Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

The report that inspired the delightful formulation unrepentant lily-gilding was one Abrams wrote about the death of Pfc. Ferrero Rodriguez in the gentle elbow of the Tigris. Abrams doesn’t know what it was about that particular Casualty Data Packet that got to him. Maybe it was the dumb nature of the casualty, pretty much an accident, a tank parked in an inopportune place. Or maybe it was the data from the operator-facing control-board combat camera, the way Ferrero had just been sitting there at his station, how he looked around at the first strange sucking sound, then tried to brace himself at the initial shift, the tank’s sudden, listing angle. Confused, a blank-faced teenager (Was this a prank? Ferrero was thinking. Or did the tread fall off or something? Did the navigator Ash-Dog steer them into another pothole, the idiot?). Then that data-stream cutting out as the tank made its slow topple into the river.

Or maybe it was the overhead view from the satellite, the pastoral beauty of the picture: the angle held wide, the waters of the Tigris a brilliant emerald snake in the sun. Or was it the maudlin thing, the scan of his last letter home, which they’d stopped: just a list of things he needed his mom to send him, that he couldn’t or was too afraid to ask for from the other guys: underwear, chapstick, something called Boudreaux’s Butt Paste. Well. It didn’t really matter what it was that made Abrams say screw it, basically, and write what he wanted to write.

He gave Pfc. Ferrero Rodriguez a good life, a better life than he’d actually had. And he used the last half of the report to describe, in increasingly florid, turgid, self-consciously rococo language, the kid’s last moments. In his report the eternity of the tank’s dorsal rotation into the water stretched on and on, creating a sort of zero-gravity type situation where Ferrero Rodriguez could watch the grease pencils and loose snacks and dirt and strands of chewing tobacco float, weightless, in the air around him, and wonder, and reflect. And so, of course, Brockton’s lightly caustic evaluation of the report had been accurate, and fair, and had happened to include the phrase unrepentant lily-gilding. This is not the truth , he’d also written. This is you being desperate for some kind of validation . But the truth was that Pfc. Ferrero Rodriguez drowned in the Tigris when the bank under his parked tank collapsed, drowned slowly, drowned knowing he was going to drown, drowned clawing desperately at the sharp metal of the blocked hatch that was now beneath his feet, drowned defecating all over himself in utter terror. And Abrams just couldn’t write that.

What is Brockton Albright doing now, this moment of Abrams’ foot’s fateful lifting progress? After they’d both left the pod assignment (Abrams reassigned to actual unit attachment, Brockton having finished his contract), Albright began a very successful career as an academic and a public intellectual. He’s now in residence at the Sorbonne, Abrams believes. And Abrams thinks of him now in some Latin Quarter square, almost dusk, his thin fingers lost in his lap, his tiny cup of tea forgotten on its saucer before him. Oh, what Abrams could’ve been in life, if he’d only tried a little harder.

But Abrams’ favorite thing to remember from his time in the pod with Brockton in Tucson is actually the rare instance of Brockton’s smile. Such a saccharine thing to willfully remember, but it holds the same relation to Abrams’ happiness (even now) as Lara Fugelsang’s smirking sneer does to Abrams’ shame. Brockton was an unexpectedly funny guy, Abrams remembers, though he never smiled at or after his own deadpan, absurdist one-liners. Abrams can’t actually remember what made Brockton smile those few times — surprise seemed to have something to do with it, and being unobserved — but Abrams can remember very clearly what it looked like. Brockton’s whole face changed, opening up, brow for once relaxing, lifting, spreading — and the impression of vulnerability flashing then across his features was so startling as to make Abrams look away. For just a second Brockton seemed just like a little boy, granted a pulse of pure, unmediated feeling.

“Momentary joy” was the phrase that always stuck in Abrams’ mind when he thought of it. A blooming. What a thing to have seen.

The principal legacy of the CAST pod assignment, though, these years later, now that Abrams has been attached to an actual unit in the actual Shit, is the ghosting awareness of being on the other end of the CAST technologies’ flow — of being in the midst of all the “data” that is really just the world, the village, the late afternoon, the alley. It’s stopped Abrams cold each time he’s allowed his mind to wince itself across the thought. What CAST data operator, sitting in what American hangar, was watching him now, displaced in time? That, of course, was the very worst part of that assignment: the nebulized awareness, as he worked, that the subject was being kept alive there before him for only the exact duration of Abrams’ close attention, and that, at some point — a point Abrams could feel dawning even as he opened for the first time each new Casualty Data Packet — Abrams would grow bored, and tired, and inured to the human life which he held in the circuitry of the control board before him — in the circuitry of his mind — and would allow it, finally, to expire. What finite expansion of memory and experience would he grant himself, if he found his own CDP loaded up on the screens, the cursor ticking away? And the irony, even in this moment of abandon, of there now actually being created, at this very moment, a CDP for this purpose, is not lost on Abrams, though he knows it’s not irony, really, just the remediated sadness of knowing.

4.

The contact plate itself is suspended, the tiny metal ridge on the underside of the plate now loosed from its delicate restraints by the pressure of Abram’s foot. Its destination — the small metal tab which will complete the electric circuit, thereby triggering the small detonation charge, which, in turn, will trigger the primary explosive (in this case, Abrams knows, probably an unexploded landmine salvaged from the Iran — Iraq war) — awaits, patiently. The contact plate has thus far been stilled in that motionless nadir of its spring-loaded inverted arc of travel but, as Abrams’ foot helplessly begins its lift (the pressure of his weight on the contact plate lessening every microsecond), the charged metal surface is now rising, heading toward its kismet of electronal reunion.

The alley’s stole of shadow moves again, Abrams thinks. The alley is attempting to shrug it off, it seems. The reverse inertia of what is about to happen is lightening the alley before him, it seems.

IED is really a terrible term for the device, for what this device that is agent of Abrams’ fate really is. There’s nothing “improvised” about it, first of all. There’s nothing spontaneous, extemporaneous, or accomplished without preparation there in its careful circuitry, its repurposed materiel. “Explosive” is a little better, but also fails to capture the true quantum entanglement of possibility in this alley-deposited incendiary: that is, that it could fail to go off, could not be explosive at all, ultimately. It is a possibly explosive thing, a probable explosive. This is a relatively unforgivable lingual oversight given the defiance of experience — of life itself.

“Device,” though, is the telltale heart of the term. It marries in its etymology the essences of its Middle English, Old French, and Latin ancestors, pulling through the original sense of “desire” into “will” and even “last will,” and bringing the word to its dark end of signal with “means of division.” The IED is fate itself. Abrams was always moving toward it. It was created (he imagines some nameless scarred ghost of an insurgent bent over the basement table in perfect silence, with no morbid élan, even) for no other death than his. Time has existed in his life for no other purpose than to draw him through it, to guide him into this particular stride.