Ascendancies (37 page)

Men and women alike wore baggy fatigues, covered with buttoned pockets and block-shaped streaks of urban camouflage: brick red, asphalt black, and concrete gray. Dark-blue shoulder patches showed the thirteen-starred circle. Working efficiently, without haste, they erected large satellite dishes on the roofs of two buses. The buses were soon linked together in formation, shaped barriers of woven wire securing the gaps between each nose and tail. The machines seemed to sit breathing, with the stoked-up, leviathan air of steam locomotives.

A dozen identically dressed crewmen broke from the buses and departed in a group for the hotel. Within their midst, shielded by their bodies, was the rock star, Tom Boston. The broken outlines of their camouflaged fatigues made them seem to blur into a single mass, like a herd of moving zebras. I followed them; they vanished quickly within the hotel. One crew woman tarried outside.

I approached her. She had been hauling a bulky piece of metal luggage on trolley wheels. It was a newspaper vending machine. She set it beside three other machines at the hotel's entrance. It was the Boston organization's propaganda paper,
Poor Richard's
.

I drew near. “Ah, the latest issue,” I said. “May I have one?”

“It will cost five dollars,” she said, in painstaking English. To my surprise, I recognized her as Boston's wife. “Valya Plisetskaya,” I said with pleasure, and handed her a five-dollar nickel. “My name is Sayyid; my American friends call me Charlie.”

She looked about her. A small crowd already gathered at the buses, kept at a distance by the Boston crew. Others clustered under the hotel's green-and-white awning.

“Who are you with?” she said.

“
Al-Ahram
, of Cairo. An Arabic newspaper.”

“You're not a political?” she said.

I shook my head in amusement at this typical show of Russian paranoia. “Here's my press card.” I showed her the tangle of Arabic. “I am here to cover Tom Boston. The Boston phenomenon.”

She squinted. “Tom is big in Cairo these days? Muslims, yes? Down on rock and roll.”

“We're not all ayatollahs,” I said, smiling up at her. She was very tall. “Many still listen to Western pop music; they ignore the advice of their betters. They used to rock all night in Leningrad. Despite the Communist Party. Isn't that so?”

“You know about us Russians, do you, Charlie?” She handed me my paper, watching me with cool suspicion.

“No, I can't keep up,” I said. “Like Lebanon in the old days. Too many factions.” I followed her through the swinging glass doors of the hotel. Valentina Plisetskaya was a broad-cheeked Slav with glacial blue eyes and hair the color of corn tassels. She was a childless woman in her thirties, starved as thin as a girl. She played saxophone in Boston's band. She was a native of Moscow, but had survived its destruction. She had been on tour with her jazz band when the Afghan Martyrs' Front detonated their nuclear bomb.

I tagged after her. I was interested in the view of another foreigner. “What do you think of the Americans these days?” I asked her.

We waited beside the elevator.

“Are you recording?” she said.

“No! I'm a print journalist. I know you don't like tapes,” I said.

“We like tapes fine,” she said, staring down at me. “As long as they are ours.” The elevator was sluggish. “You want to know what I think, Charlie? I think Americans are fucked. Not as bad as Soviets, but fucked anyway. What do you think?”

“Oh,” I said. “American gloom-and-doom is an old story. At
AI-Ahram
, we are more interested in the signs of American resurgence. That's the big angle, now. That's why I'm here.”

She looked at me with remote sarcasm. “Aren't you a little afraid they will beat the shit out of you? They're not happy, the Americans. Not sweet and easygoing like before.”

I wanted to ask her how sweet the CIA had been when their bomb killed half the Iranian government in 1981. Instead, I shrugged. “There's no substitute for a man on the ground. That's what my editors say.” The elevator shunted open. “May I come up with you?”

“I won't stop you.” We stepped in. “But they won't let you in to see Tom.”

“They will if you ask them to, Mrs. Boston.”

“I'm called Plisetskaya,” she said, fluffing her yellow hair. “See? No veil.” It was the old story of the so-called “liberated” Western woman. They call the simple, modest clothing of Islam “bondage”—while they spend countless hours, and millions of dollars, painting themselves. They grow their nails into talons, cram their feet into high heels, strap their breasts and hips into spandex. All for the sake of male lust.

It baffles the imagination. Naturally I told her nothing of this, but only smiled. “I'm afraid I will be a pest,” I said. “I have a room in this hotel. Some time I will see your husband. I must, my editors demand it.”

The doors opened. We stepped into the hall of the fourteenth floor. Boston's entourage had taken over the entire floor. Men in fatigues and sunglasses guarded the hallway; one of them had a trained dog.

“Your paper is big, is it?” the woman said.

“Biggest in Cairo, millions of readers,” I said. “We still read, in the Caliphate.”

“State-controlled television,” she muttered.

“Is that worse than corporations?” I asked. “I saw what CBS said about Tom Boston.” She hesitated, and I continued to prod. “A ‘Luddite fanatic,' am I right? A ‘rock demagogue.'”

“Give me your room number.” I did this. “I'll call,” she said, striding away down the corridor. I almost expected the guards to salute her as she passed so regally, but they made no move, their eyes invisible behind the glasses. They looked old and rather tired, but with the alert relaxation of professionals. They had the look of former Secret Service bodyguards. Their city-colored fatigues were baggy enough to hide almost any amount of weaponry.

I returned to my room. I ordered Japanese food from room service, and ate it. Wine had been used in its cooking, but I am not a prude in these matters. It was now time for the day's last prayer, though my body, still attuned to Cairo, did not believe it.

My devotions were broken by a knocking at the door. I opened it. It was another of Boston's staff, a small black woman whose hair had been treated. It had a nylon sheen. It looked like the plastic hair on a child's doll. “You Charlie?”

“Yes.”

“Valya says, you want to see the gig. See us set up. Got you a backstage pass.”

“Thank you very much.” I let her clip the plastic-coated pass to my vest. She looked past me into the room, and saw my prayer rug at the window. “What you doin' in there? Prayin?”

“Yes.”

“Weird,” she said. “You coming or what?”

I followed my nameless benefactor to the elevator.

Down at ground level, the crowd had swollen. Two security guards stood outside the glass doors, refusing admittance to anyone without a room key. The girl ducked, and plowed through the crowd with sudden headlong force, like an American football player. I struggled in her wake, the gawkers, pickpockets and autograph hounds closing at my heels. The crowd was liberally sprinkled with the repulsive derelicts one sees so often in America: those without homes, without family, without charity.

I was surprised at the age of the people. For a rock-star's audience, one expects dizzy teenaged girls and the libidinous young street-toughs that pursue them. There were many of these, but more of another type: tired, footsore people with crow's-feet and graying hair. Men and women in their thirties and forties, with a shabby, crushed look. Unemployed, obviously, and with time on their hands to cluster around anything that resembled hope.

We walked without hurry to the fortress circle of buses. A rear guard of Boston's kept the onlookers at bay. Two of the buses were already unlinked from the others and under full steam. I followed the black woman up perforated steps and into the bowels of one of the shining machines.

She called brief greetings to the others already inside.

The air held the sharp reek of cleaning fluid. Neat elastic cords held down stacks of amplifiers, stencilled instrument cases, wheeled dollies of black rubber and crisp yellow pine. The thirteen-starred circle marked everything, stamped or spray-painted. A methane-burning steam generator sat at the back of the bus, next to a tall crashproof rack of high-pressure fuel tanks. We skirted the equipment and joined the others in a narrow row of second-hand airplane seats. We buckled ourselves in. I sat next to the Doll-Haired Girl.

The bus surged into motion. “It's very clean,” I said. “I expected something a bit wilder on a rock and roll bus.”

“Maybe in Egypt,” she said, with the instinctive assumption that Egypt was in the Dark Ages. “We don't have the luxury to screw around. Not now.”

I decided not to tell her that Egypt, as a nation-state, no longer existed. “American pop culture is a very big industry.”

“Biggest we have left,” she said. “And if you Muslims weren't so pimpy about it, maybe we could pull down a few riyals and get out of debt.”

“We buy a great deal from America,” I told her. “Grain and timber and minerals.”

“That's Third-World stuff. We're not your farm.” She looked at the spotless floor. “Look, our industries suck, everybody knows it. So we sell entertainment. Except where there's media barriers. And even then the fucking video pirates rip us off.”

“We see things differently,” I said. “America ruled the global media for decades. To us, it's cultural imperialism. We have many talented musicians in the Arab world. Have you ever heard them?”

“Can't afford it,” she said crisply. “We spent all our money saving the Persian Gulf from commies.”

“The Global Threat of Red Totalitarianism,” said the heavyset man in the seat next to Doll-Hair. The others laughed grimly.

“Oh,” I said. “Actually, it was Zionism that concerned us. When there was a Zionism.”

“I can't believe the hate shit I see about America,” said the heavy man. “You know how much money we gave away to people, just gave away, for nothing? Billions and billions. Peace Corps, development aid…for decades. Any disaster anywhere, and we fall all over ourselves to give food, medicine…Then the Russians go down and the whole world turns against us like we were monsters.”

“Moscow,” said another crewman, shaking his shaggy head.

“You know, there are still motherfuckers who think we Americans killed Moscow. They think we gave a Bomb to those Afghani terrorists.”

“It had to come from somewhere,” I said.

“No, man. We wouldn't do that to them. No, man, things were going great between us. Rock for Detente—I was at that gig.”

We drove to Miami's Memorial Colosseum. It was an ambitious structure, left half-completed when the American banking system collapsed.

We entered double-doors at the back, wheeling the equipment along dusty corridors. The Colosseum's interior was skeletal; inside it was clammy and cavernous. A stage, a concrete floor. Bare steel arched high overhead, with crudely bracketed stage-lights. Large sections of that bizarre American parody of grass, “Astroturf,” had been dragged before the stage. The itchy green fur was still lined with yard-marks from some forgotten stadium.

The crew worked with smooth precision, setting up amplifiers, spindly mike-stands, a huge high-tech drum kit with the clustered, shiny look of an oil refinery. Others checked lighting, flicking blue and yellow spots across the stage. At the public entrances, two crewmen from a second bus erected metal detectors for illicit cameras, recorders, or handguns. Especially handguns. Two attempts had already been made on Boston's life, one at the Chicago Freedom Festival, when Chicago's Mayor had been wounded at Boston's side.

For a moment, to understand it, I mounted the empty stage and stood before Boston's microphone. I imagined the crowd before me, ten thousand souls, twenty thousand eyes. Under that attention, I realized, every motion was amplified. To move my arm would be like moving ten thousand arms, my every word like the voice of thousands. I felt like a Nasser, a Qadaffi, a Saddam Hussein.

This was the nature of secular power. Industrial power. It was the West that invented it, that invented Hitler, the gutter orator turned trampler of nations, that invented Stalin, the man they called “Genghis Khan with a telephone.” The media pop star, the politician. Was there any difference anymore? Not in America; it was all a question of seizing eyes, of seizing attention. Attention is wealth, in an age of mass media. Center stage is more important than armies.

The last unearthly moans and squeals of sound-check faded. The Miami crowd began to filter into the Colosseum. They looked livelier than the desperate searchers who had pursued Boston to his hotel. America was still a wealthy country, by most standards; the professional classes had kept much of their prosperity. There were the legions of lawyers, for instance, that secular priesthood that had done so much to drain America's once-vaunted enterprise. And their associated legions of state bureaucrats. They were instantly recognizable; the cut of their suits, their telltale pocket telephones proclaiming their status.

What were they looking for here? Had they never read Boston's propaganda paper, with its bitter condemnations of the wealthy? With its fierce attacks on the “legislative-litigative complex,” its demands for purges and sweeping reforms?

Was it possible that they had failed to take him seriously?

I joined the crowd, mingling, listening to conversations. At the doors, Boston cadres were cutting ticket prices for those who showed voter registrations. Those who showed unemployment cards got in for even less.

The more prosperous Americans stood in little knots of besieged gentility, frightened of the others, yet curious, smiling. There was a liveliness in the destitute: brighter clothing, knotted kerchiefs at the elbows, cheap Korean boots of iridescent cloth. Many wore tricornered hats, some with a cockade of red, white, and blue, or the circle of thirteen stars.