Blueprints of the afterl.., p.26
Blueprints of the Afterlife, page 26
The sexual reproduction of life between interplanetary species.
Yes, exactly.
Oh, come on.
What?
I just find this incredibly implausible. Whatever. It was a psychedelic trip.
Disbelieve all you want. What do I care?
Continue.
You asked for my story, didn’t you?
I did. Carry on.
I really don’t feel like continuing.
You have no choice.
I may not have a choice, but you—you can’t fuck with me like this. You can’t—
Are you threatening me?
No. No, I’m—
Good, because—
I need some water.
Here you go. Yes, yes, go on.
Sorry. Okay. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Okay, so let me—okay, so that’s the moment Erika gasped and returned to the patio behind the house and threw up on me. Then later, after she told us what had happened in the cylinder, she went upstairs and resumed work on the novel she’d stopped midsentence some months before. The old boxing match with her keyboard started up again. I had these vomited-on clothes that needed washing so I put them in a garbage bag and dumped them in the sink in the laundry room. As I was rinsing out my clothes, something caught my eye amid the chunks of potato and scrambled eggs. A little key, like the kind used for safety deposit boxes.
What did Erika think it was?
Well…
You never told her?
I would have. Just—let me back up. I didn’t tell you about the Chinese herbalist. I’d had this rash on my right ankle, a sort of psoriasis thing. I had an MD I went to who gave me some steroid ointment but that didn’t do any good. So Wyatt suggested I see his Chinese doctor. He’d cleared up this wicked sinus infection Wyatt came down with one time. So I went—this was weeks before the meeting with Chewbacca—and it was this cramped little place in Chinatown, drying herbs hanging from the rafters, a couple of ninety-year-old Chinese women sitting at a little table in the front drinking tea. Dr. Wu was the doctor, middle-aged man, glasses. He parted some curtains and had me come back to the exam room and show him my tongue. Anyway, whatever, he sent me home with some herbs that were supposed to be infused into a tea. And by herbs, I’m not talking about basil and oregano. These looked like twigs and bark and stuff dug up from the floor of a forest. Horrific-tasting shit. But the rash started to disappear. So it happened that on the day Erika took her trip, I had to go back to get more herbs. By this time it was afternoon, she was upstairs, banging away on her keyboard, and Wyatt was doing yoga or something, so I thought I might as well go do my errand. On my way through North Beach I started to feel like maybe I was being followed, like I was in a movie. There was a big black woman with a kid in a stroller, an old man listening to an iPod, some teenage girls talking loudly on their phones. Then about half a block behind me there was this skinny homeless-looking dude, huge beard, sunglasses, floppy hat. If anyone was following me, it had to be that guy. Sure enough, he stayed behind me for several blocks. I stopped a couple times pretending to look at window displays and he did the same. Then I’d continue on and he’d follow. Whoever he was, he wasn’t trained to follow people. I started to wonder if this was Squid, but Squid had spoken in an African American guy’s voice, and my stalker was white or Asian as far as I could tell. I made it to Dr. Wu’s and got my refill of herbs. When I came out of the shop there he was, standing a few storefronts away, gazing at red-glazed Peking ducks hanging like violins in the window. That’s when I did something out of character. I walked up to him. When I was a few feet away he saw me and sort of jumped, then turned to walk away. I lunged and grabbed his shoulder and yanked him around. He fell to the sidewalk. I yelled at him, demanded to know why he was following me. He took off his sunglasses and said my name. It was Nick.
Ah.
I couldn’t believe it. He said he wanted me to meet some people. So I went with him. I wanted to ask him so many questions, find out what he’d been doing the last five years. He was both as I remembered him, underneath that scraggly beard, and also someone new, some kind of mad street prophet. He struck me as someone who’d seen things. Things that damage you or at least leave you permanently altered. As I tried to keep up with him he muttered and mumbled a stream of nonsense I just barely couldn’t hear. Whenever I tried to stop him and ask him to repeat himself he just said, “You’ll get debriefed, don’t worry.” I noticed he stunk, like he’d been sleeping in spoiled milk. And yet… the guy seemed so fucking alive.
We left Chinatown and hopped on a series of buses that took us to Berkeley. He didn’t say much during the ride. Just stared straight ahead mostly. I decided I’d keep my mouth shut and let this play out. I’d abandoned my search for him and gotten rich, found myself unemployed, and now here was the path again, intersecting with my life when I least expected it. We got off in Berkeley and walked for what felt like a mile, into a typical residential neighborhood. Little Victorians in various states of renovation. Dogs and flower beds, barbecues, that kind of place. We came to a red house with a door that had a little slot where the peek hole was supposed to be. Nick texted someone and a few seconds later the little slot slid open and two eyes stared out at us. When they saw me, they widened, and the slot slammed shut. Nick appeared to text someone back and forth for a while, angrily muttering the whole time. Finally the door opened and a guy grabbed both Nick and me and pulled us in. Big dude, wearing a UC Santa Cruz sweatshirt, red afro, handlebar mustache. He dragged us to a door leading down to a basement. As we descended we were hit with these really bright lights and all these voices yelling and arguing. I could only make out silhouettes at first but it sounded like twenty or so people.
The voices calmed down as a woman yelled for them to shut up. Then she said, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Frog?” It took me a second to realize that Frog was Nick. Nick unshielded his eyes and spoke in a stammer. He said he’d brought me here because we had taken an oath of brotherhood years before and he knew he could trust me.
“This wasn’t the protocol,” the woman said.
Nick said, “I understand that, Swan. But the plan had to change. He spotted me.”
Swan said, “Well you know he can’t go back to his natural habitat now, don’t you? Now that you’ve brought him here?”
I spoke up and said, “Look, I’m not sure who you people are but can someone tell me—”
The woman commanded me to shut the fuck up. Now my eyes were starting to adjust and I could see that Swan was a black woman about forty years old. You could have passed any of these people on the streets of Berkeley and not looked twice. I wondered if this was some new offshoot of the Symbionese Liberation Army or some other kind of revolutionary group. I was scared, I really was. Hours before I’d been sitting in the comfortable house I shared with two of the kindest people I’d ever known, and now I was back together with Nick, wondering if my ass was about to get handed to me.
Nick said, “He has 12.7 million in the bank.”
Then me, dork that I am, trying to dig myself out of whatever hole it was that I’d found myself in, said, “I’d be happy to loan you folks some money to help, you know, your cause or whatever this is.” I was thinking this might be a way to get me out the door.
“It’s not money we need,” Swan said, then leaned in close to me, staring so intensely I felt I was being audited. “Can you drive a stick shift?”
A stick shift?
A stick shift, yeah, that’s what she asked. Whether I could drive a stick. And I have to say I laughed. Suddenly this didn’t seem like a revolutionary group. It was just a bunch of punks, probably dealing acid and worrying about getting busted. So I said, “What, they didn’t teach you how to drive stick in the Kirkpatrick Driving Academy of Human Potential?”
The room erupted again, shouting. When Swan finally managed to shut everyone up, she said, “We never say that name around here. Now please answer my question. Can you drive a stick-shift car?”
“Sure,” I said. “Until recently I drove a manual VW bus.”
Swan clapped her hands together. “Perfect!” she said. “Let’s eat, what do you say?”
Suddenly everyone was being cordial and helping me with my coat, showing me to a place at a table. Swan sat on one side of me, Nick on the other. One by one the other members of the group introduced themselves. They all had animal names. Muskrat, Squirrel, Crow, Salmon, Bear, Owl, Horse. From upstairs came big bowls and platters of food, that good hippie food I’d grown to love. Emboldened by the sudden change of tone, I asked Swan who they were.
“We’re the dropouts,” she said. “Dropouts from that institution you mentioned.”
“So it does exist,” I said.
She said, “Of course it exists. It’s a foundation, an incubator designed to cultivate inventors. Those who have the potential to bring about paradigmatic change. It seeks to direct the course of history by coordinating the efforts of individuals who fit certain profiles. It brings these individuals together in the hopes that when they work collaboratively, the magnitude of the historical shifts they bring about will be greater than if these individuals had been working alone.”
“Like gestalt theory.”
Swan rolled her eyes and said, “Yeah, something like that.”
“Why did you drop out?” I asked.
Swan avoided the question. “You do realize your life with Wyatt and Erika is over, don’t you?” she said. “That you’ve chosen to pursue this path again, and that your efforts must now be synonymous with the efforts of the collective?”
I said sure, whatever. The hokey SLA mind-trick shtick wasn’t working on me. Maybe if they’d had submachine guns shoved at my ribs I’d have felt differently but for now at least all I saw were young leftists eating hummus and talkin’ ’bout a revolution. I’d been immersed among these types for years in the Bay Area. A lot of talk, little to no action. I knew I’d be able to return home anytime I wanted, regardless of what these blowhards were saying. For all I knew the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential was one of those night-course places upstairs from a Korean grocery store offering certificates in “business studies.” So I just went along with the game and said, “Yes, I know my old life is over.”
I think Swan could tell I was bullshitting her but she continued. “Have you ever met a slave, Luke?” she asked. The question took me aback, coming from a black person. I stammered out a no. She said, “Really? You’ve never been to a mall? You’ve never watched shoppers with their carts piled with soda and microwavable food? You’ve never stayed in a hotel where a fifty-year-old Mexican mother of six scrubs your shit stains off the toilet bowl? You’ve never watched TV for five hours straight?” She went on to explain their theory, sort of a pseudo-Marxist vision of the gemeinschaft and the gessellschaft, the ruling class and the underclass, the proletariat and the elite, the haves and have-nots, the first world and the third. According to Swan, Mr. Kirkpatrick, whose name she refused to utter, had founded the academy as a method to ensure that those in power stayed in power, that those enslaved remained enslaved. The dropouts were the students who refused to go along with this philosophy and had instead allied themselves with the underclass, struggling for equality. Or maybe it was the other way around. It was all a little fuzzy. I asked her about Dirk Bickle. She said Bickle was one of Kirkpatrick’s agents, traveling the world in search of candidates to ensnare in the program.
There was a noise upstairs, the front door opening. Everyone in the basement got excited, saying, “They’re home! They’re home!” I started to ask Swan who they were talking about but she motioned for me to be quiet and listen. I heard the door close, people’s voices. I mouthed “Who is it?” to Nick. He whispered back, “The Millers.”
I whispered, “You guys are hiding in the basement of a family’s house?”
Swan shushed me. A couple pairs of footsteps creaked overhead. A girl’s voice. Swan said in a low tone, “They’re our test family. Jim and Helen Miller. They have two daughters, aged nine and six and a half, Melissa and Gina. Would you like to observe them?”
I said sure, why not, and followed Swan upstairs. We came up from the basement as Helen Miller was coming through the front door with a bag of groceries. I made a little startled jump, but Helen Miller walked right past me like I wasn’t there. Like one of those movies where the unseen dead observe the living. She put the groceries on the kitchen island and Jim walked into the room, gave her a kiss, and asked her how her day had been. Then Melissa came through the door, carrying her sheet music from piano class. Swan and I stood off to the side in the kitchen watching this whole scene go down. Was it some weird brand of street theater? Were these actors? They absolutely ignored us, going about their business in what was ostensibly their home, the basement of which was occupied by some fringe anarchist movement. I wondered if I was the target of an elaborately staged practical joke. I actually looked around the room trying to find cameras.
“The reason I asked you if you can drive a stick is that we need someone to steal the Millers’ Mazda,” Swan said. “The rest of us can only drive automatics. You’ll take Frog with you. He knows where you need to go.”
You have to remember that this was a day in which I’d met Chewbacca, gotten puked on, run into Nick after years of not knowing his whereabouts, and enjoyed some vegetarian fare with people with animal names in the basement of a painted lady outside Berkeley. I was seriously questioning my sanity. Swan seemed to recognize that I was going through some variety of psychic crisis and laid her hand on my shoulder. “You’re not crazy,” she said as the Millers removed a casserole from the microwave and sat down to eat. She told me that I was already involved, whether I wanted to be or not. There’d been a time, she said, when I had my life to myself, when I was merely curious about the academy, but now, after helping decipher the document Erika had channeled and by writing a pseudo-academic paper on the Bionet and qputers as a lark, I had entered the labyrinth. I was a fly, she said, a fly crawling down the throat of a Venus flytrap, my path heading in one relentless direction. That was my new name, she said. I was no longer Luke Piper. My name was Fly. I watched the Millers talk about baseball scores and weather reports, their silverware clinking on their plates. And even though I was standing in the same room, I was no longer part of their world, if I ever had been. This was what I had been yearning for all along: a secret mission, a purpose so mystifying I might only learn of its nature in the process of fulfilling it. I had no choice in the matter. I asked Swan where I could find the car keys.
And you took the car.
I picked the keys up off the kitchen island, went out to the curb with Nick, got in the driver’s seat of the Miata and backed out. Just like that. As we left the neighborhood I asked him where we were going. He told me Arizona, to someplace far from civilization. We left the Bay Area like we were escaping the looming wave of a tsunami, both of us laughing, suddenly embedded in these lives where there was no distance between impulse and experience. Fuck, I can’t tell you how liberated I felt! To just leave. And the farther away from the city we got, the more Nick emerged from his shell, like he needed to be outside the blast zone of those crazies to get back his old personality. I still had so many questions for him but figured I’d give him whatever time he needed to regain my trust. Finally, over burgers at some roadside place, at around midnight, he told me something that made me take this trip more seriously. “Your friend,” he said. “The girl? Erika? She visited the seed ship today.”
I asked what he meant. He described a project the academy was working on, to build a space ship that would contain the basic ingredients needed to terraform a hospitable planet. He called this the seed ship. According to Nick, the drug Squid gave Erika operated as a delivery method to the ship through time. After she’d erroneously received the transmission about the future of life in the universe, her writing had been misplaced on the seed ship. So the dropouts had to send her there to retrieve it. The whole thing sounded completely nuts to me but I couldn’t explain how he could have known details about Erika’s trip unless he’d been spying on us. Which he had, actually, though he never got close enough to see Erika tripping or hear her version of the trip. When we’d received the drug from Chewbacca at the park, Nick had been watching us and followed us home. He’d been assigned this duty by Swan, who wanted to make sure everything went all right with Erika. He’d watched the house from the café across the street and followed me when I went to do my errand.
Why did he follow you?
He needed to get confirmation that Erika’s trip had been a success. And he needed to get the key that she’d vomited up.
He knew about that?
Yeah. That’s when I started getting really freaked out. He asked me about the key and I said I didn’t know anything about a key, even though it was in my wallet. He seemed to believe me. We got back on the road and drove through the night. I asked him why the academy existed. He said it existed to perpetuate life in the universe, that this calling was ancient, and that there were certain races spread throughout the universe who were responsible for keeping life going. He called them the stewards. There were thousands if not millions of steward races out there. Some stewards succeeded, others failed, but all were driven by the imperative to seek out conditions suitable for sustaining life. That’s how we got here, on earth, he told me. Earth life was created billions of years ago by a long-extinct steward race. They set evolution in motion, and intervened on a few occasions, like when they initiated the messiah program.
