I feel movement in my lungs, and I cough. I taste blood and mold at the back of my throat, and I spit on the roof. My spittle is thick and yellow; it sizzles.
I smile.
I smile a lot these days.
Drew scooped me up from that Dantean alleyway so that I’d remember how I smiled when I was just a kid and all my fears were only kid fears and all my horrors were only kid horrors. He wrapped me in a musty leather duster that I think he stole from a Clint Eastwood movie, and he put me in the front seat of that old red Buick station wagon he drives, and he ferried me back to life good as if Charon had changed his mind. Drew is a magician. He makes time run in all directions. Man, he makes time do his motherfucking bidding. They gave him that, power over clocks and wristwatches. And that day I listened as Madeline talked from the backseat and Drew followed the varicose labyrinth of numbered highway signs east and south, leaving the Big Orange in the back of us for the blessed sanctuary of a Sonoran promised land. Rolling me smooth on white-walled steel belts past enchanted places I’d never been—Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, Indio, Thermal. When I saw the turnoff for Mecca, I asked, Then this is it? And he laughed that quicksilver laugh he laughs and shook his head. No, little Chloe, but we’re close now. Now we’re very, very close. Another few miles, and I got my first sight of the Salton Sea. I got my eyes full.
“I’ll tell you stories,” he said, “when you’ve got your bearings, stories about the how and the why and the when of it.”
“You mean the water?”
“I mean it all, baby doll.”
I lit a cigarette, breathed smoke and nicotine, and marveled at a great flat houseboat stranded at the side of the road like the skeleton of a dead whale. There was broken furniture scattered about on its deck, and the name written across its bow in letters faded not quite to illegibility was Heart’s Desire.
“Last chance,” Drew said, and I asked him, “Last chance for what?”
“Never mind,” he said. “Never you mind, little Chloe. One day, I’ll tell you what the Indians knew. One day real soon.”
I stand in the sun. I stand on the broiling roof of the ranch house, and my feet have long since burned until they’re callused and numb as if they were shot full of novocaine. I can hear the TV playing below me, its static choked up with voices, because in the mouth of the beast there are more beasts. I stand with my arms raised, feeling it all, hearing it all, thinking—just for an instant—maybe Drew got it wrong. Maybe my prophet is fallible, and in just a second or two more, I’m gonna come apart at the seams and scatter in a spray of photons and spores. Like, you know, those ancient crumbs of the Big Bang, spilling out across forever to reach an old TV set. I’ll be the first of all those Little Bangs to come. I’ll be both his Alpha and Omega, and he’ll be proud and not for one second regret having found me and saved me from the needle’s prick.
“Let me just ask you this,” Drew says, whispering in my ear and speaking from some other day, from now and then and some tomorrow yet to come. He sounds like hellfire, sulfur, and silk sheets. “How much have you thought about what was really in back of that great digital switchover in 2013? The fact that it was mandatory, I mean. The forced cessation of analog transmissions, the goddamn Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005? Congress, the FCC, the American Association of Broadcasters all talking about conserving electricity and how we’re getting such better picture quality, right? Yeah, sure, but who is it pulls their strings? What’s this really all about, because now not just anyone can switch on the tube and catch that sacred one-percent signal. In every cubic centimeter of the universe there are three hundred photons from the Big Bang. And SETI? That was just some hippie scientist boondoggle, and that’s what’s really going on here, see. You got these gatekeepers not wanting us to gaze into the oldest fossil in all Creation, the very face of God.”
I hear the TV, and I can hear the others. Some of them are so much farther along than me. I’m not good about hiding my jealousy. I make no secret of the fact that I want to be the first to bloom, and that’s okay, because humility ain’t got no place in their plan.
“Stop and think, okay?” And Drew taps his finger hard against his forehead, the way he does when he’s making a point. “Just stop and fucking think. The NTIA, OPAD, the Office of Spectrum Management, MediaFLO, fucking Microsoft, and definitely fucking Apple. You ever wondered about the Beatles and Apple? You ever looked at the label at the center of a vinyl copy of the Beatles’ Abbey Road or Let It Be? Ever done all the correlative and concordance work linking all those Apple Records releases—Badfinger, Billy Preston, the Radha Krsna Temple, Doris goddamn Day and Ronnie Spector, Ravi Shankar, and et cetera and et cetera and et cetera—and seen where the siren trail leads, how it gets all tangled up in that Los Altos garage with Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne? You ever thought about why Apple Inc. is Apple Inc.? That bullshit Jobs spun about his fruitarian diet, I seriously hope you’re not gonna buy that crap. About Jobs’ jobs in orchards and Sir Isaac Newton, the misdirection of that original logo with Newton sitting beneath a tree waiting to be struck by gravity? Yeah, they kinda showed their hand there, what with Yggdrasil, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Bodhi Tree, the Glastonbury Thorn—Ficus religiosa and Crataegus monogyna, respectively. ‘A is for Apple,’ yeah right, and I got a bridge you’re gonna buy real cheap up in Cisco.”
I want to open my eyes, the windows to my soul, but Drew reminds me it’s too soon to burn out my retinas. I’m gonna need them just a little longer.
The station wagon, cherry red, rushed past the Heart’s Desire, and Madeline was talking, then, about the tourist-trade, resort getaway boom and bust of the Salton Sea, about Sonny Bono and avian botulism. I listened, but her words were bleeding through me. My head was too full of sun and sea and earth.
“Did you know that between 1978 and 2006 Apple Records sued Apple Computer multiple times?” Drew asks his congregation. “That’s another bit of misdirection. But the truth is that the music playing in that fateful Los Altos garage, Steve Jobs’ parents’ garage, it was Let It Be, Abbey Road, Yellow Submarine, and yeah, The White Album. But—wait, before you start in about that lunatic Manson—he got all that shit wrong. Manson was a cunt, and he was also crazier than a shithouse rat. No, you listen to ‘Revolution 9,’ okay?”
Rouge doctors have brought this specimen. 9, number 9, a man without terrors, only to find the night-watchman, unaware of his presence in the building.
Below me, I hear the screen door bang shut, so here they come, the others, and in a moment they climb up the ladder, and I won’t be alone with the heat, with the Chocolate Mountains and the jackrabbits. I won’t be alone with Drew’s precious whispers. Some days, I’d like to murder the lot of them, if only that were part of the plan. By now, they’re probably partway to the rickety ladder leading up to the roof and me.
Take this brother, it may serve you well. Eldorado, if you become naked.
I turn my back on the mountains and face the white and stinking Salton Sea.
3. Zero-Sum Gethsemane (July 10, 2015)
BACK AT LA POSADA, the Signalman sits on the edge of his bed in a sweat-stained T-shirt and his Fruit of the Loom briefs, waiting on morning. It’s not quite half past two. He pours himself another shot of J&B, filling the paper Dixie cup almost precisely one third of the way. He’s taking it slow, pacing himself. The bottle needs to last until dawn. Right now, the thought of running out of whisky before he runs out of night is sufficient incentive to marshal the iron fist of self-control. That might change a little later on. It’s still early, after all, and the demons dancing about behind his eyes are the very competitive sort. The contents of Immacolata Sexton’s fancy briefcase versus sobriety. The fear of his dreams versus exhaustion. You get the picture. The AC purrs like a cat made of ice. The curtains are pulled shut, and the television’s on. Clark Gable is helping Claudette Colbert make her way up the Eastern Seaboard, from Florida to New York City. True love is on the line, or so she thinks. Albany’s best man sips his J&B and stares at the screen for a while, before turning his attention back to the thick dossier the Y operative handed over at the diner. He’s pacing himself with that, too.