Excerpt from The Dubious Man, an unfinished novel
“He never felt he owned the space, even though he’d lived here close to a lifetime. The once bottle-green walls he painted one distant summer were shedding their last wisps to the vast stained mural of long-forgotten paint jobs he’d been too lazy to add to, to rejuvenate. He’d lost all hope of change, in change.”
…
“–There was a time when people knew that what was wrong had consequences. Now it’s playable, you can spin it, deny it, or don’t even factor it in, you know, then it’s not a matter of consequences but whether you get caught or can’t explain it away, like, you know, that guy over there, he’s ten times worse. You can leverage it somehow. That’s why it amazes me when they catch someone doing some shit that’s very wrong, and the press pick up on it, it’s like a consensus to put the guy to the stake, really make an example of him, like if you holler long and loud enough for the guy’s head you’re absolved from your own private shit. You can move amidst the noise, the buzz, like a thief in the night.”
…
“–The old family neighborhood is like a pail of vomit. You carry it around fearing it will slop over and soil your newly-shined shoes, your just-pressed pants. You tread lightly. You spend endless brackets of time devising strategies to make the trek more practical. You fight the pull to give in. You try to whistle while you live. You know defeat is inevitable. You just don’t know where to set it down, how to just run away.”
…
“–He put a bomb. That’s why he went to jail. That’s what they accused him for. He was pardoned with the rest of them after serving some fifteen years. Nobody gave a fuck why he put it after all those years. Nobody even remembers why, and so he just drifted back after a few months when he finally got the house from his parents who had died. He moved back to their old house. The family’s lawyer found this old trust his dad had set up for who knows what future he had envisioned for him. So now he lives off that and whatever he can scrape up from the street from this dumb act he performs. Yeah, so now he’s got this act.”
…
“What he feared most about going back to the town where his parents were born and grew up was that it wouldn’t be there. That whatever he remembered he would not be able to find. They told him that it was now modern, but what did that mean in this town. What did modern mean, he thought, as the car winded through the curves that led inland. He knew too well what it meant but he hoped it was an exaggeration. That there would still be an edifice or a panorama that would regurgitate what as a child and young man he vaguely recalled. That it would spew forth when least expected and reveal itself, reveal the him in the it. And then what, he thought. He knew exactly what modern meant. It was what he wanted when the family went there, it was what he complained about, that he screamed and bawled about until his parents went crazy, that there were no stores, no ice cream, nothing to really do and no place to really go. But now there were pubs and pizza parlors, theme restaurants and ecological sightseeing tours. And he hated it, he hated it for becoming what he wanted it to be when young. And there would be no trace of what haunted his memory, no trace of where his parents came from that he could possibly understand. So then he realized that he was going there to finally kill the memory, the one last thing he had that tied him to the town. This town that dared to change and become exactly what he once wanted it to be.”
…
“He lost the Seiko watch his sister gave him as a welcome home gift. He lost it in a tiny bar where he was drinking in the late afternoon, almost a year after he was pardoned. He was celebrating the fact that maybe he wouldn’t have to work after the estate lawyer disclosed the existence of the trust fund his father had set aside for his education. Returning to school was not in his plans. The idea of being in a classroom seemed to him too much like returning to the cell that took a good hunk of his life for nothing. He mused that if there were a doctorate for waiting he deserved it. But the possibility of money made him giddy with the freedom it promised. The freedom to drink, he thought, just the freedom to get good and doused was exhilarating after fifteen years of only just dreaming about it. Drinking, sex and eating, in whatever order it came was his creed. But losing the watch scared him. What would he tell her? What excuse could outweigh the loss? It was a clunker of a watch. It weighed heavy on his wrist. About an hour after he had left the bar he realized he didn’t have it on. He ran back as fast as his drunken daze would let him. He ran back but the bartender stared him down, said that he hadn’t noticed any watch. It was then that he knew that he was finally home, that this was the city’s welcome.”
…
“He watched transfixed in the cell block common area as the reporter on television narrated the storming of the Berlin Wall by the East Germans and if he were the reporter, he laughed to himself, and he would have to say that all the inmates bristled with anticipation thinking maybe it was a universal pardon. But no, the smiles soon faded and everyone just looked on, most not truly understanding, as waves of young people swarmed over, through, or dropped down the wall to the joyous arms of West Germans. He looked on too, ignoring any eyes that could bore into him from a corner. He looked on unblinkingly as the wall also crumbled in his brain and the futility of those years rushed through the breach.”
…
“–Sooner or later you run out of options in the city. Or the city starts dreaming other dreams where you just don’t fit in. It changes and you change. And usually not for the better. It’s not like you don’t go out, but you don’t just go out, because wherever you are, you’re really not there. You’re in your head somewhere reliving a city that doesn’t exist anymore. So you don’t look out the window hoping to see something, because it’s not going to be there for you anymore. You look out the window to see how’s the weather, that’s all.”
…
“He remembered looking through the lattice trellis in the small garden at his mother doing needlepoint on the table of the sewing room with the oval egg-blue recess in the wall. When his mother received the letter asking her to have her picture taken in that room she did not understand what he meant or why he wanted it because the room was no more, it had ceased to exist many years before he was taken away. The lattice was replaced by a sliding glass door and concrete poured over the garden floor and thus his memory of peering at her through the lattice from the garden was an impossibility. She rifled through all the boxed photographs and was only able to salvage a baby picture when they first moved there and that she used as a nursery while she cooked. She did not know if it would be of any use. They called the lawyer instead and he was put on suicide watch for a week.”
…
“At first when he was let out he pretty much spent all day and part of the night in the streets. He couldn’t get enough of walking the streets, of just getting up and going wherever his feet took him, mindless of direction or purpose. But as the repetitive days seeped through his body, soaked his brain with their predictability, he realized he carried the cell inside him and that the only thing that had changed was the scenery, until this scenery became all too familiar and he found himself sitting quiet in a bar, in its darkest corner, much like he did during his sentence with the only difference being the drink in his hand. He realized this at first with blinding rage that only a drink could steady, then with tears that he stopped caring to wipe off his face, to end with a chuckle that he kept to himself, a chuckle that served as an escape valve for the delirious guffaw that wracked his insides threatening to burst out.”
…
“–I never knew him to have much piety so I was surprised to see him one morning walking to the church nearby, at the hour his mother used to go all the days of his sentence, or at least until she died. I don’t quite remember when but I do recall that it was a few years before he was pardoned. She had lived alone in the big house since the husband, his father, passed away and her only other daughter came by but once a week. They were a well respected family, or at least until the scandal, you know. He being accused of putting the bomb and all. Who would have known. He’d sit there quietly until the morning mass and then leave before it started. He did that for a long while, I think. But a strange thing happened one morning. He was sitting in the park alongside the church. He was just sitting there with the tears running down his face, just sitting there staring straight ahead. I approached him cautiously because we were never all that close. I asked him if he was all right. And he just looked up at me and said my name. Said my name just like that, and then looked to the side, the tears flowing all the while.”
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“–I’ve calculated it and I’m about five years behind everything that happens to me. So now I try to imagine where my head’s at five years from now. But I haven’t gotten anywhere. You see now that’s the reason why I think I understand what happened, why I got into all that shit that led me here and why I’m no longer there. No longer there. I don’t know that guy there that put the bomb. I don’t know him anymore. I’ve changed, no longer there. When I change I just chop off all that I was up to then. Can’t build on it because it’s no longer there. I’m guilty because I didn’t know who I was then. It was more like a fever in the air and you went with it. You read and you read and there could be only one conclusion and you want to be true to your brothers because it’s all you got. You don’t have yourself. The only thing you got is what they expect from you. What your words led them to believe. So I was in it because there was really nowhere else I could possibly be. It ennobled me, I think.”
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“–The room in the apartment they took him to overlooked a small leafy playground. They grouped them in twos and threes and he was paired off with this woman he had only seen during the trial. The couple they were staying with thought they knew each other but the woman had put that to rest. He heard snatches of the muffled conversations that wafted up through the open window, not really caring for what she said but surprised at how certain words still had the power to sling him back to a time when such words as commitment and struggle were sprinkled evenly throughout every sentence like garlands. He shut the window. He knew exactly what she was saying and did not care. Some nights he would hear the songs they once sang, he would listen to the rising and falling cadences of impassioned speeches he knew by heart. He understood the need. But he wanted out and told them as much and so he passed from being their comrade to being their embarrassment.”
....
“They were not supposed to know who they were. It was always like that. A designated point of encounter, false names, no talk beyond what was necessary. Only this mission threw them together. Each one was chosen by another whom they did not know. They gave each other their false biographies, their false names and circumstances, their false dreams and false futures. They did so with fervor, meticulously, with honed discipline, and they quizzed each other relentlessly. They did not probe behind these finely-structured masks. They both knew they must kill the other at the least suspicion and so they watched their every move and gesture. When they knew the other’s false self thoroughly, they each retired into themselves to ponder what they could not share.”
…
“He remembered her flowered dress, her clumsy shyness, and how it broke his heart. And now she sat a few tables away, unknowing. He was proud, in a way, that she became this composed, sophisticated academic. He knew she would. He knew that this moment would one day happen, that he would run into people he once knew then, before. He tried to avoid it, keeping his outings far from the old haunts, sidestepping certain streets and hours he felt too social to risk. And it did happen that he ran into people he once knew but few if any still recognized him after all those years. But there she was and it broke his heart in a way he didn’t know it could. So he went back to that night, their first formal date whose strategies he still clearly recalled: dinner close to where he worked, the reserved table at the club where a musician friend she liked was playing. He could not remember much beyond that, so he took one last look, paid the bill and stepped out into a cold, dark rain before his heart, or whatever was left of it, betrayed him once again.”
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“–It was when I rolled over on my back that I noticed the mirror on the ceiling. I remember that earlier that night I looked away when he handed over his watch as a deposit for the room. It was the gesture of his trying to hide the fact that saddened me. It was a cheap place in a cheap part of town and it was hard not to feel cheap in it. I think we tried too hard or waited too long to be lovers . But you know, lucky me, I mean after what happened. Besides, we’d split apart much before that. But of course I think of him. But we were kids. Kids do foolish things and it was a foolish time.”
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“–You’ve got to remember that it had been fifteen years. So it came as a shock to come back and find that much of what he knew is gone. I mean, his parents dead, no real friends to speak of, just this great amount of time, yet there are these big holes. He couldn’t make it fit. Then we hear that he wasn’t really into it, you know, what he served all that time for. How did he survive? What kept him together all those years if it wasn’t that?”
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“–You can always remember the eyes of those you’ve slept with, so they say. But what I remember is the amber nicotine stain on his fingers and the smell on his shirts. He doesn’t know but I got a photo of him on the floor playing scrabble naked. It was a spur of the moment thing and he didn’t notice. He hated my taking photos. I had forgotten about it until years later when I found it in a stack of undeveloped film stashed in the closet. I gasped because he looked up right into the lens a second before I clicked. So he knew. He knew and let me keep it. Like a time bomb.”
…
“–His «act» won a cult following of sorts. Not because anybody saw it assiduously but because people tried to avoid it at all costs. It became a running joke because you never knew where he would crop up as an opening act before the rock group or whatever. He’d get no billing and put out no flyers. It was just there’s that crazy bastard again. It was like he’d be anywhere so the game was to try to guess where and avoid him. So the locales would put him on like a prank. He was a street character then. And there was this one place that passed out wiffle balls and had him on for hours it seems. He’d read from a book and the crowd would shower him with everything they could get their hands on. I heard once that he was some sort of revolutionary and done some time. There was this rumor that he’d killed a few. Something about a bomb. Is he still alive?”
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“–I don’t remember what I dreamed I would be or what was the rhythm of my life before that night. If I had a purpose or I didn’t have a purpose before that I can’t recall and I guess I will never know. A lot of people in those years expected a night like that. At least I did, in theory. But the fact was far from theory. Quite a few years went by before I realized how much I had changed and how that change was irreversible. There was only one future. So when I stepped out there was no longer any timeline, past and present were erased. I became a fugitive forever just like the character on TV and time became a chase, staying one step ahead became my only future. I was fated to look over my shoulder even as I made love or slept and so I ended up running every waking moment until one morning I awoke to find that some part of my mind had run off. To where, I do not know.”
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“–You have to understand the times the bastard lived in, the rhetoric flying through the air. But most of all, the embedded innocence. Nobody knew how bad the bad really was, and nobody knew how much of that bad we carried in ourselves. Our bad was we thought we were better, smarter, more virtuous. The messianic streak, if you will. And he had it bad, the trying to save the world shit. So it was easy to dangle the carrot of remaking the world in his image before his eyes and have him bite.”
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“He sat with the theoretician’s book in his lap. What he had to read to “understand” the world. The afternoon shadow of the waning weekend sun travelled down his torso as night approached. The more he read, the less he knew of what he was reading. Yet he trudged on, awaiting enlightenment at any paragraph, but his mind would wander to thoughts of a girl he had recently met and that he could not talk to about the book he was told to read to explain the world of the haves and have nots. That in fact, he could not talk to at all because that would mean explaining her to someone else. So he cast his eyes down to the book on his lap and lifted it up to the height of his eyes and continued reading.”
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“–I had this one very embarrassing episode and it happened while I was away at school. The students there were always escaping to the nearby town at night but I never dared. I only went out on the permitted leaves with their restrictive hours that one would end up wasting away doing nothing because the infinite possibilities drowned out any real possibility. In one of those leaves I finally stumbled into something, a girl, really a woman, sitting next to me at a cafeteria counter. And when I say a woman I mean she was much older. The hardest thing when you’re young is getting a girl to laugh, laugh with you, not at you. So I forgot how really old she was because it was all flowing and natural and after a while she got to looking kind of pretty and I was getting kind of hard and I suppose she kind of knew because she then placed her hand on my thigh and just let it linger there about two fingers away from the bulge and when I later stretched to get her a napkin she let it slip between her fingers and gave it a tiny squeeze and by then she looked like a goddess. I realized then that I could just make the bus back to school and I told her I had to go. She pulled me close and told me she’d take me in the car if I would stay a bit longer. Well, on the way to her car I exploded. She was pretty upset and drove me instead to the bus. She was looking older by the minute as she raced to make it. I looked down at the spreading stain on my pants. As I hobbled away from her car trying to hide it with my jacket some joker screamed from the bus, «the old bat strikes again». I was doomed.”
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“We drove most of the night through a dark cobweb of side roads with the guy in the passenger seat indicating at the last minute the turns at intersecting routes, driving blind when approaching lights would loom either from the front as from behind. We did this for more than two hours until a consensus alighted on our minds that we were lost. We never said we were lost, we just knew it. It remained unexpressed for if true it would mean that someone or something would be held accountable. And this was no joke. It was a matter of life and death. And I remember now how hard I was trying to suppress a giggle. Yes, a giggle, for an all-out laugh with mouth agape and tears brimming the eye sockets, yes, a knee-slapping, teeth- bared laugh would tear us all asunder. But that never came to pass because in one of those jarring curves in the road we came upon a parked car and a group of men heaving an unmistakable body down a ravine and as we sped by they opened fire on us and then it ceased to matter if we were on the right road or not as we sped on into the night, taking the turns on instinct alone and silently joyous to be alive.”
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“–It was night and they took me to the infirmary. Was I ever so glad it was the infirmary. It was so fast that I didn’t have time to respond, my mind just felt that it had to prepare to die and yet it was lazy and held on to the hope it was a dream. All my brave thoughts and all my brave words that I had rehearsed for years just slipped my mind. I was mute with terror because there was no warning, no sign, no slow getting used to the idea. So when I saw the infirmary, the familiar doctor’s face, I eased up when he said my name and told me that they were going to give me tranquilizers. It was quick and I was out. I dreamt I was on a cruise ship as a boy playing Monopoly in a game room but I could not find my parents who were always somewhere else on the ship. When I awoke I still felt in a dream. Hours went by as I stared mesmerized by the play of shadows on a wall from some nearby trees. Years later I learned from the family lawyer that I was once put on suicide watch. I then thought that maybe that was what happened when they took me from the cell, but later I realized that it wasn’t any suicide watch protocol that I was familiar with. They were conducted in the cell. But then, I remember very little of that episode aside from the swaying shadows of the trees on the wall.”
…
“They stopped at the top of the curve where a small pocket-like valley spread tumultuously down the ravine. It was one of the few things that remained intact, these small impenetrable patches of green, and perched, as many similar structures on the road almost suspended in midair, was the crumbling shack of the often told story by his father’s hometown cronies when drunk. This was the shack where his maternal grandfather had died. As a child his grandfather was the stuff of myth, a tall, stone silent man. Word had it that his sex organ dangled close to his knees in its restive stage, and he recalled his father’s nervousness when men in the small town bars would mention the old yarn about having to make adjustments to the coffin to accommodate what his erection in defying rigor mortis required in enhanced creativity from the local carpenters who were held in thrall. His grandfather died fucking a young lass, in the process of a lunge, dropping like a granite cloud over her body, and who was only saved because some passing drunks heard her sobs. When they turned him over, the number of men needed to do so varying according to the occasion, they found him open-eyed with an erection that made him appear like a shipwrecked schooner with a high flying mast pole without sails, swaying in the air. He looked across the road, raising his eyes to the top of the hill where his grandmother once lived. That close he died, he thought, that close. They were on their way to the old man’s house, his other grandfather, the paternal one, the one who owned the town.”
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“There was a time when I moved with the nervousness of hope when the present was ever-new land, when waking was one fluid move into my jeans, a shake of the head, a slurp of soda and on my way, the body a silent humming thing apart yet there behind and below my eyes. And so you wonder as you see this as I explicate my presence before you, this dinosaur unearthed before your very eyes, this debacle that narrates itself and I say good evening and fuck you. Because now I move with sound effects, with numb creaks and the acrid smell of years misspent. I move with ancient rhymes, obsolete strategies amid your stinging laughter as if I give a shit, the last sputtering meteor’s tail through the vast night of stand-up gigs such as you see before you in all its wretched obsolescence. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, may you all rot in hell.”
…
“What you bastards don’t understand that what you see up here, I mean, I’m not the author, I am a character. It is the character who is speaking. But like I say, I’m just a character, on and off this stage. It is that voice you hear, my shapeless body, the tears, nobody put that shit there, this is me you morons. I’m the one who’s talking. Doing the talking. So, fuck the author and fuck you too. Don’t imagine I walk off this stage I’m any different. You think I’m the figment of somebody’s imagination, you think somebody off-stage maybe is pulling the strings of this here gig, got me to memorize it and all that shit, well you’re fucking wrong, way off target, your brain more full of holes than that wiffle ball someone just threw me, you think I didn’t see it coming? No man, I just strut and fret my hour upon this fucking stage all the while dreaming something you bastards can’t even contemplate. That’s the beauty of it, that’s what I come off on, that you believe I believe I’m really not here and that this squirt gun is just a prop and isn’t filled with bleach and that you’re unbelieving eyes will sting if I should act upon that fleeting thought just passing through my brain now, so help me God.”
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“–Everybody needs somebody to talk to and, you see, that’s the problem. The best is just the other guy in the bar and better yet if he’s drinking. No exchange of names. Just a divulging of the innards, the whole tripe and all the crap adhered thereto. Get it out of your system and then walk away, never to see the guy again. But if the guy gets too curious trying to find the logic in all you say when it’s only you loosening the radiator cap and stepping back before what’s in there burns your fingers and face, well. The thing is to never repeat the same guy too often. So that’s why I just ended up talking to myself, making those little marks with the wet glass on the bar top. You see, I thought when I was released from jail that that was the end of it, but it wasn’t. You see, for a long time before they put me away I was just moving from one little room to another, tracing a line through the city, looking out for faces in crowds. So then jail. It was all a pattern. I realized I was a man of patterns, of traced lines. There I contained the madness when hope was stripped away day by day, leaving exposed the raw meat and sinews, the circuitry of my existence. But another way of seeing it, man, was that I was just plain scared. Shit-scared.”
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“–Do you know how much bullshit begins with the words «in the course of human affairs,» do you? Well, in the course of human affairs I lost a man size bite of my life that at this juncture seems a trifle. You grow old too quick like an imperceptible rising tide that engulfs the whole peninsula of your shit life. A spot in the ocean of a collective pain, a moan heard down the hallway of a shabby apartment building in downtown somewhere. But let’s not get lost in poetry, cocksuckers, let’s take stock with the steely eyes of a brigadier general on the eve of battle. Or better yet, let’s count the bodies that lay strewn on the fields, the dead, the forgotten. How many of you know who the fuck I am? What you see here before you has survived the headlines. What you see before you is a forgotten fact. Of those young faces on the front page only a pitiful two are living, gaunt and brave notwithstanding the fortunes of time. A testament to how hard it truly is to live with one’s choices. Dragged out at every commemorative signpost, five, ten, fifteen, twenty-five, thirty. Until reality yields to myth making and this to boredom. I am here to bore you with the remnants of my life and the lives of those I once stood beside, and abandoned. I stand here in place of the heroes. I stand here because the heroes have died or are now mumbling idiots. I stand in their place as a stand-up comedian. Because, you see, I fell off the headlines and went missing in action. What you see before you, ladies and cocksuckers, is the last man standing. The traitor.”
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“–Sometimes love is just curiosity that hangs around too long. A weed that takes hold where it barely can, with the crazy promise of spreading its seed through a stretch of land where it believes it can prosper. And the winds blow and the rains fall and the sun beats down relentlessly throughout. It is nature’s prank. And we fall for it every time. But the most barren field waits patiently forever for water and the seed that could alight, unseen.”
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“–Towards the end he looked like a Rembrandt self-portrait. Those eyes staring out unblinkingly. Eyes that truly had nowhere to go. His eyes would not seek you, you had to enter his gaze and look for a rise in his eyebrow. A sudden leaping dart. Then you could begin talking and he would smile sometimes. He liked when you talked about your family, the most banal occurrences. After a while you got to know his body language. When he raised his hand and put it softly on the table, that meant cognac. I got to know his story. Everyone in that little neighborhood bar knew his story. From father to son, like an heirloom. I was curious, being the son of one of those in the original group arrested and sometimes I’d fancy that he recognized me as such, as the son. So once, close to the end, I told him the story my father often told about that night. Not that I expected much of a reply on his part. But that night he did not place his hand for the cognac and although I saw no discernible change in his features I somehow knew I was no longer welcome.”
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“She stood in front of the family house, trying to remember the good times through the garbage that muted the forgotten garden underneath, the graffiti on the porch. She looked real hard trying to fathom why her mother refused to sell. Most of the neighboring lots were sold to condo developers. She tried to remember real hard the neighbors they once had, tried to recall the old elm under whose shade they jumped rope as girls. The old neighborhood engulfed now by the urban sprawl, whose name still carried the weight of a moneyed tradition now too costly to renovate. A week after her mother died she received a call from the lawyer of the estate. What she suspected all along was true. Her mother left it to her brother, her jailed brother, her only sibling. She smiled at the irony, remembering how he hated the house. Left in trust to her only begotten son, to carry on the family name, in shame, she thought. A name she more than willingly gave up when she married. So the little bastard was finally coming home. Her own lawyers told her she could contest it in court, force a sale. She would refurbish one of the little rooms on the third floor, the maid quarters with the private stairway. Yes, she would wait and see what he would do, wait to hear his plans. So, she thought, the little bastard was finally coming home.”
…
“His grandfather was not surprised to see him because his grandfather plainly did not know who he was. After the introductions, the embarrassed hugs and news of his father and mother were dispensed with, he dived precipitously into the covers for his presence, the visit of his grandchild and godson and of the smiling couple who stood behind, their eyes darting here and there. He told him of his class project, the botany professor’s interest in the local flora, but his grandfather eyes lit into him, trying to decipher the genetic reason for this young man that called himself his grandson and barely took notice of the explanations. They needed a guide he said, some young man willing to show them around the hills. They would pay, he said. But his grandfather waved all those things aside, told them they would start off in the following morning, early, that now was far too late, the sun too unforgiving. Best to rest, call out back to kill another hen for dinner and toast the arrival of his grandson, his only grandson, so many years unseen. …
“They spent the night discussing in whispers the possibility that their covers were blown. After a brief criticism and self-criticism sessions all things pointed to the accusation that he’d botched up his first mission. That he’d been too quick to explain, forgetting the fact that his grandfather hadn’t seen him in years and was in obvious shock to see the young man now before him talking about botanists. They agreed that her initiative in the killing, plucking, and eviscerating of the hen did much to distract the old man’s attention.
…
“Their sparse knowledge of the local flora was only surpassed by their complete ignorance of a small town’s mores. Their presence sped like foxfire through the neighboring woods. The old man was seen trampling through the hills with three hippies. Oil was found in the old fart’s farm. There was a lost girl last seen walking in the general vicinity. The old fuck hinted at a secret government project that had to do with a possible cure for cancer.”
…
“The old man drank a neat shot glass of his private poison in the only town bar he could bear to be in, because he owned it. Ever since that morning when he heard the news of his grandson’s arrest he tore down the side roads in his farm, his Browning Bolt Action on the passenger seat of his jeep. On a remote hill on the edge of his property he fired into the empty sky until he spent all the rounds he had, and if a bullet laid low a bird or unsuspecting dog, well, so be it. He mulled it over and over, let it swirl up his nostrils and ricochet off the wrinkles in his brain. The pain and the tears. So that was what they were doing up here, him and his fake professor. Shitting him like his father before him when he left the town to be a judge in that shithole of a city by the sea in a world that he just read about in the newspapers or reluctantly sat through on television. And now whatever that was that his grandson was involved in just shitted this world, his town, his few remaining years. He said as much to his son on the phone and sent them all to hell. A disgrace. He shattered the shot glass against the counter. Fuck them all. And fuck this town.”
…
“-There were two incidents, really. I’ll tell you the second one first. It happened while my brother was away at school. Something happened and the school called father. It was all so long ago that the details are fuzzy, but the thing is that I didn’t see my brother for three years. I was so caught up in the university that it never occurred to me to ask. I was hardly home then anyway and me and by brother never got along. The first incident was when he was still a kid. Must have been in the fifth grade. He had gotten ill, something contagious they said, and they took him to the hospital. That time he was away for about eight months. But during that time I remember being home alone one day and grandfather came to visit announced. Said he wanted to see my brother. I told I’d call father but the old man wouldn’t wait and that I should give the name of the hospital to his driver. He looked spooked. I told him that I didn’t know. He told me to get in the car. The old man was a scary bastard in his best days. He took a $50 bill out of his wallet and told me to get in the car and I did. We went to every damn hospital in the city and my brother was nowhere to be found. The old man was pissed and told me that I should not talk about this day with anyone. Then I was spooked. He then gave me a $100 bill with instructions to call him if anything came up. Now let’s go back to the second time. Years later I ran into a friend of my brother, it was after he was arrested. He had roomed with my brother at that boarding school he was sent after his first disappearance. He said my brother was picked up my some men at the school and had never returned. But I was always told that he graduated from that school and had been admitted to an acting academy. You get it? I was fed a lie. Then I remembered that day with my grandfather. When he got out I never asked him about it, I mean I was then his only family. When all is said and done, he is my brother.”
…
“–For the longest time I was only truly free in those dim-lit spaces in the darkness that a she offered unknowingly. In the presence of a her I felt absolved, in the her’s bed a door out, if only momentarily. This had consequences that only now I fully grasp. I did not mean for them to be the victims of their ill-placed charity. They meant well but failed to see. I came to hide. Hide from all that I had become. I believed that I could keep them uncontaminated. But they have a wily way to see you through the veils. And I did seep through, which I then scrambled for security reasons. So what they finally perceived made them distraught, or maybe it was the ultimate truth. What even I did not see, caught as I was in the feverish pace of the struggle. How I hated the word. Struggle. What I finally desired was the dim-lit space alone with her in another space, struggling with my presence. Some finally found people to be at peace with. And that was fine. When they found someone I was absolved from the guilt of dragging them unwittingly into my lies, the necessary lies to survive. For those that failed to find someone or something, I grieved for they weighed heavy in the darkness. Then I finally found a way. And that was running forever, from one oasis of soft light to another in the dark-ink night, alone. You are your only victim. You are your only executioner. As it should be. It shall be. It was. It is.”
…
“–We were called «The Prometheans». He was the one that thought it up. We had broken away from another university guerilla theatre group, «The Mao Mao». It was a time when everybody tried to be two steps to the left of anyone else. I met him at the beginning of my second year. He was a transfer student, very Grotwoski, very extreme in his view of what theatre should be. I mean, there was practically nothing separating reality, the everyday, from a play. That space for him was erased. I mean, anything we were doing at any given moment for him was acting, a conversation, the walk between classes, taking a dump. Everything. We’d meet every day and he’d give us instructions of where to go, alone , or in pairs, whatever, and just be. After a while we all got tired of it. No play, no plan, no audience. He’d laugh and call us reactionary bourgeois. But we kept at it, feeling privileged in a way. It seemed revolutionary to us, I mean, who could beat that. Besides we were all pretty bad actors so it came as a relief that we didn’t have to act at all.”
…
“–It must have been years later on the bus. He was sitting across from me and it took me awhile to realize who he actually was. We’ve all aged but he looked like a piece of meat gone bad and had that habit the crazed old have, this walking around with a leather bag cracked and stained and stuffed with papers. With a sheaf of manuscripts on his lap, I mean papers written all over and in every conceivable slant. He’d look at, like, one paper that was graphed like a code, that he referred to while scribbling all the while in the other papers, a blank corner here, an inch there. I was pondering if I should address him when he suddenly looks up and meets my eyes and I was then about to smile when he started laughing, pointing his ballpoint pen at me and laughing. He stares around at the other passengers and pointing at me laughing. It got to where people were staring at me trying to see what it was about me that was so funny. Then I realized what was so funny. We hadn’t seen each other since that night forty year ago. You see, I escaped and he got caught. But who else in the bus would understand the joke?”
…
Burnett Memorandum
Re: CO-FI Files
Assessment of Program for CS
OVERVIEW
In 19 , the ODS-Adjunct filtered a project through the periphery for LR recruitment of potential FI for future placement in HT Orgs. without minders. Access to PTFI’s would be primarily through friendlies although margin was given for outlier recruitment through compromising intel.
The CO-FI program began recruitment through assessment of medical and/or psychiatric records for long internment potential. The age range would be 9-16 at precise intervals. Placements would begin at 18. Out of a seed group of , were placed back in their environment with covers for test runs. Out of this, some were finally ready and sent back to their homes for deployment when required. Each FI was coded for call out and canvassed through their names through the media or local informant references.
Success of the CO-FI program was moderate to high (40-80%) with some turnovers and waywards within the expected ratio.
In , program was deemed potentially at risk of being compromised and terminated. All
FI’s were canvassed for status updates and future assessment.
This memorandum will address the mission objectives of the ODS-49 Project and our findings for CS.
…
Burnett Memorandum
Re: CO-FI Files
FI-61 (Trigger: Janus)
INITIAL PLACEMENT ANALYSIS
XXXXXXXXXX,XXXXX XX
Placement: A patrician family with roots in the old country. Father, a federal judge. Recruited Army Counter-Intel during war (XXXX-XXXX). Hook: DiFOOS Project.
Mother: housewife. XXXXXXX M.A. Anthropology.
One older sister, finishing B.A. Business Administration.
Cover: Drama transfer student.
OVERVIEW
Infiltration of leftist groups and local art circles.
…
(From “Interview of Frank Gomer”)
Q. How did you first become interested in the “Old Man”? Why “Old Man?
A. I think now that he came already fitted with his code name. It’s what everybody called him. So we continued it. He first came into focus with all the ruckus he caused when his grandchild disappeared that first time. He gave us a run for our money, he did. What no fool in CO-FI did was run a line on him, beyond the usual particulars and that he had a load of money. The first feelers sent out got not much more than that the town hated him. As far as politics, all we got is that he was your run of the mill power broker, bought out all the town politicians and kept his fist tight around their balls. There were stories of corpses buried in the hills, people that crossed him and were never heard of again. But it was all some 30 some years before we ran our ops. There was nothing in his past because he didn’t seem to have one. It didn’t seem to bother anyone that we had nothing on him. Everybody relied on what his son the judge told them. After all, he was Counter-Intel.
Q. So what piqued your interest?
A. That he had nothing. That nothing must have meant something. So instead of starting to dig his past I started with what he was doing now, I mean then, when he started giving us trouble. Like, why did he get all worked up about his grandson’s hospitalization? Why? So I started diagramming all his moves then.
Q. His grandson?
A. Yes. Well, this is like the circles of hell. Yes, his grandson. His grandson was FI-61. His grandson was Janus.
Q. Janus?
A. Yes, his grandson Janus, the guy who went to prison for putting the bomb, you idiot. Isn’t that what this interview is all about?
…
(From “Interview of Frank Gomer”)
….
A. … This is not a world of good intentions. You do not assume the persons around you are truthful. You always have to consider the option that they are not. And plan accordingly. And that was not done here. I don’t believe that anyone truly knew who the Old Man was. He just appeared as a dot in the family tree. He was simply Janus’s grandfather, a doting old fool, probably. But he was not. But I understand. This was a big operation. From what I read, all the big effort was put in the selection and preparation of the FI’s. After placement, all was to run pretty much on its own. The idea was to see if they could place their people as organically as possible within the targeted organizations instead of recruiting informants within to snitch or to infiltrate from the outside. The point was that they would be given certain talents and characteristics so that the very organizations targeted would be drawn to them. The files from that stage that I had access to were very sketchy, maybe for a reason. And I believe it all began to unravel as far back as that stage. How? A lot was put into the program. That makes people careless with any detail that might throw the proverbial monkey wrench. So I believe that they just did not want to see it.
Q. What did they not want to see?
A. That it was the Old Man who was disappearing those people.
…
(From “Interview of Frank Gomer”)
…
A. Like I said before. They were most vulnerable at the beginning. During the abductions and placements. So I looked for traces. Anything that seemed out of whack. One of them was during the first abduction, when they first took the kid out of school and supposedly hospitalized him. The family did not have too many social friends at the time and the kid was not very popular at school. The belief was that the cover story would hold tight for the time needed. But reading the reports of the time, two things stuck out. One, on a hunch I cross-referenced all the physicians working out of the hospital where the kid was actually placed with any military service records. There were three. Then I searched all three to see where they were at now. One had died, another had retired and had a son who took over his practice. These leads went nowhere. But I found something disturbing regarding Dr. ##############. It was a news item in the local papers. Victims of a home invasion, he had to watch as his wife was repeatedly raped. Doctors interviewed revealed that the incident destroyed the family. He closed his practice and left. Two, the physician and Janus’ father were friends as undergraduates, both served in the ROTC, and both enlisted together. And both had their military records classified. That rang all kinds of bells.
…
“–It was around that time when the Prometheans were getting more political, the street theatre thing became more politically … more politically overt. The Feds they were cracking down on everybody, I mean, the groups were becoming more radicalized, a frenzy of one-upmanship that was totally estranged from the people, from any kind of social issue. It just became a thing of playing to the leftist gallery, the purity of the message with no thought to practicality. Or at least that’s how it seems now from the safe haven of the present. The groups were fragmenting, paranoia everywhere. That’s about the time I met him. Funny, we talked about it afterwards, how we were both trying to recruit the other, more or less catching on half way through it all. We became lovers. That didn’t sit well with our «groups» but we just sort of laughed it off. We were aware that we were a danger to each other but that just sort of fueled our rather reckless passion. ”
…
˝–Ever been with a woman that’s taken you for a ride, on a wild, careening jaunt to really nowhere except yourself? Well, I’ve taken the ride, but I can’t even remember what happened, really, because so many other things get in the way that all you can recall is the memory of her eyes and her smell on your hands and on your clothes. Especially the smell, the memory of it. It’s surprising what you take with you from all that. Crazy.ˮ
…
Burnett Memorandum
Re: CO-FI Files
CO Field Officer XXXXXXXXXXXX
FI-61
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX
«Follow-up on XXXXXXXX revealed that she is presently studying in XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX in XXXXXXXXXX. When asked why his daughter left and why he failed to report it, XXXXXXXX replied that his daughter was distraught because of her brother’s XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Further inquiries revealed that it was the girl’s grandfather, XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, who paid the tuition and other expenses.»
«URGENT. See DiFOOS File 6100 XXXXX. “Old Man.” »
The first thing that stands out is why this was not forwarded to ODS. Correlation of dates suggests that it was coincidental with OPERATION XXXXXX. It further suggests that “Old Man” had information of CO-FI program, probably since recruitment and first XXXXXXXX in XXXXXXXXXX. The DiFOOS File 6100 files are, to say the least, revealing.
…
“For a long time the theory was that he was an informant. I mean, after all that happened, it was the logical conclusion. After the arrest he practically went on his own. So they thought that he ratted on them, that he was in with the Feds. But if you look at the record, he got nothing out of it. He served a long sentence and when he got out he had nothing. Lost his family, lost his friends. But let me tell you an alternate story. I covered the trial back then and what amazed me at the time was that there were no stories on his family background aside from the fact that he his father was a judge. No background on friends or very little. No school records apart from his university years. It was like he came out of nowhere. Then he became a stand-up comedian? In fact, I caught his act just by chance one night and when I realized who he was I was flabbergasted. He wasn’t a shadow of the boy I saw in trial. On a whim I approached him for an interview. Of course, he refused. But my curiosity was piqued and I tried to dig up what I could on him. I looked up the papers of those years and tried to follow up on some of the names mentioned. A lot of people had moved on. It was hard if not impossible to get people to talk. Many of the leftist groups had dissolved. Many of those directly involved had died. I was about to give up when I received a package through the mail. Let me backtrack. There was a young woman at the sentencing I had never seen before. Flaming red hair. Screaming at the top of her lungs that «the Feds did this to him» before the guards whisked her away. And she said something else, something about a program. I had forgotten about her until I went to the Drama Department where the kid studied and WHAM there she was teaching there. She balked at first until I finally convinced her that I just wanted to get at the truth. I asked her what she meant by the program. She sent me the package three days later.”
…
(From “A Letter to Jazz”)
“Life is like a circle, you know, it is not a straight line, up or down. The thing is that the circle can be so big that it’s hard to see it as such. Unless somewhere along some curve you step out of yourself, you have a glimpse, maybe just a second, enough to see another story unfold, another stage. I know all this seems like one of my directions for the Prometheans, but maybe like Hamlet said, «the play’s the thing». My dear Jazz, I’ve been an actor in someone else’s play. I’ve known it for the longest time, but I played along hoping to find out who held the strings, who played me for the fool I am. I wanted to discover who penned this shit I’m in.
I don’t know if you remember the time you went with me to see the Old Man, my grandfather. You didn’t know we were going to see my grandfather. I didn’t tell you right off. He had contacted me through one of his men. I remember you were surprised when I went to see you. We had drifted apart after the whole Prometheans thing had folded. There was a reason for that and I will explain. Jesus, Jazz, there’s so many fucking things going through my head now that I can hardly put them down so I’ll just let them come out however the fuck they want to come out. The guy my grandfather sent he showed me some pictures freaked me out.”
…
(From “A Letter to Jazz”)
“That’s when I began to see that I was not who I thought I was. I just never thought about my past that much. I mean, really thought. I then realized that what I had were just these anecdotes like if they were snapshots. And every time I would thing back they were just these pictures, small movies, and nothing else. There was no before or after. I could not go beyond these small mental movies. I could not remember what led me to them or what I did after. There was this one in particular where on a day off from that school. I was in a cafeteria and this woman approached me. I think I told you about that. Well I don’t really remember that day or how I got there or if there were other days like that or who my classmates were. It’s all a blank. That memory is like a loop, enclosed within itself. That’s what my grandfather revealed to me through the pictures. That I wasn’t not where I thought I was. You think you have a past because you remember these like set pieces, but nothing more. You cannot get outside these movies. I could not even recall my own family aside from the same memories over and over. There were glimpses but I could not relate them to what I was living or what I thought was my past. There was one photo he showed me of what seemed like a military installation or maybe a prison, and there I was walking along in a group up a wooded path in a place I could not recall. But it was undeniably me and at an age that I should have been in high school. My grandfather took that picture, he was there. Had a picture taken of himself that day with the installation in the background. Then after that, it all flowed out.”
…
“Without doubt when we published the letter he wrote to Jazz, which wasn’t her real name by the way, it set off a chain reaction and the newspapers dug up all they had on the trial and before and maybe it wouldn’t have got out if one of my sources hadn’t tipped me off that the Feds were on my tail too. I literally ran with what I had on me and the file on the case. I really feared for my life. Went on the lam, so to speak. Only my editor at the paper knew my whereabouts and only after I had him vouch for me with the German papers that published the letter.”
“…the guy they called Janus, that was him, that was ######################. I got a contact to approach him before we published the letter, to authenticate it. We had a hard time placing him. By then he was long gone on booze but he knew about her, about ######################## and what had happened to her, to his sister too, ….. the grandfather.
….It was around that time that Frank Gomer contacted me. Yes, the CO-Fi guy. He had defected from the program …..he supplied the other side of the story.”
…
“–It’s like my cat. Is he just some dumb fuck or all that is attributed to them, cats, that they are the most mysterious and profound of creatures. And that’s how I remember him and so I wobble between remembering him as the dumbest fuck in town or a profound individual, or both. I’m talking way back when I met him in the University. You’d see him everywhere and nowhere. I got this group photo of a student strike back then and we’re all sitting on a bench and he’s in that photo, but his back is towards the camera. So unless you knew him and recall that day in particular, you’d never know it’s him. And the only reason why I know it’s him is that I remember what he said to me. He was reading this book and we got to talking and then at one moment or another I asked him if he wrote, because the group I hung out with we were all poets and such and he said no, I’m a reader. Now when I look back it strikes me odd that he should say that because that same morning when the cops raided the campus and we were setting up barricades he just went on sitting there, a looker not a doer. You see what I mean. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Look when he got arrested all of us in that photo dredged up our little anecdote about him, trying to piece together a reason why he did it, and that was mine.”
….
“–I don’t deal in concept, I deal in creation. I know that people thought I was doing some kind of stand-up, confessional, you know, that kind of shit, but I was just doing it with my mouth and dealing with whatever came out. I don’t think it was all that great, it just was and people read into it whatever the fuck they wanted, including get that fuck off the stage, yank the lights and let’s go home. At first it was a personal dare, could I really do it, and one night I did and it was liberating. Sometimes I took a book just in case I couldn’t think of what to say but in time I just couldn’t wait so that’s why I ended up paying for the time up there. So when I thought it might catch on, I’d stop, disappear. Because I didn’t want it to have meaning for anyone else. Let them find their own fucking meaning. When you’re in a cell 24/7, you think you give a damn who is there or not?”
…
“-When you create a character, and by this I mean your life, you’ve got to do it by chance, as the opportunities present themselves. So you have this skeleton and then you slowly add the parts. Life gives you the lead, and each part fits with the next. Because you don’t really do the operation. Put simply, you come to life in another’s eyes to fill a need. So you carefully plant and wait. They’ll tell you what you are and you become it, that. They fill in the blanks, you set the tone. Do you understand me now? So when you ask me, who am I, what in heaven’s name do you think this is? A therapy session? Am I to supply you with answers to your questions? What are you seeking? Well, anyway, I had them going for a while. I had myself going for a while. Because, you see, I never got to say any of this. I was meaning to. But then it came. That first blow to the head, the crack in the ribs. They cracked all my knuckles. With a hammer. Pain can be so overbearing. But they found nothing but the stories I told myself. But the thing is that that was all that was left, the stories, stories buzzing like flies around a skeleton. So I guess I had the last laugh. Later on, they heaved me out of a speeding van like a bundle of newspapers. How do you like that story?”
₪
© 2015 j. a. morales-santo domingo