War in a Beautiful Country

  In the desperate gloom that overtook her, Regina reluctantly decided the best way to be prepared for the certain and sudden death the bomber might visit on her was not to have anything or anyone in her life she cared about.

  To see if this state of mind was absolutely necessary, she tried an experiment with her dentist. She studied him as he took great care not to cause her pain. He struck her as a kind and lovely man, but not wonderful. The necessary “wonder” in wonderful seemed to have disappeared from the old equation between herself and the rest of the world. Without it, being with people was too ordinary for so much work.

  First she blamed them. “I spent my whole life not knowing anything real about anyone.”

  Then she blamed herself: for knowing almost nothing real about herself.

  Finally she blamed this inability to care on the new wisdom of having learned through her current crucible of raw nerves, too much now about herself and everyone else.

  How will I survive this knowledge! she wondered.

  I liked me better the other way.

  When I was still stupid.

  CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT

  i.

  BE THANKFUL!

  LOVE GOD

  ii.

  Luckily, Walker had been on duty the day after Thanksgiving.

  Regina brought the card, with its cornucopia of bright autumn fruit and nuts nestled over a cartoon picture of an unexploded, but lit, stick of dynamite, to him at the station. It seemed she went to the police station more often than the supermarket.

  “It arrived when?” Walker asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Regina said, “I didn’t pick up my mail until we were on our way out to have Thanksgiving dinner at my sister Nina’s.......”

  Walker’s cheek made an inadvertent twitch even though he swore he was over Nina. Her pull on him seemed to have disappeared as mysteriously as it had overtaken him. Regina mistakenly thought his facial movement was a reaction to the note.

  “....... but since it was Thanksgiving, it could not have come that day,.... and I hadn’t bothered to get the mail for a day or two before.....”

  “It must have ruined your dinner,” Walker said.

  “Yes. Yes, it did.”

  Walker squinted to check the postmark.

  Regina told him,” It’s from Florida this time.”

  “I’ll work on it,” he said.

  iii

  “Sweetie….” Angela boomed once again into the phone, “Look, Walker gave me the Thanksgiving card, and now we think we might have some ideas, maybe leads. But I need you to come to the station....Actually, I’m on duty…stuck inside a shipping container....”

  “A what....?”

  “It’s a Mobile Arrest Center. We drive it around neighborhoods like a Blood Bank, or a Bookmobile. Our motto is: Rolling with Crime: We come to you,” Angela joked.

  “So,… what do I.....?”

  “So, we’re parked on the West Side, on the big old Marine and Aviation Department pier—which ironically is now neither fish nor fowl--- in the meat packing district. Little West 12th Street and the Hudson River.....It’s a bit out of the way but you’ll find it. Just look for the hookers, transvestites, and cobblestones. You’ll be ok. Especially mid-morning,....can you meet me.......?”

  “Yes,” Regina said, “I’ll be there.” She would do anything. Even drive on the West Side Highway, mid-morning.

  Det. Vega told Regina there was plenty of parking on the large, nearly empty pier. Then she added,” You know, maybe the only good reason to move to the mid-west is for the ability to park. I’ll bet in Indiana parking is a life-affirming experience....” Then, like everyone else, Angela asked Regina, “But what do you want to drive in the city for...!”

  Regina was tired of the question. But she had perked up at Angela’s call, at the notion that the police might finally know something, that she might get back some control.

  She was in a hurry to get there; Angela said she was working only half a shift today.

  Regina checked the overly large clock on the loft wall. She loved clocks for their simple-minded attempt to deal with a complex universe. Apparently clocks didn’t work for everyone. Perpetually late people were described as having ‘no sense of time.’ “You mean, they have no sense of my time,” she always wanted to say.

  In any case, she had just enough time now for a shower, although she was tempted to skip it. Since she was not a farmer or a laborer made dirty by outside forces, in the modern world a shower was just washing yourself away from yourself. A shower was always a disappointment to her since it never washed away the general paltriness of her naked soul and the embarrassment of her mediocrity, which she felt whenever she entered this state of wished for liquid redemption. Each time she expected a miracle, a transition from her old life into something fresh, new, half expecting to become someone better.

  She realized it was a lot to ask ten minutes of hot water to do.

  All she ever got was clean.

  iv.

  Regina walked the block and a half from her loft, over to the open-air parking lot where she kept her car since it was impossible to leave it on the street. She did not want to deal with the “Parking Calendar” and its odd prohibitions and permissions for street cleaning, national and religious holidays, taxi stands, diplomatic immunity, VIP privileges, and weather. The signs—when, where, and how not to park—were so long and complicated, they had become literature.

  Nor did she want her car to be towed away again. Never wanted to go back to the car impound again, that place so highly volatile that everyone was overly polite, an eerie unreality, given the New York temperament. But this tightly secured car jail was not the place to vent. There was so much anger it would be explosive. And useless.

  Once out of the lot and on to the street, as she waited her turn for the light to change, the car in front of her emitted ear-damaging sounds that filled the entire block with an assault of throbbing, indecipherable noise.

  If you could never be sure which cars had brakes, you could be certain which had radios.

  v.

  The drive uptown was so slow she thought she was a passenger.

  She would be forced to wait behind idled, mammoth, street-blocking trucks picking up garbage or delivering soda. Or someone making a movie.

  She would wait until time became volumes of nothingness, yet not empty enough to concentrate on some other simple, constructive thing like stomach exercises—pull in, let out—before being distracted by the attention needed behind the wheel of her two-ton killing machine.

  All cities have traffic, but in this City of Options, there were no options.

  The special nature of a New York bottleneck was its confinement. You could become imprisoned in your car by nowhere else to go. Skyscrapers were necessary in New York because there was nowhere else to go.

  But Regina had to go, had to get there, had to see Det. Vega before she went off duty, had to be sure she did not have to wait another day for some solution to her case. She could no longer stand being stalled. In her car, on the road, in her life.

  Completely stopped in this maze of powerless horsepower, Regina could see a young man in the car next to her bobbing his head and beating a drum on his steering wheel, his shoulders gyrating to a rhythm only he could hear.

  It always made her mad when other drivers didn’t suffer enough in traffic.

  CHAPTER FORTY NINE

  i.

  The thing about living in New York City is that a good day is when things don’t go as badly as they could have.

  And only some of the clocks are wrong.

  ii.

  The thing about living in New York City is that a good day is when things are as great as they could possibly ever be. Anywhere.

  And some clocks work.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  i.

  Regina laughed out loud when she saw the Mobile Arrest Center. It was plunked down forlornly in a debris filled corner of an old pier that stored small
hills of salt for sanitation trucks to pour onto snowy streets. Rather than giving off a strong police presence, the long rusty container looked like a lost refugee from a disbanded trailer camp.

  And these are the people I think can help me? she sighed to herself.

  Once inside she was surprised. And suddenly encouraged. It could have been a top-notch media van or air traffic control room. Something could happen.

  The computer banks washed the dark, nearly windowless aluminum box in a phosphorescent blue-green glow and, with the constant low murmur of the two-way radios, it felt like the bottom of the ocean.

  Detective Angela Vega was on duty alone. She greeted Regina like an old friend, a visitor to her own house. Regina didn’t like this. She didn’t want the detective to be charming; she wanted her to be effective. She always suspected that Angela’s friendliness was one of those phony police things where they want to be your pal so you’ll be happy to turn yourself in. Did Det. Vega think Regina was sending the notes to herself? Had Walker told her his crazy idea; did he give Angela instructions to be friends?

  “You said you had a suspect,?” Regina asked.

  “Well, yes. And no.”

  “What do you mean?!”

  “There are enough notes now so we thought that if we tapped into the data bases of the cities you received the letters from....”

  “....the threats....” Regina corrected.

  “...as well as the National Crime Data Base, we might be able to match an MO, a pattern that would reveal a bigger picture to us.”

  “And?”

  “And, we couldn’t.”

  Regina had been taut, alert to what miraculous technological progress would be revealed to her in the insulated, hermetically-sealed other-dimension of this metal bathysphere. But now she walked silently, dejectedly, to a hard steel chair. She just wanted to go away, but was forced to stay by her own listlessness and disappointment.

  “Why did you call me here, make me take all the trouble to come here? Isn’t everything the same as before?”

  “That’s true. But it’s also true that we did think we were getting a break. Besides, I was excited that things might have been getting better for you. When we realized we didn’t really have anything concrete, it was too late. You had already left. So I’m sorry. I know you need some progress. We could have picked up a couple of likely suspects, just to see where it took us. But ever since the bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta, without hard evidence we are all wary of false accusations.”

  She reached over and momentarily touched Regina’s hand in an effort to soothe her.

  “You understand, don’t you,” she asked.

  Regina shook her head. Of course she understood. Being falsely accused was a fear to her almost stronger than being blown up.

  ii.

  Regina had been about seven when the incident with the blind man occurred. At Regina’s whining insistence, her mother had let her go by herself across the wide busy avenue to the little neighborhood bakery on the other side, watching her all the time, yelling out instructions for crossing traffic: “Wait! Look! Stop! Run!”

  Regina triumphantly made it to the forbidden land on the other side of the river of buses and cars and was now herself the repository of all good judgment and wisdom. She was even going to decide on which kind of cake to buy. Her mother said she could. So when the blind man came by, rattling his cup with coins, Regina took charge. She noticed that people were dropping money in the cup, but, poor man, he couldn’t see to take it out. Regina would do it for him. Without warning she reached her child’s hand into the cup to give him his money, but to her shock he began to scream, “Thief! Thief! Help!” Regina opened her fingers and let the coins fall back in. She staggered away from him as grown-ups circled them both.

  “Bad girl! Stop that!” a woman yelled as she slapped Regina’s retreating hand.

  “...no, I....but...only wanted....” Regina tried to explain.

  “Shut up! How could you steal from a blind man!!” someone shouted.

  “....I...didn’t....just....help....”

  “Go home!”

  “We don’t want little girls like you around here! “

  “You should be ashamed! What would your mother say!”

  Her mother. Through her tears, Regina could see her mother, who was just getting the picture from the other side, head for the curb. Regina caught a lull in the traffic and flew across into her mother’s arms, as the crowd around the blind man still stood glaring at her.

  “I didn’t do it!” she sobbed to her mother. “I didn’t do it! I was just going to give him the money. Please believe me! Please believe me!”

  “I believe you,” her mother said, “I know you wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  What if her mother hadn’t believed her? What if the people who don’t love you don’t believe you?

  And now, she was surprised to see that, like running into her mother’s arms, this current see-saw of fear, and then hope, and then fear again made her want to stay enveloped in this aluminum womb under the perceived protection and compassion of Det. Angela Vega.

  Regina stared aimlessly into the semi-dark, her shoulders slumped, too lost to move.

  Something must be happening to me, she thought. Usually she would have just told Det. Vega in a slightly curt manner, “Well, thanks anyway,” picked up her complicated purse in which once more she would not be able to find her car keys as she prepared to gird herself up to fight the traffic again back to her dark loft where she could hide from it all.

  But instead she just sat there, her body depleted as a sigh over a steel chair.

  CHAPTER FIFTY ONE

  Angela apologized for the condition of her cramped, disheveled apartment.

  “Apparently life is bigger and more complex than the spaces we set aside for it,” she explained jovially, as she hastily tried to clear a path through the papers and books on the floor to the couch where a large pile of clean but still unfolded laundry took up half the seating area. The fabric-softener fresh clothes would have smelled good, except for an overriding odor of dusty cat litter.

  Still, Regina was glad to be here now. It struck her that in spite of her own mixed feelings about the detective, she was comforted by Angela who had become, for better or worse, the only partner she had in the trauma that battered her life. By now there was little comfort from others. Everyone had gotten used to, actually annoyed by, her constant fears and depression. One by one they had begun to float away from her. In their haze of hopeful denial, in order to go on with their own lives, they blinded themselves to the depth of her crisis and the way it rattled her soul every minute. They wanted to treat it as some passing incident, like the flu. After all, the police themselves were still saying they couldn’t be sure there was anything to worry about.

  A huge wave of desperation and loneliness poured over her once again. She got up from the couch and stood in the doorway of the small closet of a room that passed for a kitchen in the average Manhattan apartment. Angela was noisily putting together something that with a little imagination they might consider a late lunch.

  She stood in one spot and, like an octopus, poured the tea kettle, clicked the toaster, and retrieved the cheese from the refrigerator all at the same time. Angela took the plastic tray of tasteless processed cheese sandwiches on burnt white toast and two small boxes of dried raisins out to a scratched and peeling laminate table in the corner of the living room. She gave Regina two mugs of tea encircled with advertising, one for each hand.

  As Regina tried to put them down in whatever space she could find among the scattered papers—local flyers, Chinese food menus, torn bits with phone numbers, ripped out magazine articles, unopened bills, backs of empty envelops with reminder notes now long forgotten—the paper tea tags fell into the liquid There were no spoons. Regina did not have much appetite but she sat dutifully in one of the stained, sagging canvas camp chairs. The cat saw this as his cue to come out from his corner and walk to
the other side of the room on top of the table, sniffing the food.

  Apparently Angela never closed a closet door. As Regina carefully sipped the hot tea, she found herself staring into an open utility closet with brooms, dustpans, a vacuum way in the back, plastic bags wadded together, dirty used sponges, a straw hamper with overflowing dirty laundry, and all sorts of insecticides on the shelf. When she first came into the apartment, she had noticed the coat closet at the entrance was also open, but thought that might have been for convenience. Now she realized several kitchen cabinets as well as the medicine chest in the bathroom all remained hanging ajar.

  Angela joined Regina at the table, picked up her steaming hot tea and settled comfortably into her surroundings.

  “People disappoint you.” Angela said to a startled Regina as though she had read her mind.

  Regina did not have time to respond.

  “We all disappoint each other; emotional contracts are only as good as the people we have them with,” Angela went on without skipping a beat and with no intention of doing so, although she had no trouble skipping from idea to idea. And even here the sound of her voice seemed too big for the small apartment and began to irritate the nerve endings on Regina’s skin, the way jazz or Bach often did.

  “Dealing with people is like dying of thirst and trying to drink water through a pinched straw. You get something but not nearly enough. It’s inevitable, you know, ...part of the human condition....personal demons... and all that. It seems to me that most people either consume their own flesh or yours. Some only hurt themselves. Others are more than willing to feed you to the lions that stalk them.

  Yet we continue to expect too much from relationships. And why not? When you think about it, most of what we know comes from other people. We start out with nothing, and somebody else puts in all the stuff we have in our brain. Actually, sometimes not liking a person teaches you a great deal about yourself. Without knowing it, your own soul comes up and looks around and sees the other person is not a good fit. Then you know better the shape of your own soul. When you brush up against someone else, you brush up against yourself.”