Warlord: Dervish (8 page)

“And what mortal can predict the future? You need to conceive of time as
outside you
, Jason.”

“I don’t care…”

“Jason,” Kaku tented his finger, “pay attention to me now. Focus.” He held up a single finger. “Do you know what a second is, Jason?” Kaku shook his erect digit. “Nine trillion vibrations of the cesium atom, more or less. My post-graduate work in quantum electrodynamics at the Haldron large collider—”

“You’re crazy. You are
fucking
insane.”

“If everyone around you is insane save yourself, then what would they call you, Jason?”

“I’m not listening to you.”

“If all around you were blind and you alone had sight, what is your acumen to those lacking vision?”

“I’m not listening! Blah-blah-blah-blah—”

“Really, Jason. So childish.”

“I want to go home.”

“Time is the fourth dimension, Jason. Parenthetically, there are eleven of them.”

“This isn’t
real
. This can’t be real.”

“Gravity
slows
time, Jason. Do you understand? The closer you approach the speed of light, the greater your mass. You feel heavier. You feel slower, sluggish. Yet to an outside observer, you are moving faster than the dervish.”

“This isn’t happening.”

“But back to the question of the future, Jason. That is the tantalizing question. That is the—”

“Want to know what’s in your
fucking
future?” He spat viciously. “I’m going to kill you. I swear to fucking God.”

“What was that?” Kaku grinned, holding a hand up to his ear. “I apologize, Jason. I do not think I heard you.”

“I said I’m going to
fuck—ing
kill you.”

“What a quaint idea.” The doctor’s smile widened. “Would you entertain another quaint idea? Letter writing. It is a shame…” Kaku reached for the pen atop the legal pad “…that our digital age has rendered the hand written epistle a relic of the past. People no longer
write
letters, do they?”

Jason stared at Kaku.

“Here, Jason, let us write a letter together then. A letter from you to me, yes?
Dear Dr. Kaku
—that’s me.” As he spoke, Kaku scribbled. “
Jason
—
says
—
he is
—
going
—
to
—
kill
—
you
.” He looked across to Jason. “Is there anything else you would like to add? No? Well, then,” the doctor signed, “
sincerely, myself
. That is also me.

“There—” Kaku tore the paper from the pad and folded it in thirds. “Simple and to the point.” He slipped the paper into an envelope. “Let me sign it here…” He scrawled an indecipherable signature across the envelope’s seal. “Tell me, Jason,” Kaku tapped the mahogany box, “do you know what this is?”

Jason’s gaze was smoldering.

“It is a creation of mine, of which I am rather proud. I call it an M-box.” Kaku looked overjoyed explaining it. “I am going to put our letter in this box, and when I reopen it, the letter will not be there. Very exciting, yes? Now, watch.”

Kaku placed the folded letter inside the box. He lowered the lid, looking at Jason expectantly. Jason hadn’t taken his eyes off him the entire time.

“And…” Kaku said expectantly, opening the box.

The letter was gone.

“
Voila
!”

“That’s what…” The words felt garbled in Jason’s mouth. “That’s what you wanted to show me today? Your ‘magic’ box?”

“Oh, it’s magical, Jason, but it is not magic.”

“You really are nuts…” Jason felt exhausted. “Coo coo.”

“Name calling…” Kaku shook his head. “Honestly, Jason, I thought you were above such behavior.”

“I’m serious…” Jason’s words slurred and he didn’t understand why. “You let me out of this chair…I’ll kill you.”

“Yes, Jason,” the doctor was inattentive. “I know, I know, I know. You will kill me. Let me tell you something, Jason…” As Kaku spoke, his words seemed to slow down “…we will see that letter again, you and I…”

Jason felt sluggish.

“…something you do not know then,
mmm
?”

His exhalation seemed to take forever.

“…after—you—kill—me?”

He felt like he weighed a thousand pounds.

Kaku’s mouth moved but the sound only reached Jason after what seemed an eternity.

After you kill me
…

A million pounds

…you will shoot yourself
.

“You’re crazy,” Jason turned his head from Kaku, facing the dark.

“They’re all crazy, love,” the woman with the clipped British accent commented, unseen.

“Who’s that?” Jason called out into the passageway. He could talk.

“There were never any weapons of mass destruction and they knew it.”

He didn’t know how he was with Kaku one moment then back in his cell the next. He didn’t know where he was anymore. “Yeah, well…” what mattered, Jason thought, was that he was here,
now
. “What about 9-11 then?”

“9-11 gave these guys an excuse, Jason. Let me ask you, you’re military. Where were you stationed?”

“Iraq.”

“Iraq. Jason, why do you think you were in Iraq?”

“You’re going to say the oil, right?”

“Well, if Iraq’s main resource was cantaloupe, you and I both know you wouldn’t have been there, don’t we? But it’s not about owning the oil, Jason, it’s about maintaining access to the oil.”

“What about Bin Laden?”

“
Bin Laden
? Jason, sixteen of the nineteen suicide bombers on September 11th were Saudi nationals. What about Bin Laden? What about Saudi Arabia then? What about Pakistan and Musharref? Or Karzai and his brother?”

“I don’t know if I follow you…”

“Certainly you do, Jason. The U.S. is
never
going to attack a country that might actually beat it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Think about it Jason. When were you born?”

“Late 1970s.”

“The late 1970s. Let’s see. Angola. Nicaragua. El Salvador. Grenada. Panama. Iraq. Kosovo. Sudan. Iraq again. And again. Do you see a pattern? Do I need to continue?”

“I know it sounds stupid,” Jason admitted, “but I just want to go home.”

“It’s a revolving door, Jason, between big business and big government. Look at the vice president.”

“What about him?”

“Sabian was on the board of how many corporations that these wars have made rich?”

“I don’t know…”

“He still collects a paycheck from Diogenes for god’s sake.”

“That’s not good…” Jason remarked, looking down at the ground in the passageway, trying to think happy thoughts.

“Let me tell you how it works, Jason. These companies are publicly subsidized—they get their R&D money from taxpayers—but they enjoy private profits…”

He closed his eyes and imagined that the cold stone under his feet was the cool sand of the beach. “I don’t know…”

“What don’t you know?” her voice was fading. “Companies like KBR, Lockheed, Diogenes…”

I know it sounds stupid
…

I want you to know. They were walking side by side, hand in hand. A year had passed since they’d met. Jason had graduated college and was living in North Carolina.

Aspen looked at him expectantly.

I want you to know, he told her, I love you. I’ll always love you. When I’m not with you, you’re all I can think about.

The stars shone overhead.

I want you to be able to talk to me, he continued, to be able to talk to me about anything, okay? I don’t want—I never want any drama between us. If something’s bothering you, talk to me,
please
? I know it sounds stupid…

They were on the beach where they had met.

It doesn’t sound stupid, she smiled back at him. You’re too sweet.

Courtney and Jack had broken up sometime ago. They’d driven here as a reminder. It was Jason’s idea.

“What about you, main?” The voice came out of the sky, a clear sky, no rain. “Why you here?”

“You want the long answer…” Jason asked the unseen man in the cell next to his. “…or the short answer?”

“We ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

“I was a teacher.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“
Was
, huh? What happened, yo? You touch a kid?”

“No!”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. When I was a kid, teachers were respected.”

“Main, I’ll tell you—I spoke back to Mr. Moody
once
and my grandma laid it on me good when I got home. I can still feel that shit.”

“There was this idea that,
sure
, if you were a teacher, you’d never get rich, but you’d get your summers off. You’d make a decent living. And it was viewed as, I don’t know, a noble profession.”

“All that changed, didn’t it?”

“Sure it did. They started blaming us—blaming teachers, blaming students and schools—blaming us for everything. Some study comes out, says US students aren’t up to par on math and science internationally? Must be the public schools. Must be the teacher’s union.”

“Must be.”

“Kids graduating from high school, not ready for college? Not ready for a decent job? Our fault. Never mind that we see these kids for, what? Six, seven hours a day and then what? Never mind that the economy
sucks
and isn’t creating the kinds of jobs anybody would want to work, or the fact that colleges produce more drop outs than graduates. Never mind that test scores aren’t everything, but once they became everything education became all about raising them.”

“Never mind,” the other man echoed.

“I mean, the high school I taught in, we used to spend the last third of the year prepping kids for the state tests.”

“Fucked up.”

“You know what happens when that happens? Forget the big ideas. Forget ‘intellectual inquiry’. Forget sparking a life-long love of learning. You’re not just dumbing down individuals, you’re dumbing down a nation.”

“Allelujah, main.”

“That how I sound?”

“No, I’m just messin’ roun’ with you.”

“They started to ‘measure’ us, using our students’ performance on tests. All of a sudden everyone wanted to work with the A.P. kids—”

“Advanced placement?”

“Yeah. No one wanted to work with special ed. kids, with the English-language learners.”

“That’s who you worked with?”

“Yeah. That’s what I got into teaching
for
. I didn’t think they’d be as shortsighted as they were—I mean the politicians, the bureaucrats in state ed. Breaking the unions wasn’t enough for them. They wanted to privatize the whole enchilada.”

“And so you’re here?”

“After I was deemed ‘ineffective’ two years in a row, it was easy enough for them to get rid of me. They’d already scrapped seniority, scrapped tenure, collective bargaining.”

“So you lost your job?”

“I lost my job. I couldn’t make my mortgage payments. I lost my house. I was a real good time to be around. Boy was I. I lost my wife.”

“No?”

“She left with the kids. And I can’t blame her.”

“We’ve all got things we regret,” the other man noted sadly.

“I didn’t
do
anything I regret,” Jason called into the passageway. “Not with her. One thing I know—I wasn’t a bad teacher. No matter what their ‘objective’ measures supposedly said. Fuck them all anyway.”

We’ve all got things we regret “I said I didn’t do anything I regret. Didn’t you hear me?”

“What? All right main, calm down. Shit, I didn’t say…”

We’ve all got things we regret

Jason’s head started to spin, a kaleidoscope of sights and sounds, the bars of his cell, knuckles rapping out a beat, the cold rock walls of the passageway, a little girl in a bee suit, we’ve all got things we regret, knocking, Rudy smiling knowingly at him, knocking…

She was knocking on his door so he let her in.

“Hey.”

It was spring outside.

“Hey,” she said. “We’ve got to talk.”

Like that.
Boom
.

She came into the living room.

He sat down on the couch, near the door. She looked beautiful but cold, an ominous portent. He knew what was coming. He’d lived this over and over again since.

“I met someone else…” as soon as she said it his head reeled. Her next words reached him in snippets and starts. “…I’m sorry, Jason…you don’t deserve this…” He sank into the couch, wishing he could dissolve away in the cushions, into the earth. “…I really do love you…” There were birds in the tree outside the house. “…I wanted you to hear it from me…” The birds sounded so goddamn happy.