Jamestown (11 page)

Their top ambassador, a Judaic-looking man with hooded eyes called Sit Knee Find Gold, by signs, showed us how to greet the man: pass along his left flank and briefly grasp his outstretched hand. None of our hands were big enough for the job; his enveloped each of ours and lightly crushed them one by one, except for Smith's. Smith used his two hands to encircle and vigorously shake the king's one, enough to send a ripple up his arm and even to flutter his long gray hair, which hung down over the side of the bed and grazed the hard brown dirt—“just to let him know someone had shown up at his extremity he'd eventually have to reckon with,” as Smith later said; the left eyelid of the king peeled back; the eyeball rolled left to see what had caused the modest perturbation at the end of his arm, and took in Smith before the lid descended over it again. I wouldn't recommend it, but the lying-down greeting in the dark and smoky hall was regally discomfiting, like being greeted at the bottom of the ocean by a blue whale lying on a bed of soft coral.

Two long folding conference tables stood facing one another in the center of the hall, behind each of which were five mauve office chairs on wheels. Sit Knee Find Gold directed us to sit in them and to place what used to be my wireless device, and now was evidently ours, before the chair of the man who would operate it—me, not because anyone trusted me with the rhetoric of diplomacy but because I could type seventy-five words per minute; I knew the typing elective would be useful to me one day.

How much more bearable this all would have been had the ugly girl who made me come been there.

The Indians' first question, composed by Sit Knee Find Gold in his language on his wireless device, and translated into English by software whose author's no doubt long dead, appeared on the tiny screen of the device before me:

“From where do you come?”

As John Ratcliffe leaned toward me and whispered in my ear, compelling evidence suggested he had not had time, in haste to leave his crumbling New York home, to pack a toothbrush. “Tell him we're from Manhattan, an island 300 miles north of here.” I did.

“Where are you going?” came the reply.

“We do not know where we are going, for that is how it is with going,” Ratcliffe told me to write, and I wrote it, with a qualm.

Smith hugged Ratcliffe's neck in the crook of his elbow, and smiled, and said through greenish smiling teeth, “Just how soon would you like us all to be slaughtered, John? Ten minutes from now? Five? Three seconds?”

“Get your fucking arm off my neck.”

“Why'd you say ‘for that is how it is with going' to them? We're not writing a poem here, we're trying not to get killed.”

‘“All warfare is based on deception,' Sun Tzu,
The Art of War,”
Ratcliffe said, and reached into the left inside breast pocket of his soiled suit coat.

“If you pull out your paperback edition of Sun Tzu I'll shove it up your ass,” Smith said.

“No you won't,” said Ratcliffe, who pulled out a handkerchief, once soft and white, now brown and stiff, and blew his nose.

“Please we ask that you do not plinuckment,” came the response on the screen from Sit Knee Find Gold, along with a scowl from across the hall.

The translation program evidently did not have an English word for the Indian word
plinuckment
, and while Smith and Ratcliffe continued their struggle for the soul of the Virginia Branch of the Manhattan Company, I typed “What is ‘plinuckment'?”

“Toyn,” Sit Knee typed back.

“What is ‘toyn'?”

“Gavagai.”

“What is ‘gavagai'?”

“According to the employment of the language of metaphor use, ‘rabbit slices,'” Sit Knee said, via his inscrutable plinuckment. Jack and John continued to embrace. Each whispered imprecations in the other's ear. And both of them were oiled down with grime, and both of them were skeletal and grim, and both their mouths were lip-lined rotten eggs, and how they were was how all of us were: not wealth, not power, not a gun or a knife, not a happy childhood or a promising career, neither a decade of good deeds nor one of ruthless conniving exempted any of us from foul corporeal odor. Decrepitude is egalitarian, and it warmed my mind to see Smith and Ratcliffe inured enough to one another's stink to embrace like brothers, even fratricidal ones.

“Sorry, your last message was not fully intelligible,” I wrote, and wondered which English words were unknown in their tongue. Are there, in their world,
you
and
I
? If yes, then there must also be
message
and
sorry
.

“One is there who badly thinks of it,” they said, via Sit Knee, his machine, and mine.

“What?”

“There are one, who thinks badly of it.”

I looked to see who
one
might be. Their chief, who seemed sad or drugged or both, on his bed? In the dark and smoky room, a darker darkness clung to him. Foreshortened by my viewing angle, he was compressed and condensed, except his left arm, which hung at full scale off the side of his bed. Sit Knee Find Gold looked at him, and I sensed communion between them, but of what kind I could not say since neither spoke nor made a sign. He typed, “It is compelling that we know your intentions.”

Smith and Ratcliffe had suspended their squabble and sat on either side of me, and wheeled in close on rollered chairs. Their bodies were a festival of deliquescence; I breathed them freely. Ratcliffe read the screen and said, “For Christ's sake, back at home we're running out of fuel and food and guns. Every day our enemy in Brooklyn attempts to advance on us and we can hold him off for only so long. We drag our dead off Brooklyn Bridge and bury them at night. Let's just tell them how bad our situation is and ask them for their help.” Ratcliffe swept his sodden, enervated hair from his eyes and it fell back into them, and he seemed to find this alone cause for despair.

“Ratcliffe?” Smith said. “Is this the imperious Ratcliffe I know who had the blood beat out of me for insubordination? What has happened to you?”

“I know, I know,” Ratcliffe said.

“You know?”

“I don't know.”

“Hasn't your Little Red Book of Sino-Fag Military Tactics told you you can look weak only if you're strong, but if you really are weak, which we are, you have to appear strong?”

“I don't care,” Ratcliffe said.

‘“We are in the area on a mission that is both fact-gathering-oriented and diplomatic. We are interested in an exchange of resources and ideas.' Type that,” Smith said to me.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Type it,” he said, and firmly pressed something—gun, finger, knife—against my back. I typed, but slowly: the smoked air of the great hall by now had molassesed my brain.

“We wishes you in the end in the most specific order,” Sit Knee typed.

“I don't understand,” I typed.

“You we wish for the most specific account.”

Ratcliffe, while breathing on me, said, “It's madness that our lives depend on this.”

I said, “Our lives always depend on this.”

Smith said, “Johnny, don't get philosophical on us right now, please. Let's get through this, gentlemen. No philosophy and no freaking out. Level heads. Strategy. Cunning. Think: how do we use the fucked-up-ness of the machine to our advantage? I think this guy's saying he wants us to be specific about what we're doing here, so I say we feed into the machine specificity that we know will get lost in translation.”

I said, “What about we tell them what we're really doing here, which they'll figure out eventually?”

Ratcliffe said, “But they're not expecting us to be honest, so if we really
are
honest about how desperate for their resources we are, they're going to look at that and think, ‘Well, what they're really doing here must be pretty horrendous if
that's
what they're using to veil it with.'”

Smith said, “Tell them we're looking for a trading partner, we need fuel and food, and can supply protection and technological know-how in return.”

“Oh, great, we and our technological know-how,” I said.

Smith poked my back again.

“Cut it out,” I said, and typed, “Where's the young woman? She knows English.”

Smith poked me again. I ignored him.

Sit Knee seemed to speak my query to the king, along whose foreshortened torso a ripple of dismay ascended.

“The young woman at this time is indisposed,” Sit Knee typed.

“We are an advanced society facing a shortage of key resources, chiefly food, water, and fuel. We would like to engage in a mutually beneficial exchange of ideas, information, and goods,” I typed.

His reply: “It is our habit, around all exterior-to-control-towners of, which with us demand congress, to perform a series of examinations physical and moral.”

“Where?”

“In my office.”

“Only if we can examine your people in the same way,” Smith told me to say.

“I'm the communications officer so stop telling me what to type, and if you poke me one more time with whatever you've been poking me with I shut down the machine and walk out of here.”

Smith sighed. “I think it would be judicious,” he said as if speaking to a child, “to require of them what they require of us, for the purposes of both information gathering and negotiations equity. What do
you
think, Rolfe?”

“I think we should be ready to ask for something else if they say no.”

“There's a boy, Rolfe. I didn't think you had it in you.” He lightly slapped and pinched my cheek. I felt and feel if anyone can save us it's him. Whether the world will be a better place with us saved or dead the biological imperative prevents me from considering too deeply.

Across the hall's congealing air I floated Smith's reply. I could barely breathe by now, and had brought up and swallowed several tablespoonsful of bile since we'd arrived.

“No,” was Sit Knee's reply.

“Why's he have to type that one?” Ratcliffe wanted to know. “Why doesn't he just shake his head?”

I typed, “Then we'll hold one of your best archers until the examination is complete.”

“All right,” he typed.

Negotiation ensued regarding where and how to make the exchange. I explained to them what a handshake was, and suggested we meet between the tables to perform one. Sit Knee tactfully encouraged us to improve our cleanliness and smell. Smith, Ratcliffe, and I walked toward the center of the room, as did Sit Knee Find Gold and two other officials, or guards, or thugs, or friends. Each of us shook a hand of each of theirs. For reasons I cannot enumerate, I surprised Sit Knee with a hug. “Bring the young woman tomorrow,” I whispered. He pushed me away in disgust. His eyes watered. He retched and puked at my feet, which, since vomit needs no translator, caused me to puke. Ratcliffe, also sick, ran for the door but puked instead on Bucky's feet. Bucky ran to the woods but only got as far as Newport, at whose side he puked. Newport leaned over the nearest bush and inadvertently puked on the head of John Martin, who was crouching behind it. Martin puked on himself, and the sight and stench of all the puke caused Happy Lohengrin, on the branch of his tree, to let hurl his, which also fell on Martin's head. A brook of puke whose source was Gosnold's mouth flowed along the runnel of his hollow log, and drowned the spider and the gnat, whose last acts on earth were to puke on God, who is everywhere, and on whom creatures great and small have therefore unremittingly puked since the fateful hour he'd created a man in his image and a woman from the man's rib.

Sidney Feingold

An hour on the bike and here we are at our
pied à terre
with light pouring in through the windows and a relatively fresh breeze blowing in off the Atlantic. Charlene rides shotgun and fends off predators with a blowtorch and throwing knives. Her dexterity keeps the marriage exciting, a woman no longer in the full flush of youth who can hit a leaping coon in the eye, though she gives me endless grief about my poor bike-riding technique too, remarks that are of course at this point in our relationship mostly by way of kibitzing—repetitions, as farce, of the near-tragic fights of the early post-connubial period. How many times, in the early years, did I not know whether a fight with Charlene would end in murder or in the fiercely athletic lovemaking that was more like killing and being killed than any but those activities? Whether the scratches I often bore on my face and neck in that dozen-year period resulted from the fights or the sex I was in a state of ongoing uncertainty about.

With someone like Charlene on the team, too, an aging couple gets a surprising variety of tasks accomplished with a blowtorch. Nor is your typical Algonquian schoolchild trained in the use of the blowtorch; few such instruments exist; use of them is thought profligate, what with the energy crisis. We have one and can fuel it and use it whenever we wish because we are the chief's kid sister and his chief advisor, respectively. The blowtorch and smidgeon of fuel a week are perks, the bike's a perk, the beach house is a perk, the inner place I can arrive at at the beach house where the violent, headache-producing thoughts stop coming quite so fast and hard is a hard-won perk, and of course the peace-of-mind-enabling fresh—in relative terms—air is a massive perk, in the sense that something of almost no mass can be said to be massive.

I love the quiet of the beach house. I hear hardly a peep from the neighbors, Japanese folks, fishermen and hunters, throwbacks, really, to a gentler time. (A gentler time: a constant myth since man began to prey upon the earth; nostalgia is optimism in reverse chronology.) The ocean's one big toxic vat of death, aquatic life has dwindled down to almost nil, yet season in and season out they pull from freshet, pond, and sea robust fauna girdled in tasty meat. They do the same with beasts that roam on solid ground or hover in the air, and with plants that spring up against the odds from the earth's infected soil. You've got to give the Japanese their due: they know something we don't. They have processes to draw the poison from meat and stem alike. From the quiet of their town you'd never guess their central role in the greater Chesapeake economy. They supply and purify our food, Powhatan distributes it and protects them and their way of life.