KARMA FINDS FRANNY GLASS. A short story.
Speeding out of her
buildings garage in the East Seventies and then racing her Lamborghini over the
George Washington Bridge, Franny Glass found it amusing that Zooey Salinger
considered her an absolute dearest friend. Actually, Zooey was
being too kind when she exaggerated those words on the finely engraved
invitation. The truth was, she saw Franny Glass for what Fanny was, transparent
and shallow. Everyone else in their tribe saw her the same way, but, in
fairness, that was also how they viewed Zooey Glass and themselves as well. It
is how these people are.
Compounding Zooey’s
intense dislike of her absolute dearest friend Franny Glass, was
the awkward fact that Zooey and everyone within their small universe, knew that
Franny had been sleeping with her husband, Zen Salinger, a partner in Salinger,
Sacco & Vanzetti, mergers, acquisitions and promotions a specialty.
She also knew, again
as did everyone else, that it was Franny who had been the defacto cause for
Zen’s fatal coronary in flagrante delicto. Of course, the pending
federal indictment and the certain RICO conviction that would follow and then
Zen’s mandatory sudden disappearance with the cash in the firms escrow
accounts, may well have played a role in his unexpected early demise as well.
But, for the time being, gossip being what it is, everyone, simply everyone,
was blaming Franny for his death. What Zooey didn’t know, was that it had been
such a dreadful experience for Franny, (Zen Salinger dying at the grand finale,
not the sex, which was not in the least grand) that she more or less absolutely
sworn off sex with married men for an indeterminate amount of time.
All that was behind
them now and Franny found it reassuring that the permanently oblivious Zooey
Salinger should invite her to a reception at her woodsy-leafy Litchfield place
on Pilgrim Way to meet the enlightened Maharishi Yogi Barish.
When Fanny arrived,
Zooey planned to take her by the hand and waltz her from one end of her
spacious home to the other, making small talk, the only kind of talk these
people really know, making sure that everyone, simply everyone saw that they
were the dearest and closets of friends. Zooey had no choice in this really.
The day would come when she would carry on with someone else man, or woman, and
would be found out, for these people always find out, and life would go on as
before. She would not be cut out or cut off. She had to ensure that, not only
for herself but for all those others in this special tribe they belonged too.
So Franny
accepted Zooey’s invitation. Driving at break-neck speed through the
Connecticut countryside, Franny was, despite her near complete unreflective
nature, somewhat concerned that she lived alone and that age 35,
marriage was not on the horizon, circumference, radius or any other Goddamn
celestial acronym. She reasoned it away. “A little solitude” she thought “never
hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone and she wrote some of the most moving
um….what did she write? Was it science fiction?
Something like
that. Anyway, they were some of the best whatever they were type of stories the
world has ever known...a lot of them became movies.”
She also recalled that
Emily Dickinson went stark raving, barking mad and ended her life in a mental
asylum so she decided to think about something else.
Tossing her phone into
oxblood Versace bag, she brought the car to a screeching halt
and waited for the
wrought iron gates to Zooey Salinger’s estate to open and then raced the car up
the gravel drive.
Taking her place among
the very landed gentry, she sat shoeless on the silk Zarcharakian rug,
sipping a Chateau Lafite and stealthily dripping a drop or two on the
carpet because….well just because, that’s why. It is just the way these people
are.
There was Zooey
Salinger, clad in black Michael Kors One-Shoulder. It was so last
season. But, then again, Franny reasoned, Zooey was so last season. She
was calling everyone to attention. Standing beside her was a short, swarthy
little man dressed in white linen robes and fitted with a Buddha belly. So this
was him, thought Franny.
“I like the long
flowing white silk robes” she said to herself “Nice effect and so very de
riguor for any savior and/or mystique” She noted his salt and pepper beard
and his strategically designed mop of hair. “Micelle of Paris” she though “No
one else is that good”
Everyone feigned rapt
attention as a smiling and crying Zooey once again launched into another
retelling of how this little man, the Maharishi Yogi Barish, the Wise Child,
entered her life.
It started with a
death, but then again, most things about Zooey revolved around death in one way
or another. First, it was Zen and then Seymour, her toy Shiatsu, the canine
in-residence until last fall last autumn when he went out the window at the Salinger’s
Park Avenue place, falling Nine Stories to his death. Actually, it wasn’t the
fall that killed him. He survived the fall. What killed him were the giant
hooves of a team of hansom cab horses as they pulled away to show another
tourist from Wichita dubious wonders of Central Park at night.
As one can imagine,
the death just absolutely mortified poor Zooey, coming in the wake of
Zen’s death. She was beside herself with grief and not one of her three
analysts, the Freudian, the Jungian or even the Mime therapist could pull her
from her sorrow. Well the Jungian probably could have, but he insisted she do
it herself.
The situation worsened
after rumor started that it was not suicide and that perhaps Seymour had been
pushed. It was the talk of the summer people at the Hamptons but not of the
summer people at Newport because they play tennis.
It was about that time
that Dede Bradley came back from Europe, because she was always coming back
from somewhere, and was bursting, simply bursting with the news of the
Marharishi Yogi Barish who was taking London by storm. Dede told Muffin Walsh
who told Geno the hair sculptor who repeated everything he heard anyway, thank
God and that was how Zooey heard all about the wonders of the little man.
A the Marharishi Yogi
Barish estate in London, Zooey was fairly certain she was in London, she didn’t
handle those details, she found her scrawny naked body lathered in tea oils and
saturated rose infused yogurt.
By weeks end, the
Marharishi inserted in her, among other things, the spirit of Seymour the
Shiatsu which assured Zooey that he had not taken his own life nor had he been
pushed from the ledge. Rather, as she would later recall, again and again and
again, for enthralled hairdressers from Park Avenue to Palm Beach...she didn’t
do Aspen because it’s so...so...so...not New York and the people are
so...so not New York, that the spirit of Seymour the Shiatsu said he had
fallen from that of that window because he a brain the size of a walnut.
She was also mentioned, quite often, that Seymour the Shiatsu spoke English.
Everyone was so delighted for her.
The Marharishi Yogi
Bera was, proclaimed Zooey to all the right people who had gathered in her bar
sized living room that autumn, a spiritual genius and all agreed with a hardy
burst of applause. Of course, to these people, anyone who had an occasional
reflection on the meaning of life beyond Town & Country, was a
spiritual genius because, argued many, these people had no souls.
When Zooey was
finished gushing on about the little man, the little man spoke, whispered
really, whispered and smiled and babbled on for twenty minutes speaking
psycho-social babble gibberish intertwined with most of the keywords needed to
create spiritual hogwash. It was, thought Franny Glass who was there to judge
the performance, a cellular performance.
It was only kismet
that Zooey should invite Franny to heat Yogi Bera. Her firm, Salinger, Sacco
& Vanzetti, mergers, acquisitions and promotions a specialty, had been
watching this little man and was impressed with what they saw and what they saw
was money and the potential for more money.
Franny had hired Hal
Martini ‘Olive’ Lipchitz everyone’s favorite P.I and learned that the Maharishi
Yogi Bera was a fourth generation East-ender from Londoner whose true name was
Rajesh Gupta Barish, the western equivalent of Joe Smith. He was raised vaguely
Hindu but he had absolutely no interest in the faith because its deep,
beautifully simple doctrines confused him.
The firm’s data
analysis experts...their term for computer hackers...had determined that the
Marharishi Yogi Bera liquid assets were in access to one hundred and fifty
million. There was the clothing line, Yogi for Young Kids, and an
airline, Flying Carpet Airlines with hubs in New Delhi and Hanoi. There
was the Happy Hindu Hotel chain with locations throughout Europe, Asia
and Africa. There was the equally profitable Curry Up and Eat!
Restaurant chain, assorted real estate holdings, which included an off- shore
casino in the Caribbean and a nut farm in Brazil.
The Yogi had
everything a money hungry yogi could want. Everything except the vast richness
of America. The problem was that the Marharishi was a European phenomenon and
what he needed was a single magic bullet that would shoot open the golden gates
of the land of milk and honey.
It was an odd twist of
fate, kismet if you will, that the Maharishi’s magic bullet to America came in
the form of the spirit of Seymour the Shiatsu. Zooey Salinger had introduced
the Yogi correctly. She waited for the late fall, that special magical
time between the closing of the summer places and the arrival of the first
dividend checks from those offshore investments that nice people did not
discuss. not without a lawyer present, anyway.
Zooey made sure the
yogi had face time, a favorite expression of these people, with that
smart-alecky Carlo Saint John River from The New Yorker and of course,
Thomas Wentworth Higginson from Charge, Style and Life Magazine just
absolutely had to have his ten minutes.
By the end of the
month, the Marharishi Yogi Barish was famous in America and so was his
‘Self-Help and Actualization Movement’, or ‘SHAM’. Although it was all
explained in his 125 page, ghost written book, The Way of the
Christian-Hindu Pilgrim, the basis for SHAM was taken from the Yogi code of
life, ‘To know nothing is to know bliss’. The concept was fusion, Judeo
Christianity and Hindu principles and that the Yogi had gotten the idea after
eating at the Paris French-Chinese restaurant Chinois. When asked if the
book was henotheistic, the Yogi replied no, it was for homosexuals as well.
So, now the grinning Guru
had every intention of quadrupling his cash by taking his show to the states
and lifting cash from the pockets of the fad happy-spiritually starved
Americans and the senior partners at Salinger, Sacco & Vanzetti, mergers,
acquisitions and promotions a specialty, believed they could help the Yogi with
that conquest.
So while the
firm wanted his business, Franny needed his business. The
remaining partners of Salinger, Sacco & Vanzetti, or more specifically the
wives of the remaining partners, the ones huddled in the corner throwing her
death-stares, believed that Franny should have been boiled in oil for sexing
Zen Salinger to death. Barring death by oil, they made it very clear to their
husbands that Franny Glass must go.
Yes, the end was near
and Franny Glass, a born survivor, could smell it in the air, and it troubled
her. She felt vulnerable, a new sensation for her. That was why she had given
herself that ‘A little solitude and Emily Dickinson lived alone’ pep talk on
the way up to Connecticut.
He drooled for
her. “Hello my lovely” leered the Yogi to Franny when she managed to push,
shove and elbow her way up to him. Franny, who stood just over 5’10 with in her
Stu Weitzman heels, thought it was rude that the Marharishi, who was
surrounded by two massive former Mossad men, did not stand when he met her.
Staring at him, she realized he was standing. Franny smiled her best
heartwarming smile and handed the little man one of her plasma designed
translucent plastic business cards.
“Franny Glass, Costello,
Lansky, Siegel and Accardo” he said reading the card aloud. He looked over
Franny again and stopped giggling. He leaned in close and lowered his voice to
a barely audible whisper and said in a distinct British working class accent “I
have the letters you sent to my general manager. But caw blimey girl, had we
knewed you looked as you do I woulda called” and then, effortlessly returning
to his high pitched south Asian dialect, he said loudly, “You must come
to my new ashram”
The Marharishi Yogi
International Academy of Meditation was, the Yogi’s financial advisors advised
him, the strategically right thing to do. If he intended to conquer America, he
would have to give the Yanks what they expected. What they expected was for all
of their Marharishi’s to fit their version of authenticity. Their version of
authenticity for Marharishi’s everywhere demanded that they lived in Ashrams in
India.
So, after they slowly
explained to the Marharishi what an ashram is, a buyer was dispatched eastward
to purchase a 2,000-acre former maize plantation along the edge of Lake
Vembanad in Duta, Arunachal Pradesh, in the easternmost tip of India, under the
snow peaked Himalaya Mountains, where Bhutan and Tibet meet.
Franny Glass arrived
at Tezpur Airport after a grueling 15-hour, seven thousand mile flight. She had
her Henk luggage tossed into the back of a rented ancient Russian made
Orbita and started the 200-mile ride north to the Yogi’s ashram.
Five hours after she
left the airport, Franny Glass arrived at the ashram, her nerves shattered. The
Russian made car had come equipped with a tape deck, circa 1972. After a couple
of hours of silence, Franny slammed in an ancient eight track she found in the
backseat, a Russian made tape, Yuri Popinov sings Elvis. She turned the
volume up all the way and listened to Yuri’s very enthusiastic rendition of A
hunk a Bunk of burning Funk and then the tape got stuck.
She hit it, several
times but all that did was to make it louder. After a half hour, she kicked it,
she spat on it and she threatened it with an injunction. Nothing worked. For
the next three and half hours the lyrics “I’m a hunk a bunk a burning
funk….yeahhhh!... I’m a hunk a bunk a burning funk….yeahhhh!...” played over
and over and over and over again, sung in English in a thick Russian accent
set at full volume. By the time she arrived at the ashram, Franny was
temporarily deaf, spoke with a distinct Russian accent and had developed an eye
twitch.
In stark contrast to
the majestic but rugged mountain that surrounded it on every side, the ashram
had a by-design laid-back feel to it. To ensure that the local smell of wet
mud, cow dung and burning garbage didn’t disturb the nasal sensitive
westerners, every two hours, the ashram staff would spray vast amounts of
floral aromas and pleasant spicy scents into the air. Meals were prepared by a
Parisian chef and each guest cottage was built with a private plunge pool and
came equipped with an 88- inch television theater set.
In her massive and
beautifully appointed room, Franny found scented candles flickering in the near
darkness as magnificently beautiful and uncomfortably sensual Asian women with
almond eyes, almost seductively asked Franny to disrobe so she could begin the
ayurveda treatment. Surprised but intrigued, Franny slowly undressed and as
directed lay face down, across a solid oak table. Slowly and methodically, the
beautiful woman with the almond eyes slathered oil, infused with pungent herbs,
along the length of Franny Glass’s slender milky white body.
About a half hour
after the treatment began, the Marharishi Yogi Barish wordlessly slithered into
the room, leaving his two bodyguards waiting outside. The women with the almond
eyes slipped quietly outside. He then disrobed and reached out to Franny’s
prone body in a way she would have never expected. Feeling the light nudging on
her ribs, she lifted her head from her forearms. When her eyes focused, she
wondered how that ugly fat mouse crawled so far up the table. Then she
refocused. A few seconds later, her curled fist landed in the Marharishi’s
groin with a sickening snapping sound. The little bearded man’s eyes
immediately turned inward towards his nose. Sucking in an enormous amount of
air as he fell to his knees he uttered, squealed really, one word “okay”
Franny leaped from the
table and frantically wiped the oil and honey from her body and dressed just as
the Yogi dragged himself to his feet. My goodness what magnificent legs she
has was the last thought that went through his tiny brain before
Franny’s karate kick to his forehead knocked him unconscious.
Dashing out the door,
she slowed considerably as she passed the solemn sun-glassed bodyguards,
slipped into the ancient Russian Orbita, whispered a her version of a quick but
silent prayer that it would start, smiled at the guards when it did and with
Yuri Popinov happily singing away, she sped out of the complex and down the
Burma Road.
When the Marharishi
awoke, he had a severe headache and the sinking suspicion that his advances had
not gone over well with the American woman. Worse, if word of his behavior
reached the right New York circles and then the press, he was ruined.
He called for his
guards. “Find her! Bring her back!” he ordered, “Offer her a free week at the
Ashram”
As the guard rushed
towards the door, he reconsidered “No, wait. Offer her 50 percent off a half
week at the Ashram”. A moment later, as the guards were about to
peel away in a black Mercedes with tinted windows, he stopped them again “Make
that, ten percent off her bar bill! Now go! Find her!”
When Franny looked
into her rear view mirror, one of the few times in her life that she had
actually used the device, she spotted the black Mercedes pulling out of the
ashram gate and closing in on her fast. The Russian clunker strained to hit a
top speed of fifty miles an hour and when it did it shook violently,
reconsidered exerting itself, and slipped slowly into second gear.
Franny spotted a cut
off from the road that disappeared down a slope. Turning a violent left that
nearly toppled her car, she sped down the narrowing road. Moments later, the
Marharishi guards, up the main road. sped past her.
Franny kept driving
down the road until it turned into what she assumed correctly was a cow path,
which is why it was odd that she should have been surprised to see that large
black and white cow, running towards her.
Kharaab Kismet
hated that cow. He suspected the cow hated him as well, but that was not
what had ignited his complete contempt toward the ugly beast. Theirs had always
been a complicated, rocky relationship largely because, as cows, go this one
was as savvy and spiteful as it was ornery. This is why Kharaab was certain it
had trounced into his neighbors tea rows on purpose, performing a sort of
bovine ballet as it crushed hundreds of the neatly aligned rows of the precious
mint under its mud-caked hooves before the performance ended and she was led
away.
The local magistrate
determined that Kharaab’s cow had caused $600 worth of damage to the neighbor’s
crop. In a good year, a very good year, Kharaab earned $450. In a bad
year, which was most years, he earned half that amount. To pay for the damages
he would have to sell his tiny patch of land that sat aside the Apatani River
and without his land, he had nothing. So the cow, the symbol of abundance, had
taken everything he had.
With that recent
torrid history in mind, it made sense to Kharaab Kismet to kill that goddamn
cow and then, since he had nothing left to live for or to live on, he decided
that he would kill himself as well.
He was slightly
concerned about how he would kill himself with the wooden club, the only thing
he owned resembling a weapon. He was new to suicide. Certainly, beating oneself
to death would be very painful and take a long time but he elected to deal with
issue when he got to it.
Of course, there was
another issue. There always is. Kharaab was a devout Hindu it was wrong to kill
a cow, even that smirking weasel that had caused him so much misery and shame
because, Lord Krishna appeared on earth as a cow. But, thought Kharaab
with a twinge of guilt, not even the great and mighty Lord Krishna
would save this cow from his wrath.
Walking about behind
the arrogant grazing cow, Kharaab raised the wooden club up over his eyes and
screamed “Krishna!” His eyes were opened wide with murderous rage.
The cow’s eyes were
opened wide in terror. Nobody’s fool, the cow ran before Kharaab could lower
the killing blow. Up the cow path it scurried, running, in as much as cows can
run, for dear life itself.
Kharaab didn’t give
chase. He tossed the club aside and let out a long miserable sigh. He could not
go through with it. He didn’t have it in him to murder a living thing, even
that miserable beast of a cow that deserved so much to die.
Now he would have to
live with his actions; the contemplation of taking a sacred life was an affront
to the great Lord Krishna. He, Kharaab Kismet, whose existence on this earth
meant nothing, had spat in the eye of the magnificent and giving Krishna and he
was ashamed. So Kharaab Kismet, this good and decent man with the broken heart
and the empty stomach, fell to his knees and lowered his head and spoke to the
Lord Krishna. Praying aloud, he said, “I fear my anger has driven you, oh great
and merciful Krishna, the essence of my very soul and the purpose of my life,
further from me and without you, your humble servant is nothing. Forgive me
Krishna.”
Krishna, who is a
basically good-natured type god, in as far as gods go these days, heard his
servant’s heart-felt words and smiled upon him. The cow hit the fan and every
other part of Franny’s front engine, killing itself and the car in a single
head-to-head blow.
Hearing the crash and
the mandatory screams of frustration, from both Franny and the cow, Kharaab
rose to his feet and climbed the knoll and looked down at the crash site.
Realizing that the car had killed the beast, he broke down in tears of joy. The
Lord Krishna, in all his greatness, had heard his prayers and had forgiven him.
Better yet, that bastard cow was dead and he hadn’t done it. Tears of joy;
great unadulterated, wonderful joy, streamed down his wonderfully weather
beaten face.
“Krishna!” He cried as
he fell to his knees “Krishna!”
“Let’s not cry over
spilt milk” said Franny as she climbed from the wreck and lit a Gitane.
She disdainfully
inspected the considerable damage to the cars mostly tin engine and then looked
full circle at the endless miles of Himalayan vastness and asked, “Is there a
Hertz around here?”
Kharaab shrugged in
reply.
“El…el…” she groped
for the words “El caro rento”
He shrugged again
“Oh honestly” she
fumed lighting a second Gigante to accompany the first “Why can’t you
people learn English?”
“I speak English,
Mame,” he said in flawless English
“They why didn’t you
answer me?” she demanded, also in English
“I don’t speak Spanish
Mame,” he said, again using English.
Franny was completely
confused and decided not to follow up on that angle. “Well where can I rent a
car?” she said exasperated
“At the Tezpur Airport
in Assam” he answered pointing over the mountain towards Assam
“That’s where I rented
this car” she fumed
“So you can see then,
I am correct, it is a very good place to rent cars Mame”
“Would you drive me
there?” She asked “I’ll pay you”
Kharaab pulled himself
to his feet “I have no car Madam”
“Then how do you get
around?” She didn’t believe him. He pointed to the dead cow
“Look” she paused,
handed him one of her plasma business cards, and extended her hand “Franny
Glass, merger, acquisitions and accounts management…what’s your name?”
Kharaab was fascinated
with the card. Like half the people in his village, he was illiterate so the
words on the card didn’t matter but he had never seen anything like it. Franny
withdrew her hand since he hadn’t accepted it and asked again, “What’s your name?
Kay es su namo?“
“Kharaab” he answered
still looking at the card
“Well listen Carlton,
what’s it worth to you?”
Kharaab returned the
card with a sad smile. “I can’t afford it, Madam, I’m sorry”
“No, you idiot not the
card…the cow thingy…how much for the cow?”
“The cow is sacred to
us. In India we call it the gift of Avataar”
“In Manhattan we call
it sirloin. How much?”
Kharaab thought
it was amusing but odd that the people in Manhattan named their cows and then
continued “The cow’s dung is worth a fortune. It is used as an insecticide, a
source of fuel and a fertilizer….and then there are the dairy products”
“My God” Franny said
appalled “You mean you people use cow dung as a dairy product?” she waved off
the thought “No don’t tell me…look Carol, I’m sorry I killed your little” she
turned and looked at the animal’s corpse because she couldn’t remembered what
they called those things “Bull cow friend or whatever ….but it was Krishna’s
fault. He ran out in front of my car after escaping from the… a...a….um…” again
a word escaped her “a bunch of cows where he belonged!" She was dialing
her phone and waiting for the signal to connect
"Not a bunch,
Madam, a herd", he corrected her respectfully.
"Heard of
what?" she asked, her eyes glued to the phone screen
"Herd of cows,
Madam"
"Of course
I've heard of cows." "No, a cow herd."
"What do I care
what a cow heard?” She said peering up on the road for the Yogi’s thugs, “I
have no secrets to keep from a cow! Look Caribbean, I’ll pay for your little
friend but don’t try to milk me on this one”
He considered the
vaguely sexual physical act of milking a cow and pondered what his ancestors
were really thinking when they explored that option. He was jolted out of his
thoughtful trance by the sound of Franny’s snapping fingers under his long,
thin nose.
“They moved my eyes up
here, buddy boy” she said, “Look. Carmichael…I ….”
“Kharaab” he said
respectfully
“Whatever” she said
disrespectfully “I won’t take any bull”
“I don’t want to give
you a bull, Madam,” he said completely confused
“Well don’t,” she
repeated busily digging through her purse.
“I don’t even have a
bull,” he said to himself because New York had picked up and was busy making
arrangements to bring her home. The bad news was New York wouldn’t be able to
get her another car out of the valley until the following morning. The good
news was, well actually, there wasn’t any good news.
She slammed the phone
closed and looked around the barren hills. “Look, crabby,” she said to Kharaab
“Is there a Hilton or anything resembling a hotel around here?”
“Yes” answered Kharaab
cheerfully. It wasn’t often he knew the answer to two questions in row “I am
told there is a very fine hotel at the Tezpur Airport in Assam….very fine a
Motel Six”
Franny, who was at
least a full foot taller than Kharaab blew a ring smoke in his face and said
quietly “Don’t bust my balls or I swear to God you’ll join your little friend
over there”
Despite what he
suspected might be a hostile attitude from the American, Kharaab invited her to
his humble home to spend the night because she had nowhere else to go. It is
the Indian way.
He prepared a
reasonably good, if spicy but bland dinner of seasoned rice with bamboo shoots
and local herbs, a pile of leafy vegetables and maize with eggs, all washed
down with Apong, the local drink made from rice and millet.
Franny, who had not
eaten that day and was very hungry, had noted the sparseness of the food and
noted again that Kharaab took less food for himself than he had given to
her.
“Thank you Kharaab”
said Franny Glass when the modest meal ended. There was nothing unusual in the
words themselves. It was only unusual that she meant it.
“I should tell you,
Karuba, there are men after me. They want to harm me. I’ll go up and sleep in
the car, if I stay here, you could be harmed”
The near constant
smile fell from his face and Kharaab looked her in the eyes for the first time
“You are a guest in my home. No harm will come to you that will not befall me
first” and then the smile returned to his face and for the first time Franny
Glass smiled at him as well.
“Thank you Kharaab”
she said quietly, this time with a smile.
When night fell,
Kharaab took a thin, musty blanket from the shed and set on the ground. The
lady would have the bed for the evening. He would sleep out under the canopy of
stars that shone a brilliant bright blue against the black sky. In so long as
gallant souls like Kharaab Kismet roam the earth, the last faint lights of
chivalry will never die.
Although she didn’t
understand why he did it, Kharaab’s sacrifice wasn’t lost on Franny Glass, an
unusual moment of cogniscence for her, but then again the experience of having
someone act decently without cause, was new to her. Before she turned in for
the night she said “Sleep well Kharaab”
“I doubt it,” he
whispered back
Franny slept well. In
fact, she couldn’t recall when she had last slept o well and woken up so
refreshed and relaxed. Maybe it was brisk mountain air, the dose of healthy
food or the unbelievable beauty around her that she was noticing for the first
time since she’d arrived.
She joked with Kharaab
as he prepared them a traditional breakfast of warm rice, stuffed paratha bread
that Franny recognized as crepes, cold butter, cooked spicy aloo sabzi and
unsweetened milk. It had been over a decade since Franny had sat and eaten a
full breakfast and when it was over, she did something she rarely ever did, she
relaxed. She lay back on the ground and stared up at the mountain peaks.
When the man entered
the property, Franny noticed that Kharaab’s hands were trembling and he would
not raise his eyes to look at the unhappy visitors as they spoke in a language
she didn’t understand. She was pretty sure it wasn’t Spanish or Russian. Maybe
Chinese.
The man left as
abruptly and as unhappily as he had arrived and in his dark and gloomy wake
stood Kharaab who slowly drew back his head and sucked in a deep, long breath
and then closed his eyes and lowered his chin to his chest.
Franny stood to her
feet and walked over to where he was standing and placed a hand on his arm
“What is Kharaab? What’s wrong? Who was that man? What did he say to you?”
They walked silently
to the river’s edge and washed the morning plates and as they did, Kharaab told
Franny about that horrible cow and his neighbor’s field and the magistrate’s
decision and how his neighbor, the gloomy man who had just left, had come to
evict Kharaab from his land. This tiny patch of earth that had been the home of
his father’s father and his father’s father before that. When the story ended,
Kharaab lowered his head in defeat and after a long silence, Franny said
“Wow..…you mean that cows name wasn’t Krishna?”
That evening after a
supper of a mild meat and vegetable dish cooked in yogurt and flavored with
fragrant spices, Franny asked Kharaab “How much do I owe you for the cow”
Kharaab smiled warmly
at the American. Hers was a noble spirit he thought. Like him she was poor, in fact,
he recalled, she was so poor that when they first met, she tried to sell him a
plastic card with writing on it.
“We are the humble of
the earth” he smiled “We owe each other only our kindness”
“All right you
bastard, you won. I’ll pay out” Franny barked as she took out her checkbook
“Now I’m going to
assume that cow thing was a Holstein or Goldstein or whatever those things are,
right? So what’s the value on that? Six? Seven grand?”
“Well” said Kharaab
thoughtfully because he had no idea about what the hell she was talking about.
“All right! All
right!” she snapped, “Seven five and that’s it. Now since...um…cowing or
whatever it’s called….is your primary source of income which is just a
screaming endorsement to bring back vocational training in my opinion, you’ll
need to get back on your bare feet, so that’s another year or so to train the
new cow to…do whatever you two do together….so what will you gross this year?
Twelve, fifteen grand? We’ll call it an even 13 five, how’s that? I’ll toss in
another five for stress, trauma and turmoil and….” She said handing him the
check form the Bank of New York for twenty-six thousand dollars “That’s
that”
Although at the time,
handing over the check was a spur of the moment-never-to-be-repeated act of
generosity on Franny’s part; her accountants later labeled it a legitimate
travel and business expense and wrote it off of her taxes. It wasn’t all that
much money anyway, not in the larger scheme and not when you considered the
thirty-five thousand it cost to charter the private helicopter that flew her
out of Kharaab’s back yard the next morning.
In the end, maybe
Franny Glass really was, at her core, a very bad person, although if you were
to ask her if she was, she would say it wasn’t so. And she would say it wasn’t
so because she could recall once, during a fleeting moment in time, in a place
that didn’t matter, the great and merciful Krishna had tested the goodness of
Franny Glass’s soul, and for a brief and glorious moment, Franny Glass was a
powerful and great spirit filled with goodness, kindness, decency and all those
other wonderful but sadly rare things that occasionally allow a mere mortal to
stand with the gods
Scientists find intact brain cells in skull of man killed in Vesuvius eruption nearly 2,000 years ago
By Rory Sullivan and Sharon Braithwaite
A section of vitrified brain
tissue from the remains of a young man who died in AD 79 after Mount Vesuvius
erupted.
The brain cells of a young man who died almost
2,000 years ago in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius have been found intact by a
team of researchers in Italy.
The discovery was made when the
experts studied remains first uncovered in the 1960s in Herculaneum, a city
buried by ash during the volcanic eruption in AD 79.
The victim, who was found lying
face-down on a wooden bed in a building thought to have been devoted to the
worship of the Emperor Augustus, was around 25 years old at the time of his
death, according to the researchers.
Part of the college of the
Augustales, the building in Herculaneum where the young man's remains were
found in the 1960s.
Pier Paolo Petrone, a forensic
anthropologist at the University of Naples Federico II who led the research,
told CNN that the project started when he saw "some glassy material
shining from within the skull" while he was working near the skeleton in
2018.
When it comes to iconic sneakers,
heck, when it comes to the entire history of footwear, you’d be hard-pressed to
come up with a more beloved or influential shoe than the Superstar
In a paper published earlier this
year in the New England Journal of Medicine, Petrone and his colleagues
revealed that this shiny appearance was caused by the vitrification of the
victim's brain due to intense heat followed by rapid cooling.
Speaking about this process,
Petrone said: "The brain exposed to the hot volcanic ash must first have
liquefied and then immediately turned into a glassy material by the rapid
cooling of the volcanic ash deposit."
After subsequent analysis
including the use of an electron microscope, the team found cells in the
vitrified brain, which were "incredibly well preserved with a resolution
that is impossible to find anywhere else," according to Petrone.
The researchers also found intact
nerve cells in the spinal cord, which, like the brain, had been vitrified.
The latest findings were
published in the American journal PLOS One.
Guido Giordano, a volcanologist
at Roma Tre University who worked on the study, told CNN that charred wood
found next to the skeleton allowed the researchers to conclude that the site
reached a temperature of more than 500 degrees Celsius (932 degrees Fahrenheit)
after the eruption.
Referring to the latest findings,
Giordano said the "perfectness of preservation" found in
vitrification was "totally unprecedented" and was a boon to
researchers.
"This opens up the room for
studies of these ancient people that have never been possible," he said.
The team of researchers --
archaeologists, biologists, forensic scientists, neurogeneticists and
mathematicians from Naples, Milan and Rome -- will continue studying the
remains.
They want to learn more about the
vitrification process -- including the exact temperatures victims were exposed
to, as well as the cooling rate of the volcanic ash -- and also hope to analyze
proteins from the remains and their related genes, according to Petrone.
The former task is "crucial
for the evaluation of the risk by the relevant authorities in the event of a
possible future eruption of Vesuvius, the most dangerous volcano in the world,
which looms over 3 million inhabitants of Naples and its surroundings,"
Petrone said.
Folk Music
Johnny Cash is often looked at as a country singer, although
his earliest influences were folk artists like the Carter family. He was a
great fan of traditional music, and often performed traditional spiritual songs
and the like in his performances with wife June Carter.
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Translated by Gregory Rabassa
On the third day of rain they had
killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched
courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a
temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had
been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands
of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a
stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when
Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard
for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the
courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old
man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts,
couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.
Frightened by that nightmare,
Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick
child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the
fallen body with a mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were
only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth,
and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away any sense
of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked,
were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely
that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found
him familiar. Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an
incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they
skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded
that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And
yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death
to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.
“He’s an angel,” she told them.
“He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the
rain knocked him down.”
On the following day everyone
knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in Pelayo’s house. Against
the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were
the fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy, they did not have the heart
to club him to death. Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen,
armed with his bailiff’s club, and before going to bed he dragged him out of
the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop. In the middle
of the night, when the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing
crabs. A short time afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a
desire to eat. Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a
raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate
on the high seas. But when they went out into the courtyard with the first
light of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop
having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things
to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren’t a supernatural
creature but a circus animal.
Father Gonzaga arrived before
seven o’clock, alarmed at the strange news. By that time onlookers less frivolous
than those at dawn had already arrived and they were making all kinds of
conjectures concerning the captive’s future. The simplest among them thought
that he should be named mayor of the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he
should be promoted to the rank of five-star general in order to win all wars.
Some visionaries hoped that he could be put to stud in order to implant the
earth a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the universe. But
Father Gonzaga, before becoming a priest, had been a robust woodcutter.
Standing by the wire, he reviewed his catechism in an instant and asked them to
open the door so that he could take a close look at that pitiful man who looked
more like a huge decrepit hen among the fascinated chickens. He was lying in
the corner drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels and
breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him. Alien to the
impertinences of the world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured
something in his dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and
said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of
an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know
how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too
human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings
was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by
terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of
angels. Then he came out of the chicken coop and in a brief sermon warned the
curious against the risks of being ingenuous. He reminded them that the devil
had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to confuse the
unwary. He argued that if wings were not the essential element in determining
the different between a hawk and an airplane, they were even less so in the
recognition of angels. Nevertheless, he promised to write a letter to his
bishop so that the latter would write his primate so that the latter would
write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the highest
courts.
His prudence fell on sterile
hearts. The news of the captive angel spread with such rapidity that after a
few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace and they had to call in
troops with fixed bayonets to disperse the mob that was about to knock the
house down. Elisenda, her spine all twisted from sweeping up so much
marketplace trash, then got the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five
cents admission to see the angel.
The curious came from far away. A
traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd
several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not
those of an angel but, rather, those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate
invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood
has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man
who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker
who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others
with less serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made
the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less
than a week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims
waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon.
The angel was the only one who
took no part in his own act. He spent his time trying to get comfortable in his
borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental
candles that had been placed along the wire. At first they tried to make him
eat some mothballs, which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman,
were the food prescribed for angels. But he turned them down, just as he turned
down the papal lunches that the pentinents brought him, and they never found
out whether it was because he was an angel or because he was an old man that in
the end ate nothing but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue seemed to
be patience. Especially during the first days, when the hens pecked at him,
searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings, and the
cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with, and even the
most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see
him standing. The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they burned
his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so
many hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a start, ranting in his
hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple
of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a
gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world. Although many thought that
his reaction had not been one of rage but of pain, from then on they were
careful not to annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity
was not that of a hero taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose.
Father Gonzaga held back the
crowd’s frivolity with formulas of maidservant inspiration while awaiting the
arrival of a final judgment on the nature of the captive. But the mail from
Rome showed no sense of urgency. They spent their time finding out if the
prisoner had a navel, if his dialect had any connection with Aramaic, how many
times he could fit on the head of a pin, or whether he wasn’t just a Norwegian
with wings. Those meager letters might have come and gone until the end of time
if a providential event had not put and end to the priest’s tribulations.
It so happened that during those
days, among so many other carnival attractions, there arrived in the town the
traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having
disobeyed her parents. The admission to see her was not only less than the
admission to see the angel, but people were permitted to ask her all manner of
questions about her absurd state and to examine her up and down so that no one
would ever doubt the truth of her horror. She was a frightful tarantula the
size of a ram and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heartrending,
however, was not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she
recounted the details of her misfortune. While still practically a child she
had sneaked out of her parents’ house to go to a dance, and while she was
coming back through the woods after having danced all night without permission,
a fearful thunderclap rent the sky in two and through the crack came the
lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider. Her only
nourishment came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss into
her mouth. A spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and with such a
fearful lesson, was bound to defeat without even trying that of a haughty angel
who scarcely deigned to look at mortals. Besides, the few miracles attributed
to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn’t
recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn’t get to
walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers.
Those consolation miracles, which were more like mocking fun, had already
ruined the angel’s reputation when the woman who had been changed into a spider
finally crushed him completely. That was how Father Gonzaga was cured forever
of his insomnia and Pelayo’s courtyard went back to being as empty as during
the time it had rained for three days and crabs walked through the bedrooms.
The owners of the house had no
reason to lament. With the money they saved they built a two-story mansion with
balconies and gardens and high netting so that crabs wouldn’t get in during the
winter, and with iron bars on the windows so that angels wouldn’t get in.
Pelayo also set up a rabbit warren close to town and gave up his job as a
bailiff for good, and Elisenda bought some satin pumps with high heels and many
dresses of iridescent silk, the kind worn on Sunday by the most desirable women
in those times. The chicken coop was the only thing that didn’t receive any
attention. If they washed it down with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside
it every so often, it was not in homage to the angel but to drive away the
dungheap stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new
house into an old one. At first, when the child learned to walk, they were
careful that he not get too close to the chicken coop. But then they began to
lose their fears and got used to the smell, and before they child got his
second teeth he’d gone inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires were
falling apart. The angel was no less standoffish with him than with the other
mortals, but he tolerated the most ingenious infamies with the patience of a
dog who had no illusions. They both came down with the chicken pox at the same
time. The doctor who took care of the child couldn’t resist the temptation to
listen to the angel’s heart, and he found so much whistling in the heart and so
many sounds in his kidneys that it seemed impossible for him to be alive. What
surprised him most, however, was the logic of his wings. They seemed so natural
on that completely human organism that he couldn’t understand why other men
didn’t have them too.
When the child began school it
had been some time since the sun and rain had caused the collapse of the
chicken coop. The angel went dragging himself about here and there like a stray
dying man. They would drive him out of the bedroom with a broom and a moment
later find him in the kitchen. He seemed to be in so many places at the same
time that they grew to think that he’d be duplicated, that he was reproducing
himself all through the house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda
shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels. He could scarcely
eat and his antiquarian eyes had also become so foggy that he went about
bumping into posts. All he had left were the bare cannulae of his last
feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket over him and extended him the charity of
letting him sleep in the shed, and only then did they notice that he had a
temperature at night, and was delirious with the tongue twisters of an old
Norwegian. That was one of the few times they became alarmed, for they thought
he was going to die and not even the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell
them what to do with dead angels.
And yet he not only survived his
worst winter, but seemed improved with the first sunny days. He remained
motionless for several days in the farthest corner of the courtyard, where no
one would see him, and at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers
began to grow on his wings, the feathers of a scarecrow, which looked more like
another misfortune of decreptitude. But he must have known the reason for those
changes, for he was quite careful that no one should notice them, that no one
should hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One
morning Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that
seemed to come from the high seas blew into the kitchen. Then she went to the
window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were so
clumsy that his fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he was
on the point of knocking the shed down with the ungainly flapping that slipped
on the light and couldn’t get a grip on the air. But he did manage to gain
altitude. Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she
watched him pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way with the
risky flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching him even when she was
through cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer
possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance in her
life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.
