Fantastic Metropolis

“I see you decided to settle out of court.” Jerry stared at the general, trying to recognise him. There was a memory. A yearning. Gone. “Are you on our side?”

“What we say in public isn’t always what we mean in private?” The general’s display of caps seemed to be an appeal.

“A legalistic rather than a lawful country, wouldn’t you say? That’s the problem with constitutional law. Never has its feet on the ground.”

Lobkowitz came to look down at the general. He was behaving so uncharacteristically that for a second Jerry was convinced the old diplomat would piss on Fors. The handsome soldier bureaucrat now resembled a kind of horizontal messiah.

The prince fingered his fly. “Nowadays, America’s a white recently pubescent baptist festooned with an arsenal of sophisticated personal weaponry. Armed and ignorant. Don’t cross him. Especially if you’re a girl. Captain Cornelius, we’re dealing with Geronimo here, not Ben Franklin. Geronimo understood genocide as political policy. He knew what was happening to him. Somehow inevitably that savage land triumphed over whatever was civilised in its inhabitants. They are its children at last.” Prince Lobkowitz turned in the rubble to look out at the desert, where the Egyptian Sahara had been. His stocky fatigue-clad body was set in an attitude of hopeless challenge. His long grey hair rose and fell in the wind. His full mouth was rigid with despair. He was still mourning for his sons and his wife, left in Boston. For the dream of a lifetime. For peace. “Our mistake.”

Jerry sniffed again at the populated air. “Is that cordite?” He touched his lips with his tongue. “Or chewing gum.” He had pulled on a vast white gelabea, like a nightshirt, and a white cap. His skin had lost some of its flake. He wondered if he shouldn’t have brought more power. He’d only come along for the debris.

“All that informal violence. Out of control. Reality always made yanks jumpy.” Shaky Mo licked his M18’s mechanisms, feeling for tiny faults. “They’re good at avoiding it, of forgetting it. If it can’t be romanticised or sentimentalised it’s denied. Fighting virtual wars with real guns. That’s why they export so much escapism. It’s their main cash crop. That’s why they’ve disneyfied the world. And why they’re so welcome. Who wants to buy reality? Fantasy junkies get very aggressive when their junk is threatened. You all know that sententious American whine.” He tasted again. He was hoping to identify the grade of his oil. He had become totally obsessed with maintenance.

“If I were Toney Blurr I would stick a big missile right up Boston’s silly Irish bottom. Where the republican terrorist’s paymasters live. Remind them who we are. Bang, bang. And it would make the protestants feel so much better. People in the region would understand. They admire that kind of decisive action. CNN-ready, as we say. Such a precise, well-calculated single, efficient strike would cut off the terrorist’s bases and supplies and lose them credibility with their host nation. Bang. Bang. Bang.”