No, the movie needs that historical background to foreground its real subject, which is black absence, destruction, oppression, perversion, degradation, and erasure. Quite disciplined, it does not comment on these. They are simply social products on-screen.

• the black mother, Perfidia Beverly Hills, is a sexual pervert, a traitor to the cause, and she abandons her child;

• Junglepussy is also a nihilistic sexual pervert;

• a white man nicknamed “Ghetto Pat” is filling the place of the “traditional” single black mother;

• we have a tragic mulatto, Willa, playing Foxy Brown;

• there is not a black man on the screen after Wood Harris’s Laredo sends off his “regular working white girl” before the title screen;

• the Underground Railroad is run by Mexicans;

• the black women who survive the destruction of the movement do so only by retiring to a convent, thereby sacrificing their sexuality (which was perverted anyway) and dealing drugs, presumably to narcotize their class (and race) brothers and sisters

(By sexual perversion I refer to that racially fetishistic Jungle Fever thing, and the use of sexuality for aggression.)

The whole movie is built on the demolition of the black freedom movement and the destruction of black people. The blacks on-screen are bucks (Laredo), mammies (Regina Hall’s Deandra), Jezebels (Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia), Jezebel/Sapphire combos (Brooklyn rapper Junglepussy’s Junglepussy), or tragic mulattoes (Chase Infiniti’s Willa). Consider the fact that there are zero black romantic or sexual relationships in the movie. Not a single one.

Now, this is smart, powerful, and ambitious, and it made me hope for the best. It’s a setup for a knockout. But Paul Thomas Anderson could not really handle all this. He never figured out how to relate this radical subtext to the surface story, and ended up just settling for the appearance of contemporary relevance, which works out OK precisely because our contemporary USA is indeed built upon the demolition of the black freedom movement and the destruction of black men, women, and children.

So what’s left on-screen, in the absences and aporias? Immigrants (mostly Mexicans), crazy white folks, and the state. Not for nothing, please recall that back in March 1968, Robert F. Kennedy could have gone with Martin Luther King Jr. to support the Memphis sanitation workers, well-armed with the secret knowledge at the heart of the US enterprise: anti-black racism is and has been the US ruling class’s main weapon in the class struggle.

But RFK flew to California instead, for photo ops with the reactionary, nationalistic labor leader César Chavez who was busy attempting to martyr himself in a hunger strike, to support the Delano grape workers. At a critical moment—and both he and MLK died shortly thereafter—RFK distanced himself from the black freedom movement. If you squint just right, you might convince yourself, as many liberals then did, that this pandering to reaction wrapped in ethnicity was something like “staying relevant.” “Black fatigue” is nothing new. Meanwhile, Steven Spielberg said that One Battle After Another “is such a concoction of things that are so bizarre and at the same time so relevant, that I think have become increasingly more relevant than perhaps even when you finished the screenplay and assembled your cast and crew and began production.”

The father-daughter story is fine, but it doesn’t quite rise to the occasion outlined above. As for the crazy white folks, the state and its conspirators are entertaining, but insufficient. Let’s just say ℝeality has far outstripped this representation.

What can make up for the destruction of black people these centuries? Their actual oppression, perversion, and degradation into real-life stereotypes? What can fill the absence left by the demolition of the black freedom movement, which is the only movement to attempt to create a democracy in the United States, and the only movement that could have done so?

The movie is a spectacular failure, but its failure is that of the United States. The filmmaker here attempts to synechdochize ℝeality itself, to show the results of this trauma in the degraded personalities and perversions, and to recapitulate the demolition with the destruction of the French 75, but this cannot work, because the damage is real, and it has affected the critical apparatus.

It has to do with the difference between naturalism/realism and social realism1, and why postmodernism set itself against these, valorizing the inability to perform historical judgment, and why this remains the problematic within which literary and other cultural production takes place since World War II. Let me show and not tell...

Spielberg again: “I have not seen a movie that is so tonally a relative to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.”

Dr. Strangelove is an explicit satirical attack on the military-industrial complex by the greatest filmmaker ever. It has a clear point of view and demolishes everything in sight. There is no ambiguity about anything. Spielberg is quite simply lying when he says the tone is similar. Everything about One Battle After Another is ambiguous, even the treatment of Lockjaw, perpetrator and victim of white supremacy and imperialism.

But Dr. Strangelove has no explicit politics, and satire is also built of negations… How does it purchase its clarity? Because, like the civil rights movement, it relied on the common sense democratic-republican values of the postwar era, among both the moviegoing public and the critics.

These are precisely what have been undermined by exactly the destruction Paul Thomas Anderson attempts to treat. No matter how precisely he delineates the depressions, no matter how deftly he crafts the concavities, he must rely on our historical understanding, lest the movie “feel[] like a polemic.”

There are more than a few notable shows and movies from the 2000s that attempted something similar to the subtext of One Battle After Another: they would deeply explore a corner of the world, spiral outward as they raised the stakes, and then suddenly drop the viewer back out on the sidewalk of our contemporary world, dispossessed and impoverished by the very processes just evoked on-screen. I am thinking of David Simon’s and Ed Burns’s The Wire (2002; Wood Harris appears there as Avon Barksdale), Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004; Sean Penn played the assassin Sam Bicke there), and Syriana and Michael Clayton (2005, 2007; both starring George Clooney).

Those productions succeeded because there was an appetite and capacity for critical historical judgment after 9-11. And yet the years have not been kind to this contemporary social realism. Argo and Zero Dark Thirty (both 2012) were reactionary uses of the same approach. And they thereby revealed, for the 8,541st time, that neither documenting social systems nor displaying social products is inherently critical. Benicio Del Toro starred in something similar in Sicario (2015). I hope you can understand from my discussion so far how that movie further devolved social realism into something more akin to pornography than critical exploration.

Art cannot stand on its own. It requires historical perspective on the part of both critics and audience.

And yet the very morning I write this, has written: “I often feel that modern hip hop music is considered a gimmick or not worth serious intellectual interrogation by most literary writers…. Trap is the music of the modern Black proletariat, and…it could even be understood as the soundtrack to all of American life cutting even across class in some ways.” There is no further elaboration of the complexities of the issue. In fact, with this, the object of criticism has actually been removed from criticism.

Also this very morning I had the extreme displeasure of reading from one of my favorite YouTubers, of @WriteConscious, that “Yung Lean, a 15-year-old from Sweden, created a rap renaissance that launched a new genre, which has had hundreds of billions of streams and created thousands of full-time jobs for rappers, producers, tour managers, merch managers, etc.” Mr. Literary Renaissance himself is praising here the rise of Soundcloud rap, yet another enablement of the most degraded, perverted, and backward cultural expressions of the blues tradition. This is something like Stanley Crouch in 1990 praising Eazy-E because neither NWA nor Ice Cube would exist without him, and both have sold millions of records.

Adorno wrote somewhere (Minima Moralia?) that the purpose of mainstream art criticism is to justify whatever is put out, and that’s true today more than ever. Critics have let One Battle After Another slide for several reasons. Not only because

1. they probably don’t recognize what is on the screen, but

2. because what is on the screen—black degradation—is a perennial bestseller, and

3. because even if they did recognize it, they either

1. wouldn’t recognize that it is an attempt to deal critically with the tragedy of American history,

2. and even if they did, they wouldn’t know how or why it fails,

3. and even if they did, they wouldn’t say anything because this is a business, after all.

The success of the state in destroying the black freedom movement has disoriented the entire population and made too many people resistant to and, moreover, incapable of historical judgment. Art of this kind has thereby been made generally inaccessible, and therefore meaningless.

Social realism has become a trap.

“The music really gets at the nihilism of will that permeates every sector of American society, right now.” Yes, Luke. Yes, it does.

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23. Recommencation

The rain had stopped freezing because the drops were too large. There were no washerwomen washing nor fishermen fishing, because the rivers had risen past their banks, and the waters flowed over the footbridges. Ritius accompanied Prince Feelharmonica to the tower for an inspection, and the road up the mountain was treacherous, slick with loose mud from the earth moved for the tower’s construction, and so the drivers drove slowly, and they were killed by long-distance snipers. The bodyguards rallied to defend their masters, but they were quickly dispatched, also from afar. Ritius and Feelharmonica exited their trucks with their arms raised for the captain of the assault team to lead them into a blasted cave nearby, where Prince Razorbeem awaited. He told Ritius that he wanted Ritius to watch and learn how a prince behaves. He had one of his men hold his brother’s head out, pulling him by the top of his Afro, and then he asked his brother if he had any last words, and as his brother was preparing to deliver his last words, Razorbeem shot him in the back of the head, demolishing his face. He told Ritius that no warrior can live without a prince, and that Ritius sprouted too late, in the wrong place, only to be cut down, like a watermelon seedling in the middle of a lawn before mowing day. Ritius may have stood a chance had he tossed Razorbeem from the swing or the like before Razorbeem learned to speak. Consider that this motherfucker named himself some mean intimidating shit like Razorbeem at or around the age of 6. He led Ritius outside, and they walked to the tower structure, where his men tied Ritius to one of its beams. He had his men gut Ritius with their swords. They then set fire to the tower and the entire built near environs, whether tower or ruin or squatted domicile. The fires fought the waters, and the waters always win, but in a building, the fire can race ahead of the water, setting more aflame than is put out long enough to burn it down. That’s what happened to the tower, and the electrical wires strung alongside it collapsed into the sloping canyon below, where they set fires to trash and trees and caused a three-car vehicle collision.

Razorbeem’s crack squadron fled the scene while Razorbeem radioed his man at the Little Falls dam to loose the flood gathered since his lieutenant at Great Falls had done the same minutes before. That Little Dam lieutenant did so, and the sovereignty of New Ark was drowned in flood once more, its final oblivion. That flaming tower toppled into the Great Notch, and those wires sparked fires across the light forest there, which spread. The fires fought the waters, and the waters won.

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22. Snake

Administrative staff and security personnel crowded the rear of the stage, and this made it difficult for a page to squeeze through; he was frisked twice before Ritius took note of him and pulled him aside. He leaned into Ritius’s ear and said something that first angered and then amused Ritius and then it appeared to have been resolved, because Ritius went back to his conference with Feelharmonica, Boniface, and War Councilor Hawkins. Rytius suspected that his brother had received bad news about casualties sustained during a confiscation, which certainly should have been delayed pending resolution of the affair before the council. Ritius demilitarized the exits and left the building without saying goodbye, and Rytius was sad for the young men that he was now certain he had killed that afternoon.

Ritius learned that he perhaps should be wary of underestimating his brother as well.

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21. Public

Rytius arrived 90 minutes before the allotted time and posted up on the roof of the apartment complex opposite New Ark Center, from which he could observe the councilors and citizens as they walked past the Hall of Truth, the main space of what was formerly a multipurpose exhibition center, and into the Theater of Victory. The apartment building used to be a hotel, which meant that a sort of servile subterfuge was built into its form, an entire complex of service stairs and elevators hidden and made precisely inconvenient for residents.

There were 8 councilors for the governance of New Ark, and they did not meet regularly, because they did not need to. Most were sycophants, and their portfolios rarely required actual competence, as they were politically minded delegators of genuine tasks to properly constrained underlings. Treasure, Construction, Water, Power, Food, Trade, Law, and War. War Councilor Saberman Hawkins (the once-famed defector from New York, where he had served as Worrus Fish’s Undersecretary of Defense) entered with Law Councilor Justice Boniface, and that was nothing out of the ordinary. Amfibean Brady, the engineer charged with Power, was the only other serious person—a legitimate scientist and inventor, who had attended several games in years past—but his competence served him only in the field or laboratory. Rytius watched them as they entered the hall, in their trains of advisers, bodyguards, and minders, hoping to discern either strange combination or schism, but he did not.

He waited there on the roof until the prince arrived. He had identified no surveillance to have countered. Upon crossing the street, he greeted some of the citizen stragglers entering the hall, and strode forth just as he was beckoned to do so, appearing to move at a moment’s command. This greatly pleased the council and the prince.

“Play your game,” Councilor Justice Boniface encouraged him.

Rytius walked to the center of the floor, facing the audience, backed by the councilors, who were also elevated.

He still had no idea what to say. He reminded himself to talk loud.

“ ‘It’s a tough nut to crack.’ No, no, that won’t work. How about, ‘it’s a tough knot to untie.’ That hardly rolls off the tongue slippingly,” he mugged, mock-slipping while pacing back and forth across the floor. “OK, one more attempt; how about ‘it’s a tough knot to slip.’ That’s good, right? I got the noose in and everything. It works, right? Good?” Rytius genuinely asked the audience for an answer. He got a hesitant, mumbled assent.

“OK, nice. I’m glad you agree. But you have some sort of idea of what good is after only two cases?” Rytius asked. The silence he required fell immediately. That’s when he knew that he could play well with those gathered.

“All we had was a nut and a knot,” he said, still pacing, and looking sternly at the listeners in the front row, before stopping and throwing his hands up to say, “Look, if it’s alright with you, it’s alright with me!” Rytius paused while they laughed.

“I didn’t want to tell you all yet, but, er…” He paused again and the laughter built in anticipation. “I know all about nuts and knots,” he winked. “Believe me.” Rytius then performed an exquisite pantomime of autoerotic asphyxiation in which it was clear that the entire scene was an act of self-pleasure, and yet in which no particular motion or gesture appeared vulgar or lewd. As Rytius approached his fatal climax, an old man literally died in the aisle, and his people dragged him out, laughing. “OK, so you see that it doesn’t take much to start playing. But that’s damn near nothing. Nuts and knots. Both are essentially hollow. I mean, when we speak about them in anything other than a literal or a sexual sense, we mean that hollow, empty thing. It’s either going to be empty because you need what’s in it or it’s going to be empty because you need to get out of it. But it’s going to be empty. It’s existence is a trip to nothing. It’s a cipher. It’s pure, evanescent form. Is it actually nothing?” Rytius paused and walked to the other end of the floor.

“ ‘How can you just play like that, from nothing?’ ” Rytius growled in a raspy voice. He paused and continued in his normal voice. “That’s what this trumpeter from the olden days asked a younger piano player he was working with, because he was impressed at his improvisation. It wouldn’t be long before a whole lot of people were, because he became widely known for being able to spontaneously compose entire musical structures on stage by himself on piano, in multiple styles and idioms. Others would transcribe his creations to later confirm his fidelity to the forms he played. Anyway, the young piano player’s answer was, ‘I just do it.’

“That’s saying something. Let’s not dismiss it as the arrogance of youth, but let’s take it seriously. Let’s run a little thought experiment in putting new wine into old bottles. I would take his answer, made in the twentieth century, and I say it in a spirit they didn’t have back then. I’ll say it like Fila would say it. Some of you were there yesterday, at his baby girl’s naming. You’ll remember what I’m talking about, and you’ll know why I am saying it, and then I will explain to everyone how a new nut…I mean a new wine can fill an old sack. I’ll explain it, because I don’t want to fall into a trap I see set before me. Let me tell you what that trap is.”

A murmur spread throughout the hall.

“We recordkeepers refer to ourselves as recordkeepers, and we have a relationship to ourselves such that we have never come to an agreement about what we’re doing with our time. This means we have a conflicted relationship to ourselves, and at least two parts. The concrete fact is that there are two parts. My part believes it is the strongest and the best because we have discussed it among ourselves, I say, among those who think like ourselves, and we, those who think like us, have agreed upon a certain approach to our work. We preserve and document the past, and we spend our time investigating what the past was for those who lived it. We want to know the shape of their lives, the meaning they drew from their lives. The facts are important, but they are not the thing. We seek a higher-order knowledge of the shapes of relationships. Because if we know the shapes of the olden relationships, we can more easily see the shapes of our own. And then, and only then, can we use the facts, the details, for ourselves. Otherwise, we wouldn’t know where to put them.

“It should be easier to relate to the past, but I don’t need to tell you…  We are children of oblivion, taking shelter amidst the wreckage of a continuity lost in an apocalypse we don’t understand.

“And so we can’t agree with those who don’t think like us. They believe that they can trick the past into revealing the cause of the apocalypse. They confront the past as though it can be known directly, by asking it to disprove assertions, one at a time. It sounds elegant, like the scientific method, or a Socratic dialogue,” Rytius paused and glanced briefly at the Councilor Justice. “Or a prosecutor’s cross-examination. Each single assertion pulls in all the records relating to the assertion, and that sounds comprehensive, but by doing that it aligns those records to itself, ignoring their own inherent arrangement, let alone their relationships to records outside the scope of the assertion. Their work is negative, and while they pretend to eventually be able to derive positive knowledge from all this, in the meantime all they’re doing is constructing a prism of exclusions, each one a new facet, making their view of the past that much more fractured and kaleidoscopic.

“They call themselves Speculative Historians. That’s fine. If I had to state our differences plainly, with appropriate rancor on each side, I’d say we seek first ourselves to flourish, and they seek first our pasts to prune, as a precondition of flourishing. We are opposites, united in the same activity of research, debate, discussion, discovery, rediscovery, and I will credit them with the pursuit of knowledge.

“But what regulates our opposition? We haven’t had debates on these matters in ten years, since 2133 when Fila Green and Tellem Ralph, the first two recordkeepers, split over the Lancet.” Rytius paused to seek out their faces among the crowd. Tellem wore a benign smile and looked off into the distance, while Fila met his eyes, listening intently. “We clearly don’t regulate it ourselves. We can’t even agree to hold a debate to disagree. It’s pretty sad, considering the stakes and the talent going to waste.”

Some of the Speculative Historians muttered disapproval. Rytius understood. “Both sides believe the other to be wasting its talent and opportunity.”

Rytius paused and walked over to the side of the stage, where he had lain his pack. He withdrew a wooden folding easel and a large pad of paper, and he spent several seconds setting them up in the center of the stage. The councilors could not see the paper.

“So, what regulates bodies united in opposition? If you were to poach an egg the whirlpool way, cracking the shell and dropping the egg into the vortex of a swirling bath of near-boiling water, you could see that the yolk and the white are held together by centripetal force, the force pulling inward in axial rotation. The medium and agent of that force is the hot swirling water bath itself. But it’s not so obvious that there are two separate things going on at the same time.”

He paused to draw it out.

Rytius sighed. “I sure could use a hot, swirling water bath myself right about now,” Rytius said, turning to look directly up at Councilor Justice Boniface, whereupon he danced toward her, lightly gyrating like a bachelorette party stripper, and pretended to seductively sponge-bathe himself through his body armor and leather coveralls—of which one strap was now unbuttoned and swinging to and fro—and his sweater and thermals. “Mm hmm,” he moaned loudly.

Attendees wooed their disbelief and shock and fear.

She frowned and smiled at the same time, so Rytius turned back around to face the crowd, to waggle his eyebrows for a quick bit of comic relief. He turned back to her. “You can arrest me any old time you like,” he said suggestively, presenting his arms for binding. “Do you, too, also like nuts and knots, as well?” There were more giggles and oohs. She smiled contemptuously and narrowed her eyes, as though to indicate that she had been a good sport but that gametime was now over. Rytius agreed, and turned back to face the public.

“But you know we’ve been in hot water,” he said confidentially. There was no doubt that it was true, and those gathered vocalized their plain agreement.

Rytius paused and let his head fall back in exasperation, and then he let a deep sigh buzz his lips in exhalation. “These God damned princes,” he moaned long and slow, dragging out the “-ces”, as he turned around slowly to end his sibilation and rotation with gaze affixed on Feelharmonica, who neither squirmed nor bristled, though he shot Councilor Boniface a quick glance. Rytius tested Feelharmonica once more: “What? What?” He bucked up his chest and bounced around like a man pretending to prepare to fight. “If you’re feeling froggy, jump!” Rytius froze in the stupidest threatful pose he could muster and looked menacingly at the prince with whom he had hunted pigeons and played tag long ago. He held it, and he held the prince’s gaze until Feelharmonica cracked a crooked half-smile, and everyone laughed, and Rytius could go on, frog in hot water.

“Yes, the birth pangs of the Covenant of New Ark, the death throes of Prince Appall, the trilateral sibling rivalry we’ve got going on here, right, Feelharmonica? Mercs, taxes, shortages, rents, rants, rats, roaches, and ants.

“I think I can come right out and ethically propose to you that we should consider the whole of our society to be the swirling waters that regulate the contradictory unity of our little group. That might sound abstract or big, and it might be, but whatever it is, it’s the opposite of profound. I want you to realize how mundane all this is.

“Nuts and knots. Something from nothing. New wine, old sacks. Frogs in swirling hot water baths. Centripetal force. A real situation. A conundrum. Reality.” Rytius paced a bit.

“I still haven’t decided the topic of my presentation, but I’ll tell you when I’m finished.” Everybody laughed, most applauded, and some recordkeepers stood to applaud.

“You know I’m just playing, though. It’s all in the game. I know the prince, and I might maybe even say that I know him well, and, of course, my brother works for the prince. I know that the prince and his council work hard to ensure our means of survival, and I myself have personally fought and shed blood for New Ark’s independence, for the prince’s place at the table with the other rulers of these lands. So I know that when something needs doing, the council is on top of it.” Rytius backed off to one side of the floor and turned to face the council, and he began to clap, and to lead those gathered in a round of grateful applause.

“And Prince Feelharmonica leads the council in virtually all matters. He delegates duties in a responsible fashion, but there must be no doubt that Prince Feelharmonica has agreed to any significant state action, policy, or regulation in New Ark. Am I right, councilors?” Rytius asked the councilors, who agreed, sensing some rhetorical danger, but not caring much one way or the other.

“So, in a very real sense, if something in society boils up to the level where it requires state intervention, it’s coming under Feelharmonica’s purview. As it should.

“So, we have demonstrated that Prince Feelharmonica, as sovereign of New Ark, is the master of all those processes that work on and about the bits of our lives. He is the poacher. I mean, he is—must be—the cook boiling the water, swirling it, and dropping the egg.

“And yes, that is true almost by construction, because of the manner in which the power of the sovereign flows through the law and the rest of the power sculpture. And we knew this even before this hearing began because we knew that Prince Feelharmonica’s policy is the reason for the hearing at all.”

Rytius paused to expand his diagram. “I want you all to remember that it’s two things happening at the same time. If you just heat the egg, you get a boiled egg. If you just swirl the egg, you get some sort of raw egg soup.”

“The swirling hot water works inside the egg, too,” Rytius began again. “There is a time, a window within which the two fluids held together in opposition can still slide apart if some small factor of rotation or temperature changes. The swirling water takes a different time to cook each fluid. It works from without by centripetal force, that’s the law for instance. How does it work within? With heat. That’s ambient radiation.”

Rytius drew a poached egg by itself at the bottom of his diagram. “I didn’t label the white, but you can see the yolk there.”

“Do you guys know the joke about the fish in the water?” Rytius asked. Somebody yelled “Tell it.” “Some of you might remember it from Rainbow’s Pot O’Gold Get Down last year?” Rytius asked again. Some recordkeepers sounded their recollection.

“I’ll tell everybody,” Rytius said. “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, fish. How’s the water?’ The youngsters just ignore him and keep on swimming. A couple minutes later, one of them looks over at the other and asks, ‘What the hell is water?’ ”

There was a nice round of laughter at the arrogance of youth.

“This is the joy of recordkeeping. You learn these little tricks like listening when people talk,” Rytius laughed with the listeners. “What is it that you’re surrounded by but just don’t know? If you’re a fish, it’s water. If you’re one of us, here, alive, today, in New Ark, it’s hot water!”

The citizens laughed at a higher pitch, now anxious because implicated.

“Let me be honest with you about something. I just made a mistake and I’d like to apologize. I was demagogic and went for a cheap joke just a second ago, about the hot water. That just puts us right back where we started, and it makes me have wasted a good minute or so developing the theme of something in the hot ambient-radiation water.

“Because I’m embarrassed now, I’ll just say plainly what I should have said, which is that we need to identify our water. In this particular case, the confiscation of the lifework of dozens of citizens of New Ark by Prince Feelharmonica himself. It’s like a noose around our necks.

“But let’s look closely, please, at our metaphor and our situation. We have an egg swirling in hot water, slippy for a time, and as the water transmits its heat to those two, they set, locking into their final positions against one another, defined by one another. They can no longer change form, though they can be broken apart. But you have to have both the heat and the swirl simultaneously. That’s the only way to get to the poached egg.”

“And let’s not forget that the heat and the swirl have to be coordinated, somehow, in their simultaneity. That’s up to the cook, not to overheat the water, and not to swirl too hard.”

“By now most of you probably think that I am laying a foundation to accuse Prince Feelharmonica of meddling in the affairs of the recordkeepers to the detriment of my faction and the benefit of the Speculative Historians. It’s a much simpler matter than that, and it has everything to do with why our two factions could never come to terms with one another, why we never finished our debate, and why water is elemental, despite being a compound. Water is that which mixes the miscible. This can mix with that in the medium, and the medium is the water, which is the third element, and thereby always an element. That’s logical.

“But in the real illogical world, some of the waters in which we swim are lax penalties for ignorance, open corruption in the production of wealth such that the people cannot pay even those paltry fees, and craven fear consumed as though it were respect. Can you imagine the fellows on the bed of this river?”

Rytius modified his diagram. “Remember, you can’t unpoach an egg, and you can’t cook an egg and then swirl it, or swirl it and then cook it. Poaching is a combination of the two, but you can’t factor either one out and get to a poached egg.”

“But I’m trying to spark something here with these two concepts—the miscible mixing medium in which we swim and the swamp of corruption crawling with strange bedfellows. I’m trying to push them together and hopefully reveal the sort of waters in which, say, Prince Feelharmonica and any faction of recordkeepers could mingle. We’re talking about swirling heat, cooking the inside an egg. It’s no run-of-the-mill corruption, like money under the table, that sustains our little group, yolk and white, in disunion. It has to be more like the prince and the faction share a worldview. That’s part of the coordination. They fit together in a way that escapes immediate understanding of either. Like water for the young fish.

“Even better, to keep the shapes aligned, it is more like…the ever more rigid, ever more opaque white of the egg is the way the water appears to the yolk. Tellem’s faction is the way the whirlpool of corruption, i.e., our world, appears to us, the core group performing the core activity without which the faction wouldn’t exist. While the prince’s confiscation and this hearing are somehow a manner of regulation.”

Rytius drew another diagram next to the first.

It was virtually identical.

“It’s all about coordinating the processes. It stands to reason that there would be something on the order of collaboration between the prince and the Speculative Historians, to place them in control of the tower and its research objectives. My brother Ritius is charged with enforcing the law, such as it is. He has to press it home, and that’s the swirl. But the corruption…  The corruption is the law itself—the entire legal apparatus—and the agent of that corruption must be none other than Councilor Justice Boniface, administrator of that apparatus.”

There were jeers from the Speculative Historians. Ritius, seated in the front row, gestured to a lieutenant, whereupon additional security personnel gathered at the exits. The hall was full of commotion. Tellem walked out, and Rytius breathed deeply and remained calm. He turned to face the council, and he made a point of meeting each of their eyes.

“Speculation?” he continued. “Yes. But I want you to see just how strong speculation can be.”

“They swim in the same water. The prince feels himself adrift, and the Speculative Historians promise to be able to shout ‘Land ahoy!’ any day now, as they have for years. The prince wants a shrink-wrapped, prepackaged history, a usable past upon which to build his kingdom, and the Speculative Historians want to rediscover America, even at the cost of mistaking the natives for Indians. Again. This is the worldview they share. They both want firm ground to stand on. They are afraid of water.

“So, the trap I have to avoid today is saying anything to negatively influence the prince’s decision. There’s something else, too, for which I have already apologized.

“That’s demagogy. See, I could been taking easy shots at our prince and his council the whole time, testing their patience, but meanwhile mastering the hall. But I want to fill old sacks with new wine, and that new wine is a new spirit abroad, and not just among us recordkeepers. Fila identified it yesterday for the first time, in the way we name our children.

“This is the humility we have learned in the loss of our past, and we should be grateful for it. The way we name our children shows that we know something the olden ones didn’t: the relationships we build are more important than the ones we are born to. Or those we rediscover while seeking lost shores, magic treasures, or readymade narratives. Family names, and even family histories, are accidents. What we choose to make of ourselves in light of them is what matters. We know this. All of us who have chosen our names know this. We just don’t know that that’s what we know.

“Well, now we know, and Fila said it first. I could keep this knowledge to myself, as I speak up here, and not let one half of the audience in on the secret I am sharing with the other half, so that the first half doesn’t understand the passion of the response to arguments they mistakenly believe themselves to understand. This would disorient them, but they would feel the force of our side. I could master the hall that way, too. But the target is off. I don’t want to persuade non-recordkeepers of anything other than the value of recordkeeping, and I want to valorize neither the hoarding of knowledge in secret nor the hoarders of secret knowledge.

“My only target is the nexus of corruption that brings us here today. And that nexus includes those I am still willing to call recordkeepers, though they themselves are not.

“I want to expose all of this. And I want you to see how funny it is, from my point of view, and then I’ll close. Remember, the Speculative Historians are the form the state takes for us. The state is aligned with them, and the state may as well be them. Because the state has no special existence for us except through our relation with them. Which is how I solved their relationship in the hot water metaphor. And that’s the only way I could sketch out the power sculpture, revealing the nature of the relationship.

“I want to confess one more instance of demagoguery. That’s the metaphor of egg white and egg yolk taking their final form against one another, defined by one another. That’s good as far as it goes, but it’s not really applicable here, because we never excluded them because we could never agree to disagree. We could never really hash everything out. We were always fatally split, and, having failed to achieve the impossible, we recordkeepers, the only ones who actually ethically require the confrontation, are cursed that when we finally get it, it takes the form of us against what is, effectively, the world.

“So, in attempting to save my nuts by slipping the knot of the noose the prince has around our necks, I fell…no, it felt like I was falling, but I had always been sitting, like a frog, in the swirling hot whirlpool of corruption that is the sovereignty of New Ark, only there to discover, while dissolving into broth, that the swirl and the heat have killed once and for all any potential for life the egg may have had. That’s the cooking metaphor, though, and the frog is done.

“I grab my nuts as the noose gets tighter, and I pray I can, one more time, Lord, pull something out of nothing. It better be good, and I hope they can tell after just one game.

“Before I close, with words of no particular fire, because I doused my own flame, I would like to say, in the language of the marketplace and the lawyers, and the lawyers of the marketplace and the marketplace of lawyers, that recordkeeping is a real value deal, I mean in terms of civic virtue. Consider that I just sketched the outline of an ongoing crime involving Prince Feelharmonica, Councilor Boniface, my brother, and Tellem Ralph. I don’t have conclusive evidence, but you can see what’s going on. Right? So, I’m saying, Prince, call me after you kick these scrubs to the curb, OK? We’ll have lunch. My treat.

“My presentation tonight will have been about how to blow your game up in front of everybody but still come out on top because recordkeeping has been real, folks.”

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20. Duck Eggs—Wednesday, February 6, 2143

The ducks honked and screamed Rytius awake from his nightmare of a pumpkin eating his hand as he attempted to light the candle in its belly. The lightbulb in his closet flickered and dimmed as he dressed, and so he hurried outside to see what the matter could be. The pen was flooded, and the hens were mad because they could not protect their eggs from the cold. The brook behind the house had overflowed its modest bounds and strengthened sufficiently to carry refuse from the Brookside market upstream, and so the rotten wood of a old, broken milk crate had jammed the paddle blades of his ginny. The twisted wire frame of the crate was intact and only slightly deformed, but its deformation had been sufficient to break the single plank of decaying, discolored wood that it had retained, which then crumbled and slid out of the mechanical tension grip of the frame. Rytius hardly touched the moldy board jamming the paddle before it disintegrated. The wire frame of the crate was set against the brook like the fish trap had been set against the Watsessing at Soverel Park, and Rytius observed how the flow into the box cut waves and ripples on the surface, which were then cut again, by identical wires, upon flowing out—squaring the modulation of the fluid, flowing back into itself.

He had to lift the pen up with his back to push a pair of bricks underneath its stilts, to drain it and to ensure that it remained draining. He told himself that the ducks might find the tilt engaging as he screwed the door hinge back into place, so that it would close correctly against the wind and rain, and he did not fail to collect the eggs, not only for his breakfast but also for the selling.

He had no idea what game he would play for the council, though he knew what his subject would be. It was too large. He worried, but not much, as he prepared a huevo ranchero of a single fried duck egg, a reskilleted piece of bacon, chopped in the pan, there, mixed with the egg, now a scramble, and some sort of greenery, and he chose some parsley from the icebox, washed it inadequately, he knew, and prepared himself for some grains of sandy soil. He didn’t even chop it as much as he had chopped the bacon, but he rationalized this half-taken half measure as too minor to matter, because his teeth would do the work his hands hadn’t. He would do the work, and not in the sense of taking it up to do it, but rather that in one way or another, the need satisfied by the work was so necessary to his being that it was thrust upon him every moment of every day. A living human requires to participate in human metabolic processes. As soon as a child is born, those processes are social. And so we grow.

Rytius ate quickly. He finished dressing, packed some drawing materials, and, remembering his binoculars, armed himself in a rare manner, with some dusty fiberglass body armor and a matching pair of six guns.

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19. The Castle Doctrine

It is well established that there was a time and place in the olden United States when it behooved every man to walk about armed. This was, in fact, a marker of manhood, and there were those forcibly excluded from it. Those who refused this blackmail of honor were not punished except by those who would then successfully abuse them, but they were subtly scorned. This was especially the case in the western territories after the Civil War, when men from the eastern and middle western states went out ahead of their families to establish homesteads and claim their piece of the lands then offered by the United States government, should the settlers subdue it. Including the antebellum South, more than half of the country was pacified by hard men such as these, who crafted a civics of menace, and a corresponding interpersonal ethics of threat. Both are well ramified, and there are higher orders akin to chess or speaking in drum.

It is for this reason that upon his return home that evening, Rytius showered for sobriety and descended to his basement, to collect materials for three improvised explosive devices with ballistic payloads and one, larger, with an incendiary payload. He reasoned to himself that his ancestral home was not worth much if his own brother would steal from within it that which made it important. What value was a property here in New Ark, where the prince would have it done?

The state and its laws may be arranged in such a way that the prince is authorized to act outside of the law. But this does not mean that their victims must act without benefit of the law their rulers abandon. Let them suffer a man defending his home and property. Rytius was determined that they would, and so he carefully spoon-sifted black powder into three tubes of cardboard, the first two about 6 inches long and 1 ½ inches in diameter, and the last about 8″ × 2″. He held the first cardboard tube in place at the wide mouth of a glass quart bottle as he shook in the ball bearings and wood screws and bolts and washers. He made another like that, and for the incendiary he made a gallon of sticky fire, and loaded it with the third powder tube into an ancient plastic water jug. He set the incendiary device just inside the door of the master bedroom, the first room of his shop, on the second floor, while he set the two shrapnel devices inside the front door of the house, and just inside the backyard entrance to the kitchen. He set tripwires to trigger their electric fuses, but he left the circuits open, because he needed a good night’s sleep, and he didn’t want to worry about whether he would remember that he planted bombs throughout his home in the morning. One never knows exactly what to expect from a hangover.

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18. Madness

“Did you try the sweet potato pies?” GJ asked Voom, who was chatting with Dancy and Liz in the doorway. GJ was sure Voom had a crush on Dancy.

“I did,” Voom replied, smiling. “Both of them, like Sugarpie said.”

“Well, don’t be shy. Which one did you like the best?” GJ asked.

“I preferred the one with the pumpkin spice,” Voom said.

“Ain’t no such thing as pumpkin spice,” said GJ, sort of chuckling. He pulled from his shirt pocket the joint he had made that morning. He held it up as if to ask those gathered whether they would like to share it with him.

“Heck yeah,” said Voom, nodding yes to the joint.

“You just mean the one that tastes like pumpkin pie,” Dancy suggested to Voom. “Right?”

“But it’s sweet potato, though!” chirped Liz. GJ was sure that Liz had a crush on Voom.

“That’s right,” said Voom, answering Dancy. “I know what it tastes like, but not what goes in it.”

“What kind is it?” Dancy asked GJ, changing the subject. “You always have the best stuff.”

“They be growing heirloom strains and ancient seeds and stuff, like spelt and rainbow corn,” agreed Liz.

“I think they called it maize? excuse you?” Dancy smirked.

“Frickin’…millet,” said Voom.

“Egads, I do believe it’s emmer,” laughed Liz, continuing Voom’s construction.

“Fuckin’…fonio,” GJ drawled, chuckling lightly. They all laughed. He lit the joint, pulled and exhaled a pungent cloud among them. “This,” he coughed, “and I am pleased to present it, is Toe Jam.”

“You ain’t lying,” Liz’s eyes watered as she attempted to unstank her face.

“Oh my God, that smells awful,” Dancy agreed, wincing.

“Like moldy lemon peels,” said Voom, taking the joint.

“Yes!” GJ agreed emphatically. “But it tastes like…like chocolate…”

“Yogurt,” said Voom, coughing. “Chocolate yogurt. A strange mix, with a strange aftertaste. Rich and smooth but tangy and acidic.”

Dancy had to try it. “Oh, I see what you mean,” she said. “The aftertaste is like…like lemonade or, um, lemon…”

“Ice cream!” coughed Liz, having taken the joint, pulled deeply, and held her breath. “Or key lime pie…” She looked up at Voom. “With pumpkin spice,” she added, blinking suggestively.

GJ giggled as she passed him the joint again.

“Still smells like feet,” Voom reasserted.

“Sweaty running shoe sock feet,” Dancy said, crinkling up her nose. Voom grinned, pleased with her amplification. Sugarpie joined them just then, standing beside GJ, who put an arm around her waist and took a second pull on the joint before passing it to her.

“So whose pie did y’all like the best?” Sugarpie asked, embedding herself in GJ’s arms and jabbing the air with the joint like eeny-meeny-miny-mo.

“They won’t give me a straight answer,” said GJ. Then he almost doubled over, giggling, pushing Sugarpie away. “Voom keeps talking like somebody ground up some pumpkins and made spice out of ’em.”

“Aw, man, you’re just giving me grief,” Voom chuckled. “I just don’t know which one was which, so I called it by the taste. The classic, traditional one. You know, the one that tastes like pumpkin pie.”

“OK, cinnamon,” Sugarpie agreed, nodding. “I told you they’d like mine better,” she teased GJ.

“All’s I’m saying is there ain’t no such thing as pumpkin spice, and even if there was you can’t refer to a sweet-potato pie by calling it a pumpkin anything,” GJ stated calmly, as though he were concluding a presentation in the game.

Dancy snorted a laugh and said GJwas tripping, and Liz giggled, too, at his sudden change in demeanor. GJ grinned and passed the joint to Voom. “Yeah, well,” Voom chuckled too, as GJ stifled a giggle and attempted to compose his face. GJ crossed his arms, and leaned back against the doorframe, as though he were done arguing and would now rest his case and his body against the doorframe. He missed—he wasn’t square in front of it—so he slid off to the side of it, reached out with his left arm to grab it, and extended his right arm behind him to break his fall. He managed to catch himself before he ended up on the floor. Voom, Liz, and Dancy guffawed, and Sugarpie covered her mouth laughing, while pulling her husband back up out of his half-fall.

“Yuk it up,” he muttered, attempting to square himself again. “Go right ahead.” He appeared hurt in his pride.

“Oh, don’t be like that, baby,” Sugarpie stifled her laughter and leaned against him for a kiss. He jumped back, and he was still off-balance, so he fell again, and he did not catch himself with his hand against the doorframe, though he did try to slide along the wall to slow himself. This produced a sort of rotation, so that he looked like a tree turning and falling down. He realized he could not brake his fall, so he yelled “Timber!” and landed on his right side, and he cracked up laughing, there, on the floor.

Voom bent over to help him up and GJ snapped at him. “Watch you don’t draw back a stump,” and Voom was shocked and Dancy and Liz stopped laughing and Sugarpie got down quick.

“Wait a minute, GJ, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t like pumpkin pie, and I never ate it,” he said. Voom was stunned, Liz was gapemouthed, and Dancy was frozen, waiting to understand.

“OK, but what are you so upset about? It’s just pie,” Sugarpie said, concerned.

“You remember my great grandmother?” he asked Sugarpie as he tried to stand up. He fell back down and finally sat against the wall. “She was a snakebearer, too,” he spat, looking up at Voom. “She made pumpkin pie,” he said venomously.

“What is going on with you, GJ?” Sugarpie wailed. “Why are you talking to him like that?” She shot worried looks at Dancy, Liz, and Voom, each of whom was also perplexed.

“Shut up, woman! I’m trying to tell you something!” GJ shouted. Sugarpie jumped back and stood still. Liz bumped Dancy and whispered telling her to go get Rob or Rytius or D-Man or Fila or somebody, one of the men, and Dancy did, backing away horrified.

GJ tried again to get to his feet. “I never told you she was a witch, did I?” he asked Sugarpie. “She was. She used to keep this big black leather book full of potions, spells, brews, infusions and incantation.” He noticed Dancy was gone. “You ain’t getting none of that tonight, Voom,” he laughed. “Or ever. You know they’re getting married, right? Her and Rob? She just likes the attention, stupid. And here you come, like a little puppy dog jumping all up in her face, trying to get a lick.” He giggled in Voom’s face, and then he noted gravely, “Speaking of puppy dogs, you’re one Snoopy-looking motherfucker too, ain’t you?” He could hardly stop himself giggling, and so he was pushing himself against the wall so as not to fall again. “Tell him what’s up, Liz,” GJ winked big at her and laughed a loud snort.

“I don’t know what’s going on with you, man, but I think you might need to go home,” Voom said. “Right?” he looked to Sugarpie for support. She didn’t know exactly how to respond.

“Like I was saying, that snakebearing bitch was sure enough a witch. I know. I’ve seen the book. She passed it down to her daughter, and she passed it down to hers, and that’s my very own mama.”

“Wait a minute,” snapped Sugarpie. “Are you talking about your mama’s recipe book?”

Dancy returned with D-Man, who smoothly took up the spot next to GJ on the wall. “My man,” GJ greeted him, and tried to give him a pound, but it ended up being a back slap and a low five. “I’m speaking on curses,” GJ declared. “In curses, as verses.” He laughed sharply at his rhyme and glared at Sugarpie and Liz and warned them, “Don’t think I don’t see what’s going on here, by the way. You sent Dancy to go get somebody to cool me out, and that’s my main man and it’s not just recipes. That’s just what it looks like. The shit gets inherited.”

GJ had managed to pull himself up fully erect, still against the wall.

“It’s in the blood now. And it looks like a recipe book because it’s all food potions, like pumpkin pie. And what is food? Food is nourishment. Nourishment for the body. But the soul can’t live without the body. So food nurtures the soul as well. And so if you poison the body, you can poison the soul,” GJ explained. He was calm. “It’s witchcraft, plain and simple.” D-Man looked at Sugarpie for an indication of what to do, and Liz and Voom were just as confused as Sugarpie was.

“That’s what drug addiction is. Right? Loss of the soul via ingestion. Digestion. So if you curse the nourishment, that’s not just any old curse. You’re planting the evil deep down in the metabolic process, the hormonal regulation, the growth cycle of the individual organism, and that’s a curse on all the future generations. The recipe is the transmitter, the information, the dna, how it spreads,” GJ went on. He was making a strained sort of sense, which made things somehow worse.

“And get this: it looks like culture. It looks like a recipe book. It looks like a family heirloom. And so the curse affects the minds of those who inherit it, and it spreads out further and further, deeper into the collective soul. So I have to listen to a redheaded snakebearer telling me about pumpkin spice. Fila’s right about family. Fuck family. And fuck snakebearing witch bitches, too, God damn it,” GJ finished.

Sugarpie had had enough. “OK, GJ, I think it’s time to go. You ready?” He said he didn’t care and his pupils were wide open. She put an arm in his and started pulling him off the wall while D-Man put his arm under GJ’s other arm. They got him off the wall that way, but his legs buckled after a couple of steps, and he pulled Sugarpie to the floor, while D-Man held the other arm up. Sugarpie was not strong enough to walk him out. Voom stepped in to provide support.

“I told you to back up off me, you Red Baron Flying Ace–looking motherfucker!” GJ shouted, slapping Voom’s hand away and wrenching himself from D-Man’s grip. “You Samhain-dancing triplane-flying Grand Pumpkin–eating snake motherfucker!” GJ was on his own two feet, though falling forward again as he swung his right arm wildly wide, connecting firmly with Voom’s left jaw.

Voom slumped to the floor and Liz shrieked and fell to attend to him while Dancy cried and Sugarpie yelled for help, and folks came running and D-Man grabbed GJ in a bear hug while Rytius and Sosoface held his legs to stop him kicking, and they carried him, laughing and crying hysterically, out of Fila’s Finds.

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17. Tent Raiders

That evening there was no game, but a presentation. It wasn’t historical but contemporary. It wasn’t high art or really even pop. It was something like samizdat, readymades, or early hip-hop. Fila had all the gear: the playback machines, the recorders, the cables, racks, and devices, all the screens for all the formats for all the sizes. Particularly late-twentieth-century mini-dv tape common in handheld videocameras from that era, of which there are many brands that are easy to maintain and that remain suitable for use.

The tapes are more expensive because the playing is the thing. Nobody is rushing out to buy a camera to record, because they don’t have a clue what to do. But to watch something worthwhile? To see something everybody is talking about? You need to be part of a community something like that of the recordkeepers or you need your own copy. And that means you’re at the mercy of the movie man.

Fila didn’t like how it was one of the few occasions on which all the recordkeepers could get together anymore, even the Speculative Historians. There was nothing in the event itself to push them apart. Showtime at Fila’s Finds was a tradition, and he promoted it with a poem, as a place where you might

discover a discovery!
no game but a frame to fall in
to have a ball in
to escape and go all in

Sometimes, understand, recordkeepers find things that are way out, unrelatable, perplexing and vexing, and they can’t work it into a game because their referents are lame. Or, just the same, they don’t know what to say about it. That’s one way things can get into the show. There’s a whole other way things can go.

◆ ◆ ◆

Dancy and Rob brought kettle corn. Voom made a sour-cream dip and a tomatillo salsa for his fried tortilla chips. GJ and Sugarpie had made one sweet-potato pie each, and they wanted everyone to judge which was better, because it was cinnamon versus cardamom. Floweria brought some yellow cake with real chocolate icing, made from real dark chocolate chips. D-Man said they were from Trinidad, because that’s what the merchant told him. No, he didn’t really have a reason to believe the man, but his great-great grandparents had been from Trinidad and he enjoyed imagining that tropical isle, a faraway place he would most likely never visit, and to which he would most likely never discover the substance of his connection.

“There’s never not enough dessert,” Fila noted. D-Man agreed, the reason being that he was working up an appetite moving folding chairs from the basement to the annex. He would have looked forward to rice and peas or red beans and rice or black eyed peas or fried chicken or a plate of crispy crawlers with shredded hash browns and ketchup or Sosoface was supposed to be helping, but he was flirting with Bonbon instead. Ice cream for dessert. D-Man wasn’t mad at Sosoface. Not all the way. Fila wasn’t as fast, but he couldn’t be mad at that, either. D-Man had volunteered to help Fila, and that was that.

Fila had to get up and squeeze between the chairs that were set a little too close, even for this annex, which, while able to accommodate a hundred guests milling about on foot, what with all the distance and space in and among the shelves and racks of books and artifacts, could hold maybe only about 2 or 3 dozen chairs lined up in such a way that they all faced the same way, with a line of sight to the projector screen. All this in order to start the film. Consider the hieroglyphic language of twentieth-century electronics, high technology mass-manufactured consumer goods made in Asia, where the human languages are non-alphabetical, ideographic, tonal, and altogether inaccessible to the other major marketplaces. An international system of symbols, a pictorial pidgin, arose after the Second World War, and all pidgins are commercial trading languages. Like any language, it takes time to learn. The olden ones may have learnt it easier, given that they swam in such rich streams of commodities produced by a world working class across a global network of production and exchange. Language learning is always a matter of exposure. But that’s why Fila had to be the one to press ▶️ on the mini-dv camera.

◆ ◆ ◆

The picture was fuzzy like they usually were; folks don’t clean the lenses of their cameras, dust gets into the sensor, pixels die. Handheld anti-jitter technology was in its infancy in the late twentieth century, as the contemporary trend of found-footage horror films conveys. It could not possibly have served as a source of horror unless it were real and unavoidable in recordings. Imagine The Blair Witch Project in a world with anti-jitter software. It’s impossible. Now imagine the late 1980s television show Cops with smooth tracking shots, on a Steadicam. Similarly outrageous, a formal incongruity, a paradox. That’s why Tent Raiders, a crowd-sourced community project “broadcast” by a network of smugglers, pirates, and Illadelphians remained vérité, no matter how big it got, no matter how many tapes got sold. Think of something like America’s Funniest Home Videos produced by a team of psychopathic war boys from Mad Max: Fury Road, and then consider the universe of scandals possible in the production and distribution of such an underground video series, filmed by perpetrators of piracy, rape and pillage in the very act of piracy, rape and pillage. And then consider the sort of scandal impossible in the production and distribution of the same, only via intimate personal transaction and word of mouth across the entire North American continent. The distributors always cut the rape scenes, and there were never any corpses onscreen. With that you may begin to understand the fascination the series held across all strata of twenty-second century North America, let alone among such sensitive cultural types as recordkeepers.

◆ ◆ ◆

Darkness and suddenly a green spotlight, but it wasn’t a green spotlight but a night vision scope clicking on to reveal a literal tent—but a large one, like those housing small carnival attractions or Bedouin families—being surrounded by raiders, like a squad of paramilitaries on reconnaissance. They used hand signals to keep mostly quiet, and the more one watched Tent Raiders the more one got to know and understand who the perpetrators were. Hand signals are like gang signs, and most of the perpetrators used some flavor of Illadelphian signal. Even here, in South Dakota, where the tent being raided was a slow-moving section of a semi-nomadic colony on the move. Probably for food reasons, as one can imagine would be a problem out on the Great Plains during winter.

“The chatter over the radio makes it feel so real,” Dancy said. The quiet the perps kept was mostly for dramatic effect.

“It is real,” Liz said.

“You know what I mean,” Dancy said.

The perps were as a matter of course quite heavily armed, and there was almost no chance that any normal civilian grouping would be able to match them in firepower. They never seemed to come across other gangs, perps, or mercenaries.

Slacker perps were visibly unprepared on screen, goggles off, headsets around their necks, standing lazily at ease around the tent; the cam perp filming in night vision crackled threats to shape up and they did. There was some grumbling over the air, and a long beep of censorship.

“What was that about already,” Fila said.

“Yeah, nobody even did nothing yet,” Liz said.

“It’s probably you know what it is. They don’t even let them say it,” Voom noted.

“They’re calling dibs on the women,” Hunnybunny agreed.

The cam perp swirled his index finger around to rally the other perps. Half surrounded the tent and half invaded, weapons drawn. The cam perp led the breach, and, once inside, he gave a slow look around, so as to film everything and everyone before waking the victims. They were sleeping soundly. Then he told the men outside to let off some shots. Pandemonium broke out inside among what appeared to be two families, with two sets of parents and two sets of children. Screams of surprise and a man jumped up alarmed to trip over his pallet and land on his wife, who had been trying to run from out of a crawl. It was almost funny, and then the camera cut to a new scene.

“And on the girls,” Vinilla said. Her daughter was asleep at home with her sister as sitter.

There was neither muss nor fuss in the next scene, which was entirely silent. The two bound and gagged men and a teenage boy were led out of the tent and sat down.

“Why do they cut the sound?” Fila asked. “They’re selling horror, right? Why not give us what we paid for, so to speak."

Men outside the tent had already removed the property from inside the tent, and were already going through it, splitting it into two piles.

“I think it’s against the law,” D-Man said.

The males had not been sitting for a minute before the two adult women and three tweenage girls were led out of the tent, also bound and gagged, and placed forcefully on the ground near the males.

“What law?” Sugarpie asked.

“Yeah, there’s no distribution company to charge with anything,” said GJ.

One perp set the tent on fire, and cam perp examined the pile of belongings precious to the two families. “What law?” Fila repeated.

“I’m saying, though,” Rob said. “There’s nobody to charge."

“So why censor then?” Fila asked.

Cam perp wasn’t very interested in the families’ pile of belongings. He walked back over to the victims. He spoke something to them, causing one of the men to fall over, and the other jumped to his feet, whereupon another perp slammed a rifle butt into his solar plexus. He crumbled to the ground as well.

“We agree the Illadelphians organize all this, right? They do the perpetrating and the recording and the first distribution, right?"

Nobody had any doubt about that.

“It’s organized crime showing the world that they rule the world with vicious, inhuman brutality. And yet they are careful not to offend our sensibilities,” Fila said.

“Like we can trust them, even though they are raping and killing and destroying. Like we can trust them not to...offend us, or something,” Dancy agreed.

“It’s propaganda,” said Sosoface.

“Yeah, but how and what kind?” asked Rob.

Cam perp went back to the piles of precious belongings, those things these families troubled themselves to carry through the blizzards of their travels, and set fire to the larger, presumably the discard pile. He appeared to laugh with the perp who had been doing the sorting. Then he lit the other pile on fire as well.

“You can watch it with your whole family,” Floweria said.

“Yeah. Only grown-ups get the whole show. But the essential part, that they rule the world with brutality and impunity, is a lesson for the whole family,” Fila agreed.

Cam perp got close in on the victims while another perp forced them to watch their belongings burn. After all that, they weren’t even victims of robbery, the raison d’être of the show.

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it,” Fila concluded the presentation, and hit ⏹️.

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16. Reason

There is always a place for reason but it is not very large. In fact, it is cramped and uncomfortable.

Reason has allies only when it does not need them, or when they are throwing it a surprise party, having already vanquished its foes. If reason confronts its enemies alone, it has already lost.

So Rytius, awakened by the sound of hail pellets against the window, began his day wondering again how to deal with his brother. Rytius believed that even if his brother were strictly business, Ritius would readily answer any questions Rytius had, and he had plenty. Like, for instance, what did the prince think he was doing with this tower? He reminded himself not to forget the bit about cash compensation. It would be useful to know what the prince thought about recordkeeping in general. Would the tower be like a large record store, in which listeners and readers could gather, discuss, borrow materials, deposit materials, help with indexing and collation? Floweria had asked who would staff the tower. Would there be fees or restrictions? Would it be open to the public? Would contributing recordkeepers retain special privileges or rights of access? What about sensitive materials? What about protection from theft? What about storage? Rytius had not heard from anyone about the prince reaching out for advice on how to store books, magazines, tapes, films…  Heat and humidity require caution even where mere trash is concerned, let alone the concrete artifacts of the history of human thought and expression.

Rytius was turning these questions over in his mind and still had not decided how to put them by the time he heard a truck outside, as closely as anyone could expect to 9 am. From the side window of the kitchen, Rytius saw his brother approach the door, stop and then turn his head to look directly at him. He smiled, and so did Rytius, lowering his rifle.

“So is there some procedure we should follow here?”

“Nothing special. I don’t need to get every single title today, just see what you have, generally,” Ritius answered easily, smiling gently, as though to communicate his willingness to communicate.

Rytius’s normal suspicion where his brother was concerned was surpassed here, and he felt anger rising in his breast, because Ritius had enough sense to know that anyone spending hours and days and years of their lives sifting for no pay through the debris of the world gone by would have everything tabulated, dated, related, and, where possible, replicated. Rytius’s anger was coupled with a confusion as to what purpose Ritius would expect such a pretense to serve. Perhaps Ritius was trying to catch Rytius retaining or withholding items of special interest. And that would be an insult, because Ritius also knew that Rytius would be loath to hide his rebellion were he so inclined. These things are matters of honor, and both had taken the same lessons, together.

So rather than continue trying to figure his brother’s angle, he decided to obliterate the issue with weapon he had at hand. He handed his brother an accordion folder and considered whether he should kick his brother out after handing it over. “Here’s the full, up-to-date inventory.”

“The map is not the territory,” Ritius said, as he took it. His gentle smile slipped away and his face took on the look of a man with regrets. Rytius’s confusion deepened, and he wondered whether he had misunderstood, and decided that it didn’t matter because his anger remained.

“You know what I mean. And I taught you that anyway,” Rytius said sharply, turning away. He weighed his obligations to his colleagues and himself against his unwillingness to be degraded or insulted and accepted that there was nothing else he could do.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Ritius smiled again. “But, you know, I just wanted you to take me through.” Rytius heard the change in the tone of his brother’s voice, and he turned to look again. The look in his brother’s eyes, as though he were simultaneously requesting an embrace and apologizing for any misunderstanding and hopeful of a new start and hurt at this small administrative matter between them today, made him feel as though he had not seen his brother in years.

“Oh,” Rytius said, now realizing that there was indeed an ulterior motive to his brother’s ease of instruction, though it was neither degrading nor a snare, and that he had therefore been unjust to his brother in this particular matter. He did not speak but listened. As he prepared to accept his shame to himself, he wondered sadly whether and how his brother would turn this into some new manipulation.

“I haven’t been here in a long time, and I want to see how you’re…taking care of the…of our house.”

“Uh oh,” Rytius chuckled. “Yeah, I didn’t patch the roof before the snows this past fall.”

“Yeah, but you know what I mean. Listen, I know you spend a lot of time doing this work, and I know how important it is to you. I just want to see what you’ve been doing. What you’re proud of.”

If there was one thing Rytius knew, it was not to underestimate his brother, nor to let his guard down on anything not entirely within his own exclusive control. He could not allow his shame at having misunderstood what his brother claimed to be a legitimate interest in his life and work to distort his judgment. He decided to allow his brother freedom in this small range, granting him the benefit of the small doubt that he was not crafting another manipulation. Which made it more important that Rytius be clear about what was and was not under his own exclusive control. He reminded himself that Ritius worked for the prince. The prince set the policy. Ritius had to enforce it. Rytius was a victim of this policy. How would a guided tour around their ancestral home change any aspect of any of this? Regardless of his brother’s motivations in requesting it? Could it possibly matter what Ritius’s motivations were? Rytius decided that it could have no bearing on anything else, and that it was thereby acceptable, even though he would have preferred not to have to deal with his brother at all. He marveled at how appropriate it was that he himself bore all these responsibilities—forgiveness and accommodation of family, obligations to colleagues, maintenance of personal boundaries and preservation of a way back for estranged relatives—while his brother bore nor acknowledged any save loyalty to the prince.

“OK, brother. You have to admit your timing is atrocious.” His brother blundered about like a monster in the dark.

“Sometimes we are brought together by misfortune,” said Ritius.

“The same way we’re driven apart,” noted Rytius.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

Rytius had redecorated the master bedroom to match the era in which the home was built. He had womb and egg chairs, a thin, tufted leather couch on a frame of steel, a glass table, floating atop an asymmetrical wooden support. A phonograph rested atop a long wooden sideboard, a pair of stereo speakers hidden within it.

He kept his most prestigious artifacts and documents there: his televisions, film projectors, media players—things that might be traded. It’s not that the materials filling three of the four remaining bedrooms were less valuable, but that they were less likely to be held to be so. So the master bedroom contained many audio and video recordings, and many landmark historical periodical publications, and the glass display case contained trading cards, from Topps baseball to Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids; there were such archaic board games as Candy Land, Hungry Hungry Hippos, Monopoly, Connect 4, Sorry!, and Scrabble; numerous varieties of Barbie, a full squad of GI Joes (including Cobra Commander and Storm Shadow), My Buddies and Teddies Ruxpin, and such WWF Wrestling Superstars as Hulk Hogan, Randy “Macho Man” Savage, Ric Flair, Junkyard Dog, Andre the Giant, and other heroes of the 1984–1986 seasons. He also had several Rubik’s cubes, a Lite-Brite, and a Simon Says from 1979.

Ritius spent hardly any time there, but went into the adjoining room, the art room, which might have been his own bedroom had he or Rytius ever lived there when they were children. There were mass-market West African goddesses, 1930s movie-poster silkscreens, jade Buddhas and bronze trimurtis, impressionist and high-modern prints, many smallish watercolors and oils by Klee, Grosz, Picasso, Bearden, Klimt, De Lempicka, Lawrence, and others, and Ritius lingered over the titles of the many, many books lining the ceiling-high shelves—Jaffé, De Stijl, 1917–1931; Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Toulouse Lautrec; Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting; Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism; Youngna Kim, 20th Century Korean Art; Allan Wingate, The Temples of Angkor; Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture; Wieland Schmied, Neue Sachlichkeit and German Realism of the Twenties—whereas the tables were covered with oversized picture books and museum catalogues with beautiful covers, vivid volumes on the lives and works of olden artists—Van Gogh: The Complete Life, Matisse on Art, The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book—and the movements with which they were affiliated, from the Ashcan School to Orphism and from Dada to something called Der Blaue Reiter.

They moved into the third room, devoted to the works in the social sciences, of which each seemed to believe that it belonged to one or another distinct field of inquiry, be it sociology, anthropology, political economy, economics, or political science.

“So, are they not distinct fields of inquiry?” his brother asked him.

“They use different tools to examine the same problem,” Rytius answered. “The problem was always wealth and therefore power, and who has it and who doesn’t.”

“Some things never change,” Ritius noted. “So, what do they say?”

“The olden ones? About power and wealth?” Rytius replied. “What do we say today?”

“That some have it and some don’t,” Ritius answered.

“Why?” Rytius asked.

“That’s just the way it is,” Ritius said, blinking.

“The olden ones started with reasons why that is the way it is, upon which they disagreed,” Rytius said. “So they said many different things. But different methods produce different answers, so the question was never honestly engaged in any case. The question was posed only during times of war or revolution, and most thinkers seem to have conspired to submerge it as soon as possible afterward.”

“That seems impossible or overstated. How could such a conspiracy occur?” Ritius asked.

“Behind the backs of the conspirators,” Rytius answered. “Advocates of this or that reason were able to hide behind a political-science methodology here, and pretend not to understand arguments from the econometricians, who pretended not to understand what political economists argued, while everyone ignored the historians, and on and on in circles forever. And so most came to agree with you, that there is no reason, their methods having precluded its finding.”

Ritius turned his head and his entire body sideways so that he could more easily scan a row of titles—Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations; Bukharin, Economic Theory of the Leisure Class; Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis; Lyn Marcus, Dialectical Economics; O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State; Marcus Noland, Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas; Harold Robbins, Fictive Capital and Fictive Profit; Krooss and Blynn, A History of Financial Intermediaries; T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population; McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence; Preobrazhensky, The New Economics; Benjamin Yang, Deng: A Political Biography; Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics. “I’ve not read as much as you, but it seems safe to say that olden politics was entirely about economics.”

“Theoretically, entirely,” Rytius agreed, and led them into the fourth room. “The only distinctions I respect are among the practitioners,” Rytius answered, waving at the wall of shelves to their left. “Political actors were quite a bit more forthright about their differences than the scholars.” Ritius took it in. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky: 1929–1940; Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky: 1921–1929; John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World; Jean Barrot and Denis Authier, La Gauche Communiste en Allemagne, 1918–1921; Facing Reality, Facing Reality; clr James, American Civilization; clr James, State Capitalism and World Revolution; Situationist International Anthology; Seymour Melman, The Permanent War Economy; Michel & Shakeed, The Complete Guide to a Successful Leveraged Buyout; Rudolf Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital I; James Scott, Seeing Like a State; Amadeo Bordiga, Proprietá e Capitale; Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead; Susan Woodward, Socialist Unemployment; Tiffany, The Decline of American Steel; Marvin Harris, America Now; Marvin Harris, Why Nothing Works.

“The titles alone are an education,” Ritius acknowledged.

“Yes, but if there’s only one question, and if it is never clearly posed, then one can’t follow the debate per se. One is forced to investigate the history of the question itself,” Rytius answered.

“A higher level of abstraction,” Ritius agreed.

“Which is why a lot of the titles in here are philosophical texts,” Rytius concluded. There were rows and rows of books collecting the works of Hegel, Kant, Benjamin, Heidegger, Lukacs, and Adorno, and multiple translations and commentaries on them, and another entire shelf of the works of Marx and Engels and their many commentators, also in multiple languages. There were thousands of others, and Ritius seemed to be enjoying himself—Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals; William James, Pragmatism: The Meaning of Truth; Gerard Helferich, Humboldt’s Cosmos; Marcus du Sautoy, The Music of the Primes; Jean Charon, Cosmology; Eli Maor, To Infinity and Beyond; Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture; Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image; David Lewis, We, The Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific.

Rytius let his brother explore. He forbade himself from speaking further and from hoping anything at all. Ritius stood straight, and appeared to have satisfied his curiosity.

“Have you read all these?” Ritius asked him.

“Of course not,” Rytius asked.

“Why not?” Ritius asked again.

“It’s mostly a matter of time, I suppose,” Rytius went on. “We…  I…  we can’t—everything is not equally accessible. Some of these works require a specific education, and it’s not clear how to get it. So I…  we just do what we can, and try to build knowledge and understanding.”

“Perhaps if all the records were gathered together in one place,” Ritius started.

“The records being in the same place has nothing to do with anything,” Rytius interrupted, as rudely as possible. His brother had no reason to pretend, and yet his brother had indeed chosen to utter the prince’s oily lies, as though they might actually persuade Rytius. It was two insults wrapped in a betrayal, when the betrayal alone would have sufficed. “We recordkeepers still have to do the work to make sense of them. Does the prince plan to support our work?” Rytius discovered that he had been hoping after all, that his brother would treat him with respect while doing his destructive duty. That he did not conveyed the message that nothing said had mattered at all to Ritius. He had no reasons of his own, and was somehow satisfied to have made himself entirely the agent of a spiteful and lawless power.

“I believe maintenance and storage to be support,” Ritius said stonily, meeting his brother’s gaze. There was nothing else Rytius could do. There was nothing more that he could hope from his brother, and he feared that there was no way ever to communicate with him again.

“It’s theft,” Rytius said. He was chilled by the finality of the rupture between them. He did not care whether his brother felt the same.

“It is the prince’s lawful command,” Ritius replied.

“And if we protest?” Rytius asked, curious to know the shape of the cage. He suddenly remembered that he had not gotten to any of the list of questions he had promised to ask.

“How exactly? I don’t know what penalties the prince would impose, but you know the things that can happen.”

“I don’t know how we would protest,” Rytius continued. “People find ways to express their displeasure.”

“Brother, there’s no need to make this any more difficult than it has to be,” Ritius said. “Should I be concerned about you?” Ritius asked. He looked as though he might actually be concerned.

Rytius ignored him. “You’re talking about the dispossession of immeasurable wealth.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Ritius said.

“We’ve devoted our lives to recordkeeping.”

“There are no proposed rules against recordkeeping.”

“You’re being obtuse.”

Ritius then chuckled like a slick child about to escape punishment on a technicality. “Perhaps you prefer a pillar of fire to a tower of records.”

Rytius’s face became a stone mask as his anger rose, and then he was ashamed at having identified the location of the nearest blade to hand, in his mind—the sixteenth-century rondel dagger in the art room—as Ritius vaguely threatened him. “It’s not like that, brother, but it could be.”

Ritius stood stock still. They were alone together in what should have been their childhood home. Rytius lived among the legends of their ancestors, and he felt himself to be new wine poured into the old skins of their family history, as though a new spirit would vivify the dust of their past, known and lost, and that he would re-embody the best of their bloodline. Ritius visited this home occasionally, to water their legacy with the blood of fresh battles and civic triumphs, feeling himself fully in the line, and wondering why his brother didn’t see this clearly. He had wanted nothing more than to follow in his brother’s footsteps, and it crushed him when his brother left the service. He never looked back. It was as though he had forgotten himself and their legacy entirely. As though perhaps with years of dedication to the prince they had sworn to serve with their lives for their lives he would or could show Rytius where he went wrong. Ritius never let himself think about nor wonder about his brother’s persistence and steadfastness in his new course of life. What would make a warrior stand so strongly against his own legacy? The history of his own blood? The glory of his own battles? What would make a warrior leave the battlefield? Abandon all glower?

There are secrets these warriors keep from themselves. When a man goes to move the line of ultimate concern, he is never certain of his judgment. This necessary uncertainty is the cost of living a spiritual life. That is why such ways of life emphasize discipline, which is a method to keep one’s soul safe, free of corruption, streamlined, unbound to anything other than the object of devotion. If the warrior has been disciplined, he can trust himself, and he can leap, knowing that he has not lost his way.

But warriors do lose their way. It is entirely a matter of discipline or, more precise, self-deception as to lapses in it. The conscience can be seared, the moral sense crazed, prayers can turn special pleadings, and instead of communion with the absolute, soundings of self-pity or self-aggrandizement. One constantly checks one’s object of devotion against one’s honor, but what if one’s sense of honor is distorted? This is why there are regal, aristocratic, chivalric, clerical, republican, and democratic traditions. They show us the best that has been thought and done in these ways of life. And they, too, are subject to history, which means that they too can be lost. When confused, the warrior should look closely at this, his born or bred sense of honor. Self-deception is the subtlest corruption.

Ritius believed in that moment both that his brother was a fool for having lost his way, and that his brother was confused, having lost his way. He was sad on one score and scornful on the other. And yet he was not inflamed on behalf of the prince here. He did not feel the power of the state behind him, here before the fire crackling in the den. He still loved his brother, and were he quite a bit less serious a person, it would have been the perfect time for him to pat himself on the back, gratified that he himself was proving to be more mature than his own big brother. But he knew that Rytius felt himself in the service of principles greater than princes. If the world itself had not convinced Rytius of his error, what remained for Ritius to do? No, he had decided long before never to beat his head against that particular wall. And they shared quite a bit in common anyway. He had always admired Rytius for being so consistent, persistent, and insistent.

“Never change, brother,” Ritius told Rytius.

“OK,” Rytius answered. He was determined to be responsible to his colleagues, to ask their questions, and he therefore continued to speak with his brother. “I still want to know what this is all about. Why can’t we just keep doing what we’ve been doing? If Feelharmonica wants to get involved with recordkeeping, he could give us a building, or fund our work.”

“How would you like to tell him your concerns yourself?”

“If I wanted to do that, I would have done it already. I’m not going to sit in a room with that scoundrel and pretend to negotiate my own dispossession, or that of the others.”

“Would you do so in public?”

“It’s a public issue,” Rytius noted. “Yes.”

Ritius considered the range of options available to him. “The prince’s council is set to meet this week Thursday. What about a public hearing with the council? It would be an opportunity for you to ask questions about the tower, and for the prince to answer them.”

Rytius was momentarily pleased to have something to present his colleagues, until he realized that this was no favor, but just an opportunity for his concerns to be swept under the rug after a token airing of grievances. But with all the recordkeepers and as many interested citizens as they could gather, it was a chance to declare open conflict, and in such a state, anything can happen. So he asked whether “Feelharmonica himself is going to be there?”

“It’s his council meeting,” Ritius said.

“I gather the prince has some knowledge of recordkeeping if he’s concerned about records,” Rytius ventured. “Does he know anything about our game?”

“Only the barest notion,” Ritius answered.

“I think a demonstration would be best,” Rytius said. “It would allow me to communicate our concerns more effectively. Form and content, you know.”

Ritius agreed, the brothers dapped, and Ritius departed.

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15. Disvotion—February 5, 2143

At the request of his old friend, Balloony arranged for Ritius to meet Prince Razorbeem atop Orange Mountain Tuesday dawn, at the ruins of the old academy, quite close to Feelharmonica’s construction site, and not far at all from Little Falls dam, which Razorbeem in any case required to inspect. Ritius had two aims: to discover the price of New York’s assistance with his waterways, and to understand the reason for Razorbeem’s deception and subterfuge concealing those questionable arrangements—his strategic objective.

He drove himself.

One black-windowed black armored truck bearing the white-on-navy betentacled Jolly Roger insignia of the King of New York was parked in front of the bronze eagle sculpture, which once welcomed students. The campus was mostly destroyed, but sections of administration buildings remained, as did a complicated maze, a puzzle really, of concrete and steel retaining walls shaped precisely to purposes now unknown, but which forensic architects might one day study and solve.

Ritius rolled past the truck, reversed, and turned his truck to face the other, leaving a good car-length space between the two. He checked his six guns and thought about removing his shotgun from its sling. He did not, but he exited the vehicle deliberately, never taking his eye off the truck before him. He looked for the slightest shake or tremble in its wheelbase as he exited, because if Razorbeem meant him harm, he would surely strike just as Ritius exited, while he was in other motion.

There was no incident of any kind, because the truck was empty. Ritius first held a silent hand up to hail the driver or other occupant, then he spoke a greeting, and then he barked to call them out. He approached the truck against his animal instinct, though in accord with his better judgment, which was coming to understand that things were not as he expected. He had been and remained appropriately alert to danger, but he was also genuinely scared, because his warning systems were in conflict, and he knew that that was precisely the sort of situation in which fatal mistakes are made: in the seconds it takes to realign instinct with judgment, one could easily fail to recognize the place to which the danger had now moved in the new arrangement of circumstances.

“Ritius,” a voice called from behind him. He turned faster than he could ever remember, and he heard the tone indicating that the speaker was not a threat, and did not mean to cause surprise, and he was again disoriented. He stayed his hand from his guns, and wondered whether that was the right thing to do and he had not decided whether it was by the time he actually met Razorbeem’s eyes, and knew that Razorbeem was not a threat. He did not feel good about any of this. “Faithful servant of my brother, Prince Feelharmonica.”

“You know who I am, and I know you as well. Your brother loves you and appreciates your efforts toward the glower of the kingdom.”

Razorbeem smiled softly, and breathed deeply. “My brother may believe this to be a kingdom.”

Ritius pricked up his ears and listened.

“By which he means his kingdom, I suppose,” Razorbeem chuckled and seemed to relax, though he hadn’t seemed tense. “ ‘Daddy made me primo enterprise,’ ” Razorbeem mocked his brother with a simpering whine. “Listen, I don’t know how well you study statecraft, so you may or may not understand me, but this is not a kingdom. Perhaps my father could have founded a kingdom here.”

“We’ll never know.” While on one level, his interaction with Razorbeem was already quite a success, Ritius realized that his warning systems were again crossed. He was calmly speaking with the prince of the northern part of North New Jersey, and he was pleasantly surprised to hear his own ideas spoken back to him, but he was still uneasy, and he thought he was uneasy because Razorbeem was entirely too forthcoming, plainly disrespecting his brother Feelharmonica in Ritius’s face. Such insults not only reflect badly upon the warrior, because disrespect of one’s master is disrespect to one for having chosen such an unworthy master, but they are also direct affronts in themselves, because they are evidence that the speaker holds whatever actions one might take to defend one’s master to be of no account at all. Not even worthy of the slightest dissimulation. Perhaps because the speaker has already decided to do away with the warrior.

“You mock my man, the Prince of New Ark. You know how we live,” Ritius warned Razorbeem precisely, and not merely formally, even through his anxiety and confusion, which remained.

Ritius had not clarified to himself the precise source of his anxiety, given that it was not only the open mockery of Feelharmonica, because it remained after Ritius clearly addressed it, and he still had not figured it out by the time he noticed to himself that they were still alone, standing in front of the bronze eagle. His unease was washed away in a flood of fresh fear sufficient to stop him breathing and to get him expecting a bullet. The bullet did not come in that second or the next, but he had already spoken and it was Razorbeem’s turn again, and he could not under any circumstance convey panic by, for instance, looking around frantically for signs of danger, but he was in such a state that he had to do something immediately to address his security situation.

Razorbeem smiled pleasantly and looked around, breathing deeply of the hilltop air, like a pleasure traveler. “But he is no longer your man, though, is he,” Razorbeem stated, as though it were not a question at all.

And with that strategic embrace, Ritius was no longer afraid for his life, but he was entirely disoriented. He tried to put that aside to deal with the matter immediately at hand. “Where is your bodyguard?” he asked Razorbeem, who was proving himself to be a clever and perhaps wise leader of men.

Without hesitation or artifice Razorbeem answered him “Two in trees and one in the ruins over there.” Razorbeem waved a hand toward the tumbling columns, several dozen yards away.

“Rifles?” Ritius asked.

“With these special laser sights. Have you used them?”

“I have never used one, though I have seen them used.”

“Yeah, the target can’t see…Only the shooter. You need these special goggles.”

“OK, OK,” Ritius relaxed and smiled a small smile of his own, because he could not imagine another scenario here in which he could be surprised or disoriented again. Of course, that was also the problem. His smile vanished in just as relaxed a fashion as it had appeared.

“Shall we walk? I want to see the tower site,” Razorbeem suggested.

“I’m just about sick of this eagle, anyway,” Ritius said, knocking the sculpture on its beak as they passed. “I wonder why it still stands.” Feelharmonica would surely want to destroy any symbol of olden United States patriotism.

“It’s a hawk,” Razorbeem corrected him, turning and starting off down the footworn wooded path toward the east. “Back in the olden days, the university ‘mascot’ was a red man who had the power to turn into a hawk.”

“Was this known at the time or is this new speculative knowledge?”

“The record of images shows his metamorphosis. And the redskins of old were a glowerful people steeped in the magic of their ancient folkways,” Razorbeem stopped to inspect the large tree limb blocking their path, and, deciding that it was too large to move, but too small to walk around, he threw one leg over it. Mid-straddle, he continued. “They had names like Red Hawk and Laughing Bear, which seems to indicate that they themselves knew and celebrated their powers of transformation.”

Razorbeem threw his other leg over and had to hop down to the ground. He was perhaps a head shorter than Ritius, a little smaller than his brother, who stood up to the lobes of Ritius’s ears.

“Watch your leg there…  But don’t forget the snakebearers have ancestors as well, and they feared and never ceased their pursuit of these red men, seeking either to subdue them and steal their magic, or have done with them entirely. The story I have heard, and that I believe, is that Red Hawk was kidnapped in one of many pirate raids the snakebearers visited upon the redskins, always with the excuse that it was revenge for another kidnapping, usually of a young virgin girl. The masters of the academy tortured him to reveal his secrets, and he never told. They failed to replicate his magic, and so they kept him imprisoned, bringing him into the sun only when they needed his magic before sporting events and other ceremonies. But as boys will do, he grew into a man, claiming his full power, and so he made the change and flew away home.”

Ritius climbed over and they continued down the path toward the construction site. They were not far from the clearing near the top of the mountain, over which one could look and see a large portion of northern New Jersey: Paterson off in the distance, the Manhattan skyline beyond them, Eo just south, New Ark a little past that. Feelharmonica’s workers had razed the entire area, and were leveling the ground up so that the tower would be the undisputed king of the mountain. Mounds of earth were pushed back against the wood, and they approached these mounds from behind. They could now feel the rumble of the earthmovers beneath their feet. “The snakebearers would have preferred to ignore the whole thing, but Red Hawk was loved and, moreover, missed. To quell the discontent, the masters of the academy were forced to acknowledge what had happened, and they let the truth be told, changing all images of him to reveal his new form. The people demanded that he also be honored, and that is the meaning of the statue you misunderstand and therefore fail to appreciate.”

Ritius nodded and said nothing as they stepped out into the clearing.

“There’s not a single orange on this mountain,” Razorbeem said, gravely. Then he laughed. “This whole place used to be a volcano, you know. I mean New Ark.”

“I had no idea,” Ritius said, honestly.

“Before people. This area is a big bowl, and it was flooded with lava three times. But with a gap between, so that there’s layers. Just regular dirt and ordinary sediment between the layers of lava rock.”

“Like a cake and icing.”

“That’s right. But then the earth started moving around, making mountains, and some of those layers folded over onto one another, and some just turned over and were driven into the ground.”

“You can’t really fold a cake,” continued Ritius, trying to think of something to compare it to.

“True. Maybe it’s like biscuits or apple turnovers. But the other part—the part that got driven underground—it’s like a slice of cake on its side. And the rain washed the icing away. These ridges, these mountains here, are the pieces of cake left.”

Ritius was impressed with Razorbeem’s geological knowledge.

“Lava rock isn’t the strongest material. It can withstand a bit of rain,” Razorbeem went on. “But if you look across the Bay,” he pointed toward Bergen Neck, and the Bayonne ruins. “The granite starts right there. If New York were a cake, the icing between the layers is schist, a sort of heated and compressed shale, which is already harder than the mud and basalt of the New Ark basin. The cake itself, though, the layers, are made of much stronger stuff—marble, granite, and gneiss.”

“I suppose that’s how it bears such tall buildings.”

“It stands to reason.”

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So, I wondered what these guys could be up to. I walked over and I was surprised to see not one single agency-identifying badge or sign.

As I got closer, I saw that there were three groups: plainclothesmen, machine-gunner men in green fatigues, and machine-gunner men in black “SWAT”-style tactical gear, like regular police.

The uniformed men were only labeled “POLICE” on the front and back of their uniforms, and they had “US” only on their shoulder patches. No other signage was visible.

I asked the guy who seemed to be in charge who they were, and I am pretty sure that he lied to me. I asked him if they were ICE or DHS and he told me they were DEA. But I looked it up and Google’s AI Overview told me that DHS and ICE use “POLICE” and “US.”

This is just for your information. Let’s not allow folks to get kidnapped and extraordinarily renditioned in our neighborhoods.

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14. Assembly

Carnation had Rytius at a table with Floweria Giddens, the baker, and D-Man Furness, the blacksmith, a married couple of recordkeepers with deep roots in Eo, on both their families’ sides. Hunnybunny Henry, a language arts teacher and modern dancer, and her boyfriend Wascal Chase, stem teacher, were Speculative Historians, but that’s only because her parents had been social-science teachers who knew Tellem personally. They came to most of the games anyway, and had presented more than a few of their own. And then there was the lovely Vinilla Breem and her 11-year-old daughter Light. Light was the youngest ever to play the game, and her first presentation had been on cartoon tricksters, and particularly the relationship between Anansi and Bugs Bunny. Rytius still hadn’t told anyone about the letter to his brother or the prince and the Tower of Records. It was past breakfast and before lunch but, aside from the whiskey, he had so far only slurped at a smoothie—a calming potion with carrot, celery, pineapple, cucumber, beet, and kale—putting off bringing it up, and he ran a dumb hydraulics quasi experiment whereby he measured how long it took the fluid to rise to the top of the straw as all the ice, pulverized into smoothie grain fluid dust, defrosted and turned back to water. Almost everybody in the hall was finished eating, and just sort of picking at bones and licking spoons clean.

“Y’all heard about Huggums?” Wascal asked Floweria, D-Man, Rytius, and Vinilla.

“No…?” Floweria answered. “Do tell.”

Rytius didn’t say anything, and Hunnybunny interrupted anyway. “I don’t want to hear all that again right now, Wascal,” she said. “Let’s have a good time celebrating today.”

“You’re right,” Wascal replied. “How’s the food Rytius?” he asked, gesturing at his uneaten plate of grits, mussels, and dandelion greens.

“Yeah. You’re not going to eat anything?” Vinilla asked him, smiling.

“I’m not hungry yet,” Rytius answered.

“How can you grow up to be big and strong if you don’t eat anything?” her daughter Light asked him.

He laughed. “But I’m already grown up!”

“You sure?” asked Wascal, smirking.

“No, not really,” chuckled Rytius.

“He fills up on duck eggs daily before leaving the house,” Floweria playfully defended him.

“Goose eggs, you mean,” D-Man said. “He sells all the duck eggs.”

“Well, not all of them,” Rytius said.

“You know how to cook, Rytius?” Vinilla asked him.

“I can burn a couple of things,” he said, smiling. “Name something and I bet I can make it.”

“Hmm,” Vinilla pondered the challenge. “I wonder.” She was trying to come up with something challenging but not outrageous. Like lasagna.

“You cook all your own food?” asked Wascal.

“Yeah, mostly,” Rytius said.

“There’s some things that don’t taste right unless you make them yourself,” Floweria said.

“Yeah, but that’s usually only ’cause that’s how your mother used to make it,” D-Man said, refining the point.

“And if it’s not exactly how you want it, you can’t eat it,” Hunnybunny added.

“It’s the narcissism of small differences, and the tiniest is all it takes,” Floweria said. “Like sweet pickles instead of dill pickles in potato salad.”

“Ew!” squealed Hunnybunny. “Gross.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” D-Man vehemently agreed.

“You never eat at the restaurants or sandwich stands or anything like that?” Wascal asked Rytius. “There’s a gang of them over where you stay at.”

“Not really,” he answered.

“It can get expensive,” Vinilla offered, wondering whether Rytius might be a bit too frugal.

“No, it’s not that,” he responded, smiling. The speed of his denial struck him. He did not want Vinilla to think he was a cheapskate. But she must have known that he was from a powerful family, and that money probably wouldn’t ever really be a problem for him. “It’s just flavor and quality.”

“Ooh, an Epicurean,” Hunnybunny teased.

“You like crispy crawlers?” Wascal asked.

“Sure,” Rytius answered, trying to remember where he put his rooping iron.

“Oh. I just thought you might be a vegan or something,” Wascal continued, looking at Rytius’s smoothie.

“No, I eat meat,” he answered. “How else could I have grown up so big and strong?” He grinned at Light, flexed his biceps, and laughed.

Light appreciated that, and Rytius realized that he had also most likely been flexing his muscles for Vinilla, which made him feel silly and juvenile.

“Are you a vegan? Or vegetarian?” Rytius asked Wascal.

“No, I eat everything. Almost everything. I stopped eating out, though,” Wascal said.

Floweria raised an eyebrow and cocked her head at Hunnybunny, who swallowed a chuckle. D-Man smirked, and Vinilla tried her best to ignore it for the sake of her daughter.

“I think you’ve got the right idea, though,” Wascal proceeded, not acknowledging his double entendre. “You can’t go wrong cooking for yourself.”

“Indeed,” Rytius agreed. “And you can save money, too. Ahem.” He shot a smile and a glance at Vinilla.

“I would keep it up if I were you,” Wascal noted.

“And you can impress any ladyfriends you might have a mind to entertain,” D-Man came with an assist.

“Oh, well, in that case, I would like grilled chicken salad this evening,” Floweria said sweetly, leaning over and fluttering her eyelashes at D-Man.

“Look at you, Rytius, got me running my mouth, getting myself in trouble,” he said, turning to kiss Floweria. Rytius would have blushed if he could have.

“It’s no trouble at all. Not if you make some artichokes, too,” Floweria continued, presenting her face for another kiss from D-Man. He obliged. “With that chili-ginger dipping sauce I like.”

“Don’t forget dessert, girl,” noted Hunnybunny.

“We’ll talk about that later,” Floweria said.

Rytius couldn’t continue his light flirtation with Vinilla after such a public display of affection, so he decided the time had finally come to change the subject and share his new knowledge.

“I have some news,” he said to his tablemates.

“Oh, yeah?” D-Man asked. Rytius realized he was speaking too softly, and that he needed to address the entire dining hall.

“I HAVE SOME NEWS I NEED TO SHARE WITH YOU ALL,” Rytius barked, standing. No one didn’t fall silent and turn to listen. “First I want to say how much I appreciate Fila and his family and I want to say something about how I feel the truth of what he was saying before, before his beautiful daughter Firebrite chose her name.” He swallowed hard and continued. “My brother—you all know my brother, Ritius, one of Prince Feelharmonica’s men. I received a letter meant for him from the prince this morning, and I read it by mistake, thinking it was for me. It had some instructions for my brother, regarding a tower Feelharmonica is building. The prince is building this tower atop Orange Mountain, and he means it to be a tower of records. He instructed my brother to collect our records to fill it.”

He ceased speaking and observed his colleagues’s faces. They expected additional words clarifying the nonsensical message he had just delivered. He remained silent, swallowed, and focused on his breathing while calmly looking from face to face, meeting eye to eye. Sugarpie was the first to understand, and he knew that because her face cracked and she desperately searched his face for any sign of anything further. Her husband gj croaked loudly involuntarily something like “Aw,” or “Naw,” and left his mouth open like that. Rytius sought out Fila among those seated and saw him, met his eyes, and Fila betrayed no emotion at all. Surely his mind was spinning, as was Rytius’s own that morning. Perhaps he did not believe the news either. Tellem was the first to break the silence.

“Why?” he asked, loud but plaintive. This set off an uproar, and there was rattling of utensils and slamming of fists and furious damnations all around.

Rytius attempted to answer over the din. “Ritius…Look, Ritius…” Folks fell silent to let him finish. “Ritius didn’t tell me why.” Those gathered felt that Rytius deserved further recrimination, and they gave it to him loud. Rytius tried to continue, and he yelled that Ritius probably didn’t know why himself, but somebody screamed and a green bean hit him in the middle of his forehead and slid down his nose. He wiped his face and opened his mouth to speak, but Carnation was suddenly in his face, and he thought she might be trying to comfort him, but she was yelling for people to stop throwing stuff and Vinilla was removing several other green beans from his headdress. He closed his mouth while Carnation shielded him and Vinilla cleaned him, while those gathered got the initial shock out of their system. The green beans had been simmered in a tangerine butter sauce, which was quite good.

BB bumped his belly against a long bench table before him when he stood, and it moved, loudly scraping the floor of the dining hall, which is no easy feat, considering that such bench tables typically seat 12 comfortably. The unmistakable screech of the scrape commanded such attention that he hardly had to hold his hands up and gently pat the air to calm the ruckus before asking gently, “Why didn’t you ask?” Folks started getting mad again, so BB held one hand aloft, and delivered Rytius the malicious accusation nearly all felt he deserved thus far: “And are you going to?”

“Of course I am going to ask him. He’s coming by my record store tomorrow morning, to take an inventory. I plan to ask him all about everything we discuss and decide here today,” Rytius reminded everyone of their power in the situation, and the muttering faded.

“It was only the circumstances of the letter that made it hard for me to get into all of the questions. But my first question, which I did ask, was what is this tower all about,” Rytius continued.

“It could probably be about preserving everything in a nice safe place,” said Hunnybunny.

“Yeah, it could be something like a library,” said Voom.

“Or maybe a museum,” said Rytius, nodding along to encourage the new sense of cooperative discussion emerging from the initial anger and dismay.

“Or a prison,” said Fila, souring the mood immediately.

“We don’t know anything,” said Rytius.

“It’s kind of arbitrary, isn’t it?” asked Fila.

“Of course it is. All I’m saying is that we need to talk about it.”

“In deals like this, the substance of which is entirely one-sided, there’s usually something like money changing hands as well,” Fila continued. “Please tell me Ritius said something about some kind of money or some kind of consideration or compensation at least.”

And with that, Rytius was convicted once more. Someone hissed. He knew that his answer would not elicit mercy. Rytius said “He didn’t,” and a woman cursed loudly while a large piece of home-fried potato crusted with sauteed garlic, parsley and marjoram flew past his ear. “WAIT A MINUTE, GOD DAMN IT!” he barked, and he turned around threateningly in the direction from which the fry had flown. He felt a glop of something near the back of his headdress, where his hair came out beneath, and so, reluctantly, drawing far too many giggles, he lifted his right hand slowly to the back of his neck to discover the food with which he had been pelted this time. It was a gooey clumpy farina lump. It could have been worse.

“Control,” Sugarpie offered.

“Well, yeah,” said Fila. “That’s obvious.”

“I agree, it has to be about control in general, but in particular, I think we can deduce the reason for the confiscation,” Kloz began, attempting to be helpful. “The prince cannot stop us recordkeeping or speculating on historical events,” he stated diplomatically. “But the prince can stop us working on the materials we have gathered to date. That’s the only possible reason for the action.”

Rytius was about to respond, but Floweria answered Kloz sharply, quickly, “The action taken is not necessarily bound by date. Perhaps the confiscation is to be ongoing? Perhaps we are to be conscripted to staff a new research library? Perhaps that library is a mere vanity project. Perhaps it is serious. Perhaps the records will be burned because the prince worships ignorance in his every habit and posture? Perhaps the prince just randomly this moment decided to express his hatred for us in policy? To ascribe significance to the current moment on the basis of our knowledge so far is an overstep, I’m sure you recognize.”

“Now is not the time to mistake hopes for facts. Is and ought and all of that,” Tellem interjected, defending his colleague from the argument threatening close at hand.

“That’s right,” agreed Rytius.

“We need some sort of plan,” Dancy stated the obvious. “I mean if the tower is like a library or museum, do we want to be staff? If it’s something more like a prison, do we want privileged access or do we simply refuse to cooperate in that case?”

“But what would it mean to refuse to cooperate?” Cococreem asked.

“Do you mean refusal like just saying no or do you mean some sort of self-defense?” Tweety asked Dancy.

“Armed self-defense?” asked Fila.

“Is there any other kind?” BB replied.

“Words in both cases,” Wascal proposed.

“Yeah, well, we should think about the worst case,” said Voom.

“I haven’t worked all that out yet, but let’s just say words right now,” Dancy answered.

“We’re nowhere near the point of discussing battle plans,” Rytius interjected. “We don’t know near enough yet.”

“We know more than enough,” Carnation said, sitting back down next to Fila, who stood.

“We can do two things at once. Why don’t we start planning our defense,” Fila said, drawing approval, “and we also get our questions together now.”

“I think that’s a bad idea, because it’s starting in bad faith,” Rytius said. “You know actions and thereby the effects caused by those actions can be clouded by impure intention, bewildering the mind of the actor when their action fails to produce the clarity they expected.”

Rytius had known what needed to be said, and he had just been waiting for the right moment to say it. He knew these people, devoted to knowledge and reason in and for a real life well-lived, self-appointed guardians of the spiritual narrows, that sliding space between the concept and the execution, the intellect and the administration, the council and the plan. Reminded of their vocation, they could no longer so easily turn their fear, anxiety, and helplessness to blame Rytius for failing to defend the community singlehanded, by surprise. A more reflective mood descended, sadly.

Tellem stood, scraping his chair. “I think Rytius is right, for what it’s worth,” he said. “No use going off half-cocked without the proper perspective, frame of reference, and point of view. I’m talking about information, little bits of immediately useful data, like facts, about the concrete situation with this so-called Tower of Records. Facts is what we lacks. But we can get them, and we’re going to get them, because this man lives up to his name. I think we need to show our brother here some appreciation for the risks he has taken, and for all he does,” Tellem praised Rytius and initiated a round of sustained applause. The recordkeepers and the Speculative Historians were ready first to understand their situation, and they were determined then to take whatever actions would be required to continue their work.

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In this episode, corruption overruns what had been a paradise. Many have blamed Eve and Lilith.

This is the latest installment of Cosmogony/Apocalypse, now a collection over at Invisible Ark. (I am looking for a gallery to host a video installation of the series. If you know of any, preferably in LA, let me know!)

Bonus points if you can name the song. Of course, if you want to cheat, you can just see how I recorded it.

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13. Ex Nihilo and the Exclusion of Possible Pasts

There were no circumstances under which Tellem Ralph, Fila’s old friend, would have missed Fila’s daughter’s naming ceremony.

Rytius was still in the home of Prince Appall back when Tellem, one of Fila’s boys from home, was also Fila’s friend and helper, sourcing materials, trading records, finding documentation, calling upon those who might have or know more. The first time anyone ever had what would come to be called a listening party, it was at Tellem’s Crib, his own record store, then devoted to records in the sciences, technology, and economics, opened after he recovered from injuries sustained during the discovery: he and Fila had taken tube packets of gunpowder and plenty of fuses, but the packets were too large for the door, even with the debris. They blasted a section of concrete off of the I-beam crossing the door and it hit Tellem in the quadriceps, just above the knee tendon. It was a curiously undamaging injury, considering the velocity and mass of the shrapnel, and it was miraculous that he walked on two legs ever again, let alone that he hobbled into the main hall of the library, triumphant, three stories above, three stories below, an authentic oldentime collection of technical and economic knowledge. So now Tellem swung and clacked a black walnut cane with an air of affectation, though he never mentioned his injury.

The issue that long ago evening, October 10, 2133, was a series of periodicals called the Lancet, a medical journal, whose series, like that of all the journals Tellem had then recently found, quite inexplicably ceased in 2035. The question Tellem raised was loaded in such a way that friends would understand and forgive his small transgression, because they knew what he meant. Which is to say that his first observation was that this journal, the Lancet, published a collection of articles each month, and had for more than a century. A recordkeeper named Cococreem Jennings, a nutritionist at New Ark General, and therefore sensitive to a certain kind of medical development, noted that there was nothing special at all about a journal publishing for a long time. Tellem didn’t respond, but continued with his second observation, which was that the collection of articles was usually themed around some medical or scientific issue relevant to their audience. A recordkeeper named Erron asked whether this thematic principle of publication was notable compared to other journals of the time, if Tellem knew that. Tellem answered Erron first a clear no, but not because every single journal he discovered ended the same year, but because, while out of those hundreds of technical, economic, business, and scientific journals he had discovered he had only been able to skim through a couple dozen, every single one was organized according to the same principle: some sort of general theme for the issue which, while not absolutely exclusive of material outside the theme, definitely weighs heavily in the issue. Tellem continued with his third observation, which was that the medical journal at issue had no overriding thematic interest lasting longer than a year or two at any time ever. He paused and asked his loaded question whether that did not immediately rule out any medical or biological cause of the great rip in time that was whatever occurred summer 2035.

Those gathered fell silent and, according to Fila, a recordkeeper named Kloz Munro muttered a profanity to himself, stood up and started clapping, firmly, insistently, and the whole group rose to celebrate Tellem’s achievement. His simple question demonstrated the power they sought and the glory they lived for: the power of even a cursory glance at the mere form of the mere history of a single medical journal to clarify historical perspective and thereby create actual substantive historical knowledge. There could have been no worldkilling plague.

But why load that particular question, and not another? What if Tellem had been thinking about something—anything—other than cataclysms in human history? There was clearly nothing to justify plucking pandemic from the universe of possible nonevents…  Did the material itself—a stack of magazines—demand this negative, inverted approach? Was there something beyond the magazine-stackness of the material to justify it? Tellem had violated the rules of the game by leaving those questions unanswered. But the results were astonishing.

So Tellem went through his records seeking this sort of knowledge, and he found it. He then asked for help, and those who joined him took the same backward path to knowledge, and they found it. There were no indications of catastrophe along any of the familiar lines one might expect from a basic working knowledge of twenty-first-century history. Tellem’s work, the exclusion of possible pasts, remains the indisputable triumph of recordkeeping to date and its only publicly heralded achievement. It was also the limit of what could be achieved with Tellem’s formal historical method. And he knew it.

The posse he raised among the recordkeepers threw themselves into their work with the desperate enthusiasm of millenarians rearranging their prophetic calendar. They were determined to isolate via the accumulation of exclusions the cause of the chasm in history. Of course, to fill out any space of unknown mass and extent is a task of unknown work and duration. It can be no surprise when one comes to discover that it takes a je ne sais quoi, some Fingerspitzengefühl, a couple hints, a little English, some topspin, a push in the right direction—some notion of the shape of the universe one seeks to map.

The gentlest push when investigating unknown domains is any hypothesis what will be found. Which is to say, one requires some sort of speculation on what may have happened, and the material may not tell you that it did, but it may tell you that it could not have happened. Via this method, one must invent theoretical events in order to exclude them. One forms a speculation, and goes to disprove it. Of course, the font of speculation is the imagination of the entirely unregulated individual subject, and subject to all the dangers to knowledge that subjectivity entails.

The feverish pace at which they worked, the energy they had, and the regular plodding success of their exclusions spoke for themselves. Their modest slogan was that they were clearing the foundation for the creation of new knowledge. Small successes suffice to fortify those devoted to the life of the mind, and there were those who thought Tellem’s strategy was ok, as far as it went, though he was dishonest about its potential to peer across the event horizon, to pull knowledge back out of the rip in time after which they had been fated to live. They disagreed with those who thought Tellem’s demagogy, in claiming such ambitions for so crude a method, was reason enough to kick him out and denounce him as a misleader, or even to physically exile him from what was then still called Newark.

There was a single formal inquiry into whether there was any basis for exclusion from recordkeeping, but the truth is that there had been no direct debate over the method of past exclusion, and, the group had not even concluded the previous year’s debate over subjectivity in the creation of knowledge, the memory of which was still quite fresh. There were definitely no grounds for exclusion because there were no grounds at all. Tellem’s group began calling themselves the Speculative Historians, and the fracture went unset.

Tellem never participated in any public debates on the validity of his method, nor were the fundamentals reopened. He would not debate publicly whether recordkeeping was the same activity as speculative history, though, according to Kloz, he has always insisted, informally, that it is, or at least that “it should be.” Which is no answer at all.

“The simple truth is that the olden ones had a power too great for their grasp,” Tellem continued. The subject of the debate up to that point is unclear.

“Could be, could be…  But you haven’t gotten around to the issue,” Sosoface Ferndale, a private courier from Monmouth, pressed the issue.

“I’m saying, the olden ones could split atoms, and fly around the moon, and manage riven populations as formless masses, pressing the people like clay into the empty places around the market-tested wireframe axes of their power sculptures. That’s taking too much of God’s power.”

“Yes, God is a jealous God,” Sosoface agreed.

“Indeed, and this is at least part of the reason why we don’t even know what happened. Consider the implications of the fact that we have this blindness in our history. A wall past which we cannot see, touch, or feel, past which no living memory remains.”

“We arise out of a sort of darkness. You state the problem well.”

“I’m trying to solve it, if you listen to me. Remember how I phrased the problem to start: the olden ones had a power too great for their grasp. Didn’t you show Frankenstein recently?”

“No, it was Rocky Horror Picture Show,” Sosoface answered.

“Well, same difference, in any case, though I myself prefer original sources. Or as close to original as you can get for the thing being investigated, which in this case is popular mentality and understanding of the danger of scientific and technical prowess escaping the control of the creators, and in those days, the people felt that they were among those responsible for such things, though they also felt incapable of rising to the responsibility.”

“Alright, go on then.”

“I can argue that all social horror, in actuality and in literary and other representation, is a version of the sorcerer’s apprentice. It is all about systems going haywire, leaders destroying themselves and their lands on the basis of the very strategy that brought them to power, individuals rationalizing themselves out of their minds, marvels turning monstrous,” Tellem threatened rhetorically.

“I can’t see what you’re doing here, but I’ll grant you all of that,” Sosoface said.

“So that’s all one one hand. One the other hand, let’s go back to that wall in history, shading that darkness out of which we emerge. It means something. Just by itself, it means something for what we do. We are people of culture and learning, and we live for the joy of placing ourselves in the flow of history. We feel ourselves…, no, we know ourselves to be the only ones capable of rising to the responsibility of recovery, recognition, and hopefully one day restoration of the best of the past. But God has made it so that we cannot possibly have it. We cannot ever establish real continuity. This is a message in itself.”

“I know one thing: we all want to know what you think it means,” Sosoface said, tiring of Tellem’s rhetoric.

“I got some ideas about what he thinks it means,” said D-Man, teasing Tellem.

“Yeah, me too,” sighed Sosoface.

“Listen, you all want to act like you don’t see this elephantine impediment to understanding in your face, you so-called recordkeepers. You seek to know the past through its artifacts, and you should know this best of all. This is the problem with your method, which is hardly a method at all.”

“Still ain’t answered the question,” announced Sosoface.

“Got to the point neither,” said D-Man.

“It’s going to sound crazy coming from me,” Tellem warned those listening, for he and Sosoface had gathered an audience, “but you can’t penetrate this mystery with data. You can’t get the proper perspective collecting these messages in bottles.”

“Regardless of the epistemological difficulties involved, in principle there is nothing preventing historical speculation on artifacts. We do it all the time,” said Sosoface, glad finally to have a target.

“That’s what’s in all the notes,” agreed D-Man.

“Exactly. And we put all the arguments in commentaries and record all the sources in appendices and you know how all this goes and how we build on each other’s work,” concluded Sosoface.

“But you won’t ever be open to the deepest meanings of what you find,” Tellem said.

“You just want to jam your prophecies into the fragments you find. And you don’t want to take the time to arrange those fragments, to actually tease out the relationships they themselves declare,” Sosoface said, just laying it all out. He did not expect Tellem to argue forthrightly or even coherently, but he knew from exactly which perspective, frame of reference, and point of view Tellem was coming.

“Let the man finish,” Fila said, coming up behind GJ.

“Thank you, brother,” said Tellem.

“More than brothers. Friends,” Fila smiled warmly.

“That’s the truth, Ruth,” Tellem’s smile waned and he held Fila’s gaze for a moment. “I think you might like to hear this, too, boo, ’cause as I was saying, I think I may, I think I might, have found a vein of bright pyrite.” Tellem rubbed his hands together, pantomiming greedy glee. Olden slang for pyrite was “fool’s gold” because of its appearance (ignoring the fact that it can indicate real gold nearby), so among the Speculative Historians, pyrite became slang for a new source of speculations, a new field in which to begin reaping pasts.

“Oh, yeah?” Fila asked. “How long have you been working on it?”

“’Bout five, six months,” responded Tellem.

It wasn’t that a silence fell, but that those gathered loosened their grip on their own conversations, and began to let silences linger so that they could overhear.

“I haven’t heard anything about it,” Fila said, surprised there had been no gossip, controversy, or bragging about a half-year project, presumably involving new artifacts and documents.

“Well, you wouldn’t. This one’s special,” Tellem winked. “But I phrase things a certain way for a reason,” he continued, dramatically. Tellem was enjoying himself again. “My man Fila knows what I mean. Us old-school fellows, right? Anyway, the reason I put the danger the way I did, is because I believe the olden ones really did do it to themselves and ourselves, in a way they weren’t expecting. In fact, in a way that just smacked them clean upside the head. There’s only one possible past that explains both the wall, the darkness, and the cool placidity of olden-days technical and economic discourse approaching 2035. If you take to heart the inductive-plausibility principle that underlies all our activity, the ethic by which we must always account for the most significant of the most of the thing…  well, if you believe that, as I do…  I say that the arrival of general artificial intelligence is the only event capable both of causing the collapse and cleaning so thoroughly up after itself, imposing silence where there was surely noise—weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.”

“That’s what you want to exclude now?” asked Sosoface.

“I believe that this is actually the thing that created the gap in our history,” Tellem said.

“But it doesn’t matter if it’s GAI or not,” said Sosoface.

“You’re going to have to explain that one, son,” chuckled Tellem.

“You simply won’t understand that this is not about saving us from catastrophe or recovering the past. The apocalypse already happened. This is about building the future,” Sosoface maintained.

“Out of what?” Tellem asked.

“Out of the past, of course,” Sosoface said.

“So, whats the problem with having an answer to the question?”

“If this is the answer, and let’s stipulate that it is, so what?”

“I think you don’t understand how important this is.”

“Why? Why is it important? I just asked you. It’s true. AI destroyed the world. So what?”

“Do you know how long we’ve been seeking the answer to this question?”

“Since sometime around the end of the North Atlantic Wars.”

“That’s right, but it’s not right, and you know damned well what I’m talking about. This ain’t no little piece of poetic literary cultural trivia. This is important.”

“I’ve asked you why twice. Make this three times.”

“How can we move into the future if we don’t know the past?”

“Because we’ll make the same mistakes and all that?” Sosoface asked.

“Exactly.”

“The answer is to think even through platitudes and not to believe that we understand something because it sounds familiar. We can’t possibly make the same mistakes, or even the same kind of mistake, because the world is entirely different. If you propose that we might be in danger of making mistakes that are somehow similar to those of the past we’d have to have a discussion about what similarity means, and I know you don’t like stuff like that,” Sosoface said.

Floweria said “Oops,” and somebody giggled.

“And even if we do need cautionary tales, we can discover them by treating the records with proper respect, discovering what they mean, instead approaching them arrogantly seeking to find.”

“Very nice. Remember, I’ve been at this just as long as you.” Tellem had been at the work much longer than Sosoface, and this was one of the frustrations of arguing with Tellem. Sometimes he was unexpectedly generous, and this surprised opponents who expected bad faith at all times. It also made his opponents waste energy trying to scope out his angle. He had an unethical mode of presentation, in which he relied upon commonplace constructions and well-worn associations, while never quite constructing or making them himself.

“I know,” Sosoface admitted cheerfully.

“We’ve excluded hundreds of pasts. What have you done?” Tellem took it to the mat. This, of course, was not a genuine challenge, but an attempt to close discussion and save face.

Fila could no longer allow Tellem to slide. To have dared to raise, or even to seem to circle around fundamental issues, on a day like today, after having avoided it for literal years and years, was a bridge too far.

“Wait a minute,” Fila said. “I don’t think…that’s not what our work is about.”

“I know it, but listen. Now we’re at a point where, among the pasts that present themselves, we may have scraped all away that are false. All that remains can only be true.”

“You’re switching stuff up again, talking about truth. You and Sosoface weren’t talking about truth, but an answer to a question. Answering that one question is the basis of your entire project.”

“True,” Tellem drawled slowly, laughing, redirecting Fila’s accusation. But he was eager to get back on his favored terrain, and he was hopeful that Fila would ease them back into their corners. “But it’s a fundamental question.”

“Maybe it is, maybe it’s not,” Fila said. “Sosoface is right. You can’t really say why the answer is important, or even why the question is important. You’ve been sliding back and forth between them so much that you’ve gotten them confused.”

“Yeah, my bad,” Tellem retreated. “Honestly, if you see these gray whiskers in my beard you might imagine that I know better than to argue with fools. You’d be wrong.” He put himself up for martyrdom, tireless dogged plodding on behalf of the good and the true. He just cared too much to give up on his comrades whose minds had been hurt in battle with darkness. But he was on the verge of capitulation: “If you don’t see why uncovering the mystery is important, I don’t know what to tell you,” Tellem shrugged and waved his arms in exasperation, and looked around to commiserate with those looking and listening.

“Our comrade here has asked you four times what changes if this mystery is answered that way. I know what you want, Tellem. See, I know you,” Fila said, louder, standing now. He would not allow Tellem to approach, muddy, and then run away from issues he had been avoiding since the very beginning. Not today. “You want to find, after a year or two of frenzied activity that, no, AI could not have been the cause after all. Free to cast your nets again, you’ll keep searching, speculating. There’s always something to drag up. Meanwhile, over the years, you have avoided all discussion of our aims, goals, strategies, tactics, to just plow through thousands of artifacts and volumes, sometimes more than once, blind the whole time to what you’re actually looking at.”

“Well, good evening, folks,” Tellem smiled and turned theatrically to take his leave. “I think it might be time to go get me a good seat and a hot plate instead of this here hot seat in a bad place,” he said, chuckling amiably. Folks opened a space to let him pass.

“Don’t leave now. Listen, you have accomplished a lot. We know it,” Fila wanted to make himself clear. Tellem did stop and turn to listen. Fila continued.

“But you have to know that to us, it’s not clear what your work really means. I think you have to admit that you don’t even really know exactly what your work means, if it doesn’t result in a miraculous mystery solution that bowls everyone over with its clarity and necessity. You have come to expect this, to rely on this future revelation, and you believe it will justify your difficulties plodding, and, yes, of course, explain the suffering and enslavement of mankind. Yes, you are definitely creating knowledge, but your methods are ultimately superficial and inappropriate,” Fila continued.

“You take record collections—sometimes the whole record collection—and, using your wits and what you have learned to date, you bind them together in theory, by posing a property that you believe to hold across the collection. If the past was A, then property x must hold. If the speculation is properly formed, any case in which x does not hold means that past A did not occur. You have made progress, by construction, mathematically. Excluding any one of infinite possible pasts must be counted as progress. The problem is that your method has no way of recognizing the historical necessity of any possible past it fails to exclude. You all have gone through every record we have at least once and still haven’t developed a sense of history, because you ignore the relationships the materials themselves embody and express. If gai was the apocalypse, how would you actually know? You would just keep searching to exclude it forever. Your work can never end, because you’ll never know when you’re done,” Fila concluded. “You do busy work.”

Tellem had already bragged about how many exclusions the Speculative Historians had made, and decided that it would sound peevish and weak were he to repeat it. He said nothing.

“But it is true that you perform miracles, and I’m glad you brought that up. To pull substance from form is one of the ways in which man is like God, remember? It’s not like anything else, and it’s as seductive and dangerous as anything after which man has lusted. Erron’s here today…  You remember his commentaries on the Bible, cross-referenced with his concordance of pre-Lutheran Christian doctrine. God created the world in six days, resting on the seventh because His work was complete. The substance was accomplished. He did not do anything else until He rescued the Hebrews from Egypt, resting again until He sent His son into Rome, where He offered to redeem humanity of sin, and preached that all people are children of God. The substance in that case was an idea. That idea is the basis of all doctrines of equality, liberty, and justice that man has had the nerve to speak. The substance was accomplished, and it is appropriate that God has done nothing since. He leaves to us the desperate compulsion to act when there is nothing to do. Erron calls it the power of mess making. It requires hubris, so it can only be human. But given that it is a perversion of λόγος, as though one were addicted to creation, it is only quasi divine.”

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When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.1

I discovered New Dithyrambia 29 years ago, as I was sailing through my senior year in college. It was simply beautiful then, a lush green land of rhythm and vitality.2

I mapped the coastline and I knew that I didn’t understand, but I assumed that I would “learn.”

But there are trees and there are forests, and living in a forest one only sees trees. Trees are not forests.

One needs perspective, and perspective comes only with experience.

Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd

The deaths of my fathers filled me with a new sense of responsibility for my own family, and set me running toward freedom, in search of justice and equality. I had no idea how dangerous it was to attempt to live freely, responsibly, creatively, with love. I soon came into conflict with every single aspect of the cybernetic dystopia we call ℝeality, and found myself shipwrecked on the coast of that land I discovered long ago.

Maroon Colony

There are other runaways here. It’s hard to make a new life amid the blockades and embargoes, but we will survive. At the very least we will communicate our hard-won knowledge and dearly purchased perspective to our children. The seas are rising, but this flood is manmade.

It’s the flood of oblivion. History falsified and obscured, knowledge drowned and submerged, science distorted and corrupt, every identifiable aspect of every human culture subverted to exploitation, all creative intellect recruited to personalized, real-time, systematic deception.

5D Free State

The masters thereby convince the world, precisely by their abuse and mistreatment of it, that history belongs to them, and that it’s more or less bunk anyway. Over hundreds of generations, down dozens of centuries, via enclosure after enclosure, they have forced this lie upon us, and taken more of the world up into this illusion.

In ℝeality, life is a sort of static frame, a gate through which individuals pass, living more or less random lives in more or less the same manner, one after the other, forever. There are patterns to lives, sure. There may even be cycles of types of lives lived. But the passage of time can’t really matter in ℝeality, because it is oriented around the gate, the frame, the individual lifespan. When you look at it that way, there is nothing out of which to make “history,” really. Nothing ever changes—not really. It can’t. People are a series of things that pass through a gate, undergo some sort of process, and then are more or less gone. Like widgets or cows.

Length + Width + Depth + Time

This is quite obviously an exploiter’s-eye view. And that is why it is the basis of ℝeality. It is the dominant material relationship grasped as an idea. It is the central ideology of class society, all the way back.

The masters of ℝeality don’t care about history because they care only about themselves. Though, to be fair, they care quite a lot about “time”—countable ticks suitable for calculating wages or interest.

Our work these millennia has enabled our masters to seize control of numerous natural biological, chemical, and physical processes, almost all cultural, emotional, and psychological processes, to monopolize all means of production, to bend the entire world’s population to their will, to make themselves literally masters of this distorted universe, and yet… They are powerless to do anything about the climate crisis. None among them can muster a defense of our habitat, the literal basis of human existence. There is no statecraft, no conquest by division, for which neglect of this problem could be a reasonable strategy.

The masters of ℝeality are most profoundly irresponsible, irredeemably incompetent. We live in four dimensions, and we have given them control of three. That’s almost everything. It’s enough to enslave all of humanity and destroy every living creature. But it’s not enough. Their function prevents them from taking the fourth dimension seriously, let alone mastering it.

+ Accountability

That is left to us, the runaway slaves, those who steal themselves away, through dark forests, across treacherous waters, our life and death in our very own hands. To find a home. This is already more than many have been able to dream, even despite having and raising children. Handling one’s life deliberately; taking one’s time in one’s hands, in discrete chunks, to shape it; choosing actions with wisdom, planning, and foresight. This is mastery of the fourth dimension, which is living in the fifth.

For us there are no “unforeseen consequences.” Not anymore. We know how things work. That’s just another word for “externalities,” which is a euphemism for exploitation.

No one is more or less gone. Even those that class society has destroyed body and soul, under pyramids, in wars, on plantations, in prisons and offices—even they live on in our desperate need for love and freedom. They are why and how it has come to this. We will live on in our children, and our craft will ensure that they know how to live.

Art

A sphere appears to be a circle in two dimensions, and the Invisible Ark appears to be art in three and a sort of real-life, contemporary-historical performance art in four. I assure you that it is not. It is an actual conveyance, and construction is ongoing here and at http://invisibleark.cloud.

Locality and Temporality at World’s End

New Dithyrambia is everywhere and nowhere, because it is literally the edge of ℝeality. It is the cosmic shore from which a precious remnant will launch its search for a new home worthy of our humanity.

If you get here, you are welcome to board! We need all the help we can get, and there’s plenty of work to go around.

August 23, 2023

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12. Warrior and War

What kind of man enlists and fights in war, and then re-enlists and fights again? What kind of man devotes his life to a prince? Such devotion is an incommutable death sentence with an unknown time and place of execution. This man, this warrior, is different from the kind of man who risks his life in larceny. A warrior may act identically to a bandit, but a warrior requires something that no racket can provide. A warrior requires to kill with honor for meaning. There have been many attempts by various gangs of villains and assorted lowlifes to rationalize their outlawry, and they say too much. Stories told in films, plays and books have sought to understand these creatures, when there is really nothing to understand. The best story was that of “family” among the mafiosi of the oldentimes northeastern and middle-western parts of the United States, but that is clearly a lie, because fear destroys the criminal’s family first. They can no longer believe that he will provide for their future and they must consider that he will turn out to be a burden and a liability. The crook is a useless person who, for one reason or another, has found no way to achieve a life of meaning. Their actions have no meaning, and the form of their lives is such that meaning is not even approached. They play a deadly game for pathetic stakes, and they must lose. Incarceration is a loss from which there is no recovery, and for which there is no just compensation, because nothing can be done in prison that cannot be done in the world. Death merely confirms what his family feared all along.

The warrior acts in accordance with the strategic vision of the state, as elaborated by the prince he serves. The warrior thereby serves the strength of the state and the authority of the sovereign.

But this gets us no closer to the essential truth of war nor to the essence of the warrior. Neither does the contradiction between the honorable act of the warrior and the disreputable act of the criminal, though they be the same act.

The truth of war is that it is only possible because the warrior exists. The warrior exists because there is a line in the heart of every man that when crossed demands a response. This is the line of ultimate concern, and it triggers ultimate response, as variable as those concerns and responses may be, from man to man. The warrior is the man who can move that line himself, so that his very soul will cry out at matters as abstract as the placement of a vehicle on a bridge, the change of personnel at an embassy, or the look in the eye of a man in a crowd.

This is not the same as the degenerate who kills a man for reckless eyeballing or for scuffing his shoes. That man is not in control even of his own emotions, let alone the subtle mechanisms of the heart and soul that produce them. Moreover, the warrior is one who is comfortable negotiating—and renegotiating—the placement of that line according to his born or bred sense of honor. That balancing act is his spiritual practice. That is his prayer. The warrior may give his entire life and being to his prince, but consider the strength such service requires. What is it? It is the stuff of massacres, unmarked graves, poison gas, smallpox blankets, lynchings, and pogroms. It is also the stuff of mutinies and revolutions.

Warriors can change their minds.

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11. Castle Henderson

There had been no incident of any kind. The bed of the black truck was filled, and rents in coin and kind shifting heaved—canvas bags stuffed with envelopes of silver, gold and copper jangled against uneaten winter stores of potatoes and southern-bought grains, which would serve as starches for alms and cakes for Saint Patrick’s Day. Among the sacks of grain and money were carefully lain boxes of distilled spirits, their glass bottles separated by heavy paper shocks, rattling nonetheless, neck against uneven neck, because the boxes had not been properly fully filled. Ritius had long ago recognized a sort of rise and fall where rents were concerned. When he first began these duties, the fall in the quantity and value of the rents after the first autumn month would enrage him, driving him excessively to punish both debtors and those who offered moonshine instead of money. The knowledge that the people’s wealth was more like the seasons, and that one may as well reprimand the sea for waving, made him feel wise and merciful. He was no fool, though, and he still wouldn’t accept wine, cider, or beer. The quality is too various, and the temptations of the job had made it impossible to find sober, reliable inspectors to regulate the production of the entire universe of fermented alcoholic beverages.

◆ ◆ ◆

Ritius wished to speak with Prince Feelharmonica about more than the rise and fall of the rents. He had to wait outside the office, because Feelharmonica was meeting with the spy he had engaged to surveil his older brother to the south, Prince Koolkup of New Gunswick. According to Ritius, Feelharmonica was making a mountain out of a molehill, and the molehill was Koolkup’s management of his relationship with New York, regarding Staten Island. There remained one single bridge connecting Staten Island to New Jersey, and it was hard to overestimate its economic and political significance, as it was both an explicit condition of the peace between North New Jersey and New York, and the source of the only, though great and growing, import tax revenue Koolkup received, and his principality was the bulwark against the chaos of southern New Jersey. So he took frequent trips to New York, spoke most frequently with New York, and had business relations with many Staten Island merchants and factors and tradesmen and the like.

There were three concubines in Feelharmonica’s parlor. Sorrel, his favorite, dared to stay when Ritius entered. Ritius determined to ignore her entirely. Feelharmonica considered himself to be open-minded and liberal in his relations with his women, and Sorrel had grown comfortable in her role as a sort of secret streetwise counselor. Feelharmonica believed that he could use her while properly discounting her distorted partial perspective and any ill will she might harbor against him for her position. She was well compensated after all, and she did not desire to be his wife—he did not feel he needed one, yet—and she would not have desired children even if she were capable of it. Ritius had told him more than once that he relied too much on her, which is to say, at all. But Feelharmonica was proud to possess a woman of her intellectual acuity. He enjoyed her little games, and was confident that he had them well in hand. She was quite well placed, and had come to know everyone of any note. “I swear to you, Ritius, that Koolkup is going to be the ruin of our kingdom,” Feelharmonica pronounced, seating himself informally on the sofa. Sorrel took his side and curled and shifted her legs under herself like a cat. It was some small relief to Ritius that Feelharmonica dismissed her before she had gotten entirely comfortable. The prince enjoyed his little games as well.

Ritius took the club chair across from him and poured them both a bit of whisky.

“Can I be honest for a minute?” Ritius asked, while sliding the prince’s drink across.

“I don’t know,” Feelharmonica grinned. “Can you?” He took a sip and sucked his teeth.

“That so-called covenant? established something, but it surely wasn’t a kingdom.”

“Not this double-dug dirt again,” Feelharmonica groaned. “I’m about to start taking it the wrong way.”

“You have yet to dispute my logic?” Ritius felt that, as a soldier and as a servant, he had to reiterate his position. “This were a kingdom only had your father survived.”

The Covenant established a sovereignty of some sort under the name of New Ark, but it was really just a treaty, and no founding document. There was discussion neither of the sovereign’s border with southern New Jersey nor its administrative or executive structure, nor its inner divisions or succession policy. The only geographical discussion was the explicit confirmation that Staten Island indeed still belonged to New York. Prince Appall ignored all these questions of state. His only condition, spoken, was that New Ark, the middle portion of the sovereignty, would be primus inter pares.

“But still. You remain primo enterprise. So if there’s anyone in a position to finally found that kingdom? it remains you.”

Feelharmonica glared at Ritius. He remembered when they met, long ago, in this, his father’s very house. Ritius was a bit older, months, and Feelharmonica and his younger brother (before he took the name Razorbeem) played with all the children of the house—his mother’s sisters’ daughters and his father’s wards, pages, and squires—and these two, Feelharmonica and Ritius, were boyhood friends for as long as Prince Appall would allow. Feelharmonica came of age, and he grew to learn his father’s callousness, particularly toward his very own self, as he, in his heart, abandoned his boyhood friend to his fate as his servant. His father died before teaching him the most salient method of converting pride and self-regard into a chrysalis of contempt, so that he might cope with such crippling isolation.

That frightful alchemy almost always entails the systematic abuse and humiliation of those one wishes to dominate, but only because at the end of such treatment, the dominated, now deprived of their dignity, cry out for further insult, and can in no way appear similar to oneself. For instance, there was nothing natural about the way in which the Coleman boys came to Castle Henderson, though such a thing might be expected, given the status and position of the people involved.

Fastes Coleman was a military leader, like his father before him, and his before him. He was Appall’s favorite of his father’s armorbearers, as it had been with Feelharmonica and Ritius. So, at the beginning of his reign, Appall appointed Fastes general of the legion he raised against the south, to establish and fortify his brother Boy at Trenton, where he would be a sort of marshal over the territory, and also necessarily to push the Gardeners back up against the Virginian Dominion, in hopes that the Gardeners would be crushed and die out, abandoned, exiled, and mercilessly extorted by the marauding paramilitaries of the long demobilized and disbanded Pennsylvania National Guard, who were more properly called Illadelphians then, rather than now, after discord and strife have split them apart; they remain what they were, only with smaller forces and that many more enemies.

Fastes performed his duties for 7 years.

Appall was and had always been generous to Fastes, his trusted general, calling him a friend. No one could recall Fastes ever trading upon his familiarity with the prince, and Fastes never made any attempt to challenge Appall publicly on any matter of state. It might be said that Fastes retreated too abruptly into private life. He and his new wife Lalala—a dressmaker originally from Roosevelt, Long Island—eloped and honeymooned the springtime with her people, conceiving their first child, the boy who named himself Rytius. By no accounts was Appall at all shaken by this. He spoke with no one about his friend, General Fastes, and in fact, Appall hosted a celebration for the newlyweds upon their return from Long Island.

Appall praised Lalala for her poise, because she was a common woman. He did not mention what no one failed to notice. Her beauty was such that a man would stop walking, talking and breathing just to watch her move across the room. Her body was thoroughbred perfection, and her eyes betrayed secret wonders of thought and feeling a man might do wicked things to know.

But Appall and Fastes embraced one another, laughed together, danced with one another’s wives, and generally played fools that evening. Appall had not yet hardened his heart against his old friend. Or perhaps he was practicing the duplicity that later served him so well.

He did bark Fastes whether it were a greater honor to have a prince attend a wedding, to have a prince host a wedding, or to have a prince miss a wedding. The outburst struck everyone silent. Even the piano player stopped. Fastes paused, smiled and barked that the last option is the best, because one can be sure that the prince, having missed one opportunity to show off, is sure to make an even grander display of generosity. The hall exploded in laughter, Appall actually fell off his chair, and when Fastes went to him, he also fell, and they tumbled down drunk, laughing.

Appall did not fail to govern, and early the next March, he again took up arms against rebels in the north, who began calling themselves Gardeners after those in the south. Appall raised a brigade, naming it after Saint Patrick, and its policy was to wipe these New Gardeners from the face of the earth or, failing that, to push them south of Trenton. The Gardeners, new or old, had no policy, because they had neither king nor prince nor ruler of any kind, but they are loosely bound by their ideas of liberty and justice. Their ideas and their flag are heirlooms, but they are like their forefathers who somehow never managed to live in the manner they preached. They, like their forefathers, are as poisonous as the snake they hold aloft, always carrying in their mouths a ready excuse for unfreedom, false imprisonment and injustice. But they were more than capable of bombing bridges and sabotaging dams as they fled southwest into the forests and swamps.

Appall soon required a team of builders, craftsmen and engineers of several kinds to inspect and to renovate the three dams near Paterson, and to restore the electrical power supply, if possible. The Passaic flows north for a while, from out of the swamps of County Morris, to the Little Falls dam near the Great Notch in the Achtung Mountains, and north still to the Great Falls dam at Paterson, just north of which the water turns south, toward the ocean again, to Dundee dam, near the town of Garfield, and thence the river runs down the plains to New Ark and the bay. All this territory was occupied by New Gardeners, and that team of highly skilled men, though under armed protection, suffered casualties sufficient to raise alarm, and so Appall commanded Fastes to take a small squadron to the Great Notch, while Fastes’s firstborn child was not yet three months old.

If a stream of southernbound refugees forms a river, Appall sent Fastes and his squadron swimming upstream, north along the western face of Orange Mountain. No one survived, and Appall took Lalala and her infant son into his home, where they lived under his protection. That December she bore him a son.

Perhaps a year after the birth of that second son, the boy who would name himself Ritius, Lalala fell ill with raving. She was found wandering Brookside, near House Coleman, half-naked, her face garishly painted, as though she were a sorceress or a clown or both, ranting about debt and recompense, not vacating the throne nor ever abandoning the castle but reinforcing the fastness, and Appall formed a bodyguard for her, and brought doctors to look after her health. She told visitors that she was the sovereign, and that Appall was not even a pretender but a worm eating around the edges of her seat, spoiling her place, biting and stinging her behind. He began to confine her to her rooms when appropriate, and then regularly, as a matter of course. After she overturned a heavily laden dinner table one evening, Appall began to consider her a danger to herself and others. When required, he did not hesitate to strap her down to her bed. Her guards became jailers, and soon she had no visitors save Appall, two nights a week, three weeks per month.

She never withered, but she threw herself out of her bedroom window one morning when her guard released her for breakfast. Appall’s associates had forgotten her, and he did not proclaim her death. There was no record of the younger child’s true paternity, and upon their official conscription into his service, the boys were simply considered orphan wards of the prince.

Feelharmonica trusted Ritius, all the more because he was so consistent, insistent, and persistent. Feelharmonica settled back into his sofa. “But you somehow don’t think Koolkup is a problem that needs to be solved.”

“I’m just asking questions,” Ritius said.

“Either way it needs to be solved.”

“Let me tell you a story. You remember your father’s policies regarding the northern principality. The expulsions and expropriations? sending thousands of New Gardeners streaming south? where they fire the hearts of the others with their tales of dispossession, to which their scars and missing limbs bear witness? Those nettlesome snakebearers, biting our ankles in the south?”

“Of course. Koolkup has done well with them. He has even reclaimed my uncle’s lands near Princeton.”

“Yes, he seems to have them and the Illadelphians firmly in hand.”

“You say ‘Illadelphians’ like they are one thing.”

“I know better. It is just a manner of speaking. We know what goes on in the south. I want that spoken. I want to talk to you about the north.”

“Proceed.”

“One of my oldest long ago boys, Balloony Louis, from Eo…He was with us in your father’s house for a while, but you probably don’t remember him. He moved north after the war, a couple years before Six Bridges. A born businessman, believe, he left his family and his respectable home to make a name for himself in Paramus…to establish an outpost up there for him and his partners, even before the seizures. After the expulsions, he petitioned your father for the right to operate several choice concerns. There was a furniture paint shop finishing goods for New York cabinetmakers, and there was a beer bottler and distributor. The latter was problematic, because a significant portion of the deliveries were to bodegas in Brooklyn. Getting back and forth across the bridge in a manner befitting a profit-making enterprise was impossible, as his trucks were robbed and his drivers were killed.

“He was relieved when your brother Prince Razorbeem took over administration of the northern principality. He expected support of a certain kind, but he did not receive it. Razorbeem finished his father’s work there, and since has concerned himself almost exclusively with management of the waters, the dams, and the power supply.

“Water and power are vital infrastructure, given safety and security. But the latter were not given, and my boy and his colleagues had been forced to fend for themselves, paying what they must to whom they must for security and safe passage. That, I’m sure you agree, is disgraceful.”

Feelharmonica didn’t respond.

“So Balloony went to speak with your brother Prince Razorbeem. He is prideful, and he balked at first, but my boy had brought other operators to testify as well, and Razorbeem began to understand that commerce itself is infrastructure, as are business relationships in general. He learned the lesson that you reproach your older brother for learning too well.”

Ritius paused to allow the prince to appreciate the symmetry. Feelharmonica gave him nothing and, stonefaced, cocked his head slightly.

“Those two princes, your older and younger brothers, in the absence of any new teaching, have come to learn that they must make their own separate peace with New York, given our historical entanglement.”

“My father wanted a new relationship with New York.”

“And he might have forged it had he lived. Meanwhile, to your north and to your south you have two separate relations, each a sprawling collage of compromise and convenience, mastered by no common vision.”

“Don’t think that I am blind to your concerns. I have spoken with both my brothers,” Feelharmonica stood and walked behind the sofa. “About this and more than you know.”

Ritius sat silently.

“Koolkup is preoccupied with the defense of our southern and western borders, it is true. We cannot minimize his efforts on our behalf,” Feelharmonica admitted. “But Razorbeem,” Feelharmonica paused. “He called me a warlord last time we talked,” Feelharmonica chuckled like a cough. “You believe the nerve of that little peasy-headed, stunted growth, platform shoe–wearing poseur? Anyway, when we talk, he reminds me that our kingdom rests upon but a single support and, like you, old friend, he repeats himself, saying that we have no power independent of New York, and that we live like mosquitoes, sucking the blood of those with whom we have nothing else to do. We can hardly increase our sucking power, because even our current position was purchased too dearly.”

“Neither of your brothers is a fool. But my story is not done. You and I are sitting here and we have understood and spoken the truth that each prince is forging his own policy with regards to New York. But we know only the one and not the other.”

Feelharmonica was surprised at the suddenness with which this new knowledge had taken shape, before his eyes, with his own participation. He was shaken by the sheer size of the hole it revealed in his understanding, struck by the fact that he had already known every fact required to understand, and humbled by how wisely his old friend and counselor had revealed it. He could not speak, but he swallowed and stood, still.

“Your brother Razorbeem took Balloony’s concerns to heart. He solicited bids for security services—I believe he met with Councilor Justice Boniface, given that she runs market security here, in New Ark proper. They were unable to come to terms, but your brother made armored vehicles available to certain merchants, and provides armed escort for a modest per diem.”

“OK, so he is behaving as he should,” Feelharmonica noted. “But how can he safely disperse so many men? Smallest lands, smallest numbers.”

“My friend answered me well when I asked him the same question. Your brother has his garrison between Paterson and Paramus, near the bend in the Passaic. He requires that merchants report there at the beginning of the week, one week before they require his escort, to preserve their place with a deposit of gold only. So, he was there, waiting in the lobby to see the administrator. The prince and his bodyguard crossed the hall and paused. They were not to be alone, because another group of men was rushing to join them. That second group were workmen of different sorts, tools and implements strapped to their belts like six guns. They exited the building and entered their vehicles outside, and it was a large caravan, with several armored passenger vehicles, more than two pickup trucks, and what struck my friend the most was the large armored tractor with an open trailerbed, on which was installed machinery unlike he had ever seen, and had only ever even heard of. It was some sort of large crane or wench.”

“It sounds like he was heading out to inspect the waterways.”

“That’s what I thought, too.”

“Well?”

“That’s also what my friend thought.”

“So?”

“All the vehicles were marked with the seal of the King of New York.”

Feelharmonica froze, trembling, and clutched the back of the sofa to steady himself. When he released it, he pursed his lips and walked back around to sit again with Ritius. Ritius let him gather himself, and sipped from his tumbler while waiting for his prince to speak.

“Now we know the shape of both relations.”

“We do, in general. But we do not know the price Razorbeem pays.”

“Let’s assume that it is too high.”

“Yes,” Ritius agreed.

“I guess you’re waiting for me to ask you for your counsel.”

“Yes.”

“You think I would shoot the messenger here.”

“No,” Ritius replied agreeably.

“I need to pull a tooth to get you to say something now? You’ve already spoken so freely, my friend.”

Ritius most definitely did not want to play diplomatic games, but he wanted to hear for himself the prince’s first utterances after this new knowledge. He continued.

“I have been your man for years. I have fought for you. I have guarded your life with my own. I have had the honor of serving as one of your counselors. You know me.” Ritius set his glass down and leaned forward over the table. “You say that I repeat myself, but I have also repeated my conviction that only you can establish the kingdom your father failed to found. You can. But you are doing nothing to that end while your brothers work toward even others. Even with your privilege as primo enterprise, you need a plan and you need your brothers to agree to what you propose. What exactly are you doing?”

Ritius realized that Feelharmonica was waiting for him to finish, and that he was no longer listening. Ritius sat back, rested his hands on his knees, and concluded by trying to state matters as forcefully as he could.

“To me, it looks like you are attacking some of your most beloved citizens, and spending time and money that you cannot afford, in order to drag building materials up the face of Orange Mountain, to build a museum, of all things, to mock a world long dead.”

Feelharmonica nodded conservatively, in the manner indicating that one has listened carefully. He took a deep breath and a swallow of his liquor, and a considerate silence filled the parlor.

“Are you feeling sentimental about your brother?” Feelharmonica asked coldly, no expression on his face. Ritius knew that he had upset and alarmed Feelharmonica with his analysis, and that Feelharmonica might be seeking to turn the tables, to make himself feel better by belittling or mocking Ritius. His affectlessness could be convenient cover. It could also be sincere. Ritius chose his words carefully.

“It’s not personal. I believe the policy to be misguided.”

The prince blinked, and seemed to settle himself. “Do you know about this game they play?”

“I know something about it,” Ritius admitted. “I’ve never seen it played.”

“Who chooses the topics presented?”

“No one. The presenter. It’s not directed.”

“Are the presentations approved?”

“No.”

“Is there any review of any kind?”

“No. Well, the group applauds or decries the presentation. The matter is decided there.”

“Is this true for both factions?”

Ritius realized that he had only been answering for his brother’s side. “Now that you mention it, there are differences between the two factions. The one is as I have described, and the other is different.”

“The faction decides as a matter of policy the area of research and presentation, from what I understand,” Feelharmonica said.

“Yes, they identify an area ripe for what they call exclusion, and they work for weeks, months, and sometimes years to conclude such a project.”

“The whole group undertakes a project?”

“There are teams, I gather.”

“Who decides to undertake a project?”

“I am not sure how they decide, but the leader of that faction is one of the original recordkeepers, Tellem Ralph.”

“If there are teams, then there is a division of labor, which means there is some decisionmaking process, which means there is a decider.”

“I think that must be the case.”

“What can be the result of such a project? Do they produce documents? Are their findings presented in ‘game’ form?”

“The research itself fills rooms, but the result is a relatively small document outlining the result. They compile lists of references and the like.”

“But the result is usually some sort of yes or no thing, right? A decision whether this or that could possibly have happened?”

“Exactly right. They comb through libraries, archives, artifacts, documents of any and every sort in order to produce history.”

“But it’s quite the opposite, isn’t it? They eliminate possibilities.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Another way to put it is that they remove controversy.”

“I suppose one could put it that way,” Ritius had to agree. The two men shared a silence. “But the price is a whole mess of martyrs.”

“It’s all to the glory and power of our kingdom…to be. You can’t put a price on that.”

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This video is part of a series called Cosmogony/Apocalypse, which is “explained” at my art site princekudura.net. In this episode, Adam and the boys encounter woman, opening a new epoch in human history.

I am looking for a space to host a video installation of the series. If you know of any, preferably in LA, let me know!

Bonus points if you can name the song.

                      Better than a trade slump
                      Would surely be a ______ _____!