Elegy on Kinderklavier (10 page)

“Oh, just do it already,” she said, and without really thinking Abrams undid his pants and let them drop and pushed up the soft material of her dress and pulled down her tights—she wore nothing underneath—and commenced intercourse with her, just like that.

Even as he was doing it he was aware of the queasiness of it, the problematic nature of what was happening. There were so many things at once: Abrams had never had sex in public before; he was terrified that he was enacting some surely misogynistic male protofantasy about “turning” a lesbian by phallic force; he was also concerned that he was raping her, and he stopped cold at the thought, looking at his hands lightly grasping Lara's narrow hips, trying to scan an objective description of the situation for any signs of resistance (was she being sarcastic? were her verbalizations now ones of pleasure or horror? was he in any way manhandling her?) but she only moved back against him more forcefully. And overlaid on everything was the childish surprise: he'd thought Lara hated him; he'd thought he hated Lara. With a shudder, and a sound from Lara, he ejaculated, and was done. They were still for a few long seconds, his heart beating wildly.

Abrams knows, if their seminar that semester had encountered this scene in a novel, the women of the class would have had a field day tearing it down as a completely unbelievable, pathetic projection of the author's openly misogynistic domination fantasy, and moreover would point out that it was irresponsible to put it to paper under the aegis of fiction, that it took advantage of the faux-displacement of responsibility for the scene onto the (flawed, sexist) character, and also that it was just totally unbelievable—and Abrams would've agreed with all of that. But it happened! It really happened, just that way! This was part of the irony of it, he supposes, remembering how
he'd backed away, softening out of her, the air in the computer lab suddenly licking at his slickened penis like cold fire. Lara had gathered herself silently, with effortless dignity, and excused herself to go to the bathroom. She'd left the building from the bathroom, and never said a word about what happened to Abrams. The ultimate irony being that even if he'd wanted to (which he did not), he could never have told anyone what had actually happened, because nobody would ever believe him. Thank god she had not performed the sex act he'd spent so many long hours imagining in seminar, Abrams thought, or there was no way he'd be able to live with himself.

The uncomfortable but honest point of all this being that, in those moments when everything began to happen—when she'd leaned back into him, and Abrams' mind leapt forward, already thrusting away at her pale skin—he'd been possessed by the purest instance of joy he'd ever felt. His whole body became light and airy. This seems to Abrams on some fundamental level pretty unfair to the more meaningful and substantive things in his life that he has experienced before and since, but it is, nonetheless, true.

When it came time for them to peer-review each other's theses, her notes were, oddly, both harsh and funny, a somewhat disturbing combination that over the years became even more so due to its tendency to inexplicably recur in other contexts around him.

3.

Abrams was so delighted by the last of these phrases, he didn't even mind that it came back to him in the middle of a document dismantling (in methodical, phosphorescently intelligent terms) his first Combat Action Sustainability Tactic (or CAST) report at the DIA center in Tucson.
Unrepentant lily-gilding
, Abrams thought. If that's not a perfect synecdoche for the joy to be had in life, there isn't one.

The evaluation was written by Brockton L. Albright, technically Abrams' only colleague in the CAST report pod. Abrams was pretty sure the DIA had picked up Brockton on waivers from the CIA, mostly because he simply couldn't imagine Brockton—who had the dark brown ringlets and vaguely mournful mien of an Eastern hagiological icon—ever willfully enlisting in any wing of the military. Brockton, whose interface review setup was just across the pod, spoke very, very little. Sometimes Abrams would see him coming into the cavernous space of the hangar that housed the twin geodesic domes of the interfaces, as Abrams paused behind the small organ of super-servers humming diastolically to one side. Abrams would watch him move over the polished concrete floors of the heavily air-conditioned hangar soundlessly, as if gliding.

Abrams' assignment was to prepare and submit CAST analyses of raw media from the field, which he displayed on the 3D viewing screens arranged in an angled cascade of triptychs around and over the desk in his interface office. Specifically, this was data focusing on the temporal environs of any American casualty that occurred in Iraq, as gathered by the many unblinking electronic eyes that the DIA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency might bring to bear.

The most helpful of these technologies was by far the improbably named Gorgon Stare Platform (basically: a hovering bundle of very high-performing, very expensive video cameras and sensors, which sits static high above an Iraqi town when U.S. forces are operating in the area), especially when used in conjunction with the somewhat more aptly christened ARGUS system, though it was unclear if anyone at DARPA was aware of that namesake's ultimate fate. ARGUS, that is, being the Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance system, the overall objective of which was “to increase situational awareness and understanding enabling an
ability [sic] to find and fix critical events in a large area in enough time [sic] to influence events.” What these two utilities meant for Abrams was that, once he'd booted up the Casualty Data Packet for that week, he could start, stall, restart, and otherwise retard diegetic time, all while remotely controlling the focus, zoom, and direction of three-dimensional vision in order to examine any person, face, gaze, biometrical reading or sight-line in the town when someone was killed. It was such an advanced and acute technology, and was played out in 3D for so many hours on the towering, enveloping screens, that Abrams always ended up with the feeling of
actually being there
as the casualty event happened, over and over and over.

What a CAST analysis or report really was, according to Brockton, who spent three weeks of painful vocal communication and social company training Abrams, was a
narrativization of combat casualty data
. They were to place a special emphasis on
creative conjecture
with the ultimate goal of using all this literally fantastic technology and data to render a written narrative of the casualty's
subjective experience of the pertinent combat event
. The precipitated narrative was, presumably, to be even more telling, accurate, and useful, from a procedural standpoint, than the soldier's actual subjective experience, were he alive to describe it. Brockton, whose reports Abrams also peer-reviewed, was very good at it. He had the right kind of obsessive attention and (much rarer) eidetic imagination for the job, and, moreover, he seemed to be well enough acquainted with the kind of quiet, continuous inner suffering necessary to become each casualty, to know both the soldier's mind and the technology's omniscience at once. Abrams was not so well suited to the task, he thought. What Brockton made Abrams feel about himself, basically, was that he simply wasn't intelligent enough to be in the pod at all.

This wasn't Brockton's fault. Each day, Abrams and Brockton ate lunch together at a picnic table outside of the hangar, in the falsely
natural landscaping of the empty civilian industrial park. Each day they made polite if burdened conversation, and Abrams always felt like his pathetic eagerness, his desire just to listen to Brockton speak—about anything really—was writ large on their awkwardly syncopated conversational silences.

What Abrams really wanted to do, though, in those long hours of watching Brockton's thin fingers expertly disassembling his daily orange, was to ask him about his childhood, what he'd been like as a kid; if his father (as was Abrams' suspicion) had died when he was young; if, a little older, he'd had a girlfriend, and what that had been like, what the girl had been like, and had they ever had sex, and if so, how, and etcetera etcetera etcetera. It was a kind of aggression, Abrams understood, his desire to know—information being a kind of domination, a kind of ownership, when it came to another person's life. And it was probably also a more or less understandable overspill from the task they paused each day for lunch; the delving into personnel files, the scans of letters home, but also the imagining, the conjecturing.
What you're really trying to do,
Brockton had explained to Abrams, in a rare moment of fluster during those weeks of training,
is not just explain why the subject died but what it was about the subject's very being—i.e., the subject's life, training, attention—that led to the casualty event.

The report that inspired the delightful formulation
unrepentant lily-gilding
was one Abrams wrote about the death of Pfc. Ferrero Rodriguez in the gentle elbow of the Tigris. Abrams doesn't know what it was about that particular Casualty Data Packet that got to him. Maybe it was the dumb nature of the casualty, pretty much an accident, a tank parked in an inopportune place. Or maybe it was the data from the operator-facing control-board combat camera, the way Ferrero had just been sitting there at his station, how he looked around at the first strange sucking sound, then tried to brace himself
at the initial shift, the tank's sudden, listing angle. Confused, a blank-faced teenager (Was this a prank? Ferrero was thinking. Or did the tread fall off or something? Did the navigator Ash-Dog steer them into another pothole, the idiot?). Then that data-stream cutting out as the tank made its slow topple into the river.

Or maybe it was the overhead view from the satellite, the pastoral beauty of the picture: the angle held wide, the waters of the Tigris a brilliant emerald snake in the sun. Or was it the maudlin thing, the scan of his last letter home, which they'd stopped: just a list of things he needed his mom to send him, that he couldn't or was too afraid to ask for from the other guys: underwear, chapstick, something called Boudreaux's Butt Paste. Well. It didn't really matter what it was that made Abrams say screw it, basically, and write what he wanted to write.

He gave Pfc. Ferrero Rodriguez a good life, a better life than he'd actually had. And he used the last half of the report to describe, in increasingly florid, turgid, self-consciously rococo language, the kid's last moments. In his report the eternity of the tank's dorsal rotation into the water stretched on and on, creating a sort of zero-gravity type situation where Ferrero Rodriguez could watch the grease pencils and loose snacks and dirt and strands of chewing tobacco float, weightless, in the air around him, and wonder, and reflect. And so, of course, Brockton's lightly caustic evaluation of the report had been accurate, and fair, and had happened to include the phrase
unrepentant lily-gilding. This is not the truth
, he'd also written.
This is you being desperate for some kind of validation
. But the truth was that Pfc. Ferrero Rodriguez drowned in the Tigris when the bank under his parked tank collapsed, drowned slowly, drowned knowing he was going to drown, drowned clawing desperately at the sharp metal of the blocked hatch that was now beneath his feet, drowned defecating all over himself in utter terror. And Abrams just couldn't write that.

What is Brockton Albright doing now, this moment of Abrams' foot's fateful lifting progress? After they'd both left the pod assignment (Abrams reassigned to actual unit attachment, Brockton having finished his contract), Albright began a very successful career as an academic and a public intellectual. He's now in residence at the Sorbonne, Abrams believes. And Abrams thinks of him now in some Latin Quarter square, almost dusk, his thin fingers lost in his lap, his tiny cup of tea forgotten on its saucer before him. Oh, what Abrams could've been in life, if he'd only tried a little harder.

But Abrams' favorite thing to remember from his time in the pod with Brockton in Tucson is actually the rare instance of Brockton's smile. Such a saccharine thing to willfully remember, but it holds the same relation to Abrams' happiness (even now) as Lara Fugelsang's smirking sneer does to Abrams' shame. Brockton was an unexpectedly funny guy, Abrams remembers, though he never smiled at or after his own deadpan, absurdist one-liners. Abrams can't actually remember what made Brockton smile those few times—surprise seemed to have something to do with it, and being unobserved—but Abrams can remember very clearly what it looked like. Brockton's whole face changed, opening up, brow for once relaxing, lifting, spreading—and the impression of vulnerability flashing then across his features was so startling as to make Abrams look away. For just a second Brockton seemed just like a little boy, granted a pulse of pure, unmediated feeling.

“Momentary joy” was the phrase that always stuck in Abrams' mind when he thought of it. A blooming. What a thing to have seen.

The principal legacy of the CAST pod assignment, though, these years later, now that Abrams has been attached to an actual unit in the actual Shit, is the ghosting awareness of being on the other end of the CAST technologies' flow—of being in the midst of all the “data” that is really just the world, the village, the late afternoon, the alley. It's stopped
Abrams cold each time he's allowed his mind to wince itself across the thought. What CAST data operator, sitting in what American hangar, was watching him now, displaced in time? That, of course, was the very worst part of that assignment: the nebulized awareness, as he worked, that the subject was being kept alive there before him for only the exact duration of Abrams' close attention, and that, at some point—a point Abrams could feel dawning even as he opened for the first time each new Casualty Data Packet—Abrams would grow bored, and tired, and inured to the human life which he held in the circuitry of the control board before him—in the circuitry of his mind—and would allow it, finally, to expire. What finite expansion of memory and experience would he grant himself, if he found his own CDP loaded up on the screens, the cursor ticking away? And the irony, even in this moment of abandon, of there now actually being created, at this very moment, a CDP for this purpose, is not lost on Abrams, though he knows it's not irony, really, just the remediated sadness of knowing.