Gods Without Men (37 page)

There was so much broken. They’d have to fix up the kitchen and the workshop almost from scratch. They’d a guard posted now, day and night. No weapons, just a lookout, give them a chance to run if the town came for them again. Clark and Maa Joanie had gone into their cabins and weren’t coming out. Judy was marching about with a strained grin
on her face, saying positive uplifting things like a person who’d temporarily lost her red shoes and yellow-brick road. Pilgrim Billy said they should dissolve the commune, just become nomads. You can live off the desert, he said. He was a city boy. Boston, as she remembered.

Wolf had an answer. We should hold a session, he said. That’s the way to cleanse this place.

It was the one time she ever saw the inflatables in use. They belonged to an art collective who’d abandoned the air for the sea and gone off to commune with dolphins; for some reason they’d left their prize possessions with Coyote. Wolf took everyone out to the middle of the dry lake. The light was blinding. They formed a ragged procession, their feet crunching over the crust of salt. They blew up the inflatables with giant pumps, two fifty- by fifty-foot silver pillows, a soft city tethered six feet off the earth. They were the most beautiful things in creation, the most beautiful things Dawn expected ever to see.

For twenty-four hours they stayed out there, naked, hooked up to the Tronics, playing music to rid themselves of the raid’s negative energy. When they were tired they climbed on the bubbles and lay looking out at the flat white world. It was clear now: They were living at the end of time. Dawn would remember being high above the ground with the Sky Down Feather Brothers, crawling over a gleaming surface, her vision a mess of reflected light. It was a world of pure beauty, the holy beauty of Light, and afterward, when she went into the darkness, it was this memory she tried to hold on to of the Ashtar Galactic Command: the great drone of the Tronics spiraling up into her body as she tumbled over the holy beauty of Light.

A couple of days later she was squeezed into an orange VW bus and driven to L.A. They called it a fishing mission. They sent her and three other girls, with a tall Texan, name of Travis. Officially he was there to make sure nothing bad happened to them, but he had another thing going, which she wasn’t supposed to know was a heroin deal. He talked to Clark on the phone at least once a day. But she wasn’t to worry her pretty little head, oh no. Fill up the bus, Clark said. Get them to come. We need to grow again.

To her dying day she’d wish she’d never even seen Sunset Boulevard.
She was just dumped there, right on the sidewalk outside Tower Records. Walk up and down, Travis told her. Talk to people. Travis made the girls dress sexy, hot pants and halter tops. They’d stand on the corner and cars would go by honking their horns. The point was to meet prospects, boys mainly—going in and out of the record store, hanging outside the Whisky or Sneeky Pete’s. If you got one talking you had to try to sell him the LP and engage him in conversation about the Light.
Have you ever thought about smog?
That was one of her openers.
You know smog’s negative energy, right? It’s not a question of believing me or not believing, because you can see it up there, right above your head. What else is it if it ain’t negativity?

“You could say you’ll go with them,” said Travis, “if you think it’ll get them to come out to the rocks.”

“Go with them?”

“Don’t act dumb.”

If one bit, you could take him to the house. It was a rotting Victorian in Echo Park. It had a lot of bedrooms, but they all smelled of dead things, and the neighborhood was full of junkies and Mexicans who made obscene gestures and called out after you in Spanish. She got followed a couple of times. At night she’d sometimes stop by a diner and take out a hot black coffee just to have something to throw, maybe give herself a head start.

If they needed to crash, you let them stay. You cooked a meal (mac and cheese, said Travis, something homely) and introduced them to the others. All four girls were young and pretty and they never had trouble finding men to sit on the ratty couches in the living room and listen to their pitch about the Command. She fucked some of the guys she brought back. She fucked some of the guys the others brought back. Travis would usually be upstairs. Sometimes you’d have to go up and be with him.

It was like time stopped when you were in that house. It was exactly the same, day or night. The sound of top-forty music on a transistor radio, the swish of the plastic-bead curtain leading into the kitchen. Her room was painted dark red, lit by a bare bulb on the ceiling. Someone
was always talking to someone just outside the door, telling them about the evacuation.
Think about it. About earthquakes. You want to run the risk? The Command has been monitoring the West Coast for generations. They can evacuate the entire population within sixty seconds. They know where every one of us is at any time
.

Fuck me you little bitch come on fuck me.

the ships are beautiful

the ships are full of joy

Clark wanted money. It wasn’t just that you had to go find recruits. You had to sell them the LP. Every afternoon, before they left to go to the Strip, Travis drummed it into them. How many would they sell that day? Think of a number, visualize that number. One night, Travis sat her down and made a suggestion. “Selling the record’s one thing,” he said. “There are others. I ain’t asking you to do nothing you ain’t already doing for free.”

The LP had seemed like such a wonderful idea. It was made from a tape taken off the desk at one of the sessions. Somehow Clark had persuaded Coyote to hand it over and announced in a meeting that from now on they were going to reach out across the airwaves of the world, bringing news of the coming crisis to anyone with an inquiring mind and five bucks in their pocket. At a joyous meeting in the dome, the remaining Lightworkers sat down together in a spirit of unity to put forward their ideas about how the sleeve should look and what should be written on the cover. They were disappointed when Clark played the tape. It sounded like it had been recorded through a sock. Coyote wasn’t around to shout at and Clark argued that sound quality didn’t really matter, because the Command’s message was coded into the carrier wave of the music. People would get it without having to get it. That was cool, but the record didn’t give a shadow of the real feeling of the Tronics. They’d hoped for more.

She never could explain how Coyote got on the sleeve. Everyone assumed there would be a picture of Judy looking positive, or Clark and Maa Joanie in their robes. The drawing was by a girl called Kristel, who liked to call herself
ChrisTele
, which she said meant “The Vision of
Jesus-Sananda.” She drew Coyote getting electrocuted, standing in front of one of the Command’s spacecraft. Clark didn’t put up any resistance. Perhaps he was trying to get everyone to think he was sharing the Light.

Clark wanted them to sell the LP, so they sold it. Whether anyone ever listened to it more than once was another thing. The boys who paid their money and came back to eat the homely mac and cheese and liked the sound of a place out in the desert where sexy girls wanted to make it with you all day and night got put on Travis’s bus, or else were trusted to find their way on the Greyhound, carrying parcels wrapped up carefully by Travis with the promise of a special thank-you at the other end. Dawn would wave to them as they set off with their kit bags and backpacks, like circus performers getting into a cannon and being shot up into the air. Yes, baby. I’m coming in a few days. Don’t you worry. The ships are beautiful.

the ships are full of joy

She got gonorrhea, and Travis took her to a clap doctor, who gave her antibiotics and a lecture. At night she stumbled along the Strip, joining the swarm of kids trying to get in to see bands, eating from food trucks, tripping on the sidewalk outside the 76 station and looking up at the billboards.
Come to Where the Flavor Is
. There was a giant statue of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Bullwinkle’s shirt changed color depending on the outfit of the girl on the casino billboard on the other side of the street. At the co-op, she lined up dirty and barefoot, paying with the food stamps Travis gave them in return for the LP money. After a while she lost track of time. To the store, back from the store, to the Strip, back. She watched crabs crawling over a stained mattress like a platoon of soldiers, counting them off, counting them off; she went with Kristel and Maggie to score at an all-night drug store and noticed the dealer had a wooden hand. They couldn’t stop laughing. She was sitting in someone’s office doing her first blow, saying have you heard of the evacuation and remembering the dealer’s wooden hand and laughing laughing laughing and going to the store and back to the Strip and taco stands and coffee shops and topless bars and passing cars and passing cars and passing cars and passing cars.…

She stayed three months, through the spring and early summer of
1971. Though she didn’t think so at the time, it took something out of her. A freshness. She rode back into the desert sitting on the floor of Travis’s VW bus, bumping shoulders with her latest pickup, a red-haired boy from Iowa who didn’t know he was carrying almost half a pound of Laotian number-four heroin in the lining of his bag. Through the smeared little porthole windows the Ashtar Galactic Command’s primary Earth base looked meaner, more beat up than she remembered. The dome still loomed over it, but its panels were rusty and dull. Maa Joanie’s shack had caught fire, burned right down. It was all anyone could talk about: Who’d set the fire, was it the FBI or the town or the Forces of Darkness operating through an agent in the compound. Far as Dawn could see, it could have been anybody. The place was full of strangers. She and the other fishing girls had sent maybe twenty pickups out there, but there seemed to be all kinds of other people who didn’t look like they were passing through. A lot of tattoos. One or two obvious runaways, at least three guys walking around with Gypsy Joker patches. The first night all she could hear was the sound of bike engines, people smashing bottles, raising hell. Round about two in the morning some girl started screaming. No one sleeping near Dawn in the dome seemed bothered by it. No one even sat up. She went outside and poked about with a flashlight, but the screaming stopped before she could find where it was coming from.

The next morning she saw the red-haired boy thumbing a ride by the side of the road. He had a black eye. When she said what’s up, he told her to go to hell. You promised me this place was cool, he said.

A lot of faces were missing out of the old crowd. That night at dinner (which had gotten worse, if that was possible—a scoop of rice and a slop of flavorless lentils served in institutional metal trays) Dawn caught up on the news. None of it was good. The town had been tightening the noose. People from the Earth base got refused service in most of the stores. They had to drive twenty miles to get gas. The boys from Mulligan’s had hit them with every legal trick they could think of. Building code, sanitation. They’d declared the dome a hazardous structure, wanted to send in the bulldozers and clear it away.

Clark wanted her to come see him. He made her kneel down and
once she was finished told her to be careful because walking among them were some who were not part of the Brotherhood of Light. “They are emanations of the Left Hand, little Dawnie. Their rays fall upon us as a weight, a kind of depression. If you feel such a weight, you let me know the name of the person. The Command will send help. You just tell me right away.”

Afterward, she picked her way up onto the rocks. As she sat, thinking and smoking a joint, she heard someone climbing the path toward her. A figure wrapped in a djellaba came into view, the pointed hood pulled down low over its face.

“Is that you, Dawnie? It’s me. Judy.”

Judy rushed into her arms like they were long-lost sisters, hugging her and covering her face in kisses. It was a clear night and the moon was full. Dawn was shocked. The girl looked like she was a thousand years old, her sunken eyes twin boreholes in her face, as if someone had pressed two thumbs into white clay.

“What’s the matter? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know, Dawnie. It’s all falling apart.”

Judy had a way of saying things like she believed them and didn’t believe them at the same time. When she got emotional, you’d suddenly feel part of her was completely detached, watching herself being happy or crying or interested in your day. Sometimes it seemed like she was just copying other people, as if she hoped that going through the motions would supply the feelings she didn’t actually have. That night was different. Her hands were freezing. She was quivering like a cornered animal.

They climbed up to the base of the tallest of the three Pinnacles, where there was a circular hollow, like a dry hot tub, in which you could sit and be sheltered from the wind. Judy pulled her knees up to her chest and rocked backward and forward. She shook her head when Dawn offered her the joint.

“Dawnie, they’re going to kill me.”

“What?”

“I know it. They’re going to do away with me.”

“What do you mean, kill you? Who?”

“Maa and Mr. Davis. They’re working themselves up to it. They pulled me out of the flow, now they’re throwing me back.”

She had that strange tone again, that sarcastic tone. Dawn fitted the roach into a clip and hunkered down, trying to light a match.

“I don’t understand you, honey. I don’t think anyone’s out to get you.”

“It’s all such a worry, what with the town hating us so much. Mr. Davis is looking into getting proper sewage laid, but that isn’t going to hold them for long.”

“Judy?”

“You don’t know. You haven’t even been here.”

“Try and keep your mind on one thing. Talk to me.”

“I was her little girl. They said that, over and over.”

“Judy, they worship you. They hold you up on high. You’re the one’s been to the ships. They wouldn’t harm a hair on your head.”

“Mr. Davis has got guns, you know. Stashed out in the desert. He’s got people training.”