It Happened Here

The strategy was clear from the outset. 

 

You could see it after Trump had been inaugurated and had settled down in his chair to do the work set out for him by his masters. He had to get through the signing of his executive orders, or rather, the executive orders that had been planned for him.

 

Don’t think that Trump had anything to do with them, or indeed that he knew anything about them. That was made clear by the presence of an aide, who stood next to the desk at which Trump was sitting. He announced the topic of the executive order in the same way that guests are announced at large, formal affairs. Trump nodded at each proclamation, penned his jagged signature on the document, and said a generic comment like, “oh, this is a big one,” at every turn. In the space of an hour, Trump had signed orders to end birthright citizenship, declare a national energy emergency, drop out of the World Health Organization, jettison the Paris Climate Agreement, establish two sexes (male and females, in case you’re wondering), free the insurrectionists of January 6^th, put a pause on the Tik-Tok ban, rescind 78 executive orders sign by Joe Biden, declared another national emergency (this time at the border), and renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.”

 

All but the last are hugely consequential. Any of them—barring that name change—would have been a defining moment in a normal presidency. Meetings would have been held, discussions would have taken place, debate would have swirled. A strategy and perhaps a counter-strategy would have been developed. Plans would have been made, and the announcement perfectly timed (they hoped) for maximal benefit and minimal risk. They would have been prepared for the howls from the opposition which could be expected.

 

There were grown-ups around Donald Trump, the first time around. They did the best they could, and perversely, they did an enormous amount. I loathe John Bolton, but I don’t think he’s a fool. Nor is Bill Barr, or General Milley, or Rex Tillerson. 

 

They restrained him, perhaps, by giving him one big toy to play with. He could impose the travel ban on seven or ten Muslim countries, for example. We all went to the airport, and lawyers were volunteering to represent illegally detained immigrants. We all knew, we thought, what we were doing.

 

The masters hadn’t yet taken hold, back in 2017. Trump hadn’t declined enough, mentally, for him to become the easy mark for the ideologues like Steve Bannon and Steve Miller. The bonds holding the religious bigots, the totalitarian right, and the kleptocrats hadn’t had time to cement. Trump may or may not have ever had convictions, but he could adhere to positions. He was still trying—however feebly—to play the game in those first years.

 

Now, all the bets are off, and two things matter to Trump: revenge and money. Trump’s handlers have moved in and are preparing the executive orders. They feed Trump his daily hates—transgendered youths, sanctuary cities, elite universities. They no longer fear the courts—why should they? The Supreme Court told Trump to get ONE immigrant (Kilmar Abrego Garcia) back from El Salvador. That was April 10—six weeks ago. Nothing has been done, and nothing will be done. 

 

Fascism has come to America, and all the brown-shirts had to do was flood the zone. The horrific has become routine, almost boring. Canada, for example, used to be on perfectly good terms with us, and now look what’s happened! They had to haul poor King Charles in, to murmur politely about but never address directly the elephant in the room. The elephant being the guy with the three shades of face paint and the slicked-back orange hair.

 

It isn’t death by a thousand cuts but rather a thousand slashes. And the effect is just what they desired: we (or rather, I) have become numb. It’s exactly like living with an active drunk—always primed for the worst, and secretly hoping and praying to yourself: “just bring it on—get it over with—I can’t stand living with this a moment longer.”

 

Even worse might be if Trump is taken down, but for the wrong reasons. The tariffs haven’t hit yet but soon will. Sixty percent of the stuff Walmart sells is made in China, and there’s no way that either Walmart or its suppliers could absorb a 30% tariff. The only thing to do is to raise prices, which is no problem for Trump’s billionaires, who can give him lots of money but only one vote. But most of the people who voted for Trump are shopping, today, at Walmart. I know, because I shop there myself.

 

So he could go because of the high prices, but in theory he could also go because of the corruption. The first term was child’s play—Trump was shaking down foreign dignitaries at his hotel down the road from the White House. True—the “dignitaries” were more than happy with the arrangement, and all Trump had to do was lap up the profits. But it could be argued that….well, where were they supposed to stay? At the Motel 6 off the Beltway?

 

There’s no pretense whatsoever this time around. Trump’s entry into cryptocurrency is a prime example: he announced his coin on January 17 and Melania joined in two days later. So now $Trump and $Melania have raised millions if not billions a scheme that is variously described as “pull the rug,” or “pump and dump.” Just to stir the pot (and stick it in the eye of us liberals), Trump gave a dinner a week or so ago to the top 220 investors of his coin. The price, if not the value, of $Trump jumped 50% in the day following the announcement (how often do you get to buy your way into the White House?) No one was surprised that following the dinner, Trump pardoned one of the guests—a reality TV show host and his wife, who had been convicted of bank fraud and tax evasion. Trump felt perfectly OK doing so, since he had gotten away with pardoning another criminal, a guy named Paul Walzack. Walzack had committed Medicare fraud by stealing over 10 million dollars from the paychecks of the doctors and nurses who worked for him. Fortunately, his mother kicked in a million dollars to attend a dinner in April at the White House. 

 

It's appalling, it’s Trump. 

 

So?

 

So what are we going to do about him?

 

My only answer is…whatever we can. As an American citizen living in Puerto Rico, I can’t vote for president. I also don’t have a senator or a member of the House of Representatives to represent me. But I can speak English—now the language of our oppressors—and so I call or write letters. And I can read, which is a civic duty.

 

Duty!

 

What a lovely old word, like “obligation” and “prudence / temperance / forbearance” and even “charity.” These Victorian concepts which seem as dusty as your grandmother’s antimacassar (the lace doily put over the backs of chairs to keep the hair grease from the upholstery) are strangely reassuring.

 

It’s a duty now, perhaps, to go back and read an author who I read at just the right moment in my life. And Sinclair Lewis certainly qualifies, since no one ever accused Lewis of holding back, of being overly-deferential.

 

He was a drunk, like me, and he died a drunk, though it was officially cardiac arrest that got him. And like a lot of drunks (and like me), he generally didn’t have a good word to say about anybody. He pissed people off, professionally.

 

I read him first when I was in Norway, spending six weeks on my parents’ boat in the Norwegian fjords. I was in my early teens, a time when any normal person feels disenfranchised and terminally unique. But it was also the mid-1960’s, when society itself felt unmoored. Richard Nixon was getting drunk and talking to the oil portraits of Lincoln and Stonewall Jackson hanging in the White House. Richard Daley was siccing the police on antiwar protestors in Chicago. Everybody was living in sin and smoking dope.

 

There is some music you should really hear first in adolescence—Tchaikovsky comes immediately to mind. But there are some books that you can only read, seemingly, in adolescence—and here, Ayn Rand is at the head of the pack. Sinclair Lewis qualifies as well, and it doesn’t hurt that Lewis is a guy who goes after the big themes. He doesn’t paint miniatures with a single-hair brush that he dips gently in pallid colors. Lewis is out there painting billboards next to the highway—or rather, he’s splashing neon colors all over the billboard, and some of the highway as well.

 

He has themes, he wrestles with them, they succumb and fall. Main Street is about small town life, Babbit is about boosterism, Arrowsmith about an idealist doctor, and Elmer Gantry is about religious hypocrisy.  People hated him or reviled him, but there were also some heavy-hitting defenders. Mencken came out and said, “If there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds.”

 

He pissed people off, perhaps, but he also won praise. Not only did he win the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith in 1926, but he also won the Nobel Prize four years later in 1930. He was the first American to win the Nobel, and may have been the first to refuse to accept the Pulitzer Prize. 

 

Why say no to the Pulitzer?

 

Lewis’s response tells you everything about what may be a very principled but perhaps prickly guy. He said no to the Pulitzer because it was to be given to “the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” 

 

Right—that’s an ouch.

 

In case you need more explanation, he goes on to say, in the very next sentence: “This phrase, if it means anything whatever, would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment.”

 

So he left the award (and the 1000 bucks) on the Pulitzers’ table. He did collect, however, the Nobel prize, which brings with it a green-gold medal, a diploma, and (currently) some eleven million Swedish Krona, which is over one million USD. Even to have walked away from a thousand dollars was something, in 1926. To have walked away from a million at the start of the depression.

 

Winning the Nobel can be the heavy hand that strangles a career. Lewis had to get through another couple of decades before his death at age 65 in 1951. He was well known in literary circles, and was invited to give a course in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He loved the town, apparently, until he didn’t (he left after only giving five classes, and having taught everything, he said, that he knew).

 

He returned to Minnesota, spent time in Massachusetts, and died in Rome in 1951. 

 

Almost 75 years later, Lewis occupies a certain place in American Literature. Maybe William Schirer said it best:

 

It has become rather commonplace for so-called literary critics to write off Sinclair Lewis as a novelist. Compared to ... Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Faulkner ... Lewis lacked style. Yet his impact on modern American life ... was greater than all of the other four writers together.

 

It’s a curious thing, how often books that have the greatest impact on their times come not from the top drawer but steaming directly off the author’s desk. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is another example—Lincoln didn’t cite Stowe’s literary prowess, but rather called her (according to legend) “the little lady that has started this great war.”

 

Nothing Lewis wrote had the effect of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but he may have been the first to see what the United States increasingly appears to be. No one was less surprised than Lewis when the plans for a movie based on the book fell through. He wrote this in The New York Times:

 

The preparation of the film script was turned over to the well-known playwright, Mr. Sidney Howard, who prepared a script which I thought was admirable. Most of the casting was already completed. Lionel Barrymore had been engaged to play the leading rôle of Doremus Jessup. Sets had been finished and shooting was to begin Monday.

 

Unusually, the producers of the movie came clean: they told Lewis’s agent that the movie was shelved permanently “in fear of international policies and the threat of boycott abroad.”

 

“I wrote It Can’t Happen Here,” Lewis said, “but I begin to think it certainly can.”

 

I begin to think it actually has.

 

 

 

        

 

 

 

 

The Nation's Biggest Blowhard

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Working towards Whitman

“Are you still making those calls,” said 

Lady, and I had to confess—I’ve slacked off a bit. True—I did call the FBI (another one of life’s firsts) and demand to speak to Kash Patel. The guy answering the phone hung up on me twice, which only made me angrier. That was after the FBI arrested a judge in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—some ten days ago.

 

Last Friday’s atrocity (and Trump seems to be using Fridays as convenient launchpads into terrible weekends) was the arrest of the mayor of Newark. He’s a black guy who went to inspect an ICE facility with three Democratic members of Congress.

 

And so the mayor of Newark got arrested, and watching the one-minute and 50-second clip of it on YouTube was almost more than I could bear, on a Monday morning. I am done with it, with the United States, with the anger and the frustration.

 

We might as well admit it: Putin won. He has played one side off against another, and now we’re at the point where neither side gives a fuck about the other. I no longer go out to breakfast with the guys in my AA group—although they have known me for eight years, and seen me through innumerable crises (most of which were of my own making). But I no longer attribute goodwill to any of them. I no longer believe that there is a common ground between us. In fact, there is no common ground. You think you have friends? Wait—you’ll find out in time.

 

If you are an American, you’re a Nazi. If you’re a Christian, you’re Torquemada. True, I’m an American and grew up in a Christian home (marginally) but the past is gone. Like everyone else, I’ve given up on my fellow citizens. I assume ill will.

 

Well—why not? We watched the 1: 50’ clip and got angry, on cue. The comments section is filled with Trump supporters expressing their vitriol against Ras Baraka (the mayor). The spectacle served nicely to keep us hating each other, but the real asshole may be neither the mayor or his opponents but instead something called the Geo Group.

(https://youtu.be/IYF0wTbG9Ug?si=ro1KuEW7uh2y6yD2)

 

You haven’t heard about them—and neither had I—and that is exactly the point. Fortunately, the Guardian has heard about them, and has this to say:

 

Delaney Hall is owned by Geo Group, a massive, private prison company with Ice facilities throughout the US. The Trump administration in February gave a 15-year contract worth $1bn to Geo Group to operate Delaney Hall.

 

Yeah?

 

It’s probably reason number 8,314,942 for why I hate these people. Is there any situation where a private prison is justified? Should a group of investors make money on prisons? Already, Democrats are charging that Geo Group doesn’t have the permits to run the facility, but no worries. Lifted from Geo Group’s website:

 

The GEO Group is committed to providing leading, evidence-based rehabilitation programs to individuals while in-custody and post-release into the community through the GEO Continuum of Care®. GEO's diversified services platform provides unique capabilities for the delivery of educational and vocational programs, cognitive behavioral and substance abuse treatment, and faith-based services. The GEO Continuum of Care is enhanced rehabilitation and reentry programming, including cognitive behavioral treatment, integrated with post–release support services.

 

GEO has to say this stuff, but it doesn’t have to do it. In fact, they’re free (probably) to adopt the best practices of CECOT, the terrorism confinement center in El Salvador that Trump sent over 200 people to a couple of months ago. CECOT is modern, clean and brightly lit, and reading Wikipedia’s description of the facility only hints at the reality:

 

Each of the 256 cells can house an average of 156 inmates. The cells are equipped with four-level metal bunks with no mattresses or sheets,  two toilets, and two washbasins. The cells are lit by artificial lights 24 hours per day. Each cell is provided with two Bibles, and CCTV cameras and armed guards monitor each cell.  Solitary confinement cells can hold prisoners for up to 15 days and are only furnished with a concrete bed, a toilet, and a washbasin. The solitary cells are pitch black except for one small hole in the ceiling that allows some light inside.

 

Well, it’s not much of a toss-up, but a toss-up nonetheless. Would I prefer the light and the company of 155 men, but with two Bibles? Probably…OK, certainly. But really where I’d like to be is where my feet are. And I am—thank God. After many years of too much drink and too much turmoil, I’m happy to be in this little room writing to an unknown (and unlikely) reader. I have everything I need, as a friend of my says. 

 

I can call Kash Patel, and did so. Another friend is Cuban, and he once told me that if, in the wee hours, I hear footsteps outside my door, I assume it’s a couple of drunks, stumbling home to sleep it off.

 

He hears the same footsteps, but it’s the DGI—the Cuban equivalent/offspring of the KGB.

 

Then he told me the story of Shostakovich, or maybe Prokofiev—I couldn’t remember. But AI does, and gives me the story:

 

During a period of extreme political pressure under Stalin, when Shostakovich feared for his life, he slept in the stairwell outside his apartment to protect his family from potential arrest. 

 

I think of Shostakovich when I make these calls. It’s foolhardy to do it—why should I put myself in the bullet’s path? But it’s criminal not to do it, or whatever the “it” is you’ve decided to do. 

 

“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,” Stalin did or didn’t say. I call Patel because somebody has to, and I’m it. I’m old, white, educated, and mostly respectable. I know about Shostakovich and have played his music, and I hang with people who do, or might. I belong, for the moment, to the upper middle-class / intelligentsia. I’m not a foreign grad student writing an op-ed for my school newspaper. If I can’t call the FBI to give them hell, no one can.

 

But if I don’t call?

 

I’ll be sleeping with Shostakovich in the stairwell. 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saved by Suetonius

Brother Anselmo exists, of course, even if he doesn’t.

 

You wouldn’t have seen anybody if you had stumbled into my bedroom at six this morning. You would have glanced at the bedroom and retreated: who needs to see an old guy struggling out of bed, limping his way to the bathroom, coming back to pull the bedclothes (lovely word, that) into slightly less disorder, and bending his creaking knees onto the blue bath towel at the foot of the bed?

 

He prays.

 

It’s the only thing that makes any sense at all, to Anselmo, whom you don’t see but who must still be there.

 

He’s gotta be there, since how else can you explain the fact that the old guy got out of bed, paid lip service to the idea of making his bed, and knelt to pray? Nine years ago he was waking up at any odd hour of the morning, turning on his side, and reaching for the bottle of Scotch stashed under the bed. It was a two-note aria: detox and retox. Anselmo purses his lips, remembering it. He saw it all, and remembers especially that last weekend before he was taken away: how the old man was drunk as a lord on a Sunday afternoon, listening to Ernest Chausson’s Poéme de l’amour et de la Mar, sobbing and trying to recite the French poem (or poéme) on which it’s based.

 

Anselmo can’t believe what he’s hearing.  He knows perfectly well what the drunk is trying to say, since Anselmo is from Upper Burgundy—an area that gets traded around a lot and is currently part of Italy. But Anselmo knows Latin, of course, and he will become abbot of Bec, in Lombardy. French, Italian, Spanish—they were all spoken and understood at the monastery of Bec, which became the preeminent center of learning after Cluny.  So it’s perfectly clear what he should be hearing, which is a particularly mawkish bit of doggerel from / by a guy named Bouchor. 

 

You haven’t heard about him, and you should keep it that way.

 

Anway, Bouchor had written the poem, and it was perfectly clear to Anselmo:

 

Le temps des lilas et le temps des roses 
Ne reviendra plus à ce printemps ci; 
Le temps des lilas et le temps des roses 
Est passé, le temps des œillets aussi. 

 

The old man, drunk in his bed nine years ago, had heard the words and recalled the translation, here given by Wikipedia:

 

The season for lilac and the season for roses 
will not return this spring;
the season for lilac and the season for roses 
is passed, the season for carnations too.

 

Anselmo shakes his head in disgust: a cheap translation of a tawdry poem. He would have said “the time of roses and of lilacs won’t come back to us this spring; the time of roses and lilacs is gone, and the time of carnations as well.” Perhaps better, but ultimately fruitless. Anselmo knows that the lilacs, the roses, and even the carnations return every spring and will ever do so. He saw them from the mullioned windows at Bec. The roses and lilacs were there where they were supposed to be, and they never failed in any spring. It was only he, behind his thick walls, who could not smell them.

 

And the old man in the bed, drunk—well, he wasn’t smelling them either. Anselmo had had a time of it—even the next day, when the old man had been brought to do penance in rehab, there was no smell of lilac or rose anywhere about. It was several days before the filth-encrusted jeans could be stripped from the man, and he could be showered. And it was a week before he could be sent home, with no more supervision than an old monk, his erudition and his resolve crumbling a bit from the winds of centuries.

 

Anselmo got him up the next day—somehow, God knows—and got him to his first AA meeting. He gets him up most mornings, and if you see the old man and he’s not drunk, well, Anselm has done his job, whether he was there or not. But the work of a monk doesn’t stop—it’s 24 / 7. Anselmo also has to get the old man to bed at night, and now it’s tricky because it’s not booze but YouTube that he has to work with.

 

For three or four years, at the end, the old man wasn’t going to sleep, he was passing out, which was the completion of the “retox” part of the cycle. (“Waking” was actually coming to, and marked the beginning of “retox”). If you could get him down the long marble hallway to his bed, the affair was over. In a minute or two, the hellish snores would tell Anselmo—the night is yours. Pray and refresh your soul.

 

YouTube is more difficult that the bottle. And the thoughts that follow YouTube?

 

I had gone to bed thinking of Donald Trump and what in the world to do about him. Every natural calamity—floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, drought, scorching heat, fire, ice, hatred, greed and lust---has decided to hit everywhere at once. The assaults on our democracy has been relentless and incessant. Two weeks ago, we were worried about the 15 or so high members of the military and the intelligence communities sharing information about how and when we were going to bomb the Houthis on Signal—an unsafe, only-marginally encrypted messaging app. Then were we worried about the 285 mostly Venezuelans who had all been kidnapped from the streets and thrown into a concentration camp: only a quarter of them had any criminal record in the States or in their home countries. This week we are worried about the tariffs that Trump has imposed, revoked, reimposed, paused, reinstated, given an extension, revalidated, repealed, redone, recalled, rethought and re-invoked. It has been dizzying, and the stock market tanked to the tune of 6 trillion, four hundred billion dollars and change. I saw the number written as a numeral, and I think it looked like this, but who can say? It’s been a long time sine I had 6,400,000,000,000 (I think) bucks in my pocket.

 

There’s plenty to keep an old man up at night, and YouTube is just as effective as Scotch, in an entirely different way. Anselmo leaves the bedroom, where he’s been waiting for me to get to bed, so that he can turn out the light and put the blue bath towel back on the night stand, where if luck holds and prayers are answered the old man will get out of bed and onto his knees. 

 

Which is where he belongs, thinks Anselmo.

 

And where he should be a lot more often, says the darker side of Anselmo, who has turned his face away from the mullioned windows of Bec, and is looking into the living room. Anselmo sees the old man on the couch, and hears Rachel Maddow who is there and isn’t there, in just the same way as Anselmo. Rachel Maddow is in New York and Anselmo is in the 11th century, and the old man is lying on a couch in Old San Juan watching his democracy crumble.

 

“Idiot!” he is shouting.

 

“Wonderful—the world economy is in peril because no one, not even a old man selling cold Coca Cola at the entrance to the Sahara, can figure out how to run a business. My retirement account is gone, as is everyone else’s. And you post this shit????””

 

He’s looking at the post Trump put up on Truth Social, which Rachel Maddow has evoked and manifested onto a screen in Puerto Rico. It looks like this, so that you can imagine it too.

 

  

 

Rachel Maddow has never been to Bec, thinks Anselmo, but she has been to Oxford, which even had teaching going on as early as 1096, only three years after Anselmo had been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselmo had seen Oxford, of course, but not the Oxford that Maddow saw. Maddow had seen a half a millennium of architectural greatness, green lawns and Japanese tourists. And she had seen, or known enough to look to see, this:

 

 

 

That wasn’t the graph that Maddow was showing yesterday, but it was very similar in one respect, something that even Anselmo can see: that steep drop, that cliff that must have been a devastating thing, after so many hours or months of waft gently upward. And that’s what Maddow was showing us yesterday—the day opened dismally on Wall Street, then shot up when Trump announced that IT WAS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! (capitalization and punctuation marks as in the original). Maddow, with no charity of spirit, does not see Trump’s message as a friendly bit of advice to fellow investors. She sees it as market manipulation. She couldn’t care less about the pain felt from those who had suffered the fall. She cared about the vultures who had come to pick the stocks for nothing from the dying hands of the now-broke investors. Because they had a very nice ride, indeed, the people who had bought stocks at 9:37 AM, right after Trump tweeted. Four hours later Trump would lift the tariffs and the market would soar. Maybe not up to where it had been—but enough to make you very rich, if you had timed it well. Buy low, sell high—it’s not that difficult. And it’s really easy when you know when the low is coming and the high is around the corner. 

 

“Suetonius,” says Anselmo, from the bedroom door. He copied the damn thing in his non-existent scriptorium, and he hated it. A ligator, which is all the old man lying on the couch is, has it easy. Anselmo sees what he does—the old man sits at his laptop and finds a “file,” which is neither stiffened paper for carrying documents nor an iron tool for chewing off wood. It’s a series of unseen zeroes and ones, which has to be purified by another lavation of zeroes and ones until it can be feed into what he calls a printer. The printer does what Anselmo used to do.

 

‘How very convenient,’ thinks Anselmo.  Anselmo was a scribe, and he was cursed because he actually knew Latin, and could read Suetonius. The problem, in fact, was to learn how NOT to read. The problem was to do what God had ordered: to take the lines, the curves, the spaces of words from one book and put it into a new book. 

 

Without thinking.

 

Without judging.

 

Anselmo lures the old man to bed, telling him: “the elders—it is they whom you seek. The Romans called in their elders, whom they named senators or consuls. Now is the time for Barrack Obama and George W. Bush to unite in brotherhood and lead the beleaguered populace to safety. The elders, the elders…”

 

The old man—the ligator who can only sew and never copy—gets up and stumbles to his bed. Anselmo soothes him. Platitudes about American exceptionalism don’t work, but time and distance will. Anselmo remembers copying Suetonius, and tiring of the dreadful tumult of the daily abuses and horrors the Romans endured. But they were balm to the generations who followed in the centuries after Anselm relinquished his time at Bec, at Canterbury, and here on earth. Suetonius sang to the founders of the American republic, in those dusty days in Philadelphia. I am not the first old man lured to his bed by the memory of ancient Rome, and the glory it had achieved in spite of itself.

 

“The elders,” says Anselmo. The old man throws the blue bath towel on the floor and kneels. He pays no attention to Anselmo, who anyway has no time for a man in prayer. Or rather, he has all the time in the world, now. The old man is rendered helpless now: on his knees and praying. Nothing to do here, at last, for Anselmo. He steps outside and lights a cigarette.

 

The wind blows the smoke away, and Anselmo looks up at the moon, who has seen every night and said nothing at all. As will Anselmo, who tosses the cigarette and returns to the bedroom. The day, the stock market, Suetonius, and the three hundred Venezuelans rotting in El Salvador—they’re all gone now. Anselmo gets to his own knees, wiser than the old man’s. His knees, too, creak, and the hands clasped together are dry and brittle. 

 

Two old men in a bedroom. 

 

The one we can see is sleeping.

 

The one we cannot see is praying.

 

Nine years ago, the bedroom stank of urine, old men, and cheap Scotch. The air is sweet in the bedroom tonight, and the drunken snores have softened. The hordes are sacking the temples and pulling down the idols outside, of course. That’s what they do.

 

Anselmo has his work to do, tonight, as well. There’s a mass to be said, in the privacy of his cell in the bedroom. The bell will ring at six AM, and the old man will have to be coaxed from bed and put to use. But there’s work to be done now, as the hordes run amok.

 

Anselmo is grateful: his work is done.

 

And is never done.