“Seriously.”
“Seriously? You’re a good man in some extremely limited ways, occasionally a kind and intelligent man, but in sum our love has yielded me less fun than pain, and because my means are few, my mind poor, and my need of you great in this strange land, the only way I have to pry myself loose of you is to die.”
“You’ve got a weird sense of humor. Why won’t you even try to live?”
“I’m trying! But I’ve noticed I ain’t gonna succeed. I’m not willing myself to die, I’m being killed by some idiotic disease I probably got from you or one of your pals. So before you get all moralistic about ‘trying to live,’ first try dying and see how moral you feel. Anyway, since when have moral considerations affected anything you do?”
“You insult me repeatedly.”
“I mean it. After I die, what are you going to do?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well get one. I mean it. Despite the oath you’ve sworn to anemia as a philosophical worldview and way of life, you’re a moderately capable young man and you might want to consider getting off your ass and doing something to ameliorate the world you live in.”
“I don’t feel like talking about this right now.”
“How about starting really small by ameliorating, you know, me?”
“How can I if you refuse to ameliorate yourself?”
“No, I mean make the end of my life as decent as it can be, under the circumstances. And stop badgering me.”
“So, what should I do, tell you a joke?”
“Do you know any?”
“Why’d the girl fall off the swing?”
“She was dead.”
“You’ve heard that one before.”
“You know what else you could do for me? An excellent funeral.”
“I’ll promise you the finest funeral in the world, only you must get well first.”
“I want a long procession. I hope all the wonderful folks I’ve met in this beautiful town turn out in full, and I hope it don’t rain. I want to go to meet my maker with plenty of bands playing. I want to ride up to heaven in a white velvet hearse, silk velvet. Purple satin inside the casket. I wants them folks’ eyes to bulge out. And another thang: I want horses to the hearse, I don’t like the smell of gasoline.”
She hawked and spat a mauve and chartreuse wad of phlegm into a plastic bowl beside her bed, and lay back on her hard, thin pillow in dismay.
“I’ve got one for you,” she said. “Why did the king fall off the throne?”
“He had no legs.”
“We are so in synch right now! You know another thing you could do for me?”
“What?”
“Depose him.”
“Done.”
“He’s one of those people whose life I find hilariously funny to contemplate, a little funnier than standing alone in a room looking at nothing, listening to nothing, tasting nothing, smelling nothing, feeling nothing, thinking nothing.”
She closed her eyes and her mind seemed to leave me for a while, a thing I’d dearly like my mind to do, but it never can except in sleep, which rarely lasts even an hour.
“For real. What do you propose to do?”
“Do?”
“About him.”
“Who?”
“John Martin.”
“I propose to endure him.”
“Sheesh, who’s got legs and who has none? ‘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.’”
“What?”
“I’m quoting you.”
“When’d I say that?”
“A while ago in a letter to me. And ‘… my distaste for this adventure’s conception, its goals, its trajectory, its management, its personnel, its scope, its methods, its avoidable failures.’”
“I don’t remember writing that.”
“You didn’t write it.”
“I don’t remember saying it.”
“You didn’t say it, you thought it.”
“How do you know?”
“Says so right here.”
“Where?”
“In my mind.”
“So now I have to be accountable for all my thoughts?”
“To know and not to act is not to know, Gianni.”
She closed her eyes again. To make her open them, I asked her what she’d have me do.
She sat up, tried to speak, and lay back. She coughed and spat and missed the bowl. Her black hair was pasted to her head with sweat.
“Do you want to hear some music?”
“Do you know how to play music?”
“I know how to press a button on this machine that plays recorded music.”
“Where’d you get the machine?”
“John Martin gave it to me when he appointed me vice president for communications of the newly consolidated New York Company.”
“I thought he considered you his enemy.”
“He does.”
“So why’d he make you vice president?”
“Because it’s worse than jail or death.”
“You could refuse to serve.”
“Then he’d jail or kill me.”
“How’d you get the juice to run the machine?”
“I traded a week of my life for it.”
“What song are you going to play me?”
“Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”
I pressed PLAY. A thundercloud of music darkened the room. After less than half a minute she said, “Turn it off!” I did.
A green sunbeam came in the dim window and limned her veridian skin. Sun and skin were one; she nearly disappeared. From within this haze of light I saw her pale mouth move: “That’s the worst sound I ever heard.”
“It’s pretty awful, yes.”
“Why do you listen to it?”
“I think it’s beautiful.”
“What’s beautiful about it?”
“That a hundred people sat in a room and succeeded in the complicated and difficult activity of playing a symphony together without murdering each other.”
“But people did such things together all the time back when Earth produced a seemingly limitless supply of food and fuel. That can’t be all you like about that noise.”
“It reminds me of my hometown.”
“This?” she said, and gestured toward the dirty window with her eyes.
“That.”
“Why would you want to hear the culmination of centuries of blundering and horror represented in your art?”
“Because art that represents centuries of blundering and horror makes them slightly more bearable, if not more comprehensible.”
“So you’re prospering from this program you find distasteful and are not one with and want no part of by accepting scarce and valuable fuel from your imperial overlord so you can play—who’d you say that music was made by?”
“Beethoven.”
“So you can play music made by Bait Oven. Great. I’m not kidding, you know.”
“About what?”
“Doing something.”
“About John Martin?”
“About John Martin.”
“What?”
“I can’t tell you what.”
“You want a revolutionary leader? Talk to Jack Smith. He’s a better candidate than I.”
“He’s too pragmatic. He’s good at making things run, but a revolution needs someone impractical and unrealistic to tell guys like him why and where to go.”
“Have you ever done such a thing in your life?”
“Yes!”
“What?”
“I can’t believe you have to ask me that.”
“I’m not asking to challenge you, I’m asking because I need guidance.”
“This is what I’m saying. Someone has to be the one who doesn’t need guidance.”
“I assure you I’m not such a man.”
“All right. Do this. Wait nine months
.”
“Nine months from now?”
“From when I die. From now, yes. I should be dying in the course of a difficult childbirth, but a single glance between my thighs will demonstrate I ain’t. The tiny hope of a nation from my loins does not squeeze forth into the world so it’ll have to come from someplace else. I hereby plant a seed in that virgin mind of yours from which a miraculous idea will spring forth nine months hence.” She closed her eyes.
“Don’t close your eyes! What about the one more thing you said you still had to know?”
“Now it’s yours.”
“What is it?”
“You know what’s strange? I really want to live,” she said, and died.
The Names of the Dead
George Kendall, Herb Mangold, Matthew Bernard, Gerald Mankiewicz, Happy Lohengrin, Albert, numerous fops, Bill Breck, John Ratcliffe, Stickboy, Powhatan, Chris Newport, James Stuart, Philip Habsburg, most men’s best intentions, Pocahontas, whose secret name you must not speak lest you find your own on this list.
Johnny Rolfe
To anyone willing to act selflessly in service of a vision of world improvement:
I write to you in my capacity as Vice President for Communications of the America Company. That is, I write as no one to no one.
I’m in the study of my ramshackle and dilapidated house—I work from home a lot these days—on a hill surrounded by a barbed wire fence and a moat of hydrochloric acid in Riverdale, the Bronx, one of many neighborhoods in this vast, exhausted land I love that my protector and boss, John Martin, a philosopher king with an enormous head and massive treelike arms, has taken back from terrorists and secured with armed guards. Not long ago, on this momentous morn, I could hear my friend and roommate, Jack Smith, Vice President for Strategic Planning, mill around downstairs before he left the house. Today is one of many days when even hearing him touch two dishes together in the kitchen makes me want to kill him. I think he wants to kill me half the time as well. Murderous rage may be where the passion is in this second, passionless marriage for each of us. But the presence of his body in these rooms is also a great and almost adequate consolation to me. To meet him by the long-defunct fridge and be wrestled off my feet, to have him press my face into the ancient wooden boards of the kitchen floor—boards that lay between dropped cubes of cheese and the sodden earth long before we were born—is a way to spend a morning that I find more bearable than most. With Jack at any rate it beats conversation by a mile. He’s boring. He tells in great detail about adventures he’s had and ones he plans to have, long stories with no point except that he’s telling them and they happened to him, or could. And nights up in the Bronx are long. Once in a blue, Jack goes out late, passes through the three security checkpoints, and roams the streets in search of danger, but to do that he must once again be in love with death, which is to say in love with life, which, like me, he’s mostly not, though on those rare nights he tries to be again. On other nights, he wanders through the house, burping and groaning and breaking things. He approaches the study door, which I’ve locked, and says, “What’re you doing in there?” “Working.” “On what?” “Communications.” “Who you communicating with?” “The dead.” “What do they say back?” “Nothing.” “Can I come in?” “No.” “When will you be done?” “Never.”
But recently I set in motion a little something to mark the second anniversary of my girlfriend’s death. Every day’s the birthday of the death of someone I knew but I liked her more than all the rest so I chose her death among all the deaths to celebrate with a coup against the efficacious leadership of our chief. When I told Jack about it he said, “Jesus, finally, it only took you two years.”
“So why didn’t you think it up if you wanted it done?”
“Why didn’t I? You don’t know? Have I been talking to a wall since the day we met?”
Four of us VPs—Vice President for Community Outreach Richard Buck, Vice President for Security Bucky Breck, Jack Smith, and me—assembled at our place for a top secret planning session. I had a cubic meter of the finest artificial cheese brought in, and bottles of super-unleaded water—not the premium-unleaded, mind you, I only make a VP’s salary, not a king’s. And I hauled out my dwindling stash of busthead to put us all in a mood of optimistic relaxation, or at least make us less grim and ill at ease, except Dick Buck of course, our mostly useless conscience, our Vice President in Charge of High-Handed Rage and Despair, who as the evening wore on freaked out and had to be tied to a soft chair—you know you’ve got good friends if they use a soft chair and not a hard one—and locked in the basement so he wouldn’t hurt himself. Who among us hasn’t spent more evenings than he’d like in a basement tied by his friends to a soft chair, Dear Interlocutor Whose Nonexistence This Communication Is Predicated On?
So, having meant to convene in the parlor around a platter of high-end artificial cheese, we convened instead—in deference to our good friend through whose veins rage now would take an hour to pass—in the dank, cold, low-ceilinged basement, where eating cheese would have drawn rats to our lips. Each of us but Buck sat at the edge of a crate clutching his plastic bottle of water close to his chest. Buck alone, aggrieved, muted by the wad of rag in his maw, wrists scraped raw in their struggle to be free, had a nice chair to be in. The rest of us endured the sharpness of crate slats on the backs of our thighs. What rags we hadn’t used to silence and immobilize Buck we cut to strips and used as wicks for candlelight. In that cold wet hole in the side of a hill in the Bronx two weeks back, amid rats’ squeaks and Buck’s grunts, I told them my plan and they told me it back; we argued and refined it; Breck and Smith both said they could contribute guns and willing men; I said I knew none of either but would contribute my brain and flesh, or what was left of them. There wasn’t much to plan: assemble willing men in stealth, disable Martin’s many bodyguards, move in past his most forbidding guards, his arms and head, and slit his throat. Or shoot him. Or blow him up. Or crush him with a bus. Or poison him. Or drown him. And then hold a democratic election. I guess this must be what my gal envisioned two winters ago, who knows, she’s dead, what happens now is no concern of hers.
What little bit of plan there seemed to be to make we made, or tried, and then ran out of things to say, and sat in silence waiting for our friend to let off fighting with his bonds. We couldn’t leave him down there all alone or he’d have been devoured by rats, so we sat on our hard crates and looked at one another and at him, and through his gag he tried to shout what must have been “Let me go!” or “Quit staring at me,” and each time a rat got in his pants leg Smith stabbed it fast and threw it on a growing pile, which we’d later burn in our hearth at our leisure. To eat them would have killed us but to smell them burn was not so bad.
At length, Father Buck got groggy and wept softly—tears of rage, tears of shame, who knows how to name such things? Not English, certainly. We let him go. He hugged us and apologized and asked, “But why’d you have to tie me up?” We looked at him and didn’t say a word and he apologized again. We all agreed to keep our revolution lean, and parted for the night, except for Jack and me: he chased me up the stairs.
Since that night two weeks ago the dread has grown in me. Someone less inured to disappointment—can this world sustain someone like that?—might have felt such dread as hope. That the thought to try to make a change had come to me at all, that my body had not then expelled it as it would have done a childish dream or wormy slice of pie, was marvel enough for one life; such a thought would never have found the loam of hope in me, and if it had it likely would have choked in it; no, this thought’s best home and hope has been my rocky, arid, stinking lump of dread: where else could murder’s seed have grown and bloomed?
Since that night I’ve left the house more often than before, and when I go the guards, in whose eyes I used to see contempt for me, now nod to let me know they know, which, of course, makes my dread grow. For me to need a guard to walk the streets is relatively new, not just to me but t
o the company that is my employer, home, and state. And that’s because, as this state has enlarged, its borders have become less geographical than notional. On our official map it looks as if we have more land than ever before, its edge limned in ink with bold and indivisible lines. But discontent makes holes a map’s ink can’t represent. Such holes cannot be seen at all, exist more in air than land, and more in mind than air. And that is maybe why my modest plan can now exist—not to say succeed.
Today’s the day. A couple bombs went off at eight as planned on Brooklyn and Washington Bridges, the only two that had remained unbombed in the last war. The empire’s most tender cell’s now inflamed. Enough of our chief’s guards have been drawn away from him for us to interrupt this afternoon’s board meeting with our little coup d’etat. Before I leave the house, a razor beneath my tongue, I await the final signal, an email to my battery-operated wireless that will say “Happy Birthday, Shaneequa.” The email has just arrived but it doesn’t say “Happy Birthday, Shaneequa,” it says “Plug in the fridge.” This is not a code I know. Did they change it and forget to tell me? “Plug in the fridge,” what could it mean? I pace our house’s second floor and try to think of what it means. Plug in the fridge. I stare out the window at the greenish sky and cold gray ground. It’s wintertime, we’ve been expecting snow and none has come. My study window’s view’s lone bare tree, which has its own armed guard, is mute on the subject of Plug in the fridge, as is the little stream whose edge the tree is at, whose brown and toxic water becomes one with the tree’s trunk from the vantage of this window and my eye. Winters come and winters go, as comes and goes the stream; there once was a girl I loved as in a dream. Plug in the fridge. And as the seasons and the waters go, so go the ones who watch them, and as all revolutions know, death awaits the ones who botch them. Plug in the fridge. I guess I’ll have to leave the house and go to the meeting and hope to die or not to die, I’m not sure which. Where’s my coat? It’s in the kitchen, by the fridge. Good old fridge, site of many tender wrestling matches between my roommate Jack and me. When he’s got me down on the floor by the always-closed fridge door, he likes to put his face up close to mine and whisper things to me which in my excitement and annoyance I rarely understand, maybe “Plug in the fridge.” Got my coat on, and now it’s just occurred to me what “Plug in the fridge” means. It means “Plug in the fridge.” I do. It hums and vibrates. It’s alive. A miracle has happened, everyone. Current flows through wires that have been barren of it all my life. This is so exciting I grow hard, and come! I plugged in the fridge and came just now, wow. The fridge with current in it reminds me of my lost lover, Pocahontas or Shaneequa. She, too, was soft and smooth, and hummed. Oh no wait she was rough and hard, and shrieked. I forget. Coming by the fridge short circuits the memory of love. Coming by the fridge is love. I love my working fridge! Oh the walkie-talkie is squawking the squawk of love, that must be Jack Smith, walkie-talkie-ing home to see if I’ve plugged in the fridge as per his command.
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