Happy Baby by Stephen Elliott Page A

full uniform and Toine sat with him and they talked about driving tanks through the Khyber Pass. Another time Toine sat in front with a small, hairless, pink man who wore only one long bolt of fabric like a toga. Toine later told me the man was the leader of a religion a million strong and there was a price on his head large enough to retire on. I thought he was encouraging me to kill the man and I got sick.
    “I’ve never seen a sex show,” Jessie says, placing her elbows behind her on the bar. Victoria has cuffed Alexis’s wrists together and is inserting her baton into Alexis’s vagina. “Do you think they enjoy it?”
    “What’s not to enjoy?” Toine asks.
    Victoria rubs a teaspoonful of grease into Alexis’s anus and slips her thumb inside. An artificial moan comes through the speakers. “We’ve had his presidents in here,” Toine says, pointing at me. He finishes his beer and places the empty glass back on the bar near the spigots. “I’m so bored with this I could die.”
    Toine’s room is in the front, where four windows overlook a quiet Dutch street. Not far from here is the Anne Frank Huis, but it doesn’t look different from any of the others except for the sign.
    “Tell me about America,” Jessie says.
    “America is a prison,” I say.
    Jessie balances a box of photographs on her knee as if it were a child. She runs a finger along her gumline. “You know, since last I saw you, I’ve been working in a refugee camp in the Congo. I worked there for three years.”
    “I know what you’ve been doing,” Toine says, without looking up, tossing waves of cocaine with his blade.
    “Mmmm. The Hutus used the camp as a base for killing missions into Rwanda until Médicins Sans Frontieres protested. The whole world ignored it,” she says, stretching her arms high over her head. The box nearly falls, and she catches it. “So how did you come to live together?”
    “This one? He’s an orphan. I took him in.”
    “Is that true, Theo? Are you an orphan from an American prison?”
    “I’m too old to be an orphan. I’m old enough to be a father.”
    “She cares about everybody,” Toine says. It sounds as if he’s apologizing for her.
    “You sound bitter,” Jessie says, smiling. “Anyway, I left Holland to go to Oxford and then took a job with the relief agency.”
    “You won’t get what you came here for,” Toine tells her, wagging a finger in her direction and then returning to his task. “You might as well go back to your refugee camps.”
    Jessie’s leg is shaking. “You wouldn’t believe the things you see. Have you heard of blue baby syndrome? In Gaza the water’s poison and babies are born unable to breathe. The UN sets up another tank of water every time the Israelis bulldoze a building.”
    “She would clean the wells with a toothbrush so the Palestinians can have more babies,” Toine says to me, then turns to Jessie. “Yuen is giving me the apartment behind the theater. Theo stays with me until I leave. I don’t like living with people anymore.”
    “But it was nice of you to let Theo stay,” she says. “So you’re either not as mean as you pretend. Or you have something else planned.”
    “It was nice,” I say, swallowing. The back of my throat is numb and hard. I pull on my forehead and try to stretch the skin. “Toine’s the nicest person I’ve ever met.”
    I watch him use the razor like a chef, quickly splitting then crushing the piles together. Everything comes easy to him. He has the best spot. He outsells all of the other salesmen. He’s Yuen’s favorite. All of the women love him. He doesn’t care about anything. The world gives him whatever he wants.
    “Anyway,” he says. “You haven’t heard my story.” I know what he’s going to tell her. It’s the first thing he told me when we first went for a drink. He had said I didn’t look like I could work for the Casa Rosso because the district is such a violent place, but he went to Yuen and I was