You have asked for our office's view concerning the effect of international treaties and federal laws... you have asked whether the laws of armed conflict apply to the conditions of detention and the procedures for trial of members of al Qaeda and the Taliban militia...
—Department of Legal Counsel memo, January 9, 2002
J. finished his first read-through of the memo draft after lunch. His office window blinds were up, and the dull early-January light pooled on his desk.
The pages outlined a range of possibilities. He'd used stickies as markers: five compelling arguments (green), eight questionable areas (yellow), and seven leaps of reasoning that seemed untenable (red). The whole thing perched on a selective interpretation of recognized combatants, armies, and nation states.
—it didn't—couldn't—account for those who believed their God would reward mass murder with heavenly girls; it didn't, it couldn't, account for those who didn't or couldn't believe in temporary, mundane beauty—
He should sign it now, in case the storm predicted for tomorrow afternoon arrived in a grid-stopping wallop that forced even the Feds to close early. He had to be on time for once, Kay had said. It was his dad's birthday, and her offer to coordinate the event had been a step back toward the fullness of their marriage. The reservation was at a chic, high-end restaurant-slash-sports-bar.
Traffic would get ugly if he didn't leave soon. No way could he honor his family and the memo and be on time.
He lifted the pages, aligned their edges with three sharp thwacks, bound them with a butterfly clip, put them into a manila envelope, and twisted the waxy string around its button of cardboard. He locked the memo in his cabinet and then the door to his office. He said goodbye to his secretary and the security guards and walked through the doors and down the steps.
The sky sagged, swollen with low, snow-threatening clouds.
His phone rang as he turned the Audi onto Constitution Avenue. Natalie.
Before the catastrophes of her junior year, he had felt blessed his only child was a daughter; he'd been spared the high-school head-butting reported by his colleagues with sons. But then her junior year had happened, followed by three more years at the gates of hell. It was okay, it was okay now, he reminded himself, willing his lungs to unloose all the air he'd sucked through his teeth when he'd seen her number. She was still their sweet baby girl. The circles under her eyes were the result of burning the academic candle at both ends, she'd stormed at him during the beautiful dinner Kay had prepared last Sunday. She was taking extra classes to make up for lost time. Had they not noticed she'd lost a few years to the devil? And no, she was not, and yes, she was going to the meetings. Did they have any idea how exhausting it was to be an only child, their only child? They'd managed to repair the breach before she'd left, but in the intervening week she'd missed two of their four agreed-upon check-ins.
—he didn't, he couldn't, know what it was like to be his daughter in this day and age, in any day and age—
Nat launched without a hello. "Tell me Uncle David won't bring that babe he left Aunt Janine for."
"He said he wouldn't."
"Thank god."
"We're going to be polite even if she shows. It's your Grampa's birthday."
"You won't order raw meat, will you?" She changed the topic unceremoniously. She was getting better at picking which hills to die on. "That appetizer thing where it's a ball of dead cow?"
"Steak tartare. I don't know what's on the menu. I have no idea what I'll order."
"Don't order that, please." Natalie had embraced vegetarianism alongside sobriety as a faith practice, complete with rites and rituals that involved citing statistics about the industrial meat complex and studies about animal consciousness and suffering.
"I won't order meat if you won't evangelize."
"I bet Grampa is the only one who orders meat. And that's only 'cuz, well, you know." She at least had the sense to curb unkindness about her sole remaining grandparent.
"What about fish?"
"They have eyes and brains."
"I'm not taking that bait, ha ha." He hoped a smile had come to her despite his joke's lameness.
"You going to be on time for a change?"
"If the traffic moves."
The traffic didn't move for the next four light cycles. On the fifth green, the Toyota Land Cruiser ahead of him was able to roll through the intersection, braking just past the crosswalk and earning a few slaps on its hatchback from pedestrians. He waited. So he wouldn't block the box.
But when the light turned yellow, he thought better of it and stomped on the gas, lurched across, almost kissing the Cruiser's bumper. He was in the box. He inched up.
He'd be on ti—
Everything jolted and shifted. He was lopsided, looking at the row of brownstones, the leafless street trees. His front right tire was up on the curb, the crunch of the car that had rammed his back door now registering. He'd been hit. Hit! The Cruiser was catty-corner on his left. Okay, plenty of space to open his door. Okay, so he would get out, survey the damage, get the lay of the land, call a tow.
But a large, furious face appeared at his door's window. Was replaced with a hand, a fist, beating on the window. Spit spraying it. Words, shouting, cursing, muffled by the glass but clear enough. Motherfucker. Get your motherfucking car out of the fuckin' intersection. MOVE you fucking motherfucker.
Jesus. The man stopped pounding the window and—what an asshole—kicked it. An illegal, golden groin kick J. remembered from his youthful Karate classes. So much for Karate being only for self-defense. Now even warrior codes of honor were twisted and abused to suit individual preferences. His gut cramped, sharp and hot, and he wondered if he'd lose control of his literal asshole. He untangled himself from the seat belt, scrambled incoherently to the passenger door. Couldn't open it.
The boot was a Doc Martins like Nat wore when they dropped her off for those horrible months at the rehab facility. It slammed into the window again. J. scrabbled for his phone. The window shuddered with the boot's third kick.
J. punched in nine-one-one. A calm female voice: "Nine-eleven, what is your emergency?"
"I'm being attacked." He flattened himself against the passenger door. "A lunatic is kicking in the window. Of my car."
"Where are you located?"
"My car!"
"What part of the city? The street name? Landmarks?"
He craned around. "There's brownstones. I'm in Northwest. Seventeenth! I'm at Seventeenth. And Pennsylvania."
"Officers are responding. Stay on the line."
The man's face and body receded, pulled away by a group of businessmen and a bike messenger. A siren's scream approached. Someone else peered in through the windshield, mouthed, "You okay?"
The EMTs checked his eyes, his reflexes, his blood pressure. He was okay. The police checked his insurance, license, registration, took all his information. A tow truck hauled the Audi away, its side concave like a punctured lung. He texted Kay, his fingers trembling, absurd! He was okay! Traffic. Be there asap. He didn't, couldn't, go into more detail because a stout police officer was asking if he'd been in fear for his safety and would he want to swear out a warrant for the man's arrest? Yes and yes, but tomorrow? He had an—urgent meeting. That was fine, and unfortunately because he was clearly blocking the box, he would also be issued a violation.
—it didn't, it couldn't be fair that his first and only small traffic violation would end up this way! Ridiculous! He was the victim!—
He stopped himself. He was fine. He'd not shit his pants. This was not the moment. His family would have ordered appetizers. Kay would have her exasperated face when he arrived, Nat would glare, David would sigh, only his dad would smile when he showed up. The cop offered to drive him to the restaurant.
Natalie, her buzz cut grown out to a dark pixie making her resemble Kay at 21, tapped her watch when he walked into the restaurant. "Hell has apparently frozen over. Dad is here before the appetizers are gone." The cheese board held a shattered remnant of what looked like a good parmesan.
"He's a busy man." J.'s father pushed himself upright and wavered a moment before extending his hand.
"Happy birthday, Dad." J. morphed his father's handshake into an awkward side hug. "Ignore my snarky offspring."
"Glad to see you." Kay smiled, thank god. It must be going well-enough with Nat and his dad so far. David? Coming back from the restroom, clapping him on the back.
But Natalie continued: "The last time Dad showed up on time was for his swearing in. If you're not the commander-in-chief, you don't command his time."
"That's enough," Kay said, but mildly. She and J. had talked about presenting a united front during last week's counseling. At tomorrow's session they were going to discuss him moving back in.
"I would have been here earlier if I could have." He paused. He'd resolved to keep quiet about the accident, the attack, until he'd talked about it with Kay.
Kay gestured to the chair beside her, and relief flooded him. She said, "I've ordered a round of mocktails." Then, lowering her voice, "Everyone's having a pretty good day."
The waiter arrived and presented the drinks with a flourish, placing each one just so.
"A toast." Nat raised her glass and Kay stiffened. Not 100 percent good, then. But his father had raised his glass, too, and was looking at his granddaughter with bright eyes. He must realize it was his birthday. "To another year older and wiser," Nat said. They all clinked and sipped the cinnamon-spiced drink.
"Clam chowder for the soup today." David was scanning the menu.
Their father smiled. "You remember your mama's chowder won the Chesapeake Bay prize?"
"Let's try what they've got here," David said. He raised his hand to the waiter and ordered for the table.
J. watched Nat's face darken and spoke to her quickly. "No eyes. No brains. Bivalves."
Natalie huffed. "Hardly the spirit of our agreement."
J. raised his brows at David to remind him of Nat's vegetarianism, but David just looked confused, apparently not-remembering. Great.
"Bivalves?" His dad caught that word. "Buy valves before the Chinese corner the market."
Engaging his dad's smaller inconsistencies risked turning the night into a twisting burrow of Alice-in-Wonderland free associations. But if they ignored the small ones, his dad would often stick with them. So J. said, "A little cup of soup will buoy me after the day's harrowing adventures."
Nat lightened and smiled. "Sitting at a desk?"
He gazed at her. His beloved, obnoxious, brilliant, struggling daughter. "Yeah, the thermostat was broken, and it was hotter than the seventh circle of hell." That made her laugh, and Kay smiled, and David groaned dramatically, and his dad said, "I've been there. It is fucking hot."
When the waiter glided up to take entrée orders, David said for the rest of them to go ahead and bent his head to the menu again. Even though Kay and Nat ordered the charred cauliflower and brown butter ragout, and then his dad said it was his birthday and all he wanted was Stouffers macaroni and cheese, but the restaurant's gourmet version would do, and even though J. asked for the same as his dad, with a side salad, and even though J. was nudging David's shoe under the table, when David finally raised his head, he ordered salmon.
"That's meat," Natalie said. "A fish, a sweetly swimming fish, ripped out of the water, probably clubbed to death—"
"—I'm sure the waiter doesn't want to hear this." J. talked over her.
His dad frowned. "Fish is good for you."
The waiter chimed in, "It's flown fresh from Alaska every day."
"Sweet Jesus, so dead animals flown across the world with fuel made from other dead animals." Nat's low murmuring was dangerously rapid.
"Calm down," his dad said. "I'd have some goddamn fish if the mac-n-cheese didn't sound so good."
Nat glared but went quiet. When the waiter left, Kay filled the silence by asking David about his marathon training.
David said, "I did a 12-miler this week."
Nat murmured, "We're complicit murderers of sentient beings." Her voice tilted from its low murmur toward the upper register of hysteria, the way it had when she was seven and their cat had been killed by a car. For the following year, any glimpse of a cat had been prelude to an hour of wailing.
David finally seemed to understand his order was the cause of the tension and continued, quickly. "Got some calf cramping at mile eight, but I had a banana and they eased up."
Natalie ignored him completely, closing her eyes and saying, "We produce enough grain to feed everyone, but instead of feeding everyone, we fatten livestock that feeds only some of us."
"I thought we agreed no lectures." J. tilted his head, smiled, tried for a let's-make-the-best-of-this tone.
"Yeah, well, we also agreed no meat. A deal's a deal."
"Your dad didn't order the salmon," Kay said. She was nervously folding her napkin, a midweight damask square, into an origami crane.
—it didn't, it couldn't be that cranes are more peaceful than other birds, that the eagle—our eagle—is nobler. Ideas about birds are unrelated to what birds do, which, really, all Nat's statistics and opinions notwithstanding, who knows what any animals think, if they think—
Nat's face was red, her body compressing to contain the howl she'd described to them as the reason for the drugs supplanting everything she'd excelled at before junior year of high school. Which had been a lot. Debate, theatre, running, terrible puns, laughter made beautiful by its rarity. She'd reclaimed debate and running in the past year. She stood. "Excuse me. I need to go to the lady's." She swerved around the waiter, almost unbalancing the tray of chowders.
The server placed the gleaming white wide-rimmed bowls in front of them, along with long-handled soup spoons and a fresh breadbasket. David murmured, "I'm sorry. I can tell she's trying. Doing a lot better. I just—forgot."
J. spooned up a morsel of clam.
"She is doing better." Kay said, her voice perilously close to breaking.
His dad stirred his soup, lifted a spoonful, sniffed it, swallowed it. "Not too bad, not amazing. Not better than your mom's"
J. said, "Her math is right. If we didn't feed so much grain to cattle—"
"—but people want their steaks." David interrupted brusquely.
Kay tried to straighten the swan's neck. "Not everyone gets what they want."
"That's the truth," his dad said. "Where's the bread?"
J. placed the basket in front of him.
"Should I change my order?" David said.
"Too late. She's probably working herself into fit—" J. cut himself off when Kay frowned.
Their dad was building a bread pyramid, and now David took a roll from the top of it and sopped up the residue of his chowder. "I'm sorry. I've been preoccupied."
"Of course," J. snapped. A tech-bubble buyout had left his brother swimming in assets.
A shout went up from the bar. David at least looked remorseful when he shifted the topic. "I guess the Wizards scored."
The crane's neck was slumping despite Kay's efforts. She unfolded it and leaned close to J. and spoke directly, quietly in his ear. "Natalie's taking too long." She excused herself and rose.
David continued, "They're looking good for a conference win this year."
"Hmm." His father buttered the bottom of a roll.
"Too early to be sure, of course." J. took the bowl of Natalie's cold chowder from her placemat and downed it.
"Seems like it all comes down to making free throws," their dad said. "Guys today are so tall, they think dunking is all they need. But then they run into a team that's able to foul and force them to the line." He bit into the roll.
"Fouling is a good option if the other guys can outshoot you from the paint, get the rebounds," David said.
Their dad went off track. "Enemy in 'Nam was like this Qaeda group. Slippery sons of bitches. Total disregard for the rules of engagement."
"All bets off?" David said.
"Bastards would sooner die than talk." Their father had been with intelligence in Vietnam.
"There's things worse than dying." David said. Like he would know, ditching his wife, courting that younger woman, playing rich man with his unearned wealth.
His dad swallowed the rest of his roll, pinched up the crumbs that fell to the tablecloth. "Not many."
David shrugged. "A few are all we need."
His dad pushed his bowl away, leaned back in his chair and muttered. "A few necessary worse things. The worst." His head snapped up. "Honor part of your job?" He glared at J.
"Of course."
His dad continued as if neither David nor J. were there. "Of course, honor is different in different times." His dad nodded at something beyond J.'s shoulder. "There's the beauties," he said.
J. turned to see Nat and Kay making their way back to the table. Kay looked as if she'd been crying.
—it didn't, it couldn't, be right to still imagine anything existed that would allow him to spring the trap holding his pounding heart with a single, simple touch—
Nat looked—he didn't want to speculate about what it meant, how she looked, so he didn't. They made small talk and finished the meal with a candle-lit cupcake for his dad, with good-enough feeling all around. David took his dad back to the nursing home, and he and Kay hugged Nat goodbye on the sidewalk.
Kay was sympathetic about the Audi, but she drove him back to his apartment, not to their shared home. They had an agreement about living arrangements, she reminded him, and the Audi was unfortunate but didn't void the agreement.
He peeled off his sweat-curdled clothes and fell asleep on top of his unmade bed.
J. took a cab to the office before the sun was up. Maintenance, in anticipation of the predicted storm, had already sprinkled salt along the granite of the shallow steps to his building.
He unlocked his office, unlocked the cabinet, and pulled the envelope out. He unwrapped its string and examined the yellow and orange stickies, one by one. He skipped lunch to edit the phrases and sentences such that the Geneva Convention was, arguably, honored.
—it didn't, it couldn't, be that the standards of that old world (Geneva!, for god's sake, resting on its historic laurels) would solve this new world's troubles—
He re-read it. He circled his pen on his blotter to ensure the ink flowed smoothly. He signed his name and he walked the memo out to his secretary's desk. "Courier this to Woo."
The snow didn't come, and J. left the office early. He would walk to the therapist's.
—he'd done his best, he could say that, even though it meant he was walking to the edge of the earth to jump off—
