What Not To Talk About

I won’t talk about the girl who went to Japan to ghostwrite a novel and very nearly became a ghost herself. About the author whose least unkind act toward her was an uneven slash across her forehead with a razor that had been too many other places to make a clean cut. How she sliced her hair in bangs to try to hide it, but couldn’t entirely, and how no one said anything about it or asked if she was all right because it seemed they already knew what had happened; or how she softly slit the author’s throat as he lay in bed in soft white shorts staring up at her, which in the end was exactly what he’d wanted. And no word, of course, on the book.

The Return of Franco

For some reason, the Chilean embassy had a ten-foot-tall bronze statue of Franco out front. For some other reason, the man was fond of it. For still a third reason, he followed it one night as it was put on a wheeled cart and rolled through the darkened streets, along Embassy Row, toward the East River, and down to the United Nations. During this walk, the man found out the statue’s right arm could be moved—there was a long metal pole attached to the hand, which acted as a sort of lever—placing the arm either down at the statue’s side, or up at an angle in a type of salute generally considered to be extremely offensive. Is this really in better taste than Pinochet? he asked. No one could tell him.

     The next morning, the UN was in session, but in the tall office building and not in the long, low one, neither of which seemed to be by any river. Inside, the floor was slanted like a theater, ending in a giant wall of glass. There were many people, just milling about. Suddenly there was that salute again, from most but not all of a group of pale military men, one of whom then made some joke, in English, about George W. Bush being no taller than himself and (one would presume Austrian nationalist politician Jörg) Haider.

     The man who had followed the statue on its nocturnal procession hunkered down in a space behind a row of seats. He carried a rectangular brown suede bag on which he wrote the delegates’ most quotable quotes in large block letters with a black roller-ball pen.

    He looked up mutely as outside the glass wall began a series of flashes and booms: the tops of the rest of the city’s buildings were going up, in slow motion, in clouds of white flame and debris.

     He shaded his eyes, as if watching a particularly sunny golf match.

     This is how it’s going to be now, he thought, and tried, mentally, to prepare.

     In the street below, the statue’s arm creaked hollowly as it swung at the bronze dictator’s side.