She ignores the question, and he continues.
“But they’ve never seen shit like this, right. And you don’t need a shrink to see it’s sorta blowing their minds.”
She nods and says, “I trust no one’s been so careless as to whisper a word about Vermont or the Scituate Reservoir?” she asks without taking her eyes off the photograph.
“Despite what you may think, we’re not total fucking idiots. Besides, it’s not like they’ll be walking away from this with their recollections intact.”
“Perish the thought,” she says, peeking at him over the top of the photo, and she taps the side of her nose three times.
“Anyway, that’s what I brought, and I believe it’s now your turn,” says the Signalman, and he jabs a callused thumb at the attaché case. She nods and lays the picture from Moonlight Ranch back down on the table.
2. Words Written Backwards (June 29, 2015)
DREW IS TALKING TO ME, whispering in my ear, even though he’s not here. At high noon I’m standing in the darkness cast by my own shadow—the only darkness remaining in the world—and I stare out across the desert, past Salt Creek, towards the hazy, uneven gray-periwinkle line that the Chocolate Mountains draw between the sky and the everlasting brownness of Coachella hardscrabble. Behold, the Kingdom of Caliche and Horned Toads, Drew said (and he laughed) the first day I was an inhabitant vomited upon the coast of the Sea. That day when first I stood upon the hot tin and followed the weathervane of his crooked finger. From there—from here—my eyes set eastward, I can see all the way to those crumbling schist ridges and peaks, laid down in Precambrian oceans. If I squint hard, man, and harder still, like I’ve been taught, I might as well be seeing much farther away, past what mere eyes can discern, to other mountain ranges and maybe all the way to the Palo Verde Valley and Blythe, where the desert is tormented so that green things will grow to feed us all and please the fickle eye of mankind. There are trees in Blythe. I remember trees.
Drew has gone away today on business, and Madeline went with him, and I am left here alone with myself and the others and with the sizzle of my brains in this woman’s skull, a resonant frequency that perfectly matches white noise, the random signal possessed of a perpetual power supply, and in discrete time, a procession of serially uncorrelated random variables (finite variance, zero mean). These thoughts tumble on whirring insect wings in the hexagonal honeycomb of my mind’s single eye, hollowing me out, while the sun chars me the same earth-tone shades as the desert. Down behind the husks of expired cars and trucks that make a rusty garden outside the ranch, the digital thermometer says it’s 103.7 degrees F. We’re having a cold snap. Up here, scraping myself against the belly of the sky, it must be so much hotter. But salvation has sailed me out beyond all fears of conflagration.
“It’s so close now,” Drew told us all last night. “You really have no notion how delightful it will be. Cross my heart and hope to die. Bo and Peep, Doe and Ti, as you are the Children of the Next Level.”
His voice soothes the meat and mud of my soul.
“I believe we’re the purest communists there are,” says he. “Translation, evolution, metamorphosis, bliss in everlasting ice and trans-Neptunian, Kuiper Belt blackness, and you eat of my body, and we will traipse the light fantastic across aether wastes to be free of false Christs.”
I don’t know what half of it means, and I don’t pretend I do. I can understand without a perfect understanding. He’s shown me that. I can pop the cap and inhale deeply and fill myself with the gifts of gods who never were gods. Back in Old Lost Angels, before my deliverance to this deeper Cali-dirt expanse of lizards and diamondback seraphim, wildcat bishops and roadrunners, I shot sweet Afghan heroin into my rotting arms, between my toes and fingers, but I’m free now. You think this isn’t Paradise? You think this isn’t Eden? Then you better think again, little Chloe. You better think again. Drew is a Titan. You know a Titan by the thunder in his belly and the fire on his chapped lips.
We dine on rattlesnakes and hot green tea, and Drew Standish, he tells us the last days are here. We camp upon the threshold, just switch on the television, that ginormous 1975 Zenith in its composite-board, wood-grain cabinet, and astroglide the picture tubes. The thing gets no stations out here, no rabbit ears needed. We don’t need networks and programming; we need only noise. We need only snow, electromagnetic noise, man, semut bertengkar as Indonesians say, which translates into something like “war of the ants.” Radio waves, cosmic microwave background radiation. Baby doll, dig this, okay? One percent of that crackly shit is light from the Big Bang, come down thirteen billion years to tickle your rods and cones. Me, I didn’t know shit about physics and cosmology before I left L.A. All I knew was the aching, all-devouring urgency of the next fix.
I’m barefoot up here as the day I was born, high on our hot tin roof, high on cultured spores and the words of Drew, but like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace of wicked King Nebuchadnezzar, like Indian fakirs gifted by Allah, like an Apollo heat shield, I firewalk without burns. I bathe in the all-forgiving, all-anointing, purifying eye of Old Man Ra, and I wait for the others to join me on the roof. I’m positively zealous, says Madeline, in my devotions and my sacrifices, the holy mortification of sloughing flesh, and she tells me the others could learn from my example. Sweaty rivulets scald my eyes, and I blink away the little pain. I keep my eyes on the Chocolate Mountains. They’ll come from there, says Drew. They will come from sunrise.
I raise my arms in praise.
I just looked up one day, and he was looking down, and he offered me a hand.
And man, that was a goddamn first.
“It isn’t your fault, little Chloe, that you fell so far. Chernobyl claims our souls. The opium kissed your blood to soothe the throb of NOW, and you fucked it and let it fuck you because no one else ever has loved you true and dear.”
He held me while I cried. He held me in a filthy alley behind a filthy concrete squat somewhere in the void between Ninety-third and Ninety-fourth streets in Westmont. I smelled of shit and infection, sour sweat and Goodwill castoffs. In that spray-can graffiti gangland razor-wire palm-tree Inferno did he hold me tight (and, looking back, that was surely the treacherous Ninth Circle, me sunk and frozen to my throat in the ice of the River Cocytus). I had squandered teen ages behind me and my fast squandering twenties going down in rubble all around, but there he was, silver haired and beautiful, eyes like this sky above me today. He offered a hand and freedom and absolution, and all I had to do was crawl up from the Pit. From so far down, to so far up here, the mountains out before me and the Salton Sea evaporating at my back, dying its slow, slow inevitable inland death. I am poised between, being cooked same as H once bubbled molten in my junkie’s spoon. I am being made ready for the coming evacuation of this ruined, forsaken planet.
“In those realms, the sun shines no brighter than a star,” he tells us, Madeline and me and the others, as we watch the static and listen to the voices buried in the static, two waves superimposed to form the holy intersection of the Third Wave, mightier than the one plus the one, gathering half the deep and full of voices, we cling to him, and we slowly rise and wait to be plunged, roaring, and all the wave will be in a cold blue flame. And he says, “Behold the black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges.”