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“Where beasts' spirits wail”: the Great War and animal rights

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“Where beasts' spirits wail”: the Great War and animal rights

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Content 1 “Where Beasts' Spirits Wail”: The Great War and Animal Rights A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING) August 2014 Copyright 2014 Joshua Bernstein 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments 3 Abstract 4 Introduction 6 Chapter One: Questioning Human Animality 12 Chapter Two: WWI and the Emergence of Animal Rights 31 Chapter Three: Empathy Reconsidered 70 Conclusion 88 Bibliography 92 Addendum: STICK-LIGHT 101 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author would like to thank all of his readers and colleagues for their contributions to this project. Of special importance have been Joseph Boone, Dana Johnson, Aimee Bender, T. C. Boyle, Anthony Kemp, David Treuer, Janalynn Bliss, Cris Mazza and Gene Wildman. With their support, Diana, Sarah, Nancy, and Gene Bernstein also made this effort possible. Gratitude is also expressed to the editors of the following journals, where these stories first appeared: “The Killer”, The Kenyon Review Online; “Nechama’s Gun”, World Literature Today; “The Inspection”, Shenandoah; “The Consultant”, Five Quarterly; “The Addict”, Southwestern American Literature; “The Affair”, The Rag; and “G-Shock”, Anamesa. Finally, some segments of “Stick-Light” are derived from J. D. Salinger's “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor”, and E. E. Cumming's “The Bigness of Canon” first appeared in The Dial, V ol. 68, No. 1 (Jan. 1920). 4 ABSTRACT This project argues that the British Trench Poets, while extremely diverse in outlook and sentiment, came away from World War I with a shared and heightened awareness of animal suffering. This awareness reflects a broader current within Modernism, namely the breakdown of the traditional human-animal distinction, and helped pave the way for the nascent animal rights movement in Britain. Numerous critics have pointed out that Modernism entailed a fundamental questioning of what it means to be human, or distinct from other creatures. The question remains, though: what specific forces—such as those of capitalism, industrialization, or atomization, as Marx might have it—forced humans to reconsider their roles and relations with other beings, particularly in the Modernist age? The contention here is that war was a principal factor, and specifically, the Great War, where an unprecedented 35 million individuals were wounded or killed. Importantly, over eight million animals fought and died alongside them—mainly horses, mules, oxen, and dogs. If writers such as Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen paid newfound attention to the animality of the human spirit, at least part of that is attributable to their serving alongside these animals, often in equally wretched conditions. Cognitive scientists, such as Stephanie Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal, have recently determined that empathy as a trait is acquired by gaining closer proximity to those we might actively consider, including, potentially, non-humans. In fact, what the literature of the Great War reveals, particularly through the genre of trench poetry that it sparked, is the extent to which that very proximity to animals evoked a new sense of compassion for their suffering—as well as a reaction against it, a very loss of empathy, as it were, and insistence on human superiority. In both cases, the trench poems 5 indicate how much warfare itself, particularly in its industrialized, dehumanizing form, can actually prompt a reexamination of animal-human relationships. The growing empathy also helps explain, at least in part, important legislation like the Dogs (Protection) Bill of 1919, the first wide-scale effort to ban cruelty to canines, along with later movements like the Oxford Group and the emergence of contemporary animal rights. Finally, the critical portion of this project is paired with a collection of short stories, STICK- LIGHT, many of which revolve around the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and likewise explore the conundrum of how warfare transforms the individual, in some cases altering sympathies. 6 INTRODUCTION “All the poet can do to-day is to warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.” - Wilfred Owen, c. 1918 (The Collected Poems, 31) About eleven months before he was killed in the trenches of the Somme, Isaac Rosenberg, the World War I poet, drafted a play called “The Unicorn.” He never finished the piece, and only three early versions survive, but in a letter of August 3 rd , 1917, he explained that it is “about a decaying race who have never seen a woman; animals take the place of women, but they yearn for continuity” (Parsons 260-261). In another letter, he adds: “It is to be a play of terror — terror of hidden things and the fear of the supernatural” (257). Indeed, lines from the play—“spectres wail,/ Stricken trunks' and beasts' spirits wail across to mine” (167)—make it sound like a shell-shocked version of Blake. The play has never received much critical attention, in part because it was unfinished, and also, perhaps, because the holographs that remain are “very tattered and obscure” or “not comprehensible,” as Ian Parsons remarks (164, 168). At one point, for instance, Saul, the play's biblical protagonist, confuses the sound of lightning for laughter, lamenting, “I wish that beast would come and stop this terrible suspense,” although the line itself is unclear and was deleted in later versions (168). While the play is set in some fabled and non-existent universe, there is no doubt that Rosenberg, witnessing the carnage around him, transposed the imagery of the Somme into his literary vision. More peculiar still is the collapsing of human and animal into some amorphous composite, or what he calls “bestial man 7 shapes that ride dark impulses” and “[cry] through the forest” (172). The image would sound even stranger if it did not directly parallel Rupert Brooke's pre-war description, in “The Song of the Beasts,” of those “crawling on hands and feet” who “are men no longer, but less and more/ beast and God” (36), 1 or what Siegfried Sassoon, writing, like Rosenberg, at the Somme and describing a pain-wracked body in “The Death Bed,” called “a prowling beast” that “gripped and tore” (Collected Poems 35). It is clear that we have come a long way from the Great Chain of Being, where god, humans, and animals are firmly and categorically defined. Critics like Carrie Rohrman, Maud Ellmann, Dan Armstrong, and Akira Lippitt have pointed out that Modernism, which arguably reached its symbolic apogee at the Somme, entailed a fundamental questioning of what it means to be human, or distinct from other creatures (Rohman 12; Ellmann 11; Armstrong 142; Lippit 23). Some, such as Roger Fouts and Erin McKenna, trace this questioning all the way back to Darwin (21). Others, like Keith Tester, point to 1894, the year of Henry Salt's groundbreaking Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress, as the “epistemological break” and the point at which humans began to seriously reconsider their relation to other species (Tester 156). For Tester in particular, Salt's book marks the first time that humans, at least since Descartes, began to see animals as intrinsically valuable rather than as a means to human ends (Taylor 62). Regardless of exactly when this new conception came about, though, it is worth asking what prompted it: what specific forces—such as those of capitalism, industrialization, or atomization, as Marx might have it—forced humans to reconsider their roles and relations with other beings, especially in the Modernist age? After all, this is a question that has not gone away with modernity, confronted, as we are, with lingering questions about personhood, bioethics, transhumanism, and related issues. One answer, and one that becomes increasingly clear in looking at the writings of Rosenberg, 1 Despite the apparent overlap in their imagery, there is no evidence that Rosenberg had read Brooke's “The Song of the Beasts,” much less derived “The Unicorn” from it. In fact, while Rosenberg admired Brooke's “Town and Country,” he explains in a letter of 1916 that he does not care for the rest of Brooke's work (Noakes, 309). 8 Sassoon, Owen, and others, including women and civilians, writing in the shadow of the Somme, is war, and specifically the Great War, which, as Paul Fussell remarked, entailed an “unprecedented” level of violence (87). Over thirty-seven million humans were wounded or killed (Hanlon). Importantly, over eight million animals fought and died alongside them—mainly horses, mules, oxen, and dogs. 2 Is it a coincidence that writers like Rosenberg and Sassoon paid newfound attention to the animality of the human spirit? Did this attention come from serving alongside the very “beasts” they decried? Cognitive scientists like Stephanie Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal have recently determined, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, that empathy, as a trait, is acquired by gaining closer proximity to those we might consider—although their tests refer mainly to conspecifics, or those within a species. These tests can be extended to nonhumans, however, and what the literature of the Great War reveals, particularly through the genre of trench poetry that it sparked, is the extent to which that very proximity to animals evoked a new sense of compassion for their suffering—as well as a reaction against it, a very loss of empathy, as it were, and insistence on human superiority. In both cases, the poems indicate how much warfare itself, at least in its industrialized, dehumanizing form, can actually prompt a reexamination of animal-human relationships. It also helps explain, at least in part, important legislation like the Dogs (Protection) Bill of 1919, the first wide-scale effort to ban cruelty to canines, along with later movements like the Oxford Group and the emergence of contemporary animal rights. A Note on Assumptions, Scope, and Methodology Long before the first guns erupted in France, Nietzsche was forecasting a cataclysmic war that would 2 Estimates of total animal deaths in the war vary considerably among writers and historians. Jilly Cooper, for instance, asserts that at least eight million horses alone died in the Great War (12). Kata Fowler presents the same figure (8). 9 “say yes to the barbarian, even to the wild animal within us,” (Hobsbawm 303) and Westerners, particularly in Victorian England, were beginning to fundamentally rethink their relationships with animals. As a point of clarity, how humans treated animals and how they conceived themselves ontologically are two separate matters. In philosophy, one pertains to ethics, the other, metaphysics or cosmology. They are related, however, and will be treated together in so far as the Biblical conception, where humankind is created in the image of God and has “dominion” over animals (Genesis 1:27-8), historically offered humankind a warrant for doing with them as it pleased and seeing itself as ontologically distinct from them, or, as Aristotle would have it, higher up on the Great Chain of Being. That said, it would be mistaken to treat the Biblical tradition as anything close to monolithic, given that there are probably as many conceptions of human ontology, as well as animal-human relationships, in it as there are conceptions of what constitutes the Bible or who might have authored its texts. Even the supposed superiority of humans to animals can vary across sections. For example, while “man” and “beast” are frequently distinguished in the Pentateuch (e.g., Exodus 9:9, Genesis 6:7), the forlorn narrator of Ecclesiastes bemoans that neither is innately superior, given their mutual fates: “For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that man hath no pre-eminence above a beast; for all is vanity.” Even the line most commonly cited to justify human preeminence, Genesis 1:27, where humankind is told to “subdue” other animals, is problematic, since the word “subdue,” or iההָ ששׁבבְכשׁו in Biblical Hebrew, can take on multiple meanings, with modern versions of the Bible translating it variously as “to govern” (Holy Bible, New Living Translation) or “to rule” (Holy Bible, New International Version). It is not hard to see how interpretive issues could arise, as “governing” and “subduing” are hardly interchangeable terms, with the latter implying a greater degree of submission, or even forced servitude. 10 In fact, the Modern Hebrew word for military “occupation,” שוביכ, comes from the same root as iההָ ששׁבבְכשׁו , and it is also a heavily contested term in so far as it carries important legal implications. After the Israeli disengagement from Gaza in 2005, for example, Israel contended, contrary to UN resolutions, that it was no longer “occupying” the territory. Ironically, the Palestinian militant group Hamas agreed, since it sought to claim victory after the withdrawal. Hillel Neuer, an Israeli lawyer, defended the Israeli stance in an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post, where he cites a law review article concluding “that under the Geneva Conventions and international judicial precedents, Gaza can no longer be considered occupied because Israel, despite its ability to exercise certain powers over the area, no longer exercises 'effective control,' the litmus test for what qualifies as occupation.” Similar debates have embroiled Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem, attesting to just how difficult it is to render a word like “occupy” into Modern English, given the various stakes. Thus, even if we accept that the Bible generally posits humans as fundamentally superior to animals, their common mortality notwithstanding, it is still unclear what, according to the Bible, the nature of our relationship with them should be, or the extent to which we should see ourselves as “preeminent.” It should also be said that this discussion will be limited to thinkers in the “West,” particularly Great Britain, even though many of the early animal rights advocates—John Oswald, Thoreau, Schopenhauer, and Tolstoy, to name a few—drew heavily on “Eastern” thought, as they conceived it. Moreover, as a point of reference, the term “animal” will be used to refer to non-human animals, however fraught with implications that may be. Finally, as a point of methodology, since this project is as much a history of ideas as it is a history of literature, the approach taken will be broadly historicist, though with a view, where possible, towards the singularity of individual texts. That is to say, the chief concern is with the modern British history of animality and human-animal relations, particularly in war writing, though the intent is not to 11 say that one particular vision of these things is correct or even necessarily predominant; rather, the literary texts spanning the Great War, as well as the Georgian and interwar periods, represent a host of viewpoints, all of which should be taken as espousing their own unique visions and beliefs. The goal is to sort them, to the extent that is doable, and arrive at a conclusion about what human animality and animal treatment have come to entail, particularly in light of modern Britain's experience in war. Certainly there are potential contradictions in this method. One may ultimately have to decide, for example, whether it is the author or the historical circumstances in which she finds herself that take precedence in the creation of a literary text. Even Marx was famously ambivalent over the question, musing, for instance, in his third Thesis of Feuerbach (1845) that “the materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances,” which ultimately begs the question of whether Rosenberg, in describing his “[wailing] beasts,” was portending something new or merely insisting on what the war had visibly shown him. It is the contention of this project that both views are correct. Whether they are ultimately reconcilable—that is, whether humans can indeed change “circumstances,” as Marx contends, or merely find themselves circumscribed by them—is the subject of a broader debate. 12 CHAPTER ONE: QUESTIONING HUMAN ANIMALITY In Our Image: A Background on Animality In assessing the 19 th century in Britain, most historians point to legislation like Martin's Act (1822) and the Cruel Treatment of Animal Acts (1835, 1849, and 1876) as evidence of a rising concern for animal welfare, denoting a period in law called Jus Animalum. This stands in contrast to the classical, Enlightenment view, according to which animals were property and freely subject to human whims. Indeed, Descartes, though his views about animal cognition were complicated, notoriously deemed them automata, or soulless machines, and accordingly justified vivisecting them. Locke, in contrast, argued that performing acts of cruelty against them would “harden” humans (91), a position once voiced by Aquinas and later echoed by Kant. Bentham, of course, was the first to ask famously whether animals can suffer, and, taking a utilitarian line, objected to their torment on the grounds of reducing total pleasure in the world. Rousseau also saw them as sentient, albeit unthinking, and therefore entitled not to be wantonly harmed. In all of these cases, how animals should be treated could vary, but the prevailing conception in Britain, and one that held well up into the 19 th century, albeit with exceptions, was that humans and animals were fundamentally divorced, or existing within separate spheres, on the spectrum of creation, and any sympathy extended to animals was meant to serve human temperaments, not the animals themselves. 13 That should not, however, lead us to believe that animals were entirely conceived of as unthinking objects in the 19 th century, or even unworthy of their own intrinsic moral consideration. On the contrary, scholars like Christine Kenyon-Jones and David Perkins have amply noted how much sensibility, as a concept, dictated humane treatment of animals and motivated a genuinely welfarist concern. Both, in fact, trace the belief in animal protection all the way back to the Romantics, seeing the animal rights discourse as an extension of the emerging human rights creed in Europe, which gained status with the French Revolution. Early 18 th -century thinkers like Oswald, Joseph Ritson, and Samuel Gompertz all espoused what might be called animal rights positions, and certainly Romantics like Shelley amplified them, although the question remains just how popular these currents might have been. After all, Oswald, Ritson, and Gompertz were all regarded as veritable lunatics in their day, and Shelley was not deemed a lot saner. Even Bentham's remarks about animal treatment came in a minor footnote. Moreover, many critics, including Tester, dispute that welfarist sentiment in any way amounted to affording animals rights. Tester even claims that the movement for animal protection was essentially limited to the upper ranks, arguing that “the working class plays little or no constructive role in the history” (119). To his point, the 1822 Martin's Act, along with subsequent bills banning animal baiting, did not pertain to fox-hunting, which would not be outlawed in Britain until 2004 (when, predictably, the House of Lords still stridently objected). Tester draws heavily on Norbert Elias' The Civilizing Process (1969), arguing that the effort to promote “sensibility,” and with it, a concern for animals, was principally about regulating violence and limiting violence's use to the higher, ruling class. The argument is essentially Weberian, although Tester does not mention him by name. As persuasive as it might be, it still fails to account for things like the emergence of house pets, which, as Hilda Kean notes, became a defining motif of working-class, Victorian homes and certainly reflected a heightened 14 attention to animals, if not an increasing nostalgia for farm life (161). More importantly, as both Kenyon-Jones and Perkins remark, the Victorian period marked a turning point in Britons' relationships with animals and, more broadly, their own self-conceptions as beings. Clearly, the Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871) played major roles, as well, fundamentally altering humans' sense of their own animality. Of course, Darwin was not without precedent in this regard, as many other scientists, including Count de Buffon, Lamarck, Alfred Russell Wallace, and even Malthus, questioned humans' susceptibility to environmental forces. Nevertheless, it is hard to overstate the impact of Darwin's contention that the “difference in mind between man and the higher animals...is one of degree and not of kind” (Descent, 101). As Richard Sorabji explains, Descent reframed the debate over origins, since “no trait”, according to Darwin, is “unique to man, not emotion, curiosity, imitation, attention, memory” (Sorabji 131). Donald Worster, the ecological historian, adds that Origin's effect was also shattering, since “the real issue was whether man could admit that he was fully a part of nature or not” (Worster 182-183). Worster actually credits Darwin with having engendered two contradictory impulses: a “Victorian ethic of domination over nature, and an emerging biocentric attitude that was rooted in arcadian and Romantic values” (114). As we will see, that conflict reaches its fullest expression in the trenches of World War I but also manifests itself in the prose and verse of Victorians. Nonetheless, Darwin, in spite of the affirming science, remains as controversial today as he did in Victorian England, and it is questionable whether his ideas about the origin of species ever began to take hold popularly. Theistic alternatives to his thesis sprang up immediately, and by 1903, Darwin was “beginning to be forgotten,” as Tolstoy attested (Orwell, Lear). In fact, natural selection itself would not be scientifically proven until the 1920's, with the advent of Mendelian genetics. On the other hand, it is not clear that human exceptionalism was ever entirely pervasive, either, despite Biblical 15 pronouncements and the influence of classical thought. What is clear is that it is very hard to extrapolate, especially from literature, what popular conceptions of humankind's status might have been. Certainly, as far back as the Romantics, if not earlier, Westerners were beginning to question their relations with the natural world. Wordsworth's description in “Tintern Abbey”, for example, of “a motion and a spirit, that impels/ All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/ And rolls through all things” closely mirrors Henry Salt’s espousal of “the common bond of humanity that unites all living beings in one universal brotherhood.” Of course, Wordsworth’s metaphysical pantheism might have invested the same spirit in rocks. Just the same, if M. H. Abrams is right in arguing that Wordsworth’s poetry emblematizes a radical shift in thinking from the 18 th to 19 th centuries, wherein the poet sees himself as an “integral part of an organically, inter- related universe” (Abrams 104), then it is fair to say his work also reflects a broader questioning of the animal-human dichotomy. That questioning would also extend well beyond the Romantics. Thackeray, for instance, delights in comparing Becky Sharp to a “viper” (226) and Joseph Sedley to an “elephant” (Notes, 945) in Vanity Fair (1848), remarking on the irony of their courtship: “A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES. Only let us be thankful that the darlings are like the beasts of the field, and don't know their own power. They would overcome us entirely if they did” (34). Dickens sounds an equally acerbic and cautionary note when, in Dombey and Son (1848), he explains, “Mrs. Pipchin hovered behind the victim, with her sable plumage and her hooked beak, like a bird of ill-omen” (164). Nearly all of Dombey's characters have animal names—Cuttle, Chick, Gills, MacStinger, Nipper, the Game Chicken—and animalesque descriptions pepper the novel, much as they do the bulk of his satirical works. Even earlier, Gothic tales, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1823), abound with admissions of human animality, with Victor admitting “my 16 imagination was too much exalted by my first success to permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man” (35). Certainly, the descriptions of humans-as-animals are nothing new in British literature, and the question remains to what extent they embody an actual belief in human animality, much less an anticipation of Darwin. But when Dickens compares Major Joseph to a “cold monkey” (314), and Thackeray exclaims that “the bearded creatures,” namely men, “are quite as eager for praise...as any coquette in the world” (29), it is hard not to see them as presaging Descent of Man, if not fundamentally questioning Descartes' assumption that animals are “destitute of reason” while humankind is “endowed with...a reasonable soul.” Two conclusions, therefore, can be drawn about the mid-to-late 19 th century in Britain. First, there was a general concern, especially in the later half, and especially among the upper-class, with animal welfare, embodying an essentially Kantian belief in the need to prevent brutality, or, to put it in more Victorian terms, regulate human emotion. Second, it is clear that the Cartesian metaphysical notion of human separability, or uniqueness, as it were, was beginning to collapse, probably well before Darwin. In Tooth and Claw, Indeed: The Victorians Enter Alfred Tennyson. Perhaps no other writer of the Victorian period did more to anticipate Darwin— they were born the same year—and articulate the contradictions he presented with regard to humans' ontology. Numerous critics, such as Basil Willey (87), Jerome Hamilton Buckeley (121), and John Batchelor (78-95), have read In Memoriam (1849) in terms of Darwinian tenets, and sometimes overly so. John Rosenberg, for instance, reads lines like “An infant crying in the night;/ An infant crying for 17 the light,/ And with no language but a cry” as depicting “the shock that evolutionary science posed to Christian faith”, a shock which he directly attributes to Darwin's discovery (306). Eugene August, who also sees the poem as specifically “anticipating” Origin, reads it as presenting a “terrifying fear that man is an insignificant event in a purposeless universe” (219). If the poem has continually puzzled readers, however, perhaps it is because this shock and anxiety over human insignificance is combined with an equal commitment to faith, or what John Rosenberg aptly terms “the anxious coexistence of despair and optimism” (303). Certainly, the poem has as much to do with Tennyson's own personal (and overstated) feelings of loss as it does any historic clash between religion and science. Regardless, Willey, Buckeley and Batchelor are right to read it in terms of Darwinian tenets. Where later poets, especially Modernists like Rosenberg and Sassoon, would approach what they saw as humankind's essential meaninglessness with irony, if not utter despair, Tennyson remains able to “faintly trust the larger hope” (Major Works, 236), as he puts it. At least in 1849. Five years later, Lord Cardigan would mount a British assault on Russian forces at Balaclava. The attack was significant, not only because Tennyson would famously depict it in his “Charge of the Light Brigade,” but also because it marked the changing face of battle, particularly amidst new technology and the deployment of massive cannonry: “Storm'd at with shot and shell,/ While horse and hero fell,/ They that had fought so well/ Came thro' the jaws of Death” (Major Works, 303). The Crimean War, and in particular the Siege of Sevastopol, where the Light Brigade fell, is commonly deemed the first instance of “modern warfare,” given the use of railways, photos, and telegraphs, among other things (Royle 114). On one level, Tennyson's lines depict this anachronism: the use of cavalry against rapid-fire weapons and high-powered ordnance. There is also an underlying conflict, of the sort Donald Worster describes, between the Victorian notion of dominance and the biocentric precept that humankind is inescapably tied to the Earth—in this case, returning to the womblike “jaws 18 of Death.” Most importantly, the rider and horse are collapsed in Tennyson's image, underscoring the degree to which humankind itself has became an “organic” part of its environs, to quote Abrams, literally falling en masse. Of course, Tennyon's “Charge”, like the rest of his corpus, would be widely interpreted, with many reading it as an anti-war dirge, and others seeing it as dewily romantic. Tennyson himself would later become synonymous with glorified depictions of combat, forming the backdrop for what Paul Fussell called the “Victorian pseudo-medieval romance” (135) and which Hemingway mocked as “obscene.” 3 Indeed, Hemingway's expressed preference was for the alleged realism of Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895). 4 It is worth pointing out, though, that Crane's depictions of war, while replete with animal imagery—one critic counts “at least eighty figures of speech employing animals or their characteristics” (Welsch 89)—are often as lofty as Tennyson's. When the youth finally emerges from the carnage, for instance, he admits to himself that “he had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks—an existence of soft and eternal peace” (172). Certainly, Crane's “tranquil skies” and “meadows” are as dewy as anything Tennyson envisioned. Moreover, Crane, unlike Tennyson, sees the “animal” spirit as something to repress, indeed a force to be quelled upon discharge. Regardless, what Hemingway ignores is the extent to which Tennyson, perhaps more so than Crane, rightfully appraised war's changing conditions, and what those entailed for combatants. When he has Ulysses “dole” out “laws unto a savage race,” for example, he understands that war’s participants have become equated with creatures: beings that “hoard, and sleep, and feed” (Major Works, 80). Even in Idylls of the King (1859), the final battlefield, as George Landow points out, 3 In A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway's Frederic Henry famously quipped that, “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates” (185). 4 In his anthology, Men at War (1979), for example, where he included The Red Badge of Courage in its entirety, Hemingway writes in the introduction that Crane “wrote that great boy's dream of war that was to be truer to how war is than any war the boy who wrote it would ever live to see” (xvi). 19 resembles a Modernist “wasteland”: “only the wan wave/ Brake in among dead faces, to and fro/ Swaying the helpless hands” (Idylls, 291). For Crane, they would be floating in meadows. Ironically, the other alleged, Victorian war-monger, Kipling, would write a scathing rebuke to Tennyson, “The Last of the Light Brigade” (1890), which berates the British public for ignoring its veterans. In fact, one verse, which was deleted from the later versions, mocks the British for paying more attention to animals and criminal reform: “They sent a cheque to the felon that sprang from an Irish bog;/ They healed the spavined cab-horse; they housed the homeless dog;/ And they sent (you may call me a liar), when felon and beast were paid,/ A cheque, for enough to live on, to the last of the Light Brigade.” If Tennyson bemoaned both the changing conditions of war and the ambivalent status of humans after Darwin, then Kipling was plainly outraged at both. In his poem, he describes the Light Brigade's veterans as “limping and lean and forlorn”—a mild rebuke to Tennyson but also a reflection of man's descent, to cite Darwin, and an indication of what battle, by 1890, had in actuality become. In fact, one might even make the case that the increasing popularity, especially in Victorian times, of poems about the individual soldier stemmed from his or her increasing obsolescence in warfare—an obsolescence that reached its peak at the Somme, where massed machine guns, to be sure, pinned down both sides of the battlefield and effectively immobilized conventional infantry, thus ushering in the era of tanks. Similarly, the knight, as a motif, probably achieved its greatest popularity during the European Renaissance, which is precisely when heavy, mass-mounted cavalry had come to replace the individual gallantry associated with knighthood and effectively rendered knights obsolete. In that sense, Tennyson's “Charge”, and to a lesser extent, Kipling's response to it, bear the directest comparison with Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615) in that all express sympathy for a hopelessly outmoded combatant. Of course, many of Kipling's post-war critics, especially in the 1930's, would take him to task 20 for having only limited knowledge of what the battlefield actually entailed. “The fact is that Mr. Kipling,” wrote Edmund Blunden, himself a veteran of the Somme, “appears not perfectly to understand the pandemonium and nerve-strain of war” (Field 170). While more sympathetic to him, Frank Field acknowledges that most of Kipling's war-themed stories are “unconvincing” and do little to capture the “the inner-most reality” of war (170). It is worth remembering, however, that most of these critiques came in response to what was perceived as Kipling's armchair militarism. He deemed the Versailles Treaty too soft (Pinney xvii), for example, and fell into famous disrepute with the Left—that is, until Orwell revived him as an anti-German proponent. There is little doubt that Kipling wrote with a Victorian sensibility and a largely antiquated sense of soldierly heroics. But he also understood, perhaps better than anyone, the sheer sense of helplessness Britons felt, both on the battlefield and in remote colonial settings. Orwell himself put it best when he defended Kipling from Blunden's attack, explaining that Kipling has far more interest in the common soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get a fair deal, than most of the “liberals” of his day or our own. [Kipling] sees that the soldier is neglected, meanly underpaid and hypocritically despised by the people whose incomes he safeguards. “I came to realize,” he says in his posthumous memoirs, “the bare horrors of the private's life, and the unnecessary torments he endured.” He is accused of glorifying war, and perhaps he does so, but not in the usual manner, by pretending that war is a sort of football match. Like most people capable of writing battle poetry, Kipling had never been in battle, but his vision of war is realistic. He knows that bullets hurt, that under fire everyone is terrified, that the ordinary soldier never knows what the war is about or what is happening except in his own corner of the battlefield, and that British troops, like other troops, frequently run away. (Kipling) 21 Added to this list should be the soldier's own sense of indecency, or shame at failing to uphold Victorian standards. Nowhere would that fear become more pronounced than in “Mark of the Beast,” one of Kipling's most famous (or notorious) takes on colonial India and published in 1890, the same year as his rebuke to Tennyson. In the story, an English “gentleman,” Fleete, is transformed into a werewolf after being bitten by a leper. As the prim narrator remarks, “his snarls were those of a wolf, not of a man. The human spirit must have been giving way all day and have died out with the twilight. We were dealing with a beast.” Kipling's story is reminiscent of Dracula (1897) and other Gothic tales but adds the colonial fear of “going native.” 5 When the leper is tied up and “confronted” with “the beast,” the narrator explains that “the scene was beyond description...Several other things happened also, but they cannot be put down here”, offering a curiously homoerotic element and emphasizing the degree to which sexuality, animality and xenophobia were firmly intertwined. To Orwell's point, even soldiering is mentioned: “the man or animal that made the cry was evidently moving round the house as regularly as a night- watchman.” What all of this suggests is that colonialism, like the wars that supported it, posed a very real set of challenges to the Victorian Gentleman, fearful, as he was, of “disgracing” himself “as an Englishman”—or a beast, as the story suggests. Kipling's own take on militarism—his advocacy of it at times, and his shunning of it at others— was complicated and has become subject to as much debate as Tennyson's own variegated outlook. What is fairly clear is that not only was Kipling apprised of the increasingly degrading conditions of battle, he wrestled time and time again in his writing with this question of humanness, or how humans —to cite the fundamentally Victorian paradox—could come to dominate the natural world while 5 For more on the fear of “going native,” and other colonial anxieties, in Dracula, see Brantlinger (230). Relatively little has been written about the connection between “Mark of the Beast” and Dracula, however. One notable exception is Nils Clausson, who situates Kipling's story within the traditions of the Gothic and the detective story. 22 simultaneously grasping their role in it. In “Her Majesty's Servants,” for instance, a troop of soldiers in Afghanistan is described from the perspective of the animals they board with and fight alongside: mules, horses, camels, elephants, and bulls. The story fitfully ends with a foreigner, a central Asian chief, asking an officer how the army has deployed so successfully, to which he replies, “An order was given, and they obeyed.” The chief asks, “Are the beasts as wise as the men?” The officer responds, “They obey, as the men do,” and explains that all take orders from the Queen. Orwell, in his critique, does not mention “Her Majesty's Servants” directly, but he does fault Kipling, as would many more, for naively romanticizing the soldier: “he thinks him patriotic, feudal, a ready admirer of his officers and proud to be a soldier of the Queen” (Rudyard). While there is a strong element of regimentation in the story—and probably more fascism than Orwell would allow—there is also an element of irony here in so far as the story pities both human and beast. In fact, the same line, “the beasts are very wise,” opens the final stanza of Kipling's “Beast and Man in India” (1904), where the herder breaks up a pack of cattle and “shouts in their silky ears/ Filling their soul with fears” (Works, 141). The line is significant, not only because it shows how far from the Victorian mind was the Cartesian notion of animals as soulless machines, but also because it demonstrates, as Orwell said, Kipling's very real sympathy for the fighting, working class, or the Tommies sent up to the “thin red line.” Of course, Kipling harbored well-known prejudices, and his sympathies rarely extended to foreigners, let alone “Huns”, as he would later, and not atypically, call the Germans. In France at War (1915), Kipling would fearfully describe the enemy as “barbarians”, “beasts,” and “brutes,” explaining: “we are dealing with animals who have scientifically and philosophically removed themselves inconceivably outside civilization” (49). But as with his literary descendents, Rosenberg, Sassoon, and Owen, all of whom expressed similar remarks at different times, this fear stems as much from an 23 uncertainty over what war had become—and what role humans could assume in it—as it does from lingering national prejudice. Take, for example, Kipling's letter of 1915 to Almroth Wright, the British immunologist, where he accuses the German enemy of sodomizing captured Brits: The one certain note of the German character under stress, is its unfailing beastliness and its use of certain well known forms of perversion and degeneracy. This conforms to its character in normal times. We have, in the reports of the atrocities, most ample proof that the sadism inherent in the Animal has been used...as a means to power. (The Letters, 119-120) The word “beastliness” was a common euphemism at the time for homosexuality—a term Kipling would never use. What is striking here is the conflation of animality and what was perceived to be aberrant sexuality. In fact, a Google N-Gram, a tool documenting the prevalence of a word in English literature, reveals that the word “beastliness” has several historical spikes. 6 One is around 1859, the year Darwin published Origin of Species. 7 The second is 1920, right as the Great War closed, and the third is during the late Thirties, as Europe returned to war. 6 Graph is available at: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph? content=beastliness&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 7 The spike around 1860 might also be attributable to the American Civil War. 24 While the graph is by no means scientifically conclusive, it does suggest that “beastliness”, as a concept, took on added urgency during the war years and immediately after Darwin. 8 It also shows Kipling was hardly alone in conceiving of this “degeneracy,” as he terms it. Beyond the animal phrasings, however, there is an astonishing amount of anthropomorphism in his work, even by the standards of a children's book author, and indicating how much Kipling, like Tennyson, was coming to grips with humans' animality, despite countervailing notions of Victorian refinement. Jane Hotchkiss points out that the Jungle Book constantly wrestles with this question of humanness, particularly through its use of a common Victorian trope, the feral child: 8 Within this context, one might consider Carol J. Adams' arguments about the patriarchal links between animal subjugation and human sexual abuse. In her view, the animal is an “absent referent”, or “that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product.” Within the context of Kipling, however, and other Victorians employing the term “beastliness,” animals are very much present. Indeed, animals, in Kipling's stories, very much inhabit the human realm, so much so that they have to be erased, either through a civilizing process (a return to Victorian manners and the rightful suppression of urges) or warfare (where they, the subhuman enemy, are exterminated). In any case, what Adams' book does not fully explore, but perhaps could, in this regard, is the linkage between humans' sense of their own animality, and their resultant mistreatment of others, both human and non, the scope of which encompasses far more than just sexual abuse (as Adams of course would concede). Illustration 1: The historical prevalence of “beastliness” in English-language books, 1800-2000. Image courtesy of Google Books. 25 In the late-nineteenth century...the wild-child figure is more often represented as a “betwixt and between,” as Peter Pan called himself: half-animal (or half-bird), half-human. Fin-de-siecle literature manifests a striking resurgence of the pastoral wild child figure with many of its Romantic resonances intact, but this figure reflects, too, the question of human origins as it arises in Darwin's work and, in a broader sense, in the developing Victorian discipline of anthropology. (435) Hotchkiss reads Kipling's Jungle Book, in particular Mowgli, within the context of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and she shows how the image of the wolf-child itself is bound up with colonial conceptions of race and emerging tenets in anthropology. But Kipling's concern in these stories is also, like Tennyson's, the changing face of battle and what that meant, alongside Darwin's discoveries, for human self-conceptions. After all, Mogwli's story ends with the combative wolf-child peering out at civilization and debating whether to “meet those mysterious things that are called men.” It adds a mysteriously defamiliarizing note to a world with which Kipling was no longer familiar. For all his alleged drum-breating, Kipling would come to significantly revise his outlook and politics after his son was killed in the Battle of Loos, shortly after the Great War started. He even wrote a detailed history of his son's regiment, which, as Paul Fussell pointed out (171), movingly contained no reference to his son, apart from in the final index. It was as if Kipling—and in contrast to Tennyson's outpouring of grief over Hallam—couldn’t come to terms with the loss and only sought to relay basic facts. One also has to wonder whether Kipling did not come to agree with Hemingway that “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates” (Farewell, 26 185). In any case, the emergence of the feral child in literature needs to be understood not only in the context of upending science and harrowing battlefield conditions, but also the broader question of what constituted hummaness, a question that wracked the Victorians. The most political manifestation, aside from the heated response to Darwin's work itself, was probably the famous Huxley-Owen debates of the 1860's, where Richard Owens, defending humanity, as he saw it, strove to show the anatomical differences between the human and ape (he ended up failing miserably). Concurrently, the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell, also a critic of Darwin, began studying fossil remains for “first traces of the primordial stock whence Man has proceeded,” as he termed it. In The Antiquity of Man (1863), he admitted, rather grudgingly, and in spite of his religious beliefs, that humans had existed prehistorically. In philosophical circles of the time, T. H. Green, rejecting the “the animal element in man” and in tandem with F. H. Bradley, conceived of a spiritual “Absolute,” thus birthing the movement of British Idealism. In France, Arthur de Gobineau was penning An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–1855), perhaps the first extended work on scientific racism and yet one adamantly insisting that “lowest of the human species is still unmistakably human” (230). Several years later, the first “human zoos” began exhibiting. Carl Hagenbeck, considered to be the father of the modern zoo, arranged an 1876 expedition to the Sudan, from which he brought back some “wild beasts” and Nubians. His animals and “savages”, as he called them, toured Europe, with stopovers in London, and he later acquired Inuit, who were displayed to much fanfare in Hamburg (in a zoo that still stands). Not far away, in Bonn, a young German by the name of Friedrich Nietzsche was avidly reading about Darwin, and in Vienna, a precocious youth named Sigmund Freud had recently enrolled in gymnasium. Both, of course, would come to question humans' most underlying urges and ask what, if anything, differentiates humans from 27 beasts. They would also arguably unleash an artistic movement called Primitivism, if not the Modernist ethos itself. Primitivist Creatures: Tarzan, Winnie Verloc, and Gauguin Within the sphere of arts and literature, primativism is notoriously hard to define, and its scope is as difficult to pin as its origins. But it can be said, with some degree of assurance, to encompass painters like Klee, Gauguin, Rousseau, and Picasso (in his African period). Within music, Stravinsky and Bartok come to mind, especially Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913), which combined primal tonality and, under Nijinsky's choreography, animal movements to depict a pagan sacrifice ritual. In literature, D. H. Lawrence stands out the most. Perhaps the best definition of Primitivism comes from Kingsley Widmer, who, in examining Lawrence's unnamed heroine in “The Woman who Rode Away,” calls it a search for “primordial awareness”—a search, Widmer explains, that “can hardly be taken as a recommendation for primitive transformation,” since it tends to go hand-in-hand with self-destruction, even as it offers a “richer mode of consciousness” (349). In some sense, Widmer's analysis echoes Worster's in that the contradiction posed is one of dominance, in this case conceived as a more passive quest for intellectual fulfillment, rather than physical subordination, coupled with the growing acceptance of humans' primordial place. Of course, it is also hard to overlook the colonial aspect of Primitivism. Gauguin, by all accounts, took numerous lovers in the colonies, some alleged to be adolescents, and for which he has earned near-constant notoriety. His Annah the Javanese (1893), which is actually of a Sri Lankan, animalizes the native in so far as she is seated with a monkey and sprawled out in a languid-looking 28 pose of her own. Apart from the collapsing of human and animal, the painting is important in so far as it marks a stated contrast between civilization, in this case typified by the royal blue sitting chair, and the earth-toned native. To some degree, the painting even mocks traditional portraiture, particularly with its skewed perspective and framing. Certainly, her gender contributes to the exoticism, as well, in that Annah is pregnant, and Gauguin was likely as fascinated by the primality of childbirth as he was by the question of what distinguishes the European from the native, the native from the animal, and the classical painting from the modern. In any case, all of these artists—Klee, Picasso, Gauguin, and Lawrence—distrusted technology and the blind faith in human progress that characterized Belle Epoque France and the Victorian anglophone world. Importantly, all found themselves on the periphery of those empires, as well, witnessing the dark sides of conquest. Klee's faith was shattered in Tunisia, where, as he explained, he first began to paint. Picasso's Cubism arose after Matisse brought him a mask from the Dan Region of West Africa, which was then a French colony. Gauguin, of course, fled to Polynesia to “[escape] everything that is artificial and conventional,” as he put it (Gold and Revill, 177), and he would later find himself imprisoned there for siding against the colonialists. Lawrence began his “savage” pilgrimage abroad, as he called it (Letters, 375), after enduring persecution and near-banishment in England during the Great War. In all of these cases, the “New Imperialism”, as the era is frequently called, offered the artist some perceived means of escape, and one that was inevitably fraught with social implications in so far as the native was conceived to be beastly, savage, or pure—in all regards, the antithesis to Western normalcy. Marxists have long debated the particular economic reasons for this period of expansion. 9 As interesting is what artists like Lawrence and Gauguin sought in the outbacks, and what that says about them, if not the governing mores that they fled. The other writers whom Widmer does not cite but obviously prefigure any discussion of the 9 J. A. Hobson's Imperialism (1902) is probably the starting point for these discussions. 29 search for “primordial awareness,” not to mention the New Imperialism, are Joseph Conrad and Edgar Rice Burroughs. In Conrad's Secret Agent (1907), for example, Winnie Verloc, “who had been the respectable girl of the Belgravian mansion, the loyal, respectable wife of Mr Verloc” (before stabbing him), becomes desperate enough to proposition her co-conspirator, Ossipon. He sees her stepping through the dark and is “terrified at this savage woman” (229). Where D. H. Lawrence might embrace the savage element in his heroine's behavior, Conrad, or at the very least Ossipon, still sounds a note of Victorian fearfulness about it, echoing the need to restrain those impulse, as impossible as that might be. Moreover, while Lawrence's woman-who-rode-away concedes to herself, “I am dead already. What difference does it make [if I'm sacrificed]?” (Rode Away, 68), Winnie remains thoroughly opaque to everyone, including the narrator, underscoring the hidden nature of emotions in Edwardian England, and particularly in Conrad's universe. Burrough's Tarzan, who first hit the stands in 1912, five years after The Secret Agent, is equally opaque (albeit unintentionally) but displays the same savagery. Interestingly, and in contrast to later, Hollywood depictions, Burrough's Tarzan, especially in The Return (1913), deplores the “civilized world,” snapping, “They are all alike. Cheating, murdering, lying, fighting, and all for things that the beasts of the jungle would not deign to possess—money to purchase the effeminate pleasures of weaklings.” Like Kipling, whose Mowgli probably formed the basis for Tarzan, Burroughs equates the return to the natural environment with a primal virility—one that is almost Victorian in sentiment and, as Alex Vernon, points out, “mobilizing” in its war-time appeal. 10 Yet, crucially, Tarzan can see through the “thin veneer of civilization”, as Burroughs calls it, in a way that is more Conradian than Kiplingesque. After all, Tarzan possesses the “old instinct of the wild beast”—less a young Mowgli 10 Vernon points out that Tarzan is only one in a line of works fostering mass militarization, though his emphasis is more on the gender and racial components. As he explains, “Tarzan teaches ethnic American doughboys that they too can rise from subhuman status to a new nobility by means of raw talent, hard-knocks schooling, and old-school virtues” (Vernon 139). 30 than a brooding Winnie Verloc. Certainly, Conrad, Kipling, Tennyson, Burroughs and Lawrence are all very different writers with their own unique takes on the crises engendered by Darwinian science, not to mention the dehumanizing effects of empire. It is also well beyond the scope of this paper to fully encapsulate Primitivism, much less Modernism itself, both of which are rife with interpretations. But it is important in gauging the works of the Great War, and especially those of the Trench Poets, to keep in mind the broader crisis unfolding over humankind's ontological identity, or what Conrad, in Nostromo (1904), aptly called the “crushing, paralysing sense of human littleness” (312). This historical approach is also critical, because it has hardly been the consensus in reading the Great War's poets. Paul Fussell, for example, whose Great War and Modern Memory (1975) serves as the defining text of the period, surmised that “The Great War took place in what was, compared with ours, a static world, where the values appeared stable and where the meaning of abstractions seemed permanent and reliable” (21). He is referring to a world where words like “honor” and “sacrifice” were used without irony to rally the masses (and they do show up repeatedly in Tarzan). But what that perceived stability overlooks is the degree to which humankind was already at war with itself, long before the shells started firing in France. Ever since Darwin, and arguably since Wordsworth, terms like “civilized,” “primitive,” “beastly,” and “savage” had come to represent a veritable battleground. Of course, they would find ample deployment in war, where they were used—and questioned repeatedly— as terms for describing combatants. 31 CHAPTER TWO: WWI AND THE EMERGENCE OF ANIMAL RIGHTS The Dogs of War: Trench Poetry One problem with characterizing the poets of the Great War is that no one is really sure who they are. Some, like D. H. Lawrence, are hardly read for their military writings, while others, such as W. N. Hodgson and F. W. Harvey, were extremely well-regarded in their time but have since faded into obscurity, perhaps because they were not among the 16 chiseled into the slate of the Great War's Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. Others, such as the fervently patriotic Jessie Pope, whom Owen famously derided in Dulce et Decorum est, have met with critical scorn and thus disappeared from the canon—to the extent a canon ever existed around the corpus of World War I. Moreover, many of the poets, including Sassoon, Owen, and Rosenberg, varied widely in their outlooks and sentiments, sometimes within their own works, and certainly across their own lifetimes. It would be as simplistic to say that Owen held antiwar sentiments—despite his repeated condemnations of battle—as it would be to suggest that there was ever a core grouping of writers from the period. That said, it is helpful, when trying to characterize an epoch, to take what, for lack of a better term, might be called a representative sampling. Critically, at least, Owen, Sassoon, and Rosenberg, along with Brooke, have come to occupy what Stacy Gillis rightly calls “the center” of “literary accounts of the First World War” (Kendall, Handbook, 102). This is not to suggest that their work is in 32 any way the best, nor even the most typical, of the Trench Poets, but merely to say that it has, in recent years, become the core focus of scholarship, however fickle a criterion that may be. Rosenberg, for his part, was probably among the more obscure of the WWI authors—and, in fact, remained perennially out-of-print—until Ian Parsons edited The Collected Works in 1979. Fussell also undoubtedly revived interest in him when, in 1975, he called “Break of Day in The Trenches” the “greatest poem of the war” (250). Furthermore, Sassoon, while always well-regarded among critics and writers, has never quite planted himself in the public's imagination in the same way as Owen. As Mark Rawlinson explains, Owen's “own war” became “iconic” and on some level symbolized Britain's (Kendall, Handbook,119). In fact, it is probably fair to say that Owen has become as synonymous with the Great War as Kipling has with Victorian British imperialism. Among the poets of the Great War, Owen also probably bears the directest comparison with Kipling in that, like him, Owen was never terribly comfortable among the upper-class, in spite of his latent snobbishness. Like Kipling, he enjoyed early acclaim, and he also deliberately avoided the aesthetics that others, like Sassoon, frequently courted. Owen even told Sassoon that he preferred to avoid writing the sort of poem “to which a soldier would say no compris” (Field 234). While Owen's art was never as “crude” as Kipling's, to borrow Orwell's term, he did prefer to write with the avowed intent of fomenting anti-war sentiment, and his famous quip—“I came out in order to help these boys” (Collected Letters, 580)—echoes the paternal Kipling, even if their stances on the war were, at the time, diametrically opposed. One might even make the case that Kipling repressed the same homoerotic and military-ascribed urges as did Owen. Regardless, like Kipling, Owen's primary concern was the lunacy of modern day battle and its devastating effects on the psyche. A case in point is “Arms and the Boy,” which, as Fussell pointed out, revolves around images of the body (291). The poem also needs to be seen in the context of a letter Owen wrote to his mother on 33 Easter Sunday, March 31 st , of 1918: “Outside my cottage window children play soldiers so piercingly that I've moved into the attic, with only a skylight. It is a jolly Retreat. There I have tea and contemplate the inwardness of war, and behave in an owlish manner generally.” In the letter, Owen also mentions his former pupil in France, who “leaves school this term, I hear, and goes to prepare for the Indian Army. He must be a creature of killable age by now” (Collected Letters, 544). Fussell, for his part, reads the poem in terms of Owen's fascination with boys, a reading that is not unwarranted. Yet it also needs to be seen in light of the image of the “creature” that Owen uses to describe the “boy” of the title, for the poem resounds with animality: Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood; Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash; And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh. Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-heads Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads. Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth, Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death. For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple. There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple; And God will grow no talons at his heels, Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls. (The Collected Poems, 43) 34 Carl Krockel points out that the second stanza refers to Shelley's “Masque of Anarchy,” where Shelley, responding to the Peterloo Massacre of 1817, in which British troops fired on protesters, advocated civil disobedience: “Let the fixed bayonet/ Gleam with sharp desire to wet/ Its bright point in English blood/ Looking keen as one for food” (Shelley, Major, 409). With this allusion, Owen, according to Krockel, is making the point that “the army, which was supposed to safeguard its inhabitants, had become perverted by a futile lust to kill indiscriminately” (Krockel 2). Neither Krockel nor Fussell emphasize Owen's use of animal imagery in describing the killing, but Krockel does correctly note that the bayonets of Shelley's day had become antiquated by 1914. What has not changed, however, is the carnalilty unleashed by war, a carnality that Owen, as much as Shelley, ascribed to humankind's bestial instincts. Both compare the pursuit of the enemy with a primal bloodhunt (“hunger of blood”; “keen as one for food”). What the comparison also underscores is their mutual faith in progress, or the possibility of human restraint. Shelley's optimism is more pronounced, though. His soldiers “will return with shame/To the place from which they came,/ And the blood thus shed will speak/ In hot blushes on their cheek,” (Major, 410) whereas Owen's soldier-boy “grows” no “talons” or “antlers,” denoting a more hidden and recurrent carnality. It is also crucial that Owen, in his letter, sees himself as the owl— a similarly taloned creature—and hence one who is not necessarily above this fracas. Indeed, in “Strange Meeting,” which also takes its title from a Shelley poem, specifically “Revolt of Islam,” Owen contrasts his own role as a fighter with that of his enemy, whom he meets dreamfully in hell. The poem employs his typical pararrhyme, which lends it a haunting assonance, as opposed to the more vocal pure rhymes of Shelley's “Revolt.” Compare, for example, the lines from which Owen takes his title, and Owen's own description of the encounter with his foe: 35 Shelley: And one whose spear had pierced me, leaned beside With quivering lips and humid eyes;—and all Seemed like some brothers on a journey wide Gone forth, whom now strange meeting did befall (Complete, 197) Owen: ...encumbered sleepers groaned Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes, Lifting distressful hands as if to bless. … Now men will go content with what we spoiled. Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress, None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress. (The Collected Poems, 35) Owen's poem, particularly through the soft rhyme (“bestirred”/“stared”, “tigress”/“progress”), is more quiet and plaintive, adding what D. S. R. Welland has called a “dominant note of hopelessness” (237). Shelley, on the other hand, wrote his “Revolt”, as he explained in his preface, with the declared intent of “kindling within the bosoms of my readers a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor misrepresentation nor 36 prejudice can ever totally extinguish among mankind” (Complete, 113). If that faith had not completely died out by the time of Tennyson, whom Owen despised, it certainly became muted in the trenches. Moreover, Shelley's description of “quivering lips” and “humid eyes” is more sexual and personal in character than the “piteous recognition” that Owen describes. Of course, Owen later revised the poem, particularly the last section, and his new version mirrors Shelley's more closely: “Let us forego men's minds that are brute's natures,/ Let us not sup the blood which some say nurtures,/ Be we not swift with swiftness of the tigress./ Let us break ranks from those who trek from progress” (Poems, 2). Notably, the rhyme is more pure, emboldening the message, which is that the writer and his enemy can escape this brutal condition and elevate themselves above the state of animals, or “tigresses” as it were. Where the first version claimed “none will break ranks,” the author and his enemy do in the second, suggesting, by the very fact of their embrace, or perhaps the very act of revealing war's horror, that humans can transcend their animality. The politics are essentially liberal, like Shelley's, in that they embody a faith in human “progress” and one arguably instilled by poetry. In fact, this capacity for poetry, or what Owen calls the ability to “[pour] my spirit without stint” (The Collected Poems, 35), distinguishes the human from the animal in his view. Of course, that reading depends on which version of the poem one accepts, but what is clear is Owen's brooding over this question of human-as-author versus human-as-beast. Notably, the poem ends on a sullen note, with “Let us sleep now...” contradicting the revised version's optimism. It also calls to mind the words of that other great voice from the trenches, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who famously declared at the end of his Tractatus (1922), “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (90). Certainly, both Owen and Wittgenstein struggled with the fundamental problem of language and inexpressibility. The question is to what extent that struggle stems from language itself or the dehumanization that both underwent as soldiers. 11 It was Wittgenstein, after all, 11 It is also worth noting that both, for most of their lives, struggled with repressed sexuality, though how much that 37 who, after returning from the war, taking a job as a school teacher, and getting fired for hitting his pupils, complained: “These people are not human at all but loathsome worms,” (Monk 212) which goes a way towards revealing his immediate, post-war attitude, if not his own ascribed sense of animality. Evidently, he lacked Owen's affection for youth. The writer who would exert the greatest influence on Owen was his mentor, Sassoon, whose “Rear Guard” probably helped to inspire “Strange Meeting.” Sassoon was in many ways the exact opposite of Owen and Kipling: aristocratic by birth, at ease among noblemen, naturally gallant, unconstrained in his sexual longings (most of which were for men), and perennially deemed an outsider by virtue of his foreign blood—the Sassoons were a longstanding Sephardic Jewish family. Like both of them, however, Sassoon shunned, at least in his early life, the high aesthetics of Modernism, opting instead for what he deemed a more “authentic” approach “true to what [he] experienced” (Krockel 3). Sassoon composed “Rear Guard” while serving on the Hindenburg Line in 1917, and it, like “Strange Meeting”, entails a meeting with the dead. There is no intimacy in the embrace that ensues, however, as the victim, whose “fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound,” is already ten months dead (Counter-Attack, 15). To the extent there is a realization, it is one of sheer “horror” and a pondering of the rigor mortis state of the dead. There is nothing like the outraged protest one finds in Owen. What are comparable are the bestial descriptions of the protagonist— “savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap” (14)—and those he encounters in this semi-mythic “hell”: “the dazed, muttering creatures underground/ Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound” (15). As Simon Featherstone points out, one of the major critical debates over the Trench Poets, at least since Fussell, has been the extent to which their poems were “mythologizing” (Featherstone 21), with Bergonzi claiming in Heroes' Twilight (1965) that a more grounded and anti-propagandist reality repression informed their worldviews is debatable. For more on Wittgenstein's struggles, and its relevance, if any, to his philosophy, see Goldstein. 38 was what the poems sought to convey, and Fussell, in contrast, arguing in Modern Memory that the effort was largely performative, and that the classical, mythical tradition gave the poets a more graspable mode of expression, or a language in which they could speak. As Fussell explains, contra Bergonzi, “the movement was towards myth, towards a revival of the cultic, the mystical, the sacrificial, the prophetic, the sacramental, and the universally significant. In short, towards fiction” (131). Of course, Bergonzi, as Douglas Kerr remarks (85), would later alter his claims in the revised, 1996 version of Heroes Twilight. Even the original, 1965 version cites Borges's dictum that “all literature begins in myth, and ends there” (212), which would appear to amplify Fussell's critique. 12 Nevertheless, much of this debate might also depend on how “mythical” itself is defined and the extent to which the poets were merely revisiting classical sources or actually conjuring up worlds of their own. Certainly Sassoon does both, and in the case of “Rear Guard”, the mode of mythology 13 is what, among other things, allows humans to shift between forms—from animal to human and living to dead. In fact, it is this very transmutability that helps to convey the dehumanizing essence of what men —and many women, as we will see—experienced as a result of the war. In Sassoon's case, he could as easily be “running tireless, floating, leaping/ Down your web- hung woods and valleys” as he could be “[standing]” with “the shapes of the slain in their crumpled disgrace” (Collected Poems 41, 103). Indeed, in a verse letter to Robert Graves, he describes the ghostly reappearance of their dead friend, David Culbert Thomas, a fellow-officer killed at Fricourt: We've been sad because we missed One whose yellow head was kissed 12 Despite their differences, there is also significant overlap between the critics, and both, probably more so than any others, would help to canonize, or at the very least establish, trench poetry as a genre. 13 In fact, and bearing in mind this mythical component, “Strange Meeting” curiously resembles one of Aesop's darker fables, “The Old Man and Death,” where a weary farmer, overburdened with his load, beseeches the figure of “Death” to relieve him. 39 By the gods, who thought about him Till they couldn't do without him. Now he's here again; I've seen Soldier David dressed in green, Standing in a wood that swings To the madrigal he sings. (Collected Poems, 42) Ironically, the poem recalls the “dryads”, or woodland nymphs that Sassoon depicted in his earlier poem of that title, written six years before the war started. While Avi Matalon, among others, claims that “the once timidly Georgian poet became more and more ferocious as the war progressed and casualties piled up” (31), 14 the truth is that Sassoon also underwent a strange return to pastoralism in his verse, especially around 1917, and probably because of the trauma he endured at Mametz. In “When I'm a Blaze of Lights,” for examples, he admits, “Sometimes I think of garden nights/ And elm trees nodding at the stars” (Collected Poems, 14). And in “The Hawthorn Tree,” he ponders his removal from the war, observing that “there's been a shower of rain/ And hedge-birds whistle gay” (Collected Poems, 80). Of course, Matalon is also right in that some of Sassoon's most bitter, direct, and anti- pastoral poems came out this period, most famously “The General,” where he describes the staff officers as “incompetent swine,” and “Does It Matter?” where he sarcastically remarks that being blinded or crippled will not hinder a soldier, since “people will always be kind” (Collected Poems, 75, 76). Still, the fact that Sassoon never entirely abandoned the pastoral, despite his increasingly anti- war sentiments, also explains his lingering sense of human animality. It is most evident in a poem like 14 To be fair, Matalon does acknowledge some “diary poems” as being “affectedly pastoral,” citing Sassoon's “In Palestine,” but he attributes that persistence to a lingering Jewish identity and offers no further account of it. 40 “Prelude: The Troops,” where he addresses a group of dying soldiers: “O my brave brown companions, when your souls/Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead/Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge” (Collected Poems, 67). The word “flock” connotes sheep, highlighting the Arcadian image. To the extent the poem is pastoral, it marks the same clash between the heavenly and the chthonic that his poem “Joy-Bells” does. It is also interesting to compare his description of the dying and wounded with Owen's decidedly unromantic and non-Arcadian portrayal of the same. “Who are these?” Owen asks in “Mental Cases.” “Why sit they here in twilight/ Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,/ Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish” (The Collected Poems, 35). It should be said, though, that while Owen tends towards the earthly in these depictions, several of his poems from the period do strike mystical notes. In “Spring Offensive,” for instance, he describes “the sky's mysterious glass,” and in “Apologia pro poemate meo,” he writes, “I, too, saw God through mud,” although the latter is qualified with the description of “heaven” as nothing but “the highway for a shell” (The Collected Poems, 52; 39-40). Even “Strange Meeting” itself notably takes place in the afterlife. Nevertheless, if Owen, circa 1918, is primarily earthly in his portraits, with humankind ranging from a poet who “[pours]” his “spirit” (The Collected Poems, 35) to a blood-seeking “brute” (Poems, 2), then Sassoon's run the full gamut of creation, from pastoral nymphs to the slobbering hounds of hell. Even more extreme is Rosenberg, whose war poems virtually exclude humans in favor of beasts and gods. His play “The Unicorn”, which was mentioned in this project's introduction, apotheosizes that exclusion in so far as “animals take the place of women”, as Rosenberg explains (Parsons 261), and the unicorn itself serves as the sole sexual outlet for Tel, a towering black chieftain of mythic proportion. Tel probably stems from the “Nubian” character of an earlier play, “The Amulet”, which Rosenberg evidently scrapped. To the extent that the unfinished “The Unicorn” has a message, it might be the very question Saul poses of the unicorn: “Is the beast the figure of man's mateless soul?” Lilith, 41 the Jewish mythical demon, offers one answer, responding, “Beauty is music's secret soul/ Creeping about man's senses./ He cannot hold it or know it ever/ But yearns and yearns to hold it once.” (Parsons 171). Like Owen, Rosenberg presents his soldiers as vacillating between artist and killer. Like Sassoon, however, he also remains doubtful, at least in “The Unicorn,” of humankind's capacity to “hold” real art. 15 Indeed, in his last letter, which was posted the day after he was shot and was addressed to Edward Marsh, the editor of the period-defining Georgian Poetry anthologies, Rosenberg doubted the strength of his own poems: “I've seen no poetry for ages now so you mustn't be too critical—My vocabulary small enough before is impoverished and bare” (Noakes 364). This sentiment also seems to have described his outlook, although, conversely enough, he chose to include a new poem, “Through These Pale Cold Days,” which was no cheerier in outlook, in Marsh's volume. In fact, this ambivalence over art's redemptive capacity would underlie Rosenberg's most famous poem, “Break of Day in the Trenches.” In it, the narrator, presumably Rosenberg, comically berates a rat, which flits between sides, for its “cosmopolitan sympathies.” He then asks it directly, “What do you see in our eyes/ At the shrieking iron and flame/ Hurled through still heaven? What quaver—what heart aghast?” The narrator, seizing a poppy from the field of the dead, sticks the flower behind his ear—as if imitating an aesthete—and muses that its “roots are in man's vein's” (Noakes 106). The image is peculiarly haunting in light of Rosenberg's eventual death on such a field. But where Wordsworth might have found something uplifting in humankind's organic bond with the elements and other fruits of creation, Rosenberg sees it as the prime piece of irony, remarking that this rat is more “chanced” for life than some “haughty athletes.” Fussell, for his part, aptly notes “the irony in the transposition of human and animal roles that the trench scene has brought about” (250). Where Sassoon, in “Prelude: The Troops,” becomes elegiac, and even melancholic, over that inversion, 15 Interestingly, and by parsing together several versions of the play, John Silkin reads “The Unicorn” as indicating that “beauty civilizes,” but that it needs to be “rightly responded to,” rather than “[raped]” or “seized.” What Silkin does not say, however, is whether, according to the play's logic, humans are capable of responding “rightly” (313). 42 Rosenberg takes bitter delight. Certainly, the flower that the “Break of Day” narrator wears marks him as an aesthete, rather than the “athletes” whom he is among. Yet it also relays his basic desperation as an artist trying to make sense of the world. In this respect, Rosenberg begins to answer the Victorian—and perhaps even Romantic—paradox about how humans could dominate a world of which they were invariably part. The answer seems to be, fittingly, through art, or some sort of aesthetic transcendence, albeit one that Rosenberg, and in contrast to the later, High Modernists, found impossible to attain. Critics, such as Fussell and Robert Hemmings, have ascribed much importance to the use of poppies in World War I poetry, particularly in Rosenberg's “Break of Day in the Trenches.” Fussell situates their use within the poem as Rosenberg's response to a long English literary tradition, beginning with Chaucer and culminating in the pastoral elegy (247, 250). Hemmings sees the flowers as “[invoking] another kind of symbolic reading, the unconscious, through the image of the roots reaching downwards into what is buried, into the traumatic memories of alarming encounters with death” (745). The first reading is essentially historic, the second psychological, and both are quite apt. Yet neither acknowledges the more immediate meaning, which, for Rosenberg, entailed questioning his relationship with Earth's elements: why he has been consigned to join them, and perhaps the mystery inherent in his having been initially removed. One could couch it in philosophical terms like metaphysics, cosmology, emanationism, as well as theories about history and trauma, but at bottom, the issue is much simpler. He is asking what he is doing here. Interestingly, the original version of the poem, which Rosenberg revised in 1916 before publishing it in Poetry, ends with four different lines. They describe an exploding shell, followed by: “what rootless poppies dropping?” (Parsons 104). This version is even more bitter and avowedly antiwar in so far as it literally equates the scattered dead with the thrown flowers and rat. (And 43 “rootless”, in this case, takes on a dual connotation, meaning “cosmopolitan” and “clipped”). Given the rat's own “cosmopolitan sympathies,” it is worth asking whether Rosenberg was aware of the phrase “rootless cosmopolitan” in 1917. Certainly, the phrase would take on special significance in the 1940's, when it became associated with Jewish intellectuals like him, and it was used during Stalin's purges. Regardless, the conflation of the rat and the human dead illustrates just how commingled Rosenberg thought humans and “beasts” really were, particularly during war. The question of whether he is speaking in a real or mythological language also seems less pertinent here—as with most of the war poets, he is speaking in a language entirely his own—than the question of what faith, if any, he has left in humankind, be it as an artist, or something much baser. His writings, the bulk of which were unfinished, never definitively resolve the question. In “Moses,” even his heroes remain “constrained to the stables of the flesh,” yet in “In War” he describes “how human art won/ The dark soul” (Noakes 161; 122), thus suggesting an opposing view. In another letter to Edward Marsh, written 11 months before his death, Rosenberg sighed, “I fancy poetry is not much bothering you or anybody just now...Yet out here, though often a troublesome consolation, poetry is a great one to me” (Noakes 333). If Rosenberg, like Owen, and to a lesser extent, Sassoon, was consumed with this question of human degradation, and what role, if any, art could play in forestalling it, Constance Ada Renshaw, one of the overlooked female writers of the time, offers a slightly different take. Her poem, “The Lure of England,” about a soldier blinded at the front, first appeared in 1915 in The Poetry Review and, like virtually all of the women's verse of the time, disappeared thereafter. Nosheen Khan resurrected it in her admirable compendium, Women's Poetry of the First World War (1989). 16 More broadly, women's war poetry has proven particularly contentious for critics, since, as Gill Plain explains, most tended “to 16 Catherine Reilly, in her Scars Upon My Heart, the other major anthology of WWI women's writing, did not include Renshaw's poem. 44 agree that at best this work is problematic, at worst, embarrassing” (42). Plain does not say what makes it so, but perhaps Renshaw's poem sheds some light. There's a misty sea-girt island in the sunset-haunted west; I can see it in my wounded dreams of home... Oh ! there's Spring upon the island, and the greening lures me back To mysterious meres and woodways in the west, . . . They have stripped my manhood from me, they have stretched me on the rack. . . . . . . Take me home, a blinded broken thing, to rest! (Khan 57) In her reprinting of the poem, Khan acknowledges its “pathos” and “sentiment”, but she also reads it as espousing a curiously “anti-war” message. Specifically, she sees the poem as creating a pastoral setting “worthy of sacrifice” and “[stressing] the immense cost at which the beauty the soldier yearns to behold has been redeemed” (Khan 58). What Khan does not say, or perhaps cloaks in the language of nostalgia, is that the poem, like most of Renshaw's work, and indeed like much of Kipling's, is heavily jingoistic, even if it is mildly sympathetic to those fighting. Of course, this was Fussell's critique of women's writing from the Great War, and it did little to reverse their longstanding exclusion from the Great War's canon. He does not mention Renshaw, but many of her poems, including “Great War,” tend to support his account: “Out of the East they came, — sub-human men/ Who knew no law, no bond, — a branded race/ Lustful for empire. And lo ! face to face,/ A small host met and dared them, one to ten” (England's, 59). In fact, Renshaw's characterization, 45 while shocking on its face, is actually in line with a great deal of British propaganda of the time. In a famous American recruitment poster of 1916, which is adapted from an earlier British version, “The Hun” is seen stomping ashore and drooling at the mouth, having swept up Lady Liberty and wielding a club that says Kulture. While originally meant as the English Channel, the crossed body of water came to stand for the Atlantic, with Europe still smoldering in ruins behind it. In fact, the German “brute” bears more than a minor resemblance to Merian C. Cooper's King Kong, who wouldn't come about, interestingly enough, until 1933, although the prototype was certainly laid by earlier “Lost World” literature, such as Burroughs's The Land That Time Forgot (1924) and Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island (1874). What is especially notable about the recruitment poster, and not infrequent for the time, is the construing of the homeland as virginal and the enemy as lustful, as in Renshaw's “Lure of England.” In the poster, even Lady Liberty's dangling white foot is positioned conveniently, so that the creature looks hugely endowed. The poster also has to be seen within the growing genre of “Invasion Literature” in Britain, starting with Chesney's enormously influential 1871 novel, The Battle of Dorking, where the Germans literally storm ashore. Certainly, the depiction of the “Hun” as “subhuman” is a central motif in Renshaw's verse. Equally important, however, is the revealing of Tommy's animal urges. In “Lure of England,” for instance, the soldier, who comes equipped with a “hungry heart,” “[yearns]” to be among the “mysterious meres and woodways” (England's, 57). In “The Great War,” upon entering the fighting, “the souls of men grew strangely purposeful,” suggesting an innate and previously unknown predilection for violence (England's, 59). Khan, for her part, rightly acknowledges “the transmutation of a human being” as being important, but she sees lines such as a “blinded broken thing” as “[suggesting] the unnaturalness of war” (Khan 58), when for Renshaw, as for Owen, Sassoon, and Rosenberg, it is precisely the opposite. It is the very naturalness of war, and the way it induces 46 humankind's bestial character, that is frightening, especially to those on the homefront. And in her “Soldier's Request,” the soldier pleads, “Let me forget that once I craved to kill;/ Let me dream up at God, and hide my scars” (Battle, 16). In this case, it is religion that becomes the antithesis to the human propensity for bloodlust, whereas for Owen, Rosenberg, and occasionally Sassoon, it was art that could placate or civilize. What is interesting is that Renshaw, unlike many of the female poets of the period, had few qualms about venturing out in her verse and trying to imagine the horrific carnage that soldiers endured. One, whom Khan cites, actually applauds Renshaw for having “grasped the spirit of the soldier and expressed his thoughts and emotions in action” (21). Khan does her few favors, however, in overlooking the source of that achievement: namely, Renshaw's recognition that in the heat of battle, soldiers, hardly the gallant knights that England had envisioned, tend to “[crawl] into a hole and [swoon away],” as she puts it in “The Great Push” (England's, 34). In fact, her description of a burrowing animal resembles Sassoon's image in “Break of Day,” where men “crawl to find/ Some crater for their wretchedness” (Collected Poems, 82). Significantly, Renshaw's “The Great Push” continues by describing the remaining soldiers, who fall in line “like toppling wheat that knows the swinging scythe,” a castration image if there ever was (England's, 34). She certainly shares a fear with Sassoon, Owen, and Rosenberg that men were becoming animals, but she, perhaps more so than they, also sees this degradation as a threat to human fertility, which is not surprising, since fertility tends to underlie most nationalist creeds. Indeed, the greatest fear in Renshaw's verse is that Tommy, if he does not become an animal “[craving] to kill”, will return home “stripped of his manhood,” as she puts it in “Lure of England” (England's, 57). This fear was not unfounded, either, as millions at this time were returning home crippled or “wounded in [an unmentionable] place,” as Sassoon sarcastically puts it in his bitter “Glory of Women” (Collected 47 Poems, 79). Jason Crouthamel and George Mosse have noted how prominent a theme emasculation was becoming in the literature of the Great War, and certainly enfeebled protagonists like Hemingway's Jake Barnes, Rebecca West's Chris Baldry, and Virginia Woolf's Jacob Flanders all underscore that ambivalence. Woolf's Septimus also displays more than a casual detachment from his wife in Mrs Dalloway (1925). In fact, he remains obsessed with, and ultimately paralyzed by, his relationship with his late commanding officer, Evan. Their former relationship is described as one of “affection” and is notable, among other things, for its frequent animal imagery: It was a case of two dogs playing on a hearth-rug; one worrying a paper screw, snarling, snapping, giving a pinch, now and then, at the old dog’s ear; the other lying somnolent, blinking at the fire, raising a paw, turning and growling good-temperedly. They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other. (73) Jean Kennard points out that Septimus feels an “increasing revulsion at the idea of heterosexual sex” (158), although whether this revulsion stems more from his erotic attachment to Evan or his broader feelings of disillusionment and post-traumatic stress is difficult to say. Either way, it is significant that Woolf romanticizes their lost affection by comparing them to frisky dogs. In fact, the “[pawing]” and “[quarreling]” sound remarkably similar to a passage in Flush (1933), where Miss Barrett's bracelets are fought over: “The dogs pawed and clawed them; cursed and quarrelled over them. The dogs barked” (85). If Flush, as a sympathetic outsider, “had never mastered the principles of human society” (82), then it is fair to say that Septimus has not, either. That, or the war has rendered them meaningless to him. Either way, both characters illustrate the degree to which animality, particularly in Woolf's 48 fractured universe, can connote an aberrant sexuality and social detachment on par with the estrangement that returning combatants would feel, particularly in postwar Britain. The extent to which the war unlocked previously suppressed feelings of intimacy, especially among co-serving men, has been amply documented, particularly by Joanna Bourke. Still, how much of that intimacy is attributable to the Great War itself, as opposed to the homoeroticism inherent in most military cultures, is open to debate. Among British WWI writers, the list of those articulating (or repressing) strong male-male desire encompasses everyone from Owen, Brooke, Graves, and Sassoon to J. R. Ackerly, W. Somerset Maugham, and T. E. Lawrence. In the Spanish Civil War, even Orwell, despite his lingering prejudice against homosexuality, could not help but find himself being “moved” by the “face” of a “tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with reddish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders” (3). Among WWII British writers, certainly Spender, Isherwood, Auden, Coward, and Waugh come to mind. In Waugh's Men at Arms (1952), the first of his Sword of Honor trilogy, for example, Guy Crouchback, the reactionary and maritally estranged protagonist, attempts to rekindle his marriage—unsuccessfully, of course—and then observes of his own countenance: “He had seen such mustaches before and such monocles on the faces of clandestine homosexuals” (116). While Guy's longings are probably less overt than those of Charles for Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited (1945), where, it is explained, the “naughtiness” is “high in the catalogue of grave sins” (41), it is hard not to see Waugh's military culture, like Owen's and Sassoon's, as deeply infused with male-male longing. Nevertheless, the other important point to make is that while the Great War unleashed a carnality previously unknown to the Victorians, or at the very least one they had actively sought to suppress, it also prompted a strong affinity for the natural world and a peculiar embrace of ecology. Khan is right to suggest that the pastoral view offered a sense of normalcy to soldiers. As she explains, “assimilating war into the language and thought of the pastoral tradition” was one way of resolving 49 what Fussell called “the collision between events and the language available” (Khan 56). Yet if this pastoral tradition meant anything to poets like Sassoon, Rosenberg, and Owen, it was also as a reminder of humankind's basic place in the elements, rather than its supposed preeminence. Greening the Pastoral Certainly the pastoral itself varies immensely across periods and times, and, as Raymond Williams point out, is extremely hard to define (14). William Empson famously defined it as “putting the complex into the simple” (22), and many, like Frank Kermode (17) and Williams (96), ascribe an anti-urbanism to it. Within the sphere of Romantic poetry, particularly that of Wordsworth, Jonathan Bate reads the pastoral as possessing an “evergreen language” (Giles 278). Within the elegiac pastoral tradition, Jahan Ramazani finds the Pathetic Fallacy to be the genre's “central trope,” although he is quick to point out that Owen and other Modernists also inject a strong element of irony into it (71). More recently, Ken Hiltner has come to see the pastoral in primarily ecological terms. Looking at Renaissance writings in particular, he reads the pastoral as embodying an emerging “environmental consciousness” (6). As far back as the Early Modern period in England, “nature”, he explains, became something “worth fiercely fighting to preserve,” even if it would be “as free as possible of human habitation” (132). Hiltner's account of the pastoral, unlike Ramazani's, does not mention the Pathetic Fallacy. Yet Ruskin's concept does have important ecological bearing, since the Pathetic Fallacy, for Ruskin, entails an attributing of emotion to things, particularly the natural world, which do not “depend upon our perception of them” (Works, 201). Indeed, Ruskin's stance—that only humans possess emotions and feelings—might strike some 50 as rather limiting, if not altogether shortsighted, given recent findings in science. As Kristin Andrews explains, summarizing animal cognition, “animal researchers have argued that at least some human emotions are also found in chimpanzees, and that chimpanzee facial expressions are homologous to human facial expressions in morphology and function.” Darwin, as far back as 1872, in his aptly titled The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, argued much the same, highlighting “the community of certain expressions in distinct though allied species, as in the movements of the same facial muscles during laughter by man and by various monkeys” (12). That said, even Ruskin himself, as a keen observer of the natural world—and a forerunner to modern environmentalism, particularly conservationism—might concede the possibility of laughter in chimpanzees. He says as much in Volume IV of Modern Painters when, for example, he “acknowledges...the ludicrous element” in Veronese paintings of “dwarfs or monkeys” (378). Regardless, the question, then, in examining the Pathetic Fallacy from an ecological standpoint is whether the viewer or poet, in falsely assigning such emotion to objects or animals, sees them as possessing their own vital forces, and therefore as intrinsically valuable, or as dependent upon humans for perception and worth. In some respects, this debate parallels the broader question in environmentalism of whether ecological resources should be seen as internally or instrumentally valuable. That debate has tremendous policy ramifications. An old-growth forest, for example, could be seen as entirely disposable if its only value is conceived in terms of its benefits to humans (aesthetic enjoyment, timber, air rejuvenation, etc.). In fact, as far back as 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court entertained the idea that trees could have legal standing. 17 The context for the decision was the growing power of corporations, which were thought to have interests of their own and, in some matters, personhood. 18 Thus followed 17 Christopher D. Stone, for example, contends that if corporations can have legal rights, then trees should as well. 18 While numerous U.S. Supreme Court cases have touched on the issue of corporate personhood, arguably the two most important in recent times have been: First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978), where the Court found that in the context of election spending, corporations have “protected speech”; and Citizens United (2010), which overturned the McCain-Feingold Act and drew heavily on First National Bank for precedent. 51 the question of whether trees could also be shown to have personhood or interests. In Sierra Club vs. Morton (1972), Justice William O. Douglas, in a passage almost reminiscent of Wordsworth, if not Ruskin, wrote that “valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life” could “have a legal personality...The voice of the inanimate object, therefore, should not be stilled.” 19 On a philosophical level, of course, it is important to separate the ethical question from the literary one. The first is asking whether the natural world has value; the second whether it has emotion or qualities traditionally ascribed to humans. Nevertheless, the questions overlap in so far as the perceived qualities or “voice” in a nonhuman object are what, according to Douglas and others, are needed to accord it full value as a subject, and thus legal standing. Although Hitner's What Else is Pastoral? does not cite the Georgians or Modernists, his ecological approach is important, and it, combined with Ramazani's emphasis on the Pathetic Fallacy, could go a way in explaining what a poet like Sassoon might find so appealing in the “bird-sung joy/ Of grass-green thickets,” as he calls it in “Prelude: The Troops” (Collected Poems, 67). In fact, in Modern Painters (1843-1860), in the section introducing the Pathetic Fallacy, Ruskin also cites the example of a singing bird, specifically one in a pastoral by Pope. The example, for Ruskin, shows how an author can avoid the Pathetic Fallacy by allowing a protagonist, in Pope's case, Jesse, to realize the limitations of the natural world: “Although the singing of the bird suggests to her the idea of its desiring to be heard in heaven, she does not for an instant admit any veracity in the thought” (Works 219). Perhaps Justice Douglas would disagree, but the point remains that Pope's verse, in Ruskin's eyes, is defensible in so far as Jesse recognizes the bird's inhumanness and thus its inability to share Christian thought. In “Prelude: The Troops,” Sassoon's narrator also comes to recognize a bird's curtailed scope: 19 Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972). 52 They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all Is ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky (Collected Poems, 67) Certainly the pastoral elegy has been long been conceived as a form of mournful reminiscence, with Milton's Uncouth Swain, for example, mourning his lost friend in “Lycidas”, a prototype for the genre. In Sassoon's case, it is questionable whether the thickets or birds ever existed in reality, or instead operate as ideals of a peaceful and severed past. Where Milton affords his protagonist the chance for a present interaction with the natural world—“I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude/ And with forc'd fingers rude/ Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year” (128)—Sassoon's departing soldiers can only reflect on the current irony: that the sky is blossoming (presumably with mortars) and the land is devoid of any life. In fact, the central irony of “Prelude: The Troops” might well be that it represents an elegiac pastoral for soldiers who are still alive, raising the question of who is speaking, when, and under what circumstances. If it is Sassoon, or his alter ego, reminiscing, as in the Sherston trilogy, one might reasonably ask how he has come back to visit his “brave brown companions,” as he calls them, and whether the mode of verse does not therefore allow him somehow to transcend the actualities of time. It is also hard to say whether Sassoon's poem commits the Pathetic Fallacy, since whatever joy is found in the bird's singing presumably belongs to the soldiers (or narrator) in their reminiscing, not the birds themselves. In that regard, the poem probably meets Ruskin's criteria. On an ecological level, it is equally hard to say whether the thickets and birds can be seen as possessing their own value or worth, since it is not clear that the natural world, while idealized retrospectively, is entirely separable 53 from the destruction and gloom of the present human carnage. Overall, Sassoon, like Owen and other Modernists, is clearly and quite consciously working to subvert the pastoral tradition. Less clear is what that tradition entails, especially for him and his wartime vision. Certainly “Prelude: The Troops,” like “Lycidas,” ascribes a certain value to the natural surroundings, particularly as a contrast to the present world of anguish and ruin. The question remains, though, whether that value is one of intrinsic merit or of merely instrumental use to humans, either as a mnemonic, as a distraction from current agony, or as an aggrandized ideal for the future. Thus the question of what constitutes the pastoral for Sassoon, Owen, and other Trench Poets is bound up with a number of concomitant issues: What does the poetic irony mean? What is the relationship between the present and the past, and how does one delineate the other? To what extent is the natural world, or the “green mounds that do not change,” as Ruskin mockingly puts it (Works, 212), even separable from the world of human encroachment? These are all enormously complex questions and as difficult to resolve as the larger ecological ones that embed them. It would seem the best approach would combine currents of ecological criticism, such as Hitner's, with tenets of classification, such as Ramazani's, and yet remain open to the peculiarities of individual works. After all, Sassoon's conception of the pastoral, while certainly framed by and overlapping with Owen's, contains many notable differences, not least of which are his survivorship, resultant guilt, and later, postwar emendations. While Hitner's work is a crucial starting point, very little ecological criticism has, thus far, touched on the Georgians or the writers of World War I. One notable exception is Santanu Das, whose Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2008) explores the physical sensations of battle, particularly in Owen's work. Drawing heavily on Freud and “contemporary trauma theory”, Das shows how much the “immediate, sensory” world informed Owen's understanding of the war, his own 54 sexuality, and, indeed, his conception of poetry, which he came to view as testimony, in Das' eyes (11). Importantly, Das, citing Aristotle, shows how touch “[alerts] us to the complexity of our emotional and affective life” and “[governs] our relationship to other beings, both human and animal” (Das 21). Nonetheless, Das offers little in the way of evidence for these relationships to animals, which is a rather notable omission, given both the ecological frame of his argument, as well as animals' recurring presence in the trenches. He does cite a British WWI captain, Philip Christison, who “remembers a waterlogged country choked with 'dead men and animals, the stench of which made us retch'” (Das 36). Das also discusses Arthur Graeme West, another overlooked poet from the war, who “wrote in his diary about soldiers sitting in their funk-holes like 'animals for the market, like hens in a cage,'” (Das 83) which was not an infrequent comparison. Das even interprets one of West's poems, which involves a soldier “[worming]” his way through the wire, as offering “a sense of the subhuman” (Das 86). But this sense of animality and the very proximity to animals remain overlooked in his account, even though, as the next section reveals, they very much help to explain the heightened intimacy he reads in the Trench Poets, and more generally, their conception of a war-time pastoral. Deathscapes: Reassessing the Pastoral Owen described his poem, “A Terre”—meaning, appropriately, “to earth”—as embodying “the philosophy of many soldiers” (The Collected Poems, 64), and in this lyric, he spells out, more than anywhere else, his particular vision of organicism. The poem, like Renshaw's “Lure of England,” describes a blinded soldier who fantasizes returning home. Owen's speaker, however, is dying, and thus his dreams of surviving the war, or even living to become a “muckman”, are an illusion: 55 O Life, Life, let me breathe,—a dug-out rat! Not worse than ours the existences rats lead— Nosing along at night down some safe vat, They find a shell-proof home before they rot. Dead men may envy living mites in cheese, Or good germs even. Microbes have their joys, And subdivide, and never come to death, Certainly flowers have the easiest time on earth. “I shall be one with nature, herb, and stone.” Shelley would tell me. Shelley would be stunned; The dullest Tommy hugs that fancy now. “Pushing up daisies,” is their creed, you know. ... Friend, be very sure I shall be better off with plants that share More peaceably the meadow and the shower. Soft rains will touch me,—as they could touch once, And nothing but the sun shall make me ware. (The Collected Poems, 65) Owen cites Shelley's “Adonaïs”, and he even shares Shelley's sense that humankind is irrevocably bound to Earth's elements. But where Shelley finds delight in that sentiment, Owen finds horror. His soldier mockingly fantasizes of being the lowest microbe, and, like Rosenberg's narrator in “Break of 56 Day in the Trenches”, envisions himself as a corpse feeding the flowers. He also notably equates himself with a rat, specifically a “dug-out rat.” Unlike Rosenberg, however, Owen sounds a stronger note of protest when he writes in the next stanza: We used to say we'd hate to live dead old,— Yet now . . . I'd willingly be puffy, bald, And patriotic. Buffers catch from boys At least the jokes hurled at them. I suppose Little I'd ever teach a son, but hitting, Shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting. (The Collected Poems, 64) To the extent Owen conceives himself as a rat, he still finds room to recoil in horror from what he sees as the violence in human nature, or this propensity to “hurt.” Sandra Gilbert rightly calls Owen's setting an “antipastoral deathscape”, to which she applies the term “gothic” (Gilbert 184). While she is correct to read this as an inversion of, and direct response to, the traditional pastoral elegy, the fatalism she imparts and the sense of resignation she ascribes to Owen miss the poem's underlying politics and Owen's sense of corrective outrage. 20 She reads “A Terre” as reflecting “such a state of alienation” that “even the body of a beloved comrade becomes (as in one of Ivor Gurney's poems) 'that red wet / Thing I must somehow forget.'” (Gilbert 185). Yet Owen does not forget his dead comrade, nor does he try. He is writing a poem about him in effort to remember and forewarn, as Gilbert concedes. That is crucial, because it reflects the vital conflict in Owen—one very much gripping Shelley, as well—about the need to combat the world's horrors while simultaneously accepting one's place in it. Gurney might 20 In Gilbert's defense, she does reiterate the soldier-poets' “need to testify,” which might include Owen, although the “alienation” she describes would seem to preclude that, as does the fatalism inherent in a term like “gothic” (184). 57 well have been resigned to his place, or that of others, in the “deathscape,” but Owen was hardly as defeatist. In a letter of December 31, 1917, about three weeks after he began writing “A Terre,” and while still stationed at Scarsborough, Owen wrote his mother: “for I have been bitten by the dogs of the world, and I have seen through the sorceries and scarlet garments. And so I have come to the true measure of man” (Selected Letters, 305). Undoubtedly, Owen sees humankind, if not himself, as locked in some eternal struggle with Earth's forces, which he bitterly equates with dogs. But the elegy he signs is not necessarily for himself. The fatalism that Gilbert assigns to Owen could, however, be applied to Sassoon, who, despite his ardent campaign of protest against the war, became less reassured in his capacity to end it or even attest to its horrors. His famous Declaration (1917) against the war ends by admonishing “the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise” (Sherston, 496). If the public lacks sufficient imagination, one might reasonably ask why Sassoon bothered to inform them—a question that undoubtedly continued to torment him and forms a paradox for many of the trench authors. After his Declaration was published, Sassoon was threatened with court-martial, and Robert Graves intervened to have him committed for insanity. While “recovering” at Craiglockhart, Sassoon penned, among other poems, “Attack,” which documents the Hindenburg Line in equally fateful terms: Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear, They leave their trenches, going over the top, While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists, And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists, Flounders in mud. O Jesu, make it stop! (Collected Poems, 71) 58 In her biography of Sassoon, Jean Moorcroft Wilson notes that the poem is unusual for him in that it lacks his normal irony and bears the strong influence of Owen, especially with its use of assonance and “elaborate rhyme scheme” (410). Unlike Owen's verse, however, especially “A Terre,” which mocks the “patriotic” and “all the arts of hurting,” Sassoon's “Attack” is more personal, focusing on the individual's fear in battle. Tellingly, his “hope” also “flounders” in the mud, reiterating the last line of Sassoon's Declaration. Thus, while Gilbert and many others are right to see Sassoon, like Owen, as engaging in an act of testimony, one also has to wonder just how much faith he bestows in that effort when confronted with earthly realities, or the “sucking mud”, as he calls it in “Counter-Attack” (Counter-Attack, 11). Given these earthly limitations, the pastoral also delineates the scope of human transcendence. In Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), for example, Sassoon concedes that the perspective of George Sherston, his semi-autobiographical protagonist, on the war was limited to his own minute field view: From the support-trench, which Burton called “our opera box,” I observed as much of the battle as the formation of the country allowed, the rising ground on the right making it impossible to see anything of the attack towards Mametz. A small shiny black note-book contains my penciled particulars, and nothing will be gained by embroidering them with afterthoughts. I cannot turn my field-glasses on to the past. (Sherston, 332) His novel itself is notable, wrestling, as it does, not only with questions of the past and Proustian issues of memory, but the larger question of how one human, surrounded by battle, could possibly hope to 59 make sense of it, let alone hasten its end. Significantly, and in contrast to other “memoirists” of the war, notably Robert Graves, and in contrast to Sassoon's own later, autobiographical trilogy, he chooses not to make Sherston, his semi- autobiographical persona, a poet. The reasons for this are debated in Sassoon scholarship. Bernard Knox, for example, argues that “Sherston is enough of a fiction to enable its creator to write about himself without self-consciousness” (143). Perhaps another explanation is simply that Sassoon, either at the time of his writing, or at the time of the life being depicted in the trilogy, lacked faith in the capacity for art—Sherston's, his own, or humankind's generally. His trilogy was written over a decade after the war, by which point his views and outlook had shifted. He also found himself plagued by survivor's guilt and increasing financial constraints. Max Egremont, in his biography, points out that the economic crisis of the Twenties may well have softened Sassoon's politics, to the extent he was ever a political writer—and Egremont, for his part, insists that he was not (350): “Sassoon, ostensibly a socialist, felt he should welcome radical change yet began to wonder how he might cope with the loss.” (365). Nevertheless, Sassoon's conception of the pastoral remained much the same and largely akin to T. S. Eliot's bleak “Wasteland” vision, despite their stylistic differences: “Our own occupation of Quadrangle Trench was only a prelude to that pandemonium which converted the green thickets of Mametz Wood to a desolation of skeleton trees and blackening bodies” (Sherston, 348). Here, Sassoon directly contrasts the “grass-green thickets”, which he also cites in “Prelude,” with the decimated aftermath of war, and Gilman's description of a deathscape is apt. Sassoon's grim vision of the pastoral, or the anti-pastoral, as Gilbert sees it, also notably aligns humankind with animals. His soldiers are “gnawed by rats” in “Dreamers”; die like “[flapping] fish” in “The Effect”; and fall down dead among the “big-bellied horses” in “The Road” (Collected Poems, 72; 60 73; 32). Unlike Shelley or Owen, however, Sassoon, at least by the time of his confinement, evinces far less faith in art, or the restorative effects of telling. To that end, he had probably become as ambivalent as Rosenberg, who, in “Moses,” describes “starved hopes” that “slink out/Cowering, incredulous” (Noakes 162). Rosenberg's forecast for “hope” is equally grim and, in fact, follows an image of “Half beasts snorting into the light” (Noakes 162), once again conveying this sense of human animality and the dilemma that poses for art. The Grey War: Animality After the Somme What the particular poetic visions of Rosenberg, Sassoon and Owen, as well as Renshaw, suggest, then, is how difficult it is to group them into categories like Georgian, Modernist, elegiac, mocking, despairing, optimistic, defeatist, or engaged. Likewise, the concepts of mythological or real seem to vary with each author. What they do share, however, is a peculiar organic vision—what Gilbert calls anti-pastoral—and one in which humans and animals are inextricably bound in their suffering. In fact, that vision is hardly exclusive to the poets and indeed resonates across much of the Great War's writing. Within the sphere of prose, expressions of sympathy for animals abound on both sides of the war. In Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918), Chris Baldry, the shell-shocked Captain and recent returnee to Britain, “went to the stables and looked at the horses... he refrained from touching them or speaking to them, as though he felt himself already infected with the squalor of war and did not want to contaminate their bright physical well-being” (7). In Goodbye to All That (1929), Robert Graves says basically the same: “the number of dead horses and mules shocked me; human corpses were all very well, but it seemed wrong for horses to be dragged into the war like this” (209). And in 61 The Enormous Room (1922), e. e. cummings describes how “one of the strongest men I have seen in my life is crying because he has had to sell his favourite horse,” after which the inmate explains, “this was no disabled horse, such as goes to the front...he could go forty kilometres a day” (178). All three accounts echo Sassoon's lament in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, where Sherston admits, “for I disliked the idea of good horses being killed and wounded, and I had always been soft-hearted about horses” (Sherston, 406). On the German side, Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel (1920) reflects a notoriously glorifying view of the war and in that sense one that is diametrically opposed to Sassoon's. Yet even Jünger, like Sassoon, cannot help but “marvel at the traces the gas had left. A large proportion of the plants had withered, snails and moles lay dead, and the horses that were stabled in Monchy...had watering eyes and muzzles” (82). Likewise, Manfred von Richthofen, commonly known as “The Red Baron,” describes the common bond between men and dogs on the front, recounting how one of his co-pilots, Holck, took “his little favorite, his doggie” with him “on every flight”, where “the dog would lie always quietly on Holck's fur in the fuselage” (58). In this case, the fur also blurs the line between animal and human. And no less a figure than Erwin Rommel, then a young infantry officer, observes of the carnage in Belgium: “Bleid presented a terrible sight. Among the smoking ruins lay dead soldiers, civilians, and animal” (13). To some extent, these expressions of sympathy reflect a growing concern in Germany for animal welfare, a concern that would culminate in Tierschutzgesetz, the Animal Protection Law of 1933. Indeed, Hitler, Göring, and other Nazi leaders, a fair number of whom were WWI veterans, implemented some of Europe's first major animal welfare legislation, including bans on trapping, vivisection, and even the live boiling of lobsters and crabs. Notably, they also threatened violators of these provisions with internment at concentration camps, posing what can only be described as one of the great paradoxes of 20 th -century animal rights legislation. 62 Perhaps the vividest descriptions of animals in The Great War, and abhorrence at the pains that they suffered, come in Parade's End (1924-28), Ford Madox Ford's masterful tetralogy. As Julian Barnes points out, throughout the four novels, the protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, is variously compared to a maddened horse, an ox, a swollen animal, a mad bullock, a lonely buffalo, a town bull, a raging stallion, a dying bulldog, a grey bear, a farmyard boar, a hog and finally a dejected bulldog... Even Valentine Wannop, the spikey suffragette who is eventually to bring this Anglican saint a kind of salvation, initially finds him “as mad as he is odious”, with hateful eyes “protruding at her like a lobster's”; she takes him for just another “fat golfing idiot”. Still, for all his apparent ineptness, there is one thing always to be said for Christopher Tietjens: he is very good with horses. (Barnes) The animalesque descriptions are entirely Dickensian, and yet more than that, Tietjens' compassion for horses is meant to stand in ironic contrast to the prevalent cruelty of humans, not to mention his inability to relate to other people, not least of all his wife. In No More Parades (1925), the second novel, Tietjens is surrounded by incompetent horsemen at the front, and he berates an orderly for subjecting a seized Prussian horse to abusive conditioning: “Personally Tietjens did not believe in the hardening process and would not permit any animal over which he had control to be submitted to it” (Parade's End, 377). Again, one might question whether the same standard applies in his treatment of Valentine Wannop. In the third novel, A Man Could Stand Up (1926), he even comes “to regard cruelty to an animal as a more loathsome crime than cruelty to a human being” (Parade's End, 642). Both passages recall his earlier confrontation with a coachman in Some Do Not (1924), the first novel, where he comforts Valentine’s horse by whispering to it, after which it “rubbed its forehead almost 63 immediately against [Tietjens’s] chest” and “its limbs lost their tautness” (Parade's End, 110). Again, the intimacy here contrasts with his own sterile courtship of Valentine, caught up, as he is, in Victorian mores—even as his wife continues cheating. To that end, Tietjens becomes as much of a relic in his time as horses do at the front. And where Sassoon, for example, recoils in horror at seeing horses mistreated, particularly at the ending of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), where one gets violently snagged on barbed wire, Tietjens is more resigned to such cruelty. He simply chalks it up to the whims of human behavior, or what he calls “the beastliness of human nature” (Parade's End, 453). More broadly, anyone serving at the front at this time could witness, as Sassoon, Owen, and many more did, the sheer animalizing effect of trench warfare on humans. In All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Remarque's protagonist, Paul Bäumer, describes his unit's approach to the battle lines: “We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers--we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals” (30). Hemingway's Frederic Henry famously declared in Farewell to Arms: “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it,” (191), which certainly echoes Owen's question in “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” of “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” (Collected Poems, 44). Even David Jones, who was probably the most abstract and elusively Modernist of the World War I authors, described his troops in In Parenthesis (1937), as “[hunted animals]”, “lambs of the flock”, men who slept in “horse-stalls”, and figures “entrained in cattle trucks” (2; 6; 8; 9). As Paul Fussell aptly notes, their “world is now assuredly animal” (147). What these depictions attest to, aside from the industrial-scale slaughter of humans and the commonly held perception that soldiers themselves had become chattel, was the ubiquity of animals in combat, especially horses and dogs. Horses had already been deployed in unprecedented numbers, and 64 with limited success, in the Boer Wars, where 400,000 died, mainly from poor care. In fact, 16,000 perished on the initial voyage over (Kean 165). Even so, at the start of the Great War, cavalry units were considered the elite of the British forces, and many, as Fussell points out, anticipated “sending the cavalry through to end the war” (13). Tens of thousands of horses were procured, mostly from outside Britain. Their ineffectiveness against trenches, barbed wire, and rapid-fire machine guns became apparent, however, as early as the fall of 1914, after which they were primarily consigned to reconnaissance and transport roles. They did find more use on the Eastern Front, where battles were less entrenched, and in the Ottoman Empire, where Allenby would employ them as late as 1918. Overall, though, the Great War signaled the effective end of cavalry in combat, as G. J. Meyers, and others, have pointed out (228). By 1919, an estimated sixteen million horses had served (Roberts and Tucker 103), with roughly half of them having been chopped down by gunfire, starved to death, frozen in the cold, or killed by diseases like ringworm (Fowler 8). Nearly all of those which survived the war were sold to slaughterhouses immediately thereafter, paraded around on display, or, much to the resentment of Britons, sold to locals overseas, where the new owners were frequently accused of mistreatment. Less ceremoniously, an estimated 200,000 mules, 47,000 camels, and 11,000 oxen served alongside them, primarily, though no less fatally, in transport (Kean 167). Carrier pigeons were also routinely deployed, and they were commonly shot down by both sides. Finally, dogs were used widely as messengers, mascots, and even pack animals for carrying litters and guns. Estimates of the numbers of canines that served range from 50,000 to a million, 21 but all agree very few lived, and those that did were primarily euthanized afterward, often to the consternation of the soldiers they had fought alongside. Even outside of combat, the conditions for animals were fierce. Most horses, as the inmate in the Enormous Room attests, were called up to the Front and disposed of. Within the UK, most of the 21 Roberts and Tucker, for example, write that “perhaps 75,000 dogs” served in the war (103). 65 dogs that were not initially drafted for service were eventually put down, owing to Britain's food shortage. Some cities tried to ban canines and even made it a crime, punishable by imprisonment, to feed them. Of course, amidst the food shortages, the British vegetarian societies tried to trumpet the benefits and cheapness of meat alternatives, an effort that was frequently greeted with scorn. Guinea pigs and rabbits became standard evening fare for those who could summon it. Virtually all the cattle and pigs within Britain were slaughtered and sent overseas. Beyond that, animal testing intensified at unprecedented rates, particularly in experiments related to gassing, munitions, and war-time chemicals. In one British experiment, for example, eighteen pigs were placed several feet away from detonating explosives and left to bleed to death to determine how long they could survive unattended (Fowler 10). As Henry Salt put it, “more suffering was caused to animals in a day of war than in a year of peace.” (Kean 168-69). In truth, though, while the scope of animal suffering was unprecedented in the Great War, as were the total numbers of animals deployed, the animal-to-human casualty ratio may actually have been less for the British than in previous conflicts. During the Second Boer War, for example, an estimated 335,000 horses perished alongside 22,000 British and Imperial fighters (Fremont-Barnes 86), or roughly fifteen horses for every British and Imperial soldier. By contrast, approximately four Brits died for every horse lost in the Great War, mainly because veterinary medicine had improved, horses were gradually phased out as the war dragged on, and humans themselves perished from diseases like the Spanish Flu, which accounted for about a third of all military casualties. Thus, while a British soldier was no more likely to see an animal suffer in the Great War than in, for example, the wars in the Crimea or Africa, the sheer numbers of animals that he or she encountered was likely to be much higher, attesting, if nothing else, to the advances that had been made in logistics and animal procurement. 66 Of course, beyond their roles in fighting and transport, the animals also served as rejuvenating spirits for the soldiers, and they were frequently depicted in posters and war-time propaganda intended to boost morale. Partially, this was because dogs, in the tradition of Odysseus's Argo, still connoted home, and the horse, however archaic its role had become in trench warfare, still connoted chivalry and individual heroics, especially among the officer class. The poet Julian Grenfell, for example, who was a Captain in the Royal Dragoons and achieved notoriety for describing the battlefield as a “picnic” (then dying on it seven months later), thought horses could serve as models of perseverance for soldiers. In “Into Battle,” he writes: In dreary, doubtful, waiting hours, Before the brazen frenzy starts, The horses show him nobler powers; O patient eyes, courageous hearts! (Kendall, First World War, 111) Ironically, the famed cavalry units of yore, such as the Life Guards and Blues, would, after the war, become primarily ceremonial in function, while others, including Grenfell's Royal Dragoons, became mechanized, replacing their horses with tanks. Nevertheless, horses resonated in the popular imagination, and, above all, in the minds of the soldiers themselves. Black Beauty (1877) continued to be a global best-seller and spawned a number of pony-themed imitators, such as the Moorland Mousie (1929). In painting, Fortunino Matania's Goodbye Old Man (1916), which was commissioned by the Blue Cross as a fundraiser, became one of the most circulated images of the war and was frequently used in charity drives. Other painters, such as Alfred Munning, Umberto Boccioni, and Terence Cuneo, created similarly iconic images of horses 67 fighting and falling with troops. F. W. Reed, for his part, depicted a cavalry assault on German front lines, where a horse becomes entangled in barbed wire. While not terribly notable itself, the painting went on to inspire Michael Morpurgo, the author of the children's novel War Horse (1982), prompting what is probably the most famous recent depiction of horses in World War I: Steven Spielberg's 2011 film of the same name. In all of these images, and in the mass attention that followed, one has to wonder just how alone Tietjens was in thinking that “cruelty to an animal” is “a more loathsome crime than cruelty to a human being.” More broadly, the question remains how animals could serve to humanize a war that concurrently dehumanized humans. Perhaps one answer is simply the intimacy that soldiers developed with animals in serving alongside so many of them. Mantania's image does little to dispel that. In fact, the embrace is nearly sexual, if not Christian in its resemblance to a Pietà. More than anything, the picture reminds the viewer, whose perspective is notably aligned with that of both the horse and soldier, that bloodshed is bloodshed, regardless of the animal from which it comes. Despite the propaganda and soldiers' increased proximity to animals, we should not overlook the fact that the early 20 th century also marked a very dark time for animals, as virtually every historian of the subject attests. Apart from animals' unprecedented deployment in war, behaviorism was on the rise in both Europe and the States, a position that accelerated animal testing. Humane institutions, especially in Britain, backed away from their earlier opposition to vivisection. Britain's Research Defense Society was even somewhat gratified with the war, gloating that “it had put a stop to the usual anti-vivisection debates, meetings, and correspondence” (Kean 170). Meanwhile, industrial farming began to consume animals in unheard of proportions—initially to support the war, but also to help nations regroup. By 1920, and owing mainly to internal disagreements over whether the group should support the war, Henry Salt's Humanitarian League had collapsed. While their members flocked 68 elsewhere, it was clearly the end of an era, and any gains achieved by the Victorian welfarists quickly started to erode. Nevertheless, the war wrought profound changes in Britain, especially in how animals were perceived. In a remarkable chapter in her history of animal rights, Hilda Kean details the role of the Great War in fomenting animal compassion. Highlighting the degree to which animals were perceived as fellow “sufferers” on the front, she cites a host of examples attesting to how much value enlisted men ascribed to dogs and officers to horses, as well as how much pity the sight of wounded animals could evoke from those on the home-front. She lists a variety of efforts, ranging from animal field hospitals to the establishment of Blue Cross charities, that attempted to relieve animal suffering in war, a number of which bear ironic contrast to the actual conditions of the soldiers. In fact, by 1917, operations had been performed on over 1,600 dogs at field clinics, and veterinary medicine was becoming increasingly prevalent at home (169). Above all, Kean describes the emotional appeal of the animals, which “proved to be companions and ciphers of sanity in an insane world.” In particular, she explains how women, removed from their husbands, took comfort in their pets—what few remained. She also mentions a Times article from 1917 describing the conditions at the Front: “It is is the dogs who enlist the sympathies more than anything else. Like frightened children they join the ranks, nestling down by the side of the men for warmth and protection” (173). Ironically, the one dog Kean does not mention, Rin Tin Tin, a German Shepherd rescued by an American soldier after the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, probably became the most famous of the war. As Susan Orlean points out, he helped to popularize the breed globally (60). With his appearance in the silent film, Where the North Begins (1923), his first starring role, he even helped Warner Brothers stave off bankruptcy. Regardless, what Kean, like Orlean, never really explains is why animals could offer such “sanity” in war, or what that might say about humans. In this regard, perhaps science itself holds a 69 clue. 70 CHAPTER THREE: EMPATHY RECONSIDERED Empathy: A Neurological Approach Among animal rights thinkers and activists, “empathy” is usually seen to be one of the movement's cornerstones, although what it means, and how it is invoked, are both frequently debated. In fact, empathy as a concept is notoriously difficult to define, and running debates continue to grapple with this question of what it entails: sharing another's perspective, estimating their feelings, or perhaps even feeling “soft-hearted” about them, as Sassoon said he did for horses. The issue obviously has tremendous ramifications within other fields, as well, including psychoanalysis, where it can dictate treatment or determine diagnoses of people, most notably psychopaths, who evidently lack empathy, and the autistic, who are allegedly endowed with a lesser supply; economics, where it can shape individual or corporate behavior; philosophy, where it underlies fields like phenomenology, ethics, and the “problem of other minds”; and of course literature, where, as Martha Nussbaum reminds us, the very practice of reading might teach it, (56) a theory that recent science affirms. 22 All of this of course depends on how empathy is defined or even measured. The other major problem is how it is induced in a subject. Among researchers, the current consensus is that empathy starts to develop in humans around 22 See, for example, Kidd and Castano. For more on the subject of empathy and how it underlies approaches to literature, see Suzanne Kean. 71 the age of two. Prior to that, infants are usually thought to display what is called “emotional contagion.” That is, they can feel what others feel merely by being around them, or associating with them. A baby will cry, for example, when others start to cry, even if the baby cannot properly distinguish itself from them or recognize its own feelings. Shortly thereafter, the ability for affective empathy arises—excluding the token psychopath—and allows one to share in another's feelings. Some, like Martin Hoffman, view empathy as representing a whole series of developmental stages, ranging from the emotional contagion to outright sympathy, which is usually seen as a more advanced form of empathy. Others define empathy more sparsely, relegating it to a couple of stages. There is also the as- yet-unresolved question of whether empathy is primarily affective or cognitive in form, or whether that distinction can even hold. Where scientists do tend to agree is that mirror neurons, or neurons that fire after watching someone else perform a similar action, play a causal role in empathy. They also lead to what is called intersubjectivity, a vital, although disputed, concept in fields like moral psychology and phenomenology. Nevertheless, Karsten Stueber, drawing on research from Meltzoff and Brooks, sums up the importance of mirror neurons: The evidence from mirror neurons—and the fact that in perceiving other people we use very different neurobiological mechanisms than in the perception of physical objects—does suggest that in our primary perceptual encounter with the world we do not merely encounter physical objects. Rather, even on this basic level, we distinguish already between mere physical objects and objects that are more like us. In other words, the research suggests that we tend to immediately perceive things we can relate to— 72 that is, those that have feelings—rather than seeing them as, say, rocks or bushes. Presumably, then, if one could detect those feelings in animals, one might immediately relate to them. This is crucial, because it undercuts both Behaviorism and Cartesianism (in so far as we can directly conceive other minds). Unfortunately, important questions remain about what these mirror neurons do, and exactly how they affect us. We are not even entirely sure where they are located, and some dispute they that exist. 23 What is becoming clear, though, is that these mirror neurons are not limited to humans. They have been recently discovered in monkeys and birds, who are capable, it is alleged, of some form of imitative behavior, if not empathy proper. Importantly, in 2002, Preston and De Waal showed that part of what affects this behavior, particularly in non-human animals, is familiarity with those being perceived: “The greater the familiarity or similarity, the richer the subject’s representation of the object. A rich representation involves more associations, and thus, creates a more complex, elaborated, and accurate pattern of activity in the subject” (16). What this can lead to, then, is altruism: “individuals of many species are distressed by the distress of a conspecific [one within a species] and will act to terminate the object’s distress, even incurring risk to themselves” (1). Thus, when Wilfred Owen writes to his mother on October 4 th , 1918, explaining that “I came out in order to help these boys - directly by leading them as well as an officer can, indirectly by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as a pleader can” (Collected Letters, 580), he is expressing sympathy for them and displaying some form of altruism—either by “leading them” or writing about them, as he sees it. What causes this sympathy—specifically, what causes the mirror neurons to fire—is a feeling of familiarity with his soldiers. Witnessing their distress is painful to him, precisely because he has been able to bond with them and recognizes himself in them. From an 23 Specifically, it is not clear that mirror neurons are a separate class of cells, although most researchers believe that they are. For a dissenting view, contending that mirror neurons are not distinct cells, see: Pascolo, Ragogna, and Rossi. 73 evolutionary standpoint, one might even say that his reproductive success hinges on his being able to form a degree of attachment with them and thus preserving them alongside himself (although in Owen's case, one might question the validity of the “reproductive” claim 24 ). Regardless, and ultimate causes aside, the proximate factor in explaining Owen's feeling of empathy, if not sympathy, with his soldiers is the fact that he knows them well and can form a “rich representation of them,” as Preston and De Waal would have it. The question remains, though: what makes Sassoon feel “soft-hearted” about horses? Certainly he has few problems killing animals, as his Foxhunting memoir makes clear. Is it the chivalric ideal? Or is the fact that he has spent most of his life riding horses and has attained a degree of familiarity with them? The science would suggest the latter. In fact, what Preston and De Wall also reveal is that there is no reason empathy, of the sort derived from familiarity, cannot exist between two different species, or outside of conspecifics: “Perception-action mechanisms emphasize that perception selects elements in the environment that require or suggest a response by the subject. In group-living species, objects that require a response are those that the subject relies upon to attain personal goals; these are usually friends and relatives” (6). Simply put, we are most likely to bond with those who respond to us. Those who speak our language do it best—and that is probably the biggest check against combatants of other nations. But horses themselves obviously undergo tremendous levels of communication with their trainers, which explains not only why Sassoon loved them, but why people even today tend to recoil in horror when learning, for instance, that during the Battle of Verdun, a single shot from a French naval gun killed 97 horses at once (Gilbert 235). One would be appalling, as in Captain's death in Black Beauty. But those animals we do not know as well, or cannot envision responding to us, such as oxen or mules, tend to evoke less sympathy in us. Preston and De Wall's research might also explain why most 24 The question of reproductive success, and its relation to altruism, is enormously complex and quite hotly debated, with some citing memes, for example, as explaining our altruistic behavior. One such account is Dawkins', to which Benitez- Bribiesca vehemently objects. 74 people cannot bother to watch a cow being slaughtered but have few qualms about consuming a hamburger. Recognizability matters. In any case, the implications of neural science and mirror neurons for subjects like animal rights are still quite unclear and will surely be disputed as they come to light. But what the current neural research suggests is that familiarizing oneself with another and detecting an increased likelihood of response from her tend to lead to an extension of empathy towards her. Whether this amounts to actual compassion, or merely empathetic consideration, or even hostile indifference, remains to be seen. How that happens is equally murky. In the context of 1919, though, it is clear that affinities for soldiers could translate into affinities for animals. During the war, for example, when British families faced crippling food shortages, many started breeding rabbits for food. As Hilda Kean explains, “Once the effect of gas warfare in the trenches upon men was known, the practice of gassing wild rabbits in their warrens became subject to criticism” (170). That does not mean the gassing declined, but at least a few people thought twice before doing it. The same consideration, for that matter, could extend to animals in the trenches. Kean contends that “soldiers directly involved in the fighting were concerned about the animals' condition”, and that concern certainly helps account for the prevalence of field clinics and the widespread use of animals as mascots. Importantly, 1919, the year the war ended, saw the near-passage in Parliament of the Dogs (Protection) Bill, the first wide-scale legislative effort in Britain to ban dogs' use in vivisection. The effort failed, but it is notable because it occurred in the midst of what were otherwise unprecedented levels of animal testing. It was also largely the work of one Frances Power Cobbe, a tireless suffragette and reformer. Yet it is worth asking whether millions of returning veterans, many of whom had been experimented on themselves in the Great Western theater, did not find some affinity with dogs. Or maybe they just recognized the “drooping tongues from jaws” that Owen posthumously described 75 (Collected Poems, 69). “To Hurt, Not To Kill”: Later War Writings and the Rise of Intentional Cruelty If the Great War marked an increasingly proximity to animals, and thus birthed more empathy for them, then the subsequent wars suggest just how variant this extension of compassion could be. Indeed, as a point of comparison, it is useful to look at how animals have been conceived in later works of war writing. Naturally, comparing wars in different contexts and times, not to mention British and American perspectives, is extremely problematic, but doing so can, if nothing else, shed some light on the transforming conditions of battle, as well as soldier-animal relations. On its face, the Spanish Civil War bears little comparison to the Great War. After all, the Great War, even by its cessation, was widely perceived as a futile and senseless slaughter, whereas the Spanish Civil War would soon become—and remain for some time—a global cause célèbre. It also marked an important turn in Europe away from the static warfare and conventional tactics of WWI. It is hard to overstate the Spanish Civil War's importance, both in laying the ground for future conflicts and in delineating a new type of fighter: the partisan guerrilla. Certainly, the Arabs, and notably T. E. Lawrence, waged a major guerrilla war against the Ottomans in the Arab Revolt, and partisans fought on both sides of the Russian Civil War. Indeed, guerilla warfare in Europe can be traced at least as far back as the Goths and the Huns. But the Spanish Civil War, if nothing else, popularized, on a level previously unwitnessed in Europe, the plight of army irregulars, particularly through writings by Dos Passos, Hemingway, Gellhorn, Lorca, Malraux, Orwell, Koestler, Emma Goldman and Claud Cockburn, among others. Perhaps Auden, who only spent seven weeks in the conflict but found himself 76 permanently changed by it, best sums up the romanticism—and concomitant despair—associated with such partisans when he describes their arrival in Spain (1937): They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel; They floated over the oceans; They walked the passes. All presented their lives. (Auden 56) Unlike David Jones's soldiers “entrained” in cattle-trucks, Auden's fighters are willing volunteers. It is significant that he portrays them as “burrs” and stealthy night travelers, suggesting the degree to which they were unwelcome—indeed hunted—in Nationalist Spain. The image of them “floating” on water is Christian and perhaps ironic, given their combative intent. While Auden would later dismiss the poem as propaganda, it does conjure the spirit of the war and indicate, with its injunction to “intervene” and “descend,” the extent to which the war had, despite the widely perceived menace of fascism, become a truly voluntary, popular effort—indeed, not far removed, in that respect, from the gallantry portrayed in Tennyson's Idylls. Arguably no one would summarize that contradiction of war as alluring and yet evil better than Hemingway's Pilar, who, in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), recounts a brutal execution of fascists by townspeople. She explains how a captive is let go, “because the people of this town are as kind as they can be cruel and they have a natural sense of justice and a desire to do that which is right. But cruelty had entered into the lines and also drunkenness or the beginning of drunkenness and the lines were not as they were when Don Benito had come out” (116). Robert Jordan is predictably repulsed by the tale, 77 and he compares it to a lynching he witnessed as a child in the U.S.: “That drunkenness is the same in my country. It is ugly and brutal.” Although he displays otherwise superhuman traits as a soldier, Robert Jordan is hardly above such “drunkenness” himself, and it is later explained that he “hated injustice as he hated cruelty and he lay in his rage that blinded his mind.” The rage stems from Pablo's apparent betrayal of the group and absconding with their explosives, yet Jordan's rage also carries over to Maria, to whom he confides: “I would have struck thee there awhile back if thou had spoken. What an animal a man is in a rage.” It is telling that this rage and the propensity to violence are seen as “animal” traits, much as they were for Owen and Renshaw. More broadly, Pilar's assertion that “the lines had become cruel” reflects the degree to which cruelty, no longer a singular act, has become the province of collectives, and in fact, whole bands of warring fighters. Genocide, the obvious corollary of such mass and institutional cruelty, was not far down the road historically, with the term itself being coined around 1943. Indeed, the Armenian Genocide, upon which Hitler would draw as reference, was already two decades old by the time the Red and White Terror, as such atrocities would come to be known, were ravaging Spain. 25 Arguably the most celebrated—and controversial—depiction of Republican collusion and atrocities would come in Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938), where once again cruelty is a prevalent theme. Describing life at the front, Orwell explains: “Our water, what there was of it, came from miles away, on the backs of mules or little persecuted donkeys. For some reason the Aragón peasants treated their mules well but their donkeys abominably. If a donkey refused to go it was quite usual to kick him in the testicles” (41). The scene is not terribly important in the memoir, and the mistreatment of the donkeys does not, in Orwell's eyes, in any way compare, for example, to the violent suppression of the 25 This is not to suggest that mass slaughter had not occurred before the Spanish Civil War, but merely to suggest that the perpetuation of such cruelty on an institutional scale was concomitant with the rise of industrialism and mass mobilization, reaching its climax in the early 20 th century. Of course, some, such as David Stannard, argue that acts like the European colonization of the Americas amount to genocide, as well. The topic is controversial among historians and largely depends on how one defines genocide, itself a contested term. 78 POUM. It is also worth noting that Orwell was almost comically opposed to vegetarianism, but the sympathy he expresses for the donkey goes a way in showing both his disdain for the peasantry (coupled with a martial respect) and his basic cognizance of how cruel the war had become—for both humans and animals. Even after getting shot, he admits, “I had never heard of a man or an animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it” (186). Orwell himself would know, as he was working in animal husbandry at his cottage at Hertfordshire while drafting and revising Homage. If the Spanish Civil War marked a decline in conventional fighting and a rise in mass slaughter, coupled with irregular tactics, then World War II saw both implemented on a global scale. The result was nearly twice as many killed as in the First World War, depending on how the casualties are defined. In should be no surprise, then, that where WWI commonly saw soldiers equated with rats, as they are in the “No-man's Land” of In Parenthesis and the “Rats' Alley” of Eliot's Wasteland, WWII saw humans reduced even further. In Waugh's Men at Arms, Guy Crouchback, for instance, tellingly observes this strange faculty of the army of putting itself into order. Shake up a colony of ants and for some minutes all seems chaos. The creatures scramble aimlessly, frantically about; then instinct reasserts itself. They find their proper places and proper functions. As ants, so soldiers. (Sword, 155) Of course, for Guy, like Waugh, the reduction of humans to ants stems as much from modernity as it does the war's fighting. In fact, unlike Jones and Sassoon, who revile every aspect of combat, Waugh to some degree embraces it as a faded and chivalric ideal: “the enemy at last was plain in view, huge and 79 hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle” (Sword, 10). It is also noteworthy that Waugh, by the time the Second World War rolled around, had probably become as conservative in outlook as anyone in Britain—as Orwell remarked in his notebooks, “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions” (Hitchens)—and yet even he remained skeptical of the Allied cause. In fact, while one might find quite a few patriotic accounts of World War I in the early days of its fighting—Rupert Brooke's and Ernst Jünger's, for example—one would be extremely hard pressed to find a literary account of World War II that does the same. Nearly all of the novels that followed the carnage—Heller's Catch-22 (1961), Jones's From Here to Eternity (1951), Wiesel's Night (1958), Levi's If Not Now, When? (1982), Wouk's The Caine Mutiny (1952)—questioned, to at least some degree, the tactics and worth of the war. Most plainly disparaged it. And perhaps none is more emblematic, and in fact more rabidly anti-war, then James Jones's The Thin Red Line (1962), which Jones sarcastically dedicated “to those greatest and most heroic of all human endeavors, WAR and WARFARE.” The book is largely autobiographical, and it presents a fictionalized, though heavily factual, account of the Battle of Mount Austen in the Guadalcanal Campaign, where Jones himself was wounded. Midway through the battle, Storm, an American mess sergeant, reflects on the survivors of his platoon and his own role in helping them: “It didn't mean anything, what he was doing, didn't help at all...And then that look, whether of rage, frustration, guilt, or pain, or all four, would come back over his face. Modern war. You couldn't even pretend it was human” (442). By that, Jones probably means that humans have been reduced to fodder in a global fight for “property” (50), as First Sergeant Welsh repeatedly mutters. But it also means that soldiers peer out with “ferret-like” (442), eyes or display “animal cruelty” (157). Soldiers find themselves making “animal [screams]” (171) and coming to recognize “the animal within themselves” (350). In one gripping scene, which Terrence Malick 80 successfully captures in his 1998 film adaptation, a Japanese soldier “stared back” at his captor with “pain-dulled, animal eyes” (312). The image even calls to mind Stephen Crane's description of a recaptured deserter in The Red Badge of Courage, with which Jones was well-acquainted: “The soldier went mechanically, dully, with his animal-like eyes upon the officer” (Crane 34). Either way, after Jones's Private Dale executes three Japanese prisoners, the effete Lieutenant Band muses internally that he “did not care for the sadistic cruelty Dale displayed now and then...But in a war everything had to be used that was useful” (431). This sadism, both towards animals and humans, would become a recurrent motif in Norman Mailer's The Naked and The Dead (1948), which centers on the Philippines Campaign. No less cynical in outlook, the novel describes, among others, General Cummings, who espouses fascist views and nurses an almost homoerotic affection for his underling, Lieutenant Hearn. Reflecting on their relationship, Hearn comes to realize that “he had been the pet, the dog, to the master, coddled and curried, thrown sweetmeats until he had had the presumption to bite the master once,” which he does by childishly stamping out a cigarette. “And since then he had been tormented with the particular absorbed sadism that most men could generate only towards an animal” (313). It is notable that in this case an animal is seen as docile and victimized, rather than as the prototype for human violence, as it is for Robert Jordan. Certainly there was no shortage of torture and abuse in WWI, nor in the wars that preceded it. Yet the poetry and prose of the trench-era focuses more on the instruments of war and its shocking conditions than the deliberate cruelty of humans. As Paul Bäumer reflects in All Quiet, “I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring.” For Jones and Mailer, there is nothing “unknown” or “innocent” about human 81 efforts to “slay one another.” They are part and parcel of a fully mechanized war. What is novel, however, is the sadism inherent in humans and the willingness to cause pain—to humans and animals alike. Partially this growing cognizance of cruelty, especially in postwar America, might be the effect of the Holocaust and its revelations about human barbarity. It might also stem from the fact that Americans fighting in the Pacific in WWII found themselves fighting Asians and indigenous peoples, rather than Europeans, and in dense jungle terrains, rather than open fields. 26 Either way, the deliberate cruelty certainly continues, and it would increasingly characterize the Western experience in Vietnam. In Tobias Wolf's memoir, In Pharaoh’ s Army (1994), a South Vietnamese sergeant, whom Wolf is sent to advise, threatens to roast a live puppy over a campfire. “He wasn't playing with the dog,” Wolf explains. “He was playing with me, with my whiteness, my Americanness, my delicate sentiments —everything that gave me my sense of superior elevation” (82). After paying a bribe to halt the animal's torture, Wolf realizes that this has become his lot in Vietnam: being “forced to watch an ignorant man oppress a dog” (82). Curiously, it is not the sergeant whom Wolf dislikes, but the singed and convulsing puppy: “I disliked him for being so unlucky...for involving me in his bad luck and making me a fool of me. I disliked him for not seeing any difference between me and the man who'd hurt him” (83). Because the Vietnamese sergeant is so foreign and incomprehensible to Wolf, in both race and character, Wolf attributes the torturing to the man's basic ignorance, if not his status as an antagonized native. What is fascinating, however, is that Wolf, though he may be writing ironically, expects the animal to distinguish classes of humans, as if presupposing that it would have a basic intelligence that the humans around him lack. In fact, it is not even clear to Wolf who is oppressing whom—he the Vietnamese, the Vietnamese him, or either of them the puppy. What is clear is that Wolf, 26 It should also be said that the American involvement in WWI was relatively limited, compared to that of other actors, and compared to the American experience in WWII, where roughly four times as many Americans would serve. 82 like Graves, who thought it “wrong for horses to be dragged into the war like this,” and indeed like Tietjens, ascribes a basic innocence to animals, and one that is trampled upon by humans engaging in war. A similar scene transpires in Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (2007), where, in the opening pages, Seaman Houston goes hunting for boars and impulsively shoots a monkey in the abdomen. Like Wolf, Houston is fully cognizant of the monkey's pain—Houston “felt his own stomach tear in pain”— and yet he abominates “its embarrassing and hateful condition” (4). Indeed, the monkey becomes as much a metaphor for Vietnam as Wolf's sizzled animal does. Johnson's tone is more sarcastic, however, perhaps because he, unlike Wolf, did not actually encounter such horrors in Vietnam. Moreover, Tree of Smoke is less an indictment of American foreign policy—or any one man's naivete—than the sheer absurdity of human life. In The Quiet American (1955), which is more expressly political, though no less sardonic in tone, Graham Greene delights in the treachery of humans, and one can almost hear the author gloating over the fateful end of Alden Pyle, the naive C.I.A. operative. Vigot, the French inspector, coolly explains to the narrator, “We've found Pyle's dog...I suppose it had refused to leave the body. Anyway they cut its throat. It was in the mud fifty yards away. Perhaps it dragged itself that far...Are you still interested?” (178). The dog becomes an important clue in the plot's unraveling, and the pet's dispatching in some ways parallels the grim disappearance of its owner. Indeed, like Hearn in The Naked and the Dead, Pyle is a recent Harvard graduate and one immersed in violence he cannot begin to understand. Thus for both Greene and Mailer, as for Wolf and Johnson, the cruelty to animals emblematizes that violence. In The Things They Carried (1990), Tim O'Brien remains equally scornful of the American effort in Vietnam. With equal vividness, O'Brien describes the soldiers' abuse of an animal, which in 83 many ways also typifies the American experience there: Later, higher in the mountains, we came across a baby VC water buffalo. What it was doing there I don't know - no farms, no paddies - but we chased it down and, got a rope around it and led it along to a deserted village where we set up for the night. After supper Rat Kiley went over and stroked its nose. He opened up a can of C rations, pork and beans, but the baby buffalo wasn't interested. Rat shrugged. He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee. The animal did not make a sound. It went down hard, then got up again, and Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot it in the hindquarters and in the little hump at its back. He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn't to kill; it was to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle up against the mouth and shot the mouth away. Nobody said much. The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn't a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo. Curt Lemon was dead. Rat Kiley had lost his best friend in the world. Later in the week Rat would write a long personal letter to the guy's sister, who would not write back, but for now, it was simply a question of pain. He shot off the tail. He shot away chunks of meat below the ribs. All around us there was the smell of smoke and filth and greenery, and the evening was humid and very hot. Rat went to automatic. He shot randomly, almost casually, quick little spurts in the belly. Then he reloaded, squatted down, and shot it in the left front knee. Again the animal fell hard and tried to get up, but this time it couldn't quite make it. It wobbled and went down sideways. Rat shot it in the nose. He bent forward and whispered something, as if talking to a pet, then he shot it in the throat. All the while the baby water buffalo was silent, or almost silent, just a little bubbling 84 sound where the nose had been. It lay very still. Nothing moved except the eyes, which were enormous, the pupils shiny black and dumb. Rat Kiley was crying. He tried to say something, but them cradled his rifle and went off by himself. The rest of us stood in a ragged circle around the baby buffalo. For a long time no one spoke. We had witnessed something essential, something brand-new and profound, a piece of the world so startling there was not yet a word for it. (75-76) If WWI marked the first modern British defeat—or stalemate, as it were, and mass exposure to widespread carnage—then WWII, and to a greater extent, Vietnam, marked the same for the Americans. Certainly, the effect of WWII was, according to both Mailer and Jones, and as in O'Brien's Vietnam, to create soldiers for whom the goal “wasn't to kill; it was to hurt.” To some extent, even Sassoon's admonishing of “all the arts of hurting” corresponds to the sadism that O'Brien keenly observes. But it is clearly an accelerating process, perhaps intensified by jungle combat or the blurring distinctions between soldiers and noncombatants that have increasingly come to characterize contemporary war. The heightening sadism in war might also correspond to the heightening disillusionment at home—a disillusionment reflected in the historical progression of sobriquets, from “The Great War,” to “The Good War,” to “The Forgotten War” in Korea, to the “Lost” and undeclared one in Vietnam. The Things They Carried ironizes that lack of domestic support, which in many ways parallels the British experience by the end of WWI. Where Sassoon, for example, admonishes women and civilians for blindly praising the war effort and thus perpetuating the slaughter, Rat Kiley rebukes Curt Lemon's sister for “not [writing] back.” Like Sassoon in his Declaration, and to some extent “Glory of Women,” 85 O'Brien's narrator reflects that “nobody listens. Nobody hears nothin'...the politicians, all the civilian types. Your girlfriend. My girlfriend. Everybody's sweet little virgin girlfriend” (73). In fact, it is worth asking whether the increasing cruelty of war does not overlap with an increasing sense of soldierly misogyny, particularly in so far as the woman, or “virgin,” is seen to personify the unaffected civilian. O'Brien's admission that what the soldiers witnessed was “so startling there was not yet a word for it” also reflects a broader tenet of postmodernism, namely the impossibility of using language to describe war's cruelty. To some extent, the line even echoes Adorno's assertion that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz in so far as the cruelty of the spectacle renders the participants mute. What that overlooks, however, is the degree to which the trenches themselves, three decades back, had already exerted a silencing effect, particularly on writers like Sassoon, Rosenberg, and Owen, and for whom verse became the only effective means of bearing witness, A Soldier's Declaration notwithstanding. Interestingly, what comes across in the writings of the Iraq War is a return to the clarity of Hemingway and Remarque and a shift away from the postmodern distrust of language. In Here, Bullet (2005), perhaps the most cited text of the war, Brian Turner speaks with the cordiality and openness of a friend. He points out, among other things, the “Parachute bombs and artillery shells/ sewn into the carcasses of dead farm animals” (9). The collection even opens with the burlesque “Baghdad Zoo,” where a gunner “watched a lion chase down a horse,” and “one baboon escaped the city limits” (5). Turner's attitude towards—and mock-faith in—the American effort are no more sarcastic than O'Brien's, but his primary concern is with conveying that humor, not with pointing out the deceptiveness of language or the problems inherent in narrative. In that sense, Turner's verse is closer to Sassoon's or Owen's, with whom he is frequently compared. Phil Klay's Redeployment (2014), a recent and well-received short fiction collection, also opens starkly: “We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby. I'm a 86 dog person, so I thought about that a lot.” The reason is ostensibly that the animals are eating corpses, but the narrator begins to take a morbid delight in the sniping, admitting that “it's open season on dogs” (1). This is heavily reminiscent of O'Brien, particularly in the mangling of time and the use of the second-person form of address, which Klay employs to great effect: The problem is your thoughts don't come out in any kind of straight order. You don't think, Oh, I did A, then B, then C, then D. You try to think about home, then you're in the torture house. You see the body parts in the locker and the retarded guy in the cage. He squawked like a chicken. His head was shrunk down to a coconut. It takes you a while to remember Doc saying they'd shot mercury into his skull, and then it still doesn't make any sense (2). The comparable passage in The Things They Carried comes when the narrator reflects: At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not. (78) In both cases, the “you” suggests that the narrator is speaking to himself, and the mode is largely confessional. O'Brien's narrator has already explained that in the village of Than Khe, the men “burned everything. They shot chickens and dogs, they trashed the village well, they called in artillery and watched the wreckage,” (15) yet the narrator remarks on the irony of his growing appreciation for his 87 natural surroundings. Klay's narrator, by contrast, begins to see himself as a monster, indeed one who is little different from the shrunken-headed victim of torture he encounters. In both cases, there is a fundamental cognizance of humankind's capacity to inflict harm, and that is contrasted, as in Rosenberg, with the question of how the human can still produce art, or in any way sensitize itself to its surroundings. For nearly all of these postwar writers—Mailer, Jones, Wolf, Johnson, Greene, O'Brien, Turner, and Klay—human sadism, particularly towards animals, contrasts with the human capacity for literature, a distinction that very much owes its origins to Rosenberg's question of how “human art” could possibly “[win] the dark soul.” In any case, it is as difficult to generalize about contemporary war writing as it is to demarcate a core group of trench poets. Yet it is useful, however fraught the effort might be, for understanding what war has increasingly begun to entail for combatants, especially in so far as it reawakens their conceptions of self—be it as cruel or benign, human or animal, oppressor or victim, or both. 88 CONCLUSION Thus, the Trench Poets, while astonishingly diverse in outlook and sentiment, and certainly resisting any categorical claims, apart from their membership in the Great War, did come away with a broader awareness of animal suffering. That could vary from heightened sensitivity to a conscious indifference and newfound insistence on human superiority—although in most cases, the attitude was sympathetic, as Sassoon and Rosenberg generally were. Probably the closest philosophical corollary to this outlook are the ethical views on animal welfare held by Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer has always presented something of a conundrum for “animal rights thinkers”, since, for one, he does not fit neatly into the categories that have come to define modern animal rights thinking: namely, utilitarianism, deontology, or, less commonly, virtue- based ethics. Moreover, while Schopenhauer believed deeply in animal welfare and castigated the tradition that had relegated animals to property—particularly as expressed in Kant, Spinoza, and the Bible—he never actually condemned eating animals. The reason is still debated, but generally, he thought morality stemmed from compassion, and killing an animal does not necessarily preclude that, in his eyes. He outlines the source of his concern for animal welfare most clearly in On the Will in Nature (1836), where he depicts this Will as encompassing both humans and animals alike: Unlike the intellect, it [the Will] does not depend on the perfection of the organism, but is essentially the same in all animals as that which is known to us so intimately. Accordingly, the animal has all the emotions of humans, such as joy, grief, fear, anger, love, hatred, strong desire, 89 envy, and so on. The great difference between human and animal rests solely on the intellect's degrees of perfection. (43) It is ironic that it took neuroscientists well over a century to verify what Schopenhauer—and others— had long claimed: namely, that animals have feelings. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer's broader point is that humans and animals can experience the same inner anguish and therefore see themselves in each other, even across species. Thus, the mark of a good person, in his view, is one who has sympathy for other animals, or what he would call fellow sufferers. Certainly, his views on the stages of perfection reflect a common, 19 th -century belief in higher orders, perhaps deriving from the theory of recapitulation, which was then dominant. While the notion of a higher intellect may be open to scrutiny, 27 this concern for fellow-sufferers, and the belief that they are subject to the same Will, aligns closely with the Trench Poets' considerations. In their case, the “Will” might be described as war—an all-consuming force that binds both humans and animals in battle, or what Sassoon, in “Remorse,” aptly calls the “swamp and welter of the pit” (Collected Poems, 91). This is not to suggest that the soldiers, or even Schopenhauer, believed in “animal rights.” Indeed, Schopenhauer, while he applauded welfarist groups like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, had few qualms about butchering them. Likewise, few, if any, of the soldiers serving in the trenches expressed vegetarian sympathies. But in their concern for the wellbeing of horses, dogs, oxen and mules—and even in their conscious denial of it—they articulate a basic awareness that other species can suffer like humans. This sentiment, arguably, was forced on them by 27 Most animal rights thinkers, deontologists and utilitarians alike, dispute that intelligence should be a criterion for assigning moral worth to a subject. After all, chimpanzees, for example, have been shown to be demonstrably smarter than some humans, including infants and “marginal cases,” especially the severely disabled. Of course, Schopenhauer is not necessarily suggesting that the intellect serve as criterion for moral judgment, so perhaps his views are more amenable to recent approaches in animal rights. 90 the dehumanizing conditions of war. The fact that both lived in trenches, ate alongside one another, got tattooed, numbered, or stamped, and were sent up to die en masse provoked a deep consternation among soldiers—one many critics have rightly called a shock, and one that would pulsate through literature and usher in the Modernist world. The roots of that shock can be traced back to Darwin, if not Shelley, or earlier. The nature of the shock, while multifaceted in dimension, entailed a basic awareness that humans, hardly created in the image of God, and hardly the embodiments of Victorian refinement and progress, were as prone to cruelty as “beasts”. What that realization did to humans—how it transformed them psychologically—is another study and arguably forms the basis for Modernism itself, as Rohrman, Ellman, Armstrong, and Lippit have all claimed. But in terms of animal rights, this beastliness, as it were, evoked a basic empathy—sometimes disdainful, sometimes compassionate—for those whom humans served alongside. Naturally, this increasing empathy did little to help the state of animals, as the postwar era, concomitant with the rise of mass production, population booms, and urbanization, accompanied the growth of factory farms. Today, an estimated 65 billion animals are commercially slaughtered each year for food. 28 One hundred million more are used for testing. 29 At least 75 species are being exterminated daily as humans plunder the Earth (Africa Conservancy). The burgeoning ecological sentiment, which Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg felt, has been certainly lost on the masses, removed, as we are, from the everyday horrors of slaughter. While Marx has rarely been seen within the context of animal rights, it is not hard to see his views vindicated somewhat, especially with regard to the growth of Capital and the heightening victimization of those most subject to its whims, when people, in his equation, are replaced with their non-human counterparts. The future looks increasingly grim, as countries like China and India have moved towards astonishing levels of animal slaughter to slake their 28 The estimates vary widely and are probably impossible to determine with any degree of precision. This figure comes from the Farm Rights Animal Movement. 29 This figure, supplied by The Baltimore Sun (Cohn), is also of course disputable and widely subject to interpretation. 91 ever-growing population demands. The Earth's population itself is now approaching eight billion, and perhaps the only salvation for animals could come with the economic realization that mass-producing and slaughtering them in corresponding numbers would both yield inefficient results and reap devastating costs on the planet, assuming the destruction itself is not yet irreversible. But the genocide, which clearly reached its human peak in the mid-to-late 20 th century, has only reached a starting point with animals, a fact of which Rosenberg, Sassoon, and Owen would probably not be unaware. To the extent their viewpoint, like Schopenhauer's, has contemporary affiliates, one might find it in particularly grim and near-apocalyptic versions of the ethos called Deep Ecology, Arne Næss' precept that humans and animals are mordantly and inextricably bound. The contemporary movement tends to be somewhat progressive, and in that sense would probably appeal more greatly to Owen than Sassoon or Rosenberg, whose outlooks, at least by the end of the war, were generally more cynical, though no less ironic. It is also doubtful that the millions they served alongside would want to do anything more—indeed did do anything more—than return home and eat a steak dinner. 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Cambridge: Cambridge, 1994. 101 ADDENDUM: STICK-LIGHT 102 STICK-LIGHT Stories of War and Loss 103 There he stood pale, come out of the depths of darkness, in the hot room, blinking at the light. - Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room 104 CONTENTS The Killer 105 Nechama's Gun 117 Quaint 120 The Inspection 129 Maximum Deductions 141 Opticon 151 The Consultant 163 The Addict 181 The Affair 196 G-Shock 206 Milked, or the Rise and Fall of Samuel Feldman, M.D. : A Tragedy in Four Parts 223 The Hit 259 Stick-Light 269 105 THE KILLER Israel, 2005 Private Rotem Katan had never fought a man with his fists before, but as he lay straddling Private Mikhail Koslovsky, he thought rather of the first time he made love. It wasn't love really; it was more like a chore, something his girlfriend had cajoled him into doing while her parents were vacationing in Rome, as though, since they were away, they might as well have the foyer replastered. Rotem saw a sergeant peering in through the tent-flap. He glared at them, as if this kind of thing were expected in training, like some tribal cleansing or rite. Three other soldiers crouched beside a bedframe. All had just tried to separate them, and now the entire focus of the tent was concentrated in a network of rays, a complicated series of vectors extending out from the sergeant's snarled lip, Rotem's torn shirt, the hot flapping lid of the canvas tarp above, and the soft-muttered burst of rifle fire outside, compounded by the occasional bang of LAW shells. Weeks later, when Rotem found himself assigned to base for an extra weekend, stuck doing guard, he phoned up his ex-girlfriend late one night. “Missing you,” she said. “Yeah, Chen, I'll bet.” As he hung up the phone, the sentry next to him, an American-born private named Scott, asked him, “Did the bitch give it up yet?” “What?” 106 “You know, that girl you've been dating.” “Oh, you mean the one from high school. Yeah.” “You know, you could always invite her to our base,” Scott said in his crude form of Hebrew. “Give her a tour of my bunk.” Scott was actually perched several meters above him, peering down from a rusted steel booth. They were guarding the base's weapons depot, which was surrounded by a high, wire-fence. Beyond lay the chipped gravel floor of the Negev, moricandia patches in bloom, and the jagged grey shapes of the mountains, which sliced towards the moon and the stars. “You know, I had two girls once. In Amsterdam,” Scott continued. “It was on a stopover on my way home. And the Army fucking paid for it. You know that? They donated the flight—some American sponsors—and they gave me 400 sheks for my meals. So naturally, I invested in a threesome. That kept me full for a month. One of these chicks, I think she was black, or Moroccan...” The desert stars seemed comical to Rotem, like an infrared scope filled with bugs. He wondered where he'd be going soon, as soon as their draft would depart, and if they'd head to Gaza, or Jenin, or Tulkarem. Two kids from his high school had died in Gaza. They were both Russians. An IED had melted their Puma, so they had to be ID'ed by their teeth. This is why the army took X-rays at induction. Rotem felt his own jaw, where Mikhail hit it. He wondered if they'd be able to identify him, or what his mother would say when he was reported as still-MIA. What would Chen think? “The fuck is that?” Scott said, interrupting himself. “What?” Rotem was leaning against the chain-link fence, which was topped off with razor wire and glittered dull pink in the lights. Through it, he could see some faint figures drifting, like ghosts. They were about a thousand meters down. “Bedouin, I think.” 107 “The fuck are they doing here?” “They're probably scrounging around for shells.” “You think I should take one out?” “Yeah, aim for the little one,” said Rotem. “Wait—” The night exploded. At first, Rotem thought he had been hit. The sound reverberated through the steel lookout above, powdering the top-layered sandbags and echoing rungs of the stairs. “Holy fuck,” Rotem shouted. “What the hell did you do?” “I gave them a warning,” said Scott. The radio erupted, loud voices blared, and the base, which had been mainly silent until then, this being Friday, came alive with commotion, Jeeps howling, tents flapping, and soldiers streaming out to the blocks. The whole battalion had gone to war. Or so they'd thought. Four months later, having finished his training, Rotem was serving at an infantry outpost near Bethlehem. It was a three-story, gated, brick compound that had once been an Arab hotel. When the uprising started, a couple years back, it was taken over and fitted with sandbags and wire. It wasn't the worst place to serve, although the guarding was endless and cold. One night, Rotem got the call. Or rather, his Platoon Leader did, and Rotem, being assigned to the base's response team, followed him out to the Jeeps. Apparently a settler's Ford Taurus had flipped somewhere along southern Route 60. Arabs had hit it with a rock, and the settler, going 100kph, had crashed. The driver was fine, as were his wife and three kids, amazingly. The car was completely upside down, clicking, like some overturned crab. Beyond it, barbed goatgrass swayed in the wind. An ambulance wailed far beyond. Because Rotem's team was first to arrive, they scoured the neighboring 108 fields. As they loped through the scrub, Rotem at point cradling his M203, his commander with the handheld behind him, all eying the shelves of torn limestone and sage and the copper-hued sphere of a moon, Rotem said, “stop.” He saw a young Arab running. At first, he thought it was a goat. The figure was about 300 meters down. “Shoot him,” someone shouted. “No, hold it,” said his commander. Rotem's heart raced. The rifle nearly bounced in his hands. “Waqf, waqf,” his commander yelled in Arabic, bellowing “stop” at the child. They had all started sprinting at this point, except Rotem, who still clenched his sight on the kid. The kid turned around, and even from that far away, it was plain that he was crying. He was wearing a red Puma t- shirt, and his black jeans were torn. “Shu?” said the commander, approaching him. “What's up?” Rotem and the others caught up. About a thousand meters down lay the glittering lights of a village, between which some small figures skipped. The commander spoke Arabic, asking the boy what he'd done. “Wala shi, wala shi,” coughed the boy. “Nothing.” They took him in for questioning, and the kid later talked. Rotem thought he should have gotten a medal, but the kid, he knew, was just 12. Possibly younger. Enough to nearly take a life, though. And for that he belonged in a jail. Or at least its juvenile equivalent. Rotem held no real disdain for the Arabs. He understood why they fought. He respected them for that, and sometimes, he himself wanted to throw stones at the settlers. On the way back to base, Rotem rode with Mikhail, who, predictably enough, had been assigned to the same line battalion. They'd gotten along better since the fight. 109 “You ever wonder what we're doing here?” said Mikhail. “No.” Back at the base the next night, Rotem was guarding, holding down the 2 am shift, when his phone started buzzing in his pack. It was illegal to talk while on-guard—and extremely dangerous when you were manning the base's south gates, where commanders would regularly pass, even at 2 am. He answered. “Roty, I want you to come home.” Chen. “Why?” “I think I'm pregnant with your baby.” “What?” “I'm just kidding. I'm having a party tomorrow night.” “How the hell am I supposed to get there?” “I don't know. Can't you sneak out? If you love me, you'll come.” Then she hung up. He tried calling her back a few times. Her phone was turned off, though, of course. The first time Rotem had slept with her—slept with any girl, in fact—he remembered feeling scared. He'd begun to suspect for at least a couple years that he was gay. Intimacy disturbed him. He had never been good at kissing. He rarely found himself getting an erection, even when drunk. Were these signs? He paced on guard, rubbing the stubble of his cheek, feeling his jaw again, musing on the fact that he'd never once told the girl he loved her; he'd only twice nodded his head, after she'd said it, and perhaps she interpreted that as love. Probably, in fact. It was always something strange like that with 110 girls. And the less you said, the better. Tonight, though, as he leaned against the wall of a guardbox, whose oily brown window was cracked and scribbled with names from South Lebanon, Rotem desperately wished he could talk to her. Or any girl, in fact. Someone to help kill the pain. He had never done drugs before, but he thought he should start. Or he could try smoking opium, as his father had said he'd done while serving in the Beka'a. “Hey, Scrotum”, shouted Scott, the American, who happened to be on guard across from him, about a hundred meters down, behind cement blocks. “I heard you almost shot an Arab last night.” “Fuck you,” Rotem shouted. “Well done. Next time, pull the trigger, mothafucka.” Rotem fell asleep while standing, as soldiers on guard learn to do. Twenty hours later, he was on again, this time responding to a call, along with the rest of his emergency response team. The crew, which consisted of him and three older guys, second-year sergeants who shunned him, and whom he was proud to be among, found themselves dispatched to a fairly remote region, about 20 clicks west of their base. It wasn't even their territory, properly, since it was inside the line of Hebron. As they rattled out in a Jeep, Rotem in back, trying urgently to figure out the muffled dispatch of the radio, clawing the overhead bar, holding a round in his chamber and checking that the safety was locked, he heard his cellphone beep in his vest. It was her, of course. He didn't answer. He just took out the phone and clicked OFF. He hated this person. He hated every woman. He hated people in fact, and his life. “Where we headin'?” said a sergeant across from him. The team leader in front didn't answer. He gripped the handset carefully. None of them had slept in two days. Finally, the leader answered, 111 “Rocks thrown at a car. Same stupid shit.” The sergeant across from him grinned. His name was Baz, and his father was actually a singer, a sort of has-been pop star in Israel. The men taunted him about it, predictably, but Baz never let on that it bothered him and, in fact, seemed to bask in the attention, since he was otherwise nameless on base. He had cut himself shaving, and his chin was stained red. “Where are you going when you're done?” Rotem asked him, referring to his upcoming discharge. Baz just tsked and looked off. He was probably afraid to jinx himself, since guys never spoke of it beforehand. At that very second—it was actually a couple seconds later, during the awkward silence that ensued—the Jeep swerved dramatically. Rotem hit the floor. Two others did, as well, and a green ammo box fell onto him. His head slapped the bench, and his helmet loudly cushioned the blow. His body, however, was scrunched, and as he came to, he realized that the Jeep was leaning on its side. “Son of a bitch,” said the driver. Their Jeep had driven off the road and was turned over in a ditch. The men all climbed out of it slowly, propping themselves through the back and side doors. The raised front tire was spinning and sputtering smoke towards the sun. “Where the fuck are we?” said the leader. “Not good,” said the driver. “Don't ask me your stupid fucking questions,” said Baz, turning to Rotem. Rotem just glared at him weakly. He considered fighting the motherfucker, but his whole body hurt, especially his arm, which was scraped. He wondered if he had fractured any part of it. “Everyone okay?” asked the leader. The driver was limping out. “The axle's fucked up. I think we'll need to get a tow out.” “Oh, shit,” Baz said, turning to the olive field behind them. Beyond some knotted trunks, a 112 small pack of children emerged beside a fieldstone wall. They were shouting and picking up rocks. “Watch them,” said the leader. He cocked his gun, re-gripped his handheld, explained the situation to the base, and told the three men to follow him. They crossed to the other side of the highway, which was utterly vacant (a curfew was in force), and he told them to kneel on the embankment. “Keep an eye behind us,” he told Rotem and the driver. “We'll form a four-man lookout from here. We'll try not to move until the backup arrives. You wait for my signal before firing. And only in an emergency. From the looks of it, these are just kids.” Just kids, Rotem thought. They're motherfucking killers. Wild animals with claws. Rotem knelt with the others on the gravel, feeling its rocks pierce his hand. He coughed and thought about lighting a cigarette. He wanted one desperately, even though he'd never smoked. The children coalesced to the south. One shouted “your mother's cunt” in Arabic. “Keep them at bay,” said the leader to Baz. “Fire a warning shot if you have to.” Rocks started pelting the road. One of them clunked Rotem's shoulderblade. Another hit Baz in the arm. “Fuck.” Then a gun banged. It was the driver, who wasn't even supposed to be facing in that direction and was actually a jobnik by trade—although he was probably more used to these encounters. He was also two months from being done. The shot softly buried in the earth. Smoke wisped up from the hay- covered mounds of dry soil. The kids ran away. For ten minutes, they sat like this, sweating, hearing the commotion, and fretting over the lack of the dispatch's response. Soon, more kids began flitting through the fields, fearless as always, crouching and flinging their rocks, taking cover behind the gnarled trees. “When the fuck will they be here?” said Baz. “Don't know,” said the leader. “Keep them all in range.” 113 What did he mean by that, Rotem wondered. He had never fired his gun before, and up until now, he had been rather anxious to do it, in spite of the incident with Scott. Now, however, when faced with the possibility of shooting, he found himself strangely paralyzed. He could barely grip his gun. “Rotem,” said the leader, still crouching, “I want you to run over to the Jeep and take out five or six tear gas. Go fast.” Hundreds had gathered in the fields beyond them, bounding along the tiered groves. Above them, garbage was burning on a bare, rocky, hillside; further west, along a dark incline, sprawled the poured cement homes and spired mosques. Within them, a loudspeaker was blaring, probably egging kids on. Somehow, Rotem summoned the strength to move. As he ran from the bank and down to the ditch with their truck, he remembered that two men had gotten killed not far from here a couple years back. An Arab had walked up to the Tunnel Road Checkpoint, removed a small carpet from his back, and pulled out a Kalashnikov. He shot out the neck of the front man, gunned down another, and drove off in a getaway car, never to be heard from again. There were stories like that in each town. As he heaved himself up and climbed along the Jeep's moldered seat, Rotem considered the possibility that the truck would explode. This scared him more. A transmission hose was leaking, and the engine block ticked. The whole chassis was exposed beneath him, like some ruptured gut. “Fuck,” he said, climbing. He heard another gunshot ring out behind him, which echoed the Jeep's steel walls. He located the fat orange box, unclasped it, and tried to remove the wax-papered rounds. One of them clunked on the floor, which was actually the cabin's side wall. He stuck the other six tubes in his vest. Then he lowered himself from the hatch, past the massive coils of the engine and grate, and sprinted away on the dirt, towards their encampment. The leader, he saw, had been covering him the whole time, peering through his Trijicon. 114 “You see that group over there?” the leader said, as Rotem slid down, wet and panting. “Yeah.” About 50 meters down, a small pack was perched behind an olive trunk. Maybe six or seven arms. Children or adults, he didn't know. Another rock smacked his left thigh. “If you can get an angle on them, give them some gas,” said the leader. “Son of a bitch,” said the driver. “We should just take them out.” “No,” said the leader. “Fuck you, and listen. Not unless it's life-threatening. We'll get disciplined for it. You want to stick around till July?” “But I'm getting fucking hit.” “Just keep your helmet on.” The leader, who was also part-Iraqi, turned to Rotem, as if seeking his approval or accord. Rotem still studied the tree, its black, mottled bark, and the tiny heads peering beside it. He thought about Chen, how she was undoubtedly calling about the party; or maybe she just wanted to report to him that she had found someone else. That was fine by him anyways. And he wished she could see him here now, all sweating and covered with soot. In the heat of the action, he thought. Still, he hoped he wouldn’t die. This didn't seem like it could get to that. But he remembered the two soldiers who had gotten lost near Ramallah. Mobs dragged them out from their Jeep and tore their whole bodies to shreds. Rotem felt his jaw again, clutching it. Then he steadied the dot in his reticle. “Come on, motherfucker, look out. Show your head to me,” he whispered. Their elbows projected like tiny yellow stumps. It was actually close to 40 meters, judging by the lines in his Reflex. Another rock crashed on his arm, disrupting his focus. He quickly re-sighted. Fuck. That rock really stung. He wondered if they'd start throwing bombs. 115 Just then an Arab darted out and right towards him. He was hollering loudly in Arabic. Occupier, your sister's cunt, something like that. His mustache was twitching, and his Adidas cap was swung backwards. Rotem's heart pounced. Should I shoot him? he wondered. Then he realized he was supposed to switch to gas. “Give it to him,” said the leader. Rotem cocked the grenade back, raised the leaf sight, and aimed at the Arab, who was contoured brightly by the sun. The explosion ripped out through the barrel. The grenade gave a poof as it whirred, and about thirty meters down, he saw it take the man's head off. Rotem felt his veins surge. “Fuck,” said the driver. The man was still standing, but his head was laying at his side. It rolled along a mudbank and stopped. Then the man's body fell. “Fuck.” Guns popped off around him. Soon the fire was general. “Stop, stop, stop,” yelled the leader. The men ceased their fire. By this point, all the other Arabs had run away, racing through the field, diving over stone walls. The man's headless body lay sideways, curled into a fetal position, as the ruptured neck spurted red streams. Rotem nearly wept. His arms shook. His head burned. He studied the men at his side. They all looked at him fiercely, most of all the leader. None of them spoke though, until finally Baz said, “Well, that oughtta keep them at bay.” Rotem said nothing. He gripped his gun silently and cried—not externally, but in some deeper place in his chest. He felt his heart welter inside of him. Soon, he had to piss, and his cellphone was beeping again. He thought he'd turned it off. 116 On the way back to base, in a well-armored Humvee, Rotem rode silently in back, face-to-face with Baz. Baz wouldn't look at him. Rotem felt fearless and also strangely scared. He turned his phone off. Back at the base, Scott didn't even congratulate him. He said Rotem might have to face trial. “For what?” “The Captain said the shot was fired too close. It'll probably be the leader who's in trouble. But you could be as well.” “Well fuck that,” said Rotem. He quivered for a second. Then he set his gun down on his bunk. The barrel was still steaming, but he realized that was the sun streaming in through the sandbagged window above. Other men rose on their beds. “So you're the killer,” said someone. “Fuck you,” said Rotem. Soon the Company Sergeant called him out to the hall and said it was his turn to go clean the floors. He was joined by three others, men he barely knew, who didn't speak to him during it. He wondered if they were afraid. As he sized himself up in the mirror of the bathroom downstairs, he could hear the thwacking of ping-pong balls in the yard. He leaned his mop against the sink, while the other men smoked by the windows behind him, blowing smoke between the bags. 117 NECHAMA'S GUN She wasn't so much mystified by the gun as amused that the soldier had left it. Nechama Wasserman, age fifty-seven, had just finished shopping for herring at the Shuk. She was slumped on a bench in the bus station, palming her chin, musing over the fact that Tzvi, the Number 189's driver, was running seven minutes late, despite being German by birth, and he was going to hear it from the crowd, all of whom were about to strangle each other in anxiety over the time—it was less than two hours until dusk, a miniscule amount in West Jerusalem—when she noticed that: A. her herring was leaking; B. the young, freckled soldier, who had been dozing on the bench beside her, had dashed aboard the 402, which was now pulling out of the garage, even though his M16 rifle lay propped against the wall. Its magazine was labeled “Rotem Katan.” Nechama examined it briefly. Then she eyed an Ethiopian janitor beside her who was squeezing out a mop. The station was a madhouse behind her. Nechama didn't know what to do. She figured she should notify the janitor, or perhaps the little men who sat behind the raised windows at the head of the hall. But what if a terrorist claimed it? What if it went off? What if the boy returned? Would he be disciplined for it, as she thought, in which case she would have been the instigator? What would Reb Moshe have thought? To make matters worse, her bus was now pulling in—the last one of the day—and she didn't have money for a cab. Plus her husband was already about to kill her for having raced out to get fish. But what could she do? Her new son-in-law was coming this evening, and she hadn't even baked a dessert. 118 For reasons that Nechama did not and would never understand, she grabbed the M16 and stuck it, barrel-down, in her nylon-bag shopping cart, alongside her potatoes and fish. As her bus slogged west through traffic, beneath the dim shroud of a sun, Nechama sat gripping her shopping cart, reciting psalms from her Tanakh: Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O mighty one, thy glory and thy majesty. She prayed that it wouldn't go off. These things came with a safety, didn't they? Finally, she couldn't take it any longer. She thought about telling Dvorah, across the aisle, or Miriam, three rows behind her. But wouldn't that discredit her husband? What was she doing with a gun? She bit her thumb and rose, sweatily yanking her cart down the aisle. “Tzvi,” she screamed. “Lemme out.” “We're in the middle of Route One.” “I don't care. It's an emergency.” She pointed to her dress. “Okay.” Tzvi had seen worse on this line. The bus dropped her off outside Abu Ghosh, a small Arab village three kilometers east of her interchange. She thought about burying the gun in the brush by the road, but what would that do to her nails? She wiped her brow with her snood and climbed the dirt road until she arrived at a bakery. It was the only store open in town. “Salaam,” she told the clerk, who was smoking. “We closed.” “I just need to sit down.” “We closed.” “Okay. Well, what if I buy something? How 'bout a cake?” 119 “We finished.” “Maybe you could make me another one?” The young mustachioed man stuck his Camels in his jeans. “You not have enough for that.” “Are you sure?” said Nechama, reaching inside of her cart. 120 QUAINT To most observers, the interior of the Pittsfield Building, in the Jewelers Row District of downtown Chicago, resembles the setting for some seedy film noir. The five-story, marble-faced atrium, replete with burnished brass mail chutes and antiquated shops—mostly other, obsolete jewelers—struck Sid Skolnick as a cell, one in which he had been confined for the last thirty-six years of his life, ever since he agreed, however hastily, to continue the family trade. He had studied psychology at Northwestern, back when the quotas were just removed and the school was looking to augment its name. He'd even won a scholarship to Germany, from which his parents had escaped thirty years previous and to which they would never go back. While he had intended to study psychoses, he felt compelled—it was mainly the voice of his mother on the phone, who riddled him with guilt, as only she could—to make the switch to jewelry design. Seven months later, he returned to Chicago with a penchant for platinum and silver. He lacked his father's gift, he knew, one that was honed at the Zeichenakademie, where they still used hammers and lathes, but Sid appreciated the tradition, and the craft that was involved, and the ability to work with his hands. Besides, his older brother Howard had eloped with some shiksa and saddled up for the West Coast. He hadn't been in touch with the family for years and was probably disinherited, though his mother never spoke of the will, much as she never discussed the fate of her folks in Berlin. When her husband died, bequeathing the shop to Sid, he felt as though a burden had been lifted; his brother flew back for the funeral, and the only words they exchanged were soft-spoken reminders of when and where they should be. 121 No one in the family was warm; that much would be apparent to any casual viewer of the shop, which sat astride the seventeenth floor behind two oblong oak windows and a foamy, white glass- paneled door goldly stenciled ALFRED F . SKOLNICK AND SON, FINE JEWELRY, EST. 1944. Sid could count on one hand the number of patrons they'd had the past week—not even buyers, but viewers. Tonight, as he stood polishing the display case and waiting patiently for DeShaundra to return from the safe, where she was ostensibly stowing the pieces but more likely pocketing something, he heard his desk telephone ring. It was probably his mother complaining again about her Filipino caregiver, who, on Sid's orders, refused to let her gamble online. Sid let it ring a little while, feeling especially devious. Then he hurried back to the rear office, where DeShaundra glanced up with alarm. “I already put Mrs. Mendelson's brooch in,” she said. “We s'pposed to FedEx it tonight.” The hag can wait, Sid thought. “I'll mail it myself. You can get going.” Then he answered the pestering ring. “Sid, it's me.” For a moment, he didn't recognize the voice. Then a strange silence ensued—the weight of over eight years. In that duration, their mother had grown worse, and two wars had been waged overseas. “Hi, Howard.” “I'm coming to Chicago next week.” Again, that malevolent pause. Sid briefly panicked, wondering whether he was supposed to put the man up—or, even worse, the hooker he'd married, the trolls they'd raised, the elvish white things they called dogs. “I'm coming alone. I wanted to say goodbye.” DeShaundra bolted the safe and departed, clutching her shawl, casting a menacing smirk. She was apprised of his mother’s illness and probably knew what to expect. Sid even began to suspect she 122 harbored oracular powers. “I'll see you Monday,” Sid whispered. “Uh-huh.” She detested him, not as a white, nor as a boss, but as someone she intimately knew. Holing up for twelve hours at a time in a thirty-foot space will do such things to two people, even those of equable temperament. “Howard, what can I—” “I'm staying at the Drake. It's fine. Kay had a windfall in savings. I just wanted to make my peace. And I thought maybe we could get together Wednesday, grab a bite at Coq D'Or.” “Does Mom know about this?” “Not yet.” “What makes you think she'll be receptive?” “I didn't know she was talking that much.” “Enough to complain about Rosita,” Sid said. “Rosita? Never mind. Listen, do me a favor and don't mention a thing to her yet.” “Yeah, that's just what an eighty-eight year old woman in the final throes of bone cancer wants. An unexpected visit.” “You don't think she'd want to see me?” “I don't know.” Their mother was a remarkably frigid person—enough that it had taken her husband over seven months to propose—an eternity in Weimar Berlin. “Well, I'm coming there, regardless. And if she shuts the door in my face—” “Howard, it could happen.” “I'll barge my way through.” “She'd probably call the cops. And good luck with Rosita. She's also a force of her own.” 123 That evening at the Standard Club, an ossified gentleman's club along Plymouth Court, adjacent to the Board of Trade, Sid performed his toilet with typical aplomb. He parted his hair, or what was left of it, anyways, with two careful swipes to the left, threw on a dash of L'Homme, and admired his peachy complexion. He hadn't seen sunlight in years, yet his face took on a particular rosiness here. Perhaps it was the brushed nickel sinks, or the granite block countertops, all vaguely jade and sanded finer than his father's best work. Sid would be sad to depart this, but his membership was lapsing next month, and he assumed his mother wouldn't pass away in time. Grinning, he smeared a lump of alum on his chin. Downstairs, and outside the main dining room, where Sid could not afford to eat, he complimented Al Epstein, who was outgoing club president and dining with his wife, on his splendid new cufflinks, which Sid had personally engraved. (In truth, he had them mail-ordered, since he couldn't do the work himself, but added a few finishing touches and marked them up forty percent; this was standard practice, post-Weimar). Then he greeted the bartender, Russ, a longstanding acquaintance, despite the fact that Sid, who was functionally dependent on Zoloft, didn't drink. He ordered his usual ice tea, double-lime, and perused the latest Gentleman's Quarterly, a rag he detested but found himself compelled now to read, if only because fashions were evolving. Then he unclasped his gold pocket watch, a vintage A1 Lange & Söhne, which his father had reluctantly bequeathed, and realized that he was seven minutes late for his bus. One can meet a lot of strange characters on the 146 after dark—the bulk of them transients, and quite a few insane. Where they all lived, he didn't know. Nearly every civilized person opted for the El, but Sid was afraid of heights. In fifty-nine years, he had not admitted this to a soul, opting instead for some solemn explanation of how he preferred the lakefront view from the bus. And that matched his 124 apartment, which, despite not having been remodeled in thirty-some years, did overlook Belmont Harbor. Again, most discerning visitors, including the two or three dates he had had, found the place antiquated, dusty. One woman called it “quaint”, a term he despised but had come to expect from those who bought jewelry online. The light fixtures were chrome and arrayed in atom-like balls, obviously a product of the Seventies, even though he'd bought the place in '86. The white carpets smelled damp, despite his best efforts; the suede furniture rotted. He cared. He fixed his usual salad of cold lima beans, tuna, and canned corn, wolfed down two slices of white bread, along with a tall cup of milk, and settled in for Jeopardy, when, once again, his phone rang —his landline that is; he refused to own, or even consider, a cellphone. It was Mom, checking in. He listened casually to her host of complaints, most of which, surprisingly enough, revolved around her neighbors, not the “Oriental” she'd hired. They were stealing her mail, she supposed, and someone had made off with her mat—Sid didn't mention that he'd had it sterilized and was planning to return it next week. Then she ended by saying that her brother-in-law had called and wanted to meet up with Howard when he came to town but thought he should get her permission. Sid didn't know what to say. It was unusual enough of his mother to call. Generally, she made him walk the twelve blocks to her place, which, in spite of her penchant for online canasta, was in a similarly antiquated highrise overlooking Sheridan Road. Yet she obviously did not want him to see her in this state, what with her thin, bluish head. A stickler for beauty, she would rather go to her grave all alone. Being married to a jeweler will do that to a person. Or maybe it was the ghost of the camps. “Is he coming to see me?” “I don't know,” Sid said. 125 “Did he call you?” “I guess.” “What the fuck?” She didn't say what the fuck. That was Sid's imagining. In actuality, she mumbled oy vey, another expression that she barely used—since Yiddish, she thought, was low-class. “You know, Mom, I think maybe it would be a good idea for you two to reconnect—” She hung up. When he called her back, Rosita answered and explained that they were raising her bed. Sid didn't believe it, and at this point, he didn't much care. He scraped his dishes, stowed his watch in the safe, changed into denim, and left. Wearing blue jeans was something of a big deal for Sid Skolnick. This transition came about in the early part of the new millennium and at roughly the same time that he purchased a personal computer, a device he had found, ever since, to be a curse. He had surfed the chatrooms of Prodigy, America Online, even E-Bay, where he occasionally tracked bids. Again, this was mainly a matter of keeping up with times, rather than filling any personal needs. He'd met a few women, gone out on dates. None of them appealed to him much. His father's brother's family sometimes tried to set him up, mostly with divorcees, all Jews. He had to admit he found some entertaining but never really felt any urge. Then in July of 2004, seven weeks after his father had died, Sid endured what many might describe as a groundbreaking sexual experience. It only lasted twenty minutes. He didn't get the name. It was in an alley near Belmont and Clark. Since then, he had become what men in his circles call whores, though Sid never warmed to this term. His taste wasn't cheap. He didn't do whites. And he always came home before twelve. Even if his younger suitor paid. Tonight, he stopped outside the ManHole, an overpriced leather joint that passed itself off as a 126 dive. The interior was dark and smelled of strange body oils—coconut, jojoba, pine. He shook hands with Desmond, the bouncer, and two other men that he knew, one of whom was married, the other Puerto Rican and built. Sid slept with them occasionally, but never more than once in a week, and never at the same time. Even he had his limits. Plus, he was remarkably discrete. Upon entering the Manhole, he took off his hat, a Grosgrain-striped Panama, that effectively covered his face—he could take few chances in Lakeview, what with his mother on the prowl, though he doubted she could get very far. Over Michelobs, which Sid didn't touch, he confessed his woes to a burly black patron named Reginald, who was visiting this month from Detroit. He said he had family in Fuller Park, though Sid wasn't sure where that was. Reginald also recommended that Sid tell his mother to try and reconnect with her sons—both of them. Life, he explained, was too short. Afterwards, with his chin pressed against the tank lid of a rusting green toilet and two meaty hands gripping his waist, Sid suspected the young man was right. Sid also wished that he had been so wise at the tender age of twenty-six. Had he been, he suspected his life wouldn't suck. Hell, he'd probably have a real job, instead of this dying trade, maybe even a man he'd commit to. Or someone to reflect with, and dine. They bade adieu at the sinks, and Sid thought about sipping his beer. Then he actually did it. It left a fresh taste on his tongue. The Drake Hotel, like most fading genteel establishments, featured single-ply toilet paper in the restrooms. This, in spite of its genuine marble-shaved counters and fixtures of oxidized brass. Sid stood polishing his spectacles, a crude LensCrafters pair (he had already damaged his rimless, German Cazals; some feckless thug along Lawrence), with the single-ply sheets, which didn't work. He had fogged them up with his crying—why, he couldn't say—and he came in here to make amends. With 127 himself. With the mirror. With his life. Outside, his mother and Howard were racing down Walton, she having refused to mention Howard's name, let alone dine with him. Howard had thought the surprise would be nice, and Sid had stupidly acceded. Sniffling, Sid wiped his glasses on his shirt, a cream Howard Lauren Regent with hems and French cuffs, which he'd purchased off-price at Filene's but would never reveal to his mother. He thought he should chase them. He thought he should go outside. But he preferred the cold comfort of the bathroom, with its strange brassy glow. It reminded of the Pittsfield downtown. He knew he would go into work tomorrow morning, and he would never leave his mother. Even in the afterlife, she would be there with a chain. Suddenly, the door slammed, and his brother stepped in. He was sporting a white seersucker suit, which Kay must have bought—his wife had impeccable taste, even for a gentile—and his hair was awkwardly mussed. “That old lady can run.” “She does that sometimes.” Howard washed his face in the sink. The cold water fell from his hands, and he wiped his cheeks briskly. “She's a terror with that walker.” “I know.” “Jesus, what happened to you?” Howard said, noticing that Sid had been crying. “Don't know.” “Are you upset about us?” “Something,” said Sid. “Come here.” Howard gave his younger brother a hug—a timid one, frankly, one that was hardened by years. But he didn't pat his back or try to back away. He just held Sid's weight in his hands. 128 When Sid looked up again, he noticed the burnished sinks, their regal luster, the beauty of the place, and this life. “It was nice of you to come here,” he said. “You've always been a reticent fuck.” “Just like our mother.” “Yeah, but she's got a helping hand.” Later, when their mother passed away, Sid would confess who he was; what he did for enjoyment; what he thought of the store; and his jealousy, and fierce hatred, of his brother for having had the gall to move away. But right now, they said nothing, just two brothers hugging, vaguely illumined by lamps. The lamps were antique Tiffany fixtures—with dark, leaded glass. They must have cost a fortune, Sid thought. THE INSPECTION The December 2004 administration of the Israeli Halakha Standards and Kosher Certification Board Exam, Level III: Advanced took place in a nondescript conference room on the third floor of the Jerusalem Gate Hotel. Twenty-five takers were in attendance, most of them progenies of well-regarded clans or has-been dynasties spanning the Pale and Carpathians. A few sprung from squalid development towns—Sderot, Netivot, Yeruham—or other rotting lands in the south. All were equally in-bred, and all were well-prepared for the test. Shlomo Lipshitz was not. He sat sweatily in back, gripping the desk of his writing chair, biting his lip, cupping his beard, deliberately avoiding eye contact with the furry-faced behemoth in front, a shiny-toothed Litvak named Yakov, who proctored in a glittering frock-coat. He was mumbling phrases inaudibly, lost in contemplative prayer, or otherwise trying to impress them. Shlomo should have paid him off. Across the aisle to his right sat Yossi, a smarmy Moroccan, grandson of the Sephardic Chief Rabbi, thick-lidded, round, and looking as if he might well have consumed his own weight in shakshouka that morning. He gave Shlomo a tomato-smeared grin. Question 39: After the liver is broiled and the outer juices have stopped flowing, how many times must the liver be rinsed under a stream of cold water? Fuck this, Shlomo figured. He reached in his rekel, which was bunched below his desk, parted his tzitzit, and unsnapped the leather box of his tefillin. Then he pulled out a small strip of parchment on which he had scribbled some notes. Beside him, the Moroccan just leered. Shlomo knew it was written here somewhere between bugs and the boiling of kitchen utensils. 130 Three, he marked on the test. Then he whispered to the shvartze beside him: “God comes to us in multiple ways.” Shlomo's big break as a kosher inspector came a couple years later, when he discovered two or three shrimp shells inadvertently dropped into a package of cod. The order, which had been placed by some upstart caterer near Kiryat Yam, had fallen under the supervision of the municipal rabbinate, which had neglected its watch. Shlomo, as the Deputy Regional Inspector, was actually tipped off by a friend of his, a classmate from kollel, who owed him a ride. There was hell to pay in Jerusalem. Three rabbis were fired—or not promoted, to be exact—and Shlomo's picture was displayed in the Chief Rabbinate's Weekly, which was circulated on all the important blocks in the capital and distributed as far west as Toronto. The article cited him as an “exemplary” inspector, one who is “G-d-fearing, properly trained, and responsible in all he undertakes.” He even got to pose in a shtreimel, an enormous fur cap, which he didn't even own. Three weeks later, he was married to the Mir Yeshiva head's daughter and employed as a Sabbath supervisor at the new Laromme Hotel in Jerusalem. Things were looking up. Then, in 2007, he committed a gaffe. As a side-project, and in effort to get his name out—he had hopes of becoming a district supervisor, if not more gainfully employed—he had founded a rent control committee in the Sanhedria neighborhood of Jerusalem, where landlords were gouging their tenants. Similar groups had been founded in Bnei Brak and other telescoping tenements. What he hadn't counted on was the owners being patrons of Shas, the largest rival party, and Sephardim to boot. Normally, one could negotiate with these people, and pretty much anyone wearing a hat. But when he showed up at the offices of Deri & Yishai, intending to outline his plans, and possibly squeeze them, he found none other than Yossi, his four-ton nemesis, sitting at the desk, picking an olive from his teeth. 131 “Multiple ways,” Yossi said. Then he thumbed through the sheets of his prayerbook. “How's the new wife holding up?” Twelve hours later, Shlomo was reassigned to the most isolated patch of the Negev, overseeing the kosher inspection for a senior citizens' home near Ofakim. To call the place desolate would have complimented the region. Actual scorpions crept along the sand, which had more the consistency of rock, and even in May, when he arrived, the thermometers simmered at 47°C. “I guess God wills it,” said his wife, who detested him but didn't say a word, apart from that. She and their two kids settled comfortably into their pink-walled, swamp-coolered condo, which was in an eight-story building, ironically enough, despite being 3km from the next. Shlomo, for his part, only visited the center once or twice-a-week, just enough to watch people die. Most afternoons, he played cards in the park and lingered around the yeshiva, dipping his toes in the bath or haggling with Bukhari merchants over the price of their babkas, which were obviously inflated, even for him. He took up smoking, as well. Fortunately, things played out to his favor in Jerusalem. Yossi suffered a stroke at age 36, which wasn't unexpected in his circles—they all ate a lot—but he hadn't even made it to the hospital in time to stabilize his brain. The result was that he had gone comatose—an awful, squishy state—and any other people would have pulled the plug. Shlomo visited him in the hospital once and felt a slight shred of compassion: the thin charcoaled eyes, the scintillating mask, the cables affixed to his jugular, like some massive shrimp. Shlomo thought about pulling the cord himself. Then he stepped out for a smoke. Twenty months later, his nemesis was dead, and Shlomo was called back to Jerusalem, where he attained a well-deserved sinecure as the Sabbath Inspector of the David Citadel Hotel. His wife, who had borne him two more, was elated, albeit unanxious to move. She also disliked moving back near her father, at whose home they were expected to gather each Friday night. That is, everyone in the clan except Shlomo, who made his rounds at the hotel. 132 One Friday evening around six, as a golden sun steamed through the clouds, igniting the cliffs of Talbiya and spraying warm light on his suite, Shlomo got up from the loveseat. He had been watching Jeopardy, sipping a good Cabernet (for which he had directed the import and levied a not- unreasonable tax), picking the jam from his toes, when it occurred to him that he deserved better than this. His father, a hapless shoe merchant from Netanya, had told him that nothing would come of this “life,” this newfound devotion he attained at age 17, when he'd moved to a Haifa yeshiva and taken up the calling of God. Shlomo wasn't technically ordained as a rabbi, but he had always been spiritual, and he did His work. Hell, he married a hag and had children—four of them, from what he could tell—and prayed most weekends at the Wall. He was fairly compassionate. He never overtaxed the religious and always gave alms to the poor. And he had never actually cheated anybody—that is, asked for an outright bribe. At least not without reasonable grounds. He was diligent with his reports. He didn't aim to be a district supervisor any longer, but his wife deserved more than a two-bedroom flat on some derelict block in Sanhedria. And his Audi needed new tires. He closed the drapes. He tightened his frock-coat. Then he picked up his half-emptied wineglass, wrapped it in a towel, dropped it on the floor, and stomped it. The shards were still settling in the bin when the deadbolt clamped in his door. Downstairs, he made his usual trek through the lobby, where George, the Assistant GM, was berating a security guard for having patted down a foreign head of state. A red dusky light checkered the carpets, the wrought-iron tables, the porcelain trays—all of this secular crap. Outside, the wind loudly whipped at the pool. Must have been a khamsin. He could hear its hum through the glass. As Shlomo barged through the swinging doors of the restaurant's kitchen, without warning, of course, he heard a thousand plates fall. Moses himself couldn't have exuded such power. In the center, beneath the hood of a vent and above a steel counter with plates, a goateed chef looked back at him in 133 panic. “Rabbi,” he peeped. Shlomo just studied his thumb. He knew right away what had happened. The wind had blown out the stoves' central pilot light, but the sun had already set. Six hundred chicken breasts cooled on trays along the wall, and a half-dozen servers were scrambling, unsure of how they'd proceed. “Go ahead, light it,” Shlomo said to the chef, a kibbutznik named Ron, who wasn't even supposed to be working now. “But what about—” “Go ahead. Do it. See if I care.” Shlomo eyed a young female server, an Arab, with copper- green eyes. He gave her a sumptuous wink. Then he approached Ron's counter, where a huge saucer of gravy was resting. He dipped his thumb in the pool, licked it, and turned to the five or six servers, all of whom were huddled by the door, waiting to hear his pronouncement. “I think it would be a shame to close you guys down now. What, with the delegation coming.” The Mideast Quartet was dining that night in the ballroom, and what seemed like half the UN was expected to arrive for brunch. The gravy tasted liquidy, dull. “Ron,” Shlomo dried off his hand on his frock-coat, slowly fingered his beard. “Let me ask you a question.” Ron stared straight above the plates. “How long have you been in this business?” “Twenty-seven years.” “Any kids?” “Just a couple.” “That's nice. Do you feel this place is a success?” Ron didn't flinch. He had the look of death in his eyes. “I guess.” “Hmm.” Shlomo turned to the young Arab server. “What's your name, sweetheart?” 134 She glowered at him, bravely. “I'm sorry, I didn't catch that.” “Nahla.” She grinned. “What a beautiful name, Nahla. What does that mean?” “Drink of water.” “I see.” He turned to Ron, who was quivering beneath his white chef's hat. “You know, I'd like a drink of water.” “Okay.” Then Shlomo spun around to the hall, to the extent one can spin in a frock-coat. He brushed the door's slanted mezuzah and gave the young girl a passing tap on the back—like David seducing Bathsheba, he figured. Outside, George was scrambling over through the lobby, brushing past the legions of security guards and mustached UN personnel. “Rabbi,” he pleaded. “I was going to tell you about the stove. There's nothing we can do. We couldn't ask a goy to light it, and the timers are already set.” “Just do what you wish,” Shlomo said. “But what about the license?” “What about it?” “How can we be sure it's okay?” “God has his ways.” Shlomo didn't bother to come down for dinner that night. He didn't have to. He chose to eat in his suite. The chicken was cold, but definitely reheated, and it arrived on a long silver tray, along with a vintage Bordeaux and a chilled green bottle of Perrier. Beneath it was a manager's enveloped stuffed 135 with pink bills—banded 200's—and an unstruck, newly-torn match. Shlomo's suite was actually meant to accommodate his family—it featured two adjoining rooms —though he kept the doors closed in effort to ward off the ghosts: the ghosts of his father, now dead, his nemesis, Yossi, and his mentor, the Litvak, whom no one else liked but appropriately feared, since that was the only passable way. He flipped through the bills, smelling their stack. Then he dumped them all out in the trash. Money meant nothing to him now, just part of his earthly abode. He wasn't sure why he was feelings this. But the sight of it rankled his chest. Fuck his new tires and his wife. He grabbed the Bordeaux, uncorked it, and laid himself down on the bed. At around three am, he heard a soft knock on his door. He stirred on his pillow, opened his eyes, and realized that his pay-per-view porn was still on. He reached for his kippah and rose, winding through the suite in his bathrobe. Peering through the peephole, he saw a young girl looking down, shielding her face with her palm. It was Nahla, of course. His drink. *** “So here's the plan,” her uncle told her that morning, inside the Daheisha Refugee Camp, 12km south of Jerusalem. “You've got to kill a Jew. I don't care how you do it. I don't care if you die. The payment is 12,000 sheks.” That was it, Nahla realized. That was the worth of her life, excluding the cost of her funeral and the fees for rebuilding their house. Both would be deducted, of course. Her uncle was munching on a date as he said it, a waxy medjool, propping his shoes on a 136 floormat she'd cleaned the past night. He was wearing his Yankees cap backwards, as he always did, and watching Arab Idol. “And what if I back out?” He didn't look up. He just spat his pit at the set. It clunked against the screen and bounced into a fake potted palm—a well-practiced shot. Suddenly, Muna dashed in from the store. “Abu Jabri said he can't help us any more. But he gave me an ice cream and drink.” Her clueless little sister, still clad in her navy-striped school dress, was slurping a Fanta and holding a half-melted Magnum on a stick. Then, as if on cue, they heard their father's moans from upstairs: at first, a soft whimpering, then shuddering cries, as if the life were being squeezed from his veins. Another round of chemo would kill the man. That's if they could afford the next cab. “I'll do it,” she told her uncle, “on two conditions. First, Muna doesn't stay in this house. You'll let her live with her aunt in ad-Doha”—a neighboring village, outside the camp, where she wouldn't live in squalor and fear of bi-nightly arrests. “And two, before I go, you'll let me spend time with Jaffar”—a neighbor who had repeatedly courted her, and whose marital requests her family had repeatedly denied. It wasn't that he wasn't good-looking. He was simply, unequivocally poor. And they had always entertained high hopes for their eldest. At least until the cancer set in. “If you want to whore yourself out, feel free. But your handlers will meet you at one. You'll pick up the explosives vest when you get past the checkpoint, inside the monastery gardens. As for Muna, that's fine.” She would have considered it further, but she had already made up her mind. She'd put in the request six months ago, though the Islamists wouldn't accept. So she had turned to her uncle, a crude UNRWA janitor, who had ties with the nationalist groups. They were less reliable and even more 137 misogynistic, but better-funded and seeking recruits. They had also found her a job, through covert channels, at a Jerusalem hotel, where Palestinians weren't normally employed. “Come here.” She hugged her little sister. Then she grabbed her thin, sticky hand. “I want you to run down to Jaffar's and tell him to come here at once.” “I hope he gives you a ring,” said her uncle. “I hope your wife doesn't get fat.” After Muna dashed off, Nahla bathed, said her prayers, and visited her father upstairs. With the help of two militants, she recorded a video of herself draped in red flags, clutching a rifle, and professing support for their cause. Then Muna rushed in with a reply. “Jaffar's still out at Efrat. He won't be back until six.” That figures, Nahla thought. She kissed her pale father goodbye. Downstairs, as she reapplied lipstick in her mirror, she noticed her lips were too chapped. The militants had told her that that could be a telltale sign to security. But it was clearly from the khamsin. Outside, through the bathroom's slatted grey window, a particled wind choked the camp, swarming through laundry, slabs of cement, and the chalky green leaves of a loquat, which she had once planted herself. Now all she wanted was to see the tree demolished. She could feel the hot wind in her throat. The going would be rough through the checkpoint, she realized, assuming traffic still crossed. Then she'd detonate herself outside the hotel, or wherever she encountered some guards. In the kitchen, she smeared some olive oil on her lips and retrieved her late mother's sunglasses —an oversized tortoiseshell pair, like the kind that Umm Kulthum wore. Her life had been miserable, as well. Everyone's was, she supposed. “Good luck,” said her uncle, bidding her adieu. “May God grant you peace and good health.” 138 *** “Good evening,” said the girl, as Shlomo slowly opened his door. He looked at her face, those soft Arab cheeks, the pouty, wet folds of her lips. She was wearing sunglasses, too, which she hadn't worn downstairs. But her nametag clearly said Nahla, and it was pinned to her uniform's vest. She also wore a matching blue skirt and white dress shirt with scarf, beneath which her massive breasts bulged. “May peace be upon you,” he said. Diffidently, she entered, looked about the suite, and studied the tall windows' glare. The curtains were drawn, and a wild orange light flitted in: the illumined stone walls of the Old City beyond, compounded with the sweltering dusk. It looked truly biblical, he realized. Like some heathenish plague, or a curse. “Al-Quds,” he said, using the Palestinian name. “Jerusalem.” “Are you Muslim?” She grinned, watching him retrieve two crystal flutes from a glass-covered, wall-mounted shelf. “Then I guess you don't drink.” “There's a first time for everything.” Smirking, she removed her black sunglasses and let down her long walnut hair. As he bent to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of Clos Du Mesnil, '98—she was worth it, he figured, even if she was a bit overweight—he tried not to take his eyes off her, but he noticed she was watching the trash. “Are those real?” she asked, referring to the discarded Shekels. “Nothing is real in my life.” He untied the cork and it popped. Foam drizzled onto the carpet, 139 along with his robe and his hands. His pajamas were silk, and the stain would be hard to get out. Not as hard as blood, though. This girl was a vision from God. “Do you want them?” She eyed him fiercely, as if too enraged to respond. “How old are you?” he asked her. “Nineteen.” “And you've never been with a man?” “Is that what you are?” “If you want to leave, that's fine. I'm not asking you to do anything you don't want.” Still smiling, he held out a bubbling glass. Slowly, she approached him and took it. She sipped it, coughed, and set the glass on the desk. He took her hand and pulled her into his chest. She smelled of perfume—some raw, earthly scent, and he could hear the soft tick of her heart. “I'm scared,” the girl whispered. “You're scared?” “Yes.” “Scared of what?” He could feel her whole body convulsing. “About what I need to do for the cash.” He looked at her sullenly. Then he glanced about the suite—its crystal, silk, gold—like David's own palace of sin. “Nothing,” he responded. “I just wanted you to give me a hug.” “What?” “I'm old enough to be your father. I'm not going to do anything to you. And if you want to take the money, that's fine.” She was shaking madly, half-writhing in his arms. 140 “There, there,” he said. “It's okay.” “No, it's not okay.” She backed away. “Fuck you, you Jew.” “What's wrong?” She eyed him darkly. “You forgot to inspect me,” she said. Then she reached in her vest. “Allahu Akbar.” “Shit.” The last thing that Shlomo Lipshitz would hear—besides the sound of shrapnel impacting his head—was the sound of the wind as it rattled the glass, and an echoing, high, shrieking laugh. Whether it was the girl's, or Yossi's, or even his father's, Shlomo himself never knew. 141 MAXIMUM DEDUCTIONS Three weeks after his wife left him, Walter M. Weissman flew to Las Vegas for the American Society of Actuary Professionals' 47 th Annual Meeting, which was held at the MGM Grand. He had avoided the conference for years, though his colleague, Scott Epson, had encouraged him and said he'd come along. Presently, Scott was out on the Strip, having rallied a group at Workshop Seven: Takeover Issues, Standards of Practice for a late-night jaunt to Crazyhorse III. Since none of them gambled—the conference consisted of 1,300 specialists in risk—a strip-club was about the best he could offer, and Walter had fitfully declined. Leaning back now on a faux-leather chair in his suite, Walter surveyed his pay-per-view options, which were simply too much for him to grasp. He hadn't seen a movie since Kay left, and he dimly recalled the last one they'd watched: Antonioni's Eclipse, which, like most Italian movies, featured beautiful women in dresses looking bored. Walter had fallen asleep in the middle, though Kay, of course, had been enthralled. He should have foreseen it, he knew. Checking his phone, he saw that his eldest son had called twice, and his wife's lawyer had left a message requesting his presence at an upcoming deposition, which Walter would undoubtedly skip. He sipped his gin-and-tonic, which he'd snagged from a waitress downstairs, having forced himself to throw coins at a slot for ten minutes. He'd actually won twenty dollars, which he figured he'd spend on brunch. Then his cellphone chirped. “Waldo, where the fuck are you? You haven't cut your wrists yet, I hope.” Scott. 142 “I was waiting to take out a policy.” “Get the hell down here. It's sick.” That was one of those new words he'd picked up. Sick. Scott was thirty years younger, a transfer from Towers Watson, and only twelve months out of Wharton. Walter liked him. “I'm afraid I'll have to pass.” “I'm sending a little gift to your room. Do me a favor and clean yourself up.” Forty minutes later, Walter heard a faint knock. Stumbling through the suite in his bathrobe, he opened the massive oak door and let the girl in. She wore a navy twill pantsuit and introduced herself as Precious. “Pleased to meet you, Precious.” He noticed that her right eye hung a little lower than her left, and her dental work was complex. Yet her figure was perfect, and her eyes, in spite of her coffee-tone skin, or perhaps because of it, shone remarkably blue. As they sat on the bed, a couple inches apart still, she dug through her purse and removed a coin envelope. “Your friend said you might want these.” “Excuse me?” She slid out two tiny, pink, heart-stamped pills. “Guess you never done Ecstasy.” She laughed, somewhat contortedly. The only drug he’d ever done before was pot, which Kay made him try once or twice. “Why not?” He hesitantly took one, offered her the other, and even more hesitantly offered her a swig from his glass. As she excused herself for the restroom, he waited for the effects to set in. He began to worry that his wallet wasn’t stowed in the safe. 143 Returning, this time in maroon-colored, silk lingerie, she asked about his wife, noting that he was wearing his band. “Yeah, well, what happens in Vegas—” “You got any kids?” “Just a few.” As she leaned over to kiss him, Walter leaned away. His head was spinning rapidly. “You are a beautiful girl.” He didn't bother to cloak his erection. “But I'm not ready for this yet.” “You wanna take it slow, that's fine with me. How would you like a massage?” He wiped his face. “A massage would be nice.” He studied the stucco ceiling as she rubbed his fleshy white chest. A few meaty warts sprang from it. She smelled of jasmine and bleach, and she unhitched the strap on her negligee—a frilly purple lace. “How long you in town?” “Couple nights.” When she was done, Walter tipped her generously, though he retained his prized twenty-dollar bill, figuring he'd tape it up at work. He also couldn't bring himself to do anything sexual with her, so he invited her to brunch the next morning, which she graciously declined. “You gonna be okay here, baby?” Precious asked, stopping at the door. “I'm doing great,” Walter said. Slouched on his bed, Walter flipped through the channels and settled on professional wrestling —the event was being held downstairs. Then he studied the remaining coin envelope. He thought he should mail it to Kay. Still nursing his gin, feeling somewhat sorry for himself—though for what, exactly, 144 he didn't know—Walter recalled the night of his wedding in Chicago: a chilly, velvet-cushioned room at the Drake Hotel, for which Kay's parents had paid. That night in the suite, he had wanted nothing more than to go at it, to peel back her veil and white dress, though she had insisted on smoking a little pot first. A tiny, slim joint, as if she needed that to get aroused. Afterward, she finished—twice, in fact, which was more than he could say for himself, but he continued to wonder how much she'd enjoyed it, and whether it wasn't a charade. The next morning, at Workshop Nine: Maximum Deductions, Scott emerged in last night's suit and plastic pink shutter shades, which he slowly took off. Shaking Walter's hand, he cast a warm, stubbly grin. “How the hell are you, my friend?” They sat in the back of Conference Room J, sipping black coffee and passing scrawled notes like two giddy schoolgirls while Thomas M. Flanagan, MSPA, CPC, QPA, FCA, MAA, Flanagan Associates, Richmond, V A, held forth from the lectern on the onus of PBGC coverage. was she good? Scott wrote. better than your mom During the beverage break, Scott slipped out to take a nap, and Walter was left to mingle. Bill Carbon, MSPA, CPC, QPA, SBIZ Benefits & Insurance Services, Inc., Fountain Valley, CA, asked about his wife—they had met once at a funeral in Brookfield—and Walter said she was fine, omitting any news of his divorce, which, in any case, had yet to be finalized. And by the time the courts got around to it, he figured he would be dead. Then Walter stepped outside for a cigarette. He hadn't smoked in thirty years, and even back then, he had been aware of the statistics. Yet he felt an insatiable urge. Outside the sportsbook, he flagged down a short-skirted server, who steered him towards an overpriced kiosk selling Tylenol and gum. What would Frank Sinatra have thought? Even 145 worse, after lighting up beneath an awning outside, Walter was accosted by a pimply valet, who redirected him to a glass-enclosed smoking area, where throngs of depressed-looking people cowered beneath the shimmering lamps. Walter realized that he was at least partially to blame for this sorry state of affairs, though his area had always been annuities, not human health. He flicked his Bic and breathed out. “What's FSPA?” said a plump, gray-haired woman standing next to him, noticing his badge. “Fellow, Society of Pension Actuaries,” Walter whispered, mildly embarrassed himself. “Oh, I thought you were one of the floormen.” She was wearing a Dallas Mavericks sweatshirt and smoking as if each cigarette were her last. “Not quite.” “You spend a lot of time in the prisons?” “Pensions.” He smiled. The old woman exhaled. Walter still had thirty-six hours to kill in this hellhole. After excusing himself from an afternoon networking session, he decided to go for a walk. He felt another craving, though for what he couldn't say. Definitely not sex—Kay, with all of her lingering associations, had killed any prospect of that. Nor Ecstasy, the effects of which were still resounding in his head. Nor even human connection—his two sons had talked his head off the past week; they had been trying to console him, and little did they know, a man whose wife has left him after thirty-four years of more or less untroubled marriage does not generally want to reflect. No, what Walter thought he wanted was food. And since he couldn't countenance paying $39.99 for an all-you-can-eat lobster buffet at what was basically a dank cafeteria, he headed out to find the nearest greasy spoon. 146 He walked for over an hour, passing a Tic-tac-toe-playing chicken, RTC buses, throngs of Japanese, and empty casinos pumping air conditioning onto South Las Vegas Boulevard. The late May sun lit his face. Finally, he came to an old-fashioned joint beside a liquor store. The sign said Tiffany's, though he had a hard time picturing Audrey Hepburn sitting on the rose-cushioned, torn vinyl stools at the counter, where a Hawaiian-shirted man with a goatee and mullet was buttering a week's worth of toast. A few plaid-shirted truckers loitered near the back, and the only other man in the diner was sporting a hooded sweatshirt and shades. Walter joined him at the counter, sitting a couple stools down, and ordered fried jalapenos and eggs. “Nice day, ain't it?” Walter said, trying to make conversation. The hooded man didn't seem to have heard him. Overhead, The Supremes' “Baby Love” loudly crooned. Walter perused the coffee mug advertisements: penile enlargers, housekeeping services. Then the hooded man turned. “First time here?” He was wearing black aviators and resembled the Unabomber, except his face was dark and clean-shaven. “Not really. Came out once for my son's graduation. He studied hotels at UNLV. For all I know, he's probably an overpriced pimp, but he's taking care of my daughter. They live in New York. Another time—” “Excuse me.” The hooded man rose, leaving his fork on his plate. Mildly offended, Walter returned to his poppers and eggs, which had since been brought out. He was squeezing out a dollop of ketchup when the hooded man returned. “Sorry.” He grinned. “Bad stomach.” He pushed away his plate. Then he set a pack of Marlboro Reds on the counter. “I'm glad to see you smoke,” Walter said. 147 “This is about the only damn place you still can.” Behind the counter, the Hawaiian-shirted mullet man smiled. Then he punched the register, still bobbing his head to Diana Ross. “How 'bout you? What's your line of work?” Walter asked. The hooded man stared straight ahead. “Entertainment.” “Entertainment? What are you, like, a magician?” The hooded man smirked. Then he adjusted his shades and thumbed through his wallet. Walter noticed he was stunningly thin. “I got it,” Walter said, interrupting him and pulling out his twenty-dollar bill. “That's nice of you. But no thanks. Here.” The man set a fifty on the counter. Then he removed a couple white tickets and slid them down Walter's way. “If you got nothing better to do tonight, stop by my show.” The tickets said David Copperfield, MGM Grand. The glass doors slapped behind him as he left. Walter finished his omelet. Then he called Scott. “You won't believe who I just ran into,” he said, walking back towards the Strip. “Hey, Waldo, sorry to interrupt, man, but I gotta jet. I'm going skydiving tonight at the Canyon. My class is at four.” “Okay,” Walter said. “Sounds sick.” Back at his hotel, Walter played craps. He lost forty dollars in under ten seconds. It was good for him, he thought. Then he downed a few tumblers of scotch, doing everything he could to avoid the drifters from the conference upstairs. He secluded himself in the sportsbook, placed a twenty-dollar wager—his prized slot machine earnings—and figured, after handing off the bill, that forty-to-one odds 148 on the Cubs to win the pennant, which they had yet to do in his lifetime, wasn't much of a return, but he felt good about doing it. He was turning over a new leaf. He thought he should reflect on Kay a bit, but for some reason, nothing entered his mind, apart from a sting in his gut and the sight of Jeff Samardzija's thick pitching arm. Must have been the jalapenos. Up in his suite, with his actuary tables spread along his desk, a Tom Clancy novel kicked to the floor, and an uncorked bottle of wine by his toes, Walter opened his laptop and began e-stalking his wife. Google turned up nothing, apart from his first son's wedding announcement and a couple pamphlets from her grade school, where his wife taught seventh grade science. It couldn't have been a student, Walter figured, and all the neighbors were close to death (they lived in Hoffman Estates, a manicured subdivision thirty miles west of Chicago). Maybe it was her yoga instructor, though he was pretty sure Ernesto was gay. What other men did she know? She had said there was no one else; she just “needed to be alone” and wanted to “make a clean start.” What was she hiding? Had she ever done Ecstasy? Solicited an African-American prostitute? Had lunch with a B-list celebrity in Vegas? She barely even painted her nails. Still, Kay had been gorgeous in her youth, and he knew he had never deserved her. He had courted her early, when she was still a freshman at Illinois. He had met her at a sorority formal, and he remembered the look of bemusement in her eyes the first time he had pinned the ZBT emblem on her blouse; it was a look of disdain, but one he could easily brook. And she could as well. Things had been like that in the Sixties. It was the Johnson Era. Women hadn't worked. She had earned enough of a pension to live on her own, though that wasn't what worried him now. Neither did the thought of his living out his remaining years alone. He had always thought he'd be comfortable in a place like Sun City. Hell, even here. No, what irked him was the knowledge that she had always preferred someone else: her high school boyfriend, Ron, who had left her after her prom. 149 He had gone off and died in Vietnam, and now she was left with Walter, a certified pension actuary, or prison, as that hag pointed out. Kay had been entitled to go. Rising in his suite, he studied the glittering windows, beyond which lay a spread of hotels: Harrah's, Caesar’s Palace, the Wynn, all peopled with incalculable sources of light—thousands upon thousands of rooms, all gleaming against the tranquil blue glow of the dusk. He remembered the curtains in Chicago, the way they had flapped that night in the suite, as if bellying the rain that had sent dozens of relatives hurtling towards the shelter of the gazebo outside. It had been her idea to hold the reception in the park—her idea, entirely—with no real backup in mind. What did she care if it rained? And even when it started, she smiled, and she had just said to relax. Relax. As if he were just a guest at some party she'd casually planned. He had been glad to be invited, and he had made love to her earnestly that night. And every time since then, too. Downstairs at the magic show, Walter sipped his gin at a small sticky table in back while the entertainer hoisted a saw. David was tired of this, too, Walter knew; he didn't even glance at his young blond assistant. Walter downed the last of his drink and excused himself amid the spectrum of glistening lights, stepping over children and families who had undoubtedly imprisoned themselves in overheated GMC vans, trekking all the way from Sheboygan, Des Plaines, Cottage Grove, all trying to catch a glimpse of the impossible itself before their eighty-year spans fizzled out. He knew the average American lifespan was 77.97 years, one that had been steadily rising but still trailed behind Japan's. Yet our suicide rate was about half of theirs. Which meant Americans were far more inclined to undergo suffering for incredible lengths of time. Walter blamed this on magicians and the entertainment industry generally. Or maybe they were just doing their jobs. 150 Either way, he passed through the lobby, down the percolating slots, past the ominous eyes in the ceiling, and out into a stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard, where he threw himself in front of an RTC bus. 151 OPTICON His company had been stationed on the Lebanon Line for four months, and in that time, they'd only seen “action” twice. The first was an unreported skirmish, late one night, when a forward party, crawling through scrub, was greeted with a volley of shots: low, whipping tracers, which hadn't touched a thing. The second was an unanticipated mortar barrage that torched two posts and resulted in seven wounded. Cpl. Evgeny Kozlov had been on leave when it happened, and he didn't regret that much. This evening, as he stood manning the northeastern lookout, which was basically a periscope hole dug in two meters below earth, his thoughts revolved less around the chances of his killing or being killed than his prospects of finding a wife. He had been told that most successful relationships started in the army, though he didn't know how, since he hadn't seen a girl in three weeks. Maybe it was only the jobniks, he figured. “Kozlov,” shouted his Captain, blaring through the radio set. “When you're done in twenty, stop by Command.” Evgeny did as told. After being replaced on guard, he emerged from his dugout and padded down the gravel-strewn trench, gripping his rucksack and carbine, smoking his long-awaited cigarette, absorbing the day's final rays. It was early August, near-dusk. He only had twenty months left. Inside the command hub, which was in another fortified bunker deep in the bowels of the earth, Evgeny extinguished his smoke as required and studied his phone's chipped screen. No messages from home, nor from his friends—not that he had many. At the end of the sandbagged tunnel, which was lit by a caged, sooty bulb, he saw his Captain 152 standing alongside an enormous bald man with a gun—what might have been a general, judging by his epaulettes' marks (Evgeny was never too clear on what the higher insignia denoted). “Kozlov, at attention,” snapped his Captain. Evgeny gave a formal salute, which was quite rare in the Israeli Army and almost never done, apart from in the presence of generals. “Soldier, where's your beret?” “I don't have it on guard,” he explained. This was a valid defense. “Very well,” said the dome-headed general. His gun was a Commando Tavor, which Evgeny had seen once in a magazine. “At ease.” Then he instructed Evgeny to follow him into the debriefing room, which was surprisingly empty tonight. “I understand you're a good shot,” said the General. The Captain nodded. “The best in the company, they tell me.” Evgeny didn't know what to say. “My name is General Abutbul. I'm the leader of Northern Command. Perhaps you've seen me on the news.” Evgeny hadn't. The General stopped beside a folding steel desk. “In any case, we've partnered with Grumman Northrop Aerospace Development, and we've designed a new optical device. It's in trial mode now with Givati in Gaza, but we'd like to test it up here.” Bending, he unclasped a ridged green container and revealed what looked like a vase: a gleaming glass tube encased in black foam and capped on both ends with brass rings. Above him, the ceiling bulb flickered, strobing the stubbly white mound of his head. “This is the Opticon,” said the General. “It's the latest in optical technology. GNAD swears it's 153 the best. Personally, I've always been skeptical of gadgets. I said to Gabs down at Central, 'You wanna win wars, you need better men. Our training's gotten too soft.' Tell me, how long was your final forced march in training? Fifty-five k?” Evgeny grinned. “Hell, in Beirut, we marched eighty to find a hooker one evening. Turned out she was a man.” He let out a harrowing laugh. Evgeny was still transfixed by the tube, which sparkled inside its foam case. “Anyways, this,” said the General, “will give you an unparalleled view. There's one little catch, though. It's mildly radioactive. Then again, so's the scope on your M4. They both contain tritium. Do you know what tritium is?” Evgeny shook his head. “Isotope of hydrogen. That's what the lab coats say. Causes something called radioluminescence. Anyways, this is much stronger, and as an incentive for your trying it out, we're going to give you a little gift.” He smiled brightly. “As a reward for incurring a few risks, you'll get released six months early, assuming all else goes as planned. Plus, you'll get twenty-five grand. So, to cut to the chase, if you'll just sign your name on this form, in view of our witness, of course”—he nodded to the Captain—“then we can proceed with the hook-up, and you'll be ready to stand guard tonight.” “What are the risks?” Evgeny said. “Ho-ho-ho.” The General slapped his knee. “I'm not a scientist, but I guess you're Russian, so you're smart. You know, my grandmother was Russian. Galician, to be exact. She was a piece of work. The rest of me's Moroccan. But there's also some Swedish, I think.” “Swedish?” 154 “Come, son. Just sign your name on the form.” He held out a bulging brown clipboard. “Can you write in Hebrew?” Evgeny didn't sign. At least not initially. He wanted to talk with his father. The problem is there was little reception in the bunker, and even less inside the basement of the Hadera Mall, where his father was at work inspecting bags. Finally, he reached him. “Zhenya, what the hell do you think?” “Well, I'm not sure.” “Sign the fucking form,” said his father. In retrospect, his family had always been trusting of Israelis. They had to be. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was nowhere else they could go. He had a couple cousins who'd ended up in Brooklyn. They were both unmarried. And sad. Evgeny stormed down the sandbagged hall. He slicked back his wet bristly hair—he'd showered to think it over and burned through the last of his Camels. “I'll do it,” he told his Captain, who was slumped in a chair in the Ops Room, his head in his hand, facing the radio dials. He didn't seem to have heard amidst the bleeps of the set. Then he noticed his Captain was secretly playing a backgammon game on his phone. “Kozlov, fuck.” He stood. “Don't ever sneak up on me again.” Two men in their company had been sentenced last month for playing phone games while on guard. “Why aren't you up at the mess?” “I've made up my mind. I'll sign.” “It's too late,” said the Captain, discretely palming his phone. “Rothschild has decided to sign.” “Rothschild? He couldn't shoot off his own dick.” “That's probably true,” said the Captain. “I'll phone up the General now.” Then he flipped up the 155 lid of his Nokia and studied it purposively, as if that's what he'd been doing all along. Outside, at the armory, which was housed in a weather-stained tin shed enveloped by T-walls and wire, three smiths went to work on Evgeny's M4. The tube was mounted on his tactical rail through a series of complex joints, some of which screwed, others fastened or snapped. By the time they were done, his rifle weighed 45 kilograms. He couldn't lift it alone. “Yes, the General said that that could be a problem, so we'll carry it down to your post.” “How will I maneuver it?” Evgeny asked. “Your bipod will handle the weight.” Sure enough, the three of them, all beefy jobniks who spent half their days lifting weights (the other half eating), lugged his gun through the trenches, beneath the moth-eaten bags of the parapets, beneath the grey, twinkling stars. When they arrived at his position, Casa, an Ethiopian-born corporal, said, “What the fuck is that?” “It's a scope.” “Casa,” said their Captain, who'd joined them, “you can run off to eat.” Casa still gazed at the scope. Then the Captain unsnapped the gun's under-barrel legs, set them down on a ledge, and pulled back the sliding steel slot of the lookout's front portal. “You won't need the periscope tonight,” said the Captain, pushing the barred mirror away. The portal looked down on some jagged marl cliffs, a few skeletal junipers, then the spread of the Lebanon fields, most of which were vacant, but for some tiny pink lights. “That's Ayta al-Sha'b,” he explained. “But you won't need to do any sighting. This scope should do all the work.” 156 Evgeny retucked the beret on his shoulder, which he'd thought to bring with. “Just try not to make any light.” The lookout was utterly dark, per regulations. Even their watches were taped, as were their dogtags, the clips of their guns, even the snaps of their vests. Evgeny knew that snipers had picked off men using less here, though not since he'd been deployed. Nervously, he shouldered the stock, beside the bright portal, feeling the night's soothing air. A cool mist drifted over the mountains, lightly tinted with diesel and sage. “Copy,” said the Captain, seizing the radio's mic. “Two-twenty's finally up.” Then he barreled off, and the jobniks explained the new optic. “Basically, it's like your old Trijicon,” one said. “You keep your eye in the view, watch for any movement. There's no need to focus or toggle. Everything's digitized now.” “You're a lucky bastard,” said another. Then he pulled out a pack of Wisams. “Come on,” he told the others. “Real Madrid's almost on.” When the others had left, Evgeny slid back the portal, made sure his cellphone was off, and sidled up next to the gun. Oddly, the rear eyepiece was casting a faint purple glow. Oh well, he thought. Six months is a long time to serve. Inside, he saw nothing but black. Then he remembered to open his right eye. This time he saw a glittering assortment of grains, all multicolored, coming together until they formed a dense ball. The ball started swirling, like some molten red orb, or a flame. What the fuck? Evgeny thought. He felt a bump on his chest. The gunstock had punched him, it seemed. He gripped his magazine and with his trigger-hand checked that the safety was latched and the ejection port cover was 157 closed. Sure enough, his gun started rattling, like some angry snake in his hands. He studied the glowing orb. Fuck. The light burned his eye. He blinked rapidly, rubbing it. “Two-twenty,” grumbled the radio speaker. “Make sure your attention is fixed.” What did he mean? Evgeny wondered. “It means keep looking into your scope. We're monitoring you closely.” Evgeny looked back in the view. The orb still sizzled, causing him to tear. It was way too bright to look in. “Keep going,” said his Captain. “You're doing great,” said his friends. Soon, the orb faded to a purplish-blue. That, or his eye was adjusting. Finally, it dimmed and went black. He blinked. Then he saw a small blurry figure. It morphed into a person. His father. He was breathing—heavily, it seemed. He was making love to Evgeny’s mother. Evgeny coughed. The scope's view transformed into a keyhole, and he was peering in on his parents making love. His mother looked to be convulsing as his father rode her from behind. Then the lights flashed off, and she screamed. When they flashed on again, she was giving birth to a child, her legs propped heavily before her. Out came a screaming mess. Soon, his father was rushing through the streets of St. Petersburg, carrying a steaming blanket. He stopped atop a snow-covered bridge, what must have been the Palace Bridge, Evgeny thought. Beyond it, a gold moon lighted the waves of the Neva and the Rostral Columns and the port. Then he saw a coin skip. It went slicing through the current, made a sharp u-turn, and returned to an outstretched hand. This hand put the coin in a shabby wool dress suit and pulled out a small silver card, a train ticket to Moscow, it seemed, then a boarding pass for a flight. 158 The pass showed no name, but above it, he saw an old split-flap display, like an airport marquee, whose letters were hard to make out. Then a bearded man was haranguing him in Hebrew and hustling him into a van. The van rumbled off beneath date palms and figs and out along the coast to a bay. It disappeared through a warren of tenements and arrived at a prison-like structure—an “absorption center,” said the man. Peering out from a window, above a stained wall, was a gap-toothed, dark, grinning girl. Soon, she was herding him into a dark linen closet, teaching him to smoke, and sliding down the straps of her dress. He couldn't breathe, and he was kissing the beads of her nipple, smelling her musky scent. Then she was facing him across a sleek Burger Ranch table with her arm around somebody else. She gave him that gap-toothed grin. Evgeny looked out of the scope. “Two-twenty, report,” said his radio. “All's good.” He looked back in the eyepiece. Now it was his Drill Sergeant grinning. He handed him a tester screwdriver, and soon Evgeny was scraping the grime off a tile, working diligently at it, while a toilet overflowed by his boots. He wiped his face and he was running. Then he tripped and fell on his chin. He woke in a pool of warm vomit, which had splattered his Drill Sergeant's leg. “For that, I want you to run this course again, and if you're over ten minutes, you'll do it again, and again.” The words “again and again” echoed loudly in the scope until he blinked and saw himself riding on an armored coach bus through the south, beside the cracked plains of the Negev, the gold floodlamps that dotted the hills, and up into the mountains, past the gates of Shtula, and down into the jaws of the earth, where he was manning a lookout, holding a gun like this. He turned to look back at himself and he smiled. “Great job,” said his Captain, speaking over the radio set. Then Evgeny heard a deafening bang. He looked in his scope, where the night opened up into a screeching array of pink phosphorous darts, which hissed and whistled and boomed. Men were taking 159 cover behind cement guardblocks; the gun barrel shook in his hands. Outside his lookout, along the steps to the barracks, Casa was rubbing his ear, from which blood shiningly dripped. He turned, and his cheekbone was missing. In its place was a gummy red maw. Then he fell down, convulsed a bit, and died. A PRC radio squawked, and a column of Merkavim was splashing mud waves, roaring down a path to Qaouzah. They were met with a thunderous bang. Then the sky turned black, then smoky, then black, and Evgeny watched a helicopter tilt and silently burst into flames. Next thing he knew, he was crouched beside a boulder, brushing his teeth with his hand. Another man was pissing beyond him, then the night sky bloomed with a flare, and his Captain was yelling, “Here we go, boys, this is it,” and they were marching along in formation, two rows through a small town, squatting beside the shattered stone buildings and the neon green stripes of a mosque. Soon, Evgeny was running through bracken, alongside five more. He was clutching two rifles and the slippery foam handle of a stretcher above him, from which his Platoon Sergeant dripped—sweat, blood, or urine, he didn't know. All of it tasted the same. Now he was coughing, walking on gravel, while a bearded man mumbled some prayers. Tall pine trees gleamed at his side. This time, Evgeny was gripping a flag-covered casket while his mother looked on from the crowd. He did his best to avoid her glance, and everyone else's, and he kept hearing this soft, tapping knock. It was coming from inside the oak casket, where his Platoon Sergeant was whispering, “You should have watched the south.” Then he was accompanying a squadmate named Oren, a guy he never liked, to dinner one evening on the Tel HaShomer base, several months later, the night before their discharge. Oren said he had to stop and take a shit and that he would meet him in line up ahead. Evgeny heard the bang from inside the mess hall as the steaming bourekas were being served. “I ate his share,” said one of the jobniks, speaking over the radio's mic. When Evgeny reopened his eyes, he was wading through a tropical river, beside a glimmering 160 waterfall and a girl with silky blond hair. Her name was Shulamite, she said, and she would be his bride to hold. Soon, they were standing in line at the El Al desk at the New Delhi Airport. He was clutching a padded drum, and she was wearing a sarong and fluorescent beads and a strand of lilies in her hair. Then he was sprinting to a building atop Tel Aviv U, where he was late for his Econ exam. Question 29. On a mean return-beta graph, the line that connects the risk-free rate and the optimal risky portfolio, P, is called the: A. Opticon B. Depleted uranium round C. Iodized phosphorous D. Your life in a nutshell, schmuck “Pick D, Pick D,” shouted the General, speaking over the radio mic. Then Evgeny woke in his bed—what might have been his bed—to find Shulamite giving birth, heaving and panting with the same exasperated sigh as his mother. “You're late once again,” said his boss, or somebody wearing an over-starched polo with a badge that said Pfizer. “Sit down.” Evgeny sat down at a padded-blue cubicle and picked up a headset device. “Good evening, I don't mean to disturb you at home or ask about a personal matter, but I was just wondering if you've been satisfied lately with your partner's sexual performance.” He did his best to speak without an accent, reading the words on his screen. Then someone started cursing him in Hebrew. Or Russian. In fact, it sounded like his mother. When he blinked again, she was dying, sprawled out along a green hospital bed, clutching his 161 wrist now, her nervous eyes huger than fists. “I'm glad we came to this country,” she moaned. “Me too.” Evgeny held up his youngest child. She looked just like him, but for a gap in her teeth. Then his wife was pulling his arm. She was leading him through a long hallway. Evgeny was wearing a suit. His tie wasn't tied, and she was explaining that he'd get the house and their kids. She explained that there was someone else. She was holding his Captain's hand. “Sorry,” said a voice on the radio. Then Evgeny spun round once again and found himself floating on waves. He was water-skiing, it seemed, which he'd never done before but found quite intuitive, since he'd cross-country skied as a child. Then he was parachuting briskly, whipping through air, landing and crunching his arm. He was in the hospital meeting a nurse named Allel. She was Moroccan and dark and beautiful to him and wore a sizable ring on her hand and made love to him gently late one afternoon on a terrace overlooking the bay. Then he was back at work again, supervising a mid-morning shift, when he stumbled on a caller whose laminated tag bore the same last name as Allel. Evgeny tried to smile warmly, then he removed the caller's I.D. The man started crying. “I know it hurts,” Evgeny said. “It does,” said the General, speaking over the radio mic. Evgeny pulled back from the scope and rubbed its glass tube. It was much brighter and filled with blue tendrils, like some staticky plasma globe. Looking back inside the eyepiece, Evgeny saw himself smoking, trying to reach for a pack. But Allel kept pushing it away. Soon, she clicked off his television, where Russian Idol was blaring. “No more stress for you,” she said. Then he saw himself coughing and madly convulsing and floating up high into space. There was no parachute above him, however, just darkness and glimmering stars. He 162 was soaring past planets, a hot molten sun, then a lava-like orb, which burnt out. “They forgot to pay the electric,” said a jobnik on the radio. “Or our fucking generator's down.” Evgeny looked up from his scope. Beyond the walls of his lookout, he heard a low whistle, a roaring whoosh, then a dull thud and a boom. “It's not the generator,” the Captain shouted on the radio. “The base is under attack. Hezbollah rockets. They must have hit the power grid. Run.” Evgeny rubbed his face. He was sweating deeply. The sandbags shook at his feet. It was completely dark in his lookout, minus the glow of his tube. “Two-twenty, two-twenty, come in,” said his radio. “What's the report?” “Everything's clear,” he said. 163 THE CONSULTANT She entered my office on Wilshire and 12 th with a spark in her eye. I was reading Chandler, of course. It hadn't been raining, but October was threatening to pour. It was a cool windless Friday. I took her coat. “I need to get my son into Stanford,” she said. We had talked a few times on the phone. She said she would pay cash—cash only. I had accepted. Her son was seventeen. She wouldn't say where he was enrolled. Outside, the evening streetlamps cast hazy red halos, which I saw reflected in her Jackie-O shades. “Have a seat.” I offered her a Camel and light. She said she had yoga in the morning and that I shouldn't smoke. “What are his SAT scores?” “1480.” “Well, that's wonderful,” I said. “On three sections.” I brought her some coffee. She drank. “You're not from around here, are you?” “Chicago.” “How long have you done this kind of work?” “Kaplan fired me in May.” 164 “I see. And what assurances do I have that you know what you're doing?” I pulled out a knife, a serrated steel Gerber, army-issue, '98, and sliced off a chunk of the apple I'd been eating. “You don't.” “Mrs. Olsen said you were the best.” “She should know.” “Then I'll give you a deposit tonight.” With that, she slunk over to my desk, extended her leg—she was wearing a black, satin two- piece, all velvet lace—and flashed her garter belt. As she bent down, her pantyhose ripped. “Oops.” She reached below her hemline—somewhere quite private—and pulled out a smirking Ben Franklin. “There's more on the way.” Then she pranced off into the night. “Mrs. Deakins,” I hollered. She didn't hear. I realized she'd left a manila folder on the table, which was sealed with a lipstick kiss. I held up the file, smelling it gingerly. Cocaine. A scent I knew well. Inside, there were photos of her husband—or what looked like her husband, clutching her and some African prince at a ball. Then the regular files for her son: test scores, AP slips, transcripts, a list of uneventful activities (soccer team captain, apparently, although the school name was unclear on both that and the transcripts), and finally, a near-naked shot of herself. She was wearing a plunge-cut robe, a tasseled black mortarboard, and clutched a diploma in all the wrong places. The diploma said Stanford, though that wasn't what caught my eye. I noticed she was standing in broad daylight upon USC's lawn. It must have been a Sunday, because there was no one else around, but I recognized the steps of Doheny. 165 I spit out the apple and sighed. The following Monday, I arrived three hours late for work. I'd like to blame it on traffic on the 405, but in truth, some late-paying client, a perky little senior from Brentwood High, had kept me out late. We had met for drinks along Sunset, and next thing I knew, she was giving me a lift in her Prius at dawn. “Siri,” I said, closing my blinds, “make me some coffee.” My iPhone didn't respond. Restarting it, I saw that my inbox was bursting. It was time to hire a human assistant, though I could barely make rent. For the next thirty minutes, I fended off calls from France and Beijing—most of my clients were international—and tried not to open my drawer, where the Maker's Mark gleamed. Suddenly, around noon, the dull linoleum squeaked, and a sputtering array of sunlight ignited my cave. A person came in. This never happened on Wilshire, at least not without intent. “My name is Sam,” the kid said. “Sam Deakins.” He was wearing a Burberry's trench-coat and a black wool fedora banded with a shiny white stripe. “Ah, your mother was in here last week.” “She's not my mother.” “Who is she?” “My lover. And if you don't mind, I'd like to stand.” This required bourbon. “Please have a seat.” I reached down for a swig, and as I did, I noticed he was holding a revolver. “Whoa there.” He raised it at me, pointed, and fired. A window exploded behind me. I thought I was dead. “Sorry,” he said. “Nervous tick.” He put the gun back in his trench-coat, which was about six sizes too large for his frame. 166 “Jesus Christ, what the fuck was that?” I leaned towards my desk drawer, where I kept a piece, but decided against it. “I'm sorry.” He slowly sat down. “I carry one for school now.” “Where do you go?” “Mulholland Academy?” “What's that?” “It's a school for actors,” he said. “So that's where the money—” “No. We're not actors. I just like it because it's close.” “Very well, then.” I was sure the cops were being called as we spoke. Outside, a few people sprinted, hunched over, along Wilshire. “How long have you been living in Los Angeles?” he continued. “Just a couple years.” “I see. It's good that you're new here.” “Why's that?” “Because you're new to assholes like me. Me and my mother.” “She's your mother or your lover?” “Both.” He smiled. “Anyways, we'll pay you in cash, as we said.” A far siren wailed. “Another thing,” he said, rising. “Don't tell anyone I was here. If you do, well, let's just say the application will expire.” He stalked to the door, trench coat lifting behind him, a trail of smoke wisping up from his sleeve. I leaned back in my swivel chair, palmed the birch desk, which I'd hastily bought at IKEA, and wished I had purchased steel. 167 This is better than law school, I thought. I reached down and took a long drink. Sergeant Crowley and I were old pals—to the extent one can be pals with a cop. “Tom,” he said, eying my desk, upon which the apple core rotted. “We got complaints from the pet store next door. They swore they heard a shot, and it looks like your window is gone.” Glass lay spread along the floor, soaking up the rays of my indifference. I offered him a smoke. “Shit, man, I wanna help you out. That's why I came down here instead of the Lieut, but Jesus, you know we can't have you firing off guns. Unauthorized discharge—Charlie, what's the time-off for that?” He turned to his partner, a scrawny-looking rodent who was shrewishly inspecting the wreckage. “Six-to-eight months.” “You wanna send me?” I offered my ex-platoonmate a glass. “Look, man, I know shit is rough. But we got counseling. The V A is fine. Don't be doing nothing stupid.” I shook the glass. “Tom, don't make me come back here with an MP. You know what they do in the brigs.” “Nothing Sunset hasn't done to me already, Crow.” The ice glimmered gold. “Just keep your hands clean this month. I'm up for promotion, finally.” Then he leaned into me. “And I'll be frank with you, T, army pay isn't the best.” “I see they have you working really hard down on Ocean. What is that, half-an-hour on, twelve off?” “At least I make an honest living.” He eyed my diplomas on the wall. The bulk of them were real. Beside him, the rodent was sifting through glass without any gloves on, which I took as a 168 promising sign. “What the fuck did you fire?” the rat asked me. “Who's this?” “This is Charley. 81 st Airborne. He's cool.” Charley didn't look like he'd served a damn day in his life. He was holding up a broken piece of glass, which was burnt around the edges. “Looks like a Nitro Express.” I nodded. “I didn't know there were elephants roaming on Wilshire.” “Cougars,” I said with a grin. That night, I worked arduously on the kid's essays, which wasn't easy, given that I barely knew his name. In my line of work—college counseling, that is—the less you know, the better. But basic things are required to get in: turning points, setbacks, achievements, personal obstacles, the like. I was pretty sure he was white, given the complexion of his mother/lover, but that's pretty much all I could deduce. “What do you think, Siri? Is he a psychopath?” “I really can't say.” “Sir, hon, since it's just you and me here, what do you say we have a little fun?” “I don't know what you mean,” she said coolly. Around eight pm, the phone rang. I normally took calls on Skype, which meant it was either the police pursuing an investigation or Sam Deakins announcing that I would be killed. It was neither, it turned out. It was Sam Deakins' personal attorney. Rico was his name. And he told me to meet them downtown at the Westin at 12. “Come in a suit and unarmed.” I took the bus there, of course. I figure it's part of my civic duty in Los Angeles to ride public 169 transit. Besides, the Prius girl wasn't around. The strange thing about riding the bus in Los Angeles at midnight is how few people notice you, even when you're donning a suit. The subways of Chicago and New York are veritable orgies of staring, all swimming with licentious glares. In Los Angeles, folks are afraid of getting shot, which is just as well, because I came, despite orders, well-armed. “Honey,” she said—the large black woman next to me—“You got something pokin outta yo cage.” I slowly adjusted my pants. “Surgery.” “Uh-huh.” I got off at Fig. The tall lobby lights gleamed through the sheen of puffed rain—what the cynics call smog and I deem a perpetual fount. My shirt collar snagged, and I adjusted my black linen tie. The suit was $12, and it didn't quite cushion my Colt. “Welcome,” said a sleek young man emerging from the lobby's cool air. He greeted me on 4 th and hustled me through the revolving glass door. I imagined grim scenes from The Godfather, but he was 85 pounds, Latino, and wearing a charcoal wool two-piece with notched lapels, side flaps, and quarter top pockets in the trousers. It wasn't $12. “You must be Tom.” “And I'm guessing you're the attorney.” “I wish.” Some conventioneers leaned on a fountain-rail. Little kids played. A rubber fan palm glistened in the fake tropic light. “I'm his personal assistant.” “And where's Mr. Deakins?” “Who?” I surveyed the gallery, and I had the grim feeling that I was being watched by someone beside this queer. 170 “Oh, you mean Sam. We just call him Mr. Deakins for fun.” “I see.” “He'll be arriving later on.” “And where's the attorney?” Suddenly, I felt a jab in my spine. I turned around. An umbrella was poking me. “You'll probably want this,” a man said. He was an enormous black bald man without any lips. For a second, I froze. “This is Rico,” said the queer. “Our J.D.” I had thought he'd sounded strange on the phone. But in Los Angeles, one never asks. They drove me to a joint in Santa Monica. At least, I thought it was Santa Monica, judging by the cool ocean air. I sat blindfolded in black, a canvas hood bagging my face, inhaling the new aniline trim. Imported. Japanese. A SUV Lexus, I figured. They found the Colt, of course. It replaced the umbrella digging into my back. “Stop here,” said Rico. Somebody coughed. I felt a window lower some more, and a woman's voice said, “I told him there was more on the way.” They took off my hood, and I barfed. Fortunately, I hadn't soiled the SUV's tan interior—it turned out it was an Acura, which would have been my next guess—but I had seriously dirtied my suit. “Get that piece of shit off him,” said Mrs. Deakins. We were standing outside of a club, and she was wearing a black satin number. I could see her eyes clearly now. They were dim green, approximately the color of algae, and which is where I figured I would eventually end up. Distant waves crashed along a shoreline. Beside us, ficus roots mangled the sidewalk, and hazy lights bloomed like angels that just didn't care. “Rico, get this boy a tux.” 171 I changed in the SUV at gunpoint, struggling to fasten my cuffs. It was a Lanvin double- breasted two-piece with contrasting insets, welted front pockets and peaked lapels. The shirt was mauve and slim-fitting. Then she handed me a pair of flat-topped smoke-lensed shades. “You know what would look great with this get-up?” I asked. She was still holding my gun. The four of us passed through an alley and descended a staircase into what looked like a Victorian bordello. The rose walls were wainscoted and buckling. A crimson carpet lined the stone steps, which resounded with a thundering bass. Entering a parlor, I almost got stabbed by a moose, which was mounted on a wall beneath a frilly chandelier. House music was pumping, and a couple older black men lingered by a bar. One nursed a tumbler with a fat slice of orange and an oily pink froth. Some candlesticks gleamed at his side. The other was twisting the clamp on a snaredrum. “This ma boy?” he exclaimed. “No,” said Mrs. Deakins. “He's my boy tonight, but you're sweet.” Soon the house music died, and the drinking man picked up a trumpet. A bass-man joined him, unloading his case, and they cranked out a “Night in Tunisia.” “Have a seat,” she said. Her lover/son was nowhere to be seen, though Rico joined us on some baronial, brown leather chairs. Then the queer Mexican brought me a queer-tasting scotch. “So what did you do in the army?” she asked me. “Kill.” That was only partially true. I had edited Stars and Stripes, which is where I found my knack for penning bullshit. “Good to hear. So here's the deal,” she continued. I noticed that she too was not entirely white, despite the green shade of her eyes and her seemingly straight copper hair. “Have you ever heard of Estonia?” 172 “Yes.” “You ever been there?” “Can't say I have.” “That's good. That's very good.” She looked at Rico and winked. “Because that's where we're going tonight.” “Wait a minute,” I said, choking on the liquor, which I realized had been laced. Then Rico reached over and tapped my leg. “Looks like Rambo here doesn't like to fly.” I woke in a box, or what I determined to be a box but was actually the seat of a cockpit. It was stunningly cold; the plane was twin-engine and loud. The pilot was adjusting some gears. As I came to, strapped to a chair, I noticed Mrs. Deakins strutting up the aisle. She entered the cockpit with drinks in each hand. “No more for you,” she explained to me. The pilot, whom I recognized from the photographs, took a long gulp and surveyed the glittering night. A far orange curve marked the dawn of the horizon. “You'll be starting work soon,” she said. I coughed. “You're not married, are you?” “Not this week.” “That helps.” She gave me a kiss on the cheek. Then it occurred to me suddenly that she might not have been a she. Her lower neck awkwardly bulged, and her shoulders were way too pronounced. “My son will be waiting at home. But before we arrive, maybe you'd like to have fun.” She winked at the pilot, then me. “I don't know what you mean.” 173 She was a man all right. Fortunately, I didn't have to partake. She and the pilot started up at 40,000 feet, judging by the lines on the dial. When she was finished, she offered me tea. “No smoking in the cockpit,” she sighed. My hands were still bound to the chair, and the dawn had broadened to gold. Suddenly, Rico stormed into the cockpit, slapped the tranny in the face, and said, “we don't have time for this shit.” Then he turned to the pilot. “What's our ETA?” “Couple hours.” “Keep your joystick in gear till we land. As for you, Mr. Writer.” He undid my bind, and I noticed a holster slinking out of his tux. “I understand you're not too bad at writing sentences.” “I can hold my own.” “Well, your reputation precedes you. You got the Schwarzenegger kid in, a couple of Kennedies, Puff Daddy's son, and the Bush girls.” “The last was a personal favor.” “Well, today you've got an even bigger assignment. Mr. Deakins will explain when we arrive. You might want to rest up a bit. His application's due before noon.” I glanced up sullenly. “You don't work well under pressure?” “Not without a gun in my hands.” “Don't worry,” he said. “We're not gonna hurt you. Assuming our Precious gets in.” Several things struck me as unusual about the night—aside from the queer tranny love, the spiking with sedatives, the unexplained flight, and the guns. For one, this was mid-October, and the early deadline wasn't till November 1 st . That was standard at every college, even for athletes and others 174 with questionable ins. Second, who were these people, and why had they called on my services? A new library at Stanford obviously would have done the job. Applications for those types are nominal. Sure, the price tag's gone up, but when you're flying a Gulfstream G550 and have a few tuxedos to spare, an endowed chair isn't hard to afford. And what was with the accents? Russian? Nigerian? Greek? Across from me, Rico was leaning on the console, peering at the dials, clutching the tranny with one arm around her waist, oblivious, or perhaps disregarding, of the hostile look she wore. “ECAM status checked. Standby altimeter,” said the pilot, sipping his scotch. I was soon re-hooded, which was just as well, because I could avoid the sexual theatrics as we landed and then drove along a steep-graded road. I found myself nauseous, and they let me throw up in a bin. Eventually, we arrived at a tall lakeside manor. It was a granite-block Romanesque with more gables and peaks than I could count. The sky was cerulean, if that's what folks call it, and the air a sharp shock to my lungs. Soon, a trench-coat arrived on a scooter, grinding up the flagstone path. “Well, my good friend, I didn't expect to see you so soon. Did you enjoy the friendly skies?” “Not as much as your mom.” She came rollicking out of the Citroën we'd driven in and gave her young companion a hug. Lipless and the Mexican followed her. The pilot had remained with the plane. “She's my sister,” the kid said and gave her a wet, smearing kiss. Then he smiled at me. “Come. I'll show you upstairs to your room.” He glanced at the lawyer, who gave an approving nod. My room consisted of inlaid birch floors, gilded winged chairs, and French windows curtained with muslin and lace. Towards the end stood a four-poster bed, a varnished teak desk, and, rather crudely, a Mac. 175 “I believe you've started my application,” said the boy, who was still mounted on his scooter. In fact, he'd expertly ridden it up the steps. “How did you know?” “I hacked into your I-Cloud.” “That's nice.” “Anyways, I like what you did with the first question, my most moving experience, though you never mentioned Robert Mugabe.” “I don't think that would sit well with Stanford.” “Why not?” “It isn't LSE,” I said. “They have principles.” “Very well. As Rico explained, you have three or four hours to finish. Until it's noon PST.” “Why so soon?” “Because I'm hungry.” He laughed. His cohort was trailing up the staircase behind him, pinching their noses at the fumes. “No, actually, I'm gonna need you for a couple more things. We've got some investments to deal with. You know, mid-season reports.” It turned out Stanford was the least of my ordeals. His family held shares in foreign oil, specifically in Equatorial Guinea, which was on the outs with NATO this month. The ruling general was ailing, and his son, whom no one much liked, was threatening to depose him. Earnings were down, as was investor confidence. “So we need you to rewrite the report. How can we put this...throw a positive spin on the fund.” “Shouldn't be too hard,” I explained. I had done a bit of copy in my day, mostly for temp firms when I was starting out. I didn't know shit about finance, but marketing was always Q&A: Is my 176 investment safe? Should I be concerned about national stability? What if the marketshare drops? Couldn't have been easier. I finished the reports before 10. Probably would have gone faster had Rico not been pointing his Parkerized Sig at my face. “Okay,” I said. “I'm done.” Their whole cohort slumped on the sofa, while the Mexican poured out chablis. “Are we finished with him?” the kid asked. Rico was changing the magazine. “No, not quite yet.” I knew that was my moment to flee. “Hold on,” Rico said. “We've finished the reports, but if Precious here doesn't get in, we need a backup.” “Can I ask—” I said, rising from the desk. “Sit down,” Rico hollered. I did. “Why Stanford?” I continued. “Didn't you just answer that question?” “No, I mean, seriously. Why Stanford?” Rico just grimaced, like some strange mouthless fish. “Because that's where the general's son is studying,” said the kid. “Who?” “The incoming Chairman of the Board.” “I see.” “And you want to be his classmate?” “Not exactly,” said the kid. He was checking the discs on his scooter, having worn them out on the stairs. “I'm planning to do him in. And we'll be holding you here till he's gone. Just in case you plan 177 to talk.” At that point, Rico walked over, raised the Sig, and shot the kid in the eye. “Jesus Fucking Christ,” said the tranny. The kid fell over his scooter. His brains had splattered the curtains. Rico re-holstered his Sig. “I always hated that bike.” “My son,” screamed the tranny. “Shut the fuck up.” Rico picked up the brass casing and dropped it inside his tux, beside a red handkerchief that suitably matched the drapes. “To answer your question,” Rico turned to me. “We're gonna short the stock. I'll do the Chairman myself.” “So why the fuck did we invest in the application?” said the tranny. “You can withdraw it,” Rico said to me, approaching the computer. “That was just a test of your skills. But I must say, I like what you did with the reports.” He held out his phone and checked the stock's quote. The reports had been sent out about twenty minutes back, and already the share-price had tripled. “You'll make me very rich.” Then he turned to the tranny. “Get your spic boyfriend down to the basement and make sure the cell is prepared.” “You,” he said, turning to face me. Then his mouth must have borne an even stranger expression as he noticed the back of my chair. I flashed through the hall. Unlike the shacks of Mosul, the one thing you notice about running through a medieval manor is that shots have a tendency to echo, which is extremely disorienting. I ducked into a bedroom and locked the tall doors. A blast shattered one of them. Across from me, the massive French windows stood open, and I flung myself through them. I landed two stories down on a myrtle hedge, which padded my fall, and came out rolling down a hill. I skidded to a stop beside a poplar. An explosion 178 shattered its limbs. I cut left, and dove headlong into the lake, which was freezing. The shock nearly killed me. I swam. The small lake was reedy and bedded with moss. As I tussled through it, a gunshot punctured my leg. I sucked in my breath and dove down. I glided until I couldn't see and my lungs were imploding. I came up for air beside a tussock of sedges, quietly wading, trying not to exhale. I heard splashing far behind me. I couldn't see where. The sky had since darkened a shade. I made a break for the shore. For the next twenty minutes I ran, huffing, bleeding, unable to lift my left leg, which was gashed below the calf, somehow forcing myself to gallop past the larches and pines. I heard barking far behind. I knew my only chance was to reach the canal, which I had vaguely descried along my right. I couldn't swim. I had to. I dove. When I reached the mouth, about a thousand meters down, of some larger lake, I climbed out on a neighboring property—what might have been peasants'. Did they still have peasants in Estonia?— then a low maple woodland. I was shivering cold, unable to breathe. It was dark. I was steaming and drenched. I located a blanket amazingly inside someone's boathouse, which is where I crouched and spent the night. My night would have ended there certainly had it not been for one last trick up my sleeve. The boathouse, which was sided with logs and half-toppled onto the rock-shore, was wired for a phone. The sole phone was turned off, of course, as the boathouse had been abandoned for years. I located the pole outside—it was the middle of the night when I did this, and hypothermia was slicing my veins— climbed it, and found the distribution box. Fortunately, it was one of those old residence terminals with a network box behind the lid. I yanked out the phone, unsheathed its wiring, connected the terminal cables, replaced the resistor, opened the hookswitch, and, what do you know, a small, pink LED gleamed. It felt like the warmth of the sun. It took me half-an-hour to work down the static, and in that time, my hands nearly froze. Finally, I got a dial tone, plugged in the jack, and dialed. 179 “Hello, Siri.” “How can I help you, Tom?” Thinking twice before leaving, I had left her plugged in and allowed her to answer my calls. “Siri, I'm in serious shit.” “I'm sorry, I don't understand the question.” “That's okay. Here's what I need you to do.” “I'm listening.” “I need you to open my Gmail, find my iCloud storage account, and back it up on your hard disk.” She didn't understand, and I had to repeat a few times, guiding her through the process. “Okay, now find 'My Application' for Stanford (off-line).” She found it. “Double-click. It should have a list of files to upload. One of those is a video.” It was a feed I had secretly recorded on the Mac, knowing what they would do. “Okay, I want you to make a copy, save it to the disk, and email it to John Crowley at LAPD. He's in the contacts.” “At your service,” Siri said. “That's my sweet girl.” “Hold it right there,” a voice shouted. Standing below the pole was a soaking went tranny pointing a Sig. “There's no need to do that,” she said. “Jack's dead.” “Who?” “Jack Rico, my attorney. He's gone. He's frozen in the lake with the fag. And I don't want to be connected. Get down from that pole.” She spoke in a voice that was undeniably manly. “If you shoot me, I'll have Siri click send.” “How will you talk when you're dead?” “She knows my voice, and I'm the only one who can cancel. She's uploading now.” 180 “Give me that phone,” she said. “You'll have to come up here and get it.” She started climbing the pole, one latch at a time, each awkwardly snagging her party dress. Yet she had gorilla-like arms. One of them reached up and seized me, throwing me down from the pole. I landed on the icy embankment, shattering my thigh, which was already swollen and roughly the width of her wrist. “Siri, cancel that request,” she said into the phone. Then she screamed the same thing. I ran as fast as I could. I heard a gunshot ring out behind me; I darted past a lawn. Then I jumped into a thick clump of hawthorn, hiding and clutching my knees. It took several hours before the police lights flickered, far beyond the leaves, past the lake. They were gradually approaching. I realized—as I had expected—that Siri had tracked the location, and Old Crow could extract the call. As the police lights broke out across the lake, glimmering brightly on glass, and I huddled shivering, I saw what looked like a grizzly bear starting through the reeds, splashing in a dark, mangled dress. She didn't get far in that outfit, and I was relayed safely home. After recovering for a week at St. Joseph's, I returned home to Siri, gave her a hug, and found the application to Stanford denied. Too bad. They never knew what they were missing. Outside, I locked up my office and found a Prius waiting by the curb. “Where you been, mister?” “It’s the high season, baby. Consulting fees have gone up.” “Well, let’s see what we can do about that.” Beside her, her little sister looked up from the driver’s seat. “It’s never too early to start.” 181 THE ADDICT His troubles began in basic. On the night he was drafted, after he'd been shipped out on a Greyhound; handed forty-five kilograms of roach-infested gear; and given a sagging spring bunk in an overcrowded barracks near Haifa, where he was housed with criminals and worse, Oren Halberstam found himself assigned to stand guard. He was woken just after two in the morning by a sentry who pointed a light in his face. “Halberstam?” He sighed. “Up.” Oren had slept in his boots, not out of any great sense of preparedness, but because the lacing was hard to get right. Rising, he clunked his head on the bed frame above him and had to turn sideways to pass between the bunks. Other men cursed him as he followed the sentry, lugging his helmet and pack. He wasn't even sure what this equipment was for since they were eighty clicks away from the border. Plus, the bars on the windows seemed more designed to prevent escapes than intrusions. He also wondered what he was supposed to do in an emergency, since the only implement given was a corroded fake Maglite that barely cast a beam. Evidently, the Drill Sergeant, who had made them do pushups earlier, then allowed them to eat, then made them run again until they nearly threw up, had said something or another about the proper procedures while on guard. Oren hadn't listened, of course. Outside the doors of their bunk-room, the sentry stopped beside a railing that overlooked a courtyard below. Pink spotlights gleamed in the mist, revealing other sentries pacing back and forth on 182 four floors. This sentry handed him the roster and light. “What do I do here?” “Stand.” Twenty-eight minutes later, Oren woke up his replacement after calling out the name several times. He didn't win a lot of friends by doing it, but these people were leeches and thugs. Lowest of the system. Anyone in Israel with any sort of class got to see a shrink and get out. Or they joined Special Forces, Paratroops, even the Intelligence Corps. Anything but regular infantry. This was the worst of the worst. As his replacement stomped past him, he noticed that the man's arm was tattooed with a skull. Then Oren returned to bed. He wasn't sure how he had fallen asleep the first time, knowing that he was in for three years. He couldn't leave if he wanted. The alternative now was jail. Around three in the morning, and still unable to asleep, Oren wandered outside to the hall. The skull-armed sentry was leaned against the wall, sound asleep with his light. He woke up as Oren passed him. The bathroom reeked of ammonia, rust, mildew, and bleach. The green walls were almost fractaled in their discoloring, and the open showers smelled of piss. He edged forth in his flip-flops and turned on a fountain of steam. The water felt heavenly upon him; this was the one thing they could not take. He had heard that a man had two rights in the Israeli Army: food and six hours of sleep. Later, he was to learn that both of these were a myth, but the showers were better than any he had taken at home. He stuck his face in the water and gripped the stained tiles. Then he reached for his forearm, his stomach and waist, and checked the far sinks by the door. No one could see him. He closed his eyes and thought of Shoshana, his brother's wife, whom he'd once seen changing by a pool. He remembered 183 how the sun glistened off of her breasts and the swimsuit had clung to her waistline. It was a Shavuot party, and he was only ten at the time. For the next eighteen hours, Oren was required to run, as were the rest of his company. Apparently this was standard fare. They were told to run to garbage cans, trees, even a flower sill. If anyone lagged, they'd run again. Even if they were on-time, they'd rerun. Then they'd drop to their hands and count. If the pushups weren't good enough—or even if they were—everyone had to do more. And more. And more. By eight-thirty in the morning, leaning forward on his hands, Oren could barely breathe. He had been expecting this. A couple of the other guys laughed. Fuck 'em, he thought. He felt his palms bleeding, being scraped by the sharp quartz rocks. Other men discretely moved forward, trying to position themselves above the concrete square. Oren stayed on the rocks. Breakfast consisted of some over-sweet gruel, a hard-boiled egg, and juice. When Oren asked for another egg, the Drill Sergeant told him to run. Oren stepped outside, ran to a flagpole, and returned to eat with the men. He thought about asking for one more egg, but it was plausible he could be jailed. Then again, what could be worse than this? The rest of the morning was the same. They briefly attended a lecture, which was a blissful reprieve from the sun, and the whole time he sat mopping his face with his bucket hat, listening to some officer talk. Oren didn't care what he was saying. Oren’s hand was below his desk. It was a small folding desk, wooden, in which generations of names had been carved. He eyed a few bleakly, feeling a drop on his leg. “Halberstam,” shouted the Drill Sergeant, later that night in the square. The men were all aligned in a U-shaped formation. The Drill Sergeant was wearing his gun, an old-fashioned Galil, 184 which he held like an oversized cane. “Why don't you talk to anybody?” Oren stared straight ahead. “Answer me, private.” “I have no one to talk to,” he said. “Ohhhh,” said the Drill Sergeant, imitating a girl's voice. “You're rather shy, then. How sweet. Who wants to be Private Halberstam's friend?” The Drill Sergeant glanced around the square. His arms were furry as a bear's. His voice was deep, and he was massively built in the way that short muscled men are. “No volunteers?” he blared. “All right, then. The rest of you assholes will run. I want you to take a little jog around the guard path. Twenty minutes, or you'll repeat.” The guard path was a thin gravel road that spanned a four kilometer loop around the base. They had done parts of it today. “Private Halberstam will stay here. Unless one of you decides to be his friend.” A couple guys laughed. Then the Drill Sergeant made everyone except Oren do fifty-five pushups, plus five extra slow ones for luck, and dispatched them on the run. “Anyone caught cheating or taking a shortcut is going to run it six times.” Oren stood next to the Drill Sergeant, admiring the creature's resolve. “Where you from, private?” He tightened the strap on his gun. “Tel Aviv, sir.” He gave the Drill Sergeant a meaty glare. “I thought only fags live in Tel Aviv.” “Maybe they do,” Oren said. “I like you,” said the Drill Sergeant. “You're a ballsy motherfucker.” Then he picked at his crotch and slung the rifle around his huge arm. When the men returned, panting, the Drill Sergeant made them get down. “Forty-five pushups. Private Halberstam will count them out.” 185 “Hey, fuckhead,” said one of the other recruits, later that night in the barracks, when they were given their first half-an-hour of free time. “I'll be your friend. You wanna play?” Oren threw his kit on his bunk and looked up at him scornfully. “You must think you're hot shit.” Before Oren could react, or even begin to account for what had happened, he felt a clank on his jaw. Then his arm hit a bed frame. He was down. He lay awake that night in bed, feeling his jaw swelling, plotting his future revenge. They wouldn't be given guns until Sunday. Maybe he'd wait for grenades. Around two, he was woken for his guard shift, and he paced about the wet hall. When the sentry he'd replaced had left, returning to one of the two bunk-rooms assigned to their platoon, Oren slipped into the hall's far corner, beneath the cement stairs. The dark cavity smelled of cigarettes, and standing water gleamed on the floor. He opened a button, loosened his belt, and felt the hot swell on his face. The next morning, at five, their platoon was made to run—again and again—because the Drill Sergeant reported that someone was caught smoking on guard. He didn't say who, as that kind of thing was not reported, but most of them suspected it was Shai Maimon, the guy who had called Oren out. He actually was a criminal, or so it was said at the mess. He didn't join them for lunch that afternoon. In fact, the men never saw him again. Later that day, which happened to be a Thursday, their platoon was given a short weekend leave. They were free to go home again and return to their lives as civilians, provided they showed up Sunday morning at nine. That evening, sporting new olive dress fatigues and a creased felt beret, Oren boarded the Five 186 Bus for Tel Aviv, clutching his kit on his arm. He felt like a soldier. He felt like he'd fought a war. About three stops into his ride, he gave up his seat to an elderly gentleman, since none of the other folks moved. The man was slightly offended but grateful all the same. Oren stood for two hours, priding himself on his code, as their bus inched through traffic. He got off near the old central station and walked a couple blocks west. He telephoned his brother, with whom he would stay, and said he would check in late. Oren also thought he should visit his mother (his father had died some years back), but she would besiege him with questions, and he just wanted to relax. He bought a half-liter of brandy at a kiosk and gulped it down in three swigs. The Romanian seller smiled as he did. Oren tipped him two sheks. Then he stumbled west along Perets until he arrived at the district. These were mostly stained cement buildings, a couple of which bore pink neon hearts or signs advertising a massage. A few Africans offered him X. The place reeked of diesel and whatever fried food the men ate. Still clad in uniform, clutching his bag, he knocked on a green metal door. It slowly opened. “Hello,” said the Russian girl inside. She was wearing a silver cross. Oren thought this would be quick. Twenty minutes later, she asked him to pay fifty more. He didn't know why it was taking him so long. Her face was mildly scarred. She barely spoke Hebrew. She hadn't even asked him his name. As he lay along the cream cushion, feeling her measly breasts, surrounded by a wall that was painted bright pink, she looked in his eyes and asked him when he would come. “I don't know,” he explained. A couple minutes later, too miffed to speak, he laced up his boots and he left. He stopped inside a Burger Ranch, headed to the toilets, and finished the job himself. He didn't know why she couldn't do it, but for some reason, he preferred his own touch and the feel of his own 187 callused hand. That night he sat facing his brother, eating cold chicken and rice. “How's the army?” “Jollygood fucking time.” His brother sat sipping a beer. His wife and kids were asleep. Their one-bedroom place smelled of clothes. Outside the black windows, a hazy brown moon lit the streets. “You okay?” “Fine.” “You know, you've never talked very much.” “What the fuck do you want me to say?” His brother smiled. “How about 'thank you for putting me up'?” “Thank you for putting me up.” His brother had served in an elite paratroopers unit. He was getting his MBA. “You're a fucking asshole,” said Oren. “It's nice to see you as well.” On Sunday morning, shortly after returning to base, Oren and the rest of his platoon were dispatched to the armory, where they were given M16 Longs. Then his platoon marched what seemed like an interminable distance to a grassy knoll beyond the hills. There, they ran for forty minutes and did some more pushups. When their submission was finally gained, they were given 5.56 mm rounds, handed paper targets, and told that their lives were at stake, which they were, Oren realized. It turned out he was a pretty good shot. Too good in fact. He hit every round in the black, first at 50 meters, then at 100. At 200, he was four for six. A deadeye, said the Sergeant. They made him a 188 marksman. For anyone else in the platoon, this might well have been a gift. What it meant for Oren Halberstam, seven months later, after he'd completed his training, along with a marksmanship course, is that he got to spend an endless amount of time guarding at elevated posts. He was given a radio, a telescopic lens, and an M4A1 with a mount. While the others manned sandbags, drowsed in the sunlight, or slid back the bases' main gates, Oren had to stand alone in isolated lookouts. He'd do it hourly, bi-hourly, sometimes more. Always until his skin got chafed or he couldn't see, as the rumor was alleged to go. He did it once beside a visiting general who was touring the grounds of his base. He did it once to the Youth Corps magazine that someone had left on the floor. He would do it in darkness, in the heat of the day, through the hamsiin winds and the rain. He would do it in the mess hall, where he would clean plates, and silently at night in his bunk. One night in November, when he was guarding a base in the Galilee, Oren found himself on a two-person guard shift out at the weapons depot. Below his steel lookout, along a chalk path, the other man paced about dutifully, clutching his M16 Long. He held it erectly, as they were supposed to do. This man was actually in Shayetet, the naval commandos, but owing to base shortages, his draft group trained with theirs. “Nice night, ain't it?” said the sailor, as he stopped below Oren's lookout. It was a rusted steel booth, tattooed with names, and its window ledge came to his waist. “Yeah.” “You havin' a good time?” Furrowing his brow, Oren titled his head. “I know what you're doing up there.” 189 Oren studied him thinly. He jiggled his rifle. “I'm just joshing you.” Then he laughed a bit and continued along the chalk path. Oren stared down at the corrugated tin sheds and the blue mountains that shone past the fence. He wasn't sure if that sailor had seen him. And he was probably a fag anyway. Oren lit a cigarette, which was illegal while on guard. He took a deep puff of his smoke. Along the far chalk path, the dim sailor waved. “How are you doing, you fuck?” Above him, a reef of grey clouds matted the night, and the last traces of dusk etched the cliffs. He didn't know if what he was doing was normal, and at this point, he didn't care. He exhaled deeply, watching the smoke cloud his box. Several weeks later, while on a weekend leave, he read that “sexual addiction” entails a reduction in “integral human bonding.” It was diagnosed as a pathology, and the only known treatments, serotonin inhibitors, were “not very robust” in their “effect.” Others disputed that the condition existed. Oren was uncertain himself. He shut his brother's laptop after deleting its web browser's history and all the awful things it contained. It was 10:30 in the morning; his brother was at work temping for some dogshit IT firm, and his wife was dropping their daughter off at preschool just up the block. Oren, wearing only boxers and socks, rose from the sofa on which he slept and traipsed into the apartment's sole bedroom. An enormous Paratroopers' flag graced the wall, and a throng of baby toys littered the carpet. A bright morning light seeped through the blinds. He opened the closet. Softly. Slowly. Listening for anyone from downstairs. Then he located 190 Shoshana's clothes, which were colorfully and neatly folded in hanging canvas shelves. Feeling his spine slowly tingle, he seized a pair of her panties, and then he quickly put it back. He left the room feeling horrible. Twenty minutes later, Shoshana was back brewing tea in the kitchen. She'd offered to make him eggs. Oren was standing in the bathroom, the door sharply locked, his hand on a tall wicker basket that contained the family's used clothes. He knew he shouldn't do this. He knew he had a problem. He knew he was a horrible man. And still, what did the bible say about it? If his brother was killed, Oren was obliged to take her as a wife, to “go in unto her.” It was the only part of the Tanakh that he remembered from school. He reached in the basket, parting his brother's disgusting socks, and retrieved some black lace, high-cut briefs. “Are you sure you don't want an omelet?” she asked through the door. Her voice was husky, Yemenite, lower than a man's. It didn't quite go with the briefs. “No, thanks.” He turned on the shower's hot water, wasting it. Then he pressed the lining to his face, smelling her crusty residue, tasting the remaining hairs. He wondered if one of these hairs was his brother's. Or worse. He inhaled deeply, smelling Shoshana's scent. “I'm making you a sabich,” she announced. “This eggplant's too good to throw out.” Oren was leaning on the sink's ledge, lost in a world of his own. Several months later, having completed his training, Oren was deployed near the West Bank town of Jenin. It was the tail end of the Second Intifada. About a hundred had died in the region, including a couple dozen soldiers. Oren hadn't seen any fighting himself. He'd gone on some arrests, raids, and patrols. Mostly, however, he'd just guarded alone in the cold. 191 One night in February, he was manning a lookout, which covered a checkpoint and road. The rest of his company was spread out below him, hastily inspecting cars. His lookout was dug into a gradual hillside and shrouded with sandbags and tarps. It was about two meters high, about one above ground, and surrounded with buckthorn and grass. Oren peered down through the synthetic leaf tarp, one hand on his Aquila, the other one gripping his stock. Clad in a wool jumpsuit, chewing a Skoal pack, he eyed the eight men in his scope. He watched the bright figures as they flittered and hove into view. He had to pay attention because early last week, when he was off-duty, there had been an attack. Some crossing pedestrian—an old woman in a hijab—had thrown acid on a soldier's face. She was shot in the stomach and taken to a hospital where, it was said, she died. As for the soldier, Oren barely knew him, but he'd heard the guy's face was fucked up. In another incident, about a month back, and about a kilometer up the road, a Bulgarian trucker, mistaken for a Jew, was shot through the neck. Since then, the soldiers all double-checked their armor and added more bags to the blocks. The checkpoint served a dubious purpose. Ostensibly, it divided two roads. But one of them was closed; the other was unpaved, and barely anybody came through. The army kept it open for emergency transport and to maintain a presence on the ground. That night in February, around one, about an hour into his shift, Oren got a call on his set. “Bet- shtein, aleph.” That was the checkpoint's ranking commander, a squirmy lieutenant named Tal. The man was standing about two hundred meters down from him. Why he didn't just come up, Oren didn't know. “Aleph, bet-shtein,” Oren said. “We just got a call from Control, and they just talked to Shin Bet. They said there's some kind 192 of wanted man in the area, and there's a chance he'll be coming through. Control's not really sure who it is, but they said should we keep a heads up. Over.” Oren didn't know what that meant. He asked for a clarification, but the commander couldn't tell him much more. Calls of this sort were routine at the checkpoint. Almost none of them ever panned out. “Roger,” said Oren, spitting the Skoal from his mouth. Then he surveyed the grasses swaying on the hill beyond the trench that led down from his post. The rain had let up about half-an-hour earlier. The rest of the men were soaked. He watched as two of them began setting out cones. They were shutting the checkpoint down. Then he felt the strange urge, that rise in his chest. He knew what he had to do. It had only been about thirty minutes, but he couldn't stop now if he tried. Was it worth dying for? he wondered. Was it worth other men's lives? He didn't think there was much chance of an attack though several people had been killed here before. That was years earlier, back when the violence had flared. He closed his eyes. He bit his lip. He felt the wet brush of the cold. Then he began rubbing his wrists and his hands. He had to release himself now. He didn't know why. He knew he couldn't do this. It was juvenile, dangerous, and dumb. He watched his breath twist through the crawl space and furl into the purpling night. “Bet-shtein,” said the radio. “Is everything clear?” “Lamed-ehad,” he said. Yes. He removed another Skoal pack and shouldered his gun and felt that destructive urge. Half-an- hour later, he was in physical pain. His chest was convulsing. He felt his heart heave. He had to get out of this box. Or he had to release it. Right here. Now. He sucked in his breath; then he tore off the straps 193 of his ceramic and pack. He was wearing twenty kilograms of magazines and gear. All of it fell to the floor. He grabbed himself fiercely, stroked what he could, and watched his frosty breath. Twenty minutes later, he was still fighting the cold, trying to recollect Shoshana, biting his lip, sucking in. He heard a thump and a bang. “Oren,” shouted his radio set. He peered out at the melee down below. A small silver car was zipping through the checkpoint. Two soldiers were chasing it. Another lay behind them on the ground. Among the two who were chasing, one pointed his rifle from his hip; its muzzle flashed with a boom. Ahead, the car scurried forward, apparently un-hit, and screeched along the dark road. Oren seized his M4 and darted to the hillside trench. He heaved his gun up on top of the parapet and sighted the car in his lens. It was moving quickly. 800 meters. More. Perhaps too far for him to hit. He also wasn't sure if his men were in the way or if he was supposed to fire. But somebody had. He could make out the passenger seat. His heart was beating madly. His gun barrel shook. It was 1000 meters now. Plus the declension and wind. He remembered that he had to unlock his safety. He unsnapped it and centered the car. He briefly hesitated, watching as the car vanished behind a far bend. He wasn't sure why he hadn't shot. Had he frozen? he wondered. He realized his fly was undone. Another man ran to the foot of his trench. “You okay?” he asked. “What the fuck was that?” “I don't know.” The two soldiers stood gazing at the winding expanse of the road. In the ensuing commotion, it was established that none of the soldiers were hurt. They had seen 194 the car coming, tried to wave it down, and pointed their guns at its glass. “It kept going,” shouted Sagi, explaining himself to Tal. “I thought it would mow me down.” He had jumped out of the way at the final second, which was why he had been lying on the ground. The car had hit a plastic divider, which accounted for the boom Oren heard. Two others had given chase. One of them had fired a couple times, which was against the Lieutenant's command. Tal had to rebuke him, though Oren wasn't clear why. Oren also didn't mention that he'd almost fired, or even worse, waited too long. As they were talking, and about two minutes after the ordeal, sirens wailed from afar, and a helicopter whirred through the sky. Then two police jeeps flashed down the road, rumbled through the checkpoint, and disappeared over the bend. Soon, the men learned that a chase was underway. The driver had abandoned his car somewhere down the road, making off into the fields. Tal instructed everyone to return to positions, and the soldiers kept a close watch. For the next several hours, they tried to listen to the radio. The dispatch's reports were unclear. Then, at around three in the morning, a flatbed tow-truck appeared, barreled through the checkpoint, and returned with the silver car. It was a late-model Honda with yellow Israeli plates. The soldiers inspected it carefully as it passed, regretting that nothing was pocked. Finally, at around six, as the sun broke its light on the hills, a hulking Safari showed up with their replacements, and the soldiers could return to their base. They were exhausted, wet, sweating, and cold. One of the replacements asked Oren what had happened. “No idea,” he said. He boarded the vehicle, still feeling his heartbeat, still feeling strange anguish inside. Later that afternoon back on his base, Oren was woken in bed. He heard a platoonmate saying 195 that the guy was a car thief and he must have holed up in some town. “Wasn't a fucking terrorist,” said the man. “Just a simple car thief. And he risked his life for that.” Oren rubbed his eyes. He sat up on his sleeping bag and surveyed the men at his side. The day's last light slowly bled through the sandbags that layered the windows above. “Gotta admire him,” the soldier continued. “Risking his life for that.” 196 THE AFFAIR Like most men who head abroad after college, at least in the early 21 st Century, Jared Heine was far less interested in wealth than he was in getting laid. The two go hand in hand, though, as any well- heeled traveler must know. He had studied Croatian at Duke, more on a whim than anything, although his mother's father was German and had evidently been stationed in the region during the Second World War (his exact role was not expounded upon in conversations). Through a friend of his adviser, Jared managed to procure a job in Zagreb with Nestlé, the Swiss conglomerate, which was looking to penetrate the Balkans. His job was to size up the potential for yogurt, of which the Croatians ate a lot. Too much, in fact, he now realized, sipping his gin at the Space Electronic Disco. The lacquered dance floor was spotted by hot fuchsia lights and featured an actual plastic spaceship, inside of which a helmeted DJ spun. A few meaty girls lingered by it, most with crude dye jobs, bright velvet tops, and jewelry that did not respond well to the steam. Ten years ago, Croatia had been a western's man dream. The influx of McDonald's hadn't helped, but it was really the dairy, he realized, with the BGH-injected cows. The women were heartier than any Eastern European should be. Certainly post-Tito. Yet, one caught his eye to the left. She was talking to a man in a suit, which was actually somewhat tasteful by Croatian standards—that is, it didn't have pin stripes or tails—and what struck him about her was her hair. It was cut short in a finger wave, such that one bang pressed to her cheek. She looked like a flapper, except she was wearing tight jeans and vaquero boots of red hide. 197 Jared eyed her through the rim of his glass. The man she was talking to was obviously mob. He was accompanied by two stubbly-cheeked, iron-necked men, neither of whom seemed terribly interested in her. She was phenomenally gorgeous, and he knew he had to approach her, though a man could get killed in this region for provocations far less severe. He waited twenty minutes for her to hit the restroom, then he followed her out. Parting a sea of colognes, Jared swallowed a Valium and retucked his shirt. Outside in the hall, he found her waiting in line, angrily clutching her purse. To say his heart was beating at this point would probably exaggerate the ordeal, since he had already sniffed half a gram of cocaine outside in a cab, forty minutes prior, with a colleague from work, who had left. “Hi,” he said to her, stupidly. He was aware that the eight other women in line, all of whom had been raised in good communist schools, spoke enough English to listen. “I just wanted to say—and I know this sounds corny, but it's true—that you're the most beautiful woman I've seen.” She watched him with hazel-gray eyes. A few other women stirred, expressing discomfort, but she didn't move. And neither did he. “I'm Jared.” “I'm Jelka,” she said. “And I think you should go away.” Our story does not end there, however, because well before his divorce, before the crippling affair that would cost him the bulk of his post-college savings, two BMW's, a house, and his soul, before his father died and pensively told him that he was not a disappointment, in spite of what everyone thought, before his two daughters would give him a parting kiss on the cheek, Jared found himself taking her hand. “You don't have to call me,” he said, handing her his card, which had his name inscribed in a carton of yogurt. “It's just enough for me to look at your face.” 198 She smiled, and she would obviously throw away the card, but not before noting his name. Properly fearing for his life, Jared immediately returned to his apartment, which was in a nondescript Soviet tenement in an upscale section of town. He made himself a White Russian, which usually put him to sleep. When that didn't work, he gulped another Valium and strummed his guitar. Still feeling wide awake, he powered up his industrial-strength deep-fryer, which he had had shipped from Japan, and made himself fries. The next morning, his maid, a grave-looking Bosniak shrew, found him passed out at his desk with his pants to his knees and his laptop open to some lurid cowgirl images. Most people would have been shocked by this encounter, but Amila had seen far worse. Kicking his chair (the two were fairly close), she asked about his appointment in Split, where he was scheduled to be in two hours. Then she made him coffee as he hurriedly showered and shaved. Jared nervously drove along the coast, eying the bright Adriatic, anticipating a meeting with his boss at some beachside resort where he lived. Jared thought he'd be fired, but it turned out he had been promoted. As the two sat under a grape-leaved arbor, sipping rakija, smoking imported cloves, the young German said that Jared had unusual skills and they needed him back in Geneva. Of course, Jared thought. “Starting when?” “Next week.” “Is it possible I could extend...” The white smoke wafted up through the vines. “No.” Seven weeks later, Jared resigned and groggily returned to the States. It turned out he was of 199 little use to the Croatians, despite his strong marketing skills, because they were ceding the market to Kraft. He also thought he should go back for his dad, who had just been diagnosed with lymphoma. On his final night in Croatia, he called up some friends—more like passing acquaintances, and all cokeheads, like him, from abroad—and swayed them to return to the Space Electronic. Naturally, she wasn't there. He asked around the bar. Apparently, she had gone overseas. “By the way, if you're looking to kill yourself,” said a server, “I can think of some easier ways.” The next morning, Amila drove him to the airport. He gave her a parting hug, along with a generous check, and he promised to return in a couple of years, after he'd done his MBA. Two summers later, Jared met his bride-to-be in a course on Operations Management. Cambridge didn't suit him, nor did Harvard's name, but he needed to pay back his bills. He would marry up. His wife's father had not been a senator, but he was aspiring to it and seemed to run half of Whirlpool. Jared also appreciated her Midwestern charm: the way she said “please” to her professors, cheered for the Cubs, and constantly worked on her tan. After graduation, he followed her home to St. Joseph, Michigan and took a job as an assistant VP overseeing divisional strategy. His hours were long, and he consoled himself by living on the lake —in a majestic, gabled Victorian that his father-in-law had bequeathed. Most evenings he'd run along the beach, and it was his only forty minutes of solace, given the screaming kids, not to mention the wife he was expected without effort to love. She wasn't a bad woman, he thought. Like most small Midwestern towns, St. Joseph harbored some ambitions. A new country club had been built where Catholics and Jews were not allowed (at least until Whirlpool stepped in). There were also two upscale restaurants, both Northern Italian and deeply overpriced, yet cheap compared to Chicago's, where they'd drive to find decent fare. On more than a few weekends, Jared even indulged 200 himself by calling up his old college friends—a few lived in the area—and smoking up at concerts, which his wife didn't mind, provided she was informed. He never cheated on her, either, though this was less by choice than fate. The women of the region were simply too trashy. They wore too much liner to the bars, donned tight-fitting spandex at gyms, and generally leered at him during symphony performances—like iguanas trapped in a cage. To another man, this might have held some appeal. “Do you love me,” his wife asked him one evening, pulling back the duvet. “I do.” “You always look scared when we're in bed.” “Yeah, well, I haven't been the same since Cambridge.” It wasn't Cambridge, he knew, but he settled in for the chore. Then one evening, when he was picking up his daughter from grade school, waiting for her dress rehearsal to get out, his smartphone showed a couple new emails. One was the predictable penile enlarger, but another was an invitation from a professional networking site. He almost deleted it, but then he noticed the sender's name. Jelka. Suddenly, a metal glove smacked his windshield. “Dad, why the hell didn't you come around?” His daughter was dressed as Joan of Arc and hugging her chainmail suit. “I'm freezing my buns off in this.” It was petrifyingly cold out, and his wife must have known something was wrong when he decided to go for a run. At 4 a.m. He was not a morning person. He had dragged himself out to a couple of marathons, which had painfully early starts, but he had never voluntarily run at this hour, much less with a phone. Sure, he could have waited until work, or even snuck off to the toilet. But he wanted to be by Lake Michigan. It had a certain charm. The Adriatic it was not: no shoals of fish glittered by him, the footing was sand, not rock, and the wind, when it came, resembled not an eastern sirocco, nor even 201 a foamy gregale. No, this wind was cold, hard, and biting. Much like his life. And himself. He sat along the dune and clicked OFF, sticking his phone in his sweatshirt, trying not to think. For 19 years, he had nurtured an obsession for a girl he didn't even know, hadn't even spoken to properly, and whose face he could barely recall. And yet here was the name on the phone. Maybe it was a different Jelka. He clicked on the link to the website and found himself forced to sign up. It turned out no picture was included, though her name was listed as Jelka Babić, Notary Public, Zagreb, Croatia, and the note she had sent him said, “Hi.” That's all. After 17 years of making love to his wife with another woman in mind, that's all he encountered: hi. He watched the far, icicled cliffs, which sludged their way through Lake Michigan. A yellow light broke on the shore. Are u the same woman? he wrote. Her reply came a couple days later, when he was driving on I-94. He almost swerved across traffic. What do u think? Can we meet? The difficulty came not in scheduling the trip, but in finding an excuse for his wife. Whirlpool Europe was headquartered outside Milan (which was only a short train-ride away). And it was important, he explained to his wife, to keep abreast of their affairs. “Don't they have people for that?” She was whisking the eggs for his omelet. “Yeah, but I'm dying to get back to Croatia, as well.” 202 “Well, that's fine. But I think we should hit up the Ritz.” They had honeymooned in Paris. “Actually, I was thinking I would do this alone.” “What?” “It's just a short stint, couple days.” “I see.” He tightened his bathrobe. “What's her name?” his wife said. “Amila.” “The woman who cleaned your house?” Her Teflon was steaming. “Really?” “Why not?” “You're lying to me.” “No, I'm not. And she's really getting up there in years.” In fact, Amila had been dead for six years. He had stayed in touch with her son. Eventually his wife acceded to the trip after he promised to meet her for a whirlwind tour of Provence. For the next two weeks, Jared ran daily, trying to flatten his abs. His wife became impressed with his regimen. She said it would help their sex. On the flight over, he practiced his Croatian, seated alone in first class. His knees began to swell, and he counted the hours till he'd land. “I'm sorry, I think you have me confused with someone else,” she said, the first time he saw her standing beneath an awning, where they'd agreed to meet, on the corner of Ban Jelačić Square. A clattering tram was passing beside them, and she looked at him confusedly. Then, she said, “I'm just 203 kidding.” He watched her in silence. It was definitely the same girl. She was twenty years older, but the same. Everything he had feared about her came true in this one central visage: the soft yellow face, the hazel-gray eyes, the sparkling lips, the tressed hair. “I'm Jelka,” she said, extending a hand. “I don't believe we've formally met.” Her English was incredibly good. She was wearing a black silken dress, the exact opposite of what she had worn in the club. Her arms were a little fleshier, her hair a little long, but she was otherwise exactly the same. “I'm Amila ... Jared.” Why the name had come out, he didn't know. “I'm pleased to meet you, Jared,” she said in Croatian. He couldn't remember how to reply. Finally, he said, “Good evening,” which were the only words he recalled. He knew he should have studied better on the plane, but the Halcion pills put him out. He buttoned his suit—a white linen three-piece that made him look like Mark Twain. He wasn't sure what else he should wear: a concert t-shirt, a dress suit, a scarf? The whole meeting was confusing. “Would you like to sit down,” she said, noticing his discomfort. He re-hitched his shoulder-bag. It wasn't a fanny pack, as he had been tempted to wear (the gypsies were rampant in Croatia, at least twenty years back) but the bag was distracting, all the same. He'd even packed a condom inside—one of two he'd purchased at the airport. Why else was he alive? “Yeah, well, I was thinking we might get a drink.” “I got a better idea,” she said, eying the far, passing tram. “What's that?” “Would you like to go to Rome?” “I don't even know you.” “What's there to know?” 204 “Are you a prostitute or something?” She laughed. It was the first time he'd heard her do it—it wouldn’t be the last—and the pitch was a little higher than he would have liked. It was awkward, even. And yet beautiful to him. Somehow it complemented her dress. “Would you like me to be a prostitute?” “Is that what you are?” “Are you a jerk?” “I'm sorry, I don't mean to offend you ... Ja ne znam ništa,” he told her in Croatian, meaning, “I don't know anything.” She smiled. “Are you married?” “Are you?” “I am.” “To the mafia?” “If that's what you want.” “Then I am, as well.” “So let's go.” Her full name was Jelka Babić Đokić, and she had been married twenty years back—about seven months after he'd left—to a businessman in Sweden, who was originally Serb. They hadn't yet filed for a divorce, but they hadn't been in touch for over a decade, and he was recently sentenced to jail. Jared asked her little else about him as they rode on the train. “Do you have kids?” “Yes, I do. And what about you?” “Two daughters,” he said. “Do they know where you are now?” 205 “I guess.” Later, as she slept along his shoulder and he inhaled the scent of her hair—something like thyme and rosemary, he figured, along with the smell of people as they age—he recalled the mountains he had seen in his youth, the sharp alpine valleys, the conifers springing from cliffs. He watched the sun baking the water, far beyond the tracks, and the spread of the fields as he rose. He had never been as happy as he was now. And he knew he never would be again. 206 G-SHOCK After thirty-seven minutes of standing in formation and listening to the Captain discuss emergency procedures, he retired to the barracks, where he slept seven more minutes before the First Sergeant called out his full name: “Uriel Lipschitz. You take the showers, and when you’re done with that, come see me for more work.” Uri went to the basement and grabbed three full white bottles of cleaner, a bucket, some gloves and a mop. He didn’t understand how a man could have been killed on their base and they were expected to go on with their work. It was like it didn’t even happen. They didn’t mention his name. They only talked about emergency procedures. Remember to wear your boots when you sleep, and it isn’t because of rules and regulations. Behind the main building, in the trailer for showers, Uri scrubbed the floor with a mop. He peeled off a tissue, which stuck to the shelf, and beside it, the case for a razor. The razor case, he knew, was neither his nor Yossi’s, but the thought of it clenched his throat. He thought of last Thursday, the last time that they spoke, when they were standing right here at the sink. Uri was shaving. It was ten minutes before an inspection, and he had to hurry, because he hadn’t yet polished his weapon. He was patting his lip, wiping a cut, when Yossi asked if he could borrow his razor. “What?” Uri asked. “The razor in your hand. I need to use it for just one minute.” “You need it right now?” 207 “Yeah,” Yossi said. “It’ll just take me a second.” “I don’t know,” Uri said, eyeing Yossi’s face. “I don’t think the Sergeant'll notice you.” “He will. He’s been on my case, and he gave Ivan a week for his stubble.” “Um, I don’t know. You don’t have anything else? Can’t you use Alex’s electric?” “It’s dead. It needs to recharge. Here, just lemme use it for a second.” “I don’t know,” Uri said, biting his lip. “You know what, go ahead and take it. And when you’re done with it, you can keep the blade. I got a whole extra sleeve in my bag.” Uri did not. It was the last of his blades, and he couldn’t afford to buy extras. He was saving this last one until he got paid—next month, or whenever that happened. “No, thanks,” Yossi said, fingering his chin. “You know what, I think I’m just gonna wing it.” “No, it’s really no problem. Take the blade.” Yossi looked back through the mirror. “I don’t want it,” he said, and he turned to walk off, grabbing his rifle and kit. His towel was slung over the back of his shirt, and it was the last time the two of them talked. What Uri now remembered was the smile Yossi gave, the way he exposed his teeth. His teeth shone white and bright against his lips—Yossi was an Ethiopian immigrant. But Uri didn’t feel like he was being racist with him then, which is how Yossi must have seen that incident. He just didn’t want to exchange blood with anyone else, regardless of where they had come from. And he didn’t see why he should have to live the rest of his life on an assumption that was patently false. He wasn’t a racist. Others here were. And he had gone out of his way then to help him. Aside from that blade, Uri had given him his watch after he got a new one in training. It was a Casio G-Shock, a really nice watch, though he doubted that Yossi had appreciated it. But watches were always a big deal in the army, since they were your only real item of personal wear, and they said what 208 kind of soldier you were. If you had a Casio G-Shock, you were known to be serious, because the glass wouldn't break or get scratched. If you had a Timex or one of the generic brands, you didn’t give a shit and only bought one for the clock. And if you didn’t have a watch, which had been Yossi’s plight, it meant you were poor here, or otherwise new to the concept of measured time. Yossi, Uri knew, had come at age six, arriving on a plane with his family. And in training, Yossi could tell time with his hands by holding them up to the sun. But Uri didn’t regret having dithered with the blade, and he didn’t feel this was racist. He knew about the diseases that Africa had and everything that went on in that continent. Yossi himself was probably clean, but there wasn’t any point in risking it. He knew in the army that presented a problem, since they were supposed to “shed blood for each other.” But they’d only been on the line for seven quick months, and he had yet to see blood from a soldier. Of course, that would all change later that night, when Yossi got shot on their base. Uri didn’t even get to see the body for himself, since at the time he had been out on patrol. All he had seen was the guardbox itself: a chip in the thick wall of concrete. It was shaped like an axe, with no sign of the blood or the brains that had been washed with the hoses. He had even gone to guard there a couple times since, which for some reason, he didn’t find troubling. He just sat in his chair, playing games on his phone, and wondered if Yossi was watching. Now he filled up a bucket with steaming white water and mixed in a bottle of cleaner. He splashed the cement floors and the pipes overhead, the mirror, sinks, faucets and ceiling. He wondered if the chemicals would burn through his soles as the water level rose by his boots. The drain, he could see, was clogged down below and he’d have to reach down and unstop it. He untied his new watch and slid it through his belt. Warm water seeped through his socks. He hated this job more than anything else, no matter how many times he had done it. He looked at the 209 windows, where light filtered in, spraying white rays from the sandbags. He decided that he would rather go get shot on patrol, since it was better than lifting the drain up. He stuck his hand in the water, between his two boots, and located the mush-cluttered basket. He pulled it up by the rim, and there was avocado inside, some sort of fur. Water trickled down to his feet. As he returned the grate to its hole in the floor and wiped off his hands on his pants, he realized that his watch wasn't on him. His heart missed a beat. Then he saw it was tied to his belt. Last Friday night, seven days back, he was patrolling the fields to the south. He was climbing over boulders and yellow thorn brush when he heard the report from the hills. It was just him and the Sergeant and five other men, and no one thought much at the time. Arab kids would often set off firecrackers near the base, and they had gotten fairly used to explosions. This was late, though; it was almost three in the morning, and they thought it was an Arab car backfiring. They continued on their way through the dried-up ravine, while Uri walked point by the Sergeant. They checked in their scopes and night vision sets, surveying the grasses for movement. They continued on their way for ten minutes in silence with just the rustling sounds of their vests. Suddenly they heard static and shouting on the radio. A flare shot up in the sky. It blocked out the moon and lit up the fields. The trees around them looked purple: gentle silhouettes of brushes and pine, tinged dark red at the corners. Above all their helmets and up-tilted faces: a flaring pink sun in the sky, burning. It reflected off pupils, the barrels of guns. Nobody bothered to move then. It was as if they were frozen or stuck to the earth, enamored by what they had seen there. Then the radio said that a soldier was down at Carmel Six One, Two-Aleph. That was the guardbox on top of their base, where Yossi had been on lookout. Yossi was dead before they got to the gates. That much they knew from the radio. They sprinted 210 the whole way, three quarters of a mile, and Uri tripped and fell flat on a rock face. He broke his fall with the base of his gun, and he wondered how he didn't manage to shoot himself. He struggled to stand, saw that he’d cut up his hand, and scrambled to catch up with his squad. The watch, he now knew, was unscratched by his fall, but he still had the marks on his face and hands. And the whole thing seemed like a dream to him now, much like the rest of the morning. He didn’t remember the perimeter they set up or any feelings of fear that he had then. All he could he recall was the moment he fell and his legs had given out from under him: he was floating through air, above the white rocks, facing the mouth of the canyon. Cleaner from the floor stung his right hand, eating its way through the scabs. He knew that he shouldn’t have stuck his hand in that drain without having put on the gloves first. He rinsed off his hand, and it stung him some more. His scab wounds looked fleshy and white. These scars, it seemed, were the only living proof of what happened to Yossi last week. Of course, there were other little things, like his empty blue bunk or the unfilled slot for his helmet. He had also written his name on a bullet proof vest, which was stacked in a pile by the main door. No one had since bothered to use that vest, even though he had been wearing a different one. Maybe they thought that the ink would wear out if others continued to use it. But there were dozens of names on each of these vests, and most had since finished the army. There was a tradition here, though, that you never crossed out any names when you found them on an item of gear. This was why soldiers were always losing their shit—because nobody could ever identify anything. Gear was recycled and everything got shuffled, except for Yossi’s green vest at the bottom. But the Captain had not even spoken his name since they found him curled up in the box. It was almost as if there was an unwritten rule that nobody talked of the deceased. It was weird how it 211 worked, these army superstitions—like not wishing anyone “good luck” before a mission. There was also a custom before each operation that you never took photos of soldiers. This, it turned out, was a pretty stupid thing, because they didn’t have any pictures of Yossi. The only photo they could find to submit to the press featured his ex-girlfriend hugging him at his prom. The girlfriend was smiling, clutching his neck, and Yossi looked like he knew what was coming. The water level rose again by his feet as he spilled out another foam bucket. The next drain, he saw, was clogged up as well, and its hairs swiveled up in volcanoes. Fuck this, he figured and picked up his gloves, which he’d set on a hook by his rifle. He left the whole bathroom in a stately flooded mess with his boonie cap still on the sink. When he came back to get it, ten minutes later, the water was gone from the floor. He looked in the mirror and sized up his zits, the scratches he had on his forehead. And his hair was getting long. He’d have to buzz it again. Maybe in time for a picture. When he returned to the basement, he set down his mop and knocked on the door of the Sergeants. “I’m done,” he told them. “And I’m tired of this shit. I’m ready to do a patrol now.” The First Sergeant smiled and patted his back. He said the Captain had sent him a message: “You’re free to go home, to take an early leave. He wants you to be back by this weekend.” Of course this would happen the one time in his service when he didn’t actually feel like leaving. He wanted to stay and do some arrests, if only out of service to Yossi. “Go home and get laid. And get some more sleep. You’re gonna need it, starting this Sunday.” Sergeant Benny then explained that the following week, they were shipping up north to Jenin. The camps inside there were contested ground, and they would undoubtedly see some more action, he said. Uri knew that the leave would not be a gift and that he was about to endure some fighting. And 212 if he were to survive what he saw, which he started to doubt, he was going to have to get rest first. The First Sergeant told him to report back to base by Saturday evening at seven. He said that he should also get his head shaved at home, or the Sergeant would do it himself. Uri thought about calling up a couple old friends. He had gone to a religious academy. But the only thing they ever did was read Talmud or pray, neither of which seemed too appealing. He wondered if any of his friend from the army were getting a leave for the weekend. He dialed up Oren, Herman and Josh. None of them said they were going. Uri hitched a ride in the back of a truck that was delivering food to the checkpoints. Then he flagged down a Jewish settlement bus, which brought him up north to Jerusalem. He caught another bus to the Tel Aviv station, where he bought a cold beer and a sandwich. He thought he should call up his mother at home and tell her he was coming to dinner. Of course, his parents both knew what had happened last week. They had attended the service at Herzl. But he didn’t really feel like dealing with them now, because to them, it was just a reminder. His mother had once told him: “This is what you get. It was your choice to serve in the army.” She was talking about the time when he fell back in training and fractured a bone in his ankle. And when they talked on Saturday, after the attack, the only things they discussed were arrangements: how he’d get to the funeral; if he needed a ride; what his parents could do to “support” him. They hated that he served but acknowledged his choice—as long as he maintained the religion. Instead of catching the bus up north to Haifa, which is where he lived, he went to the bank and deposited his check, which they had given him upon leaving the base. He knew that for Yossi, he was obliged to spend it on something entirely personal. Razor blades didn’t seem like the appropriate choice, and he wasn’t about to purchase a bible. At a kiosk he bought a bottle of Jack, some chips and a packet of Camels. Then he took a quick 213 bus to the Tel Aviv beach and laid his head down on the sand. When he woke up again, two hours later, the tide was up to his boots. The sun was low and red in the sky. His rifle weighed down on his chest. He brushed himself off, gathered his bag and threw out the liter of whiskey. He knew he couldn’t stay on the beach for the night, that the police would come and evict him. He walked down Allenby and Ha Ya’arkon and found a neighboring hostel. He rented a room which had flowered, blue sheets, and he sat down inside of the shower. He cried a little bit—for what, he didn’t know. Then he dried himself off on the floor. He put on his jeans and his last clean white shirt and decided to go for a walk. He thought he should get his head shaved first, but all of the barbers were closed. And the clubs were deserted, the bars emptied out, because of a bombing last weekend. It was a little past twelve and the streets were still wet, slicked with the glaze of gasoline. He only knew of one place that would be open at this hour, though it wasn’t exactly a bar. Sergeant Benny had once recommended it to him and said he was a regular customer. It was in the industrial zone, three miles west. The place was called The Tropic. It was famous in the army for servicing soldiers and even offering them discounts. When he arrived in the district, he noticed the bums, mostly camped out on the streets. African men were selling bracelets and gum. A few of them offered him Ecstasy. He could see the lights of The Tropic up ahead, but the place didn’t seem that appealing. Maybe it was the thought of his Sergeant having sex, but he decided he’d look for another. He roamed through the streets until he settled on a place that probably had a lot less traffic. It was in the back of an alley, alongside a wall, with a rusted, green, iron-frame door. The sign overhead looked welcoming enough—it said “girls” in pink neon letters. 214 *** When she heard the knock, she was making coffee at her dresser. She preferred instant, because it didn’t stain her teeth the way filter did. And she had exceptionally good teeth, which she maintained with rigor using peroxide stripes, a pharmaceutical rinse, and dental floss that was made in America— she didn’t trust anything made inside Israel. Back in Tashkent, her uncle had been a dentist, and he told her that teeth were the most important thing in a profession. That was back when she still talked to the man—his family had raised her since birth. Now they never talked, though she continued to send checks and said she was employed as a cleaner. Which wasn’t, she figured, entirely untrue, given the state of her clients. She left the electric pitcher to boil and gave a quick nod to the mirror. Behind it, Vladimir was sorting his mail. She could hear the guy flipping through sheets. He was a good man, Vlad. She wished he made more, but his salary wasn’t out of her pocket. He had also once broken a couple legs on her behalf, and for that she was eternally grateful. And the guy never asked for any favors in return. She suspected this was because he was gay. Sometimes, when her younger clients came in, she could hear a few jerks from his table. His one-way mirror looked out on the entire room: a windowless, pink-walled enclave. The spot where he sat was connected to a hall that adjoined the neighboring building, a dance club. The club was now closed, due to repairs or some sort of dispute with the owners. There were all sorts of people living upstairs—Filipino and Cambodian workers. But when she heard the knock, Vlad’s papers stopped flipping and she guessed he had moved to his chess games. Back in the Ukraine, he was a “Candidate Master,” which was apparently a high designation. These days he’d play about four games at once, each on the screen of his laptop. And she 215 knew he was smart, though he didn’t say much. He also did bills and accounting. She set down her mug and powdered her chest. She put on her lipstick in patches. She stepped up on a box, beside the green door. Through the peephole she could make out a yarmulke. Great, she thought, another black hat. The religious were shoddy with tips. When she opened the door, she noticed his rifle, which was slung around his arm like a purse. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You can’t bring that in here.” Vladimir would never allow it. The young soldier nodded and turned to walk off, clicking a thumb in his hand. Since the bombings had started, it had been a slow month. The Arabs had stopped passing through checkpoints—and they tipped. The Jews themselves were scared to go out, and the tourists had been non-existent. “You know what, it’s okay,” she called through the alley. The kid spun around with his gun. She glanced in the mirror and heard no dissent. And her hair was looking blonder than usual. Just that morning, she had dyed it again, because that’s what the locals would want. “You can come in,” she continued. “Just to look around. And don’t worry, you can take your gun with you.” The boy looked cute. He had long, feeble arms, and he looked like he might be a virgin. He grimaced. “Um, I was just looking.” I’ll bet, she thought. “Why don’t you come and have a seat? I’ll make coffee.” “I don’t drink coffee.” “Well, maybe you can have something else then.” She held the door open. He entered. “I’m Evelyn,” she said, shaking his hand. “My name’s Benny,” he said, and she knew that it wasn’t, since soldiers never gave up their real ones. His right hand felt warm and sticky to her touch. She wondered if he’d come from a bathroom. 216 “Nice to meet you, Benny.” She said the name aloud and thought it sounded vaguely familiar. “You can call me Eva, or just Eve, if you want. Here, come have a seat on the sofa.” She lifted up a newspaper which some Arab had left—he had paid an extra hour just to sit there. “I don’t have a lot of money. And I don’t mean to be rude, but I was wondering if we could talk about the price.” She sat down on the couch beside him. “It’s okay,” she said. “We can work around what you’ve got. But it’s two hundred Sheks for a suck and fuck.” “Any position?” he asked. So maybe he wasn’t that new. “Any position except anal.” “Um, well, maybe we could do just the intercourse part, since I don’t have enough for a suck.” She thought she heard a laugh from the mirror, but the kid didn’t seem to have noticed. “It’s no problem,” she said. “How much do you have?” “I only have 120 Shekels.” “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re going to have to leave.” She never went below 180—group standard. “But wait,” the kid said, “I’ve got a nice watch.” She smiled as she walked to the door. “Yeah. It’s a Casio G-shock. It’s a really nice watch, and it glows when you turn it to the side.” He demonstrated for her, and she thought that he must have been kidding. He wasn’t. “That is a nice watch.” “Yes, isn’t it?” he said. “They gave it to me as a present.” “Who did?” “The army. That was back when I finished my training. They said I was the best in the 217 Company.” “And that’s why you’re here now?” “No,” the kid said. “I’m out on the line. I finished my training in August.” She smiled. She liked his green eyes. They were rounded from drink. And she liked his red bush of a haircut. His chapped lips were sagging, pouty and low. He reminded her a bit of her father. He had once been a soldier in the Afghani War, judging by one of his pictures. “So, I was thinking,” he continued, “that you could take the watch, along with the 120 Shekels. And maybe that way you’d do a good thing for this country and help out a soldier in need.” “I think you should keep the watch for yourself. Just don’t tell anyone what you paid.” He nodded. She unbuttoned his jeans, which were tight at his knees and clung to the bones of his waist. She pulled up his t-shirt and noticed his chest, which was remarkably thin for a soldier. His ribs were exposed, his stomach quite flat, and his arms were burnt red like a farmer’s. She smoothed out the sheet on the beige leather stand. “Come here,” she said, as she patted. She undid her robe, which was cotton and white, and rubbed some light oil on her breasts. The smell was vanilla, which she always liked best, because it drowned out the smell of the men. “Come here,” she said again to the boy. He was appraising the couch for his gun. “You can leave it over there. It’ll be fine.” He hopped up on the cushion beside her. “You’re pretty,” he said, and he seemed to have meant it, judging by the space in his lips. His dick wasn’t up, so she stroked it a bit. His shaven chin smelled like tobacco. “You can touch me,” she said, pulling his hand to her breast. It sat there like some kind of dead animal. 218 He let out a groan, an uncomfortable wheeze. “It’s okay,” she said. “Have you done this before?” “Not really,” he said with a smile. She did it often with virgins—at least three times this week—though none of them came wearing yarmulkes. One of them had been a worker—a Thai, he explained, though she barely understood what he said. Another one came with his brother and dad, and all three of them finished in seconds. The third was a young Palestinian man who was planning to marry this weekend. He invited her to the wedding, and when she respectfully declined, he told her he’d bring her some cake. They all went inside her with the condoms she gave them, and she felt nothing but the sparkle of finance. But with the Orthodox she always felt a warm sense of spite, and she enjoyed corrupting their youths. Their men always scowled when she passed on the street, as if they weren’t regular customers. Just need to pluralize “customer”. She caressed the boy’s hand and tickled his thigh. She buried her head in his stomach. His skin fluttered tight and bunched with each kiss along the red fur of his happy trail. Briskly, she climbed up on top of his legs. “You want pink or dark blue?” she said with a smile, reaching inside of her robe. “Um, I don’t know,” he said, cringing a bit, as if others might have been here before him. “You know,” she said, “you have a very large dick,” which succeeded in putting him at ease. “Here,” she said, and gave him dark blue, even though the pink ones were thinner. She held up his hand. “Do you want a bit of help?” He was debating which side to roll down. “Uh, yeah,” he said. And she slid it on down. She could do it with a thumb and a finger. “Do you want to be on top?” “Uh, okay,” he said, with that shrill, nervous laugh that she’d recently started to cherish. She 219 thought about Vlad—that he must be online, because his mirror wasn’t making its noises. “Are you ready?” she asked. “You bet,” he said. He slid inside her with confidence. He went too far up—all of them did— and he turned a bit to the side. Slow down, she wanted to say to him then, but this she never said. He breathed heavily at first and then not at all. His green eyes were starting to water. She reached up around and patted his back, which dampened the side of her hand. He moved back and forth in flashing red thrusts, and she wondered what he must have been thinking. Probably of his mom—most of them did, at least the first time that they started. No, she thought, probably his dad; this one was hit as a child. She could see a few welts and scars on his brow, though those might have come from the army. “What’s that?” she asked and pointed to his brow. He didn’t look up from his fucking. “I fell,” he said as he wiped off his face and kneaded her back with his thumbs. “Sorry,” she said, and she touched his left cheek. His skullcap was dangling off him. She felt like she wanted to kiss this young boy ever since he called her “pretty.” She knew that she wasn’t—not since the repairs—though something inside him had meant it. Her face still showed signs of the beating she suffered alone in this apartment in August. It was from the District Police, a “personal friend,” who had come to collect on the payments. And it was partially her fault for not having insisted on obtaining a bodyguard like Vladimir sooner. But at the time she had worked for a small-time affair that was edging its way in the market. Of course, after the incident, the gang war ensued. The men who now owned her were decent. They were a much better lot with connections all around and promised they’d see to her safety. And the cash wasn’t bad—at least till last fall, when the clients stopped coming to visit. But her owners, she knew, would still put her up as a reminder of debts from the city. 220 And she no longer even hated all the sex that she had. Occasionally she found it quite pleasing. Of course, the heroin helped, but she didn’t do much—just a couple quick dabs for the evening. Just need to remove the “e”. This soldier, however, kept pounding her insides, and she felt nothing but the churn in her stomach. She realized that she hadn’t eaten since ten in the morning. After this, she would go make a salad. His pelvis kept jabbing up and to the right. His cheek muscles clenched in his jaw. She could see that his eyes were trying hard not to focus; that this one would require some effort. “Here,” she said, “why don’t we try from the back?” She knew that he was too afraid to ask. But all of the soldiers wanted it this way. It had something to do with the army, she figured. They tried it for a bit. He reached around to her breasts and fingered the braid of her vulva. He wasn’t too hard; she could feel him inside as she motioned herself to his stomach. She tossed her hair up and onto her back. The sight of it was usually enough for them. A couple minutes later, she felt him pull out. He turned to look down at his watch. “I gotta go,” he said. “Are you sure?” she said. She wasn’t sure why she had asked. “No, it’s not gonna happen.” “Why? What's wrong? You don't like the way that I look?” “No,” he said. “It’s me. I’m sorry. I think you’re one of the prettiest women I’ve seen.” It was strange, she thought. He seemed to have meant it, and his two eyes were lost in reflection. “So what is it?” she asked. “Is it the position we’re in? Do you want me to try with my mouth?” “Uh, I don’t know.” 221 “Let’s try it,” she said, as she reached for his waist and bent down. The blueberry didn’t mask the spermicidal taste, which was horrible, no matter how many times she had mouthed it. A few minutes later, she could see it wouldn’t work. His legs were still glued to the cushion. “Here,” she said, “let’s try something else.” She peeled off his condom and threw it. “What are you doing?” “I don’t mind,” she said. “Just try not to go on my face.” The boy didn’t hesitate. None of them did. She only ever did this with virgins. He laid his head back on the pillow and sighed—undoubtedly thinking of his father. She throated him up and down with her chest, breathing in air with her nose. She knew she was good—had been told so each day—and that not even a faggot could stand this. *** “I can’t,” Uri said, ten minutes later, brushing back hair from her face. “What is it?” she asked, wiping her mouth. She seemed to be checking the mirror again. “I don’t know. It’s something in my head. I don’t think I’m going to finish.” “Do you want to talk?” “Not really,” he said. “I don’t even know what to tell you.” He didn’t know why this woman kept asking or what he was supposed to say. There was no cause he could give, no reason to explain. He didn’t even know why he came here. He examined her eyes, her immaculate teeth, that strange, calm draw of her breath. Her face was exotic, like it wasn’t quite white, and it sent a shiver through the base of his spine. “I think I should 222 go.” “No, stay,” she said. “I won’t charge you any more—as long as you wear that skullcap.” He wasn’t quite sure what she meant by the remark as he pulled up his jeans and his shirt. “Here,” he said. “You can take the watch. I’m gonna get a new one tomorrow.” “No,” she said. “I don’t want the fucking watch. Just take your stuff and get out.” “What about the money?” “You can keep it,” she said. “Okay.” Uri rose from his seat. He picked up his duffel, his gun and his clip. He tied a quick knot in each boot. Then he took out his wallet and thumbed through his bills, setting them all on her sink. He left her two hundred. The watch was worth more, but this woman would not even take it. He shut the door and walked through the alley. He sat on the edge of the street. He lowered his head into the skin of his hands, and he could feel the beat of his heart. 223 MILKED, OR THE RISE AND FALL OF SAMUEL FELDMAN, M.D. A Tragedy in Four Parts The civilization that produced homogenized milk will soon produce the homogenized man. - J. Paul Getty, How to be Rich 1 Y ou should always distrust those who remain close with their high school friends. It means they're either overly insulated, or they have something drastic to hide. In the case of Sam , it was both. Yet I can't help but stand in awe of the man. After all, it isn't every day that a man joins the ranks of the Fortune 500, FBI's Most Wanted, and Parenting's Top 10. He was wanted in three counties, indicted in four, but only charged in the end with embezzlement and fraud, minor offenses, really, when you consider the parties at stake: young women and children mainly, the bulk of them immigrants, all of them damaged for life. Suffice it to say I only knew him when he was younger, but even then I saw a certain spark in him, much as Wittgenstein may have noted when he once shared a classroom with Hitler. Of course, Hitler downed himself with a pill. Sam was given twelve months at Butner FCI, where, I'm told, he was surrounded by a grove of eucalyptus. 224 As for which of the allegations are true, I can't say for certain. It is known that he produced a factory, which morphed into a sizable conglomerate, then a blue-chip stock, and then a well-traded public company, all the while turning out revenues from overworked, mishandled slaves—wage slaves, that is, who were every bit as immured as their antebellum counterparts. The scary part is that he thought he was doing something positive. “An Innovator in Human Nutrition”, “Saver of the Young”, “Father to Millions”, said the articles. For a while, he might well have believed this hokum. My guess is that posing with Bono, doing ads with Angelina, or earning your own seat at the U.N. will change your self-conception. Though in Sam's case, it probably did not. I'll never forget the time in high school when we were discussing our upcoming prom. I was bringing my longtime girlfriend, who, as it were, may or may not have contracted mono from him previously. He and I were not exactly close, although our high school, Chicago Classical Academy, was small enough—and rich enough—that all of us got along well. Sam said he still hadn't settled on a date, since he had never—and would never—settle down long enough with a woman to undergo the normal rituals of courtship associated with such an event. At age seventeen, curiously pale, with an emerging mustache and gut, and sporting a woolen charcoal sweater and sandals, which he persistently wore, even in Chicago's thick snow, he said to our group over lunch that he was considering bringing an escort. “You know, a professional,” he explained. “It's that or I start combing the middle schools. It's not like there's much in this room.” He surveyed the cafeteria with his heavy-browed, dark, glinting eyes. Then his hand came to rest on his corned-beef-and-rye, which his mother assiduously made him each day. “I like the idea of a woman who knows what she's doing. Not like these Oak Street hoes.” Sam had never been popular, exactly, since he wasn't athletic and was way too cynical for such contests. He also read Homer for fun. But he wasn't exactly an outcast, either. The girls in our class had 225 long given up berating him, even though he was verbally abusive, frequently remarked on their weight (often to their faces), and held them in roughly the same regard as his books—that is, something to peruse at night, possibly grow from, and discard when done. He hadn't slept with many, or any, from what we knew, though he spoke with the air of man who had sired a town. “So you're gonna get a hooker,” said Buzz, one of his friends, whose father had once been the governor. “I was thinking about it.” “Dean Ehrlich will never allow it.” “I'll let him in on a pinch.” “I think you should go with a young'un,” said Joel, another of our group, though it was never a well-defined clique. “I'm thinking about it,” Sam said. “That's disgusting,” I said. “Some of those girls barely read.” “Well, you know what they say, John?” He glanced at me with those sweaty, dark nicotined eyes. “If there's grass on the field, play ball.” He shook his juice. The period was ending. “Though I prefer this lovely lady named Suzanne. I saw an ad for her in the Reader. And hopefully, she'll bring a few friends. If you'd like a bounce when I'm done...” It turned out a prostitute wasn't in the works for our friend. He did show up, however, with a blond girl from middle school, a visibly intoxicated seventh grader, who wasn't allowed in to the dance. Dean Ehrlich personally intervened. By this point, he and Sam had endured so many confrontations, both violent and subdued, that they were on amicable terms, almost like a father and son. When Sam was suspended ten days for smoking pot in the senior lounge (actually, being found with a pipe; there was no evidence of his consumption, careful, as he was, to discard his waste and detox), the Dean 226 invited him to spend most afternoons in his office, where Sam would sit dutifully, reading dog-eared copies of Virgil. Sometimes he'd glance up at the curious freshmen passing by, at which point the Dean would close the door. They got on well together, the Dean and him. And when the Dean, a closeted homosexual, died of AIDS seven years later, Sam would incidentally and anonymously cover the cost of his funeral. To say Dan was a capable student would be like saying the Pope was well-read. It was only part of his profession and minor in comparison to everything else he undertook. While most of us were playing sports, editing the yearbook, or drinking in basements, Sam was meeting Lou Reed. How he made the connection, no one knew, but apparently he had written some fan mail, and the two met up once for Dim sum. Sam also formed a band at one point, which was appropriately entitled Young'uns, but it soon dwindled after two of its members were found to be in possession of coke. Sam was not one of them, curiously. As for what he did with his afternoons, none could say for sure, though he was frequently seen roaming the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art, where, it was said, he gave spontaneous, self-guided tours, which might have included his home. In our junior year, when we were required, however ignominiously, to complete eighty hours of community service, Sam volunteered at the Rehabilitation Institute, which was near his family's apartment downtown. He spent most of his time in the fund-raising offices, which were always abandoned after dark. There, he'd settle into some isolated, top-floor cubicle, Camels in hand, and use the huge phone-set to dial erotic chat lines. That said, I did once see him talking to an emaciated, bedridden victim of a stroke, feeding him apple sauce, and discussing the state of modern art. Sam's father was a well-regarded surgeon on the faculty of Northwestern Hospital. The two or three times when I visited the apartment, which overlooked south Lakeshore Drive, I found the place dark and foreboding, much like the doctor himself. Like most surgeons, he had inordinate amounts of 227 hair on his arms—a trait which Sam had inherited—a soft-spoken air, and a perpetual look of indifference, which probably wasn't feigned. Sam had three older brothers, two of them half, all of whom lived far away, and two of whom were now practicing physicians in their own right. The mother, a well-meaning shrew of a woman, kept the place sterilely clean, and a mounted Andy Warhol presided from the living room wall, alongside a majestic but curtained view of Lake Michigan. The piece was a portrait of Marilyn Monroe, and I couldn't believe they owned it. I had seen it in books. Reproductions of it, anyways. There were also early sketches of Chagall—doodles, truthfully—and even cruder scribblings of Picasso, all of which Sam pointed out. He took an immediate liking to me when I expressed interest in the works, since the rest of his friends were quite ignorant, as he put it. Later, when he found out I became an art critic, he wrote me glowing letters of praise, the most recent of which arrived last month from his jail. His bedroom contained walls full of books, a high-powered humidifier, and posters for late 80's bands, the names of which I'd never heard: Dead Milkmen, Black Flag, Butthole Surfers, Dread Zepplin. Among the thousands of CD's that he owned, all stored in walnut-shelved cases, the only one I recognized was Nevermind from Nirvana, a band whom he claimed he “discovered” well before they were hot. His shelves also contained dozens of obscure foreign films—mostly German horror—and fat Russian novels that I couldn't imagine he'd read. Ironically, and in spite of our school's self-designation as “classical”, he was one of only four students in our year to study Latin, a language he insisted on taking, even though, it was said, he came close to failing each semester (apparently, he refused to study for exams). He graduated, like most of us, tenuously (he had to do some coursework that summer), and at our farewell party, which was held in somebody's townhouse, he arrived with a thirty-year-old woman in a dark corporate suit. He claimed she was a cousin. He didn't introduce her too much—he was 228 already high—and disappeared before anyone could spray him with questions. I never saw him again. You might have heard of the scandal that broke in 2009 involving the University of Illinois, which, I hasten to add, was our friend's alma mater. It turned out—and I can't say I was too shocked— that for quite some time, hundreds of students with “clout”, as the Chicago Tribune put it, had gained admission despite having “sub-par qualifications”. Sam's GPA could not have been above three—more likely two. He was also suspended once, put on probation twice, and even temporarily dismissed (after the debacle at prom). Somehow he was admitted, though who pulled the strings exactly, none could say for sure. He did tell me once that he'd earned a 1580 on his S.A.T.'s, which, for whatever reason, I'm inclined to believe. In any case, his collegiate performance was rather lackluster, too, or so said his two high school friends, Joel and Buzz, who had accompanied him down to Champaign. All took up residence in a fraternity, from which Sam was later kicked out. (The reasons for that are unclear). It is known that he graduated with distinction, having penned a thesis of some sort on neurochemical behavior, and then gained admission to a medical school of questionable repute in the Bahamas. Three years later, he was admitted to a psychiatric rotation at Northwestern Hospital. Evidently, he found the work uninspiring— or maybe he was just dreading the prospecting of following his expected path. Either way, some time around age 27, he apparently left and headed to the West Coast. The story of the private school truant who snorts away his parents' hard-earned savings has become something of a cliché in our culture, and I wish it described him, but his saga in Los Angeles was actually far more complex. As I mentioned, he kept in close touch with two of his friends, Buzz and Joel, both of whom would eventually come out and join him in LA. Initially, and as it was later reported to me, Sam tried to break into Hollywood. That followed the predictable path: failed connections, missed opportunities, a stint as a production assistant, a brief jaunt in film school, and 229 finally a part-time job working in porn. He made a go for a while as a well-regarded director in Van Nuys, though my guess is the internet hindered that, as it has so much of that trade. Then he made a living selling pot. While never technically legal, marijuana, from what I understand, has always enjoyed something of a gray status in California. He invested heavily in a growery, then manned it himself, apparently moving out to the Mendocino Hills. That operation got him nabbed, though he had backed himself up legally, and only lost a sizable principal. It was said he had a wife and kid, though they later disappeared from the picture. Sometime around 2008, Joel later reported, Sam contacted him about a “lucrative opportunity”. It was hit-or-miss, Joel said, but afforded the chance for “incalculable” dividends, not to mention power and fame. And what was the opportunity for investment? I should let Joel explain. 2 We met for coffee in November at a dim little nook in Chicago. Having returned for Thanksgiving, it was the first time I had reconnected with anyone from high school. Joel said that Sam had suggested he call me, although I don't remember giving either my number. Joel also said he had a favor to ask of me, but didn't say what. When Joel arrived at the coffeehouse, which was smoky and eerily lit, he looked a bit like Conrad's depiction of Jim: “an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull”, except that his voice was depleted and his face looked thoroughly flushed. He ordered three shots of espresso and drank them down in four sips. He also wore a powder- blue cardigan and said he was looking for work. 230 “Can't help you there,” I said. I explained that I was still eking out a living as an adjunct in Philly and only home visiting my folks. (I didn't mention that my ex-boyfriend lived in Chicago, or that I was gay, though Joel probably detected it.) Joel smiled wanly. “So, you read about him, didn't you?” “I saw a few tidbits. The Alumni Magazine didn't exactly give a report.” “No, even though he's been their cover story twice now. Hypocrite fucks. Anyways, if you really want to know, I'll tell you, but we should probably go somewhere else.” I didn't want to know, but why not? At Corcoran's, a dim Irish bar along Wells, he told me the saga more clearly, and I tried to extract what I could. I had already heard of the arrest, as well as the more glaring indictments, though the allegations of child abuse were new, as was the mention of arson. “So I accepted his offer, the fuck, and came to Los Angeles. I figured why not. It was better than building fake teeth”—Joel had worked as a dental assistant—“and I still had something to prove. I thought, maybe we'll get the band going, then he offered me this gig in his lab. I said, 'what lab', and Sam said, 'I got this new company brewing, and I'm looking for a laboratory manager. That could be you.' We had taken Orgo together, and he knew I was smarter. In fact, I did better than him, and he never would have sat for the MCATs had he not copied my tests. Anyways, he let me crash at his place in West Hollywood. It was a reeking two-bedroom, covered with ash, and I guess his own daughter wasn't legally allowed to visit him. He had a regular assortment of roommates—grad students, mainly —even a couple of girls, one of whom he may have fathered a kid with. I slept on the couch, which was fine. Most days, I'd get up around two, flick on the PlayStation, smoke a couple bowls, eat a steak, and then he said to me, 'Joel, you remember why you came out here?' I actually put on a tie.” Sam had apparently spent all his days away from home, though where he'd been going, Joel didn't know. Sam refused to disclose it. Then one afternoon, he took Joel to his workplace, which was 231 this cruddy brick warehouse out along Pico, right under the 405. It was all dripping and covered with Styrofoam. Some homeless guy had left his shopping cart out front, Joel said. The weirdest part was that as Sam led him in with a flashlight, he noticed dozens of folding steel beds had been set out along the main floor. They were spring cots, like you'd find in an army. “Are you starting a shelter?” Joel asked him. “Sort of,” Sam said. “A shelter of life.” Joel didn't know what he had in mind. “With Sam, you never know. He was wearing a suit that day, too, not his normal vintage—you know, the frilled tux. This one was real, custom-tailored, and he said he had an appointment downtown. But before then, he said to me, 'Joel, what do you know about kids?'” “Kids?” “Babies.” “Nothing. That they like to shit and drink.” “Exactly,” said Sam. “That's all they do. Shit and drink. Now the shitting part, that I can't help. There's nothing to do about that. But the drinking part, that's where we will come in.” “We?” “You and I. Along with a couple investors.” “What do you have in mind?” Joel paused for a second, trotted to the bar, and ordered a couple White Russians. He returned with the drinks, both of them black, and the cream in a saucer. “John,” he asked me. “What do you know about milk?” “Does the body good.” 232 “Exactly,” said Joel. “Do you know why?” “Protein.” “Uh-huh.” Joel flexed his huge arm, which didn't quite gel with his cardigan, and said “feel this.” I did. “Impressive.” “Whey protein—best thing you can take for the gym. Legal thing, that is. Builds pure muscle mass. Problem is not everyone needs it. Women don't need it. Babies don't need it. In fact, for them, it's dangerous. That's why they need mother's milk, not cow's. Breast milk is thinner, doesn't have as much protein or salts. It's higher in iron, retinol, vitamins. These are the things a baby needs.” He tipped the saucer and stirred the milk in his glass. “You like?” “Yeah, sure. I don't normally drink before noon.” “And you teach art, you said?” Joel let the vodka set in. His eyes dimly quivered. “So Sam had this brilliant idea. I say brilliant, because, well, at the time, it was netting us cash. He decided, why not market this breast milk? I mean, it's essential for children, of which there's no shortage in the world, and it can be put to all sorts of good uses.” Joel quoted me statistics about the number of impoverished who were dying, all the hapless premature babies, and the problems afflicting the third world, to which an “adequate supply of breast milk could offer some vital” relief. He smiled thinly. “At first, the goal was non-profit.” “As it always is with Sam,” I said. Joel explained that he returned the next week to the “compound”, as they'd call it, and found the place rehabbed. “It was thoroughly redone, freshly repainted and swept, and the beds were all covered with cream cotton sheets. It looked like a hospital clinic, except there were televisions everywhere, exercise bikes, rocking chairs, tea cups, a playpen. The whole place was painted bright pink. There 233 weren't any windows, oddly (those had been sealed), but all the basement cages were taken out and replaced with these vast metal tanks, which later turned out to be coolers.” Apparently Sam had snagged some investors, mainly friends of his father, a couple of whom were physicians, and they allowed Sam to remain in charge of the ordeal. He also hired a chief medical officer, who was also on staff at UCLA, to oversee production. “He was this creepy-looking guy, even creepier than Sam.” It was amazing to hear Joel say this. “He had long hair, horn-rimmed glasses, always wore a suit with a vest. Like something out of a David Lynch film, except he was evidently medically certified, much like our friend, the CEO. “Sam said he hadn't yet decided on my role. I was tentatively assistant lab manager—I didn't appreciate the downgrade—and Sam took me downstairs for a tour. All the while, he kept recounting more numbers. He was still wearing his suit, his shiny bespoke one. Then he explained that last year, a women named Alicia Richman, from northern Texas, made headlines for donating 11,000 ounces of milk. 'That's about 86 gallons.' Sam fingered his cuffs. 'Now breast milk sells for about one to two-and-a-half dollars an ounce commercially, three to five if you're buying from a bank. That means, just doing the math here, that good old Alicia would yield about $55k if she were hooked up to a pump.' Sam paused before an enormous steel, black-hosed contraption, which ran to an even bigger one along the wall. Then his eyes faintly sparked. He said, 'By comparison, your average dairy cow yields about $2,500 of income annually, after you factor in feed.' Then he threw me a copy of the Los Angeles Times, which was dated a couple months back. An article was circled on Page 12, which said human breast milk was facing a critical shortage. 'I have more than an idea,' Sam said.” Joel said he doubted him originally. “I've heard more than a few harebrained schemes. Hell, you should hear why Sam got kicked out of ZBT. What he proposed, during our spring break trip to 234 Jamaica, made anything that Snoop Dogg's endorsed look feminist. But here's the funny part. Sam, for all of his years, seemed to have almost matured. That night, he drove me out to Santa Monica, where I even got to meet his ex-wife. She was cool, a bit large, not overweight, incredibly intelligent. You know, I heard she was also a shrink. Ph.D. in psychology, I guess. That's how they met. She was doing rounds at Northwestern. And then Sam introduced me to his daughter. Man, that was a trip. Seeing Sam hold up his own little one. She looked exactly like him. Same crazy eyes and black hair. A little uglier, maybe. Certainly as determined. And loud. She kept crying the whole time, and Sam's ex-wife started feeding her. Even in front of me. Neither of them seemed the least bit embarrassed. 'It's the most beautiful thing,' Sam said. Then he patted his ex-wife and kissed his daughter goodbye.” That night, Sam told Joel that the investments were complete, and at that point it was mainly just a matter of finding some “harvestable girls”. And where would they go for that? Mexico. “I'll spare you the details of our trip,” Joel said. “Suffice it to say, one can get in a lot of trouble in that country, and Sam repeatedly has. He's on a first name base with a couple bartenders—well south of T.J., down in the untouristed parts, out along Baja, and he came back with more than a few truckfuls of girls. I guess he had good connections from his days in Van Nuys. He said all of them were legal, technically. I wasn't sure how. Anyways, nobody stopped us at the border, and we were driving a convoy of six or eight vans. Sam also brought the medical doctor, as well as his communications officer, a Latino woman named Teresa. She already had an M.B.A. from UCLA-Anderson, so I wasn't too pissed when I found out what she was making. And she was really nice with the girls, speaking Spanish and all that— much better than Sam.” Joel explained that they dropped the girls off at the compound, which Sam had had refitted once again. It was well-heated and stocked with supplies. There were forty-gallon, walk-in refrigerators, all brimming with salmon, asparagus, plums, fenugreek, kale, and mountains of prenatal vitamins. “I'll tell 235 you, if you want anything done in this world, you need to have a person like Sam. He was personally invested. He didn't even sleep at home.” For the next three weeks, Sam lived with the girls in the compound, cooked most of their meals, in fact, and went about his affairs from there. For complicated reasons—these Joel “couldn't explain”— the place wasn't wired for internet, or even connected with a phone, so Sam had a couple of mules run his errands. “You know, send faxes, get mail, run out to Trader Joe's to get vitamins, of which we needed a lot. And he had me working on machinery. We got the place flowing really good. The women were hooked up by day two, and we let them roam about the compound, gave them silk robes, plenty of rocking chairs to sit in. We let them order all their stuff from magazines. Most had brought babies along, and these were all housed in the nursery, which occupied a room in the back. I tried my best not to go there—the fucking place stank—but Sam hired another medical doctor, a partner of his dad, to oversee all the pediatric care. He did stop by from time-to-time.” “So the girls,” Joel explained, “didn't have it too bad. Mostly, they just sat rocking, cradling their newborns. They spent six hours a day on the machines, and the whole time, they got to watch Lifetime. Sam had it shown on all the screens, then the Oxygen Network, which they loved. Sometimes, he'd broadcast their soaps, but he said those were too stressful for the mothers, and he couldn't run any risks. He also let them talk to each other, which he didn't initially want to do. My job —I don't know if you'd call it a job, since I was higher than a kite most the day”—Joel sipped his drink, then looked at me guardedly—“my job was to clean off the hoses, suction cups, pumps, and to constantly check on the generator, make sure it wasn't overworked. Do you have any idea how much power is required to fuel a pump of that sort—an industrial-grade milker? Let's just say we couldn't depend on the grid. And that became a problem, as well, because all sorts of technicians had to come in, and soon they started talking to the maids, which wasn't allowed, because of investment security. 236 Plus Sam explained that outside contact could make all the women too stressed. The fathers were allowed to visit from time-to-time—those who made it up to the States—but only at carefully prescribed hours, because he didn't want to disrupt the flow of things. “Well, pretty soon the maids started complaining. They said their hours were rough, their nipples were getting sore, the pumps weren't suctioning correctly, their milk was too thin, or that their babies were crying. We called in all sorts of mechanical support. A couple of investors bailed, and Sam had to replenish them with his own private funds, which was not a good move. We also needed someone to watch all the milkmaids' kids. As a couple months passed, they were getting older. Quite a few of them were starting to walk.” “'Where the fuck are we gonna find a babysitter?' Sam asked me.” “I said, 'This is L.A. There are thousands.'” “'I know. But it's gotta be someone we trust.'” “I never thought Buzz was a wonderful idea. When we called him, he was working at a video store in south Austin. He had kept in touch with Sam from time to time, and Sam invited him out. I backed him up. We said he could crash at our place. For which, I should add, I was now paying full rent, despite living on that rat-shitted couch. Motherfucker wouldn't even let me take his bed, not when he was out with his kid, not even when he was sleeping at the compound, as he did almost every fucking night. Anyways, Buzz arrived, and he got the floor.” Buzz, last time I had seen him on Facebook, had a fu manchu mustache and a metal bar piercing his throat. “I said, 'You know, Sam, maybe he's not the best guy to watch kids.'” “'He'll be fine,' Sam replied. 'He loves children.'” “In fact, Buzz did. We got him a truckload of toys, and he spent his days—and evenings—and 237 nights, crawling on a mat with thirty-six of his friends. Yeah, it was overwhelming at first, but he just stepped out to the alley occasionally—maybe twice a night—and baked himself a little. Problem is he kept forgetting the code to the doors, or telling it to people, so Sam had to change it all the time. Eventually, he was great with the kids. The maids loved him, too. A little too much, in fact. It got to the point where none of them could nurse if Buzz wasn't hanging around. Something about him—his mustache, I think—was comforting to everyone. And for a while, things were going great. “Then one day, we got a knock at the door of the compound. I figured it was the Feds and we were fucked. Of course, Sam had previously assured me that he had taken care of all of the licenses, and what we were doing was perfectly legal. We even had a lawyer on staff. The knock, it turned out, came from a couple of cowboys. Both were wearing suits and white Stetsons.” “'I'm sorry, gentleman, this is a private facility,' said Ernesto, our security chief.” “'I understand,' said the taller one. 'We're just here to meet Sam.'” “'Sam?'” “'Your Chief Executive Officer.'” “Ernesto looked back at the floor, where thirty-six maids were rocking in synch, all entranced by the wisdom of Ellen. Above them, the white hoses pumped, and the base machine churned like an oversized, clear cement mixer. 'I'm afraid he isn't taking any visitors.'” “'Well, maybe this will change his mind.' The cowboy handed Ernesto a business card and a printed blue check, made out by the American Dairy Farmers' Association, for 65k. 'As a goodwill gesture,' one said. They shut the door and left. “Later, Sam explained to me that the farmers were trying to buy him out. They understood the threat that he posed to them. And little did I know, at the time, our milk business was booming. Sam had graced the cover of nearly every major paper in the country. Our sales were through the roof, and 238 two other factories had been set up in East Los Angeles, of which Sam was also in charge. This is why Buzz and I had been seeing him less as of late. “Initially,” Joel said, “I was sold on the merits of what we were doing. 'Just one ounce,' Sam explained to me, holding up Rosita's left tit, which was roughly the width of his hand, 'can provide enough milk to feed three preemies. That's three lives saved with every squirt.' It would go to the hospitals, Sam assured me. And sure enough, he had contracted with a local biopharm, Prolactic, to fortify the milk and sell it directly to clinics. And we had scored hundreds of deals. The hospitals loved it, because it kept their preemies out of intensive. Saved em about 10k a head, and they paid a fraction of that for the goop. Sam even got the insurance companies to cover it—or rather, Prolactic did. The problem started coming with the supply. Prolactic couldn't get enough. The milk banks were also flowing, 'but those had to be screened more carefully, not like our girls here'—Sam winked at Rosita —'and you know, when you start picking girls off the street, who knows what they'll bring: hepatitis, AIDS. Plus, who knows how long the milk's been left out? The investors want us,' Sam said, 'but we're not cranking out enough.'” “Sam said he told the investors, 'Our women aren't cows. We can't just fatten them.' He brushed Rosita's soft cheek and turned to face me, explaining the investors' response. 'Yes, but what about our competitors? Don't forget about market share, yield, return on investment. This isn't the nineties,' they said. 'We need to see revenues now.' Sam tapped the wall's painted column, which was stenciled with daisies. 'These venture types don't understand. It's about more than just dollars and cents. We're affirming the value of life.'” “For whatever reason, relations soured with Prolactic, and Sam began to seek other sectors. He started by targeting artisan cheese. Apparently, some high-end caterer in Encino wanted to buy him out. 'They could never afford us,' Sam said. But they invested heavily. Soon Wolfgang Puck became 239 intrigued, and he ushered in a new fad. Within a couple months, the maids could watch their output being melted on television, right in the hands of Rachel Ray and other celebrity chefs. All of them wanted fresh breast milk. It was impossible to put out enough. The problem was the company wasn't anywhere close to meeting the market's demand. “'I'm raising our standards,' Sam told the girls one evening from his box in the pit. He was speaking into his mic. 'For six months now, I've coddled you. And I've had to. You're all lovely girls.' Teresa, our communications officer, translated for him into Spanish. 'And I know the work here is hard.' Ellen was dancing behind him on the television sets. Sam had Ernesto turn her off. 'But the time has come for us to move forward. Production has to expand. I'm upping your doses of Pitocin, and I need 20 ounces a day from each of you, without exception. Or I'm afraid you'll have to go.'” “'Go where?' one asked him in Spanish.” “'Why, home,' Sam said.” “Nobody blinked. After that, output was heightened, but Sam hadn't counted on the long-term effects. As any dairy farmer knows,” Joel added, “overworking your stock will only get you so far. Sure enough, come October, the girls began to bleed. Not overwhelmingly, but enough that the chief medical officer raised his voice—more than a few times—and Marketing had him replaced. We thought about bringing in new girls, but that was 'expensive and difficult to manage,' Teresa said at our executive meeting, which Sam allowed me to attend.” “'We're already making kefir,' said our operations officer. 'Full supply of yogurt. Even the ice cream has thrived. Americans can't get enough of the Cherry Gobbler. Vanilla Mamilla's through the roof, and the Japanese love BabyGaga. Even Lactation Salvation's doing well. And that was before Bono's endorsement.'” “'So what's the problem?' Sam asked. 'Is the market about to turn?'” 240 “'Samuel,' Teresa smiled. 'This is why you pay me big bucks.' I didn't doubt the two of them were boinking, even though her husband was a principal investor and assistant chairman of the board. 'The problem,' she explained, 'is the market's clued in. They figure, why get the stuff from us when they can just visit the banks? They practically sell it for free. And the FDA never checks.'” “'I see,' Sam said. 'What else?'” “'Well, there's PETA, as well.'” “'What the fuck do they want?'” “'They're threatening to alert the Department of Labor. Or maybe it's Agriculture. I forget.'” “'To what?'” “'Working conditions. They say our treatment's inhumane.'” “'Inhumane!' Sam coughed. 'For fuck sake, I bought them twelve HDTV's. I make them cookies every night.'” “'Those cookies are laced, Sam.'” “'With essential nutrients and vitamins. Tell PETA to go fuck themselves.'” “This was his first main mistake. A couple weeks later, early one evening, the generator also shut down.” As Joel explained, they were up to their ankles in milk. Sam was trying to seal the hoses himself, and they were spraying everywhere. The women were screaming. Babies were floating. Buzz had to build a quick ark. For two weeks, production ceased. They managed to regroup and cut their losses, but there was still the problem of supply. The market was becoming flooded with the milk bank donations, and they had to take care of that. Joel leaned into our table. Outside the sooted window, a few strollers pushed past along Wells. He took a sip of his glass (he'd since moved to scotch), which beaded with sweat in his hand. “Now, 241 what I'm about to tell you, I tell you as a friend, and I tell it in the greatest confidence. This didn't come up at the trial. I've only told you about half of the story so far. I didn't talk about our security procedures, or the Domperidone pills in the tea. I didn't even mention our Chinese Initiative, or our deals with Dakar and Sudan. In fact, Sam wanted to take us global—even from the start. We just weren't producing the yield. So he turned to Ernesto, Buzz, and me.” Joel raised his fist to his mouth. He eyed the place carefully. “We took care of the banks.” “You mean—” Joel sipped his Chivas and coughed. “Yeah. Let's just say the Mother's Milk Bank of Southern California suffered from faulty wiring, and the police never knocked on our door.” Joel shook his glass. “Ernesto served once with Mexico's finest. And he's not the kind who would talk. Neither are you, I gather.” “Would it help you to know that I'm gay?” “I figured as much,” Joel said. “Anyways, keep going.” “So Buzz, he got a bit jittery. You know, being the governor's son. We had to ask him to leave. And he didn't want to go so quietly, so Sam asked him simply, 'How much?'” “Buzz looked at us flustered. We were in Sam's apartment one night—the apartment that Sam had permanently left.” “'How much will it take to buy your silence and to get you to walk?' Sam asked.” “Buzz pinched his throat-ring. 'Is this how you talk to a friend?'” “The answer, it turned out, was about eight million dollars and change. Although here's the best part,” Joel added. “After Sam wrote Buzz a check—for an undisclosed 'service'—Buzz just tore the check up. Didn't want it. Wanted no part of the operation, he said. He said he was going back to Austin, 242 where he was going to make a clean start.” “'Seriously, you want ten, I'll give you ten,' Sam said.” “'I don't want your money.'” “'Then go. But know this,' Sam said to Buzz, whispering. 'If anything is ever reported, anything I don't like, I have film of you and the boys.'” “'What boys?'” “'The nursery cameras,' Sam said.” “'Jesus.' Buzz left with his bong.” “Anyways, by this time, Sam was on the cover of every major magazine. You probably saw him on the news,” Joel said. “The Katie Couric interview was my favorite—the way she started holding her breast, and Sam assured her that it was natural to go through some pain. 'It's just part of being a mother,' he said. He even quoted Psalms, something like, 'Out of the mouth of babies and sucklings, God ordains strength.'” Joel continued: “Then we were named start-up of the year. Angels began to invest—or should I say, threaten to take us over. Sam said we had to clean the place up. I was bought out—for about half the amount Buzz was offered. I should have taken cash. I settled for stocks and returns, which was about the stupidest thing I could have done. But I had just seen that Facebook movie, so I thought I shouldn't cut out.” “Then one morning, when I woke in Sam's apartment, I found a note on the table that said he would be back by six and that he didn't want to see me again. 'Thanks for all your effort. Goodbye.'” “So, from what I heard,” Joel said, “Sam began making major changes. All the Mexicans were axed—sent home in vans—and they were replaced with girls from Moldova. Most of them were late teenagers and more than anxious to feed. Plus they didn't watch television, since they hadn't been 243 exposed to it as youths. Being post-Soviets, they were also disinclined to strike.” “In any case, by this point, Buzz and I had reconciled. I flew to Austin to look the guy up. I wasn't really close with anyone else, and I had enough funds coming in now from dividends that I could buy a new pad, settle down, you know, maybe finally get myself a wife. At first, Buzz nearly hit me. I bought him some drinks and we talked. A couple weeks later, we bought a flat out in Tarrytown. Sweet place, private pool, terraced lawn. “Then, get this, sometime around March, I was leaning back on a deck-chair, Buzz was afloat on a raft, and we heard a loud sputter. It was like fucking Nam. All of a sudden, this ginormous bird comes fluttering out of the sky and plops itself down on the Bermuda grass lawn. It looked like Air Force One. I thought it was the fucking president at first. A couple dudes in suits and black shades pop out. It turned out it was the Feds, and they wanted to chat.” “'I don't know anything,' I told them. Buzz reiterated this, separately. Both of us insisted on talking to lawyers, which none of the suits plainly liked. Finally—this was at the Federal Building, downtown—this Asian suit said to me, 'I'll be truthful with you guys. We know you two aren't behind this. We know what you've done, and we don't terribly care. It's nothing we can't overlook. The man we want is Sam. And he doesn't seem to be showing himself lately.'” “'What do you mean?' I asked.” “Apparently, Sam had taken a hiatus. He had since fled to Panama. Or that's what the court records said. He was still collecting dividends, somehow, at his bank in the Caymans. The Feds tracked him down. He was arrested in May. “Naturally, I got cleaned out. Buzz did, as well. Buzz's dad still had connections in Washington and a sizable collection of lawyers. A few of them went to bat for us, but it cost us everything that we had.” 244 Joel's own father, I knew, had also been a doctor, though he had long ago passed away, and his mother was living in seclusion in Florida, probably unaware of his deeds. “Neither of us was charged,” Joel said. “We turned state's evidence, said what we knew—most of it anyways—and Sam was indicted on seventeen counts, including human trafficking. There were all sorts of celebrity amicus briefs, both for and against him. PETA wanted him hung, but the organic trade groups, with whom he had apparently registered and made quite a few friends, said he was the victim. Gwyneth Paltrow spoke at his trial. Bono did, too. Sam was also a special representative to the World Health Organization. And the State of Cambodia, where I guess he was an honorary consul—whatever that means—tried to grant him diplomatic immunity. None of it worked, but he was only found guilty on a couple of charges, embezzlement and fraud. Which was a victory for the kids, Bono said. So did Kofi Annan. In fact, today, they're still using his products. Lactation Salvation was turned into bars, and it's being distributed widely by UNICEF. Not that the jury much cared. They thought he was a manipulative bastard, especially when they saw all those photos of Rosita's bloodied black tit. If only they knew about the fire—not to mention Buzz's little fling with the kids. Anyways, John, all of this probably seems ludicrous to you.” I hadn't yet sipped my drink. “But the reason I'm here now, aside from wanting to see you, is that I need your help. Sam's request. He said you know a thing or two about art.” “Yes, that's technically my job.” “Okay, then he thought you might know what this means.” Joel sighed dimly, then appraised the other tables: Drunken Irishmen mainly. A local news anchor. Two sorority types. A Japanese man with a flute of champagne. Chicago on a Saturday. “At the trial, before Sam was taken away, he handed me this.” Joel pulled out a compact disc 245 album. Madonna's Ray of Light. I opened it; the jewel case was empty, minus the back cover. “The guards seized the disc, wary of evidence, you know. They let me keep the case. And here's the thing, as he was leaving, Sam whispered something to me. I'm not sure what he said, but I think it was”—Joel leaned down to the table—“'Epitome of a diva.'” “A diva?” Joel smiled. “No idea what it means. But I do know this: eight million in embezzled funds are missing.” “The money he set aside for Buzz?” “Yeah. Well, apparently he wasn't as intent on fucking over his friends as we thought. He actually planned to pay him. Just never got around to it, I guess.” “And the Feds never found it?” “No trace. They scoured the Bahamas, casinos, his bank accounts in Seychelles. Sam was a well-wired man. He knew what he was doing. I mean, he had no fucking clue how to run a breast milk factory, let alone a business, but if there's anything he did know, it's how to hide a stash.” “And so you think this disc-case holds the key to eight million dollars?” Joel looked around him. He pushed back his drink. “I don't know. I have to get going.” “Where to?” “For all I know, the Feds are listening in.” “Sit down,” I said, grabbing his arm, which didn't have much effect. He eyed me vigorously. “Look, if you ever find that money—I don't know how—but if you should happen upon it—and Sam thought you would; he knew you were smart—do me a favor, okay?” “What, share it with you?” 246 “No. I don't want a cent. But help out his family. I think his wife and kid are half-starved. That fucker didn't leave them a dime. Not like he would have, anyways.” “It's good to see you, Joel.” “By the way, that whole thing about the fire?” “Yeah?” “I lied.” 3 That night, I regrouped at Jack's place, Jack being my longtime ex. He and I were no longer physical, but we needed each other as friends. It's hard to explain, but he and I had developed something of an emotional connection, which came to fruition once in the Northwestern Library stacks, then gradually dwindled but never petered out. We would visit each other sometimes, merely for solace and consolation. I didn't share with him the details of my morning, but I put on Madonna's “Ray of Light”. Jack, who's black, and works as an archivist at Northwestern (where I completed my doctorate in early Renaissance art), began bobbing his head back and forth, alongside me on the sofa. He was lit rather strangely by the sallow glow of his lamp. His place was a sparsely furnished two-flat on Lawrence. Nursing a variety of additions, he often struggled to pay rent. “I don't understand why fags always listen to Madonna,” he sneered. Then he sipped his Chablis. Jack never drank wine, which I took as a sign that he was either committed to someone, and therefore altered in his habits, or turning over a new leaf, neither of which boded well for my weekend. “I can't handle this honky shit.” He was the same man. We cuddled, and I fell asleep in his arms. Around midnight, possibly two, I was woken by Jack slipping out the front door. He obviously 247 had other plans, about which he hadn't cared to inform me. I couldn't hold it against him. Coping with a four-four course load—at three separate colleges—I had put on major weight. That Thanksgiving break was my first vacation in months. Previously, I had come out to my parents, and they were surprisingly accepting, though none of our visits were warm. I lay in bed a while, surveying the darkening space, the ignominious plight in which I had found myself this evening: hitting up an old friend for a bed and a hug, and possibly some life advice, if he'd give it—I hadn't confided to Joel that none of my jobs were tenure-track, much less equipped with benefits. And here I was, thirty-six years old, drunk beyond belief—I was never one to abstain— watching the stucco wall spin. I put on Madonna. Zephyr in the sky at night I wonder Do my tears of mourning sink beneath the sun Holy fuck. I sat up and slapped myself. No. I played the song again. And again. And again. He hadn't. He hadn't done it. He hadn't bequeathed me eight million dollars. But I knew I had to look. I called up Joel the next morning, promptly at nine a.m. I had wanted to call at two, when I had this revelation, but it would do no good, because the museum didn't open until ten. Groggily, Joel answered. “Get the fuck down here,” I said. He picked me up an hour-and-a-half later, as if he didn't know what was at stake. I introduced Joel to Jack, and Jack's newest partner, a lanky white boy like myself, and to whom I hadn't exactly ingratiated myself (they had suggested at some point, possibly around six, when I was pacing around 248 the kitchen like a madman, reciting “Ray of Light”, that I join them in their bed for a threesome. As if I'd reduce myself to that. Okay, as if I'd tell Joel about it later). I said we were just friends. Then, twenty minutes later, as we were barreling south on LSD (not the drug, woefully), I said, “When we get to the museum, we should go in separately. I'll meet you at the Chinese Art.” The only reason I suggested it is that it's the only part of the museum that's never visited, and thus we could determine if we were being tracked. I met him beside a jade-colored stoneware bowl, which was gorgeously glazed and of the late North Song Dynasty. Joel said it looked like a clam. I always hated the Art Institute, not because of the crowds, which were always less than Manhattan's, but the art, which, apart from the Eastern, was tacky at best. It made the Getty look classy. When we determined that no one was behind us—or if they were, they were clever enough that our effort to lose them was in vain—I directed him to the Northern European Wing, to the section on prints and drawings, which was predictably empty, as well, minus a few moody college girls. “I don't understand,” Joel said. “What the fuck does this have to do with Madonna?” “You'll see.” I led him down to the Dürers, a respectable assortment, I thought, given the motley collection of Turners downstairs, not to mention—don't let me say it—Monet's. “There.” I pointed to the roughly four-by-six inch wood panel, which was modestly framed and featured a sun-lit seated Madonna nursing a cherub-looking Christ. Huge slashes of light emerged from the sun at her back, and Jesus was sucking her teat. “What's it mean?” “Do my tears of mourning sink beneath the sun?” “What?” “You're obviously not a fan of Madonna.” 249 “You're obviously not too straight.” I grabbed him by the shoulder and hugged him. “It means we're going to be rich.” “How will we afford a flight to Vienna?” he asked me, as he drove us to O'Hare. “You have a credit card, right?” “I've made more than a few bad investments in my life. This better not be one of them.” “Trust me.” I smiled. The flight over was long, and I didn't care to explain. I also worried that he could ditch out on me. Not that I didn't trust him. Exactly. But he was paying for the flight. Not having slept in twelve hours, we took the train to downtown Vienna, then hopped the 3A bus to Albertina Station (if being an adjunct in art can teach a man anything, it's how to ride public transit in Europe.) Finally, we arrived at the Romanesque marble museum. Joel looked as if he'd just fought a war. “Wake up,” I said. “You'll be rich.” Inside, we were accosted by Austrian peasants posing as guards. When they saw my Jewish surname, they paid their usual respect, as if marveled that I was alive. In fact, the guard let us in ten minutes before closing, which I've never known a Germanic type to do. We wound through the Old Master galleries, passing by priceless Brueghels and a couple horrid impressionist landscapes which someone had evidently loaned. I guess even the Austrians have bills to pay. “Where are we going?” Joel asked. “Valhalla.” Finally, we arrived at the Dürers. The woodcutting gleamed like some well-chiseled meteor. “Didn't we just see this?” said Joel. I'll admit it looked similar to the one we had seen in Chicago. “No. Now tell me again, what did 250 Sam tell you as they were leading him out of the court?” “'Epitome of a diva.'” As he said it, he noticed the inscription, which was carved atop the oak panel. “How's your Latin?” I asked. He did his best to pronounce what was written. “Epitome in divae parthenices mari ae historium ab Alberto D'vero.” Dürer, I corrected him. “The V's pronounced like a U.” “I took Spanish.” “Uh-huh.” “It helped with the maids.” “Do you know what this means?” “Not a clue.” “Literally, it's 'An Epitome of the Story of the Divine Virgin Mary.' “So why would he bring us here?” “That,” I said, “is a good question.” I surveyed the walls, which were oddly pastel-hued, though thankfully windowless. “Not sure.” I moved closer to the panel and studied the accompanying plaque. A pimpled guard beseeched me to move backwards. “Danke schoen,” I said. What a disgusting tongue. “Do me a favor,” I said to Joel. “I want you to walk over to the next hall.” They were having a Max Ernst retrospective. God help them. “And I want you to pull down your pants. That, or do something obscene.” “You're kidding?” “For eight million dollars, you can go to jail.” Reluctantly, he agreed. Then, clad in his Burberry parka and sagging blue jeans, he strutted into 251 the other gallery and proceeded to unclasp his belt. He watched me from afar. I nodded. He was standing beside some surrealist painting of a horse, and a little sprinkling of body fluid wouldn't have done it much harm. He removed his dick. I also couldn't help but noticing, as I often have, that weightlifting and girth tend not to correspond. Trying to post bail for a person in Austria is extremely hard to do, especially when you don't have an up-to-date passport, are severely lacking in funds, and can't definitively say how you know the detained. Even worse, Joel was already on file with Interpol—leave it to the Feds—and the Austrian police wouldn't release him. I had to leave him in the country. This was just as well, as I didn't want to jeopardize the loot. As he was being arrested and summarily dragged from the museum by twelve guards half his age, all of whom were stronger, I might add, if only because standing in a museum for six hours a day helps you anticipate these things and gives you incalculable reservoirs of strength (I worked at the Met for two summers), I gently reached for the etching, tapped its wood frame, felt behind it with my hand, and came up with the clue I'd seen seeking. It was a museum postcard displaying Dürer's Young Hare, a curio the museum would assume had been dropped. The postcard was unaltered, except for a Latin verse and a number on the back: vos et irrumabo 94 I laughed. I recognized the verse immediately. It was from the first line of Catullus 16. Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo. Irrumabo means “to suckle” in Latin, although it was a little more vulgar here. I will sodomize you and face-fuck you pussy Aurelius and catamite Furius 252 you who think, because my poems are sensitive, that I have no shame. I had read the work countless times, mainly as a freshman at Amherst, holed up in my dorm, agonizing over my choice to study art, and, in fact, other boys. Sam understood this. What a wise man. Back in Chicago, at Jack's place, as he was banging away in his room, I clicked on his laptop and did a quick Google search for vos et irrumabo 94. Nothing came up, apart from the bawdy poem. Then it occurred to me: 94, that was the year we had graduated from high school. It took a few minutes, but then I clicked on Gmail and entered the following log-in name: cautullus94 Sure enough, that email address was taken. I tried a few passwords. Okay, more than a few. I was up for most of the night and had to switch computers when Google Security blocked out my IP address. Opening up Jack's lover's laptop, and stealing a signal from down the street, I finally cracked it with the following password: Milk. That's right. 100% USDA approved. Inside the account was a message from Sam: Dear friend, if you have come to this address, you have followed me correctly. I applaud you for that. Now there is one last challenge you must face. That is the one of Roman worth. Sapiens omnia sua secum portat. This, I knew, meant “a wise man takes everything he owns with himself,” meaning that all material wealth is transient, but mental values remain, including, presumably, wisdom. Curious words from a man wanted in four countries and indicted in at least seven states. Then the email continued: Nevertheless, should you seek to indulge, this is the address. It listed a bank in the Caymans, a passcode, and key. It didn't take long for me to act. I copied 253 down the info, deleted the message, and bade goodbye to Jack. He gave me a warm hug, one that was well-meaning, I supposed. “Good luck with the rent,” I said. Then at a coffeeshop on Kedzie, which rented a desktop, I transferred eight million dollars to my bank. It took 24 hours, as international banking requires. I slept at the “El” station that night, and I supposed I wasn't the first lecturer in art to have done so. In the morning, having spent my last dime on a Dunkin' Donuts bagel, I closed my account at Chase. Naturally, one cannot withdraw eight million in cash, but bearer bonds cut it, and those were stored in the bank. I took a few with me and cashed them in to buy a flight. In Los Angeles, I looked up Sam's wife, who wasn't easy to find—apparently she'd been avoiding the media. Finally, Joel, who was furious with me when I called and got through to his cell, reluctantly offered her address. “A little prison is good for you,” I told him. He was flying back tonight from Vienna. When I explained to him my plans, rather cryptically at that, he understood. 4 I have always thought those who live in California nurture insupportable ambitions. Like Titian, or some of the greats of Rococo. Men whose reach must always exceed their grasps. I admire them for this and pity them the same. Sam had inhabited a fortified estate near Claremont. His home skirted the San Gabriel foothills like some medieval castle, except the place was all glass and surrounded by glistening lawns. I had seen the pictures in magazines—they popped up here and there on the net. It was a Gehry house, apparently. If nothing else, he had taste. 254 His wife and daughter, of course, occupied a one-bedroom flat in north Santa Monica. It was in one of those lemon-colored, peeling, motel-style buildings that seemingly extend to infinity, balconied out front and featuring an interior view of a wall. She was nice enough when I knocked. “What the fuck do you want?” “I'm John.” I tried to speak with a lisp. I didn't normally. This didn't warm her. “I'm a friend of Sam's.” “Good for fucking you,” she said through the peephole. “How can I help you?” “Samuel's friend Joel said you lived at this address, and you'll have to excuse me for bothering you at this hour”—it was ten a.m., the sun a fat ball in the sky—“but I have some important information to share.” “If it's about his funeral, I don't want to hear.” “What?” “His funeral.” “Are we speaking of the deceased?” “I thought you were providing the information.” I was still parked at her door. She hastily opened it a crack, and I caught a glimpse of her couch, which looked like something she'd dragged from Sam's cell, and an overworked Ikea bookshelf, which was filled to the brim with the Standard Edition of Freud. “Can I come in?” “No.” I glanced above the chain. “Sam killed himself last night.” “I'm sorry to hear that.” 255 “Who are you exactly?” “His friend.” The door slammed in my face. Thirty seconds later, it reopened. She was wearing a peach bathrobe, loosely gripping her daughter's hand. “This is Rumina. What did you say your name was?” I seated myself on the bedraggled sofa and helped myself to a plate of cold lettuce, which his ex-wife graciously served. Apparently, she was on a raw food diet. She made me look thin by comparison. “I'm terribly sorry to hear about Samuel.” I entertained visions of him hanging in his cell, noosed with a shoelace perhaps. Dental floss. Sheets. “Apparently, he was trying to escape.” “I thought it was a low-security prison.” “It was.” “Do the guards carry guns?” “Apparently they do. Anyways, I suspect he was plainly suicidal. He was set to get out in six months. His parole would have come through. But he was wanted by the Mexican mob. He owed them quite a bit of debt. Plus, all his legal fees. His castle was foreclosed on. That's what I know of it, anyways. I don't really care. I've barely spoken to the schmuck.” The tense she used wasn't past. “You're sure he's gone, then?” “That's what they said. I guess we won't know until we see the body.” I wouldn't have put it past Sam to fake his own death, although in this case, I doubted it, if only because he seemed not to have other plans. What else could a man set out for in life? He'd already met Warren Buffet, toured with Bono, and claimed a seat at the U.N. If he preferred cold and despondent anonymity, as the rest of us enjoyed, he was certainly welcome to it. I doubt he had fled. He was 256 probably gelling in the morgue. Even if he had paid off the guards and somehow forged his own death certificate, we would never see him again. Of that much I was sure. “So what news do you bring?” she said. Her daughter had powered up a video game console. “She's trying to distract herself. I was rather blunt about it when it happened. There's no point in repression,” she said, with a sardonic grin. “I was up all night trying to explain to her, and we were both in tears, to the extent people can grieve over a person like Sam.” “Do you mind if I smoke?” She looked at her daughter. “Yes.” “Very well, then.” I put the cigars back in my coat. “These are Cohibas.” “Am I supposed to be impressed?” “Sometimes, my dear, a cigar's just a cigar.” I crossed my legs on the sofa, which smelled like a morgue. “You're talking to the wife of the deceased now. Fruitcake?” I thought she was calling me that, but she was actually offering me cake. “No, thanks. Listen, about Sam, there's this little thing that he left.” “Hold on one sec.” She stood and parted the blinds. Outside, television trucks were accruing. I had passed a couple on my way in. “The grieving party,” she said. “I suppose the motherfucker's folks will come, too. Anyways, what did you say he left?” “Just a couple cigars.” He was always a better man than me. And I can always live with myself. “And one more thing,” I said, returning my plate to the sink. “If Sam's friend Joel calls, tell him I left for Vienna.” With that, I caught the first flight out of Burbank, intent on buying some art. I later sent her a 257 check for a couple hundred grand—a consolation prize, call it. And a Warhol original, to the extent such things can exist. As for the factory, I heard it later reopened under more favorable terms. Rachel Ray still endorses it, and the place has gone global, but breast milk has lost its appeal. Perhaps a few more infants are healthy. That at least Sam would respect. As for me, well, I won't disclose my present locale, but suffice it to say that Joel and I are doing just fine. Our pool's been replaced with a spa, and we've sworn off of dairy, at least of the human kind. 258 THE HIT Three weeks after his discharge, Ivan Kopelev was summoned to the Hunan Palace in Rehovot, twenty minutes south of Tel Aviv. Sporting jeans and a ripped t-shirt, as befitted the young veteran, and one who had spent the last twenty days frying his brain in the Sinai, Ivan exited the shuttle van and located the sparsely lit nook, which was just off of Herzl. It stood adjacent to a cleaners and a bright Russian bookstore, which was festooned with Novy-God lights. Inside, the restaurant was furnished with tasseled crepe lanterns and an oily blue fish tank that glowed. Towards the back, a Georgian-looking creature in a V-neck and suit was chewing on a seared hunk of meat. Two associates hunched at his side, one sipping ginger tea, the other thumbing his phone. Neither looked up as Ivan slowly approached. “Zdravstvuite,” Ivan said. He regretted having not dressed up. The Georgian kept chewing. A hazy green stare lit his face. “Sit down,” said one of the associates in Russian, still typing into his phone. Ivan sat down. He was surprised they didn't frisk him. “You're the friend of Anatoly?” asked the texter. Ivan just sighed. The Georgian picked at his teeth. “Did you come here alone?” Ivan nodded slightly. “Tell us about your service.” 259 “All bullshit,” said Ivan. “You know how it is. Twenty-four months on the line. Nine months of training. One in a marksmanship course. Two more in sniper's. Never did commander's school. Mostly I just scratched my ass, sat around a lot. Killed a couple people. Beat off.” The Georgian smiled faintly. “How are you with guns?” “Fourth in my course,” Ivan said. “The rest were all Russians.” “That's not too bad.” He rubbed his shaved scalp, which was knotted like a wanton. “We need you for the next seven weeks. If you don't fuck that up, there could be more. Disobey, and you know how things work. You want some glass noodles?” Ivan glanced at the wall. Inside the lit fish tank, he faintly descried, and would later swore he saw, what looked like a thumb resting on its white gravel floor. “No, thanks.” Anatoly, his friend, had received a medical discharge seven months earlier, and he was still touring Cambodia. Ivan hadn't heard from him since and doubted he would ever come back. Ivan trusted no one in Israel, much less his platoon, but Anatoly had a certain panache, a certain swagger and strut that betrayed his basic intent: to get rich, get laid, and try to stay alive, in roughly that order. Having a family, he said once, would be nice. There wasn't much to him, and Ivan respected that. Ivan, for his part, still wrote science fiction. He read it avidly as well. Finding that he had little talent for penning it, however, he set his sights on other things. The first was bad hashish in Dahab. The second was diving, which he had never done terribly well, though he did conquer the Blue Hole—the most lethal dive—after ingesting a week's worth of coke. Finally, he had survived his military service, which was more than he could say for some. He regretted this choice of profession, but he also thought maybe it would give him a story to tell. At the very least it was better than enrolling at the Technion and getting a job in high-tech. The last 260 thing he wanted to do was follow his brother's path: bachelor's in computers, master's in transistors, part-time gig at Intel, relocate to Silicrap Valley and squander away life with 2.4 kids in a house you could barely afford, only coming back yearly for Pesach, or whenever your parents fell sick. Ivan hadn't yet told his parents about this, but he suspected they'd understand. The mob had a certain clout back in Russia, more than a respectable job. In Saint Petersburg, his father had been a ranking oncologist. Here he washed floors in the mall. The next evening, pulling up in his family's used Citroën, which barely cut a wake in the rain, Ivan arrived at a flooded construction site. Ringed with a chain-link fence, it spanned a building-sized lot on a ficus-lined street near downtown. He checked the address, which the texter had sent him, and ascertained this was the place. A bored-looking Kushi in a slicker and boots was huddled against a low wall. He'd already spotted Ivan as the Citroën sloshed to a stop. “Ee-wan?” he murmured, unlocking the fence. Ivan extended a hand. The black didn't shake it. His eyes darted over the lot. Then he reached in his slicker and produced a pack of Winstons. Come, he said with his chin. They rounded some poured cement walls, which were about elbow-height and must have spanned the foundation. Scorched charcoal heaps littered the ground. Then they stopped beside a grader, a four-wheeled, mud-covered truck, and the Ethiopian knelt by its cab. Raising his slicker, he unzipped a pink fanny pack, revealing a Parkerized Glock. “You know how to use this?” “Yes,” Ivan lied. “If any Arabs come by, don't pull this out. They're probably just getting their shit. If they're Jews, though, or anybody else, make sure you keep them away. Most of the time they're just locals or buyers trying to see what's up.” He cupped his Bic with his palm. “You see, a whole bunch of people 261 bought units here already, they don't understand the delay. You tell em you're security, and you don't know shit. That's all you say, you don't know.” “What if the cops come?” His smoke drifted wetly. “You won't have to worry about that.” *** Later that evening, and across the street from this lot, beyond the arched canopy of banyans, a bougainvillea hedge, and a pear tree soaking up rain, a young woman bolted up the stairs of her building: a four-story walkup with a limestone facade and a ground-level, open garage. She was hefting a backpack of plastic containers, which were filled to the brim with moghrabieh, maluhiya, lentils, fatayer, and pretty much anything else her zealous mother could concoct. In truth, it was about twelve days' worth of lunches, but she always told her mother four. Why Nadia didn't cook, she didn't know, though she didn't care to dwell on it presently, because she was seven minutes late for her show. She slammed her door, scurried to the couch, and clicked on Channel Two, where Yellow Peppers was playing. The show depicted a family struggling to raise an autistic child, and it was incredibly hammy, she knew, but also close to home, since Nadia taught special ed. Just as she'd ditched her coat, snagged the remote, and plopped herself down on the cushions, the lights in her apartment flashed out. As did her television. She was left with a tiny green eye, like a discarded caper, peering out from her screen. “Kuss uhtak,” said Nadia, meaning “fucker” in Arabic. The power was out again. It must have been the Romanian hag across the hall, who always insisted on vacuuming late at night. 262 Groping through the dark, nearly tripping over her backpack, which was leaking along the tile floor, Nadia lighted her way with her phone. Her mother, she saw, had called twice, which was surprisingly little considering she had left only four hours back, and only spoken to her twice while driving along the winding expanse of Route 4, risking her life to placate the woman, as she seemed to do every night. Her mother had accosted her, as usual, for being single at age twenty-eight, which was more than a crime in her eyes. It was a veritable abhorrence, and attack upon God, and though no one in their family was religious or had been to a church in years, apart from her niece's baptism in Jaffa, her parents harassed her nonstop. Their latest suggestion was a cousin in Rameh with a marble kitchen and bath. Nadia thought she'd sooner cut her wrists. And where was the fucking power? There were five other units in the buildings, yet she didn't hear any complaints. Was it a Jewish holiday, she wondered. Maybe they'd all gone to war. Downstairs in the garden, she tried to locate the breaker. A full lake had formed by the stairs, ruining her Asics, which she'd need for Pilates tomorrow night. Treading through moonlight, she could smell the pear blossoms, night jasmine and sage, the lemon verbena and thyme. It all reminded her strangely of church, where she thought she should go more, even though she didn't believe. Passing along the side wall, she wished her parents could see her—and know how independent she was. Fuck them if they thought she'd need a man for this. Then she tripped and fell on her wrist. She heard herself shriek; she thought that was her and realized, as she fell, that it was. When she opened her eyes again, she was kneeling in mud, her sweater vest soaked and her blue jeans—her good ones—ruined. Fuck. “You okay?” someone asked. A young man trotted up. He had ruffled blond hair, and a cigarette bobbed on his lips. He didn't look like one of her neighbors, though she'd only met one or two. 263 Regarding her briefly, he flicked his smoke through the trees, where it arced and died with a hiss. Suddenly, she found herself rising, being pulled up by the hand. “Thank you,” she said, a bit embarrassed. His chin was stubbly, his lips stained and chapped, and he was wearing a bulky pink fanny pack beneath his soaked army fleece. Yet he wasn't bad-looking, albeit shorter than her. “Name's Ivan,” he said, digging through his fleece, retrieving a smoke and his lighter. “I'm Nad...Neta,” she said, using the Hebrew version. “You want one?” he asked through a flame. “Why not?” She'd never smoked in her life. He lit it for her, as men do in movies. She slowly breathed in, and she coughed. Fortunately, he didn't see. His eyes were scanning the street. “You gonna be okay here?” “I guess. I was just trying to find the elec—“ “Whole damn block is out. Must be a line down,” he muttered, trotting off through the rain. Back inside her apartment, with a candle burning, her mouth fully rinsed, and her Asics strung up on a line, she watched him through the slats of her shutters. He was leaning on a fence across from her building, smoking methodically, watching every car pass. She had noticed that for weeks now young men had been lingering by this construction site, though nothing seemed to go up. A few times she'd heard some workers arguing but hadn't paid much heed. Tonight though, leaning on her sofa, trying to conceal herself, she found herself a bit attracted to this person, whoever he was, in the rain. *** 264 His shift was endless. So was each subsequent night's. In the army he could play Tetris on his phone, text, or even read. His greatest fear had been a disciplinary sentence. Here, his sentence was death. Maybe not. But he knew better than to fuck with the mob. His third night in, shortly after midnight, when he was thinking about nothing at all, as he'd trained himself to do in such settings, just drowsing and watching the night, he heard footsteps along the curb. Plenty of cars had splashed by him, but very few people on foot. Unzipping the fanny pack, he softly fingered the gun. A hooded figure clopped up to the fence. Unlatching his safety, Ivan knelt behind the low wall. “Who's there?” he shouted, trying not to sound afraid. “Ivan?” said a soft voice. It was the woman he'd helped pick up. Cowled in an enormous puffy ski jacket, her shiny face beaded with rain, she was carrying a fogged-up plastic container. “I just wanted to thank you,” she said. He rose and opened the fence. Her brown eyes were glinting, her long lashes curled, her cheekbones narrow and ridged. Turkish or Georgian, he thought. “Have you ever had fatayer?” she asked. He accepted the container, which was filled pirozhok, or some flaky pastries, garnished with lemon and mint. One steamed and cracked in his mouth. “Not bad.” “I hope you like minced meat.” “I ain't a vegetarian.” “What are you doing out here?” “Security,” he shrugged. “These are really good.” “Well, if you want more, you know where I live. Just up on the second floor. And I suppose you could stand guard from up there.” Then she bit her lip softly, as if embarrassed by what she had said. “Thanks, but I—” 265 “I gotta go,” she said, turning, nearly tripping over the fence. *** Here she was, a virgin at age twenty-eight. And she'd just offered herself to a man. Not exactly offered, concretely. But when you're an Arab woman, and you live alone, and you invite a man to your home, you're basically saying do with me as you please. For all she knew, he could have knifed her. And perhaps that was part of the appeal. She continued to watch him that night. And the next one as well. She noticed he stayed until dawn, sometimes until she left for work. Others paced by: more Russians, a black. None as good- looking as him. They were mostly older, hairy and fat, wearing tracksuits and tropical shirts. The following Thursday morning, as she was backing out of her drive, clutching her coffee and fretting over her commute, she saw him trotting down the sidewalk, brushing the rain from his hair. For whatever reason, she decided to follow him, even though she'd be late. She saw him round the corner on Ya'akov, fanny pack and all, and stop outside of a shop. She figured he was heading into the bright Russian bookstore, but then he entered the Chinese restaurant, where she'd never seen anyone go. Its front door was curtained. Its sign said CLOSED. A health warning plastered the door. She double-parked. She called her head teacher. “I'm sicker than hell,” she explained. Finally he emerged again twenty minutes later. She ducked down, trying to conceal herself, not sure why she was here. Her stomach was growling. Her mother had called. Behind her, traffic was backed up a whole block. A policeman had already threatened to ticket her. “Dumb Arab,” he'd said, 266 stamping off. Across the street, Ivan was searching his pockets. Suddenly, he saw her and stopped. Her coffee went flying. Her phone rang again. A dozen cars anxiously honked. *** The fucker hadn't paid him. And he probably wouldn't, Ivan knew. He was simply guarding day in, day out. And for what? To get arrested? Or killed? “This is your test,” the associate said, still typing away on his phone. “We wanna see how well you behave.” “This is bullshit,” said Ivan. “I've been freezing my nuts off.” “Give it another week.” “Fuck that. I'm going diving.” He rose and stormed out of the place. He didn't even bother to glance at the fish tank, with its rotting little member inside. Outside on the curb, beneath the wet sun, Ivan realized he'd signed a death warrant. One didn't curse or walk out on the mob. What was he thinking? How stupid. As he reached for his cigarettes, who did he see, but Neta inside of her car. She was watching him avidly, as she'd been doing all week. She was obviously connected as well. And he should have know better. She was a Georgian, and one who dressed quite well. Earlier, he had seen her talking to a cop. This whole fucking town was aligned. But why was she here now, skulking like that, slinking down in her car? They must have put the hit on. That's all he could figure. Maybe she would do it herself. And he had to give them credit, tapping a woman, which was about the last thing he'd expect. 267 He considered fleeing. But where would he go? He doubted he would get very far. He thought about shooting her square in the head. But the cop was still up the street. Gravely, he approached her. She lowered her window. “Are you gonna do me right here?” he asked. She smiled darkly. “Let's go to my place.” He realized he couldn't run. *** Inside her Aveo, they rode in silence. Neither one muttered a word. She saw that he was sweating and shivering lightly. She figured it must be the food. Back at her place, where she hesitantly took him, she quietly led him upstairs. Outside the Romanian was sweeping the landing. She curtly avoided her eyes. Fuck her, thought Nadia. Someone around here should have fun. Unlocking her door, Nadia saw that Ivan kept gripping the handrail. Maybe he was nervous, like her. She'd had men over a couple times before, though things had barely advanced. Both of them were Christian, from her own village, and disinclined to do anything bad, if only because they knew her reputation preceded her, and her clan was as large as her town. This man, however, was even more frightened. He slowly traipsed in, pausing at the threshold, his eyes flitting over the room. And he kept digging around inside of his fanny pack. Maybe he'd forgotten a condom. “Don't worry,” she said, gripping his arm. “I've got all sorts of protection.” He winced. 268 “You know, it looks like you could stand to loosen up a bit. Why don't I fix you something? Here, have a seat.” She patted her sofa. “And you better not go anywhere.” In the kitchen she poured two glasses of sherry and cut hers with water and ice. “You like it neat?” she yelled through the hall. “I have a feeling you're a straight shooter.” No answer. “If not,” she hollered, “I could put you on ice.” She sliced up a couple of lemons. In the living room, she found him perched on the sofa. She tried to hand him his drink. But he was clutching his fanny pack, bobbing back and forth. His eyes were glazed, nearly red. “You must have eaten something awful,” she said. “You gotta be careful with Asian.” “I don't want do this.” “What?” she said. “I don't want to go through with this here.” “What?” “You know, hit you,” he said. “Or have to get whacked. I've barely even gotten involved.” “That's okay,” she said, drawing down the shutters. “We don't have to do anything at all.” Then she set down her glass, winked at him gently, and slowly unbuttoned her shirt. 269 STICK-LIGHT In December of 2004, I was among some twenty Americans, all of us Jewish, to varying degrees, who had volunteered to fight for Israel. As I look back, it seems to me that we were fairly unique, the twenty of us, in that there wasn't a real fighter among us. A number had been taunted as kids or had captained the debate team, and most bore the typical Jewish physique: scrawny build, curly hair, bad skin. Some had worked out at gyms, but it hadn't much changed their temperaments. The irony is that when we found ourselves assigned to an infantry base, where we were to undergo basic training, alongside three hundred conscripted Israelis, we were hardly alone in these traits. Here it was, the vaunted Israeli Defense Forces, and barely anyone could do a dozen pushups, much less fire a gun. For better or for worse, I had attended summer camp as a boy in the northern woods of Wisconsin, where the gentiles taught me to shoot. In the IDF, I was soon promoted to marksman, and I became as much an object of fascination among the Israelis as I had been among the gentiles at camp, where I had had to explain, however woefully, why I wasn't attending the Sunday morning worship in the lodge. That December was a cold one, with a seemingly endless rain. We had just completed our training and were awaiting deployment to the line, so for one month we guarded a base in Neve Yaakov, a pine-studded settlement in Jerusalem's east half, which also housed Central Command. Ostensibly a general worked there, though we never saw the man. We simply blew on our hands, perched inside the steel lookouts, shivering away in the gloom. I imagine the conditions in solitary 270 aren't much worse. About the only solace I had was books, which I read in secret beneath the dull glow of my cellphone. One was Nine Stories by Salinger, which I didn't much like, the other a tattered volume of poems by e.e. cummings, including my favorite, “the bigness of cannon”: I have seen all the silence full of vivid noiseless boys at Roupy i have seen between barrages, the night utter ripe unspeaking girls. War in the trenches was evidently different from this; we had lost one man to suicide already, and several more would be dead soon in Lebanon, but the war as we knew it was itinerant, more or less random, and completely without logic or cause. Men simply guarded, went on arrests, staged patrols or raids, and, as we were soon to discover, got shot in the head late at night, or while walking back from a bathroom, or carrying a carton of food. In Jenin, one man, a guy I disliked, took a mortar in the chin while losing at Halo 2. No one shut the thing off for weeks. They just left it on pause, as if believing that he was frozen within the stalled screen. Around the third week at Neve Yaakov, some artillerists arrived, and we were given a weekend leave. One of my platoonmates, Scott, a bulky teen from Los Angeles, who had recently failed out of 271 USC, invited me to stay at his apartment in Jerusalem, for which his parents helped pay the rent. I took him up on the offer, since I myself lived in an army-subsidized cell on a molding kibbutz thirty miles west of the city. He lived with another soldier, Mike, an American stoner who had also volunteered and, like him, was trying to get his life straight. We were all planning to go out for drinks that evening and pick up some girls, which they seemed somewhat regularly to do. Not being the flirting type, I bowed out around five and headed over to the Kotel—or the Wall, as Americans call it—to try and find a meal. As any freeloading foreigner in Jerusalem knows, dozens of families congregate around the Western Wall after dusk, inviting upstanding youth—mostly dressed in jackets and hats—to join them in their homes for a warm Shabbat meal. Mainly it's a chance to preach to them or bring them into the fold, if they haven't been swayed enough already. Personally, I just missed my mother's warm matzah ball soup. After making my peace at the Wall—God, please don't kill me—I loitered by the fountain, decked out in my service dress uniform and jacket, along with my emerald beret. The first man who approached me wore a typical Old City getup: pressed suit, wide hat, shiny galoshes, and a neatly trimmed beard, which he stroked occasionally while sizing up those he'd invite. He nodded to me and another, a Black Hat, mid-thirtyish, in a double-breasted suit, who might well have been homeless but had certainly dressed for the meal. “Yossi,” said the host, shaking our hands. Then he rushed us back through the dark, along the wet alley-stones, beside the flooding entrails and stomped carrots of the souk. We climbed some winding steps, ascending what looked like a medieval grotto, until we arrived at the warmly lit cave. The door was ajar, and we could smell cumin, or nutmeg. “Please, come in,” he said in Hebrew, though inside, English was being spoken: a woman was screaming at her kids. The apartment was your typical, cramped, two-bedroom affair with slat shutters, 272 cloth couches, and dozens of trays all covered in tin foil and softly ticking on heaters. We all pressed around the table—twelve of us in total, like Christ at his supper. Yossi mouthed prayers while his wife kept berating the kids, not all of whom, I gathered, were hers. A few other relatives glared at me. I pretended to nod along. One girl, who had a beautiful, tender, young countenance, kept watching me from the end. She couldn't have been twelve. Her breasts hadn't yet formed, yet she had that peculiar curvature in her cheeks, and a dimple in her chin, and a faint spark in her eyes that marked her as strangely adult. She was the only one who didn't sing—not the brachot, nor the hymns. Throughout the salad course, she didn't talk. She just looked at me guardedly, avoiding eye contact, it seemed. “David—you said your name was David, yes?” Yossi glanced at me from across the table, one hand hoisting a drumstick, the other pouring out Schnapps. “I see you're serving in the Nahal,” he said in English. I nodded. “The Stick-Lights,” he said, referring to my glow-stick-colored beret, from which our brigade had acquired its nickname. “How long do you have left?” “Twenty-two months.” “God-willing, he'll be safe,” said his wife, a thick, pale figure in a snood, who was feeding her youngest. “You know, Daddy was in the Paratroopers,” said the daughter, the first words she'd spoken that night. “Esther,” said the mother, scornfully, “Daddy doesn't talk about that.” I wasn't sure if she was challenging me with the comment, since the Paratroopers were more prestigious than the Nahal. It was also about the last thing I'd expect of her father, given his frail, 273 business-suited frame. Yossi then explained, somewhat hesitantly, that he had come from Brooklyn as a teen, lived on a kibbutz up north, and only become religious after serving in “the war”—Lebanon, I presumed. “He fought with valor,” said the daughter. “He even has a medal—” “Enough.” Yossi kept pouring us Schnapps while his wife kept feeding us food—mountains of chicken and fish, even the packaged carrot salad, which was soaked in brine and yet somehow tasted delicious. It must have gone well with the Schnapps. “Besides,” Yossi added, “the army was a lot different back then. We didn't evict other Jews.” He must have been referring to the recent pullout from Gaza. Beside him, the homeless man drunkenly grinned. Before I was finished, Esther and some others excused themselves from the table. As she bounded off, I noticed that her body was changing—not so much in her chest, but in the firming of her hips, which clung to her charcoal-gray, ankle-length skirt, and in the stiffening of her posture, which was better than that of most of my platoon at review. She had a certain grace to her, too, as she moved, that was well beyond her years and like something out of old movies. Later, as Yossi preached to us, alternately recounting the parshah and explaining how the Gaza retreat was a sin, I watched her from the corner of my eye. She was reading to her sister, then helping her assemble some Legos, and I could see that she too occasionally looked back. I felt horrible for doing this—like a snooping Humbert Humbert—especially since her father had served. “So what did you do in the States?” Yossi asked me, nearly interrupting himself. I explained, with equal hesitancy, that I had been a writer, but growing frustrated with it had decided to come overseas. 274 “Well, that's great. What kind of writer?” “Fiction, I guess. But I shouldn't really call myself a writer. I've only been out of college a couple years.” “Did you publish?” he asked me. “Not much.” That was always a sensitive topic. “I write stories,” Esther interjected from her place along the floor. “My teacher says they're really good. She says I'm a natural at.” “Esther, honey,” said her mother, gathering plates. “You should put your sister to sleep.” Esther sighed deeply. “She said mine were the best in the class.” “Well, I'm delighted to hear that,” I said. “What do you write about?” she asked me. “Well, that's the problem. I don't really know.” “Maybe you could write about me.” She smiled obliquely, through a trenchwork of braces. “Esther, please put Miriam to bed.” As she did so, Yossi began reciting more blessings, and the bum fell asleep in his chair. Afterwards, Yossi had Esther and his youngest accompany me down to the Cardo. Grinning, she carried the child on her chest, its nervous legs kicking and failing away within its snagged linen tights. “Miriam's tired,” Esther said. “So tired now, she can't go to sleep. Mom said she needs some fresh air.” I slung my rifle behind me as we snaked through the alleys and down the dank steps to the lighted stone colonnade. “Why did you come to the army?” she asked. “You should ask your father that.” 275 “He was religious.” “And I'm not?” I was still wearing my yarmulke, a synthetic white loner I had stolen from the box at the Wall. She smiled. “Maybe you're an idealist. Or maybe you're romantic, like him.” “Romantic?” “Romantic.” “That's a big word,” I said. I guess it wasn't in Hebrew. “Well, folks say I'm smart for my age.” A throng of fur hats jostled by us, dutifully trailed by their kids. “I guess I can't shake your hand,” I said, preparing to depart. “No,” she said sternly. The baby wheezed on her chest. “Can you—” she trailed off a bit, as if lost in thought. “Never mind.” I hitched my M4 up. “What?” “This sounds silly, but my friend Devorah, she had a cousin who was in the Nahal, and he sent her a stick-light last year. It was really cool, but Rav Moshe took it away. He said it was yetzer hara.” That mean sinful or lustful. “But I was thinking that maybe if you had one for me—” “We don't really use those.” “Oh,” she said, a bit dejected. The floodlamps outlined her sweater and blouse and brightened her ash-colored hair. I thought she was the most gorgeous child I had seen. “I'll bring you one,” I said. “And write me a story, too.” Back at Scott's place, his roommate, Mike, was slumped along a couch, nursing a carton of Häagen- 276 Dazs. Beside him on the flimsy end table stood a carton of Pringles, which was fashioned into a bong. Clad in giant Knicks shorts and a draft-labeled hoodie, he was simultaneously eating, picking out pot seeds, and sorting his dust-covered mail. “You get any?” he asked. “No.” I seized a bottle of Mountain Dew from the fridge. “Where's the stud himself?” “He done well for himself. Up at Hebrew U.” “At least it wasn't a Birthrighter.” “What's wrong with that?” Mike snapped. “Hey, man, can I ask you a question?” His eyes shone brilliantly red. “Yeah.” “Why did you come to the army?” “Well, it sure as shit wasn't for the girls.” He stuffed another bowl and offered it to me. “And I can't say I'm much into God. But you know, some things in life...” His words drifted off. “I guess they're like, how do you say it—” “Ordained?” “Ordained?” “It means predetermined.” “Yeah,” he said, lighting his bong. Back on base the next night, I was holding down the two a.m. shift, which was always the most difficult, since it was painfully cold, and you had to stay awake until dawn. A misty rain had passed over, and my toes were burning sharply, the rubber soles of my boots nearly frozen to the serrated steel floor of the lookout. I tried to distract myself with cummings, and my breath hovered over the book: 277 the bigness of cannon is skilful, but i have seen death's clever enormous voice which hides in a fragility of poppies. . . . Beyond my steel ledge, a quiet moon sliced through a stand of Aleppos, igniting a barbed wire fence. A few car alarms echoed, somewhere far off, and a jobnik was blasting his Trance. At around four, just as the base had finally grown quiet, a yellow light flashed through the pines. Then a Humvee ground up along the mud fence path, shaking the stairs to my booth. My Company Sergeant popped out, mounted the steps, and handed me a warm cup of tea. It must have been three-quarters sugar but tasted incredibly good. Clutching his handheld, his boonie cap beaded with rain, he surveyed the walls, which were strewn with graffiti, and said, “Make sure you stay awake.” It was hard to imagine why at that outpost, unlike others we'd see. Meanwhile, I was still holding the book in my jacket, hoping it wouldn't fall out. Men had been sentenced for less. “You need anything?” he asked obligatorily. “Yeah. You wouldn't happen to have a stick-light, would you?” He did a double-take. “What?” I said it again, this time in English. My accent was never great. “What the hell for?” 278 “I said I'd bring one for a friend.” His brows crinkled sharply. “Go to a fucking store.” As he barreled down the steps, two at a time, I heard him whisper—rather loudly, it seemed—“I hope you don't want it to read.” The next morning, when I was woken for my ten o'clock shift, I found, alongside my trunk, in the eight-person trailer that comprised our crude barracks, a tiny green stick-light, sealed in a package, along with a cold cup of tea. Two weeks later, our company left for the line. We spent a week in Jenin, then toured the northern West Bank. I didn't get back to Jerusalem much, and when I did, I forgot to bring the damn light. The rest of the story is hard to reflect on. You remember that guy Mike? He was shot in the head at a town called Ayta ash Shab. This was during the 2006 Lebanon War, where the army was deeply engaged. The Armored Corps got it the worst. They were sitting ducks inside the Mark IV's, which weren't even close to thick enough to take on the Kornets, much less the RPG-29's. You might have seen the videos. I remember thinking each time one of those metal boxes imploded, there were people inside of them, though you couldn't really tell. I saw the clips on the news, though that was weeks later, by which point we had returned. Mike's company was told to secure the Litani, which was a stupid idea from the start, since it was swimming with rockets and the air protection was sparse. They couldn't even bring the tanks— because of the mines. And time was running short near the end. Apparently, we had to withdraw. I won't go into the politics of the conflict—whether it was right to invade or not. I will say this, though: 279 it was actually my Company Sergeant—you remember the one who brought me the tea?—who was driving along the border of Shtula one morning—it was about 10:00—when a set of prepositioned explosives blew out the front of his Humvee. He didn't feel a thing, I later learned. Two more were kidnapped from the Humvee ahead of his, and that's why the incursion began. Again, whether it was right or not, I cannot say. As Orwell once put it, talking about his service in Spain, “People forget that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.” It's 9:30 at night at Ben-Gurion Airport, twelve miles south of Tel Aviv. It's mid-October; a gauzy sky looms through the glass. Inside the third terminal, beside an abandoned Air France desk and hundreds of unpeopled seats, an Ethiopian woman vacuums, then fixes her snood, then vacuums, and the tile floor glistens in the cool light of dusk. Near the back of this waiting area, bent forward, with his head in his hand, a young man is nervously pinching a cigarette. He has contemplated lighting it but knows he cannot. He hasn't slept in weeks. He hasn't been physically injured, but he can't focus on things, and shadows disturb him, sliding, as they do, across floors. He went to counseling briefly but found it didn't much help. At his feet sit two hulking tan duffel bags, one stolen from the army, the other recently bought. This is the whole of his belongings. He wears ripped jeans, a white t-shirt, and a battalion-marked, green, wrinkled fleece, which he was awarded, along with the rest of his draft group, during his initial tour. He'll wear it proudly in the States, he knows. But in Israel it doesn't mean shit. Then again, he realizes, he'll bury the thing in his bag, house it in his basement, and never look at it again. He tries not to think about Mike. He never really knew the guy—but strange things happen in war. You become 280 attached to those you have lost—more than those you still know. The soldier, or the former soldier, that is—he was discharged last week—is heading home to Chicago, where he'll try to make a new start. His parents think he's been working on a kibbutz. They know not a thing of his service, nor does anyone else. This was less by choice than decree, since he knew his mother would worry herself endlessly, and if he died, well, he wouldn't have had to deal with her then. He wrote a farewell letter once, which he sealed in plastic the night before the Lebanon War, and mailed it to Scott and Mike's, since he figured at least one of them would return. The letter said, among other things, I love you, Mom, I love you, Dad, I'm sorry I didn't tell the truth. But I've never been very good at that, anyways. And I hope you'll understand. He knew that they wouldn't have, and they wouldn't now. Near the front of the terminal, a bar television screen is on. The bar itself is empty, minus a squeegee or two, and the screen shows some news: the IDF Chief of Staff is under fire. Apparently, the war was waged erroneously. Too many souls were lost. The former pilot looks somewhat defensive, angrily waving his thumb, while the blond-haired interviewer grills him. Then the news shows old footage of soldiers returning from war, marching over the border with Lebanon. It's late at night, mid- August, and he recognizes the men from his brigade. He can't see his company, but he notices the light green berets, which their brigadier, a self-seeking leech of a man, insisted they put on. He rises and tries to find himself. Then the news flips to images of exploding Merkava tanks. For the first time, he feels sorry for the men inside of them. Still picturing the berets, he recalls the word “stick-light”—a word he hasn't heard in months— and remembers that he probably has one in his bag. He scours his belongings, dumping his clothes on the floor. The Ethiopian woman watches him 281 askance. She has probably seen worse in this place. Then he searches the second bag, digging through journals, pay stubs, faded I.D.'s, phone bills he's never paid, until he comes up with the light, which somehow managed to cleared security. It has never been used before, and he stowed it inside of a sock —a torn one he meant to discard. He zips his duffles and sprints along the waxed hall. During the cab-ride into Jerusalem, between the mountains that straddle Route One, he watches a thin sliver of moon pass through the clouds and light up Givat Shaul Cemetery. Mike is out at Mt. Herzl. He visited a few weeks before, and the place had looked decrepit: row upon row of shaved limestone, all the same squat, chiseled squares. Who would want to be buried in a place like this, he thought. As he stood over the grave, which was heaped up with flowers and shoulder-tags soldiers had left, he tried not to shed any tears. And he didn't really. He thought he just wanted a drink. Tonight, though, driving past a different cemetery, beneath this thin shell of a moon, watching the mists funnel over the pines of Har Nof and its endless blankets of sage, he starts to sob a bit. For what he doesn't know. Probably not Mike, he knows. Outside Zion Gate, he tips the cab driver well, only realizing after that he has 26 sheks to his name. He'll have to spend the night at a hostel, maybe one of the religious ones, which are proselytizing but clean. He's already phoned up the airline and changed the flight, despite the enormous fee. Inside the Old City, beneath the stone arches, he winds through the sewage-lined maze, hefting his bags, inhaling the raw meat and parsley, the fragrance of vendors, the clove scents of bibles and silk. No lights are on in the apartment. It's close to eleven, he sees. He thinks about affixing the stick to the mezuzah, or smearing it over the doorpost, like some alien's blood. Instead he knocks gently. 282 Then hard. Finally, Yossi answers the door in his bathrobe, frazzled-looking, angry, it seems. His beard has turned almost gray. “Who are you?” he asks beneath the locked door-guard. “You don't remember me, I guess. I was here two years ago. Three, perhaps. Look, I'm sorry to bother you, but I have something for your daughter.” “My daughter? Which one?” Yossi eyes him appraisingly. “Esther.” “What do you want with Esther?” “I just have something for her.” “Esther's away at boarding school.” Then he surveys his living room, as if contemplating letting him in. He probably has dozens of such requests every month from people who have dined at his home. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I have to go now. I wish you luck in your life.” “Wait,” I say, putting on my fleece. Yossi eyes the thin emblem of Nahal—the half-sickle and sword—and says, “Oh yeah, you're the writer. I remember you.” I nod gently. He does as well. “So what the hell do you want?” I sift through my bags and pull out the stick-light. “Do you think you could give her this?” He eyes me appraisingly again. “A stick-light?” he says. “You bet.” That night, I slept outside the Old City in a hostel by Damascus Gate. The place was owned by Arabs, but the price was much cheaper, and for some reason, I fell asleep.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Bernstein, Joshua A. (author)

Core Title “Where beasts' spirits wail”: the Great War and animal rights

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 07/24/2016

Defense Date 05/01/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag animal rights,British literature,modernism,OAI-PMH Harvest,war writing,World War I

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Boone, Joseph A. (committee chair), Johnson, Dana C. (committee chair), Becker, Marjorie (committee member), Bender, Aimee (committee member)

Creator Email joshuaandrewbernstein@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-449963

Unique identifier UC11286659

Identifier etd-BernsteinJ-2740.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-449963 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-BernsteinJ-2740.pdf

Dmrecord 449963

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Bernstein, Joshua A.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA