KultureDrome

Living Dead (Five)

Cordwainer Smith was cruising the men’s room at the Minneapolis Airport on his way back East. Sometimes you have to visit the scene of a crime for yourself. He was trying to get a better sense of what happened to Sen. Larry Craig just before he was snared in the sting by the under cover cops. When CRYPTO-FASCISTS go out in public it usually gets ugly fast. Agent Smith liked to inspect the premises himself, get a real feel for the little things. He wanted to breathe in the mix of urine, feces, and pine scented industrial strength antiseptic bleach cleaner. If you’re game, you can even count the bathroom tiles from the floor to the ceiling, or from the door to where Sen. Craig’s head must have been. Afterwards, these details only help you remember better what happened. You can linger on the parts you liked best as if you were fondling a trophy you are particularly fond of. Your memory will come back to you anytime you want it to with a velvety, finely nuanced grain of clarity. Smith took some pictures to throw in the incidental file, made some notes on his hand-held electronic device, and reread the police transcript from the sting in a loud theatrical voice to get a feel for what Sen. Craig’s whimpered pleading sounded like delivered in the merciless echo of a cold, metal toilet stall. Smith was careful not to spend to much time on this last bit of reasearch. He knew he was out of his element and didn't want to draw the attention of the local heat. When he wasn’t a government spook, Cordwainer was an accomplished writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Under various pseudonyms he had already amassed a number of well respected volumes, including the preeminent black-ops manual Psychological Warfare: International Propaganda and Communications still used by the Pentagon and the CIA. He held the degrees of A.B., M.A., Ph.D., Certificate in Psychiatry (Applied), and Litt.D., but, like his father, he had cut his teeth in the Foreign Service, and what he knew best about human nature he had learned on the killing fields of Cambodia and Vietnam. In fact, the strange, brutal, and beautiful world of his imagination was probably better known in the Far East. (To the familiar eye, there are no shortage of cryptic references to his science fantasy stories like “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons” and “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” in Manga comics and Anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the Serial Experiments Lain series). The detail he brought to his writing came directly from his work in the field. That was why he took such meticulous notes in the men’s room stall. Smith wrote Science Fiction, but the lines between fantasy and reality were becoming more and more blurred to him. He was having a harder and harder time telling fact from fiction, keeping his lived-life separate from his imagined one — Cordwainer Smith the agent, from Corwainer Smith the author of weird, beautiful, terrifying stories of the far future. In his mind's eye the graceful birdlike ships that plied the spaceways, human-alien hybrid mutant slave creatures who toiled in deep dark mine shafts on asteroids, and superhuman galactic absolute rulers had become hopelessly and irredeemably confused with those CRYPTO-FASCIST-ZOMBIE-SHITPANTS in the White House.