We finished loading our gear within a strained silence, stacking cases so that when we were done only our driver, Carlos, and Rob could see out of the front window. We drove into the guerrilla’s gathering darkness toward the good guy's curfew. Tick fucking tock.
On the way, dust, dimness, and suddenly braking for suspension cracking holes on the broken road had Rob swearing for reasons we could not see, and he did not explain. This unnerving practice turbocharged our imaginations, raising our collective angst so far above cruising altitude that I didn't dare mention how the authorities had put us directly in the line of fire, covered their ass, and I had pissed away precious minutes.
The reality was that we made it or we didn't, and no official gave a shit which way it went: a high-ranking officer had "officially" warned us of the dangers as soon as we got off the plane. He had also told us how long it took to drive to the city, and the hours of national curfew, after which the chances of actually meeting the Savior, and not driving to His city’s namesake, dramatically increased. There were many witnesses....
"I like it," Jeanette said, flipping pages back and forth. "Did you call him Mad Max because he was always angry, or did he put you at risk?" she said, as she stood to get a glass for herself.
"He was an extremely bright guy who constantly failed to disguise his distaste for dealing with mere mortals… unionized mortals, anyway."
"Maybe he just didn’t like you," she said, with a shrug that signaled a new topic. LeBlanc was your partner?" she said, sitting down again.
"For legal reasons, I will say he is a remarkable facsimile." I lifted the bottle and poured her a glass. Picking up the first pages she had read, Jeanette shifted closer to me, which was more intimidating than cozy under the circumstance.
"Couple of things: if you’re going to tell it like it really was, at least in your mind, you should consider using their real names. Don’t worry about trying to change that history."
"There’s another history?" I joked.
"Of course—the one you are going to live."
"His name is Tony Burman; I worked with him and Brian Stewart on most of the really hard stuff."
"You should respect how their expertise kept you alive. What was LeBlanc like when he was not in situations of conflict?"
"He’s a peculiar guy who learned to act as if he’s critically inconvenienced most of the time, so that people would leave him alone."
"With his secrets," she added as if to herself. "From our conversations, I know that he was more despairing over what he had seen than your serendipitous account of his profane and alcoholic behavior makes apparent in your writing." She sorted through the material. "If you tone down the surrounding brutality readers will be able to absorb evocative passages like this." She read a paragraph in which LeBlanc sagely pronounced a newborn baby, "fuckin beautiful," with a cracking voice. Then he reverted to his cantankerous self to deal with a directive from Max.
"Explain why he was like that," Jeanette flipped her wrist with a magician's flare, "and voila! You've got the reader looking into the mirror."
I stared at her uncomprehendingly.
"LeBlanc looked into the abyss and it looked back," she said, somehow thinking this was helpful.
"He would have told the abyss to go fuck itself. Or bought it a drink," I said.
"It's between the lines. It's, it's..." Jeanette stuttered with playful frustration, before inhaling deeply and saying "Was he cheap?"
"What has that got to do with anything?"
"It's not a trick question. You’re not seeing the big picture; his beliefs are the same as your readers taken to the next level; we’re going to another lookout point."
"He was generous to a fault."
"Did he lie, cheat, or steal?"
"He was blunt, he played to win, he congratulated anyone who beat him, and he claimed bribes as other expenses, like we all had to. He also made people who didn’t know him uncomfortable, because his mind and his mouth weren't connected, but he's a good man at heart."
"He’s a good man whose heart has been crushed; he became a reflection of his experiences, not a product of their assessment." Sliding the pages back into order, Jeanette said, "The first scenes you showed me dishonor him by attempting to shock people at his expense, and the second section makes him look like an ass, when his journey reveals the profound aspects of sharing space with the deranged. You need to build the bridge between him at war, and a younger version of him at home. What’s that look about?"
"Nothing. I had a... nothing. The scenes are graphic because that’s the way it was, and LeBlanc's attitude reflects the difficulty of a gifted man trying to cover events that defy representation. That he's screwed up honors his drive and talent, versus the difficulty of dealing with things people can’t smell."
"Did I tell you that you’re succinct when you’re angry? I think I did—never mind. Anyway, the impression your audience will get is that you’re bashing him, if you don't develop the character into a whole person." She raised her hand. "I know, you’ve told me what he thinks and why, but demonstrating his intellect doesn’t tell me about the good man that lies beneath his ragged thoughts. Without that, you’re pandering to a culture of pseudo-hero worshippers—doubly so if you don't develop scenes beyond a Roadrunner cartoon." She tapped the first section of pages. "You've got chase after chase for no reason other than to have your character's escape, then they go the hotel bar as if they had been delivering newspapers."
"Why would you run if not to escape, and what else would you do when you got away?" I said, perplexed.
Her gaze lingered long enough to confirm my sincerity, before she said, "Most of your readers haven't had these extreme experiences, so you should deal with the emotional quandary of your characters not just surviving on the heels of those who didn’t, but living well minutes later. Readers need to appreciate the deeper influence of those events because, as I said, they can connect to them." Glancing down, she read from the section I had left at the top of the stairs... a different war. It read:
Not twenty minutes later, the night crews settled across from the rookies sitting with their backs to the street level windows.
"Fifty bucks and half an hour?" Robbie said toward the bartender, tapping his ear.
Releasing a soft fart between his lips at the sucker's bet, Hakim shook his head on the threshold of imperceptibility while he poured three fingers of forgetfulness into Bryan's glass.
"LeeAnn?" LeBlanc said.
"Up yours," she said, without unfastening her mouth from the rim of her glass.
"A hundred and twenty in twelve minutes," I said.
Hakim moved toward Horst, shaking his head.
"Done," Robbie said.
Four minutes later, twilight detonated into a second crimson rain of sinew and calcium spikes piercing the gawking crowd. A silent moment passed: our marble floor shuddered, and untainted hands reached for tables and countertops to steady themselves. Those in the know resisted this natural response, and instead covered their ears before ten, six by twelve foot sections of plate glass bowed in unison, plunging compressed air into every body cavity with a rolling whump that was surprisingly painful to the unwary.
Working his jaw to pop his ears, Horst looked at his watch. "Too late to feed the bird," he said to no one and everyone...
Jeanette looked at me questioningly.
"The second bomb kills the crowd and medics who were attending to the casualties of the first one. Birds are satellites."
She nodded, and continued reading:
Hakim casually wiped condensation from the base of Bartholomew Edwards’ glass, while he sheepishly picked himself off the floor onto which he had plummeted as if he’d seen a thousand dollar bill fluttering by.
"When is cut off?" Bart said, reaching for his drink.
"Eight-thirtyish," LeeAnn said, painfully swishing a piece of lemon through her Perrier with a bandaged finger. "Depends on the kind of day, and the condition of the driver."
Tilting his drink toward Edwards, LeBlanc toasted a supportive, "Tick-tock, mate. Cheers."
'"Axe?" Nikki and Jolynn said together, seeking a translation.
"Two mice ran up the clock. The clock struck the one who stopped to ask, what's that noise? The other one dropped to the floor and escaped without injury."
Edwards nodded his appreciation toward Robbie.
Bryan, who had forgotten more about the Middle East than any three of us put together would ever know, nudged my elbow. "I can’t remember why hitting the deck was a good idea."
"Me neither," I said.
Turning to Edwards, he said, "Cheers, we all needed that," meaning we should have been picking up thousand dollar bills as well.
Edwards nodded at us, his expression changing to uncertainty as the first wisp of a pungent odor arrived at bar level.
Bryan lowered his eyes to read a beer label printed in four of the five languages he could negotiate in a pinch.
Everyone's eyes soon inspected the architecture, or their fingernails, lest they influence the decision the multimillion-dollar anchorman had to make in the brief stretch of time before another round of sirens echoed through the downtown core.
"I'll be fucked," Edwards said, shifting from one foot to the other, "I shit myself."
"Not anytime soon," LeeAnn said, blandly.
"Jockeys or briefs?" Hakim said, seriously concerned about his bar stool.
Turning toward the elevators, Edwards said, "Put that strange fellow's tab on room nine-twenty. His translator's, as well," he said, nodding toward me as I finally remembered to "pay" Robbie the $120 he had left at Julie’s Mansion in the spring.
"Stairs," Nikki said, not raising her voice.
With a chop-step, Bart angled toward the stairwell: "Hakim—everyone who’s ever done this gets doubles."
Horst glanced toward LeeAnn, who shrugged at Jolynn, who ordered gin ahead of everyone else who had eaten a salad washed in hotel tap water. Or who otherwise weren’t strangers to an unexpected shit; it was the way it was, and not a big deal in places where death was so busy.
Jeanette placed the pages on her lap, and a shallow smile faded into contemplation as she closed her eyes. And there she sat. Tick. Tick. Tick.
"That scene helps to demonstrate how combat kicks the hell out of normal values. Like I said, context is everything," I explained.
"By glamorizing their risk taking before this scene," she said, "you missed the point that some of them just sat there."
"What point; they were used to it?"
"Exactly."
"Exactly what?"
"There was a time when life and death issues weren't a usual part of their day, a time before the possibility of being shredded by glass had them take precautions, a time when they thought about what they had seen, like you did after El Salvador, and events changed them into who they were in this scene. Right or wrong?"
"I'm not saying they didn't."
"Why didn’t you investigate why they sat there?"
"I told you, they were used to it."
"So used to it that living well immediately afterwards was normal?"
"What else would you do?"
"These news crews are metaphors—they’re messages to readers who are lounging in the midst of their unacknowledged dangers until they reach the point your characters have reached, and suddenly find themselves asking what the hell they are doing there, and why they didn’t take action?" She began searching through the pages. "You allude to this quandary a number of times." She found her spot. "Here, LeBlanc asks himself how killing farmers makes the world a safer place." She looked at me. "This internal dialogue suggests that his personal cause is blowing apart before his eyes."
"I'll have him say it to a buddy," I said, missing the point.
"The question isn’t rhetorical." Jeanette shifted on the sofa to give us breathing room. "You implied he's on the verge of realizing that recording depravity for a noble cause doesn't create a revolt against the disgrace of the human condition. His pictures are revolting on their face and perverse in that an audience finds them riveting. More to the point, in that moment he glimpsed his crossroads, and now he secretly knows that his bang-bang days are numbered."
"You lost me between depravity and nobility."
"It’s in bee-tweeeeen," she stretched the word. "He has created a predicament of entangled beliefs: he saw this kind of thing in his first war, knows he will see it in his next one, and secretly fears that his artistry is raising the standard of acceptable atrocity to an audience that’s doing nothing about it. That would be the killing blow."
"To what?"
"His humanity; he can barely function as it is." She shuddered as she shook my pages and forcefully said, "This work airs your assumptions and internal dramas. Different characters represent the different options you’ve taken in similar circumstances, but you inevitably come back to where you started, because the ‘tenth’ choice," she paraphrased in the air, "made you think something will be different. It won’t: the tenth choice is always a circuitous path back to the first, because your very existence is based on maintaining a continuity of thought and action. You’d have to change a fundamental belief to change the nature of your choices."
Rubbing the top page, she looked at me compassionately. "Your style represents what you think and how you came to think it, both of which portend to an inevitable end that’s staring you in the face."
"Which is?"
"Becoming LeBlanc."
Staring, I said, "Your eyes look normal."
"Mocking me doesn’t change anything. Your characters represent different aspects of your personality, which you test from event to event to try to resolve personal quandaries. But you corner yourself by emphasizing peripheral issues, like you did with your screenplay, because the core issues either offended or made no sense to you."
"What personal quandaries? It was what it was."
She cocked her head a come-off-it pose.
"Really," I said.
"The first time we met, you said the necessity to act is the basis upon which I should evaluate your character, albeit under the guise of evaluating your screenplay character's character." She grinned. "In other words, necessity is a qualifier of bravery for you, but your characters created necessity from choosing to be there. You couldn’t distinguish courage from idiocy or hero from villain because you volunteered to be part of the problem, and that, my friend, is your cage. You became a part of the insanity in order to survive in the insanity." She pitched forward. "But you are correct on one point: courage and heroes aren’t what we think they are in warfare."
"This is going to be how your people would think of it?"
"It is. They would know that you can't turn a fundamentally flawed event into a virtue." She relaxed her shoulders. "That’s like a medic shooting a colleague, then getting a medal for saving his life under fire." Jeanette leaned back and placed her palms on the table. "It’s no different than giving medals for murder under the banner of a duty, awarded by the very people who created the drama while sipping their daiquiris oblivious to the sirens outside."
"There goes the military audience."
"You also haven’t fixed an ending in your mind," she said, "because you’re secretly searching for meanings in experiences that most people freely admit are insane, yet they still go to them, which can only mean what?"
"It was necessary?"
"Dipping her head as if from the weight of sudden wisdom manifesting—as I saw it—she said, "Within the midst of this madness, LeBlanc had a peek at himself, and he questioned what he was doing there. This tells me that you glimpsed a slice of what you are really like, but your ego slammed that door shut before the secret could slip through the crack in the mirror of your self-reflection."
Untangling her words, and still having missed her point, I heard Jeanette comparing our works under the guise of our characters' beliefs. In this light, I saw her fervor as antagonism aimed at goading me into changing my story to validate whatever she had in mind for hers. It ticked me off.
"My work isn't about special people sowing the groundwork for peace of mind," I said carefully. "It's a glassy stare at the casual cruelty of seeding minefields in fertile land. Mutilation and involuntary crapping may be less appealing social transactions to you than discussing their philosophical implications, but we aren't all on the same step of the evolutionary ladder. I can’t write about things I don’t know, and neither can you." I steeled myself for the counter assault.
"Shit," she said exasperated. "Am I speaking Mandarin? Do I have to throw you down the stairs to get your attention?"
"That might work if the lesson is about gravity."
Breathing a sigh of defeat, Jeanette picked up my pages and placed them lightly in my hands, as if they were ancient parchment. "Let’s move on. Assess events you saw for their underlying nature, and question the odds of these things happening to one person. If you do this throughout your entire book, you should begin to appreciate how your experiences are unique by virtue of what their totality represents. From there some of your shadow beliefs will fall, and the extra light will shine on a purpose." She leaned into my personal space. "Your first thirty-five years are an extraordinary tale that you're turning into a common war story, because you can’t make a single leap of faith."
"What leap is it this time?"
"You haven’t examined any of your exquisite moments, even though you believe nothing happens by chance; the leap is being willing to accept whatever conclusion you arrive at."
Jeanette suddenly stood and shouted, "I’m right here!" launching her cat into sanctuary under the couch.
"I can still see you," I muttered, my irritation dissolving into consternation over a crazy woman standing as if nailed to a cross.
Dropping her arms, she said, "Would you like a Tarot reading?" as if this was a chore. Realizing her delivery wasn’t exactly a gripping invitation, she lightened up and added, "Just for the fun of it. It also might loosen you up, so we can have interesting discussions like this. This was great, wasn’t it?"
"Yup."
Not until that night in bed did I fit a critical piece of my daily Jeanette puzzle together: she was trashing my work about adapting to conflict, because she faced her days within the cozy context of metaphysics. This meant that something bad must have happened—something particularly cruel for her to run so far away that she needed me to filter her life through my alleged levels of damaged beliefs, to regain her sense of safety. I was her disco ball.
***
Zzz: Drifting from a conversation on an El Al flight, my thoughts melted into a camera crew eating lunch at a Kibbutz patio, which became the deck outside of the Horse & Hound. Across the street a family was having a picnic in Hyde Park, a loin clothed jogger stopped to feed a Chinese chow scraps, and the animal turned into a statue of a lion. A small crowd admired it while a weeping man herded sheep into Starbucks. The aroma of coffee wafting from the kitchen lulled me into the present.
Chapter 18: Remodeling Beliefs
Annoyingly, I found myself looking forward to the Tarot card reading, a feeling I suppressed by abbreviating our ritual exchange of small talk when I saw Jeanette the next morning. This change in our routine felt transparent even to me, but Jeanette said nothing about it as she led the way to the dining room table.
Sitting across from each other, she said, "I'm going to deal nine cards face down in a cross formation, then a key issue card to the side." She handed me the deck and mimed shuffling. "I'll turn them in order, explain the metaphorical significance, and as we go on I'll integrate the focus of each card into the next, to refine the big picture, until the tenth one brings everything together."
"Dabble?" I said dryly.
"I didn't say I was sloppy. Cut them into three stacks."
I did as she asked, and Jeanette lay out the cards. Without emotion, she plucked meaning from the first four in clipped tones, spot-welding sentences together with what for her were unusual "ums," and "ahs" she seemed unaware of uttering.
The first card signified impending wealth, the next death, which she said could mean the death of a person, a relationship, or a belief. The third card was about personal development, which changed the death card to mean the ending of a debilitating idea, and wealth became knowledge gained from opening my mind. Go figure.
During the next run of cards, the pitch of her voice dropped as she repackaged information from previous ones, until we came to the ninth card. Haltingly, she said it was about journeys, but not the getting on and off planes kind. She closed her eyes. Speaking in a distant manner, her words became more formal than her everyday vocabulary, while still flowing with the easy rhythm of forethought. A cynic might call it rehearsed.
Occasionally speaking in the plural, such as, "We see that you will travel extensively on a sojourn that has rippled through time," she served up information that went well beyond the parameters set by previous cards: I managed to wrangle my smirk into a stingy smile over her contrivances, aimed at enhancing my interest, until she said I had lived some lives as a soldier. For reasons unknown, I took offence.
"This occupation performed different roles at different times," she said into my derisive grin. "In one period, they were deterrent peacekeepers watching over their borders, and those of neighbors who acted in concert with the principles of peaceful coexistence. They neither instigated nor intervened in other’s hostilities, because that postponed a lasting resolution to problems warring societies had not dealt with sensibly. At this time, soldier's practiced tact over tactics, and mental patients over medical patience, although they were well trained in the deadly arts beyond anything your world knows. Foreign societies honored their total commitment to their tasks by leaving them alone."
Apparently seeking a better response than "Uh huh," Jeanette said that, at this time, I had intimate knowledge of thirteen couples who were learning evolutionary lessons about conflict, both personal and external. These couples shared a telepathic symbiosis that made the sum of their parts a remarkably powerful force.
Essentially, the women preferred to align neighbors, and people of influence, with the side of logic by verbally launching events that drained the mental and emotional coffers of antagonists. On the practical side, whisper tactics, for example, were so inexpensively effective that large segments of populations withdrew the tacit permission their governments presumed from its citizens, through verbal protest and subtler acts of civil disobedience. Undermined, maybe even embarrassed but not stupid, they had a good look at the ingeniousness of their quarry, and they thought twice about forcing the hand of the people who refined diplomacy to an intricate art form.
The men implemented the bolder aspects of the women’s machinations, using surprise and opportunity to coordinate sudden cuts in lines of communications, and suspension of trade, to demonstrate the scope of the siege that was possible without resorting to battering rams. A key to the success of using coercion to avoid expensive conflicts was that they never threatened - they acted as a shot across the bow. If only because no adversary knew, for certain, where these people’s alliances lay in wait, they saw that it was both logically and financially in everyone’s best interests to prefer peace.
Jeanette's tone clearly favored the patient approach, without dismissing the use of force she described as a "necessary potential of other's making." She finally said that I had experienced the former mode of conflict resolution in one life, the butchering kind of soldiering in others, and my most recent occupation had completed my investigation of the illusions that cause all manner of conflicts. I was now assembling the beliefs all of these experiences had generated.
I felt betrayed: Jeanette was putting spin on our moments of candor to lend credibility to her card interpretations. Following this recognition, I felt a wave of disappointment as she mechanically said, "Do not be distressed. You are not subject to a fate based on the past. You have endless choices, all of them influenced by the totality of experiences yet not assessed."
"What card tells you that?"
The glaze over her eyes vanished with a twist of her head, and in her usual voice she equivocated, "It's a composite view from an unusually in depth session." Turning the tenth card, she said I was neck deep in a quest that would take a couple of lifetimes to complete.
Certain that I was neck deep in something I made an excuse to leave, and headed to the Dover pub for lunch.
I didn't call Jeanette until noon, two days later, because it took me that long to see past her abuse of confidences, and clever reconstruction of known information, to recall that she had warned me about teachers shocking students to move things along. That said I was less impressed by her all-out commitment this time…
Jeanette answered on the fourth ring with a breathless hello, allotted me half an hour to get to Nolan’s, then hung up as if her tub was overflowing. Thirty-four minutes later, we were chatting about everyday things, as opposed to the paranormal.
When I was as at ease as I ever was with her nowadays, I opened my manila envelope and asked her to comment on the flat tire rewrite I had done following her suggestions. Jeanette took the chapter from me appreciatively, her hand lingering on mine as she said, "I understand what you're feeling, but skepticism is something only you can resolve."
"Fair enough," I said, waving at Bréta for coffee.
Jeanette began reading.
The changes I had made included our inability to find a special tool that released the jack from its moorings, so we forced it from a French-engineered locking mechanism that would have sent Houdini into retirement. Also following the driver's manual instructions, it took us fifteen minutes to remove the spare tire, then we couldn't get the jack to function under load. We solved that problem with C-clamps from our lighting kit, but the spare went flat by the time we had repacked the tools. Previously included, but now polished, was that we caught an elderly man peeking from behind a curtained window across the street, and we asked him where we could get help. He said there was a garage a few blocks away, but it was an uncertain day; it might not be open. It wasn't, and we ended up buying a spare tire from a passing motorist for the price of a used car, because he was the only other person on the road and he knew it.
In the meantime, I wrote about the sniper’s opposing thoughts of being caught, and tortured, and those of imagining his friends’ faces when he described the moment the red h