cute.”
“One does tend to observe these things. It was our man Vinnie I take it.” He found some coffee filters in one of the cupboards.
“One does. And it was. Though he’s not my anything any more,” she said morosely. “Anyway, I’ve got a policeman on one side and an army guy on the other, and there’s the second policeman holding a gun and Vinnie kind of stumbles over to him and says ‘Knock- knock.’ And I’m squeezing my eyes closed because I’m sure Vinnie is about to become just another gory statistic. And Vinnie is asking for it. He’s leaning all over the gun guy and insisting he finish the joke. ‘No, no, you’re supposed to say ‘Who’s there?’ And the gun guy does it. Maybe because he’s some kind of sadist or something, he says in this sing-song voice ‘Quien esta alli?” And Vinnie says, ‘Jose,’ And I hear that sound, like in the movies, I hear the sound of the trigger being pulled back as the gun guy says, like he’s playing along, ‘Jose quien?’ And Vinnie starts singing the Star Spangled Banner, he goes ‘Jose can you see’ but I am not looking, I’m waiting for the gun to go off and the gun does go off, but it’s Vinnie who somehow has the gun, and he shoots the other two killers, and I did not faint and what can I say? It was love at first sight. He told me afterward he’d been watching me all evening. From the bar.” She sighed. She couldn’t help it. “So romantic.”
“Dead people aside.” He didn’t want to tell her Vinnie had been there on assignment. To hit the guys who made the hit. Things were complicated enough. The coffeemaker was burbling and steaming.
“Not at all. They follow me about. It’s in the Bible isn’t it? Your dead you have always with you?”
“Something like that. Cream?”
“Just a packet of cyanide, thanks. I should think you must be one of the most haunted people I know.”
“Didn’t use to be. I used to trust and believe that whatever I was asked to do was for the greater good.”
“And yet even back before you knew the score, back when you were being a good soldier, it ended badly. Ka-boom, right? Game over. True for you, true for me, true for the EU, true for anyone anywhere the system is in place. Only the bastards make it out in one piece. With all the marbles, mind you.”
“The New World Order ate your baby?” John grinned. Painfully.
“Beats crying over spilled weddings.”
He set a mug of coffee down in front of her. “But the truth -“
“Will set you free?” Her tone was acid.
“Can only take you so far.” John leaned against the table and ruminated. “Don’t get me wrong. We’re on the same page, pretty much. For the past two years, I’ve been here and there, in Europe mostly, watching people going about their daily lives, and everywhere I’ve been, it’s the same thing, over and over. People everywhere being ground down by one thing after another. Pretty much everybody losing - one way or another. At the same time you read and you hear - the list of billionaires is growing. These two extremes, the up and the down, with so little push back. And it just gets worse. I mean you can see it all accelerating. In Greece it is absolutely brutal. But then I think even if people had a clue, even if they all knew - what good would it do? It’s the rich against the rest and they’ve got the security and surveillance infrastructure to make it stick. As we well know.”
“But I notice you’re not wasting away in Margaritaville.”
He lifted his coffee mug in a wry toast. “Not today.”
“What about Iceland? Tunisia? Egypt?”
“Valiant efforts. But skirmishes at the periphery. Here at home, in the belly of the beast? We’ve got nothing.”
“According to the literature, humans respond to an existential threat in one of three ways,” Angela said. She took a long reflective pull of coffee. “You can try to beat it, you can join it, or you can run the hell away from it. We few, we unhappy few, people like us, have a special quandary. We have glimpsed the Leviathan. We have seen the dark shape of the deep state moving beneath the waters. We have experienced its predatory nature and cannot deny the threat. For us, there’s no going back. We wouldn’t if we could. We cannot rejoin the borg; due to nature or nurture, we are constitutionally unable. We are outcasts and conscientious objectors. We have only two choices.”
John knew the answer. “Fight or flight.”
“And here we sit. What will we do? You’re going to a certain meeting tonight. I, for my part, have decided to begin as a nun begins. I shall burn up my vanity, specifically by torching this ridiculous dress. I look at it now and I ask myself - ‘What were you thinking?’ I don’t suppose you have a match on you?”
Click-click. The sound from the kitchen doorway made them turn. There stood Jane, her trusty windproof zippo at the ready. In classic Jane fashion she had just three words to say.
“Burn, baby, burn.”.
13 Trust
The two women sized one another up - the sultry redhead, the smoldering brunette. Angela spoke first.
“The current Mrs. Livingston, I presume.”
Jane snapped the zippo shut. “The word ‘current’ has an ominous ring.”
“Sweetheart!” John stood up, trying to read Jane’s expression. He didn’t know whether to be overjoyed or terrified. “This is Vinnie’s -“
“Ex,” Angela finished archly. “Also John’s ex. How do you do?”
“I could trash a dress or two,” Jane admitted.
“I would offer to let you be my guest, but alas, my need for catharsis is acute.”
“I can relate.” Jane eyed the dress appraisingly. “That sucker should go up like a flare.”
“Like an effigy at Burning Man,” Angela predicted.
“Burning Man,” Jane appeared to savor the concept. “Now there’s a little idea.” She tossed the zippo to Angela, but John reached out a hand. Neatly intercepted it.
“Ladies, the estrogen in the room is getting a mite thick.”
“You want testosterone?” Jane obligingly brandished her gun. “I can do testosterone.”
“Objectivity. Love. Trust.” John let the words out slowly and soothingly.
“Said the man last seen kissing another woman,” Jane reminded him. “And next found schmoozing with his first wife.”
“I take it back. You light the front, I’ll light the back,” Angela offered, an instant sense of sisterhood and sympathy kindled by Jane’s words. “It’s the least I can do.”
“Not helping, Doctor,” John admonished. “Whatever happened to ‘First do no harm’?”
“I am channeling our aggression toward an inanimate object, thank you,” Angela said defensively “Not toward men in general, or you and Vinnie in particular.”
“I’m sorry, but my level of aggression has reached critical mass. Supply exceeds demand. It doesn’t want to be channeled,” Jane observed.
“Substance abuse, uncontrollable anger, difficulty maintaining a close relationship. Textbook PTSD,” Angela said to John. “Both of you. No surprise there. Passive aggressives make the best killers.”
“I am not crazy,” Jane fulminated, “I’m pissed. I am sick and tired of the bullshit people pull. I’m mad as hell and I don’t think anyone should take it any more. From top to bottom, everything is rigged and ruined and rotten to the core. Even John.
“Even Vinnie,” Angela agreed.
“That lowlife bastard,” Jane raged.
“This lowlife bastard?”
A second apparition filled the kitchen doorway. It sounded like Vinnie, looked like Vinnie in most of the standard particulars - height, weight, body type - but upon closer inspection it more nearly resembled a refugee from ‘Night of the Living Dead’. A blood-soaked bandage wrapped its head, one eye was blackened and swollen shut, it wore one shoe, and it spoke with extreme difficulty. Under a black formal dinner jacket, the shirt it wore was a ripped and bloody rag.
Fortunately for Jane, the zombie Vinnie
crumpled toward the floor, and she was spared the embarrassment of a reply. John and Angela rushed to the monster’s side. Leo walked briskly past with two brown paper grocery bags.
“Like US-Russian relations, it looks worse than it is,” he assured them. “Back in Mother Russia, they made me a medic when they drafted me. But they couldn’t make me good at it.”
“Good grief,” Angela exclaimed, examining Vinnie’s shiner. “Did you do this for me? Leo, I’m touched. But you really shouldn’t have.”
Vinnie opened his good eye and rolled his head, trying to set the record straight. “Caviar,” he croaked.
“Rosebud?” Jane suggested. She hoisted herself backward onto the table and picked up the champagne bottle. La Grande Dame by Veuve Clicquot. Not too shabby.
“It is my fault, all mine,” Leo began. “I must explain. We were early to the wedding and I noticed. There was no caviar. Champagne, many silly American finger foods - but no caviar. In Russia is a law almost - you cannot have wedding without caviar.”
“We did,” John volunteered.
“Bad luck,” Vinnie implored, struggling to sit up. John and Angela helped him to a chair as Leo unpacked the grocery bags. Orange juice, sour cream, a bag of buckwheat.
“So in Chicago I know a Russian tea room, not far, and we think we have plenty of time. So we go.”
“Ooh, bad move. That warehouse was on the East Side,” John winced. “Nice exposed brick and metro views from the inside. Bloods and Outlaws on the outside.”
“And me in my pretty black bowtie,” Vinnie said. Angela was unwinding his bandage with no-nonsense precision.
“We run into old friends,” Leo continued.
“Zetas?” Angel stopped short, staring at the gash in Vinnie’s scalp.
“Alphas, Betas,” Vinnie closed his one good eye. “At least one Chechen.”
“Me and my tattoos they left; but Vinnie they carried away.”
“Biker dudes. French Canadian,” Vinnie said. “Remember Quebec?”
“It keeps remembering me,” John replied. Jane began to hum a tune from ‘Gigi.’
That brilliant sky,
We had some rain,
Those Russian songs,
From sunny Spain.
Ah yes, I remember it well.
“A bad decision on their part. My uncle is a very sensitive man. To him, it was a form of disrespect. Particularly when he found the Chechen was moonlighting. It took a little while to track them down -” Leo explained apologetically.
“Lucky for me they wanted to make sure I got a slow painful death.” Angela dropped a furtive kiss on the head she had begun to re-bandage.
“- but minus a competitor or two, here we are. With caviar,” Leo finished, lifting the golden tins for all to see.
“So the show can go on,” Vinnie asserted. “Right here, right now.”
“The show can go upstairs to bed,” Angela corrected sternly. “Right here, right now.”
“I like where your head’s at,” Vinnie told Angela, as she and John stood him up and set him in motion.
“Hold that thought.” Angela slipped under his arm so he could use her as a crutch. Seeing that they were stable and could manage, John stepped back.
“Later,” Leo promised, “We will have wedding breakfast fit for Czar. Scrambled eggs and mimosas. Blini and beluga.”
“Sex before marriage,” Vinnie said, as they moved toward the door. “Is that still legal?”
“As long as no underage sheep are involved,” Angela assured him, with a straight face.
And then there were three. John, Jane, and Leo. The silence was deafening. The tension was overwhelming. Like a bystander in a spaghetti western, Leo looked from one to the other and back again. John opened his mouth -
And three cell phones rang.
14 Hidden Systems
Due to budget cuts, the streetlights were out in this part of the inner city, so it was lucky a waxing moon came out to play. No one lived here, and so many of the buildings were abandoned that the Anons could move unseen and en masse toward their destination. They came from every direction, a sprinkling of phosphorescent disks marking their way like luminous breadcrumbs.
They had been asked to walk in with as little noise or commotion as possible, and so they made the journey in complete silence. Well almost. At last John grew so exasperated by Jane’s frigid exterior that he leaned over and whispered.
“I’d rather you just shoot me.” Jane kept walking.
“None of this is my fault,” he insisted. Jane kept walking.
“I didn’t do anything wrong!” He yelled, in a hushed voice.
“Shhh,” Jane replied, a finger to her lips. And then she murmured the four words that every man instinctively dreads. “We need to talk.”
John stopped in his tracks, hung his head, then raised it again as if beseeching the marital gods. Leo trudged past, throwing him a look of fraternal commiseration. After a minute, John walked on, feeling indignant and ill-used, but careful to keep Jane in sight.
The building they entered was a derelict theater, one of the art deco movie palaces of the last century whose raison d'être had long since been transferred to distant suburbia with its cookie cutter cineplexes. A few Anons with glow sticks waved people toward doors and windows that had been unblocked for the occasion. John and Jane stumbled through a rear entry along a cramped hallway into what was left of a soaring auditorium that in its heyday had held 2000. All the orchestra seating had been removed, leaving the main floor bare aside from piles of rubbish and broken plaster. Through a doughnut hole in the roof where a dome used to be, a rind of moon peeked in, shedding just enough light to navigate by. The stage itself was intact and partially shrouded by velvet side curtains, tattered at the bottom so that when some current of air stirred them, they looked like ghostly fingers, stroking the floor.
The balcony had been built in tiers, so there were concrete risers to sit on and it was toward these that the attendees filed, ascending either from the auditorium or the unseen lobby. Jane climbed to the very back and stood against the wall close to one of two exits. John stationed himself on the stairs and waited for the others to get settled. Many were masked or hoodied, so it was not possible to deduce much about demographics. Whoever they were, they were perhaps two hundred strong.
As the small noises hushed to nothingness, a voice began to speak from no particular direction, but loud enough to echo a little in the empty vaulted space.
“Our time is short, our situation dire.”
Far below, at the front of the darkened stage, a shimmer of light appeared, multiplied, solidified, and grew into a man. Or, more accurately, a shining translucent hologram of a man. At that distance he looked like a latter day Jesus Christ. Or a resurrected Abbie Hoffman. With streaming dreads and a salt ‘n pepper beard.
“The Fourth World War has begun.”
A throbbing sort of music began to play on the edge of hearing and, behind the shining bearded man, another and far larger ball of light exploded into a sphere formed from a thousand crimson points connected by bright green spokes.
“The Cold War, which was the Third World War, handed victory to the owners. Since then, over the last twenty years, money and power have consolidated. One hundred and forty-seven transnational corporations - mostly banks, mostly in the US and the UK - control about ninety-five percent of the means of production. We’re talking about global domination by six thousand people, mostly men, mostly white. In addition to things, these men own politicians, generals, pulpits, and the media. They control laws, policies, institutions. The money supply. And via all these means they are waging war against the rest of us.”
Pictures of the President, Joint Chiefs, top bankers, media moguls, religious leaders, and well-known captains of industry bloomed in rapid succession, circled the sphere, then faded from view.
“They no longer
fight each other. Instead they sow fear and division and make us fight amongst ourselves.”
The sphere faded into the background as video clips of various conflicts took its place. The long sectarian wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the growing tribal war in Libya, the continuing civil war in Sudan, the vicious gang wars in El Salvador.
“Rising numbers are jobless and homeless and hungry even here, in the very heart of the empire, in the richest country the world has ever known.”
Video clips of the uprisings in Tunisia, Algeria, Eygpt, Greece, Spain, Italy appeared, followed by footage of crowded food banks, soup kitchens, homeless encampments, job lines, and eviction protests.
“Worse is coming. We have known for the last two years that they have the means to monopolize the internet.”
Major corporate logos danced in the air - Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook.
“We also know they have laid the foundations for a police state, militarizing borders and local law enforcement. Now we learn, that by manipulating wars and financial crises, they have literally stolen our common wealth, the wealth of nations, and hidden it in an archipelago of tax havens, creating what amounts to a super-financial system beyond our reach, all the while telling us that we are broke. That we cannot afford decent education or healthcare or pensions.”
A series of headlines succeeded one another - “Lie By Lie: The Iraq War Timeline,” “Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion,” “Tax Havens: Super-Rich Hiding at Least $21 Trillion.” “No Alternative to Austerity Say EU Chiefs.”
“Now, in addition, we learn that they are creating a super-legal system based on markets and trade to be run by and for themselves, which will supersede the laws of nations, annulling our rights, and essentially ending democracy as we have known it.”
Out of nowhere, the sphere with its crimson points and green spokes streaked across the stage, landing with a thunderous crash, half-buried and smoking, in the virtual floor. The half of it that remained in view magically transformed into a blue and white Earth that caught fire and was engulfed in bright blue flames.
“And all the while,” the hologram spread his hands, “the planet burns.”
“We have been told since Maggie Thatcher that there is no alternative. That there is no such thing as society and any idea of a social contract is dead.”
Pictures of the gods of neoliberalism gyrated above the blue flames, like roasting souls - Thatcher, Reagan, Friedman, Pinochet, Clinton, Blair, et al.
“That is the defining lesson the elites would have us learn. That we are helpless, hopeless, and most of all alone. But for some reason, for a million different reasons, you and I have arrived at a different conclusion. The richest among us, the 1%, have made this world, this suffering world, in their own image and according to their infinite predatory greed. But another world is possible. The question we are here to answer is how far are we, who represent the other 99%, willing to go to create that other world? How much can we do and how long can we hold out