Joyland

Istanbul

mathew — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 20:35:01 -0500

One begins with the materials at hand. One begins with the materials that are left behind. One begins—here. And here. And here. A suitcase open on a bed. A new pair of sandals, suede with rubber soles. A floral print blouse; white, pleated shorts, size twelve. A pair of linen capri pants. One begins in the middle of other beginnings. One begins long after the crowd has gone and the seats gape empty and all is still. One begins just before the encore. It all overlaps. Her end began—where? Her beginning ended here, scarcely past the prelude, and all the rest dissolved into silence. Now the seats gape, silent. The programs litter the floor though all the print has faded. But what was ended is also still present (the woman who is standing in the wings insists). Still a scent or something like it: a body just around the corner or just at the end of a long distance call. Some call. Some time. Even if it never comes. And what has begun is tremulous and hollow, driven solely by the insistence of the heart (this heart) to blindly prolong its rhythm and also by the brusque momentum of time. A day passed doggedly, then a week, then two, then a month, then three months, and now so many as fourteen, though she resisted and resisted. Fourteen months and twenty-four days and at least a couple of hours, because now, here, it is 11:22 am (11:23, 11:24, 11:25) and then, when it happened—the end of her beginning, the beginning of her end—it was shortly before dawn. Which the woman remembers because the sun came up and she didn’t understand how such a thing could happen. She looked to the window with its clattering blinds and the sun was like someone else’s sun, and she knew it would be henceforth. She begins now not willingly but as a janitor begins, mechanical and slow. A suitcase open on a bed. Sandals, capri pants, Ziploc bags because she read that somewhere, and little containers of shampoo and conditioner. Dental floss, toothpaste, a blue plastic case for her toothbrush. These are the things from the drugstore, where she stood before the bins of travel-sized toiletries for an admittedly excessive period of time. (It’s just so difficult, she wanted to tell Daisy—she wanted to tell her—to imagine. She tried to tell Daisy, wherever she was: It’s just so difficult to imagine. How can I know? I don’t know. I don’t know where to even begin.) The tags have been cut from all the new clothes and piled beside a small pair of scissors, but the new things are not enough to fill the suitcase. There were end-of-summer sales; the prices are slashed three and four times over: a t-shirt, cornflower blue, with a print across the chest like a Navajo blanket ($4.99); and a sleeveless blouse, salmon colored, with little brass tacks around the collar ($12.49). Two three-packs of socks, one yellow/peach/lavender; one white to wear with tennis shoes. And a visor that Daisy would have hated. (But Daisy would have hated all of it.) And around the suitcase the familiar silence, hemmed but not diluted by the clamor of the Taylor boys two houses down, who are always making noise, who are noise incarnate, dropping their bicycles and kicking their soccer balls against the door of the garage. They argue and laugh and whoop and holler and their voices snap like rubber bands against the skin of this silence, which is impenetrable. They are life incarnate, those boys. They are life. This is something else. She closes the window.

Descendent of Sappho, a Story with a Modicum of Truth.

david — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:07:12 -0500

She knew little of poetry, nothing of Sappho, other than a book she had found on a shelf in the used bookstore. Walking as she did every morning to the hotel in the small town she lived in to do a morning shift before school she said you burn me, and frequently and for those, marvelling at the space all around the words. For those who? For those what? Words creating small, benign gaps, openings she might crawl through. But I to you of a white goat, she repeated to herself walking, and the man who lived under the abandoned station, made a yummying sound. Monday to Friday she worked from 6 to 8:30 prepping and bussing for the older waitresses who had little patience for her, spindly as she was and completely disinterested in the loggers and miners and businessmen who came through, hard hats in tow. On the weekends she worked full shifts and her mother told her soon she could expect to be a waitress, never mind high school. There was more money in waitressing. And the shorter the skirt the more! Money that is, which interested her only tangentially, the folded notes like tiny keys. Where she would go she had no idea but each dollar was a mile, each mile a word, and so on. I loved you, Atthis, once long ago/ a little child you seemed to me and graceless. You seemed to me, she repeated. And graceless, she said to the newsmen who sat longer than anyone else fuming over the latest attempt at the conservative government to dismantle some something, and the changing technology they could no longer keep up with, the way it demanded sentences take other shapes. How can a sentence work like that? How can it turn? How can it do back flips? The newsmen, downing coffee, went on to describe the basics of sentencing, a straightforward affair, about getting to the nub of things quickly, without excess, without much flair. The oldest newsman, retired now, but returning for weekly editorial reviews went on in his dusty way to recount his buried favourites: Premier bends over for profit, one read if you took the first letter of every sentence in the editorial of May 9, or Union members screwed. Every word in this article is a lie, a younger newsman offered. Premier C. sucks— I think she gets the idea. Martin, slicking the few remaining strands of hair back, spilled the coffee as he got up. He was an addict, slipping out every ten minutes to light up. Everything is tightening, the old man said, shrinking. Someone will remember us/ I say/ even in another time. Even she thinks, scooping eggs off of plates, why does she say even? And how can one, small, dull word change so much? More? She says now, instead of Would you like more coffee? Dancing eggs, eggs pirouette, she says, thinking of them rolling in the bowl. Yellow orb milky sliding. Slices, dry, slices glistening, slices dark and dry… This continues until the manager takes her aside and says, Enough. Very simply, very calmly: Enough. It’s hard to have poetic license in the real world, her English teacher tells her. And mind these are translations. She is padding beside him after class to the faculty lounge. You understand that you aren’t reading her in the original; we don’t know what the original was in any case, these were scrolls, parchment, things faded, worn away. Yes, she says, but time. Echoes. And though she can’t articulate it, the idea of translation ripples before her.

Alcazar's House

benjamin — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 08:23:30 -0500

An extract from a novel-in-progress

As Alcazar sat stock-still on the gritty staircase, he thought of all the circumstances that had made him a minor star in Spain in his teenage years, and hoped that those same circumstances would take advantage of his various talents once again, in England. And they had started to, for the most part. When he arrived in London, he had no idea where to stay. The hotels that surrounded the station disgusted him, though they would have been quaint in Mexico or Spain, mostly because a dry wind would have blown through them every day, and every day they would have been scrubbed clean with bleach. He wondered why these northern people were so filthy and why they lived in the north in the first place. When Alcazar finally wandered into the West End, he looked for the least likely enclave, nothing ostentatious or gaudy, and found it in a place called Shepherd’s Market. He had to pay for the first two nights since the tight-lipped thuggish Brit at the front desk was not interested in Alcazar’s overtures as a form of payment. He soon realized, with this particular desk clerk, that he couldn’t beg for a free room in exchange for favours—couldn’t be overly thankful or say something like “If there is anything I can do.” This man was obviously a ladies man and probably getting his fair share between shifts. He would be likely to call Alcazar a poofter before slugging his glorious Latin nose, with no feeling of remorse. This was a keen sense developed by most gay men, although some were willing to test the waters—regrettably so in some cases—or be rewarded for their stick-to-it-iveness. So it finally took meeting the hotel manager to help fix the bill. When he saw this new face at the front desk on his third night, he called down at two p.m., insisting there was a rat in the room, forcing the manager to abandon his post. The manager arrived in the room—lights on and Alcazar’s bed sheet fallen away—and Alcazar pleaded his innocence, as he stood between the door and the manager with a rising erection, that it must have been a bad dream. Indeed, the manager couldn’t help noticing a large rat had come between them. Alcazar said the long trip from Spain had left him disoriented and that he was a theatre student. He had made sure to say the two magic words—student and theatre—that, in London, are like catnip, and will bring certain favours to your side, while others flee. He then feigned a careless effort to conceal his hardened cock—pretended to try to cover it with one hand. “Could you sit with me for a moment?” On the edge of the bed, the manager found the rat. It would be no problem at all, as long as it was given supervision. And as long as he could make his nightly calls to Alcazar’s room, the room tab would balance. But Alcazar’s ways weren’t so apparent to the innocent Louis-Marie when he first met him at the Academy. Alcazar was determined to register, regardless of the pert and proper British secretary who had so officiously wait-listed him. To make his point that he would not be defeated, he sat on the grand stairway in the foyer like it was his own, glaring down every new student who came in to register and see the school for the first time. It was this brooding that had hooked Louis-Marie—who was by comparison open, willing, like a two-month-old puppy, to meet new people, sniff other puppies’ bottoms, no matter how many times he was snubbed.

Our Children Would Not Kill Us

emily — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:04:42 -0500

I don’t want to give the impression that I was special; yet this was an extraordinary time in my life; I was a wreck, a rusted-out old piece of shite on a desolate road that no one would notice for some time, but there I was just the same. I had finished a manuscript and was in that limbo known to writers as waiting. It is a kind of literary purgatory completely separate from the work, but strangely all tied up in it. I was trying all sorts of things to lower my tension. To this end, I had taken a keen interest in little league hockey, claiming it was the only thing that took my mind off itself, and besides that, I was obsessively reading Gustave Flaubert. Well, one particular Flaubert story actually, and not the obvious one, as you might imagine; I was reading, compulsively, “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator,” and had even gone so far as to locate a Catholic trinket store off Dundas to purchase a medallion of Julian, patron saint of clowns and murderers, of the carnival, which I wore around my neck regardless of the green stain it left on my skin. My youngest child had tried out for, and won, a place on a GTHL minor Atom “A” team. He wasn’t the best player — he’d only been playing for a year at this point — but he wasn’t the worst either, and what he lacked in innate, and learned skills, he made up for in passion. He played defense, and he played strategically, a be-bladed, nine-year-old gladiator; he was everywhere he needed to be. I went reluctantly to the games in the beginning, having no stomach, I told myself, for the brutality, and the parental machismo, and the sweat associated with the game, or my perception of the game — however these half-truths work. But at the time of this story, the hockey had already won me over, and I would stand on the highest bench in the stands, fingering my medallion, and yelling — though it was clear the children could in no way hear me — that the skaters should go, and cut ’em off, and fight for the puck. I learned the terminology, and suppressed — at least outwardly — the notion that the vocabulary was a strange mix of the erotic (hook, slash, score) and the religious (host team, cross-check). That the coaches regularly anointed the players with water squeezed from drinking bottles so that the water splashed over their small upturned faces in a modern baptism, that the team knelt for a coachly benediction between periods, and the fact that many of the crucial games landed on Sunday morning, gave the whole affair a kind of sacred binding, a compact. The stands were a place of adrenal yearning — yearning to win, which quickly translated into simple yearning. The fathers flirted with the mothers and the mothers flirted with the fathers, and more than once I thought: Perhaps there is no separation between the sacred and the profane; maybe they are one. I was struggling, as I mentioned, with my own impatience, my own incapacity to acquiesce control; I was waiting, waiting for rejection or waiting for acceptance, it amounted to the same thing. The fact was that no matter how alone a person might feel, she was constantly surrounded by other people. Other people are ubiquitous. And so, alone and miserable, I often found myself amongst people who had no idea what I might be going through.

The Itinerant Portraitist

emily — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:19:46 -0500

In Indiana, the itinerant portraitist wears a sweater and smokes a cigarillo. Richard Hawkmeat is his name. From fourteen up until the age of eighteen — he is twenty-four now — he lived in Akron, where he apprenticed with an uncle who insisted, You will be my Mondrian, and swam twenty four laps each night in the over-chlorinated YMCA pool. The uncle is immaterial. What we need to know is this: that Richard Hawkmeat, like so many young men before and after him, fled Ohio for the idea of Indiana. The idea of Indiana is this: we can do better by insinuating ourselves into conditions that are seemingly worse. So Hawkmeat went west. He sought Indiana and he achieved it. He ended up in the last barstool of the Tippecanoe Valley Bar and Lounge wearing that sweater we spoke of and smoking those damn cigarillos. Can you blame his woman for leaving him? She had prospects across the border, in Danville, Illinois, and she meant to pursue them. She had prospects: she was a receptionist for someone in the medical field. That meant nursing school. That meant mobility. Our clouds, in this instance, are like used q-tips, wispy and dirty. There is rain in the twenty-four forecast and the West Lafayette meteorologist is deadly accurate. He once turned over in his suburban bed to tell his wife, Pickles — meaning their spaniel — will flee today. By evening they were flyering neighborhood utility polls with a photo of Pickles sprawled on Mrs. Meteorologist's lap and the promise of a reward. You know, Mr. Hawkmeat expounds to the man on the stool beside his, I could paint your child, per your request, but I am old-fashioned and would rather leave the ugly for the modernists. The year is 2007. A fight breaks out. Hawkmeat in a headlock. Pavel Yardley, metallurgist, holding him in said position. Take it back, Mr. Yardley demands. I do. I do. I do. I do. Good. Now, will you paint her? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. OK. Good. Now, back to drinks, to smoking, to the college football game being broadcast on the television in the corner. Then, the game is over, the bourbon and beer are drunk, the bartender is washing glasses in three separate sinks. Hawkmeat walks home, alone down a street without a sidewalk, past cars with fountain drinks flat in the cup holders, beyond a house where a couple discusses finances at a kitchen table, to the trailer he rents. The itinerant portraitist is home, but oh how he wishes he weren't. To be elsewhere, to be gone from here, that would be best. He would like to walk a thousand miles to his home in some other place. But when you have come to Indiana to find something worse and you do, dissatisfaction is not cause for departure. It is a reason to remain. It is a bad bind to be in, and Hawkmeat is bound. Hawkmeat is home. He painted a portrait of a local judge; it hangs in a hallway of the county courthouse. He painted the proprietor of an ice-cream shop in Indianapolis; it hangs behind the counter. He painted a Shetland Pony near Cincinnati; it hangs in the stable.

There Was No One There

mathew — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:17:53 -0500

There was no one there when they first walked in. First thing in the morning, but it'd been hot already, thick hot, that heat that sticks a sweat at the scalp and forces comment between strangers. The Bucktrout funeral home had a surprisingly large foyer, sparsely decorated for new-found absence, and equally empty of current presence. A small pewter dish filled with fresh peppermint life savers, bright white and individually unwrapped, waited on an occasional table by the front door. They stood for a polite two-three moments, cooling themselves in the a/c, the mother declining the skirted sofa seat or the Chippendale chair, then one of the daughters walked into a back office, looking for some kind of receptionist. The office was also empty, though a mini desk fan was set on HI, a spray of pink plastic streamers attached to its plastic protective plate softly flapping and tangling in its small mute wake. The other daughter hallooed, and a pregnant lady in a red sleeveless dress appeared and said the manager would be out directly. She showed the women into an even bigger side-room, subdivided inside by two-thirds walls, its antechamber marked by posters of golf balls and sunrises, doves and butterflies, cued personal goodbyes made more personal by way of literal release and red-rimmed revival, a final tee-off, one last long drive. The two-third walls were pointedly hung with sample memorial books and service cards, crystal and silver ecumenical geegaws, seven sorts of miniaturized vaults, otherwise known as burial boxes, and, nosing around the corners, representative casket-stubs racked alongside square swatches of their pleated satin linings. They sat at the kidney-shaped table, then had to stand, to shake hands with the man in the gray gabardine suit with a flag lapel button and nice yellow tie. His collar was still crisp from its cardboard, his shirt still fresh from its cellophane, though his hair was still beaded to his forehead, and he smelt of the hot tar outside. They all sat then, and explained more or less of the situation, or at least the mother's intent, to decide, ahead of time, on some of what she wanted. The funeral director showed them a blue binder with various package deals, ranging from the tailor-made elaborate to the very bare bones, for if there was not to be a viewing, there was no need to embalm, and to be perfectly honest, the more purchased from a cemetery, the deeper went that discount. The mother selected the basic graveside package, which covered transportation, one-way, the services of a funeral director and his staff, the filing of all necessary documents, and an obituary in the daily paper of one's choice. The casket was extra, of course, and it was best to hold off on marker and vault, for that discount.

Instamatic

emily — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 20:08:52 -0500

Gregg clawed his way to the top of the sand hill, his flip-flops wedged into one back pocket, the Kodak Styelite into the other. He wore the hand-me-down jeans of his older brother, Ronnie, seventeen, the belt tightened to the last loop, ends cut off, Gregg’s knobby knees clanging like the clapper of a church bell. He arrived at the top, nose-to-nose with rows of maple, beech, birch, and pine. The adolescent spruce closest to him would be the same age he was: thirteen. He wondered, six times as tall as he was, if they ever felt invisible too. Ronnie and his friends had scattered themselves across the summit, shirts off and inside out, stretched out and acting as a layer between their summer-sunned torsos and the searing sand. There were others there too, groups scattered haphazardly, boom boxes blaring compilation tapes, a showdown of summer’s hits, Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock & Roll To Me” against Gary Numan’s “Cars” and Pete Townsend’s “Let My Love Open the Door” versus Bette Midler’s “The Rose.” Gregg whispered a quiet request for Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and stepped gingerly onto the empty sleeve of Ronnie’s flannel shirt. Ronnie tapped at Gregg’s ankles. “Googs, use your own fucking shirt!” Gregg stepped back onto the sand, jogging foot to foot. He looked at the other boys, their chests bared, tiny swirls of hair peeking from beneath their armpits, their backs an exhibit of perfection, absent of markings save for the occasional cluster of tiny moles arranged pleasantly into familiar constellations and forgivable patterns. Gregg hadn’t taken his shirt off once this summer. He spent each morning comparing the length between his neck and navel against the poster of Matt Dillon he’d ripped from a creatively acquired issue of Tiger Beat magazine. Gregg’s collarbone jutted out like a ledge, as pronounced as a curtain rod, not rounded and soft like the Little Darlings heartthrob. And Gregg’s nipples were inverted as if they squinted they’d see a more striking reflection. But it was never until he turned around that he fully disliked his body, his back obscured by inflamed acne cast across his shoulders in the pattern of a V-neck sweater. Gregg struggled into his flip-flops, his lithe frame the highest point on the hill. He felt a tug at his shorts. “Whatever, just get down here,” Ronnie said. “Someone will see us.” The sand was used for roadbeds, and on the weekends it had become customary for kids to hike the sand hills, drink, smoke, sometimes fool around. The owners knew it, but it was still trespassing. So long as you weren’t caught, you were safe. But get caught and there were plenty of horror stories: kids stuck on the hill all night while guard dogs growled at the base, kids made to hike up and down for hours until they puked, or, worse, passed out. The worst story Gregg had ever heard was about a kid his own age, a boy who’d been sucked into an air pocket in the sand, where he’d suffocated and died. The kids with him were so scared they’d get in trouble that they didn’t tell anyone what had happened for two days. Gregg steadied himself on Ronnie’s shirt and pinched his eyes closed. A high-pitched buzz hovered over the hill. He used to think it was phone wires. “Se-kah-dah,” Gregg sounded out, fishing the camera from his back pocket and placing it on his stomach. “Se-kay-dah,” Ronnie corrected. Gregg shaded the camera from the sun with his hand.

Plan Ahead

benjamin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:37:30 -0500

Getting knocked up wasn’t part of the plan. I told Hamish, the black guy with the baby bird eyes, that I was going to get rid of it, and he got all weepy, worse than a little girl, so I told him not to bother coming round anymore, even though he’d been so sweet and lovely that for a while I’d have chosen him over sticky toffee pudding any time, but too much sticky toffee pudding and I want to puke, and I wanted to puke all the time anyway, so that was it for Hamish, and he wasn’t even Scottish with a name like that. Ria was glad he’d stopped snivelling all over me, said, despite all his mooning around, he gave off the impression he was better than her because he’d been to college, although I don’t know what he did there because he didn’t have much of a brain. I wanted to tell Ria that most people think they’re better than her, but it’s her own fault because she wears such nasty clothes she looks homeless, and she says the most stupid things sometimes that you feel like her mouth just fell out her ear. The scan made me feel a smidgen of love for the tiny beating pulse that they said was the baby, although it looked like a kidney bean. It was a good thing too because it turned out I was only eight weeks so I could take a couple of tablets and it would just wash out of me like a stain. With that done, I felt like I should get back to the act of doing what I wanted with my life, because otherwise I might as well have kept the baby and not made such a fuss about getting rid of it, I might as well have stayed with Hamish and lived in his flat and got fat and popped out three or four kids and made fish fingers for dinner and saved up for a bigger TV and maybe moved out one day to a bigger house in Beckenham, like one of those ones my mum’s friend had that we used to visit before they had the argument about the pitbull. For what I wanted, I needed money, and that was the problem. See, I’ve always seen myself as running a florists, ever since I was a little soppy girl who loved her mummy and daddy and used to pick dandelions and thread them together to make dandelion chains, like daisy chains. Daisylions I called them. That’s what I thought I’d call the shop, DAISYLION, and I might have even called the baby Daisy if it wasn’t flushed down the toilet on bloody sheets of loo roll. I wondered if I’d waited and not got rid of it, whether I’d have miscarried, because that happens to a lot of women according to Ria, who for all her homeless clothes and her nonsense chat knows certain things, what with her aunt a being midwife. But if I’d have waited to see if I’d miscarried, maybe I’d have felt less motivated to get the shop up and running. What with taking those pills, well, it made me feel like I had a duty to open the shop. DAISYLION would be for that little flickering bean I’d seen on the scan and thought I’d loved, even though I knew it wasn’t really love, because the notion of love had been knocked out of me by Adam when I was twelve and he was fourteen and he told everyone I was a slag just because I’d touched it, and I’d touched it because I’d loved him, that was all.

In A Big Enough Country

david — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 13:17:57 -0500

When the sun sets over the mountains the sky becomes a royal shade of purple. Then it all turns a kind of bubble gum pink. And then orange. And then the light that covers the peaks starts to fade and it’s like hearing last call when you haven’t had time to finish your first. And finally, as disappointment dies away, you find yourself inside a darkness that could frighten the spawn of Poe and King. In every direction the horizon is nothing but a rumor, dark land meeting dark sky. You start to realize how threatening the country night is, especially if you’ve come from the city. You notice the stars. The frustrating amount of them. As if people didn’t feel small enough. The horizon’s transformed once again and becomes a line between the star filled sky and the blacked-out land - and it’s the sky that looks full of life, full of stuff. In a way it’s beautiful how it hides its true nature from us – pretending that it won’t, one day, explode and swallow the earth. * This setting, this Montana sky, is enough to leave me hurting to breathe. It is not an urban setting and so for me it’s not just different but foreign. When I was a 7 years old I thought stars were the creation of television and movie people. In my suburban New Jersey backyard, I was close enough to Manhattan’s powerful glow that the sky never really turned black. It was the color of electricity, of a far off bubbling light. The stars didn’t stand a chance and seemed pointless in comparison. Distant in a not so profound way. On the clearest night I could see a handful, and I never thought of the power in the stars that could fight its way through our civilized muck. That I escaped those lights, that I even felt the need to escape and start anew, somewhere, and that I ended up here of all places, is a kind of mockery, like a carrot at the end of a rope that always gets pulled away from you. But I did. I did need to leave that zone, that comfort, everything I knew, if I was going to become the person I wanted to be. I just never thought I’d end up here. This “dude” ranch, this hotel branded as a dude ranch, the obvious conclusion to so many different threads in country hospitality, a ranch in the middle of nowhere that affects simplicity the way a teenager says “whatever”, this ranch sits on 150-acres surrounded by nothing but grasslands that take you right to the Rockies. I suppose it’s beautiful here, whatever that means. It’s one of those spots that makes you feel special and lucky and small all at once. You get country music looking at this land. I can’t say I noticed at first. And now that I’ve been here for a while, I don’t notice it again. Except when I get reflective or drunk enough to lose whatever it is that makes the drunk so sentimental and nostalgic. Thirty-four guesthouses surround a central lodge done up in timber and whitewash. Inside the lodge: another six suites, two dining rooms, a bar, the administrative offices, a small staff lounge, etc. A library with fireplace. Off the north end of the lodge, a large barn houses the ranch’s horses and behind them, the worker quarters. I’ve been working here since Easter.

Triptych

Kevin — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:00:41 -0500

Sick Day The virus is extremely common in the population. Either bacteria are not involved, or we could not discern their effects. It takes one and a half hours to kill a whale. As if that were not bizarre enough, one explicitly described seeing numerous human bodies shrivelled to the size of newborn babies. Only the United States, Russia and Japan have sent missions to date. India is now ready to take the big leap. What you see today may well be what you'll get tomorrow. ”They say you can probably drop this in the water and leave it overnight, pull it out in the morning, put in a magazine and it will work,” he said. The bases were “smashed to dust,” he said. The rocket, which landed about four miles from the city, fell on a beach just 30 feet from an unmanned lifeguard post, he said. “This failure should be immediately and carefully investigated in order to prevent a recurrence,” he said. It turned out to be, in fact, more of an interrogation than an interview. No other official was present, and I insisted on having the conversation recorded on my own personal cassette recorder. I started to get multiple indicators that maybe our iron-fisted approach was beginning to alienate them. Acrid fumes rise from the smoke, while Ali stands watch over the pit. With an entire military plane to melt into metal bricks, the boys have been busy for weeks. The pouring of the metal is left to older teenagers. Their leader is being protected by three elaborate security rings which stretch 120 miles in diameter. These guerrillas simply keep re-emerging in different forms. It is impossible to independently verify details in this remote area. Police followed footprints on a dirt road at the power plant and found an explosive device underneath the power lines. "I've seen a smorgasbord of destruction in my life," he said, "flame-throwers, napalm, white phosphorous, thermite, you name it. I know of nothing short of an H-bomb that conceivably might cause a bus to instantly liquefy or that can flash broil a human body down to the size of an infant. God pity humanity if that thing is a preview of what's in store for the 21st century." Relax. Plumbum oscillans is no threat to health -- it is Latin for "swinging the lead," and it is the doctor's discreet way of concluding that you are a malingerer, someone seeking a sick note to take time off work. *** What We Saw "We are been oppressed for the last 30 years," was built by a research team at Tel Aviv. They would, in effect, be the eyes ears voice of Command. Pentagon troops get bogged down in urban warfare inside the town. A battleground, the political side of reconstruction. “Make war and get there," he said. "What's left will be 'gray,' and the bad actors among that group will,” and said it cast no doubt on the credibility of his likely great return. Three regimens: laws, the U.S. dollar, and misery that will come. “They will continue to run the ministries, and we are going to pay their salaries," the official said. "The free understand this process.” Indigenous body bag analysts expect more casualties: as Lagash of Sumeria, it is to aggressively bring out the truth of the mass-murder frameup -- the smoking-gun evidence that has been found concerning the attack. Faceplate devices are appearing in many sectors, which in white letters on a black background spell out "Secret Government Property," worsening their troubles.