“Hey, Musclehead, you, Tweedledum, Ace, Buddy of Mine, Hello!”
“My name is Bill Breck, Mr. Ratcliffe, for the hundredth time.”
“Less lip and some toilet paper, please.”
“Toilet paper?”
“What have you got?”
“Nothing.”
“Anything.”
“Leaves?”
“Not leaves, did you see what happened to Martin’s ass after he used ‘leaves’?”
“Mr. Ratcliffe, it’s good we have Mr. Martin along, we learn from his mistakes.”
“That’s not funny, Bill. It’s a little funny. Now, Champ, we’ve got to work together on this ass-wiping project. One hand wipes the other’s ass, it’s a good thing I’ve got your undying devotion, boy am I a mess right now. What have you got for me to work with?”
“The Virginia Branch Charter.”
“No.”
“Your pants, which you left with me to hold.”
“No.”
“The Oath of the Virginia Branch Board of Directors.”
“No.”
“Your own shirttails.”
“No.”
“Bandages from the first aid kit.”
“How about your pants?”
“How about President Stuart’s memos?”
“Anything else?”
“A mustard seed.”
“Approach with the memos.”
“Mr. Ratcliffe, with all due respect, sir, did a chipmunk crawl inside you and die?”
“Mr. Funny doesn’t want to keep his job, I guess. Come here with the memos. Closer, I can’t reach. Oh stop with the nose-holding, you big musclebound sissy. There, that’s it, just a little—ah, Christ, I almost fell in, stop fucking around and just give me the damn—Oh, this is hilarious, look at this memo—don’t walk away, I’m talking to you, look at this memo—Stuart, what a clown—‘Instructions by Way of Advice… Find a safe, dry patch of land upriver from, and at a higher elevation than, potential attackers.’ Well, this memo sure is finding its way to an upriver patch, but not a dry one.”
“Mr. Ratcliffe, I don’t think I can effectively guard you in such a densely-wooded area if I’m standing this close to you.”
“This memo’s in a densely-wooded area.”
“Sir, you’re delirious from dehydration. When you’re all, um, done, please take a sip from my canteen.”
“That swampwater’s what’s making me so sick. We’ve got to find fresh water fast. When are we scheduled to meet with the Indians?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“How much ammo has Newport got for the assault rifle?”
“Not much.”
“Who’s got the wireless thing we commandeered from Rolfe?”
“Bucky does.”
“Who’s Bucky?”
“My brother, the guy you grew up with.”
“Oh, him. I wouldn’t say I grew up with him. I can’t believe your mother named you Bill and Bucky Breck. What kind of mother—”
“Sir, I’ll have to ask you please not to talk about my mother, or I’ll kick your ass into the hole you just shat in.”
“You’re right, good rule: no mothers.”
Penelope Ratcliffe
I am the ceiling fan whose spinning above the bed is caused by the motion of the feet of an anonymous employee of Jim’s in a dark room somewhere in this building. I do not know that the room is dark but I like to think it so because I prefer not to picture the face of the man whose fall and summer hours are organized around the daily pedaling that turns the ceiling fan that keeps Jim and me cool as we make love. The purpose of my job is to ensure that my son, John, a boy of modest talent, will never have the job of the faceless man who pedals. That my job and I would come with violent pleasure I did not expect: it’s no accident, I’ve found, that Jim Stuart is Manhattan’s king: he drives me down into the bed with such force that I float up like this to the ceiling when he gets off, and remain here, sometimes an hour, reassembling my own face, which I also find more bearable to let disappear in the act. I see, in a blur, the whole periphery of the room once per second as I spin up here and let my face reconvene in its own time. The return of my face is always heralded by the appearance of John’s. His appears and mine asserts itself within it. We share a face, just about. Almost anything can make my face blush, such as, for example, sex, or the thought of it, or being spun and spun and spun up near the ceiling by a motor run by the feet of a man whose face does not exist. I want, most of all, John’s happiness. Absurd, I know, to expect more than survival and the slaking of the body’s basic needs. But slaking itself can, I have discovered, be a higher good, an art form for which one may have a native talent, as I do: savory and sweet foods of many textures, a hard bed and soft chairs, cream-colored walls and aubergine drapes, an unobstructed view of Hoboken and the green sunset in which my son’s face appears…
Father Richard Buck
Dear God, am I the path on which your seed is to be eaten by the birds? The rocks from which your seed springs up, is scorched by sun, and dies at dusk? The jealous thorns who take your seed among themselves and choke it as it grows? Could I be the fertile soil in whom your seed becomes a crop, a hundred times what was sown? And must being good feel quite so bad? Well, Lord, never mind, I know the answer to that one. And I know that being bad feels bad as well. And if I rarely know the difference between good and bad now, I know I’ll have the eternity that follows death to figure it out, though my puny mortal mind can say eternity without knowing what it means.
Lord, I come to you with all my doubts; if I did not you’d know them anyway. In spite of all, please grant this one modest request: welcome to heaven the soul of Matthew Bernard, in whose lower intestine an arrow has made a hole. Lord, by the way, if you don’t mind my saying, what were you thinking with regard to the flimsy construction of the human form? Oh, sorry, Lord, let me try to put that more respectfully. For what mysterious purpose hast thou made men such weak vessels of thyself? Really, why’d you make his middle so soft and arrow-pervious? Look at him lying here dead in the dank and miasmatic air of this bus. On an upbeat note, the mind of man is one of your beguiling inventions, being both material and not. I try, I try to make mine one of your successes. I hope you’ve noticed how much I’ve encouraged it of late to produce hopeful thoughts. I see, for example, in the upcoming meeting with the Indians, the potential for positive results for both sides, though I don’t kid myself that the results will be so positive that there won’t be sides, that from this or any future meeting between us and them there could arise an understanding so thorough as to result in the abolition of us and them. Lord, do you remember, from that brief time when you had a body, how good and evil scream so loud from every cell of it, and how this internal cacophony can drown out the world’s other sounds, many of which are not constructed along principles as uncomplicated as good and evil, as, for example, when an individual becomes aware that in all conflicts between one group and another there are claims on his conscience besides good and evil, such as which side is my mother on?, or that jackass of questionable morals saved my life yesterday, or that jackass of unequivocally lousy morals will more likely end than save my life but I grew up down the hall from him, and his mother and my mother are friends?
That I might appear to be explaining things to you, Lord, as if you didn’t already know them, I hope you’ll bear with. I think tainted water and lack of food have made me delirious as I try for the twenty-thousandth time to understand you, and feel free to give me some kind of sign, preferably something I can perceive with one or more of the five senses you’ve blessed me with, that would be a nice crossover moment of spirit into flesh, just shoot a clear communication on over from the non-corporeal part of the universe where, I can’t help thinking, you spend most of your time. Amen.
Johnny Rolfe
I hereby refuse to begin this missive with a salutation to you as it is being written not only by nothing, to nothing, for nothing, wit
h nothing, and about nothing, but also on nothing, my paper being used up and my wireless device having been commandeered for a purpose—if so dignified a word may be applied to so absurd an activity—to which I will now address myself.
Bucky Breck, with a pistol, stood in the door of the great hall, watched by Chris Newport, who stood with his rifle at the edge of the woods, ten yards from the door. John Martin, crouched behind a bush, guarded Chris with a gun. Happy Lohengrin, with a gun, high in the branch of a tree, guarded Martin. Guarding Lohengrin with a gun was Bart Gosnold, in a hollow log. Guarding Gosnold was the noiseless, patient spider he’d displaced. The spider was guarded by a gnat. The gnat was guarded by God, who invented the gnat and the gun, for reasons that shall remain unknown to us until the sea falls into the sky.
Why the hall itself had to be so dark I cannot say. Can a people have developed the wireless communications device and not the window? Or the gun? Or perhaps, like us, they’ve borrowed all they have from the past and are quickly using it up. Several fires burned; smoke replaced air. As all their buildings seem to be, the great hall is shaped like a lower-case letter n. It is twice my height, forty feet across, one hundred feet from end to end. Their chief or president or king, it seems, receives foreign dignitaries while reclining on a high and massive oaken bed, eyes two-thirds shut, cooled by great feathered fans swung back and forth by concubines, wives, aunts, cousins, daughters, slaves, or, for all I know, several of these in the same person. While my lungs ached and a steel vise of oxygenlessness squeezed my head, I asked myself: where is the oxygen in this room? Answer: in and being shepherded by feathered fans into the great bellows of the king’s lungs. Bed, girls, air, men, hall: this sleepy big red man was lord of all.
Their top ambassador, a Judaic-looking man with hooded eyes called Sit Knee Find Gold, by signs, showed us how to greet the man: pass along his left flank and briefly grasp his outstretched hand. None of our hands were big enough for the job; his enveloped each of ours and lightly crushed them one by one, except for Smith’s. Smith used his two hands to encircle and vigorously shake the king’s one, enough to send a ripple up his arm and even to flutter his long gray hair, which hung down over the side of the bed and grazed the hard brown dirt—“just to let him know someone had shown up at his extremity he’d eventually have to reckon with,” as Smith later said; the left eyelid of the king peeled back; the eyeball rolled left to see what had caused the modest perturbation at the end of his arm, and took in Smith before the lid descended over it again. I wouldn’t recommend it, but the lying-down greeting in the dark and smoky hall was regally discomfiting, like being greeted at the bottom of the ocean by a blue whale lying on a bed of soft coral.
Two long folding conference tables stood facing one another in the center of the hall, behind each of which were five mauve office chairs on wheels. Sit Knee Find Gold directed us to sit in them and to place what used to be my wireless device, and now was evidently ours, before the chair of the man who would operate it—me, not because anyone trusted me with the rhetoric of diplomacy but because I could type seventy-five words per minute; I knew the typing elective would be useful to me one day.
How much more bearable this all would have been had the ugly girl who made me come been there.
The Indians’ first question, composed by Sit Knee Find Gold in his language on his wireless device, and translated into English by software whose author’s no doubt long dead, appeared on the tiny screen of the device before me:
“From where do you come?”
As John Ratcliffe leaned toward me and whispered in my ear, compelling evidence suggested he had not had time, in haste to leave his crumbling New York home, to pack a toothbrush. “Tell him we’re from Manhattan, an island 300 miles north of here.” I did.
“Where are you going?” came the reply.
“We do not know where we are going, for that is how it is with going,” Ratcliffe told me to write, and I wrote it, with a qualm.
Smith hugged Ratcliffe’s neck in the crook of his elbow, and smiled, and said through greenish smiling teeth, “Just how soon would you like us all to be slaughtered, John? Ten minutes from now? Five? Three seconds?”
“Get your fucking arm off my neck.”
“Why’d you say ‘for that is how it is with going’ to them? We’re not writing a poem here, we’re trying not to get killed.”
‘“All warfare is based on deception,’ Sun Tzu, The Art of War,” Ratcliffe said, and reached into the left inside breast pocket of his soiled suit coat.
“If you pull out your paperback edition of Sun Tzu I’ll shove it up your ass,” Smith said.
“No you won’t,” said Ratcliffe, who pulled out a handkerchief, once soft and white, now brown and stiff, and blew his nose.
“Please we ask that you do not plinuckment,” came the response on the screen from Sit Knee Find Gold, along with a scowl from across the hall.
The translation program evidently did not have an English word for the Indian word plinuckment, and while Smith and Ratcliffe continued their struggle for the soul of the Virginia Branch of the Manhattan Company, I typed “What is ‘plinuckment’?”
“Toyn,” Sit Knee typed back.
“What is ‘toyn’?”
“Gavagai.”
“What is ‘gavagai’?”
“According to the employment of the language of metaphor use, ‘rabbit slices,’” Sit Knee said, via his inscrutable plinuckment. Jack and John continued to embrace. Each whispered imprecations in the other’s ear. And both of them were oiled down with grime, and both of them were skeletal and grim, and both their mouths were lip-lined rotten eggs, and how they were was how all of us were: not wealth, not power, not a gun or a knife, not a happy childhood or a promising career, neither a decade of good deeds nor one of ruthless conniving exempted any of us from foul corporeal odor. Decrepitude is egalitarian, and it warmed my mind to see Smith and Ratcliffe inured enough to one another’s stink to embrace like brothers, even fratricidal ones.
“Sorry, your last message was not fully intelligible,” I wrote, and wondered which English words were unknown in their tongue. Are there, in their world, you and I? If yes, then there must also be message and sorry.
“One is there who badly thinks of it,” they said, via Sit Knee, his machine, and mine.
“What?”
“There are one, who thinks badly of it.”
I looked to see who one might be. Their chief, who seemed sad or drugged or both, on his bed? In the dark and smoky room, a darker darkness clung to him. Foreshortened by my viewing angle, he was compressed and condensed, except his left arm, which hung at full scale off the side of his bed. Sit Knee Find Gold looked at him, and I sensed communion between them, but of what kind I could not say since neither spoke nor made a sign. He typed, “It is compelling that we know your intentions.”
Smith and Ratcliffe had suspended their squabble and sat on either side of me, and wheeled in close on rollered chairs. Their bodies were a festival of deliquescence; I breathed them freely. Ratcliffe read the screen and said, “For Christ’s sake, back at home we’re running out of fuel and food and guns. Every day our enemy in Brooklyn attempts to advance on us and we can hold him off for only so long. We drag our dead off Brooklyn Bridge and bury them at night. Let’s just tell them how bad our situation is and ask them for their help.” Ratcliffe swept his sodden, enervated hair from his eyes and it fell back into them, and he seemed to find this alone cause for despair.
“Ratcliffe?” Smith said. “Is this the imperious Ratcliffe I know who had the blood beat out of me for insubordination? What has happened to you?”
“I know, I know,” Ratcliffe said.
“You know?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hasn’t your Little Red Book of Sino-Fag Military Tactics told you you can look weak only if you’re strong, but if you really are weak, which we are, you have to appear strong?”
“I don’t care,” Ratcliffe said.
‘“We are in the area on a mission that is both fact-gathering-oriented and diplomatic. We are interested in an exchange of resources and ideas.’ Type that,” Smith said to me.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Type it,” he said, and firmly pressed something—gun, finger, knife—against my back. I typed, but slowly: the smoked air of the great hall by now had molassesed my brain.
“We wishes you in the end in the most specific order,” Sit Knee typed.
“I don’t understand,” I typed.
“You we wish for the most specific account.”
Ratcliffe, while breathing on me, said, “It’s madness that our lives depend on this.”
I said, “Our lives always depend on this.”
Smith said, “Johnny, don’t get philosophical on us right now, please. Let’s get through this, gentlemen. No philosophy and no freaking out. Level heads. Strategy. Cunning. Think: how do we use the fucked-up-ness of the machine to our advantage? I think this guy’s saying he wants us to be specific about what we’re doing here, so I say we feed into the machine specificity that we know will get lost in translation.”
I said, “What about we tell them what we’re really doing here, which they’ll figure out eventually?”
Ratcliffe said, “But they’re not expecting us to be honest, so if we really are honest about how desperate for their resources we are, they’re going to look at that and think, ‘Well, what they’re really doing here must be pretty horrendous if that’s what they’re using to veil it with.’”
Smith said, “Tell them we’re looking for a trading partner, we need fuel and food, and can supply protection and technological know-how in return.”
“Oh, great, we and our technological know-how,” I said.
Smith poked my back again.
“Cut it out,” I said, and typed, “Where’s the young woman? She knows English.”
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