by Douglas Lain
Even this was something I could undo. All I had to do to get rid of the self in the photo was to turn on the Time Box again. The rest of history was impossible to control, but I had complete dominion over those twenty minutes in 1971. I stared at myself, studied my own image, and decided I would erase it. I said goodbye to the version of me on the screen.
On my last trip to the airport I tried to change everyone together and at the same time. If up until that point I’d rearranged the moment piece by piece, redirecting each person’s attention separately, my new approach would take on the totality of the moment. I would capture all of their attention at once.
“Flight 23 to Boston will be boarding in fifteen minutes,” the stewardess spoke the words into the microphone. “Departure time is 4:35.”
I stood by my pillar and smiled again. I imagined someone, Craig or Carol or Cat, taking my picture, but this in the really existing moment there was nobody aiming the Time Box in my direction. Even so I lifted my hand to point to a place outside the frame.
I stepped up to Shelly, the girl in the short orange airline uniform, and leaned down to speak into her microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I started.
“Sir,” Shelly objected. “You can’t—”
“Ladies and gentlemen, Flight 2012 is cancelled due to a future calamity. In fact, I can tell you that in the future many of you are already dead. Please remain calm. Do exactly as I say or somebody will get hurt,” I said. “Move only when I tell you to move. If anybody tries to be a hero I’ll delete them. Don’t try anything stupid.” I took the Time Box from the inner pocket of my gortex raincoat and held it up so everyone could see. “This is a nuclear device. I can destroy time with it. I can, if I have to, erase all of you.”
“It’s a bomb,” Shelly said. She started rubbing her legs together, sort of jogging in place, as if she thought I ought to have grabbed her and she ought to be struggling.
The Time Box had more than forty years of future history stored inside. The new upgrade allows the user to broadcast a wireless signal to a conventional television set. The signal is digital, but a converter is built-in and this allows the consumer to utilize the box in the past. Most users just opt to watch the tiny screen on the box itself, most are casual historians, but I’d picked a spot, found the moment when I wanted to be, and the fact that the Box would work with a TV built in 1968 was a big plus.
I moved the crew and passengers of Flight 2012 to the bar. I turned on the Time Box, switched on the RCA Solid State Technicolor dream box above the Jack Daniels on, and then started my history lesson. If Terence and Chomsky could not be pushed into a kind of joint effort, if there could be no rational synthesis, then they would at least have to face their future together, even if only this one time. Even if it would then be erased.
I started with Ronald Reagan.
“Who is that?” Cat asked.
Craig turned toward Cat. “It’s Ronald Reagan from California.”
Noam Chomsky drank a sip from a green bottle of beer. He peeled the label slowly with his thumb and watched the screen while Carol kept her arms wrapped tight around the carry-on bag in her lap. McKenna sat next to him and took a sip from the canteen he’d had with him in the Amazon. The canteen contained poorly mixed Tang. Most of the orange powder had collected as sediment on the bottom of the flask.
After Reagan I showed them the footage of the 1984 Space Shuttle disaster and followed this with starving children in Ethiopia. Next came the fall of the Berlin Wall followed by clips from the original Tron.
Terence was eating peanuts. Chomsky held the label from his beer between his index finger and his thumb. Craig yawned and stretched and then moved to put his arm around Cat. Cat, in turn, picked up a menu from the bar and read through the mixed drinks available.
“Put down the menu,” I shouted. “Pay attention.”
Watching the future with them I saw that there was quite a lot of what was terrible about it was enmeshed in that moment in Gate 23. Watching it while Noam Chomsky fiddled with the wet paper label from his beer bottle made me blush. Was I naïve enough to think that if people from 1971 could be made to see the collapse of the Twin Towers, if they were forced to witness the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, that knowing about these things in advance would somehow make them act differently?
Even as I brought them their future as an act of terrorism, even as I was satisfied with how it all fit together seamlessly on the screen, I realized that nothing I could show them would shock. Noam Chomsky and Terence McKenna were already adjusted to living in a society that presented itself as a crisis.
When a man in a bear suit had less than optimal results down amongst the luxury hotels on Wall Street, when Madonna put her hand on her belly, when Ronald Reagan waved and waved as multicolored balloons came down around him, my embarrassment grew. It was just another happy and obvious critique. There were Golden Arches and billions served. The women on the Love Boat wore tiny bikinis as they swayed back and forth across the promenade. They arched their back as a hypno-wheel turned. And when Ronald Reagan’s beautiful teeth were knocked out in a massive auto disaster, when Barack Obama’s rear-end collision made Rob Lowe come I turned to look and found that Noam Chomsky looked bored. Even when he saw himself on television, even when there were a hundred screens on the screen, and they all showed him as a talking head, even when the women on the Love Boat poured water on themselves and their skin glistened, neither Chomsky nor McKenna reacted.
Their deadly future was shown as a rock video, and they were ready for it.
The hallway outside the airport bar was still filled with sunlight when I had everyone shuffle out. The history lesson was over and I watched Terence and Chomsky shrug at each other. I held the Time Box over my head and threatened destruction again. I had the ten of them line up in front of orange bucket seats in the hallway outside Gate 18, and asked them to raise their hands to answer my questions. I waited as they did as I asked, and was pleased when Chomsky and Terence ended up next to each other in line, but I was interrupted before I could get my first question out. I was going to ask them if they felt that what they saw on the screen was separate from them, separate from their lives, but instead of asking anything I reeled forward. A stinging sensation stopped my thoughts and my right leg stopped supporting my weight. I fell forward, hit the tile hard, and rolled over in time to see an explosion of dust erupt from the pillar I’d been leaning on a second earlier.
Somebody was shooting at me. I scrambled to pick up the Time Box, I’d dropped it when I fell. Then I forced myself onto to my feet and turned toward the panes of glass that separated me from the tarmac. There were motorcycle cops out there with guns drawn. They were still wearing their helmets and they had pistols. I stood shocked, and then wondered why they hadn’t fired again.
Noam Chomsky was standing next to me at the window, looking down with me at the scene.
“You’re in trouble,” he said.
“Looks like it.”
“Is that really a nuclear device,” he asked.
I told him that I wasn’t sure what it ran on exactly, but that it had something to do with quarks which, as far as I understood things, were subatomic particles.
Terence McKenna stepped back to let some policemen in body armor past, and I imagined what it would be like to get arrested. An absurd image flashed through my mind. In the instant it took for the SWAT team to get down on their knees and take aim at me I pictured myself riding on a police motorbike, only Chomsky was driving. I had my arms around Chomsky’s waist and, as I heard the men cock their rifles, I saw Terence McKenna pull up beside us on his bike. We waved to him, and smiled. I felt a fly hit my lips, maybe a dragonfly or a flying beetle, and in my hallucination I swallowed reflexively. I imagined myself swallowing a bug, and then looked down at the spot on my leg where the bullet had hit me. There was a great deal of blood oozing out.
If I stayed in 1971 I would die there.
Looking from the SWAT team t
o Noam Chomsky I saw flecks of dust suspended in the air. The future I was about to go back to was going to be just the same as it ever was. I hit the reset button.
CRAWDADDY ONLINE
Jeff Morris
February 6th, 2014 - 5 pm | 20,213 views | 34 recommendations | 823 comments
In the Garden: Easybloom 3.0
The EasyBloom Plant/Topsoil Sensor was created for anyone who has experienced the frustration of not knowing what plant will survive in a specific location or anyone who has been unable to figure out just how the topsoil is contaminated when a crop fails. This technology is essential for those who are adding to their caloric intake with a kitchen garden, as well as for industrial farmers.
—EasyBloom Brochure circa 2012
I want to thank everyone who sent emails of concern and sympathy during the last two weeks, and to assure all of my readers that while I don’t have full mobility yet, I am feeling much better. I am walking again, although with a cane. I’m mostly just puttering around the house and garden these days. Domestic life can be quite pleasant, there is plenty of domestic tech to consider, and quite a lot of it has political or social implications.
For instance, I received my EasyBloom kit in the mail on Friday. The cardboard box that arrived with its orange flower logo and curved lines had a sort of kindergarten quality to it, but the peach colored sheet of molded plastic that held all the pieces together inside might have been more appropriately used with a medical or feminine hygiene product. The yellow plastic pedals that clip on the top worked all right, but all in all the product feels insubstantial. I haven’t bothered to figure out whether it actually can collect data, but have only observed how it makes me feel about my garden when I stick the green metal prongs into the soil. While the device is supposed to lend yuppie legitimacy to the kitchen gardens that more and more Americans are relying on for vegetables in this era of shipping hazards and failed harvests, to me setting a piece of plastic next to my lemon cucumbers just manages to reinforce the reality that my garden box is semi-toxic. Looking at this cheerful plastic phallus with its umbrella top I start to distrust the whole enterprise. Who wants food grown on top of a landfill?
Another example of a domestic product would be the new iStick I received on Tuesday and promptly stuck in my ear. It’s true that the sound quality is incredible, I could hear Carole King’s every breath as she crooned about how it was too late and how we should just stop trying. Listening to music from the seventies was probably a mistake. I was afraid to flip the switch and get the video feed going. I told myself that I didn’t want to mess with my optic nerve, but I think I just didn’t want to see Carole with long wavy hair and in a wide collared pink blouse. I’d spent enough time with that era’s fashions.
“It’s too late now darling,” Carole sang. I had to agree.
When the song was over I had some difficulty removing the device. I’d wedged it in too deep and couldn’t just pluck it out the way the instructions indicated. After several attempts with no success I thought I was going to end up in the emergency room again, but my wife suggested we try using tweezers.
Some of you might have seen my appearance on the O’Brien show yesterday. We talked about Gate 23 and about how today’s Chomsky reacted to my blog entries. Apparently he was reluctant to comment, but he did say that he felt that people ought to organize in the present rather than fantasize about the past. He views the Time Box as nothing more than a novelty, another virtual world, like television, and while he’s technically or theoretically wrong, actually existing time travel does work like television, especially in retrospect. Chomsky is, as always, spot on.
I got more into it on Conan’s show than he probably wanted, and I felt bad about how unfunny it all was. One thing I really wanted to ask him—Chomsky, not Conan—was if the past is just like television, then what is the present like?
Maybe the present is an EasyBloom flower, or an iStick that gets jammed in your ear and won’t stop broadcasting. Whatever it is, it seems to be all we’ve got. One big present stretching out infinitely behind and in front of us.
I probably won’t be getting more products to review by next week, but if I do I’ll let you know.
Catch you later… .
James Morrow is best known for the Godhead Trilogy, which includes Towing Jehovah, Blameless in Abaddon, and The Eternal Footman. He is a literary science-fiction author whose work has garnered him World Fantasy and Nebula awards. A former filmmaker, he won a CINE Golden Eagle for his poetic documentary short, Children of the Morning. His most recent novel, from St. Martin’s Press, is a loopy, quasi-historical, Darwinian extravaganza titled Galápagos Regained.
Morrow’s satiric fable “Arms and the Woman” was originally published in the July, 1991, issue of Amazing Stories, three months after the end of Desert Storm. In an essay titled “Taken Gently by the Hand,” written for the James Morrow issue of the scholarly journal Para*Doxa (Volume 5, Number 12), science fiction author Michael Swanwick argued that the story rewards a close reading, noting that it has “all the lightness and sting of a wasp soufleé.”
“arms and the woman”
JAMES MORROW
“What did you do in the war, Mommy?”
The last long shadow has slipped from the sundial’s face, melting into the hot Egyptian night. My children should be asleep. Instead they’re bouncing on their straw pallets, stalling for time.
“It’s late,” I reply. “Nine o’clock already.”
“Please,” the twins implore me in a single voice.
“You have school tomorrow.”
“You haven’t told us a story all week,” insists Damon, the whiner.
“The war is such a great story,” explains Daphne, the wheedler.
“Kaptah’s mother tells him a story every night,” whines Damon.
“Tell us about the war,” wheedles Daphne, “and we’ll clean the whole cottage tomorrow, top to bottom.”
I realize I’m going to give in—not because I enjoy spoiling my children (though I do) or because the story itself will consume less time than further negotiations (though it will) but because I actually want the twins to hear this particular tale. It has a point. I’ve told it before, of course, a dozen times perhaps, but I’m still not sure they get it.
I snatch up the egg timer and invert it on the night-stand, the tiny grains of sand spilling into the lower chamber like seeds from a farmer’s palm. “Be ready for bed in three minutes,” I warn my children, “or no story.”
They scurry off, frantically brushing their teeth and slipping on their flaxen nightshirts. Silently I glide about the cottage, dousing the lamps and curtaining the moon, until only one candle lights the twins’ room, like the campfire of an army consisting of mice and scarab beetles.
“So you want to know what I did in the war,” I intone, singsong, as my children climb into their beds.
“Oh, yes,” says Damon, pulling up his fleecy coverlet.
“You bet,” says Daphne, fluffing her goose-feather pillow.
“Once upon a time,” I begin, “I lived as both princess and prisoner in the great city of Troy.” Even in this feeble light, I’m struck by how handsome Damon is, how beautiful Daphne. “Every evening, I would sit in my boudoir, looking into my polished bronze mirror …”
Helen of Troy, princess and prisoner, sits in her boudoir, looking into her polished bronze mirror and scanning her world-class face for symptoms of age—for wrinkles, wattles, pouches, crow’s-feet, and the crenellated corpses of hairs. She feels like crying, and not just because these past ten years in Ilium are starting to show. She’s sick of the whole sordid arrangement, sick of being cooped up in this overheated acropolis like a pet cockatoo. Whispers haunt the citadel. The servants are gossiping, even her own handmaids. The whore of Hisarlik, they call her. The slut from Sparta. The Lakedaimon lay.
Then there’s Paris. Sure, she’s madly in love with him, sure, they have great sex, but can’t they ever talk?
Sighing, Helen trolls her hairdo with her lean, exquisitely manicured fingers. A silver strand lies amid the folds like a predatory snake. Slowly she winds the offending filament around her index finger, then gives a sudden tug. “Ouch,” she cries, more from despair than pain. There are times when Helen feels like tearing out all her lovely tresses, every last lock, not simply these graying threads. If I have to spend one more pointless day in Hisarlik, she tells herself, I’ll go mad.
Every morning, she and Paris enact the same depressing ritual. She escorts him to the Skaian Gate, hands him his spear and his lunch bucket, and with a tepid kiss sends him off to work. Paris’s job is killing people. At sundown he arrives home grubby with blood and redolent of funeral pyres, his spear wrapped in bits of drying viscera. There’s a war going on out there; Paris won’t tell her anything more. “Who are we fighting?” she asks each evening as they lie together in bed. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it,” he replies, slipping on a sheep-gut condom, the brand with the plumed and helmeted soldier on the box.
Until this year, Paris had contrived for her to walk Troy’s high walls each morning, waving encouragement to the troops, blowing them kisses as they marched off to battle. “Your face inspires them,” he’d insisted. “An airy kiss from you is worth a thousand nights of passion with a nymph.” But in recent months Paris’s priorities have changed. As soon as they say good-bye, Helen is supposed to retire to the citadel, speaking with no other Hisarlikan, not even a brief coffee klatsch with one of Paris’s forty-nine sisters-in-law. She’s expected to spend her whole day weaving rugs, carding flax, and being beautiful. It is not a life.
Can the gods help? Helen is skeptical, but anything is worth a try. Tomorrow, she resolves, she will go to the temple of Apollo and beg him to relieve her boredom, perhaps buttressing her appeal with an offering—a ram, a bull, whatever—though an offering strikes her as rather like a deal, and Helen is sick of deals. Her husband—pseudohusband, nonhusband—made a deal. She keeps thinking of the Apple of Discord, and what Aphrodite might have done with it after bribing Paris. Did she drop it in her fruit bowl … put it on her mantel … impale it on her crown? Why did Aphrodite take the damn thing seriously? Why did any of them take it seriously? Hi, I’m the fairest goddess in the universe—see, it says so right here on my apple.
