Jackals

Permanent bardo.

Lashana Lynch as an MI6 hunter in The Day of the Jackal, streaming on Peacock.

This morning a young man came to buy tree stumps. Richard is surprised he’s marrying a person who sells tree stumps. The young man had a beautiful, Asian face and said he wanted one stump as a platform for a small fountain and the other stump as a station for chopping wood.

I showed him around the property. It was like suggesting this dress for a cocktail party and that coat for a visit to the Norwegian fiords. I liked that he was prompt. Not only prompt, he’d followed my directions precisely—switching from Facebook messenger to texting, which alerts my Fitbit.

The man was so brilliantly on it and methodical—the way he brushed off soil from the stumps and stabilized them in the trunk of his car—he reminded me in a good way of the detailed care taken by the paid assassin, played by Eddie Redmayne, in The Day of the Jackal, currently streaming on Peacock.

We were very happy together. He was delighted with his stumps, and I forgot to be irritated by anything else in the NOW.

The paid assassin played by Eddie Redmayne has a backstory. Normally, I think any narrative that uses a backstory to prop up the front story is a broken story I feel no sympathy for. No one knows why anyone does anything, including the person who does it, and I think all stories should leave it at that.

The backstory for the character played by Eddie Redmayne is he was once the best sniper ever produced by the British military and was assumed to have died ten years ago in an explosion in Afghanistan. In fact, he had detonated the device that killed a squadron of secret ops after they’d wantonly slaughtered an entire wedding party. That didn’t explain why he’d decided to kill people for money, and I spent a fair amount of time—time well spent not thinking about the NOW—contemplating the move from killing people for your government and killing people for billionaires.

In both The Day of the Jackal and Black Doves (Netflix)—another show currently streaming about paid assassins—the killers operate in a world ruled only by money. There are no ideologies any longer. People kill for people who can pay the highest price, and they don’t feel so bad about themselves and we don’t feel so bad about what they are doing because we know the people paying them murder millions more people with the weapons they manufacture and the wars they fund. We know, as well, the people in government who ostensibly determine political policies are on the take of these billionaires, too.

Eddie Redmayne in Day of the Jackal

This morning, Richard said of these shows, “It’s James Bond meets Kafka.” He meant there’s no knowing all the corridors of power that exist and who is behind the locked doors. Pop, pop, pop go the guns, softly, of course, with silencers or across long distances, so the sounds do not rattle our brains. Isabel, the head of MI6 in Jackal, is in the pocket of the British foreign secretary, who’s in the pocket of Charles Dance, lord of the billionaires (just when you thought Tyrion Lannister had finished him off in Game of Thrones.)

The last thing I want to do is line up with conspiracy theorists. I mean, look at their clothes. And yet and yet, I ask you, dear fellow mice on the shivering spine of the planet, is it really a conspiracy any longer if everyone knows that billionaires run everything, near and far, and even if we don’t know exactly how the money flies to this or that bank account in the Cayman Islands.

In Jackal, Eddie Redmayne’s character is mirrored by the MI6 operative who hunts him, played by Lashana Lynch, who is very alive as a human being with large, expressive eyes. The way she mirrors him is that both killers live with family members who have no idea who they are and what they do. The people they live with are both okay with this gap in their knowledge and ragingly not okay with the distance. It makes you think about the secret lives we all lead in relationship to each other and how many secrets we can continue to keep.

For me, the decision to get married had seemingly come out of the blue, although as time passes, it’s changing in my mind from a solution to practicalities about taxes and medical proxies to something symbolic of the emotional attachment I feel. According to my father, I spoke in complete sentences when I began speaking, and my first sentence was, “I want to do it myself.” A slippage is occurring from one state of being to another, not unlike the decision made by the Jackal to move from killing people for his government to killing people for billionaires.

Richard and I have already lived together for 18 years, knowing how the other likes their tea, whether to add Epsom salts to the bath water, if it’s okay to straighten the paper’s on Richard’s desk (never). It’s the same deal for the Jackal of setting up his rifles, measuring the wind speed, calculating the exact position of a moving target. It’s the same pull of the trigger. In both arrangements, he is a sharp shooter. That’s what he is, and yet he has moved from point A to point B, and in the move to point B, he is never quite sure who he has become and why he is acting as he does.

Selling tree stumps, getting married, and thinking about the new breed of paid assassins, detached from the values of governments, all these thoughts are an alternative to the NOW and also bring me back to the NOW because it’s not possible to slip the noose. I mean the control that actual billionaires have of actual governments they are able to buy and why, except for let’s say George Soros and Bill Gates, billionaires pay to see freedom shot in the forehead from a distance of two miles, so we don’t hear the blasts of automatic weapons and we don’t see the bodies fall back into pools of blood.

The other day I sent an email to a friend. I said an inch of snow had fallen over night and the light had that silvery flat grayness I love in winters up here. I said I was blue about the casual acceptance of sexism that made me feel separated from the times I am living in. My friend wrote back and said she didn’t want to be in a rage all the time and was finding herself focused on “sight, color, light, music, trees, food.” She suggested, to commune, we “touch hands like sea otters sleeping on the ocean.” She was concerned this wasn’t “helpful.” I wrote back and said, “You did help.”

My father played handball on the streets of the Lower East Side. He used to swim in the ocean parallel to the shore. Where did he learn to swim? He used to say, “A woman with brains and a good figure can have anything she wants in the world.” He took care of his body. He wore custom-made suits. He dabbed cologne on his neck and handkerchiefs. In restaurants, he’d say, “Order anything.” In life he’d say, “You can fight your own battles.” My mother was beautiful. She was intelligent and didn’t go to school. In the summer, when I was at camp, she’d send postcards about the aventures of my goldfish. I’d find them fanned across my bed, and I would see her face float up to the ceiling. She loved to laugh. Her favorite story was about arriving at her dentist’s office, just as he was getting there, too, and watching the bridge that had come loose fly out of her mouth and land on his shoe.

Toby and Murray, a backstory.

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