The Royal Scam
Stephen-Paul Martin
It begins with seven grim young men walking in slow motion toward the camera, ominous hard rock guitar churning in the background. A snarling voice-over declares, “This is the Black Hand Gang. Gavrilo Princip is their leader, a trained assassin.” The actor playing Princip is frowning fiercely, a face that could win against death in a staring contest. The camera shifts to another scowling member of the gang, and the growling voice returns: “Nedjo Cabrinovic is a suicide bomber.” The guitar keeps getting louder, driven by furious drums and crashing cymbals.
Jeff is quickly annoyed by the theatrical presentation. He’s ready to shut off his DVD player and do something else, even though he’s been looking forward to seeing this documentary for several weeks, ever since he re-read All Quiet on the Western Front, which led him to further reading about the causes of World War I. He first encountered the book in high school, when a history teacher made him read it as a punishment for misbehaving in class. Back then he hated reading, but the book made a strong impression on him, leaving him with an ongoing sense of horror about the so-called Great War, all the slaughter and destruction, resolved in such misguided ways that an even greater war broke out only twenty years later. But he still didn’t understand what made it all happen, even after examining the standard explanations. So he thought it might help to watch a BBC documentary on the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, which is always cited as the event that triggered the First World War.
The film has gotten rave reviews. But Jeffhasdoneenoughreading to know that crucial distortions have already been presented, just in the first ninety seconds. There was no organized gang for Gavrilo Princip to lead. The Black Hand, a secret Serbian terrorist organization, was only indirectly involved in the assassination, and at the last minute may have tried to prevent it. Princip was not a trained assassin. He was a high school student with nothing more than a few informal lessons in shooting a gun. His close friend Nedjo Cabrinovic didn’t think of himself as a suicide bomber. He’d probably never even heard the term, which wasn’t in common use at the time. Before he got involved in the assassination plot, he’d never touched or even seen a bomb. His inexperience became obvious when he tried to kill the Archduke. He threw his bomb so awkwardly that he missed his target at point blank range. The bomb went off in back of the heir apparent’s open car, leaving him uninjured. Cabrinovic was no more of a trained assassin than Princip was. Yet the urgent narrating voice wants a menacing feeling, the tension and suspense of a prime time cop show. Jeff has already seen enough to decide that what he’s watching is not a documentary but a schlockumentary, a reduction of history to kitsch entertainment.
He ejects the DVD and thinks about throwing it out the window. He’s always wanted to throw something out a window in disgust. He thinks it would make him look forceful, like someone willing to take a decisive action, someone ruled by passion and conviction. But he lives on the tenth floor, on a busy street in Brooklyn Heights, and he worries that the disk might land on someone’s head, so he does the civilized thing and carefully puts it back in its case. Then he finishes off the bowl of buttered popcorn in his lap and goes to the kitchen to make more. He loves the sound of popcorn popping, and he listens to it with anticipation, gazing out the window at the nearly completed One World Trade Center, shining in the late morning light across the river. He tries not to imagine hijacked planes attacking it, but he knows that all over the world there have to be angry people who see the new building as an obvious target, a resurrected symbol of U.S. global domination. He was on the Brooklyn Bridge on 9/11 when the towers collapsed. He remembers the terrible panic and confusion, the feeling that nothing would ever be safe again. Tall buildings partially block his view of the new tower, and he remembers a realtor telling him that to get a full view he’d have to pay twice as much. But even if money weren’t an issue, he’d want the obstructions. He doesn’t want a clear view if 9/11 happens again.
He wolfs down the new batch of popcorn, licks his greasy fingers one by one, then goes back to his bedroom and sits at his computer. But he doesn’t want to think about the deadlines he ought to be meeting. His job has always been a source of confusion. Though he hates the way mass advertising has turned the world into a battlefield of images, he’s done promotional work for more than thirty years, and he’s good at what he does. Over the past ten years he’s developed his own business. He can do almost all of his work from his own apartment, and he makes a decent living. Yet he spends lots of time feeling guilty, trying to convince himself that the online publicity campaigns he directs aren’t really hardcore parts of the capitalist process. After all, he specializes in promoting activist groups concerned with animal rights and the environment. With clients he respects he keeps his fees as low as he can. Over the past few years he’s been in demand, and he’s got projects that he should be completing over the next few days. But the BBC schlockumentary has put him in a bad mood, so he calls his girlfriend Betty and arranges to visit her.
They’ve been sleeping with each other for the past six months, and they’re still at the stage in their relationship Jeff likes best. They’re not hating each other yet. Betty is twenty years younger than Jeff, so he tries to be realistic about their so-called future, knowing that she’s attractive enough to be with almost any man she wants. Even though she sometimes complains that she’s “past her prime” and “not what she used to be,” she takes good care of herself, dresses well, and knows how to project a sense of physical confidence, something Jeff has never learned to do.
When Jeff arrives, Betty’s playing with her computer. He’s not surprised, since Betty directs one of Apple’s tech support teams and knows things about computers that very few people know. Right now she’s making a picture of a Steely Dan album take different shapes: a triangle, an octagon, a circle, two overlapping circles, a circle within a circle. Then she makes it three-dimensional. The illusion of depth looks like it’s become real depth.
Jeff says: Is that The Royal Scam on your computer? It’s always been my favorite Steely Dan album. But it looks like it’s become a physical space, like I could walk right into it and live there, if I were small enough.
Betty smiles, takes his hand and says: You can, and size won’t be an issue. Just sit down and try it. I was in there a few minutes ago.
She seats him in what looks like a brand new computer chair. He gives her a hesitant look, but she returns it with a “trust me” smile and he decides to do what she wants.
He says: Is this like a virtual reality set-up?
She says: Beyond that. You’ll see.
She types a complicated sequence of commands and the screen turns bright orange. A pulsing dot in the center quickly grows to become a sky blue sun, smiling with sharp teeth. The chair feels alive, like it’s giving him a subtle massage. He can see a small version of himself, sitting in the chair, gazing back at him from the dark depth of the sun’s opening mouth. There’s a soft pop and the smell of something burning, a brief blurring of his vision, and then he’s in the world of the Steely Dan album cover, where the tops of skyscrapers have become the snarling heads of various beasts, menacing a homeless man sleeping on a park bench. The street feels firm beneath Jeff’s feet, and he can move and breathe normally. He walks for maybe ten minutes, down at least ten streets, but no matter how many corners he turns he always ends up facing the same park bench where the homeless man is sleeping. He can’t avoid the sharp smell of the man’s battered shoes and torn gray coat. What’s happening is not a mental fantasy. Jeff is physically there. The tops of the buildings are snarling loudly. Huge fangs flash in three-dimensional sunlight. Snapping jaws are frothing. Bestial heads twist and dart and weave and dart again, cutting the air into bite size pieces. In the sky above their heads Jeff sees a phrase, The Royal Scam, floating as if a plane wrote it there as an advertising gimmick. The words remind him that he’s in a Steely Dan album cover, and then he’s moving backwards through an orange transparent membrane. He’s back in Betty’s computer chair. The massage is over.
She takes his hand and says: So, how was it?
For a few seconds, Jeff isn’t sure where he is or who she is. He wants to say cool or wow, but he’s always thought such words were idiotic, even when they’re used by intelligent people. He finally says: I’m not sure what to say. The more I walked around, the more the space seemed real. I could move straight ahead, side to side or backwards. I could hear my shoes on the pavement. I could see my reflection in the shopfronts. There was air I could breathe and the sun felt warm on my skin. There were shadows and breezes. There were dead leaves getting blown down the streets. There were shouts and honking horns and conversations. All the basic things were in place. But I couldn’t quite accept what was happening.
She smiles: That’s what it was like for me too. It seemed totally real, like any other place I’ve been. But I couldn’t get myself to accept that I was there, even though I designed the thing and knew what to expect, at least theoretically. I think it might take some getting used to.
Jeff says: How did you pull me out of there?
She nods at the keyboard: By pressing command keys.
He shakes his head: But you were in there earlier. How did you get out? Who pressed the command keys?
She says: I did. I took the keyboard with me.
He laughs: Very clever. But what would have happened if you’d forgotten it.
She shrugs: I guess I would have been stuck in that Royal Scam space forever.
He says: What would you have eaten?
She looks surprised: You didn’t notice there were restaurants open on some of the streets? I had Eggs Benedict in an outdoor café.
He says: Real food?
She nods: It was delicious. It had some kind of incredible seasoning on it, something I’ve never tasted before. But the snarling heads were getting on my nerves—it must have bothered you too, all that growling and snapping and frothing—so I picked up my plate and my coffee cup and finished the meal inside.
He says: Inside?
She says: Sure. You should have gone inside. The buildings had interiors. Even though you can’t see interiors on the album cover, they’re implied. When you look at the album, the skyscrapers seem real enough to lead your imagination to assume the existence of inner spaces, even though you can’t see them and probably don’t actually picture them strongly enough to make a visual impression, but—
He says: Was there a waiter? Who was he?
She shrugs: There was, but I don’t know who he was. Just a guy who worked there. Probably an out-of-work soap opera actor. Cute guy!
Jeff laughs nervously: You were attracted to him?
Betty shrugs again: Physically, yes. And he was definitely flirting with me. I left him a really nice tip. But he wasn’t my type. He was dumb as hell, and you know I can’t stand stupid men.
Jeff makes a face and says: I’m glad I’m smart enough for you! She smiles and says: Just barely.
He says: But since you’re such a genius, I’m wondering if you’ve had any brilliant thoughts about what you’re going to do with this innovation you’ve come up with. Aren’t there corporations that would give you lots of money for it?
Betty: No doubt. I’m sure I could get a nice deal with Apple. But I don’t even want to think about the horrible things that would happen if Apple had control of this program. And I’m pretty sure they already know about it.
Jeff says: How would they know?
Betty says: If you own an Apple computer, they know what you’ve got, no matter what they say about respecting your privacy. I could design a special firewall, but then I’d start catching shit from the NSA. They don’t appreciate the kinds of barriers I’d probably come up with.
Jeff says: The National Security Agency? They’re watching your computer? You’re not just being paranoid?
She says: I wish I were. But I’ve set up my computer so I can tell when I’m being watched, and they’ve been on my tail for at least a year, along with the CIA and the usual market research groups. Something like The Royal Scam is bound to make them all watch me even more closely. By the way, that’s what I’m calling it: The Royal Scam.
Jeff says: Even though there might be copyright issues? Wouldn’t something like Brave New Worlds work better? If you used that name, you probably couldn’t get sued, since Aldous Huxley borrowed the phrase from Shakespeare.
Betty says: But the worlds The Royal Scam can generate aren’t really new. They’re derived from existing images. I can see your point about legal issues, but I want a more contemporary point of reference, in case I decide to market the thing on my own, and—
Jeff says: Steely Dan isn’t really contemporary. Or at least, The Royal Scam isn’t. It came out in 1976, and even though they put out two new albums in the early twenty-first century, most people think of them as a seventies group, so I don’t think—
Betty makes a face and says: Whatever. Look, I don’t feel like arguing. We’ve never had an argument before, and there’s no reason to start now. I can easily think of better ways to spend our time.
He laughs: I can too.
They tear off each other’s clothes so quickly that they don’t have time to get to Betty’s bedroom. It’s not the first time they’ve done it on her living room floor. They’ve always been hot for each other. But it’s more complex than it looks. Jeff suspects that she’s imagining someone else the whole time, and he doesn’t mind because he’s fantasizing too, though the other woman is often Betty, or rather a modified version of Betty, doing sexy things in his mind, though not exactly the same sexy things that the flesh-and-blood Betty is doing. Jeff grew up in the sixties, back when people were supposed to be doing it in the road and deeply in touch with their bodies, which led him to think that erotic pleasure was meant to be mainly physical, not mental. So he often feels wrong about his tendency to fantasize while fucking, using physical contact as a take-off point for a theater of images. He’s pleased that his sex with Betty would pass for good sex in a movie. But he can’t help telling himself that it’s also good sex in quotation marks, and he figures that Betty probably feels the same way, even if she always looks like she’s fully caught up in the passion.
When they finish, they fall half-asleep in each other’s arms, relaxing deeply, one of Jeff’s favorite things about their sex life, the post-orgasmic tranquility, his equivalent of a mystical trance. He never felt so calm with previous lovers. With most of them, he wanted to get up and leave as quickly as possible. But now on Betty’s hardwood floor there’s nowhere else he’d rather be, even without the comfort of a mattress.
It’s clouding up outside, but then there’s a burst of sunlight through the dusty Venetian blinds, making bars of light and shade on a landscape painting framed above Betty’s computer, a pastoral scene with a barn, cows in a fenced pasture, a dirt road curving past a windmill into a forest. He’s looked at it many times before without thinking much about it, except to assume that since it looks like a Dutch landscape, it’s got to be a copy and not an original. After all, the real thing would be worth much more than Betty could afford, and would no doubt be in a famous museum, giving people observing it the privileged feeling of being in the presence of a certified masterpiece. But now he sees that it’s not a normal reproduction. There’s a flying saucer above the windmill, caught in the dusty light coming in through the window. He quickly decides that the painting is a joke, like Duchamp’s Mona Lisa with a mustache, something that would fit Betty’s personality better than a real Dutch landscape would. But he’s surprised that he never noticed the flying saucer before.
He wants to ask her about it, but she’s fallen asleep and his gentle attempts to wake her up have no effect. He gets up and takes a closer look at the painting. He thinks he can hear the flying saucer humming. It might even be spinning, preparing to fly out the window, spreading terror throughout the city. Maybe it would be too small to scare anyone, but then people might think it was a drone attack of some kind, releasing tiny weapons of mass destruction, terrorism tailor-made for the second decade of the twenty-first century.
He tries again to shake Betty awake, this time not so gently. She tells him in a groggy voice to leave her the fuck alone, and she’s been nasty in the past when he’s forced her to wake up. So he leaves her a nice note signed with smiling faces, drives home and eats more popcorn, then feels bloated. He hates feeling bloated. It makes him want to swear off popcorn forever, but he’s sworn it off many times in the past and he knows it won’t help to do it again. He looks outside at the cool sky filled with clouds, his favorite weather, and decides that it’s a good time for a walk. He lives in a great neighborhood for walks, tree-lined streets and nineteenth- century brownstones. He knows each block by heart, the carved stone doorways and bay windows. But as soon as he steps outside, his body starts tingling, like he’s in Betty’s vibrating chair, a Royal Scam version of Brooklyn Heights, a space that only seems to exist, something someone else can change or destroy by pushing buttons. He feels unsafe, like he did on the Brooklyn Bridge when the towers collapsed. He can still feel panic spreading all over his body. After fifteen minutes he ends his walk, goes home and wants more popcorn, but the bloated feeling hasn’t quite gone away. He starts to scan the titles on his floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. But he already knows that he doesn’t want to turn pages filled with language.
He’s not sure what to do, so he tries the Princip DVD again. He’s not surprised that it continues to annoy him, this time by claiming that a Black Hand official nicknamed Apis was responsible for planning the assassination, without mentioning that Apis was legally exonerated a few decades later, once classified Serbian documents were made public. The voice-over says that Apis recruited Princip and trained him as an assassin, though all the accounts Jeff has read clearly indicate that Princip had no direct contact with Apis. Princip got in touch with Black Hand agents not because they were trying to recruit him, but because he needed weapons to carry out plans he and Cabrinovic had developed on their own. The documentary shows Apis wearing a fez in a darkened room in Belgrade, waiting for information from Sarajevo, while the hard rock soundtrack starts up again, quiet at first, getting louder and louder, reaching the point where it sounds like someone has set a guitar on fire. Jeff knows that this music is meant to trigger an emotional reaction and get viewers to suspend their critical intelligence. He’s been around the advertising world for too many years to miss the crude manipulation techniques. He quickly concludes that the image of a shadowy mastermind secretly directing grim and fanatical hit men is an attempt by the director (who made the film in 2003) to suggest similarities between Apis and Osama bin Laden, as if to say that all terrorist actions are equally sinister and delusional, though anyone thinking carefully would see obvious differences between the Black Hand and Al- Qaeda, and even more obvious differences between Gavrilo Princip’s pistol and the hijacked planes of 9/11, not to mention the radically different historical situations.
On trial Princip testified that Apis and the Black Hand weren’t directly involved with the assassination, had nothing to do with planning it, that he and the rest of his “gang” were acting on their own. The other assassins agreed with this, and two of them explained that they’d gotten involved in the plot only two days before the shooting, had no contact with the Black Hand, and weren’t even sure what the Black Hand was. None of this is mentioned in the BBC film. Jeff assumes that a few informed viewers will be disturbed by the crucial omissions and distortions. But most viewers won’t notice anything. For millions of people, the schlock version will become the definitive version. He wonders how much of what people call historical knowledge is really kitsch entertainment.
Again he pops the disk out of the DVD player and tries to get beyond the stick figure version of Princip he’s been watching. He imagines the assassin waking up in a borrowed little room on the morning of June 28, trying to fully grasp what he’s about to do. He sees Princip clearly, looking tired and hungry, oppressed by the summer sunlight forcing its way through dusty Venetian blinds. Princip stares at the political pamphlets and books on the floor beside his bed. He’s read them all carefully, some of them several times, and they’ve had a crucial impact on his thinking. Without them, he wouldn’t be where he is now. He takes his gun from the Gladstone bag beneath his bed and imagines pulling the trigger.
Three days before, he’d been at the city market when the Archduke made a surprise visit, shopping with his wife Sophie and members of their royal entourage. The two men looked at each other, looked away, then looked back and stared at each other. Though the crown prince couldn’t have known who he was looking at, Princip could sense that the great man was uneasy with the moment, as if he knew that murder was in the air. Jeff puts the moment on mental freeze frame, making the contrast as stark as possible: a man without a single room to call his own facing a man with a mansion in Vienna and two famous country palaces. Princip wants to pull out his gun and accomplish his mission, but the Archduke is surrounded by people in uniform, and Princip knows that if he gets caught now the whole plot might be exposed. Then he remembers that his gun is back in his room beneath his bed, since he had no way of knowing that he’d be meeting the Archduke today. The great man’s visit to the market square wasn’t on the posted schedule. So Princip has to content himself with the pleasure of winning a staring contest, using his eyes to induce a cold sweat and make a famous person squirm. It’s a look Princip has mastered over the years. He’s been told more than once that he’s got a talent for making others uneasy.
He still can’t believe that the Archduke came to Sarajevo despite the clear warnings he received back in Vienna. Surely he suspects that people are tracking him with weapons, that he’s being hunted. Princip has heard stories about the heir apparent’s hunting techniques. He likes to shoot animals but doesn’t do the hunting himself. Rather, his servants function as beaters to drive the animals toward his waiting gun, or they pen the animals in enclosures where Franz Ferdinand can shoot them one by one. Jeff likes the idea that when Princip shoots the crown prince he’ll be avenging helpless animals. He wonders what Princip’s reaction would be if he saw a now-widely-circulated photograph of the Archduke, posing in his uniform with all his decorations, holding a rifle with heaps of dead deer at his feet. The great man has a victorious look on his face, as if he’s accomplished something of monumental significance. The image makes Jeff so mad that he wants to use The Royal Scam to enter the picture, confront the crown prince and beat the shit out of him.
But Jeff isn’t the type of guy who beats the shit out of people, even in moments of extreme rage. He isn’t even the type who uses brutally clever language to shoot down people who piss him off. He quickly feels silly about the idea of going back in time to confront Prince Ferdinand, since he probably wouldn’t know what to say, and the heir apparent would quickly dismiss him with the regal disdain he was known for. Still, the time-travel idea makes him wonder if The Royal Scam could be used to arrange a direct meeting with Princip. He imagines what Princip would think if someone from the twenty-first century suddenly stopped him on the street and offered to buy him a sandwich. Jeff is realistic enough to suspect that they wouldn’t have much to talk about. After all, he’s forty years older than Princip was at the time, and he can’t imagine himself as a martyr, sacrificing himself to a cause or belief the way Princip did. But there’s a younger version of Jeff that sometimes governs what he does and thinks, and it’s this part of him that’s eager to meet history’s most infamous teenager. All Jeff needs is a good picture of the assassin. Then he can ask Betty to scan it into her computer and run the Royal Scam.
When he calls Betty’s cell, he gets her voice mail, so he decides to show up unannounced, which turns out to be a mistake. He arrives to the sounds of intense sex on the other side of her door. He feels betrayed, then wonders if he’s been going out with her long enough to justify the feeling. They haven’t established the rules of their relationship—in fact, they’ve both been clear that they don’t want rules—but Jeff still feels funny about Betty fucking someone else only a few hours after having good sex or least “good sex” with him. He decides to break down the door, something he’s never done before, and though he’s seen it many times in movies, it’s more difficult than it looks on screen. He smashes into Betty’s old wooden door several times before giving up. Then it occurs to him that the door might not be locked, and sure enough, when he turns the knob the door opens with no resistance, and he walks in feeling sheepish in addition to feeling betrayed, only to find the apartment empty and a porno film playing on Betty’s computer.
At first he’s glad that she isn’t cheating on him. But when he looks closely at the screen he sees that Betty is there in the film, in bed with another woman, both of them ecstatic in a beautifully furnished room with an unobstructed view of the One World tower. He doesn’t know how to enter the film through the screen without Betty at the keyboard, and he’s even less clear about whether it still makes sense to accuse her of cheating on him, since technically she’s in bed with an image and not a real person. In fact, as he looks more closely, he decides that the other woman looks very much like Betty, only ten years younger. Is it possible that Betty is in bed with a younger version of herself? Could she really be so stuck on herself, so stuck in her past? Or is he just misreading what’s happening on the screen?
There’s no keyboard in front of her computer. He looks closely at the screen, and he sees that she’s taken the keyboard with her into the room of passion. It’s on the glass coffee table across from the four-poster bed. He concludes that Betty’s lover is definitely Betty at an earlier stage of her life, wearing a spiked leather collar and nothing else. It’s all too much for him, so he decides to go home and try to hook up with her later.
Back in his apartment, he’s again not sure what to do with himself. He tries to return to the promotional projects he avoided earlier, but when he sits down at his computer and starts typing, the screen goes blank. He types in several commands but nothing happens. He tries the restart button but nothing happens. Then a hairy hand slides up into the screen and gives him the finger. It stays there motionless, even after he shuts off the computer. He was hoping to avoid calling Betty until he calmed down, but now he’s dialing her number, since she’s the one he relies on to solve his computer problems. In fact, they initially met when she fixed his computer for him at the public library.
Betty answers the phone this time and tells him to come right over with his laptop, but Jeff decides to bring more than that. He finds a photo of Princip in a book he’s been reading, a shot taken in Belgrade in the spring of 1914, a few months before the shooting. Jeff cuts out the picture and puts it unfolded into a large manilla envelope. He’s careful to protect the photo with pieces of cardboard. He doesn’t want it to be damaged in any way, since he’s nervous about being transported into a torn, creased, or wrinkled world.
But on his way back to Betty’s apartment, the world already feels creased and wrinkled, especially since the windows of his 1995 Honda Civic haven’t been cleaned in a long time. Then one of the streets he normally takes to Betty’s neighborhood looks too congested. It’s been taken over by a film production team, with cameras and cables and trucks and huge glaring lights and reflecting screens, so he turns off onto a side street, figuring he can easily recalculate his route. But after making several turns he feels lost. He stops and goes back a few blocks, thinks that he sees a street he should have taken, turns and drives a few blocks, then decides again that he’s on the wrong street. He does a three-point turn. Soon he comes back to the street where the movie people are working. It’s even more filled with cameras and lights and production trucks than it was before. He goes back down the same side street he took a few minutes ago. But the sun has broken through the clouds, and it’s making the buildings look different, much older than they looked before, like they’re on a page that’s been torn and taped back together, and again it feels like he’s on the wrong street.
He’s not the kind of person who gets lost. He’s always laughed at people who need the GPS on their phones to tell them where to go. He tells himself that there must have been a Twilight Zone episode in which someone kept getting lost on familiar streets and never found his way back. Then he remembers Days That Shook the World, the schlock documentary, which mentioned only in passing what other sources describe as a crucial mistake, the most fateful wrong turn in Western history. Right after Nedjo Cabrinovic, the so-called suicide bomber, failed to kill the Archduke, the Austrian generals decided that the situation was too dangerous, that the royal motorcade should change its scheduled course, taking streets that would get them out of Sarajevo as quickly as possible, while preserving the appearance of calmly making a royal tour. But apparently no one told the Archduke’s driver, who followed the original route, turning down a street named after the Archduke’s uncle, the Hapsburg emperor, Franz Joseph. The mistake was quickly noticed and the driver was told to put the car in reverse, but the gears jammed when he tried to back up. The car stalled right in front of a café where Gavrilo Princip was waiting, eating a sandwich, hoping that the heir apparent would pretend to be unfazed by Cabrinovic’s bomb and follow the original plan, published in the papers a few days before. The crown prince was suddenly an easy target.
Jeff remembers laughing in disbelief when he first encountered the story. How could World War I, a major turning point in Western history, have been the result of a wrong turn, a simple mistake? How could supposedly trained and competent people, high ranking military men accustomed to giving orders, forget to tell their driver where to go? Jeff is briefly annoyed that such a crucial part of the assassination narrative was only mentioned briefly in the BBC presentation, probably because a more careful examination would have disrupted the show’s dramatic momentum, making history seem more like a slapstick comedy than a coherent narrative. Jeff thinks of a class he took at UC Berkeley, a seminar that might have been called “The History of Mistakes,” or “The Mistakes of History” or “The Accidents of History.” He can’t recall exactly. But now he remembers a class session focused on the wrong turn in Sarajevo. He can almost hear the professor talking, a grim smile on his bearded face, a class of long-haired students laughing in stoned horror. He wants to go back in time and sit through the class all over again, recapture it like an hour-long YouTube video, putting selected moments on mental freeze-frame. But he needs to focus now on his own mistake. He hates the feeling of being lost, doesn’t like being stuck in the Twilight Zone, so he pulls out his smart phone and Googles for directions, only to find that he isn’t lost, that he’s right where he’s supposed to be, a few blocks from a familiar destination. He’s relieved when the rest of his drive is unproblematic.
But confusion returns when he gets to Betty’s apartment and she greets him smiling at the door he tried to break down a few hours before. Is it the real Betty, or the younger version of her? She looks great, somehow even more attractive than before, and for a second he assumes that the younger Betty has exchanged places with the older one, that she’s not past her prime anymore, that she’s become what she used to be. But there’s no time to figure out what’s going on because she pulls him into bed so quickly that he doesn’t even get a chance to make basic small talk. The younger Betty—if that’s who she is—doesn’t seem as capable as the older Betty in bed, like she hasn’t had as much experience and hasn’t yet mastered the moves. But it feels like she’s in better shape, has more energy, and she comes twice and wants to keep going. With a burst of strength she throws him onto his back and reaches down to pull him inside her again, but he’s worn out, too tired to continue, begging her to let him relax for a while.
It’s only when they’re resting under the sheets that he gets worried that he and the younger Betty don’t actually know each other, and that she might not know anything about The Royal Scam. But when they start talking it’s clear that she knows everything, and he wonders if the younger and older versions of Betty, since they’re not really separate people, are both in bed with him now, in the same body, even though they looked like two distinct women earlier, making love on screen. Is it possible that by going to bed with her younger self, Betty is making her body younger while preserving her mind in its current state? If so, then The Royal Scam will make her lots of money if she ever puts it on the market, offering anyone who can afford it a chance to recapture their youth. Jeff can already picture himself as her marketing director. He’s dying to ask her about her cybersex adventure, but decides not to mention it yet, since his real reason for being there is Gavrilo Princip.
He shows her the picture of Princip. He’s wearing a dark suit and fedora, sitting on a park bench in Belgrade. On the other end of the bench is his good friend Nedjo Cabrinovic, wearing exactly the same outfit. Between them is Milan Ciganovic, a veteran of the Balkan Wars, wearing a three-piece suit but no fedora. Ciganovic is the Black Hand agent who gave Princip and Cabrinovic the weapons they used a few months later in Sarajevo. It’s not clear in the faded photograph whether he’s already given them the guns and bombs, or if he’s just planning to. The expression on his face reveals nothing, except that he’s facing a camera that’s going to shoot him.
Jeff quickly explains the picture’s significance, telling Betty what he knows about the Black Hand. He also mentions Young Bosnia, a subversive network of students who met in cafes in Belgrade and Sarajevo. He expects her to ask for more historical information, but instead she laughs and asks: Did all the Young Bosnians wear dark suits and hats? Were they trying to look like Hollywood gangsters?
Jeff says: It was 1914, and I don’t think there were Hollywood gangster movies yet, especially not in places like Belgrade and Sarajevo, where there probably weren’t many cinemas. But I guess the Young Bosnians thought the look was cool, like hippies with flowers in their hair or punks with mohawks. You can’t—
Betty says: Actually, they do look kind of cool. I like Princip and Cabrinovic more than the older guy.
Jeff says: Even though the older guy’s nickname was Handsome Cigo?
Betty says: I’d go to bed with Princip any day.
Jeff says: Then you’d be taking his virginity.
She says: He died a virgin?
Jeff says: Supposedly. Of course, no one knows for sure. I read somewhere that he was with a woman a few nights before the assassination, but had performance anxiety problems. Another article connected Princip’s desire to shoot the Archduke with his lack of sexual satisfaction.
She makes a face and says: Sometimes a gun is just a gun, as Freud might have said. But whatever. I think the suits look cool.
Jeff says: You can’t really tell from the picture, but they were all desperately poor. Their suits were old and smelly. They couldn’t afford to clean them. Handsome Cigo had been thrown out of a cafe a few weeks before because his suit was infested with lice. He was—
Betty says: Why are you showing me this picture?
Jeff says: What would happen if you scanned it into your computer and then let me enter it through the Royal Scam program?
Betty says: You’d be in the world of the picture.
Jeff says: In the spring of 1914?
She nods but then stops and laughs tensely: Actually, I’m not sure.
Jeff says: When I entered the picture, would Princip and his friends be in black and white, like they are in the picture?
Betty shrugs: I don’t know. I don’t fully understand how the program works—
Jeff makes a face: Even though you created it?
Betty nods: Even though I created it. I’m pretty sure the program does more than I intended.
Jeff looks doubtful, so Betty says: It’s called wet programing. You make a design that includes potential operations, which lead to more potential operations, pathways that branch out from each other, enhancing and modifying each other, sometimes in ways that are impossible to predict. It’s the same with any signifying system. You can only control language by obeying it, respecting its autonomy. So it’s possible that you’d just be in a black and white world with those three guys and whoever else happened to be in the park at the time. It would be the spring of 1914, but it also wouldn’t be. It would be a kind of stopped moment stolen from 1914 and framed on a flat piece of paper. I’m not sure what to call it: Picture time? It’s complicated. With the Steely Dan image, you weren’t entering a place that existed outside the album cover. But this Princip picture was taken in a place that existed before and after the picture was taken. That Belgrade park was a place with an independent existence, and maybe it still is. But like I said, this is all pretty new to me. I don’t really know. Maybe you’d actually be back in 1914.
Jeff is dying to ask about her cybersex episode, and what kind of past world she entered when she went to bed with the woman she used to be, but again he doesn’t want to create conflicts that shift the focus away from the Princip photo. He says: So if I was really back in 1914, and I was able to talk them out of their assassination plans, and World War I never happened, then what?
She says: You’re familiar with the time-travel novels and movies. If you talked them out of the assassination and World War I didn’t happen, then the rest of the century would probably happen differently than it did, and computers might not be invented, and we wouldn’t have The Royal Scam to send you back in time to talk Princip out of his deadly plans, and he’d go ahead and kill the Archduke, and the twentieth century would happen the way we know it did, and we’d have computers and The Royal Scam, and I’d send you back to talk Princip out of his deadly plans again. You’d be creating a loop in which two different versions of the twentieth century happened and didn’t happen. But that’s only if your appearance in the photograph was an authentic time-travel episode.
Jeff says: There’s no way to know for sure?
She says: The only way to find out is to give it a try.
Jeff expects her to start cackling like a witch. But instead she looks at him like she’s trying to convince him that she’s really who she is and not who she was ten years ago. Or at least that’s what Jeff is reading into her expression. He knows her well enough to know that she’s always thinking of several things at once while trying to look like she’s focused only on the person she’s with. He gives her a look designed to let her know that he knows that she’s trying to convince him of something but he’s not being fooled and he’s just going along with it to be a nice guy or because it’s more convenient. He suspects that she can read the look, but she’s being careful to not look like she’s reading it.
He takes her hand and says: Okay, let’s give it a try.
She smiles: But first, you better get dressed. If you really end up in a park in 1914 Belgrade, I don’t think you want to be walking around wearing nothing. You’re sure you really want to try this?
He starts getting dressed and says: No, but I don’t want to keep thinking about it. I spend way too much time thinking about things instead of doing them. The time to hesitate is through.
She hesitates, then says: What song is that from?
He says: I don’t remember. It’s not Steely Dan. The Doors maybe.
She says: I hate The Doors. They’re so overrated.
He says: You’re too young to remember the feeling of first hearing their music back in the summer of 67. But there’s a younger version of me that’s still back there and still hasn’t grown tired of hearing The Doors, especially the long version of “Light My Fire” and not the edited version that became a big hit.
She says: The only version I’ve heard is the shorter one. You’re lucky you actually lived through the mythical Summer of Love and haven’t just heard about it, like people from my generation. I mean, we grew up watching silly black and white footage of people with long hair and beads, stick figure hippies. It’s obviously different for an ex-hippie like you. You were really there, back when doing drugs was cool and revolution didn’t sound like a bad joke or an advertising buzz word, and people talked about being in touch with their bodies and doing it in the road and thought it was cool to look like very stoned Caucasian versions of Jesus. But it’s weird the way you talk about the younger version of you as if it were a separate person that still exists and not just a collection of memories.
He says: You should know.
She says: What?
He says: Never mind. Let’s run The Royal Scam.
She picks up the picture and does the royal scan. The photo appears on her screen. When Jeff at first doesn’t sit in the computer chair, she guides him down into it and says: You have to sit in the chair. The Royal Scam won’t work unless you’re in the chair. Remember?
Jeff stands up and looks puzzled.
She says: No really, sit back down. It’s a special chair. It’s upholstered with smart foam, which is a crucial part of the application.
Jeff sits and says: Smart foam? Like they use in orthopedic beds and football helmets?
She says: Smarter. Much smarter. I’ll have to come up with a different name.
She types the commands. The screen turns orange with a smiling blue sun that opens its mouth to reveal a small version of Jeff inside. There’s a pop like a flashbulb going off, a burnt popcorn smell, and suddenly he’s in a park, standing beside a tripod camera pointed at three men sitting on a bench, looking exactly the way they did in the picture. Jeff glances quickly around the park, which is filled with trees and grass and light and shade and people walking and talking. The three men look at him expectantly. Jeff understands that they’re waiting for him to take their picture, so he puts his head under the camera’s black hood and looks through the aperture. Again, they look exactly like they did in the picture, except that they’re in color, not black and white, and the photographic silence has been replaced by sounds coming from other parts of the park, voices and footsteps approaching and receding, the brief rustling of trees as the wind comes up and dies down. He’s never used a wooden tripod camera, but it’s clear what he has to do. He pulls a cord, the camera flashes, then something is pulling him through an orange transparent membrane, and he’s back in Betty’s room, staring at the picture on her screen.
She looks at him with obvious relief, then smiles: So?
He says: How long was I gone?
She says: Maybe ten minutes. What happened?
He says: I took their picture.
She says: That’s all.
He says: That’s all.
She says: You didn’t try to talk to them?
He says: I thought about it, then realized that they probably didn’t speak English.
She says: I was wondering how that was going to work out, since I know you don’t speak Serbian.
He says: Not a word. But the park and the people were there in full color, doing all the normal things.
She says: What did you look like? Were you wearing what you’re wearing now?
He says: I don’t know. I was so stunned I didn’t notice. But the men in the picture didn’t act like I was wearing strange clothing, so I guess I looked like a 1914 Serbian photographer. But I wasn’t sure why they’d arranged to have their picture taken. Why would people conducting a secret transaction want to be photographed?
She says: Maybe the Black Hand wanted photographic records of all their secret transactions?
Jeff says: Yeah, maybe. I don’t know that much about how the Black Hand did things. No one does, because they were a secret organization, and all their members were sworn to secrecy. But I did read somewhere that all the Sarajevo assassins were under oath to kill themselves afterwards because if they lived and got captured they could be tortured into revealing Black Hand secrets. So it’s possible that right before I took the picture Handsome Cigo had just told Princip and Cabrinovic that they would have to take poison after killing the Archduke. In fact, it’s even possible that they had cyanide packets in their pockets.
She looks confused and says: Wait a minute. I just realized something weird. The names you’ve been using: Cabrinovic, and Handsome Cigo, what was his real name again?
Jeff says: Milan Ciganovic. Why?
She says: You were gone ten minutes, which isn’t really a long time, except that I was thinking about the picture time issues we talked about earlier, and I started to worry about the bad quality of the photo you brought over. I mean, with such a faded image, you might have entered a faded world that didn’t have enough definition to fully exist, which might have meant that you yourself couldn’t fully exist and I might not be able to bring you back. So I did a quick Internet search and found a better copy of the picture, thinking I could substitute it for the one we used.
Jeff says: Would that have worked?
She says: I’m not sure. But I thought it might be worth a try, in case you didn’t come back. I mean, with the Steely Dan image I could see you on screen. This time I couldn’t.
Jeff says: That’s pretty scary. I mean—
Betty nods: But wait. When I looked at the new picture, I noticed that the caption gave the name Gavrilo Princip, but the other two men are identified as Trifko Grabez and Djuro Sarac. They’re the same guys, but the names are different.
She points to the screen, where the new picture sits in a small window beside the faded version. Jeff reads the names and says: Some editor somewhere must have made a mistake.
Betty says: Who were Trifko Grabez and Djuro Sarac?
Jeff says: Other guys involved in the assassination plot. Grabez helped Princip smuggle guns from Belgrade across the border into Bosnia. He was convinced that the Archduke’s plan to inspect the Austrian troops in Sarajevo, which was one of his published reasons for making his visit, was just a pretext, the prelude to a military invasion of Serbia. That’s why he was eager to join Princip and Cabrinovic when they told him about their plan. Sarac helped them get the guns from Ciganovic. Sarac was the founder of a secret society known as the Avengers of Kosovo, which conducted secret induction ceremonies in dark basements. Princip and Grabez were in the society, but not Cabrinovic or Ciganovic. They were in a different secret society that conducted ceremonies in basements. It gets confusing. I can see why their testimony was so garbled when they were put on trial after the assassination. Think about it: They insisted that the Black Hand had nothing to do with the assassination plot. Yet they also said that people from the Black Hand had given them weapons and helped them carry bombs and guns across the Serbian border. At one point during the trial Princip and Cabrinovic led the judge and the attorneys to believe that the Freemasons were involved, but later, when the judge referred to them as Masons, they laughed at the idea. Were they making deliberately misleading statements? Or were they just confused?
Betty shakes her head: There’s no way of knowing. Maybe both.
Jeff says: If I’d actually gotten stuck in 1914, I’m sure I would have been confused too. I mean, the situation was bad if you were a Serb. The Hapsburgs had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina several years earlier. People in Sarajevo woke one morning to find announcements posted all over the city, declaring their country a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That’s when the student resistance movement began. Princip and Grabez got thrown out of school for organizing campus protest actions. Djuro Sarac got thrown in jail for comparing the annexation to property theft.
Betty says: Doesn’t sound all that different from Bush and Cheney invading Iraq, a free enterprise bonanza, and now you’ve got journalists over there getting their heads chopped off.
Jeff nods: I was thinking more or less the same thing, though of course there are significant historical differences, so the parallels might not be obvious at first—
Betty says: They seem pretty obvious to me, and I haven’t even done the kind of research that you’ve obviously been doing. I didn’t know you were such a history buff.
Jeff says: I really wasn’t, until I re-read All Quiet on the Western Front, and then read a few books about the nationalist insanity that led to World War I. Then this morning I saw this schlock documentary about the assassination, and—
Betty shrugs: I guess the important thing is that you’re back. I was starting to think you’d gotten stuck in a virtual 1914 Belgrade.
Jeff says: It didn’t seem virtual. It was just like being in a real urban park, and the three men—whoever they were—were three- dimensional flesh and blood human beings. If I’d been trapped in that world, it might not have been so bad. The park was beautiful, and the people I saw there looked a lot happier than the people you normally see in Central Park.
Betty looks disturbed: That’s not saying much. But now I’m wondering about the photographer. There’s no photo credit on the version I found on the Internet. It just says “Muzej Sarajeva,” without naming the photographer. I’m wondering who really took the picture. Was it you? Did The Royal Scam project you into a picture that didn’t exist until you went back in time and took it?
Jeff says: Before I got there, someone had already set up the camera and arranged the shot. For a second, right after I arrived, I thought the guys on the bench were laughing at me, like they thought I looked weird in my twenty-first century clothing. But they also clearly thought I was the photographer, so I must have looked like him. Or maybe they saw some kind of double exposure, right before the Royal Scam transported me into the photographer’s body, and from then on I was literally seeing things through his eyes. That might explain why you couldn’t see me on screen.
Betty nods: Right, and for that Belgrade photographer your presence in his body and mind was just a momentary strange feeling. Or maybe your intervention made him briefly aware of things he couldn’t have known at the time, things that are normal parts of our lives a century later. Like what’s happened to photography, for instance, all the digital images. When I was looking for a good copy of your picture, I found other shots of Princip, and so many people have had fun playing around with his image.
Jeff knows exactly what she’s talking about. In the online research that he’s been doing, he’s found pictures of Princip everywhere, images modified for almost every conceivable purpose: Princip wearing glasses in a short-sleeve Superman shirt, Princip in a dashiki playing tenor sax in a jazz cafe, Princip looking like Einstein facing a blackboard filled with equations, Princip in a cave man outfit clubbing a sabre-tooth tiger, Princip in a Che beret on a hammer and sickle poster, Princip giving the peace sign from a Day- Glo bus at Woodstock, Princip in a string quartet on the deck of the Titanic, Princip drinking with Bogart in a scene from Casablanca, Princip in a game of cards with Darwin, Freud and Marx, Princip in a hospital gown with electrodes attached to his head, Princip on the cross with a crown of thorns in a black light poster. Jeff is briefly amused by the idea of Princip doing an Internet search, finding himself so widely reproduced and reinvented.
Betty says: And now you’ve taken a picture someone else had already taken. It’s funny, isn’t it, how the word “taken” gets used in the photographic process. I can see why the Native Americans didn’t like it. It’s—
Jeff says: Can I ask you something?
Betty pauses and narrows her eyes: No.
Jeff says: I can’t?
Betty says: No, you can’t.
Jeff says: Really?
Betty says: Normally, when people say “Can I ask you something” they’re preparing to say something disturbing and their question isn’t really a question. It’s a rhetorical device that means “What I’m about to say will probably upset you.” And my answer is “No, I don’t want you to upset me.”
Jeff is now convinced that she knows he knows about her virtual infidelity. Why else would she be cropping his question out of the conversation? He says: Really? I’m not allowed to ask—
Betty says: Wait a second!
She’s squinting at the photographs on the computer. She says: Check to see if you have your phone.
Jeff puts his hands in his pockets, quickly looks around the room, then shrugs and says: I don’t have it.
She points to both copies of the picture, a small white shape in the grass near Princip’s foot. She says: I think you left your phone in 1914. It must have fallen out by mistake.
She quickly enlarges part of the picture, making it clear that the white shape is an iPhone. Even the Apple logo is partially visible. She says: I wonder if it was in the picture before you took your little trip.
Jeff shrugs: I don’t remember. When I looked at the picture before, I didn’t notice anything unusual. But now it’s in both copies of the picture on your screen. Why don’t we find other copies of the picture on the Internet, and see if the phone is in all of them? And now I’m wondering what happened when Princip found the phone and tried to figure out what it was, assuming he noticed it. Do you think—
Betty says: We can do the Internet search later. Right now, we’ve got some unfinished business. We never really finished fucking.
She gets up from her desk, walks across the room, lies down on her bed. She looks at Jeff with laughter in her eyes. She says: You pooped out, remember? But now that you’ve refreshed yourself in 1914, let’s get back to the task at hand.
Jeff wants to keep talking about his phone. He wants to think about Princip tinkering with it, tapping the screen, amazed by the sudden changes, looking at full-color digital pictures, listening to voicemail messages, trying to read text messages filled with emoticons and keyboard symbols, acronyms and weird abbreviations. But then Jeff looks at the landscape painting above the computer. There’s no flying saucer, just a gap in the painted sky, revealing colors and parts of shapes that suggest the presence of another painting underneath, as if the pastoral scene were just a cover-up. For a second he’s convinced that the secret painting underneath is a photo realist picture of Betty’s apartment, that he and Betty are there, painted versions of themselves in bed with each other. Again Jeff wants to ask Betty where she got the painting, but she repeats her invitation, and she looks so good that he can’t resist. He joins her in bed and the sex is great, not just great in quotation marks. They try new things that work amazingly well. His younger self is filling him with more energy than he normally has, like he’s having all the good sex that Gavrilo Princip never had.