Submission to the CL Literary & Writing forum Passing Time project

Will it be the tango or the paso doble? Two men sit across from each other at a maple conference table overlooking the Potomac. One scratches something down on a cocktail napkin, a figure with many zeroes, and passes it across the table to the other, his french cuff brushing the polished top. Who knows how the cocktail napkin (where are the cocktails) came into the picture?

A glimpse down. The figures roll around in his mouth like an incantation.

“To be wired to a Swiss account?”

“As soon as you lower the value of a life to $6.9 million.”

A moment’s hesitation and then a nod of approval. This is how it’s done on the beltway. People in the know call it the K Street waltz (okay, so it’s a waltz.) When the Environmental Protection Agency dropped the value of a single life from eight million to something south of seven, a lot of money was going to be made.

Someone has to start making money first.

Those that did were wearing this . . . the Classic French Collar (No. 2505), made of the finest cotton from the Nile Delta, this shirt is worn by both Wall Street and K Street types, and even EPA technocrats with fat Swiss bank accounts.

Pearl buttons. Single-needle throughout. Men’s sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL.

Colors: Blue with White French Collar - a classic look. Any other combination . . . well, it wouldn’t be a classic.

Page 2

He was a simple bus driver with a hankering for the life of the gentleman hunter. Those Minnesota woods called out to him on the eve of every open season. Though he was still a bus driver at heart, a regular Ralph Kramden, he could afford a better rifle, a better car and a bevy of employees/servants to carry his equipment and ammunition up and over those hills and down into those valleys in search of that prize trophy to hang on his wall.

He was an unsteady shot and bagged little more that a four-point buck, but he always looked dapper in his Tweed Shooting Jacket (No. 2106), the same classic jacket worn by English gentlemen hunters in the Scottish highlands.

His lack of skill at the hunt was more than made up for by his talent at dismantling electric trolley lines like the Pacific Electric Red Cars in Los Angeles. Mass rail transit would become little more than a memory, a page in a scrap book that your grandheirs might point at and ask about.

“Grandpa, what’s that?”

“Why that’s an electric trolley we used to get around town on just after the last big war, but some big companies ripped it out and made us buy their buses and use their gasoline.”

Where did the Pacific Electric trolley go?

To the moon, Alice, to the moon, on a stack of crisp Benjamins as a matter of fact, all padding the profit margin of General Motors and Standard Oil and Firestone Tire.

In the grand scheme of things, be the hunter not the hunted in our Tweed Shooting Jacket (No. 2106.)

Men’s sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL
Color: Grey

Page 3

OJ with a splash of Tia Maria. A gentle breeze slides off the Carribean. Sunrise isn’t too early to smoke a Montecristo No. 4 is it?

The sights, smells and tastes betray the presence of real movers and shakers here. Back home they are accustomed to living and working in what they call the “nose bleed” section of the risk-reward curve. They are the men, and a few women, who manage hedge funds.

No, they don’t have calluses from clipping at bushes all day. They generally pay people to do that while they sit, watching the market move up and down, bothering to look away from their Bloomberg monitors only to make a quip to their associates about oil futures.

In the Caymans, at the annual pow wow of fund managers (invite only), the living is easy and their attire shows it.

The Viscose Jacquard Linen Jacket (No. 2609) is tailored to let that cool trade wind in but not let market cap value out. Jackets like this are worn by a different breed all together.

Men’s even sizes: 38 through 48
Color: Blue with Creame stripe

Page 4

“Where did your watch go Senor Lansky?”

The man doesn’t answer but only rubs a pale strip of flesh around his wrist. The man’s first name is Meyer and you know the rest . . , a man of considerable means though you’d be pressed to get him to admit it.

The watch?

It’s a Cape Cod 1936 (No. 1107) with a havane crocodile strap. Senor Lansky feels naked without it, but it was an acceptable sacrifice given the dire circumstances. He gave it to a hot blooded idealist named Fidel Castro just an hour before in exchange for one more week to get his affairs together in Havana, make arrangements for passage to Nassau and transfer a fortune to various shell companies and sheltered bank accounts back in the Old World.

Yes, it was an acceptable sacrifice but one that doesn’t sit well with him. Why don’t you see for yourself how hard it would be to part with your own, even for half-a-fortnight of financial freedom?

The Cape Cod 1936 (No. 1107) comes with a matching crocodile skin humidor box. Tick, tick, tick . . . time is running out both for you and him.

Submission to the CL Literary & Writing forum Seven-in-Seven project.

So much depends
upon
a shovel in the hand
of a child
glazed with rain
water
culture
and
dragon boats with no life jackets aboard
just buoyant ideas

Keep the line taut and the fuel tank topped off
You shouldn’t wear glasses because they make you
unworthy to your sister’s
eye
and foreign words are discouraged
because the rice doesn’t know them
and won’t grow
at their whispering

It’s our water culture
and his great leap forward
from a ramp built on the skulls of your brothers
lower your eyes so that he sees you don’t weep
For that old reservoir is deep
And no time to sleep
And no time to make plans in the temple

“I catch up a lot on my reading,” she said.

“What do you do down in the hole other than reading?” I asked my mother a few days later.

“We have a ping pong table,” she said. “When I’m not reading I play ping pong with Lisa.”

“What do you do down in the hole when you aren’t reading or playing ping-pong?” I asked my mother a few days after that.

“We practice doing our job. We call them drills, like you should practice your multiplication drills,” my mother answered.

At this time of frequent Q & A, I was eight years old, my brother five, and my mother was part of a grand experiment in how to better protect the United States from nuclear annihilation. Captain Hudson was a missile woman who swooshed effortlessly between the surface world of mediocre report cards and Cub Scout den meetings, and the subterranean realm of launch and command duty of a Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silo.

“What do you practice down in the silo?” I asked after one of our den meetings. I slid off my itchy, bright yellow scout kerchief.

“Lisa and I practice turning keys and checking codes against other codes,” My mother looked annoyed with my question. Tomorrow she was going back on alert and down into the hole for a three-day shift.

My mom’s back-and-forth duty lasted for six years and was part of an Air Force program called Project Hera. The idea of putting mothers down into ballistic missile silos was born from a fear among the high brass that men were not fully dependable when given the duty of turning the keys to launch their Minutemen and Titan II rockets. Launch would be requested via an EWO or Emergency War Order on the occasion that all-out thermonuclear war were to break out. One four-star suggested that perhaps mothers, threatened with the potential vaporization of their own children on the surface, would more likely launch the missiles in a timely fashion, perhaps early enough to catch their counterparts in the Soviet Union still mulling over whether to launch their own missiles from their holes in Siberia. Thus Project Hera was born.

During alerts, my school teacher father did his best to raise us with help from nannies supplied by the U.S. government. I was well cared for and the Air Force saw that I didn’t fall through any cracks or down any holes.

Mom was still a very present and engaged parent. After she slid out of her uniform, she would effortlessly take on the uniforms of wife and den mother. Both mom and dad would help me on school projects such as dioramas and adding to our growing fleet of model rockets - our family hobby and the most common activity of our cub scout den.

I recall being so proud of a two-stage rocket my mother and I built. It took us over two months to build and perfect the design, and we were hosting the debut launch for the whole pack out on the air base’s soccer field. Dad set up the launch pad while mom hooked up the wires of the ignition system to the battery in our Volvo wagon. The rest of my friends had taken up their positions behind large pieces of plywood, anticipating a large and fiery debacle. Mom had the arming and ignition switch in her hand while we crouched behind the open door of the Volvo.

10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . .

Capt. Hudson handed the switch to me, saying, “This is your launch, not mine.”

I turned the arming key and pressed the launch button even before the rest of the den reached “2.” The rocket shot into the blue, and we never found it again even though the pack searched the neighboring forest until the darkness came and young guts began growling.

So it was with great amusement that thirty years later, while walking with my mother back to her Volvo station wagon after attending our democratic party precinct caucus, that I again asked her that same old question.

“So what were you really doing down in that hole?”

Mom just looked at me. We were both fatigued from the confusing caucus process and our discussions with our precinct neighbors of who would be best to take that 3 a.m. phone call, whether the most qualified would be Barack or Hillary.

“Lisa and I would mostly talk about you and your brother. We wondered which one of you two would marry her daughter first.”

I have a faint memory of Capt. Lisa Bonasera’s daughter, though I can’t remember her name. We moved from that Midwest air base many years ago.

“Would you have done it mom?”

“Done what?”

“Turned the keys and sent the missile on its way.”

“Of course not.”

I was shocked by the abrupt answer, her admission of insubordination.

“Why not?”

The newly assigned legislative delegate for Hillary Clinton looked at me again, this time with a bemused scorn.

“Did you forget I am a mother?”

Project Hera is therefore an unqualified success.

Driving forward will only serve to put me in the bay now. I’m at the end of the road. What I need to do is a three point turn, but there are cars on each side of the road and space is very tight. There are so many cars but not a soul to be seen walking around. I look out upon the bay to see several dive flags and bubbles floating to the surface of the darkened water. Throwing it in reverse does not seem an option to me.

Interpretation:

Common anxiety dream brought on by the climax of the electoral primary season.

Action agenda:

Relax. Take up surfing.

Recorded 7:55 am, April 18, 2008

As a suspenseful tale of Martian vs. Earthling conflict, the story is satisfying. The action is persistent and the tension builds as the Tripods approach London. However, again this is the story as it appears to the reader on the surface. Further examination forces this reader to conclude that Wells aspires to explore the same lines of metaphysical conjecture as both Gottfried Leibniz and his satiric critic Voltaire. The telling clue is on the very first page of Chapter 13.

Wells mentions the destruction of the city of Lisbon from earthquake, compounded by tsunami, compounded by fire. Perhaps in a comical sleight, the narrator believes the destruction to have occurred a century ago, but as we all know the date of the catastrophe was 1755, nearly 150 years preceding the setting of the novel.

The sudden destruction of Lisbon and the great suffering in its aftermath are important and vital scenes in Voltaire’s great satire Candide, a cutting criticism of the metaphysical optimism put forth by Gottfried Leibniz, the mathematician, philosopher and general polymath in his 1710 treatise Theodicy. It is title character Candide’s and his tutor Pangloss’ visit to Lisbon just after the earthquake (so soon after that their ship is nearly swallowed up by the ensuing tsunami and their traveling commrade the Anabaptist is lost to the rising waters of the bay) that begins sewing the seeds of doubt in Candide’s belief that this world is indeed “the best of all possible worlds.”

According to Leibniz, our reality, our world, is the best off all possible worlds - the very optimal that God, in his omnipotent concern and care for us, could create. Since God is good and omnipotent, and since He chose this world out of all possibilities, this world must be good–in fact, this world is the best. Even suffering and evil has its place in this best of worlds, because if there could possibly be one better, with a little less suffering and not as much evil, then God would have created that. Voltaire thought this idea to be ludicrous, and he sends his naive yet thoughtful protagonist Candide on adventures throughout Europe and the New World to reveal the very weaknesses of Leibniz’s argument. We witness the great suffering and evil that Candide witnesses, and consequently our own belief, if we had any, in the optimism of Leibniz is all but crushed like a monk under a huge stone hurled from the roof of a cathedral in Lisbon in 1755.

The events in Lisbon caused seismic tremors all throughout the intellectual strata of Europe. The earthquake struck in the morning, killing many Catholic celebrants at mass on All Saints Day. Who would blame any citizen of Lisbon for resigning himself to the revelation that this was the end of time? The horrific events of these few days would force many to ask again those ageless questions:

Why does God allow suffering?

If God is all-seeing and all-powerful, why is there evil?

These are the very questions at the root of Theodicy. This is what Leibniz attempted to answer through reason, and it is toward Leibniz’s answer that Voltaire, by way of his fictional ego Candide, thumbed his nose at.

It can be argued that Voltaire, like most deists of his era, believed that God simply did not care about the plight of man - that he had set the clockwork of creation in motion but then had left it at home by his bedside to enjoy some rest and recreation down at the beach. Many came around to adopt similar paradigms of reason and enlightenment. Events like the great earthquake in Lisbon had shaken the very foundation of faith in 18th century Europe, but what does this have to do with Mars?

In War of the Worlds, London is the new Lisbon. Instead of a comprehensive faith in the almighty, there is now faith in industry, in technology, in the projection of power, all things that have made the British Empire king. The sun does not set on the empire. Religious conviction has been subjugated to commerce, the smokestack and the exploitation of colonial possessions. Little do the imperial subjects realize that they are being watched by an intelligence far more advanced than their own, an intelligence that has plans upon their blue-green world.

What once was the best of all possible worlds for a Martian, is no longer suitable at all. Due to entropic decay, it has become a cold world depleted of the necessary resources to keep Martians free of suffering. Naturally the dark, black eyes of the Martian looked upon the warm Earth with jealousy. Plans were put into play.

Who would blame any citizen of the empire, his stiff upper lip quivering in fear, for believing that what he was witnessing with the death throes of human progress, eventually of all humanity? It must have felt something like a quaking in the earth to see the artillery batteries melt under the Martians’ mysteries heat rays. One would wonder what Candide would have thought surveying the ravaged towns and the mass of humanity fleeing, tearing at each other for advantage . . . Oh screw it, I liked War of the World best for all the ‘spolosions. I give H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds five tentacles up.

Ferris says it’s all there kid

There’s a day game Ferris adds

The son looks up at the balding father and asks

What am I supposed to do Dad

You do freedom son, freedom says Ferris

Why couldn’t we do this on a school day the kid says

And then the subway doors slide closed between them
and one of the commuting psychopaths straightens up in his seat
remembering that his workout videos say to always keep his
core tight

R.O. Shipman

I took to Joseph as a friend almost instantly. He was one of two nursing assistants most often assigned to my 93-year-old grandfather’s wing at Garden Terrace Care Center. My grandfather was being rehabilitated after some serious health problems last year, and Joseph could always be relied upon to help with dressing him, cleaning him up, assisting him in the bathroom and other services indispensable to the helpless and infirm. I was thankful to have Rose, the other nursing assistant, and Joseph around. They always came promptly when I pushed the help button.

The quality of care was heads above the chronically understaffed care center we had had my grandfather in before Garden Terrace. After that first experience, we were naturally wary of what would happen to my grandfather once we left the facility for the night, so several nights we would stay at the center well into the evening making sure grandpa wasn’t sitting in his own waste or had rolled off his bed and onto the cold linoleum below. After a couple of weeks of seeing Joseph and Rose in action, and getting some feel for their approach and attitude toward care, we felt a more at ease leaving grandpa in their care.

We still spent many hours at Garden Terrace wheeling Grandpa to and from the rehab room, around the rhododendron gardens outside, and between his room and the communal dining room. As I am the “free son,” working as a freelance writer and a part-time fitness instructor, I became my grandfather’s care advocate and often helped with many of the functions normally done by the nursing assistants. Joseph and I became something of a team.

During lulls of activity, we talked of his life back in Kenya, cars (he was proud of his BMW), sports and music. He was always friendly with me, had a fantastic smile and seemed to move through the day with a swagger and ease that to me meant his mind was still moving to the rhythm of the savanna - a welcoming embrace off all events and people around him. Our conversations did much to inspire the writing of Three Frames of Africa.

I remember one time when we were both sitting in the dining room at dinner time. The residents of our wing all were wearing their bibs. Some were capable of shoveling food into their mouths. Others needed help guiding spoons full of mixed veggies over lips in tremor, to clean up occasional spills of fruit punch, or to wipe threads of drool from slumbering mouths. If the Mariners game wasn’t on, we would turn it to the Discovery Channel and watch Cash Cab, the game show that takes place in a New York taxi cab. Joseph and I were a team, an invincible duo of Manhattanites trying to get to a swank watering hole in Soho from some corner uptown. Where I lacked an answer to a question, Joseph would provide. When Joseph didn’t know the answer, I always did. Talents combined, we never missed any of host Ben Bailey’s questions nor a video bonus.

Just at those points when we were most pleased with ourselves for keeping our streak of success alive, Gladdis at the near table, who was a Broadway dancer in the 40s (she’s shown me the pictures as proof), would wake up and say she knows such and such building that was passing outside of the cab’s window, or that a man by the name of Harold Perriford kissed her on the exact corner on which a team of cab-conveyed contestant was being delivered either victorious or defeated. At such moments, Joseph would turn and smile at the thought of this angel who can remember a romantic rendevous from 1947 as if it happened yesterday but can’t remember what she just had for dessert.

So what transpired that mid-March evening that has put Joseph, wearing an orange jumpsuit and whispering to his counsel, up there on my TV? Someone strangled a 75-year-old grandmother named Jane Carol Britt and shoved her body into the trunk of her Mercedes. The authorities say they have a positive DNA match between tissues found underneath Jane’s fingernails, probably the result of struggle, and my friend Joseph. I did not know the victim though I imagine we might have passed each other some time in the halls of Garden Terrace during my grandfather’s two-month stay. Another report I read indicated that they had found Jane’s Costco membership card in Joseph’s wallet.

I cannot imagine what would drive Joseph to kill Jane Carol Britt. What does it take for one man to kill? I still try to work out such machinations in my mind. Did Jane utter something carelessly and in so doing, flipped a switch in Joseph and turned him into something other, something capable of strangling the breath out of the?

By going through all the possible scenarios that would come closest to making sense, I, in fact, put myself in Joseph’s place. I become for a moment the kind killer. The real question I am asking is what would drive me to kill. I don’t know the answer to this one, so this is my street shout-out.

KOMO News Coverage of Jane’s murder and Joseph’s arrest

Oh, and if you are not familiar with Cash Cab . . .

Summer slides in through the mesh screen and over the sill accompanied by the sound of numb evenings spent on a southern shore. Bob Marley’s “Jamming” is rising from a room on what I guess is the second floor. I’m standing in my cell on the third. I think I hear some Beastie Boys from another open window across Oxford Circle, an awkward cacophony of sounds meeting over the cars of the last few frustrated souls who can’t yet make a clean break from academia.

And then I see her down below, the girl whose name I can’t now remember, walking toward the parking lot. Under one arm she carries an ironing board and under the other an abused six-string guitar. I recall that guitar and playing a few sloppy power chords, and then sleeping with her until the morning after a night of too much beer and too many happenings no longer remembered. As she opens the door to her VW bug, she slides the bucket seats forward, resting the guitar on top a hamper of folded winter clothes, and I feel damned by my lack of remembering anything between us. I can see she has gained the freshman ten over the past year and maybe a few more.

Though she is that girl - the one I would awkwardly smile at from across the Dining Commons, but never found a good enough reason to talk to.

I open the window as far as it will go and feel the heat of the sun on my face. All that has come before burns in a majestic auto de fe, all the sleepless nights, and the books uncracked, all the second-hand smoke inhaled in rooms sealed tight from the February cold. It all burns this summer day. Emerson Hall is empty now of its life. We few are the last and cursed holdouts.

From somewhere down below comes the wail, “No Woman, No Cry.”