And when I say something is bad or when I say that something I did was wrong or foolish, or when I say that something excellent that you want to ascribe to me is not something I am responsible for, or that something you call a miracle was the opposite of a miracle, then, as inconvenient as it may seem at first to believe it, the proper response is not “Gurion is too humble to admit that he was good all along, too humble to admit he was right all along,” or “He is too humble to admit that he made a miracle happen, too humble to call it a miracle.” I am not humble, much less am I what the well-meaning doubletalkers among you have taken to calling “a humble egotist.” There is no such thing as a humble egotist. And for that matter, I’m not a “peacemaking warrior,” either; I’m a scholar and a soldier. There is no paradox there, no euphemism, no contradiction. I’m both. And so should you be.
If you want to resist this commentary on commentaries, scholars, it’s because the notion I’m attacking — the notion that I’d had the Damage Proper elaborately planned well in advance of the opening sally — strikes you as appealing. Maybe it strikes you as appealing because it suggests that I am a gifted general, or a talented forseer, maybe because it’s the easiest explanation to imagine. I don’t know exactly why the notion appeals to you. However, I do know why it appeals to the Arrangement. It is in their best interests that you resist this commentary on commentaries; it is in their best interests to spread the claim that I planned the Damage Proper well in advance of when I actually did. The implications of the truth are bad for the Arrangement because the implications of the truth are good for us. In denying the truth, in spreading lies, the Arrangement protects the Arrangement.
The fact that I only planned the Damage Proper minutes before we executed it means that you are each a much greater threat than you know. It means that despite all the early-detection procedures and other “safeguards” that have, since the Damage Proper, been put in place by various houses of the Arrangement — and manifold they are, these “safeguards,” well designed to foil days and weeks of planning, as well — future war campaigns could be just as successful as the first one. They can be just as successful as long as they are undertaken as suddenly and spontaneously as the first one.
Damage, damage, and damage, the end.
19 WE
Friday, November 17, 2006
12:13 a.m.–10:41 a.m.
And there was night, and all through the night I kept waking from the same dream.
In the valley of the two-hill field stood a tower of restraint. Slokum held Nakamook in the air like Slokum had held me during the false alarm, except Nakamook’s arms weren’t pinned to his chest. Instead, they held a second Slokum, and the second Slokum held me, and I a second Nakamook, and that second Nakamook a second me:
The tower swayed. To keep from falling, we had to continually redistribute our weight. It took a lot of concentration at first, but soon I got the hang of it and noticed there was clapping. There’d been clapping all along, but my earlids had been blocking it, pushing it into the background. I looked around to see where the sound came from and saw it was Patrick Drucker. He stood before the tower, applauding.
There were two things wrong with him. The first was his pants. It was windy in the field, but the pants lay perfect on his legs, unmoving. The second was his hair. The wind didn’t blow that either.
Soon clouds parted and the sun shone and both his nose and the apex of his left knee’s pant-crease glinted. The glint was identical and I knew both were plastic: the face and the pants. Then I saw his eyes did not look like eyes, but television snow. I saw that he was not Patrick Drucker. He was an angel in a Patrick Drucker mask, standing behind a legs-shaped podium, applauding.
It got me edgy.
The Slokums both said, “Thank you,” to the angel. “Really, you’re too kind,” they said. “We’d bow if we could, but as you can see…”
That got me even more edgy.
What should we do? said the Gurions.
“Which ‘we’?” said everyone.
I don’t know, said the Gurions.
“Is that right?” said the Nakamooks.
The effect of both Benji-voices saying the same thing at once was that it flattened the question’s intonations so that I couldn’t tell if “Is that right?” = “Is it really true that you don’t know to which ‘we’ you are referring?” or if it was a sarcastic, accusatory question that = “No shit, Gurion. You obviously don’t know to which ‘we’ you’re referring,” or if I was being asked about the moral implications of not knowing to which “we” I had referred = “Do you believe it is right to not know to which ‘we’ you’re referring when you ask the question ‘What should we do?’?”
This is when the dream would start to seem familiar, and I’d remember I was supposed to be pissed at Benji.
Meanwhile, the angel continued applauding, and the Bams kept talking about how they’d love to bow to show their appreciation for the applause, but they couldn’t bow, not responsibly at least. Everyone would fall if the Bams bowed, even if just one of the Bams bowed, mused the Bams, and the angel didn’t think it was worth everyone’s falling down just so a Bam could bow, did he?
The angel kept applauding.
The tower of restraint kept swaying. It was exhausting.
I kept wondering what we should do.
Nakamook kept asking me which “we” I meant.
I kept forgetting and then remembering I was pissed at him.
On waking, I’d decide I wasn’t pissed at him, but when I fell back asleep, the dream would start again and I’d forget what I had decided, then remember I was pissed at him, then forget I was pissed and then remember it again.
When finally there was morning, and I woke for the last time, I was no longer pissed at him.
While upstairs, painkillered, my father slept deep, I prepared a forkless breakfast with my mom in the kitchen. On a breadboard on the counter, I smashed walnuts with a rolling pin. She, at the table, opened soft-boiled eggs. I liked eggs soft-boiled, but in the morning couldn’t prep them, not if I wanted to put them in my stomach. Those insect-like screams emitted by the shell when you pried its fragments from that film they clung to — the mastication of wet chicken sounded musical by comparison.
Walnuts in pieces, I dumped the sip of cloudy topwater from a tub of Greek yogurt. I globbed honey from a jar across the yogurt’s flat surface. I folded and stirred til the color was even, then folded some more til my mom’s task was finished. When she signalled it was, I came to the table, the tub in one hand, breadboard in the other; we liked to add the walnuts as we went.
The yogurt of our forkless breakfasts was for the most part treated like dessert. Though we’d always cool our mouths before we ate our eggs, we’d only use a spoonful, never even two. While the roof-blisters you’d get from a scalding one stung, nothing eggy was as nasty as a gluey tepid yolk. Plus our egg-cups, glass, were shaped like half an ostrich, and the closer the temperature of what you drew from them matched yours, the less cute the images your brain coughed up. Half-formed wings and beaks of high plasticity. Goo that would be claws and bone. A pulsing spaghetti of veins and tendons. Ligaments and cartilage not quite yet chewy. Throbbing, webbed red membranes.
Our attack on the eggs was double-fisted. We spooned them up rapidly and salted with abandon. Ninety seconds later it was over.