Feb 26 2007
Will Be Done
fiction by Brian Charles Clark
“Go,” I told you, “and make yourself available.”
Your scowl doubted me, but I pressed gas money into your hand—a hand already outstretched. Your trembling hand, your bare feet, your salt-encrusted tee-shirt, your heart weighing the wood of the past.
We were at play in the fields of the vertical. The sun shone through the groves of orange magnetism, but it was the smudge pots that attracted us. You were chased by the lion of the maelstrom. My hands were covered with soot. With pockets full of rocks, we went home to the cliff-hanging house where we were erratically rebuffed. You gave yourself ample reason to panic at life’s seemingly deliberate obscurity.
“Available to what?” you scoffed.
“To the chance you seek,” I replied, but I was too tired to be convincing. Gas money, a skull made of stone, bare feet, you stood in the door, hand outstretched. “Open to the possibility,” I tried again.
Smoke from a lung, the cadence of the magic circle, gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and the weak—to these forces add aleatory.
“Go,” I told you. The abyss, so prone to earthquakes, couldn’t hold you anyway. “Make yourself available,” I added, “and it will come.” Here is the very meaning of the word—any word; abduction, for example.
Skull and bones washed up by waves of bleach in the tenantless heat. There is no arrow because time is a puddle. You were bare foot. You opened the door and became available. Upon your lips, the fuel of chance. I held the vial in my hand, poured the greasy ash into the palm of the other.
“Go,” I said, so close I could taste it.
Vladimir Voinovich has done the unthinkable. It was unthinkable for Lenny Bruce to say “fuck” on stage in the 1950s—unthinkable but inevitable. There is nothing inevitable about what Voinovich has done: he’s written a novel about a woman who loves and believes in Stalin. Although in the West not quite as well known a genocidal demon as Hitler, Stalin is still pretty much in everyone’s top-ten list of all time murderous bastards. The amazing thing about Monumental Propaganda is that the novel doesn’t try to make you feel any less revolted about Stalin. In other words, Voinovich has managed to portray unsympathetic characters (Stalin, the woman who loves him) in a sympathetic way without robbing them of their bastardliness. That’s a nice trick, and Monumental Propaganda is a funny, devastating novel. 
