part four

 

the scythians

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

– 1 –

lessons in flying

 

 

 

Some deserts, some plains, are known for their water, their trees, their shade. Not this plain. It is hot, windy, airless. The sun is yellowy brown, the horns of the trucks far away blart out like trombones. Small wolves, tiny foxes, thistles bouncing in big bundles. Sulphur in my throat. We could be in a fading print of the Wizard of Oz, reverting to sepia.

I am stretched out beside Sola in the back, the bed, of a pickup truck. We could be Cleopatra and Caesar, or Antony, or even whoever was her first husband. Sola is a beautiful name, everyone should have a name like that. I am struggling with difficult times. Even the first spikes of prickly heat.

I disassemble my body. I blow through its long bones. I say, ‘I’m really into shamanism, you know.’

‘You don’t know the first thing about it.’

‘That first thing is also the last thing.’

She stares at me. ‘You sound so coarse. New. Brash.’

‘Always dying, always reborn, that’s me, Sola. Trying to divest myself. Love myself. Slipping off my body, flying into the boughs. There aren’t any here, of course. No one likes shamans except shamans.’

She chides patiently on, sleepy, more like Liz Taylor than Cleopatra. More ‘embarrassing mother’ than queen. She says, ‘So sure, so stubborn, so into things. Death. Animals. Such a pain in the divine ass, Jayman.’

She sounds pretentious. She believes in nothing. ‘Like Mahler,’ I think. Perhaps injustice is done.

In the sand I see a furry animal. It is in trouble, squeaks. I think it dies.

Sola says, ‘While I have your attention, I don’t think we should make love any more.’

I think that over. ‘The animals here are celibate. They must have hard information about the future. Is this not making love a punishment? A new start, perhaps?’

They pay us, to stay here in the desert. It is still an exile, it’s a punishment. If we were pardoned, we could leave. But then, they’d stop paying us. So that’s a punishment too.

We have this project here to supervise. Most of us are PhDs, but I’m a rigger. I set up the tents and strike them. Sola is the cook. She was, it seems, my lover. I’m just a desert ignoramus, like I was a minute ago.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Spencer Tracy is an Indian, a PhD. His parents were careless about names. We go together to a bar, across the state line, to Ecbatan, Nevada. Just up the road. I say, ‘Sola says I should stop screwing her.’

The bar smells like some customer’s kidneys are roasting. Spencer is more interested in technology than sex. There is this new multiple tape we use, recording all the voices, all the sounds, everything that ever spoke or whispered in the desert. A breakthrough for archives, and for voices. Anything that anyone has said.

Spencer says, ‘These goddam tapes too thick, all mixing up, together. The condition I shall call – minestra.’

The thick tapes are turning into soup, toffee, tobacco leaves, brown books. Spencer is drunk already. ‘I’m getting Scythians, too.’ He means voices shouldering through other conversations, moving on and through. He distinguishes between the seds – the sedentaries, like him and me on barstools; the nomads – passing through: and the hets – I don’t ask him too much about them, but I think they’re into dogmatism, quite strongly. We hear their strident voices when the other trivia is done, and the others snore.

‘What’s more,’ he says, ‘I’m getting movers. Movers. Guys from out there. Aggressive bastards. Muscling in. Perhaps from space. Asians, maybe.’

‘Spencer,’ I say, ‘I’ve got problems. Fly around a little, and just around the room, I come back blind and deaf.’ But he’s on about the good old camaraderie of spaceships, the need for seeing-eye carbons. I’m swimming in his space, like a frog-spot in its jelly‑bag. He rambles on, ‘First weapons and wars, then slaves, now – it’s all ephemeral. You got problems with your dick, Jayman? Write a book about killing animals you’d like to have around you? Yeah, that’s pretty perverse. Who’d read a book called Moby Dick? sounds like porn, yeah hey.’ He’s starting to amuse himself.

I say, ‘Fuck it all, Spencer. And fuck you too, especially.’

He ignores me. He is eating, always eating, thin as a snake, but that fine brain just burns it up.

‘What’s this crap I’m eating?’ he asks, ‘Marconi cheese,’ and laughs till there’s trouble. He tells me, ‘Flaky research always ends in B movies – it’s better than the journals, pays more ...’ and they’re throwing us out and the waitress called Bridget is telling them not to break us, break us up, to pieces.

I wish Spencer Tracy would tell me about being a shaman, back home, on the reservation. The boiling and filleting of the skeleton, the birds, the dogs. But he says, ‘This place – we made it, the desert, put together all the grains of sand, made it a place, place of dead voices. Was our invention. Sound booms find them out. Friendly voices. The invisible ones. Shades and shady. Never dying, just like us. Friendly tongues.’

‘What you getting from all those tongues, deep in our ears?’ I ask.

‘Bunch of Hurons with the measles. Cattle traders. Cattle. Rustlers, preachers, movie directors. Lots of drugs moving through here. Space agency wants a new addiction. New cement, make us all here stick together, whole grab-bag of us. That solidarity, like you find in

spacecraft. Find a drug to make us stand being together, for ever.’

The space agency had pooped off all its shots. No one interested any more, so now it was into human communities. We were one, but we were all transgressors, deviants. I knew what I’d done – but the others kept their secret. Scientists all, in secret business, no one without, as Sola says, ‘Portentous holiday, that was. My mum on holiday, some old gipsy gal pointed at her belly, carrying me, and says, “Sola” – meaning my old man had left her all alone. But that became my name. Like “O Sole Mio.’

Brown rim of the desert, like tannin. Riding the truck back. Spencer talking about this goddam cemetery. I say, ‘Why you PhDs want to eat together, keep us out? I put up the tents, and Sola does the eats, so why the fuck you khans of khans and shahs of shahs, rajas of rajas fucking us out?’

He is as thin as smoke, he guides the truck smoothly through the ghosts that I can’t see, hitching, throwing themselves in front of us, thumbing their gnawed-off noses. Poor fucking bastards.

Spencer says, ‘Poor fucking bastards, you guys can’t keep up a conversation. And besides, research is at a critical point. We’re getting meltdown.’

The tapes were going back to glue, to brown leaves, the thick tapes leaching into one another. I say, ‘So, what’s that to do with pan fries?’

‘Everything. It’s being exclusive.’

All knowledge is underneath our tires. I go blind and deaf. I move as far as possible from Sola. I hallucinate, and there’s a hill, a painted tantric ziggurat. My God – if only we could find a hill!

Spencer says, ‘No hills in fucking deserts, man,’ and adds so I can’t hear, ‘ignoramus!’

‘Spencer,’ I say, ‘You’re sure these guys can’t hear us? The gazelles the snakes, the Indians? And the criminals? Builders, speculators, maybe?’ The ghosts. The voices.

He says, kindly, ‘Fucking silly. No foundations here, all crime is on the hoof, running like hell, like prairie foxes. No seds here, and no buildings, no settlement. No heteros either, no straight guys. Just us twisties,’ and he laughs. I’d like to romanticise all Indians, even Spencer here, but he makes it goddam hard.

‘A real democracy,’ he says. ‘The bandit band. All us Indians, ready each one to cut your throat. Only you get off and get to shoot us in the back, so neat, just one by one, because we can’t decide who’ll do you in. And then we all sit back. Wait for them movers, from the outer space. The builders.’

I think, ‘Why does he call it “the outer space”?’, but ask, ‘Who’s coming in? You getting something on the tapes?’ Those goddam tapes like flypapers, ‘Or just more guys moving through? Even the Asiatics come with tents, look at our records and the money books, and then move on,’ and I’m reassured that the Vietnamese from the space agency don’t bother us, they move on out, they don’t destabilise a thing, and always say how good my tents is pitched and rigged. He calls them movers – thinking they’ll one day move us out, but all they do’s move on, move themselves on. Leaving me with Sola, and remembering my guilt that should be almost gone by now, it being self-defence, and all the guys I worked for meanwhile, taking their bit of me, some promising heaven and others promotion, and just the one guy both; who if I ever see again I’ll chew him up and spit him out ...

Spencer is singing, ‘It’s Christmas day in the Taj Mahal,’ as we slide past the little group of voices at the gates, the last of nothing clutching at nothing, Spencer riding me in his mind as if I’m his pony, and the good old Chevy pickup sparing me his bony knees, his weight on my neck no more than an empty sack. My body too, empty and blown through and out, Sola alone again, solving her little equation, one is one, but giving me a zero that I don’t know where it should belong.

There is a thin line of thistle-bushes, that go hop hop along the skyline, and Spencer laughs and says, ‘Haha, the Scythians’, who one day will come and drive us out, but I am sure that all these bands are in his head, the seds, the hets, the movers, and the spare frail joyless voices of the Scythians, and he turns in to the square of nothing where the big green tent is pitched, where the doctors sleep, the PhDs’ HQ, and motions me to go to sleep, over the way, alone, the apostate, not loved, I think, sorry for myself, not wise. I hear him stir the tanks, the tapes are soaking, separating out, fermenting, perhaps, back into the fronds that made voice soup, the primal grass, the twitter.

And Spencer has changed his song, to ‘not loved, not wise’ ‘sun set, sun rise’, and walks into the tent swirling it shut behind him, like the heart of the onion putting on its outer skins.

It feels portentous, like the day the gipsy named the unborn Sola, who is now, I see, busy shelling beans from their cans into the morning stew, and I feel sad, unloved, and wonder if Bridget in the bar would come across, to make them all the same as yesterday – and think that Spencer Tracy’s maybe got it right, that all the dogmatists, the hets like Sola want is privacy, by which they mean, that they don’t want to deal with you, they want to keep you out.

Sola says, ‘You bums, you’d bang the truck up if there was the road, or anything to hit,’ and I just mumble that the road is there, but thronged with ghosts, and she turns away and says, ‘Yeah, well I’m almost one too, tomorrow they let me out, and so I’m off to town, so you can serve the PhDs. And everything and everyone that’s here, can just go screw,’ and it’s as if I’ve slipped out my body and it’s gone, it’s nowhere to be found – some joke, or more like it’s a mystery I hadn’t heard about, and now, I’m just a bag of ridden bones without a skin to put them in.

I hear Sola shouting, ‘Drunk, you’re drunk.’

Of course I’m drunk. Why would I drive a hundred miles to the pub except to get drunk?

I dream of being here in the desert. The tents are closed, and we stand outside. Spencer says, ‘The king is marrying his sister,’ but then he adds, it’s all coming from the future, the tapes are all mixed up. I think of eavesdropping, and I seem to see a crown of crocodile skin, maybe a pair of eagle-wings still flapping. Some bandit, some guy wanting to settle down, keep it in the family. He must practise head-binding – his skull’s like a fat pencil.

Then I wake, feel good.

Hangover, all American breakfast. Sola looking proud. She says, ‘Though you were in hospital having your bones blown through.’ Play hired hand: ‘What’s this I’m eating?’

‘Turkey curry. You want it?’

‘Absolutely not.’ That’s where Spencer gets his ‘Christmas day in the Taj Mahal’. Criminals, is all we are. White, collared criminals.

The PhDs are arguing about Scythians. Weiss keeps saying, ‘She dam’ well could cut out the tiger’s tongue,’ and his wife shrilly, ‘Well, she hasn’t yet, she hasn’t done it yet. And she may never ...’

They break off, as I ask them if they want me to stir the tapes.

Spencer says, ‘He’s the guy that’s raising the Scythians,’ and they glare at me, but don’t believe.

Weiss and Kuninda, his wife, are basically seds. With them, every meal is a last supper, every sandwich has betrayal filling.

And there is Sangster, with a beard of many sombre colours, and Dr Garnet who says her speciality is marbles, Jim and James Sen who are lovers, and the doctors Kuninda and Bill Weiss, who are not.

And I think of the tanks, that hold six thousand gallons of the soupy stuff, and the tents, one sixteen yards square precisely, and a platform raised six inches, the partitions causing much complaint, and all a bundle of rags. And distant thirty easy paces from my tent of metres five by three; a different measure and its provenance is stamped, like Sola’s which is far away, I suppose it must be ninety paces, but I never measured it, and it doesn’t enter in the dispositions of the camp. The PhDs have hung their tent with symbols – Sangster has his crutch and old Connecticut licence plates, Dr Garnet has a kind of squatting god in onyx, Jim and James a raffia bow case, the Weisses – nothing you could see – and Tracy has a picture of a little boy with curly curls, he says it’s Spencer Tracy in another life. And it is mostly junk, or worse, and when there isn’t Sola, isn’t Bridget, I think one day it will burn down – just like the Taj Mahal, the restaurant, and we shall all be set up, dead on beds exposed to this brown sun. And we’ll go brown and black, then white, and then all come to look alike. Criminals, all white-boned criminals. All measured, though, and well paced out. The movers, the accountants, coming through, checking with their little tallies, like chopsticks or mah jong pieces, looking pleased, moving on, and moving through.

Sola is nowhere around. Spencer sorts out the Scythians in the tank. I’d like to share his views on mystery, but all he says is ‘All buttoned up, man, sniff sniff – there’s nothing there.’

From Sangster, on the other hand, I get mysteries revealed that I could do without. He was a market analyst, or a scoutmaster: ‘Like all paths,’ he tells me, ‘the one you want’s in front of you. Even if you’ve cancer, want divorce, it’s always there.’

It’s oppressively hot. He smells of onions. ‘Wild onions,’ he says dreamily. Talking to him is like eating a lobster, finding it full of chunks of amber, jade dust, bumble bees. He communicates by spilling his body over me, and I’m half under, half I’m sitting on him, as if he were an immense, growing sofa, but a terribly hot one. He asks, ‘Were you perhaps once a wild young man? Breaking the law?’

I giggle, make my face go long and straight. ‘Yes, yes, I broke the laws. Worked for a law firm, enforcing.’ We don’t say, often don’t know, what we did to get sent here.

‘And did you kill?’

Lightly, I say, ‘Sure – in the US you can’t be active unless you take that risk. In war, the streets, the subway, or just casually, by pushing buttons, like in elevators.’

‘Ah, yes, elevators.’ He seems deeply disturbed. ‘Elevators, yes, is one thing, but death’s another. It requires a solid education, a formation quite rock solid to come through that one, yessir,’ he fidgets. ‘Can be done, of course, but not so lightly.’

‘Resurrection?’

‘Well, no,’ he says. ‘More like not going in the first place. Coming back is always difficult.’

‘You mean, a scam? A fake?’ He is embarrassed. The room is pouring with sweat. He says, ‘Do you mind? Mind me asking a daring thing?’ He can’t do me any harm, this overstuffed armchair. He says, ‘Can we laugh together?’

And we laugh. It’s a fine feeling, better than getting drunk, and quicker. It lets the steam, the heat, the stuffing out.

He says, ‘The Jims – now, they’ve patterned themselves one way. The Weisses, though, are back to back, like fire dogs. The Garnet, now, is married to a stone. And that leaves me and Tracy over. You with Sola – you are quite symmetrical, although I do see you rather as a clown, and her,’ he pauses, ‘I had in mind as something else.’

I am annoyed, but ask, ‘Why should we be symmetrical? Seds are symmetrical, but we are nomads. So, we don’t couple up.’

He shakes his head. ‘Not are symmetrical, young Jayman. We flow into symmetries. Like – remember the world chiefs who made peace, and realised that after all, they were in the same brotherhood, and not too far advanced in that ...’

I remember the mad world that cost me beatings and persecution – a mystical brotherhood that brought me dubious friendships and a quick copulation in a parking lot. I ask, ‘You mean, if they had got further with their studies, they’d have blown us all up, to see if they could reassemble the parts?’ He nods, silently, finger along his nose. ‘And another thing,’ he goes on, ‘the Weisses are not doctors, they’re dentists. No right to be here at all. Should be picking up space debris in the woods. Combing the wilderness. The void, Jayman. The void – spits it all back. All the junk. What the big chiefs are at – and I include our Spencer Tracy there, of course – nothing but the mastery of the void.’

The smell of wild onions is overpowering. I say, ‘The big one, the big joke?’

‘Exactly. The mastery of nothing. The conquest of the absolute, most resistant, as you know, as nothing. One, or none, and irreducible. Zero. Unsquared circle.’

I pull back, and say, ‘I’ve heard that before.’

‘Pick up a solar battery – and plant a flower that goes for ever. The Weisses should inherit the wilderness, but they’re in the desert, like these goddam cats,’ and he brushes off four or five brutal speci­mens grabbing at his pants’ legs.

‘Hey,’ I protest, ‘They’re my kitties.’

‘Don’t belong,’ he mumbles, but the thread is lost, the design’s been shuffled, the kaleidoscope jarred and jumbled.

Spencer has been listening to us. ‘More fucking inspections, more Asian movers checking up. It seems the vice president has taken over, president having had a heart attack, and now they think the little guy isn’t just dumb, but has brain lesions.’

I ask, ‘How would he have got those?’

Spencer says, ‘Who knows? Scratching his head with his claws out, maybe. Kidnapped by aliens and his brains transplanted. Anyway, he can’t even remember the world’s hundred best books, and we’ve got this fool no-hitter up just when the Igors are getting blade-sharp.’

Sangster says deferentially, ‘I didn’t know you were so patriotic, Mr Tracy.’

‘I got plans for this big country, all you fat-ass seds, diplomas and all that crap. Anyway, the VP wants an inspection made of all that is. He asked his minders, ‘Who the fuck’s this Mr Apollinax anyway – sounds like a camera or a dose of mineral water.’ You see, it’s the course he did, a hundred characters of our era, can’t figure out who the fuck they are or who he wants to be like. The adviser to the President got launched into nomads, Russians – and so he wants to hear our Scythians.’

I say, ‘But they’re just hooves and jumble,’ and Spencer spits out, ‘That’s what he wants. You tell him Treasure Island, he wants to swim off the beach, you tell him Loch Ness, he wants monsters, you tell him total recall over everything that’s been said, the word made thick tape – and he wants the hooves, the Scythians.’

He sends the Weisses to plant flowers along the path between our tents. James and Jim are stirring up a storm in the tanks. Dr Garnet floats a balloon far off; to catch the motorcade arriving she wires the envelope for sound. The balloon is stamped like Sola’s tent, with the foreparts of a bird.

Sangster says, ‘Here, it is still beautiful, here in the desert, here you feel free of everything except those ancient voices,’ but he’s flattering Spencer, who mutters, ‘Crees with mumps,’ and runs off. He shouts back, ‘And Sola’s gone. No one to shell the beans. She has deserted the project. She will not be here for the ceremony.’

It all becomes clear. I say, urgently, ‘And I’m to go and bring her back?’

‘Certainly not,’ says Tracy. ‘She’s told you to get lost. You stay here and get lunch ready.’

This time, Spencer won’t fool me. This time, I’ll not go a-hunting and a-prying. Getting beaten, questing, laughing and becoming ever-more human until my ears pop. The world is full of Barbarellas. This time – no! Star-trekking’s done. Some guys aimed a missile at my launching pad. Space travel’s no fun now, no time to look out the windows, see who’s climbing aboard, aliens in the hold and all that, bits of childhood skeining past, blood turned to Grand Marnier, you drink it and you’re a python or a stretch of Lyons sausage or a motorway or a sonnet sequence or a virus or a kindling stick you once chopped up or your DNA code or a slice from a Paul Newman movie dubbed into Aramaic.

That doesn’t sound like fun.

Now, it’s all measuring, and waiting for visitation, and suffering from accidie that itches like psoriasis, the tanks full of globs and fill and precipitate – all receding like you’re pissed out of your mind, and how fast we’re closing on that black hole, Commodore, and he’s a freak wired up on Hitler and his youths; and now they want to know how to dispose of your shit without it dumping on the President’s head, and how fast – we’re going to hit that big parking space in the sky at least it looks, it feels, goddam solid. Like shopping on Saturdays in Bidealong, Maine: the kids’ve got the shites, nowhere to park. Not like the old days.

Wars of Jenkins ears. Right. Some Jenkinses with a trillion ears took over the nearest starclusters. Enough derring do to last all night, each ear capable of reproducing itself a trillion times ...

And of listening to our voices.

Dr Chief Tracy – we’re all ears – will lecture on ‘An Indian doctor speaks to the Scythians’. Where are we? Where are you? What do we believe in? Are nomads closet sedentaries? Closet heteros? Does everything become everything else, and if it does, does it stop being what it is too? What the fuck do we do with all these sed populations already here? Drink blood from their skulls? A lady asks:

‘Well, Dr Tracy, I’m not as good as you with the dialectics and the Cree imitations, but what do we do with all these ex-commies want to come over here and play at setting up house?’

‘My dear lady, they’re already here, some are looking in the windows of this tent even as I speak. Everyone who isn’t here already is going to arrive in two quick ticks. It’s all falling in here, all falling in these stinking tanks with the thick tapes. Voices – do I hear voices? Do I hear anything else? Any other questions?’

No. Good.

      I tell Tracy I’ll go look for Sola, take the pickup. Go to the city. ‘Who’ll set up the tents?’ he asks. He is furious.

I say, ‘You will. Just pace out the distances. Raise the platforms the right level. Sprinkle the postholes with a little something.’

‘Jayman, you can’t be allowed. We have a whole new project here.’

‘I know. Collecting voices.’

‘Not that. Collecting people. The foundation of a new city. The inauguration. The people are all here. Three million of them – and I’ve counted.’

I say, ‘Voices. And they’re dead.’

He is even angrier. ‘What the fuck’s that to you? You some kind of humanist? People are already present, we can pick them out, the Weisses even tell which ones are clacking with false teeth. These aren’t your no-good criminals, your nomads – they’re seds.’

I say, proudly, ‘I’m not a sed, I’m a nomad. I could even be a mover, a space invader from the accountants. And I’m a criminal.’

Patiently, Spencer says, ‘If you’re sedentary, it doesn’t matter if you’re a criminal.’

‘And the Scythians? Have you ironed them out?’ I see Jim and James peering into the tanks. They have harpoons in their hands.

‘Jayman,’ he says, ‘we are the Scythians. It will be our city. I, we, shall stop roaming, stop being pushed up and down the continent, we shall build our tents in concrete, marble, even. We shall settle. We shall resist the movers. We shall become,’ I think he sighs, ‘hets. We shall become straight, dogmatic even. And you know what kept us steadfast, coming here, our solidarity, our faith, our symbols? What kept us going? Was it the moon? A god with flaming hair that guided our night paths, some guy with four arms to open gates and keep the dogs off, tune to the police wavelengths, and with his free hand play the flute? Was it the moon, Jayman, our companion in the night?’

‘No, Spencer, it was the pickup truck, and sometimes Bridget, or Sola as the exceptional treat.’

He is triumphant. ‘Exactly. Exactly, Jayman. We shall start the process here all over. Taking the best religions, doing the work we want – and when the other guys, the three million that we’ve graded, Jim and James, Garnet and Sangster, even the Weisses – all on tape, and all from tape, that could be our motto – when those guys show up, we’ll have the plan all settled. The city will be humming.’

I say, ‘But Spencer, those guys are dead.’

‘Nonsense. You can hear them better than you hear yourself.’

‘Well,’ I say doubtfully. I’m in a hurry to get off, to look for Sola, even be kidnapped by some aliens. He insists.

‘You are our tent man, Jayman, and I look to you to make the dimensions stick. And when the VP comes to set us up, I want you here, mallet raised high, the spikes ... the spade to dig out gophers – I want it all. The lot.’

I say, desperate to be away, ‘But Sola. The city goddess.’

‘City tramp. I can open cans of beans, if it comes to it.’

I go to the city. Here, the makers of things are tributary, off stage. The citizens move about with little gangs, children are dwarfs, dwarfs children, slaves, entertainers, pets. There are guys who must control the steel, plastic, all that stuff, and bands of rovers, rangers, moving in and out, cutting and dealing. One day, maybe, they’ll take it all over, not for centuries, and not until the seds, the hets, get tired, tired of putting up inscriptions in the shopping malls, gathering in the parking lots. The citizens and the slaves speak different languages, but since they recognise the same chiefs, perhaps it’s just different dialects.

Sola may have gone as dancer, or maybe is working the street, or been taken by the sects. She is a pure, bright girl, and would do well at all those things. But checking out the bars is more fun for me, so I start that first. Now the CIA is in the drug conversion business and uses the cash it gets from busting to run the one-world, one-species movements, and animal libbing on the side – the straight bars here are dogmatic places, pretty het.

These two guys are scientists, and in these bars – the signs say ‘order is dull, freedom makes you feel bad’ – the air is sour, and so I wasn’t quick enough to spot their markings, tribal eco-signs and that. They have tall skulls, but is it from head-binding or their trade? – I can’t tell. The dancer is swaying like a cluster of melons, and the big guy must be a biologist or something, for he taps me on the head, skilfully, like Darwin stunning a rare fox. For mounting in his London club, the paws cut off and set as brooches, the mask mad grinning as a tankard lid, the brush a special whisk to keep the blueflies off.

An eye of mine has got switched off, my legs are losing gristle, and he’s dustied up my clothes. That makes me goddam angry, but he sees me as a doctor would, and one of my arms just pushes me up to meet his kick. And all the while he curses me, saying my blood and eyeballs make him sick, and kicks me in the jaw that hurts my neck as if a strut has gone, and kicks my ribs and there’s a kidney …

All, all in pieces now, and privacy is gone, and scared he’ll think me dead and start the autopsy, myself a crude monster now, my big boots from the desert full of sawdust off the floor, my canvas coat, the blue hat with brocade we all wear in the desert – and then he takes his tapper, got me one behind the ear. The blood comes down. Try to fly away, like those guys did in the movie where the aliens run on tram tracks and the Asiatics in the market recycle neon tubes – but that one arm still tries to help me out, a single clock arm, trying to ring alarms and say it’s late. And I smell iron and wallflowers, but no real taste in me to snuff and savour.

The big guy says, ‘He isn’t strong at all. I just can’t hit him right,’ and the other one, a biochemist, some kind of weedy guy, says how I’m irritating him, blind insolence will be the death of me, ‘Vaffanculo, drop dead you shit,’ he says, but I can’t content him, body still flops from side to side.

I guess the bouncers check me out and patch me up, and see if I’m important so I should be finished off and dumped, or just a slave or bandit, looking for goddesses in the bars. And so they throw me out, and say I’d do better in the desert where some kooks are founding cities, better get out before the whole joint starts falling down. The street outside is kind of green and deep. The two gangsters come right on out. They see me – ‘Hey, that bloodbag’s got some style.’

      ‘Style won’t keep him going for ever.’

They stand, two seasoned, broad-bellied doctors, two high-wired, hi-tec guys, slumming. Lean and brown with eating meat slurry in fastfoods and academic canteens. And now, they rescue me, from themselves.

The big one, Tex, says, ‘Goddam it, don’t know our own strength when we’re all hyped up for an evening out,’ and the weedy Smith holds out his hand: ‘Hi, CIA drug project. Looking for the new and pure one. What project you on?’

I mumble, ‘Desert voices,’ and at once they’re talking about ancestral caverns, gods with flaming heads, and Tex says respectfully to me ‘Wow, a hot-ironer, then? A shaman, pouching the hot ores, eh? Heard about you, yeah – look, Tex, he’s let all the pain out in his pants.’ Yeah, that’s what it looks like. And they are working on some drug that saves the economy for ever, and then an antidote, which probably saves some species too – a rat that climbs the balsa trees, and doffs his cap and says ‘mighty thanks’, and how old Sangster would love all this, and I remember Sola and I think, ‘The hell with her, if getting beaten’s what I get,’ and Bridget didn’t involve a half the risk. But Tex and Smith are off and running, with the caravans, and princesses in their silk pyjamas, zinc mines, head-binding, all the crap I hear from Spencer Tracy, and I think perhaps all these PhDs are part of the same hunting party, and Tex says how they would come and pick the wild onions where we live, and talk to Project Leader, thing or two they have for separating tapes and quite enjoy a chat with two or three thousand guys just passing through, the more of them that’s Indians the better, though those peoples have all tried it once, that nomadism, hunting, gathering – and boy, did it turn out bad for them, and really – goddam it all, to end up victims of a ritual slaughter thought up by the white guys, that scalping and ritual exposure, not to mention booze and syphilis ...

They ask me about Spencer, and they say they only beat me up on paper so the stains won’t show, and laugh, and Tex says, ‘That guy really can’t be serious about Cree nationalism,’ and Smith shakes his head and says some peoples just don’t shake down into the mulch, just go on being. And I say we’re all just criminals, and these two laugh and ask if Sangster is ox-footed, if the Weisses ski and if the Garnet has goat horns and if so where’s she keep them, and if that’s bruising on my face or if I use a gentian blue, and where did all my people originate. And how they laugh!

And all this gets no closer to my Sola, but I reckon that these guys have skills that put them along there with Spencer, and might be useful, if they didn’t hit so hard – and now the ideas come – the cementing of the desert to make it a parade ground, installing golden gates to keep the hordes of tourists out, and then Tex says, ‘You don’t write epics living in a cupboard,’ and Smith replies, ‘Proust did,’ and Tex looks like he’s going to hit him, but in the end they settle for an exchange of drugs and money, and a video game. It all takes time, maybe a hundred years. This goddam drug just takes you back to just before it’s all about to happen, a tape loop, and we go through it all – maybe a dozen times – until we reach the end bit, where they offer me the drug, I take it and I’m back to where it all starts off again, until at last I say ‘no way’ – the tape moves on, and new pictures and goblins start to jump around, my face hurts more, just like it does when they say it’s getting better.

They laugh, and say, ‘It doesn’t work, that fix – otherwise you never get out of the loop,’ and then they say they’ll come with me, but first they have to eat, not liking beans and stuff you get in deserts.

And holy fuck – how they stock up! The waiter says, ‘What you boys want?’ and they say, ‘Whatever’s in those big cans, the labels off, we see you bringing in.’

I tell them they can have named food, but they laugh, ‘It’s the bad old days. Just choose the tin, and eat it down,’ and Smith says it’s all like an Uncle Joe’s picnic, whatever that was, and then we start – sardines in brine, four kilos each, beer-brandy, wine to keep them quiet. Then the candied cumquats have us thinking diabetes, but we cut the sweetness with a grating of fortified wine, and Tex has more sardines with sparkling plum wine, and Smith and I have carrots with champagne. The dumplings come with lumps of lilac sausage, and we can’t get it down, but that dark Romanian beer is great, and when the frankfurters come, all laced up with wax string like fire-crackers, we have them stewed with vodka in a saucepan. Smith tells us how the Caspian fleet sailed by, parading like sailing ducks in a bombarding gallery, Iranian sailors coming out the opera pale as ghosts, would ferry them over the frontier – ‘No, no, I didn’t want to go,’ he says, ‘and they had shopping lists, truck spares and cooker parts, could hardly pole us across the sea, but they couldn’t dump us, had to load us on these rafts.’ He laughs and laughs, then, seriously, ‘A year later, all that had gone. Communism, Islam. It was back to Zoroaster, as if they’d never left it. Things endure, the sun can suck you dry, can waste the Caspian.’

They fall silent. I think, ‘You aliens? Movers? Religious freaks? Sunbathers?’ and off they go in laughter again, and so we trundle up to the camp gates,    the day’s new voices squawking and trilling on the megaphones as usual, and Spencer says, ‘Ha – you didn’t go and waste your time, I see. Got drunk and fell down here, haha.’ I start to say, ‘But Spencer, I sure did go,’ when I realise I couldn’t have, and he’s furious that I’ve found two wired, pushy drunken PhDs – especially two that won’t eat beans, and how he nearly broke his wrist opening the goddam cans ...

Tex and Smith have got the gift of tongues, it seems, but not one we can understand, and suddenly Tex makes a back, and Smith leaps up, and tosses me up high, and from his shoulders I can see a human ocean, must be forty thousand, and little carts, just wheels tacked on a tree trunk, and the horses decked in little plastic reins, all red and silver tinsel, and maybe those are zebus and camels, and a chink chink chink of hammers and an iron bedstead factory and all kinds of traded junk and newspapers torn up to hold the screws of spices, and so many carpets and must be vacuum cleaners over there and the flags are jiggling, and the horses backing into one another, and I think, ‘At least it’s all hallucination, surely the cops would never let them come into a punishment site where scientific research is being done,’ and sure enough I see a brown rangers’ cruiser swinging over the dunes, and there is no one else around, and maybe the cop is listening to the Darktown Poker Club, but at that distance it could be Mahler, and it occurs to me the army I just saw was silent, and ‘Perhaps we got their voices, Spencer, got ’em on the tapes,’ and Spencer hushes me, takes me aside, and says, ‘Them two turkeys, them new doctors – is spies,’ and he makes a set of passes with his knife that makes me think again of Cree nationalism, and where the fuck the others of us come from, and I think ‘just off some computer file’, but then again, it’s taken many centuries to get that far, and so it must conform to some weird bugger’s plan.

‘...to some weird bugger’s plan,’ I hear my voice, and Tex and Smith are taking their leave, and telling Spencer I have a habit of too much hallucination, but I see they’re taking off the account books and some paddles that Jim and James have used to stir the voices round. And Sangster takes his shoes off, and I see his hooves – but why he need a crutch, with hooves? – and Dr Garnet, dressed in white, she always is, has on her head a blue and silver band, like what gives you good luck in carnival in Bahia. ‘And you,’ she says, sternly to me, ‘Are toxic. And what’s more, you put our tent up crooked,’ which is nonsense, because that way they’d just fall down, unless she knows about tents that I don’t. ‘You look like you fell off your horse,’ she says, like I’m the hired hand she’s joshing along.

I mumble, ‘No horses in the desert,’ and she’s right back with – ‘No hills either, till Tex and Smith made you one,’ and that is true, but then so it’s true that some deserts are packed with horses.

My head is full of blows, and I can’t figure out Dr Garnet. Is it possible that in the parking lots of Southern California a vast new empire of previously unidentified peoples is being assembled, practising religions long thought subsumed into older or newer ones, an empire so rich, powerful and omnivorous that in all respects it exactly resembles the one it is replacing? Are space and drugs, inner and outer space, really the keys to its commerce, and are the doctors the new seds, the new hets, punching hard and often, like Tex and Smith? Or are they a different part of the cycle, nomads just blowing around from Penn State and Brown’s, or even Paris X or Oxford, exotic figures, familiar with quite a different array of parking lots and course descriptions, their clothes and headdresses distinguished by different bows and buttons, while from the East, leaner still and hungrier doctors and their lieutenants wait, and behind them, my people, the shamans, waiting their turn, and waiting still, and waiting, and getting tired, flying off, no longer waiting.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Spencer says to Sangster, ‘Yes, of course the VP must be told the voices are of dead people. But you don’t think that when you see TV, do you? And they have rights now – to their languages. We can have at least four languages official – for praying, for filling in forms, for screwing, and for shopping. And religions too: have to work this one out. Whether to lump them all together and make that one obligatory, or keep the dogmas separate and on their toes. But tell the VP the dead have rights the living wouldn’t dream of.’

Sangster goes red with excitement. ‘Good God, Spencer. What a turn-up for the desert project! You – we – have discovered immortality. The dead not only live, they acquire new rights, new movement, new dimensions.’

‘Yeah,’ says Spencer, unimpressed, ‘Immortality plus, de luxe.’

‘But yes!’ Sangster insists, hugging Dr Garnet – and I think I hear a rib crack, and she goes reeling back. ‘Yes – not dead. The dead live. They growl.’

He capers about, snatching up sand and pouring it over his head like grated cheese. Then, Dr Garnet is upon us, swishing a great axe – we scream ‘What the fuck?’ and scatter like geese, but she chooses me, and as the axe makes its high, high sound, like a nose flute dropping from a precipice, I can almost read the makers’ name ... ‘Crooked,’ she screams. ‘My goddam tent up crooked!’

I dodge around, and she screams again, ‘Debasing my investment, you boring creep,’ and I have only time to say – ‘Here in the desert, it’s all free, absolutely free, even the sand, and my labour too’ – but she is still on fire and swoops and slashes, till I hear Spencer Tracy say, ‘Dr Garnet, please! Before the hired hands, all this axemanship?’ and Dr Weiss shouts over that the needle’s jumped of its rocker.

Dr Garnet screams that she has always hated me, though my worthless­ness has so far stopped her killing me, but now... and Spencer whispers that it must be Sola, ‘Something left-handed going on, no doubt, no wonder, Jayman, you got dumped,’ and then he takes the axe away, deftly losing its edge chopping at Styrofoam to make himself a daybed.

We lie about, sick with each other, Dr Garnet holding her side, and saying, ‘Scenes like this so demean the world, they break the tone of caring, critical joshing and the solidarity the desert should evoke,’ and Sangster agrees, ‘Yes, yes. “Pity for women” but from all sides. Yes, the human birthmark, the species recognition ...’ and Spencer says we should save manpower and forget this crap, the meaningless that he alone is strong enough to look in the eye – the snake that will not strike unless you wink at it, and for the moment, yes, he is strong enough to take it on himself ... And I would gladly grind Dr Garnet down for pigfood, but then again, it’s not my job, Sola being absent looking after kitchen things, and so we all forget it, and I wonder how to get back to San Francisco, the truck making another of its invisible journeys, consuming no rubber, acid, gas, the ashtrays levelling off, the oil unheating.

And how to jump back after this – walking on coals is nothing when the beautiful Dr Garnet, screaming like a swan, fluffs up and fills the desert. She’s full of exquisite little bones, each one an item bequeathed individually, and in its time caressed to filigree – and yet, and yet. I’m all potential, all pure heat locked in its box, all power, all evil, waiting to be turned loose, again.

I say to Garnet, ‘I know you want to punish me, and whatever it’s for, I’ve done it, I’ll do it. But I’ll never accept punishment,’ and she says, ‘I don’t want to punish you, you clown, I want to kill you.’

And Spencer says, ‘They all have their stories, more interesting in the photographs than in the telling. They’re like cats – stroke them, and they purr, even if they hate themselves for it.’

I say, ‘That Garnet’s a dangerous piece of baroque,’ and he says, ‘Sure, she’s feisty. But she won’t let you get away with your shoddiness like I do.’

He stands tall, but fidgets, his fingers, shoulders, dancing to some wind. ‘I’m writing report on you, young man,’ he says. We have committed ‘flexible crimes’ for which there are flexible punishments. But we are classed as seds – perhaps as twisties. Spencer says, ‘You should do something to attract attention. I saw a group of Kirghiz in the bar last night. Off the Greyhound. And we’ve had them here before, got their voices... You should check it out, check out stuff like that.’

I say, ‘But Spencer, I go there every night.’

‘In your dreams, boy, in your dreams.’

I’m caught – like when I went to all-American engineering school. The first week we lifted steel, because ‘We’re engineers who lift more steel’ in goddam plates like table-tops, and I thought I’d bust wide open, and then I said in passing that the Soviet engineers didn’t bother with that macho stuff, and I had to go to honour court – ‘What court?’ I asked, and so they threw me out, but steel tents, I know all about them, and I say to Spencer, ‘And one day I’ll find Sola.’

‘But what you want to do with her?’ he asks. ‘You could find anyone who’d answer to the name, and do as well, then just disappear – but if you find this one, she must be doing something special, something out the way, not feeding us with beans.’

Jim and James are looking for Kirghiz in the tank. They don’t need to run the tapes, just run their fingers over them, and Sangster’s cast his horoscopes and sits there, looking like an onyx idol, Garnet is stropping up her axe – and all of them are shining up their reputations for report, even the Weisses must be doing something right, and pacing off the distances for when we have a million guys out here, all natural food, goatsmilk, no beans, a drive-in, parking lots, a pantheon.

Camping under a high camp sky, tiring of blue, of buttercup, now a labyrinth of kufic come-ons – traced, maybe by CIA drug planes, as they burn and plant, seize and ferment, transmute, distil, look for where the Scythians come and fusty out our tapes. People without documents, dead people but with no provenance, no accreditation, people who could be anyone.

Poor people, but at least for all this pain I need feel no pain but my own; not listen to their voices. The Weisses came with nothing, but Spencer says – ‘What nothing? They’ve got diplomas,’ and sure enough there they are now, thinking of some scam, looking for a bigger mafia, fixing teeth or people – packing the mobsters’ heads with fillings that explode when the guys bite on olive stones, tough pizza crust. ‘No,’ says Spencer, ‘Jayman needn’t feel bad about anything, he’s bottom of the pile, and so he needn’t feel responsibility,’ and Dr Garnet squawks that if I’m bottom of the pile it’s because I was fixing a tent in my dumb way – and then we’re off again with damascened blades and ‘fucking get you’ on all sides, even the voices might join in, and so I slide away, and think of Sola.

I seem the only one here without a tribe, and Sola hadn’t one, but probably got tired cooking, me when I was, or wasn’t, drunk – and yet, a woman without a tribe, she always promises to be something else, or more: founder of one, perhaps. Though Spencer says, that epic’s out, it doesn’t serve when people go on the move, only when they’re massacred – but I think there’s some special pleading there, although his folks weren’t massacred, just dwindled out through living in trailers and using knives on each other.

And so I take the pickup, go and look for Sola, this time among the sects, who now have a great quarter in the city, made by architects and all, with street signs, in the places where the gays once were, but now the religious freaks are all hets, all dogmatists, although they still go in for kidnapping, and other kinds of violent research to find the big moneymaker that’s to replace the drugs that everyone’s agreed are too dangerous and not much fun to do – and so, there must be something more. It can’t be belief, because that doesn’t show a margin, and it could be dogs or horses, anything that races; but it’s not addictive, not on a big scale, only in its way like booze or stamps or etchings, and like sex – you get the old guys, ready to spend and prosperous, but can’t keep it up, and relatives waiting for the deaths and reading of the wills, and they don’t want their granpappies sending off a thousand bucks for a little slice of young pie in a box.

Driving along, an hour a day to think of something big – like a big bang that might be nuclear, but just was disco. The area of the sects. You enter by a row of green vinyl pyramids, but then it’s just office buildings. You need a strong memory of someone to help trace them, and so that you’re a searcher, not a victim. And I fix Sola in my mind, dancing with these two desert snakes, that of course weren’t snakes but lengths of tape, I think of voices, of Scythians. People who rode through us, never left a mark. What did they take? Or, maybe, aliens, or the ones we couldn’t decode at all, and who might be no one much, or terminal, or just speak some tongue that didn’t, ultimately, really matter to us. Just so many little sounds, wriggling like syllable soup, off the tongue and on to the tape.

Sometimes I wish I’d meet Tex and Smith, but mostly I don’t, and what would they be doing in the temple quarter? – and on every building is a list of people other churches were kidnapping, and the doorman at the Ginsberg centre tells me business was bad, everyone was het now, wanted dogma, not to expand their mind or anything, and I say it’s so fucking sad, with everything so straight. I tell him about my brother – I think he was – much older than me, could have been my father or my uncle, had a fix on Paul Whiteman, and how we poor-looking greys with carroty hair could not have a harder row to hoe than a guy called Whiteman making the bigtime black scene, and this doorman giggles, and says the mergers are about to come in – all these separate cults is dead, there’ll be all one, and all the hostages pooled, and all the drugs seized, traded for something, they can’t figure what, a building or an army, maybe both, a satellite that looks right up your nose while you’re asleep, and he suggests that what he needs is: time in the desert. And I think, those nights in our three tents, the wolves, whatever they are, Dr Garnet’s Bruckner, and the Weisses brewing poison, and it being some kind of family. The voices in the tanks, always ready – with a mantra or complaint, a word of wisdom somewhere in the middle of three miles of junk, and I say, ‘The desert’s changing, friend,’ and this big commodore turns nasty, and he says, ‘That’s because you ain’t up to its challenge, can’t feel its energy,’ and that’s what Dr Garnet says, and now she’s fished her axe out of its bag, we all know where to stand, and where to run, the pleasure of the desert being you get a good start in any direction.     

Sola can be anywhere here. Bits of the Sixties, record labels, drug agencies, and spies, straight science, even an institute of shamans, smoke coming off the incinerators, initiation costs ten thousand and they even guarantee no deaths. Sola could be here, working as a secretary, a hooker, even as a dancer which is what I think, she disliking talking, after listening to the voices and the animals complaining, and all she said, ‘It’s nice here without the trees, the sand’s so clean, no insects dropping in your hair.’

And the commodore is talking about the great Romanian plain, still thronged with tank bodies, and how there is the original dark tower, the southern castle, that is oriented on all the other ‘houses of good comforts’, as he calls them: ‘They must have instruments for a crusade, a glade, a waterfall, a stream, a cave. A doorman too, of course, magician with a daughter, and some cops to free her,’ and I think of all my terrible sufferings all, as Spencer Tracy says, ‘by good luck all on paper’, my head still puffed with beating from Smith and Tex. Then, as he’s talking about walled flying gardens, I hear him say, ‘The VP’s very high on this one.’

‘Gardens flying?’

‘Classing. Classing everyone and having them live together. Not at all like zoning, ghettoes, toil and sprawl. Putting the compatibles together, having them live in garden cities.’

‘And the others? There must always be others.’

He looks suspicious. ‘In the desert, I guess. A desert city of the others,’ and I think, ‘Is this how all the epics end, those communist guys just dwindling out, and everything junked together?’ but he’s going on, ‘And to avoid the chance it’ll all go bad again, we shall interact no more by deeds, by fists in eye or bombs in fillings. Speech acts.’

‘What the fuck!’

‘We shall be voices. We shall have our say for ever, on indestructible tapes. Banked, autonomous, and individual.’

‘You mean we’ll all be killed?’

‘We shall all be immortal. That’s the positive way of looking at it. Each will have her say – or his, the difference now’s not an issue point – and will be autonomous, protected.’

‘Well,’ I say, ‘it sounds an epic project after all,’ but it also sounds a het scheme to me, and the guy says, ‘Ginsberg would have loved it. All his performances! – and in his case we’ll know who it is! That’s the deal that excites the sects: the founders’ll be named, the rest of us, the footsoldiers, will be part of the general impasto’ – he twirls the new vocabulary round his jaws – ‘the fame-effect.’

He is standing over the entrance to the kitchen, and I think I’d like maybe to try Beat food, and his braid is singeing with the heat, his scimitar’s a good orange-hot, and I see Smith and Tex are drawing off some soup in long pipettes – the liquid sparkles like a tinsel alphabet, I guess would be in Brahmi, and they spot me, and brush aside the land-admiral who’s just said, ‘Of course, when communism went belly up, it hit the sects bad too, and quests for highs and general loveliness – it got my girl, who’s trying to be a dancer,’ and Tex says: ‘You have to eat the dog and kill the chicken. Maybe it’s the reverse – but you’re the type for sure,’ and he laughs gnome-like, hohoho. What a tawdry joint this is, some semblance of a shaman’s hell – but manage to get rid of dog and chicken. And we travel on, down this archaeological dig, or prototype of earth latrine – we just go down, like it’s a Chinese warehouse with a million boxes that could hold roots or ancestors or any goddam thing. Then I see the joke, and say, ‘You guys have dug up the old Bladerunner set!’ – and they’re delighted – ‘Not dug it up – we dug it down,’ and seem to wring more than one wry laugh from living in this city. On down we go, express elevator speed, but just the freefall, with the updraught splaying out our pantlegs to the knees, and they can’t stop their hohoho. And then I see: the contact’s made, the revelation – the commodore, his dancing fiancée. In this dark wind the quest for Sola flares up like a lump of resin. I remember what the guy had said about the end of communism being bad for aesthetes, the gambling joints especially, but cartoon animators, bishops, the Quest itself, even, I’d dare bet, masturbation – a blow to Ginsberg Enterprises Inc.

And as we drop, young Smith gives me a ‘spack’, a fist high on the head, it doesn’t hurt too much. These are two delinquent boys, they earn so much, they have to buy new pants each day – the mound of bills they get from poison-tasting and analysis deforms the cloth – but I hit the shaft, the side, and hear a voice, ‘The leader’s horse has a knot in its tail.’ And when I come to, we’re going down but slowly now, and at the end of the galleries I see Spencer Tracy waiting for us, tears pouring down his face, his big Cree feather crown bedraggled and unpicked, like the hawk’s been at it.

Tex and Smith say, ‘We brought your man home safe,’ and I lie and say to Spencer how the pickup’s motor’s cold because I coasted all the way downhill, but he’s too fired up to listen, and he says, ‘The VP made the most amazing speech. The only thing was wrong, was you were spaced out somewhere, and he wanted dancing girls, and I had to say Bridget was working and that Sola – she don’t dance here any more. But – Jayman – that VP’s a marvel, an inspiration. The wit! The massive project!’

‘I know. They want our voices.’

‘Just think of someone else for once, you Jayman person. Think what it means to me, my race, my nation. To you, all this jabber is about Hurons picking up used condoms in the desert, and Dr Garnet stropping her chopper, and your good self being punished for giving infinite pain to that other grey carroty guy who offended you. But think – posthumous equality for all the victims. To everyone a voice, to each his say. A new freedom for the bill of rights. Who knows – a motto on the quarter?’

‘Who’s to listen?’

Tracy is hurt: I have never seen him so moved. I have never seen him moved. ‘Who listens now will be disinterested. You can’t kick the shit out of a yard of tape. It’s real equality, Jayman, and for eternity. They’ll found a city here – the site’s all nicely levelled off. And all day there will be the voices of the dispossessed, the victimised – making a resounding rustle. Like so many bright, invisible, undying birds. Like parrots above the forest canopy, like larks beyond the sun, like penguins in the subway.’

I ask, ‘And the Scythians? The voices that move through – and then those space accountants, the Asiatics, scouts – what of them?’

‘The Scythians. That’s the point. Ones who insist on moving through.’

I remember which leader has a horse with a knot in its tail. He’s a Scythian. ‘The accountants?’ I ask.

‘Nothing to fear,’ says Spencer. ‘We can print our own cash.’

I think, then they must know something in the city, have had the message: time is up, the dancing stops, no one is adding up the figures any more. And everything that is, is going in the archive.

Spencer babbles on, ‘The VP even said he wanted me to be just Spencer. More scientific, that, cut out the girl’s name, Tracy,’ and I say, ‘But that was your only trace of ambiguity, your spoor, your ectoplasm,’ but he’s happy that the place will be a city, full of tourists coming to see nothing and hear gibber, and he cries and cries, and he says I’m pompous and so what, and he should have settled – so I tell him – for being Spencer Tracy to confuse the records.

And I say, that in confusion lies our hope, that when they’ve killed you, you must rake through the ashes for your bones, and put them all together, and if you make another world and find an office to incorporate your clan, your tribe, you’ll end up on your knees, praying to Sola; cut off from everything but not quite on your own. A slave to VPs, and from that, to everyone; the guys will all stop moving on, settle round you like pictures on the walls, and that’s why our ancestors were good to us, and gave us tents, and made us smell, gave us bad tempers and the twelve-pack.

But he won’t be pacified, and he says that’s just locker-room, and how the VP tells him we’ve all been decriminalised, and now the only thing we have to fear, is starting off again, like being harsh to people, or them finding out something they didn’t know before about us.

‘Then there really is no more fun,’ I say, downcast. ‘The Weisses will go crazy.’

‘That’s nothing. Dr Sangster has been threatened, for a crime.’

I say, wondering what has happened to dancers in San Francisco, why the commodore would say they ‘had no future’ – if there’s anywhere in the world outside Benares, there they should be free – ‘I thought we were safe here. Being punished, not hunted down.’

Spencer is weeping again. He is as thin as a leather belt, and it is insufferably tedious to see so little of a man be so profoundly moved. I say, kindly, ‘Goddam it, Spencer! You’re a project director, much too big for all this suffering humanity crap,’ and he replies, ‘I know, I know. The trouble, is, that I’m the wrong kind Indian. Them Dravidians, now, they come out on top, they smile, they scent their bodies, and they dance like rubber drumsticks or a typewriter made out of lemonade. But, I, Jayman – I have fought. I have led, resisted, called for sacrifice, and sacrificed. And I lost, Jayman. Total defeat. Don’t even want to get up Uncle Sam’s nose by hustling slot machines. Just got my doctorate, and understood it all. Beaten, Jayman. Nowhere to go. And now – the VP says it’s “equal fame, for ever, free”. Could you resist, young Jayman? You, with your shoddy violence, some nightflying – could you resist?’

‘Absolutely. And put a knot in my horse’s fucking tail.’

But he is not appeased, and there is Dr Sangster, his face as fresh and pregnant as a slice of liver, babbling that he has to hide and dig, and James and Jim are stroking him and saying that at the most he’ll get five to ten, and maybe more but in a nicer place. But Sangster says it’s death, that if they take his voice, he’ll be anonymous, and Jim says, ‘Well, that’s not a very social outlook, who just wants to listen him all day, the others of us have a right, and that’s the point, to sing along in chorus, everyone can’t be a diva ...’

      But it’s clear to me, a diva’s just what Sangster wants to be, and named and dead would suit him well, and as he screams and twists, his record begins to poke in view, his criminality is hanging out, a little raggy, fleshy fringe, and quietly we all check ours, to see it isn’t visible, our little dose of guilt. Even the Weisses in their long white coats check out their neckbands lest some asp is climbing up and into visibility.

I wonder if – I wonder  why – the dancers have gone off. If they’ve been banned here, and so becoming just like all the rest, or been shipped somewhere, maybe for extra training. And whether Sola’s ended up with Tex and Smith, some locker-room of bully-boys, backelbowing their way to private dining rooms and presidential suites.

And if we start a city of the voices here, a metropolis of the chattering dead, there’ll sure be lots of jobs for everyone, to keep the records straight and frisk the tourists, activities that consume your lifetime, and are dull as lentils. Perhaps it’s better being ancient voices than selling tickets to their show.

I say to Spencer, ‘You should worry about the massacres to come, not those that’s been. We know about the past and humanism being grey areas and all the things that avoided being done because the good guys were around, although we’ll never know the role in history of good Roman consciences, all them philosophers and monumental masons. You’ve got this thing about avoiding massacres – and with your family history, you’re right – but looking in the wrong place. We apostates, we shamans, look at things the small side up. The great kings, historic empires, is only part, and not the biggest part.’

I dismiss them with a gesture, but there’s a cloud, a grey wave like concussion, and I think ‘Scythians’, and how hard it is not to be part of some big aggregation, blood on your muzzle, some collective virus, sacred chocolate mountain, epics you must learn, deserts stumble through.

Goddam deserts.

I see it, see how it will be. Here, there will be tents, and there will be horses, a magnificent array of horses. There’ll be Indian ponies, and those big old circus horses, and the squat expensive supercharged ones, and the standards, and the seconds, and the ones bought to trade on, or stolen, and old ones lying ready for glue, and some on blocks with legs off or jimmied together. And all the people of the world, once nomads, now all converted to be hets, all to believe, though no doubt room for heretics and shamans too. But then the tents – powdery pastels – ivory, rose, blue, grey, black, green, colours scraped off lizards, geckos, marsh flowers, eyelids. Colours of faces painted – under the black standard stamp on every canvas surface, black running horse, perhaps the mark of Great Chief Spencer Tracy – faces painted, masked, dressed for death and after-death. First the acid cuts the black-and-white, etches the lines. Then, the powders, distilled by some radical process, added. Tents like chapels, pictures on the outside, blood between blue banks, rivers of humanity long since swept away, pantocrator up there, unmoved as down the guilty go, the others can even bring a pig a goat to heaven, He not caring either way. Had risen from the dead, the trick with grave clothes, Thomas the dupe, putting his hand, going to India, turning up among the Scythians ... the angels with their trumpets of long bone, calling from the corners of the world.

And all, we must imagine, swept away.

The peasants stamping to the violins and clarinets, imagining beneath their big felt clogs the bodies of the landlords, Jews, journalists, stamping, high on violins – the plain, the plain, it was, it will be, not a desert. Full of geese, the water blue from Bessarabia. All gone, swept away. And all to come, recorded, taped. There, before the biggest tent, the castle in the plain where trials are held and innocence proclaimed, attested, Sola will dance, naked as a bean.

All the people! Round from where there’s Sola dancing, sometimes Bridget too – the tent where you can hear the voices. Dr Weiss and Dr Weiss will show us to our consoles, and Dr James and Dr Jim will warm us up. While safely out of sight our Dr Garnet carves her souvenirs, and Dr Sangster – but Dr Sangster, like poor Spencer, I don’t think he’ll make it, to the promised land, land of last men.

Tex and Smith will certainly be here, planning campaigns, sorting the armies out, which to go northeast and which southwest. Clearing everything with the movers, and accountants from Hong Kong, giving the orders to print the money that it takes to coin the coins.

I hear Spencer calling, ‘Jayman, not the time to be hallucinating. We have three tents, and one is empty still. Not like the past, a million people coming in on half-tracks or in buses. Three million souls on tapes, all victims rehabilitated. Sola must help with sorting out this suffering humanity, somewhere in this archive there must be the key ...’

It is a bright blue day. It is a shaman’s cave. It is the street, it’s Miami, Frankfurt, Philadelphia. It’s a nickel mine. It’s a castle, it’s an island, where the professor’s put a mystery in the computer, now the original is lost. A mystery that now uncovers mysteries, but conceals the original still further. List of equipment crosslinks to a hidden history of banditry: exact contents of house, the tools – are equipment for crusades, the list of places are of religious scenery – the glade, the waterfall, the stream, the cave, places of meditation and revelation. Magic put them in, magic will get them out. But who will pay? The police investigate the lists because they flicker out in daytime computer prints – the professor with his goosey daughter uses it by night, some compliant student, hoping for an evening screw with young Miranda on the Chesterfield, TV ablaze. Rerunning Miami Vice, don’t want to miss....

Perhaps the cops will free Miranda from the daytime prof, and nighttime minder, ex-revolutionary student-refugee. Is that young girl, so sweet and yummy, ingenuous, or just conventional? Pouring flaming arrows into TV sets, which shoot back little sparky ones too weak to penetrate the screen. Blood and Bud all over. Prof in the prison farm – like university, but with fewer meetings.

‘It seems, Inspector, that this old magus was an expert on the German commie state before it died, and then got into running drugs and maybe some porno photos, crucified with Louise Brooks’s lookalike strapped to the Wall, now dusted off, about to enter fatally in new fields of force of order. Let this trusty black in uniform insert his hand through portal number one, and grasp the mystery – not the subtexts, but the original one ... all that suffering, queuing, insult to the human spirit (how could they let it happen, after all? What were the police, well, what were they thinking of? So many rotten apples, so few trees).’

‘Jayman! Get out there and find Sola. Not guilty just useful.’

I think, ‘Time on your hands? Investigate a crime.’ My pickup truck is roaring, my little space-darling quivering on its pad. We’re off to see the wizard, all the wizards, and Sola spurring them on. I think:

There is a crime, certainly. But how to separate crimes, and times, on tapes? Is it a crime committed, or to come? One of commission, vendetta (evening paper says, ‘Tsar invited to rule Reds’) – or omission (‘Could have saved one billion flu victims’). And, Spencer, why choose me, racist, sexist? Well, Jayman, look at the others! Would you feel safe flying in Dr Garnet? Loss of ground of whole community, thin strips of suffering, like bacon, frying in the wind.

There is a crime, must be political, and real – or maybe ritual. So, is it Sola’s presence or her absence that’s the key? Her innocence in being on our – desert – spot, or knowing when to leave? Help me, help me, spirits of the dead, and of vendetta, curiosity killed the scam in the Boomerang Motel. Rooms let and guarded by a small (human) ocelot, three devils with forks, one horn between them – all to watch over one girl, magnificent tits, sweet fifteen, having afternoon affair with local butcher. Rest of us – eating hot iron, listening to flutes, becoming other people, taking them over via their eyes, moving through space, and practising bilocation, transfer into inorganic and quite unworthy things. Avoid love, respect the threshold. But, after all, fifteen’s a good age, and what fucking business is it of yours.

In my village, girls want to marry mafia bosses, not settle for mere hitmen. Important thing is to get the right trainers for fire-walking.

It’s important not to trivialise ourselves, and thereby also the crime we’re looking for, the beautiful dancing cook I’m seeking, we are historians of our own exploits, ‘Hundreds of years may pass before we have an interpretation that will satisfy. Will do us justice.’

Spencer sees me off. He says, ‘A great movement of the peoples going on. Many disappearing, especially the tragic ones,’ and I think that after all God is a little old woman in black, bent and incognita at Suzdal, only his unmistakable crystal voice that crumbles meteorites and unblocks the plumbing in spaceships. Inspiring Heavy Metal in Armenia, whole place falling down, the avant garde in Daghestan being resurrected like a Lazarus, life is tough with grade four geography only – and all the old milestones piled up in the one warehouse, to cut your journey time. A wholly new soup is brewed, religion and technique. The meaning of the pre-existing deaths is hereby cancelled out, new hand is dealt. New standard coin legend – ‘With meekness and with massacres’, ‘the flesh is willing, but can’t both bend and thrust’.

If I could live in the suburbs, I’d not be sitting in this dead truck, full of acid as a battery, going rorrrrrm like a straight 8, remembering Father Gasman’s question, ‘Do people in hell know they’re there?’ with no nonsense about St Teresa’s sweat, considering which Father Obsidian walks out, the rest of us contemplating Barbarella, and the old reruns, repeats of crimes, serials, the profaning of the green, women (including Barbarella), blacks and Micmacs, the guy who went up the rock chimney in the mine, loosened the plug and thirty ton of nickel and shit fell on his head, crazy bastard.

Hear that song again: ‘comes riding into town. Who? Comes riding into town comes riding into town Another Comes riding into town A blue man on a camel Comes Riding into town Reconstitute Perhaps Why? Why not me? Comes riding into town A dead man, with a death’s head. Distributing poisoned dollars Comes riding into town A coconut horse and a mouth organ Comes riding into town Followed by red cavalry ...’ Our song, the doctors’ song.

I don’t find Sola, I find Swanni – last year’s cook, this year’s dancer.

I order a vodka, an enormous one, hide it under purple vodkas. ‘Hi, Swanni.’

‘Hi there, Jayman. You shoulda come last year. You missed me.’

‘I thought you did the cop course?’

‘I did the physical, flunked jurisprudence.’

They all lie here. I ask, ‘Any trade going on down here?’

‘Only old bonds. Chinatown scam.’

Old bonds. Chip a tooth on the glass – the Weisses are dentists, that’s good, last time counted my teeth, up to 56, lady Weiss saying ‘Dr Weiss! he’s not a crocodile.’

Swanni reaches in, pulls out something – my heart. Holds it gently, I can see wires and what look like chunks of jasper. It’s beating, but looks sick, like a toad. I say, ‘Go easy with that, Swanni.’

‘It’s beautiful work,’ she says. ‘Where’d you have it done?’

‘In Italy.’

‘Beautiful. Look at the colours, and the stitching. They can’t go wrong, can’t do anything that isn’t beautiful, goddam it. Beautiful. The masters. But look – it’s joined up wrong. No exit, it just beats to itself. There’s this battery, see? Looks like it came from a radio.’

I say, ‘Got it off one of the orderlies. You mean they got it wrong?’

‘I’d say different. It doesn’t do you any good, but it’s still very, very beautiful.’

It’s a side of myself unsuspected. I start to feel ill, and I ask, ‘What’s been keeping me going, then?’

‘I guess it’s ancestry. Maybe you had Indians or something back there, guys who didn’t have heart surgeons and had to make do all their lives with what they’d got.’

She packs the heart away again, and says, ‘The desert. And you guys, the voices – and the river? Is the river there?’

‘No,’ I tell her. ‘It dried up, and we covered it in with sand.’

‘Ah,’ she says, ‘I loved the river. Like a band of speckled paper, like the spots on a goose’s breast, first the feathers, then the flesh as you eat it, the goose seen from beneath, beneath water. The voices, of everyone, of everything. One-dimensional world encyclopaedia, all the birds of North America, every sounding or resounding thing. But all under aspic, oil, vinegar, distanced, voice-printed onto birchbark, like a book sliding back into trees, every leaf a page, rustling, tonguelike, then silent, burnt or rubbish, back into paper if it was a leaf, into leaf if it was a page.

‘The tribes the Indians exterminated. Then more Indians, then the animals doing for themselves. Unable to save themselves, by climbing trees or growing thumbs. More people, Indians again, but others too, with so little. Nomads. Sedentary. Nomads. Sedentary. So little. A shell, a leaf. Buried with a shell in their hand. From a million miles away – a million years. And great big brains! That didn’t need to carve, incise, write it all down. Wow! those were clever guys, complex, gathering ideas like rain. Just procreating brought them briefly closer – “Oh, I say, excuse me”, “Just that way a little”, “Easing my ...”, “I didn’t jar you then, I hope?”, “A tree stump, I believe”, “That’s a handy mammoth tusk”– yes, they were bright, those guys.

‘The first genocide, against those eggheads, with their shells. “You see, this is enough, the whorls and spirals have all the equations, and as ears go, they’re the best”, and how they didn’t kill, or go for meat or bullying or anything that made the species really fly – just sat and planned, brains in common flowing together into brain omelette. And all that’s left on the tapes, that’s left, is “Wow, I’m sorry, that thought’s out of place”, “Smidgin of metaphysics there,” “No, that for sure is nurture.” All they left is petit point, just details, like our “do not mutilate or spike”, “no smoke”, “love thy neighbour wank at home”.’

She pauses. She is remarkable, Swanni, she dances a set, twisting like a sand-devil, comes back and says, ‘Yes, I am unworthy. Yes, I am not a pure heart, alongside the voices I am flawed, I don’t seek forgiveness, ask for immortality, expect to be given it on a plate. You, Jayman, didn’t ask – but somehow you got it. You tape doctors – you endure! Is there life after liberalism? Of course there isn’t. Leave people alone till they bug you – then you call the cops. That’s why I wanted to be one.’

‘What?’ I ask.

‘A cop.’ And she says, ‘You are ready, you have it all cut down to zero. Now you’ll begin to uncode the tapes, and smooth them out, all those millions of utterances, and motors starting up, and warthogs chewing, massacres, the mutilation, spiking, smoking – all the everything. The wonder of it. Cosmic residues.’

She is more beautiful than Sola, but, alas, she’s more available. She went off because she’d learnt it all. Fantastic brain, and great capacities. ‘Another vodka, thank you – and thank you too, young Jayman.’

I say, ‘But, Swanni, there’s eight thousand millions in the line. “Why not settle for a permanent record on our tape? Just speak, say something, anything. Preserve the essential humanity of yourself, of everything.” Voices from below, the faceless find their mouths. The basement squawks, the space beneath the basement finds its croak, the crawlspace whispers, “I was, I am. I meld. My voice runs on the printout like a deer, and when it can’t find water, it becomes bones horns hooves. And then these pass away, to sand grains, a grain shaped like a hoof, a horn, a bone. Awaiting the great, the indifferent, the bemused microscope. The angel’s long bone eartrumpets.” Whatever you said – we have it down, the dialect, your complaints, your statement.’

We are sad together, contemplate the first, the brainy guys, before we all got sexist, racist and elitist, all, nearly all of us – the first great cause was hedonism, and this disappointed, led to bloody-mindedness. Looking for the buildings there had never been – and then the nomads coming, people in motion, the gazelles, the wormturners with their little right-hand spiral pyramids, slimed zigzaggurats, pushed up by creatures with the instincts of a corkscrew – shells, green as sheep bones. That’s where we began, shells in the clenched dead fist, the empty shell, the coffinless who clutch the empty coffin. ‘The only class capable of liberating mankind’, the clenched fist class.

‘For fuck’s sake, Jayman,’ she whispers. ‘There’s refugees in here, and if they hear you turn the story into communism again ...’

My vodka has gone to my tongue. Swanni is high on something, but I don’t want another beating – this the kind of place where Tex and Smith hang out.

All this eloquence. Really, the tapes, though they held everything, held everything loose. ‘Mama.’ ‘A peach.’ ‘These armchairs are over-stuffed.’ ‘Kill that one.’ ‘This horse has thin legs.’ ‘And winds, millions of winds.’ ‘Birds, a thick jungle, perched stiffly, every morning an oratorio.’ ‘Going right back to the lizards. Those little cries.’ ‘The shackle is too tight.’ ‘You’re hurting. Mama.’ The birds, swooping on the first peaches, ‘Take this stone. It’s whiter than your skin.’ No peaks here: just songs, prayers, prayer flags, calling to the geese. Languages bed down. First, when we arrived, it was babel, but with these thick tapes, it all comes out one pitch. Nothing is lost, then. How can you tell? It seems nothing is lost, for every question there is a reply, another question.

Swanni asks, ‘What happened to the peach trees?’

‘They went slowly, the geese, the other birds, followed them. Lizards came back.’

‘You have recorded everything?’

‘Every note, every bird that calls, every beetle that protests its destiny, every prayer, answered or not. The sheep that breaks its shinbone, shaman with his shinbone flute, who mimics, “Mama. A peach”. But that is horrible.’

She breaks the mood, and says, ‘Quite the Mr Bones, you are! Too morbid for my tastes. And anyway, I’m sure you like Sola’s regime much more than mine.’

I’m puzzled, ‘Sola didn’t have a regime. More like cans of beans.’ ‘But have you come looking for her, or me, Jayman?’

‘Her. Peace, silence.’

‘But the crime? The crimes in the tapes. People doing terrible things. I can help you – my rage to be in with the new. In those tapes – insidious treacle, but I wanted to find out who’s the fault was, all those massacres, dirt done on mother nature, all those species with their tongues cut out, and ours having nothing but its tongue left in. Sola couldn’t care less about all that.’

She’s right. But here, in this bar, there’s nothing of the new. Voices of Central Asia, slaves from the West, the horsemen from the East Leaving nothing. Plops of dung that blow away like leaves. Pink dawns, orange sunsets: drinking milk and drinking blood, drinking bone marrow from bone cups with silver settings. That old-time religion, carts full of booze and drugs. Transgression a danger of falling from the saddle, like the Indians drunk. But sober Indians – what a force!

Swanni says, ‘The mystery, your most mysterious mystery. A labyrinth, somehow a store, a terracotta parrot giving directions – left left right, through painted rubber food, casts of moontruck tires and miles of pizza crust – a crime somewhere, exists, if it exists, in records, in dead voices: not in acts, not living intentions, guilts, rethinkings. In airy records.’

‘No, Swanni, I’m sure the old crimes are cancelled. It’s something coming – first we’re softened up with drugs, and then – it’s not a crime at all. Just time to be moving over. Old hets must go, new ones march in.’

‘What hets?’

‘The heterodox. First they believe something different, dogmatically. Then it becomes a whole series of dogmas, still believed in dogmatically but there are so many of them, you can’t take it seriously.’

‘Jayman, you have to be part of the human race,’ she says sadly, and I prepare to argue, but then hallucinate, I see the ornamental ostrich butchered, its egg painted, elephants in red and gold, bearing umbrellas. Led by a horse with agate eyes, the elephants grey, red, white, painted with mud and flower dust: trunks ringed and spotted. High stirrups for the ladies with bound feet: shamans’ dolls, ivory sword pommels, batteries taken apart and oozy, irons for branding obscene books, a pair of wooden legs, a nipple ring. Bull’s horn turned into a barometer, pads for writing orders for attacks, another for retreats, a shear for clipping coins, for clipping sheep, another for circumcision, and a mull for highlanders’ cocaine. Perhaps at the centre, not a bull, but something that’s quite banal – like the man that wrote the children’s books, the locked door that he’d open – finger exploring; or perhaps a tall plush rabbit, very intelligent, a wooden soldier nearly two metres high, no more in the stores they’ve all gone off to war. Magician, unfolder of little ones’ frocks, who now are gone to war, horrors outside, original ones within, the nutcracker and the rats, ‘kiss me, my duckie, kiss me’ on and on.

I come back, back to my vodka. It can’t be this, the mystery’s not this. Something more. Cash. An incredible, a most uncivil thirst for cash.

I say, ‘Love is an embalming fluid that we take in from the breast, soothing and killing, and without it we are lost, and we are killers.’

‘Yes, Jayman,’ says Swanni. ‘It’s a bugger. Nothing to be done. But I remember that you did have love, and that you also killed.’

I accept the pill she offers. It’s like a ropewalker’s pole. I take one and the pole goes down, dragging me along the canvas walls: the antidote sends me reeling up against the sky, angels’ wings, tinsel. I think I vomit, and continue drinking.

‘You’re choking on your past, our past,’ says Swanni. ‘So, we must avoid it – it’s a killer.’

‘We must break the rules. If we can’t find a murderer, we must find a victim. Perhaps in the past, when there were fewer of us, we didn’t die as often, as conclusively as now. Multiple people, multiple lives – for otherwise, all those diseases, cities sacked, royal claimants offed – there wouldn't have been the manpower left to build those pyramids, walls, dig the canals. It’s only now, that death brings no surprises, democracy of funeral parlour – to each his life, his death. No floating down the Ganges in a pot with basil in the top, rounding the corner, getting out and starting up again. No, now the victim, once discovered, leads back to the criminal, then together – there you have the crime. The trouble is,’ I pause, and there are tears in my throat, ‘They want to kill us and then make our voices last for ever. Then, the tourists will arrive. Everything will be evidence, and no one will know what it means.’

If I knew why, who for, I’d cry. Swanni says, ‘If you’re afraid of Kirghiz tourists – there’s a busload over there. Want to race their ponies on our tracks.’

I say, ‘They never got off no Greyhound. Look at their whips and bowcases!’

‘Jayman! They’re engineers and water-sculptors. Those are measuring rods and such.’

If I’m looking for a victim, it could be Sola – absent, silent, much missed. But I had hoped for something larger, something that would tie these ribbons together – the accountants even now, moving through the crowds, handing out money, so it seems, restricting credit – and in the press I see Dr Tex and Dr Smith, just in from a hard day lurking round the fire exits, beating and rolling, general gathering of intelligence, nightflyers grounded, the pure defiled a speciality.

Then, ‘Hey, Tex!’ Swanni calls him over, ‘Young Jayman here’s afraid of losing his soul to a computer!’ I think, ‘Traitor’, but say, ‘I’m not reactionary, I’m not a racist, I’m not a fuddy-duddy, Tex,’ and he’s much amused. ‘Hear that, everyone?’ and they do, ‘Jayman here’s not afraid of computers, or modernity. I think we should take him space-riding!’

There is merriment, and the Kirghiz tell me I’m more fun than all the go-go dancers they’ve seen.

I shout, ‘Swanni, you creep, it’s not the present, not the future I’m afraid of – it’s the past, and that big shiny egg it sits on and one day will hatch ...’ but she’s serving someone else, and Tex and Smith take me along to their little rocket, now gone out of fashion, used for joyrides if that wasn’t a stupid name for them, and they give me a physical that makes my nose and ankles bleed, the crowd already large, eager to see my fears realised: of being made too aware of my body, hollow fleshless (feeling it strapped down), and having its weight and gestures removed. It’s having shamanism done to me, when what I want is control. But, ‘That’s out of fashion too,’ says Smith, and I think then ‘Fuck fashion, and fuck the people doing it to me, and above all, let me get back to figuring out where Sola is, and if I’ll be close to her again, and who is coming to live where all our voices will be stored. Or where will all the stored voices live when all our seds are settling down.’ And then I think, there is some flaw in all this movement, the drugs, the outriders giving credit-ratings, stealing women and leaving ostrich eggs in their place, and commenting on our dirty habits and general sexism, falling asleep on horseback, like the Chinese ambassadors did (when they could be bothered), lumping us all together, barbarians, or hets, or nomads, not at all the fruit of close observation.

And the bastards shoot me up, and I lose my weight, but the laughter carries on, they pipe it into my life-space, whole thing made out of cans for haricots, no room for Barbarella here, no steering wheel, nor even Alice cakes. I say, ‘Alice the phallus in the rabbithole’ into a microphone, and they land me.

My space craft was a pod on a fixed arm, a fairground ploy, but still, at the top I’d seen the whole desert, pocked with tree-stumps poker-worked. All over its tan surface and three skewed tents, like squashed trapezoids, a tiny symbol of a horse – even Spencer bent like a crow, peering at wreathing coils of tapes in tanks. And further off, swirls of dust, or horses, or it might be squadrons, or buses turning in the desert, or again, just outcrops.

I think, ‘Well, Sola’s lucky to be out of this, goddammit, how we deserve all we may get,’ and then I remember how catastrophe is racist, and how fuming and goddamming is probably sexist too, and Spencer says, ‘Wow, that’s some cut, young Jayman, you should keep your head down when you’ve been in space. Keep it down, keep it down,’ and I think at least this cut through to my skull will show Spencer Tracy that I’ve really been away, though it’s all been of little profit, I could have helped Dr Garnet whittle stones, or try to pass the cheques the Weisses find in sacksfuls, old and cancelled – or the good Dr Sangster, and his philosophy which may have to do with animals or with plants, he’s not quite sure, will have to see how it fits when it’s all tailored up. And good, fine people all of them, and then I think, wow, no, they’re not, this bang on the head has dinged my self-esteem, and Smith is calling me a throwback, and they’re out to have their fun with me, and people round are laughing and deciding if I’m a goodie or the other kind, and since they’re hets the conclusions will do no good for me, though if they were nomads they’d probably not need to discuss, so at least there is more time to pass. For in all this, being in a shamanistic flight, it means it’s dangerous to cut off a guy’s hands or send two million volts spurting up his nose, or even lift his wallet, as Dr Tex here’s trying to do. I shake myself, and try to walk away. Run my tongue over the teeth remaining, try to get to 56.

What will Spencer say, if I get back? ‘Who did you see in the desert?’

‘I saw you.’

‘What does that tell you?’

‘There was no one else.’

‘Exactly.’

Not a victim, not an aesthete. Must I have power?

‘Power? Hohoho,’ laughs Dr Smith.

They whisk me through the back sets, through the quarters of the city, tantrically coloured and each with its street script, radio riddles and, no doubt, cinema, operettas, gangs and games – but we were speeding along, some big stretch cab, had to back up a block to steam round corners, the meter playing some fine computed tune – and then we’re in another fake Chinatown, with cocktail waitresses in the elevators, like some Busby special of the Seventies meet the Sixties, and a few guys in lobbies carrying big guns wrapped up, models of tent cities, specimen nosebags, spurs ... I think, ‘Fuck! It’s City Hall’, and there’s a miniature newsroom, tiny papers spilling out some slot, you put them on a reader and I read: ‘Desert Megatentsville Opens to Sheepless Voices’. Rut it’s only a pre-run, and we go up a dozen floors, and have a set of vodkas while we ride, and there’s this waitress, and she knows Bridget and Swanni, and I ask her about Sola – but it’s too late, we stumble out, and there is Mr Mayor, and Dr Tex says: ‘Here he is. It’s young Jayman, transitional figure, somewhere between quick and dead. Dense for teletransmission, carroty for the aesthetic angle, grey, perhaps with being shit-scared or just with being representative.’

And the mayor says many times, ‘Ho hum, so what, what the fuck you bringing me, and something’s the matter with democracy if these crumb-bums think they can roostle in and have a knot put in their horse’s tail, and get to dance and fuck in public ...’ but Tex is soothing, and some waitress puts a big plaster on my head, and more bouncers come and stare at me, and I just float, a little, about a foot above my chair, and Mr Mayor just stares as if he wishes I’d fall down and bust my ass. He says, ‘Look, my good doctors – this here Jayman guy may be real leadership, but all the buggers here are none of them less than leaders, some have the syndicates behind them, or have skills, or worked their way through gangs. All this one can do is hover! Not a het, scarcely a nomad. No opinions, and no dogmas. Yet he’d love to have them, secretly. My friends – this guy’s a twistie.’

And Tex cuffs me about a bit, and I wonder if the waitress with the can of plasters might be Sola, since my sight is covered by the plastic, and I hear the Mayor say, ‘Tourists or voices? Do we take their voices, or their bodies? What we need is someone who can cost it out,’ and I feel my moment is come.

‘Mr Mayor! The one thing I can fix – is tents. I’m a rigger. Show me a tent, I’ll rig it!’ It is the right note, and they all laugh like mechanical gnomes, and it’s reassuring that they laugh as if they’re in a film script or cartoon, as well as talk like it. And I think too, thank our good old site boss, Grand Chief Spencer, for letting me practise that good old time religion, shamanism, all that bilocation and hot iron in the mouth. And Smith asks if I’d like another drink, and points me to a kind of vodka mine they keep over in the corner, but when I look down it, it goes straight down to hell, and I can see guys in suits and waitresses in bunny suits just planing down, silent and resigned, and it makes a lovely sight, the orange flames, the shimmer on the shotglasses and the bottles, the guys’ horn-rims falling off and travelling slower – sparkling like snowfall paperweights. And a deep peace and satisfaction, like commuter trains on Friday night, everyone is peaceful drunk, not fighting yet, and the lives just planing down, cleanly burning up, and no regrets, no joys, just burning, purifying through.

I see my skeleton, and think – at least, if my flesh frizzles, the bones are good and tried, and I have an urge to take them out, here on the mayor’s carpet, just to blow through them again, but I hear Tex say, ‘Goddam it, Jayman, not here,’ and so I stop, obedient.

I hear a voice declaiming, ‘I remember the first albatross I ever saw,’ and it sounds like some English guy, and it seems the mayor’s office puts out all kinds of stuff, music and plays and prayers and ordinances and licences, what flowers in public places, how many people in a firetrap, and so on. It all comes out from here, this tower, and I guess he knows where Sola is, but I don’t ask.

I say, ‘I know the desert is a fabulous place, even when the trees had gone, there were still rare species, and the extent, the amount of air and wind just blowing through, the rivers underground, the sects that looked for peace and quiet ...’

‘Sure,’ he says. ‘And heavy metal bands that wanted no aural pollut­ion, and man-powered aeroplanes, and poetry and ordinations and inductions, durbahs and the shows they put on with the elephants and cavalry. Them things that cost too much and bugger around the traffic – there, in the desert, there you can feel free.’ He is a visionary, and his visions creep on to a corner of my sight, while he goes on, ‘It is a pure, an antiseptic place,’ and I nod wisely, thinking how Sola cut me off and decided to live celibate, just like the sand flies and the garter snake, but I remember, and I ask – ‘And massacres. With all that civilisation, sir, there were the killings.’

‘You silly boy,’ he says, shifting about, ‘the massacres were before there were all these civilisations, and maybe after. But what I call civilisation is the moving through, the moving in and on. It’s continental, Jayman, so that between the little group of you, all busy out there in your tents, and the much bigger group of us, with oratorios and archives, all this stuff, and that grand stretch cab you came in – there’s no hitch, you see. The small is protected only in a continental scale ...’

‘Protected from what?’

‘You think I’m going to say something racist, like nomads or Scythians, or something you can use against me in the future, when we’ve got you sorted out. Well, goddam it! – I won’t.’

He says nothing, but he’s angry. He’s a big man, too, and black, set up to fill front pages and main TVs. Slowly, he opens his mouth. I start to count the teeth. He laughs, and they’re infinity. ‘Haha, young Jayman. Yes! This guy’s good. But too easy. Guilty, but a victim too. All you want to be – is out, whatever’s something on the outside. I know – how come it is you don’t? – you must be in, or nothing. And if you’re nothing, if you’re out – so what? What does that do? And so, my friend, we start again. What does this clever Jayman want?’

He thinks of tortures. I, of a small, concrete truth, or maybe medium-sized, a Thunderbird, a lady thunderbird in the passenger seat. I think of selling, think of saving, my soul.

The mayor says to Tex and Smith, ‘Well, whatever this little creep wants, it’s not setting up tents for ever,’ and he starts talking of the madness of the VP, how if he’d gone to Chicago he’d have wanted to can the pigs’ grunts and throw their carcases into the lake.

The mayor fixes me: ‘Now look – it’s not you’ve got anything against me? What we done to nature, for example?’

‘Of course not. I can live with that. If it doesn’t bother you, why, then ... There’s still the full deck out there in the desert.’

‘Minorities? Blacks?’

‘But, sir, you are ...’ and I see what he refers to, and he says, ‘Don’t play the naif with me boy.’ Then he turns to Tex and Smith, and says, ‘You been beating up on him? He bounces back? The ethical side?’

Tex thinks hard. ‘Well, he did tell that Sola to get the hell out. But he was thinking for himself, I guess.’

The mayor says, ‘Well, that’s what validates it, Tex, validates it, is what they say.’

He turns to me. ‘Why did you tell Sola to get out, Jayman? A hint of the future?’

Because she wouldn’t give me what I wanted. ‘She saw the pictures of them pulling down the Wall, and she was sad. You see, there in the desert – where, of course, we feel free,’ and they nod, impatiently, ‘We terribly lack the protection of walls. She missed them, big solid things, with guards on top – the works. And people singing to guitars about the revolution and love and probably they smoke a bit, and want to give speeches, and it reminded her of way back, when she was a little girl. She loved those secret places.’

‘Far away.’ The mayor speaks absent-mindedly.

‘Far away, impermeable, indifferent, she loved it. The hopes, the big plan, the doing gymnastics together – and then, all the other side as well – the long white beards, the professors being fired, all that. She believed in it all very deeply, sir.’

‘And you, Jayman?’

‘I just got on with my exercises. I wouldn’t make a good cop, sir, and I couldn’t make a speech, or stand pain and hunger – at least, if I was in my body.’

The mayor turns to Tex: ‘Exactly. If this little gutless creep can do all these things with his mind, and still be happy driving in his tent pegs – we’ve stumbled on a mystery of some kind.’

Smith says, smirking, ‘if he’s telling the truth, of course.’

There is a pause, and I wonder if the beating will happen here, in the office, and perhaps that’s why the shaft over there goes tidily – so I protest, ‘Hey! Beating up the little guy has passed right out of fashion, Tex and Smith, you hear! I’m looking for Sola, I’m not warning her, or chasing her away!’

I feel dissatisfied, although America is full of gipsies looking for bargirls who gave them the air, or who, vice versa ... And Spencer sees me dumped back, and asks, ‘Motor cold again? What did you see, what design you find?’

‘America’s full of guys trying to find a story in guys like me. I went for a ride in an elevator, went to a fairground, got pushed around a bit ...’

‘Not on TV? The cops – nothing? No dope? Politics? A warning from the future? Did you find modern life was lacking something, Jayman, and bring back what it might be? Big trees, perhaps? Being kind to Mexicans? Mysterious depths, odd surfaces, deep roots or none, young Jayman? I hang on your lips, old boy.’

He stands there, triumphant, covered in broken chicken feathers; his cigarette, his clipboard questioning. He says, ‘Epics, Jayman? You into epics? You’ve turned magic into something individual, like a super pair of trainers. Run so fast you can turn invisible.’

‘Spencer, there’s helping and there’s freeing. You doctors had communism, and we tenting guys gave Mexicans and whoever else a hand. The border crossing – now, there’s an epic place of suffering, desert and refugees ...’

‘Not in Nevada it isn’t,’ says Spencer.

‘OK, you communist guys,’ I said angrily. ‘You believed in all that as much as I do in Nicaraguans in Ecbatan. Totally plausible.’

We are both angry. ‘Nothing binds us, the doctors,’ says Spencer. ‘Some were into computers, some in filing teeth, or soapstone, and whatever that guy Sangster did – we had no common ethic...’

‘You put it together and called it liberation,’ I say, though I don’t believe it.

‘We put it together and the cops called it fraud and such. Too many poor people, coming in, already here,’ says Spencer gloomily.

‘It sounds ungenerous.’

‘Yeah, I guess. But there’s doctors elsewhere, got more class than us. If this is empire, Jayman, it’s nomads trying to be Babbitts, trying to be hets. And when we look around for some guy with a knot in his horse’s tail – who do we find?’

‘You, Spencer?’ I ask, but he’s too bedraggled, and he doesn’t hear me.

‘Take you, Jayman. You’re quite a real person, in your way, not like some of those ignorant rich guys, the G-men, the soft-suited ones. But the trouble is, that in your modest way, you’re a criminal, old boy. Don’t misunderstand – it’s not the fact of what you did – it’s just its modesty. Like this guy one morning gets drunk, runs a guy down, hits a cop, steals a motor, finds a gun, and pops someone, and they find he never paid his taxes, wife’s fed to the chickens – and so, all at 1.00 a.m. there’s a whole life blown up into a hefty sentence.’

I say simply, ‘Sorry about that, Spencer.’

He goes on, ‘And what’s our future? Other guys have nationalism, religion, all that stuff. And all we got is nomads, poor people, then the brains start up – and what you get? Peasants and religious kooks, the Slovak picnic, Santeria. And the rest is hets. Dogmatic conformism, Jayman.’

There is a fourth tent. I hear Sola bustling about, and catch sight of a load of flesh, dead white – dancing in the dark, but not vigorous­ly. The fourth tent is empty.

Spencer rambles on: ‘The Europeans have all neat nations, like little front gardens. Things to clean up, fight about, be buried in. What have we got? people like me, tattered and scattered. Guys slinking in, guys hoping to slink out, unhappy people, trying to clamber up the walls of the mud pit, that’s what. Big troub1e, Jayman, that’s what you got, making your empire out of this, and with the ideas you got, the places you’re thinking of going, back to the mayor. Best you can do with bilocation, is it, flapping off to City Hall?’

He’s right. Who is going to live in that fourth tent? What if we all die, or are killed, they immortalise our voices, and no one wants to listen?

I say, ‘Poor people become rich, Spencer. Or they can be doctors,’ and he says, ‘My folks did all that, Jayman. Where do we go now?’

‘Maybe you ask the wrong questions, Spencer,’ I say kindly, though really I don’t care.

‘Maybe I’m talking to the wrong person,’ he says. ‘You’re a doctor of a kind, young Jayman. Why don’t you do some healing?’

‘I’m not into that side of the business, Spencer,’ I say coldly. Sola is emerging from her tent. I see a can opener, long as a scimitar, and then the opening expanses of a body – enormously magnified, as if she has one of my spells or incantations grossly wrong. A kind of python cobbled out of bacon sides – moving fast but unending, like those plumped up snakes do, and I say, ‘Fuck – did I go and quest for this? Or did it happen because I wasn’t quick enough?’ And then the face slides into sight, like act three of five – familiar face mounted on a cheesy slab. She waves her arms. It’s horrible. She grimaces.

She has lost her voice.

Spencer doesn’t notice. Or he notices and ignores. ‘What we going to do with you, Jayman old boy? Saving us from the Scythians – or are you one? You know, I wish you were. I wish you were.’

At this weight, Sola won’t dance. Or if she does, it will be a magnificent, a monumental sight, like all the great king’s red and white elephants shimmying together, uncute, silent. Unless she’s fallen in some visual trap, a lens burnt from vodka bottles. A warning, perhaps, against sexual importuning. Spencer presses on:

‘Well, Jayman, where’s your myth? Can you impose one? And power, money?’

He is dismissive, but I say, ‘Power, money – those I can get, Spencer. Aim of my exercises. It’s the myth, Spencer. Maybe I don’t care enough. No one’s looking at me, no one cares if I fall off my horse.’

Spencer is impressed: ‘Well, that may come, Jayman.’

We have another tent. It seems to be empty. ‘And Sola?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Haven’t you noticed, she’s immensely grown? And silent.’

Impatiently, Spencer says, ‘She’s just the right size. Adequate to requirements, our foundation. If we’re reduced to voices – then at least there is one body, and a big one too. We must be ready to accept thousands, millions, of beings. Why? How will they be treated, classified? What’s it all for? Will they be tethered, and if they roam, what are they to do? And how will they be punished and rewarded; how shall we be punished and rewarded?’

I ask, ‘Why do we have the job at all, Spencer?’

‘We were here first.’ He pauses. ‘Rather, we were sent here first. And so – we get to choose.’

And he shakes his feathers.

 

 

 

– 2 –

sola

 

 

I stand on the edge, the rim, of the world. Not of the desert: deserts don’t have edges, or rather, their living part is the extremity, pawing away at life until it yields. I stand in a silence that has just for a moment been brushed clean of the voices. I think of all the millions more of voices, the pods of drums, packed with voices, like as two million peas, the VP cranking out a speech of welcome, followed by a million of acceptance. Voices of Tex and Smith, voices of doctors discovering things, or nearly so, of rich people covering up, of poor guys, talking because it’s cheap, or nothing better, or keeping face up, and Spencer joins me, and he’s thin as a genie without a bottle, and he says, ‘I could do with some of Sola’s flesh,’ and then he makes a sign that something is gulping him down, drawing him away. Well, I guess it could be a bottle at that, or just an unplugged hole somewhere, and I could ask him what he’s doctor in, but the answer’s never interesting, there being so much knowledge and it the only thing, along with shamanism, that isn’t in the form of cash or all the various materials of being poor. So, after a while, he says, ‘Sola is our rock. Her silence is a positive thing, Jayman. Guys coming here from all over, from Europe, across from Siberia. All that communism’s got to have somewhere to roost, and now those guys are all hot for democracy and being communities and back to old scores – and what’d you know – first thing’s they got to emigrate, got to get some cash, and here they come, in the flesh or on the tape, and fuck it, but I don’t want them – I already got nations lying dead all round, and in my bones and blood, and talking away at night. Fucking spirits all over, and now they come here to start it all off again.’

I think of Sola, how they can’t help in Europe but to make beautiful things – she says the camp’s for the refugees and that they all speak like it was poems. I try to put down one of the gardens she told me about – here in the desert, where it’s all a backdrop, and I put on some leafless trees, hung with oranges, or maybe they are just big golden fruits without a taste, all lit up there like Christmas in a sooty dusk, and big elderflowers and mandrake, and some silver fern and nuts, and laurels and those little oaks the brown sheep eat. And it goes so well, over beyond the rim of the world I’m looking at, a light or two goes on, and maybe those are children or at least some sheep, a bagpipe, maybe, some kind of procession going up and up, there there is a swirling misty castle, and I think, goddam it, maybe they make everything beautiful, and it must be my sick mind that invents some fucking symbols, a cross, a castle, pile of bones or autowrecks. Even my head’s got these foul goddam things a-crawling in it, even when I look at nothing, and the good stringy doctor at my side, too eked out to do or think a thing is silent – even then, in comes the battlements, the thumbscrews and the scaffold.

I shake the orange globes off the sooty boughs, corral the sheep, put out the lights, put them all back in the box, and close up the good count’s castle, viziers and chamberlains in their slots, the guards back in their box. Another playtime. Will come, will come, I mutter, horseman riding through, will bring me a horse, and I’ll have to knot its fucking tail.

Spencer says, ‘To me, it’s a huge, angry cemetery out there. We got to keep them quiet, Jayman, can’t have them disturb the peace of the living. Yes, the living. A puzzle for you, Jayman, who think all the problem’s already spread out there. People must start with less. People are starting with less. Immigrants, movers, nomads – all spilling in. The hets here—’ He sweeps an arm round the emptiness. ‘The hets, with their practises open, rule-defined, free and corralled – you understand me, Jayman,’ and I see his red eyes glint at me, ‘Heterodox and heterosex, if you get me – tolerant of all practices yet deeply, irrevocably wedded to their own – their time is up. Have to move over, see the last spaces, however uninviting, filled up, and then creep creep creeping towards them, threatening them,’ and he looks pleased and mean, a little thin shitstick of a man, full of brains and vengeance, a total contempt for everything that is – and in his way he’s up there with the mayor of San Francisco and the VP, and no doubt as well with sun kings, Genghis Khan and streamers of weak tsars, king this the fat and that the bald, the whole panoply of people doing or in their name it’s done anyway, and he says: ‘Scythians, Scythians everywhere. Who were they? Waves. Waves of different people, practices, moving in and moving along and down. Eating up civilisations like Popeye eating spinach, and being sucked in by other guys with goddesses like octopus. Who were they, Jayman? And who cares?’

He nudges me, and I see he’s cast me as the chief – though what I do is modest, moving myself, domination of my own reactions, the dying and the resurrections, moving through air and eating white-hot iron; but – ‘Spencer, I have these techniques to help myself, to keep me safe from religion and get me out of tight spots,’ thinking of how Tex and Smith can beat me up, I wonder ... and he says:

‘Well, Jayman, look at what you got. And many tyrants started worse. First, you got enemies – Tex and Smith, no doubt the guys you met in San Francisco, like most of city hall. The Ginsberg Foundation sees you as quite alien. But here, what have you got?’

I think, ‘I got a busted Indian chief, doctorate in observing himself, his customs and beliefs.’ I say, ‘I got two doctors, dentists, who can blow your head off. I got Sangster, man of the woods and philosopher, where there’s no trees, no cracker barrels. I got that Dr Garnet, she who’d like to be an axe murderess ...’ And Spencer says, ‘Yes, yes, you see! They – we – are irreducible. We are hard as – well, hard as garnets. We’ve been pounded into shape by our own perverse choices, in the face of perversity. And what more you got?’

‘Well, there’s Swanni in the city, who’s a great spy on all sides, and of course somewhere you guys here have your brains hidden under these diplomas, the Weisses representing the survival power of minorities, Sangster being black and you would be an aboriginal brother, and my good self is more the off-white angling protesting kind, with all the ways of predominance; a bit idle, but determined to run away if I can’t get to be top dog.’

Spencer is impatient: ‘Yes, yes, all that and what does that add up to? You got Sola, you fool.’

‘And a billion voices. But voices, of the living of the dead, they don’t need land, they don’t need leaders. They just sit in their cans till someone plays them.’

Sangster has been eavesdropping. He says, ‘That’s history, boy. History. Sitting in the can till you’re played, haha.’

Spencer insists: ‘You’ve got Sola. The rock, the snake beneath the rock, the elephant the world is standing on.’

I say, ‘She doesn’t speak.’

‘They never do,’ says Sangster.

I’m embarrassed. ‘She doesn’t fuck either,’ I say.

‘They never do,’ says Spencer, impatiently, ‘Except in dreams.’

‘The great enigma, boy,’ says Sangster, heavily. ‘Woman.’

I say, ‘Sola never was,’ but they are waltzing with their own thoughts. Spencer says, ‘The debts, the bankruptcy of het life,’ and Sangster dreamily joins in, ‘States’ rights – set up your own state and fuck ’em all,’ and I feel they’ve got plans for this continent, and the Little Continent to the south, and I’m swept along, although I feel whether the voices are alive or dead should matter, and Spencer tells me not to be goddam silly, the point of history and of suffering is it doesn’t matter if you’re dead as long as your voice is preserved somewhere, carved on a rock, paintsprayed on a boxcar or a subway train, or in a high school yearbook or in some army deathlist, so that you run and run. How, if you die, what matters is your not being ‘Irretrievable’, and at the word, Sangster gives tongue, and they boom out like two cracked bells: ‘Irretrievable’, and on the rim of the world it seems they honk out a word that doesn’t signify too much, but seems to strike deep home in these two guys.

I ask, ‘Who’s the fourth tent for?’

They exchange a look. ‘It’s for you, boy,’ says Sangster. And Spencer nods.

I say, ‘But I already have a tent, unfortunately to myself.’ Spencer says angrily, ‘Then you’ll have to fucking move tents, won’t you?’

What kind of person is this Spencer, so worn into his skin, he has no character, no flaws, just cracks and fissures like a dead tree? Does he want me as a stalking horse? He has no scent of modernity, nor yet of history, a guy cast deep into their, his, Depression. One eye weeps red with staring after dusty Ford trucks with wooden tailgates: another with being too idle to close it, as he rocks like a sipping bird, rocking on a porch, a house that’s never dirty, never cleaned. House of a repentant drunk, waiting, house made organic, the old chief a wooden hulk.

Are they going to interview me, as tyrant, great king, or chief reborn?

Spencer – a series of incoherent crimes, they choose a few and give a casual sentence: life suspended. Doctor of himself – but Sangster still reeks of corridors and oil wax, of schools taken over for a freedom march, and slept in thoroughly. Until one day, he thinks, fuck it, this marching’s for the slaves. Teaching black guys about Rousseau, he thinks – could take for ever, and goes to Europe, living on his wits, and caught in some triangular trade of currency and engravings or maybe counterfeiters’ plates or dope, or plans for opening the gates of Moscow with a million tons of dynamite – it really doesn’t matter if you’ve got the dialectical approach and are used to dealing with dumb students, or who say they are, but some of them were undercover too, no doubt, and so the whole procedure runs along, plea bargaining in the dean’s office, let off with a caution and a ten-year stretch: will teach him to give up scholarship, even for a while.

Freedom, in all shapes and sizes. That was Sangster’s trade, and now he’s hooked on it, won’t give it up, even if he has to crown me, pope crowning Charlemagne, just get the upper hand one more time. A self-made doctor, reading the books, maybe the first living creature to open them, not have them given out as notes. Knowing more than all the rest, and the worst, the most dangerous thing: ‘Goddam it, I don’t want to do this the rest of my life. If this is freedom, if this is privilege, then give me Spartacus, and death in battle.’

‘Only there’s no battle, Sangster.’

‘That’s all right, Jayman, boy; you’re a holy cat, so we won’t kick you.’

I don’t want to make my fortune with these guys. Sangster knows everyone that’s living, and Spencer everyone that’s dead. And Sangster has spoken to all the philosophers, known their near-misses, their resplendent, disastrous reigns, that leave the taste, the unappeased itch. But I don’t want to be with them, I  want to build my walls, and raise my tents, then get my privacy behind them, or inside them.

I say, ‘And Dr Garnet – she’s a vicious old turkey, and she works for keeps in stone and steel,’ and Spencer says, ‘She got frustrated with procedures. And she’s got beautiful muscles.’

I object, ‘The Weisses are crooks,’ and Sangster, as I thought he would, is ready with, ‘They’re technicians, – if they want, they save you. They’re like atom bombs – it all depends how you use them.’

I say, ‘It all sounds crass to me. Besides – so many problems, all those people, many more doctors, more serious, kids getting married and the life expectancies to be set, class structures to be rigged up – you guys have no idea—’

‘Sure,’ says Spencer, ‘I know all that stuff. But remember, the chief gets to choose the religion, ideology, lay down the goals for everyone. Draws the outline, and then the others haggle over where they want to be, inside or outside. Besides, there’s always the secret sleeper, the goddess in the tent, the silent partner. What you can’t work out for yourself, you can always improvise with Sola.’

Sangster joins in, ‘Sure, like Spencer says, just busk along with Sola. You don’t have to carry a tune, the others do that for you – all you need to do is choose the key. Besides, like Spencer says, there’s nothing here the others want to take, so you’re the threat. They’ll accuse you of subversion every time you blow your nose, look at them sideways, they’ll say you’re beating up on them. All you’ve to worry about, is getting the punishments fixed right. Or even let the guys that’s going to get it, decide what’s right – that could be your smartest move.’

I say, ‘Dr Sangster, we don’t even know if these millions of traces are alive or dead.’

‘Well, boy, that’s their problem, sure not yours.’

And James and Jim – a cheap shot, that, their names ...

‘Jayman,’ says Spencer wisely. ‘Life is full of cheap shots, but we still need bureaucrats to remind us what we decided yesterday. That, James and Jim will do well – sensibilities don’t come in, they don’t come in.’

Indeed they don’t, and having in my fashion loved Sola, now she is rightly become divine, ineffable, unfuckable, in a silence that doesn’t stop her consuming, busying about to maintain her order, but beyond, below, above, my reach. Not knowing if she can’t, or if she won’t, tell me what’s going on – some trauma, maybe falling off the stage while prancing, kicking high and taking self-concussion? My irritation brings the start of blasphemy, the rudiments of doubt – for after all, apart from earthy advice on not overdoing it on the beans (which, after all, she had provided), her chat was limited: love me, love my cooking, don’t leave me, don’t drink too much, don’t make eyes at that bitch Bridget, many a mickle – all that stuff, somewhere between kitsch and dullness.

And Sangster says, ‘Sola is well enough wherever she is. The voices, after all, don’t eat, and so she will do well by us, and if needs be, we can knock something up ourselves. If we have an empire of flapping tongues, then one big silent lump will give us ballast – and in any case, young Jayman, the problem isn’t yours, nor even ours. You make your territory as it lies for you, right the wrongs you can ...’

I say, ‘But it’s desert. We’ve nothing. Our enemies are Tex and Smith, and if we leave them well alone, they’ll soon forget us,’ but Spencer shakes his head, and says if history’s gone sour on you, painted you into a corner, all you can do is start off from somewhere else, and Sangster says that blood once spilt can only serve as fertiliser, and both of them brighten up, and ask if I can ride a horse, that’s the important thing.

The horse is small, plains pony, few controls. I kick it and it runs – no excuse to fall off, and when it’s tired, it stops. The tents far off are dark as yurts, and from the amplifiers there roars out a fearful  babble, one of the tantric hordes – a charge that lasts a hundred years, a front that spans a thousand miles – triumphant scream of cork expelled from bottle. And when it stops, the horse runs back, and I remember Pinto, Mustang, Charger, and I say to Spencer, ‘That’s a goddam barbarous noise,’ and he says, ‘What you want? The welfare state? The bill of rights? They all start off like this, the movements of the people, of the tongues, the images,’ and I object, that sometimes it starts with bills of rights and then becomes this racket, and he laughs and says I should stick to what I know and not make facile judgements, and his people never got as far as the bill of rights when they got fucked and bought off, what they lacked was numbers, Jayman, and numbers is what we got, we got them in the cans of tape, and in the stencil kits that James and Jim is labelling on with. And Jayman, don’t be so goddam facile and so glib with what comes first. And if we need an executioner, that sometimes is a thing that’s hard to find, there’s Dr Garnet, trained to a millionth, and how sometimes it’s hard to find the executioner, but never hard to find the crime. And maybe that goddam pony too lives in a can, because away it goes, and Sangster and Spencer look as pleased as if they’ve bought an automobile and now by chance invented gasoline. ‘It goes, it works,’ says Sangster, beaming, and ‘Goes like a rocket,’ Spencer says, whipping about, excited, like a length of wire.

I think hard. I say to Spencer, ‘It’s you two guys that get something out of this. All I get’s to ride a horse,’ and Sangster chips in, ‘and maybe do something fancy to its tail,’ but Spencer explains, ‘Out of date, my young Jayman. Empires rise and fall in images, these days. Not people, but cultures impose themselves or die. We have resources in these cans—’ he points to the tapes, stacked in their pizza boxes ‘—greater than Alexander’s The trouble is – they’re not yet visual. What we doctors have to do, is give these guys more than a number. A shape, Jayman, a shape. But where do you find the shapes? A visual outline. Even a soul would do – you shamans know all about that.’

‘Yes, that’s true. We might fit the voices up with souls. But where—’

‘Do we get the souls?’ Sangster concludes, ‘If they aren’t, as it were attached to the voices? I think we should stick to outlines, and get them off the tourists.’

I am puzzled, and ask, ‘But if the voices are of dead people, then there may be a crime somehow. And if they’re living, then they are around and doing something else, and these are only bits.’

Spencer explains, ‘Now, Jayman. You have to listen to what these voices say – tricky though that is. But we should think of them ‘as if’ they are around, like you do with people on TV, in books, the cinema, even lurking round the rocks here, or in the caves, their paintings ...’

I see it’s a problem, who is here and how, and how long for, the thickness, but my mind runs on massacres ...

‘… natural,’ Spencer is saying, ‘that heavy with your own small, or limited, guilt, you should see all these guys as victims, but of course it’s just as likely they are all guilty too – not just in the petty way of sticking knives in neighbours, but in the more impressive cultural one of having killed anonymous people out of civilised imperatives, or just from some symbolic grudge, or cut and thrust of history, or from feelings of superiority and inferiority, which I should not dream of equating, but it’s too long to sort out here, and for our purposes irrelevant.’

I ask, ‘What are our purposes, Spencer?’

‘Aha,’ he says, ‘I like that “our”. You’re learning, Jayman, that it’s not vanity or egoism, but a project, a design, that makes us wonder – “what the fuck can we do with all these guys in the pizza cans?” – rule them, free them, follow them, or what?’

I remember asking, ‘What are all these voices for?’ and Jim replying, ‘For? They’re for transcription.’ And I remember asking the Weisses, ‘If people are flowing here, we should ask for minority status. Or as aliens, if we believe one day we’ll be freed, safe conduct; all that stuff,’ and Dr Weiss laughing, saying, ‘There’s always my starship.’

I have an idea: ‘We can’t communicate with these voices. It’s just sounds.’ In a flash, they are both on me:

‘That’s a cultural thing,’ says Spencer, and Sangster pontificates, ‘Ever read a book, young Jayman, and understood something? Walked through a graveyard? Had a dream? Ever thought?’

Spencer explains again, kindly, ‘Here, it doesn’t rain. But there are storms, of dust. We know what is happening. We can stop it. We  want to integrate ourselves – and there is no whole to be part of. We hurt. There is no pain. We are self-sufficient. No one like us. We are narcissistic. We do not kill. The others die. They too are narcissistic. You see, Jayman, some things fit and pattern; others don’t. It’s a phase the new world-species goes through. After adolescence, a kind of maturity.’

‘I don’t understand. I’ll ride my horse if you prefer.’

‘Look, Jayman,’ says Spencer roughly. ‘You want justice – Dr Garnet will give you a slice of it. You want retribution, I’ll tell you how it tastes. You hit me with ordinary people, Jayman, and I show you an interlocutor who walks on fire and flies through the air to get beaten up in San Francisco. You feed me this communist crap about people planting papyrus so they can read what Kant says – and I’ll show you a desert full of nothing, and a million voices that, if we don’t stir the tapes, turn into taffy. Reason and design, my dear Jayman – those are our banners, waving high above those voices, rumbling like pebbles on the shore, turned over this way by the tide, turned over that way by the tide. But don’t forget – we’re not the tide! The tide is something else, and it has brought a million people here, a marvel which another million or more guys will flock to see – because they’re tourists, or nomads, or bored hets or twisties looking for excitement.’

Sangster looks worried, and he whispers, ‘Spencer gets it all mixed up, though probably that way’s just about the best. Too few of them, of course; the Indians dropped the ball: too bad, too bad. But if you drop it, then’s the moment to have faith. Balls – the sky is full of them!’ And indeed, as we look up, a flotilla of starships, a cluster bright and coherent like the little gunships celebrating Lenin’s birthday on the Caspian, flashes out like Chinese lanterns in a ruined garden. So many lighted windows, and each one with its Barbarella, your first and last girl looking down, and hard, so hard you must squeak out, ‘I believe, yes, I believe’ – for, after all, there they all are.

I go into the fourth tent. It is empty except for the pony, not knowing what to do. I fiddle with its tail, and it turns to look, then pisses on my cowboy boots. I smell somewhere between beer and bitumen.

I go into Sola’s tent.

She says, ‘You smell of piss.’

‘I thought you couldn’t talk.’

She says, ‘I’m expressing the values of silence. I have become large because I need love, oceanic love.’ Then, with her usual moodiness, ‘Such, Jayman, as you didn’t give me. With your narcissistic flying here and there, talking about your goddam filleted skeleton and the dogs and rabbits, worse than a guy on dope, and probably that as well.’

I ask, ‘Who’s got to you in the city? Some sect?’ But I know it’s all part of the plan – Spencer’s, Sangster’s, perhaps mine, perhaps the prison services, to get rid of us, get us reclassified as some kind of church or relief programme, or poor people of some kind, since we’ve no guns it wouldn’t matter or cost a cent.

Sola goes on, ‘I need nations to love me, Jayman. Nations,’ and I get impatient, and I say, ‘Go somewhere where there are nations, Sola, not here. Here there’s rich guys looking for extra stuff – but why’d they add you to their pile?’ And I think that maybe in Europe where doctors sometimes get to run the show, and to complain how things are getting bad and no one’s going to the theatre or buying the right books – yes, rhere Sola might have a chance. Not of love, of course, but at least professional curiosity.

I say to her, ‘I saw some nomads yesterday. As I was coming back – from looking for you. Not tourists, not movers, not accountants – just nomads.’ She seems interested. ‘Part of the VP’s plan?’  I say, ‘They didn’t look part of anyone’s plan. They had nothing. They had some iron roofs against the sun, and their vehicles seemed broken down. I saw some marshals out there rounding up their dogs and shooting them. Nothing, Sola, nothing.’

‘They had trucks. Guns, probably.’

‘I expect they do. They got to have something, everybody does, but they was poor material, Sola, poor material.’

I am disappointed in Sola, her size and thickness not attributable to eating: the nomads’ poverty, not a protest and alternative, but simple, plain not making it. Doing nothing from choice, but firmly believing choice got them into this shit and would get them out.

‘Why do you say they were nomads?’ Sola asks.

‘They were doing what nomads do. Stopped, couldn’t get any further. All equipped for travel, and nowhere to go. And being moved on. The marshals don’t want them mixing with us. Our important experiment.’

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘It is important.’

I mimic her, ‘Yes, it is important. Why are they nomads? Stuck, they can’t go on, stuck in the fucking desert. Important, yes, why? Stuck in the fucking desert, can’t go on.’

‘Jayman, a city will arise here. Tougher than San Francisco, uglier, poorer. Less rich. And much, much noisier.’

I think of all this interfering with my studies, my old-time religion, and I say, ‘I don’t want anything to do with cities, or with San Francisco especially. I like the desert. It’s flat, you can see people sneaking up on you, it breeds a bunch of direct and feisty people, like our Dr Garnet. And paramount chief Spencer, and all the things he knows about the bar-room and the straight eight, would take you thousands of years to accumulate.’

‘Your boots smell,’ says Sola.

Later, Sola comes to my tent. I have been thinking of the nomads, broken down. Like me, grey, carroty types. Going some place, but broken down. Going no place, but stuck in the middle, somewhere they can’t stay.

      They aren’t movers, because they can’t move. They’re not accountants, because it doesn’t look they can count. They don’t have my skills, or they’d just sit and concentrate, and a mechanic would come to them, or they’d go to the mechanic. But they’d never be hets: never form a family, stand at its centre, and watch it all fall away, they looking silly as the last leaf of the onion, the heart – of the lotus? The heart the hets would like to eat and like to bank. Having and spending. Hets being free, but to believe. Believe in freedom and order, believe in their choices – and in everyone else s. Belief it’s right to have cash in the bank. Belief it’s right that banks must fail. Belief you make choices and beliefs. Choice you have beliefs and choices. Hets. Choosers of heterodoxy, believers in the swash and flow of everything. How can we go one higher than that?

How can Spencer, Sangster, the Weisses, Jim and James, go one higher than that? Contemplate my boots, that stink of skins recurring, turning back into animals, smell of generator cores and bitter radishes.

Sola’s excited about the nomads. She asks, ‘They were really wild, then? Savage?’

‘They gave me the finger as I overflew them. They looked like a pile of very old crap. No, they looked like a pile of crap in a museum. Special old crap.’

‘Well, then, they’re not hets. And they don’t come from space, and they don’t have calculators.’

‘That’s for sure. Though they might come from the centre of the earth. They look like toasted ginseng roots.’

She is enchanted. I say, ‘No, Sola. I don’t want them here, and the marshals shooting, and them begging and stealing. I’ve just got my techniques going, I can go down to hell or up in a tree, and take out my skull, and talk to the mayor of San Francisco, and look straight down into his hell, and have to do with his bullyboys – and I don’t want nomads walking over me.’

Sola says, ‘I never saw the mayor when I was there.’

I say, ‘He’s a fine person. He’s been a nomad, or at least a slave, and he’s got to his desk now, and he’s making ordinances, and goddam it, I got out of there without him putting me in his designs, and he’s got all the machines like they have; and to tell the truth, if he falls right down his hellshaft, or if Tex and Smith fill his skull with bitumen, I’d not be at all concerned. And now maybe Spencer and I will go get rid of those nomads out there in the soft dark night. I guess three million voices, a good thick tape, cranked up to about ten million sound diameters – some Sioux having a wake, some booster guys discussing flowers, bond salesmen and their fear of cancer. I shall bring,’ I say grandly, ‘the voices of the past, of the oppressed, the weak, the suffering, and jolt these nomads’ teeth right out their heads ...’

Sola says, ‘You’re a bully. You’ve no power, you don’t believe in anything, you want to terrify these poor guys by screaming at them.’

‘Sola,’ I say, ‘it’s the beauty of magnified rhetoric, the jawbones of a herd of asses.’

I hear her muttering that I’m shit, elitist, something like, but her curiosity’s too strong. Besides, so what, we’re only voices too, and Sola’s off and talking to me, and how bad the marshals are ... ‘Sola, the nomads had no food for the dogs.’

‘I guess you’d say we should kill the nomads when they get hungry.’

I say. ‘I don’t have the responsibility for them. They might eat each other. They might eat you.’

She says, ‘I might not be around to be eaten,’ and I say, ‘Come off the ritual biscuit, Sola. Your sacrifice lasts as long as yor vow of silence.’

‘You’d kill them. You’d wipe voices off the tape. You’d condemn me to beans all my life.’

I am tired of this. ‘I don’t have the responsibility, Sola. But, yes if beans we need, beans you must become. Otherwise we’ll have to eat you.’

‘You’d kill them, the nomads.’

‘There’s too few to bother about.’

‘They could put up tents.’

‘I’m the only one that knows the measurements. It’s my job.’

‘Jayman, there’s room for millions of tents in this fucking desert.’

‘Sola, there’s no room for fucking nomads in this desert. There’s no food. There’s just millions of voices of dead guys, with no order in them. Nomads always get stuck, they run out of gas, they become seds, then they become mayor of San Francisco. It’s an inevitable process, which I don’t want anything to do.’

There is a noise like the wind blowing shale up a beach.

I say, ‘My horse is pissing again. Don’t feed it beans, or I’ll not be able to ride it into the city, still less knot its fucking tail.’

Talking of killing makes my mind turn over. I ask her, ‘You’ve not been trying to grow things out here? Have you? Apart from that they won’t anyway, that’s the stupid part of jail, you know, someone always wants a kitten or a poinsettia. And you stay all your life – if they don’t kill you first. At least they give us the goddam beans in cans, we don’t have to mow them.’

And she goes back, massive, into her silence. I don’t know what to do about the nomads.

There is a meeting about the nomads, and the doctors want to hear Sola and me. I say to Sola, ‘I need a whip, to ride my horse with.’

She says, ‘Leave that horse alone. Anyway, you’ll have to get your whip in a sex shop. And besides, I need love, Jayman, so much love. It should be your job, but you’ve nothing for me.’

I say, ‘I don’t have a gift, I don’t want to share anything. The nomads are the dregs. I just want a whip, so I look good if I must ride the horse.’

It is a scrappy meeting. Garnet is grinding at her rocks. Spencer says, ‘We are at a moment of stasis. Voices, nomads – the choice is not available.’

And Sangster joins in, ‘Not available’, the Weisses nod, and James says, ‘You guys talk like in subtitles,’ and it seems he was quite a famous doctor, curing people, maybe in the head, and Jim decoded, unknown languages sprang up and into life, and what was mysterious jabber like leaves coiling round a crankshaft became writing, lists of weapons, so many thousands of throwing sticks, lengths of garotting wire, pigs for the eating, terracotta sickles, millions of them, probably, mostly thrown away – and in the end, all thrown away.

And Dr Garnet says, quite sharply, as if she’s been inhaling magic dust under a blanket somewhere, and stopped, and out her head comes – ‘What have you buggers done with the money?’

Spencer says, ‘Well, Jayman is in the hot seat, or saddle, though with that whip all he’ll do is get the same place – nowhere, faster, you take it from an old old Indian now ...’ and even Sangster’s speedy with advice, again Dr Garnet asks, ‘The money?’

Spencer looks up to the hills, but there is no money and no hill, and  he says that I’m the only person that can sign for them, being a violent person, whereas they are frauds, and cannot sign ... and once again: ‘The money!’

Spencer says, ‘Alas, we have a problem of inflation,’ and makes out it’s blown away or something, until Sangster pushes forward, and he says, ‘I spent it all.’

All the voices, all the extra for nomad city, the big feast of beans – the beans in January sauce, in plums and porkbelly – all our favourites, all gone, blown away.

Dr Garnet says, ‘What the fuck you spend all that money on, Sangster?’

‘Dodges. Beautiful old Dodges. I have the finest collection of them ever seen in Michigan  ...’

And Dr Garnet curses him for being crazy, of course the Dodges rust right out and fall to dust in Michigan, but here they never die unless you wreck them somehow on the flat, here where there’s nothing they can run for ever like phantoms – and he looks abashed, and yet his dream, his dream – it’s also one of mine, and Spencer tries to cheer us up, as all this means – no research, liberty, pardoned and thrown back into modernity, cast on the market where by the ton we’ll fetch fuck all, and Sola cries, and I would too, but by a great effort I expand, my legs, my flesh pressing on out, and even Sola’s dwarfed, – and Spencer says, ‘I turned the budget to good use,’ and slyly he shows us big gold coins, as big and flat as plates, some with a kind of image etched in carbon – my horse, or Sola, me standing with my whip, a fire altar with two fire demons. Dr Garnet says, ‘So, you got caught in town, trying to pass this stuff,’ and Spencer says he pressed it right out of federal warrants and the like, it’s all prime valuable stuff. ‘And that, my good doctors, and good Jayman, Sola, is where the rest of our budget went. They’re lovely coins ...’ they are, they are, it seems that Jim incised a legend in a language that he hopes one day will be deciphered. So, we stand and curse our fate, but mostly curse each other, and the question, will we go along with voices or will we try some scam with nomads too – all that is broken up, goddam it, and they decide to send me to the city, see if we can get cut in on Smith and Tex’s schemes, and maybe pass off some of Spencer’s golden plates, and then I think of my exercises, body over mind, distance over presence. I say, ‘It’s trivial.’

And Dr Garnet says, ‘Jayman, if you don’t know, how can I tell you? Being bourgeois is just better.’

‘Better than being king, priest ...?’

‘Yeah, much better. Look how they’re winning everywhere – poor Spencer, poor Sangster, just running hard – Indians, blacks: yesterday’s tokens, Jayman.’

‘OK, OK. Just keep your axe out my way. Or wise, or sensitive, maybe?’

‘Just don’t fuck me about, old buddy,’ she says, and smiles at me. I think – Spencer, 1957, Sangster, 1960. Lots of history under those sweet old belts, and Dr Garnet riding a pack of waves – had learned to read in ’68, doctored and going mad late Seventies, living off catfood and prime rye whisky, taste buds flattened, the body blooming here and there, still good; and Jim and James had heard things were ramping in LA; heard the bad news here, in the desert, tarrying too long over scrolls and printouts. And then the whole hopperload of us, our numbers and our timesheets up, castouts of the great new bourgeois revolution. Criminals. Museum pieces.

Veterans of liberation struggles, and others, hoping our own will come, come round again. What good did it do us, what good should it do us? All the East taking up buying and selling, getting rich so you can buy and not be sold.

Yes, it was for that I filleted out my bones, tuned them fine, for ever, living guitar, and I say, ‘I’ll never lose my pitch, I’m wired up good and tight.’

Sola says, ‘Your horse, your horse,’ and I think goddam, it’s pissing again, and so at this rate will make Sola’s beans grow, and before you blink we shall be having rodeos and Santa Claus parades and random shootings and it will then all turn into a small commonplace, and I stand up and shout out to them – ‘The desert’s a fine, a noble place, and no one must plant it, water it, in any way furrow it or fuck it about,’ and Sangster looks tired, like a little boy, and Spencer is dis­gusted, throws his chicken feathers down, and Sola backs off and she’s crying, and I wonder how it’s possible that all we have is character and throw it into destiny as if we’re dumping garbage in a waterfall, and wait until there’s Tex and Smith to stand behind the door, hit us with something hard – for what?

Power, Spencer. Power, gold plates, the record of a million voices, all with social security numbers, reciting them all day ... and I think, goddam it, better the nomads, dregs call to dregs, and I’m at home with them.

Later I hear the doctors talking in their tent. Here in the desert, you can hear everything. Sangster is saying, ‘Who is he anyway?’ and Spencer grumbles about their ‘interdictment’. ‘We’re interdicted, Sangster.’ Spencer says. ‘But all I know, he’s a rigger. A rigger with pretensions. He takes his skull out of his head.’

‘Yes, but aside all that,’ I hear Sangster, muted, ‘we better erase his records.’

‘They’ll keep us here for ever.’

James’s voice. ‘Just put his records with the others, in the tank. A voice like all the others. Give it a number: not lost, just unfindable – just like all the others.’

‘Just a good rigger, like the others,’ says Spencer, gone all to pieces.

Dr Weiss says, ‘We could cut him up and put the pieces in the desert,’ but the others scoff.

Spencer says, ‘He’s used to that. He’d enjoy it. Then put himself together, stronger than before. They can all do that trick. Even Dr Garnet’s axe – to him, it’s just a joke. You fill his mouth with liquid gold – he’ll give it back to you. A perfect little statue.’

Jim is interested. ‘What of?’

‘The inside of his mouth,’ says Spencer wearily.

I think, without my records, I am here for ever. In the tank with all the voices, can’t even try to fish myself out. Spencer, Sangster discredited, myself lost, Sola swollen like a rock and crying, the illicit unmagic beans watered with tears and horse piss. I must move, the nomads now my only chance. Of what? Getting back to the city, then getting out, getting back here.

‘He can hear everything,’ whispers Dr Garnet.

That’s what is good about tents, also the desert, though I have said to Tex and Smith, ‘It doesn’t have to be the desert makes it good.’

‘So,’ says Sangster, ‘The Mongols have arrived.’

Jim says, ‘Not the Mongols, the Scythians. The Mongols pushed, the Scythians just wafted on ahead.’

Dr Garnet says, ‘It’s your fault. You compromised yourselves,’ and Spencer says, ‘He was my candidate. Is. Self-discipline.’

‘Masochism,’ says James, and Jim says, ‘The same thing, really.’

‘Well,’ says the lady Dr Weiss, ‘I say lose him,’ and her husband says, ‘So what – he’ll still be here. We could blow his head off, but he’d need to bite on something tough. We could send him to get some pizza.’

They talk well, these guys, direct. And they reveal themselves, speaking for the record, unless they’ve forgotten I can hear them, which is why if Tex or Smith or even Mr Mayor have a go at beating me, I never talk. It’s the only way, not to speak if you get hurt, and in the end – you win. I don’t know how, or why, or if it’s worth the winning. Having to take the life and death responsibility for all of them. That’s what they fear, they know. They put their lives into my hand, and if, now, they don’t kill me, that’s the finish for them. They, and the nomads, who don’t care, and if they see me flying over, will give me the finger – even their dogs would give it me – but then of course, the dogs are dead, giving the finger to the marshals.

All of them, compromised, laying down their badges; Dr Garnet with the sequins of her college ID: the Weisses in white coats, James in his tweed, and Jim in jeans, Spencer now abdicated, feathers to feathers, chickenshit to chickenshit. Sangster returning to his flesh, a black of middle-age, driving his fleet of venerable Dodges, like any wideboy taximan. Only Sola has accumulated things not to be taken back, given away, the pyramidal bulk, a sexual turnoff, for which I think of taking out the truck, spinning up the road to Bridget, playing at zebras in the moonlight, barred motel windows make us stars in stripes. Not for much longer now, for I can see my identity thrown into the separating tank with all the other whispering zeros, not separating, joining. Unnumbered. And Tex and Smith, saying, ‘Goddam it, Jayman, man without a number here, well, well. Have to start pinning you down all over again,’ and me saying, ‘Nothing, Tex – and hi there, Smith – I’ve got nothing. So you got nothing on me either.’

Only Sola immune, too big and dense to penetrate. Cook and gardener. Baked beans.

Fashion is to say everything is beautiful and mysterious, though rushing downwards to be born in a black hole. I plan to get a whip for my horse. Nothing is beautiful, or particularly mysterious, but it’s all moving. If my friends don’t kill me, it’s indifferent to me if they’ve threatened. I shan’t kill them, one’s like another, and all in a lump not worth getting rid of, since digging all those holes, or better still, raising all those platforms so the birds can get a sight, dawn patrol, vultures rising into the sun.

I shout, ‘I shan’t kill you,’ and perhaps there is a guilty shuffling from their tent, and Sola weeps, perhaps.

Everyone gets their lumps from somewhere, but I’m resolved to do down Tex and Smith, perhaps the Mayor gets tired of them. I say like a mantra, ‘It hurts, there is no pain. It all comes down, walls; states come down. It all remains. Our fears are conventions: we live by conventions. I feel good, everything has lapsed. I’m a prisoner in the desert, so long as they have my record. I’m free, I must stay in the desert because they have my record. They don’t have my record: I must stay in the desert because I want to!’ I feel good.

Going to see the nomads, I pass a tall stupa. It must be Indian, but tourists have hung things on it, so have hippies, or whatever dynasty came after them. Beer cans, mostly, some stamped out crudely into phalluses, necklaces of pulls, some as far as from New York. The nomads sit around.

‘I’m Mr Carradine, that’s me,’ says one, the chief, afraid his name will run away. I’m leading my horse. Carradine says to me, between the cretin and the arrogant, ‘You planning to race that thing?’

‘It hadn’t occurred to me. You want to bet or something?’

He’s puzzled, wants to talk about his dogs, and gives the marshals the finger in their absence. The dogs lie under piles of stones.

I say, ‘You want more dogs, I get you all you want. But if they just get shot again … You’d be better bullet-proofing them.’

He pauses, then, ‘Yeah, yeah. Armour, dog-armour,’ and he laughs, and I go along, and say, ‘You could get them to shoot back.’

Now he doesn’t laugh. He wonders how to use me, or my horse, and can’t think how. Comets of ideas trail by him, trailing dust and lumps of atom bomb, he sneezes.

‘Carradine?’ I say. ‘You like beans? Living in a tent?’

‘Naw,’ he says. ‘I like a house. Steaks.’

‘Well, old buddy,’ I tell him, turning and leaving with the horse, more interested now in how to get a fine whip, ‘You’re wasting your valuable time with me.’

And he turns away, and I think, ‘Goddam it, there’s a disappointed man,’ he’s broken by his hopes. He’s dregs, he’s just the dregs, he doesn’t have a voice, it’s just the name, my horse knocks out a rhyme, the bell-metal on him – maybe he’s even shod, must take a look – strikes out a jingle, ‘Carradine, Carradine.’

In the malls there are people selling whips. Armour for fighting dogs, desert survival kits, little machines for making water out of the sun, Geiger counters, metal detectors, stone carving sets, big knives. There are even guys selling old Dodge manuals.

I go to the Mayor’s office. ‘Morning, Tex. And Smith’, on their desk, files for drugs, space, sunspots on the sun and sunspots on the end of your nose. They have moved in as consultants, and their diplomas are on the walls. There is an office prayer-meeting, and a big rasta is berating them.

Tex is loud. ‘It’s back to the alleys and the whores. Desert’s like a leaky bucket.’ He has drawn our desert with crayons, like a kid’s map, as a valley, forking into another desert that runs down to Mexico, then as a crescent ending in mountains.

‘Fucking Pittsburg up there,’ says Smith. ‘That guy Sangster with a fleet of Dodges for running stuff.’

Tex says, friendly, ‘What you want, Jayman? More good times? More bad times? Space trips?’

‘I want nothing.’

‘You’re in trouble, out there. You want the nomads? We want you. Counterfeiting. Them gold medals for Indian victories is shit, Jayman. And you can tell your boss, Jayman—’

I say again, ‘I want nothing. We don’t have bosses. And no victories, so they can’t be counterfeit.’

Tex and Smith discuss taking me as hostage, sending back my long bones one by one for ransom. Smith says, ‘But then he’d be back home anyway,’ and they laugh and slap the little blackjacks they get as mayoral staff, bap bap, on their palms. The dregs, just the dregs.     

Smith says, ‘You’re in trouble, Jayman,’ but he can’t go on, and Tex says, ‘You want Carradine, Jayman, you got him,’ and falls silent.

I ask, ‘Why you kill them dogs?’

‘Can’t have packs of dogs roaming, Jayman.’

Thousands of them, huge herds. For defence. Behind Carradine – a pressure that runs from Pittsburg, dregs, guys with nothing, packs of dogs. Carradine with all that pressure of people behind him, him like the cork in the bottleneck, broken down, harrassed – and behind him, the urgency, the pressure.

‘Why the dogs?’

‘For sale, Jayman. Cash sales.’

Smith adds, ‘Radiate them in the desert, maybe they grow into horses, Jayman? Old Chevvies?’

They give a message from the Mayor. Sort the voices out, or get new sentences, double or quits.

‘Fuck you, Tex and Smith – nothing, I want nothing from you or the Mayor. No sentences, no goddam beans, no nomads. Not doing your subversion for you. No voices, no people, nothing.’

I’m a rigger. When I get back to the encampment, Carradine runs to meet me. There is another tent, it seems, but it is Sola, bending over some goddam new growths in the brown dust. Carradine says, ‘I just love her, love that Sola. Beans! A real home girl.’

He’s the dregs. Nowhere to go, no holes here in the desert, so he’s at the bottom. Nothing to run from except Dr Garnet, round in circles, nothing to give except devotion, and having come to the end of his dusty road, his dusty feet cry out for peace, of which we got none, and I show my whip, in friendly fashion.

 

 

 

– 3 –

the scythians

 

 

Carradine’s still here. They call an avenue by his name. Carradine Boulevard, perhaps it’s even Mr Carradine Boulevard. Now, no tents, and first they had me pace out the distances between the tents, then they managed by themselves, and then they put down houses in the dust, and then they retired Sola, and set her rocking on her rocker.

Then, the tourists came, the nomads pretended they were looking after the voices, sorting them out, deciding who was who, and setting-up like concerts of the dead like it was Arlington, but now with pyramids they make of mud, and something like the district in San Francisco where they have the sects, but here it’s poorer, as you’d expect, there being nothing but poor Sola’s garden and the accountants always moving through, and sometimes a raiding party comes from correctionals, or Tex will call me on the radio and have me send some criminals, and I make up a bunch of guys that’s making trouble, maybe they come back, maybe we go look for them, who cares, and always there are more guys coming, all look like Carradine at first, the dregs. And when they’ve been here for a while, that’s what they look like still, the dregs.

Carradine comes to me, he says, ‘I know about you, Jayman, you’re a fraud, unschooled. The guys here, they were doctors,’ and I say, ‘They’re doctors still, so what? And you know about frauds, Carradine? Well, frauds know how it’s done, old buddy, they’ve got the intelligence and the knowledge, and what is more, they got the wit, the humour, and if you think you bother me, young Carradine, then think of hell, and how you’re going down in that melting pot, your blood will boil until it’s white, your bones will draw out like fine wire, and out of you I’ll make a man – maybe a rabbit – and I’ll take your skull and powder it, your eyes maybe, like sardine eyes ... and make your brains a paste to stick your eyes like sequins, and from your skull we’ll sniff, and sniff, and sniff. And tell me, Carradine, will we get off on your skull powder, Carradine? Sitting in our funny clothes, all covered with your brains and eyes? Will we Carradine? I doubt it, sure as fuck – and that’s the difference, Carradine, between the dregs and me,’ and he smiles nervously, because what he really wants is not to tell me I’m a fraud, it burns him up to have me say that I don’t care, he wants to know what makes me different, and all I tell him, is I can eat him and he won’t even warm my tongue, and he’s the dregs.

And I dismiss him, and there’s old Spencer, always hanging round, he looks disappointed, but he always was, and now he knows just why, and being chief with all these dregs is rather like it was when we were all camped here, not any one of us an Indian. But I say I think the sects have got it right, the little booths they got – in some they have a couple screwing, in others you can use the rifles with the twisted sights, and round the back I guess they sell the women and the guns, just like I see them do outside, especially the rich and poor, with everyone that’s in between protesting and not doing it themselves so much, but still not much else but taking fees and passing laws; sometimes they look the other way, sometimes they look and just don’t see, and goddam it’s so boring to see these little secrets of the universe all swirling up and round again like dust-storms in the sand.

Tex calls me, and says, laughing, ‘You should be out conquering somewhere’, but I ask him how Smith is, and he says he’s not over the assassination attempt. And who might that be, the Mayor, perhaps, and many complications now with people and voices filling up the desert and no doubt our currency, of all kinds, managed by Chief Spencer, who makes us not just tokens for the bars, and all the stuff for when the guys go out to hit the towns, but also diplomas, documents, all kinds of forgery and fantasy, even a new kind of space-shot to make the others waste their money. Though I enjoy an afternoon in SF, and don’t want to bring the whole lot down, though Tex is much less troublesome now that Smith is transfixed with some gadget like a sailfish spear that’s in him, inoperable, and they hope he’ll learn to grow up round, but those goddam spines look fairly definite to me.

So Tex is waiting for my move, and knowing it will be a bad one, and asking me how the race thing is brewing up, and I say that Dr Sangster’s reading all the books, but really we don’t give a shit, we’re all minorities of this and that, and don’t get to believe too strongly in it all, though now and then there’s some boozing and a church gets wrecked, but to me, the real ruin is poor Sola – so goddam big she needs a cathedral to live in, dropped out somewhere from a cult movie, and everything she does, she swells up on it. Guys trying to make her for the trip, come out the tent with eyes like turbots’, and what we going to do with you, Sola, Sola dear, so many times larger than any life you’d want to lead. And Dr Garnet, who kind of runs the hierarchies and punishments, has an idea of what she needs – a pedestal that’s high enough to hide her – but she’d bring it down, and then to punish her is just too gloomy, even for our free and easy ways. And when I think of Bridget, who we call our hostess for the dancing, my heart lightens, she’s hit our destiny right on – the guys will dance, they’d dance all night and day, if they didn’t want to gawp, and look at more, still poorer, guys arrive, and set up house and open little booths for this and that, and giving thanks, and dancing to the flute and crapping in the sand, and when they die we stick them up on platforms, since the burning of them smells, no rivers here to bear them all away, and no one wants the fuss of digging holes and that – and besides, we wish so many wouldn’t come, for all of them, there’s just the dregs, and nothing wrong with that, we were the same, but – dregs is dregs, and they don’t change, and Bridget dancing, and that muscle tone that looks like fur from bees. But they must stop dancing some time, stoned, high on all kinds of stuff – though that is how they get the cash, panhandling tourists, selling them things that’s mostly themselves, one way or another. And at times I wish there was something that wasn’t dust and orange sky, and blue, enormous quantities of blue we can’t do anything with, and all the voices, voices of history, we say, to get the crowds, but really quite inconsequential, and stoned, they sound, high on everything from bits of high-school poetry to citations for this and that, a knifing, specifications of the gates at Fez, Takeda Shingen with his horse – and so I ride on mine. Up and down Carradine Boulevard. Not making appointments, talking little, humming perhaps, signing with my whip, exchanging a snatch of song. Lots and lots of people, all orderly, all glad to be here, but not exactly exultant. Showing people round, efficiently, like Figaros. Cutting hair, but thinking they really rule the joint, that being barbers is like being lords of destiny. Silently on my way, watching the order fall away like wheat on both sides, softly swishing in the transistors, guys dancing by themselves, trading pills, eyes red like demons’, being all wired up, nothing special to eat, and all this crap underfoot – a thoroughly modern desert.

‘A thoroughly modern desert,’ Spencer says, without a spot of irony. I hear him plotting away in his tent.

‘A thoroughly modern desert,’ says Tex, who has nothing except irony, and wouldn’t come out here, fearing for his life, and it was he cut off the gasoline for pickup trucks, and so I have to use the fucking horse to move around. The good thing is, he’s scared of all the crazy guys we got here, how many of them there are, as if the world went tilt and here they slid, everyone that’s unattached, and all the crazy women too. And we, the original settlers, who got the projects married – the voices to the nomads – and went industrial: Garnet with her artefacts, the little withered plants we sell, the bodies, and the dope, the screws of prayer blasted up in space, all the old rockets and their pads, just pointing up there, doing nothing, just thrust up these old scraps of prayers, up there, confetti. God knows where it comes down. Expedients, like that – and all to pay our debts.

Clop, clop. I trot along. I don’t give a fuck about our debts. I’m mister law and order man out here, goddam it, and what I care about is sleeping good, and law, and order. Keeping the activities going, stopping too much narcissism and health fads, and people who can live a thousand years. Just keep my little tricks in shape, don’t hide them, after all, a shaman just has the knack of moving round, in that, as seeing he’s already dead, will come the day he’ll go down one more time to hell and not come back. But all the other guys, worried about the debts, and death and all, well – they will have to go, to die: make what they can of turning into voices. After all, what does a metre of that tape cost us, or them? Immortality, all scrumbled up with all the others, no one got the time to listen anyway. No doubt good sense on all that vinyl somewhere, but more is coming out all day, we have the radios, and who the fuck had ever cared about the nomads having debts and being stuck here, here in the modern, thorough desert, waiting if for anything at all, to be cleaned up and fertilised and planted – but who the fuck would try all that? – they do a study, and they find we have these debts, of course can’t pay the guys to study us and so – yes, Tex is right, if we want to move, then we got to think of conquering somewhere, but I sure don’t want it to be San Francisco, pleasure town for me and lots of guys, LA is just too far, precarious as well, besides, Spencer is scared of leaving here, and Sangster talks of new Liberias, and I tell him that Liberia is about as full of crap as here, he just falls silent.

      All the guys here have a good thing about just falling silent. Took them years to cut a rock, and set it up, that on this spot the nomads stopped their wandering and Mr Carradine placed himself in the shadow – and there are all our names, more or less they spelled them right, but shortened them, how many years it was, and all the things they wanted us to get them, how many of them were there, and a fine trumpeting of what they hoped, and when – in the shadow of the good old team, the old buddies and their tapes, the voices, and the martyr of the tank, Dr Jim Yazik who fell in one day and died, unable to get out. And signed and sealed and blessed and all so on, and Dr Garnet’s magic axe quite blunt with chopping all that out.

Nomads in debt: nomad city. But what burns me up is Tex and cutting off the gas. And having us set up a bunch of guys, most of them Indians too, that know some useful things – to trap out his courtroom every Monday morning, so he and his Mayor can show their guys that order doesn’t sleep. And we should get to make something between drugs and dancing till our balls drop off, something that makes us money and yet gives us something more than being nomads – though I say to Carradine, who’s always around me, when I ride my horse, ‘I’m proud they call me nomad, Carradine. And all you here, wherever you come from, whyever you left wherever it was – you get to record your voice before you die,’ and he says, ‘Why? What they going to kill us with? They only got old atom bombs, and they’re no use.’

I guess we don’t like what we must be. For me, all this race and sex and injustice stuff, it makes me mad, that all that piled up failure’s still around, and makes us crawl back down again, those long alley-pipes of indignation, having our bodies kicked and getting strong so we can kick, it pulls me down. The desert is my place, flat, welcoming and dead, but like a huge brown emptiness, on which you can be anything or nothing, be alive or dead, or both at once.

I say to Carradine, ‘They got machine guns, they go ping ping ping and three guys go, and so on. Don’t you worry, Carradine, we don’t like what we must be, but sure – we’ll be it, when we must.’

For that I died, I went to hell, to get away from all that tradition crap, the squirrel wheel of being hurt and hurting back. And now, I got all these guys from nowhere, from Peru and Glasgow, out of Africa, and everybody’s cleaning lady, all the dropouts, old buddies, guys from bars – and all they come, they coagulate, they copulate, they write their manifestos, make their speech, ‘And then, Carradine, you silly fuck, you want someone to take you out and get you killed.’

He says, simply, ‘I love you, Jayman.’

I say, ‘Goddam it, Carradine, I hope not, you’ve got more guts than that,’ and again he says, ‘We love you, Jayman. You tell us what we are, no lies, and we feel good.’

I think, ‘You sick donkeys,’ but remember all the plots, the tents aswish aswash with Spencer plotting, Sangster looking solemn, one thinking of the graveyard, the other – Liberia or Ethiopia – all places with the same hope as we have here. Unless Tex puts in gas stations, tidies up the bars and tames the hookers, throws up a few mountains here, some hanging gardens there. So, how about it, Tex? Desert technology. And I remember, how he says, ‘You’re turning into desert, Jayman,’ and I think, well, and it must happen too, perhaps. And Carradine says, ‘The only thing, Jayman, old buddy, is that this fucking desert stinks, it’s hell to live in,’ and I cut him short. ‘We all live in conventional places, Carradine, all live in our memories of things, for some it’s books, for others prayers or videos, or movies. So – this desert is a fucking desert, and LA is just about the world, except they hunt each other – even the good guys in the sanitation services – who know what’s really what. They leave the animals alone, on account of how the gunfire between the bad guys is so hot you can’t get to the rats,’ and Carradine says, ‘I know, you got complex things to keep bouncing in the air, old buddy, Jayman,’ and I hear a hint he’s fooling with me, and I think of strangling him with tapes, or hanging by a hook, off a platform in the afternoon – just a mild thought, but after all, the only thing I got is being dead, and so I say, ‘Carradine, I don’t want you laying all this weight on me. I want to be a modern guy, like they got in People City, pay all regular, the toilets flush, the drink and dope, you have it or you don’t – they got all kinds of programs, Carradine: they don’t want trouble, that’s the thing, you do your work, you have your fun, you dance your balls off if you want, or else you just go home, you switch on all the things. It’s just we don’t have all that. I don’t say it’s good, or bad. It’s just we don’t have what the others have.’

‘Yeah, Jayman. Why don’t we?’

I say, ‘I got them all, young Carradine. I got them all, I see them all, I go in to San Francisco and don’t fuck around I go in bars, do what the hell I want. And then I come back here, there’s all this sludge, this dust, the goddam tapes.’

‘Why, Jayman?’

‘You idiot!’ I scream. ‘It’s a punishment. I have to do it. I can’t walk away, I have to do it, Carradine!’

‘Your sentence, Jayman? But I didn’t do anything that’s bad. You saw me, Jayman – I had nothing. They even shot my fucking dogs.’

‘Time, Carradine. I got to do time.’ Yes, even shamans.

Is this shit fooling me? Is he an irritant, or just part of the tape, the time?

I hear him in the evenings, talking to Sola, reading from the gardening book, and I think, Fuck it Carradine, just leave it, leave that poor old hunk alone, the dancing in the city did for her, the beans have jammed her mind – but just don’t start it all again, let’s just for once that frog prince doesn’t kiss frog princess, fucking spawn over everything, and off we go with counselling for toads, the newts aborting and guilt and screaming, all that scene, starts up again.

And Carradine says, ‘Just tell me, Jayman, if you want, I’ll knot that horse’s tail for you. I work round horses, worked in the pampas till they laid the concrete down....’

‘I’ll think about it, Carradine. I’ll let you know.’

But then I think, that what’s left of the doctors is a difficult crew, and Spencer thinks I’m a betrayer, though what of, I’d want to know – the nomads coming from all over, there are more Inuit than Sioux, Peruvians you could cover mountains with, and Xhosa, many as you want, and Scots who just spring up, and Danes who’ve lost their benefits, and a kind of Korean guy the other Koreans seem to hate, and so and so, and all at once the dregs, but seem good guys to me, it’s just I didn’t want to live like this, with all these guys, their kids, their women, or again, with all these women, and their kids and guys – and all these guys. You can’t even eat them, like they do those iguanas, who live all sprawling over like we do, though cleaner and more wholesome with it all, though noisy too. They say it tastes like chicken, but then – chicken doesn’t taste at all, and the food here’s like dead voices in vinyl sauce, and at times I wish Spencer and Sangster’d take the war axe and chop me up. And I remember, fuck it, if they do, I’ll just go back together, ‘never kill a dead man, haha,’ heard that somewhere, and I shout at Spencer:

‘If you don’t like it, and you don’t like me, why don’t you get rid of me – I’ll tell you how, but you need seven pots all full of molten tin, and when you cut me up, you make these like men, these warriors – and each will have a trident and they’ll fight, just like I’m fighting now, inside, and against you all, and when they’ve got the tridents all mixed up, you get this bed of charcoal ...’ And I think, goddam it, if I get through that, I’ll be so strong – and then I’ll never be rid of these guys, nor they of me, but Spencer says, ‘Forget it, Jayman, that guy Sangster’s just a crook, he’s starting up his scams again, and getting Tex to fund the dancing and the bars and gardening and who knows what ...’

And I say, ‘Tex funds anything, except the gas to get us out of here, and maybe some food that’s fit for us heroes, and besides, that Sangster doesn’t want to leave. Outside, he’d just go back to what he was, a trucker. Not but what your trucker isn’t the finest guy ...’ I start to repeat what we tell all the nomads, to hide that now they’re seds, sorry guys, the gas is gone, the nomad days is done, there’s no more road, for once ‘last exit’ really means just that. They’re seds, now, all of them.

Spencer says, ‘You can’t be bad at being nomads. But as seds, these guy’s a disaster. Or they would be, if there was anything to disaster on.’

‘Spencer, this may be a poor operation, but I didn’t want any kind of scam at all. And you accuse me of sexism about Sola. I’m sorry she’s turned out a stereotype. I’ve nothing against such. We need stereotypes, Spencer, but I can’t feel close to her.’

‘Cut out all this normal talk, Jayman, and feeling close to this, authentic is that, relating to the other. The only thing that’s normal here’s the voices in the tank.’

We think silently about the tapes, how they used to be; eels in a bath, you don’t know how nearly dead they are or what they feel, or why guys bother to eat them and say lies about how great they taste, like iguanas in their way.

Spencer says sadly, ‘Values. Big scams,’ and I reply, ‘Thoroughly modern, Spencer, the desert. Nothing much either way,’ and the only way his nation’ll get back in history is if he sets to and sorts out a tape of dead voices of them.

But talk of heavy things is in the air, and Carradine and friends of his from the Peruvian camps come up and babble about Athens and the tennis court, other assemblies and all that Berkeley stuff that’s sedimented down inside. And I say I’m off, to put the perpetual question to Bridget, maybe freshen up the horse, but he insists, it’s politics or nothing, and all the guys who are interested this morning are gathering, to give themselves some ground rules, put some order in the order, make some plans and get the others to follow them, and so I ask them, why don’t they make some plans and follow them themselves, but they say no, too much democracy is just like not enough.

And Tex calls me on the radio, and says he needs a big, tously bunch of criminals, preferably a few that they can execute, they have some East Coast bigwigs coming in, the big cheeses want to make it clear that immigrants are good for bucks and business, but if they step out of line, they’ll get a million volts right up each nostril, and I’m angry. And he says he’ll come and get them anyway, and now that Smith is getting better, the dory spear has got its iron right in his system, we can launch him against a hostile army, and sniff out drugs and patent-stealing, probably wheat blight: and I say there’s no fucking wheat here, and Tex says OK, they’ll come and take the guys themselves, and get me back in jail, and I can pay for everything, from Berkeley to the other scams and quick reactions here and there, and so I go to Carradine’s assembly, and I tell him, ‘Carradine, you sit here and make the constitution, there’s other guys that come from real deserts, and got real, the old-time, religion, and I’m glad I’m already roast and filletted because sure as fuck they’ll get you, and they’re good guys too, artistic, loyal and passionate, all that, but you’ll wish you’d got your reactions sorted out a whole long time ago? And Carradine says that’s just my racism again, thinking of pistols, probably of nuclear mortars and the plague as well, to keep the others down, and I say – no, I want a thoroughly modern desert, – so he says, ah yes, now here’s a thing, and there’s another thing, and Sola’s beans is this, and should we build her a kind of temple or a football field for lounging in, or maybe get her into industrial gardening in some way, and grow some decent stuff to eat. I say:

‘Remember, you guys, you’re nomads. Nothing matters so much as that. Not being seds – though now you’re seds. Not being hets, and making the rules that tell you what the rules should be, and which you must obey. And being tolerant, if it becomes a rule, is just another rule, and if you break it, out come the Weisses in their coats and with their drills, and kindly snuff you out.’

Carradine and a lot of Mexican guys shout that that’s redneck frontier talk, and some young guys start laughing and making gestures, and the police Carradine’s appointed give them a cuffing round the head, and maybe take some off for Tex, and I think goddam it, we’re going through all this crap again, and so I say to Carradine, ‘Don’t you see, you’re deviants, there’s just a few of you that wants to start off all this divine image crap and ethics and the cattle prod, and free speech with a ten percent kickback on hardback sales, and all this…’ I can’t think of the word, and I wonder if I mean hell, but hell’s OK you can come back from that if you’ve the tricks, and everyone’s been everywhere now, and someone always gets out and back, or at least sends out a pad of notes, and so, not hell, and the only word I think of is ‘all this desert’. And then there is a cheer, the guys are really proud of being here, in this patch of scum and dust and turds, and I say, ‘Why don’t you ask the aliens?’ because I know some of the tourists are our kind, they stay here and I’m sure they’re space deviants, guys who can’t go back home to other planets, bury their space ships, goddam it, must be desperate to live here, but at least no one really cares, and here they need no numbers, and I say, ‘Get them to make a tape, and put it with the rest,’ and Carradine says, no, no, no, the tapes is for the doctors, the original guys who set up the traditions here, and Sola, of course, and Bridget with her dancing, and of course the space aliens are aliens, and full stop, and mustn’t touch the tapes. And I say what the fuck, no one listens to the tapes, and there’s a silence and other guys come running up, the horse starts straying too, and then there’s kids around as well, some guys can’t stop procreating, or maybe have an alibi. And, goddam it, what a dull, a boring afternoon, and I think of them all talking about their rights and thinking of conquering some cool oasis with appliances and malls, and watching movies about their old desperate selves, with their war flags and their fans, the arrows, the leather armour taking castles in the sun, looking like swarms of roaches, or iguanas swarming, and I say to Spencer, ‘Surely, we don’t have to start all this again?’ and he says, I think maybe sadly, ‘Must conquer or end up in the shit where you begin, old buddy,’ and I guess at least that’s the end of plotting for a a while, and so I, having the only horse and being dead which is next best to immortal, will ride out like a scarecrow at the head, and take whatever they may fire at me: hot iron, the cauldrons full of molten tin, the liquid gold, the viruses that buzz about like bees and once inside your ears and nose, they never let you go.

I say, ‘Nursery dreams. Crooks and cons, or cynical, there’s few that has the vision, most are submissive or kicked around and conned – and Sola, now, she had the vision, wanted to be chaste and all, and now she’s a rock, withdrawn completely,’ and I ramble away, Spencer looks so sad, and Sangster too, no bucks for scams, and Dr Jim has lost his mate, a sad canary now alone, he’s melded skills, all language, now all tape technology, a super hard-boiled egg. He wears a white coat, like the Weisses, who have a clinic now, looks like Detroit under canvas, the drills and incinerators, the guys here call it the Marquee de Sade, and who knows what they’re into – transplanting genital warts and teeth all over, necklaces of mastiff studs – and suddenly I know, I say to Spencer, ‘The Weisses – they’re making magic warriors. They’re wiring up synthetic guys to fight, and Dr Jim is fitting them with dead voices, saying the most goddam horrible things, go ullulating into fire, and any disaster, and the goddam space aliens are probably unbolted for their parts; or training officers – some ideas they have about immortality and travelling fast in Styrofoam, those little globs of plastic clay: you miniaturise a whole ecology of plants and animals, and birds, lianas and palm trees, garden furniture probably too. The fucking doctors are getting these unhappy guys all circuited and fitted out to win space wars. Flying without the spaceships, everlasting and colonising with these little forests, full of those goddam insects with blue eyes, those leather half-tracks that look like iguanas, those mahogany voices rapping out a social security number, a bit of Rilke, who cares, they coming to get you, every one a sword designed and monogrammed by Dr Garnet, and a paybook from Chief Spencer, payment after death in three-nines solid gold or platinum, the desert dollars, hearses a speciality from Dr Sangster, only the voices fake ...’

Sad, Dr Spencer says, ‘Yeah. A terrible shame to have Dr James lost in the tank like that, all those voices in his every hole and membrane, like drowning dry in other people.’ He shivers, but he doesn’t give a damn, and he says, ‘And anyway, if they won’t die for you, they’ll die for Sola. And if she fails, the apostates will go for Bridget. I must make about a million copies of her legs, snapping away like scissors, give the guys something to believe and trust in,’ and I say, ‘Goddam it Spencer, it’s not that it’s sick, it’s kitsch as well, and you’ve not even thought of anything that’s new,’ and he says, fuck all that, it’s worked before, and you should see those two-man cockroaches go through armour like a dream, and food bombs and the wonder viruses, and goddam it, this time the wretched of the earth were going to win, and put an end to all this failure and this modern crap of losing out and sitting back and watch the imploded bits fall down in patterns like living in a planetarium that’s full of minestrone, and I say, ‘OK Spencer, but what’s really in it?’ and he says, ‘Revenge, old buddy, being one who counts. And all the guys out here know what I mean, and they resent the being what they are, and only those fucking wooden voices, the best that we can do, but even so the genuine utterances of victims and guys with numbers, who were asked to say a last important thing, and out comes fucking social security’ – and he’s all excited, and I ask, ‘What you expect them to say, Spencer?’ and he says he doesn’t know, there must be something more than numbers and mortality, and I tell him not to be so sure. The best and worst thing is, that in the end, it all tastes like chicken, even the iguanas, and that in the end what you can say about the planet is that it probably tastes like chicken too, and he laughs and says I always say that, and so have many others before.

On my horse, I can see further than the others, until we get the mountains the guys have promised to build us, and I have to ride it to get to the city, talk to the old buddies in the Ginsberg centre, and how business is bad. Then, Tex asks me how we’re doing with the tourists, and I say they like gawping at the poor and paying us to do our tricks, and listening to the tapes reminds them of the dead and so, and so, and Tex is beaming there, he has an office now he can sit down in, has his own little screen or shaft that looks straight down to hell, and every hour or so the mayor and gangs of mates and messengers, the guys who used to be like Tex, just thugs or clients standing round, and go into some chamber where they sniff it up, or something, and come back looking keen and wired.

And Tex as usual talks to rile me up, about the horse, the desert, Sola like the foundations of a pyramid or Petra, Bridget and what doctors we have left, and I just sit and smile, and after all, this is a way to wind it down, to see the outfit as it looks from here. And he shows me, as he always does, young Smith, he’s standing, as he always will, rigid in a closet. The spear has moved, to give him backbone, now its barbs come through his skull, a fine hand of barbs gives him a topknot. Organs all grown round, but pain, it seems, is not forgotten.

Tex shows my horse, on a screen. ‘You like that horse, eh, Jayman?’

‘I can see further when I’m sitting on it.’

Then, Tex lets me see they’ve kidnapped it, and with a button-press he locks the doors; and beams, and asks me what I’ll do.

‘Well, Tex, I guess you’re the bad guy between us two, and that you’ll have to die.’

He asks, ‘What you propose to do? Bladerunner spectacular, transistor over everything, like fondu cheese?’

I say, ‘I don’t want to use violence, Tex, look how iron has entered Smith’s soul. I don’t enjoy being satrap of a satrap, giving you the guys so other satraps on the bench can say we’re dregs, and me the lowest dreg. But then again, and all in all, unless we strike that oil, we’re nomads out of gas, and if we move, we trickle into nothing, in the sand.’ And I think, fuck it, I’ve let him know that we’re prospecting, but I guess he knows, with all those bums arriving every week, ready to talk, and suddenly I’m tired of starting up the whole itinerary again, and just want to sit in bars, and get back on my horse, and in my tent. I say to Tex, ‘Give me my horse back, and I won’t set my raiders on you,’ and he laughs and laughs, so I laugh too, and wish I’d flown here, maybe left the horse to eat its halms, think about the knots one day we’ll put into his tail, and then I open up the closet, and there’s Smith, a purple bundle. All that iron, sticking out his head and out his slippers. Something that might be pity, but is probably just rage, comes on. I take Smith by the waist, and ram him into Tex.

Tex, transfixed by his wounded friend, the unfortunate Smith. It does for Smith, it seems to do for Tex. His head isn’t full of transistors, but of perpetual questions. He wriggles on his friend’s hooks. I think, that if I haven’t done for him, I’ll be meeting him again up here. And if he’s dead, I’ll meet with him and Smith down there, and either way, goddam it, what an infernal trap, and I laugh, and while I’m waiting for the raiders, I take a drink. I feel I’ve crossed a ridge, a stream. Responded as a human should, and now Carradine and his posse break the door, and do a long long frozen take, till I get bored.

Carradine is wired, he says, ‘Well, the boss done it, he got the big boss. No more drunk charges, comrades, the boss is now the big boss,’ and he goes on, a poet much after his time, the others unimpressed, and looking round for souvenirs and stuff – the other guys have heard, of course, are plotting their next move, and many already have stolen cars all ready for a break back home, and so we leave, quite orderly.

I say, ‘What about my fucking horse?’ and Carradine thinks it’s fine, that I should think of that; the others says it’s old, and can be left here, and I think, well, yes, that explains it, I’d never thought, but yes, that horse is terribly old, I have to pull its head up, don’t even discuss the whip, its many fancy uses on parade, but I go back, with no illusions that old horsey gives a damn at being rescued, or impounded, but there’s a kind of impetus in this, the guys are saying, ‘Jayman here has got to be the head guy, he’s the only one; they’ll let him sign the papers – not a fraud, just violent,’ and they take off back home like brown snakes through gold-dust, and I and the horse must wait until a sand storm gives us cover, the marshals around and shooting dogs from helicopters, and watching out for space ships, and we’re out of sympathy with all that irony, and I get back, and Spencer asks, ‘Did you go to kill him, and those guys along? But why, and did you?’ and I say, ‘What you think, Spencer? And besides, he’s just impaled, and anyone can make themselves adapt to that,’ but he takes my arm and turns me.

On one of the platforms where from respect we leave the dead for sun and birds, I see a dangling net, and in it there is Tex all bundled up and pecked and baked and there is Smith, planted in the desert, and Spencer looks disgusted, says to me, ‘Well, boss of bosses – was this the finality then? Was this what we were all to struggle for, towards?’

‘I guess so, a bit of it,’ I say, but I am not impressed, although I can foresee some years of trouble coming out of this, and Sola takes a look and looks at me, it could be that she’s crying, or it could be sweat.

Spencer shouts, and Sola waves her arms, and I see Dr Garnet whipping at nothing with her axe, warriors are tumbling out the clinic’s back-flaps like puppies from a womb, and at the other side, waiting to go in, lines and lines of sick nomads in the sun, and I think, ‘Oh goddam it, oh shit,’ and hear the steel drums limber up for Bridget – and Tex is turning in no breeze, no air, and Smith a deeper purple eggplant, planted on his own stand. Spencer shouts again, and I feel his dreams are shot and mocked, and mine have all come true, alas, and there’s no shade of anything at all in all our looks and shouts, grimaces and our old clothes flapping on our dirty bones, and no shade, no shading, we’re all hard edge, and glazed, and Spencer shouts again, ‘What you gone and done, founded this goddam enterprise on stiffs and bad temper, those rotting stiffs, all butchered up – and in the name of what?’

I pretend to misunderstand him, and there’s Carradine and his raiders standing round and looking shocked and guilty, and the horse is like he’s standing there too absent-minded to fall down, and I say solemnly,

‘We shall call the place New Scythia.’

And some shout, and caper round, with joy.

 

 

 

– 4 –

the new state

 

 

Some of the guys say the killing and elevation of Tex, using Smith as the medium, was an act of justice and our authentic voice. Others say its significance was ritual, or maybe political. And most guys say Sola was profoundly moved, made me repent, foreswear all violence, and refound our venture on quite different lines. But everyone at heart thought it a good, a positive thing.

I had spent my lifetime in the desert and I saw all this starting up again, the old cannonball running back down the tube, loving the grooves, looking forward to another trajectory (the sun, the blue, the faces looking up) – then plop again into desert. The same old things. The new things, even, the same old things. Or else the real new stuff – is hidden out in Wisconsin in a shed, or in Bannu.

They give me this goddam old horse, so old it pisses all the time, can’t run, can’t charge. Is like a bony old armchair, no style, no buzz.

And now the narratives begin, the styles begin to chatter on, like all the other dead voices, and I see them hawked around, ‘Dave Carradine’s narrative and account’, ‘Doc Spencer and his vision of the new Sioux nation’, ‘Dr Sangster and the Liberian cause’. And I have spent my time learning to fly away from all that stuff, the dead politics, the dead religions (Sola with her watering pot and secateurs), the dead voices, Dr Yazik drowning in them, fished out smelling of dried spittle.

Spencer shows me some tiny gold coins. I ask, ‘These squiggles?’

‘Smith – the man with barbs out the top of his head. Tex, the man on the platform. And a motto? Perhaps your head the other side, Jayman?’

I say, ‘Mottoes are heavy things, Spencer, even in cookies.’

He says, ‘I thought – Discipline, Autonomy, Magic, a thoroughly modern motto. Creatures with wings, perhaps.’

I suggest, ‘A line, maybe, suggesting desert. I don’t like Magic, it draws attention to the scam, the gold, what is it?’

‘Very nearly gold.’

‘So we leave it discipline, autonomy; sounds liberal, conservative, whatever, eh, but stuff guys like to feel jingling in their pockets, and we could shorten it to DA,DA, like Dada.’

He looks admiring at me, but I don’t think he gets it. He says, ‘And a title? Boss of bosses, maybe? And for our state, our nation?’

I’m bored. I say, ‘“Autonomous desert”. If those guys don’t find gas soon,’ I wave over to where the old horse is watching some guys with shovels in a hole, ‘We’ll be wiped out by who gets Tex’s job, and anyway, all we’ll ever have is tourists, and the tapes.’

He says, ‘Every state started small, Jayman,’ and I say, ‘And ends in nothing. And every founder started off as a true communist, but also wanting to keep his horse,’ I wave again, to mine, ‘And whatever wig or crown he likes to wear.’ My own is made by Bridget, and has silver globes; and at the solstices we put on fruits and stuff, a bangle from Bahia.

Spencer says, ‘We won’t need gas. They’re moving on from automobiles, and I say, ‘Sangster’ll have all the Dodges in the world,’ and Spencer is thinking how we can make a buck from that, and wondering if we shouldn’t put Bridget in the driving seat or on a coin, and she hears this and says, ‘You guys is in big trouble already, and besides, Jayman’s OK for this and that, but I don’t want my name linked, you know, indelibly with him,’ and I get bored, and say to them, ‘It’s better when you plot against me. Why don’t you invent a tree, and I can sit in it, and see what’s coming next, and you can keep the Bladerunner crews coming off the line, and paint your tents, Spencer can paint his face and learn to balance budgets if you haven’t any cash.’ And I feel that though there never was a vision, something has been lost, so when the marshals come we’ll fight them off because we don’t want to be blasted, and Bridget says that’s crap, that if you start you must do everything, with newspapers and sewage and bishops and Immigration and all that, and then art shows, and it will grow and grow until you have to make your own PhDs, your own doctors.

I say, ‘If I want that, I can go down the road to San Francisco,’ and they groan and say I’m a wise guy, a fatalist, seen it all before and never done it too, and Spencer says I won’t see it long in San Francisco because we’ve got no gas, the horse is looking sick, and now we’ve got thousands of guys who’s just about convinced that they’re immortal, and I say, ‘Being dead and move about like I am is tough, you know, it’s not a gadget you pick up in Dr James’s tent, or get an implant from the Weisses,’ but they’re high on something, if we had the spring out here I’d say they both had that, and they go skip skip skipping.

Marquez calls from City Hall. He has Tex’s job, and he wants to do some deals. He says, ‘As for Tex, you’ll get what’s coming. But you guys is hazards, and we wouldn’t like to make you all a bigger one by zapping you.’

I say, ‘We know you, Marquez, know you very close, and what we don’t want to be is that closeness. We got nothing, Marquez, you got nothing – if we start like this ...’

Marquez is one of us, but I don’t tell him so, and there’s another important difference, he thinks he isn’t one of us; and the expanses of indifference and desire and just dislike that separate us are more than adequate to keep him in his job. Like when he mocks me, calls me Cola di Rienzo, the centre of the centreless, the most popular of the unpopular, all cumbersome stuff that covers up his lack of wit, like I should join the Sufi chapter in the city and learn to whirl – I’d often thought of that. But facing Tex’s murder charge and all the stuff of exposing corpses to the sun, which there’s a city ordinance … so I say, ‘Marquez, if you won’t come and get us, give us the gas so we can come and get you,’ and I add, ‘Haha’, and he says we still owe them for my ransom, that thanks to him we’ve gone on signing documents. But of course, Spencer’s producing more paper than Minnesota, and I think it was our bad luck to be part of the States, like superfetation, and having hets as models, and how our alley’s been tried all ways, as though these deserts weren’t real deserts, and the things we do just odd and twisted. Marquez says the guys in Ecbatana has to be restrained, so I say, ‘Good work, Marquez, just keep good and busy restraining them,’ and break the link, but perhaps that sounds too weak, besides we’re vulnerable, and one of our guys had better discover relativity, or heroin or something big that once didn’t exist, so we can get on the map and into business, maybe they’ll forget about the corpses: Smith has dried and looks like the bits of Indians tourists buy, but Tex is still mixed grill, and I tell the Weisses that in my way I’m sensitive about all that, especially when it’s one-way dead, no coming back, and she says if I want anarchy I’ll have to clean up after, and he says, no, he has me for a commie, why should I care, why should he, Dr Weiss, care that I care?

Now at night, the plotting has died down. The guys are arguing about the language we should use, and some say Spanish, some say Xhosa, some say both, and on festivals and for forgeries, we’ll use English. Some is for majority rule, and some is for just commun­icate the best you can, for that’s the human way, and in a while, when we are all gone down, the kids will work something out. And from the doctors’ tents there’s scribble scribble scribble. Dr Garnet wants to make a movie, inventing a revolution to which she could have brought her special justice, and fuck! Sola cries and cries, and I scream at her, maybe she should take her love to town and maybe she should learn some languages, it seems the aliens are running courses, and a lot of guys are conversing using printouts, and looking at the dustclouds, and the herds that the marshals go on shooting. Today it will be Ossetian and tomorrow Tagalog. Word gets around a new empire’s on the move, some guys want out and others in – the confusion’s good, and certainly they’ll never catch me in the middle of all these reindeers suffering terribly, and cows with humps and my crowns now trimmed with astrakhan – the fashions spreading to the hets, the booths and churches selling booze and bodies, resurrection and all kinds of home-faked dope – with Marquez begging us to stay right here, and goddam it don’t bring all our crap and visions and disease where he might catch it. Amnesty is in the air, and I might enjoy it, if being in the middle of big vainglorious plans don’t usually bring them down around me, like having to think of excuses not to want to die in ’Nam, Eyeraq, wherever. Or other plans, more grandiose, but decently kept quieter.     

Dr Sangster shows me what he’s written, and it starts: ‘I never liked the gospels. As a beginning, they were not only repetitious, but they made you think, just on first reading, that they were a fake, a scam prepared with little literary taste, and pandering to those who would most quickly identify with the victims who get befriended by the candyman and driven up to heaven by a white chauffeur in a blue-black V16 that runs on Chivas Regal. So, in these modest thoughts, I consciously reject the gospel image, all the sorry business that it’s brought, the terrible hopes and disappointments it has brought my people, all that frenzy, and in the end an unfriendly desert. That brings me to my scene. A place of beginnings, and of ends. Of Jayman, who is a founder, against his will, and mine, and ours, and that of all the solemn doctors, and the lively ones. Jayman, who being dead, insisting on it, is proof against all resurrections, rebirths, illnesses, recoveries, and on this minimum attraction, the program of the tiniest things, he has my temporary approval. Even at times my love. A carroty type, and if one wished to make comparisons, it’s Sola, with her gift for endless suffering and ability to relate to something beyond her own skeleton that makes her at least the patron saint of what we call – what Jayman called – New Scythia.’

‘This is dull, Sangster,’ I say. ‘Very, very dull.’

He looks devastated. ‘I didn’t write it because it’s beautiful, but because it’s the truth.’

‘But Sangster, we are pirates. We’re the dregs. The guys can only go on up. More sensibility, more refinement in their cruelty, treating the women better, learning to love the animals again. Building shafts like Tex’s, that let you look straight down to hell. All we have’s that tent where they show Bladerunner all day long, all night. A guy can sleep well there... And you guys plotting, and the fucking dancing going on all night, and everyone wired up, and having orgasms in their sleep. This desert, Sangster, has gone right down to hell – I don’t exaggerate,’ I laugh. I add, ‘We need some good ordinances like they make at City Hall,’ and despite himself he laughs too, and says well at least the guys aren’t hets, and any accountants here would get to dance their balls off and forget about their calculators, and I say, ‘Yes, who needs gas, and perhaps the guys will get to bring the dogs in, and then every goddam mastiff and other guard dog will get to have a good. time here, and lonesome moons and dusty beer will find about a billion dog-throats howling on and up,’ and Sangster says that’s just his point, he doesn’t believe in on and up, but likes his good time to be quiet, and so I say that if he reads his gospel, having a good quiet time has come out clear. It is his up and up, and on and on, and he agrees and goes to write another.

With formality, I hold a meeting of the original doctors. Sola is too cumbersome to be bothered, and Bridget is dancing. Sola, says Bridget, still needs love, masses of it, but the passion for gardening has spread. Guys are tired of beans, and health is looming large. Bridget insists we need the bucks. I say, ‘The horse eats hardly anything, just beanstalks. There’s lots of ways of getting money from the tourists. We could even,’ and I know it’s a fine idea, a revolutionary one, ‘Sell them the tapes.’

Bridget says, ‘The tapes belong to the voices that made them,’ and I say, OK, we’ll sell them and credit the money to the voices, put it in Spencer’s bank.

Spencer introduces me, ‘Our founder, always with us, and am glad to say, there’s signs that charges against him are cancelling out. The death of Smith, used as a weapon to procure a death; transmutes into a charge of involuntary homicide against Smith himself. Of more significance, my friends, is what we plan to do about our civilisation,’ and he pronounces it as if it’s already dead and priced.

I interrupt: ‘What we need is something like drugs for income, that doesn’t bring the cops. Some kind of electric couscous, that Dr James here should be working on. Useless to make these guys warriors when the empire outside is dying. We never hear from Marquez now, the radio plays the Yardbirds, nothing more, there isn’t any foreign news,’ but the doctors aren’t impressed.

Sangster says we should take Nevada, and I tell him that it’s years that it seceded from the States and no one cares, it’s all a contraband in cactuses and pulque and go-go dancing, waiting for three lemons; and who wants San Francisco, and we’re stuck in a fault, a time fault here, and should try a thrust down in Peru, or maybe build Atlantis on a raft and float it out. That being Scythians is a downer, we should have tried for Arcadia, or somewhere uplifting where we wouldn’t need to work, but where living was easy, and the artefacts more chic.

And when I say Atlantis, Dr Garnet rolls up her eyes, a trance, or is it surely love? She stares at me with nothing, and I know she’s flying out there, without her body, over the shiny waves, and all the junk that’s pitching on them, and she says, ‘Yes, Jayman! Atlantis is where we come from, where we go. There we can live the good life, there we must fight to go ...’ and away she flies, and Spencer says she’s crazy, if she wants Atlantis she needs to read the books, and be sure the fucking enterprise is waterproof, and who would stop her? – the tourists roam around the world looking for stuff like that.

‘But,’ he says, ‘our being here is still a punishment. These nomad guys, who I myself dissociate, have chosen to share our fate, not just as outcasts, mister marginals, but criminals, whose everyday is made of further criminal activities. I brought to a head the engraver’s art, I should expect a millennium in a federal jail, plus whatever else we get for subversion, the political angle, the guys that shoot down marshals and their helicopters. Jayman here thinks it’s a licensed sport, but that way round, it isn’t, Jayman. So if they kill you or your horse, it doesn’t take a month out of your sentence, but we’re in deep, dear Dr Garnet. When we license our own cops to bring in justice, it’s as if we’d told them to off the guys themselves. You only get away with it,’ he looks apologetic after this formality. ‘If you have set up as a state, and that is hard. Yes, Dr Garnet, a dream is necessary; so is a mint, which I supply, and Dr James the army, and whatever the good doctors Weiss give the guys to stop the pain; religion and a dancer is important too, and having a well set-up boss of bosses perhaps the nub, the core. But all of that is not a state.’ He pauses. ‘It’s a prison without warders, and without a front door.’

I tire of this, of Sangster and his communist past and measuring us up against other guys, so far away, made for the stage, the final curtain. I’m tired of Spencer, doing one false thing and hoping it will turn into another, but I’m not sorry for the Weisses or for Dr James. I’m sorry for Sola, Bridget, even Dr Garnet, victims of their sensibility, and probably of men, and now turned into cases, case A case B case C. The weeping nymph who’s turned into a rock – but not by me, Bridget who can’t stop dancing, like the tarantulas have got her, and Dr Garnet, who would fly away – to treasure island, where it’s safe, but getting the house sorted out’s a drag. To tempest island, where there’s politics mixed in with the magic, and while I’m thinking of all this, my horse puts his head round the tent flap, and its a great relief: with those ears, it’s obviously a mule, the lassitude’s professional, and it will live a thousand years, a little recompense come from the makers for his altered state.

I say, ‘I shall go and live on a platform, for a while. Not observing outer space, nor yours, but back to my original plan. Inner space, dreamtime is back. I shall live a little way above you all.’

So, I can observe them all, without the wear on my mule, looking not just through space, but time, perched up here in what would be a tree if we had them. The guys have chosen to settle not in clumps of those who speak the same language and all that, but in rings, like tree growths. And I see – yes, there is no tree, and so they look like its sections, our good selves a montage of the roots, and on the periphery the leaves, the flowers.

Well, I think the Peruvians will win, because they like the sun, and now there come the tough ones from the inner rim of Asia, loving the sun, and guys who are into the body and its smells and wrinkles – less sure of them – and the partisans of the horse as total motion. And I think, yes, the sun, the horse, the body, those guys scattered about the world, so soon forgetting how to whirl and kneel, those are the ones that get on best here in the desert – although the sun, the horse, the body would sound kitsch in New York; here where the colour is just blue and copper, it’s all right.

      Here in the desert, here you see straight, past Tex and Smith, past all the other platforms with the dead, some with the dying too, I see, and there the guys have taken out their hammers and are making the precious pieces to be put on mantelshelves and walls, the icons, the bejewelled creeping and jumping things that infest us here, and they will much increase, until some guys decide to dig that sewage system. And I think, that all in all, although our system of rights is not so hot, owing to having nothing except the things that differentiate ourselves, our skins, our tongues – and the marshals shooting the herds and confiscating – they do what’s required to make us a quite democratic, a quite progressive place. The guys get together to hand out justice – I see them giving some guy a going over, too bad it isn’t Dr Weiss or Dr Weiss – and sitting up here in the sun and smell, the copper bodies in the copper dust, the sky blue as a bowl, I suddenly recall – the voices.

Where do the voices fit in here – all these tourists who lay down their voice for immortality? And I know it’s only air, that the real part is thinking what to do with all the tapes. And a terrible sad­ness comes, and I see the little peepshows jumping up and down like bellows with the women dancing, and the taptap chingching of hammers making souvenirs, the guys beating each other up, the temple walls, the stupas, the funeral platforms, and all the shit we haven’t figured out what to do, whether it’s a public or a private problem – and I think, ‘Fuck it! We’ve made a city, shaped like a spider’s web. We’ve become seds, and we’re becoming hets.’ And over there, perhaps it brings itself up close with some electrical effect, is San Francisco, as if it’s some kind of artist’s model mocking us to get it right. And I tumble down my pole. I think I dance, a dance of rage, a dance that brings back all those good days, learning the magician’s trade, and sleeping in the pickup, having beers. And I think, ‘How can I break this nightmare up, this dump, this dustheap?’

Winding it up. First, that ‘conquering somewhere’; then defending it and then, through banquets of syncretism and purges of monetarism, slowly, slowly drawing back. The Andean provinces, the Atlantis Attraction Park, a share in Mozambique, a small but tidy Mongol steppe – the names go back: North Chach, Balkh, add to my titles perhaps king of Zabul. Spencer kept busy, Sangster with the De Soto franchise for all the petty cauldron states that we shall centre – now on Kabul, now Peshawar, and sometimes, thinking fuck it, away to Ulan Bator. No, goddam it, I renounce all this.

I come down from my pole, my platform, and there is Carradine.

I ask him, ‘Well, Carradine, what you do before the fall?’ I don’t care what it was: agent, spy, salesman, what does it matter?

‘I was a ghostwriter.’

Well, so. ‘Carradine, you take dope, I see you from my platform. Not expecting a trip to Marquez, then?’

He says ‘The VP did it all the time. Kept running out the tent, and doing it, and all the guys could see him. It’s just a bad habit, Jayman. Besides, the problem is, that I’m afraid. The guys are afraid, and that’s why they do all these killings. And the women don’t get a good shake here, Jayman.’

‘What they afraid of everyone else don’t have to be?’

‘When the settlers settle in, there’s a lot of fighting.’

‘I know,’ I say. ‘To know is to care. Some men kill because they fear, and some because they’re confident bullies. Then again, there are all those somewhere in between. Do I have you down right as one of this last bunch?’

‘Yes, I guess so, Jayman. But you can’t give up on us humans, just because ...’ and his deference and dislike flit across his face like bat wings.

‘Because I’m not afraid of death? You mean that, Carradine? A society of people scared is no good at all. Conquer the fear of death, Carradine. Like me. And if you can’t do it that way, you have to call the cops, get your order that way, external, not internal. Teargas and billies. That’s your option.’

‘But Jayman, the cops here is savage. They’ve no respect, and they shakedown everyone. And Bridget too – the guys don’t think that she should dance.’ He gets bolder. ‘You’ve no fear of death because you’re dead, Jayman.’

‘That doesn’t follow, Carradine. And as for Bridget, she dances because that’s all she knows how to do. It’s her centre. Yours is being a ghost. We can’t all be vestals, Carradine, giving everyone a bang on their birthday and living off gratitude.’

‘I’m sorry, Jayman, that remark about Bridget is unforgivable.’

‘You can’t forgive me anyway.’

‘Jayman, we have great prospects, a chance for new sensibility. These guys from all over, all victims, and now hustling to the tops of their little piles. And your example, Jayman, so central, so valuable. Just think, when all those communist guys got pushed out, they appointed all kinds of priests and writers, diplomats, magistrates, all that stuff, them new guys did.’

I adjust my crown. It is one of the red ones, with gilt balls and a bird of paradise feather: ‘Of course the cops are big, Carradine. You want some little guy in there kicking the shit out of you? And if you want Marx, Freud, Einstein you get all the rest too. Me – I made this revolution so far in advance, there’s no goddam base for it at all. All I’ve got is nomads settling in to be hets.’

But I had no manual, only what the other shamans told me.

‘But Jayman,’ he persists, ‘I was the first, the only. There was no revolution then.’

‘No, Carradine,’ I say impatiently. ‘You had no idea of your own, and I didn’t want you. We voted not to take you, to work out some scam just with the voices, some pageant of heritage, stuff like that. And then, Carradine, you just oozed in.’

‘People are like that, Jayman.’

‘Not funny, and not cute, Carradine. I did what had to be done. And shall do it again.’

But what? Inevitably trivial, without the rhetoric. A speech on rights, by nomad Carradine, former dog-owner: a voice in the desert.

And yet, that’s where they all are, all the wisdom, all the penny pieces of a life’s schemes and dreams. In the tape tanks. I say, ‘Carradine, why don’t you find out the next step by quizzing the voices? Take a few thousand kilometres of chatter, ghost it all out. Use your own initiative if you must. And while you’re doing that, I’ll think about conquering somewhere modest, small and near, but not Ecbatana, poor type of guy there. And I’ll tell you a secret too, young Carradine. Our political economy hit a row of lemons. Digging for oil, our Dr Spencer found the biggest mine of gold ingots ever. We’re richer than all the empires now, Carradine; the only thing, we can’t move, except on my mule.’

‘This money could be the death of us,’ he says, ‘and I don’t see the women profiting at all.’

‘You’re right, of course, young Carradine. But it leaves us a problem with our productive base, not to mention the guys themselves. We have to watch we don’t send the whole global design, and everything else that has a value or a price, in TILT. And that is why I told you it’s a secret. From all you guys, Sola, and Bridget. Only the doctors and their ghost will know.’

And the guys who think that gold belongs to them, and stuck us on it as cheap guards, until they want to come and dig it up themselves. For what? More fear of death, or fear of cops and running from them? Or was there some big design? To buy up every Lincoln? Give every human one gold shoe? Or maybe make a big gold sun and hang it up, and find a way – that Dr Jim, or now that Dr James, would have to do: to make it seem friendly and warm to everyone, but in a special way and, naturally, there it would be, even when it rained, and when the other sun started to pit and tarnish, bits flaking off as long as Florida, flash out like magnesium.

I think, that after all, exploitative relations are the ones that last and last and run and run and gnaw and gnaw, and if I give up those, then what more is there in the ones that flip and flop and fly; and humming this and skatting that it comes to me, perhaps it comes to Carradine as well, that I don’t have relationships of either kind. So I say, quite kindly, to young Carradine, as though a ghostwriter was different from any other kind, and what do I care anyway – an adman, politician, game show, scripts all fucking scripts, at least the voices in their tank are all authentic, unwritten and unscripted, unremembered too. ‘Look, Carradine, I’d like to be benign all round, and give you rights, and everyone else, just what you want – order, utility, I’ll be your arbiter – tradition in its place, a certain modern flatness too, and then to make the whole thing work, of course you need your scams. The trouble is, young Carradine, we don’t have that much of anything, and I fear the guys out there are pretty tough and unforgiving now: they like the things that even when there’s lots of them, an abundance, make the quiet life a dream, poor Carradine – like dope and M16s, and girls in lamé pants. But if it’s rights you want, young Carradine, and feeling equal, writing your ghost stories – I won’t say ‘try it back in San Francisco’, because I guess it didn’t work. But here – it’s up to you, Carradine, it’s up to you.’

He looks deeply disappointed. I hadn’t even mentioned the guys wired up like pinball machines, bouncing about like suma champs in video games. And being dead but mobile gives me the distance that I want, though I must take the blame – if blame I want – for Sola’s petrified and gloomy state, for Bridget’s leaping – but then, fuck it all, no one is taking blame for me, and so, begone dull thoughts! I float up to my platform, take a new crown with silken earflaps and a diamond fresh off some bathroom shelf, the guys all cheer, it’s my time to strut about, I’m their indestructible man, they let me win at craps. And all the time I’m thinking – how can I get out of this, and also, how can we win, and get to keep the gold and spend it, conquer something, and it doesn’t have to be a city, and I hope it’s not, even to think of such a thing makes my bones itch with tedium and the detail, and not in the end just be voices, just be more eels dying in that tank, or dead. Unheard, anyway, unremembered.

I think: how can I save these guys. And how can I get them off my back. Can I sell them, maybe? But then, Russia has lots of gold, and doctors even, no one will give you a price for all that, you maybe cut off a little piece, someone’ll give you something for it, but as a souvenir. I want someone – maybe at the mayoral level, even of state governor – to take the lot. I remember Dr Sangster saying, ‘The reason no one wants Russia is there’s too many communists left there,’ and if he’s right, I wonder what it is here that we’ve got, something of everything, I should think, and all worth just about zero. But then I think that maybe Doc Spencer had it right, who said, ‘Jayman, we have here a force, guys who’ve done everything, who’ve been down the hole, who’ve been trainmen all over, who’ve planted coke and locked up guys for planting it, and guys who know you go straight to hell if you just think of doing dope, and not just a hell like hospital to die forever in, but with a personal god attending, who’s partly like your grannie screaming at you, partly like one big devil, with six sets of arms, and you twist one way, he’s sticking thunderbolts in your navel. A force, Jayman. Not a quantity, you get me, Jayman, a force.’

The guys from Ecbatana’s kidnapping people, taking them to Marquez. Well, they would. They don’t belong to anyone. It’s just cosmetic, they don’t want trouble with us, but just to keep us sad and vulnerable. Turn them against me, and every time I hear the Ecbatana crowd of hets has come and taken off – maybe three hundred guys who’s settled in, and had their stuff taken off them by the marshals so they can start real clean – I feel my good life receding and bubble and flake like old paint coming off.

So, what they do with those guys – sure as hell don’t want more guys like that around in San Francisco. Maybe they’re digging tunnels somewhere, using human screws to ream out ventilation shafts. Maybe they want scarecrows on the buildings, or human traffic lights. But they don’t want us because of our knowledge and our sensitivity, and they don’t want to send guys back, it would be like replanting Irish stew.

 

 

 

 

– 5 –

the ride to the abyss

 

 

Carradine didn’t disappoint me. The camp, the city, was lit up with tales, and scepticism, of how we’d found a mine full of freshly minted ingots of three-nine pure gold. I’d enjoyed talking to Carradine about reason, rights and planning, and policies and decisions, representation and corporations. But I did get over to him, that there was a time and a time to sell out, how the communists had found, that if you sell out when you’re bankrupt, nobody is interested. What you must do is to be rich and aggressive, and yet at the same time vulnerable and impoverished. You must be a good bargain, but also a lump of hot iron, to be juggled till it cools.

The news made history in the sects. Sola’s hysteria made thousands of converts, self-mutilation and mutism, processions of penitents, desire and pursuit of martyrdom. Bridget’s dancing, on the other hand, fired the guys up, and there were many cases of all-night ball-dropping sessions. Bridget was charmed.

Spencer said, ‘Jayman, if this gold’s a lie, what’ll you do with the believers?’

‘I guess those who can’t sublimate will be executed. Perhaps there’s something in the voices, some prophecy, some certainty?’

‘Sure there is. Who doesn’t want to find a hole full of gold that doesn’t need refining?’

I had said to Carradine, ‘The history of evolution, this crap about holding our heads up so they don’t bump on rocks, and then siting reason in the top cavity, is really a bourgeois invention. Bourgeois ape spent his time upright so his wallet didn’t fall out his pocket. This stuff about gold doesn’t take in nomads, not real guys, the truckers of this world, the foot-cowboys.’ I thought too, it doesn’t take in the accountants either.

Spencer didn’t bother long about the lie: ‘Well, Jayman, it’s your lie, and Carradine’s responsible for spreading it. So in the end, he’ll get his, and you’ll get yours. Except you can’t, being vulnerable only to men’s opinion, not their toasting forks.’

He gets together with Dr Garnet, and they start designing labarums, and cut an inscription with our victories to be filled in later.

‘That’s a beautiful labarum,’ I say. It was a mock-gold model of the barbed stiff, Smith, who had become a charm, a mascot, immediate promotion to top man of any totem.

Spencer says, ‘If I hadn’t been a chief of my nation, Jayman, I should have been a goldsmith. Dr Garnet a monumental mason, if she hadn’t been so flighty with her axe. And you, Jayman, what you plan to do with all this stuff we’re carving for you – and Dr James making up a crown you can get sixty radio channels on, and Dr Sangster making up that big Strato Chief, high on a pediment to give the guys something to aim for? A lovely car, that was, sleep three on the front seat alone ...’

‘I’m going to sell you, Spencer. You and all the guys. It’s the best thing for me. It’s the best thing for you. Then I shall go back to my secret practices, and just being an ordinary immortal.’

‘Haha, Jayman. But where’s we’ll attack?’

Still can’t see it’s over, the good old living in the present. Now, it’s success or bust, and being caught and sitting in Tex’s old office, the VP in the washroom screaming and crying, and Marquez trying to use my subcontinent like he’d use his office shredder. Empire now creeping down the spine of the Andes, guys ready to hide and breed in Terra del Fuego, even. The Kirghiz branch getting adherents, and mullahs giving nulla ostas, and everyone is joining the rising star. Qualifications: poverty, faith, universal ambition. And resistance – to poverty, faith, universalism.

‘Do I sound cynical, Spencer?’

‘You’ve not failed yet.’

I draw on my mantle. It shows all the areas we have influence. Dr Sangster says, ‘You get off on wearing crowns, the “kiss my hand” stuff, eh, Jayman. Deference corrupts.’

Perhaps. I have a soft spot for pantheism, though. There are things I’d rather do: ‘conversations with women’, ‘where to after Rock’ – the real things. Dr James says, ‘The warriors reject the Jain code, the officers want weapons.’

I say, ‘They’re not supposed to be professionals. Give them pills.’

‘Which pills?’

‘Give the officers officer pills, and so on.’

We have diffused our message, our attraction, all over. To me, it seems the usual thing, the kind of hierarchical communism that the uptight guys impose on themselves, and the bargoers have billied into them. I smile, thinking of being boss of bosses, but it has a ring, a true ring, although the other bosses are scamsters and diminished by being in my shadow – Sangster could run a ward, a city, even a province or a satrapy, a corporation, even, if he’d been a different colour, head of GM. By such shadows of difference are we kept from greatness, I think, as I settle my crown on my ears, and wonder if the mule should have one too – the fighting guys being so quick at visual gags, and we having no common language, except at times we crank up the voices into symphonies, and have a premiere, and it’s like a big ball game, and the journalists and movie guys we got hanging on to us, they show it everywhere, upriver in Brazil and Ulan Bator, and everyone together and together they must make fuck all of it, because it’s meaningless, just human sound, like it was piles of iguanas or frying chicken legs, or those frizzling sounds the alien space probes have brought back from other stars, that sounds like new wave but is really feeback from the ship itself beaching on sound molecules or earwax, like Sola used to say, the sea is in our ears, the universe riffs on our eardrums. And I see that Dr Garnet has prepared our drummers, magnificent, like at a Roman soccer game or on the galleys, so I say to all the doctors, ‘Come on, we’re back in present time again, so let’s decide – where does this expedition go? What do we take? And who comes back, and who’s the spy, and do we win or lose?’

As soon as they felt their skins in peril, they lost faith in me as general.

I say, ‘I don’t want to walk further than San Francisco, but it’s a place for drinking in, not ruling.’

Sangster says, ‘We can’t declare war, and we’ve nothing to fight one with.’

‘The voices make a powerful clatter. Millions of presences, no one in San Francisco bothers what anyone says. And if you want a reason for a battle – think of the herds they took and killed, think of the guys who’re taken off in vans to Ecbatana and sold to work in bars on every strip, in every stripmill, sent back home and billied – everywhere, all over the planet, we are struggling, against this state and that, in the name of this or that. The question is, if we could take a city, what we do with it?’

‘We could sell it,’ says Dr Garnet.

‘We could turn it all into a ballgame,’ says Dr Sangster wisely, ‘but again, we’d lose.’

Spencer whispers to me, ‘These imitations that I’ve made, they’ll never pin that on us, they’re all marked counterfeit.’

‘But where?’ I ask.

‘They’re marked in Pahlevi, in Karosthi and in Georgian,’ he says.

I see Carradine skulking about. ‘Carradine, Carradine, I know you will betray us. But what are we worth? How you make a price, a market for us?’

He protests, first his innocence, then his ignorance. ‘I get burned up thinking of Bridget dancing, and there’s Sola ... all you guys can think of is sexist things, ballgames and wars and forgery, and then drinking and doing dope and all. It burns me up – the fine ideals betrayed, the underclass will have its stereotypes confirmed,’ and he moves into top gear justification.

Spencer says, ‘If we took prisoners, the Weisses could fix their teeth, so if they shut their mouths they’ll blow their heads off. But otherwise, we need some military machine. Exploding gas tanks, like that maker fixed them once, some Dr Pepper plant that blows, goes critical, how do I know? I’m just an ethnic, all that stuff’s meant for me anyway,’ and I tell him if it’s self pity he’s into he can sit here and sort out a few billion voices on a million miles of tape, and he looks at me as if I’ve raked his face with claws.

And then some guys bring round Tex and Smith, they’ve made them into standards, and Smith is smiling like he never smiled in life, and Tex looks like a blob of something that breaks up beach parties in the Fifties, and the Peruvians say it’s the skins we should be worried about, they’ve been reading up the literature, and I tell them the last skins were nailed on barn doors decades ago, and what the fuck they want with a big dead city, to collect the water bills and that stuff, and they shrug, and I say the hell with that c’est-la­-vie stuff, and I should know, seeing it from both sides.

And they cheer inconsequentially, and Spencer has a big map of nothing out, like they give away in gas stations, of all the places you can get stranded, and others where there once was gas until they closed them down; and thank you Tex, perhaps we should mount you at the head, conquering in the sign of your bloodymindedness, and we’re all aware of being off on historic missions, and Dr James proposes sending a few million voices as a diversion through Bolivia and tying up the US army there, and dropping a big packet on Minneapolis, and I ask why the fuck do that, and he says it’s not just his home town, but part of a diabolic triangle with Ottawa and Frunze. And Dr Garnet’s getting nervous, and says we should go and smash up Ecbatana, and see if any offers come, to go on or go away, and I say I’m not smashing up a one-mule town like Ecbatana in all my costume, mobilising all these warriors and doctors and burnished stiffs, and where’s their class, the trouble is we’re starting from the wrong place, and should I not be like a light in the night and in the day, and they all follow? And then we settle for a while, but staying true to being nomads, and if possible leaving the aliens and the accountants far behind, and not messing with the hets, but keeping desert purity. And I smell that purity, it comes in the tents like a carbolic sea, and I hear Bridget and her mates, are dancing like damned souls, the pulque bars are doing well and full of warriors, and the sects are looking round for guys to sacrifice.

I say to Spencer, ‘We’re too far on to retreat, but the spirit’s wrong,’ and he says that I should know, and I think fuck yes, I’ll have to take the lid off the jar that leads them down to hell tonight, all these guys in feathers and dust, their burlap knapsacks full of branding irons and jimmies, all kinds of things to make the other guy scream, if you can get close to him and stick it in. And I wonder if it really is worth beginning another of the great world empires or religions in this way, and maybe one should just fill out an application form, and maybe Marquez has one. But then again, to speak of Marquez, means we all get lined up for judicial murders of some kind, and I don’t feel the guys should go that way.

Dr James says, ‘These campaigns always start big, and in the end the casualties are small, no bigger than a hurried leaving from the ballgame, a Saturday night that goes bad sometime into Sunday and you have a couple militia units there, some private cops, and maybe some open prison, coupla poor neighbourhoods gets hot, and in the end you got a few gangs, some mafia, various kinds, your two militias, couple of police forces, some private cops and prisoners.

‘Say you got in all some three, four thousand, and some light artillery, and maybe a hundred million bucks of stuff that’s passing down the chain, a prestige thing for two, three, gangs. A little taffarooly, nothing more. Few ethnic units hanging round, but nothing big deployed. You get your hundred, coupla hundred dead or snatched away, some chemical stuff, some hostages ...’

I interrupt him, ‘Dr James, I know, I been on campaigns and wars. I know the way guys get killed nowadays, the big stuff just gets polished, and mostly the guys is hatcheted and macheted in back streets or just cut up, or drowned in rain butts, crushed between subway trains. Or maybe if it’s religion or ethnic, or empire-bonding, or frontier-ironing, or just wars between provinces, or cattle or women, things like that – maybe you got a thousand dead, and then you got your new statesmen and parties, maybe a priest or two is coming up and looking fresh, and maybe you never get again those long campaigns of face to face, your militants and your military, and not your soldiers gassing families, all that stuff. I know, I know, but, Dr James, although I know that what has changed is style, and know that many of the campaigns I been in and even planned were real kitsch stuff, and will put it all down to doctoring that you guys do, and maybe the Weisses too, although ... and anyway, what defines us, as I see it, Dr James, is that we’ve been styled right out. We’re just poor guys, of various unfashionable colours, in Marquez’s eyes. The VP saw us as a kind of super-bin where everything might end up, even build another shit-city here and send the world’s guys who’re used to standing on the street all day, maybe hustling something, maybe like young Carradine here, is looking for some big cause to hype on, maybe get to sell it, or someone. And I insist, nothing against the city as an idea, nor yet the desert, had good times in both, though the city you get beaten more, more often, but in the desert, tie you up, you fry, you roast,’ and the thought of Tex and Smith runs round the table like a frightened hare. ‘But what I ask,’ I go on, ‘is still the same. Where do we go? Who with? For what? What do they hit us with? And what we got? And all those guys out there, are making book: what on, and what’s our odds, for doing what?’

Dr Garnet runs outside, and starts shaking the odds out of the guys, and I think, that our sensibility is pretty good, here am I, in my boss of bosses clothes, with all these doctor guys around, and we’re all discussing how to keep the casualties down, and have discussions with that Marquez guy, who must be thinking too about Tex, and about Smith, and all the provocations that he’s given us, having defined our threat to being poor, just that, no other value. Well, so the Greeks were poor, and the Incas, and they had less gold than we have.

We take a roll-call. Between pride and despair, Dr James, revealed in his colours, a street butterfly and radical, fallen into the deep treasure-pit that he has studied. ‘We should do it. It’s symbols.’

Dr Garnet has nowhere else to go. Freedom has left her with her axe. ‘Forward isn’t always upward, Jayman.’

And the voices? And the Weisses, in their white coats for dirty business? Deeper in than all of us.

We ask Bridget, who likes to dance, Sola, with that need to love, that need for love, she turns to tears, like a distillery in reverse. We ask, we ask. The guys outside would fall into their various crumbly parts without us, into their older religions, even older empires. Regimenting, like the voices, all mixed up and neglected in their tanks. Were they supposed to be wet or dry, a low voltage keeping them fired up and wired, perhaps? Maybe they’re all expired, legions of last thoughts trudged off.

Dr Sangster asks, ‘Should we have gone on to true communism, notwithstanding, Jayman?’

I’m angry, and I say, ‘You of all people, you and Spencer, ask me that! Endlessly inflating scams, and penalties to match, all some tedious leaping before your ancestors, who care fuck all, Spencer and Sangster. And where were—’ I nearly say we, but remember I’m the leader now, and say, ‘And where were they, the guys who you were riding on?’

Spencer says, falsely chastened, ‘We got you a mule, Jayman.’

‘You stole me a mule, Spencer. Carries the death penalty in the desert, one crime they won’t condone.’

I could make a populist speech, and they would applaud. I could make an anti-populist speech, they might applaud me more, or less. I’m not interested in populism, or in making speeches. I wired my power into being the most selfish, successful shaman in the history of the trade. That’s what the guys are interested in: power. But here we start again, and all over again, with nothing we can use, brawling and dancing, dealing off the bottom, and always getting caught. Justice or being – the only answers, but in a speech, it’s wasted. Perhaps up on the platform, I can see further still, but only so as to decide – does it go on, does the empire have its day, another one, and then its night?

I say, ‘We’re not modern here, we can’t do anything. We’ve all the voices and they’re useless,’ and I hear Spencer and Sangster start the litany, ‘A thoroughly modern desert,’ and I cut them short, ‘That’s not enough.’

I give them a speech, cutting through the voices, and maybe some guys hear it. I can see Bridget dancing naked as a bean. There’s one happy. If she hears my voice, she doesn’t miss a beat.

There’s Sola, practising being our temple steps. So there’s another. And in front, there’s a pepper soup of guys broiling about, and I think, well, most of you’s got no plans to get killed or even dented today. So, like Dr James has said, these wars nowadays are either tafferoolies between gangs, or else the cops bring up the tanks and make it hamburger square – so in a way, the thing’s demystified, the thing to do is not do time, is not get into prison, where they can really do you harm, not tiring of it, and not having the press around, the good thing about those guys is they need colour in their pictures. And I remember my first sentence, sentence of my speech: ‘You got to get there on your own’, and the last, ‘And you got to find your own way back.’ And that is when a lot of guys took off and smashed up Ecbatana bad, which was good for them but bad for us, when we got to town, everything was waiting for us, and the cops had those little tanks without a crew, that crawl about and pick you up, like robot shoppers in the supermarket.

But in between my first, my last, I told them about everything I knew, about the longueurs of the ancient world, still going on inventing things, and doing variations on its deities, defending itself like a crab, and going on, copying the empires. And then dying, and having nomad guys drink its blood out of its skull, and park their mules in the cathedrals and all that, and then becoming seds again, and starting off inventing things, and building cities and cathedrals, until the moderns came along, and then they got their blood drunk out their skulls. And I asked if I was too complicated for them. Of course the guys didn’t reply, I was just loudspeakers, and I guessed whatever it was we were, we wouldn’t get to drink blood out of anyone’s skull, and that perhaps was our message, that if true communism wasn’t on the cards, then at least smashing up some bars and having a good time and being beaten by the cops would be our mission. And I told them about the mountains, and the silver trees, the blue skies, blue lakes, the silver fish, the silver otters, and how the old silver Corvairs used to race on back roads on a Sunday afternoon, and what they could expect in hell, and what they might expect in Heaven. And if the ancient world was stuck into itself for centuries, then surely hells and heaven were even worse – the guys who’d done it all, and now just pale copies, drifting through the air like viruses, and Lenin avoiding Trotsky, and Hitler and Stalin maybe saying hi, and with all the used-up guys, a kind of compost of kitsch. Well, guys, is it worth it? And there’s a thin crust of ‘yeah’, and the doctors are all arming up and putting padding on their heads, and I say, ‘Well, I sure as fuck aren’t coming in the bus with all you guys,’ and I plan to leave the mule here too, and maybe get to ride him this evening.

I pass high as a cloud over Ecbatana, which isn’t burning now. Now I’m in big city. And I wish Sola and Bridget could have come along, and then I think, better they didn’t, didn’t rise to this, but then no more have we, Sola is time, time of the ancient world, in drifts. Better to survive, penetrated from all sides, becoming monumental, than to penetrate. All that power, diffusing into – cosmic strut, street democracy. Thinking of ancient worlds, colliding with Bridget, young being, kicking up her legs. And yet, and yet, it isn’t happening here in the city, nor in the desert. Not happening in this bar, not happening in the nineteenth century where these old crocks of time and being, tatty Greeks and youth freaks, still hang out.

Carradine joins me in a bar: I ask, ‘Why were you so keen on them dogs?’

‘Lot of money in sporty dogs. The only way these days you get autonomy, and ready bucks.’

‘Nomading is done. Question too dull for answer.’

Carradine says, ‘When it’s all done – if they notice, now that politics is over, these demonstrations don’t make much fuss – I’ll go back to ghosting.’

‘No, Carradine. You are a founder, and betrayer. You take your lesson as it comes hot off the shovel.’

I think, we should have done more with the voices. Had them say something, fix them up so they spoke to each other. But then, goddam it, they’re dead, and dislocated. Aspirations, spring wishes, new year hopes.

‘This booze don’t seem to work, young Carradine.’

He grins. ‘It’s no-booze day, Jayman. That Marquez is bringing in new rules – some days no dope, others no booze, no dancing, no sex, no this, no that. The guys here are wild about it. It’s a fashion that can spread and spread. One-world conformism, and then a whole new culture. Will shake the market up, revive the taste for things – ancient and modern, and whatever’s in between.’

‘City days is done,’ I say.

‘I quite agree, Jayman. And desert days and ocean days, and holidays and holy days. All done, and not begun, not yet savoured and held to the light.’

‘What light, Carradine? Judas money, Carradine?’

‘Ah yes, Jayman, the new transparent money, the glass nickels, driving out Spencer’s fool’s gold.’

‘Never drive out gold, Carradine. The secret of your betrayal, and your reward. Those fucking ingots, Carradine, the only secret that you had to sell,’ I see three shocked faces staring at me through the window. I think, ‘Usually it’s dark in here like the bottom of the barrel’, but of course, no-booze day is daylight time, and the faces start to jig, and they are Tex and Smith, both dead and mounted, painted and varnished, and my mule.

The bar is full of uniforms, and most guys are wearing guns and handcuffs, and little radios are cackling jokes, and I turn to Carradine again, the faces in the window seem leaning there, not urgent, and I guess the doctors are stocking up with technical stuff before the war or tafferooly starts, whatever, and say, ‘Carradine, are we your scam? Are you the cop that invented all this crap, the nomads turning into seds and hets, sounds like their scheme, the aliens in the out-rings, the tourists, and the crap about our sentences, the voices? Is it all your scam?’

And I look round, and see all these guys on the law-scam, and the barman’s reading a police gazette, and there are some young lawyers giving each other dope, and here there’s watchmen and drivers of money-trucks, and bank guards, private cops, and public ones is spell­ing them outside, our own guys are full of scams and devices that’s all set up so if they fail, they get a prize to turn themselves in. The black guys get to shoot the black guys, and the Peruvians turn each other in for a couple of bucks the dozen, and the only ones who don’t betray are us who is a team, the doctors, part scared and part ambitiously despairing of making it alone. And it’s not an appetising thought, and so I think, well, fuck it, Jayman, all this making history and selling people was just the scene you got out of, with the shamanising and the firewalking, not the scam but discipline and remembering the instructions, on your own, the dying and the resurrection, the real dead, not these taped spooky things – and it was to be your own immortal self, not to be king of kings, not to sit on the throne of God on Sundays, bothering the vestals, all that crap.

I ask Carradine, more forcefully, and my hands and breath make the little tin struts in his neck twist and bend, ‘Carradine, old buddy boy, did you set all this up, you and your goddam marshals and your dogs, and get the guys to come and spin their stories and to scheme their scams?’

But it’s useless to insist, because it’s clear enough, and we each in his way was taken in, and only Bridget and poor Sola didn’t care, not either way. And so I throw him down, and some cop laughs and says, ‘One away’ or some such thing, and I think goddam him and all these goblins down to hell, and there are the mule and Tex and Smith, all propped up still against the window of the bar, and I think how sick and old that mule is looking, it would be an insult to it, putting a knot in its tail, pulling its head up – and I think, fuck it, it’s wearing shoes, whoever can have fitted them – and then, of course, they’re gold, and in some part of Spencer’s scam, gold throwing-horseshoes are part of the recreation budget, getting past the border guards, and having them left over to stick on horsey’s feet. So then, the ingots? The gold horseshoes, as a king of kings should have?

When they stole the mule, they made sure it was fitted with the real thing.

But still a mule’s for carrying things, and loading Tex and Smith – Tex’s flesh abundant, like plankton, Smith more considerate, the hook for suspending him set firm. I set off down the street.

There’s always cops here with their horses, the lady cops on donkeys, and in the Peruvian quarters often riding llamas and other sheeplike things: the animals we’ve left are valuable, like Carradine’s dogs, and I remember that in cities like Prague and Sofia, before the communists moved over and let in the poets and accountants, the big publicity thing was cops on horses. Maybe you got to keep and eat your horse or he pulled your cart when you retired, there’s a good side so they say to every job. So all in all, I’m not too obvious to the crowds, who in any case don’t give fuck all, moving about not to be disturbed nor looking long at anything.

In the desert, they all walk about as if they’re officers, all wearing braid and rings and flags, but here, they’re all just simple soldiers, don’t look round too much in case they see an officer, and it reminds them of their station, and so I’m just a lawman, toting stiffs, my crown, the golden horseshoes – they may even think I figure in some food store myth, or try to make a point against their stolid disenchantment, as if I’m trying to spook them, when all I want is to see who Carradine has sold us to.

I’m feeling good, and shaking off the grey of no-booze day, and it’s good to think that being dead, nothing but good can come, even delight, and ching ching goes the mule-shoes.

The doctors are all here, and Dr Garnet is whooping, and she’s getting sisters round, they think maybe they should have gone on further, and not got stuck in history and seminars and all that stuff, and Dr Garnet whirls her axe and looks pleased they threw her out of wherever she’d once been. And indeed, she’s a credit to us, something to offer that is blood, not sweat and tears like Bridget and poor Sola. And Sangster tells me they have found young Carradine, all broken up, and what the fuck did I do to him, and why? I say, ‘I don’t even remember touching him. He wanted to be blamed, the best way to get blame is to betray your comrades, besides, the violence here comes direct, not through some bunch of cops,’ and Sangster says that anyway the guys have changed the programming in city hall, they’ve virused all the pay cheques and the pension plans, the no-booze days and free-dope days, and I say, ‘For what it’s worth, this is the beginning of the end of San Francisco,’ and it turned out this is true, and I could add, ‘And for all this phase of modern life,’ and that is true as well, but not so hard to say, or to predict.

Spencer is throwing rocks at the glass front of the museum of ethnic man, there are some plaster chiefs inside, and the rocks are bouncing off the armoured glass, and I see the tears are running down his face, but it all seems a doctorly thing to try, and unavailing, since the guys will try their guns out on the glass, and it resists the bullets, even nickel ones, so it sure won’t yield to Spencer.

Dr James is pleased that his guys’ armoured suits resist the various stuff the cops is using, chemicals and prods, and noise machines, and general looted schemes from Fifties comic books, it bounces off. But mostly we just stand about, and watch the little tanks go sniff around for trouble, but they’re wired to go for gangs and guys who’re running, and mostly we are street-accustomed, and don’t move much. Really, the best things we can do is fuck up the payroll and the sewage system, which is unglamorous, but soon the whole of civilisation as the guys have gotten used to it will start to crumble; and the end of Ecbatana’s more dramatic, but a place like that you can put up again in two weekends, whereas the desert, there’s things there you don’t know what they’re for, still less you want to copy them, or even know why it was ever there at all.

The Weisses are around, I see them with syringes round casualties, and sometimes turn them on themselves, and Mrs Weiss waves some huge shot of juice at me and screams – ‘We’re the real pros, know what we’re doing,’ and I don’t doubt it, and I nod slightly, but I feel my crown shift, and I think, how I feel better in the desert, and we are lost, kicking and picking around in this, this jungle where the parrots flew away, the dancers in the bars are all stood down, and I think, maybe we could all go to a movie somewhere, a series of old Chinatown horror and science specials, but the king of kings and all his court can’t join the line for tickets, and I think, goddam it, we can’t go in without paying. And so we stand around irresolute, the San Franciscans looting their own stuff like crazy, but our guys don’t take a thing, in any case, we’ve no gas and no power, so what are we going to do with anything?

I say to Sangster, ‘I think we’ve reached the summit and the end of nomading. Nothing we want, and not wanting to become seds. Conquered everything in sight, that wasn’t worth it. Staying? Or moving on?’

Sangster nods sadly, but I guess he’ll head off and find some old Transam, grind round until he’s run it out of gas. Guys are running, no one taking any notice. Good guys, but empty. Should have chosen, between real nomadism, real communism. One or other. But instead ... and are they real? Sure, they’re real, but now the good San Franciscans are going to do what they do when it gets dark, and I sense an ebbing of guys and doctors down the street, all settling back in territory familiar, and some will fall back in the net, and others go back, back to the desert, calling themselves tour operators and suchlike – and can they then refuse us gas? I guess not.

Though the age of cities and the citizen is ending, the dark structures here still have a mindless presence, and begin to light with the anonymous power that comes from guys throwing switches miles away. And here it is just magic, no one in these empty arks. So, do I and the mule want pastoral?

Another time, I’ll do all this in the mountains, the desert’s too easy to walk out of.

I am alone, figure from the ancient world, faced with a ‘Don’t Walk’ sign. I’d fly myself off, but with this mule, it seems absurd, and yet, to wait for the next phase – it could take centuries, before the light changes the traffic may disappear.

I ease the mule into ‘forward’, and grudgingly he goes. Two cops with late model horses sandwich me in, and soon I’m up in city hall, the mule parked somewhere and sad, and I am going down the corridor to the office that was Tex and Smith’s.

A secretary comes by. ‘Gee, Mr Marquez, that charcoal bed is real hot, real coming along all nice,’ and she sees me and stops, and I see Tex and Smith propped against the wall, all glistening, the barbs in Smith’s skull make him a turnip, some root long for the pulling, and Tex, well, like a Bosnian bean soup, maybe; and some nostalgia for the desert comes.

Marquez is formal and uncertain, ‘Hi, king of kings, how’s things,’ then feels his dignity lost with the rhyme.

I acknowledge him, ‘Boss,’ and wait.

He doesn’t make a fuss at all about Tex and Smith, ‘After all, you were the head of state, you can do what you want, we had a president once who ordered all kinds of murders through his agency, no one said a thing, and besides, thanks to their totemising, I am promoted here, that being how our democracy works, a spirit of forgive­ness and efficiency.’

He insists on Carradine, and I’m surprised, I just slumped young Carradine down between two bar stools, and besides, he isn’t dead, and anyway a spy. And Marquez goes on, how our religions break some constitutional thing about not being meant seriously, not having, as he says, ‘the sceptic’s clause, that it all may, or on the other hand, not may’, and I say, well, there’s some guys like to watch the dancers, some to gamble and others to take their religion seriously, and sacrifice each other for it, and he should see them as attempts to leave absurdity behind, and Marquez says, ‘Haha, that was your big mistake, to leave the desert where you might be either in detention, and therefore not responsible for anything except being confined, or else a head of state and so a realistic object, like a stick, a rock. And how is Bridget, by the way? A loyal girl, and Sola too,’ and I say, ‘Yeah, if we were all like that, so single-minded,’ but then he’s off, and into scams, and do we want a city for the guys, and how Doc Spencer has given every Indian in the continent a fake doctor’s papers and a thesis or a white coat, depending on the kind, and it will take centuries to sort the market and their knowledge out, and Sangster and his cars, the Weisses wanted for mass murder or it may be losing patients’ records, and Dr James for exposure, but of what, who knows? and Dr Garnet for threatening men, and I am lost in all this fuzz of citations and their menace, so I say, ‘You going to pin all this on me,’ and the secretary bustles in and says the bed of charcoal is just about ready, ‘It’s singing with hot, it’s grey, but real mean, and when you turn the light off, it winks orange at you,’ so I guess I know what’s cooking for me.

And I don’t give a goddam, since I was trained for this, and so many times I’ve chased the goddam rabbit or whatever it is away from that big jar, or pitcher, moved the lid, and it says aaah as if there is some great relief, and down you look, right down to hell, but not like it was in Tex’s office where you float down for ever, down into the absurd, the pleasure of inventing it worn off by the decades of falling through it – but a more familiar, populous place.

Marquez says, ‘Everything I say seems to come out of movies, like ‘Yeah, it’s you we really want, the big one’, and I say, ‘Well, that’s your problem, Marquez,’ and I think, ‘Maybe they want a ransom, since a nomad king of kings isn’t worth a row of beans,’ and I think of Sola, and in a dignified way, I snigger.

‘Goddam it,’ Marquez says, ‘I feel embarrassed fooling around, and I guess my secretary’s let you in on our small surprise, because you know – if I may call you this – Jayman, old buddy, some crimes, some scams, you get away with, and they enrich the human stock, and we sure as hell intend the present era to go on, to last for ever, whatever it may cost, wherever it may centre, and whoever goes on down to hell to make it keep on sailing on. And your Spencers and Sangsters – all their ethnic crap is done, and so is Garnet, and the best thing that you’ve got is Bridget, even poor Sola—’

I interrupt, and say, ‘And the voices,’ though I’ve no idea what we shall do with them, and Marquez says, ‘The voices are like license plates, dear Jayman. The voices on those tapes are dead. We gave them to you cons, like other cons get licence plates to make. Dead, Jayman, dead.’

It’s a relief, because we never figured out how they could be of any use, and so it was just another San Francisco scam that failed to take us good guys in for long, the desert peoples never giving them a thought, or even understanding what they said, just some kind of voiceprints for social insurance numbers.

Marquez is really nervous now, he shows me this bed of clinkers, hot as hell, and the pincers, metal straps and all the kind of stuff he’s read up somewhere, is what you need to make a shaman scream and tell you all he knows, and I am calm, a calm as flat as deserts, and my body and my soul are flying off already, and maybe will go down to hell again, but that part of being dead can only come back up again, to where these other dead guys are, to where this dead guy Marquez and the pretty secretary is, and Tex and Smith, who deader than they are, no one is. The living part is flying now, and will rest up and wait, in that hard part, maybe of this planet, maybe somewhere that the aliens take me, those green and brown strips, the little lines of blue that’s water, the brown animals in the brown and green, that’s desert, pasture, mountains, there, where I feel free. Where Scythians once passed through.

And Marquez and the big mean guys from payroll division get me on the charcoal bed, and there’s a bad smell, but I guess it’s just their sweat, since one thing about a shaman is they never smell, even in extremis, and I think Marquez is going to hit me with some message, maybe with some piece of wisdom from the current age, and I am slipping down, I see the tree, the jar, the lid, the rabbit standing by it, and I hear the seething of the pot, the hell, the cauldron where the first time they boiled my brains and took out all my bones, filled me with dope and powdered turquoise, all the stuff that makes you last, resist, and keeps the other devils off, and I see Marquez leaning over, and I think, give me all your works, old buddy, and he says, ‘Now, Jayman, let us talk: let’s talk about those ingots,’ and I laugh, I laugh.