Report from Ichtonyia

by Jim Hanas

Editor's Note: A little explanation.

My young friend is nervous. His name is unpronounceable as engraved into the small brass placard on the side of his leatherette portfolio, so I call him Yuri. I imagine him orbiting in space, turning spoons to noodles with his mind.

He is reputed to be the hottest art director in Lem, and he wants out. Everyone wants out. It isn't safe, especially not here, outside the bombed-out Cafe Gordita on the Corso de Marlboro, near the city's center.

Yuri dusts off one of the crumpled, iron tables and spreads out his book. I flip through the pages and pick at the enamel on the barrel of the Bulgarian-made SA-93 assault rifle I carry with me at all times. Yuri keeps a lookout through the semi-circle of ragged bistro umbrellas that partially shield us from the street.

I have an hour. I am his last hope.

I already have a copywriter, a direct mail genius who puts up phenomenal numbers: response rates of fourteen, sometimes fifteen percent.

Amazing.

Then there is the buxom, cabbage-fed traffic girl, not too long in from the fields, who can push work orders through a shop like billing records through a Remington portable shredder. A real Mussolini, that one, not at all like the getalong girls back home.

And of course the collateral twins, whom the agency simply will not do without. They could put a logo on second-hand emery boards and have people fight for the privilege to use them. There are children all over Ichtonyia who know their names and collect their work in special boxes.

The talent here is primal.

I flip the portfolio shut and run my hand against its faux-grain. Yuri turns and looks at me hopefully. What do I think? I tell him to walk with me. He wraps the case in the piece of canvas he brought it in and tucks it in under some nearby rubble.

"Too dangerous to with take," he explains in English I can barely understand.

It is quiet today. The sky is merely grey with smoke and the explosions are distant. The Corso de Marlboro is ringed by the frames of a hundred ruined billboards—a fraction of the total that have sprung up in the last half decade and been destroyed in the recent fighting. On one, I can still make out the words: "Simple Maps For Driver Humans."

In Lem (rhymes with "seem"), the capital city, the population of one million has been decimated. From outside the city, there are reports of shallow trenches containing hundreds of bodies, some of them Americans, clothed in business casual and stacked up like lumber. The Department of Commerce has ordered that the 100,000 American nationals residing here evacuate. There are colleagues I have not seen in some time.

As we make our way through the streets, Yuri flinches nervously. He should have shaved his goatee, he thinks, but it is too late now. The smell of burning tires fills the air, and I think about how far Ichtonyia has come.

+++

The People's Principality of Lem, as Ichtonyia used to be known, was founded amid the settling dust of World War I on the border of Austria and Hungary, drawing its small size from bits of both. The country's borders are not circumscribed by any natural boundaries, but by what, at one time, seemed like cultural ones. In 1915, the tiny sub-region was nothing more than farmland loosely arranged around a town that agrarians from a few miles in each direction turned to for contact with a larger community, if only because it was closer than other towns that weren't so much farther away in other directions.

Then, Lem Guldrn was a bureaucrat, albeit the only bureaucrat, since the town was only large enough to require one. He handled the mail, the conscription rolls, an occasional census—certainly not a powerful post in the scope of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. It was unique, however, and Lem, seeing that uniqueness, took persuasive advantage of it. He was a reader and he spoke French. He had even studied briefly in Budapest, although he had returned after only two months to take over the post of his deceased father with little more than a bound edition of Rousseau.

In the hard, honest faces that came to town to pick up mail and pay taxes Lem saw Rousseau's primitive man made flesh, pleasantly devoid of foresight or care. Seeing them in this state, it occurred to him that the social contract had yet to be drawn up, so he set out to draw it up himself.

Slowly he planted pieces of ideas in the minds of the people; ideas about being tossed like a cork in the chaos of the world by things that didn't affect life, and never had, here on the border of Austria and Hungary; ideas about how the people spoke in different ways and thought about different things three miles in every direction.

The future citizens of the Principality of Lem did not really think or speak so differently from their neighbors, but he made a convincing case, helped by what seemed like his wide knowledge of the world. He had been to Budapest, after all, and some said to Vienna. Occasionally, he would burst into French and rattle off streams of nonsense in a tone reserved for truisms.

Under the cover of Versailles, he closed the deal and got the new "Lems" (as the nationality is known) to sign on the dotted line. It happened calmly and deliberately, unsullied by violence or threats. They believed him and agreed to be ruled, much as an elected official agrees to serve.

The border was sealed, but only in effect: from the inside by consent and from the outside by accident. No one had a reason to go there.

Portraits of Lem soon hung above every doorway, and his reign—like his revolution—was uneventful. The citizens tended the fields as their ruler tended to the paperwork that went into the day-to-day operation of a small, historically innocuous nation-state.

Lem's mini-kingdom existed like this for seven decades, in a state of suspended animation, completely isolated from the world, despite the lack of even a show of force to defend its peculiar sovereignty.

In 1987, May, Lem died of a heart attack at his modest desk. His passing plunged the nation into mourning much more violent than anything in its history. It was then that the first journalists began trickling in to report on the Lems' apocalyptic sense of loss.

The first there reported that the natives greeted them with eyes full of tears of regret over the passing of their leader, coupled with tears of joy at having the good fortune to meet a foreigner before joining him in the hereafter. Initially, they revered foreigners, the years of isolation having subtly reversed the xenophobia of the country's formation. Their generosity was boundless. They took guests into their homes and offered their own beds to them.

The half-century of isolation had made the Lemish argot incomprehensible. It was almost a year after Lem's death before foreigners could be heard speaking it. Absent a common tongue, the Lems sat silently with early visitors for hours, usually at the dining table, beaming at their good look and wiping tears from their eyes.

That was during the first year of the country's so-called "decompression." After that, as if by prior agreement, the mourning ended and everyone went back to their business. There was no leader, and it didn't occur to anyone to need one. They had made an agreement with a man, not a thing.

Things had changed, however, in ways the Lems did not immediately understand. Their tiny country made of bits of Austria and Hungary was on the map, and outsiders continued to wander in. With journalists and transients—not to mention young and temporary American expats—came increasing exposure to Western styles. Commonplace items like nine-volt batteries, butane lighters, and Swiss pocketknives began commanding whole sacks of the largely symbolic currency passed around in the Lemish economy. Western magazines from the nation's lost-half-century began going for even more once the language barrier shook into a final crumble.

+++

"You think what?" Yuri asks again.

I don't answer. I keep walking, past unmarked graves and gasoline blazes; past the logos, slogans, and images that have been figuratively torn from those magazines and plastered over every visible square foot of the city.

The streets are empty. We haven't seen anyone, which is good. Consumer goods, which were until recently free for the asking, are now exchanged exclusively through violence. The logos, slogans, and images on most goods have been, like the ones on the billboards, peeled, scratched, or painted over.

Yuri is typical of the young generation that fueled the country's once celebrated "ad revolution." Educated in the small art college in the capital that, since the 1920s, had trained the artists who produced the seemingly endless portraits of Lem, he was schooled in the orthodox style—a hybrid of early Soviet realism and Armory Show impressionism that scarcely changed during Lem's lifetime and which can be found nowhere else in Europe. After Lem's death, the school became the city's first agency.

The advertisements originally produced by the school were for agricultural goods, paid for by loose affiliations of growers joined together by a common product. These early ads, usually based on American campaigns of at least twenty years earlier, were stamped on matchbooks and lighters and other items that were rare in the country at the time and given away as promotions. The rarity of the items themselves made the pitches on them potently effective, and soon demand (from consumers and advertisers alike) was overwhelming.

Students of the school struck out to create their own firms. Others were started by young foreigners, backed by agencies from their home countries, who saw the blossoming Ichtonyian industry as a rare opportunity to define a market as it was emerging. Magazines cropped up to accommodate the demand for media and the competition was so fierce that they often turned buyers away.

With infusions of foreign capital and a manic level of competition came more elaborate premiums. Western clothing, stereo systems, home computers, and—in the case of at least one ambitious campaign—Czech-built economy cars, were distributed more or less freely, paid for entirely by the prices their surfaces could bring as ad space.

The resulting economy brought speculation from Western observers that what was taking place here was nothing less than the future, a post-industrial barter system in which goods were replacing capital and its pitfalls, resulting in true equality of quality of life for all. Two years ago, Advertising Age, which had just opened a new bureau in Lem, made the following breathless observation:

The circulation of information in Ichtonyia—like the circulation of currency in all modern economic systems to date—has become self-sustaining. Meanings refer to other meanings, and the realization that meanings are alone valuable has ripped the system free from its foundation in commodities. Advertisements only rarely refer to products, but regularly refer to other advertisements. It is they—not the products that merely deliver them—that have value. This development signals a new era. The capital city of is a paradise where everything is available to all. Scarcity has been overcome, because meanings, unlike commodities, are infinite. In other words, the utopian economy—to which all utopias have always referred—has finally emerged, where the finitude of the physical has been replaced by the inexhaustible plenitude of the Idea.

Nothing in the day-to-day life of the country would have contradicted this heady observation, even a year ago. The standard of living plainly outstripped any in Eastern Europe and many in the West. To see the bustle and activity, the cars packing the streets, the overflowing cafes, and the shops loaded with products of all sorts, free for the asking, was to believe that there had never been a success story like this one.

The price of the new Ichtonyia had yet to reach the Ichtonyians themselves, however, and was proceeding, like a wave in a rope, through the system.

Today, people are starving in Ichtonyia. The price of basic foodstuffs—to which the layers of interlocking commercial messages ultimately, although no longer obviously, refer—has skyrocketed. Initially, the marketing efforts of the various agricultural collectives delivered stunning results, raising demand for some products—sugar beets, for example—to such an extent that prices actually fell. This in turn led to the frenzy of promotion and cross-promotion that brought about the revolution. Huge chains of giveaways were constructed to lead consumers to various raw products: Free VCRs referred to free CD-samplers that referred to free pocket flashlights that, in turn, referred to combination free keychain/bottle openers bearing slogans declaring the goodness and deliciousness of the year's potato harvest. Such chains became as expensive as they were indispensable in the increasingly hyper-competitive Ichtonyian marketplace. The ag-collectives couldn't keep up, as the scales tipped consumer prices out of reach and sales dropped in inverse relation to increases in theft.

Unable to simultaneously maintain high prices and pay off their debts to the agencies, the farms resorted to a series of half-measures. A certain portion—an inevitably increasing one—of their crops were simply handed over to the agencies to defray the costs of the unwieldy campaigns, while prices were lowered on the remaining portion.

Foreign firms brought in American security consultants and later armed guards to take custody of the relevant areas of farmland, but prices rose anyway. The agencies kept them high on the produce they controlled to cover spiraling media costs, while the farmers—forced to make ends meet with just a fraction of their total land—were likewise compelled to charge exorbitant prices, at least while their portion of the crop lasted. After that was exhausted, only the agency prices remained, and the protection of the ad industry's agricultural interests took on the look of a full-scale military operation.

The explosives had been planted—economically speaking—and required only a detonating event. That event came when a group of young farm-workers attempted a night raid on a wheat silo near the outskirts of Lem and were brutally thwarted—massacred, in fact—by agency forces. The death of the "Hershey martyrs"—so named for the ad for chocolate bars on the silo; which chocolate bars, ironically, bore slogans lauding the quality of the grain contained within—became the flashpoint and rallying cry of the counter-revolution. Ichtonyians not involved in the country's ad-biz took up arms—mostly Bulgarian-made SA-93's, like mine, which were given away in what now seems to have been an ill-advised campaign on behalf of the Ichtonyian Dairy Council.

Assassinations became commonplace, and whole brain trusts were wiped out at 8 a.m. meetings stormed by bands of reactionaries with bandanas tied to their faces. The lost xenophobia of the country's formation was rekindled, and the insurgents set about destroying all forms of marketing and promotion: outdoor, point of purchase, direct mail, or otherwise.

+++

It is dangerous being an adman in Ichtonyia today, although it is not that hard to blend in. Even the insurgents have no choice but to wear hats and t-shirts and jackets covered in slogans, although they do their best to burn and bleach them away. There is nothing else to wear, given the unbridled enthusiasm with which the whole country, until recently, embraced promotional items.

But there are signs that one must be careful to conceal. Leatherette portfolio cases, for one. And, so Yuri thinks, his goatee.

He rubs his chin as we near the crowds outside the fences that surround the agency. We are among the last to leave. Yuri and I work our way in, shouting along—in Lemish, which I do not understand—so as not to raise suspicions. Like the rest of the crowd, our clothes are bleached and burned and have holes torn in them where commercial messages used to be. I wave my rifle in the air, up there with all the others. There is no shooting. It's all but over. The crowds have assembled to watch the last of us leave.

We work our way to the front of the crowd and up to one of several gates. I flash my credentials to the guard, nod toward Yuri, and the chain link opens just long and wide enough for us to slip through. A roar goes up in the crowd as those in front realize who we are. They spit and jeer as the mass behind them surges forward, pressing them against the fences.

Inside, things are quiet. Those about to leave mill around nervously, avoiding the eyes of the Ichtonyian nationals who are being left behind. The direct mail guru smokes one cigarette into the next. The traffic girl sits, uncharacteristically quiet, on one of the lobby's leather sofas. The collateral twins wave their arms and speak to each other in Lemish.

As Yuri and I pass through the lobby, they all follow and join us at the elevator. The helicopter is waiting on the roof. I don't know where it's going exactly. Somewhere else.

The doors open on the top floor, and the six of us are braced by the vortex winds of the chopper blades. The helicopter is packed to near capacity. The others board, crowding themselves in, leaving Yuri and myself ducking low on the roof and shielding our eyes from the wind.

I have a word with the pilot, who shakes his head.

"You think what?" Yuri asks for the last time.

I shake my head, too, and take the rifle's strap from my shoulder and hand the machine gun to the young art director.

His book isn't very good. That Lemish hybrid of Soviet realism and impression was something maybe six months ago, but now ... And there isn't any room left anyway.

I worry he might shoot me but hope he will not.

Instead, he stands motionless as I step back onto the landing skid and brace myself against the wide-open doorway. The chopper rises tentatively off the roof before breaking into a sudden, vertical ascent and out over the courtyard as the mob tramples the fences under its Nike-clad feet below.