Chapter Five
In a Glass Box
“In old days, temptation was of a carnal nature.
Now it takes the form of pure reason.”
– Interrogator Ivanov to Detainee Rubashov, in
Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
A few days passed in quiet and the holidays loomed. Rumsfeld, no matter how he wished to remain lodged away from the world within his off-season keep, would have to prepare for Joyce’s arrival, and her demands that he right himself for the family get-together she was arranging for the other vacation property in Taos, New Mexico. As well, he would basically have to prepare himself for the new year which would inevitably lead to interviews, articles, slanders and rebuttals. And to face this onslaught, he realized how alone he now stood; beginning the writing of his memoirs was an enterprise born from a cauldron of bitterness for Old Man Misery.
Don Rumsfeld was still a wildly unpopular man in this fair republic; the Christmas moratorium over and the Iraq Study Group’s findings released, he would have to brace for waves of the most strident criticism, and spanning the possibilities of political expression in America – from the Left whom had always detested him, to his new foes on the neo-con Right, eager to blame him – and only him – for the failure of their grandiose vision of a muted, malleable and democratically house-broken Mid-East. Disgusted by their disavowal of his stewardship, Rumsfeld now realized his relations with the think-tank Metternichs and AIPAC potentates to have been decidedly worthless and one-sided from the moment of their inception; Abrams, Pipes, especially Perle – all of Strauss and Podhoretz’s modern Pharisees, with their exegetic analyses and panaceas born of bombarded citadels and heaps of corpses – had needed him to enact their plan of a Pax Americana enforced by brutal method and lightning campaigns. But as their beard, he also realized he was fated to be their patsy, too. Rumsfeld was amazed by their lack of loyalty and flat-out cowardice. None of them had ever foreseen the future Iraq was living at this moment. None of them. The afternoon when the documents arrived at Mount Misery was thus one segueing evenly from hopeful satisfaction to grim lucubration; Rumsfeld positioned himself in the study behind his desk and laid out documents like fusiliers at drill – strict, segregated, precise piles of information wherein lay the truth of this nation’s run-up to final reckoning with Saddam Hussein. He had the whole story, right here, and nobody at State or the Pentagon begrudged this old man his right to look Richard Perle in the eye and call him on his bullshit. Rumsfeld had earned his stripes and a cantankerous retirement. And by God nobody was going to leave him the “lone nut” for future generations to castigate and bemoan, wondering in pages of tendentious histories how this man had been allowed to craft a war of convenience with no peace possible. There were many whom Don resolved to have join him in History’s gallows dock, those who feigned such bewilderment now and those whom had affected such snide assuredness before. Atop that desk lay the foundation of what he hoped would become a tower of honor, the memoirs which would put the lie to charges of incompetence, vindictiveness and gaping stupidity. In a whorish plentitude of documents lay the nation’s foreign policy ghosts, phantoms amassed from Iran to Indonesia, bogeymen from Mossadegh to Ortega. Vetted carefully, the whole story of Saddam’s modern Babylon would emerge. And there was much in that story which would need to be harshly pruned of its thorns. He had a week to fully immerse himself in the madness of Iraq yet again, only this time with no one to answer to save his conscience.
Some of this avalanche of paper was mere curiosity, esoterica and essentially trivia of the Rumsfeld years. During a spat with Condi Rice, he’d had her phone tapped with a FISA request that, of course, was automatically approved and kept entirely secret from anybody else in the Cabinet. He didn’t know what he thought he’d find, and realized now how silly it was, and had the proof of his old man’s paranoia in front of him: Condi Rice had a thing for Italian shoes, expensive Belgian chocolates and wanted a Martini made from Polish potato vodka ready for her every night at ten p.m. no matter where she was in the world; up, dry, three olives, just like a man would take it. She also apparently had a crush on Tom Brady; either that, or she was particularly obsessed with her fantasy football team. After reading about the Charlie-Palmer’s-strength Martini, Don wondered. Either way, there was nothing of value, outside of an Old Boy snicker or two, in the pile of reports on what had been culled from Condi’s cell phone records.
But the die could cut both ways, and Don was confronted with this truth as he examined the forest of data atop his desk. After playing a hunch, Don had asked around to some NSA boys who used to be poker buddies of his factotum Doug Feith. They were willing to play ball with the old man, on promise that he’d get Feith to pay off his on-going poker losses – and this in a nickel-anty game, for Christ’s sakes – that had reached astounding heights, several thousand dollars at least. Don wondered how somebody who was such a shitty poker player could ever have been a capable Intelligence officer, then remembered it was Feith after all and that of course he’d had special plans for Feith’s singular talents when he sent him over to the Pentagon as his personal defense snoop. The fact he was so goddamn thick was what made Feith so invaluable to Rumsfeld and anybody else who needed to conjure a war when the prevailing Intel had been so dauntingly bad.
The NSA boys got their money and Don got his documents. It turned out he wasn’t the only administration member who was taking advantage of the enhanced (and completely unsupervised) FISA warrants. Don had thought something had been queer and shifty and it was true, after all; his old pal Dick had been spying on him for months, had requested eighteen taps on his various phones and here was Don looking at the evidence, reading transcripts of conversations he’d had with people from Blackwater and Halliburton, and even a birthday greeting he’d sent to his daughter. Son-of-a-bitch, thought Don – he couldn’t even trust Dick Cheney not to pile on the corpse! Those FISA warrants were priceless and it made Don’s teeth hurt to know he wouldn’t have that privilege any more; how he’d love to get a slime trail on Cheney and put it in his book, maybe some juicy details on him and that goddamn lesbian daughter of his. Now, the chance was gone, forever. It was proof, yet again, that Nixon had been right and you can’t trust anybody ever, and that when you have the chance to get some dirt on some asshole, fucking well get it. Dick Cheney, a paranoid rat too; well, Don thought, what can you expect from a guy who runs around wearing flack jackets and shooting people in the face. They could all go straight to hell now. Everybody had been spying on everybody else; as Iraq disintegrated, the Bush team dissimulated. And watched where each other went, and what kind of shoes they bought. The whole goddamn administration had been so entangled in personal espionage it was no wonder they never knew what the hell was going on where it actually mattered. And espionage and Intelligence were a particularly sore subject for Donald Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld suffered reading the Intel he had ignored in the weeks before the shallow triumph of a statue’s fall from a plinth upon the streets of Baghdad. Powell had warned him against peremptory de-Ba’athification, advised against dismantling Saddam’s army and made clear US Army doctrine sought to avoid city fighting with weary eyes akin to institutional blindness. Lose control of Baghdad even for a day and you’ll never get it back; like the US embassy in Hanoi, like the other seventeen provincial capitals hit so hard by that nemesis of empire, the master Giap himself, during the culmination of his genius during Tet. Don had listened, impassively, and then ignored the former general in arrogance assured, with visions of a grateful, simple people throwing roses at the feet of their liberators. He never thought of them as a complex polity capable of seismic shifts in loyalty and of ambiguous patience; then again, as he remembered when sadly re-reading histories of conqueror’s ill-repose past, very rarely did an Imperial power regard their newest subjects as true people in comparison to their own citizens. If they had been fully realized as a race, then why need the ennobling hand of “liberation” in the first place? The very act of conquering – or of pacifying, or of liberating, whatever hollow ring the scribes did affix to the business of making war and empire – was one speaking of profound contempt for those so in need of guidance towards civilized behavior. Pershing had regarded the Filipinos he fought in 1899 as little more than animals, and treated them accordingly; astoundingly brutal to modern ears, Rumsfeld thought, but damn him he had won. To win now in Iraq – the country, the American people, would never tolerate the slaughter necessary to make the few survivors fit for full inclusion in the world community. Better to kill them all, thought Rumsfeld; like pulling out weeds from a garden, perhaps a new flower would spring from the sod so well fertilized with the ash of the dead.
Hours passed. He read reports from the UN and diary entries direct from Hans Blix, thoughtfully culled from the dispatches of a helpful spy masquerading as a cleaning woman at a Luzerne Ritz-Carlton. Whisky drained from rocks glasses an amber-tinged anaesthetic, blistering his gullet and numbing his remorse. He read on, drank on, unable to stop or becalm or to merely die. He saw ancient photo-stats of investment portfolios held by Hamid Karzai accrued during his time advising massive Western oil concerns. He read again imputations and scorn heaped in vast, incomprehensible legalese against the credibility of the Iraqi National Congress. He came to loathe the name of “Curveball” when it appeared before his drunken eyes, this fraud only too eager to please that asinine Feith. He saw again a damning French intelligence estimate that the Saudis had known about Nine-Eleven for months before they even made a peep to our spooks in Yemen. He winced thinking about poor dumb Pat Tillman and his beauhunk patriotism, a good kid with stones like a bear but rocks in his head; as if the Army Ranger's poster boy was ever going to be allowed to come home and sit down and mouth a farrago of sedition with that old chancre Noam Chomsky. And he hurled his coffee cup against the wall in disgust that spurious meetings in Prague and Joe Wilson’s wife and goddamn Yellowcake uranium had ever been allowed to enter the vocabulary of the nation’s debate upon his own personal culpability in this fiasco. He opened another bottle of whisky and filled the hundred-dollar crystal rocks glass half-full, three-ounces of pure forgetting. He took a sip and let the heat singe his tongue; only after several seconds did he allow the bitter liquid to pass his throat. A pile of paper that scrutiny would allow made him the biggest fool in the history of the Department of Defense lay before him, and yet he had hoped to turn these pages into something of value, of vindication, of honor. For the first time, Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged to himself how horrible of a waste it had been, and how he must, at all costs, bury this horror under so much verbiage, so much conflicting opinion and so much cross-eyed minutiae that no man should ever be able to untangle the impediments strung, should ever extricate the truth from the hydra of lies he now vowed to create. Rumsfeld could serve his country one last time, after all. He could prevent her enemies from ever knowing just who his old friend Dick had been talking to merely weeks before the Trade Centers fell and the Pentagon burned, at an energy summit meeting in an undisclosed location that would have made ears prick up from Manhattan to Mecca. No one could ever handle the truth of how America ended up in a quagmire of dry sand with thousands dead and her reputation in tatters, no one could ever know whose name sat so close upon the page to his old pal Dick, or just how much money all of these bastards had made doing the business of Empire with the firm malevolence of an interest in free and unfettered trade.
Ten-thousand pages lay before him, perhaps a million more would need to be vetted, scanned and destroyed. He’d thought his working years perhaps ingloriously passed, yet now came recognition that his penultimate labor opened before him barely conceived, let alone finished. History was a whore; now here she was, virtually pleading to be raped. The task was enormous, the defilement of the record no mere fling or flirtation; it would take him to his grave, it would serve as his farewell and salutation, good-bye to the world and hello to posterity, an orphaned daughter of deceit and half-truths the product of Rumsfeld’s culling of these archives, unmucking of the grooves and burying of the unhinging details, arrogant Bowdlerizing of millions of pages of inconvenient facts and damning indictments of the culmination of America’s fifty-year long foreign policy terror of those with flatter noses and darker skins than ourselves – not a pretty thing when seen too closely, so had said Conrad. But he was dead and forgotten and who writes History except he that wins? A mere novelist could never comprehend the ingenious justifications of raison d’etát.
Rumsfeld was stone drunk when he looked at the pile and finished crafting his ideals for its coming variations. Like a dozen composers facing a minor key of Diabelli, one would inevitably surmount the others and be remembered unto the wider History. Rumsfeld placed his bet on the least bothersome to overcome the questioning rabble and assume primacy as being both definitive and antiseptic; for History was not kindred to Music. It demanded as its keeper not a Beethoven, rather a cipher.
He sipped his whisky and looked at the wall mirror, acknowledging his duty and gazing at the reflection of a man with so much still to give to his country. In that reflection, behind his own visage, slightly over his shoulder and smaller in the distance as it stood by the door, was the clear and imposing face of a middle-aged black man with a violent afro and long, sharp nose like the strake of a ship. Countenance grim and handsome, almost impossibly wise and noble from his deep set eyes to the sunken cheeks of an emaciated thinker, he stood, clearly dead, clearly animate, staring at Rumsfeld and holding his lips so taught that his jaw pulsed. There was absolutely no doubt as to the identity of Mount Misery’s watchful spirit; here stood a man dead for over a hundred years, here stood Frederick Douglass.
“Good evening, Mr. Rumsfeld,” he said.
Never thinking to doubt, Don looked into the mirror and squinted behind his twisted frames to see more clearly. “Good evening...uh, uh...sir,” he said.
“You stammer quite a bit,” said the spirit.
“Not everyday you find yourself, uh...talking to a ghost, you know.”
“You do it all the time, Mr. Rumsfeld. I’ve kept watch on you, sir. Would you kindly turn from that mirror and address a man to his face, instead of speaking to his reflection? There is courtesy, sir, even for a Negro, even upon Mount Misery.”
Rumsfeld acceded to the request and met the spirit’s eyes with his own. He was drunk and this could all be another hallucination, but if it were it was still one hell of a clear thing. Douglass stood perhaps five-ten, tall for his day, adequate even now; though sunken about the cheeks, the man was remarkably handsome, an absolute poise that held him erect and confident, not even remotely arrogant but rather assured, and clearly a man of learning. He wore a black suit and a short knotted cravat which hung above his vest; he was not translucent or spectral, but as corporeal and gainsayingly solid as Rumsfeld himself. His hands hung at his side, clenched lightly, head straight and proud. He raised his jaw in speech, nodding towards the chair from which Rumsfeld had been so recently plotting his campaign of lies. With this movement he meant to direct Rumsfeld to that chair, so that he might sit and face this small inquiry, be rendered unto a small justice.
“If you would like to sit down, Mr. Rumsfeld, please do. It is no insult to me.”
“Uh, yes...no, I uh...no, I would prefer to just stand here for now.”
“All the same we have some business to attend to, sir.” The spirit paused, hoping Rumsfeld understood. “This may take a while.”
“That’s ok, ok...I need to stand here a minute, uh, however long...”
The spirit positioned his hands on the inside of his jacket, pulling slightly downwards with his thumb so that the flanks of his vest were more visible. He wore a look of superb bemusement; the handsome dead stranger was almost mortified by the calm acceptance of these events evinced by his elderly host. Perhaps even a ghost can be surprised. “I must say, Mr. Rumsfeld, that you are taking my appearance with a remarkable degree of equanimity.”
Rumsfeld straightened yet again his wildly bent eyeglass frames. “I’ve seen bottles speak before – that’s all this is, uh, uh...”
“I assure you I am here, Mr. Rumsfeld.”
“But would you tell me any different if I were just, uh, er – seeing you?”
Pleased with Rumsfeld’s calm – a near preternatural removal from fantastic events – the spirit allowed that to be true, and dismissed it all the same. “It matters not, sir. You’ll have of tomorrow to decide whether or not such events as these did indeed come to pass on this night. For now, whether I am sprung from a bottle or in truth and veracity watchman of this sad, sad old mansion, it matters not. I am here. We shall have ourselves a chat, and I shall brook no contesting of this fact, Mr. Rumsfeld.”
“Fine, fine,” Rumsfeld said, waving anew with his active and dismissive hands, “I have no reason to doubt this, uh, this – event needs to be addressed, or, uh...whatever.” And the old man retrieved his whisky, quick to take a snort to steady his courage and calm his foul, ever-risible temperament.
The spirit arched his chin again, peeved. “Do you not know who I am, Mr. Rumsfeld? You speak to me as though I weren’t here.”
“Oh, I uh – yes, very well, I know, uh, I know very well who you are.”
“Then please address me accordingly, sir.”
“Frederick Douglass, I uh...I know damn well who you are.”
The sprit fixed its gaze upon Rumsfeld and clearly this answer had not been sufficient. “Do I know you, sir? Have we been intimate friends for some time, then? Did I not know enough courtesy to call to you as Mister Rumsfeld? Do I rate a lesser response, sir?”
Rumsfeld understood that he was speaking to a gentleman, and one whom had needed shed his own blood to be accorded such respect. He realized his error immediately. “I am sorry...uh, Mister Douglass.”
“Thank you,” said the spirit.
“All the same, uh – Mister Douglass, forgive me...you’re in my home here, we’re talking, uh, it’s late...you could call me ‘Don’ or something, uh, less formal...”
The spirit cut him off before his stammering reached conclusion. “No. That is not appropriate, sir. I had given much to be called Mister Douglass when I lived – and even though I am past that – living, breathing, man’s inhumanity and bile – this is not a social call. I would thank you to forget such informality, sir. You shall call me Mister Douglass.”
Rumsfeld stared into his whisky, baffled enough at last to speak freely. “But you’re dead...”
“So are the many taken home to God, Mr. Rumsfeld,” the spirit said, “and thousands more join them every day. But,” he said, leaning closer to let Rumsfeld see him more clearly, “they are not here. However, I am. And some might say, sir, that while you have indeed purchased this house which you call your home, perhaps I have paid an even greater interest in the possession of this old bundle of bricks atop Mount Misery. Do you know what I am speaking of, sir?”
Rumsfeld decided he had better sit down after all. He leaned into a chair and placed the whisky on a table beside him. “I think I have a very good, uh...a very good idea, yes sir, Mr. Douglass.”
“That is good,” said the spirit, nodding, “because I would have been most upset had you not paid attention to your recent readings. It is problematic to upset the dead, Mr. Rumsfeld – they have so much time to inveigle justice, and in their demise can speak very eloquently now that they’ve time to think things through, do you follow me, Mr. Rumsfeld?”
Rumsfeld looked away, assured now that he was face to face with an angry ghost. Not a pleasant prospect. “I think I see your point with exceptional, uh, uh...clarity, yes, I do see that, Mr. Douglass.”
“Good. I didn’t want to have to spend half the night telling you why it is I still haunt these rooms, Mr. Rumsfeld – why it is I still take such an interest in the goings on at what was, alas, once my home. But not like the home it is for you, sir.”
Rumsfeld was silent with his knowledge. “Yes,” was all he said.
The spirit stood perhaps five feet from Rumsfeld; his pallor filled the space fully and made him seem even closer than he was. Rumsfeld was terrified. For the first time, he got a good glimpse of the eyes of this man whom had intruded upon his night of falsehoods; the eyes were not cruel, yet miserably incensed all the same. There was something behind this phantom’s gaze that spoke of raw perplexity, and in that confusion an incipient rage.
“You know whose home this once was, Mr. Rumsfeld,” the spirit said.
“Yes, it, it, uhhh...had been a contentious subject...uh, the press...with some of the, uh, uh...”
The spirit interrupted him. “I have just said that you are aware of who once owned Mount Misery, sir – it was not a question. I know you are aware of a certain former owner, and you must, further still, be aware of some things which occurred here many years ago when I had been a living man. I know you are aware of him, sir.”
“I know of him, Mr. Douglass.”
The spirit gazed hard at the ashen Rumsfeld, now quiet and clearly moved to open fear. “Speak his name unto me, Mr. Rumsfeld. I haven’t heard him spoken of in a long, long time. Say that name, sir – prove to me you know who he is, say his name, and I shall be kind to you, sir.”
Rumsfeld looked at the ghost and for once did not stammer – in fear, he found his faculties assured and controlled, the rasping, stumbling gait of his cadence now clearly directed. “Edward Covey,” Rumsfeld said, and all was quiet again.
The spirit closed his eyes and smiled, clearly unto himself. It was apparent that so many memories returned to him in abundance, drawn merely from the mention of a name. “Edward Covey,” the spirit said, as if satisfied, “once again to think of my old nemesis, and standing here in the presence of such a cultured gentleman.” The spirit paused for a second, then opened his eyes again; they were moist with hatred. “Mr. Rumsfeld, why in the name of God did you buy this damnable mansion?”
“Mr. Douglass, why in the world would any of this matter to you now, all these years later?” Rumsfeld encouraged himself to be bold in his defense; it was merely an old bundle of bricks, after all.
“Have you ever been in a condition other than one of Liberty, sir?”
“In a sense, for the last six years I’ve not been exactly free,” said Rumsfeld.
Douglass rebelled against the suggestion, infuriated. “In a sense, is it, sir? Tell me then, you know what it is to be property, chattel, to be owned, do you, sir?”
“No,” said Rumsfeld, realizing his error and the limits of self-pity. “I do not, by the grace of God, know what that is, no.”
“Then why, again I shall ask – why, sir, did you buy this haunted old mansion? Knowing what you know of what once was common occurrence here, sir?”
“I didn’t think there would be a, ah, ahh...ghost here to, uh, uh...register his disapproval.”
“I am sorry it is only my presence which makes you think of Liberty and the costs of your own morality,” the spirit sadly spoke. “I would think you had enough of your own sense of rightness that my presence here would be extraneous, sir, even – immaterial...to your own morality, that is.”
“Perhaps I’m just thinking of it now, Mr. Douglass,” Rumsfeld said, and finally sat back, leaning his whole frame into the couch, crossing his legs so that they exposed his suddenly bony ankles, realizing he would have to be doing a lot of explaining to his interlocutor for the duration of the evening. And Rumsfeld wouldn’t be sober enough for some time to make it all go away by himself.
“Mr. Rumsfeld, allow me to ask you a question whose parameters range large and wide, its import so vast to men of wisdom: Do you know what ‘Good’ is, sir?”
“Good, for Christ’s sakes?” said Rumsfeld, exasperation inflecting each syllable; he had no intention of engaging in a free-ranging philosophical discussion with a ghost.
“Yes, Mr. Rumsfeld – as in the opposite of Evil, I mean to say, Good. Do you know what it is, I am asking you,” the spirit said, and then added emphatically, “and I mean to stay here until I have a satisfactory answer, sir.” The spirit paused and cast his mien severe yet again, registering umbrage with Rumsfeld at a quick glance. “And I would ask you cease taking the name of our Lord in vain in my presence, sir – He is, so to speak, more vital to me in my current state than even when I lived. And I was a righteous man, Mr. Rumsfeld.”
Rumsfeld removed his glasses and leaned forward on the couch; this furniture, too, had been a gift from a concerned businessman, an avionics whiz at General Dynamics. Wouldn’t that fella be interested to know what was happening upon this bit of graft right now. “Mr. Douglass, uh uh, errr uh...for Christ’s sakes what do you mean coming in here and tormenting me over some, uh, uh...abstract principle,” he said, waving his arms, a sure sign of Rumsfeld’s contempt and disgust.
“Spend all the time you like avoiding the issue, sir,” the spirit said, sanguine and not distracted, “I certainly have a lot of time to spend on your case – all eternity, if even a day. But let me vow to you now: an answer I shall receive, be it tonight or be it years from now when you lay dying. I shall find you, sir, and I shall have my answer. Now, again, Mr. Rumsfeld: Do you know what ‘Good’ is, sir?”
“All men know what ‘Good’ is, dammit,” Rumsfeld said, rising from the couch, pacing in front of it, furious at such generalizing which could only lead to vast sophistries.
“Mr. Covey was somewhat, on occasion, less than clear as to its meaning, allow me to assure you, sir.”
“I’m not a damn slave holder,” snapped Rumsfeld.
“And neither was Mr. Covey, sir – but you knew that, didn’t you?”
“I knew something about it, uh, uh...to be honest, I was somewhat less than clear on his, uh, uh...arrangements, Mr. Douglass.”
“But you were reading my autobiography, were you not? I felt I was concise of style upon those pages, sir – a great deal of time did I spend writing so that any man could see slavery for what it was. Was I less than lucid in offering from my soul these indictments born of all my people’s suffering?”
“The book was marvelous, Mr. Douglass – I uh, well – I had been drinking that night, I found the part where you explained how you came to this house to be, uh, uh...strange, not your fault, all mine. That’s life.”
“The whisky is not to blame, Mr. Rumsfeld. You know what you read. One thing I’ve learned of you is the superlative nature of your mind – yours is a solid intellect, sir. It was not the alcohol that engendered your oblivion – that was a conscious thing, wasn’t it? You didn’t want to know the true history of this place, is that not correct, sir?”
“Perhaps, perhaps,” allowed Rumsfeld, who again adjusted his ruined eyeglass frames and looked out the windows to the blackened Maryland night. The wind had kicked up again and the rain commenced anew; perfect conditions to be debating a ghost in one’s home, thought Rumsfeld.
“Then if you are so solidly fixed upon ignoring the truth, allow me to tell you here to your very face, sir – since I know the subject so exceptionally well. Mr. Covey was not a slave holder – he was a slave breaker, Mr. Rumsfeld. Can you conceive of such a terrible thing?”
“He sounded like a true bastard, if that helps you any,” Rumsfeld said, again maudlin, pitiable.
“It is not about that, sir. It is about the Truth – Our Lord suffered and died for Truth, with a capital “T”, you know this, do you not?”
Rumsfeld nodded, but did not speak. This greatly annoyed the spirit of Frederick Douglass. Too often, men had spoken to him not with language, but allowed a whip to address him instead. Any kind of non-verbal communication, save written, reeked of contumely arrogance to the memory hoard known as his spirit. “Sir, are you a religious man?”
“I go to church, yes, Mr. Douglass.”
“It is good that you allow for fellowship, but this has little to do with praising God, sir. I asked if you were religious, Mr. Rumsfeld.”
“I’m Presbyterian,” said Rumsfeld, stoic and shy of elaboration.
“Mr. Covey was a Methodist,” the spirit said, recalling it from long, long ago as if this trivia were heretofore lost and then remembered only at this second. “Mr. Covey knew Truth and perhaps he knew what was Good; yet still he abused men so they would be more pliant for others, the better to control them and keep them in their degraded, less-than-human state. I wonder why that was, Mr. Rumsfeld? It is curious, isn’t it, sir? You know, he was clever, the man who once took me into that barn beyond those homely windows, where he beat me and cursed me and took a whip to my hide until I soiled myself and begged God to take me home. He may have known Truth, or what the Methodists say it is – though I’m sure it is close to the speech of Presbyterians, too, when those good men speak of the larger verities. But he was damned forgetful when Truth ran into the hide of a Negro. All kinds of lies were born of this impasse, sir; what he knew of Good faded to oblivion when arose the question of money.
“He was clever, our Mister Edward Covey, because he was once a young man who owned property but had not the capital resources to make that farm something profitable. Slaves were useful to a man – how could they not be, they worked as cheaply as could be had, and one certainly did not have to waste undue energy or resources assuring for their welfare, Mr. Rumsfeld. A slave would be a useful item for our young farmer, Mr. Covey – but how to get one, when they were so expensive, and one had so little resources for capital outlay?
“This is why I say he was clever, Mr. Rumsfeld. For Mr. Covey found a way to get his slaves, and not only for free, but to earn money in the bargain. You see, Mr. Covey was a strapping fellow, and he absolutely despised Negroes. He hated a man like me with something akin to venom; why it is I do not know, for surely you can see that in my countenance I bear the mark of my white blood. Mr. Covey and I were racial brothers – of a sort. My father was a white man, Mr. Rumsfeld, but this coloring of mine made him see a true Negro before him, he didn’t bother with picayune niceties such as ‘mulattos’ and ‘quadroons’, he knew me for a Negro and nothing more – and that was enough for him to see me as something far less than human, sir. So for him to make the jump and treat me as one would treat any obstinate animal – you see, don’t you, how easy it was for Mr. Covey to take a whip in his hands and ‘correct’ me, don’t you, sir?
“Mr. Covey would get his Negroes from local slaveholders, and these were a special lot, sir. Slaves from all over the Old Line state were carted in with magnificent disregard as to their misfortune. They were men and women who, like me, had been branded as rebellious – troublemaking slaves, sir, the worst kind. A slave who heeds not the voice of the overseer is positively cancerous – such recalcitrance may serve to remind the other slaves of their own humanity, and thus their ability to say No; for being a man in the truest sense is to be a man who recalls how to say ‘No’ and is willing to use such a faculty in the face of tyrants, overlords and whip-wielders; and to stand up for himself and against the commands of any man, to flout the rules of oppression and deny the empowered thug, no matter his illusory greatness, the awesome and despicable supremacy of race; and all merely by brandishing the power of ‘No’. This is called Liberty, Mr. Rumsfeld.
“So Mr. Covey would take in an unruly Negro and use him like a plow mule for a year; and he was so clever that the slave owner would agree to pay him for that thing which Mr. Covey would have gladly done for free, had he merely been asked: beat down a man, sir, and a woman and on occasion children, too, so long as they were Negroes. Mr. Covey positively relished the idea of inflicting pain and seeing defeat in his brother man’s eyes. Here was a soul who thrived on submission, sir.
“As you know, I was one of those troublesome slaves. I wonder if you recall from my book, Mr. Rumsfeld, I gave the case of Demby from the days when I had been slave to another master, years before I made the acquaintance of this sinister Mr. Covey. Do you remember what I wrote, sir? Poor Demby had become unmanageable – and this wicked man Mr. Gore, our overseer, who relished his work with an appetite for cruelty of unimaginable facility, he had taken his shotgun and blown poor Demby’s brains out the back of his head, stained the swamp where Demby wallowed, he had dared say ‘No’ when Mr. Gore told him to get his behind out of the muck and back to the horsehides. And Mr. Gore was asked by the plantation master why he had done so, did this not seem to be vastly out of scale to poor Demby’s pathetic crimes? Mr. Gore memorably responded that ‘if one slave refused to be corrected, and escaped with his life, the other slaves would soon copy the example; the result of which would be, the freedom of the slaves, and the enslavement of the whites.’ I quote from my very own writing, Mr. Rumsfeld, these are words I will never be able to forget, even if I should like, throughout the vast unforgetting of eternity. Here was the logic of the oppressor, sir; when I rebelled, the man who called himself my ‘master’ could see the beginning of many fatal steps until such a time when he and his children would be hanging from the trees, strange fruit themselves and rotting, like the bloodthirsty uprising of Nat Turner or even the true slave revolution of Toussaint L’Ouverture. This is what I grappled with, sir. By rising only a little and being unruly, perhaps only to one day hope of being free, I was seen as a wild animal who sought to kill and rape and molest those who had once owned me. That is where the Law of the Whip wields its jurisdiction, Mr. Rumsfeld; a Rebel was I, and to Mr. Covey would I be sent, to make me whole and fit to be a good piece of property once again.
“In that barn, through that back window, on your property, sir, this is where myself and perhaps five-hundred other Negroes were taken over many years and beaten ‘till they were broken, like a man would tame a horse – excepting that the horse would be more humanely treated in the process. Allowances were always made, that, alas, not all of the Negroes entrusted to Mr. Covey would survive the sadistic jurisdiction of the Law of the Whip. Many of us died, and I can assure you that these deaths were more than wanting for their mercy, Mr. Rumsfeld. I believe you were allowed to hear the whipping of one of our number when you took your ill-fated walk the other night to close the barn door, did you not? You have knowledge of the power of the whip in the hands of a man who despises his prey, am I mistaken to hold this true? Mr. Covey could take flesh with every blow, sir, his was a much-practiced stroke of skillful evisceration, and there is only so much that a man may yield before he has yielded his life in the bargain of the lash. Many little boys and girls lost their parents within their precious earshot, and I wonder if you still might think that all men know what is ‘Good’, Mr. Rumsfeld?
“I wonder further, Mr. Rumsfeld, if you know what is ‘Good’, or whether you have mouthed a mealy platitude each time morality was commanded of you and you thought merely of transitory or personal gain in the bounty of the moment? How a man in your position, who has benefited so greatly from life – a man who directs the fortunes of nations, and a great nation at that – how you who have known so much plenty and so much good humour and the love of your family, and your own Liberty – my God, sir, that last thing, how precious it is! Know of it you have for all of your life! And know still further how this precious commodity is robbed from those who run afoul of this or that insane stricture devised by the malign hand of the overseer or the malcontented heart of the prison guard – Mr. Rumsfeld, help me! Tell me you know what is ‘Good’, convince me, I am in fear of standing in a room with a man such as could sit lounging on a back porch on hot summer days sipping a lemonade with great figures at his side, while within his vision stands the structure where men and women – human beings, sir, endowed by their Creator with dignity and rights – where these people died, sir, for the crime of being born a Negro! Forgive me the length of my speech, and I shall happily yield to you for the time you wish to respond, but please, sir – Help me understand how a man can claim to know ‘Good’ who could relax in such a place, and do so further from the exalted pedestal of great personal richness and luxury. I see the proof of your material wealth all ‘round me, sir – it is the poverty of your soul which commands my attention this weather-blasted night!”
Rumsfeld, silent and neither brooding nor boastful, allowed for the seconds to pass as the fine-edge of Douglass’s censure dulled against the wall of indifference he had erected. As always he was shrewd in defense and irate in his calm; diffidence had never been more cold, restraint never more purposeful. Time ate up the power of the indictment, and by refusing to answer to anything he’d been called to account for, Rumsfeld in effect escaped culpability by the mere ruse of remaining stoic; a wall he was, and no court and no jury had ever been able to make a wall hang.
“Why have you waited so long...Mr. Douglas, uhhh...to make your protests known? I’ve been here for three years, off and on. Why tonight? Why now?” he finally said.
“I’ve wondered about something for a long many months, sir, and I could take it no more. I had to make myself known to you.”
“And what was it that would push a damn ghost over the edge, Mr. Douglass?”
The spirit dropped his head, narrowed his eyes; for a second he looked distraught and even florid, no small talent for a ghost. “When you were on the telephone with a man in Cuba, Mr. Rumsfeld...”
“How would you know who the hell I was talking to?”
“I was so close, right over your shoulder...were I a living man and not a spectre, you should have felt my breath upon your shoulders, sir,” the spirit said, and his voice grew severe, brusque like Rumsfeld’s had become. “You were here one night and in great agitation. I followed you to the liquor cabinet, where you’ve been spending an awful lot of time these last months, and you picked up your telephone, those new, tiny, terrible things...and you were asking about a man with an Arabic name. His condition was of vital importance to you that night, wasn’t it? Tell me, you know of this. Admit your role, sir, and at least allow me rest that I was not unduly askance of your designs upon this man. Who was he?”
Rumsfeld knew at once who this should be, and decided it was not worth trying to fool his able questioner. “He is a very bad man, Mr. Douglass, a wicked beast...”
“To hear a man called a ‘beast’ chills me more than you could know, Mr. Rumsfeld.”
“Listen, Mr. Douglass – I appreciate your concerns. What was done to you was dreadful, an, uhh, ummm...iniquitous crime. But you have been dead a long time. The world has changed a lot. We have people who are trying to kill us all, Mr. Douglass – Americans, I mean to say kill the whole lot of us. The ‘gentleman’ you refer to is an, uh, uhhh...unreconstructed terrorist, sir. The only reason he’s still alive is that he was too stupid to pull off his part of an assignment to kill Americans by the thousands. A suicide operation, goddammit. Does the spirit realm know of what happened on September The Eleventh, sir?”
“I know,” Douglass responded, quickly. “You speak of it incessantly here, while you vacation. What is the man’s name?”
“Mohammed al-Qahtani, and he’s a terrorist.”
“And from here, on your phone, in this very living room – Mr. Rumsfeld, I know for a fact you were ordering that man to be tortured,” Douglass said, disgustedly.
“Damn you, that is not accurate! The United States of America does not torture!” Rumsfeld said, all of his rage at the charge heard so often these last months coming out in caustic defiance.
“You were asking if he had been allowed to sit down that day...”
“We have a duty pursuant to the Laws of our Constitution...”
“...you were furious that he had been allowed rest...”
“...and part of that is to protect our citizenry and homeland with vigilance...”
“...you demanded that the Marine guarding him be changed, as he was too ‘soft’ for the job...”
“...men are in this country right now, ‘sleeper cells’, and we need to take vigorous proactive measures to assure their being apprehended...”
“...you instructed the man in Cuba to have water dripped through a towel placed upon the Arab’s face, so that he may fear as if he were drowning...”
“...these men are not held to the standards of Geneva, and are illegal combatants...”
“...and it was too much for me to bear – not in this house, not in this age...”
“...franc tireurs...”
“...it was the one thing I could never tolerate, to allow to happen again in this house such a crime – it was then that I resolved to let you know of me...” Douglass said, and the banter – so remorseless, so useless, the two men not even hearing each other through the din of their dialectic cacophony – came to an end. Rumsfeld had no more to offer; but Douglass had to tell him why this had led to tonight, to standing here in the early-morning hours arguing with a drunken man who only half-believed this spirit was even here.
“You were directing the torture of a single human being from the tomb of my youth atop this mound called Mount Misery. You were calling all the way to Cuba at all hours of the night to make sure that one single man was not being allowed to sleep, or eat any save the most Spartan diets, or even sit down for more than a few minutes. Some nights you were in a frenzy. Some nights your melancholia was palpable. It was as if whether or not you yourself rested these squalid nights depended upon this one man being somewhere in dire pain – indeed, in fear of his life. You fed upon that man’s misery, sir. And it reminded me of a former master of the mansion, indeed it did. And it was too damn much for me to bear and stay incorporeal and quieted, Mr. Rumsfeld. And so I have made myself known, and called upon other tortured spirits to remind you of their presence, as well. Your terrorism forced us – all of We the Enslaved Dead – to act, sir.”
Rumsfeld thought that Douglass sounded like some damn Leftist, like the cowards who crowded the Mall on the weekends, summer-soldier pacifists and spring-weather patriots. Bigamist-moralists of the lowest order, dually wedded to incompatible aims demanding moral perfection in others while their own daily hypocrisies passed unknown, unwatched. Sickly, weak, cowards. He despised them; yet could not comment on their arrogance. Unlike the critics, he alone lived in a glass box. Where all of his foibles were on display, held to obloquy, imprisoned in a crystalline cage. (Like Eichmann in Jerusalem, he thought for a terrible second) To be called himself a “terrorist” – Rumsfeld slanted towards becoming unhinged, but remembered how to silence a deft adversary. He clammed up. Instinctively, hermetically – the wall had returned.
The silence extended for a minute, more. Rumsfeld turned away from Douglass, stared out the window at the bleakness and severity of the long Chesapeake night, admired the cleansing wrath of Nature and the workings of a simple wind storm. Lightning, tree strikes, fires and atmospheric mayhem. The chaos of the Heavens, torpid and Arcadian pastures upturned and sullied, a violence there was no defense from. To command disorder enthralled Rumsfeld; here were things even he could not order and rule, here were the workings of an omnipotent God. Douglass recognized where his subject had shifted his attention to, and realized he faced a wall. And part of him gave in, right at that very moment. The worst, most recondite and superficial abolitionist had never worn as daunting a mask as Donald Rumsfeld had, tonight.
“When did this become of you, Mr. Rumsfeld?” the spirit finally asked, unable to comprehend of a man so indifferent to the most basic morality, such that he refused to answer whether or not he could define “Good”.
“I’m growing old, Mr. Douglass,” Rumsfeld finally answered, “and have had a very long career. Many understandings of mine, uh, uh, ahhh...came to me over time, shall we say.”
“The calluses have thus been cumulative, is this correct, sir?”
“I’m not callous,” Rumsfeld said – spat it, really – and it was clear that this was a charge he had heard far too many times to face again with reserve or calm.
“I fear that you do not know yourself as others may see you, sir – when a man can empathize with his detractors, sometimes it helps him to overcome his flaws. Not every criticism is a condemnation, Mr. Rumsfeld.”
Rumsfeld scowled at the idea, one he found ridiculous. “Horseshit,” he said, murderous sarcasm inflecting the sputum-laced rasping. “You are, uhmm, uh, uhhh...unbelievably naïve, Douglass. I wish you could have seen your name in print with some of the company I’ve been forced to keep by these editorial writers – every murderer, despot, war-monger, there’s not one tyrant of the last fifty years some of these ‘humanitarians’ haven’t seen fit to lump me in with. Pol Pot. Noriega. That sonofabitch the Ayatollah. Henny-Penny the sky is falling! Rumsfeld is a war criminal, a butcher, a, a, ahhhh...a liar. Is that fair, Mr. Douglass? Tell me, you keep up on things, obviously you do – is this what you think about a man like me? Huh?”
Douglass had to admit that by now he was stumped, utterly and completely, by this fulsome enigma known as Donald Rumsfeld. “I have no idea what to think of you at this point, Mr. Rumsfeld. I must be honest. After all of this murky discourse and all of these unbridled banalities, all of this preening civility, obsequiousness, one moral cul de sac after another...I do not understand you, I can not comprehend of you, I have not found a single key to unlock what lies in your heart, where you have come from and where your morals will lead you, sir. I think that should one day someone attempt to write about you, they would certainly face an insuperable bottleneck, yes. A roman à clef needs a key to function, after all; your spirit is a closed gate, behind a wall and astride a moat, sir. You are locked away from humanity, Mr. Rumsfeld. Even the dead cannot reach you.”
Rumsfeld said nothing, then turned away for perhaps the twentieth time that night, snarling his lower lip, watching a spider scurry up the windowpane to safety. He mumbled to himself – “Nuts” – and that was all that he could muster.
“What is ‘Good’, Mr. Rumsfeld?” the spirit of Frederick Douglass asked, perhaps his final attempt to break this impasse and get a simple answer.
Rumsfeld looked at the far corner of the room, beyond Douglass’s shoulders and impressive bearing, and spied an old knick-knack his father had given him from a World’s Fair, hard to believe, but the St. Louis Expo, from 1904 – his father had been a mere toddler, and Don’s grandfather had bought the boy this little thing, a silver cup proclaiming the “Birth of An American Century.” It upset Don that he was connected by a mere generation to a time when America was a brand new power, cocksure and ready for her Imperial age – it made him realize how old he was, and how long ago was his youth.
“When I was a kid,” Rumsfeld began, adroitly ignoring, yet again, the simple question asked of him this night, “they had these glass boxes at the gas stations. They had these arms, and you would, you know...use them to grip the thing, what you were after, in this glass box. It was a prize, you would try to get a prize...they had them, at all the gas stations, it’s been a long time ago – when I was a kid. But it was hard, with all of these arms, to get your prize...they had them, you know...when I was a kid, I mean.”
Douglass, for a moment, almost felt sympathy for this babbling old man, hopelessly lost even in his own recollections – a stranger to his own past. “I’m not sure that I follow, Mr. Rumsfeld.”
“I mean to say that there are things you reach for, uh, uh...you know, uh, you try to get that prize and it is – fleeting. In a glass box. A hopeless metaphor. You can see it, you know – there it is, all of what you’ve hoped for, reached for, whatever – at the gas stations, they had them. But you had to – oh, for Christ’s sakes, Douglass, why do you keep bothering me about this stuff?”
“What is ‘Good’, Mr. Rumsfeld?” said Douglass, exhausted and awestruck by his unraveling companion, here very, very late in the night.
“You think I’m heartless, don’t you? You think you know me, eh? Let me tell you something, Mr. Douglass – I had dreams when I was younger, you bet I did. There was this old fella I knew, way, way back when – in the Sixties, we were both congressmen, my good pal Allard Lowenstein – and I’ll tell you,” he said, shaking his head and laughing, reveling in the times he spent with his good friend, “he was some piece of work. Uh, uh...a liberal – and I mean to say a crazy peacenik, totally against the war – that war, back then, not this one now. Another war. See, he and I – err, uh, him and me, whatever it is – we used to talk about starting a newspaper, I love newspapers, Mr. Douglass...we were going to go out in the country, way out in the sticks, and start ourselves a real, old-fashioned country broadsheet. Just me an Allard. A helluva nice guy. A real crazy liberal – he’s dead now. I used to have friends on the other side of the aisle,” Rumsfeld said, sad and remote, more talking to himself than anyone else, “it’s not like it is now, sir. No, no way – me and Allard, he was my friend, goddammit.”
“I’m sorry you’ve faced such loss, Mr. Rumsfeld,” the spirit said, and there was no mistaking how he intended the words to be taken. “I’m deeply sorry you’ve let your memories fog your conscience, and that you’ve lost sight of so many beautiful things, sir.”
The spirit had spent whatever reserve he possessed. There was sorrow in the face of what had been Frederick Douglass when he lived; surely he haunted Donald Rumsfeld not from within a crater of some unspeakable evil, but rather from a perch of true and incongruous confusion. This spirit that stood before Rumsfeld was positively shaken by the absurdity of his living neighbor’s callused heart; what was all so clear to the dead Frederick Douglass seemed utterly lost on the breathing Donald Rumsfeld. The spirit thought that in the interim since his demise, mankind had completely lost all points of reference to even the most basic morality. This new world was one of indefinite, ambiguous, dark-sided and amorphous evil, creeping and utterly banal. Every man a Machiavelli and even the oppressed biding their time for a chastened vengeance; if all of man’s intrigues were halted for only long enough so that the meek might finally inherit, would this Earth be any better off for said reversal of fortune? Liberty had become a poisoned chalice, thought the spirit; and the masses drank freely and with no regard outside of their selfish interests – how this age imbibed of the rot. Men were adrift from the moorings of ethics, and only too happy to find reason to celebrate their aimless doldrums; and this spirit welcomed that he was dead and didn’t have to live during such a time, where even the wickedness of slave holders paled in comparison to the obliviousness of this adrift age and its “great men”.
Rumsfeld walked to the far corner window and looked out into the night. This time of year, the sun was still two hours removed from the horizon. He would have given five of his remaining years of life to escape this relentless metaphysical grilling from a dead Negro slave and have peace for the remainder of his time in this cursed Maryland burial ground. Buried slaves, buried lies, buried dreams, hopes, futures – part muddle, part hecatomb, Mount Misery stood atop soil rich with death and rife with the wickedness a young republic had allowed stand for the unity needed to ensure its independence. Here in its essence was the bricolage of humanism and naked greed which had put the lie to so many of the promises made and since unkept of this nation born of the Enlightenment’s greatest ideals. Slavery had always been spoken of as America’s “original sin”; but, perhaps, Mount Misery allowed this monstrosity to be seen as our original irony, or a shared fever-dream of hypocrisy, a vast and irreconcilable paradox. Out his back window, Donald Rumsfeld could see only night, and the reflection in that darkness of a saddened spectral form who existed somewhere between death and life trying to find that one honest man who could tell him what ‘Good’ was, and where it might be glimpsed in this perilously disjointed world. Rumsfeld thought, with great knowing of the tragedy of this truth, that perhaps he was not the proper man to be asking these kinds of questions of.
“You speak with great eloquence, Mr. Douglass,” he finally said.
“Thank you, Mr. Rumsfeld but – please tell me that I’ve bored you to tears, so long as I might have moved your heart.”
“I’m not sure what truth is anymore, Mr. Douglass – but I can assure you that I’m moved by your pleas.”
The answer of this confused old man appalled the spirit. He was reminded of something of which he had written, many years ago, from an incident glimpsed even further back in time than that. “It is a man afforded a great luxury who can live with a poverty of truth, Mr. Rumsfeld,” the spirit began, moving closer to Don and commanding him by his relentless leer to refrain from the window and return his gaze upon the speaker. “A man mired in a penury so forgiving can be truly profligate in the wasting of his fellows – here is an indigence which is never called to account. I commend you, Mr. Rumsfeld – you have managed to elevate poverty to a virtue, indeed, a desirable condition for one to whom ‘Good’ remains an alien concept.”
“I can’t hope to match you in debate, Mr. Douglass.”
“Then strive simply to match me in – forgive the use of the term, sir – spirit. You were born in Illinois, weren’t you, Mr. Rumsfeld? The land of Lincoln – a great man, truly great. He shook my hand once, Mr. Rumsfeld – have you any idea what that meant in the Nineteenth Century, a white man taking a black man’s hand were it though his equal?”
“A Republican, too,” Rumsfeld said, somehow trying to bolster his own fading confidence.
“Mere words to which men ascribe when gathering in groups to fleece the people and fetch glory for themselves, sir. I don’t care what political party he was from, they were all scoundrels, probably still are, but – some of them rose above, Mr. Rumsfeld. Truth was something knowable to Abraham Lincoln. His heart was changed from when he was younger – he learned to look at a man like me and see a man, not a Negro. But can you see why I am saddened that it be considered a virtue for a white man to merely take the hand of a Negro? That I should have to justify this thing? That this was ‘Truth’ then and that it seems to be lost to men, now, what ‘Good’ meant, then? Can I tell you what ‘Truth’ meant to me, when I was a younger man?”
“I would not seek, at this point, to dare try and stop you, Mr. Douglass.”
“Very well, Mr. Rumsfeld. This too was in my little book, of which I was so inordinately proud upon its completion. I was proud because I could tell some of the stories which had hurt and effected me so – things of unimaginable brutality and evil, sir. I sought to illustrate, at one point rather to the middle of my narrative, what ‘Truth’ could mean to the Negro slave. I told the story of a black man who ran into my old master, Colonel Lloyd, one day when he was walking up a road. Now, Colonel Lloyd owned a thousand slaves, Mr. Rumsfeld – can you but imagine? A thousand human beings, the property of this one stout old white gentleman! He couldn’t be expected to know them all – would he be expected to know the names of all of his pigs, cows, the ducks that congregated in the swampy ponds upon his back four-hundred acres? No, of course not; these were animals, too – just like the Negro slave, to his eyes.
“The colonel saw this man and asked him to whom he belonged. The poor slave answered ‘Colonel Lloyd’, whom he obviously did not know at sight. The colonel proceeded to interrogate him about how he was treated, and the foolish, ignorant slave said several things of an uncomplimentary nature to the colonel. A few weeks passed, and that poor man was rustled up one day, tied and cuffed, and then shipped away. I recall what I wrote, sir, forgive me if I was somewhat enamored of my own prose. ‘Without a moment’s warning,’ I wrote, ‘the man was snatched away, and forever sundered, from his family and friends, by a hand more unrelenting than death. This is the penalty of telling the truth, of telling the simple truth, in answer to a series of plain questions.’ As slaves, the Negro learned he had to lie, at all times and to all white men, for mere survival. Do you see why I, when I became a Freeman, placed so high a value on truth? Why it means so much to me even today, long after mere lies could ever harm my old bones again? Mr. Rumsfeld, somehow I’ve just got to get you to speak in one beauteous moment of ‘Good’ and ‘Truth’ – I fear the Heavens may fall should I succeed, but Oh, what a deluge of the verities and be they welcomed without scorn, sir!”
Rumsfeld laughed at the imagery, and even forgave that he was being so openly mocked. He was far past caring at this point. Whatever he could do to get sober, make this long-winded gentlemen in his home be off with himself, he would accept. The fella sure had been entertaining, though. “Mr. Douglass, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. You see, uh, uh...I never, not for a moment – you have to believe me – never thought, could have, no...never thought I would be buying this house and getting a tenant in the bargain. Didn’t think you’d be here, still be here. Didn’t know I’d have to answer for crimes – awful, bestial crimes, no doubt – that occurred long before I ever thought it might be nice to have a place close to the District for me to get away to, to relax with just me and Joyce. I have to face a lot of questions, Mr. Douglass – uhh, ummm, not a lot of people are too thrilled with old Don Rumsfeld these days. But I’ll tell ya – one question, two questions, whatever it is – one question I never thought I’d have to face is whether or not I knew what ‘Good’ is, Mr. Douglass, and you can bet your bottom dollar on that.”
Douglass was far more restrained in his response. Clearly, he had wasted a tremendous amount of breath trying to reach this horribly cynical old man. “Perhaps that is just the problem, Mr. Rumsfeld. Perhaps the biggest problem is that a man in your position was never asked even the most basic questions. I try not to be political but – sir, I apologize, but if a man doesn’t value ‘Good’, can’t even say what ‘Truth’ might be – how can such a man value peace, hope, friendship between brothers, the universal love of our Creator? Mr. Rumsfeld, for God’s sakes indeed – how could a man like you ever have been entrusted to guide a nation through its most daunting hours, when before you all you see is opposition or conspiracy?
“I know now why you bought this house, sir – for me, at root, what I want to know most is, how could you sleep in it?”
“Forgive me, Mr. Douglass, but all the altruists have packed up and gone to live in Bedlam,” said a condescending old man, convinced he was, more than ever, the last realist and the last sane man still alive.
“Altruism,” said Douglass, resolved at last to finish with this business and cease his haunting of the formidably entrenched Donald Rumsfeld. Through sheer obstinacy, the old man had bested a ghost – indeed, had shown more patience than the dead. “Mr. Rumsfeld, I am reminded of another man I had some queer run-ins with, and though they were memorable, I can’t say they were always welcome. You make me think of old John Brown. I always wondered about Brown – was he that convinced of the Negro’s equality, or was he just a raving madman with a smooth-bore musket and five fanatic sons? He got himself a wife and had her bear him an army, Mr. Rumsfeld – that always left me cold, even though he was fighting for my people’s Liberty, it always made me a little raw thinking of him taking those fine young men and making them as militant and as death-loving as was he. But he never would have pleaded to anything accept the highest ideals for even his lowest crimes. The Browns slaughtered men in their sleep in Kansas, sir – cut their throats and spared not even the lads, mere adolescents. But he only spoke of the highest ideals. Every cut of his terrible, swift sword was but for the glory of God, and woe to him that stood across John Brown’s annihilating path. ‘Altruism’, as you say, Mr. Rumsfeld – it is curious, but for once I share your skeptical view of things.
“He could be sly, but Mr. Brown never did things save someone was watching. God forbid the man might face approbation for whatever he’d accomplished, but I think, to Mr. Brown and to certain other types, the ability to shrink from commendation is in itself their greater triumph. Don’t you think so, Mr. Rumsfeld? That there are certain of men who would rather hear the accolades and sound the alarums, while at the same time staunchly resisting man’s tribute and seeking to pass on glory only unto God? Do you not think this is a kind of hubris worthy of the most archly cynical and arrogant man, sir? You see what I am driving at, I presume? That perhaps the man who gives the most of himself – or appears to, as if by calculation – is, in fact, perhaps the most decidedly self-possessed and avaricious? That he’s not an altruist at all? Now there’s a thought – through meekness this false altruist assures his godhood. You wouldn’t want to consider whether this theory might apply to anyone else we both know, now would you, Mr. Rumsfeld?”
Rumsfeld turned again to the window. This haunting had ground him down to a cold, icy powder. “No, Mr. Douglass – I couldn’t possibly think of any man germane to this discussion who might meet your criterion.”
The spirit of Frederick Douglass didn’t dare think it was possible, but a living, breathing man was losing interest in the testimony of another who had reached the other side, and returned to report upon his observations. The man who had inherited the mantle Master of Mount Misery was an inscrutable, fleshless sort the likes of which dumbfounded the poor deceased spirit. Had he not been paying attention to all of the strenuous and moving arguments put forwards as to why a great man of his enlightened era should think twice about occupying the throne atop a kingdom of evil? That even if Mr. Douglass were the figment of a bottle, released in the vapors – a spirit born of spirits and then observed – that there were other kinds of ghosts which could haunt a place? Ghosts of memory. Ghosts of repression. Long unheard voices of the dead who lived and died and were never even truly sure of their actual age – men reduced to living like animals, held as property. Could not Rumsfeld see why this might bother the mind of a man who was perhaps not over-sensitive, but merely adroit to the sensibility of common decency? Who was this strange Master, this warrior-plantation owner, what kind of a man could leave a ghost left in outright unease regarding his companion’s absurd disinterest in matters of the deepest – yet most basic – humanity? The spirit could not leave just yet; there was still further one thing to be addressed, so that Mr. Rumsfeld would be clear that while a slave came to Mount Misery, a man one day left it.
“You realize, Mr. Rumsfeld, that we have not finished with our discussion of my treatment at the hands of Mr. Covey, sir?”
“I finished your book, Mr. Douglass. I commend you for your toughness.”
The spirit sighed. He felt Rumsfeld was still not clear as to what kind of toughness his rebellion had required. “Mr. Rumsfeld, I thank you, but I’m sure you speak of my mere physical strength, when what was required to stand against Mr. Covey was far more to do with the indestructible nature of my soul, rather than the rawhide fury of my bones.
“You know what led to the final confrontation. As best as I can tell – for you know I am sadly unclear as to my true age – I was sent to live with Mr. Covey when I was about fourteen or fifteen years old; times have changed, but I assure you, I was still just a boy. But I was an unruly boy, and I was to take man-sized punishment for my derelictions against the Law of the Whip. Mr. Covey, plainly, beat hell out of me for the best part of six months. Then came the day when he learned to beat me no more.
“I have written in my little volume how at one point, to my sadness, Mr. Covey had ‘broken’ me. Between the exhaustive labor and his pleasured frenzy in beating the skin off of a colored man’s back, I had become docile and poor in spirit. Yet one day I reclaimed my old self, and it took my near death to push me over that brink, and back to the realm of the living. It is perhaps fitting that all this began on the hottest day of the year – when even the temper of a broken man can be frayed and set to explode.
“I fell ill while fanning wheat in the unforgiving mid-day sun. Mr. Covey stood for no slave failing in his work, even when he was near to death from his exertions. He inflicted upon me a vicious whipping, and busted open my skull with a blow from a hickory slat; from this I bled, and in no small measure, and even now, perhaps you can see the scar I took from this enlightened Christian man wielding his dark-ages cudgel.
“I ran away, Mr. Rumsfeld. I begged another man to take me in, to let me live with him, but instead I was returned to Mr. Covey. When I returned to this torment, Mr. Covey was waiting for me in the barn, it is the same barn which stands now on your property, so many, many vile deeds had been done within that structure you may look upon from time to time – how could you stand it, Mr. Rumsfeld? Does it take a ghost to make you see the anguish of ages past, right before your eyes?
“Mr. Covey attempted to place me in a length of rope, which he tried to affix to my legs. Sir, I assure you – I know that had I not fought him then, he meant to kill me. I had seen his evil countenance close to my face many times before, but at this moment, the glean in his eyes was one of Satanic rage. Here was a killer, Mr. Rumsfeld. He aimed to kill me – that broken ‘me’ he assumed was before him – but instead he found a man prepared to die, but at least die fighting.
“We fought and struggled and bled for two hours. At a final moment, he could see I would not yield. Mr. Covey backed away, and during my final six months on his infernal estate, he would think to berate me, and then think better yet again. I recall what I wrote, sir: ‘He would occasionally say, he didn't want to get hold of me again. ‘No,’ thought I, ‘you need not; for you will come off worse than you did before.’ It felt good to bleed in the cause of my own Liberty, sir. The stripes which before had been handed out in abundance by a malign injustice now were replaced by stripes born of principled resistance. I was free, from that moment, damn the law and the attitudes of that time, from that moment when I resisted forcefully the wicked power of a man known with pride as a ‘nigger breaker’, I was free; it was only a matter of time for when I could make my escape and claim my rightful status as a Freeman. Later, I came to some prominence, as I’m certain you are aware, sir. And it all started here, Mr. Rumsfeld. In the house and out the back and on the property and within the barn where you have come to call home for your rest and vacation, where you sit and relax with many men of importance – and some of them, and how could this be, great-grandsons and granddaughters of slaves such as myself – right here, sir, this is where I was liberated. But, forgive me as I recall how rare a case was mine – so many, many, many other poor slaves met their end and doom in the barn atop Mount Misery, sir. Here was the wickedest crime man has ever conjured – daring to possess his brother as chattel – and here you sit, amongst precious and dainty things, relishing your power and good fortune. Do you not see what might bring a man back from his eternal rest to offer unto such an occupant his most strenuous of protests? Sir? Mr. Rumsfeld? Can you even hear me?”
Rumsfeld continued to stare at the far horizon. Abruptly, perhaps just like that, the barest glimmer of a sunrise appeared distantly removed and away from the Chesapeake Bay. A lovely and perhaps warmer day lurked in that burgeoning sunrise; assuredly, given some luck, it would be warm enough to dry the ground a bit and dissipate this cragging, joint-swelling fog that had been plaguing the old man. There was hope in the rise of a fresh sun and a quick new day. Rumsfeld looked for the sun to rise and liberate the night of its fleshless denizens, and then noticed that, while the reflection of the room remained, the occupant of that reflection whom had tormented him so for these last hours had vanished. Without so much as a farewell, Frederick Douglass and his spirit had given up on reaching harmonious accord with Donald Rumsfeld – and instead, merely retreated to the shadows, returned unto the ether.
Should he have done more than merely notice, Donald Rumsfeld made not a peep. His icy stare continued, frames bent and twisted atop his irritated slices of eyes, his lower lip curling a bit thinking of some of the grievous judgments made upon his person by a well-spoken ghost who had no idea what perils lurked in this unmoored and adrift modern world. Rumsfeld had started his encounter with Frederick Douglass and his spirit in a condition of woe and fear; largely, through time and the rantings of age subjected to himself the tenor of which Douglass had made most vent, Rumsfeld realized all he was really facing was just another critic, the type of which he had dealt with for years. Don Rumsfeld would outlast the critics; even in retirement, even atop Mount Misery, they had never made a critic who could tell a man like him any goddamn thing worthwhile.
The world, the critics, the conspirators, even well-meaning acquaintances and helpful insiders – the whole lot of them, had always just been wasting their breaths.
