by Sean Penn
It’s not stupid, Bob. You’re not stupid. But you don’t have to go five hundred and eighty-eight million kilometers from earth. Think practically . . . just for a second.
Annie does have a way with Bob’s brain. Instead he dreams of going to Jupiter, where there was little if any chance of social connectivity, he finds himself balancing on the edge of heartness and sets his mind on hosting an afternoon-social for the residents of Sweet Dog Lane. He’ll call a rental company, get tables, picnic chairs, and sun umbrellas, and set the stage on his front lawn.
He sits up evenings individualizing invitations in the form of cute collages. With his X-Acto knife and cuticle scissors, he cuts into photo and art books, tailoring each collage to his best estimate of the personalities of his guests-to-be, drawn from perceptions founded in the face of their homes. He then picks the right afternoon, puts the date and time of the social on the collaged invitations, and walks mailbox to mailbox inserting accordingly.
* * *
It is Saturday and sunny. Bob sets up the briquette grill for burgers and dogs, makes a hundred juice-lemon-style deviled eggs, and has soda and beer in coolers. With the first round of meat on the grill, he sits at a center picnic chair on the lawn, collectedly awaiting the arrival of his neighbors. He had set 1 p.m. as his start time. The first to arrive are prompt to the minute. It is a young man and woman of seemingly late adolescence though pushing an infant in a stroller before them. Think Sid and Nancy. Think bruised veins. Think toxic pale skin. Think body odor marching fore from meters away. Bob takes in their approach, calculates their address as a back house to one of the actual invitees’ homes. “Are you Bob?” asks the young male. “I mean, dude, are you Mr. Honey?”
Bob weighs his options as the girl picks her nose. He moves quietly to the stroller’s edge, peeks in, and checks the infant for a pulse. It takes a moment, but so far these two young cadavers have indeed kept their baby alive. “What can I do for you?” asks Bob.
The young man and woman overlap each other while beginning to answer.
“We—” “We—”
(again)
“We—” “We—”
(and again)
“We—” “We—”
Bob interjects helpfully, “Let’s try one at a time.”
The couple offer each other looks of deadened deference and then spontaneously shake their fists in a game of rock-paper-scissors. Bob breathes deeply and once again checks the pulse of the infant. The girl’s scissors dominate the boy’s flattened paper palm.
“We got your collage,” she says as her nose begins to bleed. “And, like, we want to pay our respects.”
“Your respects?” Bob asks.
“Yeah, to the lady.”
“The lady?” Bob inquires.
“Yeah,” says the girl. “We like wanna go, but I think it would, like, be all depressing for them,” indicating the stroller.
“Them?” Bob asks.
“The twins,” responds the girl.
Bob rechecks the stroller, gently pressing around the swaddle of the infant. “This is one child,” Bob says.
“Huh?” burps out the young man.
“One child. This is one child. This is not two children,” Bob repeats.
The couple again offer each other deadened looks. “Uh-oh,” they say. The young man continues to Bob, “Okay. Like that’s kind of weird and sort of fucked up, but like . . . if we kind of find the other one, are you cool baby-sitting?”
“This is a community-building exercise,” says Bob. “A block party. I am not a child-nurturing individual.”
After several beats of mutually confused silence, and the girl’s nasal hemorrhage now streaming, the couple depart without comment. They turn the stroller back toward the street and lazily move back in the direction of whatever cave they’d left. Bob sits back in his lawn chair watching them aimlessly stroll out of sight. He stays there, in that chair, still as a statue for nearly half an hour until he hears the distant approach of circus music just as the first of forty black limousines cruises past his house. Windows rolled down, his neighbors cast contemptuous glances upon Bob as they glide by. As he watches them pass, his eyes drift to a bevy of floral garlands piled four feet high on the burned-out skeleton of Helen Mayo’s house. It has taken months to certify her death, her scorched body parts so interchangeably intertwined and intermingled with the manglement of the pilot seat’s turbaned tenant. Bob had inadvertently invited a neighborhood of strangers on the day their precommitment to Helen Mayo’s funeral procession prevailed. Only Bob (and, evidently, one of two newborn twins) had not been invited. At the back of the line of limos, his ex-wife in her ice cream truck, randomly reconfirming her self-righteous rebellion. No sooner do they all appear than they vanish into the hills, the ice cream music trailing distantly with them. All consideration of convivial company is quashed. Bob eats a deviled egg and sits till sunset.
It’s a start, Bob-beam. You gave it a go.
I gave it a go.
With night’s descent, a galaxy of stars are stripped of their cover. And to the resident of 1528 Sweet Dog Lane returns a nocturnal native knowledge. In the night’s finale, as with life’s curtain call, there is just no such a thing as posthumous penance. He stands from his picnic chair and lumbers over to the Pontiac, opens the door, sits in the driver’s seat, turns on the car, and presses play on the CD player. Phil Ochs’s voice:
There’s no place in this world
Where I’ll belong when I’m gone
And I won’t know the right from the wrong
When I’m gone
And you won’t find me
Singin’ on this song when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it
While I’m here
* * *
38 loud and clear
STATION TWELVE
HARKING BACK: DRIFTING AND DECOMPOSED
In Bob’s saudade, his memory multiplies moments of longing and dreams. Sharpness of image and sound. If he is to hunt social connectivity, he will have to begin by retracing the wires of his brain and reawakening his lucidity of perception. In 2005, after executing a contract in the Ascension Parish of Louisiana, Hurricane Katrina blasted the brackish inlets, infrastructure, and population alike. With the airport closed due to weather, and later to erroneous reports of civilian sniping, Bob took up in a local YMCA that the American Red Cross hosted for shelter. Of the 150 cots set up on the indoor basketball court, Bob was assigned cot 21-LEFT.
As he dropped duffel from shoulder onto the cot, a drunk young female volunteer, lipstick smeared on her teeth, caught his eye where she sat on the adjacent cot. Her glassy eyes staring up at him. She lifted her red plastic cup toward him, the last of her lipstick sloppily kissed onto its white inner rim. The liquid inside, a pungent iceless blend of available alcohols and electrolytes. In slurred speech she offered, “Put this in your mouth. Smell it.” Bob didn’t mind drink, but he detested drunkenness. He thought to expedite her aging process, peg her a pensioner, and give her one quick pop on the noggin. He contained himself and left her raised goblet in the lurch. The hurricane’s winds felled cell towers, but Bob had thought ahead and brought a SAT phone. As he lay his head down listening to the whirling winds outside, he tried to place a call to HQ. But even the SAT phone didn’t want to break through the storm. A-B-C / C-B-A . . . A-B-C / C-B-A . . . And off to sleep he went.
* * *
By daybreak, word of the massive flooding and frenzy was building, but the skies had calmed and Bob was able to get through to HQ. Down in New Orleans, within the city center’s storm surge carnage, cut-offs, and curfews, a large nursing home had reportedly been remiss to rescuers. Bob sensed an emerging opportunity. Given the force of the storm, and the number of organic projectiles at its peak, there would be ample cover to claim concussive injuries. Bob was deployed. He joined a group of humanitarian volunteers, putting in their boat from a de facto Garden District launch. The day, warm and calm. The water, warm
and black. Everything quite still. The only air moving above the city were the pockets rotor-washed by coast guard rescue helicopters. Bob, his mallet holstered, informed the volunteers that there might be a number of elderly holed up in a nursing home in the flooded CBD.39 The sailors set sail past bloated floaters, ballooned by the bacteria of gut-released gases under too much sun. All facedown and spread-eagle body blimps in the calm black water.
Upon making entrance into the semi-submerged nursing home, Bob and a few of the volunteers found themselves in utter darkness and the waist-deep black water within. In each of their breaths, suspicions of airborne spores. The windows of the several-storied building had been boarded up in preparation for Katrina’s fury. With the volunteers dispatching to the highest floor intending to work their way down, Bob remained one up from the entry floor and found himself with the requisite privacy. One hand on a moonbeam,40 the other on his surreptitiously holstered mallet, Bob kicked in the doors of several residential cubicles on floor two. But with no oldies in sight, he sensed it was a losing game. Usually, when a location has been cleared or evacuated from a hurricane flood zone, the first rescue team on-site would indicate it with a spray-painted “X” on the building’s white side.41 Not so, this nursing home. Nonetheless, a bust. He dreaded the inevitable after-action report.
Surrendering, Bob went back to the boat sensing that the volunteers had at least two additional floors to search. He could be long gone before they noticed. With no obligation to valor, he yanked the rope pull of the outboard, abandoning his fellow searchers, taking a slow serene cruise back toward the Garden District on the newfound calm, black sea now flooding the streets of New Orleans town at twilight. In the distance some blocks away, he saw a random house fire. Here, the image of its burn surrounded by water, and the glassy reaching reflection of fire, conjured in Bob a reminiscence of those Molotov cocktails enflaming the river of his youth. It gave an almost surreal quality to his journey, or a flashback to Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride. A water moccasined serpent slithered by on the surface beside the boat, more bodies bloated by the gases of a bacterial rave, and something in all of this alchemy brought Bob a cathartic sense of momentarily connected bliss; the kind he might, in a pinch, one day pick from his back pocket, were he ever in the greater Gulf Coast area again, and in need of sensory soothing. This brief flirtation with a lightness of being made the velvet voice return to his ear.
“Stop, hey, what’s that sound . . . ? Can you hear me softly singing, Bob-beam? Considering killing the elderly in a disaster zone? Don’t you fear the devil, beautiful Bob-beam?”
And with that, Bob suddenly saw himself among those full of rage against their own insignificance and subject to the seductions of vainglorious gestalt. The subsiding floodwaters were beginning to expose cells of sanctimony and their cancerous, divisive detriment deluged by adenosine triphosphate42 delivering de-evolution. It should be noted that New Orleans’s famous Goat of Algiers did survive the flood.
Oh boy, Bob.
Filthy floodwater drenched, Bob waded his way into the Lafayette Hotel and checked in for a shower. Later, butt-naked and cleansed, he changed the station on a bedside radio that room-cleaners had left on for ambiance. As he turned the dial across Southern stations, he landed on the opening notes of Evelyn “Champagne” King’s “Shame.” Finding himself reflected in the full-size mirror on the open bathroom door, Bob began to dance. His movement at first slow and behind the beat. But as the music and its pulse rose, Bob began to follow, finally finding the spastic gesticulations that would purge his pond of pirates.
Oh boy, indeed, Bob.
* * *
39 Central Business District
40 Maglite/flashlight
41 Identification of assault side, specifically in the targeting or navigation of buildings for clarity of COMMS
42 metabolizes the division of cells
INTERLUDE
TRANSCRIPT
* * *
SHERIFF’S BLOTTER – WOODVIEW COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
JULY 17, 2016
“911. What’s your emergency?”
“I’ve got my twenty-twenties on him right now—as we speak!”
“May I have your name, ma’am?”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, I’m so very sorry. I am the daughter of Mrs. Helen Mayo. You know, the lady who just passed. I’m standing on a scissor-lift here at the demo site of my dear mother’s home. I’ve got this scissor-lift at full vertical extension and I can see right down into that terrible man’s backyard . . .”
“Your name, ma’am?”
“Oh, forgive me. I am Helen Mayo Junior.”
“Helen Mayo Junior, ma’am?”
“Yes, that’s correct. Now listen to what I have to tell you . . .”
“You did say Helen Mayo Junior, yes?”
“Yes, I told you that. That’s correct. I’m Helen Mayo Junior. But listen please. The lift is a bit wobbly. He’s out there in that yard of his pruning a melaleuca tree in all this wind with his belly out and sweating in his skivvies. I think he’s somehow sending signals. I know he’s a white man, but sometimes he just looks very Chinese to me. Those awful eyes of his swell with bad deeds, and I don’t believe this Chink is just bonsai gardening, if you know what I mean.”
“Ma’am, bonsai gardeners are Japanese. Not Chinese. I don’t know what signals you think he’s sending, but I want to suggest to you that you come down off that scissor-lift. I would hate to hear that you’d been cited as a Peeping Tom, and it’s a bit gusty out there today . . .”
“Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness . . .”
“Ma’am? . . . Ma’am? . . . Ma’am?”
[UNINTELLIGIBLE SCREAMING]
Complainant had fallen and phone went dead. So did she.
* * *
STATION THIRTEEN
OPIATES & INCEST
Miami had long been considered a ZTC43 for activities of intervention by Scottsdale Program operatives. But with the western desert community’s contract termination having transferred command and control away from Loodstar and his New Guinean team, Loodstar had seemingly gone rogue and set up independent operations. Financing unknown. Through the network of operators, Loodstar’s rumored activities had come to Bob’s attention. Cell-phone locators and FLIR44 drones had been mobilized, mapping the movements of retirees in the greater South Beach area. While there were plenty of international contracts available, Loodstar had always had a great social appetite for the fraternity of American operators. That, and the cost-prohibitive nature of flying operators abroad, may have encouraged Loodstar to localize his AO45 to Miami, where he could recruit INCONUS.46 Best practices would dictate approvals and appropriations from USG when operating INCONUS, but despite rumors of Loodstar’s off the reservation racketeering, it wouldn’t be the going politic to deport a man in grass skirt without having hard evidence of espionage. Still, a suspicious uptick in the premature passing of senior snowbirds in Florida had caught the attention of some in local law enforcement, including some of those who might frown on any covert company’s culling activities conducted against their senior constituency.
Loodstar’s alleged activities are also concerning to Bob. The flamboyant crew chief, fascinated by narcotics, had proven himself loose of tongue. Bob feared exposure should Loodstar be apprehended. It was, in fact, this unsavory aspect of Loodstar’s character that had lost him command and control of the Scottsdale Program several years earlier. While Bob and he have never met face-to-face, Bob has to assume Loodstar has his number.
It never occurred to Bob to specifically ask Spurley Cultier which publication he worked for. It rarely occurs to Bob to ask anyone other than himself anything. But now, he has come to a conscious articulation of assumptions around Spurley. Linkage, he thinks, and decides he should pay Loodstar a visit to confirm or clear the connection considered. He enters his bathroom and sits before the marble in consultation. He needs a directive. While finding the odd face of wisdom or fury before
him, the mining of marble’s dynamic disclosures mandate meditative capitulation of consciousness.
On this day is that capitulation a reach for Bob. Beset by thoughts of Annie, he is monkey-minded. In addition, he registers this day’s lighting as being lackluster to the symphonies of stone and structure. He wanders back to the bedroom, sits on the edge of the bed, and clicks on the television, where the blond buffoon aligns himself with Law and Order like a cartoon. It gets Bob thinking. Could this high priest of branding himself be conspiring against the beheading of the unbranded? Could this translate to the preservation of that one-armed banditry47 that served the candidate’s casino’s clasp of cash? Was he or Loodstar playing both sides or being played? Has Spurley been a phalanx proxy of duel four-barrel reconnaissance? As he waded into his wisdom’s windage, it was all beginning to make mechanized sense to Bob. The candidate’s own Night of the Long Knives48 might be on a-putsch, or rather, approach, as he himself famously had residences and golf courses in the greater Miami area. All roads lead to Loodstar.
Bob weighs his options. He can drive the Pontiac from Woodview to South Beach in four days, five if he stops in New Orleans. Or he can jump a plane and be there in a matter of hours. His resistance to flight, an avoidance of any sense memory that Annie’s last departure may conjure, tips the scales. He decides to put Pontiac to pavement and pick his back-pocket keepsake of connection collected from that prior Big Easy bliss. Before departing, he packs all the essentials from lies to disguise. Then, in his shed, hangs a hook-light and nails a board to a post, painting a prostration persuading message of provocation:
UDAY AND QUSAY POACHED PRECIOUS PROTECTED PANTHERS FOR PRURIENT PARTY PICTURES
He takes a post-hole digger to his front yard, where he situates the sign. Finally, he secures the penetralia of his Woodview province with a room-to-room and around the house intertwine of mother-in-law’s clothesline.49 Bob is rarin’ road trip ready!