War in a Beautiful Country

by Patricia Ryan

  “But don’t you see?!” she said to Marius, “I want more than just not having anything bad happen. I want something good, very good, to happen.”

  iii.

  What was it that always made Regina so miserable when she painted? Was it the dark loft, a seemingly strange choice for a lover of light? Regina picked this loft because she knew that natural light was the enemy of her artistic goals. It was a huge square room on a low floor of an old fabric warehouse. In the front were tall, narrow windows where light occasionally knifed down through the surrounding buildings. Regina set this area up as her sparse, undecorated living space.

  At the rear were two small windows, useless since they were just inches away from the next building. They created a shaft of perpetual sour twilight rather than a source of light and air.

  It was perfect for painting.

  Regina put black photographers’ shades over the useless windows to create the darkest spot possible in an already dark loft, so dark that with flood lamps she could re-create the artificial light resembling a concert hall. When painting, her loft became a blind, dead, and dreary cave.

  Was this why melancholy was fast becoming her permanent state of mind?

  She thought: I feel as if the sun went in and will never come out.

  Instead of her old joy, she had become one of those generally miserable people. Perhaps it was not the dark loft, but the divorce that was changing her so radically? It seemed she was flailing about with nothing to grab onto and couldn’t figure out how to hold it all together. Or with whom.

  She was beginning to understand that for some people, some things never happen: the gift of a loyal and loving mate; the energetic courage for significant work; being understood, or at least, not misunderstood.

  She never expected perfection, but also never imagined that one could live with these things so wildly inadequate in one’s life.

  Maybe this bomb thing was good. What was there to live for, really.

  When she got like this, she even annoyed herself. Maybe I ought to go out for a walk, she told herself, but didn’t go. At least she had stopped thinking of suicide. Although why not? After all in Japan, suicide was socially accepted as an apology for failure.

  “I think people commit suicide,” her twin Nina once told her, “because they feel ‘This will go on forever.’ Listen, when you realize death will get you sooner or later you can just relax

  about it.”

  Regina knew Nina was right, killing yourself for failed goals was merely petulance.

  As for the bomb threats: well, if she could manage to live with the fear of being one of the art world’s smallest potatoes, she could probably live with any other.

  Or almost….”any other”.

  Another, greater. fear—the granddaddy of all fears for Regina--- was just suppose, in spite of Marius’ opinion, or more accurately her own, that instead of being ordinary, her work was in fact extraordinary. The best!

  And nobody would ever know it.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It didn’t matter that regulations said:

  “Outgoing correspondence containing threats or extortion may result in prosecution. When such material is discovered, the inmate will be subject to disciplinary action.”

  He didn’t care.

  After all, how much more disciplinary action could there be than lifetime in a cell.

  CHAPTER TEN

  i.

  When she saw the small package stuffed into the back of the mailbox, behind the unwanted catalogues for fake flowers and outrageously priced dish towels, her mind automatically registered that it was her new checkbooks.

  But something seemed ominously different.

  True, the label was addressed correctly to her, although it was handwritten and the small carelessly wrapped box had several real stamps.

  Warning signs vaguely remembered from news reports?

  She tried to think whether or not she had ever received her checks with real stamps and if they had a return address, which this did not. She realized she never really paid attention to what the package her checks came in looked like. Now she couldn’t tell what this was. She was either succumbing to foolish suspicion, jumping at every change, or she just had a worse memory than she realized.

  Where was this postmarked? Idaho. Idaho! All her banking information, credit cards, checks, came from different places. Half the time she didn’t know what they were and almost threw them away as junk mail. So the checkbooks could be from Idaho. Before she opened it, she could call the bank and see if they had sent her new checks--although she wasn’t sure she had ordered any, but she might have-- and from where.

  No. Maybe the package was too dangerous to wait. That was silly, of course it wasn’t. After all, it had come safely through the mail. And if she called the bank, she would have to go through all those pre-recorded numbers and instructions and then hold on forever to talk to someone while the phone played bad music, or worse, the news. And would some clerk on the phone in a cubicle in god knows what state or foreign country even know if they were hers and came from Idaho?

  She didn’t think so.

  She wouldn’t call anyone. Instead, she would drive directly to the police station again and hand over the unopened package to the perpetually unconcerned Det. Walker.

  ii

  Det. Walker took the package from Regina and motioned for her to sit in the same hard wooden chair next to his desk that she first sat in so many months ago.

  “You haven’t hung up on any telemarketers lately, have you?” he asked.

  “Probably. Why?”

  “Some day they will have one too many phones slammed in their ear. ‘Revenge of the Telemarketers’,” he laughed, “And They Know Where You Live…….”

  Once such an idea would have been absurd to Regina, but now she just stared at Det. Walker, dumbfounded.

  “No, no, I’m kidding,” he said. “In any case, this isn’t a bomb. It’s probably just your checkbooks.”

  Regina tried to remember if she had told him she thought they were checkbooks or if they were so obviously checkbooks that everybody knew it, and she was grossly overreacting.

  “I’m beginning to think I’m overreacting,” she said apologetically. “I thought I was getting a grip on this, but I guess I’m wrong.”

  “Well, let’s see. Just to be sure, I’m going to take this upstairs and let the experts embarrass you instead of me.”

  Embarrass her!?! As if all the evidence of this kind of thing would embarrass anyone.

  “Embarrass me!! Look, if I’m such a silly pest, why don’t you just give me the package and I’ll blow myself up in the privacy of my own home!!” Regina reached out her hand for the small box.

  “Now, now, don’t be so touchy. I myself don’t feel the need to examine this, because ....” he rattled the box and continued in a spooky voice,”.....oh, look, oooooow....it is not dangerous. But I’m obliged to check it out because even Congress is trained not to open packages and certain pieces of mail by themselves.”

  “I don’t understand you.” Regina said.

  “Don’t understand what?” Det. Walker replied.

  “I don’t understand,” Regina continued, “how you can call me ‘touchy’, and patronize me, when in the same breath you also tell me we are in fact all blowing each other up at the highest levels. I do not understand why you are not taking these bomb threats seriously!”

  “I take bomb threats seriously. I don’t take these pathetic attempts at bomb threats seriously.”

  “But why not!!!”

  “Because bomb threats are the current harassment of choice, the latest game of chicken. Maybe it’s just your neighbor’s kid exercising some kid weirdness. Kids do a lot of this stuff. They can buy the ingredients in any grocery store or hobby shop. But they’re not a big danger because they usually blow themselves up first. Do you have a neighbor’s kid?”

  She remembered the magazine article:”….. it has come to this: kids can’t
drive to school for fear that bombs might be hidden inside their cars. Soda cans and bottles—unless they’re clear plastic—are out. Ditto backpacks, unless they’re mesh. There has been no actual violence…..but the school got 19 bomb threats last year and has gotten 10 so far this year…….”

  “No.”

  Walker was getting weary. He wanted to drop the box off upstairs and get on with the rest of his work. “Look, the sooner I get this checked out, the sooner you can relax and go home. And then maybe I can too. Tell you what....why don’t you go into the waiting room and I’ll ask one of the bomb guys to come down and try to explain it all to you....you’ll feel better....” He took the package and headed upstairs before Regina could say anything else

  The very existence of “the bomb guys” did not make her feel better. Besides she was not sure she needed anyone to explain anything to her. She knew what was going on. How bombs were just part of the ordinary, daily culture of American life. What had that television reporter said about his newscast no longer reporting most bomb threats?

  “Our news policy is not to report threats alone, unless there is strong evidence that there is a real bomb. These days the bar has to be very high.”

  Isn’t that what Det. Walker had been telling her all along? Isn’t that why he had stopped sending anyone to investigate?

  Still.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  i.

  Even without these threats to her safety, as a New Yorker she was already in the thick of it. Home to the nation’s oldest bomb squad, New York was always a hot bed of bombs. When you got right down to it, threats that were personal to her were sort of irrelevant.

  Who knew when someone would decide to bring a bomb into a crowd, in boxes of flowers, in soup cans, in backpacks, in suitcases, in trash bins, in mailboxes? In cars? Anyone could be blown up anytime without any notes at all.

  Regina didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of this before, why she became afraid just now, only as she herself became the target--if in fact she was a target--when she could logically have been afraid all along.

  Her city was under perpetual siege.

  Like most New Yorkers Regina had heard from her parents the story of the “Mad Bomber.” For nearly 20 years he terrorized the city with thirty-three bombs, killing people in innocent public places, such as movie houses. The bombings stopped temporarily only during the Second World War for, as the bomber later explained, “patriotism.” He became so much a part of the language of the city that when New Yorkers wanted to discipline their children, they would say, “Be good or the Mad Bomber will get you!”

  There was that. Who wouldn’t remember that? But there was much more.

  Historic Fraunces Tavern, where George Washington said farewell to his Revolutionary War troops, managed to stay in tact for some 200 years until it was blown up for political reasons beyond what America’s first president could have imagined. And then there was the bomb factory in peaceful, bucolic Greenwich Village, where anti-Vietnam War protestors accidentally blew themselves up in a gorgeous, expensive town house. They left a huge hole in a street full of other gorgeous, expensive town houses with their yards and look of home, rare enough in a city of apartment rooms.

  There was the blowing up of one of the three major metropolitan airports. And the man who was standing right next to his own bomb on the overcrowded, speeding subway train when it went off. And the dumping of an explosive device on a busy Bronx street by a man who then shot himself because of a domestic dispute And the bomb that mistakenly fell off the bottom of a woman’s car instead of blowing her up, a modus operandi once reserved for the Mafia, but now could be merely a disgruntled neighbor. And the Zodiac Killer, assassinating people in Central Park according to his own horoscope, who told police he couldn’t make up his mind whether he wanted to do that or become a mail bomber And the giant concrete flower pots with no flowers blocking off the fronts of certain target buildings, so a car bomber could not ram into them. And the always and ever threats to bomb the underwater tunnels, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty every Fourth of July. And the several evacuations of the United Nations building, and the World Trade Center.

  The World Trade Center.

  Regina once worked in the World Trade Center on the 32nd floor in one of the two 110-story towers. One day her assistant went out for lunch and shortly after called from a telephone on the street. “Get out of the building.” she said, “The police and fire department are in the lobby evacuating each building floor by floor because of a bomb threat. Get out of the building now.”

  Regina had been peacefully rounding up some papers and felt in no danger at all. There were no alerts, and no warnings had been sounded. It seemed so far-fetched.

  “Can’t we wait until the firemen tell us to go…”

  “No. They told me that they don’t know which tower the bomb is supposed to be in, and they said with 220 floors and maybe 50,000 people it will take some time to reach the 32nd floor in our tower. So, come down now and tell everybody else. I’m serious,” her frightened assistant said, “do it!”

  Regina was in a quandary. Her assistant was a sensible person, yet Regina didn’t want to go around the office like some “chicken little.” Although it was true that the Pan Am building had been blown up recently, killing several people.

  I’ll just tell the president of the company, she said to herself, and then let him put into motion a way to get everyone out.

  When she arrived at Mr. Pohl’s office, he was gravely busy.

  “Excuse me, sir, we have to leave the building. There is a bomb threat,” she told him. He looked up at her with supreme annoyance as he slammed his palm down on the top of his desk and said in a high, brat-like voice: “No! Not today! I don’t have time for that today!”

  Mr. Pohl went back to his work without even the courtesy of rudely dismissing her. Regina began to get worried. If the man in charge would not take care of everybody, then they would have to take care of themselves. Her next move was to go from the top to the bottom and see Joe in the mailroom. A retired police officer, Joe managed to get all 100 employees of the small firm quickly down to the lobby ahead of schedule and out onto the street as the firemen were still working the lower floors.

  There was no bomb.

  Then.

  She had personally experienced an empty threat and then watched horrified as eventually it turned into the unbearably real, deadly, thing.

  Twice.

  And forever.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  i.

  She wanted to be immortal. She thought it probably wasn’t a good idea to tell this to the Bomb Guy.

  Just another cliché.

  Like thinking there was a genius hiding in her somewhere. For someone who longed to be extraordinary, it amazed her how ordinary she was, how right on track for being average, for the statistical middle, and for the meanness of the mathematical mean.

  “My unremarkableness keeps weighing me down,” she told Marius.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Marius said, once dismissing what he thought were her pompous artistic strivings. “As far as I’m concerned, in the evolutionary process you and I are just part of the grand petri dish that a genius grows in It’s like sperm: millions for the one, and the rest discarded, wasted. That’s most of us. So forget art; it’s children that make you immortal,” he reminded her whenever they discussed the subject.

  Well, there hadn’t been any and just as well, under the circumstances.

  True, her mother could upset her by saying, “You should have children! It’s nature’s plan.”

  Nature’s Plan? Passion. Sex. Nail Polish. All to drop babies.

  “I don’t care what nature wants,” Regina told her. “Nature isn’t that smart. Nature also wants disease, floods, and animals who eat their prey alive. I don’t want any of that either.”

  Regina was convinced she herself would have been a very bad mother. She kept secret that her skin actually crawled when she h
eard children’s voices, that she hated those screechy sounds in restaurants, locker rooms, and swimming pools. She ducked for cover under the mushroom cloud of noise from schoolyards and playgrounds.

  Maybe it wasn’t the children themselves, maybe it was the life with children. Or maybe it was the parents. She felt most parents used their kids as an excuse to be rude, selfish, and inconsiderate to the rest of the world without consequence. In the name of children, too many sins were committed against adults.

  “Well, who will worry about you when you are old!” her mother retaliated.

  In spite of herself, Regina had once confessed these same fears to Doris, who pointed out: “Someone worrying about you doesn’t make your life better. It only makes their life worse.”

  iii.

  Still, beyond her grandiose idea of immortality, it sometimes bothered Regina that by not having children she was the beginning of her own extinct species.

  “Maybe Marius is right,” Regina told Doris, “Maybe children do launch our own one-of-a-kind gene pool into infinity. Maybe we owe it to our parents, their parents, and the parents of those parents to keep them all alive too.”

  Even though they provoked in her an acute melancholy, Regina loved old photos of dead people having good lives. Coming upon a group photo of her paternal ancestors could make her suddenly smile. But Regina knew that what was captured in the photo was not how each of the unknown relatives’ lives felt to them. From a photo, Regina would never be able to fully grasp that the glint in their eyes belonged to strangers who may have enjoyed being wrapped in warm sweaters, loved fruit and sunshine, were happy for the good fortune of friends, and had an unending stream of thoughts and feelings, just like everyone else. Their being dead now did not undo the fact that they had been alive then.

  Regina often wondered where good, rich lives go when they are over, what the difference between a happy or unhappy life is, once it is gone. Too bad, she thought, that good lives couldn’t be saved, collected somewhere in the universe, permanently displayed in time. If only there were some kind of preservative, like shellac, that could be sprayed over our great moments, to crystallize them into large murals and turn them into an eternal gallery of our lives.

  Regardless, Regina thought, “There will be no great-grandchildren to put old photos of my former self on their dressers and mantles, and wonder, “Who was this woman? What was her life like? Look at those clothes! That hair! What funny furniture”.