The Master Blaster by P.F. Kluge

Author:P.F. Kluge [KLUGE, P.F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781468300031
Publisher: ABRAMS, Inc. (Ignition)
Published: 2012-02-29T23:00:00+00:00

IV

The Master Blaster

Nero fiddled while Rome burned, The Master Blaster learned in school, though he couldn’t say which course it came from. Civics? Music? Latin? He also had no idea who set the fire. It was just an image, and lately—lately in his tenure in this little corner of the American empire—he’d been wondering, what was Nero’s music? What was his taste, his ability? Did he saw away like a Nashville fiddler, a sprightly dance or reel? A plangent, mournful country Western loser song? Were his strokes more classical? A poignant adagio? What if he couldn’t play at all, screeching unbearably, torturing the instrument, the air, his ears?

Nero could fiddle on Saipan. Not everyone grasped it yet, but a lesson was staring the island in the face. You could see it in the stunned puzzlement of locals, in newspapers and lawsuits, in the hangdog, hung-over rhetoric of politicians, in the end-of-days cults that grew up around casino gambling and hopes for new American military bases.

As for his site, The Master Blaster couldn’t escape a sense of endings for himself as well. The time for words had passed. The next phase, the last phase, was photos. Every week he’d offer a portrait of this or that human enterprise on Saipan: prehistoric pillars, decrepit government buildings, hospitals and jails, abandoned factories and apartment buildings, an American radar station—part of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative—that lay rusted and decrepit on a Marpi ridge. Some of his photos would show well-known places, along main roads; others would be of places buried deep in the boondocks, out of sight, off the map and on an island with a short memory, forgotten. He’d already taken photographs—important to do that before the series began. Later, it would be dangerous. And oh, would they be after him! Every week they’d confront another example of expedience and greed, of crimes committed against the island that they claimed to love. Not just the photo, but the caption below, a kind of tombstone, with date of birth, date of death, names of landowner, investor, manager, nature of business, cost of construction, cause of death, current value, if any. No telling where it would end, it might not end at all.

The Master Blaster arose from his computer and stepped outside. First the sip of cognac, then the first puff of a cigar. What a wonderful partnership. Hard for him to imagine the one without the other. His new project excited him, he had to admit. Better than the mix of investigation and opinion he’d offered for years. It was a kind of album, a series of postcards, an exhibition of what had become of the island, what confronted the people who claimed to love it. We love this island, this small, precious place! He’d heard it again and again out of the mouths of people who were born here, from wide-eyed school children to hardened politicians. He heard it from visitors, from people just off the plane. But somewhere along the line, what had started as a profession of love, pure love, mutated into a sales pitch.

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