The Isle of Minimus

The Isle of Minimus Page 2

by MKL Murphy

  slogan in English, and oversized fanny-packs that were made in China with a secret compartment for coins, the silhouette of the Eiffel Tower stitched to the front, and an X-tra Fit elastic waistband that could stretch around the tourists to secure this distended artificial gut to the tourists’ cargo shorts, stained with McDonald’s condiments and sweat, on which they wiped their fingers after shoving a cheeseburger into their cola-scented mouths and, while chewing, bellowed their disdain for whatever painting they had, out of a sense of duty, left their Holiday Inn to see as their slimy tongues flicked little specks of mashed-up meat and bread onto the work in question to, when the accumulated cheeseburger residue came to obscure a certain percentage of the painting’s surface, be cleaned by professional art restorers, lamenting, as they delicately applied their vacuums and steam-brushes, the disrespect for the museum exhibited by the tourists, of whom few were half as destructive as one notorious visitor to France named Baruch Khazâd, future Lord Minimus, of the Isle of Minimus, a dwarf no elderly restorationist or museum owner could mention without a shudder as they warned their younger colleagues to beware tourists from the Isle, especially the male dwarfs on their plastronnage, as had been Lord Khazâd when, in 1934, having learned of the tradition when he immigrated to the Isle several months earlier from Ukraine, he rampaged through Paris in a drunken frenzy, attacking with a hammer ancient sculptures from Egypt and Greece, setting fire to paintings by Titian and Manet, and committing a lewd act upon the Arc de Triomphe, by which he claimed to be symbolically defiling all of French history as the police dragged him to the commissariat, where, as he peeked over the sill of the barred window at the city, chalk-colored under the lightly-clouded afternoon sun, they threatened him with all manner of brutality should he ever return to France, then beat him with their well-worn truncheons for a few minutes before shackling him naked to the roof of a prisoner train bound for Le Havre, as was the standard punishment in France for defacing artwork, with a ticket for a cargo ship back to the Isle, to be used should he survive the inclement weather, the storm that blew in that evening and drenched him while lightning crashed all around and filled the midnight countryside with a constant, flickering illumination that gave these fields and villages the look of the land of the dead and the two other art defacers shackled to the roof with him the look of crazed skeletons that had somehow come to life and sat themselves down on a train to terrify the clochards riding the rails in the other direction, inspiring tales of the “Vagabond-Fantôme”, who, after his myth reached the locomotive vagrants of the United States, slowly acquired the accoutrements by which this sinister figure is known today, including the tall, red top hat, the shredded tuxedo, stained with the blood of his victims, the monocle that reveals to him the sins of those he sees, the black velvet gloves over his six-fingered hands, the pair of neutered jackals named Dimnah and Kalilah on silver leashes named Rhaff and Rheffyn (fashioned by the finest craftsman of Surat and a nimble-fingered prophetess of Benares), the unspayed Tasmanian she-wolf named Amazon (left to wander freely and sniff out those guilty of committing any injustice against a vagrant or other downtrodden unfortunate), and the ivory cane, shaped into a tight spiral by the bonsai-master Prysgliach Gwrachell through binding, with a modified bonsai harness for twenty years, the living tusk of an enraged bull elephant in perpetual musth out there on the rainy northwestern peninsula of the Isle of Minimus, where, after the removal of this tusk late in its life by the Isle’s sole Nazi occupier for his own collection in 1940, the elephant ceased to patrol the peninsula as its territory and disappeared into the highlands to trample sheep, terrorize milkmaids, and evade the traps of Baruch Khazâd, still as stooped as a Béraud woman from his forced train ride six years earlier but determined to capture the legendary rogue elephant and thereby impress the young women of the Isle, who were ignoring him in favor of those dashing Resistance men fighting the Occu pation from the seaside caves of the west coast and the forests of the central plateau, raiding the cities with their guns and homemade bombs to blow up a statue of Adolf Hitler in Dverberg or steal a jeep and drive it into the ocean, much to the delight of the women staring at them from the windows as they marched into town and occasionally running off to join them in their camps and cook for them or even accompany them on their attacks, as most of the Isle’s women despised the Isle’s Nazi for helping himself to food from their kitchens and groping them and their sisters or daughters in front of their subservient husbands and fathers, though not all these women shied away from his advances, and some actually made a great deal of money entertaining the Nazi in his private villa atop Bach Hill, overlooking the derelict Nouvelle-Chomedey harbor, sent there each night through the intervention of Khazâd, who used his familiarity with the Isle’s major brothel in Dverberg to secretly act as the Nazi’s “intermediary” in these matters in exchange for permission to hunt the rogue elephant, which he knew would give him the prestige to turn a few admiring eyes away from the Resistance godelureaux and toward himself, securing, through his marriage to one of the wealthier girls of the capital city, the necessary support to be named the next Lord Minimus once the Nazis, having completed their invasion of Britain and, succeeding in delivering peace to all Europe, sufficiently confident in their authority to allow the return of certain local customs they had felt it necessary to suppress during the conflict, reinstated that ancient title, which had languished, dormant, ever since the previous Lord Minimus, Carolino Gogoni, died under mysterious circumstances the day after the Nazi parachuted onto the Isle and received, despite the protestations of the Seneschal and part of the Minimal Council, Lord Gogoni’s immediate surrender, shocking this rookie paratrooper, who had undergone six months of training in anti-dwarf combat techniques in preparation for this invasion, expecting to meet heavy resistance from the famously nationalistic inhabitants, many of whom, instead, flocked to greet him and carry his luggage to the Bach Hill estate, where, after tea and boules infestées with the friendlier elders of the Council, he was led down to Lord Gogoni’s barely-seaworthy houseboat, moored in the harbor, and was formally presented, at high tide, with the Instrument of Surrender, signed by Lord Gogoni with one hundred different pens at a table set up on the houseboat’s roof, sheltered from the dismal weather by two menservants holding vast umbrella-lamps, which were printed in elaborate floral designs that threw spidery shadows across the Nazi’s face and made him appear far older when he stuck his pen in the mouth of one of the potted Venus flytraps that lined the roof and leaned back in his chair to brood on the sound of the foghorns guiding out of the harbor the boat evacuating to England a handful of families who had decided against the exercise of their patriotic duty to remain on the Isle during the Occupation while Lord Gogoni continued to pick out his name one penstroke at a time and hand off each pen as it was used to one of the many supporters filling the lower decks and spilling up the stairs, reaching out their hands as Lord Gogoni distractedly held out to them each used pen, each piece of history that would find an honored place in the home of every lucky recipient, who, years later, would, presumably, gesture to the pen on its marble dais in each of their heirloom salons and tell their grandchildren about that beautiful, sunny day they were there on Lord Gogoni’s houseboat to witness the Isle become one of the first members of the glorious Nazi empire that had now raised the swastika over every country and struck Communism, Jewery, and all other depravities from the face of the Earth, clearing the way for the Isle of Minimus to take its place at the head of human achievement, first among all nations in the eternal Reich promised by this Nazi, who sighed with boredom as he provoked the aloof flytraps and shifted uncomfortably in his tiny chair, shivering in the cold mist that blew up off the water and slowly soaked everyone on the roof, including the menservants with their umbrella-lamps, which had begun to leak water into their light bulbs and flicker ominously overhead, the dwarf octet that had, in lieu of their traditional Minimal instruments, taken up, out of respect for their German visitor, gigantic sousaphones, from
which they struggled to force some semblance of Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, and the excited crowd on the stairs, who jostled and tittered with looks of dumb joy on faces dripping with rain and seawater, then gave a raucous cheer as the Nazi was at last handed the document and welcomed by Lord Gogoni to accompany him to a celebration that night in the ancient Roman fortifications overlooking the heavily polluted Dormitory Fjord on the north end of the Isle, where, in the first century AD, the Roman tactician Flavius Phallosius Maximus had drowned after his banishment from Rome for his shocking habit of wearing embroidered sleeves and a primitive wool cravat known as a polemical, which, according to dwarf legend, when it washed ashore some time later near the dwarf settlement now known as Hudson-sur-la-Manche, was interpreted to be a message from the Gods, its ornate floral pattern a strange foreign language that only the mad shaman who then ruled over the western coast of the Isle claimed to be able to decipher, the same mad shaman many dwarf historians believe to be the basis for the myth of the Nain Rouge, but who is, otherwise, poorly remembered (since he almost certainly did not exist), known mainly for sequestering himself for one month in an unidentified cave in the central hills to translate this mysterious text, which, when he at last read it aloud in translation to an assembly of dwarfs from all over the Isle, was found to be a hymn to this shaman’s greatness, a prophecy revealing that, once he, in all his magnificence, had impregnated every woman on the Isle, giants would be forever barred from approaching its shores, and the dwarfs would at last have a homeland free of foreign domination, fulfilling the dream they all shared, even on the northeast coast, among the pirate dwarfs who had supposedly rejected the culture of the western half of the Isle, though few, according to the legend, even in the shaman’s own village of Dverberg, went so far as to allow him to impregnate their wives and daughters, adopting the view, instead, that this mysterious text should be read as an allegory expressing the gods’ wish that the Isle be united under a single ruler, that dwarfs should procreate as often as possible in order to give the Isle a greater number of soldiers to defend its shores, and that giants defiled the land with their presence, brought to it a curse through the stamping of their heavy feet and the bellowing of their brutish voices, the establishment of alien customs unsuited to dwarf life, and the worship of tall gods that held dwarfs in contempt and would never answer their prayers, never accept their sacrificed goats and lambs, and never cease to help giants oppress dwarfs everywhere, which constituted a worldview that served to guide the Resistance in their five years of struggle against the Nazi, to support them in their darkest hours, forming the infrastructure of their faith that to expel this invader would bring the Isle peace, comforting them there in those frigid little rooms somewhere up in the hills as, each evening, the setting sun seemed to drag down with it all their hopes for the future, as the earth cast skyward its limitless shadow and vague shouts from the Marcellaville concentration camp echoed over the land to mix with the sound of the bombs exploding in the cafés and the wail of emergency sirens of ambulances carrying the collaborators and other victims off to the hospital where, when the Isle was at last liberated in October of 1945, the procuretrix of the Dverberg brothel, the only person, besides the Nazi, who could identify Baruch Khazâd as the one arranging the Nazi’s entertainments, as Khazâd never spoke directly to the inmates themselves face-to-face when dealing with these matters, was brought with a gunshot wound to the head and expired immediately upon arrival, prompting the Nazi, as he shared one last dinner on the veranda of his Bach Hill estate alone with young Khazâd, to joke coarsely about the “skilled aim” of this future Lord Minimus, a joke Khazâd seemed to find in poor taste, surprising the Nazi, as he had never found Khazâd to take exception to any joke, no matter how vile, no matter how scatological, racist, misogynistic, blasphemous, or anti-nanoidic, not even the one about the young female dwarf whose nymphomania leads her to embark on an expedition into the heart of darkest Africa, where she meets a dissolute priest whose priapismic escapades have convinced the local populace of his godhood, a witticism with a punchline so revolting that it caused Serge Gainsbourg to double over in helpless laughter when Lord Khazâd shared it with him between takes during the filming of the scene in which Anna Karina hops from petal to petal on a giant cannabis leaf painted across an empty concrete lot with Gainsbourg in the center while chanting “il m’aime, un peu, beaucoup, à la folie, pas du tout”, changing her expression drastically on each petal representing each bit of amatory prognostication from the universe, cheering on the “beaucoup” petal, waving her arms and shouting with joy on the “à la folie” petal, and finally collapsing with despair on the “pas du tout” petal, causing Karina to narrowly escape the assassin’s bullet, which zips past harmlessly into the ground, and Gainsbourg to look up from his copy of Prophetic Dreams of Abraham Lincoln 1850– 1860, part of a one-hundred-volume series entitled Prophetic Dreams of the American Presidents by Sigmund Freud, and shout with annoyance at Alec Guinness, revealed (with a gong sound) as the camera pans to the right to be standing nearby with, in his leather-gloved hands, an enormous gun Gainsbourg takes from him in a choppily-edited martial arts sequence, followed by a scene in which Gainsbourg ties this inscrutable Japanese agent to the statue of the Coq Gaulois standing in front of the French pavilion and pummels him in the rain in the foreground, out of focus on the left half of the frame while, in focus on the right, Karina and Bardot dance beneath their parapluies in their cuissardes à talons hauts to the rhythm of Gainsbourg’s hit song “Bondage spécial” (he also composed the film’s main theme, “Soixante-Neuf, agent provocatif”, which he famously sang with Bardot in what some called an “obscene spectacle” at the 1968 Venice Film Festival, where the film tied for the Leone d’oro) until Guinness admits that he is in league with a sinister alliance consisting of Anglophone Canadian Peter Sellers, Soviet Commissar Marcello Mastroianni, CIa spy Lee Hazlewood, MI6 agent Michael Caine, turncoat agent of the Office québécois de la langue française Steve McQueen, and the evil supercomputer voiced by Marlon Brando, assembled together by an unknown puppet master for the purpose of exterminating the French language, a revelation that so outrages Gainsbourg that, when, in the next scene, he makes his videophone report to le général de Gaulle from his place in Habitat 67, he implores le Général to grant him authorization for Method Extreme Hostility, authorization to openly wage a campaign of total obliteration with a maximum of violence against any and every opponent of the French language encountered by the agent without making the slightest effort to disguise his actions and without any concern for the diplomatic repercussions, something, le Général tells him, a regretful look on his face on the black-and-white telescreen, he could never do, since approval for Method Extreme Hostility could only come from a unanimous vote of the Académie française, and they had not granted such approval since the conflict in Algérie ended five years earlier, although, should Gainsbourg personally make his appeal before the Académie back in Paris, they might be moved to consider it, and so, ordering Bardot and Karina to pack his bags, he telephones the airport and has them reserve three tickets for the next flight back to France, then, immediately upon arriving in Paris, represented by stock footage of an airliner crossing the sky over the Eiffel Tower, locks his secretaries in a windowless apartment with a supply of food and water served in dishes on the floor as if for dogs and takes a taxi to the Palais de l’Institut, where he pushes aside the enormous gilded doors leading to the inner sanctum and enters the enormous, utterly lightless room, an endless black void that echoes with the sound of the doors thudding shut behind him, then waits until, after a moment of dread, a distant overhead lamp clicks on, sending down a pillar of light to illuminate le Premier Immortel, the Dean of the Académie, his face hidden in the shadows of his heavy black robe where he sits on his raised golden throne (with the thirty-nine other Immortals, seated on similar thrones in a wide half-circle around Gainsbourg, glimpsed only when one speaks and the light above him clicks on to m
ark him out in the darkness), looking down on Gainsbourg with what he imagines to be contempt as le Premier Immortel extends an antenna-like finger toward him and demands to know why he has intruded on their solitude, their magnificent silence here at the heart of all France, in this chamber where they ponder the eternal mysteries of the Logos, le mot, the divine wisdom of the infinite, as it is expressed in the greatest language ever handed down from Heaven to mankind, the greatest language human tongues will ever speak, the French language, the language that he had gone to Montréal, Gainsbourg announces to the Quarante, to defend from its enemies, who would see that vile collection of grunts and coughs, English, replace it, forever closing off mankind from communication, reducing them all to the level of mindless animals, snarling at each other as they paw through the weeds for a squirming grub to chew or a rat to tear apart with their bare fingers among the ruins of skyscrapers and abandoned machinery that no one would now be able to comprehend, rusting in the gray twilight, the gray dawn of a new era of barbarism that could only be averted if the majestic Académie française, in all its perspicacity, granted him authorization to carry out Method Extreme Hostility against the international conspiracy that had lain siege against their brothers in that lonely outpost of civilization among the savages of North America, authorization the Académie, after several moments of whispering, refuse Gainsbourg with the explanation that they wish to cultivate a better relationship with the outside world after having alienated so many countries with their bloody feuds against those swarthy bandits in the Real Academia Española, jibbering corsairs whose putrid language has infected much of the Americas and leaves a sharp pain in the ears whenever one listens too long to its grotesquely ululating vowels and hissing consonants, and those effete functionaries in the Svenska Akademien, a tribe of bloated and self-satisfied Scandinavian pencil-pushers who raise their fragile little hands to cover their puckered little ears in fright whenever the virile tones of the French language are to be heard in their vicinity as their prematurely withered catamites beg the Francophonic interloper to speak instead the watery pidgin German of Sweden, feuds which have only recently ended by a treaty that deny the Académie française the ability to use Method Extreme Hostility against its enemies without the approval of the other two academies, both of whom have made it clear that they have no intention of ever granting such approval, infuriating Gainsbourg, who, furious at this defeat, when he encounters the Svenska Akademien ambassador oiling the chest of a shriveled Alaskan ladyboy, imported from a remote logging encampment, in the hall outside, can not help but shove them out of his way while shouting “va te faire foutre”, then storms past a flock of admiring autograph-seekers to, after collecting Karina and Bardot, head for the Eiffel Tower and take his private elevator to the restricted uppermost platform, where all three place on their tongues LSD microdots that allow them to see and pass through the invisible door in the tower pinnacle to Gainsbourg’s secret lair, decorated with zebra-print shag carpeting, dozens of West German “Astro Lamps” (in which bubbles of wax drift in a heated, colorful fluid), psychedelic posters on the walls, a mirror covered by a black velvet curtain, what appears to be a brain floating in a large, glass cylinder, into which an automaton called “The Turk”, in the shape of an old gentleman in a tuxedo, stares intently as he nods in agreement with the brain and takes notes on a clipboard with quick jots of a pen attached to one of his white-gloved, mechanical hands, and a hidden revolving closet full of high-powered rifles, handguns, mortars, grenades, throwing knives, a flame-thrower he has kept from his time fighting in Algérie, a toaster-sized atomic bomb he has stolen from the CIa during a recent joint operation between French intelligence and the American agency, and dozens of other weapons, all of which they take with them back to Montréal, in defiance of the Académie française’s explicit directive to allow the local police to deal with any difficulties that may arise during the forthcoming World’s Fair, which Marlon Brando (the supercomputer) announces from a speaker in the blink ing edifice of the enormous machine will, according to his calculations, never succeed, shocking the assembled Montréal politicians and Expo bureaucrats in a scene set shortly before Expo 67’s April opening day in the Pavilion du Super ordinateur, where the bespectacled scientists are showing off this invention, one of the star attractions of Expo 67, asking the supercomputer various questions, for predictions regarding the number of Moon bases in the year 2000, if the Canadiens or the Maple Leafs will win the Stanley Cup, and how many visitors will come to their pavilion, horrifying everyone when it accurately announces that it will receive no visitors whatsoever, then contradicts itself, assuring them that it must have made an error in its calculations, causing an uproar so chaotic that few, at first, notice Gainsbourg pushing his way through the crowd as Karina and Bardot fight Britt Ekland and Diana Rigg with knives amid the oblivious, red-faced bureaucrats, who, all at once, cringe and turn to watch in stunned confusion as plumes of blood spray from the combatants’ wounds, the four of them slashing and stabbing and really working the knives into each other’s flesh, sending up geysers of blood that drive the suddenly timid crowd toward the exits, that spray inexhaustibly as the secretaries hack away, that drips from the ceiling and coats the walls while Gainsbourg approaches, unopposed, the huge, evil supercomputer, whirring, flashing its lights, and laughing as Gainsbourg sloshes through the blood, swirling up to his ankles, and futilely attacks, with a big, American pistol, the machine’s well-armored façade, which, Brando’s voice announces, can not be penetrated by any known weapon, leaving Gainsbourg, along with his secretaries, who have just finished decapitating Ekland and Rigg, no other choice but to stand before the supercomputer and, as it gloats over the impending destruction of the French language and the triumph of English, sing “la Marseillaise”, jamming its transistors with this most patriotic of French anthems, overloading its wiring with the glory of Jeanne d’Arc and Napoléon, and scorching its punch cards with the righteous inferno of the Revolution and the Republic, so that smoke and flames burst from the supercomputer and it begins shouting “DOES NOT COMPuTE” as Gainsbourg and his secretaries flee the collapsing pavilion, which Lord Khazâd and Hercule watched burn from behind the film crew until Lord Khazâd grew bored and suggested that, since opening ceremonies were scheduled for the next week, they take one last walk around the Expo grounds before the place opened, convincing, with his belligerent wheedling, Hercule, who preferred to stay and watch the actors, to come strolling along the broad, winding asphalt pathways between these towering monuments to the modern age and breath the balmy air that wafted over the silver Saint Lawrence river, which flowed with a hidden strength beneath the dark and rainy sky that hung down low and hid, within a swirl of mist, the Farine Five Roses Flour sign lighting up the clouds around it with a somber, smoldering red glow that was snuffed out as the mist thickened and the colossal factories along the river grew distant and spectral and, with the black skyscrapers of downtown Montréal, plunged into an ocean hanging in the air, vanished from the distorting lenses of cold water droplets clinging to the pine trees or running down the smooth, round surface of the Women’s Pavilion, wet beneath Hercule’s face as he rested against it with his eyes closing and his coat buttoned up around him, shivering once in the immense silence then continuing on to the Isle of Minimus building along the empty pathways, abandoned for fear of the rain threatening to fall again at any moment, past the futuristic buildings and empty kiosks, to take shelter under the monorail track, where he stopped to smoke and wait out a brief downburst with Lord Khazâd, thinking, as he sat there, about the time they had gone wandering through Montréal and the strange path that Lord Khazâd had walked, the hidden pattern within the city, somehow familiar, but lost in the fog of time, fading in his mind as water poured down around this narrow patch of dry pavement, where Hercule shivered and smoked, then, resting his head against a monorail pylon, drifted off to sleep, dreaming of distances, glimpsing mountains and sand, rocks and dust that glowed in the parched glare of t
he midday sun, and a wall at the end of a road, a wall with a big door guarded by a man in a uniform who approached the car with a hand on his Taser then, noticing Sakharin, waved them through, pressing a button on his belt that opened the doors and allowed Lord Khazâd’s valet to drive the limousine onward, into Sakharin’s Location City, where paid models cavorted on the glistening lawns and relaxed in deck chairs, posing as neighbors for the benefit of prospective tenants being shown one of the houses on Olde England Street as the sound of a construction crew hammering in some final nails over on Venice Avenue resounded throughout the development, betraying the unfinished elements of this community, which, presumably, would soon be full of families luxuriating on their themed street of choice, imagining themselves to be colonial plantation owners on Patriot Boulevard or vigorous western pioneers on Heartland Escape Avenue, much as Lord Khazâd, on seeing the sign for Olde England Street from his place in the back seat in between his twin showgirl associates, puffed himself up like an old London gentleman and affected a sort of English accent that he imagined would impart a certain proclamatory pomp to his request for everyone’s attention, which he followed, in his normal Isle accent, with the announcement to Sakharin and Hercule (he had already told the twins, though they seemed to listen attentively anyway) of his latest business venture, involving a company that would, once a customer provided them with a detailed history and all pictures, videos, diaries, and other mementos of a deceased loved one, employ highly skilled voice actors to call the customer on the telephone once a day, or week, or on whatever schedule that customer’s specific tiered plan allowed, and imitate the loved one in question, pretending to be on a vacation somewhere, telling the customer how much they missed everyone, how much fun they were having there, then reminiscing about the good old days or, if this loved one had been in a romantic relationship with the customer, describing in explicitly pornographic language certain encoun ters with the customer they would have as soon as they got back from wherever they had gone, though many of the actors expressed reservations against providing this latter service and Lord Khazâd was, after several months, forced to recruit a number of “live local singles” away from “adult chat line” companies to bolster the ranks of those willing to have such discussions, relying on them to keep this core service in operation, despite the singles’ difficulties in mimicking their assignments’ voices and in remembering to follow the provided biographical materials and scripts rather than immediately reverting to old habits and pouring out a context-free litany of obscene physical depravities, which led Lord Khazâd to shift the company away from its original, relatively chaste purposes and toward providing, through a satellite transmitter, the “minds” and lip-synched voices of non-sentient Japanese brothel-bots, designed to look exactly like each customer’s dead wife and to animatronically perform a number of functions that were guided by each employee at a sophisticated control panel with a video viewscreen, through which she would watch her assigned customer while speaking to him in the dead woman’s voice and even, with the later models, undertaking such complex tasks as cooking breakfast, washing dishes, or, clumsily, going for a walk outside, never truly seeming authentically human but sufficiently similar to the deceased that the pain of loss was largely mitigated for these grieving widowers, and sufficiently able in matters both tediously quotidian and grotesquely mechano-carnal that several dozen were soon employed as maids in one Las Vegas megaresort, steered down the halls and around the laundry rooms by a team of bored men in cubicles for minimum wage (this quickly proved uneconomical), while nearly one hundred were rented by a certain Nevada brothel to perform acts on their clients that would be too dangerous or too vile for even the most experienced human prostitute, all of them operated remotely by men in tactile-feedback motion-capture bodysuits with a small number of women in headsets down the hall, soon replaced by recordings, to provide the voices when the clients would engage the robots in conversation, something the extraordinarily high price of even a half-hour session with one usually discouraged until Lord Khazâd hit upon the idea of giving these brothel-bots the faces and imitated voices of celebrities like Brigitte Bardot, who, by suing him for this flagrant violation of intellectual property, soon bankrupted the entire company and left Lord Khazâd drowning his sorrows in a glass of mushroom champagne on the balcony of his hotel room, watching the cars and pedestrians far below move through the crawling gloom of late afternoon as he reflected on his failure and wished that he could go back to that day in the limousine with his face squeezed between the colossal bosoms of the twin showgirls, announcing this project to Hercule and his friend Sakharin, who was sitting across from him, half-listening to Lord Khazâd’s vigorous boasts, but distracted by an obvious desire to change the subject to the rather flimsy housing development this Sakharin had apparently designed to appeal to the consumers of his colorful paintings of quaint churches and lighthouses seemingly illuminated from within by a fiery glow, duplicated in these houses with orange-tinted windows, which, at night, had, according to Sakharin, an effect pleasing to the eye and reminiscent of that warm light peeking out from between the curtains of one’s grandparents’ home in the darkened country side on Christmas Eve when one, as a child, would travel many miles down ancient snowy lanes with one’s parents in their finest carriage behind four great snorting beasts of horses that wore, on their steaming flanks, the family crest in lavender silk and gold thread and were whipped onward through the night by one’s father’s servants, back when the world was at peace, when people knew their station and held to it, when one’s servants showed the proper deference to one, quite unlike this lad up there beyond the glass partition at the wheel of the rented limousine, Lord Khazâd’s valet of nearly a year, who rarely missed an opportunity to betray a hidden attitude of loathsome impertinence toward his master, a contempt that this servant, whatever his name was, had already shown that very day while carrying, with face red and muscles straining beneath his uniform, Lord Khazâd up through the tunnels into the Mini-Paris strike zone to check in on Hercule and encourage him to give up this madness, to either accept the company’s offer or renew his servant’s credentials and come work for him as his new valet, which constituted a subject he, perhaps, in retrospect, Lord Khazâd realized, should not have discussed while being held by the valet himself, who nearly dropped Lord Khazâd out of spite when he heard the plan, and only failed to do so because of his master’s extraordinarily tenacious grip, developed in his elephant-wrestling days as a young man on the Isle of Minimus, where, he assured Lucille in his meeting with her and Hercule in Lucille’s “war room” that she set up in the miniature Palais de l’Institut, she would still be able to see those wild elephants that clearly fascinated her running free in the central plains of the Isle if she would only abandon this futile strike and come back to the Isle with him as one of his unofficial concubines in the guise of a half-dwarf of Hokkaido, free, thanks to the hatred of half-dwarfs among most inhabitants of the Isle, to spend her leisure time alone and unencum bered by the usual demands of dwarf society, doing whatever she wanted to do, far from this tedium, this hopeless cause, with its dwindling food supplies, with its few remaining reinforcements from Seattle fleeing in greater and greater numbers over the barricades each night and leaving behind nothing but soiled Hacky Sacks, climbing the walls and surrendering to the waiting police, who would then loudly mock through their loudspeakers the strike as they hit and kicked the barricades with their nightsticks and their regulation Cold Mercury X steel-toed boots, dislodging a few wet and unidentifiably aromatic chunks of garbage on the other side to be discovered in the morning by Lucille, who, at first, thought them, in light of her somewhat violent reaction to Lord Khazâd’s advances the previous day, to be pieces torn from the wall by the dwarf leader in a rage at this unprecedented rejection before she noticed that, up close, these mucilaginous clumps of miscellaneous debris were twitching irregularly, as if they encased some living thing like some kind of cocoon, and, pulling back the decaye
d scraps of french fry wrappers, newspaper, political leaflets, cardboard, outdated calendars, the faded remains of a poster for a 1991 movie (set in 1999) called Until the End of the World, a poster for The Matrix (which is set in a virtual 1999, a simulation of the world as it was at what the movie correctly predicts will remain “the peak” of human civilization), rotten plywood splinters, bottle caps, TV Guides, and plastic spoons, she gasped, finding one of the poisonous frogs they had killed and incorporated into the barricade (they were running out of material to reinforce it at this point), now twitching weirdly, kicking its legs like a marionette, then righting itself, leaping from the cocoon, landing on the concrete, and hopping off into the distance, a frog that had, without a doubt, been dead the day before, restored to life by the barricade, this huge wall that cast its shadow over Lucille and now, suddenly, seemed to be filled with an ominous and watchful presence, following her as she stepped back from it with a strange fear in her heart and thought back to the big, modern canal and the river of leaves contained within its sloping concrete walls in Tokyo, where, when the old man pulled her out, she had felt this same sense of being overwhelmed by a vast, living presence or pure vitality, which had frightened her and had kept her from returning to the canal until just before she was scheduled to hijack the All Nippon Airways plane near the end of September and felt that she could not wait any longer to find out what had happened to her there in that forgotten neighborhood with its big, empty apartment buildings, still hollow and blackened against the deepening afternoon sky as she passed between them and, steeling herself against the terror rising within her, stepped forth among the trees and the million leaves, orange and red, drifting down around her and glowing with a fiery brilliance in the light of the setting sun, which illuminated the old man on his stilts out there among the fallen leaves of the canal, fishing around with his hook, then, as she watched, unseen, looking toward the west and giving up for the night, trudging back to the side of the canal, where he climbed out, took off his stilts, and walked away, toward a small garage, in which, after following him through the playground, she found him kneeling among the badly rusted lawnmowers, shovels, and rakes before a shrine four feet tall with a door too small for him to actually enter, though, he explained, after she knocked and entered, the ones who had built it could easily fit inside this tiny structure, which the pious engineers of this neighborhood had been ordered to demolish while building the canal but had saved instead by concealing it inside this garage, where the old cocoon-man now came each evening to burn incense for the kami of the canal and push a prayer card through the mail slot in the little door before hurrying home to avoid the strange foreigners in black robes, who came each night to check on the long, black boats they kept moored nearby under camouflage netting behind a stack of rotting lumber as they waited year after year for water to be diverted into the canal from the Sumida River, which, owing to unexpectedly high industrial usage beginning around the time of the canal’s completion, had never risen high enough to make the canal necessary to prevent the flooding of this neighborhood, a neighborhood that, moreover, had been completely abandoned by all but a few homeless men, nesting in the upper floors of the apartment towers, who avoided strangers and seemed to view the old man’s quest out among the leaves with suspicion, leaning over and muttering darkly to each other when they saw him approaching during their feasts in the playground, where, to mark certain holidays, they roasted, with a fire under the merry-go-round, various small birds they had caught in traps that consisted of dead female birds they found lying on the ground, then, under the direction of one of their number, a former taxidermist of the old Japanese style who had lost his business when more efficient Western-style taxidermy companies appeared in Tokyo at the end of the 1980s, shaped into poses corresponding to those of their particular species that suggested that they were receptive to mating with males, which, while flying over, spotted these females lined up on the roofs of the apartment towers and, upon darting down to copulate with them, immediately became speared on the sharpened fish hooks protruding from the cloaca of each female, providing these men with just enough food to survive as they waited through the decades for something inexpressible and unimaginable to come and change the world enough that they would have some place in it, have a life that didn’t involve hiding from the police trying to beat them for vagrancy and thuggish teenagers trying to set them on fire for fun as they slept, a life beyond catching wild animals for food and growing cave cacti, imported from the Isle of Minimus, in the basements to ferment into a harsh liquor they drank to ease the pain of living in this universe of infinite horror and, occasionally, sold to the old cocoon-man on days when he couldn’t quite stamp down the feeling of pointlessness that rose in his chest and gripped his lungs with such force that, without drinking, he could only lie motionless on the banks of the canal all day, struggling to breathe and imagining, over and over, jumping from the roof of one of these apartment towers to land, he hoped, on the hard ground and not in the canal, as one of the elder homeless men did a year earlier, falling into the leaves, where the cocoon-man found him the next day encased in a thick, autumnal shell, from which, after it was cut open, the man climbed, greeting him distantly, then shook his head to clear it and strode off along the canal with a vigor surprising in one so old, older than the old cocoon-man himself, who, as whenever he saw a lonely older man, could not help but imagine himself at that age, and thought of all the empty years of meaningless suffering stretching out before him, years of solitude, contempt, and decay, waiting, wondering why everyone in the whole world didn’t kill themselves and, moreover, actually inflicted this world on children as well, reproducing, perpetuating this suffering, dooming another generation to a lifetime of pain, an act of evil that filled him with an immense loathing whenever he went down to the American-style supermarket near the army base, usually once or twice a week, to buy food and encountered the mass of bitter-faced mothers in nice clothes, each dragging a shrieking infant with its Disney character stuffed doll in its mucus-slick hands down the aisles while chatting with the other mothers about the repairs they were having done to their houses, the movies they had seen, and the vacations on which their successful salaryman husbands were planning to take them in places like Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, or Las Vegas, where, when they arrived with their still-shrieking children, Hercule, by the last few weeks of the strike, began to identify in himself a similar loathing for this ugly and cruel cycle that infested the Earth with these beings, destined to wither and die after spawning more of themselves to wither and die after spawning in turn without end, disgusting him as he watched from the barricades one bright noon a group of these foreign tourists gawking at the strike zone from a distance as a number of American tourists swarmed forth and shouted and cursed the strikers for ruining everything, throwing assorted objects in Hercule’s direction until he turned away and, thinking about leaving the strike altogether and wandering off to die somewhere, headed for the miniature Notre Dame, where, sidling between the interior wall of the cathedral and the concrete bunker that held the door to the secret tunnel, he found Lord Khazâd ensconced in a rancid shell of gelatinous sludge, trapped there, behind the bunker, at the back of the cathedral, for three days now, ever since he had squeezed up out of the tunnel to ask, one last time, that Hercule end the strike and found that, because of his rapid weight gain, he could no longer fit through the gap between the bunker and the walls of the cathedral around it and did not have the energy to squeeze back through the tunnel door, leaving him to survive by choking down bits of the spoiled whale blubber, molasses, and lard that had missed his mouth and slowly coated his entire body, which had now wasted away to such an extent that, if he had possessed the energy, he could have climbed like a hermit crab in and out of this glistening shell, which had, more or less, retained the shape of his body at its most corpulent even as he withered away inside it, sucking weakly on the walls of his shell as he lay, delirious, on the floor of its belly like a fetus, hallu
cinating that he had returned to the uterus and was gradually shrinking back to a zygote before separating back into sperm and egg, listening to the far, warm rush of the freeway reverberating in his ear and idly stroking the polished brass “bell” of his codpiece (as it was skin tight, it was not captured by the hardening sludge and remained as his only piece of clothing during his time in the shell), inlaid with jade and turquoise Chinese characters the ancient procuretrix of an “Asian massage” parlor in a strip mall on Flamingo Road had translated for Lord Khazâd in the lounge while they waited for the masseuses to emerge from the back rooms and assemble for the line-up one afternoon as an idiomatic Cantonese approximation of the Nymphocratic Oath, sworn, up until the mid-twentieth century, by licensed nymphomaniacs of the Nymphosopher’s Guild, who, she surmised, must have fashioned this codpiece for a favored client some time after the introduction of the Guild to Hong Kong by the British in the late 1850s, during the colonial government’s attempts to quell and regulate the swarms of prostitutes and assorted nymphomaniacal debauchees infecting their soldiers with “social diseases hitherto unknown in Christian lands”, as the procuretrix called them, and treated, by these embarrassed victims, with a variety of local folk medicines, such as boiled eel cloaca, toad heart, and elaborate codpieces not unlike this one, thought to magnetize the evil spirits within the genitals and draw them out into a small, poison-filled chamber called the oubliette within the codpiece, from which the prostitutes would drink the poison and thereby free the wearer of the “malign influence” that had waylaid him in this mysterious, alien country full of “exotic women, as corpulent as they were beautiful, in gossamer robes barely covering their nudities, beckoning with a flick of a pale hand from dark doorways that exhaled sweet clouds of opium smoke” and led to shadowy labyrinths, creaking like the lower holds of a great sailing ship and full of delighted murmurs and sighs from somewhere in the darkness, where a local matron would lead the innocent visitor to his doom among the embroidered pillows and gild ed Chinese samovars and hookahs of the candlelit initiation chamber, stocked with depraved girls proficient in “the forbidden Eastern repertoire of love known as the Kama Sutra, smuggled just five years earlier from the land of the Hindoos” by an English trader and already mastered by China’s nymphomaniacs, who, when an Englishman fell in love with one of their number, would refuse all his pleas of marriage and “continue to exercise their unnatural passions upon every man seeking out horizontal refreshment in their bagnios until at last he would grow so frenzied with an amative jealousy over his lynx-eyed temptress” that, in several recorded cases, he would seek out “a blacksmith of infamy” and, casting aside all smitings of conscience, would commission an iron or bronze chastity belt that, after dulling his love’s senses with wine or hashish, he would secure to her person with the turn of a key he would then destroy with a hammer or throw into the harbor in order to ensure that only he himself, with his uniquely matching codpiece, which was designed by the blacksmith to interlock with the complex mechanism of the sliding door in the chastity belt, could “enjoy a sojourn among her lower indulgences, heretofore shared by dozens of sailors from every corner of the Earth each night” and now reserved as his exclusive domain for the precious few months the woman in question would usually survive before the fire of her unquenched nymphomania, which “even the most amorous man, capable of, perhaps, five or ten expressions per day, could not satisfy”, would overheat her body with a fever so intense that her corpse would remain too hot to touch for nearly a full day after her expiration and, where it lay in contact with the metal of the chastity belt, would sizzle audibly and fill the death chamber with the noxious stench of frying genitalia, so overwhelming to the perfumed classes that only the most wretched rag-and-bone men dragged off the street and most abject of drunkards with noses plugged by weeks-old crusts of their own vomit could, even days later, be induced to venture into the room, wrap the body in linens, and anoint it with camphor before slinging it out the window into a waiting cart drawn by a donkey or old cow that, in a crazed rush to flee the hideous odor of the corpse, would, in the best of circumstances, hurl itself into the harbor and drown as the corpse floated out toward the ocean (driving, much to the chagrin of local fisherman, all fish from its vicinity), and, under less ideal circumstances, would, instead, run into the most densely populated areas of the city and dash its brains out on a wall, a bollard, or the corner of a merchant’s fruit stall, where the corpse, in its tattered shroud, would lie moldering for days as the entire neighborhood petitioned the colonial government for its removal and occasionally rioted outside the governor’s mansion under the influence of nationalist groups who demanded that the British forbid their colonists and traders from locking chastity belts to local women, excepting those cases in which the act was authorized and overseen by a panel of nuns from the Kowloon convent already granted a special dispensation to “belt” nymphomaniacs not protected by the Nymphosopher’s Guild, which, in its loathing for independent, or “scab”, nympho maniacs (so called because, outside the regulation of the Guild, these women were rarely well-treated and were usually found each morning lying in a gutter and covered in bruises, wounds, and the oozing scabs of earlier wounds), happily encouraged its members to turn these competitors over to the nuns’ militia, composed of local converts to Catholicism and foreign mercenaries, who, after having their way with the nymphomaniacs, would shackle them together into long processions that would be forced to crawl on their hands and knees through the city streets while onlookers jeered and threw dung and rotten squid at the women, led to the convent by a militia lieutenant for a day of brutal flagellation, witnessed from rows of makeshift stadium seats by those wealthy enough to afford the highly-prized tickets, followed by the belting ceremony, consisting of three novices pouring buckets of scaldingly hot water over the shackled nymphomaniacs as the Mother Superior sprinkled holy water over the newly-forged chastity belts and recited the history of the Levite from Ephraim, the destruction of Gibeah, and the taking, as wives for the Benjamites, of the women of Shiloh, who, in their meek obedience to the Lord’s will when they were abducted and deflowered for the restoration of Israel’s tribes, provided the model these nymphomaniacs should follow as brides of the Lord here in the convent, where they would, in the short time left to them, be trained as nuns and expected to carry out tasks necessary for the daily operations of the convent, such as sweeping the floors, washing the walls, and carrying, on her litter, the Mother Superior along the steep and narrow path up the hill from the convent to the enormous, concave iron dish, fifty feet across, forged by the same blacksmith famous for the codpieces and chastity belts for the purpose of amplifying the nuns’ prayers over the entire harbor and thereby protecting it from “the predations of heathens not yet willing to accept Christian rule over this corner of the total depravity that was the Orient, still largely unexplored even then in the 1850s and still as infested with sinister pagan kings as it was in the time of Marco Polo”, the procuretrix continued, “whose journey from Venice to the utter East brought the knowledge necessary to construct gondolas to the court of Kublai Khan, where that inscrutable Mongol king had a dozen of these strange foreign boats (which so fascinated him) built by the finest craftsmen of Chungking according to the rather vague descriptions shared by Polo”, then sent for experienced sailors to pilot these gondolas, which were adorned with elaborate dragon figure-heads, into battle against “the mysterious black gondolas that had terrorized merchants on the Grand Canal linking Peking with Hangchow ever since the canal was constructed in the seventh century according to plans said to have been first drawn up by the legendary Li Bing himself” and had continued even after Kublai Khan had, earlier in his reign, reshaped the canal to make it more difficult for these ghost-like invaders to hide from the watch towers set every three miles along its banks and manned by teetotaling insomniacs, who proved to be, despite their vigilance, incapable of sighting the black gondolas in time to deploy soldiers and catch them before they vanished
with a cargo of silk or garlic looted from a defenseless junk or comely young maidens (sedated with hashish) they stole from the “bride barges” bringing women from Korea to serve as wives and concubines in the court of the Khan or for these strange and apelike men from the distant West, whom he had appointed rulers of Yangchow on the Grand Canal to assuage their longing for their home, which the one called Marco Polo had described in amusing but rather preposterous tales as a flooded city where the streets had become canals and where, rather than walking or riding a horse from place to place, the people traveled on boats like these gondolas, with, instead of highwaymen lying in wait to accost someone on the road, a band of devious gondoliers, under the banner of the Black Gondola Society, attacking from the shadows of the great palaces in black gondolas that were disturbingly similar to those reported here in China by those few peasants and merchants who had seen them and lived to tell of them, gondolas not unlike those which Hercule noted, as he watched from his nest atop the miniature Eiffel Tower, had returned to the Venetian in even greater numbers than before the strike and often carried local policemen and federal agents, conversing with the gondoliers and gesturing to diagrams and blueprints that Hercule recognized as those of Mini-Paris itself and that they were undoubtedly using to coordinate their invasion on the final night of the strike, the thirty-first of December, the deadline President William “Bill” Clinton had set for the few remaining strikers to give themselves up to the authorities and allow the good, hardworking people of the Paris Las Vegas Hotel and Casino, like Rosita, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of five who folded sheets and towels for minimum wage at the hotel and had been unable to work because of the strike, Kirk, a twenty-eight-year-old blackjack dealer whose house would be repossessed soon if the situation continued, and Crystal, a twenty-four-year-old hostess in the hotel lounge who struggled to make her student loan payments and provide for her newborn twin boys (Brendo and Diano), to finally get back to work, not only for themselves, but for America, the one country on Earth where hard work was valued, where begging for a handout was unacceptable, where people like Rosita, Kirk, and Crystal knew that they could accomplish anything with enough persistence and can-do-itiveness, which was why the President, on the last day of 1999, had no choice but to authorize the use of force against these radical activists in Mini-Paris, sending battalions of sweating National Guardsmen to Las Vegas to help restore order, reinforcing the three hundred tourists already seeking wild vengeance against the strikers that evening as the local police grunted unintelligibly over their loudspeakers in support and watched a detachment of sagging Nebraskans beat their cheeseburger-stunted limbs against the western flank of the barricades to distract the dwarf patrols from the southern wall, where an uncountable mob of fraternity brothers in backward baseball caps were lighting Molotov cocktails and flinging them toward the miniature Louvre, which burst into flame with a sharp crack and sent up a roaring blaze that nearly drowned out the sporadic blurt of the fiendish Isle bagpipes that were driving the more feeble among the attackers back from the barricades and casting a sense of pessimism over a squadron of good old Texas boys who, had this unnatural, music-like noise not dissuaded them from their plan, would have, that night, infiltrated Mini-Paris through the miniature Seine by swimming, equipped with waterproofed flak jackets and improvised snorkels, down from the Venetian then arrested Ken and Johnny (the presumed ringleaders of the strike) and turned them over to the police to face a number of charges that would be summed up in the newspapers as supporting a socialistic or communistic ideal against the hard facts of reality, common sense, that sense of stagnation everyone had felt creeping in since the summer, in the back of their minds, from the corner of their eye, that sense of turning a page to find that the book has ended and the rest of the pages are blank, the way things have to be, the way things would be forever, from now on, among this collapse of possibilities into an endless grid of crumbling streets lined with fast food franchises, car title loan shacks, gentlemen’s clubs in converted Pizza Huts with the windows painted over, Hooters drive-thrus, and long-vacant strip malls with faded ethnic frescos applied to the crumbling brick to hide their decay and impart a sense that, although it had long since vanished from living memory, some measure of authentic culture had once existed here in this place, unique among all the other identical and contiguous aggregations of mediocrity baking in the haze past every horizon in the dust and in the smog mixed with blown sand in the choking wind that rose up in the mornings then left everything to stagnate all afternoon under the distant howl of a freeway and the raw choir of tirelessly barking dogs chained to a stake exactly at the center of a big round circle of trampled, bare dirt in a hundred thousand backyards carved into the endless concrete and asphalt expanse, which, outside of these little square plots with their cardboard-colored trees and withered shrubs, split to allow the most cruel and wiry of weeds to poke up from the cracks and adorn the streets with something reminiscent of the natural world that was, otherwise, depleted and forgotten in the rush to build a future that no one could still believe would ever have existed under any circumstances beyond the manic schemes of utopian madmen now mocked for their naive conception of humanity as something that could be improved or, at least, restrained from its most selfish impulses, which everyone now knew to be inescapably fundamental to even the most seemingly empathetic human acts, laid bare at last as components of a vast machine capable of only violence and reproduction, churning through its gears each living entity, which, though, in its more complex forms, might fool itself with the jargon of some illusory morality, could never escape its preordained function to either kill or be killed, decided billions of years earlier, when the first primordial chemicals began to combine in ways that perpetuated their combinations and found that, in order to flourish, they would need to destroy other combinations floating out there in the miasma that had now been recreated here on a monumental scale in a soup of car exhaust and industrial emissions where, very soon, some new and voracious form of life, better adapted to the present conditions, would arise to consume predecessors ill-suited to the artificial world they had built around themselves in a desperate and unconscious attempt to smother the natural world and all its inherent sadism and allow the planet to join the rest of the universe as a place of peace, an attempt to leave behind nothing but an ecstatic stillness that would mystify the searching astronomers of those few places where the people had not yet had the courage to face honestly the fact that their suffering need not be perpetuated forever and still expected to find others like themselves out there among the galaxies of ruins, the hundred billion worlds of strip malls and turn-key car washes slowly falling apart after centuries of silence, a certain silence that was distinguished by its sense of welcome, its sense of a merciful relief, that spread through the ancient constellations, a deluge, washing the universe clean of pain, burning away the much-sentimentalized infections and their creations, passing from city to city, planet to planet, and spilling already down the immaculate streets of Sakharin’s housing development when he brought Hercule and Lord Khazâd to visit on the afternoon of December 31 after Lucille suggested Hercule set up such a trip to scout out the development as a place where they might be able to convert the locals to their cause and begin establishing outposts of solidarity around Las Vegas, though Hercule was disappointed to find that no one had yet moved in, even months after the first homes were opened to buyers, and that, now that the construction crews, finished with the last of the houses, were leaving in their big trucks and the selling agent was driving off, grim-faced, with her prospective residents explaining that they wanted to look at some houses on the other side of town as they passed the hired models simulating neighbors locking up their houses and setting off for their real homes, a sense of utter lifelessness pervaded each of the miniature neighborhoods Hercule and Sakharin were strolling through with Lord Khazâd and his twin showgirls giggling behind them, ignoring Sakharin, who distractedly pointed out the various features of the houses
that were based on locales in his paintings while constantly checking his voice mail on his telephone for a message from his good friends Gallagher (a popular comedian) and Yakov Smirnoff, who had promised to meet him here today after visiting their mutual friend Vanessa Rimbaud (descendant of Arthur Rimbaud and an anonymous Italian-Swiss prostitute), better known as Vanessa Parodis, the self-proclaimed “French ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic” of Paris, stalled out here in Las Vegas since late July, when she abandoned, halfway through it, a monumentally unsuccessful tour of the United States to support her latest album, Nouvelle Blague, a collection parodying all the big new wave hits of the previous decade, like “Ça plane pour moi”, that Americans had never heard of and would not have liked anyway, as the crowd attacking Mini-Paris later that night demonstrated when one of the dwarfs put a Serge Gainsbourg record through their intercom, enraging these butter-fleshed tourists and inspiring them to blast “Break Stuff” by Limp Bizkit from a patrol car’s loudspeaker in an effort to drown it out while goading a dozen sneering juvenile delinquents who they appropriated from a nearby correctional facility to hurry and finish their towering juggernaut, which they constructed from a phallic parade float that had won second place in the recent Las Vegas Adult Services Festival Parade, a celebration that never failed to attract protesters from churches all over the country and local news teams to breathlessly report on the procession of scantily-dressed young women from various pornographic films clinging to the guide-ropes of the huge, genital-shaped balloons, fashioned from Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons that, after escaping their handlers and killing onlookers, had to be retired from the more reputable parades and suffer the indignities of spectacles like this one, in which, following a refit to match the “adult” theme, they swayed along over the pink Cadillacs and parade floats cruising down the Strip between thick and jostling rows of titillated protesters and a much smaller number of enthusiasts calling out to their favorite superstar actresses, who, dancing on the floats, would, in response to their crude demands for nudity, throw to them VHS tapes, which, despite the salacious promises made on the packaging, would, when these men finally got home and watched them, contain only an hour-long infomercial for actual pornographic tapes that could be ordered from the number at the bottom of the screen as quick glimpses of the early parts of the films (before anyone took any clothes off) flashed by in between segments wherein a retired actress sat behind a desk on a set closely resembling those of the popular talk shows and conversed with a number of prominent figures in the adult film industry, including Lord Khazâd, who had, for the past decade, funded, with Isle tax dollars, vast amounts of pornography, as he considered it to be the highest or purest form of art, thanks to what he called its “absolute lack of pretension” and its ability to appeal to those otherwise uninterested in art, which, too often, had, he said, “fallen prey to an effete intellectualism that is repellent to all but elitist bohemians, posturing beatniks, and the most simpering functionaries of the Svenska Akademien, whose mawkish catamites mob their underclothes with their brittle hands while listening to their masters read aloud from some long-winded novel, pretending to appreciate some incomprehensible modern painting, or enduring the hideous shrieks of elitist classical music alongside the most delicate little poodles of the university world, men with the translucent skin and stooped posture of a medieval gravedigger who has been eunuched at the mad whim of some bloodthirsty tyrant, who, despite his best efforts, has somehow failed to prevent these creatures from perpetuating themselves down through the centuries to gnarled abnormals” like this Marcel X, who, at Lord Khazâd’s suggestion, agreed on that last afternoon of the strike to hold a debate with Brody, in which the hiring manager would defend capitalism, while the visiting professor would defend what he called “systems of the Left” or, rather, as the word “systems” is, Marcel mused aloud from his podium on the debate stage to the audience of strikers assembled on the miniature Champ de Mars, perhaps a word rather too problematically implicative of the technocratic colonialist asymmetries of, primarily or, one is tempted to say, perhaps even exclusively, white male imperialism (a Weltanschauung that Marcel himself, sadly, could, as one so privileged as to identify as a white male, never totally expunge from his own mind, requiring him to constantly police himself against the complicity in Euro-Christian and phalloedipal essentialisms in which he would, nevertheless, always remain hopelessly entangled), perhaps “disruption”, then, a post-Marxist disruption, though Marcel himself disliked the word “Marxist” as well, with its highly problematic codings of masculinist binaristic continuities (and, admittedly, paralogistic disjunctions potentially no less problematic) with a Capitalist-Communist modality exclusionary toward less positivist protocols, preferring the less-loaded term “Feminarrative Multiplicitization” for its openness to a framework of anti-univocal autodisunification coextensive with the paratactic discourse one must certainly acknowledge has been too often deflected from the apparatus of non-reified yet disinvariant anti-institutionalist interpenetration and exchange-value re-institutionalism in both the dominant bourgeois hegemonies of subjectivist transconnotation and the essentialist subsumptions of Europhallic prometheisms wrong-headedly concretized through the collusive entanglement of a colonized semiotic negotiation and a fallaciously zeitgeistal phantomaticity by those who have, perchance, fallen prey to a certain totalizing instinct toward Othering a pre-orientalized and non-schematic multi-singularity refunction-flux within a heteronormatizing operational spatialization that has been undeniably intereffectuated with prostheses of supernumerary diffraction that, in this strike, for example, allowed to bloom a xenophobic fear of the Other, in this case what he believed to be a racial fear of the “yellow menace” stealing jobs that, in the minds of these strikers, belonged rightfully to people of what they clearly considered to be the somehow superior “white” race (though of course race is no more than an arbitrary social construct, Marcel was quick to note, one that does violence to counter-hegephonic alternatives pandetically supplemented within a locus of self-evidently prosymmetric memberment that has been informed by penetrations of refutational-rationalist poverties of authentic contradistinction and their corresponding semiotic and metonymic equivocational reconsumption), despite the obvious paradox of inextricably aestheticized schematic compli-citations multigenericizing narrowly transhistorical expropriations while recriminative latent antitheticism engenders perpetuation of exclusionary binaristic hybridity, a concept Marcel had only begun to unpack when the bell rang to mark the end of his time in the debate and signal Brody, looking haggard but still towering over the cringing little weed that was his opponent, to give his response, to announce to these few remaining strikers occupying Mini-Paris that, when he was a boy, his father taught him that there’s nothing more important than loving your country, America, the greatest country in the history of the world, a country that now, more than ever, needs heroes like the people assembled here today to man up and make the sacrifices of right-shoring and wage-correction necessary to promote the wealth and stability vital to preserving our freedoms, the freedom to love America, for example, or the freedom to enjoy a football game on the TV, or go driving down the highway in the car that would never have been invented if it weren’t for the big corporations that self-admitted Communists like Marcel foolishly blame for all the world’s troubles when, in reality, they’re the reason we aren’t living in huts and teepees, or speaking German, or forced every day to swear allegiance to Josef Stalin and Chairman Mao instead of the Stars and Stripes that we love so much and that our brave warriors in the Armed Forces have fought and died to defend from our enemies so that our children can grow up in a world where the traditional values that are so important to us can continue to triumph, a sentiment much of the audience cheered as Brody descended the stage and began shaking their hands and joking with them before leading many of the remaining strikers to the barricades and helping them to climb over and escape to the waiting arms of the police, most of the rest wandering
off in their wake, dispirited, to unemployment, the circuses, the demeaning Hollywood movies, and the miniature houses at the end of Main Street uSa in Disneyland, which used forced perspective to make the street look longer than it really was and dwarf inhabitants to further enhance their realism in the same manner as Mini-Paris had done before this strike that was now left with only Lucille, Ken, Johnny, Hercule, and two other dwarfs to glare at the back of the retreating Marcel as he fled the whirring darts of Lucille’s crossbow, with which, she told Hercule, she would defend Mini-Paris while he went out to scout the Location City housing development with Sakharin and hopefully recruit a few locals to their side, a plan that had failed utterly and left Hercule stranded when the others forgot him and left him behind beneath a dark rain that seemed ready to fall at any moment from the low sky into the silence that lay over the empty street where Hercule stood somber and still as he watched the rows of houses that would never be sold and after five years would be torn down on the order of the county safety inspector, whose arsenal of instruments and detectors would reveal that the extraordinarily cheap materials used to build these houses had decayed too much for safe habitation by those who might be tempted to move in here, to these rows that would be quickly replaced by a new housing develop ment built on this site and then largely abandoned soon after, when the great malaise spreading over the world could no longer be covered up with easy loans, like those Sakharin’s business partners were guaranteeing to the few idle questioners coming occasionally in that first year or two to look at some houses and promise the disappointed salesmen that they would think about it before leaving and never calling back, not even when Sakharin himself called them to personally make the case for Location City by reading from a prepared script, written with the aim of giving the effect that he was “speaking from the heart”, which likely would have succeeded had he not been so glum, uninterested, and preoccupied with ending the call and dialing up again Lord Khazâd’s phone line to talk to the woman assigned to imitate an imaginary woman he claimed was his late wife but was, in reality, based on a rival painter, whose youthful beauty had both drawn much of the world’s attention, and thereby their business, from himself, and broken his heart each time he met her and felt painfully old and doomed to be alone for the rest of his life when, from across the delicately scented art galleries, he watched her chat and smile with boyfriends tall and strong and laughing behind their eyes whenever they looked in his direction for a brief and contemptuous appraisal then back at her paintings of American Indians hunting by a swiftly flowing river as huge eagles soared above the rock in the shape of a wolf’s head on which the Indian was posed with his bow and his arrows, looking out at the customers returning his gaze with admiration whenever they got up from watching television and looked at the print hanging on their wall at home on their way to get more Xtreme Nacho Cheetos from the kitchen, where they might have had an old Sakharin print, dusty and half-hidden behind a coffee machine or novelty Pepsi can that “danced” when it heard music, but had probably thrown out all their Sakharins by now, laughing at the thought that they could have ever liked such garbage, painted by such a ridiculous little man, who, as the driver took him and Lord Khazâd to the hotel on the Strip where they were to meet Gallagher and Yakov for drinks, listened with a dull amusement as the dwarf leader described, in the most melodramatic of terms, his time trapped in the miniature Louvre in the Lord Khazâd-shaped shell of hardened blubber, which, at that same moment, Lucille was helping Ken and Johnny to drag out of the burning building into the open, where the few remaining people in the strike zone, the “dead end losers” as the journalists called them, could climb in and escape out through the bulldozed hole in the barricades among the swarming police, who, when they saw this monstrosity ambling past them, thought it was their old friend Lord Khazâd leaving Mini-Paris after one last desperate attempt to convince his fellow dwarfs to give up their mad socialist plot, though Ken and Johnny had only climbed in with reluctance, with tears in their eyes, when Lucille found that the blubber shell could not fit all of them, and that she would need to stay behind, ordering the rest to leave, then hiding herself among the miniature buildings as the police swarmed through the barricades and up through the secret tunnel, where the subterranean homeless population fighting off the police’s constant attacks had finally been overwhelmed and torn apart by huge police dogs that had been starved for weeks in preparation for this attack, in which they now ran barking and wild with blood-stained faces among the legs of the invading police and tourists waddling madly around Mini-Paris, pulling apart the miniature buildings with their bare hands like flabby Godzillas in search of the remaining strikers, who, except for Lucille, had already escaped in their disguise and, when noticed and mistaken for Lord Khazâd by his handlers, rushing to ensure that their master, currently with Sakharin and a number of topless prostitutes in a Caesar’s Palace hot tub down the street, was not caught up in the attack, were hustled onto a waiting private plane, which, after refueling in New York, soon landed on the Isle of Minimus, where, according to official Isle records, the ruse was immediately discovered and everyone in the shell was executed for espionage, and where, according to a legend that began among the remaining believers of the cult of Mallrat back in Japan, this “Lord Khazâd” was welcomed by a crowd of well-wishers and taken to the Seigniorial Palace for his signature on a bill that would make collective action by workers punishable by death, a bill that, since everyone expected him to sign it and had endured months of propaganda in favor of it on all of Lord Khazâd’s television channels, had already served to disband all of the Isle’s remaining unions, some of which hastily reconvened when the imposter Lord Khazâd shocked everyone by refusing to sign the bill and quickly began implementing a number of reforms, turning the Seigniorial Palace into a shelter for the homeless, making trade with and the outsourcing of jobs to repressive nations a recognized act of treason against the Isle, disbanding the corrupt Dvergatal, forbidding private corporations from growing disproportionately large and powerful, and, finally, ending the feudal system of government and allowing the people themselves to administer the Isle without the oversight of a seigneur, though these reforms so outraged the political and business leaders of the Isle that they soon began a campaign to dethrone the imposter by appealing to the traditionalist fishing communities in the north and the now-unemployed international bankers of the former stock exchange, who, in the first case, helped spread anti-Khazâd leaflets around among the clay igloos of their settlements and raised militias of angry young men armed with harpoons, and in the second, appealed to foreign investors from the United States and England to finance the revolt that, within a week of the false Lord Khazâd’s arrival, succeeded in placing five international mercenaries, hired with the assistance of the Honourable Mark Thatcher (who was later awarded a dispensation to establish residency on the Isle for tax exile purposes), in surveillance over the modest suburban home where the false Lord Khazâd was now living and plotting the ideal distribution of Lord Khazâd’s fortune to the impoverished citizenry of the Isle each day in the dining room on enormous maps and charts, so busy with this work that he barely noticed that he no longer thought of himself as a number of separate strikers led by Ken and Johnny from Mini-Paris in an increasingly putrid Lord Khazâd-shaped crust but, rather, as a single unified being, whose hardened blubber shell held a number of organs, each with the potential to take on any role necessary, as when an assassin attacked him in his garden on the eighth day of his reign and he used the strength of bodybuilders Ken and Johnny to fight off his attacker, when he used the mathematical genius of one of the dwarfs to calculate the best way to revitalize the Isle’s economy, when he used Ken’s knowledge of biology to identify and brew the antidote to a poison slipped in his coffee, or when he drew upon the political knowledge of another of his component dwarfs to comprehend the fierce backlash against his reforms among many cretins, most common dwarfs, and nearly all midgets, who, even if they themselves were poo
r, identified themselves with the wealthy and in their bitter and cruel hearts felt such an affinity with the sadistically bullying tone of the ruling class’s propaganda that they believed themselves to be de facto members of the ruling class and destined to someday join them in their mansions and on their yachts, sneering down at the weak and foolish compassion of those who were pathetically whining that everyone should have access to housing and food, even though they, surely, were well aware the vast majority of human beings were nothing more than parasites that needed to be crushed before they could overwhelm their superiors and bleed them to death like the three-foot-long giant leeches of the Isle’s southern swamps, which could drain an elephant unlucky enough to encounter them of all the blood in its body in under an hour and kill a full-grown dwarf within minutes, as one leech did to the false Lord Khazâd, according to the legend, when an assassin in the pay of the CIa slipped into the picturesquely frayed house the former seigneur now inhabited and dropped one of these leeches on his back as he slept on his stained and sagging cot, desiccating the body, which the doctors who performed their autopsy upon it were shocked to discover had contained several people within it, to discover two giants’ skeletons and at least three smaller skeletons that had all intertwined and fused together, operating their common body like a puppet, like a ventriloquist’s doll, made of what appeared to be primarily whale blubber that had been molded into the shape of their leader, who, shortly afterward, supposedly became aware that, while he amused himself overseas, this imposter had taken his place on the Isle, and hastily returned from the United States to restore the country to order, repealing all those reforms and denying that any of this had ever happened, a denial which seemed to be supported by plenty of evidence, including a video tape of what appeared to be the executions and signed confessions of the imposters’ mis-deeds, dated the same day their plane landed on the Isle, but which the cult of Mallrat thought to have been fabricated by the real Lord Khazâd, insisting that this myth was entirely true, and that, furthermore, Lucille herself had escaped the final assault on the strike and now traveled the world incognito, supporting other strikes wherever they might be found by erecting a large, inflatable Mallrat to warn police and strikebreakers that this strike was under the protection of that strange rodent-deity Marcel had claimed, bizarrely, to have invented, insisting, as Lucille, Ken, and Johnny, greatly offended by this blasphemous lie, glared at him from across the table the night of Marcel’s arrival at Mini-Paris, that, before he had renounced his “slave-owner name” and adopted the name Marcel X, he had been Mirando Langolier, the credited writer of The Virtual Generation, “making ends meet” by writing “rubbish” films for money while he sought academic employment, and had invented Mallrat (meant to be the ultimate personification of capitalist consumerism, ironically enough) at the suggestion of one of that ill-fated film’s producers in order to give the main character, JC, a sidekick that could be marketed to children, though he had nothing to do with Mallrat is Missing, the licensed tie-in video game that had inspired this cult in the first place, this cult which had been so inspired by his creation that they had, with the “little people” (Hercule rolled his eyes) employees of Mini-Paris, begun a strike that had captured the world’s attention, making Marcel, he felt, responsible for what happened here, which is why he had felt it necessary to come join this strike and help guide it, despite the obvious, predestined failure toward which, he said, these strikers, who had forgotten that violence has never solved anything and that inconveniencing people would only harm their cause, were racing, the reactionary crackdown that would end with most of them dead or in prison, the essentially pointless martyrdom they faced here in Las Vegas, once a seedy paradise for seedy people, but still a place of possibility, now a vice-squaded necropolis, a place where nothing meaningful would ever happen again, a credentialed mob of professional tourists rotting in the desert, the rude sneer of low-flying airplanes drowning out the banal smalltalk so endlessly repeated that everyone’s voices had gone flat and droning, hardly bothering to enunciate any consonants, well aware that their shapeless words would be understood purely from the context of all the other days when they all said exactly the same things to each other in exactly the same order, these flabby drifters and the tanned skeletons who serviced them one way or another, these married couples retired from their jobs and everything else besides eating and sleeping and watching television, waddling around the bright sandblown streets looking for a buffet among the crazed businessmen on a paid frenzy, loose from their convention centers and hotel ballrooms, among the youth supremacists pickling themselves in alcohol for their perpetual preservation, among the rare sober, the cryptic sober behind the grime-coated glass of phone booths, muttering ominous commands into the grime-coated receivers as they watched some poor slob approach his unnoticed doom on a streetcorner where a drunken bellhop or weary housekeeper was barreling down in a coughing old car that was constantly pulled over by the police for every possible minor infraction to send the message that their kind had no place in this city while licensed street performers pranced and caricature artists churned out one crooked sketch after another with a brute athleticism outside the hotels and watched through sardonic eyes that said “what can you do” as the cops hustled those who looked too poor and waved on through the bloated ones, drunken on their own sense of sloth that etched their faces with a heavy contempt that demanded respect from everyone (like these cops) who could be foolish enough to think these high-rollers might throw some of that cash their way if they could just act sufficiently subservient and cringe long enough under the mad helicopter voices roaring orders for more champagne, a room with a better view of the Strip, and less-ethnic-looking girls for their do-not-disturb afternoon massages, sweaty altercations that usually ended with the girls crying and accepting fistfuls of casino chips barely worth enough to cover the cost of all that makeup they would slather over their black eyes and bruised arms for the next month as they watched all human relations reduce to thermodynamics, the heat of the desert a steady constant that ensured only the really hot and the really cold-blooded could make any kind of mark on this world, while lukewarm souls like Hercule could only watch and wait for the slow boil of stifled anger to rise up in them and give them that one moment when they would really exist and mean something before flaming out, bursting “like an atomic bomb” (Hercule thought, relevantly) out there in the night, in the desert stretching out into the dark west, featureless, except for a few dozen craters behind some hills in the sandy gulf of the old testing grounds, which Hercule, slumped over the railing at the top of the miniature Eiffel Tower a few nights before the end, imagined coming back to life, a fireball brighter than the sun rising through the miasma of the Las Vegas night sky, purifying the entire city with its perfect white light, a bride’s dress splayed over the black shadowed mountains, a pale woman blushing amid the constellation of blinking aircraft warning lights on each radio tower melting and on each telephone pole toppling and swinging its lines around like whips in the inferno filling the sky and the earth with that perfect peace that all these people down there in the streets had, for decades, feared (but secretly, unconsciously, wanted), clinging to their suffering in the loathsome slime and heat of their planet, loudly dreading, as Hercule himself had done before he came to Mini-Paris and to his understanding that life isn’t ever worth living, the day the television would announce that Russia was sending its bombers over to end everything, or, later, firing its missiles from their little holes in the frozen ground over the frozen north, while on the other side everyone lived with the expectation that the United States would do it first, would send all their bombs over and, as the American politicians shouted in full bluster on television and in the excerpts from their newspapers translated in Pravda to remind everyone of why they needed to keep on fighting Western imperialism, “turn Russia into a parking lot”, unwittingly revealing something about the American way of seeing things, maybe, in their choice of the “parking lot” imager
y, as if, since they had already turned half their own country into parking lots for their fast food restaurants and their tacky pawn shops, that was as far as the American imagination could go anymore, as if the future would be a single shopping mall at the center of a world-wide parking lot, the President of the United States wandering through the billions of parked cars looking for his presidential motorcade parked somewhere out there, maybe where Paris or London used to be, half his entourage already lost in a Chrysler forest, the First Lady eaten by gasoline-sniffing cannibals, cooked on the bonnet of a shiny Ford, their daughters married off to the peyote-crazed neo-Appalachian warlords of Volkswagen Bus City, the Chief of Staff already a desiccated corpse in one of those tempting death-hammocks just floating there in the breeze between two pickup trucks, waiting for unsuspecting and weary victims to give up and lie down in their sticky embrace long enough for the venom-spouting bio-nylon cords to reflexively draw shut themselves shut and press the life out of him like the Venus flytraps of old, the last few surviving speechwriters flapping along behind the President with binoculars scanning the rows for the big bulletproof limousines they had left diagonal across two spaces each, as is the President’s wont, so intent on finding the motorcade that they don’t even notice when a band of sybaritic violence enthusiasts drag off the President’s shrieking banshee of a poodle, victim of a botched neutering operation that left him with a limp and an inspiration to viciously eviscerate every staffer assigned to feed him, to their hideous, thermometer-busting dungeons to guard the behemoth furnaces that power the jukeboxes of nostalgic Voortrekkers drinking away the leaden summer upstairs in idling Recreational Vehicles painted with crude images of jackals and guns that remind them of the old days of shooting down natives and swaggering around in the brush, back before the world was paved and handed over to the dreaded Meter Maid Council, whose secret police patrol the choicest parking spots and jolt with maximum voltage any offender daring to venture into their Sphere of Control without paying tribute to their blood-thirsty phallic idol, fashioned from the carburetor of a defective Pontiac and paraded around by its worshipers to frighten into silence those who dare admit openly that they miss the old mountains, valleys, trees, and houses that the younger generations now believe to be a myth invented by doddering old storytellers too feeble-minded to “apply themselves” to the sole purpose of humanity, the same now as it has ever been, the Great Search, to find a better parking spot, which the young people, with their natural brutality, can always do better than their elders, cutting off the slow and weak, contemptuous of the blinking turn signals and angry gestures of those naive enough to wait their turn as someone else backs out in search of a better place, boldly parking in spots reserved for the handicapped and laughing cruelly as dehydrated people in wheelchairs spin to death in the grip of Asphalt Delirium before their very eyes and beg these young people for help, wheezing in the heat, hallucinating all kinds of foul plants cracking the surface of the endless lot and sprouting up in wild mutant shapes to overturn cars in a celebratory frenzy and kill everyone with their writhing branches and leaves covered in a million coruscating thorns that drip with a poison so deadly that even the pickled Afrikaners, with their vast knowledge of chemistry, will never be able to brew an effective antidote, no matter how much money they are given (and no matter how often they are threatened) by the Secret Service, who become desperate to save their employer, the President, from the depths of an onanistic coma after his attempt to escape starvation by scrounging an overripe, really half-rotten, specimen of fruit that has fallen from one of the slithering vines overhead and cracked its rock-hard shell on the pavement, revealing the juicy guts inside, still fluttering with the final exertions of its primitive cardiovascular and respiratory systems as the President plunges his face in and sucks greedily at the toxic, phlegm-like blood, which, after twenty-eight days of spasmic self-abuse forced by the toxins for the fertilization of the dense vegetation (ever-growing and now almost entirely blocking out the light of the sun), finally kills him and plunge the few survivors among his citizenry into a period of National Mourning that sees the tattered little flags waving from car antennas lowered to half-antenna and the President’s mistress so distraught that she throws herself on the funeral pyre and, instantly changing her mind, leaps up screaming and burning, running off into the forest of carnivorous vines now towering a hundred or more feet above this ambulatory torch, who they watch helplessly with their photosensitive flowers stumble around in the debris of pulverized asphalt and mangled automobiles that make up the forest floor and, in her gesticulations, set to every plant in her path a fire, which quickly spreads to neighboring plants in a blaze that eventually covers the entire Earth and leaves it a barren wasteland of ash forever, as Josef Oktopussë had imagined it, sitting around the television with his parents and their household staff in Sevastopol, to which he had made his triumphant return from the United States in 1974, listening to the eloquent words of Leonid Brezhnev buzz out from the tiny speaker, so different from those politicians of the tedious and infantile Watergate hearings back in America, his voice a reassuring presence, a reminder of something more than this grim mortality, the solidity and strength of Moscow, the glory of Russia flying invisibly through the air to their estate here in the wilderness, among all these lazy and disloyal peasants, these criminals and layabouts skulking around the walls of this house that Oktopussë had designed during a vaguely Brutalist phase as a gift to his parents, themselves architects, whose Communist sympathies and partly Russian ancestry had, in the 1930s, forced them to flee Germany for Russia, where, before Stalin’s government decided they would be better employed as farmers in Ukraine, they had built many of the most distinctive buildings of Moscow and Leningrad, and, despite what he suspected to be a slight hidden jealously, were proud of their son for his accomplishments, his Las Vegas casinos, his Montréal skyscrapers and museums, his various factories in Kiev, his position as chief architect of a new power plant in the far north of the republic, and, of course, the immense resort hotel in Odessa, his first completed building, which, since it opened in 1960, had been used by countless important officials and celebrities from all over the world for important events, a towering structure, on which Oktopussë could not himself think without a sense of disappointment and a strange dread, recalling that cold and gray morning the hotel had finally been completed and he had gone up to the roof to look out over the resort, the deserted beach, the bleak city that seemed ready to collapse into splinters at any moment, the fraudulent refineries coughing up smoke into the grim sky from burning driftwood to raise morale with the sense that things were still happening here, the harbor with its famous steps, its fragile piers, and its icebreakers, which were nearly motionless out there in the freezing water, against the horizon of blurred sea and sky, which stood like a wall of steel preventing any escape, a limitless and permanent enclosure sealing him off from his dreams so that he couldn’t even see them or guess at what they might be, feeling only an emptiness that told him there was something out there he needed to find, far away from this preoccupied architecture that stretched up over Odessa and, itself, seemed to watch something unknowable but vital enormously far away from the miniscule tourists who would soon come flickering in and out of its doors day after day in their swarms, colliding and dispersing spontaneously without slowing at all for anything and, even in their vast numbers, too small to do anything that would cause the world to take notice of them as they reproduced themselves with industrial efficiency and filled their cities with inane slogans and clichés that presently imposed themselves on Oktopussë from every billboard, television, newspaper, and mouth until, at last, he felt such a buzzing in his skull that he had no choice but to leave Ukraine for England, then Canada, then the American West he had imagined for so long, where Howard Hughes had summoned him to build a number of casinos in that vast desert, that dead land of scorpions and vultures waiting among the parched rocks, of prostitutes and gangsters, each making his own law among the
lawless, beyond morality and bureaucracy, outside the civilized world, which was overcrowded with history and weighed down with memory and with expectation, outside all tradition, a place where Oktopussë could immerse himself in his work, shielded from all distraction by Hughes’s personal team of elite Mormon bodyguards, descended from the patriarch Joseph Smith himself, finishing new buildings at a remarkable pace, interrupted only by a short stay in the hospital as a result of a nearby nuclear test shaking the scaffolding of the half-finished casino on which he was standing while overseeing its construction, sending him plummeting over fifty feet to the ground and breaking both of his legs so that, for the remainder of this project, he was forced to remain on the ground in his wheelchair while shouting at the largely Mexican laborers rather than climbing up there among them to shout at them in an English no better than theirs as they assembled these hotels and casinos, which, by the time he finished overseeing construction of Location City for that tiresome idiot Sakharin in the late 1990s, had all, tragically, been replaced by larger and gaudier megaresorts like the Bellagio and Paris Las Vegas, which he passed on the way to Studio 54, where Sakharin had invited him by cablegram that last night of the strike to meet Baruch Khazâd, the current Lord Minimus of the Isle of Minimus, known to Oktopussë mainly from one of the Nixon Tapes, in which Lord Khazâd dwelled at length with the President and the Reverend Billy Graham upon the foulness of the Jews and all the ways they tended to undermine countries and open them up to Communism (prompting the President to blurt, “you know, David Ben-Gurion is a queer, that Golda woman too”), though he also remembered seeing the dwarf on television more recently, doing something here in Las Vegas, something he couldn’t quite remember until, driving past Paris Las Vegas, he saw the barricade and the police and remembered a news report mentioning that Lord Khazâd, at the request of President Clinton, had risked his life to personally appeal to the strikers to lay down their weapons and surrender, barely escaping being taken hostage, and had been mentioned in the President’s latest press briefing as an example of a “peaceful dwarf” the small but disturbing extremist elements in dwarf society should seek to emulate, rather than supporting this “deeply saddening” terrorist occupation of Mini-Paris, which had caused such suffering to hundreds of people who wanted nothing more than to get back to work at Paris Las Vegas and would accomplish nothing, a strike in total defiance of the common-sense economic realities in which everyone else had to live, and one that the American people could no longer tolerate, the President declared, vowing that the strike would be over by midnight, the thirty-first of December, one way or another, which meant, as Oktopussë could see, that the police, loading their shotguns and zipping up their riot armor as he drove past, would storm the barricades, which as of now were still standing in the rearview mirror as Oktopussë approached the MGM Grand and left his car to a valet, hoping, as he wandered through the lobby in search of the Studio 54 re-creation with its authentic decor and bartenders in 1970s leisure suits, that the attack on Mini-Paris wouldn’t affect his deal with Lord Khazâd, who, according to Sakharin, was looking to award a lucrative contract to any architect who could, in six months or less, build a Las Vegas-style mega-resort on the soft and swampy ground of Marcellaville on the Isle of Minimus to cater to the visitors to Expo 2000, and was, apparently, inclined to choose Oktopussë, whose bold design for the Isle’s pavilion at Expo 67 all those years ago had delighted Lord Khazâd with its labyrinthine complex of colossal geometric planes in bare concrete jutting over the Île Notre-Dame as he stared up at its powerful angles glistening in the light afternoon rain before hurrying back to his hotel to catch Supermarket Sweep, a new game show from the United States, then, too tired to go back out, watching Star Trek, a science-fiction drama (also from the United States, though it starred a Canadian), about the crew aboard a futuristic spaceship tasked with subjugating lesser planets under Earth’s control, its captain a drunken sadist named Kirk, who, normally dependant on his first officer, a goateed extraterrestrial named Spock, to help him command the ship and ward off the constant mutiny attempts of its crew, is, in this episode, forced to stand on his own when Spock, having peered into his space-radar instruments and announced that he has detected an uncharted planet directly ahead, travels to the surface to inform the locals that they are now the property of Earth, and is captured by these savages, calling themselves “Rawkers”, and dressed in leather jackets that give them, according to Spock’s mayday call on his portable communication device, “a mysterious similarity to a group of youths on twentieth century Earth called ‘rockers’”, famous for their clashes with a rival group of youths known as “modernists”, or simply “mods”, much as these Rawkers battle the raiding parties of “Mawds” from a nearby planet, smartly-dressed aliens on interstellar Vespas, whose Italian suits are, coincidentally, similar enough to Spock’s uniform that the Rawkers believe Spock to be a member, or even ringleader, of their hated enemy, and plan to execute him with their disintegration rays, horrifying a Rawker girl who, in love with their pointed-eared prisoner, frees him from the force-field so that he can escape back to his ship, where, after Captain Kirk has ordered the atomic bombardment of the planet (not seen, owing to budgetary restrictions) and enslaved the survivors, Spock recommends that they proceed to the planet of the Mawds and enslave them as well, bringing a much-needed sense of style to Earth’s galactic Empire, which, with its rather spartan look, is, according to Spock, badly in need of these sophisticated and fashionable young people, whose expensive clothes and space-age haircuts could, at that very moment, be seen on a group of boys in the streets below, past the television, through the window, where Lord Khazâd, his nose to the glass, watched them riding their Vespas and Lambrettas from a party in town back to the UK pavilion on the Île Notre-Dame, where, when the Expo began, these mods would represent the modern youth culture of their country, describing for the titillated tourists their amphetamine-fueled jazz parties in London, their wild mêlées with Rockers in Brighton and other seaside towns, and their epic scooter races on Sark, an island in the English Channel east of Guernsey, first colonized by the ancient Veneti, a civilization from the northern Italian peninsula who had fled the Romans across Europe to the Channel Islands, and who, after Julius Caesar found and brought them back to Rome as slaves in 56 BC, founded the current city of Venice, modeling its grand boulevards and elegant mansions on the architecture of Sark, which fell into ruins over the subsequent centuries as the island, now uninhabited, returned to nature, aside from the occasional pirate clan, such as Georremey’s Lladron, a Welsh bandit army who hunted wild boars and rabbits on Sark with their “cwnhounds” until Georremey was betrayed by one of his wives to the English and executed in the twelfth century, and le Tabernacle Sanglant, a sixteenth-century millennial death cult that, although its prophesied date for the end of the world (the twenty-fourth of July, 1999) was too far in the future to attract large numbers of followers to their cause, inspired sufficient upheaval in England to draw the attention of Elizabeth I and get them chased off the island to what would later become known as the Isle of Minimus, several miles away, where the cultists were eventually murdered by the dwarf colonists, establishing the Isle’s reputation as a dangerous place, which remained even in 1966, when Oktopussë declined to visit the pavilion he had designed for Expo 67, nervous at the thought of being surrounded by all those dwarfs and the crazed women who fetishized them, and afraid to discover, somewhere within the pavilion, one of those terrible doors, with their tunnels leading down into darkness, that had inexplicably sprung up in every building he had designed, as early as the resort hotel in Odessa, where, as he strolled alone around the roof of the freshly-completed building in the frigid dawn, he noticed, far below, a heavy steel door set into a wall of an ornamental terrace he had grudgingly agreed to incorporate to satisfy the inane whim of a Party official but designed to be inaccessible, a door the builders denied adding, insisting they had followed his blueprints exactly, even as Oktopussë had them low
er a ladder to the terrace and accompany him down there to the door, which, when opened, disclosed a set of stairs leading down into a network of subterranean concrete tunnels (wide enough to drive a car through) that, after the army arrived to explore them, assuming them to have been dug by foreign agents for some nefarious purpose, were found to extend indefinitely, or so far that even the teams of well-equipped soldiers on motorcycles could not reach the end, swallowed up somewhere out there, hopelessly disoriented, hundreds of miles down the twisting corridors, presumed dead by the government, though, in reality, most had eventually discovered exits in foreign countries and, turning their backs on their old lives, became itinerant tap-dancers, dish-washers, laborers, or joined up with deckhands in poorly fitting uniforms cringing at the feet of the shipowner who employed them in cruising the southern Mediterranean, his snout upraised, his fingers rigid around the lapels of his safari jacket, a digestive expression on his face whenever he paused to inspect a piece of rigging or a sail, nodding tactfully to the other men like himself, the little gods of the harbor, whenever they caught his eye from the decks of their own ships over the shoulders of feeble pied-noir wenches pressed against the guardrails, who had no choice but to hold on to the ship-owners manhandling them or be pushed over into water frothing with garbage from the waterfront cafes and flop-houses where these girls waited for men to come and lure them away to their ships with fistfuls of foreign currency, which they would rub all over the girls’ faces and necks, as if pollinating them, before dragging them off, claiming to be enraptured by their beauty, and that they wanted to take these girls to a new life in France or England, reciting the same empty promises and banal compliments they made to girls in Capetown, Marcellaville, Suez, and a hundred other cities teaming with an unloved and stagnant female population driven almost feral by the boredom of their lives, vandalizing crypts and overturning newspaper racks until old enough to get picked up by sailors, whose carefree love of life made them so much more interesting than the money-obsessed local men, who were merely foraging, groveling, grasping at whatever petty level of status they had managed to achieve, scabrous and redundant men, exulting in trickery, desperately happy to be allowed to lick the boots of anyone wealthier than themselves, tagging along on the heels of tall and confident foreigners who looked down on them, appalled, as these men offered food, shelter, contraband, and use of their own daughters in exchange for whatever scraps of fortune might be thrown in their direction, in awe of these visiting sinecures from Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, these plenipotentiaries of American corporations, these celebrity lookalikes who had hijacked some Hollywood actor’s yacht by impersonating him and his actor friends and gone for a cruise around the world with deckhands who, having been ordered to never look their employer in the eye, never saw through this flimsy ruse, but waited patiently as the lookalikes went threading through the picturesque jugglers and pickpockets of the docks, the chauffeurs calling out aggressively, the gendarmes tactfully vigilant for wanted criminals and terrorists departing the ships, the antediluvian prostitutes shouting in their raspy voices, and drunken gossip columnists on holiday from London staggering precariously along the docks in search of hotels where they would ring the office on their complimentary international telephone line and report those lookalike celebrities as the real thing, asking why they were here of all places and speculating that they were in town for a secret celebrity wedding, a glamorous marriage in this exotic locale, this little city full of authentic danger and mystery, unseasonably warm, ornamented by charmingly quaint roadblocks that make you feel like you’re back in the Second World War, carrying secret messages from the Partisans back to High Command, a sophisticated and determined agent of freedom, a living human being, even as you write up your latest article on the royal family or some tedious movie star’s latest scandal, pen in hand as the airplane buzzes back toward home, over the cool green fields of Europe, refueling in Brussels, Nice, or Pamplona, which Ken, sent to Spain to find new recruits for the cult of Mallrat, visited alone in 1998, since Johnny, who waited for him in Barcelona, was banned forever from Pamplona for killing three of their bulls, when, during the famous “Running of the Bulls” five years earlier, not understanding why everyone else was running away, he stood his ground and strangled one beast that charged him, crushed the skull of another with a single blow from his fist that sent the animal careening into a bollard, and, grasping his third opponent around the neck and hanging on as it carried him through the streets, tore its throat out with his bare teeth, outraging the spectators, who tried to attack him, nervously edging forward as they shouted and gestured, circling around him, each hoping that someone else would be the first to attack Johnny so that the rest of them could pile on without fear of being struck by this giant as he retreated to a taxi and fled, unharmed, leaving them angry and stifled, desperate to unleash their rage against someone who wouldn’t fight back, leading to the infamous 1993 riots that killed dozens in northern Spain, blamed on Basque separatists, of course, who, because of the increased scrutiny this brought, were unable to supply the Cretinist rebel guerrillas of the Isle of Minimus with their usual shipments of guns and ammu nition, which allowed Lord Khazâd to largely crush their movement by the late 1990s and ensured that few would dare oppose his rule again, even as he passed increasingly long episodes overseas, entrusting his palace and herd of miniature goats to one of his more loyal servants, a former disc jockey from the United States, a common dwarf he found laboring in a toll plaza on the highway between Dverberg and Nouvelle-Chomedey, unable to find employment at the Isle radio stations owing to his lack of French, the most popular language on the Isle, or the Norman-derived Isle dialect known as Minimiaise, which many older midgets still spoke, though, by the end of the twentieth century, it was considered rather snobbish, since, historically, only the midget caste was allowed to speak in this dialect, and younger common dwarfs now often mocked it by including Minimiaise phrases in their speech ironically, something that would have gotten them whipped to death in the nineteenth century, when the dialect was jealously guarded by the ruling caste along with the elaborate Minimal runic alphabet only they could use, which was now completely forgotten by all but the academics studying it in foreign universities and the archaeologists deciphering inscriptions that covered the interiors of the underground tombs beneath Mount Hudson in the central highlands, where the first three Lords Minimus had been buried along with their wives and concubines (before live burial was outlawed) and most of their possessions in the expectation that they would return to life someday, revived by the spirit of the mountain, a belief that had been promoted on the Isle by dwarf immigrants from the Middle East, who had associated mountains with the resurrection of dwarfs ever since, according to their extrabiblical account, Jesus Christ had visited a dwarf city called Nain, on the mountain of Tabor, and brought a dwarf back from the dead, then gave all in that city the same ability, there, in that frigid, rocky place where these dwarfs had been chased when the ancient Israelites, following the prohibition on dwarfs entering into the Lord’s presence, decided that they were an abomination even on the outskirts of their settle ments (where they performed unclean tasks for the giants), and butchered all but a few of the dwarfs, who escaped to the mountain and founded Nain, where they remained until the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 forced them to relocate to the Isle, leaving everything behind, including their houses, their magnificent labyrinths and fortresses, their towering statues of famous dwarfs from their local mythology, and rumors among the Christian villagers at the foot of the mountain that they would eventually return to reclaim their city, which these giants whispered with a note of hope in their voices, as they had long associated dwarfs with the resurrection of the dead and had often taken their sick and injured up the mountain to be healed by a dwarf shaman, who would wrap the ailing one in the linens of the priesthood and submerge him in the waters flowing from a spring higher up the mountain, thoroughly polluted, by the end of the twentieth century, with waste from a factor
y that made the stream undrinkable and forced Lord Khazâd to relocate his half-finished theme park to the site of a demolished town adjacent to a vineyard near the settlement of Shilo in 1999, a move that ultimately led, despite its popularity, to the failure of this diversion, which replicated a Nazi concentration camp for the huge numbers of young Israelis who felt that they had missed out on the central event in the history of their people and flocked to this highly authentic imitation camp to be whipped by imported Polish dominatrices in swastika-adorned leather catsuits among the mud and barbed wire as the loudspeakers blasted recorded speeches by Adolf Hitler, shocking the camp’s neighbors in Shilo, who, spreading rumors that massive orgies were taking place behind its walls, agitated for it to be closed, infuriating Lord Khazâd to such an extent that he shut down the camp even before the govern ment could investigate and returned to the Isle of Minimus to denounce Israel’s “radical, anti-business socialist policies” that had supposedly caused the ruin of this project, just as “similarly inclined” (he said with an implicatory wink) Hollywood producers had caused him no end of trouble in his struggle to finance his movie, written by Lord Khazâd himself, a remake of Zulu (a 1964 film directed by Cy Endfield, who had left the United States after being blacklisted for his allegedly anti-capitalist views, and starring Stanley Baker and Michael Caine), but set during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, rather than the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, and involving, instead of British soldiers, a courageous team of American police officers, led by, in Lord Khazâd’s fantasies, Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone, who hold off the rampaging hordes besieging a Korean market in which a multi-ethnic group of innocent civilians have taken shelter, terrified of the boombox-wielding savages howling and grunting outside, the thousands upon thousands of looters driven to a frenzy by the sinister ringleader of the riots, a cape-wearing rapper seated on a gold throne attached to the roof of a Cadillac being driven through the ruined streets, looking for white women to abduct into his harem and young black men to draft into his army by holding them down and showing them pornographic magazines while blowing marijuana smoke into their faces until, their eyes glowing red through special effects, they leap up, screaming, wild, bloodthirsty, ready to obey their master’s every command, running mindlessly toward the shop where our heroes have blockaded the door, firing their shotguns at the encroaching mobs through the windows, blowing their heads off, if the budget allows for it, and trading quips like “these guys have really lost their heads” as they mow down more and more looters swarming closer and closer to their target, stampeding over the bodies of fallen comrades piled up five feet thick in the parking lot, frothing and roaring, grabbing one of the junior police officers (a black officer, the script insisted, to prevent any possible accusation that the movie might, somehow, seem racist) just minutes after his monologue about wanting to get back safely to his wife and little girl and pulling him out through the window to tear into his flesh with their teeth and pull him apart, limb from limb, as the main character watches helplessly, unable to kill the rioters fast enough to stop them from dragging the officer’s remains off to be eaten by the rapper villain, who calls out through a megaphone to the police from his throne at the back of the crowd, telling them how tasty he found their fellow officer, and that one of his new concubines wants to say hello, a girl sixteen or seventeen years old, the main character’s daughter, driven to join the rapper through subliminal messages hidden in his music, but now regretting it, saying, “help me, daddy” as the rapper bellows with laughter, wiping a tear from her face with his finger and tasting it, then informing the main character that he has one hour to come out and duel with him personally before he deflowers the girl, though the film’s tentatively attached producers, under pressure from the studio to make the script more “family-friendly”, insisted on cutting this mention of deflowering, despite Lord Khazâd’s emphatic instructions, and ultimately rewrote nearly every scene, outraging Lord Khazâd, since, to leave out the threat of deflowering, he felt, made the rapper seem less clearly villainous, introducing an element of ambiguity that could potentially open the movie to charges of pretension, that quality which Lord Khazâd, in all his artistic endeavors, sought to avoid at all costs, obsessively scouring each project for anything out of the ordinary, determined to avoid pretentiousness by appealing to the basest possible interests of the audience in each work, to avoid self-indulgence by thinking of each work as “product” rather than “art”, to strive always to appeal to the widest possible range of demographics, even in such seemingly narrowly targeted projects as the Stewardesses on Roller Skates fetishist videos he shot during the strike with various young women he scouted at McCarran International Airport, paying them to roll around on antique roller skates in their uniforms in the drained swimming pool behind his hotel until one of the English stewardesses mentioned that she felt like she was in the video for “Optimum Wound Profile” by defunct Manchester punk band Dead Astronauts, the one in which the band is standing in a drained swimming pool in black-and-white, or maybe the back cover of Goodbye Eniwetok, an album by that band’s even-gloomier Sheffield rivals, Karen Novotny’s Face, at which point he immediately erased everything shot up to that point, moving the production out to the hotel parking lot, where, he hoped, fewer intellectual associations might be formed in the minds of the viewers out there at home, trying to unwind after a busy day at work, uninterested in the elitist posturing of art, popping in a tape of Stewardesses on Roller Skates, or Cheerleaders in Fur Coats, or 1950s Teenage Girls Wearing Sunglasses, all of which Lord Khazâd filmed that day, paying the stewardesses to change costumes for each set of videos, orchestrating their halfhearted chant as, in their cheerleading costumes covered by fur coats, they encouraged an unseen football team to vanquish their opponents, and renting a 1957 Cadillac El Dorado for these “teenagers” in pink poodle-skirts to drive down Greaser’s Lane, that infamous road ten minutes outside of Las Vegas where Greasers would hold massive drag races with their hated enemies, the Collegiates, forty years earlier, the Greasers in their ramshackle hot rods and leather jackets, the Collegiates in their expensive foreign race cars and letter jackets, laughing at the Greasers, calling them trash, human garbage, and filth, visibly disgusted by them, the dregs of their high schools, these outcasts, loners, criminals, the mad prophets of the American highways, hypnotized by the savage jungle rhythm of their so-called “rock and roll” music, hair doused in a paste of space-age chemicals so powerful that, should the Greasers forget to use their special lead chain-mail antimacassars known as “Grease Rugs”, the head-rests in their cars were often eaten straight through, a subject of much mockery among the straight-laced Collegiates, whose political cartoons in their intramural newsletters usually depicted Greasers with great globs of shining black grease flying from their stink-line radiating hair, while the Greasers, in obscene graffiti painted illegally on the walls of innocent citizens’ businesses and civic auditoriums, flying in the face of all law and order, portrayed the Collegiates as spraying hundred-dollar bills from their over-stuffed pockets as they paraded about in their mansions or engaged in certain unspeakable acts with their French poodles, depending on how much time these vandals had to do their work before the sun rose and the police showed up to arrest them, as depicted in the low-budget 1962 “greasploitation” film Wheels of Vengeance, filmed in Montréal, which closed with the hero’s car flying off the end of an unfinished bridge over the Saint Lawrence and crashing into the water near the spot where, five years later, an all-dwarf construction crew built the Isle of Minimus pavilion, an imposing background for the scene late in Soixante-Neuf, agent provocatif in which Gainsbourg, Karina, and Bardot, having discovered that Alec Guinness would be visiting the ringleaders of the worldwide conspiracy against the magnificent langue française outside the Isle of Minimus pavilion to make his report early one foggy morning, follow him and watch from their hiding place behind a statue of Louis Papineau the Public Security Intelligence agent’s secretaries (Twiggy and Françoise H
ardy) smoke their cigarettes and giggle under the caresses of their employer as he teases and kisses them in his rather reserved way, straightening their mink coats, calling them “mes pitounes”, as he has done ever since learning this Québécois slang term for “groovy chicks” from Steve McQueen’s character in an earlier scene, and wishing aloud that he could find husbands for them that they wouldn’t immediately kill in a reflexive frenzy, since they are now in their twenties and will never be able to get married if they don’t do it soon, he says, though some of these Westerners seem to him to have lower standards and might accept an aged wife if the dowry, which men in these countries, he says confidently, always expect, is sufficient to cancel out her advanced years and buy the newlyweds a house so that they might start having children without delay amid the unadorned white walls and imitation fireplaces of prefabricated suburban neighborhoods perched over the North American continent, spread out to vast plains and undulations lurking beyond the mist, every husband a genteel marital technician dutifully attending to the needs of his wife that society had told him she possessed while ignoring those that society had deemed better unrecognized and unfulfilled, all of them stolid taxpayers, watchers of television and nicotine-bronzed ceilings, sons of the same and fathers for the same, each a link in a chain, bearers of petty slights and humble expectations, flourishing among visions of a life that seems to these jet set secretaries almost overwhelmingly exotic after years of traveling to one distant metropolis after another among the lissome stewardesses of Pan Am, All Nippon, and Braniff and the international businessmen leering from behind a complementary brandy from takeoff to the pilot announcing that they would be landing momentarily in some country the secretaries had never even heard of as their “sensei” adjusted his gloves and handed to them with his customary look of foreboding the edible rice paper on which he had written the instructions for their current assignment to memorize before eating, an assignment that might include assassinating unnoticed a foreign despot asleep on a pile of concubines in one of the incense-choked pleasure pods of his well-guarded underwater harem dome, stealing an encryption code book from the middle of a United States army base in Korea in the guise of “Turkish dancers” visiting for the troops’ nightly entertainment, seducing a troublesome Japanese politician and photographing him during certain indelicate festivities in order to blackmail him into supporting the interests of the Public Security Intelligence Agency, running amok with a gun in each hand down the ever-narrowing alleys of Mexico City in battle with some local crime organization that had intercepted a shipment of the peyote used by their agents during their Tantric meditations to help them predict their enemies’ next actions through analyzing patterns and synchronicities, in everything from the shape of clouds in the sky to newspaper horoscopes, that would go unnoticed by all but the most skilled interpreters without this drug, or, in the present case, collaborating with an international team of highly skilled agents to destroy the French language, starting in Québec, under the command of a mysterious duo, played by Jane Asher and Ann-Margret, who have organized this campaign by pointing out to the government of each cooperating nation that this most potent and monumental of tongues is, unique among all others, impervious to foreign infiltration and domination thanks to its careful safekeeping by those tireless watchmen, the forty Immortels of the Académie française, and would, therefore, always preserve the French-speaking world as an unpredictable and dangerous element in international relations, potentially sabotaging the implementation and development toward that teleological model of history that will, they secretly assure each nation in turn, end with that particular nation at the head of the worldwide consensus by filling all other languages with that particular nation’s own vocabulary, which will, by that time, have developed a form of what George Orwell called “doublespeak” that will promote unquestioning allegiance to this consensus and the nation that leads it, although, as these women admit to Gainsbourg and his secretaries after the three are caught eavesdropping on their conversation with Guinness and are tied up in one of the big open-air tanks behind the Icelandic pavilion that are scheduled to fill with lava in five minutes to test the small-scale display of geothermal energy that will power the pavilion’s lights and fill with awe the foreigners watching it, they have not been entirely truthful with these collaborating governments, aside from that of their own, Russia, which has sent Marcello Mastroianni’s Commissar of Linguistic Superiority character, Vladimir Dumas, now appearing on the platform with his secretaries alongside Asher and Ann-Margret overlooking the helpless French victims below, to assist the women in their devious plot, which they, seeing that Gainsbourg and his secretaries have no chance of escaping this fiendish deathtrap, explain in detail as an instrumental version of Gainsbourg’s “Je me tiens coite, je tiens au coït” plays on the soundtrack, acknowledging that the only people who will profit from the destruction of the French language will be Communists like themselves, since, with the troublesome French language out of the way, deep-cover Communist agents, whom they have already seeded in the right-wing political parties of nearly every capitalist country on earth, will, while claiming to be fiercely anti-Communist themselves, begin replacing the languages of their own countries word by word with terms crafted by top Soviet linguists to present a superficial appearance of orthodox capitalism while, in reality, acting to undermine that economic theory, terms like “outsourcing” and “right-shoring” that will justify these agents’ actions in sending their countries’ entire economies to China, which has agreed Wage to suppress the standard of living for its people with a decade of instability, to be called a “Cultural Revolution”, under the direction of functionaries such as Lin Biao while investing in industrial infrastructure that will make the transfer of manufacturing to this country an irresistibly attractive cost-cutting choice for the capitalists, who, very quickly, will be indoctrinated through the subversion of their own languages to believe that handing their entire manufacturing base over to this openly Communist nation and driving their own people into poverty, even advocating the abolition of the minimum wage and the dismantling of the educational system, will, in fact, be a pro-capitalist, patriotic deed, vital to their countries’ future success, a “common sense” choice, promoting the absurd concept that even a large country like the United States could flourish with nothing more than a so-called “service economy” to replace their lost industry, gradually weakening these countries until, at last, thanks to the short-sighted and self-serving acts of people like Soixante-Neuf himself, International Communism will emerge triumphant over the squalid remains of the West, though Russia, if resistance to this plot remains as late as 1990, plans to fake a conversion to capitalism to promote the idea that Communism is dead, but will, within no more than ten years, restore a one-party, centralized, authoritarian system, ultimately joining their beloved comrades in China to rule over the desiccated husks of their former enemies, whose presidents and prime ministers will no longer truly rule their own lands but will, instead, find themselves to be the subservient members of an international politburo of up to twenty countries, local governors rather than true leaders, indirectly appointed by the Eastern Bloc through campaign contributions and East-owned media propaganda denouncing those few remaining nationalists who oppose this process as, ironically, socialists and Communists, whose antagonism to “common sense” economic policies will supposedly weaken capitalism, their naive and stubborn resistance to this false-capitalist consensus a loathsome atavism, disgusting to those people fully indoctrinated by this Communist double-speak, which will be bolstered by the old bourgeois class of libertine authoritarians, of whom Soixante-Neuf (aside from his commitment to the French language) is “a fine representative”, people who will happily trade real freedoms for a temporary relaxation of social mores and will quickly act to crush any opposition from the lower orders as they themselves self-destruct through the petty in-fighting that will arise from their desperate, futile attempts to claw their way to the top of thei
r crumbling economies over the next few decades, leaving behind a world of nothing but easily controlled drones, perfectly loyal soldiers for the new system, whose real-life counterparts, if, in fact, the “drones” predicted to rise in this obviously improbable scene had any counterparts, easily frightened, inordinately proud, and full of admiration for anyone with power, would have to include young men like Brody, who stood behind the police cordon on that last night of the strike and watched the police gear up for the final attack on Mini-Paris as he listened idly to a news broadcast on a nearby car radio announcing that Boris Yeltsin would step down as president of Russia that very night, then recap-ping the day’s top stories, such as the handover of control over the Panama Canal from the United States to local authorities, who planned to manage the canal with the help of a little-known Italian company (whose representatives dazzled everyone by arriving at the ceremony in stylish black gondolas), and, after a blast of symphonic martial triumph to mark the beginning of the next news item, in a rather unprofessionally mocking tone, reporting on a cult in southwestern Uganda that had believed that this date, the thirty-first of December, 1999, would mark the end of the world, which the reporter seemed to find greatly humorous, speculating that, as the world clearly wasn’t ending, the cult’s leader, Credonia Mwerinde, would have some explaining to do, though the appeal of this next item needed no explanation, as the reporter smoothly transitioned, discussing an animatronic street peddler that sang Frank Sinatra’s “We Open in Venice” outside the Venetian Hotel here in Las Vegas while automatically altering the lyrics to haggle in real-time over the price of novelty Italy-themed beer hats whenever it detected with its sophisticated visual and auditory sensors a tourist approaching the kiosk, which this robot operated without any human interference whatsoever, a “thrilling delight for all guests” to the Venetian, according to both the reporter, and, coincidentally, the press release for this new attraction that had been sent to news agencies that morning, a detailed description of this robot and its complex machinery that, nevertheless, omitted any mention of the robot’s origins as a Seductechnic-5 brothel-bot Lord Khazâd had imported from the Machines Désirantes corporation of Tokyo for his own use and damaged irreparably during a night of exceptional perversion shortly after his arrival in Las Vegas, destroying its fifty-gigawatt cyber-copulatory transistors and its thousand-horsepower hydraulics from a decommissioned aircraft carrier jet catapult in an attempt to perform the “sooterkin” on it with a cattle prod in each hand and infrared nightvision goggles strapped to his face, rendering the machine useless for his purposes, a mass of charred gears and melted latex, so that when the manager of the Venetian, making a personal visit to Lord Khazâd’s suite to thank him for choosing this hotel, as he did for every high-roller, noticed the sparking and twitching robot on the balcony and, after Lord Khazâd explained what had happened, asked if he might be able to buy the robot for hotel publicity purposes, Lord Khazâd agreed without any hesitation, selling it for only ten thousand US dollars, which he then invested in his new restaurant on the Strip (it never actually opened, owing to its staggeringly numerous violations of the health code, tax code, and basic human decency), specializing in the chokingly salty seafood of the southern Isle of Minimus, with preprandial salt-licks provided to each diner in the Isle fashion on strings hanging from the rafters, enormous ceramic jugs of salt at each table, and up to half a pound of salt infused into each eelburger and jellyfish pancake, exactly like the restaurants Lord Khazâd had frequented as a young man back on the Isle, restaurants like the Old Salt, the Salty Lass, and Aller à la Sel, which were always full of boisterous singing and waitress-groping from sundown until well after sunrise the next day, crowded with connoisseurs arguing over the superiority of Occidental salt versus the more piquant East Asian varieties, foreigners unaccustomed to Minimal cuisine lost in a salt-coma on the floor, grizzled fishermen challenging longshoremen to salt-water-guzzling competitions (which always drew the manager out to shout at the combatants and demand that they take this nonsense to the vomitorium down the street before they soiled his tablecloths and furniture with the inevitable outcome of such foolishness), conscripts from the militia spending their entire week’s salary on foot-long chunks of raw halite that they devoured in two or three teeth-shattering bites, and old men reminiscing about long-ago visits to the Great Salt Lake, where the local giants gaped with dumb astonishment at the sight of these dwarfs plunging their faces into the water and gulping down five or ten gallons immediately upon their arrival on the lake, in which, grateful to at last assuage this craving and replenish their bodies’ dangerously low sodium levels after days or weeks of eating tasteless, salt-free foreign food, a not-insignificant number of them drowned each year before regulations were put into place to limit the danger in 1993, their bodies floating out unnoticed on the surface of the vast lake, staring up with dead eyes at the brilliant desert-blue sky, the occasional cloud drifting along up there, a vulture or two, and, training for their next raid, Utah’s notorious Pink Angels, a band of disgraced rogue military airshow pilots, mostly outcasts from the Blue Angels, the “flight demonstration” squadron of the United States Navy, who had been dishonorably discharged from the service for their “unnatural and perverted relations or lifestyle unbecoming the uniform”, and now spent their days converting their surplus Dassault Mirage III fighters into high-speed precision instruments on a private airfield somewhere north of Salt Lake City, chopping out all the safety gear, which these pilots considered dead weight, adding illegal afterburners and other dangerous modifications, then, whenever they heard rumors of an impending Blue Angels show somewhere within range of their planes, blasting off to intercept, a squadron of “terrorist banshee-rocket kamikazes” ripping down out of the sky as the Blue Angels lazily drifted along in formation over a crowd of spectators with nothing better to do that day, typically first noticed by a child pointing to these newcomers with their distinctive rainbow insignia and pink paint job and asking, “mommy, who are THEY?” as the Blue Angels, shocked and bewildered, began to scatter, their terrified commander shrieking at them over their headsets to stay in formation, Pink Angel fighters hurtling down between two Blue Angels with an inch or two to spare on either side as a Pink pilot opened his cockpit and cracked a Blue cockpit with a chain as he passed, howling with crazed bloodlust, their radio-jamming equipment drowning out the Blue Angels’ cheesy eighties power ballads on the radios below with classic Hüsker Dü, raining hardcore gay pornography down on the audience below in converted cluster-bombs, snarling, growling, barking, and out of their minds on a brutal mix of malt liquor and ink-black meth-amphetamines brewed in stolen septic tanks hidden away within a warehouse near their outlaw airstrip by the same groupie drag-queens and failed artists (known, as are Blue Angel groupies, as “sky-ginch”) who, during a raid, would often, having infiltrated the audience in the guise of nuns, throw off their habits and run wild with cherry bombs and police-issue nightsticks, attacking the military police, journalists and their cameramen, and the beefy young men from the audience trying to be heroes, stirring up publicity for the Pink Angels and ensuring that the local Chamber of Commerce, sprawled out in their nondescript offices on their opium-den chaises longues with cigars and fistfuls of bloody horsemeat stuffed in their maws or pressed against a window watching high school bikini girls dance on a streetcorner below with their handmade signs advertising five-dollar car washes “for a good cause” like a trip to Italy or new equipment for the football team, would take notice of the latest Pink Angel atrocity against their fair city and denounce these “stinking, depraved” pilots to Dan Rather in that night’s national news broadcasts for interrupting yet another air-show with their “foul, repellent” assault on every normal value decent people hold dear, promising straight into the cameras that the next time the Blue Angels put on a show in their town, these Pink psychotics would find that, this time, the forces of good and justice were ready for them, which explains the sudden uptick in municipal purchase of
surface-to-air rocket launchers and ninety-millimeter anti-aircraft guns at the height of Pink Angel activity in the late eighties, weapons they soon found to be utterly ineffective against these drug-sharpened and highly skilled pilots, who out-maneuvered anything sent against them, swooping, diving, and spiraling with a deranged majesty as their berserker-chieftain ringleader, a three-hundred-pound one-time Captain of the Blue Angels, known by the “air name” of Skinny, roared with laughter over the radio and taunted the Blues, who, menaced and impotent, inevitably turned tail and fled this aerial landslide bearing down on them, scattering in all directions, hurtling like startled birds straight toward buildings and cliffsides in a desperate fear-trance, shooting off toward the horizon at full speed while begging the Pinks to spare them, or simply ejecting out of mindless terror as the Pinks battered their planes with bricks and Molotov cocktails into barely-airworthy debris that, if they happened to crash someplace where the Pink Angels’ groupies could get to the site before the proper authorities, would be carted off to the Pink airfield and added to the top of the huge totem poles they crafted out of their victims’ wreckage with expert applications of welding torches and hammers as they celebrated each successful raid well into the night with heavy but convivial drinking, the breaking-in of fresh sky-ginch, the merciless chain-whipping of anyone who had broken the Pink Angel Code, and the initiation of any new recruits by strapping them to surfboards and dragging them at supersonic speeds behind their planes, then, after landing, awarding the new pilots their sleeveless flightsuits, festooned with peacock feathers, grease stains, and the rainbow-symbol patch sewn across the back by whichever groupie was best at tailoring, which they wore at all times, whether they were spending an afternoon with their boyfriends at the park, smashing up a pilots’ bar for refusing to serve them, or stealing a few barrels of jet fuel in the dead of night, never quite living up to the outlandish myths that the press had invented for their hysterical and fear-mongering front-page articles but always willing to try, always ready for a major rumble with any air-show pilots who looked at them the wrong way, always tensed to unleash a ballistic flurry of fists and feet with brutish ferocity if some wise guy college boy twerp should make a snide comment about “pansies” or “punks” in their direction, shattering the windows of an entire Air Force base parking lot of cars with a low-flying buzz at full throttle, brazenly stealing Blue Angel fighters from their hangers and staging an impromptu mid-air demolition derby as the sobbing Blue pilots watched helplessly below, pummeling into a mass of jelly and shattered bone a band of good ol’ boy vigilantes in Texas who ambushed them during one of their Pride rallies at a public airstrip north of Dallas, and stirring up so much “visionary, fiendish, techno-Apache carnage and chaos” everywhere they went that the frightened squares, the businessmen, the housewives, the university academics, the retail managers, and the City Councilmen looking out their airliner windows with terror every time they felt the slightest turbulence or gasping with panic in their homes whenever a particularly near flyover rattled their teacups couldn’t help but envy them a little even as they muttered with disgust in picking up the morning newspaper and reading over their breakfast about the latest acts of savagery with which this “human garbage” had polluted the entire system, the entire American way of life, which the silent majority of citizens preferred to the Pink Angels’ frenzied anarchy, a pollution that even now, the opinion page wise men announced, was spilling into the open minds of “our children”, convincing them that a life of unwashed vengeance and looting was preferable to doing one’s duty as a citizen, and one that threatened to undermine capitalism itself if it were not soon washed away in the cleansing waters of patriotism and upright moral virtue, loyalty, hard work, stick-to-itiveness, honor, and self-control, all those things these grungy and debauched lunatics had abandoned, flaunting their filth, openly kissing each other for the television cameras, which brought back footage for the evening news to scandalize young Brody, who, as a boy, watched these reports with a strange fascination he couldn’t understand, mesmerized by the orgy of abject terror swirling on the screen while the reporter’s incredulous voice-over described that first hideous attack on the Blues during a famous San Francisco military festival in 1981, in which thousands of people were horrified to see their beloved Blue Angels viciously hunted for sport by this “band of freakish gypsies”, whom many spectators, interviewed while their compatriots, too traumatized by what they had seen to even bother to wave from behind the reporters or hoot obscenities at the cameras, slumped life-lessly in the background, speculated to be a Soviet attack squadron bent on demoralizing America, or the vanguard of an extraterrestrial invasion force that could only have come from that most savage of all planets, Mars, or else a message from the Lord, a plague of delta-winged locusts swarming over this land to punish it for some sin so terrible that only those as unblemishedly patriotic as the Blue Angels could bear the punishment for it without going mad from terror, the sacrificial lambs offered up to the heavens by this unworthy and foul race of sinners slack-jawedly chewing their bubble gum and bouncing their yo-yos in this city of filth, which would surely have joined Sodom and Gomorrah in oblivion, burnt to cinders by the purifying flames of the intruders’ inconceivable angelic weaponry, a staff of fire-breathing serpents grinding thick American skulls into dust, a hammer of molten lead crushing pure liquid hubris from the twisted and loathsome bodies of a million sinners, a flaming sword chasing the few survivors toward the Rocky Mountains (where they would hide but find no escape from the holy vengeance pursuing them), if the Blue Angels had not been raised up to accept the burden of their country’s sins, if they had not been stomped in mid-air, one of them chain-whipped, two smashed across the knees with cinder blocks, three castrated with a rusty machete by a disgraced former Blue Angel medic known as Doc, and all of them beaten so badly that they could barely land the smoking and shuddering ruins of their jets and had to be discharged from the Navy after being awarded Purple Hearts by President Ronald Reagan, who, in his emergency address to the nation, vowed to catch these repellent Pink monsters and bring them to justice for this foul crime against these men, whose daily heroism and bravery had been an inspiration to every red-blooded American, men now summoned to posterity like the ancient champions of legend, always to be remembered, always to be revered by those who cherished their deeds and told their children about them, about how they once performed a quadruple Immelman over San Diego in the middle of a thunderstorm just to show it could be done, locked their wings together and had a picnic in-flight atop their fighters over Denver, and saved a busload of orphaned nuns from a rabid mountain lion in rural Wyoming all in one day, then, upon landing, happily signed autographs for the next fifteen hours, never once complaining, their smiles unflagging, their touch causing one ninety-nine-year-old woman to spontaneously menstruate so heavily that she went into a coma and died, their dashing good looks sending all ten thousand oviparous women at the airshow into an estral frenzy so intense that over five hundred had to be hospitalized for overheated glands, their words of wisdom breaking down a dozen hardened drill sergeants to a state of uncontrollable weeping so copious that they had to wear special Kotex absorbent pads over their eyes for a month to keep from staining their uniforms with bloody tears, absorbent pads that would, on that terrible day in 1981, be needed by hundreds of millions of tearful Americans who cried so hard that they vomited uncontrollably from their eyes as word spread of the attack and the first footage began to appear on television, interrupting the afternoon soap operas and game shows with those terrible images of the Pink Angels hurtling down from the clouds to smite the Blues, enraging all right-thinking patriots, many of whom set up volunteer organizations that would patrol the airspace around a Blue Angels show in the hope of scaring off the Pinks, though, since they rarely had anything more powerful than a crop duster or private luxury jet, they were never really any help when the Pinks actually arrived, ruthlessly battering whatever new generation of Blue Angel pilots who
had accepted this assignment, despite their knowledge that each airshow might very well be a suicide mission, that they would almost certainly be attacked by this brutal and implacable foe, aberrant, wanton, despicable, savage, unstoppable, seemingly immortal, beards crusty with red mucus, bestial, atavistic, cannibalistic, necrophilic, crude, violent, obsessive, dissipated, cruel, insane, pitiless, repulsive, covered in scabs, priapismic, manic, nightmarish, and a constant worry for the ex-beauty queen fiancées grasping their Blue Angel pilots in the damp airstrip breezeways and begging them to retire, something the Blue Angels could never do as long as their country needed them up there doing barrel rolls, looping the loop, diving, and spinning for the joy of all those civilians down below relying on them to set an example for courage and patriotism that the children, who, these pilots believed, were “our future”, would always keep in their hearts, that place to which the Blues would point as they disentangled themselves from the tearful fiancées then, slapping back into composure the more hysterical of the women, who thanked them for this much-needed treatment and quickly retreated to the bleachers to watch in silence, mounted their mighty warplanes and shot off into the vast blue sky, where they knew waited in ambush the deadly Pink Angels, who, despite their obscene reputation, had, much to the shock of the journalists writing on this supposed trend in Newsweek, Time, and Reader’s Digest, become idols for certain fringe groups by the early Nineties, folk heroes for “the most pathetic and un-American of losers”, who cheered with a vicarious thrill whenever they saw the Pink Angels demolishing another airshow, even, according to Reader’s Digest, the first magazine to report this story (it appeared between an installment of Humor in Uniform and an essay by political analyst Pat Buchanan seeking to refute the cliché that “no man is an island”), supporting these psychopaths by wearing Pink Angels Fan Club T-shirts, which may or may not have been officially licensed by the squadron, a trend that, though few could claim to have witnessed it outside the reportage of certain periodicals and between alarmist segments on “a rise in teen pregnancy” and “a common household product your child may be using to get high” on the local news, sufficiently horrified the public that the government, at last, cracked down on the Pinks, forcing them out of the skies and arresting them on charges that, though usually spurious, disrupted their activities and discouraged new members from joining, revoking private plane licenses at every opportunity and infiltrating Pink bars and hideouts and locking up much of the leadership, including Skinny and Doc, for lengthy prison terms on narcotics and sodomy charges, which, by 1999, succeeded in removing the Pink Angels as a serious threat to airshows in the United States, a victory trumpeted in a press conference on the thirty-first of December, wherein the Blue Angels thanked all their supporters out there for making 1999 the first full year in which no Pink Angel attacks occurred, drawing cheers from the assembled journalists that buzzed out harshly from the car radio the police had turned up to maximum volume in order to drown out their whispered schemings that, if the strikers within Mini-Paris had overheard, might have given the enemy a chance to out-maneuver them, the police thought, ever-fearful that the strikers might somehow trick them and make them look foolish on the cameras watching their every move from a safe distance as the stern-looking reporters did their best to excite their audience with speculation that the police were finally about to storm the barricades and restore order to Las Vegas, putting an end to this awful situation so that everyone could, finally, get back to their lives, the reporters said, a mad gleam in their eyes (bloodthirst, as well as traces of tear gas and pepper spray, inflaming them), the gleam of leather, truncheon, and bulletproof visor drawing their attention, despite their best efforts to keep looking into the camera, the elegant click of rifles being assembled and boots being strapped on resounding in their ears even louder than the crazed pounding of their hearts, disorienting them to such a degree that a few of these esteemed journalists wandered away from their entourages in mid-sentence and stood transfixed, staring at the police, mumbling into their limply-held microphones vaguely journalistic-sounding nonsense like “alleged police situation report tense we spoke on the scene here with a look at tomorrow’s weather back to you exclusive” as their producers waved frantically from behind the cameras, trying to draw them back to coherence and failing, while the more professional radio reporters murmured soothingly and soberly, reading from a script, then, massaging their jaws and their drooping faces, retreated from the scene, well aware that there was no point in them staying here any longer, not when they could just as easily report from the comfort of their station studios, when everyone would be at home, or at least indoors, by this hour, their radios off, their televisions on, counting down the minutes to midnight, that moment when the big ball in New York City would drop, signifying the maturation of the age, marking the division between the twentieth century and the twenty-first, between the Nineties and the Post-Nineties (as everyone would eventually come to call the decades that followed), whatever time zone they might be in, even out here in the West, the Pacific Time Zone, three hours behind the real time being ticked away at that true center of culture and commerce on the eastern side of the continent, while a few people out here, at their drunken little séances, or out in the nightclubs, drinking, staggering, and howling, would go on until local midnight, would persist, despite that strange old feeling that the party’s over, that, even if some of the networks tried to disguise it with the magic of tape-delay, everything had already ended at nine o’clock local time, when Dick Clark wished everyone a happy new year and the drunken tourists crammed into Times Square, including the hedge fund managers, the Wall Street financial investment experts, and the Chief Executive Officers (the people who really mattered, the only people who really mattered), shoved each other’s tongues in their mouths as Auld Lang Syne warbled from hidden speakers, and that, out here in the West, the great desert, they should really be getting back home, to get some sleep, to meet the next day bright-eyed and ready to somberly maximize their earning potential, under that curious leveling feeling that, from some strange disappointment at the failure of the world to end in the expected fire and screams of terror, spread out over everything and made each day exactly like every other day, each person exactly like everyone else, numb, drifting, lost, passive, acutely aware that, although the clocks went on ticking away the hours, they only did so out of an obligation to the laws of physics and were no longer genuinely marking off any real passage of time, that everything in the world would remain exactly the same forever, a hollow simulacrum of what it used to be, of what everyone vaguely remembered from their childhoods, now an ironic joke, an endless procession of self-parodies and parodies of parodies, as purposeless as that book on Sakharin’s shelf next to his Bibles, titled 99 Reasons the World Will End in 1999, or the half-finished tome on “Surviving Y2K” that Lord Khazâd had been working on now and then up to mid-December, when he realized one evening that he would never finish it in time and threw the manuscript from his hotel balcony, casting it to the wind over Las Vegas, a flock of scribbled pages nervously fluttering over the Strip, brilliantly multicolored in the neon blasting toward the twilight sky, floating, twisting, swooping, perching here and there, on other balconies, on benches, in novelty T-shirt kiosks, in a woman’s hair, in the mouth of a trombone in an “authentic” New Orleans-style brass band, decorating the city with jumbled descriptions of storing ammunition and building walls to keep out looters, filtering water through an old sock, maintaining a Geiger counter, identifying which minority races were most inclined to accept one’s domination over them and how to communicate with each of them in the bizarre languages that would form after Y2K out of a mixture of slang and mispronounced words, and why readers should invest all their money in a certain company that sold people gold and stored it for them in their underground vaults for that day when it would be needed, a company in which Lord Khazâd coincidentally owned a great deal of stock and the only one capable, he claimed, of defending their gold fro
m the inevitable waves of looters who would swarm against its fortified gates in an attempt to “deprive you of what is rightfully yours”, advice that drifted through the city streets, wedged itself into cracks in the pavement, slipped under doors, and flowed out, in every direction, toward the desert, toward the night-cold dunes, the faded highways, the huge and mysterious unmarked warehouses sitting far off the roads, and even, after a couple of weeks, down into Sakharin’s gated community, Location City, way out there in the wilderness beyond the most far-flung suburbs, where, as darkness fell, Hercule walked among the ghostly faces of silent houses, alone, hungry, parched by the dry air, looking for a payphone or some place he could call for a ride back to Mini-Paris that last night of the strike, forgotten by Sakharin and the others as he stood staring at a “You Are Here” map somewhere near the center of Location City with a strange feeling that he had seen this odd grid somewhere before, then, turning, discovered that the limousine had pulled away and was already disappearing around a corner, leaving him to wander these streets, which, despite their uniformity, had begun to seem mazelike, returning him to the same spot no matter where he turned, no matter whether he took a right at Patriot Boulevard, past the old-timey general store that disappointingly turned out to be a facade hiding a small power substation, or left at Venetian Avenue, sipping from one of the canal-themed fountains that burbled at the center of each lawn, then hurrying onward when, from the deep shadows of one of the houses, something seemed to be watching him, a man in a black cloak, Hercule imagined, holding some kind of pike or staff with a glinting bayonet at the top, glaring at him with malevolence, though, as he walked down the center of the street, he had to admit that he had let his imagination “run wild” and that this strange little district was, in reality, entirely devoid of life, aside from himself, if he counted as life, and a single nocturnal rodent slithering down one of the gutters, fooled by all these houses into thinking there would be something to eat here, lucky if it found a discarded bread crust from one of the construction workers, or an empty french fry container that rattled in with a scattering of miscellaneous garbage from Las Vegas on days when the wind blew down from the north, something it could lick for a minute, no doubt shocked to see Hercule ambling along in the light of streetlamps that gradually flickered on overhead against the distant dark sky, black at its height and gradually reddening toward the west where the sun had just disappeared, purpling toward the north where the foul neon cauldron of Las Vegas was brewing up another night of weary spectacle, where the police, it now occurred to Hercule, might very well be attacking Mini-Paris, if the President’s threats had, despite Lucille’s belief that they were political bluster, in fact, been genuine, which they were, he knew, when, near midnight, some of the garbage howling down from the north began to look familiar to his weary eyes, and he said to himself, the police have blown up the barricades, running wild, smashing all the buildings and hunting down the survivors with rabid German Shepherds, machine-gunning the whole place into splinters, while President Clinton mournfully gazed out at all the people watching his announcement on television at home and told everyone that the strikers refused to surrender and, in the attempt to arrest them, attacked the police, so had to be pacified, leaving no survivors, no one mourning them, aside from a handful of old hippies and college kids, who would wave some signs and chant some slogans outside the White House gates for an hour or two while the President and Tony Blair sipped their cosmopolitans behind the bulletproof glass of an upstairs office and snickered at the sight of this sparse scraggle of dead-enders protesting down in the street, a “non-violent” protest designed to pressure the government into opening an inquiry into the “heavy-handed” response to the strike, or at least to issue a formal apology, as if this sort of thing, this sign-waving and slogan-chanting, had ever made any difference at any time in history, as if they could possibly impress anyone who mattered with the half-remembered Woody Guthrie song they droned out all morning and the crude Bill Clinton effigy they waved around on a stick before these bearded old delinquents and earnest rich kids went home and watched television for a while, now and then complaining to their friends about what the President had done to those poor “little people” in Las Vegas, maybe, but never forgetting that calm and peaceful protests and voting after carefully weighing each nominee’s position on each major issue were the only means of changing society, that “mindless violence” is not how one gets things done in a democracy, and that the candidates of the President’s party were, if nothing else, better than those of the opposing party, the lesser of two evils, as “evils” were now all that would ever be possible, “good” having slipped beyond reach, leaving men like the President who, though the actual policies passed under their administrations were more or less identical to those that would have passed under their competitors’, at least engaged in a rhetoric that was somewhat more palatable to their supporters than the opposition’s rhetoric, giving these protestors the hope that the government might still turn out to be sympathetic toward the next group, like the Mini-Paris strikers, to attempt to “autono mize the proletariatic delimitation of disequalibrialationalist sublimation”, as Marcel X put it in his article, published in the bi-yearly Cornell Academic Journal of Feminarrative Multiplicitization Studies alongside articles by his dear friends and colleagues Edward Said and Henry Louis Gates, on his experiences among the strikers, an article which, though some raised doubts about the veracity of his depiction of himself as a major figure in the strike and one who risked his life many times over during his time in Mini-Paris, was well-received among the academic community, who joined the self-proclaimed “superstar theorist” in dismissing the “complicitous and disingenuous” criticisms of the article by “crypto-conservative elements” as nothing more than “Pee-wee Hermeneutics”, a term Marcel had first formulated in his weekly column for a certain well-known politics and culture website, wherein he chronicled what he called his “delightfully contrarian musings” on everything from television sitcoms to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and had used many times since in criticizing the “mental midgetry” and reactionary language his enemies employed in their attacks on his writings, in their highly problematic attempts, that is, to submit his texts to the supersession of peripheral hegemonetary capitalization, inspired by their general envy of his spectacular success at Cornell, where those tragically wrong-headed professors who had tied their wagon to the totalizing aesthetic protocols of either Spatio-Temporal Multigeneric Subjectivity or Semiotic Correlative Modal-Orality could not help but resent the shadow in which they toiled and the international fame Marcel had gathered to himself with controversial essays and books that reactionary television pundits had tripped over each other to denounce in calling for the university to fire him for his views he freely admitted, when ambushed outside his home by journalist John Stossel, to be “anti-American”, in that they were anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-masculinist, anti-religious, and anti-capitalist, though, he admitted to the microphone shoved into his face as he squinted through the morning sunlight at the leering camera, he had broken with many of his colleagues in rejecting the traditional Marxist call to Revolution, because, quite simply, despite the Revolution’s possible validity as a concept in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for authentic Revolution to take place now, post-1991, and especially here in the so-called United States, would be essentially unthinkable, as it would, in the atmosphere of permanent spectacle, almost immediately devolve into mindless violence or be co-opted by conservative groups, if it could even happen in the first place, and would most likely not even lead to the empowerment of the proletariat but would, instead, lead to the further entrenchment of white male privilege and corporate oligarchy, the only real beneficiaries of Revolution in the United States, where the working class, in contrast to the relatively enlightened workers of Europe, preferred to gorge themselves on the trough of television and fast food rather than unpack the theories of Marx and Engels, and would, wheth
er they knew it or not, probably take up arms in favor of their masters, not against them, a hundred million white trash Revolutionaries fighting for lower wages, more television, more oppression of womyn, more hamburgers, rampaging out from their squalid trailer homes to pour their foul beers and fortified wines down the maws of their piggish faces and shoot, burn, lynch, stab, beat, and exterminate any minority in their path, howling slurs in the dumb redneck pidgin-English that they would force one to use in all official documents and even in everyday speech, burning down the universities and libraries and building in their place churches and sporting arenas, caging the descendants of African slaves and First Nations peoples in zoos for the amusement of the whites’ dirt-covered spawn, which, nourished entirely on sugary snacks and Chicken McNuggets, would limp rapidly from cage to cage with a hyperactivity more commonly found in small apes than in human children, shrieking and grunting in the primitive, pre-lingual form of communication to which they, lacking any education, would have reverted and pointing to one of the First Nations captives to indicate to their toadlike brood mare mother that they wished to purchase this one to torture and eat back home in their shelter, assembled from plywood and sheet metal under the ruins of an overpass or burnt-out civic center and adorned with bumper stickers and countless varieties of firearms, which would eventually be the only mechanical devices anyone remembered how to operate, endlessly shooting off these guns to celebrate the forced marriage of one of their fat and belching daughters to one of the cruel and lecherous patriarchs who would roam the land with his numerous other wives and hundreds of children in tow, searching out and killing for fun or food academics like Marcel, who, alerted by the vulgarian twang of their country music as they approached his burrow, would flee across the broken, rocky landscape, under a blood-colored sky reflecting the burning cities below, across the rivers of sewage, through a valley between collapsed skyscrapers adorned with Big Mouth Billy Basses to detect intruders and, upon sensing movement in this no man’s land, to call out the mutant descendants of hunting dogs, which would join the chase alongside the white trash as Marcel would sprint on his spindly little legs, his comb-over flapping in the wind, toward the safety of a desecrated natural history museum, where some of his fellow academics would have set up a makeshift fortress to protect themselves as they discussed the latest samizdat philoso phical pamphlet smuggled from Europe and debated the wisdom of taking direct action, perhaps even taking up arms, to revive Marxism, Post-Marxism, Delimitized Intertemporalism, Hermeneutic Spatialization, Messianic Criminality, Biuni vocal Reterritorialization, Synthetic Antiproduction, or some other Leftist modality that might rehabilitate their movement and shift the world toward a somewhat less hegemonic ideological framework, which Marcel, catching his breath in the foyer and greedily devouring the thin gruel offered to him after the others had lifted him over the walls of the ruined museum with the mutant hounds and mutant rednecks snapping at his heels, would find highly problematic, reminding his colleagues with a bold and decisive speech as they would sit around their campfire that to take any action, even one that might advance a seemingly-unproblematic agenda, would be to risk falling prey to the same positivism, the same prescriptivism, the same pragmatism, the same conser vatism that they were trying to combat, to risk betraying the spirit of their ideals by privileging one modality over another in a realm beyond academic discourse, where it would inevitably stagnate, complicitizing them with reactionary tendencies as they fought to suppress rivals and promote their own ideology, resulting in ossifying subjectivities with a normative (if not phalloholological) centralization of theory through the inescapable paradox of legitimated systemic-endemic heteronativist sublimation and the amenesial internegation of poly morphously symplectic construction alism, resulting in a totalitarianism of their own design, the reason Marcel, by contrast, would prefer that they remained cloistered here, outwardly passive and noncommittal, to continue this strange little monastery of the Left’s project of mimeographing classics and printing new works to be distributed, works which would raise questions rather than provide answers, illuminate ambiguities rather than spotlight illusory truths, and thereby keep their movement alive as a vital refutation of authority for centuries to come, he would conclude, rising to his feet and gesturing toward the ceiling with his spoon, inspiring the others to rise as well in a standing ovation, even, perhaps, impressing some of the white trash listening outside, influencing them toward new ways of thinking, convincing them to forgo their village’s next lynching party or book burning, or even to return eagerly again the next day to hear Marcel speaking from a high platform over the wall, lecturing them on such basics as “ownership of production” and “prosthetic recrimination” and relating to them the cautionary tale of the All-China Communist Purity League, which formed way back in the late 1990s and sought to restore China after that country began to show signs of drifting toward capitalism, a conspiracy, they believed, that originated among capitalist agents implanted among the Party, or good Communists brainwashed by those foreign chambermaids seen sluicing out in the evening from those big American-style mansions the Party leadership had increasingly reserved for itself in Beijing, dainty and cunning Italian and Portuguese girls in skintight green body-stockings who drove their station wagons in the smoking city dusk back to their apartments, where they would file their nails by the window and wait for their employers to slip away from wives and children to come see them and then, while these men lay drunken on their beds, would attach CIa-crafted electrodes to their employers’ foreheads and hypnotize them into accepting an economic policy that would transform China from a nation run by Party leadership for the good of the People to an enormous corporation that would seek only greater profit, controlled by the West, or by the international economic concerns that originated in the West but no longer held any identifiable center, which, with their ever-shifting demands for more or less of various products and resources, would drive China into chaos, destabilizing the entire society, developing a small core of elite owners and a bourgeois managerial class that would keep the rest of the country in poverty in order to safeguard their profit margin, put down any resistance with a single order to the military sighed into their cabana telephone from Aruba or Fiji, order the expansion of prison-factories that would fill the air in every city with choking pollutants as they themselves breathed the clean mountain air of Aspen or Geneva, or demand the suppression of wages for workers while they relaxed on silk sheets in thousand-dollar-a-night Las Vegas hotel rooms, a future China could only avoid, it was said, by supporting the All-China Communist Purity League in their assassinations of various “collaborative” Party officials and efforts to stir up a new Cultural Revolution, which, rather than moving their country away from capitalism, in fact hurried it toward that state, Marcel would say to his rapt audience, as the Purity League’s actions could only help the leadership of the Party to discredit their opponents as violent fanatics who needed to be suppressed at any cost, which they did, just as the capitalists would do in any country where the Left forgot that its primary concern must always be to avoid the kind of direct action that had so problematized the Revolution in the twentieth century, to instead influence society toward superior political thought by support for a healthy public dialectic, which Marcel himself preferred to do through what he called hyperpassivity, a method he had formulated of hurrying capitalism along to its doom by assenting without resistance to it, denying the Right any possibility of mischaracterizing the Left, of capitalizing, so to speak, on any act that could be used to make the Left appear hostile to bourgeois values like misogyny, racism, and nationalism, which were values that, once they reached total dominance over global discourse, would naturally disintegrate under their own illogic and inefficiencies, leaving the Left to pick up the pieces, unopposed, as he explained to an extremely skeptical Lucille and Hercule shortly after his arrival in Mini-Paris, encouraging them to lay down their weapons, go home, and write letters to their representatives in Congress wh
ile he sat there with them in late December watching the fluttering under the ventilation of a million thumbtacked leaflets checkering the walls with their pedantic affirmations of some “upcoming” celebration that had occurred years ago now as they sat drinking at a rusty umbrella table meant for outdoor poolside summer scenes but dragged indoors to keep off them the rain leaking through the weather-gouged roof into the miniature Palais de l’Institut, where, through the drone of the ventilation, the portable generator, and the occasional rain on the umbrella, Lucille, reminded by the look on Marcel’s face of the teachers at the Chongryon school of her youth who shouted at her in annoyance whenever she inconveniently pointed out the ways that their philosophy and government seemed to contradict the true principles of socialism, talked about laying the groundwork for an expansion of the strike into neighboring casinos and businesses, including, most importantly, the airport, since, with it under their control, they could start bringing in food and ammunition again, which had been impossible ever since Lord Khazâd had turned his back on them and the police had blockaded the tunnels against their couriers, much as Brody, peering through the window at the end of a tether tied with an unbreakable “Marcellaville” type knot (#322 in the original 1944 Ashley Book of Knots by Clifford Ashley) by Hercule around the hiring manager’s neck and a steel shaft in a leg of the miniature Eiffel Tower, triumphantly announced he had predicted before warning them all that, if they failed to man up and accept the common-sense economic realities of the current situation, they would never find any allies out there, a prediction Marcel, with a tone of reluctance coloring his voice, admitted was quite likely true, and one Lucille, and Hercule as well, secretly feared might be accurate, especially after various dwarf entertainers, such as Verne Troyer (“Mini-Me” of Austin Powers infamy) and Tom Thumb III (General Charles Sherwood Stratton’s neo-Confederate country singer descendant, who financed the recording of his crazed musical rants with the PT Barnum reparations won by Tom Thumb II in the hope of financing his son’s education), spoke out in the press against the “Minimal extremism” or “Nanofascism” that had so alarmed the army of pundits demanding registration of all dwarfs and even expulsion to a military facility in the Thimble Islands any dwarf who refused to sign a loyalty oath to the United States, though a few sympathetic dwarfs had tentatively spoken in favor of the strike and in private were even heard to denounce those like Troyer and Thumb as “Uncle Bilbos”, and most American dwarfs agreed that, whether or not the strike was a good idea, Lord Khazâd’s indecisive and disloyal behavior had brought disgrace on their people, falling prey to the old idea that people’s behavior can ever be consistent or logical, of which Hercule had become suspicious a long time ago and rejected completely by the last week of the strike, when, late one night, he saw the kindest and most decent of the remaining dwarfs suddenly snap for no apparent reason and begin beating one of the others until pulled away by Ken and Johnny as Hercule watched numbly and unsurprised from under one leg of the miniature Eiffel Tower to avoid the fresh volley of beer bottles from the tourists outside before slipping out, planning, without any real reason behind it, to leave the strike altogether, through a hole in the barricade and, as dawn broke, took a ride on a forgotten bus line past the oak-paneled all-night diners and car part dungeons of the quiet part of the city no one ever visited, his head against the bus window in the dim blue light, alone, the driver so wearily uninterested that he seemed to Hercule more like part of the machinery than another human being, mechanically turning the rumbling vehicle down these ruined streets, past the sidewalks shattered by age, half-burnt-out light-up signs for failed businesses, empty phone booths, boarded-up grocery stores, barred rent-to-own appliance warehouses, filth-fogged plate glass with a neon beer sign or two and a sad old man bowed over his limp breakfast and his Reader’s Digest or looking back out at the sparse traffic and meeting Hercule’s eye for a moment as the bus continued on into the early mist glowing somberly in the grim morning light and darkening the still-shadowed doorways that yawned from tired and sagging buildings where people (always alone) huddled under the porticos in their ragged coats and wool caps pulled down to eyes reflecting the pain in everything they saw, the ugliness of this world, the futile suffering, the decay and contempt everywhere, the ragged stray cats nosing the spilled entrails of gutted garbage bags, the roadkill opossums smashed over several weeks into a thin paste with little tufts of yellowed fur flickering in the breeze, and the other lone vagrants breathing this cool wet air and waiting for the sky to let down its rain into cupped hands that would rub themselves clean of the tacky dust that had stuck to them in the long dry days as these people shut their eyes and let out a disgusted sigh, the last language, the last words of the last language, all that was left to a world too weary to speak, all that anyone needed to say, a wordless exhalation of a breath desecrated by the fumes of distant factories, choked out from a scarred throat, swallowed up by the sound of some freeway somewhere out there with its million roaring wheels carrying workers to their days, chewing their bagels, adjusting their radios, and merging into and out of traffic that slid along in formation over the sleepy neighborhoods below, where, as the day grew brighter, Hercule awoke to find that the bus had returned to the point at which he had climbed aboard, so he climbed back down to wander along Paradise Road, past the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, to a strip mall that would, in 2004, be replaced by the Hofbräuhaus Las Vegas, “an exact replica”, according to its promotional literature, “of the legendary Hofbräuhaus in Munich, Germany”, where Adolf Hitler first presented the twenty-five point agenda of the Nazi Party (though the “ History” section of this promotional literature, oddly, fails to mention this, despite Hitler having, additionally, made this landmark the subject of one of his most famous paintings, those paintings which evince the need to colonize even the arts felt by so many dictators, since their ambitions are not merely to control physical territory but, more importantly, the “souls” of their subordinates, knowing that a loyal or, at least, cowed populace, who truly believe that there is no alternative but to submit, is a better defense than any fortification), and where two German members of the Oktopussë family, wayward cousins of Josef Oktopussë, planned to meet up with Bavarian relatives after their escape from the East, had they not been shot by snipers in 1988 as they attempted to flee across the flat stretch of land dividing East and West Berlin, across an area which had been the Luisenstadt Canal until it was filled with dirt in 1926 to form a park that eventually became part of the “no man’s land”, where these two were killed halfway to the enormous wall towering above them in forbidding concrete, a portion of which was removed during the demolition in 1989 and taken to the Main Street Station Casino, Brewery and Hotel in Las Vegas, where it constituted one wall of the men’s restroom, with urinals installed in it beneath a plaque commemorating those who lost their lives at it, which Hercule, lifting an unconscious Lord Khazâd from the tiled floor of this restroom during a drinking binge shortly before the strike began, had briefly noticed, but forgotten now as he continued walking down to the Strip, falling in behind a number of hungover businessmen, who began to mutter bitterly when they caught sight of the barricade around Mini-Paris and nudged each other as they noticed Hercule among them, then, one by one, joined in a howl of Randy Newman’s hit 1977 song “Short People” that continued until Hercule broke away and fled their jeers and catcalls across a hotel plaza to wait behind a bench and sip from a small bottle of Isle whisky he had bought at the strip mall, returning only when it seemed safe to come back out to the sidewalk and continue toward the barricades, where, again for no reason, because of a momentary idiosyncrasy of the brain, because of the weather, because of society, he decided to return to the strike, and slipped past the police cordon behind the globe-shaped gut of a bellowing tourist, walking along calmly until he got near enough to the barricade that he could leap forward and scramble up it before the police and tourists could notice him and grab him, pull him down, give him a few thumps on the
head, drag him off to the vans, as one more freak evicted, one less lunatic standing in the way of progress with slogans and barricades, locked away to restore order, to return things back to the way things were meant to be, the way things would be no matter how much deranged elements like this resisted, the way things would always be, the endless routine, a commute home for a few hours of TV Meditation, a few hours of sleep, then the return to work, to the shelves of commodities shifted at the whims of bank account artists, surgically lacquered and tanned, barking orders into their telephones in offices overlooking a sunny landscape of Jacuzzis and poolside tennis a thousand miles away, then inviting up to their sprawling hermitages their European counterparts, whom the television pundits happily chirped were now “living like Americans” in that they no longer confined themselves to one country’s borders but allowed themselves to be passed around the globe as international citizens, consulting at a Washington think tank one day, waking up in a Shanghai data-mining pod the next, then jetting over to London for a week of hovercrafting on the Thames to unwind, the way Americans live, according to the television, according to the sprayed blondes rigidly poised before the cameras over the Stock Exchange, and the steaming power-tie juggernaut-pundits glowering from behind their desks and asking scripted questions of the Beach Boys in the Eighties stock-exchangers bouncing in their seats and grinning desperately as they talked up companies like Microsoft, Coca-Cola, or the peddlers of the aforementioned TV Meditation, who, until competition from the Internet drove them into bankruptcy in 2006, sent their trained personal trainers out to people’s houses to teach them to use their televisions as an escape hatch through which they could transcend this world by focusing completely on the image and forgetting everything else, which greatly appealed to most people, making TV Meditation one of the most successful of the big self-help companies with their barrage of VHS cassettes, books, conferences in Branson and Las Vegas, and television appearances in which they would advise distant husbands to treat their wives like employees, to think of their families as corporations, to remember that love is just a transaction like any other, that you must pay your family with affection like you pay your employees with money, give them shares of attention, raises of closeness, bonuses of special nights out at a favorite restaurant or a vacation in an exotic locale, performance reviews of honest communication, that you should consider instituting “Casual Fridays” at home and “Company Retreats” to a public campground to discuss the state of the family, so that they will continue to function efficiently and effectively, frolicking with the Golden Retriever out back around the barbeque, watching a movie together in your home theater you built in your daughter’s former bedroom when she went off to Harvard, or sharing a quiet candlelit dinner to the melancholy anthems of moderately popular UK band Workstation, who, after a song from their 1999 debut was used in the climactic scene of a Julia Roberts romantic comedy, achieved a measure of international success, despite a lawsuit alleging that they had plagiarized the bass line from a 1981 song called “The Dead Time”, the first track on the album Perverse Geometry, by Dead Astronauts, losing the Grammy for Best Alternative Album to Sonic Youth’s well-received comeback Dziga Vertov, the derision of obvious influences U2 and Radiohead, who called them “dire” and “naff”, respectively, and the greater popularity of similar bands like the Upset Lads, Sob Stories, Sensitive Gums, Waffling, the Frowning Faces, Grey Hush, Dour Die, the Sombre Hum, the Weeping Boys, Coldplay, and a dozen others along those lines who slouched forth in the late Nineties and early Post-Nineties in the wake of bands like Oasis, whose arrogant boastfulness had begun to seem inappropriate to the atmosphere of gloom that, day by day, was slowly spreading throughout the world, the premillennial apprehension, the sense that something real and important was coming to an end, that it wasn’t just about a calendar flipping from 1999 to 2000, that the minatory rants of countless cults and warped telereligious fraudsters were not necessarily all that crazy, were in some way strangely believable, the reflection of a creeping dread that had built up subconsciously for years, a sense of loss, stagnation, meaninglessness, a barbarous premonition, a vast emptiness looming in the future, looming over everyone on Earth, waiting for its moment, a yawning crypt, a mass grave for the whole world, the end of time, according to the cult of Mallrat, who had determined through complex calculations performed on a stolen supercomputer from the University of Tokyo that sinister forces still unknown to them had organized a ritual, a perverse mystical rite thought long forgotten but recently rediscovered among ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, that would draw on the latent psychomagnetic energy of thousands of people driven into a rage, collect this energy, this anger, this vast hatred, and use it to annihilate time itself by drawing to Earth a figure called the King of Terror sometime in July of 1999, a ceremony the remnants of the cult, having failed to prevent it, now sought to recreate in inverse form, meaning, as the original ceremony was designed to be the evil mirror image of an authentic expression of love and common humanity (the ancient Egyptians recommended a sort of “black mass” that would deify an evil anti-Pharaoh), the cult’s ceremony to restart time would take place in the heart of an utterly soulless and decadent city, Las Vegas, and take the form of an act of self-lessness and compassion, the Mini-Paris strike, sparking a respect for basic human decency that would spread across the world, a global strike, the barricades widening until they encompassed the entire planet and vanished, returning the real progression of time to the universe, as opposed to the purely illusory time that currently prevailed, leaving a world of peace and fellowship, a goal Lucille knew, as she bled to death under the miniature Eiffel Tower, she had failed to accomplish, racked with painful sobs, clutching the bullet wound under her ribcage where a bulbous male tourist in cargo shorts, flip-flops, and a threadbare Hard Rock Café T-shirt had shot her after swarming in with the others of his kind in the wake of the police incursion, helping them to smash up the place, enraged by the apparent escape of the strikers, then, noticing Lucille hidden behind the miniature Palais de l’Institut, pulling a gun from his fanny-pack, chasing her, his face red with the exertion, and firing as she reached for the ladder to climb the miniature Eiffel Tower, again zipping up his weapon in the fanny-pack and, as the police came to look for the source of the gunshot echoing through the miniature streets, strolling out, pleased with himself for standing up for his country, a soldier in this war, a hero, leaving with head held high through the gap in the barricades at the same time Hercule emerged from the tunnel under the miniature Notre Dame (where he had used his small size to sneak past the police posted down there to guard against anyone escaping Mini-Paris), having discovered another entrance to the tunnels under a garden shed made to resemble Saint Mark’s Basilica behind one of the houses on Venetian Avenue in Location City when, giving up hope of escaping this labyrinth, he had decided to find a place to sleep and wait for morning, breaking into the shed where, at the back, behind some lawn mowers and hedge clippers attached to the wall with metal clamps that only opened to release each tool when one of the laborers swiped a personalized electronic identification badge through a slot over that tool in order to prevent theft, another mysterious door like the one in Mini-Paris opened onto a set of stairs leading down into the darkness, a gloom barely dispersed by the small flashlight Hercule rummaged from an unsecured drawer before climbing cautiously down with one hand on the wall to steady himself on the big, steep steps meant for taller people that seemed to go deeper and deeper without end into the earth until at last he reached the big map on the wall at the bottom of the stairs indicating directions to other tunnel entrances, some of which were here in Las Vegas, while others, farther out on the map, barely visible through the grime encrusting the surface, were surprisingly far away, with the red dot marking one in Kansas City just three inches away from the closely-set Las Vegas entrances, one for Montréal a few inches beyond that, while the labels for more distant points were entirely illegible, aside from a few that he felt he could possibly ma
ke out if he just had the time, but, remembering that the police incursion was scheduled for that night, he gave up in trying to decipher any more of the map and hurried down the tunnel that, according to the map, would lead to Mini-Paris, intersecting a few subterranean storm drains, where the surviving homeless population, hiding in their well-camouflaged niches, told Hercule about what had happened up there above ground and warned him to avoid the police, who were shooting at anything that moved and had blocked off the tunnel just below Mini-Paris, though these riot-suited guards failed to notice Hercule creeping past them in the darkness as they lit their cigarettes and chuckled over the failure of the strike and the destruction of the miniature city, which presented to Hercule an apocalyptic vista as he emerged into the ruined streets among the gutted buildings and the smoke of unseen flames billowing thickly overhead in a black rainbow that reflected a million oily neon colors from the Strip, growing, shifting, merging, and giving everything the murky confusion of a nightmare, painting the ruins of the Louvre a leprous blue-white, staining the water of the Seine red, and hiding in miasmic darkness the upper reaches of the Eiffel Tower, where, on the concrete beneath the soaring lattice of steel, Hercule found in a pool of blood Lucille, who grasped his arms as he knelt over her, then, with the last of her strength, as her breathing slowed and her eyes fluttered shut, begged Hercule to carry her body to what remained of the barricades and place her in there among the garbage, among the branded water bottles, the crumpled hamburger wrappers, and part of the cover art from a Workstation CD with the band’s name scrawled over Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (a cover Workstation would later unsuccessfully sue Coldplay for “stealing” with their internationally bestselling 2008 album Viva la Vida), a request Hercule considered, staring numbly down at the corpse, then silently rejected, saying to himself, she’s better off this way, she has escaped, she’s free of all this now, beyond this sick and suffering life, and saw in the wavering neon glow reflected off her pale skin a light that soared above all the meaningless pain of this world, the light of death, feeling, as the smoke drifted around them and swallowed them up in utter darkness, as if he were being lifted up, breaking through into a sky of tranquil blue light over a rolling white cloudscape, utterly devoid of life, pain, fear, the way things had once been, before the cosmic mistake that infected the earth with sentient forms of existence, and the way things would someday be again, he knew, when humanity at last would recognize the great gift they alone among all the creatures of the world had been given, the gift of consciousness, the gift that allowed them to recognize the needlessness of life and to put an end to it, to cleanse the earth of this infection, which Hercule, having escaped in the smoke and darkness through a hole in the ruined barricades, preached from that day onward, traveling the world, showing people the way out, encouraging them to stop having children, to vote for belligerent politicians who seemed most likely to start a nuclear war, to let the world fall into silence, a monument floating in the void, warning anyone who came near to turn back, give up, let go, leave behind this radioactive crust with its chalky ruins, its boiled oceans, its splintered strip malls, its melted warehouses full of Lord Khazâd’s pornographic Viewmaster reels, “REaL simulated diamonds”, and marionette fetishist tapes Lord Khazâd tried and failed to sell before reviving his phone line business in the Post-Nineties, crafting, in his spare time away from his role as a board member of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation (not to mention his seigneurship), a new company based near his palace on the Isle of Minimus, where he could be free of the usual regulations and taxes that Lord Khazâd felt had impeded his success in the United States and could take advantage of the large number of international telecommunications cables that had been installed to connect the Marcellaville Expo 2000 grounds to the rest of the world before “political instability” on the Isle had persuaded the Bureau of International Expositions to move Expo 2000 to Hannover, Germany just three months before it was scheduled to begin, leaving Lord Khazâd with five square miles of half-finished pavilions, which he filled with the displaced citizenry who had once lived on that land and were willing to work for virtually no money maintaining the huge machines, which, from a small recorded sample, could extrapolate and recreate the voice of any of their clients, then call those clients’ loved ones for ten, twenty, or fifty years after their deaths, depending on how much they paid, and hold somewhat convincing conversations with those loved ones, whose grief would be ameliorated by these conversations with the machines, which, though they could not draw as accurately upon the biographical data of their subjects as the human operators did in Lord Khazâd’s old company, were, at least, cheaper than the human operators, and still did well enough that a brief scandal erupted when mentally ill relatives of several clients began to take the calls seriously and believed that they really were talking to the deceased clients, despite all the usual blasts of high-speed recorded disclaimers prefacing each call, though press coverage of these incidents only encouraged more people to sign up for this service, and, soon, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world were talking to the simulated dead, delighting in the rather cheesy descriptions of the culturally-appropriate Heaven where each client was typically spending most of his time meeting various favorite celebrities, golfing on a cloud with Elvis, for example, singing onstage with Frank Sinatra at a casino in a celestial Las Vegas, dancing with the one and only Fred Astaire in a lavish Technicolor production, or prowling for university girls with the stars of the highly popular 1980s UK sitcom Strikebreakers, which depicted a trio of portly middle-aged men employed by the Thatcheresque boss of the so-called British Labour Mediation Company to crack heads off-screen whenever the arrogant and romantically successful lads down at the local mine shaft had the silly notion of going on strike (this happened in every episode), after which, strike averted, and the strikers presumably sent to hospital with the grievous injuries that these men winkingly implied through the most transparent of euphemisms and metaphors to the guffawing amusement of the studio audience, they returned with their clubs and chains to the dingy and over-bright “headquarters” set, full of comely young secretaries for the men to lecherously grope and proposition at every opportunity while avoiding their “joyless old bag” of a boss, who verbally castrated them in front of the secretaries with her shrill denunciations of their receding hairlines, warty faces, and sweaty necks as she handed them their payment and demanded that they get out, though they always stuck around long enough to cook up some plan to humiliate the boss in turn, such as rigging her clothes to fall off as she made a speech to the entire company, arranging for her to go on a date with a man who turned out to be Pakistani, or mixing sleeping pills into her gin and locking her in a room with a younger “strikebreaker” who, earlier in that episode, had confessed that he had never “had it off” with a woman before, nearly always drawing from the boss her catchphrase of “I’ll have you lot buried alive for this, I will” as she stumbled into work next day, glaring at the three heroes as they nudged each other and grinned under the scrolling credits listing producers, the set designer, and guest stars, among whom Hercule was once included, though he didn’t appear in the episode, having walked off the set when informed that his tightrope-walker dwarf character, contrary to the original script Hercule had read before taking the role, was expected to wear a jester’s costume and dance foolishly while singing off-key in a grotesque Isle of Minimus accent, not that this development had anything to do with him leaving, he claimed later, wandering out the back door without anyone noticing, unsure why he was doing it, but feeling a mysterious compulsion to do so, despite reminding himself that he needed the money, that this sort of thing happened all the time in television, that this sort of representation was the best people like him could hope for in the giants’ world, that this is just how things are done and how things will always be done, yet still, still walking out, defying all common sense, for absolutely no reason at all, under the compulsion of a strange little voice ins
isting from somewhere in the back of his mind that he go, like that little voice that, as years passed, would tell him increasingly loudly to keep drinking, drink a little more, and a little more still, telling him, “keep going, you’re almost there”, almost to that oblivion where all the suffering of the world is extinguished, total blankness, dreamless silence, peace, or that voice that told him, on his first day at the orphanage, to say no to the girl who came over and asked if he would be her boyfriend, clearly a cruel trick meant to lure little Hercule into some situation in which he would be mocked and tormented, so he felt quite proud of himself for wisely avoiding it and could not help but smile to himself at the thought of his own cleverness as he stood alone in one corner of the playground watching the other children, though, during the strike, as he, wearily patrolling along the tops of the barricades and looking down at everything enclosed within them (the miniature landmarks, the kiosks, the stagnant moat toward the back full of frogs, and the railing up front where the women used to lean and tease him), thought back across his life and remembered this incident, he could no longer remember any sign that the girl had been insincere, but shrugged off this thought, distracted by Marcel, who, from the ground, was calling up to him to ask when they would be having dinner and if a vegan alternative would be made available for him, as he could not eat anything that had been contaminated with the flesh of an animal, the “ultimate subaltern”, oppressed by humynkind for thousands of years with a sadism beyond even that with which the subalterns of sub-Saharan Africa had been treated by the Western imperial powers, who now, as globalization brought the Western economies to the brink of collapse, would, much to Marcel’s delight, find themselves reduced to the extreme poverty previously known only to the poorest peasants of the so-called Third World, a scenario Marcel would have presented, had he finished it, rather than abandoning it when he felt that public interest in the Mini-Paris strike had waned, near the end of He Always Cometh Too Late, That Cursed Dwarf and Clubfoot (taken from a passage in Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra), his ostensibly autobiographical novel (begun shortly after the strike, in an attempt to make sense of, unpack, inventory what he had seen there) about a brilliant and handsome university professor named Jean-Paul, a well-realized, rounded, realistic, believable character who takes part in a strike at the ominous black pyramid of the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas with some “little people” under the leadership of a Communist North Korean girl named Hequette Smintheus, pulled from her undercover assignment converting the students of Taegu Junior College to instead bring the Revolution to the United States, and an acrobat from the Isle of Minimus named Achille Œdipe, who, at the end of the novel, after Jean-Paul (who has already saved many lives by calling for peace and verbally defeating those strikers who mindlessly suggest that violence might be necessary) sacrifices his life to save him from the rampaging police, escapes the strike zone by using his high-wire skills from his days in the circus to run up atop a power line on his bare, swollen feet and past the barricades to the outside world, where he, in Marcel’s plans for the end of the novel, would then have tracked down his estranged father, a wealthy little person who had initially supported the strike but then betrayed it, and killed him, foreshadowing the final doom of Western “civilization” with this senseless act and bringing to a close this novel, which Marcel stuffed in a drawer and forgot about as he moved on with his life at the university, only thinking back on the strike from time to time, when he encountered references to Las Vegas and the famous Silver Wells golf course for midgets in rereading Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, when someone mentioned to him that people sympathetic to the strike still left toy rats at the base of the miniature Eiffel Tower as a tribute and occasionally placed bootleg “Mallrat Peeing” decals in their cars’ rear windows (Mallrat’s target, when not the logo of a disfavored car manufacturer, was usually one of the South Park characters), or when, in an obscure academic journal, he noticed an article on the strike that mentioned new rumors spread by the cult of Mallrat that Ken and Johnny were still alive and had been spotted around the world, still fighting for the ideals of the strike, rumors which were entirely and obviously false, and, indeed, conflicted with the cult’s own stated belief that Ken and Johnny had died on the Isle of Minimus, but which nevertheless filled Marcel with a nostalgia for his time behind the barricades, tending the gardens in the miniature Champ de Mars, watching Lucille’s one-woman production of Archibald Cox Dismissed from Office at the miniature Opéra de la Bastille, and listening to Hercule grudgingly recall, at Lucille’s insistence, his scene with Anna Karina, whom Lucille greatly admired, Brigitte Bardot, and Serge Gainsbourg at the end of Soixante-Neuf, agent provocatif (a film Lucille had watched many times as a child on a thoroughly degraded, almost unwatchable old VHS tape with the curtains drawn while hiding at home from the spiteful Japanese children shouting anti-Korean slurs outside), when, having narrowly escaped the clutches of the Francophobic conspirators, this trio flees to the top of the French pavilion (which was, after Expo 67, converted into a historical museum, then became one of the world’s largest casinos in the early 1990s, open twenty-four hours a day) and, peering down at the rainy fairgrounds below, as Lucille remembered vividly, see that they are surrounded by hostile enemy agents and Anglophone Canadians swarming toward the pavilion and charging inside, rushing up the stairs to kill them, and that they will not be able to escape their doom, having lost any possible diplomatic protections when Gainsbourg defied the Académie française and illegally used Method Extreme Hostility, forcing the Immortels to declare him an outlaw and leaving him and his secretaries with nowhere to run, trapped here “like animals waiting for the slaughter”, as the vicious hordes scream obscenities in English and storm up the stairs, their heavy feet thundering, closer and closer, with Gainsbourg and his secretaries standing there, in the rain, guns drawn, waiting, until Karina, noticing Hercule’s janitor character tightening the springs and gears of the big clock behind them, smiles and tells the others not to worry, and, putting down her gun, grasps the wet iron hands of the clock, telling Gainsbourg and Bardot that time is an illusion, that we can exist in one perfect moment forever, so that, as the others help her to stop the clock, the loud footsteps of their enemies off-screen slow, and the film slows, so that the rain falling around them gradually freezes, each drop suspended in the air, glistening in the light of the high-powered lamps simulating the sun, which, in a brief cut to stock footage, is seen to break through the clouds at that very moment, illuminating the three heroes pressed together, their hands on each other’s hands, holding back time in one final shot as the movie fades to a white-on-black title announcing “Grand Prix du Festival — Cannes 1968” and to the logos of its production companies.

 

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