The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 5
“I’m not sure anymore,” said Israel to Peregrine, sniffing the front page of the newspaper for what he called “the odor of corruption.” Israel added, “Nixon’s not straight no more.”
“Like he took a shot in the head?” said Earle.
“Yeah, puck in the chops,” said Israel. “I’m hopeful.”
“I don’t see any hope,” said Peregrine. “It is what it is—”
“—when it is,” finished Israel, scowling. He was annoyed with Peregrine. Father had soured on them. His heart was breaking, because his heart belonged to an American woman he was not permitted—a “full-stomach nightmare” according to Israel—namely, Miss Charity Bentham.
Of a sudden, Timothy the folk singer squeezed through to the table, sat like a pixie on Earle’s huge knee.
“You owe me ten k.,” said Israel, palm up.
“Got some news I was thinking I could trade for my debt,” said Timothy. “You guys might not like it. Deal?”
“English there,” said Israel. “You speak it, we speak it.”
“Deal then,” said Timothy. “A little Ingrid came in about nine holding a real live baby-manger-type infant. Asked Felix about a tall Yank with a red beard, wears Irish caps, makes phone calls.”
“Dear God,” said Israel.
“What is this?” said Peregrine.
“Maybe I saw her before,” said Timothy. “Maybe nine months back, climbing out of a phone booth with you.”
“This is no lie?” said Peregrine.
“Would I sit on the animal and jive you guys?” said Timothy.
“What happened to her?” said Peregrine.
“She went to the back. I saw her sit in a phone booth, the phone booth, you know? That was a while ago,” said Timothy.
“Slow, slow, slow,” said Israel to Peregrine.
“I’ll go,” said Peregrine heavily, resignedly.
“We all go,” said Israel. The four made a wedge through the swirling revelry. They found me asleep beneath the seat upon which I had been conceived. I was soaking and hungry, but I slept unbothered by the racket of revolution around me. I slept as deeply as a human being can sleep that close to innocence. I slept in anticipation of the fabulous, which did arrive, in the guise of four weary Americans in exile from everything but their heart’s truth.
I have often wondered, had I cried out before Father found me—because I was willful and not really innocent at all—whether someone might have become annoyed enough to call the authorities, who would then have surrendered me back to Grandfather and thence, stamp, stamp, to strangers. I might now be a clerk, or a fisherman, or a choir singer—anyone. It was an early dose of incomprehensible luck.
I have also always wondered where Lamba had gone. One possibility is that she left me there, safe and asleep, in order to search the beer hall for Peregrine, no simple quest for a homeless beauty amid drunken ne’er-do-wells. Another possibility is that she was standing outside the telephone booth watching over me through the glass, watching for Father’s red beard and Irish cap above the crowd. Either way, she certainly kept close by. Perhaps, when she spotted Peregrine and his friends standing aghast outside the booth, she realized there was no need to intervene. And there is the vital consideration that Lamba might have known what was going to happen to me. I mean all of it, from telephone booth to telephone booth to finish, which even I am yet to know. Mother claimed she could see into the future, could, as the Norse said, thieve time. I have never doubted her. Nor have I ever doubted that Mother saw Father open that telephone booth before she left me.
My rescuers were stunned into an awkward candor. Peregrine groaned the more. Israel gestured to heaven and consoled Peregrine. Earle scooped me up and cradled me in his sling. Guy pawed me in order to determine my sex. He was rewarded with a small piece of paper tucked in my linen, upon which was printed the following information, in English: “I am Grim Fiddle.”
My Father
ONE is too easily tempted to reconstruct one’s conception, birth, and childhood. I have indulged the former two; I shall not the latter. My childhood was decent, not entirely logical, and as loving as one could wish. After lengthy lamentations, Peregrine did keep me, his bastard blond son. In so doing, he later admitted, he kept his sanity as well, and his three comrades. I provided those four pilgrims what they lacked much more than money or security. I gave them purpose. Peregrine, Israel, Guy, and Earle bound themselves together to become my family. And with the generous help of more maternal sorts, such as Molly Rogers, we survived the torrents of the Vietnam war and the torpor of what came after, which was no peace.
On the last day of April 1975, Peregrine’s twenty-seventh birthday. the last helicopter lifted off the top of the besieged American Embassy in South Vietnam, thus finishing more than twenty years of American war-making in Indochina. Thereafter political chicanery obliged Nixon’s successors to offer duplicitous amnesty to the thousands of American men who had chosen jail or exile rather than complicity in the illegal (Israel said “unconstitutional”) American war in Vietnam. I have no need for more specificity other than to report that Father and his friends had spit in the eye of the bald eagle once and were not shy to do so again when that bald eagle offered, in its talons, a remorseless deal. My family would not concede there was any justice in the deceitful posture of the Republic that had driven them into exile. They swore on Bibles, on newspaper headlines, and on a petition of redress that we posted to the White House, signed in our blood (mine, too, though I was just three), that we would not go home again until the government of the United