Herbert Luke
It's high time, I think, to look back a few more years and relate what I have been putting off in this narrative, that is, a brief history of the fall, and the first causes that brought on our revolution.
It was a horrible time for the human race, with desperation driving our train, disease the cargo, and death the terminal. I lived through that era in part because I distanced myself from its horror, playing the historian and watching its collapse like some distant spectator, remarking the numbers, not the names and faces of those falling all around me.
For some odd reason, which doctors never could explain, the plague didn’t touch me, or about one-in-a-hundred of my fellow beings. No matter how closely we ministered to our dying friends, no matter how tightly we clasped their scarecrow frames and even wished out loud to share their fate, we never fell sick. Perhaps it was an attitude, feeding upon a strange remoteness like my own, that bid us see this thing through to its end.
But I need to go back a few years before the plague to explain the birth of our religion; the first chance incidents that made a change in our collective mind and led us to smother civilization under a blanket of white.
The founder of our universal faith, our figurehead, father and even messiah, the first who perceived the holy light and showed us the straight and narrow path, was actually a very troubled and unhappy man in this world, a media mogul, who was gone before he had any certain knowledge of the revolution he would spark from his tomb.
His name was Herbert Luke. He was orphaned at an early age and had a hard and miserable childhood in some war-torn corner of Europe. But he was a clever young man and ravenously hungry to succeed. So he came to America, starting out as a simple technician, he rose in the jungle of television networks to control an empire of media, not only behind the scenes but across its front pages, combating and creating endless scandals. Like his papers he thrived upon public notice and dished up his personal life, his wives and affairs and his children to fuel the fire. He made himself the focus of public attention, in some ways like one wretched player described by a Roman historian, "king of Bithynia, and of all the human vices."
Yet he also created a myth about himself that seemed to help him transcend his troubles. He was a brilliant self-promoter, chameleon-like in character. One thing never changed amidst all the changes; he was always the center of attention. He ran through lifestyles faster than other people went through wardrobes and with as little effort. In early old age, with the greater part of his friends and family gone, but his own energies undiminished, he began giving away large slices of his empire to charities and funds of his own conceiving and became, among other things, a world-renowned patron of the arts.
But this passion too gave way to a new one when he conceived himself to be not the promoter but the creator of great art. In everything that he looked upon in life, long enough to consider, be it fair or foul, his one response was: "I could do a better job myself." So he took up oils and began painting huge canvases, which were unveiled as media events, usually with the opening of some new museum or public concourse.
His tireless shifting and disaffection with the present made each of these semi-annual events entirely different from the ones before and he had such a knack of tickling the world into a frenzy of pre-show curiosity that each new ‘revelation’, as he styled it, was met with more acclaim than the last.
The paid critics at these ceremonies were happy to concur and the lists of celebrities that attended them added such a spotlight of fame, that it took weeks for the fanfare to die down. Along with the myriad articles and posters and replicas and books, came the television shows and debates on the merits of the latest work, telling us how it bested all previous, a new miracle of art from the hand of a master, a true seer.
Some of his paintings weren’t bad. He could imitate the style of a Rembrandt or a Picasso fairly well, always adding a few elements of his own to make the piece unique. But I must say that after five or six of these ‘events’ I personally was beginning to grow tired of the shows, mostly glitter and parade. I would tune in briefly to see what strange, new school he’d adopted, spelling death to every other school for the time being. His health was now deteriorating, and he was growing more reclusive and strange in his ways, showing himself only at unveilings, which made them all the more anticipated for his rare appearance.
But he still limped on and was constantly shuffled about within a maze of well-guarded retreats. Only the thirst for fame, "that last infirmity of a noble mind," still burned strong within his weary limbs, and so his media-machine built up one last bubble of excitement. There would be one more show and the picture to be unveiled incomparably greater than any that had come before it, depicting, rumor had it, the agonies and the triumph of a man facing his own demise, the last word in art, its final resolution.
After months of hype the show didn't happen, or rather, it didn't happen according to plan. The date was set. The invitations were sent out. The hall was readied. On the long-awaited evening blocks around the World Trade Center were sealed off as the celebrities began to arrive and viewers the world over tuned in to a show that pre-empted everything else.
It had been Luke's habit at the last few shows to arrive late, just as the show commenced, keeping his whereabouts shrouded in secrecy from all but a few. The show began without him or the canvass, but with a dramatic entrance expected any moment. No one could forget the strange spectacle that was aired that night.
It was a prelude to an unforgettable week.
The hall filled to overflowing with the elite of the media and glamour world. An orchestra played and the cameras panned the large room repeatedly just to show how many superstars were there. But the curtains never parted. Minutes ticked by and the general mood changed slowly from good humor and patience and idle chatting to one of growing annoyance. Then worry set in, taxing the abilities of the announcers to keep talking. Finally, after two hours of waiting, the audience began to disperse. But even in that slow exodus something happened and suddenly people rushed to the doors, as if a bomb threat had been announced. There were just a few injuries, but the show ended on that freak note, disturbing and disappointing everyone.
Two days later came the first reports of a strange, new disease spreading out of Africa. The world, of course, was still preoccupied with the mysterious non-appearance of Herbert Luke. A search was undertaken and rumors of various plots and counter plots and cover-ups and even death ran rampant. But the decisive evidence of his body couldn’t be found. More rampant still was the disease, which quickly spread through six continents and put out of our minds, I thought forever, the story of Luke.
The march of human progress had been for the most part a steady, if not stately thing up to this point. Though the earth had been groaning ever more plaintively under its burden of billions, and local wars and eco-disasters came and went with each season, we seemed poised to enjoy a possibly glorious, albeit tumultuous, twenty-first century.
There was one recent problem of larger dimensions. But it touched our daily existence only in the incidental color of things. There were two prongs to our attack on it which created this change. The one sprang out of the other and they were constantly grouped together in the news and came to be called, half-jokingly, the ‘white plight’.
The slow but steady deterioration of the atmosphere finally demanded the concerted attention of scientists and world leaders in one great conference, but not before it was far gone. Already large numbers of animals near the poles had gone blind, while skin cancers and miscarriages were on a sharp increase. But worst of all the world's food production was hurt, blighted by radiation, and now unable to support our ever-growing numbers.
We knew that the ozone layer was irreversibly damaged for a time. If we stopped the pollution it would still take nature generations to restore it. So scientists came up with defences, not cures to the problem. They would fortify us and our crops against the radiation through chemistry and genetic engineering.
Amazing breakthroughs had been occurring in all fields recently. A more hardy replacement for chlorophyll, called ‘glaucophyll’ was developed for plants, and introduced with surprising efficiency. But its effects were marginal. For humans an eye drop was created that glazed the eye a glassy white, not impairing vision yet protecting it from damage, and at the same time sunscreens were developed that shielded our skins. But all these schemes were still too awkward and incomplete to satisfy us.
So another congress of scientists came up with the plan of seeding the skies with a permanent layer of high-altitude clouds, designed in part out of molecules related to plastics that would last decades. Our air forces were deployed and the plan put into effect. Though it worked to thin out the radiation reaching us, turning our skies a universal white, they found that it couldn’t completely protect the fragile plant world.
And so huge glasshouses were built at an even greater cost than all the previous measures combined. But our food supply was ensured. The only change was actually a healthy one. Meat became a luxury. We could no longer support an inefficient cattle industry, as a large portion of our herds had already succumbed to blindness and sterility. We ate meat substitutes and used dyes to color our white vegetables their former hues. Our dished-up meals still looked the same as they had in simpler times and still tasted the same and we told ourselves with confidence that nothing had changed.
And nothing really had changed yet in the basic order of things. Science and industry still progressed and seemed to be keeping pace in solving the problems they themselves created. The Third World was still in a dismal state, with starvation and wars and waste and disease. But somehow we seemed to be making progress even here. A new, world consciousness was surfacing with our global media. People around the world watched the very same broadcasts, simultaneously translated by computers into twenty languages. Old racial and cultural prejudices were breaking down. A close-knit global family was being formed.
With the advent of the new sunscreens which turned the skin white for weeks on end, a sort of white craze developed. Race and color were declared a thing of the past. We spent long hours outdoors again and a strong sense of liberation and brotherhood was felt. It became a fad at this time, which everyone could afford, to go about completely dressed in white. The young all sported Arabian-style robes and headgear, which they called the ‘sheik’ look.
Because half the world had been necessarily turned white, I suppose it was one of those human quirks to mimic this turn the rest of it white. All-white furniture and houses and cars became the fashion. It was a sort of non-religious precursor to the ‘fad’ that followed, like an innocent, smiling babe we fondled and nurtured, soon to grow up into a monster dictator, with the same dire results for mankind, only this time victorious.
As could be expected the paint manufacturers were quick to promote such a lucrative rage, and it was at this time that one of the largest in the industry came up with the ‘millennium’ formula. This was the cutting edge in paint technology, a paint that flowed and covered far more smoothly than any other, lasting eternities, and of such a radically new chemistry that it could claim to be environmentally safe and completely non-toxic.
I well remember seeing the billboards that went up everywhere, with the lovely, naked, jewelry-decked figure of a popular singer of the day, her slender, white body almost blending in with the plush, white couch on which she lay, holding to her lips a glass of this miraculous liquid as if it were milk and with the caption: "So safe, you can drink it."
Unfortunately, hundreds of millions of gallons of this paint were produced and stored away at the crucial moment. If was as if an unlucky conspiracy of circumstances were forming to point our way down the path that led to our present, perfect sterility.
