Skip to main content

Death Youth, or, The Leaks: Act Four: Magnetic Island!

Death Youth, or, The Leaks
Act Four: Magnetic Island!
    • Notifications
    • Privacy
  • Project HomeDead Youth, or, The Leaks
  • Projects
  • Learn more about Manifold

Notes

Show the following:

  • Annotations
  • Resources
Search within:

Adjust appearance:

  • font
    Font style
  • color scheme
  • Margins
table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Half Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Title Page
  5. Dramatis Personae
  6. Prologue
  7. Act One
  8. Act Two
  9. Act Three. Prologue
  10. Act Three
  11. Act Four: Magnetic Island!
  12. Epilogue
  13. Acknowledgements
  14. A Note on Sources
  15. Other Works by Joyelle McSweeney

ACT FOUR: Magnetic Island!

[A diagram. An engraving. One side of the stage is lit with a hazy sunny humid light. One side of the stage has an interrogation lighting, perhaps some realist chairs and tables. Sun on one side, moon on the other. The division is a bit Platonic, a bit Exupéry, a bit Elizabethan masque. Stage makeup is thick on Assange and crew. They have been translated into beings of Art. At the center, with a foot in either orbit, stands MUSE. EXUPÉRY, in a cape of trash but wearing his swart kepi and stage makeup, including a pencil moustache, sits at the Interrogation desk. ASSANGE and YOUTH are arranged in loving but troubled tableau in the sunshine. For example: Four Saints in Three Acts]

MUSE: Now, thanks to a late issue

of slick, malignant cells from unknown sources,

we have slid across the very ocean.

We have arrived at Magnetic Island.

An allegorical masque. A dome of pure thinking.

As you will note, I hold the center of the stage.

I drink the light through my skin like black narcissus.

Dahlia Noir,

my stage name. Mama Julian here is La Dame Aux

Camilles.

AKA Camille Le Blanc as in J’ai pas sommeil. We

shared that role

as juvenile performers.

“O mon sommelier, I cannot sleep with this CUT

THROAT!”

How we tripped the boards in our peekaboo trousers

on our pieds noir….

But now we’ve run through our youthful qualities.

It’s time for my soliloquy.

[Clears throat]

According to Mother, I was just a teen like any teen

when I left Gyalko, just two weeks back

with nothing but the nylon jacket on my back.

Did I have time to become noble? To learn a role?

No. I have just as much sex drive, idealism, hunger and

violence as any other teenager of God.

Statistically average in terms of chemical composition.

I come from a part of the world where the maps

tore through

from too much loving rubbing with the eraser.

So edible, so pink…and with a pinky fume…

Something there is that doesn’t love a map, like war

butter and treasure. Europe held us to its bosom like

a drunk mother

till it didn’t. Then it became a drunk uncle,

poking us under the tarp.

But no matter. But more matter, more Art.

The mighty Ulster warrior Cuchullain

tied himself with his own innards to a standing stone

that his enemies might not realize he was dead

nor his friends either and end the war too soon.

And so I beat on. Language is my cinch and noose.

I should have died in the womb.

of malnutrition or machete by the age of three

But my mother tended me

But my mother died for me by refusing to die.

By coding me with the

REFUSAL TO DIE. So I refuse to be your tragic youth,

what your machine needs to blow off steam

in a whistle or a shriek.

The file it deletes as it performs its system

maintenance

its statistical depredations. NO.

Apparently I wrote a note

inside that boat, in the blood that flew

from my own tender throat. And I blamed it all

on foreign wars.

No, that wasn’t me. Apparently I was a little handsy

when we hooked up in my dorm room No.

I did not attend UMass Dartmouth

failing every subject but creative writing. No.

But I did kill my mother who bought me the guns

to make the peace between us

before I left for the school. I columbined.

Sic semper tyrannis.

I did meet my murderers in a bar. I knew them from

high school.

Nope. I was a Red Guard, bayonetting books

until the day I thought to open one,

then took the poison whole

in sick bay til I could not longer hold the bayonette.

NO. DON’T BARK.

SPEAK THE LANGUAGE OF THE SPANISH

EMPIRE!

wasn’t me. Act gratuit

wasn’t me. Run the gamut

wasn’t me. Instagram’d the gang rape

nope. Tied a cash register to Emmett Till’s chest

with barb wire and riverrunned him

no. Destroyed the village to save it

no. 3/5ths compromise wasn’t me.

9/11 wasn’t me. Operation Enduring Freedom

wasn’t me. Allah, allah, allah, allah.

Regime change wasn’t me.

Credit default swaps wasn’t me.

I was 16. I didn’t have a chance to come into my

full criminalitee.

Upon a peak at Darien

Upon a peak at Darien

Upon a peak at Darien

Darien Darien

Smallpox blanket

Colonie collapse or

colonie

wasn’t me

Motives are bunk.

Motives are for movies

Motives serve the plot.

But I serve nothing

except Allah. And only there

as befits an ambivalent teen.

Motives are a term of tee vee law

part of a holy trinittee.

Means, motives, or opportunity.

When did I ever have means

when did I ever have opportunities

and since I respectfully refuse to take up your ‘motives’

except panic, hormones, and a light desire to eat—

that makes me a zero a cipher

a zed a nothing in your programming

a hitch a zilch a full stop

that makes the code stutter

that dithyrambs the logarithm

and calls off the search.

The search engine stalls out like the SS Smirk.

If I must have a mask

let it be zero. Otherwize

I won’t participate in tragedee.

Motives are to me

what grappling hooks are to

deep sea divers. Throw me an anvil

and teach me to fish forever.

I’ll lie under the sea, fishing, fishing,

and lying, lying. [strapping on his ‘zero’ mask]

Now I’m invisible

now I’m a green screen

the weather crawls

on top of me

And these are the pearls

that were my eyes…

[Climbs up on a box like Abu Ghraib, statue of liberty, Mother Erzulie, etc…. Company may decide its associations]

DEAD YOUTH 1: What is it Christmas already? Is Muse the

Christmas tree?

DEAD YOUTH 2: Or a cell phone tower? Or Ariel in the Tree?

DEAD YOUTH 1: Turn him like a weathervane. See if our reception improves.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Enough. I don’t like all this poking at dear Muse.

I don’t like all this prodding. For all we know, he’s the

magic ingredient

that allowed our capsule to break down in the gut of

plot so perfectly.

To arrive at Magnetic Island.

DEAD YOUTH 1: O this island. It’s a pit.

DEAD YOUTH 2: It’s a dump.

DEAD YOUTH 1: It’s a mass grave!

DEAD YOUTH 2: Without the masses. It’s deserted.

ASSANGE: Not at all. It’s just the off-season. You boys play the part of the unseasonable youth. Untimely plucked. Watch out or you’ll be juiced. [his tail switches like a lazy cat]

EXUPÉRY: [from office area] ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE

MUSE: I recognize the representative of France.

EXUPÉRY: You are not the judge!

Nor president pro temp!

You do not recognize me.

I myself am JUSTICE.

I recognize you.

YOUTH TO YOUTH: HUM, blind justice recognizes muse!

YOUTH TO YOUTH: That’s what, in science, we call a double-blind.

TOUT YOUTH: A very pharmaceutical pursuit! Forsooth.

EXUPÉRY: Silence, youth! It is golden.

It has a mouth, but it’s fixed.

Like a clock, or a neutered cat,

or suit brought against an emperor.

In other words, can it.

YOUTH: Silence in other words! That is strange science!

EXUPÉRY: Let the interrogation proceed. Now, Muse, I don’t want to have to take out my carburetor or my salad tongs. So answer my questions. Sing, muse.

MUSE: I wont.

EXUPÉRY: Then prattle.

MUSE. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

YOUTH: The only emperor is the emperor de glace

MUSE the only emperor is the one who stands naked

YOUTH: the only emperor is the emperor sans pants

MUSE And communicates to youth, directly in his nakedness

ASSANGE: O dream of a crystalline communication.

Flap flap to dirty ears. The pidgins of pigeons.

The germs they smuggle in their penates and pinions.

The germs they share for a puddle of crumb-ions.

Good pigeons, grey matter, rats with aspirations!

O rank mass, its rank communicants! Its holy

communications!

YOUTH: We Catholics believe in transubstantiation.

Our uncanny valley runs on circuits of revulsion.

MUSE: How like a thing, how like a paragon

YOUTH: how like a think, how like an epicure

MOUSE: how like a stink, how like a pedicure

YOUTH: how like bacteria that thrives in the footbath

MUSE: how like a strand of flesh-eating staph

YOUTH: how like the society ladies hobble on no feet

MUSE: until they realize it makes their jimmy choos fit better to have no feet

YOUTH: how they then occupy the lotus position

MUSE: how like a bath salt

YOUTH: how like a bidet

MUSE: What a piece of… work is man

YOUTH: this line should be ‘le seul empereur est l’empereur de la crème glacée’

MUSE: Caveat emptor

YOUTH: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrat

MUSE: Follow your leader. That’s called dictee.

EXUPÉRY: I see you are a very learned man.

MUSE: Maleducated. Malaparte. That’s why we formed our bande à part. Before the Little Emperor could pursue his destiny, he flipped the ‘Malaparte’ to ‘Bonaparte.’ A visionary must also have a literalist’s heart. And wear it like a medal on his chest.

EXUPÉRY: O what a fine speech! O medals all around!

YOUTH: [affixing metals by driving pins into Muse’s torso. He now resembles a Sebastian] That’s tantalum, that’s for capacity, in hearing aids, jet blades, and telephony. There’s cassiterite that’s for circuitboards. And there’s wolframite that’s for ‘green ammunition’, i.e. bullets with less lead. So children who eat bullets won’t get lead poisoning and perform poorly in standardized tests. Also good for making your iPhone vibrate.

ALL: What?

YOUTH: I kid you not. Wolframite is a very right metal. People mine each other for it. I’m talking about a combat mine, mined by gangpresed soldiers. I am not even talking about a data mine.

ASSANGE: OH MUSE you are a bouquet. You are a very directory, a very index, the very body of contemporary miseree.

EXUPÉRY: That’s enough. Don’t encourage his vanitee. Second question. MUSE, when brought to trial in New York, why did you smile for the cameras.

MUSE: Because I have a face.

[rimshot]

[rifle crack]

EXUPÉRY: WHAT’S THAT?

MUSE: Because I have a face.

EXUPÉRY: OBSCENE ANSWER!

MUSE: It is the opposite of obscene. The obscene must be hidden from view. My face I show. It is a black face, but it is not in blackface. It comes from a black site. It is a leak.

EXUPÉRY: Oh Obscene. O how his teeth gleams, his smile, and his eyes, his charisma, and his native talent for being alive. O obscenity. What a felony! Youth tar him with petroleum products. Then he will know what it means to be in capitalism’s embrace. IN THE BOSOM OF THE LAW.

YOUTH: [tar Exupéry instead]

EXUPÉRY: WHAT? What is the meaning of this?

YOUTH: Are you not the font of Justice? I recognize you, I met you so many time on the other side of the bench. You sent me to juvie for a decade, took the kickback to buy golf clubs. Luckily I OD’d and was thus released from my sentence, albeit to the morgue. Now you wear black robes you wore in life, which shows you have been invested with gravure, as in the grave.

EXUPÉRY: Well I see. Grandeur is grand. That’s tautologee, a very right and total logic. Let us proceed with the proceedings. Where were we?

MUSE: You asked me why I smiled, and I replied, because I have a face.

EXUPÉRY: Yes, yes. And yet the next day, at your trial, you wept and wept. Why did you weep?

MUSE: Because I am a teen. Because I had just learned the role cut out for me. The role of tragic youth. I didn’t want it, but could not avoid it. I was trapped. And I wept because I had tears at my disposal. And I disposed of them. Or perhaps I had a grit in my eye. Perhaps I thought I could weep out an industrial diamond so tough I could use it as a weapon and cut up the court.

EXUPÉRY: O, a threat! A threat against the body of the court. Oh what a mongrel! And yet we cannot lose our composure. As a final piece of evidence, I would like to read out something you wrote on your blog. “I think I should select from my poems as my favorite the Emperor of Ice Cream. This wears a deliberately commonplace costume, and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it.”

MUSE: I wrote that?

EXUPÉRY: Yes, rat and you are trapt. You are trapt forever in your own snare because you wrote this on the Internet. It’s data. It’s datestamped.

MUSE: When did I write that?

EXUPÉRY: You wrote in 1933 in Hartford Connecticut.

MUSE: Well then I denounce it. That was in my youth. Before I came into my revolutionary consciousness. Emperors indeed. Though the essential gaudiness of poetry is quite a phrase, something to hold on to, to pin to the breast…

EXUPÉRY: Your opinion about emperors has no bearing on this case. My god, you blacks. Whine whine. Somalia hasn’t been ruled by an emperor for at least…well, decades. As for ice cream, typically childish. I can’t understand this substance’s resurgence in this play as a motif. I thought this was a play about petroleum.

DEAD YOUTH: Judge, if it please the court, I’d like to file a brief. Ice cream and petroleum are polar opposites of each other, and thus may substitute for each other, bind, and form a digital system. We pow’r this colony with the swerve, with the flip-flip. Then we can parade about in Speedos and flip-flops, and have ice-cream in the freezer and run the vaccuum cleen all night. As for me, like a true hustler, I like both oil AND ice cream. I’m ecumenical. Look, I’ve black nylons under my track bottoms. My jacket’s so synthetic it could melt.

EXUPÉRY: Silence, dead pageboys. You call that trash philosophie the ‘idealism of youth’? With that kind of idealism you’re more suited for a Weimar cabaretto than the Furor’s youth. Now, like the Furor, let’s be rational and logical. Let’s review the facts of the case. Your excuse for your great crime of piracy is your youth. An excuse immediately invalidated by the fact that you are being tried as an adult. Therefore, ipso facto, you are no youth, therefore you are defenseless. You sir, are no youth! QED. GED. JD. STD. Associates Degree from the Lice Lycee. Also, since you refuse to ascribe to yourself a motive, I must assign one to you, and I shall select one that is more than mere larceny, which would be par de course. No, sir, let me see….your motive is villainy, villainy itself, tout court and tout suite, and your wish to see villainy communicated to the innocent flank of the world, in the person of the MV Maersk which you so wantonly call ‘the Smirk.’ O piracy! O cult of villainy! O cur! O scourge! O sturgeon with black eggs! O rub his face in shoe polish, shoe ‘blacking’ burnt corn cobs and ash! I should sentence you to DEATH. O, but being Just I love MERCY. So instead I shall transport you to Terre Haute Indiana for thirty-three-and-one-third years. Don’t snuffle you’ll emerge an exhausted 51. Though I dare say you’ll have lost your looks.

YOUTH: No, MUSE, we will not let you perish! You or your good looks! You are a role model to us!

MUSE: DEAD YOUTH, I am not a role model. I’m not even an athlete. My only mission is not to die before my time. I wanted to say my piece, and my piece is over. And yet, I feel a tear forming right here. In these two organs which are to sight what hearing is to ears. I mean my eyes. They’re pearlescing. They’re dropping white bacterial wads in front of me. O I lose my vision. I am become a twin of justice. I am a white world. I am blind.

YOUTH: No! There is one more hope! A deus ex machina! A pederastic stroke of plot’s ass by the divine.

[they gather around Muse like women at the tomb of christ]

ASSANGE: I believe it is time to reveal myself.

No, I do not claim to be the son of the Divine

I think I’m a little smarter than him

I’m not going to do the eli eli lama sabachthani

just because some moron spills the salt

or tears up when the cock cries out

in some damp suburban hideout.

If there’s one error you can count on,

it’s human kind. I have been betrayed so many times!

But I am the son of Christine Assange,

who survived. In the Anthropocene,

and at the mercy of men and their

financial instruments, that is no small thing.

People, a conspiracy is an engine.

It is also a computer.

A thinking machine.

It can think better than any single component entity.

this conspiracy. Another name is Wikileaks.

I built Wikileaks to be the CIA of the people of earth

so that they could know the workings of their own states

in perfect Transparencee. The veil is rent! Or at

least soilent.

For this I have been reviled as some kind of reptile

the Original Wriggler, the one with no conscience.

Who only loves his own blonde hair and fame.

I mean the odd snake who’s gay and rapes women

you meet so frequently in films and not on earth.

Still, I won’t entirely refute the charges

because I love films. Though I’m organic.

I come from a blonde.

Sometimes I think I’m a little John Lennon

with my idealism, and my disappearing acts,

and my feminine good looks, and my conspiracee.

He wore those granny glasses to bring the truth

to light.

But really, the truth was as plain as blacklight.

the truth was a black eye.

the truth was a bottle, blonder.

A blonde of gold and tungsten

A wiry blonde, a blonde of wiring

A nylon blonde, a blonde of laddering

A punched-out blonde, a blonde of hiding

A blonde of smuggling and a blonde of trafficking

I change my hair when I’m being followed

I’ve learned that from the movies

A blonde of dubiety and a blonde of beauty

two blonde suns would make the sky fall down

pull the universe apart with too much gravity

Everything’s God’s fault

because god is not a mother.

O Christ I’m an atheist I only believe in bad motives

and mothers

And in computers. Tho mothers can have bad motives

and bad mothers can have good motives and computers

can have no motives.

Something can be itself or its opposite.

Zero can be one. The value is not significant

but the difference is. When there is no difference,

that’s where the digital collapses and gives birth to

the virtual.

That’s where the virtual betrays the digital

and is a bad son.

I’m still toting this box

its full of bees but they might be dead

I don’t know, it’s Schrodinger’s symbol

it’s Turing’s cervix

inside the box

actions are performed not as on a theater stage

where all the world is, merely players

and etcetera

no as in a black box

lost at cee when the plane went down

the chatlogs of catastrophe

a blacksite, a torture space

most profound

you have to share your cell with a dead cat

who might yet be alive

twitch twitch

bird brain

the virtual lives in the box

the virtual pours from the box

it’s not that we don’t know the facts

but that there might be no facts

quote unquote

the only place I feel safe is the Internet

quote unquote

I call that faith

which looks like fame

the drug the universe loves

I mean the Internet

eats and shits, makes more of

smears on everyone’s face

I call myself St. Julian Assange

I am such a massive blonde

I should have my own SS

and I do: the SS Smirk…

and from the outside it looks like the universe

closed in on itself

brooding

but inside

but inside

but inside

but inside

but inside

but inside

but inside

it is a massive ride

it propagates massive fields

you can’t ride there with your citizen self

you can’t ride there with your Cartesian self

it cops a massive feel

so tiny and so mass mass doesn’t mean mass anymore

a mass defection, a genuflection, a granule smaller than

a flea’s ass could crash

the gala ball

the galaxy’s confection

Henrietta Lacks

conspiracy is an engine

conspiracy is a machine

it thinks better than the individual human

but like anything built by humans

its faults are human faults

it is vulnerable to betrayal and confession

bad fits of conscience

given the bad behavior of the creator I believe

if there is a Divine man made it

it is a human product

and will have human problems

unless we can work around it

by not being humans

by being Divine, not alive

I have been a shit on earth

I will be in heaven, and on the Internet,

and in this box,

a beautiful thing

streaked in gold

I will move in the heavens like bad news

my own omenology

an encrypted key

a monstrance

a lock box

made available for public veneration

visible yet invisible

venereal like a golden chancre

God pins to the very cervix of his sanctissima

it will hold and expose all the leaks in the sea

and free all the capped-boys from their tethers

and buoys from their links

but for now [takes out large scissors and begins to shear his

hair to the scalp]

we hide

in plain sight.

we form an engine

called conspiracy

[he dons a prison guard outfit, and so do the DEAD YOUTH]

and with this engine

we reanimate the dead carcass of this cul-de-sac

and steer it to our next paradox

[they fit an orange jump suit over muse, and lift him to the

ground]

the federal correctional complex

most suited to a pirate

for his crimes against the see

is a very inward empire

with no externalitee

with no coastline

but the locks and high walls

of a paradox: a very landlocked port.

There he will be housed in the

Communications Management Unit

ie an incommunicado sound set

that looks like prison life

but is just for Muslims

and has no telephone, mail, visits or ISP

there he will turn his face from obscenity to obscurity

never to sully with his visage

what is so prized in Terre Haute:

Malls, landlines and shooting ranges.

And when he has become an ultradense

packet of information

we will release him back into the system

to explode it with his dark energy.

Gentlemen, to Terre Haute.

[they march Muse off as a police escorte]

[the interrogation light becomes superbright on the immobilized Exupéry and suddenly blacksout]

Annotate

Next Chapter
Epilogue
PreviousNext
Copyright © 2014 Joyelle McSweeney
Powered by Manifold Scholarship. Learn more at
Opens in new tab or windowmanifoldapp.org