Well, the first thing to say is that they’re not really killers, or at least not very efficient ones. I’m still here, I’m still writing (if not living), and it has nothing to do with me.
The first killer is a Russian guy who sits next to me with his alcoholism, as I sit by his side with mine. He’s KGB and he’s not where he should be, which is back in Russia being evil.
The KGB is gone, now, and so is the Iron Curtain, and so is the belief that the Russians are naturally evil. When I was growing up, the fear of Russians did crazy things—I remember the day my perfectly ordinary father got up and took a sledge hammer to a wall in the basement. He spent a good several hours carving out what looked like a prison escape. But it was just the good Wisconsin soil, not freedom, that he found.
I was interested but wary. My father was not just belt-and-suspenders, he would have used superglue as well to hold his pants up. Destroying part of a wall—a loadbearing wall—wasn’t in his nature.
He was building a bomb shelter, because although Madison, Wisconsin, looked safe, that sunny Saturday morning in 1962—well, it wasn’t. It was illusion, and woe to those who hadn’t read the signs, or had willfully chosen to ignore them. We were gonna get it. The Russians were going to bomb us, rape our women, kill our children, and then jeer at our God. They were evil and they were on the move.
The fall of communism, if indeed it ever fell, was an impossibility. We would never be anything less than sworn enemies of the Russians, and if by some chance we did? Well, we would have lost everything.
So Dmitri is a Russian, and also KGB, and anyone can see that he is therefore a murderer, at least once if not twice over. And Trump, completely in thrall to Putin? Also a communist.
But wait—it looks like I’m the communist, since I’m a crazed left-wing radical. And all of sudden, the president of the United States is sending his buddy Steve Witkoff off to pick up an inspiring picture that Putin had commissioned from Russia’s BEST artist. It depicts Trump in that heroic moment when God rescued him from death in order to fulfill his destiny on earth. Here it is:
This is insane, of course, but that’s nothing new. People go crazy all the time, but we don’t elect them president.
The world has completely changed in 60 years, and I was pondering all that as I sat on a bench in one of the plazas. That when I met the next killer, by the name of Michael. He’s a black guy in his 50’s, sleeping on a cardboard refrigerator box under a scaffold placed on a building fronting the plaza. He’s homeless, completely crazy, and usually harmless.
Until someone threatens him, as I did, apparently, or as my family did. I am quite alone, here in San Juan, and my family is thousands of miles away from Michael. But there he was, standing over me, muttering that he was going to slit my throat, the next time he saw me.
“Please don’t do that,” I told him.
He showed me his knife—a pen knife that looks just like the one the Boy Scouts gave me (or told my mother to buy). He opened and closed the knife, just so I could see.
“You tell your family to leave me alone. Next time, I’m gonna kill you.”
“Don’t do that, man,” I said.
And wondered why I said that. I thought of Dmitri, who could kill in seconds. (Offing Jeffrey Epstein in a prison cell would have been child’s play). Fortunately, Dmitri has restrained himself, all of these years. But if he kills, I won’t know it, unless I see my dead body lying on the sidewalk (or meeting room floor) before floating off to whatever great-beyond is next.
Michael shows me the knife again.
And not for the first time, I wonder. Should I move, smiling reassuringly at Michael as I edge towards my door? Should I notify a cop, who probably knows Michael a lot better than I do? Or should I simply wait and see? If he attacks me, will I resist? Should I?
My death—what will it matter to anyone?
My life—what is it worth?
I am here watching democracy disintegrate, or rather bleed out from a thousand cuts. Trump has now fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She committed the crime of collecting and reporting the data. She forgot that crucial last step—which was to see if the report reflected the glory our leader. It didn’t, and she released the report anyway. So she got fired, and the message couldn’t be clearer. Any other public official is going to think twice about what he or she reports.
I am dealing with killers, in short, and my father did not. Not these killers. Once, in 1974, my father saw a homeless man diving into a dumpster.
“What is he doing?” asked my father.
“He’s looking for food,” said my brother, who was getting married in a couple of hours.
“BUT…this is AMERICA!”
This is America. Dmitri sits next to me, his killer hands resting in his lap. Michael is going to kill me, if my distant family doesn’t behave. And I am now back 60 years ago, with my father and soon-to-be-married brother in a rental car.
This is America.
Yes, this is America.
