The underlying cause was Ted’s odd but well-funded entrepreneurial ambition. Here was a guy whose not-so-insignificant inheritance, intermittently delivered by bank wire at the command of his healthy-as-a-bull father, who was uninterested in the morbid suspense of wills and impatient sons, might have long ago been squandered had his visions been a bit more grand. Every eight months or so since his eighteenth birthday, Ted would be overtaken by some ultimately small, but at the time monumental, vision, a vision he cultivated and situated in his head alongside his father’s own capitalist ascent (having to do with luggage). They never, none of them, not a one, ever amounted to a thing, though a few, bizarrely, developed little lives of their own, this due to lingering ads in the yellow pages and the like. All the same, they kept coming. The fourth of which interests us here. Ted would get an idea, for an invention, a service, a middleman operation of some sort, whatever, and he would first do two things: (1) name it—the invention, service, or middleman operation; and upon the completion of step 1, (2) pay a good friend with graphic-design experience plenty of money to design a logo, letterhead, business cards, ads, and anything else along these lines, seeing how money was not an object, not really.
The fourth such vision, the one of relevance here, came to the destined-to-be-wealthy-despite-himself aspiring man of means during his third year at a ferociously overpriced, nearly prestigious private college. One of his classes that year, which he took by mistake, he wasn’t even in the right building, was named “Transnationalism and Borders” or something like that. Ted read only four pages, right around one-half percent, of the overall assigned readings, but diligently attended the class, where he sat silently, attuned to the goings-on with the same steady but vaguely sterile interest with which one follows a sporting event broadcast through a TV halfway across a loud bar. He gleaned nothing tangible from the class, but the word “transnationalism” did grow on him. The instructor, naturally, used the term a bunch, and though this particular student never completely grasped its most limited meaning, let alone larger implications, Ted did develop a real fondness for the prefix “trans.” It cropped up in his doodles, and over time its semantic cousins—transportation, translation, transcendence, Transylvania, transplant, transsexual, transmission—whenever they appeared, pricked him somehow. And so a vision was on its way, this one, as mentioned earlier, being the fourth in a longer, still-proliferating series. Ted concluded that all this “trans” stuff had big implications for the future—he did gather from his instructor, who seemed quite passionate about the whole thing, that the future was about transnationalism, or something to that effect—and that a business, a one day giant corporation, was waiting to sprout from this trans moment in world history. Ted looked at his trans lists—which would he bring to fruition? Transportation was mostly spoken for, transplant too technical, transsexual hardly a moneymaker, and so on until he got to translation. His would be a translation institute or company or service that would translate for people when that was needed, and, according to his instructor, this was going to be a lot.
So the first thing to do, obviously, after dishing out over $7,000 for the top-of-the-line graphics stuff, was to hire some translators. The French and German folks were easy enough to track down, but our young CEO was stuck on the idea that the longer the list of languages his company could work with, could translate, the better. Ted wasn’t a graphic-design man himself, but he did have an image in his head of the main ad listing all the serviceable languages, descending downward in some authoritative-looking font, properly spaced and all, and that the longer the list, well . . .
And this is the part that just kills Ben. He, too, attended this center of higher learning, which, again, cost so much that were his parents to have taken and smartly hidden the money required for tuition, room, board, books, phone, recreational medication, trips home—the four-year total coming in just a few bucks over $140,000—in a CD, money market, mutual fund, IRA, 401(k), tax-elusive investment setting, and just kept their child alive and fed, getting him to deliver papers or pizza or processing data or anything until the age of thirty-five just to avoid debt, he could have retired, more or less, thanks to a bull market, which, essentially, would have made him a millionaire. But his parents didn’t, so he shared the same floor of a large student-housing complex with Ted the entrepreneur during their first year.
Ben, our hero, took, in order to fulfill the foreign language requirement, an obscure language. This language is a European language, but seriously Eastern European, entirely marginal in pretty much anyone’s genealogy of languages, just barely getting invited to the Indo-European family table. Just barely. Balto maybe, Slavic probably. The language that balances out French and Italian on the unofficial spectrum of languages for a romantic evening. This language hardly gets much mention outside of its local habitat, though it is the language spoken by those unfortunates that every fifteen years or so, whether under the auspices of fascist, Communist, or unspecified geopolitical misguidance, rise to international attention as they and their linguistic neighbors do horrible things to each other in the name of nationality, religion, ethnicity, etc. Being a language so underappreciated, it rarely surfaces even at gigantic state universities, places where enough people learn and teach, say, Flemish, to push a few tables together at some popular bistro right off campus at the end of the semester in order to celebrate this Flemish thing they’ve built. But thanks to a starry-eyed partially Slavic professor, who wrote perhaps one of the three best grants this decade, enough funds were raised to create a program in this language’s instruction. This instructor, who really just didn’t get it, was of the mind that once this language program got off the ground and the initial inertia working against it was overcome, the students would sign up regularly, appreciating the sheer beauty of the language, wanting to learn it in order to better understand the unrest that speaks this language, unrest this instructor figured wasn’t about to end. Ben, not even remotely Slavic, let alone Balto, in the very early days of that first semester, was helplessly following around a striking romantic interest, who was flattered, but no thanks, who herself was Slavic and who signed up. Ben did, too. It was more of an “I’ll just hang out with her in class and see what happens” thing, expecting to likely drop the class and her, or her dropping them both, or just him, but this instructor, boy oh boy, this was no normal language class. It’s not that he made Ben passionate about the language, it’s just he forced Ben to see how it was his global responsibility to know this language, that to walk away from it, once being exposed on even the most superficial level, was somehow an act of inexcusable sociohistorical negligence. This kept Ben from bailing early on, and later in the semester, just as Ben’s transplanted sense of history was wilting, the language was resold to him from a different angle. The instructor couldn’t afford to lose students. Future funding depended on enrollment. Not only did he need them to remain enrolled, he needed them to enroll for the second semester and then the second year and on and on. Soon Ben learned that he could do nothing to earn less than an A-minus; it just wasn’t possible. So he stayed on for three semesters, even after the Slavic woman transferred to Indiana. How much did he learn? Not too much. Some basic greetings and conversation, a few hundred words, a handful of strange idioms. A poem by some survivor-victim-witness-type. Enough for Ted to put this language, with Ben as the company’s translator, near the very bottom of that impressive list in the ad, nineteen languages long.
“No. No. No fucking way, Ted,” Ben at first protested. Ted countered, over a so-called business dinner at a pricey restaurant, that no one would ever ask for translation services in this language. The meal ended with a drunk but still-intransigent Ben. His reluctance was finally overcome in the moment he agreed to listen to Ted make this same point over a bottle and a half of the same dry but full-bodied wine at the same bistro on the same night a week later, again on the company’s nickel. Because, really, what’s the worst that could happen?
The letter arrived four years after the establishment of the translation institute, two and three-quarter years after its last translation services (these in Italian) were provided. It read:
Dear Misses and Misters that concern:
I am making this letter to you for to request your assistances. I am will to travel soon to your country that is yours for meeting with my extensive family in three monthes. Much years ago a difficult event happened and took place due to me that now I do not and did not am communicating with this extensive family. From this I suffer much. My luckiness today permits traveling by me to your country that is yours so to meet and encounter this extensive family that to request a forgiveness. English but however I speak not. Please, then, please I will paying for translation. 19th October this year. I am too wanting meeting with this translating man one week earlier than the extensive family meeting.
I am thanking you.
Goran Vansalivich
Ted the entrepreneur, who long ago was already on to other not much bigger, let alone better, things, quickly drove his new Japanese sports car to Ben’s apartment, letter (already stapled to some nonsensical official memo from Strictly Speaking Translators) in hand, to demand his services. An hour later Ben returned from a pickup basketball game, clad, ironically it now seems, in sweatpants from his alma mater, to find Ted negotiating over his cell phone the purchase of a small cash-machine company, which would finally, not that it mattered, make him richer still.
“Are you out of your mind?” Ben responded rhetorically in his kitchen moments later. Ted, not quite as foolish as we first thought, announced, “Here’s your advance, I’ll call you in a couple days with more details,” casually placed a check upon Ben’s filthy counter, and exited. Ben, despite the $140,000-plus forked over by his parents, truly and really needed this money, having maniacally abused his line of credit in everything from the methodical acquisition of each and every rare Hendrix import to his strict observation and celebration of International Sushi Night (which falls on any and all odd-dated Tuesdays). The sweatpants were, in fact, about all he had to show for his eight semesters of liberal arts education. They’re great pants, but still.
This left Ben a bit over two months to (re-?)learn the obscure language in question. He miraculously unearthed some old materials—one textbook and a stack of flash cards—and with his nearly four-digit advance from his friend took to reaching the fluency he never even got a whiff of back on that high-priced tree-lined campus. Two days later, Ben had mastered the material from the second semester and was totally at home with the present tense and words like “dog,” “sink,” and “prime minister.” In the search for more materials, Ben frantically and unsuccessfully searched the Web for his old instructor, who by now was making a killing over at the State Department, then contacted numerous schools, institutions, and bookstores for these same materials, but eventually had to settle on poring through an old copy of this language’s dictionary at the downtown library. He did this for three entire days, learning words like “orchestra,” “legend,” and “diamond.”
Halfway through day three, trying, as a sort of spontaneous exercise, to describe his burrito to himself in this language (“big,” “tasty,” “brown,” “powerful,” “sincere”), he gives up and drives home relieved, practicing resignation speeches (in English) to deliver to Ted, only to find the first half of his exorbitant appearance fee in the mail later that day.
At their preliminary meeting, for which Ben meticulously memorized a host of introductory dialogues concerning instructions to train stations and questions of geographic origins, the man did most of the talking. He was short and slight, with excellent shoes and a striking chin. His eyes were dark green. Ben listened intently and heard:
My name is Goran Vansalivich and I blah you blah. Blah years ago my brothers (passive marker?) blah by blah. I tried blah to blah (assert myself?) but I could not. Their young children (passive marker?) blah from my country and blah to your country, blah blah blah blah. I tried to explain why I blah not blah blah, but they blah blah blah anyway blah blah blah blah.
Sweating, Ben nodded his head vigorously, sipping his coffee— which Goran would soon pay for—like an aperitif, and mumbled, slurring the difference between present and past-tense markers, which had suddenly eluded him, as he said either “I understand” or “I understood.” The man continued:
Now thirty-five years blah I blah to blah with my family, with my nephews and blah. I try to blah but they blah until I blah and now I can finally blah blah blah, but blah. One week from today at the blah blah next to the blah orchestra, we will blah to blah blah with my family and I will, I hope, blah, blah (kitchen?) blah.
And he gently rested his hand on the table, next to an emptied mug, and looked at Ben, whose toes were flexed against the floor. Ben flawlessly—accent, intonation, and stress aside—delivered the line, “I look forward to assisting you next week,” which he had memorized for the occasion, and raised his hand toward Goran, hoping to utter his farewell and be on his way.
But Goran continued, quicker and more upset:
But they blah blah do not understand why blah blah blah (threat?) blah blah blah my brother blah blah blah gun from the other man blah blah blah blah blah blah. If I blah choose blah blah I blah blah then maybe blah blah door blah blah blah grave. But if I blah choose blah blah, I blah blah move blah blah (future tense?) not blah together, not blah or blah blah blah, but only, yes, only blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. You must blah, you must not blah, yes, I, no, blah blah blah (Goran’s hand up around an imaginary throat, his voice inappropriately loud, as the Americans in the place not so subtly turned their heads to see) blah blah, and then boom, my brothers, my brothers blah and I blah, but not, blah, no not blah, they think that I blah, but I did not, no, no, never, no, no, no, blah, oh, blah blah blah blah (idiom meaning “nothing ever ends”).
And before Ben and his incomprehension could be exposed, Goran wiped his narrow brow, rose, apologized, and walked out of the cafe, leaving a brand-new $50 bill on the table for two coffees and the blueberry scone Ben had disfigured beyond recognition.
AFTER THE meeting Ben spent the better part of the next two days drunk and/or in bed, the “and” period being a particularly unpleasant gray stretch in between Saturday night and Sunday, when Ben negotiated unsuccessfully with his unfriendly, intransigent sheets. The first activity Ben managed to undertake was a visit to the video store. It meant standing up, moving around his apartment, dressing, leaving home in at least a marginally presentable fashion—teeth brushed, hair attended to, shoes—driving for five minutes, parking, being with other people, milling about, deciding, paying, driving for another five minutes. No small task, but the safest bet in his less than enthusiastic, but unavoidable quest for reinstatement in society.
The store was much too big: forty thousand titles. Some days this is what it took: forty thousand movies. Hours upon hours of transferred-to-video cinematic adventures. Some days he needed the knowledge that he could choose from over forty thousand titles, every last John Candy vehicle, six different Hell’s Angels documentaries, in order to be convinced to initiate the rental of exactly one movie. But today he longed for the late 1980s resort town family-owned convenience-store inventory: fifty to a hundred choices, a few new movies (the term “new release” was as yet unborn), some strange old musicals or a Cary Grant picture, a movie or two with naked ladies, an early Steve Martin piece, and Star Wars. Simple enough. But this new store, this “better” store, well, now . . .
So he milled about for a long while until he felt he was in a very bad museum. He made a mental note twenty entries long of “maybes,” though none called out. He milled some more, thinking about his socks. Yawned.
The last station was foreign. It wasn’t always; there were days when intellectual aspirations, a dull sense of culture lured him toward this aggressively self-mannered bourgeois aisle, “Foreign.” Where French pronouns and high-contrast images of the Indian subcontinent adorn small boxes with promises of a different sort. Where art supposedly resides. Crap. Today seeing a movie did not mean reading a movie. But the milling had become easy and predictable and not so painful.
The first clue was not the language itself but the chin of the actor in the picture. It wasn’t that it was larger than normal, it was somehow sharper and closer to the surface. An angular, nearly threatening chin that looked like his teacher, that woman, Goran, and pictures in xeroxed newspaper articles. A strangely dominant gene. Subtitled, not dubbed. The original language undisturbed. Better yet, accompanied by English equivalents. Resuscitated and uneasy, Ben seized the tape, gently and cautiously storming the rental counter, longed-for textbook in hand.
BEN RACED home, running a lonely red light, not even turning on the radio. Inside his apartment he was aghast at how long it took the signal from the remote control to reach his TV and VCR. His combined mania and fear found him carefully stuffing the cassette into the machine. He pulled over an upholstered milk crate to sit on. Ben watched the movie in its entirety hunched over said milk crate, motionless, keys still in hand.
Over the next five days, Ben viewed the video twenty-six times. The movie was 118 minutes long. Add to this the time Ben spent rewinding, pausing, relistening, transcribing, and imitating, and we’re talking ten-plus hours a day of video instruction. The second viewing, separated from the first by a hurried, silver-dollar drip of urine in your underwear piss and the seizure of pen and paper, initiated Ben’s transcribing project. The smaller man—clever, but weak and apologetic—spoke softly and quickly, enraging Ben. His cellmate was animated and proud, his words, thankfully, delivered in slow, important portions, everything a speech or sermon:
“I can’t help what I’ve done, but, I, I, I, am, am, am, sorry, sorry, sorry. Heh, heh.”
“Apologies and nonsense. Nonsense and apologies. A scoundrel’s best friends once he’s caught.”
Ben hated the little man, and was grateful that he, too, had eventually been captured and imprisoned alongside the leader he betrayed. Like a play unimaginatively adapted for the screen, scene after scene of conversations in the cell. The sadistic guard appearing occasionally.
Ben watched the first third of the movie four times in a row, determined to memorize it in its entirety and move on. On the third day, forced to run out to the convenience store to buy AA batteries for the weary remote control, Ben recited, nearly chanting:
“I made a mistake, an error. I am a man. This is what we do best.”
“Wrong! This is what we do most. Our best is fighting for perfection, for justice, for truth. You will not be here forever Petre . . . how will you live when you are released? In the prison of their false freedom, or as a warrior for true liberty?”
Halfway through round four of his memorization of third number two, while the tape rewound as instructed by the gallant remote, Ben was struck with the urge to find out how it all ended. His first viewing had somehow evaporated from memory. So he actually sat down, let the pen rest, even granted the remote some time off.
A woman, letters read aloud, a beating and then another. A second guard who is actually an insider. A payoff, or promise of a payoff. Both men swelling into lengthy monologues, sobbing wildly and uncontrollably, no cut for fifteen minutes of more despair and breakdown, unrefined, unchoreographed, and unedited.
Ben’s apartment had been dark or mostly dark for a number of days now. There were unfriendly smells generating from his dwelling and himself. Things, in all senses, had gotten a bit messy—again, in all senses.
The ending seemed a bit unresolved, or at least open-ended. The smaller man is persuaded, but by whom? Who is, really, the leader? The leader is revealed, maybe, to have been broken, and is now, with his promised money, a trap? Has the small man been duped into informing once more, this time to his mentor and hero—who is nothing of the sort, really—this time unknowingly? Dammit. The ending, what is it?
Ben didn’t like this. He did, sort of, but not really. More captivated than pleased. He had forgotten the whole foreign-language business in the meantime, and watched the film three times beginning to end, determined to get to the truth, going so far as to prop a body mirror in a precise position against the wall so that bathroom visits could be made without stopping the tape. He wasn’t eating much at this point. Whatever was available. A banana, a can of baked beans at room temperature, a loaf of bread, one slice at a time, the rectangled plastic bag cuddled up against his side like a languid house pet.
Might the whole thing be a documentary? Is that possible? Are there hidden cameras? There are so few edits, so few changes in camera angles, almost no close-ups. Is this real?
Ben searches for the video case, for quoted blurbs from highbrow critics, for a bit of info from the studio or video company or whatever. Some clue to this thing, this devastating thing. The case is not the case, it’s the generic, clear-plastic thing. He may as well have rented Con Air.
Ben sleeps for a while. He may or may not have decided to sleep. It’s either early morning or late evening. The lighting in his apartment is poor to begin with and all the curtains are closed, and somehow got crudely taped to the wall, apparently by Ben. Ben instinctively turns on the TV and VCR from his hygienically unenviable position on the couch. The videotape doesn’t respond. Ben panics and curses. The tape, it turns out, has been ejected by the machine. Ben recalls that the machine is designed to rewind the video to its beginning if a tape plays to its end, and then eject the cassette. Ben stares at the edge of the tape protruding from the machine. Its original title and an English translation, Captives, troubles Ben as possibly inaccurate.
Ben lies motionless for a time and takes stock of his situation. Intrigued by the film, but without much else to feel good about. In his exhaustion and hunger, in the dim light of his physiological weakness, he must relax; that is he can only, can’t help but relax enough to see the unpleasant trajectory of his entire life in sad, simple focus. At his present position along the path of his days, he is in a mild descent, a yearlong undramatic descent, which followed a shorter undeniably much more dramatic descent of that earlier period, which even here on the nasty couch can only be thought of as “the breakup.” The rest, the duly past part of his life, hidden on the far side of the horizon of his misery, is so much a memory as to be doubted. Something to do with potential and promise. Rising overall, unfazed by slight dips. Like the world’s population or a retirement account. His present smell can only be described as wrong.
He watches the video again, crawling to the machine, perhaps in a gesture of self-irony. He collapses, again self-irony is a possibility, and watches the film on his back, directly under his television, looking out over his brow, backwards. The only thing certain is that everyone can be bought, it’s just unclear who’s buying who and why and in exchange for what, and who’s getting the better end of the deal. In the final account, the middleman is the only obvious winner, and even he seems clueless.
After enduring twenty minutes of angry, chaotic fuzz and hiss from the unsupervised TV, Ben retreats to the bathroom. He sees himself in the mirror and is both disgusted and disappointed; somehow he had expected even worse. He runs a bath, tired and restless. As he disrobes, he is shocked by the sweet, full, rounded scent of his skin. He feels proud of this smell, as if producing such stench was the true project of the last few days, as if this is his greatest asset. He raises a bent right arm, lowers his nose toward and then into a hairy armpit, closes his eyes and breathes intently through his nostrils, savoring the last moments of his repugnance. The odor is so powerful and foreign, he must look at his image once more in the mirror to verify that this is indeed him and not some rank imposter. It is him, though his hair is up to tricks it has never and will never perform again.
The bathwater emits a liquidy version of his smell after little more than a minute. He drains the water but runs the shower at the same time to avoid the cold. The slow, staggered draining of the first tub makes Ben think of calculus, though he’s not sure it should. Sitting on his rubbery ass in the now nearly empty tub, Ben soaps himself, paying extra attention to his crotch, which, despite all the water, still garners his suspicion. The second bath allows him to submerge his head and torso, the soles of his feet planted flat on the linoleum wall. He relaxes, feeling his buoyant hair forget its recent behavior. The water is silent in a droning, hummy kind of way. Ben begins a fantasy about a divinely temperature-regulated tub, picturing scantily dressed attendants with steaming water jugs, but he’s too tired to develop this any further. He drains the tub, rises with the shower back on, soaps and shampoos himself twice more. He shaves twice, too. Throughout he thinks about the upcoming event, trying not to.
THANKS TO his brother’s wedding nine months earlier, Ben has nothing but good thoughts about his suit, though there is little else to comfort him here on his drive to the event. He cuts an uncommon path across town, almost due east, from one aging tier of Cold War suburbia to another. Ben has been to London, Rome, Costa Rica, and even Cairo, but he has never ever been on this part of this road, which elsewhere runs right past his boyhood home. The sights say nothing to him; all he can think of, as townships regularly announce themselves every few miles, stating their population and year of incorporation, are high school football teams, stores selling guitar amps, and used-car lots.
THE HALL is cold and boxy, with a preposterously high ceiling. Goran greets him immediately. Besides the two of them, only the caterers have arrived. Goran’s suit and shoes are immaculate and he holds a glass filled with a clear liquid and a great deal of ice.
“Good evening.”
“Good evening.”
“Did you find the blah with no difficulty? I am very blah about tonight’s blah.”
Ben steels himself, trying not to flinch. Fantasies of having miraculously acquired fluency through the video are mostly dashed, though Ben feels a tad more confident. He recites a line from the film. He can’t recall, somehow, who said it.
“Please, it is important, please speak slowly, I’m feeling a bit strange this evening.”
Goran responds to this with a measured smile, looking down at Ben’s legs and feet as if to check the veracity of Ben’s claim.
“Perhaps something to eat or drink.” Goran responds, speaking, thank God, slower. “Here,” and he reaches up to take Ben gingerly under his armpit toward the caterers. In the poor lighting of the hall, the patch of scarring on Goran’s temple, the dermatological ruins of something between bad acne and a burn, shines hideously.
Ben is served a drink by a heavy black woman, who against her black vest and black bow tie is revealed to be merely brown. Getting drunk surfaces as a possibility, but is quickly stifled. Ben is already nauseous.
“Where is the . . .” He points to where he thinks it ought to be, unable to remember the word, feeling doomed.
“The bathroom?” Ben recognizes the term and repeats it, hoping to prove something to his host. “Over there,” Goran points a ringed finger in the opposite direction. Ben hurries, an urgent rumbling in his intestines causing his forehead to perspire. Goran calls something out to him, cheerily, that is absolutely unintelligible to Ben. The intonation suggests the English tongue-in-cheek “don’t get lost” or “I’ll be here, waiting,” but the only word Ben thinks he understands is “tooth.”
The unfortunate spectacle of bread-diet constipation mercilessly and suddenly overthrown by a bad case of the willies is best glossed over, so let’s just say that even with pants pushed down around ankles, jacket hastily hung on stall-door hook, tie needlessly swung over left shoulder, and ass firmly and squarely planted on toilet seat, Ben is convinced something somehow is bound to get soiled. The seat, even for the slightly tall Ben, is too high, forcing him into an uncomfortable anti-squat position. One bit of graffiti adorns the stall, a symbol or logo of some sort, mostly covered over in a layer of paint close to, but not exactly, the color of the rest of the stall.
FIFTEEN MINUTES later Ben exits the bathroom, walks down a short hallway he doesn’t remember from the first half of the trip, and enters the main hall. Everyone has arrived. It must have been a convoy or a caravan, for everyone is now here. They stand far away from Ben and from Goran and from the bar and appetizers Goran has bought for them. Ben is stunned once more by the chin. A dominant gene of Machiavellian proportions. Through it the blood relatives are obvious, even from sixty feet. Thanks to this chin and the blond hair of one man married into the family, Ben can construct the entire family tree, which now twists awkwardly in the unforgiving breeze of the reluctant gathering. The men stand suspiciously close together, uncomfortable in suits, hands in pockets, drinkless. Moms wrestle and haggle with their young children, too young to understand the collective boycott of the snacks. Two moms negotiate fruitlessly with small whining pouters. The other women trap their own little squirming bastards between their thighs. Every minute or so, one squirts free and darts toward the goodies. The mother, furious, turns to her husband and buys some assistance with her exasperation. The dad walks quick and angry, his long gait nothing but paternal authority. Upon arrival, the child is instructed to “Come here!” The father reaches his right arm across to grab his child’s right forearm. The child is turned, and his ass is slapped, less to hurt him than to propel him back to the group to which he belongs. Each of the four fathers does this or something close to it at least once.
Goran stands away from the group, speaking quickly to an older woman. She and Goran have all the gray hair in the room. The young, boycotting parents have, it appears, no parents of their own. Excitedly Goran speaks to the older woman, clutching her arm like he did Ben’s, holding the woman up next to his chest. Her fat face nearly hides the chin, nearly. Her head bobs endlessly. Beginning from the upright position, the bobs pull her head toward her left shoulder. At about sixty degrees, it bounces back upright, in the spirit of a typewriter. Goran appears to love her dearly. She herself is expressionless, though her head certainly moves a lot.
Ben, who is working, returns to Goran in order to help him communicate with this woman. Goran smiles at Ben while closing his eyes. “This is my sister. I have not seen her in thirty-four years. She cannot speak. So sad. She blah a blah last year.”
There is twenty minutes of this. Ben stands next to Goran and his shaking, wobbly-headed sister, listening to Goran’s monologue, thanking God that he is not being asked to translate. The rest of the family continues to fester. The moms have surrendered, and the children gorge themselves on crackers, cubes of white and orange cheese, and carrot sticks. They drink soda dispensed from a special tube, a tube with access to six different sodas. The children force the black woman to prove this by testing each one. The mothers sit on folding chairs, too exhausted to maintain the postures and positions their stiff dress requires. The men are a huddle. Ben has no business here and escapes to the bathroom.
Returning to the unreunion through the hallway, Ben encounters one of the parentless parents. She is a biological member of the chin clan. The hallway is so narrow—it could not possibly be up to code—that Ben and this woman must synchronize their passage, each turning their hips parallel to the wall. She begins twisting before Ben, who pauses and stares, hoping to seize an opportunity. Her bright eyes are blue by blue-gray. Large, the skin around them is taut, crow’s-feet radiating down and outward. She cries regularly. Beyond these magnificent, expressive eyes her face is part plain, part ugly. Ben is taller, but she is bigger. Her cheap polyester knee-length skirt reminds Ben of his junior high librarian. She returns his stare, impatient, while Ben registers that he is, if only by default, the best-looking of those assembled here this evening.
“Excuse me.” Between polite and annoyed she says it.
Ben starts. “No, uh, mmm, what . . .” He hasn’t spoken English to another person for six days. Confused, her eyes grow. Not to mention she probably needs to use the bathroom. “What, um, what the fu—” He touches his face trying to concentrate, sorting out different abbreviated phrasing for what ought to be a very, very long question. “What the hell is this?” That’s his best shot.
She shakes her head. “This?”
“This,” he stammers, “this fucking thing,” his perplexed arms up to gesture out toward the larger space to his left and her right on the other side of the hallway only to collide with the narrow wall. The embarrassment and pain in his hands return to him his verbal facilities. “What the hell is going on here? Who are you people?”
She pauses, looking right over his eyes, like he’s been asking her for the time every two minutes for the last hour. “Uncle Goran,” she hisses with acidic mockery, “is a murderer.” Ben refocuses and does nothing. They stare at one another without understanding. “He killed our parents,” she blurts, with all the expression of the lady from 4-1-1. “Excuse me,” and she lowers her massive right shoulder into Ben’s right shoulder and forces him against the wall so she can go and piss.
A few minutes later, Goran approaches Ben, who has been trying to understand what is afoot in his GI tract while attempting to fill in the vast gaps of the woman’s sparse narrative, returning to the phrases “prison sentence,” “refugee status,” and “adoption agency” with most every scenario. “We will start now,” Goran says, still smiling.
“Need, can, should, um.” Ben fumbles for the right modal verb to construct his sentence with. “Might you say to me what is the thing you are going to say now to all the people here?” Ben inhales, nearly felled by his own syntax.
“I don’t know,” Goran replies slowly. “I will apologize. You should not blah. I will talk slowly.” And he raises his arms toward the two dozen chairs assembled before a podium and microphone. Loudly Goran says to the other family members, “Please sit down.”
Ben, quickly rehearsing scenarios of humiliation and failure, realizes the time has come. A couplet of dialogue from the movie keeps running through his mind: “‘I’m not who you think I am.’ ‘Exactly, you are who I thought you were.’”
“Sit down, please, everybody,” he speaks loudly, almost enjoying the authority of speaking someone else’s words.
The family migrates to the chairs, reluctant and lethargic. The men are expressionless. Two of them, both of whom have married into the clan, place themselves at opposite ends of the first row. The mothers round up their little ones. The one from the hallway disciplines her son with the word “dammit.”
Goran moves behind the podium, too short for it, but indifferent. A pair of unneeded speakers has been set up, and so Goran’s words boom: “I want to thank you for blah here tonight.” Goran, still smiling, looks at Ben.
“He, uh, I want to thank you for coming here tonight.” Ben returns a forced smile of his own.
“Many years blah, our family blah a very bad blah.” Goran pauses.
Ben pauses. “Many years, many years ago, our family had a very bad thing happen to it. Uh, very bad thing. Real bad.” Ben scans the family, waiting to see who will unmask the charlatan first, but they all just stare at Goran.
“The blah blah came into our village and made everyone choose between blah and death.” Goran pauses.
Ben pauses. He pauses. He raises his glass, his thoroughly empty glass, to his mouth to stall, feeling his spot in the room sink below the rest of the outlying world, which immediately begins tumbling down on top of him.
Just then the two men seated at opposite ends rise. One is tall, the other is wide. The tall one has a horrible hairdo. Long in back, short on top. He wears cowboy boots with his suit. The other definitely lifts weights. His tie is visibly bottom-of-the-line, and he wears no jacket over his short-sleeved button-down. They walk briskly toward the podium. The room is silent, save for the static breath of the speakers. One girl, happy at the sight of her father, suddenly exclaims, “Daddy!” The bobbing head bobs much faster, like a metronome set for the allegro part of the evening’s program.
In the instance before they reach him, Goran turns to Ben and says, each word terrifically enunciated, “I will need your help now.”
“Motherfucker,” the jacketless one says, also enunciating impressively, in the moment he arrives at the podium. He reaches out for Goran, but bumps the podium. Infuriated, he crashes the podium to the ground. The other one stutters his last step, leans back, and adeptly slugs Goran in the face. Goran goes down and the guy with the bad tie sits on him in order to beat him without having to take his stance into consideration. The translator hurries toward his client, tackles the cowboy, who topples over and onto the other two. The next three or four seconds cannot be fully known without the aid of stop-motion photography.
The main problem is the boot. First slicing up his thigh, it is now, at this very instant cleaving the translator’s bottom in two and is firmly wedged into an obvious site of insertion. There are many other things happening at this very instant. The weight lifter is, more or less, lying on top of the translator. Someone’s blood, it appears, is on the sleeve of the arm he is grasping. The cries of children and shrieks of women are surprisingly audible, their high frequencies undisturbed by the low, dull thuds and groans of the more proximate melee. But the hard leather cowboy boot, adorned with silver tips, up, yes, up his ass, this is the main problem. Ben’s immediate objective is to pull himself up and off of the boot by using the aforementioned bloody arm as a lever. His client’s voice, distinctly accented isolated vowels and consonants, can be heard nearby. Ben pulls at the arm to lift himself, but the boot follows, applying equal or greater force. The guy wearing the boots, it seems, is really working over the client, enjoying the stability Ben’s ass offers him to hurt the client as quickly and efficiently as he knows how. The body on top of Ben—whose head repeatedly says things like “you motherfucker,” “fucking fucker,” and “cocksucker motherfucker cunt” in a distinct but difficult to place East Coast accent—shifts a bit. The client pulls the man’s hair—Maine?— using his fingers to truly hurt the other man’s face.
It occurs to Ben that Goran isn’t just making sounds of suffering and pain. There is also something akin to laughter. The big man has rolled off Ben; the boot is nearly disengaged. Two women—he knows by their shoes—are angling into the pile, scolding the combatants, using their handbags for some unclear purpose. It occurs to Ben that Goran just may be the kind of man who views the relationship between a $3,000 suit and a brawl as anything but mutually exclusive. Much to Ben’s dismay, there is a counter-roll, though the boot has been successfully dislodged.
At that moment, the pile is dismantled by the two stockiest female family members and one of the caterers, who drag the attackers away by their feet. The one who had been on Ben thrashes and flops, fishlike.
Goran rises, decidedly dignified for a man bleeding from both nostrils. The wives of the two men scream at their surly, seething husbands in unintelligible unison. The children have been hurried to the exit by the other mothers. The two men who did not participate in the brawl stand silent and stone-faced next to the woman with the bobbing head. It shows no sign of slowing, though the return point is now closer to seventy-five degrees.
Goran sits in a chair, tilts his head back, and begins a series of facial contortions. Throughout, he systematically checks the flow of blood from each nostril, dabbing the area around his philtrum with a different digit at each new expression. He settles on none of them, instead grabbing a thick pile of small, square napkins.
From among those invited, only the two other men and Ben remain. The wives, the bloody husbands, and the head have all disappeared. The caterers stand far away, safe behind a table, drinking soda and picking at the remaining cheese. The two men sit down. Both dark featured with shiny black hair. Their faces clearly come from the same source, though one of them seems to have taken his a bit further. His nose, ears, lips, and even chin are bigger, wider, thicker, and sharper than his brother’s. Ben, his ass throbbing, looks at Goran, who no longer smiles as he tries to repair his face with cocktail napkins.
Goran holds a bright, newly reddened one at a distance from his face considering it like a hand mirror. He speaks in slow monotone: “They will not tell their children I killed their parents. I did not.”
“You won’t tell your children he killed your parents. He did not.” Ben looks at Goran as he says this, his chest swelling as the words come and go effortlessly.
“He did!” one of the brothers protests. “Bastard!”
“I did not,” Goran says calmly. He pauses. After a few of his more discreet efforts fail, he gives up, twists the tip of a napkin and casually inserts it in his right nostril. Half-nasal, he continues: “I did not blah them, but I could not blah them. I wanted to blah them, believe me, but I could not.” This “blah” is the same word repeated.
“What does”—and he says the sound of the unknown word to Goran—“mean?” Ben asks.
Goran removes the napkin tip, studying its saturation. “To do something so they don’t die.”
“He wanted to prevent it from happening, he wanted to save them,” Ben’s voice pleads with the brothers, “but he couldn’t. But he wanted to.”
“They made me watch,” Goran says to the napkin. Reinsertion.
“Nonsense,” one of them says.
“He’s lying,” says the other.
Ben turns to Goran. “They think that you are . . . that this . . . that this is nonsense and lies . . . what you said.”
Goran takes his eyes off the napkin, studying Ben with similar interest. “I loved my brothers and sisters. I wanted to die instead. Now I want my nephews and blah to be my family.” Ben continues looking at Goran and vice versa after the latter finishes speaking. Ben looks over at the taciturn brothers, back at Goran, and then at his own shoes. His bottom smarts, but less. He starts to translate, but one of the brothers beats him to it:
“We shouldn’t have even showed up today. We only did because Aunt Sonja asked us to.”
As Ben begins to search for their words in Goran’s language, the other brother continues: “She can’t talk, and she can barely write. It took her ten hours to write a one-line note. She wrote, ‘Listen to him. Nothing more. Listen. Please. To him.’ Well, we’re listening, but that’s it.”
“Yeah. Fuck him,” the other adds by way of conclusion. Their anger reveals itself through the bottom of their chairs now squeaking around the floor as they use their legs to spit out their contempt.
Ben thinks he might have a very crude paraphrase for that last part, and could do the rest with no problem, but Goran interjects, “The blah is the blahest. The one who does not die is the one that wishes most to die.”
Ben raises his hand to both parties, asking them in two languages to hold on and wait and shut up, please, now.
Suddenly warmed up, Mr. Big Face continues, addressing mostly his brother, who nearly smiles, apparently enjoying the intimacy of their antagonism. “I mean, how does a guy like him even get into this country or out of his own? He’s a known criminal. It isn’t just his own that he kills. He’s notorious.”
Ben feels a jolt of promise as he recalls the image of the very page upon which “notorious” and its equivalent were printed in the library dictionary. Though it may have actually been “nocturnal.”
“I wait my whole life since that blah day to blah to everyone, to my family that I am blah, that I hurt no one.” Goran looks down, moving the bloody napkins around the tabletop in a variation on solitaire.
“Please, stop, please, hold on,” Ben continues, nearly laughing in his powerlessness.
“If I could, if I were that kind of man, if I knew I wouldn’t get caught, I would kill him right now,” the littler-faced one declares proudly. “I was cheering for Earl and Tommy. Quietly, because, after all, the kids. But he deserved it.”
Outside of the brothers, who take turns, everyone is speaking at once. Ben is nearly speaking sign language, having vigorously added all known gestures to his bilingual gibberish in order to silence the room, but no one pays any attention. Goran regularly slams a fist upon the table each time he proclaims his innocence. The brothers counter by pointing their fingers, at Goran, at Ben, at each other.
Gritting his teeth, stomping his foot, and half spinning around in his exasperation, Ben invokes the translator’s authority with a spirited “Shut the fuck up!” He repeats it in English, justly confident that Goran will understand. The startling, heartfelt integration of urgent tone and intense mini-dance was the kind of thing that might have earned him an ice cream cone or another pony ride from his mom a decade and change ago.
The hall is silent. Ben sits down, unable to decide where and how to start, uncertain as to the source and nature of his interest here in the first place. Goran has built a large asterisk, the bloody napkin ends gathered into a single point, their still-white tails radiating outward. The brothers help each other put on the suit jackets they had removed moments earlier. Ben bites his lips and shuffles around a half-dozen mixed-up phrases in his head.
Finally Goran removes a checkbook and pen from inside his suit jacket. He writes a check, tears it out, and hands it to Ben. It is written in the amount of $25,000. A local bank has issued this check, printing on it Goran’s full name and a local address. “For each family,” Goran says.
“He wants to give this to every family,” Ben says, handing the check to the one with the exaggerated face.
“For what?”
Ben translates.
“They will believe me.”
Ben translates.
The brothers whisper to each other, alternately shaking and nodding their related heads.
“Not enough,” one rejoins.
Ben translates.
Goran writes another check, tears it out, and hands it to Ben. “Thirty,” Ben announces.
A brother snatches the check from Ben and studies it. He reaches into his own inner-breast pocket, removes a pen, and writes on the check. He stands up to hand it directly to Goran, but Ben intercepts the check and reviews the alteration. “They want fifty each,” he informs the client.
Goran motions for the check from Ben, then writes on it. As he finishes, a brother walks toward Goran to take the check. Ben raises his arm to chest level, stopping the brother, and instead takes the check himself. “Forty-two-five.”
“Fuck him,” one says, fed up, turning the first word into a diphthong.
For a few moments no one speaks. The caterers are carrying trays and boxes of liquor out through a back door.
Then Ben speaks his best idea in years, the kind of thing that comes to him thanks only to the chaotic distribution of dumb luck. “What if,” he rubs his unique chin, “what if he pays you thirty now and another twenty in five years, but only after he checks with your children that you’re telling them the truth?”
“What was that?” Goran asks, as if he has missed a potentially crucial line in a movie.
“What truth?” one of the brothers challenges.
Ben holds his index finger up to Goran and speaks to the brothers. “That he didn’t kill anyone.”
The brothers consult each other by looking at each other.
One says, “And if we don’t?”
Ben clumsily explains the deal to Goran, who seems intrigued. The translator turns back to the brothers.
“That’s the deal. Yes or no.”
GORAN SLOWLY walks Ben to his car through the crisp air of the parking lot. “When I return in five years, I want you to be my blah again.”
“Your what?”
“My translator.”
“Oh. Of course.”
Goran reaches into his breast pocket and hands Ben a check. “Thank you.” The short wealthy man walks away toward an idling car.
In the poor light of the parking lot Ben needs a few moments to make out the many digits on the check. His entire torso surges as a number of internal organs—lungs, heart, colon—respond instantly to the good news. Meanwhile, the cold night makes Ben’s jaw and mouth jump involuntarily, causing his teeth to click and crack together spasmodically, resulting in an irregular shoulder bounce, all of which are summarized in a dull hum Ben does not notice. Failing to wrestle control of the top quarter of his body, Ben simply nods his convulsing head and mutely smiles his open and closed mouth, unable to remember how one responds to “thank you” in Goran’s language.