Modem Times 2.0, Page 2

  Major Nye could not be sure he was actually home but it was clear that the others were certain. This was their natural environment. From somewhere came the aroma of vinegar-soaked newspaper, limp chips.

  3. CAPTAIN MARVEL BATTLES HIS OWN CONSCIENCE!!!!!

  Knowing that we are slaves of our virtual histories, the soldiers play dice beneath the cross. A bloody spear leans against the base. A goblet and a piece of good cloth are to be won. “What’s that?” says a soldier, hearing a groan overhead. “Nothing.” His companion rattles the dice in his cupped hands. “Something about his father.”

  —Michel LeBriard, Les Nihilists

  “UP TO YOUR old tricks, eh, Mr. Cornelius?” Miss Brunner adjusted her costume. “Well, they won’t work here.”

  “They never did work. You just had the illusion of effect. But you said it yourself, Miss B—-follow the money. You can’tchange the economics. You can just arrange the window dressing a bit.”

  “Sez you!” Shakey Mo fingered his gun’s elaborate instrumentation. “There’s a bullet in here with your address on it.”

  Birmingham had started to burn. The reflected flames gave a certain liveliness to Miss Brunner’s features. “Now look what you’ve done!”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Jerry rubbed at his itching skull. “They’ll never make anything out of it. I must be off.”

  She sniffed. “Yes. That explains everything.”

  She wobbled a little on her ultra-high heels as she reboard-ed the chopper. “Where to next?”

  4. ECCE RUMPO

  All Nazis fear The Yellow Star,

  Who leaves his card upon the bar.

  And ‘scaping from their railroad car

  He’s gone again, the Yellow Star!

  —Lafarge and Taylor, The Adventures of the Yellow Star, 1941

  JERRY WAS SURPRISED to see his dad’s faux Le Corbusier chateau in such good shape, considering the beating it had taken over the years. Obviously someone had kept it up. In spite of the driving rain and the mud, the place looked almost welcoming.

  Mo took a proprietal pleasure in watching Jerry’s face. “Maintenance is what I’ve always been into. Everything that isn’t original is a perfect repro. Even those psychedelic towers your dad was so keen on. He was ahead of his time, your dad. He practically invented acid. Not to mention acid rain. And we all know how far ahead of his time he was with computers.” Mo sighed. “He was a baby badly waiting for the microchip. If he’d lived.” He blinked reflectively and studied the curved metalcasings of his Banning, fingering the ammo clips and running the flat of his hand over the long, tapering barrel. “He understood machinery, your dad. He lived for it. The Leo IV was his love. He built that house for machinery.”

  “And these days all he’d need for the same thing would be a speck or two of dandruff.” Miss Brunner passed her hand through her tight perm and then looked suspiciously at her nails. “Can we go in?” She sat down on the chopper’s platform and started pulling her thick wellies up her leg.

  High above them, against the dark beauty of the night, a rocket streaked, its intense red tail burning like a ruby.

  Jerry laughed. “I thought all that was over.”

  “Nothing’s over.” She sighed. “Nothing’s ever bloody over.”

  Mo remembered why he disliked her.

  They began to trudge through the clutching mud which oozed around them. Melting chocolate.

  “Bloody global warming,” said Jerry.

  “You should have concentrated harder, Mr. C.”

  He didn’t hear her. In his mind he was eyeless in Gaza at the doors of perception.

  5. THE WANTON OF ARGOS

  People claim that Portugal is an island. They say that you can’t get there without wetting your feet. They say all those tales concerning dusty border roads into Spain are mere fables.

  —Geert Mak, In Europe, 2004

  UP AT THE far end of the hall Miss Brunner was enjoying an Abu Ghraib moment. The screams were getting on all their nerves. Jerry turned up Pidgin English by Elvis Costello but nothing worked the way it should any more. He had systematically searched his father’s house while Miss Brunner applied electrodes to his brother Frank’s tackle. “Was this really what the ‘60s were all about?” he mused.

  “Oh, God,” said Frank. “Oh, bloody hell.” He’d never looked very good naked. Too pale. Too skinny. But ready to talk:

  “You think you’re going to find the secret of the ‘60s in a fake French modernist villa built by a barmy lapsed papist romantic Jew who went through World War II in a trench coat and wincyette pajamas fucking every sixty-a-day bereaved or would-be bereaved middle-class Englishwoman who ever got a first at Cambridge, who was fucked by a communist and who claimed that deddy had never wanted her to be heppy? Not exactly rock and roll, is it, Jerry. You’d be better off questioning your old mum. The Spirit of the bloody Blitz.” He sniffed. “Is that Bar-B-Q?”

  “They all had the jazz habit.” Jerry was defensive. “They all knew the blues.”

  “Oh, quite.” Miss Brunner was disgusted. “Jack Parnell and his Gentleman Jazzers at the Café de Paris. Or was it Chris Barber and his Skiffling Sidemen?”

  “Skiffle,” said Jerry, casting around for his washboard. “The Blue Men. The Square Men. The Quarry Men. The Green Horns. The Black Labels. The Red Barrels.”

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Mo. He was rifling through the debris, looking for some antique ammo clips. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to bring this place over, stone by stone, to Ladbroke Grove. Though, I agree, it’s a shame about the Hearst Castle.”

  “It was always more suitable for Hastings.” Miss Brunner stared furiously at Jerry’s elastic-sided Cubans. “You’re going to ruin those shoes, if you’re not careful.”

  “It’s not cool to be careful,” he said. “Remember, this is the ‘60s. You haven’t won yet. Careful is the ‘80s. Entirely different.”

  “Is this the Gibson?” Mo had found the guitar behind a mould-grown library desk.

  Miss Brunner went back to working on Frank.

  “The Gibson?” Jerry spoke hopefully. But when he checked, it was the wrong number.

  “Can I have it, then?” asked Mo.

  Jerry shrugged.

  6. WILLIAM‘S CROWDED HOUR

  … and does anyone know what “the flip side” was? It was from the days when gramophone records were double-sided. You played your 78 rpm or your 33 1/3 or your 45 and then you turned it over and played the other side. Only nostalgia dealers and vinyl freaks remember that stuff now.

  —Maurice Little, Down the Portobello, 2007

  CHRISTMAS 1962, SNOW still falling. Reports said there was no end in sight. Someone on the Third Program even suggested a new Ice Age had started. At dawn, Jerry left his flat in Lancaster Gate, awakened by the tolling of bells from the church tower almost directly in line with his window, and went out into Hyde Park. His were the first footprints in the snow. It felt like sacrilege. Above him, crows circled. He told himself they were calling to him. He knew them all by name. They were reluctant to land, but then he saw their black clawprints as he got closer to the Serpentine. The prints were beginning to fill up. He wondered if the birds would follow him again. He planned to go over to Ladbroke Grove and take the presents to his mum and the others. But first he had to visit Mrs. Pash and listen to the player piano for old time’s sake. They always got their Schoenberg rolls out for Christmas Day.

  A crone appeared from behind a large chestnut. She wore a big red coat with a hood, trimmed in white, and she carried a basket. Jerry recognized her; but, to humour her, he pretended to be surprised as she approached.

  “Good luck, dear,” she said. “You’ve got almost seven years left. And seven’s a lucky number, isn’t it?” She wrapped her lilac chiffon round her scrawny throat. Ersatz syrup. Somewhere drums and motorcycle engines began to beat. “Seven years!”

  Jerry knew better. “Twenty-two years and some months according to the
SS. Owning your misery is the quickest way of getting out from under. What will happen to individualism under the law?”

  “Obama will change all that, darling. Great lawyers are coming. They will change corporations into individuals. Cross my palm with silver and I’ll tell you the future. Cross it with gold and I’ll explain the present.”

  Checking his watches, Jerry smiled and turned up the collar of his black car coat. He put one gloved hand on the Roller’s gear stick, another on the wheel. He was still searching for his Dornier DoX seaplanes. Last he’d looked Catherine had been aboard.

  “What’s the time? My watches stopped.”

  7. HOW TO GET YOUR FREE STATE $2 BILLS

  When asked to imagine the Earth in 2040, many scientists describe a grim scenario, a landscape so bare and dry it’s almost uninhabitable. But that’s not what Willem van Cottem sees. “It will be a green world,” says van Cottem, a Belgian scientist turned social entrepreneur. “Tropical fruit can grow wherever it’s warm. You still need water, but not much. A brief splash of rain every once in a while is enough. And voila—from sandy soil, lush gardens grow. The secret is hydrogels, powerfully absorbent polymers that can suck up hundreds of times their weight in water. Hydrogels have many applications today, from food processing to mopping up oil spills, but they are most familiar as the magic ingredient in disposable diapers.

  —Popular Science, July 2010

  “BELONGING, JERRY, IS very important to me.” Colonel Pyat glanced up and down the deserted Portobello. Crows were hopping about in the gutters. Old newspapers, scraps of lettuce, squashed tomatoes, ruined apples. Even the scavengers, their ragged forms moving methodically up and down the street, rejected them.

  Jerry looked over at the cinema. The Essoldo was showing three pictures for 1/6d. Mrs. Miniver, The Winslow Boy, and Brief Encounter.

  “Heppy deddy?” he asked no-one in particular.

  “There you are!” The colonel was triumphant. “You can speak perfectly properly if you want to!”

  Jerry was disappointed. He had expected a different triple feature. He had been told it would be Epic Hero and the Beast, First Spaceship on Venus, and Forbidden Planet.

  “Rets!” he said.

  8. A GAME OF PATIENCE

  Art, which should be the unique preoccupation of the privileged few, has become a general rule … A fashion … A furor … artism!

  —Felix Pyat

  “THERE’S ALWAYS A bridge somewhere.” Mo paced up and down the levee like a neurotic dog. Every few minutes he licked his lips with his long red tongue. At other times he stood stockstill staring inland, upriver. From the gloom came the sound of a riverboat’s groaning wail, and an exchange of shouts between pilots over their bullhorns. Heavy waves of black liquid crashed against hulls. The words were impossible to make out, like cops ordering traffic, but nobody cared what they were saying. Further downriver, from what remained of the city, came the mock-carousel music inviting visitors to a showboat whose paddles, splashing like the vanes of a ruined windmill, stuck high out of filthy brown water full of empty Evian and Ozarka bottles.

  Further upstream, scavengers with empty cans were trying to skim thick oil off the surface.

  Jerry called up from the water. He had found a raft and was poling it slowly to the gently curving concrete level. “Mo. Throw down a rope!”

  “The Pope? We haven’t got a pope.” Mo was confused.

  A rope!

  “We going to hang him?”

  Jerry gave up and let the raft drift back into midstream. He sat down in the centre, his gun stuck up between his spread legs.

  “You going to town?” Mo wanted to know.

  When Jerry didn’t answer, he began to pad slowly along the levee, following the creak of the raft in the water, the shadow that he guessed to be his friend’s. From somewhere in the region of Jackson Square vivid red, white, and blue neon flickered on and off before it was again extinguished. Then the sun set, turning the water a beautiful, bloody crimson. The broken towers along St. Charles Street appeared in deep silhouette for a few moments and disappeared in the general darkness. The voices of the pilots stopped suddenly and all Mo could hear was the sullen lapping of the river.

  “Jerry?”

  Later, Mo was relieved at the familiar razz—a kazoo playing a version of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” He looked up and down. “Is that you?”

  Jerry had always been fond of Berlin.

  9. PAKISTAN - THE TALIBAN TAKEOVER

  A mysterious young man met at luncheon Said “My jaws are so big I can munch on A horse and a pig and a ship in full rig And my member’s the size of a truncheon.”

  —Maurice LeB, 1907

  MONSTROUS HOVERING BATTLE CRUISERS cast black shadows over half a mile in all directions when Jerry finally reached the field, his armoured Lotus HMV VII’s batteries all but exhausted. He would have to abandon the vehicle and hopeto get back to Exeter with the cavalry, assuming there was still a chance to make peace and assuming there still was an Exeter. He leapt from the vehicle and ran towards the tent where the Cornish commander had set up his headquarters.

  The cool air moaned with the soft noise of idling motors. Cornish forces, including Breton and Basque allies, covered the moors on four sides of the Doone valley, the sound of their vast camp all but silenced by its understanding of the force brought against it. Imperial Germany, Burgundy, and Catalonia had joined Hannover to crush this final attempt to restore Tudor power and return the British capital to Cardiff.

  Even as Jerry reached the royal tent, Queen Jennifer stepped out, a vision in mirrored steel, acknowledging his deep bow. Her captains crowded behind her, anxious for information.

  “Do you, my lord, bring news from Poole?” She was pale, straight-backed, ever beautiful. He cared as much for her extraordinary posture as any of her other qualities. Were they still lovers?

  “Poole has fallen, your majesty, while the Isle of Wight lies smouldering and extinguished. Even Barnstaple’s great shipyards are destroyed. We reckoned, my lady, without the unsentimental severity of Hannover’s fleet. We have only cavalry and infantry remaining.”

  “Your own family?”

  “Your majesty, I sent them to sanctuary in the Scillies.”

  She turned away, hiding her expression from him.

  Her voice was steady when it addressed her commanders. “Gentlemen, you may return to your homes. The day is already lost and I would not see you die in vain.” She turned to Jerry, murmuring: “And what of Gloucester?”

  “The same, my lady.”

  A tear showed now in her calm, beautiful eyes. Yet her voice remained steady. “Then we are all defeated. I’ll spill no more senseless blood. Tell Hannover I will come to London by July’s end. Take this to him.” Slowly, with firm hands, she unbuckled her sword.

  10. THE EPIC SEARCH FOR A TECH HERO

  The penalties in France will be much higher than in Belgium. The fine for a first offence will be Є150. And a man who is found to have forced a woman to wear a full-length veil will be punished with a fine of Є15,000 and face imprisonment. The crackdown on the veil has come from the very top of the political establishment, with President Sarkozy declaring that the burqa is “not welcome” in France and denouncing it as a symbol of female “subservience and debasement.”

  —New Statesman, May 31, 2010

  MARIA AMIS, JULIA Barnes, and Iona MacEwan, the greatest lady novelists of their day, were taking tea at Liberty one afternoon in the summer of 2011. They had all been close friends at Girton in the same class and had shared many adventures. As time passed their fortunes prospered and their interests changed, to such a degree, in fact, that on occasion they had “had words” and spent almost a decade out of direct communication; but now, in middle years, they were reconciled. Love’s Arrow had won the Netta Musket Award; The Lime Sofa, the Ouida Prize; and Under Alum Chine, the Barbara Cartland Memorial Prize. All regularly topped the bestseller lists.

  In their expensive bu
t unshowy summer frocks and hats, they were a vision of civilized femininity.

  The tea rooms had recently been redecorated in William Morris ‘Willow Pattern,’ and brought a refreshing lightness to their surroundings. The lady novelists enjoyed a sense of secure content which they had not known since their Cambridge days.

  The satisfaction of this cosy moment was only a little spoiled by the presence of a young man with bright shoulder-length black hair, dark blue eyes, long, regular features, and a rather athletic physique, wearing a white shirt, black car coat, and narrow, dark grey trousers, with pointed “Cuban” elastic-sided boots, who sat in the corner nearest to the door. Occasionally, he would look up from his teacakes and darjeeling and offer them a friendly, knowing wink.

  “And should we feel concern for the Irish?” Iona determinedly asked the table. She had always nursed an interest in politics.

  “Cherchez l’argent,” reflected Maria.

  Thinking this vulgar, Julia looked for the waitress.

  11. LES FAUX MONNAYEURS

  Things were happening as we motored into Ypres. When were they not? A cannonade of sorts behind the roofless ruins, perhaps outside of town; nobody seems to know or care; only an air-fight for our benefit. We crane our necks and train our glasses. Nothing whatever to be seen.