Here Dr. Hotton takes the so-called “modern view,” from which I must dissociate myself. I, for one, find it intolerable that large sections of the American wilderness should be made into “no-go areas” by the vandalistic activities of our so-called “stripe-tailed cousins.” Admittedly, excesses may have been committed in early attempts to exterminate the verminous, booming population of these masked bandits. But the damage to agriculture has been severe, and the history of kamikaze attacks by self-infected rabid raccoons is a terrifying one.
Dr. Hotton holds that we must now “share the planet with a fellow civilized species.” He bolsters his argument with hearsay evidence of “raccoon culture” that to me seems rather flimsy. The woven strips of bark known as “raccoon wampum” are impressive examples of animal dexterity, but to my mind it remains to be proven that they are actually “money.” And their so-called “pictographs” seem little more than random daubings. The fact remains that the raccoon population continues to rise exponentially, with raccoon bitches whelping massive litters every spring. Dr. Hotton, in a footnote, suggests that we can relieve crowding pressure by increasing the human presence in outer space. This seems a farfetched and unsatisfactory scheme.
The last chapter is speculative in tone. The prospect of intelligent rats is grossly repugnant; so far, thank God, the tough immune system of the rat, inured to bacteria and filth, has rejected retroviral invasion. Indeed, the feral cat population seems to be driving these vermin toward extinction. Nor have opossums succumbed; indeed, marsupials of all kinds seem immune, making Australia a haven of a now-lost natural world. Whales and dolphins are endangered species; they seem unlikely to make a comeback even with the (as-yet-unknown) cetacean effects of chernobyling. And monkeys, which might pose a very considerable threat, are restricted to the few remaining patches of tropical forest and, like humans, seem resistant to the disease.
Our neural Chernobyl has bred a folklore all its own. Modern urban folklore speaks of “ascended masters,” a group of Chernobyl victims able to survive the virus. Supposedly, they “pass for human,” forming a hidden counterculture among the normals, or “sheep.” This is a throwback to the dark tradition of Luddism, and the popular fears once projected onto the dangerous and reckless “priesthood of science” are now transferred to these fairy tales of supermen. This psychological transference becomes clear when one hears that these “ascended masters” specialize in advanced scientific research of a kind now frowned upon. The notion that some fraction of the population has achieved physical immortality, and hidden it from the rest of us, is utterly absurd.
Dr. Hotton, quite rightly, treats this paranoid myth with the contempt it deserves.
Despite my occasional reservations, this is a splendid book, likely to be the definitive work on this central phenomenon of modern times. Dr. Hotton may well hope to add another Pulitzer to his list of honors. At ninety-five, this grand old man of modern science has produced yet another stellar work in his rapidly increasing oeuvre. His many readers, like myself, can only marvel at his vigor and clamor for more.
—for Greg Bear
We See Things Differently
This was the jahiliyah—the land of ignorance. This was America. The Great Satan, the Arsenal of Imperialism, the Bankroller of Zionism, the Bastion of Neo-Colonialism. The home of Hollywood and blonde sluts in black nylon. The land of rocket-equipped F-15s that slashed across God’s sky, in godless pride. The land of nuclear-powered global navies, with cannon that fired shells as large as cars.
They have forgotten that they used to shoot us, shell us, insult us, and equip our enemies. They have no memory, the Americans, and no history. Wind sweeps through them, and the past vanishes. They are like dead leaves.
I flew into Miami, on a winter afternoon. The jet banked over a tangle of empty highways, then a large dead section of the city—a ghetto perhaps. In our final approach we passed a coal-burning power plant, reflected in the canal. For a moment I mistook it for a mosque, its tall smokestacks slender as minarets. A Mosque for the American Dynamo.
I had trouble with my cameras at customs. The customs officer was a grimy-looking American, white with hair the color of clay. He squinted at my passport. “That’s an awful lot of film, Mr. Cuttab,” he said.
“Qutb,” I said, smiling. “Sayyid Qutb. Call me Charlie.”
“Journalist, huh?” He looked unhappy. It seemed that I owed substantial import duties on my Japanese cameras, as well as my numerous rolls of Pakistani color film. He invited me into a small back office to discuss it. Money changed hands. I departed with my papers in order.
The airport was half-full: mostly prosperous Venezuelans and Cubans, with the haunted look of men pursuing sin. I caught a taxi outside, a tiny vehicle like a motorcycle wrapped in glass. The cabbie, an ancient black man, stowed my luggage in the cab’s trailer.
Within the cab’s cramped confines, we were soon unwilling intimates. The cabbie’s breath smelled of sweetened alcohol. “You Iranian?” the cabbie asked.
“Arab.”
“We respect Iranians around here, we really do,” the cabbie insisted.
“So do we,” I said. “We fought them on the Iraqi front for years.”
“Yeah?” said the cabbie uncertainly. “Seems to me I heard about that. How’d that end up?”
“The Shi’ite holy cities were ceded to Iran. The Ba’athist regime is dead, and Iraq is now part of the Arab Caliphate.” My words made no impression on him, and I had known it before I spoke. This is the land of ignorance. They know nothing about us, the Americans. After all this, and they still know nothing whatsoever.
“Well, who’s got more money these days?” the cabbie asked. “Y’all, or the Iranians?”
“The Iranians have heavy industry,” I said. “But we Arabs tip better.”
The cabbie smiled. It is very easy to buy Americans. The mention of money brightens them like a shot of drugs. It is not just the poverty; they were always like this, even when they were rich. It is the effect of spiritual emptiness. A terrible grinding emptiness in the very guts of the West, which no amount of Coca-Cola seems able to fill.
We rolled down gloomy streets toward the hotel. Miami’s streetlights were subsidized by commercial enterprises. It was another way of, as they say, shrugging the burden of essential services from the exhausted backs of the taxpayers. And onto the far sturdier shoulders of peddlers of aspirin, sticky sweetened drinks, and cosmetics. Their billboards gleamed bluely under harsh lights encased in bulletproof glass. It reminded me so strongly of Soviet agitprop that I had a sudden jarring sense of displacement, as if I were being sold Lenin and Engels and Marx in the handy jumbo size.
The cabbie, wondering perhaps about his tip, offered to exchange dollars for riyals at black-market rates. I declined politely, having already done this in Cairo. The lining of my coat was stuffed with crisp Reagan thousand-dollar bills. I also had several hundred in pocket change, and an extensive credit line at the Islamic Bank of Jerusalem. I foresaw no difficulties.
Outside the hotel, I gave the ancient driver a pair of fifties. Another very old man, of Hispanic descent, took my bags on a trolley. I registered under the gaze of a very old woman. Like all American women, she was dressed in a way intended to provoke lust. In the young, this technique works admirably, as proved by America’s unhappy history of sexually transmitted plague. In the old, it provokes only sad disgust.
I smiled on the horrible old woman and paid in advance.
I was rewarded by a double-handful of glossy brochures promoting local casinos, strip-joints, and bars.
The room was adequate. This had once been a fine hotel. The air-conditioning was quiet and both hot and cold water worked well. A wide flat screen covering most of one wall offered dozens of channels of television.
My wristwatch buzzed quietly, its programmed dial indicating the direction of Mecca. I took the rug from my luggage and spread it before the window. I cleansed my face, my hands, my feet. Then I knelt before th
e darkening chaos of Miami, many stories below. I assumed the eight positions, sinking with gratitude into deep meditation. I forced away the stress of jet-lag, the innate tension and fear of a Believer among enemies.
Prayer completed, I changed my clothing, putting aside my dark Western business suit. I assumed denim jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and a photographer’s vest. I slipped my press card, my passport, my health cards into the vest’s zippered pockets, and draped the cameras around myself. I then returned to the lobby downstairs, to await the arrival of the American rock star.
He came on schedule, even slightly early. There was only a small crowd, as the rock star’s organization had sought confidentiality. A train of seven monstrous buses pulled into the hotel’s lot, their whale-like sides gleaming with brushed aluminum. They bore Massachusetts license plates. I walked out on to the tarmac and began photographing.
All seven buses carried the rock star’s favored insignia, the thirteen-starred blue field of the early American flag. The buses pulled up with military precision, forming a wagon-train fortress across a large section of the weedy, broken tarmac. Folding doors hissed open and a swarm of road crew piled out into the circle of buses.
Men and women alike wore baggy fatigues, covered with buttoned pockets and block-shaped streaks of urban camouflage: brick red, asphalt black, and concrete gray. Dark-blue shoulder patches showed the thirteen-starred circle. Working efficiently, without haste, they erected large satellite dishes on the roofs of two buses. The buses were soon linked together in formation, shaped barriers of woven wire securing the gaps between each nose and tail. The machines seemed to sit breathing, with the stoked-up, leviathan air of steam locomotives.
A dozen identically dressed crewmen broke from the buses and departed in a group for the hotel. Within their midst, shielded by their bodies, was the rock star, Tom Boston. The broken outlines of their camouflaged fatigues made them seem to blur into a single mass, like a herd of moving zebras. I followed them; they vanished quickly within the hotel. One crew woman tarried outside.
I approached her. She had been hauling a bulky piece of metal luggage on trolley wheels. It was a newspaper vending machine. She set it beside three other machines at the hotel’s entrance. It was the Boston organization’s propaganda paper, Poor Richard’s.
I drew near. “Ah, the latest issue,” I said. “May I have one?”
“It will cost five dollars,” she said, in painstaking English. To my surprise, I recognized her as Boston’s wife. “Valya Plisetskaya,” I said with pleasure, and handed her a five-dollar nickel. “My name is Sayyid; my American friends call me Charlie.”
She looked about her. A small crowd already gathered at the buses, kept at a distance by the Boston crew. Others clustered under the hotel’s green-and-white awning.
“Who are you with?” she said.
“Al-Ahram, of Cairo. An Arabic newspaper.”
“You’re not a political?” she said.
I shook my head in amusement at this typical show of Russian paranoia. “Here’s my press card.” I showed her the tangle of Arabic. “I am here to cover Tom Boston. The Boston phenomenon.”
She squinted. “Tom is big in Cairo these days? Muslims, yes? Down on rock and roll.”
“We’re not all ayatollahs,” I said, smiling up at her. She was very tall. “Many still listen to Western pop music; they ignore the advice of their betters. They used to rock all night in Leningrad. Despite the Communist Party. Isn’t that so?”
“You know about us Russians, do you, Charlie?” She handed me my paper, watching me with cool suspicion.
“No, I can’t keep up,” I said. “Like Lebanon in the old days. Too many factions.” I followed her through the swinging glass doors of the hotel. Valentina Plisetskaya was a broad-cheeked Slav with glacial blue eyes and hair the color of corn tassels. She was a childless woman in her thirties, starved as thin as a girl. She played saxophone in Boston’s band. She was a native of Moscow, but had survived its destruction. She had been on tour with her jazz band when the Afghan Martyrs’ Front detonated their nuclear bomb.
I tagged after her. I was interested in the view of another foreigner. “What do you think of the Americans these days?” I asked her.
We waited beside the elevator.
“Are you recording?” she said.
“No! I’m a print journalist. I know you don’t like tapes,” I said.
“We like tapes fine,” she said, staring down at me. “As long as they are ours.” The elevator was sluggish. “You want to know what I think, Charlie? I think Americans are fucked. Not as bad as Soviets, but fucked anyway. What do you think?”
“Oh,” I said. “American gloom-and-doom is an old story. At AI-Ahram, we are more interested in the signs of American resurgence. That’s the big angle, now. That’s why I’m here.”
She looked at me with remote sarcasm. “Aren’t you a little afraid they will beat the shit out of you? They’re not happy, the Americans. Not sweet and easygoing like before.”
I wanted to ask her how sweet the CIA had been when their bomb killed half the Iranian government in 1981. Instead, I shrugged. “There’s no substitute for a man on the ground. That’s what my editors say.” The elevator shunted open. “May I come up with you?”
“I won’t stop you.” We stepped in. “But they won’t let you in to see Tom.”
“They will if you ask them to, Mrs. Boston.”
“I’m called Plisetskaya,” she said, fluffing her yellow hair. “See? No veil.” It was the old story of the so-called “liberated” Western woman. They call the simple, modest clothing of Islam “bondage”—while they spend countless hours, and millions of dollars, painting themselves. They grow their nails into talons, cram their feet into high heels, strap their breasts and hips into spandex. All for the sake of male lust.
It baffles the imagination. Naturally I told her nothing of this, but only smiled. “I’m afraid I will be a pest,” I said. “I have a room in this hotel. Some time I will see your husband. I must, my editors demand it.”
The doors opened. We stepped into the hall of the fourteenth floor. Boston’s entourage had taken over the entire floor. Men in fatigues and sunglasses guarded the hallway; one of them had a trained dog.
“Your paper is big, is it?” the woman said.
“Biggest in Cairo, millions of readers,” I said. “We still read, in the Caliphate.”
“State-controlled television,” she muttered.
“Is that worse than corporations?” I asked. “I saw what CBS said about Tom Boston.” She hesitated, and I continued to prod. “A ‘Luddite fanatic,’ am I right? A ‘rock demagogue.’”
“Give me your room number.” I did this. “I’ll call,” she said, striding away down the corridor. I almost expected the guards to salute her as she passed so regally, but they made no move, their eyes invisible behind the glasses. They looked old and rather tired, but with the alert relaxation of professionals. They had the look of former Secret Service bodyguards. Their city-colored fatigues were baggy enough to hide almost any amount of weaponry.
I returned to my room. I ordered Japanese food from room service, and ate it. Wine had been used in its cooking, but I am not a prude in these matters. It was now time for the day’s last prayer, though my body, still attuned to Cairo, did not believe it.
My devotions were broken by a knocking at the door. I opened it. It was another of Boston’s staff, a small black woman whose hair had been treated. It had a nylon sheen. It looked like the plastic hair on a child’s doll. “You Charlie?”
“Yes.”
“Valya says, you want to see the gig. See us set up. Got you a backstage pass.”
“Thank you very much.” I let her clip the plastic-coated pass to my vest. She looked past me into the room, and saw my prayer rug at the window. “What you doin’ in there? Prayin?”
“Yes.”
“Weird,” she said. “You coming or what?”
I followed my nameless
benefactor to the elevator.
Down at ground level, the crowd had swollen. Two security guards stood outside the glass doors, refusing admittance to anyone without a room key. The girl ducked, and plowed through the crowd with sudden headlong force, like an American football player. I struggled in her wake, the gawkers, pickpockets and autograph hounds closing at my heels. The crowd was liberally sprinkled with the repulsive derelicts one sees so often in America: those without homes, without family, without charity.
I was surprised at the age of the people. For a rock-star’s audience, one expects dizzy teenaged girls and the libidinous young street-toughs that pursue them. There were many of these, but more of another type: tired, footsore people with crow’s-feet and graying hair. Men and women in their thirties and forties, with a shabby, crushed look. Unemployed, obviously, and with time on their hands to cluster around anything that resembled hope.
We walked without hurry to the fortress circle of buses. A rear guard of Boston’s kept the onlookers at bay. Two of the buses were already unlinked from the others and under full steam. I followed the black woman up perforated steps and into the bowels of one of the shining machines.
She called brief greetings to the others already inside.
The air held the sharp reek of cleaning fluid. Neat elastic cords held down stacks of amplifiers, stencilled instrument cases, wheeled dollies of black rubber and crisp yellow pine. The thirteen-starred circle marked everything, stamped or spray-painted. A methane-burning steam generator sat at the back of the bus, next to a tall crashproof rack of high-pressure fuel tanks. We skirted the equipment and joined the others in a narrow row of second-hand airplane seats. We buckled ourselves in. I sat next to the Doll-Haired Girl.
The bus surged into motion. “It’s very clean,” I said. “I expected something a bit wilder on a rock and roll bus.”
“Maybe in Egypt,” she said, with the instinctive assumption that Egypt was in the Dark Ages. “We don’t have the luxury to screw around. Not now.”
I decided not to tell her that Egypt, as a nation-state, no longer existed. “American pop culture is a very big industry.”
Ascendancies Page 28
