Flagging

 

            Business had been booming at Waving Colors, Ltd. The millennial ma & pa shop started customizing flags in the year 2000, just a year after the founders graduated from Apollo High School in St Cloud, Minnesota. They employed a couple friends and, by autumn of the following year, mortgaged a warehouse to account for a spike in orders for Old Glory, black M.I.A. flags, ‘never surrender’ messages that sometimes bordered on the anti-Islamic vibes of those who generalized Osama Bin Laben’s effect on at least a quarter of the world’s population. Jenny and Jim (not yet a ma & pa) would receive donations of fabric and machinery from local chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution, VFW, Rotary—all with a blanket assumption that the company would add to the unifying message of George W and Mayor Giuliani: you’re either with us or with the enemy, and clearly that enemy was no one Minnesotan.

            The website, when Jenny convinced Jim of the merits of the internet, would manifest their stock and reassure that every flag was sewn with careful interest in the seams—the swathes discreet and any stenciled items rolled by hand. Machines would guide the intricate weave of stars and eagles clutching arrows, olive leaves. These were standard fare, but the fun would come in customizing.

            “Like the nation of your motorboat,” Jim quipped, pointing to the fluttering of ‘Loony Bin’ on the stern of a pontoon, the floating image of the state bird stitched below the words.

            High School teams—their alma mater not doing justice to their sun god, or the crosstown rival Tech H.S. trying to put more ‘bite’ into their tiger—compelled a bunch of crowdsourcing, and parents paid good money for original designs at Waving Colors, Ltd. In ways, the company would rather make a few of any type than whole-hog mass produce. The goal was not to compete with Costco and their Made in China crap, rather to excite the chance to co-create in the upper Midwest of America.

 

            Jenny faced it first, cornered in a bar she didn’t frequent: “why you making Somali flags, when them that’re here have no love lost for that failed state.”

            “You mean the blue field with a central white star? That’s been around since I was a little girl—lots of my friends are second-, even third-generation immigrants.”

            “Don’t doubt that, but... they’re here now. I wouldn’t enter their territory to plant the stars & stripes.”

            “Well,” she measured how many drinks had been had, “the Horn of Africa has suffered too many punctures of flag poles not their own. Jim an’ I—”

            “The Russians, y’mean. I saw Blackhawk Down and, shi-it, the mess was never ours to wrangle with. The Russians handed out Kalashnikovs like they were—”

            Jenny stopped him there: “like they are not the meaning in the flag. And maybe that’s why our good neighbors here are waving a reminder to the world, that anarchy is not what they promote—”

            “What in hell d’you know more than anyone?”

            Jenny walked away, and, later when she talked this through with Jim, they decided their more-than-ma & pa shop needed more security: she was five months pregnant, and he had also faced such run-ins with the less-than-satisfied.

 

            Spring of 2017, a clash of orders came their way: some in the community were heading west to Standing Rock, straddling the Dakotas, in support or disagreement with the tribe. “Hey there, Jim, you gotta know: God put dinosaurs on this planet to let us drill for oil.” And though Jim could’ve cited another customer’s point of view—that Indians had their Reservation rights precisely to prevent another ravishment from whites—he shrugged instead.

            “Not my issue. But we also don’t want hatred bannered on our products, so...”

            “Nothin’ hateful ’bout this phrase.”

            “‘MOVE, OR DIE LIKE DINOSAURS’? Like, that is how you want your grandchildren to remember you?”

            “Leave them out of it. Just make the fuckin’ order.”

            The bigot left, and since neither he nor Jim signed anything, the latter pretended to forget.

 

            Happier were the Covid years, when negotiations couldn’t occur face-to-face. “I’d like, Ms Jenny, to put a Pegasus outside my windowsill,” an email glowed, “to stand up to this chimera we all face.” Done, delivered with mask-and-distance protocol.

            “I don’t need a flag,” another wrote, “as much as fresher drapes to make me feel a part of normal life again—a Twins throwback, for when they won the World Series, or Granite City Days, struggling to keep events on Zoom.”

            George Floyd was murdered in May, and by June, banners and flags to rouse a nation were in huge demand. Jim and Jenny and their apprentice son Jason headlined their website accordingly: “we know and grieve and surely care that you will have in hand exactly what you need.” Orders for ‘Blue Lives Matter’ left them in a quandary, because refusal would land them in legal trouble—like the Indiana cake-maker who wouldn’t honor same-sex weddings. But through these threats, the family kept optimistic. January 6^th banged on their door, and the company could honestly say: “we’re overbooked.” 

            Jason grew despondent, though, as month by month the business was his to commandeer. Jenny was preoccupied with an unexpected baby, and Jim took his fears of fathering again to daily rounds of golf. Their forty-some employees were on autopilot, but someone still had to call the shots.

 

            Gambling their insurance policy, Jason planned one winter night to dress in layers, don a beard, pull a red cap visor to obscure his eyes and—pretending not to know where all the cameras were perched—he broke into the warehouse. No flamboyance, manifesto, flag to wave, Jason poured two canisters of gasoline on boxes here and contraptions there. He lit the puddles and seemed to pause in a sort of prayer, maybe for remorse he felt the world has rarely shown. The flames rose fast, if his exit was slow.

 

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2024)

 

The Handover

 

            Dr Rukeyser grew up a Michael Jackson fan and doubled down with each change to his legacy, from King of Pop to peculiar to pear-shaped to pedophile. She argued that Michael was none of those plosive associations and rather had a right to forge his own identity, including choices (if they were) for body alterations. From her teens to her twenties, Dr Rukeyser had no second thoughts about a career in plastic surgery. Now in her late forties, she was staring down that raison d’être.

            “I’m 100% on this,” her potential client asserted—we’ll call him Hank to protect his privacy, as he would be searchable on IMDb and other casting lists. “I’ve never wanted hands and have trained my whole life for this opportunity.”

            “Trained how,” Dr Rukeyser asked, clipboarding this consultation, “like in the Stanislavski method?”

            Hank bobbed his head. “Funny you say that—you might have seen some of my roles.”

            “Not really. Tell me about them.”

            Happy to do so, he didn’t raise his arms from the sides of the chair to itemize or gesticulate. “My first commercial was for Swagtron hoverboards and I was this kid who had this catchphrase, ‘Look, Ma—no hands!’ In thirty seconds I had to convince my actor mom that I could jump from the swingset, ride a bike with arms akimbo, dribble a soccer ball, turn her concern into a glimpse of pride. The Swagtron, then, was my earned surprise under the Christmas tree.”

            Dr Rukeyser took note. “Curious strategy. Like a vetting process for gifts.”

            “Maybe. And then one for a voice-activator like Alexa or Siri.”

            “Which one?”

            “Neither. The company went bankrupt, so I’d rather not say—but my performance was nominated for a Clio award in the way I didn’t have to hold my phone or open a laptop or...”

            “I think I get the gist. You’re dexterous without the need for hands. However,”

Dr Rukeyser set the clipboard on her lap and, consciously perhaps, pushed the bridge of her glasses closer to her eyes, “the amputation of both is a jarring request. Why not bind them for a stretch of time—or even just one to see if you’d actually need the other?”

            Hank shifted his weight and scanned the pictures on the walls to call her out: “you’ve done Botox jobs for all these fine people, liposuction, wart removals, cosmetic implants—”

            “—I’ve never amputated any—”

            “fingers? Like that polydactyl child I read about online—it led me here, in fact. And the article went on: ‘if the body is a temple,’ you were quoted, ‘not all parts are doing holy work.’ You did say that, right?”

            “Well, I wanted to emphasize the predominance of what the body does right.”

            Hank shrugged in some agreement. “Or your work with gender-affirming surgery. You can’t deny that what I’m asking is so different.”

            “There is strict licensing and oversight on all these procedures. Voluntary amputations of hands is... not what I’ve ever heard of, let alone can practice.”

            Leaning in, Hank reiterated what had already been proposed: “your lawyer and mine have already agreed in principle to your complete immunity from any malpractice—beyond your substantial pricetag.”

            “This is not about money,” Dr Rukeyser put up her palms, “and certainly not what lawyers determine.”

            

            The consultation went another twenty minutes and ended on the suggestion ‘let’s sleep on this’—separately, of course. Dr Rukeyser drove home and imagined Hank doing the same in a driverless car. She stopped at an Olive Garden drive-thru to give herself the night off from cooking. She mindlessly voice-activated a playlist to the 25^th anniversary release of Bad, jumping to a side B that, as a kid, she would lift off of a turntable and flip over, carefully replacing the stylus to hear ‘Another Part of Me’, followed by ‘Man in the Mirror’; she hadn’t handled vinyl that way since the digital revolution. Maybe life was less and less hands-on.

            Nevertheless, this would be a game-changer for her raison d’être (she could not shake the term). Even if the contract provided for nondisclosure of her role, inevitably her reputation would feed the talking points of countless echo chambers. She imagined someone like Howie Mandel—a preeminent germophobe who hasn’t been seen to shake anyone’s hand for decades—extolling the choice to reduce the manipulation of social norms. She wondered what Helen Keller might say, having only her hands as a means to communicate. She thought of a friend who was born with brachydactyly, enduring endless whispers and worse before receiving prosthetics and mastering their use. That friend was a fan of Black Sabbath, largely inspired by Tony Iommi who lost several fingers at a packaging plant, then practicing like hell to become the ‘Ironman’ of heavy metal guitarists.

            Olive Garden at rest in her gut and the garbage disposal, Dr Rukeyser scrolled through her options to round out the night. She was missing her cat, who died after Covid, perhaps out of loneliness once she had quit working from home. She wasn’t quite wed to her office, but she had long ago acquiesced to being ‘in demand’. With A.I. wearables evolving to transplants, her own touch with the times would only increase. Retirement would never breathe down her neck—probably the opposite: the Hanks of this world would hound her like a queen bee to keep up the hive.

            

            To summon up sleep, she played with her hands: crocheting the fringe of the bed throw, drumming a rhythm on lips, hinging and humming a ‘here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and.... The people would either wiggle like worms or disappear in expectation, depending on the inward or outward weave of her fingers. She tried other variants, as if making silhouette bunnies with no light at all. She cracked her knuckles unnaturally to compel a massage, undo any damage. About to lose consciousness, she noticed a glow on her phone: ‘Dr Rukeyser, I’m texting without’—

            

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2024)

  

a final pay-per-view

 

Eclectic recollections on the scalp masseuse,

according to the sendoff of her clients. 

 

Said one: she tried to get inside my brain, 

the matters grey and wending. Being not my therapist, 

I wouldn’t let her in, but watched her through my windows.

 

Said another: saved me from a plague of lice,

she did, and taught me how to nip them at the nit—

 

Another: that really makes me sick! And then she’d delve

her ungloved hands into the coif of maybe me an hour later.

 

Riposte: it would give your naked soul more dignity.

 

The first: her job was but to knead our knotted frets away,

not to bake our self-esteem like some soufflé. To each

her own, I tend to say, but I was only there to—

 

Go away! Your sanctimony does not translate well.

 

                        And neither does the way you say ‘her ungloved hands’,

                        as if she were a Harijan. And by your surly squint

                        I gather that you don’t know what I mean.

 

                                                An unheard voice: I know what you mean. And yes,

                                                her lack of filter is a reason why I came.

            

            That sounds unprofessional: families, even friends,

            need filters. A lack of trust builds trust.

 

                                                Says your therapist? 

 

                        Or the molding of your windowsill?

 

                                    Again, you make me sick. I just came to say goodbye to 

                                    someone sometimes creepy, if mostly in my mind.

 

                                                Even now, she’s smiling like that movie Smile.

 

Indeed, the scalp masseuse was pleased

with how this went, having brought

these heads together for a final pay-per-view.

 

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2022)

 

Dangling

 

            Seven in the morning, somewhere in the thick of suburban traffic on a gorgeous autumn Friday. Jerry tapped his padded steering wheel at 10 and 2, jamming to the riff within his earbuds. His tie was loose, eager to be fully off by noon, when he would leave the office (prearranged) and pick up his kids at their school for a quick departure to their weekend home. This had become a favorable routine since Jerry and Beth’s divorce a couple years before—not every weekend, to be sure, but enough to calm the question of ‘custody’ in more familiar terms.

            Bikes were racked behind the trunk and snacks were packed and—BAM—the airbag blasted Jerry’s chest and chin before he’d see the backwards letters forward in his rearview mirror.

            Since his was an older car, the engine didn’t automatically shut off. Jerry swore and shook his head, then pulled the parking break to leap outside and surveil the damage. The driver of the ambulance was already doing the same, not having to tear his way through an airbag. His paramedic partner was viewable from deep inside the cab, scrambling to set some apparatus up to attend to this new trauma on whomever was the cargo of this run, lying out of sight.

            Jerry fumbled an apology that wasn’t sought, as the ambulance driver spoke brusquely over him: “undo the lock on this, pronto!”—the ‘this’ being a child’s bike half-buried in the grill. The exposed half was just as enmeshed with the next bike closer to Jerry’s trunk, a melee of training wheels and gripping pedals and festooned handlebars.

            “Don’ know if I can,” Jerry surmised, as the ‘lock’ was actually a set of U-bolts around the spines of these bikes, none of them uncrunched enough to let in a hand.

            The ambulance driver whipped up another plan: “I’ll go in reverse, you go forward—”

            “Um, okay, but—”

            “NOW!”

            

            By this time, other commuters had surrounded this demolition derby, offering advice and their own cars to rush the needy bloke in the back to ER. Someone had found out, however, that he was in cardiac arrest and tied to too many wires—as entrenched as the bicycles, perhaps. Plan B wasn’t working, a lack of horsepower on both sides. Smoke rose in wisps from each radiator and the rubber burns below these hamster wheels going clockwise, counter…. In twenty seconds the ambulance driver waved off the effort and hopped out to drum up a Plan C.

            “We just gotta wait for another crew,” he conceded, looking around for someone to call 9-1-1 before remembering he could use his own radio in the cab. The traffic lanes were log-jammed due to the spectacle and natural congestion this time of day, so it was hard to know if a patrol car was on its way, or if anyone outside the scene was even aware of the snafu. Voices, varied, lifted to whosever’s ears:

            “Patience, friends—another ambulance should come in seven minutes or so.”

            “Patients? Are there more than one inside?”

            “I heard six minutes was the window before someone can sue—”

            “Depends on a lot of things.”

            “Depends on some numbnut not wearing earbuds to block out the world.”

            “He’s taken one of them out, at least.”

            “Listen, the wait is gonna kill the guy! We gotta get him in a backseat or—”

            “And have that vehicle weave through rush hour without a siren? Stupid.”

            “Stupid to just stand here. Like watching the planet die.”

            “Huh?”

 

            Jerry, meanwhile, was sawing at the carbon steel pipes of the carrier with one of the minuscule options of his Swiss army knife. He was distracted, naturally, with the potential playout of this day: he’d be late to work only to leave early; he’d mull whether the car would be drivable and when to have a mechanic ‘retuck’ the airbag; he’d imagine his son and daughter in some awe of the story, due sadness about the status of their bikes; he’d rehearse how to frame this all to Beth, who couldn’t interfere with his weekend rights but could call foul on how they might be used, circumstances such and such.

            “That obviously won’t work,” the re-emerging driver declared, having checked his partner’s efforts to keep their ward alive. “We gotta plow ahead.”

            “Plow ahead?” Jerry echoed.

            “You know the way to Resurrection Hospital?”

            “Yeah, but—”

            “Get back in and keep the car in neutral. I’ll push and your job is to steer with as little resistance as possible.”

            Scratching his head, Jerry demurred: “wouldn’t it be better if I were in drive?”

            “No! Cuz then our braking would also have to be in synch, adding fuel to this fire. The road ahead has cleared out for the time being, but I’ll have the sirens on to part the waves, so to speak—”

            “As long as a driver isn’t wearing earbuds!” someone from the side decided to remind.

            The ambulance driver didn’t wait for Jerry’s endorsement of the idea, replacing any further discussion with his trademark “pronto!”

 

            Resurrection was nominally Catholic, as was Jerry. Perhaps their ER workers prayed through triage routines or had their subtle ways with divine unction and the like. Though Jerry had no knowledge of the afflicted person he was towing, sort of, he tried to imagine his best chances at, well, resurrection. Arguably, the hapless person would survive or succumb regardless of this coupling of vehicles—fate is not a flowchart, per se, and probably prefers to go off those arrowed lines once in a while.

            “I mean,” Jerry mused, concentrating enough on his conservative steering to a weirdly unzipping road, “how do any of us wake up to face or efface plans? Our own and those of anyone whose path we’re bound to cross?...”

            Miraculously, the engine of the ambulance didn’t overheat: autumn extends its form of grace. Sliding into the ER ramp, they stopped. Hoping for due urgency, Jerry jumped to help—

            

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2023)

 

Coils

            My son Ben is studying product design at ČVUT, a campus of eclectic buildings in a pleasant neighborhood of northwest Prague. He has to do some old-school things like free-hand sketches and three-dimensional prototypes and applied calculus, but the ‘T’ in the university’s title compels a ‘tech’ mandate to be ahead of the curve in terms of robotics, A.I., optimal alloys and such. He’s happy with the facilities at ČVUT, if equally focused at his huge drafting desk in his bedroom, which also happens to be the only place in our house that still has a functioning phone jack. That jack no longer supplies a ‘landline’ telephone number yet vitally enables our Wi-Fi router to work.

            Eight years ago this spring, when Ben was away at some scouting weekend, I spent hours in his room trying to telephone a hospital in Columbus, Ohio, six times zones away. My brother Josh was in the last throes of cancer, accustomed to the disease for half his life, battling less to die than have us feel alive for any chance occasion—throwing horseshoes at our folks’ backyard, going to Ravinia to see, say, Steely Dan (the New York band who seemed to love Chicago’s northside), owing all his happiness to a peace that passeth understanding. I had heard from my relatives how his platelets were not keeping up with chemo, and time was running out. Illinois clinics having given up, the Buckeye state was now on the case.

            “Hello?” I bellowed through the landline, putting me on hold and sometimes forcing me to “Press 1 for English, 2 for Esperanto, 3 for Are You Kidding Me,” as well as reasons to release this tendril of a vine no longer viable.

            “Yes,” finally, an unfamiliar voice: “can I help you?”

            “Oh!—thanks—you see, I’m trying to reach—” my brother Josh. You’d know him, Nurse, if only he’d be able to be himself. Listen to your jokes, precisely as he’d let you know how much he’d want every voice to be, well, heard by somebody. His own was sometimes raspy, but always waiting in the queue to let more urgent cogitations through.

 

            Again on hold, I twirled the coils of this twentieth-century phone around each finger, discretely, as if the product was designed that way. Deliberate. The furls of teen-aged hair, before or after primping for a public face. With little else to do, I studied how my son had organized his room: the foosball table sometimes used, scouting badges not quite ready for display, homework as an afterthought, a picture of a grandpa he had never met, posing as an American G.I. in West Germany, prepared (I guess) to storm the commies of the East. His smile, bequeathed to Ben, suggested otherwise.

            “Hello?” my echo through the afternoon. Nurses’ desks are polynesian posts, each integral to a culture we can never know by dropping in, demanding details of some delivery that may be docked within the still-birthed time of night. “My brother Josh—”

            “Lamken?” the fifteenth island ascertained, and gulping too much—

            “Yes! That’s me—him—both of us! Though ‘Vold’ is also who we are—our older brother Jonathan having checked Josh in, and while Josh and I took our step-dad’s last name, Jon retained our—”

            Disconnect. The nurse, I’m sure, was just as apoplexed. I slammed the plastic piece of shit into the windowsill of Ben’s good room and threw myself onto his bed. I knew I’d need to do this all again and cursed the fact that mobile phones would also have to “Press 1 for English” in the ongoing scourge of Moore’s Law. Progress made the process more arcane, regardless of the payment plan.

            For as it happened, Josh could finally receive my under-ocean landline call, through the coils of friction on my end and, I must imagine, his—a phone some nurse would tighten to his ear, tinnitus wracking anything he’d claim to hear. “Dan?”

            “Yes! Josh! You can—”

            “I can’t hear you, Dan. Can you—”

            “Yes! I can! I can hear you—”

            “hear me? Dan, I can’t—sorry, this ringing in my ear is—”

            “That’s okay, Josh,” I gauged the decibels to scream or shriek, aiming for the softness he would naturally receive. A pillow on Ben’s bed would mute the agony or be within the stretch of coil to let me give my head a rest, contingent on the minutes next to beg my brother hear: “I love you, Josh—you do not need to—”

            “I cannot hear a thing. Are you still talking, Dan?”

            “I’m here,” my lungs expelled, “not to talk but to—”

            “What? I cannot hear. I’m sorry, Dan. This damned disease—“

            The only time I heard him curse outside a joke. Still, without a hint of hatred for what seemed such a loathsome thing. “Cancer,” I might have broached, but... nothing worth revisiting. “God,” I’m sure I said, interrupted by my brother’s patient sighs, “bless your—”

            “What? I cannot hear you, Dan. I wish I could but... thanks for—”

            Disconnect. Or more likely, I couldn’t hear myself, for all the coils inside my head, hoping to fast-forward to a glimpse of heaven semi-seen on earth. Columbus problematics, Prague ambivalence, thoughts and prayers to victims plagued beyond the call of vigilante souls.

 

            End o’ story, if it ever was. Ben’s room is still the epicenter for Wi-Fi clarity, if most of what we have to say remains in bubble screens and twitter taps to satisfy the agency to filter thoughts, as ‘filling silence’ is less an issue, technologically.

            I have to think, though, how phonelines worked the psyche more than cyber-updates. When my dad died, 1989, and I had a hundred calls to make, everything went through such coils. No emojis preconsigned, only guilt if I cut a conversation short or reassurance if I didn’t have a hint of what to say—and someone on the other end was listening, anyway.

 

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2024)