The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done

by Sandra Newman

5.2She held a black urn in one hand.

  5.3Greeting us, she asked if I wanted to carry Eddie.

  32. Pullau Pangkor, Malaysia: at a picnic table on the beach, the sun setting and the sea reminding us, in waves

  “No, your brother was still in good spirits, when we arrived. Of course he was drinking heavily, as I’ve said, I take it he was something of an alcoholic. It was only when he wanted to sleep with me, and I said no. Then he changed. I don’t think I’ve left anything out. Of course I’m willing to tell you as many times as you like, but there’s nothing else. He just, called me names.” She smiled, remembering. “Old walrus. That was one.”

  I said, “Oh, Eddie says anything that might be painful to hear. He can’t help himself, it means nothing, though.”

  “No, I don’t care,” Denise said, looking away at the violet, indistinct ocean. “The point is only that he went, and when he didn’t come back.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s really all right.”

  We all then looked at the beach where Eddie had died three days before. The moon had come out and it was bright there. It looked like a place people went to die.

  We’d been sitting at the picnic table for some hours, drinking beer from plastic wine glasses, watching the (under the circumstances) baleful ocean. I’d made Denise tell the story of Eddie’s death three times: in between, she’d volunteered her stories about her gambling years with my father, until I was punch-drunk and couldn’t ask questions, and couldn’t stop her. Then I would ask to hear about Eddie again.

  Now the sunset had spread its layers of violet low, tinting the mussed sand. The flowers had changed to their evening smell. The spaced line of coconut palms behind us that marked the road were sable now, and seemed taller. Their broad leaves rose and fell, revealing the shadowy nuts underneath, like stallions arching lush tails to show their ample testicles (I thought, inappositely).

  Ralph sat too quietly. It was (he later told me) a daze, in which he couldn’t imagine giving 10,000 dollars away to pauper children, or what it would be like, directly to experience God. He didn’t have that sweet, victorious heart left. Denise did (thought Ralph)

  – and while I saw her as a callous neurotic whom my brother had fetishized because of her (still evident to me, despite the walrus thing) remarkable beauty, and who’d known my dad too well for my liking, and I wanted her to be full of shit about the aliens, out of puerile jealousy,

  Ralph saw her as a magical being. His silence was a childlike, struggling awe.

  Of course, men who are incapable of intimate relationships are prone to fall under the sway of charismatic figures who can allay their fear of choice. Hence the rise of fascism. Later that night, however, when Denise had unexpectedly been sucked into the bright maw of an alien spaceship, never to return, Ralph’s view was semi-vindicated, although I must coolheadedly observe that we, too, are aliens, to those aliens, and there may not be anything magical about them.

  At the time, Ralph’s silence just seemed rude.

  On the warm picnic table, between my hands, stood the morbid urn. It was larger than my mother’s urn: this I attributed to crude Malaysian manufacture, knowing, as I did, that Mom and Eddie were the same size. I kept addressing it telepathically, though I didn’t honestly believe it was Eddie. I was just, unwilling that nothing should be Eddie.

  At first I had been saying, how lonesome I was, and would he come to me in a dream, please. Then I began to make the urn answer back, as if playing dolls. Now, as Denise’s long tale faded from our minds, and we all waned away from the moment of recognizing Eddie’s ultimate beach, I said to the urn, sadly, I could scatter your ashes there. If you don’t mind sandcastles, et cetera.

  I’m holding out for toilet, the urn said. Seriously, final wish.

  Then I looked at Denise, considering her ideal profile as something people could love. Feeling my look, she clenched her jaw. Her face settled into a different intensity, drawing back from the seriousness of privacy.

  And she said, quietly, into the sea’s receptive space: “But of course I knew your brother was going to die.”

  I had to clear my throat. Then I said, “How?”

  She shook her head. And didn’t answer, just shrank kind of miserably, burdened with her terrible knowing. Ralph caught his breath.

  Then we all sat around, we were supposed to be awed. I was brattishly unawed. In rebellion, I thought about the way my mother said, every time she got a phone call, “I was just about to call you! It’s mental telepathy!” – although, to be fair, Mom knew it wasn’t true. Of course, if Ralph had been skeptical, I might have played the credulous role, and been disdainful of his closed mind: there’s never any telling what you genuinely think, once you enter into group dynamics.

  This is why we should avoid each other, carefully (I’d got around to thinking – we’d been awed for some time). Then Denise said, shattering my cozy inner monologue:

  “Actually, he said he was going to kill himself. Eddie, when he left –”

  I blurted, “Oh, of course!”

  Ralph put his hand on my shoulder as if I needed comforting.

  I said, “He was certain to . . . I don’t mean anything. That is, he probably said that to anyone who wouldn’t sleep with him, although it was harmless, actually.” Then I frowned and had to think exactly how this was harmless. Ralph was bugging me, rubbing my shoulder.

  Then he said, carefully, “But Denise didn’t mean . . . you said you knew?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said reluctantly, “I meant a presentiment. But I wouldn’t place too much importance on it. I only – you know, I should have chased after him. And I thought, oh, no, he’s going to die, and I went to sleep. In actuality. So that’s my guilty conscience, which, I’m sorry to burden you.”

  “You let him go?” I said, suddenly giddy.

  “I think I must have been ill.” She frowned, checking her memory. And added, absently, “I have pancreatic cancer. I’m dying as we speak.”

  I looked at the table defensively, I didn’t want other people to die. There was sand in the grain of the wood.

  She amended, in a wry tone, “Not exactly, as we speak.”

  Ralph caught his breath again and I listened to him let it out while I picked at the grain in the wood. I told Eddie, everyone’s dying, this sucks. When Ralph said he was sorry I looked up: Denise was smiling again, at Ralph her old childhood pal. She announced:

  “I can understand you wanting to think . . .” and stopped herself, with a grimace of suppressed mirth.

  “What?” Ralph said, absolutely nakedly afraid.

  “Oh, our strange experience together. You know.”

  “Yes . . .” Ralph said carefully, giving her an eliciting look.

  “You saw God,” she reminded him, grinning.

  “Did I?” said Ralph. He looked at me, I had to touch his arm, he looked so awful. But he just looked at my hand, stunned.

  Denise said wearily, “I didn’t see anything, you said you saw God.”

  “Let’s take that as given,” I said hastily. “Is that all right?”

  “I just wanted to say,” Denise resumed, “as an example. There were those strange events, with the cat and so forth. And then it began again before John’s death. So I expected him to see God, I thought I was a conduit. But in fact, it’s just more events, one after another, at random. So I really try not to make sense of things, nowadays.”

  “But your luck,” Ralph objected.

  “I was a teenager,” she said flatly, and lifted her plastic glass of beer. She put it to her lips, but then grimaced and put it down again, crabby.

  Ralph and I exchanged glances, on the same wavelength again, meeting a common threat.

  Then Denise butted in from her different, upsetting wavelength:

  “Oh, I’ve just told you, haven’t I? That I was lucky, but you know, I tell it different ways. I gave you the naughty version.”

  We looked at her unwillingly, not going to ask. Ralph noticed m
y hand on his and grasped it suddenly, making me jump.

  “Of course,” she said, with an air of confronting an old enemy, “Admittedly, I think I’m the touch of death, and my life is a series of bizarre coincidences, and it’s all very laden with meaning.”

  “But it’s not?” I said courageously.

  “No,” she said. “It’s not. There’s a famous man who’s been struck by lightning four times, you know. I imagine he thinks it’s to do with him. People like to make things into stories.” She gave her mental adversary one last defiant, withering look, and subsided.

  Good! You shut up now! I thought out of nowhere. Then I wanted to burrow into the sand and think. I wanted Eddie to bury me in the sand. I needed that.

  Nonetheless, I thought on without it, pell-mell, how I lacked any sense of fate; to me, coincidences were pure coincidence. Even my own life had not been about me.

  Immediately I perceived this as a shortcoming. Even now, I was all about Eddie, having barely shed being all about Ralph. Narcissism, I thought, wistful. Why can they all do it? And, steeling myself for a last-ditch effort, I faced the grim, gloriously selfish Denise:

  “You’ve left me out on purpose,” I said, boldly. Immediately I was alarmed Denise would now reveal I didn’t exist.

  “What?” she said, squinting, as if startled from sleep.

  “I mean,” I pressed on, “that is, my father finding me? Or whatever . . . if . . . he always said he found me in Peru?”

  “Guatemala,” she said, flatly. “I’m tired. You know, I don’t feel well.”

  Ralph cleared his throat and said, in a muted, respectful tone that made me personally queasy:

  “Do you want to go to bed? Are you going to be all right?”

  Denise shook her head: “No, no. I’ll rally.” She folded her hands and squeezed them as if to generate energy. Then she smiled at me, personally. To my alarm, I warmly responded and immediately wanted to do something nice for her.

  She said, “It’s all right, I’m honestly not stalling. I think I should get up and walk, though. That often helps.”

  We all looked around as if there might be good places to walk, hidden cunningly. Then all looked right at Eddie’s beach.

  moonlit Eddie, going out

  stopped at the totally monster bug-laden restaurant, hoping to shit they’d have a knife, but of course the assholes locked up, like who was out here to steal anything (he fumed, frustrated in his fucking stealing mission), so he took a pen cause that was all there was to steal and scribbled a stupid suicide note to disgrace himself for all time, then realized he was fucking drowning himself, so the note in the pocket deal was out, he had to go back to the goddamn room again, and Denise probably awake.

  Only weirdly when he got there, his briefcase was outside, like she had put his stuff outside in total heartless assumption he was just walking out and not killing himself like he’d specifically said, only she still had his shoes. Like, where was he going to go barefoot. He whispered to the door, “Thanks, bitch.”

  Then whispered to the door, “I love you.”

  He bent and opened the briefcase. He put the suicide note in the empty briefcase and then got the tape from his pocket and put that in too. Like trusting and hoping nobody stole the briefcase while he was dying, cause you never knew, in a place like this, the fucking backpack fraternity.

  At last (he thought in total frustration, like you kill yourself and it’s all this same annoying shit that goes wrong, just thank Christ it didn’t involve a bus ride, he’d be stuck on a fucking bus all night) he headed to the beach

  watching his feet the whole way, shit scared of stepping on a bug when he was about to

  Christ, he needed to die now

  Christ, he couldn’t fucking take it

  he scratched his face in the frenzy of, you fucking piece of shit man, disappear

  and drown yourself, you fucking, something people used to know how to do, he didn’t even know, could he do it. Breathe water, which, why they had to be there, at the beach like he was in some fun beach mood

  then a sick joy hit him, as if summoned by the thought of fun.

  He stopped in his tracks. Everything became yellow and interesting. It passed.

  and back down into hell. His skull felt wrong, there was some bad drug thing. And couldn’t think. Christ, he needed to die now, and

  there was the beach, shiny white between the trees. He didn’t run but he thought about running. He realized no one would ever know he’d died, it would be like he’d never existed, he felt reassured and noble.

  He strode through the last trees.

  The sand was cool. For a second he wasn’t going to kill himself, he was just going to sit on the beach all night, and fuck them. He threw the pen into the sea. Stare at the moon all night though it was only a half-moon, and kind of beige.

  He took a step into the water, and noticed the lambent sparkle.

  He thought of germs. The whole joke of it washed over him and he began to stagger into the waves, but something enormous came into his head that wasn’t a thought, that was like a physical object entering his head, he screamed. He tried to stop it with his hands.

  on the beach, with the sparkling waves done and undone, in black and white, Guatemala:

  “John Moffat: A Hero in the Lists of Cain”

  1You could only get burgers or fried chicken. The bars weren’t to his taste, the music all sounded the same. He gave up trying to learn Spanish.

  He spent a lot of time wasting time at the office. The boys had got Space Invaders on the computer; he played that, sometimes they all played Monopoly.

  In the evenings, he sat in his hotel room, writing letters.

  I miss you like all tarnation, he wrote. It’s hotter than Hades, the mosquitoes sweat. I can’t wait to get back to my own bed and my best girl.

  2By day, they talked, they had meetings and drafted plans. They distributed schedules and approved alterations. They had to find a new translator, the air conditioning needed work. Everything went through Washington.

  With the Guatemalans, it was always, walking on eggshells. They came to meetings armed, they met every American proposal with outrage. If the General stormed out, the whole next week was down the drain.

  They demanded:

  •a deadly, not an incapacitating weapon

  •vaccines for their troops, and the means to make more

  •technology to breed the bacteria itself

  They displayed an unsettling predilection for the word “plague.”

  2.1“It’s just yank, yank, yank – yank our damn chain,” said the Head, despondent. “No way they’ll get thing one of that stuff. All’s they really want is payoffs, and they had their thirty pieces of silver, it won’t fly.”

  3The Guatemalans pulled out.

  3.1Washington decided to go ahead.

  3.2The Guatemalans were back.

  3.3And again.

  3.4Time stood still. Whatever you tried to do, there was some Guatemalan hell-bent to stop you. In the morning, you put on a shirt ruined by the Guatemalan maid; the Guatemalan cab driver took you miles out of your way, to a meeting where a Guatemalan colonel would rattle on irrelevantly for an hour about trade concessions.

  4John would not allow the word “Spic” to be spoken in his presence. Where he was from, half of everyone was Mexican, and some real nice people. Just as bad as the f word, and he was raised Baptist.

  But it came a point, the boys complaining and cracking jokes, and the old hands egging them on 101%, until John spent a week honestly believing what some guy told him, that the Spanish word for “lie” was the same as the word for “talk” –

  The word “local” got to be like a swearword itself. He would not have called a man Guatemalan, to his face.

  And it was just a darn fool South American war, cowboys and Indians. He wouldn’t give you two cents for the Spanish, if that was the best they could do in three hundred years. Be another three hundred years before he saw
the end of this job. Well, had he known.

  One day, he was shooting the breeze with the Head, and the bug just bit him. “Vietnam, we were fighting the Communists. All fine and dandy. Now, who in Sam Hill are we fighting here?”

  The Head just looked away, dismal. He said: “Yep.”

  5It got worse. Time on his hands, he got hooked on thinking.

  5.1He’d make simple things real complicated. Then he’d take a break to over-generalize.

  5.2He started writing letters home just to tear up. To chew things over.

  5.3It was as simple as pie. He just didn’t understand.

  6It was a war of the rich against the poor.

  6.1The poor were Indians in bright cotton clothes, ever bearing loads on their backs and heads.

  6.2The rich

  •exterminated them en masse and stole their land

  •enslaved them, man, woman and child, to work the cotton fields

  •hunted those who resisted down and tortured them to death

  6.3In the bloodier acts of this old American drama, the poor were now “guerrillas.”

  6.4But, in plain English: his was an evil cause.

  7You could count on John Moffat like death and taxes.

  7.1What he had undertaken, he would surely do.

  7.2He would soldier on. Under torture, John wouldn’t talk; in a prisoner-of-war camp, John, clean and buoyant, would rally the men’s spirits.

  7.3His honor crippled him: he could not shirk his task.

  8Then the details were finalized. Suddenly it was done.

  8.1The raid was dubbed Operation Pretty Boy. A reconnaissance plane and three dusters: psittacosis; from and to Panama; just as it had been envisaged from day one. It was set for 10:00 P.M., on the 4th of July.

  8.2The date’s feeble irony thrilled the Americans. They brayed and made jokes about fireworks and independence. They laughed boastfully, eyeing the deadpan Guatemalans.

  It was a thing John never could stomach – disrespect. He stood and waited for the boys to hush up. Then he turned to the Guatemalans’ head honcho, a man he never spoke to if he could help, fellow looked like an honest-to-Betsy Gila Monster, but.