The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel

by Daniel Mark Harrison

  One wrong move and there is nothing we can do here. That goes for your mind more than anything physical that exists in the Universe we’re venturing through …

  Your consciousness is still in a stage of extracting itself out of a state of metamorphosis – that’s why you feel a little emotional, a little sad, a little attached to everything that just happened.

  It’s getting dark right now and all the stars in the sky are disappearing all of a sudden like many of God’s fallen angels dropping in the infinite depth of space like little Icarus cubs who leant one feather too close to an angry solar flare.

  This is what a power struggle looks like; and you are leaving one, which is why you see it and feel it now. In a political power struggle, the heart of the animal, no matter how wise, is as empty and endless as some of the ghosts you met along the way.

  Now take the pressure off the turbo and slide the cruise function along the bottom. The trick is to try and kind of glide within the space you see ahead – just let yourself stay there suspended for a moment and hang out the stabbing pain you feel for that’s not something we want to take back with us at all …

  … That pain, by the way, is the pain of a consciousness determined to condemn its own species to death for its own personal gain. It’s a pre-Millennial force dragging at your back wings …

  It’s one of the main reasons we came here – back to the pre-Millennial era and risked it all to understand what drives it. So you could see it and feel it and gain knowledge of it first-hand. But still, we have to incubate that type of ignorance, which grows like a wild virus inside a weak mind. And right now, your mind is going to be in a pretty weak shape for a few days – but that’s natural. It just means we have to take precautions.

  Your focus should narrow into those flashes of maroon and copper and grey, and the way the ocean looks a pale pink, out of context – that’s the reality that this is all just a game dawning on you.

  And it was just a game – now’s the time I’m meant to remind you that … the place where you were … some of it was real, naturally. The jist of it was real. You are real – you are all real. But look around you now – you can see this is not your home, and you can slowly feel that these are not the lives you were born to live –

  Stay to the right now, because if just one of you makes a move the wrong way it will set the others way out of synchronicity and we’ll lose our flight. Good – keep it hovering right there in formation.

  You need to use your giant mid-wings now like never before; flap them wide and let the harsh winds of this dead world carry you back towards where you belong.

  In a second you’re going to see a massive bright light, lit up like a big lantern in the Beijing sky. It’ll look like the gates to heaven, just as men used to believe it looked back then in pre-Millennial times.

  That’s because our consciousness has spent such an extended time in that era that it takes us all a moment to detach … there is nothing wrong with a peculiar pang of repentance, but let’s try and lose that if we can here …

  OK, now listen up. This is where it gets REALLY-FUCKING-TIGHT, where you stand the most chance of believing all you’ve seen is real for a very long time and being confined back to it – so whatever you do, don’t look back now.

  There will be a giant, momentary thudding pain that resonates outwards from the inner-middle area of your chest – around the solar plexus – as you break on out and through this next barrier …

  These rocks, the same grey slack jawed piranha-heads we glided through so easily on the way in – this is MAINSTREAM again but with a vicious burning crater for a face now that we are on the backside, existing out of it.

  To leave it from pre-Millennial times you have to physically carve and smash through it with a force that hurts like no small agony this time.

  There’s no way to come back alive without breaking the wall of MAINSTREAM down and losing your physical self completely –

  P-PP-P-PPP-P-O-PPP!!!?!

  Feel that?

  That’s the inner consciousness coming undone from the physical fabric of the body you are leaving behind … Say goodbye to that world you are leaving now – the pre-Millennial era. We might travel back there again some day, but not for a while yet.

  You’ll need to rest first. Let those primitives be for now or their mind games will make you think you really are living their reality – that there’s no way out … even they, many of the Millennials remained stuck in the MAINSTREAM worldview of the pre-Millennial era, even while it was changing directions and shifting in its values right before their eyes …

  Ω

  This is your exit – so begin to charge up what fuel you have left and make sure the thick white smoke pours through the open gaps of the glass in the back to give yourself maximum velocity acceleration turning back onto the charge field again. But if you can too, make sure it cools sufficiently first, or you’ll get burnt … and we’re nearly here now … in –five! … You can see the future through the doorway, lit up like the pearly gates. That’s where you are headed – right this way. … four! … three! … Feel yourself glide towards it; this is I, your teacher. That’s good – if you had still been in pre-Millennial mindspace you would have heard the word “creator” just then … two! … But you heard teacher, which means you are way past post-Millennial territory now. Not everyone gets back here so easily. Now there’s a lot of lightening here; that’s unusual. It’s as if some kind of electric storm has lit up the place like a huge motherboard, only it’s invisible

  – One!

  Ω

  FLASH!FLAAAAAAAASH! FLASSSSSSSSHFLA

  — AAAASH!

  FLASSSSSSSSH—FLASSSSSSSSSHHH!!!

  Ω

  PART 1: Body

  CHAPTER I

  Chairman Kane

  Ω

  In The Past

  LOOKING UP the skies seemed electric, polluted, purple and then red, a man-made complex of steel and brick infrastructure against the dense fog that hung over the horizon of the city, unfathomable, the kind of thing an early nineteenth-century picture-book salesman had come here to discover, its obscure beauty perhaps enhanced by the years of decay thanks to its Genesis, the industrial revolution. Here in the skyline was a specific kind of history; the history of the last one hundred years, the history of slaves freed only for freedom to yet again make them enslaved to a more banal establishment. Unlike other histories, this scene had a certain permanence to it, however – it was one composed of carbon atomic blasts, somewhere deep down from within the Atlantic volcanic ash of the giant sea-bed, so that many liquid metals, all ultimately the junkyard pit stop of energy consumed by America and brought over from some dry plane of wind-whisked sand a few miles outside of Bahrain, would somehow beg to soon to be battled out across plasma screens in underground five star hotel suites with ever more complex technologies just to sustain and keep within our own borders.

  Ω

  Borders have no limit in a skyline, of course. And there was something liberating in this view, contemplating the infinity of the next thousand miles, a world without structure and boundaries and political no-fly zones; birds see no prohibited right-of-passage after all, and fly madly amongst the intimate decorum of skyscrapers and neon high-rises that to us New Yorkers is a red-status terrorist warning if anything else that has a heartbeat dares enter.

  There was some inner, unspoken warning at work, I felt.

  Ω

  I like cities best, despite the madness and claustrophobia. There is a certain reason for existing inside a city that is unattainable elsewhere, a kind of squat-compatriotism jammed side-by-side miles up into the air in high-rise blocks of suffocating and yet vividly small dimensions into the make-shift remains of what urbanites term ‘home’. The bigger, more developed the city, the more make-shift the infrastructure, the more poignant the reality of neighborly conviviality – the TV set that doesn’t shut off after twelve, the high-pitch alarm of the midnight black Cadillac signaling pa
ranoia, the endless tirade of bickering and weeping and eventually the half-moans and whimpers of the drunk and high fucking of the early-twenties couple next door enters your space, fills your personal presence, shapes you, makes you more streetwise, less sensitized to the next round’s impact. Like pornography, a city only desensitizes your awareness to the desperate state of the human condition.

  It’s maybe money that brings most of us here, but the fresh-faced immigrant learns quickly upon entering the long avenues alternately shaded by the longer shadows of Manhattan’s midtown blinking commercial chaos that that any kind of real financial gain is eaten up instantly by the mass-consumerism inherent in the very presence of the impossibly short-skirts of the Latina sales girls who work late shifts at the sprawling all-night East Village discotheques that serve cheap Kamikazes and Margaritas with the sting of tequila from anywhere but Mexico City, by the mundane addiction to taxi cabs that you inherit just to avoid the up-close human voyage of the subways, by the little things that contribute no benefit to lifestyle or state-of-mind except temporary relief from karmic chaos at work in the hustle of every-day bodies coming and going and trying to rip you off or rip you one within this colossus. Most of us are not really here for the money anymore, the same way most suburbanites aren’t in the picket-fence walls of a three square meter garden for the lifestyle; we’re here either because we entered a block with a one-way revolving door and there’s no way out … or we’re just in it for the ride.

  That January morning – exactly where the wreckage of Ground Zero would one day fill up like funeral parlor ash into the New York skyline a whole decade away from now – a magnificent rainbow arched its way from East to West, encompassing the whole city and I guessed, a few of its suburbs too, signaling the climactic schizophrenia of the half-balmy, half-stormy battle playing about the clouds in a pressing electric storm. I was riding in a brand new Tanata Cayenne down one of my favorite parts of the city, FDR Drive, trying to determine the best street to cross over to the west side of the island so that I could make my way up into Westchester, where they were going to a party near school.

  At least, I figured, we were headed the right way; the hurricane for which the city’s public service transport system was ill-prepared was a typical South Easterly-one, hailing as it did from the Bahamas or some island where the very elderly and the very rich (or, as the case probably was, the very elderly rich) were at that moment coating their rubbery tanned skins in coconut- and pineapple-scented baby-oils and being served health shakes or toxic blood-orange cocktails under paper umbrella-hats. With any luck, I had hoped, we would escape its most dramatic effects by the time we had passed over Harlem’s quickly gentrifying but no less filthy former ghettos and we were into the leafy terrain of the northern city suburbs. The skies however, suddenly seemed to be forecasting a different sort of fate. The streets were paneled one side with the tinted-windows of Wall Street’s precociously ugly mid-seventies architectural faux pas and on the other by the expanse of the giant estuary-cum-ocean that forms the base of the Hudson River. Ostentatiously and without any attention to class or propriety, as only the products of an economic phalanx of united states’ know how to, the Chief Executives of these century-old financial establishments have hung rows upon rows of the familiar fifty white stars flanked by thirteen alternate Ferrari-red and ghost-white stripes that now flapped violently in the chaotic pull of the wind, while in the distance the river pulled in hard against the shores of Staten Island, a place I was glad these days to be too rich to belong to, and slapped up chaotically against the harbors of Roosevelt Island, somewhere I was proud of being far too popular to live.

  This highway, much like its namesake, is one of the few properties left to New York – nay, America – as a genuine living relic of the first immigrants to this mighty country. There’s a certain nostalgia here for all Americans I guess in riding this street, as if the rest of what we once had even here just within this great island alone that makes up what any Bangladeshi or Georgian cab driver will tell you is still to the present day the capital of the world, has been overrun by commercial tourist-guide madness and Indian pawn-shops geared to the out-of-towner, as if there’s nothing left like this area of the anti-Establishment anymore – just a political ocean of corporate blue washing over and under the lonesome red canyons spiking up in the middle of the country like open sores. It’s precisely what Beijing is scared shitless of, and one can’t help but think on the face of it, justly so – the metamorphosis of ideologies taking a quick transition from Citizen Mao to Chairman Kane.

  In the rear-view mirror I spied Tamara, my daughter Alyssa’s classmate, best friend and God-knows-what-else. Yesterday my daughter had turned fourteen, but judging by her ever-expanding appetite for all things new and foreign and her ability to stare the unknown point-blank between the eyes you could be forgiven for thinking you were a decade out. Take the Chinese language, for example; when her school had expressed reluctantly that it simply did not have the resources available to teach her how to read and write Mandarin, instead of submitting to the status quo, Alyssa had announced instead that she would learn from a fellow student and would, until the subject was taught, skip her German classes to make time.

  “Somehow I think it’s unlikely that the next political battleground is going to be in Munich,” she had scoffed at her headmaster. Hence Tamara: her friend of the same age was one of the newcomers to this era, a wealthy Chinese mainland kid who was educated on a full scholarship at America’s most prestigious and expensive boarding school, the one I handed over at least one third of my year’s income to send her to (and that was on a year when I was fortunate enough to win a literary prize, which I had done twice, or get invited to speak at some hedge fund’s cocktail party, which I had done three times).

  Tamara turned to Alyssa and for a moment she looked like she was about to say something that could not wait even if the world were to end at that very moment. But I presume such a vital confession warranted only ears thirty years younger than my own and of the opposite sex, because in a split-second, her Venusian sixth sense guiding every square inch of her immediate surroundings, she glanced diagonally up into the mirror and caught my darting eyes and in a whirl of something that felt like hypnotic telepathy froze them into the clutches of her own for a split-second. If she were American she would stare me down in defiance, but being from a culture that prides and teaches the art of the poker-face to a breathless precision, she lowered her eyes almost as instantaneously and instead breathed a gentle halo of almost invisible sweet breath in a subtle, disapproving whistle that made me feel like I was standing in midst of a party I should never have contemplated attending.

  Tamara then settled beside my daughter’s arm and threw her head casually-sentimentally on top of her shoulder in a feigned sort of innocence.

  Alyssa, for her part, was like a porcelain painting with the mind of an eighteenth-century feminist philosopher, if her yearbook page was anything to go by these days: although I wasn’t exactly comfortable with soliloquys such as “I like to be kissed before I get fucked,” I always knew somewhere in my heart that she meant this sort of turn-of-phrase with a distinctly intellectual bias; in fact, it was always obvious that she would have been one of the great ones of her very exceptional generation, and it was a badly-disguised secret that I was so proud to be the father of a young woman who blithely rejected the antiquated 20th-Century values her parents so blindly espoused without question. Alyssa – one might say – was in fact what every young woman of every second- and third-generation (if not so much that of my own parents’) alive in the early 00’s wanted to touch and hold and wanted to be, and I felt at that precise moment – as my eyes left Tamara’s silent wrath – a certain sense of empathy with her desire to break out. I fixed my gaze on my daughter’s watery-blue, almost alien-like gaze, sideways-cast, against which Tamara both trembled and because of which Tamara clenched her skinny stocking-clad legs in some sort of anticipating excitement against the
warm body of my daughter. In fact, it was quite possible that these girls might be entirely of another world; Alyssa with her upturned mouth and pointy, high cheekbones and faint, white-blonde curls that fell about the size B chest that had less in common with her mother’s bouncy fake-tits by the day, and Tamara with her fine opal skin tone and real-life photo-shopped complexion and big wandering, sunken black eyes that drowned out her pupils, her long, jet-black hair mingling in contrast with my daughter’s blonde locks. Tamara had about her that foreign, fresh, Cool Water smell that all Asian kids of this recently globalized world’s new order give off.

  In fact, I surmised, it was like a time-passage to an intersection of another far off city sitting here with Tamara, as she brought forth with her the reality of a world I had then only once in my life discovered, on a book tour in 1989 at the height of Far Eastern economic chaos, many men’s misfortune serving my extremely good joss as I changed the bulk of my traveler's checks 35 percent higher than they had been worth only days ago.

  Although she could not possibly know it, Alyssa had descended the ranks of anti-establishment like her forefathers except she had managed to do so entirely from within her own country. She’s an intellectual terrorist to modern-day capitalism, I thought glibly – the way Lincoln and Madison were terrorists to the long-dead imported European monarchical order. She and Tamara had joined the widening global village of trans-global hybridization, for it was no latter-day racial stereotype equivalent either of them chose to share their most tightly-held secrets and childish nightmares and first fantasies with today in these school holiday basement sleepovers, but rather their polar opposites; a girl from the home of a well-regarded – if nothing more than averagely well-off – author from New Jersey confided her entire life’s story, however limited that might be, not with some waspy Democrat politico’s niece or the granddaughter of a fourth-generation family of doctors, but rather with the multi-millionaire Asian daughter of a Xianxi-born coal miner who had made about as much money as had half of Long Island’s well-heeled gentry last year by selling plastic bags to K-Mart. Unlike those of my generation, for whom friendships were by necessity groomed and grounded in the closeness of the relationship between each other’s parents, these girls paid no mind to the fact that their own parents would be hard-pressed to utter more than a courteous introductory sentence to one another … if even that …