Gorgeous East

by null

  “You’re going nuts, all right,” Ralph said, chuckling as Smith switched off the microphone.

  “Maybe,” Smith admitted.

  “Like, who’s going to hear you all the way up here?”

  “I don’t know,” Smith said. “But I’ve got to keep myself awake somehow.”

  “Face it, you’re going to fall asleep sooner or later.”

  “No. Keep talking. Say something.”

  “No.”

  “Talk or I kick your teeth in!”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “What’s the T. stand for?”

  “Theodore.”

  “Ralph Theodore Wade. The Third.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Enlighten me, Ralph.”

  “No.”

  “How did it all happen?”

  “What?”

  “How did you go from Cap’n Crunch to . . . ?”

  Smith made a wild gesture, encompassing the mountain hideout, stinging bees, pointless slaughter. And the Marabout hordes waiting patiently just the other side of the metal door for their best chance to kill him and cut off his head.

  10.

  In the end, the best plan was to have no plan at all. At a signal from Capitaine Pinard just before moonrise, the Legionnaires, freed from their cuffs, exploded from the tent and into the darkened camp like snakes out of a bag.

  Solas cut a slash in the back of the tent with his razor blade, threw himself through this aperture, and disappeared into the darkness. Pinard and Szbeszdogy went together out the front and vaulted over the backs of the sentries as the latter fumbled with their Kalashnikovs. Babenco, Dessalines, and the Russian, howling like Indians, quickly followed Solas, but as they rounded the southwestern corner of the tent were instantly cut down by a 12.7 Browning hidden under a heap of camouflage netting. Solas, out of blind favela instinct, had gone the other way. Suddenly, there remained only three, as at Camerone.

  Pinard and Szbeszdogy reached the perimeter wire, round after round chopping into the sand all around them, the machine gun biting at the heels of their boots. They vaulted over this low divide and scrambled into the field of stones as the entire personnel of the Moroccan demibrigade emerged and began firing their weapons into the night. Bullets went flying everywhere, exploding into the air, into the desert, aimed at nothing in particular. This random firing went on for the next ten minutes, the Moroccans expending entire magazines of ammunition to no effect: Safely wedged between boulder and rock, heads down beneath the storm of steel, Pinard and Szbeszdogy were hit by nothing more deadly than a few stone chips. At last, the guns fell silent. Dense clouds of smoke, a mixture of propellant gas and cordite, hung in the dry, cold desert air.

  Major Rabani appeared from out of the smoke, a resplendent figure, like a god of the desert, sleek and muscular, wrapped in a beautiful robe of figured silk. A gleaming new Kalashnikov, its hardware all gleaming chrome, its stock inlaid with the Moroccan star in silver filigree, dangled from his shoulder by a patent leather strap. He stood just the other side of the wire, shaking his fist and bellowing incoherently as the shot-up corpses of three dead Legionnaires were dragged out into the open, not ten meters from where Pinard and Szbeszdogy were hiding.

  “Who did they get?” Szbeszdogy whispered. “Can you see?”

  “Can’t make out,” Pinard replied. “Doesn’t matter. Now they’re the honored dead.”

  “Nicely put,” Szbeszdogy said. “You are a poet.”

  “Go to hell,” Pinard said.

  The wind shifted. Major Rabani’s words wafted in their direction like an evil smell.

  “What do you think of your Legion now, Frenchmen!” he shouted. “We Moroccans have fought you many times and we have beaten you many times! When we catch you we will bury you to your dirty necks in sand and I will personally piss on you as you die! Like this! Like this! Watch me now!”

  He opened his robe and pulled down his silk pantaloons and began to relieve himself on the bodies of Babenco, Vladimirovitch, and Dessalines.

  At the sight of this outrage, Pinard felt a scalding heat behind his eyes. Something broke loose inside, bare wires crossed, releasing an electric charge, a surge of pure, violent energy, unusual in a Canadian. Pinard’s hand found a rock, round and perfectly balanced for throwing. It fit exactly into the warm scoop of his palm. Suddenly, without thinking, he rushed forward, winding up like a pitcher on the mound. He reversed abruptly a meter or two short of the wire and hurled the rock with all his might. The major turned just then, and as he turned the rock, spinning end over end, caught him directly between the eyes. Pinard heard a thick, ugly, cracking sound and the the major’s eyes rolled back and he dropped face-first into the sand, dead. Moroccan troops peered through the gunpowder haze, not quite sure what had just happened. Pinard jumped back over the wire and grabbed up the major’s fancy chrome Kalashnikov, turned it on them, and squeezed out the full magazine. The Moroccans scattered in disarray into the shadows at this unexpected attack or fell down, dead.

  “Surrender!” Pinard screamed between bursts. “I am Pinard of the Legion! Surrender!”

  At that moment, Solas appeared from the opposite direction, the hidden Moroccan 12.7 wrenched from its tripod and its nest of camouflage and in his hands. He opened up with this formidable weapon, spraying the tents, the trucks, the supply dump, cutting the tents to shreds with the big, flaming shells. He fired until the ammunition ran dry, as the Moroccans had done earlier, but without their lack of restraint and in a cold, controlled manner. This very control is what makes the best assassins, for death is a cold business.

  When Solas stopped firing, Pinard heard the wind and the sound of moaning. The open space between the tents was now strewn with the bodies of at least a dozen Moroccans—among them all three officers and all but one of the non-coms. They had gone to join Dessalines, Babenco, and Vladimirovitch in that blood-drenched paradise reserved for men who die on the battlefield. Pinard shouldered the Kalashnikov and stepped up, hands in his pockets. He might have been out for an evening stroll.

  “Report, Caporal-chef.”

  Solas dropped the big Browning, red-hot from firing, his fingers burned. Sweat had stained his jumpsuit black.

  “The rest ran off,” he managed, gasping. “Out there somewhere—”

  Pinard turned to face the field of stones and rubble stretching off to the horizon where the Gueltas rose against the fading dark.

  “Soldiers of Morocco!” Pinard called, cupping his hands. “You won’t survive in this desert with nothing. You’ll be dead from lack of water two hours after sunrise. Submit yourselves to my authority and live!”

  A minute passed quietly. Pinard put his hands back in his pockets. Then something waved from among the stones, a small scrap of white cloth.

  11.

  Men locked up at close quarters for more than twenty-four hours will either strangle one another or get to explaining themselves.

  Smith and Ralph T. Wade III were, after all, Americans of roughly the same age who had, each in his own way, shared the experience of a culture in decline. Ralph, his hands bound tightly so as to prevent him from strangling anyone, began instead, at Smith’s insistent prodding, to explain himself. He spoke in great, gusty bursts—sometimes in a kind of half rhyme and with the intensity of a televangelist preaching to a nation of idiots. Always, he was utterly certain of his own righteousness.

  The best lack all conviction, Smith thought, listening, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Ralph Wade, surely among the worst, ranted passionately—the perfect demagogue—his opinions all over the place, completely outrageous, often contradictory, but never unalloyed by a sad grain or two of truth.

  He was from Marin County, California, the sole offspring of wealthy, long-divorced parents: His father, once a talented aerospace engineer at Lockheed Martin with many lucrative patents to his credit, turned to alcohol and pot when his wife left him; later, sober but crazy, he became a disciple of the ne
o-Hindu guru Rathan Ram, and bought that charlatan a mountaintop retreat outside of Seattle. His mother was briefly a snippy, disgruntled housewife, then, successively, an animal rights activist, Napa Valley vintner, meditation coach, cocaine addict, big wave surfer, radical lesbian. After a string of abusive husbands and a variety of inadequate boyfriends—some far too needy, others much too self-possessed—she eventually fell in love with and married a plain, forceful woman twenty years younger than herself with whom she now operated a successful whole-grain bakery in Carmel.

  “At least Mom’s happy now,” Ralph said. “I mean with Amy. She deserves it after what she’s been through. What about your parents?”

  “Dead,” Smith said. “Both dead.”

  “What did your dad do?”

  “U.S. mail, Montezuma, Iowa. But we’re talking about you.”

  “Whatever, dude.” Ralph shrugged. “I’m just not that interesting.”

  “We were talking about your father . . .”

  “Yeah. Well, one of my dad’s first jobs was designing some gadget for the Apollo mission that went to the moon. That seems like it, right? The high watermark. Hard to believe we actually put a man on the moon.”

  Smith agreed.

  “Hey, how about you loosen these cords a little? My ankles—”

  “Can’t do it,” Smith said curtly. “You’ll try to escape, I’ll have to shoot you. And shooting you at this point is like shooting myself. Work your fingers, your toes. Maybe that will help.”

  Ralph worked away for a while, shifted himself uncomfortably, continued to talk: The Marabout uprising began as an undergraduate term paper written at Brown in 1995, for a seminar called “The Great Satan’s Hungry: The West Eats the Rest.” This seminar was taught by Abu al-Sani, the controversial academic, ex–Weather Underground, and convert to Islam. Al-Sani, formerly an upper-middle class Protestant New Jerseyite named Fred Cook, was then known fondly to his Brown students as Professor Jihad.

  “Professor Jihad had the most incredible dreadlocks,” Ralph said. “Longest dreads I ever saw on a white man, I mean down to his knees. And my God he stank, never used deodorant or soap. Thought deodorant and soap was, like, a wickedly ingenious capitalist conspiracy to sell deodorant and soap.”

  Smith grinned at this. “Maybe it is.”

  “It was from Professor Jihad that I came to understand, among other things, the power of smell,” Ralph continued. “Americans take too many showers, we divert entire rivers for the purpose, we’ve got a million scrubbing bubbles and all that crap, but it doesn’t stop the dirt from sticking to your skin every day, from oozing out of your pores. Filth is power, dude! The powerful people in the next hundred years will be the people who can live without the scrubbing bubbles, without antibiotics and plastic surgery, and round-the-clock access to, like, sushi and Diet Coke. Who can live on nothing, on dirt in the desert, like my beautiful Marabouts right here on this mountaintop.”

  “Maybe your beautiful Marabouts can live here,” Smith retorted, “but they don’t really want to. They’d rather be in Milan. They told me so.”

  Ralph shook his head. “You obviously don’t understand. You’re blinded by the whole narrow bourgeois ethic thing.”

  True, Smith didn’t understand. He was addicted to order, though he never would have put it this way. A lover of neat Midwestern streets intersecting at right angles in a spotless Midwestern town, of musical notes arranged in a grid on a page alongside other musical notes that added up to an aria, a symphony, an opera. Guys and Dolls. All this was sheer perversity to Ralph. Chaos, he insisted, was the true mode of the universe, anarchy the only viable political system.

  “Professor Jihad opened my eyes!” he exclaimed, still fired by the memory. “The man showed me just how repressed and miserable we are in America—and, because misery begets evil, how completely evil! We try to control nature with our dams and our state highway systems and our CAT scans and our erectile disfunction drugs, but a hurricane comes and blows everything away and New Orleans floods and the housing market collapses and every inbred redneck in fly-over country is running a meth lab and we just can’t get it up anymore, our Viagra isn’t working, and we realize suddenly that we can’t fucking control anything, not one bit, not even our bowel movements. We realize that control is an illusion of an illusion and that really, really pisses us off, and worse, scares the absolute shit out of us. What did Thoreau say? ‘You think you’re riding on the railroad, but, hey, shithead, the railroad’s riding on you!’ So yeah, the railroad’s riding our ass, and we’re on massive doses of antidepressants just to carry on with the old day-to-day, just to get to, like, Target and back without slitting our own throats. Misery is the air we breathe, dude! But there comes a point we’ve just got to unload or explode, and so we export our misery to the whole fucking world and end up destroying beautiful indigenous cultures in, like, Papua New Guinea, with our Big Macs and our cell phones and our iPods, with our Batman and Spider-Man and widescreen digital, hi-def flatscreen TVs. Well fuck you and your Batman too! And dude, absolutely do not dare breathe a word about all the fucking porn you’re watching, blasting like a gusher full of shit and piss and cum out of every computer screen in America! Like 75 percent of all traffic on the Internet is porn, you know that right?”

  “We’ve already been through the porn thing.” Smith sighed. “Your point?”

  “My point? Like, everyone’s pornified, absolutely everyone, even the little kids! Twelve-year-old girls shoot videos of each other getting off and make a fortune selling their snatch on eBay to good old pedophile U.S.A. Professor Jihad was a genius about all this stuff, just the complete and utter badness of bad America. He saw it coming years ago, way before YouTube, rolling down on us like an avalanche of shit! Before I took his seminar, I used to think like you, dude. I actually believed we lived in a pretty good country, that America was a pretty good place. Some problems, yeah, some homelessness and inequality and all that, but hey, steadily getting better, steadily better. Man, what a crock! A nightmare built on the backs of slaves and butchered Indians and it’s only gotten worse in three hundred years. The story of America is the story of mass murder and slavery!”

  “Wrong!” Smith interrupted hotly. “The story of America is the story of more and more rights accruing to more and more people.”

  “You’re an optimist, all right. Your glass is half full of bullshit!”

  On and on, he went. The picture of the world Ralph drew was an exact negative version of the one Smith saw. A dark mirror image of the things Smith had been taught were good and true from childhood, which were actually, according to Ralph, false and bad. Ralph had grown up in his father’s house overawed by the idea of the moon walk and his father’s role in it; Professor Jihad made him face the bitter truth hiding behind this lie: The moon walk was just another massive crime. An oppressive act of colonialist trespass perpetrated upon the pristine, ash-gray dust of the moon.

  After a while, Smith wanted to put a gag in the prophet’s mouth, could have, but didn’t. The outrage he felt at Ralph’s words was keeping him tense and awake.

  “Enough about the fucking moon walk,” Smith interrupted at one point, nearly shouting. “That’s obfuscation! Let me hear about your tribe of fucking bee-loving murderers! Why?”

  Ralph acquiesced. And seemed to enjoy talking about what he saw as his life’s great work, sprouted from a seedling planted in Jihad’s seminar fifteen years ago. The great man had urged all his disciples to become practicing revolutionaries, to reject progressive liberalism as a false doctrine and to live like those hippie saints who had been his comrades in the Weather Underground. Urged them to throw bombs of their own making at “the Bad America, beneath the western sky.” Ralph chanted this last bit, smiling. “Not his exact words, actually a tune by Gun Club, remember them? But you get the idea.”

  Professor Jihad’s quirky brand of New Age Islam—hopped-up with the odd dose or two of old-fashioned Puritanism and wired together with strands of
New Age pseudoscience—was one such bomb: Its strict behavioral codes, its emphasis on the enforced modesty of women and on the necessity of violence to achieve holy ends were the very antithesis to the corrupting ideals of personal liberty and pursuit of happiness enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Ralph’s chance to act out Jihad’s startling, contradictory ideologies came after he left Brown, and matriculated as a graduate student at the New School in Manhattan.

  “I met a bunch of other righteous dudes at the New School,” Ralph said. “A few of them Jihad’s kids. We got together and pooled the resources of our trust funds to form an arts-based activist organization with cells in Green-point, Brooklyn; Madison, Wisconsin; and Berkeley. Our mission statement at that time was a little vague. We were trying to subvert the consumerist-fake-Christian-pornified-Western-bullshit U.S.-despotic-regime-nation through agitprop street theater, free seminars on how bad everything was, and performance art. One year we recruited at Burning Man and got matching funds from the NEA!

  “We did have a few successes in those days—remember that art student who blew up mailboxes in the shape of a smiley face all over the Midwest? One of us! Remember John Walker Lindh? A fellow traveler! But 9/11 really put the lie to all that artsy crap and showed us the true way. Street theater and blowing up mailboxes was nothing compared to the Twin Towers coming down in a massive toxic cloud of burning investment bankers! If only we’d thought of that first! What a brilliant stroke! So we decided to trade in the soft stuff for something new and massive. We would out-terror the terrorists and use the excellent tools of modern culture—science, advertising, marketing—to achieve our political goals, which aimed at the destruction of the very things they were a product of. Then the fucking Patriot Act came along and things got a little oppressive for us. Suddenly, the FBI was reading our e-mails, tapping our phones. So we dissolved our homegrown cells and formed an NGO and decided to focus our resources overseas.