Cry Havoc

Jane speaks in a sing-song tone that sounds light and carefree. From listening to her, you’d never guess there was a full-fledged battle being waged only blocks away.

I let the drapes fall closed and turn around with images of the chaos still burning in my brain. For a moment, I feel dizzy as two entirely separate worlds collide. Outside, the streets have been darkened with blood and soot. People’s lives are being ripped to shreds and entire buildings burn unchecked in the afternoon sun. But in here, the gunshots seem as if they are coming from the end of some long corridor. They’re muffled and distant, no different really from a neighbor watching an action film with the volume turned up just a little too loudly.

The walls are light beige and are adorned with framed prints of the great masters: Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh, and Dali. My favorite, Munch’s masterpiece The Scream, hangs just above an oak bookcase lined with the works of Shakespeare, Frost, and Melville among others. Everything about the room, from the potted ferns to the beaded curtain that separates the living room from the kitchen, has an almost deliberate look to it: as if it had somehow transcended the glossy pages of a catalog and manifested in the real world.

Jane is sitting on a little brown settee in front of a coffee tabled shaped like the Chinese yin-yang symbol. Her curly red hair is pulled back into a loose ponytail and tied with a yellow ribbon; she’s wearing the shirt I bought her for her birthday last year, the white one with the flowing sleeves that makes her look like some romantic poetess. She smooths her crinkled skirt with one hand and then leans forward to take a sip from a pink mug of herbal tea.

Perched on the couch across from her is her best friend, Polly Wainwright. As usual, Polly is wearing a t-shirt with some sort of slogan on it; this particular one is a simple white tee with pink letters reading Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History. Like all of her clothes it is loose and comfortable, the folds of the fabric seeming to flow as easily as the golden locks of her hair.

“So,” Polly asks as she glances at me with those round, green eyes of hers, “what’s it like out there?”

I’m silent for a moment as I listen to the hiss and gurgle of the cappuccino maker in the kitchen. The strong scent of espresso mingles with sandalwood incense. The stereo in the corner plays so softly that I can’t tell whether it’s a Native American or Japanese flute. But I guess it’s probably Indian: Jane has been heavily into R. Carlos Nakai ever since she ordered from that catalog company and has bought practically every disc the man has ever released.

“Richard,” Jane says, “don’t be rude… Polly asked you a question.”

Should I tell them? Should I describe how I saw a woman raped on the sidewalk, a woman who only seconds earlier had committed cold-blooded murder? Should I tell them how the bodies are beginning to pile upon one another, how our once-peaceful neighbor is beginning to resemble the streets of some war-torn third world country?

I answer, however, without any real thought:

“It’s absolutely modern out there.”

I have no clue what this means. The words just kind of burble out of my mouth before I even really know I’m speaking; as soon as I hear them I feel self-conscious and silly, like an ill-prepared student forced to recite in front of the entire class. I feel my cheeks grow warm and lower my eyes to a throw-rug with the design of a Tibetan mandala. If either woman notices my discomfort, however, they give no indication.

“I know, right?” Jane replies. “It’s sad, the state of things these days. It’s like the whole city has lost its collective mind.”

“The whole city? Try the whole country, dearie. Haven’t you been listening to NPR?”

“Why bother? It’s not like they actually tell you anything.”

Jane’s right. We keep hearing reports of new outbreaks, of violence flaring up as quickly as the flashbulbs that freeze these horrors into snapshots of frozen time for the papers. Riots. Looting. Civil unrest on a scale our country has never known. And yet nobody can tell us why. One expert blames the effects of video games and the media, another on cosmic radiation from last month’s solar activity, while the televangelists claim that we are living through the beginning of the end. But it’s really nothing more than rampant speculation masquerading as news.

The beaded curtains rattle as Cody Preston shoulders his way through the doorway; he’s carrying a tray with four cups of cappuccino carefully balanced on it as if he were a priest bringing sacrament to the masses.

“I say, is anyone thirsty?”

My body immediately stiffens and a sour feeling blossoms in my stomach.

Cody is a tall and lanky man, given to wearing jaunty fedoras and wool scarves over careful layers of pastel. His round spectacles are almost always too far down his nose to serve any real purpose and his goatee looks as if hours have been spent ensuring that it is perfectly symmetrical.

When he speaks, he affects this slightly British accent that causes me to inwardly cringe as if his words were the mental equivalent of fingers on a chalkboard. I know damn well that he’s from some hick town in Kentucky that even cartographers haven’t heard of… but for some reason he insists on speaking as if he’s only a generation or so removed from royalty.

I detest this man, more than anyone else I’ve ever met. Everything about him makes me want to hold a pillow over his face just so I won’t have to suffer another second of his presence. But he’s Polly’s current boyfriend and since Jane and I are something of an item, I — by default — am considered a close, personal friend.

I smile and take the steaming coffee he offers but inside I would like nothing more than to throw it in his smug little face.

My therapist thinks I’m jealous of Cody, which I find to be absolutely absurd. She says, however, that it’s not so much him I’m envious of as what he represents. You see, Ms Cline has this notion that I secretly wish I were with Polly instead of Jane. She claims it would be just as obvious to me if I could manage to put some objective distance between myself and the situation. I, however, think that she’s just grasping at straws and trying to milk as many hours out of me as she possibly can.

I will admit, though, that sometimes Polly does take my breath away. When she laughs, she throws back her head and her neck looks as graceful and soft as the most delicate swan. Her eyes sparkle like diamonds and I imagine her lips to be velvety, like two rose petals passed gently over the skin. And, as long as I am being entirely honest with myself, there have been a few occasions when I’ve had a little too much Merlot and imagined the curves of her breasts pressed against my chest as I made love to Jane. But she is a strong, intelligent, beautiful young woman and I naturally respond to that. As any man would. But it’s nothing more than a fleeting fantasy. Not something I would ever actually act upon. She and I are friends, nothing more and nothing less.

I realize that someone has said something to me and snap my attention back to the here and now with an arch of my eyebrows.

“What was that?”

Jane sighs as if I’d just asked her to perform Cassius’ monologue from Julius Caesar entirely from memory.

“I said, darling, when do you think all of this will settle down?”

I take a sip of my coffee and close my eyes as I relish the bitter flavor of the beans.

“Soon, I hope.” I finally say. “Has to be.”

The other three begin debating cause and effect, each one rehashing sound bites they picked up from one news program or another, always so very careful to disagree without offense. The conversation is peppered with phrases such as What I think you’re failing to take into account is and I can see why you’d feel that way however….

They are so civilized, these friends of mine. So cultured and refined. Especially when you consider that they’re only a little over thirty years or so into life. But they wrap this cultivation around them like personal armor and it almost seems as if nothing real could ever hope to penetrate its barrier.

They sip their coffee.

They deliberate.

Point and counterpoint.

I doubt they even really hear the shots outside: the rapid fire crack of machine guns as the National Guard continues to quell the uprising.

They can’t begin to imagine the blood oozing across the sidewalks and dripping into the gutters as people moan and cry and beg for mercy; people who weren’t willing to give anyone else that same consideration just