Hey guys,

I’m sorry if I’m bogarting the blog. Please offer any feedback about this piece that is completely consuming me.  Hope you’re all well,

JP

            The American, Michael Edward Freedham, is sitting down in a comfortable chair at Café Las Quilles. There is the pretty waitress, his fifth cup of coffee now blood-warm before him, the bar and the little percolator working and the fat bartender with the pencil moustache bored and staring out at the organ man. There’s a feeling of summery drowsiness but it’s December. He’s come to the city of Abaixado at the rainy part of the year, right before the disbanding of the police.

 

In Chicago the winter is too much, all of the snow is businesslike and in stony piles. When it melts the soil underneath is raw like a wound.  In Abaixado, warm rain has been falling. There are rainbows.

Two months ago, just after Michael arrived, the police were disbanded. The air felt too close that day and Gilson Cabral had been shot. Michael couldn’t always understand the television news and he still isn’t sure what happened. He thinks the thing about Cabral is that he was what in English you would call a “ring leader.” He was the head of one of the striking trade unions. Dead on television, his plaid shirt was pulled away from his neck and there were the scarlet, neat little holes on his chest and shoulders. He was handsome, even so.

For obscure reasons, the police were disbanded shortly after the death of Cabral.

The mayor of the city is Ulíses Días, a muchacho muy alto with plasticine good looks, and he has denied involvement. Michael the American, who didn’t catch every word, could tell the mayor was lying on TV.

For some reason, the striking trade unions were joined about a month ago by the teachers and the farmers, who came down from the mountains. And then by the student groups in their multifarious ideological permutations. The revolutionaries occupied the square by the Eglisa Santo Domingo and demanded the resignation of the all members of the ORP party from governing posts around the state, including and especially the post of mayor of Ciudad Abaixado.

Every few days an assembly is held and one of the revolutionaries gives the balled fist salute to his companeros and shouts things angrily into a microphone. Michael listens to them but can’t always follow — the revolutionaries scream about the superhighway being constructed across the isthmus, about the oil in the mountains, about the sudden and strange exodus of all of the corn farmers from the state of Abaixado. Michael the American only understands what he sees: there are 10,000 of them in the streets and they seem very upset.

           

Every few days they do this and now Michael Freedham has been in Ciudad Abaixado a while and he has settled down some: his days have taken on structure and shape. The mornings come and he yawns in the little hotel room, he fingers the curlicued hair below his navel. He goes to his balcony and the heat of the day is on him and it is good.

 

            After a shave, he goes to the little café by the ministerial plaza — Café “Las Quilles” — and he orders a plate of juevos flacos. They also have granola even though this is Mexico, and sometimes he eats granola. He stays at the cafe for the better part of the day. Out on the patio every day, the same man — he could pass for 17 or 30 — is under the awning, reading as though possessed by words. Rain or no rain. The man’s lips twitch as he reads, and sweat forms beads on his forehead and he flips the pages so fast that sometimes they tear under his fingers.

For Michael, there’s the night, which also has a kind of structure. There are Emily from Kansas City and Henry, from somewhere out east. There’s Aurelien the Quebecois, and there are Mr. House (a novelist) and Marcel, the poet who lives in a brothel in El Jicaro, and who only comes down every so often. They have a nickname for Michael; it’s “Chicago Mike.” All of them run reckless at the nighttime together. The revolutionaries have occupied the central square and light bonfires at the intersections and obstruct traffic. Sometimes late at night the revolutionaries will grab someone by the scruff of his neck and ask him what the hell is he doing around here? They never even look at Michael Edward Freedham.

 

            When the bar closes Chicago Mike goes to bed and sleeps the sleep of the dead. He wakes up and begins anew. It is a cycle.

 

            At this instant he’s at the point in the cycle where he’s sitting at his table at Las Quilles, as he has every day for the past two months. It’s juevos flacos today and not granola. He is trying to read Carson McCullers or something when he feels the unnameable sense of a body too near to him and a pair of eyes on the base of his skull. He looks up: it’s the man who is somewhere between the ages of 17 and 30, who reads rabidly under the awning facing the ministerial plaza everyday at Cafe Las Quilles.

           

“American?” he asks.

 

“Yes, I am.”

 

“Here for spring break?” he says with very good English. “You’re a long way from the beach.”

 

“It’s winter,” says Michael. “Besides, I don’t like beaches.”

 

“No?” He is looking at Michael with an entertained, not-quite-friendly look.

 

“I prefer mountains.”

 

The man considers this: “There are some in America, I think.”

“I prefer mountains, but I hate cold,” says Michael.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” says the man finally. The man has air like an oil slick over dark, soft eyes, and there are firm bones under the flesh that angle gently toward a certain kind of mouth. For no reason at all Michael thinks of a thing he’s seen the night before in his little hotel room: a cockroach dangling like an autumn leaf in a spider web.

Sometimes, people confer on one another really unnecessary amounts of intimacy—liquor is involved a lot of times. But Mike isn’t drunk. There is something about the dark eyes or the voice.  So as he stands there at Michael’s table at Café Las Quilles, Michael tells the man like it is: how he has left the University in Chicago and that he isn’t any better off and no weight is lifted from him, here, now, in Mexico, just the same bits of the same old stories coming and going, creating something entirely new and yet completely old. He says that it is interesting to travel so many miles and discover that he hasn’t really gone anywhere. He is talking like thirsty men drink.

 

It has sort of surprised him, but he has been very unhappy all this time.

 

The trick, he explains, is to find yourself in bars with nothing to say, wondering if you should say something. To decide instead that you have nothing worth offering. You go to the bars with the other expatriates, who will try to engage you in speak about surfing or fútbol or, of course, The War. Eventually they start talking about Appalachian National Park—but you’ve never been. And you watch the conversation pull away much as you might watch ruefully the bus you just missed.

 

He continues: You must have a sad and alone look because the others start throwing you sidelong glances. You order another drink, quietly, with your tongue feeling too thick. Eventually Emily from Kansas City asks you if you’re feeling okay. You try to speak but now you’re too drunk even to talk. Henry from out east intones you’ve had too much to drink and you can only glare helplessly. You’ve heard and seen and felt all this before, only in Chicago. It’s warmer now, is all. Later on, you and Emily and Henry are walking to the hotel together when those two slip away wordlessly down Avenida Duruti, folding into one another. When you come to your small room in the hotel you collapse onto your bed realizing a mule can’t come back a horse, no matter how far he walks.

 

Michael finishes, suddenly breathless.

 

“So you’re unhappy?” There’s no judgment in the man’s words — they’re just a sort of clarification.

 

He wonders: “I am.”

 

“I’m making the same choice,” says the man. So they begin to talk.  

 

And what is it that people find to talk about?

 

There is religion, for example. There is in this man almost a palpable sense of disdain for faith, and it runs deep like some chasm. For him, faith is a kind of pinnacle of unreason. Michael, though he’s always hoped against hope that Some Thing is watching out for all of us, can’t quite articulate why the lack of visible evidence of a God may not be reason to doubt His existence. But it is revealed later on that this stranger has never missed mass. Not once.

 

And politics, too. They talk about politics on this day. The man sees government as only the meddling of men in things that aren’t their business. Sometimes he spits on the sidewalk, he says, just because. As for the revolutionaries — well, it’s not that he disagrees with them, exactly. The man has a hard feeling in his heart when it comes to those people at the square by the Eglisa Santo Domingo: the problem is that they are all in so much agreement. All agreement, he contends, is false. And Michael agrees.

 

Books. Oh, God, there are so many books to discuss. Conrad and Carson McCullers and James Joyce and all the wonderful, delicious books to be read.

 

They talk for a long time. The pretty waitress leaves and is replaced by a fat, balding, middle-aged man with curly hair. They don’t order any food or coffee or anything. The thing is that they are two men and they are lonely and reasonably intelligent. So they are friends.

 

After a few hours, the man introduces himself: “I’m Bocanegra.”

 

“My name is Michael,” says the other one. There’s a pregnant quietude for a second or two. “Well, I guess I should clear out.” Bocanegra nods. Michael picks up the book he has been reading; it feels strange and light. He shakes Bocanegra’s hand, leaves whistling. He becomes happily drunk and talkative at the bar and sleeps with Emily from Kansas City.

 

The next day Bocanegra is there again, at his table with the coagulant dishes and his burnt, cold coffee. He looks up when Michael approaches and puts away the book he’s reading and his notebook. It occurs to Michael that Bocanegra has set time aside for his arrival. This day and the day after that and the days and days after that they speak for hours that slip by like rolling, green hills.

 

Only one day, Bocanegra isn’t at Café Las Quilles.

8.8.08

In this summer’s Batman movie, we glimpsed a bit of Alfred’s back-story.  He tells Batman the story of when he was in the imperial service during the British colonization of Burma.  His government had been bribing local leaders with absurdly-sized gems, which kept getting stolen by a rogue thief in the forest, who had been simply throwing them away.  Because Alfred could think of no conceivable reason why any Burmese would want to resist the British regime, he must have been thieving simply to “watch the world burn.”  Later, the crime fighting duo return to the topic:

Batman: That thief in the forest in Burma, did you ever catch him?
Alfred: Yes
Batman: How?
Alfred: By burning down the forest.

And Burma (now officially Myanmar) is still burning.

I am sending you this email to remind you that twenty years ago today was Burma’s best chance at freedom.   On August 8th 1988, students, monks, and Burmese citizens took to the streets to rally around Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of Aung San, who won Burma’s independence from the British.

I am sending this email because I am largely ignorant of the political realities at issue here, and I think most of us are.   I really don’t know what I’m talking about, I just feel that we ought to be talking about it today. Seriously, Batman’s pretty much the extent of what I’ve got, here.

The protests of 8-8-88 were brutally suppressed by the junta.  Soldiers indiscriminately killed citizens on the streets of Rangoon and other cities around the country. According to the SLORC (the junta of Myanmar, renamed the SPDC in 1997), five people were killed.  Words fail me here, so click: 1  | 2 .  Independent estimates put the number of killed at 3,000.

The massacres of 8-8-88 have been repeated and amplified since.  Hopefully we have not forgotten the Saffron Revolution last September—reports of casualties have been effectively repressed, but the number is certainly radically more than we heard about in America; The Daily Mail reported that thousands of bodies were dumped in the jungle.  That was one of the most inspiring events I can remember–the sight (both in pictures and in my imagination) of a sea of saffron clad monks walking barefoot out of their monestaries into certain violence in order to go visit Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest and demand change for their country will stay with me forever.

And Cyclone Nargis.  The SPDC’s insistance that the Burmese people not receive aid must be considered an attempt at massacre.  But the Burmese people proved to be stronger than the SPDC thought they were; through community support and neighborly assistance, and the bravery and concern of the monks, a humanitarian disaster was averted.  It has been bad for the people of the Irrawaddy delta, but not nearly as bad as international aid organizations had feared.

Today, on the twentieth anniversary of 8-8-88, the Chinese light the Olympic torch, the fruit of a tremendous feat of international propaganda.  History may well look back on today as the beginning of China’s worldwide reign.  This Olympics may be for China what Hitler hoped the Berlin Olympics would be for The Third Reich.

Burma is not China; in fact, the two claim to have no relations.  But just as the red dragon is at the root of tragedies worldwide (Darfur, Tibet, Somalia, Xinjiang), so is it the root of the oppression in Burma.  Ever since the uprising of 88, the SLORC has received almost all of its weapons and funding from China.  China is Burma’s only significant trade partner.

I don’t really feel the need to rattle off the reasons for China’s growing power.  At base, China controls the largest single flow of the world’s capital.  They beat America at its own game.  Capitalism worldwide (and especially in America) is absolutely reliant upon China, much more than any other single power.

But the reason for this email is that I feel that not enough attention is paid in this country to China’s moral and ideological stance, perhaps because their cynical amorality makes it difficult to pin down what it actually is.

Of course, China is still nominally a communist nation. My parents’ generation celebrated the fall of communism as it celebrated the fall of the Soviet Union.  Yet here we are.

Much has been made of China’s move towards capitalism.  But China’s government remains in absolute control of the economy. Their economic might does not come from individual entrepreneurs, but rather their ability to organize huge masses of people into astoundingly productive units.  The potent marriage of authority and capital. Everywhere in capitalism the government and the largest businesses are in league, but in China they are almost indistinguishable. The ruling class has profited immensely from subverting Maoist philosophy into a slave ideology of the amassed workers.

China’s actions on the international stage are reminiscent of the early days of the American empire.  I am reminded of the Monroe Doctrine and the “sphere of influence” we fought for in South and Central America. Just as the CIA trains and arms dictatorships across the Americas, so has China learned to arm Sudan and Burma.  I cynically believe that this is just as much the reason America finds it impossible to stand up to China in any capacity.  Our leaders see too much of themselves in China.  Of course there is a deep economic dependency between our countries, but it is buttressed by a twisted ideological affinity that reveals the Cold War for the farce that it was.  Capitalism and Communism might be antithetical in their pure forms, but what we have is not capitalism and what they have is not communism.  We have a command economy that is designed for and by corporations powerful enough to replace state actors—America uses the idea of capitalism as a slave morality to keep the workers working for that entrepreneurial dream.  China has turned its state into a corporation, and uses communism as a unique brand of slave morality that keeps the masses working for the Motherland.  America warehouses its undesirable populations in an endless prison state.  China cuts out the pretense and harvests their organs.  It was only natural that Nixon should be the president to open relations between the two countries.

I’m not nearly well enough informed to be able to predict what will happen as China grows.  It just seems to me that as the American Empire is falling, the Chinese Empire is rising, and it will be a brutal reign.

I would love to be writing some sort of call to action at this point.  But we’re talking about massive flows of capital and power way beyond the reach of any one or group of humans.  We need China, not only for our cheap plastic crap, but also to bankroll our economy of debt.  Obama will need China just as much as Bush does.  And thank god of it, because a mutual dependency of avarice is much better than a world war—I genuinely mean that—even if some Black and Brown people have to die or live under tyranny for it.  As Americans, on this historic day, all we can do is be aware of what we are watching when we watch that torch erupt into flame in Beijing.  I could ask you not to watch it, to boycott the Olympics (I have pledged to do so), but I’ll leave that up to you.  The Olympics are some good entertainment, and no-one in Beijing or Washington or in the headquarters of Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and the other sponsors, will care what you decide.

One side note that I feel like adding: the phrase “The Rise of China and India” has become almost a cliché in America.  When we are discussing the world economy, we seem quick to associate China with India.  They are enemies: it was not long ago (in the mid eighties) that China last tried to invade India.  India is painfully aware that the annexation of Tibet puts China right next door to them. India is the world’s largest functioning democracy—although its government is far from perfect, India is generally a free and diverse society.  Entrepreneurs fuel India’s economic growth.  China’s growth is driven by the government’s firm control.  As we seek awareness about our world, we ought to remember these differences.

Anyway, I don’t want this to be a one-way diatribe.  I’m no authority on this.  In fact, this email was partly just a way of educating myself, and I’m asking you to be part of that education.  If you’re reading this, it’s because I know and respect you.  So I want to hear back from you, hear your opinion on this whole situation.

“Well, you didn’t,” said Bocanegra, the words escaping from his mouth like steam.

 

“Pero, seguramente—“

 

“Keep your voice down,” he hissed, to them both.

 

He thought again of the police, tried to imagine which set of stairs, front or back, they would use, and what his last words could be. Or should be. Last words. Though then, he was thinking, no, if the police had seen him, they would have already come in. He thought of the cops, now, uniform-less, the so-called “disbanded police,” out there, in the darkening night, in great numbers and with large guns and ingenious methods of torture. They had appeared the moment Carondele quietly pointed to his pistol: “It was I who killed the mayor.” (Had that been real?) The cops would have already come in if they had followed him. Who would have stopped them, after all? The cops?

 

The sweat poured from him.

 

“Tell me, comrade,” said Bocanegra, in so strange a way that Carondele stopped studying the ceiling to look at him, “how did you plan to leave here?”

 

The other didn’t respond and a little too much time passed.

 

“Were you going to move in here?” asked Bocanegra. “We were going to get married?” Again in his mind he remembered Carondele with his fist clenched in the air, his flapping lips and his buck teeth and his hunched shoulders. That was called a revolutionary.  The boy on the bed began, again, to cry.

 

It was a little different this time: the first time he’d only felt contempt and this time Bocanegra pitied him. Bocanegra saw for the first time someone crying about what they were about to lose: their life and everything along with it, all of the other lives wound up in a life like lengths of colored twine around a spool, all of those disappearing somewhere. When they kill Carondele, he thought, and they will, something else will have died a little, too. Bits of aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters. A father.  

 

Bocanegra stood watching him from where he stood by the window and, feeling like he was witnessing some small and intimate act, fit his wiry hands into his pants pockets. Finally, slowly, Carondele stopped crying, and simply lay on the bed with his eyes shut tight.

 

“A cab?” suggested Bocanegra in a soft tone.

 

Bocanegra, who’d never known his parents, who’d heard only rumors of brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, was seeing in Carondele for the first time what it might have been like. And what he assumed to be the only memory of his family he possessed came to him at that moment: Bocanegra saw an old woman in a gray chair by a hearth surrounded in blue tiles; she whispers, “Cuidate.” The strange mix of resentment and fear that he had felt all night slowly melted away, and in its place was something like understanding. But not really.

 

Suddenly, Carondele’s eyes flashed open.

 

“A cab!” he almost yelled. “Exactly! The cab!” Bocanegra, who had thought his suggestion wasn’t a very good one, was surprised at the man’s enthusiasm. Carondele sat up on the bed and looked intently at Bocanegra.

 

“Get me a cab,” he said, now standing up. “One in particular.”

 

He explained: down the road, near the bus terminus, was a big, orange building, the cab dispatch station. A man would be there, a very pale man, tall-ish. His name was Hérnan.

Ask for him, he told his comrade Bocanegra, as his wife’s cousin.

 

“His wife’s cousin?” Bocanegra repeated, vaguely.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Hérnan?”

 

“Yes. Tell Hérnan that his wife’s cousin will meet him on Avenida Ninos Heroes. By the groceria. Midnight—er—“ he glanced at his watch — “Midnight. Yeah. His wife’s cousin. Midnight.” He paused, “Don’t worry, Bocanegra. Hérnan’s a comrade, too.”

 

Carondele walked over to Bocanegra, so that Bocanegra could pick the boy’s smell from the staleness of the room itself; their eyes looked curiously into one another’s, and so they stood there expressing the situation’s awesome complexity.

 

“Comrade,” said Carondele, awkwardly. He embraced Bocanegra, who felt first afraid, then confused, and then disgusted. Or disappointed. The other turned from him, walked quickly to the door, made for the second time that night to grasp the handle, and turned again.

 

“I’m sorry about punching you,” Bocanegra said from the doorway of his apartment. “I’m sorry about everything.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

It was strange how quickly the next few hours passed, because the moments that composed those hours passed each one like an incurable disease. A bus had been hijacked that morning, so the buses weren’t running; Bocanegra had run the entire way to the dispatch station, a 15-minute sprint without a break and without a look behind him. The city was as quiet as a bird-less field, the streets were pale under the moon, and empty, the windows shuttered.

 

When he’d finally made it to the taxi dispatch, it took Bocanegra another fifteen minutes to determine something very unfortunate: Hérnan didn’t work on Tuesdays.

 

The man at the front desk wouldn’t give Bocanegra, who was panting and swearing and staring beady-eyed, the cabbie’s phone number. The revolution — everything — these were strange days, he explained, and you couldn’t trust just anybody, after all. The mayor, of course, earlier that afternoon.

 

Even when time itself didn’t seem to be passing, it was in fact passing. Bocanegra stood under the awning of the taxi dispatch, in the quiet, and he decided on his next step. He saw for the first time, really saw, the walls covered in their spray-painted hammers and sickles, saw the bonfires of the strikers at the far end of the avenue, heard the curious pop of cahotes, and the corrugated zinc piled up along the avenues; he saw the black beggar across the street at a stoplight, a woman shifting the baby she carried on her back, her shawl like red wine in the light from a gas lamp, slipping quickly into an alleyway. Like welts, the markings of a revolution had appeared across Abaixado—things were fit to burst, and you could hear it.

 

He turned west on Ninos Heroes, headed for the college, not knowing the time.

 

*          *          *          *

 

Sanjurju didn’t take much convincing. He knew Carondele somehow (“The son of a friend of my wife’s—how unfortunate.”), and what he knew of him made Bocanegra’s story seem very plausible. Not, Sanjurju conceded, that he knew very much. For a while, Sanjurju and Bocanegra thought things over quietly in the office, Bocanegra feeling a numb kind of sick and the president folding and re-folding his hands together and fiddling with his stupid moustache.

 

Until, not one to beat around the bush, Bocanegra asked Sanjurju whether he knew the secret police and how to get in touch with them.

 

“There isn’t a secret police,” said the president after a meaningful pause; Bocanegra nodded his assent. “They are the ‘disbanded police.’” They sat nodding at each other, in perfect comprehension.

 

“Well,” continued Sanjurju, “I do. I do know the police.”

 

“Do you think we ought to call them? Senor?”

 

“Speaking of which,” said Sanjurju, maybe not having heard, “wasn’t it a little stupid to be running around on the night of the governor’s assassination?”

 

Bocanegra nodded, remembering, though, how he had taken a few precautions: he had followed a footpath that ran along the unlit side of his dormitory, and he’d disposed of the weather-beaten haracci sandals as he loped along the gravel path leading from the western edge of campus to the president’s office on the Northeastern side. His feet had been chewed to aching redness when he came to the window, where he found the president sitting in front of his gilded fireplace in deep meditation of something. Bocanegra had tapped, light and urgent. And in the great forgiving obscurity of a foggy night in Ciudad Abaixado, they had a secret meeting — the dumpy little secretary had left hours ago.

 

“Well,” said President Sanjurju, “I know who to call.”

 

A half hour later, the man was entering the president’s office without any guards, in a brown, well-pressed, ugly suit, a red rose smooshed and wilting between the edge of the jacket’s collar and the slit of its breast pocket. His form—really big, extremely big, in a kind of perverse way—filled the room with that arsenic green aura Bocanegra was getting to know so well. He had lips and a face like a bottom-feeding fish, thick hands that Bocanegra knew would be moist before shaking one of them. Had he not recognized him from his photos, Bocanegra would have guessed at his profession: he was the former Chief of Police of Ciudad Abaixado. Xavier Franco, named after the saint.

 

“Sr. Franco is in charge of the security of the city,” began Sanjurju, as Franco narrowed his round eyes and brought them to bear on Bocanegra.

 

Franco began to say, “So, your friend—“, but he must have decided against such a direct approach. He paused and put the tips of his fingers in a mouth that operated under the same mechanics as a draw-bridge.

 

“The killer in your room,” Franco said, finally.

 

“Yes.”

 

“How did he get there?”

 

“We’re classmates.”

 

“He came to your house? Why?”

 

“He thought he recognized me from somewhere.”

 

“From where?”

 

“From a rally. One of the unionists’ rallies.”

 

“And did he?”

 

“He did?”

 

“He did? He recognized you from a rally?”

 

“No. I’m not a unionist.”

 

“Did he recognize you from a rally?” said Franco, now pressing the tips of his fingers together and tenting them in front of his chest. Bocanegra, who was now a suspected dissident, chose his words carefully.

 

 “He made a mistake about me. I guess you could say he didn’t know me as well as he thought that he might.”

 

“He thought you were a ‘comrade?’” For Bocanegra, it was an act of will not to let his jaw drop — had they been listening somehow?

 

“A comrade. He called me that, I think, once or twice,” Bocanegra said, casually. He was quiet for a while, then said, thoughtfully, “He didn’t understand I had no interest in the modalities of violent revolution.” He surprised himself by this sentence; he was fairly confident, too, that he knew what “modalities” meant.

 

“Only peaceful revolution?” asked the Chief of Police, very pleasantly.

 

“What’s the need for revolution?” asked Bocanegra, very pleasantly. He came suddenly to terms with something he had grasped about Franco from the moment he saw him: Franco had become the Chief of Police thanks to an innate genius for bullying people and bossing them around.

 

The Chief of Police swept a wisp of black hair from the glistening flesh above his eyes as he said, “So—you’re a centrist?”  The president of the college, whom Bocanegra had forgotten as he stood in a poorly-lit corner of the office, opened his mouth a little and breathed loudly—it must have been a kind of protest.

 

“I’m a skeptic,” said Bocanegra.  The president nodded approvingly, his eyes darting between the general and Bocanegra, but remained mum. Things got so quiet in the room that the quiet from outside began to seep in under the door and through the windows.

 

“You know,” said the Chief of Police after a while, “I don’t like people. I just don’t like them very much.” Again, he put the tips of his fingers in his mouth and stood there, chewing something over. For the first time that night, some veneer had crumbled away and he stood before Bocanegra and Sanjurju as himself. After a while, he turned to the president and, sighing, asked, “Well, where does Bocanegra live?”

 

“I’m not sure, honestly,” said Sanjurju. “Where, Bocanegra? Where did you come from?”

 

Bocanegra was suddenly red hot, probably, he figured, sweating again. Bocanegra couldn’t look at the two men in the room, so he looked at his feet, which shook in his shoes: “Down the road a little bit.”

 

With a guffaw, the policeman asked, “In which direction?” And not knowing what else to do, he explained Carondele’s plan to meet a taxi on Ninos Heroes by the groceria, at midnight, which was somehow only another half hour away. The president nodded with a very blank and detached look on his face.  The Chief of Police, in charge of the security of Ciudad Abaixado, put his fingers in his mouth, frowning. Then, snapping his fingers and pronouncing each syllable with care, he said, “Retribution.” He flashed a hooked grin briefly at Bocanegra and walked to the telephone.

 

“I need to call someone,” he said casually as he stared out the president’s broad window. “You can go now, comrade.”

 

So, like a thief in the night, Bocanegra left.

 

*          *          *

 

Carondele hadn’t moved from the bed, except now instead of staring up at the ceiling he lay with his face pressed into the pillow. He didn’t even look up when Bocanegra entered the room and said with a sigh that everything was taken care of. The room was a coffin they were sharing.

 

“Thank you,” said Carondele, slowly, into his pillow.

 

Bocanegra, joints now aching, walked to the window and stared out at the city where it had sprawled across the horizon. There, he thought, it’s done. His eyes, no longer seeking out the men in the darkness, rested on a Coca-Cola billboard framed against the strangely still lights of Abaixado. The absurdity of things, generally, hit him with an almost physical weight.

 

And then the clock down the road at Eglisa Santo Domingo struck midnight. He turned: Carondele had stood, was looking at him.

 

“Bocanegra,” he said from in front of the door. Had he guessed at the truth? What was written on his face? Again, red hot. He watched as Carondele opened the door and, like a thief in the night, left him.

 Bocanegra heard his name echoing through the room, which was suddenly no longer his room, and he collapsed on his bed and fell asleep.

 

*          *          *

 

Hello,

Please do read the story I filched from Joseph Conrad.Second half to follow in a few weeks. Warm regards,

John Paul G.

He didn’t notice that day that the city of Abaixado seemed to be plotting its own demise. Near dusk, a mist rose in the wake of a vengeful rainstorm, catching the weird blue-gray light of the gas lamps. In the avenues now like the pulsing arteries of an exposed heart, things began to seem like a Joseph Conrad novel and Bocanegra had no idea at all.

The evening had fallen like a hangman when Bocanegra stood abruptly, half delirious, with a need to leave the cafe. On the small black metal table in front of him were an open copy of Capitalism and Freedom, a coagulant plate of juevos flacos, an un-warm mug of coffee. The coffee had branded two pieces of chicken-scratched paper roughly equal halves of a blurred, brown-black “O,” and these he clutched, along with the keys to his apartment, in his right hand. With his left he jerkily dug in his pockets and set down a few coins — maybe it was enough, maybe it wasn’t — and thrust his notes and book into the black satchel he carried with him everywhere. On shaky legs he left by a breach in the wrought iron gate that segregated the cafe’s patio from the ministerial plaza.

He crossed the plaza with a restless look in his eye, his mouth drawn and firmly shut to, his gunpowder hair like an oil painting on his skull. He was walking a kind of walk that wasn’t totally human or even, really, animal. Like a red-eyed ghost, he passed through the plaza and onto Avenida Bolivar, where the pearly face of the clock above the entryway of the mayor’s mansion read ten past six. He smiled grimly to himself, his head throbbing.

The mist rose like the notes of a violin in the blue of the lamps, and, still some six blocks away from his apartment, he began to fumble for his keys. He patted his breast pocket, then each of the pockets of his withering pants. But the keys had already made their way to his hand.

Avenida Ninos Heroes gave way to Avenida Victor Hugo, and then came the house — his house — with its Kool-Aid blue siding, burnt orange trim, and its air of an enormous, stale pastry. The Indian maid stood aquiline at the landing, sweeping without expression. He grunted a hello before lurching up the stairs to his apartment, twisting the key in its lock, and cramming himself inside the darkness.

When he’d slammed the door shut, he stood with one hand propped against it and the other gripping the handle. The room, which was in that moment a moist kind of dark, seemed to draw him further and further into itself.

“Thank God,” he whispered.

“What do you mean?” asked in a small way the man who was waiting in his room. Bocanegra turned around: a pair of eyes, so wide that they were like two black apples, were staring back at him from the gloom. The eyes belonged to a thin but muscular figure with the suggestion of a shrug in its shoulders and a set of buck teeth that teepeed out from under lazy, loose, strangely red lips. It was easy to see, even in the poorly lit room, that he — whoever he was — was ugly.

            Bocanegra’s jaw dropped just a little—

            “Don’t yell, please, Bocanegra,” the weak, brackish voice came again, this time with urgency, and Bocanegra thought of the bottom falling out of a bucket. He wondered illogically whether he had somehow let himself into the wrong room.

            “Who is there?” asked Bocanegra, not impolitely. A half minute or more passed, the two people in the room breathing together.

            “It’s just me, Carondele,” said the man finally. “From school.” It was a name said as though belonging to an acquaintance, but to Bocanegra it was only vaguely familiar. His gaze still fixed on his uninvited guest, he started toward the door, his hand out to grasp the handle.  

           “Would you like some water?” asked Bocanegra, for obscure reasons. Time had ceased to exist (everything had ceased to exist, actually), and there was something like a very civilized carnival going on inside the room.

            He had failed to escape.

 Without another word, Carondele’s black-apple-eyes lifted (he had stood). And now, breathing very loudly through the triangular space between his teeth and his lower lip, the man removed something that looked like a silver snake from where it had been tucked into his pants. Slowly, he put it beside the lamp on Bocanegra’s desk.

            “What would you do with this?” asked Carondele, pointing at his gun.   

The room began to stink like something — like sulfur, or fermentation, or like danger, or a threat, or something — and it began to spin a little. In that instant, Bocanegra ceased to plan how to get rid of his unwanted guest and decided instead to plan his own escape from his tiny room on the second floor of the house that looked like an enormous and stale pastry.

All that was no use anymore.

*         *         *

            He’d met the mayor once. It had been almost a year now, during Bocanegra’s third year at school. It was before the strike (and then, of course, the riots), and it was before things in the city started feeling vaguely toxic and on days in late summer when it rained the rain didn’t suggest anything of the end of days.

            He was summoned to the office of the president of the college on this day, which wasn’t exactly expected and wasn’t exactly abnormal. The president of the college, a nakedly ambitious, stupid man, had always seemed fond of him, as a gardener might prefer his orchids or succulents. And even though the president of the college wheezed a lot and he sipped his tea too loudly, Bocanegra could stand him all right. His name was Sanjurju, an uncommon name. Sanjurju would call Bocanegra up to his office often enough, especially after Bocanegra won the prize for his essay on the price of bread in Zimbabwe.

            When he’d made his way to the mansion that housed the offices of administration, he was ushered by the fat little secretary more quickly than was normal into Sanjurju’s office, a bright room with a fireplace wreathed in golden plaques and certificates of distinction.  The president stood rigidly behind his desk, his well-kempt and unfashionable moustache dangling stupidly below his nose. When Bocanegra came in, the man’s chuckle (nothing good-natured about this chuckle) sounded in the room like startled birds taking to the air and Sanjurju said higher than normal that he was pleased to see him.

            He thought: I’m being studied.

            And then Bocanegra, the air thinner than normal, noticed the man seated opposite Sanjurju in a plain leather chair. He had very black eyes, pale skin, and he was dressed in a well-fitting linen suit. He was probably handsome at some point, Bocanegra figured. And there was something violent about him.

            “And may I present,” continued Sanjurju idiotically, “The mayor of Ciudade Abaixado, Ulíses Dias.” The head of the man nodded once or twice, the eyes bulged almost imperceptibly, and the nose twitched.

            “Your name is one that I hear often enough these days,” Dias said as he almost stood, extending his hand. The three men stood there, all trying to figure out what they wanted to say while they were standing there. Until Bocanegra asked in very simple terms if he was a suspected dissident.

The men laughed in this order: first the mayor, then Sanjurju, and then Bocanegra, a little and to himself.

A halting, awkward conversation ensued about Bocanegra’s favorite subjects, his favorite sports, the weather at this time of year, and the progress of the machines making the superhighway across the isthmus. And then the mayor turned to Sanjurju: thank you, Mauricio, and Bocanegra was told that he could leave. Everything they had spoken about had turned on the strange circumstances of the conversation itself—it was only later that he let a thrill passed through himself. Even when things began to go badly for the mayor, it was a comfort to know that such a man had heard his name “often enough.”

Since that day, there was the strike and then the strikers and then the movement and the farmers down from the campos; there was Gilson Cabral shot dead in the street; there was the police disbanded, but there were still the white trucks with no plates coming in the night to Eglisa Santo Domingo where the 5,000 of them slept. And they killed in the night.

People had begun to demand the mayor’s resignation, calmly, like the sea gnaws at a cliff, and Bocanegra hadn’t seen him since that day, except on TV.

*         *         *

            “It was me who shot the mayor this afternoon,” said Carondele after a while. “Just a little while ago. At the Hotel Zará.”

            When he understood the words, even Bocanegra’s eyeballs sweat. He may have gaped, and in fact that would have made sense. A groan, like wind through the rafters of an old house, left him and turned the room the arsenic green of panic. He shook suddenly and, pulling out his sad little chair from behind his even sadder little desk, Bocanegra took a seat. Vomit stung the back of his throat.

            He looked at Carondele again, and this time he recognized him as one of the idiots who liked to stand on the steps of the library, giving the clenched-fist salute. He thought with disdain of their brand new clothes and their clenched fists: Bocanegra stood and walked very slowly to Carondele, who wouldn’t meet his gaze and who looked older now, somehow.

            He had learned a dirty trick in his youth, and tonight he used it on Carondele: his shoulders, firm and thick, betrayed no movement as he pulled back his right fist and plunged it deep into the guts of his comrade. He punched as though aiming for the man’s spine. The other clutched his stomach and collapsed onto the small bed, a gasp coming and going, before he began to weep. His crying was not only for a physical pain, but for something deeper; the weeping was more existential than that, and it belonged to the first murderer Bocanegra had ever met.

Bocanegra was now thinking very quickly because the sound of the crying had kicked some lever in his brain. He walked briskly and quietly to the window and looked outside: no one.  But, he thought, who knows if the idiot has been followed?

With a sneer, he said, “Thanks for dropping by.”

He walked to the cabinet above his sink, removed some instant coffee and a mug, and filled it with tap water. He noticed that his hands were now shaking a little. He understood that it wasn’t that there weren’t any police in the city, exactly, but rather that they had taken off their uniforms.

It was all very bad and very unlucky.

In this way, slowly, by degrees, he understood three simple facts. The first was that he had no real desire to help Carondele. He certainly felt no great political sympathies, since, a ward of the State, Bocanegra had watched developments with the neutral eyes of someone who witnesses their parents fighting.  Second, Carondele was in danger of being caught and he was in Bocanegra’s room and so long as he was in danger Bocanegra was in danger himself. Third, Carondele needed to leave his room very quickly and quietly and needed not to be seen by anyone, not even the Indian maid sweeping wordless and aquiline in the foyer.

His heart felt full of panic and fear, still. But there was also his mind. And so anger gave way to curiosity and he began to think differently about things, generally.

            “Your comrade,” he said, not mockingly, exactly. He’d accepted that he was guilty by association, really. He could almost hear the television station reporting in a scandalized way the single word that would be his end: a co-conspirator. As in: The assassin fled the scene of the crime and went to the house of a co-conspirator. And he pitied Carondele. He pitied him.

            All of which meant: Fuck!

            So he said that, again and again. In his mind he saw a black hand with fingers as thick as cudgels, coming for his throat. His stomach tilted upward into his head.

Carondele stopped crying: “I’m sorry,” he said imploringly. “I wasn’t sure where else to go.” His hands were pressed to his sides and his black eyes stared straight upward, studying the lines of the ceiling, maybe. Thinking of family, friends and enemies.

 Bocanegra thought about how pathetic it was.

            The knock could come at any minute. It wouldn’t be a hard knock. It would be quick, confident, entirely impersonal. It would ring like church bells. Two men would enter, inconspicuous except for their aviator glasses and the toothpicks jammed between scarred lips. They’d be at the door, they would enter quietly; they wouldn’t take out their guns, nor would they show their badges (no doubt they would have badges somewhere). Placed there by the force of human drama, they would ask, almost politely, “Come with us.” Somewhere, in a smoke-filled room behind an unremarkable door at the bottom of an unremarkable staircase, Bocanegra and Carondele would be beaten. Gleefully they’d beat them. Burning with cigarettes, electrocution, the removal of the fingernail from the finger with a pair of pliers!

           What, exactly, is your connection to the assassination of Mayor Ulises Dias?

            They’d be there soon—any minute now—to remove his fingernails! He asked Carondele, without feeling, “But why did you come here?”

            And Carondele, shifting only his eyes, replied, “I thought I recognized you from the assemblies at the Eglisa Santo Domingo.”

This was a ridiculous notion—Bocanegra wouldn’t have been caught dead at one of those. They were noisy and crowded, and the idea that anyone should be free to speak and share their idiotic revolutionary ideas revolted him. The idea of preaching to the choir was anathema to Bocanegra, who distrusted all agreement.

“You didn’t see me there,” said Bocanegra, with finality.

“I wondered.”

“Well, you didn’t,” said Bocanegra, lip curling even as he spoke.

I was assigned to write a list of my top ten favorite books in my life, and I’ve put too much thought into it. It’s supposed to represent the “classics of [my] idiosyncratic world experience,” and equally represent all phases and ages of my life. I’m posting it here because if you guys have time, I’d be really interested to hear yours.

It’s only vaguely alphabetical by author, not by preference–that would be too hard.

1. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury: my first favorite book, introduced me to the idea that science fiction can critique colonialism.
2. Minding American Education by Martin Bickman: We have had good schools in America, it just hasn’t caught on recently. Anyone involved in education should read this book.
3. Naked Lunch by William Burroughs:
4. Anti-Oedipus by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: This book will be the foundation of my life’s work. D & G write like poets, they create a brand new vocabulary and dismantle the regime of psychoanalysis.
5. Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsburg: the most effective poem ever written, published in the most convenient and useful and groundbreaking series of poetry (the pocket poets series).
6. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin: In this list, this book stands in for a phase of my reading life when I was deeply invested in literary science fiction. LHD is a masterwork of the genre; it illustrates how alternate reality-creation is always political—in this case, feminist—by imagining alternate power structures.

7. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner: what twisted decomposing America
8. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: Many people have trouble with GR because they try to “make sense” of it instead of simply submitting to Pynchon’s schizoid production. Politically and culturally, the most important novel of the 20th century.
9. The Home and The World by Rabindranath Tagore: I just finished it, fascinating treatment of sexual politics, gorgeous philosophical prose.
10. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells: as I read it, my first introduction to Marxism.

Runners up that it hurt to cut:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelly

The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick

A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud

The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

Revolutionary Suicide by Huey Newton

Rilo Kiley: June 2 and 3, Terminal 5, NYC

Architecture in Helsinki: June 8, Irving Plaza, NYC

Sigur Ros: June 16, The Grand Ballroom, The Manhattan Center, NYC

Kimya Dawson: July 2, Music Hall of Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Kimya Dawson: July 16, United Palace, NYC

Akron/Family: July 24, Castle Clinton, Battery Park, NY

Wolf Parade: July 31, Terminal 5, NYC

Grizzly Bear: August 8, All Points West, Jersey City, NJ

Animal Collective: August 9, All Points West, Jersey City, NJ

Cat Power: August 10, All Points West, Jersey City, NJ

Anyone interested in going to any of these shows? I’ll definitely be going to a bunch of them… Sigur Ros, Wolf Parade, and Animal Collective, at a minimum. Jed, you’ll be in town, won’t you? Come with me.

Love, Inga

from “The Three Incestuous Sisters” by Audrey Niffenegger

I lick the cheese from the end of my pen.
Some read lovelorn letters on benches
and Beautiful Girls have no reason to look up.

I was a little one
too. My mother
held my hand and led me
forward as I looked
back wishing I could
chase the pigeon
just like you.

If I poured this coffee all
over my face
Say I missed my mouth
Could it burn more
than this sun?

Well, would it eat my pores
and galvanize my metaphors
into fluid flowing from the tip of a tit?
And still, hours later, we chased the pigeons.
With no desultory climax.

“Dad if we walked a million blocks would we die?”

… I had just come up the stairs and I had to go down them again.

No, no, your room’s not ready.  You must come back, come back.  Come back between five and six.’  ‘What time is it now?’  ‘It’s half-past ten.’

‘Courage, courage, ma petite dame,’ she says.  ‘Everything will go well.’

I go down the stairs again, clutching the banisters, step by step.

I stop a taxi.  The man looks at me and hesitates.  Perhaps he is afraid I may have my baby in his nice new taxi.  What a thing to happen!

No danger at all, I want to say.  Hours and hours and hours yet, she says.

I get back to the hotel and climb upstairs to my room.  This is a hard thing to do.  Has anybody ever had to do this before?  Of course, lots of people - poor people.  Oh, I see, of course, poor people…. Still, it is a hard thing to do, walking around when you’re like this.  And half-past five is a long time off - centuries of time.

When I climb the stairs again I am not seeing so well.

‘Courage, my little lady.  Your room is ready now.’

A room, a bed where I can lie down.  Now the worst is surely over.  But the long night, the interminable night….

‘Courage, courage,’ she says.  ‘All will be well.  All is going beautifully.’

This is a funny house.  There are people having babies all over the place.  Anyhow, at least two are having babies.

‘Jesus, Jesus,’ says one woman.  ‘Mother, Mother,’ says another.

I do not speak.  How long is it before I speak?

There are hooks from me to every object in this room. Hooks attached to my eyes, hooks protruding up my nostrils into my brain. Supposing I took a bottle, smashed it on the floor, kicked the shards into every corner, spread them around the floor - the cut from these hooks would still be deeper, even if I walked around barefoot.

“He might have sunk into mental chaos; instead, he triumphed through discipline, work and meditation.” Words written in the book about Van Gogh. Who was he? That he that might have but instead triumphed? That is, who almost sunk but was saved by discipline? Which one was that?

Or this one, this book by Dogen under my sheets. I had been reading it last night. It’s quite different, you see. With your little hooks a-moment, you see. He says this. “The multiplicity of one flower is five petals, the opening of five petals is one flower.” That’s good, I thought. The multiplicity of one is five, the opening of five is one. Becoming is what happens, quantity is what is. But there’s something missing in all that. A bit more about the one and that five. It got captured by ol’ Jimmy pretty well, you know the man, the one who sang about his friend, the end: “Five to one, baby, one in five, no one here gets out alive now; you get yours, baby, I’ll get mine, gonna make it baby if we try.”