Watson, Ian - SSC (12 page)

 
          
“Art
moves in cycles, hope you can ride one!” “Do you mean . . . my Yokoos are done
for? Who’s this Mark Boyle?”

           
“Forget about him, primitive level
of technology. I guess he just sprayed plastic on the street then peeled it
off in squares and hung them up to exhibit, but we can do something about his
ideas now, let me show you . . .” Fumbling in the huge kimono sleeves again,
knocking over the porcelain cup, which the wife swiftly sets up again and tops
up. Pushing a lobster still
questing
its antennae to
one side, he places a red plastic box on the lacquer table . . .

 
          
“It’s
a network, covers the whole city, they beam arbitrary squares of environment,
change as often as you like, but one has no more value than any other because
they ALL have total value.”

 
          
Pressing
a button, a square of fuzzy lines springing up in front of the alcove where the
girl poses in
The Gratitude of Aeschylus,
blotting her out, swimming into focus as . . . a patch of gritty ground, some
pebbles embedded, a used matchstick,
a
slurred
footprint.

 
          
“Arbitrary
art the art of true
impermanence.
. . because this
site no longer exists in the same form, and the computer will never beam the
same site twice. Twice unrecoverable, and that’s what true art is—the
unrecoverable moment. Mistake up till now has been to try to keep the
supposedly significant moment alive for ever and ever, but look, this site is
as significant as any other so it contains all significance, the same can be
said of the next site . .

 
          
Johnnie
Walker, stabbing the button again, The
Gratitude
of Aeschylus
briefly visible, a new site hazing in
,
focussing
. . . a square of concrete with turd in one corner, grainy
crumbling texture excretion of thick sand . . .

 
          
“.
. .
changes
the site automatically every 24 hours in
case you get attached to it!’’

 
          
...
in place, on tiptoe in green fins, legs straddled, eyes wide open, seeing
everything bathed in green by my contact lenses . . . not heeding the dinner
party, WHERE IS IT?

 
          
So
fashions change. Now it’s my turn to join the Manet girls and Utamaro girls on
the country fair and store roof circuit. My Master has put me out with the
trash.

 
          
All
the costumes and plastic figures to be sent to
Dream
Island
our rubbish reef in the bay, and I am standing
by them, free to claim them now they’re trash . . .

 
          
But
how much can I carry away—and where can I carry it to—and what’s the use?

 
          
It’s
almost worth going to Dream Island
myself
. Why, I
could live on the discarded food-gifts that pass direct from the Store to the
Rubbish Island (almost) without any intervening stage of being opened by recipients
(such is our wealth). Dress up in my roles against the backdrop of rubbish and
feel at home—for I am rubbish now, in the eyes of fashion.
A
failure of nerve?
Gradually allowing my poses to relax, moving a little
at first, then a lot, till at last I was actually running about the island
dressed as T’s girls? Seems attractive—luridly attractive—but it wouldn’t be
my art as I know it—it might be something else, nearer to madness ... Yet with
more purity by far than the show booth or the store roof! I’d soon be respected
by the outcasts—the
other
outcasts—who
ferry the rubbish barges to and fro from the City, become maybe their Madonna,
Mona Lisa, Angel, Onan Partner, in blue and red stockings with a pinned up
skirt, hairy armpits and silver total-reflection contact-lenses. Set up the
beachguard and the red devil with the flintlock musket and the wedding guest as
if for gunnery practice on the hills of compressed cans and buildings of
bottles, image sentries of our life. Straddle the plastic horseback with fish
skeleton in my teeth. Bare my breasts and brush them with toothpaste peering
through the smog for a vision of Mt. Fuji. The huge cut-out train in the oily
surf lapping the metal rocks of the island, bearing me on its buffers waving
the barges in with a giant plastic flower. Clipping on the tiny plastic breasts
of Bardot I’d suckle the mice that scamper over the food-hills. With my striped
sunshade by the striped water I’d wait for faceless people to admire me.

 
          
To
live T’s scenes at last in their totality!

 
          
The
Grid moves over the City, at random, sectioning it into areas two meters
square, beaming images of these to discerning homes where they are reproduced
flat and vertical in the places of honor. Sectioned roofing, crowd heads, tire
marks, footprints, flat spaces, rough spaces, rubble, hats, railway line,
stone, glass, metal,
turd
.

 
          
.
. . The City can’t be said to be dirty or clean, chaotic or ordered, natural or
unnatural. Each two-meter section is what it is, includes all the others in
itself
, is part of TOTAL REALITY. The new art is popular
with industrialists, the sanitation department, the town planners. The City
cannot be spoiled ever again. The City IS. Its molecular geometry is innocent,
elemental.

 
          
The
Grid sections off the head and shoulders of a girl with total-reflection
contact lenses in her weeping eyes reclining on a heap of crushed soft drink
cans and cabbages traveling in a barge on a black greasy waterway. For 24 hours
she halts in the grainy screening of the image, and hangs in the place of
honor, till the computer selects another section at random, scuffed earth with
a trail of impact craters arcing across it left by drops of dog piss.

 
          
But
she is already on Dream Island, grinning, with her tongue sticking out.

 
          
Obi
Nzekwu, age 35, profession: teacher of Geometrical Religion in a small school
in Eastern Nigeria in the mid-Euro-Afro Conglomeration— that’s me.

 
          
Till
five years ago I was teaching common or garden geometry and algebra, there was
nothing religious about Maths at all . . .

 
          
Then,
need I say, the glassy Catastrophe Barriers appeared and we found the whole
planet divided up neat as the segments of an orange. Bless Great Circle! Bless
Greenwich Meridian! Bless Barrier!—we exclaim in joy.

 
          
It
wasn’t so much of a catastrophe for us, you see, as it must have been for those
“less fortunately placed” ... A euphemism, one doesn’t speak in terms of
“Elsewhere” nowadays, it’s not done. (Non-names for non-existent places such as
America, Australia, China and
Japan.
. . . !)The
Education Ministry in Lagos has stopped issuing globes of the world with
everything painted black apart from the single segment of the sphere that is
mid-Euro-Afro. They’re introducing a new design; the single segment alone.
Visualize a bow with a fat bow-belly tapering to a point at top and bottom—a
steel bow string taut between North and South. That’s what the world looks like
now, officially. (Besides, it uses less material, that way.)

 
          
And
I have to teach this nonsense! I tell you, it offends me, logically!

 
          
We
can see through the barriers, can’t we? Eastward and Westward! Landscape
doesn’t just vanish into void. Or people.
Or towns.

 
          
There’s
just no passing through physically.
Or shouting with the voice.
Or radioing.
Aircraft that tried to fly over have slid
to the ground in ruins. Nuclear missiles that the Euros tried to punch a hole
through with went bang in the sky over the North Atlantic, but that was all.
Tunnelling hasn’t worked either. I’m not sure if wind and rain and such pass
through—but I suppose they must, somehow, or there’d have been drastic climatic
changes by
now.
. . which I haven’t noticed. The Yam
Rains have gone on falling at the right time for planting.

 
          
It’s
not actual glass. Though it looks like glass and feels like it to touch. Some
force field, they say.

 
          
Of
course being translucent we can read signs held up on the other side and talk
in sign language—like bloody savages!—and I suppose theoretically news could be
shuttled round the whole world from segment to segment by this mean. But it’s
discouraged,
this contact thing. Irreligious, would you
believe? By the time mid- Euro-Afro had banded together after the chaos and
wars of the first two or three years, the proselytizing
Church
of
Mathematical Geometry
was in charge in most states of the
Conglomeration.

 
          
Because,
being “well-placed,” we’re quite happy with the situation, would you believe?

           
We have to cross the
Sahara
to reach Euro, there’s no sea route any
more. But set against this, the Nigerian and Libyan oilfields; the industrial
heartland of Euro; its best farmland; the forests of Scandinavia. All this in
one unified Conglomeration! Then, politically, we Africans saw Namibia
automatically liberated—and the remnant of White South Africa duly cut down to
size! (The Catastrophe Barriers fell neatly into place on the Greenwich
Meridian,
then
20 degrees east of Greenwich,
presumably following the same pattern all the way round and back again. From
which you may deduce, if you like, that whatever put them there was perfectly
familiar with our old way of mapping the world! I’d say at this point,
consult a globe or an atlas, except that there aren’t any, only under lock and
key!)

 
          
Politically,
the Euros are happy too. They can be friends with us, since the White Africa
problem was solved by our Nigerian army in the first year. Then no more Soviet
threat (for that matter, no more American imperialism!) and the inhabitants of
the western sectors of Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia were delirious at
their enforced separation from the USSR—even though they lost half their
friends and kin in the process, and the tanks of the Soviet-Arab Alliance are
parked up against the Barrier in plain view; another reason i why we turn our
heads the other way! Those may have wiped out the bulk of White Africa and
earned our gratitude for it—but alas for Israel and so much else locked up in
that segment! Much bloody chaos on our right-hand side, I assure you, which we
learnt about from pathetic refugees clamoring up against the barriers with
their signs like hitchhikers.

 
          
Our
left-hand side was a sad case.
England,
sliced through
Greenwich, with the East End of London included in our prosperous
Conglomeration as a useless backwater town. The once powerful City of London
itself in total decay, and the rest of the country a surly dictatorship
obsessed with tilling the land. What else do they have in their segment? A few
French fields, most of Spain, the poverty of Morocco, Mali, the Sahara . . .
then northwards three quarters of Iceland, excluding Reykjavik: which must be
almost totally isolated in a huge ocean along with a knob of Brazil. (I’ve
scraped the blackout paint off an old globe to check—then hurriedly painted it
back again.) Hard cheese, on our western flank! But we’re doing very nicely,
thank you, in mid-Euro-Afro. A heaven-sent blessing, the Barriers! So teach
Mathematical Religion, count your blessings, don’t squint east or west, pray
the Barriers stay up. Don’t ask who put them there. Say it was God.
Or Allah.
Or Forest Head.
Some Alien Superbeing.
Or even an all-too-human ABM Doomsday
System. Paint the Globe black, except for your segment. Fine it down to a
single steel bow-belly of a world.

 
          
THAT
MIGHT BE ALL RIGHT FOR SOME PEOPLE!

 
          
All
segments have to come together at the Poles. They must join together there. The
Church has suppressed all mention of flights to the North or South Pole, to
see. But there must have been flights. I’m highly suspicious about this silence.

           
So'how about
seeing for myself?

 
          
Not
so
impractical as it sounds. I can emigrate
North
. They need skilled labor in the Euro factories. Then,
even if I have to hijack an airliner, we shall see what we shall see! Screw the
Church, screw the Censorship. I’m for Truth. Me, Obi Nzekwu!

 
          
There
must be others like me.

 
          
A
tall Negro wearing a lightweight Euro-import suit that had come by lorry convoy
all the way down the Sahara highway, with the segment emblem of the Church of
Mathematical Geometry in his buttonhole, having thrown up his teaching post in
the hot prosperous market city of Onitsha on the banks of the Niger, climbed
aboard a lopsided mammy-wagon with the legend SEARCH YOUR SEGMENT FOR SUCCESS!
painted
along one side.

 
          
At
Lagos he signed on with a Ruhr recruiting agency, receiving a one-way ticket to
Euro in return.

 
          
The
Caravelle flew due north across the great desert, the glass walls still
hundreds of miles distant on either side, though he imagined them
progressively narrowing the further they flew.

 
          
His
seat neighbor was a Hausa similarly bound for a Euro factory, who confided that
he had taught in Koranic School once. He too wore the segment emblem now.

 
          
“How
could I go on bowing to Mecca?’’ he asked sadly. “Mecca is gone. The Kaaba, the
Black Stone, is forever black and vanished.”

 
          
“Maybe
it’s a test of faith?” suggested Obi buoyantly. “Besides, you never really
bowed to
Mecca
. Not accurately. Did you ever take the
Earth’s curvature into account? Your prayers were forever flying off at a
tangent into space.”

 
          
“In
that case, maybe they were heard. By
whoever
it was.
At least it has made the world a pleasanter place.”

 
          
Obi
was on the point of asking, “
how
do you know?” when he
realized that for this man as for so many others the word
world
simply meant segment nowadays. Life was fine in mid-EuroAfro
so long as you didn’t think of the exigencies to the westward, or the bloodshed
to the east. . . .

 
          
I
lost my love when the walls came down. He was left on one side, I was on the
other. We’d even been holding hands a moment earlier. An inexorable force
squeezed us apart. His hand became rubber then jelly and slid away to join the
rest of his body over there. Let me remember this moment carefully. We were
all taken by surprise. Taxis were crashing headlong into the sudden invisible
obstruction.
Such chaos and fire and broken vehicles and
bodies.
At first we all thought it was an earthquake. So we tend to
forget certain things. Such as this very important fact: of what exactly
happened to human beings such as Ichiro and I, who weren’t riding taxis or
trains but only standing quietly, a little apart, but in love, hands joined.

 
          
I
felt
a repulsion
. Not emotional, but perhaps the sort
of repulsion the butterfly feels for the chrysalis it separates from. Ichiro’s
hand seemed to become a pseudopodium—a protoplasmic tentacle thinning out and
flowing back towards his body.
A rope of cells.
Then a
string,
a gossamer
.
Then nothing.
Whereupon suddenly it was a proper human hand again, beating on the glass
between us. I repeat, it’s only an impression, this. Perhaps I was hysterical.
So much noise and crashing of taxis and the suddenness of it! But I really
think the Walls weren’t designed to hurt us individually in the flesh if we were
just standing about quietly, in love for instance.

 
          
I
think of them as an experiment—a test, like an entrance examination.
In my case, of Love.
In other cases (there must be others),
of human will, or dedication.
Of the fine human qualities.

 
          
So,
when we found we couldn’t speak to each other, Ichiro and I, because this Wall
was a wall of silence too, we scribbled characters in the air to make our minds
clear to each other.
Easy enough for us Japanese.
We’re
used to misunderstandings, ambiguities in our
words, that
can only be cleared up by the invisible smoke signals of Chinese characters
traced in a coffee bar, in the street, in a bus, upon thin air by our fingers .
. . We vowed, by that means, to make our way to where the Wall ended, and be
reunited.

 
          
It
was to be our quest. There was some sense of
chivalry
about it, in spite of the burning taxis and the fires
spreading to the wooden houses. We’d both been students of European Literature
at the University, as well as lovers, and here was the impossible love quest
given to us in the very heart of Greater Tokyo (strictly speaking, the petro-
chemical-infested bay area—since the Wall came into being on the outskirts of
industrial Funa-bashi). We seized this task gladly, as a gift!

           
I did, at least. I believed Ichiro.
Alas—or is it really alas?—there’s only the gift, the pure idea of the quest
itself, to believe in, since he deserted me flimsily and callously after a few
minor problems of travel arose, on his side . . .

 
          
Really,
I don’t care! I lost my love the day the Wall came down, but didn’t lose Love
itself. I am, like Marie-Henri Beyle (better known as Stendhal), “in love with
Love.” Someone will meet me where all the Walls meet. He will be the one who
deserves.

 
          
Ichiro’s
excuses! Outside Otawara, our last meeting: the city on my side, paddy fields
and vegetable patches on his . . . We stood on the useless rainway tracks,
scribbling wisps of words in the air, and he said he was being drafted into the
army. Did he mean the Self-Defense Force? No, he said Army and sounded proud of
it, quite changed from his former pacifist self into an old-style classical
soldier. What did he say all the young men were in the army for?
A war between China and Russia, no less.
Shanghai, Mukden,
Changchun and Harbin, together with the North Koreans, were fighting an
alliance of Seoul, Vladivostok, Manila and the Great Japan. He seemed to have
fallen right back into the 1930s! Our own Japanese-Australian-Siherian
Co-Prosperity Alliance is far more modern and civilized. I shrugged off his
“patriotic” excuses, and hurried on north. We had the freedom to pursue our
lives the way we wanted to in our democracy.