Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

As if, back then, he had any idea of what indeterminacy really meant.

The boy was now four. He didn’t speak. He didn’t make eye contact. He wasn’t toilet trained. And Jaz was wrestling with him by the swimming pool in a cheap motel, the kind of place they were condemned to stay in because even though they had money, money Jaz wanted to use to give his family the best of everything, the romantic inns he and Lisa knew from the old days wouldn’t put up with the disruption. It was always the same. Calls from the front desk; the discreet suggestion that they find somewhere more child-friendly. They’d tried it on the way from LAX. A junior manager had knocked on the door of the room. Was everything OK? She was sorry to intrude but there’d been a complaint from another guest.

Some vacation. Raj kept them up all night. At five a.m., since they were both awake and angry, they’d decided to leave. They’d driven on until they saw the sign from the highway. Drop Inn. Vacancy . It was mid-morning. They’d had no breakfast. Jaz didn’t think they could make it any farther. He figured that in a place like this no one would look down their noses. The woman at the desk was polite enough. She probably saw and heard worse on a regular basis. As a precaution, he took the two rooms at the end of the block: one for the family and the one next door for insulation. No one should have to endure the sound of his son through thin walls.

“Come on, Raj. Let’s help Mommy unpack.”

He picked him up and slung him under one arm like a parcel. Raj began to scream properly, the full amplified monotone. For a moment Jaz fantasized about throwing him into the pool, watching him sink to the bottom. His angry face disappearing under the rippling water, the silence afterward.

Joanie had to shield her eyes against the glare. She’d scrambled up the cliff to get a better view of the site and boy, was it hot work! Her sundress was clinging unpleasantly to her figure and she could feel little droplets of sweat running down under the band of her straw bonnet. She didn’t care. The place looked so magnificent! The gleam of cars and trucks and trailers, parked all higgledy-piggledy on the desert floor among the mesquite and creosote bushes, the people swarming past the tents and stalls — what a hive of activity! What a carnival!

It occurred to her that it was a couple of hours since she last saw Judy. Poor kid. It had been a long drive, and she’d been an angel the whole way. No whining, no are-we-there-yet, even when Mom got them both lost outside Pomona and had to ask directions from a farmer. A real little grown-up, her daughter. A fine young lady. So what time was it now? Quarter of five. Long shadows and late-afternoon light. There had to be several thousand folks down there. Hard to put an exact figure on it. Six or seven, surely. Ten? All the motels for miles around were full, or so she’d heard, but she’d never even considered sleeping indoors. Why would you when you could camp out under the desert stars? Such a treat! Last night Judy had been so sweetly excited as they were putting up the tent. Manny Vargas lit a fire, and a whole crowd of the Cohort people had toasted marshmallows and sung songs. Later, as they lay snuggled up in their sleeping bags, Judy had tried to point out constellations to her, and she realized she couldn’t name so many herself. Yet another thing to add to the personal-improvement list. The Guide always said humans needed to have a better relationship with the higher planes — a more intimate relationship. So star names it would have to be. And memorizing the rest of the Blessings and writing up her Experience and finishing her poem to the Ascended Masters and — oh, so many things!

After lunch Judy had run off with some of the other kids — a little tribe of them — to explore the various wonders of the convention. Joanie wasn’t worried. They were good people, the saucer crowd, and the kid knew where the tent was. It was hard to tell, but as she looked down, she thought she could detect a shift in the patterns of movement, a general flow toward the main stage. The Command had caused it to be built in front of the Pinnacle Rocks, specifying through the Guide that it should be decorated with white streamers and reflective disks. The disks were on strings, hanging from the pyramid frame, and they channeled energy to the various speakers, plus they spun round and caught the sun in a really neat way. There was still half an hour to go before the Guide was scheduled to give his address, but Joanie guessed it was time to go down and get herself gussied up. After all, she was of the Cohort and would stand behind him as he spoke, dressed in her green sash and tunic. She’d need to freshen up after her climb. She took the lens cap off her Kodak, clicked a couple of pictures (which she was sure wouldn’t come out) and started downhill.

What a day! There was almost too much to take in at once: people selling things, promoting their theories, telling one another about their encounters, all in such an atmosphere of trust and goodwill as — well, it was humbling, you could say that for openers. She wished she could record the scene to show the skeptics back home. This was what real brotherhood looked like, not the phony kind the authorities tried to foist on you. Golly, it made her mad to think of the dirty tricks they used. The public had a right to know what was really going on, and their government, their own government , was preventing them from learning some of the most important truths you could imagine. At least out here she could be herself. There was no one like that awful Bob Rasmussen from the office. Always hanging around the typing pool. Here no one was going to mock her or belittle her research. There were secrets that were going to blow everyone’s socks right off when they finally came out. People out here in the desert knew something big was going on.

She wandered down the double line of stalls, marveling at how many vendors were patiently sitting under sunshades, waiting for customers to come and browse their displays of books and pamphlets and magazines. More organized folks had folding tables. Others had just opened up the trunks of their cars or laid things out on the flatbeds of pickups. One woman was selling statues of an entity she’d encountered in her backyard in Wisconsin, a little pointy-headed guy with slanting black eyes. LIFE-SIZE, said the sign on the truck. Well, that would make him about a foot tall, which somehow didn’t seem very likely to Joanie. She was as open-minded as the next person, but in her experience there was nothing small-scale about our alien visitors. Contact was the grandest, most awe-inspiring event in human history. It wasn’t something to get all cutesy about. Still, it was a free country, and maybe this woman saw what she said she saw. Joanie would be the last person to deny someone’s right to explore her own personal truth.

An old couple in homemade clothes were offering free vegetarian food to passersby. The man had straw sandals. Joanie ate a little muffin-type thing, which was apparently made out of beans. As she chewed her snack, she stopped to look at a stall selling books on all manner of tantalizing subjects — number vibration, psychic healing, mineral therapy, astrophysics, mental calisthenics, yoga, the dimensions of Solomon’s Temple, telepathic communication.… Apparently there had been not one but sixteen crucified saviors since the dawn of time, and most of the Bible was copied from ancient Irish druids. The stall’s owner was rhapsodizing to a small crowd about the importance of the Pinnacle Convention. Such powerful energies! He felt as if he’d been transported to another dimension. There was an angel on his shoulder, a being of light and love.