Mark Doten - The Infernal

It was only when they started the sorting process and the lines solidified that the grins got tighter. And then I understood — the flip side of ourDXGPP8JSQRK SNWTGP 1OM J272OX F-

our childish joy. Or theirs, I should say, because it was no longer mine.

We’d known, to put it simply, that this news would not be taken well by our opponents — that it would seriously piss them off- —and that , more than anything else, is what had made us giddy.

Hasn’t it been clear for some time now? That their unhappiness is our greatest treasure, just as ours is theirs?

We had known, on some level, that this was not an honor that had been earned. We had known that the Swedes understood the same. And that right now, half a world away, the Swedes — those demented and mischievous Swedes — were grinning along with us under the same sky of giddy blue.

Eight years, Reagan gets zilch, you breeze in and they’re handing them out at the coat check.

What, we wondered, would the crazies do with this?

Could you imagine how ape the crazies would go with it?

Every day the crazies look at you, and the crazies go ape, but has there ever been one to make the crazies go as ape as the one we just caught wind of?

And all of this was delicious.

But as security rifled handbags and patted down and wanded, the knowledge was turning around on us — on them —and it was no longer joyful. Lists were chec1XXTP MI1 TXCH 6IAD/F XM OMKTP=O

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wristbanded. Yellows and greens sent one way, the main hall, and fuchsias the other, for the backstage VIP, which is — if you’ll permit a sidebar — less than ideal for one in my situation, as you can see. If only I’d let them know I was coming, they said, they’d have made arrangements. But I didn’t mind. They parked me up on this rampless landing, and it was the ideal spot to take it in. Now that I was no longer a part of the happiness, I could see with great precision what those smiles were being subjected to, the degree of torsion exerted behind each one.

Because where we are childish, our opponents are much more childish. And while we are gentle children, with at worst an insult book or peashooter in our back pockets, they are dangerous children, with sticks and stones and bike chains.

I listened to the sounds of the urban choir through the stage door behind me, and I watched you work the room — watched not from the mighty berth of my Rodem Universal, but from this nursing home reject they put me in — and that I did mind a bit, though I understood their logic.

They want to keep you safe.

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I watched you move from person to person with that wonderful way of yours, that bearing that’s regal yet so calm and relaxed, just short of folksy, and I watched all of them wait their turn, these wealthy people and power brokers, several dozen fuchsias smiling and strutting between tureens and chafing dishes, filling their plates, waiting their turn or carrying themselves in the afterglow, strutting and pecking like storks.

One after the next, they all shook your hand.

They’re almost frozen now — it’s changed as we’ve been talking. Have they all lost their appetites? Did they already eat their fill?

It’s just you and me up here shaking, me in this chair with this face — this grotesquely damaged face — and you bending slightly, a tall, slim, and handsome man, and I’m so afraid that they won’t be able to help themselves.

I’m afraid that they will turn their stork faces up at us at and laugh.

This meeting, which I had so long deferred, holds a terror for me — central to that terror the very fact of the repeated deferrals. All those days I showed up at the high school or VFW or municipal park and left again without shaking your hand. Without even once watching the speech.

Part of it was that I didn’t know what to say. Now that I do know, I’m terrified as well by how much else I have to say to get there — when a single wrong word could throw it all off track. Example: when I first took your hand, and tried to give you a bit of myself, and Japan, Africa is what came out. How I heard myself say: Africa of course I know is not a country!

A sentence like that coming from the mouth of a grown man! But you see, it’s about how I was trying to get there. Gips and Roos, I’d heard about them, read in the newspaper how these men — men I’d outraised, surely — had each been given a shiny new ambassadorship.

Donald Gips stacked the paper, you gave him his own country, John Roos, same deal.

And so I started, in an embarrassing, forward, downright militant way, ticking off for you the pushpins — Monaco, Honduras, Estonia, Indonesia. I heard myself straining at these cosmopolitan bona fides , and told myself to relax, just drop it — that if an offer was coming, you’d make it in good time — but I couldn’t, somehow. Singapore, the Ukraine, Italy, I told you we had one in all those countries, too. I said we didn’t have one everywhere, no we did not— but we’re always looking! I said, I’m looking especially in Japan or Africa.

And then: Africa of course I know is not a country!

And it was off to the races, wasn’t it?

I know that Africa is not a country — of course I know that!

My god!

How would the transcript run? The words, they were all erupting in my head, a sort of time-lapse bacterial profusion — words building up so fast that the big burst they came out in didn’t touch even a fraction. The half you heard was bad enough: I wasn’t implying here’s Africa, please allow me to put it forward as a country. Only all I meant is when I get to twirling the globe these days and wondering where oh where shall I set my next new best-selling procedural series, my thoughts tend first toward Japan, then — where else? — Africa!

The continent of Africa is a completely and totally blank continent, as far as my publishing house is concerned, same as the country of Japan is a completely and totally blank country.

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Though there’s another side to it, isn’t there? To Africa.

A certain Pan-African sentiment on the continent of Africa, is my understanding.

But it doesn’t have to be Japan — it could be anywhere in Asia we don’t have one. Particularly Southeast Asia. But India too, we could use a new one there, we haven’t had one there in years!

I said that, and I wondered at my voice — at how loud it had become. I looked out at the storks — stared them down, stared down their sidelong glances — and I made the storks my subject — their grins, their nods, how they were taking the monkey wrench.

And I held your hand in my hand, and again I was calm — externally I was.

By god, I have to thank you for how you calm me.

But in my head, I was still thinking: Anywhere in Asia, sure. Just as long as there aren’t any filthy fucking Chinamen.

Joke!

No but seriously, I won’t abide one single filthy fucking Chinaman.

Joke — it’s still that! When you feel things spinning out of control like they were, sometimes what you want to do is make it worse — to make it all the way worse. And when it’s all the way worse, with a joke, you might be able to recast everything that came before — as a joke!