by Nick Mamatas
Q: What were the last words spoken aboard the space shuttle Challenger?
A: What’s this button do?
ACROSS the world, there were many other such spontaneous manifestations of gallows humor, but Bernstein’s was the first.
And so too, the movement that followed in the wake of Julia’s graffiti emerged from many precincts and quarters, cutting across land and time zone, but oriented toward that peculiar intersection of Generations X, Y, and Z. Largely white, surprisingly impoverished in their own eyes, people from whom the irony has never escaped, but who themselves cannot escape irony. The sort of people who might read a novel by Don DeLillo and decide that the term “child of Godard and Coca-Cola” applies to them, despite the fact that such clever-sounding untruths apply to nobody. Julia was already becoming incorrectly famous, though she never took credit for the graffiti.
Here is how the movement started. Five friends living in Brooklyn, put a video on the Internet. It was mostly text: white on a black background.
HELLO
WE THINK PETER NEADS FISHMAN, REAL ESTATE DEVELOPER, IS THE DEVIL
WE ARE GOING TO EXORCISE HIM BUT WE NEED YOUR HELP
WE JUST WANT YOUR HALF
THEN a woman appeared. Alysse, actually, outside near the stadium—with the letters A, L, and F prominent behind her—spoke. “Half the money in your pockets right now. Half the rides on your MetroCard.”
Cut to Davan, sitting in a small apartment’s small kitchen, an elbow on a Formica-topped table. “Half the time you were going to spend masturbating this week. Half the drama you generate just by existing.” Then he mugged for the camera and whimpered in a falsetto, “So lonely.”
Brian Bernstein, with a neat haircut and thick shoulders. A football player gone to seed, except he never could catch a ball. “Half the time you spend being queer and here. I’ve already committed half the time I’ve previously spent getting used to it.”
Another woman. Jorie Torres. Earrings like satellite dishes. “Half the time you spend compiling annoying pop culture references.” She raised a fist and shook it lightly. “Autobots, roll out!”
A man in a mask. It smiles, features pointed brows and a sharp beard. Depicting Guy Fawkes, the mask was featured in a film popular a few years ago. “Half the efforts you put into making life better for yourself while increasing entropy and in some small way sending us all hurtling that much faster toward the heat death of the universe.” His voice was distant-sounded and muffled by the stiff plastic of the mask, and the tiny slit that made do as a mouth hole.
Then back to black, and title cards:
WE’RE NOT TELLING YOU WHAT TO DO
WE’RE JUST TELLING YOU TO DO SOMETHING
Julia, living as she was out of a new construction condo unit in a building that had just opened to buyers, was unaware of the video. The condo had electricity but no appliances save a stainless steel refrigerator/freezer that made four kinds of ice and warned its owner when the milk was about to go bad. As remarkable as the device was, it did not have Internet access. Julia’s cellular phone did have Internet access, but she didn’t think to use it to check for videos featuring her slogan or Fishman. She spent the days laying on the carpeted floor, sure that passers-by would see her in the window if she walked across the empty rooms, and just as sure that she’d feel the vibrations of the hustle and blather of a thick-accented realtor coming up the steps. The wasp larvae in her blood and muscles twitched and burned, demanding action.
Graffiti covered the brick walls of the neighborhood, stencils the sidewalks. Except for the chains and franchises—McDonald’s, Blimpie, Starbucks—those with the resources to pay for constant repainting of walls (no one dared sandblast anymore) Police lexica of graffiti tags and gang symbols needed daily updating. What the fuck, it was being asked frequently, did I CAN HAZ NAYBURHOOD and GENTRIFICATION CAT IS GENTRIFIED mean?
And not even its author knew what to make of INVISIBLE HEGEMONIC POSTMODERN URBANIST GEOGRAPHIES, which was sprayed across the anchorage of the Williamsburg Bridge in a glow-in-the-dark color not easily identifiable.
There were the performances—fifty people standing still as statues in the sidewalks and in the streets during morning rush, stealing moments of attention, grinding the flow of traffic to a halt. “The fishbowl makes me sick!” screamed a fifteen-year-old boy before he forced himself to vomit on Fishman at the Aleph Zadik Aleph dinner. Eight of his confederates, strategically positioned in tables all over the Great Neck catering hall joined the puke-in at that moment, splattering their suits with partially digested potatoes dyed red, white, and blue.
The Daily News ran an article covering a press conference held by Fishman spokesperson Jacques Vamos. Vamos declared that Fishman, “feeling the pain” of the neighborhood he was “attempting to improve” had come up with a “win-win solution”: Fishman, Vamos said, was prepared to offer the cash equivalent to forty acres and a mule (adjusted for inflation since 1865) to any African-American family in the shadow of the Fishbowl who’d be willing to appear on television with Fishman and teach him how to dance. Fishman’s actual press people quickly issued a notice pointing out that there was no Jacques Vamos in their employ.
Four hundred thousand dollars in obviously counterfeit currency—Benjamin Franklin was winking—was circulated to non-union construction employees in white envelopes marked “hush money” in lieu of their weekly paychecks. Police were able to reclaim only seventy-five thousand dollars.
Two adult women and their three children were found by security guards in the unfinished concession arcade two weeks after they set up house in the area. They had deep-fried all their meals and watched the children’s Disney DVDs on the ninety-foot-tall Jumbotron after hours.
A Fishman impersonator jumped the guardrail at a live broadcast of World Wrestling Entertainment’s Monday Night Raw and entered the ring, disrupting a match between underweight “heel” wrestler Jimmy Martini and his opponents, two little people in masks known as The Mexican Jumping Beans. Despite quick work from the technical director to pull the cameras off the Fishman impersonator, several million people still managed to identify him as Fishman as he was tackled by Martini and the referee.
Fishman’s daughter, Judith, in her first year at Bennington, had sex with nine men over the course of seven days, and uploaded webcam footage of the sexual acts to the Internet.
Craig Bostwick, a realtor working for a firm that had an exclusive on several of the buildings Fishman had built in Chelsea in the middle of the decade, produced five leases allowing renters to inhabit the apartments for the sum of twenty-four dollars a month, to be paid in the equivalent amount of beads and thin plates of copper. Bostwick was fired and arrested, but was “misplaced” while being processed at One Police Plaza at the bottom of the city. He was last seen, via photos uploaded to his Myspace.com page, sitting atop a donkey in Marrakech. Tenant court found the leases to be binding, but not renewable.
In a conference room on Central Park South, immediately before a “war room” session of publicists, social psychologists, marketing personnel, and several attorneys brought together to deal with Fishman’s current public relations issues, it was discovered that one bite had been taken out of every doughnut, danish, scone, bagel, bialy, sliced piece of crumb cake, and bear claw that had been set out as the morning spread for the all-day meeting.
Defrocked priest and liberation theologist Manuel Little, with the help of his three wives with whom he lived in a “Solomonic marriage,” exorcized Peter Neads Fishman in a Central Park ceremony that was not attended by Fishman, but was attended by two out of three local members of the Blue Man Group.
Traditional pickets were a daily occurrence on the edges of the Fishbowl, as the stadium was quickly christened. Eager socialists in denim jackets and all-weather scarves practiced their refrain: “Want to check out a copy of Socialist Worker?” while smelly men and women, all bones and knotted hair, beat white plastic bucket drums and prayed for an earthquake. They we
re opposed, in the spirit of cooperation, by the sharp assistants of local city councilman Duane Goodwin, who was very much against the Fishbowl now that the handwriting was on the wall. Early experiences—the latter were class presidents in fifth grade or the children of not-very-indulgent lawyer parents, the former perhaps even wealthier or at least raised in the embrace of a more hysterical church—separated the groups, but little else.
Friday was, through a variety of simultaneous and independent decisions, the date of the big rally. The first public call was made by Leslie Marcovaldo—Columbia University sophomore and Goodwin intern—in conjunction with “Blue,” the mysterious (to Leslie) man-child of indeterminate ethnicity, a self-identified “so-called anarchist.” It was very easy to set up a decisive rally for the movement.
We simply made it clear to some of Fishman’s handlers that Fishman himself should hold a press conference within the Fishbowl that afternoon. The protestors would be blocked from engaging with Fishman directly thanks to a massive deployment of NYPD personnel, as well as Fishman’s private security. A “free speech zone” two blocks away would be arranged for the penning of the movement. Then, after the useless protest, Marcovaldo and others within our sphere of influence would do their work at the post-protest parties, drinking circles, and planning meetings.
This is how we tame political movements:
We find the activist fringe of the status quo, those who will pour their energy and time into an endeavor, taking personal and organizational responsibility. They have resources, expertise, rhetoric that sounds very compelling. They are success. They speak of meetings in Washington, Albany, Athens, or The Hague. How poor their grandparents, glovemakers and steam laundry workers to a person, were back when the world was scratchy and sepia-toned.
We find the aspirational fringe of the subaltern. The mighty fish of the tiniest puddles. The disaffected golden child, the wired-yet-rumpled intellectual working far beneath his or her potential. Those who will show up at every meeting, take most of the reasonable risks, who will accept payment in newspaper photos and lazy smiles from younger lovers. The men and women who buy books they’ll never have the time to read; who eat fried rice they make themselves because they like it.
When we cannot find them, we make them. Then it’s fairly easy. The members of the status quo with all the resources and social legitimacy make a great rush toward the target—a war, a change in legislation, the change in status of some minority or counter-hegemonic group—and then pull back. Do something else. Vote for a political party. Hold a vigil, candles lighting the night. Select a few capable individuals—the majority always from the status quo faction—and have them form a committee to negotiatea surrender. Remind the world that the movement exists by pointing out the members of the extreme faction and how threatening they are. Remind the movement that the world exists, and that it is full of semi-somnambulant television-watchers who hate all people of color and homosexuals in the name of Jesus. It works nearly always every time.
But this movement, the movement Sans Nom as it was called by Alysse, who always wanted to find a use for her French, was somewhat different. There would be no coalitions, no committees, no media except for the hydra-headed-and-toed Internet, and the movement hardly seemed to care at all whether any of the various actions were effective. But there was going to be Friday. Brilliant, glorious Friday, when all the movement would come together outside the Fishbowl and be reminded of their ultimate insignificance.
5
FROM http://www.williamsburgist.com/20__/07/15/
trying_not_to_say_it_was_just_like_a_movie.htm
Oh God! I saw that woman kill Fishman. He was there at the podium with some lawyers and his whore wife and the construction guys and then this girl just walked up onto the stage with her little purse and smiled, like a bird or something landing on a statue’s head. It was all heads and bald spots and blue safety helmets, then her wild hair and long swirly skirt.
She was pretty, or at least not a heifer, and didn’t seem crazy except that she had made her way up to the stage—I snuck into the event proper and I only made it within fifty yards of the lip of the stage, by crawling up on the scaffolding. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a silvery gun and Fishman’s head exploded. I mean, the top of his head just flipped up and blood flew out like bottle rockets. And she waved the gun around back and the cops started shouting at her but the stage was so crowded with lawyers and stage-diving construction guys with feet and elbows everywhere. Then the lady just danced off, her arms flailing and the gun shining in the light.
And I mean literally, she was dancing off the stage, like she was in a musical getting her star turn finally, and all I was doing was standing there holding a stupid banner on my lap that I’d been planning on dropping and that girl just showed up and solved everything.
FISHMAN SHOOTER IDENTIFIED
BY EX-HUSBAND
By Erin Carson—7/17/20__
New York, NY (AP)—The shooter of controversial real estate mogul Peter Neads Fishman has been identified as Julia Hernandez, a woman who disappeared several weeks ago from the Greenwich Village apartment she shared with her husband.
“We have a positive ID thanks to her husband, Raymond,” NYPD spokesman Seth Cully said. “He called in once the footage hit the net, and we are going to find her now.”
Raymond Hernandez, an assistant professor of anthropology at the City University of New York, was distraught after his wife suddenly left the home. “We weren’t fighting,” he told police. “She just left, telling me that she was leaving me. I’d figured it was someone else. She’d been erratic, always out of the house on some errand.” Hernandez also claims that his wife brandished a gun at him but that “I’d done nothing to provoke her.” Several telephone calls to Hernandez’s office and home numbers have gone unanswered.
The police do not yet have a motive. “Could be the Fishbowl, but all the protests against it so far haven’t added up to terrorism,” said Cully. “It was a total surprise. We had the usual crowd control out there, but we have no idea how she got on stage or where she had been hiding before the event.”
Fishman, 52, was a major real estate developer in Brooklyn and Manhattan for twenty years. Beginning with the rehabilitation of several storefronts on Rivington Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Fishman had parlayed his success and knowledge of the city’s depressed neighborhoods into a personal fortune of over $100,000,000. The “Fishbowl,” a 10,000-seat sports stadium critics claimed threatened the Williamsburg neighborhood in which it was being constructed, has recently been the target of several unusual protests born of an Internet-based movement with no visible leadership.
Julia Hernandez, 35, born Julia Ott in the suburbs of Cincinnati, graduated with a BA in sociology from Tufts in Boston, and worked as an insurance adjuster in western Connecticut before meeting Hernandez while pursuing a master’s degree at the New School in Manhattan. She was unemployed at the time of her disappearance, but had most recently worked for Razorfish, an online firm, as an executive assistant.
UPDATED 4:34PM: Police spokesman Cully has released an updated statement reading “Could be the Fishbowl, but all the protests against it so far haven’t added up to violence.” The word “terrorism” should be stricken from subsequent reports.
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=47654425473898
Note: The Events of The Other Day 7/20/20__
We’re all pretty messed up here, since we had met Julia a few weeks ago while canvassing and as far as Davan and I can tell, she had no idea about the stadium or Fishman until we found her and talkedto her. She seemed new to Brooklyn, but nice enough. I would have guessed she was an artist.
Annoying; Davan and I had a long, screaming fight about the whole thing, and whether or not we should go to the police with what we knew about her, and about Sans Nom and all that. It doesn’t even matter who started it or who had which position; I think we actually changed our minds in the middle of the fi
ght.
Anyway, we ended up going to the police and it was a total waste of time. Davan called the local precinct and they told us to call Manhattan because the city is handling the case from there for some reason, and we called One Police Plaza. They told us to come down. I wanted to bring an attorney with us, but when we called the Center for Constitutional Rights they said they couldn’t spare anybody. We went all the way down to One Police Plaza anyway, waited for three hours in a waiting room and then for twenty minutes in some detective’s office, then we were told to go home. Some guy in uniform popped his head in and said, “We have nothing for you, sorry,” and that was that.
From: [email protected]
To: [Recipient List]
Subject: Class Cancellation
To ANT 205, 225, 407. Dana W., [email protected]
All,
Due to extreme circumstances, with which we are all familiar I am going to cancel all my classes and office hours for the next two weeks. Dana and Carise, the ever-capable TAs of the 205, will continue to run labs and are available for help. Papers can be turned into the dropbox outside my office.
Sorry for all who are inconvenienced by this, but as my wife is missing and wanted for murder, well, let us just say that circumstances beyond my control are at work here. Visits from the police alone have been very disruptive for both my teaching and my research.
yrs.
Dr. Hernandez, Anthropology
A LETTER RECEIVED BY JARED LAMBERSON OF WESTMONT, ILLINOIS. PURPORTEDLY FROM JULIA OTT HERNANDEZ:
Mr. Lamberson (If that is your real name, and please imagine me saying it slowly, as if it made me slightly ill, or like I was that guy from The Matrix: Miii-ISter Laaaaaamber-SON)