Michael Hanson

An illustrated Story. All paintings are acrylic on 300 Pound Cold Press, Watercolor Paper. 10" x 8."

Invisible Man 2120

Section I: Escape Your City

Pg. 1: 

Two self-heating masks. Two scannable ID’s. A wide-bandwidth portable RF jammer. A backpack full of contraband. More alive than dead for once. I was ready to disappear into the night.

Pg. 2:

On the train I was an industrial painter, with official documents and exterior paint. Possession of paint, paper or pencils was illegal to help save the environment. PSA’s, advertising and other ideological apparatuses made owning anything analog to record the world, except electronic media, a social taboo as well.

Pg. 3: 

At the hotel I was in sales, a weary traveler. At edge of the city, near the giant barbed wall demarking the relative freedom of movement in the city to a prohibited area that nobody dared enter. This forbidden part of the city was never discussed, many never remembered another part of city even existing. Nobody entered, nobody left the Forbidden City; the wall meant nobody could see it-out of sight, out of mind.

Pg. 4: 

In the hotel basement was a tunnel with a forgotten storm drain ending outside the city wall. The drain’s infrastructure was untouched by the climatic disasters of 2050. Beyond the city’s surveillance, order and utopian claims was something else. I needed the search for that dangerous, undefinable unknown to continue on. I can’t say what I would need to do otherwise to escape my life.

Pg. 5:

Trapped inside the freezing blackness of the storm drain was an oily, overpowering stench that buckled my knees. Still I continued, there were desires that nobody could understand I needed to traverse. This purpose to move forward sublimated my sense of smell.

Pg. 6:

My ID’s and electronic devices with all their tracking data were hidden away in my hotel room. I was off the grid, in violation of existing anti-terrorist laws and risking everything.

Pg. 7:

The view was stunning; unimaginable devastation, a city under filthy oil slicked water, too big to disappear with grace without a trace. I entered it with no idea where to go or what dangers lie ahead. Rumors of roaming bands of criminal psychopaths, armed drones and police sweeps couldn’t turn me away. I was on edge but off the ledge. 

Section II: Escape Yourself 

Pg. 8:

Far away from the cameras and the utopian life was the wasteland, jagged and unpredictable. A place where I could record popular sentiment and beliefs in paint, hidden in long abandoned spaces. Most of the recordings are about the state under siege. As a public we were sold into a belief that no possibility of any other way of life could exist, through popular media and official government rhetoric. The final objective in any governing body is sustaining stability of power and wealth. In our culture this is achieved in media, through balancing the illusion of independent voices, official sources, big media broadcasting, paid counter sources and outright fabrications. The news outlets today were predicting another indefinite public quarantine due to a new foreign virus infiltrating our borders from enemies overseas. 

Pg. 9:

A new pandemic set in motion the need for the government to shut down all nonessential businesses and to shelter in place the population. Closures made for the public health, controlling the population’s movements and tracking their coordinates through scannable ID’s and electronic media. The public shutdowns were weighed against careful monitoring of public opinion. If too much of the economy collapsed, life/business opened up, some people died from the contagion. Rumors persist about an opportune government using the quarantine as an unofficial census, to count people, weigh sentiment and collect data. It was understood but always denied that large corporations and oligarchs leveraged government agencies to close competing interests and arrest rivals during quarantine. They are accused of stirring up social media sentiment condoning their actions, no matter how cruel, as socially responsible. 

Pg. 10: 

We were always on the edge of shortages, always asked to be patient. Patient waiting in line to buy bacon, patient in quarantine, patient waiting for the eradication of corruption, patient waiting for the economy to rebound. I taught art appreciation in a state college. It was steadier work during pandemics and recessions than other more nervous to the markets boom and bust occupations. A permanent part-time employee, the perfect state tool: disposable, aware of my position and easily supplicated towards the forces inside the system. Hard to be a radical when subsisting off the state’s payroll.

Pg. 11: 

Numerous calamities over the years jammed the smooth working order of day to day society. Home schooling was the default inevitability of martial law. This meant students have less contact hours with credentialed professionals and widely varying and esoteric knowledge bases. Cheating was rampant, all transcripts were suspect. Family connections were everything for admission to prestigious universities. To gain admission to specialized training students paid state college tuition with high interest, state subsidized loans. To combat the higher drop-out rates the state mandated obligatory military or low wage government service in lieu of a secondary school diploma. Part of the essential aspect of public education is making a docile, compliant body for future use in the workplace and military training. 

Pg. 12: 

An advertising that permeated all aspects of media celebrates the individual who consumes the life it envisioned for them. Citizens couldn’t see a way of life outside of it. The government could get a sense of citizens’ frustration or acceptance of its policies through dissent disseminated in the arts. the arts. By sponsoring cinema, music and art exhibitions and it could get a pulse of the citizens’ frustrations. By institutionalizing the specialized training required to enter the arts the state is actively enfranchised in admissions, codes and practices to predict and control the message.  If an artist gets a following their work is monetized. Financial success and ultimately makes the artist tow an economic line of stability rather than dissent. If the artist’s counter-culture message gains traction, then it is derailed and absorbed by advertising.  

Pg. 13: 

The motivated students in class not only understand the meta-narrative in the required text, they also engage in politically motivated art, believing an artist can name and make an art that resists the forces that bind them. I see in the art empty gratuitous gestures, not interested in the sustained sacrifice to make the change they desire. The good students perform their knowledge of the text, inspired to speak with a “truthfulness” about their condition. The state tracks the students’ registration and progress through the class website. All student assignments are submitted and graded through the site, for the purposes of academic transparency and accreditation. The state actively monitors the students’ data, tracking any subversive ideas the student may develop, perhaps derailing, outmaneuvering even co-opt their actions. I was disillusioned. Then I met Ed. 

Pg. 14: 

I existed on campus as an adjunct skirting around the margins, trying to blend in, to disappear. I sat in an isolated faculty office, entering grades after my Friday night class. My phone buzzed. I ignored it. “Answer it dude,” said a voice from the wall or the ceiling. I was rattled. “Get in the elevator, punch in this number and come to closet B-3. The door is open.” In the basement I was ready for anything. Awake. Inside the cement closet was a smaller thick, walled shelter with no windows and exterior floodlights. Illuminated by a single overhead, institutional light, it was eerie and out of place. A giant man emerged from the small shelter, staring at me the entire time. I held out my hand, “Hi I’m…” He enveloped my hand, pulling me close to him, “I know who you are.” A long silence followed, waiting for his next move. “This is BLISS, BLend In, Stay Small. The structure is made with an armored door, layers of ballistic kevlar fabric, radio frequency-shielding substrate and sound proofing material. It’s been engineered to conceal and evade documentation, data transmission, sound recording, and thermal imaging.” I decided right there, whatever Ed wanted with me-I was in all the way. 

Pg. 15:

Ed scared the shit out of everyone. His classes fulfilled the state’s requirement to include political and tactical art from the 21st century in the curriculum. The inclusion of the classes was supposed to offer evidence that the state wasn’t censoring culture. Ed’s projects were considered cute at first: students painting with piloted drones in courtyards, hacked cheap electronic toys converted into irritating noise manufacturing public sculptures, installed in unexpected and awkward places on campus. None of the administrators in the district understood any of it. The campus Security Service investigator assigned to the art department was over his head. Ed’s use of inoculation was superb, he readily admits and articulates an intended subversion in the artist statements, which the art always accomplished with little analysis. However, there was a hidden function that none in each project the authorities never detected. The school officials believed he was just a kook, nothing revolutionary. They were wrong. His drones deployed in public spaces with proper paperwork mapped out civic buildings through the windows before they dove headlong into the canvases depositing payloads of paint. His sound sculptures were brushed off as childish cries for attention. They were actually sophisticated listening devices under the windows of campus officials, that could “hear” and decipher with some accuracy the clacking sounds of a keyboard.

Pg. 16:  

Ed’s students installed BLISS on campus and around the city. It was out of place with clear signage, it was obviously art. “BLISS is place to go and be alone in public, covered by Kevlar lined walls and cushion pillows inside. We made this for you to feel safe.” The city tolerated it, they thought BLISS was what it said, a temporary intrusion on the sidewalk. Public art for citizens to enter and for a moment to be totally alone, which was nearly impossible to do with the dense population and sky-high housing market. The sign at the entrance of the cubes encouraged everyone to turn off their electronic devices, enter and just lie down and relax. The government agent assigned to snoop on Ed deduced he was making some impotent statement about the government’s policing and camera surveillance policies. They thought it was stupid and beneath their scrutiny. They never inspected the Kevlar hidden in the cubes. They never understood the type of Faraday cage Ed made with materials sewn into the Kevlar. In each cube people could surf the dark web, and exchange information in complete anonymity and leave hard drives in secret compartments. 

Ed designed the cubes specifically for a group of loosely affiliated artists who hacked code, stored obsolete technologies data and committed to a network of sharing aimed at disrupting the surveillance state. Most of the artists worked in low level government jobs, using the pretense that they were well educated and couldn’t make money without an outside job. Hiring them would ensure they’d be obligated to repay their student loans and achieve a middle-class, consumer lifestyle thereby swaying to join the system rather than fighting it. They processed large chunks of information in state ID departments, DMV, housing departments, records and management…basically everywhere in the government. The Invisibles met in the cubes at synchronized times, sharing and making plans. 

Pg. 17: 

The protest to reform police brutality turned ugly in my neighborhood. The protests always ended the same way, the stress burnt people out, they went back to their jobs, sometimes accepting financial payments heaped with future promises. No matter what progresses were declared it always went back to the same kind of brutality. Eventually the organizers disappeared after continual harassment and baseless search and seizures. The government tolerated protest to a point, it was of use at times to target political rivals. 

I was on the beach when dozens of police vehicles sped by with officers hanging from all sides. I was instantly embroiled in a world a minute earlier obsessed with order, on the fringe of failure. I faced down a long police line primed for violence, waiting. I stayed in the center of the madness with a firm power salute to the police on the side of righteousness, cloaked in a whooping, drunken fervor ignited by the bottles looted from the liquor store. Then I escaped, I didn’t know what else to do. Then the shooting started.

Pg. 18:

I was killing time on the web, making the spotty service more bearable in the public library. I logged in as one of my alterative identities, immediately finding the obituary of my younger brother. I disappeared when he was nine years old. I wondered if he thought of me much. A chip-person in filthy clothes sat across the table from me. His body jerked and spasmed as he took care not to look at me but did so inadvertently anyway. The chip-people wore mandatory implants adjudicated for those deemed incapable of following the Anti-Terrorist Tracking and ID Laws. If I was ever found guilty of possessing my multiple identities, after my torture and prison term I’d be adjudicated to wear one as well. The chip-person kicked a package under the table that hit my legs. Then he left the library. I immediately delivered the package to another place as instructed, the price of disappearing. The price of assuming a readymade text, waiting for a body.

Pg. 19: 

The cops picked me up. They didn’t tell me why. That was the worst part. I acted. Whatever they wanted. Concerned. Nonchalant. Affirmative. Absolute. I even began to make myself believe parts that weren’t true. Anything to get out of this noose. When they wanted to know why I was at the riots, standing against the police, I laughed. Check the cameras at the beach, I was working out, the riots came. Why did I face down the police? If I didn’t the rioters would’ve torn me to shreds. I lied. The video checked out. I was free to go, all my other identities and crimes stayed hidden.

Pg. 20:

Looking back at it I know I was being groomed. My benefactor was in the stands watching his son compete against me in a match. We competed. I won. I wasn’t great at the sport. The more violent and intense the match became, the better I performed. No strategy, no finesse, no game, just violence. I became faster, stronger, more intense, more effective. The man who changed my life understood that quality in me as a teen, something so raw, something so rare. He talked to my father and gave me a high paying after school job at his office building as a personal assistant. I picked up packages and ran errands for him. He was well connected. He treated me well. His son loathed me. I knew it was fear.

Pg. 21: 

The older men who worked for my boss would regularly ask me. “You know you’re part of the mafia, right kid?” I didn’t really know what that meant, I was too young. The day I understood was when I stumbled upon two hit men infiltrating the building to murder my boss. I easily killed them both with my hands. I found a natural talent that day. No time for fear. All action. Efficient. My boss called me his “Goomba” after that. Of all of his goons I immediately become a favorite. He set me up in an expensive hotel, we sometimes ate dinner together. He knew me. You don’t get to his position without being able to read people. He saw my sickness. “Kid you’re a straight killer but you feel stuff afterword. You hold on to things. You’re sensitive. You’re fucked. You shouldn’t be in this business.”

 Pg. 22: 

My benefactor freed me from my responsibilities to him. He procured a new identity for me through his reach in the department of records. He moved me far out west into the middle of a city. He said to me, “Know anything about art kid?” I didn’t. “It ain’t hard. You sensitive types go for it.” He called in a favor with a provost to secure a state job teaching art history. He was right. It was easy to learn but it also did something else. It opened me up to possibilities. With madness put upon my face I sat with imaginary friends.  (H/T Valie Export and Bob Flanagan)

Section III: Chipping Away 

Pg. 23:

There was someone waiting in my apartment. I didn’t wonder how, I was interested in why. I assumed that person was there to kill me. Later I realized they were specifically there for that purpose but it was the second course of action if the first one didn’t work out. Fortunately, I was down with the first plan. Badly Licked Bear asked if I was a government operative at the college. The provost’s corruption was well studied and his office was monitored. Suddenly I just showed up on campus at the behest of the provost. Who was I working for? I couldn’t say but assured I wasn’t a government plant. So you’re an associate of one of the mobsters the provost owes favor’s too then? Out of honor I denied that charge but Badly Licked Bear saw through me and knew the truth. “There is a plane of existence I’ll help you reach if you join the cause.” I’m in. “Do you want to know the nature of this cause?” Yes, but It didn’t matter. 

Pg. 24:

Badly Licked Bear represented an underground network actively looking to dismantle the entire state apparatus that tracked us and controlled us. They wanted to shut down the internet for good. Within a chaotic state we would find real freedom that none of us could really imagine as an alternative reality. Bear said hundreds of years ago the printing press created the republic, one could read in privacy, revolution could be shared from press to press. Electronic media created the mass, one that could be easily tracked and controlled. The campaign to stop manufacturing, consuming and collecting paper media hit full stride in 2055, before we were born. We lived in a world where all history we grew up with was changeable and untrustworthy. Writing on a surface permanently allows us to remember past events with clarity. He showed me a journal he kept from five years ago tracking rhetoric from the political parties. Every view each party held currently and claimed always held was exactly the opposite five years ago. Then Bear lent me the first book I’ve ever held in my life. It was small and well worn, titled 1984. In it The Ministry of Truth re-edits propaganda to stabilize power, justifying the deceptive practices with a well branded creed, “if you control the past, you control the present." Bear pointed out that what George Orwell wrote about was easier to do in the all-electronic media age. “There are obvious reasons you won’t find this text in even the darkest corners of the web today.” Then Badly Licked Bear disappeared.

Pg. 25:

I live in an ennui that is wholly hidden. Perhaps if I took the drugs that were advertised everywhere it would go away but I didn’t want it to go away. I’m sad for the world. I live in a world of experience initiated by advertising that celebrates the individual, a lost wretch saved from collective mediocrity through buying power. Maybe I’m just spoiled. I have a government job and lots of leisure time. I buy and consume just enough that the media tracking systems monitored by the corporations and government don’t read me as a threat so far. I suffer through their monitoring my time buying, talking, texting, scanning, watching. It’s all out there. I’m bored by it, the topics online are canned, predetermined in meetings, categories determined by focus groups. Everything is about inciting. Taking sides. First something provocative to incite patriotism. Then something to be outraged about. Then an action to correct the world again. Subscribe. Join. Click on the promise of finding your special cabal, where you all like and hate the same things in perpetuity. All your perversions shared with equal intensity. 

Pg. 26: 

There was nothing in my control. I took out my anxiety by working out. Sometimes I was the pinnacle of wholesome in a state that worships force: the muscled body in branded gear executing pullups in a public park. Sometimes I was suspect, another stranger, another perp: the masked loner in black, back to the sidewalk, endless twisting, sit-ups at night by the docks. Tonight, it was masked in black, under four sweatshirts and gloves. I recalled of a moment in the past where the anxiety fell away before the pandemic and the current lockdown. How many months has it been now? I guess what I experienced was some kind of enlightenment. It was the morning after I stayed up all night exploring the forbidden city for the first time. I was swimming a backstroke under a glass roof at the pool stunned and exhausted from the activities that night. The summer morning sun warmed my nose and the water around my face when I first felt the shimmering. No past. No future. Just the sun and the water and my movements existed. I was a rainbow. Pure creativity. I knew I would risk everything to go back to the destroyed ruins. I found purpose. Even though I didn’t know precisely what I was going to accomplish there. 

Pg. 27:

I live in an apartment by the ocean. Honee insisted we live there. I met Honee in one of my classes, in a world where there are no coincidences. She’s a Vietnamese refugee. She lives a secret life separate from ours with three grown children, I’ve never met them. I’m not one to ask questions. She’s gone for long periods of time always returning whenever. When I needed them, she smuggled me two fake ID’s from her sister, who is well connected in the Department of State Records. Honee is a wizard at magically producing whatever we need. She’s a classic barterer, illegally importing Malaysian folk medicines and exporting stem cell cosmetics. I think she traffics in arms but I don’t want to know in case the police capture me. I couldn’t live if I ratted her out.

Pg. 28: 

Honee was kneeling on the bed. She was radiant. She loved me. I was loyal and kept a secret. She felt safe around me. She was informed by a source she trusted she wasn’t Vietnamese, she was really Manchurian, a people destroyed by the Republic of China. She was smuggled as a baby into Vietnam. Her lineage was rumored to be part of the last emperor’s family. They were wiped out after the revolution. Honee’s earliest memories are with her sister in an upper class French boarding school in Saigon. She was leaving for several weeks or longer to try to find out more. She was sorry she had to leave. I also remember that day because we also learned about a new war on terrorism. That meant new laws, new restrictions on movement, maybe martial law soon. I was afraid to admit that I really was excited for her to go. I wanted her to find the answers she sought. I needed to be alone and think. Alone in silence. 

Pg. 29:

Wandering through the downtown, going no place in particular. I don’t know how Badly Licked Bear anticipated I’d cut through that alley going nowhere. Bear was holding a family sized fast food takeout bag. Inside the bag with a few loose fries were a couple of pads of blank paper with some pencils. I should follow and record all news stories and opinions about the new war on terrorism.  I should do my research on multiple devices as multiple identities. Officials monitoring traffic on sites is likely. As a routine I should record conversations and things I see wandering around the streets. What is important enough to remember to write it down? When I began to see patterns in anything then I should anticipate the next moves as clearly as I could in a text. Don’t settle for any one interpretation, write them all down. Don’t be afraid to sound crazy. How close are those forecasts? Within a few days my whole life obsessed about each entry re-reading it and editing it over and over. It took a long time to even be comfortable making the letter in pencil, I never learned to write ever this way. I struggled for weeks in my process. When I sat down in my apartment stream of words came into my head faster than I could record it on paper. Eventually I learned to slow the chain of signifiers belching up from inside to match the slower, clumsy pace of my writing. Controlling the speed at which I thought altered my perception. It’s hard to explain.  

Pg. 30: 

Badly Licked Bear made it clear the paper and pencils were not gifts. They were a favor and Bear would be calling in the marker sometime in the future. The favor Bear referred to wasn’t the materials themselves but a new plane of existing I was cultivating from their use. I concentrated on the gears that spun the media rather than reacting to each “important” new story. I became a new reader. I couldn’t read without asking questions. Who paid to put the story out? Who benefits if the reader is compelled to action from the story? Why did it show up at a particular time? I was learning to anticipate the next moves in a breaking story rather than spinning on a hook, scrolling from one device to another, looking for new details about the state in siege. Badly Licked Bear noted this transformation would happen at the beginning. "Write until you can predict the future, then continue.” For thirty pages I recorded in my paper journal the changes in a single story about the war on the terrorists. Who the terrorists were changed often and the older incorrect stories were updated immediately with software as details emerged. As if the older story was always correct. that backdated any new information to align with the new details. Powerful entities agreed this made the government seem more stable and trustworthy. It was good for business. A cleaning crew began cleaning my apartment every other Thursday while I was teaching class. They copied the journals I kept for Bear and the organization to study. The cleaners took great care to not open the pages I marked as personal. I know this because I installed a secret camera to watch them work. A trust formed. 

Section IV: Clarity

Pg. 31: 

I survive by floating wherever the river of fate takes me. I never saw myself as a leader or anyone to respect until I started into the craft of teaching. Helping someone achieve their potential is a better occupation than I deserve. Asking and answering questions on the fly in class is way more fun than delivering prepared materials. The Saturday morning lecture hall class is especially fulfilling. Keeping the attention of an 18 year old with a smart phone in darkened stadium seating for three hours is high theater. If a class goes well I’m full of energy for hours, relishing moments of connection with near strangers who flash in and out of my life. In the classroom I feel vital as a small part of the education machine. This recent viral pandemic put us all in another lockdown which means virtual classrooms. The computer program the state schools use for all online classes grades everything. It loves multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank formats. The program’s algorithms even remember previous comments made in discussions and without prompting repeat them on new student threads. Everything is measurable. I try to keep a human touch on things scheduling hour long lectures, reviewing materials, telling stories. I don’t require students to turn on their video. So, they often don’t. I see whatever image I’m broadcasting on my screen along with my cropped head and the initials of students I’ll only know as a text. The only face I see is my head filling up the presenter’s screen. I speak to my head, nudging myself to the most flattering angles and cropping, flirting with myself. By the end of each class I fell in love with my voice and face in the isolation of my apartment. I’m their ghost teacher. A bodiless comrade if they need me.

Pg. 32: 

There is a guilt I hold initially feeling it was a lot, when Badly Licked Bear called in the favor I owed him. As I write I can say without reserve I’m wholly indebted for the opportunity to play a role in something that mattered. I intuitively operate best when everything is on the line. Badly Licked Bear asked me to travel alone into the area known as the Forbidden City. During the climatic disasters of 2050 the largest earthquake ever recorded dropped half of the into the ocean. Nothing of this scale ever happened before, not in Pompeii, not the Minoans. The scale of the disaster too huge to repair. With so large with so many large disaster events happening one on top of another, the world threw their arms up said, “you’re on your own” and retreated. The toxic ruins were walled off and for the most part forgotten. There were plenty of rumors. Rumors of caches of arms, loot, secrets. All buried in filth underwater. Exploration was prohibited. There were pretty stiff mandatory sentences for conviction. The state always talked in the toughest terms, passing laws it couldn’t enforce, acting bitter about its impotence. The sky-high costs of operating in emergency mode for decades made budget money scarce. Rhetoric was cheap so were threats. Everything the state did to further monopolize its will to influence culture made people splinter into small anarchic groups. Like speakeasies during prohibition, it was a process inevitable and beautiful. Considering the costs of the new war on terrorism and the lockdown, enforcing code at the Forbidden City was pretty far down the list of priorities. Everything in there was ruined anyway. I thought it was funny that the paper Badly Licked Bear manufactured for our journals came from fast food and other commercial packaging. Paper for writing and reading was outlawed before I was born. Paper to signify a good consumer at work, preserving the heat of a Mcburger is totally cool, even vital.

Pg. 33: 

There was an operation underway by people friendly with Badly Licked Bear. They were infiltrating the massive ruins of the Forbidden City and routinely dodging occasional patrols and roaming gangs of bandits. They needed a diversion, a macguffin, activity in another section of the ruins that takes the limited resources away from investigating and apprehending Bear’s friends. I would be their diversion, there all alone making my movements. I accepted the task prepared to do whatever was necessary but having no idea how. I could only travel at night in the Forbidden City at night safely. Badly Licked Bear suggested I bring a weapon, perhaps a crossbow? I decided I would just go in naked, figure it out from there. Our group referred to the place as the Sunken City, the name for disaster before the state rebranded it into the Forbidden City. I entered the Sunken City through a drainpipe. The scale of the destroyed city was too much for me. I felt immediately insignificant and entirely vulnerable in the landscape. That horror gave way to an overpowering exhilaration. My mind and body sped up wanting to move quickly to find safety. I didn’t even know how to begin to look for safety. I had to control my fear and move as deliberately as possible. There was too much to take in tonight, I’d be back. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I was struck by how many people were roaming around this off-limits place. I moved like a sniper, painfully slow with the highest priority on my senses to see anyone before they saw me. How could I raise a disturbance without anyone seeing me? I wanted to write out ideas in my journal but I don’t dare let anyone find out about my mission. Even in those personal sections of the journal I was carefully guarded in terms of my honesty. I would never really reveal myself, my history. I’d only share only my observations about the world in an existential kind of way. I wanted more from my writing. I wanted that honesty.

Pg. 34: 

I figured it out. I smuggle a backpack full of housepaint into the Sunken City. I paint the rubble so a drone can spot the activity. I don’t kid myself. This is probably going to end in my apprehension. I memorize alibis for when that time comes. I make long paths of scribbling on broken concrete that leads out into the nothingness or into half-submerged buildings. One of the major hurdles for the mission is I don’t know how to paint with a brush. I just learned to write freehand within the last year for fuck’s sake. I figured out how to drip the paint well enough to make letters. My writing totally illegible. Still, it was clearly letter-based and in the context of ruins it appeared unhinged. I decided to stack the letters vertically like Chinese instead of horizontal like Roman lettering, a metaphor for soldiers standing on a baseline shoulder to shoulder. I could paint quite a bit of territory each night. I painted my thoughts, revealing them in front of my eyes, alone at the end of the world. 

Pg. 35: 

It was dreamlike in the Sunken City. I painted through the heavy stillness at night. No electricity. Water lapping everywhere. Staying up all night has its costs. I can feel it. I need to sleep by 4 PM to wake at midnight and paint until dawn. The only way to do it and stay sharp is take sleep medication. Works. Good shit. There is a strain on my pulmonary system the first night. Then I get used to it. Each visit to the Sunken City is a total shock to my senses. It takes several minutes to control my breathing before I plot my course that night. Quickly dripping out paintings, watching for drones. The part of city tonight is so remote it might not get patrolled very often. Anything useful was looted decades ago. From an old trail down a ravine the scale of my effort revealed itself. The paintings glistening in the moonlight on the broken concrete. Everywhere. It wasn’t a graffiti artist looking for fame or working on their game. It was something else. It looked insane and dangerous. It spoke back to me. Some things stick forever to you like a black tar beach after a spill. You never win. It haunts. You endure.

Pg. 36: 

Honee made some connections her trip to Asia. She hoped it might lead to meeting someone who knows what happened to her family. She returned late in the evening while I was preparing to take another trip to the Sunken City. She didn’t think she could spring me if I got pinched by the cops. I was more worried about amputation than arrest. Everything at the sunken city was continuing to slide to the bottom of the ocean. Honee is normally unflappable but tonight she was upset. She sublet some studio space from a diminutive middle aged Vietnamese woman in an industrial complex. Her next door neighbor was a mechanic. He was a real scumbag who ran the place with his reluctant, grown son. These mechanics were bullying her and her friend, trying to get them to leave so he could take over their bigger unit for his business. He had two other employees. One of them spoke with disrespect to Honee. I listened carefully I found out as much as I could about the father and son. I didn’t yell. I didn’t promise to do anything. No impotent rage. That night I held her like I might never again. The sun rose with me as a witness. It was glorious.

Pg. 37: 

I left early. I didn’t say anything other than I have a few errands to run. I was rusty, feeling old. I drove to the mechanics shop I thinking about the day I killed those two assassins for the mafioso. I attacked first. My left hand crushed the larynx of the guy with his gun drawn. I was so fast to his throat my fingers went around the larynx, underneath and in-between the jugulars. He was dead before I could get my hand off his neck. The second goon squared up to fight rather than draw his gun. Still holding the first guy, my right hand punctured both of the second guy’s eyes, thick fluid rushed out. I grabbed inside his skull and threw him to the ground cracking his head open. I’d say the whole thing took less than 5 seconds.

I didn’t want to kill these mechanics today. They were just bullies. I did expect to be in prison by the end of it though. I ran over his orange cone he used to demarcate parking space in front of his shop. I saw the him look hard at me. I deliberately got out of the car and approached him. I said, “The first thing I’m going to do is kill your dog. Then I’m going to break both of your arms because I want to see if you can fix cars with two broken arms.” His man-son pretended to rush me but the he held him back with one arm. The mechanic called the police, some madman was threatening him. Then the mechanic called his two employees from the back to fight me. I leaned into the much shorter man, “You didn’t bring enough guys.” Then I followed it with a perfect overhand right to his mouth. He fell back into the other three as they rushed out the door to get me. I took one step back and hit his clumsy, big-talking man-son rushing me with left hook. I hit him so hard he was on feet and unconscious. He never moved again. The groggy dad-mechanic tried to come to his son’s aid but his was so woozy he face planted into a the flower bed next to me. I made a show to the tall employee as he fell how I cold have hit him on the way down and how I could have stomped his head but I didn’t. This tall employee just came to work to make some money he didn’t want any from me. I turned and saw the fourth guy who called Honee ‘somefuckinthing’ and was trying to sneak up behind me. I just pointed, “You,” I said with menace. He turned to run but he was so scared looking back to see if I was coming he wiped out face-first into the concrete. He was unconscious but alive. I figured he didn’t need any more beating from me. He punished himself. The cops were pulling up and I was standing by my car. My gamble here was this, would these cops arrest a lone white male professor, driving a BMW against 4 mechanics? I mean one of them could have been a witness instead. Right? I was right. The mechanics didn’t come into work for a few days and when they did they only used the back door. Honee was a made woman at her studio. Problem solved. I did the most generous thing I could do to them that day. I didn’t kill them. I could have and they knew it.

After I took care of those creeps I drove to school and taught a class about Romantic Era madness, which culminated in viewing a 20th century film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God. In that darkened space I considered if I was just that today, the wrath of God. It’s the only thing I’m gifted in. I wish it was in anything else.

Section V: Utopia Achieved

Pg. 38: 

Nobody knew Badly Licked Bear’s original name, or as Bear called it, “my dead name.” All Bear’s IDs stated his new name: DMV, social services, IRS all without humor or irony. To say Bear is a networking genius would be an understatement. Badly licked Bear was referred to by admirers as a social justice warlord, a savage and war queer-all those together. Bear was reputed to be the author of some of the most influential memes circulating throughout the web.  Bear and “The Invisibles” took trips into the hinterland to drop off donated essential supplies to people effectively banished from the cities.

Pg. 39: 

Badly Licked Bear warned of a bleak, inevitable future. The collapse of society and all of its worst implications: shortages of everything vital, the smell of death. Neighbors turning on neighbors, our worst instincts cesspooling, living under a rotting paper dragon in a life phantasmically based on greed. An unstable nightmare full of nukes. Still, Bear believed in magic. It wasn’t ridiculous to think of Bear as a shaman, divinating the gods for some kind of luck beyond the fingertips of reason. Several years ago, Bear made art predicting the coming series of pandemics. The art was poignant, funny and totally zeroed in. One thing that I knew for sure from my limited time with Badly Licked Bear and Ed: they were righteous.

Pg. 40: 

Ed drove north in a rented truck to pick up artwork for an exhibition in the gallery at school. He’d come up with an exhibition of artists who use teaching in their art practices. We picked up the necessary equipment from an artist who engages in locksmithing as an occupation and artistic practice. Ed’s friend Devon came up with a plan for putting on so many concurrent art openings it was impossible to for the authorities to keep an eye on the all the activities. Other fields also use their expertise and connections for activism but artists were better at it. Often naturally social, artists are forced to join other fields to survive while they made art, infiltrating other fields’ secret rites and practices. Ed was influenced by art collective, Critical Art Ensemble from the last century, they believed the primary purpose of art was to subvert existing and repressive power structures. For Ed art was an excuse to get together. He sometimes used his art classes to play dodgeball. 

Pg. 41: 

The state ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present. Having seen no slow, centuries-long accumulation of a principle of truth, it lives in perpetual simulation, in a perpetual present of signs. It has no ancestral territory. The original peoples’ territory is today marked off in reservations, the equivalent of the galleries in which the state stocks its Rembrandts and Renoirs. But this is of no importance to the state– it has no identity problem. In the future, power will belong to those peoples with no origins and no authenticity who know how to exploit their situation to the full.

In this sense, for us the whole of the state is a desert. Culture exists in a wild state: it sacrifices all intellect, all aesthetics in a process of literal transcription into the real. Doubtless the original decentering into virgin territory gave it this wildness, though it certainly acquired it without the agreement of the original peoples, whom it destroyed. The dead indigenous remains the mysterious guarantor of these primitive mechanisms, even into the modern age of images and technologies. Perhaps the citizens, who believed they had destroyed these Indians, merely disseminated their virulence. The state’s day of reckoning was coming, the bill was long overdue. (Baudrillard)

Pg. 42: 

There once was an assured belief that conflict spurred technical innovation. The Great Civil War and the Climatic Disasters defined the 21st century instead of technological advancement. Every resource left over was assigned to maintenance. Maintaining the fragile power the state wielded internationally. Maintaining the scarce resources to patch that which had already been built or paved. Maintaining the illusion of living comfortably. Maintaining the axiom, working hard gets you ahead. Maintaining exceptionalism. None of it made sense to workers living in an era of stopgaps. Society used to be able to make long-term plans: people built long-term infrastructure. Not anymore. Everything was dirty except the packaging lining store shelves. The sheen and smell of something new in mysterious, brightly colored packages still excited the believers in capitalism. If you really breathed deeply through your nose you could smell the flesh burning below, fueling the engine in the rotting machine.

Pg. 43: 

The Great Civil War was inevitable after the mid-century laws following the climate disasters. Laws which included a ban on fossil fuel production and use. Several southern states seceded. The lines broke between two warring political factions.  It was a cold then hot war of cities vs southern-rural people. Manufacturing and huge populations against vast tracts of farmland and booby trapped by tuned-in militias. Each political faction urged the military to side with them. Ultimately the military sided with the cities but the war didn’t end easily. Soldiers defected. Missiles and drone strikes were superior arms. Generations of arms hoarding wouldn’t hold up for long. Rural fighters torched their farmland, ran off all the folk they thought were undesirable. The entire country starved as the war ground on. The southern-rural faction negotiated an aid deal from an enemy country. New arms and fighters pumped in. The enemy hoped their interference would force the military to fight them too. Rather than fight anymore, expanding into global war, a peace treaty was signed. The federalists declared victory. The country reunited but not like before. Everyone knew the southern-rural faction won. Each side agreed on keeping out foreign interests. Massive aid pumped into the southern-rural areas, rebuilding destruction. New money led to manufacturing and trade boom and bust cycles. Practically federal laws were unenforceable in the southern-rural areas. Travel was dangerous, migration stopped almost completely in places. There was an understood brutality that everyone swallowed their own way. Historical accounts about the Great Civil War varied wildly. 

Pg. 44: 

Brutal spectacles of sport and acerbic entertainment dominated post-Great Civil War era culture. A few proxy wars abroad flexed military might. A document leak from one war showed the country used the war as a diversion maneuver to mine and raid the occupied country before pulling out. Publicly admitting defeat after raping territory in limited wars was a common tactical phenomenon around the world. Nobody could admit how close the collapse of the country was, so we diverted our attention to anything else. CGI and SFX dominated news broadcasts showing you the world as you wanted to see it. The programmed algorithms kept keen watch to steer you to the videos and stories that you supported, solidifying your beliefs in place by keeping invisible any alternative.

As people became more casual towards their intolerance of each other they retreated from their feelings. Those feelings flooded out of their control in public rages and mass killings. Every murdered always had ta reasoned manifesto that seemed righteous to them. Nobody brutalizes someone else believing they were intrinsically wrong to do so. People over-compensated the reality of the brutality by performing homespun politeness in public. A surface of artificial sweetener mixed with endless empty gestures. Popular redemptive theologies promised eternal rewards to those who towed the line. Anxiety drugs flooded the market. The real anxious crushed, slammed and snorted the drugs. Nobody was nicer and more supplicant in public than junkies and the pious.

Pg. 45:

A wave of politics that came into power in 2116 made a move to dismantle college education. Education traditionally was a stronghold, avoiding the forces of late capitalism. Academia protected these opposing ideas from total discredit and persecution. Those political forces pivoted on their stance against loan forgiveness because it subverted the personal choice that borrower made gambling on a degree to work for higher wages later. Rather than worrying about disrupting the wealth that came into every school from federal loans, they figured out that loan forgiveness made college education worthless. Many for-profit schools shuttered their doors immediately. State universities had to shoulder more financial burden and tighten their belt, they began to crumble. Community colleges had operated for free or near free for a century and maybe could hold on for a few years.  However, there were increasingly less options after community college. The most expensive universities became cash only and only wealthy students attended. A merit system existed in public schools to identify student genius from standard testing and arrange scholarships. Each scholarship came with standard contracts for employment in companies friendly to the university, who also donate money to keep the school operational after the federal loan money dried up.  

Pg. 46: 

Pg. 46: By 2119 there were no more classes to teach. I replied to an that ad stated only: doorman wanted, with a phone number. I was hired to be a bouncer in a full nude strip club in the industrial harbor section of the city. It looked rough but It was easy work. I collected money at the door and kept an eye on the undercovers looking for drug deals and prostitution. The cops were so easy to spot. They were the only ones not watching the dancers. Looking for the drug deals, asking me stupid questions. My bosses trusted me quickly. My bosses bragged they were a foreign mafia. I kind of ignored all that and any nonsense that went with it. Everything was fine until I was in the middle of a Sunday afternoon shift. All the dancers were recovering from the party that was always Saturday. It was slow so I went outside to watch the sunset. Two men were staring at me from a car across the street. They got out of the car together, it was comical. They looked like twins from different parents. One really tall, the other really short. They wore matching reflective shades and Hawaiian t-shirts. They called me by my name, I never met either of them before. They said they were federal agents and the club was bugged. They repeated a conversation I had in club the night before. They said they knew what was going on in the club and I’d be taken down too if I didn’t work with them. I laughed at them. They never showed me any I.D.

Pg. 47:

In a world where people died every day from neglect, red tape and medical incompetence-a miracle happened. Honee was rarely around, she messaged me when she could. I worried for her safety as she travelled around the world. The Manchurians were declared a hostile terrorist group on the news. She said was still officially Vietnamese so don’t worry. Honee’s sister had stage four cancer centered in her spine. Honee used long thin needles jabbed in points on the body discovered thousands of years ago by the Chinese to control the body’s electrical flow called qi. Honee’s needles unblocked areas sending the naturally occurring electrical impulses to the muscles. She made a stroke victim walk after two sessions. From the acupuncture and a ten thousand dollar a bottle medicine from Korea, Honee’s sister was cancer free in nine weeks. Honee wasn’t a doctor she didn’t take money for her services. It was her gift. It was mutual aid in essence. Sometimes I help you and you help me when I’m in a pinch. As Badly Licked Bear said, “Mutual aid is necessary, so I don’t have to kill you for clean water in the future.”

Pg. 48: 

I was too into myself. I was alone. Stuck. I still saw the two cops before they saw me. They were on my tail. They were reading aloud and writing in a small booklet, I hadn’t seen anything like that for decades. Why weren’t they just recording with camera or recorder? 

For several hours the cops stayed on my tail. I lost them when I dove into the filthy water swimming to a lone, leaning tower. I entered the building through an air duct finding a secret shaft with stairs descending below the waterline. I wandered around the rooms for hours, noting how isolated, and probably pathogenic the space was. Hours went by, then days, I contemplated in the shaft how the cops might have found me. Why were they there in the first place? Did they stumble upon me or were they looking for me? How long was this going on?

The cops were there waiting in my hotel room when I finally found the courage to sneak away. I knew it was over. Did I really think flaunting the law, marking my space in the Sunken City would last long? Just how easy it was to track me? They didn’t want me, they wanted to know who I worked for out in the wasteland. They couldn’t believe the truth. I was out there for myself. They sorted through their booklets, they asked me about the things I was recording and snickered at my observations as they read them off-often misquoting me. They knew my real name, my old name. They didn’t seem to know much more than that though. They thought I was harmless. I suspected something wasn’t right, they were cops, yes but this wasn’t official police business. So… what now? They smiled at each other with smug assuredness. Blackmailers holding all the cards, sealing the deal on a sure thing.

Pg. 49: 

They intimidated me taking turns to let me know what they could do to me. Your illegal activities down here will continue. You work for us now. You will follow who we want you to follow. You will explore the places we want you to go. You belong to us now. We want to know who’s down here and when. We want to know what they’re doing. If you refuse us…we will “out you” to your former mob boss. You will be known as a rat and they’ll take care of you for us. 

I told them I’d do what they asked. I would be the delinquent who acted as their eyes and ears. I lost my job, my apartment. I was a permanent resident at the hotel. The night manager was working for the two cops as well. There was nothing to find, nobody to see. I told them about things they already knew. They were getting sick of me. I knew what the end of my usefulness could mean. I finally told them about the shaft in the building I’d discovered. I told them about wealth I’d found in a safe in the tower at the Sunken City. The cops were finally interested in something I had to say.

We immediately went after the loot. I took them through the tilted tower into the sub-basement shaft. The whole building could collapse at any moment, the entire shaft could flood instantly. Inside the well sticked, abandoned bunker they let their guard down, I took them both out. It was effortless and quick, like when I was young. Unlike before I felt nothing this time. I guessed they were rogue cops even though they bragged constantly how connected they were. If they were on official business, they wouldn’t have turned off their cameras to hide their actions. Their stealth sealed their death. I figured now that I rid the world of them, I could try to disappear into another city maybe using one of the other aliases I held. I guessed wrong. There was another in the plot.

Pg. 50:

The son of the mob boss from my youth hated me. It stewed with in him for years. His capo dad treated me with more love than him. It was a betrayal. He hired the two cops to track me. He put a bounty on my head spreading around his opinion. I was rat working for two dead cops. The authorities were guaranteed to look the other way. I had to disappear again.

I pieced together a raft and slowly paddled my way upstream. Right away I knew there was a heaviness around me. Doom. Miles away from the safety of my hidden silo I saw the men tracking me, they had an armed drone. I covered myself in filth and without making a ripple I swam away barely keeping my nose above the waterline. The drone flew close but moved on. By the time it returned I was in a particularly devastated part of the city. I thought I was safe but the drone must have picked up a thermal code on me. It came closer, guns pointed directly at me. The pilot was so focused on getting the drone close to me, they missed some tangled electrical wires that sheared the drone in half. I got away. I knew I was losing.

I decided I’d make the silo as impenetrable and camouflaged as possible. I had resources. Water, food, ammo, air. I entered the shaft through the hatch and welded it tight. Underground, lit by bare bulbs banished from the sun. I sit here underground until I can figure some way to proceed. I doubt I can return to any normal kind of life. How much time do I have? How much of that will be spent writhing in agony? Surely some of it. The end for sure. For a few weeks I romanticized my splendid isolation in the silo. The loneliness, desperation and madness periods passed months ago. I need to get out, to hear real voices, not the hallucinations of them. a distance. No. I have to sit here. I have to wait.

Invisible Man 2120

 Starring: The Viking

 with: Badly Licked Bear

 Ed

and Honee