I don't know how this happened. I distinctly recall telling a friend I didn't want to write another book. I meant it.
The first book, Desert Burial, was hot off the press when some buildings fell down for no reason. The news hole expanded, displacing book reviews with an endless stream of homogenized mindless slop. News conformed to the template of the CIA-guided TV melodrama 24: Is the torture going to work? Can the ticking bomb be stopped?
State propagandists flew flags from our every protuberance and planted them in every orifice, juxtaposing them with the crucifix, the national anthem, baseball, the troops, puppies, attractive women, and even the I♥NY advertising gimmick until by the magic of induced mass hysteria the flag ceased to be the international warning sign for broke low-normal rednecks and became a sort of Cthulhu totem for a nation of maddened H.P. Lovecraft primitives who drolly invaded the wrong country twice. As Richard Clark put it, in a fey and puckish mot, it’s as if the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Roosevelt invaded Mexico.
The collapse itself was elaborate war propaganda gussied up with traditional visual absurdities to poke the primitive animal brain parts that make you rage or sweat or shake. There was James Nachtwey’s ash cloud engulfing a crucifix, defiling all you don’t really hold sacred. We saw the Newark Star Ledger’s portrait of ignominious rout, a decompensating policeman with an abrasion on his nose obsessively repeating the catchphrase he heard on TV, “This is war!” We were invited to emote over Tom Franklin’s remake of the Iwo Jima flag-raising. The abc network’s Times Square message board showed a doughty fireman incongruously captioned, “The rocket’s red glare.” (They knew not to try our patience with a blow-up of an NYPD gumshoe after they let the feckless Lincoln Tunnel bombers go.) Shannon Stapleton gave us the pietà of FDNY chaplain Mychal Judge, official Victim No. 0001, divested of the holiest of his relics, his fire jacket and helmet, which were later found miraculously intact in pulverized rubble.
My book was in no wise too highbrow or profound. Standard algorithms rated it as seventh-grade reading level. It was simply unsuited to its shit-for-brains cultural milieu.
Suffice it to say that the months after 9/11 were a rah-rah time. In the literary marketplace — that is, the USA’s consolidated media, Wisner’s mighty Wurlitzer — there was not much appetite for stories about fabricated threats or CIA crimes.
This is not to whine. There were lots of things wrong with my book. As my agents Curtis Brown put it, in a plug for an award there was no way in hell I would get (CIA funded PEN through its CCF slush fund,)
“…Desert Burial lies largely outside the accepted scope of literary subject matter. It updates social naturalism by examining the technocratic mindset of surveillance and control... The lay outsider’s viewpoint is intimate but mistrustful as tensions come to light in authentic documents that dovetail logically and even mathematically…
“Desert Burial challenges the literary convention that plot stems solely from character. Impersonal forces arise spontaneously from a complex institutional environment. Organizing principles interact as characters do: hierarchies conflict with the shifting affiliations spawned by ubiquitous communications. The deus ex machina climax turns on the stability of a widely-used economic forecasting model and undermines personal closure with global consequences. The intricate plot gives the setting motive force. This book creates a world with a lot of moving parts…
“Littlefair’s work is manifestly grounded in experience, written between consulting projects for foreign joint ventures in China, India, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa. Due diligence reports and aides mémoire have shaped his style but moral ambiguity marks his point of view.”
You see the problem. I like to curl up with a good dossier. My stuff verges on the sort of Bolshy social realism CIA spent millions to suppress. Things happen in it. And all those abstract concepts, how are we going to see and touch and taste them? CIA made rules against that in PSB D-33/2. The book simply did not meet the specs set out by CIA hireling Paul Engle and his Iowa Writer’s Workshop. It obtrudes ideas about the world.
The problem would only get worse as Returner’s Diary lodged in my subconscious.
I had a sinking feeling as DB’s publication loomed. It wasn’t just the market crash. Suspenseful things were drawing our attention like the lengthening ash on Clarence Darrow’s mythical cigar. The Dark Winter exercise fretted about state-sponsored bioterror and scary germy mail. PNAC was on about its new Pearl Harbor and it was increasingly clear what they had in mind.¹
We’re apt to forget how much we disliked the twin towers, Nelson and David, ugly, brutalist, and coarsely phallic as only a parasitic class can make them. The complex swept away 1,300 businesses and 30,000 jobs that people were quite fond of. Worse yet, the two piles started decaying on completion.
Everybody knows about the Port Authority’s code exemptions, lowball costing, and corrupt contracting and inspection. Still, it’s hard to fathom what a sorry blivet they put there. Some focus on the gimcrack engineering and corrosion.² The structural members were going nowhere but the concrete was getting mealy. A fellow I knew surveyed the twin white elephants to prepare for what we coyly called emergencies. He found that tenants would run cables to their offices by drilling holes in all the concrete floors below. As gee-whiz technology proliferated, more computer networks needed more and more cables. By the time he got hired to ponder the risks, the floors were like Swiss cheese. With a bit of untoward torsion, holes near the edge could crack into a notch and perforate the floors like sheets of stamps. Crumbling concrete crunching on the flexing decks, subsiding underfoot, as if you’re not jumpy enough up there. For C-suites and their occupants, that’s not on. Big shots were apt to be sued.
Unless, of course, some befuddled evil-doers could be blamed. Not long after the survey, Emad Salem helped credulous enthusiasts plant a bomb in the raddled monstrosity’s parking deck. With his endearing Boy-Scout probity, Emad proposed to substitute something that wouldn’t blow up. He was Egyptian, a clever spook, unlike our pugil-drunk Langley jarheads, so he taped himself covering his ass. You used to be able to listen to it there. I squirreled it away, so you can enjoy it here! [link to emad_salem.mp3]
Emad’s FBI handler pulled him off the job, and the bomb went off as planned. But the building was still standing when the smoke cleared. Damp squib though it was, it scared off lots of tenants. Pillow talk and bibulous confidences seeped from architects, engineers, detailees and cutouts, the NYC EOC, and all the foreign spooks³ who recognize the slug trail of CIA impunity. I knew one poor bastard, a worker, not a technocrat, whose job kept him there in the basement. The foreboding of it drove him to drink. “All it would take is one plane,” he would say. Everyone knew what was coming, even helpless victims.
When you have impunity, if at first you don’t succeed, you try again. You know no one will stop you. By the time CIA got it right, with competent Saudi and Israeli help, the casualties were mostly apparatchiks, skivers, traders — small fry with no Ivy final or eating club, no Opus Dei or equivalent Zionist order, no kleptocrat to protect them. Nonentities like us. John O’Neil went in to work that day. The nomenklatura had been warned. There were plenty of fetching young faces in the Times to make us sniffle and pledge allegiance, but no material loss for your betters. On the contrary, the office proles’ loss was our rulers’ gain. Clients at A.B. Krongard’s old firm made out like bandits trading puts. War profiteers got not one but two lucrative wars. The totalitarian creeps I worked for got lots of draconian laws: they could spy on your entire life and lock you up forever without charge and torture you and kill you. They always could, but now they could do it openly with no sneaking around.
There wasn’t much in it for me. I lengthened my portfolio duration, unwisely, given market conditions, and reaped a tidy capital gain in the ensuing panic: extraordinary short-term returns but nothing life-changing. I was out of it then, going straight, you see, and without real-time insider scuttlebutt, you can’t take a flyer with options. Timing is everything, and the premium decay can wipe you out if you’re not privy to the latest in the relevant compartments.
Don’t give me that look. You expect me to, what? Burst into the office of an avuncular senator who puts a stop to it? Karate-chop my way into the basement and clip the wires as the digital timer reads 00:02? Or just sound the alarm, warn the world at large? Right. I’d be resting on my laurels in the Abraham Bolden wing of Saint Elizabeth’s neuroleptic sanitarium, darting my tongue like a frog. Ask Susan Lindauer.
Anyway, my ill-gotten gains just about made up for the royalties I didn’t get. The Internet liked the book, here and there, but in those days no one listened to the Internet, and the market buried my little book in the pet sematary like Woofy the neighborhood mutt.
I forgot about the book myself and got engrossed in the history of the US government’s struggle to keep human rights out of your reach. The resulting samizdat dwarfed DB’s word count. The dauntless editors of Dissident Voice keep it safe.
Desert Burial was an effort to make sense of my misgivings as I emerged from a compartmented cave into the wider world. In the course of dreaming up that pocket case study I got slapped awake to our contemporary history: the impunity and absolute sovereignty of the criminal enterprise that has ruled this country since 1949, the CIA. Desert Burial was a wistful daydream of how it might be briefly thwarted. The Dissident Voice essays show me learning how the world is going to stop the CIA regime for good.
So you try to get on with your life. But you think up a book and it’s stuck in there, accreting whatever goes through your mind like a fatberg in the sewer. It’s hard to pull a fatberg out, globs remain and adhere. They congealed into Returner’s Diary.
Events stick to the clog: the greatest financial crime in history. Undeclared war by illegal means including sector-scale sabotage, murder of legally inviolable diplomatic personnel, aggression by sending of armed bands and irregulars, banned biological weapons, bombardment of civilian populations, and inadmissible foreign intervention in breach of UN Charter Article 41. The crimes against humanity of systematic and widespread torture, murder, and medical experimentation under ulterior constraint and coercion.
Odds and ends stick to the clog: a book I read by Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson that called for fiction based on “a whole new logic of collective dynamics, with categories that escape the taint of… individual experience.” Characters are system dynamic effects. Sounded like fun, so I tried it.
And Returner’s Diary grew in the mental effluent of my vocational training and indoctrination: operations research, or systems theory, different institutions call it different names but it’s applied math nagging in the back of your mind. Mathematical models drove the plot arc and the book wrote itself.
Characters enacted the mathematical concepts of Ilya Prigogine and Rufus Isaacs, order out of chaos and differential games. The naturalism would gag Zola. Plot and incident conformed to the Langevin equation, Markov chains, Boltzmann collision operators, or other stochastic processes. You can check my math (it checks out, at the formulation level,) interpret it as elaborate metaphor, or just wallow in it as lyrical bafflegab.
The math makes you follow your logical nose, dropping postulates, imposing broader structures. That's what gets you into trouble. Why does this state exist at this stage? Why should it? You're apt to notice emergent properties of complex systems: a criminal state producing the criminals it needs, a wider world purging its parasite states, forcible overthrow as optimal control. With reserved, unsentimental Faye surfing it to blow off steam, Can we relate?
I did what I could to sugar-coat it. For normal people who hate math, the plot arc explicitly echoes Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. In fact, Returner’s Diary is a rough translation of the title of Césaire’s great poem. It occurred to me that the title might sound to some people like The Turner Diaries. But I thought, nah.
Then more real life squelched into the clog. Genocide. The most manifest, overt, and gleeful genocide in history, self-probative mens rea and actus reus, genocide commands and songs sourced to forensic standards and presented in evidence at the World Court with our rulers doing their best to negate and forbid the reckoning, collective state failure. A new crime, cruel, inhuman and degrading circumstances of life, not simply destroying a population but torturing it to death: mass live burial in baited pits. Booby traps fashioned to blind. Child extermination as a game. Holocaust reified.
Enabled by illegal CIA assistance beyond scrutiny or question.
Too much. My cognitive sewer was blocked. The fatberg plugged the flow, it had to be extracted. The manuscript was ready. No US publisher would touch Returner’s Diary with a barge pole. Certainly not the “Big Five” oligopoly publishers of Wisner’s Wurlitzer. Not the radical independents who egg you on to be transgressive. Returner’s Diary took the form of tamizdat, uncensored material published abroad. Guernica Editions pulled it out of the memory hole. So, we shall see.
1 Search for Foreknowledge, or Sections I and J, in this civil-society plea to the Special Agent in Charge of Barking Up the Wrong Tree; or read the whole thing, it’s a page-turner.
2 An architectural photographer blundered into an awkward fix, and with the photographer’s knack of inveigling his way to a vantage, he got an earful too.
3 Like Isser Harel, Dominik Suter, Benjamin Netanyahu, Hassan Dabou, Vladimir Putin, Randy Glass, Alain Chouet, and everybody and his brother. (I kept the dead links because it's fun to see what we wind up forgetting.)
About the Author:
Brian Littlefair is a former consultant to foreign joint ventures and international financial institutions whose writing on human rights and geopolitics appears at Dissident Voice. His debut novel, Desert Burial, was published in the wake of 9/11.