Better Angels Read online

  All the traditional systems seemed to reduce human life to a chain-letter sent by God or Global Operations Director or DNA. In one form or another, the missive prophesied that, if he followed the genetic generic rules and kept the Message going (Procreate! Propagate the faith! Expand market share!), Good Things would happen to him, his stock would split and rise in value, he would go to heaven. But woe to him if he ever broke the chain of double-helical commandments—Bad Fortune would befall him, his stock would crash, he would go to hell.

  So much of theology was so full of tautologies, it seemed to Jiro, but even that was to be expected. The world’s religions, in their various ways and paths to The Truth, had about them the false eternity and infinity of an endless march along a Mšbius strip, and Mšbius strips always made a one-sided argument. Purely materialist science wasn’t the way through either. An event horizon of perpetual approximation, a reference-frame illusion clothing a star’s collapse down to the unknowable nowhere and nowhen of naked singularity, the reductive scientific approach seemed to him at best a black hole promising to someday explode with The Answer—though its fuse, unfortunately, was calculated to be far longer than the lifetime of the universe.

  Still, he hoped that, buried within the dogmas of religion and the theories of science, he would find some strong hint of the sustainable and sustaining faith of which he dreamed. His search had so far proved fruitless—and profoundly frustrating. Tomorrow, he thought sleepily, he would post something about his search in the infosphere. If others tried to flame him for possessing a moral compass askew from their own versions of the due and true directions, well, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Thinking about what he would post, Jiro grew slowly more content and settled in his heart.

  The end of the world, he thought sleepily. So many ways in which the world can end. So few in which it can keep on going—only differently. If there was to be a close to the Great Day of the world, Jiro planned to stay past The End to watch the credits scroll up the sky. In the meantime, he could still believe in a religion not of blood but of flowers, a world that did not assassinate and crucify but lovingly embraced all the many pieces of truth it contained—even if such a wonderland could as yet be realized only in his dreams.

  * * * * * * *

  Bowling with Death

  Driving out of Wyoming, Mike Dalke’s car scared loose a swift-running mob of pronghorn antelope from beside the road. They were beautiful, running beside the car, pacing it with a grace no construct of metal and polymer could ever hope to match. Tears came to his eyes. He had never seen them like this before. He feared he would never see them again.

  He could never go back home again, certainly. Not given the way he had left.

  Mom had been enraged, irrational, ranting about how her boy’s mind must have been seduced by the secular humanist conspirators—the poisonous alphabet soup of ACLU, NAACP, NOW, etc., with Hollywood producers and even Unitarianism thrown in for good measure. Dad watched quietly out of his usual prescription-tranquilizer evening funk.

  “What do you mean you’re moving out?” his mother shrilled.

  Mike put down his rucksack and faced the blonde fury of his mother moving to physically block his path.

  “Just what I said, Mom. I’m moving to the west coast. I’ve transferred from Christian Heritage University to California State University at Humboldt. I want to do my graduate work there.”

  “Well you can just ‘untransfer’ yourself right now, genius!” she spat. “You’re always thinking of yourself—what you want to do. Think of your parents and what we want you to do, for once!”

  “I never stop thinking of that,” he said with a weary sigh. “No more. I’m going to live my own life now. You can’t live it for me, and I won’t let you.”

  “Your own life! Your own life!” Mom mocked, suddenly brandishing an eight-inch-long kitchen knife before her. “I’ve given my whole life for you boys! Waited on you hand and foot! And this is the kind of gratitude you show me? Oh no—no son of mine is going to move out until he finishes college or gets married!”

  She jabbed toward Mike with the broad meat-slicer’s blade.

  “Honey!” Dad cried, startled, but Mike was already moving, deflecting and taking his mother’s cutting hand, using her own momentum against her the way the Christian Martial Arts teacher at CHU had showed him. He brought his fist up and slugged his own mother hard on the jaw before he really knew what he was doing. The blade skittered across the floor. She crumbled against one wall and burst into tears.

  Dad put a restraining hand on his shoulder. Mike shrugged it off.

  “You only waited on us hand and foot to bind us hand and foot to you,” Mike said bitterly, bending down to pick up his rucksack as his mother sobbed and maoned against the wall. Behind him, his younger brother Ray was witness to it all, but Mike had been too angry to say anything to him, too angry for farewells.

  He regretted that now. Who knew what kind of tweak seeing such things might put on his younger brother’s head? But Mike had to get out. Living at home had been like living underwater. Each day he felt his airflow being cut off a little bit more. Soon he would have woken up dead and not even noticed.

  No, there was no going back. Not since his car had broken down east of Wendover, Utah. Not since he’d had no choice but to sell it to the Salvia div-chewing mechanic/tow truck operator who had hauled him and his vehicle into town. Not since he’d stuck out his thumb in the late-afternoon light and gotten picked up by an ancient four wheel drive station wagon hauling a rental trailer.

  At the other end of the station wagon’s bench seat now sat a heavy-set guy with steel-rimmed specks and long gray hair down to the middle of his back (but was, nonetheless, also scrupulously clean shaven). The driver, which he was, had recently become an ex-Information Technology administrator from the university in Bozeman. Mike didn’t catch his full name—Brewster, Schuster, something like that—but the gray-haired man in plaid shirt and brown pants and blue gimme cap was clearly trying to forget his own woes through permanently altering his state of consciousness.

  “I took it with what grace I could,” said the defrocked administrator, passing Mike a burning flat-pipe of marijuana somewhere between Elko and Winnemucca. The gray haired man suddenly laughed. “The university bureaucracy is a real hippo hierarchy.”

  “How’s that?” Mike asked, curious despite himself, absently scratching the brownish-blonde goatee he’d begun growing not long before he left home and which was still at the itchy (or at least unfamiliar) stage.

  “Hippopotami range themselves in a river current according to status,” the older man explained. “The highest ranking individual takes a position alone and furthest upstream, facing upstream. The rest of the hippos fall into tiers and denser numbers downstream, though they’re facing upstream too. Each hippo has a short, flat, paddle-like tail which it spins like a propeller when it defecates. That breaks up its dung into a cloud of fragments.”

  Mike laughed at the image, but didn’t quite get it.

  “How’s that fit a university bureaucracy?” he asked.

  The man with the long gray hair inhaled deeply from the pipe and held the smoke a moment before answering in a constrained, smoke-conserving voice.

  “The lower the rank of a hippo the more dung comes hurtling at it from upstream,” he said, exhaling at last. “When the hippo shit hits the propeller, the consequences flow downstream.”

  They laughed at that. Mike guessed it was pretty much true of hierarchies everywhere.

  “How about you?” the man with the long gray hair asked, uncapping a bottle of vodka. “What’s made you a gentleman of the highway?”

  Mike told the older man more of his own story than he had initially intended to: his troubles at home, his father’s psychological problems, his decision to transfer to a different college out of state and away from home—as well as the crisis that decision had precipitated. The gray-haired man remained quiet until they were well west of Win
nemucca.

  “Here,” the driver said at last, breaking up a capsule and tapping its contents into the vodka. He swirled the bottle. “I put a little KL in this. Good for what ails you. It’ll help you forget about the latest explosion in your nuclear family.”

  Mike didn’t know what “KL” was, but he took a healthy swallow of the vodka. It had an unexpectedly bitter, alkaline taste.

  “That phrase, ‘nuclear family,’ is more descriptive than you might think,” the older man continued. “If you head just about due south of here you eventually cross into what used to be the Nevada Nuclear Weapons Test Site. E = mc2 and all that. In most ancient creation myths, ‘energy’ is male, and ‘matter’ is female. Yang and yin. Bright and dark. Even the words: ‘energy’ is from Greek roots meaning ‘at work,’ and the Latin root of ‘matter’ is mater—mother.”

  “Yeah?” Mike said, not making the connection. “So?”

  “So Einstein’s mass-energy equivalency is a real gender-bender,” the driver said. “Energy, the male principle, is equivalent to mass, or female matter, times the constant of the unbreakable law, the speed of light, squared. Maleness is femaleness raised by the Law times itself.”

  “And the Test Site?” Mike asked, wondering what he’d gotten himself into, hitching a ride with this guy.

  “The detonation of the first nuclear device—at Trinity site in Los Alamos, not Nevada—that was a supreme yang moment,” said the older man. “Manipulate enough female matter in the right way and you can produce a blast of male energy. All the Nevada nuclear blasts were little boys emulating the Fat Man, our own little Test Site imitations of the primal wank, the Father-spurt of the Big Bang.”

  The driver gave him a sly, sideways glance. Mike laughed.

  “I don’t think you can gender-blenderize it quite that much,” Mike said, trying to be serious.

  “Why not?” the driver asked. “Humans sexualize everything, especially since Freud. Do you think it was just a coincidence that when human beings first set foot on the Moon—a heavenly body associated in most cultures with goddesses and femaleness—all the original explorers were male and the program was named after Apollo, a sun god? The Apollo astronauts were white-garbed priests of the Sun God, arriving in burning chariots to claim dominion over the female Moon. Yang over yin, see?”

  Weird stuff, Mike thought, but what he said was, “One person’s technology is another person’s symbol, I guess.”

  “Exactly,” the driver said, nodding. “When I lived in San Francisco, there were these big round-topped concrete pillars that were put in place as barriers to traffic flow, near parks and such. South Asian immigrants began garlanding these traffic piers with flowers and pouring offerings of milk over the tops of the damn things. Know why?”

  “Not a clue,” Mike said. Whatever it was the driver had put in that vodka, it had begun to make him feel woozy, disoriented.

  “For those immigrant folks, the traffic piers were lingam symbols and became impromptu shrines,” the driver said. “Or just look at the cross. For the Romans crucifixion was a capital punishment technology. The Christians made it a sign of martyrdom and resurrection, the central symbol of faith. Kind of like worshipping an electric chair or lethal injection table.”

  In the rock-of-ages Rocky Mountain states where Mike had been living most of his life, such thoughts were heresy—things that good people just didn’t say. Although he had rejected the rigid faith of his parents and their neighbors, Mike still found the driver’s analogy rather repugnant.

  The driver seemed to sense something of his passenger’s distaste. For whatever reason, he fell quiet. Very soon, however, Mike was too preoccupied with the things going on in his head to notice the driver’s silence. The colors of the sunset clouds to the west were alive, breathing and pulsing and writhing. Ahead, buildings got up from their foundations and walked into the highway, then quickly scurried back to their rightful places before Mike and the driver could run head-on into them. The driver seemed not to notice.

  “Hey,” Mike said at last, “what did you say that stuff was you put in the vodka?”

  “KL,” said the driver, smiling. “Ketamine lysergate 235. Also known as ‘gate.’ Either name is just as good. The latter name is slang and the former’s probably a code name of some sort. The chemistry of it is most likely some weird tryptamine derivative—nothing to do with either LSD or ketalar, if you ask me.”

  “Natural?” Mike asked, thoughts lava-bubbling in his head. “Or designer?”

  “Extracted from a mushroom,” the driver said. “Strange history, though. Gate, the chemical, has been in circulation for a decade and more that I know of, yet the mushroom it supposedly comes from has only started showing up fairly recently. You’d figure it’d be just the opposite. Why do you ask?”

  “Because,” Mike said, taking a deep (and deeply worried) breath, “I’m either hallucinating—or losing my mind.”

  The driver chuckled.

  “Most likely it’s the former,” the gray-haired man said, not quite reassuringly enough. “Be careful, though. Keep your set and setting in mind. I suggest you seek out someplace you find familiar and comfortable. You’re about an hour into it, so figure three more to go.”

  Mike looked at the driver carefully.

  “Why?” he asked nervously. “Are you going someplace?”

  The driver frowned momentarily.

  “I assumed we would be splitting up in Reno,” the gray-headed man said. “I’ll be heading south down 395 toward San Bernardino, and you’ll be heading north toward Humboldt. Reno seems the logical place to part company.”

  Mike nodded. The old man was probably right. That, however, didn’t make him feel any less uneasy about being dropped off, alone, in an unfamiliar city, and in an altered state of consciousness.

  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.