we get the stereotypical pirate exclamation) and started robbing from all three.
It’s unclear exactly when Rhode provided Aar with George’s seal, but most often, it appears, Aar seems not to have required it, not even when the British man-of-war HMS Sackville, captained by Admiral A. Cheriston, had set a trap for him at the inlet of Chantie’s Or. Despite all common sense, Aar and his men suddenly changed course and charted through the dangerous reefs rather than sail calmly into Cheriston’s trap. Likewise, at the Battle of Flamborough Head, where Aar had briefly leased out his services to the Americans. His ship came under so much stress that it would completely fall apart two days later, but in the heat of the battle itself, when things seemed their worst and everyone thought he would finally surrender (that he should surrender), he called out that he had not yet begun to fight and captured the HMS Serapis as his own.
That was generally how the legends began, that the seal had other magical properties beyond royal protection, and could perhaps predict the future, were it ever presented with only two possible options. Aar was said to have consulted it on all matters in his life, from military tactics to what to eat for breakfast. Only once did Aar require the coin for the purpose that Rhode had set it, when the coin instructed him to sail once more into Chantie’s Or, the gubernatorial home of Richard Avon. Despite threats of mutiny from his crew, despite the insanity of such an order, Aar didn’t have much choice, anyway. The Chanti Rose (the new name he christened the Serapis) was practically rotting under their feet, breaking down on them at their moment of most needing, after a storm caught them by surprise near Bermuda, and the only light they could see was the beacon from Avon’s topmost tower. That Aar had coincidentally decided to name his ship something so similar was not seen as a good sign, as many ships that were not named for places and people present at their launch were thought to be linked to the places they might go down.
Upon witnessing the seal with his own eyes, Avon reluctantly welcomed the pirate and his chief officers to dinner with his family, including his comely daughter, with whom Aar was instantly taken. After they had been shown to their rooms, Aar snuck back to the Governor’s daughter, a temptation so great that he must have failed to consult the coin on it, and Aar was struck down by Avon himself in flagrante delicto. The coin was still in his pocket when his body was dumped from the parapets onto the rocks below, where it was eaten by a sea turtle, which was later caught by poachers while laying eggs in Costa Rica, and the coin began its tale anew. The meal is actually captured in a painting by the Italian Agostino Brunias, known mostly for his depiction of life in the surrounding islands, called Richard Avon Eats (1784), in which Avon is totally engrossed in his meal while the pirate and his daughter play footsies beneath the table, observed rather closely by a shocked slave who has bent down to retrieve a fallen shaker of salt.
Of course, the actual man at the coin dealership knew none of this, a
nd both surfaces had worn so much that they were nearly smooth, so he shrugged, handed the coin back, and told him he was sorry, it looked like it was worthless.
***
He and Julie, it might have been said, were similarly on the rocks, by which one could interpret that the two were commonly taken to drink, except that, though true, Julie was more inclined to cheap wines from California than anything with ice, trying to look as though – through her unorthodox choices – she were trying to buck the establishment rather than just trying to establish the saving of a buck, and Chris was more partial to snobbish beers and drinks to which you’d never add more than a few drops of water. They were no longer getting along with any regularity, certainly nothing bordering on love, or even in the demilitarized zone of friendship or casual relations. They were having such fun throwing large dinner parties, however, that it was often difficult to notice the firm undercurrent of distrust, mild resentment and general boredom. Their guest lists, while not yet the veritable Who’s Who of Denver, were often impressive in an underground art and media kind of way, at least on his side, including several painters who’d had their work shown outside the state, as well as one who’d even made a living out of selling his work at outsider art fairs until someone discovered his certificate from the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design and he was banned from these events for life; a writer from abroad who’d had her work lauded fairly young, come here for the MFA program, then failed to produce anything else of note but remained continuously charming; people who wrote for the free Denver weekly, Westword, on subjects like music, movies, city politics and perverse sex, when not making unprofitable art of their own; and the indie banjo player who’d had a video on MTV2 and enjoyed much of that delightful buzz and hype without any of that horrible success; but there were also several of Julie’s workmates, like the woman who’d started in advertising with her yet managed to become the creative director of her agency before turning thirty, on the strength of a campaign even Chris Eaton respected; someone Julie had gone to school with who had founded a running magazine for new mothers; and an Ecuadorian, also a workmate, who’d come to do her MBA at Daniels and then gotten married instead to a distant cousin of the McNichols family (for whom the arena in which the NHL franchise Avalanche and NBA Denver Nuggets played was named, and with whom he held a token management position). Then there was: