Wakefield

by Andrei Codrescu

  He arrives late the next afternoon in the northwestern city where it always rains and where he is expected by the mysterious art collector. They’ve put him up in a classy joint; two valets rush to park his car. Moments later he’s sipping his customary cocktail and studying the fauna in the opulent lobby. This is the best, he muses: best hotel, best fauna, best time in America. The cigar smoke is Cuban, the money is high tech, the languages are multi. Women in splendid evening gowns and men in tuxedos float up to the mezzanine, and couples in expensive jeans and Italian leather lounge in the bar. Everyone looks as though they train in gyms, climb mountains, tan by lakes, and rub themselves with expensive lotions. The women glow like security lights outside of million-dollar homes; the men walk erect, chin forward, like rising stock.

  Still, this is not Typical, where the new lies clearly on the snowy fields like the outline of a crime victim on a quiet street. The brash, impatient new wealth of the West is struggling with the past, a past that’s not so old either. Here and there the old rich sprawl in armchairs, wondering where the young rich came from. There’s a fleshy gentleman sitting with his mistress, an ex-stewardess he’s kept for seventeen years. Her mouth is turned down, her eyes red rimmed from years of waiting by the phone. He is doughy, gone to seed, his money is still in industrials, his kids don’t speak to him. Wakefield can see this, and more. The two have a reservation at the Georgian Room for the forty-eight-dollar steak and the fifty-eight-dollar macadamia-crusted rack of lamb, and they will get roaring drunk on champagne, after which his credit card will be rejected and he’ll have to wire his Bahamian bank for cash. Then they will climb into the turned-down bed with the fine linen sheets and have perfunctory sex. In the morning she’ll be gone, and the note she will leave by his balding head will read “Enough is enough.” When the old fellow sees it he’ll take a long bath, put on the heavy cotton robe provided by the hotel, take out his shiny Beretta, and blow out his brains. Good-bye, whispers Wakefield, turning away from the vision.

  Drifting in on an effluvium of French perfume, two dizzying fifteen-year-olds examine the oyster of the world they are about to consume with cruel glee. Then the famous host of a TV game show waddles in wearing his signature tennis shoes. A camera crew is not far behind, fronted by a reporter shaved as smooth as a dental mirror. A group of Russians holding grande double mocha cappuccinos from Maxdrip bubble over with joie de money. They have arrived. Ah, dream city of the Eternal Chip!

  Wakefield has been in a lot of great hotels over the years, but he’s never seen anything quite like this finely restored grand dame, home to a new generation of gold rushers. He can literally smell the money. There isn’t enough stuff in the world to spend it on.

  After rising next morning from the angel cloud of a heavenly baldachin bed, Wakefield opens the glass door to the balcony of his magnificent room overlooking the bay. A Japanese fishing boat is idling in the blue; sky and water are touched by the rising sun; a mountain peak topped with snow looks like Mount Fuji. Dense forests climb to the snow line. Here and there a plume of smoke hangs like a question mark over the trees.

  On another balcony, a big-bellied man wearing blue shorts with red anchors on them is struggling with a fishing rod. His equally rotund wife comes to his aid in shorts and white brassiere. She wraps her hands around his and pulls. The line is taut; something in the water is putting up a big fight. Wakefield sees the slick white skin and gills of a small shark twisting at the end of the line. Inch by inch, they bring the creature halfway up to the balcony. The man’s belly strains against the railing like a hairy balloon about to burst. The wife groans, their four hands gripping hard, and then the line snaps, whipping up through the air inches from Wakefield’s head, and the shark plunges back into the sea.

  Only a few years back this grand hotel had hit rock bottom and was known only for providing guests with fishing reels and bait so they could fish out of their windows; many guests left fish behind to rot, so the management now discourages the practice, but some of the old-timers, the ones who can afford the place, still fish anyway.

  Downstairs the concierge tells Wakefield that he is very lucky to see the sun. “It’s been raining for ninety-nine days,” he quips, “twice as long as it took to break Noah.” Taking advantage of the fine weather, Wakefield strolls along the waterfront.

  Before the new economic boom this had been a place with rough characters about, dim bars, working girls, anarchist bookstores. None of that remains: no flophouses, no indigents, no winos, no whores, no sailors—pretty boring. Bright eateries crowd the water’s edge serving “fusion” cuisine: Asian simplicity, fresh herbs, poached not fried, fine wines, French desserts. When Wakefield was young and poor his friends, who like himself were poor, despised luxury. He should feel sad about the loss of idealism, but he doesn’t. These days he enjoys good food and other expensive pleasures.

  In the restaurants on the waterfront young waiters recite the poetry of the menus, the structure of ingredients in each dish growing ever more vertical, each layer complementing the next with perfect esthetic restraint, each special on display like an Amsterdam whore ready to be pointed at with ivory chopsticks. Maybe a clue to the authentic life Wakefield has pledged to find, his real life, lies in his youth when, aroused by concealment, everything was bigger than himself. Hiding, he had made himself even smaller, leaving more room for everything that was bigger, more room in the overcrowded human universe. That the world is full of hiding places was an invitation to withdraw from the overinflated ambition of human expansion. It was also a refuge from the malignancy that he felt was pursuing everyone he knew. He was like the acolyte of a monastic order that called its adherents into hiding from the moment they were born. Perhaps this hidden order that he had always imagined was not imaginary at all. He was a bona fide member.

  He returns to his freshly made-up suite and resolves to face the e-mail he’s been avoiding since he drove away from Wintry City. Amid the abundant spam he spots a message from Maggie. “Thank you for this wonderful warm feeling that hasn’t left my body,” she begins. “Everybody at The Company is giving me funny looks. The House of the Future hasn’t yet returned my shoes. I think it’s because you took that glass. PS: maybe we should have used a condom …”

  No, please, not that. Wakefield flashes forward years hence: he’s standing in front of another audience, having a public debate with Maggie about their child. No, he can’t imagine it. He replies anxiously: “Are you late?”

  It’s funny how quickly well-being can dissolve when the universe singles you out. Suddenly everybody and everything is late and the only thing that will right the world and keep it spinning is resumption of Maggie’s menstrual flow. If Maggie gets her period, the earth will correct its erroneous orbit and head away from the meteor, disaster averted. But what if—and here Wakefield has a truly frightening thought—one determined, wayward sperm was actually the shot he’s been waiting for? One shot from the Devil’s pistol could start a new life for him, for Maggie, for the poor child they may have created. “You better not, Your Scabrous Majesty, or the deal’s off, totally off!” Wakefield shouts out loud. He doesn’t know exactly what he means by this threat; maybe he’s offering to die rather than force another life into being. Wakefield stares at his computer screen, whispering, almost praying, “Please, please, no.” Then Maggie responds by instant message: “Strange,” writes she, “I was late, at least six days, but my period started at the exact moment I got your message. Had to run and take care of the sudden flood. Are you happy? Were you scared?”

  Immensely relieved, Wakefield pumps his fist victoriously into the air. “Scared,” he writes back. “Weren’t you?”

  Thank God or the Devil, he’s been given another chance, released by Maggie’s flood like Noah from the chores of earthbound husbandry.

  The demonic conference on the New World Order on Mount Eumenides is still dragging on when the Devil decides to return. By the looks of it, he hasn’t missed much, just a bunch of boring
lectures about new technologies of reproduction and the streamlining of data collection. But he’s interested in the workshop on the psychology of humans. The consensus of opinion, as far as he can tell, is that demons need no longer be concerned with human doubts and misgivings. The primitive moral skeleton left by God inside his toys has become an annoyance that gets in the way of the vast transformations ahead. The demon leading the workshop, dressed in a doctor’s white coat and with a stethoscope around his neck, puts forth the proposition that “humans themselves are eliminating their need for guilt and redemption through the invention of drugs that make all such concerns and all the talk about them unnecessary. Our job is to ensure their success by opening our vast stores of knowledge to the best researchers.”

  By way of demonstration, the doctor produces the image of a perfectly formed human female, magnified a hundred times, with glowing numbers all over her body. Using a laser pointer, the speaker identifies each physical feature: “Breasts, artificial. Face, reconstructed. Feet, hips, buttocks, hands, surgically renovated.” He turns his attention to the brain: “Guilt feelings reduced to zero by class P drugs. Memory centers reprogrammed by class M drugs to recall only pleasurable experiences. Connectivity and sociability controlled by electroneural processors. Sex drive disconnected from the need to procreate, the result of multiple biochanges. Transcendent religious yearnings replaced by simulated ecstasy available through a wide variety of psychotropic medicines. Moral skeleton atrophied almost completely, but still showing traces of biological and even social concern. If we sever the production of these traces we completely eliminate species solidarity, leaving a creature propelled only by self-interest, that is to say, our interest. In that ideal condition, human units will be extremely efficient and, perhaps, worth preserving. Oh, and one more thing: the will to continue living can be engineered by the placement of complete belief in superstitious divinatory systems. This is already occuring without our intervention. Most people are at least partly guided by numerology and other oracular mechanics, from tarot cards to coffee-grounds readings.”

  The Devil cringes. Where is the fun in that? What’s the challenge if people don’t have feelings anymore? Maybe he is ontologically attached to humans, but it’s not a superficial attachment. He likes their murky interiors, that weird blend of baseness and divinity, that struggling conscience. The sleeping God did make humans in his own image—He looked a lot like a monkey back then—and reengineering them goes against the grain of the Original Creation, an act of cosmic impertinence that even the Demonic Order cannot challenge. It goes against some kind of Primal Directive.

  The Devil leaps to his hooves and shoves the doctor aside. The female form vanishes. And then he does something unprecedented in the annals of deviltry: he takes up the Defense of God.

  “We are making a grand mistake here, the greatest we have ever made, possibly eliminating our own raison d’être. Without guilt or the need for redemption, they aren’t human anymore, they are us. If we generalize human beings to the point where they are reduced solely to their cosmic function of information gathering, such as we believe it is, we are making obsolete one of the oldest and truest truisms of our kind: the Devil is in the details. Without detail, we will have no place to live. Functional abstraction is not our home; the flesh is. Furthermore, what the good doctor, and many of you, think is waste, such as an excess of pleasure, is in fact the composition of our own beings. We are made of inefficiency, waste, moral quandaries, uncertainty, doubt, guilt, absurd architecture, seemingly useless art, gratuitous gestures, spontaneous contradiction, and humor. This is both what makes us and what keeps us going. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but only the most conflicted and absurd humans are capable of generating those treasures for us.”

  There is a huge moment of awesome demonic silence, resembling the great silence preceding the distribution of communion. The assembled demons wait for the other shoe to drop. Lowering his voice to a whisper, the Devil drops it: “We cannot make any such decisions without the presence of God. Therefore, I have found it necessary to awaken Him.”

  Pandemonium ensues. Our Devil retreats to his cave. Let them freak for a while. Anyway, some humans are perfectly aware of what the devils have in store for them, and are taking preventive measures. Some, like his pet project, Wakefield, know how to hide. Others are already fully arrived in the realm of the imagination where everything is possible, including the nonexistence of deviltry itself.

  The rain returns that night, and Wakefield sails in the ship of his great soft bed. He rises after … how many hours? and pulls aside the drapes, opens the balcony doors. The sky is dark and water falls in steady sheets, wind rattling over the black hole of the agitated bay.

  On television, stock analysts are weighing the impact of the president’s penis. Is it good or bad for the market? It’s good, they decide. The more it stays in the news, the higher the market will soar. Wakefield soaks in the bath, listening to the steady beat of the downpour, savoring his sweet aloneness.

  He must have dozed off, because he wakes with a start and the smoke detector is shrieking in the ceiling and now the sprinklers begin to spray. In the street below he can hear a crowd yelling and in the air the roar of helicopters. He jumps from the tub, pulls on his pants and shirt, and runs downstairs barefooted.

  The lobby looks like a field hospital: there are people lying on the floor gashed and bruised, medics running back and forth. Stinging white smoke pours through the lobby doors every time another wounded person staggers in.

  “What happened?” he asks a woman dressed all in black who’s holding the broken head of an Uncle Sam puppet like a baby.

  “The police went crazy when the protest reached the hotel where the delegates are staying.”

  “What delegates?”

  “What planet are you from, man? World Business Group delegates!”

  A troop of riot-geared policemen marches into the lobby. One of them speaks through a bullhorn: “All wounded anarchists will be escorted to a hospital!”

  There is a chorus of protest.

  “We can guarantee your safety,” the bullhorn says.

  Nobody moves. After some negotiations, it is agreed that two of the most seriously hurt will go in the ambulance waiting outside. The policemen retreat, flanking the two stretchers. As soon as they’re gone, everyone starts shouting at once. “They just attacked. Tear gas grenades, nightsticks. It’s criminal!”

  One of the medics shakes her head. “What do you expect? You people broke the windows at Maxdrip, the largest coffeehouse chain the world.”

  “Precisely,” laughs a boy with a bandage over one eye. “Maxdrip is putting coffee in the water supply.”

  The wide-screen TV in the lobby is blaring live reports from the street riots against the World Business Group. In addition to expected peaceful protests against global trade treaties, thousands of young anarchists have come from all over the world, surprising the unprepared city. When the outnumbered police reacted violently, groups of black-clad youth had smashed the windows at Maxdrips throughout downtown and had rushed the delegates’ hotel to stop them from attending their meetings. People surges! Tear gas! Reporters fall all over themselves on the scene and some of them are on the wrong end of nightsticks. The spokesman for a peaceful French group explains its goals:

  “We are here to stop the disappearance of Camembert!”

  Unbelievably, Wakefield recognizes the guy. His shop, the finest fromagerie in Paris, was smashed up by protesters in 1968. When Wakefield wandered into the place a few years later, there were bars on the windows. Is this the revenge of Camembert? The radicals of 1968 are Camembert junkies now, and new young protesters are defending it as a national product against imported cheese from America, but window smashing remains the eternal constant of protest. No plateglass window anywhere is safe from the wrath of an angry mob, and with the world becoming more and more transparent as borders vanish, products flow, local cultures dissolve, air and water refu
se to be owned …, the world is becoming glass! Maxdrip has outposts around the globe, producing rivers of caffeine consumed by the bourgeoisie of the planet. No wonder our nerves are shattered. Tanked on coffee, with a little Ecstasy on the side, the kids are smashing the windows of the Mother Ship! But something about this protest doesn’t quite make sense to Wakefield. Is American prosperity from coffee to cheese really the source of all global misery?

  On television chanting butterflies and turtles face a line of helmeted police. They’re all wet; rain keeps falling and there are odd reflections from the street puddles and drops of water on the camera lens. A butterfly waves a banner with the images of a Coke can and a computer crossed out. A gang of vampires and ghouls with blood dripping from fangs and eye sockets, representing American global corporations, is singing “Singing in the Rain.” Where have these turtles, butterflies, and vampires come from? From peaceful suburbs with a TV and a computer in every room, Wakefield imagines. Lovely places where their parents eat Camembert and croissants on redwood decks. They are the offspring of the Home of the Future. Egad! The cheesemonger is on camera again. This time he’s complaining about Mickey Mouse.

  The number of refugees in the lobby steadily decreases. There is only one Red Cross medic left after a while, and five or six pale, bandaged kids watching the news. They come to life whenever they see themselves or their friends on the screen. The tear gas is subsiding and the TV says that the situation is under control. Four hundred protesters have been arrested. The delegates are attending their meetings. Then comes the news that five hundred local sex workers have gone on a partial strike. The reporter is standing in front of The Orchid, the city’s premier strip club, interviewing the spokeswoman for the Sex Workers’ Union. “The club will be closed to delegates,” she tells him, “but we will let protesters in for free.” The rain streaking the camera lens makes it look like she’s speaking through tears.