Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

Abrams knows, if their seminar that semester had encountered this scene in a novel, the women of the class would have had a field day tearing it down as a completely unbelievable, pathetic projection of the author’s openly misogynistic domination fantasy, and moreover would point out that it was irresponsible to put it to paper under the aegis of fiction, that it took advantage of the faux-displacement of responsibility for the scene onto the (flawed, sexist) character, and also that it was just totally unbelievable — and Abrams would’ve agreed with all of that. But it happened! It really happened, just that way! This was part of the irony of it, he supposes, remembering how he’d backed away, softening out of her, the air in the computer lab suddenly licking at his slickened penis like cold fire. Lara had gathered herself silently, with effortless dignity, and excused herself to go to the bathroom. She’d left the building from the bathroom, and never said a word about what happened to Abrams. The ultimate irony being that even if he’d wanted to (which he did not), he could never have told anyone what had actually happened, because nobody would ever believe him. Thank god she had not performed the sex act he’d spent so many long hours imagining in seminar, Abrams thought, or there was no way he’d be able to live with himself.

The uncomfortable but honest point of all this being that, in those moments when everything began to happen — when she’d leaned back into him, and Abrams’ mind leapt forward, already thrusting away at her pale skin — he’d been possessed by the purest instance of joy he’d ever felt. His whole body became light and airy. This seems to Abrams on some fundamental level pretty unfair to the more meaningful and substantive things in his life that he has experienced before and since, but it is, nonetheless, true.

When it came time for them to peer-review each other’s theses, her notes were, oddly, both harsh and funny, a somewhat disturbing combination that over the years became even more so due to its tendency to inexplicably recur in other contexts around him.

3.

Abrams was so delighted by the last of these phrases, he didn’t even mind that it came back to him in the middle of a document dismantling (in methodical, phosphorescently intelligent terms) his first Combat Action Sustainability Tactic (or CAST) report at the DIA center in Tucson. Unrepentant lily-gilding , Abrams thought. If that’s not a perfect synecdoche for the joy to be had in life, there isn’t one.

The evaluation was written by Brockton L. Albright, technically Abrams’ only colleague in the CAST report pod. Abrams was pretty sure the DIA had picked up Brockton on waivers from the CIA, mostly because he simply couldn’t imagine Brockton — who had the dark brown ringlets and vaguely mournful mien of an Eastern hagiological icon — ever willfully enlisting in any wing of the military. Brockton, whose interface review setup was just across the pod, spoke very, very little. Sometimes Abrams would see him coming into the cavernous space of the hangar that housed the twin geodesic domes of the interfaces, as Abrams paused behind the small organ of super-servers humming diastolically to one side. Abrams would watch him move over the polished concrete floors of the heavily air-conditioned hangar soundlessly, as if gliding.

Abrams’ assignment was to prepare and submit CAST analyses of raw media from the field, which he displayed on the 3D viewing screens arranged in an angled cascade of triptychs around and over the desk in his interface office. Specifically, this was data focusing on the temporal environs of any American casualty that occurred in Iraq, as gathered by the many unblinking electronic eyes that the DIA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency might bring to bear.

The most helpful of these technologies was by far the improbably named Gorgon Stare Platform (basically: a hovering bundle of very high-performing, very expensive video cameras and sensors, which sits static high above an Iraqi town when U.S. forces are operating in the area), especially when used in conjunction with the somewhat more aptly christened ARGUS system, though it was unclear if anyone at DARPA was aware of that namesake’s ultimate fate. ARGUS, that is, being the Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance system, the overall objective of which was “to increase situational awareness and understanding enabling an ability [sic] to find and fix critical events in a large area in enough time [sic] to influence events.” What these two utilities meant for Abrams was that, once he’d booted up the Casualty Data Packet for that week, he could start, stall, restart, and otherwise retard diegetic time, all while remotely controlling the focus, zoom, and direction of three-dimensional vision in order to examine any person, face, gaze, biometrical reading or sight-line in the town when someone was killed. It was such an advanced and acute technology, and was played out in 3D for so many hours on the towering, enveloping screens, that Abrams always ended up with the feeling of actually being there as the casualty event happened, over and over and over.

What a CAST analysis or report really was, according to Brockton, who spent three weeks of painful vocal communication and social company training Abrams, was a narrativization of combat casualty data . They were to place a special emphasis on creative conjecture with the ultimate goal of using all this literally fantastic technology and data to render a written narrative of the casualty’s subjective experience of the pertinent combat event . The precipitated narrative was, presumably, to be even more telling, accurate, and useful, from a procedural standpoint, than the soldier’s actual subjective experience, were he alive to describe it. Brockton, whose reports Abrams also peer-reviewed, was very good at it. He had the right kind of obsessive attention and (much rarer) eidetic imagination for the job, and, moreover, he seemed to be well enough acquainted with the kind of quiet, continuous inner suffering necessary to become each casualty, to know both the soldier’s mind and the technology’s omniscience at once. Abrams was not so well suited to the task, he thought. What Brockton made Abrams feel about himself, basically, was that he simply wasn’t intelligent enough to be in the pod at all.

This wasn’t Brockton’s fault. Each day, Abrams and Brockton ate lunch together at a picnic table outside of the hangar, in the falsely natural landscaping of the empty civilian industrial park. Each day they made polite if burdened conversation, and Abrams always felt like his pathetic eagerness, his desire just to listen to Brockton speak — about anything really — was writ large on their awkwardly syncopated conversational silences.

What Abrams really wanted to do, though, in those long hours of watching Brockton’s thin fingers expertly disassembling his daily orange, was to ask him about his childhood, what he’d been like as a kid; if his father (as was Abrams’ suspicion) had died when he was young; if, a little older, he’d had a girlfriend, and what that had been like, what the girl had been like, and had they ever had sex, and if so, how, and etcetera etcetera etcetera. It was a kind of aggression, Abrams understood, his desire to know — information being a kind of domination, a kind of ownership, when it came to another person’s life. And it was probably also a more or less understandable overspill from the task they paused each day for lunch; the delving into personnel files, the scans of letters home, but also the imagining, the conjecturing. What you’re really trying to do, Brockton had explained to Abrams, in a rare moment of fluster during those weeks of training, is not just explain why the subject died but what it was about the subject’s very being — i.e., the subject’s life, training, attention — that led to the casualty event.