Lorrie Moore - Bark - Stories

“Didn’t Richard Burton make a speech like that in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold ?”

“That was the speech.”

“The laptop part?”

“You gotta let a guy improvise. Did you order?”

“Oui, monsieur.”

“Merci.” He smiled. She knew that he liked it when she said anything in French. His specialty was languages, including Urdu and Arabic, although only an hour and a half of Urdu, he declared, and then his mind turned into a blank blue screen. “And actually only four hours of Arabic,” he said. “And maybe even only five of English: five hours is a long time to keep talking.” Decades ago he had driven cars for a living, from Holland to Tehran, a drug runner (though he had not said this, she had surmised). Then he was recruited by American officials to teach the Shah’s guards’ children.

“What did you teach them?” she had once asked.

“Critical theory,” he’d said, his face lit with a desire to amuse. “Movies and Marxism. Of course not real Marxism, nothing so practical as that. Nothing like here’s how you kill people and throw them in a ditch. No, we did very abstract Marxism. Very ivory tower.”

“Ha ha,” she’d said.

“I taught the kids English,” he mumbled in a defensive tone, “and some of their parents as well.”

“Did you feel the Shah was all that bad?” she had asked and then received a long strange lecture on Chiang Kai-shek and the doubtful, simpleminded shelvings of various historical figures. She believed that in the photographs of the embassy hostages, the handsome blindfolded one, tall and bright-haired in the embassy doorway, was Tom. She herself had been a teenager at the time and had only decades later stumbled upon the photo online; the likeness took her breath away.

But he had said no, he had gotten out a month beforehand. The closed-then-open-again secrets of his work enchanted and paralyzed her, like the frog who fatally acclimates to the heating water.

He paid for everything in cash.

“Everyone looks bad now,” he’d said. “Not just the Shah.”

Now he held up the carafe of Côtes du Rhône, raised his eyebrows optimistically, and cocked his head. His hair was the color that strawberry blond became in middle age: bilious and bronze, as if it had been oxidized then striped with white like a ginger cat.

“No wine,” she said. “It leads to cheese.”

She had hoped to lose weight in time for this trip, but alas.

“You must not say anything if I tell you this.” He paused, studied her, considering.

“Of course not.” Did she look untrustworthy? Why did she not seem like a person of integrity, which she felt she was. It was gracefulness she was perhaps missing; people confused the two.

Tom poured some wine and drank. “In London they are reporting torture incidents involving American troops in a Baghdad prison. Someone took pictures. It is a disaster, and I have to get back.” He took another swallow.

“Are the troops OK? What do you mean?”

“The troops are kids. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re sheep.” The waiter brought the couscous and Tom made a stab at his lamb. “It’s all about to blow. The British papers are getting ready to go to press with it. It’s going to be a scandal big as My Lai.”

“My Lai? Well, let’s not get carried away,” she said, though who was she to utter such an airy thing?

His hand was trembling and he slurped his wine. “I’m serious. Believe me: the name of this prison will be a household word.” And then he said the name, but it sounded like nonsense to her, and perhaps it was, though her terrible ear for languages made everything that was not English sound very, well, mimsy , as if plucked from “Jabberwocky”: “the mome raths outgrabe.”

He stabbed the air with his fork. “They are the same unit I was in when I was in the army thirty years ago. And taking their orders from military intelligence: the most notorious of oxymorons. I rue my time in Tehran and Cairo; I rue my ability to be consulted.”

“You needed the money—”

“I’m sorry, but there are no more lecture slots available at this time!” he said, spreading his mouth into a smile that was like a star shining its far illusive light from long ago. “All slots have been filled by contestants who auditioned earlier!” She would never see him smile like that again. In truth probably she wasn’t seeing it now. He looked through her a bit and lowered his voice. “I said to them, whatever you do, don’t flush Korans down the toilet. Whatever you do don’t have them be naked in front of a woman. Whatever you do don’t involve them in any sexual horseplay whatsoever. Do not pantomime fellatio — which is probably good advice for everyone. I warned, don’t take a Sharpie and write Children of Akbar on their foreheads or put women’s underwear on their heads. Whatever you do don’t try to reconstruct your memories of seeing Pilobolus at the civic center when you were eight. It will demoralize and degrade them.”

She thought she could see what he was telling her. Don’t code for do . It was what doctors sometimes did for the terminally ill who wanted to die: whatever you do, don’t take this entire prescription all at once with water .

“Where did they get their ideas from then? The Internet?” Did he himself believe these prohibitions were not articulated this way as cover? When you fled one room of moral ambiguity, it was good to have a nice, overstuffed chair awaiting you in the next. But you then perhaps became your spook self, your ghost self, restless in a house you never knew was quite this haunted — and haunted by you.

“The Internet!” Tom said, scoffing. “The Internet just reflects what’s already in the human mind. Perhaps a little less so. Cruelty comes naturally. It comes naturally to everyone. But if one is confused, and it’s hot, one’s bearings get even further lost. The desire to break something down so you can dominate it. Where did this idea come from? Whatever happened to simple cleverness? Instead we’ve got nude interrogations and sandbags soaked in pepper sauce?”

“But you —are MI.”

“IM?”

She shifted in her seat. She couldn’t recall if she had ordered any bread with her salad. “The whole planet is based on being at the right place at the right time,” she said, lost herself.

“No! No!” he cried, seeing her eyes narrow into a squint. “They were supposed to de-conflict, not gitmoize .”

“You are simply a consultant. You weren’t responsible,” she said, unsure. Tom, she knew, had had a close childhood friend on Mohamed Atta’s plane. Sitting right up in first class with the terrorists. “Oh, my God, what a horrible shock,” she had said when he had told her the tale in a coffee shop back home.

“Yeah,” he’d said, hopelessly, “you don’t expect things like that to happen except in coach.”

Now, again, she didn’t know how to console him. “You’re speaking as if you were Death itself.”

“Perhaps I am, little girl. Let’s go for a walk and see if you return.” He began to rub his temples. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure what’s wrong with me, but! I have a good idea for a cure,” he added, smiling slightly, as if he were afraid he had made her nervous. He turned his hand into a pistol shape and placed it at his own temple, his thumb miming a trigger.

“That might only wound,” she said. “It might merely blind you, and then you’d never be able to find a gun again.”

“How about this?” he said and pointed his finger into his mouth. She could see the creamy yellow of his teeth, his molars with their mercury eyes.

“It’s really an extreme way to get rid of headaches, and it still might not work.”