The Dossier: 3.4

“Is every nigger with dreads for the cause? Is every nigger with golds for the falls?” Not only did Pete not have locks, until 2073, he had been the only man in Alltown for the past seventy years to wear a curl! He manufactured the curl activator himself. Dripping ringlets framed his pudgy brown face. He was a large framed man, and every part of that frame was filled with soft, loose, jiggling fat that the ladies absolutely loved to squeeze. He owned a pair of gold designer frames that he always carried around his neck, but rarely ever wore, in addition to several gold and silver chains. He wore a customized bulletproof vest with his name embellished on the back in red, black, and green gemstones. His corpulence, and his lifestyle, compelled him to have a vest made. He figured might as well go all the way there with the thing. He had deep, inviting dimples in his tender cheeks and not a tooth in his head.
The year two thousand seventy one found anyone in Alltown who needed anything lounging in wait at Pete’s Sanctuary from the Storm. Two thousand sixty-six six marked a turning point for Southtown. Johnstontine modernized two major employers: the schools and the hospitals. Automated machines handled many nursing duties, vending machines fed students, and a Southtown Intranet obligated the citizens to file many of their own public records.
This meant many more job cuts but, also, cuts in supplies and suppliers. Thus, Northtown lost, too. With each round of layoffs, unemployed Northtowners flooded Southtown, renting when they could, but often seeking refuge as squatters in the abandoned homes of early Johnstontine escapees.
Meanwhile, Johnstontine gained control over the right to try and incarcerate. He dramatically expanded Johnstontine police force. Many joined. In 76, Johnstontine became the South’s number one employer. Those who didn’t work for a Johnstontine industry relocated. Evidence of absence was everywhere.
Pete still had a few teeth left when ex- doctors and ex-patients discovered Pete as a conduit. The young man whose lips wrinkled around an ivory-and-empty-checkered, dimpled smile began raising the toll on traffic. Like a drawbridge, when Pete raised the cost of his service, those near the edge teetered. They’d throw any weight at Pete to get meds and stay stable—a deed of property, a prepubescent child, a physical indulgence. Pete accepted deeds, indulgences of all sorts, and in only one case, a child. When Johnstontine brought down needles, Pete had enough capital and clout to own the contact. He became the source for needles. Every shooter had to see Pete, and every dealer wanted to be near.
Pete got up the money, bought the building he’d been squatting in, and built Pete’s Sanctuary from the Storm in 71. Pete loved free live entertainment, and he would audition bands to play in exchange for food, drinks, and a shot at fame. Pete never failed to bring find sensational music. The Sanctuary served delectable food. Pete cooked, and he could make some of every dish imaginable.
Pete kept his spot clean and hardly ever let trouble spill onto the street. Pete guarded the safety of his venue as his life and solved all disputes. Johnstontine’s Alltown Military Police never had a problem call them to Pete’s, other than the heed of social misanthropy to drink.
Johnstontine preached Ancient Protestantism, and it was rapidly taking force, but no one of significance believed in the principles of Protestantism, not even Johnstontine. He simply espoused them to gain the political advantage of being a maverick, or so it appeared to Peter Vessey. Johnstontine wanted to be a politician, and like all the others, the hypocrite Johnstontine hosted travelers and diplomats with live music, pork chops, short ribs, dancing girls, and dope.
Johnstontine had sired Peter Vessey’s drive. During that lesson, with Dr. Tran and Mrs. Chaudhury-Okunade still, in Peter's memory, looking on with bated breath, Johnstontine instilled fear. The difference between Peter Vessey and most other men like him are, in this situation, when faced with odds such as these facing Vessey, most men would resign themselves to defeat or explode in frustration. Instead of letting fear separate him from his goal, Pete put himself between fear and the goal, and let that rabid state meter his industry. At 23, not only was Pete surviving the economic repression, he had enough sources of income to grow fat as others in Southtown wasted away. He had burrowed so deep in the underworld that though Johnstontine visited Pete’s, and just as often railed against it as a Sodom, Johnstontine could not see the extent of Pete’s influence, and dismissed the toothless boy as a hustler made good.
Johnstontine’s 2078 election had been a coup. He won the popular vote by a landslide, 68% of the vote, but he lost the Alltown Council Vote. This was the only non-aligned vote in Alltown History, so pre-Reparation history books were consulted. Though, in fact, pre-Reparation precedent did not support Johnstontine, Johnstontine’s opponent suddenly and quite mysteriously conceded.
At the Inaugural Ball in the Hiram Revels Library, Johnstontine foiled an assassination attempt on his life. The resulting uproar destroyed much of Hiram Revels. Once the gun battle spilled out the doors of the library, guests looted the banquet hall. It was an omen. Johnstontine could have read it, had he not been unloading shells down Bertrand Aristide Park Plaza.
Mrs. Johnstontine, quite famously, lost a child. The Alltown paper ran a slew of stories covering every aspect of the case, from the indefinite closure of Hiram Revels Library to Mrs. Johnstontine’s trials in conceiving. In the press, Johnstontine dismissed it as Southtown crabs trying to claw the king back into the boiling pot. Pete knew the truth, of course. The Council had paid some out-of-towners to do the hit, and, if caught, give up Southtown addresses.
The plot backfired. Their Northtown neighbors, the better part of that 32% dissent, buckled at photos of Mrs. Johnstontine crying onyx gem tears and holding her brown, tear drop belly. Johnstontine did not know that Northtown was behind the assassination, or if he did, he didn’t care, because it was Southtown, which had turned out in record numbers to elect Johnstontine, who he castigated.
Johnstontine immediately began to implement a three-pronged approach to the future. He would wall in the Alltown classroom, extending his officially sanctioned curriculum into all Southtown schools. He would extend the powers of the Johnstontine Police Force, endowing them with the right to arrest, try, and convict without trial in misdemeanor crimes and non-violent felonies. Finally, he allocated 35% of his budget to HIV/AIDS research. To lead this project, he imported two researchers, descendants of original Australians.
The Dangerfields’ Australian heritage gave them the mystique of sages. They were two generations descendent from mainland Australians. Of the four remaining continents and Eurasia, Indigenous Natives, Border-Abused, and Captive Immigrants inherited the Americas, as they owed such a low balance of blame—at least as determined by United Asia—in the destruction of Australia and Antarctica. Johnstontine thwarted the influence of the East by rejecting Eastern medicine for the guidance of the Australian nationals. The Dangerfields owned and manipulated the largest extant database of pre-Reparations HIV/AIDS science.
Before the TV Announcement Riots, Southtown still looked pretty much the same as it had at its founding.
There were squatters everywhere, and junkies staggered the streets like a zombie invasion, but most people chose to abstain. The houses were in repair and people kept up their lawns. Neighborhoods had businesses embedded within them. A trip to a market required a walk of no more than a mile or so. The air smelled clean. The services were good. The busses ran. Tourists came in droves. Not as many lived there, but people filled the streets—especially in the summer. People still visited the piers. Bands still set up on the street corners to play for change and drew crowds and accompaniment until some days the streets were a festival.
Initially, the HIV research was strange to, not secret from, the population. There were more prescient medical issues--chicken pox, syphilis, and malaria. Johnstontine prognosticated a second coming of HIV, and superstitious Southtowners embraced the doom sentence. They supported the Dangerfields, sight unseen, and, by public vote, supported the allocation of an enormous budget to this research. After all, once this mysterious HIV/AIDS had been cured, the pox, malaria, or syphilis could be next. A shadow of fear spurred their support; a plague of HIV/AIDS must be endured.
Each month Johnstontine circulated a checklist of accomplishments, and with each monthly report, he raised the HIV Alert Status, feeding a growing fever of fear and fatalism. Though no one in Southtown yet knew what HIV/AIDS looked like, a terror froze them to the core when Johnstontine announced that the second coming of HIV had descended, with the plague, AIDS, soon to follow.
Johnstontine anticipated a violent reaction. In addition, he planned to unveil the Dangerfields, who were white, and until this moment, there had been no reason for anyone outside of a very, closed circle to know this.
Johnstontine’s walled-in institutions nurtured fear. The Dangerfields looked very, very strange. They were small, bony, and weathered travelers. Both had fire red hair, and tawny brown leather skin. Perhaps they were, also, sister and brother; that would explain the purity of their line. The Dangerfields would make the superstitious edgy: two specters pronouncing Alltown’s descent into hell.
Johnstontine rented regional satellite time and hand delivered invitations, listing the public viewing centers to every Alltowner. Better reason persuaded Johnstontine to pre-record the announcement. For their own safety, he sent the Dangerfields away. He considered leaving the country, himself, but suspected it would be much easier to defend his throne from within the kingdom walls than without. People went out and bought TVs to hear the great announcement. Johnstontine discouraged this useless squandering of precious dollars. Even Pete told the people to think twice. He made a nice cut off fencing televisions, but he felt no good would come of it.
If people had known what the next ten hours would bring, they would have paid more attention to every detail of their beloved home, from the leaves falling onto rooftops, to the carpentry and architecture of the original fathers, down the stone sidewalks that gave their footsteps a chalky timbre and filled their nights with individuations in rhythm. They would have etched every detail of the scene onto their constitutions.
Without romance, Johnstontine addressed the people. This germ, afflicting an increasing number of Southtowners, was HIV/AIDS. He showed some very graphic slides of the disease in its worst untreated states. He stated over and over again: AIDS is death. To reinforce the gravity, appeared the Dangerfields.
Alltown gasped at the images of the Dangerfields. There were still whites here and there. In pockets of the country, there were many. Approximately, eighty-five percent of the white population fled to Europe in the decades after the Asians gave America to the Natives, Slaves, and Border-abused. They decided there were, in fact, better countries than the United States of America.
Of whites, these Dangerfields had to be among the unhealthiest specimens. Their skin was tough, and the wrinkles were so deep as to possess a markedly different coloring than the surface of the skin. If their skin color seemed unnaturally orange-ish brown, their hair had the color of autumn leaves. They had emerged from the trees themselves, somehow, brown and orange outside but white just beneath the surface. Their appearance set everyone on edge.
Then, the Dangerfields went on to state the horrid facts of the situation. They had positively identified presence of the plague, possibly hundreds in Southtown were infected and asymptomatic. Little research survived the Pre-Reparation Wars about HIV/AIDS. The vaccine remained, and there had been regular boosters over the years. Anti-retrovirals could be obtained, but would be prohibitively expensive until Alltown could find and sanction multiple vendors.
Mrs. Dangerfield took the microphone. In her wickedly shrill, and perfectly inexplicable Australian accent, she counseled heroin addicts to overdose rather than suffer the side effects of medicine. They were killing each other anyway by passing dirty needles. Medicines must change frequently. So must the dosages, the times administered, and the methods. This meant that people would have to organize their whole lives around medicating themselves, not getting the next fix. They, as well, repeated again and again: AIDS is death.
Alltown couldn’t believe it. Johnstontine returned. He looked contrite, as if to say woe is we. His wife wept crystal tears from the polished, ebony wells of her eyes. There was no cure! Alltown couldn’t believe it. It took Johnstontine to get some white people to tell it to them, and, look at the devilish ones he got. They probably gave Alltown the shit! On top of all that, folks had spent good money on those accursed TVs so Johnstontine could make an asinine announcement like this one.
The TVs were the front line. In homes, they were kicked and hurled out of front doors. At Pete’s, Pete backed the crowd out with a baseball bat. Once he saw the Dangerfields with his own two eyes and glasses, he kicked everybody out. Pete’s folks left the bar dizzy. At the public TV in Hiram Revels Library, people began throwing books, escalating to desks and chairs, until there was full unrest, and the battle began to spill out onto the street. There the mob encountered the group from Pete’s and sucked the drunkards in like a vacuum. They intensified in a dance, a swirl, and finally, they spiraled into an all consuming human storm, destroying any and everything in sight. The Johnstontines killed fifty-eight people. Seventy-seven people died during or as a result of injuries caused during the riots.
After that, anybody who had the money moved away. Those who couldn’t afford to move, but could afford to ascend, allied themselves with the Northtown liberals, if they could. A Northtown friend meant access to libraries, schools, grocery stores, and modern hospitals.
Johnstontine began to exploit fissures between the South and the North, as the North had once tried to do to him. Johnstontine’s manipulation worked. He praised the wise as those with savings enough to migrate North, while the junkies and indigents festered in the remains of the burned, looted, and raped Southtown. Those Southtowners who claimed to be trapped were, in fact, people who would rather suffer than change. Southtown could not cooperate. Southtown was not goal oriented. It did not work hard. Education meant nothing; it could only be trained. It was 85%, deaf, dumb, and blind, easily led in the wrong direction, hard to be led in the right. It was heavy. Johnstontine, then, began protecting the North from the imaginary threat of the South.