Jamestown (20 page)

“Well,” Jackshit says, “what do you want?”

“What is the purpose of your trip?”

“Friendly exchange of goods and ideas.”

“So y'all done undertook a long and dangerous journey and are in the shape you're in now—which is disgusting, have you no pride?—for the friendly exchange of goods and ideas?”

“Yes.”

“Well then you've come to the right place! We is a peaceful people. We believes love is thuh ansuh to all questions, except thuh questions to which the ansuh are ‘Relax.'”

“All right we're going around in circles here. Guard!”

“I blew the guard.”

“Guard!”

“I shot the guard.”

“Are they going to kill me?”

“Now we're getting somewhere.”

“Though you've given me squat.”

“But, being a man, you've taken what I haven't given.”

“Are they?”

“I don't know, they don't consult me.”

“Can you get me out of here?”

“No.”

“You refuse?”

“I'm unable.”

“I thought you shot the guard.”

“I pantsed the guard.”

He glowers and curses me in his head. Sometimes a part of the back of a man's head as seen in the dark through a hole in the wall is all one needs to know what's going on inside it.

“Since you're considered by my dad and his men to be a hostile extraterritorial, as all extraterritorials are considered hostile until they prove otherwise, and sometimes not even then, and since you're therefore tied up in jail and may be about to die, while I'm free to move around at will and am the daughter of the man in whose mind your fate lies, I'd say you should start being open and honest with me and if I see that you're making an earnest effort to do so I'll do what I can to make sure you (a) don't die, and (b) go free.”

“You're Powhatan's daughter?”

“Oops, I did it again.”

“Did what again?”

“Revealed something to you by accident.”

“What was the other thing you revealed?”

“My love of Johnny Rolfe.”

See, Self? This is the new me, the one who opens herself to the world, who gives a lot and hopes to receive a lot in return. It's almost unbearably exciting. My hairs are standing on end, as if they were penises. I'm so scared, too, and sad. I feel like crying. I can't cry, though, in front of him—in back of him, I mean.

“You crying?”

“No.”

“Yes you are, I hear you. I see a teardrop clinging to your mouth.”

He's turned his head again. I see his eye and ugly, bloody brow. I lick off the tear he saw on my lip and stick my tongue through the hole and out at him. Now my tongue's in jail—whoa, how symbolic—and now I pull it out again and put it in my mouth.

“I can't believe I have to negotiate with a punk girl who's probably yanking my chain, but, listen, what do you want? You want to meet up with Johnny? You get me out of here and I arrange for you to meet at sunset by the second fallen log on the right as you head up the creek?”

“I don't want to meet him—”

“You
don't
want to meet him?”

“Let me finish, Jesus, men are so—ugh! I don't want to meet him
yet
. I prefer to exchange a few emails with a guy before I date him. You can tell a lot about a guy by how he emails.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Give him my email address.”

“That's it?”

“Well, and make sure there's something he can send me a message on.”

“And in exchange for this you'll make sure I get released and not killed?”

“Yes.”

“What's your email address?”

“[email protected]”

“Deal. I'd shake your hand but…”

“Who you talking to?” That was Harry Parahunt, who's entered the cell whose unintended gap my ear is pressed to.

“The air,” my new friend says.

“I'm moving you. Put your arms behind your back and if you try to make a move on me I'll stab you in the heart.”

“Where you taking me?”

Harry Parahunt does not reply.

“Don't forget,” Jackshit says to me.

“Don't forget what?” Harry says.

“Not to stab me in the heart if I don't make a move on you.” Jackshit turns his head to me one more time and shows me his green, bloodshot eye, in which I see enough will to kill a whale.

I can't save his life or ensure his release but I know my dad will let him go, that's his way in these things, and when he's let go Jackshit may think I made it so, or he may not, and I may or may not get an email from that man for whom my feelings scare me very much. If only I can get my hands on a communications device. How hard could that be? Very hard! But I love this day, which has shown that a big wooden wall around a small port of air can serve to make two folks work hard to say what they mean, and that one can sometimes understand what the other thinks and wants despite the great impediment of the matter between two minds.

Penelope Ratcliffe

I like the dark, in which touch, smell, taste, and hearing overthrow sight, their queen in the light. I like that my mattress is firm, the thread count of my soft sheets high. That I live like this I don't know how to justify. On what surface does my son now lie? Does soft cloth surround him too, or do waters, spiders, knives? When can a mother no longer save her son? When she conceives him.

After we had sex tonight, Jim read aloud a haiku he wrote for me, as is his wont, and gave me a copy in his fast and clear and forceful script on company letterhead:

Great haiku, Jim. The hardest part of my job as executive secretary to the CEO of the Manhattan Company is liking his poems night after night. I like some but must say I like all and do so convincingly, the job never ends, thank God the sex is more consistently good than the haiku.

He's breathing quietly now. Glad he doesn't snore. After drink, food, sex, and art, as his brief interval of pre-sleep languor began, in a room smothered in dark velvet and lit by fifty candles, on our firm, acre-wide bed, I told him I'd intercepted an electronic communication from Brooklyn's ambassador to Manhattan, Pete Zuñiga, to his employer, Brooklyn's CEO, Phil Habsburg, with whom my man is engaged in a struggle to the death, by proxy of course, since they haven't met in years.

“Is it about our meeting yesterday?” he said.

“Yes.”

“You have it on you?”

“Yes.”

“Read it to me.”

‘“Cherished Leader—”‘

‘“Cherished Leader'? How far up his—”

“I know.”

“If I had a higher tolerance for bullshit I'd have all my employees—”

“Resist the temptation. ‘Dear Mr. President' gets the point across just fine.”

“Proceed.”

‘“As per usual when I have an audience with Stuart, I was met by a group of thugs on foot halfway across Brooklyn Bridge, blindfolded, and shoved into the back of a bike-taxi, as if this were high school and I the unpopular kid being brought to the secret clubhouse for an interview with its leader, who would inevitably rebuff me.'”

“Poor guy, must have had a rough adolescence. Despite myself I've always found his petulant rage, thinly disguised as formal decorum, poignant. I feel another haiku coming on:

I laughed and continued. ‘“When the blindfold was removed I found myself in the usual candlelit—”'

“But what do you think of my new haiku?”

“I thought my laughter would signal that I found it funny.”

“But I like to hear you say it. I love the sound of your voice.”

He said this with half-closed eyes, his naked, lean, middle-aged body limp beneath his pale and massive politician's head, which was half-submerged in organic pillows. His voice broke slightly on the word “voice.” For the hundredth time I'm amazed and moved that he lets himself be weak with me. I could kill him now.

‘“When the blindfold was removed I found myself in the usual candlelit room with freeform damask wall hangings and futons on the floor, an agreeable room designed no doubt by Stuart's executive secretary, Ms. Ratcliffe, the former Mrs. Philip Habsburg, and, Sir, I hope you don't mind my saying that I fully commend your having married her despite her subsequent perfidy, she's quite a woman, intelligent, artful, astute, wonderful to look at, with excellent posture….”'

“What a mystery that Phil hasn't had this guy fired or executed every day. As most men do, he wishes the seat of your bike were his face.”

“Look,” I said, pointing, “the vice president has risen to the podium again.”

“Come here,” Jim said.

I rolled and sat up on the stalwart VP, who gave a short but pithy speech that my body received with brief but heartfelt applause.

“Whew.”

“Is that a quote from Zuñiga's communiqué or is that you ejaculating as it were?”

“Me.”

“Finish reading the letter so I can think it over in my sleep.”

‘“Stuart let me wait in this perfumed room for a good forty-five minutes, but waiting is to being ambassador as having your upper lip waxed is to—”'

“My God, he avenges himself for the waiting on whoever reads this. Proceed.”

‘“I used the time to commit to memory one of the sonnets of Olena Kalytiak Davis, last Poet Laureate of the United States—at the end of the time when there were such things as poets laureate, and states—an endeavor in which I am indebted to you for allowing me free access to the closely guarded underground vaults of the erstwhile Brooklyn Public Library.'”

“Now there's a man who understands the need to undergird statecraft with poetry. This Davis, have you heard of him, Penny?”

“Olena is a woman's name, Sir.”

“You sure? What about the middle name, Call-it-a-yak? Is that a woman's name?”

“I don't know.”

“Man's name?”

“I don't know.”

“Is it a white name?”

“Don't know.”

“Black name?”

“Don't know.”

“Red name?”

“Don't know.”

“Yellow name?”

“No know.”

“Lady poet laureate. I guess it could happen. You don't ever write poetry, do you, Penny?”

“No, Sir.”

“I like that you call me ‘Sir' late at night. It means you know that to be Manhattan is never to be off duty.”

“Nor to be Lady Manhattan,” I didn't say aloud. ‘“In any case, my dear Philip, Stuart arrived in his own time and I told him Brooklyn owns Virginia. He said he didn't know that. I expressed incredulity. He said he understood that in Virginia Brooklyn owns a five-mile-wide corridor of land through the center of which runs the largely disused Interstate 95, and not until that road crosses the northern border of Florida does Brooklyn control a wider swathe of land around it, “and anyway,” he said, “whosoever commands 1-95 commands the world, so what are you worried about?” I suggested to him that I was worried about us both being bound by the real estate contracts we'd signed down through the years and he told me he was “not the i's and t's man of this outfit.” I wondered aloud whether, if it were the case that Brooklyn owned only 1-95 in Virginia, which it is not, his men's journey down along it, before they veered east to the Chesapeake, would not then have been an act of trespass. He said they hadn't taken that route as far as he knew, though again he averred he was not the detail man. What route
had
they taken, I wanted to know. He said he didn't know and wouldn't tell if he did, and went on to assert that indeed the sense in which any man at all could be said to be “his” was flimsy, and that these so-called men of “his” in the Chesapeake environs were acting not on his word or behalf but of their own will and for their own gain or loss, and if it could be proven that the ground their equipment and selves now covered were that of Brooklyn—which proof he doubted I'd produce—Brooklyn would then be free to do with the men what it saw fit. I tried to let him think I lived in this imaginary world of his in which his fellow islanders are not his employees and had not driven south on an armored bus in the name of Manhattan. I moved then to build an argument—”'

‘“I moved then to build an argument'?” said my man, sleepily. “This guy couldn't move to build a fart after spooning down a quart of hummus.”

“‘—about their intentions. Could they, a group composed entirely of men, mean to settle this land? No, they could not, else why not bring ladies? And even if ladies were present, why would anyone settle the most tainted, unproductive, oil-poor, animal-less patch of the North American continent east of the Mississippi? My answer: they would not settle it, they would station themselves there to perpetrate cowardly acts of privateering against their neighbors across the East River. He suggested I no more knew where the Mississippi was than I knew where my own, well, anal area was—excuse me, Sir, I include this detail to give you a sense of his vulgarity—and he went on to correct my use of the word
privateering
with the word
piracy
, since, as he had asserted earlier, these men's actions were neither caused nor sanctioned by himself. As for my argument, he felt it was as uninteresting as it was pointless insofar as he'd already covered what I was saying and probably would say for the rest of our meeting, which he hoped would be short, under the umbrella of “Brooklyn was free to do with the Manhattanites in Virginia what it saw fit as long as it could prove they were there illegally.” Very steamed I was at this point as I'm sure you can imagine, Sir, so I stood to go and told him I'd be sending him the relevant documentation on the ownership of Virginia with a messenger who would be holding a 10-by-13 manila envelope embossed with Brooklyn's corporate logo, bobcat rampant, and enjoined him not to slit the throat of this man, as he had done to the last several, before he could complete his delivery. He apologized and lamented that he found it difficult to distinguish between the messengers and the assassins we send, and I replied that one carries a manila envelope, the other a gun and throwing stars. He thanked me and I gave him a curt headbow that I think he recognized as the diplomatic equivalent of the finger. At this point as if by telepathy Ms. Ratcliffe entered the room and took my arm, a gesture I must acknowledge as negotiational genius because how can a man maintain the sharp inner feeling of aggression necessary to any diplomatic interchange when being touched along the length of the arm by Ms. Ratcliffe, if you'll pardon my forwardness on this point.' You still with me, dear?”