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    Beat Space
    Beat Space
    Beat Space
    Ebook145 pages1 hour

    Beat Space

    By Tommaso Pincio

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Melding Pynchon with the Beats, Pincio sends his heroes Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady on a pulp sci-fi adventure in a satire of contemporary capitalism. Coca-Cola sells dreams and blames their customers for maiming caused by exploding bottles. Neal Cassady chases Marilyn Monroe. In Pincio’s 1950s, history is lost in fantasy, and the result is sheer entertainment.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Letter
    Release dateApr 11, 2016
    ISBN9781940953434
    Beat Space
    Author

    Tommaso Pincio

    Tommaso Pincio is the author of two other novels (unpublished in English), M, and Lo spazio sfinito. Having spent many years in America, he now lives in his native Rome.

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      Book preview

      Beat Space - Tommaso Pincio

      1.

      The sight of the starry sky makes me nauseous. I can barely stand it reduced to mathematic formulas, said Albert Einstein.

      2.

      It’s me that’s done all this and come and gone and complained and hurt. One day at the beginning of summer in 1956, Jack Kerouac, having said these words to himself, decided that the moment had finally arrived to come face to face with the Void. On that same day the average price of a hamburger broke the 99-cent barrier, and an unusual atmospheric disturbance originating in Mediterranean Europe seriously undermined the credibility of meteorologists.

      Many years later, convinced they could tell the story of the past once and for all, historians would reconstruct the events of that long-ago day, breathing life into the figure of Jack Kerouac as he was about to pass nine weeks as an Orbital Inspector on behalf of Coca-Cola Enterprise, Inc. This particular Jack Kerouac would live for sixty-three days on board one of those minute spaceships circling the planet Earth at a height of approximately thirty-six thousand kilometers, scouring the orbital spaces of big-name companies. All this, however, would not help him find the meaning of life.

      Like many other drifters before him, all Jack Kerouac had to do was verify the functionality of the ship’s detectors. If the LED lights on the central panel were lit up according to the pattern they had shown him before departure, the detectors were in working order and he shouldn’t do anything. If, on the other hand, the lights were illuminated in an unanticipated pattern, it meant that there was some problem with the detectors and he should make contact with the base. If at any point the lights turned off, Jack was to deduce that the detectors no longer functioned, period, and it was all the more advisable he contact the base. Contacting the base was the maximum effort they expected of him—nothing else was asked. He’d contact them down at the base and they would look after the rest. How precisely they could look after it remained a mystery, but look after it they would. Jack didn’t need to know anything else and, more importantly, he didn’t have to do anything else.

      It might happen that the small monitor situated over two blue buttons would detect an  intrusion into the orbital space owned by Coca-Cola Enterprise, Inc. Intruders might take the form of debris of stellar matter originating from some desolate corner of the universe, but most likely they were metal cylinders of garbage that had been surreptitiously abandoned in Space. Verifying the actual nature of the intruders was not among Jack’s tasks. An Orbital Inspector simply had to record the presence of the intruders and contact the base to communicate their locations. That was all it took, they did the rest.

      Basically, the possibility that Jack would need to contact the base was remote to say the least, if not entirely impossible. By this time, in 1956, technology had perfected the detectors to the point of such indestructible efficiency that the orbital spaces of the big-name companies were well-controlled beyond every reasonable need.

      Climbing aboard his tiny Orbital Inspector’s shuttle, Jack embarked on a new period of his life—nine weeks which he would pass doing nothing, save for being completely alone, looking out at Space from his porthole, trying to understand that the Void he had seemed to recognize in his solitude was, in fact, the Void outside and that he had not gone back and forth for nothing. Because in reality he wasn’t so different from the Stars that pulled away from everything else in the universe without rest, Stars that would be extinguished just as he would be extinguished... one day, far away from everyone and from the Void.

      Jack Kerouac had decided to confront the solitude of those weeks head-on, without help. No weird pills, no alcohol, no music. Just him and the Void, symbolically materializing out of the immensity of Space and in the light of the Stars.

      3.

      Day 1 in the Void passed by like any other day. He mentally composed a haiku and then contemplated the blackness of the universe, letting the day elapse in his omnipotence.

      Star-words, words of stars

      You stars are speaking to me

      I don’t understand

      At the start of Day 2, Jack Kerouac thought he was really earning his pay. He had done precisely what they had asked of him—nothing, in other words. He felt proud and, in some part of his being, something close to self-satisfied. It made him feel foolish. Here I am, in the face of the great Void and I’m worrying about being an honest worker! he reproached himself. Why can’t I be empty and indifferent like Space? Why do things affect me like this?

      The people who had hired him as an Orbital Inspector sincerely despised him. That’s if they felt anything toward him at all, or even remembered his name. Arthur Miller and the others at Coca-Cola Enterprise Inc. considered him to be among the dregs of society, an irrecoverable misfit, a member of that pathetic element of society destined to run from nothing his entire life.

      It’s not true—I’m not running from nothing. I’m running from the direction of traffic, he had explained to Arthur Miller the day before he embarked on his nine weeks as Orbital Inspector.

      Course. You say 'change course,' Miller had said to him. Christ Kerouac, you’re leaving for Space and you talk like a cabbie from New York.

      And he said: We should think of Space as a huge street. Courses are an illusion; there’s just one big street and we have to change the direction of traffic.

      Whatever, change the direction of your traffic all you like, but try to understand something about this job. I’m not the type of guy who likes screw ups, I love boredom and hate surprises, so no unexpected fuckery. Have I made myself clear?

      I think so. I have nothing against the job, I was talking about life in general. Changing the direction of traffic is a mental thing. I mean, take you for example: you put in your eight hours in this fantastic office and then you go home and maybe even to your beautiful house and beautiful wife. You enjoy your house and eat, and screw your wife, watch a little TV, go to sleep, and the next day you’re back in this fantastic piece-of-shit office. It’s like a circle, but it’s also an illusion. It seems like it goes round and round and you know what’s happening instead?

      Arthur Miller was staring at his documents and seemed unmoved to respond. Kerouac insisted, trying to zero in on Miller’s lowered gaze. You know what happens?

      I don’t give a damn about what happens, I told you: no screw ups. That’s the only thing I care about.

      But by this point, Kerouac had gotten engulfed in the fervor of his train of thought. What happens is you keep on moving in a straight line, you’ve covered another nice stretch of road and before you know it you discover you’re old, sick, alone, two steps from death and . . .

      That’s enough! Miller interrupted him peremptorily. Just shut up for two seconds.

      Kerouac hushed and began to watch Miller, who continued to examine his documents. Then, losing track of time, he let himself be hypnotized by the contents of a giant prototype of Coca-Cola Space™ that sat in all its imposing beauty on Miller’s desk. For the launch of this new version the company had revived the original hobble-skirt model, the goddess-like Mae West design of 1914. The color of the soft drink had been tweaked just enough to give it a cosmos-black shade. The introduction of a derivative of flourine into the recipe was the real discovery—it reacted with the carbonic acid to make the bubbles glow with actual light. In that moment, the bubbles in the prototype were swimming lazily and aimlessly, like a peaceful summer night sky, but if you were to shake the bottle you might see one of the bubbles hurtling toward the bottle cap, leaving a twinkling trail in its wake. People had gotten into the habit of shaking Coca-Cola Space™ before drinking it in the hopes that a bubble-comet would appear so they could make a wish. Kerouac was in the habit of doing this. Actually, he used Space™ to pick up girls. His technique was to strike up a conversation in this way: Listen, Stella, you are the most fantastic creature in the entire known universe and that’s why I bought a Space™. I thought you could give it a good shake for me and if a bubble-comet shows up, well, you might just decide to change my life. Bottles with a bubble-comet were roughly one in a thousand and girls were well-aware of this fact. Still, they played along, they gave it a shake and then ended it there with a Sorry. Once, though, he happened upon a girl with real personality. Tall, blonde, volumetrically smooth and seductively humoral. He led off with the usual business of the known universe, Space™ and all the rest. She looked at him impassively, then she grabbed the Space™ and smacked it over his head.

      Additionally, something particularly special was possible with the new type of Coke. They said that for every one billion eight million bottles—that

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