Elegy on Kinderklavier by Arna Bontemps Hemenway

drowned knowing he was going to drown, drowned clawing desperately at the sharp metal of the blocked hatch that was now beneath his feet, drowned defecating all over himself in utter terror. And Abrams just couldn’t write that.
    What is Brockton Albright doing now, this moment of Abrams’ foot’s fateful lifting progress? After they’d both left the pod assignment (Abrams reassigned to actual unit attachment, Brockton having finished his contract), Albright began a very successful career as an academic and a public intellectual. He’s now in residence at the Sorbonne, Abrams believes. And Abrams thinks of him now in some Latin Quarter square, almost dusk, his thin fingers lost in his lap, his tiny cup of tea forgotten on its saucer before him. Oh, what Abrams could’ve been in life, if he’d only tried a little harder.
    But Abrams’ favorite thing to remember from his time in the pod with Brockton in Tucson is actually the rare instance of Brockton’s smile. Such a saccharine thing to willfully remember, but it holds the same relation to Abrams’ happiness (even now) as Lara Fugelsang’s smirking sneer does to Abrams’ shame. Brockton was an unexpectedly funny guy, Abrams remembers, though he never smiled at or after his own deadpan, absurdist one-liners. Abrams can’t actually remember what made Brockton smile those few times—surprise seemed to have something to do with it, and being unobserved—but Abrams can remember very clearly what it looked like. Brockton’s whole face changed, opening up, brow for once relaxing, lifting, spreading—and the impression of vulnerability flashing then across his features was so startling as to make Abrams look away. For just a second Brockton seemed just like a little boy, granted a pulse of pure, unmediated feeling.
    â€œMomentary joy” was the phrase that always stuck in Abrams’ mind when he thought of it. A blooming. What a thing to have seen.
    The principal legacy of the CAST pod assignment, though, these years later, now that Abrams has been attached to an actual unit in the actual Shit, is the ghosting awareness of being on the other end of the CAST technologies’ flow—of being in the midst of all the “data” that is really just the world, the village, the late afternoon, the alley. It’s stoppedAbrams cold each time he’s allowed his mind to wince itself across the thought. What CAST data operator, sitting in what American hangar, was watching him now, displaced in time? That, of course, was the very worst part of that assignment: the nebulized awareness, as he worked, that the subject was being kept alive there before him for only the exact duration of Abrams’ close attention, and that, at some point—a point Abrams could feel dawning even as he opened for the first time each new Casualty Data Packet—Abrams would grow bored, and tired, and inured to the human life which he held in the circuitry of the control board before him—in the circuitry of his mind—and would allow it, finally, to expire. What finite expansion of memory and experience would he grant himself, if he found his own CDP loaded up on the screens, the cursor ticking away? And the irony, even in this moment of abandon, of there now actually being created, at this very moment, a CDP for this purpose, is not lost on Abrams, though he knows it’s not irony, really, just the remediated sadness of knowing.
    4.
    The contact plate itself is suspended, the tiny metal ridge on the underside of the plate now loosed from its delicate restraints by the pressure of Abram’s foot. Its destination—the small metal tab which will complete the electric circuit, thereby triggering the small detonation charge, which, in turn, will trigger the primary explosive (in this case, Abrams knows, probably an unexploded landmine salvaged from the Iran–Iraq war)—awaits, patiently. The contact