Excerpt from Novel in Progess: "Sons and Daughters" Part I: The Lion and the RAM
Offline
In response to Aqua_seal's request for an excerpt from the extremely long novel about a near-future in which America succumbs to a Christo-Fascist government opposed by... well, people like.
For previous reference, see the discussion at:
http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/14133
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“I learned in Korea that I would never again, in my life, abdicate to somebody else, my right, and my ability, to decide who the enemy is.”
-Utah Philips
Red Scarf
Battle of Ankara, Franco-Turkic War:
March 31, 2018.
Sometimes you hear the bullet.
The one that kills you. It was an old saying. She wasn’t sure from where, but the French soldiers knew it, and they said they’d heard it on M*A*S*H.
Amazing.
She didn’t know if it was true, if you could hear the bullet or not. She’d never had the honor of finding out.
Once upon a time she’d been a little girl who loved Darwin, Punk Rock, and Pink Hair.
She grew up.
Five years ago, when the war had started, she’d been trained as a psychologist. She’d been made a strategist in the Parisian-American Secular Militia, though she’d lived there for only four years, mostly as a grad student. Her official title was Information Officer. Her rank was equivalent to a captain in the French Army.
Information Officer. Like so many other things in war, it was a violent euphemism. She was an interrogator. Lately, she’d been on the front lines, upgraded to combat status. After torture- up close and personal- what was it to her to point and shoot at nameless faces?
Absolutely nothing.
France had been at war for five years. The war, initially a conflict over what Western Europe saw as Turkey’s undue influence in the European Union, had metamorphosed into something grander: a conflict between the secular values of Western Europe and the Islamic Fundamentalism so prominent in Turkey and her allies.
As France and Turkey were both nuclear powers, the situation had not been good from the start. The nuclear exchange was brief. Two missiles, one from each side; Paris and Istanbul were gone, just like that. A brilliant flash and a mushroom cloud. Ankara, too, had been shelled in recent months to ruins and irradiated by dirty bombs in the long fighting that followed.
She, Lillian Beatrice Keighn, wept for Ankara as she wept for Paris: a beautiful city reduced to rubble. It was said that one could see the face of the devil in a mushroom cloud, but Lillian didn’t believe in that nonsense. She hadn’t bought into it before the war, when she was a student, and she didn’t believe it now. Not after what she had seen… and all she had done.
At the age of 32, she was a killer. She had killed 13 men at the Battle of Izmir, 21 at Adana. She stopped counting after that, except for the faces she saw up close, the faces of the men and women she had frightened to death behind the locked doors of the Militia’s interrogation rooms. She remembered a boy, he couldn’t have been more than 18 when he’d put on the Turkish uniform and joined the Jihad.
In France it was called the Jihad. America called it The War. The conflicts had become so inextricably linked that there was no distinction made anymore, in the U.S., between the battlefields of Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq, or any of the other places whose names its politicians couldn’t pronounce.
As she wept for Ankara and Paris, Lillian wept for Philadelphia. For New York. For Washington. She wept because she was afraid of what she would find when she returned. News from the States was scarce, but what she knew frightened her deeply: a new political party, the Moral Patriots, were threatening to supplant the old GOP. They were doing it though a politicized brand of religion. She did not have to be told who these Moral Patriots were. She’d known them before, under a different name: Dominionists[1]. These were the kind of people who would spit on you if you doubted that American was a “Christian Nation.” They hated gays, atheists, intellectuals, and anyone else who didn’t fit their vision of the day when they would take America back for their savior. They were a cancerous mass and they were spreading through the halls of Congress.
America was officially neutral in the war. Sure, if there was one group Americans hated more than atheists and gays combined, it was the Muslims. Turkey, a formerly secular country, had fallen to fundamentalist fervor. The United States, however, did not intervene. They continued sending soldiers to the Middle East to fight their Oil War, but France, in an attempt to rally the other secular countries of Western Europe to their aid, had simultaneously alienated the many fundamentalist Christians who held sway in American politics. Overnight, American soldiers left any bases they had in Turkey. American exchange officers were recalled from France and England, sent to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. Lily had just completed Grad School and was considering staying in France for another year when the war broke out and Paris was evacuated.
After the brief nuclear exchange in the early days of the war, which left Paris destroyed, many of the Parisian refugees formed militia units. Having been involved with the network of Secular Humanist and Rationalist groups in Paris during her time as a student, she signed up in a special legion of radical American émigrés, the Red-Scarves. They were called such because of the red bandanas they wore around their necks to distinguish themselves from the French servicemen and militia soldiers.
Lillian’s unit was called the American Idiots. It was a Green Day reference. They all wore Green Day t-shirts under their uniforms. They were mostly young, and disaffected from mainstream American society. That was partly the reason they’d wound up in Europe, meeting, of course, through the secularist networks.
The other reason was that their movement in America was in trouble. Though the Moral Patriot Party was technically still a political minority, they were influential enough with both politicians and voters to manipulate political sentiment in a masterful fashion- by wrapping themselves in the cloak of religious and patriotic fervor. As Lillian once described the situation to a feverish French soldier, it was a plot ripped straight from the pages of Sinclair Lewis.
“Who?” had been the perplexed soldier’s response. “You ever see that old show, V? With the alien fascists?” The soldier nodded. “V for Victory!” he managed in English. “Well that was based on It Can’t Happen Here, but they threw in aliens because the network executives thought the LCD wouldn’t get it otherwise.” The soldier, confused, had asked about the meaning of LCD. “Lowest common denominator,” clarified Lily, realizing just how many pop-cultural idioms were lost to translation.
A lot of things don’t translate. That soldier, who she’d nursed back to health only scant weeks ago after a grip with fever, lay dead at her feet now. He was just a kid, no older than the boy who taught her what she was capable of…
Last year, she had learned from a smuggled newspaper, Marvin Raycliff had gone into hiding after a failed attempt on his life by an “unknown assailant.” Raycliff had been adjunct faculty to the Anthropology Department when Lily was an undergrad in Philadelphia, her home. He’d been one of the leaders of the secular movement there. He was an avowed atheist, a militant rationalist, a vehement skeptic. She loved having sex with that man…
…that man, who fondled her breasts, the two of them alone at night, in a dank apartment in South Philly. He said, “This is wrong.” She said, “We’re here, aren’t we. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t right.” “I could lose my job…” “You could lose me…” Going into her, on top of her, underneath her, writhing on their sides in bed, a position for all the grains of sand on the beach… He made her feel important, but not like a princess. They were partners in crime, the Bonnie and Clyde of the Rationalist Movement. They were rebels for being together, and for being who they were.
She had loved him, known him, inside and out. It was not love, in the romantic sense of the word, but rather the sharing of passions- political, philosophical, scientific. It was stress relief, a base, human urge, for two like minds to come together in She loved how he made her feel untamed, blurred the boundaries between human and animal, barbarian and philosopher, between little Lily Keighn and Lillian, the woman of power, force, resistance. She loved the man he saw himself as, that maverick of an intellectual, who walked tightropes every day for what he believed in.
Raycliff, according to the article, had eventually gained tenure, but lost it that same year over his unique brand of militant “rational activism.” He had recently criticized the Vice President, Adam Powers, a born-again Christian who abandoned the Republican Party mid-term and declared himself a “Moral Patriot.” Powers had not taken kindly to this, nor had his supporters. Hence the probable affiliation of the “unknown assailant” was not so mysterious to Keighn, as she read the article.
The failed attempt on his life convinced Raycliff to flee from the public eye, which he had. He’d disappeared. The article said he “could not be located to testify.” No investigation was planed, but the charters of the Secular, Humanist and Atheist organizations in the U.S. had been subsequently revoked by the government, their members silenced. Or so they thought. According to the smuggled article, these events had sparked a new phenomenon: A kind of “Atheist Nationalism,” represented by fearsomely-named organizations like the Scarlet Panthers, Ockham’s Razors, and the League of the Militant Godless. They were young, angry, and vicious. They vandalized ministries where homophobic parents sent their gay teens to “Conversion Therapy,” assassinated sex-predators in the Catholic Church… They were absolutely magnificent.
Their magnificence motivated Lillian not only to survive this war, but to return to America and to employ her needed skills that she had learned as a Red-Scarf to the fight for a Rational Society, in which children did not wear uniforms and carry guns, a society in which religion was never allowed to interfere with government, a society in which leadership would be based on qualification, skill, and competency, not political clout. She fought for a rational society in France, and she would fight again in America. Her country needed her. She swore to herself that if she made it back, she was taking the Red-Scarves with her. They were the only ones with the skills, the only ones who could lead.
Skills, she thought. Play-acting. Like all the times she’d pretended as a child to serve on the Starship Enterprise and explore strange new worlds, she’d learned to explore strange, new skills. She learned to be a torturer and she played her role well. In the interrogation room, she’d made a point of slipping her hands into black leather gloves in front of the subject. She’d smiled evilly, purposefully when she first made them sweat, gone out of her way to instill dread in the POW’s.
She understood how people thought. She knew which buttons to press. Sometimes, though, there were no buttons needed. The boy who’d died of a heart attack before she’d even arrived for their second session had taught her that, scared as he was, to death, by the thought of her.
At night, it sometimes occurred to Lillian, that she did not particularly like who she had become. She took pride in the idea of the thing, not the actions that the thing required. So she was a fighter, and a torturer because she had to be. She didn’t like it. But then, she’d think, Maybe I don’t have to. How many lives had she saved with the information she’d retrieved from those sessions with the Turkish prisoners of war? Thousands, probably. She’d never really know, it didn’t work that way, but what she did was necessary: every cut, every whipping, every drop of the enemy’s blood until she’d stripped away the lies and broken him. She was very good at breaking people. It was the only way to get them to talk.
This was war. She understood that. It had become part of her mystique: all the young, French infantrymen were in love with her, the crazy American woman who smoked hand rolled cigarettes like a European and could drink them under the table faster than you could sing The Bastille. She didn’t have to like who she’d become. It was enough for her to be who she needed to be, and she needed to be a fighter…
…She’d been a protester. Skipped her senior prom to go along with all her other friends to a massive protest in DC. She was walking down Pennsylvania Avenue, holding a sign, when she realized who was behind her. They were wearing bandanas over their faces. They carried a scarlet banner with golden-yellow sickles and hammers, surrounding the words Free Saddam[2].
Her first thought was, who let them in? She realized, then, that there was a problem. She had always known that she was a dissenter, someone who stood their guns when everyone else went with the herd. The problem, she realized, with dissent, was that it had become too damn permissive.
In retrospect, she thought, in that moment she had been revitalized as a human being and a rational actor. She had reasoned then, that self defense was not only logical but right, and that in war, the best defense is always a good offense. And in prelude to war…
…At 16 she’d watched in silence in her high school class room as the second plane hit the World Trade Center on the TV. She’d scanned the faces of her classmates, hoping to discern whether anyone shared her opinion: So what? Now America knows what it’s like to live in the rest of the world, she’d thought… She understood, even as a teenager, that one death was tragic but 3000 deaths was a mere statistic.
…She knew, then, that a human being had to be able to choose when to strike preemptively, to judge when action, direct action was warranted. A human being had to know when to fight, and when not to fight.
She reasoned that there was no God counting the heads of sparrows, no heaven or hell waiting for her after death. She’d seen enough death to know there was no other side. At Ankara, at Izmir, at Paris… she’d seen Ground Zero, stood where the Arc de Triomph once stood, surveyed the wreckage, the nuclear shadows of victims burned to the walls of buildings and the concrete of sidewalks by the mighty burst of gamma radiation. She had lost so many friends and comrades.
The fighting in Ankara was dying down, but it was not yet over. She observed, in the distance, an explosion- black smoke, orange dust. The smell hit her. Napalm. Across the street, a dog stepped on a landmine and lost its lower abdomen. She thought of all those post-apocalyptic sci-fi movies she used to watch with her brothers, in the basement rec room of the old house: the tales of familiar worlds destroyed by terrible cataclysms, nuclear and viral holocausts. Only the most toughened survived. She felt like one of those survivors now. She felt like she’d lost everything, even her humanity, until she reminded herself what humanity was: the state of being an intelligent animal. She felt marginally better.
In all those movies, the whole world looked like this, like Ankara: smoking, smoldering wreckage, a dying land. Once, as a precocious ten-year old, she had asked her brothers if the movies were realistic at all. Sam, 14, said they weren’t, that they were made up, but their older brother, Nathan, corrected him. “They’re not realistic about here, but there are some places in the world that are just as bad.” 10-year old Lily had wondered how anything could be worse than having to go to school, to which her brother Sam had replied, “puberty.”
27-year old Lillian remembered another article she’d read, smuggled in with the newspaper in which she’d heard about Raycliff. It said the world was dying. Entire ecosystems were collapsing. Every month another natural disaster claimed more and more lives. In America, millions of patriotic Christians swore on their Bibles that this was it, the Apocalypse, metaphorical or literal, that it was here. Surely the Anti-Christ walked the Earth; the Moral Patriot Party grew.
Maybe it wasn’t death, not really. She was being anthropocentric. It wasn’t very rational of her. What the world was doing was changing. It was never going to be the same again, and Lillian Keighn wondered if the human race would change with it, or die from it.
Civilization could not survive as she knew it. She was aware of that much. Her country needed a revolution, and the revolution would not be civilized…
In the King of Prussia Mall with her mother, Beatrice, shopping for a prom dress: all the shoppers turned to the displays of televisions as Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Their eyes were glued to the TVs on display…
… as years later she could not avoid staring at the portable television in the refugee camps, after the nuking of Paris, and President Le Mont ordered the evacuation of all major cities and areas located near military bases in preparation for a counterstrike. Suddenly everything made sense to her…
...Lillian Keighn, little Lily Keighn, ten years old on the playground, her knee bruised by a hard kick from a nasty, rotten boy. She cried until she felt something else, something base, and she stopped crying. The strategic genius that she would become, she began to plot her revenge.
The boy’s name was Simon Kushner, and he was a jerk. Everyone hated him, even though they all pretended to like him, because his parents were so rich and they had a pool and a rec room with an air hockey table…
Nathan’s medals shipped home from Iraq in a little box. Nathan himself arrived in a larger box. The day after the funeral at Valley Forge, 18-year old mourning Lily skipped her prom to go with her friends to Washington DC to protest that illegal war out of no pacifistic ideal. She understood that some things were worth dying for, and some things would never be. She always said that she’d fight for a cause she believed in, be it revenge, or a political movement. In France, she’d found her niche in the Red-Scarves, but the war, as terrible as it had been, would be over soon, and she would go back to America… if America would let her return. The French government certainly would vouch for her, but she didn’t know how much that would really amount to, considering the international tensions.
…Little Lily spray painted one of her brother’s old water guns black and even gave it a shiny finish, painstakingly reproducing the technical details with her art set, from a picture she printed off the internet. The next morning, as she passed Simon’s cubby on the way to her own, she slipped the gun into his backpack. Simon freaked that day at lunch, but since he was known for drawing attention to himself through stunts like that, his parents and teachers assumed he had been trying to play a very inappropriate practical joke on the class. It didn’t help when he realized it had been a water gun and tried to change his story so he didn’t sound like a wuss…
Lillian Keighn, Captain Keighn of the Red-Scarf Legion looked over her unit, the American Idiots. “At ease. Sergeant Carson, bring me the flare gun,” she ordered, looking at her watch. It was 1320. Any minute now, French reinforcements were set to arrive by helicopter at the ruins of Ankara. She was to give the pilots the signal for safe landing conditions. She looked around, waiting for something to go wrong. Strangely, nothing did.
The militia unit’s ranks had been thinned, but the best of them lived yet. A few cases of shellshock, some trauma, but they’d live. She had it on good word that this would be the last battle. She was waiting for a sign, whether she was right or wrong.
In the distance, Lillian heard the sound of helicopters. “Sergeant,” she snapped, and a Red-Scarf soldier peered at the horizon with his binoculars. “Captain,” he announced triumphantly, “it’s the French. They’re coming. The war’s over. It’s over.” Lillian cradled the flare gun in her hands, stepped back, positioning it for a forward arc. She steadied her frame and fired a burning pink flare into the sky. The war was over. All the pent-up feelings she held inside her were released. The war was over. She cried.
“Are you okay, Captain?” asked Carson. “Yeah, Carson. I’m fine,” she said, wiping the tears with her red bandana. She suddenly felt very old, realizing she was a veteran. Silently, tearlessly, she mourned the passing of the war that had given her purpose, defined her coming of age, and made her who she was. There was no escaping her past. She was a soldier without a cause. The only thing left for her was in America. In America, she would be a rebel, but at least there was a cause there, waiting for her, and it was worth fighting for.
[1] Dominionism: Conservative Christian movement to control secular government through political action. Dominionism was centered around an apocalyptic belief system and a propaganda machine that attacked reputable science and retroactively interpreted current events to support this belief. Identified as a Fascist movement by author Chris Hedges in 2003. Also called Christo-Fascism by non-Dominionists, a play on the conservative term “Islamo-Fascism.” Widely considered the genesis of Moral Patriotism.
[2] Saddam Hussein, former Dictator of Iraq
“It is true that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. It is equally true that in the land of the blind, the two-eyed man is an enemy of the state, the people, and domestic tranquility… and necessarily so. Someone has to rearrange the furniture.”
- Login to post comments
Immigration and Naturalization Services
Transcript: Émigré Re-Integration Interview
Date of Interview: 4/5/2018
Interviewer: Stanley Berman, Officer Second-Class, INS, DoJ, Commission for Émigré Re-Integration (CER)
Subject: #0910; Keighn, Lillian Beatrice; Major, Parisian-American Secular Militia
Subject DoB: 7/22/85
Stanley Berman (SB): Please state for the record, your name, date of birth, and former rank, occupation and any pertinent information regarding said occupation.
Lillian Keighn (LK): Lillian Beatrice Keighn. I was born on July 22nd, 1985. I hold the rank of Major, retired, in the disbanded Parisian-American Secular Militia. I served as Information Officer in a unit called the American Idiots, Unit SM-121. Serial Number PASM-041212C.
SB: And at this time, are you mentally or physically incapacitated in any way as to be unable to testify?
LK: No.
SB: In addition to your military experience, you are also a trained psychologist, is that correct?
LK: I hold a PhD in that subject.
SB: And you received that PhD before the start of the Franco-Turkic War?
LK: That’s correct.
SB: What were you still doing in France, then?
LK: Considering my options.
SB: Please be specific.
LK: I was considering whether I would return to America sooner or later. There were jobs in Paris. I was looking for the right job.
SB: And you found it as a soldier in a foreign militia.
LK: I’d been a sympathizer.
SB: You became much more than a sympathizer. As an American citizen on an expired student visa, you were a soldier in a foreign militia. You were an officer. You were an information officer. Did your duties as an information officer include interrogation of enemy prisoners?
LK: Yes.
SB: As an interrogator in a foreign militia, the Parisian-American Secular Militia, did you abide by the legal obligations of Article 17 of the Third Geneva Convention?
LK: I don’t understand the relevance of the question.
SB: As a senior interrogator in the Parisian-American Secular Militia, did you inflict on any prisoner of war, any physical or mental torture in the process of extracting information? Did you use coercive methods? Did you make threats?
LK: In accordance with the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, I refuse to answer that question.
SB: This is not a court of law, Ms. Keighn. The Fifth Amendment doesn’t apply.
LK: It’s Major, not Miss. Am I not being compelled to testify? I’ve already provided justification for my refusal. Next question.
SB: Do you consider yourself a loyal citizen?
LK: What do you mean?
SB: Would you ever consider taking up arms, unlawfully, against your government?
LK: Only against an unlawful government, Eagle Feathers. How archetypically American can you get?
SB: The subject will refrain from redirecting questions to the interviewer. Major Keighn, before you left this country, as an undergraduate you were an associate of a Dr. Marvin Raycliff, is that correct?
LK: I took some classes with him.
SB: As an undergraduate, you were associated with several local and national organizations, which used to operate in this country, but have since been shut down. These organizations include PhillyCOR, the Humanist Association of Greater Philadelphia, the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia, the Secular Student Alliance, Coalition for a Secular America, The Center for Inquiry, the Rational Response Squad, Americans United for Separation of Church and State…
LK: What’s your point?
SB: The subject will refrain from interrupting during this procedure. At this time, do you, Major Keighn, intend to contact other former members of said organizations during your time in the United States?
LK: Only socially.
SB: Do you intend to contact Dr. Raycliff?
LK: I thought he was dead. Is he alive?
SB: The subject will refrain from redirecting questions in a manner counterproductive to this session. As a re-integrated citizen of the United States, do you intend at this time to engage in dissenting actions that would threaten the domestic tranquility of your country?
LK: I don’t follow.
SB: You said that you fought in France for a cause you believed in. Would you do the same here?
LK: Is this a test of my character or my patriotism? Cause they’re not the same thing.
SB: The subject will refrain from redirecting questions.
LK: Loyalty to the country, always. Loyalty to the Government when it deserves it. Mark Twain. Ever heard of him?
SB: The subject will refrain-
LK: The subject is done.
SB: Ms. Keighn-
LK: Major Keighn.
SB: Major, I have additional questions.
LK: If your additional questions have a legal basis, you can call my family’s lawyer. Dwight Duncan. He’s in the Yellow Pages. I’m leaving.
End Transcript Record.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.”
-Joseph Heller
Readjustment
Lower Merion, Pennsylvania
July 4, 2018.
The Fourth of July had always meant Barbeques and Fireworks to Little Lily. To Nathan, the Fourth of July had been something more: a patriotic holiday.
Every Fourth of July, Lily’s parents set up a little shrine for the son who gave his life in service.
The shrine was like so many others that she’d had seen in her youth- shrines to countless fallen soldiers- husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters. There were pictures of Nathan as a child, a young man, and a soldier. She looked at the pictures: 10-year old Nathan in his Star Trek uniform; Nathan, the Boy Scout, at 12, with all his latest merit badges on display; Nathan, the linebacker for the High School football time; Nathan, the graduate. In the next picture Nathan wore the uniform of a Private in the US Marine Corp. In the last picture he wore the uniform of a Sergeant. A Star of David- a necklace from a girlfriend that came back all those years ago with Nathan’s medals lay on the shrine, next to his dog tags: Gunnery Sergeant Nathan W. Keighn. SE-7224923. J.
A hand on her shoulder. Sam. He had developed into a strikingly handsome man, married a beautiful woman and fathered two beautiful children. Mark and Lisa were playing on the backyard swing set, supervised by their mother, Linda.
Lillian turned, faced her brother, the middle child and the baby of the family who’d both outlived their older sibling. “It seems so long ago,” said Sam. “Yeah,” said Lillian.
She was still wearing the uniform she’d worn in France. She’d worn it every day. She didn’t have a job, was living with their parents. Every day she washed and dried that uniform, and put it on fresh in the morning- the red scarf, the Green Day t-shirt, the French military apparel. She stared at the shrine, to Nathan again, clutched her own dog tags. She’d kept everything. Washington had reached some accommodations with the new government in Lyon, and had allowed the émigrés to return home with minimal harassment: a three-day detention, a re-integration session, and a two week observation period. The French Government had even ensured that her guns would be there when she arrived in the airport.
Lillian removed her dog tags, set them next to Nathan’s on the shrine. She picked up the Star of David necklace, rubbed it between her thumb and her index finger. “I thought you didn’t believe in all that stuff,” said Sam.
“It can still mean something to me,” said Lillian.
The uniform had not gone over well with her mother, Beatrice. She begged her to change. “If you put on something else you could get a job at the Starbucks,” Beatrice had said to her one day. “Mom, I have a PhD in Psychology.” “Who could tell from how you’re dressed? You look like…” “A veteran?” “Well, if it were an American uniform…” “What if it were an American uniform, Mom? Look, I’ve got an arrangement with the new government in Lyon[1], they’re sending me veteran’s pay, I can manage.”
She had, of course, been working. Not for pay, but for solidarity, rebuilding the ties of the old secular groups, driven underground. She’d been busy, she and her other Veteran Red-Scarves. Before leaving France, she’d received a promotion to Major. She’d been told that if she wanted it, she could have her rank transferred to the U.S. Armed Forces. She declined. She had other plans. When she and the Red-Scarves returned, the other groups in the splintered American Rationalist Movement had rallied around them as war heroes mistreated by a biased government.
None of this, she could tell her parents, or even Sam. The INS had made it clear that activism was not to be in her future. Of course, she would resist, but she couldn’t endanger her family. Sam had a wife, two kids. A normal life. She didn’t want to ruin his dreams, didn’t want to tell him she was up to something dangerous. It would have shattered him.
“When are you gonna take off that uniform?” asked Sam, at the shrine.
“When I’m finished,” said Lillian.
“Your war’s over. What are you still fighting?” asked her brother.
“Everything,” she replied.
She couldn’t tell him the details. It was too much for him. He’d been an average kid, a C-student who loved basketball and bubble gum. Decent, average, normal. He owned a Yum-Yum’s Water Ice franchise in Bala Cynwyd. He wasn’t an intellectual, like her. He couldn’t understand that there was more at stake than mortgages and college loans.
“Forget I asked,” said Sam. He walked on, rejoined his wife and their beautiful children. Lillian went to the barbeque, plucked a sausage from the grill and put it on a bun with plenty of mustard.
“When do the fireworks start?” she directed the question at her mother, sipping iced tea with a slice of lemon at the patio table.
“Same time, every year,” said Beatrice. “7:00.”
“19:00, got it,” said Lillian. Beatrice frowned. Lillian was so used to thinking in military time, she hadn’t meant to alienate her mother, but everything she did, everything that was now second nature to her, seemed to have that effect.
The only person not particularly affected by her presence was Noah, Lillian’s father. He was a shy man of 59, standing off to one side of the patio and smoking a cigarette. Lillian felt in her pocket for her pouch of rolling tobacco, and walked to where her father stood.
Noah Keighn passed his daughter a lighter. It was an old, steel lighter he’d been given by his father.
Lillian’s grandfather, Bernard, a German-Jewish immigrant, had no sooner arrived at Ellis Island than he’d signed up to fight Hitler. He served with distinction in World War II, and again in Korea. Noah Keighn himself had fought in the first Gulf War. The family had a military history. It was a history of servicemen, infantry. The Army had bought her family their beautiful suburban house with a backyard, practically paid for her education, and here she was, proudly attired in the uniform of a foreign officer.
She lit her cigarette, handed her father the lighter. “It’s yours,” he said. “I was gonna give it to Nathan, but he never smoked. Grandpa picked this up in France. It’s a war trophy. I can’t give it to Sam, he’s never worn the uniform. Never thought I’d be giving it to a daughter.”
Lillian pocketed the lighter. “Thanks, Dad.”
“Sam, your mother … they don’t understand that service is service, if you believe in what you’re fighting for. Doesn’t matter what flag you’ve got sewn on your fatigues. We’ve known something they can’t know.” Noah Keighn exhaled blue smoke into the summer evening as he said this. Lillian nodded.
“You wanna go somewhere?”
“Where?” asked Lillian.
“How about the Wooden Horse? I need a drink.”
Lillian sat with her father at the bar, drinking Yuengling draft. On the television, the fireworks exploded and screamed like the bombs at Ankara. “You’ll never forget those sounds,” said Noah, noticing his daughter’s discomfort. “Every fourth of July, just like the war. Just like whatever last battle it was you fought. You’ll be living that battle every day.”
“I know,” said Lillian.
“It’s not enough to say it’s over, because you still have to deal with all the faces… the arms, the legs, the broken bits of bone. The memories are what drag you down. And every day, you go over the choices you made, and you ask yourself if you were right.”
“I know, Dad.”
“Every day, you’re going to wish you could forget.”
“I already do.”
Noah took a long drink from his glass, rubbing the froth from his moustache with his index finger. He took out a book of matches and lit a cigarette, inhaling deep.
“Dad, I know you and Mom are worried about me. I don’t want you to worry. I’m an adult. I grew up, Dad. I’m not the family baby anymore.”
“When your grandfather was 18, he went to war, Lily. Didn’t even have a chance to grow up before he saw action. He came back. Four years. Eight tours of duty. Under all those wounds, Lily, he was still a teenager. He grew up on the battlefield, for what that’s worth. Learned what he needed to know there. Never could learn anything else. So he went back. He wasn’t recalled for Korea, he volunteered. Couldn’t hold a job stateside. His war wasn’t over. Now I made damn sure that didn’t happen to me, Lily, and I hope it doesn’t happen to you. It’s time to take off the uniform, accept that it’s over.”
“How can a war be over when there’s no winner or loser?” asked Lillian. “Dad, there are still soldiers in Ankara. Everywhere- France too. The whole region’s one big DMZ.”
“Looks to be the trend these days,” said Noah. “Look, just because it happens in Southern Europe… Lily, it couldn’t happen here. We’re Americans. We wouldn’t let it happen. There hasn’t been a single attack on American soil since 9/11.”
She wanted to tell her father that it was only the beginning. The battle lines were being drawn. Where would her father stand? How could he understand? She wanted, desperately, to know that her father would still love her, no matter what…
“We should go back,” said Lillian. Noah belched. “I’m driving,” she added, taking her father’s keys.
“There you are!” came a familiar voice. Sam was standing at the entrance of the bar. “Come on, I’m taking you home,” he said.
“We drove here,” said Noah.
“I’ll come back with Linda for the truck. You’re both drunk.” Sam tried to take the keys from Lillian, but he was unprepared for his little sister’s deflective moves. Sam quickly found himself lying on the floor. Lillian helped him up. “Lily,” Sam pleaded. Lillian looked in her brother’s eyes, saw his concern. “Fine,” she said, handing him the keys. At the bar, Noah tried to hide his embarrassment.
They drove home in silence. The fireworks had started. As Sam maneuvered his station wagon into the driveway, Lillian lapsed into memory…
…She was 20 years old, in the dark of her old apartment, with Raycliff. They were sitting in bed. She had been asleep, but she’d woken up, and Raycliff was on the edge of the bed, reading from the light of a tiny lamp.
“What are you reading?”
He showed her the cover of the book. Camus, The Rebel.
“Find something you didn’t underline already?” asked Lillian.
“It’s difficult,” said Raycliff.
“What’s difficult?”
“This,” he said. “Fuck, Lillian, you still call me Dr. Raycliff in bed. What’s it been, two weeks?”
“Two and a half,” said Lillian. “Marvin’s not a sexy name.”
“How long can we keep doing this?” asked Raycliff.
“How long do you want to keep it up? We talked about this. This isn’t about love. We’re not in love. I don’t think either of us could ever really love another human being. We’ve committed ourselves so well, to our causes, our passions…”
“Lillian… If there’s one thing I care more about than anything else in the world…”
“We both know that’s not true,” said Lillian. “We’re in love with ourselves. We’re fucking ourselves vicariously through each other. We might as well sit here and masturbate, that’s all we do to each other. Even talk, it’s just intellectual masturbation.”
“What’s wrong?” he’d asked her.
“Dr. Raycliff, I can’t do this anymore.”
They got out of the station wagon, met with the disapproval in Beatrice’s eyes. Sam gave Linda the keys to Noah Keighn’s truck.
The fireworks exploded above. Keighn watched the brilliant streaks of color- pink, blue, green, red, white- all the colors of the battlefield, the colors of flares and smoke grenades. She felt lightheaded, looked at the ground to make sure it was still there. When she did, she saw the French soldier, that mere boy, lying dead at her feet. A few weeks ago, struggling through fever, they’d shared precious nuggets of pop culture- TV shows, songs, tropes. He wasn’t regular army. He was militia- one of the Parisian refugees. She’d known him before the war. He’d been at the Rationalist group meetings. He’d been an eloquent speaker, a student leader. He’d wanted to go to Germany to study sociology at the Max Planck Institute after he finished high school, but he never got that chance. The world had been so full of opportunity for him, so many ways to live and to die. She turned her face away, but she could not keep it turned. Her gaze snapped back to her feet. The soldier was still there, his nose, bloodied, probably broken by the fall. Lillian had seen how he’d died, shot in the back, his legs buckling, falling face first on the exploded concrete rubble that covered the streets of Ankara. She closed her eyes.
The sounds of explosions intensified- whistling, screaming- grew louder and louder. Finally they stopped.
Cherishing the silence, she willed her eyes open. She was still looking at the ground beneath her feet. The dead soldier was gone, no spill of blood where he’d lain.
He’d never been there.
Lillian wondered if she was going crazy. It wasn’t the first time she had asked herself that question. In her mind it was a perfectly rational question.
“For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.”
-Albert Camus
“The names for things don’t come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.”
-Tom Stoppard
Extradited
Democratic Republic of Kenya:
July 16, 2018.
The Savanna makes for a surreal experience when viewed through a dusty windshield at 127 kph. It doesn’t look like a nature documentary, but more like a video game. Kenyan Road Rage 5000 or some other bullshit.
For much of his life, when he wasn’t in the United States, Dr. Marvin Raycliff had lived inside a nature documentary: it was an idyllic, primordial Savanna where baboons amused themselves by trying to make each other miserable, and occasionally got mauled by the local hyena population. Over in the next valley, to the south, there was a rustic Maasai village where the women, spurned in recent years to challenge patriarchal authority, argued with their traditionalist husbands and uncles and fathers; where the Maa girls tormented the Bantu wait staff in the nearby safari resort; where the boys terrorized their Kipsugyi neighbors by taking the cows off their pastures to feed on the Bantu famers’ crops.
Pursued by three jeeps belonging to the Kenyan military, he had been forced to explore new media: Enter the Video Game.
He pressed the gas pedal, accelerated to 130. 135. 140. The dust caked his Land Rover’s windshield faster than the wiper blades could dispel it.
The Maasai Elders, some of whom he’d known as young warriors when he’d first come to Kenya to do his fieldwork, had arrived at his camp that morning. They had warned him that the soldiers had come to their village, looking for Raycliff. He didn’t need to be told twice. He packed up his camp in the Land Rover and started driving south, toward the Tanzanian Border.
He could hardly see through the windshield now, but his rearview mirror was clear: the jeeps were still behind him. A soldier rose from the closest jeep, a rifle in his arms. He fired, twice, taking out Raycliff’s rear tires. The Land Rover wobbled, shook. Raycliff panicked. The vehicle hit something- he couldn’t see- it must have been a rock, or a ditch. Whatever it was, it flipped the Land Rover upside down. Raycliff was very stubborn when it came to seat belts. He lost consciousness as the airbags failed to deploy, and his head knocked against the steering wheel.
Through his mind’s eye he saw a beautiful face… elegant features that could not be called soft… the severity of the darkness of her eyes, the precision of her symmetry: a healthy, virile primate of the Homo sapiens persuasion. He tried matching a name to the face, going through so many names… Marie, his wife, Karen, Jennifer, Sun-Li… the Cambodian prostitutes, the one-time research assistants, the one-night stands in New York, London, Nairobi… so many names, and only one face mattered.
Her face, as he’d remembered it. Beautiful, but stern. A disciplined mind. She measured every word she spoke, never impulsive, never immature. That face held a wisdom that surpassed her years. How old had she been, when they made love, he wondered. Was she even alive now?
His mind drifted through time, to all the many arguments he’d won, the logical fallacies he’d called…
…to his youth, when he first refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in High School…
…to the protests of later years- MoveOn, Anonymous, Secular Coalition…
…to the letter he’d held in his hand: Official Notice of Revocation of Tenure…
…back to her face, in the darkness of her apartment, where they sat in her bed:
“Dr. Raycliff,” she’d said, “I can’t do this anymore.”
He’d understood. They had never been in love. It was about the power that each of them felt, exploring each other’s boundaries. Raycliff was a scientist. He didn’t believe in the existence of the soul, but if he had…
…soul mate.
He’d left. She’d gone back to sleep. He’d packed his clothes and let himself out.
…Lillian.
That was her name. She’d been an undergrad. How long ago, now? A figure eight formed in his mind’s eye… eight years.
…Lillian Keighn. Probably has a doctorate by now.
Has it really been that long?
He was on the ground. His hands were shackled uncomfortably behind his back. There was a boot pressing on his ribcage. His eyes followed the boot, the leg, the trunk, the neck, to the Bantu face of the senior soldier. Two other faces peered at him, almost silhouettes against the burning, blue sky. They were wearing wrap-around sunglasses. The two subordinates wore helmets, but the head of the senior soldier- a lieutenant from his rank insignia- was bare.
“Dr. Marvin Ratcliff?” the Lieutenant asked.
“It’s Raycliff,” he replied in the local Swahili dialect.
“Do not try to confuse us your identity. We know who you are. You are under arrest, Doctor, by the Democratic Republic of Kenya, to be extradited to our American war-allies,” said the Lieutenant. One of the soldiers pulled him up, off the ground. Raycliff was led, shackled, to the back of a jeep.
“Extradition?” he asked.
“You have the choice not to speak. Anything you say can and will be used against you,” said the Kenyan Lieutenant.
“What’s the charge, Lieutenant?”
The Bantu lieutenant laughed. “Charge? As they say in your country, we don’t need no stinking charge. You’re called Most Dangerous Man in America. Uppity atheist, yes?”
He’d always been so good at pissing off the right people.
He’d pissed off Adam Powers- Vice President of the United States of America- for one. Powers probably counted a hundred times.
Almost two years ago, Powers had abandoned the GOP for the Moral Patriots. The President, Ramos, had asked for his resignation. Ramos didn’t get it.
What Ramos didn’t get, either, or maybe what he didn’t want to admit, was that in the distressed marriage between the fiscal and the social conservatives, the Moral Patriots wore the pants. They were calling the shots. They had been for months.
Raycliff nodded. “The worst,” he said.
“Rather you want, we give you to the Sudanese?”
“They can’t be any worse than the Americans.”
“Quiet. We take you to Nairobi. You are to be processed.” The soldier took out, strangely enough, a satellite phone. “You’ll get one call from Airport,” he said. “Doctor, I will give you two calls. You have been… out of touch with your homeland. I understand.”
“There’s a notepad with numbers. It was in my backpack.”
The lieutenant issued orders in Swahili to his subordinates, who searched the overturned Land Rover for the back pack. They brought the Lieutenant the notepad. “Can you read?” asked Raycliff. The lieutenant nodded. “I need to call Lillian Keighn. The number should start with a “610.” I have to find out how I can reach her.” “Five minutes, each call,” said the Lieutenant. “My soldiers know I am a generous man, but my superiors cannot.”
Raycliff nodded. “I understand. Thank you, Lieutenant.”
The burly Kenyan lieutenant leaned close, out of earshot of his soldiers. “I read your book. My uncle smuggled it in from Ethiopia. I’m a man of God, Doctor, but I agreed with what you had to say, about government, about religion. We have nothing on you, nor does your country. You’ll go home, spend a few months detained, and they’ll let you out and apologize for the inconvenience. It works that way, here, it must work like that in the States. I know corruption.”
“Thank you,” repeated Raycliff. The lieutenant undid the shackles, and Raycliff dialed Lillian’s emergency number on the satellite phone with his fingers.
Raycliff’s hands were clumsy, the shackles had cut off his circulation. He managed to dial a number. A woman who could only have been Beatrice’s mother answered: “Hello? Who’s this?”
“Would you know how I could contact Lillian?”
“Who is this?” The voice repeated.
“My name is Dr. Marvin Raycliff. Please, I need to get in touch with Lillian. Is there a number I can reach her at?”
Across the Atlantic Ocean, Beatrice sighed. She knew better than this, but she wouldn’t deny her daughter the benefit of hanging up herself. She reluctantly gave Lillian’s number at work to the man on the phone. “Thank you,” he said. She hung up, went to her computer and googled the name Dr. Marvin Raycliff.
“Don’t wanna be an American Idiot,
Don’t want a nation controlled by new media,
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mind-fuck America!”
-Green Day
Fallout
Lillian Keighn tried to secure a job. She swore this would be the last time.
She took off her uniform, put on makeup, jeans and a casual blouse. Her old clothes still fit her. What she had available was essentially her high school wardrobe that she’d left behind when she’d gone to Europe. Everything else she had there, before the war, was gone, probably rotting away in the ruins of Paris.
She looked in the bathroom mirror, trying to figure out something to do with her hair.
Thirty minutes later, she was being interviewed in a backroom by a manager at the local Starbucks. The manager, some NEmo-haired college kid[2] who probably didn’t even remember when heelies were new, seemed likeable enough. Not too bright, but she could deal with his type. She was sweet and polite during the interview. The manager must not have looked at the birth date she put on her application, because after he informed her that she’d gotten the job, he seemed to be trying to ask her out. She let him down easy, convinced that no 20-something year old manager of a Starbucks would admit to having probed into the possibility of a date with a barista he’d just hired.
She started the next day, training. It was low-key enough. In the ten years since she’d left for France, the neighborhood demographics had changed, and there fortunately few enough people who’d known her that she felt comfortable working at the counter and wearing that stupid, green apron.
A week after New Year’s, she was about to take a cigarette break when the NEmo-haired manager, whose name was Allen, informed her that she had a long-distance phone call. “Who is it?” she asked him in the back room with the store’s phone. “He said you’d know,” said Allen, not wanting to probe any deeper. He knew enough about Keighn’s past to know that probing was a bad idea. They were friendly enough as it was. They’d even gone out for beer a couple times. Allen had turned 21 a few months ago.
She took the receiver from him and asked who was speaking.
“Lillian- it’s Marvin. Dr. Raycliff.” Her heart nearly jumped out of her ribcage.
“Hold on one second,” said Lillian, who told Allen that this was a private matter. Allen respectfully left the back room. Lillian closed the door. “Dr. Raycliff?” she asked, apprehensively. “Yeah, it’s me.” “I thought you were dead, they said you’d disappeared.” “I’ve been hiding,” came Raycliff’s voice, from what seemed like a million miles away. She wasn’t sure if it was the phone, but Raycliff sounded older, tired. His voice reminded Lillian of the voices she’d heard the men under her command develop over the war- raspy, wary, but not yet lethargic- the kind of voice that, being unable to hear herself, she wondered if she possessed now. There was an urgency to his tone that was familiar. He’d always been a passionate talker. That much was still there.
“How did you get this number?” asked Lillian.
“Your parents,” came his reply.
She cursed to herself.
“Where are you?” she asked him.
“Africa,” said Raycliff, over the phone.
“Are you alright?”
“I’m being extradited back to the States,” said Raycliff.
“Under what charge?”
“Apparently, none,” said Raycliff.
“They can’t do that,” said Lillian.
“It’s nothing. Government’ll keep me for as long as they can, then they’ll let me go. I wanted you to know I’m coming back.” The phone clicked on the other end.
“Dr. Raycliff?” Lillian asked, over the dead line. “Marvin?”
His voice was gone.
Lillian asked Allen if she could take the rest of the day off. Allen gave it to her, no questions asked. She walked home in something of a euphoric state. The world looked different. She felt like she was a kid again, the world was so vibrant. It hadn’t been that way since Nathan’s body came home in a box.
She noticed colors. The natural green of the grass on the perfectly manicured suburban lawns was nothing like the mottled green of camouflage or the chemical-neon green of flares. It was a healthy color. It felt right.
The sun felt right on the back of her neck. She’d taken to wearing her black hair short, in an almost masculine style. The rays of heat comforted her, made her feel connected to the continuum of nature.
That continuum was shrinking. It was hard to know, from the suburbs with their fresh-smelling, green grass that elsewhere, entire ecosystems were failing. The natural disasters kept claiming more lives in earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, hurricanes, fires. In a perverse way, Lillian almost felt a sense of pleasure knowing that an environment hospitable to man was as mortal as man himself. She thought of a favored comedian who’d ended one apocalyptically funny routine with the question, “See, don’t you love it when nature gets even with humanity?”
That comedian was gone now. He died, but not before he came to France, during the war. He was famous for dumping on religion, and as per of a relief effort on the part of American radical sympathizers, he’d gone to Lyon to entertain the troops fighting for French Secularism. Lillian had been temporarily assigned to his escort party. It was the closest she’d ever gotten to him.
On his way home, a Turkish missile struck the French airliner he was flying on. The plane crashed down in the Bay of Biscay. George Carlin was presumed lost at sea.
If only you here today, George, thought Lillian. You’d be having a real laugh right now.
It was 16:00. Lillian still went by army time. An airplane soared above in the sky, probably headed for the Philadelphia Airport. The sound of the plane caught Lillian off-guard. She stilled herself, listened for the inevitable whistle-drop-boom.
In her mind’s eye, a nuclear warhead fell to Earth in the center of Lower Merion: a burst of gamma-rays; a shockwave emanating from a growing mushroom cloud; the Devil’s face staring into the soul she didn’t believe in. The radiation burned the shadows of suburbanites onto the sides of their homes and minivans. The shockwave and the looming cloud consumed the town, a nuclear rape of all that is supposed to be good and wholesome and sheltered from evil. In its wake was a blood-red sky, streaked with black and orange. The air was thick with dust. She struggled to breathe.
She gripped the edges of her reality, shook off the delusions, cursed herself for losing her rationality in that moment. There was no bomb, of course. The plane was a jetliner, like the one that she took back to the States from France; like the one that George Carlin died on; like the one that would bring Marvin Raycliff home.
She reached her parents’ house, hoping to enter undisturbed, but her mother was at the door, holding the cordless phone. “Who do you know in Africa?”
“It’s my business, mom,” she told Beatrice.
“This Raycliff character called our house, Lillian, looking for you. I didn’t want to give him you cell so I gave him the number of your work.”
“I guess I should thank you,” said Lillian. “I thought he was dead.”
“No. Don’t thank me. I didn’t want to do it, but your father insisted. Don’t think I don’t know who this Raycliff is, I’ve heard all about him. He’s a dangerous man.”
“I’m a grown woman, mother,” said Lillian. “You don’t get to judge my friends anymore.”
“So he is a friend of yours?”
“Yes, he’s a friend.”
“You know you’re not supposed to be associating with those people…”
“Stay out of my life, mom.”
“I’m only trying to help. I’m so proud of you for getting a job, Lillian. I just don’t want you to be in trouble. You know how INS has been checking up on you,” said Beatrice.
“And they’ll check up on him too, I’m sure,” said Lillian. “So you don’t need to worry about us?”
“Us?” asked her mother. “You mean, you and him…”
“I told you. I’m a grown woman. This doesn’t concern you.”
“It concerns me as long as you’re living under my roof!” argued Beatrice.
“Mother, for once, shut up. Just, please, shut up. I’ll be out of here as soon the hell as I can,” said Lillian.
“Now just a minute, Lillian, how do you expect to live on your own with those measly checks those beret-wearing Frogs send you in the mail?”
“The French, mom. Not ‘frogs.’ They were my friends. I fought with them, saw them die. And I have a job.”
“At Starbucks.”
“A few months, I’ll have health benefits.”
“If you don’t get fired, or quit, like the last three jobs you tried?”
“Enough, mother! If it’s so terrible I’ll take Nathan’s car and find a motel.”
“I never said you had to leave,” said Beatrice, tearing.
“I have to. I’m saying it,” said Lillian.
And she was gone. Out the door.
“There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
The Miner’s Canary
She slept in her dead brother’s car that night. She’d parked it on 495.
She dreamed of war. She always dreamed of war.
In her dream she wore a fancy uniform with piping and epaulettes. She rode a horse and carried a sword. She spoke inspiring words that she struggled to remember in the morning.
It was always the same dream, the same battle, the same uniform. She was riding a horse, and carrying a sword, but there were planes in the sky and an omnipresent mushroom cloud loomed on the horizon, its raw power threatening to consume everything in sight.
She heard gunshots. She looked at the ground and saw the dying French soldier. “V for Victory,” he said in broken English.
The mushroom cloud was growing, a massive, radioactive pillar of black and grey and orange. It grew as if in time-lapse, billowing and smoking and breathing and shouting her name: Keighn, Keighn, Keighn as the inevitable shockwave emanated from the pillar of fire, leaving a devastated wasteland before her army…
She woke up, struggled with her memory.
“…”
The words she’d wanted and struggled to remember came up blank.
06:00 hours.
She woke up every morning at that exact time. It was something she’d trained herself to do automatically, like a mental alarm clock.
She went back to her house before her mother woke, to get her things. She owned very little that mattered to her. Her sense of self-discipline meant far more to her than a collection of Neon Genesis Evangelion DVDs and a Nintendo Wii. She certainly didn’t need the Hello Kitty bed sheets. She didn’t need any of those things. She’d hardly inhabited this room since High School. Her parents had kept it this way for fourteen years. She hadn’t been back since college, and even, but more so now, she felt like a guest in that room.
Her guns were in Nathan’s car, already. She’d kept them there, since her parents didn’t want her to keep them in the house. She looked around. All she could think of that she needed was her toothbrush and some clothes. She packed a suitcase, stripped, put on her old uniform, and walked out. She didn’t want to be around when Beatrice woke up.
Noah had always been an early riser. He was on the porch when Lillian walked out the front door. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking a steaming cup of coffee. They embraced. Neither of them said a word, except, by suggestion, in their tears.
Lillian Keighn headed for I-76. After a few miles, she merged onto the Vine Street Expressway and got off at the 8th Street Exit, in the heart of Philadelphia. There was no place she’d rather be than Philadelphia. Once it had been Paris, but Paris was gone. Ankara with its oriental charm was now a ruined nightmare, the province of soldiers and refugees. Only the city of her youth remained close to her heart.
A feeling of elation that she had begun to associate with the sensation of being on the cusp of something massive, no matter how terrible, crept in her. She had felt it in Ankara, tried to suppress it, ignore it, the voice inside telling her that maybe things had to get worse before they could improve. Again, her mind’s eye projected destruction- the towers around her, laying in ruins. She imagined, almost involuntarily, the old familiar nuclear shockwave, the diabolic mushroom of superheated particles… she imagined how noble the dirtiest of beggars could be, even- no, especially- in death.
Nearly sideswiped by a taxi when she began to drift toward the lane marker, she admonished herself for her apocalyptic fantasies. She drew all her concentration in one focus and decided on a destination.
The Miner’s Canary was located a few blocks south of City Hall. It was something of an underground phenomenon, having no official liquor license and no publicity. It was funded mainly by charity. There wasn’t much, but it was always enough for the radicals and the hipsters who hung out there. Lillian had discovered it in college; Raycliff had introduced her. It was a smoky, non-carding dive run by a fat, bearded oldie called Stuart who wore a beaded moustache, cowboy hot, Utili-Kilt and an extra-large Philadelphia Folk Festival t-shirt.
“My God,” said Stuart, as Lillian Keighn entered the establishment in her Red-Scarf Uniform.
“Entirely yours,” said Lillian.
“Welcome home, Major,” said Stuart, saluting her. She dutifully returned the salute, and Stuart came out from behind the bar to give her a big bear-hug.
“It’s good to be back,” said Lillian. She sat down, and Stuart got her a Yuengling draft.
“Still your label?” he asked, putting the glass down in front of her. Lillian smiled. “Everyone, this is Lily… sorry, Lillian Keighn,” announced Stuart to the entire bar.
“Oh no you don’t,” whispered Lillian, to no avail.
Stuart continued: “Major Lillian Keighn, a true hero of the Franco-Turkic War and the Secular Rationalist movement, here and abroad!” The patrons of the bar- mostly youngish students and faculty from the major universities in the city- erupted into applause. Lillian blushed as several of the older members of the crowd- probably professors- saluted her. “Lillian, you might not know, has been organizing the Philly Rationalist meetings you’ve all been attending the last few weeks. She’s a personal friend of our absent mentor, Dr. Raycliff, and if you don’t show this little lady the proper respect, word on the street is she’ll have your heart cut out and sent to your family in a box.” A group of college kids in the corner, their lower faces covered by bandanas, cheered especially hard at this. They were tough-looking youths, dressed in decorated leather jackets and camouflage pants with Doc Martins. Lillian knew who they were: the League of the Militant Godless.
The League had almost gotten itself labeled as a terrorist organization for assassinating religious sex-predators until Lillian, respected as she was in her circle, used her influence to arrange a meeting with their leadership, as well as with the leadership of other militant atheist groups in which she’d convinced them to stop carrying out acts of violence until the time was right, when there was no other option. She’d met with them in the outskirts of Philly, in an abandoned warehouse. From that meeting, and a few others with the less-than-militant organizations, she could see that the movement, angry at being forced underground, was rife with internal tension. The militants thought everyone else was too moderate, and everyone else said the militants were too extreme, though they secretly lauded their determination and consistency. The former RRS[3] thought the Secular Humanists were too tolerant of irrational precepts other than mainstream religion; the Secular Humanists dredged up ancient history, claiming the RRS had always been the lightning rod of the atheist community. Most of the hardcore Rationalists, especially the SciPunks[4], wouldn’t even talk to the Humanists…
It had been a bad situation, but Lillian’s status as a war hero in her circle helped. The other Rationalists did the bulk of the organizing there, while she handled the fine art of diplomacy. She understood conflict well, too well. It was only natural that she would be the one to rebuild their former alliance. While the other Red-Scarves organized cells in their own cities, she had strategized and planned from her old room in her parents’ home. Now she was on her own. She needed a place to stay for a while. It made sense for her to return to Philly.
In the back of the Canary’s kitchen, Lillian called Allen, told him she wouldn’t be coming in for work anymore. He didn’t ask questions. It was for the best.
Back in the bar, she downed another beer. It was on the house. She’d talked to Stuart. She could stay in the room above the Canary, no charge. The best thing about an underground network is that, in order to be largely self-sufficient, members had to take care of their own. It was solidarity in practice. The activist in her and the soldier in her knew it equally well.
The solidarity of atheists, skeptics, secularists, homosexuals, radicals of every rational stripe- no one could have predicted this, not even Lillian, no one except…
…except for Raycliff. He’d had vision, worked to build it, and had it blow up in his face. Lillian had thought until yesterday that Raycliff was dead. She had worked to restore his legacy. Now she knew he wasn’t dead. She knew he’d be back.
“I have an announcement,” said Lillian, loudly. The bar patrons quieted, put down their drinks, extinguished their cigarettes. “I spoke to someone yesterday, someone whose name you are all familiar with, even if you’ve never met him. I’ve spoken to Marvin Raycliff.”
No one said anything. Like Lillian, most of them had believed Raycliff to be dead.
Lillian continued: “He’s been extradited from Kenya under no charge. Doubtless, he’ll be held under no charge. We will not stand for this. We will build a campaign around him, hold demonstrations, marches… we’ll force their hand, and they’ll let him go. And when he’s with us again, we’ll be whole. No more conflict between us. We can’t take it anymore. We can’t take the divisions, we can’t survive them. If we want our movement to be triumphant, if we want history to care about us in a hundred years, we’ve all gotta be together on this.”
The patrons didn’t clap. It was too serious a moment. The silence seemed to last forever. In reality, it was no more than a few seconds before someone started stamping their foot.
“Keighn,” she heard a voice.
“Keighn,” another voice.
“Keighn,” a familiar voice. Lillian turned. Stuart was chanting with the chorus of patrons: “Keighn! Keighn! Keighn! Keighn!”
They stomped their feet, banged on the tables. “Keighn, Keighn, Keighn, Keighn!”
Keighn glowed in the fire of their hearts, burning strong. They reached out to her with all their love and their pride and their hopes. Their fire consumed her. She was transformed. She rose, walked among them, smoked with them, drank with them. She walked across the bar, over to the table in the corner where the youth members of the League of the Militant Godless sat. Another patron offered her a seat. She took it to the League’s table, sat among their ranks. She untied her bandana from her neck, re-tied it around the lower part of her face.
“Glad to have you with us, Major,” said their leader, a tall black youth with long dreadlocks.
“By what title should I address you, sir?” asked Keighn.
“The league has no hierarchy,” he said. “We’re all our own headman. We speak for one and we speak for all. You may call me Joshua.” He introduced his companions: Serena, Yuri, Kim Lee, Hoagie and Boxer. Serena was a pretty black girl with beaded braids. She looked to be about seventeen. Yuri was a tough-looking kid with a scar over his right eye, who spoke with a hint of an Eastern-European accent and had long, sandy-colored hair. Kim Lee was a lanky, tattooed young Asian-American. Hoagie and Boxer were handsome Hispanic boys. Hoagie was beefy, but Boxer was tiny, the smallest of them. Keighn looked at Boxer, his face half-hidden by his bandana. She discerned that he wasn’t even in college, couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Probably Hoagie’s little cousin or something.
“The kid’s my brother,” said Hoagie.
“Don’t worry Major,” said Serena. “Boxer was a non-combatant in the Days of Rage.”
“Does a mean hacking job, too,” said Joshua.
“Is that right?” asked Keighn of Boxer.
“Yes, Major.” The boy said.
“Joshua,” began Keighn, “last time I talked to the league, I was told you’d made your peace. Am I right?”
“I’m still havin’ to deal with a few malcontents, won’t stop harassing the clergy on their way to church. They don’t see the big picture. But the assassinations have stopped.”
“And you see the big picture?”
“Sun-Tzu, Art of War. Know when to fight, know when not to fight.”
“Good lesson,” said Keighn.
“It’s like you said sir, we force their hand. If they’re the fascists we think they are, then violence is justified. They’ll show their colors or they won’t. We’ll hit on the real threat or its shadow.”
“Very good,” said Keighn. “Is than an iClip?” she asked Boxer, who was fiddling with some sort of miniaturized headset. “What kind of music you kids listening to these days?”
“Most of the new stuff is censored,” said Yuri.
“I been sorta… re-discoverin’ old stuff,” said Boxer.
“Like what?” asked Keighn.
“You ever hear of Green Day?”
“I think we’re gonna get along, kid,” said Keighn, taking off her uniform jacket and revealing her t-shirt. Boxer smiled, passed her the iClip. Keighn attached the device over her ear, let Boxer select the music with his tiny, white remote controller. “Volume good?” he asked over the music.
“Turn it up,” said Keighn. “Turn it way up.”
She closed her eyes and let the music take over her mind.
In the dark, she raged against the memory of her dream, at the terrible cloud. She stared into the face of the devil, dared him to show her the future.
She could only imagine destruction. That was all she saw, all she knew she’d ever live. She thought about every one she loved being gone, dead. She could almost see their graves, every epitaph and flower. In the end, the cloud had consumed even this, and Lillian Keighn stood alone in the wasteland.
She could almost hear a guitar in the wasteland. It was playing an angry, bitter song. She knew the words, and she sang with all her pent-up rage.
“Yes,
My guard stood hard when abstract threats,
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect.”
-Bob Dylan
Daughter of the Revolution
Philadelphia:
August 27, 2018.
She loved the streets at night. They didn’t lie, didn’t cover up anything. It was said that the only way to really know Philadelphia was by riding the subways and walking the side streets.
Liz liked to believe, at fourteen, that she’d seen everything. That was a projection, it wasn’t true and she knew it. She liked to have people think of her that way, because she was largely responsible for herself, and had been for a long time.
She liked to walk at night. It was her freedom from the responsibilities that awaited her at home. Her mother was divorced and had no idea how to be a parent. Liz was used to taking care of herself, cooking dinner, cleaning the apartment. On the streets, she didn’t have those expectations. She could walk by someone else’s mess without having to make a mental note to clean it up. She could observe other peoples’ dysfunctions, let them register in her head as a reality that was not hers alone.
She crossed Broad Street, heading east on South.
South Street had once been a Mecca of art and culture. So she had been told. It must have been sometime in the late Nineties before the Starbucks and the fast food chains, took over. She wasn’t sure when Tower Records had closed, but she knew Zipperhead had gone first. Only last year, the current owners of that building had finally won the legal right to take down the giant spiders from the wall. It had truly been the End of an Era.
The occult shops were no more. You could still buy a glass piece, but there were no alternative music shops anymore. Everywhere Liz went she heard the same brainless, moronic commercial rap that she’d convinced herself as of Eighth Grade had to be a government conspiracy to make people stupid, along with just about everything that was popular.
The clothes she wore were simple: blue denim coveralls, an army jacket, thick glasses, Timberland boots and the inner circuitry of a gutted digital watch on a chain around her neck. She dressed like this so other Young Technocrats could tell she was one of them.
She was used to having people stare at her. They’d done it with a kind of disdain before, almost pity. Then the Days of Rage happened, and people now looked at her like she was wearing a bomb. They looked at her with fear, and that meant they respected her.
If the other militants had known that she was out, they would have insisted on going with her. She wanted to be alone. Most of her life she’d had to be protected by someone on another from within the Movement. After her father had nearly been killed, the League had given her a body guard. Now that the Days of Rage were over, they’d relaxed a little, but Liz was still too much of a target, being the daughter of the movement’s absent leader, Dr. Marvin Raycliff.
That was why she used her mother’s name. When her father was home, she visited him on weekends. She loved the time she spent with him. Raycliff was not exactly an involved parent when he was around, but Liz worshipped her father nonetheless. She read his books, listened to his speeches on the internet before the YouTube authorities could take them down. In school she had always done well, but she scared her teachers. They didn’t know what to do with this girl who spouted her father’s philosophies when asked to write a three page essay on the Civil War. Finally, they’d recommended she be sent to the Liberty School. She’d begin 9th grade there in just a few days.
It was the end of summer, when each passing day just sunk further into the hearts of every child with the knowledge that school was just around the corner. Liz was not immune to that heavy feeling, but when she walked at night, on these streets, it was bearable. She could deal.
She was good at finding ways to deal.
Once, years ago, after she’d started a fight at school, the authorities had requested that Liz’s mother send her to a child psychologist. After forty-five minutes of talking to her one on one, the shrink called Marie in and informed her that Liz was probably the most self-sufficient ten year-old he’d ever spoken too.
Marie barely spoke English, and Liz had to translate for her.
The shrink had said there was nothing wrong with her. That was all Liz had understood, and it was all she could translate. The rest of the psychobabble, she hadn’t known.
Thinking back on it, she’d done her best. She always did.
There was a man sitting on a crate outside the liquor store, holding a paper cup in his hands. Liz walked by him, ignored his pleas for spare change. There were a few kids she knew who were out, but they didn’t notice her. They wore identical, blank expressions and called each other home-boy and bullshit. She almost felt sorry for them, unaware as they were.
Awareness was important to her. It meant something to be clear-minded, a freethinker. Other girls her age busied themselves with fashion, trying to impress vacant-headed boys, but not her. While they went to the school dances, she stayed at home and read.
She loved Darwin.
Her mother didn’t know what to do with her either. Marie was an immigrant; assimilation was important to her, and she wanted her daughter to have the happy, fun-filled adolescence that America promised on its packaging.
Liz was native-born, and she saw things differently: she liked being an outcast, it was part of who she was, and at fourteen she’d accepted that. She had no intention of trying to fit in with any crowd that wouldn’t take her. In the Young Technocrats, at least, she’d found people who were like her… unconventional. They’d read her father, too. It was his ideas that they’d organized around, pledging their support to the movement at large.
Of course, they treated her like royalty, and that wasn’t what she wanted. So she walked alone at night, and they didn’t have to know.
Her mother didn’t have to know, either, probably didn’t want to. It was enough that the dishes were done and the trash was taken out and Liz’s grades never sank below a B+.
She walked alone, past homeless beggars and airheaded kids and people with more sadness in their eyes than she’d ever seen anywhere else in her life.
The streets were sad, and the streets were beautiful. Out of work musicians played for the odd coin. Vendors sold their wares from tablecloths on the sidewalk. Loud music played from tattoo parlors. Across the street, a bunch of idiots, not much older than herself, were breaking the glass off a mosaic.
The streets didn’t lie.
She thought about Liberty, the Corporate School. She’d heard rumors- Youthguard, for one. Some of the kids in her class had started talking about near the end of last year. It was supposed to be some sort of Boy Scout program, but she’d heard another word, one that sounded ominous when applied to students in uniform: Greyshirts.
She barely knew anything about them, just that they weren’t her type.
She wasn’t sure what was true and she didn’t want to find out, but she knew she’d have to go. There was no getting out of this.
She cleared her mind, continued to walk. Ninth Street. Eighth Street. Seventh.
She walked another half a mile, hit Front Street and headed north.
Old City. Cool people lived here. They still held First Fridays, still had bar-crawls. Liz didn’t hang out here much, it was an older crowd.
She had a few dollars in her pocket and she wanted something to eat. She was sick of eating her own meals. She found a place that served falafel, paid for the sandwich with three bills and a handful of coins. The woman at the counter gave her a funny look as she handed Liz her falafel. Liz decided to take her food outside.
She sat down on the sidewalk, not thinking that she probably looked like a runaway to all the neo-yuppies, in her coveralls and army jacket. She wondered how far she could go on sympathy alone.
It was a pragmatic thing to ask oneself, of course. She had to think of herself. If she didn’t, who would?
She considered, for example, that it would not be too hard to exploit any of the hip urban couples walking past her. She could pretend to have been robbed, or worse. She could take advantage of their generosity, have them take her home and fall in love with her, and in the morning she could be gone, with whatever of theirs she could carry away.
It wasn’t something she planned on doing, just that she thought about it.
More or less, everybody does. Liz had been alive long enough to know that most human interaction was manipulative. It was right there, in Darwin, and in her father’s books:
“Cooperation and competition are mathematical distinctions, part of the same algorithm. We want to believe that there are intrinsic, fundamental truths because it is most comforting to us, but the reality is a moral grey area where we are free to write our own rules, and most of us are scared to death of that potential. They are afraid that human beings may not be entirely one thing or another. They are afraid of complexity. That is why so many people in this country are afraid of what I have to say: I am not afraid of complexity. I welcome it, desire only to understand it, and I think the notion that all people really need is simplicity in their lives is an insulting one. If anything, we should all try to understand reality instead of shrinking away from it like frightened children.
“So what if we are cruel to each other as we produce our works of art, our scientific discoveries, all those expressions of human self-consciousness? We’d be cruel to each other if we lived in primitive societies, too. Egalitarian doesn’t mean the same thing anthropologically as it does colloquially: in a primitive, egalitarian society, it’s not that power and responsibility is shared equally. What egalitarian really means is that everyone has a theoretically equal opportunity to exert power over everybody else. The people who fear complexity would not let you believe this: they would tell you that once upon a time, human beings lived in perfect harmony, and that knowledge and modernity have spoiled our lives and removed us from nature.
“I say to them that modernity is our nature, that no knowledge, no matter how trivial, can ever be insignificant in the human drive to understand our world, and that the primitive utopias of modern society’s renunciatory dreamers are fairytales.”
She hummed a song, her father’s song. He’d rewritten the words, taught them to her on their visits:
The Radical to the War has gone,
In the ranks of death, you’ll find her.
Her father’s sword, she has girded on…
Something, something, something…
Land of proles, cried the Rationals,
Though all the betrays thee,
One freedom she at arms did guard,
A Rational Society.
The soldier fell, but no fundie’s guns
Could bring that woman under,
For the words she spoke resound today,
In our Revolution’s thunder.
She said, Blind faith shan’t sully thee,
Nor fear of God, your dignity!
Her songs remain for the young and free
From the propaganda factory!
Or was it “the Party’s Bullshit factory?”
It was not a smart idea to sing it out loud. She liked its sound, though, and she didn’t know the original words, so she hummed.
Daa-daa-da-da-daa-da-daa-da-daa…
Da-da-daa-da-da-daa-daa-daa…
She watched the people as they passed her by, averting their eyes. Pity. Prelude to sympathy.
It would be so easy. They needed money, she and her mom. Liz knew she could pull off a hustle if she tried.
What harm could it do? All these people were just like the ones at her school, only richer. They were unaware.
“Albert Camus believed that awareness began with rebellion.”
She’d never read Camus.
“Camus was wrong. Awareness begins with critical thinking. There is no excuse for not being a critical thinker in the modern world.”
She laughed to herself. Most kids her age didn’t know what critical thinking meant.
“Are you alright, kid?”
Pretty, thirties, red dress. The boyfriend, or husband, or whatever was in a suit. They looked like they’d come from the suburbs.
“It’s starting to rain. Do you need a ride home?”
She’d felt drops.
“Hey, are you alright? Someone hurt you?”
“I was thinking.”
“Do you need a ride home?”
The woman spoke slowly, as if to a small child.
“No.”
“You live around here?”
“No.”
“Are you okay?”
How many times had she asked that?
“I’m okay,” said Liz. She did not want to go through with it. “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”
“We saw you sitting there. It was starting to rain. We were worried.”
“You’re not my mom,” said Liz.
“Does she know you’re out here?”
“Is it your business?”
“Are you at least going to get out of the rain?”
“Come on, Linda,” said the man in the suit.
“Sam, I think there’s something wrong with her.”
“I like the rain,” said Liz.
She just wanted them to leave her alone.
“You mind? I want my space,” said Liz.
“Sorry,” shrugged the woman in the red dress. She and her suit walked off.
Liz got up from her spot, started walking in the direction of the Frankford El. She was going home. Her wanderlust satisfied, she was bored.
[1] Lillian Keighn refers to the EPL (Emergency Parliament of Lyon), which was formed in the wake of the nuclear bombing of Paris. The EPL was dominated by the Social Democrat Party, the Secularist Party, and the National Labor Party. It was a parliamentarian democracy that lasted from the beginning of the war in 2013 to the NLP Coup d’etat in 2030, the beginning of the era of “French Socialism.”
[2] NEmo: A subculture that grew out of Emo in the mid-to-late 2010’s in an attempt to get back to their punk roots. Folk etymology uncertain.
[3] RRS (Rational Response Squad): Controversial web-community founded by Rook Hawkins, Kelly O’Connor, and Brian Sapient, until 2017. Considered one of the probable origins of SciPunk.
[4] SciPunk (Science-Punk): The shared countercultural ethos of the militant atheist youth groups, including the League, the Young Technocrats, the Scarlet Panthers and the Ockham’s Razors. SciPunk stressed rational thinking and a scientific outlook while also embracing its roots in the Punk rock scene and other alternative subcultures.
“It is true that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. It is equally true that in the land of the blind, the two-eyed man is an enemy of the state, the people, and domestic tranquility… and necessarily so. Someone has to rearrange the furniture.”
SKIP LARGELY UNREFINED CHAPTER
-----------------------------------
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Transcript: Post-Extradition Subject Interview
Date of Interview: 12/27/2018
Interviewer: Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, Special Agent, FBI, DoJ
Subject: #ZZZ001; Raycliff, Marvin
Subject DoB: 5/10/1973
Elizabeth Fitzpatrick (EF): Please state for the record, your name, date of birth, and occupation.
Marvin Raycliff (MR): Dr. Marvin William Raycliff. I was born on May 10, 1973. Before leaving this country I was an adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the Department of Physical Anthropology.
EF: And at this time, are you mentally or physically incapacitated in any way as to be unable to testify?
MR: No.
EF: You previously held the position of Full-Time Professor in the UPenn Department of Anthropology, is that correct?
MR: Yes.
EF: You lost your tenure, is that correct?
MR: That’s correct.
EF: Why?
MR: My tenure was revoked.
EF: Why?
MR: The Board of Trustees felt I had… a subversive influence on the students.
EF: Are you a subversive? Or do you consider yourself a patriotic American, a loyal citizen?
MR: Considering my options…
EF: Doctor… please don’t make light of this. It’ll go so much easier if you’d just answer yes or no.
MR: I have always considered myself a loyal American.
EF: Why did you leave the country?
MR: My countrymen did not reciprocate that loyalty.
EK: You were targeted for a violent crime because you upset people. You made them uncomfortable. They felt threatened. You understand that now, correct?
MR: Yes.
EF: Before you left this country, you affiliated with several former national and local organizations which are no longer recognized by this government as legitimate entities. Several of them have been designated domestic terrorist organizations. These organizations include the following: Rational Response Squad, Secular Coalition for America, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, American Atheists United, Society of Concerned Scientists, the Association of Non-Religious Professionals, the Evolutionist Education Lobby, BrightPAC, Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia, Freethinkers Anonymous, PhillyCOR, and the Humanist Association of Greater Philadelphia. Do you intend to contact former members of said organizations?
MR: No.
EF: You were an associate of a Lillian Beatrice Keighn during the years of 2004 through 2008, were you not?
MR: She was a student of mine. Very promising.
EF: Very beautiful.
MR: Yes.
EF: As a so-called Rationalist activist, you drew attention to yourself that contributed to the circumstances under which you left this country, is that correct?
MR: I suppose so.
EF: Do you admit that it was your drawing attention to yourself that resulted in your near-assassination?
MR: No.
EF: Dr. Raycliff, in order to be released, you must satisfy all preconditions.
MR: I admit that I’m not popular.
EF: That’s relative, Dr. Raycliff. Did you know they’re printing T-shirts with your face on the front now?
MR: That doesn’t sound like a standard question.
EF: It was rhetorical. Of course you wouldn’t know about the t-shirts.
MR: No, I wouldn’t. I’ve been holed up in here for six months, and you people still won’t tell me what I’m being charged with!
EF: When this session is finished, you will be permitted to leave this facility. The purpose of this interview is to determine other factors, unrelated to your detainment.
MR: Other factors such as what? Video surveillance? Wire tapping? Postal interception?
EF: The subject will refrain from redirecting questions at the interviewer.
MR: You got rhetorical first.
EF: As for the answer to your question, Dr. Raycliff, these factors are classified. May we go on?
MR: You may.
EF: You said your country did not reciprocate your loyalty. This is somewhat vague. We would appreciate if you would clarify that statement.
MR: Is that a question?
EF: Yes.
MR: No. I don’t care to clarify. It’s as clear as day.
EF: You said that you consider yourself a loyal American. As a loyal American, would you ever consider taking up arms, unlawfully, against your government?
MR: No.
EF: Would you ever consider sedition or espionage as a means of dissent?
MR: No.
EF: Are you now, or have you ever been, a homosexual?
MR: Let’s just say I think you have very pretty eyes for an FBI agent.
EF: I’ll put that down as a no, unless you have an objection.
MR: Maybe after this we could get a cup of coffee?
EF: The subject will refrain from romantic solicitation. Besides, Doctor, I’m engaged.
MR: Never stopped me before.
EF: The subject-
MR: I know, I know. The subject will refrain.
EF: Next question, Doctor: If you are to resume your work at another university, would you continue to frame religion and science as mutually incompatible?
MR: I’d have no integrity if I didn’t.
EF: Should I repeat the question, Doctor?
MR: Only if you want me to repeat my answer.
EF: Moving on. You were married to Marie Ottero-Raycliff from January 2004 to July 2007, is that correct?
MR: Yes.
EF: You are currently single and divorced?
MR: Yes.
EF: You have a 14-year old daughter?
MR: Yes.
EF: Her name is Elizabeth?
MR: Yes.
EF: I’m an Elizabeth, too. Does she live with her mother?
MR: Yes. Don’t you have Marie’s records?
EF: Of course. She’s an immigrant, is that correct?
MR: Marie’s a citizen.
EF: Native?
MR: No. What does that have to do with…
EF: The subject will refrain from redirecting questions. I ask, Doctor, because I see that you’ve requested visiting privileges. I want to make sure you can see your daughter when you’re free.
MR: Any more questions?
EF: That’s it. Thank you, Doctor. We’re done here.
MR: The subject is free?
EF: You’ll have to be processed out. Follow me.
End Transcript Record.
“It is true that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. It is equally true that in the land of the blind, the two-eyed man is an enemy of the state, the people, and domestic tranquility… and necessarily so. Someone has to rearrange the furniture.”
After all, over 100 pages double-spaced (mostly) is enough, isn't it?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty...
I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech...
I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.
I believe in the reality of progress.
I - But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.”
-H. L. Mencken
“I believe only in the human capacity to underestimate our own potential. Religion is the ultimate expression of this unfortunate insecurity in the species.”
-Marvin Raycliff
Redemption
Philadelphia Airport:
1/1/2019.
The demonstrators had taken over the airport. They were everywhere, their faces hidden by bandanas, holding “Free Raycliff” signs. They had been there for almost three weeks. Christmas and New Year’s had come and gone- another stark Philadelphia winter- and they were still there: camping out in the parking lots, bathing in the bathroom sinks, doing everything they could do to rub authority the wrong way.
They did not carry arms. That was expressly forbidden, the edict issued by Keighn herself. Even the League of the Militant Godless, acting as Major Keighn’s personal bodyguards, was unarmed. Keighn had stressed this: they had to trust Airport Security to protect their right to demonstrate. She’d made sure the League had understood this before declaring, publicly, by pirate radio, that the Rationalist Movement would be at the airport until Marvin Raycliff’s plane had landed, and he had disembarked safely.
Last night, Keighn had missed her parents’ annual New Year’s Party for the tenth year in a row. She had not spoken with her mother in six months. During the three-week campout at the Philadelphia Airport, Keighn had received a single letter from Beatrice, delivered by a Leaguer.
Her father was dying of lung cancer. His condition was critical.
She did not want to see him, did not want to know how weak he was, on his hospital bed. She could only imagine, and that was enough to haunt her.
Any day now…
The situation felt primed to explode.
That was what everyone kept saying, in Keighn’s circle. Outside her circle, the saying was, “It can’t happen here.” She’d heard that before, encountered the sentiment from the people she tried to warn on the streets, in the airport, the subways, the telephone poles… she had been busy.
They had been busy- the veterans, the militants, the moderates- it was their baby, the Free Marvin Raycliff Campaign.
Keighn and the others knew, of course, that Raycliff would eventually be let go. The point was to draw support. They were not asking for sympathy. They were asking for loyalty. They wanted to force the people to pick a side and take a stand.
Raycliff would be released. Word was he was already on his way.
Lillian Keighn, Major Keighn, was facing off a cop. It was the same cop she had faced off for two and a half weeks. Every morning, the cop asked Keighn to put out her cigarette. Every morning, six or seven Militant Godless, or Razors, or Scarlet Panthers, or Young Technocrats- whichever gang of toughs was on hand- would surround them both, leaving enough space open for the cop to back out of the situation, which she always did. This morning, though, before she left, she said: “I got word for you, Major. Your boy’s coming in today. Straight from DC. See you never.”
Keighn saluted the cop to her back as she walked away. The toughs- the Young Technocrats- snickered.
In one of the Rationalists’ tents that had overtaken the parking lot, Stuart was protecting 14-year old Liz Ottero, daughter of Marvin Raycliff. Liz’s mother was at home. There was an armed guard, courtesy of the Scarlet Panthers, in her home.
Somehow it had leaked to the media that Liz would be there. The damned Paparazzi had nearly accosted her at the food court, but Stuart, wearing a Red-Scarf uniform, had intimidated them to the point of leaving. He’d made a point of telling Airport Security that the situation was all under control.
Now, in their tent, he was concerned about his friend, Raycliff. How would he react to seeing his daughter in the uniform of the militant Young Technocrats?
They did not carry arms, but the airport crawled with men and women and children in uniforms of one kind or another. They were the many tribes of Rationalists. In the airport, they must have looked like a foreign culture, a strange, alien ethnic group, but they spoke English and carried Free Raycliff signs, distributed Rationalist pamphlets, proclaimed their atheism, their homosexuality, their deviance from mainstream America in the parking lot, in the terminal, in the food court. They made speeches. held demonstrations, put on skits and ripped the pages from Bibles on the spot.
They also made a point of following clergymen into the bathrooms, just to make sure.
Stuart’s job was to make sure that Raycliff’s daughter didn’t get into trouble. If there was one thing he knew that Raycliff wanted, it was that Liz be spared the anxiety associated with having the so-called most dangerous man in America for a father. Liz, however, had different ideas. She worshipped her father and insisted on seeing him the moment he arrived in Philadelphia. Stuart had taken it to Keighn, and Keighn had relented.
“That was his plane, wasn’t it?” Liz asked Stuart.
“We’ll find out. They’re gonna come and get us when he’s here.”
“You promised I’d be the first thing he sees when he steps off the plane. He’d want that.”
“I know, honey, I know. You’ll be the first thing he sees, you and a dozen tabloid journalists.
“I don’t care about them. You can duct tape my mouth and write Godless on it with a magic marker if you want.”
“You won’ talk?”
“What do I have to say to them?”
Keighn entered the tent. “The plane’s here,” she told Stuart.
“Let’s go,” said Stuart, taking Liz in hand.
“She’s not coming.”
“I promised her she’d be the first thing he sees.”
Keighn gave Stuart a mild death-glare.
“Please, Major? I just wanna see my dad,” pleaded Liz.
“Fine,” Keighn relented. “Don’t let her out of your sight,” she said to Stuart.
The three of them walked at the head of a procession of Rationalists to meet Raycliff as he stepped off the plane and arrived at Gate 5D. The sight of him rendered their hearts with pride: he was 45, but he looked considerably older. There were fleshy, wrinkled bags under his eyes. His hair was grey. He wore a long, untrimmed beard.
He pushed his way through the journalists, and hugged his daughter. The others closed around them, cutting off the reporters. They moved as a mass out of the concourse, leaving the airport. In the parking lot, they packed up their tents and took off in their vans, returning to their homes, their jobs, their lives.
“It is true that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. It is equally true that in the land of the blind, the two-eyed man is an enemy of the state, the people, and domestic tranquility… and necessarily so. Someone has to rearrange the furniture.”