Better Angels (7 page)

Night fell and deepened. The driver told Mike his theory about KL’s provenance, how the chemical extract might have come into circulation before the natural source did: “Maybe they—whoever they are—originally got a small sample from a medicine man somewhere in the jungle,” the driver speculated, “but then couldn’t find the true source for a while.”

After that, however, the driver didn’t have much more to say. His thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. Not far from the I-80 and Nevada 395 interchange, the driver exited and pulled over to let him out. Mike hefted up his rucksack from the back seat of the station wagon and reached into his back pocket for his wallet.

“No, no,” the driver said, turning off his engine. “You don’t owe me anything. I appreciated the company. You might want to spend a little time in Reno, though. Come down from the KL a bit before you go back on the road. A few hours, anyway.”

“Okay,” Mike said, shouldering his gear. “Thanks. Have a safe drive.”

The gray headed man nodded and touched the bill of his cap in salute.

“Right,” he said, switching the engine and lights back on. “See yourself a new now.” The driver must have noticed Mike’s quizzical expression, for he explained—or thought he did. “Envision a better present. The future may be too late.”

Mike smiled and nodded. The driver pulled his vehicle and trailer back onto the road, headed down Nevada 395. Mike turned and walked down the street. No other cars or people were about. Here off the highway, the place seemed eerily quiet, deserted. An empty city with all its lights still on.

The emptiness touched a deep chord in Mike. He remembered the insomnia he’d suffered through as a little kid, crying night after night because he couldn’t sleep, crying because he feared he was the only creature left awake in all the universe. That was a terrible and frightening burden, to be so awake and so alone, in haunted solitary freefall down the well of night, the fall growing worse the longer it went on. The loneliness had seemed to rush faster and faster upon him, until he feared he would overshoot the lost world of sleep completely, never rendezvous with it again, just crash and burn on the desolate surface of some dark star of eternal wakefulness.

Shaking the memory out of his head, Mike walked past discount stores and strip malls, thinking about the driver with his talk of nuclear bombs and astronauts, symbolic technologies and technological symbols. He thought of the gray-haired man driving through the night, into and through towns of people he would never know.

Mike stared up into the night sky, looking for those few bright stars and secret satellites that might shine down on him, despite Reno’s star-killing fog of ambient light. Up there somewhere was the old international space station, hanging above the earth for as long as he could remember. Up there, too, construction was underway on the first of the new orbital habitats. He wondered which would be lonelier—looking down on empty cities with all their lights still on after some great depopulating disaster, or looking down and knowing that the cities were filled with billions of people you could never really know.

From a certain height tragedy ceases to be tragic, Mike thought, remembering it only as a quote from some philosopher or other. Maybe that numbing loftiness was the greatest tragedy of all—the tragedy of gods and vast, impersonal, technorational societies. Maybe that was why people were trying to build little communities out there in space, human-made planetoids to shrink the world back down to human scale, so ordinary people wouldn’t feel quite so much like ants under a wanton boy-god’s burning glass—test subjects in a daily scientific experiment indistinguishable from mere cruelty.

Returning his gaze to the street, Mike noticed that he was quite a distance from any major casinos. The nearest buzzing place was Reno Lanes, a bowling alley a block ahead, toward which he quickly made his way.

Once inside, Mike couldn’t tell whether the place was retro or just hadn’t been remodeled since the 1950s. Garish neon and tacky furniture pummeled his senses from every angle. He seemed to have walked into somebody’s dream-vision of funky atomic futurism. The space before him was carpeted in star-spangled black, with blue and lime lines weaving back and forth in a pattern as haplessly meandering as a drunkard’s walk home. Metallic orange-and-avocado cutouts of hyperBohrian planetary-orbital atoms, giant children’s balls-and-jacks, huge asterisks without accompanying footnotes—all stood bolted onto the silvery papered walls. The starscape ceiling was chandeliered with tailfinned rockets and ringed planets. Muzak from another dimension played over hidden speakers.

Taking a seat in a pucker-upholstered booth, Mike soon realized that the music coming over the speakers was thoroughly unrecognizable, weirdly distorted, reverbed, misdigitized. As he glanced at the menu, he wondered whether the KL was causing him to experience auditory hallucinations, or the bowling alley’s speaker system was monumentally screwed up, or both. Whatever the cause, it was a very discomfiting experience.

A woman, garbed and made up like a waitress in Ming the Merciless’s favorite Marsside cafe, asked Mike what he would have. The exhaustion in the thin, overworked woman’s voice was faintly reassuring—an anchor of reality in the surreal world ballooning all around him. He ordered a shake and fries. When she turned toward the kitchen and left, he was sorry to see her go.

There was only one person bowling, someone dressed in what, at this distance, looked like an orange prison jumpsuit. Even a solitary bowler’s game was more than noise enough for Mike in his current state, however. The dopplershifting of the ball rolling down the lane began to say strange things to him—the mouthed and muttered echoes, in some benighted crowd, of unseen actors speaking from a hidden stage, talking of mind viruses and science fiction religions and human fertility cults, telling him that the stars are gods and we are their ashen tears.

Are alien abductions the Zeus rapes of our time? the dopplershifting asked him. Are humans the consciousness of the planet who kill the planet they are conscious of? Is a nervous breakdown like hitting the Reset or Restart button on the psyche?

Is the gravediggers’ dirtpile the positive of the gravehole in the ground, or is the gravehole in the ground the positive of the dirtpile, viewed from the other side?

His food came, blessedly breaking him out of the hastening downspiral of his thoughts. Mike ate, trying to concentrate on nothing but what he was eating. That activity, at least, was enough to fill his senses and his mind while the experience lasted.

He had just finished eating, laid out his money for the bill, and leaned back to relax and digest, arms outstretched atop the curved back of the booth, when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey,” said a pale, hippo-corpulent man dressed in orange prison coveralls, “want to bowl a few frames? Knock ’em dead?”

Mike stared up at the man. His complexion was the color of bloated meat maggots. His eyes, behind his steel-rimmed spectacles, were the yellow-brown of grub worms’ heads. His visage squirmed under long, wild, muddy gray-white hair that seemed as unhealthfully alive as a nest of poisonous snakes. The man and his appearance struck paralyzing fear into Mike’s heart, so much so that he could only nod mutely in response to the bowler’s request.

The pale, bloated bowler watched diligently as Mike traded his street shoes for bowling shoes, then signed for Mike to follow him. Walking along past the empty lanes, Mike could not help noticing that the pins were in fact people frozen in the same rigid, repeated stance. The bowling balls in the returns, too, were human skulls.

Once they reached the lane on which the bloated bowler had been warming up, the game began. They bowled frame after frame. Mike felt terrible as he bowled each skull down the alley and sent the rigor-stiff pin-people flying—especially when he glimpsed the ghoulish, robo-zombie pinsetters working behind the scenes, then the reaper’s scythe coming down and clearing the pins at the end of each frame—but he bowled his absolute best nonetheless, sensing that quite literally everything was at stake.

His pale, bloated opponent grew more and more furious as Mike maintained a slim lead into the final frames. At last the corpulent competitor could bear it no longer. In fit of rage the bloated, maggot-skinned man snatched off his glasses, ripped off his own head, stuck his middle and ring fingers into his eye sockets and his thumb into the mouth, then gave the ball of his head a carefully aimed and mighty heave.

The flop-haired ball roared down the lane, shaking the whole building as it went—or rather, the world was shaken by the thunder not of one ball moving down one lane, but of infinite and innumerable bowling balls moving down infinite and innumerable lanes. The instant all those myriad balls struck their ten-times- myriad pins, a mighty blast obliterated everything, the explosion hurling Mike cruciform into the air, sending him flying until his left shoulder caught on something.

“Hey,” said someone, shaking his shoulder. “Sir. Sir!”

Mike woke to see, bent toward him, the waitress and a balding man in a dandruff-speckled suit with a tag that said KARL, MANAGER. Karl was shaking his shoulder and talking. “We’re glad you liked our food and feel so comfortable here, but if you want to go on sleeping you’re gonna have to find a hotel. Okay?”

“Yeah,” Mike said, rubbing his eyes and mouth, looking around. The bowling alley was empty, except for the three of them. No one was bowling. “Okay.”

Getting his gear together, he glanced at his watch and saw that he’d been asleep for nearly two hours. Getting up to leave, he noticed that the bowling alley now looked far more tawdry than surreal. Mike thought he must be coming down from the KL the driver had given him—a realization that brought him much relief, but also a little regret.

He had trusted to the kindness of strangers and it had gotten him a night out bowling with Death. Are we having an adventure in moving yet? Mike asked himself with a smirk. He’d had enough adventure for one trip, and enough trip for one adventure. Before he walked out of Reno Lanes, he asked the waitress for directions to the nearest bus station. She was only too happy to provide them.

* * * * * * *

A Shadow on Her Present

Catching Marty blissfully slow-convulsing on some perverse mix of alphanumeric chemicals—“delta nine and 5-MeO DMT,” as his trip-sitting derelict buddy Rick explained—had scared and infuriated Lydia at first. Now, however, with Mary okay and Rick ushered out of the apartment, Marty’s secret drug escapade and Lydia’s own unexpected return from a weekend out of town had combined to provide her with a pretext for something she should have done weeks before.

“I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” Marty said, pleading with her.

“I don’t want you to do whatever I want you to do!” Lydia said, shaking her curly dark hair vigorously about her head, letting him hear the frustration rising in her voice.

She looked at Marty and saw his eyes filling and reddening to a very different color than his full head of red hair. Oh God, he was starting to cry on her. Obviously, their sleeping together for the last month and a half had meant considerably more to him than it had to her.

“Look, Marty,” she said, taking him into her arms to comfort him and also so she wouldn’t have to see the tears that were beginning to trickle down his face. “I’ve really enjoyed the time we’ve had together, but your drugging out and hanging around with Rick just confirms what I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks now. Your life’s just too chaotic. I’m afraid it could never work. I need stability in my life right now. We can’t keep going on this way. I hope we can still be friends, but we just aren’t compatible in the long run. You can see that too, can’t you?”

He blubbered something that sounded affirmative. She gave a slight sigh of relief. This might turn out to be easier than she’d expected. She hugged Marty and comforted him for a while longer, thinking that she would never have gotten involved with a man nearly half a dozen years her junior—a second year graduate student in comparative literature, at that—if she hadn’t been on the rebound from breaking up with Tarik.

Not that breaking up with Tarik had been a bad thing. Lydia had lived with him for nine years, after all. It had been because of Tarik that she’d moved to California from the East Coast in the first place. He’d wanted to pursue his ambitions as a folk-punk musician and she had been his overweight and insecure “biggest fan.” Not long after their arrival, she and Tarik had survived and bonded more deeply together amid the devastation wrought by the Great Los Angeles Earthquake, the so-called Niner Quake.

Both of them had seen the madness of bright-shining angels and UFOs at that time—and had been deeply relieved to learn that, the statements of UFO or angel believers notwithstanding, those sightings were most likely not supernatural but natural, side-effects of the earthquake’s sudden tectonic stress relief. The slippage of all those miles and depths of granite, with its embedded quartz, had piezoelectrically generated high-amplitude electromagnetic disturbances. The concomitant electromagnetic energy bursts had affected the interpretative cortex in the temporal lobes of hundreds of thousands of individuals—Lydia and Tarik among them—causing them to see lights and angels in the sky.

Even that strange bonding had worn off eventually, however. Living through the Great Quake and its aftermath had changed her. Her own dormant ambitions had reawakened. Within weeks of the quake, she took up running. She lost forty pounds in six months. She kept running and kept the weight off. She enrolled in a joint graduate program in biochemistry and paleontology, working toward a doctoral specialization in paleogenetics. Her presentations and articles on her work with DNA samples, taken from the Harlan’s ground sloth remains at Rancho La Brea, had made a big splash at Page Museum conferences and in the online journals. Her future seemed assured.

Tarik’s career, meanwhile, had gone absolutely nowhere. His folk-punk ethic made both the idea of working a day job and the idea of achieving financial success as a performer equally distasteful to him. The fact that Lydia’s own brother, Todd, was a success in the music industry only made things worse. To Tarik, Todd Fabro was “that pop sellout” and he bristled at any offer of help from that quarter. Tarik was determined to be an artiste endlessly perfecting his art for his art’s sake—while Lydia supported both of them.