He has stumbled onto one of those half-hour slots reserved for dispensing pitched bewilderment. They’re doing news again, as they do around the clock these days. Image chorus line. The sight-bite Zeitgeist. One signal block has been hijacked by an emergency update on this year’s flash point, one that Kraft has until now only dimly registered. He focuses in on the account, amazed at how quickly this one has slipped from precocious to precarious. The language of direct confrontation—the contempt for the public behind all action in the public interest—cranks itself up to a pitch past the usual theatrics. The endless, impotent, international diplomatic game of chicken in Dad’s car begins to embrace its casualty rates. Grim foreign secretaries shaking their heads Live at Ten rule out negotiation, basking in an electrified aura of imminence that, because of the network-wide inability of home audiences everywhere to sustain concentration, will once more turn to boredom by the dismembering end.
This evening’s particular head-on high noon has been busy escalating, introducing new twists and chicanes while Kraft’s been away. All sides accuse the others of disinformation, a spiral of ever more sophisticated muddying of the waters. Claims of historical mandate crash up against new world orders. Preacher beseechers on a competing channel tick off the prophetic countdown to Megiddo Revisited. Nebuchadnezzar is returned to power. Engineers work at constructing life-sized living models of Babylon. TV-steered TOWs stand in for angels of incineration. Infidel legions mass for final face-off against the emissaries of evil expansionism. Does have a familiar ring to it—the old high road to simplification. Details available in this million-selling handbook; order now by calling the toll-free number on your screen.
Where’s the Rapparition when we need him? The pint-sized poet could defuse this whole self-powered keg with a few well-placed hypermetrics. You know, a little sync along the lines of:
Some say this madness is the workin’ out of scripture,
With Belial and Nemesis taking up the picture;
You tell me the unlivable is better than okay
’Cause we’re heading for a showdown like the Good Book say.
Yeah, set the kid up as equal-time evangelist on the alternative station and we might just get enough market share to survive. But Kraft himself has only recently put the boy to bed with a mouth full of bloody fudge ripple.
On another block of sets, glitz-punkers probe the anarcho-disintegrating underside, pretending (like the solitary man trekking across the Gobi followed by a hidden documentary crew of two dozen, or the first-ever flimsy plane touching down on a deserted island, as shot from below by the disembodied camera) that they aren’t part of a million-dollar, cake makeup, multiple-take, posturing, slick production number. Another, adjacent slice of the color carousel busily spins out its insistence that the universe can be saved only by constructing a doughnut the size of a galaxy.
An oval nimbus above this row of screens spews out one of those Unsolved Celebrity Mystery Tonight! samplers. Today’s real reenactment includes the lavish particulars of Eva Braun’s unquenchable and probably unrequited crush on Robert Taylor as well as Sukarno’s lifelong ambition to sleep with Marilyn Monroe. Both utterly true, the anchors swear, so help me Broadcast.
A movie verité police-blotter public service announcement about the recent epidemic of vanishing little ones—two million annually, a full two-thirds of these abductions masterminded by estranged parents—dissolves from a gloss of the Missing Children Act into an advertisement for Home Litigation Workshops. This offer, void where prohibited, is flanked on both sides by banks of full-length shots, each in slightly different tonal registers, of a devastating Brit girl, fourteen at the most, telling her Yank soldier that she isn’t going to do it, war or no war, unless they do it standing up, the best contraceptive method available. He leans her gently against the wall and provides her with stirrups by sticking two Coke bottles (empty) in his khaki back pockets while the cameras cozy in for this bit of shared intimacy in the endless, interchangeable, beautifully textured darkness at the edge of time.
This brief cross-sectional spin through the dial’s mandala suffices to remind Kraft of what incontestable research continuously discovers and covers back up: the species is clinically psychotic. Pathetic, deranged, intrinsically, irreversibly mercury-poisoned by nature, by birth. And what more could one expect of a cobbled-up bastard platypus, a creature whose spirit is epoxied to its somatic foundation? Mental thalidomide cases, every last mother’s son, as far back as accounts take things. On one cadre of tubes, slithery androgynes belt out a hardcore rendition of the station’s signature slogan: “We nail your eyes to the screen.” Just kitty-corner to these, the minority bank of “educational” monitors takes things back to a past whose name is somehow familiar to Kraft, although the face evades him.
At first he mistakes this signal for more current event. But a minute’s wading in this current and the waters open up just upstream of the present. A cavalcade of years from—how long ago? What time is it now? Kraft stands staring in review at events he witnessed once, some of them firsthand, when he was still young enough to weave them into the semblance of sense. The replay unfolds in front of him, hurting afresh, the second bite of remorse.
Watches a river rising, somewhere in the Sunny South. It has swollen before, overflowed even, but never like this. The Flourishing One, survivor of countless previous auguries, the jerkwater money-lenders’ town that rose to respark the West, is going under. Florence’s shaky alliance with its pulmonary artery has been severed. Nervous black-and-white hand-held cameras make their way down the mud-plundered streets-turned-sewers of what was once the most angelic of angel cities.
Crude floodlights play over the Old Bridge or huddle under a loggia. Here and there, spors of sculpture bob above four meters of water. Piazza becomes lago, and eight centuries of art’s aid and comfort are lost. Distraught signori from the National Salvation Board tell how they have given up on the mosaics and frescoes and are concentrating on porting as many priceless paintings and papers as possible out of reach of the rising ooze. All those not busy saving themselves are conscripted: inmates, the army, whole schools . . .
On that sound cue, cut to another, simultaneous mudslide. North now, October of the same year. From the center of history to its exploited edge. Pitiful little Welsh mining town, population too small for formal census. The view of disaster from inside the doomed schoolroom. How they looked out, looked and saw a mountain rise up and roll down its own slurry of slag, settle in and simply annihilate this building like a felt hat left on a chair. Inside, the town’s entire next generation, one hundred and sixteen studious would-be graduates, most of them slated for the mines, hard at work doing sums and grammar and history—the Blitz, the famous Evacuation—look up for a minute before they are mass-buried, swallowed in one spasm by the sliding earth. Look up and see a tribe of faces their age, peering in the schoolroom window, coaxing them desperately outside, elsewhere, beyond safety.
Now is already too late. Mudslide slips elementally into sandstorm, a desiccating desert war. Boy soldiers in that same epochal year once more march into the town of God’s Foundation, while other boy soldiers flee the sacred city through secular back streets. Everywhere, scripture is fulfilled faster than it can be written. At the same time (now what, Kraft wonders, can that absurd little phrase possibly still mean?) as this holy showdown, student armies face off on three other continents. The call for victory of belief over doubt wipes away with one sweep the last cobweb cling. Half a dozen simultaneous dream liberations are declared by those young enough to have nothing to lose but the childhood already denied them.
A six-year-old black girl fire-hosed from the streets of Birmingham is replaced by a crowd of her contemporaries, singing into the city center. Teen rioters vent their birthright terrors even here, just down the block from Kraft’s alma mater. He watches them stand off the State again for a while, until the inevitable body bags decide matters. The newsreels veer to the shadowed half of the ball.
There, in mass placard marches, Maoist high school dropouts cow a quarter of the planet. French, Spanish, Chilean, Indonesian, and Rhodesian school-agers blunder through the revolutionary calendar, staunching their way toward year one. A fly-fanged, glazed-eyed, successionist, baby Ibo exoskeleton flexes its stick-limbs, twists to reach a mother’s teat no larger or moister than a shriveled mole.
No possible connective thread explains, let alone excuses, this shock-wave assault of images. The obvious answer—Chronology, Your Early Years in Review—appalls Kraft with its arbitrariness. Okay, so the pics in this sampler of disintegration all took place in the space of—what? A small-spanned handful of months? A shared time frame still reveals nothing by way of explanation, nor says what possessed the show’s rambling editor to string these random spots together. Empty syllogism, domainless variables: this then this then this . . .
His nostrils flare at the remembered stink of a certain institutional-green, paint-plastic coating, a pocked, porous, cinder-block lunar landscape. He feels the impression of it, close up, smashed against his face during some drill—fire, tornado, raid, political collapse. He and a few hundred others, crouched down for hours, giggling and dry-heaving by turns, compacted into the stingy angle between wall and floor. The smell sticks in his throat as if newly coated, memory’s phlegm brought up by this cough of cavalcade. If these film bursts share anything at all, it’s the thread running through all the other free-associating open channels. The one distributed middle, the only available theme: tender-foot decamping, refugees on the run, issuing from cities set ablaze by those no closer to legal age than they.
Angel Cities: well, he is getting warmer now, much. That must be it, the link he’s supposed to recover. But what can this panicked pleasuredom, this theme park of loosely confederated, strip-malled membership stores—self-asphyxiating, self-immolating, drugged, gelded, joyriding, willfully slipping back into the worst of Third World crippling sinkholes—what can his current address possibly have in common with the first one, the city Kraft once spoke to in its native language, before his facility with languages withered away to pocket translating dictionaries?
It comes to him with the force of first discovery. He lived once in another place by the same name, yet spelled in a far more ample alphabet. A city called the City of Angels in a country called the Land of the Free. A people called the Free People, although the outside world knew all three only in clumsy transliterations.
And this picture parade, the infinitely extensible police lineup of intermediary staging grounds for those Crystal Nights all school drills promise: Florence, Aberfan, Madrid, Detroit, Prague, Paris, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Newark, Belfast, Harare, Jerusalem. Each a namesake, yet sharing something steeper, deeper down, beneath names. All are celestial suburbs gone wrong. Single steps, separate arithmetic means between the shining seraph of his own childhood and this place, its follow-up succubus.
His confirmation comes in one quick cut, almost faster than he can frame his guess. There it is, on three dozen diffracting screens at once, each appliance assorting its yoked electron sprays into patterns that whisper of geometries past the axiom, corollaries beyond the freshest new crop of Euclids’ ability to prove. He sees her on the screen, her beyond all reasonable doubt, running naked through cratered streets, clothes singed off, taking her skin with them.
She runs in blind panic from something dropped out of the sky. She limps, favoring the ankle he himself has only recently excised, a girl unable to outrun the leading edge of her own animal terror, running both from and right into the next descent of aerial rupture. Running dead on, in another minute perhaps dead, into the impartial lens (but a man behind it, some picture scavenger, standing there filming). She runs into a world-famous image, one arrested forever a dozen years before his little girl is even born.
And she’s not alone. The whole canon of ward cases accompanies her, in shot after shot. The No-Face fills the screen, his features miraculously whole for a moment before they are smashed in again by a Chicago policeman’s cudgel. Then the Rapparition, laying down a Frelimo battle celebration in Bantu-Portuguese. Joleene Weeks holding what at first seems to be her Chatty Cathy doll but horribly isn’t, mother and child both panting, breathing through their ribs in—well, could be anywhere. Remember these places, does he? The day’s Biafra, the day’s Dhaka?
Even if he has blunted the exact coordinates for a couple of sedated decades, he cannot fail to recognize the next face, as fresh in his mind as if he’d seen it for the first time just days ago. It’s the newcomer, the old kid, a year or two further along, yet a half-century younger. Still bald, or rather, shaved. Led out of the subterranean prison where he’d been buried alive. Turned about for the camera like a vertical rack of lamb, his body molded all over with blue flash burns, a Roquefort grown in caves on copper wire skewers.
And this one does not come from out of the bowels of some provisional capital a day’s forced march from the Chaco. This one’s from closer to home. As close to home as can be, as flush, as smack up against it as video and imagination permit.
WITH INTERLUDE AGAIN fuzzy to the point of nonexistent, Kraft is back at his flat. The freeway bit is totally missing. He has negotiated those masses of lanes with no recall, even from what he hopes is only a moment later.
But he knows he’s home, because the lady across the way—used to call them neighbors back before the West Was Won—female, mid-fifties, non-racially distinct, slightly dyspneic, partial to ceramic goods with ironically upbeat printed messages on them, a radical mastectomy within the last year—is standing in his doorway asking him to sniff her chicken fillets. She is the first human he can recall seeing aboveground and outside an industrio-retail complex in he can’t remember how long.
“I just bought this from the Food Parade not two hours ago, and it smells rotten to me. Does it smell rotten to you? Tell me honestly, because I don’t want to bring it back and have them tell me I’m crazy.”
Kraft takes a whiff. He smells nothing, neither micro nor macro, animal, vegetable, mineral, nor any of commerce’s more recent hybrids. He can’t even smell the chicken an sich. “Yes,” he says, surprised at how clinically he carries it off. “You may be right.”
“Are you sure?” Sung to the tune of the old NBC triad. The living color peacock preens in front of him.
Then, he’s still standing at the same door, but opening it for a second buzz, time lapse style. It’s the woman, Linda, arms full of packages, volumes, damp and aromatic paper sacks. When he fails to make way for her, she slips past him with a playful nudge of the shoulders. “Hi, baby. I came straight from the hospital.”
“Hosp—? Are you all right?”
Her eyebrows curl over her eye ridge, two caterpillars racing to reconnoiter the bridge of her nose. Her neck stem straightens in residual reflex. Half a beat, then she giggles. “Oh, I get it. Hospital, sick. Funny stuff, there. I stopped on the way and got some grub. I was seized by caprice to eat Chinese.”
“Eat Chinese?”
“For God’s sake, sit down. Open your mouth and close your eyes, and you will get . . .”
After dinner, she jumps up and says, “Stay put. I’ll do the dishes.”
“All right.” He’s in no position to move anyway.
“That was a joke, dope.” She crumples the eternal plastic plates and multiple sacks, makes of them a single wad that she sinks with a twenty-footer into the trash. He is still sitting motionless, staring at the spot the meal had occupied. She smuggles around behind him, kisses the crown of his head.
His spine convulses, half of the famous galvanized frog’s legs. “What?”
“What, ‘what’? Relax. Assault waves are over for the day.”
He jerks his face around to look at hers. Assault? How much does she know?
“Tough one for you today? They do you with the rubber hoses again?” Her fingers go deep, directly into his shoulders. It’s good, relief beyond description, revealing what he hadn’t known had been festering in
that knot of confused tissue. At the same time, the pain is excruciating, worse than the one it exorcises. Retaliatory surgical strike he has no choice but to submit to. And she hasn’t even slit him yet. Just the prep, the antiseptic scrub.
The rubdown expands, deeper and wider, radiating outward from his sternocleidomastoids like dioxins through the food chain. She must feel him succumb, because her cadence starts to do the Ben-Hur-galley-master-with-the-timpani thing. “Bare your privates, huh?” she coos in his ear. “Make them available for female consumption.”
These words don’t seem to issue from the Linda he knows. But maybe it’s the answer all the same. Now that push comes down to shove, his hormones flush from his system with cruise technology: accurate and massive, even from a great distance.
But release is no relief. Worse, that state of blurred conviction returns to him, locking up his receptor sites. Some attempt to attract his macerated attention hovers around his apartment’s seams. That tribe, that band of eyes outside the school window, waving madly, hurry, come away. The massed, perhaps coordinated movements of minor militias, an agenda afoot already, stretching forever through time and space. A single overarching pattern doubles back repeatedly on two names, words that camp out in the deflated oxygen tent that once fed the language center of his brain. The first, a place name, already ascertained. The place of his own childhood mobilization, the same name as the place where he now euphemistically lives.
Operation Wandering Soul Page 21