by M G Vassanji
That war-torn country lies safely away from us behind the Long Border, and yet it never ceases to preoccupy us. Something or other always happens there that works us up. Maskinia baffles us and frightens us, we wish we could solve or even disappear it, and even as we observe it and describe it, it remains the persistent unknowable alien. It’s our Other, our id—to use a term now back in vogue—our constant dark companion on the bright path of our progress.
In the news, a naïve young XBN journalist named Holly Chu had ventured out to a severely deprived area in the city of Sinhapora in Maskinia and was snatched and apparently torn to pieces and eaten. Her own camera relayed back a shaky purple-hued scene haunted by shadows; white teeth, white eyeballs. A shrill scream.
To discuss this grisly development on The Daily Goode, the star and host of the show, Bill Goode, had chosen to remain on his feet today, while on the set with him was a panel consisting of two specialists, both apparently seated before a table. Bill Goode of the mauveine hair, square face, and thin-lipped grin, was wearing an electric-blue jacket. Exposed full length in full colour he had just asked the panel this question:
—Do we let those areas behind the Border suppurate in isolation until drained of all their miserable, poisoned life, and they can start afresh?
Bill tells it as it is, as they say, for the Public Goode, but a few times he’s had to apologize for going too far. That’s not deterred him. He repeated for the benefit of new viewers that he had known Holly personally, they had worked as interns together. He was angry. He went on, in a quavering voice,
—I ask you, is it even necessary for such places to keep existing on our planet? Why help them survive at any cost? Isn’t attrition a better solution—shouldn’t we let them fade away in their misery and hatred? Evolution—anyone heard of it? What do you say, Dwayne Scott?
The panellist, a young-looking woman in a smart striped suit, was from the World Development Network. She looked startled, but then sat up straight to respond.
—First, before my reply to your question, my condolences to you, Bill—and to all those who knew Holly and to her family. Holly came to us at WDN for research and she used our camp outside Maskinia as a base. We even fed her, when she returned from one of her assignments, famished. Now to reply to your question, Bill. Well, it goes against our traditional humanitarian values, doesn’t it, letting fellow humans just die? Most of them are innocent men and women who’ve done us no harm, but who’ve come to depend on us. We also have to ask ourselves how the kind of policy you describe desensitizes us in our treatment of the less fortunate among our own population…Bill.
Bill’s face lit up, he looked around with a grin, priming his audience.
—Now wait a minute. Am I missing something here, Dwayne? They don’t threaten to eat us, do they, our less fortunate, as you call them? It’s different with our own people, surely. We know who they are, we know what their problems are—it’s not out of hand here, is it? They don’t fire rockets at us or smuggle out terrorists. Prem, what do you think? Should we let populations that can’t help themselves and are a threat to the rest of us go their own way—die if they must?
He sounded increasingly harsh and his face was red. Holly’s fate seemed to have hit him hard. His guest on the other side was Dr Prem Chodhry, a political scientist in India. An older man, he spoke with a slight accent but an assured tone. I could see now that he was not physically on the set but was being relayed from Bangalore.
—It’s a hard choice, Bill. And I sympathize with your compassionate view, Dwayne. But we have enough problems of our own this side of the Long Border. At some point we have to cut off life support of the hopeless and save on resources. The good that’s in the human race must be preserved—or we all sink.
To which Dwayne quickly but politely responded:
—Do you mean to say, Prem, that large numbers of people should simply be cut off like cancers from the body? Are you truly advocating that?
—Well, Dwayne, pouring supplies into the region hasn’t helped the poor there, has it? You know that. If anything it’s strengthened the warlords. They live lavishly and buy sophisticated weapons, using the aid given to them…and those same weapons are then used against us on this side of the Border. We’re funding our own affliction.
Dwayne took umbrage at the insinuation. Emotionally she began,—But we can feed the poor directly, even if—
But here Bill cut her off.
—If you please, Dwayne, we’ll come back to this point—which is extremely interesting, by the way—but first let’s see what our viewers think. It’s time for the…Goode Poll!
A flood of responses rushed in, thousands of faces streaming into the YES and NO boxes that had appeared, the corresponding babble of voices reached a screaming crescendo, which was filtered into a single, trained male voice that cheerfully expressed the impassioned consensus: Let them die!
The poll result: 91.5 percent in favour. Let them die.
And then we were back in the midst of frightened, frightening people, desperate hungry people, and armed well-fed men with gleaming, buffed torsos, all gawking at cheerfully naïve Holly Chu, an athletic young woman dressed by Safari Apparel, loping along the street with her equipment, pausing to speak to the mike on her collar, waving here and there familiarly, pausing to chat with a mother, tickling a toddler, until she is suddenly snatched and swallowed up by a flash of darkness. That quick scream. Then the horror vanishes, perhaps you’ve dreamed it. You’re back in the real, climate-controlled room, your needs at your disposal. The Roboserve skates in with your scotch. There’s something to be said for limiting such traumatic exposures, X-rated news that’s diversion, entertainment, and voyeurism combined. That abduction scene will become part of a game, a Holly Chu lookalike with a big weapon will be the hero who teaches the Barbarians a lesson.
So much for Maskinia, out there somewhere in Region 6 behind the Border. Most people couldn’t even point to it on a map. Elsewhere, the punitive, preventive war was dragging on in Bimaru, also in Region 6, Operation Stunning Strength. If we don’t beat them over the head, they’ll send their fighters here. And they play dirty. Therefore, stun and hold, stanch the flow. The scene was noisy, chaotic; flashes of light and dark; the muffled staccato of airships. A medical helicopter landed a few feet away, a wounded soldier was carried away, a leg blown off, the torn exposed flesh throbbing, life ebbing away as the bright red blood dripped its image onto the kilim carpet in my room.
Elsewhere still, some sixty refugees had attempted last week to swim under the EuroBarrier section of the Long Border in the Mediterranean; some twenty-five survived, the remaining were electrocuted or simply drowned.
Such daily reminders keep you thankful to be this side of all that horror. You repeat this gratitude like a mantra, the unlegislated anthem of our North Atlantic Alliance: We live in the best city in the world; in the best and richest nation in the world; in the civilized world of worlds. Of course other nations say the same thing, those of the East. But by what throw of the Dice of Life are you born here and not there in the Other? You might as well ask why you were born a human and not a fly. But if you found yourself there in that bottomless misery, wouldn’t it be natural, as part of life’s programmed struggle to survive, through osmotic pull to strive to get here, the prosperous North Atlantic? As natural as it is for us to do anything we can to keep them there. But once they are here, then we open our arms to these wretched of the earth and offer them a new life. Surely that’s fair.
One of those twenty-five survivors could well have ended up at the Sunflower, and I would have been among the team that would give him or her a new life, transform them into someone useful to our society, someone perhaps who grew up in Egypt and ended up on a potato farm in Peoria, Illinois, or a vineyard in Niagara.
But Presley Smith was not my creation. He came ready made but damaged, to have his wound stitched.
—
Joanie, my beautiful cheating BabyGen, breezed in, remo
ved her jacket. “Hi, Doc!” She still calls me that. I switched off the TV. The studio was bathed for a fleeting instant in an eerie, spectral glow before returning to normal. We greeted each other with a peck.
She looked tired, she looked spent, she looked alluring all the same. I buried my head into her straight blond hair and sniffed her. The perfume had gone faint by now. La Divina. She stepped away. How long would she stay with this back number that was me? As long as I supported her.
—I’ll go and have a shower first.
—How was the match?—who played? Like I cared.
—Maple Leafs and Red Stars; Leafs lost.
—Any good—the match? You had fun?
—Uh-huh. Thrilling finish. We should have won.
—Score?
A pause.
—Three–two…two–one…what does it matter?
That edge in the tone, that silly response shouted guilt to me. And I replied mutely, It matters, but it doesn’t matter, because I know. And you know that I know.
—You eaten? I asked instead. Of course she had.
—We stopped at a bar after the match.
She ran off to shower. And she emerged, ravishing, glowing, hard tits poking through the fitted pyjama top, and I grabbed her, to prove a point, disprove my suspicions…but to no avail. She skipped off to her side of the bed, got between the sheets. I followed. She curled up, a defensive hedgehog, her knees her armour. I knew she was no longer mine the last time we fucked, when she burped just as I came—hilarious, I know, if not so heart-tearingly pathetic. But she’d stay with me and we’d live the double life, pretending nothing was wrong. Why pretending? Nothing was wrong.
What’s so attractive and so frustrating about the Baby Generation is that insouciance; the assumptions they make and get away with; that time in bed when she burped to my climax, as I turned away snickering on the one hand and almost in tears on the other, she remained as calm as ever.
—Anything in the news? she asked now.
I reminded her about the XBN reporter Holly Chu.
She shuddered, then mused,—I wonder what it would be like to be eaten alive?
—I could show you…
I moved closer, put my hand on her hip. She smiled, eyes closed.
—It would be painful, for one thing…Come on…
I kept trying, mostly because it’s the required form for a twosome. I’ve even convinced myself that it was for her sake that I humiliated myself.
—I would put up a fight, I think.
—So did Holly, but she got torn and eaten all the same. It’s the hunger.
But she was in dreamland now, turned on her back, those La Divina lips slightly ajar as she snored a soft melody, the smile not entirely gone. Beautiful. The sleep of the innocent, where memory doesn’t hide in the basement.
And here I was, eyes wide open.
—
It’s not that I stalked her, regenerated old man yearning to ravish and possess firm young flesh. It was she who came to me. Proposed to me, yes. Should I have been wary? I was, but as that old quip says, there are some offers we dare not refuse, whatever the dangers. She could have been on the other side of a fire and I would have walked through to meet her if she had called. The flesh yearns, the hormones leap. Well, sort of.
I was tending to the barbecue at the annual Fairlawn Summer Picnic when she came walking over, swinging, plump breasts ripe against a yellow shirt closed only at the bottom, tight shorts, bare feet. Two beer bottles nestled close to her abdomen. Everything about her said G0. Baby.
—Have a beer, Doctor—you look roasted.
—I must be!
I laughed, sweating more than her bottles, forehead dripping like a leaky faucet. I took the beer, flicked the cap open, and had a swig. With the fumes from the fire, I was practically marinated. This was one defect I had postponed attending to. It was embarrassing. And here was a girl as fresh as a morning flower.
—How—you know I’m a doctor—what kind?
—Word gets around, she teased, with a gleaming smile, leaning on her back foot.—You’re a life-giver!
She was tall, with appealing grey eyes and an earnest look.
—I don’t believe I’ve seen you around here—you are?
—Joan Wayne. I’m visiting my sister—she’s at number 63.
I must have gaped. I’d never physically met both someone and their actual biological sibling—or mother or father. Everyone has their family, to be sure, but more often these days they’re simply characters in a story, the planted narrative. The created memory and the virtual past. (Isn’t all past virtual?) But this one had a real flesh-and-blood sister—Meg from 63, a straggly blonde and golf coach, who waved vigorously—encouragingly?—from the softball game in progress.
Someone shouted,—Joanie, come take up your position!
She had deserted the game—just to hand me a beer? What had she seen? An older man—distinguished looking, may I flatter myself?—roasting over a fire while tending hot dogs and burgers for the neighbours in a well-meant but futile attempt to get to know one another.
—I must go. Well, bye!
—Bye. Nice meeting you.
Joan left, then moments later turned back and grinned.
—Would you like to meet for a drink after?
—Yes. I’d like that.
—What’s your number?
I told her and she walked off. Oh how she walked. What she said, how she smiled, what she offered in that movement of the buttocks. Why haven’t we, with all our advances, been able to stop that sharp ache in the heart, that physical hurt that signals that the mind has been laid to waste? I looked at her beside me now, the straight posture, the full body; the perfect face tipping at the chin, the golden hair. Breathing softly, evenly, a living work of art. What’s she dreaming of? What does she hide in that mind? We who work with fictional lives, artificial memories that we plant in adult brains, tend to forget what a real, fresh mind—what a BabyGen—thinks like. To our eyes, every life story is one more narrative, to be examined for structure and meaning and coherence; for its utility. And then a life enters your life, your heart. It’s no longer just a narrative, it’s your ache, moment by moment. That’s what had happened to me.
That evening she called and walked over to my place. We had drinks, and I learned more about her. She worked on the women’s floor of Bay Harrods. She had grown up in Pennsylvania and followed her sister to Toronto. I told her about myself, but at that stage we were both reticent with details. She agreed to stay the night and we made love. Or I made love, she gave herself up to sex. And she agreed to move in with me.
I glanced at her once more beside me and got up and padded off to my refuge, my study.
THREE
I LOOKED UP PRESLEY SMITH’S PUBLIC PROFILE.
Born in Madison, Wisconsin, son of high school teachers, educated at Woburn High and Ranleigh College. Had a brother and sister, both younger. Trained as an electrician, moved to Toronto, where currently he was out of a job but worked part-time as a security guard in a multinational tower.
Chief interest: war games, especially the popular Akram 3 and the outdoor adventure Ramayana 9: The Bridge to Lanka. The battle scenes are terrfc; Hanuman Forever! Superdude rescuing the good guys—annihilate the Barbarians!
Other interests: soccer. Played occasionally at the local park, followed the North American Soccer League, and supported Nigeria during the World Cup. He worked out at the Columbus Centre and until recently used to run long distance—came in the top 15 three years ago in the Boston Half Marathon, then gave up. No reason given.
Music: B4U, Fallout, Aboubakar Touré. Beethoven, Wagner. (Wagner? perhaps that went with the war games.) And not, apparently, his namesake, the former pop idol Elvis Presley, now a cult god.
Best book? Heart of Darkness.
Best friend? My cat, Billy.
A loner, then.
Favourite memory? Playing soccer with my dad and brother and sister—we would go
to the school ground behind our house to play, then go out for burgers. My favourite position was forward, getting behind the opposition defence and scoring goals.
Favourite team? Madison United.
This was a generous Profile, rather more than the minimum demanded by the Public Directory. It did not quite hang together, did it? How did Ludwig Beethoven fit with Aboubakar Touré, Wagner with B4U? I recalled the jumbled features of Presley himself. I pondered over his choice of favourite book—a novel, and a serious one. The warlike rhetoric too seemed entirely unsuited to the benign-mannered agreeable man I’d met earlier that day. It looked as though more than one résumé or personality had been scrambled together. How much of this résumé was true and real, that is, experienced, and how much was fiction? What had he brought with him from his previous life? It did not matter; my job was to preserve the owner of this strange and intriguing Profile.
In the process of implanting a new personality, parts of a patient’s memory are erased or numbed, and new narratives (fictions) played into the brain. The patient comes to you with his fiction, a custom-made past, and—once it is accepted, usually after revisions—leaves as a new person with fresh memories, benign and archival, free of trauma. Superficial, yes, but it’s more pleasant to have good memories. Only, don’t call on them: the father you played soccer with is entirely imaginal. And perhaps you’ve never really read Joseph Conrad, only think you have. Over time the brain bridges gaps, fudges connections, invents where necessary, and so the actual past disappears. History gets rewritten, the dissenters say. But does history matter? In the cosmopolitan world that’s now evolving without deep memory, conflict is reduced. People—and nations—without long, painful memories are free of guilt. They fight less.
