Saturday, February 7, 2009

Bountyhunt:: Sudan

"Living only for the moment, turning our attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maples. Singing songs, drinking wine, and diverting ourselves in just floating, floating, caring not a whit for the poverty staring us in the face, refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along with the river current: this is what we call the floating world."


-From "A Tale of the Floating World," by Asai Ryoi, about 1665


This would have been several years back. Istanbul. It was late afternoon, I was seated at an Internet cafe, pecking out some cowardly communication to a girl back home I never could confess my feelings for. The mosques lining the still cove below flared to life as I typed. Maghreb, sunset prayer. Muezzins wailing their articles of faith in crackling harmonies that roped their way over the water and rebounded against the far bluff, horn of a passing ship briefly booming through it all. I enjoyed the orderliness and ceremony of the hour.

Once I'd sent my irresolute demi-message, I stumbled on something that interested me. It was a file sitting on the desktop. ‘Sudan_Report_Untitled.doc.' Coasting my eyes along the title gave me a little tingle.

To me 'Sudan,' just the sound of it, had always savored of danger, adventure, thrills of obscurity. I had romantic thoughts about the ancient Nile cultures, the impenetrable swamps and forests, the neverending conquests, the unashamed feudalism and slavery, the monumental failure of the British pan-Africa project. I had long hoped to visit the place: A harsh desert crossing, an excursion to the Nile headwaters, a walk among crumbling monuments built by slaves dead three thousand years. Romantic notions or not, I’d never managed to set foot in the country, be it for lack of daring, focus, or cash.

Now here was this file. I glanced over my shoulder to see if anyone was broadcasting sentiments of offended propriety with respect to it. There wasn't, but one can never be too careful. I tried to make it look like I was opening an e-mail attachment. Ben Hornigold can be a sly dog when he needs to be. The computer was slow. I noticed that the screen and keyboard were covered in a film of dust and grease and perhaps other things besides. The entire cafe seemed coated in dusty grime. I hate dust, hate having to negotiate my thoughts and movements through the medium of it. The end of the world will be a vision of dust.

The file had opened. The title was “A Fortnight in the Sudan: A Business Traveler’s Report.” The byline, as if the report were intended for publication somewhere, was Karlos Wrangell Braxator. A difficult name to place. My eye lingered on the novel texture of it before I began to skim down.

The report was written in a style suitable neither to business nor to journalism. But maybe allowance should be made for eccentricity in a composition penned by someone named Karlos Wrangell Braxator. It did not take long, as I read, before I was overcome by a shaky feeling of uncertainty. The writing was complicated and strange, and the events it described were unlikely and possibly criminal. After skimming several pages I closed the file. Then I sent it to myself, paid, and went off in search of another place to print it.

My apartment was a skeletal place 10 floors off the street, and that night the elevator couldn’t be called. Someone had left the door ajar on one of the landings. Bastard. I slammed the door and mounted the dusty stairwell. But I thought better of it, turning back to prop the lobby door open with a stray shred of cardboard. I was panting but not displeased with my minor vengeance by the time I cleared my landing and saw the oddly welcoming doormat bought on what seemed an almost prehistoric family trip to Alaska: Welcome to Grizzly Country. I dusted the soles of my shoes off on its worn nap. I opened the door and gagged on a migration of dust streaming window to window. As if my apartment were not a refuge or interior at all, but focal point for channeling the outside world. I lit the stove and tossed some ingredients in a pot, almost at random. I slurped it up like a some lower order of man--homo bachelorus-and settled into bed to give the Braxator's report a careful reading.


~


A Fortnight in the Sudan: A Business Traveler’s Report

-By Karlos Wrangell Braxator


We wanted to set ourselves up like a gang of overland tourists to avoid risking the stray raised eyebrow that might clap the kybosh on our endeavor. But what’s this? We? No, not the royal pronomial--dear readers and sponsors, your astonishment is entirely forgivable, for how could you have known that once in country, the lonely I would yield to a sociable we? And neither could I! How did it happen? It seemed, you see, that X. has been quite a busy bugger indeed.

It began with me sat down to table across from a sympathetic young couple staying in my Khartoum hotel. You didn’t think that I did everything alone while out on assignment, did you? We were discussing our how comes and our where tos as one is wont to with like-cultured people in far-off places, and I gave as my raison de pelerinage that I was tracking down an old friend who had disappeared. Bernal, the male half of the sympathetic duo (her name was Rita), laughed and asked how much my friend owed me. The casual question caught me so off guard that I blurted out that it was not I who was owed, but a third party whose trust my friend had forsaken. I have never before similarly disclosed an assignment, never once let the bounty slip the lockbox. Nor had I ever before been asked a question as immediately compelling as the one put to me then by Bernal. Something about the tone of his words or the look in his eyes made him both disarming and commanding. Once I’d managed to swallow the initial shock at having revealed myself, I reasoned that my prospects must be safe, that what were the chances, what could it possibly mean to them that I was chasing this bounty. Yes, to them it would be no more than a charming frottage with the world’s suddenly manifest underbelly. But my admission did not fascinate or titillate. Bernal stared at me with eyes like those of a Sultan taking in his realm, saying nothing. Rita's gaze was directed down in sudden fascination with the tines of her fork. I spoke. So what was their affair in the Sudan?

Bernal blinked, stuttered something about following up on a lead for their expose on black market chimpanzee trafficking. They were journalists. From Mexico, like my dear departed father. And they had a scoop on a ruthless foreigner who was doing brisk business with mankind’s mongrel relative in the south.

You can imagine my gobsmacked surprise, employers. Following my hunch, I asked Bernal what, aside from a good features item, their putative article’s publisher hope to get out of the ape trafficker. He stonewalled with talk of groundwork they'd done in London. An interview some English petty English noble who had been put behind bars after being caught using a team of blood-crazed chimps to chase down foxes and tear them apart. Such sport becoming much more advanced and engaging to the degenerate nobility when it is prosecuted two types of primate--a quest for emergent effects, if you will. Several times Rita’s eyes flashed culpably up from that very interesting fork as he talked. In her eyes too, something tremendously vital. Eyes over which she had no control. That they too should be after X. seemed too strange to be believed. I'd cut for sign of hare and stumbled on the nest of the very viper.

For most of dinner we discoursed civilly on Sudan’s several civil wars, the myriads of fauna rumored to now be embarking on their seasonal migration in the south, and how pleasant it was to witness the moon rise over the Nile and across its waters and chase Mars up the ecliptic. And it was pleasant. After dessert, Rita suggested we all share a bottle of the prosecco they had brought along to insure against tedium. Prospect delightful, but setting foot in their room was not a risk I was willing to run. Sensing my guard, they left it unsuggested, and Bernal ran up to fetch the ceremonial tackle. While he was gone Rita looked at me in a way that a novice might find seductive, but I’m too professional to succumb to such wiles, what I mean is that I wasn't born under a rock, and anyway you know I incline ever so slightly away from distaff complications. When Bernal returned, it was with a bottle of fine vintage, its neck already dressed in an elegantly tied napkin. I made a gesture in kind by withdrawing three very good Cubans from inside my seersucker. By the time we’d polished off the bottle I had used my charm and the trustworthiness conferred by my threescore years to precipitate the admission that they too were, in their way, hunting a bounty that had been hung on X. Once I had led them to the edge and could feel them rearing up and skittering, I pushed them over by saying that we we'd be bumping into one another down the road, and if we preferred to avoid the pratfalls of competition and the ugliness of mutual contempt, bloodlust and even and, Lord above preserve us from the prospect, killings--we had better work together.

It was a relief to have it out in the open.

It was a gambling debt. Poor hapless X had broken the book, and not in the good way. I didn’t for a second believe that they were after anything other than the object of my own errand, but they were courteous people, and they made a sympathetic impression as I’ve said, so I let them tell their story. It was a tidy cover, I’ll admit, if somewhat circumstantial. All very entertaining, though. They had married early, romantically running their own little shaymus shop to make ends meet. In a place called Broodburg-on-Bayou. Early in their marriage, they gave me to understand, both had had close friends ruined by gambling. One threw himself off a bridge, leaving wife and children under a thunderhead of bad debt. Blackjack the culprit. The other, her best friend since childhood, had spiraled into debt on the gaming boats. When her bid to refloat her financial fortunes using smart tips on penny stocks failed, she’d seen no way out but to auction off a kidney. Do you know how that little narrative excursion ended? Her book had got wind of the chop job and, sniffing opportunity, cajoled her surgeons into make off with both organs instead of the one, end of story.

The couple’s reaction had been to resort to an unorthodox antigambling crusade: Their revulsion at chance’s insidious allure prompted them to sell their services to the devil in hopes of doing him one better. In plain language, they hired themselves out to books with bad debts, collecting them with a brutality that made them legendary. The idea was that their atavistic reprisals on defaulters would make Johnny Wager or Bobby Blackjack think twice before laying that next big bet he couldn't afford. An altogether American way of thinking, wouldn’t you agree? I resolved to keep from them my own penchant for punting, doubtful though their backstory may have been. I may have allied myself with them, but these were still vipers.

X’s debt, they went on to tell me, was born in a bizarre scheme of handicapping acrobatics. X. had long been a sports bettor, and a successful one. Yet success had made him languid. He’d begun to tire of the regular fare. Nothing bored him more than the prospect of raking in the money from another wager correctly researched and placed. Instead of contesting the scraps that fell from Vegas' table, he wanted the steak on the silver platter. He was going to scarf it down. The gambit involved the nation's favorite football team, the viewing public's favorite quarterback by a wide margin, and He who was unquestionably the nation's favorite deity—God.

It so happened that an athletic but troubled young man had borrowed a considerable amount of money from X.—who was always keen to promote the sort of dregs-level entrepreneurship that might not blossom without his assistance—and proceeded to lose half of the sum at gaming tables and the rest in a pyramid scheme. The young man in question had been paying X. back in scrupulous installments over the course of a year or so, but when X. learned through the grapevine that the chap had been a college football player with an exceptional physique and an abundance of talent on the field, yet that his athletic career had been sidetracked by just the sort of indulgence that had allowed X. to make his acquaintance in the first place, X. picked up the scent of opportunity. He approached the fellow and proposed the following: No one liked to see a young man of potential frittering his talents away, least of all X., who had an idea that would allow the chap to make good on his debt in a way that played to X.'s avuncular benevolence and the man's own inborn talents. The errant young man would prevail on his former college coach to put a call into the front office of the winner of the previous year’s Soup-a-Bowl (a close championship game, sponsored by soup company of note, in which the officials had clearly favored the winner), a team whose stars were all returning, and which X. had every reason to believe would be playing in the Big Game again at the end of the coming season. As a courtesy to the college coach, the young man would be invited to try out for the team. His payments to X. (which as X. had learned were financed by petty burglaries and pickpocketing at nightclubs) would be suspended without interest while he got into football shape for the tryout. If he made the team, the debt would be forgiven, end of story. Almost. If the team did in fact make it to the championship game, the young man’s debt to X. would come due in a different and much more congenial way. TBA. Before they shook on it, X. gave the object of his altruism to understand that any word of X.’s “sponsorship” would result both in the entire sum of his debt falling due immediately, and in an unfortunate and career-ending injury to one or both of the young man’s talent-laden trotters.

As X.'s hitherto spotless luck would have it, the young fellow did indeed manage to turn his life around and make the team. He was signed as a probationary special teams player and given four games to prove himself. All he needed was one: After a pulverizing open-field tackle on a punt return and recovery of the ensuing fumble, he was signed for the full year. And though he saw limited playing time at first, his gratitude, spite the terms of their agreement, was such that he sent X. a check for the entire sum of his original debt just a few months later. $50,000 stops seeming like a whole lot when you’re making the NFL minimum, and even a fool, which one could argue was indeed the existential status of the young man in question, could see that settling the original debt with X. made sense, whatever X. may have had up his sleeve.

The coach of the team that had signed the young tackler was a man of exceeding and public piety. X. hated him with a consuming passion. He saw in him the kind of mindless company man who achieves success by repackaging other men’s strategies and ideas in the cheap dazzle of his own charisma—and then daring to claim that his cheaply got success came somehow from God. His charisma, though, was the stuff of legend. It seemed that almost anything he chose to talk about would inspire people, be it the burger he had for lunch or the bowel movement it brought on just before bed. Yet on those postgame occasions when he was called on to say something substantive, he got by on imitation. It wasn’t that X. disliked the empty charisma as such—how could he? Plenty of successes were built on a foundation of plagiarism oversprinkled with the intoxicating effects of raw personality, in all fields of endeavor. It was the man’s spiritual presumptuousness, not only in thinking that his winning record was a sign of divine favor, but in assuming that the god he believed in must have been made in his image, namely that God’s love was specially inclined to fall on cover-2 defensive schemes, zone blitzes, shotgun spreads, and--the most glorious of his signs--touchdowns. The organization and its front office were usually right behind the coach whenever God was invoked. The team played in a city festooned along the nation's biblical girdle, and an apparent alliance with God was not going to hurt ticket sales. The one occasion when the land city, and an apparent alliance with God could only improve ticket sales. front office felt compelled to distance itself from his overgodliness came in the wake of an incident when the coach went into a trance between bites of pulled pork at a summer pig roast. He had fallen to his knees, gaped unseeingly at the vault of the sky, and frothed at the mouth. He shook and kicked, was made (by himself) to speak in tongues. A free safety took a cooler of Gatorade and dumped it over his head to snap the trance. Dripping with the freezing yellow slurry, he stood up as if nothing were the matter. The coach then pinged his bottle of O'Doul's with a fork and asked to make an announcement.

God, he said, had revealed to him that it was anathema for football players to eat pork. This was because the vessel into which they poured their attempts to praise the Lord on Sundays was the pigskin, and thus for a football player to eat pork would be to demote the oneness of the pigskin as the football eucharist. It was an act, he claimed, of idolophagia. Players were miffed. The barbecue had just started. They wanted their ribs, their trotters, their pulled pork. Especially the offensive line wanted these things. But coach insisted, because God insisted. The teamwide prohibition went into effect immediately. It was the faith they were talking about after all. And football. Both of which trumped the impulse to gluttony at a barbecue. Then, with the help of a half-willing linebacking corps, the pig was wound in burlap and heaved into the dumpster along with all the paper plates and the party favors printed with the team logo that nobody wanted. So, thanks be to God, the pig roast was demoted to a potato salad and watermelon and non-alc lawn party. As mentioned, the front office was not in agreement with the coach on this one. This was a team that played in a big hogfarming state. In the end, the coach was gently persuaded to reinterpret his lawnside revelation into a hog-friendlier exegesis.

Normally, of course, X., who had the mark of greatness, would never have let a mediocre man get under his skin this way. He had his own spirals to throw. The problem was that he cared too much about football to let it slide. Football to him was both crucible and showcase for man's greatness, his struggle to foster and nurture the spark that dwells within the individual, and which erupts into a conflagration when integrated into the dynamo of collectivity. The game’s beauty transcended the physicality that was its hallmark: A good football player had to be intelligent, both by rote and by instinct. A good coach, who needed to master both the long-term horizon of cultivating talent and the real-time aspects of conducting the tightly scripted movements of 11 men on the field, had to be brilliant. And players and coaches alike excelled through the intense cultivation of a pool of native talent that was already unfathomable. To see the winner of the Soup-a-Bowl coached by such an obvious hack was offensive. It denigrated the game. Not only that, it made X. think less of himself as a fan. And even though X. was not religious, the coach's constant invocation of God struck him as heretical.

But the team had been successful under his reign, and they bought his line. Just like their coach, they greeted their success with the thoroughly false humility. The locker room and the local press resounded with nonsense about the Berserkers being the chosen squad, a team of destiny, etc. The contagion of godliness had had emergent effects, too. It was a matter of unstated agreement that some players on other teams played in fear of this one, lest by winning they upset an order foreordained on high. That had been the case in the the previous year’s Soup-a-Bowl, which had included sloppy tackling and loose coverage in addition to official prejudice. It seemed that bling and worldliness need not always go hand in hand.

X. had keenly followed the coach's utterances in the wake of the dubious Soup-a-Bowl victory. Asked if he thought the officials had helped them to victory with a string of controversial 4th down measurements, he said that victory was not the officials’ to give, but that it had been bestowed by divine agency, by the rectitude of himself and his players before God. And that if the officials had been partial, why that was to be read in God’s plan too. He also went on record saying that God was not a fan of instant replay.

Instead of provoking outrage, these statements just rolled off an indifferent public. X. could not understand it. Had everyone gone crazy? Was the world asleep? One morning X. determined that he would make it his mission to discredit the coach. Only then could the game emerge from its slide into medieval determinism and regain its status as the true barometer of human enterprise.

X. observed the coach’s movements during the offseason as he went on his customary rounds of the bible belt lecture circuit, assuring swaying congregants and impressionable pupils at institutes of evangelical learning that the warden of the loaves and the fishes and the wine did indeed reward his faithful with victory, acclaim and, best of all, cash money. An unofficial team source even had it that the coach had intimated receiving reassurances from God that his team would take home the next Soup-a-Bowl trophy as well. A handful of dour Christians called it heresy, and the league commissioner clucked and shivered his tailfeathers. But instead of saying that divine preference had no place in football, most opposing coaches and players were content to remain in the shadow of the coach’s holy aura. Astute cultural critics observed that the coach was becoming a kind of shadow-pope to America's Evangelicals. Think tanks saw an opportunity to make money analyzing the phenomenon, and documentary filmmakers rattled off a dozen projects. X. alone took it upon himself to do something about it.

Come January, the pious coach's team had secured homefield advantage and a first-round bye. X.’s unlikely protégé was playing well, and had earned a starting spot on the team's punt coverage and kickoff return units. As nearly everyone expected, the Berserkers breezed through the playoffs to advance to the Soup-a-Bowl. Their opponents seemed hardly to offer any resistance at all, but X. could not have been more pleased. The plan was falling into place.

On the evening that the team took home the conference championship trophy, X. turned off the television and called up an old friend who happened to run a large Las Vegas sportsbetting book. The plan was to get to the quarterback, Tom Telluride, with the rehabilitated specialteamsman to play a supporting role. Telluride, a religious man himself, was a 10-year league veteran with an uncanny ability to engineer fourth quarter comeback victories, and was the nation's unquestioned QB darling. His play was unorthodox, wily, resourceful, his mistakes few. He took part enthusiastically in the team’s nationally televised group prayers that so appalled X, and generally echoed most of the coach's pious guff. Telluride could use a humbling, too, X. thought.

Not that Telluride would be told to turn in a bad game, nothing as crass and transparent as that. Instead, Telluride would be prevailed on to infect the team with the taint of spiritual doubt. At a team meeting just a few days before the big game, he would accuse the coach of heresy. After that it would not matter what the coaches said, or whether Telluride played. The Soup-a-Bowl contestants were evenly matched, and the seed of doubt would sprout into a staggering arbor of defeat for the defenders of the highest trophy of the ultimate team sport. X.’s bookie buddy was enthusiastic. A few more calls were made, and the plan began to roll.

Three days after the conference championship game, man of the people Tom Telluride dropped by a Burger King on his way home from practice. There he was engaged in a bit of friendly banter by a Catholic priest. Their conversation would have gone something like this:

“Hey there, Tell! Great job in the conference championship."

“Thanks, father. I didn’t know the clergy was into football."

“Oh we at the seminary are all very interested in the Billington Berserkers. May I sit down for a moment? Thank you. So. Big game coming up.”

“Yeah, but I think we’ve got a pretty good chance.”

“I wouldn't get too smug if I were you. The Lord frowns on pride. Come to think of it, there's something that's been eating at me, Tell. It's your coach. He invokes the name of God quite a bit, when what he's really talking about is football.”

“Yeah, well, he's really into his thing, and also, a bit, you know..."

“Out of line. Football and God don't mix, son."

At which point Telluride must have looked up from his burger to notice that the priest sitting at the table with him looked very burly, with hard eyes and big, scarred knuckles. “I don't understand, father."

“Let me tell you exactly what I mean, son. The church bureaucracy is full of powerful, invisible men. These men are very jealous of their God, and they want to make sure His name isn't bandied about in vain. Like on the football field. They don't like your coach running around saying you guys are the chosen team.”

“Look, father, it’s just football. I'd hate for us to offend the church, but please don't blow it out of…"

“Let me finish, son. You may not have heard my sermon in church, but you'll hear it now. Your coach has adopted positions and employed rhetoric that the church finds unacceptable. We priests usually like to remain in the wings or under the eaves or behind the tinted glass of the skybox. But because of your coach’s...heresy, we have decided to come down and join the fray. What I mean is this, son. The reason you aren’t the chosen team, beyond the obvious that is, is that we have chosen the other team. Even though you’re just a football player, I'm sure you know the church has a lot of money. The church also has a lot of, shall we say, leeway. We play on a wider field than you do. We have 2,000 years of getting things done under our belt, and we usually get what we want.”

"Hey, what's going on here?” asked the quarterback, a piece of half-chewed grade D beef dribbling from his mouth onto the tray.

“That is what I am trying to tell you. Tell, you have a simple choice. Either you accuse your coach of heresy at the next team meeting--for example, you can tell the team you had a dream where God came to you and said the entire operation was ungodly, and that the Lord said he would curse the team's play in the big game--either you do this in return for two and a half million dollars—or we make sure you get a decent Christian burial. We'll be watching you.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“Believe it, son. When you're being blitzed by the Catholic Church, you want to get rid of the football. Look, it’s not like we're asking you to throw the game. With a little help from the frail carpenter in the sky, that should take care of itself." At which point Telluride got up to leave, visibly shaken. He was on the point of saying something, but did not. The priest watched him go, then reached across the table to finish the quarterback's burger.

This, Bernal and Rita's story continued, was where the specialteamsman came in. X. needed a way of being sure that Telluride lived up to the covenant sealed over burgers, and the specialteamsman was how. When X. called him up, the reformed punter-cum-coverage man responded as if it were a shout-out of gratulation and encouragement. He owed it all to X., he said, for helping him get his life back on track, for guiding him toward this opportunity, and so on. X. told him to save the you made it all possible schtick for his mother in his I'm going to Disneyland moment. And God, of course. As happy as it made him that the prodigal son had abandoned the primrose path he'd once happily trodden, X.'s real errand was to call in a favor. X. needed to know what was going on in the locker room. Needed a pair of eyes and ears. Needed the specialteamsman to report to X. every day with anything regarding the team that might be of interest; X. was particularly interested in what the quarterback might be up to. When the specialteamsman kicked and screamed that it would be a breach of contract to divulge the game plan, X. explained with care that he wasn't interested in the playbook, just the atmosphere in the lockerroom, what people were saying. He revealed no detail of the arrangement with Telluride. And he hardly needed remind the young man that contracts in which blood was pledged as surety superseded any sealed in ink. For all his dearth of intelligence, the specialteamsman knew better than to disagree. X. said he would check in on his young protégé soon, and hung up.

For over a week X. had to listen to tedious insider accounts of the cheap motivational techniques used by the coach he despised. There was also a sordid love triangle involving two starting linebackers. With the game fast approaching, X. thought they might have to get the priest to make a housecall and give Telluride his last chance to walk in the grace of God before loosing a papal bull on him. But on the next day, just five days before the big game, X. heard what he'd been waiting for. Telluride, the specialteamsman said, had gone crazy. As the coach was going over the portfolio of trick plays with the offensive unit, the ever-calm, ever-affable Telluride suddenly stood up and accused the coach of being a heretic, a sinner, an unreconstructed evildoer. There followed a long speech about the impiety of the coach’s hubris, about scourge and disaster foretold. Telluride, it turned out, could delivery a fiery monologue as well as he could throw a spiral. By the time he had concluded his revelation, saying that coach and players alike would soon feel the sting of the divine lash across their shoulders, the atmosphere in the lockerroom had become funereal, the team's spirit a guttering candle. Receivers and coverage men whispered nervously; running backs cast baleful glances about the room in search of fugitive comfort; trainers and assistants suddenly remembered pressing duties that would take them out of the conference room; and the men of the offensive and defensive lines—huge men whose strength was melded with equal portions of fearlessness—these men were reduced to a kind of slackjawed cowering that was neither offensive nor defensive. The coach, for his part, had blanched the color of a hotel linen. After saying nothing at all for a good minute, he declared in a choked and froggy voice that he needed some time alone in his office with his 'master and savior,' and slipped away. The seed was planted.

When the specialteamsman had finished, X. thanked him for his testimony and wished him luck in the game. All he required of him was one more call as it as it came down to the wire. Lighting a cigar, X. called his friend in Vegas with the intelligence. Predictably, the quarterback’s revelation had ruffled the coach, particularly as it came on the same day as similar allegations on national television by Archie Rivers. Rivers, a well-known televangelist with a not so well-known penchant for gambling and little boys, happened to have played his way deep into the red in the book kept by X.'s friend. You could say he got off easy.

X. could have anticipated the team’s official reaction: The following day, Telluride was deemed mentally unfit to play and benched. But news of his revelation could not be cooped by lockerroom walls, and in the days leading up to the Big Game, the national media was gripped by a succession of orgasms brought on by the twin stimuli of Telluride’s titillating revelation and the televangelist’s thundering reproach. Suddenly the favorite was looking vulnerable.

The oddsmakers, it should be noted, had never dealt with last-minute spiritual turmoil besetting a highly favored Soup-a-Bowl contender. Initially, the spread swung from 11 in favor of the Berserkers to 1 in favor of their opponent, the Whalemen of New Bedford. Two days before the game, the coach issued a video press release in which he calmly said that in spite of the rumors, neither his nor his team's faith in their eventual victory had been shaken. Nor had his faith in his quarterback budged. They had had a disagreement, that was all. Telluride made no comment, but the coach explained, idiotically, that players sometimes got jumpy before big games. The media’s feverish speculation about the team’s coming collapse continued after the announcement, but for a recondite reason known only to them, the wing-and-a-prayer press release made the oddsmakers reconsider, with the Berserkers soon rebounding to the position of high single-digit favorite.

As long as there was nothing going on that he did not know about, this augured well for a bet on the underdog. X. called up his specialteamsman for any news, but the reformed young man had nothing new to report. He said that the mood in the lockerroom was still dire, that the coach had pulled his public assurances out of thin air. And as for Telluride, he still maintained that the coach was a heretic, who in turn maintained that it was out of the question that the orthodox quarterback would get the start.

So much for the rationality of the oddsmakers, thought X. No: So much the better for him. He and his friend then joined forces to lay an exotic bet where they wagered not only that the opponent would win by 7 points or more, but that the demoralized Billington squad would not be able to put more than 20 points on the board. If it succeeded, it was a bet that would return over 600%. But that was just icing on top of what his friend stood to make in the bargain, and X. off his coattails. It wasn't just that they would fleece the suckers who had gone through him to get in on the early bets on the Berserkers: In both his cupidity and his lifelong tendency to be besotted by whatever scheme X. was selling, he had allowed himself to be convinced to mortgage his entire betting book on the game. It was what you might call a highly leveraged mortgage-backed gamble. If he won, it wasn’t only the other bookies and their backers who would be brought down. The reverberations of X.’s bold plan would be felt as far away as the vaults of bullion stowed deep in the secret hearts of Swiss mountains: There would be reinsurance to pay. X. could not wait to see the actuaries of the world choke on this bone.

By the time the big game's coin toss came round, the Berserkers were looking just as rattled as X. had imagined they would. They even lost the coin toss. And it pleased X. to see the yesman second stringer start in place of Telluride, to witness their failure to move the chains until well into the second quarter. Nor could he complain when the Whalemen scored consecutive touchdowns on their first three possessions. The score at halftime was 27-6, a comfortable margin for his bet. As the gameclock expired, the field camera panned on the coach. He was looking at his clipboard with an expression of almost beatific blankness. Oblivious to his many millions of witnesses, he placed his playbook reverentially at his feet. Then, kneeling down as if the clipboard were a communicant's altar, he looked up at the leadcolored heavens and extended his arms in vulgar imitation of the Passion.

X., who had flown to Vegas to watch the game with his friend, squailed his cigar's aluminum sleeve at the hotel suite television in disgust. God how he hated that fool! Nor could X. be consoled by the halftime performance of an aging rocker. Through the compound nimbus of Havana smoke and the angels' share of his scotch, his friend could hear him muttering, over and over again, that the only thing that would teach that moronic coach, and the only thing that could satisfy him, was a trouncing. A trouncing by God! X.’s friend couldn't care less, so long as the underdog won by seven and the Berserkers scored fewer than fourteen.

When the ball was kicked off to the Berserkers to start the second half, the return man muffed it. X. jumped out of his celebratory cloud with excitement, but it did not take long before his billowing cigar dropped to his side and burned a hole in the silk of his pants. On the screen, a blocker for the Berserkers wearing the number 49 flattened an opponent going for the fumble and then dribbled the bouncing pigskin through the oncoming stampede of coverage men before scooping it up, squirming through a terrifying convergence of tacklers, then hurdling two diving desperation tackles before scampering into the endzone. When the endzone camera zoomed in on the man of the moment, the cigar dropped to the carpet and smoldered in the nylon nap. It was the young man who one year ago had been picking the pockets of unsuspecting clubgoers to satisfy his gambling debt.

When the Berserkers’ defense held on the ensuing series, the Whalemen of New Bedford were forced to punt from deep in their own territory. The previous return had convinced the goadfearing coach that God wanted him to do exactly what X. prayed he would not. Number 49 had been deployed to field the punt. X. could hardly bear to meet the screen's flicker as the ball left the kicker’s foot, described an arc cresting up along the bleachers, then hung at the top of the stadium for a moment at the apex of its ballistic trajectory into number 49's hands; could barely peep at the coverage team’s preventative plow as it hurtled down the field on a trajectory as programmed as the ball's; and recoiled in anguish as number 49 sliced through its flagging blades and returned the ball to the Whalemen's 10 before being tripped by his shoestring. Then, as if to lard mockery with contempt, Tom Telluride came out onto the field beaming a shiteating grin through his faceguard. He gestured in mock supplication to the heavens before the snap and needed only two plays to command the team to the touchdown that pulled them to within one score. X. sheltered behind his veil of smoke. The hated coach, on the other hand, had come out into the open. He shed his customary communications gear and his sunglasses, the better to stand in direct and flagrant communion his Deity.

As it happened, the deity in question was a cruel god that must have taken a page out of the Old Testament, a god concerned with confirming himself in his own fickleness and unreason, who reveled in his own power, who rewarded those whose sole virtue it was to invoke him before other gods. In his wisdom, he also happened to reward the old guard of moneychangers that stood hovering just outside football’s high temple. These were the Vegas oddsmakers who had gone with the conventional wisdom about the resurgent Berserkers and fixed the spread at ten. Over the next 25 minutes of gameplay, not only did the Berserkers drive for the go-ahead touchdown-and-two, but were marshalled by a resurgent Telluride for yet another 10 points—just enough to cover the Vegas spread that so many had bet against.

Telluride's final touchdown came with just over three minutes to play. X. knew that there was no chance that his money would be made, the Berserkers had scored too many, but was a consolation touchdown from the Whalemen too much to ask for? Did he dare hope for a touchdown to narrow the gap, and then an onside kick to give them the hope of snatching victory from the jaws of unholy defeat? After all, as long as the Berserkers lost, X. could draw comfort from having come out on top in the ledger of pride.

The Whalemen did indeed manage a touchdown and a two-point conversion to draw within 3. From behind the jungly cloud that was half Havana and half highlands, X. allowed himself to fancy that human ingenuity might prevail against Providence. With a minute left to play, the Whalemen went for the onside kick. X. cowered as they lined up to kick off. Again the ball was kicked off, albeit on a clipped and unsightly onside trajectory. Now there was the chaos of fumbling, the uncertainty of flying bodies, the suspense of a game that hung in the balance. And again it was none other than specialteamsman 49 who came up with the ball and played holy havoc with those who would tackle him before returning the ball for a touchdown.ned defeat? After all them the hope of snatching victyir

To cut short a long story of lost money's vengeance and the evasion of the same, the outcome of the game, other than to cost him both a friend and his love of football, was to make X. a wanted man, pursued by wrathful creditors and the henchmen of bloodthirsty laws alike. It may have been that Telluride had dared defy his Burger King covenant by telling the coach he had been forced by a linebacker-sized priest to speak as he had; it may have been that the rehabilitated specialteamsman somehow got smart and had been able to foil the plan with his own mind and body--or the Berserkers' victory may have been nothing more than the child of brute chance and divine vagary.

Interesting story--I didn't believe a word of it. The point is that by whatever stretch of the truth, it gets us to where K. Wrangell Braxator and his dubious bountyhunting allies Bernal and Rita found themselves that evening in Khartoum. When their story was finished, they told me they would sleep on my suggestion that we band together. We slept.

When I came down to the breakfast room in my Hong Kong herringbone blazer and chinos toward the end of the breakfast hour, I caught Bernal's head ducking into the lobby. I peered in to see him settling his bill. With as much archness as a man of my years can muster early in the morning, I asked if he was planning to get an early start. He looked at me frankly and smiled. Those eyes. Yes, he said, in fact they did. He and Rita needed not only to rent a truck, but to provision it and apply for the necessary permits. I was welcome to come along, of course. He said that having thought about it, they would be happy to work with a man whose reputation had preceded him as glowingly as mine. There was no note of subterfuge in his voice, dear readers. I should have been suspicious, but the eyes, the voice! Rita soon joined us, her face shining with the flushed contentment of vigorous morning activity. She echoed what Bernal had said.

As I said earlier, we decided to pose as foolhardy and somewhat gauche overland tourists to avoid raising eyebrows among whatever network X. had managed to set up for himself down there. Our day comprised all the queuing and hurrying and hectoring that such overland tourists have to endure if they ever hope to get their start in the Sudan. I will spare you the details. get started in the Sudan o through to get started in the Sudn a Someone has written that details are vulgar, and it's true.. I was welcome to come along rovision it and apply for the necessary permits Bernal's head disappears

Suffice it to say that by evening, we were camped along the White Nile outside a town to the south of Khartoum, having obtained all the needed permits and an off-road vehicle with a tent built into the roof rack. By three-way consent we decided all three of us would sleep in the vehicle's tent rather than banish either them or myself to a groundtent with its enhanced risk of abandonment of one party by the other. It was an unnatural arrangement born of fraught circumstances.

Bernal, who was an epicurian, took the time to prepare a peppersteak with a caramelized red onion glaze, served up with a side of mashed sweet potato, and rounded off with generous portions of a homemade rice pudding. Not bad, considering that it was cooked out of the back of a truck. Our meal was accompanied by a rising chorus of hyenas. Then, as if to complete the illusion of overlanding innocence, Bernal and Rita asked me to videotape them as they cleaned up the campsite in a silence broken only by the hyenas' odd greedy hoots.

Later that night, as we lay in our lit a trois quaffing a bottle of prosecco, they urged me to give them the story of why I was hunting X. A fiction for a fiction. This is what I told them as I gazed up at a sky punctured by the distant stars. The fact is that the prosecco was making me fanciful.


Oriental Rarities


As I primed my listeners with dusted-off platitudes about the abominable viciousness of a debt-fleeing gambler, I decided to have a bit of fun with the account of my errand. I would tell them that the bad debt for which I had chased X. into this cruel, spindly land was rooted in none other than the world of rare books.

X., I began, had long been making trips to London and Paris to dabble in the finest, most sought-after examples of the bookmaker’s art. First editions, signed editions, crumbling folios bound in vellum, incunabula, apocrypha, the literary flotsam of the ages. He was known to own first editions of Swedenborg, Swinburne, and the book in which Svidrigailov is a character. He was thought to possess friable fragments of the original work of Bede, Aquinas, Dante and Averroës. And there were whispers among some of his more imaginative admirers that he had stolen snippets of the Saxo Grammatica and the work of Snorri Sturlusson on polite visits to the national libraries of Denmark and Iceland, respectively. Beyond these jewels both known and suspected, the most interesting case in X.’s collection was devoted to works that showcased what he called audacious imagination. The top shelf started off with copies of the Bible, the Qur'an and other books of that nature--for who can advance the claim that there is anything more audacious than a work of literature citing a divine source? These works he owned in the oldest and grandest editions he could get his hands on--although one of the Qur'ans was the work of an Antebellum North Carolinian slave named Omar ibn Said, who had been abducted and shackled on the way to Timbuktu in search of writing materials. The shelf also included works of philosophy, political economy, and treatises on what constituted a just social order. His favorite, of course, was his first edition of Fourier's Theory of the Four Movements.

On the next shelf stood works that were just a rung lower in audacity, works originally attributed to someone other than their actual authors, and which had been discredited. These included MacPherson's Ossian cycle, the spurious journeys of Sir John Mandeville, the Hitler diaries that came to light in the early 1980s (which had been particularly hard to get hold of, with Der Spiegel initially unwilling to sell at any price), several original copies of the Shakespeare "discoveries" made by the old lettered hoaxster Billy Ireland. In a tribute to his own attempt at literary hoaxsterism, the shelf held an anonymously published compendium of criticism of the works of the nonexistent poet Thorsteinn Mariposa, the release of which had coincided with cocktail parties held simultaneously in Mariposa's honor at a handful of the nation's elite universities, including X.'s alma mater at Billington, each one of which a Mariposa imposter had managed to attend sporting full bohemian regalia calculated to impress innocent literary undergraduates, while putting on an accent plucked from the Atlantic cod run somewhere between the Iberian peninsula and Iceland. The best part was that each Mariposa/impostor had recited to his respective crowd a canonical English poem under an assumed name that made it sound as if it had been inspired by a life of Icelandic pastoralism. X. himself had recited Blake's The Tiger, titling it The Scourge of the Herds of Keflavik. Then again, perhaps the best part of the prank was that each of the phony Mariposas had managed to take home his own co-ed and make a decidedly authentic conquest of her.

On the final shelf were the more or less accepted masters of unlikely fictions, writers like Borges, Pessoa, Calvino. Nestled among these was a little-known biography of the Baron Ungern von Sternberg, the opportunist who with his tattered renegade remnant of the White army managed to clap a Procrustean-totalitarian yoke over the vast Mongol steppes, looting and terrorizing the realm for a year until he was captured and hanged by a vengeful division of the Red army detailed on a cleanup operation. Before his capture, rumor has it that von Sternberg buried a magnificent hoard of looted silver and gold somewhere beneath the gravel of the Gobi. X. loved the idea of lost treasure, thrilling to accounts of the expeditions that have vanished in their quest for it, lost with the same mysterious finality as Cambyses' great army in the Egyptian desert. X. had even considered equipping an expedition of his own to go after the Sternberg loot, but we all know X. had more pleasant ways of making money.

I stopped to refill my prosecco—a delightful beverage in hot climates—and to make sure I had my listeners’ attention. The hyenas provided an interesting score, and I was starting to feel in the mood. About a month ago, I said, X. flew to Istanbul on some unrelated business. Maybe to fix a football match. The Turks are crazy about the other kind of football, and according to some of the stories I hear, X. goes in for that sort of thing. Or maybe he was there to meet with one of that country's business-friendly generals in hopes of landing a below-board contract. The point is that he did his business. It was late afternoon by the time he finished. He went strolling along Istiklal, where he had never been before. There seemed to be nothing much there at first. Just the push and throng of the city, the snarling crowds, the windows of goods before which the crowds feigned postures of elegance and pecuniousness, and though the people were of a somewhat different hue than he was used to, it wasn’t anything he hadn't seen before. Among the Turks he would spot the occasional sallow Englishman or the ruddy visage of the low countries, sometimes catching snippets of his own idiom that never failed to annoy. There were restaurants, stationers, bars. The shopping street was well-stocked with beautiful women. There were even a few bookstores, but they all sold horrible new editions of respectable old books that would have been much better bound in leather, much more readable with a bit of gilt and lacquer on the spine. Some of them featured nothing on the cover but the sigil-in-trade of the publisher. It was a crime, but X. walked on.

At length the cobbled street narrowed and dipped, funneling him down toward the glinting waters of the Golden Horn. The crowd thinned, too, until the only people in his periphery were the itinerant musicians and beggars who artfully preferred this hectic venue for showcasing their talents and miseries. Situated across an unspeakably wretched youth hostel, he came across a more promising kind of bookstore. He walked in, giving the proprietor his greeting before having a look at the wares. The proprietor was sitting at an old, chipped scriptorium, slowly making entries in a large leatherbound ledger. As X. perused, the man took an occasional draught from a pipe with an ivory stem. He had a way of breathing the smoke out where it would cleave close to the plane of his face before dissipating into the dusty bookish atmosphere off the crown of his skewbald pate. As it curled up his face, the smoke would sometimes crowd the space between his eyes and the thick glasses he wore. When this happened, the man would look up from his figures with annoyance to let the smoke clear. X. happened to be looking on one time when the man looked up, and the smoke parted to reveal a pair of blazingly intense black eyes set against starkly white sclera. Like two eclipses focusing to burn off a glaucous mist, the unexpected power of the gaze gave X. a start. He caught himself and they each looked away, the proprietor at his ledger and X. at the books that might one day enter the ledger as items sold.

The books in the shelf were of reasonable quality, though nothing particularly grabbed X. at first glance. A lot of stuff by western travelers detailing actual travels and mystical inner journeys in Turkey and the Levant over the years, some old pieces of French theater, and a number of German academic tomes with bulky titles. There was a case freighted with crumbling works in beautiful Arabic script. He seized one, but the act of plucking it from the shelf sent several of its pages flickering to the floor. Casually, X. looked over at the old chap bent over his scriptorium, but as the grizzled head was occluded by a nimbus of pipesmoke, X. bent down to restore the pages to their proper place among their neighbors. His eye caught a tab of paper nestled between cover and frontispiece. It was the book's advertised price, at several thousand dollars. Hurrying to arrange the fallen pages, he discovered that one of the sheets did not quite fit. X. looked at it. It was an invoice for an alarm system, addressed to the store. Maybe the old man’s bookkeeping wasn’t as exacting as it looked.

With feline cunning, X. slipped the stray invoice into his sportcoat's inner pocket at the same time as he slid the book back into its berth on the shelf.

X. moved on. The next shelf, he discovered, held a charming little array of ancientlooking travel guides, Baedekers and others. Many were devoted to Turkey, but some of the little old greasypaged and waterlogged volumes must have been the first of their kind to cover places like Peru, South Africa, Shanghai, Tokyo, Odessa, Bombay—and Mongolia. Feeling his enthusiasm quicken, he reached for the Mongolia copy. It wasn't a Baedeker, some other outfit had put it out, I don't know who, year of publication 1921, and though the pages bloomed with mold, they featured wonderful engravings of nomadic yurts, Bactrian camels being broken, and the esoteric wrestling matches of the steppe. Best of all, the publisher noted that because of von Sternberg's ironfisted rule, the marooned outland of Mongolia was now considered safe for civilized people to visit for the first time in years--a claim that was spurious at best given the state of generalized banditry that prevailed throughout inner Asia as the great powers reeled. X. wasted no time in taking it to the counter. The price was high, and it may not have been authentic, but it hardly mattered. It was a perfect piece for his von Sternberg collection. He and the proprietor exchanged lettered views for a while in French. X. likes to pass himself off as a Mexican when he leaves the country, and though it offends me slightly, that is the cover he gave himself when speaking to the proprietor of Oriental Rarities. They hit it off. He asked about the market for rare books in Istanbul. Not so good, the owner said. At least not day to day. The masses were unlettered. They played videogames and read gossip. They masturbated too much. Even his own son and daughter, they played video games and read gossip. He didn't want to think about the last part. And all the other proprietors of used and rare bookstores were spending their days on computers, selling their wares over the Internet. Even his brother! Gone were the days of the personally facilitated sale, the charisma-facilitated sale. But there were still some serious collectors out there, international mostly, who would stop in and pay their respects, then pay well for what they knew could not be found anywhere else. His inventory was not indexed on the Internet. He had inherited well. Married well, too, he added with a smile. Some of his most secret inventory was not even indexed in his ledger, he winked. Now that they were face to face, X. noticed, the man’s eyes seemed less like blazing astral phenomena and more like the gently yearclouded eyes of a bookkeeper approaching the brink of dotage. X. thanked him for his time. In parting, he invoked the jealous deity of the Old Testament to keep the man’s health and look over his shop, and said he would stop back in before flying home. He cast a glance back at the shopglass as he walked back up the hill. The old bookkeeper’s stooped figure was framed in it. Pipesmoke was again sliding up his face, again curling off his crown into dusky dissolution, and again the smoke parted to reveal a set of eyes that glinted with an intensity that was downright threatening. The image made him shudder slightly, then was gone. X.’s mind was turning somersaults as he walked back to the Hotel Cartoon.

Some days later, X. did return to the bookstore, as advertised. This time he came at night, along with some friends whose interest in rare books was strictly professional. All of them wore orange jumpsuits with stripes of reflective tape across the chest. The cobbled lane was empty as they drew near, save for a drunken vagrant grinning horribly through a mouth stove by one too many falls onto ill-lit pavements. X. strode up, handed him a fifty lira bill and motioned for him to get lost. He tipped back an imaginary bottle and gave the miserable shriveled sot a wink. X. watched as the man staggered into a caricature of uprightness, gave a disorderly salute, and wobbled up the hill toward hideous echoes of revelry and laughter. X. walked up to the shop and peered inside. Inky halflight, shadowed forms of scriptorium, shelves, their books shadowing a more complete darkness in the rebates. No light issued from the cubicle at the top of the shelving ladder's parking spot. The beady diode eyes of the security system’s twin cameras washed the floor with two vague pools of reddish light. X. remembered the unassuming owner, his slippery eyes waxing and waning like moons, and wondered if those eyes might now be watching the store on closed circuit. No matter, it would be over before they could blink. With the professional's distaste for hesitation, X. gave the signal to start the job.

In the days since his first visit to Oriental Rarities, X. had looked up the specifications of the security system listed on the invoice and taught himself how to defeat it. The two men who made up his team—men whose personalities were not known to extend past their reputations for competence in everything, and which thus need not and cannot be described—had been furnished courtesy of the network of international contacts to which his stature in the field of larceny entitled him. He had kitted the team out with materiel smuggled in from Greece. The assistants would take 10% each, leaving X. with 80% of the take. They were honored to be working with him. nd hele and gave the to the treywhw

In little more than a minute, they had blown the rolling gate off its tracks, cut through the door’s many locks, and disabled the alarm system. They slipped in through the door like smoke, flitted along the shelves like cats. Although they were not up against a particularly agile response time—the caper was being pulled off in Turkey, after all—X. looked down at his wristwatch every 15 seconds, whispering commands with the effortless intensity and precision of an orchestra conductor. But this story is not about the technical aspects of X.’s gambit. If you are curious you can silver my tongue with another bottle of that wonderful prosecco, and I just might tell it to you soon. My point is that within three minutes, they had not only harvested, from floor to ceiling, the three shelves that X. had identified as strategic, but had neatly packaged their literary booty in twine, then heaved the bundles into the hamper of the support vehicle that arrived at the moment they were ready and not a second before. It was a small methane-powered trash truck whose doors were emblazoned with the name X. had chosen as the gambit’s standardbearer: Mariposa Haulage, LLC—Istanbul.

X. had one foot in the vehicle when he had a thought that made him dart back through the door and try the floor with his boot. It took just a few taps to find the cavity. Bringing his heel down hard, he sundered a board, then used a prybar to order the opening. Sprawling out on the floor, he thrust an arm into the void. After some flailing he came up against a splintery wooden crate about the size of a box of wine. It was too large to grip with his hand, but he was able to get a finger around a strip of metal lashing and pull it out. The box was not particularly heavy, but the metal sliced into his finger and drew blood. Something solid and slippery slid along the inner grain and thudded against the bottom end. He left the store and placed the crate atop the other bundles, looking on with proud approval as his men covered the haul with black bags full of empty clinking bottles and rotting rinds.

Back in the suite he had booked for himself at the Cartoon, X. sat down with the jewels of the haul. He didn't know what the items in Arabic script were, but he understood their prices clearly enough. Perhaps they were Korans or Koranic commentary from Ottoman times. He copied the listed prices of the books into a little ledger of his own and eyed the sum approvingly. It had been a nice little job—just surprising that there was so little security in place.

X. turned his attention to door number two. The slender woodcrate. He lifted it, tried its weight, jangled it. Same knock of something hard and solid against the wood. It would have to be a very peculiar book to make a sound like that. He used a penknife to pry the end off the crate. It came off and sent a resinous smell into the room. X. tipped the contents onto his bed. It came out. On his comforter rested a sizable gray lump. It had a bit of a sheen to it. He sounded it, but the report of his knuckle yielded no clue. He felt it, and though the lacquer was hard, the gray mass underneath deformed slightly before coming to rest against some underlying shape. A piece of the sheeny substance flaked off under his touch. Some kind of resin. And the gray material underneath seemed to be molding clay. What was this? He took his penknife and sliced a gentle ribbon through the clay. Then he used a butterknife from the Cartoon’s self-catering kitchen to peel the clay back from whatever was underneath, and was not long in shucking the whole thing, being careful to preserve the gray shell’s shape for repackaging. Beneath was something in slightly-larger-than-yellowpages format sleeved in vacuum-sealed plastic. X. used a knife to pare away this sleeve, only to reveal another, this one of parchment. Here was the meat. Eagerly, X. thumbed open the tape that held the wrapping together. There was another brief layer of plastic wrapping beneath, but X. could already see what he had stumbled across on his devious waste disposal route. It was a Gutenberg bible in the very pulp.

To cut a long story short, my friends—I know we have to sleep if we want to get a jump on the morning—X. spent that night becoming tenderly reacquainted with the good book’s ancient lessons. The truth is that his understanding of German was not really up to snuff, so that the point of many a passage was lost on him. It is possible that if that venerable example of the ecclesiastical bookmaker’s art had been called the Goodmount bible, and had been printed in the good English of old England, he would have seen the error of his ways and been persuaded to return the illgotten bible to its bereaved and wizened owner. But X., who was not, did not. In fact, he sent for champagne and raki before he had got midway through the second chapter of Genesis. Growing quite drunk as he read on, in his state he classed the few fragments he could understand as the most poignant absurdities--and as oversensitized as he was, they stuck with him for a long time afterwards. The general impression was of a constricted space under tyrannical supervision, where hidden hands and voices periodically clapped down to avenge the deity's claim to singularity. A deity like the state. He was intrigued by the tale of Abraham and Isaac, but nearly flung the book against the wall when God stayed Abraham's hand with the sun scintillating on the bevel of the poised blade. Kill the boy, for fuck's sake! But no, now that faith's proof had been submitted it wouldn’t be necessary. A Hollywood ending if there ever was one! A few deep draughts later he flipped over to Matthew and read how all that formerly was hidden would be revealed. X. nodded with the drunkard's alloy of hilarity and seriousness. It was this priceless Bible that had been hidden and was now revealed! A divine revelation of wealth! At some point deep in his cups he flipped to the Book of Revelations, started reading about the pale rider, but no sooner had he done so than drunken sleep began its glacial creep on his consciousness. He couldn't manage much more than a column before the book lay splayed across his chest and the half-empty bottle of Turkish bubbly, which had been eluding his grasp with the same glacial certainty, fell to the carpet and uttered a brief foamy geyser. X.'s myoclonic jerk took the form of a contented chuckle.

I mentioned that X. did not know what he was looking at when he held the books penned in the squiggly ebbing script of the Near East. But as the one hired to restore them to their owner, I knew, and there are two that were very significant. The first was a Sultan's Koran copied out by the imperial scribe Hafiz Halil Efendi in the Ursik script, circa 1700. The other, also a Koran, was an example of the scrivener's art of Agakapili Ismail Efendi, this one in the script of the holy city of Qom, dated 1686. Both are Ottoman treasures. Both belong in a temperature-controlled display case somewhere, maybe in a national library, in a museum--but certainly not littered among empty bottles on a dusty floor in a suite at the Hotel Cartoon.

But do you know what, friends? X. was sorely mistaken in his appraisal of the man who kept the books at Oriental Rarities. Far from a myopic geezer of no account, he happened to be one of the heavies in the Istanbul underworld. The man with the ivory-stemmed pipe was as rich as his possession of the Gutenberg Bible would indicate, and a Muslim zealot to boot. He ran most of the rackets that there were to run in a city of 15 million people, and while a part of him was truly devoted to the acquisition and sale of rare books, the store was a front. The figures he had been tabulating in his ledger as X. perused the store pertained to the balance of protection monies owed him, and the reason the invoice for the security system had been forgotten in a book was that the security people had quit their claim in exchange for said protection. The old man happened to own most of Istanbul’s garbage routes too, which made X.’s choice of support vehicle a particularly grievous slight. X. would have to pay. I mentioned that the old man, whose name was Özgür Karagöz, was a Muslim zealot. By which I mean that he is one of the fellows trying to bring down the secular government in favor of a shari’ocracy, preferably ruled according to his very own interpretation of the Koran. Which I have nothing against, particularly as I find myself on his payroll. Isn't there too much democracy in the world as it is?

The point being that Özgür Bey is the man who hired me to track down X. He could hardly entrust the recovery of something that valuable to one of his own henchmen, especially since it would compromise him to have them know that his most valuable object was be a Bible. But it was foremost a matter of competence. He had to go with the best. As for how a fundamentalist Muslim came to own a copy of Christendom’s most valuable printed edition, allow me to say that he came across it in much the same way as X. did. The fact that it was kept under the floorboards owed as much to ritual derision and profanement as it did to caution. And yes, he did have plans for the Bible, though I’m hardly at liberty to part the curtain.

I’ll say one last thing before I retreat into my own thoughts and let you sleep. It is that many years ago, when I was at college and my track team competed at New Haven, I was treated to a glimpse of Yale’s copy of the Gutenberg by a friend who happened to be suiting up for their team. It was at the old library, that one with the roof of translucent marble had not been built. Nice building that new library, Kahn I think was the name of its architect. But regardless. When all those years ago I saw that bible, I was immediately infected by the desire to steal it. I can't account for it, I just wanted to steal it. Not have it so much as just get it. I never got close to going through with it, but I did manage to acquire blueprints to a number of that school’s buildings from a dean's secretary who was being very nice to me at the time. I can hardly count the nights I spent poring over them, trying to puzzle out my perfect line of approach: My entrance, how I would break the case, my escape from the country via canoe, the fence who would help me sell it. So it’s a bit personal as well, you see. The thought that someone would just stumble across a Gutenberg and get away with it grates on me. It isn't fair.


My story was done, as was the prosecco--I'll admit without compunction that the length of the tale was tailored to the depth of the bottle--and the three of us turned to the business of sleep. I felt a little proud, like I had lived up to the clever twists of their Soup-a-Bowl ditty. But at the same time I was a little wistful that my story couldn't be true. It was a nice story. Drifting off on one of Lethe’s quiet currents, suddenly my wistfulness bloomed, and I was gripped by of one of those fancies that simultaneously reveal both the depth of our childlike folly and the staggering sublility of our highest desires. I couldn't be more serious, dear readers. Here's the rub: I wanted the story I told them about X. and the stolen Bible to be true. I mean to really be true. Every bit of it. And I wanted the story they had told about X.'s Soup-a-Bowl fix to be true, too. How much more exciting it would be that way, how much more ornate! I may be very much a man of the world, some might say of the demimonde, but no matter how deeply in the muck I've wallowed, I have never let go my desire for something higher, more artful, nor will I ever. And please don't think I hold you responsible for the type of work you assign me. Every man must stand for his own sordidness. It's just that these wistful assaults on the fortress of reality, if they could somehow be well and truly "weaponized," could constitute the building blocks of the earthly harmony that has always eluded us. Don't you see? If these stories were true, we could cast aside our games of tactical calculation and strategic multiple choice, forget about the politics of what we chose to reveal and conceal, simply be, me and Bernal and Rita, free to go about the business of pursuing X. in easy union. Have you ever thought this? Has a thought ever whispered in your ear: How much better if at last, by a miraculous congruence of reality with desire, we could wake up in the morning and have the world remade after our most ambitious fictions, each overlapping shamelessly with the other! How I cherished the thought! The new day could dawn on three boon companions pursuing a common goal instead of a couple and an elderly man who had concluded a fragile mercenary truce, and would sooner spill each other's blood than compromise their sordid individual missions. Of course, being the types of men who stand guard behind the arrow slits of the fortress named above, you have probably never thought such thoughts, and if you did have them, there is no guarantee that your cherished fictions would not be malicious. But still, you would surely have to agree, even if only in theory, that beauty would be be better than baseness. Wouldn't you? And do you know what? Believe it or not, somehow, in the hallucinatory wistfulness of that half-waking moment, it seemed possible, even likely, that on waking everything would be different. A tall order for a passing drowsy thought, I know. But then it was gone: As quickly as it had seized me, the idea let go its hold and left me to sleep.

Now that I’m remembering the moment and the entire journey, it occurs to me that this idea—of the world standing the best and most beautiful chance of being remade after a reverie close to either of sleep’s shores—has been expressed many times before this progress report, and better to boot. One sees it in idioms like “a new beginning” and “a rejuvenating sleep.” Foolishness of course. There is only one beginning, and it is old, and rejuvenation is a term that mocks the intellect. But still, the reverie of the new beginning seems to exist somewhere in the fabric of experience itself: Who has not experienced a renewed sharpness of perception after a prolonged period of intense concentration? Literature expresses the sentiment more precisely. I hope my readers won’t chafe at the prospect of a quote or two. If there is one thing a bounty hunter must have besides his cigars and his gun, it is a diverting intellectual pleasure or two that allow his vigilance to relax before flexing anew. ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ comes to mind in this connection. When a program is being spelt out for the eponymous egotist to recreate life according to a ‘new hedonism,’ Gray awakens to exactly this type of reverie as the new day quickens around him. “…it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure…a world in which the past would have little or no place…” & c. This is the founding impulse for the intellectual lives of poets and megalomaniacs both, beautiful but always out of place. Hatched in the mind of man--and where else would it be hatched--the divine impulse is always both awesome and laughable. But I'll say it again: I’ll be damned if I didn’t have it that night as I was falling asleep to the placid swirl of Nile waters meandering north under a comfortless blanket stitched from indifferent stars.

One more thing occurs to me. I know what you’re thinking. The yachtboard readers of my report are looking for the cold cadences of hard facts. True enough, but I have been in the business of hunting bounties and composing progress reports long enough to have earned at least a few perks, and I don’t mind if I claim the due of my outstanding service record now, in the form of the odd digression. As I was composing the above section of the report, yet before getting into the business of its antecedents, I was acutely aware of channeling the atmosphere that characterizes the Dorian Gray passage in question. I couldn’t help myself. So I yielded to the temptation and focused on channeling said atmosphere in a way that was true to the texture of my own sublime and childlike impulse that evening. The idea is this: Is it possible to cover a work of literature? Or a chapter, scene or page of from one? It’s something I have been thinking about for a long time, never mind the fact that I write nothing but progress reports. Instinct says that the answer is no. But why? A song can be covered. A particular reading of a poem can be “covered.” A joke can be retold with new verve. So is it a matter of the cover being limited to performances? But the underlying note structure of a song can be rewritten to produce a cover--a cover can be a piece of notation that exists outside of its performance. What about translations? What is the difference between a cover and a translation? Is it just text versus voice? Actually a translation is similar to the act of retelling a joke.

But baldly, yes, aside from the constraints of copyrights and literary estates and other such nonsense imposed by the Fortress of Reality, it would seem entirely possible to “cover” a novel or a story by retelling it with different names, different details. Can we imagine Moby Dick retold in an updated and foulmouthed vernacular, set in a world in which the huzza and mealy-mouthed porpoises of Ishmael’s duodecimo classification are the only examples of the great whale’s ocean kin that have not been harvested from the oceans to extinction? Of course we can. It is possible. But it would seem somehow cheap, degraded, sordid. Wouldn't it seem a little bit like sneaking onto a movie set to record the scenes on the sly as they were shot, and then doing some creative edits and presenting the result as your own work? Or worse, like bootlegging a movie in the theater? If so, why?

Music is music. But words, with the exceptions of French ones, refer to things that are either part of the real world, or which help us understand it. Most of the words we hear spoken, or which we read on labels or in the press, reflect the world as we already conceive of it, or as we know others conceive of it. They are banal, they add nothing. We want for the books and stories we read to be an exception to the rule of banality; we want them to reflect the world or some possibility inherent in it in a way that is new—meaning that an adaptation of someone else’s preexisting reflection of it is not enough. In writing, novelty is beauty. To “cover” literature is to dabble in simulacra.

~


I woke at the dawn's first stirring. Through the tent flap I could see the moon, slung low in the sky like a blanched skull. There was a silence on the land, even after I’d removed my earplugs. A lurking, African silence. Did something seem different? I climbed down from the tent and sat down on the hood. I was groggy, the mountains blurry. I stared at them, waiting for the fatigue to pass. I thought about lighting a cigar, but it did not seem fitting.

We were on the road an hour later. Petrol trucks vied for space with donkey carts. I drove. Bernal asked me a question or two about the Bible. I obliged, then put a query or two to him about the Soup-a-Bowl fix. He obliged just the same. Lies all, but a wish half fulfilled was better than nothing. Maybe he had had the same thought last night.

Later in the day, Rita asked me what makes a person a gambler. It had to do with feeling you could control events by predicting them, I said, or convincing yourself that the audacity of a stake could shift the course of things. I spoke generally. Maybe it was true. I do get the feeling now and then that a form of gambling lies at the heart of most people's lives, great and small alike. Only the stakes differ, and the bookies. Most place small, safe bets on known contenders, and never bluff. Others wager their lives for the glories of war or other conquests. Statesmen and demagogues derive satisfaction from playing roulette on the wheel of history, casting the lot of millions in with their own. It is a false bet unless they dare to walk with their people. But it strikes me that some of the most interesting handicappers--for my money, that is--wager exclusively within the confines of their own books. Without saying so, it occurred to me that the three of us were gambling that the lovely fictions buttressing our truce would hold until we reached X., and that the stakes were high.

Rita would have none of it. Gambling in the strict sense was for losers who had forfeited control over their lives, for rich people lacking the decency to do something useful with their money, and generally for the bored, the boring and the stupid. As for the metaphorical kind of life-gambling I was talking about--nonsense. People had certain abilities, and they followed them. Those who gamble with life were simply confused, and did not know their places. Bernal echoed her, but his voice was faint and uncertain as he gazed out along the sandy scarp. He was a man of feeling, and must have felt, like me, that the dice were still skittering along the felt at that very moment.

We drove for several days. Acting the part of overland tourists, we stopped to take in the sights. Not that there was much. A pyramid here, the site of a battle from the Mahdi rebellion there. Several sites were infested by crocodiles and hippos, and I felt happy we were all sleeping in the roof tent more than once. Game's abundance increased as we moved south. We took our pictures, cooked our food, slept in our tent. On something like the fourth day we stopped in a village with a wellkept appearance to buy some fruit and water. There wasn't a fissure in any of the houses, not a scrap of trash blowing down the street, in stark contrast to everything else we had seen. There was nothing to suggest that the people were wealthy, but it did not take long to conclude that they might well be happy. They were tall, black, and had full, unwavering smiles as they went about their work. It was uncanny, given the indifference to public squalor we'd seen in the all the other villages along the way, places where the shari'ocracy was unable to muster any civic pride. tj eg the way different trsu could control events m or in tort

Once we'd paid for our fruits and water, I saw an old man reading something under the shade of an acacia. He looked like he knew what he was about. I approached him, trying on a phrase or two of Arabic for size. He tapped his glasses down the bridge of his long nose and gave me an appraising look. Then he asked me in reasonable English what it was I desired to know. Embarrassed, I made a sweeping gesture and begged the village's secret. He boomed a laugh and said there was no secret. Of course, they had to be discrete and not flaunt their ways to the government, but the fact was that they had simply decided to view life together as an experiment, and had tinkered with it until they got what I saw before me. Until they got it right. Come, he said. Come to my home and let me tell you how we live here. Thinking that Bernal and Rita could use a little time alone, I followed him. The old man walked tenderly, but his gait was upright.

He was the village's founder. Like many things in Africa, his story was simple and remarkable. As a boy, he had been early to identify the creeping indolence in his village culture. His mother did all the work around the house. And though his father leaned on the excuse of his duties in the fields, the fields were in fact poorly tended. That the children were fed at all had more to do with the bounty of the earth than the industry of the men sprung from it. The majority of the men were drunks, daytime and nighttime drunks. There were some good ones, but the general atmosphere reeked of complacent corruption. I don't think that's what he said, but that is how I understood it. It was dark in the old man's reed hut, and pleasantly, actively cool. His daughter brought tea as we spoke. He explained that in the village their dwellings were cooled by water pumped through bamboo pipes using solar power. It was simple.

He had tried to raise the issue of labor allocation while living at home. In vain. Then, when he was 16, he did what no one had ever done, at least in that part of the Sudan. He had read widely since then, and recognized that there were precedents, though still none in his personal experience. He took a wife, then invited other young men to settle as equals on the plot of land he had cleared, along with their wives and children. It was far from other towns and the only road that existed at the time. The only condition for acceptance was that they agree to try to lead a new kind of life. They would evaluate the ways that had kept their ancestors poor, benighted, downtrodden; they would rethink the traditions that had earned them the scorn of the successive waves of Arab invaders. Starting out, the idea was simply to assign tasks across the barrier of sex. Men and women would work together in the home, men and women would toil side by side in the fields. There would be a rotation so that each could eventually settle on what he or she had a knack for. There had been problems of course; the village had lived through its share of defectors, denouncements and blights. But it would be hard to claim, he smiled, that their modest little experiment had not worked. Naturally most men still gravitated to fieldwork, and women to the cookery. But there was still mixing, which cut down on the alienation and contempt that led the men to drink and deceit and the women to contempt and deceit. There were still problems between the sexes, but fewer than he had remembered, and none that could not be arbitrated by the disinfecting light of day. And the village's congenital willingness to try new things had led to the adoption of new crops, new inheritance laws, new methods of sanitation, food storage, cotraception, and, as I had seen, cooling. Everything had changed, he said. And nothing was missed.

The man was composed, serene. He did have that light in his eyes that can signify zealotry, but I doubted that was the case. There was a fairness to him, a wise fairness. He had been more than happy to let go any families who couldn't hack it or who had a hankering for the old habits. At the end of the conversation I asked him what their religion was. Smiling that frank smile of his, he explained that he was not the leader of a cult. The villagers could believe what they wanted as long as they contributed fairly. More concretely though, he said that there were a few Christians and a number of ancestor cultists, but no Muslims. What about the Muslims all around them, I asked. He said that their relations with the outside were as simple as their internal arrangements. They paid dikkat to the relief organization of the nearest mosque, and paid their protection money when Khartoum's collectors came around. On the other hand, they did not accept donations from anybody. Not that the offers were many--the charitable men and women of the West seemed most perturbed when they chanced on an African standing erect and surviving unassisted. I joked about wanting to make a donation, and we shared a chuckle. As I got up to leave, he left me with a quote from the redoubtable Churchill: We make a living by what we get, he said. But we make a life by what we give. Then he erupted into a huge laugh. I smiled agreeably and started making my excuses to leave. I was much relieved to have escaped before that old man seized a chance to shift gears and ask me what I was contributing to mankind's tenure on earth. I wondered if he was familiar with the profession of bounty hunting.

Returning to the car, I could see that Bernal and Rita were as ready to go as I was. Rita's formerly tense jaw had given way to a healthy blush. She was a classical Mexican beauty. It was my turn to drive. I started the car and drove quickly, trying to put as many miles between me and that serene old man as possible before night fell. They did not ask me about my conversation with the old visionary, and I was happy to escape its repetition. I wanted to forget all about it, my reverie of a few nights before notwithstanding. We were coming up on some most serious business, and no amount of fiction was going to help me address myself to it. I drove on, grinding my teeth to the rhythm of the corrugations.


The night before we made Juba I killed Rita and Bernal. It was either them or me. We couldn't both have X., it was impossible. I've never before confessed to a killing like this, not in writing. It's strange. Somehow it seems a lot more...dastardly this way. Before putting it in writing, it was just one unpleasant memory among a million jumbled impressions, something that could be pushed aside in favor of more pleasant remembrances. But now that my confession is in writing, what can be written over it? I killed them. I had tried to wriggle out of the inevitability of it at first. Maybe I wasn't going to have to go through it. That damnably serene old man had got his unlikely paradise, why not me? Why shouldn't I be able to live in harmony with my brothers and sisters? Yes, they would take X. back to face his debts and those he forsook, and I would get the Bible and tell my vengeance-bent Turkish employer that X. had perished in the scuffle, mauled by an opportunistic chimp. Here, look, I might not have had X., but here was the Bible. I clung to the fabric of this fiction for another day or two--how beautiful, how stupid!

The truth of the matter is as simple and disturbing as death itself. Hardly even worth the telling, really. You'll soon have the facility you hired me to return to you. Isn't that enough? Why insist on the full report? Why go through the long and short of it? Why torture myself to please you, who put me up to it, who gave me the explicit license to do "whatever was required?" I should note that if you had done better background work, I might never have found myself in this nasty situation. They really were such a nice young couple.

The truth is that I shot Bernal and Rita full in the face in the middle of proposing a toast to celebrate our attainment of X.'s doorstep. Their faces were gone, simply gone, everything, eyes and sleek skin and the feathered light that played on them through gauzy fabrics, and it was a shame because they both had such nice faces, Bernal especially--but gone, too, after all, was the threat they posed. What am I to tell you? Life is sordid, my dear employers, and even though you hire me to put a buffer between yourselves and that fact, know it now. Hell, I will make you know it.

The hardest part was not so much doing it as trying to stay focused and businesslike afterwards. Not even my finest cigar could take away the wish that it hadn't come down to this, that our fictions had held. Not even the whiskey could do it. Especially not the whiskey. It is true that the act could not have been avoided. Not given who we were and where we were headed. The thing that shames me is that I tried to displace the responsibility onto them. I blamed them. I also denied them the opportunity to defend themselves. Let me tell you what I mean.

I had spiked their drinks with a certain patent medicine as they were setting up the roof tent. When camp was ready, we had sat down in folding chairs for our celebratory drink. I had been talking excitedly about it all day, all while dreading the moment. I began the toast on a congratulatory note. The sun was setting behind me as I spoke, the land breaking into its predatory nighttime chorus. I said Ahem. Bernal, Rita, I'm not usually overly formal, but tonight we stand on the brink of what we've come down here to do. What I wish to do is, er, to conclude a prenuptial agreement with destiny, as it were, by proposing a toast. In clinking these glasses together, as we will do once this toast is complete, we will be affirming our, uh, dependence on each other in pursuit of our common objective. Not only that, but the chinchin of crystal will ring in a vindication of the spirit of...selfless teamwork, and will be, uh, a rousing refutation of the notion that people like us are unable to put selfishness aside for [cough] the sake of another. What we are doing is, uh, we will be putting a seal on the unique achievement of having set aside these differences in pursuit of a goal...a goal held in common you see, the precious object of which will, uh, be parceled out equitably among us once...

I can't remember exactly, but it must have been around this time that the barbiturate-quaalude cocktail really kicked in. These, combined with the booming hollowness of the toast to that point, had been enough to immobilize them. Both were sprawled back in their chairs with drool swelling from the corners of their mouths when I interrupted my toast to bind them hand and foot. Nothing could have been easier. I gagged them too, of course--this toast would brook no countertoast. Once they were immobilized, I re-raised my glass and continued in the venerable Hollywood tradition of justifying a villainous deed before pulling the trigger, though unlike in Hollywood, this extravagance was not my undoing: Ahem. I meant what I said just now, I really did, and the undeniable truth is that you have only yourselves to blame for the fact that you were unable to transcend onto a higher moral plane, the plane where tender fantasy becomes adamant truth, where fiction gulps down and digests ugly facts, where reality's unflinching fortress is beleaguered and overrun by a troop of handsome nonsense that constitutes the other way. This is your inability. I am not to blame here, my friends. I cannot be held to account for the fact, unfortunate as it is, that you failed to transcend the bounds of your mercenary allegiances, your mercenary realities, that you were not strong enough to reshape the world, as we might have done together, side by side, if it were not for the depths of your weakness, the gaping abyss of your treachery. I believed every bit of your Soup-a-Bowl story, for the record. I did! And I could tell that you wanted to believe me, wanted to transcend, but your transitory want was not good enough. I saw how you began to crack up in the end, how you mocked me in private for being sentimental enough to want to believe the lies we told each other, how you preferred being professional to being human. Admit it!

I really wish it didn't have to be this way, dear friends, but this is our case. In the tautological parlance of our times, it is what it is. I know very well you would have killed me sooner or later, maybe "by accident" in the melee at the compound tomorrow, whereas I would never have dreamed of killing you, I want you to know that. The thing that passes all understanding is why you waited so long, given that you must have been planning to do it. I realize I'm charming to have around, that I'm a sort of eminence grise. But I think you'll agree that by waiting so long, by banking on my harmlessness, you have engaged in nothing less than the very gambling that offends you to the very kernel--and that you have bought into this game with the greatest stake of all. I think that you will furthermore agree, if you are to to be true to yourselves, that such irresponsible behavior must be duly punished. Which time is now come. Or pehaps the simple truth is that you are sentimentalists, just like me--which is the greatest sin in our profession.

Know that I am not acting on any mercenary thoughts of gain when I do this. Know that I am doing it to satisfy a greater debt, one that you incurred both as a result of your professional refusal to transcend, and your hypocritical gamble that I was a safe bet. May you be forgiven. May I be forgiven. Cheers.

I touched my glass to each of theirs before shooting them.


Do you know what I wish I could tell you, my niggardly employers? It is this: That far from murdering amid a tumult of imploding fictions, far from that, I awoke alongside the young couple in the morning and agreed with them on a way to approach the problem of X. A way to secure the spoils and then parcel them out to the contentment of us all. That I got the Bible and returned it to you, my Turkish strongman of an employer--instead of to you...my contented, atrocious readers. And that this is how we did it:

Once in Juba I put a call through to my lead, Ali al-Qadi of Ashraf Business Consulting and Holding Company LLC Dubai. They called him Judge Ali. He was a prototypical dealmaker, the kind of fellow who managed to have both ears to the ground and his fingers in a dozen cookie jars at once, most if not all sub rosa. As it happened, one of the cookie jars with which Qadi's fingers stood in sticky connection contained trafficked chimpanzees. Another was loaded with rare printed works and incunabula.

The Judge, in brief: He'd come up alongside the crop of nouveaux riches Gulf Arabs drawn out of their erstwhile existences as herders and nomads by the oil boom of the 1960s, and had from an early age catered to this class's need to evince the forms of high culture in order to fully occupy their new status. Like many a bold enterprise leavened with a prise of unscrupulousness, it began with Ossian, the notorious quasi-Scottish hoax of the 18th century. I'll spare you the long version, since what we are supposed to be talking about here is how X. got to Juba. Suffice it to say that although he lacked much formal education, and though his English left a lot to be desired, Qadi had a genius for aesthetics, and was able to install himself as a sort of court adviser to the new oiligarchs in matters literary and artistic, and that between his wicked sense of humor and questionable restraint, had managed to reperpetrate some of literature’s more fabulous hoaxes. In addition to passing off Ossian as the real deal, Qadi had made a brazen and successful attempt to convince a certain emir of the authenticity of the already thoroughly discredited Hitler diaries, a bad copy of which [X. owned the real forgery, remember] the emir proudly displayed for many years in the belvedere of a tower that he had built to guard against what he believed to be a very real Jewish menace. The only time Qadi got in trouble for one of his ruses was when he misrepresented L. Ron Hubbard as a Christian prophet, and was sued.

The point being, my dear employers, that this was a man who had become well-placed over the years when it came to sniffing out what famous and oft-stolen books were being sold where and by whom. He and I had got to know one another a few years back when I was working on another case involving a purloined work of literature—I can't remember what to be frank, some first edition of a Russian work discussing the issue of whether or not a woman was to be considered a human being (in which I believe the authors solemnly concluded that she was)—on which case I had been rather like a salamander deprived of its mucusoid-membraney ensleevement. I was out of my depth, I needed help. A colleague tipped me about an Arab they called The Judge. Qadi turned out to be intimately acquainted with the affair, and the case was soon solved with his help.

When after several years I called him up again on the subject of the purloined Gutenberg, he cut me off before I could finish, saying my old friend I know exactly what you talking about and I theenk you might be interesting to know all my informations for a fee. A simple bank transfer, and his information could be mine. I paid the same day, and he delivered the information the next. This, dear Sirs, is how a professional transaction works.

At first I thought it was a joke. Who would flee to the jungles of south Sudan with a stolen Gutenberg? By what logic was that a safe refuge? I called Qadi to protest, but he was quick to take offense, saying that I could have my money back if it wasn't exactly as he said it would be. One hundred out of one hundred, my friend, I am right. The information briefly described the seller as some kind of outlander who’d washed up down there and managed to install himself as a latterday Emin Pasha, natives groveling at his feet and everything. The name Qadi provided was not X., but Rita and Bernal instantly recognized it as a compound of two of his many aliases: Desmond Threatte, know locally as Dez-Tret. A ridiculous name, but I'm hardly one to talk. More importantly, the details were very precise regarding the location of the compound, the date of the transaction, and the name of the buyer. In short, my dear employers, the man in Dubai gave me a set of GPS coordinates, a date, and a name. Maybe you should hire the Judge the next time you hang a bounty on someone.


~


There we were, then. Outskirts of Juba, itself the most extreme sort of outskirt. A blazing hot noonday. We knew where the compound was, but not the track that led to it. It looked close enough on the GPS screen, but everyone knows that these devices can be a bit of a siren, beckoning their users to plunge straight ahead into whatever unseen danger when the coordinates of their objective lie just ahead, when in fact proceeding straight ahead will assure you never get there. The coordinates lie.

Discretely, we asked several people about the whereabouts of the compound. Most feigned incomprehension of English, but at last we got a few mute jerks of the chin pointing down a wretched track into the bush. Bernal and Rita and I took counsel together. How wonderfully earnest Bernal’s onyx eyes looked in that hard sunlight! And how lovely the sight of Rita's scarves suffused with that light until they seemed to well soft and feathered color in warm pulses! The three of us discoursed, we three discussed. We were parked under the ambitious boughs of a huge and ranging fig, and no one seemed to pay us any mind at all.

The result of our figshaded confab was an assault carried out in the predawn. Not before a reconnaissance though. A la mode touristique. We put on our floppy sunhats, our cumbersome mosquito gear. We wore cameras like millstones around our necks, stowing pistols in the glovebox and center console. We streaked our cheeks with sunscreen and consulted our crinkly colonial survey map with the banal intensity of the hardened tourist. Bernal equipped his back pocket with plastic handcuffs. Rita loaded her money belt with cartridges of pepper spray. Bernal slid under the truck to displace something in the engine compartment. That way we would sound less professional. They consulted eagerly in a Spanish I could only follow at a distance. My understanding was delayed and incomplete, but the two of fairly glittered as they spoke. A pool of soft rosy light had filtered through Rita's sheer scarf and gathered in the nape of her neck. In Bernal’s eyes there was a kind of matte, light-devouring hunger, as if he'd let no amount of daylight play on his eyes and so escape being consumed by them. We were ready.

We drove through thick jungle under a luxuriant dark green canopy. Filtered through the foliage, the frail light that reached us washed everything in a sickly shade of green. For a moment there was only a single speck of sky to be seen. It looked impossibly distant, too, as if it were glimpsed from the suffocating murky rebates of a cave. When I looked down my hands were glazed by green sweat.

For a quarter of an hour we bounced over a narrow mud track, our windshield screening nothing but a tunnel of green. It seemed as if the track might be choked off at any moment, whether by the encroachment of bushes from the understory, from above by the low-slung lianas that trailed tentacular and prehensile off the canopy, or from underneath by the shoots sprouting from the track itself. It was like boring a dark green tunnel. It occurred to me that we might have been misled and thrown off the scent of Dez Tret.

Not so. Gradually the forest thinned and gave way to patches of what had been shaded clearings that were now overrun by pest species and wild grasses. Gone to seed. Discarded beer bottles and jerrycans punctuated either side of the track, flashing with dull difference. No sooner had we entered this zone of sometime cultivation than a derelict man in rags burst out of the bush and tore after us, his mouth gaping a mute message in the side mirror as we drove on among butterflies. Rita, still carrying the cathedral quiet of the green tunnel we had come through, whispered when she said the compound must be just ahead. We got our tourist cameras out for the approach. Mine was a shell of a camera, the sort of dummy used to cut costs in stock film scenes where thousands of cameras have to be shown at once. Which saved weight and conferred the advantage of a hiding place in which I kept a clutch of small stogies. Never know when you might need them.

At last we saw it. The track ended up ahead. Like a stream discharging into a lake, the track gave way to a large clearing. Access to the clearing was blocked by a metal boom. Near the fulcrum end of the boom was a guard. A tall African. Slack jaw. Sunglasses. Jean jacket with military emblems stitched haphazardly into the fabric. Slouching across the front of a rude three-sided booth. He waited. Once sufficiently convinced that we really did attend to approach, that the mere sight of him had not turned us back, he summoned his strength and came out at last, thumbing his mirrored shades flush with his face. His gait was wobbly. He came to a halt before Bernal's window, idiotically using his AK-47 as a cane.

Who were we? What did we want here? There was an edge of military authority to his question, but the way he slurred his words undid the effect. I looked at him. He was failing his audition for the role of suavely intimidating jungle colonel. At best he could get the role of the ne'er-do-well deputy--the juiced one.

We said we were tourists headed for some hot springs that were out this way somewhere. This was our first time in the Sudan, and we were just loving it! Did he how to get to the hot springs?

The guard surveyed us for a long moment, his face betraying no expression. It was a face with the jagged angularity seen in Africa's Horn. Who knew where X. got him from. His features flickered as Rita casually undid the top button of her blouse and inclined into his gaze. Catalyzed by cleavage, a kind sluggish animation at last worked its way to the surface of his face. Not exactly an animation of invitation, though. This, he would have us know, was a forbidden zone. He slurred out a speech about us not being waycome and that we had to turn back immeedly at peril of out lives, Dez Tret he don't want no one heah at de asyenda. With his gaze riveted to Rita’s bosom, Bernal and I were free to gaze around the clearing and see what was what. X.’s compound was not much to look at. To one side were the hutments. African-style, a couple with smoke filtering into the open through reed roofs. In the middle, encircled by a pike stockade, stood a number of utility vehicles. On the far right stood a large canvas tent. There was a stout fellow posted by the flaps. Wearing a Panama hat, he looked as if he were controlling access to an exclusive garden party.

There was no activity other than the smoke rising through the roofs. As on our approach through overgrown fields, here too was an air of tropical despondency. The last thing I took in was that the tent's support mast had been extended into a kind of standard-bearer that rose a good ten feet into the air. Halfway up hung a limp banner. Just as I looked a light breeze came through and billowed into the fabric. It was the flag of the Republic of Mexico, at half-mast. So this was X.'s jungle folly.

After a minute we allowed ourselves to be chased off, but not before interlarding the guard's billfold with some notes from our own to smooth the departure. He could have been a lot nastier, truth be told. We made a note to spare him if possible during our second, more aggressive visit. He would in all likelihood be in the depths of a drugged sleep, anyway.

I have a bit of a squeamish streak, my dear reader-employers. I hope you'll forgive me if I elide some of the details concerning our storming of the compound. But this bloodshyness will not prevent me from discharging my reporting duties entirely. Let us just say that at a certain point, after things had gone rather well for the three of us, the situation stood like this. The sun had come up, its light just starting to poke through the canopy in golden staves. I was smoking a cigar and letting its delightful flavor spread along my tongue as I decided what ought to be done. X. had been captured, with most of his hangers-on either killed or put to flight. It had been surprisingly easy. I wasn't too worried about the the escapees. I knew enough Arabic to understand when one of the guards yelled ‘Run for it, they only want the Mexican!’ to his associates. El-Meksiki. As it turned out, only the gatekeeper from the day before offered any resistance to speak of. I wished we could have spared him, but the doggedness with which he was trying to protect the compound that morning made it impossible. Must have switched to uppers.

Bernal was busy questioning X. about some of the ins and outs of the superbowl fix, but I found it hard to follow. Which is to say that I wasn’t quite there. The gibbering and screeching of a dozen chimpanzees in their rude wire cages was driving me to distraction. The problems I was being forced to consider were many. First, what to do about the Arab princeling who'd come down to buy the Bible? He'd come staggering out of bed when we raided, all I'd had to do was throw a cargo net over him and watch him strugle himself immobile. Now that we'd taken the compound, he had become a problem. Simply setting him free and risking being fingered for the attack before we could get out of country would not do. Nor would outright murdering him. Moral considerations, you know.

Then there were the chimpanzees. That they were of commercial interest could not be denied. But it could no more be denied that they were absolutely insufferable in their present condition—they were screaming bloody murder and looping gloopy turds through the bars of their cages. Bernal had responded by shooting two of the worst offenders dead, but I had thrown myself on his elbow to plead for clemency.

Then there was the question of the book.

When I’d caught up with X. in his inner sanctum (an air-conditioned medium-sized nylon tent within the shell of a much larger one of canvas), he lay sprawled across a mini refrigerator in a craven attitude of utter desperation. He would not respond when we told him to heave off and give it up, that the game was over. Eventually we had to use physical persuasion to depose him from his humming cubic throne. X. plonked to the floor and remained where he fell, contracting into a miserable fetal worm. It was undignified. The thing I've gathered about X. is that he's a master when things are going his way, but truly pathetic in the face of setback.

Now, as the person whose bold criminal exploits had brought all three of us to the Sudan lay gibbering on the floor, I opened the refrigerator to inspect the thing that would get me my bounty. There it was. In the very waterlogged and mold-blooming pulp. Mold-blooming! Waterlogged! Mierda! When X. rolled over and saw that I had opened the door, he screamed. "You'll ruin it! You'll fucking ruin it!"

Like the old erring questers after El Dorado, and like those Africans in the stories who have portentious dreams of finding a nugget of gold on the path, X.'s sudden acquaintance with fabulous wealth in the form of a concrete object that was small enough to fit in a Kegerator had driven him insane. "You'll ruin it," he moaned. The thing had already gone halfway to ruin, of course, covered page and spine in a ghastly black mold. It inspired a horror of contagion, and I shivered uncontrollably. I quickly put it back in the coldbox. What had happened to it? Yelling, I asked X. how he could have let this happen. He said nothing, and I shook him, kicked him. How could he have let this happen to one of the world's profoundest treasures? Still he said nothing, so I gave him a kick in the shoulder for all my leg was worth. Which solved nothing, as good as it felt. What had he been planning to do when the poor Arab buyer saw the book? This was X. X.! What had the Bible done to him?

Regardless of X.’s criminal foible in letting the book go to seed, I still needed to arrange for it to be transported back to Istanbul in that little kegerator, and with it running. Otherwise I wouldn't be fulfilling the terms of my contract. The thought of simply packing the book in ice did cross my mind, it would make things so much simpler, but of course that wouldn't do, since it wasn't only the temperature, but also the humidity that had to be regulated. I planned to use batteries lifted from the utility vehicles ranged in the stockade to power the thing until we got to Khartoum.

As I stood thinking, the ullulating croons of the chimps crushing all thoughts before they hatched, Bernal tapped me on the shoulder, said we needed a group think. Time was not on our side. X.'s retinue could come back firing at any moment, not to mention the militias that loused the region. No telling how far our reports had carried in the predawn quiet. First things first: Something needed to be done about the chimps. Nothing could be accomplished with them going on like that. You couldn't talk fear into them, nor did you have to look closely to see the wire cages were provisional at best. A beast could wrangle its way out any moment. Bernal was for shooting them, Rita against. Seeing no way out, I was tempted to side with Bernal when I remembered the barbiturates I kept in my medical kit, for just such occasions. They thought I was kidding. I ran for the car rather than waste time explaining the merits of the plan. Readers, it was as simple as shoving pills into bananas and tossing them liberally into the cages. Every monkey got at least one, of that I made sure, with the biggest fellows howling and chest-thumping their way to three or more. My Sudanese daiquiris had taken effect within minutes: Screeches gave way to contented grunts, rumpus to rest. In a few more minutes, all had surrendered to unconsciousness.

Next up was the buyer. He was glaring up at us from where he lay tangled in the cargo netting. He could sense that we were talking about him. There was no reason for our date with X. to affect this lover of old books adversely, we agreed. And although he wasn't going to get his Bible, maybe we could cede the chimps to him so he didn't have to walk away empty-handed. We certainly didn't want them, and it was a matter of general agreement that Arabs had a fondness for chimps. They were X.'s main customers down here after all. The buyer could use one of those utility vehicles for all we cared. Bernal went to tell him how it stood with him.

With the chimpanzees silenced, we worked quickly. X. would be brought along to Khartoum with us. From there Bernal and Rita would fly him to Billington, and I would return to Istanbul with the Bible and report that, with X. having perished in the scuffle, justice had been served, albeit by a deputy. As for flying under the radar while leaving Juba--the local militias were sure to be on edge--nothing could be simpler. All we had to do was scrawl some anti-Khartoum grafitti on the canvas of the main tent. When it was discovered it would give our raid the look of an unprovoked attack by one of the local groups, which would reassure everybody. The Mexican flag would have to go, too. It would make a nice addition to my collection.

~


Ahem. My dear employers, I know all this must be getting tedious for you. You want facts, yet these are nothing but fictions. You want me to tell you of my success, yet here I am, toying with failure. But please, relax--the facts are coming. Just allow me my perquisite. Remember that although I am a man of this world, very much so, I have never stopped wanting something better. It is still true after everything that has happened, after everything I have done. You see, I want to write this thing to the end, to write the ending as I would have wished it. Better yet, I want to write myself out of what I have done. Even if Bernal and Rita weren't strong enough to besiege the fortress of reality, I still am. If you'll just hear me out, I may be able to find my peace. After that I will prepare the professional progress report, sparing no detail.


~


There were no problems leaving Juba. We were the same overlanders going out as we had been coming in. There was one more of us, of course, but people in the south of Sudan can't be bothered to tell three whites apart from four. X. wore sunglasses and one of those French Saharan hats with neck flaps in the back. We kept him on barbiturates the whole time. Bernal and Rita tried dressing him down regarding the evils of gambling. I guess their instructions prevented them from going to work on him as they might have liked. Their sermonizing, peppered with a great deal of why I outtas, was tiresome. The only thing I cared about was getting the Bible back up to the Stamboul, making sure that the corruption didn't spread. I stopped the car several times a day to go around back and check contents of the refrigerator, just as a normal overland tourist might do if he was worried about the refrigerator being overpowered by the harsh Sudanese sun and spoiling his meat, his cheese, his dessert wine.

"Why?" Bernal asked X. toward the end of our first day driving back north. X. was slumped back in his seat, legs spread wide, eyes glossing nothing.

"Wha?"

"You heard me. Why do you do what you do? What is the point?"

"The hell you talk bou?"

"This! Your crazy schemes, your animal smuggling ring, the Mexican flag. You're no fucking cholo*. What possesses you?"

"Dunno. Mebby my momma hit me when I was lill."

Rita punched him in the thigh from where she sat. X. drooled in pain. "Don't be smart, pendejo. Answer the question. You're an educated man. Why didn't you become a lawyer in Billington like anyone?" She said it Beelingtón.

"Fugav. Do it cuz it suits me. And I'm not...anyone. Hell are all these queshuns aboutnyway? Stuyerjobz an we can all g'ome."

"Because it suits you. Did you hear that, Mr. Braxator? He does it because it suits him!"

"Well," I said, "we all have certain...proclivities."

"Mmmm. But shouldn't we use our...proclivities in an intelligible way?"

"I suppose, Bernal. But what are you getting at?" Dusk was falling as we spoke, the shadows of every thing sprinting toward the eastern horizon before congealing into a generalized gloom kept bisected and at bay by our headlights. Bernal's eyes were flashing with that odd matte intensity of his.

"It's just that I don't get this guy. It's like he's made of trouble. X. this, X. that, and it's always a crazy fucking story with no point. It's not like he's following orders. He comes up with all this shit himself, and most of it doesn't even make sense. Is he a troublemaker? Is he a professional criminal? Is he a prankster? Who the hell is he? I mean take this chimpanzee farm down here. What kind of cabrón does that kind of mierda?"

X. had started laughing. It was convulsive, deep, and slow, the kind of laughter you might hear from someone about to fall asleep, or die. Bernal and Rita were unable to get him to say anything else on the subject. Bernal swore, invoked the names of several Catholic saints, even drove the butt of his pistol into X.'s knee, but X. just kept laughing in those same convulsive wheezy bellows until he had exhausted himself.

Nobody said much that night as we made camp in a burnt-out clearing by the side of the road. Down here, you avoided the bush at all costs if you wanted to avoid lions, hyenas, warthogs and snakes. Bernal was still visibly upset, with Rita faithfully mirroring his mood. X. appeared to have succumbed to a barbiturate delirium, and was allowed to remain by himself gibbering in the backseat of the truck. I thought that Bernal was right about X.'s behavior being hard to fathom. For a career criminal, he was awfully Quixotic. I was looking foward to asking him about the chimp business in the morning when he came off the barbs and ludes. I imagined it was a line of work that lent itself to interesting anecdotes.

When dinner came around, the general mood went from bad to worse. The Sudanese sun may not have managed to corrupt the Gutenberg any further, but when Bernal went to open the mini-fridge we used for our food, he was greeted by a rank stench. The mini fridge's capacity to keep the jungle's heat at bay had been overpowered, and our beef and chicken had gone off. Gourmet camping was over. Our meal was a tasteless lentil porridge. Nor would we allow ourselves any of that delicious prosecco with X. around. Our meal was a dreary affair endured in silence.

It was decided that X. would sleep beside Bernal in the rooftent, bound. They suggested I sleep in the car, but I opted for a blanket roll on the ground. That way I could see the vastness above me. Without really knowing why--an old man shouldn't do these sorts of things--I took one of my own barbiturates before turning in. The stars were lustrous, even through the shimmering blanket of the earth's seething tropical exhalation. I gazed up and used the little dipper's outer edge to trace my way to Polaris. Point, point, make a line, draw it long, not that star, not that one...that's the one. Modest beacon Polaris. Twinkling the way north down through the centuries. Then I tried to search out Orion, without luck. Maybe it wasn't Orion's hour, maybe it was too close to the horizon, maybe it hadn't risen. Maybe I just couldn't see it for the complexity of the sky. I've always been fascinated by the sky's sudden shift from blank uniformity to spangled, unfathomable riddle--it had always seemed indicative of other riddles and revelations, and I liked the idea that you could cut the light to reveal what lay behind.

The point is that I couldn't find Orion, the barbiturate was making me groggy. Not exactly groggy, that wasn't it, not groggy, more like...oppressively giddy, heavily distracted. My thoughts were drifting from one thing to the next, but very slowly and with a kind of tectonic feeling of inevitability. My mind moved like the hour hand. I made a conscious effort to retrain my focus on Orion, but my mind was hurried along each time, slowly so that I could feel it happening, unable to do anything about it. My attention drifted off to X., then touched on and was touched by Bernal's smoldering matte gaze, then pushed off again to brush up against the corroding Bible. I strove to return back to Orion, but my mind shrugged me off to repeat the cycle, time and again, until at last I drifted off. The sensation continued as I dreamt, I remember it clearly. I had a flying dream, the kind where you are in the middle of doing some everyday thing and to your astonishment you begin to rise slowly off the surface of the earth. You gaze down as the ground retreats from your feet, the pace is stately, but suddenly you are hurled into the heights at speed, as if you were skydiving in reverse, skysurfacing, and in those heights you hurtle across landscapes like a stormtossed leaf before at length--again very suddenly--you are no longer borne up by the wind, you plummet back to earth, yet--why should it be any different--you survive the impact as if you had done no more than slip off your front porch. Which is all common enough, except in this dream--I recall this very precisely--the odd glacial giddiness continued, my thoughts drifting from circumstance to circumstance, so that even the incomparable feeling of flight was unable to hold my attention for more than a long moment.

In the morning I had X. tell me about the chimp farm as Bernal and Rita fried panckakes. X. refused to be engaged at first, thinking he was in for a lecture or another outraged Q&A. But he soon relented, saying he could be willing to tell me, if only I would do something for him. That depended, I said. He looked at me very seriously. X. was of average height and build, but he had a very large head made even larger by a great crop of curls. Looking like some grotesque and overgrown baby, he asked if he could please be exempted from taking his medicine this morning, saying it just made him feel plum tuckered out. The answer should have been no, but my curiosity got the better of me, and I agreed. It would be our little secret. And what harm could it bring? It's not like he was going anywhere.

Like most things in his life, X. said, he had come to the chimp farm by accident, and had been thrown into it by a curious mixture of curiosity, greed, and an unflagging conviction that he could do things better than could others. After stealing the Bible--which he'd repackaged in its cast of clay and sleeves of plastic, then committed to cold storage on an industrial estate outside London--he'd gone drifting around Europe, aimlessly to outward appearances, yet vigilantly on the lookout for something to sink his claws into. While visiting a friend of his in Glasgow, the friend asked if X. wanted to be let in on a secret. X. said sure. His friend's face had flashed with a kind of shamed pride as he whispered that he was the proud owner of a pet chimpanzee. A baby, he said, cute and well-behaved. The friend took X. home to show off the monkey. X. didn't mind it. Even took a liking to it. Where had his friend got it? It was a complicated business, the friend explained, one brokered through several layers of intermediaries in London and then Dubai, and that while it was likely that the chimps ultimately originated somewhere in the Congo, the first link in the business chain was somewhere in south Sudan.

X. was intrigued, and, being X., soon set to work to see if this was a racket with any room for him. He wasn't sure what he was going to do, but wanted to start by seeing for himself how this chimp thing worked. He started by bribing his friend's Glaswegian contact to get at the contact down the line in the London underworld. Another bribe and a piece of con artistry put him on a flight to Dubai, clutching at a wheedled address in the pocket of his Italian blazer. The front man in Dubai had had a problem with X. trying to get at his source. X. casually noted in his drawled Bayou cadences that he had been "compelled to use a modicum of force." Certain threats and certain covenants led to the provision of information, and about a week later he was in Juba posing as the representative of another Dubai animal dealer. What he found was disturbing. The operation was being run as a side line by the leader of a small-time militia, and he and his men seemed almost indifferent to the value of their product. They were keeping over a dozen chimps in a single cage. The animals were clearly not having a good time, glaring at each other with caged sullenness. X. had the impression that they were waiting on an opportunity to kill one another. Nor did the chimps have reason to think well of their captors: Even as X. was engaging in polite commercial banter with the "general," one of his deputies walked up to the cage and executed a chimp that had been hooting at him, point-blank. No one seemed to mind much. The general only laughed when X. waxed incredulous at the treatment of the animals. It eeda dis or bushmeat fa dem sah, he said. These sokowuntu, dem de lucky ones. Suddenly remembering something, the general nodded at one of his men, who turned on his heel and rushed off to a storage shed. Minutes later he returned with a wicker cage containing two red-assed and blue-balled vervet monkeys, which he set down on top of the chimpanzee pen. Seeing the chimps, the monkeys began to hiss in terror, clutching savagely to the roof of their little cage. The chimps, lulled out of bitter listnessness by the prospect of some sport, began shrieking, lurching their arms furiously through both sets of bars to grasp at the monkeys. Their hands came within inches, just short.

With a smug feline smile, the general launched into a brief rehearsed speech about the law of the wild. Certain creatures were endowed with certain traits and powers; lesser creatures had no choice but to accept. Such was the iron law of life. The general knew where to pause for dramatic effect, knew what phrases to emphasize, what rhetorical questions to ask. And yet X. thought the general seemed a little weary of himself as he spoke, as if he were an actor performing this role for the umpteenth time, keen to get past the chatter and move on to the climax, after which he could retire backstage with a drink. It did not take long. Exegesis on the natural order of things complete, the general walked over to the cages. Also knowing their part by heart, the chimps lined up on the far side of the cage. The general then seized a line that X. had not noticed earlier. The line led to a hasp securing a hatch built into the top of the large cage. When the general pulled on it, looking at X. as he did, the hatch swung down into the cage, narrowly missing the foremost of the chimps pressed against the far wall. On cue, one of the general's men slid the vervet cage into the chimp cage, where it clattered against the wall opposite the chimps. Quickly, the general retracted the hatch and shoved the hasp back home, tying the hatch's outer corners to the cage structure as a precaution against potential simian interference. X. described what followed with a level of clinical detail that I will spare you. The law of the jungle was amply illustrated, suffice it to say.

With the matinee acted out, it was time to talk real business. A healthy adult animal, X. learned, could be had for seven grand, and a healthy youngster for ten. They chatted awhile longer, but X. was shaken by what he had seen, and wanted to get out of there. As quickly and smoothly as he could, X. thanked the man for his time and said he'd be back. He booked himself into the town's only hotel. That night he decided that he would go for it. The market for domestic chimps wasn't likely to go away. That being the case, X. thought, he might as well be the man to institute progressive supply-side regulations. There was no need for all the nonsense he had seen that day. It was cruel. Just as importantly, it had an unduly negative influence on profit margins.

The rest was easy. It took him no more than a few days to recruit a trio of shiftless ex-rebel types loitering around town. The selling point was simple. They would get rich selling chimps to stupid westerners and Arabs. It was just a matter of capturing the inventory, X. said. Once the capture was accomplished--it went very smoothly, X. assured me, smooth as a water mocassin, a perfect illustration of market reforms--it was time to make a supply deal with the poachers coming out of the south. Which was easy enough. Within a week, a party came trekking out of the bush. They were bearing a long pole dangling a miserably fettered chimp that was limp and walleyed and near death.

Receiving them into camp, X. explained that there was a new chimp dealer in town, and that the rules of the game had changed. He would be paying double what their past buyers had paid. In return, he expected the chimps he received to be well-fed and healthy. Not only that--it would help if they were not psychologically scarred. It was simple: If these men were unable to deliver sound specimens, X. would be forced to find other suppliers. A round of handshakes sealed it.

X. maintained a presence at the previous chimp camp to receive new arrivals, but shifted his main operations by a few miles to keep his suppliers at a remove. At the new site, X. had immediately paid tribute to the local chief, pledging to roll a tithe of his proceeds into the community. The man gave his blessing. In the months following, both village and chimp dealership prospered. The supply's quality improved, and X. instituted a system of dietary and health controls, employing the services of a game vet trained in Johannesburg. X. improved the quality of the supply chain by organizing air-conditioned transport every step of the way to the chimps' new homes in the Gulf. For their part, the Arab agents who periodically rolled into camp in their fancy Toyota trucks were glad to pay more than before. Three months into it, X. initiated a breeding program perfectly in keeping with the state of primatological knowledge. He liked to refer to the entire operation as "ISO-certified monkey business."

Business was booming, and X. began to think he might have a future in Africa. After some consideration, and after due preparations like procuring a refrigerator and a generator, he decided to take a weekend trip to London to retrieve his Bible. X. looked wistful when he told me that he had never felt better than upon his triumphant return to his jungle hideaway, clay-packed and refrigerated Gutenberg in tow.
Time went on, as did business. Healthy chimps kept rolling in from the Congo, and healthy chimps kept rolling out, bound for caged lives in places like Abu Dhabi, Doha, Kuwait City, Sharjah. As promised, X. tithed to the village. Relations were good. He took one of the village girls for a wife. It was a time of feasts, dances, rituals of gratitude and initiation.

Yet the operation's success was its undoing. A tenth of what X. was making was a devastating sum for villagers who had been subsistence farmers before X. came around. It was a long story, but its point is that the money fostered greed, exacerbated rivalries and diverted the villagers from their usual pursuits. Things came to a head with an inheritance murder--and it did not take long for the blame to find its way to X. The village chief called on him to pay a double tithe to make amends. X. agreed, but the fighting and discord bred and multiplied.

His bushtracker suppliers had also begun to feel the corrupting sting of success, and were soon demanding more money for the same service. X. called their sudden sense of entitlement an uncomfortable reminder of where I come from. X. refused the request, and deliveries stopped. X. was no fool. He knew his time as a chimp dealer would soon be over. He'd just cycle through his current inventory and shut the operation down. He didn't have the time or the resources to capture and tame the supply chain. The silver lining was that he had the perfect golden parachute in the Gutenberg Bible--it was just a matter of selling it. He began sounding his Dubai contacts to see if there was an oil sheikh who might be interested. The price of oil was rising by leaps and bounds, and a week's worth of inquiries generated more interest than he had dared imagine. A week later, he had a meeting set up. It was a classic case, X. said, of a son wondering what to give to the father who has everything. The prospective buyer was the heir to an oil sheikhdom, and his father's 70th birthday was fast approaching. The old man already had a jumbo jet. Maybe the Gutenberg Bible was just the thing.

Then, on the eve of the meeting, X. had removed the Bible from its protective casing and discovered the horrible mold. He had tried to daub it off, scrub it off, scream it off, yet nothing did any good. The Gutenberg had been X.'s key to an easy fifteen or twenty million. The thought of having lost all of that, just as quickly and as seemingly without reason as he had come across it, was too much for X. After putting the doomed book back in the refrigerator, he had lowered the Mexican flag to half-mast and gotten horribly drunk, releasing several chimps from their pens in the process. And that was all. X. concluded his story by saying I don't want to be discredited as a geographic determinist, but maybe tha's just the way things go down here in Africa.

Once X. had finished his strange story--I didn't want to believe a word of it, but I suppose I had to for lack of a likely alternative--we walked over to the mess area set against a boulder to join Bernal and Rita over pancakes. Bernal had somewhat recovered from his pique of the night before, and with him the ever faithful Rita. What a wife Rita was! With what zeal she addressed herself to her role! There are two basic types of Latina wife--A good ones and a bad one. The good type is often a woman of exquisite beauty, though not necessarily so. More often than not, she is also intellectually uncomplicated. Not to say dumb, just uncomplicated. The point is that whether because of her beauty, her guilelessness, or through some contagion of inner fortitude, she is entirely sure of her husband's affections. Given that her husband is the right man for her, this certainty translates into a constant and healthy object for her passions: Her husband, just as he is. This type of wife (and they are more common than nuptial cynics would like to admit) will do everything for her husband, is faithful to him in everything, even, yes, to the point of unconsciously mirroring his moods. Such devotion is also able to survive infidelity, to a point. What is important is that the husband's feelings toward her remain untarnished, though sexual exclusivity be breached. For the man who loves her and who can handle the intensity of such a relation, she is the perfect wife. There are of course those men who, however constant to her in body and mind, are for some reason unable to handle the intensity of her devotion--but that is a subject for another day.

The other type of Latina wife, the bad one, can best be described as a case of misdirected energy. Like the good type, she is also a woman of great passion. The problem can cleave one of three ways: Either she does not love herself enough, or he does not love her enough, or she is not satisfied with the man he is. These failures are like short-circuits: Fuses fry, sparks fly, lines of communication melt and things go to shit. If she does not love herself enough, she is unable to accept that he could love her, and is constantly engineering clever little tests of his love for him to fail, inevitably plunging her into despair as he does so. The result is similar in the case of him not loving her enough, though less tragic, as both may be able to move on and find love elsewhere. By far the most common, though, is the wife who does not love her husband for the man he is, and is always looking beyond him for an imagined Platonic ideal husband. In this case, the friction caused by her incessant efforts to change him into a man worthy of her love, and the bitterness she feels toward both him and the world at large for having compelled her to marry him, is the source of constant strife and despair. Of course, these categories are common to the wives of many cultures, but the typical calór of these women make them particularly fitting exponents.

The morning's tranquillity did not live out the day. Not that there were any problems between Bernal and Rita. Far from it. In fact, the two of them were as united as ever, in this case in a fury directed against the avuncular personage of our hero, K.W. Braxator. Late in the day, as we were passing through a village on the banks of the White Nile, X. asked, groggily (I know, I should have picked up on the ruse, but the fact was that I had popped the pills he was supposed to take), if we could stop for him to "drain the ole dragon." Bernal said no problem, letting a stumbling X. off into the thicket on the side of the road. Bernal called after him not to let the snakes bite, then joked that X.'s stool must have backed up to the size of an elephant turd with all the drugs he'd been taking.

After 5 minutes, Bernal called out. "Hey pendejo! You get it all out?" No response. Bernal called again. Still nothing. Bernal got out of the car. He walked into the bush, calling his name. To say that it didn't feel right would be an understatement. I hoped X. was not planning to ambush Bernal. I jumped down to join him, my stomach in a knot. I caught him up, I had his back. We poked around for another minute before scrambling back up to the road for a wider view. Then I saw it: No more than 300 yards away stood a pontoon ferry. It had taken on its complement of donkeycarts, trucks and people, and seemed all readiness to leave for the opposite shore. I seized Bernal by the elbow and pointed. His body turned rigid on seeing it. There was no time to lose. We ran for the truck, got in and pulled away, shifting hard. I was having a hard time catching my breath after the little run up the bank. It looked like I would be paying dearly for the story of how X. became a chimp dealer.

Braking sharply, Bernal made a hard turn onto a track in the direction of the pontoon. But the track dead-ended no more than a hundred yards in. A torrent of Spanish obscenity flew from Bernal's mouth. Spastically, he put the truck into reverse and backed us out. There was another track cutting down to the riverbank 50 yards ahead. This had to be it. Bernal gunned it. My head hit the ceiling as we bounced out of a rut, sending a dull pain down my spine. My vision fogged and I slipped briefly out of this world.

I must only have been out for a minute or so. The next thing I saw was the pontoon boat crossing the river, sputtering diesel no more than 15 yards from the bank where Bernal and Rita stood. No sign of X., yet he must have been there. Husband and wife were screaming at the top of their lungs for the boat to reverse to shore, but the ferry captain's response was to shrug his shoulders, sweeping an arm across his rickety dominion to indicate that they were full up. Bernal ran back to the truck and produced a gun, which he waved and fired into the sky. The display failed to convince the captain that it was in his interest to come about. We could only watch.

Bernal then tore off his shirt and made for the riverbank. He had the body of an athlete. I got out of the car and staggered toward him. I put my hand on his shoulder and told him not to do it. He threw my hand off and put a foot in the river. I asked if he wouldn't rather be cremated than eaten by crocs. He relented at that. I am fully convinced that my intervention saved Bernal's life.

A few minutes later, the pontoon ground up onto the gravel of the opposite shore. A chain clattered off a windlass to lower the gate and let the vehicles off. First donkey carts, then trucks. X. was nowhere in sight. Bernal, whose face had turned the shade of a beet, reached down for a stone that he hurled at the pontoon. It plonked into the river about a third of the way across. Maldito cabron, ven aqui! In no time at all, all the trucks and donkey carts had disappeared into the foliage on the other side. Bernal cried out to the ferry captain, was ignored, swore, fell silent, then tried waving a juicy wad of notes at the opposite shore, again without success. The ferry was not coming back.

The three of us stood quietly for a long minute as dusk began to fall. Her voice struck at me like a whip: You didn't give X. his medicine, did you, Karlos? That Rita was a smart one. No use denying it. I owned up. Yes, he had got me to exempt him from the doping in exchange for some information. How did she know?

"The two of you were talking in the morning. Then he treated you like a sucker all day. Que traicion!" Worldly, world-weary K.W. Braxator a sucker? A traitor? Ouch. Maybe she was right. What followed was a bedlam of yelling, gesticulation, threat. They had nearly intimidated and guilt-tripped me into agreeing to pay their retainer if X. could not be found when I spied a fishing boat coming around the bend. The boat was freighted low with its catch, bound for port after a day on the lines. Following my gaze to what I saw, Bernal stopped in mid-imprecation, then ran to shore and called to the fisherman. Calmly this time. The man rose to his feet to look at us, appeared to weigh his options, then went with his curiousity and puttered the wallowing boat to where we stood. As Bernal began to explain what he wanted, the ferry captain across the river called out to the fisherman in their language. What he heard caused the fisherman to reach for the tiller. Bernal lurched forward and put his hand on the man's shoulder. The man recoiled. Thinking better of it, Bernal pulled up his wallet and produced some cash. The fisherman's face brightened for a moment before going slack again. He looked frankly at Bernal, then said a single word, clear as a bell: More. Bernal didn't care. He reached into his wallet and showered the bulkhead and the day's catch of perch and bream with cash, easily several hundred dollars' worth. Bernal raised his eyebrows in query. And now? The man nodded with an air of slight distase, then motioned for X. to get in the boat. They pulled out and chugged across, wreathing the brown water with faint blue smoke.

We could not make out the conversation on the other side, but whatever Bernal said had the intended effect. In a few minutes the pontoon was gurgling back across the river with a barechested Bernal foremost like some ancient bowsprit statue.


~


All right, employers. You win. Fortress reality wins. I give up. I'm no writer. I hunt bounties and compose reports. I should know better than to edge in on other peoples' turf. The story may be interesting enough, but it is as false as a lottery ticket, as hopeless as the notion of waking up to a new day. I would have liked to go on, but time is short, and time is money. Now, if I had had the time and the inclination to finish, I would have written about how we'd never found X. on the other side of that river, that he'd slipped into the continental void beyond the far bank, but that I still parted from Bernal and Rita on good terms, all of us having learnt a valuable and redeeming lesson about the point being in the journey rather than the objective. Acknowledgement of X.'s strategic mastery, of his status as the sovereign of the unpredictable, would have made it easier for Bernal and Rita to let him go. The two of them would have concluded a truce with their hatred for gambling, having realized it was vain and foolish to begrudge others their relationship to risk, and that life was more of a handicapper's affair than they ever dared admit.

For my part, I would have returned to Istanbul with my moldy Bible and been paid a pittance for my services. I may have had a case with Özgür, but he was a bigger fish than I, and I would have contented myself, having taken our journey's lesson to heart. Better yet, I would have viewed the experience as the final whistle, signalling that it was time to hang up my cleats. After visiting with friends in odd places for a month or so, I would have decided to settle in a beach town in Mexico and use my savings to open up a tasteful little cantina dedicated to the pleasures of the cigar and the fruits of the sea. From the verandah I would have flown the Mexican flag that once flapped above the jungles of Juba. Bernal and Rita would have come to visit me from the capital twice a year, and it would have been nice. And who knows, maybe X. would have dropped by, whether to clean me out or to reminisce I'm not sure.

-The end.


I will be starting on the true progress report tomorrow. It will be delivered in the same manner and in the same place as this one, in installments as needed.


Cordially,


K. Wrangell Braxator



***********************************************************



I woke up at noon the next day, head in a fog. My bedroom looked strange. When I staggered into the kitchen to put coffee on the boil, the flower of blue flame leapt and focused like a malignant flaring eye. In the bathroom, the feeling of brushing my teeth was novel, odd. Specific. The report, you can imagine, had kept me up long into the cryptic hours. Gripping and unsettling in like parts. Unsettling because it was impossible to know what was true. My ordered house had been thrown into disarray.

I tried thinking things through over coffee. Divine beverage! The sheaf was sitting on the table. At times the whole report had felt like a joke. But the wounded and earnest tone, the hysterical style, the minute descriptions, these things made me wonder if it might not be at least partly a true confession.

But there was some abstraction to the thing, as if it had been written or thought up through smudged glass. When I tried to imagine Braxator and the couple I could only see them in vague outline. No faces, no language, just three forms in a truck, seen over a great distance, moving through an alien landscape.

I pushed myself back from the table and stood up. I had my own affairs to attend to, and I was running late. The fact is that I had a lot to do in those days. I was taking classes in Turkish and history, and a friend had lured me into being the fiction editor a foundering English-language weekly that put out mostly silly articles and tepid stories. It was called Anatole. There were also the translations of petty German scholarship that I had been doing for a peanuts for years and had a hard time saying no to. My uncle Bernard had got me involved with the organization many years back when I was still in college, and he still asked me about the translations with undisguised pride every time I talked to him.

Later that day, I met my friend Selim for tea at a pretty place on the waterfront, with an excellent view of the shipping lane. Selim was a professor of physics, but I'd met him through Anatole. He'd been an editor there when I started, but had since stepped down. He claimed never to read anything in Turkish but receipts and food labels, and was bored sick of his own culture. He also lived in my neighborhood, which was nice, considering that it was quite out of the way and making social calls was usually a bit of a commute. The conversation started on the topic of women, whom he was in the habit of referring to as "professionals," and with whom, categorically, he had a deeply ambiguous relationship. The most attractive professionals earned the term "fly honies" in his lexicon. He loved American slang, and his English was easily better than that of about 95% of American college graduates. He'd been on a date recently. It hadn't gone well. The woman had had "insect eyes." They never went well. I don't think that women appreciated his style, to express myself cautiously. I told him about my scenario and the latest circumstantial demi-confession I'd sent out to the girl back home. Moving into the present, we looked around us and assessed faces, attire, curves. He said at least two things out loud that I would have been loath to admit having thought.

After a silence I told him about Braxator's report, voice hushed. He was curious. I had the sheaf with me and let him read some of it. I sipped hot sweet tea and watched the ships go by as he read. His face wore a look of satisfaction as he read. He laughed out loud once. After about twenty minutes, he looked up.

"You have to publish this," he said.

"What do you mean publish?"

"Come on, man. This stuff is better than any of the shit that's ever been printed in Anatole."

"Hmm. But it's not really...I mean, would it be right?"

"What do you mean, right? It's fascinating. You've got to get it out there. It will change the way people think about the magazine, man. And if you're worried about confidentiality just fiddle with the names. It's a slam dunk!"

A slam dunk it wasn't, but I had to admit the possibility was interesting. It did read an awful lot like fiction. I could change the names like Selim said, then publish the thing in installments. After that, hopefully the "true progress report" would turn up in time to keep readers hooked. And if it didn't, who was to say that I couldn't cook up the true progress report myself? It was certainly something to think about.

As we were parting ways, Selim asked me what I thought. "You think there's going to be a follow-up?" I said I sure hoped so. Braxator had me. I was squirming on the hook.

I didn't have to think too hard about the proposal. In the days intervening I had been obsessed by Braxator's ludicrous execution scene, even had one of those detatched nightmares where you see it happening but are not really part of the scene and are unable to lift a finger to do anything about it. Better to unburden myself and let the public have it. Why have Braxator's deeds on my conscience?

At Anatole's next editorial meeting, I mentioned what I had found. The other editors were enthusiastic, and the first installment was slated for the following week. Slam dunk. They were especially excited about the Istanbul connection, which buttressed the magazine's raison d'etre. For me the best part was that we wouldn't be lying about anything. The report would be introduced as a document found by an anonymous informant in a public place. We would neither affirm nor deny its authenticity, and would say nothing about the extent to which we thought it mirrored real events. This was for the readers to decide. I did allow myself the liberty of changing the names. I amused myself by changing Braxator's name to something more ordinary--Brent Locke Jones is what I eventually settled on. X. was allowed to remain X. Bernal and Rita I rechristened Jesus and Dolores, respectively. Few things give more pleasure than to assign names. And as an editor, to assign names to the characters in a story is a thrilling encroachment on the territory of the writer.

I felt good about the initiative. If the report was even partly real, what could please Braxator more than to see his "lovely fictions" being presented as such? And if the entire report was conceived as fiction by someone to begin with, so much the better. We'd be getting its author exposure that he would surely appreciate.

I did not think much about the report for the rest of the week. Come the weekend, it was time to take care of one of those pesky academic translations again, something I had decidedly not been looking forward to. The authors of these professorial excursions had had an overblown style to begin with, believe me. And as the years wore on, and as they had retreated into the booming recesses of their own semantic labyrinths, my Sunday sessions had started to really gall. For most of the day I sat at home and churned it out amid the dust streaming through my open windows. Toward evening I walked over to the Sinan Bey Internet Café to clear up a few mothballed terms before turning it in.

I'd sat down at the same computer as I had earlier in the week after exchanging a few polite terms with the manager. The Sudan file was still on the desktop. It was a welcome interruption, and I could feel my fascination return now as I opened the file. It was not the same document. The title that now flickered on the screen was "A Commercial Endeavor in the Sudan: Progress Report." The byline was still held by Braxator, and the report was dedicated to the memory of someone named Eddie Edgarsson-Broodthaers. But a quick scroll down revealed that there was nothing to the report but this title page. As if the author had sat down to write and been chased off by a need or a fear before he could do so much as get past the title page.

Quickly, but not too quickly, I closed the document and saved it to my blessed memory stick. My head zipped with excitement as I went about the business I had come in to do. I looked up my German words like a robot, submitted my work like an automaton. The muscles in my neck wanted to crane around and see if there was anyone else around, if anyone was looking at me. But I kept my eyes fixed to the screen, turned in my work, checked my e-mail. There was a mail from the girl at home this time. Normally I would have been at the edge of my seat, but now my attention would not focus on it. Not that it said anything very important. Just the keen enthusiasm for life that so attracted me to her, interspersed with the usual deflections of my flattery.

After finishing at the bandwidth center I took a walk along the Bosporus and thought. In those days I was taking a series of walks in different directions from where I lived. The idea was to try to determine which view in my area of the city, Sariyer, was the most beautiful. I was torn between, on one hand, the intimate sensation of being down by the water and feeling braced and contained by the surrounding hills, and the exhilarating experience of looking out on city and sea from above on the other. Loving both, I could decide on neither, so my walks separated into the categories of high and low, ridgeline and waterline, with a shortlist of favorite views in each category. That day it was water; I did not want my thoughts to find too much traction in an impressive view and run away from me. So Braxator was somehow and for some reason using the Sinan Bey Internet cafe as the "drop location" for his reports. It didn't seem to make much sense--why store sensitive information where it could be found and e-mailed around the world in a second?--but there it was. It looked like I would have to find a reason to go back there regularly.

Which is what I did. I went nearly every day. The place was almost always deserted, and it did not take long before I ended up becoming friendly with the manager, Hakan. He was a nice guy, if a bit nosy. I kept my guard up, though--I wasn't about to reveal the obsession that drove me there. Soon enough he had grown comfortable enough to ask me not only how, but what I was doing that day, and I ramped up by own efforts by making sure I always had a good story ready in response. Sometimes I told him the truth about having to send in a translation of the latest blustery tenure-seeking exegesis of an ism, confessing my distaste. Hakan, who had an education that far outstripped the demands of his simple clerkship, could sympathize. I liked him.

Once I told him that I had come in to write an e-mail to my secret love, but I found it embarrassing when he made sensible suggestions about honesty and forthrightness. The truth wasn't enough. I needed lies. One day, needing a reliable narrative, I started telling Hakan that I'd come in to e-mail back and forth with my brother about my father's worsening medical condition, that and the estate to which said medical condition would soon entitle us, both of which I told him I was managing from abroad as my father’s legal guardian and executor. Of course, being dead, my father was hardly in the position to be having a medical condition. And I’d already sold or squandered what chattels he left behind in my unremmitting attempt to live a shade of the dolce vita without anything approaching what you might call a capital. I didn't think the old man would be mad though, and least not to start. The ruse was in line with what I remembered of his sense of humor, so I went with it.

A long way, actually. Almost immediately I realized that the twists and turns of my father's case history had to be judiciously conceived and thoroughly researched: It turned out that Hakan had been quite far along in his medical studies when recession had hit and his stipend had expired and forced him to fend for himself. Because of how much he knew, and because of the detailed questions he asked in his desire to understand and to help, what started off as a deflection came close to what people call a self-fulfilling prophecy: I ended up spending a considerable portion of my time in there reading medical articles to be able to hold up my end of the conversation.

My father’s condition started off as dementia served up with sides of arrhythmia and glaucoma. Hakan sympathized, but could not see what the fuss over the inheritance was about (I had hugely exaggerated the scope of the inheritance in my reenactment, not without a certain pleasure). None of those afflications were deadly in the short term, after all. I agreed, but told him what my brother had told me: That Dad was convinced his time was at hand. Hakan agreed that convictions of this type were often more certain than a professional prognosis.

About a week into it, I tossed in a timely scare. In his dementia, Dad had launched himself out of a hospital window, only to have his plan for final dissolution foiled by the fact of the merciful earth his glaucoma would not let him see being a mere six feet below the sill. But his coccyx was broken, he had to be immobilized, and his dementia worsened. Which gave me a lot of easy material, since I was able to make up demented utterances and pass them off as medical observations. Hakan was an earnest man with a love of learning, and it pained me to be misleading him so, but I couldn't change course now.

Meanwhile, Anatole had run its first two installments of the report. 'Positive response' would be an understatement. My inbox was swamped by excited queries from readers who wanted to know who had come up with this stuff and if the author had any other stories out there. Traffic on our website spiked, meaning advert earnings would go up, meaning we could print more paper editions, meaning we would increase our readership, meaning we might actually attract some talent other than Braxator to fill the pages. Good news all around.

One day Selim called to congratulate. And to say I told you so. He said he liked the changes I had made, that Brent Locke Jones was an especially nice touch. He was glad, he said, that he could still exert some positive influence on the magazine from afar. I had to agree that he had a sharp eye. He asked if there had been any more installments at the Internet cafe. I mentioned the document that had consisted of nothing more than a title page. He said hmm, and wondered if there really was a Braxator. I said I wished I could help him with that question, but for now the fact was that Braxator or whoever was behind Braxator had done the magazine a great favor.

Later the same day, the two of us met to go poking around Taksim and Galata. As usual, he engaged in merciless critiques of the "professionals" filtering through our midst. This one was an insect, that one a sheep, that one over there a fox, all hideous behind their masks. Some, he mused, were total bitches, which was why he liked them. He professed an especial admiration for the ones that wore bandages on their noses, badges attesting both to their recent rhinoplasty and their ability to afford one. When our legs ached we stopped by to have a beer in a smoky little place where he engaged two young women in conversation. My Turkish wasn't good enough to stay afloat in it, but I had the impression that he was leading them on, getting them to say silly things. They grew nervous and left. We had another beer. After that we paid and pissed and resumed our stroll. There was a bookstore that we checked out at one point. We went straight for the back where they kept the English books. There were some cheap editions with blank white covers he looked at. He picked one up and called it an "abortion in print" and "a crime." He was a peculiar fellow. Damned interesting though. Wished he hadn't quit his post at Anatole.

The next day there was an installment to go with the cover page on the desktop at Sinan Bey. A chill crept down my spine as I read it.


~


A Commercial Endeavor in the Sudan: Progress Report

by K. Wrangell Braxator

Dedicated to Eddie Edgarsson-Broodthaers, of whom there can only be one


Sirs:


It is complete. As you know, there was some competition for your research station and your chattels beyond just X. and his shifting allegiances. Again though, X. is the cause. He betrayed your confidence by publicizing what was being done. I believe the story of how those specific competitors were elided has been told in sufficient detail, and will omit further mention of them. But the elimination of one threat is no guarantee that others will not materialize. If the principals behind the pair knew of your operation, it is reasonable to assume that X. fanned the information out in various other directions as well. Now that your properties have been restored, I don't need to tell you that it is incumbent on you to take steps to secure them.

Between the evidence of outside knowledge and the rumors now beginning to circulate in the station's human environment, I believe the only way to secure your operations is through significant geographic displacement, preferably to a location beneath the forest floor. The move will naturally involve significant exposure, meaning that additional tribes will have to be brought on board and be convinced to accept your 'tropical disease research station.'

Now that X. has been turned over to you, I will shortly return to the Sudan to focus my efforts on deflecting any further advances by the Chinese. Meanwhile, I ask that you provide me with as much information as you can about the Chinese principals and their business interests at present and historically. Do they really have past experience in the field? I will be monitoring all developments and will report to you accordingly.

I wish to conclude by mentioning two potential leak scenarios. The first is in situ and revolves around a pair of Dutch animal rights activists who have sniffed the chimpanzee trail up to the facility gates. They seem to have heard rumors about great ape sales and have contacted the facility several times to demand an audience. I have so far been able to fend them off by claiming that the facility is under quarantine to depress the risk of cross-species infection. Indications are that they are committed to their cause, and are not the usual errant whiteskinned thrill-seekers. Which both means that something must be done about them, and that we must be exceedingly cautious in so doing. I will investigate their history and the extent to which they have raised suspicions among peers or in the press in their native Holland, and will await your decision in consequence of my findings.

The next scenario is a data leak in Istanbul. I mention it now so that you do not hear about it from soemone else, should the situation escape my control. Somebody appears to have intercepted my initial report. To this point the only known step taken by the interceptor is to have sent me a taunting e-mail indicating that he has knowledge of my Sudan mission. Judging by the tone of the communication, the interceptor is a youth, perhaps an expat brat living with his family through his father's Istanbul posting, and is endowed with above-average intelligence, but little or no capacity of judgment. It is true that the initial report avoided mention of any unencrypted enterprise-critical information, but the corruption of our data routines is worrisome. It is uncertain what the interceptor will do with the information, but I am already taking steps to follow the trail back to its source, and believe to have the problem firmly in hand. Obviously, we will have to initialize a new communications protocol.


On assignment,


K. Wrangell Braxator


~


As you would expect, the installment had been cryptic on the score of exactly what kind of operation Braxator's employers were running, but the brisk assurance of it was enough to make me think for the first time that it was quite real, whatever it was. Not to mention sinister. Criminally intentioned chimpanzee research in south Sudan? I hardly wanted to guess. And who the hell was Edgarsson-Broodthaers? Could such a name possibly be authentic? And, perhaps the most important question, insofar as it concerned me directly: Why did these files keep appearing on the desktop of this public computer? A mystery though it was, it clearly meant that I could not possibly be the leak Braxator was talking about. I was still anonymous. Maybe the 'interceptor' used Sinan Bey for his hacking and I had just never seen him. The place was open all night.

Like a diligent sleuth, I returned to Sinan Bey every day after that, commitments or no commitments, though for several weeks there was nothing new. The cover story continued. I had left my insane father immobilized in a hospital bed with a shattered coccyx, condition stable. Hakan comforted me with speculations that with enough of what he called nitro and psych, my father’s dotage might be prolonged into an indefinite period of managed myopic dementia. Golden years. I was tempted by the notion of just letting the story unfold as Hakan had predicted, the idea being to spare my father's memory (Benjamin senior had known not to take a prank too far), but I decided against it. Authoring a medical destiny was fun, if a bit, well, sick.

During the time he had been immobilized to let his coccyx heal, I claimed one day, my father's backside had erupted into a landscape of nasty bedsores. Hakan was astonished. The news made him think Dad might not have been receiving the care he deserved. With enough diligence and care on the part of the staff, he said, bedsores should never be a problem. I responded that even if he was not quite in his right mind, I was sure my father would be happy to have a man like Hakan on his side. He ignored my flattery and went on. He was serious. Of course, in Turkey hospitals were chronically understaffed, and bedsores were the norm. But in America? It was scandalous!

Hakan had been laboring under the impression that America was a medical Mecca. I tried to disabuse him by saying no, bedsores were normal in America, too, where hospitals were often understaffed, but he refused to believe me. Grew suspicious, even. There was no way that an even average level of American care should allow bedsores to develop on an old man with a shattered coccyx. No way. I told him that my brother didn't seem to have any problems with the level of care. At which Hakan assumed a very serious, slightly apologetic air. Had I ever considered, he asdked, whether my brother might be doing something untoward to reduce the level of care? To--as he put it--fast-forward through my father's morbidity?

Things were getting too complicated. I started worrying that I would somehow miss the next development in the Braxator story for all the energy I was devoting to my departed dad's phantom ailments. The discussions were starting to feel painful--itchy, if you will, like a bedsore. I tried convincing myself that dear old dad would understand when I gave him an aneurysm and had him lapse into a coma. It was a masterstroke. Comas may be melodramatic at the outset, but it does not take long for their value in conversation to fade. Once Dad had been unconscious for a few days, Hakan backed off.

But I was still going in every day, and I needed some more fodder. About a week after the onset of the coma, when things were starting to feel boring and I had to refresh my excuse for being in the bandwidth center, I tossed in a renal condition. A mistake--Hakan turned out to be a bona fide kidney expert, and it was only natural for him to ask if I would get my brother to scan and e-mail my Dad's dialysis charts. That was it. I was out of my league.

But it wasn't just the stress of keeping up with the game. I have to admit that feigning grief at my dead father's second demise was starting to gnaw at me. I could not go on grafting the tribulations of dialysis onto my father's memory. I had crossed a line, and was starting to feel his reproaches from beyond the grave. How utterly undignified, Benny! Instead of sticking with my original plan to saddle him with the further indignities of a stoma and a colostomy bag, I opted to kill the old man off with a pulmonary embolism caused by a clot that not even the most stringent course of blood thinners and anticoagulants had been able to prevent. I had Hakan's questions covered.

Two days after I'd delivered the bad news, Hakan gave me a kilim that his wife had loomed out in condolence. It was delicate and beautiful. I wanted to refuse it in my shame, gushing tears alloyed with guilt as I took it in hand. Hakan put his hand on my shoulder as I cried, then asked when I'd be flying home for the funeral. I'd committed a serious strategic blunder. I had to feign a return home. Hakan would never understand if I kept showing up at Sinan Bey now. It would be shameful. I would be unable show my head in the bandwidth center for nearly a week. It was my father's post-posthumous revenge. I could almost hear him: Why, it's unbecoming, son...I don't know what else to say to you now.

The recourse was clear. If my own surveillance was to be put on hiatus, I would need a deputy. But who? Who would go along with this foolishness? And not blab? It was tricky, but pivotal. Not until something comes along that is both important and awkward do you realize how few your true friends are. They are the ones who will tolerate your madness. The best ones will even support you in it. My fellow editors at Anatole were a scratch. They would think I was crazy, and I didn't want to involve them in something that could be perceived as threatening. The woman (not) in my life was thousands of miles away, so that was out. There were some expat types I vaguely associated with, but they were a catty crowd unsuited to an assignment of this nature. At last, seeing no alternative, I put my feelers out on a limb and asked Selim to tea. It was worth a shot. He might just be crazy enough to enjoy such an assignment.

We arranged to meet at night at a little tea place down by the water. The night was cool and foggy. I arrived first and looked on as ships glided slowly through the mist. I strained to make out the name of a red tanker headed up toward the Black Sea: Stealth. True stealth did not identify itself, I mused, blowing into my hands for warmth. Selim was smiling broadly when he drifted into view a few minutes later. He was clad in academic black.

"Wassup my brotha?"

"Chillin yo," I told him with a laugh, motioning for him to sit down. "You?"

"You know. Little of this, bit of that. Been better I guess. No ladies drifting into my no fly zone. It's been a while."

"The obscure have it rough."

"Mm, I hear you." Selim called to the boy to bring us two teas. "So how have you been?"

"Well, I'm in a bit of a bind, truth be told." I started explaining how I had painted myself into a corner with Hakan. At first he was nodding, gravely you might say. When I got to the bedsores, he was grinning. By the time I mentioned my introduction of the kidney condition, he was howling into the mist, nearly choking on tea and laughter. That's the spirit, I thought. When I said I would have to disappear from the Sinan Bey for awhile to make it look like I had gone home to put the old man in the ground, he composed his face and resumed his nodding, looking very serious indeed.

"So you need a stand-in spymaster?" Attaboy Selim. Relieved that he had suggested it himself, I said that was the idea, and that I was hoping he would punch my ticket. "I see," he said.

Now Selim settled back in his chair, thoughtfully stroking the sandpaper stubble on his chin. He looked out into the water and sipped his tea, stroking away as if the chin were the key to limbering his powers of reason. Then he looked at me, opening his mouth, only to close it again and look away just as quickly to consider some new wrinkle. After several more minutes of chin-stroking and near-utterances, he finally said:

"All right. And only because there I see literary and philosophical value in this surveillance. In this whole situation you've stumbled into. The thing is that I have just given my idiotic students a test and need to do an assheap of grading. I don't have that much time these days. I may even have to put my cousin Kemal on the job some days. He's got nothing to do, and he owes me some service, that bum. Hmm, I wonder what we'll find. Do you have any thoughts on what they might be doing down there? Assuming this business is real I mean."

"Well, I don't know. Monkeys, research... maybe it's something genetic. I don't know. Militarized monkeys? Navy chimps?"

He agreed to do it or to have it done for five days. With utmost discretion of course. That seemed like enough time to go to the funeral and sort out some estate paperwork. I thanked Selim for being willing to help in what for me were interesting times. And then we just sat there, drinking our tea and taking in the ghostly slippage of ships through fog cut by the silent flight of white gulls.

Now that I had some days off my Sinan Bey surveillance detail, I would have a chance to catch up on my work for Anatole. A drift of correspondence had backed up since we'd begun running the Braxator installments. The next of which I also needed to prep by making sure all the names were changed throughout. I was also thinking about changing the place names to be on the safe side. Sudan had already been said a million times of course, but I could change Juba, maybe to Rumbek. I still wanted to keep Istanbul in there.

The next day I took a bus downtown and forded the crowds to Anatole's dingy editorial office, heading in through a door next to a lively KFC. There was no one there when I unlocked the door. The charette was still several days off, and compensation was nominal. The magazine was bankrolled by an expat American named Peter de Rozier, rumored to have made his money at the pinnacle of a ruinous pyramid scheme. He lived in a villa on the Turkish Aegean, and although he didn't demand much of Anatole, he was also famously stingy, vast personal wealth notwithstanding. Every editor had heard or read his stock response to almost every funding request: It was better, he thought, for a publication to have to "struggle some." Funding was paid in dollars, and when the dollar dropped against the lira and we asked for more money, he laughed out loud. "My creation shall bear the temper of adversity." It was at this point that Selim quit. But de Rozier was probably right about the money. Writers should live on love and water, to riff on the French expression. I thought our warrenlike office felt about right, though the smell of the Colonel's home cooking could sometimes get in the way of concentration.

I checked my messages and saw that a scout at a small press in the States had written to express interest in the story, and to see if there was any way she could get in touch with the author. Interesting. I wrote back to say that the author was genuinely anonymous, but that we would try to establish contact and communicate their interest--perhaps "broker" would have been a better term.

Best to wait before making any moves down this path. Rash to engage a publisher before the entire story was in place. What if the rest of whatever installments were composed in the same officious vein as the last? And what if nothing juicy was revealed about the operations down there? If there was no more 'story' to the report? Interesting request, though. Wheels had been set in motion. There could be some money in this. And again--who was to say that I couldn't try my hand at the ending myself?

I spent the rest of that week thinking I just might just do that, though when Selim rang at the end of the week it turned out I wouldn't have to. He'd found a new installment. A juicy one. Said it was pretty disturbing, if still a bit vague on the exact nature of the operation. We arranged to meet so he could hand it over. Then, before hanging up, he told me in a tone of strained conviction that he was washing his hands of this business.


~


Sirs:


In addition to fulfilling the requirements of my expanded custodial assignment in the facility's interregnum, I have looked more deeply into the Dutch problem. Piet Van der Merwe and Katrin Ten Eyck represent a well-funded animal welfare association based in Utrecht. Apentrots have a special fondness for chimps in need, and v.d. Merwe and T. Eyck appear to have been dispatched on assignment in the Sudan to determine the extent of western commercial involvement in the diminishing numbers of wild chimps in the strip along the CAR-Sudan border. Typical obstructionist ninnies. Cultural heirs to an extortionate commercial imperium puffing themselves up to deny others an opportunity to do business!

Merwe and Eyck maintain a shared blog on their activities called apentrots.org. They have evidently had some success exposing dogfighting rings in the Balkans in the past, which should tell you that they are not shy of going up against rough customers. I have read through the recent posts detailing their Sudan research trip. They have not made any claims with respect to the Project beyond the fact that chimps are used at the facility for 'research purposes,' which is a fact already well-known to the locals. Equally significantly, their geographic specifications have been vague. They write that the facility lies in the vicinity of Juba, but provide nothing in the way of roads, coordinates, maps. Seen in the light of expedience, this means that they can be deleted from the picture without undue risk of repercussion. I will await your decision, but by way of buttressing confidence, please note that in the wake of their disappearance, I am prepared to continue authoring posts on their blog myself, to the effect that they had to let the research facility off the hook, the trail has gone cold, we met a nice older fellow who smoked cigars and showed us around, etc., etc.

I regret to inform that the Istanbul interceptor continues to elude detection. He has sent a number of additional messages, all just as mocking, all equally untraceable. It is hard enough to get bandwidth out here in the bush without having it frittered away on opening e-mail sent just to taunt. Just now, sitting down to write, there was another. Without wanting to ensnare you immoderately in my rancor, which, too, would be a waste of bandwidth, I will mention that the chattering little ape insinuated unspeakable things about the particular "rituals" I performed in disposing of the corpses of the competition. Which is ludicrous. Not so, actually--laughter and play were the farthest things from my mind when I came to grips with his allegation. But it is false, of that you can be sure. All I did was to burn the corpses and remove their molars and fingertips. Like a professional, not at all the transgressor in the bush that he had in mind. To be honest, I did indulge in a bit of ritual for their sake, though nothing at all like what our devilish little eavesdropper had in mind. I scattered their ash to the winds from the summit of a little hillock. I like to think of myself as a mannered criminal.

I mention all this because I suppose it would be natural if he were to forward these mocking messages to you as well. Let us just say that I wish to dispel any suspicion that he may have sown about my character, or my effectiveness. I shall mention one more item by way of further divesting myself of outrage and you of budding second thoughts. Literary pretense, the kid wrote, does not become a contract killer. His words. He said the whole report smacked of falsity. Which of course is likely to mean that he understood nothing. And which is also quite good for him, as otherwise we'd even now be ramping up our efforts to find and silence him. I suppose I should look on it as a positive development in terms of overall workload. But you should have read these e-mails, my dear employers. There he was, setting himself up like a kind of hieratic critic speaking from on high, gushing all sorts of pronouncements about my stylistic predilections. My sentence structure, he wrote, smacked of "a hallucinogenicly deluded attempt to render literary English." I'd be lying if I said it hadn't got under my skin. He said it had been like swimming through sentences that were so long and so suffocating that he'd to break off and come up for air to avoid being done in by them. He said that my writing taxed his brain, not in a way that challenged and developed it, but in a way that actually made him dumber. He said that the experience of reading my report had been like dying a small death. To read one of my pages was like being forced to swim along the bottom of a lagoon that oozed stinking mitteleuropean sewage, hunting and pecking along the seabed for some abstruse piece of meaning covered in shit like everything else as his single lungful of fresh air inexorably ran out. And not only that! He said that my dream sequence and my extended riff about parlaying fiction into fact were 'the crusty wet dreams of an old windbag who has spent both mind and body, with naught to show.' I bet you are thinking like me that you'd like to know what this superior young chap has done with his life to justify the perch he's shitting on me from! To what noble ends has he dedicated his body and mind? What cruelty and prejudice hold sway in young hearts!

But let's step away from these minor quibbles about what constitutes a just life--it's not exactly your home turf, after all. His stylistic quibbles, then? Points of style are things that can't be helped. And you know as well as I that my English is not truly native. But a lagoon of sewage? It chafes. It rankles. It galls! Of course, we also both know that the code served a far different purpose than was apparent to his cruel critical faculty. If he knew the truth behind the report's composition he'd realize his objections had the value of so many shriveled turds sprouting a white and wispy mold, but for all that I'd really and secretly hoped that a chance reader--some starry-eyed deckhand on your yacht entertaining dreams of shaking the world with his words, perhaps?--might appreciate the dazzling surface of it even as its true meaning remained buried and murky. But it did not dazzle the interceptor, which makes me suspect that I may not be as much a man of these dazzling-surfaced times as I had thought. I would hope that you could find it within yourselves, employers, to yourselves go some way toward determining the physical location of the leak. I am a long-term "asset" of yours, after all. Either way, there will be hell to pay when I find that upstart little bastard. Which I hope is soon for the sake of our enterprise.

Onto our third action-item, then--the Chinese. An issue, I'm afraid, that is not as simple as we might prefer. They refuse to go away, it is a fact. They still hope to do business with us, it is evident. They have come sniffing around the facility almost daily, they really are quite persistent. Yesterday I decided to meet with them in person, once and for all. So when they came a-sniffing I radioed the gatepost to ask if one of them would agree to lunch with me in the air-conditioned confab tent. To understand each other, I said. To clear the air.

Three had come to the gate. The one they decided to post to the prandial discussion was a distinguished-looking gentleman by the name of John Kang. With ties to Hong Kong, he spoke flawless, if heavily accented, English. Although he wore thick glasses that made his outlook on the world appear phlegmatic, walleyed, what would otherwise have been a hopeless gaucheness was offset by a suit of shimmering grey herringbone, which clearly was tailored by one of the grand masters of Hong Kong's famous habedashery row, if not at Saville itself. His breast pocket sprouted a starched kerchief like a piece of origami, and his tie was yoked in place by a clip of matte jade set in brushed chrome. While there was nothing remarkable about Kang's shoes in themselves, it was certainly worth noting that he had managed to penetrate into the interior of this jungle while keeping them perfectly spotless. A shadow inheritance from expired generations of English colonialists and their impossibly high standards. I would have felt really shabby in comparison, were it not for the cap.

To complete the habit, for his crown Kang sported a shapeless, oil-smeared piece of material whose despicable filthiness would have outraged the commonest Shanghai shoeblack. If there were no grubs or insects crawling around on it, it was only because they could not bear to have taken even temporary refuge on such foul terrain. A pair of mended slits on either side indicated that the cap had been let out to fit a head larger than that of the intended wearer, giving the small brim a constricted and somewhat vulgar appearance, like a girl's tongue stuck out in mockery. Noticing my eyes drift off his and up along the smeared bill, Kang flashed an understanding smile and removed it. I swear I could nearly see the stink that came trailing off as he held it before him with unabashed pride and explained that it had graced his dear father's head from his earliest days as a Harbin newsboy, with nary a pot to piss in. As a youth suddenly conscious of his position at the threshold of a lifelong quest to scrabble a path from lowliness to prominence, Kang explained, his father had scraped together more than he could afford and had gone to see a fortune teller. Old and witchy, she conducted her business out of a hovel that was surrounded by informal smithies and junkshops and separated from the clamor of the street by a tattered curtain. Even so, Kang's father had found the room, with its candles and ancient odors, strangely peaceful. The old woman had sat hunched a long time in silence before delivering her pronouncement amid the smiths' cries and ring of hammers and hiss of cooling baths. And positive though the crone's augury had been, its realization had been predicated on the cap Kang's young father had worn coming in. He had laughed at the time. Surely there were other, more reliable ways of ensuring success? Placating the ancestors, for instance? Working hard?

Then, with her hand clawing furiously, almost epileptically into his wrist, she cautioned him never to shun it from the moment he left her door. From that moment and as he made his way out into the wider world to dance across his life's motley stages, never should he step out of doors without it, not once, no matter how exalted and rich and feared he might become, no matter how much other caps might tempt, no matter how this one might shame. And that once her augury had come true--as she continued to say in a dead serious whisper that silenced the din--he should bestow the cap on his eldest son to ensure that the good fortune carried over into the next generation. Kang suddenly broke off into an uncertain laugh. The woman had probably just been making things up as she went along, he said. He knew how Chinese businesspeople operated, and a fortuneteller was a businessperson among businesspeople. At that point a sort of mystical and googly-eyed look overcame Kang. After a moment's hesitation, he said that what a fortune requires for its truth was not the belief of the teller, but of the seeker.

After a brief silence filled by Kang's beaming, he explained that things had gone exactly as the woman had predicted. His father had breezed his way from newsboy to street restaurateur to landlord to property developer to Hong Kong mogul, all thanks to the felicitous influence of the hat. Then, when Kang, Jr.'s turn to prove himsef on the great stage of the world had come, he had inherited not only his father's work ethic (though not so much as a silver sliver of his capital), but also the cap. Which, of course, had to be let out for him, since the family's prosperity had coaxed the son into greater dimensions than the father.

Finally, Kang told me, although the woman had never mentioned anything about whether or not washing the cap would have any effect on its star-aligning properties, it was a fact, and a cruel one, that his father had suffered a near bankruptcy when, twenty years into his own wearing of it, the stink had prompted him to have it washed. That, of course, had been twenty years ago, meaning that in 40 years of being more or less continuously donned, the lucky newsie had been washed exactly once. Which sometimes made things difficult, Kang admitted, as it did have a bit of an odor (for the sake of due diligence I should mention that it would be more accurate to say that it smelled like an alley behind a cheap restaurant with its complex olfactory structure of rotting grease and vegetable matter and, somehow, chicken skin), but who was he to object when it had worked so manifestly well? Smiling, he concluded by saying he was glad it was not the rainy season down here in the jungle. I asked if that was because its powers as a charm were diminished when it got wet. No, no, Kang said, smiling. You just can't imagine what this thing smells like when it gets wet.

Our lunch was a local dish of corn pap with stewed beef and pumpkin leaves prepared by the villager staff. I used a fork, but Kang seemed to have no problem shaping the corn into little vessels to scoop and convey the relish the way the locals do it. He had been making local contacts, and had not spilled so much as a glob on his suit. Dynamic.

By way of buttering me up as we ate, Kang told me some jokes vaguely related to the field of genetics. What, he asked, do you call a Drosophila that likes a drink now and then? A bar fly, he said. Then, lowering his voice to a confessional whisper, he asked,

"What do you get when you closs a Party member with a German shephard?" I said I didn't know.

"Mao's best fliend!" yelled Kang, laughing hugely at his own wisecrack. Next he told one about crossing a black man with some other breed of dog to create 'woman's best fliend.' I wondered how many more of these I was going to have to endure as I sloshed the pasty maize pap around in my mouth and mmm'ed at the joke.

Kang ordered a beer from one of the sulking staffmembers before continuing. "Why is it irregal to crone a Party officiar?" I said I didn't know. "Because you can't crone a crone!" Then he told one involving a clone football team. He was beaming like a child who'd stumbled across the drawer packed to the hilt with his mother's unmentionables. I can't remember the punchline. Obviously it doesn't bode well. And it means we have to assume that X. told them everything. So as you can see, we are on a bit of a short tether.

Kang kept up the bluster as he started talking business. He spoke as if we already had a deal in place courtesy of X.'s groundbreaking work--can you believe it?--and as if it were only a matter of straightening out the modalities (his word). His outfit's heavies had been apprised; a team of scientists could be flown in as soon as next week. Then, with a wily smile, he told me that that his team had already secured an impressive volume of genetic materiar, and would be ready to hit the ground running. Just a matter, he said, gesturing with the ethereal air of a blue-sky thinker, of getting the two research teams to 'overrap.'

I interrupted Kang. Enough, I told him. Enough of his cockamamie act. He'd made a misstep in thinking he could keep pursuing this with X. out of the picture. Did he think that X.'s defection had disposed us well toward them? They, who had been on the brink of poaching our facility--how could they possibly think we might be about to sit down and hammer out a deal with them? Kang had overplayed his hand, and I had a little piece of advice for him if he wanted to leave this part of the Sudan unscathed. Kang smiled politely, saying nothing.

I enjoyed settling into my avuncular role and trotting out an old man's frank and world-weary words of caution. Life, I told him, was a narrow bridge. It amounted to no more than a delicate structure that swayed feebly in the wind, was riddled by broken planks, but that it bravely, almost impossibly, spanned an abyss with a structure like butterfly wings. To cross, it was not enough to set a general course, to put one foot in front of the other, as the saying goes. One had to proceed carefully, sniff the wind, test the planks, judge the distances. Every step had to be right, every shift of weight considered. To err was to plummet, and one's fellow crossers were only too willing to impart the fateful shove in a moment of imbalance.

Kang nodded. His expression increased into a smile as he clasped his hands and looked me in the eye. He said he knew perfectly well what was meant, but that he was much more afraid of disappointing his own employer than of making a misstep in front of me. He was confident of his footing. To continue the metaphor, he said, if life was a narrow bridge, then the assignment on which his employer had sent him was a tightrope running parallel to the bridge over the same abyss.

I failed to see the purpose of the parallel. Why walk a tightrope when you could take the bridge?

The greater the risk, he said, the more artful the dance.

So his flirtation with the fury of my employers was for the sake of a vain pose?

Again Kang smiled. In my parable, he asked, did anyone ever reach the other side? Fixing me with a gaze that made me want a beer, he said he supposed not, since everybody must die, no? The abyss claimed every prancing pretender to the other side sooner or rater, no? Did so no matter how balanced and considered the steps, no? Maybe, I conceded. Though had he paused to consider that it might not be about getting to the other side? That maybe you just wanted to get as far out as you could, somewhere out in the middle of the void, farther than most--and look good doing it? Perhaps we could think of the whole thing as an imperfect structure, destined never to be finished.

Kang, the bastard, was beaming again. "Now I think that we can understand each other! Ret me tell you why I am warking the tightrope. As far as your research is concerned, my emproyer and I berieve that by making a partner of us, we may actuarry get the tightrope to bring us across to the other side. Arr of us. Make no mistake, Mr. Braxator. We need you. But if you provide what we need, you stand to gain the urtimate prize arongside us. To be honest, we do not understand why your project is so rimited. Why setter for superior footbarr prayers when the technology can be applied for the purpose of indefinite rife extension?"

And so on. A term that kept coming up in his excited speech was partial immortality. Which sounds as ominous as a vaguely written law. Needless to say, once his speechifying had begun, I ended the meeting as quickly as I could, saying I wasn't at liberty to make strategic decisions on my own. And that I doubted my superiors were likely to be interested in facilitating the scheme. We might have talked longer if it had not been for that damnably stinking cap.

The conclusion? That Kang is obviously someone to be taken seriously, accent notwithstanding. And that the Chinese represent a threat of a different order than any we've faced. These people are neither lilly-livered protesters nor dopable, dupable rebels. They come to us not as enemies, but as seeming friends, which I hardly need to remind you is infinitely worse. Worse still, their notions of collectivity and the enshrinement of individual sacrifice means that threats of reprisal at the personal level are bound to be ineffective. Employers of mine, their advances are going to be difficult to repel, and we need to face this. They are well-funded, well-organized, and quite likely to be absolutely ruthless. Imagine the kind of person it takes to wear a stinking cap like that his entire life on a wisp of a promise that it will propitiate lady fortune! And the type of organization that that type of person will pledge his allegiance to, no less. I'm jesting of course, but only partly. We cannot allow them to get the upper hand. These are people who would not hesitate for a second if there was an opportunity to turn our team into 'genetic materiar,' myself included.

Take their setup in China by way of illustration. Exactly what you would expect, purposeful evil, or evil purpose, isn't it, filed to and whetted down to the point nearly of comedy--just as all humor is born through this act of winnowing, of paring away until you are left with the point, which glistens dangerous and hilarious. But let me drop out of the blue sky for a moment and chart a course for the ground, which I hope to hit running, as they say. Now, if I understood Kang correctly, it is that the support of certain party officials for their organization translates into a constant supply of raw materials in the form of inmates. To cook an omelette, Kang said, you have to break some eggs. Cruel usage. Poor bastards--imagine!

It scarcely need be said, but I shall continue to supervise plant operations within the scope of my expanded custodial assignment until you can find a suitable replacement for X. Also, please be aware that I have Van der Merwe and Ten Eyck in my custody, drugged and bound. I believe I forgot to mention that above.

Finally, I would like to remind you that I have yet to receive your briefing on the Chinese organization. Perhaps you will be able to uncover some weakness. I will await word from you on how to proceed.


On assignment,


K. Wrangell Braxator


~


The next day I was taking a walk among greenery in the hills footed in the strait. Drizzle came soaking down out of low cloud, gentle but insistent. It was picking up. Heavy chop on the sealane below. The slow drift of whitecaps reminded me of a stormy cobalt sea as seen from the window of an airplane at altitude, a tableau shifting so rapidly and so thoroughly that single changes of hue and texture become impossible to track.

I was underdressed for the weather. But the fact was that in those days I used to set an objective for these walks of mine, an objective in time or distance, and sticking to the target had become a point of pride, rain or shine, heat or chill. The day's objective of two hours was modest enough, though the seasoning of discomfort had made it seem longer. An hour out and another back, as ever returning by a different route. Always an interesting sight or two on these walks. On days like this the weather was a part of it. I passed through a religious neighborhood. The women were in headscarves and looked away at my approach. Sturdy examplars of the sex. What would I possibly want with them anyway? Then a shuffling train of men bowed by oversized Korans. I supposed they were on their way to a study the words of the illiterate prophet.

I had changed my mind about the Braxator affair. The story could not possibly be true. Genetic engineering in the jungle? A mysterious Chinese outfit using prisoners to tinker with a recipe for 'partial immortality?' No way. No way in hell. The writer of the Braxator reports had overplayed his hand too far to be believed. Kang's speech patterns, for instance. What place did such mockery have in a stern and serious report submitted to the author's criminal overlord? Someone was having a laugh. A good laugh, no doubt, but unhinged. My thoughts about the report may have started to ferment with derision, but that did not stop me from looking forward to the next installment.

Not everybody saw things as keenly. Selim, for instance. It had been ridiculous for him to take fright like that. Unsophisticated. Undignified. Ungallant. That was the problem with these physics guys. The social world had no depth for them. Everything was as immutable and defined as a wave form in a physics textbook. They couldn't tell when someone was just having a laugh.

Despite the thorough soaking that went with it, my walk left me energetic and refreshed.

The rest of the day was spent in a fluvium of dishes, laundry, housework, rote correspondence--whatever manages to detract from life while also being necessary for its perpetuation. I gave myself a rest after the whirlwind of domesticity had settled. I liked to supplement my already long sleeping hours with naps in those days. I had been looking forward to sleeping as I walked, feeling dazed even in the act of refreshment. I dreamt, I remember, of frenzied Chinese scientists being chased around a meadow by outsized chimpanzees, yet that both chase and frenzy were slow, viscous and atmospheric.

I wakened in faint crepuscular light. The sun had set and left in its place that odd inconsolable feeling one gets. I suppose it could be explained away chemically, but why ruin yet another of life's sweet mysteries? Snapping out of it with the sudden elan of living, I heaved myself upright, made for the shower. The magazine was having a staff party that night. A snazzy bar downtown. De Rozier had splashed out--only the best when he was going to be in attendance. I was looking forward to it.


~

Across the bar I could see the features editor striking a pose. Yelda. Hand on hip, chin set in the challenge of the moment. She was talking to a guy I didn't know. The place was thronged, loud, and I was sure what I saw him do was a feigned act of listening. Next to them De Rozier in form, De Rozier holding forth to a crowd of acolytes. I preferred to stay away from him when he was holding court. Lest I feel tempted to agree with something he said. His listeners were rapturous. Who knew what he was talking about? Probably the latest trend on the financial markets. He was a man who had made his money in the shadiest possible way and derived sick pleasure from passing himself off as a financial guru. Words like 'securitization' and 'equity' drifted across the room to confirm the impression.

I sipped on my raki and looked for a poor drifting soul like myself to talk to. I did not have to wait long until Selim walked in. He was vested in the usual academic black but was looking jolly.

"How are the professionals?"

"Don't know. Haven't talked to any. What's shaking?"

"Bits of bacon," he said. "Nada. Did you read the thing yet?"

"The thing? Oh yeah, the Braxator instalment. Yeah. Whoever's behind that has a good imagination. But I'm not buying it."

"I don't know. Maybe you're right. It sure scared the drizzling shits out of me."

"Why?" I asked. "It's not like we have any ties to this thing. They have no idea who I am."

"I don't know, man. If you asked me I'd say you should be more careful. I kind of regret advising you to serialize this stuff in the first place. It could hit closer to home than you expect."

"What makes you say that?"

"It's just that these people seem very thorough."

"Selim, they're not fucking real. Get you a drink?"

"Sure. Get me a Budweiser. I hate Turkish beer."

I navigated through the sea of leather and nylon to the bar and ordered our drinks, thinking that the Turkish beer was actually quite good. A Budweiser for Selim and a whiskey for me. The bartender's smile when I said Budweiser made me flinch. He guessed it was for me. Turned out the American was as just as keen to distance himself from the malted products of his country as Selim was to disavow those made in his. I paid and tipped, laughing at myself.

When I got back to where we had been standing there was a bear of a man at Selim's side. He was sleeved in black leather that was obviously having a hard time containing his bulk. Incongruously, his cruel and ample head was crowned by an old-time fez. Selim was nervous. I gave him his drink and asked what was going on. The mountainous fellow was glowering down at us.

"Ben, this guy wants to have a word with you."

"With me? What for?"

"I don't know."

"Tell him to fire away, I guess."

"Okay." Selim said something to the bear, who pawed him aside like a piece of lint. Selim went sprawling. The guy then looked down at me and started belting out Turkish at a rapid clip. I nodded like an idiot; he looked up at the ceiling and muttered an oath about Americans. He looked over at the grovelling Selim and motioned for him to come back.

"He wants me to translate for him to make sure you understand."

"Whatever floats his boat."

Selim looked up, nodded. The invective was relaunched, and went a little something like this:

"Do you think Özgür Bey is stupid?"

"Excuse me?"

"I said, do you think Özgür Bey is stupid? Do you think he can't read English or something?"

"What?" I said, my grip about my beverage suddenly slippery.

"You think you can fuck with Özgür Bey? He knows what you printed about him, and Özgür Bey does not tolerate...encroachments."

"But...look, man, it's just a story. I didn't think that Özgür Bey existed. We have this writer and..."

"I don't care what you have! So let me get your story straight. First you print lies about Özgür Bey without checking up on the truth. And now when he gets angry you tell me that Özgür Bey doesn't exist? He is not going to be happy when he hears this."

"Er, I don't know what...look, just tell him I'm sorry about the mistake. I didn't mean to offend him." The bear laughed sardonically when he heard the translation of what I had said.

"I'm not telling Özgür Bey anything from you. He asked me to come here to deliver a message to you. Are you listening?"

"Yes." What the hell was going on here?

"He said that if he ever sees his name in print in your magazine again without his approval..." The bear--ursus horribilis--then made the throat-slitting motion that cannot be misunderstood. He paused to put his hand on Selim's shoulder and smile his malevolently towering smile down at him before walking away.


~


Walking the next day. Hangover. Acrid taste of metal on my tongue, head a sodden void, nerves firing off all over just to fuck with the sap and sot at the controls. Strolling by the sea this time, some foggy half-conscious notion about taking a maritime cure, cycling salts pulmonically to hasten the dawn of clarity. I'd rolled out of bed early with dull incessant explosions firing off behind my eyes, then attempted a cure a la russe, viz. a plate of slimy pickled herring fillets chased down by a shot of vodka. And another for good measure as I groaned my way across the threshold and into the world. We'd drunk heavily once the towering bear had left us to our own devices. I'd switched to the cheap whiskey. The unmentionable stuff you have to settle for if you're going to drink ten, the rotgut they keep in smeared and scarcely legible bottles in the dusty rebates at the bartender's feet, mention of whose name prompts a wink from the man who knows.

For Selim it was the unjustifiably expensive American beer, one after the other, dead soldiers row on row that detailed him again and again to the bathroom to pour the intoxicating life they once held out into the greater world. You didn't drink beer, you borrowed it.

This new notion that Özgür could be real quite simply needed to be drunk away. Selim's swill seemed to take fast effect. He was soon joking around as if that knuckle-cracking bear had never come around, as if there were no bear and no Özgür to train him, after a mere two or three buds. For me it took longer, but when the euphoria came, it came. Where one minute I'd been brooding in semi-shock in the corner, the next I was dragging Selim around the bar on a rakish trawl. I sparked fugitive interest in Yelda's eyes by indulging in what at the time seemed like a fantastic piece of rascality, faux-cooly dropping unimaginitive hints about being a clandestine Washington-backed provocateur posted to Istanbul to gather information preliminary to a U.S.-supported generals' coup, with the outwardly liberal and loyal Turk Selim acting as my fifth-columnist facilitator. It fell apart when Selim began reciting the 'pledge of allegiance' and laughed so hard he dropped a full beer to the floorboards. The night's coup came on the heels of that when I monopolized the attention of De Rozier's lovely paramour for a good hour, flirting outrageously, touching her hands and wrists and shoulders every chance I got, delighting in her adamant red hair and head filled with air. De Rozier was visibly galled, and hearing the decibels of his pontification gutter off into brooding silence gave me almost as much pleasure as the company of his girl. But at the end of the hour I had become incoherent, and De Rozier able to sweep in to reclaim his flavor of the month. I staggered into the night and found Selim smoking. He looked opaque and lost to the world.

"Came up empty, huh?" I asked.

"Another night, man. Another night draws ineluctably toward its disappointing conclusion. I am a professor whom professional tenure continues to elude."

"At least there is an upside."

"The peerless pleasure of overdrinking?"

"No. The bear, I mean. At least he didn't put the brass knuckles on us or anything."

Selim looked at me uncomprehendingly for a moment. "Oh! The bear. Yeah, lucky for us. Or, you know, maybe not so lucky...maybe if the bear had given us a going over a nice young lady would have taken one or both of us home to nurse us back to health. And if he had delivered a message with his fist tonight, at least you could then wake up in the morning knowing the worst was over." His mouth had drawn up into a nasty cynical rictus.

Smoking one of his cigarettes, I pondered his way of looking at things. The whisky fog was fading into a spurious pickled clarity through which I could see the looming unknown form of Özgür again taking shape.

Shitty though I may have felt that morning, the weather was fine as I strolled. The sun shone like the molten idea of a hole. Around it winked a sky so immaculate that I thought the flagrant medallion might have been seized by a promethian hand to scour and burnish it, which only yesterday had been bleared and hazy, into a approximation of the original sunstreamed cerulean day, the way a housewife uses silver polish to reconcile her fixtures and cutlery with the ideal they'd represented when first bought or bestowed. A trace of haze spilled out from the city and ran in a corridor along the strait, but it didn't oppress or diminish so much as serve subtle reminder of man's industry and aspiration.

So there was the odd matter of Özgür to deal with now. The man who had seemed the most figmentary character in Braxator's first account had suddenly become real. Which was really elaborately strange given that he, Özgür, had been more or less the linchpin of the first account's bizarreness and fanciful misdirection. Notwithstanding the weather, I had a hard time thinking clearly, but by now there had been enough twists and turns with the Braxator story that I thought a more conservative approach to its interpretation might be in order. Instead of drawing new conclusions every time I read a new installment, why not just sit back and read them as they arrived, enjoying them to be sure, but saving my conclusions for the denouement? Regardless of my eventual interpretation, it did seem that I would have to omit any mention of Özgür's name from the serialized KWB report in Anatole, maybe even rewrite the entire section in which Özgür featured. I could change the grizzled, myopic and fundamentalist Turk into, say, a young and eagle-eyed paragon of rationalism. A German 'enterprise resource management' expert, with a passion for collecting on the side.

Thinking about it more wasn't going to get me anywhere. Not in this state. My thought drifted to the weather as I walked on. It struck me that the weather was not only coloring my thoughts in a certain way, but was actually directing them. The specific play of wind and clouds and temperature seemed to make certain thoughts possible while precluding others. There was something to this. Slippery though it may have been, it was something I could hold onto. A jellyfish littering the shore of the sea of thought. I began keeping a log of the weather, jotting down each day's particular combination of atmospheric elements, as well as the thoughts and moods that they entrained.


I could not let it go. There was a charette coming up at the journal, a deadline approaching on a translation, and my apartment was developing a nasty plumbing problem that had me wearing flipflops in the bathroom and pinching my nose. But I could not stop thinking about the weather. The days wore on, and infatuation tilted into obsession. I was not unaware of this greased gradient into folly, but I would not be persuaded that my obsession was anything less than fundamentally healthy, that mine was a solipsistic or irrelevant descent, or that my quest, if pursued with diligence, would not yield up a pearl stunning to behold--a pearl whose at once prismatic and cloudy surface would show its reverent beholders that their true evolutionary destiny lay in not in riding elevators to the tops of air conditioned skyscrapers, but in joining the ranks of homo sapiens meteorologicus.

I saw my hunch confirmed every time I looked out my window onto my wide view of sky and water: There really was something to the weather. More than a shifting background or a convenient foil to smalltalk, weather constituted the fundamental conditions of our daily experience. My conviction grew like a seed that had found purchase in good soil, and soon I thought that the world needed to know. And I already had the perfect forum. My swelling notes on the spiritual mechanics of meteorology could be turned into a running feature in Anatole. Some Weather, I would call it--The Vaporous Science of Meteorology.

Being a literary and cultural magazine, Anatole was perfectly suited to the topic. Any reader who stopped for just a minute to think about it would know that weather and literature were inseparable. Observations on the interplay of sun and wind and rain, or fictional admixtures of the same, seem to be sine qua non tools for the writer's art if it is to live up to its mandate to chart out limitless exemplary maps of the human experience.

As much by instinct as by read example, I knew that the body of human literature contained as many portentious thunderheads and blazing sunsets as did the history of man's tenure on the planet.

And with good reason, too. Weather not only frames the mood; it impels it onward in an incessant series of small adjustments, taps on the soul's steering wheel. Just as man's Enlighted understanding of the world cast fields as diverse as physics and history as dynamic, evolving, revisable, so any latterday holistic understanding of the human experience must cast mankind not as a blessed creature apart, but as a creature of the weathers. And, continuing in the Enlightenment tradition, the weather itself must be seen as an unremitting act of physical becoming which tows the receptive spirit closely in its wake. The examples in literature are as numerous as the storms that have fed and battered the earth thorugh the ages, and are too many to cite here. [But consider, if only for a moment, Defoe's publication of observations on the winter storm of 1703, when the lead roofing on Westminster Abbey scrolled up like parchment, and up to 8,000 souls came to grief at sea. Or the fact that poetry, regarded on the whole, is well and truly the result of meteorological measurements performed on the atmosphere of the poet's brain.]

If all this seemed obvious to me, it also seemed uncanny that no one had before thought to systematize the effects of weather on the soul. Indeed, there was a yawning gap at the very heart of the humanities. Who has ever undertaken a systematic examination, not only of weather's role in literature, but of its function as a barometer to the human spirit, and as the missing ingredient in nearly every attempt to chart the course of human history? That this failure stood in such sharp contrast to the hurtling progress being made on the apocalyptic meteorological problem of the age made it even more egregious. On a personal level, I also thought that such an exercise would be good for me, since it would help me understand my own moods and prejedices much more objectively. It might, for instance, help in parsing my own reactions to any future Braxator installments.

To answer this plaintive calling, then, I decided that I would continue making my daily notes on the weather, with consideration paid to its dynamic and dictatorial nature, while leaving open the possibility of asking important questions or drawing tentative conclusions as I saw fit. The idea was for this effort to function as a spur to reader contributions, since the experience of the weather was sure to be as diverse and enriching as the fertile field of humanity itself.

What were the questions I asked myself? Maybe, I thought, the experience of weather was genetically conditioned. Maybe there were people out there who were impervious to it, people whose spiritual constitutions were insusceptible to variations in temperature and sunlight by virtue of an ancestral bequest of storms and other extremes, and who as such were most qualified to lead institutions through times of turbulence and uncertainty: Icelandic helmsmen, the shepherds of the Caucasus, Bedouin. Or perhaps it was quite the opposite, that the centuries of storms running in their blood made them too volatile to be trusted at the helm? And what role did ancient weathers have as an ingredient in religion, in philosophy? Was it a coincidence that the cruelest and most impossible of the monotheisms was hatched in and then flourished across an unremitting desert? Did Siddhartha's upbringing in a lush Nepalese valley play a part in the detatched equanimity of his teachings? Might not the diversity and capriciousness of the Hindu deities have something to do with the subcontinent's endless succession of monsoon verdure and dire drought? And do the surviving pagan superstitions of Europe have anything to do with the cruelty of that continent's weather in prehistorical times? What about paleometeorology? Could ice cores and fossil records tell us something about the conditions that formed the crucible of human perception?

And what of the way the weather mirrors the human metabolism? Typical days start still and sluggish before progessing to a midafternoon peak of activity. Body and soul both ride the crest of this wave through the afternoon. But winds quiet again at dusk, the waves on the water die, giving way to a time of withdrawn reflection. The wind is still, the surface of the water reflects its calm. Might not the waves playing on the surface of the mind suddenly still in the same way? And if such waves do not settle at the approach of velvety dusk, is it not desirable that they should--that the proper condition of the human soul is to be receptive to and reflective of the weather, lest we miss an important message coded into the elements?

Finally, does it make a difference to the human metabolism that hyperborean twlights are more prolonged than in the middle latitudes? Do breaches of the diurnal cycle, whether by virture of dissoluteness or of nocturnal duty, impose a spiritual penalty? These were the things I wanted to find out.

So much for lofty thoughts. Here is what I eventually settled on for an opener to the weather serial:


Some Weather: The Vaporous Art of Meteorology


--"Wrap me in the weathers of the earth. I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones."


My life long, I have heard people complain about the weatherman. The usual charge is that his forecasts are inaccurate. Some even suspect him of duplicity aimed at clearing the golf course or the beach of impediments to his view. But we all know full well that he has no greater hand in the forecasts than we ourselves do, determined as it it by complex computer models and weather satellites. I do share the plaintiffs' general sense of grievance against the weatherman, and have always found him to be possessed of a sorely deficient character. But my gripe has nothing to do with the accuracy of the forecast. I am always filled with quiet pleasure when computer models are disproved by the weather's true complexity. Another relatively common complaint is that the weatherman is boring, which is closer to my own assessment. For me the problem is that the weatherman as we know him is too trifling a character to address his topic with the gravity it deserves. To the average weatherman/woman, weather is like traffic, or the day's lottery draw. To prove how completely he has failed in addressing himself to his task, let us ask ourselves a leading question: Is there anyone more vapid than the weatherman?

No. Nobody is more vapid than the weatherman. But why? This question is best answered by way of another: What is more profound and inscrutable and sublime and awesome than the weather? The answer is nothing. The weatherman is vapid because he fails to live up to the weather's profundity. Of course, the weatherman's inadequacy to his task should hardly be surprising. The weatherman is employed by and panders to the same people as the newscaster, after all; and to weather the news requires exactly the same gravitas, integrative critical ability and wicked humor required to announce the weather.

It is a very sad fact indeed that the marks of a good weatherman are limited to a smooth delivery, an upbeat attitude, and a pleasant sweeping motion.

But what would a man truly worthy of the weathers do in our banal weatherman's stead? What improvements would he undertake in the realm of weathermanhood? We'll start with what he would look like. For my ideal weatherman I envision a man with a salt-and-pepper beard, elderly but vital, with a glint in his eye that could be interpreted as either sprightly or malicious. For his garb I see a simple tunic or kurta, perhaps a Nehru shirt, and for the understory baggy pantaloons and unpretentious thong sandals. This would be the foundation, and a sage one at that. Over this he would place accessories appropriate to his forecast: A yellow fisherman's slicker and galoshes to cover the sandals in the event of rain; a panama hat and a wristband for a hot day with strong sun; and a walrus pelt parka fitted with an ermine collar for days with temperatures below 0 degrees Fahrenheit--and maybe a hat of otter fur thrown in for the truly frigid days.

More than just a mark of good taste, appropriate dress would be a touchstone for appropriate behavior. Which is to say that the weatherman's style and mood of presentation would be as variable as the weather itself. Meteorology affects us all more than we know, and it would affect him the most. It would be the ideal weatherman's task to heave open the floodgates and abandon himself to what we'll call the total meteorological experience. He would not embarrass himself, as today's weathermen do, by simply relaying satellite pixellations while actually contemplating his next round of golf or his next assignation with the woman unfortunate enough to be the mistress of the weatherman. My weatherman would not put the weather out of mind as soon as the studio door shut behind him. The forecast-watching public deserves more!

This man, this eutopian weatherman, would live the weather. His waking mind would be bent on it, his dream life would be populated by fantastic and freakish weather phenomena, and his home would be all portholes and skylights and aneroid barometers. He would go for long meteorological walks every morning and afternoon, often with friends and disciples, not to trump the information about storm fronts and pressure systems provided by satellites, for that is impossible, but to subject it to a more relevant, you might say spiritual, human exegesis. I am not afraid to say it: My ideal weatherman would be a philosopher, and it would be a sign of his very profundity that he has taken what is commonly held to be such a banal topic for the object of his philosophy. Like certain poets, his trick would be to access the numinous and the sublime in the ordinary, the everyday--though of course weather's everydayness is not as much a fact as it is a mark of our own calcified perception and growing intellectual poverty.

His philosophy would be transcendental-epicurean. Which is to say that, while able to meet the buffets of stormy weather not only with equanimity, but with a keen view to its philosophical lessons, he would also take childlike delight in the blessings of fine weather--the enthusiasm would be infectuous. Such a weatherman would never be caught dead moaning and groaning about snow or rain or cold in the fashion of our base and childish crop of modern weathermen. He would delight in the extremes that serve convincing reminders to sensitive souls that they are alive.

The philosopher weatherman would be sensitive but never lachrymose, reflective but above brooding, wonderstruck yet not easily mystified. For instance, when discussing snow, he might take a moment to discuss the wonder of seeing water in a different phase, the beauty of crystal structures, and the bittersweet melancholy that attends the certainty of their transcience. He would pay homage to snow's knack for blunting the edge of hibernal darkness, and cite the role of snowmelt in the coming regeneration of life. The current vapid manner of talking about cloud formations and atmospheric fronts would be completely revolutionized. Cloudmasses would be infused with the spirits that they eminently represent. A thunderhead would be cast not only as a source of inconvenience and destructive potential, but as a stormy disturbance fast approaching the percussive skin of the collective soul. Generally, clouds would receive a great deal of attention. Like snow that is sure to melt, clouds are a convincing reductio of life's frail transience, but also of its heartrending beauty. My ideal weatherman, then, would be a serious connoisseur of clouds. He would encourage his readers to take as their ideal a life floating among the clouds. His segments might feature footage of clouds taken from the ground, from buildings, from airplanes, from space. On certain days he might invite viewers to call in to pick out the shapes of faces or animals or other things that sometimes flicker through passing cloud formations, awarding some meteorologically relevant trinket to the most imaginitive caller. He might also sponsor contests in which viewers made competing predictions about how long it would take lone clouds passing over a great desert to expire.

Furthermore, there would be no mention of Canadian-born cold fronts without concomitant mention of the clarity of the faculty of reason that cold weather never fails to inspire. Finally, in those cases when weather causes loss of property or of life, the weatherman-as-philosopher would firmly spurn the usual platitudes about tragedy and calamity (on which the health of the modern economy and system of governance is anyways predicated), preferring instead to look on such events as a lamentable but nonetheless bracing and healthy expression of the human condition's frailty. And he would instantly terminate and maybe even rough up any acolyte weatherman with the gall to film a "why did this happen to us" segment in the wake of a natural disaster.

Rather than as a predictable broadcast of anticipated annoyance or pleasure, how much more uplifting to see the weather report forecast in detail what is about to transpire in the viewer's soul! It goes without saying that to pull this off, you need experience. The ideal weatherman must be elderly, or at least seasoned. To fix matters somewhat more precisely, I think the bare minimum should be a lifetime experience of 200 seasons, or 618 moons.

Of course, like most good philosophers and spiritual people, my ideal weatherman would also host public forums for discussing pressing weather-related issues. He would invite friends both serious-minded and frivolous, personages both esteemed and despised, to participate in panel discussions on weather-related issues. This charged atmosphere of debate, this serious-mindedness, would go some way toward rehabilitating the weather as a subject for earnest people. The obvious topic, of course, is global warming. It is worth asking how the ideal weatherman would approach it. To begin, he would not be content to ignore the issue in the fashion of the stooges and fools who now pretend to be weathermen on television. His would not be a tightly scripted refusal to entertain the notion that the weather has a spectral and even apocalyptic dimension. He would not shy from the issue that the weather nearly always carries whispers of an approaching calamity. I suspect that the ideal weatherman would be fundamentally sympathetic to concerns about environmental stewardship. At the same time, however, he would be wildly intolerant of the common class of fanatics who use the mantle of environmentalism as a foil for misanthropy and nihilism. No, our philosopher-weatherman would be too smart to reject the legacy of the Enlightenment and whatever utopian traces it might contain. In short, his attitude to global warming would be one of restrained alarm. While refusing to shy from the plight of the poor African villagers hounded by desertification, he would punctiliously tack away from the siren call of defeatism. And if he could find an economical way to do it, the old sage might even put a cap on his own carbon emissions.

Is it really a secret that weather is inseparable from the world of the spirit? Am I alone in thinking it deserves such attention? Hardly. Through the ages, writers of every stripe could not have done more to corroborate my thesis. Open a novel and see how many pages pass before there is mention of rain or snow or sun or wind. If you look at it honestly and without preconception, you will glimpse clearly and without reservation that literature and meteorology are inseparable. Better put: You cannot have literature without meteorology, and while you can have meteorology without literature, why the devil would you want to? The link is fundamental. Weather is not cited in literature as an empty flourish of convention. It is strummed on with such frequency because weather is both the legend for decoding our lived experience and the surreptitious boot that spurs us to think and act as we do. More than that, it is the soundtrack without which nothing in the movie makes sense. Depending on our circumstances, stormy weather provokes either the desperation of exposure or the cozy comfort of interiority. A day of merciless sun is a cipher for the fragility of human endevor, of nature's implacable indifference. And who will raise his head to disagree with me that the description of a storm at sea is the language of brute terror itself? There is a very good reason that, on recollection, these events nearly always seems portentious: Nothing happens in the atmosphere without its immediate complement in the heart.

But just as the philosopher-cum-weatherman does not yet exist, nor does the transcending humanist compiler of weathers. Yet instead of lamenting their refusal to be born, I will step into the breach. I will put my money where my mouth is. I will give birth to the ideal weatherman, with this publication as my midwife. In a grotesque turn of the metaphor, the ideal weatherman to whom I give birth will intially be myself. Yet it is my deeply held hope that he will go forth and multiply so that, before long, many of my readers will have converted to the gospel of said ideal weatherman. That said, I will leave the birthing of the transcending humanist compiler of weathers to someone else--I do not feel it to be my place, as I do not hold an endowed academic chair, which would be a distinctly more comfortable perch for such a lofty undertaking.

Here's what's happening, folks: Beginning with the next issue, I am going to put out a weekly weather report. As befits a text that aims to be philosophical, far from being a forecast aimed at minimizing inconvenience and helping you make money, my report will be a reprise of weather that has already occurred, and will tend to celebrate nasty weather wherever I find it. Nor does it lay claim to comprehensiveness: There may be some weeks when I report on the weather on seven out of seven days as a tribute to the weather's joyful motleyness, but others whose vapidity leaves me cold and with nothing to say. Also, in the interest of leaving enough space for Anatole's readers to file their own weather reports, I will try to keep my philosophical points as pithy as possible, with nothing approaching the magtitude of the above excursions.

By way of reader encouragement I would like to note that each of the following may be thought of as weather phenomena in the holistic way we like to see things at Anatole:


1. The way the setting sun gilds the top of a hill.

2. The way colors grow richer and more profound the closer they come to their final shuddering surrender to darkness. Witness the blue of the sky opening hallucinogenically into the infinitude of space. Witness the color of grass flaring into an impossible green at the threshold of dusk winking into night.

3. The way clouds or fog can inspire you with a feeling of interiority, making you feel, even when you are outside, that you are in a low room with a ceiling made of plush white cushions.


Readers, knock yourselves out!


~


This is what the four sets of meteorological observations I felt compelled to make the following week looked like:



1


Returning from town along the highway by bus the vehicle entered a drift of thick fog. I wondered if it might be coal pollution, but the thickness of it told me we would all soon be dead if it were. Most remarkable were the floodlit banking skyscrapers lining the highway. One of them looked particularly eerie. Spectral. The building panels were the color of alabaster. It was a white building ducking in and out of thickest white fog, its alternate appearance and occlusion like a tentative act of will faltering its way through tendrils of mist. In the topographical bowl of my neighborhood the fog had massed so thick that not even the bottom of my hill was visible, let alone the blotted currents of the strait beyond. It made my apartment feel even more like a ship's cabin. It also, more suggestively, made me feel that the things that happened that day would have no bearing on the events of any other day. It was a day encapsulated by fog, to which no other day could have any relation.


2


It was a day with the inscrutability and remove of a black and white photograph. The Bosporus was still, but the clouds overhead fled mistily westward along the backs of the hills. Most remarkable was the dramatically narrowed color spectrum. Almost all the blues and greens seemed gone from the usually vaguely florid water, and what blues were there were so profound as to be nearly indetectable, so that the water presented a palette ranging from turgid slate to marine cobalt. The aspect of the day seemed unfinished, as if it had somehow not yet come into its own, as if its painter had denied it a final touch or two of color before walking off. Yet this poverty of painterly detail somehow made its prespective deeper. I felt my vision liberated, as if my gaze could range up the seaway as far as distant Odessa.


3


The sky I saw when I peaked my head out the mudroom window in the morning looked like what the chief of Asterix's village used to see before he declared that the sky was falling. It was cold when I left the house. The rain was not steady. It came flicking down in spurts like the dangled prospect of punishment, a hint of sadism that its wielder never quite applied. I felt that the sky and its particular pressure were filling me with malevolence.


4


No, it is not just a matter of the psyche being a percussive surface against which passing weather beats out its endless succession of impressions. It is not as simple as all that. We are not just floating freely among the clouds and airs. We carry other weathers inside of us. Our heads may be home to lingering thunderheads, childhood memories remaindered into an eternal background, such that when we hear a peal of thunder it is not the present peal that we hear, but an echo that evokes that distant first storm. Or we may carry weathers with us literally in the form of hangovers: Surely one of the reasons for the misery of the summer hangover is that body and mind had got too comfortable for too long in the cool changeless night air and are not ready to waken to the crude heat of noon.

More innocently, consider dry spells, cold spells, hot spells, cloudy spells; any spell, in short, that is broken by a day of different weather. For instance, after days on end of cloud that finally dissolve into luminous sunshine, might not the sensitive soul continue to labor under the impression, or rather the impact, of all those piled clouds?

Today, for instance, the city had its first dose of direct sunshine in over a week. And though such deprivation might be thought to put me in a better position to appreciate the sun when it finally poked through, the reverse is also at least equally true. Just as rain can soak into wood and weaken it, so clouds can soak the senses and make them sodden. The very expectation of cloudy weather when I woke up in the morning somehow made me less able to appreciate the sun. No matter how valuable the dictum about varying our routines, I think we always retain some contempt for forces that play havoc with our habits and expectations.

Similarly, anticipation of forecast weather can either dull or whet our appreciation of present weather, often with unintended or even disastrous consequences. Here, as in so many other areas, weather mirrors life. In mythology and wherever else in literature it features, knowledge of the future nearly always brings evil. Witness Oedipus, witness Cassandra. It seems somehow ruinous, somehow disruptive of the human condition to look too far into the future. Here encapsulated are both the fascination and the ruination of the gambler, that most human of characters. Why should the case be any different with the weather? How is it that we've lulled ourselves into thinking that weather forecasts are innocuous? Today's meteorological situation is characterized by this conflict. Although today was sunny and quite mellow, the forecast of plummeting mercury over the weekend seemed to detract from most people's enjoyment of it, as if prompting them to cave to the conserative instict toward premature hibernation. Not me, of course. My "genetic memory" predisposes me to cherish the prospect of cold.


~


Anatole ran that first instalment of Some Weather a week later, in versions printed and electronic. My colleagues around the editorial table hadn't thought much of the idea, but time had inured them to my odd initiatives, and no one had felt strongly enough to seriously oppose it. The magazine's course was set only very generally through the murky waters of "culture," and with five sets of hands pulling the tiller in different directions, our publication had become a kind of gallery for the obsessions and prejudices of the editors.

Having got the go-ahead, I had still had to resign myself to my revolutionary meteorological item being fettered by placement, consenting to see it tucked away somewhere in the middle of the magazine. On one side it had been bracketed by the usual run of ads plugging carnal delight, on the other by a dead-serious advertorial admonishing against just such pleasures. But there'd still been an upside to my editorial burial: It was not uncommon for this particular advertorial to be the most entertaining page in the magazine. For almost a year, our treasury had been able to count on a steady stream of advertising income from a cranky old expatriate moralist (one of those who must have come to the East seeking purity and found only venom) who filled his weekly ad space with furious invective against online pornography generally, though particularly against the burgeoning threat of wireless Internet access, which, as he felt it his duty to report, was exposing upright and unsuspecting people to an intolerable slew of pornographic radio signals whose potential moral-molecular effects were unknown).

So it surprised me not a little when I emerged into the KFC-scented office a few days later and found my Inbox swamped with reader comments and reader-composed ideal weather reports. Many had been sent in by our Turkish hipster readership, their points often lost amid the profusion of verbiage spilled in what their almost puppyish enthusiasm to express themselves in our somehow both insular and universal tongue. I almost felt dirty thinking so, but most of these submissions read like the sort of desperate attempts at elevated self-expression you might get from disadvantaged high school students who, having missed the scheduled departure to the life of the mind, never imagine that there will never be another service.

Not every Turk could talk American like Selim, that much was clear. These e-items wheezed on about sad days, bright days, clear skies, lazy afternoons and other worn weather tropes. All very fine, to be sure, but hardly the great leap forward I had envisioned. These e-mails washed over my inbox in such an engulfment that I found myself wishing I hadn't opened the forum up to reader comment.

Having read item after item of rubbish that was not only unpublishable as written, but which failed to contain even the germ of a publishable idea, I wanted to be done with it. I thought about subjecting the dozens of still unread e-mails to a filter that would discard those that failed to contain x% or more words with more than 7 letters. Or maybe I could cook up a filter to delete any e-mail that resorted to the simplest terms used to describe the psychological landscape, words like 'happy' and 'sad' and their extended network of unevocative kin. All of which is to say that my disgust and budding connivance go some way toward explaining why I nearly missed Braxator's mail. Not to mention that, having finally capitulated to the tempting fumes wafting up from the Colonel's chicken establishment and ordered up a chicken bucket and a biscuit box, I was already well on my way into the food coma that plagues the post-prandial office worker. Yet once my eyes had truly fixed on it, the Braxator name managed to refill whatever chemical cache had been depleted by the fried chicken and biscuits. Using a greasy finger to work the mouse, I opened the e-mail.

This is what Braxator wrote:


"Dear Editor,


Allow me to introduce myself. I am K. Wrangell Braxator, a reader recently won over to your publication by a series of odd circumstances, regarding whose nature you are no doubt as well au courant as I. Strange and fraught though these circumstances may be, I see no reason to let external considerations sully my deep appreciation for what I hold to be a very fine and fresh literary idea--or spiritual idea, as you might phrase it. Yet rather than follow my nature and allow this laudatio to go on and on, and on, I shall try, to the best of my questionable abilities, to continue along the seam of pithiness stitched into your initial weather-related serial item. In other words, ecce aeris:

Having digested your rallying cry, and having in some measure been inspired by it (though I reckon this had something to do with my sudden surplus of free time), I decided to make notes on the weather. A pleasant task, I thought. At best, I suppose I thought it would be instructive, uplifting. But all I managed with my observations was to confirm the horror of the tropics. Believe me when I say that the rain forest is not suited to the practice of ideal meteorology!

There are no inspiring cloud formations to be seen from among the groundcover of a thick Sudanese rain forest. And in a part of the world with a rainy season and a dry season and so little in the way of interstitial variety, there is very little to report in the way of the joyful motleyness you celebrated in your by all accounts elegant opener to Some Weather. Motleyness? Bah! Days here simply run into each other, lacking all distinction. One after the other: Same sudden dawn, same sticky heat filtered through canopy's moisture, same dusk delivered at the stroke of a gavel, same inability to discern whatever weathers reign above. So when I sat down one evening to write about the weather, there was nothing to say. Nothing. I had already experienced so many days exactly like it, what could be said? The weather here does not inspire. It exhausts. The only meteorological philosophy possible here is a nihilistic materialism, maybe sprinkled with a dash of eternal recurrence. But even assuming I were to chart such a philosophical course--no, it wouldn't be possible. Too much exposure to these airs is depleting, they have robbed me of my philosophical rudder, I would be forever jibbing, doomed always to spin around on an insignificant carousel. No, this is not the place for your philosopher-weatherman. You've seen the historical attempts at philosophy by Europeans stranded in the tropics. Why should this be any different?

Allow me nevertheless to close by engaging in a piece of philosophical frippery: It is thought that the biodiversity of the tropics stems from heat, i.e. that warmer temperatures promote faster cell mitosis and thus more frequent mutations and adaptive radiations. What happens if we apply the same analogy to the brain, to the thought process? Allow me, before following this thread to its conclusion, to counter any criticism of my logic by citing the fact of its provenance in the tropics. Very well: You say that cold weather sharpens the faculty reason. I say that hot weather dulls it, but not because the heat quells our thoughts and impressions. Rather the opposite. The fact is that the physical environment of the tropics produces more visual, auditory and olfactory impressions than do temperate or boreal climes. The heat produces more life, and the heat promotes quicker conduction of scent molecules. And while it would be foolish to claim that the brain must operate at a higher physical temperature in the tropics, it might reasonably be argued that it must operate at a higher metaphorical temperature, with the effect that its circuitry is overloaded by impressions which, in the din and glut, are never allowed to blossom into thoughts. And here there is a similarity to life itself in the tropics: While there may be more of it, its very profusion and internal contradictions tend to make it nasty, brutish, and short.

The weather is the same. Its very intensity precludes close observation. Through the leaves of the canopy, it is impossible to begin to appreciate the beauty of a cloud before it passes on and is gone. I can come to no other conclusion than that your philosophical weatherman is an inadvertent neocolonialist.


~


No sooner had I begun processing this reader submission--it was quite fine, and would carry the standard of Some Weather impeccably, yet being in direct e-mail contact with Braxator or whoever was posing as him did worry me--than yet another mail containing a Braxator document hit my inbox. The sender's name was Lance Davenport.


~


Oh Employers!


Alloying your enthusiasms for oceangoing and for trailblazing, you have often maintained that this project of yours was the future. Specifically, on several occasions you have laid claim to the future of athletic achievertainment. On occasion you have even gone so far as to dabble in a bit of blue sky thinking, speculating that your initiatives could do much more than merely change the face of achievertainment. And yet it always struck me that as helmsmen of a future-bound vessel, you had an oddly cavalier and unseamanlike way of charting your course, of maintaining the ship, of skirting what shoals and reefs loomed. You did not want to do any of the dirty work in the bilge, nor did you involve yourself in the poring intricacies of navigation. No, the dirty work was left to me, and the navigation to the myopic perspectives of your hutch of biologists. This when the bald fact is that the port you were yawing towards is grander than you had let yourselves imagine. My somber mood as I pen this last correspondence to you is the yield of an abundance of dashed hopes.

After an interim that has excruciated me, what with having been left adrift by you with my prospects for continued employment and cellular life in jeopardy, I write to you now to inform that it would appear that you yourselves have been pitched into the diesel-frothed wake of the past. There has been a hostile takeover of the vessel, and you have been heaved by the board. And it needn't have been this way. How could you have failed to act in our time of need? I realize you may have been up against some serious obstacles, but the notion that you could not find a way to communicate with me while your entire operation fell prey to outsiders is...unforgivable. And in your incommunicado interim, disaster. Disaster! Champagne should be consumed in celebration, not in deferment. You are flopping around in the open ocean without a lifejacket; and even the foam of the wake that momentarily kept you in spurious connection with the ship is dying around you. Moreover, you are drunk, unable to flop in harmony with the currents. Can you feel the extent of your loss, can you hear the desolate silence lapping at you from every quarter? I'd wager you wouldn't mind cashing this bankrupt reality in for a piece of gold-backed fiction!

It is Kang & Co., of course, who have struck at us in our hour of greatest weakness. Yes, employers, they are running the goddamn show! You have been bound hand and foot by these pirates and, like the meanest of scapegraces, eighty-sixed! Your future is not a cossetted berth in a gentle haven, but a sundered transit through the bowels of a school of sharks. Employers, you know the writing was on the wall. I saw it coming, you saw it coming--It came. And when it did, who was I to engage in a doomed resistance, let alone to loosen my own slipping purchase on the cutting gunwale of mere cellular survival by risking a violent defensive stand? Again, a failure in your provisioning is to blame. We could easily have laid up better defenses, no?

So now, the only piece of semibuoyant flotsam you have to hold on to amid the wreckage of your ambition is this lean fact: Having established a bit of a rapport with M. Kang, I have managed to retain a custodial role, when I could just as easily have been surrendered to the mercies of the keel. Please note that I make no warrants in this regard.

By custodial role I mean just that: I sweep the cages, bring the resources their once-daily cassava-and-sorghum slurry, fetch out their slops in the morning, and hose them down twice a week with silty brown water. I am charged with no technical responsibilities at the moment, but after I cut my custodial teeth, I hope they will deign to move me into tissue sampling or database maintenance. Who knows, maybe I could even move into recruitment, as they so delicately call it. A lot hinges on intensifying my working relationship with Kang. The others, I feel, would just as soon shave my head and lump me in with the resources. Luckily Kang sees me as an outlet for his sense of humor and his occasional episodes of philosophizing rather than as a resource for genetic harvest. If I had to characterize my highest ambition, I'd say it would be to be promoted back to the position of security manager. After all, that is where I thrive. I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong--you didn't give me the resources. As if removing X. could ever have been enough!

I hope you can be dignified enough in defeat to realize that where I am concerned personally, although my duties have been slightly crimped, the upshot of switching over to Kang & Co. could well be positive. The downside of the menace of takeover is gone, for one. What about the looming upside? Start with their business model. You don't need a topmost tier degree in marketology to see that it goes much farther than yours toward recognizing the potential of the science. The fact is that suckling-creation is and always will be a larger market than sporting entertainment. And that is what Kang & Co. are focusing on. They are perspicuous. Children are fucking important when you can have only one. And what with their growing wealth, there are more and more Chinese people who want their children to be all they can be. They want their children to be smart, diligent, tall, free of rickets and yaws and doubt and whatever other pesky afflictions may hinder a child's potential in the cutthroat economy. They want them to be able to jump higher and run faster and to absorb more oxygen than they or their forebears ever could when they were wee. They want young Chinese athletes to be able to compete with Africans in sprints. Of course, that is where our erstwhile proprietary infrastructure comes in: Our technology does the brawn, while theirs provides for the brains and the immune system and whatever else makes a man. They even have a prototype plan to breed bovine enzymes into future Chinese to allow them to survive on grasses and twigs in the event of a major crop failure. Which is what I call thinking ahead. Of course, Kang has expressed some concern that this might spawn an overly independent breed of restive nomads, meaning that a preference for narrow geographic horizons will have to be inserted into the sequence. The resulting cross-breed will be called the Dormant Angus Sinensis. And it doesn't stop there. Kang's outfit is full of forward-thinking ideas. I'm not privy to much in my lowly custodial position, but from what I've been able to piece together it looks like Kang & Co. are exploring the potential for integrating methanophagic bacteria into the cellular structure of the intestinal walls in order to enhance glucose delivery within the organism. A good analagous way of thinking about this would be along the lines of a turbocharger attached to a vehicular exhaust system: By harnessing the potential energy of cellular waste, the organism will be able to perform at higher levels, even while subsisting on a diet of beans and expired dairy products that would otherwise go to waste. In theory, such methanopahges could be tweaked to deliver energy at speed, i.e. for engineered anthroproducts involved in athletic achievertainments, or at a more stately pace, as might be useful in developing a prototype miner or deep-sea anthropoid salvage tool. Naturally, these kinds of 'emergent' metabolic properties would increase the rate of cellular oxidation and hence hasten mortality, but you can be sure that where Kang & Co. are concerned, this type of trait would be coupled with the 'partial immortality' solution that Kang was discussing at our first lunch meeting, as an offset.

But these are trifles compared to what I believe to be the hush-hush centerpiece of Kang's enterprise. Like many an audacious modern plan, this one traces back to the intoxicating visions of antiquity, and to the minds of the gifted atrociocrats who hatched them: A snippet of a document I saw on Kang's desk one day while delivering my perimeter security report to him has led me to believe that he might be scheming to engineer a breed of martial eunuchs: Men able to reproduce only the power of the men who made them. And, as one would expect of these sleek and peacefully rising Chinese, the plan is refined, edified, and serene, involving none of the messy surgical operations and suddenly imposed gonadal losses of yore. If the drawing I saw is to be believed, these new eunuchs will be born not with a penis as such, but with a nearly fleshless purgative member, about two inches long, resembling nothing so much as an extruded urethra. Such an organ would confer all the practical eliminatory advantages of the penis while completely eliminating the volatile sexual downside that has cast so many invading armies into frenzied and prostrate disarray. Of balls, naturally, there can be no mention. One cannot--as I'm sure you cannot--help speculating whether such an aboriginal excision of the gonads might not find its counterpart in a set of instincts modified to suit the prerogatives of their negator. Employers, meet Homo Castratus Bellicus Sinensis. There can be no doubt that we live in interesting times!

Another development that might interest you, from a purely technical point of view, is that the Dutch spies on whose destiny I was awaiting your decision, have been converted from organizational captives to operational resources. Genestock. I tell you, Kang seizes every opportunity to serve his customers. The Chinese lack the squeamishness of the putative intra-racial sympathy that prevented us from integrating white sequences into our operating genestock. Who can deny that Kang is correct when he says that his commitment to sampling genes from all across the human spectrum will lead to a better overall product line, and a better ratio of outlay to yield? For the case at hand, he has something very specific in mind: Like a good Dutchman, Piet the chimp activist is as tall as a beam, and Kang hopes to splice the gene for just that tallness into his product sequence line. This will be very advantageous in future business meetings between Chinese and northern European executives. He has not decided on an application for the girlfriend Ten Eyck yet, but he is working on sequencing her code to see what parts of her can be translated into useful proteins for Chinese babies. If it were up to me, of course, and I don't mean to be course, merely frank, all Chinese girls of the future would come with the breasts Ten Eyck is dangling. The problem you get with white resources like this though, or I should say educated ones, as I'm sure you can imagine, is that they love to harp on the catechism of 'inalienable rights,' of which these two seem to think they are particularly possessed. I'd be disingenuous if I failed to admit that their situation vexes me a little bit, but I mean, come on: Here is a couple that instead of staying home to work diligently for Philips or Royal Dutch Shell, was monkeying around in the grimmer reaches of the southern Sudan. Shouldn't they be prepared to accept the consequences of their choices? And they talk about corporate responsibility! Need we mention to them that there is no sovereign in the southern Sudan? And without a sovereign, how could there be inalienable rights? Piet's inalienable right boils down to nothing more than a pitiable gaze. I will not allow it to go any further than such a pitiable gaze, though. Believe you me when I tell you that I will not hesitate to have him and his girlfriend beaten if the exchange of ocular viewpoints should again cross again into the verbal by so much as a word.

What of Kang's prospects for holding on to power down there, you ask? The answer is as simple as it is depressing. It is no secret that the Chinese know how to do business in Africa, so it should hardly crush you with surprise to know that Kang & Co. have also done us one better in terms of relations with the government. Where we lived in terror of both Khartoum and the rebel militias, not to mention a conscience that smarted in anticipation of being branded as human rights violators, Kang sees no reason to hide his activities, seeing them rather as a hallmark of foreign direct investment (f.d.i.) and a sign of prestige (s.o.p.). In fact, he has posted a liaison to Khartoum to lobby the government in hopes that it will be able to guarantee a steady flow of human resources.

I'm not sure whether on your yachtfreighted gallivant you ever paused to consider how much slack had bunched into my routine during the endgame leading up to the era of Kang & Co. Let's be honest--Gene harvesting and prototype splicing ground to a standstill well before X. was parted from the facility. Long having sensed his uncertainty, without his catalytic presence the scientists swooned into tropical torpor. Some came down with malaria and other fevers. The rest developed a nebulous lethargy marked by long sleeps, an indolent gait by day, and participation in the frantic drum and weed-smoking sessions of the Africans by night. One took the chimp whose dexterity gene he had been trying to sequence for a pet, trading in the jab of needles for the looping of banana gamepieces through the canopy in a lazy and pointless intersimian game. It is a remarkable thing to witness a man with a post-doctoral degree who, at a loss for what to do, decides to play a game with a monkey for the fun of it.

With the scientists sunk in their unfathomable doldrums, there was hardly much for me to supervise by the end. In those last days I would wander about the compound pondering the friability of all human enterprise, shut off in the closed and pointless loop through which I'd alternately chase and flee the fire of my thoughts. As I weighed the special impermanence of people and their undertakings in these doomed regions, and the oppressive-fugitive regularity of the region's weather, I may have dangled my own toe over the brink of tropical torpor. At other times I'd loiter around the front gate as the guards dabbled at the drafts they played with rocks in the dirt. When not loitering at the gate with a length of some jungly stalk dangled from my teeth lips like some apostate Huck Finn I'd be seeking the fullness of my time in a series of experiments with newfangled cassava recipes, not to mention a nearly constant stream of abortive attempts at executive summaries I never did dispatch.

The day I grilled cassava medallions with stewed okra and jerked vervet monkey, for instance, I penned an alternative ending for X. that provided for his delivery not onto the remorseless point of your steely fang, but into the bitterweet embrace of his childhood friend cum Vegas gambling buddy left in the lurch by X.'s failed bid to rig the Soup-a-Bowl. As I wolfed my jerked monkey cassava down in the sudden dusk, I thought it smacked both of historical revisionism and pure playful fantasy, depending on the view you took to it, and the morsel's specific composition of gristle and relish.

Or take the day when we noticed Kang & Co. beginning to string conspicuous sentries along the perimeter of our bio-fort, when, inspired by the Vichysoise and cured salmon and other historical attempts to express classical cuisine in reduced circumstances, I made a reduction of pulped cassava and mango spooned over a bed of rice alongside an assemblage of voluptuous jungly crudites I could only hope would not poison me. My savorment of this dish was set in what you might call the mythical-absurdist mode, where I somehow felt both constrained by form and wryly reconciled to the hopelessness of it all. The moment I had set down my fork and daubed crumbless my wispy beard, I got to work on an executive summary in which Kang's maneuvers on the perimeter acquired the fresh wisdom and agile profundity of an Alexander, or of Lao Tsu's ancient epigrammatic instructions on the exercise of bellicosity. In my scribbled summary, inevitably blossoming with smudges of the orange grease in which the spirit of my dish was dissolved, the spirit of a general dead 3,000 years swept away what feeble resistance central Africana could muster in her squalor. And there was a classical chorus to comment on the action and the negligent hubris that allowed Kang to sweep to such uncontested victory. Who were the chorus? The resources, in their cages, the genes and proteins of each and all joined in harmonious song. They sang in an African protolanguage with the clarity proper to essences and originals. Their wails were a crestfallen commentary on your vanilla-flavored milquetoast acquiescence to this modern-day Lao Tsu, on your emasculated failure to rise to the occasion and to fight the fight by which you would have posted yourselves to a greater destiny. From their barred grandstand, they trilled out the pro forma chorus to the anticlimactic confrontation that undid your project. I offer my translation:


For the foolishness of yachtfreighted investors!

And their blah whateverness as the prize slips away!

Lacking will and foresight to lay up weaponry in stores,

Today they are ranged 'gainst a foe they'll never stay.


Or, as the caged chorus pondered their own impending transfer into new and yet more sinister ownership, with the whine of bullets singing over their words as their old captors laid down arms and fled to the woods trailing monkeys and pieces of valuable laboratory equipment:


Fetched from the stewpot of the future NFL;

Stirred into a kettle for preparing the kids

Of the fretful fathers who in rising China dwell

Our traits to season the dish of he who highest bids.


Or this vituperative croon as I emerged from the loco sanctorum of my battered captain's cabin to meekly surrender the flag of your genetic flagship to the piratically victorious Kang:


Fiendish, treacherous lieutenant Braxator

Great the blow to the vessel thus inflicted!

Blind to the smirch of forsaking honor--

Be you banished, and by Satan conscripted!


It was a sequence (action, chorus, poste, riposte) that went on for some time as Kang hunted down the stragglers and then proceeded to negotiate the terms of my surrendered life. He ended with a victorious soliloquy that I feel obliged to omit out of respect, since the faintly ridiculous Hong Kong pronounciation would detract from what he had to say.

But, employers, my little foray into cassava dishes would not be complete without mentioning a certain dinner I cooked up a few nights before Kang's devastating strike. In terms of galley resources, I was down to bare pole. There was one cassava left in the kitchen, yes, but very little in the way of spice, garnish, relish, tang, zest and what have you. The problem was that the camp cook and his deformed assistant had started to refuse orders to go forage in the vegetable patch for fear of being shot to ribbons by Kang's sentries, or, if not that, of molestation by the troupe of wild chimps who had begun stalking fearlessly through our installation in solidarity with their caged coevals. Needless to say, the thought of plain salted cassava porridge for dinner made me tremble with fury. So I dug deep into an old bachelor's bag of tricks and made do with what I could. In earlier years I had been very adept at whipping up satisfactory meals from minimal and even half-rotten ingredients: Cuisine Clocharde, I'd called it. Which might fit well with Kang's methanophage plan, but that is another story. One cassava segment I pureed, cooked, salted. Another section I cut into dimes and fried in the last of the monkey lard, grinding some grass from around the tent into the frying medium for freshness. Then I peeled a final section into thin ribbons and soaked them in vinegar to be served raw: Cassava Tartare.

Though far from delicious, the composition had a certain internal harmony, and it comforted me to know that I had been able to conjure some variety out of a single cassava root. Which got me thinking, in terms of the narrative method of my next executive summary, along the lines of gritty naturalism as a way to simultaneously embrace and transcend the tedium of everyday life. In this final executive summary, I strenuously avoided formal convention, scorning every flourish of the literary register, making do instead with the words that were actually floating through my head as I cast my eye on our worsening situation. Here is an excerpt:

Fucking food tastes like shit. Goddamit. Why can't these fucking lazeabouts go fetch some greens, get a jump on things when I'm cooking? I guess someone else's legume isn't worth risking your neck for. No sense of fucking honor. Doubt I'd do it either. But why can't they hunt? Africans living in the jungle with guns should be able to fucking hunt. But no, these guys catch a cold and run indoors when a jackal farts. Mention a lion to them and they'll curl up like a child with a knife to its throat. There's no goddam excuse for it. Why did I volunteer for this? Why can't I be like every fucking other ex-merc and hold down a private security job in an office tower somewhere where you can look out the belvedere and see who's coming, then fucking draw a bead on them with all the laws of the sovereign on your side? Jesus Christ. There goes that slob guard again, picking his nose and eating it like a piece of fucking Christmas candy. Is this guy trying to shit me? What I wouldn't give to make all of this not real.

And so on. Do you realize that by the end our guards had started collaborating with the resources? One night they even braii'ed our prize chimp and fed the grilled strips of him in through the bars. And don't tell me you don't know which chimp I'm talking about, I've told you a hundred times: the one with the scientifically unique proportion of fast-twitch muscle fiber, the one that kept bending open the bars of its cage and chasing the guards and sowing general panic. Ask yourselves this: What if the braii'ed chimp somehow caused the resources to mutate? Then where would we be? In any case, loss to science though it may have been, it did give me something better to do with the cassava. Do you know what I reckon? I reckon that if we hadn't been in mortal danger in those days, my skills as a cassava cook would have made me the toast of the guards.

But now everything is different. I no longer have the luxury of voluptuous narrative methods, whether classical or surreal. Hell, after my demotion I can't even rely on the bluntnosed businessspeak of the executive summary. The only thing permitted to me in these reduced circumstances is the humble reportage of a custodian's progress report. Let me start by giving you an idea of how organized and effective my workaday life has become under the new Chinese command structure. Maybe that way you'll know how to run things if you ever get off your yachts and invest in anything again. Kang is a firm believer that humans should get up when the animals do, something about making the best use of our shared instincts, so reveille sounds at 6 o'clock sharp. Most days it is Kang himself with the trumpet, though he is a man with his moods, and at those times he appoints one of his less melodious lieutenants to do the honors. After that there are ten minutes of drowsy dread before the second and definitive blast of the Chinese horn. After that I have twenty minutes to splash water on my face, do my push-ups, shave, and don my linen boardwalk suit. For the sake of appearances and la paternidad, on my first few days under the Kang system I tried uphold the tradition of the Mexican flag ceremony. But Kang found out, and he told me to stand down and desist. In his view this compound is now a territorial possession of the PRC, by right of conquest. Besides, he says that Mexico has long abandoned its revolutionatry socialist principles, meaning that its flag should not be entitled to keep company with the red and gold standard. Before you giggle and scoff, imagine how you would feel if it were your flag.

After ablutions, it's time for muster. This is when Kang barks out the daily assignments to the staff, scientific and custodial alike. It doesn't matter: You're there, Kang orders you around. Of course, since the orders that bear on science are barked in Chinese, I haven't the foggiest about the working methods now in effect in r&d. When it comes to my role and that of the other African cagekeepers, however, things are pretty clear. After muster it takes me an hour to wipe down the cages and fetch out the slops. It is a routine without variation, unless one of the resources soils himself overnight in pungent protest against his captivity, in which case my work is a bit more motley. Nothing like a motley shitstorm, hey? The other thing that can lend a little variety to the cleaning of the cages is that the resources are sometimes inclined to engage me in dialogue. Thankfully I can't understand most of what they say, but they appear to be petitioning me for help. My guess is that they regard my white skin either as a sign of gullibility or of some underlying capacity for empathy, as if the relative thinness of my patina somehow made me more susceptible to their feelings. They are barking up the wrong tree, of course. If I had a grand for every time appeals made to me have gone unanswered! There is also the matter of me having what you might call a kind face, which has been nothing but a blessing in my career, since it serves as a sort of passepartout, consistently opening doors for me that any sensible person would keep shut. I've often wondered about this face of mine. Now that I'm on the subject: What might I have accomplished by using this face 'for good?' Perhaps I could have used it to free some hostages, to smooth the way for a pension plan that would demand shareholder sacrifice, maybe to raise good children and become a pillar of my community. Nonsense naturally. I believe my use of it has been the best one possible: To tempt lady fortune into dealing me a good hand, time after time. The old crone is a sucker for a sweet face. Everything else is as perishable as fortune--why not go for the best the world has to offer?

I really should have a confab with Kang to let him know the resources are trying to fraternize with fugitive intent. I might also let him in on my plan for how best to restrain such impulses: Foster a hierarchy among the resources, hatch a little social system on them with its own sticks and carrots, its own masters, peons, insurgents and informers. If we delegate authority to some resource leaders, we will have outsourced the greater part of enforcement. Better part of valour, better part of management. Like most genial moves, this is simple.

After cage-cleaning, I report to Kang for my midmorning assignment. At first it bothered me having to bow and scrape to the guards posted at the flaps of his Victorian jungle tent, but I am as adaptable an exemplar of the species as any, and by this point it has pretty much gone to muscle memory, allowing me to abstract from my performance as an active token of subservience. Within the gloom of the tent, Kang is always at his desk, either analyzing a gene sequence on the computer or talking to China on his dragon-embossed satellite phone. Then I am compelled to wait for a few minutes, shifting my weight uncomfortably from one elderly leg to the other until Kang gets off the phone or sees fit to look wearily up from his work. At which point I ask, How are you getting on, Sir? to which he replies Step by step, my good ferrow, we're crossing that bridge. Then he will entertain me briefly with an anecdote from the animal kindgom or the realm of genetic engineering. He might ask, for instance, whether I think it might be wise to investigate the genetic underpinning of the cellular metabolism of loggerhead turtles as a tine in his multi-pronged effort to develop 'partial immortality solutions.' Or might mention that his outfit's Chinese cloning facility had recently recorded a significant success, though always with the caveat that he is afraid it is not possiber to give you the precise detairs. With these formalities out of the way, Kang gives me my assignment, which is nearly always one and the same, and also, in its way, a formality: To take a tour. By this he means to walk around our site and pick up any trash and unroot any weeds that may have shot above ground since the day before, and to report to him any irregurarities that I might encounter along the way.

There are usually none of the first or the third items, and since finding a container of herbicide about a week ago, there isn't much of the middle one either. Of course, my heavy application of it has also impacted my vegetable patch, but it's worth having my cassava with a little less relish to avoid the indignity of bending my old back to pull up weeds. My tour lasts me until lunch, also always the same, after which I am granted a siesta in recognition of my advanced years and the toll taken by the heat on the body that did not come equipped with the 'thermal disippation gene' Kang has been trying to develop for what he envisions as a new class of Chinese, or rather Afro-Chinese, high-temperature workers.

After a mosquito-troubled siesta on a hammock stained by the carcasses of moths and the burst eggs of lizards that will never be, I have only two more tasks: To supervise the cooking of the cassava-sorghum slurry, and to distribute the ration to the resources. My supervision is sorely needed. I have learnt that without it, the mess staff will begin immediately to take liberties. They will embezzle cassavas and sorghum for personal use--which weakens the resources and undermines the entire foundation of what is now Kang's project, and will continue to do so until the methanophagic sequence is inserted. Or they will neglect to cook the cassavas thoroughly, resulting in nights of unbroken moaning and terrible cramps for all. Once I even caught the deformed sous-chef spitting into the gruel, his face twisted into Schadenfreude's serpentine grin. Usually my discipline is confined to a sharp voice raised in anger or mockery, but for this I had to give him a sound thrashing. The only way to improve on its soundness would have been to administer it with the legendary chicotte, a cruelly lacerating whip fashioned from a strip of cured hippopotamus hide, much beloved of King Leopold's lieutenants in the Congo Free State. I am beginning to understand how teachers must feel about the recidivist idiocy of their charges.

It is a pitiful irony that the supervisory and custodial staffs here believe themselves superior to the incarcerated genetic resources, when the truth is that the only reason they weren't themselves herded into cages is their inferred genetic inferiority. I'm afraid the same holds for me. It's not like Kang keeps me around just because he likes me. What can I say? Sometimes it just pays to be inferior. In any case, the cooking and doling out of provender lasts from 4 to 8 P.M. Again, no variation here. As you can imagine, it really tests my patience to put up with the idiotic antics of the kitchen staff every day in my new position as elevated subaltern, not to mention the groveling entreaties of the resources as their trembling eyes survey yet another pitiable culinary debasement of the earth's bounty.

Night falls during mess duty, and after dinner a kind of quietude settles over the camp. I'm sure you're unaware of this, never having inspected your own investment, so I'll tell you: The consumption of sorghum-cassava gruel has two salient metabolic properties. This first is that, owing to the meal's high starch content, it quickly puts those who consume it to sleep. The next is that, for whatever gastric reason, it promotes flatulence, even in Africans. Meaning that just as I am settling into my hammock after another exhausting day, my wistful thoughts are punctuated and scattered by a chorus of wind breaking out of the resource cages. Some are blunt and powerful, others long and elegiac. But there is a particular fart, issued from the ass of I don't know which peacefully sleeping prisoner, that sounds like the cough of a man who is ill: Percussive, phlegmy, redolent of death. And this is the sound, combined with the incessant falsetto whine of the hyenas that surround our camp at night, that haunts me into the shallow grave of each night's sleep. Our Chinese masters, of course, have none of these problems. Their arrival at the facility coincided with the delivery of a refrigerated containerful of non-flatulent Chinese food. The Chinese also make their beds at the end of the camp opposite the cages of the slumbering resources and the adjacent cots and hammocks of their adjunct supervisors. I'd even venture to guess that Kang even sleeps with earplugs. As it was before, so it is now: The foreign exploiters of the central African jungle continue to live in insulated privilege.

So now, my dear employers, now that I've given you the downside, the upside, my insights from the inside and perspectives on the outside, it is time, as you might say, for the upshot, the low-down, and little else besides. I'll be brief though, because who can really say? In which case, in the limited ambit for expression with which I hereby circumscribe myself, the upshot is that we stand at the dawn of a new era that is passing strange. Whether I or you will be able to participate in it as envisioned may be debated. We had our chance, of course, and a good one it was, but you'll be relieved to learn that I exhausted my font of reproach at the beginning of this custodial report. Dry runs the well.

Very well then. I would venture to say that we will see new forms of life, human and semihuman and quasihuman and superhuman and subhuman and quasi-supersubhuman. Of doubt there can be none. We will see new heights of athletic achievertainment, new profundities of endurance in the armies of the laboring, new methods for channeling and preprogramming the will of those masses, of which we are eminently a part, who are born to breathe and eat and sleep and engender new life, and to die, methods that will allow them to build a city in a week and an airplane in a day. We may even see grass-grazing humans with an appearance reminiscent of Tiger Woods, not to mention weightlifters and sprinters given that extra oomph by what otherwise would have been mere wasted flatus--for the sake of specificity, I will predict that my native Mexico, with its legumocentric diet, will provide a significant showcase for such flatus-charging. And unless something goes dramatically wrong, we will almost certainly see tall Chinese, aquatic Chinese, hyperintelligent Chinese, and Chinese endowed with Kang's mysterious 'partial immortality solution'--party members only, of course. And who can doubt that the greatest wars in the history of our bewildered species loom just over the horizon whither we blindly shuttle?

What remains the most uncertain, as I will never tire of stressing, is our own invitation to participate in the festivities. It would be a mistake to think that our own presence or absence matters more than a fart in the wind. Which is where a little piece of redemptive fiction can come in handy, if only for a fleeting balm.

Fiction? Yes, employers, now I have you! Surely you will appreciate this closing bit of fiction more than any sober analysis at this overripe juncture. You acquiesce? Alrighty then. So what will it be? As the closing movement to this vain, silly and heartless enterprise, it had better be good. Thus, after due consideration and consideration's due, what I propose to leave you with is my vision for the ideal engineered human being. Assuming I were in charge of the laboratory equipment and the resources, not to mention I were master of the science.

The first thing I should mention is that my ideal is worlds apart from the visions of next-generation football players and methane-boosted workers that first spurred you and now goad Kang. This ideal fellow of mine is no more able to juke a cornerback than a cornerback would be able to head up a jungle genetics laboratory. Nor could my fellow split a boulder by cutting the cheese, I'm afraid. He is not particularly strong. Please know too, that this vision is far removed from my own person, however true it be that he and I have a trait or two in common. The artist cannot help leaving some trace of himself. And yes, you read rightly--he. But do not take me for the exponent of a chauvinism. Even though we may be firmly implanted in this age of genetic wonderworking, the leap across the sexual barrier remains broadly alien. Compared to such a fundamental difference, the flatus boost, Dormant Angus and even partial immortality seem soothing, familiar, normal--I like to think of them as patches tacked onto an unchanging source code. Is it realistic to think that technological breakthroughs should have the power to budge the organizing tension of all human endeavor? Science supplant the eternal truths of philosophy? Gene science transgender me? Phoo!

This opening has been more vaporous than I would like. It has been meteorological, in the pejorative sense. So come, let us settle onto solid ground. Let us behold the man. Allowing for proper development and upbringing & c., I would like this ideal man to be observed at around age thirty. In appearance he is not remarkable. Not tall, nor is he particularly short. He is slight without being vanishing. He is good looking enough to be considered handsome, though never disruptively so. As for the colour of his skin, it is far from black, but Aryan supremacists would clamor to dispute his claim to whiteness, were he to advance one. In point of fact, his complection is somewhere in the middle of the long crescent described by the intermingling of hominid hides from the Mongol steppes to the Karakoram crags through to the grim beaches that rim the North Sea. Let us call it olive, alloyed with equal parts of the bounded Mediterranean and the open ocean of the steppe. But the color of the skin is striking only for its normality, its middle-of-the-roadness, its Mittelmenschlichkeit. The only truly remarkable thing about the appearance would be the eyes. These shine with a sardonic intensity peculiar to those of profound intellect. Large, black, riveting, the eyes have the power first to arrest and then to scatter the objects they touch. Incandescent as they are, their intensity is not to be confused with the shallow lustre of the zealot. Also notable are the hands, which are long-fingered, supple, and delicate enough to be considered feminine. They are hands made to flourish a pen. But the eyes and the hands are more than the aggregate of their apparent qualities. These are markers pointing within.

So what gives, then, within? Of course, the within, the character, cannot be described as such, but only obliquely and in terms of "outlook" or "disposition," which, in the case of this ideal fellow of mine, would have to be characterized as one of wicked disdain. He trains his powerful eyes on the world in order to debunk it, to dismember it, offering the ragged pieces up for sale as the wrought tokens of his wit. And it is precisely this wit that saves him from being a cynic, whose vision is undone by his inability to temper his bitter dish with the solace of humor, entertainment, play--not to say purpose. His disdain is that of the satirist, that great exponent of the traits that make us the most red-handedly human. This man sees the motive behind every act of charity, the creeping red taint on every herring, the unflattering cui bono in every arrangement settled among men. He has nothing but disdain for his countrymen and his city, but nor would he move anywhere else. Cretinous as they are, he knows they are the best of all possible countrymen and cities. It gives him comfort to despise them, to skewer them. But he does not relish using his talents to call out specific people, or to make himself enemies. He enjoys his life a bit too much for that. Which is not to say that he would not put his life on the line if there were cause compelling enough. But not everyone lives in interesting times of the oppressive variety, and my ideal man does not believe himself oppressed enough to warrant being consumed on the pyre of martyrdom. He wishes to see Epicurous's bitter gift through to the end.

Instead of conjuring a barricade to run to, he uses his considerable mental capacities to get himself taken on as an intellectual professional of some sort, what exactly doesn't matter. The chief thing is that the job is easy. Maybe he teaches, maybe he consults, maybe he uses his pedigree to make hedged oracular pronouncements about things that are impossible to know. It doesn't matter. He could be a professional poker player for all I care. The chief thing is that there be plenty of time left over to pursue his reading and the odd bit of mischief, on which more below. I considered making my fellow independently wealthy, but rejected this boon on the grounds that he would then fail to absorb enough absurdity to leaven his wit. And that would make my ideal fellow a non-starter.

I feel it should be noted here that this ideal fellow, unlike, say, myself, is free of compromising involvements. He does have a job, but it is a normal job that neither tasks him too much nor rewards very gorgeously. Keen to maintain the open independence of his sea, he is expert at navigating away from any compromising or mercenary landward entanglements. He does not, for example, have a girlfriend. I would say that the main respect in which he differs from me morally is not that he has any greater capacity for goodness or any greater aversion to wickedness, but that he simply does less evil as a result of his enhanced independence. And this independence, notably, includes independence from too much money, access to which, past a certain relatively niggardly threshold, stands in direct proportion to outflow of wickedness. It is my belief that a man will be as wicked as circumstance allows. In this case, as a result of both radical independence and meagre means, he simply has no scope for visiting his wickedness upon others, at least not directly. As we shall see below, his wickedness is what we might call sublimated. At the same time, my ideal character is imbued with a notion of the Quixotic. Although not exactly an altuist, the romance and absurdity of lost causes and vain pursuits very much appeal to him. If someone were to ask this fellow, for example, and as has been asked before, 'This battle offers no stipend, and no reward. Will you fight it?', his impulse would be to assent every time.

The particular things that my ideal fellow reads are not that important, only that he read in general. Heavy stuff of course. Heavy, heady, humanist stuff. Perhaps he reads Shakespeare. There is a good chance he reads hoary old chaps like Racine, Voltaire, Diderot, Montaigne. And while not exactly a teutonophile, I can see him getting into grizzled greats like Schopenhauer, Goethe, and the redoubtable Ungern Von Aschaffenberg. In fact, he makes a principled point of only reading authors who are dead, in order to accentuate the frailty of his own existence. He believes that to read literature is to gaze into the chasm of mortality. The authors provide him with a sort bass line over which the riffs of his day to day thoughts are superimposed. Of course, if any of these authors happens to be "in" among a circle on which my ideal fellow is tangential, he will shun them until he can be sure they are once again and firmly out. Although I'd be mortified to have him confused with Kang's Dormant Angus, it has to be said that my ideal fellow does thrive on marginal pastureland. In fact, marginality is central to his outlook. Though perhaps not quite as unequivocal in his formulations as, say, the French situationists, he does believe, in his way, that society can only be understood by opposing it. I can assure you that he does not oppose the world in any physical or, shall we say, hard-core sense. I suspect our ideal fellow is actually too frail to effectively man the barricades. He may even be a self-avowed coward, although it should be noted that he uses this professed timorousness as a foil for other kinds of audacity.

Now, if you think that this gentleman sounds like a real charmer, and go on to wonder whether he might not be a ladykiller, the answer would have to be no, albeit from a background of yes. You see, as described above, his gaze is magnetic, and the ladies are indeed drawn to it. But the same gaze is also devastating, and after being drawn to it as moth flutters to flame, these women feel discovered, betrayed, as if this fellow had somehow been able to rifle through their secrets and dirty underwear with no more than a searing glance. It is true that women are drawn to the knowing glance, but it is at least as true that they are appalled by the glance that knows too much. And there you have my ideal fellow's problem with the womenfolk. It cuts both ways, actually. His congenital disdain rarely allows him an unguarded moment, and he cannot begin to count the number of times he has felt his loins' desire succumb to the rank disgust that accompanies the discovery of a mercenary intent. Which is not to say that he is incapable, whether of the act or of a relationship; but that it happens rarely, and that, to paraphrase Whitman, the touch of another is about as much as he can bear.

But all this--this rubbish about appearance and outlook and reading material, this chaff about women--all this, however much it may help you get a taste of what lies at the bottom, is external to the heart of the matter. The main point about my ideal fellow, I mean the savory kernel of him, is that he has an almost preturnatural gift for trickery, dissimulation, hoaxing, in short: Fiction. And by that I do not mean to say that he is a writer, properly speaking. Nor is he professionally engaged in any other type of narration. Instead, he draws on the same skill set as the ad man and the spokesmen of powerful personages keen to elude opprobrium and shame. Of course, this ideal fellow's heart is both too pure and too sordid for such fripperies. How to categorize a master of fictions who is neither an author nor a marketeer? If you must have a category, I would offer this: Sovereign lord of bullshit.

Now, although he is a superior verbalist and storyteller, and with a keen eye for subtle ironies and the sort of detail that can unleash cognitive cascades, my ideal character believes that novel-writing or essay-writing or poetry or what have you are all both too vain and too indirect for his purposes. Especially now that people don't read very carefully anymore, and the world's grammars are in a state of babeliferous decay. The only kind of novel he would be capable of producing would one written under another name, preferably as an elaborate hoax. And the only essays he'd ever write are those vehemently stating the case, full of convincing examples, for an absurdity in which he'd rather vomit than believe. Our ideal fellow prefers to tamper with perceptions in a way that is both more self-effacing and more direct than literature. The truth is that, for the brief period during which it is to be his privilege to feel his gills ruffled by the invigorating gusts of time, his aspiration is to mislead people. He writes false letters to the editor, leaks phony press releases, submits reviews of books that do not exist, trashes the reputation of insignificant persons long dead, excoriates the platforms of political parties that have disbanded, and blasphemes against evangelisms espoused by none. If he had the stomach for it, he would not object to the life of a false prophet. If he existed, you can be sure that the world's weight of dangerous confusion would begin to multiply. Here, if ever there was one, is a man to convince the world that the sky is red, and the world's end nigh. I'd also like to think that he would be responsible for at least 10% of the jokes being told in the city of his residence at any given time. Moreover, my ideal fellow will work hard to undermine language: Engaged in learned disputes with the lexicographers and grammarians of several languages, he would invent and disseminate new conjugations for the verb "to be," would argue that the meanings assigned to the modal verbs "should" and "could" were all wrong, would introduce new gradations of conditionality, and generally make people to speak in tongues. If my ideal fellow must be thrall to some greater enterprise, if you insist that he be possessed by a vision, it is this: By inventing the perfect joke, and by broadcasting it into all the world's corners at once, he would like to see the machinery of human affairs seize on its axis and grind to a juddering halt, to see humanity's billions spill dizzily onto the streets and succumb to an epidemic of hysterical laughter lasting for a day and a night or a night and a day, after which nothing would ever be the same. What we are talking about is a subspecies of man unique to one person: Homo Ludens.

Now that I'm at it, and since I would be down here at the lab with access to all manner of enhancements, I suppose I should toss in a few of Kang's "enhanced anthropoid features." What is ideal should be better than what is, after all. One thing I think my design for an ideal man should allow for is a way to bypass the terrors of restless leg syndrome when he gets old. I, who am old, can't stop shifting the position of my legs in a vain quest for comfort, and I think that my ideal fellow should be spared this demeaning fate. There must be a way to tweak the genome to defeat this most restless of syndromes once and for all. Come to think of it, such a patch would allow me to make a lot of money. And maybe, if I'm to be completely honest with myself, I would like my ideal fellow to come endowed with a very large capacity for enduring pain. That way he could continue telling his jokes and spouting his absurdities in mockery and in defiance of anyone who would torment him into silence. Finally, in an act of artistic restraint that beggars belief but reveals me in my breathtaking mastery, I would abstain from including Kang's 'partial immortality solution,' courtesy of the magisterial loggerhead turtle.

And that, my dear employers, is the man. Behold him.


~


I had printed the latest Braxator installment and taken it to a coffee house overlooking the strait's hallucinogenically mutable waters. Braxator's prolixity meant that my coffee had gone dead cold before I could get halfway through. It also meant that as I read it, there was time enough for the sunny day to give way to a squall that passed through the strait and disappeared as quickly, unveiling a sky burnished bluer than before. More time was passing than I wanted. More than any of the previous installments, this one was plainly a load of nonsense. Its only purpose seemed to be to disorient, to confuse, to beguile. My gullibility be forgiven, but I think that if certain details had been less tellingly ridiculous, or if the style had been just a tad less precious, I would have been willing to believe that Braxator had fallen afoul of a gang of wildcatting Chinese gene scientists in the Sudan. But his attitude, his way of expressing himself--not to mention the bizarre sequence about cassava recipes and potential progress reports--made it seem no more than deranged invention. The clincher had to be Braxator's 'ideal engineered human.' Small, slight to the point of femininity, even physically craven, burdened with impediments to intimacy--who the hell would alloy these qualities into their ideal man? I could appreciate the bit about prankstership, granted, but if chance conspired to give me the latitude to create an ideal human being, I think I could come up with something better than a mercurial figure whose highest aspiration was to tell a joke. Yet when I finally lifted my eyes off the last page and looked onto the strait's now spangled waters, I had the distinct feeling that there was some fine print, some hidden message, some scrawling on the wall that I could not make out.

My earlier decision to suspend judgment and avoid becoming overly involved still stood. I had better things to do than get entangled in a series of absurdities that appeared, for whatever reason, to have singled me out. I still needed to find female companionship, for instance. But I did know an interesting piece of writing when I saw one. If it bedevilled me, it would entertain others. And since there was no mention of the tetchy Özgür & co., I reasoned there could be no harm in placing this installment in Anatole just as I had run the others. It appeared in our next online issue a week later.

Later that day I saw Selim for a beer at a place downtown. I arrived early, and was chatting with the bartender in my broken Turkish--pursuing my favorite fruitless line of questioning, Kurdish nationhood (to which the response was usually that there was no problem, and that Kurds did not really exist)--when Selim walked in. He was ill-shaven, and the dark, swollen flesh under his eyes made it look as if his fatigue had given him a beating. I stood up, and we drifted over to an open table.

I told him he looked like he could use a beer.

"You're telling me," he said. "I'm fucking bushed." Expressing himself, as ever, in impeccable American vernacular.

"What's been keeping you up at night?" I asked.

"Just these student papers, man. I wish it were something more edifying, but twice a semester, fortune spits on the man who professes physics to undergraduates, forcing him to come to grips with umpteen examples of recidivist idiocy, all day and late into the night."

"Has anybody told you you look like hell?"

"Make me lame in hand," said Selim. "Make me lame in foot and thigh. Take out my loosened teeth. While life stays, so am I."

"What's that?"

"Montaigne, my friend, on the indomitability of the human spirit."

"Nice."

Beers appeared. Selim pounced on his, drinking nearly half the measure in a single rapacious draft, the foam of it expiring uneasily on his unkempt mustache. He looked like one who has been wandering in the desert.

The first beer's conversation was focused on the deficiencies of his students. His stridency took me by surprise. I had never seen him this way. "These little shits are just at the university to see how it feels to spend a little money on something distinguishing and immaterial. A degree. Something to prepare them for the rest of their unthinking cruise through life. None of them are there to fucking learn. Young Turks my ass." Toward the end of our first beer he was talking wistfully about using the remainder of the term, in which was supposed to cover electricity and magnetism, "to feed them a bunch of lies."

"Like what?"

"The wrong principles, the wrong equations, the wrong phenomena, the wrong examples. The wrong tests, the wrong grading scale, the wrong methods. Altogether the right approach. My highest hope is to get them all electrocuted."

I thought about invoking the Brecht quote about the government dissolving a people it didn't like in order to elect another, but held my tongue. There was a smouldering look in his black eyes that something told me not to test. Instead, I grunted vague assent to the litany. I had never taught; who was I to say?

Halfway through the second beer, I started telling him about my own, less substantial concerns: The latest Braxator installment, how it seemed to have derailed into fantasy. I spoke at length, detailing the latest post's absurdities and inconsistencies. I rattled off the laugable genetic engineering plans attributed to Kang, reserving particular scorn for Dormant Angus. The language Braxator used to discuss bioengineering and genetics and what have you, I told him, betrayed an ignorance apparent to even a layman.

"How dumb do you have to be to think that you can just add a dash of loggerhead DNA to the genome to make people live longer? Clearly the work of someone who doesn't know what he's talking about, right?"

Selim appeared not to be thinking at all. The fiery eyes had glazed over; he appeared to have heard nothing. He was jogging his leg up and down automatically on the ball of his foot.

"Selim?" Nothing. "Selim, did you hear me?" Still nothing. Just fidgeting at two Hertz. "Selim!" The effect of raising my voice was to send Selim's knee shooting up into the table, toppling my beer onto its side and sending a gush of foamy liquid onto my lap. Now I had his attenion.

"Shit, sorry. Just had a spell of flatus cerebellus."

"Are you sure you're alright? Maybe you should go home and take a breather."

"No, man, sorry. I'm just stressed and overworked. Let me get you another beer. We'll have eternity for a breather." He summoned the orbiting waitress and ordered. A moment later she returned with a beer and two outsized whiskeys. "I think I need a little boost," he winked.

"If you say so." We drank too quickly and for too long, and it ended up being not quite enough.

~


In the week intervening, I did a translation of an academic paper about some incomprehensible psychological issues touched on by an incomprehensible German novel. Something about deriving proofs for the wisdom of the species' extinction from psychological disorders existing only in Germany. I went on walks, trying to appreciate the weather's medley and taking notes that I was pleased to think would turn into nice little nuggets for use in Some Weather. The latest weather phenomenon that came to occupy me was the phantom nature of spring; how a series of nearly indiscernible positive temperature and sunlight adjustments could provoke such an explosion of renewal. I wondered if weather phenomena could similarly hasten the crossing of psychological or spiritual thresholds, and thought it might make a good post if I could find a more compelling way to express the thought. I participated in Anatole's franctic charette that Thursday as usual, drinking coffee and craning my neck over copy late into the night.

Except there was something unusual going on as we scanned copy and set type and sipped acrid instant coffee. It was Yelda, the features editor. We had been friendly before, sure. She sat close to me. Our relationship was congenial, if not exactly warm. But that evening, it was as if a circuit had been tripped. She noticed me. She seemed to have become a part of my desk. I didn't exactly find it disagreeable. Besides being very well put together, she had a cute accent that made every word a pleasure to hear, slow and syrupy and inflected at the wrong places. I couldn't fathom the sudden interest. It's not like I was in great demand in those days. There were plenty of better-looking, richer, funnier, friendlier and more accomplished foreigners for the sultry Turkish ladies to choose from. And it had been so long since I'd last touched a woman that there must have been a nimbus of desperation trailing after me and thwarting all prospects for a dalliance. Yet there she was, approaching me for help she didn't need, unsubtly telling me that she was without plans for the weekend, suddenly assuming the most provocative postures at the edge of my desk. Toward the end of the night I cashed in what courage I had and asked her out. She was delighted. I thought it would be better than nursing a bottle of fraudulent wine alone, too.

We met the next evening for dinner at a nice rooftop restaurant with a sweeping view and a vaguely stirring old Ottoman name. The city's multitudes of shimmering lights looked as if they had been lit and arranged expressly to be seen through this lavish windowbank. Yelda shimmered like the city. Her dress was spun from a yellow crepelike material run through with sparkling filaments, and her eyes were set off by a streak of the innocently garish glittery shadow favored by Turkish women in those days. I took her hand as we were led to table. Its delicacy excited me, light and cool like a vernal breath. Her nails were painted the stigmatic color of dried blood. She walked with a sinuous hip-driven grace that seemed made for the occasion, as if the gait were part of her outfit, something she had modeled variously in front of the mirror before settling on a particular amalgam of step and strut and pivot and sweep.

Our date moved like a clockwork mechanism. That's the best way I can put it. Like a vehicle boarded. We drank wine, we ate light and varied foods. We talked about her family and mine. We shared some stories and I paid some compliments. We reached across the table to inspect the necklaces that each of us wore, mine an amulet of obscure purpose gained in Egypt, hers a lacey affair chosen for this occasion. When dessert came I dashed all pretence and asked directly if she would come home with me. She giggled faintly, then parried. A flare of mischief lit her eyes when she said that her attraction to me come over her quite suddenly. I told her I had had the same impression. We had worked side by side for almost a year now. Why these sudden sparks? What was it that drew her to me now? She hesitated, her eyes two twinkling facets set against night's gauzy black, looking for all the world as if they had been set by a jeweler into the panorama of lights unfolding in the wide rebates of the city past the window. For a moment, she seemed the beauty of the city personified. Then she put out her hand.

"It was your section about the weather."

"Oh?"

"Yes. Before that I couldn't understand why you had come here. I thought maybe you were lost and this was where you ended up, like a boat in a storm. But when I read your section I began to understand. You see beauty where others see nothing."

That may have been so. Still, I told her, her initial assessment had not been far off the mark. Maybe not a storm, though. More of a pleasure cruise, and I had been seduced by this port to moor my craft.

"I think that's beautiful." I tried to shrug it off. It's not like the way I conducted my affairs was unique, whether in place or time. Nor was I haler or happier than most.

"But you are the only one I have met. I want to feel the weather with you."

A grin was tugging at the corners of her mouth.


In my bed the following morning, Yelda turned to me and said she'd seen something she wanted to tell me about. It was something from earlier in the week that came flooded back as she lay in bed thinking about me that morning. She occupied a window desk at the office, and earlier in the week she had seen a couple of Chinese men in blue and white track suits standing across the street from our building for several minutes. They were looking up at the windows and taking notes. She'd seen them take pictures of staff members as they came out the door. They'd also made a telephone call or two. With the charette coming up she'd forgotten about it, but now that she'd read the latest Braxator installment in the new issue and had had time to connect the dots, it seemed maybe she should mention it.

Purely coincidence, I responded. Tourists, likeliest. And if not, then they were men with some business that did not concern us. The Chinese number a billion and a third, and a billion and a third are their inscrutable purposes. There was no sinister Chinese connection. My pronouncement sounded suitably profound, and it put a seal on the conversation. I was less sure than I sounded, but I did not want my time with her to pass in the umbrage of concern.

We spent the rest of the weekend entwined. It was the first time I had been with a Turkish woman, and there was something pleasant about our alienness to each other. She did not know the codes for my behavior, nor I hers. The way in which we came together seemed totally novel, as if what was being discovered were greater than the sum of its parts. I felt inclined to study her reactions, her expressions, the things she was saying. She had my full attention.

Most of the first day was spent in bed, and most of the second strolling along the strait. Neither had ever held such allures. I don't remember much else of what we said. Sometimes it is important not to talk too much.


On the Monday I was in for a shock. Yelda was standing on the second floor landing as I plodded up the stairs through tendrils of proto-American fried chicken smell to attend our weekly editorial planning meeting. An odd amalgam of mirth and rue rippled across her face as I mounted the last stair to kiss her. What was the look was for, I asked. De Rozier had come to the office, she told me, rather breathlessly. He wanted to see me. I looked at her without understanding.

De Rozier stood just inside the door to intercept me. Tall, slender, fey. He wore linen slacks and a herringbone jacket and shoes wrought from an unknown slithering creature. After fixing me for a moment with a look that was possibly benevolent, possibly wistful, he took me by the arm and steered me gently but firmly into his office.

The door closed. De Rozier began to speak easily in a drawl that stirred from some forsaken repository in the language.

"Well. Benny. Do you know why I called you in here?"

"No, Peter. What's going on?"

"Well. You know I hate for it to be this way, but we're gonna have to take it in another direction."

"Take what in another direction?"

"Your section. The literary supplement. What I mean to say is that our visions are...well. They're discordant. They're incompossible."

"I'm not sure I understand. I thought your policy was to exercise managerial restraint. What vision of yours is at odds with mine? What do you want me to change?"

"No, no, that's where you've got me all wrong. I'm not asking you to make any changes at all. I just think we're going to take it in another direction."

"But what do you mean by that? You've got to name the direction if that's where you want things to move."

"My dear boy. I'm sorry for your sake that this has to be so difficult, that it has to dawn so gradually in your skull, which is sure to make it smart more in the end, akin possibly to the tightening of a vice or a garotte. What I mean to be telling you, my dear friend, is that I feel, we feel, that the time has come for us to move on."

"Move on?"

"Move on. Part ways. Sever ties. Bid adieu."

"What the hell do you mean, Peter? You've never let anyone go. You've never even expressed an editorial preference on way or the other. Are you pulling my leg here?"

"I'm afraid your leg is being pulled nowhere but out of this office. The fact is that this reckoning is long overdue. We feel that your section has taken on an increasingly...elitist tone, an increasingly cliquish veneer, and an attitude that has struck me as ever more, let me use just the right word...esoteric." He was smiling viperously, this silver-tongued acme of a pyramid scheme.

"I held off talking to you about it for a long while, hoping that an editor's affinity for the wants and needs of his public might take hold and bring you around to our way of seeing things, which ultimately must be called more, well, reader-friendly, than the stuff you're selling. I believed that like a young tree you might be capable of righting your own growth to accord with the changing conditions of soil, sun, and water. Foolishly I see now. The seed of your editorship was afflicted from the beginning with a dangerous and inflexible mutation that led you to plow your own furrow, to the detriment of the plantation as a whole. Your flourishes of ivory elitism have no place in the fertile lowlands of an anglophone Anatolian cultural magazine. And we cannot afford to let you plow that furrow any longer. But I do get ahead of myself. I ended up giving a speech, when what I meant to do was show you the door. The speech may have had its merits, I'll admit, but I've always prided myself on being a capable, practical man. A brass tacks sort of man. The door is there. You must go through it."

I tried to stand up, but I was reeling. "Peter, what the hell is this? You can't let me go! People like my section. It's a success. People like the Braxator shit, and they're especially into Some Weather. The other editors will back me up."

"I'm sorry Bennie, but this organization is not modeled on a parliamentary democracy. Did you think this was a condominium association? It's over."

"I just can't understand this. I've been here for a year and you never said word one before this."

"Well, look at it this way. You were on probation, and you've now committed your last offense. I'm sending you up. But it's not within my remit to help you look at things this way or that way. Now if you'll clear your desk."

"Clear my desk?"

"You heard right. I'm sorry."

"Can't I at least sort through some papers, send some e-mails, have a coffee with my fellow editors? What's the hurry?"

"Bennie, I just feel that as a matter of policy I can't have you around the office anymore. The remaining employees should not fraternize on office property with one on permanent furlough. It's not the thing for morale. That's the way it is, and you'll do well to accept it. I'm going to give you ten minutes." He stood up and used his arm to make a little thoroughfare to the door.

I stood up and slipped past him, unable to bring myself to say anything else. I went to my desk and did as I had been told. Ten minutes of internally maudlin bitterness and it was over. What use making a scene? I spoke to none of my colleagues as I shuffled and sorted, my eyes hotly clouded with the humiliation of it all. I did catch Yelda's eye on my way out, though. Her look was nothing if not amused. Had she somehow made me into a patsy? Why?


Later that day I went to the Sinan Bey Internet Cafe to check my e-mail. Hakan manned the desk, but he was indifferent to my arrival. Gone was the sweet diagnostic camaraderie in which we had tracked my father's putative illness just a month ago. Good day and that was it. As if he didn't know me. Had he somehow learned that I hadn't flown home to attend my father's funeral after all? When I sat down to check my e-mail I could feel his eyes boring into me in a most unpleasant way. I didn't want to devote time to thinking about how I may have sullied the impression Hakan had of me, but nor could I ignore it. Why should my business be any of his affair? He was making a bad day worse, and I quietly hated him for it.

There were several e-mails, but only one of interest for our present purposes. It had been dispatched from the desk of someone named Wilbur Ken Ming Chan. It read:


Good Sir,


Far be it from me to wish any harm upon your head, much less to do such harm. But then that is precisely the formulation I once used--'far be it from me', you understand--in assessing my own proximity to the act of sending you an unsolicited communication. And wouldn't you know, here I am doing it now, sending you an unsolicited communication. Isn't it peculiar how circumstance can sometimes mysteriously align itself such that we undertake those actions that once had seemed remotest from our nature? Odd the causes, and murky the methods, that fortune compels us to take up one moment and abandon the next.

Allow me to introduce myself--and yes, politeness demands that I had done so at the very outset, though in my errand it was no small matter that a certain vigor of demeanor should be established, even prior to the introduction that is good form's due. My name is Wilbur Ken Ming Chan. I represent certain personages--I think you know very well who they are--and far be it from you to fuck with them.

Allow my to be pithy. You, good sir, give my superiors umbrage. They object to the characterizations of their activities that have appeared in the journal of which you are the literary editor. And though you may have issued the descriptions of our Sudanese activities under the gloss of fiction, those whom you have slighted and libeled are real enough. My highest superior takes particular offense at your heedless mockery of the Hong Kong dialect in English. As my superior's, ahem, executor in these matters, I cannot help but agree. And even from an objective viewpoint, I think many would join me in a chorus of outcry that your characterization of the dialect was nothing less than offensive.

But my employers' case goes beyond peccadillos of gustibus and coloribus. Your gross mischaracterization of my superiors' activities in the Sudan poses a serious threat to both the commercial and social goodwill enjoyed hitherto by the apparatus of their enterprise. Due to the ungodly sums of human and financial capital invested in the project to date, your editorial excesses risk running afoul of serious countermeasure. Big bears get angry when you punch them on the snout.

Please do not mistake my meaning. I am not a cruel man. As I stated above, far be it from me to project menace, wish harm, or inflict hurt. But I am a man with a mandate: If goodwill is impacted, the resulting ill will must come home to roost somewhere. You had better hope that your publication has a narrower circulation than its avid readership in south Sudan would indicate.


Cordially,


Wilbur Ken Ming Chan

Coordinator of Special Operations, K.A.N.G. Enterprises


~


"Always was a squirrelly bastard."

"Yeah. The problem is I don't see the angle. I mean the magazine was starting to do well. And then he goes and fires me. And I had the distinct impression that he was not above threatening me physically if I did not comply. Where does he get off?"

"Yeah man. The bastard axed you and cracked you. For no reason. Maybe he just had it in for you personally. Or has there been anything going on that he might be less than...pleased about?"

"I'm not sure. Do you think he has a thing for Yelda? Some might say that the two of us were seeing each other."

"Yelda? No shit man! Way to go." Selim extended his arm across the table in elaborate simulation of the high five. It was the subtle tincture of mockery lacing his many Americanisms that saved them from being grotesque--indeed, made them fetching and funny. "I myself had a thing for her for a while, but she sealed me up in the friend box. Which is no mean place to be anyway, in my opnion. That chick is flossing. But no, man. As far as I know De Rozier has never entertained a weakness for Yelda. Maybe the guy is just power tripping. Maybe he decided that he didn't like you for some stupid reason. Some look you gave him. Now that I think about it, I always did feel paranoid around him, like he might turn on me. I'm glad I got out before he had a chance to. No one has ever accused me of being too likeable a character."

I told him I thought it might have something to do with Yelda after all, given the timing of the events and the way she had been looking at me after I was fired.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know. Just that she has something to do with it. I mean if she didn't, what was so goddamn funny about seeing me shuffle through my papers after being kicked off the magazine?"

"I see what you mean. But you forget that I've known Yelda for a long time. I don't think she would do that. She's not a cruel or conniving person. Maybe she just couldn't help smiling at De Rozier's performance as she heard it through the door."

"There's something fishy about it."

"Would you like to find out what?"

"How do you mean?"

"I mean if you're so convinced that there's some intrigue why don't you try to get to the bottom of it?"

"But how? Should I resort to cloak and dagger techniques like bugging De Rozier's office, or having Yelda followed? Is that what you mean?"

"Not exactly. Is there anything else you can think of?" Selim's leg was jogging up and down restlessly at his own question.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know. I mean you saw what happened with that rascal Özgür when his name appeared in print. He sicked his thug on us. Maybe this here is the same sort of thing. This whole Braxator business may be escaping your control."

I took a contemplative draft of sharp and bubbly beer. A disturbing notion, but perhaps not totally unlikely. There was the little matter of Ken Ming Chan's weird e-threat.

"What did it say?"

"Nothing in particular. Just that his boss took umbrage at the descriptions of him in the latest Sudan installment. By which I suppose he means that ridiculous Kang character. He said something about ill will coming home to roost, which I took for his way of threatening me. But I got pretty much the same feeling from that e-mail as from everything else in the whole Braxator saga. Like it too was just part of some lavish hoax too clever for the hoaxster's own good. How am I supposed to take an e-mail seriously when it says 'far be it from you to fuck with them.' You don't write that way if you mean business."

Now it was Selim's turn to take a contemplative draft. "I don't know," he said. "Threats come in many guises. Don't you think you owe it to yourself to take them seriously?"

"Like how? What am I supposed to do? Issue a formal apology?"

"I don't think that would make a lick of difference. These guys aren't teddy bears. I'm talking about making yourself scarce." His voice had quieted, and he was fixing me with a downright frightening stare.

"Don't be ridiculous!" I erupted. "I'm not even sure these guys exist. And now I'm supposed to run away from them?!"

"I'm not saying anything, man," said Selim. "I'm just saying." I had the sneaking and confusing suspicion that he was mocking me.

I finished my beer. "Whatever you say. But I think I'll sleep on it before catching the next flight out of here, thanks. After all, as soon as there is life, there is danger."

"As you like it. Just don't get me involved if this turns out to be real and these guys come after you. They probably have genetically enhanced enforcers. Christ, I hate to think of it."

"What's that supposed to mean? Now you're not going to help me?"

"I'm not going to shelter you is what I mean. I'll give you a hundred lira and send you on your way. What I'm not going to do is have these guys on my ass, if they exist."

"You know what? I don't think I can sit here any longer with you. Betrayed by Yelda, fired by De Rozier, prepared in advance for betrayal by you. It's all getting to be too much. Friends like these."

"Wait, where are you going?"

"I'm going for a walk. Disporting myself in the hills and along the water. Cleaving as faithfully to the earth as it cleaves to me."

"Which route are you taking today?"

"What do you care?"

"I don't know. You used to tell me these things. Listen, I was joking. Of course I'll help you out if you need it. Which I'm sure you won't. It's just a bizarre situation all around. Come on, look at me. I'm just as confused about the whole thing as you are. But you've got to understand I'm glad it's not me. Come on, put her there." He put out his hand. I acceded and extended.

"Alright. I'll let you know how it is. I'm gonna take the tram to Karaköy and walk over the bridge and along the water and think about things. There you have it. That's what I'm doing."

"Alright my friend," he said. "Good luck. Stay with me if you need to."

"Thanks. Hope not to need it."


Walking now. I step off the tram and head for the bridge, caught up in a heavy throng. Everyone jostling and pressing without heed or surcease. I navigate the buffets. Indifferent like nature itself, the crowd has no regard for my being or the space it occupies; I am openly intimidated from all sides. I intuit in these bodies hastening alongside mine toward their dim and sordid purposes a ravening aggression and pitiless lust long pent up and dammed in but yearning with all their substance against the levee where they come suppurating out in hateful rivulets at the eyes and the mouths; I feel keenly, as if for the first time, that I might easily be delivered to the tender mercies of tromping treads a thousand strong at the slightest slip or misstep.

With all due humility, I would like to advance the notion that in this moment, as I feel myself swept up in the throng's indifferent systole and diastole, I am having an honest to goodness philosophical thought. To see the social nature of humanity disrobed, I muse, look no further than to the milling crowd of people mingling and moving anonyomusly. How do they behave? They clamor shamelessly, men and women alike, devoid of all decency. They cut and bump and shove, they trip and tangle and tussle. They insult, accuse, scorn. Every man is a potential pickpocket or lecher, every woman a potential jailer and tormentor, every hand evincing a dangerous emergent gravitation to the crotch, site of billfold and family jewels. The crowd is the ultimate crucible of sociopathic values. Each takes what he can and gives what he must. They would fain make war were it not for the looming threat of violence done by mob, police and penitentiary. Student, doctor, housewife, beggar, priest or whore, it doesn't matter in the crowd. In the crowd each is a cretin in equal measure, revealed at last in all his despicable humanity. Look no further than the eyes: Where is there an exception to the rule of hate, lust, or fear?

Nowhere. A rule for all is a rule for each. No one may flirt with the notion of relaxing his own ruthlessness lest he be cut and trampled in the automatic reflex wage of weakness. There is no alternative. You must throw yourself into nihilistic struggle. At its logical extreme, the fire panic, the clamoring crowd is society's most absolute and merciless normative political institution: All against all, with death to the stragglers and pardons for the most ruthless. A valuable lesson for any would-be humanist, I mutter as I dig a razorous elbow into a tubby upstart flank. I've seen the lay of this land, I've loitered at the edge of the abyss, and I just want to go somewhere else. Humanity! What are you but a masquerade ball for murderers, cheats and liars? The levy will break, be foretold.

At last, free of the crowd's worst, my own skin still held hale and untattered to the world in permenent struggle against whatever is other and else. Only a few walkers in my immediate vicinity now. A buxom young woman clad in a sweats and walking somewhat frantically a few steps in front of me, keen to have witnesses for her sporty undertaking. Fun to keep pace with all that luxurious jiggling and jouncing. Alongside me is a middle-aged fellow with a fishing rod and tackle, contentedly on his way to a bridgeside pescatorial assignation. On the other side nothing save my shadow and the water below. To my rear, as I confirm last of all, are two hearty Chinese fellows, robust tourists in matching blue and white track suits.

My phone rings. I look at it. Yelda. What could that conniving little thing be up to?

"Yelda? Why are you calling? No doubt to multiply my misfortunes."

"Ben, no. Please, listen, I must tell you something."

"Let me tell you something. I don't want to hear it."

"No, you don't understand. I mean it's an emergency. You are in large danger."

"What are you talking about? I don't believe you. I have learned not to trust women when they use the word emergency."

"No! Ben, listen! There were men here. They were asking about you and making threats. Unkind men. Chinese. I really think highly you should take this seriously. You should get your passport and go to the airport now."

"You're serious?"

"Ben, yes. I think you are in large danger. Why won't you listen to me? They were hitting Peter in the head!" She starts crying. I hang up the phone and look back at the husky tourists. They do not look particularly absorbed by the lovely maritime scene below. I look again. No, these chaps seem quite exclusively preoccupied with whatever is straight ahead of them, which happens to include me. And if as their attire would indicate they lend their skills to a track team, it is definitely in service of muscularly putting a shot or flinging a disc. I think about what Yelda said. I think about what Selim said. I think about De Rozier's inexplicable behavior. I think about Ken Ming Chan's courteous death threat. Uh-oh. Could the revenge of the slighted wildcatting gene scientists be at hand?

I begin walking faster trying to think of what to do, trying to put myself in the place of characters in movies I've seen, books I've read. How to shake a murderous tail? I could break into a run and hope to lose them in the crowd, but that wouldn't do. It's too obvious, and these buggers are professionals. What about turning on them and felling them both with a graceful sweeping chop. No, I have neither the training nor the raw strength. It would be playing into their hands; they would snuff me before I could put up my dukes. I look back at them again. They appear to be inching closer. Shit! Have to keep my cool until I can settle on what to do. There is the option of fomenting a public disturbance and slipping away in the confusion...but no, no, certainly not, that would be leaving too much to chance. This isn't Hollywood, and again, these chaps are professionals. And the response time of the Turkish authorities is hardly something to be taken on faith. I continue to reason with myself, feeling increasingly frantic--what about jumping into the water as I near the end of the bridge, then making an somewhat septic aquatic escape? Yes, that one is probably the most suitable, if not exactly appealing. I look down into the brown and viscid waters of the Golden Horn. There is a tour boat approaching the bridge through the scum. I reckon the craft will be there by the time I get to the end of the bridge. Soon. Continuing my stride, I fix the point where I will jump. I train my vision down the metal barrier's defilade of teal-painted bars. There. That is where I will jump. The plan appeals on the score of its simplicity, and because it provides a good foil for my spry athleticism. I will take a swan dive to safety, leaving the the Chinese heavies behind in stunned perplexity, their bulky bodies giving them pause and preventing them from doing anything but dumbly beholding so large a leap. And if they jump, why, they just might break their little old legs. There is where I will jump. So close now. Fast approaching. Almost there. Just a few more strides. There it is, next stride, now....come on, no hesitation now, there, there I am, seizing the rail, mounting it in a fluid motion to stand suspended at the nexus of metal, water and sky like an outsize deplumed albatross, fixing my aquatic bulls-eye in an instant and then gloriously flinging myself into brief superaquatic flight.

Plonk. Not exactly an apotheosis. In the water. Multiple smells of sepsis and decay. Furious churning of legs to keep my nose off the agitated effluent. I heave my glance first to the railing--my Chinese pursuers are eyeing me doubtfully--and then to the tour ferry bearing down through the lane marked by green scumstreaked buouys. Seconds away, it is looming, looming. I stroke furiously to escape the range of its lumbering steel pontoons, just clearing the rim of the starboard drum as it passes. I dogpaddle and look about wildly for handpurchase on the passing craft. A grimy tirecasing is passing just within reach. I seize it and haul myself up, staggering to my feet deckside wild of eye and much to the delighted horror of the tourists convened on board suddenly to learn of this beast risen from the depths of the Horn distilled from the accrued riddles and legends that haunt these waters like the bilge of the febrile imaginations of a thousand departed souls. The Japanese women recoil in especial horror from my aspect, as if they would retreat entirely within their SARS masks. Bold American youths are laughing at my bedraggled aspect, Get a load of this basket case, man! Snap, snap, snap, I am immortalized after all.

But my public reception does not matter. The chief thing is that I escape the pursuers come from the wrathful bowels of private enterprise defrauded of goodwill. I look keenly as our craft passes beneath the quiet shadow of the span. I see no Chinese pursuers. Relief. I've lost them. I collapse back against the rim of the gunwale and fade from relevance. Show's over, folks.

That is, until a great bong! bong! shudders the deck roof and rocks the boat. My stomach yaws with more than the boat's motion. What to do? The choice is simple. Before the Chinese chaps can get down off the roof onto the deck, I launch myself headlong back into the cloacal waters, watching them gape at me in mute vexation between my flurried gasping strokes, obviously loath to stain their shimmering track suits in the city's waste medley, this comic tandem death squad like of cloth and like of stature and with faces you'd be hard pressed to differentiate in a line-up. Which will be the one to kill you, Hornigold?

Minutes later against a dead current I am at the city's solid rim, heaving myself with a final purgative effort up onto a slimy turdspattered step in a niche cut into the seawall. When who should step forth but a third husky and impeccably track-suited Chinese man? Yours truly then scrabbles to his feet, deftly ducks and smartly weaves, sets off at a dead run. The third heavy flails, misses, spins, swears, lurches into lumbering pursuit. My footfalls smack wetly on the flagstones as I flee to what I think will be the safety of a large Ottoman mosque. New Mosque, though its age spans a dozen generations and the dreams that built it are as quaintly dead now as the ones that spurred Rome and Athens. Up the steps and into the courtyard I fly, across the flagstones and then into the building itself, the attendant vainly objecting at the shod state of my feet as I blow by. I have to find a place to hide, a place to duck out unnoticed. I run to a pillar where a pious man is praying, prostrating myself alongside him to do glory unto Allah.

Bismillah I'll convert if this saves me.

Suddenly a clamoring at the front. Evidently the attendant objects more strenuously when a Chinese man tries to gain shod entry to this house of worship. I pray harder. Come on. Nothing happens. I dare not look up. There are footfalls here and there, otherwise silence. I want badly to look. My eyes are riveted to the devotional pattern on the carpet. I believe I am coming close to having a religious experience.

Then I hear my name called out. Butchered, actually. The Chinese accent makes my own handle sound hideous to my ears. Benjamin Hornigourd! Benjamin Hornigourd! The man next to me mutters something, then begins to bow out his ritual genuflections. I join him, thinking fervently about the sole oneness of God and how Muhammad was his prophet. But then there is a heavy hand on my shoulder. "Mr. Hornigourd." The game is up. The praying man next to me curses and stalks off. I turn around to face my pursuer. It is the third man. My body is slack and numb with fear.

"Mr. Hornigourd. My emproyer word like to have a word with you. He has asked me to bring you to his hoter."

I muster some courage. "I'm not going to any hotel with you."

"That is not your choice to make, Mr. Hornigourd. But perhaps we can begin our talk here. Ret me curr him." It occurs to me that his Chinese accent sounds a tad overdone. The man reaches into his pocket for his phone. He flips it open but then thinks better of it, now fishing with his hand for something else. It is a plastic manacle. A quick flourish and my hands are bound in front of me. He makes his call, says something in Chinese.

A few minutes pass as I look down at my shoes, thinking of what I am going to do in my own defense. The man marches me out into the courtyard, apologizing as we leave to the attendant for the disturbance he claims I caused. The attendant nods warily. In the courtyard, my captor motions for me to have a seat on the marble steps.

"Prease. My emproyer has agreed to meet here. But he would rike you to meet some of the other people who work for him first."

"What are you talking about?" I ask.

"Just watch," he says, indicating the mosque entrance. Seconds later, my two initial pursuers walk in, matching one another stride for stride, track suits still spotless.

"I see you didn't take that swim after all," I say. The pair stop about ten feet in front of where I am sitting, join hands, and bow formally. "Pleased to meet you, too," I say. "Glad to see you've calmed down a bit." What the hell was going on here? First they have me running for my life, then they take a stage bow?

I am still looking at the men in their warmups when I become aware of another figure approaching. A exceedingly large figure in silhouette. I look up. He is wearing a leather jacket, sunglasses. He is striding purposefully toward me. My stomach knots with fear. But he stops up short, joins the men in track suits, and takes a bow. When he takes his sunglasses off I recognize him. It is the henchman sent to the bar by Özgür.

I struggle against the hand on my shoulder. "What the hell is going on here?"

"Prease, Mr. Hornigourd. More emproyees are here. See?" He is pointing at the door. A woman and a man enter, arm in arm. They approach with dignity. It is Yelda and De Rozier. Yelda is fixing me with a wicked twinkle. They join hands, bow, and line up next to the tracksuit squad. I am gaping, understanding nothing. My mouth works but the words don't form.

Now, by some hidden cue, the assembled cast turns around and faces the entrance where the sun streams through. No word is said. I am looking at the entrance. Nothing happens. There is only light and a window to the sky. I focus. The entrace seems to shimmer with the effort of my gaze. At last there is a shadow coming up from the steps and spilling across the threshold. Quickly. The figure materializes. It is a man, he is jogging. I recognize him immediately.

He takes his place in front of everyone else. As he is bowing I lurch up, feeling the flagstones wobble beneath me. "You son of a bitch!" I yell. It is Selim.

He takes off his sunglasses and looks at me. "Even more than that, Ben. A rascally son of a bitch, don't you think? Did I ever tell you that I was into American football and rare books?" Then he bursts into a great bellowing bout of laughter, far deeper and louder than you would think his small frame could support.

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