by Sean Penn
Essentially a child bomber who’d dreamt of being a geologist, Bob had always found something just, righteous, or otherwise impulsively self-medicating to do, and he carried that habit into his adult years. On geological terms, Bob initially concerned himself only with the shine his lapidary equipment and tumbler could bring to nearly any found stone. But upon some reflection, it occurred to him that within the dust, bones, and petrification of Paleocene sedimentary rock was held an egoless and truthful history. Somewhere in the spaces of time, like the expanding and contracting fissures in hardened earth sharply worn by millenniums of moisture, it seemed mankind had traded truth for treachery, both religious and commercial.
Branding is being! Branding is being! The algorithm of modern binary existentialism.
His childhood’s fears of foreign wars and messianic maniacs, real and imagined, had developed into an ultra-violent skepticism toward the messaging and mediocrity of modern times. And, in opinions of morality, religion, politics, and science would he increasingly consider the possibility . . .
EVERYBODY
. . . ELSE
. . . IS
. . . WRONG.
By thirty, he’d gotten his grad degree. Physics, engineering, and a military CV. It was love that had gotten the better of Bob. Love of women. Love of innocence. And lust for his own maddening mind’s doubt.
He’d spent such a significant several years in the septic specialization industry, one so full of pathogens, worms, and protozoa that if left untreated would come to represent a present public health crisis. Like love or innocence, it’s not a business so easy in which to get one’s footing. The very soil upon which one stands contains forty million bacterial cells per single gram of soil. It is jam-packed with microbes that if used properly will break down the pathogens. Now, while sanitarians decide design, Bob found his forte in pumping and baffle replacements. Despite a deep understanding of depth soil’s vertical separation to the bottom of the drain field, then to the top of the ground water’s restrictive layer, and also a relatively acute sense of sludge layers leading to scum layers, to the effluents leaked to leech fields, there was one sentence from a Sunday sermon that had stuck out to Bob from the basic precepts of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who had built their “system of belief and practice from the raw material.”
That phrase had summoned in him the singular entrepreneurial interest in isolating those churchers’ investment in his septic services as a pumper. This had kept him far from the branding crowd and the technological advances of social indulgence so circuitously enslaving those more supple of skin. Bob kept his skin supple on the work site with latex gloves.
Paired with an extraordinary auditory augmentation efficiency that came to Bob in equal parts handy and haunting (more on that anon), his engineering acumen was unparalleled. His knowledge and experience, secured through a surgical sensibility toward his vocation, complemented Bob’s skill set–specific capacity for reverse engineering. Almost without effort could Bob synthesize civilian architecture. By identifying where urine and feces fell, and its storage system’s size, design, and placement (especially where gravity systems are employed), he could mentally x-ray the interior of a building simply by observing its exterior. This, he thought, had application in human systems analysis as well. Such thinking could render a man’s spirit and personality severe. His ability wasn’t brandable, but it was Bob. Bob Honey. A man with a Middle Eastern mission in mind.
* * *
1 The San Joaquin Valley sits between an oceanic trench and a volcanic arc, geologically determining that real estate a forearc.
STATION THREE
EPHEMERALLY DISARMED
Bob traveled to Baghdad during the holiday season of 2003 to explore opportunities in the waste management sector. If he could get an exclusive with the new Shia-backed power base, he might package a turnkey operation from septic tank installation to pumping and disposal. This had projections far exceeding the earnings from his monopoly on Jehovah’s Witnesses in the eighties.
After a surface-to-air missile had clipped the left wingtip of a DHL Express plane shortly after takeoff from Baghdad on a November afternoon, all commercial flights into or out of the city had been suspended. Bob worked his way onto a flight operated by Air Serv International, its seats exclusively at the service of NGOs and other humanitarians of note. The Afrikani pilot had been trained by a former employee of Bob’s own (now defunct) fixed-wing shuttle business. He did Bob a solid for seven hundred in cash, securing him a seat out of Amman. Bob and six certified humanitarians went wheels up at 0400. He leaned his forehead against his seat’s portside window, gazing into the night as they streaked the ninety minutes of flight. He caught himself humming the chorus of OutKast’s “Bombs Over Baghdad.” His limited awareness of popular music was such that all hip-hop and rap sounding songs were to his knowledge from a black band called Two-Pack.
In a distant desert darkness, towers descend into black.
Vapors of Iraqi oil burn like floating fires
atop of their black night blended stacks.
As carbon dioxide poisoning purities escalate war,
chemically charged coloring surrealizes sunsets galore.
It was into such a sunset that the plane approached Saddam International Airport.2 All passengers on the eight-seat aircraft were instructed to strap in tight and expect a g-force sensation caused by the corkscrew landing necessary to confuse and evade any heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles fired by insurgents. The pilot employed the hard-banking spiral landing technique. Bob knew that corkscrews often take their toll on more touristic tummies. Halfway through the corkscrew, two of the terrified aid-workers aboard succumbed to its strain and torque, spontaneously regurgitating in barf that boomeranged back into their own faces. Bob sighed as the suffocating stench consumed the cabin. His olfactory system offended, he held his breath for five complete minutes until the plane, as if riding the rifling of barrel spirals, pitched level and landed, taxied, then opened its door. Bob hastily exited and breathed the new morning’s Muslim air.
He’d checked in to the Rose Petal Hotel, outside the Green Zone and behind its own ineffectual barricades, blast walls, and barbed wire. He was to meet with ministers and blackmarketeers serving under the auspices of Ahmed Chalabi, El Jefe of the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi, a US seducer, pawn, and all-around purveyor of bad science. Chalabi, a fugitive from Jordan who’d fled a case of fraud, hiding in the trunk of a car and stealing his way to Baghdad.
In black linen suit, businessman shoes, and a pressed white shirt, Bob dressed and exited the Rose Petal Hotel on the night of the arranged meeting. He hot-wired a sitting taxi, but ran out of gas on his way to the INC compound in the Mansour district. He began to walk along Haifa Street, where he stumbled upon a sidewalk sandbagged gun emplacement, and simultaneously sized up the sixty-cal barrel protruding from its position. Without warning, Bob found himself molested by a team of rogue indig military contractors wielding Kalashnikovs and well-traveled Khyber Pass Copies.3 “Moonlighting Kurds,” he thought them. After they’d gone through his pockets and waistband, they caught a wood-handled and leather-wrapped mallet he’d concealed in a shoulder holster. When they attempted to seize it, he steadfastly and physically refused. Avoiding an escalation of scuffle, the Arabic mono-linguists radioed their dutiful dragoman. That’s when the New Guineans arrived and took jurisdictional control.
There can be no wiggle room on the facts.
FACT: Grass-skirted Guineans patrolled and protected corporate sites on the streets of Baghdad following the Shock and Awe4 campaign of March 2003. And, what better mechanism of terror than to embed grass-skirted cadres of cannibals within these ghostly ghettos of the Arabian night? Right?
Gold, copper, oil, natural gas . . . Mining interests and exploratory missions of bullish buccaneers in New Guinea brought an appetite to build paramilitary and security capacity on that Oceanian island. The indigenous model was spearheaded by a head-shrinking entrepreneuri
al tribesman named Loodstar (himself, a turncoat to Indonesian oppression). Loodstar established the Papua Academy of Urban and Guerrilla Warfare in the early ’90s and, after the October 2000 attack on a US warship in a Yemeni harbor, he had the forethought to supplement tactical war-fighting and security strategies with Arabic and English language syllabuses.
Splitting their days between Academy training, subsistence farming, and archaic rituals, the Guineans became a force to be reckoned with. Corporations that sought to protect their interests in the Levant at discount rates skipped over Blackwater and DynCorp and went straight to these snake and bird tribesmen. In the early 2000s, the five-sided puzzle palace5 had an autonomous private contracting budget6 of $20 million a year. Dollars dispersed with impunity to contracting companies operating without elected oversight. Their employees, often good eggs doing the dangerous and difficult work, and, just as often, assholes in need of attitude adjustments. A grab bag of seasoned former soldiers, security specialists, and small-town truck drivers toiling for tax-free tender,7 with government gifting grandly to these corporate gunslingers, be they of guts or greed. Loodstar fit both bills and sealed a couple of contracts quickly. And so began the peregrination of tribal ops to contract in Iraq with spear-ian flare, grass skirts, and bare feet.
With that Baghdad evening’s chorus of crackity-crack percussion from long-barrel volleys exchanged in purlieu, the rhythm of multiple mosques’ Calls to Prayer, and the occasional ominous offstage okónkolo of ill-tempered ordnance, Bob sat soothingly sung to with his newfound brothers-in-arms; the tribesmen and he in a blast-blackened office space, its roof reduced to rubble by a car bomb the night prior, leaving the stars and the Iraqi moon to illuminate their Turkish tea, freshly slaughtered chicken, and Tawi, a red fruit indigenous to New Guinea.
Bob’s relationship with people, much like his relationship to food, had become largely independent of that which might pleasure his palate. He’d long since lost touch with a diversified appetite for either. But there was something in a people like these Guineans. They, whose first contact with the modern world and its corruptions had only been a short half century earlier when missionaries became more culturally constructive communicators with cannibals. In them, Bob found a subsistence-based serenity and grace of purpose. It did occur to him (as a private joke with himself) that were the chickens they chewed not in such high supply, he might have found himself on the menu. By the time the hookah was fired up to be shared, his newfound sense of belonging left him socially, if ephemerally, disarmed. As such, he began to share tales of his failed relationships with redheads, cowboys, neighbors, and needs.
Though he’d come to Baghdad with sewers and septic tanks on his mind, Bob would leave emboldened, not as an entrepreneur, but as a fresh recruit to a program sublimely suited to society’s solitary men. That chance meeting with the tribesman on Haifa Street in 2003 had, in its discovery of kindred spiritude, graduated our traveler from his personal practice of practical patriotic vigilante-ism to a sanctioned occupational status. A brand-new job for Bob!
When he woke on that stone floor of the bombed-out Baghdad office space as morning came, Bob found himself chimney-sweep filthy and abandoned by Guinean brethren to their predawn re-deployment. Inside his passport, he found they’d left behind mission codes for him. These were the digits he would henceforth press into a burner phone whenever he sought a contract. He also found all that was left in his ankle-sock hideaway: a grand total of ten US dollars. Now he would have to make his way to Jordan by road: a fourteen-hour, $400 cab trip. Despite having been intermittently successful in rather diverse businesses, his minimal money-management skills had always restricted him to cash-only transactions. He neither invested nor took lines of credit. As a traveler, he would often find that he was prone to under-budgeting his various escapades and found himself scrambling to access a bank. Filthied but un-frazzled, he road-marched to Saddam City,8 where he was able to find a cell phone vendor from whom he could purchase ten tele-minutes with his remaining ten dollars. He called the Arab-accented POC9 he’d intended to meet with the night before.
With every bank on the Baathist boulevard bombed, he was ultimately able to get a $400 marker from the man at the Chalabi compound. He took it and hired a taxi to Jordan. Fuel shortages in the oil-rich country led cabdrivers to spend entire days in pump station lines. But not Wader, the abaya-bearing cabbie he encountered. For one thing, Wader’s fuel gauge was on the blink, so, assessing its levels and range was for Wader a constant and challenging guessing game he engaged with glee. Rather than linger in lengthy lines, Wader would make the long trek through the Anbar Province, buying one precarious liter at a time along the way from the black-market boys of Fallujah and Ramadi. Wader’s whimsy for wheeling Wahhabist roadways was unsettling to his white war-zone passenger. But, to his credit, Wader had a way with fuel-wagers. Gauge on the blink though it was, he deposited this California commuter with punctuality for his flight out of Amman.
* * *
Back stateside, among Bob’s neighbors was the bouffant boasting, burdensome Helen Mayo. During his often and extended absences from Woodview during the years following 2003, she’d satisfied the ire of her snoopy suspicions by making a point of walking her Chihuahua, Nicky, by his house, eagerly encouraging Nicky to do his business there on his lawn. There is a karma in this world. It can’t always be understood, but in 2016 it would put on quite a show.
* * *
2 now Baghdad International Airport
3 black-market bootleg M4-series rifles built by gunsmiths in the semiautonomous tribal region between Afghanistan and Pakistan
4 “Shock and Awe” is a term commonly remembered as a moniker meant to bolster the visceral muscularity and charismatic propagation of a violent campaign in order to titillate for the TV turnouts back home. As a matter of diligent fact, “Shock and Awe” is not a media-baiting term or a term invented by the media for the purpose of baiting their viewers. It’s a military term for actions of rapid dominance. A term for an action meant to introduce such apocalyptic terror in its first strike as to bring its enemy into rapid psychological collapse, inducing surrender.
5 the Pentagon
6 This was separate and apart from the no-bid outsourcing contracts that tallied bills in the billions. Halliburton’s KBR, etc.
7 While US soldiers were paid downward of $60,000 annually and taxed on their gross income, their private counterparts were paid by their same puzzle palace $100,000 tax-free.
8 later renamed Sadr City
9 Point of Contact
STATION FOUR
THE SCOTTSDALE PROGRAM
In the American state of Arizona, Scottsdale Senior Services offers a wide range of fitness, recreation, and leisure opportunities. This and its dry air make Scottsdale one of the preeminent retirement communities in America.
There is little but coincidence to connect Scottsdale, Arizona, to Papua New Guinea; Scottsdale’s dry climate contradicts the clammy calescent of New Guinean condensation. It had nonetheless come to the attention of the New Guinean intelligence apparatus, Loodstar in particular, that a covert contract of international implementation was in the offing. It was called the Scottsdale Program, named with nods to both the city of Scottsdale itself and to the Phoenix Program of the early 1970s, with which the CIA sought to devastate the military infrastructure of the Vietcong in South Vietnam through a series of targeted assassinations on its military commanders.
The Scottsdale Project’s origin at the Heritage Foundation was sold on the back of separate studies from Rand Corp and McKinsey and Company at the behest of the Rendon Group public relations firm. The project was adopted by NSA, who believed that in an era of globalization, an internationally unbranded generation of seniors threatened to bleed human progress and market development dry. Neutralizing pushback against the program from the pharmaceutical lobby were those in the EPA’s covert section, whose data concluded that the extermination of high-flatulence populations10 would lowe
r levels of ozone-depleting methane. This would be a boon to industry! On an atmospheric real-estate basis, it would allow industrialists to freely occupy the terminated tenant’s toxic-absorption zone. In simple language, an air-grab wherein air-polluting companies could expand production with a zero-sum exacerbation of environmental impact. A sort-of sewer swap offered for the emission of one in the expulsion of the other. No harm. No foul. No fogies. FANTASTIC!
An interesting note on this: Studies show that kangaroos expel no methane while providing lean and tasty meat. And as a result, in the prevailing portfolio of per capita killing, the flatulent and significantly unbranded elderly under the Scottsdale Program were second only to sweet meat kangaroo among biped land mammals being culled.
Our mallet-wielding American male has never, despite some deliberate delving, satisfactorily distinguished between Scottsdale’s direct government implementation status and that of a shadow enterprise. It is not clear to him whether the White House is, or is not, in the sodality of Scottsdale’s reporting chain. His only substantive certainty is that practical patriotic tasks of triage are everyone’s responsibility, and that American taxpayer money is paid to career operatives in stacks of small denominations. Bimonthly, a Janet-Jet11 (white plane, red stringer, no tail number) drops in on random remote runways of red states where Scottsdale’s clandestine operatives, each wearing an identity-shielding gorilla mask, have been called to greet it. As the air stairs meet the apes, a fetching functionary of the confederacy descends, handing each a stack of singles, congenerous to mail calls in conflict zones.
Where others might dream activities such as Bob’s, in Bob’s living of them, he finds himself dreamless in sleep. It isn’t such a different experience, he thinks, than what the hordes who so alienate him encounter themselves in their daylight’s consciousness. In his mission-gap moments he studies the skin of his arms. “Is that me I see? Whose arms are thee?” In these moments of physical self-study, Bob feels foreign, separate from his own body. The brown-black hair upon his outer forearm. The smooth-skin hairlessness of his inner, where whenever a stray might sprout, he’d bite it out.