Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

“Don’t get grumbly,” she said.

“Oh for God’s sake,” he said. “I don’t want to know what’s going on and I don’t need another task. I could be on the phone all day tomorrow trying to find out what’s going on with the Convergence , you think I need another task? You’re making me get the names of all the help in the place so you can greet them the way you want to, for God’s sake, and the staff is multiplying as we speak instead of sleeping.”

“Multiplying like coat hangers. That’s what Ma used to say.”

“Well Ma hit the nail on the head with that one. Nina, please be quiet.”

She observed a pause, then said, “There are no curtains in here you know. And that peeping Tom son of your best friend is still on the loose.”

He exploded at her. “God damn it! He would have to be a lizard to get his head outside our window, not to mention that Niagara Falls is down there.”

She was silent for a while, again. The hallway was still. But she was annoyed. She was wishing she’d put on her plaid underpants and gone out in the hall that way. No doubt they all hated plaid.

Now she was remembering something she’d forgotten she did. She’d made a note to herself after the last call to her mother. She tapped Ned on the shoulder.

“What?” he asked.

“I think we’re being unfair to my mother too much. Do you know what the Akashic Record is?”

“No, but you’re going to tell me. Help.”

“I’ll be brief. It was one of her beliefs, okay? It was the theosophical idea that every thought you have gets recorded out in the ether in this thing called the Akashic Record. So I said to her, That’s the most fascist thing I ever heard of. How can anyone live with that? I must have been about twelve or thirteen and all I had to say was fascist and she dropped it immediately. I’d said the magic word. I give her credit.”

“Wonderful,” he said. He pushed the covers down preparatory to getting up for a trip to the bathroom. They slept naked, which was unlike the nighttime protocols under Claire.

Nina turned her penlight on his penis. “Handsome penis,” Nina said, and then said, “These are pretty, too,” brushing her naked breasts with the beam of the penlight.

“Don’t be relentless,” he said.

He was right. They needed their sleep.

Nina was sleeping in. Yet somehow she had tasked him with the mission of finding yogurt for her somewhere. He’d forgotten to ask if he was supposed to wake her up when he found it, if he did find it. The fact that she’d had a sudden sharp food preference could be good news.

So far he had asked two obviously wrong people if there was any yogurt they knew of. The ground floor was overrun with media. They were around every corner. The kitchen was a chaos. Calling the media people ninjas had started with Joris. It was appropriate because they were all similarly dressed in dark clothing and were always disconcertingly darting about. They came and went, came and went, communing with one another in European languages, German mainly. Elliot had instructed the friends not to interact with the media.

Ned had his petitions with him, arranged with the top blank petition just askew enough to show that it rested on a thick block of filled-up petition forms. That was show business. There were blank petition forms at the bottom of the block. Nina had gotten on his case about the petitions. She was accusing him of mixing up the question of self-worth with getting all the friends to sign. He had denied it, knowing it was true, and she had said, I’m thinking of writing your biography and I have a good title for it, but unfortunately it’s been used, and he’d said, Okay, what? and she’d said, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time , you poor thing. He understood everything. She’d said she wanted him to keep his spirits up so he could keep her spirits up for the sake of their, as she was already calling it, their homunculus.

Ned went out the front door to look at the scene developing all over the place. Elliot was trotting up the drive, followed by a ninja.

Ned ran up to Elliot, who declined to stop, so Ned fell in beside him, all the way into the living room where Ned was inspired to hold his clipboard out in a way that blocked Elliot’s viewfield. Elliot stopped and so did the ninja.

“My petition, Elliot. It’s against …”

“I know what it’s against. I don’t need to sign that.”

“What do you mean?” And this is my friend Elliot, Ned thought.

Elliot said, “I have no time to explain this now. Look around. But Ned there isn’t going to be a war.”

“What do you mean ?”

“What we’re doing is called compellence. Compellence . It’s a bluff.”

“So you think he’ll just leave, Hussein?”

“He will. He’ll join Idi Amin someplace nice. Riyadh. I have to get to the office.”

“You don’t understand,” Ned said.

“ You don’t,” Elliot said. What he was insinuating was that he, Elliot, was operating at a loftier level of contacts and information and should be left alone by Ned.

Ned thought, At least he looks uncomfortable doing that. He said, straining for a neutral tone, “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Good! At the seminar.”

“What seminar? Do you mean the planning session for the memorial?”

“That’s it.”

Ned found Gruen in the physic garden. Gruen was just putting his cell phone away, in his jacket pocket. He looked yellow. He said, “Never again, sambuca.”

“I thought we learned never to get drunk on liqueur,” Ned said.

“You should have reminded me. By the way, right here is good for phoning. Better than down by that rock, and closer.” Gruen shook himself. He said, “I missed breakfast, but a woman named Nadine Rose, I can describe her, dug up a container of yogurt for me. Now, Nadine Rose, her job is, as it was explained to me, is to fix you up with any kind of food you need between meals. She’s Jamaican. She’s the extremely pretty one, maybe thirty. For some reason she told me she was single. I didn’t ask. Nadine Rose.”

Ned held out his petitions to Gruen. Gruen sighed and said no.

And then it was exactly what Ned had anticipated. Gruen was sure Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons because he had done it before. And the Israelis had blown up the Osirak reactor and his recollection was that Ned had been fine with that years ago despite the fact that it was plainly illegal under international law, the same way the invasion of Iraq in the next couple of months was going to be, unfortunately.

Ned said, “But the scale of this is going to be completely different. This is not going to be about killing seven French technicians.” Ned faltered. There were too many factors that had to be left below the surface when it came to Israel. The main one was the rightness or wrongness of asserting a right to have a state dedicated to one religion only. It was hard to be fair, very hard. And another problem was the general demographic apocalypse that Jews worldwide were facing through assimilation and low birth rates, which made it all the more urgent to get rid of the criminals who were going out of their way to speed up that process through terror, by terrorizing Israel. Ned had his own dubious solution for the Arab-Israeli problem. It was to let America be the homeland for all Jews, any Jews, from anywhere, right of return, and let the UN take over all the holy sites for Jews and Islamics alike over there. Then the world would see what the Arabs did with the place. It had no oil and the Dead Sea was evaporating.

Ned said, “Gruen, do you really believe he has nuclear weapons?”