The spoor trail led to a large pile of flat red rocks standing out in the desert like a home for the weary. The tarantula and kangaroo rat, desert lark and roadrunner, seed and cacti … and Cosette/coy with her brood of suckling pups.

  Lois/coy heard the canine growl and then yell before seeing Cosette/coy lying on her side with five babies sucking at her milky teats. Lois/coy cowering and wanting to approach her friend; remembering her own suckling puphood and wanting to devour a babe or two.

  Cosette/coy screamed a high-pitched warning and Lois settled some distance away. Folding her paws and laying her sleek head down, she watched as Cosette peered over the bobbing heads of her pups.

  The heat rose in the afternoon and Lois/coy drowsed. The yips of the hungry pups lulled her and she no longer had the desire to rip and rend. The coyote smells on the breeze reminded her of a long history of traveling, traveling along nearly invisible trails that her kind had known for thousands of years.

  In her sleep her feet scuttled quickly out of the way of the puma and the great black bear. She stalked fish in the rivers where she drank and played with the porcupine that never stabbed her even once.

  Under a moon that seemed to take up the entire sky, blazing in the cold cloud-ridden night, she migrated unable to sleep more than a few hours at a time. Something called to her, something dark and sonorous, something that she ached for but did not know or understand.

  She whimpered on the hotbed earth then Cosette/coy licked her neck. Lois/coy got up gratefully pressing her head against her friend. They licked each other and rolled together. They whimpered in happiness at finding a friend again.

  They rolled and licked and inhaled each other’s scent until Lois opened her eyes. She was underneath Cosette licking her labia, her chin slick with the Arab girl’s discharge. Cosette was at the other end doing the same to her.

  Lois pushed and kicked Cosette away. She tried to get to her feet but the orgasm weakened her legs and she fell toward the carnival door.

  “Arrête,” Cosette said, reverting to French.

  “I have to go,” Lois replied fumbling at the painted doorknob and stumbling into the hall.

  SEVEN

  IN HER ROOM again Lois sat on the high bed hugging her knees. She had never made love to another woman before. And Cosette wasn’t even a woman. She was a teenager, a girl. But the satisfaction lingered, the sudden opening and flowing outward; the muscles that clenched hard around some place that she had never known even in her own private explorations.

  But, while the guilt bore into her, she wondered about those coyotes and the desert that was so pure and vast and free from the plastic and asphalt and glass detritus of man.

  Where had the child taken her? How?

  This internal question coincided with a tapping at her door. It was a soft knock, feminine. Lois worried that it was Cosette come to drag her back to the desert to transform her again, to ravish her. Her heart beat with fear and anticipation. She did not move or make a sound.

  The tapping came again, no louder.

  Lois wondered if she could escape through the window. She’d drive to Grant’s place tell him that Marchant had drugged her and beg him to have her committed. In a straightjacket in a cell under the influence of sense-deadening drugs she would begin to escape this nightmare. She would not feel anything, imagine anything.

  “Lois?” a man’s voice called—Frank.

  “Go away,” Lois said.

  She went to the window. There was no fire escape, no trellis or even a ledge.

  “Let me talk to you, Lois,” the gambler said. “I know how disturbing all of this can be.”

  “Go away.”

  “I could no more do that than the gray goose could fly north in the winter.”

  Lois pressed up against the window frame with both hands. She expected it to be nailed shut but it went up with no problem. She was looking on the sunlit street but thinking about that goose; that solitary gray goose going the wrong way with no friends to help it, looking for something that was not there.

  “Lois.”

  “What?”

  “You need us.”

  “I don’t even know you.”

  “Maybe not,” Frank said. “Maybe you don’t know us in the physical ways that you have known family and friends of the past. But this is a new day. We are beyond lunches and trysts and jokes about the current president. We have left behind hierarchies and schemes and one man, one vote. You feel it. You know it.”

  “I don’t need you,” Lois said.

  “What will you do out there?” Frank asked as if he knew that Lois was standing at the window wondering how to get away.

  Down on a patch of grass at the curb two young black children were playing a game that involved touching each other’s shoulders. They were laughing and too near the traffic, in a world of their own but under the impotent gaze of the Korean-American science manager.

  She turned and went to the door. It was unlocked. Frank could have walked in whenever he wanted.

  He was wearing a yellow-green felt suit with a dark green hat that sported a red feather, and short white gloves that revealed his pale wrist. The thin mustache went well with his slender face. His green eyes seemed somehow appropriate for a gambler.

  “What?” she asked, exasperated by the inanity of her quest to make sense of what was happening to her.

  “May I come in?”

  “Are you going to take me out of my body to some crazy place?”

  Frank smiled and shook his head.

  Lois backed away and he entered leaving the door wide open.

  Frank sat on the oak floor in half-lotus. This surprised Lois. She had figured him for a chair and maybe a cigarette. She backed away perching at the edge of the high bed.

  “Why do you think I need you?” she asked.

  “Without us you will wander through this world having experiences and feelings that no one will understand. They will label you as weird or worse—insane. You will be in a thousand places you’ve never known, talking to people like me and Marchant and Marie.”

  “What did Cosette do to me?”

  “I don’t know. That was between the two of you. But what I can say is that whatever transpired that is not what you should be wondering about.”

  The gambler, for some reason, calmed Lois. It wasn’t so much what he said but the demeanor he struck while addressing her. His gloves and silly hat allayed her fears. His sitting on the floor …

  “What should I be asking?”

  “Marchant is a monster,” Frank said. “It is as if you were strolling around in the Muir Woods and then suddenly came upon a great Tyrannosaurus rex. He’s a monster but he can’t help it. He’s hungry for you but he can’t help that either. The world, our world is filled with monsters. Organized religion and nuclear power, indiscriminate sex and nationalism all kill with such regularity and in such awesome numbers that we are numbed by the crimes and blood and wars. But still we walk around the streets calmly as if our history wasn’t a list of holocausts and annihilations.”

  “What’s your last name?” Lois asked.

  “Grimes.”

  “Where did you go to school, Frank Grimes?”

  “No school. My father was a burglar and my mother was a part-time whore. I’ve been to more cities than a presidential candidate or the Fuller Brush man. The only thing I could read, before coming to this house, were racehorse names. The only math I got is counting cards—up to four decks.”

  “But you speak so eloquently. You all do.”

  “That’s the monster in us,” Frank said gazing down. “I can’t read a word but I can recite Shakespeare. I couldn’t do long division but I could explain why there is no absolute standard of length or time because of the theory of relativity. I am, we all are, part of the other. And if you run from us your mind will freeze up without the constant pruning of the Co-mind.”

  “What is the Co-mind?” Lois asked. She was so concentrated on his words that her insides felt invisible, intangible, inconsequential. Frank was knowledge and she was the vessel. This feeling elated her.

  “The Co-mind, as Marchant says, is the nexus of the human soul and what lies beyond it. We are one soul throughout history, one continuous, riotous ramble from the caves of sub-Saharan Africa to the igloos of the Eskimos. Our languages living for centuries, our talents honed over the ages. We are more than simple small lives bumping around tiny quarters learning and forgetting at a furious pace through the briefest span of time. We have become each other and therefore we are forced to think as one and many.”

  “That’s … that sounds crazy,” Lois said.

  “So would a jet plane to an ancient Hopi or a distant galaxy to Galileo. We, you and I, are the beginning of a new age … the age of the mind. At any moment you could enter my experience, feel my history, my sex. And I could know what you do. In some ways I might be able to do things that only you could know but only I could make real.”

  “Like Cosette painting what Javier sees.”

  “Yes,” Frank said. “Marie’s eyes are clearer than mine, her heart cares nothing for the rush of the game. And so she, through me in her, can play poker or blackjack better than I ever could.”

  “And you,” Lois added, “are a better cook even though the talent is hers.”

  “We are one,” Frank said, imploring Lois.

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Possibly,” Frank said holding up his hands and gazing into the palms. “But our world would seem crazy to the ancients and that doesn’t make us crazy, at least not necessarily. Change makes people afraid but we cannot escape the impact and the reorganization that change brings to our lives.”

  “But if what you say is true how can I even know that I’m talking to you?” Lois asked. “Maybe you’re just Marchant. You sound like him.”

  “In the world you have entered, Lois, there is no you and me as in the old days. We are interdependent minds maintaining our identity but aware in ways far beyond any other being in the history of this planet. We have gone beyond the instincts of survival and procreation. Our beings are in many ways immortal and our destinies are as one.”

  Lois understood what the thin white man was saying. She saw in his eyes, heard in his words an intimacy and empathy that she’d never experienced. They were sharing something inside of each other all because she’d put her hand in a silver box and felt phantom oil oozing between her fingers. She experienced Marchant’s infancy, Javier’s favorite moment of innocent young love, unrequited and all the sweeter for it.

  “When Cosette touched me we became coyotes,” she said, her stomach knotting over the sex they shared.

  “Lana C,” Frank said with a nod.

  “Who’s that?”

  “A coyote that came down from the hills and Marchant fed in his Garden of Eden. It took seven months to get the creature’s confidence. Then Marchant developed a Datascriber that was like a water bowl. Cosette put her hand in one side while Lana C drank from the bowl … Now our family has extended beyond the limits of mere human thought. Lana has taken us on month-long treks through the experience of the coyote. We see through her eyes and smell-language. We experience a spectrum of excitation that no human has known in eighty thousand years, if ever.”

  “It had sex with me.”

  “Cosette is a child of the streets of Marseilles, an urchin. When Marchant and Marie brought her back from a conference in France we were happy to have a child among us.

  “You see, Lois, we are all a part of the monster’s collection. He is building the Co-mind brick by brick with each of us. We are the prototype for a new world being, a world-mind. There will be gamblers and orphans, scientists and wild things…”

  “But Cosette didn’t use the Datascriber on me,” Lois said. “She just touched me and it was like I was in her mind.”

  “Once we’ve been calibrated to the Love Machine our nervous systems develop a sensitivity of their own,” Frank said, wincing. “Sometimes I’ll be walking down the hall and I just brush up against someone and I’m thrown into their mood, we … connect. It’s very disturbing. That’s why I always wear rubberized long sleeves and acrylic gloves.”

  “But why me?” Lois asked.

  “Marchant would never have chosen the coyote if Cosette had not urged him in his dreams. She wanted a pet, a wild thing. No one wanted Javier but me. I saw the artist in him, the real American in him. And you … You are certainly Marchant’s choice. We can all feel his need for you. Marie has resisted. She loves Marchant. In her mind he is always a young boy pointing out secrets to his mother. But, as much as Marchant loves her, he needs something in you. He has a whole file cabinet filled with your pictures and discarded mail. The afternoon after you merged he came in singing. Our whole evening session was devoted to the singularity of your mind.”

  “I’m nothing more than bureaucrat with a Ph.D.,” Lois said. “I don’t have any special talents. I could never make it as a researcher or even a good research assistant. That’s why I went into the business of managing researchers for InterCyb. I can speak to research scientists but I could never do what they do. I’m too, too mundane.”

  “Javier killed six people in a rival gang in L.A.,” Frank said. “He was an assassin for a fledgling drug business in the barrio. But we didn’t want him as an enforcer. He has the soul of an artist. Most of us, people of Earth, do not know our beauty, our truth, our ultimate destinies. Take you for instance.”

  “What do you know about me?” she asked, knowing full well the answer.

  “You are wasting your life herding scientists for a company that treats science as a cash cow for the stockholders. Is that what you want?”

  Even though she expected those exact words there was a concussion in the question that sounded in a distant part of Lois’s mind. She heard it as if it were the demolition of a condemned building that had stood long past its allotted time. She thought that this image was an odd interpretation, not the way she imagined things at all.

  But Frank was right. She didn’t want to be a well-educated shepherd of superior beings, gathering their scat for household gizmos and role-playing computer games.

  “Come with me, Lois.” Frank was standing over her. She hadn’t noticed that he’d stood and come up beside her.

  “Where?”

  “To the evening session.”

  That was when language overwhelmed her last defense. The words, “evening session,” were there in her mind like a pair of old slippers or a favorite mug. They were a place and a time and destination that was so ingrained that it was like the thousand-year-old trails followed by Lana C; like her own ritual flossing and tooth care at the end of every evening, even after making love with the shy and reticent Grant Tillman.

  EIGHT

  THE NEXT THING she knew she was walking down a rickety stairway from the first floor to the basement. The cellar was like any other she had seen; rough-hewn tables and benches strewn with tools, piled with boxes, a stacked washer and dryer against a wall under a weak bulb.

  There was a hall that led to another part of the underground chamber. Frank led her this way and she followed feeling familiarity in her senses and a strangeness in her conscious mind. It was dank down there and the light seemed to be filtered through green glass.

  When they came to the white door the coyote was already there, waiting. As Frank used his key on the lock Lana C licked Lois’s fingers and the self-professed shepherd of scientists scratched the creature behind her long and pointed ears.

  The next set of stairs was dark all the way down with a pool of light at the distant base; a light that tried but failed to illuminate the journey down ward.

  Lana C scampered ahead while Lois felt her way tentatively, afraid of missing a step and falling.

  It was a long way, longer, she knew, than it looked to be.

  Reaching the bottom at last, Lois sighed. She and Frank entered a small room that held a large whitewashed table around which sat all the members of the Marchant Lewis cult. The subbasement was like a bunker; like a secret held underneath another secret—locked away where no one could find it, or suspect it, or even imagine it. They all sat in chairs, even the coyote, and in front of each one was a Datascriber half the size of the one used to usurp her mind. The DS Machines (as she came to call them) were connected by a tangle of wires that crossed and jumbled in the center of the table.

  There were two empty places. Frank went immediately to his chair and everyone turned to Lois expecting her to take her place.

  “I have to know what’s going on first,” she said in answer to the unspoken request.

  “This was a child pornographer’s studio,” Marchant rumbled. “They would bring children down here and exploit them for needs that came down from beasts. Frank knew about him and we came in on him one night…”

  Lois could see clearly, and simultaneously from four separate points of view, the Family as they closed in on the pornographers. They were slender white men with short haircuts, wearing short-sleeved button-up dress shirts with no ties. One was working a small digital camera while the other was talking to a naked three-year-old boy who was sitting on a filthy mattress, crying.

  Lois watched from Marie’s and Frank’s perspectives as Javier approached the men with his semiautomatic pistol. She gazed from their eyes while feeling the blood rush in the Mexican’s veins. Then, for a moment, she saw a dark room with tiny Javier and two dark-skinned men raping him one day that was actually many days one summer twenty-five years before …

  And then Marie was hustling the children (there were five of them tied together, in various states of undress and makeup) up the long dark staircase. But even as she was moving up the stairs she was also in the room while Javier shot the men in their legs and their arms, while he stood over them salivating like a coyote, while the men begged and whimpered and cried out for help in a basement that they had soundproofed so carefully.

 

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