As Georges and Bernadette were getting dressed in their room at the hotel Marmonde, a breeze blew in through the open window, softly rustling the semi-transparent muslin curtains apart to reveal the beautiful marble courtyard outside, which at 7pm was still teeming with activity. Two parallel, grey marble footways that ran twenty yards each, fortified the center of the courtyard, with green gardens running the length on either side of those, while a massive glass terrarium in the shape of an inverted pyramid situated itself at the very center. Using her left hand, which bore a ring on its second finger, Bernadette propped her foot up on the window sill for leverage as she slid her pantyhose up around her leg. Georges glided up behind her just as she was lowering her foot back to the ground and cupped his hands around her hips while gently kissing her on the nape of her neck. Moving his right hand up along her hip and past the arch of her back, he paused to zip her dress up a final inch, then rested both his hands on the edge of her shoulders. He took a silent but deep breath. Looking down into the garden, she asked him if he knew anything about the terrarium in the courtyard. Tracing a figure eight around her shoulder blades with his right index finger, he said he believed it was the centerpiece of an outdoor Geological Garden, whose footprint, some twenty-some-odd years ago, once contained the land their hotel now occupied as well as that of a few of the surrounding restaurants. Georges paused for a moment, looking down at his hands which again rested on her shoulders, before saying how he remembered visiting the garden in grade school, how seeing the plants, trees and flowers, and then in the middle, the glass pyramid structure that displayed the roots, dirt, rocks and worms had had a strong effect on him, as it was the first time he’d seen the underbelly of things, seen behind the curtain.
Bernadette laughed as she put on her jacket, and commented that he must have been a sensitive boy to extrapolate so much from something so simple and seemingly forgetable. As Bernadette buttoned up, Georges walked a few steps to an end table and picked up a notepad, quickly scribbled a few words down, and folded the paper in his closed palm. Walking back to Bernadette by the window, he whispered something in her ear as he placed the envelope in her jacket pocket unbeknownest to her. He slid his hand down her elbow to her forearm affectionately, lightly pressing against the pocket containing the note as if to confirm that it was still there and said, “I’ll bring the bags down if you want to walk through the garden one more time.”
Liquid washed across an image of Bernadette and Georges’ grainy black and white faces as Clemont used plastic tongs to pull the print up and out of the fixing solution and then down into the rinsing bath. Strung up along a clothes lines circling the back of the room were photographs of Georges and Bernadette eating lunch at the Plumes Cafe, George turning the corner at Leumix Square with newspaper under arm, Bernadette purchasing a new dress in the Faubourg Saint Honore district, and Bernadette holding hands with Georges as they walked down the Museum steps at Valhubert. Sliding through the circular darkroom door, Georges asked, “So how’s it coming?” Clement remarked, “You really must have been enjoying your work these last two weeks. You two damn near saw the whole city.” Georges smirked, “I’m thorough, that’s all. It’s an essential part of the job.” “That you are, that you are,” responded Clemont, his voice trailing off as he walked to an enlarger at the far end of the room. Georges turned around and walked back through the sliding circular door, entering a well lit hospital-white hallway. Pulling a newspaper from under his arm, he reads the headline “Fremont buiding construction to begin next week.”
In Secret Agreement
It had been six years since Granger had last experienced a panic attack, an uncontrollable night sweat, or anything close to anything that he associated with a nervous breakdown, of which he had counted two since returning from the war and subsequent occupation of Iraq twelve years earlier. Watching the beige wallpaper ahead of him, Granger held his mouth closed and relaxed as he lowered his large hind legs into one of the yellow plastic chairs lining the left side of the lobby. The sharing of his stories had once been difficult and draining, an experience Granger had, if asked, compared to bungee jumping after invasive surgery. It had been just two months after Granger’s twelve years previous return from the war when Myles Nix, Granger’s Lance Corporal for all three of his tours in Iraq, phoned him on a Tuesday afternoon mid-roast beef sandwich in his dingy apartment to tell Granger that he would be giving his testimony at the Winter Soldier Hearings in Rochester that Friday. Myles then asked Granger to make the trip for moral support, “I need some of the guys there. For me… and for you Granger… for you, cause I could see it in your eyes man.”
Granger arrived a reluctant attendee that year in Rochester, having thrown up at four of the ten rest stops he counted along the nine hour drive north. He sat in the furthest row from the front of the crowded auditorium and held his hand tightly to his cheek so as to conceal his face as Myles, who was positioned in front of a microphone at a wide table with seven other decorated soldiers, began to tell his story. It was five minutes into Myles’ testimony when Granger rose from his seat rather abruptly, his mind filled with thoughts of the many school productions that had without a doubt occurred on the stage in front of him. As Granger made his way down the center aisle towards the front of the auditorium he saw lines of children, singing and holding hands, moving across the stage in unison, disappearing to the ether from which they came. And as he walked straight up onto the stage to the now risen Myles Nix and moved towards his Lance Corporal to embrace him, he could hear the distant choir ringing in his ears and the two men held each other as beads of sweat dropped down their foreheads in the bright lights of the silent auditorium.
Granger was provided a chair next to Myles and sat in front of the somber audience until all the men on stage had spoken. Myles then turned to Granger, who felt a pause, his knee shaking and his head aimed down at the table. He closed his eyes briefly and an inevitable force, a force which seemed to have been at work from the moment his phone rang that Tuesday afternoon, took hold of him, controlling his arm as it reached for a glass of water and his quivering voice began to speak. And then, bit by bit, the secrets Granger held in every sinewy tendon, varicose vein, and aging bone fell out, spilled out all over the place in front of the microphone and quietly recording camera. The small red light next to the lens winked back at him, thumping in sync with the fast rhythm of flashing memories as he delivered his testimony, unaware of the mouths hanging to their sides in the audience. Granger remembered the distinct sensation of his stories being verbalized and released that day, as if they had taken form in front of him, a dark swirl of light with a face, arms and legs. They moved and changed shape as he spoke, and it was then he knew that to release this from his limbs there was only the cold and unfiltered truth, a truth that Granger remembered not just as “The Truth,” but “The Astounding Truth,” that which you assume you knew when it burrowed inside you, but is only revealed when pulled from your bones, a butterfly from its cocoon. Sailor interjected, waving his hand, “Grrrranger. What time does this start?”
And then beige wallpaper. Granger turned to Sailor, “Soon bud, take a seat.” He would soon be telling the same story at what was now the twenty-third function since the Winter Soldier Hearings in Rochester in 2008, for despite his many attempts, he could still feel a clinging in his rib cage and along the indentations of his skull, and he felt a dark swirl every month or so fill his solar plexus for just a brief moment. And it gnawed at him, however faint.
The five men were led blindfolded, their wrists resting on the shoulders of the man in front of them, through the overgrown brush by Samuels Ziegler, the engineer of this year’s experience. They walked in lockstep unison, each footstep filling the previous man’s footprint, letting out controlled breaths that steamed the air in front of there lips. Kenneth, in the first position directly behind Samuels, felt blood trickle from a freshly struck wound on his left cheek where a thick branch that Samuels brushed aside had slashed his face. The blood slowly slipped down his skin, welling up at the bottom of his jaw and dripping off his face, making a slight patter as it hit the ground. Samuels slowly turned to his left, putting his forearm against Kenneth’s chest, stopping all the men where the brush finally opened up and gave way to a clearing about fifteen meters wide, surrounded on all sides by the thick thorny brush. Samuels intently surveyed the full span of the clearing, starting at his immediate left, his eyes slowly tracking along the edge of the brush, until he had almost completed a full circle. Once he was satisfied, he lead each blindfolded man one by one to a point along the edge of the brush, carefully separating each man five feet from the next so that they faced the center of the clearing, and placing a clear plastic bag on the ground in front of them that contained a bound document with the title “Survival Journal” scrawled in bold handwritten marker across it’s cover.
Alithea raised her hands towards the drop-ceiling as her sister Margaret clenched her eyes shut, and her two best friends, Anabel and Dara, both of whom she had met two months before during the Annual Amulet Retreat Colony in the Catskills, hummed and swayed, each of their hands clutching a gemstone of their choosing, which, in unison, and following Alithea’s gesture, they stretched above their heads. The living room, which was still dispersing a cloudiness from overuse of the smoke machine minutes before, was full of people who had taken part in the Annual Amulet Retreat Colony that year, which, judging by Sailor’s calculations as he guided himself through the crowded and noisy kitchen into the living room, numbered at twelve of the guests, thirteen if he included himself. Alithea, her sister Margaret, and her best friends Anabel and Dara were dressed in the red and yellow silk gowns they had made regular attire in the Catskills, and had attracted most of the party from the upstairs bedrooms and the downstairs den to the center of the living room, where they now chanted in a tight circle, their arms waving left and right, in each hand gripping what Sailor assumed was a piece of either Tourmaline or Riverstone. Sailor turned to his right to see Granger and his bear-like hands maneuvering himself through the crowd towards him, holding a drink in one of them and a bunch of pamphlets in the other. Sailor returned his attention to the girls just in time to see Alithea’s eyes open briefly and scan the room, connecting her gaze with Sailor’s right as Granger’s paws descended on Sailor’s shoulder. As if on cue, Alithea glanced from Sailor to Granger and back, and Sailor watched as she rolled her eyes back into her head, furrowed her brow, and resumed to chant with the others.
