After being bashed around in low-light, airless environments a while they left me in a dark room to wait for my interrogators.
I knew they had arrived when the lights and air-conditioning came on.
As my eyes painfully adjusted, I couldn’t believe them. Maybe I had caught a contact high from Búmbúmi when she hugged me before the show. This had to be some kind of hallucination.
I was expecting to face a team of enforcement industry-types ready to play good-cop/bad-cop, but instead, hovering like a supernatural apparition, was CEO Billy-Bob Paolozzi himself.
This was the early days of autonomous hologram corporate icons. It was a primitive, flickering thing created in Billy-Bob’s image. Since Billy-Bob was pretty damn predictable, it was essentially like being interrogated by Billy-Bob himself.
“Great,” I said, “I’m hallucinating. I’m never kissing Búmbúmi again.”
“No, boy. This is for real. And don’t look at me like that. You could end up a hologram someday, too, y’know. You’re in the custody of the Bureau of Texanization!”
“So to what do I owe the honor of your holographic presence, Mr. Paolozzi?”
“That’s pronounced Pow-Oh-Law-Ze Texas style — I ain’t no Eye-talian. I ain’t no Americano. I’m a Texan! Hell, I’m the Texan!”
“Sorry, I used to go out with this Europhilic arty gal.”
“Bet she’s been shipped back to Europe by now.” Billy-Bob grinned big. “We all gotta be Texan, you know! It’s the law, dag nab it!”
“Speaking of which, just what are we all doing here?”
Pause. Static. “What wrong with you, boy? Don’t you know what’s been going on in the great nation of Texas Unlimited for the last few years? Ain’t you hear about the Great Succession? You spend the whole revolution doped up on drugs and that bad music of yours?”
“Some people like it.”
“Do I detect some sarcasm in your mode of expression, boy?”
“I don’t know. I always talk like this.”
“We’re beginning to think that you ain’t the kind of citizen we need here in Texas.”
“I’m Texas born and bred, amigo.”
They liked occasional Spanish words, but you had to pronounce them Gringñol style with a Texas twang.
“Born in El Paso. Mother Texas-born Mex. Father Texas born Jewish.”
“What?” Billy-Bob lit up. “You got Jewish blood in you?”
“You some kind of racist?”
“Don’t you try to pull that Americano political-correct mumbo jumbo on me, boy! We’re still working the bugs out of a lotta things. It isn’t enough for Texas to be corporate and install me as the constitutional CEO — I think we need an official religion to go along with Texan as our official language … but at least for now, the great nation of Texas Unlimited does not believe in racism. To be Texan is more about attitude than blood or skin color.”
“You saying I’m not Texan enough for you?”
“Too bad we can’t come up with a genome to define Texan purity. I wish we could create some kind of nanohudu stuff like what they’re using on Mars, y’know, instead of making people into purple Martians, we could make ’em all into proper Texans, with all the right attitudes — if you know what I mean!”
“What, I’m not rebellious enough for you?”
“Rebelliousness is part of the e1s1s000000ential Texan identity, but it’s more than that. There has to be a balance. You have to have loyalty to the Texan way of life. Besides, we’re the ones who decide who’s Texan and who’s not.”
“What, you mean things like my being born here don’t count?”
Billy-Bob grinned. His teeth were unnaturally white, and symmetrical. “No, boy, Texas Unlimited ain’t gonna recommit that fatal error that them there United States of Americans did. Letting anybody sneak across the border to drop anchor babies all over the place. Being born here is no longer enough.”
“Since when?”
“It’s a recent development. Folks have been yakking up over it all over the planet. Haven’t you been keeping up with the news?”
“Well, I have been busy lately, with my career talking off …”
“Oh, you have been a busy buzzer. With that song popping up on some of the sleazier net sites I’ve ever seen. My sainted mama would turn over in her grave if she ever dreamed such things would come to be. Like this song Texanization Without Representation — downright shameful.”
“Why? There’s no sex, drugs, or glorified violence in it.”
“You don’t need to get dirty to be a menace to the society that we’re heroically struggling to perfect here! This slop-bucket of sonic trash just oozes with disrespect, disloyalty, and subversion!”
“What ever happened to freedom of expression?”
“You can’t go around expressing anything that twisted excuse for a brain in your pointy little head can come up with! We have to work to achieve a balance. In New Mexico, and Arizona the Indians and Hispanos have taken over. California looks like part of Asia or Africa. We can’t let that happen in Texas. We can’t let things get skewed too far to the dark side — like they used to say in those old-time rocketship movies. Everyone needs to undergo the Texanization process, after all, this is Texas, and if you don’t like it you can run for the border.”
“So, you’re going to Texanize me?”
He flashed those big fake teeth again, and yukked like a happy idiot.
“No, Paco, my boy, I’m afraid that we’ve determined that you’re a hopeless case. Just trying to log your information into our database confuses our algorithms! All our social pathology specialists say your influence will ruin our plans for a pure Texan society.”
“And I thought I was just being me.” I blushed a little.
“You’re in a heap of trouble, boy. I’ve got a very creative legal staff that can come up with all kinds of ways to get you put away for the rest of your natural life — hell, they could even find a way to justify the death penalty. They’ve done it for me before. So, what you may be thinking about is just getting your half-breed ass out of Texas. Go to the U.S., Mexico, or some other God-forsaken place that will take you. If I were you, I’d get off the planet — I hear some of these corporations need folks to do menial labor for their developments on Mars. Y’know, I heard that some nerds somewhere are working on a gadget that could turn the entire planet into liquid assets. We should kidnap them, and force them to work for us …”
“I need to think about it.”
“Think about it? You should have done that before you started all this! And you better do it fast!”
“I need to talk to my mom about it.”
Another static-y pause. The mother reference must have triggered some algorithmic distress.
Eventually, some officers came and got me. I was tracker-chipped and released into my mother’s custody.
“Mijo, I don’t know what’s going on in this world! Why should you have to go to Mars, just because of songs that kids like?”
“Ask Billy-Bob.”
“He’s a meshugana pendjo!”
She’d cry, hug and kiss me, and feel the lump where the chip was.
Then she collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital.
I didn’t hear from El Muertonto or Búmbúmi again.
I tend to imagine him killing himself. His entire life was one long excuse to give himself to his beloved Santa Muerte.
I imagine her running off to some cyberpsychedelic commune.
I hope they found some degree of happiness.
Tongoléléita, was another story. Suddenly, she was all over every screen you saw. It wasn’t quite the fame she wanted, but the world — or at least Texas — was paying attention to her for a while.
Seems Billy-Bob went crazy for her state-of-the-art body. Soon he was parading around with her as First Fiancé.
She was constantly being interviewed, giving tearful confessions about how I had manipulated her in singing subversive songs and
having illicit sex: “I’m just a poor, innocent girl, all I ever wanted was to become mondoultramegasuperstar! I didn’t know what those strange, big words they used meant. I didn’t know that those sex acts were unnatural!’
Soon people were calling to have me hung on live pay-per-view broadcast.
“The way I see it, if enough legitimate citizens of Texas decide that someone deserves killing, the state should provide that service.”
Death Penalty Live was the most popular show in Texas, and Tongoléléita was leading the campaign to put me in front of their celebrity firing squads.
That was about the time my mom went into a coma. It wasn’t long after that that she died.
I blame Billy-Bob. And Tongoléléita. And Texas.
For a while I considered doing a maddog assassination on his ass, but I kept thinking about what Mom would think, kept hearing her saying:
“Mijo, don’t be a yutz.”
This was when people were checking themselves into the Texanization Reprogramming Camps for reeducation:
“It’s a crazy, mixed-up world, amigos, and you can never be sure if you’ve picked up some unhealthy, unTexan influences. They can hang around for years, festering away in your brain, until one day — KAPOW! — you find yourself committing a shameful act that will get you a guest shot on Death Penalty Live. So I recommend you do what I did, go through a Full Volunteer Reprogramming Course at your local camp. They use proven reeducation techniques that some fuzzy-headed types used to call brainwashing — but what’s wrong with a clean brain? Especially one that’s one hundred percent Texan!”
Then I was seeing bugs everywhere. Big ugly ones that looked weaponized.
Life was horrible, and I was never one for suicide — besides, it would have made Billy-Bob and Tongoléléita happy, so I signed up to go to Mars instead.
It was just in the nick of time, too. I didn’t like the look of the bugs that were following me around, and the votes of Texans who wanted me dead kept coming in.
It was a relief to get rid of the tracker chip, and get out of Texas, and off Earth.
Billy-Bob just loved to shoot his mouth off. Kept saying things that pissed people off not just in what was left of the United States of America and Mexico, but the rest of the world. As he like to put it, “I’ve got nukes, if you don’t like what I say you can kiss my ass.”
I was approaching Mars’ gravity well when Austin went up in mushroom cloud, taking Billy-Bob, Tongoléléita, and a lot of other poor bastards along for the radioactive ride. They were never sure who did it. The list of suspects went on forever.
Some of them were even Texans.
Of course, with the fallout and all, Texas, and all of Greater Norteamerica got weirder than ever. New improved Texas! Wild, weird, and radioactive! Yee-haw, pendejos!
I was sure glad, Mom didn’t live to see all that shit.
No matter how crazy it gets on Mars — it’ll always be a lot saner than Texas!
MONSTRO
Junot Díaz
Yunior, the distinctive narrator in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), comments on his protagonist Oscar: “You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.” Díaz not only uses the language of science fiction and fantasy, he is also a piercing theorizer of the genres he loves, making clear that the colonialism endured by the Caribbean is deeply intertwined with science fiction and fantasy. He says in interview: “… if it wasn’t for race, X-Men doesn’t make sense. If it wasn’t for the history of breeding human beings in the New World through chattel slavery, Dune doesn’t make sense. If it wasn’t for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn’t make sense.” Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Díaz has a BA from Rutgers University and a MFA from Cornell University. His collection of short stories Drown (1996) took the country by storm and he received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in 2008. He is currently a professor of writing at MIT.
At first, Negroes thought it funny. A disease that could make a Haitian blacker? It was the joke of the year. Everybody in our sector accusing everybody else of having it. You couldn’t display a blemish or catch some sun on the street without the jokes starting. Someone would point to a spot on your arm and say, Diablo, haitiano, que te pasó?
La Negrura they called it.
The Darkness.
These days everybody wants to know what you were doing when the world came to an end. Fools make up all sorts of vainglorious self-serving plep — but me, I tell the truth.
I was chasing a girl.
I was one of the idiots who didn’t heed any of the initial reports, who got caught way out there. What can I tell you? My head just wasn’t into any mysterious disease — not with my mom sick and all. Not with Mysty.
Motherfuckers used to say culo would be the end of us. Well, for me it really was.
In the beginning the doctor types couldn’t wrap their brains around it, either.
The infection showed up on a small boy in the relocation camps outside Port-au-Prince, in the hottest March in recorded history. The index case was only four years old, and by the time his uncle brought him in his arm looked like an enormous black pustule, so huge it had turned the boy into an appendage of the arm. In the glypts he looked terrified.
Within a month, a couple of thousand more infections were reported. Didn’t rip through the pobla like the dengues or the poxes. More of a slow leprous spread. A black mold-fungus-blast that came on like a splotch and then gradually started taking you over, tunnelling right through you — though as it turned out it wasn’t a mold-fungus-blast at all. It was something else.
Something new.
Everybody blamed the heat. Blamed the Calientazo. Shit, a hundred straight days over 105 degrees F. in our region alone, the planet cooking like a chimi and down to its last five trees — something berserk was bound to happen. All sorts of bizarre outbreaks already in play: diseases no one had names for, zoonotics by the pound. This one didn’t cause too much panic because it seemed to hit only the sickest of the sick, viktims who had nine kinds of ill already in them. You literally had to be falling to pieces for it to grab you.
It almost always started epidermically and then worked its way up and in. Most of the infected were immobile within a few months, the worst comatose by six. Strangest thing, though: once infected, few viktims died outright; they just seemed to linger on and on. Coral reefs might have been adios on the ocean floor, but they were alive and well on the arms and backs and heads of the infected. Black rotting rugose masses fruiting out of bodies. The medicos formed a ninety-nation consortium, flooded one another with papers and hypotheses, ran every test they could afford, but not even the military enhancers could crack it.
In the early months, there was a big make do, because it was so strange and because no one could identify the route of transmission — that got the bigheads more worked up than the disease itself. There seemed to be no logic to it — spouses in constant contact didn’t catch the Negrura, but some unconnected fool on the other side of the camp did. A huge rah-rah, but when the experts determined that it wasn’t communicable in the standard ways, and that normal immune systems appeared to be at no kind of risk, the renminbi and the attention and the savvy went elsewhere. And since it was just poor Haitian types getting fucked up — no real margin in that. Once the initial bulla died down, only a couple of underfunded teams stayed on. As for the infected, all the medicos could do was try to keep them nourished and hydrated—and, more important, prevent them from growing together.
That was a serious issue. The blast seemed to have a boner for fusion, respected no kind of boundaries. I remember the first time I saw it on the Whorl. Alex was, like, Mira esta vaina. Almost delighted. A shaky glypt of a pair of naked trembling Haitian brothers sharing a single stained cot, knotted together by h
orrible mold, their heads slurred into one. About the nastiest thing you ever saw. Mysty saw it and looked away and eventually I did, too.
My tíos were, like, Someone needs to drop a bomb on those people, and even though I was one of the pro-Haitian domos, at the time I was thinking it might have been a mercy.
I was actually on the Island when it happened. Front-row fucking seat. How lucky was that?
They call those of us who made it through “time witnesses.” I can think of a couple of better terms.
I’d come down to the D.R. because my mother had got super sick. The year before, she’d been bitten by a rupture virus that tore through half her organs before the doctors got savvy to it. No chance she was going to be taken care of back North. Not with what the cheapest nurses charged. So she rented out the Brooklyn house to a bunch of Mexos, took that loot, and came home.
Better that way. Say what you want, but family on the Island was still more reliable for heavy shit, like, say, dying, than family in the North. Medicine was cheaper, too, with the flying territory in Haina, its Chinese factories pumping out pharma like it was romo, growing organ sheets by the mile, and, for somebody as sick as my mother, with only rental income to live off, being there was what made sense.
I was supposed to be helping out, but really I didn’t do na for her. My tía Livia had it all under control and if you want the truth I didn’t feel comfortable hanging around the house with Mom all sick. The vieja could barely get up to piss, looked like a stick version of herself. Hard to see that. If I stayed an hour with her it was a lot.
What an asshole, right? What a shallow motherfucker.
But I was nineteen—and what is nineteen, if not for shallow? In any case my mother didn’t want me around, either. It made her sad to see me so uncomfortable. And what could I do for her besides wring my hands? She had Livia, she had her nurse, she had the muchacha who cooked and cleaned. I was only in the way.
Maybe I’m just saying this to cover my failings as a son.
Maybe I’m saying this because of what happened.
Maybe.
Go, have fun with your friends, she said behind her breathing mask.
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