Political Fiction....This novel took off from the premise that history might be something far different from the boilerplate we are given. It might have gigantic holes in it, and through those holes impossible events and circumstances might enter.
"The greatest spy in the world wants to enter the place where universes overlap and collide. Then he is sniffing on the Big Track."
Hidden Legends of the CIA,
I enjoy reading crime novels, but after I toss each one aside, the triumph of justice, the exacting of revenge, and the victory of the hero fade like four-second dreams. I thought I'd blow open the windows on the genre and see what came in.
Excerpt
From Jon Rappoport
Arthur Meriden
A FEW WORDS ABOUT AN ENDLESS NOVEL
What most people take to be magic these days is a watered-down version of the real thing. They want polite magic. They want neat corners and five thousand people thinking the same "positive thought" at a given moment. They want a program, a system, a collective mystery and a collective solution.
There is magic for children and magic for adults. As our society becomes more worshipfully centered on delusions about children, it stands to reason that ideas about magic will become more cloying and simple-minded. This fits in well with the massive reductionism of the so-called self-improvement field. Become a millionaire by this afternoon. Manage a corporation in one minute. Take a seminar and trade stocks like a genius. You have a disease no one ever heard of; it could kill you; take this pill; you'll be cured.
When I say the era of magic is returning, I'm serious. People are being driven to it. That doesn't mean they're smart about it. Cults and chic little groups and juvenile adherents will continue to spread.
Nevertheless, magic is coming on an express train. Some people will recognize it has everything to do with individual creation. Religion has always been about bottling up that impulse and sidetracking it into some deity who invented the whole universe and keeps a monopoly on it. These religions, as they have come down to us, are Mob operations. Nothing more. They're Mafias.
We come into this world imbued with a flattened program of perception. We do indeed think all people are more or less the same. As we grow up, this view is confirmed, because the bulk of the population is afraid to create on its own. So everyone does begin to look alike. But below that hypnotic layer, every individual is unique, whether he wants to be or not. A person realizes that uniqueness to the degree he is expressing his own imagination on a very broad scale. And uniqueness gained equals magic.
These are facts of life beyond the control machinations.
Time, as we see it and have been taught it, is crumbling on many fronts. For some, this pronouncement is tantamount to saying our future is psychosis. I reject that. In the long run, liberation from puerile formulations of causation and sequence will prove to be bracing, to say the least. The distant future will have a new face. Many new faces, all at once.
Traveling faster? Communicating faster? These are minor fantasies. The radical future will demolish so many cherished limits, our present lives will look like tinker toy Levittowns of the mind.
For those who want to block it all out, pharmacies will have to sell absolute catatonia over the counter. People will have to submit voluntarily to brain extraction.
"The children are the future." Nonsense. We are the future. We'll be here to see it, to feel it, to throw up our hands and surrender to it, to resist it, to make war against it, to pound it, to kill ourselves off (temporarily) in the face of it, or to stand on its platform and create from it. That's the case now, and it will be again.
Or maybe the future is bleeding into our world right now. Maybe we're subconsciously adjusting our eyes so we see around it and between it. What are we afraid of? Time cut from its moorings? Are we afraid to finally apply the antidote to massive layers of interior boredom and repetition?
Imagining the impossible has its rewards. They may not be as immediately comforting as a trust fund, but they are satisfying in a spiraling way that permanently changes the individual's outlook. Spiritual pundits, at the end of their rope, preach Unity as the catchall. But Unity always foreshortens and dampens. It's the signal of a mind that is fatigued. It's the inking of a peace treaty with one's own restless psyche. The eyes glaze over at the dead-end where the alley becomes a wall.
The future is built on the impossible, and where do we find that in ourselves? Exactly where we put it: the imagination. The ultimate bullpen. So if we want to do R&D beyond the walls of what is known and accepted, that's where we have to go.
It's taboo to be bored with this world. We're supposed to find succor, majesty, and instruction in nature. In life as it is. Did life proceed forward, in proper increments, to what we have now, from the beleaguered environment of the cave man? Or did people make invisible leaps? As has so often been stated: the future is invented by those who stand outside the consensus. We pay lip service to that crusty nugget, and only retrospectively. Our cherished notion of time, however, must not be disturbed. That would be too much.
It seems to me "the breach" has always been with us. A peculiar kind of history has been our bulwark against it, but now that history is sinking into a bog. Once, not so long ago, the kings and the queens, wearing their crowns and jewels, gave up the ghost. They then found covert economic means and front players to maintain and extend their domains. In the same way, as serial time loses its throne, its adherents mount "operations" to prop it up. That's why the focus on spying and intelligence in this novel is apt.
Time was always partial and temporary and improvised. It was always a failure. It was, in its own way, a joke, but the human race is still waiting for the punch line. The show is over, it closed down after three weeks, the theater is empty, the janitors have swept up the programs, and yet the compliant audience is still sitting in the seats. Other places and other times have moved on, but this one is frozen in a half-smile.
A rock in the stream.
I can say with certainty that I'm 15 years old. I remember those fifteen years. But I look about 30.
My name is Bosh Reed, and this is my journal. My notebook. I don't know what the hell to call it, and I don't know how long it's going to last.
Maybe my father was Frank Palmer. Reed is the name I made up. My supposed father, as I hope you know, supposedly died at the beginning of the Blank Period. But he had already impregnated his girl friend, a woman named Kay. My mother. I think. A lot of this is vague. Sorry.
I was born during the Blank Period, so I have no memory of my childhood.
Today is May 24, 2039. But there's a catch, and you need to understand it. Be patient for a minute.
What caused the Blank Period and all this shit we're facing now? As far as I can put it together, and there are many opinions, it started with my father.
There was the Blank Period. No one knows how long it lasted. When time started working again, the leaders of the world decided to go back to 2007 and pick up from there. I mean, they decided to say it was 2007. A temporary fix. So this is 22 years later than that. 2039.
Here is pretty much the way the rumors about Frank shake out. I'm sure most of it is insanity, filtered through thousands of squeeze-bags of amnesia and lies:
He was some kind of private spy operating out of Hollywood. He knew people in the CIA. They recruited him for an operation. They sent him to find a guy who owned a special machine. It generated light at a speed faster than light. Nobody really knew what that meant, but the CIA wanted it. They wanted to check it out. Frank teamed up with a woman, Kay, who was working for the FBI, and the two of them went down into Mexico, and met a man named Liot Schaefer.
He was their contact. He took them to a professor named Markov. Markov had made the machine, which he called the Texas 360. Markov wanted 30 million dollars for it. He offered to demonstrate it. He must have been completely crazy. Frank said no. Frank wanted to transport Markov and the machine to Langley. He was ready to call in a jet. But Markov turned the thing on. And that's when it happened. Frank got caught in a beam from it. He was turned into ash. The Blank Period started. Sounds bizarre, right? I'm sure it's a rank distortion. Who knows what actually happened?
I occasionally go to meetings in Hollywood. A house, on Wilcox, has pictures of Frank and candles all around. It's a permanent shrine. The pictures are artists' renditions.
From the moment when Markov turned on his infernal machine (if that's what it was all about), things started to go haywire. The official accounts say earthquakes and storms and volcanic eruptions. But that's just fifteenth-hand hearsay. There was a Blank Period. Could have lasted two weeks or two years or ten years. Whatever. Then the people who were left woke up. Estimates are seven billion were shaved down to five hundred million.
So now we're waiting for the payoff. The other shoe.
Softcover, 8¼" x 6¾, 500 pages
Perfect-Bound