by Nick Mamatas
Feel that, the tapping on your temple? That’s me. Tap tap. Go abroad in your head, that’s the message at least some people heard. That’s what Kelly did, by emigrating to Weinbergia, and she wasn’t the last. People, being generally happy, have a weird way of looking at the television or the Internet: they read something and decide that it secretly means something else, and they think that only they can see through the lies of the media. Their own opinions they’ve come to thanks to logic, or hard-earned experience, or Jesus showing up at the foot of their bed and telling them what time it is. Everyone else? Well, they’re dupes and morons, emotional wrecks, or people who actually think Jesus showed up at the foot of their bed to tell them what time it is. And media people love this. Rich told me once, “As long as we get complaints from both the liberals and conservatives, we know that we’re reporting the news right.” That the media thinks it is telling the truth because everyone thinks they’re lying—no matter what the news actually said and no matter what the audience originally thought—doesn’t make much sense to me, but I checked a few heads over in the city and, geez, Rich was right.
So anyway, it was some vanishingly small percentage of the people who watched the interview, but they got the message: go abroad in your heads. Weinbergia’s approval ratings plummeted, but the Great Hajj began. The next morning, the Long Island Expressway and Route 25A were choked with, well, Dad called them hippies. There were plenty of those: guys with long beards, ready smiles, and laid-back personalities. You know that movie where the rock band says of its amplifiers, “Well, these go to eleven”? These guys’ emotions only went up to eight. There were women hippies too, mostly boiling under a happy surface (but happy again, under the boiling). Most people weren’t hippies though: there were lots of nerds, some crazier than others. Tax cheats, college kids who made up their own languages in their spare time, a woman who called herself Doctress Arcologia who wanted to build a treehouse in the oak outside my window; in exchange she’d give us exclusive rights to market her perpetual motion machine: a generator hooked up to a motor.
Adrienne gave herself the job of border guard and decided to keep out anyone who she thought might want to sleep with or kill Dad. She mostly got it right too. Dad was a bit too busy to welcome his new subjects; one of the people who slipped past the border—he looked kind of like John Travolta, except fatter and dressed in unconvincing tie-dye—handed my father a summons and then vanished back behind the line of American troops.
I had heard his thoughts coming, but I was too busy with Kelly to stop my Dad from taking the letter. Kelly had cornered me right outside of the upstairs bathroom.
“Hi there. I’m Kelly,” she said.
“Hi. Herb.”
She smiled, “Can I call you Prince Herbert?” Her mind was a dizzy array of anxieties and what she thought were Really Deep Thoughts (Men are simple creatures, driven by appetites; women are driven by duty.) streaked with a low-level adrenaline rush. I liked her though, because she wasn’t thinking what most adults do when they strike up a conversation with a kid. You know what I’m talking about, unless you’re a kid. Then you probably just suspect it:
Aw look. The little person can talk. I wonder if it can say anything interesting if I ask it how old it is.
Hee hee, look at that little moron go!
But she didn’t think that; she only thought, I’m so lonely . . . and excited. So of course I let her call me Prince Herbert. She tried a crooked curtsy, and I patted the air with my hand like a TV king might, because that’s what she wanted me to do.
“Prince Herbert, can you tell me something?” she asked me. “What’s the plan?”
“The plan?”
“Yes, I mean, what’s next. You can’t live in this house forever, not being part of America.”
“Why not? People live in their houses all their lives and are part of America. And they do it without UN recognition.”
Then she started up with that moron thinking. “You don’t understand. I mean, you ever heard that saying ‘No man is an island’? You can’t just separate yourself from a country.”
“Countries do it all the time. America did it in the first place.”
“America had an army, kid. And it has a bigger one now. You just can’t go challenging the world’s largest superpower.” So much for Prince Herbert.
“Well, that’s what we’re doing. Heck, that’s what you’re doing, Kelly. Why did you even emigrate?”
“I thought you’d have some answers!” She looked away from me and then out the window, brushing the curtain aside with her cheek to look at the swarm of weirdos snaking across the lawn, and the cordon of troops surrounding them. “I should have just stayed home.”
“Well, what kind of answers were you expecting?” I knew the answer already, and also knew that she couldn’t put it into words. The questions were there, though, like the flavored glop inside an unlabeled Valentine’s Day chocolate—even after you bite into it, you don’t know what the hell you’re eating. There were no answers for her; she wasn’t even really looking for them. She just wanted to hear some set of words that would attack the glop and make it vanish, like antimatter.
“Well, you just seem so happy. How could you be happy knowing what will happen?”
Why was I so happy? I didn’t really feel all that happy; never did. I mean it’s not like I could move into my own apartment or anything. Even back when I kept a diary, I never wrote about being happy, except when recording what other people were thinking or experiencing, and they were generally happy about dumb stuff, like a football game or someone agreeing with them.
I guess I just liked the craziness of it all. That answer wasn’t going to satisfy Kelly’s brainglop so I did what I usually do at chess club. Kids aren’t really very good chess players, except for the occasional supernerd, so it’s no use reading their mind for the proper response to the moves—they don’t know what the hell they’re doing either. So what I’d do is poke around the mindscape of the club sponsor, or the guy in the next town who had all these chess books and who subscribed to all the chess magazines, and who always had three or four games going in his living room, and get the answer from him.
So I checked Dr. Phil and Dr. Laura and the social worker from school who asked me once why I never applied myself and The pope and Billy Graham and Tom Hanks and all sorts of other people that make their living giving advice, or just being warm and giving their opinions, and came up with a response.
“Oh Kelly,” I said, reaching out to touch her hand, “it’ll all be all right.”
“But—”
“It’ll all work out for the best.”
“They have so many gun—”
“Everything happens for a reason.” I smiled a cereal commercial smile.
The glop in Kelly’s brain melted and steamed out her ears, deflating her tension like a balloon. She leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. “You’re right,” she said. She was about to say something else but then turned to see as our new resident aliens marched up the steps by the dozen to use the upstairs restroom, full of pardon mes and I really gotta goes and ohmygod this isn’t as big as I thought it would be on TVs, and is this the right doors. “Herb-AY, my man!” one very very white guy said; he was in the lead and held out a palm for me to high-five.
I left him hanging.
Downstairs, Adrienne and Dad were frowning over the summons. In the corner, Rich was taping them. He had a new assistant, a teenager I recognized as a bagger from Pathmark—his job was apparently to take the lampshade off my mother’s old lamp and hold it up behind the camera to make sure Dad squinted from the light, and that the rest of the room was cut up with stripes of shadow.
“Herbert, we have to talk,” said Adrienne, whose brain was spinning with crazy thoughts of being my new mother. She saw herself in flickering black and white, wearing an apron and handing out bagged lunches to me and Rich, who in her little daydream was wearing dress shorts. Then out come the servants to drape a min
k around her shoulders and place a tiara on her head. Weirdo.
“Your mother has filed a custody suit. Don’t worry, your father is going to fight this all the way to the Supreme Court.”
“No, I’m not,” said Dad, “I’m going right to the General Assembly of the United Nations. This isn’t a matter for family court, if they want Herb, they’ll need to extradite him.”
“Extradite me!” Okay, so it didn’t mean what I thought it did at that very second. I checked Dad’s mind for the actual meaning of the word, but really didn’t feel all that much better.
“You’re not going to go anywhere, Herbie, don’t you worry,” Adrienne said. I shot my Dad a look, and he shrugged. Then he announced, regally, “Nobody is going to leave Weinbergia against his or her will! We are a sovereign nation!”
“That’s right!” shouted whoever was using the downstairs bathroom. A smattering of applause floated throughout the house like lost butterflies.
“Hear hear,” said Adrienne, getting another stare from Dad. Then Rich stepped forward and pointed his camera at me. “Do you miss your mother?”
“Yes . . . uh, I mean—” and that was that. I knew what he wanted to hear, I knew it, and it still just came flying out of my mouth anyway. I did miss her. Weinbergia was already filling up with hippies and morons (some lady with long gray hair and a tie-dyed skirt even got on her knees behind me to wave into the camera, I’m sure you saw it a million times on TV), the air outside stank of diesel fuel and ozone and I really just wanted things to be like they were before—when Dad and I were building the bomb. When we had time together and when my mother smiled to see us hanging out all the time.
So I said yes and the world heard it. There’s a big difference between being able to know what’s going to happen and being able to do something about it. I could feel them, the entire weight of the American military, the media, the factories, the great thinkers, all of them, arraying against Weinbergia. The first line of cordons were only scrubs—expendables—but beyond that the Special Operators lurked. They were holed up in the Red Berry Bed & Breakfast on the other side of the highway, toward downtown. Spiderholes had been sunk in the Cases’ backyard, just in case we tried to tunnel our way out. Under the waters of the Long Island Sound, and off the south shore too, submarines bobbed slightly under the waves. Every plane that passed overhead, even the commercial flights, heck, even the skywriters promising great deals, quogue chevrolet, were stuffed with air marshals. In a spiral pattern, cutting across Suffolk County, Connecticut, out into The City and even to the tip of Orient Point, where a ferry sometimes goes, there were soldiers, their eyes and guns pointed toward little Weinbergia. Beyond even them, in factories in refineries, good old blue-collar workers bent over their machines and smiled into the spray of sparks spat out of their equipment—overtime, double time, maybe even triple time. And they were all coming for me, fueled and driven on by Geri, my mother, and her nasal shrieking for me on every television screen in the world. “My boy, I want my beautiful boy, home, safe with his mother! Home with me!” she cried out, and her whining landed on the broad backs of the world like a slaver’s whip.
And there was nothing I could do about it. I read the minds of the generals, nothing. They’d sewn America up tight. I checked the military minds of foreign powers—the only option in North Korean dreams was pulling the trigger on the bomb out on the lawn. Paranoids, the ones with those tinfoil hats (they don’t work, by the way) and a million back-up plans, they were out of bright ideas. So were the military historians, the Warhammer players, the Dungeons & Dragons nerds, everyone. No one had any answers, except one.
Get used to being pushed around by America.
4
Of course, one thing you can do if you’re playing chess—and if you’re actually playing chess in a dumb movie with a really dramatic script or something—is just kick over the board and declare victory. We didn’t kick over the board; everyone else did it for us. Vermont went especially crazy. The counties full of snowy hillbillies that make up what they call the Northeast Kingdom declared itself a literal kingdom, and the towns of Brattleboro and Marlboro seceded, formed a pair of communes, and then merged into one city-state. But that was Vermont, so nobody really noticed except that Unilever issued a press release stating that Ben & Jerry’s ice cream production wouldn’t be affected, and the US sent some troops to make sure none of the highways were blocked by either the hippies or the rednecks.
The bigger news was the explosion, of course. Gray McGrath, who owned a big farm in Springettsbury Township, Pennsylvania, didn’t have a nuclear bomb, but he had plenty of gasoline and fertilizer, and a few handy flatbeds on which to arrange the stuff on the borders of his acreage. He announced that his farm was seceding from the US and that McGrathia would be a new homeland for “the white race” via his website. He also especially requested “blonde-haired white women,” the “proud kind” he said, to report to McGrathia in order to help “build the race.” He even promised to “treat” them “all very nice” especially if they could show that they were of “French Huguenot extraction.” He was also very worried, he said about “secret Puerto Ricans” with light skin sneaking into his new country, so there would be strict “border policing.” All those quote marks I’m showing you are annoying, but really, they were all in the press release, in quotes for no reason, just like that.
Anyway, as you probably saw on the news, McGrathia exploded when a woman named Lenora Cline—she’s black, not a “secret Puerto Rican”—drove down from York with nothing but a book of matches and a copy of the local paper in which she saw the McGrathia story, stopped at his border, walked right up to him (the dog was barking, McGrath was too flummoxed to even call her the n-word; he’d never fired his shotgun at anyone before and was afraid), turned the paper into a torch, and tossed it at a wagon full of kerosene-drenched fertilizer. She got blown across the street, and her eyebrows went even farther, and McGrath suffered third-degree burns over much of his body. (The really funny thing is that McGrath and Cline are like in love now; they even share a hospital room and talk all night long about the country they’ll found on an oil rig somewhere with book deal and insurance money.) The dog lost a leg and was found limping about half a mile away, its fur singed, but otherwise happy. That was the dog Sandra Bullock adopted, remember?
Then there were all the others. Libertopia in Idaho, where a whole condo complex got together and declared itself a tax-free capitalist zone—they tried to hold off the troops with a vial of what they said was anthrax. One of their CEOs, a fellow who called himself Glen, but whose real name was Ted (he thought that was “too faggy” for TV), made his declaration public too. After spending forty minutes trying to figure out which side to part his shaggy light brown hair on (he finally decided the “right,” because he didn’t want to “seem left”) he set up a podium in the complex’s common room and waved a vial around during their press conference.
“We are all willing to die for our freedom,” he explained, “the way the Founding Fathers were willing, the way most Americans, infantilized as they are by the womb-to-tomb nanny state, are no longer willing. But we are, and we shall show it through superior competition and the harnessing of individual ingenuity and freedom,” and then he dropped the vial.
“Of course we wouldn’t endanger ourselves or media professionals gathered here by risking exposure. That was just a prop!” he said, though now he stumbled over his words and kept glancing down at the broken test tube, the white powder spilled across the tasteful beige carpeting. The journalists murmured and silently moved the story from page A3 and the six o’clock lead to after sports and “Pet of the Week.”
“We do have anthrax. It was purchased in the free market, which Americans are indoctrinated to believe is a great evil when it is—” and he was interrupted again, this time by the local police, who just beat the crap out of him while the cameras still rolled and then dragged him and his four cofounders away. The cops had been called in by on
e of the private security guards who wanted to go home and have Sunday dinner with his mother, but couldn’t because one of the Libertopians had welded the main gate to the condo complex shut and then blocked it with a big yellow Hummer. “How the hell were those idiots gonna ‘free trade’ anything with the gate shut?” he wanted to know.
And there were others. The mayor of Bloomington, Indiana, tried to declare independence, only to say that he’d willingly rejoin the United States if the federal government paid off the city’s debts. He was recalled. In Texas, four different microstates emerged, and three of them even managed to chase off the local cops, and then set up counter-operations against National Guard sieges. Cincinnati’s Gaslight District split off too and managed to even absorb a police presence through a big block party. An all-black nation emerged in one of the neighborhoods of Camden, New Jersey, and cops traded small arms fire with the rebels for most of the afternoon before drawing back. The governor of New Jersey acted upset, but deep down he hoped he’d be able to excise the city altogether and not have to worry about it. He wouldn’t even use the New Jersey National Guard and insisted that the Camden problem was a federal matter.
Five squats in Eugene, Oregon, left, as did the homeless of People’s Park in Berkeley, California. Somebody declared himself the King of Harlem, but at his press release just shouted “Howard Stern rules! Bababooey Bababooey!” A sandbar in the Connecticut River was claimed by a couple who had built a minigun in their basement. A warehouse turned loft in El Cerrito, California, went rebel too, thanks to the Maoist Labor Party or something like that. (Yes, I read their minds; there was disagreement over their own party name. Very weird. Half that group were FBI agents anyway.)
