Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Four hours after the phantom security breach, Don Rumsfeld was nowhere near sleep as he sat, engrossed, in his favorite old chair, one lone lamp directed at his head, lighting the object he held and glared intently upon as he followed the words printed within its pages. He’d changed into his pyjamas and had thrown an old blanket around his midsection that Clare Wolfowitz had given Joyce a few years back, thick and heavy and damn good and warm. A cup of tea steamed away on a small table; it was a pungent amber brewed double-strength and spiked with a jigger of whisky. With a slice of lemon, Rumsfeld had made himself one potent, warming grog. It was the perfect late night drink for doing some intense reading.

Rumsfeld had opened The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and read the first paragraph and that had been the end of his plans for sleep that night. Two sentences in, he came upon the following lines:

I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday.

He’d wanted crisp, clear English and by God he’d found it. The more he read, the more the style enveloped him. Pages went by, one grog led to two, and Rumsfeld had entered a deep trance that only the best storytelling can engender. The wind shook the windows and a clock ticked away in the living room, but other than that there was no sound, not even any Chopin or Bach. The idea of a man not even knowing his age astounded him. It was a perfect way to illustrate, in the first paragraph of the book, exactly the level of de-humanization slavery had achieved; a man rendered as ignorant as a horse. Don tightened his jaw and narrowed his eyes; with age playing such a role in his own recent intemperance and maddening discord, he was aware of the perils flush for a man looking back upon the years cut down like so very many ripe stalks in a field. A man not having even a record of his lost time in either comfort or bedevilment was disconnect itself, was angst and unknowing to even one’s own past; the idea of such a thing greatly disturbed him. He read on.

Rumsfeld had never read Douglass’s book before, but he certainly was glad he had the chance now. No matter how, or by whom, it got there in his kitchen. Strange, indeed. But fortuitous. By five a.m., Rumsfeld finished the book, took one last swig of grog, and went up to bed, resolving to sleep late, at least ‘till ten. He was filled with admiration for Douglass. As a boy, the slave had taught himself to read while running errands in the streets of Baltimore, he’d do double-time on the march and then take a few minutes to study his vocabulary – and this in an era when teaching a Negro to read was a capital offense in much of the South. The book he’d used for guidance was The Columbian Orator, he’d bartered a copy from some young Irish lads by giving them bread in return for the book. Bread for books, and how lightly education was taken these days. Douglass had been a rare breed of courage, audacity and intellect.

The young Douglass had escaped and made himself an author, he’d written his Narrative with his own words, in his own style, he’d insisted on it – and compared to the florid, orotund effusions littering the Introduction written by William Lloyd Garrison, how fortunate it was indeed that Douglass had demanded this freedom. It was a gripping story, Rumsfeld had read few others so stimulating, but it was the style – he’d cost himself a night’s sleep to finish this gem, and was pleased with every lost minute and every gained paragraph. Frederick Douglass could flat out write.

Douglass had gone from bondage as a youth to become the human face of abolition as a man. He was so eloquent a speaker that, initially, the crowds come to watch him tell firsthand accounts of the horrors of slavery refused to believe he had ever been a slave, for he was far too bright and ranging of reference. Before Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois as pioneers, long before X and MLK as dueling visionaries, and as a writer generations before Ralph Ellison or Richard Wright, there was the first truly great black American, and that man had been Frederick Douglass. That a man such as this had ever been property should have been the shame of the nation; but Douglass had made sure that even the more common folk were accounted for in his book, rife as it was with appalling tales of inhumanity and degrading violence, the only means of law known to a system of such hideous oppression. The Narrative was always a human story first, and Douglass’s life had been far beyond merely worthy as a subject which could encapsulate all the evil that was the slavery system.

There were other things in the book that Rumsfeld knew about, but perhaps with deliberate disregard and unknowing had he not pursued them. They were less sanguine corollaries to the wizardry of Douglass’s restrained, modern prose. Things that made clear why perhaps someone was taunting him by leaving a copy of the Narrative lying around in his kitchen atop a hill called Mount Misery. Whoever that person was...they definitely had an agenda, no one could doubt that.

Rumsfeld was slightly drunk and hit the pillow snugly. His mind cooled down, yet still he wondered as he crossed over to sleep how that book had made its way into his kitchen, and who possibly could be leaving so many books, so obviously interconnected, around his sorrowing summer home.

He slept for five hours, never once dreaming, the sound of the violent windstorm creaking the floorboards and rocking the gables, calming him, easing him, away from some very unsettling thoughts associated with this house and Mr. Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

* * *

By noon the next day, Rumsfeld had eaten his breakfast and drank four cups of coffee, read the newspaper and checked his E-mail, talked by cell to the half-dozen secret service agents ringing the property, and informed them of his intentions of taking a walk, alone, around the three-and-a-half acres he owned here on the Chesapeake Bay. The decision to get away had been made final after five minutes spent listening to that loudmouth ass-kissing rodomontade Rush Limbaugh on the AM dial; Rumsfeld had always despised him, couldn’t tolerate his smug and sanctimonious lecturing, didn’t think he knew shit from shinola when it came to foreign policy and, above all, had always been shocked by how much the man would eat during some kind of Republican fundraiser. There he’d be, across the table from Prince Bandar or somebody with real class, and he’d order two filets from the banquet waiter or have a big slab of chicken with an entire bowl of ranch dressing for the frites. The man ate like he was at a strip-mall buffet. He spoke with his mouth full and made crude ethnic jokes during coffee, he’d fart and act like it had been someone else, his collar was always soaked with sweat and he wore horribly loud ties – an absolute lout. Several Mormon businessmen with bu-koo bucks confronted Andy Card once after a fundraiser and wanted to know why they had let somebody who was obviously high on drugs into a thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner. Nobody had known at the time, but those Mormons were dead on target.

Now the sonofabitch was talking about the election and how he wouldn’t be “carrying anybody’s water anymore”. Rumsfeld wondered if Limbaugh was talking about him. The very idea that a goddamn disc-jockey from Pittsburgh, a rank curiosity of the Age of Invective, that this obfuscator should be leveling rifles at Don’s execution – Rumsfeld had put in twenty-hour days, he didn’t need a “water boy” – the man was a braggart and a buffoon, etiquette was an insuperable Russian novel to that jackass – Don turned off the radio, called the secret service boys, and went to the closet to try on his new shoes. The weather had let up outside. It still wasn’t raining, and had reached a balmy forty degrees. Screw Rush Limbaugh. Don would never have to make nicey-nice with that toad again.

Joyce had ordered his new shoes from an outlet store on the Internet. She loved shopping on the computer. It was fine by Don, he needed a new pair of weather-proof shoes and she was just the ace to track a pair down. He opened the box and thought how nice it would be to go off the paths and into the woods; it said right on the box, “100% Unconditional Guarantee: These Shoes are Skidproof and Water Tight.” They were kind of spiffy, too. Joyce had a good eye for things like that. He looked in the hallway mirror, admired his new sweater and faded Levi’s, put on a lined canvas jacket, and thought the green and black shoes with a kind of “duck bill” pattern on the toe made him look like a real outdoorsman, fit to go herd cattle with Cheney out in Wyoming. Or whatever Dick did when he went home out West, besides hunting, of course.

Don had taken a few hundred yards of steps down a path before he came to the first rough area. A branch had been blown down in the night. He decided to get off of the path and go move the thing, maybe drag it back to the barn and chop it up for kindling later; or maybe just chainsaw the mother, his very definition of a good time. Don took two footfalls into the high grass that had been inundated by rain for the entire week, and his feet, both of them, were immediately and totally soaked by the ground water seeping through the bottom of his guaranteed-waterproof shoes. He considered the rottenness of this latest indignity, totally unforeseen; simply off for a stroll to remove some debris from his property, he took one misguided step from the path and now found himself in a quagmire. The mud was glutinous, cold and vindictive; how else to describe the mere earth, now joined in collusion with the other elements, seemingly only to infuriate him? Rumsfeld looked to the sky and came within an enraged-breath of saying something really bad to the man upstairs; but he thought better of it, and stormed, sloshing with each step, back to the house. Furious, he took off the shoes and saw how water came through at virtually every seam. His socks were ruined, smelly Maryland mud clinging to them like tar. Rumsfeld shook with cold, sneezed, swore legal action against the shoe company, and fired the faulty footwear at the far wall, where they left big muddy footprints on the Biscayne-azure paint. He’d have to clean that off, or Joyce would have his balls. She’d picked out the paint colors herself, and was very proud of how “modern” she’d rendered the inside of this two-hundred year old mansion.

Don made another pot of coffee, and grabbed the Columbian Orator. The thing was kind of addictive. Education in the 19^th Century had been a far different ideal than that which passed for literacy today. Long excerpts from Pitt the Younger would be bookended by perorations of Cato or exhortations to Republican virtue by Roman legates. The scathing and dramatic philippics of acid-tongued Cicero delighted him, and he resolved to work some of the Roman’s more caustic diatribes into his own forthcoming denunciations – for Don felt he had faced his share of Catilines, too. The language was occasionally hopeless but some of the pieces were enthralling. It was nice to read something that hadn’t been prepared by a RAND analyst or some other drybones scribe. So he missed out on his walk. A good book was a nice afternoon, too.

One of his personal agents had belatedly arrived around one o’clock with a six-pack of Budweiser, Rumsfeld having then completely befuddled him by saying “Good job, Rosencrantz” upon delivery, the man formerly known as “Sparky” having no frame of reference for this scorn he now faced from old Rummy. With the old man, the way he told a joke was evinced so sarcastically as to make a man wonder where the humour was supposed to be behind all of that snarling. Rumsfeld was just trying to be sociable, and dismissed the lunkhead with asperity, off to the kitchen to crack open a beer and make himself a couple of scotch eggs. They gave him heartburn, especially with his patented Coleman’s mustard sauce served alongside (laced with cumin, Hungarian paprika and whisky), but Don was so resentful of the world this day that he simply didn’t care whether it killed him or not; there are times when what a man needs is cheap alcohol and fried foods, and such was a time this day for the lugubrious master of Mount Misery. He ate his eggs, belched mightily, and retired to the old comfy chair for some reading time, fantastically alone.

Rumsfeld was re-reading the marked-up sections of the slave dialogue when he heard the steps creaking in the hallway, just like a pair of boots clomping down in heft and rhythm, deliberate and slow. The wind wasn’t blowing, he wasn’t sure what could be making the house shake like that. It was enough to make him put down his Budweiser. As he did so, a sound like a length of chain being drug through the living room greeted his ears, and as he got up to investigate, his eyes caught yet again in their haunted periphery the moving shadow of a vast head of hair with that hatchet-ridged nose carving down the middle. When he turned to face it, the phantom was gone. He was seeing things again. Hearing them, too. It had been a rough week, but this was too much. Don resolved to get to a doctor as soon as Joyce arrived, sometime next week, right before the holidays. He had also eaten his last over-spiced food for a long time to come. Scotch eggs, whisky, coffee and beer – he was eating like Krook must have been right before Dickens conjured him out of existence by having him spontaneously combust. Gas, indigestion and florid depression – Bleak House, indeed.

Don dumped his beer and called one of the agents. He was going into town, goddammit, and get out of this place for a few hours before it made him nuts. He had a Chevy Suburban on the property, and so long as a few agents went along, he was free to take a drive during the day. To hell with the world; Don Rumsfeld was going to go look at antiques for a few hours and get his wife a nice new something-or-other for Christmas.

As soon as he switched the cell phone off, the sound of a door slamming shut upstairs clamored through the house. A goddamn draughty old house at that. So old and draughty, Don thought, it was almost like having a goddamn ghost in the place.

* * *

Rumsfeld, again beset by the sleeplessness so often the bane of enforced idleness, walked down the main stairwell and poured himself a snifter of the Armagnac that had not met with his approval the night before. With nothing other to drink than the ’61 Château Petrus which Don feared was nothing more than high-falutin’ Frog vinegar anyway, it was that or another long draw of grog or straight Scotch. Leery of the whisky after the hallucinations and in need of entrenched sleep which would not be aided by strong tea, he gave an aggravated sniff to the brandy and slugged back a jigger full in one draught. Settled and less jittery, he ended up where he always seemed to when he couldn’t sleep, in the old cozy chair he so adored and which had followed him from the middle-class beginnings of Georgetown to the exulted manor of Chesapeake Bay. It was three-twenty-seven a.m.; another night of rest shot to hell, he put on his glasses and began reading a book he’d meant to finish for some weeks. He had understandably been loath to continue with the present tome’s lessons, for he feared that someday, perhaps while he was still alive, someone might be writing a book very much like it, only directed at himself.

The book in question was The Battle of Dienbienphu, written by a young Algerian named Jules Roy, and once the standard historical manual for journalists with serious intent during the exhaustive campaign of Khe Sahn in 1968. Westmoreland’s arrogant stranding of his Marines at that isolated firebase had so much, in damning profusion, in common with this battle that had doomed Euro-Imperialism just fourteen years before that even the press had reasonable concerns about trying again a strategy which had led to such a fiasco. The Frenchman sent to fight this battle, Henri Navarre, erroneously thinking his duty was to defeat those “scraggly bastards in black pyjamas” of the Viet Minh, was about to be run out of Southeast Asia in an ignominy matched only by the Italians of 1896, crushed by Menelek’s brave Ethiopians at Adowa, or the Spaniards upon the Rif in 1923, slaughtered by ferocious Berber tribesmen – and who did not take prisoners. Rumsfeld knew his history, could stand to learn a thing or two about the French misadventure in Indochina, but – he wondered what the hell the old friend whom had given him this book could have been thinking, really, at this particular time to make a gift of a volume such as this.

The Algerian was relentless in damning this “stupidest kind of imperialism”, as he called Navarre’s folly at the behest of the doomed Fourth Republic. Roy summed up the other-worldly conceit of desk-bound bureaucratic warriors as encompassing “the clearest ideas, when translated into the language of the Staff College...[become] complicated and buried in memoranda...metaphysical directives which cover masses of typewritten paper. A spade ceases to be a spade, difficult airstrips are practicable, hilly country opens up before battalions...and the Air Force completes all of its missions despite adverse atmospheric conditions. But on the spot men become men again and mountains mountains.” Don read the passage, re-read it again, underlined, excised and emended, all within his alerted mind, set to trigger with the slightness and surcease of the paranoiac; and he closed his eyes and saw Baghdad neighborhoods in flames, billion-dollar weapons systems ineffectively squandered and high-tech albatrosses rendered useless by clusters of detritus picked from trash heaps, wrapped in gobs of clammy Semtex, and triggered to a violent bright-orange vengeance by disposable cell phones.

The first night reading, Rumsfeld, ever on guard for impropriety and insult, was convinced his old acquaintance had been trying to send him some kind of message. Later, he realized that Douglas Feith, knowing absolutely nothing about military affairs, wouldn’t be capable of such an insult; he’d probably just bought the damn thing from a discount rack in a chain bookstore out in Fairfax, just the kind of place a dunderhead like that liked to spend his free time.

When he had been younger and seeking to grasp influence with the military by trying to think like them, Rumsfeld would read military history for days on end, weeks if he could, dozens of volumes still here on his shelves at Mount Misery and heavily annotated in the crisp, argumentative hand of this reader who made such good use of the wide margins so thoughtfully provided by the publishers. They may have had men like Rumsfeld in mind when they allotted these broad white borders to bracket the text and allow the eye a canvas for disagreement; they served the critic-reader beheld of Rumsfeld’s mania to great effect, where one didn’t merely read a book, one argued with it, from first page to last. And some of Rumsfeld’s interpolations upon these mouldy pages were quite quarrelsome, indeed.

While Navarre had been despised by the sabre-and-dreadnought cognoscenti for generations as reward for his imaginatively deprived tactics in the face of the Viet Minh, Don came to see his plight in more sympathetic terms – perhaps in recognition of how little sympathy had been give he by the press, crowing sarcastic and pompous in the manner of after-the-fact prophets as his lightning war faded to a drizzle of endless occupation. As he read, Rumsfeld saw virtue where others saw pig-blindness; resolution where many decried obduracy and near-catatonic complacency. Here was a genuine colonial warrior, Navarre, of the same stripe and vigor and horizon bleu bloodline as Franchet d’Espérey or de Lattre (but also the sinister putschist Raoul Salan), yet not remembered save in any fashion short of the vituperative. Hadn’t the despised general shown the tenacity required of an anti-insurgency struggle, had he shown not only élan but, more importantly cran – had he not, Don thought, stayed the course and given the French civilians room to get the hell out of Indochina?

So it was that as Don read this book, he learned much he never knew about the First Indochinese War, and saw disturbing parallels to the current intractable deadlock in another country, now, of a name which made him visibly wince when said aloud. He came to argue with Roy upon his very pages, scribbling marginalia in a petulant hand, divvying out criticism in spates of acerbic, quick-drying black ink. And he came to hate this journalist who so blithely condemned the entirety of a man’s career, as if the “chamber pot” of Dienbienphu spoke definitively and completely of a man’s full life. The aspersion had a familiar, daunting ring to the ears of the old man.

Rumsfeld also knew that there was a long-standing rumor in both State and within the bowels of the Pentagon – within the A-ring where clandestine worldwide misery had been planned for fifty years – that the real architects of the Dienbienphu operation had been the Dulles brothers, eager to have France perform an ill-conceived strategic sacrifice which would drive them out of the whole of Southeast Asia. From there, who but the United States could be powerful enough to continue the great anti-communist crusade? A conspiracy theory, thought Don, but perhaps a valid one; for he knew about Operation Ajax, the convoluted plan of subterfuge these same brothers had imagined for the deposing of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran just a few years before Dienbienphu. That had started as a nasty tiff between the democratically elected socialist Mossadegh – the legitimate government of Iran – and British Petroleum over oil revenues. The Crown had wanted American support for putting this arrogant usurper Mossadegh in his place; Allan Dulles decided it would be a good idea to remove Mossadegh and bring back the Shah, but why go to all of this trouble for Britain? And a very cozy relationship with a tyrant named Pahlavi and his brutally efficient Savak was thus born. Don knew the Dulleses weren’t above anything when it came to oil revenues; and who knew what riches still lurked in the barely-exploited Mekong Delta and Laotian hinterlands? If things hadn’t quite worked out in Vietnam, Don thought you couldn’t blame Eisenhower for having tried, or the Brothers Dulles for their ingenuity.

Rumsfeld continued over several days to analyze Doug Feith’s ill-conceived gift; Feith was an idiot, the whole world knew it, but this was a whopper even for him. It certainly was a helluva time to have a book in front of you which belabored numerous esoteric points to near-tedium regarding the impossibility of subduing a mass, nationalistic movement which refused to follow the rules of engagement needed by a Western commander to achieve military victory. Baghdad was a great city, vast appendages of suburbs ringing the blasted hub, seven million people and seemingly none of them able to tolerate their neighbors without strapping dynamite to themselves. France had fought in Indochina for eight years, God knows how long it would take to subdue the militias in the Sunni neighborhoods, you needed patience, vast amounts of it, to wear out a foe to whom casualties were badges of honor, instant-ticket martyrdom to a paradise of herbs, oils and virgins. You’d need to get over the squeamishness of Empire the American people were now showing – you’d need to get used to massacres, acres of body-bags, vast bonfires of dead and grievously wounded dying. America would have to learn to stare, unblinkingly, at calamity – a million Mogadishus and the My-Lai-of-the-week, for years to come.

And what of it? – Don thought. War was a bloody business. The Frenchman had failed, catastrophically, but Navarre had fought doggedly, he’d had patience that was utterly unexplainable to an American public with a thirst for interactive maps and a thirty-second attention span. The same slander would be evinced upon Rumsfeld one day, he knew it; war was glorious indeed until the first bag of bones came home on a transport jet, bathed in a flag and speaking of a true price for pulling that trigger, striking in anger, sending our boys “over there” with retribution in their hearts and violence slung across their shoulders. Rumsfeld’s own war had to be fought, he’d tried so hard to explain it, but yet still he had been sent away in humiliation when the American public first started to clamor for the decadence of peace. In Rumsfeld’s world, there was no peace; it hadn’t been earned, was a myth born of sybarites and poets anyway, and not enough bodies of the ruthless hung upon hooks to sweeten the pot and inform the enemy of what the true meaning of a Pax Americana would be. What the press in gangrenous harmony called “imperialism” Rumsfeld knew as something else: a reckoning.

What Rumsfeld had envisioned was something not seen since Rome. Only this time, the decadence afflicted the Empire before her borders were fully strung and her foes fully humbled; not understanding the complexities of this vast struggle for a whole new kind of empire, the media made arrogant sport of the fickle public’s attention span and after the disastrous mid-term elections he had been the first to go. That was a democracy, and that was life. Don thought that, over time, he might learn to forgive the American people, but he’d never forget what a chance had been lost by a public not understanding that the tenacity and obstinacy of a Navarre was what they needed to see this thing through. It was their loss, and someday they were inevitably going to pay dearly for it.

Rumsfeld, now fully engrossed in his own legacy, the problematic future of his own reputation, placed the book aside and thought about Iraq more exhaustively – what had been intended, what he had sought to achieve. And since the subject had such a festive appeal for the pundits whom had turned so venomously against him, he thought yet again of that other era of imperial overstretch, that of Vietnam – a metaphor worn thin and frayed, still the worse the old man’s nerves, each of them of perilous stability and tiresomely overwrought. Don had thought in the final days of office, when his firing seemed so clear, so imminent, that should one thing good come of it, it was that never again would he have to humour a member of the press corps, those assholes who threw the word “Vietnam” around like they had actually fought there – or understood anything about it. To stand isolated and completely misinterpreted – Rumsfeld, in hubris rarified even for he, thought this was the inevitable fate of great men who saw the world in terms of a challenge, like the great Greek philosophers so many centuries buried under the false hermaneutic texts of academia. Yes, alone and proud – here stood men like Donald Rumsfeld. Or Plato, he thought.

On the bookshelf was a private Department of Defense study on the battle of Khe Sahn, published in 1971 and probably never read since; a forgotten monograph, which Rumsfeld had had to cajole out of the ambiguity-minders in the Pentagon’s classified library. He’d read the small book before the first Tomahawks screamed into Baghdad, now almost four years before; and only now were some of the deeper lessons of previous American failures in imperial conflicts becoming clear.

If the war was an irredeemable disaster, then his own legacy would be that of a blundering pedant, a meddler whom had utterly wrecked the military – and worse, left a smouldering ruin of American foreign policy in the guise of Baghdad, that shattered metropolis. Yet Don realized, as he read the small book on Khe, that these things had happened before and nobody seemed to be learning any lessons about how tricky it was to travel to a foreign land and change the basic culture without simply killing everybody and starting from scratch. During this long night of realization, when his own legacy was at last becoming more clear to him, the most daunting idea of all may have been that “the quiet American” hadn’t learned a goddamn thing, from his time in Saigon pimping for the corrupt Diem, to the present, grandiosely pretending Iraq was a real country rather than a Westerner’s absurd series of scribblings of arbitrary lines upon an arbitrary map.

Rumsfeld was in a frenzy of discord – irate and no longer able to tolerate his own company, he returned to the bookshelves and found an old volume on Napoleon’s masterpiece, the Austerlitz campaign. He left the comfort of the old chair for the assurance of his formidable desk; in front of him, he assembled some of his private papers, an ice cube holder for the Chivas (he’d yielded to the inevitable and returned to the welcoming embrace of the whisky) and the book. His mind was a million places at once, a recent phenomenon for the assured and stolid Rumsfeld; but alone in this old house, with the wind unprecedented and violent, shaking the walls and rattling the door frames, he couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t think with any clarity – he couldn’t stop thinking about the insurgency, had the worst feeling that no matter his hopes this would be his true and lasting legacy, and he wondered what Napoleon would have done. But an hour later, despite plucking that volume from the richly and tightly packed shelves, he had read all of three pages, half-assed and absentmindedly, on the beau soleil of Austerlitz. Every paragraph or two, his mind wandered, his head raised, he took a sip of Scotch and set back to staring down his greatest demon, the fear of total failure. And instead of reveling in the genius of Bonaparte, he wallowed in the ponderousness of Navarre. Finally, he gave up on the book and sat back and sipped his whisky, staring out the side window towards the back of the property, where stood the barn whose original purpose he knew of, but simply chose to ignore.

As he watched, the wooden cross-lock failed on the front door of the structure, and the barn’s front door flew wide open into the maelstrom, clanging and banging back and forth with insistent thuds. The tocsin of the door’s metal latch striking the wood kept a poorly syncopated backbeat, keeping time only with the irregularity of the elements. That racket would keep up all night, Don thought – of course the goddamn door flew open at four o’clock in the morning with it freezing as hell outside. What else could it do? While sleep was out of the question, that banging would drive him to further despair, and quite possibly fury; he decided to put on his shoes and go shut the goddamn thing, who knows, maybe the poor secret service guys were out there and they deserved their rest. They didn’t have Iraq hanging over their heads like the Damocles Sword, either – so it was possible they might actually get it.

Rumsfeld tied his robe tightly shut over his flannel pyjamas and decided this would be sufficient cover for the hundred-yard-or-so walk to the barn; he’d be out for five minutes, no need to bother with getting fully dressed. He put on his “water proof” shoes as he prepared to leave, but forgot that they had failed earlier that afternoon; they were still soaked, and his feet became immediately wet and cold. Cursing a particularly brutal epithet gleaned from one of the Dutch Masters of profanity, old blowtorch-tongued Dick Nixon, Rumsfeld put on his slippers and exited by the side door, his feet instantly freezing next to the cold Maryland sod. He swore vengeance upon the company which had dared sell him the utterly worthless “waterproof” shoes, now lying in the corner of the house, saturated, discarded and despised.

The wind was like a lathe, furious, intense – not a speck of rain in the sky, nor snow looming in the clouds, but wind, howling mad and truculent, like judgment and execution. He arrived at the front of the large structure, an A-frame one-storey affair with a disused loft and floorspace, in its heyday, for several large horses – or other beasts of burden. His wife had mooted several plans for the eventual modification of the barn, all of which sounded expensive to Don and terribly impractical. Taking a rare dictatorial stand in his home life, he had vetoed them all and thus the barn would remain nothing more than a curiosity for some time to come. Why couldn’t a barn just be a goddamn barn, anyway? The structure had great conversation value when visitors came to stay over and Don gave them a walking tour of the property. It didn’t need to be a goddamn pottery kiln, or whatever Joyce had worked up in her mind.

Rumsfeld surveyed the situation and surmised that this was just a standard inconvenience, one easily rectified and not worth blowing a gasket over. He grabbed the rapping door and slammed it shut. Using his still-mighty wrestler’s legs to hold it steady and flush, Rumsfeld retrieved the cross-block and shoved it in place with tremendous force, cursing it, too, with a colorful flurry of invective and a solemn threat not to make him come back out here tonight. As soon as he released his shoulder pressure from the door, a huge gust erupted, sent the lock hurtling past his nose, and the door swung into him with such force that his glasses went flying, and so did he, into the ground with a gasp and a blizzard of obscenity, and there quickly covered on his right side from shoulders to slippers with cold, viscous mud. Blinded without his glasses, he lay there for a moment and resolved to dynamite the structure on the very morrow, call for a demolitions team while he still had such connections, take vengeance on the barn and in the meantime deal with the prospect of mud by paving over the entire property, at least the walks and pathways. And, when spotting the utterly useless cross-lock lying several feet away and now split into two impalement-worthy pieces, for the second time that night Donald Rumsfeld called an inanimate object a “cocksucker”.

The door continued to bang, now louder than ever, faster than ever, the cacophony more a battering ram than a rhumba, the pat-pat-pat of a Vickers gun in one of Haig’s armies its signature and score. Rumsfeld was enraged to the point of silence; now was not the time for a fulsome display of spleen in the night and muck of sleep gone wrong and sabotaged. He rose to his feet with imprecations of muttering savagery upon his lips. He turned and looked to the ground. The wind blasted him in the face as he did so. The trees marking the far path swayed at a jaunt, their branches shorn of leaves ragged and defenseless, it was all a blur to Don without his glasses. He had the sound clear as a firing range in his ears, though. The door scraped earth a few yards to his rear, and would inevitably break away in the commotion and violence. Branches snapped and scattered, Rumsfeld stood cold and still, all the creatures were hunkered down and quiet, the barn creaked and shook, and then Rumsfeld heard something quite different, and very specific. He heard the low, small moaning of a man being beaten with a chicotte, the corkscrewed hippopotamus-hide whip tearing into his back for the fiftieth time that night and the man moaned low because it had been too much this time and the rivulets of flesh would not coalesce to ridge-backed cicatrices and he was going to be one dead nigger with the next blow of that vile, evil whip.

Blinded, Rumsfeld turned to the barn, an object large enough for him to recognize in his dilapidated state. He’d heard the wind, yes, he’d heard the branches, what could be more normal, but for Christ’s sakes what was he doing hearing the sound of a man being whipped to within an inch of his life? And he’d known it was just that; somehow, he even knew the exact derivation of the implement, and it wasn’t a bullwhip or even a cat-o’-nine-tails, it was definitively the sound of the West African chicotte, a flesh-scourging juggernaut of radical discipline, a prized and fearsome corrective tool wielded by the Congolese as part of King Leopold’s empire of blood and rubber, but also not unknown in the Thirteen Colonies when this property of Rumsfeld’s had been...something other than it was today, recalled Don. Something he didn’t need to be thinking of right now, utterly dumbstruck blind and blinkered sure as Gloucester when he’d finally run far enough afoul of Cornwall in what had always been Don’s favorite Shakespeare – he liked it best when it was produced with gusto, let Lear carve his Kingdom into threes sure as Sh’ia, Sunni and Kurds, bring on the Grand Guignol, buckets of blood and gore, cleave some viscera to all those blades of the heart – poetry. Now he was frigid and all was a blur, the scene of the mad old King trailed by a sarcastic Fool ran through his head and torture clamored in the night and vulgar, cold mud clung to him like earthen glue. Don was frightened to immobility thinking of excuses for why he had heard his property’s barn giving off the vent and steam of two-hundred year old violences, the savage, scathing wassail of distemper that was the chicotte’s unforgiving song of strike and the creep of death come low and heavy to a man about to be extinguished by that flesh-carving entrenchment-tool of racial correction.

He found his glasses after a few bungling steps, feet now utterly soaked of course, and the frames were maliciously bent by the encounter with the heavy wooden door – the glasses sat on his face at a comical disproportion, cock-eye skewed, he was muddy and frigid and half-filthy but yet fully disturbed. And of course furious. Resolving again to raze the structure and watch it fade to rubble as though it were an old foe from when he’d been Nixon’s errand boy with the liberals on the EOC, he twisted the frames as best he could and turned to go back to the house, the door banging more loudly than ever, flat out mocking him at this point. He’d taken maybe five steps when he heard the sound of the chicotte tear through him again, this time a child wailing in an unknown Southern dialect, instinctively he thought it was from one of South Carolina’s coastal islands, how he did not know, the child was screaming but not nearly as loudly as its mother, who had stolen some corn from her master and had been sent here for correction, to this barn behind him, stripped to her waist and her full black breasts being gouged and carved as the whip carried over from her ruined back to her sides, she, too, was about to die and in sight of her littlest child, born into slavery, sent here as chattel to learn manners at the side of his mother – property.

That was what had used to go on in the barn behind Donald Rumsfeld’s gorgeous and period-perfect brick Georgian mansion. In that very building. And he had known it, from the moment he signed the papers taking the property over – he’d known it.

Apparently, he was finally having some troubled sleep from the buried knowledge, because he assured himself this had to be a hallucination brought on by whisky and utter exhaustion. Because no matter how many slaves were broken in a barn or worked in the property’s adjacent fields until domesticated skeletons, goddammit there was no such thing as ghosts. Rumsfeld was cold but he wasn’t crazy; he needed to put away the Napoleon, grab a hot shower, take a strong nap and get outside in the daylight when his mind would be clearer and straight. And maybe consider backing off the Chivas for a day or two. He didn’t need his wife to show up at the house next week with him wearing bent and broken eyeglass frames and seeing fucking ghosts out of them.