Subtle Bodies (16 page)

“Wonderful,” he said. He pushed the covers down preparatory to getting up for a trip to the bathroom. They slept
naked, which was unlike the nighttime protocols under Claire.

Nina turned her penlight on his penis. “Handsome penis,” Nina said, and then said, “These are pretty, too,” brushing her naked breasts with the beam of the penlight.

“Don’t be relentless,” he said.

He was right. They needed their sleep.

30
Nina was sleeping in. Yet somehow she had tasked him with the mission of finding yogurt for her somewhere. He’d forgotten to ask if he was supposed to wake her up when he found it, if he did find it. The fact that she’d had a sudden sharp food preference could be good news.

So far he had asked two obviously wrong people if there was any yogurt they knew of. The ground floor was overrun with media. They were around every corner. The kitchen was a chaos. Calling the media people ninjas had started with Joris. It was appropriate because they were all similarly dressed in dark clothing and were always disconcertingly darting about. They came and went, came and went, communing with one another in European languages, German mainly. Elliot had instructed the friends not to interact with the media.

Ned had his petitions with him, arranged with the top blank petition just askew enough to show that it rested on a thick block of filled-up petition forms. That was show business. There were blank petition forms at the bottom of the block. Nina had gotten on his case about the petitions. She
was accusing him of mixing up the question of self-worth with getting all the friends to sign. He had denied it, knowing it was true, and she had said, I’m thinking of writing your biography and I have a good title for it, but unfortunately it’s been used, and he’d said, Okay, what? and she’d said,
The Neurotic Personality of Our Time
, you poor thing. He understood everything. She’d said she wanted him to keep his spirits up so he could keep her spirits up for the sake of their, as she was already calling it, their homunculus.

Ned went out the front door to look at the scene developing all over the place. Elliot was trotting up the drive, followed by a ninja.

Ned ran up to Elliot, who declined to stop, so Ned fell in beside him, all the way into the living room where Ned was inspired to hold his clipboard out in a way that blocked Elliot’s viewfield. Elliot stopped and so did the ninja.

“My petition, Elliot. It’s against …”

“I know what it’s against. I don’t need to sign that.”

“What do you mean?” And this is my friend Elliot, Ned thought.

Elliot said, “I have no time to explain this now. Look around. But Ned there isn’t going to be a war.”

“What do you
mean
?”

“What we’re doing is called compellence.
Compellence
. It’s a bluff.”

“So you think he’ll just leave, Hussein?”

“He will. He’ll join Idi Amin someplace nice. Riyadh. I have to get to the office.”

“You don’t understand,” Ned said.

“
You
don’t,” Elliot said. What he was insinuating was that he, Elliot, was operating at a loftier level of contacts and information and should be left alone by Ned.

Ned thought, At least he looks uncomfortable doing that. He said, straining for a neutral tone, “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Good! At the seminar.”

“What seminar? Do you mean the planning session for the memorial?”

“That’s it.”

31
Ned found Gruen in the physic garden. Gruen was just putting his cell phone away, in his jacket pocket. He looked yellow. He said, “Never again, sambuca.”

“I thought we learned never to get drunk on liqueur,” Ned said.

“You should have reminded me. By the way, right here is good for phoning. Better than down by that rock, and closer.” Gruen shook himself. He said, “I missed breakfast, but a woman named Nadine Rose, I can describe her, dug up a container of yogurt for me. Now, Nadine Rose, her job is, as it was explained to me, is to fix you up with any kind of food you need between meals. She’s Jamaican. She’s the extremely pretty one, maybe thirty. For some reason she told me she was single. I didn’t ask. Nadine Rose.”

Ned held out his petitions to Gruen. Gruen sighed and said no.

And then it was exactly what Ned had anticipated. Gruen was sure Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons because he had done it before. And the Israelis had blown up the Osirak reactor and his recollection was that Ned had been fine with that years ago despite the fact that it was plainly illegal under international law, the same
way the invasion of Iraq in the next couple of months was going to be, unfortunately.

Ned said, “But the scale of this is going to be completely different. This is not going to be about killing seven French technicians.” Ned faltered. There were too many factors that had to be left below the surface when it came to Israel. The main one was the rightness or wrongness of asserting a right to have a state dedicated to one religion only. It was hard to be fair, very hard. And another problem was the general demographic apocalypse that Jews worldwide were facing through assimilation and low birth rates, which made it all the more urgent to get rid of the criminals who were going out of their way to speed up that process through terror, by terrorizing Israel. Ned had his own dubious solution for the Arab-Israeli problem. It was to let America be the homeland for all Jews, any Jews, from anywhere, right of return, and let the UN take over all the holy sites for Jews and Islamics alike over there. Then the world would see what the Arabs did with the place. It had no oil and the Dead Sea was evaporating.

Ned said, “Gruen, do you really believe he has nuclear weapons?”

Gruen had something green in his mouth. He had plucked mint leaves from a bush growing in the ruined garden.

Ned was encouraged by Gruen’s delay in replying, and said, “War isn’t the only way. If we can convince Bush that there is going to be so much unhappiness in this country, you’ll be surprised at how fast he comes up with, oh, boycotts, seizures of assets, blowing up the ports maybe, which I could go for, I suppose, but if there’s an invasion? How much blood is going to be spilled are you thinking? And
for
how long
? And one other thing. You
want
to sign this because I can tell you we are going to have
millions
of people in the streets, not thousands
millions
. Douglas would sign this petition but he’s dead.”

Gruen’s smile was a truly beautiful thing, it had to be said.

He signed.

Ned said, “Now for Joris. But first Nadine Rose.”

He had to get Joris out of the way. A Nadine Rose did exist, but her whereabouts were a mystery. No one in the kitchen at present had ever heard of yogurt, to judge by their mystified expressions when he used the word. Most of them had to be emergency hires who understandably felt no urgency to assist him in his quest. He wondered if he was signaling to them that he could safely be ignored. Ah well, he thought.

A glowing sun room lay ahead of him, down a dim corridor. He had walked through the sun room a couple of times. Ned was certain, for no good reason, that he would find Joris there.

Blinking, he entered the brightness. The air was tepid and humid. The room was solid glass on three sides. Thriving ferns stood in copper planters along the window walls, some growing so tall they would block the vista in places for anyone sitting down. He found Joris in an oversized rattan armchair, hunched over an enviable leatherbound notebook. The chairback fanned up and out so flamboyantly that from the rear Joris had been invisible. Ned sat down next to him in a matching chair. Joris closed the notebook. His feet were resting on a grisly thing Ned hoped was one of those
ingenious resin replicas the Chinese produced in every branch of home décor. It was an elephant-foot ottoman with a metal cap on top. Joris looked at Ned with his eyebrows raised in question, but his attitude was friendly enough. He waved away Ned’s apology for interrupting. Ned gripped his clipboard. The elephant foot was real, he could tell. A musty smell in the immediate vicinity that he was surely imagining seemed to be emanating from the thing.

Joris put his hand on the block of petition forms. He said, “I know what you want and I wish I could make you happy and sign that. Also, your wife. She is nice as they come and I wish I could add to her happiness. I don’t know if you know that she asked me just lightly had you gotten hold of me yet with this petition to sign. Not asking me directly but putting a nice kind of pressure. I didn’t mind.”

An odd thing was that Ned felt himself looking forward to the contest that was coming. And if he could have sciencefictionally gotten Nina out of bed, into and out of the shower, dressed her and fed her, all in sixty seconds so that she could come and watch them fight, he would have done it.

Joris said, “But here’s what:
they are going to do it
, whatever you do. The government decides what it wants. The State sings the Song of the State. Brecht, I believe. The Congress is out of it. And war makes money for the happy few. War is like the prime interest rate, it is something the government takes care of. Or like the Geodetic Survey, it is something the government takes care of. The people don’t care. There’s no draft.

“And you know what? I bet they love it. The government loves it that you put on big walks and demonstrations, as big as hell, and you know why? Why is because it keeps
up the lie that you can do something about it, that the government can be touched in its heart. And wars don’t lose you elections, either. When the draft was on it was a little bit different, but not now. And don’t forget
they lie
. And you can’t prove it’s a lie until thirty years later a scholar might and by then nobody cares.

“Okay, so all that is under the heading on one side called Wasting Your Time. So now, come to the heading of killing as a good idea or not. Wait, first just to remind you … the reason Finland never went communist in 1918 to 1920 is because the government had a pogrom against the communists living there, thousands of them, trade unions, schools, everything, the White Terror, they called that massacre, and today Finland is a sturdy good little democracy, a place you could live in by choice, and they manufacture the piece-of-shit phone I use.

“So here is what it is …”

Ned said, “Soon you’ll let me respond!”

Joris said, “I shall! As God is my witness, your voice shall sound! But here is what it is. These people we are supposed to go over and kill?—we
helped
them be stupid. We
subsidized
their insane religion all over south Asia, us, we gave guns to the Wahabis, and money. We don’t like what we made but somebody has to kill it and in my opinion it’s the least we can do.”

Ned said, “May I …?”

“
Not yet
. You want to know how hopeless these fucking people are? The Shia believe the secret imam is going to pop up once he sees they are fighting hard enough and creating enough fire and bloodshed in the Christian world. And the Sunnis, those geniuses, believe the same thing will happen if
they
create enough hell, except, and you won’t
believe this but it’s true, for them it’s not some ghost imam coming back, it’s the fucking
Virgin Mary
! So not only do these primitive assholes think they are going to get a permanent bacchanal with completely inexperienced women in paradise if they complete their jihad by getting themselves killed, they are also helping to deliver the whole wide world into the lap of Allah Himself. Sorry, these morons have to be
managed
.”

“Killed by us, you mean.”

“It’s worth a try!”

Ned said, “Are you through?”

Joris said, “I’m never through. And by the way we have the perfect warrior assholes to do it. The officer corps is full of
Christians
who have their own version of the end of the world. All that has to happen is the Israelis win a big battle in a place called Megiddo, something that might easily happen, it’s right there on the map and there are plenty of Arabs around there. Then, of course, Jesus comes. And then what?

“I’m talking about people you can’t reach by normal means, Ned. You can’t make a deal. The Israelis have a doctrine. I forget what you call it, they send teams out into villages, the West Bank or wherever, and they kill the leaders showing up, and the next generation of weapons-makers, like they did with Gerald Bull who was going to build the world’s largest cannon for the Iraqis and fire shells the size of Volkswagens into Israeli cities. So they sent a team to kill him. They got him in Beirut. You have to. Was that a bad idea, Ned? You won’t like this, but this is what I say.
Especially with people who think getting themselves killed so they can go to paradise is a really good idea
. What I say
is that a time comes when you have to kill them in large enough numbers so it interferes with their assumption that they can keep putting up mosques and proselytizing and having enough of them to look forward to covering all the patches of the earth’s surface that Islamics lay claim to, Dar al-Harb, which is anywhere they’re not in control of yet, look up irredentism why don’t you? It’s insane. And I’m saying it may be the fastest and most sparing of overall life, like Bentham, in the long run … it’ll lead to the least overall killing, if you get it done now.”

Ned could feel Joris getting happier as he pitched himself deeper into his argument. His mode had changed as he’d progressed, he was intentionally roughing up an old friend, taking a chance of alienating him. What was happening to Joris was the return from the grave of the old style of outrageous, absurdly insulting argument. One thing they had amused themselves with during the NYU years was visiting the representatives of the fossil left, all of whom had some sort of decaying perch in Manhattan, some loft, some basement. They had seen invective as an art form, and as entertainment.

Joris wouldn’t stop. “Now the last thing. War is insane from the standpoint of the big democracies because it competes with fixing everything that’s important, the environment, the bridges, the hundreds-of-years-old water mains. We have to stop spending on war if we’re going to survive as a First World country. And you’re not trying to stop some kind of all-out war that’s going to solve anything. It’s going to be half-assed because we don’t fight wars of extermination anymore, I will say that for us …”