The following is a work of fiction.
It is the conclusion of a novel, The American Diaspora, which I began in 2005, while at Corante. The table of contents for that book is here.
That book, in turn, is a sequel to The Chinese Century, a novel I wrote in late 2004, right after the U.S. election of that year. Its table of contents is here.
I am currently planning a third book in this Alternate History trilogy, to be called The Duke of Oil. It will be published, as these books were, online. If you are an agent or publisher, and would be interested in killing trees for these books, please contact me.
Otherwise, just enjoy.
When last you heard from me
I was in the hands of the Bush Administration.
Why was ICE interested in emigrants, in legal American citizens whose status was
not subject to question, I asked when we got downtown.
A South African passport was presented
to me. “American?” asked the officer, who never gave a name.
I pulled my U.S. passport from a back
pocket. “Yes, American,” I said.
“The United States of America does
not recognize dual citizenship. You are with us or you are not. From
our investigation, from your own actions, you are not.”
“Bullshit,” I responded, getting a
slap in the face I needed for my trouble. Then my mind made a great
speech. “I’m as American as you are. Maybe more. Because I know
what America is supposed to be. It’s about the assumption of liberty,
it’s about granting it to all people. It’s not this Homeland you
defend for your leaders.”
But, as I say, I kept silent.
It would be months before I saw Jenni
again, in an ICE
hearing room in Houston, where we’d been college sweethearts three
decades before. She was older, her hair mostly white, cut short, and
thinner. But there was a defiance in her manner, an anger in her
heart, that made me fall in love all over again.
I hadn’t done so well in custody. I had
ignored my hair, my shoulders had become stooped. I looked a lot more
like Ted Kaczynski than I would ever like to have admitted. Part of it
was depression. Part of it was also their failure to properly manage
my health, my cholesterol, my blood pressure. My own technique for
managing it was to stay in a state of constant meditation, or try to.
I told time by my blood pressure, by the headaches that came every
morning, by the crash I endured when each day’s storm broke. I gave
myself a year or two at the most.
The hearing room was white, bright, a
portrait of the President smiling down from its front as big as the
flag. The hearing officer wore a suit, but a 10-gallon hat hung on a
rack by him and I was certain there were boots under the table.
The hearing was perfunctory, and the
news was good. We were being expelled, exiled, placed in the custody
of a young black man of about my height, whom the officer seemed to
know, trust, even to be in some awe of.
Everyone left the room except for me,
Jenni, and the black man. I hugged my wife, and she looked up,
worriedly, at me. I smiled, cried, and hugged her some more.
The black man introduced himself.
“Avery Johnson,”
he said. It didn’t register with Jenni, but it registered with me. He
was the coach of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban’s old team. Old
because I felt certain he no longer owned them, given the
government’s attitude toward the Virgin-Maverick co-founder.
Jenni still didn’t recognize him, but
could tell from my wide smile and body language that I did, and for
the first time in months she relaxed.
Johnson’s job was very simple. He was
to get us to the Houston Bush airport, onto an international flight.
He first took us to a gym near downtown, a Bally’s, where he ordered
me to shower, gave me a razor, and pushed a suit on me he had taken
from his trunk. Jenni cleaned up, too, while he signed autographs in
the lobby.
When I came out I was a different man.
I looked like a banker. I decided to shave my whole beard off to
celebrate, and Jenni barely recognized me. Until we kissed, that is.
Johnson seemed pleased with the change.
As we drove north on I-45, through
heavy traffic, Johnson stayed on his cell phone, so I never really
got a chance to thank him. When we got to the Airport a Skycap opened
the door, he greeted us with great respect, and then he nodded over
at Johnson, who simply shook my hand and patted me on the shoulder.
We were going home. But to what?
“I’ve told you about ‘Sullivan’s
Travels,’
I told my wife, as we sat in First Class seats, holding complimentary
champagne, bound (apparently) for Jamaica (given the raucous
celebration going on behind us).
“One of your old movies,” she said,
smiling the smile I recognized at last.
“It’s about a famous film director,
named John L. Sullivan. He’s played by Joel McCrae, who wants to do a
movie about the poor and dispossessed. But he lives a life of luxury,
and every time he tries to get away and learn about the poor he’s
brought back. Then, at last, when he tries to do something silly and
noble, hand out money to the poor, he’s hit over the head, thrown
into prison, and can’t get out until he finally claims that he killed
himself. And in the last scene he’s a hero, surrounded by worshipful
admirers who are ready for him to do his great film, called ‘Oh
Brother, Where Art Thou?’ Which he then decides he won’t do, because
comedy is more important.”
“Yes?”
“I just wish I was funny, is all.”
There was a lot to catch up on, when we
finally reached Kingston, and we were directed to a corner of the
runway where a private Virgin-Maverick jet waited for us. Mark Cuban
was there personally, and Robin, and John. I had become quite
well-known, it seemed, an Amnesty International poster boy, and the
price of my release had been steep — $100 million and a promise to
keep my release low-key, lest other political prisoners in America
suffer. The church had abandoned its plan to re-settle the New
Orleans refugees, our American citizenship had been taken away, and
the house had been transferred to our friend Tommy’s name, ostensibly
for the market price but in fact for $1. Jenni’s parents were
heartbroken, but word would go out to them, along with a welcome to
visit us any time, health permitting.
But America had also paid a price. The
dollar had fallen, the economy was still in free-fall, and markets
had moved out of New York, to London, to Shanghai, and to an enormous
degree to Johannesburg, to Virgin Maverick.
The grub stake I’d bought in the
company a year ago, the stake I’d practically been handed for taking
a job as a blogger for Richard Branson, had now made me a very
wealthy man. Famous as well, at least in Europe and Africa, where
Amnesty was strongest.
But the biggest surprise was waiting
when we got back to JoBurg, a day and a night after my release in
that Houston hearing room.
The first tower was finished, and the
second was rising to meet it. Jenni and Cuban and I got out at the
street, while Robin and John stayed in the car as it was driven
toward a nearby garage.
Just across from the Carlton Centre,
near a freeway junction separating downtown Johannesburg from the
suburbs and shantytowns, there rose a 110 story building every
American holds in their heart forever. To the naked eye, an exact
replica of the World Trade Center, the North or South Tower, with its
twin rising next door.
Only the surface aspect was the same,
Cuban assured me as I stood by it, mouth agape. The interior
construction is entirely different. It can’t pancake, as the New York
towers did. Fly a jet into it and you get a hole, but that’s all.
The streetscape below the building was
also different. Instead of the white, empty cement plaza of New York
there were two markets, one a set of stalls outside, the other a food
court inside. The stalls were filled with delicacies, and hand-made
tchotskes advertising the Virgin Maverick Africa World Trade Center.
Security was obvious, but friendly, black men in police hats and open
necked shirts. I smelled stew, and was told that the company had
opened a free food kitchen, alongside the local government, whose aim
was to identify and account for everyone who came in, a trade of
social services for the promise of civility and peace.
Once we stepped inside, everything
changed. The air was chilled, and what seemed like polarized lenses
on the windows were, I was told, solar dots, which not only cooled
the building but helped collect electricity that kept down its
electrical use. Everything was controlled by Always On Technologies,
purchased from the company I had founded with Mma Ramosawa,
who had now retired from the business and was building an elite
school for local children, which she hoped would compete with Oprah
Winfrey’s. “Kind of an Oxford-Cambridge thing,” said Cuban.
The elevator rose smoothly, and stopped
at the 75th floor. Cuban smiled, and motioned for me to
come into the hallway. I obliged. Then, after a brief walk, he
produced a card from his inner coat pocket, which he swiped against
the wall, near the door.
Which opened.
“Welcome home,” he said. From
inside, Robin giggled. From outside I could see all of the city, the
Carlton Center just below us, the suburbs on hills beyond, the whole
of Africa in the far distance.
