"You'll just have to listen,

and practice not taking notes." 

  "Why?!  Where's the equipment?" 

  "Locked up.  Marie's people get first dibs." 

  "What's your take on all these tariffs?" 

  Men shifted their weight in a variety of rolling chairs and on feet in sneakers.  One sighed.  A woman griped, "It's making it hard to pay the bills." 

  "Right, it's only about you." 

  "That's not fair." 

  "Everybody has sacrificed in this." 

  "Some more than others," eyes went to a wall covered in now-Veteran photography. 

  "I think if we aren't going to just all waste each other, tariffs and sanctions are the power a president needs." He said it like he'd thought about it long and hard.  Like he was aware of a bigger picture, bigger than using powdered cream in burnt coffee and sharing bagels with co-workers.  "But I don't agree with the man on every issue." 

  "You and him in couples therapy?" 

  A (i)hmmmmph(i). 

  "Death and taxes people." 

  "Speaking of death," a man said almost quietly and people looked not at him directly, "A major part of what happened over there most recently, had to do with a convergence of forces." 

  A woman had closed her eyes and was breathing deeply.  Some of the people just looked at her.  One threw a wadded up napkin at her chest.  "Still alive?" 

  "Helps me to meditate.  Convergence of forces, I heard." 

  "Convergence of forces, lack of resources in those countries, and..." 

  A binder of Out There Observations was placed on the table alongside summaries of nuclear facility visits.  "It's (i)not(i) evidence," someone said as a phone kept ringing on a desk somewhere." 

  "Hey, Lotus Woman, is that yours?" 

  The woman came to, realized it was her phone, and went to answer it. 

  "Obviously we need to keep covering world events, but now with other governments killing their own people, this is different than 

  "Marie's in the hospital." 

  "Oh dear." People pulled jackets off backs of chairs, stuffed reading materials into sachels and bags, and filed out of the room. 

"Stay out there and," the

  loudspeaker on the burnt out because bombed utility vehicle competed with the mineret sounds.  "And what?" A woman in a rain drenched surgery gown and broken gloves yelled at the sounds.  Tried to get hair out of face with wrists.  The loudspeaker scratched the feeling of jagged nerves into the otherwise abandoned courtyard area.  "I'll have your ass for aiding and abetting." 

  "YOU WOULDN'T.  YOU CAN'T!" The woman screamyelled and stuck a pointing finger in the air.  "As God is my witness I will finish this work!" 

  "You're so stupid and useless you don't even know they just keep adding bodies, adding bodies!" 

  The woman looked through bloodshot eyes at the body pile she was standing in.  Body parts pointing at unnatural angles.  Stumps frozen motionless "not doing whatever they could be doing", "such a waste, such a bloody fucking waste!!!!" 

  Trembling, chilled to the bone, others came towards the pile of bodies and the immovable woman.  "We'll help," they said in many languages. 

  And they worked around the clock for days until one day the lady plopped a file down before a regional lead journalist.  "Not stupid.  Not useless.  Tired but they'd been bringing scattered piles.  And look at these," she took photographs from inside a jacket and shirt and tank top "bra", "Bones!  Mass graves." The woman's audible voice was hoarse and deep.  "This is only one place here.  There are many other places to see.  To document." 

  "It won't change anything Marie." 

It was at the same time,

  that effigies of political people were being "tortured" on the National Mall, that an OWL handed out sheets of blank paper. 

  "What should I do with this?" One partisan asked. 

  "Surrender!" Said an opposing partisan. 

  The owl shook head and wiped tears from face.  An activity coordinator interpreted.  "These are quilt pieces." 

  Some people divided their sheets of paper into professional selves and family life.  People realized a lot of things about what they'd focused on in their lives to date. 

  And an overwhelming sense of grief was not busted up by the exercise. 

  Some people took their sheets of paper with them even as they were deported and elsewise sent out of the Homeland. 

  One ambulance driver in the war zone of the Middle East had had the MOU, Memorandum of Understanding, laserprinted onto his quiltpiece sheet of paper.  And though it was ripped to shreds by persons insisting (i)no peace possible(i) he'd taped it back together and framed it.  It hung on the wall in a rundown room where sewing threads marked routes still open.  Banana stickers stuck parts of the thread to the hard plaster wall, (i)rubbled(i).

  "Oh my God," he said in his thick Indian accent to a woman helping archive deaths, "You killed all those people and put them in a pile?" 

  "That's our reputation honey, but not all Americans are the same."  The ambulance driver turned to a Monitor and asked, "Would you kill all those people and put them in a pile?" The man shook his head slowly (i)nooooooo(i), saying, "And I'm not American." 

  "Whoever did this is in BIG trouble Mamboo," a lady de-gloving kissed both his cheeks and asked if he'd come to help.  "Oui." He had.

There was a sort of

  what we visualized as a quilt being unsewn in places where the Greatest Generation was passing out of active duty as citizens-number-one. There were long pauses in filming movies because parents and loved ones were dying.  Sometimes the pauses were a person crying too hard at the passing of time to regain composure and work. Sometimes on sets there'd be people ready to act, but a chunk of set was missing or the person who'd been paying the assistant was having a life change.  Sometimes people who'd been in life roles of animosity and foil became friendly enough to (i)carry on(i). 

  Some pieces of quilt got stacked instead of unsewn.  Some whole families had gone into real estate or the law or law enforcement.  As particular families were changing, the American family was changing too. 

  For all the big moves that systems make, there were little people with knowledges and personalities, disciplines and passions, really making the world tick.  

  Some people with a penchant for studying everything took more of a witnessing-the-world stance during the critical years of the big aging phase.  Others spread keynote and tone, especially of kindness and compassion, like they were rambos.  And some pushed their own endurance to the max to drop everything in their own lives to not let the quilt come undone.  "On a mission" became a rallying cry for others to give both space and support. 

"Okay, now sort the piles by crime #456." A

  person in the small crane used for lifting body bags told the ground crew who'd already waited on investigators to archive, log, and report findings. 

  Most of the female bodies were re-piled into the domestic abuse category.  Friends and family stood nearby murmuring and wailing.

No one knew everyone

  was wired for sound. 

  A very frail WWII person who'd known about the Tribunal, like inside and out, explained to a friend that in reality, about "war criminals", a lot of them were just criminals anyway.  Criminals who needed a war.  Criminals who would not be "actors" and "operatives" if the war hadn't have been letting them run their courses. 

  "It doesn't mean there's no place for war," said a strategist immediately.  Looks burned him from every angle in the room.  "If conducted properly," the man said. 

 

"Those people are dead and this," a

  head shaking at the weight and volatility, "This, is, not a schoolyard." 

  Most of the living people near the pile of bodies were students and missionaries.  And one had been backhanded for calling the decidedly anti-human rights people with machine guns, (i)bullies(i). 

  "Nobody leave." 

  "I didn't think we were allowed." 

  "That too."  An Israeli man looked at photographs by journalists of other piles of bodies.

  There had in fact been decisions made.  Throughout spontaneous soccer games and at tables where porridge was the only option to "get something in your stomach", youth were courted.  Most were promptly wedded to machine guns and long knives.  Crates and crates of grenades and dynamite sat on the wharf beside rotting vegetables and donated used clothing.  News of the pirated AID never making it out of "humanitarian crisis" zone. 

  Mumbled warnings that "everything is political" made way through groups and orgs with other focuses besides "politics" like religion and education, but this seemed to create a vacuum in "action".  Within a short time span people were just people, some with weapons and some without. 

"Are you Americahn aliens?"

  "Do we look like little green men?" One woman passed a crate of olive oil along the wharf in a human chain. 

  "Sing us a few notes of a newer song!  We can't remember any music." 

  "Yeah that happened to us in the late seventies." 

  "You lived here?" 

  "Naw, New York." 

  "Same life everywhere.  All over the world." 

  Dried tomatos.  Lightly passed along. 

  "Sing we need an angel music." 

  Someone started humming.

"He was saying that why

  there's ultimately no peace possible is really between God and Satan." The woman flipped the shared dentures in and out of her mouth.  "We've had no denture glue either." 

  "I'll put that on the list of essentials needed."  The list was pretty serious since the carrier had been stalled at Sea for quite some time. 

  "That's what all this really seems like to me and my husband.  We got split up back on land in an operation and I ended up with our teeth.  A dentist visit was on our, what have people been calling it?" 

  "Bucket lists?" 

  "Yeah.  Like Lennon sang, (i)life is what happens while we're making plans." 

  "Right.  And we really are pretty tiny and fragile." 

  "Oh! Give these to the girls." She took a string of pearls tied in knots where the string had busted from a jumpsuit pocket.  "Maybe somebody'll have a lucky date.  Get married and go home." 

The man unfurled a roll of blue ribbon.

  He was standing between a gaggle of reportorial types and a line of buses.  "Okay, so as most of you know, I've always been more into politics than like crime and drugs." Someone boo'd.  The smells of breakfast mingled with bus exhaust. 

  He laid down the ribbon in the dewy grass. 

  "Did I leave anybody hanging on information or assignments?" 

  "What are you doing?" A woman asked.  Another took a picture of the ribbon. 

  "Everybody sure?" Nobody said anything.  "Once I cross this line I'll be a political operative and not an independent journalist anymore even though I can be reached if there's something I can do." 

  "For our sorry asses?" 

  Some of the younger guys started to get looks of ambition jostling. 

  "Anybody want to join me?"  More pictures being snapped was the response.  "Well alrightie then," the man stepped over the ribbon, and looked at everyone.  Then went into the highway restaurant.

"It's not what you think," a woman told a frantic

  looking child, small in a circus of flashbulbs and clicking sounds like cicada.  The child who couldn't speak at the time later said she was wondering, (i)Is that my real father?(i) 

  "Why is that woman handcuffed to that man?" A typist asked a beat reporter.  The reporter shook head just a little dazed himself, but fighting nervous at all the commotion.  Then he unfolded a roll of newspapers.  WAR CRIMINAL RECAPTURED was the headline on one of the less popular papers.  "Could be related to this." 

  "I better call her Literary Agent." 

  "And a lawyer, no?"