Jamestown

by Matthew Sharpe

  Pocahontas

  “Excuse me, Sir, are you the northern aggressor who ordered the hamburger?”

  I said that, about two seconds ago, through a hole in a wall of the n-shaped room where my father put the captured man from the bus who looks impregnable to arrows, knives, and doubt.

  “Who’s talking to me? Where are you?” He stands with his back to the wall through whose one dot of not-wall I speak to him. He is short, and so my mouth, whose height the wall’s hole is at, addresses the small, sad spot of scalp around which his manly red mane swirls. I spied him through a side window a moment ago, his legs slightly bent at the knee, arms not quite touching his sides, never unready for an attack on his life though his feet be tied to the floor.

  “You want a side with that? The chef would also like to recommend her delicious turtle-meat bruschetta, at no extra cost.”

  “How many of you speak English?”

  “How many of me do you imagine there are?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Your conscience.”

  “Come on.”

  “Call me the voice of the hole in the wall.”

  “You’re the girl we met the day we arrived, you were sitting in a corn field with that old guy, you did that dance, you led us back to that town where all those girls were.”

  “Those weren’t girls, Sir, those were ladies.”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  “What is the purpose of your visit?”

  “We’re here on vacation. Where are you?”

  “Will knowing where I am help you tell me why you’re here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m behind and above you.”

  He turns—I think, though I can’t see him well since his head blocks my view—to look at me as best he can, given the disposition of his feet, and sees, I’d guess, a dark hole, since where I am behind the wall is in the shade, and this is what I am to him for now, a dark hole, as he’s a large and darkened head to me.

  “How’d you get back there?” he says. “Am I not being guarded?”

  “I bribed the guard.”

  “Is this some kind of psychological torture? What are your plans for me?”

  “What would you like my plans for you to be?”

  “Seriously.”

  “Seriously? First fatten you up, then eat you. A soup and salad comes with your meal. I’d recommend the corn chowder and the caprese with tomato, basil, and coon’s milk mozzarella.”

  He’s breathing deeply now, I think. He’s taking long, slow breaths to dissipate his fear with air. I’m messing with his head, though that’s not what I came here to do. What did I come here to do? I came here to know. Know what? I don’t know, but I came at peril of my freedom, if freedom only to run from corn shack to corn shack in the margins of night and day. If Harry Parahunt—the muscle at the front of the jail who loved me as a child and spit in my hair to prove that he did—were to find me now, I’d end up like the redhead here, I think: in a darkened room, bound to the floor, or worse.

  “Who are you, anyway?” he says.

  “I’m the clouds in the trees, I’m the screech of the owl who flees from the sun, I’m the breast of a young man slain by a gun, I’m a drop of menstrual blood, I’m an egg.”

  “Ah for crap’s sake,” he says, and adds, softly, as if not for me to hear, “this is like talking to Johnny Rolfe, if he had a sense of humor.”

  At the sound of the name of the man who broke that thing in me whose breakage maybe made me start to bleed, a little something broke in me again, though it didn’t hurt as bad or good this time; more like the slamming open of a door, though door from what to what I know not.

  “You still there, princess? I say something struck you dumb?”

  That little redhaired bitch, he said the name of the man to get to me, I’ll make him suffer if I can. I can’t. I won’t. The girl who values niceness gets shoved back down my throat each day by bitches like the redhead here, why must they exist? They must exist to test my niceness creed, I guess. I must not let niceness lose, though right now I feel something want to take its place in me that I can’t name.

  “So let’s get back to why all you funny-looking men are here, okay?” I ask the dark back of his head through the hole in the wall.

  “Are you asking in an official capacity?”

  “Nope, this is just me, the independent-minded little princess, asking in an unofficial capacity and even a kind of illicit capacity.”

  “If you’re here illicitly, what happened to that guy at the door with the knife and the bow?”

  “I drugged the guard.”

  “Look, princess, uh, what shall I call you?”

  “Pocahontas.”

  “Look, Poke-hunt-ass, I want something from you, you want something from me, let’s see if we can both get what we want.”

  “Look, Captured Man—what shall I call you?”

  “Jack Smith.”

  “Look, Jackshit, why don’t you start by telling me what you want.”

  “I want to know why I was captured and why I’m being held in this room with my feet tied to the floor. And you want to know about your sweetheart, Johnny Rolfe, am I right? He wouldn’t ever say this to me but I think he’s pretty gone on you.”

  “No, you’re not right.”

  “So what do you want to know then?”

  Ooh, I regret having revealed to this man that I like that man, just as I regret having inadvertently revealed to those other men—my father, his advisor, and his young warriors who rise up from the ground with penile stiffness—that I had a wireless communications device and a period. I didn’t know that I liked that man but the burning I feel in my face right now tells me I do. How do I end up revealing these things I don’t know I have or feel? And why must the knowledge of my liking that man come to me from the violent little mouth of this one? Note to self: Learn how to reveal nothing to men. Corollary note to self: Reveal everything about us to me before conversing with a man or other threatening entity. Self’s response: But some self-knowledge comes only through engagement with others; you cannot truly know me if you devote all your resources to defending me against potential threats, for in so doing you also foreclose the possibility of knowing me; you must allow the world to touch you and penetrate you and know you; only then will you be able to know me and protect me from harm. Response to self’s response: I wasn’t expecting you to talk back. Self: This is what I mean, no communication is one way, how dense are you? Pocahontas: No need to be insolent. Self: I’m just saying. Pocahontas: Am I not, by opening you to the world in order to know you, exposing us to the very sort of danger I hope to prevent by knowing you? Self: Yes. Pocahontas: This is confusing. Self: Tough corn nubs. Pocahontas: Tough corn nubs, that’s your answer? Self: Yes.

  “Well,” Jackshit says, “what do you want?”

  “What is the purpose of your trip?”

  “Friendly exchange of goods and ideas.”

  “So y’all done undertook a long and dangerous journey and are in the shape you’re in now—which is disgusting, have you no pride?—for the friendly exchange of goods and ideas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then you’ve come to the right place! We is a peaceful people. We believes love is thuh ansuh to all questions, except thuh questions to which the ansuh are ‘Relax.’”

  “All right we’re going around in circles here. Guard!”

  “I blew the guard.”

  “Guard!”

  “I shot the guard.”

  “Are they going to kill me?”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “Though you’ve given me squat.”

  “But, being a man, you’ve taken what I haven’t given.”

  “Are they?”

  “I don’t know, they don’t consult me.”

  “Can you get me out of here?”

  “No.”

  “You refuse?”

  “I’m unable.”

  “I
thought you shot the guard.”

  “I pantsed the guard.”

  He glowers and curses me in his head. Sometimes a part of the back of a man’s head as seen in the dark through a hole in the wall is all one needs to know what’s going on inside it.

  “Since you’re considered by my dad and his men to be a hostile extraterritorial, as all extraterritorials are considered hostile until they prove otherwise, and sometimes not even then, and since you’re therefore tied up in jail and may be about to die, while I’m free to move around at will and am the daughter of the man in whose mind your fate lies, I’d say you should start being open and honest with me and if I see that you’re making an earnest effort to do so I’ll do what I can to make sure you (a) don’t die, and (b) go free.”

  “You’re Powhatan’s daughter?”

  “Oops, I did it again.”

  “Did what again?”

  “Revealed something to you by accident.”

  “What was the other thing you revealed?”

  “My love of Johnny Rolfe.”

  See, Self? This is the new me, the one who opens herself to the world, who gives a lot and hopes to receive a lot in return. It’s almost unbearably exciting. My hairs are standing on end, as if they were penises. I’m so scared, too, and sad. I feel like crying. I can’t cry, though, in front of him—in back of him, I mean.

  “You crying?”

  “No.”

  “Yes you are, I hear you. I see a teardrop clinging to your mouth.”

  He’s turned his head again. I see his eye and ugly, bloody brow. I lick off the tear he saw on my lip and stick my tongue through the hole and out at him. Now my tongue’s in jail—whoa, how symbolic—and now I pull it out again and put it in my mouth.

  “I can’t believe I have to negotiate with a punk girl who’s probably yanking my chain, but, listen, what do you want? You want to meet up with Johnny? You get me out of here and I arrange for you to meet at sunset by the second fallen log on the right as you head up the creek?”

  “I don’t want to meet him—”

  “You don’t want to meet him?”

  “Let me finish, Jesus, men are so—ugh! I don’t want to meet him yet. I prefer to exchange a few emails with a guy before I date him. You can tell a lot about a guy by how he emails.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  “Give him my email address.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, and make sure there’s something he can send me a message on.”

  “And in exchange for this you’ll make sure I get released and not killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your email address?”

  “cornluvr@werowocomoco.com”

  “Deal. I’d shake your hand but…”

  “Who you talking to?” That was Harry Parahunt, who’s entered the cell whose unintended gap my ear is pressed to.

  “The air,” my new friend says.

  “I’m moving you. Put your arms behind your back and if you try to make a move on me I’ll stab you in the heart.”

  “Where you taking me?”

  Harry Parahunt does not reply.

  “Don’t forget,” Jackshit says to me.

  “Don’t forget what?” Harry says.

  “Not to stab me in the heart if I don’t make a move on you.” Jackshit turns his head to me one more time and shows me his green, bloodshot eye, in which I see enough will to kill a whale.

  I can’t save his life or ensure his release but I know my dad will let him go, that’s his way in these things, and when he’s let go Jackshit may think I made it so, or he may not, and I may or may not get an email from that man for whom my feelings scare me very much. If only I can get my hands on a communications device. How hard could that be? Very hard! But I love this day, which has shown that a big wooden wall around a small port of air can serve to make two folks work hard to say what they mean, and that one can sometimes understand what the other thinks and wants despite the great impediment of the matter between two minds.

  Penelope Ratcliffe

  I like the dark, in which touch, smell, taste, and hearing overthrow sight, their queen in the light. I like that my mattress is firm, the thread count of my soft sheets high. That I live like this I don’t know how to justify. On what surface does my son now lie? Does soft cloth surround him too, or do waters, spiders, knives? When can a mother no longer save her son? When she conceives him.

  After we had sex tonight, Jim read aloud a haiku he wrote for me, as is his wont, and gave me a copy in his fast and clear and forceful script on company letterhead:

  Manhattan’s dirt in Brooklyn’s eyes

  my cock in your ass

  orgasm

  Great haiku, Jim. The hardest part of my job as executive secretary to the CEO of the Manhattan Company is liking his poems night after night. I like some but must say I like all and do so convincingly, the job never ends, thank God the sex is more consistently good than the haiku.

  He’s breathing quietly now. Glad he doesn’t snore. After drink, food, sex, and art, as his brief interval of pre-sleep languor began, in a room smothered in dark velvet and lit by fifty candles, on our firm, acre-wide bed, I told him I’d intercepted an electronic communication from Brooklyn’s ambassador to Manhattan, Pete Zuñiga, to his employer, Brooklyn’s CEO, Phil Habsburg, with whom my man is engaged in a struggle to the death, by proxy of course, since they haven’t met in years.

  “Is it about our meeting yesterday?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You have it on you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Read it to me.”

  ‘“Cherished Leader—”‘

  ‘“Cherished Leader’? How far up his—”

  “I know.”

  “If I had a higher tolerance for bullshit I’d have all my employees—”

  “Resist the temptation. ‘Dear Mr. President’ gets the point across just fine.”

  “Proceed.”

  ‘“As per usual when I have an audience with Stuart, I was met by a group of thugs on foot halfway across Brooklyn Bridge, blindfolded, and shoved into the back of a bike-taxi, as if this were high school and I the unpopular kid being brought to the secret clubhouse for an interview with its leader, who would inevitably rebuff me.’”

  “Poor guy, must have had a rough adolescence. Despite myself I’ve always found his petulant rage, thinly disguised as formal decorum, poignant. I feel another haiku coming on:

  Pete Z.

  annihilation in a thimble

  Brooklyn weeps”

  I laughed and continued. ‘“When the blindfold was removed I found myself in the usual candlelit—”’

  “But what do you think of my new haiku?”

  “I thought my laughter would signal that I found it funny.”

  “But I like to hear you say it. I love the sound of your voice.”

  He said this with half-closed eyes, his naked, lean, middle-aged body limp beneath his pale and massive politician’s head, which was half-submerged in organic pillows. His voice broke slightly on the word “voice.” For the hundredth time I’m amazed and moved that he lets himself be weak with me. I could kill him now.

  ‘“When the blindfold was removed I found myself in the usual candlelit room with freeform damask wall hangings and futons on the floor, an agreeable room designed no doubt by Stuart’s executive secretary, Ms. Ratcliffe, the former Mrs. Philip Habsburg, and, Sir, I hope you don’t mind my saying that I fully commend your having married her despite her subsequent perfidy, she’s quite a woman, intelligent, artful, astute, wonderful to look at, with excellent posture….”’

  “What a mystery that Phil hasn’t had this guy fired or executed every day. As most men do, he wishes the seat of your bike were his face.”

  “Look,” I said, pointing, “the vice president has risen to the podium again.”

  “Come here,” Jim said.

  I rolled and sat up on the stalwart VP, who gave
a short but pithy speech that my body received with brief but heartfelt applause.

  “Whew.”

  “Is that a quote from Zuñiga’s communiqué or is that you ejaculating as it were?”

  “Me.”

  “Finish reading the letter so I can think it over in my sleep.”

  ‘“Stuart let me wait in this perfumed room for a good forty-five minutes, but waiting is to being ambassador as having your upper lip waxed is to—”’

  “My God, he avenges himself for the waiting on whoever reads this. Proceed.”

  ‘“I used the time to commit to memory one of the sonnets of Olena Kalytiak Davis, last Poet Laureate of the United States—at the end of the time when there were such things as poets laureate, and states—an endeavor in which I am indebted to you for allowing me free access to the closely guarded underground vaults of the erstwhile Brooklyn Public Library.’”

  “Now there’s a man who understands the need to undergird statecraft with poetry. This Davis, have you heard of him, Penny?”

  “Olena is a woman’s name, Sir.”

  “You sure? What about the middle name, Call-it-a-yak? Is that a woman’s name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Man’s name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it a white name?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Black name?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Red name?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Yellow name?”

  “No know.”

  “Lady poet laureate. I guess it could happen. You don’t ever write poetry, do you, Penny?”

  “No, Sir.”

  “I like that you call me ‘Sir’ late at night. It means you know that to be Manhattan is never to be off duty.”

  “Nor to be Lady Manhattan,” I didn’t say aloud. ‘“In any case, my dear Philip, Stuart arrived in his own time and I told him Brooklyn owns Virginia. He said he didn’t know that. I expressed incredulity. He said he understood that in Virginia Brooklyn owns a five-mile-wide corridor of land through the center of which runs the largely disused Interstate 95, and not until that road crosses the northern border of Florida does Brooklyn control a wider swathe of land around it, “and anyway,” he said, “whosoever commands 1-95 commands the world, so what are you worried about?” I suggested to him that I was worried about us both being bound by the real estate contracts we’d signed down through the years and he told me he was “not the i’s and t’s man of this outfit.” I wondered aloud whether, if it were the case that Brooklyn owned only 1-95 in Virginia, which it is not, his men’s journey down along it, before they veered east to the Chesapeake, would not then have been an act of trespass. He said they hadn’t taken that route as far as he knew, though again he averred he was not the detail man. What route had they taken, I wanted to know. He said he didn’t know and wouldn’t tell if he did, and went on to assert that indeed the sense in which any man at all could be said to be “his” was flimsy, and that these so-called men of “his” in the Chesapeake environs were acting not on his word or behalf but of their own will and for their own gain or loss, and if it could be proven that the ground their equipment and selves now covered were that of Brooklyn—which proof he doubted I’d produce—Brooklyn would then be free to do with the men what it saw fit. I tried to let him think I lived in this imaginary world of his in which his fellow islanders are not his employees and had not driven south on an armored bus in the name of Manhattan. I moved then to build an argument—”’