All-Day Breakfast

by Adam Lewis Schroeder

  “I’m sorry for yours too. More than you can really know.”

  “Oh, Dave? Don’t be, no, he’s a piece of shit.”

  Mrs. Abel stood in a hairnet beneath the American flag. The hungry crowd bumped me on either side as I loaded my paper plate with pineapple segments, and all the time I smiled up at Mrs. A with zero effect while she surveyed the snack tables despotically.

  “So I guess you want gum?” Grace’s mom asked someone—I couldn’t pinpoint if she was behind or beside me.

  And what I’d thought were humdrum cantaloupe cubes were actually mango! Gary had been alive the last time I’d tasted bacon, and since then my gastronomic energy had turned entirely toward tropical fruit, to the detriment of the kids’ birthday parties. Did they have the least idea how hard it was to get mangosteen in season in Nebraska? Someone squeezed my elbow.

  “Are you free for dinner?” Kim asked, despite the bacon between her incisors.

  “Uh, no, afraid not. I need to get back to my kids tonight.”

  “Oh, that’s sweet—you’ve got kids of your own?”

  Fuck you if you think I don’t have kids. I turned and showed Mrs. Abel my twenty-eight fierce teeth, all wolfman, the thin veil protecting civilization, but Mrs. A didn’t notice that either. My plate bent in my hand like a big taco. Kim swirled away into the square dance of small talk, but Megan and Clint, surrounded by celery-chewing admirers, had circulated nearer.

  I led with my elbow to get within six feet of them, until I ran up against Colleen. She raised an eyebrow and stole a segment of my pineapple.

  “Megan looks beautiful,” I said gently.

  “If you’re so stressed, go ahead and pull your ear.”

  “Hilarious. Are you still pissed off?”

  “I’m here for Megan, period. And for that matter I don’t need you around to be pissed off.” She tucked her toothpick into my breast pocket. “I quit the insurance so I could work full-time at the junkyard, know why?”

  I shrugged, nearly tipping the plate—a hundred people were talking so I had to concentrate like hell on what she was saying.

  “Because that’s what the world is—salvage. Junk. Selling insurance demands that you care the least crap about the future. Anyway, forget that, I’m going to stand here smiling for Megan’s sake, that’s good parenting.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  We gazed at the valedictorians. A white-haired woman swayed in front of them, miming she was dragging on a joint. Clint guffawed good-naturedly. Kirsten née McAvoy stepped in and Megan hugged her tight, the purple gown enveloping them both.

  Colleen started talking without looking at me, so I didn’t catch on right away.

  “And I’m right where you are,” she said, “I understand you’re broken up about her, you did cartwheels on the stupid tv, but don’t take it out on your kids, you know? I bet your daughter looks more like her all the time, but even so you should hang out with your daughter instead of these kids, because what do these kids care?”

  With the plate in my one hand, I realized I’d have to eat straight off it like a dog. She folded her arms and seemed to study my face. I was trying not to listen to her.

  “When’s the last time you saw the poor kid?”

  “Yesterday,” I said.

  “I can’t get used to how weird you look.”

  I pushed the paper plate against her chest and she grabbed it before it tipped, then I angled past the white-haired dope-smoker to extend my hand to Clint. We shook.

  “Clint, buddy,” I said. “So great to see you up there. I’m so proud of you guys.”

  He gave a tight-lipped smile and let my hand go. Kirsten took a step back, watching, so I shook Megan’s hand too. It felt dry and tiny.

  “Oh, hey, Mr. Giller, you came! That’s so great.”

  “Sure,” I nodded. “Wouldn’t have missed it.”

  They defaulted to their toothiest smiles. They’d rehearsed watching the “In Memorium” slideshow a dozen times so it was all old news, which was how it ought to have been. Maybe they didn’t even remember Velouria. It was time for them to start college and have sex with hundreds of people. They swayed their enormous sleeves back and forth.

  “So,” they asked, “everything good with you?”

  I walked back down the hallway, past bored younger sisters pulling off each others’ Band-Aids, toward the open doors to the parking lot—a square so bright I couldn’t look right at it. I was done with Hoover. The dead kids had all graduated, so I could forget that everybody had been put through a meat grinder in order to further the military-industrial complex. I could exhale. I stepped out into the grasshoppery heat.

  “Here now, Giller. Okay,” Svendsen said.

  It was too bright to even see him at first, but who else could it have been?

  “Not entirely polite to leave a citizen waiting so long. But, oh well.”

  He took a swig from a can of Pepsi, pivoting on the ball of one foot there beside the yellow garbage can.

  “Yes, sorry, Lieutenant.” I scratched hard at the back of my neck. “You know, I think we might still have a couple of things to talk about.”

  “I’d better show you something,” he said. “Any private place around here?”

  He straightened his red tie and grinned at a pair of grandparents hunched in the dark doorway, squinting out at the shimmering cars.

  “You know, secluded,” he murmured, “where the children give each other their, I don’t know. Their hummers. Don’t you have a house around here?”

  “Not any more, no.” Asshole. “Got a car parked over here.”

  We crossed the sticky blacktop, Svendsen clenching and unclenching each hand like a wrestler coming out of his corner.

  “The Federal government, see, allows its citizens to get away with anything if the Federal government feels that behavior is for the greater good, though history inevitably proves the Federal government wrong.” He raised his chin high. “This your car? Must be, big enough!”

  It was a special-edition Lexus hybrid with a cushy leather backseat as wide as a church pew, and Mark had even managed to park in the shade. I unlocked it with a beep and flash of tail lights.

  “I do a lot of business in it,” I explained. “Lobbyists.”

  “My, this is where the children come to get hummers!”

  It would’ve been easy, standing behind him, to grip the back of his stubbled head and break his nose against the side of the car. But violence was no way to move the human race forward so I held the back door open for old Svendsen and he slid into the cognac-and-cigars atmosphere that the interior perpetually exhaled.

  I sank in beside him, shut the door then opened the mini-bar that Penzler Innovations had installed between the front seats. I was sweating from my forehead so I pressed the button on the key to start the ignition, and the air-conditioning came on.

  “Have a drink?” I asked.

  “Any make of bourbon’s okay.”

  He threw his head sideways and arched his spine so I thought he was commencing a fit, but he was only tugging something from his back pocket.

  “I bought this iPhone, you ever hear of these? Hell, you probably invented it.”

  “That’s true.” I set a glass on the armrest and poured him four fingers of Maker’s Mark. “Invented it for an elementary school project.”

  “Just let me find this little movie here. It’s an ugly damn thing.”

  He glared at the phone, prodding the screen with his thumbs. A movie? Maybe Doug Avery. Svendsen had presented himself as such an authority on the subject, probably just footage of a blood-stained sidewalk. But maybe there’d be a shot of the yellow car. If it was useful I could always track Colleen down in the phone book.

  “Once you find the thing we’ll patch it through to here,” I said. “Easier to watch.”

&n
bsp; I dug the usb cable from under the mini-bar and plugged the narrow end into the screen in the back of Mark’s seat.

  “Good, good,” he said, “this thing’s so damn small. Friend on active duty sent it to me. Here’s the bastard.”

  I plugged the wide end of the cable into the phone. The play arrow appeared on the big screen, then a swirling circle telling us it was nearly ready. Active-duty video of Doug Avery?

  “So this is classified?” I asked.

  “I thought so!” He took an inaccurate slurp of whiskey and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “But then, other goddamn day, I see some kid in the doughnut shop looking at it, so it must be on the internet too already! I don’t know. Here it is.”

  His movie started: a flickering patch of golden dirt on the back of Mark’s seat, and we heard wind whistle across a microphone. Then the camera swung up from the dirt to show black-bottomed clouds, then slowly came down again past tin roofs a hundred feet away. Buildings looked like black burnt frames. We heard flies.

  “Here it is.” Svendsen nodded encouragingly, jogging his knee up and down.

  The picture had settled on a thin black arm, severed at the shoulder, lying in the dirt, a mottled black pig sniffing it. The arm’s hand still gripped some kind of machine gun. A leafy branch shooed the pig away as voices spoke gravely in a language I couldn’t understand. Offscreen kids laughed and shouted. The camera backed up a couple of steps and turned to the left, where thin dogs circled a pile of eight or ten more arms and legs. An object in blue cloth might’ve been a head.

  This looked like Africa, the Africa that the word Africa suggested to the American mind—butchered people were that continent’s expected output, sad but true.

  Someone lifted an arm from the pile, turning it appraisingly, to show the clean purple lip where the limb had come away from the shoulder. Someone had dropped to pieces just like I had.

  Our wildly imperfect d.s. 3 had been deployed to Africa.

  I gripped the Maker’s Mark between my knees so I could uncork it.

  “Had enough?” Svendsen balanced the iPhone across his fingertips like a tray of martinis. “There’s more good stuff.”

  I took two long swigs of the whiskey.

  “The feds never got it,” I said. “No, we said no way.”

  “You see for yourself they had it, do have it and will continue to have it. I’ve dipped a toe in many an organization, sir, and no one ever knows what everybody else knows.”

  The grave voices began to shout. Near the half-burnt buildings, women milled around in what might’ve been giant beach towels, but then the camera swung unsteadily into the clouds, then cutting left onto a wide-winged bird flapping lazily above the rooftops.

  “Take hold of your cajones,” said Svendsen.

  Had too many legs to be an ordinary bird. Jesus, so what was it? The shouting became more distant and urgent, but the picture still hadn’t budged and we heard what had to be the cameraman’s breathing.

  Women screamed, “Ack-ack-aye-aye.”

  The flying creature moved closer with an up-and-down loping motion across the sky, and though the wings looked wide as a vulture’s—no, the thing filled the screen: an open-mouthed baboon, head tilted accusingly, eyes so wide it must’ve seen the two of us there in Hoover. Raised something dark in its hands. We heard a mechanical bark, then the camera swayed back nauseatingly. It filmed nothing but gray sky. A black wing tip passed across the edge of the frame. The ack-ack-aye-aye never let up.

  The gray sky froze and the white play arrow reappeared.

  “Get it? The monkey must’ve shot the guy—great stuff.”

  Svendsen leaned forward to smile, like he’d caught me sleeping. Shit, maybe he had.

  “This was Congo,” I said. Not even a question.

  “Democratic Republic of. How’d it come to pass, yeah? Some glimmers have come down to me of you handling yourself in Velouria and points east, sir, and I wonder some why you haven’t been in handcuffs since then. You’re familiar with a lot of deals on your behalf, clemency and such?”

  “For handcuffs you need two wrists.”

  “They can cuff your ankles.” He pawed at the phone again. “I’ve seen it on those trials on tv. Here’s a—here’s another quality segment.”

  Blue sky above blowing green jungle, and a baboon, sitting in profile on a huge fallen log, its brown wings drooping to the ground. Only the wind could be heard. The picture tightened on the thing’s face as it lifted something to its mouth, tearing a strip away with a sidelong pull. It chewed placidly. The object had fingers—another baboon.

  The screen went black. This was Duffy’s lab, spilled out across the world.

  “Isolated incidents,” I said.

  “My buddy scooped that camera up ’cause he was first on the ground in that village—they sent the baboons in ahead of him! The Rangers, the Green Berets!” Svendsen leaned back into his corner of the seat, studying me, massaging a kneecap through his brown trousers. “I saw our guys chasing a pack of those LRA into the woods. And one of our boys, he didn’t have his helmet on.”

  Svendsen refilled the glass, running his tongue over his teeth.

  “That might’ve compromised his head,” I said.

  “Well, yes, it did!” He flopped into the corner. “Son of a bitch had half his head compromised, just a pound of raw hamburger, but he had an Uzi in each hand and he was hopping over the logs.” He gulped back half the glass. Belched succinctly. “Think your concoction might’ve done that too?”

  Jesus, was d.s. 4 really that good? Alice couldn’t have been handing it around—had to have trickled out during Duffy’s day.

  A shiver up my neck, someone walking on your grave, Mom called it. Our miraculous formula, used only for the betterment of humanity? No, thrown in my face like flat beer.

  “Show me that video,” I said.

  “Got rid of it! Gave me nightmares. Kept dreaming a lot of boys standing for reveille, but no arms to salute with.” He looked at me sideways, like a shark drifting by. “So. How’d you lose the ears?”

  “Be surprised how seldom I get asked that.”

  “Know what I think? And I’ve got to tell you, it’s relief like a week’s shitting at once to be hashing all this out, capiche? I think with all your hellfire in Velouria you crushed so many toes, your bosses had to give the medicine up to save your bacon, yes?”

  “That might be,” I said.

  I fished my phone out of the inside pocket. My bosses were only one person.

  “Call Alice,” I told the phone, then asked Svendsen, “Can you play Angry Birds for a minute?”

  He pursed his lips and tapped a fingertip on his knee—there was one more topic we had to touch on, he and I.

  “Hey there,” said Alice.

  The old guy glanced our way. It wasn’t on speaker but might as well have been.

  “Hi,” I said. “You busy?”

  “Yes and no,” she said. “You’re making a splash today. If you felt that strongly about not doing tv, you should’ve said so.”

  “I’ve just seen that maybe d.s. 4 hasn’t only been used for medical applications.”

  “Oh, have you?” She muttered as if she wasn’t quite listening, which was possible since she usually watched televised tennis when she was on the phone, even if Warren Buffett was on the other end and it was a rerun of a match from the seventies.

  “I’m looking at some images here that—”

  “Okay, you got me. Well done. I won’t even ask what you’re seeing since it could be anything with a mangy dog in the background, am I right?”

  “It’s not—”

  “Well, you’ve risen to the occasion on the R & D, I’ll give you that, rerouting the nitrate situation—”

  “Nitrite,” I corrected, purely out of habit.

  “Exact
ly, but you aren’t a money guy. Something’s got to pay your salary, manufacturing, distribution—can cancer cure itself? No, pal, it needs finessing. We work it from both ends. So do I start with abstracts or specifics?”

  Svendsen took a pocketknife out of his trousers and started whittling his thumbnail. His sour-milk smell was infiltrating my robust interior.

  “Neither one,” I told Alice. “I’m taking time off. See my kids for once. Lena and Glen can run the clinics. You don’t need me.”

  “I actually planned for this. Know why I kept you out of the loop? I knew you couldn’t swallow this scenario. You were a bloodthirsty nut when you were a zombie, true, but—”

  “So I know exactly what the future should not look like.”

  Though what really nauseated me about flying baboons with machine guns was that pointy-bearded Mike had predicted the future with one-hundred percent accuracy. I watched graduates pile into cars to back out of their parking spots, stereos booming. Svendsen helped himself to bourbon with sixty percent accuracy. Mark would have to wipe the seats down.

  “You still talking?” she asked. “Sorry, pal, I’m brushing my hair before this Uzbek embassy guy comes in.”

  “He came out to Preston?”

  “Fuck, no, I’m in Washington. Before you go, you need to absorb this stuff and realize d.s. 4’s done a world of good that’d never have happened if you’d had any say in it. Is it better to heal the wounded with unprecedented success, pal, or for nobody to be wounded in the first place? Oh, and Harvard’s sending a team into Kuwait to look into the Bedouin origins of the compound and whatever else they can drum up, wanted to know …”

  I pictured her staring into space in her white Flava T-shirt, but, no, it was probably her ruffled blouse and the tall boots. Svendsen licked spillage off the back of his screaming eagle.

  “Wanted to know what?”

  “Sorry,” she said, “I’ve got two other calls. Yeah, Harvard Middle Eastern Studies wanted to know if you could tag along but I said you’d be too busy homeschooling your kids at an undisclosed location. They thought I was kidding.”

  “Wanted me in what capacity?”