Agents of Dreamland Read online

  “It’s so close now,” Drew told us all last night. “You really have no notion how delightful it will be. Cross my heart and hope to die. Bo and Peep, Doe and Ti, as you are the Children of the Next Level.”

  His voice soothes the meat and mud of my soul.

  “I believe we’re the purest communists there are,” says he. “Translation, evolution, metamorphosis, bliss in everlasting ice and trans-Neptunian, Kuiper Belt blackness, and you eat of my body, and we will traipse the light fantastic across aether wastes to be free of false Christs.”

  I don’t know what half of it means, and I don’t pretend I do. I can understand without a perfect understanding. He’s shown me that. I can pop the cap and inhale deeply and fill myself with the gifts of gods who never were gods. Back in Old Lost Angels, before my deliverance to this deeper Cali-dirt expanse of lizards and diamondback seraphim, wildcat bishops and roadrunners, I shot sweet Afghan heroin into my rotting arms, between my toes and fingers, but I’m free now. You think this isn’t Paradise? You think this isn’t Eden? Then you better think again, little Chloe. You better think again. Drew is a Titan. You know a Titan by the thunder in his belly and the fire on his chapped lips.

  We dine on rattlesnakes and hot green tea, and Drew Standish, he tells us the last days are here. We camp upon the threshold, just switch on the television, that ginormous 1975 Zenith in its composite-board, wood-grain cabinet, and astroglide the picture tubes. The thing gets no stations out here, no rabbit ears needed. We don’t need networks and programming; we need only noise. We need only snow, electromagnetic noise, man, semut bertengkar as Indonesians say, which translates into something like “war of the ants.” Radio waves, cosmic microwave background radiation. Baby doll, dig this, okay? One percent of that crackly shit is light from the Big Bang, come down thirteen billion years to tickle your rods and cones. Me, I didn’t know shit about physics and cosmology before I left L.A. All I knew was the aching, all-devouring urgency of the next fix.

  I’m barefoot up here as the day I was born, high on our hot tin roof, high on cultured spores and the words of Drew, but like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace of wicked King Nebuchadnezzar, like Indian fakirs gifted by Allah, like an Apollo heat shield, I firewalk without burns. I bathe in the all-forgiving, all-anointing, purifying eye of Old Man Ra, and I wait for the others to join me on the roof. I’m positively zealous, says Madeline, in my devotions and my sacrifices, the holy mortification of sloughing flesh, and she tells me the others could learn from my example. Sweaty rivulets scald my eyes, and I blink away the little pain. I keep my eyes on the Chocolate Mountains. They’ll come from there, says Drew. They will come from sunrise.

  I raise my arms in praise.

  I just looked up one day, and he was looking down, and he offered me a hand.

  And man, that was a goddamn first.

  “It isn’t your fault, little Chloe, that you fell so far. Chernobyl claims our souls. The opium kissed your blood to soothe the throb of NOW, and you fucked it and let it fuck you because no one else ever has loved you true and dear.”

  He held me while I cried. He held me in a filthy alley behind a filthy concrete squat somewhere in the void between Ninety-third and Ninety-fourth streets in Westmont. I smelled of shit and infection, sour sweat and Goodwill castoffs. In that spray-can graffiti gangland razor-wire palm-tree Inferno did he hold me tight (and, looking back, that was surely the treacherous Ninth Circle, me sunk and frozen to my throat in the ice of the River Cocytus). I had squandered teen ages behind me and my fast squandering twenties going down in rubble all around, but there he was, silver haired and beautiful, eyes like this sky above me today. He offered a hand and freedom and absolution, and all I had to do was crawl up from the Pit. From so far down, to so far up here, the mountains out before me and the Salton Sea evaporating at my back, dying its slow, slow inevitable inland death. I am poised between, being cooked same as H once bubbled molten in my junkie’s spoon. I am being made ready for the coming evacuation of this ruined, forsaken planet.

  “In those realms, the sun shines no brighter than a star,” he tells us, Madeline and me and the others, as we watch the static and listen to the voices buried in the static, two waves superimposed to form the holy intersection of the Third Wave, mightier than the one plus the one, gathering half the deep and full of voices, we cling to him, and we slowly rise and wait to be plunged, roaring, and all the wave will be in a cold blue flame. And he says, “Behold the black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges.”

  I feel movement in my lungs, and I cough. I taste blood and mold at the back of my throat, and I spit on the roof. My spittle is thick and yellow; it sizzles.

  I smile.

  I smile a lot these days.

  Drew scooped me up from that Dantean alleyway so that I’d remember how I smiled when I was just a kid and all my fears were only kid fears and all my horrors were only kid horrors. He wrapped me in a musty leather duster that I think he stole from a Clint Eastwood movie, and he put me in the front seat of that old red Buick station wagon he drives, and he ferried me back to life good as if Charon had changed his mind. Drew is a magician. He makes time run in all directions. Man, he makes time do his motherfucking bidding. They gave him that, power over clocks and wristwatches. And that day I listened as Madeline talked from the backseat and Drew followed the varicose labyrinth of numbered highway signs east and south, leaving the Big Orange in the back of us for the blessed sanctuary of a Sonoran promised land. Rolling me smooth on white-walled steel belts past enchanted places I’d never been—Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, Indio, Thermal. When I saw the turnoff for Mecca, I asked, Then this is it? And he laughed that quicksilver laugh he laughs and shook his head. No, little Chloe, but we’re close now. Now we’re very, very close. Another few miles, and I got my first sight of the Salton Sea. I got my eyes full.

  “I’ll tell you stories,” he said, “when you’ve got your bearings, stories about the how and the why and the when of it.”

  “You mean the water?”

  “I mean it all, baby doll.”

  I lit a cigarette, breathed smoke and nicotine, and marveled at a great flat houseboat stranded at the side of the road like the skeleton of a dead whale. There was broken furniture scattered about on its deck, and the name written across its bow in letters faded not quite to illegibility was Heart’s Desire.

  “Last chance,” Drew said, and I asked him, “Last chance for what?”

  “Never mind,” he said. “Never you mind, little Chloe. One day, I’ll tell you what the Indians knew. One day real soon.”

  I stand in the sun. I stand on the broiling roof of the ranch house, and my feet have long since burned until they’re callused and numb as if they were shot full of novocaine. I can hear the TV playing below me, its static choked up with voices, because in the mouth of the beast there are more beasts. I stand with my arms raised, feeling it all, hearing it all, thinking—just for an instant—maybe Drew got it wrong. Maybe my prophet is fallible, and in just a second or two more, I’m gonna come apart at the seams and scatter in a spray of photons and spores. Like, you know, those ancient crumbs of the Big Bang, spilling out across forever to reach an old TV set. I’ll be the first of all those Little Bangs to come. I’ll be both his Alpha and Omega, and he’ll be proud and not for one second regret having found me and saved me from the needle’s prick.

  “Let me just ask you this,” Drew says, whispering in my ear and speaking from some other day, from now and then and some tomorrow yet to come. He sounds like hellfire, sulfur, and silk sheets. “How much have you thought about what was really in back of that great digital switchover in 2013? The fact that it was mandatory, I mean. The forced cessation of analog transmissions, the goddamn Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005? Congress, the FCC, the American Association of Broadcasters all talking about conserving electricity and how we’re getting such better picture quality, right? Yeah, sure, but
who is it pulls their strings? What’s this really all about, because now not just anyone can switch on the tube and catch that sacred one-percent signal. In every cubic centimeter of the universe there are three hundred photons from the Big Bang. And SETI? That was just some hippie scientist boondoggle, and that’s what’s really going on here, see. You got these gatekeepers not wanting us to gaze into the oldest fossil in all Creation, the very face of God.”

  I hear the TV, and I can hear the others. Some of them are so much farther along than me. I’m not good about hiding my jealousy. I make no secret of the fact that I want to be the first to bloom, and that’s okay, because humility ain’t got no place in their plan.

  “Stop and think, okay?” And Drew taps his finger hard against his forehead, the way he does when he’s making a point. “Just stop and fucking think. The NTIA, OPAD, the Office of Spectrum Management, MediaFLO, fucking Microsoft, and definitely fucking Apple. You ever wondered about the Beatles and Apple? You ever looked at the label at the center of a vinyl copy of the Beatles’ Abbey Road or Let It Be? Ever done all the correlative and concordance work linking all those Apple Records releases—Badfinger, Billy Preston, the Radha Krsna Temple, Doris goddamn Day and Ronnie Spector, Ravi Shankar, and et cetera and et cetera and et cetera—and seen where the siren trail leads, how it gets all tangled up in that Los Altos garage with Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne? You ever thought about why Apple Inc. is Apple Inc.? That bullshit Jobs spun about his fruitarian diet, I seriously hope you’re not gonna buy that crap. About Jobs’ jobs in orchards and Sir Isaac Newton, the misdirection of that original logo with Newton sitting beneath a tree waiting to be struck by gravity? Yeah, they kinda showed their hand there, what with Yggdrasil, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Bodhi Tree, the Glastonbury Thorn—Ficus religiosa and Crataegus monogyna, respectively. ‘A is for Apple,’ yeah right, and I got a bridge you’re gonna buy real cheap up in Cisco.”

  I want to open my eyes, the windows to my soul, but Drew reminds me it’s too soon to burn out my retinas. I’m gonna need them just a little longer.

  The station wagon, cherry red, rushed past the Heart’s Desire, and Madeline was talking, then, about the tourist-trade, resort getaway boom and bust of the Salton Sea, about Sonny Bono and avian botulism. I listened, but her words were bleeding through me. My head was too full of sun and sea and earth.

  “Did you know that between 1978 and 2006 Apple Records sued Apple Computer multiple times?” Drew asks his congregation. “That’s another bit of misdirection. But the truth is that the music playing in that fateful Los Altos garage, Steve Jobs’ parents’ garage, it was Let It Be, Abbey Road, Yellow Submarine, and yeah, The White Album. But—wait, before you start in about that lunatic Manson—he got all that shit wrong. Manson was a cunt, and he was also crazier than a shithouse rat. No, you listen to ‘Revolution 9,’ okay?”

  Rouge doctors have brought this specimen. 9, number 9, a man without terrors, only to find the night-watchman, unaware of his presence in the building.

  Below me, I hear the screen door bang shut, so here they come, the others, and in a moment they climb up the ladder, and I won’t be alone with the heat, with the Chocolate Mountains and the jackrabbits. I won’t be alone with Drew’s precious whispers. Some days, I’d like to murder the lot of them, if only that were part of the plan. By now, they’re probably partway to the rickety ladder leading up to the roof and me.

  Take this brother, it may serve you well. Eldorado, if you become naked.

  I turn my back on the mountains and face the white and stinking Salton Sea.

  3. Zero-Sum Gethsemane (July 10, 2015)

  BACK AT LA POSADA, the Signalman sits on the edge of his bed in a sweat-stained T-shirt and his Fruit of the Loom briefs, waiting on morning. It’s not quite half past two. He pours himself another shot of J&B, filling the paper Dixie cup almost precisely one third of the way. He’s taking it slow, pacing himself. The bottle needs to last until dawn. Right now, the thought of running out of whisky before he runs out of night is sufficient incentive to marshal the iron fist of self-control. That might change a little later on. It’s still early, after all, and the demons dancing about behind his eyes are the very competitive sort. The contents of Immacolata Sexton’s fancy briefcase versus sobriety. The fear of his dreams versus exhaustion. You get the picture. The AC purrs like a cat made of ice. The curtains are pulled shut, and the television’s on. Clark Gable is helping Claudette Colbert make her way up the Eastern Seaboard, from Florida to New York City. True love is on the line, or so she thinks. Albany’s best man sips his J&B and stares at the screen for a while, before turning his attention back to the thick dossier the Y operative handed over at the diner. He’s pacing himself with that, too.

  The life and times and crimes of Mr. Drew Standish.

  All that’s known, plus some guesswork, plus just a little bit more.

  The Signalman lights another cigarette. At fifty-five, he remembers when it wasn’t necessary to disable the smoke alarms of hotel rooms. Too often, it occurs to him that he’s lived just long enough to have completely outlived the world that made sense to him, the world where he fit. He’s as good as a goddamn dinosaur.

  He picks up a sheaf of typed pages held together with a green plastic paper clip. It’s obvious they were typed, that it isn’t a printout, since almost all the o’s and 8s are punched through. The page on top, a coffee-stained memorandum from Barbican Estate to its offices in Dubai, is dated October 12, 1999. Standish was a busy little beaver that year, that long string of red-letter days for doomsayers and cultists of every stripe. Never mind that the whole Y2K thing was a washout, a false alarm, a tempest in a teapot of hype. There’d be plenty of second chances for Standish, all of them leading—in hindsight—straight to that sun-blasted shack in the Coachella Valley.

  The Signalman flips through the report, only bothering to scan every other paragraph, then drops it onto the bed with the rest. It’s hard to concentrate. Faced with all this shit and alone with only his thoughts, half a pint of 70-proof Scotch, and old movies for company, he keeps flashing back to the ranch. That was eight days ago now, but it hardly seems like eight hours. Time’s moving too fast for him to keep up, and even with London’s prompt cooperation and the package that ghoul dressed up like a woman delivered, he feels like he’s chasing his own tail. Whatever revelations and helpful, relevant patterns might eventually be gleaned from the dossier, that’s work for someone else, someone with distance and clarity. Someone who wasn’t on the ground during the raid on Standish’s compound.

  He takes another dry swallow of whisky, trying to forget the sickly, musty taste of the air trapped inside that house. No such luck, not tonight, probably not ever. He rubs his eyes, then stares at the television screen. Clark Gable is munching a carrot and lecturing the runaway Ellen Andrews. He looks like Bugs Bunny. Sounds a little like him, for that matter. You can’t be scared and hungry at the same time, he says. If you’re scared, it scares the hunger out of you. Sure, that Peter Warne, he’s one smart cookie. Before it’s over, he’ll get the scoop and the dame.

  Out on Route 66, a driver leans hard on their horn, the sound stretched and distorted by the Doppler shift. In his room, the Signalman jumps, startled, immediately embarrassed and wondering why the fuck anyone would blow their horn on an empty highway at two thirty in the goddamn morning. But maybe there was an animal crossing the road. Maybe it was a coyote or an armadillo or Good ol’ Señor Chupacabra, come round to pay its respects.

  He takes a drag on his cigarette and glances at the empty briefcase lying open on the bed, yawning like the jaws of a stylish, toothless carnivore.

  I can’t forget it. I’m still hungry, says Ellen Andrews, speaking from the celluloid ghost of 1934. And then the Signalman’s restless mind slips back to Friday again, that moment when he draws his revolver and steps through the doorway, crossing the threshold, and, sure, he knows better because he’s already relived, replayed, revisited it all a hundr
ed times by now, but he does it anyway.

  The house is full of sunlight and shadows.

  And the smell of toadstools.

  He’s right behind Vance, close enough he can see the beads of perspiration standing out on her brow and upper lip, and he’s wondering why she’s on point. Coming up the drive, wasn’t she two cars behind him? Crossing that maze of drooping cacti and rusted automobiles, wasn’t he in the lead?

  There’s nothing much in the front room but broken furniture and even more dust and sand, he thinks, than there is outside. He follows Vance into the kitchen and spots a dead scorpion in the sink, belly up atop a stack of filthy dishes. Off the kitchen, there’s a narrow hallway, and now he can hear television static coming from one of the bedrooms. The mushroomy stink is worse back here. A lot worse.

  “Place is empty,” says someone behind him, Malinowski or one of the FBI mooks who haven’t yet figured out they’re in way over their pay grade and over their heads. “We missed him. Shitbird’s probably halfway to fucking Tijuana by now.”

  There’s a calendar on the wall by the fridge, the sort you get free at Chinese restaurants. Someone’s circled July third. He looks up to find that Vance is already in the hallway, and the Signalman hesitates, starts to call her back, opens his mouth, then shuts it again. He winces at a sudden burst of white noise from the radio Velcroed to his bulletproof vest. That hall, it makes him think of a slaughterhouse chute. No room to turn around in there. No room to fucking fight.