Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

  He paused, then burst out at the second secretary. “I urge you once again not to go public. You will find yourself vulnerable to a buyout. I’ve told you that Evans is an agent of Marubeni. If he brings your precious plant down around your ears, don’t come crying to me.”

  “February 1998,” I said. “An anti-communist zealot fired on your bus.”

  “You’re a big fan, Sayyid.”

  “Why are you afraid of multinationals?” I said. “That was the American preference, wasn’t it? Global trade, global economics?”

  “We screwed up,” Boston said. “Things got out of hand.”

  “Out of American hands, you mean?”

  “We used our companies as tools for development,” Boston said, with the patience of a man instructing a child. “But then our lovely friends in South America refused to pay their debts. And our staunch allies in Europe and Japan signed the Geneva Economic Agreement and decided to crash the dollar. And our friends in the Arab countries decided not to be countries anymore, but one almighty Caliphate, and, just for good measure, they pulled all their oil money out of our banks and put it into Islamic ones. How could we compete? Islamic banks are holy banks, and our banks pay interest, which is a sin, I understand.” He fluffed curls from his neck, his eyes glittering. “And all that time, we were already in hock to our fucking ears to pay for being the world’s policeman.”

  “So the world betrayed your country,” I said. “Why?”

  He shook his head. “Isn’t it obvious? Who needs St. George when the dragon is dead? Some Afghani fanatics scraped together enough plutonium for a Big One, and they blew the dragon’s fucking head off. And the rest of the body is still convulsing, ten years later. We bled ourselves white competing against Russia, which was stupid, but we’d won. With two giants, the world trembles. One giant, and the midgets can drag it down. They took us out, that’s all. They own us.”

  “It sounds very simple,” I said.

  He showed annoyance for the first time. “Valya says you’ve read our newspapers. I’m not telling you anything new. Should I lie about it? Look at the figures, for Christ’s sake. The EEC and the Japanese use their companies for money pumps, they’re sucking us dry, deliberately. You don’t look stupid, Sayyid. You know very well what’s happening to us, anyone in the Third World knows.”

  “You mentioned Christ,” I said. “Do you believe in Him?”

  Boston rocked back on his elbows and grinned. “Do you?”

  “Of course. He is one of our Prophets. We call Him Isa.”

  Boston looked cautious. “I never stand between a man and his God.” He paused. “We have a lot of respect for the Arabs, truly. What they’ve accomplished. Breaking free from the world economic system, returning to authentic local tradition…You see the parallels.”

  “Yes,” I said. I smiled sleepily, and covered my mouth as I yawned. “Jet lag. Your pardon, please. These are only questions my editors would want me to ask. If I were not an admirer, a fan as you say, I would not have this assignment.”

  He smiled and looked at his wife. Plisetskaya lit another cigarette and leaned back, looking skeptical. Boston grinned. “So the sparring’s over, Charlie?”

  “I have every record you’ve made,” I said. “This is not a job for hatchets.” I paused, weighing my words. “I still believe that our Caliph is a great man. I support the Islamic Resurgence. I am Muslim. But I think, like many others, that we have gone a bit too far in closing every window to the West. Rock and roll is a Third World music at heart. Don’t you agree?”

  “Sure,” said Boston, closing his eyes. “Do you know the first words spoken in independent Zimbabwe? Right after they ran up the flag.”

  “No.”

  He spoke out blindly, savoring the words. “Ladies and gentlemen. Bob Marley. And the Wailers.”

  “You admire Bob Marley.”

  “Comes with the territory,” Boston said, flipping a coil of hair.

  “He had a black mother, a white father. And you?”

  “Oh, both my parents were shameless mongrels like myself,” Boston said. “I’m a second-generation nothing-in-particular. An American.” He sat up, knotting his hands, looking tired. “You going to stay with the tour a while, Charlie?” He spoke to a secretary. “Get me a kleenex.” The woman rose.

  “Till Philadelphia,” I said. “Like Marjory Cale.”

  Plisetskaya blew smoke, frowning. “You spoke to that woman?”

  “Of course. About the concert.”

  “What did the bitch say?” Boston asked lazily. His aide handed him tissues and cold cream. Boston dabbed the kleenex and smeared makeup from his face.

  “She asked me what I thought. I said it was too loud,” I said.

  Plisetskaya laughed once, sharply. I smiled. “It was quite amusing. She said that you were in good form. She said that I should not be so tight-arsed.”

  “‘;Tight-arsed’?” Boston said, raising his brows. Fine wrinkles had appeared beneath the greasepaint. “She said that?”

  “She said we Muslims were afraid of modern life. Of new experience. Of course I told her that this wasn’t true. Then she gave me this.” I reached into one of the pockets of my vest and pulled out a flat packet of aluminum foil.

  “Marjory Cale gave you cocaine?” Boston asked.

  “Wyoming Flake,” I said. “She said she has friends who grow it in the Rocky Mountains.” I opened the packet, exposing a little mound of white powder. “I saw her use some. I think it will help my jet lag.” I pulled my chair closer to the bedside phone-table. I shook the packet out, with much care, on the shining mahogany surface. The tiny crystals glittered. It was finely chopped.

  I opened my wallet and removed a crisp thousand-dollar bill. The actor-president smiled benignly. “Would this be appropriate?”

  “Tom does not do drugs,” Plisetskaya said, too quickly.

  “Ever do coke before?” Boston asked. He threw a wadded tissue to the floor.

  “I hope I’m not offending you,” I said. “This is Miami, isn’t it? This is America.” I began rolling the bill, clumsily.

  “We are not impressed,” Plisetskaya said sternly. She ground out her cigarette. “You are being a rube, Charlie. A hick from the NICs.”

  “There is a lot of it,” I said, allowing doubt to creep into my voice. I reached into my pocket, then divided the pile in half with the sharp edge of a developed slide. I arranged the lines neatly. They were several centimeters long.

  I sat back in the chair. “You think it’s a bad idea? I admit, this is new to me.” I paused. “I have drunk wine several times, although the Koran forbids it.”

  One of the secretaries laughed. “Sorry,” she said. “He drinks wine. That’s cute.”

  I sat and watched temptation dig into Boston. Plisetskaya shook her head.

  “Cale’s cocaine,” Boston mused. “Man.”

  We watched the lines together for several seconds, he and I. “I did not mean to be trouble,” I said. “I can throw it away.”

  “Never mind Val,” Boston said. “Russians chainsmoke.” He slid across the bed.

  I bent quickly and sniffed. I leaned back, touching my nose. The cocaine quickly numbed it. I handed the paper tube to Boston. It was done in a moment. We sat back, our eyes watering.

  “Oh,” I said, drug seeping through tissue. “Oh, this is excellent.”

  “It’s good toot,” Boston agreed. “Looks like you get an extended interview.”

  We talked through the rest of the night, he and I.

  My story is almost over. From where I sit to write this, I can hear the sound of Boston’s music, pouring from the crude speakers of a tape pirate in the bazaar. There is no doubt in my mind that Boston is a great man.

  I accompanied the tour to Philadelphia. I spoke to Boston several times during the tour, though never again with the first fine rapport of the drug. We parted as friends, and I spoke well of him in my article for Al-Ahram. I did not hide what he was, I did not hide his th
reat. But I did not malign him. We see things differently. But he is a man, a child of God like all of us.

  His music even saw brief popularity in Cairo, after the article. Children listen to it, and then turn to other things, as children will. They like the sound, they dance, but the words mean nothing to them. The thoughts, the feelings, are alien.

  This is the dar-al-harb, the land of peace. We have peeled the hands of the West from our throat, we draw breath again, under God’s sky. Our Caliph is a good man, and I am proud to serve him. He reigns, he does not rule. Learned men debate in the Majlis, not squabbling like politicians, but seeking truth in dignity. We have the world’s respect.

  We have earned it, for we paid the martyr’s price. We Muslims are one in five in all the world, and as long as ignorance of God persists, there will always be the struggle, the jihad. It is a proud thing to be one of the Caliph’s Mujihadeen. It is not that we value our lives lightly. But that we value God more.

  Some call us backward, reactionary. I laughed at this when I carried the powder. It had the subtlest of poisons: a living virus. It is a tiny thing, bred in secret laboratories, and in itself it does no harm. But it spreads throughout the body, and it bleeds out a chemical, a faint but potent trace that carries the rot of cancer.

  The West can do much with cancer these days, and a wealthy man like Boston can buy much treatment. They may cure the first attack, or the second. But within five years he will surely be dead.

  People will mourn his loss. Perhaps they will put his image on a postage stamp, as they did for Bob Marley. Marley, who also died of systemic cancer; whether by the hand of God or man, only Allah knows.

  I have taken the life of a great man; in trapping him I took my own life as well, but that means nothing. I am no one. I am not even Sayyid Qutb, the Martyr and theorist of Resurgence, though I took that great man’s name as cover. I meant only respect, and believe I have not shamed his memory.

  I do not plan to wait for the disease. The struggle continues in the Muslim lands of what was once the Soviet Union. There the Believers ride in Holy Jihad, freeing their ancient lands from the talons of Marxist atheism. Secretly, we send them carbines, rockets, mortars, and nameless men. I shall be one of them; when I meet death, my grave will be nameless also. But nothing is nameless to God.

  God is Great; men are mortal, and err. If I have done wrong, let the judge of Men decide. Before His Will, as always, I submit.

  Dori Bangs

  True facts, mostly: Lester Bangs was born in California in 1948. He published his first article in 1969. It came over the transom at Rolling Stone. It was a frenzied review of the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams.”

  Without much meaning to, Lester Bangs slowly changed from a Romilar-guzzling college kid into a “professional rock critic.” There wasn’t much precedent for this job in 1969, so Lester kinda had to make it up as he went along. Kind of smell his way into the role, as it were. But Lester had a fine set of cultural antennae. For instance, Lester invented the tag “punk rock.” This is posterity’s primary debt to the Bangs oeuvre.

  Lester’s not as famous now as he used to be, because he’s been dead for some time, but in the ’70s Lester wrote a million record reviews, for Creem and the Village Voice and NME and Who Put the Bomp. He liked to crouch over his old manual typewriter, and slam out wild Beat-influenced copy, while the Velvet Underground or the Stooges were on the box. This made life a hideous trial for the neighborhood, but in Lester’s opinion the neighborhood pretty much had it coming. Épater les bourgeois, man!

  Lester was a party animal. It was a professional obligation, actually. Lester was great fun to hang with, because he usually had a jagged speed-edge, which made him smart and bold and rude and crazy. Lester was a one-man band, until he got drunk. Nutmeg, Romilar, belladonna, crank, those substances Lester could handle. But booze seemed to crack him open, and an unexpected black dreck of rage and pain would come dripping out, like oil from a broken crankcase.

  Toward the end—but Lester had no notion that the end was nigh. He’d given up the booze, more or less. Even a single beer often triggered frenzies of self-contempt. Lester was thirty-three, and sick of being groovy; he was restless, and the stuff he’d been writing lately no longer meshed with the surroundings that had made him what he was. Lester told his friends that he was gonna leave New York and go to Mexico and work on a deep, serious novel, about deep, serious issues, man. The real thing, this time. He was really gonna pin it down, get into the guts of Western Culture, what it really was, how it really felt.

  But then, in April ’82, Lester happened to catch the flu. Lester was living alone at the time, his mom, the Jehovah’s Witness, having died recently. He had no one to make him chicken soup, and the flu really took him down. Tricky stuff, flu; it has a way of getting on top of you.

  Lester ate some Darvon, but instead of giving him that buzzed-out float it usually did, the pills made him feel foggy and dull and desperate. He was too sick to leave his room, or hassle with doctors or ambulances, so instead he just did more Darvon. And his heart stopped.

  There was nobody there to do anything about it, so he lay there for a while, until eventually a friend showed up, and found him.

  More true fax, pretty much: Dori Seda was born in 1951. She was a cartoonist, of the “underground” variety. Dori wasn’t ever famous, certainly not in Lester’s league, but then she didn’t beat her chest and bend every ear in the effort to make herself a Living Legend, either. She had a lot of friends in San Francisco, anyway.

  Dori did a “comic book” once, called Lonely Nights. An unusual “comic book” for those who haven’t followed the “funnies” trade lately, as Lonely Nights was not particularly “funny,” unless you really get a hoot from deeply revealing tales of frustrated personal relationships. Dori also did a lot of work for WEIRDO magazine, which emanated from the artistic circles of R. Crumb, he of “Keep On Truckin’” and “Fritz the Cat” fame.

  R. Crumb once said: “Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures!” As a manifesto, it was a typically American declaration, and it was a truth that Dori held to be self-evident.

  Dori wanted to be a True Artist in her own real-gone little ’80s-esque medium. Comix, or “graphic narrative” if you want a snazzier cognomen for it, was a breaking thing, and she had to feel her way into it. You can see the struggle in her “comics”—always relentlessly autobiographical—Dori hanging around the “Cafè La Boheme” trying to trade food stamps for cigs; Dori living in drafty warehouses in the Shabby Hippie Section of San Francisco, sketching under the skylight and squabbling with her roommate’s boyfriend; Dori trying to scrape up money to have her dog treated for mange.

  Dori’s comics are littered with dead cig-butts and toppled wine-bottles. She was, in a classic nutshell, Wild, Zany and Self-Destructive. In 1988 Dori was in a carwreck which cracked her pelvis and collarbone. She was laid-up, bored, and in pain. To kill time, she drank and smoked and took painkillers.

  She caught the flu. She had friends who loved her, but nobody realized how badly off she was; probably she didn’t know herself. She just went down hard, and couldn’t get up alone. On February 26 her heart stopped. She was thirty-six.

  So enough “true facts.” Now for some comforting lies.

  As it happens, even while a malignant cloud of flu virus was lying in wait for the warm hospitable lungs of Lester Bangs, the Fate, Atropos, she who weaves the things that are to be, accidentally dropped a stitch. Knit one? Purl two? What the hell does it matter, anyway? It’s just human lives, right?

  So, Lester, instead of inhaling a cloud of invisible contagion from the exhalations of a passing junkie, is almost hit by a Yellow Cab. This mishap on the way back from the deli shocks Lester out of his dogmatic slumbers. High time, Lester concludes, to get out of this burg and down to sunny old Mexico. He’s gonna tackle his great American novel: All My Friends Are Hermits.

  So true. None of Lester’s groovy friends go o
ut much anymore. Always ahead of their time, Lester’s Bohemian cadre are no longer rock and roll animals. They still wear black leather jackets, they still stay up all night, they still hate Ronald Reagan with fantastic virulence; but they never leave home. They pursue an unnamed lifestyle that sociologist Faith Popcorn (and how can you doubt anyone with a name like Faith Popcorn) will describe years later as “cocooning.”

  Lester has eight zillion rock, blues and jazz albums, crammed into his grubby NYC apartment. Books are piled feet deep on every available surface: Wm. Burroughs, Hunter Thompson, Celine, Kerouac, Huysmans, Foucault, and dozens of unsold copies of Blondie, Lester’s book-length band-bio.

  More albums and singles come in the mail every day. People used to send Lester records in the forlorn hope that he would review them. But now it’s simply a tradition. Lester has transformed himself into a counter-cultural info-sump. People send him vinyl just because he’s Lester Bangs, man!

  Still jittery from his thrilling brush with death, Lester looks over this lifetime of loot with a surge of Sartrean nausea. He resists the urge to raid the fridge for his last desperate can of Blatz Beer. Instead, Lester snorts some speed, and calls an airline to plan his Mexican wanderjahr. After screaming in confusion at the hopeless stupid bitch of a receptionist, he gets a ticket to San Francisco, best he can do on short notice. He packs in a frenzy and splits.

  Next morning finds Lester exhausted and wired and on the wrong side of the continent. He’s brought nothing with him but an Army duffel-bag with his Olympia portable, some typing paper, shirts, assorted vials of dope, and a paperback copy of Moby Dick, which he’s always meant to get around to re-reading.

  Lester takes a cab out of the airport. He tells the cabbie to drive nowhere, feeling a vague compulsion to soak up the local vibe. San Francisco reminds him of his Rolling Stone days, back before Wenner fired him for being nasty to rock-stars. Fuck Wenner, he thinks. Fuck this city that was almost Avalon for a few months in ’67 and has been on greased skids to Hell ever since.