by Robert Stone
“Come with me!”
She stared at him.
“Come on,” he said. He laughed. “Don’t think about it, just do it. Come on!”
She blinked and for a moment she seemed about to follow him.
“Why did you do that to me just now, Mr. Strickland?”
“Because Garcia-Lenz is a hypocrite. That’s why.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t trust you.”
“Actually,” he asked, “what’s to trust?”
“I want you to leave me alone!”
When she started past him, he blocked her way.
“I’ll call someone!”
“You’ll be laughed at,” he said.
“You fucking bastard,” Rachel said. “I know about you.”
“What does that mean, Rachel?”
“I know about what happened in Vietnam. There are reporters here who were there with you.”
He smiled, but she had seen the shadow pass.
“Everybody knows that story,” she told him. “What the GIs did.”
“If you only knew the half of it,” Strickland said, “you’d eat your heart out.”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t,” she said. “Not anymore.”
“Garcia-Lenz won’t remember your name, Rachel. I know who you are. I understand what you’re doing down here.”
Rachel’s eyes were bright. She began to speak, broke off and turned her face to the artificial stucco wall.
“How can you know who I am?” she asked.
“Because it’s my business. Perception. Do you understand?”
“I don’t know what I understand,” Rachel said.
“I’ll tell you about it all,” Strickland said. “My version.”
“Your version?” she demanded with unhappy impatience. “Your version of what?”
“The world,” he said. “How it goes. You may spend your life looking at revolutions. You should understand how to look at them correctly.”
The promoters, police characters and lay missionaries in the lobby turned after Strickland and Rachel as they passed.
“I’ve been hyper since I got here,” Rachel said. “For a while I was sick.”
“Hey,” Strickland said, “me too. Sick? Let me tell you!”
As he led her across the lobby, his spirits soared.
He pushed the button to summon the elevator and saw Rachel frown at him and take a step backward. He wanted to reassure her.
“Where are you from, Rachel?”
She looked at him in silence and shook her head.
“I mean, I sort of know where you’re from,” he hastened to say. “You went to private school somewhere. You probably went to progressive camps. Cookouts with food-from-many-lands.”
Rachel raised two fingers to her brow as though her head ached.
“Folk dancing,” Strickland fantasized, “interracial sing-alongs. Am . . . I right?”
Rachel leaned back against the wall beside the elevators and began to slide down it, bending at the knees.
“Hey,” Strickland said to her, “be cool.”
“I have to go,” she said. “I have to wash my walking shorts. Goodbye.”
She was sitting on the floor next to a giant aloe plant between the two elevator doors. The elevator arrived. Although they were operated by push buttons, each of the hotel’s elevators carried an attendant. The attendants, Strickland had heard, were men who had served as informers under the old regime and who had been pressed into the same service by the new. The one who presented himself for service had been liberally tipped by Strickland as a basic precaution and he appeared pleased at the sight of his patron. When Strickland did not step into the elevator, the attendant peered around the corner and saw Rachel on the floor. He looked from the woman to Strickland.
“I suppose I went too far,” Strickland said to the elevator attendant. None of them admitted to a knowledge of English. “I suppose I blew it.”
He stepped into the elevator. It was, in fact, Strickland’s last day in-country. He was bound home to New York to begin work on a film about a billionaire sailboat racer.
“Ándale,” he told the man. “Arriba.”
It was almost all the Spanish he knew. When the doors closed on the lobby and the silent stares of its habitues, he felt a considerable relief.
Halfway up to Strickland’s floor, the operator turned and smiled. When he saw Strickland’s stormy, disappointed face his smile vanished.
“I work in the service of truth,” Strickland told the old man, “which is nowhere welcome. Understand what I mean?”
The operator, seeing his passenger’s disposition improved, smiled and inclined his head. Strickland took a ten-dollar bill and wrapped the man’s hand around it.
“No you don’t,” he said.
3
BESIDE THE SOUND, under the brightening sky, Browne dug in along the shore, planting one foot in front of the other, breathing the sour iodized sea air. He ran with three-inch weights behind his fists, pumping, working the hump of sinew around his shoulders, stretching his legs. Three miles down the beach, the stack of an enormous power plant flashed a red warning beacon from its summit. The lights over the chain-link fence at the plant’s perimeter were Browne’s halfway mark. Panting, he strained to bind his thoughts to the plain rhythm of breath.
His chief regret had always been leaving the Navy. He was aware that this was the fair price of a rational decision, hardly more than nostalgia, a kind of luxury as regrets went. He would not have thrived there. Pushing harder, he turned his face into the breeze, saw the clean line of the Long Island shore and increased his pace. Ahead, the lights of the plant fence went out, then flashed on again as a cloud passed across the risen sun.
Running, Browne felt a pang of expectation in his breast. He felt suddenly outsized by his own hunger, by a desire that filled the new day from sea to sky. When he reached the power plant fence he ran beside it. The harsh squares of the fence and the ugly metal sheds behind it made him feel vaguely captive and violent. He turned off and went back the way he had come.
“What are you waiting for?” he whispered as he pumped over the soft sand. He could not seem to outrun the thing that had settled over him.
In the littered cul-de-sac at the end of his street, he walked off the run and tried to put his mind at rest. After a little while, the anguish and disorder he had experienced began to seem like an illusion. Running could stir things up. It was just another Sunday, he decided. He jogged down to the cigar store for the paper and trotted home with it under his arm. On the way he passed a few solitary walkers and nodded good morning to all. Each person he passed paused to look after him. Browne found himself the only one awake in the house. He tossed the Sunday Times on the kitchen table and called up the back stairs to his sleeping wife and daughter.
“Wake up, people! Pancakes!”
He mixed some pancake batter and diced a few Granny Smith apples in with it.
“Wakee, wakee!” he shouted.
When no one appeared he vaulted up the stairs to his daughter’s room and banged on the door. Maggie was down from school for a long weekend, and it occurred to him that he should make an effort to spend part of the day with her.
“Mag! Up all hands! Time to jump off, my young friend.”
When there was no answer he prepared to assault the door again. His daughter’s scream arrested his hand.
“Goddam it,” she cried from inside, “get out of here! Leave me alone!”
“Now listen . . .” Browne began. He was surprised and hurt. It was hard to be reasonable. “Listen here, Maggie.”
“Leave me alone!” the girl shrieked. She sounded utterly hysterical. “Leave! Me! Alone! Leave me the fuck alone!”
As she had recently discovered, Browne could not abide her using such words.
“Open the door, Margaret,” he demanded. He tried the door but it had been locked from the inside. He rattled the knob, resenting the absurdity of his position and quite
aware of it. “Don’t you use that kind of language to me!” Her adolescent wrath made him feel brutal and ridiculous. He pursed his lips in frustration.
Maggie raised a pitiable moan.
“Please! Please go away.”
“No, I won’t go away,” Browne said. “Nor will I stand here talking to a door.”
The door of the master bedroom opened and Anne came out into the hall wearing a woolen bathrobe.
“Owen, let it pass.” She came up to him and took hold of his hand, referring to their tenderness of the night before. “Maggie’s had some kind of social crisis. I think she may have a spot of boy trouble.” She led him gently away from Maggie’s door, holding him by both hands.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Browne said. “But it’s no excuse. Did you hear the language she used?”
“Please let it pass, Owen. I’m sure she’ll apologize. She’s been in a state, the poor kid.”
“For God’s sake,” he muttered. “I didn’t know she commanded such language.”
“Oh, they all do,” Anne said. “She does it to get a rise out of you.”
Browne let himself be drawn away.
“Look, take your shower,” Anne told him. “I’ll make the pancakes. You cool off and have your shower. Don’t let it spoil your morning.”
In the shower, Browne tried to salve his bruised propriety and ease the anxiety he felt about his only daughter, whose adventures in the jungle of young America filled him with dread. It was a difficult time to bring up children, he thought, almost as bad as the late sixties and seventies had been. Browne’s expectations were high and Maggie had been an exceptionally dutiful and well-behaved child, more attuned to her parents than to her peers. All this, it seemed, was changing and the New England convent school to which, at great cost, they sent her seemed unhelpful. It had been her mother’s school, but Browne had been very reluctant to send her away. Now it seemed that the other girls there were wild and sometimes unwanted at home. Drug use was more of a problem there than in the public schools. He tried not to think of it. He could not bear the thought of his daughter’s pain and she did not, at this point in her life, seem very clever at protecting herself from it.
Browne and Anne consumed the pancakes. Maggie sulked in her room.
“I should take her sailing,” Browne said.
“But the boat’s in Staten Island.”
“Well,” he said, “we could go down there.”
“Surely you don’t feel like doing that today.”
Browne was not much in the mood for sailing. He was picking at his guilt over having Maggie away at school and neglecting her.
“No I don’t, really. I should have taken her along when I moved the boat in the fall.”
“Well,” Anne said, “she has other things on her mind.”
As it turned out, he could not find much to do with the day. Anne went to work in the study he had built for her, finishing the article she was doing for the yachting magazine where she worked as an editor. Maggie hid out and then slipped away. In the early afternoon, Browne put on his mackinaw and prepared to go in to the office. On his way out he knocked on the study door.
“You should have gone to church this morning,” he told his wife. “To pray for the market.”
They had a laugh together.
4
IN THE TAXI from La Guardia, Strickland had the persistent notion of being followed. He rode with one knee up on the back seat, guarding the road behind. He had noticed a man in the bar at Miami airport watching him, a man he was sure had boarded his flight in Belize. Between Miami and New York he had been upgraded to first class, only to find the same tall mestizo in a seat across the aisle. As his cab mounted the Triborough Bridge his eye was on a Ford Falcon that had left the Grand Central Parkway just behind him. A dark-haired man in sunglasses was at the wheel. A second man of similar appearance sat beside him. All the way across the bridge Strickland kept watch, reflecting that there was no more sinister sight in all of the hemisphere than two tall Latinos in a Ford Falcon. It made you want to pray. When the Ford eased past them to leave the FDR Drive at One Hundred Sixteenth Street, he turned his face away.
Driving downtown, Strickland had a gander at his driver, whose name was presented on the hack license as Kiazim Shokru. He had a bald bullet head and fierce, lustrous eyes behind which burned the fires of Shia or drugs or plain madness.
“So what d . . do you think, Kiazim?” Strickland inquired. “You like New York?”
Kiazim Shokru stared at him in the mirror, apparently with rage.
“No?” They had taken the Forty-eighth Street exit and were deep in gridlock. Strickland was already weary of his new conversation. “Where do you like, then?”
The driver ignored him.
Strickland’s premises were in Hell’s Kitchen, just west of Ninth Avenue. He got out on the corner, took his bag from the trunk and paid off Kiazim. On his way to the building, Strickland was approached by a lost soul who had been begging from passing cars with a Styrofoam cup. He sidled past the man but then thought better of it. Pausing, he filled the man’s cup with his Central American small change.
He let himself in through the metal street door, leaned against the moldering green wall of the first landing and pressed the elevator button. The elevator arrived complete with Archimedeo, the Colombian super, who, seeing Strickland, stepped back in stylized surprise.
“Hey, where you been?”
“Atlantic City,” Strickland told him.
“Yeah,” Archimedeo said, stepping out of his way. “I know where you been.”
Strickland maintained half of the eighth floor of his building, which had been a musical-instrument factory long ago. His place consisted of two cutting rooms, a small office and a big loft space in which he had his living quarters.
Approaching his shop, he heard a radio playing inside. When he pounded on the door someone came to listen by it.
“Yes please?” demanded a nasal, impertinent voice.
“It’s me, Hersey. Open the door.”
The Medeco lock and the deadbolt were undone and Hersey stood before Strickland, bowing and rubbing his hands together. Hersey was an apprentice, an awkward youth of frail and scholarly appearance.
“Welcome, master,” Hersey intoned. It pleased him to assume the demeanor of a freakish laboratory assistant in a horror movie, a role for which he was, in fact, well suited.
“What’s happening?” Strickland asked him. “Everything arrive?”
“I think so. A hundred and eighty rolls. Thirty hours.”
“Got it sunk up?”
“But of course.”
“Good,” said Strickland.
He went back into his quarters, showered and changed. As he dressed, he listened to his message machine. After a while he shut it off. The messages were boring and he was not in the mood to talk on the phone.
Back in the cutting room, he found Hersey at the Steenbeck, working to the creepy contemporary music the youth favored.
“Knock off, Hersey. I want to see what I have.”
“The moment of truth,” Hersey said. He stood up and assumed the parody of a servile cringe.
“Truth is right,” Strickland said.
They sat and watched selected dailies from Strickland’s Central American documentary. There were scenes of political rallies sponsored by the party in power, of religious processions and of volunteers for the harvest. There were sensitive studies of the dead. There were views from the door of a moving helicopter that raced its shadow over the savanna in a ghostly reference to Vietnam, of flamingos rising in thousands from a mountain lake, and of pre-Columbian ruins, somber and murderous. And there were interviews of every sort.
“Christ,” Hersey said, watching an American diplomat attempting to explain himself, “you really open them up.”
“I get them to spread,” Strickland said. “That I do.”
They watched the brother of a cabinet minister, sounding a little the worse
for rum, attempt to explain what could not be explained to a camera.
Hersey giggled asthmatically.
“Doesn’t he know you’re shooting?”
“Sure he knows. And then again he doesn’t.”
After about an hour of film, Strickland threw the switch.
“That’s about all I can take,” he told Hersey. “The pungent odor of the real thing.” He clapped his hands. “We’re in business.”
“Take a bow, big guy,” Hersey said.
Strickland reflected on how often he and his principal assistant found themselves on the same wavelength. Distractingly obnoxious, Hersey was nonetheless a formidably gifted super-techie who could edit, operate the camera or take sound, enduring Strickland’s proximity the while. His master prized him.
“They’re so urgent,” Hersey said admiringly. “And they always blow it. How do you do that?”
Strickland rounded on him.
“You don’t understand, do you? Do you really think it’s me getting them to look bad? On the contrary, they piss all over themselves. Half the time I have to clean up their act.”
Hersey was chastened. He took off his thick-lensed glasses and wiped them on a Sight Saver.
“It’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.”
“Hey, I decide who the good guys are, Hersey. When you learn how to cut film, you’ll decide.”
“Really?”
Preparing to go, Hersey put a jacket over his black rising-sun banzai T-shirt. In the front pocket of the jacket he carried three ballpoint pens as a joke. Generally, he favored Astor Place haircuts and suits of Milanese drape.
“What about this guy Hylan?” the assistant asked on his way out. Hylan was the yachtsman who was to feature in the next project. Strickland had an appointment with him.
“Hard to say,” Strickland said. “On the one hand he’s our patron. On the other hand he has a cruel infantile face.”
Hersey’s laughter echoed from the outer loft.
Alone in his cutting room, Strickland ran another reel in sections, fast-forwarding from time to time. The scenes with the birds struck him particularly. The rising flamingos, swallows in the cactus, doves and vultures in the palm trees—he could not account for all the footage of birds he saw. Mythic and heraldic notions occurred to him. He whistled “Paloma” between his teeth. There was a way in which the birds proclaimed the country.