KEEP PLANNING – Avee Chaudhuri

It was my friend Zed Holbein’s 32nd birthday and I wanted to get him a gift. He’d sent me a lovely book for mine. But he had all the books he ever wanted. On several occasions he’d said this. “I have too many books. They should make me the warden of a prison barge.” “I’m sorry. What?” I asked. It didn’t follow. Holbein, no relation to the artist, continued, “I have so many books that we could drift up and down the Hudson, taking on prisoners, chickens, potatoes, parsnips, in exchange for the labor we provided, the men in my care, and we’d be dredging our septic tank wherever septic tanks are dredged. I’m sure the department of corrections would provide me with a map of facilities. In all other respects we’d be reliant on the quaint riparian world of farmers and septic-mongers, except in this singular instance: our library would be comprehensive.” He sat down from his oration and had another scotch whiskey. We had furnished him with a bottle of Cutty Sark, which I think put him in mind of ships, barges, indentured labor, uneven trades, doomed marriages perhaps. He spent several minutes staring at the bottle. Someone in the corner said, “get this man some egg rolls, stat!” A buddy of mine from long ago, he lives in South Texas now and has sent me photos of the rattlesnakes he’s shot and eaten, once gave me a copy of the Playboy Magazine from the month and year of my birth. Very kind of him. I thought I would do the same for Holbein, who was named for the artist. Holbein is his middle name. His last name is de Quincy, which is already too ludicrous. Born June of 1994, the centerfold from the month and year of his birth is Jenny McCarthy, a vaccine skeptic. That would not do. I’m not a partisan I hope (really I do hope this). My politics and Holbein’s are all over the place I imagine, not inconsistent but ecumenical as we are both men of the world, but we were up to date on our shots. Holbein would have objected to the McCarthy. I tried a couple of the other nudie mags of good repute but ran into more concerns: support for nuclear escalation, the Iraq War, disdain for the free press, disdain for public healthcare, that is a public option. Zed Holbein had not been shy about his college years, dalliances with men and so forth. So I wondered if he wouldn’t mind an issue of Playgirl from the month and year of his birth. No luck on that end. The centerfold was none other than the Cypriot pornstar Amos Skarparis, who hated Turks, not just those involved in opposing the Cyprus free government but all Turks everywhere, the Turks as a race, as asiatic foreigners. He said of the Turks they were subhuman. Good Christ, this would not do. Still, I was convinced I could find Zed Holbein a suitable gift, though I had to concede perhaps it could not be a nudie mag from the month and year of his birth. Another idea occurred to me. On his bookshelf Zed had a lego boat (he was a great lover of all things nautical) and I thought I might get him the Lego Catalog from the month and year of his birth. I could only find one in Russian. I presented it to him at the bar. “Oh wow, thank you. Haha this is tremendous,” he said. “Let’s have a scotch.” He flipped through the catalog, showing me the sets he had desired as a boy. “Ice Planet was my favorite. I remember my brother was partial to Blacktron, but hell, you know we were raised in Southern California. It never snowed.” Zed turned the page once more and started to frown. “You know I don’t speak a word of Russian nor understand the phonetics of Cyrillic, but this is all somehow…familiar to me.” “Is that so?” Zed stood up suddenly. He went behind the bar. We were regulars and such liberties were afforded to us. At this bar, which Zed had introduced me to, we had celebrated birthdays and New Years, the World Series, the Midsummer Classic, when Sergio had gotten the job in the bookstore we’d all turned rummy feral within the confines and safety of this bar. Zed had related once he was just passing in the street and had heard music coming from this bar he’d never been in before, which seemed strange and yet familiar, there was that term again, “familiar." From behind the bar Zed retrieved a submachine gun and he walked out into the street where a black SUV was waiting for him. Four hours later members of the Chinese trade delegation were gunned down outside a hotel in Santa Monica. My friend in Texas said his people came from somewhere in the Caucuses. My friend in Texas and I spent many long hours at the Yellowjacket Social Club in Austin talking about politics and I now recall he was extremely deferential. We never disagreed. And I remember now also (it had been so long ago) that when I first moved to Los Angeles this friend had arranged for me to stay with a cousin of his. The cousin had a bungalow in a walkable neighborhood where the corner store was a veritable piccadilly. It served all of one’s needs. Everyone used it and it was in that corner store one day that I met Zed when he was perusing the selection of tinned fish. “Excuse me,” I said, reaching past him for some anchovy fillets. “Oooh, nice,” Holbein had said. “Caesar Salad?” “Ah, no a chip dip.” “Chip dip?” “Yeah, caramelized onions, garlic, butter, the fillets, mixed up with sour cream and greek yogurt.” “Damn, dude. How the hell do I get invited over? I think I’ve seen you walking around, right?” “Bring scotch.” “You’re not a snob are you.” “Cutty Sark. J&B. JW Black if I’m feeling really really fancy.” “I can get down with the Sark.” I called up my friend in Texas. His number had been disconnected. I looked further into the matter of the Lego Catalog (Katalog). It was impossible it seems to get one in another language besides Russian. I called on not an antiquarian, nor an antiques expert, but a person I knew who studied such things with interest and he said, yes, it had been a curiosity among the Vintage Lego community, that the 1994 catalog remained extant only in the Russian language. “Almost as if it were a conspiracy,” he said. It seems that at some point earlier in life, my affinity for friendship had been noted by some kind of Russian intelligence organization or paramilitary force (of course I remain very much uncertain about the details) and a vast, rather deliberate plan was conceived for me to activate Zed Holbein, a sleeper agent ‘raised in Southern California,’ but conceived where exactly and first reared in which of the languages that arose on this earth when God scattered across its face the principal architects of the Tower in Babel.

*** Avee Chaudhuri teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is chef/owner of The Sepoy’s Revenge, an illegal restaurant he runs out of his office on campus. 28 July 2026