What We Are (19 page)

My newfound friend slaps my arm. It leaves a trail of warm sweat. “They taking the dog around the block for a walk?”

I take a sip. “Maybe he has Tourette's or something.”

His eyes narrow into slits of cynicism. “Are they gonna throw a muzzle on him next?”

“Hey, I'm with you. Let him bite someone.”

“Yeah. The kid ain't got Tourette's or anything else. He's just got bad luck. Look at him.”

The kid's docile as a neutered dog.

“Lazy aristocrats. The kid's constricted neck is the price for his burger and fries.”

I say, “Topic shift?”

“Yes, sir. I just got back from Afghanistan.”

“Yeah?”

“I've had no one to talk to for a long time and so I'm a bit diar-rheic. All I got was lean and brown from a yogurt diet and the lingering smog of war.”

I sip my pint, ask, “What were you doing there?”

“Taking pictures.”

“What part of Afghanistan?”

“Outskirts of Kabul. I'd stop at a tenement stuck to a hillside, sip tea on the dusty dirt floor. No running water, the blown-out walls in piles everywhere. Looked like ant mounds.”

“Sad.”

“It is what it is. The Afghans play house almost as if nothing has happened, no bombs dropped, no drone flybys. The family right there, fifteen people in a circle under the black speckled sky, no roof. We'd munch on salted chickpeas, smiling at one another. Toward the end, a week ago, I attended a luncheon with these Western media intermediaries. Bent on sustained U.S. funding. Contracts, extensions, that kind of thing. It was like being at the New York Stock Exchange. Oh! And I followed a herd of gypsy rug sellers called Kuchis. For two days. Here are the pictures.”

The Kuchis are robed in flowing chestnut gowns, hair knotted like Rastafarians, leading camels heaped with salable goods, sheep-dog trotting between the front and hind legs to shade in the camel's shadows.

I say, “They look like gypsies.”

“That's what they are, nomads. Sell goods on the border of Pakistan.” He pushes another photo toward me, sipping his beer, and there he is with a bearded Afghan, flanked by two men with RPGs over their shoulders.

“This guy a tribal king or something?”

“Close. Actually, yes. It's just we call 'em warlords over here. That's Ishmael Khan. He's the tribal king of Herat.”

“Think I read something about this cat.”

“You read evil stuff about him. He's refused to concede his region to Karzai. He had bodyguards everywhere. The only way I got in was by telling them I was a Canadian novelist writing about a warlord named Khan who's fighting off an imperial juggernaut. They asked me to prove it and I said, ‘Fuck the Soviet Union.' They shook their heads like I was way behind the times or something, and I said, ‘Okay. Fuck the USA, too.' I made a thumbs-down sign and they nodded and let me in. Khan told me I looked like an Afghan warrior in another life. That was a compliment.”

“So is he a crook or what?”

“Sure he's a crook. All the warlords over there are crooks. It's a tributary system. He was so flagrant about his power that he gave me the lowdown on a laundering operation. Hinted at an upcoming coup against a rival warlord. It's a way of life that extends far beyond our little jiffy in time there. Whether we're dropping bombs or Wal-Marts in their cities, we better be sure about it.”

“Yeah,” I say.

He slams down his beer glass, squints, refills the both of us, says, “Once this old sage with half his face creviced by flesh-eating sand flies told me that the Afghan political picture is like the nine-hole Kabul golf course. He said the course was built in '73 by the Afghan king. Closed by the pro-proletariat Soviets for ten years. Reopened for several years after the Soviets fell. Closed again by the Taliban. Reopened in 2002 by an NGO. There is no grass, only sand and oil. The greens are called the blacks. No American will set foot on such a lowly course, for fear of irreparable damage to their skills. Very few Afghans have ever learned how to play the game in thirty years. Probably never will. But they liken the view to a peaceful plain, so sunbright with promise you can't even follow the ball.”

“Well,” I say, “if you don't remember that the sun also rises, you're gonna die internally.”

It's the most I've talked to anyone but my uncle in a long time. I realize I may have made a mistake. Don't know why it happened, except it feels right to reciprocate the sharing spirit.

“That was a picture of you,” he says, “in the
Mercury News
.”

I'd forgotten about the bruises on my lip, the black eye. I resist the temptation to massage one or the other, sip my beer. “Yeah.”

“Mr. Hate Crime.”

“That's right,” I say, and then, “but that ain't right.”

“You look Mexican to me.”

“Shit.” The urge to clear my name to this guy seems heightened by the beer. I want a smidgen of truth to get into the discourse, so I say, “I might as well be Mexican. Those cops and that blond snitch haven't spent even a tenth of the time I've spent south of the border. Right here in San Jo: I grew up with
eses
. My best friend growing up was Mexican, my first lay was a girl named Dora Candelaria for chrissake. Those fools know nada. We used to cook carne asada in the summertime, pumping Vicente Fernandez's ranchero gigs on hot stereos.”

“Clarify then why you assaulted them.”

“I didn't assault
them
. They assaulted
me
. And the reason for that is they're no different from anyone else. They protect their own, that's how it is.”

“I see.”

“Just like anyone out there. It's a power play, from both sides, from every side. And that fucks with the notion of justice, with what's right.”

“Or wrong,” he says.

“Which fucks with my ability to act with conviction.”

“So what you're saying is you couldn't decide who to support?”

“It doesn't matter,” I say.

“But it does.”

“Of course it does,” I say. “We're born into this age with a Verifiably Committable stamp on our birth certificates. I mean it. I know it.”

“So why were you at the rally then?”

“I don't know, man. For some reason, I keep hoping that life ain't as disjointed as it always seems to be. That there are more bridges than canyons between us. But I've spent the majority of my life keeping friends away from friends, family away from family, because they can't get away from some claim that defines them. And as all of these people and their positions are in me, by inference I don't mean a thing.”

“Because you can't take a stance?”

“That's right.”

“And you want to take a stance.”

“More than anything, man.”

He nods. “I told you I met a friend. This ain't a topic change.” He looks over at the couple and their leashed child. “The question is: What about them? Is that their stance?”

He downs his Hefe-Weizen and doesn't look back over his shoulder. I've been watching the table, even in my rant: The kid knows the limits of the leash. In everything he does—rising from the woman's lap to look into the restaurant window, squatting down to play with the laces of his shoes, reaching across the table for ketchup or water or silverware to rattle, turning to embrace his mother—the leash gets primary consideration. He's methodical in his upper body movement, frugal in head movement. His right hand, subconsciously designated the save-me hand, always lingers close to the leash in case slack is needed. The kid's learning geometry at three, conceptualizing radius and circumference, a kind of physics confined to five feet.

“I'll let you have this one,” I say.

“Well,” he says, shivering as if it were cold on this warm patio, “those two parents on the cutting edge of what's hip are under the impression that life is theirs and theirs alone. You and I both know their notion of control is an illusion. Like anything else in this life, it
can be smashed. And will be. It's a question of when; maybe—if you're a voyeur—how.”

He lifts his pint and drains it, I follow suit. To hell with the happy yuppies and their errant flippant chatter. A slew of hot and slick twenty- to thirty-five-year-olds, this fake-and-bake crowd reveling in their temporary glory, their masquerade of fraudulence. The life force drawn from their Ayn Rand books of absurd objectivism, self-help gurus justifying their greed in a large-print book of clichés, the natural embodiments of Roman decadence, all on the verge of something huge:
huge
fake tits for the ladies,
huge
calf implants for the non-ladies,
huge
promotion at the place of employment,
huge
hierarchal notch up on the auto scale,
huge
trip to Cabo Wabo.

But maybe they're not that bad. It's just us, the reflectors. We must be a reminder of the exact kind of life they've been working so hard to avoid, a dual portrait of pariahood invading this warm safe plastic haven. What's strange now is how little it would take to be like them, to in fact
be
them, a tiny adjustment in the circuitry, the ousting of a glitch. Something has got to be turned off to survive in this century: not turned on, turned off.

I give the kid on the leash a quick glance, a safety measure: his teeth are too few and too dull to chew through anything. My newfound friend twists and puts an arm out. He and his index finger have ID'd the culprits for everyone to see, there they are. Right there.

He stays in this position for a long time, so long it pisses me off: not at him, at them. No one notices a thing, immersed in their own public private vacuums. A patio of mind-thy-own-business etiquette, let the authorities handle the problem. There may not even be a problem. I suspect we're the only two deviations who think there's something gangbusters wrong with this scene.

A waitress appears, the third in the last hour. I suddenly see the strategy employed by someone working the patio. There's a row of empty tables that have cleared out over the past hour and no one's
filled them. So we've been sequestered off in the corner from our fellow citizenry.

She's nineteen or twenty, pierced in random spots across the face. You'd think by the light blond cilia on her arms that she'd also have blond hair on her head, but everything's dyed black. You can't think like that anymore, match up body parts like puzzle pieces. Now it's all just black.

She says, more sentence than question, “Would you like to close out your tab.”

I smile and shake my head, my newfound friend squints and laughs out loud once, like a cough. She takes it as a yes. “I'll be right back with your bill.”

He turns over his empty glass and says, “Did we ask for our bill? You act like you don't want our business.”

“Well, we just want to make sure that—”

“We'll take another,” says my newfound friend, handing her the glass.

“Would you like a pint, too?” she says to me, her perforated face starting to sweat.

“No,” he says, handing her the empty pitcher. “A pitcher. We want a pitcher.”

She walks off and we lower ourselves back into the conversational abyss. I tell him about La Dulce's virtually real son. He says, “In thirty years, no one's gonna leave the room. Everything'll be right there within arm's reach.”

“I know it. Fuck. But we can't stop time.”

“If only there were a reset button.” His eyes are bottle-cap big. “We could start all over.”

“You're talking like the Unabomber.”

“Kaczynski was brilliant. I read his prison journals. He had too much vision. And commitment.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Mostly that.”

He starts coughing into his elbow. It sounds bad. He strokes the ends of his goatee into a downward arrow and says, “Now I'm a little faded.”

“As am I.”

“But tonight you're gonna witness me trying to save this story.”

“Oh. And I thought you were just spinning yarns. Being a good raconteur for your brothers and sisters.”

“No, no. Tonight you'll get your chance to take a stance.”

He stands and stretches and I immediately look to the kid. He's finished his dinner early and is pricking his palm with his fork. He gently pushes his plate forward, then jumps down off the woman's lap and carefully circumnavigates the table. He goes around three times, on his toes, heels, he's bored. Runs the slack of the leash through the palm of his little-boy hand like a rock climber preparing to descend the face of a mountain. Finally he stops, looks back at the blushing-of-wine man, who's either fully indifferent to the kid or totally absorbed in himself, and leans outward to test the pressure of the leash. No more slack. The kid's out over his toes, looking down on the ground, turning a little but smiling, a bona fide image of gravity. The turtlenecked metro wrist-taps the leash like an old stagecoach driver on the reins, and the kid obediently leans back in toward the table.

Before I can say,
Vayan con Dios
or
Esperas: ¿como te llamas?
my newfound friend's walking over to their table. The metro is swishing wine, holding the glass by the stem between thumb and index finger. The woman and the child stretch their necks out and around my newfound friend and find me. I nod assuringly, smile at the kid. His eyes are so big and unblinking that I want to comfort him, take him inside the restaurant away from all the heat of the patio and say,
Don't worry: on your side. Keeping an eye out for your future
. He looks up at his mother for guidance. The woman taps twice on her thigh and the little boy jumps up on her lap.

I can't hear what's being said, but I can see the face of the father. He expects a friendly encounter, briefly conned. His mouth is slowly opening. Finally, he's shocked. He recrosses his legs knee over knee and says, “Excuse me?”