This time the note contained a Xerox of a letter that had been printed in a newspaper, but the margin had been torn off so that where it had appeared was impossible to determine.
January 13, 1969
President Richard M. Nixon
The White House
Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. President,
As I watched my draft card burn last night I imagined what it would be like to be an herbicide, say, Agent Orange. Okay, here we are in Vietnam, and I am a molecule of exfoliant, floating toward a banana leaf, dissolving through it, landing on a woman’s arm, eating through bone, finally resting on the ground, burning a monkey’s paw, or searing a snake as one or the other passes over me. With a wind I drift into a rice paddy, and anyone who eats me becomes a mutant and has mutant offspring for many generations. As a molecule, or if I really were a molecule, I would want to thank you for putting me to work in such an exotic setting, and I would ask you what more could I do that would be as mindlessly destructive of innocent civilians and verdant jungle? Advancing up the food chain of weaponry I might prefer to be a mine, a piece of shrapnel, a bullet or a bomb. Unleashed in the middle of a firestorm I aim my pointed head at bamboo huts because you never know, there might be tunnels to Moscow underneath. I pass through walls and limbs as if they were no more substantial than crackerjacks. I’ve never had so much fun, but I’m none of these things. My card is burnt. I flush the ashes down the toilet.
I write to accuse, to point a finger at you, Henry Kissinger, and the other architects of this degrading and inhuman war. We should let the people of Vietnam decide their own future. I am writing to you to express alarm and outrage over the war. We have no right to be there. Like the bully on the playground who gets his own way by force, not by compassion or by engendering reason among others, nothing can be won or achieved because there is nothing to win by bombing Vietnam into the Stone Age. American actions in Southeast Asia are nothing short of genocide.
Yours very truly,
Jack Kews
A man (Jack Kews?) stared at me as I looked in the window of the appliance store next door to Burrito Fresca. Children were making faces at themselves in the self-broadcast television. I stood to one side so I could watch them and myself while they rolled their eyes back into their heads, stuck out their tongues, and called each other names. There were two of them, and the one who clearly had the upper hand was quick to goad the smaller one, taunting while her friend lagged a little, mesmerized by the process of seeing herself reflected on a regular television. See, this is you. This is what you look like. Someone who resembled my idea of Jack walked behind me. I turned around quickly, but as the man crossed the street he darted around a truck. I couldn’t see where he went, and traffic prevented me from following him. By the time the truck moved, and I was able to cross the street, he was gone, leaving nothing but an afterimage. It hits you between the eye and the eyeball, Louis Kahn also wrote, but I couldn’t remember what it was. The thing that hit me between the eye and the eyeball might have been an afterimage of a running Jack Kews, might have been Méliès’s lost negatives, might have been a bottle of Wet Gate smoothing the abrasions and scratches so that everything looked as if it were shot yesterday. 1-800-HISTORY turned out to be a useless number after all.
I went back to Jack’s apartment building. I didn’t think he’d be there, and I was right, he wasn’t, but the man who had read his mail in front of the building stepped out of Mail Boxes Etc just as distractedly as he had done the last time, stumbling and looking around. The hour was the same. He looked in my direction as if he recognized me as well. It turned out he was the building’s super; he lived on the ground floor and had keys to every apartment.
“I’m looking for Kews in 5B.”
“Haven’t seen him in weeks. Did you lend him money? One of the other tenants wanted me to break the door down because he was owed.” He stuck a thumb in a belt loop of his plumber’s pants, creating structural stress on the pants. There was a distinct possibility they would fall even further, perhaps down to his ankles.
“No, but I’d like to talk to him.”
“A lot of people would like to talk to him.”
Anticipating this, I reached into a jacket pocket and handed him a twenty. Jack’s building had a way of reaching into wallets.
“You know, this is highly irregular,” the super said as he gestured for me to follow him upstairs. “But I haven’t seen him in some time. It’s worth checking out. Once we had a tenant who ate rat poison. Didn’t find the body for days, and let me tell you, it wasn’t a suicide or an accident.”
“Somebody was forced to eat poison?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Well, no, sorry. I don’t think I do.”
“Suit yourself.”
Holes had been punched in the walls and dry plaster crumbled from them, yet the surrounding surfaces seemed damp and shiny as a result of a glossy red paint job. I heard a child’s voice screaming as we approached one apartment, and I banged on the door shouting to whoever it was to stop. The super grabbed my hand and told me the screaming wasn’t what I thought it was. We reached the entrance to Kews’s apartment. Even from the outside each door in the building bore the marks of a history of bolts and screws, presumably associated with locks, installed and then removed by successive tenants.
“It was the only time anyone died while I worked in this building. There were a lot of aliens here at the time. Some of the women were forced to do things, you know what I’m saying? One woman discovered the art of rat poison and thought that was her ticket to freedom. So what I learned is, it doesn’t hurt to be nosy once in a while, but don’t bang on that door,” he jerked his head in the direction of the apartment where the screaming had come from. It was quiet now. The pants shifted about an inch lower. “If a stiff’s in here, we would’ve smelled it, but’s still worth having a look, you know.” He took a last gulp from a bottle of orange soda and deposited the empty on the floor beside Jack’s door. Taking a key from a back pocket he unlocked the door and flipped a light switch.
Jack lived in a one-room apartment with a small kitchen stuck into a kind of alcove. A bathtub with ball-and-claw feet jutted out from beside the sink, but the first thing I saw was that his bed, pushed against a wall, was wrinkled. I walked over to it, put my hand on the dented pillow while the super made a beeline for the dripping tap. The sheets still felt warm. There was only one window, and although it faced the street, light was blocked by the adjacent building whose bay windows projected further out, encroaching on the sidewalk. It was mid-afternoon and very cold. The room darkened quickly.
While the super looked under the sink I walked over to Jack’s desk, which had been positioned in front of the window. Photographs of Jack with various people and photocopies of articles had been taped to the walls. I glanced at one about POW Garwood, falsely accused of something I couldn’t make out. Bug Suspect Got Campaign Funds. Radio Hanoi. . . . An article about mining strikes in England, written by Jack Kews, was tucked into a beat-up copy of Zola’s Germinal. I had to be careful the super didn’t catch me snooping. The articles were eclectic, and the walls’ contents made the room resemble that of a student writing papers for an array of classes that might not, at first glance, have much to do with one another. A jar of Wonderbond Plus glue and a staple gun lay on top of some papers, and enclosed in a paperweight was a scene of a hillside with