Then they followed suit:
“I’m Chris,” said the powerfully built young man from the front seat next to the driver. He had a bony nose, blue eyes, and a shock of blond hair. “I’m the drummer.”
“I’m Sylvia.” The woman, on the bench-seat behind the driver, was dark and had an intense face and her eyes were fixed unremittingly on Mery-Isis. “My folks came from Greece.”
“Vic,” said the gangling black youth next to her, his curious gaze flickering from myself to Tari. “Glad to meet you.”
The fifth, sitting almost on my knees, courageously gave me his hand to shake. I took it carefully. His face was surly, his hair a mess, he looked exactly the sort whom once I’d have dismissed as a bumpkin. “I am called Johan,” he said in a guttural voice. “I play the synthesiser. In Atlanta last night they throw rotten fruit at me. It is okay in New York but here they do not like the new music. I am from Europe too. How is it in England?”
“I… don’t know,” I said haltingly. “It is a long time… since I was in England.”
“Ah.” Johan nodded sagely. “Many people leave England now and come here. It is the same in Germany, where I come from. They are fascists everywhere in Europe now except where they are communists. Everybody wants to put everybody else down. Here there is more room and the people do not like to be told what to do. I play in England last year. There they throw stones, not fruit, and shout that I am elitist because I do not shout their slogans. Yes, many shitheads are here too, but some good people, and for me it is better.”
“Where are you from in England?” asked the woman, Sylvia.
“I was… born in Devon,” I managed to say, dizzily. “Devon? Great! I was there two years ago”
“Hey, man,” interrupted Vic—but he addressed Tari, not me, which confused me, “where you from in Egypt?”
Tari smiled. “I lived near… Alexandria”
“What’re you doin’ over here?”
“I have come looking for a new expression of what some would call the Life-Force,” she declared slowly, her eyes bright. “There are many possibilities in this land, though it will take much remembrance of the purpose behind the foundation of these United States before the Force can know itself, before enough people find the will and courage to make a difference. Now tell me—what does KRONONUTZ mean?”
They looked at each other. Then Vic demanded:
“You mean you ain’t heard about chrononuts?”
“No,” said Nefertari Mery-Isis.
“Man, you really have been in the woods. You haven’t heard about Project Vulcan and ail those guys from other times that the government keeps shut up somewhere?”
Tari and I looked quickly at each other.
“Yes,” said Tari, “we heard about that.”
“Okay. Chrononuts are people who can’t stand the way their lives are going, so they make out they’re from other times and got kidnapped here by Vulcan. And that’s like how we feel sometimes, like we don’t belong here. So we’re KRONONUTZ. I mean, we started out in skull-masks and stuff as THE DEAD ZONE—you know, that story by Stephen King—but we get a lot more bookings since we changed to KRONONUTZ. Guess it relates better.”
“We wanted to call ourselves the DTIs,” said Sylvia, still gazing at Tari, “but there’s another New York band calling itself that.”
“Right,” Vic went on, “and we got this act on stage, we’re all decked out in weird gear from different times and cultures. I come on like an Ashanti warrior and I’ve got this rap about how the white slavers grabbed me but I got away. Dan there makes like Daniel Boone, coonskin cap and all. Chris is a Viking. Syl does a Minoan priestess bit when we play big cities on the coasts where you can get away with bare tits and stuff, but out here in the sticks she has to cover up. And Johan’s just Johan, like mad scientist in silver suit. We wanted him to wear Nazi gear for his big Raydee number, but he won’t have none of that.”
“I am a musician!” protested Johan, “not a goddamn clown!”
“Listen,” said Sylvia. “Don’t want to offend either of you, but I get this really strange feeling about you. What exactly did you mean”—she addressed Tari—“when you said you came out of the woods to meet us. That sounds like you expected us.”
“Yeah,” said Vic, “you said something told you we were coming.”
“Sometimes I’m right about these things,” said Tari, “and sometimes not. This time, I am glad to say, I was right.”
“You mean, like precognition?” said Sylvia.
Tari looked blank. “I don’t know that word.”
“Seeing the future,” said Sylvia.
Tari shrugged, still smiling.
“I saw a picture of you in my mind. I was sitting very quietly, and just for a moment I saw you coming.” She eyed me for a moment before going on. “We would like to go to Saint Lou with you. We have no money to pay our way, but…”
“Forget it!” Dan called back over his shoulder.
“…but we have a drug which I’m told is valuable,” she continued, bringing one of the carefully wrapped bottles of Interferon out of her jacket. “Perhaps you know where we can sell it? We were in danger of sickness, but now I think we will be all right, and…”
“What is that?” demanded Johan. “Liquid speed?”
“No, I think it is called Interferon.”
“Interferon?” Sylvia’s eyes widened. I sensed a strong current between her and Tari. Later Tari said it was Sylvia’s mind she had picked up that morning in the woods; and also how she thought that Sylvia had indeed once lived in Minoan Crete, about the same time as Tari had lived in Egypt, but that Sylvia had no recall of it. “Where did you get that?” Sylvia went on. “If it’s not spoiled it’s worth a fortune.” And she grew more puzzled still as she stared into Tail’s eyes. She tried to joke. “Just when do you come from anyway?”
“I think,” said Tari, gazing straight back, “that possibly you and I were born within a few years of each other.”
In this remark was a resonance that nobody cared to pursue so early in the day. And so we met KRONONUTZ, and went to St. Louis.
We reached St. Louis in midafternoon. I slept much of the way, save when we stopped in a dusty one-street town for food and a stretch of the legs. I was worried at the suspicious looks we got, but Vic told me to ignore them. Soon enough we were back on the road again, and I sinking teeth into the first De Luxe Hamburger of my life, and so hungry that I had no heed for beard, manners, or digestion. This I regretted later, somewhat, but at the time I was refreshed, and sat up energetically.
I asked about this event to which we were going. In reply Sylvia unrolled and showed me a large broadsheet, or poster. At the top of it, in a row, were a number of ugly monkeyfaces, some in military uniform. Others, I was told, were the faces of prominent politicians and leaders of great corporations. Under these faces, in large red letters, ran a message something like this:
THE LIFE ALLIANCE DEMANDS AN END TO THE WARS IN GUATEMALA AND PAKISTAN! WE DEMAND THE TRUTH ABOUT VULCAN AND DAMASCUS, ARKANSAS! WE DEMAND FEDS OUT OF NATIVE AMERICAN LANDS AND ALASKA! WE DEMAND THE RESTORATION OF SOCIAL PROGRAMS AND CUTS! WE DEMAND AN END TO MILITARY INVOLVEMENT IN THE SPACE SHUTTLE PROGRAM! WE DEMAND AN END TO PENTAGON CRIMINALITY, AN END TO HARASSMENT OF MINORITIES, AN END TO NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION!!! JOIN US NATIONWIDE TO FIGHT FASCISM AT RALLIES IN NEW YORK, WASHINGTON, NEW ORLEANS, ATLANTA, ST. LOUIS, CHICAGO, DENVER, PHOENIX, LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO, PORTLAND AND SEATTLE ON 23 MAY 1985!!! JOIN US IN THE FIGHT FOR LIFE!!!
During the next few months I was to see many such posters, and to become much involved in all this, but at the time, of course, it made little sense, so as we drove along Sylvia and Vic tried to tell us what was happening in the land. They said that U.S. Government and corporate policies in many areas were arousing huge opposition at home and abroad, and that KRONONUTZ would be just one of many bands playing in the rally at St. Louis, and that also there would be many speakers for a great variety of
causes. On the other side of the poster was a list of the names of participating groups who funded and supported this “Life Alliance.” There were over seventy of them on the list. We were told that there would be many different racial groups protesting discrimination, and Gay Rights groups, and Women’s Rights groups, and young men resisting the Draft, and many teachers, doctors, and administrators fighting the abolition of public services, and others fighting agribusiness, and nuclear policy, and chemical companies, and oil companies, and… on and on it went. “There’s a whole lot going on that’s been building up over the last five years,” said Sylvia in an urgent voice, “and just lately it’s got really mad what with the Slump, and Vulcan, and the Idaho Leak, and Damascus, and the Feds going into Indian lands for coal and uranium, and troops up in Alaska protecting the oil pipeline from secessionists, and the war in Guatemala, and eyeball-to-eyeball shit with the Russians in Pakistan. I guess there’ll be some Raydees there tonight as well: the military deny responsibility for the Damascus ICBM and won’t pay compensation; they say it was enemy sabotage; and the AEC insist that the Idaho leak and a dozen others aren’t really that bad, even though people are dropping with cancer everywhere—I mean, it just goes on and on and on!”
But then my eye was caught by the enormous bridge we crossed over a great wide brown river. I gaped as we entered the city of St. Louis past a huge gleaming silvery arch that stood hundreds of feet high in the thick brown hot city air. Soon we were among buildings that dazed me with their size, with the severity of their glass-and-steel construction. But Tari did not seem impressed. “They have the proportion,” she said later, “of monuments built by men more concerned with the size of their pricks than with healthy harmony.”
Nor were the others interested in what so amazed me.
“Right,” said Chris, continuing what Sylvia had been saying, “and what with the religious nuts going full blast it’s a wonder anyone manages to stay sane at all. It can’t go on. The Monster’s gobbling itself up. Pretty soon it’ll all blow up and we’ll have to start again.” He sounded almost cheerful about it. “The Hopi have prophecies about that, and Nostradamus too, I guess.”
“Nostradamus?” I cried, as Tari gripped my hand warningly. “He was very famous in…” I was about to say, “my time” but checked myself before the words came out.
In fact it didn’t matter, for soon I would inadvertently take a drug called LSD, get up on stage, and babble out the history of Vulcan and Horsfield in front of one hundred thousand people.
One hundred thousand human beings, shoulder-to-shoulder? Nothing in my former life—not even the coronation procession of Her Majesty on the seventeenth of November 1558—had prepared me for such a spectacle.
The sun was low when at last we reached Forest Park and began our crawl through miles of parked cars, Dan flashing a Performer Pass at the stewards who waved him through the seething crowds and the great blare from the stage. I was amazed and nervous, and Tari was bemused at first too, but our hosts were too excited to note this as finally we reached the backstage area and found a place to park. They jumped out and started removing equipment as Tari and I eyed each other.
“You two staying here?” Chris asked, bright-eyed.
“Until we’re used to it,” said Tari, breathing deep.
“Sure thing. Hang about. You’re with us, if anyone asks.”
Fortunately there was no rock’n’roll band playing as we arrived there. Had there been, I think I might have turned tail and run all the way back to New Jersey without stopping for breath. It was bad enough as it was, with a vast amplified voice booming through the late afternoon. The words throbbed and echoed, reminding me of my welcome to the Slocum. It was as hard to understand them as it was to breathe the hot and sticky air, which smelled foul, and worried me. “There must be many… germs and… viruses here to which we are susceptible,” I said to Tari in a low voice. “I think we should take some of the physic.” Tightmouthed she looked at me, then nodded in swift agreement. So, with crowds of people surging about, some of them rough-dressed and others dandified in bizarre ways, we sat in the minibus and swallowed several pills apiece, and also wet our thumbs with solution from one of the Interferon bottles, and licked. Johan saw us doing this as he came to pull out a long flat case.
“You are sure that is not liquid speed?” he asked suspiciously. “Why do you need Interferon? What illness do you fear?”
“Aw, leave them alone,” said Sylvia, pulling him away as the giant voice rolled and thundered from the stage:
“…The FBI act like Nazis on our reservations! Nothing has changed! You people ever hear of the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo made in 1848? Promises, promises, promises were made, but…”
“Who is this man who speaks?” Tari asked Sylvia, not shouting, but pitching her voice very sharp in order to be heard.
“Navaho guy, I think.” Sylvia still stared intensely at Tari. “Biggest and richest tribe in the Southwest. Lately the army moved in on their land because of coal and uranium, and they…” Her voice was suddenly drowned by a tremendous burst of cheering; and when the cheering died the angry voice roared on:
“Remember the words of our brother Russell Means! ‘Rationality is a curse since it can cause humans to forget the natural order of things. A wolf never forgets his or her place in the natural order. Europeans do.’ Yes! And so does the Washington President!”
For this the cheering was even greater. Sylvia left us, and I turned to Tari. I was shaking and afraid.
“What is this? What sort of world have we…”
But I stopped, because her eyes were very bright, her whole face was shining, and I could feel the power radiating from her.
“Can’t you feel it?” she demanded, “This is why we came!” I was taken aback by the speed of her adjustment to this mayhem.
“It may be why you came,” I stuttered, “but leave me out of it!”
“This is where our work starts,” she said in an intent voice that chilled me. “There’s Hawk-energy here, but all divided, without focus, not knowing itself. Surely you can feel it!”
“It’s madness!” I cried, near panic. “How can people live amid a tumult like this?”
She shrugged. “Of course it is different to what you knew, and to what I knew. Now”—she eased herself out of the minibus onto the grassy ground—“I am going to look about. Are you coming?”
I wavered, caught between fear of discovery and fear of loss of face, then realised that sooner or later I must step into this wild new world. So I followed Tari into the crowd. We were both still filthy and ragged but, as we pressed our way round the side of the huge covered stage, I found out that this hardly mattered; many other people looked just as tattered—though closer inspection soon showed me that most of them were not tattered at all, their “rags” in many cases being artfully made to give the impression of poverty. This I could understand no better than false wood and the rest of it, but later Sylvia told me it was part of a recurrent craze for well-off folk to spend a lot of money in order to look poor. “Guilt is part of it,” she said, “and looking poor helps to avoid being mugged by the real poor. It’s a crazy world.”
Before leaving us, Sylvia had given us ten dollars. “I’m very thirsty,” I shouted at Tari. “Perhaps we can buy an ale, or a Coke.”
She didn’t hear me, but pressed on. I struggled after her, giddy already, pushed on every side, taken aback by the near-nakedness not only of many men but women too, feeling attacked by the booming from the stage, by the shouting of hundreds of people, by the pandemonic blare of loud dance-music from radios at close-quarters. I passed bright-coloured stalls and kiosks from which wafted the aroma of hot dog, hamburger, fried chicken, and then, with Tari somewhere in front of me, I found myself in front of the stage, looking out over the vast audience seated or standing on the natural grass amphitheatre. Here for a moment I stood, trying to collect my wits, and saw a big man with a spadelike beard, a hairy chest, and a leather apron ove
r blue jeans. He carried a big red plastic bucket and a stack of paper cups, and he was giving cupfuls of the bubbly drink in the bucket to anyone who wanted one, winking at them as he did. I licked my dusty dry lips, and he saw me watching him. “Hey,” he said, casting an eye about as he did. “You like some pepsi, man? You know, real special, like way back when—none of that Jim Jones shit.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That is very kind of you.”
“Sure thing.” He gave me a cupful. “Have a good one!”
I drank it down quickly. It did very little for my thirst. Grimacing, I looked for Tari.
I couldn’t see her.
The crowd had swallowed her up.
I had sufficient presence of mind to mark where the KRONONUTZ bus was. Then, feeling I must press on into this amazing new world, I did so.
It must have been about an hour later, with the sun setting in a muddy blaze of ochre-tinged reds and yellows, about the time when KRONONUTZ came on stage after a succession of angry speakers, loud announcements, and continual tumult, that I began to feel very strange indeed.
In the first place, as will be clear, the monstrously loud rock’n’roll was an experience as initially terrifying in its way as anything I ever encountered, including war, including Vulcan, including the night of our escape from Horsfield. Nothing in my life had prepared me for it—and I was right in front of one of the banks of loudspeakers when it began. Yes, at Horsfield I’d heard a little of the modern music, and had not much liked it, I whose experience was limited to a gentle galliard, a stately pavane or frisky almain. I could play the lute with some proficiency, and had tried viols, flutes, and sackbuts, and even the harp. Dowland was popular in England in my time; Batchelor and Bulman and Cutting also had their following—and I used to enjoy a merry rush around the Maypole as much as anyone else—but of course none of this was any preparation for the insane assault that my gentle KRONONUTZ acquaintances unleashed upon me.
Fire in the Abyss Page 27