Samurai with sword, ca. 1860.
Respected Sir,
Let me introduce ourselfs. We are Mutta Rescue Brigade (MRB) special ops named after late respected senior commander General F.U. Mutta, level 60 freedom fighter, second brigade rank.
All forms transport, including armor truck, speedboat and helicoptor on request service as needs. All 100% martial and soldier training with first class sniper, assault, machine, carbine, grenades, artillary, missilles, IEDs, bombvests, chemical.
“Fast, reliable, highest recommended.”
Five star rating.
– Henry Kruggers, Captain, Mermaid Luxury Cruise Liner
Faithfully,
Lord Mutta Fuk-Fuk Jr.
S.Corp, 8th Division
MRB LTD
And here’s another:
Dear Mister Honorable Pak de Pupkin,
We are fully aware your precise location, time in captivity, all private plus family matters in Banki. Plus home country of Canberra ACT Australia 2600. Max 3 day delivery to Kuala Namu Airport. Low low low cost plus season discount 20%. Txt 3999 or msg StealthE77 for quote plus time operation availability.
Sincerely,
StealthCo
“Don’t care,” my wife sighs, weakly coughing and rubbing her one good eye. Sweat-soaked hair and neck, she wrestles the twisted wet serpent of a bed sheet (a baby serpent in her gargantuan grip). “Any of them.” Her words are slurred. Anyathem. “Just do something, Siggy…Pup-kin…Take action. Like you did with that Samurai.”
“A semi-samurai.”
“Death is death,” she says. “Same result, same threat” — then throwing decorum to the barking dogs outside — “same sonofabitch whatever size.”
Our options have dwindled since her joints began to swell. No walking out the front door some hopeful early morning. Or escaping in the night with stolen weaponry to plunge our way through the jungle’s shaggy dark. Even the poison-laced meal idea, hotly simmering in my dear wife’s mind for many days, has evaporated completely from her pan of possibility.
“We’ve paid Binatang,” I say. “He accepted our offer.”
“He accepted our money.” She coughed. “So did the hookers he spent it on.”
“His great granddaughters, you mean.”
“Suspiciously” — spishushly — “young for just great-grand,” she grumbles. “Would need to be great great great. And why they all trained in Swedish massage,” which comes out shweedish mushaj.
“Genetic talent,” I tease, grateful for her voice, however stretched and strained; and more so for the priceless, salutary gift of her humor. Not long ago I might have wept at so much devotion; the way, in all her misery, she still insists on assuring me of the soundness of her faculties while pleading for my help. But now I see it differently. We’re strangers, she and I. My wife and me. Jasmine and Pupkin. Strangers yet dependents, duty-bound, respectful, married by circumstance, less husband and wife than a pair of non-identical twins, blonde Hippolyta and her Neverland Gnome, vital organs conjoined, each aware of the dangers of separation, yet desperate for the operation that will give us our freedom.
The good eye squints. A sudden squirt of daylight as the bamboo portière cleaves and releases the short and shriveled old Binatang. He wears an argyle sarong, sandals, no shirt (polished rippled resin for skin). He’s followed by his old schoolmate double, Mr. Raccoon, manager of the Little Glory Hotel who fed my wife the platter of cakes and who first introduced us to Binatang and his so-called “platoon,” two members of whom, brother and sister it appears, saunter inside with their AR-15s.
“I’ve brought our very best doctor,” lisps old Binatang, his smile a weightlifter hoisting a pile of blankets. The hotel proprietor is equally shriveled but unequally attired. He wears a silk paisley waistcoat, rose satin necktie, a top hat.
No hospitals, I’m thinking. No doctors you can trust. No clinics. No nurses. No emergency rooms. Not even a church or temple or mosque or monastery.
A graveyard. Banki does have a graveyard.
My wife is quick to lay open the coiled-up bedspread, stretching its meager serpent skin over the lower section of her shrinking but still very elongated body. Hard leathery hand against her spongy forehead, her red-enflamed neck, her thin milky wrist. Mr. Raccoon flips the covers from her feet and his large rubbery nostrils inhale the foot odor. A lift of her arm, a sniff of the armpit.
The prognosis is tersely spoken. She will not last the week, he says. And that’s it; the two old men are walking away, chattering in their dusty Bakat, having lived ten thousand weeks too long and expecting another million to go. The sibling guards kick, salute, spin, vanish. My wife is mumbling something I can’t understand. I’m not paying attention anyway. I’ve taken out my phone and my fingers are following an instinctive dictation.
A tap of the three. Then a tap-tap-tap of the nine.
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