William Gibson. The Gernsback Continuum
---------------------------------------------------------------
© Copyright William Gibson
---------------------------------------------------------------
Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode.
When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it's peripheral; mere fragments of
mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was
that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost
translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways
discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty lane monsters
I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none
of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single
wavelength of probability. I've worked hard for that. Television helped a
lot. I suppose it started in London, in that bogus Greek taverna in
Battersea Park Road, with lunch on Cohen's corporate tab. Dead steam-table
food and it took them thirty minutes to find an ice bucket for the retsina.
Cohen works for Barris-Watford, who publish big, trendy "trade" paperbacks:
illustrated histories of the neon sign, the pinball machine, the windup toys
of Occupied Japan. I'd gone over to shoot a series of shoe ads; California
girls with tanned legs and frisky DayGb jogging shoes had capered for me
down the escalators of St. John's Wood and across the platforms of Tooting
Bec. A lean and hungry young agency had decided that the mystery of London
Transport would sell waffle-tread nylon runners. They decide; I shoot. And
Cohen, whom I knew vaguely from the old days in New York, had invited me to
lunch the day before I was due out of Heathrow. He brought along a very
fashionably dressed young woman named Dialta Downes, who was virtually
chinless and evidently a noted pop-art historian. In retrospect, I see her
walking in beside Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes THIS WAY
LIES MADNESS in huge sans-serif capitals.
Cohen introduced us and explained that Dialta was the prime mover
behind the latest Barris-Watford project, an illustrated history of what she
called "American Streamlined Moderne." Cohen called it "raygun Gothic."
Their working title was The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never
Was.
There's a British obsession with the more baroque elements of American
pop culture, something like the weird cowboys-and-Indians fetish of the West
Germans or the aberrant French hunger for old Jerry Lewis films. In Dialta
Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a uniquely American form of
architecture that most Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn't
sure what she was talking about, but gradually it began to dawn on me. I
found myself remembering Sunday morning television in the Fifties.
Sometimes they'd run old eroded newsreels as filler on the local
station. You'd sit there with a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk,
and a static-ridden Hollywood baritone would tell you that there was A
Flying Car in Your Future. And three Detroit engineers would putter around
with this big old Nash with wings, and you'd see it rumbling furiously down
some deserted Michigan runway. You never actually saw it take off, but it
flew away to Dialta Downes's never-never land, true home of a generation of
completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and
ends of "futuristic" Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in
American cities without noticing; the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some
mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the
chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels. She
saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring
present; she wanted me to photograph them for her.
The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial
designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners had looked like pencil
sharpeners your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of
decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners
looked as though they'd been put together in wind tunnels. For the most
part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell,
you'd find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense,
because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the
ranks of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a series of
elaborate props for playing at living in the future.
Over coffee, Cohen produced a fat manila envelope full of glossies. I
saw the winged statues that guard the Hoover Dam, forty-foot concrete hood
ornaments leaning steadfastly into an imaginary hurricane. I saw a dozen
shots of Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson's Wax Building, juxtaposed with the
covers of old Amazing Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the
employees of Johnson's Wax must have felt as though they were walking into
one of Paul's spray-paint pulp utopias. Wright's building looked as though
it had been designed for people who wore white togas and Lucite sandals. I
hesitated over one sketch of a particularly grandiose prop-driven airliner,
all wing, like a fat symmetrical boomerang with windows in unlikely places.
Labeled arrows indicated the locations of the grand ballroom and two squash
courts. It was dated 1936.
"This thing couldn't have flown. . . ?" I looked at Dialta Downes.
"Oh, no, quite impossible, even with those twelve giant props; but they
loved the look, don't you see? New York to London in less than two days,
first-class dining rooms, private cabins, sun decks, dancing to jazz in the
evening... The designers were populists, you see; they were trying to give
the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future."
I'd been in Burbank for three days, trying to suffuse a really
dull-looking rocker with charisma, when I got the package from Cohen. It is
possible to photograph what isn't there; it's damned hard to do, and
consequently a very marketable talent. While I'm not bad at it, I'm not
exactly the best, either, and this poor guy strained my Nikon's credibility.
I got out, depressed because I do like to do a good job, but not totally
depressed, because I did make sure I'd gotten the check for the job, and I
decided to restore myself with the sublime artiness of the Barris-Watford
assignment. Cohen had sent me some books on Thirties design, more photos of
streamlined buildings, and a list of Dialta Downes's fifty favorite examples
of the style in California.
Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building
becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a
detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal
itself in a certain way. While I was waiting, I thought myself in Dialta
Downes's America. When I isolated a few of the factory buildings on the
ground glass of the Hasselblad, they came across with a kind of sinister
totalitarian dignity, like the stadiums Albert Speer built for Hitler. But
the rest of it was relentlessly tacky: ephemeral stuff extruded by the
collective American subconscious of the Thirties, tending mostly to survive
along depressing strips lined with dusty motels, mattress wholesalers, and
small used-car lots. I went for the gas stations in a big way.
During the high point of the Downes Age, they put Ming the Merciless in
charge of designing California gas stations. Favoring the architecture of
his native Mongo, he cruised up and down the coast erecting raygun
emplacements in white stucco. Lots of them featured superfluous central
towers ringed with those strange radiator flanges that were a signature
motif of the style, and made them look as though they might generate potent
bursts of raw technological enthusiasm, if you could only find the switch
that turned them on. I shot one in San Jose an hour before the bulldozers
arrived and drove right through the structural truth of plaster and lathing
and cheap concrete.
"Think of it," Dialta Downes had said, "as a kind of alternate America:
a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams."
And that was my frame of mind as I made the stations of her convoluted
socioarchitectural cross in my red Toyota as I gradually tuned in to her
image of a shadowy America-that-wasn't, of Coca-Cola plants like beached
submarines, and fifth-run movie houses like the temples of some lost sect
that had worshiped blue mirrors and geometry. And as I moved among these
secret ruins, I found myself wondering what the inhabitants of that lost
future would think of the world I lived in. The Thirties dreamed white
marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the
rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the
dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car no wings for it
and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself
darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal...
And one day, on the outskirts of Bolinas, when I was setting up to
shoot a particularly lavish example of Ming's martial architecture, I
penetrated a fine membrane, a membrane of probability... Every so gently, I
went over the Edge And looked up to see a twelve-engined thing like a
bloated boomerang, all wing, thrumming its way east with an elephantine
grace, so low that I could count the rivets in its dull silver skin, and
hear maybe the echo of jazz.
I took it to Kihn. Merv Kihn, free-lance journalist with an extensive
line in Texas pterodactyls, redneck UFO contactees, bush-league Loch Ness
monsters, and the Top Ten conspiracy theories in the loonier reaches of the
American mass mind.
"It's good," said Kihn, polishing his yellow Polaroid shooting glasses
on the hem of his Hawaiian shirt, "but it's not mental; lacks the true
quill."
But I saw it, Mervyn." We were seated poolside in brilliant Arizona
sunlight. He was in Tucson waiting for a group of retired Las Vegas civil
servants whose leader received messages from Them on her microwave oven. I'd
driven all night and was feeling it.
"Of course you did. Of course you saw it. You've read my stuff; haven't
you grasped my blanket solution to the UFO problem? It's simple, plain and
country simple: people" he settled the glasses carefully on his long hawk
nose and fixed me with his best basilisk glare see . . . things. People see
these things. Nothing's there, but people see them anyway. Because they need
to, probably. You've read Jung. you should know the score... .In your case,
it's so obvious: You admit you were thinking about this crackpot
architecture, having fantasies. .. .Look, I'm sure you've taken your share
of drugs, right? How many people survived the Sixties in California without
having the odd hallucination? All those nights when you discovered that
whole armies of Disney technicians had been employed to weave animated
holograms of Egyptian hieroglyphs into the fabric of your jeans, say, or the
times when "
"But it wasn't like that." "Of course not. It wasn't like that at all;
it was `in a setting of clear reality,' right? Everything normal, and then
there's the monster, the mandala, the neon cigar. In your case, a giant Tom
Swift airplane. It happens all the time. You aren't even crazy. You know
that, don't you?" He fished a beer out of the battered foam cooler beside
his deck chair.
"Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County. I interviewed a
sixteen-year-old girl who'd been assaulted bya bar hade."
"A what?" "A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar hade, see,
was floating around on its own little flying saucer, looked kind of like the
hubcaps on cousin Wayne's vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing eyes like two
cigar stubs and telescoping chrome antennas poking up behind its ears." He
burped. -
"It assaulted her? How?" "You don't want to know; you're obviously
impressionable. `It was cold' " he lapsed into his bad southern accent "
`and metallic.' It made electronic noises. Now that is the real thing, the
straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a
witch. There's just no place for her to function in this society. She'd have
seen the devil, if she hadn't been brought up on `The Bionic Man' and all
those `Star Trek' reruns. She is clued into the main vein. And she knows
that it happened to her. I got out ten minutes before the heavy UFO boys
showed up with the polygraph."
I must have looked pained, because he set his beer down carefully
beside the cooler and sat up.
"If you want a classier explanation, I'd say you saw a semiotic ghost.
All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi
imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that
look like Fifties' comic art. They're semiotic phantoms, bits of deep
cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like
the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.
But you saw a different kind of ghost, that's all. That plane was part of
the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow. The important
thing is not to worry about it."
I did worry about it, though. Kihn combed his thinning blond hair and
went off to hear what They had had to say over the radar range lately, and I
drew the curtains in my room and lay down in air-conditioned darkness to
worry about it. I was still worrying about it when I woke up. Kihn had left
a note on my door; he was flying up north in a chartered plane to check out
a cattle-mutilation rumor ("muties," he called them; another of his
journalistic specialties).
I had a meal, showered, took a crumbling diet pill that had been
kicking around in the bottom of my shaving kit for three years, and headed
back to Los Angeles.
The speed limited my vision to the tunnel of the Toyota's headlights.
The body could drive, I told myself, while the mind maintained. Maintained
and stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing of amphetamine and
exhaustion, the spectral, luminous vegetation that grows out of the corners
of the mind's eye along late-night highways. But the mind had its own ideas,
and Kihn's opinion of what I was already thinking of as my "sighting"
rattled endlessly through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic
ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my
passage. Somehow this feedback-loop aggravated the diet pill, and the
speed-vegetation along the road began to assume the colors of infrared
satellite images, glowing shreds blown apart in the Toyota's slipstream.
I pulled over, then, and a half-dozen aluminum beer cans winked
goodnight as I killed the headlights. I wondered what time it was in London,
and tried to imagine Dialta Downes having breakfast in her Hampstead flat,
surrounded by streamlined chrome figurines and books on American culture.
Desert nights in that country are enormous; the moon is closer. I
watched the moon for a long time and decided that Kihn was right. The main
thing was not to worry. All across the continent, daily, people who were
more normal than I'd ever aspired to be saw giant birds, Bigfeet, flying oil
refineries; they kept Kihn busy and solvent. Why should I be upset by a
glimpse of the 1930s pop imagination loose over Bolinas? I decided to go to
sleep, with nothing worse to worry about than rattlesnakes and cannibal
hippies, safe amid the friendly roadside garbage of my own familiar
continuum. In the morning I'd drive down to Nogales and photograph the old
brothels, something I'd intended to do for years. The diet pill had given
up.
The light woke me, and then the.voices. The light came from somewhere
behind me and threw shifting shadows inside the car. The voices were calm,
indistinct, male and female, engaged in conversation.
My neck was stiff and my eyeballs felt gritty in their sockets. My leg
had gone to sleep, pressed against the steering wheel. I fumbled for my
glasses in the pocket of my work shirt and finally got them on.
Then I looked behind me and saw the city. The books on Thirties design
were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealized city that
drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything, soaring up
through an architect's perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires.
That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire stood on
spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple
tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You
could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads
of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver
shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant
wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver
shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join
the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were
gyrocopters...
I closed my eyes tight and swung around in the seat. When I opened
them, I willed myself to see the mileage meter, the pale road dust on the
black plastic dashboard, the overflowing ashtray.
"Amphetamine psychosis," I said. I opened my eyes. The dash was still
there, the dust, the crushed filtertips. Very carefully, without moving my
head, I turned the headlights on.
And saw them. They were blond. They were standing beside their car, an
aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rudder jutting up from its spine
and smooth black tires like a child's toy. He had his arm around her waist
and was gesturing toward the city. They were both in white: loose clothing,
bare legs, spotless white sun shoes. Neither of them seemed aware of the
beams of my headlights. He was saying something wise and strong, and she was
nodding, and suddenly I was frightened, frightened in an entirely different
way. Sanity had ceased to be an issue; I knew, somehow, that the city behind
me was Tucson a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an
era. That it was real, entirely real. But the couple in front of me lived in
it, and they frightened me.
They were the children of Dialta Downes's `80- that-wasn't; they were
Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes.
They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America
first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the
Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of
pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible
to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and
their world. And in the Dream, it was their world.
Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the
sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble,
orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their
floodlit avenues and silver cars.
It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda.
I put the car in gear and drove forward slowly, until the bumper was
within three feet of them. They still hadn't seen me. I rolled the window
down and listened to what the man was saying. His words were bright and
hollow as the pitch in some Chamber of Commerce brochure, and I knew that he
believed in them absolutely.
"John," I heard the woman say, "we've forgotten to take our food
pills." She clicked two bright wafers from a thing on her belt and passed
one to him. I backed onto the highway and headed for Los Angeles, wincing
and shaking my head.
I phoned Kihn from a gas station. A new one, in bad Spanish Modern. He
was back from his expedition and didn't seem to mind the call.
"Yeah, that is a weird one. Did you try to get any pictures? Not that
they ever come out, but it adds an interesting frisson to your story, not
having the pictures turnout.
But what should I do? "Watch lots of television, particularly game
shows and soaps. Go to porn movies. Ever see Nazi Love Motel? They've got it
on cable, here. Really awful. Just what you need."
What was he talking about? "Quit yelling and listen to me. I'm letting
you in on a trade secret: Really bad media can exorcise your semiotic
ghosts. If it keeps the saucer people off my back, it can keep these Art
Deco futuroids off yours. Try it. What have you got to lose?"
Then he begged off, pleading an early-morning date with the Elect.
"The who?" "These oldsters from Vegas; the ones with the microwaves. ~
I considered putting a collect call through to London, getting Cohen at
Barris-Watford and telling him his photographer was checked out for a
protracted season in the Twilight Zone. In the end, I let a machine mix me a
really impossible cup of black coffee and climbed back into the Toyota for
the haul to Los Angeles.
Los Angeles was a bad idea, and I spent two weeks there. It was prime
Downes country; too much of the Dream there, and too many fragments of the
Dream waiting to snare me. I nearly wrecked the car on a stretch of overpass
near Disneyland, when the road fanned out like an origami trick and left me
swerving through a dozen minilanes of whizzing chrome teardrops with shark
fins. Even worse, Hollywood was full of people who looked too much like the
couple I'd seen in Arizona. I hired an Italian director who was making ends
meet doing darkroom work and installing patio decks around swimming pools
until his ship came in; he made prints of all the negatives I'd accumulated
on the Downes job. I didn't want to look at the stuff myself. It didn't seem
to bother Leonardo, though, and when he was finished I checked the prints,
riffling through them like a deck of cards, sealed them up, and sent them
air freight to London. Then I took a taxi to a theater that was showing Nazi
Love Motel, and kept my eyes shut all the way.
Cohen's congratulatory wire was forwarded to me in San Francisco a week
later. Dialta had loved the pictures. He admired the way I'd ``really gotten
into it,'' and looked forward to working with me again. That afternoon I
spotted a flying wing over Castro Street, but there was something tenuous
about it, as though it were only half there. I rushed into the nearest
newsstand and gathered up as much as I could find on the petroleum crisis
and the nuclear energy hazard. I'd just decided to buy a plane ticket for
New York.
"Hell of a world we live in, huh?" The proprietor was a thin black man
with bad teeth and an obvious wig. I nodded, fishing in my jeans for change,
anxious to find a park bench where I could submerge myself in hard evidence
of the human near-dystopia we live in. "But it could be worse, huh?"
"That's right," I said, "or even worse, it could be perfect."
He watched me as I headed down the street with my little bundle of
condensed catasttophe. Fragments of a Hologram Rose
That summer Parker had trouble sleeping. There were power droughts;
sudden failures of the delta-inducer brought painfully abrupt returns to
consciousness.
To avoid these, he used patch cords, miniature alligator clips, and
black tape to wire the inducer to a battery-operated ASP deck. Power loss in
the inducer would trigger the deck's playback circuit.
He bought an ASP cassette that began with the subject asleep on a quiet
beach. It had been recorded by a young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an
abnormally acute color sense. The boy had been flown to Barbados for the
sole purpose of taking a nap and his morning's exercise on a brilliant
stretch of private beach. The microfiche laminate in the cassette's
transparent case explained that the yogi could will himself through alpha to
delta without an inducer. Parker, who hadn't been able to sleep without an
inducer for two years, wondered if this was possible.
He had been able to sit through the whole thing only once, though by
now he knew every sensation of the first five subjective minutes. He thought
the most interesting part of the sequence was a slight editing slip at the
start of the elaborate breathing routine: a swift glance down the white
beach that picked out the figure of a guard patrolling a chain link fence, a
black machine pistol slung over his arm.
While Parker slept, power drained from the city's grids.
The transition from delta to delta-ASP was a dark implosion into other
flesh. Familiarity cushioned the shock. He felt the cool sand under his
shoulders. The cuffs of his tattered jeans flapped against his bare ankles
in the morning breeze. Soon the boy would wake fully and begin his
Ardha-Matsyendra~something; with other hands Parker groped in darkness for
the ASP deck. Three in the morning.
Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when
you pour the boiling water.
Morning's recorded dream, fading: through other eyes, dark plume of a
Cuban freighter fading with the horizon it navigates across the mind's gray
screen.
Three in the morning. Let yesterday arrange itself around you in flat
schematic images. What you said what she said watching her pack dialing the
cab. However you shuffle them they form the same printed circuit,
hieroglyphs converging on a central component; you, standing in the rain,
screaming at the cabby.
The rain was sour and acid, nearly the color of piss. The cabby called
you an asshole; you still had to pay twice the fare. She had three pieces of
luggage. In his respirator and goggles, the man looked like an ant. He
pedaled away in the rain. She didn't look back.
The last you saw of her was a giant ant, giving you the finger.
Parker saw his first ASP unit in a Texas shantytown called Judy's
Jungle. It was a massive console cased in cheap plastic chrome. A ten-dollar
bill fed into the slot bought you five minutes of free-fall gymnastics in a
Swiss orbital spa, trampolining through twenty-meter perihelions with a
sixteen-year-old Vogue model heady stuff for the Jungle, where it was
simpler to buy a gun than a hot bath.
He was in New York with forged papers a year later, when two leading
firms had the first portable decks in major department stores in time for
Christmas. The ASP porn theaters that had boomed briefly in California never
recovered.
Holography went too, and the block-wide Fuller domes that had been the
holo temples of Parker's childhood became multilevel supermarkets, or housed
dusty amusement arcades where you still might find the old consoles, under
faded neon pulsing APPARENT SENSORY PERCEPTION through a blue haze of
cigarette smoke.
Now Parker is thirty and writes continuity for broadcast ASP,
programming the eye movements of the industry's human cameras.
The brown-out continues. In the bedroom, Parker prods the
bru~hed-aluminum face of his Sendai Sleep-Master. Its pilot light flickers,
then lapses into darkness. Coffee in hand, he crosses the carpet to the
closet she emptied the day before. The flashlight's beam probes the bare
shelves for evidence of love, finding a broken leather sandal strap, an ASP
cassette, and a postcard. The postcard is a white light reflection holo&ram
of a rose.
At the kitchen sink, he feeds the sandal strap to the disposal unit.
Sluggish in the brown-out, it complains, but swallows and digests. Holding
it carefully between thumb and forefinger, he lowers the hologram toward the
hidden rotating jaws. The unit emits a thin scream as steel teeth slash
laminated plastic and the rose is shredded into a thousand fragments.
Later he sits on the unmade bed, smoking. Her cassette is in the deck
ready for playback. Some women's tapes disorient him, but he doubts this is
the reason he now hesitates to start the machine.
Roughly a quarter of all ASP users are unable to comfortably assimilate
the subjective body picture of the opposite sex. Over the years some
broadcast ASP stars have become increasingly androgynous in an attempt to
capture this segment of the audience.
But Angela's own tapes have never intimidated him before. (But what if
she has recorded a lover?) No, that can't be it it's simply that the
cassette is an entirely unknown quantity.
When Parker was fifteen, his parents indentured him to the American
subsidiary of a Japanese plastics combine. At the time, he felt fortunate;
the ratio of applicants to indentured trainees was enormous. For three years
he lived with his cadre in a dormitory, singing the company hymns in
formation each morning and usually managing to go over the compound fence at
least once a month for girls or the holodrome.
The indenture would have terminated on his twentieth birthday, leaving
him eligible for full employee status. A week before his nineteenth
birthday, with two stolen credit cards and a change of clothes, he went over
the fence for the last time. He arrived in California three days before the
chaotic New Secessionist regime collapsed. In San Francisco, warring
splinter groups hit and ran in the streets. One or another of four different
"provisional" city governments had done such an efficient job of stockpiling
food that almost none was available at street level.
Parker spent the last night of the revolution in a burned-out Tucson
suburb, making love to a thin teenager from New Jersey who explained the
finer points of her horoscope between bouts of almost silent weeping that
seemed to have nothing at all to do with anything he did or said.
Years later he realized that he no longer had any idea of his original
motive in breaking his indenture.
* * * The first three quarters of the cassette have been erased; you
punch yourself fast-forward through a static haze of wiped tape, where taste
and scent blur into a single channel. The audio input is white sound the
no-sound of the first dark sea. . . .(Prolonged input from wiped tape can
induce hypnagogic hallucination.)
Parker crouched in the roadside New Mexico brush at midnight, watching
a tank burn on the highway. Flame lit the broken white line he had followed
from Tucson. The explosion had been visible two miles away, a white sheet of
heat lightning that had turned the pale branches of a bare tree against the
night sky into a photographic negative of themselves: carbon branches
against magnesium sky.
Many of the refugees were armed. Texas owed the shantytowns that
steamed in the warm Gulf rains to the uneasy neutrality she had maintained
in the face of the Coast's attempted secession.
The towns were built of plywood, cardboard, plastic sheets that
billowed in the wind, and the bodies of dead vehicles. They had names like
Jump City and Sugaree, and loosely defined governments and territories that
shifted constantly in the covert winds of a black-market economy.
Federal and state troops sent in to sweep the outlaw towns seldom found
anything. But after each search, a few men would fail to report back. Some
had sold their weapons and burned their uniforms, and others had come too
close to the contraband they had been sent to find.
After three months, Parker wanted out, but goods were the only safe
passage through the army cordons. His chance came only by accident: Late one
afternoon, skirting the pall of greasy cooking smoke that hung low over the
Jungle, he stumbled and nearly fell on the body of a woman in a dry creek
bed. Flies rose up in an angry cloud, then settled again, ignoring him. She
had a leather jacket, and at night Parker was usually cold. He began to
search the creek bed for a length of brushwood.
In the jacket's back, lust below her left shoulder blade, was a round
hole that would have admitted the shaft of a pencil. The jacket's lining had
been red once, but now it was black, stiff and shining with dried blood.
With the jacket swaying on the end of his stick, he went looking for water.
j-Ie never washed the jacket; in its left pocket he found nearly an
ounce of cocaine, carefully wrapped in plastic and transparent surgical
tape. The right pocket held fifteen ampules of Megacillin-D and a ten-inch
horn-handled switchblade. The antibiotic was worth twice its weight in
cocaine.
He drove the knife hilt-deep into a rotten stump passed over by the
Jungle's wood-gatherers and hung the jacket there, the flies circling it as
he walked away.
That night, in a bar with a corrugated iron roof, waiting for one of
the "lawyers" who worked passages through the cordon, he tried his first ASP
machine. It was huge, all chrome and neon, and the owner was very proud of
it; he had helped hijack the truck himself.
If the chaos of the nineties reflects a radical shift in the paradigms
of visual literacy, the final shift away from the Lascaux/Gutenberg
tradition of a pre-holographic society, what should we expect from this
newer technology, with his promise of discrete encoding and subsequent
reconstruction of the full range of sensory perception? Roebuck and Pierhal,
Recent American History: A Systems View.
Fast-forward through the humming no-time of wiped tape into her body.
European sunlight. Streets of a strange city.
Athens. Greek-letter signs and the smell of dust... and the smell of
dust.
Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman hasn't met you yet; you're
hardly out of Texas) at the gray monument, horses there in stone, where
pigeons whirl up and circle and static takes love's body, wipes it clean and
gray. Waves of white sound break along a beach that isn't there. And the
tape ends.
The inducer's light is burning now. Parker lies in darkness, recalling
the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality:
Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the
rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered
fragments revealing a whole he'll never know stolen credit cards a burned-
out suburb planetary conjunctions of a stranger a tank burning on a highway
a flat packet of drugs a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.
Thinking: We're each other's fragments, and was it always this way? That
instant of a European trip, deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape is she
closer now, or more real, for his having been there?
She had helped him get his papers, found him his first job in ASP. Was
that their history? No, history was the black face of the delta-inducer, the
empty closet, and the unmade bed. History was his loathing for the perfect
body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab driver, and
her refusal to look back through the contaminated rain.
But each fragment reveals the rose from a different angle, he
remembered, but delta swept over him before he could ask himself what that
might mean.
Last-modified: Sun, 26 Aug 2001 18:11:43 GMT