Noise (21 page)

[1] (i) Avoid the implementation of a full, professional army for as long as possible. With professional armies come the risk of military coups. Instead, rely upon a civilian militia, and employ an elite, professional officers’ corps. (ii) Determine the length of rotational service in your militia by popular vote. (iii) When rotated out of service, militia men and women should immediately assume some other form of contribution. In this fashion, you anchor your potentially internally dangerous militia to the Place and its Members by keeping them Members and not para–Member enforcers. (iv) Rely upon a volunteer militia for as long as you can. (v) When this is no longer sufficient, you must resort to conscription.

III.

“THE NECESSARY LIES OF PROSPERITY”

[1] (i) Ensuring Group and Place prosperity, especially in the presence of nearby opposition groups, necessitates a number of deceptions. (ii) For example, when opposition Groups become intolerably capable of harming your Group, they necessitate elimination and Forage—even when they have yet to commit any offense against your Group. (iii) Your Group is everything. (iv) Your Place is all Places.

[2] (i) Your civilian Membership will, most certainly, oppose preemptive strikes, acts of sabotage, assassinations, and the like. This is a mark of your new civilization. (ii) To avoid confrontations between the Group and its Administration, ensure that you devote appropriate time, energy, and resources to effecting the deceptions, the blame-placement, and the counter-Narratives that will draw the support of the Administrated for the necessary operations of prosperity.

[3] (i) Prosperity requires such deceptions; however, ensure that such operations are always targeted
beyond
your Place and Membership. (ii) Targeting such operation inward leads immediately to Collapse and Failure, for your armed citizenry will remove you. As you would also do. As you
should
also do. As is always done.

[4] (i) Your Place is an edifice of entropy. (ii) All maneuvers and operations lead eventually to Warfare and Failure. This is inevitable. (iii) Struggle not against Failure; struggle instead to facilitate the most rapid Recovery you can.

i
halted the caravan on the Farm Market Road. Outside the gates to Amaranth. I let them look. All of them—even our Addition, Mona (who accidentally revealed her old name), and her son, Levi. I hadn’t given him the right to choose a name for himself. I hadn’t given Mona the right, either. The boy became our first Monument, flat-topped and unafraid, watching as I cleaned my pistol that morning, before we left the second-place. I told him that I would do anything I had to. To keep him and his mother safe. When I asked him if he understood, he said “Yes.”

I told her to expect horrible things, as Four painted my face. We were going masked, for the final leg. All of us. I told them it was just a precaution.

I let them look at the tilled fields, at the pair of modular homes, at the modified single-wides just in front of us, alongside the road. I let them look at the greenhouses and the chicken coop and the goat pen. At the garage and the corrugated-tin workshop.

I let them look at the few homes nearby.

I had brought them through the desert. They were excited, chattering across the walkie-talkies while their trucks idled. Out here, it was quiet. There were no burning buildings, no gunfights. No executions, deaths, accidents. There were no dead husbands or mothers, fathers, boyfriends. There were no abandoned sisters, no credit card payments. This was something that hadn’t lied to them, that had drawn them in. There would be no going against the current on the formless waters. Here, there were flowers in the underworld, in the darkness. There was no need to look back, because they weren’t trying to get anyone out.

“It’s perfect,” one of them said into a walkie-talkie. I couldn’t tell who it was.

Four rested her fingers on my arm as she leaned across me, struggling to See Everything.

“We haven’t Arrived,” I said.

They watched, waiting on Mary’s orders now, as I got out and walked through the gate. I walked along the driveway, and my cousin came out of one of the homes, a shotgun over his shoulder. The rest of his family peered out at us through the blinds on their windows.

I pulled off my mask.

He leaned the gun up against one of the beams supporting his porch, and they watched him meet me in the caliche driveway.

Mary had her orders, knew when to move in. She was waiting. She was answering their questions over the walkie-talkie. She was telling them because they needed to hear. To see the Place thinking. To see where we would erect the Monument, the underworld mile marker, for our dead.

Last made bricks to build walls for his dead
.

They saw me make the offer to my cousin. Saw him using my name, only once. Talking into the darkness to hear himself speak. Making noise. They saw him getting angry.

They saw me lift my Beretta.

“What you did was right,” she said.

MAKING SENSE OF ALL THIS
NOISE

Spectra:
Allow me to introduce Darin Bradley, author of
Noise
. This novel offers many ideas about individuals, society, and collapse, so I’m going to do my best to make him answer a few questions.

I’m going to jump right into it: Do you really see the near future being this bleak, or did you just have a scary idea and decide to roll with it?

Darin Bradley:
Well, I am probably one of the least-qualified people to make predictions regarding the socioeconomic future of the United States. Before I drafted
Noise
, I did a fair bit of research, and as I came to each new stage of revision, I updated the data I’d collected, but even so, I know comparatively little about such things. It’s certainly possible that we’ll see an “Event” in our lifetimes, but it’s equally as possible that this is yet another panicked flash-in-the-pan and that a new status quo and new ideas about “stability” will arise. People have been fearing, discussing, and mythologizing the collapse of their civilizations since the
beginning, so our current anxieties may simply be the same old act on a new stage. When you gather in groups, personal fears come to both define and be defined by cultural narrative, so fear of death—of the End of All Things—necessarily occupies large portions of our senses of self.

But, I think we can agree that “collapse” or “apocalypse” is definitely in the air. Today, it may be the quickest shorthand for the global zeitgeist.

As for the novel, I’d say it was a coincidence that the story came to mirror, in many ways, what’s happening around us “right now” (which is about a year before
Noise
was printed). That’s the short answer, but as a participant in
this
cultural narrative, I was almost certainly channeling some of what was going unsaid in the American hive-mind.

The story itself arose from years of thinking about social theory and only came to be because of the situation I found myself in: I had just finished my Ph.D. in English literature and theory, I didn’t have a job, and my wife and I had moved from Texas to South Carolina. Suddenly, I didn’t have to be in class anymore, I didn’t have to write a dissertation, and I didn’t have to teach. So I had a head full of cognitive theory and nineteenth-century American utopianism, and I had loads of free time. This was all in the fall of 2007. I decided on the story I wanted to tell, and that led me to the idea of the
Book
. With the plot in mind, I actually wrote the
Book
first—initially, it was much longer than it is now—and when the economy started quaking in the fall of 2008 (a few months after we’d sold the novel), I was as surprised as anyone.

To come back to your question: I suppose I had a scary idea about loss, and social collapse made a perfect vehicle for arriving at the tenor of that metaphor.

S:
One of the reasons I enjoy talking to you is because, like many readers, I like to know about the author (I tend to look at the author photo to get an idea of “who is telling me this story”). I think this is because we want to see if any of the characters in the novel are subtly (or not) a shadow of the author. Would you say any of the characters in
Noise
have any connections to your own life (being aware, of course, that admitting to murder here might be a bad thing)?

DB:
Of course, all of the characters are connected to me
(are
me), in that they’re all ideas of what people could be like filtered through Hiram’s perspectives, anxieties, beliefs, etc. But that’s a bit of a dodge. Hiram’s story is largely
my
story. Now, I won’t entirely say which of his experiences and characteristics are direct self-portraits, but, for example, my father is alive and well (unlike Hiram’s). However, I did live in that duplex at that age with a roommate like Adam (the duplex’s description, location in town, and its personal importance are all, definitely, lifted straight from my past—it’s still there, by the way, in roughly the same condition). Certainly, I’ve never lived through a social collapse, so I haven’t done anything that Hiram does in the novel, but a very large portion of his past experiences, personal mythologies, and perspectives might qualify as narrative nonfiction.

Hiram fascinates me because he is, indeed, my shadow, but he’s struggling much harder for clarity, for solidity, than I do (or did). His past tells us that he was a “good” kid, but the wholesome things he learned playing T-ball, or in the Boy Scouts, or at church become very confusing and problematic when their contributions to his identity can no longer serve him. When you can no longer count on inhabiting a generally peaceful and cooperative social environment, things like how to hit a ball off the T, or
how to be “loyal,” very suddenly come to mean something else. When the mind is desperate to keep itself alive, any past experiences are fair game for deconstruction and revision.

As for Slade—I’ve renamed some streets, moved some buildings around, and taken artistic license with my descriptions, but otherwise, it’s very highly based on the town I was living in at Hiram’s age: Denton, Texas. Again, I won’t say what’s “real” and what’s not about the town—you’ll just have to pop in for a visit and see for yourself.

S:
Hear that, Denton Chamber of Commerce—stock up on brochures! Okay—taking a different tack, what would you say if someone described this book as “a dystopian novel”? Do you find that an accurate genre for
Noise?

DB:
I think it’s difficult to say, one way or the other, in regards to the “real world” in the novel. However, the meta-society that Hiram and the gang intend to create at Amaranth very well could be dystopian. They envision an almost totalitarian, certainly fascist, regime. So, from the perspective of a real-world, contemporary U.S. reader, we could say that Amaranth is (or would be) dystopian. However, as far as the characters in the novel are concerned, it
isn’t
dystopian—it’s
utopian
. At Amaranth, they’ll be safe, they’ll be free from persecution and predation, and they will acquire everything they need to live
their
way. If one looks back at the utopias of, say, Thomas More, Charles Fourier, or Edward Bellamy, one might conclude that realizing utopia is impossible—but only
sort of
. Whoever ends up at the top can certainly achieve utopia, only
personally
instead of
socially
. History largely tells us that utopian communes fail (e.g., La Réunion near what’s now Dallas, or Brisbane’s and Greeley’s Fourier-inspired “phalanxes,” or the Ripleys’ Brook Farm), but could you make
one succeed as a totalitarian compound, à la the medieval city-state, wherein the civic leader(s) lives in luxury? In a personal utopia? I think you could.

Really, though, for the novel as a whole, you’d need several perspectives to draw a conclusion about utopia, dystopia, or antiutopia. There is the collapsed world, but then there are the worlds that Groups have established (or will establish). CLO.WN, for example, seems to be in hog heaven, so I’m not sure we can call their society anti-utopian (it’s not
striving
to be utopian, it already is—to them). Hiram and his allies, however, spend the entire novel not having “Arrived” at their “Place,” so they occupy a non-space—meaning, all we can really classify are their worldviews, not any “real” society. Does this make the novel “dystopian,” as far as genre is concerned? I can’t say, but really, genre labels are less important than the readers’ reaction to the story.

S:
Still, I think it isn’t a stretch to say that
Noise
follows a similar path to those postmodern post–World War II novels about the collapse of society. I’m specifically thinking of not just
Lord of the Flies
and
1984
, but also the works of J. G. Ballard, such as
High Rise
. Since much of this tradition evolved from the growing political and social systems of the post–World War II, post–Cold War mentalities, how do you explain the anarchy of
Noise?
Do you see society already in this state of regress?

DB:
Boy, that’s a can of worms. In fact, Hiram hints at it when he hears the newscaster refer to Salvagers as “anarchists” (he wants to hit her).

The role of anarchy in Salvage, it seems to me, is philosophical. To them, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were
the
nineteenth-century American anarchists (though I’m sure there are a few Americanists who would take issue with the idea).
Emerson and Thoreau (and other American Transcendentalists) advocated that no one person can hold authority (moral or legal) over another simply because of the accident of birth. For many, “anarchy” connotes violence, arson, theft, abuse, etc., but this should really be referred to as “omniarchy,” which isn’t the anarchic idea that “no one rules” but rather that “everyone rules”—which is shorthand for do whatever the hell you want to.