Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

Donny said on the stand that he’d bought LSD from Floyd, and that was how they got the warrant. At the trial there were a few photographers around, trying to get pictures of the crazy hippies in their crazy outfits. The Command tried to get the underground press on their side, but none of them would bite. Those so-called hip assholes. Either they couldn’t be bothered to get in their cars and drive out of town, or for some reason they didn’t dig the Command’s thing, which kind of weirded Dawn out, since she’d thought most everyone was on their wavelength. Wasn’t it what the counterculture was about, working for the Light? And here they all were printing words like cult .

She sat on the public benches with six other girls, dressed in home-sewn silver minidresses, with tabards saying the names of various Ascended Masters who were acting as celestial witnesses for the defense. Korton, Cassion, Soltec, Andromeda Rex, Goo-Ling, Blavatsky —she was The Count of Saint-Germain . Everyone was staring at them, but that was the point. They were an official protest against the court for not recognizing the Masters and allowing their channels to testify as to how Floyd was set up by Donny and the Rotarians. She looked down at all the suits and ties and thought to herself, Well, Dawnie, here they are, the Forces of Darkness. Here they are in the flesh.

Floyd’s sentence tore the heart out of her. Ten years. Ten years because Donny Hansen said so. What a good day for the boys at Mulligan’s! Oh, they had right on their side! A good day for Mulligan’s, for bastards who pushed people around by saying they built stuff and others were lazy, when actually that was just a barefaced lie and they didn’t build a thing, not a damn thing, just balled their fists and made their backroom deals and planned how to keep hold of what they or their daddies or their daddies’ daddies had stolen from everyone else.

They went to all the trials, not just Floyd’s, and it was a horrible time. Seemed like they were always on the bus going into the city, watching the buildings get closer together, the concrete spreading over every patch of open ground. It was exhausting, heartbreaking. Walking up and down with placards, sitting through hours and days of Dark Side agents reciting so-called evidence. A couple of defendants drew five years, the rest two to five. Turned out Marcia had an outstanding federal warrant and she ended up back in New Jersey on some kind of armed-robbery charge. It was political, so Dawn heard; seemed she’d been in a branch of Chase Manhattan with a sawed-off and a bunch of black radicals wearing luchador masks.

A lot of people didn’t want to be out at the Pinnacles anymore. Every day, one or two more packed up and moved on. Hugging and kissing and making her friends promise to write, Dawn felt scared. The rocks were the people, and if they all vanished she’d have to vanish with them, because otherwise it’d be her against Donny and Uncle Ray and the sheriff and Mr. Hansen and Robbie Molina and all the other bastards, young and old, a whole town of men who wanted to put her down. She’d lose that fight, didn’t take a genius to see it.

There was so much broken. They’d have to fix up the kitchen and the workshop almost from scratch. They’d a guard posted now, day and night. No weapons, just a lookout, give them a chance to run if the town came for them again. Clark and Maa Joanie had gone into their cabins and weren’t coming out. Judy was marching about with a strained grin on her face, saying positive uplifting things like a person who’d temporarily lost her red shoes and yellow-brick road. Pilgrim Billy said they should dissolve the commune, just become nomads. You can live off the desert, he said. He was a city boy. Boston, as she remembered.

Wolf had an answer. We should hold a session, he said. That’s the way to cleanse this place.

It was the one time she ever saw the inflatables in use. They belonged to an art collective who’d abandoned the air for the sea and gone off to commune with dolphins; for some reason they’d left their prize possessions with Coyote. Wolf took everyone out to the middle of the dry lake. The light was blinding. They formed a ragged procession, their feet crunching over the crust of salt. They blew up the inflatables with giant pumps, two fifty- by fifty-foot silver pillows, a soft city tethered six feet off the earth. They were the most beautiful things in creation, the most beautiful things Dawn expected ever to see.

For twenty-four hours they stayed out there, naked, hooked up to the Tronics, playing music to rid themselves of the raid’s negative energy. When they were tired they climbed on the bubbles and lay looking out at the flat white world. It was clear now: They were living at the end of time. Dawn would remember being high above the ground with the Sky Down Feather Brothers, crawling over a gleaming surface, her vision a mess of reflected light. It was a world of pure beauty, the holy beauty of Light, and afterward, when she went into the darkness, it was this memory she tried to hold on to of the Ashtar Galactic Command: the great drone of the Tronics spiraling up into her body as she tumbled over the holy beauty of Light.

A couple of days later she was squeezed into an orange VW bus and driven to L.A. They called it a fishing mission. They sent her and three other girls, with a tall Texan, name of Travis. Officially he was there to make sure nothing bad happened to them, but he had another thing going, which she wasn’t supposed to know was a heroin deal. He talked to Clark on the phone at least once a day. But she wasn’t to worry her pretty little head, oh no. Fill up the bus, Clark said. Get them to come. We need to grow again.

To her dying day she’d wish she’d never even seen Sunset Boulevard. She was just dumped there, right on the sidewalk outside Tower Records. Walk up and down, Travis told her. Talk to people. Travis made the girls dress sexy, hot pants and halter tops. They’d stand on the corner and cars would go by honking their horns. The point was to meet prospects, boys mainly — going in and out of the record store, hanging outside the Whisky or Sneeky Pete’s. If you got one talking you had to try to sell him the LP and engage him in conversation about the Light. Have you ever thought about smog? That was one of her openers. You know smog’s negative energy, right? It’s not a question of believing me or not believing, because you can see it up there, right above your head. What else is it if it ain’t negativity?

“You could say you’ll go with them,” said Travis, “if you think it’ll get them to come out to the rocks.”

“Go with them?”

“Don’t act dumb.”

If one bit, you could take him to the house. It was a rotting Victorian in Echo Park. It had a lot of bedrooms, but they all smelled of dead things, and the neighborhood was full of junkies and Mexicans who made obscene gestures and called out after you in Spanish. She got followed a couple of times. At night she’d sometimes stop by a diner and take out a hot black coffee just to have something to throw, maybe give herself a head start.

If they needed to crash, you let them stay. You cooked a meal (mac and cheese, said Travis, something homely) and introduced them to the others. All four girls were young and pretty and they never had trouble finding men to sit on the ratty couches in the living room and listen to their pitch about the Command. She fucked some of the guys she brought back. She fucked some of the guys the others brought back. Travis would usually be upstairs. Sometimes you’d have to go up and be with him.

It was like time stopped when you were in that house. It was exactly the same, day or night. The sound of top-forty music on a transistor radio, the swish of the plastic-bead curtain leading into the kitchen. Her room was painted dark red, lit by a bare bulb on the ceiling. Someone was always talking to someone just outside the door, telling them about the evacuation. Think about it. About earthquakes. You want to run the risk? The Command has been monitoring the West Coast for generations. They can evacuate the entire population within sixty seconds. They know where every one of us is at any time .