“You won’t find what you need.”
“We’ll try. We’d love to try. Give us the chance to see your town once more and its toolshed.”
Myth shrugged. We walked back through the hole, or gate. Twenty of our fifty hidden men emerged from the dark sides of their respective trees and filled the space where fence did not meet fence, bows at ease on fingertips like fingernails or waves of air.
“Have your men stand down,” Myth said.
“Can’t.”
“Why?”
“They’re here on orders from my boss.”
“They’re making my men nervous.”
“No need for nerves unless you plan to do us harm.”
“We don’t.”
“Or cheat us.”
“If cheating were a capital offense we’d already have killed you for giving us the so-called fresh water that made us sick.”
“And we’d have killed you for giving us an incomplete disassembled motorbike.”
“Exactly.”
“They’re on Powhatan’s orders to be here, but mine to shoot or not to shoot.”
“So you won’t mind,” the plump one, the boss, Rat Cliff said, “if a few of our guys train their guns on you and your bowmen.”
“Well, they already have.”
It was true, they had. From the gaps in some of their tents, I saw the tips of narrow metal cylinders protrude. Before the last big war, or so I’ve read, situations such as this were called mutually assured destruction, a phrase used to describe a set of conditions wherein all sides in a cold conflict were considered safe if each had arms enough to annihilate the other no matter who attacked whom first, a sweetly hopeful use of the subjunctive mood which has since been proved naïve.
Frank and Joe and I entered their small shed, the early morning sun ceased to shine on the backs of our necks, and we strolled around the stacks of stuff they called supplies. In the dim light I saw blank CDs, scissors, shears, saws, machetes, boxcutters, utility blades, awls, picks, a hoe, mousetraps and rattraps, staplers, paper, double-ledger accounting books bound in recycled vinyl, wire, wirecutters, matches, planes, hammers, files, portable fans, a box of dusty partial books whose titles were obscured, walkie-talkies, alarm clocks.
“No wrenches or pliers,” Frank said.
“Told you.”
“Do these work?” Frank held up a walkie-talkie.
“Put that back.”
“How much distance can you use these over?”
“Put it down.”
He tossed one to Joe. “Head out into the woods and talk to me on this.”
Myth made a move to block Joe but he was already out the door.
We went to the door and watched, through a gap in the fence, Joe’s large, rectangular ass dart among the trees and diminish in size, while his voice, clung to by clumps of static, came through the little plastic box in Frank’s hand. “Frank. Frank. Can you read me. Can you read me. Over.”
“Roger that, big Joe. How far are you from the gate, over.”
“Fifty yards. Fifty-five yards, sixty yards, can you read me, over.”
“Roger that I can and do big Joe. How’s the weather where you are, over.”
“Heavy snow. Over. How many more of these do they have, over.”
“Roger that question, Big Daddy Joe. Am reconnoitering an accurate response at the present time, over—I mean, how far out are you now, over.”
“Hundred yards, one fifty, two, quarter mile, over, the sea, over, Europe, over, the moon, over.”
“Ten. Over.”
“What. Over.”
“They have ten walkie-talkies, over.”
“Take them, over.”
“I am, over.”
“What. Over.”
“I am. Over.”
“What are you putting them in. Over.”
“A bag. Over.”
“A what. Over.”
“A bag. Over.”
“Oh, a bag. Over. I thought you said a leg, over.”
“Where are you now. Over.”
“The sun. Over.”
“Hey these walkie-talkies are good,” Frank said to Myth.
“And if you think you’re walking out of here with them, you’re wrong.”
Frank tilted his head a half inch toward the door of the shed. Myth looked. There stood cousins Rawhunt and Parahunt, arrows in their bows aimed at Myth’s ear.
“If they shoot me they’ll get shot in the back.”
“Not if first the guys who’d shoot them in the back get shot in the back.”
“Don’t take the walkie-talkies and no one will get shot.”
“We won’t take them all.”
“How many?”
“Six.”
“Four, and we keep six.”
“How ’bout five each?”
“That makes no sense.”
“We’ll use the fifth to contact you.”
“You’re not so stupid after all.”
Frank put four walkie-talkies in the canvas bag he’d brought inside his quiver. He added paper, pens, a stapler, some bandages, a portable fan.
“Now you’re acting stupid again.”
“Don’t forget you screwed us over on the guns.”
“Did you really think I’d let you have the guns?”
“Did you really think I wouldn’t take as much crap as will fit in my bag and still hold a grudge about the guns?”
Joe stepped in and loaded a couple more bags full of stuff. Each of us took a bag—well, they took two each and I took one—and we jogged back to our town. Things were said, plans were made, but my lungs and legs, not as strong as Frank’s and Joe’s, kept my brain from knowing what it heard. I know I was assured, in whispers too soft to be heard by the fifty men whose footsteps crackled lightly in the cracked concrete and scrub brush by our side, that my friends’ ill treatment of me in our town is a ruse to make our boss and his advisor think things are as they’ve been.
“Then what,” I asked, “is the purpose of your ill treatment of in the woods?”
“Oh that’s just for old times’ sake,” Frank said.
This joke, if joke it was, made the dread in me metastasize. Like love, it gobbled up my nerves. It made me want to undermine my friends, and steal a certain thing from them and give it to a girl I like, whose thing it once was anyway, if a thing can be said to belong to a girl, or to anyone, which it can’t, since, as has been all but proven for a certitude, you can’t take it with and even if you could you wouldn’t know what to do with it. The girl, like Joe and Frank, has caused, causes, and will cause me great hurt, but unlike them she doesn’t do it out of spite. I’ll always love the way she looks and acts, no matter how she makes me feel.
I found her by the black cloud that floats above her head at all times those days. She’s curled in a ball on the floor of the jail. The wireless device, which I stole back from Joe for her as per my plan, I lay at her sleeping face. When she wakes it’ll be the first thing she sees. The second thing she’ll see is me, though thing I’m not, technically, though soon I’ll be, and soon after many things, then no thing. The jail is quiet and dark. Her left breast lies on the spot where Jacks Myth’s left foot stood when he was kept here two weeks in ropes. No guard stands at the door. No foreigner’s been captured, no criminal caught. The jail holds no one, as far as those who do the counting know. Its disuse makes it a good hiding place for an exile, who is an inside-out prisoner. The moon in the eastern sky lays a column of light across her face. As ever, I favor the dark part of the room.
She’s still curled up into a little dot. A dot of her’s better than a line of most. The left side of her face lies on her folded left arm. Her north eye opens, looks at its closed southern counterpart, closes again. What she saw first, if she saw at all, was not, as I’d guessed, the gift I stole for her, or me, but herself.
“You awake?”
“No.”
“See what I brought you?”
“No.”
“Want to have sex?”
“No.”
“See what I brought you?”
“What’d you bring me?”
“Open your eyes.”
“Don’t want to.”
“Then you won’t see it.”
“Describe it to me. Is it bigger than a cockroach?”
“Yes.”
“Bigger than a rat?”
“Yes.”
“Bunny rabbit?”
“Same, unless the rabbit’s just eaten the rat.”
“Is it my wireless device?”
“I thought you said you didn’t see it.”
“I didn’t.”
“Liar.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“What are you talking about?”
“How your whole life has become a lie.”
“I don’t lie, I scheme, it’s different.”
“You joke but what you’re doing is deadly serious.”
“What am I doing?”
“I don’t know, why don’t you tell me?”
“Nothing.”
Her eyes have not yet opened again. She hasn’t moved an inch. She may still be asleep.
“How’d you get the wireless back from Joe?”
“He gave it to me.”
“Liar.”
“I bought it.”
“Liar.”
“I stole it.”
“Liar.”
“Anyway, I just wanted you to have it.”
“Thanks.”
“And see how you are.”
“Fine.”
“And have sex with you.”
“Ugh.”
“What do you do all day?”
“What do you do all day?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing.”
“No really.”
“I sulk, and then I fill my mind with light.”
“How?”
“I sit in a place where I’m undetected and unobstructed. My legs are crossed, my back is straight, my posture easeful yet erect. It helps me to imagine an enormously long cable attached at one end to the crown of my head and at the other to a helicopter that hovers soundlessly above the clouds. Then the sulking begins. It comes quite naturally: all I have to do is think. To think and be sad are one for me now. ‘Thought is the indwelling of the father in the head of the child.’ You know that proverb?”
“No.”
“I just made it up.”
“But how do you go from thinking and sulking to filling your mind with light?”
“I’m telling you how.”
“You’re not.”
“If you’d shut up.”
“Okay.”
“I see.”
“What?”
“I see instead of think.”
“How?”
“By seeing as fast as I can.”
“But how can you see without thinking? When you look at a thing, isn’t your mind naming it and qualifying it for your eyes?”
“Your eyes have to outrun your mind. You see and see and see so fast your mind tries to keep up, gets tired, has a heart attack and dies. Then it’s just you and your eyes, and the green air leading the world into them.”
“What does that feel like?”
“It feels like the world is getting lighter and lighter and lighter until you can’t see it anymore.”
“Is that what you do all day?”
“I run a lot.”
“How do you eat?”
“I steal food, or get it from Char, or I disguise myself and take my meals among the unsuspecting people of our town.”
“Who do you disguise yourself as?”
“Different people. This morning I disguised myself as a squirrel, and accompanied you along the branches of the trees to the interlopers’ sad little town. That’s how I know about your traitorous heart.”
“Is it not treason to love one of them without even knowing him?”
“If the gods had made woman to love a man only after she knows him, no woman would ever love.” Her eyes, which have been closed until this time, open. “You brought this back to me so I could contact him.”
“Yes.”
“You’re very sweet.”
“Shut up.”
“I love you.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Stickboy.”
“While you let in the light, I let in the darkness,” I say, and shut my eyes. When I open them she’s gone, and so am I.
Three
06:01:43
Knock-Knock from: Internet user GREASYBOY
GREASYBOY has sent you an Instant Message not bound by your Terms of Service Agreement. Would you like to accept the Instant Message from GREASYBOY?
Yes
No
06:02:19
Knock-Knock from: Internet user GREASYBOY
GREASYBOY has sent you an Instant Message not bound by your Terms of Service Agreement. Would you like to accept the Instant Message from GREASYBOY?
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06:02:32
Knock-Knock from: Internet user GREASYBOY
GREASYBOY has sent you an Instant Message not bound by your Terms of Service Agreement. Would you like to accept the Instant Message from GREASYBOY?
Yes
No
GREASYBOY: Hi.
CORNLUVR: Have you ever dated a woman much older than yourself?
GREASYBOY: But you’re younger than I am.
CORNLUVR: Have you?
GREASYBOY: Why are you asking me this?
CORNLUVR: Must we build the wheel before we roll along on it?
GREASYBOY: Yes.
CORNLUVR: Then this is going to take forever and be tedious.
GREASYBOY: No I mean yes, I‘ve dated a woman older than myself.
CORNLUVR: Much older?
GREASYBOY: How much is much?
CORNLUVR: Ugh.
GREASYBOY: I was an undergraduate at the Manhattan School of Communications.
CORNLUVR: I‘d never have guessed you went to college.
GREASYBOY: I was going to have an affair with one of the martial arts instructors but then her back went out.
CORNLUVR: Out where? Remember English is not my first language.
GREASYBOY: Apparently bullshit is your first language.
CORNLUVR: And that was that?
GREASYBOY: What was what?
CORNLUVR: That was the end of the affair?
GREASYBOY: I guess it’s hard to have an affair with a bad back.
CORNLUVR: Was she beautiful?
GREASYBOY: Yes. She had puffy hair. She was thirty-eight, to answer your other question.
CORNLUVR: What was she like?
GREASYBOY: Sad.
CORNLUVR: How do you know?
GREASYBOY: The back pain.
CORNLUVR: What’s that got to do with it?
GREASYBOY: Body pain always has its duplicate in mind.
CORNLUVR: You think you know women.
GREASYBOY: I didn’t say that. I think I understood that woman, a little.
CORNLUVR: Maybe less than you think.
GREASYBOY: You’re not one of those women, are you?
CORNLUVR: Which?
GREASYBOY: Who think men do not and will never understand women, especially herself.
CORNLUVR: It’s not impossible, just unlikely.
GREASYBOY: And do women understand men?
CORNLUVR: Better.
GREASYBOY: Why?
CORNLUVR: Because women are more like men than men are like women.
GREASYBOY: Horse dukey.
CORNLUVR: What’s dukey?
GREASYBOY: Teeth.
CORNLUVR: Gotta go bye!
GREASYBOY: When can I meet you?
INTERNET USER CORNLUVR IS NOT ONLINE AT THIS TIME
From: GREASYBOY
To: CORNLUVR
Subject: What was that?
Dear CornLuvr,
That thing tha
t happened when we saw each other last night is all the more crazy given that I don’t know how to spell your name. Do you trust me? I don’t trust you. I want to. It’s hard to. I’ve not been bred for trust, and you’re quite strange in almost every way.
Please know I’m not one with all the programs, intentions, wishes, and behaviors of the gentlemen I am visiting your region on business with. They’re them and I’m me. I’m with them but not of them. I’ll supply specific examples of this in the course of what follows. Here’s the first example: the induction or “hiring” of your father as vice president of the Manhattan Company, Virginia Branch. Not my idea. A guy observes a lot of the ideas his fellow humans come up with and act on and he despairs; he wonders how the human race survives; evidently not by the frequency or consistency of its good ideas. I believe survival is predicated on unrelenting will plus aggression plus, of course, how very pleasurable God made fucking, and I hope neither pessimism nor the explicit mention of the great pleasure of sex are taboo in your culture as they sometimes are in mine, but I say these things in the interest of total honesty and transparency, anything less than which, I feel, will be an impediment to the fullest possible understanding between us, and I figure if you like me at all, which you seem to despite not having answered my last half dozen IM’s, you like my darkness and devotion to pussy.
Guess I’ll stop here for now. Let me know if you want to hear my account of what happened that night leading up to and after our encounter. I’ll take a breather and hope to hear from you.
Yours truly,
Johnny
From: CORNLUVR
To: GREASYBOY
Subject: No Subject
Jah Knee
Re Lacks
Paw Cunt Ass
From: GREASYBOY
To: CORNLUVR
Subject: RE: No Subject
Dear P—
I’ve got a lot of reason to be tense: the fire that wiped out half our town, the rats that ate the corn your father sent to us last week, other things. But it does relax me to write a girl like you and tell her all I think and feel and am up front. I wish you’d know me all at once, with no need for the slow and unreliable advance of time.
As you’ve seen, we made a bunch of car trips to your place with gifts our CEO sent for the “induction.” I know I said this last time but can we agree the induction was a fuck up? Not least because your dad was not at home when we arrived. And your people’s sense of ownership and theft diverges from our own. As our town’s officer of talk, I told your dad’s VP, Sit Knee Find Gold, what the gifts were meant for as the car made trips back and forth with more and more of them, but that did not make him stop a group of prepubescent boys from spreading out around the growing pile where he seemed to egg them on to pick things up—shoes, clothes, watches, jewels—and run off to the woods with them. We tried to block them from the stuff or chase them down once they had it but they were too fast. A few of my guys kicked their legs and punched their arms and necks as they passed, and when that failed to deter we tried reason, though studies have shown that the male brain does not begin to develop the capacity for reason until the age of fifteen, so our efforts resulted in further theft accompanied by the looks of blank incomprehension that make boys their age so cute. When two of them took buckshot in the thighs, ass, and lower back, that seemed to daunt the rest, but by then they’d denuded us of half the swag we’d meant for your dad.
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