Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

Fuck me you little bitch come on fuck me.

the ships are beautiful

the ships are full of joy

Clark wanted money. It wasn’t just that you had to go find recruits. You had to sell them the LP. Every afternoon, before they left to go to the Strip, Travis drummed it into them. How many would they sell that day? Think of a number, visualize that number. One night, Travis sat her down and made a suggestion. “Selling the record’s one thing,” he said. “There are others. I ain’t asking you to do nothing you ain’t already doing for free.”

The LP had seemed like such a wonderful idea. It was made from a tape taken off the desk at one of the sessions. Somehow Clark had persuaded Coyote to hand it over and announced in a meeting that from now on they were going to reach out across the airwaves of the world, bringing news of the coming crisis to anyone with an inquiring mind and five bucks in their pocket. At a joyous meeting in the dome, the remaining Lightworkers sat down together in a spirit of unity to put forward their ideas about how the sleeve should look and what should be written on the cover. They were disappointed when Clark played the tape. It sounded like it had been recorded through a sock. Coyote wasn’t around to shout at and Clark argued that sound quality didn’t really matter, because the Command’s message was coded into the carrier wave of the music. People would get it without having to get it. That was cool, but the record didn’t give a shadow of the real feeling of the Tronics. They’d hoped for more.

She never could explain how Coyote got on the sleeve. Everyone assumed there would be a picture of Judy looking positive, or Clark and Maa Joanie in their robes. The drawing was by a girl called Kristel, who liked to call herself ChrisTele , which she said meant “The Vision of Jesus-Sananda.” She drew Coyote getting electrocuted, standing in front of one of the Command’s spacecraft. Clark didn’t put up any resistance. Perhaps he was trying to get everyone to think he was sharing the Light.

Clark wanted them to sell the LP, so they sold it. Whether anyone ever listened to it more than once was another thing. The boys who paid their money and came back to eat the homely mac and cheese and liked the sound of a place out in the desert where sexy girls wanted to make it with you all day and night got put on Travis’s bus, or else were trusted to find their way on the Greyhound, carrying parcels wrapped up carefully by Travis with the promise of a special thank-you at the other end. Dawn would wave to them as they set off with their kit bags and backpacks, like circus performers getting into a cannon and being shot up into the air. Yes, baby. I’m coming in a few days. Don’t you worry. The ships are beautiful.

the ships are full of joy

She got gonorrhea, and Travis took her to a clap doctor, who gave her antibiotics and a lecture. At night she stumbled along the Strip, joining the swarm of kids trying to get in to see bands, eating from food trucks, tripping on the sidewalk outside the 76 station and looking up at the billboards. Come to Where the Flavor Is . There was a giant statue of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Bullwinkle’s shirt changed color depending on the outfit of the girl on the casino billboard on the other side of the street. At the co-op, she lined up dirty and barefoot, paying with the food stamps Travis gave them in return for the LP money. After a while she lost track of time. To the store, back from the store, to the Strip, back. She watched crabs crawling over a stained mattress like a platoon of soldiers, counting them off, counting them off; she went with Kristel and Maggie to score at an all-night drug store and noticed the dealer had a wooden hand. They couldn’t stop laughing. She was sitting in someone’s office doing her first blow, saying have you heard of the evacuation and remembering the dealer’s wooden hand and laughing laughing laughing and going to the store and back to the Strip and taco stands and coffee shops and topless bars and passing cars and passing cars and passing cars and passing cars.…

She stayed three months, through the spring and early summer of 1971. Though she didn’t think so at the time, it took something out of her. A freshness. She rode back into the desert sitting on the floor of Travis’s VW bus, bumping shoulders with her latest pickup, a red-haired boy from Iowa who didn’t know he was carrying almost half a pound of Laotian number-four heroin in the lining of his bag. Through the smeared little porthole windows the Ashtar Galactic Command’s primary Earth base looked meaner, more beat up than she remembered. The dome still loomed over it, but its panels were rusty and dull. Maa Joanie’s shack had caught fire, burned right down. It was all anyone could talk about: Who’d set the fire, was it the FBI or the town or the Forces of Darkness operating through an agent in the compound. Far as Dawn could see, it could have been anybody. The place was full of strangers. She and the other fishing girls had sent maybe twenty pickups out there, but there seemed to be all kinds of other people who didn’t look like they were passing through. A lot of tattoos. One or two obvious runaways, at least three guys walking around with Gypsy Joker patches. The first night all she could hear was the sound of bike engines, people smashing bottles, raising hell. Round about two in the morning some girl started screaming. No one sleeping near Dawn in the dome seemed bothered by it. No one even sat up. She went outside and poked about with a flashlight, but the screaming stopped before she could find where it was coming from.

The next morning she saw the red-haired boy thumbing a ride by the side of the road. He had a black eye. When she said what’s up, he told her to go to hell. You promised me this place was cool, he said.

A lot of faces were missing out of the old crowd. That night at dinner (which had gotten worse, if that was possible — a scoop of rice and a slop of flavorless lentils served in institutional metal trays) Dawn caught up on the news. None of it was good. The town had been tightening the noose. People from the Earth base got refused service in most of the stores. They had to drive twenty miles to get gas. The boys from Mulligan’s had hit them with every legal trick they could think of. Building code, sanitation. They’d declared the dome a hazardous structure, wanted to send in the bulldozers and clear it away.

Clark wanted her to come see him. He made her kneel down and once she was finished told her to be careful because walking among them were some who were not part of the Brotherhood of Light. “They are emanations of the Left Hand, little Dawnie. Their rays fall upon us as a weight, a kind of depression. If you feel such a weight, you let me know the name of the person. The Command will send help. You just tell me right away.”

Afterward, she picked her way up onto the rocks. As she sat, thinking and smoking a joint, she heard someone climbing the path toward her. A figure wrapped in a djellaba came into view, the pointed hood pulled down low over its face.

“Is that you, Dawnie? It’s me. Judy.”

Judy rushed into her arms like they were long-lost sisters, hugging her and covering her face in kisses. It was a clear night and the moon was full. Dawn was shocked. The girl looked like she was a thousand years old, her sunken eyes twin boreholes in her face, as if someone had pressed two thumbs into white clay.

“What’s the matter? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know, Dawnie. It’s all falling apart.”

Judy had a way of saying things like she believed them and didn’t believe them at the same time. When she got emotional, you’d suddenly feel part of her was completely detached, watching herself being happy or crying or interested in your day. Sometimes it seemed like she was just copying other people, as if she hoped that going through the motions would supply the feelings she didn’t actually have. That night was different. Her hands were freezing. She was quivering like a cornered animal.