Chapter 7.2
A boy named Val
One day, maybe, relations between our country and your country, our country and the countries that used to call ours theirs – one day maybe these relations will improve, and maybe, in that friendlier environment, it will be possible for the scientists of the world to come in their necessary numbers and tell us what it is that raised the Carotid so high, so relatively quickly. As it is all we’ve got, scientist-wise, are the Chinese engineers who live and work out there along the great artery of the people, running the mines.
And they, the Chinese, certainly aren’t sharing any of their findings. That — specifically, the fact that they do not have to -- is an important part of the deal, the contracts, the terms attending the leases for the Salt concessions. The Chinese wire money to the Palatiparvanian treasury twice monthly in gargantuan quantities, and we ask exactly no questions. Of necessity, therefore, we have developed some answers on our own. In some ways they are vague. Please do not criticize. Vague is how we like them. Impossible ideas? We are drawn to those, as well. Vague and impossible ideas are inflatable and flexible, therefore indestructible, therefore long-lasting, and indeed: our Carotid myths have withstood with iron wispiness the depredations of a dozen colonizers. So, too, will they withstand the truth, when it comes, which it surely will, once we’ve secured your scientific help, or, possibly, somehow, that of the Chinese. In the meantime we will tell ourselves what we have told ourselves, partly playfully and partly not, for centuries: that the Carotid is, roughly speaking, the center of the universe. Or anyway of the world. Your idiot courier says no. He says that the earth is round. And yes. Of course it is round. We are aware, Langley. We understand that a wiggling line up the middle of a country cannot be the geometric center of a sphere.
Let us live poetically, however. For a moment, let us. There is an awful power in the idea: something all-encompassing and primordial once took place along the length of the Carotid, and the planet itself recognizes as much, and recognized it when the something happened, and therefore pressed the land beneath that land upward toward the heavens, as an offering to God. Or to god. Or the gods. Whatever you happen to prefer. Here in Palatiparvu we are not, as you probably know, particularly interested in such things. And neither are you, Langley, are you? Frankly? You do not care a whit about our gods-or–whatever. You do not even care about your own deities! All you care about is your cell phones. All you care about is tapping and swiping and staring with open mouths and bugged-out eyes at whatever the west coast monstrosities have funneled before you for the day. That, ultimately, is what all of this is about, is it not? Your cell phones, and the fact that they cannot function in the way you have come lately to expect them to function -- not without the salts from the Great Salt Carotid. This is a battle for rocks, at its base, and there is something I need to make clear: if your intention is to get my help in re-creating for yourselves a new Carotid somewhere in New Mexico, or maybe Utah, I’m going to end up disappointing. I cannot offer you any such assistance.
I know that you must look at the satellite imagery of the Carotid and think to yourselves that Goodness, that looks a lot like certain territories we’ve already got; and I know that you might think, further, that it would maybe not be too hard to manufacture in your sere western wilds stones like the ones we’ve got the Chinese digging up out of the ground. But I don’t have access to scientific secrets. I tuck the President in, at night, and his desk drawers are kept unlocked; but if he has somewhere a set of documents explaining exactly what it is about the Carotid salts that, ground-up and melted-down and factory-spread like mayonnaise on the newest of the cell phone screens — if he has some set of documents explaining exactly why those special hunks of sea–deep sandysoil make the new displays uncrackable and unscratchable and as clean as the soul of a baby, I do not know where they are kept. Those documents.
And you’ll recall, Langley, that you were invited to join the bidding process, when the mining concessions were put up. You had the opportunity to test your guts against Beijing’s. But protocols, and so forth. Sovereign investment restrictions. Public–private partnership regulations. And on and on. There is no need to repeat yourselves. We heard it all the first time. Now you’re on the outside, is the point. You’re on the outside, and you want to get back in, and that means you’re going to have to charm the President. Your big boss is. He is going to have to show my boss that he understands him; and that means understanding his country — which, in turn, means comprehending the Carotid.
If your president fails at this, if you fail at this, you will end up no different from or better than the Imperials. You will be just another bunch of foreign bullies chewed up and coughed out of a country that will not tolerate disinterest in its central seam. The President is the president for the same reason you have been unable for fifty years to manage us: the key to this country lies long and dirty across a landscape most of its citizens have never glimpsed. The plains are empty, but they remain the womb of the people, and what we are talking about, when we are talking about the President, is always, at some level, Settlement #22. That was my village, that was my home: the little cluster of gray brick insulae where we grew beans and maize and were betrayed, eventually, by a boy named Val.