69. Another short story while you're waiting for "The Secret War . . . " to resume. (Sorry for the delay.)

The Mason Jar Incident

A long time ago, at the tender age of five (still early in my development as a rotten little kid), I found myself one day sitting alone in my grandmother’s parlor, a little room cramped with too much overstuffed furniture, probably shipped from the old country (a.k.a. Sweden). At least it smelled as though it had been stowed with the bilge at the bottom of a freighter for a long, long voyage.

The circumstances for my visit I don’t recall. I may have been prevented from attending a distant relative’s funeral, for fear that I’d become too curious about the corpse. It was a risk, I’ll admit. There was a phase in my life when I liked to touch anything inanimate—a dead squirrel or mouse, a half-eaten finch left on the driveway by the neighborhood stray. Then again, I may have been sent to Grandmother’s house as punishment for my habitual apple stealing, which was strictly a seasonal weakness on my part.

At the edge of an overstuffed chair I sat, my left knee twitching. On the table in front of me stood a bowl overflowing with mints, soft little cubes that, if left out too long, would eventually turn into little jaw breakers. They looked tempting. Then again, my knee was twitching. Clearly, hard decisions lay ahead.

While Grandmother fiddled in the kitchen, I quietly took a single mint and waited. No repercussions. No sudden snap of a horsewhip. I returned to the bowl and took small handfuls, which eventually turned into large handfuls, which eventually turned into an empty candy bowl and one very hyped up five year old. My knee was now twitching uncontrollably. My lack of self-restraint was clearly an issue.

Grandmother entered the parlor noiselessly and stood in front of me, her bourbon barrel body blotting out the kitchen light, eclipsing my hope for anything short of Armageddon. Smiling at first, she wiped her dish hands on a cloth stuffed into her apron. Then she looked at the candy bowl. Then she took out a Kleenex stashed in her sleeve and blotted her brow. (In fact, I have since learned that in order to qualify as a grandmother elderly women were required to have at least one Kleenex stashed in their sleeves. If they wore perfume reminiscent of an old tuna can left opened on the back step for the better part of the summer, they automatically received a lifetime membership in the Grandmother’s Club.) Then she looked at me. I was hoping she couldn’t read my mind, but something told me she could. Her eyes grew smaller by the second. Back and forth, to the candy bowl and to me, over and over again. For about twenty minutes was my best guess.

Finally, in a conspiratorial tone, she whispered to me, “My dear little Woody, would you do me a favor?” Her dentured breath poured over me like a thousand ancient casseroles, not all entirely successful.

Who was I to refuse? I had already committed a crime against humanity.

“I need some mason jars,” she continued. “Would you be a little dear and get them from the cellar?”

She led me to the cellar door. It opened with an agonized creak and released the stale air of the souls of a thousand rotten little kids, I had imagined. She gave me a little shove—at least at my tender age of five it felt like a shove--and down the steep and narrow steps I crept to a little room surrounded by shelves of mason jars, cobwebs, shadows, unknown evils, and the occasional creaking sound, as if the entire cellar were on the precipice of caving in, entombing me forever. I considered for several long moments the unfairness of being entombed in a dark and dank pickle cellar at the tender age of five just because my grandmother had ordered it so. “I’ll need three,” she ordered from the top of the stairs.

As I reached for the jars, the door slammed shut. “A monster! A monster!” Her voice howled, animated, unworldly. “Watch out for the monster! Woody! Woody! Save yourself!” Never before that moment had I any reason to believe adults were capable of guile. The mason jars leapt from my hands and crashed on the concrete floor. I scrambled up the steps. The door was locked. My mind raced: Was it locked or was an unmovable object—an enormous, flower-print sack of grandmotherly spite--blocking it from opening? I still don’t recall to this day. Then the 40-watt bulb in the cellar died. “Monsters! So many monsters!” echoed from just inches away through the old plank door. 

I pounded and cried, “Grandma, Grandma, help! The door is locked! Let me out!” I could feel the monsters tugging at my sneakers. Soon I’d be pulled down into the darkness and eaten alive, my bones broken into pieces and stored in the remaining mason jars. What’s worse, I was no longer confident of maintaining control of my bodily functions.

“Oh . . . you’re still here,” Grandmother said, letting the door fall open, her voice filled with bitter disappointment. “I’m beginning to think you’re more trouble than you’re worth.” She held out a huge straw broom and a tin dustpan.

Later that afternoon, we watched TV together, a new episode of Gilligan’s Island, on her black and white Magnavox, which occasionally flashed a clear image of the Professor and my favorite--Ginger. Sitting too close, Grandmother scratched my scalp affectionately, as if checking for lice.  

I hadn’t noticed when it happened, but a fresh supply of candy awaited me in the candy bowl—like bait below a deer stand.

Grandmother cleared her throat, which was never a good sign. “I’m going to need another favor,” she began. “There’s something in the attic,” her breath warm and fragrant like sour dough biscuits, “after the program, of course.”  

I glanced up at Grandmother, her eyes gazing through sparkly glasses at the old Magnavox, both of my knees now jiggling uncontrollably. “It won’t take but a minute.”

As I examined her rouge and powder and networks of veins and crevices, her face betrayed the faintest wisp of a smile, an indecipherable smile, a smile I’d never even begin to understand for years beyond my training as a rotten little kid.

68. A Revised Short Story Primer (because the previous story sucked--a warning not to be in a hurry to finish)

American Routine

When he finally gets up, Rahm has no idea what will occur in his otherwise routine day. But why would he know? Why would he know that at 4:19 p.m. Rahm will be in the middle of a highway pile up, and he will learn how to read an American word, a four-letter word, backwards?

1

Rahm gets up at 5:55 a.m. after five reminders from the alarm.  His head hurts. He hates getting up, although he’s been  awake  most of the night, insomnia his longest, most steadfast nighttime companion. His two kittens are asleep at the foot of his bed. His new companions. When they're not fighting with each other, they're attacking his toes, sometimes drawing blood.

The radio alarm reveals a British voice on an NPR station. She describes the latest killing in Syria and a bombing in Turkey. Her voice is pleasant enough. She’s professional, detached, slightly sly. As she talks authoritatively, Rahm’s mind wanders to the next-door neighbor—about whether he may be plotting against Rahm, considering Second Amendment solutions, a term in vogue in an American political season. A few days back, the neighbor received a nuisance citation; Rahm’s complained too many times about his dog to the local police department. (The dog, the now popular pitbull, once charged him like an Aleppo militant, full of hate and fanaticism, while he was mowing a clearly defined border between the two yards.) Rahm wonders whether a $100 citation would push the blue collar, unstably employed neighbor into an act of extremism.

It’s still dark outside. The fan next to Rahm’s bed is whirring and oscillating; it’s supposed to screen distracting noises to help him sleep, although he still heard the neighbor’s car start and his dog’s earlier barking around midnight. Rahm wonders how well versed his neighbor is in plotting a car bombing; his bedroom window is only feet from the neighbor’s driveway, separated by a flimsy peek-a-boo fence. He imagines that a small car filled with C-4 and propane canisters could create a reasonably large mural of his blood and bits of brain and bone splattered, Jackson Pollock style, against his bedroom wall. He thinks about his kittens, how a bomb would mingle their little furry bits with his, fusing their DNA; a larger bomb could reduce Rahm to a vaporized memory. Rahm wants to suffocate himself under his pillows, to grasp a few more fleeting moments of freedom against the chains of responsibility. He wonders who will take care of his kittens if they somehow survive--the nine lives thing and all.

Rahm’s been awake for hours, yet he feels instinctly as though he has slipped back into a restless sleep for perhaps a few moments at a time. He awakes from a dream at 3:47 a.m.—he remembers the time because he religiously checks his watch. Rahm remembers only parts of the dream: He’s returning from work only to find his garage has been emptied, the doors left open, and his kittens nowhere to be found. Despite his lack of sleep, he routinely experiences brief snippets of dreams: People are trying to shoot him or he’s trying to outrun tornadoes, sandstorms, tanks. This morning, Rahm confronts a man, holding his own severed head like a basketball at his side. He's wearing Rahm's favorite T-shirt, now splattered with blood and hot dog mustard. The head of the man looks despondent, his eyes downward, hopeless. It’s Rahm.

On the previous Monday morning he awoke at 2:15 a.m. and never returned to sleep. His body, tense and stricken, tells him to be ever vigilant. Its inner voice can’t be ignored. Routine. This morning, now Tuesday, he gets out of bed, feeling somewhat more rested. The dread, well, that’s a sticky partner who gives him a break on Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes, though, the dread stays with him, like an unwanted tagalong, sweating, as if after a long jog. 

Rahm almost thought long job. It’s been 17 years; he wonders how long the remaining three years will linger until 2021—that’s his goal. To survive his neighbor. His pitbull. His potential Improvised Explosive Device. His own nightmares. Rahm hopes to avoid ending up disfigured or incarcerated or lodged in a wood chipper . . . And his job, he never wanted it, but applied for it out of a lack of better options, then accepted the job offer, and grew through complacency and hopelessness to accept it. He also hopes, before wholesale layoffs or arbitrary firings, his job will survive long enough to allow him to cross the threshold of minimal twenty-year pension security. He wonders what he’d do without a job—where the hopelessness of unemployment would take him.

In the kitchen, Rahm switches on the coffee maker with just enough water for half a cup. That’s all he can handle—just enough caffeine to sharpen his thinking without sending shudders down his spine. His breakfast consists of six or seven sugar slathered wheat biscuits drenched in milk. Blueberry this time. Sometimes, strawberry. Or vanilla. It doesn’t matter. Rahm pushes down his pills with the milk and biscuits; they mix into an artificially flavored, pharmaceutically fortified wad of morning routine. Now awake, his kittens climb up his t-shirt and jump on the kitchen table. Rahm’s already thinking about the commute ahead. His stomach gurgles. He refills his kittens’ water bowl, strokes them the length of their tiny bodies, and leaves.

2

Twilight dimly lights the neighborhood. Feeling the chill of an approaching autumn, Rahm scans the front yard, the taller shrubs; he listens to the blue jays, surveys the neighbors, their cars, their TVs flashing early-morning cartoons from their living room windows. It has become something of a self-protective habit to assess his surroundings, to listen for possible changes in the birds’ or squirrels’ chatter. Rahm feeds them every day, spending a fortune every year on sunflower seeds, peanuts, and suet blocks. At first it was just a harmless hobby. Now he thinks the routine, and its early warning system the blue jays and gray squirrels and even the chickadees provide, is well worth the expense. Their self-protective surveillance and Rahm’s well-being create a symbiotic relationship.

His cell phone rings. Rahm sees the number and refuses to answer. Then, it happens, the explosion of a villainous, unchecked exhaust system violating the morning calm. Across the street to the west lurks a felon, shaven head, body tattooed--a Harley rider, a noise terrorist, a catalyst for jangled nerves. His hog often scares Rahm’s kittens into a retreat under the sofa. He revs it, incessantly, as if flipping the neighborhood an early-morning bird, then explodes up the street. Rahm listens to the grinding of gears, the Harley swooping through traffic on the main highway. The felon is heading back to the County lock-up, where he spends his working days, his productive years, behind bars. Rahm wonders how the felon will ever collect Social Security, whether such a possibility is a moot point. Rahm wonders whether the homegrown felon ever thinks about him. He checks his phone again.

Before leaving, Rahm double-checks the door lock, then takes a long, uneasy breath. He’s considering installing surveillance cameras. Home security, cyber security, the all-watching eye. The new routine.

As he creeps up the street, Rahm surveils the apartment building running the length of three houses; he watches the upper windows, the movement of shadows and lights, the possible glint of a sniper rifle. He notices the parking lot full of utility vehicles, vans, and trucks. Rahm imagines himself in France, sees a silver refrigerated truck, sees the driver—a bulky, unshaven brute—accelerating, his engine whining, accidentally losing control, knocking over a power pole, crushing Rahm’s car, the high-voltage currents shocking him to a horror-movie-like-death. Rahm plays out these scenarios routinely, his mind infected by social media, the nightly images, if not in the movies then on CNN and FOX and RT and the rest, his imaginings just a tiny cell of a growing national neurosis—Paris, Nice, Orlando, Istanbul, San Bernadino, Mosul, Aleppo, etc., etc., etc. 

His imaginings, he also assumes, belie the effectiveness of his breakfast concoction in adjusting the chemical levels coursing through his limbic system. He should probably make a U-turn and call in sick.

Instead, he takes the usual route, heading east, the sky still clotting the rising sun. Usually, the rising sun challenges him to forfeit his daily commute, its light burning stringy webs of red lines in his eyes, its glare sometimes erasing the highway ahead. Every weekday, the beautiful burning ball of billions of hydrogen bombs welcomes him to pull the covers back over his head, to soak in the sweaty comfort of his unwashed sheets—if only.  

He’s in a convoy of anxious commuters, all in a rush, crowding him. He thinks about the kittens—from a rescue shelter, undocumented aliens, perhaps little terrorists in training. Who knows their lineage? They like to attack his hands, feet, neck; he’s covered in shrapnel wounds from their razor-like canines and claw attacks. Will they assimilate? Will they take on his peace-loving, bare-foot-at-home lifestyle? Or will they turn atavistic, pre-modern, uncivilized and unrepentant?

An SUV honks because Rahm won’t risk pulling out into speeding traffic; the SUV continues to make his point by tailgating Rahm, mile after mile after mile. Rahm’s mind drifts to images of convoys, like a vertebra, severed by an IED, shattered and burned, a single SUV like a disc, blown off to one side and left on its side to disintegrate. His shoulders and neck stiffen; his blood pressure surges, overriding the effects of his meds. This day is not off to a good start, but it’s also routine.  From the night before—having a drink that turns into two drinks. Mixing alcohol with diphenhydramine, swimming in its own alcohol. The grogginess will last until about two in the afternoon; it’s replaced by a slow dying off of hundreds if not thousands of neurons. Rahm can feel himself grow duller. Routine.

3

At work, thoughts about returning home to his kittens consume Rahm. He wonders whether they’ll get themselves into trouble, whether they’ll get themselves into something from which they can’t escape. At lunchtime he wanders the halls. He checks his phone. Coworkers have conspicuously avoided sitting with him in the break room. They’ve concluded that he may well be among the others. A few of the younger women tease him, pinch his copper cheeks. Others will ruffle his dark wavy hair. He tolerates their actions to appear unthreatening. Men just grunt, openly speculating about whether he is a little too effeminate. It’s easier than to view Rahm as a threat, as someone susceptible to wearing vests, etc., etc. Their minds too are infected.

To while away the hours until he can exit the building, sigh a long sigh of relief, and repeat the commute home, he keeps a little notepad on his desk and periodically records notations in it, a sort of countdown, with a variety of different numbers on it. His countdown has four columns: first, a column to indicate the current time; then a column with hash marks to indicate the number of hours left in his day. To make his measurements more interesting, Rahm then translates the hash marks into numerical representations of the remaining hours. Finally, in the fourth column, he translates the hours into minutes. When the final column is down to two digits, he feels his spirits lift; when it’s down to one digit, he’s giddy—the suicide bombing, without the fatalities, of another day of corporate drudgery. Occasionally, he adorns the numbers with little sketches of kittens. Rahm repeats this ritual every day, out of sight of other employees who might question his focus and allegiance to his job. He also flips his browser tab from time to time to see the online headlines in the New York Times; he goes to the World page, sees the rubble, the twisted metal, the fires spewing black smoke, the potholes filled with blood, children carrying AK-47s, sees the anguished faces, some blank with shock, sees his family in all the shattered families.  

Rahm knows he’ll never be promoted.

4

On his way home, Rahm is tranquil, expectant. He sets the cruise control and starts to unwind, surrounded by cornfields drying like crackling paper, curled like unread reports. He’s thinking about his kittens. Rahm wonders whether they will come to life from their slumber and meet him at the door. They usually do. He counts on that. It’s become a routine. Rahm’s thinking about the yard that needs mowing, and he’s thinking he likes to cut grass. It shows that he’s accomplished something. Yardwork gives him a greater sense of accomplishment than his nearly twenty years on the job—yet Rahm’s also anxious about whether his neighbor in his sweaty neon t-shirt will surveil him as he re-establishes the boundary line with his riding lawnmower. Another border war in the making. 

He listens to the radio, NPR, already well into a discussion about a high school student’s anxiety. The moderator probes the subject, clinically.  Some days, according to the student’s parents, they have to put a red sign in the window. It’s a signal to the bus driver, and it means he’s too anxiety-ridden to leave his bedroom and face the world. Rahm listens intently, hoping to hear solutions to the poor boy’s problems. This is an American boy, Rahm thinks.

A MACK truck is edging closer, nearly tailgating. It’s been following Rahm for miles, at first maybe 15 seconds behind him, then maybe 5. The truck is now just a second behind Rahm, menacing.  Up ahead, Rahm sees a mini van parked at the end of a driveway off to the right. It must be waiting, he thinks. Two golden retrievers dance and spin near the parked van. As he watches the dogs, a bus pulls out in front of Rahm from a side street and stops almost immediately, its flashers on, its STOP arm extended. Rahm brakes hard. A little girl dives off the bus and flings her arms around the dogs. 

The MACK truck fills Rahm’s rearview mirror, its all-cap letters appearing backwards. It encroaches, crowding the mirror, the MACK emblem growing, growing—its air powered horn blaring like a thousand angry pitbulls, smoke pouring from its seized tires. Rahm grips his steering wheel; the face of the MACK driver comes into view, a stogie stumbling down his Al-Baghdadi face. He’s waving his arms and cursing. Momentum carries his gravel load over his hood, crashing down like a breaker against molded metal and asphalt. It’s my turn. I’ll join the others. And what right do I have to deny it? Rahm closes his eyes, his hands clenching the steering wheel, prepared. His kittens are bounding for him as he enters the living room, their backs arched, ready for battle, already lunging for the newspaper dangling from his hand. One pounces on his loose shoelace. When he discovers he hasn’t been crushed or buried in gravel or burned alive in a fiery crash, Rahm opens his eyes and exhales.

5

When Rahm gets home, he treats his kittens to an extra-large can of beef and gravy, food that he’s been saving for himself, along with a baked potato from his own garden. As the kittens eat, Rahm cleans their litter pan. Routine. Every day. Then he sits down and watches the news. The multi-vehicle accident leads. Rahm watches intently as the Sky Cam Eye in the Sky video footage shows a mess of cars in the ditch and the MACK truck rolled over, its contents sprayed across the roadway. Rahm’s car is at rest behind the bus. Neither is damaged. The reporter notes no one in the ditch was seriously injured, students had already been unloaded from the school bus, and MACK Al-Baghdadi was cited for speeding in a school zone. Rahm switches the channel to CNN screaming "Breaking New!" in the background: More dead, more wounded, more bombs, more ghastly images--repeated on a loop.

Rahm turns off the TV and plays with his kittens. They bite his hands, a little too hard. It’s the best part of Rahm’s day . . . He looks at his watch--only twelve hours and thirty-seven minutes until the routine begins again—his routine, an American Routine, toward an American Dream read backwards.