by Jarett Kobek
BABY’S SECOND NOVEL, Saving Anne Frank, really did have a plot that included hyperintelligent gonorrhea.
In Baby’s novel, the World Time Travel Authority infects all time travelers with a mutated strain of gonorrhea that pools in the back of the throat. The gonorrhea is hyperintelligent and capable of carrying on conversations with its host via shared control of the host’s vocal cords.
Time travelers often experience isolation fatigue. So the gonorrhea keeps them company.
Unlike present day gonorrhea, the strain modified by The World Time Travel Authority has no negative physical effects and can not be transmitted through sexual contact.
THE PROTAGONIST of Saving Anne Frank is a man named Boaz ben-Haim. One of the quirks of the future is that all time travelers are Jewish. According to Baby’s narrative, Jewish culture is the only culture with a realistic understanding of history.
The Ashkenazi handle recent history. The Mizrahim do the distant historical past. The Sephardim handle pre-history. At the time of writing, Baby was ignorant of Beta Israel so Beta Israel have no role in his novel.
Boaz ben-Haim is assigned to Nazi Germany during WWII. He experience produces a crisis of confidence. He decides that must save victims of the Holocaust, a course of action barred by the World Time Travel Authority.
He starts with Anne Frank.
BEFORE BOAZ BEN-HAIM can save anyone, he must rid himself of the gonorrhea.
Boaz ben-Haim believes the gonorrhea is more than an anti-isolation device. Boaz ben-Haim believes the gonorrhea is a spying mechanism. He believes the gonorrhea reads his thoughts and intends to report him to the World Time Travel Authority.
So he travels to the 1970s and gets some penicillin and kills the gonorrhea.
Usually when gonorrhea is removed from the throats of time travelers, it’s done under sedation. Boaz ben-Haim can’t sedate himself, which means that he hears the gonorrhea die in his throat, speaking words with his vocalcords.
In its last moments, the gonorrhea says: “help me, help me, help me. help. help. help. help.”
Then it dies.
WHEN BABY WROTE SAVING ANNE FRANK in the mid-1990s, it was very hard to look at America and not feel like its unwitting citizens had been born into complex systems of unfathomable evil.
Americans were destroying the Earth and exploiting poor laborers in their own country and exploiting poor laborers in other countries and Americans were the beneficiaries of multiple genocides and economic horrors that stretched back to the country’s founding.
There was no way out. The only escape was death.
Baby saw Boaz ben-Haim as an American stand-in, as someone who was in a situation that paralleled that of the American people.
Boaz ben-Haim worked for a world governmental body that refused to help people in the past for fear of what their deaths might wreak on the future. This was a terrible moral equivalence which suggested the lives of future people outweighed the lives of past people. By virtue of the past people being dead.
But they weren’t dead. Not when you could travel in time and smell and hear and touch them. When you traveled in time, nothing ever really died. Not even gonorrhea.
ADELINE AND ERIK finished eating. They went outside.
It was 9pm on a Friday night. Valencia Street was packed with human bodies. People came in search of alcohol and food and the illusion that if you combined alcohol and food, they added up to meaning.
White lumbering Google buses drove past.
“I suppose anything is better than writing about gonorrhea,” said Adeline.
“Pardon me?” asked Erik Willem.
“Oh, nothing, darling,” she said. “Every time I see a Google bus, I concoct very strange thoughts.”
“The symbolism is awkward,” said Erik Willems. “I’d have figured out a less ostentatious way of handling the matter. That’s me. I don’t have billions of dollars. I don’t think these buses belong to Google. I think they’re either eBay or Apple.”
“Do you know that sometimes I forget you still haven’t cracked the big four zero,” said Adeline.
“What should it matter?” asked Erik.
Many of Erik’s coworkers knew that he was sleeping with a MILF. They never let him forget it.
How was last night? asked his co-workers. Did the cougar’s claws scratch her cub’s back?
What’s it like tasting that stale cupcake and pastry? asked his co-workers. Is the frosting bitter?
“It shouldn’t. It doesn’t,” said Adeline. “It’s only that I was thinking yet again about how exhausting it is to get older. How miserable it is to see what happens to the lives of your friends. Not your favorite writer, darling. Don’t worry your silly little head over that gunsel. Other than abandoning his early literary principles, our charming author has navigated the waters with rather heap big success. Minerva’s doing dandy swell. So is Jeremy. But there are so many friends who’ve fallen by the wayside, victims of that creeeepy ol’ middle-aged spiritual dissolution. Why, they start as strapping young things full of hopes and poetry and then the grind of life and jobs and spouses and children and mortgages and kids wears them down. Then they can’t even say Bo to a goose. C’est très cliché. I prepared myself when I was younger, I said, ‘Adeline, self, you simply must make certain that you don’t become spiritually dissolute. If you catch the same blurry look as all of Mother’s friends, you won’t be able to spot your own peepers in the mirror, not for all the shame you’ll see.’ What yours truly didn’t anticipate and for which I had no preparation is that the dissolution would creep upon the others. I was so self-obsessed that it never occurred to me the problem would be other people! Think of the compromises and strange choices. All the misery they’ve brought upon their selves. It’s simply exhausting.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Erik. “My oldest friend is a Saudi prince with a media company and addiction issues.”
“Ah yes,” said Adeline. “My mysterious Arabian benefactor. Isn’t it strange how small the world is? It’s like a Russian novel. And I hate Russian novels.”
“Did you meet Dennis?”
“Nein, darling, I stayed out of the process.”
“I doubt you could have seen him, anyway,” said Erik. “Trill was when he was doing another degree at the London School of Economics. Do you know who turned him on to that racket? Saif Gaddafi. Gaddafi’s son!”
“YOU REMEMBER EMIL, don’t you sweetheart? My son? Mine own flesh and blood? The one who’d flit away your filthy lucre in a flash? When we talk, sometimes I can’t even hear his words. The only thing I hear is his youth. The eagerness for life. The innocence. I only want to tell him one thing. I simply want to say, Good luck, kid! You’re gonna need it!
“Yet then I rebuke myself. I worry that the feeling is my own spiritual dissolution. But it can’t be, can it? I still feel young. It’s the others who’ve gotten old. Darling, what I wouldn’t give for some friends as wild and maniacal as dear sweet Edward Snowden.”
BABY WASN’T THE ONLY PERSON looking at America and feeling as if its unwitting citizens were born into complex and impossible systems of unfathomable evil.
The story of the season was about a eumelaninless guy named Edward Snowden, who contracted for an American intelligence agency called the National Security Agency.
The NSA was like the CIA, except the NSA didn’t have field agents and hadn’t funded the creation of American literary fiction.
Snowden had worked for the CIA before he worked for the NSA. But that was long after the CIA had stopped funding literary fiction.
You had to give the CIA credit. For an agency marked by a persistent tone deafness of cultural approach, they had realized literary fiction was completely pointless. No one cared about good novels.
The funding of good novels was based on an abandoned misapprehension that writers, being the apparent creators of culture, had some impact on contemporary international affairs.
This was, of course, insane.
The men who worked at the CIA were something of an aesthetic vanguard. They had learned a lesson in the mid-Twentieth Century that American writers still couldn’t grasp in the early years of the Twenty-First.
The creators of culture had no impact on anything. The only thing writers were good for was sending messages across time.
The people who controlled mass production and the flow of meaningless information were the rulers of the modern world.
Now the CIA funded things that really mattered, like computer networks and systems of global surveillance.
When Snowden was working for the CIA, he had worked with their computer networks and systems of global surveillance.
AT THE NSA, Snowden was given access to a wide range of information about various programs instituted by the agency. Snowden found much of this disquieting.
He discovered that the NSA was funding elaborate computer networks which put all of the world’s Internet communications under surveillance. The NSA could track everything that everyone did on their computers and cellphones.
Snowden was appalled.
THIS WAS A BIT NAÏVE. The Internet was a creation of the US Government’s Department of Defense. It was built as a weapon against the Soviet Union.
To think that a government which had created a tool wouldn’t use that tool to perform the basic task of every government, which is to say exert control over the lives of its citizens, was a bit strange. It was an expectation akin to running beneath Wernher von Braun’s V2 rockets and hoping you’d be showered with flowers rather than death.
Snowden gathered up an unfathomable number of documents circulating inside the NSA. These documents bore evidence of the NSA’s systems of global surveillance. These systems had been constructed with help from companies like Google, Facebook and Apple.
Snowden contacted several journalists and staged an elaborate leak of these documents to the world media. Much of this was orchestrated from a hotel room in Hong Kong, surrounded by media hacks who drooled over his every word.
SNOWDEN’S DOCUMENT DUMP was the public culmination of an anxiety about mass production and information technology. He wasn’t the only person feeling this concern.
A great number of people in developed nations were very worried about the effects of a fully computerized society on privacy.
This discussion was happening primarily amongst the middle classes. The truly rich didn’t care about privacy. They could buy their way out of anything. Poor people didn’t care about privacy because poor people lived in social milieus where privacy did not exist.
The souls and bodies of the poor were property of the world’s governments. They were the raw material burned in the fires of capitalism. Their private lives were subject to massive police and governmental intrusion. Thus it was and always would be.
The idea of privacy was rooted in the concept of individualism. As such, it was impossible to have privacy when the systems of control refused to see you as an individual.
Nowhere was this more true than in the lives of African-Americans. Their privacy was fucked from the beginning. There’s no privacy when Ole Massa rapes your whole family. There’s no privacy in the slave quarters. There’s no such thing as privacy when the police systematically target you for every manner of abuse and stitch you up on bullshit drug charges. There’s no such thing as privacy when every person on the street suspects you of anything.
Watching the media coverage of Snowden’s revelations, it was hard not to feel like the world had been transformed.
It had become a place where the greatest concern was whether or not mass produced cellphones were turning White people into Black ones.
WHEN EDWARD SNOWDEN made his foray into the seedy world of hotel room revelations. he brought along some reading material. He had two books with him.
The first one was the hardcover edition of Homeland by Cory Doctorow. It was published by an imprint called Tor Teen.
The second book was a trade paperback of Baby’s Annie Zero.
chapter twenty-four
A Buzzfeed contributor wrote an article about Adeline’s twenty best tweets. Adeline was aware of Buzzfeed because Buzzfeed articles were the only things that people shared on Facebook.
These articles always appeared in the same format. These articles always appeared as lists.
Like: 25 Things That Get Harder After 25.
Like: 35 Things You Will Never See Again In Your Life
Like: 25 of Kanye West’s Most Thought-Provoking Tweets.
Like: 25 Things That Were Normal in 1999.
Buzzfeed made money by serving content sponsored by its advertisers, which was a seamless way of mixing entertainment and product placement. It made other advertisements on the Internet look like total shit.
Most of the lists on Buzzfeed were built of material harvested from the Internet. The creators of the harvested material had very little say over Buzzfeed’s harvesting. The creators of the material harvested were expected to eat whatever garbage the world served them.
The lists were accompanied by light commentary in simplified language. People had compared the writing style to book reports delivered by elementary school students.
Buzzfeed was one of the most popular sites on the Internet, which was a wonderful place for reading lists of tweets, learning about the construction of White Privilege, and critiquing Lady Gaga’s bitchin’ beach-bod.
20 Best Tweets from M. Abrahamovic Petrovitch
People know her as the artist of Trill with the name of a Russian man. After a video flame-out in a classroom, she started tweeting. Here’s the twenty best examples of how she uses Twitter!
1. On becoming a Hindu.
Given the predictable wrongness of crowds and the prevalence of #YOLO, I am forced to conclude in the factuality of reincarnation.
2. Disinterest in Catholicism.
Pope Francis says that priests must work ‘amid the muck of life.’ I should be quite happy with a plumber amidst the muck of my bathroom.
3. Critiquing fellow artists.
Saw more images of George W. Bush’s paintings. Like peering into the shattered mind of a suicidal beagle that’s lost depth perspective.
4. Harsh.
Heard Kim Kardashian is 21st Century Jayne Mansfield. My hope is that it’s a matching set and Allah sends both the Buick and the truck.
5. Let me guess. The other is Portland.
San Francisco, California: one of America’s two cities where residency comes with an instruction manual for soy-free living.
6. Memories.
Remembered my first visit to SF. Cat-called a different way in each neighborhood and then the blessed silence of the Castro. #love
7. This is just hilarious.
Journalist phoned. Writing about comics. Asked about Thrill. Talked for hour about a literal emotional rollercoaster in an amusement park.
8. Troubles with parenting.
My son sent me an email. He’s still embarrassed by my Twitter and again asked me to stop. Forgets I have baby pictures and am very proud.
9. Deep thoughts.
If art can be anything, then what’s all that other stuff sitting at the bottom of my closet?
10. She has friends!
Message from J. Karacehennem: “Staying a week in Vienna, the world’s most baroque monument to state oppression.”
11. It kind of is...
Isn’t it strange that @BretEastonEllis, an out gay man, is somehow a villain while everyone worships David Foster Wallace, a sexist jock?
12. Harsher.
Watching wedding video. Bride, groom, wedding party in choreographed song and dance numbers. Like tourism in Hell without any souvenirs.
13. What?
My great contribution to cinema scholarship: discovered Steeleye Span album Commoner’s Crown in Florida bedroom scene of The Shining.
14. LOL. Too true!
Yes, please, mansplain why astrology is bullshit. No, darling, I’ve not heard this before.
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15. Definitely.
Most inappropriate Comic Con costume? MAUS cosplay. #ithappened #2009
16. Um, okay.
You think that I couldn’t possibly understand but I’ve been alive forever. I knew the people that used to be you and they were less boring.
17. Deeper thoughts.
Had a ride along the 101 today. Saw all the construction cranes hovering over the city, like elongated hammers waiting to strike.
18. Harshest.
Bay Area men + Eames lounge chairs. Simply can’t fathom why tech ppl might want to look as if they’re about to drop Napalm on Vietnam.
19. Don’t we all have this friend?
Old friend married a professional photographer. Certain it’s for inaccurate and well lit portrayal of her life on Facebook and Instagram.
