by Sean Penn
“I know all about the Scottsdale Program! People tell me everything because people like posts, Bob. I am a poster, and the third satellite of your syzygy.” These words sit Bob back down. “You’re looking for Loodstar, am I right?” She informs him that Loodstar has left the elderly-elimination business. That he is in Miami with his gaggle of Guinean gladiators and local-hire hostile homeboys. He currently contracts for the man she refers to as “you know who.” She describes infighting within the man’s own organization. They debate the value the worn players of one-armed bandits offer their casinos. One camp believes them booming to the bottom line. The other deems the decrepit and deflationary injurious to the sustainability of such a branding bonanza, boding badly for P&L.
Lamenting Loodstar, she says he’s gotten into the sex trade. Human trafficking. And, according to Anasyrma, is himself financed by the aforementioned “you know who.” Her sources identified Annie among the most recent sexual slaves snatched as inventory. “She’s at the Marble Palace Hotel.” To Bob’s now skeptical sneer she says, “Like I told you, people tell me everything.”
With that, Anasyrma excuses herself, “I happened to bring my bikini. I’m going to go through the back to the beach and get some late sun and post some selfies until the smoke clears.”
As her epicene frame do-si-dos downrange, Bob calls after her. “People tell you everything?”
Anasyrma stops slowly in her tracks and turns to him. “Everything, Bob Honey. That’s the new order. The new world. Don’t you know that?”
“Know what?” he asks.
She smiles, lights a cigarette, and takes a deep drag, then speaks through egressing smoke. “Narcissism’s nasty little secret,” she teases. “Oh, poor man. You don’t know, do you? You think yourself a killer but there’s no one left to kill. Identity is life. The world has replaced its identity with electronics. You, old man—if you don’t mind me calling you that—are from a generation of SELF-love. Our only self is . . . well . . . selfies. I sense you are a humble man. You don’t have the skills to be anything else.”
Bob ponders this, visibly dizzied and distressed.
She laughs, then goes out the back with, “Anasyrma always in action!”
Is her knowing to be trusted? Or are these, perhaps, the memetic meanderings of a millennial so advanced by the evolution of informational access that it might render her information inexorably uninformative? Still, it is more actionable than any other intel he has at hand.
Bob turns to El Greco, finding his eyes on him. El Greco leans toward Bob over the bar, beckoning Bob closer with an extended finger, and whispers to Bob, “Charlie Mike,60 my friend. Charlie Mike.” Bob suddenly understands. He pays his tab and tip, then moves to exit the bar, trailed by El Greco’s salutation, “Shukran.” Without turning around, Bob says, “You’re welcome.”
Mallet secure beneath Bob’s jacket, he exits the hotel to the street. With a few notable exceptions—emergency workers, barricades, cadaver dogs, toxicity teams, and overhead media helicopters—South Beach has become a ghost town. Public threat assessments have considered potential additional bombing activity within the city likely, and authorities have encouraged shop owners to close, residents to stay in, and tourists to flood the airport in hopes of flight. Bob serpentines his way through barricades to his line of departure,61 then sets off through a heavy shopping district, he a nearly lone figure surrounded by signage. Famous faces of models and movie stars, their airbrushed images like unexploded ordnances in a minefield of storefront windows. Billboards, both electric and paper. Is it they or the scent of Semtex filling the air? This conundrum represents a problem-set all its own for Bob. Considering it a coefficient of variation,62 he carries on. As he approaches the grand facade of the Marble Palace, he considers it may be a hardened site.63 He pauses and peruses it as a patrol car cruises him suspiciously. He nods toward the hotel as if indicating he were a guest returning to his abode. Seemingly satisfied, the patrol car moves on.
The glass and golden door he gently breaches. Less Trojan horse than matter of course. One foot, then the other, steps inside, the Marble Palace foyer high and wide. With every step he registers re-experience: the echo of his shoes on the marble floor, against its walls, gold-gilded halls, and ceiling. In this tomb of odious opulence, he is startled to notice that the hotel stereo system is playing Morricone’s “Gabriel’s Oboe.” The music moves him to his monkey-mind’s mea culpa. Bob approaches the concierge desk. There, a slender young black male in suit and tie stands behind the desk, speaking to Bob as he approaches. “Feelin’ beddah?” asks the man.
“Beddah?” asks Bob. He takes a last few steps forward, approaching the young man behind the counter with the intention of further questioning this fella’s oddly familiar inquiry. As the man himself sits, it is then that Bob sees the bottom of the man’s waistcoat lift, exposing the top band of a grass skirt. Bob catapults into combat! The music takes over Bob’s mind, and his mastery of the mallet leaves the Loodstar operative on the floor, head cracked open like a coconut split by a tungsten vise. The ballet has begun. Bob flashes on the surveillance camera above the concierge desk. He’s been made. Argus-eyed.
No sooner do the first of Loodstar’s troops exit the elevator than Bob dispatches them. Between marble, mallet, and mayhem, Bob is most in his element. In these halls of magic stone can Bob read patterns. Its accentuating phantasmagoria of faces, ancient and contemporary, speak to and navigate him. A wizard’s cape breezes Bob to the stairwell. A dragon’s tail points him to the fourth floor.
Rise on oboe.
Behind the hallway door, he hears their mercenary mumbling. The Guinean grumbling in dispersement of fire-teams. No offense to the dragon, but Bob assumes higher-ups to higher floors as he bounds the staircase, just one more floor to a suddenly opening door, face-to-face, he topples three tribesmen. Weasels down. How many more? He rushes the corridor.
Rise of strings.
Room 331 just to his right.
The choir sings.
With his mallet, Bob Honey pops the lock. It is time to catch his breath, take a moment out of sight, and a little stock. But inside the room, the television is on. A Duck Dynasty star speaks conventionally for the artist of con. Pundits report their version, already inured to the preposterous perversion. A singularly immoral inversion. When Bob sees the locked bathroom door, he gives it three inquisitive taps with the mallet, and then one more. A voice from behind the door.
“Dat you, my bruva?”
Bob recognizes a New Guinean twang coloring this ghetto-ized slang. From behind the bathroom door, “Caught me a case of kuru!64 I crackin’ a grizz,65 my bruva. Give me a minute more.”
“Who’s in there?” Bob asks. “Identify yourself!” Bob contemplates the RUF.66
“It’s me,” says the man behind the door. “Da bruva you used’a work for.”
“I did? I worked for you?”
“C’mon, my Winnie-da-Pooh-mutha-fucka-bruva. Your man Loodstar here!” Bob has always assumed a different personality onto Loodstar than that which he now encounters in their collision. But, he knows his former supervisor is not one to be trusted and will have to be teed off the toilet.
“Can you turn the TV up? I’ve been waiting to hear what my man from Duck Dynasty gotta say.”
“Where’s Annie?” Bob blurts through the door.
“Who’s Annie? She Russian? Ain’t seen no Annie on the traffic.”67 He goes on. “Let me wipe my butt. We’ll hear out the Duck Dynasty boy, den I’ll get you some girls and drug’es.”
Bob finds himself at the end of his rope. He kicks in the door of the bathroom, Loodstar, sitting on the toilet, grass skirt around his ankles. Bob has barely made assessment upon entry when Loodstar’s purse-lipped PFFT! sends a dart careening through a three-foot length of bamboo tubing. Bob’s eyes cross, observing its trajectory as the tree-sap poison dart pierces the thickened cartilage of his nose. But before Loodstar can re-load, Bob bashes him. As Loodstar crumples to the floo
r like a bloody bag of smashed asshole, Bob pulls the dart from his nose before the poison has much chance to be absorbed. He drops the dart into the waste bin beside the fallen tribesman.
Back in the marble corridor, he moves again toward the stairwell, where the faces of time now guide him to the highest floor. It makes sense to Bob that whoever is in charge of this outfit would likely have chosen a suite with a roof garden.
The piccolo plays.
Hearing the sounds of assembled tribesmen now seemingly swarming from all directions, Bob slips out a window from the stairwell, where he is able to launch himself from sill to fire escape. He makes a rapid ascent, where he clears the cornice, collapsing briefly onto the roof garden. Beyond a grinding air-conditioning unit, Bob sees what appears to be a skylight. He skull-drags his way toward it. Looking down into the room below, a terrible sight. A voyeuristic sideman stands by as if managing the campaign waged by the ghastly freckled back and the golden blond hair of a fat man pouncing, puckering, and fucking a slender blonde woman. It is Annie, he thinks. His arm draws back and he crashes the mallet through the skylight, sending its shattering glass raining down on the bed below. The girl screams through the choir of marbleized sirens of song. The pummeling man flounces, exposing a glance of the girl’s face to Bob. Paradigm shift. It isn’t Annie at all. Nonetheless, has he found Loodstar’s libertine? Has he stumbled upon the towering titan of treachery?
Bob jumps through the skylight’s fractured frame, landing on the crowded bed below. He pops up onto his knees, remembering,
Slow is smooth
Smooth is fast
And bloody is slippery
As he arches back, mallet raised, the man’s big blond head swivels to see his attacker, subjecting Bob to a visage, repulsive in repose, then BANG! The echoing report of the sideman’s magnum as its wadcutter target-round pierces Bob’s head beside the cerebral cortex, its lands and helical grooves settling and embedding in the inoperable real estate of Bob’s brain. His body seizes, folding to the floor. Warm blood escaping the perfect circular puncture behind his ear, pooling, cooling, and coagulating like hot Jell-O on the marble deck. Out-of-breath Guineans gain entrée, weapons drawn. The sideman, his face like hell’s hooligan, barks at them to move on. The nude girl seeks solace in a wrapped bedsheet, trembling in paralytic panic, pleading for her passport. Before the arrival of paramedics or police, the unscathed blond man and his hooligan are extracted by helicopter from the roof garden, leaving Bob barely breathing in the sky’s broken glass.
Was that broken skylight
his last song and worldly sight?
That sun’s rays shafting
through gun smoke
in the late afternoon
its filtering focus
and smell of the moon.
From moment to malady
to montage of pain,
he wondered were he really feeling,
or ever would again?
He observed a familiar sensation
in sensing himself alone,
Might next he go to prison,
or die there on his own?
Would his body be poked and prodded
or simply left to rot?
Then his recall brought back
the words of
Egypt’s own Sadat:
“I will die, I will die, I will die
knowing death is not my foe
but not one second sooner, sir
than when
my God
says
it’s so.”
* * *
In less an oddity of adjudication than a predictability of political obfuscation and skulduggery, Bob was never charged with a crime. His neuro-cranial injury, while relatively superficial, left a mark on his mind. A mark on his mind. They must be blind. They cannot see what Bob Honey sees.
* * *
43 zone too conspicuous
44 forward-looking infrared
45 Area of Operations
46 Inside the Continental United States
47 elderly usage of slot machines
48 The Night of the Long Knives, a series of executions ordered by Hitler in 1934 to consolidate his absolute hold on power in Nazi Germany
49 Mother-in-law’s clothesline: a colloquialism for pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN)–infused detonation cord, which explodes at a rate of 6,400 m/s, and resembles common clothesline
50 Trumpery derives from the Middle English “trumpery” and ultimately from the Middle French, “tromper,” meaning “to deceive.” Trumpery first appeared in English in the mid-fifteenth century with the meanings “deceit or fraud” or “worthless nonsense!”
51 Russian-built fighter-bombers also operated by the Syrian National Army
52 ancient Greek goddess of exhibitionism
53 a psychological operations tactic where fake communiqués are intended to demoralize combatants
54 a highly malleable explosive, suitable for all your demolition needs
55 organic compound of white solid explosive classified as a nitramide
56 that which has been ejected and then falls back to the site of the explosion or near the explosion’s epicenter
57 an individual or way of doing things that is particularly odd
58 Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategies, and Action Plans
59 Critical Incident Stress Debriefing
60 military slang for “Continue Mission”
61 starting position for attack on enemy position
62 a measure of variability and volatility relative to the average member of a population or data set
63 a structure usually built under rock or concrete, designed to withstand conventional, nuclear, biological, and chemical attack
64 a virus contracted through ingestion of infected human brain matter
65 taking a shit
66 Rules for Use of Force—Domestic military terminology differentiating from its OCONUS counterpart ROE (Rules of Engagement)
67 traffic: classified intelligence stream monitored only by those in government agencies with high security clearance (and sophisticated New Guinean hackers)
STATION FOURTEEN
DEBUNKING CAMUS
Rarefied resins liquefied during a life languishing unloved were beginning to create new free radical initiation of polymerization. The chain reaction had Bob heating, cooling, incrassating, and beginning to cure. Newfound catalysts created by catastrophic systems failure.
What for so many years had seemed a loss of memory function, Bob now observed in himself empathetically as editorial wisdom. In the absence of memory will memory have no influence. From repression concealment, the slaughters that had led to his atonement had opened a celestial door. Necessary no more. For the first time would Bob see the culmination of his fifty-six years without regret, finally accepting that he was born this way. Born with a bullet in his head.
A mind is bending, twisting, turning, floating. It inhabits hurricanes, earthquakes, outbreaks, and elections. It contemplates the rise of locusts. In Bob’s morphine dreams at Jackson Memorial, the desert debunked Camus.
So said the French Algerian:
Truth, like light, blinds.
Falsehood, on the contrary,
is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
His dream’s desert daylight diffusion dictated disturbances in the void of visual detail. Rocks not yet sharpened by shadow. Colors washed clear by high sun. Incandescent is as incandescent does, hence flat light sight for Bobby-boy was no sight at all.
“Button-button-button. Belly button.” Bob practiced the Zen breathing of Annie’s book, extending his dream of the desert till the sunset. Now, Bob thought, could something truer be told. If you’ve never flown a single-engine craft in a South Sudanese sandstorm, put your seat belt on! Drifting into his dream were donkey-blue diatribes from the next bed’s TV. Philadelphia, feelin’ the burn. Daytime speeches twist and turn. And celebrities yearn to be close to those taking an eve
ning stage turn. The Man from Chicago spoke, drawing an oratory ace from beneath his cloak. Bob listened, but never woke. The wind and tumbleweed of his dry desert land whispered a speech from its own parched earth and sand. Then, the television switched to a German rock band.68
Sometimes,
Sometimes I like to lie
I don’t know why
I don’t know why
In this desert of Bob’s dream did disturbances seem a truth of beauty. For the first time did Bob feel himself a thing apart, renewing value as the low light’s heart declared the desert hollows a directive.
Sometimes,
Sometimes I fool strangers
I tell them wrong names
I tell them lies
And they’re mostly the same
When I tell them about my past
There is nothing that’ll last
The horizon’s shuttering red skyline drops behind a summit of time.
Sometimes I say the truth
Maybe just because of my youth
Sometimes I like to lie
I don’t know why
When an orderly returned to the channel of the lame duck’s inspiriting speech, Bob began regaining consciousness. Felt this man’s words speaking directly to him. Hard in this world to be an elegant man, Bob thought, but when his game’s on, that Chi-Town-Kenyan-Kansan can-can-can. Then there she was—the woman of our political hour entering stage left. The crowds rise up in glee.
Her opponent might be tweeting, admonishing repugnantly.
As the orderly reduces volume, Bob hears a distant choo-choo whistle.
Just a klick or two from the hospital, cargo containers on rail ride station to station. City acoustics travel trains with doubtless purpose. Sounds of morphine all their own. Sounds that built this country with black and Chinese hands, and the genocide of Indian bands. As the orderly leaves the room, he utters, “Every war we’ve ever lost has been somebody else’s civil war.”
Bob sits up in bed, and through the window watches Old Glory waving wistfully in electric illumination atop an adjacent building’s spire. He thinks aloud: