Soon a laid-back group of people assembled on the most spacious of the numerous irregularly-shaped terraces. These terraces were scattered about as if they had been designed by Escher. The company was congenial and cosmopolitan: Mexican artists and intellectuals, foreigners of various stripes, including American Outsiders, mostly older ones. Playful children, outnumbering the adults, scampered over the various terraces. Food and drink were in abundance, and elaborate hookahs stoked with opium and hashish were at hand. The conversation was witty, but charged with an anti-American theme (to which I could not dissent, but which left me uneasy). The main subject of discussion was the launch, within the hour, of the enormous U.S. Space Ship, driven by the Extraordinary Propulsion Device (EPD).
The American airwaves, freely accessible – almost unavoidable – in Mexico as elsewhere, had been filled for weeks with much triumphal crowing about this technological prodigy: a 2000-person crew in an enormous ship would be lifted out of the atmosphere by a safe, secret propulsion device (the EPD) that would revolutionize travel and finalize the lack of dependence of the US on the rest of the planet.
The crowd gave clever vent to frustrated resentment, making bright but pointed jokes about the likelihood of a crash. I felt ill at ease; sharing the frustration but feeling torn in my loyalties. I remained silent, and entertained myself by playing with a little Mexican boy, some six or eight years old, who had attached himself to me, clambering over and kissing me.
What followed is seared forever into my memory. The spaceship appeared overhead, emerging on its southward trajectory from behind the steep blood-red sandstone top of the Apartment/Temple. It was enormous, even at its great height, but I instantly saw what the sullen crowd had not yet recognized: that its trajectory was headed downward and not up. It was going to crash.
It took approximately ten seconds for the ship to cross the sky, and within that time it became clear to everyone what I had seen at once: it was going to crash. The crowd went from snide remarks about US imperialism to stunned, disbelieving silence, and only a second or two before it disappeared behind the horizon was someone – perhaps me, who knows? – able to utter a strangled, "My God, it's going to crash."
Within a few seconds of its passing beyond the horizon, the Ship's demise revealed itself with a clarity that I'll never forget: a blazing funnel topped by a mushroom cloud appeared.
The bastards. The fucking bastards. They'd lied. There was no "Extraordinary Propulsion Device." They'd taken the risk of putting a Nuclear Reactor on the space ship, and now it had just exploded, some 30 miles or so to the south.
For the first couple of seconds I just stood there staring, with an uncanny mixture of detachment, horror and rage. Then, as I watched a kind of weird wavering in the air in front of the mushroom cloud, it occurred to me that that must be the heat wave, and this would strike us within 10 or 20 seconds, as we stood there on the balcony. We were all about to be roasted alive.
Then horror was replaced by resolution: we were standing on the balcony of a meters-thick piece of architecture that could withstand even this fiery blast. Immediately I crushed the Mexican boy to my chest with folded arms and plunged into the building, screaming back over my shoulder at the top of my lungs, "GET INSIDE!! GET INSIDE!!"
Some of the crowd began to do so; others were rooted to the sight of the doom rushing toward us. I didn't wait to see; at all costs I would save myself and the boy, though I kept shouting "GET INSIDE!" Indeed, the structure was of an incredible thickness, but one of the modifications to its basic Aztec Temple design was the addition of glass windows to let in light. As I charged through the living room it was instantly clear that these would be blown out by the heat wave, despite facing east rather than south. But attached to the back room there was an empty storage space with no windows, walls as thick as the Pyramids of Cheops, and a heavy, safe, vault-like door. Still screaming "GET INSIDE!!," and feeling the first hints of the nearly-arrived heat wave, I dove into the storage room, hand on the door.
"GET INSIDE!!" "Three seconds," I thought to myself, the terrified boy clinging to me, "they've got three fucking seconds to get in here, then I slam this fucking door."
Damn. Again. That same fucking dream again. For 10 years, ever since the night after central Boston had been rendered uninhabitable for the next 100,000 years, he’d been having that dream – at least two, three times a week. Now, sitting up in a cot, sweating in a tent, where was he, why wasn’t he in bed in… oh, yes, “Combat Tours Unlimited.”
All those years of wishing that he’d taken another path, that he’d done something crazy instead of pursuing security – he’d succeeded wildly, there could be no denying that, his natural talents and the smart choice of moving, after Boston, from environment-friendly energy-efficiency issues to security-related software design had seen to that. A beautiful wife with whom he interfaced well, a comfortable, blast-resistant house in the Atlanta/Birmingham suburbs, all the money in the bank that he could possibly want… still… hadn’t life been better when he’d been riding mopeds around South East Asia with a backpack and a copy of the Lonely Planet Guide?
Not, of course, that there had been a copy of the Lonely Planet Guide issued in the last six years. It had been all too horrible; the fatwa issued after the mildest imaginable criticism of the new Lebanese Hezbollah government, in the “History” section of the last Middle East Lonely Planet Guide, had led to a global vendetta. All the protestations to the effect that “we’re really on your side; really, we’re down with opposition to American Imperialism,” had failed to prevent the car-bombing of Lonely Planet’s Head Office in Victoria, Australia. And that had only been the beginning; every last contributor to a Lonely Planet Guide was remorselessly hunted down and slaughtered, often in the most disgusting fashion imaginable, dying as they shrieked, “can’t we talk about this?”
Well, with the way the world had turned out, what other path could he have taken? How could he have possibly pursued his dreams of social justice, sustainable communities, and fuel-efficiency in a world gone mad? Of course he attended the secret meetings against Dick Cheney’s continued residence, under National Security Order 683, in the White House. Still, to take a public stand, well, that would jeopardize everything that he’d worked so hard for…
But the desire to break loose, to do something different, something crazy, had been building in him over the last few years. From his extensive connections in the every-burgeoning security industry he had heard tales about “Combat Tours Unlimited.” At first he’d been nauseated, but nonetheless his ears pricked up at each new rumor. Eventually he had to admit to himself that he was fascinated.
And now here he was, camped out in a stinking jungle in the south of Thailand, not far from the Islamic Republic of Patanni. He and two other clients, and that weird fucker Elihu for a guide. If that really was his name; all three of the clients had been assigned aliases well before they’d arrived in Bangkok eight days back. He was “Eliphaz,” the woman was called “Bildad,” and the creepy old guy with the silly looking hat and black sunglasses was known as “Zophar.”
Zophar said almost nothing, never took off either the sun glasses or the hat, and appeared to be older than the Mississippi. Despite his enormous and incessant intake of cheap whiskey, he never really gave sign of being drunk, other than perhaps that stupid leering grin of his.
Bildad said little more than Zophar, and when she did speak it was in precise, clipped English, only slightly accented but clearly not her native tongue. A casual inquiry into her ancestry earned him a glare that would have cut through tungsten. He had avoided contact with her after that, but at times he caught her staring, as if she were undecided as to whether to copulate with him or thrash him with a crowbar. He suspected that the outcome of either proceeding would be identical. While of average build,