PART NINE
THE END
1. CAMPUS NOVEL
HAVING GIVEN UP on the so-called real world, Buster and Charlie had taken refuge in a Midwestern Cultural Studies Department. Being just about the only authentic animal lecturer on the market that year, Charlie had been offered a generous “recruitment package,” which featured an associate-level salary, faculty housing, health benefits, a meal card, and even a researcher’s supplement for Buster. In exchange Charlie agreed to deliver two lectures per week in Animal Ideology for the department’s new Colonial Studies Program, as well as make regular appearances at all faculty benefits and public luncheons.
“Learn to read books for yourselves,” Charlie tried to tell his students every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon at one. Noisily digesting their beef-burger lunches, Charlie’s students slumped heavily against their desks, propping open their eyes with pencils and fingernails. Many were entering the REM stage of sleep even before Charlie had opened his briefcase on the podium. You’re gonna spend your life being told how to read, which is a lot worse than being told what to read, believe you me, and I guess that’s about the only knowledge I’ve got to impart to you guys this afternoon. What time is it now–one-oh-five? Well, I guess that leaves us another hour and a half to kill. Do you guys have any questions, or would you prefer to go home for a nice little nap?”
Lapses like these left Charlie’s students feeling slightly befuddled and obscure. For once in their young lives an authority figure was asking them if they wanted to do something they actually wanted to do. They were certain it was a trick question.
“Are you saying, Professor,” ventured an Honors Student in the back row, “that all systems of social or political discourse betray some Heideggerian presumption-towards-being?”
“Sure,” Charlie said, waving at the question as if it were somebody’s secondhand smoke. “If you think that’s what I mean, that’s good enough for me.”
“Or are you saying,” ventured a graduate student in the front row, who was auditing Charlie’s class in order to prepare herself for an impending M.A. oral, “that socially defined gender roles limit the polyphasic potentiality of feminine discourse?”
“You’ve taken the words right out of my mouth,” Charlie replied, smiling and happy for one of the few times in his life.
“And if I get this straight,” ventured a young, retro-attired woman in the middle row, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and a long flowery skirt, “you’re saying, like, we could just get up and leave? Just go back to our dorms and take a nap, or whatever we wanted?” She was hugging her dense, unlovely Sociology textbooks as if they might protect her.
The entire class roused into one long murmurous accord, like an ocean awakening to itself. This didn’t happen too often in a university classroom–this immediate consensual interest.
“Like I said, take a nap, read a book, watch TV, whatever.”
Charlie loved to see the dawning knowledge in all those luminous young eyes. “I mean, this whole education thing is pretty much up to you guys. And if you’re not interested in education, well. That’s okay, too.”
***
LIKE UNIVERSITIES IN the Middle Ages, higher education had turned into a state of siege. Ever since the outbreak of civil strife, tanks, gun emplacements, and barbed-wire barricades had been erected around the college perimeter, both to protect the students from the outlying community and the outlying community from the students. This was because the world outside the school was filled with insurrections, mutiny, discord, and bad faith. And because the world inside the school was filled with students who liked to get pissed out of their minds and run over mailboxes in their cars.
Every day while Charlie lectured, attended committee meetings, and held office hours, Buster amused himself no end with the pastoral perks of college life. He woke late, breakfasted on tea and croissants at a nearby dorm, walked on the grassy knolls, lazed in the sun, and watched attractive young students flick dull plastic Frisbees across the blue sky. There were butterflies this spring, blossoming cherry trees, lemonade stands, girls in halter-tops, and bright birds visiting from all over the continent. Orioles, bluejays, starlings, and variously-pheronomed finches. But no matter where they hailed from, they all sang the same sad song, and more sweetly than Buster ever imagined possible before.
They’re coming to get Buster and Charlie
Tra-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-laaah.
They’re coming to get Buster and Charlie
Tra-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-laaah.
These days the story of Buster and Charlie’s impending assassination featured prominently on evening news programs, the front pages of national tabloids, and the wide spreading animal grapevine, but Buster didn’t care anymore. There was no use crying over spilt milk–life with Whistling Pete had taught him that. And there were some things you simply couldn’t change–life with Charlie had taught him that.
“Hey, like, wow, you’re that penguin, aren’t you?”
Occasionally Buster was approached by gangly, celebrity-struck students. They folded long skeins of hair out of their eyes and offered Buster generous helpings of beer, cigarettes, and marijuana.
“I’m sorry?” Buster replied modestly. “Can I help you?”
“You are, aren’t you? And you travel around with that black bird, what’s his name, he’s on TV all the time. Charlie, that’s right. Charlie the Crow.”
Buster looked off across the ivy-entangled buildings, the defunct water fountains and underfrequented bookstores. He didn’t see any remote ivory towers anywhere, but that didn’t mean he would ever stop looking.
“And like you’re in a whole pile of trouble or something, right? The animals hate you, and the humans hate you, and you’re like totally unpopular, like Madonna or somebody. Oh wow. I can’t believe this. Hey, everybody! Look here! I just met Buster the Penguin! And he’s not any more special than you or me!”
2. FIFTEEN MINUTES
CAPT. JACK HOLLISTER and Sgt. Yuri Rudityev were doing forty-three miles an hour on the interstate through Pennsylvania, the Plains States, and South Dakota, making love all the way like hormone-struck adolescents. Their ride was an Abrams M1 Main Battle Tank, which, much like Hollister himself, was slow on the straightaways, but could take any curve with the best of them. It was equipped with a 105mm. M68A1 cannon, one .50 and two 7.62mm. MGs, air safety bags, and power brakes. The steering console was on automatic pilot. Jackson Browne was playing softly on the dashboard stereo.
“You’re a really special individual, Yuri,” Captain Hollister whispered under his breath, zipping up his green fatigue army pants and buckling his gray cloth belt. He was sucking on a breath mint and feeling the deep diesel hum of the Lycoming AGT-1500 gas turbine in his bones. “And I mean that sincerely, Yuri. Not only are you unafraid of compassion–you’re unafraid to be a man. And that’s a really unusual combination to discover in any guy these days, especially a Russian-born lifer like yourself. You’re too good for women, Yuri. You deserve a love more permanent and enduring than all that messy, yucky bumping in the night, all those expensive meals and overpriced greeting cards. In fact, now that I think about it, Yuri, you’re probably too good for me. ”
It was impossible to tell how much Yuri understood what was happening between him and his commanding officer. Immured within his carapace of bandages, all Yuri did anymore was squirm continuously and utter the same muffled epithets.
***
THOUGH THEIR MISSION lacked all the official sanctions of a military maneuver, it still qualified as what was known in NSC circles as an “unconfirmed covert op.” In the last few days, somebody’s commanding officer had let it be known to somebody else’s commanding officer that if a couple of unnamed former intelligence types were to, you know, “borrow” a particular piece of military hardware for the weekend, and that, say, this aforementioned military equipment were to be involved in the subsequent annihilation of two avian-revolutionary types practicing PC anti-Americanism at some bohunk land-grant liberal arts university, well. Let’s just say there’d be no questions asked. And if those former intelligence types were to vanish into the woodwork immediately afterward? Well, it was no skin off the Company’s nose, was it?
“We’re projecting a target approach of fourteen hundred hours Midwestern time, Yuri.” Now that Hollister was back in the driver’s seat he was all business, snapping toggles, punching digital displays, and adjusting the dashboard stereo’s balance and tone controls. On the cassette deck Jackson Browne was letting everybody know that, having endured the love of a bad woman, he was still alive.
Hollister couldn’t have sung the lyrics any better himself.
“Those damn birds have hid out in the one place they thought we’d never find them,” Hollister declared. “A place with books in it, Yuri. A dream world completely cut off from reality and populated by nothing but long-haired hippie girls who’ll roll in the hay with practically anybody. Big Negro quarterbacks and pituitary-freak basketball players, stealing educational opportunities from strong, equally deprived white boys like ourselves. Female sportscasters, Asian chemistry teachers, fluoridated water. An entire town filled with young people who want to do nothing but lie in the sun all day, drink beer, and have sexual relations with their professors. It makes my heart sick, Yuri. It makes me want to cough up my own bile. In a world falling apart even as we speak, all these Gen-Xer’s want to do is masturbate while watching rock videos on MTV.”
Hollister couldn’t stop clenching and unclenching the 50mm. firing trigger as they climbed over the smooth amber hills into Wyoming.
This was the real world, Hollister thought to himself. This rolling piece of thunderous malevolent metal.
Then, out of the thrumming darkness, Captain Hollister heard them coming. Skimming across the surface of the spinning Animal Planet like angels propelled by wings of song.
The dashboard radar screen lit up with a blizzard of blips.
“I think we’ve got company,” Hollister sang softly, lighting up a Cigarillo.
At which point the fleet of news-watch helicopters came swooping down for a live-on-the-scene exclusive.
***
ACROSS THE UNIVERSITY, public and private televisions were tuned to the same news channel.
“Is this war, Captain?”
“No. It’s a surgical strike.”
“Has the World Court approved your actions?”
“Screw the World Court. Don’t you support our boys in uniform?”
“Have Charlie and his penguin friend really done anything so serious that they deserve being blown away with a howitzer?”
“Are you calling me un-American? Are you questioning my integrity as a military representative of this mighty nation? I’ve fought animal anarchists all my life, lady–not like you liberal media queens with your wine and cheese soirees. Not like those earring-wearing, twenty-something bureaucrats in Congress! I’ve been decorated more than a dozen times, and so has my... well, my friend Yuri, here. We’re cops of the world and you can’t blame us for doing our job, can you? It’s an ugly job and someone’s got to do it.”
Charlie and Buster had come out to a high, grassy knoll on the edge of campus. They could hear televised voices resounding in the air like a ghost of history.
“Oh well,” Buster said. “I never finished my memoirs, Charlie, and now I never will. I’ll never fly in a hot-air balloon. I’ll never sleep with a virgin. I’ll never get that cosmetic surgery, you know, to get rid of this double chin I’m so self-conscious about? I’ll never visit California, I’ll never learn to speak French, I’ll never have kids, and I’ll never see my wife Sandy again. But that’s okay, Charlie. In order to see the world, you have to pay a price. And considering how far I’ve been and how much I’ve seen, I consider the cost to have been worth it.”
They could hear the escorting fleet of journalists heading their way before they could see the actual military hardware. The journalists were riding in big, overcrowded yellow buses, drinking beers and watching sporting events on battery-operated televisions. Boom mikes extended weirdly from racing jeeps and minivans like robotic appendages. The Abrams tank was puny by comparison to all the hoopla surrounding it. Bathed by a bank of 100,000-watt mobile klieg lights, it looked flat and dull colored, like a tatty carpet on wheels.
Charlie was ready. Even more ready than Buster.
“Looks like we’ve got company,” Charlie said.
Then he sat down beside Buster on the green grass and waited for something to happen.
***
AT THE SAME time Hollister, Yuri, and the news media were approaching from the west, Rick the Husky was taking a rocky shortcut up a disused fire road and approaching even more rapidly from the southeast.
“Muk Luk tired. Muk Luk don’t want to get up. Muk Luk want to sleep.”
Muk Luk was curled up in the backseat with her whiskey. Wanda was shaking her by the shoulders and splashing tepid water on her face from a bottle of Evian.
“You’ve got to get up, Muk Luk. You’ve got to do what you do best. Or there won’t be any Buster around to feel mournful about. Just think of it, Muk Luk. How terribly you’d miss him then. ”
Underneath her mound of parkas, Muk Luk had come unhinged from all her clothing except the long underwear. Her skin was denuded of hair and muscle tone from weeks of self-neglect, making her look as spindly as an unshelled sea tortoise. Her limbs rolled loosely when Wanda shook them.
On the dashboard radio, the President’s motorcade was being covered live on CSPAN-FM: “Tell the penguins we want to negotiate!” the President’s voice barked at his crowd of advisors, “and that this isn’t an ultimatum. And while we’re all, how do I put this, quote, deeply saddened by the loss of one of our nation’s finest military commanders, unquote, we remain willing to provide long-term international economic incentives and U.N. Charter resolutions to protect the sovereignty of their silly little island–oh, dammit, Max. Promise them anything–just make it clear we want to send weapons inspectors into the Penguin Island Nuclear Reactor and shut the damn thing off–”
Rick clicked off the radio and took the summit in third gear. The old Pontiac rocked wildly, diving through heavy brambles and extinguished campfires. The engine cut out for a moment–Rick jumped the clutch–and sparks reignited as momentum took hold.
Suddenly the entire campus appeared in full view below them like an outdoor stage set, all even green lawns and tidy brick buildings.
“Come on, Muk Luk!” Rick shouted. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself and get it together! You’re a goddamn Eskimo and they’re no match for you! So pull up your knickers and let’s get cooking! We’re running out of time, Muk Luk! And so are Charlie and Buster!”
3. MEDIA EVENT
FIRST-RUN COMMERCIAL revenue alone was predicted in the high jillions, and the event was already being broadcast live on three-hundred-plus cable and world-network channels simultaneously. This was the sort of all-out mainstream product approval rating that marketing people once dreamed about as a theoretical absolute. Total Entertainment Value. Everybody had studied the idea back in business school, but nobody had believed it actually possible before.
“It’s bigger than Foreman vs. Ali!” exclaimed the various development directors of Worldco Books, Worldco Films, and Worldco Home Entertainment, venturing hesitantly outside the lead-shielded doors of their corporate bomb shelters and blinking at the noon sun. “It’s bigger than Woodstock Four! It’s bigger than Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King! It’s bigger than Martians landing from outer space! It’s bigger than the goddamn end of the world!”
A stillness had descended even over the riot-dazed streets of America’s cities, where a few random animals continued wandering listlessly about.
“So what do you think, Charlie?” The announcer was shoving his microphone into Charlie’s face like a statement of fact. “Now that you’re pretty much finished, have you got any last words for everybody at home?”
“Not really,” Charlie replied, chewing laconically on a long dandelion stern. “I figure that everybody watching at home’s a grown adult, regardless of species or gender. Let them figure it out for themselves.”
“Are you saying you’ve renounced political action, Charlie?”
“I haven’t renounced it. I’m just not wasting it on you guys.”
“Isn’t that a little unfair, Charlie? After all, we here at the media don’t invent the news. We just report it.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “Yeah, sure.”
***
ALL OVER THE Animal Planet, the slumbering beast was starting to rouse.
“Hello, Bunny? This is Jack, Bart’s replacement over at Worldco Books and Entertainment–”
“–Hello. This is Bunny Fairchild, and I’m either in a meeting, or else conducting a high six-figure paperback auction right now–”
“Bunny? Hey, I said it’s Jack from Product Development. Are you screening this call?”
“–But if you’ll leave your name and number at the sound of the beep–”
“I left my goddamn name and number twenty minutes ago. Are you avoiding me, Bunny? Our Publisher warned me about this. He said you might try avoiding me–”
“–and I’ll get right back to you. And by the way, if you’re calling about the new Sandy the Penguin Advertising promotion I’ve been discussing with Sears and the May Co., I’m afraid, as they say, that that deal’s already done. Better luck next time. And bye.”
Jack slammed down the phone and spun around in his leather upholstered swivel chair. Jack’s immediate predecessor, Bart, had been slow to respond to a crisis, and look what happened to him.
Jack couldn’t help gazing around philosophically at Bart’s old office, which had been reduced by the recent “incident” to a pocket catastrophe. Splintered furniture was strewn haphazardly among broken-spined Sales Reports, torn hardback best-sellers, and petrified punctuations of animal dung.
Jack picked up the phone and punched another number.
“Hello? Who the fuck is this?”
“Hello, Stan. This is Jack, Bart’s replacement over at Worldco.”
“Oh yeah? Well fuck you, Jack! And fuck all you bastards over at Worldco!”
“Look, Stan, no hard feelings, okay?”
“Fuck you and your no-hard-feelings, Jack! You know where I am right now? I’m hiding under the bed with my fucking wife and I haven’t bathed or eaten in three days! My apartment looks like fucking Berlin, Jack. And I blame it all on you bastards at Worldco!”
“You’re a businessman, Stan.”
“And you’re an asshole, Jack!”
“And we’re not enemies, Stan. We both believe in the same things, don’t we? The right to bear firearms, the all-knowing supremacy of a God who loves us, and the free-enterprise system.”
“I believe you’re a fucking shithead, Jack. And so’s that fucking cunt of yours, Bunny Fairchild.”
“I only want to say six words to you, Stan.”
“My cleaning lady left me for those Animal Anarchists, and I haven’t been laid in three weeks!”
“And those six words are these.”
Jack spoke evenly, one word at a time. He kept reminding himself that Stan Garfield was a consummate professional who knew a good business proposition when he heard one.
“Yeah?” Stan ventured slowly.
It wasn’t a response. Like a zero in the sales figures, it acted more like a place holder.
“We,” Jack said.
“Okay so far.”
“Want.”
“I’m listening, shit brain.”
“To.”
“Come to Papa, Jack.”
“Make.”
“I’m still listening.”
“A.”
“And this better be good.”
“Deal.”
Another long, significant pause. A place holder big enough to pay both their salaries forever.
“You want to make a deal, huh?”
“That’s right, Stan.”
Static hissed on the line. Somewhere out in cyberspace, the entire world was listening.
“Oh yeah?” Stan replied. “Then you boys better stop pissing me around.”
***
FAXES, CELLULAR PHONES, E-mail, express couriers, and conference calls were all soon getting in on the act, making the entire Animal Planet hum with heat and information. Things and ideas began to make themselves known. Identities emerged from the corporate rubble. Brand names and copyright insignia clambered out of ruined cities and subway systems. Somewhere deep within the near-dormant ember of the world-business network, an entire system of meaning was beginning to speak again. And the only word it wanted to speak anymore was itself.
“–I don’t care if you tried to reach Bunny Fairchild–I’m saying try again! And who’s that homosexual over at Twentieth Century Fox? Get him on the line too–”
“–I want a conversion clause in this contract to match the conversion clause I should’ve gotten in the last contract–”
“–I’ve got Stan Garfield on line one, sir–”
“–Oh yeah? Well fuck Stan Garfield!”
“–Oh yeah? Well fuck you too, you cheap motherfucker–”
“–We’ve got an audience rating of ninety-nine point eight percent, and that’s only because the other point-two percent are dying, asleep, or going to the bathroom–”
“–Slow down the cocksuckers in the armored vehicle–close up on the Eskimo chick–and I wanta see more cleavage on the ape babe, and I mean pronto–”
“–I want a line of doll merchandise on the shelves by this afternoon and I don’t care if the stores have just been looted, we’re talking about your job lady–”
“–I’m saying it again, I want to speak with Bunny eff, ay, eye, are, sea, aitch, eye, ell, dee–”
“–Jack O’Malley on five, Mr. Garfield–”
“–Hello, Stan? There’s a glitch in production and we won’t have our merchandise in the stores until tomorrow morning–”
“–Oh yeah?–”
“–But we’re still trying to reach Bunny over at CMA–they say she’s out of town on business, Stan. What’s that bitch up to, anyway–”
“Well, fuck your glitch in production, Jack! Did you hear me! Just fuck fuck fuck fuck you!”
***
IT WASN’T EVEN their denouement anymore. Their lives belonged to somebody else now.
Sprawled on the green grass, Buster and Charlie watched the world of culture mobilize itself around them like an army of disinformation. Humans were aiming video cameras and boom mikes at them from every horizon. They didn’t want to miss a move either Charlie or Buster made, yet they didn’t seem to care a whit about what might happen to them.
“Human beings have manufactured a lot of really amazing things in this world,” Charlie conceded, chewing his soggy dandelion and enjoying the warm sun on his back. “But the one thing they sure do a lousy job with is space. Just look, Buster. They pour concrete over everything. They park a million smog-belching cars in every available lot. They plant down these hard, really uncomfortable bus benches that nobody but a homeless person would ever want to sit on, and then what do they do? They chase those homeless people off, as if there’s a queue of reputable people right behind them just dying to make hemorrhoids for themselves. Human beings should be left to do what they do best: manufacturing cookies, soda water, really bad Sylvester Stallone movies, and Levi’s. But when it comes to space, man, leave it to old Mother Nature. I know there’s the goddamn bugs and everything, but at least the green grass has a little texture to it. At least I can lie out on the soft ground without blistering my sore butt.”
Buster had never seen so many people spending so much money in order to understand so little. Within just the past few hours, human beings had flooded the campus with portable gift shops and fast-food restaurants. They had begun selling commemorative T-shirts and puzzling plastic doodads out of burlap tents and the backs of old pickup trucks. It was impossible to doubt the incredible industry of human beings, Buster thought. But what the hell they were on about–that was a different story.
“We’re not even animals to them, are we, Charlie?” Buster was watching multiplied images of himself being played on ballpark-sized video monitors mounted over the main road. “We’re not even flesh and blood. It’s like they’ve sucked all the meaning out of us, isn’t it, Charlie? They’ve sucked out every inch of animal flesh until all they’ve got left to show for us is our skin and our beaks.”
Charlie thought about this for a moment. Then he reached over and gave his friend’s wing a firm squeeze.
“Human beings are a trip, aren’t they, old pal? I mean, how could a bunch of hairless bipeds be so smart and act so stupid?”
It was the first time Charlie, in all their many months together, had ever ventured to touch him. Buster liked this moment. He wanted it to last.
“That’s a good question, Charlie,” Buster replied.
But it wasn’t a question anybody in the world seemed poised to answer.
***
RICK THE HUSKY didn’t like the look of things one bit.
“We seem to be driving in the only direction we’re allowed to go,” he told his friends. “And I don’t know about you guys. But that idea makes me really nervous.”
Outside their car, the fleets of news vans and crowd-control emergency vehicles had shut down all roads leading on or off campus. Everywhere Rick drove, he was directed down crowded thoroughfares by men and women wielding orange Day-Glo batons.
“Make way for the Eskimo!” shouted highway patrolmen through their high-tech car megaphones. “Make way for the Eskimo!”
Wanda was entranced by the lights and glamor.
“You know, this could be my big break,” she told herself, plucking her eyebrows in her flicking gold compact. “I mean, bigger careers have amounted from less.”
“Grrr,” Rick muttered deep in his throat. The hair on the back of his neck began to bristle.
As they were ushered through a gauntlet of cameras and audio-processing equipment, a crowd of jogging news reporters swept around their car like a blizzard of locusts, gobbling up every bit of stray grain in sight.
“Has Muk Luk kept up with her training?”
“Could this be regarded as a sort of ‘grudge-match’?”
“Where do you fit into all this, Rick? Were you ever abused as a pup? Have you ever been abducted by a UFO?”
“Wanda, Wanda, can we have a word with you, Wanda?”
“Yes!” Wanda shouted. She was trying to roll down her window. She was trying to unlatch her door. “I’ll answer any question! I’ll help you as much as I can!”
But Rick was in control of the dashboard electrical panel. He rolled up all the windows with a squeaky whine of rubber and glass. Then he activated all the interior locks with a solid, unified click.
“Rick! Stop! Open the windows! Please let me talk!”
Rick regarded Wanda’s look of amazement in the rearview mirror. She wasn’t herself anymore. She was just that awful animal presence the cameras wanted her to be.
“Grrr,” Rick told her. “Stop embarrassing yourself. We’ve got a job to do.”
Released from Wanda’s frantic arms, Muk Luk moaned and slid to the floor with a thump.
“No point in nothing,” she muttered. “No place worth going, no way, no how. Muk Luk just want to go home to her igloo-tract housing and never come back. Living so close to the equator makes human beings totally nuts.”
***
THE CULTURE INDUSTRY was generating its own momentum now, and doing what it did best. Processing time and selling it off in bright tiny packages. Reinventing the same old ideas that had been invented a zillion times before. Duplicating and reduplicating every image that had ever been manufactured and storing them all on CD, microchip, and laser disc.
“The tank’s on the green–”
“We’ve got closeups of the crowd–”
“We’ve got closeups of the tank–”
“We’ve got closeups of Charlie and the penguin–hey, could somebody make them look alive out there! They’re sitting on their butts getting a bloody suntan–”
“We’ve got a closeup of the ape lady’s cleavage, of Rick at the wheel smoking a charred cigarette butt, of Muk Luk swooning loosely in Wanda’s voluptuous arms–”
“What a barker–”
“What knobs–”
“Who’s that on line two?”
“Who the fuck you think it is on line two, you fucking four-eyed collegiate piece of mandrill shit! I want action! I want passion! I want lesbo-love between the ape lady and the Eskimo! I want–I want–I want–ugh–ugh–ugh–ugh–”
“Is that interference?”
“I think it’s a mild coronary–”
“–ugh–ugh–I want–I want–that’s better, just a glass of water and get Bunny Fairchild on the line rightthisgoddamnminute–I want a big fucking finale! You hear me! I want that tank to blast them into fucking smithereens! I want planes exploding! I want buildings collapsing! I want you to shove fireworks up everybody’s asshole and blast them to the fucking moon–”
“Camera five on Car two. Camera four on Car one. We’ve got surface movement on the artillery. We’ve got a reaction shot from the penguin. But somebody, somebody somewhere, could somebody make those guys look alive out there!”
“And cut to the President on six–”
“–despite the terrible inequalities existing between animals and humans, that ours is a nation of compromise, and not of division. A people of magnitude, and not of bias. A culture of reconciliation, and not of–that’s right, recycle some old LBJ speeches or something. And as for our meeting with Mister Big, just say we got on well, and that I described him as a, quote, noble, God-fearing, practically Baptist-type of individual, unquote. But mainly that the resumption of normal Manhattan business hours is being discussed as a quote real possibility unquote and on all other inquiries stamp a no comment on that, okay? Over.”
“And cut to Copter two. We’ve got the tank on the green. We’ve got the tank rolling over student blankets and Styrofoam beer containers. We’ve got a live eyewitness account on Camera four. And cut to Four.”
“Things have gotten pretty hairy in the last few minutes of the competition, wouldn’t you say, sir? And I hope you’re not offended by the term ‘hairy.’”
“Not at all, Mr. Newscaster, I have taken no offense whatsoever. Is that camera live? Am I actually on TV?”
“You sure are, sir, and do you mind if I ask? What’s your name and where are you from?”
“My name is Roy the Gorilla and I hale from, well, Africa originally, but these days I live on a pretty big corporate farm down in a friendly state I like to call Georgia.”
“Up for the holidays, are you?”
“I’m here with the Mr. Big bus tour, which has been a very educational experience, and has introduced me to many lovely females of many different species and nationalities–”
“And your thoughts on the current action out there on the field?”
“Well, I like Charlie okay, and I think the penguin is really cute. But I like the army a lot, too, and I know they must work really hard at their jobs. So I guess I kind of hope Charlie doesn’t get killed. But at the same time, I want the army people to be successful, too, since they’re probably very hardworking and all–”
“And cut to the tank on the green–”
“And cut to Charlie and Buster–”
“And cut to the Eskimo babe–”
***
“NOW, MUK LUK! Now!”
They had propped her against the hood of the Rambler, the spear cocked in her throwing hand like the Liberty Torch. They were being filmed from every conceivable angle by media representatives of the world’s most-favored-nations trading partners.
It was so weird, Rick thought. Like my life’s already a rerun even before it’s happened.
At which point Muk Luk’s eyes rolled back into her feverish head and she swooned, sliding down the surface of the car and collapsing on the green, overilluminated grass.
Wanda picked up Muk Luk’s battered spear and showed it to Rick with a weird look of dissociation, as if it were a size 20 ball gown, when everybody in the world knew Wanda was a size 18.
“Jesus, Rick. What are we supposed to do with this?”
***
THE MEDIA WERE impartial. This meant that nobody who worked for them ever got in the way of increasing their own revenue.
“Cut to the tank–”
“Cut to the weapon arm being raised–”
“Cut to Charlie–”
“Cut to the penguin–”
“Cut to the blue sky–”
“Cut to the green grass–”
All over the world, humans and animals alike were tuned to the same already-scheduled event-about-to-happen.
***
“WELL, OLD BUDDY, I guess this is it.”
“I guess so, Charlie. It just seems to be taking so long.”
Charlie gave Buster that same cynical look one more time.
“You just don’t get it, do you, buddy?”
“What’s that, Charlie?”
“They’re making room for more commercials.”
And then the tank was on the green. And Charlie and Buster were gazing dully into the eye of the humming weapon. And the sky was filled with helicopters.
And then it happened.
It happened.
And then it happened.
After billions spent on cameras, guns, road food, cheap dates, minority sports casters, digital sound, CD-ROM, simulcast stereo, local research, location coordinators, communication degrees, film school, corporate lawsuits, and bad love. The one thing everybody feared and nobody could prevent.
Nothing.
Nothing happened.
***
“SOMEONE CUE THE tank–”
“We’ve cued the tank–”
“What are those bozos doing in there?”
“Someone open the hatch. We’re taking down the cameras. We’ve got the hatch door open. We’re into the tank. We see human movement. We see two men rolling around on the floor, oh Christ–Cut–Cut–Cut, I said–Cut!—For chrissakes, CUT!”
The moment of fulfillment had been too much for Jack Hollister and his adjutant, Yuri Rudityev, to bear.
When the cameras found them they were rolling around on the floor of the Abrams, making love like there was no tomorrow.
4. THE BIG FINALE
“MOST OF THOSE animals down there aren’t any different from you or me,” Bunny Fairchild told her guest in the helicopter’s rear cabin, gazing out at the media-wrought multitudes, the hastily erected shopping kiosks, the steaming barbecue grills, and the trailer-bound recreational boats. “They want too much from life, and all they’re given is too little. They wake up, go to school, get a job, have babies, take a series of terrible holidays, suffer pointlessly, and, just as pointlessly, die. They attend school holiday productions, yard sales, political rallies, sporting events, RV and boat shows. They may not know what they want, but they know they want something beautiful. They look and look, but when they get tired of looking, they come to us. And we try to help.”
Down below, the Presidential motorcade had drawn a bold dark arrow straight to the heart of the assembled news cameras and technical support crews. The President was already delivering one of his most heartfelt orations from the summit of a firm wooden podium. The human and animal onlookers listened distractedly, waiting for something important to happen.
“We offer them all the truth and justice we’ve given up finding for ourselves,” Bunny said softly. As the helicopter began to bank, swoop, and descend, she felt a lightness in her chest, a sense of freedom and possibility. “I’m not saying we’re better than anybody else, exactly. But we give those poor dumb animals something to believe in besides themselves. And that’s all they’re looking for, you know. Something besides themselves.”
The President was saying over the loudspeakers, “Let us not divide ourselves into warring factions, but work together, nobly and gloriously, in manufacturing new products, and promoting them proudly in the international shopping mall of our new global economy–”
The crowds, though, were waiting for something else, and when the helicopter came down onto the tarmac, their expectations began to rouse. They had come here to see justice, but all they found was another high-ranking government official, and another fleet of eyewitness-news minicams.
But now, finally, that someone else was coming. Someone they hadn’t been expecting until now.
“It’s time,” Bunny told her guest as they set down on the field with a little bump. The rotors stirred up candy wrappers and discarded program booklets like secondhand confetti. “We won’t keep them waiting any longer. We’re already here.”
Then she escorted Mr. Big out across the windy tarmac to address the President and his multitudes.
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