by Sean Penn
“Popsicle?” Spurley asks.
“No thank you,” Bob replies.
“Good,” says Spurley, with a smile. “More for me. Can I come in, Bob?”
In the living room again, they sit in their appointed positions. As Spurley sloppily slurps at one of the Popsicles, Bob can’t help remembering similarly slopping sounds made by the woman who graces its package. Embraced as he is by his couch of comfort, he is feeling considerably creeped.
“So, Bob,” Spurley begins. “I’ve been doing a lot of work.”
“Yes.” Bob nods. “I see.”
“Spoke to a buddy of mine down at the ASPCA. Do you not have a checkbook, Bob? You should consider caution when mailing cash.”
“Caution?” Bob asks.
“Yes, caution is something I’m guessing you and I relate to in different ways.”
“Really?”
“Oh, mind. I am by no means suggesting that you are without caution. Do you know what I mean, Bob?”
“No, Spurley. But so far, I rarely have.”
“Let’s make today the day we change that. Whaddya say, Bob?”
Bob thinks. And thinks more. Then, “Okay, Spurley. I’ll try.”
“You seem a rather practical man, Bob. Your ex-wife tells me the two of you ended up as perfectly good friends in the aftermath of your marriage.”
“Yes,” Bob says. “Advertising the adversarial is not good branding.”
“Advertising the adversarial?” Spurley asks.
“Well yes. Don’t you find that people take opportunities to advertise themselves as being up in some way?”
“You’re talking about the perception of the high-road, Bob?”
“If that’s the phrase,” says Bob. “I just have to wonder why people have to talk about certain things at all.”
“Well, thinking along those lines, Bob, wouldn’t offer a fellow like me much job security.”
Bob lets out one of his guttural laughs.
“Here’s what I’ve got so far, Bob,” Spurley announces. “I’ve got a lonely man, perhaps spurned by love, perhaps chronically depressed. He keeps odd hours. Disappears for weeks and sometimes months at a time. Makes no effort to meet or greet neighbors. Has, from what I can tell, virtually no social life at all. Likes his BLTs toasted. Has dabbled, over the years, in several businesses. And not only done quite well with them, but they’ve taken him around the world. And yet, Bob, you don’t appear, to me, worldly at all. How am I doing?”
Bob did not listen as Spurley spoke, his own thoughts stirring. “Spurley . . . have you heard the phrase democracy dies in darkness?”
“No, Bob,” Spurley answers.
“I wonder,” continues Bob, “are we the darkness, Spurley? You perceive me practical, yet, it’s you who drive a Prius, and myself a Pontiac . . .”
Spurley’s loss for words coincides with the ringtone of the phone in Bob’s back pocket.
So I just did me some talking to the sun
And I said I didn’t like the way he got things done
Sleeping on the job
Those raindrops are falling on my head, they keep
Fallin’ . . .
Bob takes out his cell phone, and masking the screen from Spurley, sees that Annie had just sent him a photograph of herself. When she did that, her portraits were in diligently unassuming poses. Her expressions, as in the one sent this day, never seemed meant to pander toward Bob having one reaction or another. More as though she’d been caught off guard by the photographer. Curiously, Spurley asks, “Whaddya got there, Bob?”
“I don’t want to be Eustace Conway-ed.”34
“The mountain man?” Spurley asks.
“Yes, that’s him,” says Bob. “Your scrutiny seems like what it might be to be spied on.”
“Spied on?” asks Spurley. “Knife collectors?”
“Yes, that’s right, Spurley.” Bob begins to state an expressed stress. “Edward Lee Howard was a polygraph flunker who got fucked and fled to Finland. Foul news followed when Aldrich Ames aimed high for such a low-ass guy. The Russkies were rigorous in their ruse. They sent Vitaly Yurchenko to play at being anti-Pinko. Foul news TWO.” Bob holds up two fingers. “Oooo! You know what’s scary? A person who isn’t scared. You know how and why Bob’s gonna die?”
Spurley interjects. “You are Bob.”
“Correct. With a blowtorch to my genitals and a foreign, or non-foreign, cock in my mouth because my fellow American chickenshits will just stand by, including the few graveside who cry. Peace, love, and understanding never did squat for anyone born un-blind. For anybody born poor with a clever mind or in a poor and violent place of their ancestral disgrace.” Suddenly, Bob shifts his tense statement’s tenor to one of calm attribution, “I tell you this because I love you. —Simply Georgia, 1658.”
“You’re confusing me, Bob,” Spurley says.
“No, Spurley,” Bob replies. “It’s you who confuse Aldrich Ames with Robert Ames. Do NOT confuse Aldrich Ames with Robert Ames.35 Do not do that. And do not confuse me with Eustace Conway.”
“I’ll do all I can to take that onboard, Bob. But, are you equating an article I might write about you with a reality show?”
“Something like that, Spurley. Are you really writing an article?”
Spurley deflects the question. “You interested in spies, Bob?”
“Me?” Bob asks.
“That’s right, Bob. Spies.”
“I’m interested sometimes. In eyes. Mostly women’s eyes. That’s a bit like spies, I think.”
“How do you mean, Bob?” Spurley asks.
“Some of them see us and some of them don’t. But, they all see our sins. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know, Bob. What would you consider a sin?”
Bob thinks for a moment. “I think I’m interested in spy craft, Spurley, but have never been a diligent student of it. And when the world went satellite and cyber, I didn’t. Although I do keep a cell phone, that’s true. Let’s say I don’t know much about these things in the same way I know so little about women.”
Satellites. Sky’s eyes.
Women. Real-time transmissions.
High-resolution.
Revolution.
“Isn’t everything, and the burden of scrutiny, moving very fast, Spurley?”
Spurley has never heard Bob string so many words together in a row. But before he can query further, Bob clicks on the television set and turns his attention from Spurley. The news is reporting the shootings of five police officers in Dallas. No deliberation in the deification of police officers offered here, when just the day before it was police officers who shot two civilian black men to death. Judge, jury, and journalists had reflexively pre-convicted them of racial rancor by Ruger in a country rife with rule of law. It occurs to Bob that the media had effectively encouraged the killing of cops with that previous day’s reporting meant to buoy its own fraudulent negrocentrism and grandiose liberal enlightenment. Today, they shifted gears.
“What do you think about all that, Bob?” Spurley asks, referring to the television’s report. “Do you think the police create the problem?”
With his eyes fixed on the television, Bob says, “I think people create the problem, Spurley. White men are afraid of black men. And I can’t speak for black men. I don’t really know all the statistics but it does seem that fear is a dangerous thing, and not the unique domain of police officers or black males.”
The TV now reports that the perpetrator had been dispatched by police with C-4 explosive by robotic proxy. Spurley sees that this too seems to worry Bob and asks if that is so. Bob responds, “I worry, Spurley, when cause and effect are underestimated. Once subsumption architecture36 is introduced to popular culture, well, you know, it’s never just one side that picks up the trend, or that has exclusive access to tools. 3D printing lesson rules.”
Bob turns abruptly to Spurley. “I don’t want to be Eustace Conway with a reality show. I don’t have a messa
ge to promote, Spurley. I don’t want to be 3D printed. You might as well write your ballad of the broken man without me.” Bob explains further, that while he appreciates Spurley taking an interest in him, and that he has indeed considered Spurley’s proposition in this moment of his life and its potential to open social opportunity, still, he’s changed his mind.
He asks Spurley to leave once and for all.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Bob. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort here. I think I’ve been patient with you. For some reason, I felt that you were ready. Let me ask you one thing before I go, if I must go. That cherry I left in the glass the last time I saw you . . . did you keep it?”
But Bob has already walked to the door and opened it. Unresponsive to Spurley, he stands silently awaiting the man’s exit. When Spurley does exit, Bob closes the front door behind him, locks it, returning to his comfort station center couch. Silly questions of cherries saved served to sever any last impression Bob might have had of Spurley as a serious citizen.
On the television, ISIS-anti-inflammatories, al-Nusra-diapers for men, al-Shabaab-computer coupling, and Boko Haram-diuretics. CHANNEL CHANGE: Israel, Saudi, sickness, and the systemic degradation of the environment. The planet and humankind are feminine things. Their peril a corporate rape, and climate change just another tale of sexual inequality.
Bob’s irrational passion for dispassionate rationality is, for him, irreconcilable. The gap between those things we are told and our limited faculty for interpreting them is obvious in any question of cultural complexity, a Rubik’s Cube of historical brainwashing, petty crime, and swine-sugar.
He wonders if any notion of intra-culturalism might be foiled by the science of the brain. Where one population has wired its brain to read from left to right, another may take on the same task right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top. Trying to understand those who are differently wired may prove inherent folly. When viewing a face and its expression, is it not true that the same expression may be made or observed in totally contradictory ways depending on the wiring of any given culture? If the left corner of a mouth raised in one culture expresses friendliness or pleasure, might it express unfriendliness and displeasure in another? Are we truly able to understand each other, or doomed not to? Is culturalism explained by brain science, or foiled by it? Or is love only visible in the art of angels and tomorrow’s children?
Bob cannot help but worry himself further with these questions. He looks longingly at the pictures of Annie again. Her splendor of unselfconsciousness. Wanton will. The accelerant enzymes her image infuses in Bob create a chemical cocktail he can only counter with self-preservational condescension. A practice he restricts to the privacy of his own home. The Tannerite37 target of Annie’s charms, he stands and presses play on his CD player. Phil Ochs’s voice:
Play the chords of love, my friend
Play the chords of pain
But if you want to keep your song
Don’t – don’t – don’t
Don’t play the chords of fame
* * *
34 an American naturalist and loner who became a reality show star, leading to his arrest by the US government
35 Aldrich Hazen Ames was a longtime CIA case officer who became a mole for the KGB. He was convicted of espionage in 1994 and is widely (and correctly) regarded as a total shit. Robert Clayton “Bob” Ames (no relation), the CIA’s Near East Director, was killed in the suicide bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in 1983 and is widely (and correctly) regarded as an exemplary public servant.
36 in robotics, a bottom-up design that begins in simplified tasking, for instance, mobility, and is then built upon evolving to complex dynamics
37 a binary explosive commonly sold in outdoor outlets for use as a dynamic target triggered by impact of high-velocity rounds
STATION ELEVEN
MEIN DRUMPF
His journey ushered in by an era of urban over-development and social decline, Bob’s life story might yield unpleasantries upon any close examination. Though he recognized the onset of punctuated equilibrium and the confluence of Spurley’s efforts, he’s taken stock, and he will not surrender his anonymity at large. To submit to such an attention-seeking deed at this crossroads would be to trade catharsis for coffin. A fight or flight. With this gauntlet thrown down, it increasingly seems that conventional social connectivity was a much more pragmatic remedy than to allow oneself to be exposed to the masses on a lark. His life’s success could be quantified by having remained principally unknown to all he’d encountered. His failure, same-same. Bob had run from recognition, recognizing that with it came reputation. Reputation—that infinitely most attackable heel of Achilles. Without reputation, only one’s body volunteered vulnerability to viciousness. Only one’s body. Bob’s, just a blub. Cells, tissues, bioelectrical energy. A blip, barren of the big idea. But now the jig was up. Nothing less than Lima-Charlie38 to Bob. It was no longer enough,
to just
do
stuff.
This realization created enormous challenges for Bob. In Princeton psychology professor Julian Jaynes’s 1976 publication The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes suggests that primitive man was not a creature of consciousness, but rather acted in direct accordance to the voice of God. Heard God Speak! As consciousness evolved through the ages, so did conflict. There are some historical examples of those theories artifactually—Joan of Arc would be one. Religious extremism, another. Even those behaviors on the spectrum today associated with schizophrenia can be tied to the shaman-esque figures of another epoch. Bob was no shaman. Never heard the voice of God. But man, that Annie can get into his head something good.
Are you in crisis, Bob-beam?
Isn’t the whole world, Annie?
Bob sits himself center couch, flicks on the TV. Another debate over guns. Bob sometimes doesn’t know what the fuss is all about. It seems to him that words are as lethal as any weapon. Words, unburdened by background checks and available at all times to all persons. Still, Bob understands that assault by word is most typically employed as weaponry of domestic dispute and antidemocratic dog whistle. Situations where media interest is minimal, lacking as they do the entertainment value of a warm gun. If society and the media choose to posture themselves culturally as counter to killing, some commonsense control over guns might conform. Still, he isn’t sure this yearning for reform or “good news” stories is genuine. It could be said that the public yearning once bent on belief reinforcement has now become an insatiable hunger bent on having one’s own insecurity empowered. It’s an exponentially logarithmetic madness in the making. In fact, Bob’s argument be made, what the cumulative actions and culture of America now yearn for are lawless days and lonely nights for all. A hybrid of race war and civil war amid a massive movement by a plethora of gangs and militias to upset a fraudulent order, posed and imposed by a wealthy few and their conveniently unwitting puppets for profit. Problem.
While the privileged patronize this pickle as epithet to the epigenetic inequality of equals, Bob smells a cyber-assisted assault emboldened by right-brain Hollywood narcissists. They of self-righteous hypocrisy, who will give aid and comfort at the bad guy’s bidding. Find a gangster galvanizing sales, and you’ll find a spokesmodel begging to sell-sell-sell. Find a singular issue of distraction and they and their news hours will dwell-dwell-dwell. Criminal crumbs and corresponding celebrity crusts, bound together by dough. Together they make a mockery of mockery mimicking mystery, and this Bob surmises is the only reasonable explanation for the bloated blond high priest and pavonine of branding. The masturbatory populist who’s become a media sensation, and then some, during his candidacy for King, making despots sing. And helping the retro-party, so inviting of the stupid, to conscript the even stupider.
Bob likes Jupiter.
It had been a cosmos full of communist cosmonauts over Indochina that had once frightened boy-Bob in a dream. Ever since, he’d looke
d to Jupiter for high ground.
But back on earth, Bob likes Woodview, California. He likes California enough that when media maligns it, he makes mental arguments against their methodology. In a red culture that celebrates itself for the origin of farming and other symbols of Americana, they are naive to the fact that California not only supplies 60 percent of all produce domestically, but also is the state that produced both McDonald’s and the Hells Angels. If there were a one-only territorial claim for the abundancy of American archetypes, from rural heroism to outlaw ideology to just downright and dogged hardworking men and women in all the United States, it would certainly be owned by California. How dare any marginalize the long Golden State? Damn them to their dopey demagoguery and its devilishness, Bob thinks.
Do you think it’s possible to sell your soul to Satan? To a darkness, Bob-beam?
A darkness, Annie?
Yeah, like Led Zeppelin. Didn’t they, my gruff goat?
Bob flicks the channel. A young pop star is selling acne medication.
It’s manufacturing, Annie. Dark things are manufactured. They’re not endemic. We don’t give ourselves to dark things. We create them.
Are you creating dark things, gruff Bob-beam?
Bob’s head begins to throb. If only he were nine, picking into a rock wall, chipping out artifacts of ten-thousand-year-old sea life. Turritella shell structures, mussels, and Xyne Grex fish. Or maybe riding his red Schwinn raining fire on rivers, riding work-runs with Cowboy, and relishing with regret the chocolate-brown legs of the black girl called a whore he’d never had opportunity to love or explore. Like the heart, brain, liver, or kidneys, skin too is a vital organ. That we are shamed for our love of skin is a bias toward brain minus organic kin. That Bob was born to explore makes neither he nor teenage black chick “whore.” He could’ve been an astronaut, he thinks.
What about space, the cosmos, Bob-beam?
I want to go to Jupiter, Annie.
Jupiter, Gruff? The planet of polar cyclones?
Jupiter. Stupider. Stupider. Stupider. I’m . . .