eek

Arrival at the David Beckham International Airport, Purgatorio for trans- hemispheric flights.¹ I knew the lightning storm that delayed take-off would make my transfer difficult, but I didn’t expect to be told not long beyond disembarking that the connection had already left and that the next one on offer was not for four thousand hours and twenty-five minutes. I accepted the situation. This airport was designed by the military for leisure and was surely suited to stays of intensities such as mine.

¹ Regarding Purgatorio. This not a simple ‘throw away’ analogy, or at least, the analogy is quite serious given that Emperor Henry VII’s reign over the Airports International Council mandates that all long-haul flight paths conform to Aligherian allegory, which is why flights from Liverpool to Ibiza now evoke Dante’s Eclogues.

Routine security blood analysis and AI e-meter reading goes smoothly. Signs direct us from ‘FOUCAULDIAN BIO-TYRANNY – (Arabic Translation) – (Mandarin Translation)’ to ‘BAUDRILLARIAN PLEASURE GULAG – (Arabic Translation) – (Mandarin Translation)’, and I do feel relaxed by this transition despite having not showered in recent memory beyond the ‘randomly administered’ (but obviously biased) full-body pesticide spray I endured as I entered the Inferno stage of this journey (I’m travelling from Australia to rural France to see a vintage iPod perform for thirty seven minutes at a music festival organised by François Hollande).

Despite some people claiming the DBIA (David_Beckham_International_Airport) as one of the most advanced in the world it was in fact largely inspired by the 2002 film Attack of the Clones which is now seventy years old.² This does feel like a city in outer space. A David Beckham hologram approaches me to task if I needed any help getting wherever I’m going. I tell him how long my flight’s delayed for and ask for a best course of action. David Beckham replies that there are two primary options for the lengthier of airport stays, a) a choice of from up to nine hundred grades of hotel accommodation or b) experimental cryopreservation as a part of a Taliban- sponsored reality tv pilot.³ I’m given directions for one of the general hotel concierges.

² Attack of the Clones became the only film of the early 21st Century to maintain or receive (or in its case, rather, cultivate) acclaim beyond the year 2037, which marked a profound taste-change (or “vibe-shift” as the quaint common parlance of the day would have referred) in popular culture, such that all previous acts of derision and acclaim had to be transvaluated.

³ I only recently read that the ‘Afghan Economic Miracle’ had less to do with its purchase by Samsung and more to do with its endless production of reality tv pilots for both Anglophone and Chinese-language audiences.

A twenty-minute walk and two-hour train journey lands me with the general hotel concierge. After a two hour and twenty-minute credit check I’m approved for ranks one through to three and a half of the nine hundred hotel options. I splurge and go for level three and a half, which the hotel concierge (a David Beckham hologram) tells me is wise as levels three and below in fact double as migrant detention centers; one simply pays for a more cosmopolitan lunch menu. I’m also advised that three percent of all purchases in this airport go directly to a Timothée Chalamet-fronted charity fighting for the global illegalisation of trade unions (especially in third world countries).⁴⁵ This David Beckham, like the last, also suggests that I spend plenty of time in the airport’s famous central forest – a real forest that looks fake, not vice versa – the first of its kind.⁶ I have indeed been recommended this forest many times. I’ve seen photos of it on the social media pop-ups that subsidise my sleep medication via nightmare-advertising. I will spend time in this forest and eat a Gordon Ramsey hamburger for six hundred USD (after tax).

⁴ Timothée highly personal campaign to ensure that the world’s working class live as poorly as possible was triggered by an incident detailed in Vanity Fair in which a janitorial worker once told him that he looked like “a stupid girl baby”.

⁵ In the year 2048 the world criminalisation was replaced with illegalisation; the former term deemed inherently antisemitic due to use of the world ‘criminal’ in description of Benjamin Netanyahu’s son, Adolf Netanyahu, for running over newborn babies with his Tesla. Classification of semite further redefined in 2051 to exclude all Arabs + Jews declining support of Pelosi’s deployment of Agent Orange against Iranian nursing homes.

⁶ Not all David Beckham holograms are the same age, strangely. Some also look very little like him at any age.

The good thing about staying so low down the hotel’s levels is that the lift journey will be quick. This is what I thought at least, before entering the lift and realising that this reverse-privilege must have been realised during the design process: the levels are reversed, and so it is we of the lower levels who spend more than an hour rising to our levels of purchase. About halfway through the journey another low leveller tells me that we’re actually travelling downwards, not upwards. This central airport hotel was renovated out of a nuclear Armageddon bunker slash militia training center built by an eccentric Oligarch from the Wittgenstein family who was obsessed with the 2003 science fiction film The Core. When I ask this person why it feels as though we’re moving upwards, he says that the experience we’re currently enduring is an effect of a Psychological Operation administered hallucenogenically via the lift’s mild fragrance and Taylor Swift bot muzak, which together create an extremely believable sensation of rising when we are in fact falling. I ask this person, who is an unaccompanied six-year-old boy wearing a The Core (2003) branded t-shirt, what purpose any military would have in reversing one’s experience of downwards vs. upwards, to which he replies that if it’s possible for military scientists to reverse this experience in our minds, then there’s no telling what other experience they may invert. This child exits the lift at level ninety-six.⁷ I continue forth on my own.

⁷ As with most things in life, this child will return, trust me.

Level three and a half is better than I expected. It feels like a normal hotel lobby. Not a great one, but one. A non-holographic person in butler-ish attire welcomes me in and tells me nothing of use. The area is self-explanatory I suppose. A sea of dark brown leather lounge furniture with a smorgasbord at one end and bathrooms well- signposted. The furniture is mostly curved, many pieces allow you to lean back in attempt to sleep though it seems the prevention of sleep is still a design objective; mangled bodies try but just worm back and forth between stress positions. All is lurid as around the furniture clusters are also lamps, almost as tall as those of the street; their brightness is absurd. In fact, I think I watched a documentary about Abu Ghraib on YouTube which claimed the use of similar fittings for sleep deprivation torture across multiple Iraq War prisons. A twenty-minute exercise in climbing up one such lamp like a spider monkey lets me inspect the light fitting to then determine via Google that my hunch cannot be verified.⁸

⁸ There are eight thousand Tik Tok videos and three four-hour-plus YouTube documentaries on the light fittings used in Abu Ghraib and its sister institutions, and though I’ve watched half this material I still can’t verify the hunch. I remember being told that such fittings (specified with exactitude) were the material basis for many art installations I’d witnessed personally, but I can never remember technical details. I do remember the catalogue texts of one of these installations talking about Greenbergian medium-specificity with regards to light fittings, but I’ve no idea whether that exhibition used these airport lights or not. I wonder how our lives would change if we could choose what we do, and do not, remember.

To the smorgasbord. Also, better than I expected. The presence of both breakfast and indeterminate lunch and/or dinner food suggests that the lights never go off here, which is of no surprise. As I load a plate with multiple pastas a fifty-odd year old in a purple shirt asks me how long I’m “stranded” here for, to which I reply, “somewhere near four thousand hours”. He doesn’t tell me how long he’s here for but offers me “the major hack” or rather warning for this hotel level: the bathroom attendants are understaffed and so for several hours each day their roles are filled by some of the prison guards from the levels below. If you go to the bathrooms (which thankfully have showers) while the regulars are working, they’ll just stand there silently until you leave before hatefully cleaning up after you. If you get the guards, then as soon as you exit your cubicle or shower cell, you’ll be blasted by water cannons by men and women in hazmat suits. The man tells me off the top of his head what he believes the prison guard shift hours are typically, and on the basis of this knowledge I decide that once I’ve eaten, I’ll shower, then I’ll return to the Airport’s ground level to inspect its Academy Award-winning sustainable forest.

Showered and fed I return to the lift, which now of course feels as if it descends despite my knowledge otherwise. I sleep for much of this journey, far more than I did on my flight here, despite now standing upwards. I’m awoken by the phone conversation of a woman I share the lift with; her son has been lost in this airport for nine years and has just been discovered by one of the higher-ranked secular airport militias, who found him not in the forest as they expected but in a very multicultural smoking room. The boy is eighty years old now and is excited to see his mother.

Our journey to ground is nearly done. The ceiling turns on. I didn’t realise it was a screen. It plays adverts for the films and tv series that all planes show, most of which I watched on my flight here: Kevin Costner’s untitled 1997 flopbuster film in which he’s the first homeless man to become president of the United States of America (tagline: from “No House, to the White House”), We’re Oppressed Too (2017 – 2098) – the reality tv show where the teenage children of trillionaire outer space real estate developers competitively search their ancestries for trauma, The WINEona rydBAR, the interactive wine bar sitcom starring a Winona Ryder bot (among other accomplished bots) which you, as a member of the audience/customer provoke zingers from, I’m Still Talking (2025) – the documentary about Emily Emalay, the eleven year old anarcho-capitalist lifestyle influencer known for promoting anoxeria and foot-binding, Baz Lurhmann’s trap rap musical adaption of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales starring…we reach ground level. ⁹¹⁰¹¹

⁹ Emalay maintains Enver Hoxha as the most successful practitioner of Austrian Economics. She rates Javier Millei second, whose controversial stimulus bill which banned drinking water and guillotined his own wife’s head and own self’s penis off Emalay defended as “Anarcho-Sigma Realness”.

¹⁰ Foot-binding became a popular fad among American and Albanian ‘Trad Wife’ influencers in the 2040s who claimed both the practice itself and its Oppium Addict Taiwancell contemporary male enforcers (alongside Esoteric Hindu-Nazis, AIDs- Virus Denialists, and Orthodox Satanists) as paragons of ‘Judeo-Christian’ Culture.

¹¹ Chaucer scholars have frequently ridiculed Lurhmann’s desire to “make Chaucer Camp” given that the word camp in Chaucerian English meant to smear one’s semen over eyelids of elderly goat in honour of local Bishop.

I follow the signs to the forest. Soon large objects block my way, the first of which is a luxury jeep, the prize of a lottery boasting three trillion tickets sold. Closer by I learn the car was Idi Amin’s and still holds literal skeletons. It has a union jack painted over it like Spice Girls’ paraphernalia.¹² By the car is one of those scale cut- outs of a photo of Amin beside which you can stand and insert your face through an oval chasm negating the face of whoever he stood next to in the original photograph, if tall enough you can insert your own face into the oval chasm for the sake of an unrealistic though still comical portrait of yourself with the smiling Amin. These scale cut-out products seem to have survived the sands of time, and though their popularity peaked between 1974-2006, they’ve been around since the Iron Age and show no sign of disappearing entirely; they seem undefunctable in their low-tech charm. Past Amin’s car is an artwork by Damien Hirst’s great grandnephew. The artwork is called ‘Idi Amin’s Car’ and is a car, but a different brand to Idi Amin’s literal car from before, and the didactic says the work is about the climate crisis, Buddhism, and Ethical Cryptocurrency.

¹² This is, in the context of this artwork, I assume, to be a reference to the Englishcore political party ‘The Spice Girls’ formed by Morrissey and Nigel Farage’s German dog, who maintain the pop band ‘The Spice Girls’ are the last historical vestige of Protestant English Nationalist Isolationist Separatism, the likes of which have become ‘counter-cultural’ since Sinn Féin’s colonisation of Britain in 2101, which replaced the island’s national anthem with ‘Get Your Brits Out’ (1968) by Kneecap, and made English a dead language spoken only as code by ‘nonces’ Old English in prison.

I feel the forest approaching, but first up is the airport’s primary blue-chip fashion district. Migrant workers tend to electrical engineering everywhere which makes sparks fly constantly, a fire hazard surely though no signs are displayed. This is an awful and horrifying place, but no one seems to care. Some fashion brands still display on their store screens adverts staring Lil Gucci Hitler, the seventeen-year-old male model rapper who always evaded ‘cancellation’ due to his difficult childhood and aesthetic defence of claiming that his performing name, as with all his music, was entirely AI-generated.¹³ Most advertisers cut ties with him after he joined the Westborough Baptist Church before being killed by a lightning strike/lion attack. Lil Gucci Hitlers are everywhere in this strip.¹⁵ Their kind will die out soon when this culture reverts to another law-binding four years of syrupy sincerity before gagging, and then wallowing for four years of cynical jaded depression once more, and on and off again onwards into eternity.¹⁶

¹³ This defence also worked for LGH with regards to his use of the ‘N-Word’, which his lawyers also claimed legitimate use of due to his ethnic-minority status as the great grandson of German emigrants to Brazil in the mid-1940s.

¹⁵ Though it was discovered in the 2020s that the Westborough Baptist Church were in fact the only ever ‘crisis actors’, employed by a bipartisan post-political neo-con committee to de-legitimise critique of American warfare, the GOP of the 2030s began nonetheless to revive the group as icons of American nuclear familial loyalty, despite the fact that by the 2030s the group had only eleven members, all of whom were Korean and non-related by blood. The polyamory of the Korean(-Philippine) reformed Westborough Baptist Church also lead in the 2040s to veneration by the DNC and their splinter group, the Self Party.

¹⁶ This ‘Four Years’ policy of sincerity-cynicism oscillation was devised by World Economic Forum same long weekend as the Culture War Reform Package which implemented World Government of Culture with board of Camille Paglia, Candace Owens, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and Judith Butler to ensure that representational politics of Disney Star Wars Cartoons tick liberal, conservative and syncretic boxes in balance.

The forest at last. Approaching it is reminiscent of the first major factory environment scene in Willy Wonka (1971), the chocolate river scene (many are unaware that the character William Wonka was in fact based off Joseph Stalin, whose deportation of entire national populations for the sake of industrial labour found representation in the Oompa Loompa musical workforce).¹⁷ There are some similar colour hues, but the reminiscence I feel is primarily mood-based, a feeling that at any moment, from within this world of pure hyperbolic consumer joy, misery might arise and fracture the atmosphere like in bad horror films or tv dream sequences where suddenly all goes wrong and evil. The forest invokes the work of the Albert Speer of eco-capitalism, Danish architect Bjarke Ingles and his design ideology of ‘Hedonistic Sustainability’, accused of glibness for his professional affiliation with fascist-pyromaniac Jair Bolsonaro.¹⁸ Among the forest trees migrant workers with robots tend to the seemingly constant maintenance of an ecology devoid of life beyond their nursing and the endless flow of transit-spectators. I can’t see any insects of any size, not other than the giant mechanical spider that replaces garden lightbulbs. The trees and plants feel fake as I knew they would, to the point that I, as someone of no horticultural knowledge, need to touch them to see whether real trees can in fact look so fake. The presence of wires running up and around organic matter makes this all feel clinical; these are not trees and plants but rather Darth Vader-esque cyborgs which, despite their performance as a symbol of green power and vitality, are biologically hanging by a manmade thread.

¹⁷ The 1971 film William Wonka has only just been rightfully re-entered into the Socialist Realist canon by art historian and philosopher Boris Groys. The Stalin- esque Wonka leads kangaroo court tour through factory, by the end of which the only non-purged child is proletarian Charles and uncle, who join factory dictatorship (a ‘Deformed Workers State’ by Trotskite terminology).

¹⁸ Unfairly claims Gwyneth Paltrow, Ron DeSantis, and Bashar Al-Assad.

I sit in the forest, surrounding by a panopticon of Parisian cafes selling 50 USD Flat Whites, vintage Lego Stores, ironic assault rifle vendors, VR Yoga studios and a flagship outlet for Beyonce’s drone warfare startup, and as if to bring this whole world crashing down a young man asks me to take a photo of him with his phone, a portrait of him in the forest smiling. I take the photos and he thanks me and shakes my hand. He leaves me with a sense of humanity almost forgotten. A film I watched on the plane here had a scene like this, but it felt so much more fake. It won a non- simulacrum award but still felt hollow compared to what just happened.

I sit and hope to find some trace of life in the plants. Even something like an ant, an animal I’d otherwise consider ‘robotic’ compared to ‘real life’, but which now would feel inspirational, like a single flower growing in a desert or desolate, grey, and waveless beach. I’m not finding anything, but the search feels meaningful. I wonder whether my days of sleeplessness will trigger hallucinatory life; this would be fine, so long as I wasn’t sure; I’d be willing to fall for it.

I wake from sleep in a sitting position. I’m still here in the forest. My watch says I slept for three seconds. I need the bathrooms now. There are many nearby and they’re all expensive. They’re armed by guards dressed like Colonel Gadhafi, which to me means they look more like Naval officers than anything, but I don’t really know anything about military aesthetics.¹⁹ I can only afford the cheapest of bathrooms, which is just a long urinal; there are no cubicles no sinks no nothing. The smell is extreme and there seem no attempts at mitigation beyond Michael Jackson music. Despite the utter disgustingness of this rancid room of polished tiles I have found what I was looking for; signs of animal life; for the urinal is raging ecosystem of dark brown insects unlike any I’ve ever seen, each the length of my middle finger, none flying around the room, they just crawl and pulsate around the wet stainless steel. A woman’s voice from behind me says,

¹⁹ I know more than nothing but not enough to speak with confidence here.

“You’ve never seen these before, have you?”

“No – are they, indigenous to the region?”

“They’re bred here in the airport somewhere. They crawl through the plumbing. They cause no harm though. They sell them, actually, on the level above, next to the Lego Store. They’re sold in jars. They crawl around in there. It’s not torturous for them; they enjoy physical solitude. All they need is imagination. They’re not even so expensive to buy either. Airport management want rid of them, so they sell them cheaply. If you’re transit is long, I’d suggest going up and buying one. They’re good company.”

“Yes, I’ve been, feeling a little alienated here. The nature of travel, I guess. I’ve been wanting some human connection. But one of these in a jar – maybe it’ll do for now.”

“You’ll be surprised by the bond you develop. I’m not just saying so because it’s my job.”

After using the facilities, I make my way upstairs through the forest to buy one of the insects I just pissed on. That woman was right about the prices: one insect in a jar is just four US cents, whereas next door, the cheapest LEGO product – an average LEGO-sized figure of Saddam Hussein – costs five thousand US dollars. I buy an insect in a jar. I can afford two but I decide one’s enough for now. Better to see how I handle one before growing the family.

I return to the forest, to one of its most dense portions, the leafiest of its areas, where one can almost, if trying hard, believe they’re not in an airport. I lie down and look into the jar I just bought. The animal inside does seem content. It’s not a product to me, it is a living thing, and the world of the jar does somehow for it seem limitless. I wonder what would happen if these creatures were introduced to the forest. Upon purchase I was told the punishment for opening the lid of this jar was death – it was illegal to do anything but take the jar with you onto your next flight, then dispose of it in the bins of wherever you land as these creatures are deemed biohazards in almost all states on earth. If I were to let it out here, would I really get caught? And what would happen to this forest if one or two or more of these creatures made it their home? Perhaps a biblical plague would erupt, and maybe no living thing, after a certain amount of time, would see this as anything beyond a necessary fate.

I’m rocked to sleep peacefully by imageries of plague.

I’m not sure how long I slept for, but I know, instinctively and logically that my rest made no major subtraction to my remaining hours here. Dreams not remembered well either, oh well.

I make my way to the closest smoking room, the division of which in-two between middle aged Northern English women and mid-twenties South Asian farmers feels mechanically even to the point of conscious curation, but reality can’t possibly be the case. I enter despite not smoking. I’ve learn’t that such tobacco clouds can in fact prove ‘refreshing’ after infinite hours in that air-conditioned xerox botox choking clarity reflective shine. I sit on the last seat available by the window which looks out to black nothing, as well as shipping containers filled with black bowling balls. As he starts speaking to me, I realise that next to me is sitting neither northern English nor South Asian woman nor man but rather an Australian who asks me,

“Are you here with Mahler?”

“No, who, what? Sorry…”

“Mahler. Group.”²⁰

²⁰ Did realise later that I do know the Group by way of their work, as they’re well known for also operating a chain of hardware stores of no relation (beyond embezzlement) to their Southern Hemispheric private violence.

“No, sorry.”

“Oh ok, I thought you might be a new recruit for some reason.”

This Australian wears a beige cap on backwards with a shirt branded by ‘The O.C’ (2003-2007).

“What’s the Mahler Group?”

“You haven’t heard of us?”

“No, sorry…”

“We’re a spin-off of the Wagner Group, you know them right? They assassinated that Canadian, the paedophile motherfucker Prime Minister fuckin, whoever.”

“You’re flying somewhere for work?”

“Look given you’re not one of us I probably shouldn’t spill too many beans. But basically, on the horizon I see regime change in Ouagadougou. I’ll say no more.”

“How long have you been doing this kind of work for?”

“Mercenary work, well, I’d say I’m fairly ‘mercenary’ by nature. So, it’s hard for me to say exactly when I started, you know. I notice you’re not smoking.”

“I don’t really smoke, I guess. It’s just a bit of an escape, in here, from out there.”

“You know there are brothels in this airport.”

“Really?”

“Yep indeed.”

“I thought this was a kind of a, fairly, socially conservative country?”

“Well, such societies are often highly dialectical. But airports are a kind of heterotopic, extra-territorial kind of environment. A lot of things are technically legal here that no one knows about you know.”

“Really, like what?”

“Well I don’t want to go giving you any crazy ideas. Not while you’re still a stranger to me at least.”²¹

²¹ Years later I learned that one such phenomenon to which I believe he may have been referring was the (rumoured) legality of dog fighting in international airports; general failure of exploitation explained by difficulty of getting civilian dogs in such spaces. Nevertheless, Dwane ‘The Rock’ Johnson does apparently have a cult reality series Airport Dog Fights which he presented for 19 non-consecutive seasons.

“Yeah, fair enough. How long until your flight?”

“Only about fifty minutes. I haven’t been here that long either. Felt like I might miss my connection when I first got off here.”

“I did miss mine.”

“That fuckin sucks man.”

I don’t learn the man’s name, and our conversation ebbs until he bids me farewell, seemingly worried that his connection may be missed unless he moves with visible panic.

My scalp begins to perform something like antennae, transmitting to me – via what I assume are microscopic yet tyrannically discomforting grains of sweat – the smoking room’s hot, stale, moisture; tryptich ingredients for a common boring misery. I hope now that re-entry into aircon will make for momentary pleasure, the kind that evaporates into something like ennui, which all together is something like the opposite of entering ocean, where the immediate displeasure of cold makes way for sustained comfort once climatized.

I do find pleasure, but it’s more momentary than ever.

I sit on seats near a gate whose next flight departs for Rhodesia in two hours. I decide to pull out my iPad and spend some time in the Netflix Reich. First filmed advertised is an AI-generated remake of The Holiday (2006) starring Cameron Diaz, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, and Jack Black. The remake recasts them all except it’s called The Holodomor. I vaguely recall criticism of the film split between claims that the film advocated Hitlerite genocide of all Slavic peoples against a more idiosyncratic position that the film is in fact a form of Holodomor apologia ghost-written by Alexandr Dhugin’s best Tartar friend. The film proves unwatchable. Seeing advertisement for ‘The O.C’ on that Australian mercenary’s shirt provokes me to start watching a Ken Burns documentary about the show’s relation to MAGAism- Leninism:

“…The O.C. quickly became a staple of the so-called ‘alt-right’: its protagonist Ryan representing the white working class, indentured to a liberal Jewish family, in an aesthetic universe in which seven out of ten women resembled Melania Trump. For some the analogy was too abstract, which is why Tucker Carlson would come to compare The O.C. to El Lizzitsky’s Russian Civil War-era ouvre.”²²

²² Tucker Carlson takes position in neo-Soviet intra-culture war that Constructivism was superior to Stalinist Realist Gesampkunstwerk (he says “Constructivist avante-garde = traditionalist hetero values as opposed to Realism = progressive cosmopolitan queer-ist ‘bosh’”).

Netflix screen invaded by DBIA-specific advertisements: there’s a Mike Kelley Retrospective on in here, somewhere. No indication of where, but I want to find it.

Personless airport kiosk screen offers McDonalds menu plus bot questionnaire interface.

“Where is the Mike Kelley Retrospective?”

“Do you mean the one occurring in the David Beckham International Airport? Or the one which occurred in Hamburg in 2051?”

“The one occurring in the David Beckham International Airport.”

“I’m sorry Madam/Sir/etc. but there is no Mike Kelly Retrospective currently held in the David Beckham International Airport. Several installation pieces by Kelley are however on display. One is called Insect Nest and is comprised of a civilisation of insects which live in several of the airport’s urinals. Bathroom attendants are encouraged to piss on the insect civilisation and try to drown their queen. Another is called Cabin, a life-sized reconstruction of Ted Kaczynski’s ‘Cabin’. This is also found in one of the airport’s male bathrooms. His final piece on display is called Lego Store, which is a Lego Store which sells Lego figurines of Saddam Hussein, among other members of the Hussein family, entourage, and aesthetic universe.”

“Well I’ve actually seen the two other than the Cabin. Where abouts is it exactly?”

“Do you have the David Beckham International Airport App installed on your phone?”

“No.”

“Install the David Beckham International Airport App on your phone. Use it to access the David Beckham International Airport Directory, then go to Things to See at the David Beckham International Airport. Select Mike Kelley Ted Kacyznski Male Bathroom Terrorist Installation and then select Direct me Here (Exclamation Mark). This will give you directions through the app from where you are now all the way to the Mike Kelley Ted Kacyznski Male Bathroom Terrorist Installation on view at the David Beckham International Airport until September 11th.”

“Ok, thank you.”²³

²³ I don’t know why I always feel the need to thanks the inanimate consciousness, but I do, and I don’t know whether this habit is nice or depressing. So too does it feel both nice and sad to receive an email from Chess.com about how well one performed their past year of playing.

App downloaded do make way for primitive map of airport ground plan with red throbbing line lead from where I stand to a place an hour away on foot. Decide to walk without help of segueway or train or novelty vernacular camel ride.²⁴ Midway along the endless road of travel, heated arguments of ‘ideally’-said-in-parantheses young couples from Manchester ‘ideally’-said-in-parantheses invoke universal schadenfreude, so seeing eight fights along this hour walk proves relaxing. Each couple seems to replay the same fight, which at its mid-point implies no logical beginning or end, and thus the rage sustains, I suppose.

²⁴ Camels have never been used for transport in this region historically, but it ‘seems’ as though they would have by way of Orientalist caricature, and thus this airport culture sustains.

The bathroom which the app says the Mike Kelley artwork is in is next to a KFC’s playground which too looks Kelley-esque.²⁵ Upon opening the door to these bathrooms I already see the cabin consuming the majority of the space between urinals, sinks, and toilet stalls. The drop-ceiling has been partially dismantled to make way for the cabin’s height, which pokes through the void in a way that one might imagine to be aesthetically pleasing but is in this case for whatever reason not so. One can walk into the cabin to find realistic simulation of all the various tools and books and detritus that I can remember seeing in FBI photos of the original. That six- year-old boy with The Core (2003) branded t-shirt is inside Kelley’s Kacyzinski’s Cabin.

²⁵ I suppose of one’s aesthetic operation taps into the world deeply and subtly enough it registers both as entirely distinct and ‘in-itself’ yet also importantly visible everywhere: Kafkaesque, Joycean, et al (though not ad infinitum, it’s a rare thing…one would think…).

“Fancy seeing you here!” He says.

“Yeah, I suppose your flight’s still not for a while either right?”

“We got a second delay. Myself and my wife that is. Fiancé I should say. I’m from a religious community in which marriage is arranged ten years prior to birth, for boys that is – sixteen years prior for girls.”

“Ok. Did you come here specifically to see this work or is your gate just nearby?”

“My gate’s nearby, but I did come here specifically.”

“Have you seen any of the other Mike Kelley stuff they have here? The insect urinal, the Lego, etc?”

“Why do you say et cetera when you already relayed the entire catalogue of works displayed by the airport?”²⁶

²⁶ I proceed henceforth to hate six-year-old boy (plural not singular, universal not particular).

“Verbal tick I suppose. Um-ing and Ar-ing.”

“I’ve not seen them no, you?”

“Yeah, I did see them, but I had no idea they were artworks. There wasn’t a didactic or anything, no indication that they were artworks.”

“There’s no didactic here either.”

“That’s consistent at least, I guess.”

I don’t much enjoy the company of this child and find the installation, in this state of mind, not suitable for extended contemplation, and so I leave without bidding the boy farewell, and nor do I look for a hidden didactic (simply for the sake of proving the six-year-old wrong).

I’m in no real mood for KFC but it’s right here and I haven’t eaten in while and well I guess KFC just sell sushi now so I can eat something little.

While eating KFC vegan tuna sushi I decide to return to the What’s on at the David Beckham International Airport section of the David Beckham International Airport App. It’s fairly smooth finding out what’s on nearby. An indoor beach ten minutes away entices me the most.

Line to enter the David Beckham International Airport Saltwater Indoor Beach is about ten-to-fifteen people long. Most of these people are already dressed for swimming with towels over the shoulders, and some, for some reason, are already completely wet. This part of the airport feels otherwise much like a shopping center, unrefurbished for so long that it feels anachronistic against even basically identical but marginally more polished versions of the same. This zone has maybe been left repressed due to the expense of the indoor beach, the entry to which is not just costly but ostentatious; lime-green marble portal aperture filled with tickets kiosk of bullet- proof glass non-hologram Elizabeth Holmes mans kiosk marble portal guarded on either side by palm trees (real or not, not sure).

It takes half an hour for me to reach the kiosk. The past person to speak to Elizabeth Holmes before I was that miserable brand of time-terrorist whose demands on service workers should be radically punished. I only now see the menu for entry:

1. Basic Entry: $10 USD blue pastel type
2. Premium Entry: $50 USD yellow pastel type
3. Platinum Entry: $700 USD green pastel type
4. Friends of the David Beckham International Airport Special Entry: $200 USD
purple pastel type
5. Champion Entry: -$3000 USD orange pastel type

I want to ask Elizabeth Holmes what each of these mean as they come with no description, but I realise that the line behind me is now nearly seventy-odd people long, and I don’t want to descend to hypocrisy by delaying their entry as the person in front of me did, so I simply ask her,

“What’s the difference between Basic Entry and Premium Entry, sorry?”

“Basic Entry just lets you swim in the beach, but it doesn’t give you access to the showers…which you’ll really want afterwards given it’s salt water. Only Platinum Entry gets you conditioner and shampoo though.”

“Ok, Premium Entry I guess.”

Past the kiosk one walks through a continuously lime-marble corridor for nearly ten minutes before arriving at the beach. It does look like a beach, except for the absence of waves, and the fact that the entire space is entombed by windowless white plasterboard with a rusticated base of mould. There is real sand here, not that I know what unreal sand is or what it looks like. I don’t know where all the people went though; there seems to be far fewer people here than were lined up in front of me.

There is perhaps a way-out that I’m not aware of.

Given that I’m not dressed for swimming I just sit on a beach chair by the water. Unlike those Mike Kelley works there is a didactic here on bronze plate attached to wooden stump in sand, with type larger enough that I can read from meters away while reclined:

“To Celebrate Gordon Ramsay’s unveiling of the David Beckham International Airport’s food court as a part of the Taylor Swift x Lil Gucci Hitler Vans World Airport Warped Tour, the David Beckham International Airport decided to create a 1:73 scale replica of ‘Streets Beach’ found in Southbank, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The David Beckham International Airport Gordon Ramsay Foodcourt Taylor Swift x Lil Gucci Hitler Vans World Airport Warped Tour Streets Beach sees audiences of up to nine hundred thousand for per annum.”²⁷

²⁷ Didactic perhaps not updated since Tayor Swift’s broad fall from grace as female face of ‘Judeo-Christian’ Supremacist Ethnostate ‘Fantasia’ founded by Steve Bannon and Jerry Seinfeld who reinvented the by-then-dead Barrack Obama as model Philosopher King of resurrected ‘Fantasian’ German Empire due to fact of his 2008- 2016 Presidency deporting far more migrants and aborting far fewer foetuses than the “shitlib” reign of Donald Trump.

From behind me I hear the words of a late-middle-aged-to-early-old-aged woman, “They’re cooking the books with those numbers.”

“The attendance?” I ask, turning around to guess her age as early-to-mid-fifties, whiteish-blonde hair, black sunglasses, white-buttoned shirt, ‘Anonymous’ tattoo on back of hand, small straw hat.

“By my calculations, this place sees between about seven and a half thousand to eleven thousand people per year. That’s even despite the Champion Entry fee.”

“What’s that?”

“You didn’t see it out there?”

“No, I felt rushed in getting in, so I didn’t ask what the more expensive prices meant.”

“Champion Entry Fee is negative three thousand, not three thousand. You get paid to enter. It’s a tax loophole. They make money off it. They just can’t let too many people take it, which is why the price board’s graphics are designed by Bush-Cheney- era CIA Visual Scientists.²⁸ They’ve made it so that exactly the right amount of people take the Champion Entry price; fee, rather, which ultimately means, after taxes, the airport makes way more money on this thing than if way more people came. Actually, give me a moment to do the calculations…I think I can prove that what they mean by “nine hundred thousand attendees per annum” is that they make the same amount of money through the Champion Entry tax-deduction loophole strategy than they would if they had nine hundred thousand attendees per year paying the Basic Entry fee.”

²⁸ Who would become equally famous for both de-bunking and reinforcing multiple competing 9/11 conspiracy theories.

The woman spends a few seconds counting the fingers on her right hand with the index finger of her left before saying,

“Yep. That’s what they mean. It’s a financialised definition of attendees with reference back to the Entry Menu.”

“So what do the middle prices get you, the five hundred or seven hundred or whatever ones?”

“Fuck knows. Stuff for the showers probably. Maybe a discount on food. Dagwood dogs here are $40 USD. By the way, you didn’t download this airport’s app did you?”

“Yeah, I did, why?”

“Well you shouldn’t have, because you’re now technically enlisted for the lowest grade reserve units of this country’s military. Everyone falls for it though, so it would have to be a pretty big war for them to contact you.”

“I never read the Terms and Conditions with these sorts of things.”

“No one does. In a Post-Literate world, those who read, rule. It’s one-eyed man time. I’m what’s now referred to as a T’s and C’s Cowboy. All I do is read Terms and Conditions to find loopholes and Easter Eggs, similar to the Champion Entry Fee for this beach. For example, this whole holiday I’m on I funded by finding the coordinates to late-Renaissance Hungarian Kingdom Highway Men treasure buried in the T’s and C’s of a magnet company I bulk-bought from. I’m also automatically paid 89k per year because I knew exactly which boxes to tick, and not tick, when I started my third account on Chess.Com.²⁹ Those cunts are currently trying to take me to court to end or reduce my salary, but I’ve never lost a court case through self- representation.”

²⁹ I immediately wonder whether I’ve played this woman. I suspect she would have beaten me.

“So where are you travelling to?”

“Here. This airport is my final destination. I got a penthouse on level nine hundred of the hotel system.”

“Oh yeah. I spent a bit of time there, right down the other end though.”

“Where are you off to after this?”

“I think it was France. But I can hardly remember anymore.”

“I’m actually reading a lot of French Tax Code at the moment in my spare time. I can probably give you some tips if you need any financial advise while you’re in the place.”

“I don’t think I’ll be there for long. I’ve actually been here, in the airport, now, for longer than I’m supposed to be in France for.”

“You might have a better time here than we’re you’re going. Have you been to ParisTown yet?”

“No, is that near here?”

“I think it’s directly below here. Saltwater drips down from here into their fake Seine, which is made of green Gatorade. ParisTown is a public-private partnership between the French Ministry of Culture and the Gatorade Corporation, which I think is owned by PepsiCo. It’s a much more authentic experience than you might imagine. Just don’t drink from the Seine. Not because it’s made out of Gatorade, but because it’s rumoured to be at least seven percent cocaine and tourist piss.”

“I’ve got plenty of time to kill so I might as well go there, I guess. Where else do you recommend going?”

“LilBerlin is worth a punt. I’d stay away from Burkina Faso Town until the unrest in real Burkina Faso ebbs. Little Dublin’s also decent. You’ve been to the Forest, right?”

“Yeah that I have been to.”

“There’s a performance there of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream which might be worthwhile. All the parts are played by the airport’s migrant workers and the mechanical spiders and bits of machinery that garden the forest. I’d check it out if it’s playing before you leave.”

“I’ll have a look through the app. I might as well keep using it if I’m already enlistened in the army, right?”

“I think you’ll find that they legally a greater and greater percentage of your inheritance every time you log on. Then again, I’m not sure there’s any other way to find out, unless like me you’re active in the forums of this airport’s cleaner’s union.”

“I thought unions were banned in this country?”

“That Chamalet expletive hasn’t gotten his way here yet, not quite, at least.”

The waveless saltwater beach gradually fills with swimmers generally younger than ten or older than seventy. I can’t see any lifeguards. There are palm trees in here too, which do look real. Many people are eating hot food from the stall next to the bathrooms. I grow sick of sitting to the sound of children’s joy.

Shower entries divided between entry divisions. Barcode on cardboard ticket from Elizabeth Holmes scans for Premium Entry gate.

Against all else at this version of ‘Streets Beach’, the bathrooms define acutest verisimilitude relative to real beaches. Floor tiles are uniformly wet and muddied with sand in way resembling slop left brewing in kitchen sink; the sound of walking is worse than the feeling, though the feeling does make me long for the staleness of the airport’s smoking room.
Showers emit salt water too. No conditioner nor shampoo anywhere as assumed but subconsciously hoped would be otherwise with spirit now considered revolting hubris.

I’ve never felt less comfortable after showering. Even before I reach the green marble exit portal my hair near dries and the salt seems to have crystalised such that my hair feels like helmet.

Beyond the exit portal (which appears no where near the beach’s entry) I’m immediately flagged by a young man, late-teenaged, early-twenties; not sure; Adidas- clad head-to-toe, believeably working-class as opposed to bourgeois appropriator, eye-contact plus head nods.

“You need a shower, right?”

“Ah, yes I do.” The culture is clear: equivalent of illegal-taxi carpark solicitation but for showering. “There’s a bathroom near here that I’ll take you too. Eighty Five US dollars for key to it.”

“Ok.”

We walk silently for what I’d say are less than five minutes. His stride is faster than mine, a couple of steps ahead. He makes two brief phone calls before we stop at a handle-less white door easily missable against the broader, mammoth white wall, not unlike those enclosing the beach. I tap my debit card onto his phone’s payment interface. He hands me a ring containing two keys which appear at a glance as identical. He gives no further instructions, returning to his phone. Beyond the bathroom door is a single toilet, sink, and mirror. On the toilet’s lid are conditioner and shampoo. An A4 sheet of paper sticky-taped to the wall above the toilet reads:

“FLUSH HEAD IN TOILET TO WET HAIR. APPLY CONDITIONER AND/OR SHAMPOO ONCE HAIR WET. FLUSH HEAD IN TOILET APPROXIMATELY THREE-TO-FIVE TIMES TO ENSURE PROPER RINSE. USE COMB ON SINK TO COMB HAIR AFTERWARDS. USE MIRROR TO JUDGE STATE OF HAIR.”

I’m sceptical that it will only take one flush to thoroughly wash my hair ready for product application but I’m wrong. It’s almost as if this toilet were designed specifically for showering. To get my money’s worth I flush five times, though I’d believe that after three my hair was likely ready. The sink’s mirror is slightly dirty though this proves no problem for quality comb job.

I exit and hand the Adidas man his keys. “Thanks.”

“All good. Do you need anything else?”

“What else do you offer?”

“If you don’t know I won’t say. Do you need directions anywhere? Don’t use the app.”

“Ah, do you know where ParisTown is?”

“Yeah that’s below here. There’s escalators down that way. They’re based off the escalators from the Charles de Gaulle Airport.”

“Does it cost to go down there?”

“Not to get in, but the place itself is expensive.”

I walk down blank white massive nothing for what feels like half an hour before seeing enormous mosaic’d flatscreen displays for ParisTown, indicating thankfully that I’m walking the right way. In between ParisTown adds are ones for Jordan Peterson’s opera on his conversion to Islam performing at LilBerlin’s Berghain.

Peterson pictured in Taqiyah with frown face.

A long line to enter the Charles de Gaulle Airport-styled escalators. Middle-aged American man in Hawaiian shirt and shorts turns head back to me to say,

“You that May 68 thing, that erupted down here, in ParisTown, months before over in France.”

“I wasn’t aware of that.”

“Oh yeah. ParisTown is legally French Territory you know. They sent the Foreign Legion down here to squash the uprising. It was a real blood bath.”

“I’ve never heard of that happening.”

“Oh yeah. A lot of revolutionary violence in airports these days. The modern era. The End of History. Have you seen Mohammed Peterson’s Opera yet at Berghain?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“It’s a space opera see. As the big man says, Earth now is just an airport for outerspace. That line really made me think.” “Have you been to ParisTown before?”

“Oh yeah. This is my third time in the city of love.”

“What do you recommend particularly?”

“The Beckett memorial gardens are worthwhile. I’d go to the 68 memorial too, especially if you’re unaware of the history. Word on the street is that the David Beckham International Airport ‘higher-ups’ aren’t too pleased about their being such a memorial within the airport complex, but given that it’s French territory, they can’t do much about it. A lot of fear here that the airport workers are being radicalised.

The Airport app randomly deducts money from workers’ accounts see. They claim the money goes towards a raffle but no one’s ever heard anything. Anyway, airport security feel an uprising might be a foot. Heads-up on that note too: you might be profiled by the airport’s security for even visiting the 68 memorial. So just keep an eye out. If anyone starts randomly talking to you, they might be airport security, like I am.”

The man pulls up his lose ill-fitting Hawaiian shirt to reveal a gun holstered to his belt, well-hidden.

“Ok, thanks. I might stick to the Beckett stuff.”

“Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre stuff good too. You know Woody Allen actually filmed Midnight in Paris (2011) down in ParisTown, not Paris.”

“I didn’t realise, but it makes sense.”

“It definitely made sense from a tax point of view. But you know all cities are fakes. Or at least, they’re all remakes of an original Imperial blueprint. So I suppose Paris is one of the only ‘original’ cities. Then again, all roads lead back to antiquity. We’ve been copying and pasting for a long time now, you know.”

A brown-haired teenage girl returns from elsewhere to stand by the man. “The bathrooms are fucking ages away.” She says to him.

“My daughter.” He tells me with affectionate, feigned embarrassment. “She just graduated highschool. Wants to study Dentistry.”

“Why do you keep saying stuff like this to random people!” The man reacts with mono-syllabic laugh before finishing with,

“Look if you run into any trouble in ParisTown just give me a text or call ok? Here’s my number.”

I thank the man, who’s name I learn is William, and save his number to my phone. I don’t know how my phone remains on thirteen percent battery after so many days now. I need to change it as soon as I’m through ParisTown customs. I’ll find a Starbucks or something and just sit for a while.

The wait to reach ParisTown’s border proves painfully slow. Phone battery down to four percent. I just need it to last past customs in case they ask for the PDF of my (lack of) criminal and war crimes record as asked for on flight to DBIA. The border to P’Town comes before not after the Charles de Gaulle Airport escallators. Makes sense I suppose.

Passport interface is entirely automated cept’ for one man’d booth titled ‘PLEASE LINE UP HERE IF AUTOMATED PASSPORT INTERFACE FAILS’.³⁰ As far as I can see, not one of the two hundred automated passport interfaces work, and so after dispersing from the line to engage the interface, everyone automatically re-enters 2nd line for analogue passport check. Hawaiian shirt man and daughter are out of sight by the time I reach the passport counter man’d by Franco-Mauritian guy in Mickey Mouse ears.

³⁰ Sign in German (with Swiss German onomatopoeia) in which I’m thankfully fluent. Police Drones hover round ready to translate German to English for Americans.

“What’s your reason for visiting France?”

“I’m just killing time while waiting at the airport.”

“That’s not an acceptable answer. You have to answer with one of the multiple choice answers from the automated passport machines.”

“What are the options?”

“I don’t remember all of them.”

“What’s one of the acceptable options?”

“’Leisure’ is probably closest to what you said.”

“Ok, leisure.”

“How long are you staying for?”

“Maybe just a few hours.”

“The line you just waited in lasts six hours. You should stay for a minimum of ten hours.”

“Ok.”

“You’re not an illegal immigrant or a religious freak are you?”

“No.”

The man stamps my passport then says, “Welcome to France.”

From passport control to Charles de Gaulle escalators, I pass through kitsch giant head of Charles de Gaulle with hat whose mouth (our portal of entry) opens and closes constantly like mini-golf gimmick.

Beyond the escalators ParisTown looks immediately little like Paris, but I do find a Starbucks in which to charge phone (for cost of twelve dollars USD, cost in ParisTown Euros unknown, Starbucks seems to play by its own rules).

Starbucks is full of people sleeping. Almost no one beyond baristas are awake and ubiquity of oversized luggage makes walk to counter hard.

Large iced coffee costs thirty ParisTown Euros. Conversion rate unknown. Framed portrait of Beckett on wall. Probably plastic, not glass. Frame plastic too, probably.

Left Bank soon found. Wouldn’t know the water was Gatorade unless informed by woman at beach whose name I did not learn. I’ve a bad habit of not learning names.

I’ll remember William though.

ParisTown is so far largely deserted. It has a significant homeless population, the origins of whom are unclear. Were they once in transit? Or does the national population seep into this place beyond those passing through DBIA? Artificial Parisian sky is quite believable. Similar construction to Seagaia Ocean Dome.³¹ Woody Allen with film crew filming Beckett biopic scene where Beckett is stabbed by pimp.³² Beckett actor unknown but pimp played by Alec Baldwin. Joyce actor too with crew though not present in scene if Allen abides by history. Joyce paid for hospital stay as far as I recall. Coincidentally also see sign for Beckett Memorial Gardens. Only a short walk away which does feel more so than any moment here so far truly Paris-like, though the memorial gardens are unexpected; an underground carpark filled with wheat, more like Anslem Kiefer than Beckett-reminder, but why make a memorial memetic, I suppose. Text received already from William,

³¹ Where Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt famously drowned on December 17th, 1967.

³² Year, 1938.

“Hiya sport! The daughter and I are just at a café by Place de la République if you’d care to join.”

His message came with a map pin that reveals the ParisTown Place de la République to be just three minutes from the Beckett Memorial Gardens, both of which are but five minutes from the ParisTown Notre-Dame.

Despite having just spent two hours in Starbucks I feel it’s impolite to not take on William’s offer. I find him sitting in the middle of forty outdoor seats beside his chronically disinterested daughter; his smile booms as I approach. “You getting around the place ok?”

“Yeah, not too bad I suppose. Some parts feel almost completely deserted. Then some like this aren’t too far off what I remember real Paris being like. Is it possible to live here?”

“Live? Well, yes. You can live in a hotel, which some people from the oil and renewables industries here live in. But ParisTown also houses a lot of the DBIA workers. The airport employees eight-million people you know. A good percent of those live permanently down here in ParisTown and its sister cities. The French government has a special visa that prevents them from transferring over to real France. Back in the day President Macron devised the strategy as a part of the (Third) Neoliberal Thirdway. He believed it created the best of both worlds: you get cheap-as-chips migrant labour, but you section them off into these external national entities like ParisTown. You get to tell the left-liberals that you’re letting in more and more people the developing world and global south, but you also get to tell the fascists that these people are permanently curtained-off in Airport enclaves.”

“So if you’re a French citizen living in ParisTown, can you vote in French elections?”

“You get to vote in ParisTown elections, certainly. Woody Allen is currently the mayor of ParisTown. It’s a fairly ceremonial role. Real policy is outsourced to the Gatorade Corporation. He does make a lot of films here though.”

“Yeah, I just saw one about Beckett on my way here. Saw the Beckett Memorial Gardens too. So, can I ask, as airport security, are you on-duty right now, or not?”

“Well this is supposed to be a holiday. But in my line of work, living here in the airport, I’m always on standby.”

“Is there much crime in ParisTown?”

“Not really on the street level, but you know I mean, Jeffrey Epstein used to have a place here.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. He had a place on the Avenue Foch. Real kitsch shithole if you ask me. There were paintings of Ronald McDonald on the walls. I had to search the place after he got taken down. No sign he was up to much there by way of sex crimes…” William’s daughter interrupts with “Dad!!!” without removing earphones.

“…but the forensic accountants did discover that he was exploiting the special taxation status that the DBIA gave him when he bought the Avenue Foch place. It wasn’t a big news story among all the more sensationalistic stuff discovered but I still got a line or two in a few national papers. You know I heard Larry David was playing Beckett in that new Allen movie.”

“Really? I saw the guy playing him, no resemblance. That was the stabbing scene though, so it would have been young Beckett.”

“No no he’s not playing young Beckett, that would be absurd. Larry David’s playing classic middle-aged-and-elderly Beckett.”

“Can he do a mild Irish accent?”

“Larry David actually is Irish. It’s a little-known fact. ‘Larry David’ in Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000-2087) is just a Leopold Bloom-esque Jewish character based off Joycean equivalence of Jews and Irish.”

“Oh, ok, I didn’t know that. So does ParisTown riot like Paris?”

“Well I mentioned to you that May 68 stuff already. But in terms of regular unrest, well, I don’t think the population here is big enough to make for optical equivalence between Parisian and ParisianTown class warfare. To understand the politics of ParisTown you really have to take a much more internationalist approach, one which takes into account the entire airport…”

William’s daughter interjects, “I’m off, dad.”

“You’re not going on one of those app dates are you?”

“Gross. Don’t ask me that.”

William turns back to me to say,

“There’s a particularly dodgy dating app that operates solely in the DBIA. It’s called ‘MerryGoRound’.³³ Hypersexual. Many a’ young woman’s has been murdered by encounters with it. Netflix True Crime series on the go right now. I have a few sound bites in it. Whenever we security people respond these days to a dead body in a hotel or motel – not just in ParisTown, anywhere in the airport – we know instinctively that it has something to do with that goddam app.”

³³ Have in fact heard of this App on FuckedChan. Apparent relation to Epstein too. App also active in Somali Pirate territories beloved by Libertarians. App apolitical, apparently.

William’s daughter is long gone. William continues,

“Say, if you ever see Mary out there on these airport streets with a young fella or fellas, you might want to give me a friendly text, especially if her company seem, less than trustworthy.”

“Yeah sure, I’ll keep an eye out.”

“I’m not a paranoid man by nature, but fatherhood, well, it’s a whole game of it’s own. Do you plan on raising children yourself?”

“I think I’d like to. But I’m so far off that point in my life. I mean, not in terms of average age or whatever. I’m probably close to it if not there yet. But I’ve got no money, and no sign of a person who I could imagine having kids with.”

“Well, you’ll be surprised my friend how quickly things change. And then when they change, they really change everything. Anyway, I’m probably going to head back to our hotel for some rest. I hope you don’t mind me leaving so quickly.”

“No, not at all. I’ll keep an eye out for your daughter while I’m walking around.”

Aimless walk through central ParisTown past French rap music shoots, police pat- downs of mixed-race teenage couples, William’s daughter on date with strange man, stray dogs prowling through garbage mounds, made by a garbage strike, perhaps.

Wander into ParisTown Belleville where many sex workers solicit on street. Why not on app I wonder. Wonder what their legal status is. I guess Australian Mahler mercenary was right; there is sex work in this airport, surely there are also brothels like he said. Is that where these women lead back to? Don’t know the culture, though they seem to profile me as indeed knowing the culture, as being ideal (rather archetypical) clientele. Militant speaks from megaphone in square to crowd of sixty- odd,

“…coordination against elites of airport special economic zones needs detailed communication between airport sub-zones…make sure you’re in chats which include intra-zone workers…learn fastest possible entries-to and escapes-from key airport spaces. During periods of protest and unrest we need to be able to band together, and quickly disband, from virtually any public position within the airport complex. Carry Charles de Gaulle masks. Be ready to change masks frequently. Learn camera dead zones. Change appearance in dead zones. Go to Chamelon Workshops. Maintain cardiovascular fitness. The David Beckham International Airport accounts for eleven percent of the planet’s GDP. They thought robots could do our jobs, but they can’t.

They’re fucked without us, and if we’re going down, we’re taking the planet with us. We’ll send the oligarchs back to the Stone Age, collapse their currencies, choke their trade networks. Who’ll fight for them when they’ve nothing to pay the mercenaries?”

I can see airport security approaching in plain-clothes but with riot shields batons. I see the Centre Pompidou beyond dessert shops ahead.