by Mark Doten
Would that be such a bad thing?
Get me a trilobite, and set one aside for Ivanka, I’m sure she’s on her way.
If I have to die, shouldn’t everyone? They buried them in the tombs with the kings and emperors of old, but they didn’t bury everyone.
We’re going to bury everyone, the gold, all of that and everyone.
But who says I even have to die.
Me and death, me and dying, I’m really not sure, it doesn’t sound right.
Ronny Jackson is a doctor, he is actually the doctor that gave me my physical. And he said that I am in great shape. And the Democrats, liberals, deep state, they were very upset to hear that.
They were thinking—maybe—that I’ll die. I know some were hoping that.
But why should I die? I created maybe the greatest brand. I was successful at everything I ever did and then I run for president, first time—first time, not three times, not six times. I ran for president first time and lo and behold, I win. And then people say oh, is he a smart person? I’m smarter than all of them put together, but they can’t admit it. They think I’m not smart? And they think he’s someone who’s going to die someday? They had a bad year.
You’ve all been so incredible in this. In the beautiful statements you’ve made about the job we’re doing. Everyone, all across this country, united, making beautiful statements about the job we’re doing. I’m here, aren’t I? You put me here. What a beautiful thing, what a very beautiful thing, and everything I’ve given you to see.
So let’s do it.
Let’s just do it.
I have talked to the generals and the generals who are with us have given me some really, really wonderful codes to work with, and the codes are beautiful, just beautiful. Reach through the sheetrock to the gold. I am not going to let anything happen here. We’ll find our families and we’ll save our families if our families can be saved. So, the first events were small little events, and with some of the others, they’re still gathering the data, and we’ll know soon, but now’s the time to act. I’m landing now, and here are the codes. Ivanka, I’d like you here when we do the next response. It is contained but we need more response, and then we’ll go up to the Mar-a-Lago living room with its thousand-wing gold-leaf ceiling. These are the codes. I can see Mar-a-Lago now, how it’s all gold. Everything they are saying is that it is contained, and they are saying they really love our response, they’re all saying it’s gold, but the gloves are coming off. I’ve been nice, but I don’t have to be so nice anymore, we can’t listen to the babies anymore, all the little crying babies, waah waaaaah. I’m taking the gloves off, right? Yes? Take the gloves off. Taking the gloves off. The generals are saying, the ones who are any smart at all, they look around and say, Look at all this gold, all this gold you’ve made, let’s take the gloves off. They’re saying we won’t be able to survive up there in the living room, but they don’t know us, do they? The thousand-wing ceiling, and my fingers, they’re gold. Yes? Here are the codes. Can you see those on camera? Here’s all of the codes. Guys, let’s go all in. We’re doing the big one. The response we did this afternoon, I’m a real estate guy, I build things, I built real estate and I built a family and built so many terrific buildings, some of the very best buildings, and I want to tell you, the response we did was the most beautiful thing I think I’ve ever built, bones flecked in gold and wrapped up in all kinds of slashing golden light. But this will be ten times bigger. I had boys and girls, I lose track sometimes. It will be ten hundred times bigger. Sending everything we’ve got, everything, every last thing. They’ll all be here. Sure they will be. All my boys and girls. And what a phenomenal thing to see. And believe me, we’ve got much, much more like that, now that the gloves are coming off, the gold that’s coming is so much more than all the gold that’s been in all the worlds that have been. So I think in terms of my response what you’ll see is we’re doing very, very well, that that one was one of the best, did you even see that, the response we did? We’ll build things in gold and we’ll build things in bones. The codes, you’ve all seen the codes? And the next one, it’s going to fill us up, Ivanka, honey, fuck the babies, run the codes, it’ll be gold all up through everything, the best ever.
After the events at the Birdcrash compound, the relaunch of the New York Times was halted, and Galloway was moved from Modesto to a military base in Northern California.
The general in charge of the Office of Communication Oversight told Galloway not to worry, the magazine launch would still happen, most likely on the eighteen-month anniversary.
Galloway said that the pieces were keyed to the first anniversary—they wouldn’t work later.
The general said, Now Tom, that’s not true. The pieces are mostly evergreen.
Two years, the general said, could even be fine, though he didn’t think that sort of delay would be necessary. But the thing was, Rachel, for the moment, she had to be their priority. Her health, her recovery. She was in a coma, yes, but there was hope, unquestionably. And her investigation had unearthed a lot—wonderfully, but also … there is a shadow on it, he told Galloway. A shadow on the whole launch of the magazine, to those watching from above. Given the whole business with Birdcrash et cetera. Some very fruitful, very interesting things. But complications of this magnitude, they call for a period of reassessment. And, the general added, though he couldn’t go into details here—there’s trouble in the provinces.
Galloway said, I don’t need to know anything about that.
Tom! You make this sound like some kind of trap. I’m telling you, I think we could partner on this stuff, I’ve grown to like you quite a bit, and telling this story the right way, that’s going to be key. That will be the anchor piece in the magazine. Keep the other light pieces, of course, but we’re at a critical time. There’s, ah, unrest out there, and we’ve been … a little scanty with the details and I understand why people are getting tired of that. If we get this story right—and it has to be done in the right way—it’s a story about a certain incompetence in the past, but things now are different. Things are in hand, experts are hard at work. Obviously, we’ve been going with the foreign powers thing, that they were the ones who did the internet attack, and I think we stick with that story. The evidence supports it, in all honesty. Sebastian, you know, he was from the Philippines. And there’s a China link, and I’m sure Korea once we sort it all out. The Aviary might have been a handful of people, it might have been a hundred. It was decentralized, but they certainly got it together and delivered in the clutch. So foreign powers is still the thing, but also, the domestic enemy. We can’t just have a whole new story, we need to add on to the one we already have. The enemy without and the traitor within—that’s our story.
That’s a good story, Galloway said.
Yes, I think so. We’ve found all kinds of really wonderful piquant details. There are notebooks, Birdcrash had these notebooks. He was involved in a massive cryptocurrency heist, he had a crazy idea about an internet made out of birds. Do you know where his name came from?
Galloway said that he didn’t.
There was a cassette—it was released by a little record label in Oregon. It was called Birdcrash, and apparently he was quite obsessed with it: it had resisted the internet, that was his idea, you see, the music wasn’t on any streaming site, it was this analog artifact from the late ’80s. Only a few hundred copies ever made, a sort of amateur basement music, and it was this great music, he thought, that had somehow resisted the totalizing power of the internet. Sort of a fun peg, isn’t it? You use it if you want to. Your call, of course. I’m also going to get you some pages from de Rosales’s novel. I’ll admit I can see why it wasn’t a bestseller. There’s so little actual story. That’s what I like about you, Tom. You can tell a story. I’ll have the lyrics transcribed.
Galloway’s job was to spend the day at Rachel’s side, reading to her, making a familiar voice heard. His phone and network access were suspended. The general gave him access to a s
mall library beside his office.
Galloway pulled detective novels, a humor book by David Sedaris, a volume of Chekhov plays.
One afternoon, the general called Galloway into the office. He maneuvered Galloway onto a couch, unzipped his pants, and began to suck him. It was unpleasant, seeing the general’s head attaching itself to his own body this way, a head jerking in rhythmic little lunges as though it were dead flesh wired up and stimulated by a series of electrical pulses. Galloway tried to push the head away, but the general’s hands were on his own, lowering them back to his side. Galloway had shot before he could really process what was happening. The general told him to zip up and then handed him a few pages from The Subversive, “Notes for a Philosophy of Time,” along with screenshots from a subtitle site for Vanya on 42nd Street. Try reading her these, the general said, holding the door open. Little blasts from her past. Maybe something will spark her brain, get the engine humming again. Off you go now, Tom. We all have our jobs.
The general closed the door. Galloway rolled the pages into a tight tube. He thought of the thousands of blowjobs he’d received throughout his life—not the individual acts, but the notion of it, that he had received thousands of blowjobs in that other world, that other lifetime. That this unpleasant thing was quite possibly the last one … he felt a scream of rage and indignation catch in this throat.
On This Day.
Today in History.
List of historical anniversaries.
Even before the internet, the greeting card industry liked it, the news liked it, less the acquisition of knowledge than the acquisition of a feeling, perennial information parceled out day to day, each day like unwrapping a new gift, little nuggets of the past, some abstracted but utilitarian sense that one had learned, that one had done one’s part for history.
As Galloway read to Rachel he would feel himself enter something near a trance. He would rather have been back in Modesto putting together the magazine, but he was here, and that life in Modesto felt distant, off in the fog, and also something terrible, something he didn’t like thinking about, now that it was past.
November 8, January 27, January 29, December 13, October 29, February 28, November 8, June 12.
Moctezuma welcomes Cortés to the island city of Tenochtitlan; three astronauts burn up on a Cape Kennedy launchpad; Anton Chekhov is born; Ella Baker is born and dies; ARPANET is deployed; Oscar Wilde is called a posing Somdomite; Donald Trump is elected president; the first Tupperware party.
June 24, June 24, June 24.
Miguel López de Legazpi founds Manila, the capital of the Republic of the Philippines; Samuel de Champlain discovers the mouth of the Saint John River, site of Reversing Falls; Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, kicks the bucket, and a subspecies that had numbered more than a million individuals throughout its time on the planet (but less than ten million, according to estimates) is at last released to extinction.
She was small, hardly more than five feet, and she seemed insubstantial under the blanket, tubes strapped to her mouth, smaller ones on her hand, her hair damp and stringy on the pillow, a network of blue veins visible at her forehead beneath her thin pale skin. It was cruel to try to bring her back into whatever the world was now. He stared at the machines, the IV, from time to time, and thought about it: an air bubble in the IV. Or turn off the respirator.
He would take a break from reading and think, holding her hand, concentrating as hard as he could, Die now, you can die. A sense of how ridiculous the idea was would soon overtake him—the idea that he could somehow beam it into her brain by thinking hard enough—and he would sit back, ashamed and tired.
The news about what was happening outside of the territory controlled by the government, to the extent that it reached him—conversations in passing, alerts through the PA system, elliptical words from the general after their encounters—was increasingly bleak. Several containment zones had been captured. On both sides, massacres, wholesale slaughter.
Galloway increasingly had the feeling that he was part of some terrible machine, and yet in another part of himself he felt that none of it mattered, that they were all just ghosts going through certain motions of a strange life long extinct. But yet another part of him would think that no, this moment would open out to a new future, that his work on the magazine would resume and give his life meaning, and offer meaning and hope to other survivors, even as so many parts of him wanted to die.
Galloway’s meals were brought on a plastic tray, sometimes in a bag, or on a paper plate—there was no constancy there. He tried not to think too much about the food. On a good day lunch might be saltine crackers and sardines and a candy bar. On other days, it was a nutriment mush. A good dinner—one with the general in his office—was some sort of pork in a brown sauce, something like Chinese. Or breakfast for dinner, pancakes with corn syrup and powdered eggs. Every day he read to Rachel, though her condition didn’t change, the blue veins in her temple seemed to get bluer and more prominent—when he asked a nurse if that was a good sign, she gave him a look that was annoyed and pitying. Weeks went by.
On This Day.
List of historical anniversaries.
To the roughly 20 million whose birthday fell on any given day of the year, the information might be of interest.
To the historically inclined, to the bored, to the superstitious, to those with a mind for conspiracy, or at least for patterns, it might be of interest.
Go back to the liturgical calendar, the saints’ days, for instance go back to Saints Crispin and Crispinian, possibly brothers, possibly twins, beheaded October 25, in either 285 or 286. Then a thousand-year-plus jump to October 25, 1415, the battle of Agincourt.
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
It was double now. The beheadings, the battle of Agincourt, they were noted and bound together.
From this day to the ending of the world.
This day not in fact the day of the battle, but the one on which Shakespeare wrote it down, the speech—over decades and centuries—reproduced, passed on, producing variants, errata, moving into and out of hundreds of languages, thousands of these translations, a global efflorescence that would make it one of the few relatively ineradicable texts from its century.
We few, we happy few.
Many things would thenceforth be noted and bound together, who was born, who died, what popes and treaties, what Hollywood prizes and nuclear tests, the centuries after Shakespeare were a time of noting and binding together.
First she blinked, then she was moving her hand.
They took her in for a surgery, a tracheotomy, she was having a persistent infection in her upper throat.
They brought her back groggy, barely responsive, but out of the coma. She did not speak, or seem to register his presence. He was to hold a cup to her lips and give her little sips of apple juice. He read to her from Sedaris and the lyrics and Chekhov and de Rosales.
Sedaris: I think about death all the time, but only in a romantic, self-serving way, beginning, most often, with my tragic illness and ending with my funeral.
Birdcrash cassette: This town will follow you around / up and down the side streets alleyways and back around / front stairs back stairs it’ll be there / and when you’ve finally forgotten someone tells you they care where you are / and it’s not just your name it’s your heart you surrender in this town …
De Rosales: It is hard for us, as human animals, to imagine the death of Lonesome George, to think that the species only ever had a million or even ten million and then went extinct.
Chekhov: Not “till we meet again,” but goodbye. We won’t see each other ever again.
Birdcrash cassette: You know I hate you I love you this town.
De Rosales: Lonesome George was found in the Galápagos National Park by Fausto Llerena, his f
orty-year caretaker, who later told the environmental news website Mongabay, I feel like I’ve lost a best friend, there is a void and there is sorrow, especially when I see the photos, in my heart I’m not convinced he’s dead.
Galloway added, improvising, It is hard for us to imagine the hundred billion–plus humans who have lived on this planet. The seven billion–plus humans alive on 1/28, and the one billion left a week later, with their stupid gold eyes.
Galloway thought about the general. He thought about the juice moving through Rachel, all the way through and out into the bag under the bed. He thought that was good, if the juice would do that, it was good, it meant her system was coming back online. And she did take a sip every now and then when he put straw to lips. After a while, he went to the general’s office.
Three hundred sixty-six days of the year, and for each thousands of pages, a branching, evolving set, cut and pasted, intercut, reposted, some dormant for a decade or more, some lost (404 error) in the proliferation and flow.
No real center to the calendar, to the days: all 366 in a sense the same. A steady distribution of oddities and epoch makers.
Slap up some ads, farm the content. Like song lyrics, easy to steal. But here there were no rights holders sending out takedown notices. The facts, the dates, they were there, they were out there. What would it mean to sue a site that had reposted your content verbatim, when you had lifted the same yourself?
That the pages for February 29 looked more or less the same as the rest says something about the fractal or bottomless nature of history.
Each day casts its net, draws forth its haul.
Today in history.
No center, no bottom.
Not until time itself seems to be ending.
When he wasn’t reading to her, Galloway told her about his plans for the magazine—the number of pages in the first issue, how long until they got back to the old size. When they could start selling ads again. Nutriment mush, that’s what they needed, to get the nutriment mush people on the phone, sell them on the inner front page, the back page, a spread in the middle, for nutriment mush.
