Deserts of Fire

by Douglas Lain

  I lost concentration. He lunged at me and grabbed a hold of my wrist. The knife clattered to the ground. I tried reaching for it, and when I was off-balance he shoved me hard, causing me to tumble into a pile of trash. He picked up the knife and squatted down next to me. His face now looked hard and mean.

  You ever seen me before? he said.

  I shook my head.

  I said, you ever seen me before?

  No, sir.

  You say your name is Joseph Downs, huh? Iraqi veteran, huh?

  Yes.

  Tell me your unit.

  I already told you.

  Tell it to me again. This time he was shouting.

  1st Battalion, 7th Regiment, 1st Division. What the hell is this?

  When did you serve?

  What?

  Dates served, soldier! He pressed the knife against my throat, drawing a trickle of blood.

  Shipped out August 11, 2004, I said. Honorable discharge … May 13, 2005.

  Bullshit! he shouted. Who are you?

  I already told you, I said. Jesus, what is wrong with you? What do you want from me? I can show you my tag—I keep it around my neck.

  His eyes opened wide and his lower lip trembled. Give it to me, he said. Let me see your tag.

  Put the knife down, I said.

  Slowly, he placed the knife on the ground, inches from his body. He nodded his head. I removed the tag from around my neck and tossed it gently toward him. He picked it up without taking his eyes off of me.

  DOWNS

  J.D.

  522715386

  USMC M

  BAPTIST

  He stared down at that tag for some time. Then his jaw slackened and his eyes filled with dread. He shook his head a few times and muttered something under his breath. He dropped the tag on the ground and then grabbed a shovel to steady himself.

  He continued muttering but I couldn’t decipher the words.

  Uneasily, I rose to my feet and backed away. Listen, I said. I’m not looking for any trouble. I was on my way to the Mountain when my truck broke down. There’s been a misunderstanding of some kind.

  The stranger looked at me wild-eyed. I’m not crazy, he said. I’m not crazy. He backed away slowly. I’m not crazy! Then he turned and lurched forward like a wounded animal. I watched as he dissolved into the trash around him. And as a fleet of garbage trucks appeared over the horizon, I wondered if he had really been there at all… .

  war is over?

  (do we want it?)

  “Not in Our Name” is a name. It’s the name of an organization formed after the attacks of September 11, with the aim of protesting the US government’s response to those attacks. As an organization it started to pick up steam and gain membership when it became clear in 2002 that the US would be invading Iraq. NION was involved in organizing many protests against the invasion of Iraq including one big protest. On February 15, 2003, with the help of NION, millions around the world took to the streets in an effort to …

  Well, that part is unclear.

  If you asked protesters at the time most of them would have told you that the goal of the protests was to stop the war, but if you asked if they themselves believed that the protests might stop the war, they would have told you that they did not believe stopping the war was possible. So, if nobody believed in the stated purpose of the big protest, what unstated goal were people really working toward?

  Turning to the NION statement of purpose for an answer clarifies what was at stake. What one finds is some free verse co-written by the neopagan new age author Starhawk, and spoken word performer Saul Williams. The poem concludes:

  Not in our name

  will you wage endless war

  Another world is possible

  and we pledge to make it real.

  Despite this pledge, the protests against the war in Iraq were, all in all, merely symbolic.

  A decade later Brendan O’Neill, a blogger for the conservative Spectator newspaper, would describe February 15, 2003 this way:

  “It wasn’t a mass protest so much as it was a mass opting out, a mass switching off, a mass scrubbing of one’s own name from a preordained course of bloody action.”

  That’s the crux of the problem. The anti-war movement could no more escape the seeming inevitably of combat in Iraq than Colin Powell could. The only distinction between them is that while Powell went through the motions of arguing for the war as if arguments mattered, the protesters did the opposite. That was the difference, that and the fact that the protesters got their regret out early whereas Powell only realized how the whole thing had blotted his reputation and sullied his name after the fact.

  “Not in Our Name,” the protesters said.

  “Take my word for it,” said Powell.

  In both cases the sentiment expressed didn’t have any material effect.

  In the remaining two stories you’ll find examinations of this problem.

  Nobody wants war and yet, somehow, it happens. War doesn’t seem to need a justification. War doesn’t require that things make sense.

  Douglas Lain is a novelist and short story writer whose work has appeared in various magazines including Strange Horizons, Interzone, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His first novel Billy Moon was published by Tor and was selected as the debut fantasy novel of the month by Library Journal in 2013. His second novel After the Saucers Landed came out from Night Shade Books in 2015, and was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award.

  “Noam Chomsky and the Time Box” was originally published in the British science-fiction magazine Interzone in 2011.

  “noam chomsky and the time box”

  DOUGLAS LAIN

  CRAWDADDY ONLINE

  Jeff Morris

  December 22nd, 2013 - 3:30 pm | 6,815 views | 2 recommendations | 75 comments

  Stuck in History: My Time Box 3.0 Frustration

  It’s still amazing what can fit in your pocket these days, but while standard computing and gaming devices like iPhones and Mini-Wii systems continue to dominate the market, the most expensive and advanced personal computing device, the Time Box, has had a rough couple of months. Both the recent problems with the marketing and introduction of Box 3.0 which met with less than the projected demand, and the chorus of consumer complaints—the Time Box version of history is too self-contained and static (one example would be the thousands of complaints to the company that visits and revisits to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland always conclude with the Titanic sinking)—has led to a downturn in the company’s stock. While educators, science-fiction fans, and historical hook-up artists are still purchasing the box, the company must do something to increase sales beyond these niches, and the company is pinning its future to the hope that version 3.0 will reinvigorate sales. The new Box includes many features consumers have come to expect with hand held computational devices. Partnering with Sprint and Dell, the new Box will allow customers to make cellular calls from the past, to maintain an internet connection as long as one is within the last thousand years of history, and to photograph and take video of both past events and encounters with what everyone agrees is an ever expanding present.

  —The WSJ, December 20, 2013

  If anyone needed more proof that the gadget-driven marketing scam that was the American Empire is now completely dead, the utter failure to adequately create demand for the world’s first personal time machine should suffice as proof. Nintendo, Time Warner, and Apple computers have all backed off their various offers to buy out Time Box incorporated, and while last year it seemed impossible that the product might suffer the same fate as Betamax and electric cars, a year later it’s becoming obvious that people without a history or a future are uninterested in the kind of Time Travel the box offers. The public seems content to leave history to the necrophiliacs and Civil War buffs.

  A year ago the device came onto the market like a revelation. The consensus in December of 2012 was that a personal time machine would alter everything. Tech Review at MIT love
d Timebox, Doctorow at Boing Boing was beside himself, and historians and political pundits couldn’t contain themselves either. The first month out the door people lined up to buy. There was a mad rush, but when consumers found the disclaimer word of mouth put the kibosh to the whole pseudo-event.

  It’s the first thing you find when you take a Time Box home. The warning is printed on the front page of the instruction manual, plainly and in 36-point Helvetica: “Time Box is paradox free. Do not alter factory settings.”

  If you mess with the Box, adjust the settings, you risk voiding the warranty, and yet it comes equipped with an interface to allow such alterations. I imagine that somebody in marketing thought that this interface might stave off realizations of the obvious. As long as people were under the impression that raising or lowering the probability level and flux could have some impact on their overall experience they could be kept from realizing the obvious.

  Time travel is boring as fuck.

  It is impossible to impact the past. That’s why the Box is underperforming sticky Elmo as a stocking stuffer.

  Believe me, I’ve tried it. A year late to the game I purchased my first Box at the Lloyd Center Mall on black Friday. I just managed not to get trampled on my way from the parking lot to the Computer Store. On my way out I stopped by the food court for a hot dog on a stick, enjoyed the ambience created by the giant fountain and the rats that scurried between the plastic tables as they searched for bits of fries and meat left by the throngs of holiday shoppers, and read and reread the instruction manual:

  Steps for Time Box 3.0

  • Wearing loose clothing and after consulting your physician, take Time Box in hand and sit comfortably.

  • Input historical figure, architectural style, or any other historical indicator as a search term. (Specific dates along with geographical locations will allow Time Box to transport you with pinpoint accuracy.)

  • Enter timeline and interact with the past.

  • To end Time Box timeline simply reset.

  • Live today as yesterday. Experience yesterday as today.

  THE TIMEBOX IS A PARADOX FREE DEVICE

  Once I was home, like every newbie to the Time Box, I set off to change the past. Despite the disclaimers I had to try. The theory is that history is fixed, that you can’t kill Hitler, save Jesus, or stop Larry Summers from getting a job with the Clinton Administration, but once I had the thing plugged in and humming I figured maybe everyone else was just going about it in the wrong way. After all, while most physicists agree that the universe is some sort of hologram, that the structure of time is complete, that the universe is one big thing across space AND time, there are dissenters. Some claim that while the universe is a hologram, it’s a hologram built out of tinker toys. The structure can be moved around. The universe is one big thing, but it can be rebuilt and altered. It’s not cemented together like a model airplane or a brick wall.

  One of those dissenters, professor Hopkins at the University of Hawaii, put it this way:

  “You could change the structure if you knew where the seams were, what the elements of construction were. The trouble is finding a way to measure time in qualitative rather than quantitative units. The past appears unified right now, acausal, but the final word hasn’t been written yet. We might be able to change history. Theories exist that say we could change it.”

  I emailed back asking if one might find these seams.

  “I don’t know. But, let’s say you were to find the seams, and that you were able to change the structure, then all the old time travel problems would resurface. If you could change the structure of reality so that your grandfather was never born then how could the universe generate you as a causative agent? It’s theoretically possible, if you take the universe to be para-consistent, and if it turns out that there are qualitative units of construction that can be somehow manipulated on the micro-level,” he wrote back.

  So there would be paradoxes. That seemed okay. I’d cross those bridges when I came to them, if I came to them.

  I connected the Box to my personal computer, plugged it in to the USB port on the back of my computer screen, and typed in my key phrases. I didn’t set the device to take me back to something obvious like the attacks of September 11, 2001, or the day we invaded Iraq for the second time. Instead I searched for what seemed like a lull, a gap between the two points. I played a hunch.

  I found Noam Chomsky at a pizzeria near the campus of MIT in 2002. Caught up with the professor right before the US went down the rabbit hole. Most of my readers probably already know who Noam Chomsky is, but for those who haven’t heard of him I’ll give the basic bio:

  Professor Chomsky is the father of modern linguistics, sort of the Sigmund Freud of universal grammar. However, most people don’t know him for his scholarly work. Along with being America’s Newton, Chomsky is America’s most well known anti-American, or in less reactionary terms, America’s most famous dissident. He’s a self-described libertarian socialist whose been exposing and urging resistance to the American Imperial project for around fifty years.

  The professor was sitting in a faux antique chair by the exit—a flimsy wooden chair that had been painted a light green and then intentionally distressed. The shabby chic furniture offset the chrome tables creating a look of corporate bohemianism. Chomsky was sipping from a Moose Head beer and reading the Financial Times. He was using a red ballpoint pen to circle words and phrases in the paper as I bought a slice of mushroom and olive pizza and took my grease stained paper plate to his table.

  When Chomsky looked up at me I realized that I’d entered the Time Box without considering my appearance. I’m nearly forty and yet I was dressed like a teenager, like a teenager from 2012. I was wearing loose blue jeans that hung down below my waist exposing my tartan boxer shorts, an orange t-shirt that read “Free the Bunny Suicide” in sarcastic Helvetica, and my eyeglasses that, back in 2002, probably looked like something from Star Trek or an Andy Warhol factory party. The frames are oversized, made of transparent plastic, and filled with red ink. Cool, no?

  And I was unshaven. And I was not wearing deodorant.

  I saw a deep and abiding tolerance in Chomsky’s eyes, and I couldn’t tell whether he’d noted my attire or not. He looked at me and then down at his plate and his body language didn’t change. It didn’t matter whether I was kempt or unkempt, rational or irrational. He didn’t anticipate any surprises.

  I did not introduce myself, but sat down across from him at the chrome table, took a bite of my gourmet pizza, and then started in with my mouth full. I asked Professor Chomsky why he was willing to stay at the level of critique. I asked him why he didn’t use his influence to move people to gum up the machinery of war. Why did the professor always stop short of offering a prescription?

  “That’s not a serious question.”

  “Why not?”

  “The way to make this world better is to work with other people on the various problems. It is just a matter of doing the hard work. There isn’t a prescription. That’s not how the world works. You’re looking for utopia.”

  Chomsky had already heard the question I’d come back in time to ask him. He’d heard it and heard it. At every lecture he’d ever given, at every book screening, at every cocktail party for eminent academics, he was always asked the same inevitable question:

  “What are we supposed to do?”

  Listening to Chomsky prattle out his standard answer, chewing gourmet pizza and watching Chomsky peel back the label on his Moose Head beer, I realized that the professor didn’t really have an answer. In fact, after all the years he’d spent fielding it, he still didn’t even understand the question.

  Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar postulates that the human mind is constructed with language built in. There is a universal grammar built into humanity, there are rules of expression set up biologically. There are limits to what can be expressed and, no matter how hard one tries, one can’t go beyond those limits.


  Consider two sentences:

  Sentence 1: “Unicorns sleep furiously at the moon.”

  Here you’ve got a subject, a verb, an adverb, and an object. It’s an absurd sentence, but it fits the grammar. To the extent that the sentence is absurd is exactly the degree to which it fits. Just to rise to the level of absurdity the sentence has to work by the rules.

  Sentence 2: “Zoom zagga ba bagga za grumboon!”

  Here we have a sentence that, on it’s face, is nothing but a series of expletives. The word “zoom” for instance fills in for a subject, maybe. Perhaps zoom is standing in for the definite article? Try saying the sentence outloud.

  “Zoom zagga ba bagga za grumboon!”

  I wanted Chomsky to help me find the seam. I thought Chomsky could push, that he had power in reserve that he was reluctant to use. But talking to him in the pizza shop in 2002, listening to his rap on how we had to organize, on how the solutions available were obvious if not exactly sexy, I realized that he was as stuck as anyone. Chomsky had to work within the system, within the grammar, even if in the end he only managed to be absurd.

  I tried to tell him. I showed him the Time Box, and told him when I was from, but Chomsky wasn’t particularly impressed. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe me so much as what I told him didn’t even enter his consciousness. I produced the Time Box from my jeans pocket and held it up to him, but he didn’t really look at it. Instead he continued to explain what organizing was, what alternative media was, what true self-interest was. I nodded along and then walked to the center of the restaurant and pressed the reset button.

  I’m sure he was as undisturbed by my disappearance as he’d been by my sudden appearance. I imagine he simply finished his pizza slice, took one last sip of beer, and headed back to MIT.

  I tried to return to that moment, to flip back fifteen minutes, to the moment before our conversation had started, but I overshot it. I hadn’t set the preference correctly and I ended up standing in the dark, surrounded by chairs set upside down on the tabletops. Across the street from the pizzeria a two-story New Colonial house had been converted into a second hand clothing store, and as I fumbled with the Time Box, struggled to find out when I was and send myself to the right moment, I stepped forward, toward the pizzeria’s pane glass front window. I stared out at the display across the street.