by Sean Penn
* * *
The America Bob drives, from Woodview to New Orleans, is not that one of lore. Not the one he’d known in his earliest cross-continental automotive excursions. Not the one of “pay later” gas stations, vintage diners, and two-lane roads. Only the trains remain in tribute to that spirit refuge now vanquished by modernity’s craven trumpery.50 Vanquished as if by lightning, blinding burdensome myths, and dispersing misbehaviors exposed.
Perhaps a truth worth grabbing and holding on to for dear life, that where life is really lived is in simple places of love and happiness. Bob owned neither. And in lieu of that, only solitude would suffice. There are few remaining romantic vistas experienced in the seclusion of reclusive roadways. In their place, interstates, strip malls, retail emporiums, traffic, roadwork, and bottlenecks.
America, it seems to Bob, is no longer that beautiful girl who’d birthed him. But instead, the ghost of a girl he’d never known.
Driving at night through the intermittent expanses can Bob sometimes see the distant amber lights of isolated compounds. Perhaps prisons. Perhaps casinos. In either case, somebody’s in there losin’.
It seems many of the towns are built either on the back of vo-techs or on the job security offered by various states’ corrections departments. These are just one observer’s thoughts from within a white Pontiac drifting through the American nightscape.
Come morning’s light, the new day’s Bob feels briefly bright, until traffic, like Tinder, takes its toll in travesty upon trails once left fated to foreplay and fairy tale. Bob passes a feature film fourplex and formerly divine deco drive-in. He realizes that not only in road-roaming reality has romance been relinquished to ruins, but the cinemas themselves have been caged and quartered into quixotic concrete calamities of corporatized cultural capitulation. Perusing the menu during a diner stop in San Antonio, Bob is intrigued by the Venison Wellington, a selection that comes with the written disclaimer: “Even though greatest care has been taken, due to the nature of the product, there is a very small risk of bullet fragments that could be found in the meat.” Bob decides on a grilled cheese sandwich and is served where he sits by a skinny, vanilla-perfumed waitress. His head hangs over the counter in a meditative first bite. His incisors make surgical entry, initiating a delicately inconspicuous cut through the toasted buttery carapace. His tongue laps the melted cheese as his jaws’ pressure squeezes it into his mouth. All systems watering. Delectable. Frigging magic. Frickin’ diner grilled cheese magic. Then BLOP! BLOP! BLOP! Black coffee pours into the cup of the place setting to his right. It whirls, burbles, then settles into stillness with the emerging image of a grinning septuagenarian staring Bob in the eye, now reflecting on the coffee’s surface. Eyes locked into the reflection, Bob surmises that the image of his own face is being simultaneously counter-reflected in the coffee-mirror of his newfound neighbor. Without lowering his sandwich, his swallow, slowly and quietly, allows that first bite to drop like a Special Forces paratrooper into his belly. As the two men stare into each other’s reflections, through the blur of java steam, the old-timer initiates conversation in intermittent mountain twang.
“At least you don’t strike me as one of them hipster herbivores.”
“Who are you?” Bob asks the man.
“I’m Pappy Pariah of Kerstetter, Kentucky, son. Pastor to the argot-applied Appalachian Archdiocese. I’m the one tellin’ your story and intend’ta continue right after ma’ coffee.”
“My story?” Bob asks.
“Don’t worry about that . . .” replies the man. “That undernourished nymphomaniac over there just poured my coffee hot and black. But don’t tell her I said that. Shhh,” the man hushes. “Let me tell ya sumtin’:
It takes very little time
to drink a cup of wine
or to destroy a village.
One day soon
it will take a week to conquer the world
and a couple of days to establish a motive.
It currently takes about one hour
to underestimate the compassion
of a stranger,
their face reflected on a burnish of
black coffee in a quaint café.
And, no man learns to cycle rounds
on a paper route especially when he has
egg on his face.”
* * *
Finally lowering his sandwich, Bob instinctively wipes his mouth with a napkin, inventories the napkin. No egg. But, how could there be when eating a grilled cheese sandwich?
With aleatory artlessness Bob asks the Appalachian, “What’s with all the opiates and incest in your area?”
He watches the old man’s grin go grim turning from the reflected image to Bob’s physical face beside him. Bob returns the favor. The old man steps up, putting his face very close to Bob’s. “Could you repeat that question, son?”
Bob does. “What’s with all the opiates and incest in your area?”
The man smiles, sits back down, sips his coffee, and answers,
“Just folks getting by.”
And so it was . . .
Bob finishes his grilled cheese sandwich, last French fry, and final gulp of Pepsi with the bulk of its remaining crushed ice. As he places Pepsi drained genuine Georgia-green Coca-Cola tumbler on counter, the old man takes hold of Bob’s paw with purchase.
“I see you got that Pontiac out there bent toward the east,” he tells Bob. “The east can get sticky this time’a year. If I were you, I’d head back west to Scottsdale—if you know what I mean . . .” Bob glances at the old man’s hand, gripped around his own.
“I’ll take my chances,” Bob says.
“Oh boy, Bob.” The old man shakes his head and releases his grip on Bob. “Son, you gonna do what you gonna do. Just don’t get yourself bit by one’a them Zika mossies. Could compromise ya bringin’ a healthy baby to term.”
“I’m a man,” Bob reminds the adroit au courant. “I’m not a girl.”
“Yeah?” says the old-timer. “Whatever gives ya comfort.”
A bit stymied, Bob asks, “How did you know my name?”
“I wrote you.”
“A letter?”
“If that would give you comfort, I’m willing. But, for now, your home’s a tome.”
Unsatisfied, but on a clock, Bob pays out for himself and for the seventy-something soothsayer, then forges east, pointing the Pontiac to the parish state and Pontchartrain.
* * *
New Orleans is his one sleepover stop en route to Miami and mission. Rest is a weapon. He finds a flophouse on Lafayette Street. After taking his turn at the hall-end common shower where he washes road from body, he goes walking. Following the sound of the French Quarter, he drifts into a bar/resto for calamari and an adult beverage. On the TV above the bar is a live broadcast of the Red-Robed Cleveland King-Making Convention. Bob is interested in hearing what the delegate from Guam might have to say. But between the verbosity of a former New York mayor boasting anti-crime and domestic Brexit bluster and the chatter amongst bar barons, Guam is not to be heard. Nonetheless, the visual effect of their floral shirts and leis offers something less conventional for the convention. That’s when the millennials put Bob in their reticle.
Three blocks from where Bob sits with his plate of fried calamari is a club called Checkpoint Charlie’s, the hub for acid-dropping youth. Two of its trippers had gone walking and perceived Bob through the glass as a sideways-sitting sphinx with a candelabra in its mouth. Within twenty minutes, Bob’s drink has been dosed with seven hits of liquid acid. Within an hour of that, images once reserved for marble manifest ubiquitously. Bob’s world alters aggressively. As the blood flow to the control centers of his brain is reduced, connectivity is enhanced in lysergic hallucinations. Conversations between two cultures, between two languages that rarely exist in the same house, are now in their proximity lucid and active. Parts of the brain that hadn’t known each other before are put in the same room. The visual cortex plays mediator to
quarks, while neuronal networks part ways and sleep in default. In this vortex from subatomic and molecular mitosis, Bob finds a connectedness in New Orleans . . . just not the one he’d planned for. That one he’d hoped to pull as bliss from his back pocket. Nonetheless, Bob adapts as he always does. After thirty-five hours’ dancing between expanding flowers, grab-ass gypsies, bingo parlor bivouacs, and images of the people purging payloads of an SU-22,51 Bob wakes from a final lycanthropic slumber to find himself a day and a half behind schedule. Pontiac to pavement, he sets his sights on Miami.
As the Pontiac’s radio reports two-day-old news from Cleveland—the candidate’s mail-order bride’s plagiarized speech, black militias open-carry AK-47s, and the blond one thinks it neato to leave NATO in the lurch—Bob muses on the likelihood that a new norm may visit America. Random car bombings, claimed erroneously or not, with conceit, provocations, or patronage to Middle Eastern manifestos manufactured in Saudi madrassas. Lone, lonely loonies lacking love beyond their guns. You can’t depress the depressed, for whom fear is the folly of static scoundrelism. Never static nor separated from depression, Bob is implicitly immune. He arrives in Miami late the following afternoon.
He goes big and checks in to the Fontainebleau Hotel. Thirteen floors up in Room 1406. Bob drops his bag on the bed, flips on the television. ’Tis the final day of the Cleveland King Maker in all its peculiar pageantry. The Mussolini of Mayberry would be fomenting his flock. To Bob, the hypothesis is clear. Between the id and the superego, the sheep had traded a love of their own children for the chance to cry, “Look at me! I’m a pisser on a tree!” Ouch goes the human heart. Out comes the orator’s brain-fart, this Jesus of Jonestown, this blind man to Newtown, spits bile aplenty, to bitch us all down. And with Lonesome Rhodes above the crowd, Bob switches the TV off, moves to the window, and opens the blinds to the bikini-cladders, the beach, and the big blue. Somewhere out in that twinkly blue sea are whales being treated brutally. Bob is bothered by brutality toward beasts, has never been a hunter of animals. In fact, he despises hunting and hunters. They and their easy-kill technologies. Their detachment from the kill. From the purpose. From their own primal existence, and their petty thievery enacted against the noble beasts. With one exception: those who hunt wild boar with their own bodies and a dagger. There is pride to be had where the prejudicial is practiced with precision in the trenchant triage of tactile terminations. This came to him via the crucible-forged fact that all humans are themselves animal, and that rifle-ready human hunters of alternate-species prey should best beware the raging ricochet that soon will come their way.
From his back pocket:
Raindrops keep falling on my head
But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red
Crying’s not for me . . .
His phone calls out to him. It is a photo of a woman’s forearm with a deep horizontal gash, bleeding profusely. No message attached except its sender’s codename, “Anasyrma,”52 who, with some follow-up, Bob sees has also posted the photograph on social media. Bob would know that arm anywhere. It is Annie’s! The slash, he thinks, shows all the hallmarks of Guinean fanfare. Is it possible Annie had been nabbed by Loodstar operatives? Has fate forwarded him to Florida? Is this a warning, a war declaration, or a soap chip?53 Has Bob been surveilled? If so, by whom? And, if Loodstar has Annie . . . for what reason? Through what reticle or rhyme?
While Bob is no creature of panic, the measure of these uncertainties and his consciously palpable paranoia concerning the sudden and coincidental circumstances calling Annie’s well-being into question prompts in him a primitivism of perspiration. Optimal blood flow to his extremities shunted, he breathes deeply. In then out. Exhale extends to excess. Repeat. Again. Repeat. And with oxygen’s return to his outer cortex and frontal lobe comes homeostasis. He disrobes. Showers have always helped Bob clear his mind and prepare himself for remedies requiring rigorous focus. Bob showers and towel dries.
From his go-bag, he pulls a black linen suit, businessman shoes, and a pressed white shirt. He dresses and exits the hotel onto Ocean Drive. Crowded with tourists, beach comers and goers, shoppers, bicyclists, and big ostentatious cars . . . there it happened. From a perpendicular street came the marchers a-many. Not so much deplorable as the violently immature followers of the violently immature seventy-year-old boy-man with money and French vanilla cotton candy hair. They appear Aryan-esque with their “Yellow Lives Matter” banners and all with yellow-blond hair and eyes of Prussian blue. They chant, “Make America More Yellow!” Bob can’t help but consider that the doings and don’tings of the day are less a political or cultural crisis than a cataclysmic crisis of the country’s mental health. He makes up that it might be measurably mended by mandatory public service. If only every American might have, or have had, one marvelous moment in their young lives as living proof that they matter. Instead, he is reminded of Big Bob Dylan descanting, “The sun isn’t yellow. It’s chicken.” Then—
KA-BOOOOM! FLICKER-FLASH! SHMOKIE DOKIE AND FIRE!
A concussive car bomb blasts, sending shockwaves, blast wind, and pyroplastic-esque fragmentations through a five-hundred-square-meter radius. Bob is thrown backward but uninjured, shy a brief bout of auditory exclusion. After standing back up, dusting himself off, and relaxing his respiration, he surveys the street before him and identifies the unmistakable odor of plastic explosives, sensing Semtex.54 Semtex has potent personality and punch. Its hexagonal booster-charge-blast fancy, fulminant, and forcefully familiar in Honey history. With RDX,55 PETN (Bob’s go-to det cord) is the second of Semtex’s principal segments. He susses this stash as stock made available from the demilitarized erstwhile Czech army caches captured in the concessions of the late 1980s and early ’90s.
Peeking through the mass of yellow-blond bloody body parts, material destruction, and fallback ejecta’s56 rain re-devouring, he glimpses the blast crater and molten Miami’s underground substructure. Now, our American melting pot so hot, it liquefies the plot. Through the obscuring smoke and flame flashes the face of an exotic dark-haired woman exiting a damaged building from across the street. Her eyes briefly lock Bob’s until rejuvenated black smoke and red blades of fire re-obliterate the view. Sirens start to fill the air, and their harkening of that ice cream music most wretched suggests his retreat.
Bob makes his way back into the hotel and drifts toward the lobby bar. While chaos dominates the frantic atmospheric foray upon guests, employees, and scrambling police officers seeking to secure the greater crime scene, Bob spies the bar. An oasis. Tending it, a loath-to-be-bothered barman. This is El Greco Hernandez, and his lounge plays as a shadowy and quiet calm to the lobby’s brightly lit territory of turmoil. As the doings in Cleveland play on the television above the bar, Bob asks El Greco simply, “Are you serving?” To which El Greco responds, “I’m always serving.” It occurs to Bob, El Greco may be a bit of a football bat.57 Bob sits.
He slowly sips some Russian spirits while staring sparingly at himself in the mirror behind the bar. He contemplates his VMOSA,58 beginning with his immediate situational awareness. First, he has a bomb scene outside his hotel that has clearly created disembowelment for some, and a disruption of mood for many, but is confident that CISD59-tasked teams will arrive to settle those souls whose day at the beach had gone BOOMingly bust. Secondly, he has El Greco there, more interested in television than in any situational awareness of his own. Thirdly, there is the original problem: that Loodstar may be active and surveilled in a way that could compromise Bob’s cover, and may need neutralizing. And finally, there is the added dilemma that Annie might be involved, caught in a cross fire? Or, in any case, bleeding. El Greco switches the bar television channels back and forth between the after-blast coverage in front of the hotel and the party in Cleveland. Bob wracks his brain and seeks his dog’s nose for a starting point. It is then that a female voice comes by surprise from the stool beside him. “You’re Bob,” she says in an Eastern European accent. Bob nods.
> “I am Anasyrma.” Bob turns. It is the woman he’d spied after the blast. On first impression, hers is a mischievous if not mystical beauty. She looks roughly Annie’s age, and the kind another man might take for a lesbo-leaning lunatic. For Bob, she is his date with danger’s dark web deity.
“Don’t look at me!” Anasyrma instructs, then whispers, “We can’t be observed talking to each other.” Bob dutifully turns away but only to adjust his observation of her to the mirror’s reflection.
Anasyrma does the same, saying, “That’s better. You know this is all unsustainable. We are near the end of days, Bob.”
Bob nods, as if to a nuisance claim.
“Do you know who I am?” she asks.
“I think you sent me a picture,” Bob says. “Are you responsible for that bomb?”
She responds bluntly, “Don’t ask personal questions.” Bob shifts in his seat. She continues, “You know the Marble Palace Hotel? The one with the terrible gold gilding? Everything you’re looking for is there.”
“Are you from . . . Scottsdale?” Bob asks.
Anasyrma begins to giggle. The giggle becomes a laugh. Soon she guffaws herself from stool to floor. She begins to writhe, cackle, and cough out her laughter uncontrollably. Her eyes watering, she nearly poos. Bob spies what might be a dime-sized and expanding moisture blossom from her rear-end-center, signifying perhaps some minimal ass-piss. Bob looks at her rolling and cackling on the floor. She can only hand gesture to remind him not to look at her. Has the cover of their conversation not already been blown?! Nonetheless, he submits and turns back to the mirror, where he finds he now has to rise on his stool to regain a reflective angle that will allow him a visual on the Eastern European picture poster. After several long minutes of her spasmodic guffawing, Anasyrma begins to compose herself, telling Bob,