Night of the Avenging Blowfish Read online

  I wanted, for sentimental and probably irrational reasons, to think that the people hired by the Service represented the full mix of cultures and nationalities that made America as expansive as it was, but it hired mostly white men. How Yamato, who was Japanese, got in, I didn’t know. He told me his father owned a carpentry shop in California and was an American citizen before Pearl Harbor was bombed. Not long after that, Yamato’s mother and father were put in one of the prison camps for Japanese that we weren’t taught about in school because the revisionists who wrote American textbooks wanted all American children to believe that America was incapable of the kinds of crimes that the textbooks routinely reported in other nations.

  “Imagine me, growing up in America in the 1950s, when all the white kids I went to school with assumed my father bombed Pearl Harbor,” Yamato told me once.

  “Just one guy bombed Pearl Harbor? I thought it was more than that,” I said.

  “And then when I told them that my parents were put in a prison camp in California by the American government, they called me a liar and tried to start fights with me. They said I couldn’t be American because I was Japanese.”

  “Ignorant buttholes. Do you remember any of their names? We can look them up in the computer and have them killed.”

  “I’ve thought of that. But two wrongs don’t make a right.”

  “Well how many wrongs do make a right? We need to find out.”

  That same night, while Yamato and I were drinking beer at Nevermore, I asked him how he got his first name.

  “The story I’ve been told, which seems reasonably true, or at least somewhat believable, is that my father, after he got out of prison and somehow wasn’t very bitter, wanted his first child to have an American name, or something that sounded American. He was always watching movies on TV and he saw some gangster movie one night where the main American gangster was named Dutch, so he named me Dutch Yamato. Of course it backfired. In school, people not only accused my father of bombing Pearl Harbor, they said a Japanese boy couldn’t be named Dutch. At first I hated my name.”

  “Dutch?” I asked.

  “No. Yamato. Anything that sounded Japanese was always associated with World War II. And so my peers, these naive schoolchildren, these young, innocent bastards, were actually teaching me to despise my own heritage, as if anything that was Japanese was innately evil. I think when I was six or seven I asked my mother which one of our Japanese ancestors was named Dutch. I said I wanted the rest of his name, too, so I wouldn’t have a Japanese name and people wouldn’t hurt me anymore. I imagined that one of my grandfathers in Japan was named Dutch O’Flannery or something, but of course I knew this was stupid, and what I was, was this strange boy who was part Japanese, by blood, and part American, by citizenship. I gradually began to figure out from what we were taught in history class that, goddamn it, even the people who called themselves Americans weren’t really American, because mostly it was a bunch of organized thugs from Spain and England and France who came over here on ships and basically stole the country from Indians. And then I began to wonder, which was worse? Bombing Pearl Harbor, or stealing the whole country from Indians?”

  “Well, Dutch, as an American citizen, you’re not supposed to say we stole this country. Didn’t you learn in school that, in American history, stealing is a synonym for discovery? That’s why the Indians were always saying ‘Help! Help! I’m being discovered!’ This made us realize that once the Europeans began settling North America, the leading cause of death among Indians was discovery. They were almost annihilated by discovery. And then we named some baseball teams after them.”

  “And where’s the justice, then?” Yamato asked.

  “It’s in the movies, Dutch, where you got your name.”

  As Yamato and I, on our side of the grandstand, watched for assassins while the president droned on to the poor people in the crowd about self-reliance and self-esteem, hurling enough platitudes at them to encourage self-delusion, a man in a black suit and a yellow necktie pushed his way through the crowd nearest us and approached the side of the grandstand, waving a black Bible at us. I tensed, ready to knock him on his ass, having no idea if he was a danger but assuming he was. I stared at him malevolently, the way a hawk stares at a bunny.

  “Do you know Jesus?” the man asked, either to the president or to me or to no one in particular, as I walked toward him so he couldn’t advance.

  “Get out of here,” I said, watching his hands, looking for a weapon, as three cops behind him moved quickly along the edge of the crowd to come get the man. I pushed him back with my hand, not even trying to be polite, but just wanting the son of a bitch to leave.

  “Do you know Jesus?” he asked again, as if I simply must answer the question.

  “You can’t come up here. Get back,” I said, steadily pushing him backward even though he was a lot bigger than me.

  “The Lord’s coming,” he said.

  “He can’t come up here, either,” I said, pushing the man back into the arms of two of the cops.

  I felt a little bad about that later, being so rude to an ordinary zealot. But it was true. Without the proper clearance, we wouldn’t even allow the Lord to approach the president. There were rules.

  5

  Flies were in the White House most of the day Tuesday, landing on everyone without regard to rank or social standing. When they weren’t landing on famous paintings or eminent guests, they rested upside down on the historic ceilings, or flitted, buzzed, and careened with reckless impunity through confidential meetings, because flies just don’t care.

  Chief of Staff Gardenaul called the flies a breach of security.

  “Where’d all these goddamn flies come from?” he asked me peevishly in one of the hallways.

  “Outside.”

  The idea that I could piss off the chief of staff never particularly worried me, since I worked for the Treasury and wasn’t a member of his staff. He couldn’t fire me. Certainly he could recommend that I be fired, but not just because I announced that the most likely origin of flies was outside. Gardenaul flung his hands upward in the direction of some flies zigzagging nearby and said, “Well, what’s the goddamn Secret Service doing about it?”

  “I don’t think we’re responsible for flies. That might be the General Services Administration,” I said, as we both seemed to be looking at flies here and there. People in the hallway seemed amused as they swatted their hands at passing flies, not as if there was a plague of flies, but just enough of them to be conspicuous.

  “So you’re not going to do anything?” Gardenaul said in a slightly accusing tone.

  “I don’t think the president’s being endangered by flies.”

  “Are you taunting me?”

  “I’m not authorized to taunt you.”

  “Get out of my way,” he said, although I wasn’t in his way, and he walked angrily down the hall on an imperious mission to find some subordinates to browbeat about the flies.

  “Eat me,” I said quietly, wondering how many days I’d spend in jail if I kicked Gardenaul in the back of his head. I wouldn’t really do that. The front of his head, maybe.

  As I stood idly in the hallway, looking at a fly crawl across the face of my wristwatch, a sudden and incomprehensible sense of panic seemed to surge through my entire body, tingling in my head and washing instantly across my skin in a cold sweat. I felt suddenly lonesome and lost, which had happened before in recent months, as if all of my normal sensibilities and emotions instantly vanished and were replaced by some horrifying tangle of repressed, lethal sadness, leaving me with the sense that all my life I’d been lost, and I had no idea where I was supposed to be, or whose face I needed to look at and ask to hold me, because there was supposed to be someone, and there wasn’t. I felt this way now, that somehow I was living the wrong life, and that the sequence of all the ordinary hundreds or thousands of decisions I’d made to get me here in life was a horrifying mistake, and that whoever I desperately needed to
hold—as if there were such a person—was nowhere in the world, and I had just now realized it.

  My vision blurred a little bit. Things went out of focus and I was dizzy, as if this sadness I couldn’t explain or stop was damaging my eyes. Then I realized that things were blurry because I’d started to cry, just standing there staring at a fly on my watch, because I had no idea why I was supposed to be anywhere in the world. It felt like some secret part of my mind was telling me the only truth that mattered, that all my life had been taking me nowhere, and now I was finally there. And the only one to greet me nowhere was me.

  I breathed in deeply to quit crying, to try shaking off the panic that still trembled through me, knowing someone might see me and think I was mentally ill, which maybe I was. I was looking at the fly on my watch while down the hall I heard Widdiker saying, “Raid kills bugs dead.” He was talking to Gardenaul, which I didn’t care about, because I was so thoroughly sad and in a panic, suddenly wanting to live my life well and find whoever in the world was supposed to want me, with no proof that such a person existed. I thought of Natelle, but she was married. I tried to stand up straight, and casually, so, if anyone looked at me in the hallway standing oddly alone, they wouldn’t think there was something wrong with me, which there was. It wouldn’t go away. I felt exhausted and frighteningly alone, this being only the truth, the way in an instant of insanity you at last see something true.

  I couldn’t decide if I should step left or step right, or step anywhere at all. To step from nowhere to somewhere required a reason I didn’t have. It seemed like I should go down the hallway to Natelle’s office, although Natelle didn’t know this was happening to me. How do you suddenly tell that to someone, even Natelle? I think I’m having a nervous breakdown. I’ve had these before, but I politely kept them to myself, so that my horror was graciously kept private. Or maybe it’s not a nervous breakdown since I don’t know what that is. Maybe I’ve just lived my life wrong all these years and I feel utterly, hopelessly lost and I’ve learned to repress all that every instant of my life. But sometimes it won’t be repressed anymore and it breaks free and swarms all through me and I’m reminded in an intense and cruel panic that I’m alone and I’m the only one who knows it. I’d like to hold somebody without having to ask permission. And I remember that there is nobody to hold. And no wonder I hurt so much. No wonder I should go crazy at last, knowing then that the only time someone will hold me is if they come to carry me away. How do you say that?

  I stared at the fly on my watch. I knew I’d be fired if someone thought I was crazy. You could be fired for sadness. And so I stood there pretending I was okay. Widdiker came up to me, seeing nothing in my eyes, the way men sometimes willfully see no emotions in other men’s eyes because they want to pretend nothing’s there, just like I pretended there wasn’t.

  “Gardenaul thinks we’re responsible for flies,” Widdiker said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “There must be hundreds of goddamn flies in here,” Widdiker said, impressed with the success of the flies. “What’re we supposed to do? Detain them?”

  “All right,” I said, still not knowing if I should step left or right.

  “I told Gardenaul to call the Smithsonian and ask for the director of flies.”

  I nodded my head, and a fly flew off of it.

  “Maybe we should go outside, where there aren’t any flies,” Widdiker said.

  I was going to pray something, but I couldn’t think of what, as if my prayers were sinking inside me and couldn’t escape.

  “Are you okay?” Widdiker finally said, staring at me seriously.

  “I’m pretending like I am,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “I’m depressed.”

  “About what?”

  “Eventually I’ll die. I’ll be better by then.”

  “Of course you will. Is there something wrong?”

  “There’s always something wrong. That’s how the world works.”

  “You look exhausted or something.”

  “I am.”

  “Did something happen?”

  “Yeah. I’m forty-one years old, and when I go home at night, no one in the world wonders where I am.”

  “You mean a woman?”

  “That’s who I want to wonder where I am. Yes.”

  “So then you’re depressed because you don’t have a woman? I don’t have a woman and I’m not depressed.”

  “That’s because you’re too stupid to know how awful you should feel.”

  “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had sex?”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “It’s been nine or ten months.”

  “That’s trivial. I haven’t had a girlfriend in five years.”

  “Five years? Goddamn. What’s wrong with you?” Widdiker said, glancing down the hall as if he didn’t want anyone to hear two Secret Service agents telling secrets. “Five years? Frankly, I’m a little concerned that your dick might fall off.”

  “I have some electrical tape in the car,” I said.

  Widdiker waved some flies away from us and said, “So that’s why you look as if your brain just blew up. Maybe we should go out looking for women tonight. You still have your dick, don’t you?”

  “Probably just for sentimental reasons,” I said.

  6

  Of course, when we went out looking for women, Widdiker and Yamato and I dressed in jeans and T-shirts instead of our stupid suits—three reasonably good-looking men on a secret mission too ordinary to suppose it was really secret. The mission was to search randomly in the world for a woman who’d care about us and whom we could care about, which in a way reminded me of tadpoles in a pond searching for food. You took whatever was there. This was sad.

  I used to believe, and still had a strong sense of it that I couldn’t evict from myself, that somehow in whatever part of the world you were in, willingly or unwillingly, you could find a woman you should be with, as if on one day that you didn’t know about, a girl had been born and had lived her whole childhood and teenage years and early adult life without even knowing you existed, but then, by some grand accident or by providence (providence was the word you used when you needed to explain something and had no idea what it really was), you finally met this blessed woman, as if this was fate. If this were true, that you had to spend most of your life waiting in frustration and emptiness for the one person you should meet, fate was a pretty shoddy force. Also, there were probably thousands of women you could get along with and love, and thousands of men they could love, and so why you ever met anybody didn’t seem so much like providence as it seemed like an accident. You were just waiting for the right accident.

  It was no more romantic than wildebeests mating on a nature documentary. I didn’t believe that. I just enjoyed hurting my feelings by imagining it. I wondered why the National Geographic Society didn’t set up cameras in the bar we were in, filming all of us and our glances and stares and comical, urgent attempts to meet that one person whom, from the distant beginnings of eternity, we were going to meet by accident. The National Geographic narrator would say on the soundtrack that these were the diverse mating behaviors of North American Homo sapiens, who tried to meet and form intimate relationships by drinking enough alcohol to disable their judgment. “However,” the narrator would say, “they will not actually copulate in the drinking establishment.”

  Such films had been made, but they were usually called pornography. Humans regarded themselves as the only animals on Earth whose mating was obscene, even though nearly all of them hoped to do it repeatedly.

  Being in the bar was depressing. Not being in the bar would have been depressing, too, so we sat in the bar drinking our depressants, which was how I ordered drinks when we sat down.

  “Could we have depressants, please?”

  “We’re here to find someone to mate with. Whom would you recommend?” Widdiker asked the bartender.

 
“I think you should go slow on your first date,” she said.

  “You mean mate slow? That’s good advice,” Yamato said.

  Naturally, we didn’t meet any women. This was because when women saw three men together at a bar, they assumed that the only reason they were there without women was to find women. So women wouldn’t look at those men and avoided them, as if the kind of man they wanted was a man who wasn’t looking for a woman. We figured this out to the point of incomprehension.

  “If a woman thinks you’re looking for her, then that’s predatory and she doesn’t want you,” Yamato said.

  “That’s right. And if she thinks you’re not looking for her, it’s just a trick and you really are looking for her, so she still doesn’t want you,” Widdiker explained.

  “I know. And if you’re really not looking for her and show absolutely no interest in her, then she’ll like you because she’ll never have to meet you,” I said.

  “True,” Yamato said, glancing at some women who weren’t glancing at him.

  Another reason we didn’t meet any women, we thought, was that even if a group of two or more women came to the bar to talk about the men they didn’t have in their lives, they didn’t want to be interrupted by men—as if there might be good men in the world, but certainly not at that bar.

  “Or else maybe they want to meet a man, who of course happens to be a stranger, but they assume that if a strange man wants to meet them, there’s something wrong with him for wanting to talk with a woman he doesn’t know. Am I making any sense?” Yamato asked.

  “In a way I don’t understand,” I said. “Or maybe they really do want to meet us, but they’d rather know us before they meet us.”

  “You mean they only want to meet people they already know?”

  “What are we talking about?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “Why’re we doing this?”