Agents of Dreamland(6)
The station wagon, cherry red, rushed past the Heart’s Desire, and Madeline was talking, then, about the tourist-trade, resort getaway boom and bust of the Salton Sea, about Sonny Bono and avian botulism. I listened, but her words were bleeding through me. My head was too full of sun and sea and earth.
“Did you know that between 1978 and 2006 Apple Records sued Apple Computer multiple times?” Drew asks his congregation. “That’s another bit of misdirection. But the truth is that the music playing in that fateful Los Altos garage, Steve Jobs’ parents’ garage, it was Let It Be, Abbey Road, Yellow Submarine, and yeah, The White Album. But—wait, before you start in about that lunatic Manson—he got all that shit wrong. Manson was a cunt, and he was also crazier than a shithouse rat. No, you listen to ‘Revolution 9,’ okay?”
Rouge doctors have brought this specimen. 9, number 9, a man without terrors, only to find the night-watchman, unaware of his presence in the building.
Below me, I hear the screen door bang shut, so here they come, the others, and in a moment they climb up the ladder, and I won’t be alone with the heat, with the Chocolate Mountains and the jackrabbits. I won’t be alone with Drew’s precious whispers. Some days, I’d like to murder the lot of them, if only that were part of the plan. By now, they’re probably partway to the rickety ladder leading up to the roof and me.
Take this brother, it may serve you well. Eldorado, if you become naked.
I turn my back on the mountains and face the white and stinking Salton Sea.
3. Zero-Sum Gethsemane (July 10, 2015)
BACK AT LA POSADA, the Signalman sits on the edge of his bed in a sweat-stained T-shirt and his Fruit of the Loom briefs, waiting on morning. It’s not quite half past two. He pours himself another shot of J&B, filling the paper Dixie cup almost precisely one third of the way. He’s taking it slow, pacing himself. The bottle needs to last until dawn. Right now, the thought of running out of whisky before he runs out of night is sufficient incentive to marshal the iron fist of self-control. That might change a little later on. It’s still early, after all, and the demons dancing about behind his eyes are the very competitive sort. The contents of Immacolata Sexton’s fancy briefcase versus sobriety. The fear of his dreams versus exhaustion. You get the picture. The AC purrs like a cat made of ice. The curtains are pulled shut, and the television’s on. Clark Gable is helping Claudette Colbert make her way up the Eastern Seaboard, from Florida to New York City. True love is on the line, or so she thinks. Albany’s best man sips his J&B and stares at the screen for a while, before turning his attention back to the thick dossier the Y operative handed over at the diner. He’s pacing himself with that, too.
The life and times and crimes of Mr. Drew Standish.
All that’s known, plus some guesswork, plus just a little bit more.
The Signalman lights another cigarette. At fifty-five, he remembers when it wasn’t necessary to disable the smoke alarms of hotel rooms. Too often, it occurs to him that he’s lived just long enough to have completely outlived the world that made sense to him, the world where he fit. He’s as good as a goddamn dinosaur.
He picks up a sheaf of typed pages held together with a green plastic paper clip. It’s obvious they were typed, that it isn’t a printout, since almost all the o’s and 8s are punched through. The page on top, a coffee-stained memorandum from Barbican Estate to its offices in Dubai, is dated October 12, 1999. Standish was a busy little beaver that year, that long string of red-letter days for doomsayers and cultists of every stripe. Never mind that the whole Y2K thing was a washout, a false alarm, a tempest in a teapot of hype. There’d be plenty of second chances for Standish, all of them leading—in hindsight—straight to that sun-blasted shack in the Coachella Valley.
The Signalman flips through the report, only bothering to scan every other paragraph, then drops it onto the bed with the rest. It’s hard to concentrate. Faced with all this shit and alone with only his thoughts, half a pint of 70-proof Scotch, and old movies for company, he keeps flashing back to the ranch. That was eight days ago now, but it hardly seems like eight hours. Time’s moving too fast for him to keep up, and even with London’s prompt cooperation and the package that ghoul dressed up like a woman delivered, he feels like he’s chasing his own tail. Whatever revelations and helpful, relevant patterns might eventually be gleaned from the dossier, that’s work for someone else, someone with distance and clarity. Someone who wasn’t on the ground during the raid on Standish’s compound.
He takes another dry swallow of whisky, trying to forget the sickly, musty taste of the air trapped inside that house. No such luck, not tonight, probably not ever. He rubs his eyes, then stares at the television screen. Clark Gable is munching a carrot and lecturing the runaway Ellen Andrews. He looks like Bugs Bunny. Sounds a little like him, for that matter. You can’t be scared and hungry at the same time, he says. If you’re scared, it scares the hunger out of you. Sure, that Peter Warne, he’s one smart cookie. Before it’s over, he’ll get the scoop and the dame.
Out on Route 66, a driver leans hard on their horn, the sound stretched and distorted by the Doppler shift. In his room, the Signalman jumps, startled, immediately embarrassed and wondering why the f*ck anyone would blow their horn on an empty highway at two thirty in the goddamn morning. But maybe there was an animal crossing the road. Maybe it was a coyote or an armadillo or Good ol’ Se?or Chupacabra, come round to pay its respects.