Part of it was that I didn’t know what to say. Now that I do know, I’m terrified as well by how much else I have to say to get there — when a single wrong word could throw it all off track. Example: when I first took your hand, and tried to give you a bit of myself, and Japan, Africa is what came out. How I heard myself say: Africa of course I know is not a country!
A sentence like that coming from the mouth of a grown man! But you see, it’s about how I was trying to get there. Gips and Roos, I’d heard about them, read in the newspaper how these men — men I’d outraised, surely — had each been given a shiny new ambassadorship.
Donald Gips stacked the paper, you gave him his own country, John Roos, same deal.
And so I started, in an embarrassing, forward, downright militant way, ticking off for you the pushpins — Monaco, Honduras, Estonia, Indonesia. I heard myself straining at these cosmopolitan bona fides, and told myself to relax, just drop it — that if an offer was coming, you’d make it in good time — but I couldn’t, somehow. Singapore, the Ukraine, Italy, I told you we had one in all those countries, too. I said we didn’t have one everywhere, no we did not—but we’re always looking! I said, I’m looking especially in Japan or Africa.
And then: Africa of course I know is not a country!
And it was off to the races, wasn’t it?
I know that Africa is not a country — of course I know that!
My god!
How would the transcript run? The words, they were all erupting in my head, a sort of time-lapse bacterial profusion — words building up so fast that the big burst they came out in didn’t touch even a fraction. The half you heard was bad enough: I wasn’t implying here’s Africa, please allow me to put it forward as a country. Only all I meant is when I get to twirling the globe these days and wondering where oh where shall I set my next new best-selling procedural series, my thoughts tend first toward Japan, then — where else? — Africa!
The continent of Africa is a completely and totally blank continent, as far as my publishing house is concerned, same as the country of Japan is a completely and totally blank country.
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Though there’s another side to it, isn’t there? To Africa.
A certain Pan-African sentiment on the continent of Africa, is my understanding.
But it doesn’t have to be Japan — it could be anywhere in Asia we don’t have one. Particularly Southeast Asia. But India too, we could use a new one there, we haven’t had one there in years!
I said that, and I wondered at my voice — at how loud it had become. I looked out at the storks — stared them down, stared down their sidelong glances — and I made the storks my subject — their grins, their nods, how they were taking the monkey wrench.
And I held your hand in my hand, and again I was calm — externally I was.
By god, I have to thank you for how you calm me.
But in my head, I was still thinking: Anywhere in Asia, sure. Just as long as there aren’t any filthy fucking Chinamen.
Joke!
No but seriously, I won’t abide one single filthy fucking Chinaman.
Joke — it’s still that! When you feel things spinning out of control like they were, sometimes what you want to do is make it worse — to make it all the way worse. And when it’s all the way worse, with a joke, you might be able to recast everything that came before — as a joke!
I thought that by looking into your face and feeling your hand in mine, I’d be able to gauge your reaction. But now that I’ve said it, I realize I can’t — that you’re giving me no reaction to gauge.
Perhaps the Ray-Bans are due for another nod. They don’t know me, after all — if they knew me, they’d have let me keep the Rodem Universal. Now, can you do me one more favor? Just to keep things moving, so we don’t spin the tires when it’s the monkey wrench we have to contend with? Can we pretend for a second that you did make the offer? That you said, Tell you what, when I get back to the office, let’s have a look at the big board, see where we might have an opening—something like that?
OK?
OK.
Ha ha!
Thank you, it’s an honor, truly — but I cannot accept. The fact is, by means of the dozens of best-selling international crime series that I’ve published, I am every bit the ambassador that Gips and Roos are — and then some.
I am an ambassador for the whole world, to America, just as you are an ambassador for America, to the whole world.
What a team we are — and look at us here shaking!
I do not want an ambassadorship, I want so MZ#BLOP0X1 6V
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What I want is something else altogether — something I just had the plan for this morning.
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ou’ll give your speech — and you’ll have to offer some kind of response to the Swedes.
So we have to move quickly, but at the same time we can’t rush — this is the kind of conversation you simply cannot rush.
Just look at those storks!
They don’t know our hearts.
They surrendered their plates to the caterers without a word — almost, it seemed, behind their own backs — and now they stand in those hunched clusters of four or five, and they swivel their heads slowly our way, and their grins just grow tighter and tighter.
Our two hearts are something they can’t see — no one can see into another’s heart. Sometimes when I was shaking with Daddy, I could feel in our hands our two hearts beating.
But Daddy shook much harder than you.
Would it be too much to ask you to look into my heart and measure my words against what you see?
Yes, it would be too much.
Because you can’t see my heart.
You can see my face, the terrible damage that’s been done to it, and you can see this nursing home reject I’m sitting in, but you cannot see my heart.
No one can see into anyone else’s heart.
It seems to me these days we as a species — or as a species in a country — see very little of each other. And I think of how careful we have to be with each and every word. Skip Gates, case in point. You blurted somethinNL2S’X?SGW’#/
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said a few words and then you saw these things you’d said — perfectly ordinary things, that all of a sudden seemed so terrible. You left them orphaned. You left them at the mercy of the elements. Your left your own words to be abused, misunderstood, brushed away, despised.
Cambridge, Massachusetts. The good professor Skip Gates, an encounter with a police officer. Stupid, you said. You called a cop that — a man you’d never met and didn’t know the first thing about, as the talking heads wasted no time in tsk-tsking.
Later, it’s beers in the Rose Garden: too late. The wind has changed. What they’re allowed to say about you, how loudly and directly they can put forward certain notions — that’s different now.