THINGS LOST

A SHORT STORY COLLECTION

MATTHEW SZWEDA

Dedicated To:

Mari Isabel Patio Vargas

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Table of Contents:
BLIND DATE. Page 07
GONE MISSING......... Page 13
KODACHROME.......... Page 19
LOSING THE FAITH........... Page 27
PARADISE...........

Page 39

HOMELESS Page 50

BLIND DATE

I was at this party, it was late, the people who liked dancing
had all left, and it was just a handful of us who stayed because that is
when most interesting things happened at the end. (As a friend of
mine once explained it, You watch sport for the end, not the
beginning.) We were all sitting out on the balcony, smoking
cigarettes. Someone had pilfered a bottle of Brandy from our hosts
liquor cabinet. Then somebody asked, What is the closest you ever
have been to death? Someone mentioned getting hit in the mouth
with a baseball, another falling off their roof; he spent a week in a
coma. Someone else had been in a car accident. They thought the
driver of the other car had probably died.
How can you not know?
We were all quite for a second. I saw the hand it had rolled
off into the center lane. I knew the medics were trying to cut him out.
I didnt want to know. I didnt want to know anything about it.
And then it was my turn to tell.
It was a day after Valentines Day. I hadnt done anything
special for Lisa. I dont know what happened. I was working late; she
had an event at the library. When we finally got home, we were both
worn out. So the next day, Saturday, we were both busy doing things
again. That evening I decided, We are going to celebrate Valentines
Day.
Lisa was like, No, just come to bed.
No, I am going to get you something sexy to wear, some
satiny red thing and some coco butter give you a nice massage.
I left around nine thirty. We lived in St. Louis. The only
place I knew that had sexy lingerie at that time of night was across the
river in East St. Louis. There were some Go- Go bars over there, and
there are always novelty stores around those places. Problem was is
that East St. Louis has one of the highest crime rates in all the US. I

did not know exactly where the Go Gos were. I did know that the first
exit after the bridge would lead me to downtown East St. Louis, and I
didnt want that.
Before I crossed over the bridge, I stopped for gas. I didnt
want to run out of gas where I was going. (This is important. Maybe it
saves my life and maybe it almost gets me killed. Im not sure which.)
I took my credit card out and threw my wallet on the seat. I swiped my
credit card at the pump and filled up. When I got back in the car, I put
the credit card on the seat and locked all the doors.
I was over the bridge in about ten minutes but I couldnt find
the exit. I just kept going. (This often happens to me when I cannot
decide on anything, I just keep going.) I went thirty miles before I
decided to turn around. On my way back, I began to try exits. I
searched one small town after another. I couldnt find anything, so I
decided to get back on the highway and go home. You know how on
some roads, you get on them and its so dark and you want to turn
around but then you drive right by where you should turn around? And
then the dark gives you that whole Deliverance feeling? Well after
going down this road aimlessly for a mile, I spotted a light and decided
to turn around. It had a nice wide driveway. It looked like a storage
lot.
As I am turning around, this woman comes running at me. I
quick locked my doors. I expected her to stand away from the car, but
she came right up to itthe way that some people get too close to you
in a crowd or stand too close in a conversation. She banged her fist on
my window. It jarred me. Then she yells, You gotta let me in! You
gotta let me in! This guy is gonna kill me.
I stopped the car for just an instant. I couldnt make out behind
her. Everything was black where she came from. Then I saw this big
fat guy. He wasnt running; He was walking. He was the strong kind
of fat that if it ever caught you, you would be in trouble. I kept going.
She ran around the back of the car. I was edging towards the road. I
stopped at the road. This time she banged on the passenger window.
You gotta save me. You gotta save me. Please.
I unlocked the door. I dont know why. It was an impulse.
Maybe it was because she looked scared and maybe it was because she
looked half attractiveblond hair, black, shiny coat, blue jeans. She
looked tough, but a good tough. As she got in I looked back and I saw
the fat man say something. He was balding with strands of black hair
slicked back and a small white t-shirt and stretch blue slacks. And then
I saw a young Indian man behind a long window-counter, watching me
drive away.
She said, Drive fast. You gotta go fast.

I asked which way. She pointed me away from the highway.

That was my biggest mistake going away from the highway. She
kept telling me to go faster. She was looking out the back for someone.
She was looking out the back worried. After about a minute, she
stopped looking back and opened her purse.
So what do you want?
She was different than the girl I let into the car. There was so
little time to really see anything then. Now, up close, she looked older.
Her face had that look of perpetual sleeplessness. She looked worn.
Her coat was a cheap imitation black velvet job and she had a dirty
white T-Shirt underneath.
I just want to get home, I said.
She shot back without thinking, Ill give you a blow job for
twenty.
I just want to get home, I repeated. I looked over at her and
she had her purse all open and there was a wad of money, some small
plastic bags (which looked like crack) and there was a pipe.
What are you doing out here?
Tell me where I can let you off, I said.
She started looking back again. You cant just let me off. Do
you got some money?
Its in my billfold, I said. I was checking my coat pockets
and I couldnt find it. I was feeling around my seat. And then I saw it
like in a dream the man mouthing the words again. And this time I
saw the words. He said, Now, shes your problem. And again, I saw
the man at the counter and the blue, hazy neon lights and I realized I
had turned around in a motel.
Do you have a gun, she asked.
No.
I do.
I thought to myself, So I guess a blow job would be out of the
question. It really occurred to me, not sexually or anything. It just
passed through my mind. We passed a bar. I thought for a moment
about stopping, but I let it go.
Look, I said, Im just trying to get home and I got lost. If
you want some money I have some in my billfold. I was trying all the
pockets. I tried my pants pockets and then started checking and rechecking randomly, like it might be there if I just checked another time.
The car kept going. We hadnt passed anyone. Everything was black
and there was nothing else on the road. The area was deserted with tall
reeds growing up all over. It looked like a scene from some Mafia
movie where they leave the guy dead in the marshes.
She looked out the back for a while and then grew calm. I

dont got a gun, she said. I was just kidding.

I just want to drop you off somewhere and get home.
You do dont you. She smiled, but it wasnt like a happy
smile, it was more like, sure you would and I would like to win the
fucking lottery.
She thought for a minute and then said, I dont have a gun,
but I do have a knife. I could feel the arteries in my neck. All I could
see was blood all over my car. She was probably pretty good with a
knife or box cutters.
The next part I am very proud of. If I could have asked one
question, if I had a lifetime to think of the question, if I had consulted
with Albert Einstein and Nietzsche together, I couldnt have said
anything better. I did you a favor by picking you up. You owe me a
favor.
She paused. I could feel her thinking. I had an enormous
sense of hope and satisfaction. Like a master chess player must get on
the third move when he knows that he has won the game. The game
might go on for twenty more moves, but he knows hes won. I knew I
won.
Another smile came across her face. I couldnt see it straight
on; I could sense the shadow. You have had an accident. She paused.
There are accidents all the time. Planes fall out of the sky; a car runs a
red light. Accidents happen all the time.
I am your accident.
Butterfly wings in South America start a typhoon in Asia.
(The interconnectedness of things.) So simple. I did her a favor. She
needed to do me a favor. It was Karma. But Karma is for people in big
houses with 401Ks. (Like she would have cared about Karma.) I am
sure her whole life had been one big fucking Karma accident.
There was nothing left to say. We spent another thirty seconds
looking for the wallet. It was no use. It is funny how you can lose some
details and see others so clearly: I didnt see the motel or recognize her
as a prostitutenow I saw that she didnt have her seatbelt on and she
hadnt relocked her door. I was thinking of slamming on the breaks
and grabbing the back of her head and shoving it against the dashboard.
She might just flip out of the car on impact. But then I thought of the
blood and AIDS. I knew I would probably get cut.
She was way ahead of me. If you are planning on trying
something, I know what I am going to tell the police. Do you know
what your story is going to be? She kind of laughed at me with a
smile and said, You think you can tell some story and make everyone
believe you. Not even your friends are going to believe this one.
Maybe I could knock her out. Maybe I could push her from

the car. Maybe even far enough so she was in the reeds. But she
would eventually be discovered. There were the witnesses back at the
motel. There would be a trial. And I could see the Prosecutor like out
of some Camus novel asking, What kind of a person picks up a crack
whore in the middle of the night?
It wasnt courage that made me do what I did next. I cant say
I was frightened either. There was just nothing left, I was empty. It is
like sometimes when I am in a nightmare and I am being chased by
someone and I have a gun but it doesnt fire. Sometimes I just stop. I
give up. And just before I die, I wake up. That is what I did. I pulled
over.
There was an old farmhouse right beside the road. There was
no driveway, just this old house without any lights on. Mind you I had
not seen any house all the while we were driving. I had not seen
nothing. And then this farmhouse just appears. She rolled down the
window real fast and said, Now you are going to get it. I have some
friends who live here. They are going to kick your ass. She yelled a
name at the house. And yelled again. She was feeling around her seat
with one hand and waving out the window with the other.
Then she was out of the car. I never saw her get out. I was
sitting two feet from her and I never saw her get out. I locked the door
and rolled up the window. She was still right next to the car. Not even
off the gravel. She got a little off to the front of the car and I saw she
had my wallet. I rolled down my window and started shouting at her to
give me the wallet. I steered the car towards her.
Out of nowhere, this van comes up, the opposite way, face to
face. I hadnt seen nothing on the road the whole time. No cars, trucks,
nothing. It was so dark I had trouble keeping on the road. And now out
of nowhere this van appears. The van stops.
She turns right into the lights of my car and mouths, Now
you are going to get it. You better get out of here.
The sliding door of the van opens and two black men get out.
One of the guys has a long handgun. He holds it to his side. I slowly
push my car onto the road, he rotates the gun, locking it on me as I go
by. I am ten feet by and he lowers the gun, I hit the accelerator.
From behind I saw her cross the road, talking to the guys. I
went as fast as I could. I dont know what happened out there. Maybe
these were her pimps. Maybe they were just gang bangers stopping by
the road. Maybe they were friends of the fat guy. I dont want to
know.
About ten minutes later I get to a crossroad and there is a Gogo and right next to it is a novelty store. I parked in the lot among some
other cars and I shook. I had a stale cigarette in my glove

compartment. I fished it out and shook and smoked and shook and
smoked. I left the car running, just in case I needed to get out fast.
When I finally crushed the cigarette out, I thought, So here I am and
Ive got no money. How crazy is that?
The next morning, I told my boss to cancel my credit card.
She asked me what had happened. Of course, if it was stole there
would need to be some police report. I told her that I thought I might
have left it on the roof of my car when I filled it up with gas. She
shook her head disappointed and said, Your lack of responsibility is
going to cost you your job one day.
Maybe I should have told her right then and there. But, like
my crack whore said, Not even your friends are going to believe this
one.

10

GONE MISSING

I work at an advertising agency in the Citrus Building

downtown across from the Hilton. There were three of us working on a
campaign for a chocolate bar. But it was the beginning of the
campaign, and we were all working alone coming up with ideas. The
company believes that this creates an atmosphere of competition, and
they get a better product by being able to choose between several
different ideas. So as it was, I had not talked much with anyone for
over two weeks.
The first sign that things were not right was the parking lot
no cars! At first, I thought I missed a holiday. There was probably
some memo on my desk that I must have missed. There was a guard at
the front desk. Usually there were two. I wanted to ask him why no
one was there, but I would look really stupid, having forgotten the date
of a long weekend. I told him, I just came for a bit of work I need to
get done, and I went to my office on the fourth floor.
My desk was cluttered. I spent ten minutes cleaning it off. I
could not find the memo. I dug up the calendar it said nothing about
a long weekend. I decided to check my mail and the sports page. I
turned on my computer. As I was waiting, I checked the work I had
been doing. I am not proud to say it, but the fact is that there are days
when I do no work at all. I chat on the internet and check the sports
page. I am addicted to sports. In fact sometimes I spend all my time
writing up sports articles on games I have seen on television the night
before. There was something wrong on the sports page. They said the
football game was this afternoon. I checked the date. I clicked to the
news page and checked the date again. The dates were all Saturday.
I had somehow lost a day. I had absolutely no memory of my
Friday. I checked my computer for anything-- newspapers articles,
sports events, dates on Word Documents. I could not recall reading
any of the previous days events, and my newest Word Documents
were from Thursday. There was all the evidence that Friday had come
and gone, but no evidence that I had been.
Again I passed the guard at the front desk. I wondered if he

11

knew if I had been there yesterday. Then there was the guard at the
gate as I left, maybe he might know if I had been there yesterday.
Would they have known? Would they have known among all the other
cars that came and went and among all the people in those offices?
Again, it was not the type of question you could ask someone, without
them thinking you were crazy. I thought too about calling one of my
colleagues or my bosses, but you just don't do that especially in a
competitive business environment.
I must have been sick. As I drove back to my apartment, I
tried to remember the road. This was Saturday. What did it look like a
day ago? I should have seen coming up that it was Saturday. There
was not the traffic as I came down for this to have been a Friday. It
was so simple to see. But what was there to know that this was a
Monday or Thursday, or Friday. That Friday, last Friday was there
anything that would have distinguished it from the other days of the
week, any reason I might remember being on the road the other day.
There were always vendors along the way. The newspaper boys on the
fifth street intersection and the gum people at the light that turns into
the Carrulla Shopping Center, or the guy who sold the little donuts near
where they were repairing the road. Was there something different
among those faces, which might have said this was Friday?
I set my keys and wallet on the dining table in my two room
apartment. How many times I had to go searching for my keys. I was
not very good at trying to remember what I did when I last had them. I
always tried to remember to leave them on the desk right when I came
in.
I must have had a fever. I could have woken up turned off
both alarms and gone back to sleep even if I had never done that
before, I could have done it this once. After all, I had never exactly
slept through a day either. Still, I had heard or seen in movies where
sick people can wake up and not know where they are or what day it is.
That has surely happened.
I have an intercom phone in the kitchen to call down to the
guard. I rarely ever use it. Usually they call me to ask if it is ok to let
some delivery person in. I can never hear quite clear on it. But I
thought I would give it a try. The guard answered. I am sorry to ask
you this, but I was just wondering if maybe you saw me go out
yesterday. My building had fifteen floors and six apartments per
floor and the parking garage had another four buildings connected to it,
all underground. And maybe it was not the same guard that was on
yesterday. Why didnt I know that? There must have been six or seven
of them who sat behind the glass and I did not know how many guards
just wondered around the complex.

12

I saw you leave this morning, sir, the guard said.

I am not asking about this morning. I am asking about
yesterday morning.
Yes, sir.
That is yes what?
Yes, I saw you leave.
The conversation left me more confused. People often say
what they think you want to hear. Often they do it unknowingly. I said
thanks and hung up. And maybe he said he saw me leave yesterday
because he thought that maybe I was checking his workwanted to
know whether the security was good, or they just opened their doors to
anyone. I could not exactly call him back and say, Look, I am really
quite worried. I think I might have lost a day. He would not
understand. Or if he did, he would think that I had lost my mind. Who
in their right mind would lose a day? Surely I was sick.
I went to the bedroom. I turned on the TV. I could not find
the remote to change the channels. I have always wanted to buy one of
those little beepers that they sell in home stores so that I could find all
my things. I would leave the big beeper in the table beside my bed. I
would never take it from there. I would just click the beeper and put it
back.
For a moment I thought that is it! The TV. I had seen it in a
detective series. The detective asks the witness what time the murder
happened, what time she heard the car, and she says that she had just
turned on Nightline. Nine O Clock, she says. If she can get an hour,
I should be able to find a day, a yesterday. But I dialed through the
TV and I do not know which days what happens on the TV. It is all so
much alike, this detective show, that police one, those friends. I watch
whatever is on. I do not plan. I have no favorites.
So I went back to the phone. I can just use call back. If
someone called me or if I called someone, I would know which day it
was. And maybe we had some sort of a conversation which could
explain everything. I call the operator who explains the procedures.
And now that I have called the operator; the whole process is somewhat
more complex.
My mother answers the phone; she is happy to hear me. She
asks if there is some problem. I remember: I had called her on
Thursday to find out if she could order me a book. I had been reading
the class notes from my college and there was a classmate, whose name
was vaguely familiar, who had published a book. I was not sure that I
wanted to read the book. What I wanted was to see if there was a
picture of him to know if I knew him.
There it is. Saturday, and I have not called anyone and no one

13

has called me in two days. How do you like that? I cant help but
think of all those people with cell phones. How many calls must they
make per day? I must have more friends than my mum. I do. I have
friends I shoot pool with, drink with, go to see movies with. But they
are not the friends who I would have called or who necessarily call me
on a Friday. Well, they would, but not necessarily if I was sick at
home.
I have to go back to the first things the things that I do every
day and my last memory of this day. The alarm clock, the cigarettes,
the juice. I had a professor in University once who said the thing about
smoking for him was that it kept the time. He knew exactly how long
one lasted. And whether he was in conversation or just going
somewhere, it gave him a sense of the time he took. I check my pack
of cigarettesthere are ten left. I had one when I woke up. One after
my shower. One in the car to school. One on the way home from
school. That would be four minus twenty, so if I had started with a new
pack, then I would have fifteen left. I had ten. But I never started a
new day with a fresh pack. What addict could smoke to the end of a
pack and know, accept that they would be done for the day? Maybe I
smoked fifteen or eighteen per day, but I could never know exactly
what it was.
I went to the refrigerator. I was thinking about limestone. I
am told that if you go to the Grand Canyon, you can look at the
limestone white, brown, red lines and see how it changed colors so
many million years ago as the water webbed through, a small trickle of
water cutting the canyons like a surgeon delicately slicing through
layers of skin. Each layer of color represents so many millions of
years. Somehow I imagined the fruit juice having those lines along the
sides. Each ring would be a different morning. I only had juice every
morning. I could count the days. Of course it made no sense. But I
looked anyway. Unfortunately, the carton has a fine layer of wax on
the inside, to prevent the juice from making those little lines. There
was a date of expiration on the outside of the carton, but so what?
I tried to think when the last time I went shopping was. Milk
might go bad, and how many eggs were there. But I rarely had eggs in
the morning and even the cereal; there was no way of knowing that I
would have even had those things before I left on Friday.
What could I say about what I ate? I looked for any leftovers
that I could not place. There just wasnt much there. I had left a lot of
my Tupperware at school. I had not got to replacing what I had left,
forgotten, stolen. Every time I tried to get around to it, I kept looking
at the price and thinking of all the other things I might get with that
money. So I had been eating most of what I cooked. I could only tell if

14

there was something that might have been left over from a meal I could
not place. There was a kind of Tuna Casserole, but when I pulled off
the lid, it was clear it must have been there much longer.
Then, somewhere in the rotting smell of fish, I remembered a
guy in the show CSI Miami where they checked the stomach of a
victim to determine the mans time of death. I felt my own stomach.
All that would be in it was the banana, yogurt, and sweet cakes I had
had. I wondered, I felt, is there something else in there? Thursday I
had fish. I had emptied the waste basket afterwards. Fish always stinks
up the apartment. I threw the fish out and then lit an incense stick.
What did I have to eat on Friday?
I checked all of the garbage. There was nothing in the kitchen
garbage. Then I thought maybe I did miss Friday. Why would I have
changed the garbage twice Thursday and Friday? I would have
changed it on Thursday, but I do not necessarily change it every day. I
checked the other waste baskets in the apartment. I was looking for
anything. There was toilet paper that I had blown my nose into, a gum
wrapper, an old note, some old bills that I had since paid. But there
was nothing I could place. I thought there would be more in my
garbage. There is an exhibit in the City Museum in St. Louis that is
just a glass wall of garbage and you walk around it and you find out it
is a big cube. They say how many tons of garbage we as a world, a
nation, and then as individuals, how much we all produce each year.
The cube is like what the average person produces in a year. So you
are supposed to think if each of these cubes were made into the
pyramid at Giza how many pyramids at Giza would you get. I don't
know how many they said, but there would be pyramids at Giza
littering the world.
Each side of the cube said something different. The front side
I remember was from an archeologist. It said that if for whatever
reason, the world should become lost and we should all perish, what
would aliens think about us when they reached our planet? What
would the garbage tell them? My garbage told me nothing about me
not even what day it was when I threw whatever it was I threw out. I
could not help but think about people who did really important things
and had paper shredders. All I could come up with was some toilet
paper I used for Kleenex. I guess it all meant, I was too cheap to buy
proper Kleenex.
I do not know what it all means. But I spent my whole
weekend trying to remember and checking anything I could. I even
walked around the neighborhood trying to recall. But it wasn't so bad
the not recalling as the not having anything to help me recall. I had
terrible nightmares where I was climbing a wall, with the little pegs for

15

your feet. And then it all turned into glass and there was nothing to
hold onto. The falling was not so bad; the bad was trying to grab
something again and again and there just being nothing there.
Look the Doctor said, we all have different ways of
responding to stress. Sometimes there does not even need to be a big
event. The best thing you can do is just to forget this.
I looked at him puzzled like.
Look, the Doctor said, I turned forty about ten days ago.
And I was thinking what was it that I had wanted to do when I was
thirty. Do you know, I could not remember even some of the years
from thirty to forty.
If it happens again see me.

16

KODACHROME

I did not notice anything was missing until I had finished my

breakfast and was putting my dishes away. Down the hallway that
leads to the kitchen, I had put up four snapshots. All that remained was
the blue dye from the gum used to affix them to the wallsixteen blue
dots were all that were left.
One of the photos was of Valentina, my daughter, on an
Elephant. But the one I was most proud of was a photo of Elephants
charging down a street.
We had gone to see an Elephant park in India. There were no
gates or bars. The elephants walk around and you get right up close
to them. At noontime, fifty of them walk through the small village,
which is just one street, littered with tourist stores, that snakes its way
to the river.
We were walking ahead of the elephants. People were
moving to the sides. The curbside along the street was a good three
feet high on either side. Vendors who had their wares on the street
quickly folded up and moved to the sidewalk.
There were two elephant handlers. The first, who walked
ahead carrying a large bamboo stick, was the head handler. He
walked like a conductor leading his band on parade. His assistant, a
boy of not quite thirteen, scurried about the sidewalk checking that the
elephants kept moving and gently prodding them with a stick if they
faltered or became too inquisitive.
The head handler caught up to us. The elephants were about
forty feet behind. My daughter and I turned around and walked
backwards, watching the elephants. We kept pace with the handler.
He smiled at us, but said with his eyes, Stay up with me.
My
daughter and I had been taking photos all afternoon. She had the
camera around her neck. I am going to get this one, she said. She
took a step forward. I stopped. She went down on one knee. The
Elephants kept coming. They were now thirty feet away. I could see
her playing with the focus. I could see that when she first leaned into
the photo she lost the focus with their movement. I did not know if she
knew to adjust the focus to where they would be and not where they
were. The elephants kept coming. The handler kept walking.
I turned and continued walking, forward to the river. I

17

looked back just in time to see her get off the picture. The elephants
almost upon her. I turned back, so she would not see me. She jogged
up to me,
Got it!
Some of my daughters things were still in her room. There
were three Beanie Babies on her bed. But when I looked, really
looked, I noticed that they were not her favorites. The one leaked
beans; another had been chewed by the dog. These were things that
had been placed after other things had been taken.
Beside her bed there was picture frame that had been placed
face down. I turned it over. The photo was missing. It was a photo of
Valentina and two Filipino children paddling about a lagoon on a big
log.
We went to the island of Palawan, which is a long, thin island
which skirts the whole of the main Philippine island. We stayed in a
small, rustic fishing village in a clapboard cottage. A local fisherman
approached us on the beach. He offered us, for seven dollars, the
whole day and he would take us to see all the coral we wanted. Seven
dollars for the whole day. The next morning, I gave him an extra three
dollars, and his daughter took me to buy the lunch we would need-two tins of tuna, French bread, a gallon of water, a liter of coke, and
five bags of chips.
He took us straightaway to a place in the open ocean. I am
not sure how he found it. The shoreline had all but disappeared and
two islands were so far in the distance they could not have been much
good for navigation. His boat was no more than a row boat with an
outboard, there were no fancy black boxes or depth finders or even a
radio. He cut the motor and said simply, Here.
My daughter and I obediently rolled of the side of the boat
with our masks and snorkels in hand. There is an ecstatic, uneasy
feeling of being on the open ocean, in a new place, your feet dangling
like bait as you adjust your mask. But what we discovered when we
looked down was remarkable. We were in a perfectly round coral
reef, thirty meters in circumference. It could only have been formed by
a meteor crashing to earth in some lost millennium. Inside was all
color, pink and white and green corals, and life, fishes and sponges
and starfish, but all about the edges was the darkest and most ominous
blue, the last possible shade of blue before black. The way my
daughter described it was like being in a zoo without any bars.
Everything we saw was something we had never seen before.

18

There was one fish that swam between us, the size of a small hammer,
with its head permanently facing the bottom and its tail towards the
surface. And that is the way it swam, sideways. We followed a group
of silver fish right to the top of the reef to the dark, blue waters. When
you got up close, you could see right through them. They moved
slowly enough that at times we caught up to them, and they parted.
They parted so that there was a hole around you, like they were
making an impression of your shape. I went through them, then my
daughter, and then we did it all over again. It was like they liked us
there, playing with them.
We played that way for an hour. The boat had drifted a
couple hundred meters away. We decided we would swim for it.
Leaving our protected little cove and heading over the black precipice,
my heart raced. Even, playing on the inside there was always the
tension, of what might drift over from out of that blue black abyss. And
now we went over into it.
One hundred meters from the boat, Valentina said, look at
this, and she held up a small, pink gelatinous blob. I quickly quit it
from her hand. When I looked down, they were all about. I told her
we should swim as fast as we could for the boat. And so we did, but
the closer we got the more dense they became. They stung so that
Valentina crawled on my back the last fifteen meters. On board, she
shivered from the stings. Our pilot started the boat, and said, It will
go away soon. I will take you to a lovely place.
Dolores said on the boat , I just want her safe. I don't want
any more of these coral reefs.
I don't know what you are saying. Are you really saying that
you would rather have her see nothing and be safe, than to see all the
fantastic things we saw today?
I would not mind if she were trapped in an apartment in a
city and not see any of this. I don't want her stung by jelly fish or eaten
by a shark.
The Pilot took us to an island, surrounded by a coral reefs.
The island looked like a piece of solid granite shoved into the earth
like a spike and the sand washed up around it bore no resemblance at
all to the dark granite. When the boat was tied, the pilot brought us to
a small cove. He told me, Dive down, through, through. He took
my hand and guided it to an opening. I swam through and there inside
was another world-- a small cove with a sand island and palm trees.
We dined that afternoon on tuna sandwiches in this hidden island.
After lunch, Valentina and the pilots two girls paddled about the cove
on an abandoned trunk with palm fronds as paddles.

19

I went next into the spare bedroom. I opened up drawers and

closets. Nothing. But the most telling thing was that the photos were
missing from the albums. If you were going to show photos, you
would just take the album. Unless you were trying to cram everything
into your suitcase, then you would not have room for the albums. You
would take the photos out.
There was an album labeled Sri Lanka. There was one photo
with Valentina reaching her hand over our dugout on a lagoon and
inches from her hand was a monitor lizard emerging from the dark
water his red tongue licking at the air....
We had traveled to Goa, at the Southern tip of Sri Lanka. We
had spent the day at a Sea Turtle reserve which harvested eggs from
nearby beaches and hatched and cared for them until they were ready
to be released. For three dollars we bought three turtles and swam
with them in our hands to a coral reef and released them. We watched
them swim off into the ocean. We stayed afterwards and played about
the reef. Our guide explained that this was a kind of cleaning place
for the Sea Turtles and we wouldn't be half lucky to spot some big
turtles come to clean their shells on the reef. Sure enough after about
a half hour, just when Valentina was tiring and asking to go back to
shore, three turtles arrived; they came right up to us, curious to know
what we were doing at their reef. I caught the back of one and he
carried me about, and it was like being on the back of some great bird
soaring through the air.
That afternoon we were walking back to our hotel for a short
nap and evening meal. We used the railway tracks as it seemed
everyone in the village did. People were friendly coming from work or
from market, and several people asked us if we had seen the flying
dogs. We tried to understand what that was, a flying dog, but nobody
seemed to have any ready explanation in English. They just smiled
and clapped their hands. They pointed to a large tree half a mile down
a dusty back road and said...In that direction.
We set off but just as we were stepping off the train tracks, a
small van stopped and the driver, rolling down the passenger window,
asked where we were going. No, I know the best place to take you to
see flying dogs. My wife said quietly there was no way we could just
get into somebodys van. He overheard and pulled out his license and
showed her the stickers on his van. I take tourist there all the time,
he said. It is just but fifteen minutes drive.
And off we went with him. The road was hardly a road, just
dried dust and grass worn by water and cars and bicycles and feet. He
drove like he had missed an appointment and we were flung about the

20

van, each of us holding some part of the vehicle so as not to crash our
skulls, and the farther we went the darker things became, we were
sinking down into the jungle. Then at the last moment he put on his
brakes and we were all thrown forward. He had stopped at the edge of
a large lagoon, like he didn't expect it to be there. I half expected that
he was going to tell us we needed to try a different route. As quickly
as the car stopped, he popped out and was opening the sliding door.
Here we are.
My wife asked, demanded still sitting in the van, Where are
they?
From nowhere came half a dozen small boys on dugouts.
They lightly grabbed our arms and tried to cajole us to their boats
which were no more than dug out tree trunks. The driver explained
that to get to the flying dogs we had to get in one of them. My wife just
looked at them and said, No. The boy whose u out we were to go in
was no ore than ten years old and his younger brother was scooping
water out of the boat with a rusty tuna can.
C'mon, I said. It will be fun.
I don't want this. I am tired of this. I had all of this when I
was younger, backpacking around Europe. I don't need this anymore.
I don't want to take risks anymore. Get in a van with someone we
don't know; Come to a place we know nothing about; Go out on a lake
to see something that might eat us. I just want to be safe in my own
house.
I have not come all this way to sit in a hotel room.
Then you go. I will stay.
C'mon Valentina, I said. Valentina and I began to get into
the boat.
No, you are not getting in the boat with her. We were
already sitting in the boat. The boy was bailing faster. This isn't
even a boat. Look at it, it has cracks all over it. You are going to get
half way out and it is going to sink. She put her finger in one of the
many long cracks in the boat and pulled out what looked like a long
strip of gray gum.
The older boy put down his paddle and went to nearby tree,
holding his hand up to tell her to wait. He pulled of a piece of bark off
a nearby tree and scooped out the sap and rolled it between his hands.
He held it up to her and stuck it back in the crack.
The driver began to talk her into the boat. He explained that
they took hundreds of tourists out on the lake and nothing ever
happened. My wife said that she would only go if he went with us. He
assured her and helped her into the boat. We all got settled and then
the driver and one of the boys pushed the skiff from the mud. The boy

21

slipped back in the dugout; the driver let go and waved. Dolores
shook her finger at him-- he smiled and waved.
The lagoon was surrounded so by dense jungle that waters
were dark even in the middle. At first they paddled to the center and
then there was a kind of dogleg. All the while everything was so calm,
that looking into the deep pool you could see so perfect a picture that
the clouds in the sky looked painted on. The boys pointed to the trees
as we came close to the shores. They gently let the boat scrap against
the roots of the mangroves which enshrouded the place.
Valentina was the first to see it and she pointed above us.
There, do you see there? she said.
And then as if on command the whole of the green mass of
plants began to move like some gentle breeze, but this was no breeze.
The jungle came alive. There were dozens of green, gray monitor
lizards all around us. They boy who was steering in the back tried to
move the boat but it was not caught in the roots of the mangroves. We
were stuck and everything around us was moving. The boys looked
worried and the one in back shouted instructions to his brother in front
and they begin to rock the boat in rhythm. We all looked up, it was
like in an accident where everything slows down and what might take
three seconds seems like thirty minutes, but there was a large six foot
plus monitor above us and whether he lost his balance or just planned
it, he dropped out of the tree. Just then, the boy in back slipped half
out of the boat and lunged it forward, catching one leg of a root and
pushed us off. The lizard fell with a silent plop along the length of the
boat.
When the dinosaur surfaced through the black ink, the first
thing to emerge was his shoulder less head and bright red tongue.
That is when Valentina reached out her hand and I snapped the photo.
The boy noiselessly lifted his paddle and pushed the giant beast gently
away
We headed towards a small island. I don't understand.
Those are the flying dogs? I asked.
The boys did not speak English, but one of them pointed to a
tree on the farthest end of the little island and said, No, no.., those
are the flying dogs. Evening was coming on. From the coast, not far
off, white Egrets were coming in groups of three and four and circling
around the tree. They were coming in to roost for the evening. The
tree had been dead for centuriespetrified, tall, wide, whitebut in
the waning light you could make out these big dark leaves. The closer
we came; we noticed that the leaves were moving. And then the white
Egrets began landing and the leaves, big giant leaves, began falling.
And as we watched the first one fall, and the moon was now ought, the

22

first one fell and right before it hit the water it took on wings and flew
off in a big circle about the lake. And then there were more and more,
so many that by the time the tree was covered now with the white
birds, who covered the tree like a great big northern snow, these bats,
hundreds were circling about the lake, rising and falling.
Flying dogs. These were the flying dogs.

The last place I checked was beside our bed. There was a
photo of the three of us. It was to be the last trip that we took as a
family. I knew that I would have missed it if it hadn't been there, so it
must have been there. But still I had to check. And there it was the
three of us in front of the Pyramids at Giza.
I had to wonder why she left this one. Did she just think that
if she took it, I would have noticed before they got out the door? Or
was it some message to me?
The taxi cab driver left us off on a dusty, dirty little street. We
got out of the cab and I paid him through the front window. I asked,
Where are the pyramids? I had no idea of knowing if we had just
been taken or what. The pyramids were some forty stories high. You
could see them on the horizon of the city from the airport, but here
there was no sight of them now. He just pointed straight ahead, said
something in Arabic and followed that with Pyramids. He took the
money and wheeled the taxi around and was gone.
Fortunately, there were shops and people milling about. We
walked a block, and my wife asked someone drinking coffee through
his mustache, with paper in arm, and the man waived his paper in the
direction of an alley that took a sharp right.
And right as we made the turn, there they were straight up
out of the dessert. The Sphinx was there crouching eastward, the
pyramids posed behind him. It was cut out of a postcard.
Next to the Sphinx is a Giant walkway made of brick. I do not
know what the Great Wall must look like, butthis one was pretty
impressive. My wife sat Valentina up on the wall and said, Would
you take a picture of us? I did. She asked for three. She changed
sides with Valentina. And finally she got up and sat up on the wall
with her for the final photo.
Then this couple approached me. They might have been
French, but I do not know. They were older, in their fifties. There was
another couple two, somewhere farther down, having their picture
taken by a guide. They were young, maybe just married on their

23

honeymoon. I did not see them clearly. The older couple asked me to
take their photo. I looked at my camera for a minute thinking they
meant for me to use my own. I was embarrassed by the dumbness of
that thought as they handed me their camera. They took up the
position that my daughter and wife had just been. I took their photo
and then, I just stood there, looking at the Sphinx.
Cmon, my wife said.
What about me? I was not looking at the Sphinx. I was
looking at the photo of my wife and child. I was not in it. I began to
click through the hundred some photos we had on the digital camera. I
was not in any of them. I had taken photos of Valentina and my wife
on the camel they shared. I had taken them at the foot of the largest of
the pyramids. I had taken them as they emerged from a long tunnel. I
had taken them having scrambled eggs. I was in none of the photos.
And so I demanded a photo there and then. The British
couple took it.
When my lawyer asked for a list of things I wanted, I suppose
he expected me to ask for the dog, the car, the house. We didn't have
any of those things.
All I wanted was the pictures.

24

LOSING THE FAITH

The travel brochure says El Nido is a magical place.

From its ageless towering marble cliffs to its white sandy beaches with
crystal clear water, many refer to it as paradise. There are over 50
beaches to discover, so many in fact that sometimes you feel as if you
are on your own secluded private beach. You will also find enchanting
lagoons with tranquil turquoise-green water, caves that can take you to
hidden beaches and a very diverse variety of wildlife.
John and Joanne were Missionaries celebrating their sixth
wedding anniversary. They were from Iowa big-boned people with a
healthy look of righteousness. John was balding, thirty-five, with a
stomach that came tight around his belt. Joanne was motherly, the kind
who cant have babies, whose short fingers were always adjusting
something on her husband or holding his wrists when they sat.
Mitch was ordering food on the veranda that looked out
over the sea. He was in his thirties; he had the look of a traveler-- a
thin lithe body with muscles gotten from long walks. The Manila girl
he was traveling with might have just brushed her twenties. She was
resting in the bungalow.
John was the one who introduced himself. He was used to
introducing himself from all the missionary work they did. He would
talk to people waiting in a checkout line or sitting in an airplane. Do
you mind if I sit down? We have been here for three days, and it just
seems like we have had nobody to talk to.
No go right ahead, Mark said. Do you want a beer?
No, dont drink. John continued talking. It is a beautiful
place isnt it? The snorkeling is great and the night, well you can see
all the stars in the sky. So bright, I have to close the curtains in our
bungalow.
Mark ordered a beer. John ordered two fruit drinks, Sunset
Passion.
You dont drink?
Havent had a drink in thirteen years.
You count.
I used to play high school football. Got caught drinking
and got suspended for the State Championship. Just never went back.

25

Did you win the game, Mark asked.

Oh, we won. Three of us got caught. I was a linebacker.
The other two guys didnt start. Hurt the team, but we still managed to
win.
I was angry about being suspended for a long time. And
then I got to thinking about what my goals was. And one of my goals
was to win the State Championshipit was my Senior year. Then I
thought about my anger. Why was I so angry? The team had got what
we set out to do. It was our third consecutive title.
You know what it was?
No.
It is what I said before, my goal. You see football is a
team game Did you ever play?
A little. Mark hadnt really played. He had sat on the
bench one season. He was a receiver-- too slow and too skinny to play
in games. Plus, he could not see stretching for a ball when some
linebacker was about to crush him.
John smiled, You were always a spectator. He did not
mean it offensive like. He saw the world that way-- spectators and
players. Football is a team sport. My goals werent part of the teams
goals. Thats why I had been out drinking; thats why I was upset even
though we won.
He paused for a minute. This was his practiced speech and
people liked the pause. That State Championship changed my life.
John stood up and pulled the chair out for Joanne. She
beamed proudly at her husband. She had heard the story before and
each time it confirmed all that was good. As she sat, the drinks
arrived. She looked disapprovingly at the beer; her husband handed
her the Sunrise.
Are you with someone, Joanne asked after they had
exchanged some small talk.
A friend from Manila.
Someone from the States? Joanne asked.
No, just a girl.
That was the end of their conversation. Joanne and John
took their half finished drink back to the bungalow. They knew what it
meant to bring a Friend from Manila. No amount of God was going
to change a guy who brought a Friend.

DAY ONE
Radio Manila was first to break the news. The resort was

26

isolated. Accounts were confusing. What they did know was that in
the early hours of the morning, two speedboats with eight to ten armed
men landed on either end of the island. The men encountered little
resistance. They shot the cook who was having a cigarette on the
beach. The other staff they tied and bound. Then they went from cabin
to cabin searching for guests. They took those who they thought had
money. Ten hostages total. Then they headed back out to sea.
The armed men had temporarily separated the men and
women, six and four. Marks friend, Maria Jose, was sitting, worried,
next to Johns wife across the way. She had no papers so they thought
maybe she had a US passport she was hiding.
Bound and sitting in the bottom of the cigar boat, John
asked, Are we going to make it out of here? Mark was laying on his
side.
I dont know.
Are you worried?
Not right now. We are pretty safe for a few days. When
the government comes and tries to rescue us, there might be problems.
Do you think they will kill hostages.
I suppose they will. Mark was calm. He worked odd
jobs and used what he made to travel. He had seen lots of the world.
He had seen most every human condition from legless, syphilitic
beggars in India to street children in Bogota huffing on coke bottles
filled with industrial glue. He was a spectator. Whatever the world
brought him, he observed.
I just thought that cause were Americans you might think
they wouldnt kill us. Our government might get involved and they
wouldnt like that. He thought about this and then added, We have
more money than these people; we could pay. I dont like saying this,
as long as they got us this thing stays in the spotlight. Without us all
they got is some Filipinos.
Mark could not help but remark, Or maybe, Americans
arent worth the risk. So they just cut our heads off. That would be the
Muslim way.
Do you think we should try to run for it?
I dont know.
You know if I was you, I think I would just run. But I
dont know if I could make it with Lucy.
Where are you going to make it too, John?
Ever been in boy scouts?
Briefly.
We used to go every summer when I was a kid, up there in

27

Northern Minnesota. They got a place called the Boundary Waters.

Boxes, foods, cansthey mark it all down just to make sure that
whatever you take in you have to take out. It is one of the most
beautiful places in the world. In the Boundary Waters, we learned how
to live on just about nothing. I once caught a fish on line I made out of
a vein from a leaf. I figure if I ever have a boy, and Im sure we will,
he is going to be a Boy Scout.
He could sense that Mark was not following him, had no
appreciation. All Im trying to say is that if you are looking to run for
it, you might talk to me before you go. I might be of some use to you.
The Colonel did not like any of the hostages talking. He
was tired and nervous; the sun was just coming up, six am. They had
a long day ahead of them, and he did not want to die today. They were
coming into the shore, Some of you might be thinking about escaping
right about now. We have some hard hiking ahead of us. We arent
afraid to make an example of somebody who cant keep up. We dont
mind sending a corpse or two back to Manila just for good measure.
So if you give us an excuse, that corpse will be yours. Keep up.
The other thing is escape. Some of you might think you
have would have a better go at it on your own. Let me just tell you a
little about the three step viper. The Colonel pulled from a brown
sack a dead, green snake, still waxy, neon green. This is a three step
viper that one of our guides cut out of a tree. I brought it just as a
visual for you. This is the most dangerous snake in the world and it
grows thick in these parts. They call it the three stepper because when
it bites you thats about how many steps you have left. If you are
thinking of escaping, you wont last long in these parts.
Now the final thing, if someone still wants to escape and is
so successful, which is very unlikely, we would execute two people for
every person who escapes. Look around you carefully. You escape
and you are signing the death sentence for one of your neighbors.

DAY TWO
News of the kidnapping began to filter into Western Media.
The American CBS News reported that the Abu Sayef, a Muslim group
seeking to create a Muslim state, was suspected of carrying out the
audacious raid. A military aircraft spotted the speedboats. The
aircraft tracked it for half an hour across the Philippine Sea. No shots
were fired. When the plane went back to refuel, other planes were
unable to locate the two boats. By all accounts, the boats were

28

heading to Mindanao. The hostages had likely spent the night at sea
and were transported in the morning to a jungle camp.
Have you thought about that? John asked.
They had spent the whole day hiking into the jungle. They
had gone almost two days without sleep, before they settled in a
makeshift camp. Mark was still waking up. What was that?
Have you thought about if one of these people might be a
spy? Joan said they always make one of the hostages one of their guys
to find things out.
Mark looked at Joan. She was listening to her husband and
looking around camp.
How do you think they know about our escape plans.
What escape plans? Mark asked.
Well, I mean what you and me were talking about
yesterday, you know the Boundary Waters.
I didnt know we had agreed to that.
Dont you think we should be careful with whom we talk.
That always sounds like good advice to me.
That guy over there, what is he some kind of guide at the
resort?
Mark shook his head yes.
Dont you think they would need somebody to get on and
off the island? Somebody who could show them the way around?
Joan and I dont remember so well what he was doing that night. We
think he might even have been on the beach.
Mark grunted. He wasnt looking to be a Boy Scout or
some kind of hero. He could guess the kind of videos a guy like John
rented.
What did you think what the Colonel said about escape.
Do you think that means we cant try it?
I think if someone escapes, somebody will die.
But I dont think that means us. I think he means if they
try to escape. I think we are something else entirely.
What do you mean by that.
The way I figure it is they will kill one of their own. We
dont have anything in common with these people. Its like apples and
oranges. If one of them escapes, they kill one of them. With us, they
cant just kill us.
Mark finally said what he wanted to say the first time he
met John. Arent we all Gods children?
You know what I mean, John said.

29

DAY THREE
The Philippine Star carried the names of those who had
been abducted from the luxury resort of Palawan, including three
Americans-- two missionaries celebrating their tenth anniversary, and
a traveler from California on vacation. Speedboats had been found
abandoned near a mountainous region of Mindanao. Philippine
Special Forces were pursuing the kidnappers in the region and the US
was negotiating with the Philippine Government to provide
surveillance and intelligence.
The Colonel always had a newspaper and a transistor radio.
He had a fresh newspaper from Manila, the morning after the
kidnappings, with the faces and descriptions of every hostage he had
taken. The Colonel was about to begin the task of deciding who was
worth how much and who was expendable. He called the hostages up,
one at a time.
What is it you do in this country? He asked Mark.
I come for the corals.
Corals?
I like to swim; I like the sea.
Do you think I am stupid, the colonel asked. Do you
think I do not know what the foreigners come for.
I think you are smart. You dont know why I am here or
you would not ask.
The Colonel smiled at him. He knew the struggle before
him would be largely physical now. They had to stay hidden. They
had to suffer through damp, mosquito ridden nights, and who could
forget the small bites of bugs that were already covering their bodies,
especially their backs, with small red, painful, blotches.
I have dived in the Red Sea, The Great Barrier Reef, The
Caribbean. I wanted to dive here in the Philippines.
The Colonel next called the couple. A guard brought them.
They were motioned to sit on a fallen limb. They sat quietly.
Tell me what you were doing on the island.
John answered. We have been married for ten years. We
were celebrating our wedding anniversary.
And what do you do here in the Philippines.
John looked at his wife. She offered him nothing. They
knew that this was not something good.

30

(They had talked the night before about what it meant to be

a witness for Christ. Jane had grown up with parents who felt at ease at
a strangers door explaining the faith. Have you heard the good
news? She remembered the men at the door with their boxers, the
woman who showed her tit, or the boy with the nose ring who showed
them the Ouija Board after he served them tea in his living room.
Despite the setbacks, the great shocks, she always felt good at the end
of the evening. Even if there were no converts, the act of going out
made her feel stronger in her faith.
You wouldnt knowingly go into a crime ridden place,
her husband argued.
I dont know what that has to do with it.
Well, you wouldnt go proselytizing in an area that you
knew was dangerous.
But that is sometimes where they need it most.
Still, our church would not send you to such a place.
Joan pursed her lips in that way she did when she didnt
want to say more.
My point is that we do not have to be witnesses now. It is
putting us in great danger. Danger we would not normally be called to
do.
But I believe God put us on that island for a reason. Dont
you see, this may be the test that we were born for.
John could not say more. He was committed to his wife.
He could not turn to her now and say, No, I am not ready for this.
That would mean he did not have the faith. The faith they had been
building for ten years and for three years now in the Philippines.)
The Colonel waited. Joan waited for her husband. John
finally said, We are doing the work of God.
What would the work of God be? The Colonel wondered
whether they would try to lie. If he was ever caught, he would spit in
his captures faces. What would these Christians do?
We tell them that Christ died for their sins and if they will
believe in this him, they can live with Christ forever.
The Colonel looked blankly at him.
And if not?
John looked at his wife. He knew what he could say to the
natives. They would go to hell. That was the beauty of god. He
could attract you by his grace or if you needed a coaxing, then there
was always hell. There was something for everyone. What he didnt
know is what to say now. What to say to a man who had all the guns
and was about to decide the fate of his life?

31

Joan felt that if she could talk to people about Christ, then
they could see and would believe. But what of those people she talked
to and they did not convert? She believed in seeds. It was like the
mustard seeds in the Bible. Sometimes they fell on fertile land and
sometimes on rock. The beauty of the metaphor was, and she did not
see it this way, is that she might never know if her when her seeds bore
fruit. It left her conscience free to preach more.
But she had been taught to wait. Her whole life she had been
taught to wait for men. Her father was first to be served at their table;
She would iron her brothers shirts; She would wait in the stands while
her cousins played baseball.
If not, she finally broke in, we believe that the soul will not
rest in peace. The soul will be left forever to serve in a state of
penance, hell. She said this last bit with some satisfaction.
Afterwards, John reprimanded her, Why did you have to tell
him all that?
His wife looked at him, the same way she looked at that beer
in front of Mark, the first afternoon that they met. If we are going to
die, Im going to die with God.
The Colonel decided to separate the Americans-- John,
Joanne, Mark-- from the Filipinos. Marks friend, Maria Jose, the
single girl from Manila was led off alone..

DAY FOUR
The Daily Telegraph carried on its front page the
picture of a corpse whom they identified as Maria Jose Ramirez of
Manila. (They described her work as that of a companion.) Her
body had been discovered by Philippine Special Forces; she had been
beheaded and her hands chopped off. Ransom demands had been
stuffed in her shirt pocket, a hastily scribbled note- a half a million
dollars for each Filipino and one million for each American. The
American Press ran a second page story which said that a Filipino had
been beheaded by the Muslim extremist group thought responsible for
the Palawan abduction. The fates of the Americans were unknown.
There were no photographs.
When they were eating dinner, Mark asked, What brought
you here?
We were brought here to do Gods work.
Come on John, Mark said, looking wearily at him.

32

Nobody leaves the suburbs of Detroit where everything is green and

the bushes are trimmed at right angles, to a place like this.
Both men were growing weary. I might ask you just the
same question. But I havent, John said.
And what do you suspect?
What do I suspect? I suspect that you spent a few days in
Manila. I suspect you had a few girls, and then when you discovered
they had never been to high school, I suspect you became bored.
Maybe you even took one with you for a couple of days. But you got
tired. She wanted to talk about marriage, houses, children and then
there was nothing else to talk about. You were bored. Maybe you got
another girl and had them both at the same time. You woke up the next
morning, disgusted, disillusioned and then decided to go out diving.
To call yourself a diver.
John knew he had lost his cool. Mark was one of those that
he could not convert and had to walk away from. He must not hold
hate in his heart. Hate the sin and not the sinner.
What brought you out of the suburbs? Mark asked.
I was tempted by another woman.
Tempted?
We believe that sin is not just in the act, but it is in
thinking of the act. It is the thought that produces the act.
Who was she?
John thought quietly for a moment. In our church, we
have a public confession. When we are falling out of the state of grace,
we are asked to confess to the whole, the group. That too is the test we
put to our faith. If there is something you would be embarrassed to
share with others that thing is sin. A life should be lived openly.
You confessed you had an affair in front of everyone?
I had kissed a girl at a church function. (She had really
kissed me, but there is no difference. It is still a sin.) I had to tell our
group. It is the only way re-enter the group when you have lost Gods
grace.
Who told you to confess?
God.
Come now John, I know your wife must have had
something to do with it.
She didnt know anything about it. But I couldnt go on
with those monthly meetings knowing what I had done.
But there was the woman too.
We each are responsible for our own actions.
And she didnt know anything about it.
No.

33

And then you had the idea to do missionary work?

That was my wife.

DAY FIVE
News of the kidnapping was catching on in the media. The
American newspaper, USA TODAY, carried pictures of the hostages
with a diagram of the Palawan resort showing yellow arrows
describing in detail the night of the abduction. The US Special Forces
had now officially joined the Pilipino Special forces and were
providing direct technical support. A spokesman for the group, Abu
Sayif, said that if the government continued to pursue them, they
would be forced to kill an American.
Do you think they can be serious about that? John asked.
I would say they are serious.
But if they lose us, they lose all their political bargaining
chips.
Mark thought about this for a moment. He was finishing a
banana that he had been given as breakfast. They were short on food
as they trudged through the jungle. They were just foraging now. We
have been separated from the others. The others have money. It may
be that we represent something political to them. But who knows.
Maybe they just want the money now.
I don't understand, John said. Does that mean we are
more likely to get killed or not?
I don't know. If they kill one of us, it might take some of
the pressure of them. The military might be a little more cautious. Kill
one of us, and the military might slow down, They could hear
helicopters overhead. They were forced to take cover again and again.
Who do you think they will kill? As soon as he said it,
John regretted it. He knew just as well as Mark, who it would be.
Even in the savage jungles, even with men who are willing to blow
themselves up in the name of religion, there was an older law, older
than all of these, that said you do not kill a woman, if you do not have
to. And between a Mark and John...,well John had a family.
Mark did not answer. He began to eat the soft skin on the
banana.
You won't escape will you?
I don't see how I can. I wouldn't get very far would I?
John let some of the water trickle from his canteen and with
a bit of water still guarded in his cupped palm, he put his palm to

34

Mitch's head.
What are you doing, Mitch asked as John put his hand to
his forehead.
I am baptizing you.
What?
He made the Sign of The Cross on his forehead. I know
you might not think it is any good. And maybe it wont do you any
good. But if you should decide at the last moment, if it should come to
that, then we believe that you can be saved.
I dont believe in all that.
You make light of Faith, but if you so choose, if you
accept Christ as your risen savior you can be saved in a much more
meaningful way.
I have given you the opportunity. That is all I can do.
You must want to join the team.
I think if God wants me, if there is a God, he will take me
for who I am and not because I have joined some team.
That is very modern thinking, John said. He had heard
this before. And his answer was all memorized like he was reading
from a catechism. You must admit that Jesus is your personal savior
to be accepted.
And why is that? Mark asked. Because you say it is
so?
Because our God is a jealous God, and he does not take
lightly to those who leave things to chance.
Mark wiped the water from his forehead. I suppose we are
not going to the same place.
That night the Colonel whom they had not seen in a half
day, came into camp. The seven soldiers guarding the Americans,
stood up, he had a sentry with him. He directed the Americans to sit in
a straight row. They were facing him. He directed that the rope
holding them all together should be severed. He told them to turn
around. He had a shotgun which he placed one at a time on the back of
each of their heads. Joanne began to recite the Lords Prayer and John
followed her. Mark looked out into the dark green of the jungle where
he could hear a howler monkey. He had in all his travels never seen
one. The colonel let the gun rest for five seconds, before letting the pin
drop on the empty chamber.
When he had done this to each of them, he explained that
the Americans had joined the search. They could deal with the Pilipino
Military. They did not want the Americans. The one thing the
Americans could not stomach were casualties. He needed to send them

35

a message.
He placed the gun on the back of Joannes head and asked
her, Why should I save you?
Joan was crying. She said, I have children.
He did the same to John.
John paused and said, I have children.
He did the same to Mark.
Mark was silent.
DAY FORTY FIVE
News of the rescue was carried on a mid day news flash on
Channel Five in Manila. Philippine Special Forces had raided the
rebel camp at sunrise freeing the American missionary Joan. Six
rebels had been killed in the firefight. Joannes husband, John, had
been fatally wounded in hostile crossfire. The third American, Mark
the tourist, was presumed dead. A corpse, without head or hands, had
been found nearby and the authorities were awaiting DNA testing to
confirm the identity.

36

PARADISE

Alex had taken a job working overseas. He had responded to

one of those ads in the back of a magazine Big Money in Alaska,
Make Your Life a Vacation on Carnival Cruise, English Teachers
Needed in Taiwan.
It was not at all like Alex to do such a thing..,
COLLEGE
Alex and I lived together for half a year in college. A couple
needed someone to house sit, the house was large red brick on the
outside, aged, dark oak beams on the inside, a large dining room and a
living room with a spacious fireplace. There was even a solarium with
two stained glass panels and a study with large leather reading chairs.
Upstairs there were five big, square bedrooms with canopy beds and
private bathrooms. The couple wanted somebody responsible to look
after the house. That was the kind of guy Alex was; if you were middle
aged and would be out of the country for a while, he was someone you
would want to look after your house.
One weekend, when we were living at this house, his parents
came down from Pennsylvania. His father had dark black, thinning
hair. He moved deliberately and wore button down shirts that had been
cleaned, ironed, starched many times over. He was not a preacher but
he carried the Bible with him when he traveled. He spoke to his son
like he was in an old movie: Alex are you doing well in your studies?;
Your brother, Raymond, is enjoying his work with the Latvian refuges;
The Sayers was replaced by an Osco.
Alexs mother took charge of the kitchen as soon as she got
there. We kept a clean house, but there were some dishes left from
breakfast, a couple of coffee mugs and a bowl and two juice glasses.
The mother came in the front door went right through the living room
to the galley kitchen. I remember once when I was a child driving
home from Sunday service with the family. One of the old matrons of

37

the church had died. She was a woman who had never married. My
father said, You rarely see that type of devotion anymore. It seems
that she had been a young and beautiful girl and ready to marry when
her mother took ill. She cared for her mother until she died. Then she
cared for her father and her three brothers. And before she knew it
there was no time left and she was old. That is what Alexs mother was
sort of like, devoted to her family and such.
Dinner was excellent. We had fried chicken (the Mrs. brought
her own special flour mix in zip locked baggies) and mashed potatoes
(which were a little chunky like Mr. liked them) and waxed green beans
(out of Green Giant tins). I asked about the whole family. Alexs older
brother was a weather reporter who sometimes did community service
and his younger brother was teaching third graders.
After dinner, they invited me to play scrabble. They were
going to make popcorn and drink soda. Alex had soda at dinner, but his
father and mother had milk. I recused myself; it was after all Saturday
night.
I got home at three. The porch light was on. We never left
the porch light on. And a small night light was plugged into a socket in
the hallway.
That morning, Alex came to my room to call me down for
breakfast. My Moms made us a big breakfast. The Mrs. didnt
show anything, but Mr. looked a little disappointed, like, So this is
what my son has to put up with. They never said anything about it
directly, but they didnt ask me anything about what I had got up to.
They talked of family and town happenings and what we boys were
doing at school.
They were going that day to look at an old tourist boat docked
in the harbor and the father asked me if I wanted to go along. I sensed
it was my last chance at atonement.
I said no.
That was pretty much the end of the weekend for us. After
another late night, I wasnt invited to breakfast the next morning.
They left that Monday as planned.
1st LETTER
The first letter I received from Alex was a postcard him on
a beach in the Philippines, Cebu. There were two Filipinas with him.
They both had thick, curly black hair which fell to their waists. One
had eyes like small, deep tide pools and the other had a round face and
round hips. He wrote that he was giving them English lessons. He had
fallen in love.

38

I looked at the photo and I said to myself, good for him. I

couldnt help but wonder at the same time how long it would last.
I showed this postcard to my friend Brian. We were both third
year law students. He had accepted an offer from Kellogg. He had a
Father and Uncle who worked for Kellogg. There is a lot more to
cereal than just a spoon and some milk, he used to say. He would be
making six figures faster than any of us.
He carefully turned the postcard over several times. He
fingered the stamp like he was expecting the ink to come off.
My father was in the Philippines after the war. Beautiful
place. Beautiful people.
I was packing my bag to leave the library. Wait for me,
Brian said. He went to check out some books. We left the library and
walked slowly back to the dormitory. The snow had all melted. Things
were gray, spring had yet to come.
Then he said. How could it possibly work out?
What? I asked. I was thinking about what salad dressing I
was going to have at dinner.
How could he fall in love, really in love, with someone who
grew up without stoplights and someone who hawked single cigarettes
and warm coke to tourists?
You dont know that? I said.
My Dad used to have this great place in the Cayman Islands.
You are down there a week and everything is great. The swimming,
the bar scene is all great. But by the second week, you are bored out of
your mind. My Dad ended up selling the place. I admit it teaching
English, living in a foreign country that all looks like great fun. But
that is all it is.
You cant live that way all your life.
I never wrote back to Alex. Now before you go jumping to
conclusions, I did not write him back because I had moved on from
those college days, or because I resented that he was living the good
life while I was toiling away. II just did not know what to write. What
do you say to someone who has found paradise while you are toiling
away?
2ND LETTER
The second letter arrived when I was practicing law in Beloit,
a small town caught between the Wisconsin farm belt and industrial
Chicago. I had just finished a case that brought me some money.
Alex began his letter by saying that things had changed. I

39

thought at once, Well here it comes.

He had come across a Frenchman who sold hospital floors.
Apparently hospital flooring and the initialization process is very
specialized. Anyhow, this man had made a fortune doing it. He had
been to the Philippines several times and he wanted to open a resort.
He didnt particularly care to live there, at least not all year round, and
he needed someone to run it. Yes, he could choose a Filipino, but they
were all too eager to help. No, he needed a foreigner and he needed
someone who had to be convinced to do the job. Anyone who already
knew the job would also, inevitably, know how to steal from him.
Someone untrained would lose money, but that he could deal with it
was the stealing he did not like.
Alex moved to El Nido, a far away archipelago at the southern
tip of Palawan. He was overseeing the construction of ten bungalows
on an island surrounded by a large coral reef. The workers did
everything by hand and left at the end of every day, taking a small skiff
back to the coastal town. He and his girls went swimming for food and
slept when the sun went down, there was no electricity.
He described how they ate the fish, putting a stick lengthwise
through it and roasting it over an open pit until the skin turned soft like
wet paper. And one of the girls would flake off the meat unto a banana
leaf and they might add some boiled coconut milk and certainly rice,
always rice, and carrots sliced lengthwise and a caramelized banana for
desert.
The island had a small hidden lagoon carved out in the center
which was only accessible by swimming through a hole which
remained wholly submerged. They had only discovered the place after
talking to a pilot who had flown over the island and looked inside.
I passed the letter to a friend of mine, Roger. Roger belonged
to the Rotary Club and played baseball in a league, and went to church
breakfasts. He ran three miles every day. He got up at six, ran, and
was to work by seven thirty. I asked him if he liked all that exercise
and he told me, No. But it is the only way to stay sharp. He had a
theorydiscipline and routine was what truly separated people. He
knew a lot of very bright people, but without discipline they were
nobody. Success has a price he would say, Discipline and Routine.
He lived his life, like life was a job.
He looked at the letter. He finished it, like a legal brief, and
stood up. He placed it back on the bar. Yes, I suppose that is very
interesting. He excused himself to go to the bathroom.
When he returned, he asked Your friend?
Yes, I said.
Well, I wouldnt make too much of it. That kind of life is not

40

supportable. It is a vacation and vacations always end. It is just not in

our human natures to live without challenge, without adventure. The
trouble with paradise is that it cannot sustain itself.
VISIT
Alex met me at the Manila airport. His forehead was soaked
in perspiration which he wiped with a white, old handkerchief. Alex
had changed, he had long hair braided in a pony tail, and he had put on
an extra twenty pounds, no protruding stomach, just a bit more girth
A happy, hibernating weight.
He told me we had no time to waste. We had fifteen minutes
to catch a flight on the other side of the city. And before I could even
sit down to collect myself, we were whizzing across Manila in a
Jeepney a jeep converted into a short bus with bars for windows and
an old two by four on either side for seats. There must have been
twenty people crowded in a space for ten with three chickens and a
parakeet. All I remember was the heat and sweat and diesel. The local
airport was a menagerie of porters grabbing for packages, and street
venders selling everything from cigarettes to peanuts to warm coke.
We did not have time for any of it. Alex put two tickets down at a
counter and doors opened and we were waiting on a tarmac with twenty
other confused passengers. We climbed up a ladder into a plane that
was no more than aluminum cage. Alex told me not to worry, the plane
does not go that high.
We were out over the ocean in no time. There were enough
islands to spend a lifetime exploring. The blues and greens, if you
would have painted anything like that, nobody would have believed it.
We were up there about twenty minutes and then the plane drops out of
the sky. We put down on what was little more than a mowed field.
There was nothing but a maintenance shack made of old planks. Alex
paid some seven year old to take my bag which the kid and his six year
old brother carried like drunken sailors to our waiting skiff. Within
minutes all land disappeared
As we sped across the ocean, the first stars of the evening
were coming out. We had studied astronomy in college, an obligatory
course, and I remember Alex out practicing with a quadrant and later
giving the class a rather thorough demonstration in it. He could get
very caught up in the technical aspects of a thing he was doing. I asked
him if he knew the names. He said he used to. And then he added,
We suck the life out of things trying to name them. In no time the
sun was gone and, with no moon and calm sea, the stars in the heaven
and the stars in the sea were all the same; up and down were all the
same; heaven and earth all came together; .

41

Half hour later, we were sitting on the sand outside his house.
Alex said to me laughing, I really dont know where we are or how to
get back.
A light came on in the cottage. The girls are back, he said.
I went to get up. He grabbed me by the arm. No, they will come
down, he said. Five minutes later, they went streaking past us
laughing; running into the surf until the first one tumbled the other
ran past her and dove in. They were wearing nothing but thongs, and I
cant say that I have ever seen two more beautiful women. And
playful. They walked on their hands, the one counting how long the
other could walk and then switching turns. They swam until the one,
Vicki, looked up and said, Tom is that you? and she covered her
breast.
Yes, Alex said, and he told them I was there. Vicki took her
arms from her breast and both women ran up to us. Camille, quietly
sat by my side and placed a hand on my thigh as her sister asked from
Toms side where I was come from. Do you like it there?
I guess I do, I said.
At dinner, we talked about everything. They had spotted a
shark in the cove two days ago, and they had not seen it again.
I once saw a man eaten by a shark, she said looking into my
eyes.
Do tell, Alex said.
We, Camille said, nodding at Vicki who was grimacing,
had decided to take a night swim.
I dared her, Vicki said.
She dared me to swim to this point and back. But because it
was dark and there would be no way of knowing whether I made it to
the point or back, I had to swim with a torch. I swam out all the way to
the point. On my way back I hit into this thing. I picked it up but it
was all clumpy, a pale pink and all filmy. At first I thought it was some
kind of jellyfish.
Vicki could not resist, But then she pulled more and it was
attached to a body.
Camille continued. No one ever knew who it was. It was a
Westerner, from his face. Some think maybe from a Russian freighter.
The police tried to find out who it was, but finally he was buried in a
grave without a tombstone. We found some drift wood and burned the
inscription, Our lost Viking.
There were six cottages plus the main one where Alex and the
two girls stayed. He showed me his abode. Half of it, namely the
dining room, the living room, and the kitchen was shared with the
guests. Their bedroom was in the back and they had a small living

42

room with a patio that looked across the palm trees. It was beautiful.
And from the looks of the bed it appeared they all slept together.
I stayed in one of the guest houses. I liked the clean tiled
floors which kept the sand out. The walls were all painted in cool white
enamel, the sink was a giant conch shell, and a humidifier kept the
mattresses firm. Mosquito netting hung from the ceiling and draped the
beds like gossamer wing. Everything was clean crisp and modest..
That night my door opened. I must have been asleep no more
than an hour. Vicki came to my bed. I said, But, and she put her
finger on my lips and proceeded to make wonderful love to me. It was
not like anything I had ever had before. Her body was tremendous.
Her nipples rose straight up on taught breasts, but it was not just that.
It was the way that she cradled my penis in the palm of her hand and
placed it into the moist, sweaty folds of her vagina with just a slight
parting of her hips, and then she was above me with her soft, dark hair
brushing across my chest. But it was not just that. It was how when
we finished she took my hand and led me out, naked, into the surf
which was all white with the moon and stars. But it was not just that.
It was how she pulled me into her back and enveloped me until we both
drifted off to sleep.
Camille and Alex came by the cabana the next day. It must
have been about ten, and Vicki was doing her hair sitting at the mirror,
we had just finished showering. Camille came in and asked Vicki if
she had a nice time. Alex just stuck his head in and said good morning.
I joined him in spearing two fish off the reef and I made a ceviche that
afternoon with limes, a few tomatoes, some barbecued peppers and
wild onions.
Later that afternoon a group from the Peace Corps Volunteers
arrived. There were four guys and two women. They were all in their
twenties except for the guy, who was in his late thirties the head of
the crew.
I helped Alex in the kitchen. I asked him, You like
cooking? All I could remember were his mothers plastic baggies.
We were making fish burritos. We had some red snapper that
the girls had fetched, and we had some lemon grass, and we had some
onions, and we had some green peppers. Taste is such an essential
thing, fundamental, basic, he said.
Satisfying hunger is a basic need.
Yes, I suppose it is, he said. But this what we are doing
I am about to throw a very mild spinach into this burrito because I do
not have lettuce and then I have some cheese from our goat Greta, And
I am going to turn the burrito and hope the whole thing gets seared
together so that it does not unravel and somewhere I am hoping the

43

spinach wilts just a little but not so much that it turns bitter. He
laughed.
This we do here has little to do with hunger; This is all taste.
One of the five senses. He brought down his big Chinese knife, a big
square thing. And he lopped off a third of a burrito and handed it to
me, his hands all sweaty from the grill.
It was delicious.
The Peace Corp Volunteers stayed for three days. Alex and I
did all the cooking. The girls collected the food and occasionally did
some chopping or kneading of bread. One time one of the Volunteers
came into the kitchen and said, Hey, is someone going to clean the
cabanas? We all laughed, Camille and I went off to take care of it.
I never saw in any of my time there what the order of work
was. Alex liked cooking so he mostly took care of that. But getting
food, or fishes, that was like childs play. We often went swimming
mostly to just play in the corals and to see what might have been blown
in. There are so many colors and things in the sea. Every day I was
there I saw something different a different hue of color. One time
Alex and I both saw this fish that swum upside down. It had its head
towards the bottom and its fins moved like cilia, and the whole fish,
well, it moved sideways. When we got to shore we were both
laughing.
What was that? he exclaimed.
It was just remarkable that anything could ever be made that
way. It was like God had said, Well, I dont know if we have
something that does thisI wonder if it will work?
When we did not see it again, Alex asked me, Well, do you
think he took it back?
Who? I asked.
God.
We never thought much about collecting or getting food. We
carried the spear gun with us when we went swimming, and when
something big, or ugly, or menacing came by we brought it to our table.
One night the Peace Corp had a heated discussion after dinner.
They were arguing about aid and the best way to give it. There were
the Muslims in the South, in Mindanao, who wanted to start a Muslim
state. They had been planting bombs across the country, carrying out
kidnappings, terror.
Kelly The only solution is food and education. When people are fed,
they arent so willing to blow themselves up.
Terry And education. Food and a job.
Jeremy Have you ever seen a Muslim classroom?

44

Jeremy There arent books. Mostly just the Koran. Biology, how do
you study that without evolution? History, how do you study that when
every map has Israel blackened out?
Kelly And what is your solution. Just send in the Marines.
Jeremy Yes, sometimes it is a solution. You give more aid to these
people and it is not going to just stop the bombs. That is way to
idealistic.
TerrySo what are you just going to stomp out the whole religion?
They went on like this into the night. We sat and listened
from two hammocks on the porch. We were drinking red wine. When
they had gone off to bed, I asked, So what do you think of all that.
You didnt have such thoughts when you were young.
I suppose I did That I held the answers.
I dont know if you remember that book The Quiet
American. There is a part in it that he says something to the effect
that the most dangerous of people are people with a plan.
An ideology.
After five days on the island, we went to the mainland to buy
some supplies. Alex went to the bank to collect money that was
deposited by his benefactor. The girls went off to find ice cream and a
church. I found myself watching television in a nearby restaurant.
Do you miss TV, Alex asked me.
Not that much.
I am mesmerized by it. Just as soon as I find a way to get a
generator, a wind powered generator, when I figure out how to get one
of those on the island, I am going to get a thousand channel package.
One of those disks that you just put on the roof and shoot in
one direction.
Do you have one of those?
The truth is I have very little time for it with my practice. I
am usually working at night.
We drank cold cokes with ice and watched TV. He convinced
the matron to lend him the remote and he incessantly flipped from
channel to channel. The problem with these things is that they need to
have more than just one recall. You should be able to choose the
number of channels you want to recall. What if I want to watch more
than one channel at the same time?
I told him about how they had TVs now where you could put
several channels on the TV at the same time, and view them all at once.
I asked him on the way back in the boat. Do you miss it?

45

You mean civilization? he asked.

I suppose. Yes civilization.
Tell me a few things. How long do you spend in traffic each
day.
An hour and a half to work and an hour home. Two and a
half hours a day.
Do you lock your doors at night?
Of course.
The food that you buy.., do you ever see where it comes
from.
Not usually.
Frozen?
Often. I saw where he was going. But your family. Do
you talk to them?
I do by internet.
Christmas, Thanksgiving, all of that family stuff. Dont
you miss it?
I am sure at some level. But of course I could not explain all
of this, he looked at the two girls. And then all of the questions about
my life and when will I stay home. I cant say that I dont miss it in
some ways, but it is more like childhood. Do you miss childhood? Yes
I suppose that there are fond memories. But I dont really want to go
back and be a kid again.
My time there I kept wondering what was it that had him,
made him change. Here was the boy of a religious mother and father
and he was living out this fantasy life. What made him suddenly
change?
One night in bed Camille, and yes both girls visited at night,
Camille asked me, Do you believe in God.
I dont know, I said. I hope someone is up there. Do
you?
She thought about it for a minute. We go to church when we
visit the mainland. I like the statues, the stained glass windows. There
is a smell of the place that I like. I think it reminds me of childhood.
But then I listen to the Priest speak and then they go on and on and I
just think that it isnt about all that. Speeches and prayers, whatever it
is, I just dont think it is anything like that.
Some people might say it is living like this.
She laughed and kissed me.
I left the island at the end of my ten day visit. Someone asked
me, If it was so great, why did you leave? That is the day that my
ticket said I would fly back and so I did. Alex said, Whenever you

46

want to visit you can and however long you want to stay, you can.
But my ticket said, Now.
And as I sat on the plane, I could not figure it out. He just did
not seem to have any big idea. There was not some philosophy to the
whole commune thing that I saw going on. No one was really told, you
cook this or that, and people seemed to just sort of wander around.
And there was no great religion or lack of it. The whole thing left me
confused. And even Alex, he seemed a lot like the college roommate
he was, just different, older. No crisis, no great decision. I sensed in
many ways, this whole thing just sort of had happened.
A year and a half passed. I was working in St. Louis. I was
driving home, stuck in traffic about a mile outside the St. Charles
Bridge listening to radio news. I had not heard anything from Alex in
over a year. But it was like I knew that if I ever needed it, I could just
get on a plane and fly there. And the beauty of the thing is that I would
have to catch the jumper flight, after the big one, and then get on a little
skiff, and by the time I reached him, I would be so far away that no one
would know where I was. The announcer said, A large Tsunami has
struck South East Asia. My heart sank. When I got home I turned on
the news, and I watched as this computer generated wave washed over
Palawan.
The last thing I heard was my friend saying, That kind of life
is just not supportable.

47

HOMELESS

My parents took my sister and me to Washington DC. We

were going to see the museums, particularly the aviation museum. My
father had always loved airplanes. Sundays, after Church, he used to
load us up in the car, and with my mothers fried chicken, we would sit
at the end of the runway of the local airport to picnic. He knew
everything about airplanes. He was not a reader, but next to his chair in
the living room, he had a three tiered shelf every book was an
airplane book. He never flew on an airplane. That is what made his
fascination with airplanes all the more extraordinary.
We stayed at a little, inexpensive hotel just outside of DC. We
used the Metro to get around. Coming up on one of the stops I saw
them: two black guys with grisly beards and a white guy with a crusty
bulbous nose that was yellowed with dried puss. My father pushed me
to the side away from an outstretched cellophane coffee cup. My
mother and sister went into a kiosk to get a map of the plaza. My Dad
and I went across the street and sat on a bench. I asked him what that
was; he told me that they were guys without jobs. Where we were from
there were guys out of work, but they always had a place to stay.
Then like he knows we are talking about him, the white guy
comes across the street with his cup. He comes right up to us and asks
where we are from. My Dad told him Onalaska and he asks where that
is and my Dad says in Northern Wisconsin. The guy says Wisconsin
and then like something hit him on the head he says, Milwaukee.
Pabst. Now that was a real beer. I fought for what would have been a
chance at the Middle Weight Crown in Milwaukee. I was one fight
away. The Probst Arena.., that is where it was. You know that place?
My Dad said politely that he did not know the place. The man
asked for some money for coffee, just some change. And my Dad told
him that no he couldnt spare any change. We were out of town and we
hardly took trips like this. Had to save up for it. I still remember the
look in that guys eyes. It was like he wanted to box us right there. And
then he got his composure back and he says, meditative like, So that is
how it is going to be. Hope you see what you came looking for, he

48

says. And he then put his hands out like he was tapping gloves with an
imaginary man and he swung around and returned to the subway
entrance.
Do you really think he was what he said he was? I asked.
I dont see why not? my Dad said.
My Mom and sister came back and we made our way to the
Mall. There were all sorts of things to be seen. We spent all four days
going from one place to another. My sister wanted and bought a TShirt with a Matisse drawing of some woman with her boob where her
eye should have been. My father was not so sure. He wanted to know
where she was going to wear something like that. My sister said that
she didnt expect to spend her whole life in Onalaska. My Mom finally
said that it was alright nobody would probably know what it meant
anyway.
We talked about the homeless man at the park. Funny how
there were so many things we saw that day, and that got stuck in my
memory. My Dad said that sometimes people get bad breaks in life.
My Mom must have seen how I was worried. She wanted to reassure
me. She said, It is not just bad breaks. People make bad decisions.
She patted me on the head, I was still of that age, and then she said,
That wont ever happen to you.
One of my best friends in school was Jim Fink. Onalaska is a
small town. I had a couple of best friends. We had this club when we
were in grade school. Jims Father ran a snow plow and they had this
old barn where they kept it. It had the big, old rafters where his dad
had stored two by fours and big squares of ply-wood. It was a great
place for a club house. We had a rope ladder and collected money for
comic books and board games. We used to play monopoly like we
were Wall Street bankers. Jim insisted on wearing this clip-on tie when
he played. Things were idyllic. We did not worry about dinner or
Saturday lunches. Someone had to call us to come home and eat.
During high school, we grew apart. Not in any bad way. Just
the way that boys grow up and girls become more important. Jim
found that he was fast, very fast. He could take the football from the
quarterback and split the tackles before the linebacker knew to shout
run. We remained good friends. On Friday night after the game,
when we were splitting a Pizza, he would come and sit with us and
inhale a piece or two and leave a dollar. Graduation happened and we
went separate wayssome went off to college and some got jobs.
When I came back from college, we would get together but then it
became little and then less and then my mother would give me updates.
Timmy had opened a restaurant with his brother in Florida, Peter had

49

joined the Navy.

The only thing I heard about Jim was that he had gone to
college for half a year and returned home. I expected that he had torn a
ligament or had some kind of injury that shortened the lives of most
football people. My Mom had run into him at his Dads store. He was
working there His Dad used to be fond of saying that he was in one of
the two oldest professions known to the world. One was prostitution;
the other was beer. Even in bad times, times is good. But the
extraordinary thing about it all was that he was lonely. Jeff came back
to town because he was lonely. A big athlete like that and he came
back because he was lonely. I always thought he had lots of friends in
high school. I would have thought a guy like that could make friends
easy. It made me feel kind of good about him sitting and eating pizza
with us. Made me think maybe through it all we were his friends for
real.
There is that Robert Frost poem where he says how way
leads unto way, well that is what happened. I graduated from college.
I took up a high paying sales job in Chicago, selling government
funded real estate, mostly housing complexes. We bought the real
estate and then right away sold it back into private hands. I have
always found it uneasy that you can make money by just moving
something from one hand to another. And that is what this was. But it
brought in good money so that I could hardly complain. I had a swank
little apartment five blocks walk from Michigan Avenue a loft job,
with the bedroom up a fashionable brass ladder. My fiance was an
Indian medical student, who was doing her internship in Milwaukee
and used to come in by bus for weekends or whenever she had time off.
Times were good.
I was going to work on Monday. Just like any other Monday.
And that is when I saw Jim. He had on an over-big pair of jeans with a
rip in the side so that the belt held together the tear which showed a
double pair of boxers. He had on a green shirt that had been washed
and bleached so many times it looked more like tissue than material.
And his skin, his face and hands were hardened in big red splotches by
the sun. I would not have known it was Jim but for his bright blue
eyes. Even as a boy, people would stop and look when he passed.
There was a brief moment of embarrassment. I looked at him
and as I said, I knew at once who it was. I had not seen him in more
than ten years. I knew him right away. But he did not recognize me.
And when I saw this, I briefly turned from him.
I do not offer an excuse for this. I am not unlike others. We
are trained since youth to avoid embarrassing or uncomfortable
situations. And this was indubitably an embarrassing situation. Here I

50

was about to enter my office building in suit and tie and a seven
hundred dollar, calf skin briefcase. I do not care where you live, the
rags to riches story is a slim one, and people may like a good tale, but
they would rather a good lineage. Having Jim outside my office was
no sign of good lineage. I was embarrassed.
But I quickly came back to my senses. There was a moment, a
very brief moment, when he recognized me and I still had my back
turned. (This may strike you as strange, but it is no different than being
in a crowded room and feelings someones eyes upon you.) I knew he
had recognized me. He understood, full well why I had turned. He did
not hold it against me. He waited for me to turn around.
Jim, I cannot believe it is you.
He wiped his hand on his pants before he extended it to me.
He asked me what I was doing, and then he laughed before I had time
to respond and said, Oh, you are coming to work. I also laughed.
He had not been to work in so long that he had supposed that someone
he knew could not have work. He was so far out of the mainstream, so
far removed from home.
I invited him for a cup of coffee. There was a Starbucks just
off the entrance. He looked at his clothes sheepishly. I looked at my
watch. He was perceptive of these things. Again, I felt like a dolt.
There are some things you do that you dont want everyone to see.
Again, the look at the watch. It was just a nervous thing. Still, Jeff
was good about it. And he even gave me a way out. I guess I am
really not dressed for that, he said.
I have a better idea, I said. I always carry three hundred
dollars cash with me. During my college days, I cannot tell you how
many times I was short. At the end of the month, I would be selling
books. Some exams I went into without having seen the book in
weeks. At the first of the month, I would get my check from my
parents, and I would be going around paying people offthe old lady
at the Diner, a bar tab at The Little Campus. When I got a fancy job,
I told myself I would never live like that again. I always carried three
hundred dollars. So I gave it all to Jeff. Look, go get a hotel. Take a
shower. Go buy yourself some clothes. I will meet you back here at
six, and then well go out and have a proper meal and some drinks.
Beers, he said.
I called my girlfriend and told her what was happening. She
said, You cant do that. You buy him new clothes, get him a hotel,
buy him dinner. You dont think that is going to do anything, do you?
He got to where he was. He isnt going to turn that all back with
twenty dollar jeans, and a Burger King Deluxe Meal.
Is there such a thing, I asked.

51

Jim was waiting for me in the lobby. He was sitting on a

bench with his legs crossed looking at a fresco by Diego Rivera. He
looked like a model out of a Lands End Catalogue. He had on a smart
pair of jeans and brown suede shoes with a blue shirt and Khaki coat.
With his hair slicked back, he might have passed for an Egyptian
archeologist or a Mexican historian.
He told me at dinner that he felt like a fugitive. He had gotten
a room for twenty dollars at a flophouse. There were ten rooms per
floor and each floor had a shared shower. He had taken a shower to
clean up but he didnt have any soap or a towel. He used his shirt to
dry off. Then he went and got a pair of jeans and a shirt from the
Salvation Army. He said they had all kinds of things there. He showed
me his smile. They have doctors from the University come over to
practice. He also got a bar of soap and a towel. He had to do all that
before he could even get a haircut. Couldnt be sitting next to anyone
that long without a shower. He had gone and gotten a first class
haircut from a guy with purple hair who was one of his regular tippers.
With the hair cut, he could go and buy a proper pair of pants and a
proper button down shirt.
Then he got a headache. He got a head ache thinking about
how you needed this to get that and then that to get this other thing. He
didnt want me to think he was crazy, but the whole getting things to
get other things got him exhausted. Everything was linked to getting
more. It was like a moving elevator in a department store. He told me
did I know that a million people a year were injured on those things.
He never used them. A million people. Some of those had died. You
would think more people would know about these things. Every store
with all those video cameras. But as soon as anyone gets hurt, they
take them to the elevator in the back. The service elevator. They erase
the tape real nice so nobody knows anything.
I ordered us two twelve ounce Kobe Steaks at one hundred
and fifty dollars a pop. These things are fed a daily dose of beer and
massaged with warm sake. They are so evenly marbled that you can
put them in a saucepan, face down.., no oil, no grease. They cook
themselves. And there I am counting, savoring each chew, and I am
watching Jeff tell me about his conspiracies, while he stuffs big pieces
of meat in his mouth. He tilts his head back and rinses the meat down
with a Bud. I could not enjoy my meal. It was a little like being in a
movie theatre and some guy next to you is chomping on Popcorn like a
Mastodon.
I had to ask him if he was a conspiracy theorist. He asked me
what that was. I asked him if he believed the Kennedy Assassination

52

was some sort of government conspiracy. You cannot possibly

believe that Oswald was the lone shooter. Have you even seen the
physics on that? You cannot believe there was just one shooter? He
got kind of wild eyes when he said this.
Before things got too crazy, we started talking about a circus
that had come to town when we were kids. One of our Friends Danny
boasted in school that he was going to join this circus. We were just
eleven at the time. I think he probably got the idea from some Curious
George book. It was George that convinced him to crawl into the tent
box. He told him it was going to be the first thing they opened when
they got to wherever they were going. Danny wanted to go home and
pack some ham sandwiches and milk for the trip. He was going to put
together a survival kit. But Jim convinced him that if he was going to
do it, he had to do it now. And so I went and bought a bunch of
popcorn and coke. What we didnt know is that they sent the tent back
to Denver to be repaired. Danny was in there three days. He became a
Priest. We asked him if he made some kind of deal with God, but he
says he didnt.
We were having chocolate Mouse for dessert. And he says, I
know you want to know how I got to this.
I am not one of those guys who say what I know somebody
wants to hear. I just cannot do that. But I did not want to say
something that would put him in a corner. And I knew there must
have been something strong that brought him here. Many of the
homeless are mental patients, or people who should have been mental
patients. (His whole bit about agents in department stores.) I thought
he was suffering from delusions, maybe schizophrenic delusions. What
other explanation could there be for a boy from a good home to end up
here on the streets.
I suppose you think that I am crazy. He was reading my
mind. You know I had a good job. I had two or three good jobs.
After I left school, I went home. My Parents converted the basement
into an apartment for me. I could come and go out as I liked. I worked
for my father in the Department store. There was something nice
coming home without any worries and a little pocket change.
After a year, I went back to school. I enrolled at UW
Platteville and took to engineering. I was a quick study. I bet you did
not know that about me. Being a football star and all, you probably
didnt know that I was so good with numbers. But I got an almost
photographic memory for numbers and stats. Did you know that Gale
Sayers had just thirty eight yards in his last season with Chicago?
Things like that just stick with me.
I got a job with Caterpillar, my second summer. They sent me

53

to India for a few weeks. I liked it. They offered me a job and I took
it. (I figured I could always finish up college.) They made me a
salesman. I sold turbines to big power plants, billion dollar projects.
When I saw you this morning, I did not recognize you. I was looking at
your tie. I was thinking that is all silk and you tie a double Windsor
like I used too. I didnt even look at your face.
I had everything I was supposed to have. I bought a lot of
stuff on credit. I bought so much stuff on credit that I didnt know
what I really owned and what was make believe. Did you know that
we carry something like nine hundred and eighty million dollars in
credit card debt? That does not include home loans and everything
else. Look around you. All these people in here living fancy, it is just
a matter of time. If the Chinese rice farmers or the Russian mob ever
calls in the credit, all these people, he thought for a minute and
chuckled to himself, they are all going to be on the street.
I tried to get him back on track. But what happened to you?
I dont know that anything happened, he said. I started to
see things. He looked at me and chuckled. Not like you are thinking.
I started to see how everything was connected. Everything flows like a
big river. There are some times when I go up to the highway or I come
down here in the city. I just watch the ebb and flow.
I was working hard and all. There was pressure. It was not
like my Dads shop. (Definitely not my Dads shop.) I worried when I
came to work and when I left work. The only time I did not feel that
drowning dread was when I was at work.
Everything is so connected. Everything is so planned, from
the moment we are born. He looked hard at me and said, Dont you
believe that? I pursed my lips and looked into my coffee. That was
the best way I could think to say no. What is it called, The Butterfly
Effect? A butterfly flaps its wings and it puts in motion wind that
turns into a hurricane by the time it reaches China. That is true of the
weather; it is bigger with people.
I dont know if we are born and cannot do any different or if
we are just pushed and jostled until we are walking in line at an
amusement park. But we are doing what somebody else wants us to
do. That is what all the pressure was about. My job I was doing so
good, but the pressure. You dont feel that kind of pressure if you are
doing what you like to do. But that is the big lie. What does Marx call
it the Opiate of the People? The big lie is that nobody does what they
really want to do. How many Movie Stars end up drugged out and
dead at Motel Eights.
I told him how everybody had stress at their work. He shook
his head like I was affirming everything that he had just said. Of

54

course that is not what I meant.

Everything we do is planned. Have you seen these phones
people are carrying now? I pulled out my phone to show him. He
took it from me and flipped it open. He was like some greedy
archeologist going through a treasure trove of gold coins. Then he
quickly stopped and gave it back to me. You have appointments there
scheduled until the year thirty thousand, probably infinity. You wont
even live that long but those dates are already set. I asked him what
he meant. He was looking at birthdays and anniversaries. But dont
you see, that is telling you you must do something on those days,
maybe a gift, a card, even to just think about this. I see you also have a
UPS on there. Not only can people call you anywhere in the world and
at any moment, but now they can find exactly where you are. All of
this for what? For what?
I shook my head.
All to control you. Anyone. Not just a government agent or
a Russian, but now a peasant farmer in China can pick up a phone
and control you. That person can pick up a phone and stop you from
watching a movie or throwing a ball. I have read where people picked
up a phone and the next moment they were dead. How many people
pick up a phone in a car on a busy highway and the next moment they
are dead.
So what? I said, disappointed. But I knew better. People
die all the time Jim. Yes they shouldnt be on their cell phones when
they drive. But things happen.
Things are connected, he countered. I have stepped out of
it all. I know that you think that you control things, with your office in
the tower and Worchester wool suite. You are just doing what
someone tells you. And when someone isnt whispering things into
your head, some things are subliminal you know, but when they are not
whispering things, you are doing things to keep your car and house and
wife.
I do not have any of that burden. He pulled two wads of
cotton he had stuck in his ears. He had them so far in, I had not seen
them any of this time. I can affect anything I want. I may be the only
one left.
When my girlfriend arrived for the weekend, she asked about
Jim. I told her it went alright. Would I see him again, she wanted to
know. I didnt think it was up to me. I looked for him for a long time
after that. When it snowed or rained, I took extra time getting to and
from where I was going. But I havent seen him. I think maybe
whatever it was he was supposed to do, maybe he had done.

55

56

Matthew Szweda is the author of numerous unpublished short stories

and three unpublished novels.
He has lived and worked in Ecuador, The United States, Taiwan,
Kuwait, Colombia, and Ghana. He has swum with Sea Turtles in the
Indian Ocean, ridden camels to the Pyramids of Giza, steered a sailing
boat in the Persian Gulf, set his watch to Big Ben, taken mass with
Pope John Paul II, done jail time in Colombia, bathed in Roman Baths
in Turkey, survived a 7.5 earthquake, slept under an active volcano, lost
his eyesight for a week.., as well as more adventures and
misadventures.
He holds numerous degrees: a doctorate in Jurisprudence from The
University of Notre Dame, a Masters in Education from
The University of Alabama, and a Bachelor of Arts from St. John's
College in Annapolis (The Great Books School). He also attended, with
limited success, Lawrence University in Appleton Wisconsin.
He maintains residence in Colombia, Ecuador, and The United States.
He is the father of Caroline Szweda.

Contact:

Mszweda34@google.com

Webpage:

http://sites.google.com/site/1madmuse/

57

ISBN #

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