A Star Called Lucky

by Bapsy Jain

  He pointed at her and smiled. “The lady in the blue suit.”

  “Very observant. Yes, that would be me. I mean, I was wearing a blue suit. I had a premonition. I mean a presentation. But I had a premonition about the presentation, too. I don’t usually wear suits. I mean, but you know how business is. Or,” she looked at him, staring impassively at her. Then realizing she was making no sense said, “Oh! maybe you don’t. But you were easy to remember. Yesterday you were the only one here in a monk’s—what do you call those, anyway? Habits?”

  “Robes,” Usko answered.

  “Yes. A robe. And a nice color, too, I might add. It suits you.”

  “We don’t get to choose the color, though. That’s traditional. But thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “And the suit?”

  Lucky blinked. “The suit?”

  “The suit you had a premonition to wear. Should you have worn it?”

  “I think so, yes, but the presentation was canceled anyway. That was my premonition, that the presentation was going to be canceled.”

  “I see. And you often have these premonitions?”

  “Sometimes. But they’re usually spot on when I do.”

  “That’s a good sign,” he said. The other monks, all three of whom were short, thin, old, and Tibetan, looked quizzically at Usko.

  “Do you know where I could find a good cup of coffee around here?” Usko asked.

  Lucky pointed at Café Vision. “Right there,” she said.

  “Would you like to join me?”

  Lucky checked her watch. She had a little time. “Okay,” she said,

  Usko turned to his fellow monks. “Will you excuse us?” The monks nodded and shuffled off.

  They walked to Café Vision, where Usko ordered mocha for himself while Lucky got a latte. They found a table by the window.

  Lucky cleared her throat and shuffled her feet.

  Usko took a sip and smiled. “Do you work for the government?” he asked.

  “No,” Lucky said. “I mean yes, but probably not the way you think I do. Why do you ask?”

  “You mean, besides that you were suited and were headed into a government office?”

  Lucky smiled. “I was working for the State Department of Corrections. The New York State Department of Corrections, I mean. Not the State Department.” She winced.

  “I see.”

  “But I was just hired at the Health Services. Sort of. I’m on my way to JFK to go to Washington. And you?”

  Usko smiled. “Regrettably, I was not “sort of” hired by the Health Services. I will also be on my way to Minneapolis. Washington is nicer, but Minneapolis is cooler.”

  “Yes, it is. Much cooler. Washington has more art and more music and more museums. But Minnesota is cooler. Weather-wise, anyway.”

  Usko looked at Lucky. “So you’re going to work for Clevis Coleman?”

  “How did you know?”

  “He runs the Health Services. And he was here. And there are important FDA meetings going on inside. He’s the reason we’re protesting. It wasn’t hard to guess he would be the reason you were attending.”

  Silence. Usko sipped his mocha but his eyes were penetrating. Lucky shifted in her seat, crossed, and then uncrossed her legs. “So what are you really doing?” Lucky asked feeling rather odd.

  “Well, besides protesting, I’m raising funds for a special school for children maimed by landmines. I have a presentation at a Lion’s Club convention tomorrow.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how’s that going?”

  “Not very well. Since most of the children live far away, and people in America don’t have much experience with landmines, nobody around here cares much about them. But the Lions care about children in general, at least in theory, although they mostly support charities for the blind. I might get a token donation. If I’m lucky, I’ll touch some rich veteran’s conscience and he’ll write me a check worth cashing.”

  Lucky thought about Usko’s poem—the one about the boy planting the improvised explosive device. She wondered how much he really knew about explosives. A lot, I bet, she thought. Hadn’t he been in the Balkans? And Afghanistan?

  “Since I’m not having much luck soliciting donations, I was thinking about suing the companies that manufacture the mines. Do you know mines only cost a few dollars to make but almost a thousand dollars each to remove?”

  “I did not know that.”

  “And mines laid in conflict zones are often not mapped—they’re laid in a hurry and often by foot soldiers who don’t write things down—so they’re difficult to find. In fact, we frequently don’t know where the minefields are until people step on them. Most often, that means children, because they’re the ones running around in the forest. And mines are designed to maim, not to kill. So long after the war is over, we have children losing their feet and hands and eyes to landmines.”

  “But why maim?”

  “Why? Because a dead soldier is a dead soldier. He can be left and buried later. But a wounded soldier—preferably bleeding and screaming in agony—his brothers won’t leave him. They’ll carry him to a doctor. That takes at least two more men out of action. And the sight of all that generally stops the rest. Hard to find a man who’ll knowingly walk through a minefield.”

  “I see.”

  “These corporations make millions manufacturing mines, then do nothing when it comes time to remove them.”

  “So, who makes mines?”

  “You’d be surprised. GM used to make them. Mercedes used to make them, until we outed them and a protest ensued. Lots of companies make them. Nowadays, they are mostly made by rogue traders. Arms dealers and Mafioso with little factories on the side.”

  Lucky nodded. “If you need help with this,” she said, “With a lawsuit, I mean, I know a good lawyer…”

  “John Black?”

  Lucky caught her breath.

  “So you’re the mysterious stranger who posted my bail.”

  For some reason, Lucky expected Usko to be angry with her—to call her a meddler or some kind of do-gooder—but instead he bowed slightly and said, “Thank you.” He leaned closer and looked straight into Lucky’s eyes.

  She blushed.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why post my bail?”

  “Well, you’re a student and all, and I didn’t think you had a ton of money to pay for a lawyer—not that Columbia wouldn’t go out and find you a good one—but John owes me a favor, so I called him. I mean, you don’t look like a criminal. You’re just out there for your cause, you know? You don’t even look dangerous and you don’t belong in jail. I mean, are you? Do you?” Lucky bit her lip. There was something about Usko that she found both incredibly disarming and unbelievably alarming. She couldn’t stop talking and she couldn’t make sense. “I’m not very good at this kind of thing,” she said. “Talking to guys I mean. The opposite sex. I guess that’s why I’m pushing thirty and single.”

  “Me neither,” Usko said. “The opposite sex.” He leaned back in his seat and crossed his legs. “Maybe that’s why I became a monk. So what do you know about Clevis Coleman?”

  “Not much, really. I only met him yesterday. He hired me to be on his team. Just yesterday. You said you know him—”

  “Sort of,” Usko said. “Sort of, sort of, sort of. Sort of in passing.” He scratched his chin absentmindedly. “I try to cross his path as often as I can.”

  “Why?” Lucky asked.

  “Coleman is ambitious. I don’t mind ambition if it’s tempered with ethics, but Coleman runs the world’s largest institutional torture of animals. Since the animals can’t ask him to stop, I’m asking for them. And I’m going to keep asking until he does. I’ve made him a symbol, a target. Kind of like we did with Mercedes. If he doesn’t want bad publicity, he’s going to have to mend his ways. And bad publicity is the one thing he doesn’t want.”

&n
bsp; “But the government doesn’t torture animals.”

  “You can’t be that stupid, Miss….”

  “Boyce. Lucky Boyce. But you can call me Lucky.”

  “The experiments the FDA now approves–under Coleman’s personal direction, mind you—are not very different than those that the Nazis performed on Jews and Gypsies and other unfortunates. Give them x amount of this drug and see if they die. If they do, cut them open and see why. If they don’t, cut them open and see if they might have died, if you hadn’t cut them open.”

  “But the work is scientific research—I mean, it saves lives. Doesn’t it?”

  “Does it? If that were true, wouldn’t we be healthier today than we were fifty years ago?”

  “But aren’t we? I mean, life expectancy has gone up, hasn’t it?”

  “Prolonging life and improving the quality of life are two different things. Many of the things that used to kill people we have learned how to treat. But many other things that used to be statistical blips are now major killers—things like cancer and heart disease; diseases that thirty years ago were virtually unknown in many parts of the world but are now as common abroad as they are here—thanks to diet and medicine.”

  “You mean the things tested at the FDA?”

  “Precisely. Tell me…Lucky. Do you know anything about sociology?”

  “Sure. It’s the study of systems and societies. Much like psychology but at the group level.”

  “Nicely put,” Usko continued. “Societies, like people, operate on many basic assumptions. For instance, that the purpose of schools is to educate.”

  “But isn’t it?”

  “Could be. We’d like to think so. But if that was the purpose, no student would leave school without an exemplary education. No student would earn, say, a 70%, a C. Only when a student mastered a course would they move on. Some might finish sooner, some might finish later, but they’d all graduate with full subject mastery. Sociologists looking at schools without any idea what the stated purpose was would conclude that schools exist, not to educate but to stratify students—to break them down into groups. Some students get educated, but all students get classified. Classified and stratified.”

  “But isn’t that just a measure of achievement?”

  “Not necessarily. Often, the brightest students are the ones who fail. Take Einstein, for instance. Failed math. He was a genius at math—knew more than his professors. He’s a perfect example. He could have skipped ahead ten years. The same principle is true with the FDA. If scientific testing was to find out that things were safe, we wouldn’t eat or consume or use half the things we do. Rather, testing is to find out how unsafe things are, to quantify the risk, classify the risk, and proscribe acceptable levels of risk. That way, when people get cancer and die, the manufactures can shrug their shoulders and say that they were acting within the law. Sort of like making landmines and then not cleaning them up.”

  “In other words,” Lucky said, “the whole thing is a sham to keep the blame for deaths away from the producers, and to shift the blame onto the consumers?”

  “Pretty much that, but I think scam is a better word.”

  Lucky looked Usko over. “I don’t know,” she said. “Is it wrong to make an animal suffer if it helps a human being?”

  Usko moved closer to Lucky and lowered his voice. “Have you ever heard an animal scream in pain? I have. A deer. I was eleven. I was hunting with my dad.”

  Lucky remembered a dog she saw run over by a taxi when she was a little girl. It lay in the street yelping for several minutes until another car finished it off. “I guess so,” she said.

  “That scream was the loudest sound I ever heard until…well, maybe not in volume, but it was a sound I never forgot.”

  “Until what?”

  “Come again?”

  “Until what. You said it was the loudest sound you ever heard until.”

  Usko looked away. “Never mind. The thing is, is that a sound you would enjoy listening to? Would you, say, buy a CD of cats screaming in death agony and listen to it over dinner?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So what would you think if I told you that sometimes they surgically remove vocal cords so the experimenters can’t hear the animals scream?”

  Lucky looked down at her feet. This wasn’t why she had followed Usko, and things certainly weren’t going the way she had imagined. “Look,” she said. “I don’t believe in torturing animals. Is there a middle ground between testing and torturing?”

  “Not really,” Usko said. “Even if there were, corporations and the governments that serve them are not so much concerned with doing what’s right as doing what they feel is legally necessary—and doing it as cheaply as possible. Ethics are expendable—just like the animals they kill. It is about respecting life,” Usko said. “We have no right to cause any being to suffer. If I won’t respect the life of an animal, then I won’t respect the life of a man or woman, either. It is about respect for life, Lucky.”

  “You sound a lot like an old friend of mine,” Lucky said. “But just for the record, I’m not involved with any of that testing stuff.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “I was hired to research people, I mean a person.”

  “Who? Me? Is that what he sent you to do? To get close to me? To spy on me? ‘Bail him out of jail and see if you can strike up a conversation.’”

  “Sent? Spy? Nobody sent me. I’m on my way to the airport.”

  “And I never said anything about being a student at Columbia, either, so I suppose you just saw my maroon robe and deduced that?”

  Lucky blushed. “You’re not hard to find,” she said. “All I had to do was Google you.”

  “And how did you know my name?”

  Lucky stammered. “Look, the truth is, I wanted to help you. Believe me, I don’t always help strangers.”

  Usko stood up, frowning. “Tell Coleman I said ‘Hello’ and I’ll see him again soon.”

  Lucky caught his hand. It was warm. “I wasn’t sent. Seeing you here was just a coincidence. I looked your name up in the arrest records—that’s public domain. It wasn’t hard to find. And I meant what I said about bailing you out. You don’t look dangerous and you don’t seem like a criminal.”

  “Well,” Usko said, “You’re wrong on both counts. Go back to Google and read some more.” He walked away for a moment then turned and looked back at Lucky. “And the dress would have suited you better. Green, yes. Blue is not your color.”

  When he was gone Lucky thought, Do I know how to pick ‘em, or what? How can I be such a lion in the office and such a lamb on my own? She hailed a taxi and headed for the airport, realizing as she arrived that she could have almost missed the plane. She was the last person to board.

  As she settled into her seat and buckled her belt for takeoff, her phone rang. She struggled to retrieve it while surrounding passengers glared. “Hello?” she said.

  Collette. “How come you didn’t call me?”

  “Collette, sweetie, I’ve been really busy. I just barely caught my plane and I can’t talk right now—we’re just about to take off.”

  “Well call me,” Collette said. “From a pay phone. And be careful with your phone. You’ve been hacked.”

  “I’ll call you when I get to Washington, okay?”

  There was a sound like someone smacking chewing gum. “I gotta go.”

  Lucky turned off her phone.

  As soon as they landed in Washington, Lucky turned her phone on and it rang before she could even check for messages. At the other end was a deep, melodious, slow Southern baritone voice, “Miss Boyce?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Evan Cotton. Clevis sent me to meet you. When you pick up your bags, I’ll be by the exit.”

  “And how will I recognize you, Mr. Cotton?”

  “I’m six feet seven inches tall, black, and I’m wearing a red, green, gold, and black knit cap. Do I need a sign?”

  Lucky
laughed. “I think I can manage that.”

  Evan drove—another of those annoying black SUVs.

  “Why do VIPs always drive SUVs?” Lucky asked.

  “Beats me,” Evan said. “Me—I’d have me a Beemer or a Benz. I s’pose they’re worried about crashes. And you can get an SUV armor plated.”

  “So, is this armor plated?” Lucky asked. She looked around self-consciously, suddenly feeling important.

  “No—we’re expendable. But you can bet the boss man’s is, top to bottom. I bet that sucker weighs four tons, all the stainless steel it carries.”

  Lucky sighed.

  “But don’t repeat that. Me—I can get away with it. I am, as you will soon figure out, Coleman’s token black man. I’m in all his photo ops. But often, I feel like I’m just a glorified gopher.”

  “Gopher?”

  “You know—go fer this, go fer that. Like pickin’ you up. I s’prised he didn’t tell me to wear a blue suit and little chauffeur hat. Go fer a ride, Miss Daisy?” Evan laughed.

  “Come on, it can’t be all that bad.”

  “Oh, it is. Oh, yeahhhhhhhhhh,” Cotton said, exaggerating the yeah.

  “I’ve heard that before. Who was it? Soupy Sales?”

  “Timmy Rodgers. But it works for me, too.”

  “I don’t remember him,” Lucky said.

  “Probably best that way,” Evan said. “He was a sad Uncle Tom, but he had a good punch line.”

  They dropped Lucky’s bag off at the Marriott—it was on the way to and very near the office. Evan checked his watch. “We’ve got a half-hour until the next staff meeting. Anything you need?”

  “I could do with a coffee.”

  Over a latte, Evan explained that his background was in immunology—he was a medical doctor (Brandeis, 1997, Magna Cum Laude) whose specialty was tropical diseases and their prevention. He had been with Coleman for almost three years, but he wasn’t happy about it. “I came here to do science, but instead, I’m wasting my time,” he explained. “You’ll find Coleman unbelievably demanding. He’ll ask the inconceivable, settle for the impossible, and when you’ve done it, he’ll berate you for taking so long. But trust me, that’s all a façade. Underneath that hard exterior beats a heart of stone-cold granite. The man has toxic waste for blood. It would freeze, if it wasn’t for all the radioactivity he carries around.”