“Just think of the team we’ll make, Lou,” Larry said. “If I have a client who needs me to appear in court in Wales, or Dublin, Belgrade, I’ll just have you at my side translating to the court and I’ll win every case.”

“You need me. You see.” Louis said.

Yugoslavian: Cestitamo Bozic

Louis studied a while longer, looking up Happy New Year in Arabic and sending an email to Omar and Habib.

Around one p.m., after a lunch of sandwiches and soft drinks, they put on t-shirts and long-sleeve flannel shirts, blue jeans, tennis shoes, and drove to the capital where they had volunteered to help at a soup kitchen sponsored by a relief organization affiliated with their church in Fairfax where they had become members in 2006, another Anglican church that accepted them as gay and Christian.

The soup kitchen was located in a working class area of the District of Columbia.

Since his early years in grade school, Louis had been brought up by his parents to spend some time each holiday helping the less fortunate, often at a Brooklyn area soup kitchen, or, when he was a teen, helping deliver meals to the needy and the disabled or elderly. He had asked Larry if this were something they could again do together, having spent time the previous Christmas at an Iraqi relief mission in Arlington where they had been among those helping unload a food van and helping serve meals to the mostly Iraqi refugees who had told them stories in their halting English about what they had experienced of the war.

This Christmas in 2008, the theme at the mission was:

HOPE COMES WITH A MEAL. There were many black and Hispanic among those in the food line, with Larry standing at the buffet helping with potatoes and gravy and Louis in the kitchen helping refill the hot warming plates, a process that continued over ninety minutes while the main afternoon meal was being offered, another round to be given out that evening between five and seven to those who could not make it for the lunchtime dinner.

They drove home feeling rather tired, in need of rest, Larry taking a nap and Louis sitting reading on their living room recliner after they had opened their Christmas gifts to each other and from their relatives, the artificial tree in the living room having been set up by Denise, a decorator who lived on the block and who had bought an assortment of lavish golden stars, Santa figurines, birds, elves, reindeer, and glass ornaments that she said she had found at a liquidator two weeks earlier who had given up on the holidays at an exclusive shopping mall in Alexandria, Denise having charged McIntire and O’Connor only her cost plus a reasonable fee for the set up and asking them for references, “If you’d be so kind, as I’m just getting established and interior design is so based on recommendations,” which Larry especially had done, telling friends at the capital such as Todd as well as Dick and Rosemary who in fact, still being rather new to the capital area, had hired Denise and spent so much on her services outfitting their estate with interior and exterior lights for the season such as would have made the more disapproving conservationist of electricity experience heart palpitations, even more so upon seeing the bill that Denise had presented and which Rosemary had paid without hesitating, merely telling Dick, “It’s only money.”

Among the presents that Larry had received and which sat in partially opened boxes with luxurious wrapping paper and bows in piles around the carpet were:

A $100.00 gift certificate from Louis for Gabir’s Grill on the River

An art of shaving engraved shaving set from his brother and sister-in-law

A Rene Lalique glass perfume bottle, signed, from Rosemary

A Connecticut chest of oak with three vertical panels in front and tulip motif, split baluster on stiles, dating from the 17^th century from Dick, which had been shipped by experts in the trade, carefully wrapped and received “in impeccable condition” - as Larry indicated on the shipping manifest - at the McIntire/O’Connor residence on the 23^rd of that week.

Above the wood burning fireplace in the living room, which they rarely used, sat a French mantel clock circa 1840 that Omar had given them for their 3^rd wedding anniversary from his collection still stored at his home in Ann Arbor and which had not sold at the Chicago antique dealer where he had taken it in 2004 on consignment before moving back to Iraq. The conical pendulum was swinging lazily back and forth, Louis having wound up the spring for the first time in months to see if the wheels in the clock train and bobs would move properly in the circular path of their design.

On the wall to the left of the front bay window hung a 44” x 75” oil on canvas of apples and apple blossoms by a Virginia artist that Larry had bought in 2000 and that both men liked. “Impressive when visitors walk in and see such a large work,” Louis would say.

In back of the fireplace was an 18^th Century Dutch cast-iron fireback of 2’ 8” height with ornamental figures from mythology as well as fleurs-de-lis.

Louis decided to put on his new stereo AM/FM headphones, so as not to disturb Larry, and listen to the Christmas Day message of Hudson Elsmere Pembroke, which had been pre-recorded on the 24^th.

Pembroke began with:

The list is complete. Is yours? I mean the list of those who were not so fortunate as others today and who did not receive what they needed most today. In some cases, enough food, despite the best efforts of a world of concern.

Louis took off the headphones and petted Augustus, who had just come in from the kitchen, apparently wanting more food.

“Come on, kitty, want some extra Christmas dinner?” Louis said, getting up and going to the cupboards to get out more of the canned cat food Augustus liked to eat. Petting the cat while it nibbled on the salmon treat, Louis continued. “You’ll have me and Larry studying that book I gave him about cats talking and before long I’ll know exactly which flavor you want. How about that? You’ll be able to tell us all kinds of things you learned, and I know you’ll be an honest kitty and never lie to us. You’ve never lied to anyone in your life, have you?”

The cat purred.

“That’s what I thought. You wouldn’t believe the hoaxes and fooling and folly and lies that have gotten the human world into another mess, and this time looks like a big one.

“We’ve got fruitcakes and I don’t mean the kind we got in the holiday assortment from my uncle Ron. I mean the conmen and swindlers and people with nothing better to do that dupe the public with charades and abuse and hoaxes you’re lucky you don’t have to read about on the Internet like half the people who have nothing better to do than read and wonder about all the hoaxes and false claims posted on the Internet each day.”

At that moment, Chad, who had been given a copy of the new book THE COMING ANTI-DOLLAR by his conservative father who had divorced Chad’s mother when the boy was ten and who kept in touch from Idaho - where he worked for a food conglomerate - via email and steady gifts at birthdays and holidays and who had also helped significantly with Chad’s college expenses.

Chad was at his mother’s and step-father’s attractive home in the Hudson valley where she had lived with her third husband, Chad’s father being number one, since 2005 and who also had tried to instill in Chad “a rather exaggerated sense of conservative thinking….” as Chad told his college friends, and who approved with reservations his gay orientation. Chad sat down in the well-lit library with view through the patinated glass windows of the formal garden under snow in the backyard. It was quiet, with his parents gone and his younger brother age seventeen sleeping late after a late Christmas Eve party with friends of both sexes.

Chad took a deep breath and opened the cover, which was inscribed by his father: “What you don’t know can hurt you in a world where anything can happen. Merry Christmas 2008 - Stan.”

He flipped to the middle of the book and began scanning the pages:

“Now through step by step analysis we have proved beyond a reasonable doubt, based on direct and indirect inferences drawn from marketing habits of consumers up to the very date of publication of this expose, that indeed this Anti-Dollar not only exists but is suave enough to be granting bonuses already to his minions who reek of wealth but that diminutive indeed in comparison to the grand mass of capital accumulated through the utmost cunning by the Anti-Dollar since his first foray into what he saw years ago as the path to ultimate global economic control.

Chad flipped to near the back of the book, to the last chapter and read:

They thought the gilded age of emperors and European royalty would last a thousand years, and it was brought down by World War II. They thought communism would last a thousand years, and it was brought down by the fall of the Berlin wall. What everyone who reads this book is thinking…

Chad shook his head. It’s not what I’m thinking. I’m thinking this is a joke.

He read on:

How long before the Anti-Dollar takes control of American commerce and then the entire global economy as we now know it? How long will the Anti-Dollar remain in power before an uprising of the elite who can still afford a luxury car united with the unemployed and workers reduced to poverty-level subsistence rise up and demand that their governments end his abuse of his massive wealth? How long before the powers of government themselves must ask the Anti-Dollar for permission to legislate, to govern, to stand in judgment?

Chad closed the book and thought: People actually make money writing this drivel? No wonder America’s going down the tubes.

Back at the home of Louis and Larry around 4 p.m., the two men were planning to dine with Larry’s parents and a few of their friends at their mansion on the Potomac.

“Dressed?” Larry called out from the master bathroom.

Louis was in the living room sorting through more of the unopened gifts.

“Yes,” he called out. “Got on the new slacks and sweater you gave me. I’m ready!”

“Okay,” Larry called back. “I’ll be ready in a minute and we might as well leave before it gets darker.”

“Good. Take you time.”

Louis sat down on the sofa in front of the bay window and unwrapped another gift from Larry, a book of poetry published by peaceforiraq.net that Larry had bought on the Internet. It contained anti-war poems including one by Patrick Conway, a Tulsa writer and artist who had met Louis during the protests led by Cindy Sheehan in Washington in 2005.

Louis opened the ninety page book and found the one by Conway entitled:

THE VERY FIRST DAY OF THE WITHDRAWAL

They will hardly believe it in Baghdad,

The children who ran from the tanks,

The men released from Abu-Ghraib who draw a blank

Refusing to think of the trillions of memories

Of what they saw and cannot believe they saw

Of torture and abuse and despair

Among their thousands of fellow Iraqis

Held prisoner by the army of the nation

That said freedom depended

On a shot heard round the world at Lexington.

They will think of how many times they awoke

And awoke and awoke in cells too filthy to believe

Their wives and mothers denied visitation

Their days filled with barbed wire boundaries

And a world beyond that beckoned

And taunted them with “why they and not others“?

And the U.S. tanks - symbols of waste

In a war for the sake of waste itself

By a society that could not forbear

Teaching a lesson to the helpless of Iraq

Who wonder still as the Americans withdraw

Just what Iraq had done to deserve the occupation.

And they will wonder when they will find work,

And what that work will be

And how they can introduce themselves:

“I’ve been in a camp since 2003.”

And they will study and hope and pledge

That Iraq never again be forced to its knees

And think why the world deserts its reason

On the weakest of lies, frauds about WMD’s,

Nuclear fictions about Africa and uranium

And will wonder what can be done

To undo such injustice.

Let’s leave that to God to decide.

Indeed, let’s leave that to God to decide, Louis thought, hearing Larry coming down the hall, standing up and stretching, getting his wallet and keys from a desk drawer, and hugging Larry.

About forty-five minutes later, they drove up to Larry’s parents’ front door, parked, got out, and spent most of the evening enjoying Christmas dinner and conversation with Dick, Rosemary, and their guests until leaving at ten p.m.