No Direction Home Page 9

  What could I say to that? I had offended him deeply, and, besides, I couldn’t think of anything else to show him. I took the juniper to five hundred and headed downtown over the river at a slow one hundred, hoping against hope that I’d somehow think of something to salvage this blown million-yen deal with before we reached my office and I lost this giant goldfish forever.

  As we headed downtown, Ito stared impassively out the bubble at the bleak ranks of high-rise apartment buildings that lined the Manhattan shore below us, not deigning to speak or take further notice of my miserable existence. The deep orange light streaming in through the bubble turned his round face into a rising sun, straight off the Japanese flag. It seemed appropriate. The crazy bastard was just like his country: a politically touchy, politely arrogant economic overlord, with infinitely refined aesthetic sensibilities inexplicably combined with a packrat lust for the silliest of our old junk. One minute Ito seemed so superior in every way, and the next he was a stupid, childish sucker. I’ve been doing business with the Japanese for years, and I still don’t really understand them. The best I can do is guess around the edges as to whatever their inner reality actually is, and hope I hit what works. And this time out, with a million yen or more dangled in front of me, I had guessed wrong three times and now I was dragging my tail home with a dissatisfied customer whose very posture seemed designed to let me know that I was a crass, second-rate boob, and that he was one of the lords of creation!

  “Mr. Harris! Mr. Harris! Over there! That magnificent structure!” Ito was suddenly almost shouting; his eyes were bright with excitement, and he was actually smiling.

  He was pointing due south along the East River. The Manhattan bank was choked with the ugliest public housing projects imaginable, and the Brooklyn shore was worse: one of those huge, sprawling, so-called industrial parks, low, windowless buildings, geodesic warehouses, wharves, a few freight-booster launching pads. Only one structure stood out; there was only one thing Ito could’ve meant: the structure linking the housing project on the Manhattan side with the industrial park on the Brooklyn shore.

  Mr. Ito was pointing to the Brooklyn Bridge.

  “The… ah… bridge, Mr. Ito?” I managed to say with a straight face. As far as I knew, the Brooklyn Bridge had only one claim to historicity: it was the butt of a series of jokes so ancient that they weren’t funny anymore. The Brooklyn Bridge was what old comic conmen traditionally sold to sucker tourists—greenhorns or hicks they used to call them—along with phony uranium stocks and gold-painted bricks.

  So I couldn’t resist the line: “You want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge, Mr. Ito?” It was so beautiful; he had put me through such hassles, and had finally gotten so damned high and mighty with me, and now I was in effect calling him an idiot to his face and he didn’t know it.

  In fact, he nodded eagerly in answer like a straight man out of some old joke and said, “I do believe so. Is it for sale?”

  I slowed the jumper to forty, brought her down to a hundred feet, and swallowed my giggles as we approached the crumbling old monstrosity. Two massive and squat stone towers supported the rusty cables from which the bed of the bridge was suspended. The jumper had made the bridge useless years ago; no one had bothered to maintain it and no one had bothered to tear it down. Where the big blocks of dark gray stone met the water, they were encrusted with putrid-looking green slime. Above the waterline, the towers were whitened with about a century’s worth of bird shit.

  It was hard to believe that Ito was serious. The bridge was a filthy, decayed, reeking old monstrosity. In short, it was just what Ito deserved to have sold to him.

  “Why, yes, Mr, Ito,” I said, “I think I might be able to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  I put the jumper on hover about a hundred feet from one of the filthy old stone towers. Where the stones weren’t caked with seagull guano, they were covered with about an inch of black soot. The roadbed was cracked and pitted and thickly paved with garbage, old shells, and more bird shit; the bridge must’ve been a seagull rookery for decades. I was mighty glad that the juniper was airtight; the stink must’ve been terrific.

  “Excellent!” Mr. Ito exclaimed. “Quite lovely, is it not? I am determined to be the man to purchase the Brooklyn Bridge, Mr. Harris.”

  “I can think of no one more worthy of that honor than your esteemed self, Mr. Ito,” I said with total sincerity.

  About four months after the last section of the Brooklyn Bridge was boosted to Kyoto, I received two packages from Mr. Shiburo Ito. One was a mailing envelope containing a mini-cassette and a holo slide; the other was a heavy package about the size of a shoebox wrapped in blue rice paper.

  Feeling a lot more mellow toward the memory of Ito these days with a million of his yen in my bank account, I dropped the mini into my playback and was hardly surprised to hear his voice.

  “Salutations, Mr. Harris, and once again my profoundest thanks for expediting the transfer of the Brooklyn Bridge to my estate. It has now been permanently enshrined and affords us all much aesthetic enjoyment and has enhanced the tranquility of my household immeasurably. I am enclosing a holo of the shrine for your pleasure. I have also sent you a small token of my appreciation, which I hope you will take in the spirit in which it is given. Sayonara.”

  My curiosity aroused, I got right up and put the holo slide in my wall viewer. Before me was a heavily wooded mountain which rose into twin peaks of austere, dark gray rock. A tall waterfall plunged gracefully down the long gorge between the two pinnacles to a shallow lake at the foot of the mountain, where it smashed onto a table of flat rock, generating perpetual billows of soft mist which turned the landscape into something straight out of a Chinese painting. Spanning the gorge between the two peaks like a spiderweb directly over the great falls, its stone towers anchored to islands of rock on the very lip of the precipice, was the Brooklyn Bridge, its ponderous bulk rendered slim and graceful by the massive scale of the landscape. The stone had been cleaned and glistened with moisture; the cables and roadbed were overgrown with lush green ivy. The holo had been taken just as the sun was setting between the towers of the bridge, outlining it in rich orange fire, turning the rising mists coppery, and sparkling in brilliant sheets on the falling water.

  It was very beautiful.

  It was quite a while, before I tore myself away from the scene, remembering Mr. Ito’s other package.

  Beneath the blue paper wrapping was a single gold-painted brick. I gaped. I laughed. I looked again.

  The object looked superficially like an old brick covered with gold paint. But it wasn’t. It was a solid brick of soft, pure gold, a replica of the original item, perfect in every detail.

  I knew that Mr. Ito was trying to tell me something, but I still can’t quite make out what.

  THE LOST CONTINENT

  I felt a peculiar mixture of excitement and depression as my Pan African jet from Accra came down through the interlocking fringes of the East Coast and Central American smog banks above Milford International Airport, made a slightly bumpy landing on the east-west runway, and taxied through the thin blue haze toward a low, tarnished-looking aluminum dome that appeared to be the main international arrivals terminal.

  Although American history is my field, there was something about actually being in the United States for the first time that filled me with sadness, awe, and perhaps a little dread. Ironically, I believe that what saddened me about being in America was the same thing that makes that country so popular with tourists, like the people who filled most of the seats around me. There is nothing that tourists like better than truly servile natives, and there are no natives quite so servile as those living off the ruins of a civilization built by ancestors they can never hope to surpass.

  For my part—perhaps because I am a professor of history and can appreciate the parallels and ironies—! not only feel personally diminished at the thought of lording it over the remnants of a once-great people, but it also reminds me of our own civilization’s i
nevitable mortality. Was not Africa a continent of so-called “underdeveloped nations” not two centuries ago when Americans were striding to the moon like gods?

  Have we in Africa really preserved the technical and scientific heritage of Space-Age America intact, as we like to pretend? We may claim that we have not repeated the American feat of going to the moon because it was part of tire overdevelopment that destroyed Space-Age civilization, but few reputable scientists would seriously contend that we could go to the moon if we so chose. Even the jet in which I had crossed the Atlantic was not quite up to the airliners the Americans had flown two centuries ago.

  Of course, the modern Americans are still less capable than we of recreating twentieth-century American technology. As our plane reached the terminal, an atmosphere-sealed extension ramp reached out creakily from the building for its airlock. Milford International was the port of entry for the entire northeastern United States; yet, the best it had was recently obsolescent African equipment. Milford itself, one of the largest modern American towns, would be lost next to even a city like Brazzaville. Yes, African science and technology are certainly now the most advanced on the planet, and some day perhaps we will build a civilization that can truly claim to be the highest the world has yet seen, but we only delude ourselves when we imagine that we have such a civilization now. As of the middle of the twenty-second century, Space-Age America still stands as the pinnacle of man’s fight to master his environment. Twentieth-century American man had a level of scientific knowledge and technological sophistication that we may not fully attain for another century. What a pity he had so little deep understanding of his relationship to his environment or of himself.

  The ramp linked up with the plane’s airlock, and after a minimal amount of confusion we debarked directly into a customs control office, which consisted of a drab, dun-colored, medium-sized room divided by a line of twelve booths across its width. The customs officers in the booths were very polite, hardly glanced at our passports, and managed to process nearly a hundred passengers in less than ten minutes. The American government was apparently justly famous for doing all it could to smooth the way for African tourists.

  Beyond the customs control office was a small auditorium in which we were speedily seated by courteous uniformed customs agents. A pale, sallow, well-built young lady In a trim blue customs uniform entered the room after us and walked rapidly through the center aisle and up onto the little low stage. She was wearing, face-fitting atmosphere goggles, even though the terminal had a full seal.

  She began to recite a little speech; I believe its actual wording is written into the American tourist-control laws.

  “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the United States of America. We hope you’ll enjoy your stay in our country, and we’d like to take just a few moments of your time to give you some reminders that will help make your visit a safe and pleasurable one.”

  She put her hand to her nose and extracted two small transparent cylinders filled with gray gossamer. “These are government-approved atmosphere filters,” she said, displaying them for us. “You will be given complimentary sets as you leave this room. You are advised to buy only lifters with the official United States Government Seal of Approval. Change your filters regularly each morning, and your stay here should in no way impair your health. However, it is understood that all visitors to the United States travel at their own risk. You are advised not to remove your filters, except inside buildings or conveyances displaying a green circle containing the words FULL ATMOSPHERE SEAL.”

  She took off her goggles, revealing a light red mask of welted skin that their seal had made around her eyes. “These are self-sealing atmosphere goggles,” she said. “If you have not yet purchased a pair, you may do so in the main lobby. You are advised to secure goggles before FT leaving this terminal and to wear them whenever you venture out into the open atmosphere. Purchase only goggles bearing the Government Seal of Approval, and always take care that the seal is air-tight.

  “If you use your filters and goggles properly, your stay in the United States should be a safe and pleasant one. The government and people of the United States wish you a good day, and we welcome you to our country.”

  We were then handed our filters and guided to the baggage area, where our luggage was already unloaded End waiting for us. A sealed bus from the Milford International Inn was already waiting for those of us who had booked rooms there, and porters loaded the luggage on the bus while a representative from the hotel handed out complimentary atmosphere goggles. The Americans were ; most efficient and most courteous; there was something : almost unpleasant about the way we moved so smoothly from the plane to seats on a bus headed through the almost empty streets of Milford toward the faded white plastic block that was the Milford International Inn, by far the largest building in a town that seemed to be mostly small houses, much like an African residential village. Perhaps what disturbed roe was the knowledge that Americans were so good at this sort of thing strictly out of necessity. Thirty percent of the total American Gross National Product comes from the tourist industry.

  I keep telling my wife I gotta get out of this tourist business. In the good old days, our ancestors would’ve given these African brothers nothing but about eight feet of rope. They’d’ve shot off a nuclear missile and blasted all those black brothers to atoms! If the damned brothers didn’t have so much loose money, I’d be for riding every one of them back to Africa on a rail, just like the Space-Agers did with their black brothers before the Panic.

  And I bet we could do it, too. I hear there’s ail kinds of Space-Age weapons sitting around in the ruins out West. If we could only get ourselves together and dig them out, we’d show those Africans whose ancestors went to the moon while they were still eating each other.

  But, instead, I found myself waiting with my copter bright and early at the International Inn for the next load of customers of Little Old New York Tours, as usual. And I’ve got to admit that I’m doing pretty well off of it. Ten years ago, I just barely had the dollars to make a down-payment on a used ten-seat helicopter, and now the thing is all paid off, and I’m shoveling dollars into my stash on every day-tour. If the copter holds up another ten years—and this is a genuine Space-Age American Air Force helicopter restored and converted to energy cells in Aspen, not a cheap piece of African junk—I’ll be able to take my bundle and split to South America, just like a tycoon out of the good old days. They say they’ve got places in South America where there’s nothing but wild country as far as you can see. Imagine that! And you can buy this land. You can buy jungle filled with animals and birds. You can buy rivers full of fish. You can buy air that doesn’t choke your lungs and give you cancer and taste like fried turds even through a brand-new set of filters.

  Yeah, that’s why I suck up to Africans! That’s worth spending four or five hours a day in that New York hole, even worth looking at subway dwellers. Every full day-tour I take in there is maybe twenty thousand dollars net toward South America. You can buy ten acres of prime Amazon swampland for only fifty-six million dollars. I’ll still be young ten years from now, I’ll only be forty. I take good care of myself, I change my filters every day just like they tell you to, and I don’t use nothing but Key West Supremes, no matter how much the damned things cost. I’ll have at least ten good years left; why, I could even live to be fifty-five! And I’m gonna spend at least ten of those fifty-five years someplace where I can walk around without filters shoved up my nose, where I don’t need goggles to keep my eyes from rotting, where I can finally die from something better than lung cancer.

  I picture South America every time I feel the urge to tell off those brothers and get out of this business. For ten years with Karen in that Amazon swampland, I can take their superior-civilization crap and eat it and smile back at ’em afterward.

  With filters wadded up my nose and goggle seals bruising the tender skin under my eyes, I found myself walking through the blue haze of the
open American atmosphere, away from the second-class twenty-second-century comforts of the International Inn, and toward the large and apparently ancient tour helicopter. As I walked along with the other tourists, I wondered just what it was that had drawn me here.

  Of course, Space-Age America is my specialty, and I had reached the point where my academic career virtually required a visit to America, but, aside from that, I felt a personal motivation that I could not quite grasp. No doubt, I know more about Space-Age America than all but a handful of modern Americans, but the reality of Space-Age civilization seems illusive to me. I am an enlightened modern African, five generations removed from the bush; yet I have seen films—the obscure ghost to woof Las Vegas sitting in the middle of a terrible desert clogged with vast mechanized temples to the God of Chance; Mount Rushmore, where the Americans carved an entire landscape into the likenesses of their national heroes; the Cape Kennedy National Shrine, where rockets of incredible size are preserved almost intact—which have made me feel like an ignorant primitive trying to understand the minds of gods. One cannot contemplate the Space Age without concluding that the Space-Agers possessed a kind of sophistication which we modern men have lost. Yet they destroyed themselves.

  Yes, perhaps the resolution of this paradox was what I hoped to find here, aside from academic merit. Certainly, true understanding of the Space-Age mind cannot be gained from study of artifacts and records—if it could, I would have it. A true scholar, it has always seemed to me, must seek to understand, not merely to accumulate knowledge. No doubt, it was understanding that I sought here…

  Up close, the Little Old New York Tours helicopter was truly impressive—an antique ten-seater built during the Space-Age for the military by the look of it, and lovingly restored. But the American atmosphere had still been breathable even in the cities when it was built, so I was certain that this copter had only a filter system of questionable quality, no doubt installed by the contemporary natives in modern times. I did not want anything as flimsy as all that between my eyes and lungs and the American atmosphere, so I ignored the FULL ATMOSPHERE SEAL sign and kept my filters in and my goggles on as I boarded. I noticed that the other tourists were doing the same.