by Jim Nisbet
Few let her rabbit on.
I’ve been wrong about women before, he understated to himself. Maybe her brother will show up sooner than later and I can file this chrono-sink under Daytime Television.
Half an hour later, at approximately eleven-thirty, at home on Quintara Street, Tipsy poured herself a shot of tequila with a beer back, wrapped herself in a Oaxaca blanket for consistency, snuggled up in the backyard chair, and, despite being more excited about the Newbie Scooter forum than anything she’d visited in years, she passed out.
Her dreams were, for the most part, fantastic. But a thread ran through them that had remained coherent, for lack of a better term, for many years.
Tipsy had often experienced the sensation of reading, or reciting, or conversing in dreamscapes, but it was the rare session in which the text made sense, for lack of a better term; it was an even rarer occurrence if, when the sugar resulting from the metabolism of alcohol consumption shocked her awake four hours after it knocked her out, she remembered such texts.
This night, loaded on beer and tequila, wrapped up in the Adirondack chair under a howling westerly and a starless sky, her dream was startling in its, for lack of a better term, clarity. Among other unrealistic characteristics of its tenor—for this was a dream, after all—was the unlimited amount of time she had to articulate her thoughts. And the size of the venue in which she performed. And the size of the crowd, attending her every word. And the fantastic lighting …
When the metabolism of alcohol into sugar and acetylene kicked her awake four hours later, she was cold and had a crick in her neck.
The clatter of fig leaves sounded like applause.
“… As some of you may remember, the great Buckminster Fuller rediscovered ancient truths as regards solid geometry and pioneered their contemporary and future utility. Though much of his work in this regard occurred mid-twentieth century, he himself realized that, his engineering skills aside, it would be a generation or more before the properties of materials caught up with and were able to realize the innovation inherent in his calculations.”
The screen behind and above the speaker’s head illuminated. Its corona did great things for her hair.
“Here we see a simple geodesic. In this case, a 20-frequency icosahedron. For you, of course, mere policy makers,” and here the speaker permitted herself the toothy grin, much-practiced before the arms-length camera lens of her Committee Digital Assistant, by which cognoscenti recognized her world-round, “the mathematics are irrelevant.”
Laughter.
“Why?” the speaker asked.
“Engineers are a dime a dozen!” screamed a voice from the floor of the assembly.
“Winner!” boomed an asexual tweeter, accompanied by sirens and the fluting tones of a ballpark pipe organ. Confetti rained parallel to the directrix of a narrow cylinder from the stratospheric ceiling of the hall onto the mown dome of a single audience member, already triangulated by a pair of roving spotlights, and not so incidentally encompassing a radius of three people in any direction around her. “A vacation for two innnn—” timpani crescendoed and stopped: “—Langley, Virginia!” Cymbal crash. “The Safest Place to Vacation in All of Cryptopolis!”
The hall erupted. A tall and blonde young man in tennis shorts, the sleeves of a cabled V-neck letter-sweater draped over his shoulders, and designer reading glasses with an italic CW in the blind spot appeared bearing an envelope. “You and the sexy wonk of your choice,” boomed the announcer, “will tour the CIA Gatehouse, the outer ring of the Pentagon, the unlabeled parking lot of one of the many unmarked buildings in the area, and, as a special donation from a concerned network, you and he or she will receive free lifetime transfusions of State TV.
“And you know this is a big deal, folks,” the speaker addedd, lowering her corona to speak softly into the microphone, “if only because you also know how the State prefers the delicious irony of making people pay for it. It’s no different than paying 250 shells to a manufacturer to walk around in a pair of sneakers with the manufacturer’s logo on them. Not different at all.”
Fists pumped. “It is The True!” Polite applause persisted desultorily, which served to make the ruckus of the claquers a tad obvious.
Before the applause could die out completely the tennis player, in a single continuous move, handed the startled winner the envelope, draped an arm over her shoulder, pointed at a camera, pinched her ass, mugged for an exploding strobe light as she squealed, stepped aside, thrust both arms in her direction, and backed into the darkness defined by the perimeter of the spotlight. “Winner!” redundated a computerized voice amid a renewed clamor of sirens, cowbells, and the nasal, fluted tones of a ballpark pipe organ. “Because,” roared the announcer, “there is no place in all of Cryptopolis in which to so safely vacation as Langley, Virginiaaaaaaa!” The crowd responded with a full-throated roar.
The speaker prolonged her smile as screens shuffled. “That’s one lucky policy-maker down there,” she said warmly. She looked directly into teeming darkness. “Enjoy your trip. You can catch up on your work the following weekend.”
“Ah ha. Ah hah hah hah hah,” agreed the claquers. “Did you hear what she said?” yelled one member to another. “Fucking great!” said the woman next to him, barely audible through the hilarity and applause. They high-fived.
The computer materialized a map of the Middle East on the screen, and the crowd settled down. The speaker adjusted the dahlia on her hat.
“Kurds to the north of the country, roughly from the Iranian border beyond Al Sulaymaniyah, north to Turkey and northeast to Syria,” the speaker recited. Little narghile icons appeared on the map as she ticked off the locales. “As many of you have cause to regret because you came to the knowledge so late, Iran is home to the largest Shia population in the world. This influence extends west, throughout eastern Iraq, from Al Sulaymaniyah all the way south to Basra.” Quarter-moons appeared, coping varying distances east of the Iraq border, their concavity facing Iran. The map scrolled as she spoke. “The extent of this border is about five hundred miles as the crow flies, but its reality is more complex, and in truth it’s perhaps half again as long. Here is Kuwait, secularized as most of you know, firmly under the sway of western influence and, thus, endangered. Now.” The speaker caused a laser pointer to highlight the three-way border at the corner of Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. “Who among you knows which of the countries bordering Iraq shares its longest border? Which country shares the shortest border? Which country has accepted the most refugees fleeing the civil war?” If the speaker had been a superannuated professor in a flowered hat teaching political geography in a small two-year college on the banks of the Pecos, she couldn’t have presented a more benign aspect as she surveyed the audience. “Anybody?” She darted her laser pointer about the audience at random. “Speak up.”
“Saudi Arabia!” someone said.
The speaker raised an eyebrow. “Saudi Arabia, you say?” The map scrolled west. The crimson dot of the laser circled a line on it. “Here is their border. What do they offer? Sanction for refugees?”
“No!” chorused two or three voices.
“Shia sympathy?”
Two or three people laughed.
“The longest border!” yelled the first voice, overcompensating for the boredom inherent in it.
Abruptly the map zoomed out. “That’s not quite correct,” said the speaker. “Saudi Arabia shares the second longest border with Iraq. Iran comes first. See.” The map zoomed out. Figures crawled up and over it. Saudi/Iraq: 900 km; Iran/Iraq: 1,200 km … “And the refugee statistics?”
“Jordan,” came a woman’s voice out of the darkness, “has taken upwards of 750,000 refugees. Syria has accepted one million.”
“And Saudi Arabia?” asked the speaker.
A voice piped up. “Saudi Arabia doesn’t make a statistical showing, refugee-wise.”
“How about the United States?” asked a voice.
Laughter.
“Ahem,�
� the speaker resumed, “so it’s Jordan, the country sharing the shortest border with Iraq except for Turkey; and Syria, whose common border ranks third in length after Iran’s and Saudi Arabia’s. Between them, Jordan and Syria account for nearly two million of Iraq’s refugees, which is some 85% of the total. Correct?”
“But they’re all Arabs!” somebody pointed out.
“That’s true,” the speaker confirmed. “The Iranians are Persian and Shia. Jordanians and Syrians are Sunni and Arab.”
“So,” spoke someone very near the foot of the stage, “they are looking after their brothers.”
“How very good of them,” confirmed someone else.
“But what of Saudi Arabia?”
“They have their own agenda.”
“Which includes Wahabism.”
“Which includes American Air Force bases.”
“Used to include American Air Force bases.”
“Wait.” The speaker held up a hand. Far above, her laser pointer described little ruby bundles of quantum string on the ceiling. “Let’s not confuse issues. Setting aside the military question, how may we best characterize the refugee crisis?”
“It’s a humanitarian issue!” someone shouted.
“Yes! It’s a humanitarian issue!” several voices responded.
“And so?” queried the speaker.
Many voices roared as one voice: “And so it’s a dispensable issue! Negligible! Antithetical to good policy!”
The speaker did not repress a smile. To Demagogue Is To Rule, proclaimed the flybutton discreetly nestled under her lapel. She looked up at the screen. One by one the east-facing crescents, the west-facing crescents, and the narghiles winked out.
In the ensuing bath of applause, a pair of dotted lines began to propagate northwards from a common vertex at the base of the Shat al Arab.
“This is the waterway in the northwestern corner of the Persian Gulf which drains through both the oil port of Basra, in Iraq, and the oil port of Abadan, in Iran. Watch me now,” cautioned the speaker.
Dreamwise, it might rank with flying. The lines snaked like meridians, parallel but diverging, north through Iraq. The line on the east more or less followed the Iraq-Iran border. The second line sidled west as it progressed north, flanking An Nasiriyah, An Najaf, Karbala, and Ar Ramadi. The two lines met again in the Jabal Hamrin, south of Kirkuk and southwest of Al Sulaymaniyah.
“So,” said the speaker contentedly, as she caused the ruby dot of her laser to circumnavigate the pair of lines, “from Basra to Tuz Khurmatu, in the Jabal Hamrin, to Basra again.”
“The oil fields of Iraq,” various of the awed spectators realized.
“It looks like a purse,” said one.
“The Purse of Oil,” agreed another.
“What’s the Arab for purse?” asked the speaker.
“Hafiza!” shouted someone. “Zayt! Zayt is oil! It’s the Hafiza min Zayt!”
“Winner! Ding ding ding …”
“Damn,” said another, “does this dream have Vision, or what?”
“Winner! Ding ding, ding ding ding …”
“By all that is right,” objected another, “much of that territory is Persian!”
“Fuck ’em,” someone said.
“Fuck them!” shouted another, and many took up the cry. “Fuck them! Fuck them! Fuck them! …”
“Now, now,” beamed the speaker, “that’s not very diplomatic.”
Led by the claquers, the hall was subsumed by sycophantic laughter.
“What of the rest of the country?” someone asked when the hilarity died down sufficiently for a single voice to be heard.
The pointer circled. “This swath of eastern desert—which is called, by the way, the Syrian Desert”—a smattering of cheers—“may be easily divided by lofting a perpendicular bisector from the Jordanian border”—a line appeared—“and extending it to the western border of the Hafiza min Zayt, thus.” A line traced a path through the desert along the highway connecting the border town of Trebil to a severely depopulated area about seventy-five miles southwest of Al Ramadi, where it intersected the western border of “the newly christened, as it were …” the speaker noted, to derisive snickers, “… Hafiza min Zayt. So that everybody doesn’t feel completely shafted, this highway”—the laser pointer traced the road back to Trebil—“becomes international territory.” The perpendicular bisector split into two parallel lines and proceeded to cope to the highway, forming as it were a corridor for it.
“Although,” the speaker apostrophized, “it will probably remain unsafe to travel until at least the end of the Epoch of Capitalism.” He turned to the audience. “And about how long will that be?”
“One thousand years!” came the ready reply of many voices speaking as one.
The speaker cupped a hand to her ear. “How long?”
“One thousand years!” came the response.
“I can’t hear you!” roared the speaker.
“ONE THOUSAND YEARS,” came the redoubled roar.
“Thank you.” The speaker smoothed the front of her flybutton display.
“That’s longer than the heckafucking oil is going to last!” someone pointed out.
“Winner!” Everybody laughed. “Ding ding ding …”
The speaker returned her attention to the screen. “Saudi Arabia gets this half”—the laser pointer scribbled in the desert south and west of Karbala, An Najaf, and An Nasiriyah—“and Syria gets this half.” The crimson dot spiraled in the deserts surrounding Baghdad, Kirkuk, and Al Mawsil.
“Those aren’t halves,” someone pointed out.
“More or less half of something beats the heckadarn out of more or less half of nothing,” another voice pointed out.
“Just ask Kuwait and Jordan,” another chimed in.
“Or Iran, for that matter,” a woman interjected.
“Who is making these decisions?” someone asked loudly.
“Who’s asking?” the speaker asked, turning toward the crowd.
“You’re answering a question with another question,” the first questioner boldly responded—so boldly indeed, that there could be little doubt that he was a claquer and his statement scripted.
“On the contrary,” the speaker stated forthrightly, as if patiently. “What we are doing here is exploring a White Paper by way of brainstorming an intractable problem. We’re not necessarily determining policy.”
“Po tee weet!” someone shouted.
“You’d think they’d come up with a packet-burst for these disclaimers and be done with it,” muttered someone in the Very Important Apparatchik Suite. The speaker picked it up in her earbud. “Make a note.”
“Fair enough,” the audience member responded, to much good humor. “But how do you propagate your solution? How do you enforce it?”
“Yes,” responded several voices. “How, for God’s sake?”
“God does not come into it!” the speaker roared, and the dream gelatin quivered. “Let there be no invoking of deities within this assembly. Is that clear?”
“Clear! Ma’am!” The entire assembly responded with a single voice.
“I can’t hear you.”
“Clear!! Ma’am!!”
“I can’t hear you, you pussies.”
“CLEAR! MA’AM!” echoed the ineluctable response.
“That’s more like it.” A little dehydrated, with a headache coming on, the speaker cleared her throat. “As you were.” She darted the laser about the twinkling audience. “And we were … ?”
“Dividing up the Middle East, as the world has otherwise known the vicinity in the post-colonial era as demarcated by the Balfour document.” The response, though coming from the proceeding’s official stenographer, was appropriately timorous. “Ma’am,” it added.
The stenographer, formerly a journalist, was no longer he nor she. The change was necessary.
“Right. And the question concerned?”
“Imposition, sir.”
“As
in … ?”
Someone in the audience found the courage to speak. “As in how do we propose to impose the demarcation of the new Purse of Oil?”
“Ah,” said the speaker. “That is where Mr. Buckminster Fuller comes in—whether he likes it or not.” Laughter. The crimson dot traced the borders, the in-country rotations of troops, the Hafiza min Zayt. “We build a heckadome over the entire thing.”
“A heckadome!”
“A synergy of domes, plural, yields one … singular … heckadome!”
“It’s totality exceeds the sum of its parts!” someone declared, to cheers of agreement.
“But is it possible?”
“Absolutely!”
On-screen, an animated time-lapse sequence of struts, girders, beams, columns, and hubs assembled itself and arced as if overhead.
“A heckadome!”
“A mere ten stories high. Segmented to allow for salients of geography, control vertices, points of egress, and, of course, the heights of derricks.”
“Carbon fiber … ?”
“Did Fuller know carbon fiber … ?”
“He must not have. …”
“Pyrolysis of synthetic fiber would be a fruitful area of res—”
“Para-who?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Technology is your friend—”
“—Or Else!”
“Ding ding, ding ding ding. …”
“Plus, of course, Avogadro ratios favorable to inert gas dispersion.” The speaker tugged at her lip, which elongated disconcertingly. “Argon, maybe.”
“It almost has to be carbon fiber. …”
“The substance is classified. But, be assured, it exists. The technology is approximately the same as that pioneered by NASA in anticipation of the hapkeite mining colonies soon to be constructed on the moon.”
“Pure genius!”
“Pow pow, pow!”
“A triumph of tax-funded engineering!”
“But again—I say, ladies and gentlemen! Be reasonable! Be rational! Be realistic … ! How do we enforce it?”
“Yeah. What about the people?”
Laughter.
“No, really. They’ll get in the way.”