Jamestown (39 page)

But recently I set in motion a little something to mark the second anniversary of my girlfriend's death. Every day's the birthday of the death of someone I knew but I liked her more than all the rest so I chose her death among all the deaths to celebrate with a coup against the efficacious leadership of our chief. When I told Jack about it he said, “Jesus, finally, it only took you two years.”

“So why didn't you think it up if you wanted it done?”

“Why didn't
I?
You don't know? Have I been talking to a wall since the day we met?”

Four of us VPs—Vice President for Community Outreach Richard Buck, Vice President for Security Bucky Breck, Jack Smith, and me—assembled at our place for a top secret planning session. I had a cubic meter of the finest artificial cheese brought in, and bottles of super-unleaded water—not the premium-unleaded, mind you, I only make a VP's salary, not a king's. And I hauled out my dwindling stash of busthead to put us all in a mood of optimistic relaxation, or at least make us less grim and ill at ease, except Dick Buck of course, our mostly useless conscience, our Vice President in Charge of High-Handed Rage and Despair, who as the evening wore on freaked out and had to be tied to a soft chair—you know you've got good friends if they use a soft chair and not a hard one—and locked in the basement so he wouldn't hurt himself. Who among us hasn't spent more evenings than he'd like in a basement tied by his friends to a soft chair, Dear Interlocutor Whose Nonexistence This Communication Is Predicated On?

So, having meant to convene in the parlor around a platter of high-end artificial cheese, we convened instead—in deference to our good friend through whose veins rage now would take an hour to pass—in the dank, cold, low-ceilinged basement, where eating cheese would have drawn rats to our lips. Each of us but Buck sat at the edge of a crate clutching his plastic bottle of water close to his chest. Buck alone, aggrieved, muted by the wad of rag in his maw, wrists scraped raw in their struggle to be free, had a nice chair to be in. The rest of us endured the sharpness of crate slats on the backs of our thighs. What rags we hadn't used to silence and immobilize Buck we cut to strips and used as wicks for candlelight. In that cold wet hole in the side of a hill in the Bronx two weeks back, amid rats' squeaks and Buck's grunts, I told them my plan and they told me it back; we argued and refined it; Breck and Smith both said they could contribute guns and willing men; I said I knew none of either but would contribute my brain and flesh, or what was left of them. There wasn't much to plan: assemble willing men in stealth, disable Martin's many bodyguards, move in past his most forbidding guards, his arms and head, and slit his throat. Or shoot him. Or blow him up. Or crush him with a bus. Or poison him. Or drown him. And then hold a democratic election. I guess this must be what my gal envisioned two winters ago, who knows, she's dead, what happens now is no concern of hers.

What little bit of plan there seemed to be to make we made, or tried, and then ran out of things to say, and sat in silence waiting for our friend to let off fighting with his bonds. We couldn't leave him down there all alone or he'd have been devoured by rats, so we sat on our hard crates and looked at one another and at him, and through his gag he tried to shout what must have been “Let me go!” or “Quit staring at me,” and each time a rat got in his pants leg Smith stabbed it fast and threw it on a growing pile, which we'd later burn in our hearth at our leisure. To eat them would have killed us but to smell them burn was not so bad.

At length, Father Buck got groggy and wept softly—tears of rage, tears of shame, who knows how to name such things? Not English, certainly. We let him go. He hugged us and apologized and asked, “But why'd you have to tie me up?” We looked at him and didn't say a word and he apologized again. We all agreed to keep our revolution lean, and parted for the night, except for Jack and me: he chased me up the stairs.

Since that night two weeks ago the dread has grown in me. Someone less inured to disappointment—can this world sustain someone like that?—might have felt such dread as hope. That the thought to try to make a change had come to me at all, that my body had not then expelled it as it would have done a childish dream or wormy slice of pie, was marvel enough for one life; such a thought would never have found the loam of hope in me, and if it had it likely would have choked in it; no, this thought's best home and hope has been my rocky, arid, stinking lump of dread: where else could murder's seed have grown and bloomed?

Since that night I've left the house more often than before, and when I go the guards, in whose eyes I used to see contempt for me, now nod to let me know they know, which, of course, makes my dread grow. For me to need a guard to walk the streets is relatively new, not just to me but to the company that is my employer, home, and state. And that's because, as this state has enlarged, its borders have become less geographical than notional. On our official map it looks as if we have more land than ever before, its edge limned in ink with bold and indivisible lines. But discontent makes holes a map's ink can't represent. Such holes cannot be seen at all, exist more in air than land, and more in mind than air. And that is maybe why my modest plan can now exist—not to say succeed.

Today's the day. A couple bombs went off at eight as planned on Brooklyn and Washington Bridges, the only two that had remained unbombed in the last war. The empire's most tender cell's now inflamed. Enough of our chief's guards have been drawn away from him for us to interrupt this afternoon's board meeting with our little coup d'etat. Before I leave the house, a razor beneath my tongue, I await the final signal, an email to my battery-operated wireless that will say “Happy Birthday, Shaneequa.” The email has just arrived but it doesn't say “Happy Birthday, Shaneequa,” it says “Plug in the fridge.” This is not a code I know. Did they change it and forget to tell me? “Plug in the fridge,” what could it mean? I pace our house's second floor and try to think of what it means. Plug in the fridge. I stare out the window at the greenish sky and cold gray ground. It's wintertime, we've been expecting snow and none has come. My study window's view's lone bare tree, which has its own armed guard, is mute on the subject of
Plug in the fridge
, as is the little stream whose edge the tree is at, whose brown and toxic water becomes one with the tree's trunk from the vantage of this window and my eye. Winters come and winters go, as comes and goes the stream; there once was a girl I loved as in a dream. Plug in the fridge. And as the seasons and the waters go, so go the ones who watch them, and as all revolutions know, death awaits the ones who botch them. Plug in the fridge. I guess I'll have to leave the house and go to the meeting and hope to die or not to die, I'm not sure which. Where's my coat? It's in the kitchen, by the fridge. Good old fridge, site of many tender wrestling matches between my roommate Jack and me. When he's got me down on the floor by the always-closed fridge door, he likes to put his face up close to mine and whisper things to me which in my excitement and annoyance I rarely understand, maybe “Plug in the fridge.” Got my coat on, and now it's just occurred to me what “Plug in the fridge” means. It means “Plug in the fridge.” I do. It hums and vibrates. It's alive. A miracle has happened, everyone. Current flows through wires that have been barren of it all my life. This is so exciting I grow hard, and come! I plugged in the fridge and came just now, wow. The fridge with current in it reminds me of my lost lover, Pocahontas or Shaneequa. She, too, was soft and smooth, and hummed. Oh no wait she was rough and hard, and shrieked. I forget. Coming by the fridge short circuits the memory of love. Coming by the fridge
is
love. I love my working fridge! Oh the walkie-talkie is squawking the squawk of love, that must be Jack Smith, walkie-talkie-ing home to see if I've plugged in the fridge as per his command.

“D'you do it?”

“Yeah, I came.”

“I'm coming home right now. Save some fridge for me.”

“Is the coup off?”

“Of course the coup is off, everyone's got electricity. Plus Martin's giving away gadgets down at City Hall.”

“D'you get anything?”

“A coffeemaker and a microwave. Guess where I am.”

“I don't know.”

“The West Side Highway, ten minutes from home. Guess what kind of transportation I'm in.”

“A car?”

“Yes.”

“Ours?”

“Mine.”

“What kind?”

“I don't know. You know what else I got?”

“What?”

“Food.”

“So?”

“No I mean
food
food, real food.”

“Plants?”

“And animals. Ham, I've got sliced ham, and not your fake sliced ham. You know where we can put the ham?”

“In the fridge!” we say together, as if coming.

“I'll be home in nine minutes,” he says, and squawks off. Squawkneekwa. Wonder where the filaments of her former self are now. Maybe in my eye, or in that ham. No, I know where they are. They're in our newfound electricity that suddenly runs our fridge. Think of all the energy, total number of joules outputted by a vivacious young female of the species over the course of an unremarkable and foreshortened life: we sucked it all up in a tube, and now it's gonna keep our ham sandwich cold, and will continue to when we're gone from the Earth. And when the Earth itself is gone, on will go the fridge I now stand before in awe, I'd like to think. Its rectilinear form floats on through the black and airless cosmos, and inside, a lit cube of air, and inside that, a ham sandwich on a flat plastic shelf, kept at edible temperature for all eternity by the used-up life of a girl I may once have known.

To the Reader

The foregoing novel is an ahistorical fantasia on a real event, namely, the founding of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, in 1607, in what is now the state of Virginia. Following are some of the books I found to be of value in my research.

Philip L. Barbour, editor.
The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter: 1606-1609
. 2 volumes. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Edward Wright Haile, editor.
Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony: the First Decade: 1607-1617
. Champlain, VA: Roundhouse Press, 1998.

Karen Ordahl Kupperman.
Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America
. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

David A. Price.
Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation
. New York: Knopf, 2003.

Helen C. Rountree.
Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown
. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.

Helen C. Rountree and Randolph E. Turner.
Before and After Jamestown: Virginia's Powhatans and their Predecessors
. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.

John Smith.
The Complete Works of Captain John Smith
. Edited by Philip L. Barbour. 3 volumes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Thank You

Ray Abernathy, Michele Araujo, Nick Balaban, Kate Brandt, Gabriel Brownstein, Linh Dinh, Leslie Falk, Bram Gunther, Anne Horowitz, Neil Levi, Gillian Linden, Michael London, PJ Mark, David McCormick, Denise Mitchell, Bruce Morrow, Richard Nash, Maggie Nelson, Tina Pohlman, Kristin Pulkkinen, Sylvie Rabineau, Ellen Salpeter, Sergio Santos, Carole Sharpe, Myron Sharpe, Susanna Sharpe, Amy Sillman, Adam Simon, Mike Smith, Jacqueline Steiner, “Bob” Sullivan, and my colleagues at Wesleyan University.

I am also grateful to the New York Foundation for the Arts for a 2004 fellowship in fiction.

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