“Are the troops OK? What do you mean?”
“The troops are kids. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re sheep.” The waiter brought the couscous and Tom made a stab at his lamb. “It’s all about to blow. The British papers are getting ready to go to press with it. It’s going to be a scandal big as My Lai.”
“My Lai? Well, let’s not get carried away,” she said, though who was she to utter such an airy thing?
His hand was trembling and he slurped his wine. “I’m serious. Believe me: the name of this prison will be a household word.” And then he said the name, but it sounded like nonsense to her, and perhaps it was, though her terrible ear for languages made everything that was not English sound very, well, mimsy, as if plucked from “Jabberwocky”: “the mome raths outgrabe.”
He stabbed the air with his fork. “They are the same unit I was in when I was in the army thirty years ago. And taking their orders from military intelligence: the most notorious of oxymorons. I rue my time in Tehran and Cairo; I rue my ability to be consulted.”
“You needed the money—”
“I’m sorry, but there are no more lecture slots available at this time!” he said, spreading his mouth into a smile that was like a star shining its far illusive light from long ago. “All slots have been filled by contestants who auditioned earlier!” She would never see him smile like that again. In truth probably she wasn’t seeing it now. He looked through her a bit and lowered his voice. “I said to them, whatever you do, don’t flush Korans down the toilet. Whatever you do don’t have them be naked in front of a woman. Whatever you do don’t involve them in any sexual horseplay whatsoever. Do not pantomime fellatio — which is probably good advice for everyone. I warned, don’t take a Sharpie and write Children of Akbar on their foreheads or put women’s underwear on their heads. Whatever you do don’t try to reconstruct your memories of seeing Pilobolus at the civic center when you were eight. It will demoralize and degrade them.”
She thought she could see what he was telling her. Don’t code for do. It was what doctors sometimes did for the terminally ill who wanted to die: whatever you do, don’t take this entire prescription all at once with water.
“Where did they get their ideas from then? The Internet?” Did he himself believe these prohibitions were not articulated this way as cover? When you fled one room of moral ambiguity, it was good to have a nice, overstuffed chair awaiting you in the next. But you then perhaps became your spook self, your ghost self, restless in a house you never knew was quite this haunted — and haunted by you.
“The Internet!” Tom said, scoffing. “The Internet just reflects what’s already in the human mind. Perhaps a little less so. Cruelty comes naturally. It comes naturally to everyone. But if one is confused, and it’s hot, one’s bearings get even further lost. The desire to break something down so you can dominate it. Where did this idea come from? Whatever happened to simple cleverness? Instead we’ve got nude interrogations and sandbags soaked in pepper sauce?”
“But you—are MI.”
“IM?”
She shifted in her seat. She couldn’t recall if she had ordered any bread with her salad. “The whole planet is based on being at the right place at the right time,” she said, lost herself.
“No! No!” he cried, seeing her eyes narrow into a squint. “They were supposed to de-conflict, not gitmoize.”
“You are simply a consultant. You weren’t responsible,” she said, unsure. Tom, she knew, had had a close childhood friend on Mohamed Atta’s plane. Sitting right up in first class with the terrorists. “Oh, my God, what a horrible shock,” she had said when he had told her the tale in a coffee shop back home.
“Yeah,” he’d said, hopelessly, “you don’t expect things like that to happen except in coach.”
Now, again, she didn’t know how to console him. “You’re speaking as if you were Death itself.”
“Perhaps I am, little girl. Let’s go for a walk and see if you return.” He began to rub his temples. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure what’s wrong with me, but! I have a good idea for a cure,” he added, smiling slightly, as if he were afraid he had made her nervous. He turned his hand into a pistol shape and placed it at his own temple, his thumb miming a trigger.
“That might only wound,” she said. “It might merely blind you, and then you’d never be able to find a gun again.”
“How about this?” he said and pointed his finger into his mouth. She could see the creamy yellow of his teeth, his molars with their mercury eyes.
“It’s really an extreme way to get rid of headaches, and it still might not work.”
“I’ve got it,” he said and with both hands placed each trigger finger on either side of his head. “That do it?”
Laughter in the midafternoon night. The daylilies in the Plexiglas table vase had already called it a day.
“Veterinarians really have it down,” she said. “It’s so much more humane than human medicine — especially the endgame. They’ve got the right injections. No bad morphine dreams.”
“That’s why I’m getting my little puppy suit ready,” he said.
“Ho ho.”
“If you’re suicidal,” he said slowly, “and you don’t actually kill yourself, you become known as ‘wry.’ ”
He had headaches that could be debilitating, but he had always hid in his apartment when they came on so she had never seen how crippling they were. Two years later, when he had a chip implanted in his head — a headache cure, experimental, cutting-edge, but who could not think of The Manchurian Candidate? — she would go visit him, bring him lunch, listen to him joke about his shaved-off hair and the battery pack implanted in his chest. Someone, it seemed, was experimenting with him, but he did not say who, precisely. He was susceptible to charming leaders and group activities despite his remarks about sheep. He was also simultaneously stoical about all. Still later, when the chip was removed, sloppily, and the trembling that had begun in that café overtook the entirety of him, leaving him frail, unsteady, leaning on a cane, filling out retirement forms—“apparently I was in the control group and the control group does not experience the experiment”—she would drive up to see him in one of the cottages in the veterans’ lakeside compound in the northern part of the state. But the woman at the reception desk always said, “He’s just not seeing people today.” Uniformed guards would check her car at the security gate, and once when she got home she found one of the guards’ cell phones in her trunk. Mostly, if allowed, she would walk the grounds and seek out his cottage — he had his own, like a high-ranking officer, so his GS number was probably substantial. Still there was no response, even though he had replied by e-mail that yes it would be good to see her. He never answered the door the four times she had gone to see him and the nine times each that she had knocked.
“By the way,” he added now, “make sure I don’t have one of those ostensibly green funerals where they put the unpreserved body on view on a giant heap of ice in someone’s blazingly sunny backyard. I want a church. Also? I have my music picked out.”
“OK.”
“Just plug my iPod into some speakers in the front of the chapel.”
“Positioned to Genius?” A compliment, forehanded, she thought. They were so rare in life and even less often believed.
He acknowledged it with a nod, respecting her effort. “Oh,” he said, “Shuffle will do.”