McDonald, Ian - SS - Fat Tuesday.pdf - Ian McDonald - przemosta

Fat Tuesday

Ian McDonald

Not only was Ian McDonald one of the first of a new generation of

British SF writers to break into print in the eighties, he did it in the USA.

After publishing several highly acclaimed short stories in Isaac Asimov’s

Science Fiction Maga-zine and being nominated for the John W.

Campbell Award for Best New Writer of 1985, he published his first

novel, Desolation Road, and a collection of short fictions, Empire

Dreams, in 1988. Three more novels have followed, the latest being

Hearts, Hands and Voices. At present he’s working on something called

Necroville, but whether that has to do with the fact that he lives in Belfast

isn’t apparent. If anything, as with Van Morrison, Belfast inspires

McDonald’s lyrical fictions, notable for their density of ideas and

exuberant characters and prose, which in ‘Fat Tuesday’ find an ideal

marriage of form and content.

McDonald tells us:

I’d like to say it happened like this:

Six fifteen. Pressing buttons on the remote control.

Channel one: the child killers of Rio are abroad in the hills

again.

Channel two: dance energy, some Harlem kid pulling

incred-ible rhythms out of a plastic bucket.

Channel three: ladeezlgennelmenlboys ’n ’girls: life in the

Lycra Age!

Channel four: the great white guitar thrash fetish.

Remix is the dominant popular culture form of these last two

decades of the twentieth century.

Except - it didn’t. Quite.

* * * *

Black Sunday

ambada: musical composition in 2/4 rhythm characterised by massed

drum-ming, remixed sampled material and extended electric guitar

improvisation.

Also: sambada: a popular dance originating from the conur-bations of

Alto California province, to the above-mentioned musical composition,

especially as performed during the annual pre-Lenten carnival.

Also: sambada: a social gathering at which sambada is danced and

performed.

Sambada school: a collection of individuals, usually of one shanty

district (see cabaña) incorporating musicians, dancers, costume

designers, etc. who represent their district in the carnival parade and

sambada competition.

sambadero(a): a man or woman wise in the ways of sambada.

* * * *

Run, Annunciato

Do not doubt they are behind you, pouring down the steep alleys of

Birimbao Hill. Do not doubt that theirs are the voices whooping and

cheering, theirs the wolf cries and the laughter like whips, echoing among

the shanties and favelas. Do not doubt that theirs is the batteria surging

through the trash streets and dirt squares, drums beating beating you from

wherever you try to hide. And never for one instant imagine that they will

ever give up until they catch you and kill you. For they are the Lobos de

Sangre, and no wolf will abandon the chase until it has tasted blood.

Grasped in Annunciato’s right hand, the glass guitar gently bleeds.

Thoughts of escape, Annunciato? That maybe if you can reach the

boulevard you will be able to lose them among the holographic saints and

neon madonnas and videowall advertisements for Coke and Sony and

cannbarillos? Prayers, Annunciato? Oh Mary, dazzle them with your neon

halo, oh gay St Sebastian, send your laser arrows into their eyes?

Better to run, Annunciato. The freeway has new gods now, new

deities born out of the media remix. They are gauche and inexpert, but

enthusiastic.

Nissans and Toyotas cut smoking rubber hexagrams into the blacktop

as Annunciato and his glass guitar weave between the bumper-to-bumpers

crowding the five lanes inbound and five lanes outbound: Hey boy you tired

of living, stupid favelado, cabañero you want to mash yourself all over

my hood ornaments I am only too happy to oblige you where he steal

that guitar from anywhereplacehow? Oaths and imprecations cease as

the Lobos come loping through the gridlock slap-ping out the rhythm of the

hunt on spray-customised hoods, leaping from fender to fender to fender,

leering in at the Valley Girls in six centimetre heels and hi-thi-leos and

wrap-round teleshades.

In some off-avenue back alley overseen by videowall Marys, he stops

to listen if they are still behind him.

Oh yes, Annunciato. Most definitely, Annunciato.

The roar of engines is like a steel-capped boot in the stomach. The

lowriders come revving along the alleyways, Lobos hungry, eager, riding on

doors and roofs, beating out their hunting song on hot-shopped Toyota

steel. Sparks scream back from their scratch plates.

Reconcile your soul with the saints of the boulevard.

And the big hoload for Diet-Coke on the side of the National Lottery

Office says: ANNUNCIATO.

The name, tastefully iconised in spray-can platinums and razor blues,

tumbles away through holospace. The spotlights of the Lobos pin and pluck

you naked as one of the chickens Madre Amparo takes to the shrine of St

Anthony. The back streets off St Dominic’s Preview are loud with the

whisper click of switchblades.

TRUST ME. I WILL PROTECT YOU.

Lasers sear the night. Brave, bold howling Lobos fall back swearing

screaming clutching burns gashes scars. A new ingredient in the city

perfume of sweat, shit, smoke and semen: scorched flesh. Glass guitar in

hand, Annunciato is safe behind a wall of flickering laserlight.

A miracle.

STAY HERE. SOMEONE WILL COME TO HELP YOU, says the

hoload.

‘What who why how?’ says dazed and confused Annunciato.

The big BVM videowall on the Credit and Loan fills with starry starry

night. A pair of strawberry luscious lips rezz up on the startrek sky. Fruit

comes tumbling out of the mind of the Coca-Cola Company’s

videographics computer; bananas, pineapples, oranges, guava, mango,

piled up like Mr Socks’ stall in Birimbao Plaza. A woman’s face fills in

behind the lips, beneath the tutti-frutti hat. Blessed Virgin Mary was never

like this.

LA MIRANDA, says the videowall as, with a wink and a smile, the

woman fades into the Alto California night. Los Lobos howl and smash the

big chrome wrenches that are their ritual weapons against the oily concrete.

But the lasers hold them.

A light. And a voice. A woman’s voice. Flashlight beams, a vision,

riding down on an extending fire escape out of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

on the U-Bend-We-Mend. Silver lamé from the peak of her baseball cap to

the tips of her boots, a jingle-jangle of ripped-off hood ornaments around

her neck, the Six Mystic Stars of Subaru.

Angel of mercy, and, incredible of incredibles, white.

Annunciato thought they had all died out in their rotting haciendas and

Tudor mansionettes years ago.

‘You come now, right now,’ she says. Her Angeleño is appalling.

‘Right now, you come. La Miranda, she cannot go on drawing this much

power from the grid for long time. Catholic engineers come, shut her down.

So you come, come now.’ He reaches toward the pure white hand and is

drawn up into heaven. Over rooftops, she leads him, through forests of

aerials and satellite dishes, past cooling towers and rotary clotheslines and

coiling serpentine airco ducts, across rooftop marijuana gardens and coca

plantations, leaping through the yawning dark over deep dark alleys while

the never-ending stream of taillights winds and wends beneath them and

the Lobos, released from luminous imprisonment, go loping along the

shining sidewalks, howling at the grapefruit moon. And the glass guitar drips

a trail of minims and crochets like the silver slime of a night snail on the side

of the basilica of Santa Barbara.

‘Down. Now.’

The big jacked-up mauve and yellow 4X4 is circling, growling in the

parking lot of Señor Barato All-Nite super-mart like a bull in the ring, pawing

at the piss-stained concrete with its monster balloon tyres. The Lobos, war

drums a-swinging, arrive in a wave of uniform pink and green as Annunciato

and the angel drop from the swinging end of the fire escape and hit the

ground.

‘In, in.’ The driver is an old old black man - more incredible even than

the silver lamé angel - already gunning the accelerator, tyres smoking on

the concrete. ‘In!’ Doors slam.

‘Caution, caution, your seatbelt is not properly engaged, please

engage your seatbelt,’ says a made-in-Yokohama chip-generated

conscience. Lowriders slam to a halt beneath Señor Barato’s flashing sign.

Grinning and gabbling like a loco, the old black man throws the beast into

four-wheel drive and up they go on those big monster wheels right over the

tops of the lowriders and out into the neon and smog of the boulevard.

* * * *

¿Porque?

Because on this Black Sunday night Annunciato killed a Blood Wolf

with a glass guitar.

The sambadrome had been jumping. Word is up, compadres.

Tonight tonight tonight is the big Play-Off. Tonight the last two guitarristos

do battle to the beat of hip-slung drum and mixing desk for the glory glory

hallelujah of leading all Birimbao Hill on Fat Tuesday.

Yelping and blowing football whistles, his brother Lions’a’Judah had

carried him shoulder high down the precipitous paths of the favela, this boy

from nowhere who had swept the wing play-offs with his glass guitar. Have

you not heard? Tonight tonight tonight the red gold and green of Judah will

smash the pink and green of the Lobos.

As the rival guitarristos were borne into the sambadrome, the batteria

had struck up, those aristocrats of rhythm, drumming up an avalanche of

McDonald, Ian - SS - Fat Tuesday.pdf

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