by Lavie Tidhar
‘Anything to declare?’ The girl was pretty in her uniform. Joe wasn’t sure what to say. He wanted to declare he was here to investigate a global conspiracy of mass murder; or say, perhaps, that he was trying to understand a war no one seemed to understand, not even those who were fighting it the hardest; or to explain about the ghosts that kept flickering at the corner of his eyes when they thought he weren’t looking. He said, ‘No, nothing,’ and gave her an apologetic smile, and she waved him through.
Luggage rolling and turning in an intricate loop… a brown leather bag; a silver carry case, the kind gangsters used to carry money in movies; a beaten-up black-and-brown suitcase with peeling stickers on its wide back that said its owners had visited the Grand Kenyon, Yellowstone Park, the Natural History Museum and Graceland. Backpacks with Cyrillic address-tags. Carton boxes with Chinese characters running down the sides. An arrivals board clicking as its slats rotated: Phnom Penh, Damascus, Reykjavik, Baghdad, Kuala Lumpur, Luzon, Cairo, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Rome, Kunming: old cities and new, cities on hills and on planes, on river and seas, dots on a wide map each sending out threads of clear light that all came here, all terminated in this terminal, in this city on the edge of a continent, with threads going in all directions until a globe was filled with interlocking bands of light…
Outside the terminal he took a moment to lean against the wall and breathe, though he smelled cars more than anything else. He lit a cigarette. Above his head planes took off into the skies. The earth seemed to thrum beneath him. FDR was chrome and glass and joyful arrogance.
‘Help me,’ someone said, and Joe shuddered once and was then very still. He couldn’t tell quite when it started. He had the feeling that, even back at the airport in London, he had a sense of them. Shadows at the edge of sight, blurred silent figures, watching him, following him. Fuzzy-wuzzies. On the plane, when he came out of the toilet cubicle, in a seat that had been empty before: a young woman, only a girl really, staring up at him with mute enormous eyes — he could see the seat through her. And on the conveyor belt at the airport, amidst the luggage there were cases and bags that belonged to no one, it seemed, that kept circling indefinitely, like planes overhead which will never now be granted permission to land…
‘I can’t,’ he said. He didn’t look, didn’t want to see the speaker. He took a drag on the cigarette and went and hailed a taxi and got inside.
‘Drive,’ he said, and when the driver looked at him with a quizzical expression Joe said, ‘Just drive.’
artificial day
——
Lights and people and too-tall buildings… it was warm and dark inside the taxi, and smelled inexplicably of aniseed, covering a deeper lingering smell that was familiar. The driver glanced sideways, saw the paperback in Joe’s hands and scowled. ‘My nephew has that book,’ he said. ‘Listen to this. A bomb goes off downtown and the police arrest the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and Osama Bin Laden. They put them in an identity parade and have a witness try to point out the perpetrator. Who does she pick?’
Joe said, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Osama Bin Laden,’ the taxi driver said. ‘Because the other three don’t exist.’
He scowled harder. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. Then: ‘I told my nephew I catch him reading this shit again I’ll smack him.’
Joe just felt tired. ‘Did it work?’ he said. The driver shook his head, slowly and with great deliberation, from side to side. ‘No,’ he said.
Joe was looking, not at the open book but at the single sheet of paper he had smoothed open between the pages. It was the paper he had found in Mike Longshott’s correspondence. Like the taxi driver, he didn’t get it either.
The paper read:
Conspiracies and Crime, Murder and Mayhem, Vengeance and Valor—
For the First. Time. Ever!
Only In New York City—
A Global Gathering of Like Minded Minds:
OsamaCon !!!
Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden ??
The shadowy Vigilante, the arch-criminal mastermind, the enemy of Western Civilization?
Come and find out — if you dare!
Panels, lectures, family entertainment, dealer tables, art expo and costume competition!
An all-you-can-eat B.B.Q following the parade on Sunday!
Only $55 pre-registration, $65 at the door, The Hotel Kandahar, Lower Manhattan (does not include room price. 10% discount available for members registering early. Kids go half-price). To book dealer tables contact the organisers ( Mike Longshott Appreciation Society, Queens, New York ). Price negotiable.
Be blown away — only at the First Annual OsamaCon, coming soon—
And then the dates, hotel address and contact numbers, all crowded in at the bottom, as if shying away from the bold, mis-matched writing overhead.
‘What’s that?’ the taxi driver said.
‘That?’ Joe said. He shook his head. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, folding it closed again. ‘Can you take me to the Hotel Kandahar, please?’
‘Hotel what?’ the driver said.
Joe gave him the address. The driver shrugged. ‘You need a girl?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Everybody needs a girl,’ the driver said. Joe said, ‘I have one already…’ though he wasn’t sure he did. An image of the girl rose in his mind again, under the plane, just before it took off. I will find you, she had said. And so far she had…
‘Dope?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You need some dope? I got some Burmese stuff, make you see paradise.’
Under the aniseed, the familiar smell of opium. Joe said, ‘Just drive.’
He sat back and closed his eyes against the city they were passing through. The driver drove. Silence like a spider’s web shivered behind Joe’s eyes.
It was coming up to morning, but New York had an artificial day lit up that was all of her own.
towers reaching for the sky
——
‘I’d like a room.’
A burned-out light bulb in the ceiling fixture meant only a single light shone and the bulb was bare and hanging from its wire. A high-class dump. The man behind the high counter had the eyes of a rabbit — they moved so much it was impossible not to imagine him running from something. He looked as if he’d ran for a very long time and didn’t know how to stop. He shrugged, open palms forward, did a small, strange shudder with his shoulders. ‘I’m afraid we’re full.’
Joe put down a wad of cash. The black credit card burned a hole in his pocket. ‘But we might have something. Let me check.’
Joe put down another, thinner wedge of money. Machine-cut, printed in the US of A. Dead presidents stated up at the man in reception. ‘Tenth floor,’ the man said. The money disappeared. Perhaps he was an amateur magician.
There was a cut-out of Osama Bin Laden, life-sized, at the entrance to the hotel. A wooden table and two folding chairs and a sign that said Registration. There was no one sitting there. The man at reception followed Joe’s gaze and his eyes opened just a little wider and he said, ‘Are you here for the convention?’
‘Has it started yet?’
‘Pre-registration was today — yesterday, I should say.’ Outside, night like a giant ape had been defeated by morning’s firepower and was toppled. There was no one else in reception only there was, but Joe wasn’t willing to admit it. Not just yet. Only when he moved the shadows in the dusty corners of the room seemed to move with him, and shapes materialised only to resolve themselves into everyday objects when he focused on them. Maybe he was just tired.
He hoped so.
‘Your key,’ the man behind the reception desk said. Above his head a row of round clocks showed the time in Tokyo, Los Angeles, Kabul and Bombay as well as New York. Only New York time was frozen at 8:46. ‘When do they open?’ Joe said, jerking his thumb at the empty desk by the door.
‘A couple of hours.’
He didn’t
feel tired. He said, ‘Do you have a bar?’
‘Through there, but—’
Joe collected his key.
‘When do you come off-shift?’ he said.
The man shrugged and twitched. His pupils were dilated. ‘I don’t,’ he said.
Joe shrugged and headed for the elevator. ‘Go easy on that stuff,’ he said. The shadows followed him with dry whispers.
In the room he prepared a bath. The sound of the running water was soothing. Daylight seeped in through the window-frames. He turned off the water and went and sat down on the bed. He must have fallen asleep, because when he opened his eyes the light was much brighter and when he went to the bath the water was cold and the bubbles had gone, leaving only a film of murky perspiration on the surface of the water. He opened the windows and let in air, and the murmuring voices quieted down. He lit a cigarette and ran a fresh bath.
Outside the window, towers were reaching for the sky like Babylonian minarets. The bed had been made military-fashion, you could bounce a coin off it if that was your idea of amusement. It wasn’t Joe’s. The bed looked undisturbed. It always did, even though he must have fallen asleep on it. Sleep, for Joe, was merely an absence.
A khaki-brown blanket was folded neatly and precisely over the bed with its edges tucked into the underside of the mattress. Joe looked out of the window again. He had the feeling that outside the window there should have been hover-cars, men in trilby hats and jet packs, spider-webs of passageways spreading out of the distant tops of the towers. There should have been women in silver suits taking in a show at the tri-vids before indulging in a spot of lunch, the kind that came in three-course pills, great big subservient robots trailing behind them. Instead there was a brown man in overalls collecting rubbish with a long stick outside an adult cinema, and the cars were halted, bumper-to-bumper, beside a traffic light that seemed to be stuck permanently on red. There was a siren in the distance. There was the sound of car horns, a door slamming, someone cursing loudly in American English. Joe shut the window and put out the cigarette and stripped, taking off tie and moustache and Victor “Ricky” Laszlo.
The bath water was warm and soapy. He lay with his head resting on the chipped white coating of the bath. His toes poked out of the water like a jagged reef exposed at low tide. With his ears under the line of the water it was very quiet. He thought — I could lie like this forever. He closed his eyes. No thought, no sound, no sight, no taste, no smell, no touch. For a moment there was no one there, just the empty bath, the water cooling at a rate of zero point one five degrees a minute.
Then flavour came back: ashy taste and airplane food and the phantom-taste of coffee, and Joe blinked and rose from the water, the water sliding off his skin like a benediction.
in the pages of a book
——
There were two people, a man and a woman, seated behind the registration desk downstairs. The same man was still in reception, tired eyes looking far away. The Osama Bin Laden cut-out stared at Joe as he walked past. It could have been looking at the same nothingness the man at reception did. Joe approached the registration desk.
‘Here for the convention? Welcome, welcome.’ The man had a beard that covered his face like a mile-a-minute vine in a thick and straggly jungle. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, smiled genially, wore a name badge that said, Hi! My name is Gill. The woman wore a flowered dress and drop earrings that shook when she moved her head. Her name, according to her badge, was Vivian. ‘I would like—’ Joe cleared his throat, which felt raw and disused, ‘yes, I would like to register?’
The woman smiled and pushed a sheet of paper towards him. ‘Just fill this in, dear.’ She had a thin transatlantic accent, a hint of County England diluted with Mid-Western Américain. ‘Very glad to have you.’
‘Am I the first one?’ Joe said.
Gill looked shocked. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘There should be a good turnout.’
‘People are still arriving, you see,’ Vivian said. ‘Most people register in advance—’
‘The Mike Longshott Appreciation Society,’ Gill said, pronouncing the capitals, ‘has over thirty members.’
‘We just love the Vigilante books, don’t we, Gill,’ Vivian said. It wasn’t really a question. Gill nodded. Joe half-expected paratroopers to fall from the quivering brambles of his beard. ‘Love them,’ Gill said.
Something made Joe say, ‘Why do you think that is?’
Vivian smiled. ‘That’s a very good question,’ she said. ‘Which, I think, is covered in the first panel tomorrow morning—’
‘Eight thirty in the conference room,’ Gill said, looking down at what must have been a schedule. ‘But, if you ask me—’Vivian said, as if Gill had never spoken, and smiled and shook her head. ‘It’s escapism.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Gill said, and Vivian said, with a wave of her hand that may have been aimed at Gill, may have been aimed elsewhere, ‘Gill takes it all very seriously. He’s an amateur historian—’
‘It’s just, don’t you think—’ Gill said, then stopped, then smiled and shrugged — Joe decided the two had to be married — ‘the question of what if. Right? What if the Cairo Conference of 1921 went ahead as planned, with Churchill and T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell dividing up the Middle East for the British? What if they chose a Hashemite king to rule Iraq, and would that have led to a revolution in the nineteen fifties? Or, what if the French war in Indochina somehow led to American involvement in Vietnam? Or if the British held on to their colonies in Africa after the Second World War? You see—’ he was in full steam now, his eyes shining like the headlamps of a speeding engine — ‘the Vigilante series is full of this sort of thing. A series of simple decisions made in hotel rooms and offices that led to a completely different world. And also—’
‘And also they’re just good escapist fun,’ Vivian said firmly, and Gill subsided beside her, giving an apologetic smile. ‘To read about these horrible things and know they never happened, and when you’re finished you can put down the book and take a deep breath and get on with your life. To know it’s fiction—’
‘Pulp fiction,’ Gill said, and the two of them smiled at each other, ‘and that’s where all these terrible things should stay—’
‘In the pages of a book.’
‘And aren’t we lucky that they are? That’d be sixty-five dollars.’
Joe handed over the completed form, fished cash out of his pocket. Vivian said, ‘And here’s your name tag.’ Joe pinned it to his chest. Hi! I’m Joe.
‘Will Mike Longshott be here?’ he said. Vivian sighed and shook her head. ‘He is so awfully reclusive,’ she said, lowering her voice as if revealing a great secret. ‘We tried to write to him, didn’t we, Gill—’
‘We did.’
‘But he never answers.’
‘Never answers.’
‘I see,’ Joe said. Behind him, he noticed to his surprise, a small queue had formed. ‘Well, thank you again—’
‘Thank you,’ they both said. Their eyes were already on the next registrant. Joe nodded, once, and went in search of coffee.
what ifs
——
Operation Northwoods did not, officially, exist. The proposal was submitted by L.L. Lemnitzer, then chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, to his colleague the Secretary of Defence.
The subject: Justification for US military intervention in Cuba. The date: 13 March, 1962. The objective: provide a brief but precise description of pretexts for military involvement on the island.
The Annex to Appendix to Enclosure A set out the plan in more detail.
* * *
A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.
a. Incidents to establish a credible attack.
1) Start rumours (many). Use clandestine radio.
2) Land friendly Cubans in uniform “over-the-fence” to stage attack on ba
se.
3) Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.
4) Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans)
5) Blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires.
6) Burn aircraft on airbase (sabotage).
7) Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base.
8) Capture assault teams approaching from the sea.
9) Capture militia group which storms the base.
10) Sabotage ship in harbour; large fires — naphthalene.
11) Sink ship in harbour entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims.
b. United States would respond by executing offensive operations to secure water and power supplies, destroying artillery and mortar emplacements which threaten the base.
c. Commence large scale United States military operations.
3 A. “Remember the Maine” incident could be arranged in several forms:
a. We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.
b. We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters… the US could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to “evacuate” remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.
4. We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement, also would be helpful.
