The Mercenary Comes Home, Part 2

Start The Mercenary here

Photo by Anja Niedringhaus / AP

I`m a man I`m a man
Run run run I no go run
Run run I no go run
Brothers and sisters
Na GOAT dey run, n MAN dey stand
I`m a man I`m a man

- Fela Kuti, "Fear Not For Man"

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Every step he took brought him further away from danger eventually. He accepted the tight uncomfortable pants. His gun was safe back there. It moved with his hips. The only place for him was out of this city. Egypt was a crazy idea, but he felt crazy. Crazy was what saved him. He swung the crispy plastic bag like a beggar, because no one would bother a beggar.

He forgot about his sidekick, but that was ok, for a while. It was still back there, scraping the top of his ass a little, the biting little fucker.

An hour later, he was on a paved road, his heartbeat back to a casual lightness. Every step sent the city, fraught with gunfire and rebellion, people running amok, killing and taking over their own city, and sucking him in like quicksand as if he cared, in fact the entire last several days and nights, into a single slathered picture memory.

He was wondering about food, but kept walking.

Every now and then a vehicle would pass, either in the direction he came from or in the direction he was headed. Whatever that was. Maybe Egypt, but mostly south. He wouldn’t say no to Egypt. The one fact becoming certain was that when sun went down, he’d have to find a house with something to hide in and sleep. Planning for this was not a new procedure and its moment came without shock or anguish because its regularity predated being hired as a soldier.

Getting into the barracks and company of men was vitalizing. It broke his life of roaming and helplessness and hidden dismay. The people in his village who didn't leave and the refugees who did and who he met on the road all advised him: he should find a rebel group and belong. And then he could achieve something. When he found the group, bivouaced under trees in the desert, they asked him questions and let him enter. Some of the men liked to fight and so fought everywhere, and that was ennobling. Some of the men fought to get payed the way his father sang at weddings, and that was cunning. And some of the men fought with the hope that their fighting elsewhere could some day, somehow, be returned to Chad for revenge and establish the right kind of power. That was inspiring. They made their camp under the trees an unruly junk yard. 

Locating food and shelter for the night was child’s play compared to that..

Did he really want to give up being a soldier? The near disaster he was walking away from was the exact opposite of what he wanted to be involved in. It was a mess, men got swallowed eaten and forgotten, he had been tossed aside, and it all meant nothing.

As he saw it, the bag in his hand was two things: his recent self and the shedded skin of that self. Now he was in a blue shirt and tight pants, the clothes of a stranded civilian and easy pickings for anyone who wanted to be tough

As a soldier, he had men all around him. They made a group and as a group they could look outwards at anything that crossed their path. They could choose to engage it or let it pass. A man swinging a bag on the road had to be careful about everything and everyone, especially if they were in a group looking at him. He had to be careful even about the sun going down and dragging the heat of the air with it and from him.

The sound of the diesel truck stopped him from thinking like a lonely person and made him turn around. It shuddered emptily, moving quickly in his direction, rumbling with purpose. Show yourself, he decided and pulled out the fatigues from his bag. He waved it to them: “Hey Hey Hey!”

The truck flew past him, spitting bits of gravel into his neck and hair. He looked at the heavy wheels and thought of jumping on somehow, but it was gone. Then it swerved gently to the side and waited, panting.

He ran up to the passenger door and the open barrel of an automatic pointed between his eyes. A shiny black face glared at him. He swerved back a step, but didn’t think to put his hands up.

“C’mon,” he said.

“What are you doing?” the driver yelled from inside.

There was no good answer for Tewwe. He eventually lifted his shoulders  and showed the them the area they were in: nothing.

The man with the rifle said, “He’s got a uniform in that bag.”

The driver tried again. “Where’d you get that uniform from?”

He decided to answer. He spilled everything he knew: about being recruited, offered pay, Captain, the cold building they were bivouacked in the last few nights near the freak Colonel’s compound. But kept the name of the rebel faction and the camp he walked into six months before out of it. Factions had colors and pride and private treacheries. It was all homeland crap, but it still mattered. That was what passed between Tewwe, the two men in the truck and the black hole of the rifle eyeing him.

“We’re going for more men. Get in the back,” the driver yelled. It was a big, open face truck and he moved quickly to the back, climbed the metal panel and jumped over, but not before overhearing the rationale going on up front, that even if he was a deserter, they were already ahead one warm body.

Settling down, squirming around rivets, it never occurred to him until now that someone could see him as a deserter. He was redeploying himself and the dickheads up front will hear about that, he promised.

The sun swiveled across the front of the truck and found a place to land on his left shoulder as they headed south. Realizing this, south and all it entailed changed his mood and his frame of mind. South meant a long, agonizing ride through the desert. He remembered he had no food. Night will come and bring a rattling desert chill to the back of truck. Perturbation, and a minor dread settled on is chest. Shit. He remembered musing about Egypt, when he was free. He reached around, banged on the cab. Nothing came back.

After a long while, he thought very little, especially after the sun left. Peaks of thought were as short and widely separated as the contour of the desert, monohued like the full moon. This was the thin trance of waiting, upon him again. When the truck, breaking the headwind, lurched into a long curving reroute to the left, he didn’t bother to look, just let his body roll with the bend. The stars were dense.

A deep unknown stretch of time later, the truck slowed and then came to a stop. Their forward heading ghosts went on without them. Front doors opened and the two men stepped out silently. The driver stepped to the side and looked in at this passenger.

“Go pee if you want,” he said.

Tewwe didn’t return the look, just shook his head. Then changed his mind. Agile arms and legs sent him over the truck panel and the sand gave slightly under his boots. He didn’t pee. Stretching felt good. The goon with the rifle had his pants down, his back propped against the toasty front grill, trying to dump.

“Where are we going?” he asked the driver, and then inserted his own answer. “Don’t tell me. Fada.”

He meant to show he knew something about where they were headed, but it was a childish joke. The driver looked at him coldly. “Ounianga first,” he answered. “Visit the pig on your own time.” Fada and its people gave birth to and spit out the fat criminal prick president everyone else hoped at best to avoid, better yet see swinging from a tree. But his spaniels and henches kept everyone at knife point. Comparatively, Ounianga spread itself like honey over an oasis between where they were and the treacherous pile that was Fada. 

Tewwe’s juvenile guess made the driver warily curious. “What’s your story again?” Tewwe told him, in crisp, dry terms. He took his time. That it didn’t end well earned sympathetic nodding from the driver. His commandant, higher up than Captain and therefore tantalizingly closer to the pay and rewards promised to everyone, ordered the driver and twelve other men into ambulances provided by the freak’s perverse, unmilitary son. When the citizen-crowds marched, they were supposed to drive up to them, lights and horns flashing and when the crowd let them in, they opened the doors and started shooting.

“Terrible,” he said. “Terrible. I did that, but I also learned how those bastards think.” He touched his head. Locked safely inside. “It’s something your Fada pig-fuck would pull.”

Tewwe took the opportunity to be insulted. “Don’t confuse me with – ”
but the driver raised his hand and turned his cheek.

“Joking. Don’t get so hot.” He went to the cab, reached in and pulled out a bag just as the rifleman returned, tying his belt. The driver handed Tewwe the bag of food.

“Came out yellow,” the rifleman said.

“It’s that fish. I told you.”

Tewwe ate a little while the slim driver spoke. The driver liked to use his hands, deftly. He had beliefs, sturdy and earnest, crafted little by little by experience and driver-seat contemplation. Tewwe learned that the commandant was a template for planning and stalwart reserve, working collaterally to build a resolute force of modern, democratic fighters. We will be the spoils you bring home, the commandant told his men, the driver among. And as one, made of many, we will inflict real justice on the thieves and reprobates your family and kin all have to hide from individually.

Tewwe admitted this was the man he wanted to meet all along.

The driver agreed. The commandant himself pulled him aside and sent on this little mission because why? Trust, the driver answered. And loyalty in return. Fighting for the bedouin ass and his son didn’t matter as much as establishing relationships, learning who to trust, and recognizing what you really saw when you looked.

“When I opened fire in the ambulance, I recognized what or who I was shooting. Those people – they’re right. You’ll see. I was breathing their air. And so were you. So was he,” thumbing at the rifleman.

“I just want my pay,” the rifleman snorted, unfunny. When the other two didn’t pay attention, he sucked his gums with his tongue and spit.

Everyone back in their places, the truck churned on. It found a railroad and followed on the right of way. The packed sand and gravel helped their speed and for miles they hurtled track side, slightly canted and aloof from the shifting desert floor.

photo credit: Andrea Pistolesi

All the driver did that night was keep to the simplest route, and on the way passed black misshapen wrecks of tanks, peeled open with fire, still sitting cold and vacated, their turrets pointing south, meaningless and forgotten that night and every night. In the demi-moonlight of mission-haste and nonchalance, they looked like desert rocks. Even though they were also sent this way thirty years before by their employer, the same despot colonel whose whimsical fury was no different attacking the desert or defending his compound. It was also the route the commandant suggested.

In the back, having made friends, the prickly chill and the hunkered waiting in a dull trance didn’t take Tewwe over completely. Instead, he rolled in his mind what the driver was getting at. Justice, until this moment in the back of a fleeing truck, did not really hold any weight. Imams mentioned it but he couldn’t cut through their scolding and berating. Its lightness and certainty may as well have been compassion for aliens in the distant future.

But because of their shared gunfire experience, the driver managed to be the first to put a little context into Tewwe’s thinking. And out of that alchemy, his imagination tried on a little moral clarity. The vicious yellow teeth of thugs who broke into his home and left with his uncle then came back for his older brother, they brought into his home the wind of evil. The policeman who coolly collared his friend Janjan at the market for no good reason and stuck a reptilian finger in Tewwe’s face for silence and permanent foreboding, he spread the evil further. The official who accepted the money in a sack from his mother in one hand and with the other made his mother jerk with a sharp, hooked penetration that forced her to come whenever he called and return home even more frayed and poor – he was the infector and administrator of evil.

And still he was not the cause. These and the countless incidents everyone shared but didn’t speak about, until he couldn’t stand the ringing of awfulness in the air any more and left, it all oozed from the sore of Mustafeh Kep. He knew it because he was old enough to be alive when Mustafeh Kep appeared in his family’s region, sent up from Njdamena by the pig of Fada. They could all be eliminated from his memory at the hands of justice wielded by an army of inflexible men convinced of their truth and rectifying power.

First the sunlight warmed his forehead and eyelids, making sleep a little cozy and pleasant. Then the doors banged shut and he remembered lying in the back of a truck. He sucked in long warm breath and curled over his shoulder as the rifleman stood at the truck panel.

“Get up. We need some breakfast.”

He climbed down and found himself standing on the side of a thoroughfare already come to life with smoothly striding women, their children and the crumbly gaits of older men. The rose colored pinnacle rocks in the distance, the date palms, squat buildings nearly windowless and blind to the sun and the arcading dyed cotton sheets flapping above merchants, one next to the other down the length of the thoroughfare – he’d dropped into the time and setting of his unfinished childhood.

“What the hell are you doing?” the driver asked. He was heaving a large drum of gas into the truck’s fuel line.

I used to live here. “I know this place,” he answered. The cool floral scent of the lake, invisible but faithfully near, whipped around him.

“Hurry up.”

The tight pants screeched up his leg with his quick hop-to and finally tore along the inside seam. He shook his other leg to give it and his asscrack some room and then headed across the dusty road for the family who fried fangasou with the raisins. The pistol rocked and rolled in the jacket’s pocket as he jogged.

It should have felt like a homecoming morning, but the lopsided heft of the gun and the business he rode in with wiped that from his mind. It was only sentimental any way. He was concealing purposes and looking warily in all directions again, reviving that hunch-shouldered need to be invisible.

The building with food was a short walk upwind, but people were watching him already. He realized he was different now, walking upright, dressed modern, eyes on something. Who else wore that here? They were seeing purpose, confusing him with a stranger. Definitely – well, hopefully – not seeing the boy returned, the one who’d left in a panic the last time rebellion was fomenting around here and people started disappearing one at a time, or were popped in the street and left stone cold dead until nightfall and his own family scattered like beetles, children scurrying to hide in other homes. And he, gone.

“Good morning, mother,” he said to the old woman in the doorway. She was either waiting for him or guarding the door, the slanting shadow of morning sunlight cutting her in two. He didn’t want to shout. “Six fangasou. With raisins?” The woman didn’t move, the creases of her face dry and stagnant. Her bright little eyes blinked. He held up the paper money, hoping that would trigger an order to daughters inside. Instead she withdrew from the doorway. Two men sat against the building, regarding him.

He approached the doorway. What was she doing? As his eyes got used to the dark, he didn’t see a soul, not at the work table with the cups, knife and bowl or near the fire with the pan and the snapping grease. A thin almost naked child came around the corner, her mind on something else. A young woman yanked her back. He took a step inside when he heard the two men to his right stand up quickly and hurry away.

He turned around in the doorway as a cloud of dust moved across the street. Down by the truck two men with guns aimed down at a figure spread on the ground, a third waved a gun over the truck and two other men grappled a figure with his hands tucked behind his head. Their voices were secret, wind wiped.

Shit. His body whipped around once, twice. Shit! What?

A sixth man climbed into the cab of the truck, and started the engine. This was daylight organization, precise. The five men herded the driver and rifleman into the truck bed and then drove off, efficiently stranding him.

Bewildered, he backed into the house. Two women held three children while the old woman dangled her hands in front of her body. You’re trespassing, he thought and found a rear door.

The sunlight was brighter back here, opening to the desert. He kept  himself against the building, troubled, worrying, scanning his mind for a plan. Mustafeh Kep’s power now proved omnipotent, patrolled with men circling so high off the ground you could never see them. Their vigilance was devotionally hostile and they were deliberately kept untethered. The pitiless speed they used to snatch the truck, the driver, the rifle man, their guns, their plans, their bodies overwhelmed him.  He was lost in any direction he went.

He brought himself around to the front again and darted across the street, up another way perpendicular to the main road. There were residences scattered up here, people he knew, and maybe they could shelter him until nightfall, but after that he hadn’t a clue.

There were hills up this way and the road would eventually go out to the lake. But now he recalled the nature of this road. This was the road to the night building, the building among trees that was black inside, without rugs or furniture and an empty morning dread on the walls. The building everyone knew to avoid and swallowed in their minds that it even existed.

The truck sat outside.

A hundred yards away, the ravine he and his cousins played in and used as a safe conduit to visit the building after every incident could still protect him, even now. He crept close to the homes on his way there, then dashed to it when there was no more shelter. The gun, his sidekick, bounced against him.

There really wasn’t any planning in the ravine. He would snake with it, climb up its sides just outside the building, hide and then kill. Get the keys with or without the driver and the rifle man and drive away. More importantly, he would kill. For the first time, killing something that counted. Send his own message that the time had come. That was enough to goad him up the ravine.

The covert crouching was satisfying, menacing on its own. He relished the idea of laying these snarling assholes onto the bloody ground.

It was a quick exposed run from the ravine to the sheltering, desert-flaked sidewall. He sensed the noiseless vacuum of intention all around him. Against the building, but not touching it, he didn’t breathe. Rocks lay everywhere outside, their shadows pointing away from him, pointing away from every spot of the desert they lay in. But there was no where to go.

Then a shriek. It burst through the building and cut deeper and spread its barbs further inside him than he ever dreamed possible. Immediate and quailing like the shriek he heard in his home when they took his older brother to the back room and forced everyone out and he was kept still by the hostile ugly man pointing the weapon.

He was unmovable. And the next queasy wail turned him into water.

From the front a boy came around the corner, carrying a ball of fangasou in his hand. A half-mooned mouthful was bitten from it. He stopped when he saw Tewwe. Unmistakably, his cousin Djamou – this much older, this much left behind. Djamou gasped, uncertain if it was true.

“Djamou!” someone bellowed coming outside. He was reprimanding a child but also gripping a rifle with hair and blood smeared on the butt. He turned the corner and his sun shadowed face found Tewwe. Young Djamou, poised helplessly between now and then couldn't say a word either.

/End

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"The Mercenary Comes Home," © CMMartin, 2011

The Mercenary Comes Home, Part 1

The earliest phase of the Libyan upheaval, you may recall, was just an uprising, inspired by the apparent successes in Egypt and Tunisia. Libyan military officers defected and opened their ammunition dumps to their fellow rebels. At the same time, Colonel Qaddafi, wishing to spare his relatively tiny defense forces, hired mercenaries from Mali, Chad, Niger – black Africans all, and especially loathed by Arabs and Berbers of the Maghreb north. The Chadian mercenaries, particularly, have been led on by Qaddafi for years as a way to perpetuate his ongoing secret war against the Chadian government, also known as the most corrupt government in the world.

Photo by Anja Niedringhaus / AP

"Who would be born in a man's man's man's world?"

- Everything But the Girl, "Trouble and Strife"

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Translated from the Chadian French

Each man’s steps were routine, sometimes assertive, from the hips, but more or less cohesive to the unit. Each one was quiet. This wasn’t their city. Their boot falls popped and smeared with tiny crunches of glass and stone. To anyone hiding in the buildings, the crunching sound turned the neighborhood over to the African men, who were stepping through on behalf of the unseen but fantastically self-televised Colonel Dictator.

Most of the men didn’t give a crap about the neighborhood or anyone in the buildings. Anyone peeking was just cowering. The people likely to do anything to them were out with the crowds, the poncy Arab shits gone berserk. They, by not being here in the neighborhood, were the ones who held the black men’s attention. The men listened ahead of themselves, making their way down the tight Maghrebi street. The nearby uproar was rippling off the buildings, from somewhere.

Just a block ago the uproar was thin, speckley and distant. But they were heading towards each other and, leaving his body for a second, he thought: if the sound weren’t invisible it would be rising overhead like a khamsin dustcloud, looming, then shrouding his head and the street behind him.

Captain spoke from behind, in the middle, cursing and yelling sex talk back at the invisible crowd, trying like a football fan to make his men relaxed. Behind the captain, the tight-lipped, sunglassed overseers in their jeep kept pace, but tenuously, obligations teetering.

This was not like last night, in the pickup with the machine gun. That was almost like a night on the town, careening wherever they liked, pulling the trigger, yapping bullets into the air. They were having so much fun that when someone suggested they find some local pussy, that free, wild idea marked the height of possibly everything.

Today was different, the distant crowds. And the new orders: keep the terrorist crowds away from the plaza, shoot if you have to. He accepted the grim security detail trailing them: it was their country, their heads. Of course they’d want to see the job get done, done right. It was fortifying having experienced military watching.

He’d drawn the far right flank and chose to keep his eyes peeled that way.  A heavy gun was a safe gun and he was glad his grip was tight, a man’s. His small gun, a pistol – ok, that was still his sidekick – but it was tucked like a secret down his back. The heavy gun, held in front, was business.

Treading forward, his leg kicked at a small cafe table and it fell out of the way. He stepped onto a box of small fruit, then got annoyed by it. Who puts food on the ground? And also: it was almost clumsy. So he looked away from Captain and the minders on the chance they were looking at him, evaluating his stumble through boxes and tables. He put his attention into the vacated cafe on his right. The television was still on and it showed the upheavals and battles throughout the country in small pieces, Arabic flying out of the speaker. Best part was knowing he was ahead of the tv. It didn’t know what they were going to do.

Huh – Tewwe thought, humorously, with his safe gun. The drinks in the glasses were still shaking from the people who beat it. Funny. Except that another, smarter part of him said: No, wait. A shiverous no. And then his mind caught up – the ground was vibrating. It made him turn forward.

The tank ahead peeked out from the intersecting street. He felt his line, the men, bend backwards with disbelief. Its gun waggled, like an arm putting on a coat.

Captain saw it too and, irate with the sudden switch in power, yelled “God damn donkeyfuckers – “ and to his men, “Wait, let them come ...!” And then yelled at the tank, “My dick! In your mother’s camelcunt!”

Then the uproar arrived, whooshing down from the far side. The loose spray of the crowd poured into the street, consolidating, curling and gathering in front of where the black soldiers were walking. It buckled the line, sending the men toward Captain, making him angry with panic.

“Get away from me! Shoot, you fucks!” Behind him, the military jeep wheeled around and sped off. Tewwe saw it and decided they were probably heading to let higher ups know what they saw. Or to fetch reinforcements. The crowd and its commotion, overwhelming the little plattoon of soldiers, gathered in front of them, chanting, and he caught himself still standing upright, surveying. Not moving.

Mahmud Turkia / AFP / Getty Images

They didn’t just have chants and songs – incredulously, they had guns too, but no soldiers of their own. They just waved the guns around, shouting viciously, hatefully, buoyant with uprising. The rogue tank was still banging inexpertly behind them, trying to turn towards the foreign soldiers.

Then the bullets flecked and picked all around him. He pointed his safe gun at the crowd and then straight ahead at the dumb tank and then back again at the crowd. But rivulets of the crowd were spreading and collecting in front of him, sealing off his advance. Not all of them were armed, but all of them were angry, yelling infuriated variations of “Get out! African niggers: get out! Libya for Libyans!”

He didn’t want to fire at them, shouting banner-wavers in jackets. You fire at men who have guns and can take it. He shook his safe gun at them instead and yelled  something like, “Get out of here! No one wants to get hurt, you assholes!” just as angry and outraged as they were. “Give it to your wives!”

But the bullets kept flicking in from the other side, so he turned to fire in that direction and saw Captain snap backwards, spin like a dancer flinging blood and fall on his face. A yellow flash in the corner of his other eye and a frightening chunk of building erupted nearby. 

The men, his men, his friends even though they weren’t really but now they were – they crumpled, or fell, or ran backwards firing away. Only one man stood still, raking the crowd until he was struck from the side and left his feet. The crowd pounced on his spot.

The wheeling drunken tank took another swipe at the corner of the building. He felt the shocked air press him back against the cafe wall. The instinct to give room led his feet backwards and nearly tripped him over the upset cafe table. Still facing the crowd he sent a long step over the square tabletop dodging the metal column and spiking legs, hopped, and then dove to his knee. The rifle rested on the table edge and he pulled the trigger with a jolt. Some people’s shirts and chests ripped open, but then the tank announced itself again, cutting into the building nearest him with an ear dulling boom.

Some of the crowd on his end turned to the tank. “Tell that idiot to stop! There’re people here!” and yes! he agreed, that’s right. Shit with the tank! He wanted to get up and join them, waving his rifle. Get this back to something we can handle.

He glanced to his left and realized he was the most forward soldier. The rest of them were heading backwards, firing away or running. The swelling, impending moment of disaster grabbed hold: now was the time to leave.

So he about-faced, with his gun, and right away grasped how far they were separating from him. The sinuous membrane of coterie snapped and then he was just a black pebble left behind. The tank erupted again, giddily, and he felt exposed, available to be pricked by countless bullets or blown away by explosion. He crouched low, like in the movies, keeping his head down. He ran like that along the walls of the street until the fear was so much he fell into an empty space on his left. The doorway of a shop. The floor made his shoes slip and though he sensed the dangerous chaos diminish behind him, he wanted to run, get the hell out, go far away, get to safety, get away, go back.

He picked through the boxes in the hallway. Shoved away chairs. It was dark and there was something like a branch or a stick on the floor, a mop. It snagged itself between his legs but he crashed through or over it, tumbling at a wall in the blackness that gave way and whoosh: there he was in daylight. An alley, long. So he ran.

His hands were empty. Where was his gun? He felt it bang against his ribs, strapped without memory across his back. The alley had wires and tangles and boxes. A cat stopped, petrified for the newcomer. Behind him the crowd noise erupted into the empty shop as hundreds upon hundreds, regaining their street, marched over bodies and streamed ahead, thrilled with themselves.

The end of the alley came quickly and opened into another cross-street. When he got to the edge, the crowd noise blustered around the corner, unseen. He crouched against a wall and knew that if he peeked around, he’d be shot at. But he had to.

No one was there. Only the bodiless clamor of the crowd. Where were they going?

The rat survives, he thought, and ran across the street, then against its walls in the direction he guessed was opposite from the crowd’s and turned again into the first opening he found: another street. Also empty of people. Where were they? They were in the crowd, all around him. He ran down this street, too. And then chose another alley. Only to find that alley had an end.

It stood passively at the far end. Friendly. Like a door. He ran all the way up to it and it said, climb me. He found a way up, clutching with his fingers and digging with the cusp of his shoed toes and with a heave, over he went. He landed like a boy, on his feet, with a clack from the rifle butt, running before he found his balance, pumped, because when he was a boy, he got away hundreds of times and now he was doing it again, getting away and running, even here.

As if the wall was the perfect barrier, the angry din of the hundreds who wanted him dead disappeared. Then, not entirely. But enough to tell him he was ok, and with his gun, even safer. These were residences. Or rather, he was in the backs of residences. With fences, garbage, a couple trees, a ruined car, and a football rocking in a puddle.

Clothes flapped. He took a minute and settled into his breathing. Then his eyes started to see. He was in the middle of a city he wouldn’t give a finger for, in other peoples’ country, supposedly trying to help them save it from the riotous shitheads, the terrorists, who were trying to take over. He flashed on that cruel indomitability he sometimes tried to show off. But it wasn’t there now. He was still catching his breath.

Am I shot? Tewwe wondered. He patted himself, looked for blood on the ground. Clean, he thought, and laughed. They went through me. Ha!

The joke about magic dissipated. He was alone, among other people’s houses. This city sat on garbage.

He had to go. This whole enterprise was a dead end. Captain was dead and therefore no one would be impressed. If Captain was dead, he was worthless. He had to start all over again, find other men, this time smarter and better, more willing to help him and take him wholly, friendfully.

It’s not going to be these Libyan fucks, even with all their money and a savage delusional Colonel who flounced like a sheik, happy to kill his own people. That embarrassed Tewwe. Because up towards the sea, the Colonel’s men were folding like clothes in a basket, against a crowd of pussy Arabs who didn’t know how to shoot the rifles they found.

Embarrassment then bitterness: now he had to give up on seeing any reward, the leather wrapped money rolls, the money which the uniformed Libyan greaser said would do everyone good: first to help kill terrorists here, then punish and overthrow the fat criminal scumbags back home. You know who he would have started with? He would have started, first day, first hour, with Mustafeh Kep, le patron des fucking connards, the shithead who puts his foot on your throat, on the floor of your own home.

No, maybe, I don’t know. His breath caught, he was realized he was staring at the ground, making squiggles in the mix of sand and pavement with a stick. He stood up, intending to walk. But he was still swimming in his own thoughts. Maybe coming here was a mistake. A good guess, sure. But not any longer. Just have to find others to operate with.

The wind pushed his cheek. Clothes – that’s right. Hide these soldier clothes.

Clothes were nearby, in a yard to his right so he headed there. A blue shirt with white dots snapped on the line, black trousers bounced. He noticed a frayed lengthwise tear on the side of the shirt and a faint brownish tea stain around it. Still, very smart. A puffy sleeveless jacket sunned itself on the back of a chair. White stuffing pursed itself from a gash there, too.

Do it.

Soldier fatigues dropped to the ground and tangled around what his aunt called duck feet. The long sleeves of the rough-like-canvas army top wouldn’t let go and he angrily yanked one inside out around his fist. Relax he thought and the other sleeve slipped away effortlessly. On went the shirt. A wet spot on the shirt pinched his side, just where the tea stained hole was.

Oh, it dawned on him. A bullet. He connected the jacket with the shirt. and when he slipped into the jacket, he lined up the hole and gash like evidence. He jiggled his finger through the connection.

Soldier clothes stay with me – in a bag – from somewhere – he decided, looking around. He grabbed a torn white plastic sack caught on a weed and shoved his troubles inside, the soldier’s clothes.

The change of clothes brightened him, like a Saturday night.

He swung his safe gun behind him, slid his sidekick into the small cave of his lower back and walked. Within the first couple of strides, he was just a visitor here. Shades, like those worn by bodyguards at a nightclub, would be perfect. But the pants began to rebel: we’re too tight. They cleaved up his crotch, trying to divide his balls and nearly splitting the seam inside his thighs. Then the pistol chafed the top of his ass. He felt foolish.

 Further down, another yard. He dropped his troubles onto the ground and stepped in. He unswung his safe gun from his shoulders onto a rickety table. Gray pants, with stripes. Hell no – faggots. Ok, fine. Just by looking at them, they were big. Maybe with a rope or belt....

“Get away!” someone yelled in Arabic. It startled him. He looked around at several black faces. “What are you doing?” He turned to grab the rifle but another man held it in his thick paws. A fat man, with small white eyes, purple cheeks and little lips pursed with menace.

Tewwe answered with his first impulse. “Journalist,” he said and played the trick of believing it himself.

They didn’t believe him. Someone said, “Mercenary fuck.”

“No,” he corrected, countering with deeper belief, “A journalist.” He wrapped his conviction with an accent and some protective indignation. “Egypt. BBC.” He remembered that journalists were oily cowards and so raised his hands defenselessly, decorating his face with a toothy grin.

Even though they glared at him, a thoughtful pool of plausibility and consideration spread among the men. They were black like him and secluded like him in a country of Arabs and Berbers chanting and shooting in the streets beyond. 

“What are you doing here?” the man most directly in front asked. He tilted his head menacingly when he spoke, but he wore his clothes peacefully. The man of the house.

“The crowd!” It was beyond obvious. He kept his jaws tight and happy teeth showing, knowing to limit the words expressed to keep any accent buried down his throat.

Finally one of the men looked sideways at the master of the house. “There are black journalists.”

“What’s this?” the big man with his automatic yelled. It looked small against a body like that.

“Safety,” he answered, with a shrug.

His answers, his scared reasonableness, his hiding, his digging through people’s backyards like a dog cast a persuading glint onto what the men saw before them: journalists get into people’s business, his accent is from somewhere strange, he was afraid like they were of their neighbors and the used to be Arab friends who were now shooting at and rounding up blacks, no matter whether they lived here or not. Weren’t they all Africans, putting years and their families into living and working in a country just because it was only marginally better than where they came from? Isn’t a fragment of mercy like that enough among people? And all this because poor luckless Africans were chosen by the greasy thug in Tripoli as his defenders and some of those used to be friends secretly agreed, the maniac has to go?

Well, turmoil always washed misfortune up to anyone’s doorstep, like this journalist weasel.

Someone jumped hastily, believing the stranger. “We want to be free!”

“Stop,” the master of the house said, clearing the political air with a vague, harmless slogan. “Libya is for Libyans.” For godsakes, the stranger could be a spy, too.

Tewwe leapt into a final, lunatic gambit, summoning the Siwi-Arabic voice of his Egyptian mother and every radio program he’d overheard. “This is the BBC. Rebel mans ... journey today, with courage for bread, like Egyptian persons .... toppling the monkeyface. Old Arab Qaddafi in sheets with camel today.”

To the men, it was a bewildering array of words, smeared with foreign sounding accents and the blithe imbecility of the British. Enough to obscure a threat in their backyard.

“What news do you have?” someone else asked, but the man of the house stopped it there.

“Get out – whatever the hell you are.” He waved him away like smoke. “You have no right walking among our homes.”

Tewwe relaxed his grin. He nodded, apologetically. He used his eyes only to look at each man with a sturdy grace. Respect. The fat man kept his rifle and used it to move Tewwe along.

He retreated, one step at a time, steadying his gaze on each man, even when he bent down and grabbed his bag. Then he turned and walked, his mind swerving between bravery and prayer that a guileless retreat would prevent them from shooting him in the back.

/Continued

 ◊      ◊     ◊

Next: Into the desert at night, home by morning

  Next Part

"The Mercenary Comes Home" © CMMartin, 2011

Letters

Breakfast first, then Alpha Centauri




To Whom It May Concern -


Hello. I just wanted to say that this morning I was sitting at the breakfast table when Frank – my husband – comes in and sits down. I still had my tea. Tea my daughter Maureen sent me. She calls it green tea, but it has bits of Rice Krispy in it. I know, huh? I must say it turned out to be pretty darn good.

So Frank, he drops into his chair as normal, still reading his magazine from the bathroom, and reaches over and without looking up pinches away the end piece, just a bit of crust really, of toast. From my plate. Crumbs fall in a line from my little plate to his chair. A rabbit could follow it. I saw the whole thing, but my mind was elsewhere.

This happens with him. It’s his way of saying "I see you sitting there staring into space.” Even though: he won’t drag his eyes up from his article. Not involving himself in the necessary social interaction such a comment really needs.

And you can just sense – well, I can sense, but it’s pretty obvious – you can just sense with the way he raises his eyebrows and pinches that corner with those fingers of his, that he isn’t really reading when he's pinching. Because when his hand comes back with whatever it is he’s helped himself to, you can see his eyebrows relax back into position. Then he’s reading. First he's reading, then he's pretending to read but not saying hello or I’m hungry – then stealing – then reading again.

That is the morning conversation.

You can guess I prefer just thinking my thoughts with company like that.

Well, so what? you say. Fine. Just let me finish.

So I decide it’s not worth it to get up and fix him some toast. He’ll manage. He’ll probably go to the clubhouse later, I think, because his friend Max will be there for lunch because Max likes the French Dip on Thursdays and Frank just goes to talk politics, be with the boys.

Well, the French Dip then makes me think of slices of roast beef and the juice they give you in the cup. And naturally I think: that juice they give you is like liquid beef. It is. Not ground-into-pulp liquid beef. Not squeegeed beef, but I mean = liquid beef. Like the commercial says, the very essence. Yes that's right, I agree: the very essence. You don’t need the texture of the meat, because there in front of you is the beef. As a liquid. And it comes to me of course as spring follows winter that: people are going to be eating food like this in years to come. We all just need the nutrients and the tastes but the actual structure of the foods is not you know so important than if you can just have a cup of chicken or right: a squirt of pie.

Is this a good thing? I can’t tell. What I do know is that I like on movies and tv when someone in a far off galaxy – a human, right? – on a space ship – or even here at home – on our Planet Earth – pushes a square button on the wall and a panel you haven’t noticed before slides up and there you are: the meal of the day. In a cup, or maybe if it’s polite, the cup sits on a saucer. Or maybe the food is pink and square on a white plate next to a green ball. Lettuce and tomato. I get it.

But again, I think, is this a good thing? Food comes from the earth. My father rest his soul was a greengrocer’s and before that his father drove wagons from the farms into town. The guys who delivered every morning came in with dirty boots and dewy aprons. Some of them quite attractive. At least that’s how I remember it. And yet here we are now at the point where we can make whatever is or was the cow into a liquid that is or was him, the cow. I honestly can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not. Because it’s pretty smart of someone to go through all the trouble of figuring out how to do that and we shouldn’t say no to having people investigate new ways of doing things. That would be unethical and not good for society, right?

Now, the reason I’m on this, you know, track of reasoning is from this night out with my daughter Maureen the other night. And that she writes her own blog as she calls it about what she eats and where. Making a small name for herself and maybe meeting boys too. The girls today are free to be as crafty as the boys. I said craFFty. Any way, this very nice boy she brought with – his name was Jimmy, thank god, as in you know, a little Irish – the entire night he, the two of them spent talking about science. Such as, taking little bits of DNA from this that or the other thing and putting it to use somewhere else. A little here, put in a thing over there, is what I understood. I don't even think Frank was listening.

Now, do I think that’s good? I don’t know. I know I should, you know, be up on things, form opinions. But come on. I’m sixty-three years old. People smarter than I think this is the way to go. But I’ll eat soup, thank you very much, if everything’s going to be liquid. I don’t have to experience the wonder of somebody in a white coat taking a perfectly good living farm animal, whirl it up and separate it into molecules and then rearrange those molecules like beads on a string and voila! Your beef, hooves and all, is a rose. A real rose. That you snip from a branch. Because I have heard that that’s what they can do, in order to make the rose, I don't know, stronger? Strong like a cow? Well yes, excuse me, but they are doing that, at the very least thinking about it. Maybe not a rose because you don’t eat roses. But a cow, made into a pink flower, sitting on top of a green branch made out of I don’t know seaweed or maybe paper which probably wouldn’t have any taste any way, and if it did, it would definitely be sugar free to keep the bugs away? So ok: that would be impressive.

Any way, to continue: this is all going through my head at breakfast. It’s just like us, I decide, to try to convert a cow into its liquid form. In the laboratories. Because doing such a thing, it seems to me, and I was thinking this so help me God when Frank came in from his you know "morning elimination," I was thinking: if you look at where we are now and where we’ve been – first refrigeration, then instant noodles then Tang – remember Tang? – then of course, just listen: liquid cows. That's what's next. Because it is all part of the entire effort to blast into space and leave this planet behind. It’s clear to me. You can look back and see it all come to this.

And when we do blast off, we can’t take cows with us. What good would a cow in space or for that matter on another planet do? It’s almost like kidnapping, which unfortunately did make me smile a little on behalf of the poor cow wondering where the hell it’s being taken to and why, peeling past Saturn. But it's because we’ll want to have something cow-like, something to remember it by. It would make a body homesick for his planet when he should be piloting the space craft. Converting a cow into liquid is a lot less trouble in upkeep than having it in its four-legged version, you know – pardon the image – piling onto the white tile of the spaceship. Its hooves would probably not keep it upright on that kind of floor anyway. It’s like ice.

So that’s why I’m very quiet with Frank this morning. I don’t tell him anything: don’t touch my toast, or nicely, do you want your own? Because I’m sitting there, admittedly riveted with myself. As my daughter says, in my head. And still in my gown. Not realizing the tea’s got cold. Struck that we, the human race, all of us, are unconsciously working like demons, fighting wars, building skyscrapers, digging, I don't know, canals, just to .... well, in fact, I had this image of breaking out of the earth like you would from an egg. From the inside. Only, with a tremendous explosion. Fire with rocks and debris flying into the heavens with a bright powerful light pouring out of the center of the cracked open earth. Maybe we are supposed to go through all this trouble learning things, breaking things, cluttering everything up and then just like that rocketing off to distant planets without cows or butter or ants or flowers, hopefully bringing some of them with us, but I know, not all of them. Just leaving the earth behind like a messed up, stinking crib. The worse feeling.

So then I look at my husband. He was still reading his magazine. After all that. I felt like I just woke up. I mean, whew! And me, still sitting in my gown, not made up, at the table, with a plate of crumbs and my cold tea, and across from me, my husband, Frank. Who is now beyond pretending not to look, as if I don't exist. Just blissfully ignorant.

And yet here am I, sitting in my safflower kitchen on a cloudy spring day, an oldish, if you like, woman in a retirement village in a duplex which if you look down from on high it has a roof and a little white patio like all the others – if you just picked up that roof and saw tiny me sitting at my kitchen table with my tiny gnarly husband sitting with me there, you still wouldn’t have any idea what I was just thinking.

Which got me to wonder what I must look like. Its a bad habit, but I’ll sometimes put myself in Frank’s place for a moment and pretend to look at me staring off into space, thinking god knows what. It's a bad habit that always gets me to go leave the table at a restaurant or even in my own kitchen and take a look at myself, beautywise. But today I decided, well, why, if I was busy self-examining myself thinking these things, then why couldn’t I just put all these thoughts into him and watch him go through it himself and I watch him, step by step: first the French Dip, then the liquid beef, the meatflowers, breaking out of the egg, zooming off into space, so many thousands of years in the future that we, us two, myself and Frank and you, and everyone we know and their generations times ten, would be forgotten dust in the hooves of the cows rendered into liquid for the benefit of space travelers. Who maybe won’t even look like us? Right: he probably wouldn't bother at all.

Well any way, you had to be there. It seemed funnier when I sat there pretending Frank was thinking all this.


Peggy Anne Sullivan

Naples, FL

The Holly King, Part 13

 Start The Holly King here    |   Previous Part

In which Mashipan falls from the Church's graces, Carson's Christmas abruptly ends, as does his movie (though less so), and also this story.

 ◊      ◊     ◊

Roving, peaceful shots of old Mashipan, the mountain priory, under snow. A Mashipanite shovels a walk. A lingering shot of the complex from its nearby cemetery. All of the stones have crosses on them, some elaborate, some plain wood. Carson narrates.

“Peter’s funeral was where my brother met Father Archibald Solano. He and Peter knew each other from seminary. Father Archibald had just assumed the role of abbot to Mashipan. A monastery for roughly a hundred years. Then the church gave up on it, leasing it as a sanitarium. When a cure for TB was found, it was abandoned. Available to the first disenfranchised, disgusted man of God who saw it.”

Video footage of Solano on a Swedish talk show in the still hip, but strongly revolutionary early 1970s. He is finely, but austerely dressed in a white and gold clerical gown and the host, longhaired, bearded in a blue suit with wide lapels, is achingly serious.

“Mashipan,” Solano says to his interviewer, “is not the first time nor will it be the last time that a community of human beings grows out of their supernaturally shared belief that their own humanity is responsible for the suffering of the world, on the one hand. But is, on the other, the relief of that suffering. Many souls, acting as one.

“Where we are different, at Mashipan, is that we are refugees, eager for the monasticism of the earliest apostles, but which does not require any allegiance to or patronage from a crippling, denuded, oblivious paternal church. A church that is a manifestation of the order of things which needs overthrowing.”

The host can’t help asking, “Then what would say is the difference between your order and for example, the Red Brigade?”

Solano, dignified, grins. Pleased to answer. “Mashipan is devoted to two things: aiding and alleviating the poor and oppressed of their earthly burdens. And two, Christian fellowship. Fellowship in the name of Jesus Christ, involving Christian faith, though not necessarily allied to a given church or essential belief. Other than the continuation of its own fellowship under Christ.”

"By historical standards," Carson says, "Archibald Solano was in the right place at the right time to be a questioning, near heretical monk. Still under the sway of Vatican II, which attempted to open the church to the modernity swirling all around it in the early '60s, someone in the church hierarchy granted Solano  permission to re-access Mashipan and steer it accordingly. It may have also been a way to grant him his own mountaintop banishment."

Back to Humphrey, speaking to Carson.

“When Peter died, I was consumed with a new emptiness. Not only his physical absence, but also the absence of clues he provided when he was alive, ways to think and revelations on how to feel. One of them being Solano and Mashipan. I approached Father Archibald, met him, started correspondence with him. Mashipan was already operating eight or nine years.

“What do you hope out of a monastic life, he’d ask. Am I clear on the idea of it as a journey rather than an escape? As a service to others rather than a retreat from them? And I’d answer yes. Yes to all that. And he, Father Archibald, I won’t say patiently – he doggedly called me on every one of my answers: what are you agreeing to? Tell me what you are agreeing to.

You can hear Carson ask: “Did you know yourself?”

Humphrey nods. “I did. The entire time. It took shape as a game. I had started asking him out of grief, for Peter, and my loneliness. I decided that if this man really wants to know why a willfully destitute, overly educated – “ he twirls his fingers up past his head like smoke “ – fucked in the head son of the upper class is alternately begging for, and intellectually playing with, the limits to his theology, I would lay it on him. If he chickens out, the whole thing was wrong to begin with.

“So I wrote him a letter that said...:”

Cut to a new shot of Humphrey wearing glasses and standing, with one foot forward reading his letter. He rocks on his heels as he reads, with more animation than he’s shown sitting down. The punk on the hood of the car throwing stones, reawakened.

“...Even the most ascetic hermit, the nakedest, hungriest, unwashed man in a crevice in the desert – in fact he especially – has an ego bulging in proportion to the extent of his asceticism. In other words, the ego of the dirty naked little mute in the desert is greater than all others because he says ‘I will make myself so worthless to prove my devotion. I will handicap myself, God, I will give up everything, even You, to prove my devotion.’

“A submissive to God stays in her home, goes through all that the priests command: marriage, all the weekly services, charity, confession, and casts her eyes humbly to the cross nailed on her wall at night, waiting. Waiting to join her God. Does God want submission?

“What I do not propose is a blind following of orders and papal utterances. My devotion is to synthesizing and then dispensing the quality of love and compassion that is said to come from God. But without diluting it one second to worshiping or even mentioning that God.

“What I propose, with my monasticism, is to be responsible for stopping my line in the progeny of my family. Stop it dead. Stop it from infiltrating society, insinuating its vein of accumulated awfulness into a world that is already choking on millions of others. Do what I can to improve that world, just a little, by my absence. Exist fully as the unexpected outlier. The random particle of chaos that does good. But from a long, unstaining distance.”

When he’s finished reading he lowers the letter and looks through the camera to Carson. You can see his chest rise, breathing.

Back to Humphrey, seated, recording his face as it evaluates his younger brother’s reactions. Whose voice you can then barely make out.

“You told me once your intention was to cut off this limb, your limb, in our family tree and end the dysfunction there. No children to pass it along. But there have been many many men and women like you. Hermits and suicides. Through the centuries. And yet here we are. Still.”

Humphrey leans back in his chair, his angled face sloping in consolation and grave attention. His feathery eyelashes blink once or twice. The moment hangs and descends. “You’re right. Engaging with atonement – striving to be at one with the divine – is not new. It still needs to occur in every generation.

“I know my atonement is presumptuous. Maybe even preposterous. And violent. Ad absurdum. And that letter was written along time ago.

“Still," Humphrey says, shifting in his chair, "the trick, Father Archibald eventually said to me, after months and months of not hearing from him, is not to make the atonement destructive. Or constructive. Just neutral. So that the intention of atonement lifts and the act of atonement remains. This leapt off the page at me. We were arriving at the same harmonious thought, from my time squatting and hating, to his simultaneous war with but love for his church, across lives and experiences and continents unknowable to one another and yet converging on the same source of beatitude.”

Over images of his brother performing chores and the necessary small jobs required of life in a monastery, Carson says: “When my brother says he wrote the founder of Mashipan, Father Archibald, letters of presumption, he doesn’t say that Father Archibald also found something in Humphrey’s words that fit his model of Mashipan.

“When my brother arrived, the order of monasticism was still intact, with a daily schedule, a series of liturgical activities, maintenance and chores, and one or two programs of Christian ministry. My brother refused to participate in any of them. Older brothers and men of God were astounded not just by his laziness or apostasy, but with Father Archibald’s willingness to permit someone like him among the pious, without any other duties expected from him. Father Archibald waited until my brother found a way to fit in.

Clips of Humphrey tuning, plucking haltingly, perhaps not so well because it looks difficult, a theorbo in the refuge of his cell (I had to look that up).

“His solitary atonement disappeared. Instead, my brother assigned himself curatorial duties. Gathering, archiving art and music. All of which, in its day, was meant to be devotional. But whose beauty and coherence he thought was transcendant. Whose sorrows or joys would no longer be expressed through Christianity. But could be experienced like art everywhere else. Expressions of reverence. Not to a diety but to the condition of the universe.

"Canticles honoring the Virgin became songs honoring the wonder of biological, carnal motherhood. Motets exulting the death of Jesus became fragile, compassionate songs of mourning and pity.”

Humphrey continues. “In retrospect I can see how disruptive I might have been, even to men who followed a very liberal, revolutionary priest like Solano to live here. They and I had much in common politically, morally, but the shell of their faith separated us. Or me from them.

“I would tease them to look at the eucharist. See? A tasteless white wafer. A body has tasty fat and blood and flesh. Or goad them into argument, like, why is loving kindness or forgiveness the only vehicle to an afterlife? Or even, why is there a redundancy like afterlife at all? I must have been very annoying. Childish.

“And yet Solano said nothing. To any of us, about this.”

Carson suggests: “Like Ingmar Bergman’s god of silence.”

Humphrey, it seems, doesn’t share his brother’s taste for cinema. He smiles, generously. “That was Solano’s preference. No authoritative interference. Without banishing me, he doomed several brothers into questioning themselves, their faith, their choice of coming to Mashipan, which to many was a last clerical resort. Some even questioned their service under Christ.”

“And you?”

“His silence, as you put it, condemned me again towards that solitary nihilism I thought I escaped from with Peter. I was again on my way to living a dancing, foolish half life of only questioning, without mercy or leniency, and an all-consuming self regard. Fortunately I learned. An exquisite teacher.”

Over images of monastic life at Mashipan, monks and novices dining, at prayer, in the kitchen, raking leaves, reading, Carson adds: “Many of the brothers left. But many replaced them, notably women. And despite the heresies being entertained on the mountain, it was news of the presence of women, commingling, that upset the diocese.

“Meanwhile, as if an unspoken spell or virus crept among the order, monks like my brother began one by one discussing and petitioning Father Archibald for the freedom of direction and action they knew was occurring off the mountain, among the nonreligious.

“They were hearing about NGOs and other secular groups doing essentially the church’s work without need for or direction of the church. Or even government. Groups of lay people, atheists included, devoted to alleviating the burdens of the poor without the underpinnings of spiritual doctrine. Fundamental morality was all the inspiration required.

“They were discovering that even Father Archibald’s radically stretched Christianity was getting in the way.

Humphrey in his cell: “I – one day we found ourselves arguing whether it was better that the contemplation of life resulted in compassionate service to others or the creation of art. And for some reason, after years of terrible arguments among us, in which brothers would break down or leave or even renounce their faith, for some reason that one argument cast a pall over us that lasted months.

“It was as if we had exhausted ourselves in argumentation. Our critical thinking was enervated.”

“Why?”

“Because, we had reached the point where we were questioning the very reason we were together. Productive contemplation requires peace and separation. Solicitude. Especially if you’re contemplating life through the teachings and example of Jesus. That is such an exquisite filter to think through, you need peace and solicitude just to approach any kind of understanding. Even I, poking the other brothers, never really advocated dispensing with Jesus. Just the doctrines built around him.

“Except that in reality, living via the teachings and example of Jesus means deliberately adding a burden to everything you do, especially contemplation. In contemplation, or call it prayer or meditation, you don’t want anything in the way. That’s exactly what you’re trying to overcome: anything that stands in the way between you and perfect living silence. 

“So the question became, why contemplate at all? Why sit up here, away from society if the precious thinking is not limitless and leads nowhere? Isn’t it better to either dedicate yourself to helping others or creating art than find the right Christian or spiritual impulse from your contemplation? Retreating is not advancing. These were the very reasons Father Archibald called to us. And this dynamic was being hampered – hamstrung – by a religion locked in nostalgia for a view of the universe that was already 2000 years old.

“When we realized this, we didn’t think oh this is terrible! In fact I’d say we thought it was a relief to identify one of the causes of sorrow in life and begin the work to circumvent it. When sister Yvonne decided to take off the cross around her neck and still desire living here as a base for her work, just not as a bride to Jesus, but as a woman, that was the start.”

Photographs of Archibald Solano in the pulpit. Reading and writing at his desk from his enormous ministerial chair. And one final one of Solano, with help from Humphrey and two other younger, stronger monks, heaving the chair into an enormous bonfire in the courtyard of Mashipan.

Carson: “After too many years of discontent and discouragement from the church, Father Archibald began to wrench his community from its see. It is a long, heretical and administrative process. But the day eventually came.”

Humphrey says, “When that letter arrived, turning Mashipan over to him, to us, it was an overcast day, in summer. Father Archibald had us all together in the courtyard and he read it – he and we were not surprised it finally arrived – but after reading the indifferent, formal termination, he added in his next breath, ‘And the earth said welcome.’ That felt like freedom.”

Workers at Mashipan carry crates and boxes as well as sagging, heavy looking rug rolls wrapped in paper to a staging area near the edge of the mountain. A transom has been rigged to hoist these items down to a loading area a thousand or more feet below. 

“My brother tells me that even before Father Archibald took ill, the community was already carefully making their way into a future where no one religion was adequate. Where, in fact, religion itself was problematic.”

From a balcony or loft, we look over a long high sanctuary toward its chancel and apse. Along its length, an abundance of heavy red, purple and yellow insulating drapery. Red carpet runs down the middle of what would be the nave, but the only pew is being carried away by two of the workers.

"The new mission Mashipan has found for itself is beyond ecumenical. One the one hand, its creativity in working with youth, in working to alleviate poverty little by little, in putting itself near those who are suffering is its strongest expression.

On spiritual matters, it is groping toward a reverence for the sacred that is not bound by anything other than its presence. The sacred moment is what the Mashipan community is after. And it hopes to keep a space for sacredness to perpetually fill in, the way an eternal flame is perpetually stoked. And one of the ways it tries to do that is by eliminating traditional icons of the religious. Icons which, as the thinking goes, trigger associations of the sacred which may be a step away from the actual sacred moment."

Humphrey walks through the snow, carrying a thermos to the men working near the obelisk. From a distance we see them put down their tools and meet him, taking cups and happily watching over the coffee pour. Tilting up, we see the cross is carefully, oh so carefully, lifting off its mount by a swarm of ropes.

"Having attended some of their lectures, though, I have to admit that they are still finding their way to useful inspiration. Fire and brimstone sermons may make the sacred sound crazy, but they are at least interesting."

A prolonged wide shot of a forest at snow-filled twilight. Then, cutting in, the bough of an evergreen bobs with snow and a spectral black takeoff of a bird. A ravine, overseen by hunched trees, seems even more still when you notice it’s a frozen stream. The wind pulls powdery snow from tree tops across the haze of an overcast dimming sun.

“I always meant to visit my brother at Christmas. I thought I’d do my interview with him and then experience what I thought would be a quiet seclusion of Christmas at Mashipan. In fact, when I got there I realized I couldn’t even be sure whether they celebrated Christmas at all."

Shots of Humphrey’s empty room and kept bed. “The third day I was at Mashipan, it was Christmas Eve. My brother was gone when I woke up and gone for most of the day. I didn’t know where he was, but we had covered most of what I wanted us to talk about, so I didn’t think about it too much. I took walks with my camera."

Shots of the men and women of Mashipan working, walking, reading. Another shot of the cemetery, cloistered among trees and overlooking a turgid gray snow cloud covering, and perhaps sprinkling snow on, the valley below.

"I was looking forward to filming and maybe participating in the Christmas service."

Down in the New Mashipan basilica. People busily fit hundreds of little sconces and chandeliers and votives with candles, adjust electric lights in the rafters, and, shoelessly, vacuum the huge red carpeting that forms the sacred heart of the sanctuary.

"I was certain that the service would beautiful. Perhaps even attaining sacredness. And I was especially looking forward to shooting my brother in attendance. That was more or less the shot I wanted all along. Why I was here. And then this happened.”

Humphrey leaning in his doorway, hands in pockets, seeming a little irritable, a little rushed, a little tired. Carson's voice. "I'm sorry, can you ... I'm ready."

Humphrey, after a patient inhale: "Alright. Take two. The news is I'm going to have to send you down to the valley. There's a room set aside for you. You can stay as long as you like, take what ever pictures and video you like."

Long hold on Humphrey, as if he's waiting for the camera to stop. "Because .... " Carson leads him, but Humphrey won't go there.

"That's enough. You should go. I have to go. I'm sorry. Someone is waiting outside to take you down." Humphrey turns and leaves the doorway empty. Carson lingers on it a while.

"Like I said earlier, I was surprised to find out that Father Max had come to Mashipan a few years ago. And I hoped I could meet him. When Humphrey said he wasn't well, I didn't know that he was in the Mashipan infirmary, dying."

Cut to the Mashipan grounds. Dusk is settling, fighting back against the grainy limits of Carson's video. First a shot looking up at Humphrey's room, which is dark. Then panning down to meet Humphrey walking towards the camera. Hands still in pockets, Humphrey strides with purpose, withdrawn. He walks briskly past Carson who quickly pans to keep up with his passing brother. And then changes his mind peremptorily reaching for and hugging Carson. The camera swings up and around as Carson returns the hug. "I'm sorry," Humphrey says, very closely, the mic on the camera jostling. "Next year, ok?"

"Of course," Carson says. The camera swings back down when Humphrey lets go. When Carson steadies it, we see Humphrey continuing away, up a path to another building near by. A little wooden sign out front says Infirmary. Carson holds the shot as Humphrey yanks open the door and enters, closing it behind him. The camera timidly searches up the face of the building, finding a window with warm yellow light. A grainy, smudged figure steps gently past the window.

Voices, a congregation, singing "Silent Night." The New Mashipan basilica. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people in the enormous candlelit space, ribboned and billowing with colorful wall hangings and drapes. Faces of people singing, following the words, glancing at one another. Children on the floor, some squirming. A woman, eyes solemnly ahead as if listening to the words she's singing. She turns to the camera, to Carson, to us, and smiles.

Outside the basilica, whose windows also shine from the inside. There's just enough light to sense its size, the forest nearby and the snow. And while the congregation continues singing, the camera tilts up, past the trees, up the cold crags of the mountain to the faintly lit monastery where Humphrey resides.

Fade.

Blackness. Sound of Humphrey’s voice. “Sure, one more question. Go ahead.” Fade in on Humphrey, still in the chair, being interviewed.

“What are your thoughts about Christmas?”

Humphrey’s taken aback a little. Carson’s question seems preposterous to him, with even some room for humor.

“Well ...” he starts, then apparently swallows a joke. “You’re still making this documentary about Christmas. Ok. Christmas – the time of the year around Christmas – seems the perfect time for reflection. And maybe a little more than that. Some fun and partying. Why not?"

Carson waits for more to come. "Is that it?"

Humphrey realizes he's not going to get away with just that. He takes a moment. “As an event, a dedicated holiday, well, this is what I think: I think about what it must have felt like to soldiers in the barracks of Rome, every year watching more and more people begin to celebrate the life of an executed Jewish political prisoner. And find their own belief about Mithras and his resurrection, become less meaningful. Less inspiring. The other thing people are talking about and finding inspiration in, that belief that excites other people so much starts to seem more relevant.

"I think about the quandry they must have gone through, the anger or incredulity they must have felt that at the same time of year they dedicated to Mithras, people were celebrating something else. More and more. At some unnoticed time, in some forgotten year the last few people who cared to celebrated Mithras got together one last time and never did so again. I'm afraid that’s what I think of during Christmas."

Another Humphrey pause. His fingers then fiddle with something on his chest, the mic. "Is that it? Are we – " Off goes the mic with a click. Black wipes across the screen.

Then, snow falls over the pines on Mashipan's ledge of the world. The snow falls without direction or drive. It falls on the garden, it falls on the stone benches and on the workers at the top of the scaffolding carefully ratching chains around the base of the cross which are hooked to cradling lines running up to a crane whose long yellow arm is grounded to a four wheeled machine waiting to lift and gently remove the cross from the top of the promontory.

*          *          *

Even after I turned off the DVD player, I felt Carson’s movie linger in the apartment. I was hungry, but didn't want anything. I decided not to form any critical decisions about his movie yet. Then again, I didn't know when I'd see him again. I felt a little embarrassed, for myself and for Carson, that someone would spend so much effort weighing the effects of religion on a holiday, especially Christmas. I'm not very religious myself.

Still, I felt edgy, a little dislocated, and really didn't want to ask why. The Bangalorean heat in my apartment moved me from the couch to my open doorway. Outside my garden apartment, the green of the shrubs and trees and the shroud of rain pouring down seemed like a separate, uncontrollable reality I could walk right into.

I knew I had to work and glanced at my watch. The hour was getting late, but the date, which didn’t matter to me before, grabbed my attention. It was June 23. I’d missed the summer solstice and in fact, I, or we, were already heading down the long long long fragrant path toward Carson’s darkness and delight, a winter future already underway. I ran my finger along the dripping edge of an ivy leaf.

The end /

Mithraeum (temple to Mithras), Ostia, Italy

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"The Holly King" © CMMartin 2011