CHAPTER TEN – “ALL SHOOK UP!”

…Earth... so vast, so patriarchal, so seemingly solid... is, in reality, a thin, stony plate, of no more consequence than a toupee barely covering the fertile, fervid scalp of genius, or psychopathology. Now and again, the inner world's inquietudes burst forth... usually, though not always, in places and at times predictable to those who measure geologic epochs by centuries or by millennia, not the days or hours so dear to commercial travelers who ever thrive in atmospheres of change and confusion. One great swath of vulcanism traverses the Balkans and down the Italian boot... the obliteration of Pompeii being attributable to this and, perhaps also, that great eruption upon the isle of Santorin, which may be the historical foundation for all the legends of Atlantis. Other swaths of seismic peril radiate from Asia Minor into the depths of China. Most dreaded, of course, the legendary "ring of fire" circles the Pacific Ocean - hardly a year passing without incident in the Andes or Alaska; in Japan, in California or those tormented realms of the South Seas, where earthquakes and volcanoes (consider Pinatubo, Krakatoa, Tonga or the tremors off the coast of Sumatra) spew millions of tons of debris into the air, to make a night of day and winter of summer and, often, raise great tidal waves up from the deep to smash and drench, and drown.

But there are lesser-known faults... stealth zones whose rare destructiveness shall be magnified many times over by the long durations between incidents, and carelessness of those who inhabit these seemingly tranquil zones. Over the winter of 1812-13, a series of magnitude-8 and 9 earthquakes jolted southeast Missouri on what has come to be known as the New Madrid faultline, terrorizing the few inhabitants of what was then America's frontier... fur trappers and fugitives, adventurers and Indians. Making new plastic of the Mississippi delta, it changed the river's course and, even, caused it to run northwards, a ways. Two centuries after, most geologists chose to dismiss these upheavals as a rare, once-in-five-hundred-year happenstance; although some few, also, did admit difficulty in mapping the obscure mid-American faults, so much deeper embedded in bedrock than such near-surface blemishes as the San Andreas or Alaskan rifts. These remained unknown, unnamed, uncharted anomalies. Consequently, the Permian and Wabash Faults... or such near-apocryphal geological blemishes as those crevasses said to zigzag through Boston, Manhattan and Chicago... slept as one with Bigfoot, Nessie or white, blind alligators in municipal sewers; curiosities to be trotted out as sidebars when catastrophe visited Iran or the Aleutians.

There are many earthquakes in Mexico and... before, even, the advent of Columbus... its Native civilizations (reckoning time and circumstance by dozens, as they did) believed in worlds destroyed by fire and trembling earth, and even set a date upon which God would again rise up against humanity. Civilized, Christianized sophisticates as had comfortably reconciled faith and reason scoffed at superstitions of silly savages, especially after the winter solstice of 2002 passed without incident, but, a quarter of a century later, the uncharted Wabash Fault... of which New Madrid was proven only a small tributary, arose from a slumber of millenia to cleave the United States down its middle, cleanly as a butcher chops poultry lengthwise for the spit.

Centered in the southwest of the state of Indiana, beneath the river of its name... known, if at all, only for a railroad and song... the initial, measured tremor of the first of December, 2027 was of at least Richter 9.4 magnitude, some aftershocks possibly reaching 9.7. Since every geologist within three hundred miles of the epicenter perished, and their devices were buried beneath millions of tons of mud and water, we must admit only an approximate truth. Disequilibrated relations ultimately possess the deepest, most dangerous beauty.

The Wabash Cannonball (shortened over time to Cannonball, K'ball and finally... as am oath... "keb") blew through America the way its namesake locomotive would have blasted a Toyota, stalled before it on the tracks.

Great cities... Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis... were reduced to rubble in less than a minute. A score of mighty rifts... like Titans' fingernails... raked through low foothills bordering the Great Lakes, generating a flood of Biblical proportions, a wall of water thirty meters high, that bolted down the Wabash to the Ohio and Mississippi. Others rent the ingenious Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to the Illinois River, cleaving a path for the tidal wave that covered the St. Louis Arch to three quarters of its elevation before the whole broke away, careening downriver with the rest of the K'ball's debris and its dead. The white bluffs of Memphis melted like sugar in boiling water... the swelling torrent proceeding south to devour Vicksburg, Natchez and Baton Rouge before the tumbling Mississippi abruptly veered west to slice that new, more linear path to the Mexican Gulf several millenia before God and time would have come round to doing so on their own.

To a vast zone of ruin as far north as Minneapolis, east to Pittsburgh, west to Omaha and Kansas City, aftershocks and sympathetic resonances now joined the Wagnerian chorus of devastation. Perhaps agitated... or embarrassed at having been upstaged by this upstart to the East... the Ring of Fire struck back, petulantly, though vengefully. A dozen volcanoes erupted in North America alone... Seattle disappearing under Mt. Ranier's ash, Portland beneath Mt. Hood's. Anchorage, Tokyo, Manila, Jakarta... all ceased to exist within six hours of the Cannonball. A few Chinese stations even claimed to measure tremors exceeding that mythological, magical Richter Ten (though an understandably jealous Western geological establishment scoffed; what remained of it, that is).

(The fertile California central valley sank, too, leaving a long, thin archipelago stretching from the ruins of San Jose and San Francisco to Cabo San Lucas - which remnant broke off politically, as physically, reconstituted as Mex-America – although the few survivors renounced their Spanish heritage as completely as the Anglo, returning to the Aztec monarchies and city-states of five centuries ago.)

The quakes and volcanoes raised great tidal waves that lashed the great, complacent shoreline cities of Africa, Europe and the Americas. Perhaps four million drowned as the North Sea lunged up the Thames to London, five times that in Boston, Washington and New York. Even in far off Timbouctoo, the clockwise swirl in drains turned counterclockwise. A Caribbean island, famed haven for those seeking confidentiality on the interstices of crime and finance, vanished entirely – taking its phynancial secrets to a watery grave. Another, however, arose on the slopes of newly emergent volcanoes in the Grenadines (promptly claimed by, then disputed, lethally, between the various private armies of Wall Street, Hong Kong and Cartagena).

When Nature's wrath receded, greed and terror, fear and misapprehension carried on the Reaper's bloody task. Though acts of courage, selflessness and compassion were legion, the magnitude of trauma unhinged many survivors... and emboldened more than a few desperate predators. With the Mississippi cresting ninety-four feet above its level in the flatlands of the Illinois Delta (to remain a frozen lake twenty miles wide and seven hundred long South to the Gulf in the geological winter six months after the K'ball), food disappeared, and starving mobs converged on ruined Washington over that long, gray cold summer to overthrow their government – and then to overthrow the overthrowers. Alarmed, those more fortunate states west of the Mississippi and east of the Sierra Nevada range established an alternate government in New Vegas... still sweeping away the accumulated ash of the Long Valley caldera eruption, two hundred miles to the northwest. A decade after the K'ball, the rebuilding EastAmerican and WestAmerican republics would remain apart, proud and distrustful.

Astonishingly, the theme-park city of New New Orleans... a gated carnival Potemkin of plywood and plastic only seven years old... was spared by diversion of the no longer mighty Mississippi south to Atchafalaya Bay (though bon vivants as paid their entrance fee waded through knee-high water and slapped at snakes and spiders washed down from the debris of Baton Rouge). Sausages sizzled and gumbo-pots boiled over outdoor fires, hurricane glasses were raised to toast the city's fortune. It was a premature celebration... of such calibre as Mr. Poe would have appreciated. Their river reduced to a pathetic and poisonous trickle, the refugees still inhabiting shacks and trailers outside the gates were decimated by winds of disease festering in the millions of heaped-up corpses left in the mudflats and swamps to the north and west. Once the microbes eluded security like door-to-door salesmen for the Apocalypse, Crescent City's wealthiest krewes finally deserted en masse after one last, infamous debauch, leaving behind humid, windblown streets of glastic cobblestones, sawgrass, dead snakes, skullbones, lethal insects, blanched advertising signs and some mighty fine, fine faux-ruins disintegrating under a blazing sun, all the more eager to recoup its place in the... well, sun... after eighteen months of a brutal, volcanic winter.

The immediate casualties of the Cannonball numbered perhaps eighty-five million Americans... a toll perhaps tripled within three years. The exact property damages never would be tallied up... bankers and insurance magnates fortunate enough to escape the waters of New York and London seized what transactionable assets they could and disappeared. Worldwide, perhaps six billion human beings ceased to exist but, that being only somewhat less than double the Biblical third of the whole, the remnant struggled back to their feet, though with perhaps a little less hubris, and lot less liberty.

Dictatorships had become fashionable, again.

Refugees from New Orleans, Memphis and the less-impacted population centers from Jackson to Houston joined a flotsam of the post-Cannonball economic storm, crossing and re-crossing Dixie like locusts, waiting for someone... anyone... to step forward, plant authority's rod into the earth, declare sanctuary and dominion. And, within a year of the holocaust, a hero... finally... did come forth.

He was an incongruity - barely five feet tall and the proverbial ninety-eight pounds soaking wet at the advanced age of seventy-seven years, but still an Olympic class marathon runner (not to mention a renowned entomologist and optician). Proprietor of the tiny Aaapex Artificial Eye Company become seventh-richest man in all the Americas (owing to invention of a furnace that utilized the refractive powers of his special glass to literally release the congealed solar energy stored up within common waste materials)... that scion of Substance and adjudicator of the line and field, Jezekiah Jemaliel Jates, stepped forth.

A visionary... a savior... a Messiah for the New World forecast by ancient Americans more than fifty centuries past…

A lunatic...

(Or, as he would allow himself... a solatic...)

When the mighty, muddy waters receded from his properties in the Atchafalaya Basin, west of the ghost town of New Orleans, Triple-J decreed that these swamps be drained into cachement reservoirs and a grand, new metropolis be erected to shelter his workers and some five million refugees of the Cannonball. In return, he demanded... and received... national sovereignty (not so difficult an accomplishment; with MexAmerica seceded, a swath of the Northwest broken off to join the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan in the Aryan redoubt of Can-America and the remains of EastAmerica and WestAmerica already at loggerheads) and dubbed his principality Barataria, after that briefly-extant pirate republic of the region, founded by Jean Lafitte two centuries prior.

Within five years of the k’ball, Barataria thrived again,

Triple-J was a man of principle and severe character - boasting that no hint of alcohol, caffeine or tobacco, let alone illegal drugs, had ever crossed his lips. Having renounced animal proteins, sugar and a dozen other vices, eating painstakingly crafted, fibrous biscuits and drinking only complex, odoriferous herbal potions marketed under his own Integral label, Jates decreed a dictatorship of hygiene be established... firstly among employees of his varied companies, than upon Barataria in whole. While EastAmerica and WestAmerica both slid from the precision of their machine-ages into neoplastic decadence and partisan upheaval, Barataria prospered, gaining wary trust and grudging admiration from the rest of a recovering world. Triple-J penned and imposed a new Constitution; modeled, vaguely, after America's, but rid of "childish" presumptions to life and liberty (let alone scandalous, sinful happiness). In their place, he dedicated his new, private republic to the loftier principles of health, security and property... veneration of curvature and Substance, and opposition to the ogres of linearity and substance abuse.

The national patriarch decreed severe penalties for lifestyle crime... which included fornication, usury (except through his own banks), divorce, vagrancy and sedition, alongside possession or consumption of an ever-swelling roster of unhealthful substances. He adopted, with enthusiasm, the waning American predilection for compelling the production of urine, and its testing for an ever-mushrooming regiment of contraband. Women were swept back into their homes - prohibited from most professions and offices, allowed to labor only during national emergencies (which, at first, remained distressingly frequent). The parishes of East and West Feliciana, bordering Barataria, were annexed without conflict and converted to prison farms and factories, their most despicable inhabitants handed over to bioresearch firms that composed a growing segment of Triple-J's empire. Lifestyle criminals were conscripted to perform the dirtiest, most menial city services under the pain of the lash. Dissenting literature, art, fashions, utterances and faiths were summarily banned, with an especial interdiction imposed against the reality-distorting glass purveyed by perverts and persons of ill repute, whose insolent mockery of pure, wholesome curvature was especially loathesome to Jates. Amusement parks and novelty shops were shut forthwith... carnival mirrors smashed, binoculars and kaleidoscopes burned at great crossroads bonfires. "I have been to the Concert of the Universal," proclaimed the tiny patriarch, "where that Grand Conductor raised his baton to set into being an economics of the cosmic; the scientific, diuniversal core of all things! International Finance seeks to reflect the people, yet those who control capitalism, financialism, art and the public weal remain uneducated that mere mortality must be transcended, incorrect vision firmly corrected and eyes set to look towards that which is the bestower of all Substance."

Yes... Jezekiah Jemaliel Jates, for all of his severity, was no drooling Philistine... in fact, he had deep (if some might say eccentric) opinions on design, culture and aesthetics. Idolizing and defending Elvis Presley as the foremost exponent of the sinuous American spirit, Triple-J decreed that, of only two radio (besides one television) stations licensed in Bartaria, Jade-2 was to play nothing but the King... all day, and all of the night. (Because KJAD-1 broadcast nothing save recordings of his own speeches, some carefully edited newscasts, commercials and the occasional public service notice, KJAD-2 thrived.) A realist of the most rigorous tendencies, he loathed both abstracts and the Surrealists but, also, adversarial disciplines as Cubism, Concretism and Constructivism with an equal passion... and, in raising to pre-eminence the interrelationship of MICRORG, MACRORG and HUMORG against the destructive suction of FASHION and STYLE, those two left-hands of rectilinear TUMORGs, he could (and did) offer up the most complex and punctilious arguments against his intellectual adversaries (before seeing them trundled off to Feliciana to go under the clinicians’ knives).

Dissatisfied with the persistent linear disorders of Barataria, he leveled a great, central swath of his still newly-rising principality and there caused to come into being Jean Lafitte City (duly renamed Jatesland following his Ascension, four years and four days after the earthquake that had so magnified his fortunes). Save for two intersecting highways... the Straight and Arrow, which intersected at the four gates of his own opulent residence... all of the streets of Jatesland were elliptical, as were all its commercial and residential towers (which he called "lozenges" after the fashion of those artists of the previous century whom he tolerated... if not endorsed... their manifestos and disputations standing third only to the solarity and curvature among his passions) and its public spaces. Even the rocketships which took off from his Jatesport on deeded EastAmerican property some three hundred miles northeast, not far from the ruins of Tupelo, were composed of millions of intricate, cunningly-fashioned spheres.

After the seer's ascension to join his mentor, Elvis, on the sun, however, Barataria experienced that sort of backsliding which often follows the passage of blazing, but barren, human comets: Alexander of Macedon, Charlemagne, Genghiz and Kublai Khan, to name but a few. Even as Jates still reigned, handfuls of heretical communities had sprung up on Jatesland's northern frontier like toadstools... the uber-Surrealist enclave of Mormentz and Blue City, a Cubist suburb. After the prophet's ascension, authority in Barataria devolved to a fractious City Council sharing power with remnants of Triple-J's fiscal empire, the Law Firm and Household Research Institute. Dancing finally being re-deregulated, a combat zone of herbal bars and nightclubs sprang up on Jatesland's so-called Hamorite Strip of Abraham Southwest, from Eighth to Tenth Streets. The ascended entrepreneur's health-inspired prohibitions remained effective... where the visages of murdered innocents, pedophiles and drug criminals had once been portrayed on milk cartons, now suspected milk-smugglers were exposed on containers of herbal and soy substitutes. Still, lifestyle crime soared, corruption flourished.

Jates had left no heirs... a predictable consequence of his antipathy to animal lusts, even within marriage. His wife, a small, terrified apparition... seldom seen... joined him in Ascension and his far-flung empire was bequeathed to a secretive Foundation. Once Jean Lafitte City became Jatesland, the patriarch's mansion was commandeered as a research center and museum, the Jatesaneum. His lands south of the city were claimed as an Academy, a refuge for Baratarians of unique talents and perceptions; the celebrated and reclusive author of children's literature, Stephen Stimwood, being appointed Headmaster. Barataria took its place among retrograde citadels of perfect virtue... revolutionary France and Kampuchea, Mao's China, Khomeini's Iran, Kabul under the Taliban... finally making its difficult bargain with an imperfect world, though not without lurchings, forwards and back. Triple-J having no innate objection to unnatural medical researches, the Republic had carved out an economic niche by participating, with enthusiasm, in the new technologies of cloning and human and animal DNA recombination that, a century and a half following the Thirteenth Amendment, provided a cheap and pliable source of quickly growing, quickly passing labor and replacement parts for the aged. Restive youth, conscripted, were sent around the world as mercenaries, swelling the Republic's coffers... money and the means of its acquisition insinuated sinuous tendrils into social intercourse like a destructive vine. Ten years after the K'ball, Baratarians traded fex with all of the enthusiasm of all four Americas (not only East and West, but Can and Mex), the New Acadians, Euros and Pan-Asians. After a long season of adversity through virtue, predators flourished... men like Dane Varrick who, with his loyal armies of cricket-mutes, developed and marketed prefabricated "vacation estates" in the swamps south of Jatesland.

All in all, a tolerable balance endured... Baratarians finding actual vissure (to use one of many Jatesisms, barely understood but forcibly fashionable) in rhythmic, curved compression, seeking new relationships between new noises... debating (intensely, on occasion) martial and thermal qualities of planets (towards a design on construction of new, unique systems of calendrics). The historical, epiphenomenal manifestings of Substance became core curriculum in public school education; the moral authority of Jates continuingly enforced, by the state, through the Trouble Factory. The rights of citizens... even not so wholly human ones - sometimes allowed the status of three-fifths of human beings... were ensured by a Compliance Doctrine. (On the principle that every action inspires an oppositional recation, a vast network of private-sector spies, working for pay or ideology, emerged within and without the law, and, further, in real estate, commerce, and in the media and postal sectors). Barataria's survival became dependent upon development and evolution of its institutions. The Household Research Institute approved and applied technology and commerce, the Law Firm adjudicated disputes. Man Ray University provided Jatesist higher education to deserving young people, and Stimwood Academy... well, that place had its agenda. If rather compromised, the "one-ized vision" of Jezekiah Jemaliel Jates, nonetheless, ultimately survived his Ascension and, as the dawn of the centennial of Elvis Aaron Presley... that veritable Amfortas of Jatesology... drew near, the sinuous swirl of Substance, the Undinomic Frontier and nourishing properties of Congealed Sunlight still buttressed the Baratarian Interim against the far superior legions of hungry, crafty enemies...

While, in the bowels of the Trouble Factory, Frank Desperate... still taped to the door of an antique refrigerator full of healthful, legal consumables... still struggles and screams into his gag...