i get that your paragraph shows the aspiration for personal fulfillment, but isn't a big component of humanism that of equal enjoyment?

 

You're right, it's terribly written and doesn't make logical sense. I took it out. I should have mentioned that this character lives in a time when things are really, really bad for atheists, so he's sort of a next-gen atheist, part of a more militant and cautious generation.

 

About the day job comment, I would suggest not judging an entire work from one questionable paragraph, which I admit was terrible and unnecessary. For the record, I am actually quite a good writer. That just wasn't a good example.

 

Thanks for understanding. Everyone has bad moments. I've been working on this for weeks, and much of it is far more readable than that.

 

Sure. It's a work in progress and it's a very dark novel about resistance to an attempt by the Christian Dominionists to takeover civil government in the near-future. There are many parts that I am still going over- that I have highlighted for future work- because I'm trying to move the story along. It's quite a long novel. I will post the Author's note:

 

 

Author’s Note:

Please read before proceeding

 

Choose carefully: this book may not sit well with you. By the end of this passage it is assumed that roughly half the people who picked it up in the first place will have put it down and refused to read on. If I have managed to offend you, provoke you, anger you, then I have already succeeded. Of the more open-minded among you, who continue past this admittedly wordy note of mine to read the novel in its entirety, I hope you see that the purpose of this work is to open a dialog. This dialog can be one of amity or enmity: at this point, I don’t care because in either case I will continue to struggle for the de facto civil rights of my atheist, deist, secular humanist, rationalist, bright, freethinking, agnostic and pagan brothers and sisters. I will struggle by any means necessary, because the enemy I am up against is relentless and unwilling to listen to reason. Speaking of the enemy…

…Marvin Raycliff, one of the novel’s central protagonist characters, once said of Dominionism that sometimes, very rarely, conspiracy theories are true. Only a real skeptic would say this. Speaking of skeptics…

…Populist America condemns intellectualism, so intellectuals condemn America in snide retaliation. I admit my complicity in this sordid affair. By way of a subtle but vicious cycle, the standing of the intellectual in America has been utterly eroded. For those seeking the votes and allegiances of “the common man,” this is a godsend, a way to mobilize disparate people against the arrogance and smugness of “ivory tower intellectuals.” Speaking of God…

…the threat posed to the freedom of all Americans by Dominionism and Christian Reconstructionism is a major theme of this novel, but there are other themes as well that are at issue in these pages. They are themes drawn from my own political and scientific philosophies: my eupraxsophy, if you will. Let it not be said that this is a propaganda piece: the novel is written “under the microscope” and my own ideas are under the same strict examination, through the perspectives of the various characters, as are the ideas that I personally oppose.

I am an atheist, a humanist and a rationalist. As such I represent a minority in America that, while it has gained media traction of late, is actively distrusted and misunderstood by the masses and villified by a vocal minority of fundamentalist religious leaders who want nothing less than total “Dominion” over all institutions and aspects of civil and private life: the destruction of secular, or civil, government. They want to replace secular government with Theocracy, a political system in which, in the case of the United States, the head of government would be the distorted Jesus Christ of the Christian Right. “Jesus, save me from your followers.” Non-Christians, especially Muslims, homosexuals, atheists, and even more progressive Christians would be second-class citizens at best, or euphemistically “relocated for their own protection” to concentration camps.

These Dominionists are not the Evangelicals, although they exert considerable political influence over Evangelical voting blocks. They are the worst of fundamentalists, and had they not been born to the luxury, comfort, and opportunity of life in this country, perhaps it would have been D. James Kennedy and his Christian Coalition cohorts flying planes into towers. Imagine if the middle-eastern Jihadists and the most hardcore, hateful fundamentalist Christians in America switched places and lifestyles, but not religions: I don’t think we’d see much of a difference except that a secular and predominantly Muslim developed western country would be locked in an unwinnable war against Christian terrorists. The difference between a fascist and a terrorist is this: technical legitimacy, and the correlates of birth. If or when Christian Fascism, or Christo-Fascism, rises to power here, it will at first take the form of (marginally) popular democracy: social conservatives of every stripe, including Catholics and Protestants who would have been killing each other two hundred years ago if not for our free thinking founding fathers, will unite in a kind of holy alliance to expunge this country of its intellectuals, its atheists, and its outcasts. In short, anyone who is not a social conservative is at risk.

The focus of this novel is a conflict between the rational and the irrational, between knowledge and ignorance. I am not supposing that the irrational does not have a place in our culture: it has been a driving force as much as reason. Irrationality is what makes myths, literature, movies, TV and comic books entertaining, but it is also what leads to the acceptance of propaganda by a population subsequently willing to endure economic sacrifice and to send its loved ones to die in places whose names its leaders can’t pronounce.

I’m not afraid of a Christian president; Christian Presidents are all my country’s ever had. I am afraid of a president who approaches public policy in the same way that he approaches personal spirituality. That is scary. I am afraid of a Christian Nation, because there’s no such thing. If there were, if the world was filled with people who were truly Christ-like, then I doubt you would be able to find a shred of religion on Earth. A little joke among my circles is that Jesus Christ must have been one of the greatest atheists who ever lived, as he had such a brilliant understanding of religion.

What exactly should- or must- be done about a fundamentalist movement within the world’s most powerful country, a movement which recognizes no boundaries and engages in no rational dialogue? I have ideas, and I want to test them, so I am writing this book, which is called Sons and Daughters. The book begins by chronicling the organization of a resistance- a counter-movement, indeed a counter-conspiracy- that recognizes almost, but not quite as few boundaries on what is acceptable conduct in the fight against religious totalitarianism.

Some people put their trust in our political system to weed out the bad crops. In other words, “It can’t happen here. Americans wouldn’t let it happen.” I think we all know that the only appropriate response to “it can’t happen here” is “the hell it can’t.”

I do not want to give the impression that I think all people of faith are sheep or cattle waiting to be herded by charismatic and dangerous leaders. However, I have too often met those who believe that if someone were to falsely represent their religion in such a manner as the Dominionists misrepresent Christianity, then surely the evil-doer would be struck down by an omniscient and benevolent God; that no human intervention is needed to prevent the next holocaust. They further insist that since that’s what they believe, it’s okay.

It’s not okay. Prayer alone is not an option against religious tyranny.

Generally they believe that “God is love” and that He operates out of free will, but to say that you would do nothing, because God will take care of a problem- especially a problem as big as 21^st Century America’s successor to the Nazi Party- recalls that terrifying and ageless poem by Pastor Martin Neimöller:

 

In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.

 

Does this sound familiar? It should. I’ve got two words for it: moral bankruptcy. It may be happening next door, right now. Why don’t you put this book down for a second and check on your neighbor?

Thanks. Much appreciated.

In continuation: The evils wrought by those who came cannot compare to the evil of the silent ones, the evil of those who would not speak because it wasn’t their turn up against the wall. The Dominionists are a vocal minority, but they are influential enough that during the past eight years of George Bush’s presidency, we have come as close to a tyranny of the religious majority over the non-religious minority since the Era of McCarthyism.

There will always be evil. That is a given: human beings are capable of great kindness and cruelty in the same moment. Evil will always come. But silence… is no virtue. It is a choice, and it is the wrong choice. For fuck’s sake, tell your children, warn them of the aggressor who wraps himself in the cloak of patriotism and religion; warn your sons and daughters before it is too late.

 

 

Thank you,

xxxxxxxxxxx

Atheists and skeptics should all be willing to put their views forward by whatever means possible to open the eyes of the the complacent. My position is even if you can reach a few people to think and reason instead of following fantasy and insane theology it will eventually undermine their grip on our world. As Nordman suggests, I would realize the average American has difficulty with words beyond the 8th grade and lose interest quickly when they need to utilize a reference book to comprehend.

I would also suggest you forego warning people they may be offended by the content of your book, many of these people actually need to read it. You can state your views and your perspectives but your goal should be to get your book into as many hands as possible. Your statements in an Introduction or Author's Notes are really for marketing. The idea is to sell the possible reader into purchasing your book. Your editor or publisher will likely have proven techniques for maximizing browsers into purchases. Anyway, I applaud you for your effort and I look forward to your publication.

 

 

A more polished excerpt (doesn't start at the beginning of the novel, but that's because though I'm otherwise satisfied with the beginning, there is one chunk of narrative that I need to polish. Keep in mind I am trying to get the story out and then go back and polish, so there might be some technical problems with the following, but I think it's got a pretty solid basis.

 

============================================

 

“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. The context: a war correspondent arrives at the 4077^th with a preconceived notion of war. He leaves, of course, with his preconceived notion dispelled. He left in a body bag.

What it comes down is that preconceived notions are useless. The writers of M*A*S*H had known it, and the French knew it too.

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. She’d heard it 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.

By the age of 32, she had killed 13 men at the Battle of Izmir, and 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. Turkish nationalism had found an ally in Islamic fundamentalism, and had declared war on the European Secularism.

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 in Washington. They were the reason she and so many other young Americans had found their way to Europe.

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 EuroSec[2] 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 unpunished sex-predators in the clergy… 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.

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’d 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.”

The thirty-two year old Lillian on the battlefield 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, people. Sergeant Carson, bring me the flare gun,” she ordered, looking at her watch. It was 13:20. 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 an outcast, but at least there was a cause there, waiting for her, and it was worth fighting for.

 

 

Immigration and Naturalization Services

Department of Justice

www.usdoj.gov/ins/

4/19/2018

 

From: Re-Integration Officer First-Class Robert Pulansky, INS, DoJ, Commission for Émigré Re-Integration (CER)

 

To: Director Harold Spoon, INS, DoJ

CC: Director Sarah Whistler, FBI, DoJ

 

Re: Subject Interview (transcript to follow)

 

Director Spoon:

 

The attached transcript is typical of our sessions with American émigré combatants returned from the Franco-Turkic War. The common pattern is one of not only arrogance, but outright defiance and distrust of authority. We are still going over the psych profiles of the former émigrés, looking for a more consistent diagnosis. It is not shell-shock, though we have encountered this as well. This may be of note: The subject of the following transcript, KEIGHN, LILLIAN B., a former Major in the Parisian-American Secular Militia served with distinction, earning a post-war promotion before returning to the United States. She was offered instatement, with transfer of rank, in the United States Armed Forces. The subject, fitting the typical pattern, declined. Since returning to her home of Philadelphia, subject KEIGHN, LILLIAN B. remains unemployed and living off veteran’s checks from the French Government.

 

If a psychological basis can be found for this phenomenon then we must act to protect the mental health of these individuals and re-integrate them by any means; however, if this is indeed a pattern of outright dissent, the Commission recommends surveillance and wire-tapping of any and all former émigré combatants.

 

 

Robert Polansky, Re-Integration Officer First-Class, INS-CER

 

 

 

 

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

 

Time Index 14:45

 

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 22^nd, 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 MS-12. 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. Did your duties as a militia information officer include interrogation of enemy prisoners?

LK: Yes.

SB: As an interrogator in a foreign militia, the Parisian-American Secular Militia, were you familiar with the legal obligations of Article 17 of the Third Geneva Convention[3]?

LK: Yes, I was familiar with Article 17.

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? Did you violate the Third Geneva Convention?

LK: In accordance with the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I may incriminate myself.

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 to answer. Next question.

SB: Do you consider yourself a loyal citizen?

LK: What do you mean by that?

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 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 participate 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.

 

 

 

“War is the health of the state.”

-Randolph Bourne

 

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’d given 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-7224923K.

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[4], 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. His son, Noah- Lillian’s father- had fought in the first Gulf War, and in Vietnam. 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 give it to a daughter.”

Lillian pocketed the lighter. “Thanks, Dad.”

“Sam and 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

 

Two Calls

 

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; her mind had reveled in discipline. 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. The only love was their love of themselves in each other.

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, bwana. 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, bwana. 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 charges. You’re called the 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 over.

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 at the Bantu soldeir. “The finest kind,” 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 country. 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[5]  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, weary, but not yet lethargic- the kind of voice that, being unable to hear herself, she wondered if she possessed now. His urgent tone 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?”

“Lillian, does America still hate to see the smart guy win?” asked Raycliff.

“Now more than ever,” replied Lillian.

“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. Feds’ll keep me for as long as they can, probably say it’s for my own protection and 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 greens of camouflage or the chemical-neon green of flares. It was a healthy color. It felt right.

It was Lillian who was out of place, but 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 part of a relief effort on the part of the American radicals working with the French Military, sympathizers, he’d gone to the provisional capitol of 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 dead.

If only you here today, George, thought Lillian. You’d be having a 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 an adult, 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.

---

[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] EuroSec: The political philosophy of European Secularism.

[3] Article 17 of the Third Geneva Convention governs the treatment of enemy prisoners in war time.

[4] 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.”

[5] 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.

 

 

It's not as simple as that. The characters are supposed to intentionally subvert and distort my views. That's the whole point. By the time Part II rolls around (what I've described so far is pretty much the plot of Part I) the world the characters live in is no longer so familiar, but how it got to that point is a direct consequence of today's issues. It strikes really close to home. Much of it is literally painful to write as much as it is exhilarating.

 

 

Thank you! You really think it's good?

Thanks for understanding the motivations for writing this. I fear sometimes it will alienate other atheists, and I consider myself one of the most militant Rationalists short of Hitchens. Does the sense of American Rationalists as an isolated community who are in the process of becoming an extended family come through?

 

The first chapter ( which I did NOT reproduce above, as I am still working on it) actually starts in 2011, with the character of Marvin Raycliff taking care of his daughter for the weekend (he's divorced from his wife Marie, after his affair with Lillian Keighn) and being clued in to Liz's "nascent intelligence" and impending outcast status, and he sort of subverts the typical parent-to-child pep talk with his own philosophy when he discovers than his seven year old daughter is smart enough to ask him, when he says he does not believe in God, what if "daddy" is wrong?

 

In the story line, Liz as a teenager is affiliated with the militant youth groups who were responsible for the Days of Rage, but she later drops out of that when she decides to pursue a career in medicine. Her father, Marvin Raycliff, then- Secretary General of Free State Philadelphia, will die when she's about 17, and on an accelerated pre-med track at college. She, Lillian, and several other women are victims of a reproductive disease which is discussed in the Evolution Forum under  the topic name "Technical Question for Epic Atheist Novel" if you'd like some more details on the trajectory of the novel. This is partially what inspires Liz, Raycliff's daughter, to become a doctor specializing in women's reproductive issues. By the time of Part II, when Free State Philadelphia has fallen, DC has been nuked, and Philadelphia is the capitol of Moral Patriot America (though the resistance lives on), Liz is something of a "street doctor," denied her residency because of her political views because of , who cares for a "City of Orphans" (the title of Part II, the title of Part I being "The Lion and the Ram&quot. Her relationship with her stepmother, Lillian, the leader of the revolution, is difficult to say the least, though the RUF (Rational Underground Front) and later the RAM (Rational American Movement/Militants, the government of Free State and later, once again, the resistance) adopts her until she is reasonably enough of an adult to take care of herself for the rest of Grad School. As a sufferer of RHV (the reproductive disease) she is involved in the search for a vaccine, and when she's denied her residency for her political and philosophical groups (as a former "Young Technocrat" militant and the daughter of the slain leader of the RUF/RAM) she steals a sample of the vaccine to replicate on her own and administer to the children of slain resistance members who are the main characters in Part II.

@Nordmann: I can't find that specific example after going through it though. Every instance I found was contextually clear.

 

(The first chapter, still working on some points but I cleared up what was bothering me before)

 

Book One:

 

The Lion and the Ram

or

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Screw the Mob

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Point

 

 

Resistance Song

My country,' tis of thee,

Land of bad Biblespeak, where no one thinks;

Land where reason dies,

Drowned by Dominion’s lies,

But from the underside, resistance springs!

My idiot country, thee,

Land of obesity, fast food and all;

I love thy burbs and hoods,

OCs and Hollywoods;

From shore to shore - suburban sprawl.

Now guided missiles fly,

In the name of Liberty – ideals gone wrong;

So shut out your despair,

And play your part, aware:

Punk Rock, past silence blares- a righteous song!

What is theocracy,

But dark age tyranny? I give a fuck!

Long may our fight extend-

By reason, freedom rend;

Protect from fascist ends- let Atlas shrug!

 

 

“He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how little [sic] he knows. He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet this [sic] is a funny thing [sic]: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless— so much less cold than the Professional Optimists.”

 

-Sinclair Lewis

 

Hard Light

 

South Philadelphia, PA:

 

Thirty-nine and divorced: statistically insignificant. Generally speaking.

He was very used to abstractions. They were useful things. Distance was useful, too. Objectivity… possibly impossible, but nothing inherently wrong in a concept. Inherently.

At least, not a reasonable concept, if it’s useful: a working model. Deviations were expected, but at least…

…the deviations could be accounted for. Or they were so small that they were insignificant…

…he would run the numbers in his head, sometimes, wondering what had gone wrong. As if it wasn’t obvious. He’d never been able to restrain himself…

…not when he perceived as much potential could be unlocked from inside her. He’d sensed in her a kindred mind, disciplined and rational.

She was gone now, and before she’d gone she’d left, just like Raycliff himself had once left the home he’d shared with his wife.

He’d met his wife, Marie, in Argentina. By the end of Raycliff’s field trip, they were married and travelling back to the United States. For a year they’d lived in Brooklyn, then Philadelphia when Raycliff had accepted a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania. Their daughter was born later that year.

It had been 2004 when Elizabeth was born in March.

In September of 2004, Marvin Raycliff had met Lillian, the brilliant one who got away, and who took his marriage with her.

That wasn’t fair. The divorce had been Marie’s idea, and it was right.

After he’d left his wife and then-three-year old daughter, he and Lillian had lived together for two weeks before he’d walked out on her too. She’d asked him to leave. He knew he’d done right, that Lillian needed to feel in control enough to force him out. It had been important to him that she had felt empowered by their relationship, but considering the circumstances at the time- he, an adjunct faculty member, she a student… it probably wouldn’t have lasted (and all the better that it didn’t), but that had been too late to save his marriage to Marie. All the potential in the world couldn’t save that marriage.

He didn’t think he’d been in love with Lillian. He thought that he was simply loving himself through her, a vicarious self-love. A flaw, yes. It was simple as that. But Marie… he’d loved her, and he’d betrayed her. There was no going back.

…it didn’t matter now, did it? Regrets were appreciable sentiments, but utterly useless on any grand scale. Unencumbered passion was the domain of the ambitious and of rational egoists. He’d convinced himself of that. It was no higher calling, just a kind of self-consciousness that enabled him to deal with the disappointments in his life, and with his own shortcomings. He’d always a dramatic flair and it attracted intelligent, young women. He admitted that. He’d taken advantage of his perceived authority, yes. Lillian had not been the only one, but she was the only one he thought about. And he admitted this, too. He was only human, and didn’t deny himself pleasure.

Once he’d been a young man, an extremist. He’d softened into a moderate, and was shocked back into extremism by the continued social onslaught against clear and rational thinking that distinguished America from every other developed country in the world. He’d finally decided if he was going to have a political conscience, he could still be skeptical about it. He could retain his compass of reason by subjecting all his most deeply-held beliefs to close examination and discarding that which failed to hold up to the process of inquiry… or interrogation, as the case sometimes was. He’d interrogated the socialist out of himself, and the anarcho-syndicalist. The vegetarian. The artist. That one had to go, he’d never had any talent. The romantic, too, within him was gone. What remained was a rock-solid core of reason guided by the scientific method.  Every waking minute of his life he would try to dissuade himself of his more extreme convictions, and he’d dropped many of them, but those that remained… became all the stronger for having withstood the process.

He took it as fact that reality could be uncomfortable, even maddening, but that he could not turn his back on reality for a fantasy. He believed in responsibility, his responsibility and the responsibility of others to address reality, and to try and affect change. He was a skeptic, but he could not be called cynical. Or perhaps he was the best of the cynics, for they alone know when a limited measure of idealism is permissible, even necessary, for even the best of Rationalists to avoid the pitfalls of total nihilism. As a skeptic, as a scientist, he relied on facts. Data. The core of reality, the universal language of inquiry.

 

After seven years of war, recession, and unfulfilled promises on the part of the society in which he lived; after nearly twenty years of an adulthood that had left a broken home in its wake; after thirty-seven years of living as a non-theist in a country where a minority of religious fundamentalists had veritable control of the popular sentiments of the majority, he was proud to say that he was not a nihilist, that he had not given up.

He still had pride. He had the practice- the method- of skeptical inquiry to temper his radicalism. He had his daughter… for two and a half days out of the week, to live for and to come home for. As a parent, there lay the unstated: he would die for her if he had too.

That he would die to protect Liz was dictated by a simple equation:

 

C < R x B

Where in C represents the cost in fitness to the actor, Raycliff, R represents the relative genetic relatedness of the actor to the recipient, and B represents the fitness benefit to the recipient

It was the equation of self-sacrifice, why parents died for their children. It was natural law.

 

 

May 7, 2011:

11:30 PM.

 

Friday night: the sun had set three hours ago. It was hot and sticky. The overhead fan ineffectually stirred the air in the room. Marvin Raycliff decided to slide open the door to the balcony and spread his inflatable camping mattress outside. It was something he did often on nights like this. Sometimes sleeping outside was the only way he could accomplish the monumental task of getting at least six hours of unconsciousness into his busy schedule.

Marie had dropped off Liz that evening, before dinner. He’d barely exchanged a word with his ex-wife; she could not bring herself to look at him. She could not forgive him. She’d left Liz in his hands for the weekend, as per their agreement.

He’d cooked dinner- spaghetti and meatballs- and they’d eaten. Liz was a talker. Raycliff loved to listen to his daughter talk. She’d open her mouth and he’d become hypnotized by her innocent creativity, her interpretations of the world around her, the connections her young mind perceived with what logical framework she’d developed in her seven years of life. There were moments of brilliance when she would describe the picture stories she was writing in her journal at school, and would dig the journal out of her backpack to show him the fantasies she’d concocted, some which really hit home. They were stories of abandonment.

For all her apparent well-being, Liz never mentioned having friends. It was not something Raycliff brought up, but he’d wanted now, for weeks, to call Marie and ask her about this. He feared the worst, that Liz would soon discover the stigma that her nascent intelligence would earn among her peers.

Raycliff had always been a smartass, even after he’d learned the hard way that not even he could talk his way out of anything. As a child, he’d been the constant victim of school bullies, had learned to stay inconspicuous as possible, and which tables were the most difficult to target with spitballs and M&M’s. Finally, in high school, after enduring years of torment, he decided to do something about it. In true primate fashion, he’d migrated as a freshmen to a new cohesive social unit: from the tribe of the Geeks to the tribe of the Freaks, those vacant-eyed, cynical rebels who smoked their cigarettes outside the loading dock and ranked among the coolest of losers. Finally, the bullies who’d once tormented simply chose to ignore him. No longer just a geek, he’d finally become totally incomprehensible to them, and received the far preferable shunning.

Liz telling Raycliff about her language arts class: “They put me in a special class because I was always reading ahead.”

Liz had learned to read as early as two. She was an avid reader; Raycliff maintained a small library of books for her weekend visits.

“That’s wonderful, sweetie!”

“But some of the other kids don’t talk to me anymore, and Mrs. Weeks says it’s ‘cause they’re jealous.”

It was happening to her. She was smart, and she was already a social outcast at seven. Raycliff himself had been a social outcast at seven. He struggled, trying to figure out what to say to his daughter.

“She’s right. They are jealous, but they don’t realize it.”

“Is that why they’re mean?”

“No. They’re mean because they’re scared of you.”

“Why?”

“You’re smarter than they are.”

Marvin Raycliff hated to say that. As a non-parent, he’d once sworn that he was going to lie to his (then-hypothetical) kids about what opportunity really meant. The truth, so far as Raycliff was concerned, was that not everyone could be a pilot, or the president of the United States, or the a famous rock guitarist. The words you can be anything you want to be were a mind-numbing string of false niceties. Raycliff believed parents and schools should encourage their children to set reasonable goals according to childrens’ abilities and aptitudes. He didn’t see that happening, but at least he could count on his own daughter being a bit more perceptive than most first graders.

Raycliff recognized in Liz a quality that was lacking in the majority of people he interacted with on a daily basis: a true intellect, and damn him if he wasn’t going to acknowledge that in his only child.

“It’s just a special class. My teacher said there’s no differences between anybody.”

What were they teaching her at that school?

“Your teacher’s wrong, honey. Some people are stronger than others. Some people are smarter. Some people are better-looking, or more popular. We’re all equal under the law…”

“…Cause we’re all created equal by God,” said Liz.

That set Raycliff off. He was going to call that school, he decided. Liz was supposed to be getting a first grade education, not a religious indoctrination.

“Did your teacher say that?” he asked his daughter.

“Yeah,” said Liz. “She said God made us all equal.”

“That might be what your teacher thinks but it might not be true and she shouldn’t be allowed to tell the class things that aren’t true, should she?”

“I guess not. But doesn’t everybody get to be equal?”

“Yes, under the law. But some people believe they’re more equal than others.”

“What do you mean, Daddy?”

“Lizzie, when you’re in class, who does the teacher call on most to answer questions?”

“The kids who raise their hands,” said Liz.

“And where do they sit?” asked Raycliff.

“In the front.”

“What about the kids in the back of the room? Does the teacher call on them?” asked Raycliff.

“Sometimes but they never get the answers right. And they talk through class when I’m trying to listen.”

“Do they have a lot of friends?” Raycliff asked.

“Yeah. I guess that’s why they’re always talking,” said Liz.

“And what are they like outside of class?”

“They’re mean.”

“Do they break the rules at recess?”

“Yeah.”

“Do they get in trouble?” asked Raycliff.

“Sometimes. Mostly they just get yelled at,” said Liz.

“By the teacher?”

“Yeah.”

“Does the teacher ever yell at you?” he asked her.

She thought about it. “No. But she said I hafta give the other kids a turn to answer the questions.”

“Well in twenty years those kids in the back of the room will cleaning your toilet,” said Raycliff.

Liz giggled. “Really?”

He was simplifying it for her. In time he hoped she’d come to understand the complexity of the situation.

“Of course. That’s how things work. Smart people get picked on when they’re kids and they end up doing all the important work later in life. Kids used to make fun of me, but I was published in science journals when I was twenty. The people who mattered to me weren’t the ones making fun of me.”

“You really think I’m that smart?”

“Don’t your teachers tell you that?”

“Yeah, but they say that to everyone.”

“Well, they don’t always mean it. But they mean it about you. And so do I. You’re really special. There aren’t a lot of people like us. Maybe if there were, then things would be different. We wouldn’t be at the bottom of the pecking order.”

“I wish it was like that,” said Liz. “I only don’t talk to the other kids ‘cause they don’t have anything to say.”

“Nothing?”

“They talk a lot but they don’t really say anything.”

Raycliff no longer wished that his daughter would stay seven years old forever. He formulated a different wish, the selfishness of which he was fully cognizant: he wished he could have had a different conversation with a much older Liz about the value of ambition, with words like “intellectualism,” “rationality,” “moral responsibility” and “paradigm shift” involved in all their glory. He regretted that he’d have to wait years and years to see whether or not his daughter would escape the mind-numbing effect of contemporary American culture that could leave her incapable of even having such a conversation. He wouldn’t let that happen to her. Listening to her observations of life, her answers to his questions, he had hope that she wouldn’t let it happen to herself.

 

After dinner, they watched Jeopardy and the evening news. Liz didn’t like fiction. She liked puzzles and games and “real stuff.” Raycliff was proud of that: Liz preferred the news to Saturday morning cartoons. She had a passion for the truth. He looked over at her, next to him on the overstuffed couch. She sitting with her legs curled up on the cushion and her tiny arms locked under her chin, staring intently at the television as the latest footage from the Oil Wars[1] danced across the screen. She let out a little yawn.

The TV lied, of course. The footage, and the so-called “journalism,” was propaganda, sterilized and sanitized and bloodless to dispel the notion that the entire region, the whole Middle-East, was succumbing to anarchy. It had started in Afghanistan and Iraq, and grown like a cancer, swallowing Iran and Syria and Pakistan.

The TV lied. Liz didn’t have to know that, yet. It could wait.

She yawned again.

“Daddy” decided it was time to put Liz to bed in the guest room he kept for her. He tucked her under the covers and read her The Stinky Cheese Man. By the middle of the story, she was asleep.

 

He’d been up, writing, for hours after that, was still going on that feeling of inexhaustible creativity that wouldn’t let him sleep. Finally he’d willed himself into the makeshift bedding outside, lay down and folded his arms behind his head. These sticky nights in May were a staple of Philadelphia summers, when it wasn’t raining.

There was a canopy on the balcony to protect his sleeping site from the rain. His bedroom opened directly onto the balcony.

Most nights, he slept with a Beretta under his pillow. It had been his lawyer’s advice.

Raycliff had never owned a gun before he’d started receiving death threats over the publication of the first edition of The Rationalist Manifesto last year. On Fridays, before Liz was dropped off, Raycliff put the gun in a safe hidden in his bedroom closet. It didn’t come out again until Sunday night after she was out of the house.

An old friend of so many Folk Festivals had taught him to shoot. They’d driven out to a field in the middle of nowhere, Bucks County with a pickup truck full of empty soda cans and the Beretta, and Raycliff had learned the fine art of targeting, as well as maintenance and safety.

The Manifesto had done exactly what he had intended it to do: it had cemented the solidarity of those who already agreed with Raycliff’s thesis, which was the humanity, if allowed to survive, would eventually outgrow its irrational fetters like religion, superstition, prejudice, greed, inefficiency and intolerance. However, in order to get to that, irrationalism had to be confronted in the present day. Irrationalism was the source of so much dangerous intolerance, and a society could not survive by tolerating the intolerant. It was a social evolution he foresaw, but the foundations for that evolution depended on the contributions of people like himself, who were intelligent enough to realize human potential fully by exploring a new way of life as rational actors in that evolutionary progression.

Obviously, the concept was provocative, enough that Raycliff had received, to date, over one hundred death threats. He was currently working on the second edition. That was what had kept him up after putting Liz to bed. His bedroom was littered with hand-annotated bits of manuscript, and the books that were his source material. Raycliff didn’t own a computer at home. He had one in his office at Temple, and that was enough. If he needed to use the internet he went to the Free Library in Center City. His room was full of books. He had a chalkboard on one wall with a flow chart demarcated by variables and signs depicting the relative fitness tradeoffs involved the mating strategies of males of the Papio cynocephalus persuasion.

He tried to clear his mind, let sleep overtake him, but he heard screaming from down the hall. He instinctively went for the safe, opened the combination lock and checked the revolver. He grabbed his bathrobe and slipped the gun inside its large pockets, running down the hall and opening the door to the room where Lizzie slept.

She balled up in the bed, crying. It had been a nightmare. She had nightmares, sometimes. Raycliff suddenly felt very self-conscious about the gun in his pocket. He picked her up and carried her down the hall and through his disordered bedroom to the balcony and tucked her in underneath the covers.

“Daddy will be right back,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. He wasn’t sure if she’d gone back to sleep. He went inside the room, put the gun back in the safe, buried the safe in his closet. He was sure his daughter hadn’t seen the gun.

Back out on the porch, he settled in under the covers. Liz was asleep. He wrapped her in his arms, hoping that this would somehow make her dreams safe. He tried so not hard not to have regrets, but he did regret how little he saw her.

Rain came down around them. It splattered on the canopy that protected them. Raycliff was reminded of the rainy seasons he’d spent on the savanna, inside his tent. It was the often the only way he could get to sleep. He missed those rains. The humid subtropics of Philadelphia were close, but muggier, mistier. After a fall, the rain still hung in the air as an omnipresent mist. There were days when the city was simply choked by this moist, gloomy mist, when the concrete jungle felt like a rainforest. Then, there were dry heat waves that lasted weeks, and the city became a concrete desert, a wasteland.

He went to sleep listening to the rain, thinking of half-remembered guitar chords, singing softly, almost under his breath:

“The minstrel boy to the war has gone…

“In the ranks of death…”

 

May 8, 2010:

9:30 AM.

 

Raycliff edged the spatula between the sizzling eggs and the surface of the buttered skillet, flipping them with ease. Liz sat at the table with a glass of orange juice in front of her. When the eggs were properly cooked, he transferred them to a plate with two pieces of toast (the crust cut off, for Liz) and set it down in front of her. She was a light eater, and Raycliff himself almost never ate breakfast. He generally settled for coffee until lunch. Liz poked at the eggs, taking small bites.

The radio was on. He flipped through the stations, bypassing the inanities of a certain Senator Adam Powers and finding a station that he liked. The DJ was a friend of his, the friend who’d taught him to target shoot: Archibald Stuart III, his friend of so many Folk Festivals:

“It’s 9:32 in the AM and you’re listening to Molotov Stu on ‘Airstrip One’ on 98.6 FM.  I’m watching the warplanes take off from the floating fortresses right about now. Soon they’ll be strafing the desert, destroying dozens of communities and killing thousands of lives, and for what? For a war on terror. How can you have a war on terror, folks? I ask you, how? Can you wage war on jealousy? On anger? On fear? No, and yet this is what our politicians use to justify the thousands of soldiers killed over the last ten years, in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond. The Cold War was absurd, but at least it was a war that could have ended two ways: with the economic collapse of one or the other superpower, or with mutually assured destruction. At least they had the decency to be specific about what kind of bang the world was supposed to end with then. Today, everyone talks and no one says anything. The truth is you can’t win a war on terror. You can’t win a war against desperation. You can’t land on an desperation, can’t dig trenches or pitch tents or build hospitals on desperation. You can only react to it, and our reactions have bred a vicious cycle that’s lasted for ten years, people, and it’s probably gonna last another ninety if we don’t do something about, and if we could only figure out what to do. War on Terror, how is that rational? That’s right, I’m not supposed to say that word. It’s a word that’s kept off the streets these days, uttered in the safety of campus coffee dives and the basements of American bohemia. You’re not supposed to be rational, not really. You’re not supposed to question the state of things, because skepticism can only lead to one place, and we’ve all been there. Up is down is nowhere; black is white is grey. Well, I live in the grey areas, and a lot of you out there do too. You can’t tell your neighbors, can’t tell your family, but you’ve already got one foot in the underground for the simple reason that you, and I, and everyone I care about, are Thought Criminals. And speaking of Thought Crime, here’s the latest from Hereticks’ new album. Enjoy.”

The Hereticks sounded like a post-punk, mom’s basement-grown mental disorder that had yet to be classified by the DSM.

“Because I would not stop for death he kindly stopped for me…

“Emblazoned as a burning cross against the cherry tree…

“His sword was red, his boots were burned, he held his heart in hand…

“He squeezed it ‘til the blood had leaked and stained the diamond sands…”

Not bad, but not the kind of stuff Stuart- or “Molotov Stu”- usually had on his show.

He looked at Liz, finishing her orange juice. She seemed to like it the repetitive guitar riffs.

“This war is brought you by IBM and by Halliburton too,

“Driving the economy as they drive me and you…

“The sad cry of the herd against one microscopic man,

“Impregnated with madness, this epic of the damned.”

Raycliff couldn’t help but laugh at his daughter copying the stereotypical head-banging that doubtlessly was meant to accompany the song, with its basic three chords, its repetitive bass guitar rhythm and droning, uninspired drums. She must have seen that on television. She saw him and laughed with him, prompting Raycliff to join in, making awkward movements and silly faces that led Liz to double over in a fit of giggles.

Suddenly the piece deconstructed itself, the basic post-punk arrangement giving way to flutes and tambourines, bagpipes, and a sitar. There was a melodic transition, and then:

“And who is he condemned to die

“Who does not know his self at all?

“His word is stained, as is his heart,

“Absorbed of late by vitriol.”

It was that song. The one he’d sung last night, to calm his nerves:

The minstrel to the war is gone/in the ranks of death you’ll find him/his father’s sword he hath girded on/his wild harp slung behind him…

He’d learned it from a buddy in Africa, a field biologist he’d worked with. Marcus Okayo, that was his name. He was a rising star at the University of Kenya, and probably the only person behinds Raycliff within 100 miles of their base camp who could appreciate The Clash or the Dropkick Murphys or Enter The Haggis. As an exchange student in London, Marcus had been exposed to punk. He’d come back to his Bantu family with a blue Mohawk, and had almost been disowned. This was his kind of music. Raycliff wondered where Marcus Okayo was, and what color was his hair now, and whether he’d survived his country’s recent and bloody border war with Tanzania[2].

The music reverted into a single lyrical refrain:

“This war is brought you by IBM and by Halliburton too,

“Driving the economy as they drive me and you…

“The sad cry of the herd against one microscopic man,

“Impregnated with madness, this epic of the damned.”

It was good to know that some musicians were still willing to let their music actually say something, even if their talent was limited at best. He shuddered to think what kinf of bland, watered-down children’s music Liz was hearing at her school. Probably “This land is your land.” Missing verses missing, of course.

“This land is my land,

“Go get your own land,

“I got a shot gun,

“And you don’t got one…”

That had been the subversion of his day. He had to wonder if the kids still conspiratorially giggled at their own bastardized lyricisms.

“And we’re back at Airstrip One. That was the Hereticks, boys and girls. We’re about to cue for a commercial break, but we’ll be back after a word from our sponsors…”

The mindless onslaught of commercialism followed. Raycliff felt forced to eat breakfast on those days when Liz was with him, so he boiled himself two eggs in a pot.

“Hard boiled eggs for Breakfast?” asked Liz from the table.

“You’re eating eggs your way. I’ll eat’em my way. Are you going to finish your toast, sweetie?”

“I left one for you.”

He smiled, and took the piece of toast with its crust cut off, took a bite and forced himself to swallow. He hated eating in the morning, just wanted his coffee. He’d have to re-organize his lecture plan today. He was going to start from scratch, from the Big Band to RNA World Theory to evolution of angiosperms and the birth of the primate order.

He tried to think of the best way to explain it: As these complex systems… No. In the beginning… He smirked at that one. He was sure to offend, but science wasn’t meant to be politically correct.

“We’re back to Airstrip One, ladies and gentleproles.” A siren wailed on the radio, one of Molotov Stu’s sound-effects.

“I’m in the mood for a little Zappa,” said Molotov Stu. “Don’t know about you but I’m itching to know, Whoooooo are the Braiiiin Poliiiice?”

Raycliff could just picture Stuart in the recording booth, smirking and smoking and laughing inside at everything he saw. The man was unflappable. Raycliff still laughed inside, but there were some things that scared him now, and he knew Stuart- Molotov Stu- was scared too. It was why he dragged himself to the studio every day and let his booming voice resound over the airwaves.

Dear Ms. Weiller: Yesterday my daughter said something that I found disturbing, considering that the only place she could have heard it was at school. Liz has never been to a worship service in her life, and we don’t send her to public school to hear about God in her First Grade social studies lessons. Liz’s mother and I are not religious people. We do not want to enforce any religious beliefs on our daughter, even a non-denominational belief in the existence of an inexplicable higher power. As an employee of the Philadelphia Public School System, please respect our daughter’s right to a secular education.             ~Marvin Raycliff

Zappa played. Way before Raycliff’s time, but he still appreciated the classics. He rummaged through his kitchen drawers for the pen he knew he kept there, found a pad of yellow legal paper. “Lizzie, what’s your teacher’s name?”

“Ms. Weiller.”

“I need you to give her a note from me, okay?”

“Okay daddy.”

He sat down, began writing.

It was short, direct. He’d only needed to subtly imply the possibility of legal action, should the teacher in question respond unfavorably. He folded up the note and gave it to Liz.

“What’s it say?”

“That teachers aren’t supposed to talk about God at school,” said Raycliff.

“Why not?”

“You know what freedom of religion means?”

“Yeah.”

“It means freedom from religion, Liz. You don’t go to public school to talk about God, because not everyone believes in the same god.”

“How come we never talk about God?”

“I don’t believe in God at all. Your mom does but she despises organized religion, and doesn’t want to impose her belief on you. We wanted you to learn about the world first, before deciding whether you believed in God.”

“Why?”

“Well, it was something your mom and I agreed to when we had you.”

“No, why don’t you believe in God?”

“I’ve never seen any proof, and I don’t take things on faith.”

“What’s faith?”

“Faith is belief without proof.”

“Why would anyone believe something if there’s no proof?”

“Maybe because it’s easier to believe than not. It’s easy to be wrong and think you’re right than to admit that you can’t know, but can only guess, based on what we see in the nautral world. Nature. And something we have inside us called reason.”

“Oh, that makes sense.” Liz had hit on a satisfying answer and did the greatest thing a child could do: question it.

“What if you’re wrong?” she asked her father.

It was the most perfect question a seven-year old could ask of a parent. What if you’re wrong?

“Then I’m wrong,” said Raycliff. “But it will still take proof to convince me I’m wrong, and getting that proof is the responsibility of the person making the claim that there’s a God.”

“Why?”

“Because you can’t prove a negative, unless it’s something like ‘Lizzie is not a Gorilla,’ which obviously isn’t true.”

Liz cracked a smile, nodding, understanding, her mind opening up like the petals of a flower, blossoming into new depths.

“That’s silly.”

“Of course. That’s the kind of thing that can be proven or disproven, but you can’t prove that there’s a God anymore than you can prove there’s no God, and it’s useless to try to prove a negative, so we look for proof, and if we can’t find proof, we give up on the idea.”

“Is it hard?”

“Yeah. Not a lot of people can do it. It takes a very special kind of person.”

“Like me?” Liz chirped.

“Absolutely,” said Raycliff. “I think whatever you do you’ll be making the most of your mind.”

Molotov Stu was going over the news that didn’t make the headlines: “So the Oregon Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union appears to have been broken into last night, and several important files have gone missing. Now, according to an unnamed source within the Department of Justice, the missing files concern high-profile medical professionals in the field of reproductive health who’ve had problems with harassment from the Pro-Life crowd and have sought legal protection with the FBI and the ACLU. The files, according to this source, contain the names, addresses of business and residence, descriptions, and other information on the activities of abortion doctors and the workers at their clinics that could be used by violent factions of the Pro-Life Movement to harass, threaten, harm or kill these professionals and their loved ones. Our hearts go out from Airstrip One to Doctors Miguel Corliss, Bob Rogerio and Jacob Weiss, who have already received letters threatening their lives.”

Jake Weiss.

Shaker, mover, doctor, ally.

President of the Pro-Choice Alliance.

He had grown accustomed to containing his anguish under an almost laconic façade, but it was a façade. He knew that. He had resolved to be self-conscious, to constantly examine himself and the things he held to be true, like a good skeptic. That was what made it so hard, having to live day after day in a society that did not appreciate scientists. He’d heard all the familiar sentiments: sneaky intellectuals, unpatriotic, godless.

He believed he was a patriot. He liked to believe that, but patriotism, like nationalism or religion or superstition, was a sacred cow that had to be slaughtered.

“Daddy, what happened to Lily?”

“Who?”

“Mommy said Lily ran away from you.”

Lillian.

“Mommy’s confused. Lillian and I were friends and she lived here with me for a while, but then she moved on.”

“Where did she go?”

“She’s at a different school, I think. Hey, you been practicing your Spanish?”

“Si,” Liz said with an emphasis of boredom. “Papa, por que tengo hablar español?”

“What if you wanted to visit mommy’s country one day? Wouldn’t it be nice to speak the language?”

“Mommy says Argentina’s not a good place to visit.”

“Your mommy had some bad things happen to her there. She has trouble letting go of the past.”

Who didn’t? Pain clung with hooks to the most vulnerable and sensitive places. It couldn’t be gotten rid of, it can only be acknowledged, consciously and honestly. That was how to live with pain, to let go of the need for comfort.

He was working on that. Trying, anyway. Xeno’s fucking paradox.

He stood within inches of the curb, crossing half-way and half-again, never quite reaching his goal. That was the way of things: harsh, cold and clear. He stepped into that light, decided to pick up his feet and break the rules of the thought experiment. A human being could do that. A human being could choose to step over infinite subdivisions of street and onto the curb. It didn’t take a leap of faith to think the curb was there on the other side.

He paused, and looked back. He could see that the subdivisions, all those minute steps, were not infinite. Raycliff lived in a world where there was a clear and legitimate difference between the improbable and the impossible. Liz was entering that world too. She was becoming a realist. Nothing would ever be the same for her again. Nothing would ever be simple, for either of them.

That was too easy. They lived in a cold, clear light, and they embraced its harshness for all it was worth.

---

[1] An alternative term for the so-called “War on Terror.”

[2] Historical details regarding this conflict are scarce, but it is believed to have lasted for three weeks during January and February of 2010. During this time, the Kenyan Military conscripted many young men to fight. However, it is also possible that the entire war, or at least the majority of it, was part of a Tanzanian disinformation campaign, as it is unlikely that a relatively short and geographically limited conflict would actually necessitate a nation-wide military draft. It is further theorized that the war was in fact a tribal border conflict that was manipulated by both governments for the purpose of propaganda.

 

 

 

Thanks

Good point. I'm used to feedback and not used to working in isolation.

 

Nordmann, I refer to this post which outlines the story in brief: www.rationalresponders.com/forum/14133#comment-174499

Nordmann, I really appreciate that particular bit of advice. This particular story has been in conceptual development for over a year, it was originally envisioned as a kind of post-apocalyptic Greek Tragedy, but then certain prequel elements got involved.

Yes, Book III does parallel The Time Machine (I realized this after I conceived the idea, but it fits with the fact that Parts I and II are heavy with references to Orwell, Ayn Rand, Lewis Sinclair, Anthony Burgess, etc... It's intended as a novel to acknowledge the literary/genre tradition while simultaneously deconstructing it.

 

I am saving the above in my file dedicated to this endeavor as "Nordmann's Advice."

It was a genuine criticism, if phrased strongly (though I did say myself that it could be considered callous but was genuinely meant).

 

I have found that what passes for a good command in English in the US educational system does not necessarily infer a good command at all. In general, American use of English tends to be very forgiving with regard to grammatical constructs, and sometimes even "pseudo-vocabulary" wholly invented by the writer/speaker. This doesn't apply in other English-speaking countries, and when it comes to getting your story out to a wide readership is a real handicap.

 

I have no doubts at all that it is a tendency however that you have the ability to suppress and eliminate from your writing. The examples you have posted indicate sometimes that you have indeed done just that in the interest of clarity and immediacy in your text. But there are several lapses, and unfortunately it is these that hop out from the page and assault the reader (who will absorb well-written text without noticing it at all - ironic, but a necessary part of the deal). Too many of these will interfere with the relation of the story to the detriment of the reader's experience. A good publisher will spot this immediately and, if so many exist as to indicate the author is unaware of his or her impediment and that no amount of proof-reading and editing will address, your manuscript will be rejected - and rightly so.

 

So, if you think my criticism is heavy-handed, that is fine. But it is far better to address problems raised by an honest if harsh critic at this point of the exercise than to deal afterwards with the absolute rejection of a work that you had spent a long time constructing and thought was ready.

 

As I said however - I can have really no further criticisms to offer without seeing a synopsis properly presented, and I most definitely do not recommend that you submit such a synopsis to an open forum of any description. I seriously doubt therefore that you will receive much more valuable advice from anyone else in the context of this forum and I am afraid that your "Nordmann's Advice Folder", in consequence, won't grow much larger than the few sentences collected thus far!

 

Incidentally, the same wall is hit at so-called "writers' workshops" - an exercise that begins as if it is going to elicit good advice but, as you insert more and more of your project into the discussion, rapidly deteriorates into your brainchild being hijacked by a committee. Avoid these like the plague!