Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  Only Joe Way remained on the well’s floor with me, because, of course, he was a plasmic distillate of the su’lakle rather than a holojection.

  As my studio audience filed out, Lena Faye picked her way down the stairstep seats to join us. We hugged each other. Khalil Khalaf eyed her from his booth. He knew for whom she worked and had no doubt why she’d come.

  “Mr. Way, I have a question,” Lena Faye said.

  “Please.” (Permission to ask it.)

  “Why did you bring Earth’s religious leaders—all of us—the message of your local ‘indispensability’?”

  “Why?” The cello voices sounded confused.

  “Yes, why? I mean, what did you, or do you, want us to do in response to that message?”

  A damned good question. I should have asked it myself. And I would have, I think, if I hadn’t striven so hard to make it appear that the su’lakle was “really” a virrogate of one of my randomly selected viewers.

  Joe Way shifted before us. The manta-ray wings of his “head” flapped a kind of querulous veronica.

  “Do you want us to do you homage?” Lena Faye asked. “You know, worship you?”

  The gaseous emeralds swirling inside the su’lakle throbbed brighter, as if she’d blown on a green fire. “Absolutely not,” Joe Way said.

  “What, then?”

  “In time,” he said, “I hope to persuade you—your species, I mean—to supplant us, the su’lakle, in the indispensability business hereabouts. Voluntarily.”

  With that, he convoluted once, slowly, and funneled upward in a keening rush that hurled him out of the studio, as if he’d popped into another continuum through the tip of that notional funnel.

  Three evenings later, after the first four episodes of my F/A tapings had appeared, Lena Faye and I had dinner together on the sidewalk outside the Green Line Café. To stymie both gawkers and would-be autograph seekers, we sat near a trellis bearing oligs (hybrid olive-figs) and thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company.

  I seemed to be falling in love with Lena Faye again. Why she wanted me, though, I had real trouble figuring. For some months before leaving Tulsa, I’d treated her as a mere human accessory. And even since her arrival in Lebanon, our mutual sack time notwithstanding, I’d generally shown more interest in F/A’s global ratings and the likelihood of more infogab awards than in shoving our relationship into something akin to permanence.

  Now, though, I was beginning to perceive that Lena Faye had always seen in me the inhering specter of my better self. She had always believed in and struggled to free it, when a woman of less patience, and a less atoning vision, would have written me off as Superjerk. Now, I theorized, her fastidious observations of the microscopic virtues in me were actualizing them—collapsing them into being—in the day-to-day realm of human interactions. Maybe.

  Anyway, I was thinking seriously of abandoning Beirut and of marrying Lena Faye Leatherboat.

  Suddenly, a gang of youthful Shi’ites came marching toward the café jogging placards up and down; they wore stained white sandwich-board pullovers bearing upon them militant slogans in Arabic script: Only ALLAH Is Called For. The Green Thing Is a Devil. Satan Lies in Many Colors. One pistoning sign held a startling message in English:

  George Gist, atheist!

  We have no need

  Of his gabfeed greed

  Or Godless creed!

  Bleed him from his crown,

  Run him out of town,

  Uproot him like the weed!

  “Uh oh.”

  Lena Faye took my hand. “Sort of catchy.”

  “They’re looking to catch me, that’s how catchy it is. I wish you wouldn’t trivialize this.”

  “Tighten your sphincter, George. Let them go.”

  It was good advice. The protest, obviously provoked by the week’s first Forum/Againstum, had a noise-making rather than a vengeance-taking agenda, even if one of its signs read like a death warrant. It seemed highly likely that Iman Reza Bahadori himself had sent these young zealots out. In any case, they marched loudly but harmlessly by.

  “I’m no atheist,” I said.

  “No?”

  “I believe—” I thought a moment. “I believe in the Great Spirit.” Another thinking spell: “Or a great spirit.”

  “The or a? Which is it? Investing in lower-case stocks doesn’t require much capital.”

  “Small investment, small risk of woe.”

  “Small hope of a bracing return.” Lena Faye nodded after the noisy Shi’ites. “Those guys have no doubt you’re the weed in their spiritual garden.”

  “Me? I’m a high-profile media spear-carrier.”

  “Meaning you think the demon-weed they should really take out after is poor old Joe Way.”

  “I don’t think they should take out after anybody. I think they should give it a rest.”

  “Some people have strong opinions, Mr. Gist. Some people commit.”

  “Some people scare the holy sand out of me.”

  “Not me, I hope.” Then: “I believe in love.”

  “Great song title. It’s been used, but so what?”

  We left the Green Line Café and wandered along the Rue de Damas to a bistro called Hobeika’s Den occupying most of the bottom floor of a bank building gutted in the anarchistic and self-cannibalizing 1980s. No signs of rubble, pock marks, or coverups today: Hobeika’s Den looked spanking new, a high-tech watering hole with vidverge mirrors, game screens, a voluptuous animatronic belly dancer, and a car-park band with wired flutes, guitars, and percussion sets.

  As soon as Lena Faye and I got inside, we could tell that the Tarabulus Music Militia’s lead singer, a young Druze in a psychedelically embroidered kaffiyeh, was singing, in a kind of bastard cockney, a hard-rock curse called, if the recurrence of one phrase means anything, “Simply Indispenserble”:

  “S really arfly risible,

  A daftness indivisible,

  To so much pride surscepterble,

  E thinks e’s [bump! bump!] ‘simply indispenserble’!

  “E’ll avtah take some sass fum us

  To be so bogon blasphemous,

  Cause it’s crudely indefenserble

  To claim e’s [bump! bump!] ‘simply indispenserble’!”

  The crowd in Hobeika’s Den, or a major part of it, was dancing to TMM’s syncopated heavy-pedal scorn. Someone had even programmed the belly dancer to punctuate the bump! bump!s with staccato hip swings—unless, of course, its microcircuitry simply triggered automatic kinetic feedback to whatever music it “heard.”

  “Cripes,” I murmured.

  “Don’t be profane.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. Then I took Lena Faye’s hand and led her to the cappuccino-and-cordial bar. I’d just drawn a stool out for her when a bearish man in a lapelless silver-lamé jacket and a gold-foil kaffiyeh grabbed the stool and shoved it toward the dance floor. Lena Faye’s eyes widened. Otherwise, she showed no sign of alarm.

  “S awtuhgedder winceable,

  At on barmy princerple,

  Lahk e’s ploom invincerble,

  E sez e’s [bump! bump!] ‘simply indispenserble’!”

  “Gist, you camel-dung pig-dog dormouse! You dare to show up in public? To push your shameless mug into a place where living flesh-and-blooders can do you the infinite justice of spitting in your eye? Phfffthhhhhht!”

  With the back of my hand, I wiped a bleb of saliva from my cheek. (Ha ha, you missed.) Then: “Lena Faye Leatherboat, allow me to introduce you to the mild-mannered Bashir Shouman. Mr. Shouman, Ms. Leatherboat.”

  “An honor,” Shouman said, kissing Lena Faye’s wrist before turning back to me. “Have a care, you pig-dog! You sully her name merely by appearing in her company! Your depravity, like your cableglom, has no discoverable limit!”

  “Allah is de Prince-uv-All,

  But Joe Way’s blubber-dense, yer-all,

  Is skin so fiercely flenserble

  To swear e’s [bump! bump!] ‘simply indispenserble’
!”

  “See? See what your mendacious gabfeed has wrought? Now I know why you call it Forum plus Againstum! You stand against all decency! You lie to up-puff yourself!”

  “Translation: Levant’s ratings have annihilated ShariVid’s in our contending time slots,” I told Lena Faye.

  “Say on, say on!” Shouman raged.

  “Mr. Shouman doesn’t like adjusting to this hurtful fact. We even plastered him tonight, with Joe Way sitting there about as talkative as Tar Baby.”

  “I could ask the Ayatollah Sadr to do string figures on my program! Or hire Kuwait’s soccer team to kick around a ball in ClingFlex thongs! My ratings would also soar! But never do I pander! Never do I manufacture attractions!”

  “I manufactured the Pope?”

  “Not him! Not Iman Bahadori! Not the Dalai Lama! Not that veil-free Pilgrim woman! Not them, but the unscrupulous fraud of your so-called DOS ‘energy being’!”

  “E sneers at pious protocols

  N kicks at commonsense, yer-all!

  Is power’s awl ostenserble,

  But, yah, e’s [bump! bump!] ‘simply indispenserble’!

  No way, Joe Way, no waaaay!”

  “Joe Way is for real,” I said.

  “He’s a see-throughable holojection which some deluded people—” nodding at the Tarabulus Music Militia “—lack the commonsense to see through. They suppose your meretricious Gumby-ghost is lying, never considering that the lie springs instead from you, you pig-dog!”

  “It doesn’t,” Lena Faye said quietly. “I know Joe Way to be exactly what he has claimed.”

  This assertion, from this source, gave Shouman pause. How could Lena Faye speak false? He sidestepped his doubt:

  “You corrupt even the most innocent, you garbage thrower, and chaos descends!”

  “Unlike your spite wall, which keeps going up.”

  “And will do so until it has left your towerhouse as blind as its dungball-eating occupant! You deserve to see no farther than a man in a windowless box!”

  “Like Wigner’s friend,” I said.

  But Bashir Shouman didn’t hear me. He had elbowed his way outside onto the Rue de Damas. Meanwhile, it had taken nearly the last of my psychic energy to keep from trying to choke the vituperative crap out of him.

  “You did good,” Lena Faye told me.

  The TMM combo had finally brought “Simply Indispenserble” to a crescendoing end. Now the boys were crooning, “Bright are zuh stars zud shine, / Dark izzuh sky. / I know ziss luv ufmine / Will nevuh die.”

  Pretty. Truly pretty. I was astonished.

  At my place south of Beirut, Shouman’s hired hands worked more furiously on his spite wall, as if he’d offered them bonuses to speed up its construction. Before Lena Faye’s and my eyes, it was turning into something less like a wall than a prodigious monument to malice. People in shacks farther down the hill tottered upslope just to watch the ugly barrier grow in width and height.

  “The bastard,” I said.

  “At least he’s putting people to work,” Lena Faye said.

  “I need a bazooka. I know where to get one too. There’s still a dilapidated arms depot at the old Burj Al Barajinah refugee camp, and it’d be—”

  “Stop talking rot.”

  “Yessum.”

  “If you do stay here in your adobe tower, simply turn the wall’s stucco backside into a laser-mural canvas. You could switch the mural out every month or week or day, depending on your attention span.”

  “Ha ha. I’d already thought of something like that.”

  Lena Faye had only four more days of her working vacation for Okla*Globe in Lebanon. On Monday morning, I’d escort her to the airport either to see her off or to accompany her back to the states. Okla*Globe’s final salary package was definitely attractive, and for additional inducement there was Lena Faye herself. …

  Meanwhile, my vidverge wall showed that, although hostile local reaction to Joe Way’s Forum/Againstum gigs had developed slowly, it had now begun to heat up. This anger had its roots not only in various Islamic groups (the Sunnites, the Shi’ites, and the Druze), but also in the Christian community (Maronite Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, etc.). Ten thousand Jews also live in Beirut nowadays, and their religious leaders were attacking me and Levant both for putting Joe Way on the show and for excluding a qualified representative of their own faith from the cablecast.

  “Two Christians this come-lately Cherokee goy has on his gabshow,” Rabbi Moshe Hillel Silver told Nadia Suleiman in a spot between reports of Shi’ite street protests and of a Maronite picket line outside the Sabra Hotel. “Not a single Jew. You call that balance?”

  “He’s right,” Lena Faye said.

  “I know. Tell that to Pope Jomo and Iman Bahadori.”

  “My, how you can crab-sidle, injun.”

  The protests against Joe Way and the outrageous su’lakle message of their indispensability to this region of the cosmos—and against my gabfeed for providing them a forum—were now receiving at least as much cable coverage as the proceedings of the New Millenarian Ecumenical Council.

  The NMEC, however, appeared to be in as much disarray as Beirut’s streets, parks, and beaches. Officials from the Big Three monotheistic religions suffered excruciating trials of conscience accommodating to the session-opening prayer rituals of Wiccans, animists, goddess worshippers, voodooists, and idol devotees. And vice versa. Nor did these partisan brouhahas prevent internal bickering among all the denominations, cults, cabals, and sects within either the major or the minor spiritual alignments. A spokesperson for Pope Jomo I announced that His Holiness would depart Beirut a full two days before the closing ceremonies.

  “Why?” our reporter Mitri Ahad asked this flunky.

  “Unfinished business at the Vatican.” The spokesperson did a rude preemptive heel-pivot.

  Then my vidverge screen disclosed that a large party of Druze protesters had joined the Maronite sign-wielders on the sidewalk below Levant’s studios in the Sabra. Despite their common purpose—namely, reviling me, my employer, and F/A—the two groups clashed with one another about tactics, sidewalk territory, and even the su’lakle’s degree of insidiousness as an extraterrestrial Satan. Police moved in, but placard poles, with much accompanying cursing and shoving, began to jab about like pikestaffs.

  “Do you think Nadia’s safe up there?” Lena Faye asked.

  I was about to say, “I think so,” when the picture on my wall crumpled in zigzag bands and scrambled away to static. Before I could use my multiflicker to repair the picture, the static resolved itself into the manta-ray-headed phosphor-dot image of Joe Way. This image stayed two-dimensional only long enough for him to acquire focus and to step out of the vidverge as his old viridescent self. This time, though, he had to duck to get fully out, and when he straightened again, he resembled a hammerhead shark upright on its tail, or maybe the freak show version of the not-so-little brother of the Melancholy Green Giant.

  “Joe,” I said fatuously. “What’s up?”

  “Ignorant members of your species don’t believe I’m what I say I am, or else they assume I’ve somehow insulted—blasphemed against—their frail sectarian notions of the godhead. They think I’ve arrogated to myself the creative energies and the abiding omnipotence of God by using your infogabshow to declare the fact of my indispensability.”

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “that’s true.”

  Joe Way flickered from one side of my relaxall to the other like a pacing would-be suicide. “How can I ask your species to take over the observational task of local universe-sustenance if I’m not believed? Even if I were to give you a simplified subatomic transition kit, full instructions, and intensive techno-spiritual aid, your species’ disbelief—your intolerant wrathfulness—would probably sabotage the takeover and with it, inevitably, much of the enveloping cosmos.”

  Lena Faye said, “Even if every human being alive believed you, I’m not sure we’d rush to accept the responsibilit
y you’re trying to stick us with, Joe.”

  “Nonsense. It’s a great honor.”

  “We probably couldn’t do it,” I said.

  Joe kept up his spectral golemesque pacing. “That’s true. But mostly because your kind fatuously assumes indispensability equates with divinity.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “Of course not. The su’lakle—finite entities at least passably comparable to your own species—operate on a divine mandate, a ukase from God Wholeself.”

  “What’s God like?” Lena Faye said.

  “You’ll never really know until you take this job.”

  “So God exists?” I said.

  Joe Way stopped pacing, and with Pope Jomo’s all-to-human eyes—a su’lakle affectation of cagy ulteriority—fixed me with a condemning/forgiving glare. Believe me, to escape it, I’d’ve gladly kevorked.

  “Mr. Gist, you’re descended from a man named Sequoyah, who taught his people how to ‘write.’ True?”

  “Yessir.”

  “This Sequoyah, alias George Gist, once said, ‘We have full confidence they will receive you with all friendship.’”

  “Maybe. I never heard that before.”

  “My final F/A segment airs tomorrow night, ne pas?”

  I nodded.

  “Tape a segment to append to the cablecast. Announce that to demonstrate the earnestness of su’lakle intent, along with my capacity to do whatever I say, I will put on a ‘pyrotechnic spectacle’ not long after your announcement.”

  “When exactly? And where?”

  “Midnight. Across an unmissable arc of sky over Al Biqa Valley, directly east of Beirut.”

  “But why?” Lena Faye said. “What’s the point?”

  “To make a point. Human beings like shows. Next week, I will appear on Forum/Againstum again to explain simplistically how humanity may acquire indispensability.”

  “But I’ve already booked next Monday’s guests.”

  “Pshaw,” said Joe Way. “After Saturday night’s spectacle, Levant’s subscribers will clamor for my return.”

  When he was gone, back through my looking-glass vidverge unit, Lena Faye said, “Quel ego. Kinda like one of my beloved Superjerk’s greatest hits.”