Soft Skull: Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe

Set in the indeterminate but not too distant future, JAMESTOWN chronicles a group of "settlers" (more like survivors) from the ravaged island of Manhattan, departing just as the Chrysler Building mysteriously collapses, heading down what's left of I-95 in an armor-plated vehicle that's half-schoolbus, half-Millenium Falcon. They are going to establish an outpost in southern Virginia, look for oil, and exploit the Indians controlling the area.

The story is of course based on the actual accounts of the first ten years of the Jamestown settlement from 1607 to the death of Pocahontas in 1617. Set against a cataclysmic backdrop, the book features the historical characters – John Smith, Pocahontas, her father Powhatan, John Ratcliffe, John Martin, and John Rolf – but in an act of wild re-imagination, akin to Baz Luhrman's re-interpretations of Shakespeare (the great playwright of the Jamesown era!), Powhaton is half-Falstaff, half-Henry V (with a psychiatrist consigliere, Sidney Feingold); John Martin gradually loses body parts in a series of violent encounters, while John Smith is a ruthless and pragmatic redhead continually undermining the aristocratic leadership; and Rolf's and Pocahontas's romance is conducted by text-messaging, IM-ing, and ultimately telepathy.

Despite the grim sounding circumstances and large quantity of spilled blood, it's a romantic book, a meditation on history and interpretation, told in language that is endlessly delightful; the jokes, the rhymes, and the rimshot dialogue throw the story's bleak underside into brilliant relief. It's a big book, a cross between the terrific maximalist novels of Barth and Safran Foer and the minimalist magical satire of George Saunders.

JOHNNY
To the one I hope receives this, though I'm not sending it:
Sarcastic hope is a mask made in the shape of the hopeful man's face before the lead pipe of experience fashioned him a new one. My wireless device is gone. I'm composing this by hand on humankind's flimsiest and least likely invention, paper. Hope of reaching you I've never had. Some other type of hope I still must have, I guess, or else I wouldn't make these notes at all, and now I'm going to let this hope alone: factual scrutiny's corrosive effect on hope has been demonstrated down the ages on folks who started out with far more hope than I.
We're on this bus again against our will, a bunch of guys on a non-moving bus in the middle of a dark, alien field. The bus we thought would take us to our new home may turn out to be our new home. This stinking, fetid, airless bus may well be where we spend our final days, which may well be tomorrow.
We woke up in a good mood, collectively. I suppose a hot meal and even the sort of swift and businesslike erotics most of us underwent had had a healthful impact, moodwise. So a lot of us were thinking what an excellent idea it had been to take an interminable bus trip that had almost killed us, if it meant ending up in this beautiful new land where people eat real meat, and which we would soon lay claim to. And everyone was eager to start scouting for food and a worthy place to build a provisional town.
We all got off the bus and stretched and shook our limbs, and were dazedly taking in the singular and vivid hereness of the place-the warmth of the clime, the less-intensely greenish tone of sky, the field of corn, I think she said it's called, and other things I can't describe. Some guys slapped each other on the back, some guys laughed, some guys talked about looking for water and food, and then, in a sense, we met the local men.
A guy named Matthew Bernard-nice young guy, good guy to have around for his cheerfulness, and who cares if he's a little stupid?-felt what he first thought was a stomach cramp, and looked down to find the back half of a short arrow sticking out of his lower abdomen. I think the wisdom on these things is that you're not supposed to yank them out. Would you have remembered that if you were him? He yanked it out and moaned and said, "Oh no."
Then a lot of things happened at once. Other arrows sprang into being in other guys' body parts-hands, beards, knees. Some guys scrambled for the bus. The guys with guns removed them from their hidden sheaths and fired in various directions since no one knew where the arrows were coming from. Richard Buck, our priest, laid Matt Bernard on the ground and said to him, "Okay, let's lift up that shirt and have a look at that, it's probably not all that bad, even if it hurts like hell." Matt sobbed. What we saw then-Richard Buck, kneeling over the first victim of our new hosts, and I, standing above him, not helping and in harm's way-was a sort of second bellybutton an inch below the first, darker, more inward, more bottomless, oozing a thick, unthoroughly mixed red and brown goo. I don't know much about anatomy and physiology but the goo didn't seem like something that ought to happen to anyone, least of all a nice young guy like Matt.
I looked around: no assailants, just arrows, visible not as they flew through the air but only as they hit or missed their mark, and not many missed. I guess a tall and densely-planted field of grain is a good place from which to launch an arrow attack against a group of hapless guys getting off a bus. I envied the shooters. They did with their bows what I'd been trying to do with my wireless device: send a message, instantly and invisibly, across a vast amount of space. I had my cloth bag on my shoulder and now touched my wireless through the bag, held it, my sad and stupid wireless. It got shot out of my hands. I dropped to the dirt to look for it. I saw instead Matt Bernard's aggrieved face, which I was now crouching above. Father Buck was down by his feet. "Lift him, Rolfe, for Christ's sake, how many times to I have to tell you, hello? Gently, don't shake him." We eased him up into the bus, and all the while I thought of my wireless on the ground. Maybe without me its luck will improve.
Our guys shot, hid, shouted, and ran, while Dick Buck made do with me as surgical assistant on the floor of the bus. It was nice and not-so-nice to see how shiny-clean and sharp the tools were. Buck cut a short red line in Matt's belly. The line grew into an ovoid hole. Matt howled and passed out. I tried not to let the stench make me retch.
"Try to stay with me here, Rolfe, I can't do this by myself. Clean that out."
"Clean what out?"
"That."
"How?"
"Do you think I've ever sat on the floor of a bus and operated on a guy who's been shot with an arrow before? Don't be a dead weight."
I did my best to clean him up. He's still alive, though febrile, tonight, here, next to and slightly above me, as I sit on the floor of this bus writing this, glancing up at Matt, thinking of my lost device.
The arrow attack didn't last long. Newport, our driver, stopped it with an automatic assault rifle. (Again the emphatic wrongness of my previous assessment of who on the bus had what arms. Wronger and wronger I grow day by day.) With his single arm he wasn't too precise with it, but didn't have to be to get his point across. The particular wisdom of the assault rifle is the wisdom of abundance and speed. But any of our guns, really, seem gross and stupid compared to their lean and intelligent arrows, with the assault rifle earning the prize for the stupidest gun of all. It takes no intelligence or skill to use it, and it took not only no intelligence but a willful negation of intelligence to have invented it, though I do think it took a certain kind of imagination to invent it. To consider the imagination it took to invent the automatic assault rifle is not a happy or controllable activity. I wish I hadn't started to think or talk about it or its user or its maker or its effects. I wish I hadn't seen its effects, or known of its existence, or been born into a world in which people use, make, think of, or are shot by automatic assault rifles.