His grin is a dissertation on the Tartar of the Future.
“Good. In the end we must all follow our heart. For it is a very lonely hunter.”
“Flannery O’Connor?”
“No, Carson McCullers. But I always get them mixed up, too.”
He takes another huff of Freon.
“Now get the fuck out of my yurt.”
12. No one leaves Base Omega. Ever.
I knock softly on the Citroën’s window, but Young Nick Drake is already awake.
“I knew you’d come.”
His guitar is slung over his shoulder, some trinkets tied into a square of rag.
“Now what?” I whisper.
“Now we carpe the diem, baby.”
We cross the compound in a running crouch, from Audi to Peugeot to Pinto. We loop behind the latrine to avoid Pink Lady, who’s on watch, and to avoid Jeff, who watches Pink Lady. The moon is up and full. Its light feels irradiated. There are few places to hide, long shadows cast in every direction. But we’re lucky and make it to the spot where the kidney-gnawers once attacked, where the razor wire is bent and slightly lowered.
I throw a blanket across the spiky rampart, grab two links and flip myself over, land cleanly on the other side.
Young Nick Drake winks, goes next.
WE’RE FORCED TO KNEEL, arms tied firmly behind our backs.
Larry Our Leader yawns.
“Spin that shit.”
“Spin the wheel! Spin the wheel!” Base Omega chants, as the wheel is dragged to the middle of the compound. Torches are lit. Everyone gathers around the colored triangles and rickety axle and clackity stopper, which apparently once topped a tricky par 3 at North Vegas Mini-Golf.
Dorsal Vent gets a good grip on the pegs and sends the disc whirring.
Clackity clackity clack clack . . . clack . . . clack . . . clack.
The pointer almost lands on CRUCIFUCKTION.
Just barely makes it past WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE.
Neither are good options.
But both are better than GRIEVOUSLY BETRAYED REDRESS STEW, where it finally stops.
There’s twenty seconds of horrified silence.
And then Base Omega begins to chant.
“Grievously Betrayed Redress Stew! Grievously Betrayed Redress Stew!”
“And so it shall be,” Larry Our Leader says.
The Sanctifying Salt and Pepper are quickly found. A fire is lit. For the next simmery twelve hours, Base Omegans who are otherwise squeamish close their eyes and hum ditties, tell themselves that if you looked at it less factually and more like cartoons hallucinated during an unmedicated fugue state, Young Nick Drake could really be a lean little billy goat found frolicking in the desert.
Which is probably to some degree accurate.
In the end, I didn’t get to have any stew.
Mainly since I spent the next seven days in the Box.
I don’t think I could’ve eaten anyway.
All week, late at night, as I lay there with arms and legs numb and tongue swollen and flecked white, Larry leaned against the Kia trunk and whispered.
“As we evolve beyond the sort of people who once fetishized cell phones and spent their lives revenging playground slights by acquiring powerfully red cars, we have to decide who we are going to be now. Right this moment. Here in the irradiated zone. Behavior does not change. People do not change. History does not change. Only the weather changes. Are you prepared to be the weather, Krua?”
“It’s like, I am literally about to die of thirst here.”
LOL chuckles. “Yes, but assuming you don’t, you tiny chunk of meat, what are you going to be from this point forward? A filet that I can trust? Or one that I need to debone with malice?”
“So totally trust. I swear.”
When they finally let me out, I drink a ’77 Impala’s worth of crankcase water and sleep for a week. Then, when I can walk again, I have to learn how to do everything all over. Left-handed. Like write and wipe my asshole.
Also, now I’m comic relief at Tribal Caucus, because I keep dropping the parchment.
Larry Our Leader laughs and says, “You’re my left-hand man.”
The rest of Base Omega laughs with him.
I go to give them the finger, realize I’m giving them the stump.
GOOD ONE, Dorsal Vent writes in the sand.
And then we do roll-call, announce our names and purposes.
When it’s my turn I stand in front of all of Base Omega and say, in a clear voice that rings out across the desert morning, “I am Krua, Keeper of the Dictates.”
Exposure
6:12 A.M.
The peeling Victorian sits north of Cesar Chavez and south of a Safeway lot, on a street called Guerrero, which means “war,” three lanes of nonstop traffic and no good bars to speak of. Two flats, two stories. Connected by a wobbly staircase, by the ever-present smell of wet rug and spilled soy and unstable neighbor. There’s a crayoned wall and a stack of detective magazines and a fireplace piled high with dead flowers. There’s a dozen roommates who call each other flatmates, an apartment they call a commune. I hear them all from my center room, the laughter, anger, orgasm. I feel them from my spot on the floor, vibrations rising through the joists, random lives under cheap planks and the rusty nails that run the length of my spine.
8:40 A.M.
Johnny, who lives across the hall.
“Good morning.”
“Hi.”
Johnny, with his beard and slippers and trucker’s belly, looking down at me, worried.
“Why are you lying on the floor?”
“No reason.”
“Aren’t you cold without any clothes?”
“A little.”
Johnny, depressed, on my couch with a crumpled tissue, telling stories, boyfriends come and go, have come and gone.
“You’ll be all right,” I say.
He nods, flips through my record collection, the last eight or ten left, a Human League and a Ramones, some other stuff.
“You mind if I play “Fever” again?”
“Not at all.”
He lifts the needle.
Johnny, who loves Peggy Lee.
9:12 A.M.
Susan, who collects the rent and arranges house meetings. Who drapes a towel over my hips before she can speak.
“Need some help getting up?”
The floor is splintered in circles, lacquer worn away. Someone plays the old piano, a barely realized minuet.
“No, thanks.”
“Listen,” she says, trying to smile and falling short. “I don’t want to pry, but is this something that could involve the cops?”
Susan, with the three best rooms, a hoarder. Floor to ceiling boxes, beads, bolts of fabric, doll heads, gears and wires, newspapers stacked and snipped, paper-clipped articles about Squeaky Fromme and Victor Mature and Shirley Chisholm.
“I doubt it.”
She looks out the window. There’s broken machinery in the garden, compost unattended, a small patch of cement yard, more cigarette butt than cement. The fog settles around a city that believes its own clichés, practically crop-dusted gray.
“Listen, I don’t want to pry, but if you’re just going to lie there, how are you going to pay rent?”
11:22 A.M.
Irene, who wears a fedora and studies Foucault. Irene, with random scraggly hairs that will never flourish into a beard. Irene in a Che shirt, toasting her birthday with a hammer-and-sickle cupcake that arrived packed in dry ice. Irene who steals kerosene for the generator, siphons it from a barrel behind the French restaurant with a length of rubber hose. Irene who burned a VR FOR VICTORY insignia into the front lawn, said it stood for Volta Redonda, the Amazonian hamlet she intended to machete her way down to by Christmas in order to found a Utopian colony based on the precepts of Eldridge Cleaver.
“Direct action is the only sane response,” she says, and then gives the Black Power salute.
NOO
N
Terry and Trish who thumbed from North Carolina, the sounds of rutting from the room above. Terry with his three-string guitar, two-string drawl, black turtleneck. You can take the seed out of the hay but not the hay out of the seed.
“Don’t you wanna eat a hamburger? Don’t you wanna get up and see a matinee? Damn, boy, are you even alive?”
Terry, sweating and chewing his crank-lip, clomping around me in circles, the white-boy duckwalk, pretending to play Chuck Berry on a broom.
Trish, long and straight and auburn, who carries scissors in her purse “just in case,” a smile that says she can’t wait. Trish, standing in my doorway in a T-shirt and panties. “I could get you a blanket.”
“No, thanks.”
“I could rub your shoulders.”
“No, thanks.”
Trish, throwing things at Terry’s head, a good aim, his dented skull.
“That woman thinks she’s Orel Hershizzer.”
Trish with a laugh like a tubercular mule.
“That is so funny, HEE HAR.”
Terry, who had to be bailed out, blood on the door.
2:36 P.M.
Bryan, the rumor, the roomer. Bryan with extensions piled like an understudy for Carmen. Bryan in bare feet and loose pants, taut, halfway between dangerous and not.
“Monday’s my recital.”
“Wonderful.”
Bryan sweeping into my room to stretch, one leg extended, mastering the Alexander technique in a crouch against the wall. He contorts, twists, a spasm of muscle, suddenly over me.
“For real, though. What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Is it, like, some kind of boycott?”
I don’t answer, watch him pirouette, lower into an impossible split.
“I guess this means you can’t make my recital?”
“I’d like to. But probably no.”
Bryan, twirling away to his room full of plants, his radio, banjos or drums or ululating Arabs. Bryan disappearing for a week then coming back reincarnated, insisting his new name is Ariel.
3:09 P.M.
Highguy, who wants to start a techno band with two laptops and four grams of coke. It’ll be called Storming Kabul. He’ll be Ace Storming and I’ll be Billy Kabul. He’ll be vocals and I’ll be drums. He’ll be right back and I’ll be waiting.
4:17 P.M.
Sasha, elaborately dreadlocked, bored, in bangles and cheap jewelry, the real stones in some Manhattan safe box that will open on her thirtieth birthday. Sasha, who squats at my side, shows yards of white thigh, wants to really talk, wash her feet in the Euphrates.
“You ever wonder if there’s a purpose?”
“Yes.”
“You ever wonder what happens after?”
“Certainly.”
“You ever wonder why we’re even here?”
“Many times.”
“I don’t mean in this house.”
“I know what you mean.”
She arranges her skirts, runs her finger around me like a chalk outline.
“Is it yoga? Meditation?”
“Om,” I say.
She laughs, then stops, worried it was the wrong thing. Her shirt falls away, shoulder draped with a ruinous tattoo, an enormous lizard playing the stand-up bass, the idea of some drummer who dumped her over the phone.
5:05 P.M.
Tom, who’s on a tight allowance after Susan cashes his SSI. Tom, who smokes like it’s his only tether, who runs out of Bugler midmonth and then will roll anything, lint, leaves, dust, hair. Tom, who talks to the sconces, berates the wainscoting, describes the damask. Tom, who giggles into his jacket sleeve, an ancient blue pinstripe, who paints canvases of stacked eyeballs in intestinal caverns, more Gacy than Van Gogh, more Manson than Warhol. Tom, who got lost in the park and lived for a week off a jar of salsa. Tom, who knows he’s not allowed in my room but likes to peek in anyway.
6:54 P.M.
Red and Miriam, married. Miriam over forty and Red maybe twenty-five. Red, with an ancient Volvo and greasy handshake. Red who took me to an apple festival where we polished off a sack of Royal Galas and watched clog dancers spin in bonnets.
Miriam embarrassed. “Red’s got an old soul.”
“You don’t need to explain.”
“I’m not trying to.”
Miriam, round and vaguely menacing, who claims to be a nurse, who has a room full of tinctures and concoctions, a gynecological exam table from the twenties. Straps and wires. Studded leg stirrups.
“It’s an antique.”
Miriam, prepared to inject remedies, insert vitamins. Spansules and suppositories. Aminos and lysines and B12.
“I can start you on a course of antibiotics right now.”
“I’ll pass.”
She shakes her head, repacks her tools. “Suit yourself.”
“I won’t come crying,” I say, half a beat before she says, “Don’t come crying.”
The stairs creak, with her weight and all its intent.
9:01 P.M.
Gareth, pale and ropey-huge, shaved head and thick Buddy Holly glasses, like a Marine in Da Nang in 1962. Gareth, whose own little slice of anarchy is refusing to scrub the pans and then taking his shirt off if it’s such a problem. Gareth, whose favorite tangent is on the evils of sampling, but also how Minor Threat was so overrated. Gareth, who has read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance three times and can quote thoughtful passages. Who is positive global warming is a hippie conspiracy and that London skins have a secret and one day he’ll fly to Kings Row and learn what it is.
Gareth, whose obliviousness is like cologne, a pent boy in a soldier’s body, a walking slogan misheard or dimly understood, curiosity masturbated into submission.
Gareth, wound so tight he’s practically backwards.
Gareth who stares, shakes his head, slams the door. Twice.
MIDNIGHT
Cassandra, mixed-race, whip-tight, a bike messenger in riding shorts. Cassandra smelling like a dray horse, rubbing my forehead.
“My mother has a new husband. This one’s white, too.”
“Rich?”
“She lays around all day in a satin robe.”
“Like Eartha Kitt?”
“No, like you.”
Cassandra, who takes me in her arms sometimes, dark nest scratching my back. We spoon, chaste, warm one another. But not tonight.
“Sorry, but I’m not getting down on the floor.”
“I don’t blame you.”
Cassandra, who wears tube socks like debutante gloves. Who has a horizontal scar under one eye that only makes her more beautiful.
3:56 A.M.
My wife, who figured if we went and talked to a woman with a suspect degree and scented candles and paid two hundred an hour, it would get better. If we sold her mother’s house and took a cruise up the Adriatic and toasted with glasses of Retsina on various balconies, it would all become clear. Who thought there were zones of unexplored erogeny whose erogeny wasn’t forever dissipated by calling them “zones.” Who thought a triple-A Duracell would power a reawakening between us somewhere along the magnitude of Loma Prieta and the rise of Cthulhu.
My wife, who eventually gave up and said, “Fine, leave,” put me on the Greyhound with a packed lunch.
The diesel groaned away from Florida, packed, a welter of sweat and raw dumbness, a box full of tight hats. Six days of sandwiches and bourbon, a thousand miles of gravel. Texas then Chicago, highway pickets and billboards and dirty snow, Boulder then Salt Lake, sixty seats and sixty feet and two bumpers. The port of Oakland as it rose behind steel containers labeled in Chinese, and then cold Market Street, which lay unloved between the spread legs of downtown San Francisco.
Schoolgirls slapped each other’s lollipops to the sidewalk, Hey, bitch, hey!
Traffic accelerated through the yield.
The sidewalk was oddly impacted with gum, a black-pock Braille. There were posters with warnings a
bout a new flesh-eating disease, a guy bumming change with a canoe missing from his thigh, a big chunk gone pink, marbled deep to bone.
I had two drinks in a bar where some men were painting an Aztec warrior on the wall, slept in an all-night laundry for a week, across ridged orange seats bolted to the floor.
“Hey, buddy, you can’t lie there.”
“My sweater is on spin.”
“Beat it.”
I took pictures at random, shutter exposing actual film, a place downtown you could rent darkrooms by the hour, the guy at the desk offering two hundred for my grandfather’s Leica.
A Rasta with paperbacks laid out on a blanket said, “You need a place to live?” and when I said, “Yeah,” closed his eyes and said, “Try the grocery that sell the green drinks.”
Next to the juicer was an index card taped to the wall, CHEAP ROOM.
It said, HI! DO YOU PREFER TO LIVE AS A COMMUNITY?
No.
SHARE MEALS AND CHORES AND EXPERIENCES?
Not really.
ARE YOU LOOKING FOR SOMETHING DIFFERENT?
Than what?
$260 A MONTH. COOK ONCE A WEEK. NOT SCARED OF VEGAN, WICCAN, OR AIDS.
I moved in the next day, found a job as an attendant to a man who was very rich, who had one of those illnesses where you’re perfectly healthy.
I wheeled him to clothing stores and movies, made him grilled cheese and sliced oranges, indexed his receipts and wiped his chin.
I met my roommates, went to baseball games alone, froze, spilled beer.
I locked my door at night, unlocked it in the morning.
Did the chores I was scheduled to do.
By then it was obvious I was never going home.
Or maybe even getting up again.
5:20 A.M.
At first light I can see out the window. It’s an odd angle, from the floor, a view of eaves and gutters and under-roofs, a line of grimy flats. Pink-green. Orange-blue. A love-me trim. For half a block, I can see the gauze of curtains, tops of heads behind them, peering out for the mail or the bus or someone vaguely familiar to wave to. I can see the reflection of televisions, hosts and scores and a cartoon ferret distended across a white plaster ceiling. The horns of insulted cabs play call and response. A traffic light changes too quickly.
Brake, curse, a trail of weary threats.
Upstairs, a faucet turning.
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