Jamestown (36 page)

“Hit Brooklyn hard, with everything you have. Destroy Brooklyn. Send enough fully armed troops down to commandeer Virginia. Send large armed expeditions out to Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Ohio. Find who's there, conquer them, take what they have. Suck dry a radius of 500 miles. Leave enough forces in each town to control it. Expand your power and land holdings quickly and emphatically. Go deep into Brooklyn, wipe out isolated rebel cells, establish settlements of civilians. Conquer everything, own everything, run everything.”

“Martin, how can I?”

“How can you? How can you? Every bullet you have you shoot. Every bomb you have you detonate. Every bus you have you roll through a tunnel or over a bridge. Every man you have you deploy. Every coin you have you spend.”

“It was a rhetorical question, Martin.”

In three grand knuckled arcs across the floor, Martin had his shoulders pressed to Stuart's knees, teeth not much more than a foot from Stuart's treasured dick.

“Does anything at all about me seem rhetorical to you right now?” Martin whispered.

“Thank you, Martin, for your advice,” he said in calm but weakened voice, and eyeballed two guards to come get Martin.

Martin held them off with the force of his voice: “Look at me.” He took a half-swing back on his hands and pointed with his half-finger at his ruddy, scar-hardened face, the shaved-off arrow nubs that jutted from his skull, his nonexistent ear, his interrupted legs. He said no more; his pointing alone said loudly that he was not just a strong advocate but the very embodiment of maximizing diminished resources with hardly a thought to the imminence of their exhaustion.

“All right, all right, tell me what you think I should do first.”

“Not with these three here.”

Smith said, “You're gonna let this ineffectual…” He didn't finish, since he knew what had been true of John was no longer true. Smith had many strengths, but top-level statecraft seemed not to be among them. Martin in his new incarnation had just been effectively bumped up to executive VP.

“I'll talk to Martin alone now,” Stuart said. “Find Smith a soft bed, he's done an adequate job. Get some fluids into the princess here, and get her a front-row seat at the shooting of our new advertisement in Central Park tomorrow. And scrape her boyfriend off that chair, and drop him in a room somewhere.”

Pocahontas

I've skimmed across the earth and here I am in Central Park. What a mutilated place this is! I watch it through a lightly mucoused eye. “Park,” I'm told, once meant grass and trees and rolling hills and playing fields and flowering, perfume-giving plants imported from around the world—a place to frolic, jog, rest, work, wild, and sigh. But now it seems to be where beggars come to die, and has no trees nor grass nor sun, has cardboard beggars' shacks and dirt and fences made of chain. Hills it has, which hide still other hills, more shacks and fences, more large and broke-down buildings, more brown and retched and wretched air. They chose this spot to tape a little show. “Tape” means capture in a little metal box all the sights and sounds within an open-ended cube of space, and in a little cube of time, or so I gather by looking. The author of the script that they will act out and tape I met and spoke to for an hour on this selfsame hardwood bench I'm on right now. He's tall, bespectacled, stoop-shouldered, with pale, moled-up skin, large and pointy nose, and thin brown hair that seems to continue to thin as one watches it, which is surely less grim than watching his opaque and doleful eyes. “So, you're an Indian princess, what's that like?” If there be a duller man in all God's sick republic let me not ever have to converse with him lest I die of the acute agony of not wanting to be conversing with someone so menacingly dull. Luckily he has become absorbed in the task of interfering with the taping of his script, or advertisement as it's called, which, it turns out, is based on the story the now-deceased Chris Newport told of his first encounter with Uncle Sid and me in a field down south so many months ago. Where is Uncle Sid right now? I wonder and may never know, I feel so sick, eyes hurt, head hurts, skin hurts, ass hurts most of all. But the other me—not my man, I mean, but the gal who represents me in the ad—wow, is she ever robust, look at all that black hair and tight, rosy skin. If that's me, I see how beautiful I am. But what's she doing being me? Is it not enough for them that I'm me? That northern tart with too much hair on her head and not enough hair on her arms and legs, and not enough me on or in her, what a grim little cunt she is as she saws the air with her hands and says words (“Welcome, handsome English-speaking stranger!”) I'd rather die than say. Who and why's this me-not-me they tape? The only thing true about their fake corn shack is that it's made of wood they stole from us, but how they made it sucks, all square and straight and held with metal nails and screws and too high off the ground, surrounded by gray-black dirt and painted cardboard urine-yellow corn. And do they think just any hack Jew with gray hair and a tan's good enough to be my Uncle Sid? (“We enjoy cultural and economic exchange with energetic and enterprising northerners. Here, take this barrel of oil for free as a token of our good faith in your intentions toward us.”)

“What is this, anyway?” I ask some unknown underling I can't quite see now that my sight's grown dim, and he replies, “This is a reek-rooting film,” and I say, “What's reek-rooting?” and he say, “It's when you get people to go on a trip by telling them that it will be far easier and more useful than it ever turns out to be.” I'd know that jaundiced worldview anywhere, that's my man saying that to me. “Who are you, are you my man?” I say to him and he say back, “I sho is yo man, Shawneekway, and will be till you die, which, judging by your jaundiced eye, could happen pretty nigh.” And no longer can I say for sure which is my life and which the advertisement version thereof, am I living or “living,” dying or “dying,” talking to my man or “talking to my man”? Is this my consciousness or a voiceover? Help!

“Shaw-knee-quai, wake up, wake up.”

“What?”

“Wake up.”

“What?”

“Wake up!”

“Oh.”

“You were dreaming.”

“How you know?”

“You said, ‘Oh beautiful English speaker, I welcome you to my humble land' and other bullshitty things people don't say except in dreams or advertisements.”

“Where are we?”

“Central Park.”

“What happening?”

“They're shooting the advertisement version of our arrival at your home.”

“How is it?”

“Inaccurate but compelling.”

“How do I know you're you and not the actor playing you?”

“Because he's far handsomer and healthier than I and he's over there in front of the camera saying, ‘I love you, beautiful Indian princess, and I love your gentle people too,' while I'm here saying this to you.”

“They both sound like something dopey you would say.”

“Well then look here at my penis. Has anyone else got one quite like this?”

“There you have an excellent point.”

“I'm glad you like my point, it likes you.”

“What's it doing now?”

“Coming toward you.”

“Going into me.”

“I hope you don't mind.”

“Well I feel pretty under-the-weather but this is—Oh!—making me forget my aches and pains. Hey, aren't your buttocks getting dirty?”

“Don't care! Don't care!”

“Oh!”

“Awe, awe.”

“Hm.”

“Uh.”

“Wow.”

“Ah.”

“Good thing these eleven fake stalks of corn were protecting us from sight while we did that.”

“And everyone's distracted by the fake me and the fake you over there doing much the same.”

“Sex is reek-root-ment?”

“What man in his right mind wouldn't want to meet and enjoy a gal like you down south?”

“A gal like her, you mean. Not sure I like her-me to be used that way. Ooh, the sex exhausted me, I feel sick and sad, I must lie down.”

“You are lying down.”

“Not on this wet, cold dirt. Somewhere safe and soft and dry and warm.”

“Nowhere safe in God's bellicose nation-state.”

“Are they done taping?”

“No, taping takes longer than life.”

“I'm depressed.”

“Soon you won't be.”

“I fear you're right.”

“Why you say that?”

“Cuz I'll die.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“How you know?”

“I'm sick.”

“Not that sick.”

“Sick enough.”

“Live.”

“Can't.”

“Why?”

“I said my secret name.”

“I thought that meant I'd die, not you.”

“Um well that's the secret secret of my secret name.”

“What?”

“The one who dies is me.”

“Don't believe it, won't, can't.”

“You might have saved me had you not said it back to me as a question.”

“Said what?”

“My name.”

“I did?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I said
Schoen y qua
and you said
Chaud ni quoi?
you know like with incredulity.”

“So I killed you?”

“Li'l bit.”

“Sorry.”

“Luv mean muthuhfuckuhs doan nevuh gotta say they sorry.”

“I'm depressed now too.”

“But your depression'll last a long time.”

“I fear you're right.”

“Sigh.”

“Ow.”

“Want to see and smell the East River tomorrow?”

“If I get a good night's sleep and amn't dead.”

“Big state occasion.”

“What?”

“Brooklyn-Manhattan cease-fire talk.”

“Where?”

“On a barge on the East River.”

“It'll never work.”

“Could be fun though.”

“Who'll be there?”

“Jimmy Stuart, Phil Habsburg, John Martin his son, Smith, armed thugs, maybe Penny Ratcliffe.”

“Who you asking me as, yourself or a mid-ranking officer of the Manhattan Co.?”

“Both?”

“Bitch.”

“Sorry.”

“Love means—ah screw it, what I'm supposed to do there?”

“Just be yourself.”

“Who dat?”

“The one over there with the hair.”

“Bet she don't got pussy hair like me.”

“How could she, she's just a white girl from the Upper East Side.”

“No rilly, what I gotta do on that boat?”

“Pretend like you like Manhattan Co.”

“Can't do that.”

“Then don't.”

“That's it?”

“What's what?”

“I help your side, I don't help your side, do, don't, easy come, easy go, all the same to you? No side you're rooting for? Don't care who wins?”

“No.”

“You should.”

“Both sides stink. All sides always stink.”

“Then make one side better by being on it.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“You must figure it out.”

“So you're saying take action.”

“Yes.”

“I don't know what to do.”

“Figure it out. That is the meaning of
Shunequal.”

“What is?”

“Figuring it out.”

“Really?”

“Sure, why not.”

“Huh.”

“What was that loud bang?”

“A bomb.”

“Whose?”

“Brooklyn's.”

“Anyone dead?”

“Looks like the advert's dead, for now.”

“It was a dumb story anyway.”

“Let's get out of here before another bomb explodes.”

“Okay.”

“You're not moving.”

“I'm tired.”

“I'll carry you.”

“Hey! Easy on the ribs, ace, they ache. Ugh, how tedious to be carried out of Central Park.”

“Sorry.”

Pocahontas

What strange fish these are who fear the water that surrounds them. And by fish I mean men, and by men I mean these grim and self-destroying fools among whom I sink down now in illness and despair. But the heck with Shell Knee Craw for uttering the
d
word, even in her mind, and to no one. She—I—might as well say aloud, seriatim, to her worst enemy—and who dat is she think she know but (
ugh
!) will not admit—all her killing secret names, show all her secret selves, leave no wall between her outside and her inside, become, in other words, nothing.

We stand atop the high sea wall that guards the island's long and languid eastern flank from the deadly water it yearns to merge with, and await a boat to take us to a barge where the two big chiefs will meet and talk, not fight and die as they've had men do in their frightened stead lo these past however-many years. Such is their agreement anyway, though in my short life I've come to see agreements as I've come to see girls: soft and leaky vessels of consent, not hard to poke a bigger leak in and make sink.

And the troubles they take not to let the water touch them! The mobile gangway from wall to boat; the gangway's splashguard; the toe-to-head wet-suits; the facemasks; the repeated instruction to walk lightly on the gangway and with excellent balance; the increased alertness and heart rate as shown in the redness of the skin around their eyes that can be seen beneath the hard, transparent surface of their masks; all of these subordinated to the prayers—as vehement as they are varied—to their deity, that one widely knowledgeable Ghostman whom they make wear all the hats and who surely died long ago of overwork.

How exciting to take a trip on the sea! Well not sea but river. Well not river but narrow, goopy mass of wet brown stuff that stinks and burps and barely flows, and barely separates two groups of men who keenly wish each other harm. And here we are at the barge, about which even I want to say
Is that all there is?
though I hope if I am ever remembered, described, or accused, it won't be as an Is-that-all-there-is? girl, I'm sure the past is burdened with enough of those. Another splashguard-saddled gangway brings us from small boat to flat and drab and worn-down barge, which makes up in bigness for what it lacks in ornament.