Trump Sky Alpha

by Mark Doten

  The Subversive is divided into four parts. The first part begins in a classroom in an unnamed city in the Philippines, where the narrator, ten-year-old Benjie, begins to shake. It seems to be coming from inside him—he believes that he is being visited by the Holy Spirit, or dying, or both. Then he sees the nun pitch over her desk and curse. A seriocomic scene follows: the nuns telling children to keep calm, be orderly, get into line, get onto the stairs going down, reciting Hail Marys—nuns leading their students in prayer in strident, drill-sergeant voices, the various nuns and various classrooms staggered, waveforms of prayer falling further and further out of phase as the prayer loops, nuns seeming almost to compete with each other, leading the children in tones of barely controlled fury at what the Blessed Virgin has allowed, Mary and grace and thee and thou almost shouted, nuns dragging their lines down the stairs two or three classrooms at a time, children clogged and tripping even as the stairs themselves roll in waves—and it is as if the school is on the back of a great bird that is flying away. Later, Benjie helps his aunt and uncle and cousins clean up the spilled merchandise at their sari sari store—jars and bottles have been smashed, the floor is sticky with orange soda—and on the TV, there are people in other neighborhoods that have been squished in collapses. Benjie has never seen anything like it. They’ve been squished! he says. He says, Ewwwww! His cousins shout, Squished! Squished! And his aunt sends him to his room. But he isn’t joking: he saw them, they had been squished, the meat and organs of them squished, and now they’re dead.

  A few days later, a balikbayan box arrives from his mother in the US: clothes and imported candy for him and his aunt—two giant Toblerones—and in a wrapped package labeled For Benjie, a Nintendo. His aunt sets up the video game system in the back of the store, and she charges five pesos a head for boys to sit in back and play it. The boys will remain in front of the screen in a small shifting group all afternoon, day after day. They are playing Super Mario Bros., and they are in the infinite loop of Negative World. Benjie is older than his three cousins; he tends the store while his aunt is gone. Sometimes he takes a few pesos from the register. He has a ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary with a red felt bottom that peels off, and he can hide bills in it.

  Benjie teaches all of the boys how to get into the glitch level that is Negative World by crouching on the pipe at the end of 1-2, jumping and sliding over—it is deeply frustrating to get there, but there is nothing more satisfying than when you land right, and start to slide.

  There is a way out of Negative World.

  He thinks it has to do with the coins—with which ones you grab and which ones you leave as you swim through the level.

  If you beat Negative World, the Nintendo company pays you a million dollars.

  Later in the book, the narrator will spend some time ruminating on this question: Where did that belief come from, that you could win a million dollars? To what extent did he ever believe it? He did, in some part of him—he is sure of this—believe it. It is this belief that fuels the action of the first part of the book—he orchestrates the boys to try various strategies for beating Negative World. His aunt is pleased with the money they bring in, and the candy that they purchase, and she gives him more responsibility, leaves him in charge for a longer amount of time.

  But one day, his aunt discovers the stolen money (he is not the first person to hide bills in a statue of the Virgin) and as punishment, she sells the Nintendo to the parents of another boy down the street. She is tired of having all these boys hanging around in her store anyhow. That boy’s mother sets up a similar situation, but the boys have lost their belief in Negative World and the million dollars, they just play the game like anyone would. Benjie and his cousins can’t play it anymore. Why would I give you money for that? his aunt says. His cousins beg her. She tells them to get the money from Benjie. He is a thief. Who knows how much money he has stashed around?

  He tells the other boy, the boy who now has the Nintendo, that he has learned how to beat Negative World—his mother has a friend in America who works at Nintendo. Benjie says that he won’t tell the boy, though, not unless the boy promises to split the million with him. Benjie gets 75 percent, that’s only fair. The boy does not think that it’s fair. At last they agree, they will split fifty-fifty. Benjie says there’s a chip—a simple rectangular black chip. It lifts right off. If you take it out and turn it around, rotate it 180 degrees, and replace it, then you can beat Negative World. It’s the biggest chip, and you have to use a little force but then it lifts right off.

  The next day his aunt slaps his face.

  You convinced that stupid boy to break the Nintendo?

  It is not my fault he is stupid.

  You are both such stupid boys. Susmariosep! Now his mother is telling me to give her her money back or get a new Nintendo! Where am I supposed to get a Nintendo? Where do I get the money? Do you have the money? You had better write to your mother and get the money.

  The truth is, he does have just enough money, hidden in the spine of a Bible that sits on the shelf downstairs. He thinks: All his aunt wants is the money. She won’t care where he got it. That is what aunts want. They just want money.

  His mother is in Minneapolis, where she works as a nurse for him and his future, working herself to death for him, she tells him every month or two when she calls.

  He won’t call her for this.

  The next day he gives his aunt the bills.

  She counts the money.

  She tells him that he is not living under this roof anymore—his mother can take him, or he can live on the street. She won’t have a liar and a thief living here with her children.

  In part 2 of the novel, Benjie goes to the United States, where calamity descends almost immediately. He is never able to quite untangle it, and he doesn’t feel he can ask his stepfather which came first: the marriage, or her lung cancer diagnosis. There is a photo of the three of them, after the ceremony in their backyard (his stepfather isn’t a Catholic, and there’s no time to make him one, so it can’t be a church wedding, which Benjie is told not to tell anyone back home), and his mother looks beautiful. She poses, hip out, head back, long dark hair suspended straight down from her angled head, in a short, shiny blue dress and heels with buckles with shining blue and silver gems. His stepfather wears a brown suit. Benjie wears silver pleated pants, a white shirt, and a silver bow tie. His mother nods approvingly at the photo when it comes in (she is happy with the photos as long as she looks good, the lighting is okay, and it’s her good side): she says, You know, Benjie, how you look in this photo? You look pensive.

  This is a word that she uses over and over to describe him in the coming months, always with a little flourish, as though she’s just plucked it out of the air (You know how you look? … pensive), and he comes to dread it. He is embarrassed for her—it is a vocabulary word she picked up somewhere, and it is overly mannered like her shoes and her lipstick. He hates himself for thinking this. Perhaps he is pensive, if it means a bad kid, ungrateful. And things are moving quickly. Within a year she is dead, and he and his stepfather are left together, baffled and a bit shy, moving through the house like two boys stuck together in a house without parents. They eat in front of a television playing Star Trek: The Next Generation or MacGyver. On TV commercials, people open a can of Coke and money pops out. People buy a car and they get a “cash back rebate”—stacks of bills are ejected from the AC vents and the glove compartment and ashtray, the new owners gasping in delight. There is an arcade that Benjie’s stepfather has taken him to that ejects long strands of red tickets from the Skee-Ball machine. His stepfather encourages him to get a prize, a pencil topper or an action figure, but Benjie carefully hoards the tickets. He wants the top prize, a television of his own. His mother had insisted that he call his stepfather Dad. Now that she’s gone, that has fallen away, but Benjie does not know what to call him, and it seems that this is at the root of their problems—he finds it embarrassing to talk to the man he lives with
, because he doesn’t have a name. He has heard other children call their stepparents by their first name, but the idea is so wild, so altogether out of the question, that it might be a custom of alien beings. At night sometimes he hears her saying, I worked myself to death for you.

  His first week in America, they all went out for Arby’s. They ate it in the car, driving out to a lake. Benjie threw his wrapper and cup out the car window on the highway. His stepfather yelled at him: What the hell are you doing?

  His mother shouted back, He doesn’t know! She explained that in the Philippines, sometimes people just throw their trash, no big deal. She tells him not to do that anymore, but she’s laughing as she says it. Benjie at first has a hard time quite believing the prohibition, and he tries it again the next day: his stepfather pulls over to the shoulder of the highway: this is as angry as he will ever see him: his face is bright red. It’s a $100 ticket, he says. And more than that, it’s wrong.

  You need to get this straight, right now. We don’t litter! Do you want to be a litterbug? It’s disgusting. It’s primitive. I’m sure the Philippines are wonderful, but welcome to civilization.

  Benjie watches Star Trek and reads Dragonlance books.

  He likes Data and he likes Raistlin. They both have gold skin. They don’t fit in. Data is very quick at calculations, but humans don’t relate to him. Raistlin is more powerful than anyone: he controls magic that will be able to destroy the world. He has a delicate stomach, he eats bread dipped in a few drops of red wine. Data has a daughter, but she dies. In another episode, a new life form is created in the holodeck when the computer is told to make a being smarter than Data. When Raistlin sees people through his hourglass eyes, he sees them dying, their skin withering away.

  Every morning Benjie eats white rice and four microwave sausage patties. He drinks a glass of SunnyD. He is gaining weight. His stepfather sets him up with computer games. He is a network engineer, he shows him how to access bulletin boards. He stands with his hands in his pockets watching Benjie at the computer, then goes into his bedroom and closes the door.

  Benjie likes the computer, but doesn’t like to be in the house. He often goes to a park and sits on a swing or walks in the woods. There are things under pieces of wood when you turn them over, ants and grubs and beetles. In the woods one day he meets a boy, who invites him back to his house to play. He and Benjie take their bikes there. They’re playing with two yardsticks and a tennis ball. He has seen other boys’ places before, and they all have plastic bats, plastic toys—real toys. This is something different. The boy is poor. He is in a low house that doesn’t have aluminum siding like the other houses, it is wood, and the paint is bad. After a while playing (he can’t remember the game, the game itself never really coalesces …), the boy’s father is there, and he tells them to come to the toolshed. He turns a padlock on the door, entering the combination—Benjie tries to look, but it moves too fast. It smells inside like paint and rot and something warm and sweet. There is a wheelbarrow hung on the wall, and saws, and hammers, and a screwdriver set: the wood there is full of holes in neat—he wonders what the word is—grids? If you drew vertical and horizontal lines between the holes, they would be grids. The father has a calendar on the wall. There are women in it without shirts. They have big tits with nipples on them. Do you like this? The father asks. I bet you like this. The other boy is gone now, it is just the two of them, he has been maneuvered, he is sitting, in fact, on a lawn chair next to the man, and their knees are touching. It might be an accident—it is just how the chairs are—he is looking over his left shoulder at the grids, the tools there. He feels the man’s hand touch his chair, the armrest—and like it’s nothing, like he’s not even in the chair, the man pulls Benjie’s chair so that they are next to next and the sides of their legs are touching.

  A month later, Benjie sees the man again. He’s walking to the 7-Eleven when the car pulls up beside him. The man tells him to get in. Benjie can’t move. The man talks to him, and Benjie is able to move at last, but only into the car.

  In part 3, Benjie is older, he’s gone away to college at USC, where he is studying computer science and engineering. It opens with him watching the movie Anak in a class on Southeast Asian cinema. It’s the story of an OFW, an Overseas Filipino Worker, a mother who’s taken a job as a nanny for a wealthy Hong Kong family, leaving three children behind with her husband, who is killed years later in a workplace accident, leading to her return. He does not feel much of anything, but he wishes his mother was there to watch it with him—he thinks that he would like to watch her feel something, watching it. He would like to see her cry. She went away when he was one, and then he had her for another year at the end of her life, and apart from a few visits, that’s all he got. He would like to ask her why. He doesn’t think that the money is enough. He would like to understand it, he would like for some kind of understanding to emerge. He would like for her to weep and hold him and beg forgiveness. He gets hung up on a scene where the mother buys a Kermit the Frog stuffed toy—a big one, two or three feet in length or height—it flops around, neither length nor height seem quite accurate. It is clearly unlicensed, a knockoff. The proportions are wrong, it seems like someone’s bad idea of Kermit, a cheap idea of him, which is what it is—and he thinks, I can see this, the characters in the movie, they can’t. They don’t see that it’s unlicensed. I see that. He knows if his mother were alive, she would not have looked at the Kermit and understood that it was a knockoff, or why it mattered. And he finds himself flushing with shame at his dead mother for her not knowing, and at himself for thinking this thought.

  At USC, Benjie also meets Jon Postel, who runs the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and was the editor of RFCs (Requests for Comments), thousands of documents going back decades that describe the protocols on which the internet is based. Postel is a big deal, one of the grand old men of the internet, Walt Whitman beard, a serious aura around him and his office at USC’s Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey. There was no chance for a freshman to meet him or study with him, but Benjie became quietly obsessed with him, reading RFC after RFC, spending hours lurking in the ISI, and finally he hacked Postel. He wrote a few lines of BASH that he slipped into Postel’s .profile on the main server. Every 300 to 1500 seconds, the script would flip Postel’s keyboard mapping to Flemish and back. Postel could be heard cursing in his office, for days, and then one day he started to laugh. He stalked out into the hallway, shouting, Okay, who did it? Who did it? And Benjie was there, he was on the floor, he stepped in front of Postel, his whole body trembling.

  You? Postel said. He spoke matter-of-factly, without anger, with a mild curiosity.

  I’m a student. Benjie could barely speak—the words were stuck in his mouth. I wanted to meet you. I only had it do it for two to eight seconds at a time.

  Only two to eight seconds at a time. He seemed mildly amused, wavering on the edge of something. Why don’t you help me make up for some of the time you’ve wasted. Your first job is to figure out how to distribute IP addresses to Central Asia. Do you think you can handle that? Or are you just here to make my life worse, two to eight seconds at a time?

  Benjie becomes wrapped up in Postel’s unfolding struggle for control of the DNS system. He takes a world literature class where he reads José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, and on his own he reads Rizal’s second and final novel, El Filibusterismo. He befriends another student, Apolinario, who is involved in WTO protests.

  This part culminates on 1/28, when Postel grabs control of the root authority for the internet, a watershed moment in internet history. However, the authority claimed by him on behalf of the small group of technocratic elites who had always run the internet is superseded by new, global concerns, the stakeholders. By the end of the year, Postel is dead.

  If the book had ended there, it seems unlikely that it would have had much of a life after the initial, modest round of attention (a pair of mixed prepublication trade reviews; no national or region
al print reviews; and a smattering of online mentions). It was published by short-lived Nebraska micropress Cyber Prairie Books, the second of four titles the press released before folding only a year after its launch.

  However, in part 4 of the book, the form changes radically. There is no longer the attention to psychological realism and to the story of Benjie. Instead, we have short chapters, philosophical or ranting, taking on a diverse array of subjects, including:

  ILOVEYOU, a computer worm that originated in the Philippines and infected tens of millions of computers across the world;

  the first cable to go around the word, which was sent by Theodore Roosevelt, on completion of the transpacific cable to Manila;

  a riff on how Magellan was killed in 1521 in his attempted circuit of the globe, and now, almost four hundred years later, the cable was completing his mission;

  a massacre of the Moro people in the Philippines in 1906, about which Teddy Roosevelt sent a congratulatory telegram to the general in charge: I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag;

  a long riff on the Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture magazine that inspired a generation of those who would transform the computer industry;

  an explanation of the inverted tree structure of the DNS;

  a quote from a newspaper documenting the fact that the transpacific cable had a section welded from the great electrical circuits of history, the very wires used by Samuel F. B. Morse and Alexander Graham Bell; a section of Atlantic cable laid by Cyrus W. Field, through which the first cable message was sent across the ocean; a piece of wire over which Thomas Edison lit the first incandescent bulb ever lighted from a central station, and another through which the current of electricity was sent by President Grover Cleveland when he opened the World’s Fair at Chicago;