by Mark Powell
One night they watched an episode of Frontline about Bin Laden.
“Fuck Bin Laden,” Stone said. “He didn’t jar us out of our American mythos. If anything he allowed us to sink deeper into it. War belongs on TV, not in the streets. We know this in our heart of hearts. Dead brown people. That’s become our normative state. We grow up with it, always far away and always dead.”
Same paper cup, same wandering hand.
“We need them—the Japs, the gooks, the hajis. They hate us and we need that. We need their hate to assuage that deep Puritan guilt nobody talks about anymore. Our world had been flipped and we had to right it. We kill brown people on TV. It’s what the people expect and for seventy years it’s what we’ve given them. The Japanese. The Koreans. The Vietnamese.”
He numbered them on his fingers.
“The Iraqis, the Afghans. The Iraqis once more for good measure. We kill them and they hate us—it’s symbiosis. And don’t give me that look, all right? I didn’t make up the rules. I’m just telling you.”
And then Stone wasn’t telling John anything. Stone’s appointment expired and just like that he disappeared from John’s life, or so John thought at time. A few months later Ray Bageant walked in. Ray Bageant was the link between them.
In between, John had published a thin book called Regarding What Is Lost, a treatise addressing absence and regret, theorizing the way in which the gravitational pull of suffering binds the world, and in turn makes plain the world. But the book was so abstract—he never even mentioned Karla—what started as a memoir about the death of his wife gradually came to seem a work of prophesy. Suffering and loss were revelatory and what they revealed were the hidden workings of life. There was a secret wound through the universe yet buried beneath the accumulation of living. But to burn through this, to lose, to suffer, was to gain access. There was a pattern, and if you could stand in the presence of suffering, if you could stand on the edge of death, you could know it. And you could live.
It was a blur of Catholic theology and featherweight Zen packaged with tables and flow charts regarding gross domestic product and projections of glacial melt, all of it just banal enough to be a great, if brief, success, read in the halls of power in Washington and New York and London, discussed on news shows before being exposed—rightly—as the ravings of a damaged mind. That several opportunities were offered, positions in government, or with NGOs—let it be said that he drank away those opportunities.
The point being he was alone in his office—both physically and metaphysically—the day he learned of Peter Keyes’s interest through his assistant, Ray Bageant, a thin, angular man with the gray skin of a porpoise. John was staring out at the lake, his back to the door, when Bageant cleared his throat and John found him standing on the threshold, hands spread apologetically.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “There was no one out front.”
“Catherine,” John said, for some reason calling the name of the office manager. “She’s at lunch.”
“I supposed as much. You’re Professor Maynard, I presume. I’ve come quite a distance to see you, Professor.”
They talked in the office and later in the rented Prius Bageant had driven north from the Minneapolis airport, following the narrow lanes that spread out from the college toward dairy farms and wide expanses of wetland. Peter, Bageant referred to him only as “Peter,” was interested in meeting him. He had read John’s book and felt John could offer some insight that might help drive his thinking.
“We are poised,” Bageant told him, wheeling past barns red and collapsing, “on the verge of a great shift. The way we live, the way we conceptualize our very lives is about to change, abruptly and profoundly. The wars are pushing us, technological advances are pushing us. Peter is a great believer in this push and wants to position himself to fully embrace what is next. How to think around issues,” he said, “certain theoretical blocks to which we are acculturated, Peter wants to bend beyond those. To shatter old ways of conceiving life—this is Peter’s purpose.”
The zeal of an evangelist. Some small-town Mormon selling whole-life policies. Except there was always the hint of mockery, the closet apostate who, for nothing more than shits and giggles, lays it on extra thick. Or maybe he believed, maybe he truly believed. Peter Keyes certainly did. Keyes was a self-made billionaire with a cultist following in futurist and libertarian circles. A visionary of sorts: half the social networks, half the companies fabulously wealthy but pragmatically useless, had been founded by Peter or one of his acolytes. He was one of the fathers—grandfathers, by that point—of Silicon Valley. A newly uncloseted homosexual. A former Republican money-man disenchanted with party politics and now pouring his wealth into obscure start-ups and causes that might have been championed by Milton Friedman.
“Are you familiar with the Keyes Group?”
“Afraid not.”
“Good,” Bageant had said. “That’s a good thing. We would prefer that, actually.”
The Keyes Group had long been doing work for the government, electronic surveillance, data-mining. But just after the September 11 attacks their contract had expanded broadly when they acquired Global Solutions, a very discreet, very influential consulting firm based out of DC but operating all over the Middle East and Africa. Global Solutions’ area of expertise was the gathering of human intelligence. The then-current administration in Washington was functioning in legally nebulous areas and they knew it. They needed to ensure their activities could withstand the scrutiny and restrictions of some future administration. By 2004 it was already clear there would be inquiries and commissions, clandestine officers taking public oaths swearing to tell nothing but the truth. There would be talk of overreach.
“Understand our objective after nine-eleven wasn’t to necessarily strike the right people,” Bageant said. “Our objective was to strike, to act. It’s what great powers do, Professor. It’s the very definition of a great power.”
It was important for John to remember that people really did say these things. They talked about great powers and the precariousness of our position as the world’s policeman. Every conversation was framed by the governing presence of the post-9/11 world. There was so much money suddenly pouring out of Washington and into private companies that talking that way wasn’t so much lavish as necessary, linguistic justification for the fact that the Pentagon had just increased your operating capital by a factor of 300. John could say that he never heard the expression “Great Game” uttered by anyone within Global Solutions. It was the sort of meta-comment they were all supposed to be past. Irony and cynicism were for the people on the ground, the trauma surgeons with Médecins Sans Frontières, the boys in the Third Special Forces Group.
They rode all day through the winding hills of central Minnesota, past the greening fields, past the barns with stars and horseshoes tacked above the doors. Bageant quoted Einstein: no problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it. He invoked German loanwords, things Goethe might have uttered in his sleep. By evening they were somewhere outside Duluth, wending through a morass of empty suburbs, lost, had either of them given any thought to it.
“So what does he want from me?” John finally managed to ask.
“He wants you to do your thinking in-house,” Bageant said. “There would be no formal expectations, only that you apply your cognitive powers to the service of Peter’s agenda. Think of it,” he told him, “as an advisory position.”
The pay was ten times what John made as a fellow at the institute, a position that would anyway expire in a few weeks’ time. He suspected he would have to complete his appointment but that was not the case: they were happy to see him go. So he packed all that he owned in an overnight bag and unplugged his laptop. Kayla flew to Atlanta where his parents picked her up. He would send for her when he was settled, but it turned out he was never settled. He was in and out of California and then he was at Site Nine, regretting everything, if only he’d had the courage to.<
br />
I still think of it like the Blitz, Ray said after. A few RAF pilots holding the line against the barbarians. And there were barbarians, this was true. But there were also men like Hassan Natashe.
And then there was the man behind it all—and this was John—John was the man watching.
9.
Tess’s father called. He wanted to know if she was happy.
She was at the playground with the children, Laurie strapped to her chest while Tess moved between Daniel on the baby swing and Wally on the big-kid swing because if either went more than a single freaking second without a push they would start to melt down.
Whales—
She was telling them about whales and dolphins—listen to me, honey. They can hear at 160 kHz. That’s like eight times higher than we can hear which is pretty amazing if you think about it—talking and talking when her cell went off and there was her father, sitting in his orange grove and humming Shostakovich. Her mother was a former pianist, not a concert pianist, but talented, adept. Her older brother was at Wells Fargo in Charlotte. Her little sister was in a Savannah loft, busy selling purses on Etsy and cultivating her gut flora. But it seemed all anyone could think about was Tess. Was Tess—this seemed to be everyone’s question—was Tess happy?
“What is this sudden concern with my happiness?”
“Honey, I’m always concerned with your happiness, always have been. You and your sister and brother. All of you.”
“I know, I just mean—Liz called. Apparently Mom thinks I’m depressed.”
“Your mother worries.”
“Apparently she wants to send me money.”
“Honey, do you need money?”
“No, Dad. I’m fine. Please. If she wants to send me something tell her to send her prayers. Tell her to pray for me. Tell her to pray for the world.”
“Don’t be like that, darling.”
“I’m not being like anything. I’m being serious. Tell her to pray for the world.”
Did Tess pray?
She thought she did, but to some extent she was no longer sure. There was a thing Wally did, though. He must have been about three when he developed the habit of “washing” his washcloths in the sink. He would soak them, wring them, and then spread them in the porcelain basin. It broke Tess’s heart, her son’s focus, the delicacy of the act. He called his shadow his “statue.” He kissed her hands. It broke her heart. Everything broke her heart. She had those things now, but she also wanted those things back. Except she couldn’t exactly name the things. She wanted everything back but couldn’t name a damn thing.
Was this wanting a form of prayer?
A few days ago she had stood with her eyes shut a few feet from the bedroom wall and clicked her tongue until it wasn’t a sloppy wet click but an elastic pop. And was she imagining it when she felt the sound wave go out from her? Was she imagining it when she felt it return? Was that prayer?
She went back to pushing, back to whales and dolphins.
“Listen to this,” she told Wally. “If something’s that high frequency it can materialize and dematerialize matter. Some people think it’s connected to levitation, to healing. Sometimes sick children swim with dolphins or pilot whales. Are you listening, baby?”
But she was hardly listening to herself.
10.
A few nights after Stone’s reappearance, John and Tess had the Glenns over for dinner.
“You know how hard it is being the oppressor, Professor?” This was Pat Glenn, a member of the local college-and-business alliance on which John sat. He was in his early forties and had inherited three dozen pest-control trucks and two fiberglass bass boats he kept at a lake house, also inherited. He was paranoid and angry, his life a nest of pistols and pills.
“Stop it,” his wife said.
They were on the couch, Tess in the kitchen preparing an enchilada casserole.
“Keeping the colored man down. The ragheads. The—the what? Wetbacks, for lack of a better word.”
“He has this shtick he does.”
“Wetbacks encompassing everyone south of the Oklahoma State line, all right?”
“It’s also vaguely anti-Texas which actually, if you think about it, makes like no sense.”
“The capitalist system,” he said. “All the structural injustice.”
“Stop it, Pat.” His wife had a boob job and foil-tipped highlights.
“ ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.’ ”
“You’re terrible.”
“ ‘Can’t we all just get along?’ ”
“Honestly, stop it.”
At the table Glenn started talking about Hadawi. What’s the story they’re telling? No, no, no, didn’t take no admin job. Nobody voluntarily takes no freaking job in Yemen, I don’t care where you’re from. That SOB is on the run. Had John not heard this? Stop it, Pat. You’re making things up. The hell I am. There’s a mosque in Atlanta. We used to do the pest control until guess what—the feds raided the place and shut it down. Pat, stop! How did y’all not hear this? The place was a front for jihadis. All these charities supposedly pumping money to poor little starving Arab kids were really buying ’em suicide vests. And your buddy—pointing his fork across the table now, jabbing it at John—your colleague was their main man.
*
Tess cleared the table and stayed in the kitchen until they were gone.
“I can’t stand him,” she said.
“I know.”
“His just general awfulness. He’s evil.”
“He’s not evil. He’s just conservative.”
“My father’s conservative. You’re conservative. That’s not conservative. That’s being a bad human being.”
“Maybe so.”
“Maybe or not, I hope we never see him again.”
“I know,” John said, but found his mind wandering not to dinner but to Stone, to the way Stone had stood outside his office. Not the way he’d looked or the way he’d dressed—jeans and blazer, more or less standard campus attire. But the way he had pushed himself off the wall and stepped toward John. Almost as if he’d intended him some harm, if only as a reminder of their past.
*
The next day John avoided his office and walked the campus, something he didn’t do as often as he should. Just speaking to people. Hey. Good morning. Nice to see y’all. A circle of tables was spread out over the grassy quad and arranged around the fountain, each covered with literature and posters and sign-up sheets. The Org Fair it was called. The day every campus organization came out to attract new students.
Oxfam and the Spirit Club.
The ACLU and Students for Disability Access.
Clubs against cyberbullying, sexual assault, child soldiers in Africa. In keeping with the school’s ethos they were all socially minded and mind-numbingly elitist. A pack of private-school biology majors from Buckhead paying $21,000 a semester to conduct field research in Ghana. Not Ebola, mind you—that was real. But there would be some scary, if actually harmless, strain of infection, frighteningly complex when named in Latin, that would look lovely on med school applications.
Another group painted murals around town. Another tutored the poor Appalachian kids, the sons and daughters of the folks cleaning their bathrooms or mowing their grass. There was a de-stress station with massage chairs and squeeze balls and actual golden retriever puppies. A few dozen barefoot twenty-year-olds played red rover. Posters read BE RESILIENT! It was all high-minded and well-intentioned, all heart-breakingly naive. You think any society that sells life insurance could be anything other than damned? Another of Stone’s drunken rants. Not that it mattered. If they wanted to play white savior let them play white savior. What John had discovered when he lost his wife—and he hated himself for it—but what he had discovered was that there were ways of dealing with everything, even the end of everything. Maybe that most of all.
He smiled and waved, asked about their classes, their families. Everyone looking up now and then from t
heir phones to say how fine everything was. Classes were fine. Parents were fine. Me? Yeah, I’m fine I guess.
What he wanted to ask about, but wouldn’t, was what was being said about Hadawi. There had to be rumors. A campus rally had fizzled. The article in the student newspaper mentioned only his resignation. The silence was so deafening it seemed contrived. Where was the student outrage? Cops on our campus? Hadawi was hated by many, but he was also loved by a small but vocal minority.
John walked out to the edge of campus on through the arboretum and past the athletic fields to stand on the edge of Highway 76. A long line of RVs stood at the traffic light by the college entrance. Winnebagos and Colemans and Starcrafts. A few cars between them. Garrison sat on the edge of the Chattahoochee National Forest in the lower reaches of the Southern Appalachian Mountains and this was the last of the late-summer vacation traffic. In a few weeks they would give way to the leaf peepers. He’d never heard the term growing up, but figured the simple act of watching a tree change color had become exotic enough to require its own name.
He watched the light change, called Tess on his cell.
“Out visiting,” he said. “How ’bout y’all?”
“Laurie cried all morning but she’s finally asleep. I’m about to fix the boys lunch.”
“It’s like—it’s like ten A.M., Tess.”
“Well, it’s that or three breakfasts.”
“I understand.”
“I’m getting sick of the second and third breakfasts.”
“I understand,” he said, and said goodbye before she could say more.
He knew he was killing time, delaying what it was on his mind to do which was call James Stone. Finally, he gave up and dialed.
“Got curious, did you?”
“Shouldn’t you know this already?”
“Somewhere there’s a big computer that runs the world, John. But so far nobody’s handed me the password.”