Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  We flew from Damur Ridge to the Sabra Hotel in one of Levant’s helis and set down on the aviary landing pad. The disorder in the streets had come under an uneasy modicum of police control, but I was happy we didn’t have to try to enter the Sabra from the ground.

  In Levant’s studios, I taped the add-on that Joe Way had asked for and turned around to find both Lena Faye and myself facing a uniformed officer of the United Nations Near Eastern Security Service (UNNESS), which President Balthazar Hariri regularly dismisses as UNNESSesary.

  “Mr. Gist,” the officer said, “I’m Colonel Patrick Rulon. I’d like to see all the tapes of Forum/Againstum on which the virrogate Joe Way actually speaks.”

  “Why?”

  “Purposes of evaluation and security. Are there forms I need to fill out?”

  “No, you can see them. Did you hear me tape that business about Saturday night’s light show in Al Biqa?”

  “I did.”

  Nothing else, not even a smile, just “I did.” So I took Rulon to a corked booth where he could review the first and third hours of this week’s cablecasts and then preview the one scheduled for tomorrow night. I gave him a multiflicker so he could fast-forward through Joe’s silences or back up and replay his odd pronouncements about “the heart’s most basic longing” or su’lakle indispensability.

  When he emerged from the booth, in which he’d spent less than an hour, Rulon handed me the tapes. “Interesting.”

  “What did you think of them?”

  “I just told you.”

  “How do they bear on Near Eastern security?”

  “That stuff has global implications, Mr. Gist. Keep it under your hat.”

  “The last episode you watched cablecasts tomorrow. Then there’s that Al Biqa thing.”

  “Yes, I know. Night.” The colonel beat a tight-lipped, tight-assed retreat.

  Lena Faye: “What was that all about?”

  “Pissing on bushes,” I said. “Territory.”

  The following afternoon, even before the last of the six F/A programs was to appear, Lena Faye and I took my Levant heli out to Al Biqa and landed on a hilltop from which we’d have a good view of Joe Way’s promised midnight spectacular.

  The stretch of irrigated valley to our east lay below us like a beautiful gridded quilt of lavenders, salmons, and jades. The most unusual feature in the landscape, though, wasn’t the crops (leafy tobacco here, tangled grape arbors there, apricot and cherry trees on islandlike ridges), but the spaced-out wind turbines—tri-petaled pinwheels set atop spindly latticework derricks—generating power not only for the hamlets of Al Biqa but also for Sidon, Tyre, Byblos, and parts of Beirut. The blades on those turbines pleasantly hypnotized us as we picnicked on cheese and bread, polished off a couple bottles of wine, and waited for The Show.

  Meanwhile, about a mile away, a convoy of military trucks crawled up a hill into a concealing stand of fruit trees. (It may have joined others already positioned there.) Also, once Joe Way’s last episode of Forum/Againstum had concluded, groups of sightseers in buses and touring cars began to filter into the area, via the main highway from Beirut and dozens of rutted muhafazah roads. We saw these last arrivals by their headlamps and taillights, not by the shapes and colors of the vehicles, which, in the gathering dark, registered as amorphous creeping shadows, small smudges on the vaster, darker smudge of the valley floor.

  “What time is it?” Lena Faye said.

  Before I could check my digital, the sky flashed once: a great, silver-veined lilac throb.

  This lilac throb, occupying more aerial territory than a hundred overlapping full moons, faded slowly away, but the sky kept glowing, as if God had turned on a monstrous scallop-shell night-light behind the star-dusted scrim of space. Someone sitting on our picnic blanket murmured, “Wow.” It could have been either, or both, of us.

  I don’t have the heart to describe in its entirety what the su’lakle showed us over Al Biqa. Imagine the biggest and most complex Fourth of July celebration you’ve ever seen, heard of, or read about. Then cube it. At least.

  Even that doesn’t quite convey what we witnessed, though, because the bursting rockets, drifting fireballs, parachuting tear drops, and migrating color streams continuously deformed into sky-borne images: fields of lion-maned flowers, roaring Niagaras, breaking tsunamis of Oriental-carpet figures, flaming baobab trees, translucent calving icebergs, oddball animals at play or at rest, faces human or disturbingly alien, spiraling keyholes to other continua. Et cetera.

  “You know what’s weird, George? What has my gut strings twanging really strangely?”

  “What?” I was propped on my elbows, my head thrown back, my mouth stupidly agape.

  “I’ve got a hunch they’re dumbing this hurly-burly down.”

  I glanced over at Lena Faye.

  “You know,” she said, “for us. Condescending. Dumbing it down for our sakes. It could be ten times as spectacular if we had the brains, or the sensory apparatus, to take in their very best. Maybe a thousand times. You know?”

  I didn’t want to think about that. Usually, I hated fireworks; they boomed and hissed, scintillated and glowered, and all you could do was watch big-eyed and of course moan in orgiastic approval with the rubes around you. This thing the su’lakle had set shifting kaleidoscopically across the sky, though—it was different. I had the feeling not so much that they were patronizing us poor Homo sapiens as subtly trying to reorganize our brains through our eyes, to carve fresh pathways through our gray matter by preprogrammed visual stimuli, to refold our convolutions in evolutionary ways we wouldn’t fully twig to until they’d left.

  Joe Way’s manta-ray-shaped head took shape in the fading remnants of their final image, an energy-storm parody of The Creation from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel work. That was what I saw. Lena Faye read into it the spare and moving cover illo on Art Spiegelman’s Maus. (Who knows what everybody else on hand beheld or thought they did?) She and I agreed, though, that emerging from this last image was Joe Way. The head, with its weirdly compassionate eyes, floated over Al Biqa, appearing to sustain its hover by means of its fins’ endless rippling. This head occupied as much sky as the first lavender throb had done.

  “In order to acquire indispensability,” Joe Way began in a thundering overture, “you must—”

  From the ridge a mile away, the UNNESS vehicles parked amid the fruit trees began firing a concentrated barrage of scathing laser energy at the su’lakle. Vehicles hidden in other parts of the valley joined this attack. The rays—dozens upon dozens of them—launched upward in furious, vindictive assault. Bombs detonated in Joe Way’s cheeks and boccal region. The energy comprising and tethering together the features of the entity’s startled face began to dissipate. One of its rippling wings detached and floated off toward Tripoli, pulling into tatters as it drifted. The other, hit several times in a row, vented an emerald glow of gigantic phosphenes and evaporated. Shortly thereafter, Joe Way closed his Pope Jomo eyes, and the midnight sky—the old midnight sky—reasserted itself, sealing Lena Faye and me, Al Biqa, Lebanon, and maybe even the world itself into the benumbing boxes of our work-a-day lives.

  I scrambled up and shook my fist at the UNNESS encampment a mile away. “You idiots! You blooming xenophobic idiots! You may’ve just ruined everything!”

  “They couldn’t hurt the su’lakle, could they?” Lena Faye said. “Beings who sustain the cosmos.”

  “Look!” I told her. “Just look! Where is he? Where are they? What’s happened?”

  The valley filled with the honking of all the touring cars and buses whose drivers and passengers had come out to witness the midnight show. Honking, cursing, keening. An obstreperous mix-and-match symphony of outrage and disappointment.

  My God, I thought, the whole planet sounds sick, grievously wounded. Sick unto death.

  I guess it takes a while for a system as far-reaching and complex as the universe to unravel. Despite the chaos, anger, and traffic tie-ups in Al Biqa after
UNNESS’s ostensible preemptive strike on the su’lakle, most sightseers managed to get safely back to their homes. Lena Faye and I, of course, simply lifted off from that hilltop and whirly-birded homeward.

  On our way, seeing the flares and bonfires illuminating a multi-vehicle collision, we took the time to land, investigate, and help two badly injured people—a woman in her fifties and an unrelated child of five or six—aboard our Levant heli for transport to a medical facility. Indeed, I flew them to the Danny Thomas Memorial Hospital in Beirut, refueled on its roof pad, and undertook three more such missions—Lena insisted on coming along on all of them —before returning to my towerhouse on Damur Ridge. We arrived home just before dawn. There, we turned on my vidverge unit for reports of the aftermath of the fatuous UNNESS assault on the su’lakle.

  Instead, we got Joe Way in his viridescent manta-ray-headed guise. This time, though, he refused to step away from the screen into the authentic three-dimensionality of my relaxall. He peered out at us like an alien prophet.

  “Joe!” Lena Faye cried. “I thought they’d destroyed you! Your species, I mean!”

  “Fat chance,” he replied. “They disrupted the surface of a hologrammatic display projected from the interstices of this spatial-temporal continuum. Nothing more. That ill-advised action, however, has determined me—us, if you like—to abandon the task of observation to you without delay or instruction. I return to offer my apologies, for I know you two human beings, at least, as entities somewhat better than even you yourselves suppose and so not necessarily deserving of this kind of abrupt rejection. As for your species as a whole …”

  “You’re leaving?” I said. “You’re simply going to pull out? What will happen to us? Joe, we don’t know diddly about universe-sustenance!”

  “We haven’t succeeded all that spectacularly in holding our own planet together,” Lena Faye added.

  “Shit will happen,” Joe Way said. “Some of it will result from active manipulation of macrocosmic, as opposed to quantum, forces, and much of it will mystify and frighten you. This manipulation will be punitive. But the worst may stem from the psychic impact of our withdrawal on adjacent observer species, many of whom will follow our lead in abandoning the sustenance game. That’s all I care to impart. Goodbye.”

  “Wait!” Lena Faye and I both called out.

  But Joe Way faded away, and my vidverge unit commenced to operate exactly like a vidverge unit.

  Since then, despite repeated U.N. pronouncements about the legitimacy—yea, the urgency—of its laser disruption of the unpredictable alien energy beings who’d appeared on Forum/Againstum as “Joe Way,” the cable-watching public has reacted with either withering scorn or outright indifference. Maybe the latter response is the more common. After all, most folks assume the entire Joe Way phenomenon just another example of TV hype, from the distillate’s “scripted” remarks on my show to UNNESS’s self-authorized and, yes, highly colorful “ambush” in the valley.

  Firm believers in Joe Way, however, want an investigation into the incident. They also demand the literal head of the chief administrator of UNNESS and a concentrated international effort to retrieve and reassemble the insulted alien(s). They have no faith in the U.N.’s promises that the untoward events of the last few hours—occurrences that seem to require the suspension of immemorial “natural laws”—will cease as soon as the jet stream gets back to normal, or martens reinfest the cedars of Qurnat as-Sawda’, or the planets of our solar system realign.

  “Right,” I say. “Or Siddhartha Gautama reappears wearing an NBA warm-up jacket, some Bombay Gear tennis shoes, and a pair of virching goggles.”

  We sit in my relaxall either monitoring the vidverge unit or looking downslope at Bashir Shouman’s spite wall, which his busy-busy fellaheen workers completed yesterday while Lena Faye and I were picnicking in Al Biqa. It effectively blocks our view of the beach, the docks, the sea. Shouman’s hired hands left themselves some stuccoing to do on its uphill face, but why should I care whether something so evil in intent and true to its function looks finished? My consolation, now that Lena Faye and I appear to be trapped here, resides in the certain knowledge that the wall will prove useful to Shouman for only a short while longer.

  Sadly, with no one to make the key quantum observations that undergird the structure of the universe, the universe will cease to cohere. The center won’t hold; things will fall apart. The problem appears as grave to us as was the ruination of the ozone layer to our grandparents.

  Okay, graver.

  “About five minutes ago,” Lena Faye says, “I realized that reality truly is breaking down.”

  “How?”

  “Your bathroom scales. They weighed me seventeen pounds lighter than yesterday. Impossible, of course. On the other hand, George, I feel lighter—you know, semiafloat even when my feet’re touching the floor.”

  “I know.” I do: Sometimes, walking, I curl my toes to get better purchase, to keep from drifting away.

  The vidverge unit gives us a window on the anomalous events now occurring in the outside world. (The available vidgrids keep changing, though. Levant holds steady, but CNN, ShariVid, ABC Overseas, and Okla*Globe have fi-opted out, leaving behind either static, noisy Milton Berle kinescopes, or geometric test patterns framing the profiles of Amerindians like Pontiac, Tecumseh, and Geronimo.) The first anomaly that Nadia Suleiman reported today was the disappearance at the end of its runway of any flight attempting to leave Beirut International. The big jets would lift off, squeeze into a shimmering slit in the air, and vanish like a magician’s pigeons. At least three jets got airborne—and vaporized or inter-dimensionally transported—before airport bigwigs noted that such wholesale fishiness was bad for passenger morale, ordered an investigation, and closed the facility down.

  Other strange things have occurred. Without any warning, the bank building housing the Green Line Café reverted to its rubble-filled condition of over thirty years ago. No one was hurt but the drum-set operator of the Tarabulus Music Militia, who had stretched out under a table after last night’s final session. A Syrian soldier vacationing on the Ramlet el Baida beach spontaneously grew a tail (apparently, a spider monkey’s) and began collecting money in a stolen fez. The Ferris wheel on this same beach started releasing its cars at the top of its arc, until not a single gondola remained, and people citywide could see the released cars drifting upward and southward like giant bubbles. The streetlamps on the Avenue Charles Helou grew palm bark, heavy green fronds, and coconuts that looked exactly like bowling balls. The horses running in the eighth race at the revitalized Hippodrome crossed the finish line in a neck-and-neck tie without even a nose’s difference among them. Elsewhere, the Canadian army invaded Alaska, the Eiffel Tower lifted off with a hundred-some tourists aboard, the Taj Mahal turned into a tangy-smelling construct of melting tangerine Jell-O, and at least a million two-foot-long lobsters with WIN WITH TIM buttons taped to their carapaces swarmed ashore on the southernmost tip of the Malaysian peninsula. An oil firm struck a crème-de-menthe deposit in Tierra del Fuego. Denver, Colorado, collapsed into an immense sump of some kind, and all over the world statues of sundry eminent persons began coming to life, no matter how long their commemorated subjects had been dead.

  At long last, here on Damur Ridge, night has fallen. For a while, I doubted that it would. I figured snow might fall, or pfennigs from heaven, or the self-pared toenails of feathered protodinosaurs. Lena Faye and I look out the picture window of my towerhouse. Kon Ichikawa’s 1958 film Enjo flickers on the backside of Shouman’s spite wall, subtitleless. I have no idea how it’s being projected there, from where, or why. The acting has an earnest panache.

  Above the pain and melodrama of Enjo, the sky is visible. Shouman’s spite wall has not risen high enough to blot it from our view. I think of TMM in the Green Line Café doing “And I Love Her” after pounding out “Simply Indispenserble.” And I pull Lena Faye to me as snugly as I can. She rests her head on my shoulder. Friendly stars bl
aze in their familiar places, but the full moon shines down—pale, knobby, and large—like a face on Mount Rushmore.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” Lena Faye means the cosmos, or this goosy portion of it, without the su’lakle.

  “Yeah. I’m afraid so.”

  “I can’t fly home, but if you’d like to be alone, I can get myself a room in a hotel—the Sabra, maybe.”

  I look Lena Faye straight in the eyes, replay the TMM cover beginning “Bright are zuh stars zud shine,” and shake my head.

  “Uh uh,” I tell her. “Tonight, Ms. Leatherboat, I couldn’t possibly do without you.”

  Once again, we look outward and up. The spite of our kind rebounds on us immediately, for overhead, without any fuss, the stars—all of them—have begun to go out.

  Last Night Out

  SOME WILL NOT UNDERSTAND THAT ON THE EVENING before our suicide attack M. and I visited the strip club not as a last vulgar gift to the animal in us but as a way to bolster our scorn for the reputedly innocent people we planned to kill. This strategy worked every time that we paid our cover and ducked inside. The smells of spilled whiskey, warm beer, and frank male rut never fail to replenish my outrage; they also firm my fluctuating sense of righteousness, may God forgive me.

  On this slow Monday night, few other patrons vied for the bartender’s attention. What do you fellas want? he said.

  A blonde young woman in hand-tooled crimson cowboy boots and a glittery red thong strolled the high counter behind the bar, dipping or shoulder twisting in time to the recorded techno-rock. In the dark mirror behind her, her reflection mimicked her dance, and M.’s pupils dilated to encompass both images even as he squinted against the offense they embodied.

  Come on, fellas, the bartender said. Order up.

  My friend would like a Manhattan, I said.

  And you?

  Bring me a Bloody Mary.