SCARE TACTIX (prologue)

I can still hear our screams competing – a-ha

Nobody but the skipper has any relish for the sea – Iain Sinclair

Prologue: Barrio Ga Ga on the Magdalen Islands of Quebec

(Planet Vaan / Summer of 2032)

We ran out of Spanish wine before we ran out of Gaulioses and we ran out of Gaulioses before we ran out of hashish. Jean Louis and the Argentine girl had begun talking about Soviet art and the Senegalese boy with the motorcycle said we should all go listen to Dixieland at his flat in Trieste in exactly one year. Camilla returned from the beach, which was about a hundred yards beyond a hill on the other side of the river. She set down her flip-flops, which she had taken off to cross the river, and placed her coffee mug atop one of them and then unrolled her beach towel in the red sand and sat on it. Her coffee mug was filled not with coffee, but with the last of the Spanish wine that Jean Louis had stolen from his father’s café. The river was very shallow but swift and muddy from all the rain. An ambitious sun elbowed its way through a phalanx of dull clouds.

“Turista, baby, tell me a joke,” said Camilla.

I passed the fishing rod off to Jean Louis, and in the chunky-style squawk of his native province, he said, “Go tend to your little dead girl.”

In English, I told him, “I hope you get eaten by a shark.”

“In these waters the only danger is eels.”

“That’ll do.”

The Argentine girl was humming a kiddie pool Elvis tune and deftly playing along on her bongos, effectively drowning out the dainty soundscape of the river and nearby beach.

Quebec’s Magdalen Islands, an anorexic archipelago shaped like an upside-down semicolon, were located in the middle of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. I had been here four days and slept maybe twelve hours.

Camilla said, “Turista, I want a joke.”  

“I heard you. What kind of joke do you want?” 

“Any kind. Tell me something that’ll make me laugh.”

Camilla was blessed (or cursed) with knowing the exact date of her death: today. This was according to a month-old text message from an imp named Preston, who, in my opinion, ought to be skinned like a rabbit and stuck in a microwave for fuckteen minutes for bestowing her with this information. This had all happened here on my home planet of Vaan. Camilla, who was not only my doppelganger, but also my steadfast lover, was from Vaan’s doppelganger planet: EARTH.

I said to her, “All the jokes I know are long and complicated.”

“Even better.”

Jean Louis casted into the river and said to us, “What did Marshall McLuhan say when he went to Starbucks?”

I made direct eye contact with Jean Louis for the first time all day and said, “The medium is the grande.” French Canadian jokes were all the same: snobbish, wacky, and about as much fun as a head of wet lettuce.

Jean Louis mumbled something about me destroying his joke and how he was going to dice me into chum and then started troubleshooting with a perch he caught that was about as big as a paper airplane. He had hooked the thing through its eye and it was laying a very enthusiastic guilt trip on him. Finally, it wriggled its way off the hook and disappeared into the muddy water.

“One-eyed Willie rides again,” I said. That late afternoon murk of the body and mind that is so familiar to all inveterate day-drinkers was beginning to set in. “Camilla, babe, if we stay out here, we’re gonna need more wine, more beer, more cigarettes, more hashish, more everything.”

“And more tick-tock!” the Senegalese boy said, using a coin to scrape dried mud off the exhaust pipe of his motorcycle.

“Definitely more tick-tock,” I said. “But actual tick-tock this time, yeah? Real cocaine. No more of that nonsense we were brushing our teeth with earlier.”

“We had koh-keh-een-ah?” said Camilla. “Who had koh-keh-een-ah?”

“Jean Louis did.”

“Jean Louis did what?” asked Jean Louis.

“I was talking about that baby laxative you oinked up.”

This confused Jean Louis enough for him to reengage the fishing rod. He undid the red bandanna around his neck and folded it and set it next to his tackle box and then opened the tackle box and changed lures—losing the beetle spin and putting on a Hula Popper—and then started casting around a different stretch of the river. His dark brown euro-shag always looked wet.

“I’m runnin’ on fumes, y’all,” Camilla said. “Do we have anything to eat besides poor people food?”

The Argentine girl dug around in her wicker basket. “We have a mango, another mango, some sort of zombie plantain tragedy, and a plank of dark chocolate that cost me ten American dollars.”

“Bienvenido al Café Proletariado.”

“What happened to that little box of fried okra?”

“Gone like a train.”

We gave the Senegalese boy three Canadian fifty dollar bills and he motorcycled into town and came back an hour later with a flotilla of vice: drugs and beer and junk food. Camilla had fallen asleep and Jean Louis and the Argentine girl had walked over to the beach and not yet returned.

The Senegalese boy, who called himself Zing, gave me a big can of Beck’s.

We stood there by the river staring at Camilla, motionless in her sleep. Zing ran through those universal sound effects people squeeze out when they hear of someone who has died or is dying.

“Today’s the day, eh?”

“Allegedly,” I said. “Guess we’ll see.”

“How’s it supposed to happen?”

“I have no clue,” I said, lying through my teeth. “The little dude didn’t say.”

The beer was cold and tasted good.

“You two are very close, aren’t you?” asked Zing.

“We are as close as two people can be without being related to one another.”

“I figured you to be twinsies.”

“Everybody does.”

“You’ve known each other your whole life?”

“Nope. We joined forces about ten years ago.”

“You met in a bookstore, I reckon.”

“Exactly. I asked her to suck my coochie right there in the Occult section and the rest is history.”

And… Silence. If I was good at anything, it was putting an end to unsolicited interrogations.

I asked Zing for a bump and he pulled out a husky set of keys and strategically picked one out and then dipped it in a little baggie of coke and brought it to my nose and I vacuumed it up with my right nostril. The coke baggie looked like a little pillow

“Whoa. This shit’s the real deal. This shit’s got zing, Zing.”

“Only the best for mademoiselle.”

We were standing where the red sand meets the red mud near the bank of the river. Little weird birds near the water’s edge were either fighting or mating or both. Zing was wearing a white Tottenham Hotspur jersey that was dotted with dozens of small dark red spots.

“What’s going on here,” I asked, pointing at the cluster of spots. “You get in a knife fight with Jackson Pollock?”

“Ah, this…” Zing stretched his shirt out in full display. “This is nature’s way of saying: Don’t eat me, I’m poisonous.”

“Thou art a strange creature.”

“Nah, for real, it’s a souvenir from America. I got jumped by some guys.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be,” he said, grinning. “It’s not my blood.”

Zing reached into the front pocket of his jeans and pulled out an unopened pack of blue Gaulioses and gnawed it open and took out a cigarette and lit it.

“It’s cool that you call it America and not the US,” I said to him. “You go down there often?”

“Only when I have to,” he said, holding up his little coke baggie and dangling it. “Or when I need to go to CVS, of course.”

“Ha… I have to admit, Zing, it feels real goddamn good to be away from the prickly vibe of modern day America… The United States of America, grown thoroughly exhausted with itself—grown bored beyond belief with itself!—has taken up the hobby of self-micromanagement.” I schnozzed up a husky bump off Zing’s key. The stuff really was strong. I took a big sip of beer to even it out. What was I rambling on about? Ah, yes, America…

“When I think of the current state of America, I am besieged with the impossible imagery of farts versus turds, ” I said, now totally steeped in the effects of the coke. “It’s basically a whole nation of snitches and trash zombies and unessential businesses and rock bands without drummers.”

Zing nodded in noncommittal accord and said, “In Dakar, my hometown, at any hour of any day on the calendar, I can go to the market and buy bottle rockets, cold beer, heavy-duty pornography, anything I want.”

“Well, see, that is freedom. In America, you are free to sit there and fuck around on your phone and, brother, that is it. You’re free to live and die by instant replay—you know what I mean by that, Zing? America is constantly rubber gloving itself, trying to see what it did wrong… Always trying to blast its own ass, always lopping away at itself like a damn maniac… Thwap! Thwap! Thwap!... The whole country has turned into an uninspired, uninspiring pile of rocks and garbage and dead bugs, which is a total drag, because it used to be such a hip spot, you know?” I said, gesticulating like a simian the whole time. I zipped my lips and took a sip of beer. My superpower was my ability to realize when I was talking a lot of bullshit about absolutely nothing.

Zing did a massive bump and sucked the innards out of his key and got bug-eyed with whatever emotion the coke was amplifying and said, “America is where you get overdraft fees because you have overdraft fees.”

“That is absolutely right,” I said, cheersing him. “You’re a cool dude, Zing… Tell me three things about yourself. Three things that I would never ever know otherwise.”

“Three things?

“Yeah, three things. There are no terms, there are no conditions.”

“Hmm,” he said, digging in the sand with his foot. “Okay… Number one, I have an irrational fear of cops in shorts.”

“Cops in shorts? You mean, like, police officers wearing shorts?”

“Yes. Gives me big time anxiety. Let’s see, number two, I slept with your twinsie last night, and the night before that, and the night before that.”

“I figured y’all scrumped that first night, but not those other two. Interesting.”

“And number three, it took me six and a half years to learn how to spell my name.”

“Z-I-N-G.”

“My real name. Souleymane.”

“Solomon?”

“Well, yeah. Solomon is, you know, the gringo version.”

Jean Louis and the Argentine girl came over the hill and waded through the river and dried themselves off.

“The little dead girl is dead,” Jean Louis said, talking about Camilla, who appeared to still be sleeping.

Camilla yawned and stretched and said, “I’m alive, you twink.”  

“Ah, too bad for us.”

She rolled over on her stomach and faced everyone and said, “Is there anything more exhilarating than letting people down? Turista, babe, how dare you direct your fly-by-night compassion elsewhere. Mama wants some zing, Zing. And bring me one of whatever is in that ice chest.”

The Argentine girl said, “Jean Louis and I were talking about taking the boat to the mainland tomorrow and going to a horse race.”

“There literally is no tomorrow,” said Camilla. “Not for me, at least. And why the hell would you want to go to a horserace? Racehorses are the prissiest bunch of psychopaths on the planet.”

The weird little birds had doubled or tripled in number. Their chorus of chirps was growing oppressive.

“Jesus,” I said. “What’s with these birds?”

“They’re called piping plovers,” Jean Louis said, rummaging through the freshly-stocked ice chest. “Endangered species. Only about eight thousand of them left on the planet.”

They had the stature of a sparrow but were white with orange legs and had this little black band around their neck and face that looked like a windy day scarf.

“There’s eight thousand of them right here,” I said.

The birds were all fiercely angular and manic in their motions… A swarm of a tiny little war faces.

“I’ve never seen them do this,” Jean Louis said. “Something’s not right.”

One of them buzzed us. And then another… And then they were upon us, everywhere, in full-blown frenzy.

“Oh my God,” someone said.

Something hit my head from behind. I touched the back of my head and looked at my hand. Blood. Someone started screaming through the cacophony…. Terrible, throaty screams…

The Argentine girl…

Where she had been was now a globular pile of feathers.

Zing king-konged at the birds: swatting, grabbing, stomping. Shit. I hope the little fuckers don’t eat the coke. He went to his knees… Was he crying blood?

I ran through the river, fell down, loped on all fours, fell, scrambled, ran… I used both my lungs to narrate my actions, all verbs and adverbs and no nouns.

Maybe I’ll reach the beach. The mad flurry around me persisted. Stinging sensation all over me… I reached the beach and ran into the water. Cold as anything ever.

My mind does this thing when it comes face to face with overwhelming situations such as this one. I think of chicken nuggets. Big juicy chicken nuggets, lightly breaded, and accompanied with an array of dipping sauces…

Someone plowed into me, reawakening my focus, and then others splashed down around me… I scrambled deeper out, grabbing at the others, pulling them, getting pulled by them, maybe four feet deep now, I baptized myself and stayed under… I held my breath for a shit ton of seconds… I resurfaced, gulping at the air… I heard the elusive, distinctly nightmarish sound of heavy hyperventilation. The sky was all birds.

“Not like this,” Camilla said, from somewhere. “Not like this.”