Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

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The Old City at New Jerusalem still stands, more or less, though it’s been closed to tourists ever since a wooden cutout of a minaret fell over on a kid from Kansas City, causing him a head injury. The well-marker shack and all of the old vacation cabins at the old Hope and Grace Bible Camp were pushed down a few years ago so the church could sell the land.

Samuel Lincoln and I dated all the way through high school, and we tried to keep it together in college — me at Pittsburg State, him at Missouri Southern — but Samuel eventually dropped out to go roughneck on an oil derrick outside Wichita Falls, though not before getting me pregnant with my beautiful daughter, who is five years old now. I don’t feel badly toward Samuel, in the end. As he got older he got eaten up by an anger even he didn’t fully understand, I don’t think. He sent along what I think must’ve been nearly the entirety of his paycheck, all the way up until the day he fell from some rigging and hit his head on a girder and died three days later in a hospital in Dallas.

Douglas Reeter and Marly ended up buying that old house on my father’s property, and getting married. Three months after their wedding I was at college, and so I wasn’t there at my window to see Marly steal away, leaving him as he slept. Nor was I there four weeks after that, when Douglas Reeter took himself off into the woods, making sure to get clear of my father’s land, and put a bullet through the roof of his mouth.

Nobody really knows where Marly went, how far away she got. None of us have ever heard from her again, not a single word. I’ll confess that sometimes, when the house is quiet and the light long and blue, I’ll fantasize about the phone ringing, about me picking it up to hear nothing but a familiar breathing on the other end of the line. I want to ask her where she made it to, where she ended up going, what she ended up doing. I want to ask her if she made it all the way to the real Jerusalem, what it’s like there. And I also want to tell her to come here and sit in my living room and dream up those dead boys with me again, Reeter and all. But I don’t know what story I could tell her about how things went to convince her. I don’t know what story there is that could bring her back.

1.

What is he looking at? The maze of light made by the high mud-brick walls of the narrow alley that the line of men, generously spaced, are navigating. It is the early part of late afternoon, the heat subdued into a smoldering focus by a low ceiling of clouds, everything very dry. The dust from the passage of something or someone — recently? hours ago? — floats through the diffuse angle of light at the intersection of two alleyways, giving the air there a sort of grain, causing it to briefly coruscate. But that is only at the border of what Abrams is looking at as he feels the strange texture under his boot, the slight resistance of the rectangular metal contact plate.

Though it’s not a maze of light he can really see, not completely, at the moment, just one he imagines. The part he can see is, he supposes (or was supposing in the microseconds before registering the change under his foot), only one corridor. Farther along, he can also see the beginnings of a perpendicular corridor, another alley. Together they make one small corner of the maze.

It is enough: the narrow, dirt-floored alley, cast partially into cool shadow by the obstruction of the high walls on either side. It is almost pleasant, the quiet at the end of their patrol, the stillness of the village around them, the genial fatigue of the men, which is a kind of gladness, Abrams has always thought. And it is this moment of mindfulness — when Abrams looked up from the ground in front of his feet and noticed the alley half in shadow and the slump of the shoulders of the men in front of him at their delicate distance — which caused Abrams to look farther upward, to allow his face to continue on its vertical pivot enough to take in the sky, the light, the unparsable complex of sky and light framed in that curious way by the tops of the walls into a kind of maze. And it was exactly then that he felt the slight slip, the sudden ease of friction beneath his right boot afforded by the metal contact plate.

Though that’s not quite right either because it implies a false parade of events, when what it is surely more accurate to say — accuracy being meaningful to Abrams — is that there was a sensory-cognition master-fade type situation going on somewhere in his cortex, the phrase maze of light fading out even as contact plate or, more simply, IED faded in. That is to say that even as maze of light was dawning on Abrams (seeming, in fact, to fall down out of the vision in order to describe it) IED was beginning its scaled march into attention, so much so that the two thoughts may be said to have been coeval.

Neither is the irony lost on Abrams that it was a moment of actual mindfulness (and not distraction or carelessness) which possibly led him to place his foot on the small stretch of shallow dirt that hides the contact plate. He can still hear the instructor during the lengthy pre-deployment training exercises in the real alleys of the fake village in the Arizona desert. Specifically, that in order to never ever be caught unawares by the presence of an improvised explosive device while on patrol in the Shit, they needed to first and foremost learn how to cultivate a state of extreme mindfulness in which each of them could stare at the ground, the dirt in front of their feet (carefully stepping only in the compressed boot shapes of dust left by the man ahead), for hours and not become zombified or otherwise rendered senseless to the small hints of micro-terrestrial disturbance that would signal the presence of a device.

Abrams had thus far handled the weeks of their patrol assignment by allowing himself to focus so hard he lost all sense of scale. In his vision the miniature landscapes of alley dirt became actual landscapes; the ridges and mounds, the troughs, the swales, all began to loom, began to feel like life-sized features of an entire sprawling world.

No, what Abrams and the other men actually needed was a sort of mind less ness, an absence of thought that would allow them to stare at unremarkable stretches of dust and dirt for hours at a time without developing an acute awareness of the moment, or the light, or the other men, or any of the marginalia of actual experience that is mindfulness . It now seems a strange irony that such a human moment — the maze of light, the pleasant preprandial lull of the village, the alley wearing its stole of shadow, the pleasant cutting scent of the other men’s sweat — has possibly led to Abrams’ imminent cranial evacuation by way of shrapnel moving through the tissues of his face at unimaginable speeds.

Unbidden, the flash of memory: Mrs. Clowney (sharp-faced, gently obese English 9 teacher). She is repeating, somewhat smugly, the true definition of irony. Irony is when the audience is aware of something that the player on stage is himself unaware of .

Unbidden, also, the related memory of Mrs. Packard, Abrams’ third-grade teacher, trying, for some reason, to impress upon the class the unthinkable speed of light. She is standing at the classroom’s light switch, flipping it on and off, which sets off tremors of giggles. Abrams raises his hand (the teacher’s face falling at another of his questions) and asks which is faster, then, the time it takes the electricity to go from the switch to the light, or the time it takes the light from the light bulb to reach their eyeballs, or the time it takes the students themselves to know that the lights are on? For a moment, Mrs. Packard, in her sturdy floral dress, goes silent, her face bled of its pride at her lesson. She clasps her hands in front of her in a way that Abrams understands on some level as a sign of vulnerability, of being hurt in some way by this child, which makes him feel really bad the rest of the day every time he looks at her, though, of course, he can’t explain why.