Friends and Traitors

by Jarett Kobek

  In an ideal situation, removal of hyperintelligent gonorrhea occurs in a hospital, while the human host is under sedation. Boaz ben-Haim suffers the transition without tranquilization. The gonorrhea dies, croaking out with ben-Haim’s voice, its pleas for mercy diminishing into a final empty silence.

  —help me, help me, help me. help. help. help. help.

  For his next destination, Boaz ben-Haim travels forward to the distant future, to the epoch when time travel technologies are first mass duplicated.

  There is the distinct danger that this journey may create a paradox. The Commission has always warned every traveler about the impossibility and danger of arriving in an epoch that possesses the technology. Death is the only result. Only death and doom.

  Taking the chance, he punches in the coordinates and arrives unharmed.

  Nothing happens. It’s like any other historical era. He interacts with people, uses bewilderment technologies upon them. Nothing changes. He’s still alive. Boaz ben-Haim concludes that time travelers have been visiting the post-travel epoch all along.

  Perhaps the Commission knows. Perhaps they knew from the beginning. No one informed him that the gonorrhea could read his mind.

  He steals the central processing unit of an older time travel hutch, one lacking the nanotech filters that block the ingress of organic matter. He interfaces the CPU with his hutch.

  For his next destination, Boaz ben-Haim travels to Mauritius in the year 1534. He captures a dodo and brings it inside the hutch. The machine does not reject the bird. For his next destination, Boaz ben-Haim travels to the year 1988 and frees the bird by Cleopatra’s Needle. The creature gives Boaz ben-Haim a stupid, screwball look and then hops away, rubbing against the obelisk’s base.

  With evidence of the possible, Boaz ben-Haim resolves to rescue victims of the Holocaust. It is his hope that this removal, at the last possible moment before death, will create as little havoc as possible. Boaz ben-Haim plans to bring those whom he rescues into the far future. Into the year 2700. After the last great war, after massive depopulations.

  He’ll rescue them from the worst government known to man and deliver them to human history’s most universally admired system of political representation. The Neo-Doge of Nuovo Venexia. I am a one-man Zion. The only question is how many. The sheer enormity of all of those deaths.

  Boaz ben-Haim opens his hutch. As the dodo watches, Boaz ben-Haim climbs into the hutch. He travels to Bergen-Belsen, to March 1945. He moves among the sick, among the doomed women, among those bodies riddled with typhus. They are about five hundred in number, crammed inside a single poorly constructed wooden barracks. There are no windows or doors. The wind howls through the room. It’s freezing. There are no beds. The inmates sleep on the floor.

  Boaz ben-Haim stops above a young starving girl, delirious with illness, hovering near death, shivering on the ground.

  —Anna? Anna?

  MAY 1994

  Baby Sees a Ghost

  Every Wednesday, Regina and I attended every Disco 2000. The freak show had erupted into new extremes. I doubt that even the Romans under Heliogabalus, or Berliners in the Weimar Republic, experienced such tortured hedonism.

  People dressed in costumes of butchered meat, anorexic midgets, amputees, piss drinkers, shit lickers, men fisting themselves on stage, people eating their own vomit, brutal S&M. The spectacle dusted with endless white powders. Ketamine and cocaine and heroin. Snow was general over Ireland.

  I loved wallowing in the filth that accrues around every fin-de-siècle. That dewy moment before a new millennium when the peasantry stage orgies before the wrath of a nameless God.

  One night in May, I ran into Jae-Hwa, or Sally, or Sigh. She was dressed down, looking like a young professional in her late twenties. Which I guess, technically, she might have been. She was like Franklin. I had no idea what she did for money.

  I was crazy on cocaine. She couldn’t get in a word. I kept talking about three Aerosmith music videos starring a blonde actress named Alicia Silverstone. A living embodiment of fresh-faced lust, appealing to the world’s schoolboys. And their fathers.

  The videos, released over the course of a year, were incredibly popular. People kept talking about them. The most recent, “Crazy,” had debuted a few weeks earlier.

  —There’s a full narrative running through the trilogy, I said. Alicia Silverstone experiences a personality transformation of sexual disinclinations across an elapsed timeframe. The failures of heterosexuality and suburban rebellion in the first video leads into an escape from the phantasms and pleasures of the digital world in the second, the simulacra of which ultimately cannot sustain her interest nor salve the wound of her hetero failures, culminating at last into the petit mal climax of crime and bisexuality that dominates the third.

  —Ah, Baby, said Sigh, I need to make wee.

  I saw a drug dealer named Angel Melendez. He knew Michael Alig. Everyone knew Michael, especially the dealers, but Michael’s relationship with Angel was inscrutable. They were junky and dealer, but Angel had allowed Michael to corrupt the natural power dynamic of the relationship.

  He’d become blinded by Michael’s fame. And, by now, Michael was dazzling.

  He’d become a staple of daytime television. He’d thrown parties in every major American and European city. Every fashion magazine of note had done an article. His movements were tracked in gossip rags, in newspapers, in glossies.

  Angel was one of those sad people who believed that if he suffered a famous person’s abuses, he’d end up famous too. The reward for his naiveté? One time Michael invited Angel to a taping of Geraldo, but Angel had to sit in the audience.

  Angel always wore a pair of wings. Hence the name. These were both a fashion choice and a helpful accoutrement of the drug trade. Potential buyers could spot the wings across even the darkest club. Some people thought he was ugly, but I found him rather handsome, if overly groomed.

  Anyhoo, we didn’t talk much but he did sell me something that he said was ketamine, but as soon as I snorted it, I knew that it couldn’t be ketamine. The taste was wrong, a way different chemical experience. I wasn’t numbed. I wasn’t experiencing the failure of my human senses, but rather their heightening. Like dropping acid without the confusion. Everything shimmered. Everything seemed hyperreal.

  I stumbled around, looking for Queen Rex. I couldn’t remember if I’d come with her. I couldn’t recognize anyone. Everyone’s faces were melting. Whenever I attempted conversation, no words came out of my mouth, or theirs, only the sounds of a thumping techno beat.

  —Thump, thump, thump.

  —Thump, thump, thump.

  —Thump, thump, thump.

  —Thump, thump, thump.

  —Thump, thump, thump.

  I quit Limelight’s cloistered atmosphere for the streets. The cars blurred into a solid state streak of traffic. Light and paint smearing above the pavement. Buildings swayed into each other, charcoal messes of breathing matter.

  I must have started walking, because I stood on the far side of the West Side Highway, looking over the water at the green hills of New Jersey. There wasn’t another soul present. I saw the sky, the slow liquid motion of the heavens, the stars smudging across the sky, as if it were me dislodged in time, as if I were Boaz ben-Haim and could see the twelve evening hours as simultaneous events.

  —Thump thump, I said, thump thump thump?

  Fog rolled off the river, thick tepid tapestry. The piers from the ocean, the streets from the buildings, the buildings from the cars. One gray mesh layer, one impossible situation. I’d done bad drugs, I’d done good drugs, but I’d never done a drug like this. The faux-ketamine had boosted my intelligence, giving my brain a massive spike in capacity. For me, the point of drugs was getting fucked up, dimming the controller, not enhancing its perceptual faculties, not being so transformed that I lost any sense of matter. There was a reason why I hadn’t done DMT.

  A sound came down, a sound like an air horn, a sou
nd like buildings collapsing, a sound like the cries of a banshee announcing the death of a family, a sound like a Greek chorus of dogs heralding their owner’s tragedy. The fog parted, a pathway made through the middle, and walking toward me, I swear, was a solitary figure of unknown proportions.

  I trembled.

  And then it closed upon me. A frail man, five feet eleven inches in height, wearing an Andy Warhol wig. Only another person who thought that if they dressed up like Andy, then they could be Andy.

  —Oh, gee, said the Andy, what are you doing here?

  —Bad drugs, I said.

  —That’s tough, said the Andy. I knew a lot of people who took bad drugs. Most are dead. Some took too much. Some took too little. The rest committed suicide. One girl was hit by a car. It was so sad.

  —Who are you? I asked.

  —You know who I am.

  The Andy took off his black leather jacket. Andy lifted his black turtleneck, revealing the tortured area where Valerie Solanas had fired .32 caliber slugs into his exploding plastic inevitable torso.

  —That’s the best makeup I’ve ever seen, I said.

  —It isn’t makeup, said Andy.

  He took my hand. He put my fingers inside the bullet hole. My fingers sank into his body, warmed by his inner flesh.

  —Don’t look surprised, Andy Warhol said. I came back before, after Valerie murdered me. If death couldn’t stop me then, why would it now?

  —Angel told me it was ketamine, I said. Are you a ghost?

  —I’m much worse than a ghost, he said. You know what the Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite says, don’t you? You can’t define what I am, only what I’m not. Lots of kids know that I’m going to live forever and they haven’t even seen me. You only believe because I’m here before you. All those people have a faith that you don’t. Isn’t it terrific when people believe in you? Isn’t it great when they love you?

  —I don’t believe in anything, I said. I don’t love anyone.

  —Gee, said Andy, that’s too bad.

  Blame the drugs or the writing or the drugged writing. The next night, at Tunnel, I found some kids who’d bought ketamine from Angel, and asked if they’d had similar experiences. They hadn’t. His ketamine was fine, they said. What was wrong with it?

  I called Angel at his number and at Michael’s, but no one answered. I didn’t bother leaving a message on Michael’s machine.

  I found Franklin in the Tunnel basement. I suggested we amscray back to my apartment and do the things that people do when they’re desperate for a flickering glimpse of intimacy. He said that he’d rather stay at the club. I reminded him that he hadn’t checked on The King of France for over a month, and wouldn’t it be nice to see the little guy before he wasn’t a kitten anymore?

  We abandoned Tunnel. Walking back to my place, I kept thinking about Andy fucking Warhol. He’d always been a sore spot, dying a few months after my arrival in Manhattan and long before I’d joined the Downtown scene. He’d haunted my years in New York, his influence lingering over every aspect of my life.

  His death caused a vacuum, and then there was this evil creature Michael Alig, desperate and salivating, muscling his way into the lights and glamour. For over twenty years, those lights and that glamour were Andy’s, he was the beacon for America’s fucked-up and alienated and gay kids. He transformed himself into a living idea like a Tibetan tulpa, an image that self-replicated across the whole culture. But the thing about Andy, the inexplicable thing, is that in addition to being a media superstar, he was the greatest American artist of the twentieth century. I’ll defend that opinion till the death. No one was better.

  Someone like Michael, or the thousands of kids who came to New York each year to throw away their lives on the fable of the Silver Factory, assumed the outward form of Andy without having an ounce of his talent.

  One of life’s cruel facts. Talent floats you in ways that are incomprehensible to the untalented.

  Ability was Andy’s foundation, the bedrock on which he built everything else. When Edie was vomiting up bile, when Ondine was shooting speed into his own eyeball, when Billy Name trapped himself within a bathroom hermitage, there was the underlying stability of talent. A talent that could survive anything. A talent that could survive being shot. A talent that could survive death. A talent that could survive the 1970s.

  Franklin and I got to my apartment. I took off his clothes. Then I took off my clothes. Then I screwed his brains out. Then we hung around, naked, for hours, playing with The King of France.

  —Aren’t you so glad you adopted this little guy? He’s the cutest!

  —It’s probably the best thing that I’ve done with my life, I said. Whenever I imagine his kitten face in a trash can, rotten food on his head, I know that I’ve done something genuinely good.

  The King of France enjoyed chasing change. I’d throw my nickels and dimes and pennies and quarters around the apartment, and he’d run after them, often leading to the spectacle of the fellow trotting around with silver currency dangling from his mouth. At any given time, my floor was littered with roughly thirty dollars in coins.

  We were throwing quarters when someone knocked on my door. I heard a man and a woman giggling.

  —What fucking time is it? I asked.

  —Two in the morning, said Franklin.

  More knocking. The woman’s shrill laughter even louder.

  —This building. These people must have the wrong floor, I said. Straight people can be so fucking annoying. I’m not putting on any clothes. If these people are so rude that they’d knock on a stranger’s door in the early am hours, then they deserve the poet in his naked glory.

  I opened the door. There stood Cecil and Karen Spencer. They’d lived through the East Village arts scene, sure, but it hadn’t prepared them for the glory of my nudity, for a sudden dewy explosion of the uncircumcised human form.

  I should have moved into the hallway and closed the door behind me. Instead I stood there, waiting for them to say something, waiting for them to get over the abrupt frankness of my Hellenic neo-paganism, none of us saying anything until Franklin walked up behind me, himself stark naked, his cock half erect. He put his arms on my shoulders and nuzzled into my neck.

  —Hi, he said. I’m Franklin. Who’re you?

  —I guess I’m not the only person who lives in a soap opera, said Karen Spencer.

  I tried pacifying Cecil, calming him and reassuring him, blaming myself, talking about how much he meant. His need was obvious. He wanted me to fight for him. He wanted a grand show, a pantomime to convince him that it was okay to forgive me. But I didn’t have the energy. I let him slide. I let it pass.

  It’s taken me years to admit it, but it was a shame. Cecil would have forgiven me anything. If I hadn’t fucked it up, he would be sitting behind me now, typing on his computer, happy as a clam.

  Franklin didn’t give a shit one way or the other.

  And me?

  The only thing I cared about was the writing.

  JUNE 1994

  Baby Turns In His Manuscript

  I finished the manuscript, finished my revisions. I typed the title page:

  SAVING ANNE FRANK

  I put the manuscript on Parker’s desk. He reached out with his thick ham hands. He read the title.

  —You’re fucking killing me with this, he said. How the hell am I going to make this right with Bill Thomas?

  —We have a signed contract.

  —Big whoop.

  —Read it. Tell me what you think.

  Happy to be rid of the manuscript, happy to be done with the absolute depths of human darkness, I wandered from Parker’s office and ended up in Central Park, a locale that I generally avoided, ancient obelisks notwithstanding.

  I walked through Sheep Meadow and across West Drive. A large pedestaled statue stood in a leafy grove, dedicated to the memory of the New York 7th Regiment, a Civil War unit. It depicted an infantryman as standing sentry, leaning on his rifle. Scattered aroun
d its base were a bunch of old chicken bones.

  It’s an idealized portrait but I recognized the face. The simple, dumb American face. A face that I’d grown up with, a face that had died hundreds of thousands of times because half of the country could not admit the evils of slavery. I’d spent half a year working on a manuscript, a year that I could have spent living, and soon I’d be gone, too, as dead as the 7th Regiment. Those who escaped battle had gone with old age, or with disease, or with accident. There was no way out. Everyone turned to dust. Why had I even bothered?

  I had a sensation that the Civil War hadn’t ended. That our world lay atop the true, older reality. We were doomed to fight out the same battles. Look at American politics. The schism has always been the same. North versus South. White versus Black. Over two hundred years of the Republic and nothing had changed. The battle went ever on, would go on long after my death, long after my books were forgotten.

  As I looked into that stupid American face, I thought, Oh, fuck, this could be a really good book. This could be great. I was back on the treadmill, the never-ending march of literature.

  Oh, Ulysses S. Grant, you patron secular saint of addiction, how I wished you would deliver me. How I wanted a drink! I stopped at a tourist bar near the Empire State Building and downed a series of vodka sodas.

  Back at my apartment, my answering machine held three messages. All from Parker.

  —You miserable piece of shit, said the machine, you had better pull your dick from whatever hole in which it’s stationed and ring me as soon as you get this. I’m not fucking around, you weak sister.

  He answered the phone. He too had gone into the realm of the drunkard. His voice too was thick with demon alcohol.

  —Parker, I said, it’s Baby.

  —You son of a bitch, he said. You fucking goofball queer.

  —Do you hate it? I asked.

  —A fat girl with a bad weave in yellow snake skin shoes and red pants. That used to be my vision of god. But now I know that god is your manuscript. I want to dress it up, name it Susan and propose blissful and fiscally rewarding matrimony. I want my dick between the pages, evenly distributed on both sides. I want to ride it. This is hot shit, kiddo. I can sell this like water to a ragheaded sonofabitch who’s dying from thirst in the Saudi desert.