Roy Scranton - War Porn

in the world

Dahlia shook the man’s hand and pointed over to Matt, who grinned stupidly and waved his grass-covered brush, remembering this must be Aaron, right, standing staring. The one who just came home.

“How you two want your steaks?” he forced himself to shout.

“Medium rare,” Wendy said.

“Still mooing,” the man said. “Thanks.”

“Coming right up!” Matt said, his voice going high and brittle, hoping a fat smile would numb his unease. He cracked another beer and drank deep. He pulled the vegetables and tofu off the heat and wrapped them in foil, then laid on the salmon and Wendy’s steak.

The man walked up and offered Matt his hand. His grip was gentle but strong. “Hey,” he said. “I’m Aaron.”

“Matt. Nice shirt.”

“Thanks. Wendy got it for me on the internet.”

“She’s good at t-shirts.”

“Yeah. She thought it’d be funny. She said you work with computers.”

“Yeah, I code. I’m sort of… well, what I do now is part-time tech support for the county, but really I’m working on a freelance project, data-processing. Sort of global forecasting.”

“Like stock markets and stuff?”

Matt chuckled, hating the self-deprecating note he struck. “Well, sort of. What I’m trying to do is use turbulence in complex systems to predict unforeseen events,” he said, waving the barbecue tongs. “The problem with ‘unknown unknowns’ is that you don’t know what you’re looking for. Take 9/11 for instance, or the fall of the Soviet Union. The patterns were there but we weren’t looking for them, and there was no way to know in advance which data points were the important ones. What we needed was a tool for monitoring data systemically, for helping us watch events not as points or lines but as flows and breaks. The program I’m developing uses chaos theory to visualize predictive data as a field. Then we can use those visualizations to shift our frame of reference so that something that would have been an outlier becomes something we’re looking for: from an unknown unknown into a known unknown. It’s about letting chaos show its underlying order. I mean… Whoa, I gotta flip this shit.” He turned over the salmon and Wendy’s steak, then reached for the last two steaks and threw them on. “Hey D,” he shouted. “Just a few more minutes here. You wanna get the stuff?”

“Got it,” she said, handing the weed to Rachel and going back inside. Aaron nodded after her, his look lingering for Matt’s taste a second longer than was really necessary.

Rachel lit the pipe and passed it. They smoked. Chatted. Dahlia came back out with a pitcher and glasses. Time slowed.

When did the porch light come on? Who turned the light on?

“Fuck,” Matt said, turning back to the grill and sliding the salmon on a plate, forking the steaks and serving them up, while Dahlia portioned out tofu for Rachel and Mel and divvied up veggies and spooned out the vegan potato salad Mel had brought. Everyone moved to the picnic table. Matt lit the tiki torches and citronella candles and Dahlia passed the tabbouleh. They tore into their food, washing it down with beer, ripping into animal and vegetable flesh, throats bulging. Their steak knives flashed in the light, flecked with fat and blood.

They discussed: the virtues of cats v. dogs, as pets and generally, how best to marinate tofu, the election, how sick they all were of the election, the curious nature of modern life where it feels like part of you is connected via mass media to this hyperlife that doesn’t objectively exist but functions entirely as “news,” but what’s news if not events yet the news isn’t the event and you don’t really experience the event but only the “news” of it, “yeah like 9/11,” and how sometimes it feels strange when there isn’t some disaster happening, like there’s a gap in the matrix, and as Wendy parsed this phrase they talked about The Matrix and then other films commenting on Contemporary Life Post-9/11, and also music they’d been listening to like the new Wilco, then Rachel told a story about one of her second-grade girls who’d memorized all the lyrics to “Toxic” and had made up a dance to go along.

They compared tattoos: Wendy had a jaguar on her ankle—this was her Aztec horoscope, she said—and a fleur-de-lis on her lower back; Mel, a flaming skull with born to lose on her left shoulder, a barbed tribal band around each bicep, and a complex floral design going down from her hip into the joint between her thigh and pelvis that she only showed the very top of, tugging at her jean shorts; and Aaron a crude circled A on his right shoulder, which he laughed off as his first tatt from back in ye olde punk days, an inverted cross on the inside of his left forearm, and then, pulling up his enemy combatant t-shirt, sweeping across his muscled back a pair of intricate spiked wings, crested in Gothic script reading long is the way and hard. Neither Matt nor Rachel had tattoos. Dahlia had a dahlia, on her hip, which she didn’t show anyone.

How it had gotten dark. How they made a circle with lawn chairs, smoked another bowl, and drank some whiskey out of plastic cups, the coals dying behind them, the moon rising into the stars. Their bodies hummed, satiated, lips slick with grease. Dahlia got a little cold and went in for a hoodie. Rachel got cold too, and Mel wrapped her in her leather jacket. Aaron lit an American Spirit. Xena chewed a bone. Balinese gamelan banged and gonged from the boom box.

“So, I have a story,” said Wendy.

“Let’s hear it,” said Mel.

“Alright. Aaron already heard this one, but it’s really weird, so I’ll tell it again. Thursday night I was driving to Grand Junction. I was going to a poetry reading there. It was one of those days where nothing seems to quite catch, you know, like Mercury’s in retrograde, like the universe is off-kilter.” Wendy paused, casting her gaze into the distance. “It’s like I wrote once, ‘The fissure between the thought and deed, against the universal, the palsy in the hand of God.’”

“Nice,” said Matt.

“The reading was this guy David T. Greene, who won the Yale Younger Poets prize last year with his book Emblazoned Arcadia. He’s at once very classically concerned with craft and meter, but also super experimental, right, and he’s working with hypertext and interactive poetics, doing things with New Media artists, and has a blog. So that’s where I heard about the reading, the blog: he’d gotten a grant to drive across the country and write a sort of cyberpunk-Whitman long-poem meditation on America, blog it, and along the way he organized a series of readings. So he was reading at the Black Cat in Grand Junction, and…”

“Why didn’t he read here?” Rachel asked.

“Well that’s interesting. I asked him the same question myself. I told him about Eklectika and Back of Beyond and that there’s actually quite a dynamic poetry scene here, but he said he had to leave early to make it to Salt Lake City in time for his reading there on Friday and then it was up to Washington and yadda yadda yadda. He seemed really edgy—his aura was totally broken up. He’d planned to have the readings be auxiliary to the experience of writing the trip, but instead he’d just been driving like crazy, barreling through to get from one reading to the next, and he hadn’t even really had time to write the poem… But first, before all that, I was driving across the desert and do you remember the lightning storm Thursday?”

“Sure,” Dahlia said.

“The sky was a ‘charcoal smear livid with electric fire.’ I watched it as I drove… I was halfway watching the storm in the distance, the way the light changed against the mesas, and halfway watching the road. You know how you do, especially when the highway’s empty. I had an old mix tape Aaron made me years ago—I found it the other day and thought, wow, right before I get to see him in I don’t know how long, here’s this mix tape. And it was playing ‘Teclo,’ right, the PJ Harvey song, and I was very much in the moment, the speed and the storm and the rain flicking on the windshield and PJ Harvey sort of moaning right, ‘let me ride on his grace,’ and I flick on the wipers and then there’s a coyote in the road and bam! I feel the car hit him.”