A Good Old-Fashioned Future

by Bruce Sterling

  “No no,” Jackie said swiftly. “There’s bloody horrid noise on this phone, Salim—I’ll be in touch.” He hung up.

  Half an anxious hour with the script and cigarettes got him nowhere. At last he belted his robe, put on warm slippers and a nightcap, and tapped at Bubbles’s door.

  “Jackie,” she said, opening it, her wet hair turbanned in a towel. Furnace-heated air gushed into the chilly hall. “I’m on the phone, darling. Long distance.”

  “Who?” he said.

  “My husband.”

  Jackie nodded. “How is Vijay?”

  She made a face. “Divorced, for Pete’s sake! Dalip is my husband now, Dalip Sabnis, remember? Honestly, Jackie, you’re so absentminded sometimes.”

  “Sorry,” Jackie said. “Give Dalip my best.” He sat in a chair and leafed through one of Bubbles’s Bombay fan mags while she cooed into the phone.

  Bubbles hung up, sighed. “I miss him so bad,” she said. “What is it, okay?”

  “My oldest boy just told me that I am culturally inauthentic.”

  She tossed the towel from her head, put her fists on her hips. “These young people today! What do they want from us?”

  “They want the real India,” Jackie said. “But we all watched Hollywood films for a hundred bloody years.… We have no native soul left, don’t you know.” He sighed heavily. “We’re all bits and pieces inside. We’re a jigsaw people, we Indians. Quotes and remakes. Rags and tatters.”

  Bubbles tapped her chin with one lacquered forefinger. “You’re having trouble with the script.”

  Mournfully, he ignored her. “Liberation came a hundred bloody years ago. But still we obsess with the damn British. Look at this country of theirs. It’s a museum. But us—we’re worse. We’re a wounded civilization. Naipaul was right. Rushdie was right!”

  “You work too hard,” Bubbles said. “That historical we just did, about the Moon, yaar? That one was stupid crazy, darling. That music boy Smith, from Manchester? He don’t even speak English, okay. I can’t understand a word he bloody says.”

  “My dear, that’s English. This is England. That is how they speak their native language.”

  “My foot,” Bubbles said. “We have five hundred million to speak English. How many left have they?”

  Jackie laughed. “They’re getting better, yes. Learning to talk more properly, like us.” He yawned hugely. “It’s bloody hot in here, Bubbles. Feels good. Just like home.”

  “That young girl, Betty Chalmers, okay? When she tries to speak Hindi I bust from laughs.” Bubbles paused. “She’s a smart little cookie, though. She could go places in business. Did you sleep with her?”

  “Just once,” Jackie said. “She was nice. But very English.”

  “She’s American,” Bubbles said triumphantly. “A Cherokee Indian from Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA. When your advert said Indian blood, she thought you meant American Indians.”

  “Damn!” Jackie said. “Really?”

  “Cross my heart it’s true, Jackie.”

  “Damn … and the camera loves her, too. Don’t tell anybody.”

  Bubbles shrugged, a little too casually. “It’s funny how much they want to be just like us.”

  “Sad for them,” Jackie said. “An existential tragedy.”

  “No, darling, I mean it’s really funny, for an audience at home. Laugh out loud, roll in the aisles, big kneeslapper! It could be a good movie, Jackie. About how funny the English are. Being so inauthentic like us.”

  “Bloody hell,” Jackie marveled.

  “A remake of Param Dharam or Gammat Jammat, but funny, because of all English players, okay.”

  “Gammat Jammat has some great dance scenes.”

  She smiled.

  His head felt inflamed with sudden inspiration. “We can do that. Yes. We will! And it’ll make a bloody fortune!” He clapped his hands together, bowed his head to her. “Miss Malini, you are a trouper.”

  She made a pleased salaam. “Satisfaction guaranteed, sahib.”

  He rose from the chair. “I’ll get on it straightaway.”

  She slipped across the room to block his way. “No no no! Not tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  “None of those little red pills of yours.”

  He frowned.

  “You’ll pop from those someday, Jackieji. You jump like a jack-in-box every time they snap the clapperboard. You think I don’t know?”

  He flinched. “You don’t know the troubles of this crew. We need a hit like hell, darling. Not today, yesterday.”

  “Money troubles. So what? Not tonight, boss, not to worry. You’re the only director that knows my best angles. You think I want to be stuck with no director in this bloody dump?” Gently, she took his hand. “Calming down, okay. Changing your mind, having some fun. This is your old pal Bubbles here, yaar? Look, Jackieji. Bubbles.” She struck a hand-on-hip pose and shot him her best sidelong come-on look.

  Jackie was touched. He got into bed. She pinned him down, kissed him firmly, put both his hands on her breasts, and pulled the cover over her shoulders. “Nice and easy, okay? A little pampering. Let me do it.”

  She straddled his groin, settled down, undulated a bit in muscular dancer’s fashion, then stopped, and began to pinch and scratch his chest with absentminded Vedic skill. “You’re so funny sometimes, darling. ‘Inauthentic.’ I can tap dance, I can bump and grind, and you think I can’t wiggle my neck like a natyam dancer? Watch me do it, for Pete’s sake.”

  “Stop it,” he begged. “Be funny before, be funny afterward, but don’t be funny in the middle.”

  “Okay, nothing funny darling, short and sweet.” She set to work on him and in two divine minutes she had wrung him out like a sponge.

  “There,” she said. “All done. Feel better?”

  “God, yes.”

  “Inauthentic as hell and it feels just as good, yaar?”

  “It’s why the human race goes on.”

  “Well then,” she said. “That, and a good night’s sleep, baby.” Jackie was enjoying a solid if somewhat flavorless breakfast of kippers and eggs when Jimmie Suraj came in. “It’s Smith, boss,” Jimmie said. “We can’t get him to shut up that bloody box of his.”

  Jackie sighed, finished his breakfast, dabbed bits of kipper from his lips, and walked into the lobby. Smith, Betty Chalmers, and Bobby Denzongpa sat around a low table in overstuffed chairs. There was a stranger with them. A young Japanese.

  “Turn it off, Smithie, there’s a good fellow,” Jackie said. “It sounds like bloody cats being skinned.”

  “Just running a demo for Mr. Big Yen here,” Smith muttered. With bad grace, he turned off his machine. This was an elaborate procedure, involving much flicking of switches, twisting of knobs, and whirring of disk drives.

  The Japanese—a long-haired, elegant youngster in a sheepskin coat, corduroy beret, and jeans—rose from his chair, bowed crisply, and offered Jackie a business card. Jackie read it. The man was from a movie company—Kinema Junpo. His name was Baisho.

  Jackie did a namaste. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Baisho.” Baisho looked a bit wary.

  “Our boss says he’s glad to meet you,” Smith repeated.

  “Hai,” Baisho said alertly.

  “We met Baisho-san at the disco last night,” Betty Chalmers said. Baisho, sitting up straighter, emitted an enthusiastic string of alien syllables.

  “Baisho says he’s a big fan of English dance-hall music,” Smith mumbled. “He was looking for a proper dance hall here. What he thinks is one. Vesta Tilly, ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay, that sort of bloody thing.”

  “Ah,” Jackie said. “You speak any English, Mr. Baisho?”

  Baisho smiled politely and replied at length, with much waving of arms. “He’s also hunting for first editions of Noel Coward and J. B. Priestley,” Betty said. “They’re his favorite English authors. And boss—Jackie—Mr. Baisho is speaking English. I mean, if you listen, all the vowels and consonants are in there. Really.”
r />   “Rather better than your English, actually,” Smith muttered.

  “I have heard of Noel Coward,” Jackie said. “Very witty playwright, that Coward fellow.” Baisho waited politely until Jackie’s lips had stopped moving and then plunged back into his narrative.

  “He says that it’s lucky he met us because he’s here on location himself,” Betty said. “Kinema Junpo—that’s his boss—is shooting a remake of Throne of Blood in Scotland. He’s been … uh … appointed to check out some special location here in Bolton.”

  “Yes?” Jackie said.

  “Said the local English won’t help him because they’re kind of superstitious about the place,” Betty said. She smiled. “How ’bout you, Smithie? You’re not superstitious, are you?”

  “Nah,” Smith said. He lit a cigarette.

  “He wants us to help him?” Jackie said.

  Betty smiled. “They have truckloads of cash, the Japanese.”

  “If you don’t want to do it, I can get some mates o’ mine from Manchester,” Smith said, picking at a blemish. “They’re nae scared of bloody Bolton.”

  “What is it about Bolton?” Jackie said.

  “You didn’t know?” Betty said. “Well, not much. I mean, it’s not much of a town, but it does have the biggest mass grave in England.”

  “Over a million,” Smith muttered. “From Manchester, London—they used to ship ’em out here in trains, during the plague.”

  “Ah,” Jackie said.

  “Over a million in one bloody spot,” Smith said, stirring in his chair. He blew a curl of smoke. “Me grandfather used to talk about it. Real proud about Bolton they was, real civil government emergency and all, kept good order, soldiers and such.… Every dead bloke got his own marker, even the women and kids. Other places, later, they just scraped a hole with bulldozers and shoved ’em in.”

  “Spirit,” Baisho said loudly, enunciating as carefully as he could. “Good cinema spirit in city of Boruton.”

  Despite himself, Jackie felt a chill. He sat down. “Inauspicious. That’s what we’d call it.”

  “It was fifty years ago,” Smith said, bored. “Thirty years before I was born. Or Betty here, either, eh? ‘Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.’ Mad Cow Disease. So what? BSE will never come back. It was a fluke. A bloody twentieth-century industrial accident.”

  “You know, I’m not frightened,” Betty said, with her brightest smile. “I’ve even eaten beef several times. There’s no more virions in it. I mean, they wiped out scrapie years ago. Killed every sheep, every cow that might have any infection. It’s perfectly safe to eat now, beef.”

  “We lost many people in Japan,” Baisho offered slowly. “Tourists who eated … ate … Engrish beef, here in Europe. But trade friction protect most of us. Old trade barriers. The farmers of Japan.” He smiled.

  Smith ground out his cigarette. “Another fluke. Your old granddad was just lucky, Baisho-san.”

  “Lucky?” Bobby Denzongpa said suddenly. His dark gazelle-like eyes were red-rimmed with hangover. “Yaar, they fed sheeps to the cows here! God did not make cows for eating of sheeps! And the flesh of Mother Cow is not for us to eat.…”

  “Bobby,” Jackie warned.

  Bobby shrugged irritably. “It’s the truth, boss, yaar? They made foul sheep, slaughterhouse offal into protein for cattle feed, and they fed that bloody trash to their own English cows. For years they did this wicked thing, even when the cows were going mad and dying in front of them! They knew it was risky, but they went straightaway on doing it simply because it was cheaper! That was a crime against nature. It was properly punished.”

  “That is enough,” Jackie said coldly. “We are guests in this country. We of India also lost many fellow country-men to that tragedy, don’t you know.”

  “Moslems, good riddance,” Bobby muttered under his breath, and got up and staggered off.

  Jackie glowered at him as he left, for the sake of the others.

  “It’s okay,” Smith said in the uneasy silence. “He’s a bloody Asian racist, your filmstar walla there, but we’re used to that here.” He shrugged. “It’s just—the plague, you know, it’s all they talk about in school, like England was really high-class back then and we’re nothing at all now, just a shadow or something.… You get bloody tired of hearing that. I mean, it was all fifty bloody years ago.” He sneered. “I’m not the shadow of the Beatles or the fucking Sex Pistols. I’m a working, professional, modern British musician, and got my union papers to prove it.”

  “No, you’re really good, Smithie,” Betty told him. She had gone pale. “I mean, England’s coming back strong now. Really.”

  “Look, we’re not ‘coming back,’ lass,” Smith insisted. “We’re already here right now, earning our bloody living. It’s life, eh? Life goes fucking on.” Smith stood up, picked up his deck, scratched at his shaggy head. “I gotta work. Jackie. Boss, eh? Can you spare five pounds, man? I gotta make some phone calls.”

  Jackie searched in his wallet and handed over a bill in the local currency.

  Baisho had five Japanese in his crew. Even with the help of Jackie’s crew, it took them most of the evening to scythe back the thick brown weeds in the old Bolton plagueyard. Every half-meter or so they came across a marker for the dead. Small square granite posts had been hammered into the ground, fifty years ago, then sheared off clean with some kind of metal saw. Fading names and dates and computer ID numbers had been chiseled into the tops of the posts.

  Jackie thought that the graveyard must stretch around for about a kilometer. The rolling English earth was studded with plump, thick-rooted oaks and ashes, with that strange naked look of European trees in winter.

  There was nothing much to the place. It was utterly prosaic, like a badly kept city park in some third-class town. It defied the tragic imagination. Jackie had been a child when the scrapie plague had hit, but he could remember sitting in hot Bombay darkness, staring nonplussed at the anxious shouting newsreels, vague images, shot in color no doubt, but grainy black and white in the eye of his memory. Packed cots in European medical camps, uniformed shuffling white people gone all gaunt and trembling, spooning up charity gruel with numb, gnarled hands. The scrapie plague had a devilishly slow incubation in humans, but no human being had ever survived the full onset.

  First came the slow grinding headaches and the unending sense of fatigue. Then the tripping and flopping and stumbling as the nerves of the victim’s legs gave out. As the lesions spread, and tunneled deep within the brain, the muscles went slack and flabby, and a lethal psychotic apathy set in. In those old cinema newsreels, Western civilization gazed at the Indian lens in demented puzzlement as millions refused to realize that they were dying simply because they had eaten a cow.

  What were they called? thought Jackie. Beefburgers? Hamburgers. Ninety percent of Britain, thirty percent of Western Europe, twenty percent of jet-setting America, horribly dead. Because of hamburgers.

  Baisho’s set-design crew was working hard to invest the dreary place with proper atmosphere. They were spraying long white webs of some kind of thready aerosol across the cropped grass and setting up gel-filtered lights. It was to be a night shoot. Macbeth and Macduff would arrive soon on the express train.

  Betty sought him out. “Baisho-san wants to know what you think.”

  “My professional opinion of his set, as a veteran Indian filmmaker?” Jackie said.

  “Right, boss.”

  Jackie did not much care for giving out his trade secrets but could not resist the urge to cap the Japanese. “A wind machine,” he pronounced briskly. “This place needs a wind machine. Have him leave some of the taller weeds, and set up under a tree. We’ve fifty kilos of glitter dust back in Bolton. It’s his, if he wants to pay. Sift that dust, hand by hand, through the back of the wind machine and you’ll get a fine effect. It’s more spooky than hell.”

  Betty offered this advice. Baisho nodded, thought the idea over, then reached for a small machine on his belt. He open
ed it and began to press tiny buttons.

  Jackie walked closer. “What’s that then? A telephone?”

  “Yes,” Betty said. “He needs to clear the plan with headquarters.”

  “No phone cables out here,” Jackie said.

  “High tech,” Betty said. “They have a satellite link.”

  “Bloody hell,” Jackie said. “And here I am offering technical aid. To the bloody Japanese, eh.”

  Betty looked at him for a long moment. “You’ve got Japan outnumbered eight to one. You shouldn’t worry about Japan.”

  “Oh, I don’t worry,” Jackie said. “I’m a tolerant fellow, dear. A very secular fellow. But I’m thinking, what my studio will say, when they hear we break bread here with the nation’s competition. It might not look so good in the Bombay gossip rags.”

  Betty stood quietly. The sun was setting behind a bank of clouds. “You’re the kings of the world, you Asians,” she said at last. “You’re rich, you have all the power, you have all the money. We need you to help us, Jackie. We don’t want you to fight each other.”

  “Politics,” Jackie mumbled, surprised. “It’s … it’s just life.” He paused. “Betty, listen to old Jackie. They don’t like actresses with politics in Bombay. It’s not like Tulsa, Oklahoma. You have to be discreet.”

  She watched him slowly, her eyes wide. “You never said you’d take me to Bombay, Jackie.”

  “It could happen,” Jackie muttered.

  “I’d like to go there,” she said. “It’s the center of the world.” She gripped her arms and shivered. “It’s getting cold. I need my sweater.”

  The actors had arrived, in a motor-driven tricycle cab. The Japanese began dressing them in stage armor. Macduff began practicing kendo moves.

  Jackie walked to join Mr. Baisho. “May I call on your phone, please?”

  “I’m sorry?” Baisho said.

  Jackie mimed the action. “Bombay,” he said. He wrote the number on a page in his notebook, handed it over.

  “Ah,” Baisho said, nodding. “Wakarimashita.” He dialed a number, spoke briefly in Japanese, waited, handed Jackie the phone.

  There was a rapid flurry of digital bleeping. Jackie, switching to Hindi, fought his way through a screen of secretaries. “Goldie,” he said at last.