"It's MuskaDEEN."

  "No.  It's muska-DINE." 

  "COME ON!" 

  "What the sock is in my van?" The man held up big bags of powder and buckets for Cotton Candy.  A teenager hollered, "It has to get across the State Line!" 

  "Not in my sockin' van." The man threw a bag of the powder hard at the ground after lifting it in sunburned, hairy arms.  "We stayed up all night to make the perfect tequila mix," women dressed in long skirts jumped off logs and out of camping chairs.  "WE HAVE TO STAY IN BUSINESS." 

  "Get your own van!" The man threw a bag of the mix at the women.  The neonish green powder exploded and the dust coated skirts. 

  "Why are all these symbols around the campfire?" A teenage boy held up a block of wood and a chip of cinderblock.  "Don't throw those!" A woman ordered.  "It means you can go into any trade you choose to learn.  We interviewed all the teachers." 

  "Are you in a harem now?" 

  "YOUR FATHER AND I." 

  The storm of shut down swirling into surviving business.  A Christian Conference winding down but mostly unable to fly out, ditched hundreds of books by the side of the road.  "Oh, maybe we should read this one," the teenage girl had got in the van and started pitching the books out a window.  Victory in the Storm sailed by.  

  "Which way is north?" The man kicked a stack of buckets as he made way towards the dirt road. 

Asian shrinks call Americans schizophrenic.

  And a European buzzword right now is nuance.  

  Like we don't all have enough pressure on us with the dollar, dollar bill situation. 

  It can make the guts feel funny, this dimensional "personality" situation.  When you need to exude patience with a spectrum of behavior and kindness like Christ in a stall of kicking hooves. 

  "What part of rather kill you don't you get?" A beaming with lightfulness, rested interviewer had been wrestled into a tent in a lockable basement.  Yes, only lockable from the outside, a nun tried to conjure the import she'd had on the woman when the woman had been a child.  "I suppose I shall sit inside and comport myself," a Marie made a big deal of announcing to a "cue" of actual young people, graduated and with career prospects. 

  "The world was not ready for Jesus either!" 

  "See what happened," a grandmother said in Yiddish. 

  "What's this?" A boyfriend licking and sucking a girl's neck tongued a tiny Jesus on a cross and a chain. 

  "What have they done to you?" To tiny hand smacks back to ass smacks. 

  The trip to Israel had paired Jews and kind of converted to Christian Jews.  Nobody really knew what to say and the exuberance of conversion was washing away like the Dead Sea salt. 

  The reality of reality.  "Don't tell the kids." It's very often not let's cut our losses and/or run.  So we couch our moods and talk in I'm not being a toddler about this.  And, that just happened, now what?  if   there are options. 

  A lot of times there's a set pattern.  Sometimes that's different.  Free will and freedom sometimes refuses to bend to repression and communism.  The fighting has always been intense between authoritarianism and rebellion.  Most compromise.  Not all people have an "easy" time with navigating the subject matter.

  "Yah, there's no raisin bread." The man went back inside the cabin.  A slender Czech woman crouched and a tiny girl grabbed her ear and whispered into it.  The woman asked a man with a walkie-talkie to ask inside the cabin.  A man came out of the cabin.  "Yah, we don't have this Cheerios." 

  "What do we have to eat poppy?"  

  "Actually, this is not where we keep the food." 

  "Is there food somewhere?" Someone called out weakly. 

  "I have grocery shopping in my car," someone else said.  "But no place to lay it out." 

  "I can make a cooking fire." An older woman was staring at the ground but talking to everyone.  "I can help you Babu." A young boy put a pale hand on her shoulder. 

  "Ground to a halt."  An editor explained to a producer.  "Who needs these?" An actress held up multivitamins.  "Let's put them in the cabin," a boyfriend suggested.  

  Down the line of parked vehicles people determined if they knew anybody local.  And who should walk out to see if the rest of the world was in the same state. 

  Life settled people down into grooves.  Until political flip and turned out again riled a sense of co-existence in "American communities". 

  "You are not going to believe this one." The visiting team comported selves. 

  "Was found neked, hypothermic, and babbling

  "About?" 

  "Sparse notes.  Chinese.  Poking holes in eyes.  Surgeries not in hospitals." 

  Some on the team visibly started to back away from the Observation Window.  "Sounds political," one said.  "Why naked?" One wondered.  "Is it an American?" Another asked. 

  "We're not allowed to tell you." 

  "And BEFORE anyone of you disappears, you should know, there are nine more rooms on this hallway AND someofthemare," the nurse swallowed hard, "Are 

  "Yes?" 

  "Okay, most of them are just locals." 

  "Like that work?" 

  The nurse suppressed a Durham hmmmmhmmmmm. 

  "You start talking to potential investors," a tanned arm swiped a glass of champagne from a tray.  The man in the tuxedo looked around at the buzzy room.  Saw a guy in a sweater standing in a grand room entryway.  "What's wrong with him?" The tuxedo'd man asked no one who blocked the easy begin-ing.  Another woman in a sleek business dress not evening gown style murmured talking points.  A young person standing nearby re-interpreted the points into a question.  "So, he's upset that he's been put in charge of an award-winning crew of researchers and developers?" The question hung in the air even as banned "pop stars" crashed into the room and made a bee-line for a piano.

  Doh!  cough  OW!  Lights coming on.  "Did she hurt you?" 

  "Me?" 

  "Her?" 

  "Garrison whacked his shin on the coffee table and then hit his head on a pipe."  One person narrated as another took stillshots of the table, pipe, and G holding head and shin.  "My better half." Everyone stayed frozen in active time.  "I see you put the spare bedroom back together." 

An Easter-Passover family time

  lent itself to parents and adult children being real with each other.  In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre low conversational tones.  Some release of stress in being so close to Judeo-Christian landmarks.  Letting history be connection between meaning and symbolism.  Agreeing that it took Christianity a long time of talks to develop Sacraments and processes that safeguard peoples' perception of the Biblical stories with Jesus as the Son of God who came on a world-changing mission.  Forgiveness and triumph over death.  

  Some of a spray of machine gun fire came right through the walls. 

  Curiously, a briefcase was hit. 

  Papers fell out. 

  Cartoonish drawings.  A seminar had asked what kind of person are you?  What kind of person do others see you as?  

  Two drawings were face up.  A wolf in sheep's clothing.  And a Dad as being Christ-like.  Looking a lot like Jesus.  

  A hand reached from under a pew and scooped the paperwork toward itself.  

  "Why rounds of twenty in each spray?" Security had caught up to Security on foot from several other locations. 

  One person was hurriedly explaining twenty point peace plan; sue-ing the Board would take millions of dollars; for PEACE 

  THERE CAN BE NO PEACE IN THIS GODFORSAKEN PLACE, a man gripping his chest huff-pushed the words out of his mouth. 

"We tried their way."

  The lion-hearted peacemaker folded up an ironed shirt sleeve and pinned it. 

  "That was before this." A woman ironed another set of uniform clothing.  "Before this," she echo'd. 

  The "this" was hostages and cement poured into tunnel openings.  The "this" was another generation of commanders without families.  The "this" was navies trapped without air support.  And it was daughters joining the fray. 

  "Their over there for talks." 

  "So the grocery stores are empty again to stock the shelters." 

  "To stock the shelters." 

  We'd eaten a canned pineapple.  Everybody had a ring and a half.  Each person ate the one ring and tried to give somebody else a half to have a whole.  Not fitting into any one militant-about was making for some interesting get-togethers.  And that was lifting spirits out of tedium. 

  "It'll be a problem." 

  "The nukes?" 

  "The Democrats, the Lebanese, the talks.  People of a certain something, economic class or something, same bubble.  And some of the Jews choosing to keep drilling down.  There's always a problem, but this is of particular concern." 

  "Concern," came the echo from his other half.

  "Why do you people keep trying to rip my boyfriend's face off?"  The woman was irate.  The talon'd nails on one hand not holding a lap dog or "toy" dog flickered silvery green  even in the only-emergency lighting.  The tall, hansome man with the golden locks pulled into a bun and wrapped with a grease rag turned his face so everyone could see what "the Korean pop star" had done.  Bright red claw marks were welting on his skin. 

  "Dey say his a trannie." 

  "His what?" 

  "Here focus.  We got a call for an arm.  Here's the number." 

  "Did they say transforce?" 

  "Yah.  Mebbee." 

  "They meant multicultural and multidisciplinary." 

  Body bags on dry cleaning style moving hanger racks crackled and parted.  Gray and black uniformed people were lift-carrying one of the dead.  "Best to shut dah fuck up," one barked.  "Especially if they meant multi-national," a woman's voice said behind surgical scrubs and mask.  "All that's changed now." 

  "Time to find an arm Doctor?" 

  "No." 

  "I'll do it but somebody better feed me after shift," a guy said.

I was hiding in my dorm room.

  The semester was slicing and dicing my brain.  James Taylor and Tracy Chapman music seemed to be the moon between Earth and Mars.  The last solid grip with human emotions on an intellectual mission to: 

     I didn't know anymore. 

  Each keg party was part we're so dumb and part, the hangover part, realizing such was devolving the whole person that family and community had painstakingly raised to be 

                Who knew who or what? 

  Impossible as it was, I'd forgotten that I'd sent a couple fiction stories to an editor.  It hadn't been on a whim.  At the suggestion of someone in the literary world who worked under the Greatest generation and above the relative few our-agers, a kind of trial and error was taking shape to see if anyone could work with anyone else. 

  "What are you doing in here?" She stood in the doorway of the opened-to-knock dorm room door.  I looked around the barrack-style cluttered study.  There would be no explaining how twenty years of living came and went through my study like a quirk in space, sometimes real as mama in her rocking chair, sometimes as unreal as time spent in foxholes.  "I mean, it's a gorgeous Spring day outside." 

  I glanced at the brash sunlight beyond the curtains.  "Who are you?" 

  On the way to the Meal Hall since offered to buy coffee and had enough points left for at least one, the editor complimented my grammar skills, it helps me read through faster.  I get A LOT of submissions.  "Is it a magazine?" I managed to not spill any coffee as I handed her one.  She brushed the back of a long skirt neat and sat on a retaining wall.  "It could be.  But I edit pre-swamp.  Peoples' writing could go to a magazine or into a book." 

  "But did my stories make you feel anything?" 

  She bit the inside of a cheek and stared forward.  "Not sure I felt anything but, 

  Scrambling in the mind for the moon, unsure Mars or Venus, maybe some constellation somewhere, anywhere but here 

  "It's probably because I've read three books, a History, and six thesis-maybe works in nine days." 

  "Oh.  Well.  They were stupid stories anyway.  One was trying to reconcile the Biblical and secular worlds.  And one was trying to put narrative to video games." 

  "TRON!  Now I know which writer you are.  Thanks for the coffee.  We didn't realize that you're still a student at this time."  Walking away.  "It disqualifies you from our, from what we're publishing at this time.  I, uh, do editing on the side but I don't have a business card for that and don't give out my personal number.  Yeah, your stories made me think! But, the topics, okay, I'll tell you that I've read you in newspapers and some other, you've done some readings, right?!  Well, what I'm trying to say, is that the industry is changing but you've, you've got what it takes to...I don't know, your work sparks others to keep going." 

  "Wow! Thank you." 

  A tiny watch face soldered onto a tennis bracelet on the perfume side of a bone thin wrist, the talked-about indicator, gotta go.  "Thanks.  Thanks so much." 

"How was your day?"

  The little boy beamed a toothy grin. 

  "What made it so good?" 

  He thought.  "You didn't tell me there was gonna be a Grandpa!" 

  The woman who'd raised the boy patted a spot to sit beside on the cushioned bench.  "I see.  Yes, it's a family, so even though I didn't know, it makes sense that there is a Grandpa."

  Some sun screening behind the bench rattled raspily and a voice bellowed, There.  Tel Aviv is open for business.

 

Back home...

  It did and didn't matter that the guy had said faggot because he didn't know the word hustler.  It didn't matter because we'd battled across Continents to work for the Americans, the Patriot-Americans to be exact.  Bathing and Confession wasn't the sum total of our needs once the talks were over.  It did matter to the Nation's blood supply being rapidly organized into Types. 

  It did and didn't matter that spoiled, grown, "children" were fussing and fighting over who gets what and where.  Jewish mothers had already picked younger children up from schools and made a point of being "clucks".  That mattered because people could be seriously reprimanded for giving away any and all information about military.  So the mothers, some too tired to stand, others almost instantly bereaved, decided to talk loud about the Jewish soldiers already back Overseas.  It didn't matter that some people can't put anything but themselves first.  And, "to be fair" a mother-to-be from the Metro world had explained, everyone's individual priorities are different in moments like these. 

  It very much mattered that inside the trailer there'd been built a special 2x4 triangle.  That a mother-in-law and daughter were determined to learn how to fold a flag into a triangle.  That they were learning this to support a then-one-armed brother determined to support other Veterans and survivors.  Like it had mattered that without knowing exactly how, our generation had stepped into the traditions of the United States of America.

"I need to find me a

  "BRIC, it's all about the money stuff right now!" 

  Back from War College, back from assignments, back from Court cases, back from Odd Squad and Transforce meetings and ignores, back from Cadet training, back from vacations and drunken escapades...        D.C. into war stance. 

  Don't budge.

  Don't cave. 

  Don't look at me. 

  Do bring this over there. 

  Don't stay.  Don't say.  Anything?  Here rearrange the desk. 

  High and mighty among civilians is standing on an ant hill when military commanders are surviving a military that is at times the only "thing" between freedom and other forms of nationhood. 

  Besides winning scholarships and scraping by on less and less, people don't have good options without systems that function for a future.  Men and women in dysfunctional relationships and collapsing houses of cards financially had to pull up the bootstraps or lose it all.  The Chinese had sucked the money away from us in a hot air balloon of debt and chintzy product.  It was said to be a last straw.  The finer points of how our Country was already collapsing, well, not everyone can stomach the same knowledge.  

Some of the locals had said,

  We're on it. 

  Now the health care tech under observation by State and insurance technical experts on procedure was picking up hypodermic needles and dropping them one by one into the Needle Ball. 

  "Don't you even care we all went to school together?!" A frantic girl started at the Tech but stopped short of interference.  "Maybe that's why they sent me.  I'm not from here." The Tech responded cooly. 

  The Tech deposited the Needle Ball back in a Hazmat container in a kind of ambulance and took off gloves and face shield.  She walked to a nearby car and blurt-yelled at friends, "I used to care.  But that may have been the millionth." 

  "What time are you done?  It's beans and hotdogs at the Bat Cave campsite!" 

  A piece of paper drifted toward the ambulance-van on a light ground wind breeze.  A form.  Observations.  The script wildly bubbly.  "What happened was that the guy whose missing now told everyone around the fire that they'd been told they could try out to join, but we can't be faggots anymore. The guy that was told this said, okay." 

  "Then what happened?" The Tech asked while handing the page back to the frantic girl.  "Write it.  I'll turn it in." 

"The man could not stop

  "Saying faggot?" 

  "Said it like it was coming out a machine gun." 

  "More often than he quoted the Bible." 

  Other people in our generation but hardly old enough to vote let alone drink lit cigarettes. 

  An already-real-writer drove up to the campsite rambo-quiet.  Perfunctly donned his backpack, tucked his keys into a fannie pack inside his shorts.  "YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE WHAT ALL WE'VE SEEN SO FAR," a people pleasing but somewhat domestically abused young woman stealthed to him and practically yelled.  The writer didn't flinch.  "Toldya." 

  Most of us were not yet committed to Service and Corporations and spouses and children.  The fact that we'd only seen so much of the world-in-action lent itself naturally to discovering.  Almost right away our minds started comparing multicultural to wars, and, we fought vertigo to debate...when do we write? 

  On our own, at first, in our minds anyway, there was a free-for-all on how something should be written. 

  "So.  What did you think about assignment?" 

  The fire crackled and taunted can't just live in the forest.  "To be honest, I felt lucky to not be living in that State.  And among the many things I can't tell anyone I feel like I should tell you that we hid our Black person under clothing to get back into this one non-violently." 

  "I'm not yours," the Black girl grumbled from a sleeping bag surrounded by chairs facing outwards.  "I didn't mean it to come out that way." 

  "Then you shoulda said it different." 

Informal questions and answers led

  to teams having "handlers". 

  "Why did dey have peace talks in Pakistan?" An Indian asked. 

  Guy fires off an answer.  "They owed us one since Osama Bin Laden was holed up in there without them knowing." 

  "Let us proceed to the main room!" A host cheerily urges. 

  "But why? What does it mean to call a staunch Catholic leader weak and liberal?" 

  "I heard a football team kind of fake insult a faggot not tied to the bleachers like that once.  It's like, I guess, how men sometimes navigate as Velcro when all kinds of sticky stuff is being thrown around.  I mean, it's not like defenses that are in the Middle East and Eastern Europe can save somebody in a funny hat on a different Continent if some guy offends another religion.  Jeez." 

  Good thing technical experts do their thing so well.