Free Elegy on Kinderklavier by Arna Bontemps Hemenway Page A

the men in front of him at their delicate distance—which caused Abrams to look farther upward, to allow his face to continue on its vertical pivot enough to take in the sky, the light, the unparsable complex of sky and light framed in that curious way by the tops of the walls into a kind of maze. And it was exactly then that he felt the slight slip, the sudden ease of friction beneath his right boot afforded by the metal contact plate.
    Though that’s not quite right either because it implies a false parade of events, when what it is surely more accurate to say—accuracy being meaningful to Abrams—is that there was a sensory-cognition master-fade type situation going on somewhere in his cortex, the phrase maze of light fading out even as contact plate or, more simply, IED faded in. That is to say that even as maze of light was dawning on Abrams (seeming, in fact, to fall down out of the vision in order to describe it) IED was beginning its scaled march into attention, so much so that the two thoughts may be said to have been coeval.
    Neither is the irony lost on Abrams that it was a moment of actual mindfulness (and not distraction or carelessness) which possibly led him to place his foot on the small stretch of shallow dirt that hides the contact plate. He can still hear the instructor during the lengthy pre-deployment training exercises in the real alleys of the fake village in the Arizona desert. Specifically, that in order to never ever be caught unawares by the presence of an improvised explosive device while on patrol in the Shit, they needed to first and foremost learn how to cultivate a state of extreme mindfulness in which each of them could stare at the ground, the dirt in front of their feet (carefully steppingonly in the compressed boot shapes of dust left by the man ahead), for hours and not become zombified or otherwise rendered senseless to the small hints of micro-terrestrial disturbance that would signal the presence of a device.
    Abrams had thus far handled the weeks of their patrol assignment by allowing himself to focus so hard he lost all sense of scale. In his vision the miniature landscapes of alley dirt became actual landscapes; the ridges and mounds, the troughs, the swales, all began to loom, began to feel like life-sized features of an entire sprawling world.
    No, what Abrams and the other men actually needed was a sort of mind less ness, an absence of thought that would allow them to stare at unremarkable stretches of dust and dirt for hours at a time without developing an acute awareness of the moment, or the light, or the other men, or any of the marginalia of actual experience that is mindfulness . It now seems a strange irony that such a human moment—the maze of light, the pleasant preprandial lull of the village, the alley wearing its stole of shadow, the pleasant cutting scent of the other men’s sweat—has possibly led to Abrams’ imminent cranial evacuation by way of shrapnel moving through the tissues of his face at unimaginable speeds.
    Unbidden, the flash of memory: Mrs. Clowney (sharp-faced, gently obese English 9 teacher). She is repeating, somewhat smugly, the true definition of irony. Irony is when the audience is aware of something that the player on stage is himself unaware of .
    Unbidden, also, the related memory of Mrs. Packard, Abrams’ third-grade teacher, trying, for some reason, to impress upon the class the unthinkable speed of light. She is standing at the classroom’s light switch, flipping it on and off, which sets off tremors of giggles. Abrams raises his hand (the teacher’s face falling at another of his questions) and asks which is faster, then, the time it takes theelectricity to go from the switch to the light, or the time it takes the light from the light bulb to reach their eyeballs, or the time it takes the students themselves to know that the lights are on? For a moment, Mrs. Packard, in her sturdy floral dress, goes