by Nick Mamatas
Well, Paul doesn’t know. Paul doesn’t even know why he occasionally sees a tank trundle down his street these days either, because he doesn’t like the news and he doesn’t talk to too many people these days, not since his girlfriend Tammy dumped him because she doesn’t like being screamed at, especially not in front of her own mother like he did that one time in the parking lot of the deli when it was her cousin’s Confirmation and they were sent to pick up an eight-foot hero sandwich. So he’s never heard of Weinbergia and he doesn’t know that he’s in the red ring of instant vaporization if the nuke goes up. He’d really be pissed off if he did.
The next car, a military Hummer that was disguised as a civilian vehicle with its baby-blue paint job and silkscreened unicorn on the side, came up behind Dad and the Weinbergians slowly, its lights dimmed by half-stop gels borrowed from a news crew in exchange for the crew getting a berth and embedded journalists on the mission to end the stand-off once and for all.
Captain Whiting leaned out the window of the vehicle and shouted over the noise of the engine to Dad, saying, “Hey! Weinberg! Stop, you’re under arrest.” The others stopped, but Dad kept walking. Jake and Leif hurried to catch up and bumped into Adrienne, who scowled and yelped at them.
“Diplomatic immunity!” Dad called out, not even turning to face the captain.
“You surrendered!”
“No I didn’t,” Dad said. There was some underbrush, so he stomped on it forcefully. Ahead, the white sign of the Qool Mart illuminated the four-car parking lot like a little moon.
“I have a soldier and video says you did, son!”
Dad still didn’t stop, still didn’t turn. Adrienne huffed after him, upset that she was being reduced to a bit part in the moment with every stride my father pulled ahead. Barry and Jake decided to pace the Hummer, trotting behind it as if they’d be able to hop onto the back, climb in, and subdue everyone involved with all the ninja moves they didn’t actually know. But Leif felt strangely confident, giddy. Like he did when he had first emigrated. History was happening. Jake wondered if he shouldn’t have saved his passport for eBay.
“No, I said I was ending hostilities. But I also declare victory,” Dad said as he finally stopped and turned on his heel to point a thick finger at the captain. “That means you surrender!”
“Okay—wait, no!” From inside the Hummer came a high girly laugh. Whiting craned his neck to frown, and then turned back to Dad. The Hummer idled on the street right outside the Qool Mart as Dad, followed a few steps by Adrienne, stepped onto the asphalt.
“Don’t be juvenile, Weinberg. You messed up, big time. I can shoot you right now.”
A huge spotlight, which had been left on the roof unused since the Qool Mart opened back in the springtime, sparked to life and flooded the Hummer with a blazing beam. Whiting threw up his arm and squinted. Moths fluttered about, mad from the light. And a voice, lilting and foreign, declared from a tinny PA system, “No you cannot! This man is in my parking lot, the territory of the Islamic Republic of Qool Mart Store No. 351, and any violence on the part of imperialist American aggressors will be answered a thousandfold!”
7
My mother likes to wake me up in the middle of the night, because she misses me so much and she doesn’t want to be without me, plus she is easily made tipsy on white wine, which she loves and which her new admirers give her all the time. She’s like a cloud of perfume and cough medicine, drifting in a windy sky, when she wakes me. Her mind, her scent, all of it. She says, “Love Bug, oh Love Bug,” and brushes my hair with her fingers every time. I always try to stay asleep, but it never works. I blaze awake but hold my eyes shut to keep up the illusion, like a guy in prison hiding in the corner of the cell when the guard comes in. All boxed in. She did this now, as I was watching an international incident unfold.
I missed Captain Whiting’s barked curses and quick scatter of footsteps guided by rote drilling rather than thought that rushed out into the parking lot. When the spotlight died to a little orange spark, the Hummer was doomed. Propane tanks, set with detonators made from duct tape and clock radios, were positioned under all the doors and wheels. King Dad and his followers were surrounded too, by three Qool Mart employees in red-and-white striped shirts and off-the-rack sunglasses. One of them, his name Umer (though his name tag read Mark), wore big novelty sunglasses with pink frames and smiled at my father. He held his arm out toward the door of the Qool Mart and said, “Please, please, come in.”
Mom said over and over, “Love Bug, my Love Bug,” but her tone was weird, as was her own experience of sitting on the corner of my bed, her arm reaching for me as tenderly as Umer’s did toward the entrance of the Qool Mart. She wasn’t looking at me through her eyes, but just saw the grayish-black blob of my shadowed face. What she saw, in her mind’s eye, was herself at the edge of a neater-looking bed, with her clothes fitting better than they really do, caressing a superior version of me. Me, but not so portly, me who had the haircut the Today Show wanted me to get. Me, who was thrilled to be free from my psychotic father and his war criminal ways.
“We’re out of Cuebars,” explained Musad, the franchisee of the Qool Mart, and the Bey of the Islamic Republic of Qool Mart Store No. 351. “We couldn’t keep them in stock at all today, thanks to the mention on the television.” Musad’s name tag read Sam. He wasn’t wearing sunglasses, which gave him a special look given that all the other employees were—he was the Bey, and they were the Secret Service or something. Even Dad was impressed. “But,” said Musad, “I do think we have a product you’d be interested in, if you know what I mean.” Musad was sure that Dad did, especially after Dad mimicked the smile and sly tilt of the head Musad performed, but really, Dad had no idea what he was getting into.
Adrienne scowled; she hated Arabs because she heard that back in their home countries they treat women very poorly, wrapping them up in headscarves or even full-length hijabs, and then squeezing their butts and boobs in the marketplaces while the women are trying to shop for their families. And she disliked the idea of being handled too much to feel comfortable among so many of them, especially as she couldn’t tell whether or not they were undressing her with their eyes.
Barry and Jake busied themselves getting beer and crushed ice.
Mom, all inspired, left my room and sat down to her new laptop, where she checked her email, and answered a few from well-wishers. She used to write back to everyone, but recently got a little jaded. Any mail that mentioned Jesus Christ or contains more than four exclamation points (or two right next to each other) she finally decided to ignore after getting way too many of them. She liked what she calls Geri’s Generic God. Letters from Christians and Jews and Buddhists and pagans all offered up God’s good will, but it could be any God at all. The Generic God, Geri talked to all the time now. About me. (“Will my little boy be okay through all of this?”) About Dad. (“What happened?”) About tomorrow. (“Please please please make Oprah call tomorrow, or at least Regis.”)
Captain Whiting burst into the Qool Mart, sidearm drawn and arm raised. He waved the gun around till the barrel looked like it was made of rubber. “You’re all under arrest!” he shouted. Umer was on him in a flash, his mop handle slamming hard against Whiting’s forearm. The gun fell and was kicked across the slick floor. The second blow landed right on Whiting’s head, and then as Whiting’s guards began running to the door, Umer slid the mop handle through the looped handles of the double doors, wedging them shut. He turned the little sign hanging from one of the handles around so from the outside it read closed. Then he just stood there and smiled as an anxious soldier hefted his rifle and fired a shot into the bulletproof glass of the store. They scattered at the ricochet.
Whiting got to his feet and held up a palm. “No,” he barked to the soldiers outside. “Hold your fire! Back to the vehicle!” He turned, wincing, and with his hand now to the tender part of his head. “What’s going on here? Do you realize that we’ll have a Black Hawk Down here in three minute
s? Who has my gun?” There was a tap on the glass. Everyone turned, and a soldier looked at his captain and shrugged, confused.
Umer said, “The glass is thick. He cannot hear you easily. And the report of the rifle is probably ringing in his ears.”
Whiting grunted, then stepped up to the glass and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Go back to the Hummer!” he yelled. “and wait!” The soldiers nodded and started to walk back, but then Whiting remembered something and started banging on the glass. They turned and Whiting cupped his hands again and shouted, “Private Wallace! I want you to remove the mudflaps—” Wallace, the soldier who had fired, then knocked, shrugged, and shook his head, so Whiting pointed at the rear of the Hummer, and said even louder, “Those ermine mudflaps are private issue! They’re mine!” The soldier, Wallace, smiled widely and nodded, finally understanding. “Take the mudflaps back to the staging zone, Wallace!” He waved, “And the rest of you, stay by the Hummer and don’t try to defuse anything!”
Whiting turned back to the assembled employees and Weinbergians, who were staring. “What? They’re sentimental. And I bought them out of my own pocket. You need to do that sometimes. It cheers you up to decorate your own Hummer. It’s like a home away from home.” Barry understood him at least. He sighed, not thinking anything he wasn’t saying, which is really strange for an adult. “So, who has my gun?”
From the back of the room came a voice familiar to local TV news watchers. “I do,” said Rich, standing up from his hiding place behind a display case full of old doughnuts. In one hand was Whiting’s gun, and in the other, a Cuebar. He was thinking Pulitzer, and about how, when he went to journalism school, he learned that Pulitzer was pronounced, “Pull it, sir,” and not “Pewlitzer.”
At just that moment, in the next room over from where I couldn’t sleep, my mother began to have a religious experience. Religious experiences are pretty common, actually. I had to teach myself to tune them out when I was a kid, because they’re like . . . hard to explain. Ever see a movie or something on TV where they record a flower or a city all night and then speed up all the frames so it looks like blooms are exploding, cars speed up into red and white squiggles of light, clouds roll under the sky like we were all on a planet-sized roller coaster? It’s like watching all those things at once, and being all those things at once. Imagine smelling all those flowers and being sniffed by a giant nose.
Oh, and there is no God, of course. Religious experiences are just a weird thing that happens in people’s brains. It’s actually the exact opposite of getting a song stuck in your head. You really have to be telepathic to understand what I mean.
The eye of Geri’s Generic God manifested itself at the top of her vision. She saw the ceiling separate from the walls of the room and like the sun the Eye peered at her, a giant, inquisitive It. She felt herself rising from her seat, chest first, arms and shoulders thrown back like she was nineteen and being carried to the lifeguards at Lake Ronkonkoma after being discovered in the water by her boyfriend. My mother almost died that day, and her brain starved for thirty seconds. She’s been vulnerable to religious experiences ever since then, but never had one till she clicked shut her email and accidentally fired up the wrong screen saver—one she’d never seen before—on her computer. The wavy red into blue with a bright white blob in the middle triggered her.
Now Geri hallucinated that from her perch in the grip of her own Generic God she looked down and saw her body, slumped forward, forehead pressed heavily against the screen of the laptop, which made the edge of the keyboard rise up. Geri wasn’t worried about her new machine though; she had transcended material concerns. Then she turned away from her empty body doll and turned to make eye contact with It. Mom stared into the sun-like eye of her Generic God and became It.
From there, it was the usual. All religions have some essential wisdom to share, but unscrupulous men and the pleasures of wealth obscured the message. All of us have a little of God in us, thus we are all one, and should be unified in peace and brotherhood. All we need to do is treat others in the ways in which we want to be treated. God is nature, and nature is God, so we must stop polluting the Earth. Everyone deserves a full stomach and a warm hug. We should never die alone. An angel watches over each one of us, keeping us from harm. Everything happens for the best, even death, as our own bodies become the flowers of the next generation.
“I, uh, brought this one with me,” Rich said of his Cuebar. He was also wearing a T-shirt with the Cuebar logo on it.
Adrienne said, “Great. So now what are we supposed to do? We’ll probably be arrested if we try to get back home.” She glared at Dad.
“Actually, orders on the border are to shoot,” said Captain Whiting. Dad glared at him. Not knowing what else to do, Whiting glared at Umer for a moment, but Umer’s sunglasses made that unsatisfying, so he tuned to Musad, who had moved from behind the cash register to behind the hot dog warmer, and glared at him. Jake glared at Rich. Barry just put the bags of ice back in the freezer; this was going to take a while, like one of those horrible hour-long pre-meetings his old boss would have before the real, three-hour, meeting. And he had come to Weinbergia to escape.
Musad, his hand in a glove, took a large hot dog—one of those foot-long Qool Dogs that are really kind of gross because they’re also like three inches around; too much meat—put it in a bun, and offered it to my father. He took it gingerly, not really thinking. His nervous system was doing all the work. The bloom of confidence in his chest that made him get up and tromp out of his own country was gone, and what replaced it was nothing. No fear, but no thought either. A hot dog was as good as a Cuebar until he bit into it and frowned.
“What?” Adrienne asked. Dad clenched his teeth and pulled from the hot dog a piece of paper, tightly rolled up.
“Hold this,” he said of the hot dog to Adrienne, who wouldn’t. Jake turned and did. Dad found the edge of the paper with his thumb and carefully unrolled it, then quietly read the peace treaty to himself. In the corner, Rich thought, Yes!
Geri’s Generic God was all yes. There was no hesitation: yes yes yes yes yes. Flowers are beautiful. The universe is a large and wonderful place. There was no room for a Generic Devil or even any explanation for the bad things in the world, like all those people who have been killed by Daisy Cutter bombs, tortured in camps, beaten to death by their parents . . . well, those things just happen so that Geri can understand how precious life is. Daniel might have beaten me to death, or maybe his new girlfriend would have. If not beaten, then maybe I would have been locked in the bathroom and forced to drink from the toilet, or abandoned to the crabgrass on Weinbergia’s eastern frontier, or maybe even sent over to the Cases’, where they eat spaghetti out of a can.
That’s what brought her back. Me, her precious Love Bug, face smeared with sauce too bright red to be tomato, sitting on a stool at the counter in the Case kitchen, holding an ice cream scoop over the rim of a huge cafeteria-grade can of “prefab” pasta. The glories of life and universe, debased by factory pasta. It was as she awoke that Mom realized that her entire life had been a fraud and a failure. She had never really lived, not since that day when she had enjoyed the cold dark waters of Lake Ronkonkoma for a few seconds too long. She needed to reconnect with nature, to reclaim her wild, primitive self, to transform herself from media figure of the moment (“I think my book might suck” was her first coherent thought upon awakening) and back into Woman. Mother. Eve.
Her head still throbbing as though she had just been awoken from an incomplete nap by a telemarketer phone call, my mother ran around the bedroom, dragging out her luggage and yanking her clothes out of the dresser and closets. It was time for us to move on again, but she wasn’t packing for a trip. She was packing to burn.
“Five years . . . peace between Weinbergia and the entire Muslim world, as vouchsafed and guaranteed by the Islamic Republic of Qool Mart,” Dad read aloud.
“Wait a minute,” said Whiting, “these people don’t speak for th
e Muslim world.”
“Hyah,” said Barry. “He’s got a point there.” Barry hoped making friends with Whiting would get him out of here alive, maybe even without a prison sentence.
Musad said, “Of course I speak for the Muslim world. You, man,” he continued, pointing his chin at Barry. “You made it so.”
“We have video,” Richard said.
Musad reached up to the security monitor and punched a button. The real-time footage on the screen went black and then a moment later was replaced with the same scene, but daylight, with Musad and Barry, only the latter in other clothes, chatting.
Video Barry waved a copy of Newsday in Musad’s face and, his voice tinny as a thought from both the mic and the fact that the playback was on the small security speakers, said, “Why did your people go crazy this time? Bombing our soldiers just for trying to protect your freedom to sell me this newspaper!”