Brown & Root supplied almost all of the logistical support for the Vietnam War, a conflict that was precipitated by an imaginary attack on an American sea vessel.
And here’s a funny anecdote, apropos of nothing.
Nancy Brown Wellin was at the Armstrong Ranch on February 11, 2006 AD.
This was the day when, and the place where, then Vice President of the United States Richard B. Cheney, architect of the First and Second American Wars against Iraq, was trying to murder innocent animals and accidently shot a lawyer in the heart.
It was like gladiators before a Roman emperor.
You fight, sure, because otherwise another gladiator would kill you, but ultimately your life and your death and your fighting were interchangeable.
It was all someone else’s entertainment.
You were paying obeisance to the Cash Horizon.
Then Fern’s spell did something funny: it took that abstract representation of the Whitney Biennial and shot it forward through time.
The abstraction landed on the Twenty-First Century AD.
And that abstract representation infected the Internet and all human culture.
Fern doomed everyone in the Twenty-First Century AD to the worst possible fate: rehashing the Cultural Wars of the 1980s AD and 1990s AD, with all of its direct and internecine fighting, and doing it purely for the amusement and enrichment of people who had moved past the Cash Horizon.
When her spell fizzled, Fern took a good look at Anthony.
It was one of those things: when you live with someone, it’s harder to notice subtle changes in their appearance.
Fern had missed it.
But now she could see.
And something was dreadfully wrong.
Fern left New York City.
In the Year of the Speckled Band, which roughly corresponded to 1995 AD, 1415 AH, and 5755 AM, Fern returned to New York City and moved back into Anthony’s apartment on St. Mark’s Place.
Anthony was not well.
It could not be ignored.
Anthony himself seemed unaware of the change.
Anthony kept plugging away at his PhD.
Anthony contributed to a handful of minor academic papers trapped in an arduous process of backbiting peer review.
Anthony kept teaching classes at Eugene Lang College, the undergraduate division of the New School for Social Research.
But his every step was tormented.
Fern cast spells trying to remove the primal magic and its radiation, but these too were repulsed by Anthony’s biological transformation.
Fern left New York City.
In the Year of the Salted Earth, which roughly corresponded with 1997 AD, 1417 AH, and 5757 AM, Fern came back to New York City.
Anthony’s apartment was empty of Anthony.
His possessions were there.
Anthony was not.
There was an eviction notice taped to the apartment’s front door.
Fern cast a spell that handled the pressing issue of outstanding and future rent.
Then she tried to find her boyfriend.
It took some high-grade magic, and a ride on the Long Island Rail Road with a transfer at Jamaica station, but Fern found Anthony in the same state-run institution where his uncle’s useless machine had run out of fuel.
Anthony had his own room.
The useless machine of his body had sprouted wires that were attached to other machines that monitored, and influenced, his weakening vital signs.
Sometimes he was lucid. Sometimes his useless machine would stop processing data.
Fern touched his face.
Anthony woke up. His milky eyes focused on Fern.
“I wondered when you’d show up,” he said. “How was Bloomingdale’s?”
Anthony’s mother was in and out of the room.
His siblings were in and out of the room.
Fern never left.
She cast a spell which made her invisible to Anthony’s family and the state-funded institution’s staff.
When Anthony slipped back into consciousness, he and Fern would speak.
“Oh God,” said his mother. “Now he’s talking to himself!”
Fern tried to remedy Anthony with magic, but his body repulsed the spells.
She stayed in the room and watched as her boyfriend died.
She knew that she was the one who had assassinated him.
A day before Anthony died, he told Fern that he’d managed to complete his PhD dissertation.
“A lot of Maimonides,” he said. “More than I would have thought fucking possible.”
“And it was accepted?”
“I’m a doctor now,” said Anthony. “Not that it helps.”
When the end came, it was gentle, except for a brief moment in which Anthony began speaking with the dead.
“I see her there,” said Anthony, his useless machine arm lifting itself and pointing to the empty doorway. “Why are you here, Edith? Keep away! Keep away! You never understood. Everything you said was a lie. Every word. Keep away! Keep away!”
Anthony’s family thought that Anthony was talking to himself.
Fern looked at the doorway with the eyes of Fairy Land.
And for a moment, a luminescent human form was present.
It was a woman dressed in costume from Eighteenth-Century AD America. She was carrying a bouquet of flowers in her right hand and a scythe in her left. A fake beard was plastered on her brow.
One minute Anthony was there.
The next he was gone.
His mother wept.
Fern couldn’t figure out how this woman had given birth to Anthony.
She couldn’t understand how any of his family shared his lineal biology.
The things that they’d argued over while he lay in his sick bed.
Money, property, romances.
He was a man who’d dedicated his life to escaping the suburban isolation of Long Island. He’d thrown himself into the world. He had not left his home in shame or fear, but with the spirit of a conqueror, with the thirst of someone who wanted to know everything.
He is me, thought Fern. I am him.
She too was from an island.
She too had chafed at the isolationism.
She too had fled everything.
Fern returned to their apartment.
She found a xeroxed copy of Anthony’s PhD dissertation.
She read it.
All 263 pages.
She had absolutely no idea what the hell it said.
She walked to Fifth Avenue and went into the Graduate Faculty building of the New School for Social Research.
Before its acquisition by the university, the building had housed a department store.
It still felt like a space dedicated to shopping.
Fern took an escalator to the second floor and wandered past an abstract representation of three-dimensional reality. The abstract representation was a painting that depicted the Bacchae.
Fern found Anthony’s advisor.
He was in his office.
By human standards, he was on the threshold of being ancient.
By Fern’s standards, he looked like a baby.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“I am Anthony’s girlfriend,” she said.
“It’s a shame,” said Anthony’s advisor.
“Yes,” said Fern. “It is.”
There was a long silence.
“I read his dissertation,” said Fern.
“Did you?” asked the advisor.
“I did not understand a word,” said Fern.
“I’m afraid that we don’t write for the layman,” said the advisor.
Fern left the New School for Social Research and went south down Fifth Avenue, and through Washington Square, and through the West Village until she found herself on Jones Street.