John says some platitudes about life always throwing curveballs, and that he did not expect his heart to be broken.
WHAAAAAAAAAAT?!
Do you really think he is going to break up with Joy? Really, truly think? If you do, slap yourself please.
This “stunning plot twist” is put on hold for a while as our protagonists arrive in Mexico City, where they meet up with Sal who is supposedly a suave executive now. Since when did he become a travel agent? Inquiring minds want to know. Apparently he got them reservations at the swanky Grand Mexico City Hotel, which I have translated from the Gratuitous Spanish that Rummel is using. (He forgot an accent on an E.) In this scene, not only do we learn that John and Joy let Sal and his friends call them by their first names, but also that Sal is a total tease, who seems to have figured out that John and Joy are friends with benefits, and thus has arranged for them to stay in the same room. Might I remind you again that the setting is well before the Sexual Revolution? This would have been scandalous!
After this bizarre and improbable scene, they all go to dinner, and Sal asks them if he can invite a friend over. Believe it or not, this is foreshadowing.
But first, John and Joy bathe together. It is claimed that the hotel they’re in is one of only two in the city that has running water, because it is apparently necessary to point out how backwards a country Mexico is. It was behind the times, but it was no Africa!
In a crude attempt to show how nice of a person he is, there is narration which tells us that John’s heart goes out to all the poor native peons who have to work in near slave-like conditions for John and Joy to enjoy their hot bath. Despite this, John does not have enough cultural sensitivity not to call them “Indians”. Really, this comes off much the same as all those whiny YA protagonists who claim to care about the starving children in Africa or what-have-you but then complain when things do not go their way. It’s very shallow and irritating. At no point do our alleged heroes actually see the natives being mistreated, which would have made John’s sympathy a bit more significant, if he had actually stopped to help them instead of enjoying the fruits of their labor. It would also show that the government of Mexico at the time did, in fact, need to be toppled.1 Yet again this novel runs afoul of the “show, don’t tell” rule.
As if admitting his hypocrisy, John outright says that his sympathy for the peons is abstract while his comfort is real, complains about the conditions of the train ride over there (which are nothing compared to the working conditions of the natives) and then has sex with Joy in the hotel’s bed. They do not even have the decency to hang a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door.2
They go down to dinner and see Sal sitting at a table with his new girlfriend, who will not actually be very important to the plot. John and Joy try to join them when, surprise surprise, a waiter mistakes Joy for a native and tells them, in Spanish, that they do not serve Indians.3 This is the first time that actual racial prejudice is shown in the story.
Of course, John moralizes to the audience about how racism is wrong and that he had learned the proper response to such beliefs during the Civil Rights Movement. Wait just one New York minute here! John was 26 when 9/11 happened. He was not yet born at the time of the Civil Rights Movement. He could not possibly have taken part in it. Now the author is trying to give his Self-Insert even more undeserved accolades. I think he, just like most fanfic writers, has forgotten that he is significantly older than his Self-Insert. Ultimately however, he does nothing, because in his own words, “Fighting such prejudice here was futile.”4 Someone tell that to the ghost of Rosa Parks. But the conflict is resolved as soon as John tells the waiter that Joy is Chinese. I’m pretty sure the Chinese were also considered second-class citizens in 1908 Mexico. Moreover, note that John calls Joy Chinese, and she does not object. This will be important later.
As an aside, Rummel-as-John claims that the proper responce to such bigotry is “We don’t eat Indians.” It should be pointed out that the waiter addresses Joy in Spanish, and I am pretty sure that “No comemos indios” does not make any sense in response to “No servimos indios aquí”. The Spanish word for “to serve [as food]” is “abastecer”. But that’s for another time.
She isn’t an important character, but here we learn that Sal’s girlfriend-of-the-week is named Alicia Cardenas . This is a bit like naming an American character “Beth Lincoln” or something like that. Also, Rummel doesn’t have the accent over the first A. (But maybe that’s just me being pedantic.)
In any case, the following scene happens:
She gave me a slight bow and, in a most ladylike way, slid onto the chair, crossed her ankles, put her hands on her lap, and sat primly, back straight. It was so unlike my image of her, like a wild tiger trying to act like a domesticated cat, that I only barely stifled a guffaw. Her way of being sarcastic.
I plopped into the chair next to her and told an amused Sal, “You had better explain our humor to Alicia. He did so in Spanish, in effect telling her we were incurable jokesters.
She replied in Spanish, “Really. I thought John was such a gentleman and Joy so much a lady.”
I could tell Sal was struggling to suppress his own snicker. (page 206)
What was that all about? That “joke” is impenetrable to anybody who doesn’t know John and Joy. And in any case, aren’t they supposed to be acting like adults? I’m also a little surprised that this Alicia, who appears to be this high-class lady, has no objections to sitting with an Asian.
Since Joy doesn’t understand Spanish, she asks John what the waiter had said earlier, and he lies to her, and says that the waiter was commenting on her good looks. Was there any reason that he couldn’t have told her the truth? …Wait a minute, he may have realized that Joy would throw a fit if she knew.
So Rummel wastes some more time and narrative with the characters’ double date. Seriously, a double date. They could be stopping dictators or something right now! Isn’t that what this book is supposed to be about? The story that the readers are interested in and wanted to read about when they opened this novel? Instead of fast-paced action scenes or psychological examination of how evil people think, we get small talk about Sal’s date being this rich girl from a noble family,5 and note that our so-called heroes don’t care in the slightest that Alicia’s family are some of the hacienda-owners they oppose. Oh, the irony. They don’t even try to ingratiate themselves with her in order to ally themselves with her family or anything that actual social reformers would try to do. So what was the point of making Sal’s girlfriend come from a wealthy background in the first place?
Afterwards, John and Joy wake up at midnight, armed to the teeth, and sneak out of the hotel. Other than a street-cleaner, no one else is outside. By the way, John and Joy aren’t really headed anywhere; they’re just taking a midnight stroll. Seriously. They realize the foolishness of this when — GASP! — four teenagers approach them! Oh no, not teenagers! Said teenagers are dressed like stereotypical Mexicans, sombreros and all. One of them says something rude to John, yet at the same time addresses him by the respectful “Usted”. Just after we learn that Rummel doesn’t know that much Spanish, the teenager asks John what he is doing with that “Indian whore”.6 Immediately after that, they tell John to leave, and try to rape Joy, brandishing knives.
John apparently thinks that Joy is a dumbass, and tells her that their assailants want to rape her, as though she couldn’t figure this out on her own. When she hears this, and this is important, she says “Oh. Fun.”7 It is meant to be a Pre-Ass-Kicking One-Liner. But John, as we will soon learn, apparently sees it differently.
What follows is a badly choreographed fight scene in which Joy takes out three armed men by herself, and John just stands there like a dumbass. Joy kills one during the fight itself, and then murders the other two after they are incapacitated. There is literally no reason for this incident to even happen; the teenagers just show up from nowhere to create cheap conflict, and to demonstrate Joy’s ruthlessness.
John is understandably horrified. This is the last time we will ever see him have a normal reaction to anything. I know I’ve said that a lot, but this book is schizophrenic when it comes to characterization. He’s so upset that he throws up, and his vomit only barely misses hitting Joy.
The thought burst into my devastated mind: Thank God. She would have killed me. (page 210)
Immediately afterwards, he denies this, but I actually believe it. That is some Freudian Slip you did there, John.
Joy just brushes it off and tells him that they had better leave. How convenient for them that there were no witnesses.
John… is actually a wreck. He is on the verge of a Heroic BSOD because of what has just happened, with Joy considering it fun to kill people. (Yes, a bystander is actually more affected by a rape attempt than the would-be victim. That’s another Unfortunate Implication.) The next paragraph is him rationalizing Joy’s behavior. It looks like John is developing Stockholm Syndrome, or at least something a lot like it. After a pointless line break, John staggers back into the hotel with Joy following emotionlessly.
He looks like a wreck, and when Joy innocently asks him what’s wrong, he flips out on her, telling her that she could have (and in fact, did) incapacitate the teenagers effortlessly, so killing them was excessive. He calls her a murderer right to her face. Could John actually be getting some Character Development?
Joy says that they tried to rape her (even though she effortlessly fought them off) and rationalizes her killing of them by saying that she probably saved more women from their rape gang, and then calls John an asshole while insinuating that he’s sexist.8
“So,” I screamed even louder, “You are judge, jury and executioner. Not of what they did, but of what they might have done.” (page 211)
He says this while on a mission to kill dictators before they come to power. Forget my Sue-dometer, now my irony meter is broken.
Joy barely stops herself from inflicting bodily harm upon John for that remark. Instead, she screams at him, says that she did all the work in the fight, and leaves the room.
Line break.
John stays in the hotel room all the next day. He does not want anything to do with Joy anymore. At last, he goes down to eat dinner, and meets up with Sal, alone.9 Sal says that he heard from Alicia that four people were killed not far from the hotel— unbeknownst to them, the very same four teenagers Joy killed. When John hears this, he vomits all over the table.
And with John running back to the hotel room crying, the chapter ends.
Cliffhanger!
Footnotes
1 It did, but Rummel doesn’t do a good job of showing it.
2 He also complains about the bed’s “awful springs”. I don’t know quite what he means by that.
3 And yet Sal, the son of a prostitute, is able to sit there without a problem.
4 page 205
5 Yes, really. She is allegedly a Cardosa of which “Cárdenas” is a spelling variant. That further raises the question of what she’s doing with Sal of all people.
6 page 208
7 Ibid.
8 You know what they say about stopped clocks…
9 Sal, by the way, has no idea why they are even there.
Forest Purple on 17 February 2013, 13:26 said:
Let me guess. John and Joy get back together, and John forgives her, apologizes, and experiences an epiphany where he realizes it’s good to kill people who are going to do bad things?
Asahel on 17 February 2013, 15:22 said:
And hence why puns don’t translate well. It works in English, but not in the language of the person to whom the retort would’ve been directed. That’s something Rummel should’ve looked into before putting in the aside.
See, here’s where I’d like to have some moral thought into their plan. Now, those teenagers are lost to the annals of history, I’m sure. They don’t know who they are or what they did with the rest of their lives; the only thing they know is what they did when their paths intersected. On the other hand, we have the dictators. These are people that we know with absolute certainty what they will do if left to continue in their own way. Their crimes are certain, but one known assault is the only certain crime of the teenagers—the crimes they may commit are uncertain. So, here’s the rub: Does the certainty of the dictators’ crimes make it moral to kill them before their crimes are committed (if such a thing were possible via time travel for example) while it would still be immoral to kill the teenagers because their potential crimes are uncertain and their only known crime was one that wouldn’t warrant the death penalty?
That’s the kind of thought I’ve been looking for since this novel started, but I have the feeling that boat’s never going to sail.
Tim on 17 February 2013, 17:35 said:
Also to further Rummel’s habit of setting the moral bar impossibly low. As in “see, I’m not a racist because I know being a Klansman and burning black people is wrong” or here “I’m not a sexist because I’m depicting excessive violence to a rapist.”
It’s like “proving” you’re not alcoholic by demonstrating you’ve never drunk brake fluid.
Brendan Rizzo on 17 February 2013, 17:45 said:
I don’t want to spoil anything, but you’re not far off.
swenson on 18 February 2013, 00:10 said:
How, exactly, does one mistake an East Asian woman for an indigenous Mexican? I knew a lady who was a native, and she looked nothing even at all like an East Asian. Like, not even the slightest.
Mingnon on 18 February 2013, 00:48 said:
Actually, it appeared that John was more affected by the fact that Joy killed people.
The line about killing people for something they could have done seems to cement that John didn’t really care about the fact that the teens could have raped Joy, never mind that he told her about that before the ‘fight’ sequence.
Then again, it appears that something that did happen is more concerning than something that didn’t happen. In which case Joy could have simply knocked the little monsters unconscious and brought them to the police.
But wait… could they be able to report and arrest people for attempted rape back then? In Mexico?
Tim on 18 February 2013, 06:34 said:
If they’d done it before you could probably at least get a good old fashioned lynching going, even in a place with no law and order at all.
But wasn’t Mexico in 1908/9 under a repressive government? I don’t see how Rummel has parsed that as ‘lawless.’
Brendan Rizzo on 18 February 2013, 08:20 said:
To be fair to Rummel here, we are currently living in an age where racism is unacceptable. Racists don’t really give a damn about anyone other than themselves, so they will not bother to do any research and will frequently lump all nonwhite people together. Really, that’s the most realistic part of the book so far.
I can see how quite easily. He is claiming that, since dictatorships are horrible places, clearly nothing about them must be even slightly functional. He seems to have confused Mexico with Somalia. The irony here is that the belief that government even can be a force for good is a left-wing position, and Rummel has spoken very strongly against what he considers “academic leftimania”.
Fireshark on 18 February 2013, 12:20 said:
I disagree. Rummel is an outspoken fan of George W. Bush (or at least he was a few years ago), and Bush wasn’t particularly anti-government, as I remember. He may not have talked government up, but he certainly increased spending, created new programs, created mandates, and made heavy use of the military. He also didn’t try to get rid of Medicare, food stamps, and other social programs. Not everybody on the right is a Tea Partier or Libertarian.