The Green Lady 🗽 NYC

From the Battery

February 24, 2020

Purple Haze

Remy was sitting in Battery Park looking out at the harbour. The sky was a weird bright blue, with patches of purple and violet. From where he was sitting, he could see pink beams streaking into the new capital from the Caribbean and South America. He saw that the Statue of Liberty was now a hub for purple waves.

He was sitting roughly in the same spot he’d been sitting two years ago when the aliens invaded. At that moment, he’d been thinking what a mess his country was in — the President had declared the Revolution a threat to the business interests of the nation — when from the corner of his eye he noticed a black swarm lifting into the sky coming from the vicinity of Hell’s Kitchen. A few seconds later he could see it more clearly: a locust swarm of predator drones, at the centre of which were two squadrons of S-70A Black Hawks, with their elite Marine troops and Hellfire missiles.

He knew their target: the Revolutionary camp in Liberty State Park. Students and radical Democrats had set up batteries a month before the Baulians had arrived, and three weeks after the government closed down Congress and declared martial law. All the Democrats who opposed gun culture now openly embraced it, and the showdown was going to be nastier than the regime imagined. The Chancellor didn’t, for instance, know that the Revolutionaries had bought 20 Russian S-400 Triumf air defence systems. While the Press had been muzzled for its attempt to tie the 2016 election to the Russians, the Revolutionaries had taken the opportunity to secretly import an array of recent hardware from Tula and Irkutsk.

The regime wanted to put on a display of force, to see if the Revolutionaries would fold like the liberal chickens they suspected them to be. If the terrorists didn’t pack up camp, the regime vowed to carpet bomb the entire park. Grizzled grandpas from the glory days of Nam vowed to bomb them to the Stone Age.

The squadrons only got half-way across the harbour, however, at which point they were lit up by a purple pulse that seemed to come from the sky itself. Then slowly, in two or three seconds, the sky shifted from purple to intense yellow and red. The ground itself turned pink.

The Black Hawks looked like black bugs popping in a campfire. For a second or two they roasted on sticks of dark orange light, then burst into a sea of bright candy red. The fate of the Revolutionaries was more difficult to make out. The next day Remy learned that they’d been evaporated along with the rest of New Jersey.

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After the invasion, Remy’s family had been given special treatment because of his legal expertise. He’d been tasked to explain the Baulian legal system to people brought up with the concept of property rights — a concept that to the Baulians suggested suspicion, paranoia, insanity, or a greed so deep that the Baulians couldn’t understand what it meant. The family’s prosperity, however, was also due to Françoise’s expertise in diplomacy and to her deep connections in France and Switzerland. The Baulians had given her the top job as the chief American cultural liaison to the European capital. Every few days she was beamed over to Paris to deal with diplomatic squabbles.

Even though completely defeated, the French still complained and tried to stage marches. In one march they complained that there were no more cars to set on fire. The rest of Europe was no better. In Syntagma Square the Greeks were still throwing rocks and insisting that Germany pay for their restaurants and beach stalls. The Russians were making special deals with the Baulians, and hacking the intergalactic network to see what they could find.

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Across the harbour, Remy could see the Statue of Liberty, festooned with a shifting purple crown that pulsed day and night, signalling who knows what.

He knew that if he could see the way a Baulian saw he would see more lines than that. He would even see the orange lines, that for Baulians were almost sacred. He read that they believed these orange lines connected them to other galaxies, even universes.

The Baulians said they’d come to save Earth, and to end its five thousand year-old floundering in the dark. They’d come to share their Ethical Directive, which to Remy sounded like just another way of saying dictatorship. And yet there was no doubt that the plants and animals were going to have a better life. Far better than what the old regime had in store.

The year prior to Total Collapse was a bit of a blur, especially because his usual sources of information dried up left and right. The New York Times had been requisitioned in 2017 and reduced to monthly publication. By Christmas it was reduced to accounting work and writing Human Resource bulletins for the State Firm, Trump Et Al (TEA).

FOX News was turned into an ad agency for selling TeaPhones to China, and TEA had dismantled all quixotic windmills and doubled fracking output. Eager to protect its nuclear monopoly, TEA forbade nuclear energy plants from operating anywhere. It made up the energy deficit by quadrupling the output of the tar sands and the coal pits of the Empire.

TEA controlled all the major industrial parks and media outlets in the greater New York area. It had turned all the small bookstores and magazine stalls into employment centres for those who still preferred work in the city to labour camps on the Mexican border.

The war with NATO was going well, but it was difficult to say: one day the USA seemed to be at war with NATO, then the next day American troops and NATO were facing the endless columns of the Eurasian Army. The next day they were bashing the French. Apparently, it was all the fault of a treacherous Arab from Brooklyn who went by the name of Al-Goldabi. While all of this just confirmed Francine’s view of the American Empire, Remy decided to forget politics and stock up on Victory Gin.

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Les Liaisons Bienheureuses

Françoise and the children had finally joined him on his bench. Françoise was absent-mindedly unloading the picnic basket, which was full of the delicacies that she calculated would run out in a year or two. On her trips to Paris over the last year she had strategically scoured the best bakeries and the larders of the three-star restaurants for the best France had to offer. She got confit de canard from Le Comptoir de la Gastronomie and macarons from Pierre Hermé. She took day trips to Camembert, and scoured the beaches for the best moutarde de Normandie.

In their New York apartment she had turned the spare bedroom into a larder, packed with sacks of rice from Camargue, Black Diamond Hackleback caviar, fleur de sel de Gruisson, ham from Parma and Jabugo, and every brand of sheep cheese from the peppered pecorino of Sicily to the smooth pecorino of Tuscany. She would carefully select some of these and add them to her picnic basket of fresh sandwiches from Zabar’s.

Françoise’s mind was usually on the delicacies in her picnic basket, but today she didn’t even mention what was inside. The kids had already eaten so she encouraged them to play with their soccer ball on the grass in front of them. Usually, she’d try to get them to guess the difference between a pecorino stagionato from Rome and a pecorino stagionato from Sardinia. As they kicked the ball around in front of her, the open-faced bagel with lox and cream cheese dangled above her lap, without so much as a bite to disturb the soft perfection of its orange and white. She stared absent-mindedly into the glistening harbour.

“Dis-moi, qu’est-ce qui se passe?” Remy always spoke French when he wanted to know what was really up.

“Jsai plus. I don’t know what to make of it.”

“Of what?”

“This morning I was linking with an old friend of mine at le Collège de France. Martine. Tu te souviens d’elle?

“Yes, I remember her. She was seeing the philosopher, the Canadian who talked in circles.”

“Yes, Kenneth. They finally got married. I met Martine for a coffee last week in le Quartier Latin. O, ce quartier! It looks just the same as it used to. If there was a sandlot on a backstreet there I’d stick my head in it and never come back. But ça ne vaut rien. What’s the point of looking backward?” She paused. It was as if she had windshield wipers in the back of her eyes, to erase the possibility of regret. Souvenirs, chagrins, plaisirs, all swept away. Edith Piaf didn’t know the meaning of forget.

“Martine told me she’d been assigned to liaise with other representatives in la francophonie du nord.”

Remy was interested in la francophonie, since his parents were from Quebec. He’d often wondered how much he’d lost when they left Montreal for New York.

All of these differences — French, English, Spanish — all seemed so quaint now. Remy had seen videos of the White House bursting like a pink balloon made of bubble gum. The bubble rose higher and higher, above all the nations, puffed up with all sorts of rubbery sugar. Then ** SNAP CRACKLE POP! ** it became one with the pink sky.

In the first year after the invasion, Remy felt relieved. There had just been too much insanity. Too much violence. No one listened to anyone, yet everyone had something to say. Loudly at first, and later, if no one agreed with them they resorted to angry tweets, isolated cells, molotov coctails, militia meetings online, and special military operations. The Oklahoma bombing was just the start, just a nudge toward the anarchy that the MAGA crowd was more than happy to turn into a full frontal assault on the very idea of negotiation and peaceful debate.

If Remy had been a religious man, he might have seen an Apocalypse or Rapture in the gathering storm. But he wasn’t, and therefore all he saw was division, hatred, and destruction.

In the first year after the Baulians took over, his legal work depressed him, reminding him that all that was left was a memory of human ideals. In his private thoughts all he saw was a history of humankind — and, of course, of human unkind. All he could do was be true to the record, so that the universe would know that there was once a race that was proud and ingenious, ruthless and loving. A planet of ten thousand peoples, all so proud of themselves that they couldn’t get along. Peoples that built great monuments, walls, guns, and supreme commandments, but couldn’t imagine anything greater than themselves.

Françoise continued. “Kenneth was also assigned a liaison job — between Europe and the remaining northern cities,” by which she meant Halifax, Québec, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, and Victoria. All the other cities were now industrial regeneration sites, bean fields, or golf courses.

“Kenneth had been in contact for several months with a writer from Vancouver, Matthieu Leclerc. Matthew had been tasked to write a literary documentation of the human condition. He called it The Human Tragedy. Matthew asked Kenneth whether the French had managed to remain French. He was also interested in the re-design of the Paris, and wondered what happened to the Louvre, the museums, the wine bars, the cafes. He’d heard stories of the universities closing, of professors ordered to entertain the pink cubes in ‘history cafes,’ and of vineyards converted to bean fields.”

Françoise looked wistfully up to the sky, and then back down to earth. “Laissons tout ça à côté… There’s something else. Martine told me that Kenneth and Matthew were linking when a form emerged from the wall behind Matthew. The wall was a dark cobalt blue, yet the figure was darker, deeper blue. It wasn’t a Baulian. It said that it’s name was Farenn. The last thing Kenneth heard was Matthew saying, “Let me get back to you, Ken.” The last thing he saw was Matthew slowly swivelling his right arm and turning the camera off.”

On the way back to their apartment, Françoise and Remy tried to fit the pieces of the puzzle together when they saw an enormous headline on a paper at a news stand. In large green print it read:

BAULIANS PASS RULE 2.7

BUSINESS AS USUAL

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Next: New Lines of Control: Rule 2.7

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