Wakefield (29 page)

By way of demonstration, the doctor produces the image of a perfectly formed human female, magnified a hundred times, with glowing numbers all over her body. Using a laser pointer, the speaker identifies each physical feature: “Breasts, artificial. Face, reconstructed. Feet, hips, buttocks, hands, surgically renovated.” He turns his attention to the brain: “Guilt feelings reduced to zero by class P drugs. Memory centers reprogrammed by class M drugs to recall only pleasurable experiences. Connectivity and sociability controlled by electroneural processors. Sex drive disconnected from the need to procreate, the result of multiple biochanges. Transcendent religious yearnings replaced by simulated ecstasy available through a wide variety of psychotropic medicines. Moral skeleton atrophied almost completely, but still showing traces of biological and even social concern. If we sever the production of these traces we completely eliminate species solidarity, leaving a creature propelled only by self-interest, that is to say,
our
interest. In that ideal condition, human units will be extremely efficient and, perhaps, worth preserving. Oh, and one more thing: the will to continue living can be engineered by the placement of
complete belief
in superstitious divinatory systems. This is already occuring without our intervention. Most people are at least partly guided by numerology and other oracular mechanics, from tarot cards to coffee-grounds readings.”

The Devil cringes. Where is the fun in that? What's the challenge if people don't have feelings anymore? Maybe he is ontologically attached to humans, but it's not a superficial attachment. He likes their murky interiors, that weird blend of baseness and divinity, that struggling conscience. The sleeping God did make humans in his own image—He looked a lot like a monkey back then—and reengineering them goes against the grain of the Original Creation, an act of cosmic impertinence that even the Demonic Order cannot challenge. It goes against some kind of Primal Directive.

The Devil leaps to his hooves and shoves the doctor aside. The female form vanishes. And then he does something unprecedented in the annals of deviltry: he takes up the Defense of God.

“We are making a grand mistake here, the greatest we have ever made, possibly eliminating our own raison d'être. Without guilt or the need for redemption, they aren't human anymore, they are
us
. If we generalize human beings to the point where they are reduced solely to their cosmic function of information gathering, such as we believe it is, we are making obsolete one of the oldest and truest truisms of our kind:
the Devil is in the details
. Without detail, we will have no place to live. Functional abstraction is not our home; the flesh is. Furthermore, what the good doctor, and many of you, think is waste, such as an excess of pleasure, is in fact the composition of our own beings. We are made of inefficiency, waste, moral quandaries, uncertainty, doubt, guilt, absurd architecture, seemingly useless art, gratuitous gestures, spontaneous contradiction, and humor. This is both what makes us and what keeps us going. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but only the most conflicted and absurd humans are capable of generating those treasures for us.”

There is a huge moment of awesome demonic silence, resembling the great silence preceding the distribution of communion. The assembled demons wait for the other shoe to drop. Lowering his voice to a whisper, the Devil drops it: “We cannot make any such decisions without the presence of God. Therefore, I have found it necessary to awaken Him.”

Pandemonium ensues. Our Devil retreats to his cave. Let them freak for a while. Anyway, some humans are perfectly aware of what the devils have in store for them, and are taking preventive measures. Some, like his pet project, Wakefield, know how to hide. Others are already fully arrived in the realm of the imagination where everything is possible, including the nonexistence of deviltry itself.

The rain returns that night, and Wakefield sails in the ship of his great soft bed. He rises after … how many hours? and pulls aside the drapes, opens the balcony doors. The sky is dark and water falls in steady sheets, wind rattling over the black hole of the agitated bay.

On television, stock analysts are weighing the impact of the president's penis. Is it good or bad for the market? It's good, they decide. The more it stays in the news, the higher the market will soar. Wakefield soaks in the bath, listening to the steady beat of the downpour, savoring his sweet aloneness.

He must have dozed off, because he wakes with a start and the smoke detector is shrieking in the ceiling and now the sprinklers begin to spray. In the street below he can hear a crowd yelling and in the air the roar of helicopters. He jumps from the tub, pulls on his pants and shirt, and runs downstairs barefooted.

The lobby looks like a field hospital: there are people lying on the floor gashed and bruised, medics running back and forth. Stinging white smoke pours through the lobby doors every time another wounded person staggers in.

“What happened?” he asks a woman dressed all in black who's holding the broken head of an Uncle Sam puppet like a baby.

“The police went crazy when the protest reached the hotel where the delegates are staying.”

“What delegates?”

“What planet are you from, man? World Business Group delegates!”

A troop of riot-geared policemen marches into the lobby. One of them speaks through a bullhorn: “All wounded anarchists will be escorted to a hospital!”

There is a chorus of protest.

“We can guarantee your safety,” the bullhorn says.

Nobody moves. After some negotiations, it is agreed that two of the most seriously hurt will go in the ambulance waiting outside. The policemen retreat, flanking the two stretchers. As soon as they're gone, everyone starts shouting at once. “They just attacked. Tear gas grenades, nightsticks. It's criminal!”

One of the medics shakes her head. “What do you expect? You people broke the windows at Maxdrip, the largest coffeehouse chain the world.”

“Precisely,” laughs a boy with a bandage over one eye. “Maxdrip is putting coffee in the water supply.”

The wide-screen TV in the lobby is blaring live reports from the street riots against the World Business Group. In addition to expected peaceful protests against global trade treaties, thousands of young anarchists have come from all over the world, surprising the unprepared city. When the outnumbered police reacted violently, groups of black-clad youth had smashed the windows at Maxdrips throughout downtown and had rushed the delegates' hotel to stop them from attending their meetings. People surges! Tear gas! Reporters fall all over themselves on the scene and some of them are on the wrong end of nightsticks. The spokesman for a peaceful French group explains its goals:

“We are here to stop the disappearance of Camembert!”

Unbelievably, Wakefield recognizes the guy. His shop, the finest fromagerie in Paris, was smashed up by protesters in 1968. When Wakefield wandered into the place a few years later, there were bars on the windows. Is this the revenge of Camembert? The radicals of 1968 are Camembert junkies now, and new young protesters are defending it as a national product against imported cheese from America, but window smashing remains the eternal constant of protest. No plateglass window anywhere is safe from the wrath of an angry mob, and with the world becoming more and more transparent as borders vanish, products flow, local cultures dissolve, air and water refuse to be owned …, the world is becoming glass! Maxdrip has outposts around the globe, producing rivers of caffeine consumed by the bourgeoisie of the planet. No wonder our nerves are shattered. Tanked on coffee, with a little Ecstasy on the side, the kids are smashing the windows of the Mother Ship! But something about this protest doesn't quite make sense to Wakefield. Is American prosperity from coffee to cheese really the source of all global misery?

On television chanting butterflies and turtles face a line of helmeted police. They're all wet; rain keeps falling and there are odd reflections from the street puddles and drops of water on the camera lens. A butterfly waves a banner with the images of a Coke can and a computer crossed out. A gang of vampires and ghouls with blood dripping from fangs and eye sockets, representing American global corporations, is singing “Singing in the Rain.” Where have these turtles, butterflies, and vampires come from? From peaceful suburbs with a TV and a computer in every room, Wakefield imagines. Lovely places where their parents eat Camembert and croissants on redwood decks. They are the offspring of the Home of the Future. Egad! The cheesemonger is on camera again. This time he's complaining about Mickey Mouse.

The number of refugees in the lobby steadily decreases. There is only one Red Cross medic left after a while, and five or six pale, bandaged kids watching the news. They come to life whenever they see themselves or their friends on the screen. The tear gas is subsiding and the TV says that the situation is under control. Four hundred protesters have been arrested. The delegates are attending their meetings. Then comes the news that five hundred local sex workers have gone on a partial strike. The reporter is standing in front of The Orchid, the city's premier strip club, interviewing the spokeswoman for the Sex Workers' Union. “The club will be closed to delegates,” she tells him, “but we will let protesters in for free.” The rain streaking the camera lens makes it look like she's speaking through tears.

“I'm trying to understand,” Wakefield tells the boy with the bandaged eye. “How did you all know to come here?”

“That's funny. How come everyone thinks we came from outer space? We connected on the Internet, man. We trained for nonviolent resistance since last summer. The multinationals are destroying the planet, but nobody seems to know that, either. It's amazing how much people don't know. Ever hear of genetically engineered corn?”

The boy has an age-appropriate sneer, and smells sweetly of sleeping bags, no showers, and youth.

“Genetically engineered corn bad?” Wakefield baits him.

The boy turns away, exasperated.

“Sorry,” Wakefield insists, “but what exactly is cultural imperialism?”

The boy turns his good eye to Wakefield. “That's when Indian kids play with Mickey Mouse instead of kachinas. Kachinas mean something to their people. The mouse means nothing.”

“He must mean something,” Wakefield says.

“Yeah, he means money. A kachina tells the story of the earth, of the people, of dances, rituals, how to make rain.… Talk to the fucking mouse and see what he tells you.”

“Well, good luck to you,” says Wakefield, walking back to the elevator, hoping the fire sprinklers haven't destroyed his room.

“Stay busy bein' born, not busy dyin', man!” the kid shouts after him.

Certainly. He has a deal to that effect.

What is culture? And what culture is being imperiled? Beyond his balcony the bay is a gray cypher, the mountains invisible. Should he feel sad because the French are unable to resist Big Mac? Since his experience with the hate-filled micronations in the Wintry City, he just can't feel sentimental about this antiprogress, this defense of the past. He enjoys (intellectually) Baroque mittel-Europa for its hint of decadence, its illuminism and Mozart, but would he defend overpriced hot chocolate and a putti-filled Viennese café against McDonald's? Not a chance. Where are you more likely to find somebody like the neo-Nazi Heider of Austria or another Milosevic? At Café Mozart or at the McDonald's down the street from it? Whatever idea of European “culture” is hiding in Heider's chocolate, they can keep it.

Still, there is something disappearing from the world, something composed of many instances of tradition and skill, or maybe not disappearing, but translating. Maybe culture, like physical matter, doesn't disappear, but is subject to infinite play, and the world is a vast workshop for making and remaking everything, including people, and the engine of this play is desire.… Enough, Wakefield warns himself, you'll end up dematerializing.

The Orchid, a so-called gentleman's club, is just a few blocks from his hotel, so Wakefield walks there, bareheaded in the rain, to see how the strippers' strike is going. A squarely built bouncer with black-dyed bangs and tattoos on her pecs guards the door.

“Delegate or protester?”

“Heads or tails?” Wakefield answers, then sees himself through her eyes. A middle-aged swaggerer with a long face, sad eyes, smooth shaven, no tattoos. More delegate than protester. “Really,” says Wakefield, “can one declare oneself so readily?” He glances behind her into the bar and sees the kid with the bandaged eye standing by a vending machine, looking uncertain. The kid looks up and Wakefield waves to him. The bouncer turns around and sees the kid waving back.

“Okay,” she says, “you know the wounded. Go on in.”

Wakefield heads straight for the boy, who is still pondering the vending machine. “It's unreal,” he says, “there isn't one thing in this fucking machine that's not manufactured by a multinational.”

“Aw, go ahead and have a Coke.”

“I guess you think that's funny.”

The bar is occupied by all kinds of people, some of them watching the strippers, others deep in conversation. The stage with its shiny brass pole is bathed in red light; a bored Black girl with small breasts is pulling on her G-string, doing her routine. The tables directly in front of the stage are empty except for two enthusiastic women, fans or friends of the stripper on stage, waving dollar bills and wolf-whistling.

The place has a blue-collar feeling, perhaps because some of the nonprotester-looking folks at the bar are heavy-duty lesbians wearing lumberjack shirts.

The one-eyed boy has settled on some kind of peanut bar and sits on the stool next to Wakefield. “Sad, don't you think?”

“What's sad?” Wakefield orders two longnecks from the bartender, who looks familiar. “Do I know you?”