The Anecdote

Pass/Fail

Or

 

Bio Ethics: A Statistical Perspective

 

By Greg Steinbruner, 2011

Inspired by the fortune cookie: "Your emotional currents are flowing powerfully now."

Characters

 Professor Renee Mills, PhD.

A respected academic in the field of Bio Ethics. Older just a little bit than Arthur.

 

Arthur

An attractively hirsute undergraduate who is taking a Bio Ethics minor.

 

 

 

A small private office in an academic building on a bucolic liberal arts campus in New England.

 

On shelves: weighty tomes.

 

A drying up plant.

 

A woman shuffles already orderly papers absently at the lone desk. She checks her teeth in the reflection of her darkened flat screen computer monitor. Smooths an imperceptible fly away hair.

 

Presently a young man in casual attire leans his head through the doorway. He has dark circles under his eyes. He carries, rather obviously, an apple.

 

PROF.

We said noon. Close the door please. You’re late.

 

ARTHUR

Totally. Whoops. Hey, how are ya? Wow. Like an oven in here, Renee.

 

PROF.

Stop. Right. There. Remember? We said? We wouldn’t do that?

 

ARTHUR

Sorry, Professor Mills. Brought you an apple…

 

PROF.

(grimly unimpressed)

Of course you did.

 

ARTHUR

But dude, you’re office is kind of oppressive. In the heat sense, not the coercive political sense--on the one hand--but also, like, cold at the same time. Hot and cold. Seriously, it’s boiling in here. Is that a space heater?

 

PROF.

Are you listening to your iPod?

 

ARTHUR

What? Faith Evans. You likee?

 

PROF.

Arthur, please! When you have an appointment with a professor you need to be on time. You need to dress respectfully—not in your pajamas—you need to use the professor’s title—don’t roll your eyes--It’s important Arthur—and you don’t have a meeting listening to Faith Evans!

 

ARTHUR

You don’t. (MOUTHS: “I do”)

 

PROF.
No, you don’t either. Stop trying to get a rise out of me. This is too serious for that.

 

ARTHUR

Professor Mills, you know there is no such thing as a perfect student right? You can’t manufacture a perfect student or a perfect…

 

PROF.

Wherever you are going with that, don’t. I’m saying all these things really reflect on you! Attendance, participation in class, it’s all important when you get out into the real world…this is exactly what has gotten us to this--let me just say--frustrating moment. You’re so impulsive, which is very charming, but we need to start adding a little rationality, a little bit of intellectual rigor to the many other ways you are endowed; gifted; what have you; science is about rigor, it’s about the rational and the dispassionate, which will help you foster your capacity for the higher executive functions, multi-tasking, time management, and right now… Arthur, please don’t yawn when I’m talking, it’s exceedingly diminishing to the person speaking to you, can we just get through this meeting?

 

ARTHUR

Professor Mills. Relax!

 

Making himself more at home in the small office taking off his jacket. Fingering knickknacks idly. Yawning.

 

ARTHUR CONT.

Dude. I am ragged. You’re cold? I’m boiling, god, I gotta take off this jacket, man. How can you wear that sweater?

 

PROF.

They over-air condition. My extremities get cold. Numb.

 

ARTHUR

Do you like this jacket? Space heater is a fung shui no-no, by the way.

 

PROF.

Very fashionable. Arthur sit down, look, you know this isn’t very pleasant but we have to talk about this.

 

ARTHUR

Hun mor dun! That’s mandarin for very fashionable. Professor Liu is great. Great lecture. You should get some tips…

 

PROF.

So let’s get right down to it: as of right now you’re failing. You’re failing my class. Why is that funny? 

 

ARTHUR

Not sure.

 

PROF.

You’re failing my class. I’m going to have to fail you. Ok? You’re not applying yourself.

 

ARTHUR

In class?

 

PROF.

Right.

 

ARTHUR

Ok. Well, I’m kind of bored.

 

PROF.

In class?

 

ARTHUR

Yeah. In class. “Bio Ethics; a statistical perspective” it’s not exactly riveting

And I mean, I’m not getting good restful sleep.

 

PROF.

You’re an undergraduate. You don’t need sleep. Time management. That’s exactly my point. I get less sleep than you do.

 

ARTHUR

OK, but you’re older.

 

PROF.

This meeting is not so far doing anything to improve your standing…

 

ARTHUR

You need to let it be more exciting.

 

PROF.

The lecture.

 

ARTHUR

Little bit. ...I mean your voice is nasal and kind of monotonic. The lectures have no structure. They don’t build towards a climax. I’m on one hour, two hours of sleep there’s no way…

 

PROF.

Your sleep habits are irrelevant!

 

ARTHUR

Irrelevant! I read an article on Yahoo news groups about sleep being a necessary factor and strong determinant in stimulating the proper capacity for both short term and long term memory. How is that irrelevant? So, you can’t fail me Professor Mills!

 

PROF.

You don’t do the work!

 

ARTHUR

In class?

 

PROF.

Right.

 

ARTHUR

I was afraid you meant--

 

PROF.

We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about Bio Ethics and the fact you never hand in homework.

 

ARTHUR

I’m telling you I’m not getting enough sleep.

 

PROF.

That’s not an excuse!

 

ARTHUR

Sure it is. When am I supposed to do the work? You keep me up all night. I’m not complaining. It’s just not feasible to satisfy you sexually and academically. I’m a healthy young male, Renee—

 

PROF.

Professor Mills!

 

ARTHUR

--Professor Mills, and I have to say that you are completely wearing me out. To the point that I cannot adequately do all of my work. You can’t fail me, Renee!

 

PROF.

Professor Mills, Arthur! It is not appropriate!

 

ARTHUR

Wildly inappropriate I would say! I can barely walk this morning, Professor. That and your lecturing make it tough…

 

PROF.

Our relationship outside the classroom is not germane with respect to your grade. I asked you not to bring this into the discussion, Arthur, before you came. I indicated that in my email this morning. That the discussion here would focus strictly on academics, Bio Ethics, and otherwise only the most general of personal terms.

 

ARTHUR

Ok, I’ll speak in generalities. My girlfriend is so freaky I can’t study.

 

PROF.

Don’t call me that!

 

ARTHUR

Freaky?

 

PROF.

Girlfriend! One: I am not a girl I’m a woman…

 

ARTHUR

Oh hell yes! That is true.

 

PROF.

Two: we made an agreement remember…

 

ARTHUR

You’re so—I don’t know—

 

PROF.

And three: I’m a PhD and you’re my student, so I am not your fucking girlfriend.

 

ARTHUR

Gender politics: pretty last decade, but anyhoo...compartmentalized that’s what you are.

 

PROF.

Can we please just stick to talking about your grade, here. That’s why we are here. To talk about your grade. Currently an F. I’m not compartmentalized, I’m principled.

 

ARTHUR

You teach Ethics as it relates to biology and you’re fucking one of your students.

 

PROF.

And flunking him.

 

ARTHUR

Well, Professor Mills, here’s the thing…

 

He crosses behind her and begins rubbing her shoulders. Dutifully at first. A reflex.

PROF.

Arthur

 

ARTHUR

Renee. Fucking and flunking don’t mix.

 

PROF.

What you call compartmentalization is my way of retaining my objectivity; using reason to limit biology; we are feeling organisms, but it is our new brain that controls, if we let it, the baser instinct that we have to…

 

ARTHUR

Just a lot of tension in your shoulders.

 

PROF.

I know, that’s why my circulation is so bad, god, ow, that’s soooo tight.

 

ARTHUR

Yeah so um, if you fail me, you know, I’d have to, like, let the department know.

 

PROF.

They’ll see the grades, so yes, you may have to change your major, you’re just not quite Bio department material…

 

ARTHUR

No, I mean about us.

 

PROF.

What? What! You wouldn’t! Don’t! Oh, God, you can’t!

 

ARTHUR

I mean am I really failing or are you hyper-sensitive to any flaws in me because of our physical connection. I mean ethically, we’d need to let Dean Schmidt parse that, if you think about “Howard pg. 14-16” from the reading last week, on scientific recusal in cases of overriding personal gain…

 

PROF.

You don’t come to class. You failed three quizzes…

 

ARTHUR

I’m too sore some mornings to even get to the bathroom to shave…

 

PROF.

I get to class

 

ARTHUR

You’re the teacher. It’s your job.

 

PROF.

I can’t pass you.

 

ARTHUR

It’s really not fair to expect me to perform at a peak level in both the classroom and the bedroom setting, so I just think I would need to give the dean some kind of explanation of why I wasn’t able to do the work.

 

PROF.

You can’t do that!

 

ARTHUR

I mean I don’t exactly know the policy on when teachers are sleeping with their students.

 

PROF.

You can’t be this callous. Arthur I’m appalled. I never dreamed you’d betray me like this.

 

ARTHUR

Who’s callous. You’re the one who decided to fail me. How do you think that feels? So I could take a C. I’d prefer a C+

 

PROF.

It’s not ethical. I teach ethics.

 

ARTHUR

I’ll just text him, then I guess. “Dean Schmidt. So, awkward! But here’s the deal:”

 

PROF.

Stop that! And keep your voice down, his office is right there! You want to get me fired?

 

ARTHUR

Renee, think about it though, babe! If you get fired we could take a road trip, right now, really be together, throw off the dry shackles of narrow academe, connect to the earth spirit, give reign to our sensual natures and find in the eyes of the other the limitless fecundity of the infinite. Ethical!? That’s whole problem with your class. There is no ethics in biology. There are observable principles of attraction and curiosity, and we are powerless against them, and all of our cultural signifiers are just a veneer or pretext with which we justify elaborate ways to mark time between the physical acts of biological imperative that form the basis for our true motivations. In that sense, what is the use of even having a job, much less a boring academic one, you’re so much more alive, so much more alluring, so much more ‘what you truly are’ when you are in the long hours of anarchical physical attraction that we exhaustively share every night in my cramped and badly furnished but homey dorm room than you are here in this stuffy, sterile, rational but ultimately stultifying intellect-space; how can you teach biology and not live it, Renee; you are a monkey queen, let me feed you your fill of subservient banana…Can I call you my girlfriend in the text?

 

PROF.

Arthur if you send that text we’re through.

 

ARTHUR

What?

 

PROF.

I’m serious.

 

ARTHUR

No.

 

PROF.

Done. Over.

 

ARTHUR

Why?

 

PROF.

I’m sorry.  I would have to dump you.

 

ARTHUR

Dump me? What are you saying?

 

PROF.

We won’t make more of a scene, but it’s for the best.

 

ARTHUR

But we love each other.

 

PROF.

You’re about to ruin me, my whole career, and life work, over a single grade on a minor elective that recruiters I guarantee won’t even care about…

 

ARTHUR

(Weeping bitterly)

And you’re going to smear my transcript with your afterlust, just because you have a remarkably intense and unrelenting desire for my body that leaves me physically and emotionally too spent to pursue my studies. And now you want to break up with me over a silly text message to your boss? I don’t believe this.

 

PROF.

Don’t, Arthur.

 

ARTHUR

Please. You’re heartless.

 

PROF.

No.

 

ARTHUR

A user.

 

PROF.

No. Honeypie.

 

ARTHUR

I wanted you to hatch my babies.

 

PROF.

This has gone far enough, now.

 

ARTHUR

I wanted to plant my swimming spawn in your ripe wombnest.

 

PROF.

Oh, god. Arthur please.

 

ARTHUR

It’s not gross!

 

PROF.

I know it’s just…

 

ARTHUR

You’re a biologist! With an Olympic caliber libido! What do you think the essential drive to mate is for, Renee! Don’t leave me!

 

PROF.

So let’s just stay professional here.

 

ARTHUR

Oh my god, I mean we have tickets booked to the Caribbean over spring break. I mean, we’d still be boyfriend and girlfriend for that, right? We would right? I can’t believe this is happening. I need you! Pooky! Please!

 

PROF.

Be reasonable, Arthur—be reasonable—god why is this fucking heater blasting in here?

 

ARTHUR

Somewhere under that cardigan is Renee, the beating, breathing, Renee, and she would not do this! [Sings the Faith Evans maybe]

 

PROF.

Keep your shirt on—Arthur!

                                                                        He doesn’t. Beats his breast with pathos.

 

She is heaving with passion now and deposits Arthur bodily on her desk.

 

PROF. CONT.                                                           

Just take the F you petulant imp!

 

ARTHUR

No!

(calling off)

Dean Schmidt!

 

PROF.

Standing too close! Arrrrrrrg!!! Why the hell is this space heater on? I come in here every day and freeze my goddamn ass off and the one day, the one day I need it to be cold in here it’s like an ever loving sauna, and this goddamn sweater is so goddamned itchy and I feel like 99.9 percent of my life I’m asleep, I am just sleepwalking through a freezing cold meatlocker and my mouth is choked with a frozen tongue of and words that have no meaning at all they’re all just abstract sounds and my voice is cold and dead and my heart is barely beating in my breast and I’m just a head in fact without a heart at all and days go by like that, and weeks, and years have gone by like that and then for some odd reason one day the same routine dissolves around me in a powerful current of emotion and your hands are like some kind of crazy human heating coils literally searing my cold flesh with its magma, and your scent makes me drunk with a dark wine of man musk and appetite and I’m transported to a place of sand and sun and the simple sound of waves like breath and the thudding kiss of surf and the rhythm of nature in which all things are made to join with a careless humidity and unbound joy and in my ears are the strangest sounds of children laughing like mermaids oh god…drop the class.

 

ARTHUR

Wait, what?

 

PROF.

 Drop the class.

 

ARTHUR

Drop the class…Don’t I need the elective minor credit in a science or humanity to qualify for the Bio Dept minor…?

 

PROF.

Yes. You do. But what I’m saying Arthur is drop the class this semester, so it doesn’t go on your transcript, audit if you want, that’s fine, and re-register for it next semester.

 

ARTHUR

Re-register?

 

PROF.

Next semester.

 

ARTHUR

Take the class again.

 

PROF.

Take me again. Yes.

 

ARTHUR

Take you again. Next semester.

 

Renee distractedly has let her hand land on the apple, that Arthur brought at the top of the play. She takes a lusty bite. Her mouth full.

 

PROF

Yes, Athur. Take me again. Take me again. Take me again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Varya

“God what a miserable dump,” Varya remarked cheerfully to herself. The waiter, or busboy, or bartender, or cook or whatever you call the one guy at a place where all he’s got is soup and cheese and bread and vodka, had just plonked down a dirty glass and an ice cold bottle of some oily looking crap with no cap and an unrecognizable label. There was a place like this just about everywhere, everywhere Varya had been to anyway, and she had learned early on to look for them at the end of the night. Small, dirty, empty.

            Would you call something like this a café, a bar?

             To Varya’s mind a bar or a café implied that there would be customers. A place like this never had any customers. And that is exactly what drew Varya so often to these places. No customers.

            Another thing. At the end of a long night, with money in her purse, what she most wanted to do was spend it. Varya wasn’t thrifty. The opposite in fact. But she had been at this for a while and she knew that she’d be a lot happier if when she woke up in the morning, afternoon, or whenever, she still had some money left to show for her work. You just couldn’t spend all your money in a place like this. Not only would they run out of Vodka first, but these kinds of places were only good to take the edge off, have a drink, some soup, a smoke: you’d never find yourself not wanting to get the hell out of there.

            Before taking off her gloves and her hat, she picked up the bottle of vodka and sniffed: sharp, medicinal, perhaps a whiff of something chemical. She snickered aloud. Pouring herself a generous belt she knocked it back with gusto—definitely something chemical in there—a cleaning agent one could only hope—and returned the empty glass to the table with a resounding thud. Varya was instantly in a great mood. Satisfied that she had found what she was looking for, she now peeled off the glove on the non-vodka pouring hand, leaving the other protected from the cold of the bottle, and too, removed her fur hat, shaking her hair down as she did so, smelling the stale reminder of the cigarettes and cheap cologne and sweat as it clung to her full mane of wavy hair. Varya secretly cherished the chemical aftertaste of cheap generic label vodka. It reminded her of being clean. The night was over, her purse was full of money, and here was a full bottle of vodka to clean her out. An empty dive, and with luck a bowl of hot, if otherwise virtue-less soup.

            The guy, waiter-cook-bartender guy, turned on a small boom box that he kept behind the beat up old counter. Now Varya’s end-of-night snack had a thin and hollow sounding kind of soundtrack. She preferred it silent, but she got the feeling that the guy had turned it on because he thought she’d like it. Varya was still preoccupied with her pleasure at being able to be alone with a cheap bottle, but she allowed a small part of her mind to wonder what was implied in the fact that the guy had turned on the music.

            He was probably just trying to get into her pants. She seriously doubted he had the dough if he ran a dump like this. She was done for the night anyway. It wasn’t going to happen. On the other hand, he might have turned the music on just to be nice, because he thought she’d like it.

            Did people do things like that? Random things, like that, for strangers, just to be nice? Not likely.

            Something about the way he did it though, flicking the switch on the box sort of as an afterthought, made her think that maybe that was all it was. She could almost imagine that hopeless as this place was, he might simply take pride in doing nice things for his customers. Varya would never think to do anything like that for her customers.

            If he was nice like that, though, why was the place such a dump, anyway? If his customers meant so much to him would this place look the way it looked. The walls were some kind of imitation-imitation wood paneling that had been popular for about two weeks, before you could get ‘real’ imitation wood paneling. There was one light. A raw bulb, needlessly bright, overwhelming the dingy room, and hanging by an ugly wire that was tacked to the ceiling and ran to an outlet in the wall. Too much light for a place like this.

It was nice to be alone in a dirty dive, but it would have been nicer not to see the dirt.

There was a poster of the national football team’s hero about to strike the ball into the net. He had long hair. So did the bartender guy. Maybe he worked for the person who owned the place and it wasn’t up to him to make sure it was clean? It didn’t matter. Most likely he had turned on the annoying music because he wanted to listen to annoying music.

As the second belt of Voldka sloshed its way down, Varya decided he probably was just trying to get into her pants after all.

            He brought the soup. Put it down on the table without looking at her. She wondered how to take that. On the one hand, if he had looked at her directly, she knew that would have meant that he was interested. Even after a night like the one she just had, she knew that she was nice to look at. She was used to people sneaking quick appraising looks at her. Especially men, though women did too. It had always been that way.

            On the other hand though, the fact that he didn’t look was probably even more significant. Most people would just go ahead and stare at her. If he didn’t look, it was almost certainly because he didn’t want to give away that he was interested. Which meant that he was. Unless he just wasn’t at all. It was possible he was gay.

            Varya considered that as the guy cleaned a glass left by a long departed customer. Before he had picked it up to clean it, the light had reflected several greasy finger prints on the surface of the glass. She watched his hands as he cleaned the glass methodically with an old rag.

            It’s hard to be surreptitious about checking someone out when there are only two of you in a small room, but she figured she’d get away with a certain amount of checking him out without him getting the wrong idea, because he was concentrating not at all on her. Or was that it? Perhaps he was only pretending to concentrate on his work, thinking of her the whole time. The music droned away. She recognized the song now. It had been popular a few years ago. Sentimental.

            His hands were strong. The large veins bulging as he twisted the grease away. He held the glass up to inspect his work in the glare of  the naked bulb. It looked like he was about to give a toast. Unexpectedly she thought of her father. She almost never did. Perhaps it was the smell of the cheap vodka. He had hands like the bartender guy. Strong, but not clumsy. Varya looked away.

            Her father had come back from the war when she was just a little girl. Varya remembered standing with her mother for a long time on a train platform. The day had been very cold and, when the train came it made a lot of noise stopping. Several people got off the train. The last of these was a big man with a wide face, a crooked nose and, a grim frown. Though she was unaware of it at the time, this was her father. Varya was too little to understand much about it, but she knew he was someone important. Her mother cried. Or rather her lips pursed tightly and her chin trembled slightly, which Varya later learned was what her mother did when normal people would ordinarily shed tears. Her mother never shed any tears.

            Varya was introduced to the big man. The man had patted her head, and they all went home together to the small flat. For the few months that he lasted, Varya watched with fascination as the big man came apart piece by piece. There didn’t seem to be any part of him that wasn’t damaged. His lungs we weak from something he had breathed in during the war. He seldom slept, preferring to chain smoke as he gazed out the small window in the kitchen. When he did sleep he woke up screaming. And his eyes, unlike Varya’s mother’s were always filled with tears.

            Unless he had been drinking, he could never come up with enough words to finish a sentence; when he had been drinking, it was the opposite problem: when he had been drinking there were too many words; one sentence could run on for an hour. Varya never could understand anything he said. Even now she could not decide if it was because she was too little, or because he never spoke a language she recognized. She couldn’t recall that he ever addressed her directly in any case.

            He had friends that came to share his vodka, when he could get it, and it was these comrades to whom he would solemnly raise his glass and give his incomprehensible and deeply, deeply felt toasts. Towards the end, his toasts would always end with the strangely un-ironic punctuation, “but let us thank god, friends, we still have our lives.” At least that’s what Varya seemed to think he said. He was so quickly a headstone in the little graveyard down the street, Varya attached almost no significance to him until she was old enough to understand that a father was yet another potentially useful advantage that she had missed out on in life.

            She ate a spoonful of soup. She could feel its warmth work its way down her throat. How strange that ice cold vodka and boiling hot soup should have such a similar effect. Why was it that opposite things were so often hard to distinguish from one another? Varya’s father and the old system had given up the ghost almost at the same time. Now things were supposedly different. Even though she had been little more than a toddler when he and the old system had met their dismal reward, she could see that a lot of what went on now was exactly the same as it had been before. There was no war now, but she could tell that someday she would look and live just like her mother. Only, she thought wryly, she wouldn’t be found waiting for any trains, with tears or without.

            She was convinced now that the bartender guy was deliberately not looking at her because he secretly wanted to look at her. Why did people behave that way? Did he think she couldn’t tell that he was looking at her in his mind? Was that any different from just openly staring. It was like that sometimes with her customers. In a way she preferred the ones who just came out and said what they wanted. It’s not like she was easily shocked anyway, why waste time by dropping a million hints?

            The guy hadn’t brought any bread. She supposed he must not have any. On the other hand the little handwritten sign behind the counter-bar-thing said “soup with bread.” She wanted to ask for some, but now she felt awkward about it. If he was secretly wanting to look at her but not, he probably knew that she had been checking him out. If she asked for bread now he might get the wrong idea, like she wanted to talk or something. She didn’t want to lead him on. That would just end up being a hassle.

            The buzz from the vodka had turned a corner. A maudlin kind of resignation crept into Varya. She felt like a half eaten dish. The warmth evaporating away, she felt herself turning cold and stale as the sentimental music blared on. There was nothing romantic now about the little dive where she found herself.

            The guy had put down the glass and apparently finding nothing else to occupy his attention, merely sat, back to Varya, on a stool at the empty bar. She stared at his back. He didn’t give a crap, she thought. What’s another drunk whore more or less. What did he care? But he was polite, she’d give him that much. He didn’t act superior. He just did his job, and took pride in it.

            How simple it was for someone like that, Varya mused.

            Another glass of vodka, deepening the chill, but firing her imagination.

            How simple life could be for some. With strong hands and a clear mind. Varya didn’t think of men as something that she needed, but something like this kind of man might do the trick. Simple, and strong. Nice; not so pushy. Not so demanding. Something you could wrap yourself around and know that it couldn’t be shaken from the ground on which it stood. They could have a little farm somewhere. Not near here, but somewhere in the south where it was warmer. It would be nice, it would be just nice to sit, like this, in silence. They would own a little bar. Not like this, clean and warm. Clean.

            Vodka. Varya’s forehead rested on the table. Cold table.

            Somewhere clean, and every day he would get up and put on some music, just because he knew, he knew without asking that she needed something to distract her from thinking too deeply about anything. He would cook eggs for breakfast, and there would be bread on the side, and they would laugh sometimes at nothing, the way she never had, but had seen people do who were together in that way.

            The soup. The soup had some warmth in it still. Varya lifted her head from the table. She spooned in the last of the thin broth. The man had gone into the back through a door behind the bar. She left a few bills on the table and taking the half empty vodka bottle, headed home.

            She had wanted to ask for bread, but the vodka had made her too tired to care. On nights like these, thin soup was all Varya could swallow anyway. 

 

 

 

 

WANDA

The decision to come to the clinic had been difficult for Wanda. If she had it, her family would shun her.  Also she felt so tired these days, and it was such a long way to come here from the village. She came in the end anyway. She did not know why.

Now, as she stood numbly in the long line at the free clinic, she regretted making the trip. It was bad enough not feeling right in her body, but having to make a long trip on top of that, to come here where it was so crowded and the smell of sickness thickened the air like a cloud of insects, she felt it was more than she could take.

Wanda put her forehead against the painted cement wall. She could feel the rough texture underneath the paint pressing against her head, probably leaving a mark. She argued gently with her eyelids in her mind. “Go on now, there can be no reason for you to be so heavy. Talk to the feet, they did all the work to get here, and they are still working, keeping me standing here. They didn’t walk all this way just so the eyelids could rest.” Her protestations notwithstanding her eyelids continued to close, so that it was a good thing she was leaning against the wall or else she might have fallen in her strange drowsiness. In her doze she was still aware of the buzzing flies and the murmuring distress of the many other patients waiting hushed in the line, or stretched out on the simple benches that ran the length of the windowless waiting area. The noises blended together and gave a hypnotically hopeless rhythm to her semi-dreams. She dreamt that she was sleeping.

The clinic was a small building in a poor neighborhood at the outskirts of city. The one story square building was set back from the street.  Except for two or three warehouses there was nothing else in the immediate vicinity. It was not as crowded here nor as dangerous as in the shantytowns on the other side of town. There were even some trees, and you could still feel the wildness of the land as though the warehouses and clinic were masks hiding the place’s true nature.

When Wanda had arrived there had already been a line outside the front entrance. She was glad she had gotten there when she did. Soon after she had found a place in line just a few meters from the entrance, a crowded bus had pulled up in front of the clinic, and dozens of people had spilled out of it, and queued up behind her.  From then on the line coiled like a snake all the way around the little building. The would-be patients sat listlessly in the queue, exposed to the unforgiving sun.

A woman from the clinic had come and counted them and given everyone in the queue a number. Wanda had soon been let inside where she now waited, but it was hotter inside than out, and they wouldn’t let you sit here except on the benches, which were full. From the entrance hallway outside the waiting area, she could see the tail of the line emerging from the opposite side having wound all the way around. The file of patients was starting to twist irregularly away from the building so as not to block the entrance.

Wanda pulled her head from the wall and shook her head to clear the tiredness. There were still twenty people ahead of her. Now and then the door at the head of the Queue would open and the next person would be ushered in. The people who had already received care did not come out this way. Wanda guessed they were released through some kind of back entrance. For a while she had tried to keep track of how often people went inside, but there did not seem to be any pattern to it, and in any case it just made her more aware of how much longer she had to stand.

As a girl Wanda had often dreamed about being able to come to the city for work. Now that she was older and had spent time in it, she realized that she did not like the city at all. It was so dirty, so hot, and crowded. The shantytowns were awful. She had once visited her aunt who had lived in one. She hadn’t liked it. Her aunt’s life there had seemed hard—worse than Wanda’s mother’s—and anyway her aunt was dead now. There were many unusual things to see in the rich part of the city of course, but she stuck out there and knew she would never belong there, even as a domestic. For someone like her, with no money, and no relatives in the city, it just felt overwhelming and foreign. This morning at the last minute she had almost decided that she would not come at all, but the alternative was to spend another day at the crossroads in the small town near her village, begging people to let her do odd jobs, and that had seemed pointless to her, so here she was. Lately she barely had had the strength to do what little work there was to do in her town. It seemed like fewer and fewer people came to the market each day. No one spoke much about it, but the sickness was all around.

Wanda had heard about the clinic from a friend. She had been thinking for a few days about making the trip. Last night she had made up her mind to go. Most people who had it eventually just lay down and did not try to get back up again. Wanda was not sure if she had it or not, but she had reasoned with herself that if she did, it did not really matter if the trip was too much for her because she was sure to die soon anyway. If she did not have it, perhaps the doctors would be able to help her. She had been to the healer. When she had entered his house, it was plain to see that he was himself dying of the sickness. Despite her misgivings, she had set out for the clinic.

Starting well before dawn it had taken her six hours, walking quickly at first and more slowly later when the heat rose through the morning. It was very hot for this time of year. The dust from the road had soon caked her mouth and nose, and there was very little water to be had along the way. The roads had become a little better as she had gotten away from the small settlements near where she lived and closer to the city. She had gone through a number of towns each one a bigger than the last. She had gotten so thirsty as she walked. Eventually she had stopped a woman on the road who was carrying a large container of water and asked her for some. The woman had grudgingly given her a sip. It had a sharp taste, but Wanda hadn’t minded.

At last she had reached the outskirts of the city, and passed through the big shantytown on the northern edge. The sun was just past its peak and the scene shimmered in the heat. Men stood at the doors of the tin and wood shacks, staring blankly. Behind them the deep shadows of the interiors stood out against the bright light of the sun. Between the slum and the paved highway that marked the proper beginning of the city there was a big expanse of open ground. The refuse from the thousands of little dwellings in the shantytown collected here, as did the children. There seemed to be hundreds of them, barefoot and ragged picking through the garbage and playing frantic games.

A large group of boys played football with a pile of rags tied up to resemble a ball, their bare feet kicking up an impenetrable cloud of dust. The boys were of all sizes, and even the littlest were as fierce as warriors. Wanda was transfixed for a time. The heat and the sight of so many children made her feel lightheaded. She missed her own boys, but what she mostly felt was relief, when she thought of them living with her sister somewhere. She could barely provide for herself these days. She hoped that her sister’s husband treated them well. 

A woman in a white uniform emerged from the little door at the head of the line. She had a clipboard and a stethoscope. Once more Wanda tried to clear the grogginess from her head. The woman was asking everyone questions and noting things down on the clipboard. She would soon get down the line to Wanda. Watching the woman with her bright white uniform, and stiff demeanor, Wanda began to feel apprehensive. She was not sure that she would be able to tell the woman why she had come here. When she set out she had been determined to have that test that she had heard about. You took it and they could tell if you had it or not. Now she was not sure. Maybe she could just tell the woman what was wrong with her and let the woman tell her what to do.

When she thought about the things that were wrong with her though, she was not sure they would mean anything to the woman. She had been tired a lot, but it was very hot, and lots of people get tired from the heat. She had lost weight, but it had been much harder to get work when she began to feel the great tiredness a few weeks ago, and that meant there was less for her to live on. When she was younger there had always been enough food in her village, but for a few years now the crops had been bad, not enough rain, and the village had tried to shift to making things and earning enough money to buy food. It had not worked well. Then the sickness had begun. Now, unless Wanda worked very hard to get the odd jobs that earned her a few pennies every day, she would go hungry. When she had become tired she found it harder and harder to keep going. But how could she tell the woman all that?

A few years ago Wanda’s husband had disappeared to the city leaving her with the children. Wanda wasn’t sure what had happened to him. Once, she had heard from a friend that someone had seen him in the city and that he had been sick. That was probably why he had left. At that time the sickness had come with a great stigma in her village. It was much better for people to think that he had left for some domestic reason, than the alternative. If he had gotten the sickness and people had found out, Wanda and the children would have been forced to leave. It did not much matter either way, because the result had been very much the same, but at least Wanda had gotten some sympathy for her predicament at the time, instead of the shame of having a husband who had gotten the sickness.

            The woman in white, clipboard in hand, was nearing Wanda. Wanda pushed herself out of line and away from the wall. Her feet took her towards the street, past the opening to the clinic and out into the bright light, away from the woman in white, her questions for which Wanda had no answers, and the door from which no one ever emerged.

            Later, as she trudged back through the successively smaller towns, back towards the bush and the ancient home of her people, she realized that death would not come any sooner or later for knowing. Tomorrow she would try to find the energy to get some odd jobs in her town. After all, hadn’t she found the strength to walk all the way to the city? On the way back she only stopped once, for rest, and to look again at the children playing football. 

NYaiku: Now a ferry ride

Used to ride the L

'Track work on weekends' kills me 

Rivers never break

 

XAVIER

Xavier!” his mother called. “Where are your soccer shoes? We’re going to be late for school, sweetheart.” Her voice carried to his room only faintly up the main staircase.

Xavier sat on his bed studying the cartoon characters on the bedspread. Earlier his mother had helped him pick out his clothes for school, and she had made his bed while he dressed. Now the clock on the red night table said 7:42 AM. He imagined that he could hear his mother rooting around in the closet in the foyer. Next, she would jog down the stairs to the playroom in the basement and look there. Then she would come back up and stand at the foot of the main staircase, or maybe come three or four stairs up it, and call for him to come down and eat breakfast.

Xavier idly picked his nose.

Xavier’s mother descended to the playroom in the basement in search of Xavier’s soccer shoes, the ones with the little rubber cleats on them. She was determined that he would have them for his first day of practice. She knew already that the new coach would take some breaking in. Right from the get go she knew there were going to be problems.

It was a third and fourth grade team, and it seemed to her not such a great idea to have children from two different grades playing. Wasn’t it a little demeaning for Xavier to have to compete for playing time with kids who were younger than him? Of course he would play as many minutes of the games as he wanted to—she made sure of that with Mister Bickerson the league organizer before she signed Xavier up— but even so it just didn’t seem like such a great idea. She could tell Xavier had been upset by it. Why couldn’t they just have a different team for every grade? She would speak to somebody about that. Especially because of the number situation. Boy, that had been really unbelievable.

At the first get together of the team and the parents and the coach, they signed the kids up, paid the registration fees, signed the waivers, and had coke and cake and chips and sports drinks and oranges, and then they were supposed to pass out the uniforms. They went alphabetically by first name, and that meant Xavier was last. If only she and Rob had thought of that before they named him Xavier. He would always be last for these kinds of things. They really should alternate and start at the end of the alphabet every other time. Somebody would always have to go last, but it shouldn’t be Xavier all the time. Should it? By the time it was his turn to pick out his number, none of the good numbers were left. He was supposed to get the number 12, he had really wanted it, but of course some other kid got it. A third grader. This was just the kind of situation that they should have prevented. Why have grades at all if the older kids don’t get seniority in these kinds of situations? It would have been so much better for the children, so much simpler and easier, if each team had one grade. The way it was was just so confusing for the kids, who are more comfortable with people in their immediate peer group.

Xavier had been devastated, first by the waiting, and then at having to pick from the bad numbers.

She had spoken immediately to the coach about it, and he had been very unsympathetic. He obviously didn’t know how important it was for a child to get the right number on his jersey. He was very insensitive and had brusquely suggested that she try to trade with the child who had gotten the number twelve. In the end she had practically to bribe the parents of the fat third grader who had gotten 12 to make him trade with Xavier. At least they had finally understood how much it meant to Xavier to get the right number. It was maddening that Xavier had already been treated so badly, but she was not about to let that sort of thing continue.

Xavier was absolutely going to get the most from his soccer experience.

The coach had also seemed extremely nonchalant on the subject of equipment. When Xavier’s mother had asked him for a list of shoe brands that he recommended they try on, he had acted surprised. He said he thought any sports shoe would be fine for this level, but that she might consider shoes with cleats for the days when it would rain. Well, she didn’t play soccer, but she knew enough to know that every sport has very different demands, and luckily she had gotten a more authoritative second opinion from the customer support representative at the sporting goods store. He had shaken his head in disbelief when she had told him of Xavier’s coach’s attitude towards shoes. The customer support representative had pointed out that soccer is an extremely skilled sport with a lot of rugged contact, and that inadequate footgear was bound to result in a debilitating injury sooner or later. The proper shoe was a lightweight brand name cleated shoe that had superior turf traction and good arch support. They were quite expensive, but they greatly reduced the risk of injury and really gave the player a great feel for the ball, which was critical for learning good technique. The customer support representative had said, “Ma’am, with shoes, you get what you pay for.” Xavier’s mother had heartily agreed and had resolved to petition Mr. Bickerson to make these safer, better shoes mandatory wear throughout the league.

By now she had rooted through all the large bins of childhood accessories in the basement playroom in search of the soccer shoes with the good arch support. She was secretly hoping it would drizzle a little bit today—it said in the weather report it might—so that she could point out to that coach how important it was that the children have the proper shoes. Xavier had insisted on wearing them right home from the store and the clack, clack of the little cleats against the floors of the mall on the way to the car had made her smile with pride. Xavier was so unusual in his devotion to his activities. Soccer already meant so much to him, even though today was his very first practice. She could hardly wait to cheer him on through his first exercises or drills or whatever they were called. She had washed and ironed his number 12 jersey because she knew he would want to wear it in practice as well as for the weekly games.

While his mother continued looking for his shoes, Xavier had in the meantime made an excursion downstairs to the kitchen in search of pop tarts. As usual his mother had set out a bowl and spoon, a napkin, three kinds of cold cereal, a piece of fruit—today a banana—and a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice from the big juicer on the counter. The kitchen was filled with the sharp smell of orange pulp.

Xavier knew where to find the pop tarts. They were in the pantry. They were supposed to be a Saturday treat, but Xavier pretty much asked for them every day and pretty much got them every day. Today he decided it would be simpler to take the box upstairs with him. That way tomorrow he wouldn’t have to make the long trip to the kitchen while his mother collected his things for school. He could just stay in his room. He poured out the orange juice and put some cereal in his bowl and splashed some milk on it. He put a spoon in the bowl and left it all sitting on the breakfast table where his mother would see it and assume that he had eaten.

As he padded up the main staircase he could hear that his mother was on her way back from the basement. He quietly ascended to his room and shut the door. Strawberry pop tarts were his favorite. These were chocolate. Not bad, but not his favorite. He sat back down on his bed.

Xavier nibbled the first chocolate pop tart without much enthusiasm as he contemplated the day in front of him. He didn’t think much of school. The teacher almost never asked Xavier what he wanted to do. She almost always just launched into some thing or another without ever asking him if he was interested or not. Mostly he wasn’t. The other kids seemed really dumb to Xavier. They just went along with whatever she had in mind. They didn’t seem that interested in what he wanted to do either. Mostly he just doodled with the colored pens his mother had gotten for him. They weren’t the kind he wanted but there wasn’t anything else to do. His mother was always impressed when he showed her his doodles. The teacher had gotten mad for the first couple of days and said that Xavier wasn’t paying attention. After his mother had met with her though, she pretty much left him alone. After school he would have to go to the soccer practice.

Xavier was pretty sure that he didn’t like soccer. At the thing where they were supposed to meet the other kids and the coach and stuff, pretty much everything was annoying. The chips they had were not the kind he liked, and they had only had Pepsi. There were a lot of kids from other schools he didn’t know, and some kids from his school that he did know whom he didn’t really like. In addition to his own, there were a lot of other parents there, and that was never good news. Most kids’ parents were really weird and made Xavier uncomfortable. He wasn’t always sure how you got them to do what you wanted.

After what seemed like forever, they had finally given out the uniforms. They were blue. Xavier didn’t like the color blue. The blue pen in his set of colored pens had always bothered him because the actual color of the ink was different from the color of the top of the pen. He didn’t want to play soccer, he didn’t like the uniforms, and he had to pick last of all, which meant that there were only three shirts to choose from when it had at last been his turn. All of them were blue, of course. The whole thing had pretty much stunk.

The only thing he liked about the soccer-meeting thing was the coach. Xavier liked the way the coach ignored the parents and did what he wanted. The coach had made a lot of the parents mad. Xavier had been pouring himself a Pepsi when he had overheard two of the kids’ mothers and one father gathered around the bowl of chips complaining about how the meeting was going. The coach had gathered all the kids together to talk to them about what they would be doing at soccer practice, and he had asked the parents to gather at the back of the room and mingle amongst themselves. Xavier had lost interest in what he was saying about practice and went to get himself the Pepsi. That was when he overheard the parents complaining. The two mothers were annoyed that the practices were so short, and the father had said he wasn’t thrilled about the fact that they would have to take turns attending practice. They were all annoyed that the first game was scheduled for the early Saturday morning time slot.

Xavier remarked that when adults talked to children they sounded like adults, but when they talked to each other they sounded like children.

When Xavier returned to the front of the room, the coach and the kids were still talking. They had stopped talking about soccer and were talking now about what everyone’s favorite show on TV was. The coach kept the parents waiting at the back of the room for the rest of the time. Xavier appreciated that. Still, he didn’t want to have to play soccer.

His mother was on the stairs again. She couldn’t imagine where the soccer shoes had gotten off to. “Xavier, sweetheart, do you remember the other day when we got your special new shoes for soccer and you wore them home? Where do you suppose we left them. Do you remember? I’m having trouble finding them and I know how much you want to wear them at your first practice.” She arrived at the doorway of the room. “You haven’t seen them, sweetie, have you?” Xavier shrugged his shoulders. She mused, “Gretta probably put them somewhere when she was cleaning.” This new inspiration drew her away again, this time down the hall towards the upstairs TV room where there was a cordless phone. As she retreated, thudding quietly on the thick carpet in the hallway, Xavier heard her say to herself, “She always knows just where to put things so I don’t find them.”

Xavier finished his pop tart and lay back across the made up bed, staring up at the mobile hanging from the ceiling. It was a mobile of the solar system. The idea was that the ceiling light, a globe of frosted white at the center of the room, was the sun, and if you attached the mobile to the ceiling five feet from your light fixture the distances sort of matched the proportions of the actual solar system. The mobile hung from a center string and was made up of painted replicas of the planetary bodies neatly balanced and strung out in a line along a curved black metal rod. It didn’t quite work because when the central air conditioning kicked in and stirred up the air in the room, the center of the mobile was actually the big plastic Jupiter, and the rest of the planets revolved around it rather than around the ersatz sun,. Pluto was frequently the closest planet to the light. Xavier’s father had tried to explain that the light in the ceiling was really the center of the system and the planets were actually supposed to revolve around it, but Xavier didn’t really get it. It was pretty obvious that all the planets revolved around Jupiter.

The ceiling light was hardly ever on anyway. Only Gretta ever turned it on, when she cleaned.

Xavier’s mother was on the phone now coming back down the hall. “Hi Gretta, it’s me, you’re not asleep are you. Good. I just was wondering if you had seen Xavier’s new soccer shoes yesterday. I can’t find them. Well I’m in his room now and I’m not seeing them. In the closet? Yes, I’m standing in the closet, I’m looking in the plastic thing with all the shoes and I don’t see them here. Xavier, were they in here, do you remember? All right, never mind, it’s the new shoes we’re looking for, the ones with the little rubber cleats on them. Well they‘re not here; I don’t know where they are. Okay, thanks, bye. C’mon kiddo, its time to get moving. Gretta doesn’t remember what she did with them. She thought they were in the closet, but that’s obviously not where she put them. I’ll just put your shorts and your jersey in this little duffle bag. And the shin guards and socks and your last year gym shoes. We wouldn’t want your new shoes to get all messy in the rain anyway. This way they’ll still look nice for the games. I’ve packed your lunch, so lets go get in the car, Okay, otherwise we’ll be late.”

Xavier slid down off the bed and waited for his mother to make her way back downstairs. He closed the door to his bedroom on his way out. He waited in the foyer next to the front door while his mother collected his lunch and book bag. She helped him put on his puffy beige coat, and they walked together down the drive to the car.

Xavier could see his breath in the morning air. He stared out the window from the back seat of the car while his mother drove the usual route to his school. There was a lot of traffic, but once they were past the mall the drive went more quickly. As they pulled up in the school driveway the clock on the dashboard read 8:00 am. His mother walked him to the door of the school with his things. She kissed him on the cheek and mussed his hair. Xavier could hear the morning bell ringing inside as he watched her drive away. He waited a moment before going in. The car was out of sight but he still stood looking after it. He was picturing in his mind the new soccer shoes, under his bed where he hid them, next to the box of pop tarts.

 

 

 

Yi

Yi could just make out through his swollen left eye a tiny area of cement floor. An expanse of perhaps two centimeters. He could not say how long he had been awake or how long he had been staring at this same spot. The cement was a dingy gray color like the sky on a winter afternoon when rain is expected. There was nothing else to see, and it had taken him a good while to ascertain that the gray before him was in fact cement. With only one eye working, even that knowledge seemed to Yi a kind of victory. Yi’s right eye was swollen completely shut. 

For some moments this was all he could comprehend: the floor was cement, and he could only see it with his left eye.

There was little sensation at all in the rest of his body, so all of his attention was directed to what his left eye could tell him. He concluded that the left side of his head must be resting on the floor since his eye was practically touching the gritty surface. This made focusing very difficult. Yi had been trying to contract the muscles around his eye for what he guessed was ten minutes in an effort to bring the field of view into better resolution. What else could he do? 

At length it occurred to him that he had been wavering in and out of consciousness, so it might have been much longer than ten minutes since he had become aware of the cement. He couldn’t be certain. However long it was, in that time he had been able for brief intervals see the cement more clearly.

It was a raw sort of cement, unpainted, and the surface was from this vantage not flat at all, but had thousands of bumpy little peaks. He had never had occasion before to wonder at the intricacy and variation in the minutiae of a patch of common cement. He did wonder at it now. With its microscopic gray dust and uneven, crater-ed surface, the patch of cement looked like a miniature model of the surface of the moon . Even two centimeters of it was far too complex in its changes in elevation, its imperfections and subtle discoloring, to be fully comprehended. At length he concluded that cement was a substance best taken in as a whole concept, for while it held reasonable interest as a uniform surface, in close up it became deconstructed and difficult to understand. Tiring of cataloging the topography of the cement he began to extend his awareness beyond what he could see, to what he could not see.

He sensed that beyond what he could see, just offstage as it were, from what he could see, there was a redness, and this observation jolted Yi into a more alert state. While staring at the unfamiliar cement he could not be entirely sure that he was indeed awake. When the thought suddenly came into his mind that the red substance that he sensed in the margins of his little gray horizon was most likely blood, suddenly he was able to assure himself that he was awake, and apprehension banished the lingering wooliness in his head. Now came a thousand pressing questions that the cement floor seemed suddenly to be asking but could not in its mute cold inanimateness be expected to answer.

Where was he, and why he was reduced to staring at a tiny patch of cement floor? Was he bound in some way that he was unable to move himself into a better position to view his condition?  Why was he having so much trouble putting his thoughts in order? Had he been in an accident of some sort? Where was he?

 With no answers to these many questions forthcoming from the cement, and to steady his nerves, which told him that something was probably very wrong, Yi returned with renewed enthusiasm to the task of making a mental map of his two centimeters. How many bumps could he see? Were there any obvious imperfections? If he were king of all that he could see, would he change anything about the configuration of little bumps in his postage stamp cement kingdom? He found it was much better to concentrate on the concrete, as it were, than to dwell even briefly on the possible explanations for his predicament. He was alert now, but panic was threatening to rob him of his ability to reason. With as much self control as he could muster he counted bumps.

After some minutes he felt his panic subsiding, replaced by a growing resignation in himself. With less urgency in the task, Yi grew tired of trying to count the miniscule bumps on the cement. It was very hard to tell where one bump ended and another began. It was annoying, but he enjoyed the sensation of his own annoyance. It felt familiar, a welcome relief from such an unfamiliar situation as he found himself in. Very bored now with his two centimeters, Yi explored once again the possibility of somehow changing his perspective.

Try as he might he was unable to shift the limit of his gaze. He could neither lift, nor even rotate his head. He surmised from his being able to see the cement that it must either be daytime or there must have been a light on, but he was not able to seek out the source of the light at all. The only movement available to him was the small contracting and un-contracting of his eye muscles. He could also close his left lid a bit and thereby return himself to darkness. Having had his fill of the cement vista he squeezed his eye shut again.

He noted with surprise and no little chagrin that the cement pattern had burned itself into his eye, so even with his eye shut he was forced for a time to contemplate his now thoroughly hateful two centimeters. Eventually the effect diminished and Yi took stock of the various sensations that make up perception.

First he considered again what he had been able to see and not see and what it implied, letting the exercise of logic force his brain into a more responsive condition. He was in all likelihood lying on a bare floor, blind in the right eye, mostly so in the left, and suffering from some kind of general paralysis.

Alert now but with no cement to distract him Yi concentrated on what he might be able to hear. He listened but he heard nothing. He listened harder, and wondered as he did so was it possible to listen harder? Wasn’t hearing just something that happened? It was really a question of concentration, there were no muscles in the ears as far as he knew. He brought all his attention to his hearing. He heard nothing. Not even the sound of his own breathing, though he presumed he must be breathing. He tried making a noise in his throat, something that he had previously not thought to try. Perhaps he could call for help. He could not be sure if he had made a noise or not. He had not felt any vibration anywhere, nor had he heard anything. Except there was a kind of ringing, like the long dying tone of a gong, but one that just kept on dying indefinitely without ringing out. He concluded his ears must be in much the same condition as the rest of him. It was an open question as to whether he had been able to make any noise. He had not heard anything or felt anything, but perhaps that was just a function of the deafness and the paralysis. On the other hand was it likely if he were paralyzed that he would be able to call for help. He opened his eye a few more times, just to reassure himself that he was still awake. There was the cement. Next to his left eyeball.

As he lay, contracting and un-contracting his one responsive set of muscles he thought paralysis did not seem to be the right word for his condition. It’s true he could not move, but as he concentrated more and more on the various sensations beyond what he could hear and see, he realized that it was pain that rendered him immobile. What he had mistaken for paralysis was a kind of generalized pain the like of which he had never before encountered. The pain, like the ringing in his ears, was so constant that he had not noticed it at first. Now that his mind seemed to be waking up he was able to remember that this was not always how he felt. His whole body, from his head to his toes, which he could now feel but not move, was in agony. He was getting there. The beginnings of understanding were begrudgingly working their way into his thoughts.

Could he smell anything he wondered? No, his nose was stopped up and now that he thought of it—

The idea came into his mind at last. It took some moments to connect the idea to the sounds that would express the thoughts in words, apparently whatever had happened he was having nearly as difficult a time thinking as he was seeing, hearing and moving, but at last he was able not only to know what was happening but to put words to it. Now with his eyes closed the characters for words began to float by behind his lids. At last the words rallied into a coherent sentence. He felt like he was reading a newspaper report. But once the phrase had appeared it simply hovered there in his mind. It was like a sort of iceberg in the clouded water of his consciousness, jagged to behold on the surface, but even more ominous beneath. The words danced and bobbed behind his darkened and swollen lids, “You have been beaten by someone, Yi.”

“Broken” is a good word for what I am, thought Yi. Some one has beaten me, so that I am broken. The more he turned it over in his mind the more indisputable it became. It explained the redness, the blood, he could sense but not see, the immobility, the ringing in his ears, even the cement. Despite his desperate condition Yi felt a kind of satisfaction at having made some headway from earlier. Armed with no more than a little patch of cement, he had worked out a good deal of what was going on in this moment. It made sense, it all fit. He could not move, or hear, or do anything because he had been severely beaten. Yi’s small feeling of accomplishment gave way quickly to a dreadful bewilderment. Why would someone want to beat me, he thought. Who am I? Now Yi made his most important discovery yet. The reason he was having so much trouble figuring out what was going on was that he had no memory. That explained a great deal of his difficulty working things out. He was forced to deduce things from what he could sense because he had no other frame of reference, and of course all his senses had been rendered useless or mostly so by the beating. He was finally getting somewhere!

While he was having this thought his left eye had filled with water. He realized he was crying all of a sudden, but whether it was from the pain, or from his happiness at having made so many important discoveries he could not tell.

Yi could not think why someone would go to the trouble to beat him. Had he been the victim of a crime or was there another explanation? The particulars of himself were maddeningly hard to locate. Anyone who has ever had a word on the tip of the tongue that would not shape itself from memory into utterance will sympathize with how Yi felt at this moment. Only Yi’s case was more acute because with him it was not just a word that he could not remember. He was alert, and apparently alive, but he did not know himself.

He reasoned with himself that he was most likely no one of consequence. Surely he would never have been left to bleed, broken, on a cement floor if he were a person of consequence. That was a natural assumption. But assumptions were not always correct. For instance the same premises served a contrary conclusion.  Why would someone go to the trouble of beating him so horribly if he was entirely inconsequential? There would be no justification for it. On the other hand, people often suffered misfortune without justification. Though having no memory he could not cite any specific instance to support this last assertion, Yi felt sure that had he been in possession of his memory, he should have been able to easily find examples which corroborated it. Vexed by his own ability to argue either case he presently allowed that there were no conclusions to be reached either way, as to whether or not he was an important person, based on the simple fact of his beating. He had been beaten, perhaps for a reason or perhaps for no reason. Deep within him panic surged again. He was sure that he would be missed by someone, but he could not be sure at all that he would be.

The uncertainty was eating away at Yi, now, raising in him the lively palpitations of fear. He was in a bad situation, that was for sure. If nothing else was certain the fact that he was lying on cement, bloodied and broken was impossible to refute. On the other hand he might be dreaming, but that would not account for the pain. He resolved to overcome the pain and move something more useful than his left eye. Move your arm, he told himself. But which arm? Where was his left arm? He felt kind of hot stabbing pain in his right shoulder, but the pain stopped there. All sensation seemed to stop there. Below the shoulder he felt nothing.

His panic had changed now to a dull kind of anger. He used the anger to motivate himself to think harder. It was like his revelation about hearing he decided. You’re always thinking it’s just a question of concentrating on the act of thinking and not concentrating on anything else.

Think, think, Yi willed himself. It’s crazy to think that you don’t even know who you are. What was the last thing you remember? Who was the last person you remember seeing? His effort resulted in an astonishing nothingness. He was not ready to give up. The pain was making his mind race, albeit in circles, for answers. It occurred to Yi suddenly that pain is bearable if one has a sense of why one should persevere through it. Yi was determined to comprehend his agony before succumbing to it.

I am a man who has been beaten, thought Yi. I am a man. I do not know who I am but I know that I am a man. I have been beaten. Why are men beaten? Men are beaten for different reasons. An innocent man might be beaten during a robbery, or attacked by a gang of youths, or in an argument of some kind or just randomly by a twist of fate. So a man might be beaten for something he possesses or for some innocent misunderstanding or for no reason at all. Which of those is most likely? Difficult to say.

What if one were not an innocent, but somehow precipitated the beating. One might have gotten in a heated argument with a neighbor or a stranger and said something stupid. Those sorts of things often lead to fights where someone is beaten up. If one is a criminal and not a law abiding citizen it seems more likely that one would find oneself in the kind of situations where a beating might occur, but there could be any number of reasons and places in that case that would occasion the beating.

Yi paused in his line of reasoning for a moment. He realized he had been overlooking an important fact. Whoever had beaten him, and for some reason he felt certain it was a beating and not some other sort of calamity, had beaten him in an extremely thorough and heavy handed way. He could not move, or hear, or smell, and he could barely see. This was unlikely to be result of a street fight. Yi tried to think if he had ever seen any street fights. Nothing came to him. Still, one might expect a few broken bones or ribs or a cracked head, but to be so completely brutalized? Also, if he had been beaten on the street in some sort of brawl or robbery he would most likely have been taken to a hospital to see a doctor, or at least to a healer for some sort of treatment. He had been beaten and left somewhere on a cement floor. Who would be capable of doing that? Some kind of criminal organization perhaps.

Yi was overlooking one obvious possibility, but given how severely he had been beaten, it is hardly surprising. This last train of thought had at last brought some images to Yi’s mind. He had been thinking about street brawls and robberies and the like in general terms but by association he had found himself thinking more specifically about streets. He had as if by accident arrived at a mental picture of a street on which a brawl or a robbery might take place and from there it was really not too difficult to remember some real images from real streets from before his newfound state of amnesia. He became aware without knowing when he became aware that the streets he had images of were in a big city and he knew that he lived in a big city, and it was while he was pondering the implications of that awareness that the obvious possibility that had previously escaped him at last came into his head.

He had been beaten by the police.

He had been at a student rally, a massive one, protesting the imposition of more restrictions on certain kinds of free expression. The rally had gotten out of hand. Yi had neither intended to go to the rally, nor to stay when it had unexpectedly lasted three full days, during which time the students occupied a prominent city square near the university. Yi was not a very politically minded person. His passion was photography. He had been at school studying engineering, but his real love was the camera. He liked to take pictures of ordinary people going about their daily lives. At some point during his first year at graduate school he had agreed to take some pictures for a friend who was organizing a small group who liked to get together and talk about literature. Or so they said. After not too long Yi realized that they were mostly interested in talking about government reform, and he knew that he should have probably tried to distance himself from them as soon as he had realized that. There was not anything too subversive about what they were doing though, and really Yi had not stopped because he had liked the members of the group. They were earnest, and smart and in general pretty entertaining. They had asked him to come to the rally because one of their members was scheduled to speak. Yi agreed to come in order to photograph him giving his speech which was to be about education reform and giving graduate students more access to foreign research publications. When at the end of the third day the army and the police had moved in to retake the square from the mostly peaceful demonstrators Yi had been more than ready to go home and try to forget the whole thing. A group of radical students had countered the authorities’ advance with a sit down protest and that is when things started to get crazy. What had been a fairly orderly dispersal of the rally turned into a frightening melee when the police launched a barrage of tear gas into the retreating crowd. People began running and because they were surrounded they were forced to run toward the line of riot police who looked on that as an act of overt aggression. Yi had mostly kept his cool and simply began walking in the direction of the least number of people. That strategy had worked well enough until on a whim he decided to get a picture of one of the tanks rolling over a banner that had some clever slogan on it about freedom of speech. Before he knew what was happening he was being arrested. When after a day in jail and a brief interview in which he explained that he was not protesting himself but merely taking pictures for a friend who had spoken on the first day of the rally, he was released he thought that was the end of it. They had taken his film and camera, which was a huge disappointment but not surprising.  Four days after that however a man had come to his room and had the camera with him. He asked Yi if the camera was his and Yi had said yes, that it had been taken from him at the police station. The man had nodded and said he would be back. He did come back two days later this time to arrest Yi.

In the interrogation they asked Yi about all his friends in the student group. He tried to tell them what he knew since there was nothing incriminating as far as he had seen. He described how he had taken pictures for the small social events the group had every month and said he never thought that the student group was engaged in anything subversive or illegal. The questions from his interrogators had become more insistent. They began to make allegations which seemed outlandish to Yi. That his friends were trying to overthrow the government, that he was a dissident and had contacts to the foreign press. In the end Yi had very little to tell them other than that he did not know what they were talking about, he was simply an engineering student who liked photography. The police beat him, whether out of frustration, or for some other reason Yi could not tell.

Yi was very glad that his memory had come back. He was in a bad situation but at least he knew who he was and who had beaten him. Much of his memory had returned after those tense few moments lying broken on the floor, and he hoped one day his body would heal. This slow process of recovering his awareness of himself after his beating had taken eighteen or twenty minutes. Yi would live another twelve years in the cell with the cement floor.

He never did recover his hearing.

 

The Comforting Constant

3 Minute Podcast. Subject: Impermanence, the death of newspapers, and other comforting thoughts.

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ZARKO

For vileness, few could compete with general Zarko. He was the sort of man that foreign journalists liked to position as a “brilliant tactician” or “daring soldier.” Embroidering his talents to sell newspapers, the idea was to paint him as a true Dog of War. And perhaps he was. By killing constantly and without mercy he achieved a kind of atavistic efficiency in his arena that was notable. Most paeans to his marshal virtues though, over sold his abilities. Zarko was not a brilliant tactician. Nor was he more than adequately daring. It was unusually unpleasant to be in Zarko’s company. In this lone respect, he may have outshone his colleagues. Zarko was an ethnic cleanser.

Call him a particularly rotten apple in a barrel of rotten apples.

If one could not get a true impression of the man solely from what one read in print, it hardly mattered. A balding, fat man of middle age, with a wide mouth, a blunt and crooked nose, and an overly high opinion of himself, in the flesh he was unremarkable. Only one person in the world much heeded the many hyperbolic things that had been written about him anyway. Zarko himself. Not his mother; she was long dead. But the notoriety, if you could call it that, inflated his ego, making him even more unpleasant. 

In his breast pocket the general carried an article that had appeared in the New York Times about him. His ragged clipping was actually a translation, not even the official Times story. A hastily cribbed re-print in Zarko’s hometown newspaper of the original article. Notwithstanding, he bore this petty badge of infamy smugly around the region that described his killing fields. He referred to it often when in conversation with rival officers. 

The days immediately following its appearance in print, he had been particularly toxic. Typically dour and pessimistic, he had been openly giddy at the thought that so many people around the globe were reading of his exploits, and he brandished the scrap of paper at an important meeting of fellow generals, thrusting it skyward for emphasis and referring to himself in the third person. It was partly as a result of this embarrassing tirade that his subordinates had begun to suspect that as a military man he was past his prime. How else to explain a general memorizing verbatim an eight hundred word newspaper article? That day his men started referring to him as “the celebrity” behind his back.

Part of his glee lay in the fact that the article gave him an opportunity to grandstand about the stupidity of foreign journalists. One of his favorite topics of conversation. The reporter had missed many of his most excellent qualities he complained to his staff sergeant. Deep down, though, Zarko was secretly proud that the article had mentioned his prowess at chess in the lead paragraph. Remarking that Zarko never seemed to lose. To Zarko’s mind the journalists mention of his chess mastery nearly balanced the annoying omissions because to Americans, his staff sergeant assured him, the mention that he played chess implied that he was some sort of genius—Americans were stupid, as everyone knew.

Zarko himself was blind to the obvious truth—noted by the journalist but not commented on in the article—that the people he liked to play with very shrewdly let Zarko win at the game, not wanting to provoke his volatile temper.

Zarko intuited from the article that Americans appreciated people who were good at their occupation regardless of what that occupation was. He secretly liked that about Americans. He was good at ethnic cleansing. It had taken him a long time to learn, but he felt now that he knew enough about it to call himself something of an expert. He judged that it took a lot of concentration. Like Chess. And had told the journalist as much.

The general had many disciples and apologists around him, as such people often will. And as with all self promoted generals, his men feared more than respected him. To both his apologists and subordinates the shitty little scrap of newsprint quickly had become a source of amusement. They joked that Zarko wanted to be sure that he was prepared to wipe the Devil’s ass when he got to hell. It was a kind of gallows humor. Chess enthusiast or not, just now the war was not playing out in the general’s favor, and every soldier knows when things are bad for the king, they are usually three times as bad for his pawns. The men around had begun laughing at Zarko’s expense so that they would not cry at their own.

Unaware that he was becoming an object of derision in the eyes of his men, it would not necessarily have surprised him. Zarko knew that loyalty in his chosen profession was as reliable as the weather. Though he saw no overt signs of his slipping mystique, like all intuitive self promoters, he could feel with every setback that his star was fading. The article came into his hand more and more as though by reading the reporter’s account of him if he could remind himself of who he was.

 

The cleansing project had gotten messy. Particularly in the last week, there had been many bad moments for “the celebrity.” If he had been one of his men, he knew he would have been plotting ways to engineer his permanent exit from the theater of battle. Still, no one openly defied him. None dared make light of the week’s misfortunes in his presence. The faces around him were uniformly blank masks of concentration and obedience. But he was losing them.

All great generals had bad weeks, Zarko reasoned. But he felt distracted. Deep within himself he felt the stirrings of uncharacteristic misgivings about the war. It was bound to end, and Zarko secretly hoped he might one day be one of those analysts on a TV talk show. He would be a charismatic Ethnic Cleansing expert, wear expensive Italian suits, and leave his wife of thirty years, a fat ill-tempered woman, for one of those blonde newscaster women. A skinny Russian.

These sorts of thoughts usually kept his spirits up when the war became too tedious, or difficult. But as he found his mind wandering ever more frequently to the possibilities that might await him after he had accomplished his goal of ridding the region of the enemy, he found these fantasies comforted him less and less. The more he thought about why his future seemed less interesting to him than it once had, the more distracted he became. His distraction had made a bad week even worse.

Monday had started badly when his normal driver, a seventeen year old Private who was handy with a gun, and had never once failed to carry out orders as instantly as a well trained dog, was blown to bits by a land mine. This was annoying. The boy had walked up the road to take a piss, which he knew better than to do.

It was his new driver who on Tuesday had taken a bad turn on the way from Zarko’s rear camp to a front line position, and in one of those strange moments one encounters in war, they had to ask directions from refugees they had recently driven from their houses. The refugees had been so terrified that they had given them good directions, but he later found out that someone traveling with that same group of refugees had radioed in his command car’s position to the enemy as soon as he had turned the car around. So by the time he had reached the forward camp he had lost six men in a flanking action by a bunch of local yokels. He was so irritated that he went back and burned the village near where he had gotten directions from the refugees, only to find out on Wednesday that the village had only recently been occupied by the enemy and the houses he had burned still technically belonged to members of his own ethnic group.

That had made his troops mad.

They were still grumbling about it on Thursday when they ran into a larger column of enemy refugees guarded by what looked like rag tag bunch of enemy deserters. His men instantly fell on the column and chased it into the woods thinking to exterminate them conveniently off the beaten track. Over-pursuing, they banged right into a large concentration of the enemy’s regular forces, two days before Zarko had expected to encounter them. He had lost more men in that debacle, but more dire than that, he had gotten cut off from his normal supply route and would have to fight his way back through to it by tomorrow night or things could get seriously hairy. He was forced to order a “tactical evasion.”

Today was Friday, and given their touchy position it was a bad day for something else to go wrong. By the nature of war and fate, that pretty much guaranteed that something would, and so it did.

A little more than an hour before, Zarko had been organizing the “tactical evasion” when his command unit had unexpectedly created a prisoner situation. It was an unusual prisoner situation because it looked like it was not going to go away quickly the way most of his prisoner situations did.

He and his men had occupied a house for a few hours on the outskirts of a mountain village. In a shed they had found four foreign journalists. On most days he would have just left them after letting them take his picture, but ordinarily he would not have been in retreat. He would ordinarily have been advancing. Advancing was what he was paid to do. But however you justified it to yourself and your troops, the “tactical evasion” meant going backwards. And going backwards required a different set of rules than going forwards. Just as in Chess playing the dark or the light color requires a different mindset.

In this present case were he to leave the journalists here, in an hour or two they would be taking pictures of his enemies rolling into town and he could well imagine them telling his enemies that Zarko had been here, and that was what he wanted to avoid. He supposed the alternative to leaving them was to pack them into the trucks and take them with him, but he did not really want journalists along for the ride on this particular maneuver, one in which his units would be very thoroughly covering their tracks and not leaving behind any witnesses as to which way they might have gone.

He had remarked in the past that journalists tended to enjoy writing about ethnic cleansing more than they enjoyed taking part in it.

So, what to do with four foreign journalists who could neither be brought along, nor left behind: this was the dilemma which preoccupied Zarko, and kept him from enjoying his usually reassuring thoughts of his future Russian mistress.

Zarko’s soldiers who had been attempting to ascertain who the journalists were and what they had seen, were crammed into the little common room of the house with their foreign prisoners. For a time there had been a lot of yelling both from the journalists, who were rightfully alarmed at their situation, and from Zarko’s men who were already on edge and not blessed in any case with a native patience. The yelling became tiresome to both prisoners and soldiers presently and so the scene had stabilized somewhat into a more standard kind of gesticulated negotiation, which generally served in these situations. At that point Zarko entered as un-surreptitiously as possible and took up a position in the corner of the room where he could observe the time honored journalist-soldier ritual while pretending to study a map. The journalists’ command of the language was rudimentary. It seems they too had taken a wrong turn.

 

 

The most animated journalist was tall, correspondingly skinny, carried a camera or two, and claimed to be Dutch. To Zarko he sounded French when he spoke. A photog presumably, the oily man had an impossibly large supply of cigarettes in his bag and was successfully trying to bribe Zarko’s men into giving him and his mates a lift to the next town. The next prisoner was a soft looking balding fellow. This one seemed to be the ringleader, and to Zarko’s mind had the arrogant air of a writer. While the oily photog passed out the cigarettes two, three, five at a time, the shorter man kept a steady cannonade of chatter up as though the air he breathed was made of letters which mingled in his lungs; with every inhale ammunition was loaded and at every exhale a new sentence sallied forth, scattershot, irrespective of content, coherence, or intelligibility. The doughy looking man gave the impression that it would be an impossible miracle to shut him up. Zarko surmised that this was precisely the point of the exercise. The journalist was hoping to create the illusion that his words were simply a fact of nature, a non-negotiable condition of existence.

There was a woman. That was unusual, but not unheard of. In contrast with the photog, she did seem Dutch to Zarko, but did not say or do much of anything. She looked nervous, or possibly angry. Zarko knew that he did not enjoy an estimable reputation in the eyes of the foreign female reporters. He sensed some antipathy towards him and his men from her. Certainly he would not leave her behind to wait for his pursuers. She was bound to invent all manner of falsehoods about him, or, equally problematic, write about some of the true things she had doubtless seen when they secured the town this morning.

Lastly, there was a sad, beat up looking old cat who had obviously covered too many wars, and simply stared at the wall and spit on the floor occasionally. He looked familiar to Zarko, though at the moment the general couldn’t place him. Like a soldier, Zarko mused from his corner—he still had not yet decided to take control of the situation—or a ghost. Apart from Zarko, no one paid much attention to old fellow, and Zarko noted with some appreciation that he called no attention to himself even when he spat.

The general could feel himself disengaging from the drama which unfolded in front of him. Through the empty panes in the window near his corner he could see the street outside, smoke billowing from a burning motorbike. Intermittently he could hear the sound of small arms fire coming from somewhere at the edge of town. That and the haggling in the room were the only sounds he could hear. It was late morning, and the smoke from the bike was the only thing interrupting the blue of the sky and the brilliant summer light. He could smell the burning rubber, the cigarettes and beneath it all the dank and aromatic earth of the hills.

The war around him was like a familiar symphony. The emotion, the fear, the silence of the empty dwellings, the pop pop of his roving death squads as they finished cleaning the village.

He brought himself back to the room in front of him.

Zarko was all too aware that the tight spot he found himself in was of his own construction. He had made mistakes. None of them monumental in themselves, they were all of them small, every day kinds of things. Routine decisions which might have been more thoroughly thought through. But when taken together they had amounted to an unsuccessful attempt to cleanse the area of the enemy, and had made necessary the impending tactical evasion. He had the sense that the decision about what to do about these four foreign journalists was another one of those small decisions which might come back to bite him, and as a matter of principle, and not getting himself killed, he was determined to think this decision through to the end, and to come to the most reasonable possible decision. He allotted himself three minutes for this task. About the time it would take his new driver, his third now this week, to finish clearing from the road the rubble that at the moment prevented them from leaving.

Here is how he worked the problem out.

The first thing to consider in all decisions, Zarko knew, was the matter of consequences. If one choice held out hope of obviously more advantageous consequences than another, then a decision was as good as made. This much was simply good chess. In this case he felt certain already that the consequences of leaving them or bringing them along, though superficially different, were in reality the same. They would cause trouble in either case. Wasn’t that a journalist’s nature? They wouldn’t like to see him killing civilians, abusing them first for good measure, and then burning their houses so their relations would never have cause to return to the spot. Truth being told, only he and his men derived any pleasure in seeing that kind of thing, and even for them it was more satisfaction than pleasure. They would object and having been invited along would feel like guests and therefore immune from reprisals as they whined away about everything.

If they stayed here—well that was hardly worth considering. He did not relish the thought of having to put another article in his breast pocket to go along with the first one; one that described him and his men beating a hasty retreat from some particularly unappealing examples of his work that he had left just up the road that his enemies would waste no time describing to these foreigners once they had had the chance to get acquainted in Zarko’s recent absence.

No, this was a tricky situation because in cases such as these one needed to do more than merely weigh the consequences, one needed to attack the premises that created the problem. So dismissing the various consequences of his various options as universally bad, Zarko began to tackle the premises.

The bald talker had gotten so far in his negotiation that he swaggered over to Zarko and mistaking his silence for acquiescence had actually grabbed the map out of the general’s hand in order to show Zarko’s soldiers where he would like to be delivered next. Zarko’s men had looked in that moment for a sign from the general as to whether they should continue the negotiations or end them. Zarko remained impassive, belying the rapidity and nature of his calculations.

The debatable premise in this case was that journalists merited different treatment than anyone else who got in Zarko’s way. Vile as he was, Zarko rarely killed journalists outright. For some reason, someone, at some time, in some place, decided that journalists, being “objective observers” and not “participants,” were exempt from rules of war, but that was not why Zarko generally avoided killing journalists. For him a war crime was an oxymoron. No, there were two reasons Zarko normally ignored the roving journalists who congregated like a pack of flies around any stink of war. The first was a tactical reason. Journalists could often be relied on to repeat anything that you asked them not to repeat. This could often be an a advantage when used sparingly and with a good deal of subtlety.

To use this tactic the journalist first must be convinced that they have earned one’s trust. They are always suspicious when they are freely given information. They are so used to being stonewalled that when they are simply given what they want they become wary. In fact the best way to hide the truth to a journalist is to tell it straight to their face. They will assume they are being lied to and will begin to perceive some opposite meaning in what one has said. But given that they are flighty in this way it can be difficult to convince them that they have one’s confidence.

So to use a journalist to create misinformation, one must first convince the journalist that of all journalists they alone have accomplished the task of getting into one’s good graces. This is quite easy to do. Journalism and vanity are so similar as to be nearly synonymous.

The second step requires more skill, thought Zarko to himself. To convince a journalist that they have gleaned reliable information one must be at pains to make it look as though they have caught you in some lie. They must believe that they have cleverly manipulated you into some lose lipped slip up. Let the journalists think that they have subtly siphoned the very thing you sought for them not to know and you can be sure they will share it with the world. On some basic level then Zarko didn’t kill journalists because he always was conscious that they might be more useful alive than dead.

The second reason why he didn’t kill journalists outright had to do with the nature of his work. Zarko knew that what he spent his time doing was distasteful to some, but he had a well defined sense of why he did it. He wanted to get rid of the people who were not his people. His work was not so much about killing as it was about peace of mind. He needed to be able to assure his people that they could settle in the places he cleansed without fear that some long lost claimant to a house or a yard would one day come back to reclaim property that rightfully belonged to his people. And in this sense journalists fell outside the framework of his killing threshold. They had never impeded him from killing someone or burning their house. They weren’t going to take up residence in a house that belonged to one of his people, nor were they going to get pissed off later and come back with some Kalashnikovs and take him out. They were irrelevant.

Zarko felt certain that he did not have time enough to prime these journalists to lie for him if he left them behind. There was therefore no tactical reason to leave them behind that he could see. If the second reason he normally did not kill journalists was that they were not normally impeding him, he was sure he could make an argument that they were impeding him at the moment from leaving without anyone knowing which way he had gone.

One thing to consider, as he watched the photog’s cigarettes making credible headway with his men, was that the news services that paid these people might be more disposed to report his activities in a more favorable light if he made a big deal of pulling them out of this killing zone alive and sending them back to their comfortable desks with a vivid reminder of his open minded and generous nature. That might help him get the TV job someday.

Also conventional wisdom had it that killing journalists would bring NATO into the picture, or at least earn the ire of whatever nation the journalist represented. It was all well and good to slaughter former neighbors and civilians, but most of the people Zarko’s men slaughtered were utterly defenseless. The nations that these journalists came from were not as defenseless; many of them could be relied on for tacit support or at least non-interference, as long as these sorts of pretend limits were observed.

On the other hand, thought Zarko, who did these people think they were to waltz into a country that is clearly in a state of chaos and war, and expect international courtesy and diplomatic convention to bail them out every time they wandered mindlessly into the barrel of a gun. It seemed silly.

Just look at that fat writer yabbering away, thought Zarko now, thousands of miles from his home town, writing lies about everything he sees. And still he expects that regardless of who rolls into town he should be free to roam and say and do as he pleases. You don’t see me striding up and down in his home town, passing out cigarettes and expecting everyone to greet me with open arms.

Zarko could see that these people clearly did not understand what was happening in these picturesque hills. If they did, they would not have come here. Yet here they were, determined to misunderstand, misinterpret, and misinform. Zarko had at one time been an ordinary citizen, postal worker actually. But who were they when they were at home? If anyone had loved them or needed them, they would never spend their time like this, chasing doom.

Zarko did what he did because of the great struggle his people were engaged in against the enemy. But what kind of person flies thousands of miles to be dumped in the middle of someone else’s hellish reality and stands around and watches events transpire that they will later claim they were shocked to see and helpless to prevent?

Were they to any appreciable degree less mercenary than himself?

If he were to go to one of these idiot’s nations he would be arrested and hung for war crimes. These people came into his nation, uninvited, and expected to be given professional courtesy.

With a minute to go in his deliberation, Zarko considered now the disposition of his men. They were glad certainly to have the cigarettes, but much of this trade was mere formality. They would have had the cigarettes eventually in any case. He could see that his men were unnerved. First by the perilous position they were in and also by the discovery of these foreigners. The work they had been doing was nasty. They had no moral qualms about it, but what made the nastiness possible was the fact that what transpires in a valley in the mountains miles away from anywhere does not make a sound. If events turned worse and they were somehow overrun, the last thing they wanted was a first hand account of what they had been doing fresh in the minds of their captors. On the other hand, if they were overrun, his men would be a lot less likely to be shot immediately if there was this cordon of journalists observing the surrender.

Zarko could see clearly that the soldiers in the room were undecided whether to bully or to suck up to these four, terrified, parasitic, foreigners. He knew he would have to decide the issue himself before his soldiers had made the decision for him, without the illuminating consideration that Zarko was giving the matter.

Zarko’s driver stuck his head in the door and indicated that the road was clear for them to execute the tactical evasion. Zarko stirred from his corner and drawing his pistol he shot the photog and the writer in the head. He took the quiet one with him for good luck and left his men to rape the woman. To Zarko, it was the only reasonable thing to do.

 

 

 

NYaiku: "Anti-social Media Marketing"

Commenting on blogs

Sky like a Simpson's cartoon

Two more hours of work.

NYaiku: "Recession my new friend"

Poor is the new Rich

Unemployed the new Employed

Drunk the new Sober

NYaiku: Turkey in Traffic

New Jersey Turnpike

Cold rain, bumper to bumper

Thanksgiving long gone.