[4] (i) The precise skills and abilities you will seek in your Additions will be situation-specific. Several you should watch for (and can rarely have too many of) include medical personnel, experienced educators, physical laborers, engineers, tailors, and combatants. Of particular value are either doctors or midwives capable of safely managing births, since procreation is unlikely to decrease, even following the Collapse of Old Trade.
[5] (i) The sooner you can recruit, establish, and support a medical community, the sooner you can enhance your Group in the form of temporary visas. (ii) Seekers of particular professional communities, such as those who wish their children safely born, can exchange goods and materials for the services of your specialist communities and a temporary stay in your Place—a visa. (iii) This reduces the immediate need for and risk of external Foraging. (iv) This capitalizes on the energy expenditure of others and conserves your own.
[6] (i) Recruiters who range from the Place to seek Additions should be capable of and willing to commit acts of violence, as very often their survival will depend upon it. (ii) Outfit your recruiters with the best your militia has to offer in arms, equipment, and armor. (iii) Recruiters should be effective at personal stealth, and they should be able to withstand torture, should they be captured by opposition Groups. (iv) It is advised that recruiters be equipped with poison or some similar device for eliminating themselves, lest opposition Groups Forage valuable intelligence from them.
[7] (i) Recruiters should double as spies and saboteurs. (ii) They should be personable and should appear trustworthy. (iii) Only Members with unflagging loyalty to the Group (or whose loyalty can be ensured by the continued presence of valuables at your Place) are eligible for this service.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
we were in the L part of the Nike site, which had housed the missile magazines. One of three parts to a site like this. The whole of the part was about forty acres, which was plenty of room. The storm hadn’t abated. I wasn’t ready to leave.
The problem with romance is the occlusion. The tunnel vision, drawing your every gaze downstream, into those other eyes, the flotsam of your better self, your clearer self, along for the ride. It doesn’t matter what secrets swirl and bob in the waters beneath you, as you float toward that lady at Delphi, who, you imagined, reading Mythology, must have been beautiful. It doesn’t matter that Charybdis, with no body, with no form, with only a mouth-as-being, couldn’t have been evil, because she lacked the brain for it. It doesn’t matter that following the logical course of events, the natural course, always disadvantages someone else, because love, after all, is simply a competition for resources, made infinitely complex and unknowable when squared and cubed and raised to every other emotional exponent—and then layered with sex and society and a bad memory for what those resources were in the first place.
It was our turn to rest. Mine and Four’s. We were using an inflatable mattress in one of the old control rooms. A small, cement cube. There were scars on the walls where electrical outlets had been, back during the Project—I saw them before we clicked off our light. We had to share the mattress, which was fine. Everyone did, in turns.
“Are you okay?” Four asked.
But the Other—waiting, waiting, for you to be the first one down, into the darkness, with the immortal flowers and everything everyone ever said, ancient or not, listening to the oracle or not, about love—is, of course, yourself. A wave function that measures everything you want about and for yourself, while necessarily being nothing else, otherwise you would already be this other person. Because it’s nice not to be alone.
She was on her side, lying on the serpent arm. I could tell because I could feel her breath, which helped me orient in the darkness. I didn’t have maps for girls in dark rooms. I wasn’t carrying a compass. These walls were feet-thick cement, for protection from the exhaust of the climbing missiles, if the Guard had to launch them.
“It’s nice not to be alone,” I said.
• • •
That’s the reason. The problem. The point. The reduction of self to absolute zero—nothing but the quiet in the darkness, like Orpheus on his way down, defying the laws of normal motion.
Four moved closer. I could smell us better, when she came close, stinking in the darkness. Smelling like death and fire and sweat. All the things from the underworld, where you spoke into the darkness, sounding distance the way bats do, trying not to look back, or you’ll lose her.
“But are you okay?” she asked.
“I saw this coming.”
“What?”
“In Slade, on the Wailing Wall.”
She touched my face. “Wait, what? You saw, like, a picture?”
“I saw this.”
“What is this, Hiram?”
“The darkness,” I said. “The solitude. Everything.”
After we formed our first secret society. After we taught ourselves, adolescents in the woods, to smoke and to write poetry and to be unafraid. After we taught ourselves to revere, above all things, Love, so we could reduce ourselves to absolute zero and no longer feel those every-day adolescent deaths. After we had codified, structured, and mythified our struggle to be Ready for All Things, we learned that our Narrative was a better “we” than “we” were. It was totemic, and we called it a “knighthood.”
After these things, everything Collapsed, because the Narrative did not imply a Group—it implied a mob, a collection of individuals, each of us struggling individually not to be alone.
• • •
Four closed the darkness between us. “Tell me what you saw, Hiram.”
“How could it have been real?”
“Hiram.”
“I saw darkness,” I said. “A square, painted black. Nothing. My tag was in the corner.”
She was quiet for a minute.
“That doesn’t mean anything. Your tag was probably a trick of the light.”
“There wasn’t any light, so I didn’t look back because it might have been real. And it was.”
“You didn’t see anything. You just think you did. You saw what you wanted to see.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It meant everything.”
Really, we disbanded the knighthood because Jon and I took girlfriends, and for once, when we tried to sound our own distances in the dark, there were people sounding back, and they were girls. Which made it difficult to believe that our knighthood was real.
We didn’t have time for rites in the woods, or Friday nights at Adam’s, to game until four in the morning. The feeling of someone’s flesh other than our own, beneath our fingers—the sensation of small places between lips and eyelids. These were new physics, and they meant everything more than everything else.
It was Collapse, and it was better than everything that came before it. Than everybody. It was the Event.
• • •
“Hush,” Four said.
Her lips were chapped where she pressed them against my nose. A kiss so barely happening, it was the only thought in the darkness. She kissed the way moths might, when there isn’t a lamp sucking at them, a Charybdis with no teeth. With nothing but heat and light—what would be left when they dropped the bombs and the Nikes weren’t fast enough. When the blasted earth developed wings and fluttered toward the fires in ways that defied normal motion. In ways that couldn’t be real.
Four’s kiss was bomb physics against my nose. It was ground zero in the darkness, and we’d been pushed into the underworld, through the smoke, underwater—before we’d even seen the flash.
Because that’s how it would go.
This was not Collapse. This was something else.
I let the kiss think me.
We’d told ourselves how it would go, how things would remain, when our ideas about love were still soft, because we couldn’t afford what it would do to us to cross that Rubicon. There was no going back once you set up the hardware and put the final edge
s on your ideas about love and sharpness. Then, you were ready, terribly.
Adam graduated a year before I did, and he went away, to Slade. To school. The Plan had been that I would come a year later, after Jon and I graduated. Jon wasn’t going to school. He had other plans, and he married the girl who bore his son.
• • •
Four was so close, her lips a moth’s wing from mine. Her labret the only thing between us. This was something else, at least.
I spoke into her mouth: “I thought you … liked girls.”
“I do.”
“But—”
She spoke quietly. “I like boys, too. Moron.”
Oh.
It was nice to not be alone. We had found a way out, Four and I. One of many that included holes in the earth, columns of smoke, underwater fairylands, and whirlpools with teeth. That included the guns and the noose and the roadside bomb in Irby. Which had malfunctioned and blown apart its crew before we were in range.
It included the bullet from the gun in the hands of the mole who’d been ready. Down here, in the bunker. Waiting, waiting for the first down the stairs.
We’d had … a Plan…, and it included … a Place, a Group, and an Event Exit Strategy…., to get out, to make it to Slade. To keep our adolescent Narratives alive.
But I hadn’t followed it. I went west, following Her, and when I finally returned from the desert, another year later, I could see in Adam’s eyes what it had meant to him to be Secondary.
THE BOOK:
“SIX” (“POLICING, MILITIA SERVICE, AND THE NECESSARY LIES OF PROSPERITY”)
SEC. “I” (“POLICING”)
[1] (i) When your Group reaches sufficient size that you need a system of law enforcement, your police force must comprise civilians. (ii) Do not use your militia to police your civilians. (iii) Situate informants within your police force to ensure it does not abuse your civilian Membership. (iv) Disclose all policing activities to your Group. (v) Do not use excessive force.
II.
“MILITIA SERVICE”
[1] (i) Avoid the implementation of a full, professional army for as long as possible. With professional armies come the risk of military coups. Instead, rely upon a civilian militia, and employ an elite, professional officers’ corps. (ii) Determine the length of rotational service in your militia by popular vote. (iii) When rotated out of service, militia men and women should immediately assume some other form of contribution. In this fashion, you anchor your potentially internally dangerous militia to the Place and its Members by keeping them Members and not para–Member enforcers. (iv) Rely upon a volunteer militia for as long as you can. (v) When this is no longer sufficient, you must resort to conscription.
III.
“THE NECESSARY LIES OF PROSPERITY”
[1] (i) Ensuring Group and Place prosperity, especially in the presence of nearby opposition groups, necessitates a number of deceptions. (ii) For example, when opposition Groups become intolerably capable of harming your Group, they necessitate elimination and Forage—even when they have yet to commit any offense against your Group. (iii) Your Group is everything. (iv) Your Place is all Places.
[2] (i) Your civilian Membership will, most certainly, oppose preemptive strikes, acts of sabotage, assassinations, and the like. This is a mark of your new civilization. (ii) To avoid confrontations between the Group and its Administration, ensure that you devote appropriate time, energy, and resources to effecting the deceptions, the blame-placement, and the counter-Narratives that will draw the support of the Administrated for the necessary operations of prosperity.
[3] (i) Prosperity requires such deceptions; however, ensure that such operations are always targeted beyond your Place and Membership. (ii) Targeting such operation inward leads immediately to Collapse and Failure, for your armed citizenry will remove you. As you would also do. As you should also do. As is always done.
[4] (i) Your Place is an edifice of entropy. (ii) All maneuvers and operations lead eventually to Warfare and Failure. This is inevitable. (iii) Struggle not against Failure; struggle instead to facilitate the most rapid Recovery you can.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
i halted the caravan on the Farm Market Road. Outside the gates to Amaranth. I let them look. All of them—even our Addition, Mona (who accidentally revealed her old name), and her son, Levi. I hadn’t given him the right to choose a name for himself. I hadn’t given Mona the right, either. The boy became our first Monument, flat-topped and unafraid, watching as I cleaned my pistol that morning, before we left the second-place. I told him that I would do anything I had to. To keep him and his mother safe. When I asked him if he understood, he said “Yes.”
I told her to expect horrible things, as Four painted my face. We were going masked, for the final leg. All of us. I told them it was just a precaution.
I let them look at the tilled fields, at the pair of modular homes, at the modified single-wides just in front of us, alongside the road. I let them look at the greenhouses and the chicken coop and the goat pen. At the garage and the corrugated-tin workshop.
I let them look at the few homes nearby.
I had brought them through the desert. They were excited, chattering across the walkie-talkies while their trucks idled. Out here, it was quiet. There were no burning buildings, no gunfights. No executions, deaths, accidents. There were no dead husbands or mothers, fathers, boyfriends. There were no abandoned sisters, no credit card payments. This was something that hadn’t lied to them, that had drawn them in. There would be no going against the current on the formless waters. Here, there were flowers in the underworld, in the darkness. There was no need to look back, because they weren’t trying to get anyone out.
“It’s perfect,” one of them said into a walkie-talkie. I couldn’t tell who it was.
Four rested her fingers on my arm as she leaned across me, struggling to See Everything.
“We haven’t Arrived,” I said.
They watched, waiting on Mary’s orders now, as I got out and walked through the gate. I walked along the driveway, and my cousin came out of one of the homes, a shotgun over his shoulder. The rest of his family peered out at us through the blinds on their windows.
I pulled off my mask.
He leaned the gun up against one of the beams supporting his porch, and they watched him meet me in the caliche driveway.
Mary had her orders, knew when to move in. She was waiting. She was answering their questions over the walkie-talkie. She was telling them because they needed to hear. To see the Place thinking. To see where we would erect the Monument, the underworld mile marker, for our dead.
Last made bricks to build walls for his dead.
They saw me make the offer to my cousin. Saw him using my name, only once. Talking into the darkness to hear himself speak. Making noise. They saw him getting angry.
They saw me lift my Beretta.
“What you did was right,” she said.
A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR
MAKING SENSE OF ALL THIS NOISE
Spectra: Allow me to introduce Darin Bradley, author of Noise. This novel offers many ideas about individuals, society, and collapse, so I’m going to do my best to make him answer a few questions.
I’m going to jump right into it: Do you really see the near future being this bleak, or did you just have a scary idea and decide to roll with it?
Darin Bradley: Well, I am probably one of the least-qualified people to make predictions regarding the socioeconomic future of the United States. Before I drafted Noise, I did a fair bit of research, and as I came to each new stage of revision, I updated the data I’d collected, but even so, I know comparatively little about such things. It’s certainly possible that we’ll see an “Event” in our lifetimes, but it’s equally as possible that this is yet another panicked flash-in-the-pan and that a new status quo and new ideas about “stability” will arise. People have been fearing, discussing, and mythologizing the collapse of their civilizations since the begin
ning, so our current anxieties may simply be the same old act on a new stage. When you gather in groups, personal fears come to both define and be defined by cultural narrative, so fear of death—of the End of All Things—necessarily occupies large portions of our senses of self.
But, I think we can agree that “collapse” or “apocalypse” is definitely in the air. Today, it may be the quickest shorthand for the global zeitgeist.
As for the novel, I’d say it was a coincidence that the story came to mirror, in many ways, what’s happening around us “right now” (which is about a year before Noise was printed). That’s the short answer, but as a participant in this cultural narrative, I was almost certainly channeling some of what was going unsaid in the American hive-mind.
The story itself arose from years of thinking about social theory and only came to be because of the situation I found myself in: I had just finished my Ph.D. in English literature and theory, I didn’t have a job, and my wife and I had moved from Texas to South Carolina. Suddenly, I didn’t have to be in class anymore, I didn’t have to write a dissertation, and I didn’t have to teach. So I had a head full of cognitive theory and nineteenth-century American utopianism, and I had loads of free time. This was all in the fall of 2007. I decided on the story I wanted to tell, and that led me to the idea of the Book. With the plot in mind, I actually wrote the Book first—initially, it was much longer than it is now—and when the economy started quaking in the fall of 2008 (a few months after we’d sold the novel), I was as surprised as anyone.
Noise Page 16