End Time

by G. A. Matiasz

  “How’s it feel, your first working day without Sumner looking over your shoulder,” Marcus greeted Brian.

  “He’s gone for the moment, but his Operation Anvil is still in effect,” Sampson’s voice seemed to shrug on the line, “You still can’t take a step without bumping into a special agent. And I don’t doubt he’s glib enough to convince his superiors he’s really doing a good job.”

  “If killing street people can be ignored. So, what’s up?”

  “Some not so good news I’m afraid. Kenny Wisdom wrote a letter to the box and posted it Sunday, my MCC source says. But the car registered to Eugene Wisdom, it was found abandoned, yesterday evening, in LA.”

  “Fingerprinted yet?” Marcus asked.

  “Yes. Most recent set, driver’s side, are not Peregrine’s. But his are there. He could have been a passenger.”

  “And he also might have loaned his car to someone, now that we’re closing in,” Marcus said, “No, he’s still in the Bay Area. I feel it, Brian. Strongly.”

  “All right,” the Captain sounded rueful, “I know better than to argue with your hunches by now. But I can’t guarantee you that parking space for more than a week.”

  “Thanks for that,” the detective smiled, wearily, to no one, “When’s the funeral?”

  “Saturday. Alabaster. How’d his girlfriend take it?”

  “Badly. She asked Gwen to stay with her the last two nights. Did that dacoit turn up Sulawesi?”

  “She remains an unidentified, though I’d stake my job she’s Sulawesi. Her rig was something special. When Alabaster PD finally got her into the county morgue and her outfit into SF’s crime labs, both were in the process of decaying beyond recovery. Apparently, the instant she died, her rig broadcast a code back to her employers, and they started both to self-destruct. Mineral acids for the hardware and corrosive biotoxins for the body, injected from her rig. The powers behind that thug are clever. How are you holding up?”

  “Well enough,” Marcus said, “Obsessed with catching this fucker, but aside from that I’m managing. Joe was a good man. But you knew that to recommend I work with him.”

  “Yes, I did,” Sampson sighed, “Doing police work, you start taking for granted all the violence; punks on a spree gunning down cops, drug stings gone wrong and bloody, folks going psycho, taking hostages and wasting a policeman or two, all of that grief. In the morning, you sometimes see in your fellow officers the chances of them dying in the line of duty that day. Sometimes you see those chances in your own face in the mirror when you wake up. But when it’s someone you inspired to go into police work. Someone you encouraged and coached and goaded to become a cop, until he did. I’ve felt worse only once before. When my own son, Aaron, died in infantry action in southern Mexico. Need me to do anything for you while you’re on stake out?”

  “You’ve done enough,” Marcus said, truly grateful. “I’m on my way in to see the postmaster to make arrangements for some inside notification. If the PO receives a change of address by mail and such.”

  “Feel free to drop my name,” Brian signed off.

  The aged detective was ready for his retirement, once Peregrine was safely jailed. Every ache, break, muscle and bone told him his age in no uncertain terms as he sat in his car in the rain. Unlike the Captain, the detective’s line of work rarely exposed him to the Grim Reaper’s constant, daily presence. Not that he could ever get used to having a friend, his partner on a case, fried away in front of him. He called his answering machine back in Alabaster, tapped in his code, and found one message waiting.

  “Mark, Neal here. I’ve bought us some time. Got that Sumner character recalled to DC on killing that street bum. Sicked some of my friends in Congress on him. So, how are things going?”

  “Shit,” Marcus hung up. He groaned, opened his door again and snapped open the umbrella before stepping out to his day’s work.

  ***

  Greg showered off the illuminated night’s harrowing sleep in the Center’s cold bathroom. Daylight bled out of the rain. The Center was quiet. He scavenged newspapers to cover himself on his walk to the bus stop. The New Afrika arm band was now folded in his jacket pocket, alongside the halved, hollow grenade. The bus took him to the out-skirts of New Afrika, near Telegraph and West MacArthur, and Greg walked past the still extant but now deserted barricades to the open MacArthur BART station. Walked out of a dream. Someone had spray-painted “New Afrika Lives!” on one of the BART station walls.

  He could not see either the sliced Pleiades, burnt Bay Bridge, or blasted Transamerica Pyramid in the rain as he took various means of public transport to reach Alabaster in time for Humanities. It had stopped raining and the overcast cracked as he hurried between surreal sculpture to dash through the class door. He felt like an alien, the proverbial stranger in a strange land. But he forced himself to sit quietly through the entire class, even though he did not have a clue. The class dynamics—those who asked questions or responded to the professor’s questions—were fast cementing in this, the beginning of the semester’s third week. The outsider, Greg managed to study these as much as the cascade of words showered over him from professor Holmes.

  “Historians are often history’s worst enemy. History is best understood as large scale pattern. As metaphor. As a tapestry. The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the Norman Conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066 with courtly splendor, martial glory and stylized heroism. The historian too often studies history thread by thread and loses or muddies the greater pattern. When the historian examines history down to its very weave, invariably the pattern of the whole disappears. A gold thread here, a green thread there, a blue and yellow thread intertwined in yet another place; in picking these apart as is the historian’s principal methodology, the pattern of the whole is inevitably reduced to a mass of frayed, virtually random yarn out of which the historian steps in triumph.

  “What the historian does not recognize is that there are often greater truths than mere facts will allow. A black doctor, a US physician named Charles Richard Drew, was a medical researcher who founded the American Red Cross blood bank. He lived during the first half of the 20th century and the story goes that, after having a terrible automobile accident, Drew was denied access to a nearby segregated, ‘whites only’ hospital and so died of loss of blood. It turns out that, in fact, it never happened that way. Yet the story is expressive of the truth; that truth being the nature of American race relations, particularly in the south at the time.

  “Another example is the ‘apocalypse fever’ that is supposed to have swept Medieval Europe at the turn of the first millennium AD. Supposedly, heresies and blasphemies were rife. People flocked to seaports en mass, awaiting the ships that were to take them to the Promised Land and a New Jerusalem. Riot and revolt ensued. And it is neatly encapsulated by the vision of impending turn-of-the-millennium apocalypse, the round figure of a thousand years inspiring the fever. When historians got a hold of this metaphor, of course they systematically debunked it. The first three hundred years of Christian history is solidly millenarian, until Christianity became a state-sponsored, conquering faith. Messianic, apocalyptic and millenarian movements returned when feudalism stabilized, and can be found as early as the 900’s and as late as the 1300’s. Depending upon the interpretation, Catholic cenobitic monasticism and the Crusades are either the high point of this apocalyptic period, or else Church efforts to redirect popular chilliastic sentiments. And finally, because the system for dating at the time was based on roman numerals, the year 1000 would have been indicated as an M, not a very inspiring notation lending to end-of-the-world movements. In seeking to discredit the myth of turn-of-the-century millenarian ‘apocalypse fever,’ historians fail to grasp the archetypal truth within the myth. In so broadening the span of pre-Reformation Christianity’s chilliastic hysteria, they in fact arrive at the truth without realizing it; that perhaps apocalyptic millenarianism is an essential feature of the Christian religion.

  “In turn, the vast and gro
wing affluence of the upper classes in the High Middle Ages is key to how Christian millenarianism and its limitations were transcended by feudal Europe’s lower classes. The indulgence and decadence of the aristocracy, and the corruption and whoring of the clergy, may have fueled a desire among the lower classes for judgment and condemnation, feeding into apocalyptic feelings for Final Judgment. But also the wealth and surplus which prompts many a historian to postulate as to why Europe never ‘took off’ into capitalism and industrialism in the 12th and 13th centuries, also permitted the lower classes of Medieval Europe to imagine a land of plenty, a Land of Cockayne where amidst plenty, no one need work. This is nothing less than a vision of the Garden of Eden, a genuine Utopia.”

  Greg felt as if he had come through a revelatory experience, one that was also a sudden beginning for him. People had died to keep a vision called New Afrika alive. It had been more than a vision for so brief a time, four days and the first of those simply the takeover, before being returned to the status of a vision once more. What was he doing sitting in a comfortable chair, in a comfortable classroom, listening to a boring professor lecturing on something irrelevant to the last thirty six hours or so of his fife.

  He found Larry in the Redwood Eatery after class.

  “First off,” Greg dropped his books onto his friend’s table, steaming. “Why are you telling Smoke about me and the riemanium.”

  “Whoa,” Larry said, glancing about, “All I told him was that we’d had contact with Peregrine, who had the riemanium.”

  “And this bullshit about the Solidarity Brigade talking to the media,” Greg hissed, continuing to vent his outrage without thinking.

  “You didn’t show up at the meeting. I was fucking outvoted!” Larry said, trying not to be too loud. “George, David, Beth, Lori; they outvoted me.”

  “And this shit about me having veto power...”

  “I couldn’t enforce it. They said the statement wasn’t a departure from the last, only an extension. And besides, David said you agreed to have the meeting yesterday at 10. We tried calling around to get a hold of you, but you were not around.”

  “I was in Oakland, damnit,” Greg hit the table top with his fist, “And we had a deal. If I don’t approve of it, it doesn’t go through.”

  “That’s right,” Larry said, “But what could I do? Tell them you’re the one with the riemanium, so anything they want to do is null and void? Secrecy was also a part of the deal. Jesus, no one knew you were in Oakland.”

  “Fuck,” Greg knuckled his hands into his cheeks, “They didn’t need to link Oakland in with the nuclear thing. Folks in Oakland were doing just fine on their own. They wanted to stand on their own. It was their revolution. Who knows, maybe making the riemanium link pushed the New Afrika Coalition into making their compromise.”

  “Check with anybody,” Larry waved his hand, “I voted to wait until you could be consulted. So, you were in Oakland?”

  “Alright,” Greg straightened with his internal decision, “Tell everybody that, until further notice, the Solidarity Brigade is on hold. Tell them Peregrine contacted us and is rethinking us fronting this deal. And tell them its because of Oakland. I’ve got to think this bomb thing through again.”

  “Absolutely,” Larry nodded. Greg could see the desire on his friend’s face to hear about Oakland, but he did not have the time, nor the inclination to regale Larry with his stories. From the Eatery, he headed for the library.

  Quite a few people were rethinking things, thanks to Oakland. And already, the question of “who lost New Afrika” was stoking anger in Oakland and sectarianism on the Left. Within the Coalition, the Nation of Islam and the revolutionary Black nationalist Left criticized the deal cut, castigating the Coalition for giving Commander Malcolm Brown too much deference and power. They had already invited famous Moslem businessman, philanthropist, author, world traveler, and often, unofficial liaison with the United Nations General Secretary, Hamran Mossoud, to visit Oakland. It was rumored that he arrived at SF International that evening. Uglier rumors persisted that, during the insurrection, members of the Afrikan Peoples Revolutionary Party and the New Afrikan Peoples Movement had engaged each other in private warfare, trying to assassinate each other’s leadership.

  The gang alliance remained volatile. They claimed a willingness to die for New Afrika, to fight the final battle and to fall in battle if necessary to keep New Afrika free. The Panther cure had worked on many of them, with a vengeance. They called the Coalition a bunch of old men unwilling to take the risks needed for their own freedom. For their part, the Black Unity Front, the Black Panthers, the African American GI Organizing Project, et al, claimed that tremendous, behind-the-scenes pressure had been exerted upon the Coalition by Commander Powell and the Congressional Black Caucus to negotiate a deal. Malcolm Powell Brown was not saying anything, at the moment. Greg systematically pursued the sources and references he needed to do his homework through the Library virtual halls, even as Black nationalism thrashed out its divisions and splits. He felt as if he were digging away at a mountain with a teaspoon, so great was the work he needed to do. Yet he kept at it while the Left continued its blood frenzy.

  Outside of the African American community, on the mostly white Left, not much creative thinking and a lot of stereotyped blaming was in progress. Leninists pointed out the “petty bourgeois nature” of the Coalition’s leadership. Anti-statist communists and revolutionary socialists claimed that the Coalition had substituted itself in power for the “organized masses.” Social democrats bewailed the lack of “real democracy” after the first and only popular assembly called by the Coalition. Anarchists disdained the Coalition’s “statist structure and aspirations,” and all except the Leninists criticized the prominent role port and subsequent demise.

  The house and block councils, the gang alliance, the workers’ councils formed in the city’s services, abandoned industries and expropriated businesses; these now defunct examples of popular self-organization the anarchists, revolutionary socialists and anti-statist communists praised, while castigating the rest of the Left for seeing revolutionary or democratic leadership as a panacea. But while the revolutionary socialists and anti-statist communists pushed for a dual role for spontaneous mass action with militant revolutionary leadership, the anarchists touted only the benefits of spontaneous, autonomous, popular action. So the two sides called each other names over the difference.

  Social democrats held up the example of the Coalition’s first popular assembly, and cited the failing of New Afrika to immediately elect a true Constituent Assembly as its principle mistake. They took the rest of the Left to task for not believing in “true democracy.”

  Leninists, aside from disagreeing amongst themselves over the National Question, the Liberation Forces Question, the Lumpenproletarian Gang Question, and a half dozen more catechisms, universally praised the early, radical measures of the Coalition. Communalizing community resources and supplies, coordinating the organization of communal social services and defenses, and galvanizing a national identity; these things the Leninists commended while they lashed the “ultra-Left” for ultra-democracy, voluntarism and adventurism. In particular, they excoriated the anarchistic tendency to claim that popular self-activity and self-organization could have carried a revolution, any revolution, through on sheer spontaneity and gang machismo alone. The socialists were faulted for their timidity, their willingness to immediately tame a revolutionary moment to parliamentary procedure out of a fear of revolution itself, and of being too willing to subsume a Leftist agenda by supporting the liberal Black Democratic Party hacks who ultimately negotiated New Afrika out of existence.

  Greg drove home through a miscreant night, the tired moon casting shadows of lost utopias across the road. All the tired old Leftist debates emerged. The same old historic divisions flourished. Mutations occurred, but nothing radical emerged. Democratic socialists and social democrats, De Leonists, unreconstructed Leninists, Stalinists, Maoists and Trots
kyists, syndicalists, libertarian communists, feminists, pacifists, anarchists in all their idiosyncratic variety, situationists and post-situationists, autonomists, greens, genuine nihilists, nationalists, anti-imperialists; the list was endless, as were the debates. None could face up to the criticism from the African American community that black folks had not seen them—white radicals of any stripe—on Oakland’s front lines in any great numbers during New Afrika’s four short days of glory. Yet the mostly white Left continued to presume that they could analyze New Afrika’s faults and failings.

  Insurrectionary Oakland, as New Afrika, if anything accentuated all the old contradictions and divisions in the Black community, on the white Left and between the two. All of this while National Guard units took up positions, unchallenged, throughout the city to escort the police and sheriffs back to substitute quarters near their gutted stations and substations. All of this while the LA NLG made available copies of stolen Oakland PD and Alameda County Sheriffs Department documents detailing joint Red Squad activities against Black and nationalist movements in Oakland. An internal Sheriffs memo from the top instructed the Department’s Red Squad to single out the Young Afrikan Lords for special attention, dated three months before the assassination. Steven McCaffrey’s resignation as head of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department had been accepted by the Board of Supervisors.

  Greg gleaned this much from NPR while working on his lathe, finishing the custom engine block order. He had responded to his father’s fax that Andre would be delayed until late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, was everything all right. He was concentrating on his craftsmanship when the familiar voice of a NLG attorney, Garcia Oliver, announcing the document coupe came over “All Things Considered.” So, that had been the Latino man, his intended passenger out of Oakland. The recycling run had gone off without a hitch. Greg briefly wondered where Smoke was as he sluiced through hard, polished steel with emerald light bits. He followed a computer generated grid hologrammed about the hunk of metal locked in rotation. Finished with another part, he paused to wipe his forehead, sip a soft drink, and dial to KPFA for a snatch of the nightly news.