All the Nevada nuclear blasts were little boys emulating the Fat Man, our own little Test Site imitations of the primal wank, the Father-spurt of the Big Bang.”
The driver gave him a sly, sideways glance. Mike laughed.
“I don’t think you can gender-blenderize it quite that much,” Mike said, trying to be serious.
“Why not?” the driver asked. “Humans sexualize everything, especially since Freud. Do you think it was just a coincidence that when human beings first set foot on the Moon—a heavenly body associated in most cultures with goddesses and femaleness—all the original explorers were male and the program was named after Apollo, a sun god? The Apollo astronauts were white-garbed priests of the Sun God, arriving in burning chariots to claim dominion over the female Moon. Yang over yin, see?”
Weird stuff, Mike thought, but what he said was, “One person’s technology is another person’s symbol, I guess.”
“Exactly,” the driver said, nodding. “When I lived in San Francisco, there were these big round-topped concrete pillars that were put in place as barriers to traffic flow, near parks and such. South Asian immigrants began garlanding these traffic piers with flowers and pouring offerings of milk over the tops of the damn things. Know why?”
“Not a clue,” Mike said. Whatever it was the driver had put in that vodka, it had begun to make him feel woozy, disoriented.
“For those immigrant folks, the traffic piers were lingam symbols and became impromptu shrines,” the driver said. “Or just look at the cross. For the Romans crucifixion was a capital punishment technology. The Christians made it a sign of martyrdom and resurrection, the central symbol of faith. Kind of like worshipping an electric chair or lethal injection table.”
In the rock-of-ages Rocky Mountain states where Mike had been living most of his life, such thoughts were heresy—things that good people just didn’t say. Although he had rejected the rigid faith of his parents and their neighbors, Mike still found the driver’s analogy rather repugnant.
The driver seemed to sense something of his passenger’s distaste. For whatever reason, he fell quiet. Very soon, however, Mike was too preoccupied with the things going on in his head to notice the driver’s silence. The colors of the sunset clouds to the west were alive, breathing and pulsing and writhing. Ahead, buildings got up from their foundations and walked into the highway, then quickly scurried back to their rightful places before Mike and the driver could run head-on into them. The driver seemed not to notice.
“Hey,” Mike said at last, “what did you say that stuff was you put in the vodka?”
“KL,” said the driver, smiling. “Ketamine lysergate 235. Also known as ‘gate.’ Either name is just as good. The latter name is slang and the former’s probably a code name of some sort. The chemistry of it is most likely some weird tryptamine derivative—nothing to do with either LSD or ketalar, if you ask me.”
“Natural?” Mike asked, thoughts lava-bubbling in his head. “Or designer?”
“Extracted from a mushroom,” the driver said. “Strange history, though. Gate, the chemical, has been in circulation for a decade and more that I know of, yet the mushroom it supposedly comes from has only started showing up fairly recently. You’d figure it’d be just the opposite. Why do you ask?”
“Because,” Mike said, taking a deep (and deeply worried) breath, “I’m either hallucinating—or losing my mind.”
The driver chuckled.
“Most likely it’s the former,” the gray-haired man said, not quite reassuringly enough. “Be careful, though. Keep your set and setting in mind. I suggest you seek out someplace you find familiar and comfortable. You’re about an hour into it, so figure three more to go.”
Mike looked at the driver carefully.
“Why?” he asked nervously. “Are you going someplace?”
The driver frowned momentarily.
“I assumed we would be splitting up in Reno,” the gray-headed man said. “I’ll be heading south down 395 toward San Bernardino, and you’ll be heading north toward Humboldt. Reno seems the logical place to part company.”
Mike nodded. The old man was probably right. That, however, didn’t make him feel any less uneasy about being dropped off, alone, in an unfamiliar city, and in an altered state of consciousness.
Night fell and deepened. The driver told Mike his theory about KL’s provenance, how the chemical extract might have come into circulation before the natural source did: “Maybe they—whoever they are—originally got a small sample from a medicine man somewhere in the jungle,” the driver speculated, “but then couldn’t find the true source for a while.”
After that, however, the driver didn’t have much more to say. His thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. Not far from the I-80 and Nevada 395 interchange, the driver exited and pulled over to let him out. Mike hefted up his rucksack from the back seat of the station wagon and reached into his back pocket for his wallet.
“No, no,” the driver said, turning off his engine. “You don’t owe me anything. I appreciated the company. You might want to spend a little time in Reno, though. Come down from the KL a bit before you go back on the road. A few hours, anyway.”
“Okay,” Mike said, shouldering his gear. “Thanks. Have a safe drive.”
The gray headed man nodded and touched the bill of his cap in salute.
“Right,” he said, switching the engine and lights back on. “See yourself a new now.” The driver must have noticed Mike’s quizzical expression, for he explained—or thought he did. “Envision a better present. The future may be too late.”
Mike smiled and nodded. The driver pulled his vehicle and trailer back onto the road, headed down Nevada 395. Mike turned and walked down the street. No other cars or people were about. Here off the highway, the place seemed eerily quiet, deserted. An empty city with all its lights still on.
The emptiness touched a deep chord in Mike. He remembered the insomnia he’d suffered through as a little kid, crying night after night because he couldn’t sleep, crying because he feared he was the only creature left awake in all the universe. That was a terrible and frightening burden, to be so awake and so alone, in haunted solitary freefall down the well of night, the fall growing worse the longer it went on. The loneliness had seemed to rush faster and faster upon him, until he feared he would overshoot the lost world of sleep completely, never rendezvous with it again, just crash and burn on the desolate surface of some dark star of eternal wakefulness.
Shaking the memory out of his head, Mike walked past discount stores and strip malls, thinking about the driver with his talk of nuclear bombs and astronauts, symbolic technologies and technological symbols. He thought of the gray-haired man driving through the night, into and through towns of people he would never know.
Mike stared up into the night sky, looking for those few bright stars and secret satellites that might shine down on him, despite Reno’s star-killing fog of ambient light. Up there somewhere was the old international space station, hanging above the earth for as long as he could remember. Up there, too, construction was underway on the first of the new orbital habitats. He wondered which would be lonelier—looking down on empty cities with all their lights still on after some great depopulating disaster, or looking down and knowing that the cities were filled with billions of people you could never really know.
From a certain height tragedy ceases to be tragic, Mike thought, remembering it only as a quote from some philosopher or other. Maybe that numbing loftiness was the greatest tragedy of all—the tragedy of gods and vast, impersonal, technorational societies. Maybe that was why people were trying to build little communities out there in space, human-made planetoids to shrink the world back down to human scale, so ordinary people wouldn’t feel quite so much like ants under a wanton boy-god’s burning glass—test subjects in a daily scientific experiment indistinguishable from mere cruelty.
Returning