THE SAGA
Description
PRELUDE    CHORUS    JOURNAL
 The Society    Shots

EXCERPTS
from the upcoming Second Edition of
THROUGH THE EYES of GOD
The Battlefront Journal of VASSAL SQUEEZESHOT

by Vassal Squeezeshot
with Victory Tree and
The Reverend Professor Henrietta A.*

*The JOURNAL and its authors are
fictional creations of Marcus Parsons.

EDITOR’S NOTE
by The Reverend Professor Henrietta A.

Vassal first published his famous journal decades ago, to describe how he invented his all-seeing little drones. Now, he has given that invention to the world, come what may.

To accompany that gift, he and I have published PRELUDE and CHORUS — a big work and a short postscript. We have also begun to create a second edition of his journal, adding details and clarifications. We hope that, along with PRELUDE and CHORUS, it will help people deal with the gift of his drone. We expect to complete and publish the new edition soon. Meanwhile, we are providing the excerpts that follow below. We plan to keep adding to them here until we are done.

—H.A.

CONTENTS
(i.e., excerpts so far)

Preface to the Second Edition
To the Murderer
A Saving Grace: The Eternal Present
The Indians
A Mad Moose
The Bigheads
Awake
Victory

Preface to the Second Edition
by Vassal Squeezeshot

Most everyone knows that years ago, in the 1970s, I invented a tiny marvel that could have turned our civilization inside out. I refused to allow that change to happen. The time wasn’t right, I believed, and might never be right. I kept my invention to myself.

I kept a journal in those days. My entries in it were sketchy; I am not much of a writer. Fortunately, I was living with the playwright Victory Tree, who helped me with it. After she was murdered, I decided that I must complete and publish it. I enlisted The Reverend Professor Henrietta A. to continue Victory’s editorial role. Her assistance, like Victory’s before her, proved invaluable. We published it to predictable acclaim.

Now, several generations later, I have given my tiny marvel to everyone, for free. To accompany it, as The Reverend Professor has mentioned in her EDITOR’S NOTE, above, she and I have published PRELUDE and CHORUS, both of which she authored with my cooperation. They comprise the most up-to-date installments of what she calls my saga. In them, she describes my experiences and my thinking far better than I can. Both on the page and through her art, she speaks for me more truly than I can for myself. 

She also speaks for herself. I am delighted that our project has given her a platform from which to share her perspectives as well as mine. That’s not to say that we don’t see many things similarly. Our perspectives tend to coincide, and she is generous toward me when they do not.

As she reports above, we have also been revising my journal, and expect to finish it soon. We have also written more of my saga—a series of volumes—which we will also revise, and publish if our circumstances allow.

— V.S

---

 

To the Murderer

Two years ago, down by my dock, you aimed a rifle at my beloved Victory and pulled the trigger. Your bullet went into her forehead and out the back of her skull, killing her. I was in the house, and heard your shot. After the controversy, threats, and attacks brought on by news of my invention, I knew what might have happened. I sprinted down the path to the dock, and arrived in ten or twenty seconds. I didn’t see Victory until I reached the top of the ramp. She was lying in the water on her back, slightly submerged, a few feet from the dock. Her eyes were closed. She appeared to be unconscious, or worse.

The tide was going out. She was drifting away. I ran down the ramp, jumped into the water, and pulled her to the muddy shore. She was not breathing, and had no pulse. Blood poured from the wound in her forehead, onto her face and chest. I knew that she was dead. Nonetheless, I sat astride her and for several minutes pumped her heart and breathed into her lungs. A few times, I paused to clear blood from her closed eyes. Soon, it covered my hands, cheeks, nose, and mouth. I could feel it, smell it, taste it. Some of it trickled down my throat, still warm.

I couldn’t revive her. I didn’t accept that; maybe there was something that someone else could—. I looked for our guards offshore in their launch. They were there as usual, in the river’s main current a few hundred yards out. Hadn’t they heard the shot? Hadn’t they noticed? Why weren’t they here? I leapt up, waved my arms, and hollered. Apparently, they didn’t see or hear me. Leaving Victory on the mudbank, I ran back toward the house to get the guards at the end of our driveway. I knew it was too late, but I ran as fast as I could, my arms churning, my feet pounding the uneven ground.

* * *

You shot her in the forehead. She must have been looking in your direction. She may have been looking right at you. She may have seen you pull the trigger. I thought of that as I ran for the guards. I have thought about it often since.

For you, those moments were different. For you, they included how you held your aim, breathing softly; and how you gently squeezed the trigger until your rifle fired. Then the sound of your shot, the kick of your rifle against your shoulder, the sharp whiff of gunpowder, and seeing her drop from the dock into the water. And within that were whatever other thoughts and feelings you were having: your desire for my invention; your rage at her and at me for keeping it from everyone; your concern that your shot land where you aimed it, and your satisfaction when it did. And whatever else.

Your bullet ended her life and ruined mine. As the world knew, probably including you, she and I loved each other. We were so attuned to each other that we could think each other’s thoughts, feel each other’s emotions, and share each other’s perceptions. Saying that doesn’t even begin to describe how we were, however. Our love was more than words can say.

* * *

One day, despite the protection of a battalion of government guards—or with their complicity (the thought saddens me)—you may kill me, as well. Or you may want to kill me, but find that you can’t get to me. Or you may feel content with killing Victory, and wish to do no more harm.

You are alive. I wish you weren’t. I wish you had never been born. Maybe if your parents had known what you would do one day to Victory, they would have acted differently at the time of your conception; given a different sperm and egg a chance. Too late for that now, of course. All I can do is direct these remarks to you, which you may never read. Which is fine. What difference can it make whether you read them or not?

I also have something else for you that you may never read: the journal I have kept in recent years. It begins on the next page, and covers the time from my invention’s inception to Victory’s death. During the last months of her life, she and I were preparing to publish it. If you read it, you will pay attention to it as only you can. But again, I don’t care if you read it. Millions of other people will, and they’re the ones who matter. Many of them will understand, as I’m sure you cannot, why it and not my invention is all I wish to share with everyone. That has been an easy choice for me to make, made easier when you murdered Victory.

 

---

Bang
The bullet flies
blunted by the wind

There
the true report of war

Use the earth
Burn it and live

— H.A.

shooting a look

 

---

---

The Indians

At summer’s end, I found an engineering job in a research lab near Boston. There, I met the Indian. At first, he was just one of dozens of engineers who worked there. Someone said his wife worked in another part of the corporate campus, in Administration. Aside from that, I knew nothing about him. We encountered each other now and then, and nodded to each other, friendly, but I never took much notice.

Then one day, he sat down across from me in the company cafeteria.

“Parmacheene Belle?” he asked.

He was looking at a tiepin I wore, a little silver disc with a trout fly carved into it. A Parmacheene Belle is a traditional Maine fly pattern, used since the 1800s for catching brook trout.

“Could be,” I said. “The shape is right, isn’t it? But it’s hard to tell, since this one is silver and the real thing is red, white, and gold.”

I smiled.

“Must be you’re a fisherman,” I said.

“Yes.”

We talked. We found that we had much in common. Both of us had been born and raised on farms near the Maine woods, less than an hour’s drive from each other. Both of us had inherited our parents’ homes, and often spent time there on weekends and vacations. And we both loved the woods and fly-fishing.

Fly-fishing can involve much technology and applied science. That makes it appealing to people in our line of work. Fly-fishers are often knowledgeable about fishes’ ecosystems and food chains, freshwater limnology, the intricacies of fly-tying, the mechanics of fly-casting, the design and manufacture of fly rods and lines and other equipment, the effects of weather, the history and literature of the sport, and more.

After that first conversation, we often met over lunch, and sometimes in the course of company projects. We talked about the arcana of fly-fishing, and the woods that we knew: trout ponds and streams, salmon rivers, swamps and beaver flowages, mountains and valleys, remote roads and trails, backwoods towns and the people who lived there. We became friends.

His Native American ancestors lived up that way beginning after the end of the last Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago. At first, they lived a semi-nomadic life of hunting, fishing, and gathering. Later, they took up agriculture, and their villages became more permanent. During the 1500s and1600s, as colonists from Europe arrived, they suffered ravages of disease and armed conflict—with other tribes, as usual, and with colonists. They also became objects of Jesuit proselytizing. As a consequence of those and other developments—colonial expansion, agriculture, livestock, and lumbering—they endured a gradual elimination of their traditional lifestyles. When the Indian Wars ended in defeat in the 1700s, most of his tribe moved north to Canada. His ancestors, however, wanted to stay, and settled on a piece of riverside land where the tribe had grown corn. They survived by growing vegetables, catching fish, shooting game, and working at nearby farms and on lumbering crews.

It was there, shortly before World War II, that the Indian was born and raised. From childhood on, he studied the lives of his native forebears. He found remnants of their villages and encampments: fire rings, stone tools, arrowheads, spear points. He followed their ancient canoe routes, and their paths through the woods. He observed the wildlife they had depended upon. Some of the forests, many of the rivers and lakes, and much of the wildlife, had changed little since after the glaciers had receded, when the natives first came. He learned to see the land and its creatures as they had done. He taught himself their skills: hunting, fishing, gathering (herbs, roots, berries), cooking, canoeing, campcraft, basket-weaving, and more. He acquired some of their understandings, as well. He experienced some of their mysteries, and adopted some of their beliefs.

Every few years, first with his parents and later on his own, he went to Quebec to visit the tribe. He learned more there, from its members, and shared with them what he had learned in Maine. On one trip, when he was in his early twenties, he met his future wife. They fell in love and married. He brought her home to Maine.

* * *

In addition to meeting each other at the company, the Indian and I met after hours. With his wife, we shared dinners at their apartment, at my town house, and at restaurants. Up north, we visited each other’s inherited homes, and spent time together in the woods.

At first, I didn’t tell them about my private inventing, except to say that I fiddled with electromechanical devices at home as well as at work. I described that as a pastime, like my fishing, though it was more than that. Not that I felt guilty about it. It didn’t compete with my work, or use the company’s property, intellectual or otherwise. But my interest in certain devices, materials, and technologies had become an obsession. I had no girlfriend or other buddies to hang out with, so I devoted most weekday evenings and early mornings, as well as weekends in the city and in Maine, to my tinkering. My process was in part deliberate and analytical, carefully experimental. But it was also immersive, intuitive, and often confusing to me. It progressed in fits and starts. I had no desire to talk about it; I wanted to find my own way with it, free of anyone’s characterization or suggestion.

Now and then, the Indians asked how that was coming. I replied briefly, offering no details. Once, at my townhouse, the Indian asked if he could see my workshop. He wasn’t prying, just being a friendly fellow engineer.

“I’d like to show you,” I said, “but it’s a mess.”

Liar. They could tell I was up to something interesting. A time would come, I knew, when I would tell them about it. They were my good friends, and should know about such an important part of my life. Also, the Indian’s skills would be useful to me, and I knew he would be glad to apply them. He would help me with experiments, and make suggestions that would save me time, money, and effort. And I could use him as a sounding board. That would be wonderful. But not yet.

 

---

A Mad Moose

One fall afternoon, I sat at the edge of a clearing in the woods, writing in my journal. I heard a thrashing in the brush across from me. A bull moose loped into the clearing, saw me, and stopped. He stood for a minute, then reached one leg forward and scraped the ground. Then he lowered his head and began to swing it from side to side, brandishing his antlers.

I was sitting with my legs crossed, my back to a thick spruce tree. I assessed my situation. He had me cornered. Whether his behavior was rutting rascality (it was mating season) or game-trail road rage, he was mad at me. At a thousand pounds, hundreds of them muscle, and standing six feet tall at the shoulders, with antlers six feet across and with hooves like war clubs, he could do me a lot of harm. He might charge, toss me around, kick and stomp me, bust my gut. I didn’t want to risk trying to escape; he could run me down. And I couldn’t climb the tree behind me; it was too tangled. I decided to make some noise, thinking maybe that would frighten him away.

“Alright, moose!” I shouted.

I spread my arms and began to sway. And I began to pray aloud, vehemently. I’m not normally a praying person. I never have been. I didn’t know what to say, and I wouldn’t have meant it if I did. But I figured any theatrics would do, so I improvised.

“Please God, godammit!” I cried, “I know I’ve done wrong! But please, I’m sorry! I really am! It’s true that I deserve this. Everything about me deserves this, and I know it, but please—!”

The moose stopped scraping the ground and waving his antlers. He raised his head and stood looking at me again, his brown eyes unblinking. I stopped yelling and returned his gaze. He didn’t move, didn’t leave. A standoff.

I was wearing a headset, testing a wireless communication system I had devised. The Indian and his wife were helping me, wearing headsets that I had given them so we could talk to each other. They were sitting in their pickup truck a mile away, listening to me; calmly, no doubt, amused by what I was experiencing.

I had sprayed spit when I was hollering. Now, inches in front of my mouth, some of it dripped from the headset’s microphone.

I spoke to the Indians.

“You heard all that, right? A big bull moose has got me cornered. He’s been scraping with his feet and shaking his rack. He’s too close for me to get up and run for it. I think I need your big guy in the sky to call this Bullwinkle off. I thought that a little false humility and a show of guilt on my part might do the trick, since the god that’s supposed to be in charge in our Judeo-Christian nation is the forgiveness-of-sins type. But apparently, if he’s listening, he is unmoved. Maybe he can tell I’m a nonbeliever, faking it. So I think maybe I’ve been beseeching the wrong god. Maybe out here in the woods I should be talking to your people’s guy. What do you think?”

The Indians said nothing.

“You call him Glooskap, right?” I said. “Think I should try him? Would he, or she, be offended that a few minutes ago I started out by talking to the god of the dominant culture that has given your people such a hard time?”

I waited for a reply. The Indian spoke: “Mmp.”

He was playing along. He likes to grunt, to parody his ethnicity.

“I doubt he’d care,” the Indian said, “since he doesn’t exist and never did.”

“Not a believer, are you?” I said. “But unless you have a better idea, I’m going to talk to him or her anyway. Yelling seems to be keeping the moose away from me, at least for the moment. So I’ll do more of it.”

Once again, I raised my voice. I addressed the sky above the moose.

“Look, Your Honor, Great Spirit that some people believe in—this moose, this creature of yours, is angry with me. Or he is focusing his anger on me, whether it’s about me or not. I don’t know why he is behaving this way, do you? I’ve done nothing to hurt him. He is a big, strong, noble beast, which I respect. Well, maybe not noble; could call him dumb and confused. He’s certainly acting more threatening than he has to. I’d be glad to leave here quietly and let him continue on his way. I assume that’s what he wants to do. I’d be glad to allow that. I’ve no desire to see his antlers and hooves pound my face and poke into my guts.”

The moose glared at me, then lowered his head again and stamped a hoof. His shoulders shook. The mane on the back of his neck stood at angles.

“Look, Glooskap, if that’s really your name, this moose is thinking of doing violence to my mortal shell. That would do him no good. He is wasting his energy. I know that, and you know that, but he, apparently, does not. Whatever light of awareness burns within him doesn’t burn bright enough for him to see that. So, would you mind calling him off? Isn’t it within your power to do that?

“I think you have some responsibility here, don’t you? If you don’t help me, I’ll have to seize my fate and act on my own, a god unto myself. You wouldn’t want that, would you, especially here in the woods, where your people have been at home since the Ice Age? Wouldn’t you rather have me defer to your power and glory, rather than figure my way out of this situation on my own? Have you no pride? Do your bit!”

The moose resumed waving his antlers from side to side. Then he began to hop from one foot to another, in a ponderous dance, really working himself up. He began to snort. His breath poured from his muzzle.

I couldn’t believe it. Moose are not normally this aggressive. They’re the least aggressive members of the deer family. But there are times. I was still afraid that he would charge me if I stood and ran, or even if I tried to crawl away. I remained stuck, with no way to escape.

Then my memory dredged up a tired joke I knew about a bull moose.

“Hey, moose, I’ve got a joke for you. Listen. A bull moose like you walks into a barroom and up to the bar. His hooves clonk across the floor. At the bar, he shifts his forelegs, accidentally knocking over a stool. Then he just stands there. His neck and head and rack of antlers lean far across, almost to the bottles lined up on the wall beyond. Down the bar a ways, the bartender is holding a glass, polishing it with a cloth. He approaches the moose, stops, and looks up at its face.

“ ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘good to see you again, buddy. How are you?’

“ The moose says nothing, doesn’t move.

“ The bartender squints at him. ‘You don’t look too good,’ he says. ‘You look like you could use a drink, maybe two. Shall I get one for you?’

“No response.

“ ‘Tell you what,’ the bartender says.

“ He steps away, gets a bottle of whiskey, fills a glass, brings it back, and sets it down in front of the moose. The moose doesn’t move.

“The bartender shakes his head. ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘not thirsty?’

“Nothing.

“ ‘Listen,’ says the bartender, ‘want to tell me what’s been going on with you? I’d like to hear. We bartenders do that kind of thing, you know. If you’ve got troubles to talk about, we listen.’

“ Still nothing.

“ ‘C’mon,’ says the bartender, ‘open up.’ He points to the moose’s muzzle. ‘Tell me. Why the long face?’ ”

Ba-da-dum, a lame joke. Across the clearing, my moose didn’t find it funny. Not that I expected him to; language and cultural barriers, you know. I was hoping he would, but there he stood, unamused, still looking like he was ready to charge.

Our standoff continued. I looked at the moose’s hooves. They looked bigger than I’d thought, a giant’s war club, ready to swing against me. The Indian told me later that at that point he and his wife were finding my predicament hilarious. Beside him on the truck’s seat, his wife shook with silent laughter. Tears poured down her cheeks.

“Vassal is in a pickle,” I heard him tell her. “His god, such as it is, is marinating his ass. That’ll be good for him.”

The moose took a step toward me.

I screamed: “Whoa! Stop right there!”

He took another step. I uncrossed my legs, and raised my feet in front of me, to protect myself.

“Indians!” I hollered, “I hear you talking. Listen to me, please. I think he’s about to come at me. I don’t dare move. It’s rutting season, isn’t it? He’s as blinded by his hormones as any horny teenager ever was, and with that rack on his head, his horny is hard in more ways than one. Know what I mean?

“I think he’s gonna charge me and rip me up. Isn’t there anything you can do? Come running over here screaming your people’s war cries, maybe? And scalp him, how about, or skin him; he’d make a nice wall hanging, some traditional décor for your home.

“Or if not that, since you probably wouldn’t get here in time, have you got any useful advice to offer from your fund of native wisdom? You’re woods people, after all, more than I am. You’re children of the forest, right? Been here for thousands of years, haven’t you? This beast is your brother, right? You’ve been dealing with his family since before the Stone Age. He’s your old friend, right? Come on, got any ideas?”

Nothing. Then the Indian replied, with his usual calm.

“Vassal,” he said, “we all make our luck. Play yours out. Believe it or not, you should consider yourself fortunate. You have a chance of surviving. It could have been otherwise. I’ll tell you a story. According to my people’s legend, Glooskap, who made all the animals, almost made that one in front of you a lot tougher to deal with. When he first created Moose, he made Moose huge, as high as the clouds or the tallest pine trees. Then he asked Moose what Moose would do if he saw an Indian coming. ‘I would tear down the trees on him,’ said Moose. When Glooskap heard that, he changed Moose; he made Moose small enough for Indians to kill. Much better for them, and for you.

“Maybe you can see if Glooskap made Moose small enough for you to kill; with your bare hands, maybe, or using your headset. Can’t you strangle him with it, a big strong guy like you? Maybe jump on his back and ride him around, through the trees, until you squeeze the life out of him? Then we can all eat him. We know how to cook moose meat. It’s great.

“Or if you don’t do that, maybe you can figure out how to talk to Glooskap, like you’ve been trying to, as if there really is such a being. Maybe you can conjure him up and get him to step in and make Moose the size of a small dog, or a bird, or a bug. You’d have no trouble escaping those. Or try something else. Anything. You’re a resourceful fellow. Try something.”

The Indian burst into laughter, bellowing. The sound overloaded the headset’s electronics, sending me a blast of distortion. I snatched the headset from my head. When I did, the moose snorted again, stomped on the ground, lowered his head and antlers, and lunged at me.

“Yikes!”

I rolled sideways. He missed me. I yelled again to the moose—“Whoa!”—and jumped up onto my feet. He backed away a few yards and faced me again. I leaned toward him, swung my arm back, and tossed the headset at him. It caught in his antlers and hung there. He lunged at me again. I leapt to the side. He missed me.

“Hey, Indians!” I yelled. “He’s attacking me! I threw my headset at him, and it’s hanging from his antlers, near one of his ears. Talk to him! With your ancestry, you must know his language. Tell him to back off!”

The Indian grunted and looked at his wife. A moment passed, then she brayed with laughter. He laughed, too, bellowing again. The moose snorted, whirled away from me, and stood still. One ear and then the other turned. The headset still dangled. I heard tiny sounds coming from it. My breath came in gasps. My heart pounded. I felt faint. The moose stood in front of me, his back to me now. Absurdly, I thought that I might raise a hand, walk up to him, touch him on his flank, and calm him down: “Easy there, buddy.”

He seemed to be listening to the Indians’ laughter in the headset. Maybe it triggered memories of his infancy, mewing sounds he made curled up next to his mother. Or maybe it mystified him, or confused him, or frightened him, or simply distracted him.

I decided that I must try to escape. I reached behind me and felt for the spruce tree. It was a yard behind me. I slowly raised one of my feet and set it down a few inches farther from the moose. Then my other foot. After a few short steps, the back of my trouser legs brushed the branches of the tree. I began to sidestep around it, watching the moose all the while. He continued to face away from me, listening to the Indians laugh.

A minute later, I was beside the tree, then behind it. I breathed more easily. I moved away with longer steps, still looking back at the moose. He stayed as he was. Soon, I was far enough away that I couldn’t see him.

Nearby, a small bird chirped, warning his neighbors that I was there. I began to walk fast. Several times, I tripped over tree roots, which normally I never do. I circled far from the moose, to the trail that led to the logging road where I had parked my jeep and the Indians had parked their truck.

When I reached the road, the Indians were gone. I opened the door of my jeep and slid behind the wheel, banging my knee on the steering column. I slammed the door shut, and tilted the seat back as far as it would go. I felt weak as a marionette, my body slack. I closed my eyes. Sleep came over me in a wave.

When I awakened, it was dark. I reached overhead and turned on the jeep’s interior light. I pulled my daypack from the floor, and took out my pen and notebook. Earlier, in the clearing, talking with the Indians, testing the headset, I’d begun to dream up other uses for its technology. Now, I sat in my jeep and resumed those thoughts, making notes and diagrams. 

---

 

The Bigheads

 

Soon after I began working at the company, I bought a military-style jeep. The dirt roads I traveled to my fishing spots were too rough for the old sedans I’d owned during high school and college. Their ground clearance was too low. The roads’ rocks and ruts banged up their underbodies, destroyed their mufflers, bent their tie rods, and sliced and punctured the cheap retread tires I put on them. I frequently had to replace parts. To make matters worse, my cars’ two-wheel drivetrains made it hard to get unstuck when a rut or mud puddle proved too deep, or when I got hung up on a boulder. I was glad to finally have enough money to buy an appropriate vehicle.

The jeep was red with a brown canvas top and a black roll bar. I loved it. Even when I wasn’t going fishing, I sought out bad roads, just for the pleasure of driving on them. In the spring, after the ground thawed and mud season began, the roads were at their worst. I spent hours driving around looking for challenging conditions.

I particularly enjoyed churning through deep mud. When I saw a patch of mud ahead, I stopped short, looked it over, charted the most exciting course through it, gunned the jeep’s engine, and blasted forward into the swim. Sometimes the muck was several feet deep. As my tires searched for traction, the jeep yawed and side-slipped like a motorboat rushing downriver through whitewater. Sometimes it slid off the road. If I couldn’t drive it back on, I climbed out, fastened a cable to a tree on the other side, and winched it back. To do that, I often had to clamber on foot through the mud, sometimes knee-deep. I sweated and strained, and sometimes fell in the mud. Even that was fun. Sometimes I wondered how such foolishness could amuse me, but it was harmless.

 * * *

One day, that sport led me far from home, to an unfamiliar road. I came upon a long stretch of rutted mud. I stopped to look. The ruts appeared to be two to three feet deep. No jeep, truck, or wagon could have produced them, and no vehicle that wasn’t an Army tank could have driven through them.

I got out of my jeep and looked more closely. None of the ruts were tire tracks. In each, I saw scrapes and smoothing that could only have been done with a shovel. The ruts had been dug by hand. I looked at the road near my jeep. All vehicle tracks turned around there. No one had dared to drive on.

The strange ruts continued to where the road passed over a rise and out of sight. A hundred yards ahead of me, on the right, the road passed a clearing. I heard laughter coming from that direction. Curious, I walked along the side of the road to the clearing. As I approached, I heard the laughter again, howls of it. Some of it was pitched high, and some lower, like it came from a mixed group of young and older children. It was getting louder, and seemed to be getting closer.

Eight or ten children came running from the clearing, toward the road. There were eight or ten of them, laughing as I had heard. They seemed to be wearing loose shifts that reached to their knees, but it was hard to tell for sure because thick mud covered each of them from head to foot.

They carried shovels, which they held in front of them like two-handed swords. Without looking toward me, they ran to the road and leapt across several ruts, to the middle. There, I saw what looked like a red plastic tube, about a half-inch thick, protruding several inches above the mud. Giggling, the children began to dig near the tube. As I watched, I noticed that all of them had unusually large heads.

They dug a hole a foot or two deep. Then several of them threw aside their shovels, reached down, and pulled another child from the bottom of the hole. He—or she; I couldn’t tell which—was covered with fresh mud. Drips and clots of it fell from him. He was wearing a swim mask, also covered with mud. He removed it from his face, revealing a pale oval of eyes and nose. Blinking, he reached to the red tube and pulled it from the road. It was two feet long, muddy except for the upper end. He put that end to his mouth and sang a toodling sound through it, as if it were a kazoo. The other children laughed.

Then they saw me. They snatched up their shovels and ran off the road toward the clearing.

“Wait!” I said.

They stopped. I spoke to the one with the tube.

“What were you doing buried in the road?”

“It’s something we do for fun. We take turns being buried with a breathing tube. Usually we do it for hours at a time; sometimes all day.”

“That’s fun?”

“We think it’s interesting what our minds do down there.”

“What if somebody drives down the road?”

They glanced at each other. Then, five or six of them answered me, one after another, smoothly taking turns, one phrase per person. Their sentences came as if from one mind.

“Nobody drives down this road this time of year, and if they do they have to turn around before they get here. Nobody lives farther down this road than us, and most people around here know you can’t get through here in mud season. We dig the ruts deep, to make sure nobody tries. No one can drive into this mess without getting stuck. Everyone around here knows that. We’ve done it for years. The small chance that some stranger would actually try to drive through, and somehow get this far . . . . Well, that’s one of the things you think about while you’re lying down there.”

They all laughed. The last speaker turned and rushed out of sight. The others followed in a row.

I walked after them, into the clearing. It was a hundred yards wide, and ran several hundred yards back from the road, up a gradual slope, into the forest. Old piles of stones lay along the edges, probably from when the lot was cleared years ago.

Twelve or fifteen cabins sat scattered across the lot. Paved paths wound between them. One path, broader, cut straight through the lot diagonally, from the road to a back corner, where it passed through an opening into the woods. Mature maple trees spread high above the paths and cabins. In the center of the lot was what appeared to be a gathering place: a dozen wooden benches facing a large fire pit.

The cabins looked nearly identical. Each was two stories high, with weathered grey shingles on the outer walls, a tin roof slanting from front to back, a couple of skylights cut into the roof, and a stovepipe chimney that ran up one of the end walls. I supposed that each cabin had a room or two on the main floor—living room, kitchen—and a bedroom or two upstairs. Some of the cabins had open porches without railings.

One cabin, with no porch, stood nearest to me, in front of the others. A foot-high stone, a perfect cube, the color of slate and smooth as marble, rested in front of the door—a stepping stone, evidently. Beside it, along the front of the cabin, were three large stainless steel dog bowls. Behind the cabin, a satellite dish perched atop a high wooden pole that had totemic figures carved into it.

The settlement seemed well-constructed and maintained, not the picture of rural poverty that many houses up that way present. I judged it to have been built sometime before World War II, maybe as early as the 1920s.

I looked around. The children I’d met were nowhere to be seen. The only signs of life were columns of smoke that rose from the chimneys. I walked to the first cabin, stepped onto the stone, and knocked on the door.

From inside came a sound I knew well, of fingers tapping the keyboard of a computer. That surprised me. This was a few years before people commonly used PC’s. I used an IBM prototype of a fifty-pound “portable” in my work, and mainframes as well, but they were expensive in those days, and rare. Few people had one at home, and this was the boondocks.

The tapping ceased. I heard a chair move. Footsteps approached across the floor, and stopped behind the door. A voice called out.

“Yes?”

“My name is Vassal Squeezeshot. I was driving along the road….” I told what I was doing, and said I was curious to know more about children who play by burying each other in muddy roads.

The door opened. In the doorway stood a person no more than three feet tall, who wore a brief white crinoline dress, perhaps an antique, whose stiff petticoats puffed out from waist to knee. The person was adult and male, which I realized when I saw that his face showed a few days’ growth of beard. His body and face were flat and wide, and his head as oversized as the children’s, but more grotesque for the lack of obscuring mud. His eyes shone big and brown, his lips protruded, and an immaculate, blonde, shoulder-length, Prince Valiant hairdo—a wig, perhaps—framed his face. As he stood in front of me in the doorway, he held his naked, pudgy arms out sideways like a baby—a normal attitude, perhaps; he certainly wasn’t about to embrace me. His feet and legs were bare up to his knees, where they disappeared into his dress. His lower legs were covered with dark, curly hair. I stared at his bare toes.

“They weren’t all children,” he said. “Some were adults.” His eyes twinkled. “They’re my relatives. We’re all relatives here. They call me Jimmy, Queen of the Fairies, for reasons that you see.”

He curtsied, and touched the hem of his dress with his fingertips.

“In case you’re wondering about my name and my appearance, I should add that I don’t own a magic wand. So don’t be afraid of me; and don’t get your hopes up, either. I’ve no such powers.”

He gestured toward a muddy patch of floor inside the door.

“Would you like to take off your boots and come in?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Watch your head,” he said. “We built these places full-size, for when we have visitors, but you’re pretty tall.”

I ducked through the doorway, into the cabin. “You and your family surprise me,” I said. “I didn’t expect to meet a queen of the fairies this afternoon, or the rest of you.”

“No doubt,” he said. He watched me struggle out of my boots. “Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?”

“Yes, thank you. Coffee, please.”

He crossed the room and put a kettle on a wood-burning cook stove. Next to it, a stone sink and an old-fashioned hand pump sat in a stone counter. Next to them stood an old four-legged refrigerator. Shelves of books covered the walls. In the middle of the room, a long wooden table held a radio, a television, a multiline telephone, piles of books and paper, and an up-to-date computer terminal with a small monitor full of text, which he had evidently been working on when I knocked. Under the table slept three wirehaired dogs so large that I supposed they must stand as tall as Jimmy.

When I saw the computer and the books, a suspicion arose in me.

“Are you the Jimmy who—?”

“Yes, I am.”

As most of the world’s academics, book and music lovers, educated newshounds, art mavens, and other culturati, eggheads, and members of the chattering classes know, our country’s premier cultural critic, commentator, and all-purpose public intellectual was and is known by only one name: Jimmy. This was he. I had known he was a short person, but had no idea he lived in Maine, much less that he lived in the backwoods, or that he was the leader (I now supposed) of a clan of short people. I had seen him many times on television, and noticed his dwarfism, but there he had always worn a suit, and never the big, blonde hairdo.

“Sit down,” he said.

He pointed to some cushions on the floor near the table. I sat. He brought me the coffee, and set a milk pitcher and sugar pot on the floor next to me. The only chair in the cabin was at the computer terminal. He turned the chair toward me, vaulted up onto it, crossed his legs, and sat. The skin on his legs was pale between the coils of hair.

“I hope you don’t find us too strange,” he said.

“I’ve seen a few things in my time,” I replied. “Nothing like this, but—. You look acceptable to me. And at this point, I realize that I know who you are, as a lot of people do. I know and admire your media persona. I certainly didn’t know that you live here. Until I walked in here and saw all those books and your computer, I had no idea. Those made me suspect.”

He smiled.

“I try to stay isolated, and let my words do my talking—in my books, newspaper columns, magazine articles, conference papers, and so on, as I guess you’ve seen. I keep out of public view except when I’m on TV news and talk shows, or when I’m paid a lot of money to talk to groups in various parts of the world. Then I bundle up my hair, to get it out of the way, and I put on a very expensive suit—my costume for public viewing; nothing like what I wear around here, as you can see. It covers me as elegantly as a stubby guy like me can manage. Elegant by outside standards, that is. Around here, dressed as I am, I’m the height of fashion.”

(There is much about the Bigheads in Prelude, and more coming, perhaps, in other volumes of the SQUEEZESHOT saga. — H.A.)

---

Awake

That August, I flew to Paris for a break. I stayed a few days, strolling the streets, recalling my first visit, with my parents when I was twelve. I found familiar sights and sounds. And familiar smells, of the streets, sidewalks, and buildings; the fountains, flowerbeds, and gravel walkways of the parks; the exhaust from cars and trucks; the cigarette smoke (Gauloises!), perfumes of passing strangers, and aromas of food, wine, and coffee wafting from cafés, restaurants, and the open windows of people’s apartments. I was footloose, idle, a flâneur—a welcome change for me.

Days later, it is 3AM in my hotel room on the coast of Normandy. I am sitting in bed, writing in my journal for the first time since leaving the States. I am dwelling on matters I cannot describe. Something needs saying, I know, but I don’t know what.

I hear a sound through the window beside my bed. And again, a rattling in the alley outside. The window is open, the air warm. A breeze gusts across Normandy from the west, stirring the curtains. Whatever is out there worries me. I am often fearful these days, sluggish with fear, but tonight my thoughts turn more heavily and slowly than usual. They slip, fail to engage, their mechanism malfunctioning. This condition began hours ago. I awoke into it. It hasn’t diminished. I keep regarding it, trying to force perspectives upon it, but I can make no progress. I am unable either to escape it or rest from it.

Again the rattle. This time I recognize it: an empty metal trash can, fallen, rolling back and forth in the fitful wind. I hear it again, and again, percussion for my turgid symphony. I can do nothing about it. I put down my pen and listen. An hour passes, and then another. I want to sleep. Several times I close my eyes. My belly rises and falls with my breath. Finally, the wind outside dies and the rolling stops. A glow of daylight starts through the window, to where I lie.

 

---

 

Victory

 

The next night, my life changed. After Last Call, my hotel bartender told me he knew a nightclub I should visit.

“You are sober enough, mon ami?”

“Mais oui! Of course!” My head was full of brandy. I heard my voice as if from a distance, as if it wasn’t mine.

The bartender called a cab. When it arrived, I sailed out the hotel’s revolving door and down the carpeted steps. I bent low into the cab and, leaning back, sank into the springs of the seat.

The cab drove me along the two-lane road out of town, toward the nearby beach. The headlights projected into the darkness. We rode straight and fast through the countryside, behind the bluffs and cliffs that hang high over the shore. The driver said the club he was taking me to was popular. Every night of the summer, he said, fancy people, regulars, came in fancy cars: Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Rolls Royces, top-of-the-line Porsches, and a few old gull-winged Mercedes 300SL’s and restored Facel Vegas. “I love seeing those cars, monsieur.” And proletarian cars too, of course, he said—Renaults, Citroens, Peugeots, Simcas—but not so many. The club was popular among certain people, he said, the kinds who drove those fancy cars. They came from Deauville, Trouville, and other nearby resort towns, and even from Paris, hours away. No signs announced the club, he said. It had no name. It didn’t advertise. It didn’t need such things. As he drove through the darkness, he talked on and on, gesturing to me across the back of his seat. I stopped listening, lulled by the brandy in my head and the swaying of the car.

Finally, the car slowed down and pulled off the road. I looked out the window beside me and, dimly, saw a field full of the cars the driver had described. No attendant, no illumination. The light of stars and a three-quarter moon glinted off the metal and glass.

“Monsieur.”

The driver pointed to the other side, toward an oceanside bluff.

“Walk to the light.”

I got out of the cab and he drove away.

It was past midnight. Rather than walking toward the light, I circled left around it, up a low bluff. The ground was sandy. I plodded along, my legs pushing through grass up to my knees. I stumbled on rises in the ground.

A warm mist hung in the air. As I came to the top of the bluff, the ocean rose into view. The moon shone above it, lighting the waves. The sky full of stars rested on the horizon. I looked up at the moon, then at the sea. A row of rough bushes stood dark a few feet in front of me. I found a gap between them, walked through, and stopped on the other side.

I was at the top of a cliff, ten feet from the edge. I took a few steps forward, crouched, and peered downward. A hundred feet below me, a broad beach stretched for a quarter mile, to the sea. Low tide, I thought. I watched the white lines of the distant waves, and heard them, faintly, hit the sand.

I felt an urge to pee. I stood up, fumbled with my pants, and leaned back, sending my stream of piss arcing over the edge. It sparkled as it fell. As my bladder emptied, I sighed with relief—a distant sigh. Still pretty drunk, big guy.

I turned and walked back down the bluff, toward the light. As I approached, I felt what seemed like pulverized concrete crunching beneath my feet. More than thirty years before, in the early 1940’s, the Nazis had built concrete bunkers into that bluff and others like it along the coast of France, to defend against Allied invasion. They armed the bunkers with artillery and machine guns they hoped would repel any attack. But the invasion came. In Normandy, early on D-Day in June 1944, the 16-inch guns of American battleships threw tons of steel and explosives against the fortifications on the bluffs. The explosions flung storms of concrete through the air, spreading chunks and bits of it across the ground.

When I reached the nightclub, it turned out to be one of the old bunkers. At the entrance, a single light bulb burned in a rusted cage beside a heavy metal door. On the wall around the light, remnants of camouflage paint faded into stains of mildew and mold. Machine gun pockmarks scarred the wall and door.

I heard a car start somewhere behind me. I looked back into the darkness. A scarlet carpet stretched toward the field where I’d seen the cars. There, a set of headlights came on, then another. I turned back to the door. A heavy metal ring hung in place of a doorknob. I twisted it. The door opened inward. I entered.

* * *

In front of me, down a step, lay a crowded barroom. The walls and ceiling were bare concrete. The floor was concrete, too, no doubt, but I couldn’t see it; it was swarming with people standing, walking, sitting at tables, talking, laughing.

I stepped down into the room. The ceiling hung low, seven feet high. I walked a few feet. People slipped past me, brushing against me. I reached a hand to the ceiling to steady myself, and felt the cool concrete and a tickle of peeling paint. A cloth-covered electrical wire ran along it, ahead, where every ten feet or so a light bulb hung inside a small cage like the one at the door. The bulbs glowed dim, yellow, casting dull shadows.

The wire disappeared into a second big room. I heard a pulse of music. Tall as I am, I could see over people’s heads. It looked like people were dancing in there. I still couldn’t see the floor, but as I walked across it, it felt thinly carpeted, as if by a layer of felt.

People sat and stood everywhere. The tables and chairs were square, heavy, wooden, no shine to them. Every seat seemed to be taken. People inched along aisles that led between the barroom and dancing room. The light from overhead was so faint that every face was in shadow. Here and there I could make out the glint of someone’s eyes, the turn of a mouth.

The bar ran alongside the room. I veered over to it, found an empty stool, and sat. A bartender ambled up. I ordered the oldest Calvados they had, a tumbler of it.

“That much?” the bartender asked. At least, I think that’s what he said; it was noisy in there. I nodded.

The bartenders worked by the light of kerosene lanterns, one to each of their workstations. There were no waiters or waitresses out on the floor, so customers thronged to the bar to get drinks.

I listened to people near me talk, some of them about war. At the time, U.S. soldiers were lined up at a hostile border, getting tough with an enemy. The people around me spoke in French, giving opinions pro and con my country’s actions. Then, rising from a table close behind me, a woman’s voice spoke fiercely in American English.

“At the root of these antiwar people’s sentiment is naïveté, a child’s daydream born of ignorance. It’s a dream that would be dispelled if they could see that all this present militancy—sharp talk, threats, jostling, violence, pain, killing—is part of the Paradise we live in. These people are wimps, adults who aren’t at peace with themselves or their world. So far in their lives, they’ve missed the signs that might guide them to happiness, and they know it. They dream of a glory that they fear will never come their way, a contented life that countless other people live every day. 

“They aren’t lost souls, but they’re incomplete. In their rants of opinion they say they want to save humanity from as much misery as possible, including extinction. But they’re mostly just battling their own unhappiness and mortality. They fear their own deaths; their own shadows, almost. They haven’t learned what everyone knows in their bones: that death is not fundamentally different from life; that what we are when we’re dead or not yet born or never to be born is as good as the present miracle of being alive. So, why not be happy? 

Meanwhile, go, America, I say! Blow things up! May the explosions of your bombs, roars of your cannons, and your victims’ cries of agony and alarm continue as you make your meaningless progress. It’s inevitable!”

Her voice broke into rich laughter. Male laughter rippled behind. I swung part way around on my stool, to look. Three men sat at the table. A fourth chair was empty.

“Bartender!” The woman’s voice barked from the other side of me, beside the bar. I swung counterclockwise toward her, too fast. My knees bumped hard into the backs of her legs.

“Whoa!” she said.

I spun back the other way, to the bar, and grabbed it with my forearms and hands, stopping my spin. You’re drunker than you thought, Vassal. My head lolled forward. My vision swerved, then settled on the bar in front of me. I felt too flustered to look at the woman beside me. Out of the corners of my eyes, I saw her face turn and look at my glass. It was nearly empty.

“Had enough firewater, mister?”

“Sorry to bump into you like that,” I said. “But about the firewater, no, not enough, not yet. Up to a point, the more I drink of it the more my interest in everything grows, even if it does wreck my co-ordination.”

“Poor boy, crippled by fine spirits.”

She turned away.

“Bartender!”

Down the bar, a bartender turned to her.

“A margarita this time, friend. Straight up, salt on the rim, with your best teh-kee-la!”

I straightened on my stool, and, holding the edge of the bar, turned my head to her.

“I heard you talking,” I said. “I like what you said about Paradise. It’s here, isn’t it, and on every battlefront? Concerning which, it’s time our soldiers had some live targets to shoot at. We mustn’t let our war machine get rusty. It’s the guardian of our prosperity, fueled by our god-given greed and wish to live comfortably. Such is human nature. We’ve gotta keep in fighting trim. And it’s not just selfish. Despite the harm it does, waging war is beneficial to others in lots of ways.”

She threw back her head, laughed loudly, then looked down at the bar, her face deadpan, and shook her head. Her hair swung forward, obscuring her face except the tip of her nose.

“Hmm,” she said, seemingly to herself. “I must’ve drunk too much, like this guy.” Then, toward me, “You said it, buster. Sometimes, often, fighting is best. Or it might as well be, since, like everyone, we do it anyway and always will. All anger, craving, and desire wages war.

“As for what’s happening this time, the army needs a training ground with human bulls-eyes, as you say. How else can we the people do what we must to get what we can? Sometimes it’s also for the good of others, but it’s always primarily for ourselves and our countrymen and our hungry ways. We’ve gotta eat, right? That’s reason enough to give our soldiers what we give them: a small paycheck, lifetime benefits, a flag to wave, and weapons; plus a lie, a simple-minded piece of brainwash with which they and we justify using our weapons and pretend ever so sincerely that our cause is always just.”

The bartender set her drink down in front of her.

“I do go on, don’t I? Words, such playthings. I’m not sure I believe any of them.”

Say what? I couldn’t keep up with her. My mind was too sluggish. I felt I was improvising a scene in a movie without being ready, with too little sense of the situation. Cut, mister director! Stop the action! Turn off the camera!

She leaned across the bar beside me and gazed into her drink. I looked down behind her. She wore high heels and a long black satin dress, its side slit up to her thigh, showing flashes of a pale leg. Her neck was unadorned, her bare shoulders white, her shoulder blades delicate. The back of her dress was open to her waist. I stared at the top of her rump where it curved out of sight beneath the fabric. I couldn’t see if she was wearing underpants. I wanted to slide my hand down along her back and beneath her dress, but was sober enough to keep my hands off.

I looked back toward the bar. She was reaching for her drink. Her arms were bare, with a black bracelet around one wrist. The front of her dress was open between her breasts. I wanted to dive in. I leaned forward and looked back at her face. Beautiful. I was entranced.

She was young—mid-20’s, I supposed, five years or so younger than me. She wore red lipstick. Her brows and lashes were dark. Her eye color I couldn’t tell; in the low light, I could barely distinguish the whites from the irises and pupil. She didn’t seem to be wearing eyeliner, but I couldn’t be sure. Her face looked flawless in the darkness except for a mole above her upper lip and small concentric wrinkles at the ends of her mouth. A touch of pink colored each cheek, from rouge or maybe the close air and heat of the room. Her nose was small, and turned up slightly.

As I looked at her, she tilted her chin upward, swinging her hair back. She must have known I was looking at her, as I’m sure men often did. Her hair caught some light. It was brown, and curved halfway to her shoulders. She looked more girlish than she sounded when she spoke.

I looked back at my drink. Without speaking, her drink in hand, she turned away from me, walked back to her table, and sat down. She started talking to the men there, too quietly for me to hear over the barroom din. I felt I was at the end of a scene, amid a crush of scene makers. I spoke aloud to myself. “Why are you here, Vassal, sitting at this crazy bar?” I stood and made my way toward the dance floor. “This joint is nothing special,” I said to nobody.

In the next room, I stood at the edge of the dance floor and tried to move with the music. I was too drunk to get in sync with it. I felt dull. I thought I might leave. Then I began to warm to the music. A new song began. Its rhythm caught me and took hold. The music was loud. It swept, banged, and boomed through the room. Some people around me danced face-to-face, shouting to each other, barely able to hear, but most leapt and spun, this way and that. Some jumped up and pushed off of the low ceiling again and again like pistons, in time with the music.

One dancer who must have been a professional held his partner’s shoulders and jumped way up, repeatedly. At the top of each jump, he bent far forward, banged his butt against the ceiling, and kicked his legs straight out behind him. Each time, after suspending himself up there for a moment, he curled down and dropped lightly to his feet. His shirt was soaked in sweat, and an ecstatic smile transfixed his face.

 I whooped, raised my arms, and began dancing. I plunged onto the dance floor, joining the crowd. As I danced, I glimpsed other people’s faces, clothes, and limbs, all in motion. Those visions became my partners, part of the music. After a while, I closed my eyes and just bounced in place, one particle among many. Occasionally, my eyes still closed, I drifted a few steps one way or another, somehow not colliding with other dancers.

* * *

Some time later, I reached the far side of the dance floor. I was breathing hard, feeling heavy. I stopped dancing and stood by a wall. People were passing into a wide hallway to my left. I followed.

I found myself walking through an arched passageway made of the same unadorned concrete as the rest of the bunker. A string of light bulbs ran overhead. Twenty or thirty feet along, I passed doors to restrooms. Beyond them, the string of lights ended. The passageway opened in front of me onto the floor of an old gun emplacement. A ring of rusted tracks stood in its center, where an artillery piece had once pivoted. A kerosene lantern sputtered from the ceiling, above the ring. At the far side of the floor, people gazed over a wall of concrete chunks, out intoo the night. I walked over and reached to lean on the wall, then pulled back awkwardly. It didn’t look safe. Mangled steel rods bound the chunks together loosely. Several chunks lay loose on the floor.

A cool breeze touched my face. I looked out into the night and saw that I was standing on the cliff, looking again at the sea, which stretched to the western horizon. The moon still hung above, but closer now to the horizon, where it would set. I felt dizzy. Facing back into the emplacement, I sat down on the floor, leaned back against a chunk of the wall, and closed my eyes. I heard people come and go, talking. I sat for a long time, eyes closed, listening. 

Suddenly, a finger brushed my cheek.

“Hi there, firewater. I was wondering where you went. Would you like to dance?”

I opened my eyes. The woman from the barroom.

“Sure.”

I struggled to my feet. We walked back down the tunnel.

Was she a spy? I was wondering.

“Where do you work?” I asked.

“I’m a government worker.”

“What part?”

“State Department.”

We were on the dance floor, starting to dance. Her dancing was fluid, a sequence of postures and gestures such as I had never seen except in sculptures of hundred-limbed goddesses. One after another, she angled her chin, head, shoulders, elbows, wrists, and fingers; raised a leg to one side then the other, pointing each knee, toes up; then raised each leg again and straightened it, pointing each foot like a ballerina. In each posture, she paused, her gaze distant. Her belly seemed always to be still, a center around which she revolved. She didn’t look at me even once.

The music pounded. We orbited each other slowly, as if in a trance. Every moment felt new to me. As well as I could, clumsy as I was, I danced in a way that suited hers, like a dancing bear, maybe, or a dog on its hind feet. But I didn’t care how I looked, and she didn’t seem to care either. No judgment.

We danced on and on. I had no idea what time it was. Finally, when we were at the edge of the barroom, the music stopped for a few minutes. We walked to an empty table and sat across from each other. Half the tables around us were empty now. People had left, or were dancing. It was quieter, too. Both of us put our elbows on the table, leaned low, and propped our heads on our hands. Usually, I’d be talking by then, but I was feeling passive. She sat back and looked idly around the room. What a beauty, I thought, or near enough. Am I really here? The wacko engineer, on some kind of vacation far from home, has come to this?

Her look around the room stopped at me.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Vassal Squeezeshot. What’s yours?”

“Victory. Victory Tree. Listen, I want to rewind you a bit. You were saying that our boys need practice on living targets. Do they really?”

“Yes, now and then. It’s a pity for the enemy soldiers, of course, but I suppose they need practice too, coming under fire and shooting back. Seeing death approach, other soldiers’ and possibly one’s own, teaches vigilance. ‘It’s coming, maybe,’ and all that.”

“It’s coming, eh? Are you a soldier?”

“In a way. But I try to fight for all sides at once.”

“That’s decent of you.”

All sides at once—silly thing for me to say to someone who doesn’t know me. Too heavy for the moment. 

A minute passed.

“Where did you learn to dance like that?” I asked. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“In New York, from some actors. It’s something they studied, to help them perform. Before that, I took ballet lessons for years. Never quite got over it.”

“Where are you from in the States?” I asked.

“Colorado. But New York City is where I live.”

“You live in New York and work for the State Department?”

She smiled. 

“No, I don’t work for the State Department. I said that to you on a whim. I’m a playwright with an adolescent taste for stirring things up. I’m working in Paris on an exchange that the State Department had a minor role in arranging. I talk to students at the Sorbonne, teach them about playwriting, and stage a few plays with them.”

“In English, or French?”

“Both—whatever suits the moment. All the kids speak a little English, and like to use it. They are dears. And wild, which I like to stir up.”

“What do you say to them?”

“I try to turn their imaginations loose. I tell them that everyday life is theater, that our classroom is one of their stages, and that at some point after they leave it they will be dead, so they’d better get down to their playwriting while they have the chance. I encourage them, but also make them defend themselves, slash at themselves and each other, cut and shape their artistry. They’re ravenous but undeveloped. I teach them how to be merciless with themselves, with how they see and do things. They like that. They come to class with great energy and willingness. It’s wonderful. Often, I guide the mayhem, but a lot of times they’re in the lead. Occasionally, I’m its object, which is only fair. We all need plenty of that, and most of us don’t get it. Always, I watch for signs of progress. And at the end of each class, no matter what we’ve talked about and how we’ve talked about it, we put ourselves back together. We learn to appreciate ourselves and each other more.”

“Dramatic, isn’t it?”

“Yes, often on the edge of crazy. Which is fine. Like everyone, they’ll develop smoother edges as they get older.”

“I bet they like you, even when you frighten them.”

“There’s some of that. It comes with the territory. Some of them are kids who don’t know what they’re doing there. The high heat does them good, maybe like that benevolent war-making we were talking about.”

I looked around the room. A few people having conversations.

“I hope I haven’t bored you with all that, about me,” she said.

“Not in the least. But I have a question: Who are you with tonight?”

“Three men colleagues. Friends, but nobody special. One owns an apartment in town where I stay when I visit the coast. They—”

She stopped. We were both still leaning down on the table, our heads in our hands. Her face hung a foot from mine. She squinted at me as if seeing me for the first time. Or maybe she wasn’t seeing anything. Her mouth was half open, relaxed, a world-weary chanteuse. Was she more drunk than I was?

A corner of her mouth crept upward into a smile.

“So, who the hell are you?” she said. “What do you do? What bull’s-eyes do you shoot at?”

I sat up as if awakened.

“I’m an engineer, madam.”

“Where are you from?”

“New England.”

“What do you engineer?”

“Creatures.”

“What kind of creatures?”

I didn’t want to say, but decided what the heck.

“Little mechanical ones. There are two kinds. One kind swims, the other kind flies. You can control where they go, and they have eyes and ears that anyone can see and hear through.”

“Really? I never heard of such things. What do you do with them?”

“Nothing much, so far.”

“Who has them?”

“Just me.”

“Who pays for your work? Are they devices for spying?”

“I pay. And no, they’re not for spying. And lately I’ve become pretty tired of them.”

I was about to prattle on more. I opened my mouth to speak.

“Wait,” she said. “I’ve been here long enough tonight. How about you? Are you staying in town, too?”

I nodded.

“Let’s take a cab back to my apartment. Just a change of scene—don’t get the wrong idea. I can see we have some things to talk about. I’ll make some coffee there, bring the night to a close, then send you back to where you’re staying. Is that OK by you?”

She went to find her friends, to tell them we would be taking a cab back to town. I watched her cross the room—her hips, her swing. I felt charmed by her and her attention, and happy to be talking with anyone, particularly an attractive woman. She could be spying on me for the government, but I doubted it. I figured I could avoid harm even if she was.

A few minutes later, on our way out the door, she said, “You know, I don’t drink much usually, and I almost never go to clubs these days.”

“Well, you certainly seemed at home here.”

”You, too. As for me, I loved it. I was in the mood.”

 

---

 

 

COMING SOON

. . . the rest of The Journal (Second Edition)

Below are the section titles from
the first edition. Most will
migrate to the second.

A Saving Grace
The Indians
A Mad Moose
The Bigheads
Glories of War
Northern Lights
Minnow
Fly
Zermatt
Eyes and Ears of God
Telling the Indians
Invention
G-men
Talks
Awake
Victory
Paris
The Epic
Standing and Flushing
Return
Victory Writes
To the Ranch
On the Lookout
Mountain Adventures
Moving Pictures
War Considered
Victory’s Notes
Join the Bugs
The President
With the Bigheads
Home
Butting In
Opinion Survey
Assault
Break-ins
An Idea Grows
Naked on the Battlefront
The Fly Lands
Repercussions
Between Shows
Baring All
Between Shows, ctd
Show of Shows
Destruction
Then What?
Shot
Trips
Run!
Last Rites

---

 

TOP⬆︎
CONTACT / SUBSCRIBE
SIGN UP for the occasional newsletter
— new works, exhibit notices, etc. See the latest here.