the coast of North Korea. The missing on our lips. Order in the House. Tedium.
THEY WERE TOGETHER. It was a party. Left, right, red, blue, let’s examine this with love, and on network TV, too. In the house, the House of Representatives: the makings of a scandal, a probing of the facts.
421 Rayburn, Washington, D.C. Oak and silk and fleurs-de-lis.
The chairman and his statement. Thanks to you and you and you. Today is momentous. It is about accountability and oversight and truth, but in human terms, it’s about everyone we are missing. Four Department of the Interior employees. One cult leader. One ex-wife. Our key players have disappeared, and here we are, holding the bag. Among developments of equal sensation, there has been OJ in his truck, Rodney King, and Columbine, but for analogue to the hopes and dreams of the masses bound up in the fate of a few, we have on heart Baby Jessica’s two-day ordeal at the bottom of her uncle’s well in Midland, Texas. The organizing sentiment back then? If she is okay, we’ll be okay. Everyone just wanting to be okay. So, okay, order in the House. Let’s get this hearing under way.
First up: guys who wore their suits half assed and hair askew. One psychologist in the House—his glasses were sloped like a ray of light come down through the panes.
He was here to testify on behalf of the mind and what it does in the aftermath of trauma, for instance, what it might do to the four hostages should they ever be found. What is memory. Flashback. PTSD. Will they sue? This was what the representative from North Dakota wanted to know, though he padded the question with so much blarney, it seemed he was asking the shrink whether the emotional dissipation of a cult leader was cause enough to burn his house down. Because that’s what happened, right? The feds burned his house down? No? It was burned from the inside? Whatever.
It was time for the Ph.D. He had come with case studies of kidnapees past and of renown, and miscellaneous data that summed in template how the sundering of people from their lives could pan out in the long run.
Patti Hearst, scion. Kyoko Chan, scion. Frank Sinatra Jr., Charles Lindbergh Jr., John Paul Getty III, Adolph Coors III. Shergar, champion racehorse. Shin Sang-ok, South Korean director. Johnny Gosch, sold as catamite or fate unknown. Colleen Stan, locked in a box. Victor Li Tzarkuoi, ransomed for $134 million. Muriel McKay, mistaken for Rupert Murdoch’s wife and abducted from the sleepy village of Wimbledon, in which tennis legends are made but successful kidnappings are not. The Born brothers. Terry Leonhardy, Foreign Service officer, died of heart disease at age eighty-eight, kidnapped twenty years before in Mexico City. Terry Waite, hostage negotiator, who was nabbed in Beirut and kept in solitary confinement for four years. Terry Anderson, pinched by Hezbollah and jailed for six years alongside several Americans, including one Edward Tracey, everywhere referred to only as an “itinerant poet,” which has struck the Ph.D. as odd. Also worth noting: first name Terry does not correlate positively to an increased chance of abduction, witness homophones Teri Garr and Terri Schiavo, whose degenerative neurological problems, now that he thinks on it, do suggest something accursed in the name, prospective parents beware. (Terry Southern, crestfallen artist steeped in drug abuse, alcoholism, and financial insecurity; Terry Gilliam—no, wait, Terry Gilliam is God.)
There is no more welcoming venue for peroration and longueur than a congressional hearing, but still the chairman exhorted the doctor to get to the point—What is your point?—as the doc drummed his fingers on the table, thinking: My point? Kidnapping is part of the national consciousness. Should I move on?
Oh please, yes, move on.
The doctor said: Among postings online about kidnappers at large and lionized by his people is one about North Korean potentate Kim Jong-il.
But he was stopped there.
Mr. Chairman, I gather the good doctor is trying to get it on record that the Helix and Kim Jong-il are in bed together, and I want it known this is balderdash.
Mr. Chairman, unless I am dotty, I don’t think the doctor was claiming kin between North Korea and the Helix, but that it’s actually my good friend from Massachusetts who is trying to get this absurd rumor on record, which is an affront to the comity of these proceedings and also the intelligence of the American people watching and—
Another motion on the table. Procedural squabbles.