Better Angels (43 page)

A yellowish beaked skull of a small bird. A glinting computer macrochip. A fragile, nearly translucent piece of snakeskin. A tiny mechanical umbrella. The shoulder blade of a turtle. A desiccated, dark-brown morel mushroom, pitted and convoluted like a dried and shrunken brain. A bent metal asterisk of age-blackened barbed wire. A pair of smudged white feathers, looped together. A red, rust-pitted toy gyroscope. A stub of dark green candle. A silk cocoon, dirt-smudged. A crucifix. A plastic-laminated scapular “medal”. The story behind each of the objects flashed through his mind, but the one associated with the morel particularly lingered. It was an act of illegal trespass, he supposed. The road to Crystal Cave in Sequoia Park had been blocked off during the winter and throughout the spring while a construction crew demolished the old bridge across the Marble Fork of the Kaweah River and began work on the new bridge.

To the west of the river the forest had burned, late in the previous summer. Jiro knew a section of the woods where he was sure the much sought-after morels would, that late spring, be present in incredible abundance, especially after the fire and then the unusually cold winter and wet spring. Morel mushrooms had a freeze/flush trigger for their fruiting in all years, and the previous year’s fires would only intensify the triggering effect. The only problem would be getting across the Marble Fork at morelling time, when the river would be in full spring thaw and uncrossable with the bridge still out.

He had convinced Seiji to go on a mushroom foray with him in the Crystal Cave area. Despite the ROAD CLOSED signs and his misgivings about trespassing, Seiji followed him one Sunday afternoon in late spring, collecting bag folded in his back pocket. Down from the sequoias beside the main highway they walked, along the road to Crystal Cave, past the blooming dogwood, past the heavy equipment parked along the road, past the wrecking and building machines, past the rubble and debris of the demolished bridge, to where the road ended and the river gorge gaped, once again unspanned but for a pair of surprisingly thin I-beam girders, set like uneven parallel bars deep in the throat of the canyon that the bridge had formerly spanned from above.

Twenty five or thirty feet below the uneven parallel I-beams, the river roared with all the happy killing savagery of spring in its throat. Seiji balked, yelling over the river’s roar that crossing would be taking a “crazy risk” and that no mushroom was worth risking your life for, no matter how tasty morels might be. Jiro, however, secretly mind-altered on KL, laughed and pointed out the hand-over-hand cable lying down the gorgeside to the nearer end of the I-beam footbridge. The two-girder footbridge must be safe, since the boot prints on the steep path down to the footbridge’s nearer end showed that construction workers were using the girders to cross over the river.

While Seiji dithered, Jiro let himself down the drag cable backwards, hand over hand down the side of the gorge, to the near end of the girders. Unsteadily he stepped onto the uneven girders, immediately wishing that the cable had continued across the bridge—that there might be any kind of railing, some place to put his hands. There was nothing—just his hands teetering in the empty air, his boot-clad careful feet on steel sweaty with the damp and cold of the river mist, and always the river itself, the deafening wet white noise ceaselessly roaring from its granite and marble maw a couple dozen feet below his boots.

Step by teetering step he made his way across the uneven pair of girders, his concentration narrowing down so tightly that at times he thought he would not so much fall off the girders as fall through the six-inch gap between them. At other moments the KL would reverse his sense of figure and ground so that the girders seemed actually slits cut into the surface of a white-noise, wave-interference world.

Just past the midway point, he was paralyzed by the idea that, with his next step, the girder would become a slit indeed and, if he stepped onto the girder, his foot would fall through that shining steel slit and he would be trapped. He was sorely tempted to step off the girder and onto the solid-seeming white noise of the river.

Jiro blinked. Figure and ground reversed again to a more classically accurate relationship. With great relief he made it across the twin-girder bridge at last and onto the solid stone of the other side. Looking back, he watched as Seiji, having walked upright about a third of the distance across the footbridge, gave up and crossed the rest of the way on his hands and knees.

Beyond the far side of the bridge they pulled out the big paper shopping bags that they had kept folded in their pockets and began to look for mushrooms. They found so many morels in the burned-over ground that the morel foray—usually a happy Easter egg hunt for adults—eventually became tedious. The mushrooms, shaped like little hybrids of brains and pine cones and sponges, could be seen everywhere, an embarrassment of riches. He and Seiji grew tired of picking them even before they had filled their collecting bags.

At one point they moved down from the hill they had been harvesting and across the road, to eat lunch beside a small creek. As they ate, Seiji, without a word, pointed from spot to spot about them on the burned-over hummocky bottomland. There were morels everywhere. The two brothers were so completely surrounded by them that it was almost claustrophobic. Jiro had never seen anything like it.

On the way back across the girder footbridge, Jiro too crossed on hands and knees. Too harrowing, trying to balance himself and the bag of mushrooms. Once he and Seiji were both on the other side, however, they felt exalted—even if they had had to cross humbly.

Back at camp, Jiro was so anxious to enjoy some of their harvest that he had boiled up some pasta and then tossed in a couple handfuls of morels—not letting them cook nearly long enough, as it turned out. He and Seiji spent the rest of the evening experiencing what the mushroom foray books euphemistically referred to as “gastro-intestinal distress.”

Jiro laughed to himself, remembering it. On the floor of the coldbox he put the morel directly above his head, then spread out the rest of his talismans around it. When he had them spread out in the pattern he most preferred, Jiro geared up, putting on trodes and feedgloves, circlets and eyewalkers, a full connection suit, wondering if Seiji would consider what he was about to do now a “crazy risk” too.

He had had his share of good and bad times since then After the debacle with Lydia and her fiancé, Jiro began to go underground. The next night in L.A. he had gone to bars he had heard of—Decade de Sade, the Sex Factory—until he found a prostitute. He had done so much KL by the time he found her that no sooner did he get back to her place than she turned into a giant cockroach before his eyes, rippling mandibles and spurred bronze legs and shining bugeyes and flickering antenna bursting out of the carapace of her clothing—a horrible hybrid of Kafkaesque nightmare and deeply buried racism. He fled, screaming wildly, before she’d even completely removed her clothes.

Within the week he was picked up by the police, who hospitalized him and shaved his head and interrogated him simply because he’d been found in the street, muttering and shouting and drunk out of his mind. After he’d been released—and after he’d gotten better, with the old shaman’s help—he had hacked back into Los Angeles Police Department records and found his grainy interrogation video.

He sat back cross-legged on the padded floor of the coldbox, thinking of how he had played it again from time to time. He switched on his eyescreens to watch it once more, to remind himself how far he had come—and how far he still had to go. He watched his earlier head-shaved self rant about secret “headplug” implants getting police signals “to hyperactivate Wernicke’s area in the right side of the brain,” causing “the micromachines to swarm” and “reinforce bicameral walling” until others controlled him and he became a “stranger” in his own head.

Yes, Jiro thought. He had definitely been a stranger in his own head, at that time. Before he met the old Indian. Before he learned to fast deeply and purify himself. Before he learned how to get clean. Scanning on through the video records, he watched his head-shaved self theorize about how “the military and security apparatuses, deprived of adequate external enemies,” had to “turn inward and become an internal superpolice...colonizing not only the hearts and minds but also the brains and bloodstreams of the population”.

Jiro fast forwarded, uncomfortable with seeing too much of any one scene of himself in that shave-headed and darting-eyed condition again. He scanned onto a recording of himself talking about a police conspiracy to “lock everybody’s lobes into the same Big Picture.” Then he came to the strangest part of all, his recounting a vision of waking from one coldbox coffin into a trashheap world covered by billions of coldbox coffins—one for every person on Earth, all living in a dream of suspended animation, all sharing the same virtuality construct, the same mass hallucination of active lives in a human universe of haborbs and metroplexes and terraformed planets, when in fact they were all frozen supernumerary sleepers in a single blown-out trashworld ruled by machine soldiers.

Not good for me to watch too much of that, Jiro thought. It called to him, a basin of strange attraction, some other ground state of his mind. Yet that dreamvision was also an echo of a future—one he hoped to prevent, even as it provided him with the idea for his own plan. If ending one life by freezing to death in a coldbox would save countless billions from entrapment in an endless, frozen, living death, then the risk was well worth it, at least as far as he could determine.

Making sure that all his systems were ready and that he was fully connected and webbed in, Jiro thought that he and Seiji had both thoroughly learned and discussed the terms for his “condition.” He knew about psychosexual dysfunction arising from “incomplete gender identification.” He knew about depressive disorders and Messiah complexes and long-period paranoid schizophrenia. Maybe what he was doing now was all just his final Corpsicle Messiah delusion. He couldn’t know for sure. That was always the problem with everything he knew: Being comes before knowing. He actually had to be crazy before he could know he was crazy.

And now he would actually have to be—or not to be—dead before he would know if his plan really worked. He had done to himself what he had most feared a government or corporation would do to him. Over the year since he had silently taken with him from the Page Museum the alien nanotech he had been working on, he had extensively modified that tech, reprogramming it to suit his needs. Within the last hour he had ingested a sizable dose of that customized nanotechnology. If the submicromechanisms were working as planned, the angel tech was following neurotransmitter gradients across the blood-brain barrier into his brain. He had put things into his own head.

Now he would put even more things into his system, he thought as he popped into his mouth a couple of tabs each of Kava kava and Ibogara, both of which he took in a precisely predetermined dosage—the Kava kava for its enhancement of the potential for lucidity in the dreamstate and the Ibogara because it would allow him to dream while conscious. If he were going to lucidly dream the Big Dream, he figured he needed all the help he could get.

Carefully he unwrapped the Cordyceps fungus he had obtained from a defrocked Brother of the Ascended Order whom he’d met at a truck stop in Banning. It was a good looking specimen—full of the bluish dust of spores in the pits covering its surface. He began to chew the strangely shaped mushroom. Swallowing, Jiro remembered to send to those names on his infosphere list the design schematics and application scenarios for the antidote enantioviroid he had envisioned. He eyewalked SEND from his heads-up display, hoping someone out there might be paying attention.

That sudden flash—of recalling his planning, of remembering his memory of the future—was that the Kava kava kicking in? It felt like much more than that. Was the angeltech accelerating the spawn growth from the mushroom’s spores in some manner? So that he was managing a particular and focused attention now? Despite the general lassitude he felt enveloping the periphery of his thoughts? No answer to those yet. The point was to stay aware in the Big Dream, so he might perceive and understand. Maybe what he was experiencing was yet another result of how he was weird-wired, his awareness preceding his perceptions once again.

The message-sending done, he lay back on the pillowed floor and waited for the Cordyceps jacintae to bring on its deep dream, its heightened brain chaos. From his research he understood a little more clearly why the scientists who had isolated the fungus’s most prominent supertryptamine had named that extract Ketamine Lysergate 235, even if that naming had been somewhat tongue-in-cheek. While not that similar to either ketamine or lysergic acid in terms of its stereochemistry, the altered state of consciousness produced by KL was a dreamlike condition full of vivid visual imagery, not so very unlike a combination of the two, though more deeply dreamlike than either of them.

The fungus itself was even more dreamy than the KL, however. The little available information Jiro had been able to find in his psychonautic research suggested that the mushroom, much more than KL alone, did interesting things to a number of areas in the brain—particularly the pontine cells and the dorsal and median raphe nuclei. At least one result of its complex of effects was that, on EEGs, the ponto-geniculo-occipital (PGO) waves demonstrated an extra upward deflection. Jiro suspected that this upward deflection in EEG measures of brain waves was a demodulation effect, a second “J wave” very much like the upward deflection of the J wave scientists had already recognized in ECG measures of heart waves demodulating in hypothermia victims.

EEG wave demodulations were important because they meant the brain was functioning in a more chaotic fashion. Chaos was important because the transdimensional gateway Jiro hoped to open could, he suspected, only be opened by a demodulation, a chaotic acausality of the appropriate dreamlike type.