During a reception the journalist is cornered by an alcoholic playboy. The boozer claims to be a close friend of Midway Joe and promises to arrange a meeting. In the following weeks they meet several times in an apartment on Independence Avenue and wait for Joe, while the nervous host tipples whisky, sweats and free-wheels unbearable marine anecdotes. Their intention is to place the legend at the table end, opposite the journalist. One is to put the questions, the other answer, while a tape recorder registers the course of events. The journalist feels safe; he is not going to answer questions.
Usually the meetings end with a telephone call and expressions of insincere regret, that once again Joe won't appear. Joe never shows up. The promised meeting is endlessly postponed and in the end the journalist realizes that he is faced with a mythomaniac. Does Midway Joe ever make close acquaintances? He is brutal to women, it is said. But some women are attracted by violence.
The journalist decides to write a thorough in-depth article, but Midway Joe's secretary denies him everything. Midway Joe will not allow himself to be pinned down, just as his colleagues had warned him: no admissions, no explanation and least of all an interview. Joe's Atlantis thrives on the legend of Joe himself, and a demystification would be fatal.
In his continuing hunt for the legend, the journalist pretends to represent a business concern. He claims that the man wishes to open a tax free deposit on Midway Joe's island, but discovers that all deals go through front men. The journalist attempts a number of new initiatives, but one by one is using up all his opportunities.
One night he has a nightmare. The journalist dreams he has lost his sight and in his dream he talks to a female doctor. She wants to drip a medicament into his eyes. Either it will give him back his sight, she promises, or it will make him him permanently blind. He never sees the doctor's face and worries when she rests her heavy breasts on him.
"What if it doesn't work?" he whimpers, while in the dream he leans back his head to receive the drops.
"It works every time," the doctor's voice says, and the journalist awakens as the first drop hits his eye.
He works out a final, desperate plan. He packs a suitcase and a briefcase, then calls for a taxi. He then phones a colleague. After a brief conversation he turns off the lights of his apartment at the fuse box and rushes down the stairs. The taxi has already arrived. The journalist allows his hand to stroke over the hood of the car, painted chrome yellow. He is not blind, but it's as if this one colour dominates his vision. Then he notices the black and white chequered streak and wonders where he had seen it before.
Parasols and café tables crowd across the sunlit helipad, where the anti new age journalist is about to throw in the sponge. He has turned up there every morning for a whole week, observing the constant activity. Supply boats and cruise liners full of transnational tourists dock all through the days. His futile hours waiting at the aluminium table are documented by a mess of drained coffee cups, newspapers and used paper napkins.
The telephone awakens him every morning. He had already been advised against stage-managing an 'accidental' meeting, but his boss warns him again: his research is assuming an unprofessional aura, on the verge of morbidity, a personal vendetta. The boss recommends a local psychiatrist. It gives the journalist an idea.
There is not much to work on. Where Midway Joe controls his tax-haven empire a Rifat Ozbek suit can sometimes be glimpsed at the balustrade of the roof terrace, or beyond the office windows, seventy metres above sea level. It is said that Joe lives a solitary, hermetic life, but in periods of wistful mood he might seek out company in the night clubs or stare out over the glassy waters from the helipad.
The journalist studied photographs of the figure, projected on the walls of the flotel room, uncertain if they were of Joe or of a security guard. They displayed a corpus as a former heavyweight boxer, but the eyes were impossible to discern behind the smoke-coloured shades.
Based on the personality profile that the journalist had persuaded the psychiatrist to draw up for him, the temp agency delivers an assistant to work for him. She is a yellow-haired Quebec girl in a characteristically black-tagged yellow motor cycle outfit, with a face as innocent as a crash test dummy. The delivery note she arrives with bears a discreet warning, that she can defend herself - a requirement he had forgotten to specify. She has no criminal record, no mental disorder in the family, no sexual diseases.
The laser counter hidden beneath the newspaper gives off a bleep and adds a digit to the crystal display. The journalist looks discreetly towards the entrance. It is his new assistant, as late as usual. She settles herself at the opposite side of the table, ready to play her role for capturing the legend.
The journalist greets his assistant and raises his eyes. One of the Hermes space-shuttle's burnt-out booster rockets has finally reached heaven. Adorned by spraybomb arabesques, it is elevated on the roof of the pilgrims' dormitory like a minaret.
"I've talked to all the ship breakers on the list," she tells him. "They deny ever having had any contact with the drilling company."
The journalist does not listen. Only the last words, "drilling company", trigger his consciousness with the percussion of heavy associations.
Drilling hole. Hole. The rod, turning in a greasy hole. Pulling out, hammering in. Pumping. Steam, by friction against slimy walls. Farting sounds. Hard stools, pressing in the rectum. Something black, suddenly released, comes bouncing up from the deep. The pain. His step father's rugged face before the blow.
While he waits the journalist writes a number of short articles on local events, but the in-depth article about Midway Joe defies any attempt. Too many detached headwords indicate the non-existence of Midway Joe. Are they right, after all? He will not contribute to the myth, not for anything in the world. Instead he begins to draw. But neither will the portrait come alive. A profusion of strokes merges the features into symmetrical blots, resembling a space monster rather than a human face. His new assistant becomes drawn to the drawing, which is gradually taking on the shape of a black triangle. She watches the journalist struggle with black on black, with the subject he cannot see. In the end he notices her distrustful scowl. He crumples up the sheets one after the other and throws them out over the rail, where they disappear towards the restless metal of the sea.
"Does this mean we can go home?"
The journalist shakes his head and tries to re-catch the woman's model eyes. Her oblong face takes in a provocative indolence, which seems to invites slaps to the mouth. How little does it take to bruise the soft parts? The journalist cannot picture exactly what force will leave a smashed eyebrow, a torn corner of her mouth, yellow lipstick on the back of his hand.
The assistant tightens her mouth in a clown-like grimace, as she refreshes her lipstick. First the lower lip, then the upper lip, and by squeezing them together she evens the colour. Finally, she clicks her tongue. The purple-blue veins underneath her tongue flashe within the yellow.
The journalist shakes his head again and eyes his blank notepad, just a touch whiter than the brined aluminium encircling it. He notes down a number of stray thoughts, emerging out from nowhere:
"The advertising banners of the radio towers flap in the eternal breeze. Barrage balloon. Striped wind socks. Signal flag standards: limited manoeuvrability. Something simmers within the pretty head, stronger than the turbulent outside world. It seeps out to us, through the dark hollows of her eyes. Bearing. Radar. Genetically perfect mouth. Thorough, in depth."
Reconsidering a list of questions.
The laser counter displays a number of visitors, far beyond the statistical probability that Midway Joe has been among them, but the journalist has ceased to ascribe anything to the registration. Through his binoculars he observes his assistant strolling along the crazy golf course on the flight deck of the corroded aircraft carrier. By some schizoid logic she reduces the contrasts. Are the golf links actually flower-power space ships compelled to land by the ruined naval forces of NATO? He catches himself wishing that somebody will annoy or assault her so that he can study her reaction. Unconsciously he fiddles with the signal flag that he can use to summon her, senses the delicate yellow plastic fabric, hears the waves hit the legs of the rig and spray up under the deck.
The journalist wants his assistant to slip a custom-made drug into Midway Joe's drink - a complex combination of truth serum and stimulants to hide the undermining of will. He reflects on how to talk her into it. The covering letter from ther agency tells about her high IQ, but he still finds it difficult to judge her moral sense, since she almost never speaks.
Late in the afternoon, the assistant has returned to her seat at the aluminium table. Using a fat board marker, shaped alarmingly like a dildo, the journalist erases the questions to which he has already learned the answers. Directed to nobody in particular, he reads the questions aloud, one after the other. She comments absently. The journalist notes the tiredness in her voice.
"Similar places are found around the world and throughout history," she says. "The shapes diverge, but chaos is conservative. Chaos has its own rigid rules." She follows the marker with her eyes as he deletes a sentence. "It's an unsophisticated point of view, that the continuous existence of the complex depends on the reputable companies that run their con tricks from here."
In the end the list is dramatically reduced, but the urgent topics remain among the black strokes. Who are you? He starts asking questions about drugs.
The assistant sprawls with her clothes arrayed around her ankles and with her naked knees spread apart. Her mouth gapes open, her tongue playing over her lips, while her eyes are tightly shut. She breathes heavily and rubs herself greedily in her crotch with the fat marker.
It is the last state in which the journalist had imagined her. Why had she not locked the door? He tries to back away and close it without revealing his presence - too late. Her eyes slide open. She sees him and instantly her body reacts. She jumps up from where she has been lying, pulling on her yellow motor cycle outfit. The dildo marker flies from her hand and hits the floor in front of the journalist's feet. He reaches automatically for it. It is oozing moisture.
When the journalist senses her insecurity, her plastic-like skin becomes a prospect for sexual abuse. He pictures her as a creature manufactured for his exclusive pleasures. He craves to lick her everywhere, caressing her tits and ass until they glow scarlet. It won't bother him in the least whether or not she resists him. He is about to put his arms around her waist when she finishes dressing. The zipper of the motor cycle suit reaches her neckline. Her glance destroys his randiness. It vanishes, like convection bubbles in a kettle removed from the heat. Only a faint fizz of adrenaline is left in his blood. Confused, he looks around for a place to put the marker. It fears that it might now be difficult to continue working with her.
Joe did not like it. Almost everyone he came in touch with seemed to change character. But the reporter, who was about to destroy his career for the sake of a single interview, was disturbing him. Joe had a vague idea about what triggered off this worry. Superficially, the reporter was hard to differentiate from any of the intense, young men, who turned up here, running away from themselves, or in search of themselves. A closer examination of the journalist revealed that he looked like a younger version of Joe himself. Joe did not disapprove of this man, yet he did not wish to him to insinuate his life. Long ago, he would have send a co-worker down to the helipad with a straightforward request to go home. It was now too late for that, though. Joe watched the waiter clear the tables for service, newspaper cuttings and crumpled cigarette boxes, while the water behind the rig turned into gold. He had let time take over, once again, as when the insane mess favoured by life still made him laugh. Did the reporter appreciate the same emptiness?
The refuge had had another existence, long before the line of submerged volcanoes became the anchorage for this messy way-station for war refugees, this neutral zone for bootleg congresses and political summits, this tax-free yachting brothel, a medina quarter of departure halls, night clubs, hotels, branches of banks, marine stores and amusement arcades, where you arrived by submarine or pedal boat or Zeppelin - anything that was fit to make the Atlantic crossing. Once it had been just a corroded oil drilling rig. Nobody remembered whose it had been: Exxon's or British Petroleum's, or one of the other oil companies'. The original owner had denied all responsibility for it, after insurance disputes. Now, the company logo was concealed beneath geological deposits of graffiti. Only the myths were intact.
The oil wells off the coast of Malaysia had finally run dry and the personnel had been transferred to other jobs or were sacked. Joe was among the few who stayed behind to dismantle the rig. He was still aboard when the tugs pulling the decrepit rig were refused entry to Singapore, where it had been intended to have it broken up.
More struggles with the insurance company, negotiations with one ship-breaker in Halifax and another in Valparaiso, led to an idle month on Java. While Joe rediscovered the paddy fields, whose shelves piled up almost supernaturally over the volcanic slopes, he suddenly realized that in spite of the superficial similarities it had nothing in common with the islands he had visited just a few years before. Every face had been an carefree, glowing sun of happiness, in this country where nobody really needed to do anything, where anybody could be provided for by the explosive lushness of the jungle, sheltered by leaves the size of roofs. An imperceptible, disturbing change of faces had occurred. They didn't approach strangers any more, but stared in misbelief, or if not, they conned you for cash. Since he had left elementary school, Joe had never done anything but work on the oil rig and seek out pubs and trouble. Without ideas or wishes he spent his time in the temple ruins, where the forest shed shrieking beings in impossible plumage and the monkeys matched the professional tricksters in fleecing the tourists. While the last rays of the sun illuminated the surf off the virgin lava beaches, he stood in the water's edge, gazing at his hands and down his body, as if he had just realized it was his own. Then he had been unable to appreciate it, what to do with it. He could not imagine any future.
Joe was just about to fall asleep when he received instructions go to Djakarta, and prepare the departure. Djakarta - an incomprehensible town of millions of inhabitants, no main street, and no middle class. Like mutant bamboo shoots in an Asian toxic-waste dump, the skyscrapers stood strangely arranged in the lower town centre. Enormous showy American cars drifted about in the streets, caught in endless eddies of crowded buses and battered vans. Everything was overtaxed, run-down and ugly.
Joe found his way into the English clubs, situated in the office buildings, high above the noise and smoke, but still the shifting lights were a study in putrescence - squashed brains sliding across the sky. Every morning, already drunk, he tottered out among the wealthy Chinese, enormous in furs in front of the casino foyer of the hotel. He consolidated his time in the roof tennis courts, took his regular seat in the bar, but had no strength for games or conversation. In his flight from the vacuum of the future, he was unable to share his thoughts with anyone. After a month had elapsed in the bars of Djakarta he was picked up by a taxi driver, who spoke Dutch but not English. Although Joe had not ordered any cab he surrendered reluctantly, when the bartender insisted he had to go. Sitting sweaty and ill at ease in the rear seat he wondered what he was doing in this crowded town, and where he was going.
He was barely aboard before they set out over the oceans,
towards countries, never greeting them welcome.
Caught by a tropical cyclone they drifted off course. Roars and crashes chased the vessels, soon huddling in tunnels between seeming mountains of black glass, soon raised to frothing plateaux. The sea was too turbulent to do anything but estimate the damage and condition, guess that they had ended up somewhere between the Azores and the Tropic of Cancer. Fearing that the wry rig should pull them down if it sank, the ships did not dare to continue to tow it. When the rough seas finally calmed, they anchored the rig to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and hurried away. It took a while before Joe was reported missing. They assumed he had been washed overboard during the storm. And in a way, that was what had happened to him.
Like a fabulous monster, the ocean lifted and lowered its chest and roused a drowsy clanking of drooping chains. Further down, the sea grass waved from the flanks of the corpulent pontoon. With both hands on the ladder Joe let himself plump into the fathoms of the sea. Mercury boiled over his body, through his hair, became myriads of diamonds, slowly floating away. He took a few strokes out of the shadow of the pontoon and found a peristyle of lights below the mosaic of waves. Shadows from a shoal of retinue fish shot through the galleries. Darkness and light sparkled around the bodies, as if a tray of silver spoons had been dropped in the water. A ship's propeller rumbled from far away.
Joe rested with the sea. For a long time he let himself rock, pulse-like, and then dived again. While an upcoming burst of air bubbles passed in the twilight, he understood how vulnerably he hung over the abyss, as in an enormous shaft, stretching through the volcanic crater all the way into the belly of the Earth. There was no bottom below, but from the darkness a black outline stared back at him. Its yearning to escape to the surface was only held in check by refulgence. In spasmic jerks Joe rolled around to find his bearings and discovered he had drifted away from the rig. An exhausting crawl up and down over the pitching waves did not bring him any closer. He attempted to gather his strength, but glided further away. Unexpectedly, a wave rose above him, sucked him down into the dusky deep. He had not caught any breath and had to fight not to sink. A final gasp escaped him, when something hard and rugged bumped into his side.
In panic, he resisted with hands and feets, but suddenly realised what it was, and grabbed it just before he was washed away. The cable tightened and slackened soothingly, as he pulled himself out of the water.
Fearing that the sea would try to swallow him again, he climbed up the cable and hung there, huddled-up, as if connected to the sun by an umbilical cord.
Joe spent days staring into the immense emptiness above the sea, remembering his old Java. Coming to Java had been like falling into a wonderful trap. A safe harbour after a long and stormy voyage. Sure of himself, in the company of friends, he waited for the storm to subside. But the storm never died. He had lived in the storm for so long it had become part of him. Nobody noticed as the winds howled and raged through him. Nobody saw how he longed to know what it was like, to have calm in his soul.
From time to time a military airplane swept over the derrick or a Russian trawler sneaked past in the horizon. But nobody hailed Joe or disturbed his exile, although they must have seen him running, startling the sea birds along the mountings.
In the dusk, alone in the extensive kitchen, he heated the contents of cans without labels. He sat as in trance among the scratched table tops of the canteen, long after having finished his meal.
Sparks fled out into the night from the heaps of booklets and empty briefcases he had found in the run-down offices. During the starry nights he lay wrapped in blankets in the centre of the helipad. The sea fluoresced greenish. He saw meteors collide with the stratosphere while he attempted to think of nothing. Other nights the stars faded behind a milky mist and low-lying clouds hung like plastercast against the background. The dazzling full moon seemed disturbingly close, as in Palaeocene, and the light prevented him from sleeping.
One day, he went to the radio room only to discover
that the transmitter had been removed.
The journalist and his assistant prepare for a party where Midway Joe is expected to show up. She takes the journalist shopping. The department store is dominated by a maritime display. Sketches of floating paradise islands and palace-like yachts are passed by in silence, while a series of photos of man-made submarine landscapes attracts attention. Heaps of rusty machines lie like beaten-up animals, full of coagulated blood. A World War II bomber in the gardens of the pearl divers. The oil refinery terminals off the coast of Saudi Arabia. Queer white plants clinging to dumped drums of toxic waste. The sea floor below Joe's complex, strewed with coins and champagne glasses, is a banquet, visited by the stars of the sea. But in the stationer's shop a jungle is hanging above their heads and bird song is sounding from up there - all plastic and a never-ending compact disk.
While they are shopping she suddenly disappears. He locates her absorbed in a colourful National Geographic publication and just before she closes the book he sees a glimpse of yellow coral fish with black Rorschach markings. What else can interest a person like her, who long ago had isolated herself from trivial contacts? In her eyes, he sees how she converges with the shop dummies of the apartment store, but he also senses something else, something unidentifiable. Perhaps she will appreciate Midway Joe. He buys the book for her and, after some indecision, she points out a cat-suit she would like, which he also buys. To feed his own memories he buys a set of micron-thin briefs and a bra. They consist of almost nothing except tiny chrome-yellow elastomer triangles.
A crying homosexual curls himself into the foetal position to fall asleep. Further down the corridor a businessman in his mid-fifties sits naked in an unmade bed, busy writing reports on his laptop. In the room next to him you come across a pretty if not quite young lady, endlessly smoking cigarettes in the armchair, while thinking her life all over, as well it might have been. The double suite at the end of the corridor is shared by the journalist and his assistant.
The journalist is a bit scared by the alien furniture of the suite. He eyes the doll woman sprawled on the floor, who often turns to refer to a National Geographic publication. With small rubber stamps she prints radiation hazard warning signs on yellow garments; over shoulders and back, along the outer rims of the legs and sleeves. She distributes the signs like the fur of a wild cat. The journalist is fascinated by the unceasing way she redefines the room and herself.
Suddenly she looks up at him, beaming with joy like a child with a new toy.
As they arrive at the party they are accosted by a drunk. She does something to the man's thumb, removing all colour from his face, and they proceed undisturbed into the halls. The air is dense with artificial smoke, smouldering in suggestive illumination.
The journalist lets himself get annoyed by the drunken smartasses, who cannot keep their hands away from his assistant. She can't help smiling at him or burst into laughter. He hates the place, because it reminds him more of a computer fair than a party. Slowly, he remembers how he became anti new age and recognises too late that it is even more unconstructive. He feels drugged, is about to forget what role she plays, and why he came to Joe's oil rig in the first place. Eventually he slips into a trance-like despondency and tells her he is depressed, that his eyes are smarting, that he needs sleep and wants to go home. As he does not expect her to care for him, he turns around and leaves. He has problems getting the porter machine to hand over his key card and on his way to the suite he loses his sight completely.
In the middle of the night the assistant finds him lying at the end of the corridor, in a deep, cold sleep. He explains that he is not drunk but unable to see. After having eased him in through the door, helped him out of his clothes and into bed, she finds some medicine in her bag and undresses.
Standing at the bedside she watches the journalist trying to handle a glass. She has bathed his eyes and given him the glass and some pills. The journalist takes the drug and leans back in the pillows. Then she relieves him of the glass, puts it on the bedside table and crawls down next to him in the bed to keep him warm.
"It works - I can see. I can see you!"
As a sign of markedly inner danger he draws three trapezium petals around her left nipple. The right nipple is encircled by three rings, just overlapping. He does not recall the exact meaning of the symbol. On her briefs he draws diagonal warning stripes. As he finishes these she turns about lazily, allowing him to continue the stripes across her behind. The symbols rub off on the bed linen. He spreads her legs to make room for the marker, starts to draw a flash over her cunt but ends up rubbing it with the marker. Soon her crotch is black and shiny with ink. The journalist strokes his ink smeared hands along the assistant's thighs, grabs the drawing, works on it. He gropes with his hand under her briefs to find the moist opening. She observes the back of his hand moving under the elastomer, how it tightens over the knuckles, glistening and striped as new-born wasps.
When the journalist starts removing the briefs from his assistant she suddenly becomes nervous and asks him to stop. She jumps out of the bed and dresses without once looking at him. Not until she stands in the doorway she briefly turns her head and bites her lip. Her reluctance excites him in ways he never knew before.
He staggers after her, dives, catches her by her waist. She grabs the door frame but doesn't really resist. Maybe she can't. The cries and breathlessness of the struggle travel through the corridor, where the face of a curious child face appears behind the chink of a partly opened door.
In the end he manages to mover her away from the entrance and pushes her towards the bed. There he throws himself across her. Consumed by a tsunami of bodily lust he tears at her suit. Snap fasteners and zippers fling open to expose her tits and stomach, as far down as her ink-smeared briefs. The journalist strips and rips the clothes of both of them and holds her arms fixed, while his dick penetrates into warm, wet flesh, unaware of her terrified gasps or his own insane roaring. All he senses is a glaring, pink, heavenly hell of spreading legs and wriggling hips and his glistening dick, thrusting deep into a wonderful sum of shoulders and cunt, sweating armpits and ass, curved neck and back, when he takes her from behind.
The journalist awakes. His assistant sits in a distant corner with her legs and clothes pulled up in front of her. She is shaking. She watches him with a look as a timid animal. The room has been smashed. The furniture is shattered.
She does not seem to be hurt, bears no purple or yellow bruises. He does not know what to say and lies for a long time just staring back at her. In the end he raises himself on his elbows and asks her if she feels cold. The assistant shakes her head.
"You're mistaken," she corrects. "I ought to spank you - but what's the point? You're chronically blind."