Rick Moody
from J6
1.
They always put the females on the National Mall, so that’s where I was, by the Vietnam Memorial—about 1 P.M. I was pulling a double so I’d had maybe four Red Bulls already and I’d just hit the Fluticasone inhaler hard because of the seal-barking cough thing, which was so SARS-CoV-2. Still accessorizing with the KN-95. I had Snickers and some Ritalin too. Whatever it took to finish the double shift. Hai Tran was standing next to me, by the memorial which he says he likes just from a design perspective; as a second gen refugee, he had an abundance of complicated feelings. Hai was doing his night class in slam poetry, where he was, he said, honor bound to represent his anguished and indomitable Vietnamese American perspective, and he was trying couplets out on me including the line “If you’re the one hating, I won’t be waiting.” Which I said smelled like Febreze. Officer Tran laughed a long, historically-inflected, weary laugh because there we were, adjacent to that giant slab of dues-paying. The speech at the rally was underway. I said: Brother, do you want a hug?
A lot of chatter on the earHero covert tactical earpiece, like really a lot, like the earplug was hot. Late morning. I was on break at the Dunkin on 17th, getting the Snackin’ Bacon, and/or a glazed. One time in Tampa, where I first trained, I got a Raise the Red Flags style donut, which has 12g of saturated fat and 270 calories, it was good. I also like the frozen coffee with butter pecan swirl, 720 calories. I just should not do this to myself, but still. Okay, so anyway, while I was waiting, at or about 11:43 P.M., the chief reassigned my detail to the Capitol steps. I mean, not going back to the library. I’d been following along on the earHero. So I called my wife and told her I would not be able to pick up the brisket. And I left the ice coffee on the Dunkin counter. And I broke out in a trot.
As my report indicates, I was on duty in the LOC, that day, with MacGowan, who everyone called the fat guy, and Kwan was there, too, doing the MotoWeigh by himself for twenty minutes, while we were out getting tacos on 1st and D, later I saw he’d gotten the shit kicked out of him, covered in bruises all over his face and head. At the taco joint MacGowan said he was on a paleo thing, which I figured meant he knew everyone made fun of him; he said he was on some weight-loss meds, too, though there was no Wegovy yet, and he said that he’d gotten a long list of dietary no-nos from the endocrinologist, and I don’t know why I said that he was reminding me about the seventeen types of American dissent, it was a dream I had; I’d seen this book lying around in the LOC in my dream. MacGowan said: what does that have to do with weight loss? I said number one is grassroots organizing, and number seven is cutting off transportation hubs or blocking major thoroughfares. Number nine is flag burning. Then the call came.
In my line of work, I used a lot of hydration-type products. We were pretty physical, moving around a lot. The water was essential. Now, I took a dim view of hydration products in plastic containers, like say anything in the Aquafina family of products. Or Fiji, or the plastic version of Evian. Isn’t there a Dannon bottled water? Who wants water from a yogurt manufacturer? These products shed nanoparticles into the contents of the bottle, which were then ingested. These nanoparticles probably caused hormone imbalances, not to mention the PABAs getting past the blood-brain barrier. I drank my hydration-type products out of glass or aluminum, wherever possible. But that day I found like three cases of Aquafina in a break room and I dragged these three cases outside, behind the line, because, you know, I was so covered in pepper spray, there was so much pepper spray on my uniform in my hair on my face in my mouth that I needed to rinse just to get back out in the game, by which I mean getting called a traitor and other choice epithets unfit for this a family publication. My eyes were swollen up, even with the Aquafina. Officers were stripping off the riot gear and emptying whole bottles of Aquafina (in the eight-ounce container) onto themselves. Needless to say, we were all grateful for the plastic, because otherwise the peaceful visitors to the capitol would have gotten hold of those glass bottles so that they could gouge at us with the jagged edges, while making claims about liberty. Aquafina: refreshing, rehydrating, riot-proof.
I saw Goodman! Running up the stairs! Leading them away! the exhausted person said to the poorly lit interior space in Baltimore, later, dusk, to no one to speak of, after some Hudson Babys and some Castle & Keys and a similar number of Sam Adams Lights, to no one, to a congregation of nobodies, to some basketball game on the seven monitors, Wizards versus somebody somebody, and no one gave a shit about another singleton, a two of clubs, with drinking-related impulse control fuzziness, viz., off-duty cop. I saw him! the guy said again, flecked with some of his own saliva, or maybe it was where he got hosed off at some point earlier, some teaspoon of bear spray remaining. Then the guy was silent later, passing into a phase of self-recriminations. Another of the no- bodies drinking at nobody with nobody to pick him up. When he next got the bartender’s attention he pointed to: the lower shelf.
That officer reported mitigated consciousness, specifically a coming to at the sound of the X26 model Taser being applied to his person, the sound being the irritant that woke him, such that he had a “depersonalized” conception of self, floating at approximately two meters over the reviewing stand (for the upcoming inaugural), and in this floating state he mused about the nature of the sound of the X26. That officer did in fact have multiple tattoos, including both Italian and Irish flags, and, on his back, a skeleton entity (Ghost Rider) riding on a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide, and thus that officer did know well the sound of the tattooing needle, like the Cheyenne Hawk brand, which is noteworthy for its modest hum, but also, during the “depersonalization,” he thought that it, the Taser, sounded like the Azdent dental handpiece, or the Marathon dental mi- crometer. In fact, after an impossible to verify period of mitigated consciousness combined with “depersonalization,” that officer found himself awake, having had multiple Taser blast-events inflicted between the shoulders and at the base of skull, with multiple rioters, including members of the paramilitary groups, having held him down so that the Taser could be administered. He had, now, severe chest pain, which in turn, during the beating with the flagpole, coincided with myocardial infarction. More unconsciousness. A rush of abstraction, con- sciousness and unconsciousness, dark figures in municipal police riot gear, stay with me, Mike, then the bearing up and carrying out.
Jankowicz was guarding the door on the East Side tunnel unaware that the line had been breached, on or about 1:43 P.M., above and beside. Guarding the door meant a subsequent hand-to-hand battle of forty-five minutes, no ground gained by either set of combatants. It was Jankowicz, Martinez, McCoy, and Pulsipher, and the goal, which turned out to be pointless, was to keep any further hopped-up deer-camp zombie and his pals from entering, so the four of them dug in. Jankowicz was a fan of MMA, and he also liked WWE, and Total Nonstop Actionwrestling and Mexican professional wrestling, which he watched on Sundays. He had made exactly two arrests during his seven years as a Capitol Police officer. No jeopardizing life and limb. The forty-five minutes slowed down until it felt like hours with the same blunt gestures of hatred, the raising of the pepper spray canister, the shouting, the baseball bats on the fingers, the clipped buzzing of language on the walkie-talkies, a cloud of stinging flies, all slowed down, the shouting, it was like Total Nonstop Action and Jankowicz, fell back, collapsed, and another officer stepped in. And so it continued. At one point Martinez reached out to grab one thug, thinking, what, to use him as collateral? And instead got dragged half in and out of the door where they attempted somehow to vivisect Martinez in the door, and thus Martinez heard in his torment the sentence he later could not stop hearing, from his own mouth, I have kids!
Can you move east to about Third Street at the Crossover? . . . Just be visible in that area ready to respond . . . Having just a couple of minor issues in that area with the small crowds—or with the large crowd . . . Cruiser 50, 64, 54 mount up
. . . The crowd is shifting over to the Capitol . . . We’re supporting Capitol on the West Front . . . Cruiser 50 authorizing hard gear, hard gear at the Capitol . . . Get me a DSO team to respond to the Capitol . . . CDU 12 up to maintain the lines!
. . . They’re throwing bike racks . . . Multiple Capitol injuries . . . Multiple Capitol injuries! . . . Be advised the speech has ended . . . Be advised you’ve got a group of about fifty charging up the hill on the west front . . . Multiple law enforcement injuries! . . . DSO get up here! We’re here! . . . We just had an explosion go on up here . . . They’re starting to throw explosives . . . One sting ball deployed and authorized to hold the line . . . When are the hard platoons coming? . . . They’re scaling the scaffold . . . They are behind our lines . . . Have all units respond to assist him! Do what we’re trained to do!
Officer Soto achieved consciousness, down the corridor from the lower terrace, near to the entrance to the Crypt. As during any visitation to the Underworld, Soto saw milling around, aimless shades, here and there, the great army of per- sons with regrets, those whose self-evaluations would prevent progress toward any further achievement in the afterlife. One insurrectionary was in the present moment being subjected to a stern talking to from a brace of valiant MPDs and the fellow was foaming at the mouth and had a glassy look. Disjointed speech. Soto theorized that this insurrectionary was under the influence of PCP, methamphetamine, xylazine, testosterone or HGH, maybe opioids. Soto himself had, he believed, a grade-three concussion and this he knew from his classes in forensic psychology, at UMBC, which he had undertaken in preparation for a career change owing to repeated hazing episodes from other officers relating to (he believed) his sexuality. He’d been standing next to Officer Gunther Hashida, this he realized later, or was told, and either later, or in the Crypt, Soto believed that he saw Hashida, and/or that Hashida was memorialized there in statuary, and/or that Soto told Hashida that his was a hero’s journey, and that they would all meet again, where law enforcement fraternized in the eternal, unchanging latitudes of honor. The medic told Soto to rest.
They sent Dennehy out for certain domestic disturbance calls, well, when she was available they sent her out, and she was back at work that night because someone had to work, because it’s not like there was a cessation of domestic disturbances owing to an attempted coup. The call was to go to the Taft Bridge, just in from the Perry lions, northbound side. Dennehy drove north from near the White House, in a squad car, with the siren going, and she could tell from the way the traffic was snarled there was definitely something on the bridge impeding flow. There were already a couple of squad cars there, and then the guy was standing on that tiny little ledge over by Cathedral, and his wife, or some friend, some female person known to the customer (that anguished person with the thoughts of self-harm), was trying to persuade him not to do the thing he wanted to do. Dennehy had, on numerous occasions, successfully rescued others in this particular posture, and her procedural formulation, her theory of incident prevention, involved the perception that nobody believes the language, whatever language, will allow us to speak from the one group to the other, like those people over there are speaking Sarsi or Ongota or Basque or Dumi or Archi, or Sentinelese, while to Officer Dennehy the language was the one language, the human language, in fact, we all can speak across, in all our fleshy desperations, when we must, and so Dennehy brushed past one fellow officer standing outside of his squad car training a flashlight on it all, and to him Dennehy muttered, what a day, and now she strode into the beam, toward that destitute American man, with her one language, supplicatory, hands upraised.
2.
hi my name is (redacted by site monitor) and im posting this embedded with the citizen investigators where we’ve been working round the clock and found the guys who beat the fuck out of jeffrey l smith where its in the video that the guy with the astros baseball cap and the dyed red beard and the camo jacket raises up this club which is really obviously a tire iron like any fucking anybody could see that is a tire iron and brought it down on jeffrey l smith who was in the line of duty guarding that western entrance to the capitol building and this was on or about 3:18 P.M. on jan 6 and if you watch the video posted below its about 4:13 in and youll see dyed red beard guy and this fucking proud boys zombie come into the frame from righthand margin of the image and unload a fucking boat- load of bear spray on that lady cop right there and then she staggers off to the right behind the line and gets some water to try to rinse out her eyes and that’s when jeffrey l smith comes up front to the line and dyed red bear guy and his bro then wait a second till smith has recoiled from someone else’s assault and then they each use a blunt force trauma type thing on him one of these being a tire iron and the other one has a shiv or some kind a blade and also a signpost that was used by multiple rioter types, and then and there they started in on jeffrey l smith and even though he was wearing protective gear pretty obvious that the blunt force trauma on the helmet is enough for tbi because they’re just fucking up his helmet at least till they get him down on the ground im not gonna go into more details because just watch the video but the guy with the tire iron is ronald m. spitz of 11 oak bluff st akron oh 44305 and phone number (redacted by site monitor) and his credit card number which I happen to know is a discover card and i happen to see right here that his charges on jan 5 including the hampton inn charges including porn rental was a happy meal at the mcds like right before the speech like what the fuck was he going to do with the toy from the happy meal? take it home? put it on his mantle? this information posted for jeffrey l smith’s wife and family so that they know that this was an in the line of duty death owing to repeated head injuries and repeated blunt force trauma all re-spect to jeffrey l smith martyr.
Why do I feel like such shit? Joe said, almost entirely within the baggy confines of his person, in the extra-large bed in the official residence in the southwest corner of the building, the extra-large bed that really needed a Tempur-Pedic but didn’t have one, and why the fuck can’t he get a Tempur-Pedic in the official residence. It’s his official residence. His wife stretched out a limb, as if testing some basic physics, and the presence of the self in the fleshy apparatus, and then reached across, the brief swipe containing, after a fashion, the entire history and purpose of touching. There were so many reasons to feel like shit, if totaled up. These would be summarized in the official biography and Joe experiences them now more as attenuated psychic bruising than as a catalogue, and yet there was the son who died, much beloved, and then everything having to do with his other son, and that son’s calamitous years of addictiveness and horrible decision-making, the extended fucking up, and then there was his daughter’s inability to deal with her personal property, which she left around like a demented person, and then there were the grandchildren, like there was the out-of-wedlock grandchild, that was all plenty, but, too, there was all the stuff going wrong in the world, like maybe Ukraine was going to get invaded or maybe Taiwan was going to get invaded, and then that cocksucker in the middle east, one of many, and a stubbornness of interest rates, fuck, but like the stubborn monochrome of cataracts to which one grows accustomed, and there was the memory of his first wife and the accident, and, after the car accident, the stubbornness of remorse and desperation, and the kids, and the years after, and all the things that were done as an attempt to distract from a sinkhole of grieving. There was nothing on earth that could alleviate that long ago. His wife Jill and he had a code phrase for the fact that no amount of distraction could help, and that phrase was Catholicism no longer applies. Oh, and there was the sciatica, the knee pain, the neuropathy in the one foot. Oh yeah, then the one thing Joe and Jill had been keeping secret, from everyone, that Joe, in these his advancing years, has been stuttering more often. Sometimes calamitously. And the more emotional he was, like today, like on a morning when he awoke with a hopelessness that he tried to hide even from his family, the stuttering was sometimes overpowering. Neurological. Pitiless. Why do I feel like . . . he said to her, and then blocked. Upswept she, by history, by morning light, by God’s compassion, by fear and trembling, in her nightgown, looking away, almost undone, Oh hell, honey, look what day it is.
The bar in Baltimore had been his bar, always been his bar, from long before, as a child when alcohol abuse had been his mansion on the hill, because you had to have a bar, locally owned, one without significant numbers of cameras trained in front or back owing to it being transient, near to the interstate, without good sidewalk egress, no other popular businesses nearby, that sandwich shop there closed at five, barely adequate parking, near the warehouse, they’d taken witnesses now and then, he’d even been here night of where there was some potted sonofabitch from the USCP raving about what he’d seen on 1/6, till Merrill took him outside and told him notwithstanding the lack of obvious cameras, it should now be understood that there were recording devices on site, in every sensitive location within a hundred miles of the capitol, and Merrill was personally going to dump him in the fucking bay if he didn’t shut the fuck up—bravery wasn’t brave that wasn’t silent, see, even though Merrill himself, one year later, was destroying evidence on his phone right then, during some basketball game. The six screens wall mounted in the bar. Merrill got the tip about the specific organizing of the committee. And he’d tipped off the main guy himself before the arrest, see, the banner-burning arrest, at the Asbury United church, he’d tipped the main guy off for months, but in this case he’d shared the UCSP real time radio communications, which the main guy then shared back with the rank-and-file from the Motel 6 just up the street. This was a criminal info-sharing consortium that blurred any distinction between law enforcement and the paramilitaries, or it would be seen as such by the committee. It said right here on Merrill’s phone 700 messages with the main guy, which was more even than when he’d been involved with that ADA and brought her kid baseball tickets and a signed stormtrooper mask from Comic-Con and they, Merrill and the ADA, noted that they were closer than the moon to the oceans. One message to the main guy said: You know the MPD has a reservoir of reliable sources and can get a message to USCP, or even higher, the whole organization is compromised, and we think there are people at the DoD who are getting real time info. And one message said: Why not come over to my place on Sunday and we’ll hoist a few IPAs and put burgers on the grill? And there was one where Merrill said: I am pretty sure they are listening. And: I know you have given us a lot of information about the other groups, but if you want to be sure that the Asbury charge dies a quiet death you gotta produce more, like tell us who knows about the capitol plans above you. And: I go around all day feeling like I have never had a meaningful conversation with anyone and I think I’ve never had self-respect. And: I put up really a lot of money betting on the superbowl and I lost all of it. I lost $50,000 on one bet. There needs to a reliable system of reward for patriots. And: You have to tell me more, I’m sitting here putting my reputation on the line, and you tell me all this stuff that just sounds like the same two-faced shit you serve up everyone else.
* * *
Soto was moonlighting over the holidays at a spot by the supermarket where they sold Xmas trees. This wasn’t far from Antietam (site of the bloodiest Civil War battle!). It wasn’t really moonlighting if it was your only job and selling Xmas trees was Soto’s only job, right then because he was on FMLA leave owing to the post-concussion syndrome. The symptoms were the symptoms, and the MDs seemed to think it was useful to talk about how they were watching for CTE with the police who were on duty that day. Soto did not like to talk about the symptoms, mainly irritability and hypersomnia, but there was another thing, which was the copious weeping over stuff that other people would consider minor, or forgettable. Like the dog in the wagon thing. He and his boyfriend called it the Corgi Incident. He’d been with his boyfriend walking over by where the new playground was going in, Sharpsburg, and he’d seen this dog, a little smiling corgi, like from a commercial, and it was situated such that the back end of the animal, paralyzed somehow, was in some kind of wagon contraption, and the smiling corgi was wheeling itself around, and Soto, upon seeing this, had begun sobbing like he had just lost his mom, and immediately he hustled off toward the parking lot, hysterically sobbing, because he did not want to be seen, because he was a veteran, a police officer, and a grown man. That was almost funny, the Corgi Incident, unless you were Soto, and his boyfriend thought it was endearing except when it started being weird, especially with the hiccupping thing he did when he couldn’t stop. It was a crippling, an unfolding, a light shining ephemerally, a cloudbank of evil, it was the lowtide washing-in of history. Anyway, he took the job at the Xmas tree place, in December, over by the site bloodiest battle in the Civil War, and things were going pretty well. It wasn’t that cold. They were flexible about the hours. Then, one night, there was some bearded guy doing that bell-ringing for donations, like for the Salvation Army, and just this way the dude raised his arm, in this the half-light of winter solstice, just the way he rang the bell, the upraising of a human arm, and it was a frozen video still, just like the way a piece of metal, some kind of twisted piece of steel, had been brought down on Soto’s skull that day. He could remember it so vividly, he was turned away, reaching toward a colleague, and then, in peripheral vision, he saw that mask of irrational rage, that mask of delusional certainty, bearded and hysterical, and Soto got one arm up just in time to not get hit right in the face, and instead that bearded guy pivoted and got him on the side of the head, and Soto went down. And: now he thinks he sees the guy all the time. He thinks he sees that guy in the supermarket, in the meats, and out front of the supermarket, right there, by the Xmas tree stand, and he sees the guy pulling up in his mud-befouled black pickup truck with MAGA bumper stickers to buy a tree, and he thinks he sees him in line at Starbucks and he thinks he sees him walking his corgi in a wagon contraption, in the Sharpsburg Park, and he thinks he sees him at the airport, and at church, and at the neurologist’s office, where Soto is going for his post-concussion treatments, and at the pharmacy and the bank and the pizza restaurant, and at the police department. Especially, alarmingly, Soto thinks he sees him at the Police Department, some officer he didn’t know, hadn’t met, off duty, oath-keeping, that day, coming at him with the metal club, driving him to his knees.
Cryptocurrency Prices and Statistics, Jan 6, 2022: Bitcoin (BTC), market cap, $895,688,387, 523.14, price, $47,345.22, circulating supply, 18,918,243, volume (24 hrs), $27, 952,569,574.04, last 24hrs -.72%; Ethereum (ETH), market cap, $455,713, 570, price, $3,829.57, circulating supply, 118,998,781, volume, $9,881,471,547.68, last 24hrs, +1.59%; Binance Coin, BNB, $88,637, 570,485.46, price, 531.40, circulating supply, 166, 801,148, volume, $1, 462, 276,184.94, last 24 hrs, -2.85%; Tether (USDT), $78,373, 882,136.14, price, $1.0005, circulating supply, 78, 337, 882, 507, volume $43, 202, 922, 802. 33, last 24hrs, 0.00; Solana (SOL), market cap, $54, 552, 495, 291.77, price $176.38, circulating supply, 309, 284, 593, volume, $995, 389, 409.20, last 24hrs, -1.20%; Cardano (ADA), market cap, $46, 129,061, 735.77, price, 1.3776, circulating supply, 33, 485, 491, 062, volume $881, 893, 010.44, last 24hrs, +.04%; USD Coin (USDC), $42,562,534, 941. 23, price, $0.9998, circulating supply, 42,572,544, 666, volume, $2, 491, 554, 184.76, last 24 hrs, -.03%; XRP (XRP), market cap, $40 838, 984, 413, 81, price $0.8591, circulating supply, 47, 535, 963, 473, volume, $1,134,033,205.41, +1.14; Terra (LUNA), $32,335, 168, 164.92, price $89.37, circulating supply, 361,805,570, volume, $1,332,237,742.44, last 24 hrs, -2.18%; Polkadot (DOT), market cap, $29,361, 884, 232.15, price $29.73, circulating supply, 987, 579, 315, volume $1,217, 867, 246.33, last 24hrs, +4.01%; Avalanche (AVAX), market cap, $27,588,210,907.87, price $113.19, circulating supply, 243,741,532, volume, $777,052,324.48, last 24hrs, -.85%; Dogecoin (DOGE), market cap, $23, 138, 181, 422.90, price, $0.1744, circulating supply, 132, 670, 764, 300, volume, $391,041,932.67, last 24 hrs, +.79%; Shiba Inu (SHIB), market cap, $18,692,252,748.29, price, $.00003404, circulating supply, 549,063,278,876,302, volume, $574,109,133.67, last 24hrs, -.27%; Polygon (MATIC), market cap, $18,259,576,689.35, price $2.5492, circulating supply, 7,162,892,403, volume, $944,553,719.06, last 24hrs, -.99%; Crypto. com Coin (CRO), market cap, $14, 847,022,636.66, price $0.5877, circulating supply, 25,263,013,692, volume $177,501,913.29, last 24hrs, +.41%; Binance USD (BUSD), market cap, $14, 625,354, 832.86, price, $0.9995, circulating supply, 14,633,196,848, volume, $2,793,373,260.86, last 24 hrs, -.11%; Litecoin (LTC), market cap, $10,486,459,759.57, price, $151.26, circulating supply, 69,329,445, volume, $680,239,630.59, last 24hrs, -.37%; Insurrectionary Commemorative (ICC), market cap, 10669,967,912.89, price $1.6739, circulating supply, 6,373,779,456, volume, $328,237,594.46, last 24hrs, -7.82%.
We was casing the FBI office in Knoxville, because we was thinking to blow up this FBI office here in Knoxville, and we was hitting the gummies, so sweet and delish, also truth be told some other shit, too, I mean, going to sip some Drank if I am nervous and uncertain and I barely knowed a guy, and I am furthermore intent on combining Drank with crushed up Charm pops and a homemade fermented beverage type delicacy, sometimes I’d be doing some amphetamines in a suppository way, which is like as not causing me to hallucinate in the vehicle, whereupon I was thinking this day there was a shelf to being, a tearing of spacetime above the shelf, like extra storage space, and I needed to climb up to the shelf above this shelf, into the tearing, which was the shelf of elimination of all pigs and law enforcement types of individuals, and I was thinking to say this to my friend who I barely met who sat in the driver’s seat and kept flicking the turn signal up and down, even though the car was turned off. Maybe he was saying the things about the law enforcement type individuals, and imagining that everything was a fork in the road, turning left or right, a great irony type of situation in that he was saying was that he agreed with the law enforcement individuals about a great many things, such as the necessity of eliminating all women, but they was likely to investigate him, like congress types, in suits, owing to him being very early breaking and entering the capitol building on that day, where I was unable to accompany (though I did say that I attended now and then), and therefore casing the FBI building there in Knoxville, to inflict bodily harm on FBI agents, before he was indicted, which was, as I been saying, a doing-business type of endeavor. I think we started in with the thinking about this on or about the anniversary of the day, which mostly we spent in this convulsion of partying, which involved menacing ethnic kids in the parks in Nashville. We didn’t have no jobs, and we’d sing country and western stylings as we drove and then tell the kids in the park that liberty required them to skedaddle, all non-believers were to be consoled in a fiery pit. Look, we was sitting there in Knoxville, planning for the time where the maximum number of agents would be in the FBI headquarters, kaboom, but somehow I came to be discussing my daughter, which I shouldn’t oughtn’t, but I was saying how she needed a little extra help, specially in the part of the school that dealt with the grammar, like with commas and such, and I was saying I tried and sat with her, but I could not say, and he asked some leading questions, and I could not wriggle out, the talk having its own way, and then he found out, or rather I told, about my daughter, like that at one point she’d had, as she’d say it, a dead name, and sooner or later he was screaming at me about my daughter saying I had done what about my daughter was not a daughter and I started screaming back, because that sonofabitch was supposed to be my friend, even though I’d only knowed him coupla weeks, and then I inflicted fisticuffs, and I said we shouldn’t be screaming because we were casing out the FBI headquarters, but he kept going on, no fuck you get the fuck out of my car you get out of my car. I loved my daughter, my only, and course I got out of the car, and I realized right then that when the day came I could turn him in.
This all happened long ago. In the time before. The Main Guy, owing to his having a substandard Catholic school education, and also the bad dyslexia, always felt that good writing was a thing devoutly to be admired, and before he tried to crush an adversary, he first warned this adversary with fine compositional displays. Often he would go through draft upon draft, and would translate, untrans- late, retranslate, and then obtain help from a trusted associate, in order to ensure that any threats were composed in the finest English. Similarly, the main guy had found, when he made lists of things that definitely attracted him to what he thought of as the weaker sex, mainly because he just didn’t know so many young ladies, as he thought of them, who trafficked, e.g., in anabolic steroids or HGH, or, you know, stolen used diabetic test strips, the list of things that attracted him had really only two items thereupon, 1) involvement in some ambitious criminal conspiracy, and 2) capability in the matter of fine writing. When first he went to the meetup with the FBI alleging that he was willing to inform on the human smuggling operations he knew about in Miami, which he had to do some version of his attestation in writing, so that the FBI had evidence of his cooperation, and he was put in touch with a young lady, to compose and complete this attestation, who worked for the bureau and he found himself unaccountably drawn to the warmth of this young lady, who was like an orange blossom unfolding upward in the winter months, spreading Floridian grace, all fragrant, all fructificant, and he felt certain that there was a foul, perspiring quality to himself, the Main Guy, at the moment of making clear that, yes, he would inform, and, yes, he would expect as a condition of his informing that his own criminal operations would go unmolested. The Main Guy, in the year after, harkened to the siren call of this memory, looking only for such women as would both permit and enhance criminal operations and involve themselves in his search for excellent prose, and it happened that at the gym one day, to meet contacts for his business in anabolic steroids, he met this one young lady, as he would have called her, and it was not her surpassing splendor as a physical being, nor what his contact referred to as her expertise in cryptocurrencies, which of course the Main Guy liked up to a point, but rather the way she talked, which was all condescending and SAT Verbal Test-like, especially when she said “blockchain.” Did she use also “whereof” at one point? The Main Guy fucking hated those grads from colleges in the Northeast, those elites who think they were smarter, just because they didn’t have dyslexia, or they had a math tutor in high school, he hated all those fuckers with their preening and skincare products, their yoga classes, their obsession with hydration and locally grown produce, you know, like he hated Gavin fucking McInnes, that fucker who couldn’t even win at arm wrestling; still somehow the word “whereof,” in secret, really was a thing for the Main Guy, “whereof,” like the first view of a field dense with the poppy, like when you come over the escarpment, “whereof,” poppies carpeting the earth before you, unto which you recline. Anyway, because the Main Guy was so into the fine writing, the dulcet piling up of simile, the bomb burst of the adverb, the Main Guy decided that, using Grammarly, and Spark Notes, and maybe any other online source he could find, that he would get this girl to compose, the one who said “blockchain,” she would compose with him, a document that would bring down the American government so that it could be replaced with a government of right-thinking men.
In this way he would win her to his side.
The business contact at the gym invited them, and several other soldiers from the cause, to a restaurant called Wilde on the Porch, which was right near the gym, and the Main Guy felt it was ridiculously expensive, and he had no intention of being on the hook, because it was the business contact’s dinner, and he wouldn’t have come here himself, because he would only go to a restaurant if it had hamburgers on the menu, and also his dyslexia made it hard for him to go deep into the menu, and he generally had to rely on associates to give him nuance, or else he would just ask the waitress what to get. The thing was his Beatrice was here, his Isolde, his Roxane, Crypto Shelley as he took to calling her, and he did not want to get into the matter of his lack of nuance, he just wanted to get her alone, so that the bringing-down-of-the-government could begin. He had consulted his friend Roger, and Roger had reminded him that G. Gordon Liddy had won over Nixon by putting his hand over an open flame, and this would be his technique, analogously.
The Main Guy literally pushed one of the other associates out of the way, which was easy, so that he could sit beside Crypto Shelley, whose smile was warm like molten tariff-protected American steel when they first pour it into the mold in PBS documentaries. He asked her what she was going to order, and she said: carne asada. And the Main Guy said, Listen, we should get out of here. Sig- nificant dialogue followed thereupon, all heaped up. And then he said, Listen, I got this document I’m working on called “Storm the Winter Palace,” and I think you’re really going to like it, and I could really use your help with the section on logistical and staffing issues. It’ll be hot.
Hello, is this Phan Thi Hong? Do I have the right number? I think this is your number. Anyway, my name . . . well, I’m not going to tell you my name, but I’m a member of law enforcement in the District of Columbia, and I’m calling you today at 3:00 P.M., on the anniversary of the January 6th riot, at which I think you were present and at which you were a participant, and during which I think you breached the capitol property and trespassed inside the building, and I’m just wondering, as I am a fellow American citizen who also happens to come from the nation of Vietnam, I’m just wondering how you became involved in this situation? Of course, I have no doubt, based on the nation from which we come, that the issue of power and who has the power is the question, as it is for all of us. But is it not the case that you came out on the wrong side of this? Is there some kind of thing that you thought you were going to get, some kind of injustice you thought you were going to remediate from doing what you did? Like you were opposing the communists in Vietnam in this way? But maybe you have just aided and abetted persons who are very similar? Might it not be useful to ask yourself whether this isn’t just another kind of tyranny or despotism, just the same kind as the regime in Vietnam, only with a different name attached? Didn’t it occur to you to think that way about it, especially when the man you are supporting has been so vocal about his distaste for people who come from our part of the world? Look, it’s true that I don’t expect you to agree with me politically, and certainly part of the genius of this woebegone country is the differing opinions, that beautiful cacophony of opinions, but I do want to tell you about the kind of violence inflicted on other officers that day, people with whom I served that day, guys who can’t work anymore. Those men and women were just doing their jobs when you and others like you pulverized them on the steps of the Capitol, all at the instigation of one man. Were you not subjected to disinformation and propaganda in our country only to come here and swallow down more propaganda and disinformation? Anyway, I’m just calling you today, and leaving this message, and I’m just telling you now that it’s my intention to call you on every January 6th, as long as I can find your number, to remind you about the people who were hurt, or died, or took their own lives, because of what you and people like you did that day. I’m going to call you each year to remind you, and if you pick up the phone, I’ll tell you in person, though I will be very apologetic that it is a necessity that I do so. So just remember this and I’ll talk to you this time next year, I hope you have a quiet one. Bai.