from “Everything at Once: Scripts & Postscripts”

“Everything at Once” began as a sequence of sixty paragraphswritten back and forth by Christopher Merrill and Marvin Bellover a period of fifteen months. Bell’s were written in the states ofIowa, Washington, and New York. Merrill’s were sent fromLebanon, Afghanistan, China, the Congo, Uzbekistan … Thesequence has since been extended into “Scripts & Postscripts”These are the paragraphs numbered 43 through 52.

CM:

Afghanistan

She said that what I saw I didn’t see: a Predator drone taxiing down the runway of an airbase near the border with Pakistan and taking off toward the mountains. And where I went I didn’t go: a house in which young women wrote in secret, nibbling tea cookies in a narrow white room that looked out on a snowbound garden. And what I heard I didn’t hear: a story told by the crippled woman seated by the woodstove, who used both hands to straighten out her legs. Let’s go to school, her father said when she was little. School: a marvelous word for a girl confined to her house. What did I see? An old man rubbing his dislocated shoulder beyond the street of butcher shops. A bomb-sniffing dog biting its trainer’s arm. Soviet medals for sale on a table covered with knives. Where did I go? The gym, the canteen, and the Duck and Cover—a windowless bar on the other side of the tunnel. What did I hear? The whirr of helicopters, the footsteps of an aid official running on the treadmill, acronyms: prt, idp. The armored vehicle that took me to a roundtable discussion was called an mrap (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected); the soldier swiveling around in the turret, aiming his mounted gun at cars and buildings, couldn’t believe the mission was for poetry. The word on everybody’s tongue was kinetic—i.e., dangerous. I was marking days off the calendar in my hooch when the duck and cover warning sounded. Under the bunk bed I crawled to wait for the all clear signal. What did I see? A photograph of a green-eyed Afghan woman taken before the Russians came. Everybody knows her.

MB:

The Scope

I confess that in any group of three, I am two. Myself watching myself. I admit that, in my writings, the third person, while not me, is someone who knows a lot about me. Thus have I altered the first person pronoun so that he is I and will be I long after the one who here inhabits the I has gone. What am I getting at? It is to suggest that projection and abstraction are ways to transcend the tangible gang war that is contemporary nationalisms. To conjecture that artifice, fancy, illusion, fable, and the generalized vision made possible by abstraction are what we use to save ourselves, day after day. We inhabit them. We push ourselves out of ourselves to inhabit them. If there are those who do not buy it, well, they have their own escapes. Some went under the bed, some to the cellar, some to the woods. Some enlisted, some went to prison to be safe. Some sought anonymity—if not off the grid, of a profile so low they would be overlooked by the satellites and could readily stay off the moving target. We were writing students when Dr. Finch, our nervous professor and cellist, praised Lew’s story, in which a distraught salesman on the way home stopped in a penny arcade to fire a rifle beam at the midsection of a glassed-in bear. Our beloved teacher noted that the shooter was at the same time shooting his reflection on the glass. The bear reared, growled, and reversed his course with each hit. The man shot himself again and again. For the moment, his truth lay in the efficacy of a rifle scope. I had no symbolism in me and did not understand. Lew’s was the best of our stories, because his troubled character would remain in the arcade, never running out of quarters and bullets. He...