Say Uncle

by Benjamin Laskin

  Anya, on the other hand, viewed nutrition as the basis of a healthy life. Her silky hair and glowing complexion attested to a lifetime of good eating and grooming habits. After Anya took the kitchen reigns none of us experienced anything worse than a few sniffles. Even the rare cold was short-lived, as Anya was well armed with an array of herbal remedies. She loathed the huge pharmaceutical companies, and accused them of conspiring to keep the world ignorant of the preventive powers of good nutrition, herbs, and supplements. This was but one of the many conspiracies she espoused. Her eloquent distrust of big business was not kept secret from the girls, an irony I found amusing considering our work. We both had carried out operations whose main beneficiary was some multi-billion-dollar corporation that had convinced the government that what was good for Company X was good for the country.

  I thought Anya’s preaching and moralizing about ethics and integrity were both a vain satisfaction she got at hearing her own voice, and a clever masquerade meant to keep the girls from knowing the true nature of the future careers for which they were being so painstakingly trained. I was wrong.

  Dinner was followed by instruction in more specialized skills: computer usage, medical training, explosive engineering; as well as study and lectures in obscure skills such as lip reading, sign language, and etiquette.

  Sharc wanted the girls to become thoroughly versatile, capable of handling any situation from the most primitive and brute to the most blue-blooded and diamond-studded. Sharc’s expectations were clear:

  “I want these girls to be able to live on a diet of sand and termites if they have to. They will make princes blush and pirates walk their own planks for them. They will outrun and out-spear any jungle bunny and outclass and out-charm Europe’s prissiest royalty. I want three warrior princesses who are as at home in a Bedouin tent as in the Queen’s parlor. If need be, they’ll be able to discuss fucking quantum mechanics with Nobel fucking physicists, tree felling with an Oregon lumberjack, or wine legs with a goddamn sommelier! Do this for me Agent Fuckwit and you’ll be well compensated.”

  “You realize,” I said, “that what you’re talking about will take at least a decade of day in, day out training and education.”

  “It’s a cushy job, what do you care? It keeps you out of harm’s way. You should be thanking me.”

  “I don’t have half the skills you’re asking for. How can I teach what I don’t know?”

  “You think I don’t know what a lame-ass you are? You’re obsolete, Agent. But don’t worry, I don’t hold that against you. I’ll be flying in specialists to cover your ignorance. You and the woman teach them all you know. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  Ishin Dotai

  Excerpts from Journal Six, continued…

  …I had to hand it to Sharc. Mad though his plan was, as the years passed I became a believer.

  One girl on her own could not have endured the schedule, pressure, alienation, and constant uprooting that the Organization demanded. But the girls supported one another and forged a seamless alliance, fusing in a way I could not have foreseen. The children went beyond mere team spirit and camaraderie. They nurtured one another and seemed to grow into one soul, playing house in a mansion of their own making.

  Each girl, however, exhibited her own distinct personality. Lena from Göteborg was cool and stoic; she had snowy white hair and frosty blue eyes that snapped every passing image with incredible detail, and never forgot what she saw. Hiromi from Osaka, with a curtain of silky black hair, was doe-eyed, eternally patient, intuitive, and wise beyond her years. Millie from Perth was cranky, willful, and capricious; she was always first to charge and last to quit.

  Anya and I never hinted to the children at the fate that had been chosen for them. They were meant to grow up believing that life as they lived it was the natural course of things. The time would come when we would tell the girls who they were and what was expected of them, but by then, according to Sharc, they would have already passed well into the unique world they were destined to inhabit, and willingly embrace it. After all, their destination had its privileges. The Organization would take good care of them as long as they toed the line.

  The girls’ eventual assignments would be very dangerous, but they were being raised to be interested in only the most challenging and riskiest experiences. A life once expanded to new horizons would not willingly retreat to old, cramped, and monotonous margins. The frivolous, petty desires and amusements of the common world could never interest souls such as theirs. A person who has acquired an unusual skill enjoys exercising it until he can no longer improve upon it. When Millie learned to walk on her hands she was reluctant for a time to stand on her feet.

  Anya and I were not ideal parents, but happiness grew from situations much odder than ours. Although we never coddled the girls nor gave them the kind of affection normal parents shower upon their children, we never abused them, and we always gave them respect, encouragement, and honest attention. We were not a textbook family, but when I considered my own childhood, which by all outward appearances seemed model, we were far happier.

  Anya and I discussed at length the girls’ happiness. As immoral as our work would have appeared to most people, we truly believed we were helping these children to build a foundation for lifelong happiness. As a matter of practicality, their happiness was paramount to achieving our goals and those of the Organization. Simply, unhappiness would impede progress; happiness would accelerate it.

  Anya and I agreed that happiness depended partly on external circumstances and partly upon oneself. The former included food, shelter, health, and security. The girls had each of these. The latter was more problematic. After much debate we divided it into two camps: philosophical and psychological.

  Philosophically, we sided with Aristotle and his golden mean, and Epictetus and the Stoics and their basic premise of the education of the will, which meant that some things exist within your will and others without, and that the wise man will seek to understand which is which and live accordingly.

  Psychologically, we specified passion and desire as both a blessing and a curse of individual existence. Positively channeled, they contributed to a healthy, joy-enhancing life; negatively manifested, to a sickly, bitter, and joyless life. Among the negative passions, we named fear, envy, and self-pity. It seemed pointless to deal with each and every psychological brute, so instead we strived to name the source that spawned the other weaknesses. We settled on self-absorption, or the preoccupation of the self, and its companion—boredom.

  Anya liked to say that, “an interesting person is an interested person.” She believed that if you are obsessed with the state of your own happiness there can be no genuine interest in the world around them, and so you live fearing that the world may injure you, fail you, or ignore you. The happy person, on the other hand, is the person who lives objectively, who offers his or her affection freely, and who has a wide array of interests. Such a person becomes an object of interest and affection to others.

  We believed, then, that though the training we put the girls through was difficult and exhausting, it satisfied the criteria upon which happiness depended. As boredom was nonexistent, self-absorption was not an option. Busy as we kept the girls, they found nothing tedious about their lives. Their education was hands on, interactive, and stimulating. Ever curious, they loved to read, and because of their wide interests, book learning was never a problem either.

  I took no credit for our happy circumstances. All credit belonged to the three remarkable girls. Anya and I marveled at their intimacy. They never fought, bickered, or teamed up against one another, but patiently endured one another’s idiosyncrasies, even encouraged them. Giggles and laughter were the only noise we ever heard through the door of their bedroom.

  Though Anya and I insisted we were guardians and not parents, the girls cared little about the distinction. To them we were simply Ellery and Anya, and they loved us.

  A Battle of Epigrammatic Proportions

/>   Excerpts from Journal Six, continued…

  …As the years passed Anya warmed more and more to the children, but to me she remained as frigid as a Siberian winter. Any inquiry on my part into anything other than the practicalities at hand was met with a look of cool annoyance. I took her silence and lack of curiosity into my own life as a terse message that she considered me beneath her, as necessary and welcome as one’s appendix.

  How much did she know of me? I wondered. What might Sharc have told her? And why should I give a damn what she thought about me, I who had seen and done and survived more life than any mortal ought to be able to boast? I, who month by month, was covertly planning and executing my escape into anonymity by leaving her, the children, Sharc, and the Organization far behind? I should have been callous to what this woman, or any woman thought of me. Dammit, I was in love.

  The realization staggered me, and my insecurity perplexed me. I became self-conscious and clumsy. Like some gawky, pimple-faced teenager, in front of Anya my mouth became my permanent footlocker.

  Then, one fateful, late summer afternoon near the end of a three-month stint in the Pyrenees Mountains, Anya’s glacial waters thawed. Having left the girls at the ranch with a tutor, we went for a stroll in the woods to discuss arrangements for our fall quarters in Greece. Our conversation turned to the girls and their happiness. I thought them plenty content already, but Anya, who always needed something to worry about to feel dutiful, had been refining her philosophy of life and happiness, and felt the urge to preach it to me.

  As usual, she bolstered her arguments for her latest theory by invoking the words of history’s greatest minds, much as a Bible thumper points to passages of scripture to prove a point. This day, Anya was feeling more brilliant than usual. Carried away by her genius, she started to quote long passages of classical poetry, philosophy, and literature. I asked her if the memorization of such tracts was standard KGB curriculum. Insulted by my quip, Anya turned indignant and looked at me like I was a cretin.

  “Well,” she said, “I ought not have expected an American to understand.”

  “Understand what?” I said. “Those musty old words you like to regurgitate? I can quote too: ‘Rise early. Work late. Strike oil.’ J. Paul Getty.”

  “Briefcase-wielding barbarians, what do you Americans know of culture? If you can’t put a dollar sign on it, it’s worthless. Isn’t that right?”

  “And if you can’t invoke the spirit of some long-dead charlatan it’s not worth uttering, huh?”

  Anya rolled her eyes in disgust. “I’m not going to demean myself with this conversation. You know nothing of the intrinsic value of art, literature—beauty. You’re an ignorant pig.”

  I smiled and said, “It is amazing how complete is the illusion that beauty is goodness.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Dostoevsky. Ever heard of him?”

  She folded her arms and eyed me suspiciously.

  I said, “‘Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.’ George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra.”

  Anya sucked back her smile.

  “‘The one serious conviction that a man should have,’” I said, “‘is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.’ Samuel Butler.”

  Anya flipped back her hair, planted a fighting stance, and put up her dukes. The battle was on…

  Anya jabbed with two Dostoevskies and a Tolstoy. I blocked with Emerson and uppercut with Thoreau. Her desperation anything but quiet, she unleashed a flurry of Pushkin, Turgenev, and Chekhov. I stumbled backwards, dazed and confused. Shaking it off, I rushed at her and tackled her to the ground, tickling her with Twain. I pinned her arms down with both James’s, a Henry left and a William right. But her will was unbelievable, and she threw me off as if I were the devil with some well-placed Goethe. Anya scrambled to her feet, and headed west. I laid chase.

  She pulled out her poets, and I ran into a shower of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Taking cover behind some Shelley I answered with Keats. Then, under a Byronic cloak, I slipped into the darkness and retreated toward the Orient.

  Anya stayed hot on my tail, taunting me with Sufisms as I ran. I dropped verses of Bhagavad-Gita, hoping to shake up her chakras, but kundalini rising, she dodged and lobbed a fearsome round of Upanishads at me.

  Anya knew exactly where I was going and headed me off with Confucius. Showing no mercy, she then hammered at me with Mencius. Thinking she had me beat, gloating over my imminent destruction, she tried to end my suffering with a final Buddhistic barrage.

  But she had underestimated me. I was not going to go gentle into that good night. I had some satori up my sleeve yet, and swept her off her feet with the Tao Te Ching. She looked up at me searchingly, unable to put her thoughts into words as I fluttered over her like a butterfly and recited Chuang-Tze. Finally, in my arms endlessly rocking, Whitman on both our lips, covered in leaves and grass, we sang the body electric.

  Hostile Blood

  I awoke to the sound of birds, which is how mankind was meant to awake, Doreen’s head on my chest, the both of us wrapped in a Lahu blanket. We washed our faces in the river, breakfasted on last night’s leftover crumbs, and then we were on our way, certain we would arrive at some road or Thai village in no time.

  No time can be eternity. We walked and walked and found nothing, just more of the same dusty mountain paths and lush valleys. As we hiked I pondered the latest journal. It answered many questions, but others sprang up in their place.

  Other than Anonymous Man being my long lost Uncle Ellery, I still didn’t see the connection to me. After fifty years of silence, why come to me of all people? If he felt compelled to return to his family roots, why single me out, a distant twig on the family tree? Why not someone closer to the trunk, someone who knew more about him, like my mother, or one of my aunts?

  “Furthermore,” I said, no longer able to keep my thoughts to myself, “why all the foreplay? Why not pay me a visit in person? Knock on my door and say, ‘Hello, I’m your Uncle Ellery.’ I’d have let the guy in. You’d have let him in too, right? I mean, family is family, right? If he’s a total loser then you just say, ‘Sorry pal, we might be related but I don’t know you from Adam.’ Ya know? Doreen…? Hey, are you listening to me?”

  “Oh, Guy, would you please just drop it? I’m tired, okay? There aren’t going to be any more journals. We’ll be on our way home within forty-eight hours, and that’s that. Finished. Done. Back to normal, okay? As soon as we get home I’m telling dad everything. He’ll take care of it. We’ll call the police, the FBI, whoever it takes. Just keep walking. I’m not interested in your theories or his stupid life.”

  “But you are,” I insisted. “Last night when we read about Noriko, Johanna, and Melody, I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough for you.”

  Doreen picked up her pace.

  “You know,” I said, pulling back along side her. “Maybe there’s a little bit of you in these journals too, Doreen, and that’s what makes you so uncomfortable.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Skeletons in the closet, remember? The ones everyone else knew about but me. The ones I couldn’t possibly have been interested in. Remember?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “You know something that you’re not telling me.”

  “I don’t know squat, Guy.”

  “Bull, you knew all along that these journals were written by Uncle Ellery. Didn’t you? Doreen…?”

  “Okay, the thought crossed my mind.”

  “So why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Because I didn’t want to believe it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I knew in my bones that it could only mean trouble, and I was right. Damn him.”

  “But he’s our uncle. He’s blood.”

  “Great uncle,” she corrected, “and he’s a monster. You heard what mom and Aunt Paula said about him.”

 
“Why should I believe them? They never even met the guy. It’s a load of crap if you ask me.”

  “He abandoned his family,” she snapped. “He never once mentions writing them to say he was okay. Don’t you think they were worried sick? He was a rotten son and an even worse…brother.”

  “So they thought him a bad egg, big deal. You heard what he wrote. He had no choice. That Sharc guy made him do it.”

  “I think he purposely wanted to spite them. He was reckless, irresponsible, callous—”

  “I don’t see how you can accuse him of things you know nothing about,” I said. “Unless, of course, you know something more than what you’re telling me, which I think you do.”

  “I know what mom and Aunt Paula said,” Doreen huffed, “and considering the unconscionable danger he has put us in, I have every reason to believe them.”

  “The guy has got to have his reasons, and I’m willing to suspend judgment until I have evidence to the contrary.”

  “We were almost killed, you moron. What more evidence do you need?”

  Wow, I thought. Doreen is really upset. She had never raised her voice like that to me before, ever. It hurt me too. Maybe I was being unreasonable. God knows it wouldn’t have been the first time.

  We walked another thirty minutes in awkward silence. I knew that Doreen was mad at me, and knowing Doreen I also knew that she was mad at herself for being mad at me. Maybe I was being selfish. I shouldn’t be dragging her into this thing, I thought contritely. Didn’t I learn anything from that kidnapping? There was no way I wanted to go through that again. No, this was between Ellery and me.

  The trail descended sharply and then cornered and leveled out again, cutting a narrow swath through the heavy foliage.