“Where are we?” Marco says.
“I don’t know. Maybe we should have stayed on the highway.”
“You know what we really should have done? Not taken an ancient car that runs on gas.”
“Well, we’re here now,” Zeke says, and giggles. Marco stares at him. Trying to wave away Marco’s attention only makes it worse. Inside his skull, Zeke’s brain is in hysterics. I will never run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. He hasn’t been this happy in years.
They sit down, lean their backs against the car; Zeke wishes for a deck of cards, while Marco realizes that he hasn’t played cards since his thousand-and-twelfth game of gin rummy a year and a half ago in the Baltic Sea. There’s so much to talk about—they haven’t seen each other in years—but they lapse into the pattern of their friendship and say nothing; neither of them thinks that they have to speak.
They’re in the miniature valley of a creek that winds and bubbles over rocks, then plunges into pools; under the bridge, the water is calm, a deep warm brown that catfish hide inwhen they want to live to be a hundred. Morning fog blurs the thick green slopes to either side. Fences run across the hills, swerve out of sight, where livestock bellow, wary, sliding toward panic; there are no signs of people anywhere, as if the farmers were abducted, pulled into the sky or led away in trucks, the cows still in the pasture, the tractor halfway out of the barn, coffee weaving threads of steam in the kitchen.
“You know,” Zeke says, “if we needed any more proof that things are different now, this is it right here. Four years ago, the two of us wouldn’t have been left alone on this road so long. Somebody would have come along either to pick us up or shoot us.”
“About that,” Marco says. “Why did the Aardvark put you in jail? Why didn’t he just shoot you?”
“I made myself valuable to him. Gave him some advice, made him some money. He even started to trust me a little. But I didn’t think I’d ever get out, Marco.”
“I didn’t think I’d ever get out, either,” Marco says.
“…”
“Someone might be coming to shoot us,” Marco says.
“If they are, they’re taking their sweet time about it.”
“Have you seen any of the others since—”
“Since you went to prison? No.”
“…”
“Is it really that surprising? It’s not like we could do business anymore.”
“But apart from business.”
“Was there an ‘apart from business’?”
“If there wasn’t, then why did you go to New York?”
“…”
“Ah. I’m sorry.”
“It was never me she wanted anyway,” Zeke says. He’s looking straight at Marco now, and has stopped tapping his foot against the rocks. “Don’t worry, I don’t hold it against you. After all, it was nothing you did. Just like it was nothing she didto hook me. Sometimes I think that at any given point, you could connect half the world like that. There was a woman in Monaco, the wife of a textiles magnate, who wanted me; I don’t know why. And a man who lived on a yellow sailboat wanted her. And no doubt somewhere in the Mediterranean someone wanted him; some poor woman, or a man, in Alexandria, or Beirut, maybe. Her to that sailor, to the wife of the textiles magnate, to me, to Kuala Lumpur, to you. And on and on, until the chain loops back on itself, connects up again. A big ring of desperation around the planet. But for us, it’s just the people we want, and the people who want us.”
“Are you asking me about anyone in particular?”
“No, no. Just thinking in the abstract.”
“…”
“Is there? Anyone in particular?” Zeke says.
“…”
Three hours later, the ground vibrates; from the north, there is a clamor of voices, the squall of an electric guitar, grinding and wavering, growing louder and louder, a shuddering engine of rust and oil. A tour bus yowls over the top of the hill, snaking three trailers behind it, all painted with swirls of pink and lime green, festooned with stickers and graffiti, dogs and birds, dancing figures melting into starbursts and sunlight. People hang out the windows, people are piled on the roof, pitching and swaying, whooping as the bus wobbles down the hill; whoever’s driving it isn’t sure how to control it, and the bus veers to one side, crosses into the other lane, then swerves back, the trailers whiplashing along the same path, groaning and screeching, picking up speed as the caravan growls downhill. The people riding on the top yell and wave their hands; a few of them dangle over the edge, are pulled up by the others as bottles and packages slide off and break open in the road. Zeke and Marco leap up, at first pretend that it’s coincidental, but soon their mistrust gets the better of them and they’re off the shoulder, crouching in the weeds, wondering if they shouldpush the car into the trees. But as the bus crosses the bridge, it eases, shudders to a stop, and the door opens in front of them, releases a miasma of jaunting drums and Mary Jane, unwashed hair and ragged, happy voices that flow onto the gravel, over their feet, into the earth and the creek below the bridge, where the fish hear it and mellow, the rocks feel it and soften, and the water slides toward the sea.
“Hey, you two,” the driver says. “I got something to ask you. You got any gas?”
“No,” Zeke says.
“Motherfucker,” the driver says. Then he just sits there.
“What?” Zeke says.
“Nice ride. Is it yours?”
“It is now.”
The driver laughs. “Totally,” he says. “But you’re out of gas.”
“Yes.”
“Drag.” He leans back, talks to someone behind him that Zeke and Marco can’t see. Then he looks back at them.
“Hey,” he says. “Today the gods of circumstance smile upon you. Doctor San Diego has authorized me to extend an invitation to both of you fine gentlemen to join our merry party, the Americoids.”
Marco knows who Doctor San Diego is. Before the Slick Six were slick, Doctor San Diego and his right-hand woman, Keira Shamu, were the major conduit for natural hallucinogens from South U.S. into the United States, a minor conduit for U.S. currency into South America. If all of the stories about Doctor San Diego are true, he is over one hundred and ten years old; Marco has always believed that the name has been passed down at least once, like the Americoids are pirates, pirates or revolutionaries. Or perhaps there is no such person; the emaciated, bearded vehicle of joy is a legend created to make the business friendlier. Doctor San Diego restricts himself to pot and other natural psychotropics because, he says, they areemissaries of nonviolence. I am in the trade of bliss, he says. I am a servant of the Big Now, turning the bummer inside-out wherever it is found. He allows transactions on credit, takes IOUs, lets customers pay him in rutabagas, turnips, massages, prayer. Good karma is my true profit, he says. Yet he was also one of the richest people in California, until the ATF stormed his mansion near Eureka, a solar-powered bamboo-and-hemp compound guarded by redwoods observing the Pacific. But the feds found the doctor gone and the house empty, no furniture, no carpets, lightbulbs taken. Now he’s the richest nomad in the Americas, from the Hudson Bay tundra line to the Uruguayan shore. He has partied with decommissioned troops in Colombia, generations of families who live in the junkyards of Guatemala City; once he split a spliff with the man who had commanded Marco when the boy was not yet ten, though neither of them knew the connection. The man was trying to put his war years away, sink them in the well, and Doctor San Diego did not ask. My bus runs on good times, Doctor San Diego says. That and gasoline, the driver thinks.
“Who are the Americoids?” Zeke says.
“We are all Americoids,” the bus driver says. “Most of us just don’t know it yet. Come aboard, brothers. The name’s Felix Purple, and I will be conducting you to your destination posthaste. What is your destination, by the way?”
“Asheville.”
“Everyone’s going to Asheville. As if there were only one way to be free.” He salutes the convertibl
e. “Good-bye, beautiful ride.”
The smell wraps around them first, a musk of herb and sweet sweat; then shapes emerge, people lying on the floor near the windows, huddled together, standing in tight circles, holding on to leather straps that have been bolted and welded to the ceiling by bulbs of metal. The bus floor is covered in a patchwork of mattresses and blankets; the Americoids took the seats out years ago, gave them to a village in Ecuador that theythought needed chairs; silla, silla, they kept saying, when the villagers were just trying to say good-bye. Everyone is talking at once; dozens of names and places collide in the air: the things he did, the things she did to him, have you heard this album? They swear they’re never going back. They all jolt together as the bus kicks forward again, lean in unison toward the front as it angles up the hill. Someone calls to turn up the radio, though it’s already playing “Willie the Pimp” as loud as it can, all bass rumble, hissing high-hat, clicking gears, a violin like a buzz saw, Captain Beefheart’s hooting hellion blues, Zappa’s guitar tumbling and soaring, since Felix Purple’s calling the playlist.
“Where are you going?” Zeke says to a man huddled near an electric heater, which appears not to be plugged in.
“I don’t know,” the man says. “Assville? Something like that.”
“I think you mean Asheville,” Zeke says.
“That’s what I said. What did you think I said, Assville?”
“You did say Assville.”
“Wait, what did I say?” the man says.
“Assville,” Zeke says.
“Man, it’s not Assville, it’s Asheville.”
“I know that.”
“Then why did you say Assville?” the man says.
“I only said Assville because you did,” Zeke says.
“But I only … oh, shit.” The man’s eyes widen with panic, and he spends the next few seconds staring at his watch. Then he sighs, relaxes.
“What?” Zeke says.
“Just wanted to make sure we weren’t, like, replaying the same couple of seconds over and over. It’s happened to me before. You just go around and around, and never get there.”
“Get where?” Zeke says.
“Assville.”
“There. You said it.”
“No, man, I said Asheville. You said—oh shit.” He looks at his watch again, sighs, relaxes.
“Stop teasing him,” Marco says.
“But it’s so much fun,” Zeke says.
“That’s because you’ve only gone around twice,” says a girl in jeans and a fringed leather jacket with the words BORN TO SCALP painted in white on the back. “You go around more times, and you stop laughing and start believing. Once I saw the Mayan calendar painted on the side of a school in southern Mexico. It was wheels within wheels, gears within gears.” She widens her eyes, wiggles wizardy fingers at him. “The innermost circle was for days. You could see all of that one. The next for weeks, then months, then years. Out and out, to centuries, millennia, who knows what. The school wasn’t big enough for that outermost wheel. It was almost a straight line. Get it? Whenever you think you’re going in a straight line, it’s just because the wheel’s really big. You could go to the moon and not feel the curve, but it’s still a circle. You just have to get far enough away to see it.”
“And you are?” Zeke says.
“Asia Sherman. Pleased to meet you.”
“You Mayan?”
“Nope. Sioux.”
“New Sioux, she means,” says the man who’s going to Assville. “She’s our talisman, warding off marauders.”
“He means, as long as I’m on the bus,” Asia Sherman says, “the New Sioux won’t touch us.”
“Why’s that?” Zeke says.
“Because I’m the chief’s daughter.”
“Why aren’t you out marauding, then?”
“I’m not into that kind of thing.”
“You ever heard of the New Sioux?” says the man.
“No,” Zeke says.
“You will.”
A rope ladder swings from the emergency exit hatch in theceiling, and Marco and Zeke climb to the roof, where people sit in a tangle of limbs and torsos, pushing against the railings, shouting at each other while their belongings fly upward into the vehicle’s velocity, an airborne wake of clothes and old newspapers. Three men and a woman are burning through five pounds of opium, arguing whether the universe began as a singularity, or is just expanding after a big contraction trillions of years ago. To the extent that measurements of time are meaningful in such a discussion, since time itself shifts, they are quick to qualify. Big Bang or Big Squeeze?
“Bang!” the first two men say.
“Squeeze!” the third man and the woman say.
“You look like you’re looking for someone in particular,” says a woman in a blue smock, seven months pregnant; she can’t remember who the father is, but knows with complete certainty that her unborn daughter will one day found a religion by accident, as profundities drop like grapes from her lips, cool and tart, and her believers run to catch them.
“Keira Shamu,” Marco says.
The woman points behind her to the walkways of hemp and two-by-fours between the trailers, Americoids hanging out on them, leaning out as far as they can over the pavement, bleary with speed. Look! I’m walking on snakes! someone shouts. A triangular entrance has been pushed into the top of the last trailer, as if by a giant can opener, and Marco and Zeke slide down the bent metal into a soup of hashish and apples, the jiving push of an Afrobeat record, percussion shuffling over staggering horns, a man barking into a microphone, mocking and angry with the vision of a better world than the one he’s in. People sit and stand around tables riveted to the trailer floor, shouting at each other over the roar of the road, throwing dice that ring with the clarity of bones, snapping down cards. They lean forward and sweep their arms through the game; they lean back to the hookah to put pipe in mouth, faces collapsing as if playing the oboe, then relaxing to let smoke slither out.
Four voices rise with chattering emotion, are put down with violent hushes, until the axles groan under the labor of a hill and the whole room pitches upward, angles downward again, cards, dice, and all roll and skate off the tables to slosh across the floor, and everyone puts up their hands and squeals; they’re on a roller coaster that turns the last two minutes into ancient history. When the floor levels again, they put down their hands and blink, can’t remember what game they were playing, don’t care; they know only that they love the people sitting across from them, their fellow humans, and they pick up cards and dice to play again and again.
The Keira Shamu they seek sits at a table with a pad and paper, her feet in a washtub full of bottle caps, the casino’s chips.
“Hello, Keira,” Marco says. “Remember me?”
“Of course,” Keira says, through glazed eyes. “The last time I saw you, you should have been on fire.”
Keira Shamu has been working for Doctor San Diego for almost twenty years, is considered to be one of his most focused operatives, more logical when she’s stoned. She and Marco met when Doctor San Diego and the Slick Six’s interests both happened to converge upon a fungus native to Greenland, off the radar of drug-enforcement authorities, appearing in the botanical literature only seven times, but well known among the Inuit and global connoisseurs as a world-class hallucinogen. Capable of surviving less than three days when removed from its habitat, it was at least a hundred times more valuable than gold by weight, depending on the vicissitudes of the commodities market, of course. Very little of it had ever been seen outside of Greenland until a ship captain, an engineer, and a biologist in Nuuk had a mountain-to-Mohammed idea. They created the ideal habitat inside the hull of a freighter, cultivated a quarter acre of the stuff, set a course that kept them north of forty-two degrees latitude, putting their closest port to the United States somewhere in the maritime provincesof Canada. They chose Digby, Nova Scotia, because of its relative seclusion, and because the engineer had al
ways wanted to eat the scallops there. Doctor San Diego’s high-end customers were very interested in the product, which would be broken up into much smaller acreage and each section sped by boat to ports south within forty-eight hours. At those ports, customers were waiting on docks, leaning against cars with tinted windows and chauffeurs, planning to take the stuff in the car, then be driven to the beach, the woods, a nightclub, a hotel room, a karaoke bar, the public toilet of a train station, the places they liked best to be altered. The monetary transactions, involving very large sums of euros and American and Canadian dollars, needed a presentable front to the port authorities of the United States and Canada and the foreign affairs office of Denmark; the Slick Six were thus called to work their mojo. For their trouble—three hours of work for Zeke and Carolyn on a Friday afternoon, with a quick assist from Kuala Lumpur—the Six would net $974,523, enough to send Marco, their man who could do things, to the piers of Digby to make sure that the handoffs of the product itself were smooth and easy.
They were not. Minutes after the freighter arrived, a thick fog ate the harbor; fishing boats left in a line, disappeared one after the other into the mist. The night before, the engineer had found the one bad scallop in Digby and eaten it, and he squatted at the edge of the pier to retch into the gray water. The Greenlander biologist and captain looked nervous; they were people with day jobs, regular hours, health benefits, wives and children, and as they looked over the people who they were dealing with now, with their missing digits and casual talk of human trafficking as they loaded the small boats, they understood that they were in the kind of trouble their grandparents had warned them about when they were children. Keira and Marco tried to calm them; everyone here’s a professional, they said, and in two hours they wouldn’t have to seeany of them ever again if they didn’t want to. It didn’t help. Looking back, Keira is pretty sure that this was because the Greenlanders knew what was coming. It wasn’t the sailors making the biologist and captain nervous, or the scallops that had made the engineer sick.
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America Page 7