If I’m going to write Kisangani 2150 I’m going to need a voice to do so, a style. I was looking around on my hard drive and came across this fragment from an aborted project called The Chronicles of Jivometric Johnson and the Lady Irene. It’s a bit informal and freewheeling for something that’s conceived as something of a sequel to New York 2140, but, and setting aside the issue of whether it’ll be in the mode of a novel of some kind or an imagined historical treatise, that’s only about the dynamics of the underlying world. It’s not about style, though admittedly this particular style does imply something of a mythical dimension to that world.
And yet...Why not?
Caveat: Note that this is not supposed to be a draft of something that might go into K2150. It's something I had lying around. I drafted it for a somewhat different intent, now forgotten. It's just a thought.
At the River Jordan
Back in the early seventies, before the Internet, the iPhone, the PC, even before we got our asses out of Vietnam, but not before we forgot “The Age of Aquarius”, I told my friends that we were the Moses generation. We’d get to the banks of the River Jordan but we wouldn’t cross over into the Promised Land.
Well, we’ve been camped out now for several decades and I ain’t seen nobody cross the river. No one.
Obama, Al Thani, Karzai, Sarkozy, Trump, Macron, Bolsonaro, Putin, Modi, Abe, Xi, ‘n ‘em, they’re high up on a cliff jabbering away. Every once in awhile one of them’ll step to the edge, haul it out, and see if they can throw a stream across the river. Not even close, not a one of ‘em. So, who-ever he is, he shakes the last few drops off the tip, hides it away, and goes back to the high muckety-muck jibber jabber. And the River Jordan just keeps rolling along, covered in an oil slick from shore to shore and punctuated, of course, by a bit of Grand High Exhalted Urine here and there.
As for the rest of us, well, in one way or another folks pretty much bought into the idea that we’re the Moses generation. Though I did have the idea myself and don’t recollect getting it from anyone else, I don’t claim that its wide currency is my doing.
I sure hope it isn’t, because it’s a dumb idea. Obvious enough to anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the Judeo-Christian scriptures—and that’s what my knowledge is, superficial—and dumb. Or at any rate dangerous. For it breeds complacency, inertia, and helplessness. Since we’re the Moses generation, the thinking seems to be, we might as well sit back an relax and let the next generation figure out how to cross the River Jordan.
And that’s what we’ve been doing, camping out on the banks of the River Jordan and preparing to wish the next generation Good Luck and Bon Voyage! when they finally set sail. Trouble is, THEY bought the damn story and have decided that they TOO are the Moses generation. And THEIR kids after them.
So here we are, three generations piled up against the River Jordan waiting for someone else to march the human race into the land of milk and honey. Meanwhile we have our toys to play with, our iPads and YouTubes and remix this curate that having a high old time cruising through three millennia of human blood sweat and tears as evidenced forth on the internet. We’re having all this fun extending our minds through digital tendrils grasping the globe, and the globe itself is strangling on phosphate run-off, methane fumes, oil slicks, acid rain, and radioactivity seeping into the water. Never mind, they say, never mind, the next generation will fix it. They’ll cross over. Me, I gotta’ watch me some of those old Ernie Kovacs shows. He was a Master. Lucy, too.
And so the pileup continued. Pink Cadillacs with the tail fins, Tamogatchis, fire brick from thousands of old blast furnaces, old blue jeans, TVs & radios, DC10s put out to rest, tons of old World Book encyclopedias and Hardy Boys mysteries, rotted sheet rock by the square mile, trash trash trash must piling up on the banks of the River Jordan. In among the trash, cave houses and cliff dwellings nestled in among the junk, WiFi dishes pointed in whatever direction and all draped in wires humming with digital juice.
* * * * *
He wasn’t much to look at, this,Jivometric Johnson: skinny, a bit over five feet tall, couldn’t tell how old he was ‘cause that changed with the light, as did his skin color. He was just this short, skinny, chameleonesque guy.
It was a thing of beauty, that stream. Shimmering golden yellow in a high parabolic arc that made it into Canaan, and then some. Talk about golden arches! Whew! That liquid gold did arch. The drops that didn’t make it to the other side, and not all of them did, fell into the river, plink, plink, plink. Where each one hit the surface the oil-slick retreated in an ever-widening ring. When the rings got wide enough they connected so that by the time he was done relieving himself there was a narrow but oil-free path across the river. First time in a decade anyone saw the water itself.
Now you’d think, what with the importance of getting over and our boy’s obvious talents in that regard, that the leaders would welcome him to the fold, maybe set up some lessons. But, no, not them. He was tossed in jail for a week for peeing without a license and disturbing the peace.
‘Bout the third day he was in there he reached way down in his pocket, way down, and fished out an ocarina, a sweet potato he called it. Started playing a sweet melody.
Suddenly there was a commotion over at the Old Cat Lady’s. The Cat Lady herself opened the door and shuffled out, first time she’d been out in weeks. She spends most of the time indoors with her cats. Nobody knows how many she has, 20, 30, maybe more, nor how she feeds ‘em. But she does, though the little fur balls’ll supplement her provisions with the usual: mice, birds, the occasional rat and every once in awhile you’ll see about a dozen of them go down to the river and gang up on one of those albino crocodiles that show up.
Anyhow, Cat Lady comes out and shuffles down to the jail. Can’t really call it a walk ‘cause her feet never leave the ground. Cat Lady’s a big women, almost six feet tall and rather heavy, though the weight’s well distributed. Like with Johnson you couldn’t really tell her age. Maybe she was 30, maybe 50, or anywhere in between. As for race, just call it the human race.
She gets down to the jail, cocks her ear listening to the sounds of Johnson’s sweet potato, and speaks, for the first time anyone’s ever heard her talk.
“Metric? ‘Zat you?”
“Irene?”
“Yeah, it’s me, Lady Irene.”
Lady Irene? You mean the Old Cat Lady is really Lady Irene, Mistress of the Transcendental Shuttlecock?
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