Daniel Abraham: Inside Straight

1: Who the fuck was Jetboy?Posted Today 1:04 am

HISTORY, JETBOY | REFLECTIVE | “THESE ARE THE FABLES” — THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS

Who the fuck was Jetboy?

My grandfather tried to tell me when I was too young. I didn’t get it. A flying ace, he said, from before there was the wild card. I could never get my head around that. How could you have any ace—much less one who flew—before there was the wild card? And that all happened back during the Great Depression, which was right before Napoleon who took over after Rome fell. My grandfather hadn’t kissed a girl yet when Jetboy died. That was forever ago.

My sense of history has gotten a little more nuanced since then. I know there was a Middle Ages, for instance. I understand that women existed before Christina Ricci, though I’m still not entirely sure why they bothered. I’ve read all the underground R. Crumb comics about the Sleeper. My dad told me stories about the Great and Powerful Turtle. My fifth grade babysitter—who smoked pot and sometimes forgot to wear her bra—told me lurid tales about Fortunato, the pimp ace who got his powers from sex. I saw Tarantino recycle all the tropes of Wild Card Chic, trying like a lifeguard on amphetamines to breathe new life into them.

When I drew my ace, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I wasn’t Jonathan Tipton-Clarke. I was Jonathan motherfuckin’ Hive . I was hot shit. I was the kid who really could sting like a bee. Let me assure all of you out there that nothing but nothing stops bullies picking on you like being able to turn into your equivalent mass of small wasplike stinging insects; it shuts those rat bastards down. I figured I didn’t need to go to school or worry about how a swarm of wasps was going to pay for an apartment. I was sixteen and an ace. I was God.

Maybe that was why Grandpa always wanted to talk about Jetboy. Jetboy, who didn’t have any powers. Jet-boy, who tried to stop the wild card from coming into the world and failed.

Jetboy (I thought, through all my youth and adolescence and most of my adulthood to date) was a great big loser who died half a century ago. But here’s the thing: He was a hero to my grandfather, and my grandfather was not a stupid man.

When Grandpa started junior high, there were no aces in the world. When he started high school, there were. He was alive when the virus hit. He read about the 90 percent that drew the black queen. He heard rumors of the first jokers back when people still hid them away like they’d just crawled out of a David Lynch flick. And he saw the first aces. Golden Boy. The Envoy.

How can I imagine that change? How do I, or anyone in my generation, put my mind back to think what it would have been like in a world without jokers, much less a jokers’ rights movement? A world where we didn’t think that aliens existed? Where phones had actual dials, and no one locked their car doors?

It’s hard—it’s always been hard—to look back at that kind of simplicity and ignorance and not sneer. We know better now. We know more. We were raised on President Barnett. We saw pictures from the Rox war. We always knew that if we happened to be around when two aces started fighting each other, they might bring the building down, or cut us down with laser eye beams, or turn us to stone without even meaning to; we could die at any time, in any way, and there was no way to protect against it. You couldn’t expect us to get choked up over a guy who fell off a blimp before our parents were born.

Most people my age think of history as being divided into two essential halves: before the Internet and after. But there was a shift before that, and maybe there have always been shifts, back through history. Maybe every generation has seen the world change forever, and we don’t know only because we weren’t there.

Ace or not, I grew up. I went to college. I got a degree and trust fund that I’m rapidly spending down. I write a few magazine articles, and I’m working on a novel. I’m an ace, and that’s great. But I’m a journalist, too—or will be when I catch a break. Being able to turn into wasps won’t help me meet deadlines or pick the right words or forgive a cent of my electric bill. So, maybe what Grandpa was trying to tell me sunk in after all. Or maybe I missed his point and made up one of my own.

Here’s the best I’ve got, folks:

Jetboy was the end of a world. He was the last man to die before the wild card came, and his age died with him. He is a symbol whose meaning I will never understand, except in the way I’ve come to understand King Arthur, JFK, and all the other beautiful losers of history. He will never mean to me what he did to my grandfather, and not because I’m more sophisticated or smarter or more jaded. It’s just that the world’s moved on.

To me, Jetboy’s a reminder that there have always been people—a few—who fought for things that mattered. And (cue the violins, kids) that maybe being a hero isn’t just about whether you win. Maybe it’s also about whether you die memorably.

How’s that for a Hallmark moment?

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Somewhere off to her right gunfire erupted.

Anywhere else in the world people would flee that sound, but here in Baghdad it was just one theme in the symphony of celebration. The sharp chattering of a machine gun set a high-pitched counterpoint to the deep bass booms of rockets. A shower of golden sparks hung in the night sky, and edged the needle-like spires of minarets like a benediction. The sparks seemed to fall in slow motion. The light from the fireworks briefly lit the faces of the crowd. Men whirled and danced. Tears glinted on their cheeks, and their mouths stretched wide as they chanted for their Caliph.

Kamal Farag Aziz, the new president of Egypt, had come to Baghdad to submit himself to the Caliph and make his nation one with Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, under the restored caliphate. In Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus, East Jerusalem, and Mecca, the masses celebrated. In Lebanon, Qatar, and Kuwait, the leaders of the few remaining sovereign Arab states were shivering.

Lilith pulled the edge of her shimagh across her nose and mouth. Partly it was to disguise the fact she was a woman, but it also kept the dust, raised by thousands of shuffling, stamping feet, from choking her. Only in Iraq could you smell the rich, moist tang of water and reeds, chew on grit, and endure nighttime temperatures in the high nineties. Her robe clung to her body, and she felt a trickle of sweat inching its maddening way down her spine. When Saddam had lived in the palace the acres surrounding the building had been given over to lush gardens. The Caliph had chosen not to take water from Iraqi farmers, and allowed the gardens to die.

From her vantage point near the palace wall Lilith could see the looming bulk of the palace. The white marble walls were washed in a kaleidoscope of colors as the fireworks display continued. A man dressed in snowy white robes and keffiyeh stepped out onto a third-floor balcony. He paced, rested his hands on the carved balustrade, peered down into the crowd, paced again, and vanished back into the room.

Idiot , Lilith thought. Get yourself killed by a stray bullet.

She waited until one particularly spectacular fireworks display lit the sky and every head craned back in that particular kind of amazement unique to yokels. Then she swept the folds of her dishdasha and jalabiya around her body and felt that strange, internal snap , as the surface beneath her sandals changed from dirt over concrete to less dirt over polished marble.