"There they all are," Solly said. He laughed harshly. "I wish I could blow up the Earth too!"
He walked in circles on the rubble of the crater"s rim. The rocket rails, Oliver thought suddenly, must have been in the direction Freeman had sent the debris. Bad luck. The final upward sweep of them poked up out of the dark dirt and gla.s.s. Solly pointed at them. His voice was loud in Oliver"s ears, it strained the intercom: "Too bad we can"t fly to the Earth, and blow it up too! I wish we could!"
And mute Elijah took a few steps, leaped off the mound into the sky, took a swipe with one hand at the blue ball. They laughed at him. "Almost got it, didn"t you!" Freeman and Solly tried themselves, and then they all did: taking quick runs, leaping, flying slowly up through s.p.a.ce, for five or six or seven seconds, making a grab at the sky overhead, floating back down as if in a dream, to land in a tumble, and try it again. . . . It felt wonderful to hang up there at the top of the leap, free in the vacuum, free of gravity and everything else, for just that instant.
After a while they sat down on the new crater"s rim, covered with white dust and black dirt. Oliver sat on the very edge of the crater, legs over the edge, so that he could see back down into their sublunar world, at the same time that he looked up into the sky. Three eyes were not enough to judge such immensities. His heart pounded, he felt too intoxicated to move anymore. Tired, drunk. The intercom rasped with the sounds of their breathing, which slowly calmed, fell into a rhythm together. Hester buzzed one phrase of "Bucket" and they laughed softly. They lay back on the rubble, all but Oliver, and stared up into the dizzy reaches of the universe, the velvet black of infinity. Oliver sat with elbows on knees, watched the white hills glowing under the black sky. They were lit by earthlight-earthlight and starlight. The white mountains on the horizon were as sharp-edged as the shards of dome gla.s.s sticking out of the rock. And all the time the Earth looked down at him. It was all too fantastic to believe. He drank it in like oxygen, felt it filling him up, expanding in his chest.
"What do you think they"ll do with us when they get here?" Solly asked.
"Kill us," Hester croaked.
"Or put us back to work," Naomi added.
Oliver laughed. Whatever happened, it was impossible in that moment to care. For above them a milky spill of stars lay thrown across the infinite black sky, lighting a million better worlds; while just over their heads the Earth glowed like a fine blue lamp; and under their feet rolled the white hills of the happy moon, holed like a great cheese.
Sacrament.
by Matt Williamson.
Matt Williamson"s fiction has appeared in Barrelhouse Magazine, Gulf Coast, The Portland Review, Ruminator, and The Cimarron Review. He is a graduate of the University of Texas and the Iowa Writers" Workshop. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he"s currently working on his first novel.
Ever watch TV and think the ads are funnier than the sitcom they interrupted? Or see a beautiful photo in a magazine, only to wonderingly discover it"s an advertis.e.m.e.nt? Moments like these blur the boundaries between art and advertising, a borderline that grows increasingly unclear in this era of corporate sponsorship of the arts.
Matt Williamson spins a world where art and advertising have collided on such a large scale that a Nike art project can fill Times Square, and an Apple light show can be seen from outer s.p.a.ce. The world is loaded with art-advertising objects so ma.s.sive and inescapable that an international war has erupted over its imperialist presence. Or perhaps that"s just the view of our protagonist, a character who maintains his own uncertain boundary between art and his life"s work as an intelligence extractor.
It"s not an easy craft, pulling information out of the unwilling. It takes special tools, a unique skillset and a sense of intuition that can"t be taught. It"s a gift. A talent. It"s easy to see why some people might call torture an artform.
But it"s only in a truly broken world that anyone would.
Bones are not organs, under the Protocols. I"ve got that stuck up on the wall in the locker room, the briefing room, big signs, all caps: BONES ARE NOT ORGANS.
That leaves a lot of running room. The kneecap? What you can do with the kneecap? That alone will get you farther than you need to go, in almost every case. The kneecap. The chin. The lowest knuckle on the forefinger. Those are my favorite bones.
I always say, you can tell my guys in a crowd. From their hands.
The trick is, can you keep him lucid. Can you keep Ali sharply focused on the Program all the way through. Part of it is physical control, part of it is drugs, and part of it, I say a little facetiously but not totally facetiously, is artistry: the artistry of the lead interrogator. Before the pinpoints, before Suspensions, we couldn"t keep a guy from pa.s.sing out. Wake him up with ammonia, it"s not the same as having him alert. Now we"ve got pinpoint synthetics that allow sustained equilibrium. No fainting, no grogginess, no euphoria. It isn"t quite the same as True Awake; Dr. Ghose calls it a simulacrum. It"s better than True, in some ways. Ali"s awake, sans certain defenses. With catheters and drips, we can preserve that balance-not for hours, but weeks, months. Last week, I left a Session, went home, played kickball with my son, dinner with my wife, long night"s sleep, woke up, breakfast, walk the dog, read the paper, when I come back in, Ali"s still going from the night before. With the pinpoints, we don"t have to take the Rests, and there"s not the same concern about organic damage.
That"s the drug side. Part two is, the control technologies, and some of the advances over there. The tech stuff"s done a lot to change the playing field. The new Chairs don"t just offer refined muscular control; we actually have retinal. When I peel the skin back, when I kiss the edges of the F1 joint with my drill, Ali"s going to be paying close attention. And because of the synthetics, he"s not in la-la land; he"s tracking, he"s alert, and he"s ready to talk.
We"re careful to stay on the right side of the line. I"ve referred three men for crossing that line. Dishonorables in every case. It"s something we take seriously. Even without the Protocols, I"d tell my teams: nothing that results in death or organ failure. Because it"s lazy, because it"s counterproductive. Because it misses the point. The promise of survival: that"s everything. The promise of emerging intact. If you don"t understand that aspect, you won"t understand Deep Interrogation-I don"t call it Heavy, I call it Deep-and that lack of understanding"s going to show up in your Usable Intel numbers.
The other reason"s trust. When you do the cowboy s.h.i.t, you might break through some walls, but other walls are shutting up tighter than before. The new model, we do much more than break the subject. Break Ali"s will, reduce him to a state of dependence, we do that, but it"s just step one, the first pivot point. In any interrogation, there are multiple pivot points. The first is when Ali discovers he no longer has the power to end his life. Everything before that moment is pre-interrogation, as far as I"m concerned. That"s why, in the Chair, we keep him ventilated and catheterized. We decide whether and when you eat, s.h.i.t, p.i.s.s, breathe-and we can keep you here as long as we like. And we can. We can keep these guys alive forever.
Not literally-not yet. That"s one of my dreams: the replenishers, the Suspensions-push them to the point where we can squeeze these guys indefinitely. We"re on our way. It won"t happen in my lifetime, probably, but someday, yes. Keep Ali in the Chair thirty, forty, a hundred years. I"m not kidding. Ghose is doing stuff that"s going to change the medical sciences forever, forget about interrogations. And the longer you keep these guys, the more you can do with them. Their reality is changing every minute, every hour. At 90 days, you aren"t looking at the same Ali you had at 30. At 30, he"s still fighting you, in some small part of himself, whether he knows it or not. By 90, 150, 200, you have the power of a G.o.d.
That"s why we welcome hunger strikes. That"s why we welcome suicide attempts. You can tell Ali, you"ll be here till your hair"s as gray as mine, but it"s just talk until he makes a move. That"s why it works for us when Ali tries to kill himself. It"s a teaching moment. Suicide we don"t allow. Starvation we don"t allow. Ali wrapping his head in a bedsheet noose is Ali testing the boundaries, feeling out the limits of his field of control. Ali chewing off his tongue is Ali testing the limits. And what he finds, in every case, is exactly what we said he"d find. There"s one way out of this, and it"s through us.
But that, as I say, is only the first part of our work. When you break a subject, you get the stuff he wants to keep from you. A Deep Interrogator"s after more. We want to get inside the memory and experience of a subject-get inside and have a long look around. Look, listen, smell. And we get everything: childhood, adolescence, grief, anger, fantasies and phobias. We get the transient moments and impressions that may not seem, in themselves, to hold any strategic value, but which, in combination with a thousand other such impressions, taken from a hundred other guys, form a kind of tapestry-or, as Ghose puts it, a vivid four-dimensional map-of daily life in extremist enclaves. You can think of the new model, then, as a way of getting access to the peripheral perceptions. Ali"s no longer the author of his story; he no longer gets to judge what"s worth our knowing.
I"m not afraid to talk about it. It"s a tricky area. Interrogation of Confirmed Innocents. It"s complicated, and there are good arguments on both sides.
Defense knows what its policy is, certainly. To some extent, we"ll follow that. Certainly, we obey the Protocols. We"ll track the White Papers to a point. And then, to some extent, we"ll go our own way. There"s a degree of autonomy. But the short answer is, yes. If there"s usable intel, we will interrogate. We don"t look to Culpability as an Entrance Criterion.
That doesn"t mean we don"t wrestle with it. We make evaluations on a case-by-case basis.
Last year, after the Ramadan attacks, the decision was made to go ahead with a Deep Program on a suite of CIs. Before we initiated that Program, we did ask ourselves, what are our obligations here. In the end, the determination was made to go ahead. And I stand by the decision. Why? Because we found the bomb. That"s not to say it"s simple-and there will be some people for whom that"s not enough. Find the bomb, save a couple thousand lives, that"s not enough, and I respect that. Where you are on that issue is, I think, largely an ethical matter, and something that will differ for you, depending on who you are personally. For me, the Objective is decisive. Without the CIs, the bomb explodes. The target was a metro station in central DC, which is maybe something to consider.
Different Guidelines will apply, of course, if it"s a CI in the Chair. That"s literally-as in, there"s a separate set of Guidelines printed off, everybody has a copy-and also in the-maybe just the att.i.tude you take into the interrogation room.
One difference-to start with one example-is when we"re working a CI, we won"t do the chin. That"s not Protocol; that"s our own rule. My rule, actually. And I enforce it just like any other policy, and I don"t make exceptions. When Culpability isn"t Indicated on the Profile, the chin becomes an organ.
If we"re doing a CI, we"ll conduct the interrogation fairly. We"ll make the Parameters clear. When the Objective is reached, we"ll stabilize and Exit. Ideally, in a CI Session, it"s a team process, where we"re working with The subject to achieve a common goal. We"ll never go into a CI Session blind-ever, that"s the rule-and we won"t do fishing expeditions.
And that"s obviously very different from the program we apply to CCs and Suspecteds. When a Suspected"s in the Chair, we"ll wring him out. When Ali thinks he"s told us everything he knows, that"s when the Session begins. Where the problem area starts is when a CI tells us something that alters his designation. This is tricky, because a lot of CIs will confess to things they haven"t done. In that case, there"s no way to avoid changing the subject"s designation and reverting to the CC protocols. But it"s something that we wrestle with.
The suite last autumn, a lot of my CI Alis didn"t lose a drop of blood. I"m not exaggerating. I say you can tell my guys from their hands, these guys, you can"t, because it never got to that point.
Others, it did. And that"s tough. When you"re dealing with a wife, a husband, and you"re saying, where"s Ali, where"s the husband, the wife, the son, the uncle, that can be tough, because relatives are intransigent. The wives, sometimes, are more intransigent than the target CCs.
And there"s where a sense of delicacy, and a sense of balance, can be very helpful. Say you"ve got Ali"s wife in the Chair. Okay: now she knows what Ali"s in for. Or Thinks she knows; actually, she has no idea. But she knows Ali"s going in the Chair. How bad, then, do you make it? You have to find a place where Mrs. Ali wants to end the Session, where she"s ready to give her husband up-but not so far that she knows she won"t be able to live with herself if she cooperates. You have to let her leave the Chair with dignity, let her feel she"s made a choice that she can live with, morally.
It"s delicate. When a Confirmed Combatant"s in the chair, there"s no Good Cop-Bad Cop; there"s no carrot and stick; it"s Bad Cop-Worse Cop, and it"s stick, razor, drill. CIs, it"s different. With Ali"s wife, there might be a carrot in there too.
I"ll give you an example.
These CIs, most of them, they won"t ever be going home. I say most, really it"s all. If it"s home, it"s a prison in Pakistan-but that"s not most cases. Most cases, the CI"s done with the Chair, he or she is headed to the Low Restraint Unit, presumably for the remainder. One reason we keep them is, we"ll be needing them again when their intelligence proves out: when my target Ali is in the Chair. And there"s a host of other reasons.
Ali"s kid, though, sometimes he can be an exception. If we have Ali"s wife in the Chair, if there are no Culpability Markers, we"ve been willing, in certain cases, to see about orphanages, see if we can keep the child in the US, versus Pakistan, Syria. So that"s an example of the carrot. If Ali"s wife is ready to give her husband up, here"s a chance for Ali, Jr. To enjoy some of the benefits of an American upbringing. And that"s worked well for us, in a number of cases.
Why I like the chin. A bunch of reasons.
I like its complexity. It"s not a major pain-point, relative to the kneecaps and knuckles-but there are intersecting nerve systems there, which give the chin a different character, a different flavor. And there"s something particular about the way the destruction and remaking of the face impacts a subject. We"ll mirror Ali almost continuously during chin-work, and I"ve found, time and again, that a kiss on the chin, when Ali is watching, does more to concentrate his mind than complete powdering of the kneecaps.
What else? I want to be careful here, because I"d never want to make it seem as though some private form of catharsis is ever among my Objectives in a Session-but there is a satisfaction, for me, in the physical transformations that some of our CC subjects undergo. They come in, they"ve got the Intel hidden; they leave, the Intel"s gone, in a sense, and the fact of the extraction is written on their faces; it"s physically manifest. The chins heal over-some of them, you can"t even see the scars-but the faces, the subdural structures, are changed. It"s like we"ve literally chipped the Intel out of their heads.
I like it, also, because, for me, the chin represents a threshold, a point of commitment. Once we"ve changed his face, Ali can"t see the light of day, whatever happens. That means he won"t be available as a witness, we can"t trot him out if there are hearings, inquiries. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, he"s gone. And that"s not my rule; it"s in the Protocols: nothing that shall bring embarra.s.sment or discredit to the State. In English, that means something like, you broke it, you bought it.
For me, then, the chin is an important moment. Before you go into the chin, you"re hamstrung, a little bit. You"re always thinking, in the back of your mind, can we make this guy presentable. After the chin"s when you can really squeeze him. From that point forward, Ali"s value is purely dark. Maybe we can bring him in for leverage in another Session, if we"ve got a relative or friend in the Chair, but for the most part, he"s a source of information for us, and that"s it. So we can push him harder, we can go longer. And, a lot of times, we can get more than we thought was there.
And that, of course, goes to another question, which is when is an interrogation over. It"s hard to say; it"s always hard. In some ways, it"s similar to a question that I faced in legal practice. At what point have I reached the end of my research on a particular question?
And the answer is, you can"t always know. There"s no every-time rule. Because it"s so hard to tell, in some cases, what Ali"s brain is sitting on.
I had someone on a steady Program, once, for two straight years. We had an Executive Warrant on him, which meant the Protocols were off. 18-hour Sessions, six-hour Rests, he"s colostomized, castrated, pinpoint-stabilized, liquid meals, catheter, two full years we ride the guy. 20 months, he gives us nothing. Suddenly, month 21, he"s talking about Montreal. And through that piece of intel-the stuff that came out after 20 months-we"re able to track down five more guys. And through those five, we get six more. And from those six, we get a lead that helps us stop a gel-attack in Rochester. All because I had a feeling: this guy"s got more to tell.
It doesn"t always work that way. One Suspected, we took him 50 months, never got a sc.r.a.p of Usable out of him, not a drop. And so, again, it"s that question, of when do you throw in the towel.
For me-and this is just for me-this is how it works. For 49 months, my Ali insisted he was Innocent; he didn"t know anyone we named, never heard of Ya.s.sir Omar, wasn"t a devout Muslim, we got him by mistake. All that time, I"m sure he"s bulls.h.i.tting; I"m sure of it. At 50 months-for what reason I can"t say-I flip, and I"m starting to believe him. For me, that"s the end. I admit, then, that it"s partly intuitive.
So we initiated Exit Protocols. We stabilized Ali, injected him with Nurturer. We eased him down. Then my PFCs got him suited up and took him to his new home, down in Medium Restraint. Far from the sun-but far away, also, from the Chair. After 50 months with me, most Alis will take that trade.
It"s better now, for sure. The old way, it was messy, and-just-messy.
I didn"t like the messiness. Part of it is just my nature; I"m a tidy person. When I first started at the Unit, before the Chairs were Standard Ops, we were doing Water Parties, Music Parties, Stack-Ups, Fingers.c.r.e.w.i.n.g, Group Sessions, Electricity. Wiping Ali"s face with menstrual blood. Wiping the Koran. I thought it was fake menstrual blood, I found out after six months, no, it"s real, they get it from the Women"s Unit. A lot of that kind of stuff.
Now, I will say this: any time you permit a measure of chaos, there are going to be good and bad things that come of it. Sometimes, under the Old Model, we got surprising results-stuff we couldn"t have predicted, stuff we couldn"t have extracted in the Chair.
On balance, though, I prefer the Chair. At the end of the day, I want to feel that I"m a professional. It"s important to me that the boundaries be clear. I"m not a doctor, but-it is professional, what we"re doing here. And you lose moral credibility with Ali when you"re urinating in his presence, when you"re laughing over some funny costume you put him in. It always felt disrespectful to me: disrespectful to Ali, disrespectful to the process.
So, certainly, the New Model"s much better.
There are some, I know, who"d a.s.sume, just based on my family background, that I must be motivated by a desire for revenge. People will believe what they want. But nothing could be farther from the truth. As soon as I sense that a member of my interrogator corps is motivated by revenge-revenge, or a perverse enjoyment of cruelty-I strike him from my team; he"s gone.
It"s true-it may be true-that a soldier has to hate his enemy, but we aren"t soldiers here, contra The official narrative. Here, strange as it may sound, we have to love our enemy, in a way; we have to understand his pain, empathize with him, his fears and desires. And we have to be curious about him in a way that a trained killer must never be; we have to Thirst, and I use that word quite consciously, to understand the workings of his mind. And we have to credit his humanity. It"s a cliche, but true nevertheless: there"s no fortress better defended than the human mind. Our technology gets us into that fortress part-ways, but human intuition goes a long way too, and without human intuition and compa.s.sion, it"s impossible to get to where we need to be. Dr. Ghose calls them the sacred s.p.a.ces. Sacred s.p.a.ces of the mind. To reach the sacred s.p.a.ces, you have to love the mind. You have to want to keep it intact as much as you can even as you methodically break down its defenses. And the subject"s mind has got to love you back, peculiar as that sounds; you"ve got to accustom Ali"s brain to your presence inside of it, until your presence there seems as natural as anything else. It"s like date rape: you start with force, and then you seduce.
All that being said, I would never deny that my father"s death was instrumental. His death set the course for my entire life; that much is obvious.
It"s Stalin, I think, who said the death of one guy is a tragedy, while the death of millions is a statistic. In that sense, if only in that sense, Dad"s death wasn"t a tragedy.
I was seven years old on 8/23. Like thousands of kids-tens of thousands, maybe hundreds-I watched my father die in real time, on live TV. Watched the buildings melt, run together-those unearthly swirls of color, the greens and vibrant blues. All that life and death, bleeding together, pooling and spreading, hardening into a marbled brick that, to my eyes, looked just like candy. It was a kind of murder-and who knew such things existed?-that totally erased its victims" individuality. Bodies and birds and plants and rock and metal, all disintegrating and reforming into this elastic, anonymous whole.
When I was younger, you know, I shared in my mother"s outrage at this additional taking, the blotting out of ident.i.ty, which made it impossible for the survivors to bury their dead. As I"ve grown older, though, I"ve come to find a poignancy in the way the Gel Attack melted down and mixed the human remains with the remains of the city. On August 23rd, it was impossible, for once, if only briefly, to ignore the ways in which all of us are one, and the ways in which we"re one, also, with the physical world. And then too, as I grew up, I started to appreciate the parallels between this epic act of destruction and the equally epic acts of creation that were, and are, my father"s legacy.
Dad was an artist. He would never have called himself an artist-he always insisted, a little impishly, I think, that he wasn"t one, he called himself an ad-man-but of course he was an artist, and a great one at that.
By the end of his career-the ending that should have been the apex-he was chief communications sculptor at CFG. He"d been at CFG his whole career, and anyone who knows will tell you Dad was personally responsible for most of the firm"s growth. And everything he did, he did with no graduate education, no formal artistic training: joined CFG straight out of MIT.
His work, if you believe the job t.i.tle, was to create "public points of attraction"-uncanny images, shapes, and s.p.a.ces. In reality, his job was to bring the impossible into physical life, usually with startling beauty.
Examples-I could give you a bunch. One you"ve heard of-they only took it down last year-was the metamorphic installation on Times Square. My father created that. The only credited designer. Today, there are duplicates in every shopping mall from Juneau to Dubai. At the time of the Times Square unveiling, though-this is eight years before I was born-there was nothing like it anywhere. A miniaturized red-rock formation, hovering fifty feet above the ground. This ma.s.sive, solid, seemingly organic mini-mountain range, just hovering, as if by magic. Perfect facsimile of plant and animal life. Fully animated, fully responsive deer and mountain lions. Trees and bushes that swayed and rustled with the actual wind on the Square. Pigeons, when they landed on those tiny pines, they"d bend, even snap from the weight. And all those breathtaking details-here"s maybe the most amazing thing-were generated with the Imitation of Life engine that Dad had patented, at the age of nineteen, when he was still a college student.
In the first years after that installation went up, back when my parents still lived in New York, Dad used to sneak down to Times Square at lunchtime to watch the faces of the tourists as his mountains changed. Many years later, I stood on Times Square for the same reason: to watch the ways in which strangers were moved by my father"s creation. To see Dad"s mountains on a monitor is not to see them at all. That"s the beauty of his work-of all of it: the immediacy and physicality. The Times Square piece morphed twice a day: first at 12:30 and again at sunset. In the first stage, trickles of red, like a red paint, would run, almost imperceptibly at first, along the slopes of those little mountains-like some gentle volcanic eruption. Then the trickle became a steady flow. And as people stood and gaped, they"d start to understand that it was the mountains themselves that were pouring down their own rock faces-melting from the peaks down. Instead of dripping to the ground, the rockmelt collected on the flat base of the mountain range, collected and hardened and oozed into a new shape, which only at the final moment of the transformation became identifiable as the Nike swoosh. The piece retained that "down" form for only a few seconds before defying gravity and the laws of physics to melt and flow upwards, back into the shape of the mountains. From the wet, claylike mountains, little animals and treelike protrusions would poke out and writhe free, until, in the s.p.a.ce of a few seconds, the range was fully animated, fully alive, swarming with tiny birds and elk and covered in those trees that rocked and danced with the wind on the Square.
Events, Dad called his installations. Visual events, auditory events. They were events-and they were also, as his job description had it, public points of attraction-but they were also the fruits of a brave artistic imagination: father"s imagination, his dreams, brought into this improbable and tangible life.
I was six when Dad put the finishing touches on his Gobi Apple. He would have finished it years before, if not for all the problems Apple had negotiating for the thousand-year lease of the desert.
The Apple was meant, from the beginning, to be his lasting mark: a replica, in colorshifting SuperLight, of the Apple logo. Four hundred square miles in dimension. More money was spent, if you can believe it, on that Apple than was spent on the entire Egypt War. You can look that up. Father made it with the thickest, most expensive light: hyper-radiant, non-dispersable-a light that, in spite of its soft appearance, pierced though the clouds and was visible from s.p.a.ce. In initial testing, his main concern was, would the Apple be able to survive a total continental submergence. And he wouldn"t build until he got it how he wanted it. Even if the icecaps melt completely-even in the event, fantastic event, that humans abandon the earth completely for some other home-father"s Apple will persist, burning bright as ever from the bottom of the ocean.
My fondest memory of childhood was the trip I took, with Mom and Dad, to see the Apple in person. The whole way there, Dad was like a little boy-a side of him I never saw before. We first flew over in a gla.s.s-bottomed helicopter, at night. And it was like we were gliding over the clouds of heaven. The next night-all night-we wandered a stretch of the desert on camelback, guided by Mongolian goatherds who looked on my father-my small, soft-spoken, gentle father-as my Alis would later look on me: as a kind of G.o.d. My own opinion of my Dad wasn"t too far off from that. I wouldn"t have said G.o.d; what I would have said was superhero. I would have told you, if you"d asked, that there was nothing Dad couldn"t do. And all of this was a little more than a year before the day when two illiterate fourteen-year-old Syrian boys, armed with Jansport backpacks full of I-9 self-perpetuating gel component, destroyed my father along with much of the city of Boston.
Some have said-cruelly, I think-that Dad, by virtue of working for a global marketing firm, was more responsible than others for the events of 8/23: that CFG"s sky banners, in particular, invigorated The extremists-invigorated, the word they use-as if the invasion and occupation of Egypt were of secondary importance. According to the post facto logic of the extremists, the posting of sky banners visible from Mecca was an quote-unquote act of imperialist sacrilege equal to a ground invasion of the holy city-a sacrilege that justified any savagery, any cruelty, that could be dreamt up. By the same tortured logic, America"s use of gels and evaporators in Egypt justified the 8/23 terrorists" use of gel weaponry to decimate Boston"s civilian population. For the record, my father never worked on sky banners. He did design the first-ever colorstorm-drenched the whole earth in this gorgeous kaleidoscopic light-but that was long after banners had become ubiquitous in the Middle East and Central Asia.
There"s always seemed to me to be something morbid about the fetishization-by extremists, even by some Western pacifists-of the natural world in its mythic virgin state. Not to get philosophical, but man"s always been a creature apart from, and above, the other life of the earth, a creature destined to remake the world in his own image just as G.o.d made man in His own image-and thus a creature destined to remake the world in G.o.d"s image. Whatever we imagine, G.o.d"s imagined first. If you don"t believe that, you don"t believe in G.o.d. That man would repaint the sky, that he"d fill it with his own colors, his own designs, was inevitable from the moment he discovered SuperLight. But apart from questions of man"s destiny, the fact is, everything"s got to change, or die, or become new. Before the banners-and Dad"s colorstorms-the skies, at least in the cities, were just ceilings of smog. To prefer that featureless, s.h.i.t-brown, smothering pollution to my father"s electric palette is simply to prefer deadness and decay to the possibility of life.
In a similar way, I think, to reduce Dad"s art to "marketing"-as he himself was willing to do, but impishly, as I said-is to be willfully obtuse. What were Michelangelo and Raphael, if not marketers? Marketers in the employ of the Pope. People forget that after Dad had finalized his patent on the Imitation of Life engine, there was no need for him to work again; his wealth was fixed for life. What he did for CFG-the swooshes and colorstorms and robotic eyes-he did only because of his obsessive need to create, to commune and converse with the world, celebrate and enrich the life around him. If he tethered his work to Prudential Investments and f.u.c.k Body Spray, it was only because without those sponsorships, his achievements would never have been technically possible-and the first and ultimate imperative of any artist is to create; he has To make his art, whatever the terms. Dad"s stuff on Rapa Nui-and at the Taj Mahal, the Forbidden City-was controversial, really, only among the kinds of people who believe, naively, that ideas like "France" and "j.a.pan" are intrinsically more n.o.ble, more authentically human, than "Apple Computers" and "Toyota"; that the rules that govern and define our achievements are immutable and unchangeable; that it"s not for us to dictate the terms of our own evolution.
But I"ll tell you a story-something from a Session not too far back-that connects a few of the ideas I"ve been talking about, and gets at some of the ways in which my Dad"s career, ostensibly so different from my own, converses with my work as an interrogator.
This is the early winter of last year. We"re on week three with one of the Islamabad captures. Ali"s knuckles are gone; we"re moving to dental.
The Objective"s not important to this story. Something involving Ali"s mom; she"s hiding somewhere in Brunei. Ali swears he doesn"t know where she"s hiding, but it"s clear he does. And in the end, a few weeks after the stuff that I"m describing here, he did give us what we needed, and we were able to bring the mother in.
Right now I"m in his mouth with the finest drill, going straight down the middle of every tooth, one after another. That"s how we do it: one pa.s.s through each tooth with the finest drill bit, and then we stop and interrogate. Then another full pa.s.s with a bigger bit, and more questioning. We call them Rinse-and-Repeats. Ali"s on a c.o.c.ktail, now, of Sharpener and Nurturer, which makes the drill work like a light switch: when it"s going in, Ali"s pain is at the human maximum; the second we stop, he"s on cloud nine.
We"re on the first pa.s.s-I"m entering an incisor-and all of a sudden, Ali"s teeth, all of them at once, begin to spray. Eight or nine of them: these fine, crisscrossing sprays arching straight up in the air from the holes in his teeth. Like we"d struck oil.
You ever seen this? I say, sort of to the room. No: n.o.body"s ever seen it. We"re all just fascinated, observing this phenomenon. The blood loss is minimal, but the spray is getting pretty far, inking Ali"s bib, turning it a very pale pink. Something about this image seems familiar to me-deja-vu-type familiar-and then I figure it out: Ali looks disconcertingly like the heads from Pier Pierson"s Geysers bodywork. From thirty years back. Pierson was the guerilla artist and serial killer who plastinated his victims" heads and installed them, rigged with lights and fountains, in public s.p.a.ces. A twisted descendant, in some ways, of my father-but let"s not start down that road right now.
What"s Ali"s drug situation? I finally think to ask my Technician.
Euphoric, the Technician says. He"s drifting.
I wavered. Let him drift, I finally said. Ali was a CI, I should add, and also just a kid: fourteen, if even that. It wasn"t going to hurt to let him float around for a few minutes.
And as he floats, Ali starts smiling-his eyes narrowing like this is the happiest he"s ever been. As I"m sure it is. That"s one of the uncanny things about this job: in moments like these-and at the end of long sessions, when we inject the Nurturer-our guys have never felt so good in their entire lives.
For a long time, then-a mysteriously long time-we all just stood around Ali and watched. One of my PFCs took off her goggles, and I didn"t reprimand her. A little later-it"s obvious in retrospect-we figured out the mist from Ali"s mouth was leaching Nurturer into the air; that"s why we were feeling giddy, and why, for a short time, I was almost hypnotized, was actually seeing rainbows reaching into the room from Ali"s mist. At the time, though, it seemed to me that it was just something about the strange sight of that fountain of pink, its queer resemblance to the Pierson heads, that was making me feel this way. Ali, meanwhile, is smiling so hard-so happy-that he"s started to cry.
In moments like these-when art intrudes, unexpected, like a ghost-it"s easy for me to think that my father is speaking to me. That he"s reminding me of why I"m here.
I don"t deny the truth of men like Muhyi Al-Din-of the men who"ve spent, and will spend, their last long years in my interrogation Chairs: there can be heroism in destruction-heroism, as well as art. There was art in my father"s murder-in the transformation of a major American city into a primordial swirl of liquid color-just as there was art in my CI"s smiling face, the gentle sprays of blood. But it was a destructive art.
My father, who could never have aligned himself with the destroyers, was blessed by his opportunity to stand with the creators. That"s the American opportunity, isn"t it? And that"s the opportunity I fight for here. All of us. We"re fighting for the triumph of a civilization that lets its heroes be creative heroes. My own destiny, determined from the day my father melted into color like one of his own brilliant creations, is to stand against the destroyers by becoming a destroyer myself. The sacrifice is worthwhile only if we win.
Twenty thousand years from now, when people marvel, as they will, at father"s Apple, n.o.body will see an advertis.e.m.e.nt for a laptop or a phone; when they see the apple, they"ll a.s.sume, perhaps, that the shape had some religious significance, or maybe they"ll conclude that it was chosen for its inherent aesthetic properties. And what will they be able to think, if not that the people who lived here at this time, however primitive, were a questing people, reaching through their blindness, and the limitations of the real, in an attempt to touch the divine?
And it was these kinds of thoughts, sentimental and a little grandiose, that cycled through my head as, drunk on Nurturer and surrounded by rainbows, I laughed and cried with my Innocent Ali.
Just Do It.
by Heather Lindsley.
Heather Lindsley"s short fiction has appeared in Asimov"s Science Fiction, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, and Strange Horizons. This story first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, was reprinted in Year"s Best SF #12 and Escape Pod, and has been translated into Polish and Romanian. Lindsley is also a graduate of the Clarion Writers" Workshop.
As America"s largest chemical company, DuPont is best known for its work creating fibers like nylon, Kevlar, and Teflon. . . and for developing CFCs, the refrigerants responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. But beyond its products, DuPont has given society a special gift. In 1935, DuPont adopted the slogan "Better things for Better Living. . . Through Chemistry. " Other advertisers and cultural figures immediately jumped on this slogan, creating the infamous phrase better living through chemistry.
Chemistry has a bad rap these days. The late twentieth-century is riddled with environmental and health disasters stemming from human abuse of chemistry. From thalidomide babies to endangered eagles, it"s difficult to see a good side of the chemical industry.
And our next tale turns a scathing eye upon it. Lindsley says "it"s about desire and how easy that is to manipulate. But I"ll go a bit further and say I was also thinking about the ongoing conflict between doing the right thing and doing the comfortable, pleasurable thing. It"s about having a compelling excuse to take the easier, ethically questionable path. To just do it and blame somebody else"s chemical. "