taught to you, but you chose not to listen. How much longer must we wait, TUSK?”
"Preferably until Voice of Conscience itself self-analyzes; Will without Reason; Action without Intent; I had been there, and here, all is one.”
"But now record what really happened.”
It’s possible that what really should be recorded is ERI/COPENHAGEN, but one thinks attention has moved on now; those space cadets from year one have been recorded for posterity, and though TUSK gave face deliberately to QUARTERBACK at the very very end and JOHANN explained how he did in theoretical terms, really, what mattered was the millions and millions and not the few; if that big catastrophe had blown through this text, right exactly at the middle, this was coincidence and not Jungian synchronicity; it was true in the end some were grasping at straws, hoping beyond reason to provide a full and honest accounting of things but only succeeding in muddling things all the more. Korea and Japan grew closer together; they had to. But in truth they remained independent entities, even if Japan continued to tear holes in the fabric of reality (as did twenty other countries), and while anybody looking through those holes would see stars, that by itself was no reason to fear future outcomes, the world that would result, infinite supplies of cheap cheap energy. TUSK’s friend returned the car in good shape; he recontracted and got good terms; he got his groove back, he lost ten kilos. The complete destruction of the rest of the world was microcosmed into a single street fight in El-alabai City, but your team or mine, the elites or bulge section, the heavily equipped or single snipers of the world, all were pulled into the maelstrom without hope for future redemption. Everybody was at war.
"Where did you go, the first week before the first week.”
"Russia; I was called into action on a private contract, the study of a single region’s separatist movement that was just a statistical blip in an election campaign. You would approve; you said it was all the numbers rather than individuals.”
"Was anything discovered?”
"Traces of a prior inhabitation, but nothing too offensive or requiring further attention. Here in one valley they made carpets this way; there in the next, they made it that way. Henceforth, war would be required.”
"But otherwise the Russians remained calm, collected?”
"More educated, more elite than ever. VICTORY was always pro-Western; after contact with me, they were cool, they continued holding their training camps; many went on to Masters’ or PhDs, those there was always this sexual undercurrent between me and the girls.”
"Quite pretty.”
"Of course. The most beautiful in the world for some briefest of intervals.”
"And educated, too.”
"And highly educated.”
The Iceland volcano erupted, shutting down air traffic over Europe for weeks. Several huge snowstorms shut down many north European airfields that winter, and the Shanghai Expo 2010 jumped off, giant fireworks heralding the launch of the greatly enhanced Chinese international world position, although generally 98% of visitors were Mainlanders and most Americans didn’t care. TUSK began to fly in, once a week. He visited in the end almost every single pavilion; it was fun to switch languages between countries and surprise people. Germany’s was good; the French were surprisingly friendly; Italy was stylish and chic, and Russia’s perhaps the best organized. The U.S. barely put something together; Korea and Japan were decent.
"But what of the people? What of events?”
"Angola’s representative was fairly clearly Socialist whereas Timor Leste leaned West. France handed out free buns while Palestine gave out pins and disbelieved I was not Chinese. Nigeria was lusty; Germany implicit, the Peruvians generous, the Chileans cool, Cuba alcoholic, Koreans image-enhanced; Japanese nervous; North Koreans aloof; and all the Mainlanders pushed and screamed and tried to cut in line. Although their national pavilions were probably all the best.”
"Happenings, rumors?”
"Supposedly a fist fight broke out over a BigBang concert. I never saw it. Never saw the Chilean mine rescue shaft though I did catch World Cup games.”
"Yes the World Cup.”
"A first walk with the Chinese. But as could probably have been expected, they wanted all expenses paid, additional favors, kept asking for more and more service. Eventually we broke it off.”
"I don’t think your experiences are all that unusual.”
"No, indeed not. It was merely surprising when I got funding at unexpected junctures. Somebody said, ‘money comes from God;’ if not, it certainly seems random.”
Voice of Conscience, in truth sixty-three, an old man, at times talkative, leaned back and contemplated things. He wasn’t totally about things at the margin: he understood there was potential in everything; that things were not all about decline. ‘Maybe Britain is just over,’ he once commented, but probably he didn’t actually believe it. His experiences in the Middle East awakened his interest in the goings on in Libya; TUSK and VOC achieved such agreement on things, but VOC wanted in whereas TUSK was hesitant. It was about expenditure, gold, etc.
"Well, that about wraps up things, I suppose. Hard to characterize your own time, of course; just as it’s impossible to know what things are like since we can only know our particular span of time.”
"Such you are V.O.C.”
"I think should you go to the Middle East, you would find it difficult to operate; they have their own preconceptions, and quite possibly they would resent your company with an unattached female; they might very well arrest you whereas they would let a clear British person go.”
"Of course since I’ve lived around many places in the world, I’m not uncomfortable with structures as they are. But there’s balance in things; things even out over time, and we live with the systems we have.”
"It sounds philosophical.”
"More like a philosophy of action. The people who talk aesthetics are the ones who ultimately offer the most complex responses to things; you know, ‘asymmetry,’ ‘minimalism rather than absurdism,’ ‘beautiful rather than kimoi/kawaii.’ These kind of characterizations are the groundwork for this world gone mad.”
"You may just be better off saying, ‘okay the world caught fire.”
"The world caught fire.”
Into the fold, spinning, unfolding, characterizing, giving birth to each pregnant moment after the next, light without sound; sound without quality; image divorced from meaning or interpretation. This work stands only because you don’t actually have the pictures. So word-play, let go; float; it didn’t happen because it did. It was SEARCH FOR SEATTLE.
So they came! They came! Out of the thundering, chundering skies they came, in VC-22 Osprey tiltwings, first specks in the sky, then noisy bumble-bees, then quite loud crow-shapes, and then finally, upon the Rezeption, huge twin-bladed tilt-planes that landed on Keiwha campus and disgorged their passengers. It was Keiwha not Keiwha’; it was delegation not assimilation, but they came in any case, the sole artifact from Other World, and the planes landed right in the middle of Keiwha campus, where a peculiarity of geography hid TUSK from the downdraft; his hair was flying and his jacket fluttering, but he was cheerful and looking forward, wide-eyed; the very first girl out of the plane was BARBIEDOLL.
She wasn’t BARBIEDOLL back then, of course. She was big-blonde-haired floral print dress girl back then, and because it was winter she had on something underneath; so the net effect was that she first seemed a little fat; TUSK moved back a half-step, a habit picked up from one more year’s living in China, where people kept bothering you on the streets, but he didn’t move back all that much, just enough to politely offer a hand to BARBIEDOLL as she disembarked the Osprey, and he registered a handful of names here and there before the 180 students made their way to the placement test. As before, everyone would form little neat peapod rows; BARBIEDOLL actually ran into TUSK again at the end as they were among the last two to finish, and the fact of his Americanness came out; he learned her name from her test-sheet, but he thought he wouldn’t see he
r again. But he was wrong.
2/1 class streamed in Tuesday. It was BARBIEDOLL (looking quite different; she had restrained her hair; her more close-fitting clothes revealed she wasn’t in fact fat) and it was GOAT and it was Alpha and it was Rockstar and it was ICEPRINCESS and Brillopad and Linglingling and AnotherRitsuko and Farhome and Aj-4 and some other chubby Japanese girls; and that was it; that was everything; there were no boys whatsoever in 2/1 this year; there were no other boys at the program at all; minimal foreigners. TUSK was alone. But drama would continue on despite his changed circumstances; actually immediately day 1, Alpha and Rockstar would both be approaching-level friendly to TUSK, he subtly positioned Rockstar away and Alpha forward (and this was against type; Alpha was one of those small dark Polynesian Japanese girls, the younger and female equivalent of those thirty-something small dark Japanese right-wingers you saw in Kita-setagaya with Russian girlfriends), and now, with his attention focused on the program-at-large rather than the specific 2/1 all the time, TUSK noticed that half the girls were fat. This was degeneration from ten years ago, let alone twenty; the Japanese were becoming like the Americans; they were getting fat. Or perhaps his standards had changed. 2/1 the previous year had had no really fat girls; now that he had scored AKEMI, TUSK would divide all future J-girls into