Vaporworld: A Ghost Story

The Things That Haunt Us; After Yeats

To this person of a certain age the mall had always been there, part of the world like the rivers and the mountains, though of course the mall obscured the view of such things, jealous of attention as it was.  He remembered it fondly from his youth, a place to shop and socialize, away from the vagaries of the elements and deteriorating downtowns.  He didn’t have any concept of urban life as bearing any redeeming features, and of course the country was dull; both were places one’s parents had blessedly escaped.  The suburbs were the zone of authentic life and the shopping mall was its agora.  It may have lacked a Socrates to liven up intellectual life, but there was a Waldenbooks, and a Borders, and even a B. Dalton, so there was that.  He could buy a paperback and head to the food court and spend hours reading.  Some of his happiest memories were had here, first dates and movies after work, window-shopping and daydreaming about a future when he would care about things like couches and flatware.  Oh to have a job like an adult- what a boy could do with a solid $30,000 a year! 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer

It had been a wilderness for eons before the first people came.  Who could tell you their names now, sing their songs or lament their passing?  A great age rolled by before their chiefdoms arose, still nameless among the races that replaced them, as they lacked the trick of representing their words with signs.  Then came their doom.  The rough men who came through the mountains were not a sympathetic lot, as they had themselves been displaced and driven from their tribal lands across the great waters; their chief in Washington said as much by way of explanation when he signed the law that removed the first people across the Mississippi.  The names remained long after the people were gone.  The new men were crude, certainly, but full of passionate energy.  They cleared the forests and drained the swamps.  They built courthouses and whiskey stills; they sued and shot and stabbed and caned and horsewhipped one another, all held to be equitable means of settling differences.  The men to their east thought them low, while those to the north, a different breed altogether, both feared and hated them. 

Yes, the Yankee.  The men of the southlands he understood- heathens, little better than the Indians.  But if there was one thing of which he truly stood in dread, it was God.  He was a loving God, to be sure, showering blessings on those he loved.  But that love was simply inscrutable.  For his own reasons He saved and damned, doling out grace through no merit of the recipient.  You could not earn His love; there was nothing men had that He needed or wanted.  The agony of unknowing was simply unbearable for a people who thought themselves an elect, a shining city on a hill.  But then, one really didn’t earn anything in the big scheme of things.  For a God who knew every sparrow that fell from the sky, nothing was left to human agency.  Blessings were from on high, flocks and children and slaves and victories in war- these were the marks of His favor, as it had been in the days of Abraham.  In time the Yankee would come to understand that he could make a system of these blessings, bring order to the chaos of the grace of his God.  He would use what his God had revealed to him about nature to shape its forces, to harness wind and water and coal and iron.  He would fashion his blessings with machines, or rather, the Machine.  The Machine was certain where the God of Abraham was unknowable; the gifts of the Machine were regular and predictable.  They ceased, after a while, to bother to try to say anything about the unknown God- He could be counted on to work in the background.  He didn’t need praise, after all.  The Machine, though, was ever present.  His incense was smoke and his offering was blood and sweat.  He was at once a Golden Calf and a Brazen Bull.  He was not a loving god, to be sure.  But he was a reliable one.  Deus est Machina

Of course, being that adult, walking in that same mall, one had a different experience.  The bookstores were long gone now, replaced first with pet supply stores, then vape shops, then nothing.  The big boxes had mostly closed, and while the Macy’s still sat at the far end at the north side, the mall-facing entrance was shut with a great rolling gate.  The few people working there saw no reason to invite further shoplifting by allowing access to the now-dim space between their store and what had once been an intersection featuring a carrousel and a stand for cotton candy.  A lone security guard still roamed, or rather, rode his Segue Scooter around every hour or so, but he was mostly checking for vagrants.  Here one could see cracked windows that had once displayed suburban haute couture as one tread along the scuffed and chipped tile floor that had last been redone around 2006.  He’d walked by these places so many times as a kid he should have known what had been there like the back of his hand, but yet, there had been so much turnover over the years that the context had been lost.  Had the Babbage’s been next to the Chess King; had the Chess King become a Gap before it turned into the now-closed African Art imporium?  When he closed his eyes he could see it, but the photo was blurred somehow, like a Polaroid exposed to the light too soon.  He vaguely remembered reading something long ago about ‘spectral photography’ back in the 1800s, or maybe he saw it on TV.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was born into a hardscrabble Tennessee family in July of 1821. His father was a blacksmith and he sired twelve children altogether with his wife, half of whom would make it to adulthood.  People died suddenly and inexplicably in those days.  Forrest’s father was one of those casualties of life, passing on when his oldest son was 16.  That meant that Forrest was now the man of the house with all the attendant responsibilities.  He learned early on how hard life could be and he knew that to survive he would have to be hard in turn, but Forrest did not have any notion of merely surviving, eking out a living in the backwoods.  Forrest meant to prosper. He sold firewood and worked on farms; he learned to pilot the riverboats on the Mississippi.  He bought shares in plantations.  He gambled and was good at it, and came to be even more skilled at the fights that accompanied such activities.  Forrest would always like to fight.  Fully grown, he was well over six feet tall and more than 200 pounds.  To his contemporaries he was a hulking beast of a man with a fiery temper, but that masked an uncultivated but fierce intelligence.  Forrest went into business with his uncle, until a rival killed him in a great brawl that saw Forrest shoot two men to death and stab two others.  One of the survivors would later ride alongside him in the war.

People shopped online now.  It was a wholly virtual experience.  Why go out when they could just send it to you?  No one judged you sitting on your couch.  You didn’t have to explain to the salesgirl that you needed a bigger size, with all the implications.  You didn’t need to explain your ‘particular interests’ in videos to the guy at Suncoast, with all those implications.  He didn’t blame them really.  Dealing with computers was easier than dealing with people, after all.  People had personalities to be negotiated.  Amazon knew what you wanted and gave it to you, with suggestions for more.  You didn’t have to think much about the people that made it all happen, toiling in panopticon warehouses, monitored even as they went to the bathroom, squeezed for every drop of labor until they could be tossed aside.  He had read in The Weekly Standard that this was a good thing, that people like Bezos had made things cheaper.  He wondered about that.  Maybe making everything cheaper was the same thing as cheapening everything.  Maybe there were other ways to be rich and other ways to be poor.  He had watched as the bookstores all closed over the years, one by one.  Barnes and Noble was still around at least.  Not many people seemed to work there, though the employees outnumbered the customers.

Things fall apart the center cannot hold mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Forrest was one of the richest men in America when the war began, so the governor was surprised to learn that he had enlisted as a mere private alongside his grown son.  Forrest hadn’t bothered consulting the high and mighty about what he should do- after all, he had made his greatest fortune in the most disreputable of occupations, slave-trading.  Even overseers looked down on such men.  But times and necessities being what they were, approaches were made and an understanding was reached.  Forrest would be given a commission as a Lt. Col. to recruit his own cavalry regiment, which he would personally fund.  They were very much his men.  Forrest had no experience as a soldier and was barely literate.  He made for a great contrast with the polished commanders in the east; even the hillbilly Jackson had gone to West Point.  But Forrest proved to be quite the natural.  He had something of the Indian in him, some atavistic traits retained from his Scots-Irish forebears.  War was not a science to him but an art, an avenue of personal expression.  He was at once a war chief and an impresario, though he would not have known the word.  At his first battle, just outside Sacramento, KY, he ordered his men into a pinscher attack on both flanks of the enemy.  He himself charged into the center at the head of his elite escort company.  One reads that swords were made obsolete by this war; Forrest didn’t pay any mind to that.  He killed three men that day with his heavy dragoon sabre, and a half-dozen more with revolvers.  Witnesses compared him to a Viking berserker, red-faced and bulging-eyed, rageslaying the hapless Yankees who fell under his hand. 

Lincoln was wiser than pampered peacocks like McClellan, who called him a baboon and despised him.  His cabinet was full of Yankees who saw as he did that the Machine was the future, and Slave Power was the past, but for all their grim commitment to their crusade they lacked his crucial insight.  It would take men formed by different circumstances to conquer the likes of Lee and Johnston, men with the same mind as his own, with the same certainties, but men prepared to follow the faith of  the Machine to its furthest commandments.  He needed harder men than the east possessed. He found Grant after Fort Donelson, and with him Sherman.  Grant’s superiors had considered him reckless; Sherman was simply thought insane.  Lincoln understood, however, what those lukewarm souls did not- the pair belonged to the faith, and would offer the sacrifices necessary.

The music was perhaps the oddest part of walking through the mall now.  Only every third florescent light was on, and some had long since burned out.  Store after store was shuttered- even near Halloween the costume store no longer opened (people bought their costumes online- superheroes were still popular last he checked.  He had noticed once that they only came in adult sizes, though.  Kids didn’t trick-or-treat anymore).  Hardly anyone but the odd elderly person on an indoor walk even made their way through most of the space in the mall, and they didn’t stop to talk or listen.  Yet the music was still playing. It was the same cheery canned instrumental score as in days gone by, the sort of upbeat tunes that used to play in the background while the customers shopped.  Now that there was no foreground it was all there was, stark and unsettling.  The speaker system, no longer well-maintained, sounded discordant and scratchy.  It was like being in the Mos Eisley Cantina after Luke and Co. had departed; what was left but the meaningless babble of the extras?  He thought about the radio waves beamed into space that would continue moving through the galaxy long after the sun was a cold ember, the Earth a thing long ago and far away.

The blood dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned

Forrest would later be called “the Wizard of the Saddle,” though the Yankees knew him more starkly as “the Devil.” He was the most gifted cavalry commander of the Civil War, a man who prefigured 20^th century notions of mobile warfare.  One by one Yankee commanders were sent to stop him and they were all defeated in turn.  Abel Streight he chased across three states and tricked into surrendering when he outnumbered Forrest 3-1.  One unfortunate enemy officer actually challenged him to single combat during one of Forrest’s raids on Memphis, like Hector fighting Achilles.  It went even more poorly for the Yankee than the Trojan; a witness compared it to an eagle fighting a butterfly.  He had a harder time with his own commanders, West Point professionals who looked down on him as a jumped-up slave-trader with friends in low places.  Bragg he hated and rumors spoke of his threatening him with death after Chickamauga- silly talk, as Forrest seldom bothered with threats in personal matters.  Forrest had had to kill one of his own subordinates for being so bold as to shoot him during a dispute over a transfer, after all.  Nonetheless, the war was taking its toll despite his personal successes.  At Oklona, in February of 1864, Forrest’s youngest brother Jeffrey, whom he had practically raised as a son and put through college with his hard-won wealth, was shot down while leading a charge under his older brother’s command.  It was said that Forrest’s inconsolable grief was matched only by his unstoppable rage.  He charged into the enemy lines almost faster than his men could follow.  No one could even keep track of the men he killed that day.  He was never quite the same. 

Grant went east at Lincoln’s summons.  He was to destroy Lee’s army.  Other men were certainly capable of accomplishing this, but none other were willing to make the sacrifice the Machine demanded.  Lincoln knew his man.  Grant met disasters at the Wilderness, at Cold Harbor, the fiasco at the Crater.  McClellan, now running against Lincoln for president, would have retreated. Grant pressed on.  More blood and smoke were offered to crush these rebels, and more still would be needed.  Sherman, left behind to manage the west, certainly understood this.  It wasn’t even remotely personal with him, a man free of abolitionist cant or any pretense to serving some higher morality.  One side in this conflict would burn and he wished to do the burning.  The Machine would see the fires of this hecatomb and bestow the grace to build the future.  No one understood the Machine like Sherman. He was a god so blessedly knowable, if only men had the courage of their convictions. 

The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity

He walked through the food court, now decommissioned.  He sat on the edge of the dry fountain and looked fondly at what had once been a chicken sandwich place.  He had flirted with the girl who worked there years ago but never asked her out.  One day she simply wasn’t there anymore.  One day the restaurant was gone.  This place that had been the cynosure of so much frantic commotion was now a lonely place.  He thought himself especially sensitive to such things- forlorn playgrounds, empty houses, his old high school that he’d snuck into before they’d torn it down.  One could feel what it had been somehow, a space given form by human will and reason, a soul breathed into it, giving and being given in turn a certain energy.  What was it now then, bereft of life but retaining its form?  What do people call such things?  He thought of George Romero, of the walking dead, of what they were drawn to in their undead state.  It wasn’t their homes . . .

Fort Pillow was named for the Confederate general who’d abandoned Fort Donelson.  The Yankees who occupied it were said to be using it as the hub of a criminal racket, smuggling cotton and contraband north, as well as shaking down the locals.  That was the rumor that had reached Forrest anyway. The fort housed rear-echelon soldiers, half of whom belonged to the United States Colored Troops.  Major General Forrest demanded their unconditional surrender.  The garrison, thrown into confusion by the death of their commander, hedged.  The Confederates stormed the walls.  Forrest had been wounded at this point and taken from the scene.  He didn’t order what happened next, but then, perhaps he didn’t really need to.  General Milley calls it “disciplined disobedience,” the authority a subordinate has to act in accordance with the implicit wishes of his commander, even in contradiction of direct orders.  Forrest was a brutal man but had never been a cruel one.  Then again, his brother was not a month in the ground, the war was not going well, and perhaps his men understood him now better than he understood himself.  It was a massacre, particularly of the black troops.  Forrest’s men drove them to the riverbanks and shot them down.  It was a useless battle all told; the fort was a militarily meaningless target. It was not the kind of destruction a man like Sherman would have bothered with.  He was a sacker of cities, a burner of homes, a man who drove women and children into exile, but it was to a purpose.  It was the will of the Machine.  Had he not always insisted that war was hell and its glory was moonshine?  Forrest was the romantic.  The Fort Pillow Massacre would haunt Forrest’s reputation for the rest of his days, even after his greatest victory at Brice’s Crossroads, where, outnumbered 2-1, he drove a Yankee force from the field in a hard panic.  After that, he’d been promoted to Lt. General.  The site is still there today.  They built a mall not far away. 

Grant squeezed and crushed and ground Lee into powder.  Stuart fell at Yellow Tavern.  A.P. Hill was shot off his horse seven days before Appomattox; it seems he hadn’t wished to survive the fall of his nation. Not Lee, Lee would bear the burden, as he had borne burdens his whole life.  It didn’t really matter to Grant.  Grant wanted peace and order and a smooth transition to the new world he’d cleared space for with the destruction of the old.  He tamped down the calls for treason trials and recriminations.  Such would only inflame tensions when accord was needed.  The better class of men in the South had to be made to understand where the future lay.  They had to be sold on the marvels of the Machine.  But of course, yet again, that damnable Forrest was there raiding behind the lines.  He denied it of course, to journalists, even to Congress when he was summoned to Washington in 1871 during Grant’s first term as president. But everyone knew.  Forrest had formed a new cavalry, not soldiers but faceless terrorists, an invisible empire night-riding against the new order.  Forrest was the Wizard once more. They kidnapped and murdered, beat and intimidated, wreaking havoc in the military districts of the South, everywhere and nowhere all at once.  But while this bothered Grant, he knew that sooner or later his god would come through.  The Machine, after all, was a giver of gifts.  That better class of southern men came around in 1877, and orchestrated the ascent of another former Yankee general to power in Washington in exchange for the removal of the army and leave to organize things as they pleased.  The night-riders hung up their sheets.  What was left for them to do?

Surely some revelation is at hand surely the second coming is at hand 

It was one of his clearest memories, at least he thought it was, perhaps it had changed subtly over time without him noticing.  Memories tended to do that.  It was a week before Christmas, 1995, nighttime.  He had money from his first high school job and he’d gone to the mall to buy presents for his friends.  Every store was decorated with all the regalia of the holiday, bells and bows and tinsel.  Not quite all the regalia, come to think of it; there were no manger scenes or notices of the birth of the Savior.  They still had trees and Silent Night, though those would be dispensed with in the years hence.  Such things were divisive in a way buying and selling never could be.  And there were people, thousands of people, a great churn of humanity, purposed to a multitude of variations on a single theme, purchasing things to give to those dear to them, to express through material means the significance of the bonds they shared.  He had felt rich that day, and the mall made him feel richer.  He was a part of this whirl of abundance, to be sure, at the far edge, but a bright future beckoned.  He had never thought of the Machine, the god that moved so subtly into the place once occupied by the subject of Oh Holy Night, but like all kids his age he knew its promise.  If you gave him the sacrifices, he would give you his gifts.  If you gave him your youth, your energy, and your service, he would provide.  He would be waiting at the door of Crate and Barrel one day, ready to furnish your tasteful home with all the accoutrements of a decent life.  It was so beautiful that night, the lights and joy and harmony and exhortations.  It reminded him of another place, one he couldn’t quite recall.

The second coming hardly are those words out when a vast image out of spiritus mundi troubles my sight somewhere in sands of the desert a  shape with lion body and the head of a man a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun is moving its slow thighs while all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.  

Forrest, for his part, had given up on his invisible empire long before the Yankees departed.  Something had happened to him in the years since the war.  He was older now, and the many wounds from battle told on his now weary body.  He was poor; his wealth, after all, had been in something now quite illegal, though the Yankees, ingenious as they were, had allowed for the rental of convicts from prisons- workers with all of the benefits and none of the liabilities, much like in their factories.  Forrest for the first time in his life had the space to ponder.  He thought about what it all meant, what that violent life of his had amounted to in the end, an end he fast saw approaching.  He had worked his whole life to achieve wealth and success, and after all of that he now lived in a log cabin like the one in which he’d been raised.  He thought about Jeffrey.  He thought about Fort Pillow. He began attending church with his wife, and more and more each Sunday he found himself hanging on to the words of the sermons.  George Stainbeck was more than the local Presbyterian minister.  He was a deeply educated man, a former professor of Greek and Latin, one of the leading experts in theology and the Classics in the South.  He was the sort of man a younger Forrest would have never thought to approach, a man from a different world.  After the service one Sunday, Forrest did just that.  The general bowed his head, confessed his sins, and with tears asked if God could pardon a sinner like himself.  He was duly baptized.  Some time later, Forrest was invited to a July 4^th barbecue held by the Fraternal Order of Pole Bearers.  White southerners didn’t celebrate the 4^th.  The pole bearers were a black benevolent society, made up of former slaves, some of them men whom Forrest had perhaps bought and sold.  He gave a speech, exhorting the attendees to be good citizens, to vote, and promised them he would support them in all things.  The speech scandalized wider white society; he was denounced throughout the South by the very people he’d hazarded his life for in the worst war his race had ever known.  He was past caring.  He looked to other things now.  When he died of diabetes (too much sugar in his system, such irony!) both black and white citizens marched in his funeral procession.  Stainbeck gave the eulogy and the Devil was laid to rest, his final reward known only to God. They set up statues in his honor once they’d forgotten they’d denounced him.

The darkness drops again but now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,  

The Machine’s disciples spread the word across the plains, from shore to shore, completing the work their ancestors had begun.  Sherman sent Sheridan to burn out the Sioux and Cheyenne the way he’d razed the Shenandoah Valley; others followed.  Some, like Custer, died like fools, but that was to be expected.  The Machine was quite accepting of casualties in its service.  Once the Indians had been liberated onto reservations attention could return to the American people themselves.  The Prophet Dewey set up temples in every city; great lords like Carnegie patronized the new faith.  Two great crusades in the next century led to the creed of the Machine becoming the leading religion on Earth.  All the while the new god promised and delivered.  Still, there were some doubters.  Some wondered if the power he gave man really belonged to man after all.  It seemed to some that for all his gifts there was something forgotten.  The old God had made man in his image.  What then, some wondered darkly, if the new god was doing the same, not making, but remaking, shaping men into the sorts of things a machine could profitably use- homogenous, fungible, soulless creatures?  Do not all tools become obsolete after a time, now at an exponentially increasing velocity? What if the same came to be true of men themselves in the new order? What if we were all of us deceived?  The Machine was a giving deity, but notably unforgiving of such heresy.  It had ways of dealing with such things.

And what rough beast its hour come round at last slouches towards Bethlehem to be born

He stopped short when he left the mall, stunned by how full the parking lot was compared to when he entered.  He felt lost for a moment, like he’d slipped back in time somehow.  But then he remembered the news that morning.  There was a protest up the road, some offensive statue.  They must have all parked here.  He didn’t really know the story or care that much.  Still, he thought he might drive out of his way a bit to see the commotion.  It didn’t take long to get to the town square.  He’d only been here once, to pay a traffic ticket back when the old courthouse was still in use.  It was closed now, like the rest of the square, empty storefronts and sidewalks adorned with dandelions in the cracks.  It reminded him a bit of the mall somehow.  The main difference this night was that the square was very occupied and very loud.  A great mob had gathered, chanting and screaming, surrounding some old-timey statue of a man on horseback.  He didn’t know who it was, but he must have been pretty bad, because these people were angry.  It was a strange sight nonetheless, this inanimate object being shouted at, as if they expected it to answer for some crime.  The people themselves were a bit of a paradox.  Despite the proliferation of unnatural hair colors and tattoos they were all characterized by a gray flaccid pudginess and similarity of carriage and bearing.  They were at once furious and fearful, crying out that they could no longer abide the presence of this entity among them.  Some were laughing and some were contorted with rage, but the mood seemed to pass through all of them at different points.  They seemed to feel as though they were on the brink of some great victory.  Several charged forward with spray-paint, others came in with hammers.  A wiry person who resembled a young man climbed to the horse’s back, grinning for the camera phones held aloft.  He strung a chain around the rider’s neck, and the mob below began to pull.  It took a while, the statue’s foundations were deep and the mob was not made up of strong people, but as its resistance was passive the outcome was a foregone conclusion.  Toppling it, they howled in triumph, hitting the fallen rider, spitting on it, all manner of disgraces. Their energy spent in this triumph they were only muttering to each other as they departed.  Already they were perusing the internet for the confirmation of the significance of their action; they would all of them spend the rest of the night online, phone and laptop both, searching out every mention, every note taken of their existence.  They were known in that moment, acknowledged, validated.  One might even say blessed. 

Walking away from the scene, he tried to think of a movie that reminded him of what he had just seen.  For some reason he thought of Exorcist.  He didn’t think about it for long.  For some reason, he had a song stuck in his head, the last thing he’d heard as he departed the mall that afternoon.  The lyrics- there was something about the lyrics:

Not giving up

I’m trying

To sell you things

But you ain’t buyin’

It’s your move,

I’ve made up my mind,

Time is running out,

Make your move. . .