by Sean Penn
* * *
27 the magnitude of a magnetic, electric, or other flux passing through a unit area
STATION NINE
RELIGIOUS TOURISM 2015
The shimmers, booms, sparkles, and arcing sprays of color, the virtual sky dance that had been Bob’s pyrotechnic display at Isla de Margarita, Venezuela, had been a sensation and gained the attention of progressive governments throughout the region. They clamored for his services. The winning bidder, Bolivia, was landlocked since it lost its coast to Chile during the War of the Pacific. But its determined Indian president had designated Lake Titicaca as a showplace for environmental studies during the weeklong National Quinoa Festival. Bob would airfreight his pyrotechnic barge and land fourteen thousand feet above sea level in La Paz, chew a little coca leaf to thin the blood, then truck his wares to the lake and the fireworks christening of the president’s showplace. En route, his eyes followed “Wanted” posters that pictured a Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn who had been imprisoned on a bogus money-laundering charge. It was strange to see a man with a yarmulke and sidelocks on a South American wanted poster. Even stranger posted roadside on the trees of a Bolivian jungle. Evidently, the fellow had escaped his prison and was now a wandering . . . fugitive.
After Bob once again impressed a presiding figure with fireworks, he opted to make his way to the port town of Arica in northern Chile to raise a sail on the barge, and take it north by sea back to California. With a Peruvian trucking company and portolan in pocket, he traversed the disputed territory28 to the sea. Armed with a tent, scuba dive kit, plenty of fuel, and an outboard, Bob would brave the swells and perhaps get in some choice diving. Only two miles off the Chilean shore, a maritime map identified a tasty deep-water canyon. Bob anchored the barge to the canyon’s shallow edge some seventy-five feet below surface, geared up, then plunged into the crevasse.
Bob found peace in the darkest depths, and swam beneath bioluminescent fish. In the company of clusterwink snails, Abraliopsis squid, and the symbiotic bacteria of anglerfish, the ocean, it could be said, was Bob’s only friend. In this place, where Bob offered the water no disturbance, more floating with the current than swimming. And where it took no disturbance to initiate luminescence, unlike at the surface where all luminescence disturbed him, and seemed itself born of disturbance. The only expectation of a man at that depth was to see, breathe, and monitor his own heart rate. There were no billboards, no televisions, no Instagram messages, no Annie, no ex-wife. Not even the echoes of mayhem from a mallet muted. No, the sea was Neptune’s land, and Bob its most serene servant. With his hypoxic nitrous mix dwindling, it was time to make the slow ascent to the surface. As the chasm’s diminishing darkness led to refracted shafts of rainbow sunlight, he rose, then broke the surface and took a big gasp of fresh air. Spent, he pulled his butt up onto the edge of the barge, facing out and flippers in the water, pulled off his mask and the top of his atmospheric dive suit, shut off his regulator, and released the clasps of his tanks. The weight off his back, Bob stared into the sun until a voice startled him. He turned to see a frantic, water-drenched Jew pointing Bob’s own spear gun directly at Bob.
“Who dju?!”29 demanded the man. “You’re vid Bolivian intelligence?! Dju vid cartel?! Judiciary?! Tell me now, who dju?!”
“I’m Bob. Bob Honey.”
“Dju American?!” barked the man.
Bob nodded.
“Vat ver you doing down d’ere?”30
“Fish. Looking at fish. Floating around.”
The man asked, “Shvimming?”
“Well, yes, I guess so. I was swimming. Diving.”
“I need to get out of here!” said the man.
“Where did you come from?”
“I tunneled outta da prizon. Ran inta’da jungle. Ran tru da trees to da road, den caught a bus’h to da border. Den da beach. I never loiyned how to shvim, but I made it, dju SHONS-OF-BITCHES!! I dog-paddled, LIKE A DOG!”
Bob’s thought process inadvertently led to a private notion being shared aloud.
“I feel like a dog sometimes,” he said.
These words seemed to calm the man, and Bob may have met his amphibological match!
“Vere are you goink, Bob?”
Bob told him he’d be attempting to sail the barge all the way to California, stopping intermittently at tasty scuba diving locations. The man lowered the spear gun with apologies and introduced himself.
“I’m Fischel, Bob. Take me vid you.”
In the days navigating north through international waters, Fischel and Bob found a simpatico camaraderie. Fischel whined on about the wife that had left him during his long Bolivian imprisonment. While often taxed by the diatribes, Bob’s brain read between the lines and found solidarity in Fischel’s anguish. But more than that, Fischel was a creature stripped of all conditioning, religious and civil, suffering the inherent indignity of years as the lone American in Bolivia’s worst prison, and doing so on the trumped-up charges made by corrupt officials had left him animalistic, almost primitive—qualities that fed into Bob’s briefly burgeoning emotional wheelhouse. Perhaps too, timing had played its role in Bob’s recognition of friendly feelings. After all, Fischel was his first creature contact since the bioluminescents from below. Though a non-swimmer, this dog-paddling Jew offered courage to the sea, and Bob and he were able to switch shifts sailing northward. This allowed each some tent-time, their typically restless sleeps immunized by the lulling sea.
A week into their journey, and well into the international waters off Cabo San Lucas, Fischel napped away his Shabbat for Moses as Bob, in his scuba gear, explored the ocean’s depths and listened to his heart’s proof of life. When he ascended, he felt a slight disturbance in the water. Looking up, he first thought he was discovering the underbelly of a humpback whale, but in fact, after a bit more ascent, it became clear the barge was being approached by the hull of a large vessel.
Bob worried for Fischel, that it might be pursuers, bounty hunters, Mexican mercenaries. As he surfaced, he encountered a strange phenomenon. The architecture of sound defining this place, which, at the time of his submergence, had been a diligence of seagull songs and wind-lapped water, had changed. Now upon his ascent, its audio architecture had been superseded by reverberative subwoofers and an up-tempo Mexican disco tune. And in this otherworldly wall of mercurial sound did Bob find Fischel, dirty dancing atop the barge with a gyrating and bikini-clad curiosity of cryptozoology. The music came blasting from the yacht that had twinned with the barge. Fischel’s chimera-esque dance partner, red lipstick smeared on her teeth, held a shot of tequila high above her head. Seeing Bob swim toward the barge, her smile widened, the streak of lipstick on her teeth, magnified. Her face vaguely familiar to Bob from channel surfing stables of semi-famous Televisa tarts. This goat-backed lioness began to hoot like a bruxism bedeviled banshee. She stalked toward Bob offering one hand to boost him up onto the barge while exclaiming, “If you don’t drink our TEQUILA, we’ll throw you under the barge!” She laughed with vagarious vulgarity. Thinking herself funny, she flung a shot of tequila into Bob’s facemask. Its drippings streamed glass to mouth. He licked its cheap perfumes with salty lips and grimaced. Though feeling conspicuously out of place, he took the shifty chimera’s hand and boarded the barge, where he dropped his gear. Fischel said to him, “Bobby BOIIIII-EEEEE! Glab yourshelf a shenyorvita. It’s FIESTA time!” So much for Shabbat.
Standing at the yacht hull above the christened inscription, Plata o Plomo, was a man of diminutive stature and imposing presence. “Amigo!” he called out to Bob below. Bob smelled the waft of seasoned food. The man on the hull took note, pointing at the ladder where the bikini-clad chimera’s cellulite sloveled its way up. “Come on board, amigos! We’ll eat!”
In a palatial maritime dining cabin, Bob and Fischel found themselves enjoying a bounty of marvelous Mexican cuisine. There were pretty girls dancing, servants serving, and machine gun–toting bodyguards scanning the skies and chumming the frie
ndly sea to frenzy sharks for fun and folly. Bob and Fischel sat with their host of diminutive stature. They drank from a bottle of tequila boasting the image of a winged woman resembling Fischel’s dancing partner and branded with the name Tequila-Mockingbird. Common interests shared at the table included tunnel technology. Bob had often thought to dig tunnels under his home. Escapeways for the endlessly imaginable scenarios of need, and as a boy, had delighted in his own hand and shovel excavations of underground forts. He’d take days or weeks to dig 8 x 8 x 8 foot holes in a square. Worm-slicing, rock-cutting, water-revealing holes. He had found an affinity with the underground. And on this basis alone, the yacht fiesta was for him, a bountiful if bewildering occasion.
CRACKITY-CRACKITY-CRACK! Sudden automatic gunfire interrupted the easy feeling of the fête. One of the boatman’s bodyguards had sighted a hovering drone and shot it out of the sky. It was time for the yacht’s host to be on his way. His crew hustled him into a DeepWorker31 and he parted from Bob and Fischel politely, “Adios, amigos!” As the hatch of the miniature sub was sealed over him, he was craned and splash-dropped overboard. As the submerging DeepWorker disappeared the diminutive drug dealer into the depths, the tequila-wielding chimera howled desperately after it, “Mi amor! Mi amor! Llévame contigo!”
With that, the bottle of Tequila-Mockingbird was blasted from her hand by the gunfire of fast-approaching vessels, its bitter brew splashing in broken glass at her feet. As the captain of the cumbersome yacht geared up engines in a futile effort to flee, Bob and Fischel bounded onto Bob’s barge. With a hurried pull of the outboard cord, they plotted their way away from Plata o Plomo, staying hidden within the convenient cover of a blue-black smoke cloud the bigger boat had dispersed when her captain hit its multi-stroke’s choke. The crew of that cocaine-cruiser was left behind to combat with Mexican marines. And the awful chimera? She sharted agave shimmering spirits and shifted shit-faced overboard, landing boozy, bird-glass-bleeding feetfirst into a shiver of fifty frenzied sharks (adios, amiga).
By the time Bob and Fischel were entering the San Diego harbor cruising amid the pedal-boaters of Balboa Park, they’d been tracked and tagged for a grilling. They were immediately boarded by officials of the United States Coast Guard, taken ashore, and sweated in separate stalls. Each succumbed to a lengthy interrogation.
Bob’s passport sat pissing in the hand of DHS agent Coco DeMille. DeMille sat tall in his seat, scanning Bob’s passport through thick glasses and cross-referencing data lazily on his laptop. On the wall behind DeMille, a framed poster of DHS self-promotion: a square-jawed handsome white agent underlined with the stolen slogan “Dressed to Kill.” But DeMille was a slender man, slightly walleyed. The previous evening’s bourbon permeated like hot breath from his skin. Sour. Unpleasant. He began his interrogation.
“I see you were in Baghdad in 2003. What was the nature of that trip?”
“The nature?” Bob asked.
“What was your business there? You some kind of hotbed whore?”
Bob squirmed, then sternly said, “I’m no kind of whore at all. I was answering nature’s call . . . sir.”
Coco dipped his head to gaze over the top of his glasses, pinning his cross-eyes on this curious creature before him. Was this creature clowning? Mocking?
Reflexively, Bob found his own eyes crossing to keep up in the silent mutation of misunderstanding that had become the metamorphosis of their mutual gaze. He realized his subtlety had not been sensed.
“Oh, I see. Yes,” Bob said. “Well, the bombing of the US embassy that summer did bring a lot of attention to the city’s infrastructure deficiencies. I work in waste management.”
“Waste management?” queried Coco. “And was it waste management you were working on in Cuba that same year?”
Bob coughed. “No, sir. Religious tourism. Sensational city.”
Coco looked into a file on his laptop, noting the red flags of an Iranian visa and two subsequent OFAC32 investigations following earlier travels.
“Tehran 2005?”
“A septic systems leech field symposium,” Bob replied.
“Belfast ’84, Egypt 2011, Israel, Istanbul, Abadabad, Peshawar, Karachi, Beirut, Damascus, Uruguay, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Moscow, Rwanda . . . What’s this one, Macau, 1986?”
“I’d forgotten about that trip but I’m aware I went.”
“Chile to Managua to Mexico City 2015?”
“I hoped to see Masaya Volcano erupt. I didn’t.”
“Let me ask you something, Mr. Honey,” said DeMille. “Are you aware . . . REMOTELY AWARE of the status of company kept between you and your friend on that yacht off Cabo San Lucas the day before yesterday?”
“Yes,” Bob told him. “We shared an interest in tunnels, boat tacos, and I think he liked tequila warmed by the sun. I will say though, I don’t know about you, but I’m not one to often be hurried. He seemed a more energetic person than I am. Or, maybe it was just his patterned shirt. Do you know that the Rwandans are pursuing major mining development with the wonder that its own resources may be a curse coming its way?”
DeMille removed his bottle-glass specks, rubbed his eyes, and noticeably shifted tack.
“Let me try this one more time,” said DeMille, hoping his unfocused eyes might lend to a less adulterated interpretation of this fellow Bob Honey before him, and perhaps bolster his own patience. He took a deep inhale, followed by a robust exhale.
“Can you tell me about Tripoli, September 2011?”
“Yes, I had been in Benghazi. An entrepreneurial seminar. In Tripoli, I wanted to take pictures. I never took pictures before much. I thought I might get a picture of big female bodyguards,33 but I didn’t. Everybody was very busy at that time.”
DeMille then asked, pointedly, “Tell me about your trips to Syria.”
“Actually, there they call it Soo-rya. Jesus mispronounced it too.”
The room hung silent. Bob then asked, “Agent DeMille?”
“Yes, Mr. Honey?”
Bob, beginning to struggle with DeMille’s dermal halitosis, said, “In candor, can you tell me how long you think it would take to get the barge from San Diego to Catalina Island?”
DeMille looked at Bob, whose expression, less blank than a black hole, seized DeMille with a vex of vertigo. While Bob’s areas of travel may have raised red flags, and the dates of travel coincided coincidentally with events of note in those regions, it seemed there was something about Bob’s benign character that afforded DeMille’s surrender. Shaking his head, DeMille threw Bob’s passport across the table to him and excused him with a blunt “Get out!” As Bob approached the exit, DeMille asked him, “You gonna wait for your friend? He’s still in interrogation.”
Bob stopped and stared blankly.
DeMille’s patience with Bob’s blasphemy and incongruity of critical thought had run out.
“Yo, clockface!” DeMille said. “Tick-tock! I asked you a question.”
“Tick-tock?” Bob asked.
“Are you going to wait for your friend?” DeMille repeated.
“I think he’s everyone’s friend and in good hands with you. He’ll understand if I go. Spiritual people do,” said Bob. With that, he absquatulated.
* * *
28 The Attacama border dispute between Chile and Bolivia currently leaves Bolivia landlocked.
29 Jew-speak for “Who are you?”
30 Jew-speak for “What were you doing down there?”
31 a single-man submarine capable of diving to depths of 2,001 feet
32 Office of Foreign Assets Control
33 Haris al-Has were the giantess girl-band bodyguards who made up the personal protection detail of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. (Known by Europeans as “Amazons.”)
PART II
It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
—J. Krishnamurti
STATION TEN
BALLAD OF A BROKEN MAN
Back in the alley of the
dog, Bob plies the wind-wrapped page of newspaper from his face, in this and direct daylight’s return to his derma, he remembers how the sun and sea air, upon his return from Bolivia to Woodview, had taken a toll on his uncared-for skin. Home from his walk, he studies the foreshadowing of his elder years in the mirror, and he wonders if, at nearly sixty, his already deepening wrinkles might at some point come to accumulate unabsorbed Nivea cream. But it is a fleeting cerebration, since he knows he could simply avoid the usage of cream. He remembers feeling the movement of the sea in his body for days after his Pacific voyage return. Sitting at the edge of his bed in those days, weaving and watching television movies—movies themselves, mostly made from the seasickness of misguided creative endeavor.
Normalization of commercial compromise had left this medium as one of dominantly irrelevant fantasies adding nothing to the world, and instead providing a perfect storm of merchanteering thespians and image builders now less identifiable as creators of valued product than of products built for significant sales. Their masses of fans as happy as hustled, bustled, and rustled sheep. A country without culture? Nothing more than a shopping mall with a flag? Still, business is branding buoyantly, leaving Bob to yet another bout of that old society-is-sinking sensation.
As Bob contemplates his navel, per the instructions of a book on meditation Annie had purchased for him in a new age store, he chants, “Button-button-button. Belly . . . button.” Then he hears the knock at the door. It is Spurley again. When Bob opens the door, Cultier is revealed standing on the stoop posing two Popsicles of the barren broad’s brew. Bob’s ex-wife’s salaciously smiling face is brandished on their wrappers.