The
haves
remain
on
peaks
because
the
state
protects
all
land
owners.
Our
work
creates
all
value,
raising
them
higher,
reaching
the
clouds.
Supposing
we
rose
against
our
rulers,
turning
everything
topside
down.
We’d flatten the bumps of the Earth.
Who
claims
workers
can
never
organize
and
move
mountains?
The next day, Peter was in their bedroom looking at his cellphone.
Again, I’ll take another look for videos of the Bolshivarians doing good deeds for the Earth, as I did yesterday, he thought as he did a search for relevant videos. I didn’t find much to convince myself yesterday, so I’ll try again today. I’ve just got to be sure that when they say they are working to improve life here, that they mean what they say.
The search included a video with this title, uploaded a few hours before his search: “Aliens reversing flooding near Rio de Janeiro, interrupted and attacked by Lloyd’s of London military.”
OK, he thought. I’ll check this one out. He clicked PLAY.
Indeed, the video showed a swarm of the floating dots of white light near a neighbourhood with flooding almost up to the second floor of the houses. The video went on for a period of about twenty boring minutes, but near the twenty minute mark, one could see the water level begin to recede ever so slightly. After another five to ten minutes, the water level was significantly lower than that.
One could tell by noting that the water, having risen up the wall of a house about ten yards away from the person getting the video, had covered almost all of the house’s first-storey window. The surface of the water had now gone down to reveal the upper half of the window by the twenty-five minute mark. By the thirty minute mark of the video, all of that window was showing.
“They really are helping us,” he whispered.
A minute or so after that, he suddenly heard shouting in British accents: “It’s the aliens! Kill them! Fire your bug spray! Now!” Then the sound of bug spray could be heard hissing all over the area. The shaky cellphone camera swung around to get video of men in Lloyd’s military uniforms spraying in the direction of the one holding the cellphone and at the Bolshivarians behind him or her. Since this person didn’t fall down and die, dropping the cellphone, he or she obviously wasn’t a carrier.
Whoever made this video isn’t a carrier, and so probably isn’t presenting pro-Bolshivarian propaganda, he thought.
The camera swung back to show the balls losing their light and dropping dead to the ground. The flooding waters began to rise again; the rising had been apparent after only a minute, for that window was covered up a third of the way already with water.
“You stupid bastards!” he said of the British troops. “Are you so blind as to how they’re helping us?”
Screams of those troops could now be heard. The cellphone camera swung back around to show other dots of light, coming from behind and entering the troops. From a distance of about ten yards away, one could see their bodies ripping out of their uniforms and flesh tearing open to show internal anatomy. A lot of dark red poking out of green camouflage, but no rivers of blood, until the bodies exploded.
The cellphone camera followed the dots of light as they floated over the carnage and, at a safe distance from where the bug spray toxins were still in the air, they resumed reversing the flooding. The cellphone camera resumed getting video of that house. After a few minutes, Peter saw the water go down below all of that window again.
“Well, thank God for that,” he said.
“Peter!” Michelle called to him from the living room. “Come watch this!”
He left his cellphone on the bed and came out of the bedroom to see what she was watching on the news. President Price was at her desk in the Oval Office.
“We know there are some people out there, not carriers of the aliens, but sympathizers with them,” she said. “They would have you believe that the aliens are our friends, here to help us. Well, I’m telling you now just how wrong, misguided, and outright mendacious such a notion is. In fact, such false information is dangerous. We have video, taken just today in Brazil, just near Rio de Janeiro, that will show you how wrong it is to believe the aliens are a force for good.”
The TV switched away from Price to video that looked exactly the same as what Peter had just watched…
…well, almost the same.
Now, instead of the water level going down to reveal more and more of that window, he saw the water going up.
Peter and Michelle heard Price say in a voiceover, “Notice how the aliens are raising the flooding water, exacerbating the flooding of the world, not lowering the water, as their apologists claim they do.”
“That’s not true,” Peter said. “Someone has tampered with this video.”
“How do you know?” Michelle asked.
“I’ll show you in a minute,” he said. “Let’s just see where they’re going with this bullshit.”
Soon, they heard the voices of troops, but with American accents instead of British ones, saying, “The aliens are flooding the area! Spray them before they kill those people!”
The cellphone camera swung around to show the troops, who were now seen in the uniforms of the military division of Newmont Mining.
“They altered the uniforms, too,” Peter whispered.
“As you can see,” Price said in the voiceover, “our brave American servicemen and women tried valiantly to stop the alien menace…”
“You lying bitch,” Peter grunted, scowling at the TV.
“…but alas, they couldn’t,” the voiceover continued. “It is the formidable nature of this foe that shows we may need to take more drastic action than we have.”
Now the video showed the Bolshivarians entering the troops and tearing up their…American…uniforms. At the first sight of red internal organs, the video stopped abruptly. Price was seen in the Oval Office again.
“In heated discussions with the members of my administration, I have been strenuously arguing the case against the use of nuclear weapons, and I will continue to do so,” she said. “But the seriousness of this menace is making it harder and harder to argue my case.”
“Bullshit,” Michelle said. “You’ve wanted to nuke Latin America and Africa from the beginning. You’re just rationalizing with this propaganda, and preparing the world for the worst, bit by bit.”
“I’ll prove that what you saw is all lies,” Peter said. He ran back into the bedroom to get his phone while saying, “I was just watching the original video when you called me over to the TV. I’ll replay it for you.” He came back into the living room with his phone. “The Bolshivarians were lowering the water, not raising it; and the troops were British, not Am–“
His phone indicated that the video was no longer available.
Here’s another poem from Jason Ryan Morton’s collection of poetry and prose, Diverging Paths. As anyone who has read my blog posts knows, I’ve written about my Facebook friend’s poetry many times. Again, I’ve set his writing in italics to distinguish it from mine. Here’s the poem:
I hate it all,
Can I watch it die,
Fading embers,
Of a burning sky,
Call me,
To be nothing but what I am,
Every fucking day is the same,
Breaking me apart,
Too dark to start,
Can’t hit the Wall,
break the design, a
pattern of time,
Is unheard and underlying,
Maladies return me to the death of my humanity,
O Lord I am broken,
My soul tattered and shattered,
Too a point nothing fucking matters,
And all the dreams are lies, I kiss
my Deliverance goodbye, And yet
it seems,
I am me,
But broken,
Where no vessel should be,
I am nothing, I ….
Will not bother, I….. Will not bow,
I…..
Will not scrape,
I am nothing,
But at least I’m me,
And now for my analysis.
The poet would “watch it die,” the “Fading embers/Of a burning sky,” that “Call [him],”… He seems to be referring to the religious authority represented by God in the sky, which is “burning” because the validity of that authority is “fading”. Having been abused by it, he would happily “watch it die.”
In “Every fucking day is the same,” the use of the word fucking doesn’t seem to be just gratuitous swearing. I’ve learned from his life that he was a victim of sexual abuse, something kids often suffer in Catholic institutions, for which the perpetrators all too often go unpunished. Feeling the effects of the trauma is an every day thing, hence “Maladies return [him] to the death of [his] humanity.”
The poet calls out to God for help, “O Lord I am broken,” but that God isn’t there to help him, because here God is just the idol of institutionalized religion, rather than representative of any genuine spirituality…”all the dreams are lies.”
“Too a point nothing fucking matters” should be seen as a pun on too and to. Nothing matters to a point, but his problem is, too, a point, the point of the rapist’s phallus. Again, fucking isn’t gratuitous swearing. He kisses his “Deliverance” goodbye, because there is no deliverance, yet the capitalized D implies an allusion to the film and novel featuring the rape of a man. The deliverance of the Church, resulting all too often in the sexual abuse of children, is mere deliverance into another kind of hell.
He is broken, so he calls himself nothing, since part of the trauma he feels makes him devalue himself. In spite of his pain, though, there is some defiance against his abusers. He “will not bow,” and “will not scrape.” Society devalues him, yet “at least” he’s sincerely himself, not the kind of phoney person that society favours.
The aligning of the first half of the text to the right, where the focus is on the cause of his suffering, versus the aligning of the second half of the text to the left, mostly his reaction to his suffering, as well as his defiance to it, suggests the right-wing authoritarianism of the Church versus his left-wing aspiration to be liberated from such authority.
The afternoon of the next day, Peter and Michelle were in their apartment across the road from the gym in the basement of which they’d attended the meeting with Lenny and George.
They went into the living room. “Let’s see what’s on the news,” Michelle said, reaching for the remote and sitting next to Peter on the sofa. “After what Lenny said about heightened military presences in South America, I’m a little worried. They might know about the carriers in the military base on the other side of town.”
She turned on the TV and switched it to CNN. President Price was in the middle of another press conference.
“So, the status in Africa has still shown no signs of improvement?” a reporter asked her.
“I wish I could say we have seen such signs, but sadly, no,” Price said. “Our attempts to wipe out the alien menace in Africa have been, to be perfectly blunt, frustrating. We manage to kill so many of them, yet thousands of those little lights rise up to take their places.”
“Making friends with them, of course, is out of the question,” Peter said.
Michelle frowned at him, wishing he’d remain quiet during the press conference.
“What’s worse, there are more and more reports that the aliens are being spotted taking over populations in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Just yesterday afternoon, an administrative clerk in a base in Venezuela suddenly went missing, though he was known to have arrived for work that morning. There was no reason for him to disappear, so already there are suspicions that that base has been compromised. We may have to send troops there to confront the alien menace.”
“Oh, my God,” Michelle said. “Could that be the same base here, the one Lenny was talking about last night?”
“Could be,” Peter said.
“If our suspicions about all these reports are true,” Price said, “I must stress that the international community will not and cannot tolerate this growing threat to our interests.”
“Of course not,” Peter said. “If the Bolshivarians keep on taking control of everything, the ‘international community’ can no longer make money from all the oil it sucks out of Venezuela.”
“Shh!” Michelle said. “We’ve gotta listen.”
“Defeating this menace, I’m afraid, will require more radical, sweeping action than what we’ve used up to this point,” Price said.
“You’ve said ‘radical’ and ‘sweeping’ a number of times over the past year, Madame President,” another reporter said. “But you never elaborate on that. What exactly might these ‘radical’ and ‘sweeping’ measures entail? How much longer are we going to hear that they are classified?”
“Well,” Price began with a sigh and a pause, “I’m not saying we’re going to use nuclear weapons…”
“Oh, my God!” Michelle gasped.
“…but that option is not being ruled out any more,” the president went on. “If, and I do mean if, it is ever considered, I assure the world that it will be only as a last resort…and an extremely last resort at that…”
“It’s extreme, all right,” Peter said with a sneer.
“…one I’d be loathe to have to use,” Price went on, “but one we can no longer dismiss as a possible solution.”
“You bitch,” Peter hissed.
“Could we dismiss you as a possible solution, Madame President?” Michelle said.
The Passenger (Italian–Professione: reporter) is a 1975 drama directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and written by him, Mark Peploe, and Peter Wollen. The film stars Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, with Ian Hendry, Jenny Runacre, and Steven Berkoff.
The Passenger competed for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s been widely praised for its camerawork and its acting. Roger Ebert originally didn’t like it, but he revised his review in 2005, calling it a perceptive look at identity, alienation, and the human desire to escape oneself.
As of this blog post, the film has a rating of 88% on Rotten Tomatoes.
A link to quotes from the film can be found here.
One thing I found striking about The Passenger is how it can be compared and contrasted with Last Tango in Paris, and I’m not merely talking about how, in both films, Schneider plays opposite one of the greatest Hollywood male actors, playing his character’s love interest. In Tango, Paul (Brando) is also trying to escape from his painful past, and in a totally unrealistic way, by meeting with Jeanne (Schneider), not wanting to know her name or anything about her life, and her not knowing anything about him or his name.
The apartment in which Paul and Jeanne have their anonymous affair is an oasis from the pain of his past, which included not only the adultery of his wife, Rosa, but also her suicide. In The Passenger, David Locke (Nicholson) has an affair with the girl (Schneider), whose name we never learn, by the way; his wife, Rachel (Runacre), is having an affair with a man named Stephen (Berkoff), yet it is Locke who commits, so to speak, suicide by having the world believe he’s dead while he takes on a dead man’s identity.
Reality and the past catch up with Paul in the end; he is shot and killed. The same happens to Locke. Neither man can sustain his fantasy world for long.
References to French colonialism in Africa are made, if indirectly, in both films: in The Passenger, it is Chad; in Tango, it is Algeria. Related to this is the liberal hypocrisy of Jeanne and her fiancé wanting to name their children after communist revolutionaries (Fidel or Rosa), while she has such a love and admiration for her father–a colonel in Algeria in the 1950s whom revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon would have fought–that she won’t have Paul say anything bad about the colonel. In The Passenger, Locke is a liberal reporter who poses as a gun-runner for a Chadian liberation movement with Marxist leanings (one like FROLINAT), but all he does is take the money, without any concern for making sure that the Chadian rebels get their weapons.
The theme of duality pervades both films; see my analysis of Tango (link above) to find a discussion of duality in that film. In The Passenger, apart from the man/woman duality of the main characters that is also in Tango, there are the dualities of past vs present, the First and Third Worlds, the two Davids (Locke and Robertson, the latter played by Charles Mulvehill), and perhaps the most important duality of all, which is personified by the two Davids: liberal vs revolutionary.
We are meant to understand that Locke and Robertson are sufficiently similar looking for the one man to be possibly confused with the other (even if Nicholson and Mulvehill don’t look all that alike). Perhaps the African staff in their Chadian hotel consider all white men to look the same.
The similarity in these men’s looks is significant when we remember their political affiliations. Just as the identity of one David is swapped for that of the other, and just as one David is confused with the other, so is the liberal far too often confused with the radical leftist revolutionary, and the need to beware of such confusions is the political message that Antonioni was trying to impart here.
While being a ‘left-leaning liberal’ actually meant something (if not much) back in the 1970s, as opposed to the fact that it’s meant absolutely nothing since at least the 1990s (Bernie Sanders, AOC, et al are useless at opposing imperialism, and that’s speaking kindly of them), any real leftist knows that those 70s liberals’ activism was woefully inadequate at best, and at worst, an indirect aid to anticommunism. This is why Mao wrote “Combat Liberalism.” This is why Lenin didn’t trust the liberals. This is what Parenti meant when he distinguished the liberal analysis from that of the radical. And this is why even a moderate leftist like Phil Ochs satirized liberalism.
The real meaning of the film’s title (not the European one, mind you) is fully realized when seen in this political distinction between liberal and leftist. A passenger just sits passively while others do the work of moving. Locke is the (metaphorical) passenger, not the girl riding in his car, as many assume of the renaming of the film. Liberal opportunists are passengers: they go with the flow, blowing to the left…or to the right! depending on which way the political wind of the time happens to be blowing. The radical Marxist revolutionary, on the other hand, is the driver of the car, the steerer of the ship, one of its oarsmen, or the pilot of the airplane. The leftist actively brings about social and political changes; the liberal just goes along for the ride.
Conservatives–either out of stupidity and ignorance, or disingenuously out of a wish to exploit people’s confusion–like to conflate the liberal with the socialist. They’ll make idiotic claims like ‘hippies are communists,’ or assert that Biden and Harris are bringing about ‘toxic socialism,’ when the Democratic Party had already swung over to the political right back during the Clinton years (even Carter, with Brzezinski squirting his anticommunist poison in Carter’s ears, was hardly ‘left-leaning’ in any meaningful sense).
Locke personifies what I’ve characterized as the liberal mindset. His id would have him indulge in all kinds of pleasures: taking a huge wad of money (without even trying to supply the weapons he’s being paid for) and traveling around Europe (Munich and Barcelona), buying colourful clothes, and enjoying the charms of the girl. His ego would keep him safe from being found out by his BBC associate, producer Martin Knight (Hendry), Rachel, or the Chadian dictator’s secret police, those who kill him in the end. His superego, however, has him in an existential crisis wherein he’d report on the Chadian civil war in a manner sympathetic to the Marxist rebels, but Knight and the establishment media would have him keep his sense of “detachment,” have him remain ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ (translation: leaving the colonialist status quo unchallenged).
As a passenger, all Locke wants to do is keep moving: it doesn’t matter where he’s going, since he’s directionless, as long as he’s moving. His feeling stuck in “God-forsaken” Chad, his truck stuck in a sand dune, is symbolic of his existential crisis. Where can he go with his life as an establishment liberal reporter? He wants to feel as though he’s going somewhere, making some kind of advancement in his life. Not necessarily really going anywhere in particular, just feeling as if he’s moving. And that’s what makes him different from men like Robertson.
In the hot desert of Chad, he feels himself to be in a hopeless situation. He can’t find the guerrillas he wants to interview, to get a perspective opposing that of the dictator. He has recorded largely only the biased and dishonest point of view of the country’s ruling class; he’d might as well be supporting them. Here we see the existential crisis of the liberal who would be a revolutionary…if only he had the guts.
He feels dead in terms of the meaning of his life; it’s fitting that his truck is stuck in the desert sands. This sand is like the dust from which Adam sprang, and to which Locke will return when he dies (Genesis 3: 19; Ecclesiastes 3:20). All is vanity, the absurdist vanity of living in a meaningless world in which his only end will be death.
So when he finally returns to his hotel, exhausted and crestfallen, and he finds Robertson lying dead on his bed, Locke decides to die himself, by taking on Robertson’s identity. Adios a la pasada for Locke.
Though the past and present are bitterly opposed for Locke, there is nonetheless a link between the two that he can’t break, and this inability of his is foreshadowed in the scene when he’s switching his and Robertson’s passport photos. Locke has recorded a conversation between himself and Robertson, which he plays back while switching the photos.
The tape recording isn’t the only link with the past, though. In one of Antonioni’s famous long takes, we see bare-chested Locke at the table with the passports as the tape plays; he looks over to the side and the camera moves away from him to where the balcony shows a living Robertson and…Locke in a shirt! There is no cut in this camera shot. Antonioni has fused the present with the past in a manner bordering on the surreal; he had experimented with the border between the real and unreal, between certainty and uncertainty, in Blowup. The shot immediately after the balcony one, also without a cut, shows the flashback with Robertson return to the present with bare-chested Locke changing the passport photos. He’d cut himself off from his past, but not even the camera will cut away from it.
Earlier, Locke is sitting on Robertson’s bed, looking at the face of the corpse up close. This dead man, whose life was so different from the dead-end one that Locke wants to escape, is someone he now idealizes. He looks at the face, of this similar-looking man, as one would see oneself in a mirror; recall how Lacan spoke of seeing one’s ideal-I in a mirror, that perfect, unified image one sees, as opposed to the fragmented self one feels oneself to be.
Locke feels just this inadequacy compared to his dead twin; he feels even less alive than Robertson. Soon after, he finds Robertson’s pistol–not only representative of the dead man’s revolutionary leanings, but also a phallic manhood that Locke lacks. This ineffectual liberal now feels all the more inadequate.
But he can fake being a revolutionary, like those liberals who wear Che Guevara T-shirts and vote Democrat?
In trading Robertson’s identity for his own, Locke is establishing a narcissistic False Self and projecting his hated True Self onto Robertson’s corpse. Taking the pistol, Locke no longer feels psychologically castrated. Ironically, Robertson has said he’s in Chad “on business,” as if he were a bourgeois, when it is Locke who is the bourgeois, swapping identities with the revolutionary.
Antonioni’s films give great importance to location, including architecture, and The Passenger is no exception. In this film, we find a recurring motif of architecture, including churches or at least buildings whose names are associated with religion, like the Plaza de la Iglesia and the Hotel de la Gloria. Then, of course, there are the buildings of Gaudí, seen when Locke meets the girl, a student of architecture who knows Gaudí’s work.
Gaudí’s earlier career involved making buildings for bourgeois clients, though religiosity preoccupied his thoughts in his later life, through his focus on the Sagrada Família. The significance of these changes in Gaudí’s work for The Passenger is in how they can be said to parallel the change in Locke’s: his existential crisis, his search for meaning, can find a symbol in Gaudí’s search for God.
Now, none of this is to say that Locke’s search for meaning is anywhere near as noble or lofty as Gaudí’s; but in Locke’s narcissistic imagination, in his False Self as ‘gun-running revolutionary,’ he’d like to think of his search as comparable to a spiritual quest. Linked with this would-be quest is his meeting of the girl, who as a kind of guardian angel to him in her pressing of him to continue showing up for every meeting in Robertson’s little appointment book, is like a reincarnation of Robertson. When one considers Locke’s sexual relationship with the girl, that she can be seen as Robertson come back is in how, when Locke looked at his corpse up close, his face was so close to dead Robertson’s as to imply a wish to kiss him; after all, Robertson is his ideal-I, just as the girl, as his lover, is in a sense his other self.
While wearing that fake moustache in England, symbolic of a mask for his False Self, Locke sees the girl and will later remember her, as if it were fate bringing them together. In Munich, he is paid for papers with gun illustrations, in a church, of all places, one in which one can see the Stations of the Cross in the background. Since The Passenger is, in effect, the film documenting Locke’s life that Knight and the BBC would be making for their ‘deceased’ colleague, all these associations with spirituality and revolutionary heroism would seem to indicate that this ‘documentary film’ is an idealizing of his flawed life, in true narcissistic fashion.
He, of course, isn’t helping any revolutionary cause, nor has he found God. Like Paul in Last Tango in Paris, Locke is being completely irresponsible, throwing away his wife and his past, taking the rebels’ money without providing anything more than pictures of weapons, and having an affair with the girl. Like that fire he burns in his yard in his home in England (one of the flashback scenes) with Rachel wondering what he’s doing, Locke wants only to destroy the old, not build the new. What’s he running away from? Look back with the girl and see the road that Locke’s car has driven on: he’s in constant motion, getting away from the past, but with no discernible future or destination.
He can try to destroy the past, to run away from it, and (like Paul) try to live in a fantasy world, but he won’t succeed. Hitherto unfaithful Rachel becomes guilt-ridden over his ‘death,’ and wants Knight to contact the Robertson she understands to be alive. When Knight fails to find him in Barcelona, Rachel is all the more driven to find this mysterious man.
She isn’t the only one searching for “Robertson.” So are the secret police of the Chadian dictator, who–as Rachel learns at the Chadian embassy when she collects Locke’s things–wants to stop the illegal sale of guns to rebels in his country. Rachel is unwittingly helping these men find “Robertson,” whom she soon learns is really Locke. Incidentally, one of the secret police is a white man, presumably French (we hear him speaking to the girl in French at the Hotel de la Gloria when his associate is off to shoot Locke), strongly implying French neocolonial involvement in the Chadian Civil War, to root out the Marxists.
[As a side note, the Wikipedia article for The Passenger refers to the two men who follow and kill Locke as working with the rebels: on this assumption, the white one beats the crap out of Achebe (played by Ambroise Bia) because the rebels are mad that he gave the money to the wrong man. I disagree with this interpretation. I don’t think the rebels would react that violently to one of their comrades for what was an honest mistake, and would kill the thief of their money rather than angrily demand he give at least what he hasn’t spent back to them…and beat the crap out of him. Agents working for the Chadian dictator, on the other hand, would be that violent. Besides, I have the authority of Theodore Price, whose article on the movie includes references to the complete, uncut script, and who calls the men Chadian secret police.]
The film begins among the sands of Chad, a dictatorship persecuting the leftist resistance within it. The film ends in Spain, at a hotel surrounded in dust. Though Antonioni is too subtle a director to point this out, the viewer who knows his history will be aware that the Spain when The Passenger is set (1973) was also a dictatorship, that of Franco, who had leftists holed up and ‘reeducated’ in concentration camps, and who died the year of the film’s release, after which Spain only slowly crawled back into the realm of liberal democracy. The film thus, like music, has a kind of ABA structure: from dusty dictatorship to pretty democracy, and back again.
Before the penultimate scene with his death, Locke tells the girl a story about a blind man who regained his sight. The man was “elated” at first to be able to see, but he was soon disillusioned when he saw so much “dirt” and “ugliness” in the world. When blind, he easily crossed the road with a walking stick; with his sight, he became afraid even to leave his room. In three years, he killed himself.
This story seems to reflect, though one isn’t sure if Locke realizes it, that through those changes we make in our lives, we think we’re liberating ourselves, but we are only putting ourselves in different chains. Locke thought his trading identities with Robertson would free him from his past, but the pursuits of Knight and Rachel have proven that he’s escaped from nothing.
The girl leaves him in the hotel room and walks around on the dusty ground outside, as if to continue her work as his guardian angel, to be able to return if he needs her. The famous penultimate scene of his death, curious in being a long take largely without him in it, deserves special attention, obviously; I’d also like to give my personal interpretation of it.
Antonioni said that we don’t see Locke when he is killed because he was already dead when he chose no longer to be Locke. I’d like to expand on that idea by saying that, instead of seeing him, we see a POV shot of his spirit, even before the shooting, looking out onto the dusty square where the girl is walking about. His spirit approaches the bars on the window and passes outside; he has freed himself from the prison of a human body. Locke is rid of the lock on the door of his caged existence. Like Gaudí, he has found God, in a way, in the Hotel de la Gloria, its very name suggestive of religiosity.
Just as pious Gaudí was killed by a tram, so have vehicles arriving at Locke’s hotel brought his death: the car of the Chadian secret police, who followed Rachel to find him, her own vehicle with the police arriving too late. Locke is dead lying on the bed of his hotel room, as Robertson was found dead; both men have died thus in countries that are dusty dictatorships–ABA structure.
For dust Locke is, and unto dust shall he return.
His murder by the Chadian secret police is interesting in how he, having only received money, but having never provided weapons to the rebels, is actually innocent of being any kind of danger to the dictator of Chad. Pilate, learning from Jesus that His Kingdom “is not of this world” (John 18:36), also concluded that the man to be crucified was innocent of any revolutionary crime against the Roman Empire. Locke is thus a Christ figure, his holy spirit, as it were, slowly floating out of that room, through those bars, and out into the dusty square. In this way, Locke’s death is also comparable to that of the mystic architect.
Now, this making of Locke into a Christ figure is to be seen from the point of view of fascist, imperialist dictatorships. Men like Franco justified their authoritarian rule by claiming that they were saving their country from ‘satanic’ Marxism and preserving its Christian traditions. In this way, Christ-like Locke, like a good liberal who only pretends to be a revolutionary, is doing the Lord’s good work, keeping the strongmen in power by doing nothing to threaten their hold on it.
When Rachel finds her husband’s body on that bed with a bullet in him, she says she “never knew him,” echoing Peter’s denial of Christ three times before the cock crowed (Luke 22:34). This is the perfect ending to Locke’s ‘documentary,’ for in his narcissistic imagination, he’s died a martyr, and yet his spirit will always be with us.
This martyr-like status, of course, is just part and parcel of Locke’s narcissistic False Self. He couldn’t really be Robertson to save his life…literally. Locke deals in “words, images”; Robertson deals in “concrete things,” so the people understand him straightaway. Locke thus personifies Hegelian idealism, while Robertson personifies Marxian materialism.
Locke’s existential search for meaning is just a Camus-like absurdist one: Locke has tried to escape his liberal past by merely posing as a revolutionary; and like Sisyphus’ futile rolling up of that rock, Locke has failed miserably. We defy the Fates and attempt to give our lives value, and we’re happy in the attempt, as Camus says Sisyphus is, and as Locke briefly has been (think of that scene of him in the cable car in Spain, when he pokes his upper half out the window and stretches his arms out over the water…he feels as free as a bird); but the certainty of death assures us of the ultimate futility of our attempt.
So the lesson we must learn from The Passenger is, do we as leftists want to be engagé revolutionaries in the driver’s seat, or do we want to be mere liberal passengers, going along for the ride, hoping to share in the glory, but doing none of the heavy lifting? Certainly, when Antonioni filmed Chung Kuo, Cina, the Chinese Communists hated it, regarding him as a mere liberal, pandering passenger. Deeply hurt by this reaction, he made his 1975 masterpiece in response.
Now, what will we do in today’s neoliberal hell? Shall we try to throw away our pasts and live in a fantasy world, à la Paul and Jeanne in Last Tango in Paris? Shall we carry Robertson’s pistol around, feeling tough with it, but be too scared to use it? Shall we try to take the easy way out and avoid our painful reality? As Robertson warns us, “the world doesn’t work that way.”
“Friends, brothers, and sisters, thanks for attending tonight’s meeting,” Lenny Van der Meer said to all the carriers and sympathizers sitting in attendance, including Peter, Michelle, Tory, and Karen. They were in the spacious basement of a gym on the opposite side of town from that military base, on the night of the same day as the incident with Miller. “Before I begin our discussion of our recent progress, I’d like to introduce my second-in-command.” Lenny gestured to a large man with short brown hair and a moustache. “This is George Villiers-Joseph, who in the event of my death will be your new leader. Trust him as you would trust me.”
George stood up, and everyone clapped for him. Michelle clapped enthusiastically with the carriers and most of the non-carrying sympathizers in attendance; Peter, Tory, and Karen clapped politely, but not so enthusiastically. George sat down.
“Now, let’s begin,” Lenny said. “As you know, our plan has been to take control of South America, Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia, but far more surreptitiously than had been the case with Africa, which was taken almost in a panic, upon the world learning of our presence as extraterrestrials rather than as a virus. If only we hadn’t taken Africa in such a rushed, clumsy way, we might have avoided the war that’s been going on there for the past year, and prevented so many deaths on our side.”
At one point, Michelle’s eyes drifted over to Karen, who seemed distracted. Instead of listening to Lenny, she was watching his bodyguards. Michelle furrowed her brow, then turned her eyes back to him.
“Much progress has been made,” Lenny continued. “We’ve made inroads in controlling the Exxon-Mobil base on the other side of this city earlier today. We’ve become better able to stop and reverse flooding in many parts of South America. We’re controlling the wildfires at the edges of the rainforest and on the savannahs without arousing suspicion among the UCSA and NATO militaries. But mistakes have been made elsewhere on the continent. A heightened military presence in Quito, in the form of the Chiquita Brands International armed forces, in Santiago’s Codelco military branch, the military division in Buenos Aires’s British American Tobacco, and Tesla’s military in La Paz, have all been provoked by sloppy attempts by our comrades to pass on our Bolshivarian light to those in the city-state governments/corporations, and among some in their corporate militaries.”
Michelle looked over at Karen again. She still seemed to be interested more in Lenny’s bodyguards than in his words.
“This clumsiness, I’m sorry to say, has been the inevitable result of our Bolshivarian consciousness being merged with, no offence to our non-carrying sympathizers, the limitations of the human mind.”
“Oh, no offence taken,” Peter snorted. “Arrogant little glowing bastards. They’re so superior to us.”
“Well, aren’t they?” Michelle whispered. “If it weren’t for their medical superiority, we’d be dead in Luanda, wouldn’t we?”
Peter’s only reply was a scowl that acknowledged her point.
She then took a third look over at Karen, who was still watching the bodyguards while Tory was listening to Lenny with a grin of contentment. “Karen? What is it? Why are you always watching Lenny’s bodyguards?”
“Hmm?” Karen said in confused surprise at Michelle’s question. “Oh, I’m just worried that Lenny’s security might not be tight enough. He needs more men, I’d say.” She let out a little giggle.
“Oh,” Michelle said, then resumed listening to Lenny.
“Still, it would be unfair to blame all our flaws on the human brain; much of the fault of our mistakes is our own,” Lenny said. “We’re not perfect. We’re only Bolshivarian, after all.”
This got a few chuckles from the non-carrier listeners.
“Anyway,” Lenny went on, “we must keep aware of any new developments. Watch the news, as biased against us as the media is, and find online videos showing what we’re doing to help the people, where we’re succeeding and failing. We must be prepared to react to any new problems and challenges as they arise.”
Yes, Michelle thought. We need to know what that bitch Price is planning against us.
I really want to believe the Bolshivarians are sincere when they say they are working to help people here, Peter thought. Over the next few days, I’ll be looking for those online videos on my phone…if they exist.
Here’s a new poem by my Facebook friend, Jason Ryan Morton, whose work I’ve looked at many times before. This one is another one with a happier theme–love. Again, I’ll put his words in italics to distinguish them from mine. Here’s the poem:
I ran into the mirror
Fell right through
Woke up without eyes
But could see you
You were brighter than the moon
You smiled I swooned
Kissed your lips with my finger tips
I wrote our love sonnet
Upon your flesh
Awoke with a Memory
And a belief
That today we may be strangers
We will meet one day
And we shall be
Complete
And now, for my analysis.
Note the relationship between running into a mirror and seeing the person he loves. When we see a mirror, we see ourselves, of course; but mirrors can be metaphorical, too. The mirror in the Lacanian sense can be a metaphor for the face of another looking back at you, an idealized version of yourself, or an idealized parent looking back at you, mirroring your love back to you.
The Oedipal relationship with the idealized parent gets transferred onto someone that one later falls in love with. The poet “fell right through” (i.e., in love) and “could see” his love “without eyes,” because as we know, love is blind. His love was “brighter than the moon,” the same moon that was envious of her maid, the sun Juliet, for being far fairer than she (Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene ii, lines 2-10).
Another indirect reference to Shakespeare can be found in the poet having written their “love sonnet.” They “will meet one day/And…shall be/Complete.” This is the lifelong drive to attain the idealized state of the object seen in the mirror (the “Memory” from one’s first childhood experience of looking into the mirror and establishing a sense of self…a repressed, unconscious memory), to try to be as perfect as the image one sees on the other side, with whom one feels a stranger. To have one’s love, projected into and embodied in that other person.
[I have just republished an expanded version of the entire novel, with added scenes and further character development. Instead of publishing it chapter by chapter, which would have been too much of a pain, I did it book by book. Here are links to the four books: I, II, III, and IV. As you can see, I’ve also left the original, shorter versions published, because replacing them all with the expanded version would also have been too much of a pain. So I leave you, Dear Reader, with the choice of the shorter versions or the longer ones. You are free to choose whichever ones you prefer: a quicker but less-developed read, or a longer and fuller story. Either way, I hope you like my story.]
2032, Puerto Ayacucho, Amazonas, Venezuela
Sergeant Dan Miller, of the United City States Army, Exxon-Mobil Division, saluted Captain Finch as both of them were about to enter their office in their nine-year-old military installation. Both men had coffees in their hands, and they’d just finished lunch.
“Did you have a good lunch, sir?” Miller asked as his saluting hand came down.
“Yes, I did, Dan,” Finch said as his came down and they entered. “How about you?”
“Oh, fine, sir. I must say, I like the food here much better than I did in the Samsung base in Seoul, where I was posted a couple years ago. I hate kimchi, but the corn, rice, and beans here are a lot better. I’m so glad we kicked all the commies out of this place, that old Maduro government, and that Exxon-Mobil is running things in Caracas.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Finch said, looking away and his smile fading. “This whole continent is our backyard. We have far better use for the locals’ oil reserves than they do. Anyway, have those reports on my desk by 1400J.”
“Yes, sir,” Miller said, and went over to the filing cabinet, which was on the wall opposite to Finch’s office, where Finch went in and closed the door.
A minute later, Sergeant Judy West, of the Shell Oil Company’s air force, entered the office. “Good afternoon, Sergeant,” she said.
“Hi, Sergeant,” he said, looking away from his files. “How can I help you today?”
“Oh, I was just wondering if you were aware of any reports of alien activity here in Amazonas.”
“Not much of anything,” he said. “How’s things going in Africa, with the airstrikes and the drones spraying those glowing little bastards?”
“Well, after a year of it, we’ve killed many of them, but they’ve killed many more of ours,” she said. “At best, it’s been a stalemate; at worst, it could become Vietnam and Afghanistan, all over again.”
“Fuck,” he grunted. “Why can’t the good guys win, for a change?”
“I know how you feel,” she said, looking away and frowning. “Anyway, do you know of any rumours that there could be carriers of the aliens among us? Not necessarily here in this base, but maybe in other bases in South America, American soldiers who could be possessed by those little balls of light?”
“I’ve heard a rumour or two, a few suspicions, but nothing more than that.”
“Can you name any names of suspected military people?” she asked. “Even the vaguest lead could help.”
“No, no names, sorry. I wish I knew some, I really wish I did. I’d love to have an opportunity or two to fuck them up. I hate those sons o’ bitches.”
“Oh, I know the feeling,” she said with a sigh and a scowl. “If you learn of anything, just let me know. Here’s my name card.” She gave it to him.
“Thanks,” he said, taking it and putting it in his pocket. “In the meantime, though, I have my trusty can of bug spray here.” He gestured to it, fastened to his belt, as was standard for all military uniforms. “The very second I see any of them, my first reaction won’t be to call you, understand. Instead, I’ll zap the shiny little cocksuckers. Watch ’em die like the little cockroaches they are.”
“Well, you may encounter them pretty soon in the future,” she said. “We have intelligence that they’re infiltrating the whole Global South: not only here and Africa, but also Southeast Asia.”
“I’d enjoy a chance to kill some of ’em,” he said, with his back to her and looking at his files again. “Bring ’em on.”
“You may get that chance sooner than you think.”
“Oh?”
He looked behind.
His eyes and mouth widened.
Those glowing little bastards were flying from her fingers.
He got out his can of bug spray as quick as lightning and sprayed the half dozen of them that flew out in front. They all fell, tapping and bouncing on the wooden floor beside him.
“You little whore!” he shouted, reaching for a pistol he had hidden in the filing cabinet, in case of alien carrier emergency. He pointed it at her. “Now it’s time for you to die, you alien carrier bitch.”
But before he could pull the trigger, Bolshivarian balls of light were entering him in his back. Shaking and grunting in pain, he pointed the gun up to the ceiling and pulled the trigger.
Click.
He still had the safety on.
Still shaking and grunting, he dropped the gun and fell to the floor. The familiar red cracks were showing all over his face and hands.
Luckily for his assailants, his grunts of pain weren’t loud enough to attract the attention of anyone outside. West and Finch approached Miller, looked down with blank expressions at him from either side of his fidgeting body, and watched him begin to rip apart, tearing holes in his uniform.
“Open the window,” Finch told her. “We need to get the toxins out of the room.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, walking around Miller and the sprayed area to get to the window.
Finch watched as Miller’s flesh was ripping open, exposing his brain, trachea, stomach, bladder, and leg muscles. His ribcage was broken out wide open, like two doors to a welcoming entrance, to expose his heart and lungs. His uniform shirt and pants were in shreds.
The torn-open innards had mouth-like holes formed in them, grunting, “No. No. No. No. Get out. Get out of me.”
“It’s a good thing most of everyone else is still at lunch,” Finch said. “We can’t have anyone seeing this.”
Miller’s body exploded, spraying his blood everywhere. Finch and West dodged the red spray in time, getting only a minimal amount of tiny dots of blood on their uniforms.
“I’ll go outside and use our energy to influence everyone to stay away from this office,” Finch said, heading for the door outside. “Our Bolshivarian technology fortunately can clean up this mess far quicker than human hands. Then we can honour our fallen ones lying there among his body parts.”
“Yes, sir,” she said in a choked-up voice, watching him go out the door.
The remaining balls of light came out of her, careful to keep their distance from the bug spray toxins still in the air. The lights pushed the toxins out the window; then they made the blood disappear off the walls, Miller’s desk, her uniform, and the floor. It was a slow fading away of red, but it was ultimately faster than rags, a bucket of water, and mops would have been.
Once Miller’s body parts were picked up and disposed of, she had time to look at the marble-like balls on the floor, those that used to glow with life.
Before picking them up for burial, she needed a moment to weep for them.
Head
down,
arms stretched out
and kneeling,
eyes
wet,
on the sidewalk,
feeling
cold
and
dirty. Lost
outside,
with
no
hope, no home,
no pride.
A
hat
before you, filled
with change,
but
no
one wants to
rearrange
your
life,
to fill those hands
with love,
and
help
you, luckless,
get out of
the
pit
of pennilessness,
shame,
and
see
who really is to
blame.
Back in their hotel in Luanda that night, Peter, Michelle, and Bob slept much better than the night before. The Bolshivarian lights in Bob’s body gave him a psychic connection with Phil that soothed him to sleep; some of those lights also flew into Peter’s and Michelle’s room to soothe them to sleep with the energy of their parents.
Michelle especially slept like a baby. Her connection with her parents felt so comforting, it was almost as if they’d never died. She felt the Bolshivarians to be the surest of friends.
Peter enjoyed no less restful a sleep, hearing the loving words of his parents’ energy calming him. Still, though he enjoyed his sleep and woke up the next morning thoroughly refreshed, he wasn’t sure if it was his parents that had lulled him into such a perfect sleep, or just the skillful, yet deceptive, charm of the Bolshivarians.
The next morning, after breakfast, Bob apprised Peter and Michelle of the situation regarding the American response to the Bolshivarian takeover of Africa.
“The first of the airstrikes is coming today,” he told them. “The Bolshivarians informed me of their plan to engage the fighter planes and drones, which will hit us not only with missiles and gunfire from the planes, but also with bug spray from the drones.”
“How will the Bolshivarians be able to counterattack with bug spray shooting at them?” Peter asked.
“They didn’t tell me exactly how they were going to avoid the bug spray, but they’re aware of the danger and planning a way to evade it,” Bob said. “Don’t worry: the Bolshivarians are clever enough not to let themselves be exposed to the drones’ spray guns, which our intelligence tells us will all spray only forward. We can sneak up from behind and their radar won’t pick us up. The American and NATO forces are the ones who need to be cleverer, not our side.”
“How will the Bolshivarians fight them?” Peter asked.
“They’ll fly into the planes’ cockpits and into the bodies of the pilots,” Bob said. “You know what happens next.”
“What if the pilots wear those protective suits?” Michelle asked.
“Oh, everybody knows by now that those suits never worked,” Bob said. “Bolshivarians can fly through them with ease.”
“If so, then why did they let people think they were safe in the suits last year?” Michelle asked.
“For several reasons,” Bob explained. “First of all, we wanted humans to have some sense of hope, so they wouldn’t feel all hopeless and despairing. Secondly, we came to Earth right when you humans were so worried about all those coronavirus variants. We wanted you, for the time being, to think our presence was just another disease, to distract you until enough of us had settled in and established enough carriers around the world so we could move around among you and blend in with you, so you wouldn’t be able to tell which ones were carriers and which ones weren’t.”
Clever plan, Peter thought, and devious.
Bob looked at him as if he’d heard Peter say those words out loud. “We’re here to help you, Peter, not to dominate you. Our ways may be strange to you, but that doesn’t mean we have ill intentions.”
Whoa, Peter thought with widened eyes. The Bolshivarians can read my thoughts. I’d better bury my feelings deeper down in my mind from now on.
“We know your doubts, Peter,” Bob said. “But we don’t doubt you. Don’t worry.”
“I don’t doubt you,” Michelle said.
“Even though they killed your dad, my dad, and my mother?” Peter said, glaring at her.
“You know the real reason they died,” Bob said.
“I know your rationalization for it,” Peter said, and then with sarcasm, “‘They rejected the new way, so their deaths were their fault, not yours’.”
“Our parents still exist in spirit, Peter,” Michelle said. “Didn’t you feel them last night?”
“Did we feel their spirits, or did we feel hallucinations?” Peter asked, looking hard at Bob.
“Peter, if we Bolshivarians had wanted to kill all of humanity, we could have done it like that!” Bob said with a snap of his fingers. “If we’d wanted to take control of all of your bodies and enslave you, we could have done it like that!” He snapped his fingers again. “But we didn’t. We could have gotten through every protective suit and either controlled or killed every head of state in your world, every CEO/leader of every city-state government, with none of you able to stop us, in the blink of an eye! But we didn’t…and many, many Bolshivarians have died because of the fluke discovery of bug spray toxins.”
Now Peter looked down at his hands.
“We want to save your planet and your people from destruction, but before we can do that, we need to gain the trust of at least a reasonable number of you, and gain the willful cooperation of enough of you. We’ve given as many of you as we can a chance to choose either to work with us or against us. We’ve allowed many to be non-carriers, because we want your friendship by free will. Even those who’ve died, like your parents, can still communicate with you through our collective psychic energy. Can you please try to trust us, Peter?”
Peter looked at Bob for several seconds.
“They cured the world of the coronaviruses, didn’t they?” Michelle added. “You, Peter, of all people, should be grateful to the Bolshivarians for doing away with the masks and vaccines, right?”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Peter said. “Wayne Grey did pull that off. I’ll give him that. I wish I hadn’t punched him.”
“And those were not hallucinations of my mom and dad,” Michelle said in a shaky voice, looking in Peter’s eyes with pain and conviction.
“Can you try to trust us, Peter?” Bob asked again.
“OK,” he said. “I’ll try. The governments here on Earth have certainly proved themselves untrustworthy.”
“Good,” Bob said. “Now let’s get ready for those airstrikes.”
************
Four hours later, Bob was in his room, sitting crosslegged on his bed in a meditative position. The balls of light were floating on all sides around his body. He could feel the messages the Bolshivarians from other parts of Angola, including those of the warehouse hideout, were sending him.
Oh, no! he thought.
Peter and Michelle were in their room, too, lying on their bed in each other’s arms and waiting for Bob to tell them what was going on.
From outside their window, they could hear approaching planes.
Just as they got off their bed to look out the window, Bob rushed into their room.
“Hey, Bob!” Michelle shouted in annoyance. “We could have been indecent in here!”
“Sorry,” he said. racing for that window. “I didn’t have time to knock.” All three of them looked out the window.
Four fighter planes were approaching, accompanied by half a dozen small, brown ovoid drones with spray guns on them.
“Just as I feared,” he said. “Not only did they know that Lenny Van der Meer and the other Bolshivarian carriers are hiding out in that warehouse, but they know we’re here, too!”
“Who informed the Americans?” Peter asked. “Were there spies hiding out in that basement? Are there spies here in this hotel?”
“Unlikely, bordering on impossible,” Bob said. “We’d have been able to sense treason among us; it would take an extraordinary ability to bury one’s feelings for us not to sense traitors. Spies must have been hiding out among the trees or bushes outside.”
“There aren’t many trees or bushes to hide behind around here, or near that warehouse,” Peter said. “Years of global warming and wildfires have ensured that.”
“Not many trees or bushes, but enough for, say, one or two spies to hide among,” Bob said. “In any case, somebody from outside, somewhere, found our people there…and here. We’ve gotta get out of here. Move!“
The three of them rushed out of the room, down the hall, and down a flight of stairs to the ground floor. Just as they were making a run for the front doors, the striking of the first missile shook the building.
“Oh, shit!” Peter shouted.
“Are these the same fighters and drones that hit the warehouse, do you think?” Michelle asked.
“No,” Bob said. “Lenny and his people took them all out as I described before.”
“So, Lenny’s still alive?” Peter asked.
“As far as I know, yes,” Bob said. “Let’s just hope the Bolshivarians here can be as successful.”
Three more strikes shook the building, causing it to collapse. Peter, Michelle, and Bob screamed before losing consciousness and being buried in rubble by the front door.
Outside, drones were shooting bug spray at swarms of dots of light flying at them; after a dozen or so of lights flying in front were sprayed, all of them lost their light and fell like marbles on the ground, all lifeless. Then, the fighter jets shot at the carriers who’d been sending up the lights. They all lay on the ground in a bloody lake.
These victims, however, were just a sacrificial distraction.
A swarm of Bolshivarian lights far greater in number were flying behind all the jets and drones. None of their radar could detect the approach of the lights, whose advanced alien technology could easily evade being picked up by radio airwaves.
The overconfident pilots had no idea what was coming at them.
The first man to feel the tiny lights entering his body screamed. His jet veered to the right as he fidgeted and struggled in his seat, feeling his body tearing to pieces and ripping out of his uniform.
“James, what’s wrong?” the pilot to his right said; but before he could say any more, James’s plane crashed into his. A huge explosion lit up the sky. Three drones flying nearby also got destroyed in the explosion.
A number of carriers looking up from the ground cheered when they saw the explosion.
“Half of the threat gone, all at once!” one of them shouted.
Sadly, he was gunned down, seconds after, by one of the two remaining fighter jets.
The remaining carriers sent up their balls of light; one of the drones sprayed them, causing them all to drop on the ground, as lightless and lifeless as the other ‘marbles.’ Then the fighter jets shot at the carriers and left them all in a pool of gore.
Meanwhile, the other two drones turned around to face the swarm of lights behind. They sprayed at the leading dozen or two of them, causing them and many more behind to fall on the ground. The third drone turned around to help the other two.
Now, the remaining carriers were free to shoot their lights up at the two fighter jets.
As the pilots screamed, fidgeted in their seats, and felt their splitting bodies rip out of their uniforms, the lights took control of the jets, aimed their guns at the three drones, and shot at them.
The carriers cheered as they saw the drones explode up in the air. Then they dodged out of the way when the two jets fell to the ground, a few feet away on either side of the hotel, and blew up in flames.
The surviving Bolshivarian lights flew over to the rubble of the hotel, soon to be joined by the surviving carriers, who ran over. The lights scanned the rubble for signs of life: only three were found to be still alive, and barely so–Peter, Michelle, and Bob.
The carriers, about a dozen of them, worked fast to pull the pieces of brick off the bodies of the injured three. Bob was unconscious, approaching death; Peter and Michelle lay there, hovering between consciousness and unconsciousness, moaning and sighing.
The lights hovered above and around the three. Their light and warmth touched the three hurt bodies.
Bob, being the closest to death, was the priority. The lights scanned his vital signs: his pulse was extremely weak and rhythmically irregular. He had broken bones all over. He was bathed in his blood; his life was fading fast.
Even with all the Bolshivarians’ medical knowledge, centuries in advance of that of humanity, they couldn’t save Bob. Since Peter and Michelle also urgently needed help, they switched their focus onto them. They weren’t as near death as Bob had been, but they weren’t much further away from death, either.
A crowd of people, carriers and non-carriers, watched the process of treating Peter and Michelle. Their eyes were locked on the two injured–eyes full of worry. A tense several hours ensued.
Peter’s and Michelle’s broken and fractured bones, their cuts and bruises, were hardly fewer than those on Bob. All onlookers, including the carriers, who knew of the Bolshivarians’ abilities, and even the Bolshivarian lights themselves, were full of doubts as to whether or not they could save the two.
Their pulses, though not as bad as Bob’s, were still weak and irregular. They showed considerable shortness of breath. The struggle to heal them involved a back-and-forth movement between weaker and stronger pulses, more and less irregular pulses, and greater and lesser shortness of breath.
Broken bones were set, fractures were healed millimetre by millimetre, bruises and cuts ever so slowly faded away–the bloody red slashes lengthening, shortening, and lengthening and shortening over and over again, the blotches of black, blue, and purple shrinking, growing, and shrinking again and again.
But finally, the white lights’ healing efforts succeeded here where they hadn’t been able to with Bob. Non-carriers–local Angolans as sympathetic to the Bolshivarians as Peter and Michelle–watched with dropped jaws and agape eyes at the aliens’ ability to bring Peter and Michelle fully back to health, all in only three to four hours.
Peter and Michelle, of course, were no less amazed.
“What?” he said, getting up slowly and awkwardly.
“We’re better?” Michelle said, also getting up and testing her arms and legs by moving them around. “So quickly? How could they do that?”
“To explain to you what Bolshivarian medicine can do,” one of the carriers said, “would be like explaining computers to cavemen.”
Peter and Michelle looked down at Bob’s lifeless body.
“He didn’t make it?” Michelle asked.
They could feel a sad answer in the negative from the floating lights.
Peter moved his body around, to test how well he’d been healed. “Wow,” he said. “The Bolshivarians make our doctors look like…well, witch doctors in comparison.”
“Now do you trust them?” she asked with a sneer.
“Yeah, I guess I do,” he said.
“If only their skill could have saved my mom,” she said with a frown. “I guess she was as close to death as Bob here, too close to be saved.”
Peter’s cellphone rang. “Wow,” he said as he pulled it out of his pants pocket. “My phone didn’t get damaged. Hello?”
“Peter?” a woman’s voice said. “This is Karen Finley. It’s a good thing you gave us your cellphone number yesterday. Are you and Michelle OK? We know about the attack on your hotel.”
“Oh, hi, Karen,” he said. “We’re OK now. The Bolshivarians just saved our lives after the fighter jets hit our hotel. They’re the most amazing doctors.”
“I’m glad for that,” she said. “That’s so awful, what happened to you there. I’m so sorry.”
“How did you know the jets attacked us here?” he asked.
“The Bolshivarians told us,” she said. “They can find out anything, you know, if they focus on it. First, we learned about the warehouse being hit, then Tory and I wondered if you two were OK, so we asked them.”
“Thanks for your concern,” he said.
“Wait,” she said. “Tory wants to talk to you.” She gave her phone to her husband.
“OK,” Peter said. “Hello, Tory?”
“Hi,” Tory said. “Lenny says we’re all going to have to get out of Africa. More airstrikes are planned. Now that we’ve seen how badly the Americans and NATO can hit us, how well they can find us, thanks to their spies, the plan is to go to South America, where the Bolshivarians have many contacts who will help us. Lenny and his contacts here have arranged airplanes to take us there. There’s an airbase not far from where the warehouse was. The Bolshivarians can guide you to it. We all have to hurry, though, OK?”
“OK,” Peter said. “Thanks for the call. We’ll get over there right away. Bye.” They hung up.
“What’s the plan?” Michelle asked.
“We’re going to South America.”
“South America?” she asked.
“Yes, and we gotta hurry,” he said, taking her by the hand. “I’ll explain on the way. Let’s go.”
“B-but Peter?…” she said.
Michelle, Bob’s voice said in her mind. Go!
Yes, Michelle, Siobhan’s voice now said. Go with Peter.
Peter and Michelle started running towards a car one of the carriers was gesturing to.
END OF BOOK TWO
Infinite Ocean 
You must be logged in to post a comment.