Skyscraper Heavens

By John Rubens

Khalid, our narrator, and his two cousins, Jahan and Jaleh, comment on the record of a historic revolution they are busy researching via live lessons and recorded discs. Skyscraper Heavens weaves the dialogue of the characters, which include Zareen, Khalids wife, around the backdrop of a largely chronological summation of a revolution in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Baug. The retelling of the events of the revolution and the characters responses to it touch on Marcusian themes of opposition and containment. The juxtaposition of timelines and the live and prerecorded study sessions in which the characters participate form a motif for the reader, a mosaic of the dialectic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514404331

John Rubens

John Rubens was born in San Francisco and grew up in San Mateo County, California, just south of the city. He is a graduate of the University of California at San Diego and Santa Clara University School of Law, and he learned French during his eighteen months of scholarship in Strasbourg, France. While practicing law in Hollywood, California, in 1995, John met his wife, Lucia, and they have made a home together there since 1998. Skyscraper Heavens began as a work of nonfiction told to the author while still an undergraduate at UC San Diego. Over the next thirty-five years, it was stored, rewritten, and is now presented as an antinovel. The work is set in Baug, a fictional Middle Eastern country inhabited by fictional characters who struggle coming to terms with a national revolution, its causes, and implications.

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Copyright © 2015 by John Rubens.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation

Rev. date: 09/04/2015

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Introduction

The title of the book is Skyscraper Heavens. Those two words came to mind before dawn the morning of December 31, 2014.

The skyscraper is a male-dominant motif, a phallus, a challenging conception of engineers, developers, and heads of law firms, banks, and insurance companies. The skyscraper, or high-rise, as it is more commonly known today, is prevalent in history (see Tower of Babel Genesis 11:4 et seq.; the necessity of shared resources of a precinct, unit, fort, or firm {e.g., a library or intelligence unit}; the World Trade Center attack, Manhattan, New York City, New York, September 11, 2001) and objectifies in steel, concrete, mirrors, and other building materials the concept of professional success in the industrial era. See also Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man (1964). The history of the modern high-rise, perhaps beginning with the Eiffel Tower’s erection upon its pedestal in 1889, portends prestige as a by-product of the partnered construction of high-rise real estate by numerous parties: architects, artists, builders, financiers, subcontractors, unions, as well as the taxing authorities.

The dialogue in Skyscraper Heavens seeks to create a mosaic exposing dialectic themes of opposition and containment.¹ Narration and dialogue weave into the backdrop of a 1978–1980 revolution in the fictitious Middle Eastern country of Baug. Khalid, our narrator, and his two supervisors Jahan and Jaleh who happen to be cousins, often play a CD or DVD, the contents of which we read in quotation marks off and on throughout the entirety of the book. Retrograde time and space sequences jump into a loopy weave with the culminating audio-visual reports recorded on discs by United Corporate (UC), their benefactor. Khalid and the cousins set out to analyze the UC data in order to find models that can predict how strife and conflict run a course from their causes to calls for law and order.

Funded by the UC grant, the three researchers collaborate informally to recap events leading up to the revolution and discuss how violent confrontations led to an Islamic Republic in Baug. The pertinent aspects of Baug’s historical record are either dictated in-person by Jaleh and/or Jahan or by UC analysts on prerecorded discs. When the numerous opposing parties identified in the book clash with each other, the victors invariably form a new entity relative to the remnant populations in a mosaic of the dialectic.²

Prologue

When I was a student at Warren College, one of a cluster of colleges at the University of California at San Diego, I took a job as a janitor, cleaning dorm rooms during the transition from spring quarter to summer quarter, 1980. One day, I was browsing the cork bulletin board at the student center in my spare time and came across a 3 x 5 inch flash card soliciting a ghostwriter for a book about the Iranian Revolution. American hostages were being held in Tehran at the time, and being a literature/writing major, I took down the phone number on the card and contacted Mr. Rahmatollah Mehraz for the first time. Mr. Mehraz was a newly arrived resident of the United States, a former professor and director general of educational research of the National University of Iran, Tehran (1966–1978). We started work on the book in San Diego on July 7, 1980.

I was so happy working on a book about a major media event; I remember riding my brown Schwinn ten-speed all the way from La Jolla to the Marine Corps Air Station—Miramar. Stardom was just over the next hill, or so I thought. That was thirty-five years ago. We worked almost every weekend for a few hours, and then his wife would cook an Iranian dish for the family, which I was always invited to share in once we were finished working on the book.

It often got hot and steamy in the dining room at dinnertime, and that meant quitting time. Mrs. Mehraz smiled as we relinquished the dining room table back to her. The whole family gathered at a big round table adjacent to the kitchen to enjoy each other’s company during the delicious supper prepared just for us.

The book was submitted for publication to a half dozen publishers in the winter of 1980–1981 under the title The Iranian Revolution: Iran’s Struggle with a New Father. Although I did not find a publisher willing to take on the responsibility of publishing such a controversial work at the time, I did get two encouraging rejection letters; one of them had a handwritten note below the boilerplate that read simply Not my cup of tea. That cup of tea is currently located at the blog johnrubens.wordpress.com under the title Installment 77: An Account of M (Call No Man Father) copyright July 8, 2014. Zamie, Mr. Mehraz’s son, wrote me in 2014 telling me that his father sold the story he told me to an undisclosed buyer for not much money after I left the San Diego area.

The names of the people, places, and institutions in the following work are fictional to protect the innocent and a few conjectures inserted due to the benefit of revelations gleaned from continuing education.

Have we not all one father? Hath not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, by profaning the covenant of our fathers?

—Malachi 2:10, King James Version, modified with capital letters beginning a sentence

Preface

Call me Khalid. I’ve got a story to tell you about the Baugi Revolution, or what I remember of it, but I’ll preface that with a recap of the major political events that transpired some twenty-five years before that in the early 1950s. These 1950s events had a direct bearing on the seminal stirrings of revolution that took hold in the era of 1978–1980, the remnants of which still exist today.

Father, May I?

Call no man your father on earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.

—Matthew 23:9, original King James Version

Prime Minister Rahmat, a populist, led the people of Baug from 1950 to 1953. He supported an inclusive central government, but Baug was spread out over a large geographical area. Tealandir, the capital of Baug, has been a metropolis of centralized government for centuries. As its capital, rulings from Tealandir affect every Baugi, even those living in the periphery of the country, thousands of miles away. Many grew dissatisfied with life in Baug in the 1950s, and opponents of the Rahmat administration voiced opposition to the effects incessant compromising had on citizens and stakeholders.

For their part, the multinational oil companies of United Corporate (UC) could not stand Rahmat’s laissez-faire government and decided to overthrow him with a coup d’état. UC supported the coup because they wanted to reinstall Amir as Baug’s regal leader. A quasi-monarchy would allow UC greater influence in the ways and means of petroleum procurement within Baug’s borders and elsewhere in the region. UC wanted Amir’s administration hailed as a model of the Common Concept of Mutual Interest (CCMI) between Baug and UC, stubbornly strained for as long as anyone could remember.

A slender, scrappy, and determined individual I met in the courtyard outside our mosque, named Jahan, told me the logistics of the 1953 coup d’état were spearheaded by the Central Wombat Agency (also known as CWA) of Sargon in conjunction with disaffected youth of Baug. He said the first agitators buffeting Rahmat were demonstrators shouting taunts, degrading his name while lifting praises to Amir day and night. The relentless derogatory chants and Rahmat’s misplaced trust in the lawfulness of the assembly allowed the demonstrators to overcome Rahmat’s guard and enter his abode. After a brief struggle, CWA’s operatives seized Dr. Rahmat and transported him to prison to await trial in an Amir-led government.

The capture of Rahmat made Amir’s return to power imminent. The Emilians, another rival of Rahmat’s government located to Baug’s southwest, had been concealing Amir and his extended family to preserve an opportunity for Amir’s reemergence to the imperial throne of Baug as His Eminence. For his part, Amir was grateful and indebted to his Emilian benefactors and planned to lead Baug into a firm alliance with them and their greater Western allies. Amir envisioned a land of skilled and educated Baugis coming together as one nation. Operation e pluribus unum could now move forward to its blessed fruition, or so he thought.

Jahan soon introduced me to his first cousin, an attractive medical doctor named Jaleh. They looked alike with their thick, black, straight hair and tanned complexion, but while Jahan was wiry and surprisingly brutish for his lean frame, Jaleh was supple and compassionate. We were in Baug on a grant from United Corporate to investigate the Baugi revolution of 1978 and its repercussions. They provided us with a stipend and essential materials, which included secret reports and a scrutinized expense account to conduct our research. Sometimes Jahan would fill me in on what he knew about the revolution, and other times it was Jaleh, but increasingly we used secondary sources such as DVDs produced by United Corporate. Sometimes we would gather to listen to discs together and discuss their contents, while other times we researched solo. Jahan, Jaleh, and I were considered grantees under the provisions of our contracts with UC, and both cousins my immediate supervisors. The work would have been boring if I didn’t take the ball the other way sometimes. I guess I was a little like the Harlem Globetrotters,³ making fun of the game but at the same time seeking to accomplish amazing feats of novel dexterity. Jaleh was a counterweight to the severity of the research required under the UC contract, and my wife, Zareen, provided me with much-needed support. Throwing Jaleh into the mix made my heart pound and my dick hard at certain intervals. Maybe UC found in one of their many research projects that the grantee work product finds enhancement with the introduction of coed romance. Although directed to destroy the DVDs immediately once consumed, I used them as flying saucers around the flat. Sometimes Zareen and I played a sort of airborne demolition derby with them.

Let’s Flashback: Why Rahmat’s Government Was Troublesome

What I have so far on the history of Baug that Jahan prepped me on was that Rahmat’s administration gave Baugis a sense of freedom and liberty that they hadn’t had for ages. His administration modeled itself after democratized nation-states, such as Sargon of the continent of Kir and Jahangir of the continent of Bahar. In those two democracies, citizens retained certain inalienable rights allowing them to think and act on their own initiative and to speak out as to their beliefs and opinions. Baugis retained similar constitutional freedoms under their constitution until the 1953 coup toppled the Rahmat government.

The Bahram Party

Numerous political parties coexisted within the constitutional boundaries set up, interpreted, and enforced by the Rahmat government. However, the lax regulation of social discourse and investigation of racketeering created an opportunity for the Bahram Party to disrupt the delicate balance that shaped Baug and maintained a peaceful coexistence within its borders. The Bahram Party was determined to destabilize peace in Baug at whatever cost and to overthrow its opposition, whomever that might be, at any given time. During periods of unrest, Bahram was able to make inroads at fracturing whatever confidence Baugis still had in their democratic constitutional society.

We live, and we learn … Then we die, I suppose.

If you want, dear reader, skip ahead a few dozen pages. I won’t care, as long as you’re happy. Reading this next part last or not at all is not essential, as events tend to repeat themselves throughout the book. Sargon’s Central Wombat Agency (CWA) often does thankless and uninteresting work, which is why it goes undetected and thankless. The Wombat Agency, as one might expect, did not like Rahmat’s tolerance of Bahram Party members in the early 1950s. Bahram distributed pro-Xerxes (communist) propaganda with bravado aimed primarily against Sargon. The leaflets and tracts lambasted Sargonian foreign policy and its imperialistic motivation to dominate the vital interests not only of Baug but of the entire developing world. Baugis were paying at least some attention to the flyers the Bahram Party distributed espousing their criticisms and their platform. Bahram supported the communist megastate Xerxes and beckoned developing nations less technologically advanced than Baug to join in opposing Sargon and that of its allies.

The Bahram Party continued to gain popularity under Prime Minister Rahmat until Sargon made the decision to dissolve it after committee review. By acting to suppress and ultimately disband the Bahram Party, Sargon would diminish their influence in Baug and allow the West greater unimpeded access to Baug’s petroleum market. (Sargon and Jahangir diverted away from the Baugi oil industry due to what Rahmat saw as unfavorable pricing terms.) The West was not paying enough for Baugi crude, and that had to change.

Yesterday, I, Khalid, had tea with Jahan at a small café in Tealandir. Wicker chairs and teakwood tables stained with the residue of spilled sweeteners and dark infusions mostly filled the café. Jahan told me Rahmat started planning an oil embargo as soon as he assumed power in 1950 because that was the central theme of his campaign platform of reform. Until Sargon and Jahangir paid a fair price for Baugi crude, Rahmat would continue to embargo their access to it.

Baugis were generally sensitive to oil-interested politics in the early 1950s, he said. "Between 1951 and 1953, oil production in Baug was at a virtual standstill because the service contracts between Jahangir and Baug to extract and distribute product were seen as unconscionable by many influential Baugis. For instance, it was widely publicized that Jahangir granted Baug a mere 16 percent share of its profits in return for its exploitation of the resource. For their part, Sargon bankers were driving inflation higher as the price of crude and the products tied to its price escalated.

"In response to Baug’s oil embargo of the early 1950s, Jahangir gave the Rahmat administration an ultimatum: either relent and end the embargo or suffer naval occupation of the Gulf of Tahmour (with the implication of an imminent blockade). The Baugi populace reacted tout de suite. They let the foreign oil businessmen and technicians know in no uncertain terms they were no longer welcome in Baug, and its natural petroleum resources would no longer be accessible by the West. After the mass expulsion of Western oil interests for the first time since the turn of the twentieth century, Rahmat set out to nationalize oil.

"Once the oil sector in Baug had stabilized after the nationalization of its petroleum reserves, foreign workers would again be allowed to return to Baug, but solely to work for the nationalized program, not for oil companies under Jahangir’s jurisdiction. Jahangir’s oil industry workers, particularly experienced engineers, did not like being told how to do their jobs by Baugi superiors. They complained to their corporate bosses in the West that Baugi managers lorded over them like snobby, obnoxious know-it-alls, yet without them, the managers would be lost. Taking the lead for the West, Jahangir persuaded expatriates to abandon their posts and leave Baug.

Since Baug’s engineers and technicians did not have the expertise to manage the petroleum industry, production suffered, especially due to an infrastructure that soon fell into a confused state of disrepair. If that was not enough, no one was buying Baug’s crude oil product due to political pressure from Jahangir. It made a spectacle of Baug’s breach of its contract with them and sued Baug at the international court located in Fairhausen, a city in the Western Alliance States (WAS).

It was strange listening to Jahan for so long without interruption, but being the first meeting, I took it in stride. He said the first few days are the most difficult to concentrate on the material, but I’d catch on. The way Jahan told it to me at the café, the Jahangiris relied too much on their outspoken political persuasiveness than the nuts and bolts of contract law enforceable by the court, which, ironically, they helped create. Jahangir believed the situs of the court in WAS would aid them in achieving a favorable decision from the court, or at least more favorable than the current embargo situation. Notwithstanding their hunch, the international court ruled in favor of the Baugi government, not them.

The court based its ruling on the finding that Jahangir began exploiting Baug’s petroleum resources under alleged contracts, written evidence of which was not produced at trial by Jahangir, and Jahan told me, The Baugis allegedly did not have copies of the agreements to enter into evidence.

The court went on to point out that Baug had fought hard for independence from Jahangir and was no longer a colony under its jurisdiction but a sovereign nation. As a sovereign nation, it not only had the right of self-determination but the means to ensure that right. The holding of the court was that Baug had the sole right to all mineral resources located beneath the ground of its territories. Although the Baugi government asked for restitution, it could not prove a theft of its sovereign natural resources over the preceding sixty years. Since neither Baug nor Jahangir produced copies or originals of any agreements the two sovereigns allegedly worked under since Baug won independence as a state in the late nineteenth century, the court did not need to address the validity of the disputed contracts. It did however, nullify any alleged agreements either of the two countries may have thought they were working under going forward subject to the instant judgment of the court (emphasis added).

As Jahangir Recedes from the Baugi Oil Picture in the mid-1950s, Sargonian Oil Companies Step Up Efforts at Winning Baugi Petroleum Contracts; Baug Perceives Sargon’s Influence as Treacherous

The lesson for the day was over. It did take the full eight hours, most of it in a private booth in the café but some of it in the adjacent park at Farhooz Square. Before dismissal, Jahan gave me a large nylon satchel with cash, a prepaid credit card, an iPod, a tablet, and about ten DVDs to start work on. From Farhooz Square, my flat was only a couple of kilometers away. Jahan’s house was on the opposite side of Tealandir. Start listening to those DVDs tonight, he admonished, and we split up. I hopped on the first bus and found a seat. It was rather empty that afternoon, and I played one of the DVDs Jahan handed me earlier on my tablet receiver, listening with headphones:

"Initially, Sargonian oil companies had supported the Rahmat regime. With the war raging in Rosana, Sargon’s President Hightower reluctantly sent his predecessor, President Parry West Troopman, to explore the possibility of an oil trade with Rahmat’s administration in 1953. Sargon’s President Hightower, a rival of Troopman’s, knew it was important to send a balance by imbalance message to Rahmat. A rival diplomat of high regard sent to meet with the Baugi prime minister meant Rahmat would have to be on his toes—all ten of them—in order to discern what this show of enthusiasm from Sargon, an ally of Jahangir, indicated for Baug’s vital strategic interests and industrial prosperity.

"For his part, Rahmat wanted to aggravate Sargon but at the same time continue to sell and ultimately transport oil to their domestic markets. But Jahangir, like a jealous suitor, urged its WAS allies, including Sargon, to boycott Baugi oil in order to stifle its economy. Although the boycott was effective in disrupting the Baugi economy, it did not implode, but the shortages took their toll on the population, and many suffered severely. Baug’s oil production slowed to the point of barely supplying domestic needs for fuel, and Baug’s inability to produce surplus oil for export became a catalyst to already rising inflation and huge trade deficits.

"The Bahram Party relished the fact that Rahmat was in a bind, as they were determined to rule Baug in his place. On the issue of oil exports, the Bahram Party actively and demonstrably opposed Rahmat’s suspension of oil exports to the West and provoked a