Polarized state.

• Author: Arnett, David L.
• Position: Short story

On the day the poles shifted, Kaspar Korkut was sitting quietly one sunny fall morning outside a coffee shop on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., reading an article in The Washington Post on battered husbands. The unusual subject was beginning to gain currency in the social welfare community, although Kaspar could easily have written the article from personal experience twenty years earlier.

He was, in fact, 45 years old. His wife Magda was actually quite pretty and trim, too pretty for the good of his psyche and too trim for the good of his body, which too often bore the bruises of her blacker moods. In their twenty years of marriage, they had experienced only one fight, but, as the story goes, it had lasted twenty years.

They had met in Munich, where Kaspar was serving in his first overseas tour at the American Consulate General as a Vice Consul adjudicating visas. The Germans were pressing for the establishment of a visa waiver program; Kaspar would have pressed just as hard in the opposite direction had he known what awaited him. Magda's maiden name, Hausdrachen, neatly printed on the visa application, should have warned him, but he was growing tired at the end of the day, and, truth be told, he was growing ever more enticed as she smiled at him from the other side of the window.

"It says on your application that you are 22 years old and that you wish to travel as a tourist for three months in the United States. It also says that you are unemployed, single, and that you have only 500 DM in your bank account. I'm afraid that I will not be able to issue the visa, unless I have more definite proof that you will be returning after three months."

Magda smiled at him flirtatiously and said in passable English, "I don't have anything with me now. Let me prove it to you at home."

A more experienced officer, and perhaps a better-looking one, would have thrown her out. Instead, he threw in with her, and she showed him what she had to show. She also got the visa to the United States, although a little bit later as Mrs. Korkut, and his fate was sealed.

As he looked up from his newspaper at the loud screeching across the street, Kaspar observed a perfectly healthy and rather large black cat running apparently for its life from a small creature that appeared to be an unremarkable gray mouse. Must be a shrew, he thought to himself, as he saw the creature gaining on the cat. As the two animals rounded the corner and passed from his line of sight, Kaspar 's thoughts turned to the office and his own current nemesis--burly Jack Stark, the Director of the Office of Austrian, German, and Swiss Affairs at the State Department, the man for whom Kaspar labored as Deputy Office Director and served as permanent fall guy.

In the beginning, two years before, Kaspar thought that perhaps all Office Directors claimed the credit for everything that went right in their domains and blamed the rest of the staff for everything that went wrong. A meek but honorable man, Kaspar readily took all blame upon himself, as he genuinely liked his other colleagues and wished only the best for them. The fact that he had been stuck at the FS-02 level for nine years bothered Magda far more than it did him, and his bruises testified silently to the extent of her displeasure.

He was hurt far more by Jack's refusal to assign the credit to him that he clearly deserved. How many times had he prepared memoranda for Jack's signature and read the compliments addressed to Jack on the come-back copies without ever hearing a word of acknowledgement from him? How many times had he reminded his boss of meetings about to take place and deadlines about to be missed without a word of gratitude in return? In his last rating, Jack had actually begun the narrative by writing: "Mr. Korkut is a modest officer with much to be modest about."

Kaspar paid his bill for his coffee and donuts, folded his paper, and began to stroll toward the Harry S. Truman building on C Street, "Main State" for legions of State Department employees. Unfortunately, his marked physical resemblance to President Truman had proved to be no advantage in his career. He stopped two blocks later to join a small but growing crowd of students from George Washington University gaping at a loudly chattering gray squirrel that was nipping ferociously at the tail of a black Labrador retriever that somehow believed it could escape by climbing up a young elm tree. When the squirrel's teeth finally hit flesh instead of hair, the poor Lab abandoned its climbing pursuits and fled down an alleyway, howling pitifully.

As the crowd split into small conversation groups amid nervous laughter and scattered applause for the still chattering squirrel, Kaspar began to walk again toward Main State with the memory of the fleeing cat suddenly front and center in his consciousness. He empathized with the two small creatures that had somehow turned the tables on their larger foes, and he began to feel an unaccustomed stirring of resentment at the many slights and embarrassments that he had endured for so many years. Even so, it had not yet dawned on him that he had never before really been aware of the slights and embarrassments.

Once more, he began to walk toward Main State, and it occurred to him that he had better hurry or he would not reach the office by 0830. For the first time in his life, however, it also occurred to him that he really didn't care whether he was late or not. As he began to savor that surprising thought, running it several times through unfamiliar corners in his mind, he spied two nondescript gray rabbits in the yard to his left that had jumped from behind a bush and were sniffing intently at what appeared to be carrot peelings that had fallen from...