Woke Up Lonely A Novel - By Fiona Maazel Page 0,116
I am sixty-three. I am five-two without the platform shoes I’ve never been seen without. I am rotund. My hairline has withdrawn midway up my skull; it hopes to reach the summit by 2012, Year of the Perfect Strong and Prosperous Nation. I wear girly glasses, but I am a man at heart. I like women who take off their clothes for money, and ravioli with pumpkin filling. My favorite garment is the anorak; my favorite color is brown. I am mysterious and unreachable, North Korea cannot live without me, and just now I am about to meet a gentleman from the United States who will tell me about the Helix and its plans to bring our people together. We will drive around Pyongyang. And a few hours later, when I ask about his family, he will say things about his wife and child with a subtext of longing whose content is the loneliness we’re born into and cannot shake, but so what, so what, so what. It is the wife who matters now. The wife and child, nothing else. And for this information, I will begin to rethink my life.
60. So now it’s on record: How dangerous is Thurlow Dan? Not so much. When he was in North Korea, all he did was tour the city with his sweetheart in disguise.
The chairman wiped his brow. It was getting on 4 p.m., the sleepiest time of day. He thought if this were Spain or Israel or any country more attuned to the circadian needs of the body, he could at least recess for a siesta. But no. They would carry on until the very Western hour of 5 p.m., the happy hour. The hour a chairman returns to his wife and her cause du jour—the weeding of our SWAT and HRT personnel for those with jiffy finger: boys who don’t think, just shoot. Was there any chance the hostages got sniped and no one was telling him? Doubtful. His private theory? The four detained by Thurlow Dan were dispersed throughout the country, having escaped the Helix House hours before it blew and wanting, horribly, to escape everything else. The chairman understood. Were he not accountable to the people for answers, he might even have wished them luck. Either way, those stories would out.
VII. In which: Four short stories after Kim Jong-il’s On the Art of Cinema. In which stories are not so much similar as empathic. A city under a city. Labia, gambling. The USS Pueblo. In which: Run, run, run for your lives.
VII. In which: Four short stories after Kim Jong-il’s On the Art of Cinema. In which stories are not so much similar as empathic. A city under a city. Labia, gambling. The USS Pueblo. In which: Run, run, run for your lives.
Anne-Janet, the set should reflect the times.
All things considered, this wasn’t so bad. A cot in the Helix House. A chance. An emotional context for events that might never transpire elsewhere, events called kissing and touch. Anne-Janet planning it out; Ned was her target. Anne-Janet taking the reins because she had survived cancer and incest and was not about to be cowed by a dark place in a dark time.
“You okay?” she whispered, and she put out her hand, which he couldn’t see or did not take.
Not cowed, but maybe a little discouraged. And unhelped by the warfare in her head. Half going: Kudos for exploiting alone time with a guy you like, AJ! Half going: Um, in the hours since being kidnapped, you have done nothing but augment an attraction that was already burlesque, and some ideas any sane person would dismiss. Among them: if you were kidnapped with a guy you liked, mutual duress was supposed to hasten the intimacy between you. Forget the barter of secrets and memories in the afterglow of sex, forget the dating and twaddle and rollback of your defensive line until you either had to love this person or kill yourself. Forget the prelude, just head straight for what your heart needed, which was a place to go when you were scared and lonely and, in this case, detained in a cult leader’s house in the suburbs of Cincinnati.
Right? Wrong. And Anne-Janet wasn’t stupid. She had not forgone self-doubt. She could never forgo self-doubt, since amid the miscellaneous fallout of being a victim was the constant suspicion that your feelings were nuts. If you’d fallen prey to the world’s incapacity to bring people together but were thinking only of