14. “Christmas Eve (II)”

She lives in the motel room, now.

In the evenings, the man gripes about his job for hours, and she listens in silence.

She has lived in the room for three weeks, and every evening has begun with this ritual of unburdening. Every day, it seems, the man’s employers invent new species of indignity to visit upon his poor, beleaguered head. They display a kind of creative genius for it.

Often the violation is of a subtle nature, involving jams and malfunctions in obscure parts of the U.S. military-industrial-bureaucratic machine. One needs a lot of context just to understand what has gone wrong, and how badly.

That doesn’t deter the man, though. He explains it all to her. If it takes hours of prefaces before he can come around to the point, so be it.

She’s grateful for the opportunity to sit in silence. Speech is always a risk.

During the daytime, she can do as she pleases. The man is always gone in the daytime. He works seven days a week.

She watches TV, mostly.

The news is a valuable resource, providing her with stock phrases to memorize. She squirrels them away in her memory, and deploys them one by one, in the rare and tense moments when the man expects a response from her.

Ads plead with her to try this show, or that film. She tries them, but can rarely stomach the experience. Their sensibility is alien, their concerns obscure. They venerate the mere form of the body, curiously indifferent to the light and substance inside. They prepare bodies of different kinds, nude, coiffed, mutilated. They linger over the specimens with their camera-eyes, expecting her to share in the fascination.

She prefers the older films. She watches and rewatches Meet Me in St. Louis and The Wizard of Oz. She studies them with care. Judy Garland has much to teach her, she knows. In Judy she finds a goldmine of information about poise, expression, the powers of eyebrow and eyelash. In Judy she finds, too, a sort of spiritual compass. A direction on the map, indicated in every stray, wistful glance. That is where her future lies. That is where she will go, when her time in the motel comes to an end. Judy-ward.

And of course there are the songs, which bear up to repeat listening without fail.

The new films are barren of song, and nearly empty of color too. What has happened?

The Fed needs to step in, the newsanchors said. We’re headed for a recession. The Fed needs to take drastic action. They spoke often of this angel, the Fed. It could save them in the blink of an eye, if it wanted.

The Fed should step in, she thinks, listening to the man gripe. The Fed should step in, she thinks, watching the new films without songs, without color, without Judys.

Maybe it will really happen, someday. The Fed will descend to earth, surrounded by a flock of lesser divinities singing hymns in its name. It will announce that we have suffered to prove a point, and that the point has now been proven to its satisfaction. With a mighty hand, an outstretched arm, it will fiddle with the world’s TV until the colors come back. With a colossal foot, it will step in, and set us all back on our feet.

Someday, maybe. She is full of hope, in spite of everything. Wouldn’t Judy be full of hope, in spite of everything?

She’ll have to wait, though.

We have suffered to prove a point. Really, you ask? What point?

If you have to ask, the point has not yet been made with sufficient force.

She is not like the Fed, a bearer of good news, a lifter of burdens. She is a different kind of angel.

 

---

 

She spent the first few days trying to guess the password to the man’s laptop. She was unsuccessful.

She remembered someone saying that there was a library in the town. She went there.

She asked for a librarian, was directed to a desk, risked speech, tried to ask for what she sought. She was unsuccessful. The librarian did not understand her. He gathered up the bulk of his body, towered above her, peered at her in suspicion. In his brows and lashes were all the powers of Judy’s, and none of Judy’s goodwill. His gaze pierced straight through the lie that was her life. She fled.

It took her many hours to learn to use the library computers. They mocked her with colorful, toylike letters, the same tetragrammaton on every screen: PLEX. Four letters on a plain white background. Nothing else. No other clues.

The listless youths around her muttered to one another about plexing this and that. She considered asking them how it was they did the magic trick, but she remembered her encounter with the librarian, and kept quiet.

She figured it out by herself, eventually. Then her struggle with the computer began in earnest.

She plexed Judy, as a first experiment and as an act of ritual devotion. The computer disappointed her. It gave her many pictures, but she already knew what Judy looked like. It gave her disconnected lists of trivial facts. It made a mockery of the woman it claimed to summarize.

She entertained the thought that plex and Judy were immiscible essences, spiritual antonyms.

Car, Fed, Plex. The world was made of monosyllables.

It wasn’t what she had expected. Not here. Not at Babel’s summit, just before the fall.

It took her many more hours to find her way to the library’s own catalogue. By the time she arrived there, she’d acquired something called an email address in the process. And another thing called an ad blocker. The latter was apparently precious, as the computer wanted her to surrender it as a proof of her loyalty. So she obtained one, for the purpose of losing it again.

The library didn’t have any of his books. They were not lost, but if she wanted them, she’d have to resort to something called Inter-Library Loan.

What was Inter-Library Loan? Could she trust it? She clicked the button, and called on Judy for hope.

 

---

 

Since it is a special day, she dons the outfit before he gets home.

The outfit he likes. The one he owns, so that she, or someone else in her place, could wear it for his enjoyment. A “school uniform,” according to Plex. Originating in the British Isles, but now imposed upon schoolchildren in a hundred sovereign nations.

She’s still not sure why he likes it so much, but it doesn’t much matter. What matters is that she can use him.

Usually she only puts it on much later, if at all. The daily gripe comes first. Often the whole of the evening is given over to it, and they fall asleep the moment it is over.

It’s a special day, though. She must convey that to him. She doesn’t think she can bear another version of the gripe, not when she’s so eager to know whether she has been successful at last.

When the door opens, she is ready for him.

She stands with her back against the TV, legs slightly bowed, head down. Almost cringing into the TV behind her, as if she expects it to protect her from some threat. Hands behind her back, fingers interlaced. She chooses every aspect of her posture deliberately. She’s had weeks to study the flow and ebb of lust across his face.

She fixes him with a gaze she learned from Judy.

“He-llo,” he says, with strong emphasis on the first syllable.

“Hello,” she says, in a flat meek voice.

“I am ready to tell you about the man,” she says.

She keeps her voice meek and cringing, as he likes it. She takes all the things she really feels—the horror, the unbearable weight—the resolve to do what she must, in spite of everything—the dream of something after, something, a purposeful gaze, a direction on the map, ruby slippers, home—and then, much later, the Fed’s outstretched arm, in spite of it all, because of it all, because she did what she must—she takes all these, and she compresses them down into mere modulations of meekness.

Is that all he sees? Or can he see through her, like the librarian did? Speech is always a risk!

“Tell me,” he says, “about the man.”

In a lilting cadence, as he lunges towards her.

Because all of this, to him, is only more dirty talk. No different than donning the outfit before he even got home. Just good, dirty, nasty fun—

(because he doesn’t know, oh god, he really doesn’t know, he has no idea what is coming, oh god, oh god)

(he is an innocent, spare him, please, let the rest suffer until they see but not him, he really has no idea, don’t you see, have mercy, please—)

She brings her arm forward slowly, in a tentative, cringing gesture. The book is in her hand.

He snatches it, and squints.

“Layla . . . Loony?”

He parrots the print on the front of the book, from top to bottom, in perfect blessed innocence, not knowing.

LAYLA / LOONY

Nizami Ganjavi

A NEW TRANSLATION by

Azad Ghorbani

“This is the man . . . that you want me to hire? He wrote this book?”

She makes the slightest, meekest of nods.

“Nizammi . . . Gan . . . jovvee?”

“No,” she says. She narrows her voice, feigning fear.

(oh god, he doesn’t KNOW—)

“Not the author,” she says. “The translator.”

“Azad Gor . . . baa knee.”

“Yes,” she says.

“The Reconnaissance General Bureau,” he says, “of the General Staff Department of the Korean People’s Army . . . wants to install this man, this Ghorbani, on our project.”

Does he doubt her? Does he see right through her? Was it all for naught? All for naught, when—if only this can be done with—only this one night, and then—ruby slippers—the World’s Fair—a long-distance call all the way from New York—!

—the Fed watches us, and savors the dramatic irony we make for it without knowing, and says, we have not gotten the point yet, so we must suffer more—

“Wow,” he says.

Does he doubt her? Of course not, silly. He craves something, something, to add color to the slow-motion suffocation that is his life.

And he’ll get it—oh god, he doesn’t KNOW—he’ll get it, oh god, yes, he will get what he wants. What he thinks he wants.

“This Ghorbani,” he says. “What’s his deal? What’s his angle?

“He’s what, Iranian?”

“Iranian-American,” she says, meekly.

A is for Arbitration, B is for Bilateral, C is for Crash—

No, no, A is for Abomination—

A mad giggle, the death of every hope—

But you don’t know to cringe, how could you, he doesn’t KNOW, the poor baby, oh god—

“Jeez,” he says. “Iran.”

“I’ve never been a mideast watcher. Don’t even know any mideast watchers. Wow. I’m seriously out of my depth.”

She looks at him, eyebrows forming calculated arches, and tries not to convey a single thing she has not already conveyed. Speech is a risk. Silence is a risk. Being here at all is a risk.

Am I doing it right, Toto?

Talk less, smile more. Is that still your counsel, wise Toto?

She forces a smile.

“I mean, you know, I know, so, the revolution, right, and the Ayatollah, and oil prices, right? And then, of course when nuclear’s involved. Well, when nuclear’s involved. Then I can see how, you know, things become interesting to various parties.”

She smiles. She doesn’t talk.

“So this Ghorbani is like, what, like a nationalist? Or an Islamist? An Islamic nationalist?

“What’s his angle? Is it like a sort of, uh, common cause against the Western global order sort of thing? Sort of a post-Cold War, like, conflict of visions thing? With like, you guys have your Juche, you know, self-reliance, and then the Islamists sort of go their own way, in the same way, in terms of having an ethos of their own, you know?”

“He is a translator,” she says.

“He will be the translator for your project,” she says.

“Wow,” he says.

“North Korea wants the U.S. to install an Iranian translator for our latest talk-to-aliens gimmick project. Holy shit. I am so out of my depth. I’m fucking lost. I have no idea why you guys want this.”

He’s utterly sold. He is hers.

“I have one further request,” she says in a small voice, almost a squeak.

“Tell me.” His eyes are hungry.

“I need unrestricted use of a radio telescope capable of sending messages into interstellar space.”