Hieroglyph (22 page)

“I'm guessing two more hours to Reno, then we'll get some last-minute supplies and head out. Unless you want to play the slots and catch a Liza Minnelli impersonator.”

“No, I want to get out there and get set up.”

“Good.” Suddenly he gorilla-beat his chest with his good fist and let out a rebel yell. “Man, I just can't
wait
.”

I smiled. This was the voluble Pug I knew.

He pointed a finger at me. “Oh, I see you smiling. You think you know what's going to happen. You think you're going to go drink some beers, eat some pills, blow stuff up, maybe get lucky. What you don't know is how
life-changing
this can all be. You get out of your head, literally. It's like—” He waved his hands, smacked the dashboard a couple times, cracked and swigged an energy beverage.

“Okay, this is the thing. We spend all our time doing, you know, stuff. Maintenance. Ninety-eight percent of the day, all you're doing is thinking about what you're going to be doing to go on doing what you're doing. Worrying about whether you've got enough socked away to see you through your old age without ending up eating cat food. Worrying about whether you're getting enough fiber or eating too many carbs. It's being alive, but it's hardly living.

“You ever been in a bad quake? No? Here's the weird secret of a big quake: it's actually pretty great, afterward. I mean, assuming you're not caught in the rubble, of course. After a big one, there's this moment, a kind of silence. Like you were living with this huge old refrigerator compressor humming so loud in the back of your mind that you've never been able to think properly, not once since about the time you turned, you know, eleven or twelve, maybe younger. Never been
present
and
in the moment
. And then that humming refrigerator just
stops
and there's a ringing, amazing, all-powerful
silence
and for the first time you can hear yourself think. There's that moment, after the earth stops shaking, when you realize that there's you and there's everyone else and the point of it all is for all of you to figure out how to get along together as best as you can.

“They say that after a big one, people start looting, raping, eating each other, whatever. But you know what I saw the last time it hit, back in 2019? People figuring it out. Firing up their barbecues and cooking dinner for the neighborhood with everything in the freezer, before it spoils anyway. Kids being looked after by everyone, everyone going around and saying, ‘What can I do for you? Do you have a bed? Water? Food? You okay? Need someone to talk to? Need a ride?' In the movies, they always show everyone running around looting as soon as the lights go out, but I can't say as I've ever seen that. I mean, that's not what I'd do, would you?”

I shook my head.

“ 'Course not. No one we know would. Because we're on the same side. The human race's side. But when the fridge is humming away, you can lose track of that, start to feel like it's zero sum, a race to see who can squirrel away the most nuts before the winter comes. When a big shaker hits, though, you remember that you aren't the kind of squirrel who could live in your tree with all your nuts while all the other squirrels starved and froze out there.

“The Playa is like a disaster without the disaster—it's a chance to switch off the fridge and hear the silence. A chance to see that people are, you know, basically awesome. Mostly. It's the one place where you actually confront reality, instead of all the noise and illusion.”

“So you're basically saying that it's like Buddhism with recreational drugs and explosions?”

“Basically.”

We rode awhile longer. The signs for Reno were coming more often now, and the traffic was getting thicker, requiring more attention.

“If only,” he said. “If only there was some way to feel that way all the time.”

“You couldn't,” I said, without thinking. “Regression to the mean. The extraordinary always ends up feeling ordinary. Do it for long enough and it'd just be noise.”

“You may be right. But I hope you're not. Somewhere out there, there's a thing so amazing that you can devote your life to it and never forget how special it is.”

WE CRAWLED THE LAST
thirty miles, driving through Indian country, over cattle gratings and washed-out gullies. “The local cops are fine, they're practically burners themselves. Everyone around here grew up with Burning Man, and it's been the only real source of income since the gypsum mine closed. But the feds and the cops from over the state line, they're bad news. Lot of jack Mormons over in Pershing County, don't like this at all. And since the whole route to the Playa, apart from the last quarter mile, is in Washoe County, and since no one is supposed to buy or sell anything once you get to the Playa, all the money stays in Washoe County, and Pershing gets none of it. All they get are freaks who offend them to their very souls. So basically, you want to drive slow and keep your nose clean around here, because you never know who's waiting behind a bush to hand you a giant ticket and search your car down to the floor mats.”

I slowed down even more. We stopped for Indian tacos—fried flatbread smothered in ground beef and fried veggies—that sat in my stomach in an undigestable, salty lump. Pug grew progressively more manic as we approached the turnoff for Black Rock Desert and was practically drumming on the dashboard by the time we hit the dusty, rutted side road. He played with the stereo, put on some loud electronic dance music that made me feel old and out of it, and fished around under the seat for a dust mask and a pair of goggles.

I'd seen lots of photos of Burning Man, the tents and shade structures and RVs and “mutant vehicles” stretching off in all directions, and even though I knew the Fourth was a much smaller event, I'd still been picturing that in my mind's eye. But instead, what we saw was a seemingly endless and empty desert, edges shrouded in blowing dust clouds with the hints of mountains peeking through, and no sign at all of human habitation.

“Now where?” I said.

He got out his phone and fired up a GPS app, clicked on one of his waypoints, waiting a moment, and pointed into the heart of the dust. “That way.”

We rumbled into the dust cloud and were soon in a near-total whiteout. I slowed the car to walking pace, and then slower than walking pace. “Pug, we should just stop for a while,” I said. “There's no roads. Cars could come from any direction.”

“All the more reason to get to the campsite,” he said. “We're sitting ducks out here for anyone else arriving.”

“That's not really logic,” I said. “If we're moving and they're moving, we've got a much better chance of getting into a fender bender than if we're staying still.”

The air in the van tasted dusty and alkali. I put it in park and put on the mask, noticed my eyes were starting to sting, added goggles—big, bug-eyed Soviet-era MiG goggles.

“Drive,” he said. “We're almost there.”

I was starting to catch some of his enthusiasm. I put it back into drive and rode the brakes as we inched through the dust. He peered at his GPS, calling out, “Left,” then “straight,” then “right” and back again. A few times I was sure I saw a car bumper or a human looming out of the dust before us and slammed on the brakes, only to discover that it had been a trick of the light and my brain's overactive, nerve-racked pattern-matching systems.

When I finally
did
run something over, I was stretched out so tight that I actually let out a scream. In my defense, the thing we hit was a tent peg made out of rebar—the next five days gave the chance to become endlessly acquainted with rebar tent pegs, which didn't scar the playa and were cheap and rugged—pushing it through the front driver's-side tire, which exploded with a noise like a gunshot. I turned off the engine and tried to control my breathing.

Pug gave me a moment, then said, “We're here!”

“Sorry about the tire.”

“Pfft. We're going to wreck stuff that's a lot harder to fix than a flat tire. You think we can get to the spare without unpacking?”

“No way.”

“Then we'll have to unpack. Come on, buddy.”

The instant he opened the door, a haze of white dust followed him, motes sparkling in the air. I shrugged and opened my door and stepped out into the dust.

THERE WERE PEOPLE IN
the dust, but they were ciphers—masked, goggled, indistinct. I had a job to do—clearing out the van's cargo and getting it moved to our site, which was weirdly precise—a set of four corners defined as GPS coordinates that ran to the tenth of a second—and at the same time, such a farcically huge tract of land that it really amounted to “oh, anywhere over there's fine.”

The shadowy figures came out of the dust and formed a bucket brigade, into which I vanished. I love a good bucket brigade, but they're surprisingly hard to find. A good bucket brigade is where you accept your load, rotate 180 degrees and walk until you reach the next person, load that person, do another volte-face, and walk until someone loads you. A good bucket brigade isn't just passing things from person to person. It's a dynamic system in which autonomous units bunch and debunch as is optimal given the load and the speed and energy levels of each participant. A good bucket brigade is a thing of beauty, something whose smooth coordination arises from a bunch of disjointed parts who don't need to know anything about the system's whole state in order to help optimize it. In a good bucket brigade, the mere act of walking at the speed you feel comfortable with and carrying no more than you can safely lift and working at your own pace produces a perfectly balanced system in which the people faster than you can work faster, and the people slower than you can work slower. It is the opposite of an assembly line, where one person's slowness is the whole line's problem. A good bucket brigade allows everyone to contribute at their own pace, and the more contributors you get, the better it works.

I love bucket brigades. It's like proof that we can be more together than we are on our own, and without having to take orders from a leader. It wasn't until the van was empty and I pulled a lounger off our pile of gear and set it up and sank down into it that I realized that an hour had slipped by and I was both weary and energized. Pug handed me a flask and I sniffed at it, got a noseful of dust and whiskey fumes, and then sipped at it. It was Kentucky bourbon, and it cut through the dust in my mouth and throat like oven cleaner.

Pug sprawled in the dust beside me, his blond hair splayed around his head like a halo. “Now the work begins,” he said. “How you holding up?”

“Ready and willing, Cap'n,” I said, speaking with my eyes closed and my head flung back.

“Look at you two,” an amused female voice said. Fingers plucked the flask out of my hands. I opened my eyes. Standing over us was a tall, broad-shouldered woman whose blue Mohawk was braided in a long rope that hung over her shoulder. “You just got here and you're already pooped. You're an embarrassment to the uniform.”

“Hi, Blight,” Pug said, not stirring. “Blight, this is Greg. He's never been to the Playa before.”

“A virgin!” she said. “My stars and garters.” She drank more whiskey. She was wearing overalls with the sleeves ripped off, showing her long, thick, muscled arms, which had been painted with stripes of zinc, like a barber pole. It was hard to guess her age—the haircut suggested midtwenties, but the way she held herself and talked made me think she might be more my age. I tried not to consider the possibilities of a romantic entanglement. As much of a hormone-fest as the Playa was supposed to be, it wasn't summer camp. “We'll be gentle,” she said.

“Don't worry about me,” I said. “I'm just gathering my strength before leaping into action. Can I have the whiskey back, please?”

She drank another mouthful and passed it back. “Here you go. That's good stuff, by the way.”

“Fighting Cock,” Pug said. “I bought it for the name, stayed for the booze.” He got to his feet and he and Blight shared a long hug. His feet left the ground briefly.

“Missed you, Pug.”

“Missed you, too. You should come visit, sometime.”

They chatted a little like old friends, and I gathered that she lived in Salt Lake City and ran a goth/alternative dance club that sounded familiar. There wasn't much by way of freak culture out in SLC, so whatever there was quickly became legendary. I'd worked with a guy from Provo, a gay guy who'd never fit in with his Mormon family, who'd spent a few years in SLC before coming to L.A. I was pretty sure he'd talked about it. A kind of way station for Utah's underground bohemian railway.

Then Pug held out his hand to me and pulled me to my feet and announced we'd be setting up camp. This involved erecting a giant shade structure, stringing up hammocks, laying out the heavy black rubber solar-shower bladders on the van's roof to absorb the day's heat, setting out the grill and the bags of lump charcoal, and hammering hundreds of lengths of bent-over rebar into the unyielding desert floor. Conveniently, Pug's injured arm wasn't up to the task, leaving me to do most of the work, though some of the others pitched in at the beginning, until some more campers arrived and needed help unloading.

Finally, it was time to set up the Gadget.

I'd been worried about it, especially as we'd bashed over some of the deeper ruts after the turnoff onto Route 34, but Pug had been awfully generous with the bubblewrap. I ended up having to scrounge a heavy ammo box full of shotgun shells to hold down the layer after layer of plastic and keep it from blowing away. I drew a little crowd as I worked—
now
they weren't too busy!—and Blight stepped in and helped toward the end, bundling up armloads of plastic sheeting and putting it under the ammo box. Finally, the many-legged Gadget was fully revealed. There was a long considering silence that broke when a breeze blew over it and it began, very slowly, to walk, as each of the legs' sails caught the wind. It clittered along on its delicate feet, and then, as the wind gusted harder, lurched forward suddenly, scattering the onlookers. I grabbed the leash I'd clipped to its rear and held on as best as I could, nearly falling on my face before I reoriented my body to lean away from it. It was like playing one-sided tug-of-war. I whooped and then there were more hands on the leash with mine, including Blight's, and we steadied it.