“Too Maoist for him, maybe,” is one of the less bitchy comments, and indeed colleagues seem to have struggled at length with doubts about Windust. Considering the money to be made off of troubled economies worldwide, his unexpected reluctance to grab a piece of the proceeds for himself soon aroused suspicions. Duked in, he’d’ve been a safely co-enabling partner in crime. To be motivated only by raw ideology—besides greed, what else could it be?—made him weird, almost dangerous.
So, over time, Windust got pushed into a peculiar compromise. Whenever a government at the behest of the IMF sold off an asset, he agreed either to go in for a percentage or, later on, with more leverage, to buy it outright—but he never, the hippie nutcase, cashed anything in. A power plant goes private for pennies on the dollar, Windust becomes a silent partner. Wells that supply regional water systems, easements across tribal lands for power lines, clinics dedicated to tropical ailments unheard of in the developed world—Windust takes a modest position. If one day, untypically idle, he should pull out his portfolio to see what he’s got he’d find himself with controlling interests in an oil field, a refinery, an educational system, an airline, a power grid, each in a different newly privatized part of the world. “None of them especially grand in scale,” concludes one confidential report, “but considering the assembled set all together, by Zermelo’s Axiom of Choice, subject at times has effectively found himself in control of an entire economy.”
By the same kind of thinking, it occurs to Maxine, Windust has acquired a portfolio of pain and damage applied to various human body parts that might have added up to hundreds—who knows, maybe thousands—of deaths on his karmic ticket. Should she tell somebody? Ernie? Elaine, who’s been trying to fix her up? They would so plotz.
This is fucking appalling. How does it happen, how does somebody get from entry-level foot soldier to the battered specimen who accosted her the other night? This is a text file, no pictures, but Maxine can somehow see Windust back then, a clean-looking kid, short hair, chinos and button-down shirts, only has to shave once a week, one of a globetrotting gang of young smart-asses, piling into cities and towns all over the Third World, filling ancient colonial spaces with office copiers and coffee machines, pulling all-nighters, running off neatly bound plans for the total obliteration of target countries and their replacement by free-market fantasies. “Need one of these on everybody’s desk by nine A.M., ¡ándale, ándale!” Comical Speedy Gonzales dialogue would’ve been standard among these generally eastern-seaboard snotnoses.
Back in that more innocent day, the damage Windust caused, if any, all stayed safely on paper. But then, at some point, somewhere she thinks of as down in the middle of a vast and unforgiving flatland, he took a step. Hardly measurable in that immensity and yet, like finding and clicking on an invisible link on a screen, transported in the act over into his next life.
Generally, all-male narratives, unless it’s the NBA, challenge Maxine’s patience. Now and then Ziggy or Otis will hustle her into watching an action movie, but if there aren’t that many women in the opening credits, she’ll tend to drift away. Something like this has been happening as she scans through Windust’s karmic rap sheet here, that’s until she gets to 1982–83, when he was stationed in Guatemala, ostensibly as part of an agricultural mission, in coffee-growing country. Helpful Farmer Windust. Here, as it turned out, he met, courted, and married—as his nameless biographers put it, “deployed into a spousal scenario with”—a very young local girl named Xiomara. For a minute Maxine imagines a wedding sequence out in the jungle, with pyramids, native Mayan rituals, psychedelics. But no, instead it was in the sacristy at the local Catholic church, everyone there already or about to become strangers…
If government agencies were in-laws, Xiomara would’ve been less than acceptable on a number of counts. Politically her family was trouble waiting to happen, from old-school arevalista “spiritual socialists” on leftward, through activists with a history of nonnegotiable hatred for United Fruit, hardcore anarcho-Marxist aunts and cousins who ran safe houses and talked Kanjobal with the folks out in the country, plus assorted gun runners and dope dealers who just wanted to be left alone but were invariably described as Suspected Guerrilla Sympathizers, which seemed to mean everybody who lived in the region.
So… what do we have here, true love, imperialist rape, a cover story to get in good with the indigenous? The record is less than forthcoming. No further mention of Xiomara or for that matter Windust in Guatemala. A few months later he surfaces in Costa Rica, but without the missus.
Maxine scrolls onward but is now focusing more on why did Marvin bring her this in the first place, and what’s she supposed to do with it? All right, all right, maybe Marvin is some kind of otherworldly messenger, an angel even, but whatever unseen forces may be employing him at the moment, she’s obliged to ask professional questions, such as how in secular space might the data-storage gizmo have found its way to Marvin? Somebody wants her to see it. Gabriel Ice? Elements in the CIA or whoever? Windust himself?
11
A week or so later, Maxine’s in Vontz Auditorium again for eighth-grade graduation. After the usual interfaith parade of clergy, each wearing some appropriate outfit, which always reminds her of the setup to a joke, the Kugelblitz Bebop Ensemble plays “Billie’s Bounce,” Bruce Winterslow sets some kind of Guinness Book record for most polysyllabic words in a sentence, and then on comes the guest speaker, March Kelleher. Maxine is a little shocked at the effects of only a couple years—wait, she wonders with a sudden pulse of panic, how many years exactly? March now has gray not just coming in but putting its feet up and making itself at home, and she’s wearing oversize shades today that suggest a temporary loss of faith in eye makeup. She’s wearing desert-camo fatigues and her signature snood, today a sort of electric green. Her commencement speech turns out to be a parable nobody is supposed to get.
“Once upon a time, there was a city with a powerful ruler who liked to creep around town in disguise, doing his work in secret. Now and then someone recognized him, but they were always willing to accept a small handful of silver or gold to forget all about it. ‘You have been exposed for a moment to a highly toxic form of energy,’ is his usual formula. ‘Here is a sum I trust will compensate you for any damage done. Soon you will begin to forget, and then you’ll feel better.’
“At the time, out and about in the night, there was also an older lady, probably didn’t look too different from your grandmother, who carried a huge sack full of dirty rags, scraps of paper and plastic, broken appliances, leftover food, and other rubbish she collected off the street. She went everywhere, she had lived out in the city longer than anyone there, unprotected and in the open regardless of the weather, and she knew everything. She was the guardian of whatever the city threw away.
“On the day she and the ruler of the city finally crossed paths, he got a rude surprise—when he offered his well-meant handful of coins, she angrily flung them back at him. They went scattering and ringing on the paving stones. ‘Forget?’ she screeched. ‘I cannot and must not forget. Remembering is the essence of what I am. The price of my forgetting, great sir, is more than you can imagine, let alone pay.’
“Taken aback, somehow thinking he must not have offered enough, the ruler began to dig through his purse again, but when he looked up, the old woman had vanished. That day he returned from his secret tasks earlier than usual, in a queer state of nerves. He supposed now he’d have to find this old woman and render her harmless. How awkward.