JUNE 1815.
*
HMS Association (not that one) lies on her side. That’s not right, she’s skewered askew on a scrap of rock. Irony abounds in the sound that is un-sound, that failed to shelter the half-sunk ship: most vessels wrecked on \ by \ near Ignatius aren’t trying to reach her shores.
His Majesty’s Ship came willingly, but the island that would look like a crudely drawn marine predator on a map (if many/any included it) still did it’s thing. Ignatius appeared out of a fog (itself fresh) and a brand new storm rose up astern as if to herd and urge the ship into the island’s mouth: the sound. Superstition says she’s a pitcher plant, an angler fish, an ambush predator.
A dozen drowned crew, a few more half drowned. One maimed. Many so-very-many dead Puffins (not those ones). The normal kind. The little cute Auks from gentler climes that you’ve probably seen pictures of with the silly webbed feet and whimsical coloring. Those Puffins. An East India man had the bright idea of rounding up wild Puffins, a whole fucking ship full, and introducing them to their Ignatian cousins. The fool hoped the happy little birds you and yours know might intermingle, mate, and make the foul little Ignatian land-raptors slightly less vicious.
Reader, we know this mission was doomed to fail. Those are “the devil’s birds” as the locals and everyone else say. Later, Darwin’s good work and modern biology and genetics would confirm that, indeed, some of the soft outlander birds mated with Ignatian puffins. This effort at gene analysis would cost plenty of field scientists their lives and only muddied the waters of the search for something, anything indigenous to the island. Not because their scientific effort was bad or the results wrong, quite the opposite. Prospero is the problem, that some small portion of the scientific community working the island would suffer “Prospero Syndrome” (think Stockholm but not at all). Those afflicted with this illness have a disturbingly predictable tendency to claim in their derangement that Ignatian Puffins are not of this world.
Charles Stuart (not that one) was a bland standard East India stooge who work-waited patiently until middle age to inherit a modest family fortune, one he would promptly squander. Charles fell in with a charlatan ‘naturalist’ (not Darwin), the other one no one remembers because he was so wrong and insistent. Head of the Stuarts funded several expeditions and boondoggles and left the family finances to an overtaxed but enthusiastic younger brother.
By 1815 loom-smiting ruffians had brought the house of Stuart low, and the family’s last best chance lay in a flock of sea-sick Puffins in the hold of a British Naval Ship on ‘survey mission’ to Ignatius. Those birds, once bred with the local stock would temper the vicious humors of the local flock(s) and create an animal whose shit would be fine fertilizer for tobacco or cotton (on the island and abroad). The naturalist, having done the math, assures all interested parties that in three generations they’ll have birds ripe for domestication and bird shit enough to begin planting-at-scale. Wasn’t to be, and the naturalist and little baby brother Stuart were among the drowned dozen.
Maybe there is no ‘Prospero Syndrome’ and the man broke when he found his fortunes literafiguratively dashed by rock and fate. The man who couldn’t retrieve his brother’s body from the ship being slowly beat to death against the rocks that keep it above water. That one, he ripped his clothes off and ran screaming into the woods.
Nah. Puffins didn’t get him. He was seen and heard from again and again again. Stuart lived long and wrote prolifically, and the bird cult he established bedevils the island(s) to this day. A century later when the constellation of villages and the laborers from the ‘float’ farms rose up like baby bolshies to run the old dictator out and usher in the People’s Republic, Stuart re-emerges as a figure of rebellion–symbol of a place that cannot ever truly be mastered or tamed.
British Museum has some diaries and pamphlets, all (still) shit-soiled. We know the mechanism of madness that afflicted Stuart and the bird cultists. Naturally occurring LSD aside, Ignatian Puffins host a gut fungus, harmless to the birds and certain to cause euphoria, intense hallucinations, and later ergotism (or something quite like it). St. Ignatius’ Fire is much like St. Anthony’s: a list of convulsive symptoms, eventually the same gangrene at the extremities. Where the two differ: the delusions. Those afflicted with Ignatius’ Fire often-almost-always experience delusions of grandeur. We’re talking claiming godhead while smearing shit on the walls.
*
JANUARY 17, 1966
*
For reasons unknown, and through mechanisms poorly understood, the Island of Ignatius lodged itself somewhere West-North-West (maybe) of the Pillars of Hercules some time in late 1965–right beneath the path of American ‘ready’ bombers orbiting. Fidel didn’t like American bombers in his airspace, “they diminish us.” If you think he means the Ignatian people? No that’s the ‘royal we.’
Fidel (ours, the shitty one) showed some leg to the Soviets, who winked and wagged anti-aircraft missile dick and here we are.
The “mountains” of Ignatius are just large hills outside the big-busy capital. The things are bald topped, and the north face of the biggest hill of them all has its face shaved. A slope clear cut. Free of trees is free for use. Ignatian puffins won’t stray far from tree cover without good reason or extreme provocation. A football field and some barbed wire away from the edge of the woods, there’s a SAM-site. The angry looking little air defenses are trailers and trucks and wire rat’s-nest tacked to generators and the grid. Little radar dishes everywhere, the cokehead-tiny radars rage-rotating and the bigger boys tick-flicking back-forth-back across a narrow window of sky like sprinklers. The thing itself: The SA-2, the Soviet codpieces ‘gifted’ to cover Fidel’s (our Fidel’s) pride. They are telephone poles with wicked fins, more razor than shark that run on rocket motors and try to murder things up in the sky. Those are the two purposes of the missiles on Ignatius: murder or codpiece, no in between.
There’s a war on, the word war, accompanied as always by the rattle of sabers and the clatter of dropped munitions and ‘oh shit’ missteps almost-metastasizing into near miss or actual attack. The words fly, no not the B-52’s, those are jet powered and full of American airmen, themselves fueled by coffee and spite. The words work way across transatlantic cables and across airwaves.
LBJ’s cable read: “Remove those missiles or we will.”
Fidel’s reply: “Get fucked, Cowboy. Yanqui go home.”
Nobody on the island heard or read a damn thing about the incident in the news or would for quite some time. Ignatius is pretty big for an island, always been a tiny media market. In the modern, the place has always been run by a regime that found it beneficial to censor and filter the outside. But in that Cold War moment (and beyond) the glorious west with its free press censored too: nobody printed that first line, just the ‘go home’ bit. Every major American outlet did announce quite loudly that a ship named Enterprise was now furiously steaming from Tonkin to Ignatius with malice in her heart and “as many bombers as deemed necessary” would track dirt across Ignatian airspace.
Fidel (our shitty Fidel) had reach that would make a STASI man weep, would give the Keh-geh-beh a boner. No seriously. I heard you scoff, reader. Yes, it’s a tiny shit-covered island, but we’re talking about men who covet control and want nothing else, not even wealth (as anything other than mechanism for moving levers). Yes, telling Lyndon to “get fucked” was awesome, but the guy cos-played commie and was as vain a man as any world leader has ever been, fond of having threats to his person or prestige, real or perceived, disappeared (verb) and tortured to death. But not even Commandant-Comrade-Gen-ay-rahl could censor the sky.
B-52’s the endless circling circuit, Strangelove flights on every-second-of-the-day alert, many times many more than usual in response to the words and the missile wagging. The people hear the hissing engines and see their enormous metal bodies overhead and feel the shimmy of their passage when they do dive low for show (or did before the missiles arrived).
As above, so below. There was another war that week. The anti-aircraft missiles meant to menace the bombers came with advisors to teach them how to use the things, and allegedly to ensure that they were not used foolishly. Colonel Nabokov was one such advisor assigned to one SAM-site. There he taught Commander Cameron and a bunch of skinny kids to read the radar and operate the deadly things and re-load the launchers with more deadly things. Colonel Nabokov then taught them how to get blind drunk and pass out in a radar hut. The military man on colonial vacation then demonstrated how to convince the sex workers’ union to ban a man from every brothel and club on the island, permanently and in record time.
Colonel Nabokov bored out of his mind finds some way to convince a young Ignatian at the site, a kid named Stefan who will later become a local party stooge, to help him score some weed and some ‘puff’–the recreational form of the fungus extracted from bird shit.
Colonel loves the drug, consumes it with great vigor. The hubris hits Nabokov swiftly, and a week later the senior Ignatian officer on site is shot dead, and a Soviet ‘advisor’ is barricaded in the command shack with the short range dish spinning on the roof. That would be Stefan outside the shack, drunk as fuck, guarding the door. And if he’s not as high on bird shit as the Colonel, Pvt. Stefan is in hot pursuit–sweaty, armed, just waving that thing and spouting gibberish about “stopping the invasion.” Threatening to shoot his comrades.
That constant irking engine whine from the sky, the Americans either coming or going. More planes, 24/7 rotation, all armed to end, if not the world, some portion of it. The rough rumble-roar, those present feel their vision blurred by a rocket engine finding life. For no reason greater than a man’s shit-induced madness, two missiles, two of the telephone poles with the wicked fins fly off to end something.
Above, each flight is part of one big sky parade meant to demonstrate the size, might, and endurance of a nuclear cod-piece, figura-metaphorical dick, a great and mighty American sky phallus. The demonstration is working, kind of, in that its irking the island’s leadership. And two rocket-powered murder-dicks, or Soviet-Made SA-2 munitions, seem the official response. The missiles sing something dark and nasty out their engine-asses as they race toward murder or their best effort.
Zoom in on one of many B-52s and tankers above, trailing one another menacing and lazy. Imagine an electronic warfare officer has just spilled his coffee on his console. The man thinks this is the low-point of his day, but it’s just an inauspicious start to the fine art of evading missiles. The crew begins by. Never mind.
Two. No three. Three parachutes attached to three mostly-alive American airmen and a disintegrating plane dropping into the northern forest–the ‘shark fin’ peninsula north end of the island. Two men at a SAM-site high on bird shit and booze who think they prevented an alien invasion hugging. Five other men rushing in to beat on and restrain them.
A chilly January evening in 1966, on The People’s Republic of St. Ignatius. There is a smoldering wreck that used to be a B-52. At the center of the ruin and amidst the burnt broken trees and scorched flora sit two singed, but very intact, American nuclear weapons.
*
END IGNATIUS 2