Trump Sky Alpha

by Mark Doten

  The initial plans had been to replicate the flight path of Trump Sky Alpha at a 1:1 scale, and in the same compass bearings, though ultimately Trump had been convinced that the zeppelins could be oriented in various directions depending on local need, but since the local need was in many cases nil, it still resulted in zeppelin landing stations in the middle of the desert, or way out in some Hebei province backwater where there were mountains and big ancient pagodas and other obstructions, so at last a further compromise was made, the 207 miles from the White House to Trump Tower could be scaled up or down, and in Yemen, for reasons of security, after the first two were downed midflight by shoulder-fired missiles, the zeppelin now lifted up and went “in place,” whereas the route from Brussels to Frankfurt was a near match, and the longest route in the fleet, from Moscow to Minsk, 446.7 miles, required the zeppelin to travel at nearly double the speed of Trump Sky Alpha, which had led to the April disaster, but the craft had quickly been replaced and the route recertified, and if passengers all over the place were a bit leery after all the miscellaneous attacks and accidents throughout the global Trump Sky system, it had nonetheless been made clear that Trump wanted full flights, all of them full, it would not do to simply buy them out and send them up empty, Trump watched the crafts from video screens on the bridge of Trump Sky Alpha, and though there weren’t enough commercial passengers to fill them (and indeed, given the routes they took, and the differences in time zones, there was very little utility to the flights, the flights from Brussels for instance left at three in the morning, and on Mar-a-Lago days the crafts across the fleet were permitted to abandon the pantograph notion altogether, they were simply made to turn in circles and then go back to their launch points), but nevertheless, the flights were almost always full, booked far in advance, bought out by the sovereign wealth funds of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Hong Kong, as well as by corporate partners, the latter tricky at first, many corporations at first resisted—they had stockholders they were accountable to, they couldn’t be spending tens of millions on luxury travel—but soon it became clear that certain favors were being granted, playing fields tipped, sabers rattled more or less vigorously, regulations loosened or just gone, so that in numerous ways, plausibly deniable and otherwise, those in the zeppelins were accruing certain advantages: money that had previously been allocated to study peatland fires in Indonesia, fires that some alarmists had claimed were major sources of carbon emission and global pollution, had been zeroed out; and State reversed its opposition to certain uses of lèse-majesté in Thailand, after all these people had their own ways and traditions and who were we to interfere; and Trump himself gave a big thumbs-up in a Fox News interview to Azerbaijan’s overrun of Nagorno-Karabakh, as part of a larger package of policy initiatives geared to combat terrorism in the region; and in Zimbabwe, human rights restrictions were lifted and the Zim diamond mines were in full swing, despite the fact that in the first months of the new president’s term more than two hundred students had been killed by police; and in Taiwan, we temporarily halted follow-on support to certain Tactical Information Distribution Systems that we had sold them; and sanctions were lifted in Yemen and Burundi and Belarus; and the Magnitsky sanctions were quietly scrapped; and those who were not buying into the fleet watched all this from the sidelines until at last they did not, it was the new world-system and it seemed more and more that to deny the way it was, to refuse to play, was to lose, but the money that got you advantages a month ago was no longer enough, it was more, always more to feed the global Trump apparatus, and so corporations made extraordinary efforts, each according to its means, some buying out whole ships, and some, in the case of the globally promoted International British Petroleum Trump Sky Day, buying out the entire fleet, which was temporarily rebranded, a BP logo added to the rear stabilizers and onto the US flag itself, BP’s logo resting tastefully on the canton, while Trump’s face mugged and grimaced and gaped (within three months, offshore drilling rights granted to BP all up and down the coast of California), and it all seemed to work, for a time—for a time everyone was still making money, or most everyone, and the money that the global economy generated just seemed to be more and more, and yet the markets were anxious, they’d be burgeoning for days or weeks, and then they’d stumble, the markets would shake for a day or two, there were afternoons they’d lose a trillion, two trillion in value, but soon enough, before a full panic could set in, they were surging again, and the whole time the Trump Sky fleet was going out fully loaded with passengers, the markets in some sense seemed carried on the back of this global network of aircrafts, by Trump Sky itself, Trump joked more than once, that his fleet was recession proof, that that was one sector that would never take a hit, he’d joke with a wild insistent grin that no matter what, they’d fill the zeppelins, and of course there was no recession, he’d add, only unprecedented growth, a galloping, record-breaking market, even if the process was leaving the players shook, even if there was a feeling among the elite getting richer and richer that they still never knew quite where they were, quite what to give, quite what future this was all galloping toward, and those who purchased seats but didn’t keep up with the rising prices of the ultraluxe enhancements found their interests actively impeded, a less profitable week for a given aircraft could send mysterious vibrations throughout a whole country, a rash of bad fortune and destabilizing influences, said country scrambling to increase its purchases, to spend more, and where would it end, many wondered, where could it all end? so that when the first European zeppelin was taken down by terrorists there were those who sighed a bit in relief—an excuse at last to bail—only to find the Trump Organization suing the European Union, threatening sanctions if the EU didn’t assume responsibility for rebuilding the zeppelin and settling the lawsuits of the dead and massively compensating for pain and suffering, not only the families of the dead, but the Trump Organization itself, and in the final settlement there were two crafts built in place of the one that had been lost, twice the demands from the Trump Organization, and across the whole system flights had to be full all of the time, and not only full, the passengers had to play perfectly the roles of enthusiastic supporters, smiling as they listened, applauding and cheering, a pair of protesters once got on board the Trump Sky aircraft in Saudi, a cloth sign was unfurled, TRUMP IS BAD FOR THE WORLD, and when they were executed later that year, Trump tweeted, “LYING CNN MAKE IT SOUND LIKE I WANTED THEM KILLED!!! NOT MY LAWS, DIFFERENT COUNTRY!” though later that night he tweeted that he respected dissent as a bedrock principle of America, even where he disagreed, and on board the flights the cheering got louder and more sustained so that there were mini-instructionals on how to preserve your voice for maximal cheering throughout the course of the flight, and extra hot teas were added gratis, or at a low price—they certainly could have charged more—and the clamorous passengers who filled the flights were increasingly good-looking, they were attentive and well groomed, Look at these crowds, Trump would say, beaming, just look at all of you beautiful people, could you ever imagine anything more beautiful than this, and the passengers were indeed becoming more and more beautiful, it was often models now, and out-of-work actors, and then came another dynamic shift, the move to mix passengers with “modern dress” and “traditional garb,” this custom had started the day Trump cheerfully complimented the mix of modern dress and traditional garb in a flight in the Middle East, the thawbs and agals of the men, then wondered out loud the next week why more countries didn’t do that, both modern dress and traditional garb, it really gave him a kick, he loved a good traditional garb, and he pointed out a pair of Indian women in saris, and so it happened that the flight after that there were kimonos and kilts and dashikis and Brazilian carnival costumes and Maasai beadwork and Balinese temple dress and Filipino Barong Tagalogs in zeppelins lifting off around the world, audiences serving up rapt and approving expressions, then ovation after ovation, as Trump played on their screens, all those beautiful people all across the globe, the greatest co
rporations and countries, all the best people in all the world feting Trump twice a week, roaring and rising to their feet, and Trump basking in it, facial features registering a look of surprise, exaggerated faux shock and gleeful irony twisting his face, the mock disbelief you show at a surprise party you know is coming, and he stepped on into the planned surprise of it like you’d step into a love you knew you had coming, an unconditional love, a party with everyone you ever wanted in attendance, your friends and even better your enemies, all on their feet radiating the love you’d always known you deserved, the love of the whole world, and it was enough, at last it was enough, this love, or it almost always was, though there were moments when something else crept in. Even though you could see a uniform field of love, a field radiating in a continuous stream from all the monitors tracking all the dozens of flights, Trump’s body cast out into each aircraft in 3-D hologram, gifting each zeppelin with his presence, the noise of the passengers’ acclaim in his bulletproof central chamber no longer a noise but a condition, the air that surrounded him a thunderous buzz of endless and enveloping love, but still, disappointment crept in, because there were the faces, and the faces revealed things if you looked too close, if you lost the crowd for a moment and checked the faces you’d see that they weren’t communicating the full love, not all of them, not in the first moment the camera fell across them, and sometimes they’d realize they were on screen (monitors facing the passengers had been added for this reason, so that they could check their own reactions and be mindful of how much enthusiasm they were communicating) and eyebrows would shoot up and mouths go wide with a performance of pleasure and acclaim, but still, but there was that gap, that breath of disappointment, and it made him quietly furious, it should have been pure love he was feeling, and they were ruining it with their distraction, even at moments something like a smug and ironic superiority, though of course today it was quite different, it was not the usual faces he was looking into, the fleet was half-empty, or the half of the half that had not already been annihilated was half-empty, and on the flights that weren’t ghost ships there was an air of disassociated panic, clenched hands, silent tears, occasional screams, headdresses askew or clutched nervously in laps, two women on the Italian zeppelin in dresses and hats out of La Dolce Vita rose in hysterical panic as huge lobsters caught in the gearworks above popped and sprayed them with viscera, the women quickly gunned down by twitchy Italian security, blood spraying the white loges as the Leaning Tower of Pisa silently slid by beneath, lobsters elsewhere causing big problems as they were ground into the pulley and claw systems, gumming up the works, so that chairs were dropped in the wrong places, cracking the transparent floor, and in Rio actually shattering it, the passengers plunging into Guanabara Bay, giant lobsters with branded TRUMP claws and tails crashing down with them and drifting contentedly to the seabed, Trump still talking, still calm (“People have called me up crying and thanked me for saving their families, so many calls, now we wanted to keep that private, because I don’t think it’s anybody’s business if people are crying and saying Thank you, Thank you, Mr. President, but you look at the people and families I’ve saved, we are talking about millions and millions”), and then, there at the wheel, Trump clicked off the Italian and Brazilian feeds, and soon all the feeds, because what he was seeing was so weak, all the dying, and the roasting humans, and who would the fake news media blame? when it wasn’t his choice, wasn’t his fault that any of this was happening, when the economy was the best in fifty years and if they wanted to know whose fault it was try the FBI and the people who had wasted their time and the country’s time being distracted by phony investigations when there were big dangers they could have been going after including the massive abuses and criminality of Obama and Crooked Hillary that had left us wide open to a truly devastating attack.

  But now Trump Sky Alpha was being targeted, they had been tracking him, apparently, through his livestream, foreign fighter jets screaming in from God knows where, Trump couldn’t get the nose up, and he crashed in a cascade of sparks into some high-tension power lines that bounced him, sent him sailing starboard, for a few plunging, wobbling seconds, until the next set of lines bounced him back portwise, it appeared that the zeppelin’s velocity, and the tensile strength and elasticity of the lines, and the distance between the towers, were all so perfectly calibrated that even though twenty or thirty lines were dangling from the zeppelin’s snout, Trump Sky Alpha was staying up in the air, its zigzag path actually helping Trump evade the enemy fighters, giving US planes the chance to shoot them down, Trump still talking, gestures more and more emphatic, conveying, even in their hyper and erratic and disgusted affect, a look of confidence and ease, Trump speaking the whole time (even as he glanced at his phone and fired off a retweet of a map that showed how much of America would have been destroyed if Hillary had been in charge, which was much, much more than had been destroyed) while all across the world the linked zeppelins were following his movements without the power lines to bounce them back, and it was a global slaughter, Abuja down, Abu Dhabi down, and in capitals and military encampments and shantytowns and suburbs throughout the world it was being reckoned, how this might affect the future, what it would mean in the coming minutes and hours, how Trump’s reaction to the failure of his fleet might affect the future of the world, as Trump lost control, as enemy planes flew at him and a fleet of US fighter jets and helicopters swarmed Trump Sky Alpha, slicing through power lines, jets and helicopters shot down defending the president, and then Trump Sky Alpha finally found its balance, rose up above the lines to a safer altitude, there in North Jersey, and it seemed that the danger had passed, at least for the moment, but then it appeared, a dozen enemy fighters had already been shot down or crashed down in suicide runs by US aircraft, but this new and massive enemy fighter came roaring in, hugging the ground and then pulling up sharply, huge suddenly at Trump’s feet, missiles firing, and there was no one who could stop it, no one to intercept, they could all only watch as a foreign fighter jet turned its nose up and rushed up screaming and unloading all it had into the pale underbelly of Trump Sky Alpha, and it all blew up, Trump’s zeppelin, with Trump on board, it massively exploded, taking out a half-dozen helicopters in its escort, the livestream now nothing but noise and fire, and around the world millions held their breath, everyone was watching an instant that seemed to float, the whole world floating in that suspended moment, the death of Trump, the end of the Trump era, finally, and would we be able to recover, and what was to become of us, of the whole world, but as the fireball dissipated, as the smoke cleared, it was still chugging along, the aircraft, and there he was, Trump, he was still there, still going, no longer piloting a full zeppelin, envelope and metal frame burned and fallen away, it was just the glass amphitheater, all the empty seats in their oblong spiral coiling around the bulletproof glass bridge, emergency safety rotors extending out over what was now a much smaller oblong shape with Trump at the center, a dozen stuttering rotors of various sizes keeping the craft afloat and working double duty to pump out the smoke of the burn, the now blackened contraption festooned with a multiplicity of spinning rotors, Trump Sky Alpha looking now like an exploded cigar sprouting dozens of propellers keeping it jerkily in the air, the thing chugged and puffed along like an old coal-fired, steam-powered boat, the moth-white rotors blackened and rattling, but still holding the aircraft up, the flag still flying, the flag now a burned gray collection of tendrils writhing like a tub of snakes, and a pale gaping skull-like thing where Trump’s face had been stamped, the rest of the fleet unlinked now and crashing, Trump seeming to float, hands at the gold wheel, still speaking, still smiling, his eyes puffy and steadfast, chin set, whole face smeared with soot, his face like a Creamsicle dropped in the dirt, hair up on end in footlong follicles and twirling in the craft’s slowly rushing air like some undersea organism, hair rotating and swaying like primitive life seen at great magnification, “It’s New York now, it’s Midtown, there’s Trump Tower, Central P
ark, the best views, the best apartments. I have talked to the generals and the generals who are with us have given me some really, really wonderful codes to work with, and the codes are beautiful, just beautiful …” he said, and he was alive, he really was, there was simply no way of stopping him, no way that the people in the situation room could see to make it end, and right there he authorized it, aboard Trump Sky Alpha, on the YouTube livestream, he authorized the big one, a massive response, lobsters in Bermuda and Turkey and Paris raising branded claws in silent salute as the flames engulfed them, the last remaining cameras going dark, helicopters and fighter jets crisscrossing the airspace around and in front of the big smoky capsule surrounded by whirling rotors, US President Donald J. Trump floating at the center of it all, and he pressed the automated descent button, his face smudged like a chimney sweep’s, and the livestream cut out for a final pitch for boutique shopping experiences (Ivanka on video offering bangles and Donald J. Trump signature neckwear and vacation ownership opportunities) and then back to Trump, full frame, at the wheel of Trump Sky Alpha, another thumbs-up to the YouTube livestream audience, to all those watching, those who still had internet, those still alive, and in the situation room, Trump was almost hypnotic, hair a gentle swirl seeming to coalesce on his head before swimming apart, hair alive, undulating and thin and on the verge of collapse, scalp fully visible, pale and fat as a peeled hard-boiled egg, and among and between all the generals and the members of the deep state and now even Trump’s private security apparatus, there was a humming awareness, a panic that they were watching, just watching, the world end, and wasn’t there something they could do, but it was too many, there were too many different strategies, there were too many shouts, and too many sudden silences, there were murmurs and side conversations and cries for consensus, but they were all locked into their own roles, each of the individual human animals that had been brought into that room by life and chance and skill and theft, they were in the room, just there, a small mass of people had no idea what to do, individually or collectively, and Trump had already announced it, the big option, right there on the livestream, to the whole world, to all our allies and enemies, and around the world protocols and contingency plans were going into effect, there just wasn’t any time, just no way to wiggle out of the moment, to say sorry, to say stop, to say we fucked up, nothing to be done, there might have been a chance, once, to resist, there must have been, but that moment was lost somewhere, it had slipped away—where had all the little moments been? there must have been so many chances to not be where we were—but this is where we were, these American human animals were just right there, and there was nothing to be done, they could do the big one, or just nothing, sit passively, hemmed in by life and by all the possibilities they couldn’t quite dream into the real, and they understood that to play was to lose, but to bow out, to step away from the table, to renounce play altogether, was no longer an option, if it ever had been, and so it was the football, the gold codes, it was all initiated, it would start very soon, all that just minutes away, the big event, the one we’d been waiting for for the better part of a century, the button got pushed, it was easy, sure, it really was, now that it was done, and across the Midwest and elsewhere the missiles took to the sky as President Trump landed softly on the roof of Trump Tower, not listening for but hearing nonetheless, somewhere far below, faint and inescapable as his own heartbeat, the oceanic roar of protesters flooding the streets of Manhattan, crashing through the doors of Trump Tower and up every stairwell.