Say Uncle

by Benjamin Laskin

“Doreen likes her life just fine,” I said.

  “Not for long…” she sang to herself.

  “Huh?”

  “Gotta run, Guy. Get better fast.” She pecked me again and disappeared out the door.

  For a long time I lay awake staring up at the ceiling, thinking. As annoying as Melody was, she sure was interesting. I wanted to talk to her more. I wanted to get to know her better. I wanted to wake up in the morning with her hair in my face.

  Obviously this was not what she had in mind, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I felt bad and blue and yucky. My brains slopped around inside my cranium like so much sour milk. My body was stiff and my heart beat in a lonely, mournful monotony. On top of that my crotch ached and I had no pubic hair. I felt like a snail without its shell.

  A Good Dump

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, little brother, whatcha doin’?”

  “Reading.”

  “It’s a gorgeous day. Let’s go for a hike.”

  “I have a final on Monday, Doreen.”

  “Don’t be a poop, Guy. I haven’t seen you in almost three weeks. I miss you.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Zeeva’s coming…”

  “Yeah?”

  “She’s hoping you’ll come.”

  “She said that?”

  “She likes you, Guy.”

  “As a friend…”

  “Don’t start with that again. Come on, we’ll be over in an hour, okay?”

  “I really shouldn’t, Doreen. I can get an A in this stupid class, you know that? An A. Me. Guy.”

  “But it’s a stupid class like you say and the professor is a charlatan, so what does it prove? Study tomorrow. I’ll help you. I had his class two years ago. It’s probably the same final. I’ll dig it up and bring it over. Is it a yes?”

  “What’s gotten into you? It was you who told me to take his class. You said he was a genius.”

  “I changed my mind. I’m not so easily impressed anymore. He’s a pompous ass just as you always said he was. An hour, okay?”

  “Doreen…”

  “What?”

  “I have something to talk to you about.”

  “Can’t it wait? Zeeva and I want to put together a nice picnic and have to run to the store.”

  “I’ve already waited almost twenty years…”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothin’. See you in an hour.”

  Sitting on the floor of my small, thick-walled, adobe duplex in Tucson, Arizona on a May morning in the final week of spring semester, I was looking at straight A’s. I always knew I could do it, and I was going to do it that semester just to prove it. For the past four months I felt like proving something, and the only thing I could think of was straight A’s in school.

  An open book, the third of the journals Melody had promised, lay face down on my lap. The author whose name I didn’t know had become one of my favorites. I called him Anonymous Man—Mr. A, for short.

  I found the first journal waiting for me under my pillow when I returned from semester break. About four weeks later I discovered the second one in a brown paper sack on the dashboard of my truck. Both my apartment and my truck had been locked. The third one turned up mysteriously in my daypack while I was at the library. It was unnerving to think that my privacy could be so easily invaded, but I kept it to myself as I had promised Melody I would.

  I hadn’t seen nor heard from Melody since the hospital, but I still thought about her a lot. I thought about Johanna and Noriko too. I kept Johanna’s book by my bed where I often perused it, and tacked above my desk were three favorite pictures of Noriko from the magazine Debra threw at me. I also had a snapshot of Doreen with her new friend, Zeeva.

  Zeeva was a graduate student from Israel who came to study anthropology. Doreen met her one day in the cafeteria at the start of the semester and they became fast friends.

  Brilliant and talented, Zeeva spoke at least seven languages and possessed a phenomenal memory. Once I heard her recite two hours of poetry from Baudelaire, Rilke, Dante, Shakespeare, and Whitman. Zeeva was tall, athletically slender, and had long, curly black hair and a large, soft mouth with thick rosy lips. Her eyes were dark blue, the color of the desert sky at dusk. I liked the way she carried herself too. She reminded me of Melody and the others, and I had a crush on her. Also like them, I didn’t know how old she was, only that she was older. I thought any of them could pass for their late-twenties, though I supposed they were older than that. Whatever, I didn’t care.

  I didn’t know where Zeeva had acquired her many skills. Because she rarely talked about herself, all I knew about her came from Doreen. I heard that she grew up on a kibbutz at the foot of the Carmel Mountains, did her time in the army, traveled extensively, and was an only child.

  Doreen had clearly fallen under her spell, and had changed considerably since having met her. She started blowing off classes and dating, preferring instead the outdoors, reading, and Zeeva’s company. I saw less and less of her, though that was as much my fault as Doreen’s. I was jealous of her too—not because of her closeness with Zeeva, but because she was succeeding at the same kind of thing that had landed me in the hospital.

  Doreen was always a good athlete—I never beat her at anything—but now under Zeeva’s guidance she was fast becoming some kind of iron-woman commando. Zeeva turned her on to rock climbing, archery, martial arts, orienteering, and even scuba diving, which took them to Mexico on many weekends. Naturally cheerful before, Doreen had become positively vivacious. I never saw her so happy.

  The changes in my sister’s life didn’t end with her new outdoor enthusiasms. The last time I stopped by her house it seemed obvious that she had also turned some philosophical corner in her mind. Her place used to look like the inside of a thrift store: full of crap. She hoarded crap—bobbles, trinkets, knickknacks, toys, dolls, posters, souvenirs—and anything else she thought looked cute or cool or old. Now, every dusty gewgaw she had ever collected had disappeared.

  But she didn’t stop with curios and mementos. Gone too was her hair blower, curling iron, electric can opener, coffee maker, and just about every other gadget or appliance, including her microwave oven.

  The hundred and one different types of cleaners that she kept under her kitchen sink dematerialized, and her bathroom boasted only soap, shampoo, toothbrush and toothpaste.

  I used to like raiding Doreen’s refrigerator, but now she stocked it with only fresh fruit and vegetables. Worse still, her cupboards contained not a single bag of chips or cookies, and no label on any product listed ingredients longer than three syllables.

  Fast food and dairy products were out; fish was in. She bought garlic by the pound. But nothing dismayed me more than the absence of her two pride and joys: her megawatt stereo system, which had taken up half of her living room, and even more unbelievable, her 50-inch Sony LCD TV.

  “But why?” I exclaimed.

  “To see what it would be like. An experiment of sorts.”

  “Don’t you miss all that crap?”

  She smiled wryly. “Nope, that was the best dump I ever took.”

  Anonymous Man

  I laced up my hiking boots, picked up the journal again, and began to read where I had left off while I waited for the girls to come and get me.

  Mr. A’s handwriting was awful, but by now I had become adept at deciphering its hieroglyphs. The journal was absorbing reading, and yet the more I read the uneasier I became. Small details leaped from the yellowed pages and nipped at my ears. Often I would look up and ask aloud, “Who are you?”

  The journals began with the writer as a young man in World War II. He was an American, about my age, leader of his platoon, and smack dab on the German front. He mentioned no actual military movements, and recorded few dates or details concerning his location or specific orders. Presumably, he felt that if he were ever captured or killed, such information in the hands of the Germans might be useful to them.

  He
wrote mainly about what he thought and felt, and his reflections were mostly philosophical. Many literary references appeared in the journals and he came across as well read. Perhaps he had studied literature or philosophy at university before the war, but he made no mention of having done so. His writing style was often sophomoric, pretentious, and full of the bravado of youth. No wonder I liked him so much!

  Here, I thought, was a young man, an American, far from home, the same age as me, the leader of his platoon, living day to day in the maw of death, and whose death was he mourning? Philosophy’s! The guy had character. So what if he didn’t write with the eloquence of an Emerson or Santayana. He wasn’t sitting in a leather-covered rocker, snugly warm in front of a fireplace, able to polish his words like an apple. No, he was knee deep in muck and gore and madness. He wrote on the run and his words were raw, as if cracked open between his fingers like peanuts. What moved me was that he wrote at all and as well as he did.

  During quiet times, while others in his platoon talked about sports or food or women they missed back home, he read philosophy and literature, studied German and French, and meditated on the history-making time he lived in, and the effects it was having on his conscience and soul.

  Though he must have felt very lonely at times and quite the outsider, he never complained of it. Often while reading his journals I was reminded of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor, General, and Stoic philosopher who, while trying to hold back the onrush of barbarian hordes among the misty swamps of the Danube, also kept a journal, the later revered Meditations. Anonymous Man, however, was not the leader of an empire. He was little more than a boy scout guiding a small band of bedraggled, luckless youths through mazes of mine fields, ambush-haunted woods, and bureaucratic red tape. Marcus Aurelius didn’t want to be emperor and Anonymous Man didn’t want to be platoon leader. His fellow soldiers pushed him into the part after their commander tripped over a mine and was turned into hamburger before their eyes.

  As platoon leader, Anonymous Man was the final link in a long chain of command that began at the mouth of some general at SHAEF, the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force. This became Anonymous Man’s introduction into the fantastic world of decision-making, where the sparks of clashing egos supremely set the world ablaze. Many pages in his journals described his efforts to understand how these magnificent minds operated. He often wondered if he was fighting the same war that they were.

  The second journal found him asking bigger questions. He never doubted that Hitler was a madman and that Germany had to be stopped. He believed wholeheartedly that he was fighting a just war and that all the carnage and misery served a noble end. He wrote that he’d feel honored if he or one of his men could fire the decisive bullet between Hitler’s beady eyes.

  Still, a nagging skepticism frequently leaked from his pen. He felt that greed, pride, moral cowardice and willful ignorance is what got the world into this mess in the first place, and that these sins would live to wreck havoc another day. Frustrated with his superiors, suspicious of world leaders, and distrustful of politicians in general, he wrote that his first allegiance was to his platoon—to the men he knew, respected, and loved. He wrote:

  How is it that nations can’t seem to find a dime to invest in common sense, and that the smallest step in that direction comes only after a terrific grunt and much mumbling under the breath; yet, publish the word WAR and overnight governments will spring to their feet with fistfuls of money to throw against their enemies? If one went by numbers only, he’d have to conclude that hate accomplishes in a month what prudence and good will has no chance of procuring in a lifetime.

  • • •

  Instead of counting sheep at night, I count the chain of command.

  • • •

  My men are fighting and dying in a war started by a bunch of big babies.

  • • •

  To hear a few of my men talk, you’d think that this front line is safer than the streets they came from back home. “At least here,” laughed one, “when I crawl back into my hole after a hard day’s work my old man ain’t around to take swipes at my head with a beer bottle.”

  • • •

  In the last two thousand years, how many battles were waged on this same worthless scrap of ground I sleep on tonight? I wonder. How many corpses am I lying on top of? How many unanswered prayers am I lying below? Why should I think that fifty or a hundred or a thousand years hence this cursed ground won’t still be swallowing up young men and their prayers?

  After a long, dreary winter campaign the third journal opens with this curious passage:

  I was on guard duty, and it was just before dawn. It was so quiet and still that I thought I could hear the grass waking from its winter slumber. My breath hung in the cold air, the only clouds in the sky, as the first tints of dawn spilled over the horizon. I was sitting in a tree watching a large bird soar playfully in the distance. How free and contented it looked. As I watched it, a strange, foreign joy began to rise within me, and for the first time in years I smiled in pure delight, happy to the brink of tears.

  I didn’t know why, but all at once my life seemed so amazing to me. I felt I was floating in a vast sea of meaning, as if everything was connected in a significant way. I found it astounding that I could have ever been bored or unhappy in my life. Even the worst experiences of the past seemed exaggerated in their gravity. I felt buoyant and free, as if my mind had bobbed up like a cork from the bottom of a brown, roiling river. I knew intuitively that the highest virtue is courage, that all other virtues are helpless without it, and that with it anything is possible…

  For the next four hundred pages I witnessed the making of a consciousness. Anonymous Man no longer asked questions that had no answers. Gone too were his tirades and indignant flailing against an absurdity too blob-like and slippery to nail down. A new confidence resonated in his writing, a new sense of purpose. A year at the helm of his platoon had made him stronger and wiser. In the first journal he expressed doubts about his ability to lead, but after a strenuous winter and many struggles, in the third journal he came across iron-spined and confirmed in his competency.

  He began to think beyond the war, not longingly, but purposefully. He never mentioned returning home to America. Apparently, he had no girlfriend waiting for him there and no family either, for he never wrote of one. He talked of travel and adventure, of making money, of study, and of experiencing life to the fullest.

  He formulated a philosophy, a code to live by, intended for no one but himself. His aim was not material wealth and the supposed security it was said to bring—something he mocked—but more life: a life lived deeper and more authentically.

  The meaning of discipline covered a few dozen pages in the journal; discipline not for his men, but for himself. He believed that nothing great could be accomplished without it. In the journal he made a long list of exercises that he vowed to practice; disciplines for the mind as well as the body.

  The physical training was similar to what an athlete might undergo, stretching, running, and calisthenics. Mental training included the memorization of the two cheap novels he had in his possession, one in French and the other in German, to help him learn those languages. He also formulated his own brand of meditation, including the curious, quasi-religious rite of rising every morning before the dawn to climb a tree.

  Although his men joked that he made boot camp appear easy, they became inspired by his pluck and determination. I laughed out loud when Anonymous Man recounted how one foggy morning his entire platoon, as a joke, followed him into the treetops. Obviously a good sport, Anonymous Man was not indignant, and what began as a joke became a ritual, for from that day on whenever there were trees to climb, the entire platoon rose to huddle in the treetops like birds to greet the dawn. “Arise,” they would sing out, “and live as though the eyes of Epicurus were upon thee!” They even dubbed themselves, ‘The Druid Patrol.’

  Anonymous Man was surprised and pleased by th
e many changes he witnessed in his platoon after having taken over command, but he didn’t boast about his accomplishments. He marveled at his men’s camaraderie and even more at their faith in his ability to lead. He was neither the oldest nor the strongest among them, but they trusted him. He led by example and his men followed him because they respected and loved him.

  This wretched war drags on and has never seemed more hopeless, yet the more it demands from my men, the more they seem to have. Merry in the midst of disaster! I love these brave soldiers.

  Through his scanty details I learned that his missions often consisted of sneaking back and forth across enemy lines in operations of rescue or sabotage. Their successes soon earned them a reputation as a band of eccentric, reckless and unorthodox mavericks.

  The Druids’ enthusiasm and daredevil tactics, however, often put them in opposition to the starred and striped brass from whom they took their orders, when they took them, the weight of the censure falling upon the shoulders of Anonymous Man. The Druids behaved as if they were beholden to no one, and represented no Republic but themselves.

  The third journal ended abruptly. It was winter again and the Druid Patrol had just ambushed and captured a dozen or so Germans. As was his habit, Anonymous Man struck up a friendly conversation with the captives. He often practiced his German on his prisoners, which he believed they mistook as torture. A prisoner once joked to him that if the Americans could broadcast his awful German across Europe, the Germans would throw down their weapons and surrender in swarms. After getting what useful military information he could from the captives, Anonymous Man moved on to more interesting matters. He said, “I liked to see if there is any Goethe in them.”

  On this particular day he found a young, blond, blue-eyed medic named Hennes who was thrilled to discuss the German greats with him. As it was, the young man dreamed of becoming a scholar, but his father forbade him, insisting that he go into the family business. Nevertheless, books remained his passion and Anonymous Man found him very knowledgeable. The German admitted being an admirer of the American thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom he had come to via the German philosopher, Nietzsche.