Long time ago. Easy enough to regret a thing. Not good to get in the habit. When you regretted, folks pounced. You were weak with regret, they felt it, they pounced.
Then what? You had less power, could do less good.
So: no regrets.
Ever.
He looked so frail, his wife was thinking. When he was weak like this—in a crowd of taller men, nervously twisting a sheaf of papers, feeling his authority undercut by their superior height—that was when she loved him best.
She was going to spare him every bit of pain she could. And that was that.
She adjusted his pain meds up, up, up.
Then left the room and it was just the two of us again.
—
Your wife seems lovely, I said.
Longing for peace, wishing me gone, awash in the new swellof the drug, he directed his thoughts to a long-completed project involving a tight, clayey sandstone, considerable extraction costs. His negotiating partner had been an Indonesian. Baya. Baya Ajung. They’d sat in the hotel lobby taking a third meeting. Nice fellow, Baya. Had a strange gait. Was sensitive about it. Would always try to be last to leave the table.
The drug was strong. Too strong. Suddenly the Jakarta evening was full of marching soldiers. Through the window a sergeant blew him a kiss. A kiss somehow menacing. The unit marched off to a pier where all good citizens were to gather. A frightening pier. He and Baya would be late to the frighteningpier. Their food had only just arrived. In this culture, it was considered rude not to spend a fortnight writing out words of praise on thin parchment paper, a roll of which had just been brought to their table by their waiter: praise for the meal not yet eaten. Baya rose and rushed away, his gait miraculously normalized, calling back: Now I may leave table whenever I wish!
Outside, the Indonesians had done something clever: remade Jakarta into the Grand-Place. In Belgium. Quite a trick. Good for them. The Jakarta streets, he found unsavory. Unclean. Lacking Western organization. Every building in the Grand-Place, save the husk of one, had been destroyed in a 1600s firebombing. By the French. Goddamned French. What did he have against the French? He’d lately had something against them but he couldn’t remember what.
The industrious Belgians had rebuilt the whole thing from scratch.
Lots of history here.
Lots. Of. Dang. History.
The Inquisition had burned a couple fellows alive in this very square.
Also: numerous beheadings. Right here’d stood the decapitation gizmo.
Per Luc, their guide of that morning.
Imagine the millions of folks who’d passed through here. Over the last, say, thousand years. You couldn’t. The mind wouldn’t hold it. He’d been part of that. The long march of history. Not such a small part, either. No: in a relative sense, he’d been more important than many (most) of those millions of souls. In terms of influence-on-world. He had been, that is, more important to the lives of the people on earth during his time than the vast majority of those dead-and-buried folks had been to theirs. That was just a fact. Even if you included kings. Strange but true: he’d had more actual power than most kings of old. Someone had told him that once and he supposed it was true.
What a thing.
The moon reflected gloriously in the hundreds of melting ancient windows all around. He’d left family and bodyguard behind, wanting to be out in this wonderment alone. Unguarded, free, walking the ancient cobbles, thinking about his place in things.
How’d he done? Mother? Father?
Good.
Pretty darn good, yep, you got that right, folks.
His daughter’s voice chimed in from somewhere: What a life you’ve had, Daddy. You go, buddy.
Julia, Jules. You wouldn’t believe the crap I’m being put through tonight, sweet pea.
As far as birds?
There were still birds, there’d always be birds, birds bred like goddamn rats.
Across the Grand-Place, doors flew open in agreement, emitting an uproar he understood to be the ancient sounds of long-ago parties, brawls, and feasts, an unnerving, summed cacophony of grudges and vows and squeals of pleasure in a multitude of regional accents no longer to be heard on this planet. Yes, there would always be birds, the long-dead folks seemed to agree. Thousands of glasses broke at once, and corks popped, and dogs whose legs had been caught beneath moving chairs yelped, and there were sounds of childbirth and hallooing and spirited objection and toasting and sexual congress (from pairs; from grim, voracious groups of three or four; from lonely, hapless self-pleasurers), drunken singing, mournful singing, absent-minded singing, humming, farting, passionate whispering: in short, every sound a human being had ever made here.
