“If she told me once, she told me a hundred times that Bokser means carob, a tree that doesn’t bear fruit for seventy years, so you plant knowing that even though it will offer you nothing, the tree will benefit someone in the future. Like by telling this story she proved that she, a Bokser by second marriage, was providing for her grandchildren while the rest of us were deadbeats. What she was really doing was stealing from you and Ruthie.”
“Ada, are you at home?”
“I’m not going anywhere.” She sighed, remembering our conversations were often short. “Call me if you hear from Ruthie.”
I borrowed a paper from my neighbor’s doorstep and quickly turned to the obituaries. It was true. Ariel Bokser had died, no memorial service, no dearly missed stepson, etc. Just a short notice:
Deceased: Ariel Bokser, Aged 32. Born May 19, 1950 Brooklyn, New York. Died suddenly of unknown causes, March 18. Graduated from the University of Chicago. Did field work in Iran. Survived by former wife, Ruth Koppek Bokser of Mexico City and stepmother, Miriam Raub Bokser. Contributions can be sent to the Zafar Institute.
I didn’t know whose body was found in the Gowanus Canal. It couldn’t have been Rostami, because Ruth had seen him (mistaking him for me) waiting for a Q train at Union Square. Assuming Rostami wanted to shed Bokser, but didn’t want to kill me, perhaps he’d found some anonymous shmuck on whom to plant my passport, fake tax returns, whatever, and put an end to him, so Rostami could become Jahanshah again. Well, it’s a theory. Now I, too, was going to have trouble being Ariel Bokser. I could no longer apply to the Zafar Institute in order to return to Suolucidir, for one thing. I was floating, like a man walking on a wire between tall buildings, or only navigating the possibility of a short drop between sawhorses weighted down by sandbags, not sure whether the risks of reinventing myself were life-shattering or more inconsequential than one might think.
Pin Trays (first half of the nineteenth century), although they are authentically of the seventeenth century; nonetheless, this description leads one to believe they were in fact used as pin trays in the period indicated by the antiquaries of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Apollinaire’s version of Cinderella,
cataloging the fate of her renamed squirrel-fur slippers
“MY TELEVISION ISN’T WORKING, AND I need to watch the Iran Contra hearings.” Alyssa, who lived downstairs, was at my door holding her cat, Catullus. This seemed out of character for an astrologist; perhaps it was just an excuse. Alyssa was wearing a striped man’s shirt over black tights, not something she would wear on the street, I’m guessing, possibly something one would sleep in, so it did occur to me that watching the hearings wasn’t the only reason she’d knocked on my door.
“Sure, Alyssa. I was just about to turn them on.” This wasn’t exactly true, but my apartment was small, and if one person was watching television, everyone else present was as well. I flipped on the set, fiddled with the channel until Oliver North’s gap-toothed hound dog expression filled the screen. His voice trembled, he pointed to the ceiling and talked about his willingness to meet Abu Nidal anywhere at any time.
Alyssa flopped into a chair and put her feet up on the table, littered with my artifacts constructed from found junk. I looked at her feet, but she was oblivious. Among the pieces of tile, bottle caps and the hot-glue gun was a letter from the Red Cross office in Zurich that still handled queries about possible World War II refugees. She picked it up and looked at the envelope.
“A registered letter? Ariel? Do you owe someone a lot of money?” She flicked the envelope making a snapping noise as fingers hit the return address. “Are you studying to be a doctor? We’ll be sorry to see you leave, but Zurich is a cool place. You can hang out at the Dada café, Apollinaire’s, around the corner from where Lenin plotted the revolution.”
“It’s Café Voltaire, not Apollinaire.” Who was the royal we who was going to miss me when I left to work for the Red Cross in Switzerland? Alyssa and the spirits?
The letter confirmed that a Bruno and Sidonie Nieumacher had been students in Berlin, moved to Marseilles, and a year later were listed as passengers on Le Faroan. The dates of the International Red Cross records and the dates in the Nieumacher documents coincided.
“If you can predict the future, why do you need to watch? I mean don’t you already know the outcome?”
“That’s not what I do. I just write an astrology column.”
“But it’s related.”
“Not really. I’ve told you before, my horoscope predictions are all pretty much made up, and listen Ariel, that’s just between you and me. Give it a rest, hey, I want to listen to this.” But she got up from the chair, walked into my kitchen, looked through my fridge, found some orange juice and vodka, and made herself a drink.
“Make yourself at home,” I said.
“Well, I wasn’t sure you would offer. I’ll make you one, too. Actually, you may find this hard to believe, but I’ve found watching the hearings helps me with my work. My column’s not all love and romance and money, money, money, money.” She sang the last words to the tune of the O’Jays song. “You’ve seen Fawn Hall,” she said. “If I looked like Mrs. Oliver North, and my husband had a secretary who looked like that, fuck Iran, I’d be worried about something else.”
The astrologist walked back, paused to swallow, then handed me my drink.
“So I write: Taurus, watch out for a threat to you that is present in a loved one’s life. Perhaps you never thought about this person. He or she could be someone you overlooked or took for granted, but they might very well spell trouble.”
So that was how it was done. I was impressed.
“Did you watch any of North’s testimony?” she asked.
I nodded. I had seen Oliver North testify that he met Iranian arms merchant Manuchar Ghorbanifar in a men’s room, and it was here, leaning against a wall graffitied with initials, penises and jokes about bodily fluids, that Ghorbanifar had given him the idea to divert profits from Iranian arms deals to the Contras.
“A men’s room. I ask you,” Alyssa commented, though she didn’t say what exactly she was asking. “Reagan uses an astrologer to make decisions. I’d bet my life on it.” She didn’t have a very high opinion of her colleagues. I began to realize this was just a day job for Alyssa, though I never found out what she did when she wasn’t writing her column.
“Sometimes you have to go above written law,” Fawn Hall squeaked into her microphone. “You have to heed a higher law.”
“What fucking higher law?” Alyssa shouted at the screen. She sounded like my grandfather, a cranky alte kahker, yelling at the radio during the McCarthy hearings, the Rosenberg trial, when election returns were announced. “Dumb shite. Look at that hair! She looks like she’s got a Pekingese puppy sitting on her head.”
Hall had shredded a stack of documents relating to the illegal war against Nicaragua, a war effort funded by the sale of arms to Iran. The known dimensions of the stack measured a foot and a half high, but it was probably bigger, and included memos, codes, telephone logs, notes of all kinds. This speaks of spectacular patience and stamina in the face of a boring, time-consuming, repetitive task. Fawn Hall, patriot and former Playboy Bunny, had the strength of her convictions. Sometimes pouty and biting her lip, yet Hall voiced no doubts that she had done the right thing. Confident of the body she inhabited underneath the loose shirt and tight skirt, she invited anyone who watched her to imagine her standing over the shredder, long fingers slipping one document after another into the moving blades, long strips of confetti coming out the other end.
“These are like the people who advertise on late night TV or in the margins of magazines, promising miraculous vegetable peelers, extra sharp knives and certified gold dust for sale.” Alyssa insisted on the banality of the players on