I can’t read his name tag yet, but that isn’t necessary. I know intuitively who it is. It’s destiny, arriving out of the heat shimmer.
He enters without saying a word. A shock wave seems to accompany his passage, forcing me back into my seat. He takes a place behind the pilots and plugs into the intercom so as to monitor their conversation.
We take off. Things smooth out now. The Iranian student flyer makes no further mistakes, and the flight instructor’s blood pressure returns to normal.
At the end of the flight, as we approach the base and prepare to land, I lean forward to read the language tutor’s name tag.
It says Jon Glass as I’d expected.
We make a smooth landing, and Jon starts to leave. I reach up from my seat and touch his arm. It feels as hard as an iron bar.
“I’ve got to talk to you,” I say.
He looks down through his tinted helmet visor, unmoving. I can discern none of his facial features, just a reflection of my own.
“I’m Tyler Lakatos, at the Mechanics’ School.”
He nods slightly and is gone.
***
Later, I discover that my letter to Julie has been misplaced. It is never mailed. I can always write her again – some other time.
49: A Fun Day at School
These are the first year students. They are busy and happy. The walls are white, and the blackboard is black. – Middle school English textbook, ROK Ministry of Education
I stand by the blackboard and regard my students sitting at their desks. The walls are a dingy color. The guys are studying their textbooks, faces filled with childish mischief waiting to spring out. Eight Iranian teenagers in army fatigues and short, bristly hair. The ninth student, Sergeant Hosseini, is a man of around 30 with longer hair and a mustache. He looks out of place among the kids.
This isn’t a bad class, really. They’re immature and wild at times, but an okay group. There are certainly worse ones at the Mechanics’ school.
Despite their extreme youth, we always refer to the cadets as “mister.” In some ways, they remind me of my Korean middle school students – the shaved heads, the irreverent troublesomeness always ready to burst out from their restrictive, militarized environment.
This period we’ve been reviewing sub technical English vocabulary, terms like: ball peen hammer, main rotor assembly, and adjustable wrench. As always, the students read obscene, usually phallic, double meanings into the words. A helicopter component called a push pull tube is a particular favorite.
But now things are momentarily quiet, and my mind drifts. My encounter from the day before haunts me. Jon Glass really exists in the flesh! I’ve seen him with my own eyes and have felt his powerful arm. Once, when I was a kid, I’d touched a baby elephant at a petting zoo. I remember its cast-iron solidity. Jon’s arm had felt like that.
Sergeant Hosseini looks up from his desk. “Mr. Tyler, are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine, thank you,” I say.
“You seem unhappy today,” Mr. Gohari says.
I try to smile.
“You like hashish, Mr. Tyler?” Sergeant Hosseini asks. “This afternoon, you and I go my house and smoke the hashish. Make you feel good.”
I glance out the door, fearful that somebody might be overhearing. My fictitious wife will have to rescue me from this situation.
“Thank you, Sergeant,” I say, “but my wife wouldn’t like that.”
A soldier with an almost cherubic face pipes up – Mr. Hekmati, the class clown.
“Iranian wife always does what man wants!” he cries. “You want hashish? She likes that.”
“Well, American wives are different,” I say lamely.
Last week I got fed up with Mr. Hekmati’s constant antics and sent him out to the Lieutenant for discipline. He returned several minutes later, his uniform covered with dust and tears running down his cheeks. Witnesses told me that the Lieutenant starting whacking him with a swagger stick. Mr. Hekmati retreated toward the stairs and fell down a flight.
Guess I won’t be sending anybody to the Lieutenant for a while.
“You know opium?” Sergeant Hosseini says. “We can smoke the opium.”
I feel my face reddening, much to the amusement of the class.
“I’m afraid that isn’t possible,” I say, “but thank you anyway, Sergeant.”
I pick up my textbook. Best to keep drilling right up to the bell. The next item on the vocabulary list is the word “exposed.”
“Can somebody give me as sentence with exposed,” I say.
“Hekmati is exposed!” a student cries, pointing to Mr. Hekmati’s half opened fly.
“Thank you, Mr. Rafizadeh,” I say, “that’s very good.”
I notice a couple of wires dangling from a small hole in the wall. Here is the perfect visual aid, much better than Mr. Hekmati’s fly.
“Look at these wires,” I direct.
The students lean forward.
I point to the bare copper. “These wires are made of ...”
“Metal!” the class replies.
“What kind of metal?” I say.
“Copper,” somebody says.
“Right!” I say.
I point to the insulating material “The copper is covered with ...”
“Plastic!”
“Does the plastic cover all the copper?” I ask.
“No!” the class replies.
“So, these wires are exposed,” I say.
I take hold of them. A tremendous shock jolts through me.
“Ahhhh!”
I wrench my hands away and barely manage to plop into my chair before passing out. I sit there, holding my head in trembling hands. The students are dumbfounded. Even Mr. Hekmati is silent.
Thank God, the bell rings.
“Well ... there’s one word you’ll remember,” I say.
I leave the classroom with as much dignity as possible.
Damned idiot! I chide myself.
Everything else in this building is fouled up, I should have figured those wires would be hot.
Still dazed, I trip on the stairs and almost fall. A death grip on the handrail is all that saves me from Mr. Hekmati’s fate. Somehow, I make it back to the teachers’ room.
“You’ve got a call, Tyler,” Rolf says.
He shoves a phone into my hand.
“Hello?” I say.
“This is Glass,” the phone says.
Silence, finality, as if the words are carved in stone.
“Oh ... Jon. Hi! Thanks for getting back to me.”
More silence. I scrabble to force words out of my electrified brain.
“Can we get together?” I say. “Have a beer or something?”
“You like hiking?” the phone says.
It is more a statement than a question, a command almost.
“Sure, I – ”
“I’ll pick you up Saturday morning,” Jon says, “7:30 sharp.”
“Well, yeah, that’ll be fine. I live at – ”
“I know where you live.”
I try to say something more, but the line has gone dead.
***
Anticipation keeps me awake much of the night. I wonder what he looks like from behind the darkened helmet visor. At long last, I am going to meet the mystery man who haunted my return from Korea, who mocked me from the pages of the Clarion, besting my accomplishments.
What am I going to say; should I question him, confront him with the evidence of his past appearances? What evidence might that be, come to think of it – reports in a newspaper that no longer exists, rumors, Korean letters scratched here and there?
But he’d been on the same skydiving plane with me! Or maybe it really wasn’t him on the plane, maybe my overwrought mind had only imagined him there. Had I imagined other things as well? Had life driven me so far around the bend that I’d concocted a personal bogey man?
No matter. Come morning, there will be no imaginings
, only facts.
Such agitated thoughts keep me twisting in my servant’s quarters. I am reduced to tuning in the Peace and Progress radio program. The drone of Soviet propaganda finally puts me to sleep.
50: Opening Adventure
The only hero is a man without heroes. – Bang the Drum Slowly, Mark Harris
Come morning, I shove a few things into my knapsack and drape Jewel Eye over my shoulder. Precisely at 7:30, a car pulls up and cuts its engine. I open the gate at the first knock. Jon Glass enters.
He wears a wrap-around Middle Eastern type head dress and a sleeveless sweat shirt, out of which ropy muscles bulge. Mousy-brown hair protrudes from under the hat, and a short, sparse beard bristles on his chin. He nods a greeting.
“Hi, Jon,” I say.
His face is angular and sharp, like a hawk’s, with deep-set eyes. I step out of the way. Jon cuts through the air with his razor face and advances into our courtyard where he stops to survey the surroundings, a hand resting on one hip. He has a tensed, predatory aspect, like a cat ready to spring.
For a moment I think Bruce Lee has walked in. Except for the Caucasian face, Jon looks much like the late martial arts star – compact, hard, lethal.
“Nice place,” he says. “Ready to go?”
Bob emerges from the main house and stops dead in his tracks. Surprise bolts across his face, displacing the droopy countenance of his hangover.
“Jon?” he says.
“Hey, Bob West!” Jon says.
He grips Bob’s hand. At first, Bob looks about twice as big as him, towering over Jon by several inches. But in the grip of the handshake, Bob seems to shrink – like an inflatable man having his air sucked out. He extricates his hand and retreats toward the bathroom.
“Well ... catch you guys later,” Bob says.
Jon looked towards me and cocks an eyebrow.
“Let’s go,” I say.
Jon’s gray VW Beetle is utterly without personality, as undifferentiated as if it has been run off on a mimeograph machine. It’s sterile and odorless, without idiosyncrasies. A neatly prepared backpack on the rear seat adds to the impression. I set my knapsack beside it.
Before leaving town, we stop at a sandwich shop to buy some take out. Jon chats with the Iranian counter man. This surprises me, as no other foreigner I know can speak Farsi.
I get Bulgarian salami on a submarine roll. Jon orders a brain sandwich. What kind of brain, I didn’t know. The counter man places the yellowish, pickled thing on his cutting board and carves it into slabs. I watch, a bit appalled. The cutting board is worn paper thin in spots.
As we leave town, I ask Jon where we were going.
“The mountains,” he says. “About five hours away.”
That is the extent of our conversation. The car’s noisy engine, exacerbated by wind blasting through the rolled down windows, discourages communications. Jon isn’t interested in talking anyway, I sense, so I keep silent.
Glare coming in from the desert sky turns Jon into a haloed and dusty silhouette. My first impression of him in the courtyard must have been inaccurate. He’d appeared very lithe and compact then, especially next to Bob. Now he seems massive, and the arm working the transmission looks powerful enough to snap the shift lever like a match stick.
Burdened by my near sleepless night, I soon nod off. When I awake the VW is leaving the pavement and turning down a dirt road. We bump along for an hour, dust blowing in the windows. Then Jon leaves the road altogether to motor across the open desert.
The VW’s bottom scrapes the rocks occasionally, but we make steady progress. We approach an area of low, rolling hills behind which lurk barren mountains with rivulets of snow in their high creases.
Jon stops the car. The steady thrum of the little engine dies, and a faint gasoline smell drifts away, leaving silence and hot desert air. He withdraws a backpack from the trunk, empty except for a sleeping bag secured to the frame.
“You can use this,” he says.
“We’re camping overnight?”
“Yeah,” Jon says.
I haven’t planned on this, but who’ll care if I don’t return tonight? Stars doesn’t care about anything, and Bob will be so bombed out of his skull that he probably won’t notice where he is himself. So, I transfer my stuff and strap on the backpack. Jon hands me a couple of water bottles which I add to my load.
“We’ll hike a while and find a camping spot. Okay?” Jon says.
“Sure.”
Jon takes off at a blistering pace that I can barely match – even though his pack is much heavier than mine and despite the fact that he does not have proper hiking boots but wears peculiar ‘Arabian Nights’ shoes with curled up toes. He pulls ahead, despite my best efforts.
Round, dried-out shrubs are scattered about, each is two or three feet in diameter. Jon pauses to drop a lit match into one. It burns furiously and is consumed within seconds. I move up to examine the charred remains, and Jon shoots ahead without me.
I know I can’t keep up, so I just resume walking at my own pace, my mind blank as an erased chalkboard. I’m not thinking very well today, as if my intellect has gone into inertia mode. Jon moves on ahead, traversing the foothills at incredible speed. Flames shooting into the desert air mark his progress. I drop a match onto a bush, but the fire quickly sputters out.
Finally, Jon halts at the top of a rise. I join him there and turn to view the way we have come. Below us, rocky foothills descend to a barren, rippled mesa that sprawls to the horizon. The ant-like VW sits abandoned in the transition zone between hills and flats. Haze blurs the sky into a dusty blue. At the far limit of vision, I make out a column of smoke.
“From up here, I own everything,” Jon says.
“Not much to own,” I say. “Seems pretty empty.”
“Yeah, that’s the best part,” Jon says.
An enraptured look attends his hawk-like face. Standing on the bare rock, amid the desolate atmosphere, Jon seems a natural feature of the landscape. A breeze kicks up, bringing a spooky chill, and I pull my compass out from under my shirt. It gives me a dose of rationality.
“We’re heading northwesterly,” I say. “Though I’m not positive about the declination.”
Jon gazes at me like a man suddenly finding a stranger in his living room.
“Uh-huh,” he says.
He turns and resumes walking. Before long he is far ahead, intentionally keeping distance between us.
Well, screw you, too! I think.
The atmosphere is one to kindle anxieties. As I move over the increasingly barren terrain, ominous thoughts prey on my mind – fears of getting lost, of stumbling and breaking an ankle. Everything seems so dead around me, even the tough desert shrubs have disappeared. I am suffocating in the torrid air.
Snap out of it, Tyler, I tell myself, you’ve been in wilderness areas before.
Yeah, but not like this one.
After a long trek through the desolate foothills, we enter a steep mountain valley and begin an ascent. My spirits rise in the freshening air. The gloomy fear thoughts retreat. Hell, if I squint my eyes, I can almost imagine myself traversing the Alps, dressed in leather shorts with a feathered Pinocchio hat perched on my head instead of the faded Detroit Tigers baseball cap Bob gave me.
Why, just over this mountain a rustic chalet reposes where pretty girls wait with jugs of wine. An orchestra kicks in, and Julie Andrews sings a Sound of Music melody. I begin singing myself:
I love to go a-wandering ...
I can’t remember more words, so I simply hum the tune. When the chorus rolls around, though, I have a customized version ready:
Va la reee, fuck the Shah!
Va la reee, fuck the Shah ha ha ha ha ha!
Up ahead, Jon gestures for silence.
“My singing’s that bad?” I say.
Jon waves for me to join him. Curiosity aroused, I sprint the whole distance, winding myself in the process. Jon is crouching in the rocks, his
backpack cast aside.
“Over there, at the bottom of the cliff,” he says.
He hands me binoculars. I scan the area, unable to distinguish anything besides sheer rock. Then something shifts position, and a large tan-colored animal with fantastic curved horns materializes out of the background. I feel its supreme confidence through the lenses.
“What is it?” I gasp.
“Mountain sheep – ibex, maybe,” Jon says. “A big stud, whatever he is.”
I ditch my pack and creep forward with Jon. The animal watches us indifferently. We walk a little faster; the animal stirs slightly, and Jon motions us to a halt. We stand frozen for several seconds. The great buck lowers his head and nibbles at a plant.
“Let’s get closer,” Jon whispers.
We move slowly, cautiously. It seems as though we might get near enough to pet him. Then, without warning, the animal bolts straight up the cliff, feet effortlessly gripping the rock. He climbs with swift grace, contemptuous of us earth bound humans.
“Yaaaa!” Jon howls.
He dashes to the cliff and flings himself upon it, groping frantically for holds as he pulls himself up. He’s already scaled several feet by the time I reach the base. Just looking up the nearly perpendicular wall makes me dizzy.
“What the hell?” I mutter.
Jon continues his upward surge until his foot breaks off a piece of rock. I dodge away as the fragment narrowly misses hitting me. Jon begins to slip. One hand loses its hold, then his remaining foot, until he dangles by a single hand only. More pieces of rock shower down. Finally, he stabilizes himself, holding on with all fours. I release my pent-up breath.
“Jesus, get back down here!” I yell.
Jon falls. A long, agonizing scrape, hands clutching uselessly for holds as he accelerates down the cliff face. He hits the ground hard.
Anxiety sinks its fangs into me, and I am angry as hell, too. I stand over him, trying to determine how badly he is hurt. After a few moments, Jon manages to sit up. He appears uninjured except for some cut fingers and a bloody nose. He fumbles a handkerchief out of his pocket and presses it to his face.
“Does it feel broken?” I say.
He glares at me over the bloody rag. My anger and concern instantly vanish, replaced by a stab of terror. Jon’s eyes are feral, holding so little humanity that I cannot bear to look at them. I stumble back.
I am afraid of Jon in that moment, frightened for both of us. Some dreadful power seems ready to lash out and sweep us away to God knows where. Jon sneezes, spraying a bloody mist, and the spell breaks. A wind whistles down the valley, clearing the air.