Gods Without Men (22 page)

The next morning, before he left for work, Lisa asked if he could take some time off. He stared at her as if she was insane, even as he realized he probably could. No one else at the firm was worried about the Honduran trade. It was only him. He told her he’d see what he could do and
phoned Bachman’s assistant, asking to be notified when he was next in the office and free to talk.

Bachman seemed to be in Bangkok. It was almost two weeks after the lempira crash when his assistant finally phoned to say Bachman could give him a few minutes. Jaz hurried over and found him staring out of the window, wearing noise-canceling headphones, big black cans clamped over his bald head like parasitic beetles. The sun had just set, and the skyline was performing the trick it had of dissolving, three-dimensional buildings becoming shimmering planes, then checkerboards of light. Jaz didn’t want to startle him. He stood there for a full minute, waiting impatiently, until Bachman swiveled round in his chair.

“Gershwin,” he explained, taking off the headphones. “I do it every so often. You know, with the buildings? I’m sure I shouldn’t. It’s probably fattening. What can I do for you?”

“I need to talk.”

“So go ahead.”

“Cy, you once told me we were cheating, gaming the system.”

“Yes?”

“Well, I think we should stop. Walter’s—well, it’s very deep in the guts of the financial markets. I feel as if it has the power to—I mean—I don’t know what I mean, Cy. But I’ve been thinking a lot. Walter has the potential to be very disruptive. I can’t help being worried. About consequences, unintended effects.”

“These unintended effects being what, exactly?”

“Instability. Increased volatility.”

“We’re properly hedged, Jaz. You don’t need to worry about the firm.”

“I don’t just mean us. I’m kind of tired, so I’m probably not expressing myself too well. Take the Honduran thing, for example. Walter crashed their currency. Just like that, in a morning.”

“Walter didn’t do any such thing. Sentiment moved against the lempira.”

“We fucked their country.”

“That’s a little dramatic, Jaz.”

“And at the same time, the BRVM and Thai stocks moved in the same way. If Walter can do that, what else can it do? And it’s getting better.
More sophisticated. What happens when we use the same techniques at high speed? Too fast for actors in the market to respond?”

“It’s operating exactly as we built it to. It’s a heuristic trading engine, Jaz. It’s learning as it goes along.”

“I know Fenton is authorizing larger volumes. What if Walter does something else like that? What if it does something systemic?”

“Systemic? You think we’re about to crash the global economy? And you get this from a medium-size win for our currency arbitrage strategy? When I last looked, this wasn’t the Fed, Jaz. We’re a hedge fund, not the People’s Bank of China.”

“I just think we should consider pulling back.”

Bachman laughed. “Don’t let Fenton hear you talk like that.”

“You’re not taking this seriously.”

“Trust me, I understand. You feel a little queasy about that trade. On corporate social responsibility grounds, whatever you want to call it. But we didn’t cause anything elsewhere. Shit happens, Jaz. If it wasn’t us, it would have been someone else. You won’t feel so bad when you get your bonus. I expect we’ll soon be neighbors up in Montauk. Perhaps your wife could get on one of the museum boards.”

“What happened to the face of God? You usually talk as if we’re about to discover the secret of the universe.”

“Are you all right, Jaz? Is everything OK at home?”

“Yes, everything’s OK at fucking home. Why won’t you listen to me?”

“Calm down. It’s a model. It’s not causing anything. You’re mistaking the map for the territory.”

“We’re trading on the model. We’re acting.”

“Jaz, Walter won’t even exist in two years’ time. At least not in this iteration. The market is going to adapt. When that happens, we’ll need a new tool. All we’re doing is contributing to market efficiency, and as efficiency increases, our profits will drop. We’ll move on. Life will go on.”

“Why don’t you understand? I’m trying to say I believe you! I think I finally get what you’ve been trying to tell me all along. That it isn’t about money. That we’re messing with something—something fundamental.”

“I don’t know what to say. You’re talking like some villager waving a
pitchfork in a Frankenstein movie. You want to burn the witch? Tie old Cy Bachman to a stake?”

And then he started using stock phrases. Take a few days. Get some rest. It was only when Jaz was riding the subway back to Brooklyn that he realized he’d just walked the plank.

The sun hammered down. The pool was glittering blue glass. Behind the roofline of the motel cabins, the sawteeth of the mountains rose up against the sky like a graph of profit and loss. Fenton Willis’s braying voice came through his cell phone as a tinny rasp, as he watched Raj trying to stack plastic chairs by the hot tub. The sound of New York. You can run but you can’t hide. Well, every blocked drain and pretzel vendor and gala fund-raiser and overpriced apartment in the whole fucking city could go to hell. This was as much as he could cope with: an almost-empty world, a jumble of rocks and sand.

“I’ve got to go, Fenton. I’m sorry.”

He ended the call, stared down at his BlackBerry like a gun that had accidentally gone off in his hand. No one hung up on Fenton Willis. No one. So that was it. No more Walter. No more firm. That was him done. He felt, for the first time in months, a profound sense of peace.

It was as simple as that. Step by step, she walked away from the town and into the Command, which absorbed her into its structure like a big soap bubble incorporating a little one.

Bubbles, said Wolf, were a good way to think about the future. Soon buildings would be more like them, soft and fluid, free to float away at any time and attach themselves to another cluster. At a moment’s notice you could change your mind about how you lived. You could be part of a city, or a village, or stay on your own. Just untether yourself from your surroundings and go. That, he told her, was what freedom looked like.

Dawn didn’t know much about freedom. All she knew was the life she wanted didn’t include working at the store or grappling on the backseat of Frankie’s Plymouth or her uncle running her over with his eyes all the time like she was something good to eat.

There were about ten of them. They lay out on the rocks by the Indian signs, climbing a route she’d known since she was a kid. The whorls and crosshatched lines scraped into the red-black varnish. The white bed of the dry lake leading away toward the mountains. They passed a joint. Someone was tapping out a slow, soft rhythm on a drum. Wolf laughed and stretched out flat, sunning himself on a ledge. Dawn peered over the lip at the construction going on below. Beneath the overhang, in a hollow whose roof was about fifty feet off the ground, nestled the half-finished skeleton of a dome, like a broken eggshell. People were clambering over it, winching up metal poles welded into triangular struts, bolting them to the structure. Raggle-taggle freaks in Goodwill finery, spidering over a huge frame. Already the cluster of huts and trailers where they lived seemed small and temporary.

From one of the huts emerged a long tail of cable. It snaked its way under the rocks, where it disappeared into a hole.

“What’s that down there?”

Wolf glanced down. “Oh, that’s my brother. He’s probably under us right now, listening.”

“Listening?”

“That’s what he does. He’s sneaky that way.”

“Did I meet him?”

“I don’t think so. You’d remember if you had. He looks like me, only uglier. Slant eyes, long nose?”

She laughed. “I don’t think I met anyone like that.”

“Like I said, you’d remember.”

As the summer wore on, Dawn spent most of her free time at the rocks, hanging out with Wolf and his friends. There were so many people to get to know. Pilgrim Billy and Floyd and Sal and Marcia and Yucca Woman and the Sky Down Feather Brothers. They were all older than her and about the most interesting and different personality types you could imagine. They were scary too, in a not-quite-good way with their weird talk about reintegration and the land of the dead and the community of the whatever-they-were planets. The person who freaked her out most was one-eye Clark Davis. He dressed like a fool, in a panama hat and Keds and a sort of biblical bedsheet robe. He must have been handsome once, in an old-fashioned Errol-Flynnish style. Before his accident.

Dawn tried to keep her distance from Davis, who was friendly in a manner she didn’t care for. She never saw much of Judy, who was usually shut up in one of the caravans or meditating with Maa Joanie. The girl wasn’t like anyone else at the compound. She never dressed up, always wore the same white shirt and jeans. She looked so neat and scrubbed it was hard to imagine she lived in the midst of all that dust and chaos. If you met her on the street, you’d think she was a secretary or maybe the nicer kind of student. A good Christian. She didn’t sing or play music with the others. She never hooked up with anyone, though you’d find her beautiful, if you went for the wholesome type. She looked healthy but at the same time far away, like someone had unplugged something she needed to connect her to the current of everyday life.

Dawn made a friend called Mountain. She had a southern-fried accent and green eyes that seemed to be looking at something just behind you, as if she could see what was coming up in the future. One night they went up on the rocks and Mountain told her the story of Judy and Joanie and what had happened back in the old days, when the First Guide had gotten himself killed trying to reintegrate the Earth into the Confederation. There was a terrible fire, something to do with the electrics in a machine he’d built to communicate with the Space Brothers. He was trapped inside a capsule and burned to death. Others were killed, too. Clark Davis had been there, and lost his eye trying to drag people out. After everything was cleared away there was still one person missing and that was Joanie’s daughter, who was only eight years old. Everyone thought she must have been killed, though they couldn’t find her remains. Joanie refused to believe them. She always said that little Judy had been evacuated by the fleet, and sooner or later she would come back. She knew that if she waited patiently, the Space Brothers would return her little girl. So she came out to the rocks and that was exactly what happened. One day Judy came walking out of the desert, looking like she’d been out for a stroll. She was older, of course, because time had passed on the ships just the same as it had on Earth. But Joanie knew her at once. Judy had spent ten years in orbit being educated and infused with higher knowledge. Now she had returned to be the new Guide.

Dawn didn’t know what she thought of that. She busied herself helping out with the earthly business of the Ashtar Galactic Command, fetching and carrying, chopping carrots and potatoes for huge pots of the tasteless vegetable stew that was all anyone seemed to eat. The food was one thing she found hard to get along with, but she was prepared to suffer a few hardships because her new friends turned out to be on a mission to achieve the salvation of Earth.

Here are some of the things Dawn wanted: to be herself, to live in a bubble, to make it with Wolf, to experience Divine Universal Love. She diced onions and humped scaffold poles and stared into the fire and little by little the Pinnacles became more real to her than the dusty streets of town, more real than the high school or Hansen’s Service Station or the Dairy Queen or even the General Store, though she still spent
long hours dreaming behind the counter, tuning out Old Man Craw’s lectures about morals and Communism and the correct way to stack egg noodles. Wolf said the purpose of the Ashtar Galactic Command was to reintegrate the Earth into the Space Confederation. At first she just laughed at him and he laughed along with her, as if he didn’t really believe it, either. But he was serious. They were all serious. There was some kind of project, and thinking about it scared her slightly, but for the moment all she wanted was
to be part of something bigger than herself, to clap her hands in the circle and sometimes get up to dance.

Soon the dome started to shine. The Command was cladding it in metal from car tops, which could be had for twenty-five cents a time from a wrecker’s yard in Barstow. The guys drove over in the school bus, and since they didn’t have cutting torches they just chopped the tops out of the cars, standing on the roofs and swinging axes like giant can openers. Back at base, they beat the metal into triangles, hammering them over the frames. The dome looked like a shiny ball trapped underneath the arch of a foot. The metal surfaces caught the sun like a beacon, which was the way they wanted it, except they were trying to signal outer space rather than town, and town was where people found they couldn’t ignore it. At certain times of day, particularly late afternoon, the glare fishhooked you, caught in your eye as you tried to go about your business. A lot of folks found it a provocation.

In town they grumbled. Out at the rocks, girls perched thirty feet off the ground, their bare breasts swinging back and forth as they swung a mallet at some nut or bolt.

“Our job,” confided Mountain one day, “is to reconnect the Earth to the current of spiritual impressions.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re surrounded by negative energy and it’s beginning to tilt the Earth on its axis.”

“What’ll happen when it tilts?”

“Tidal waves. Massive destruction. The devastation of almost all life on the planet.”

She must have looked freaked out, because Mountain stroked her cheek.

“You don’t have to worry, honey. You’re part of the Light now. The Command is monitoring us on all frequencies. If it happens, they’ll evacuate us. It’s the others we’re worried about. There’s not going to be enough room for everyone.”

Dawn tried to imagine a tidal wave rushing across the desert. Like a flash flood, only a million times greater. There were many things she had to learn. It turned out there were many sources of negative energy vibrations, including: