Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

This was the bardo of the moment of death.

There was no chanting, no prayers. Just the drone, unfolding, opening up a doorway between the lands of the living and the dead. Merge with the Light, urged the drone. Know that you are part of the clear light of reality. Let go of all else.

There were guns. There were knives and machetes, duct tape, a saw. There was a car battery, jumper cables.

The dead boy was pulled down to the second bardo.

It was the scariest night of Dawn’s life. It was like finding yourself at the bottom of a cold, dark well. How long did it last? Days? Weeks? She fell away from the Light into visions of hell. Blood and darkness. Writhing snakes, like intestines. The boy’s body was wrapped in a tarp and carried out into the desert. Figures digging a hole, throwing him in.

When the sun rose over the mountains, and a wedge of watery orange daylight started pushing its way through the doorway of the dome, Dawn wept with relief. That morning, as people stumbled, blinking out into the light, she packed a bag and headed to the highway junction. She didn’t say good-bye to anyone. Not Judy. Not anyone. All she could think of was getting away.

She thumbed a ride from a trucker who was going to L.A. and, like water heading downhill, soon found herself back on the Strip. She spent a few nights on the street, a few more nights with a pickup, then found a job dancing in a cage at a bar where the girls served drinks in superhero outfits. She crashed at a place in West Hollywood, then another in Santa Monica, owned by a Hasidic Jew who had a chain of dry cleaners and was happy to take favors for the rent. Time passed. She made the glitter scene. She never talked about Ashtar or anything like that. Ancient history. She wore hot pants and five-inch space boots and hung around with nymphet girls and faggoty boys outside the English Disco, trying to meet musicians. For a while she followed bands, fucked roadies and booking agents, trying to get close to Bowie or the Stones. One of them took her to Vegas, where she got raped by three guys in a hot tub to the sound of the Doobie Brothers and things kind of slid from there, five shifts nightly, topless, full nude, no touching, touching, until she was giving head in the bathroom at an all-night coffee shop in return for food, her arms and legs a mass of bruises, her mind shot to hell. One night she headed down a rabbit hole following a line of cocaine and by some miracle emerged alive to find it was 1986 and she was sitting on a bed in a Miami hotel room with a hundred and eighty thousand dollars cash and a lot of smashed furniture and the memory of something bloody and violent she’d promised never to speak about again.

She bought the motel with that money, and only when she was painting the place, using healing lilac and purple, did she start to have doubts. Had that last session in the dome ever really ended? Was the life she’d led just another bardo, another intermediate state? Waking consciousness was a bardo, between past and future existences. Dreaming was a bardo. Was she dreaming? Or was this one of the bardos of death? She could feel herself falling away from the Light. She could feel the drone, still working inside her.

No one except Laila seemed to think it was a good idea to take the record deck.

“Why you need this?” asked Uncle Hafiz. “You have iPod, everything you want for music.” Uncle Hafiz was a big fan of modern things. If he had his way, they’d all be living on a space station, eating food that came in tubes.

Her aunt worried about the dust. “It’s mine,” Laila reminded them. “I know how to look after it.”

“Leave her,” said Samir. “She’s loco .” Lately he’d started talking Spanish. He’d been telling kids at school he was Salvadorean, swaggering around and throwing hand signs. He told horrible stories about revenge killings and severed heads rolled onto dance floors. She thought he might be getting bullied.

She packed the record player into the station wagon, carefully coiling up the long tails of wire that hung from the back of the speakers, wrapping the units in towels and wedging them between her suitcase and the cardboard box containing her uncle’s mayoral props. She carried the records on her lap so she could look at the covers on the way. Her collection had been more or less dictated by other people’s taste — what they’d once liked but didn’t anymore. For more than two years, since Uncle moved them from San Diego, she’d been making regular trips to the thrift store to riffle through dusty crates of marching-band music and nineties pop. It had started as a necessity; there was pretty much nothing to do in town unless you had a car. It soon got to the stage where she had to limit the number of times a month she’d go in, so at least there’d be a chance of finding some new stuff. Mostly she looked out for hair. A band with good hair, or at least big hair, was probably worth risking a dollar to hear. She liked eighties power ballads, synth pop, old-fashioned Jheri-curled rappers. New stuff she found on the Net, same as everyone, but with old records you got more than just music. You could put an album cover close to your face and smell garages and attics, trace with your finger the ballpoint-pen signature of the previous owner on the inside of the gatefold. Digital things were just what they were. They had no atmosphere.

She replayed, for the hundredth time, the way she’d gushed at Nicky Capaldi. The best thing that’d happened to her all year? Oh God. And he just stood there and stared, looking all British and bored. He’d been kind of a jerk, actually. A while back she’d had this breakthrough that was probably more to do with a new level of English, some tone she was finally catching, than with music or philosophy or God or anything, but America had suddenly made much more sense to her and she’d felt happier than she had since — well, for a long time — and it was all wrapped up with his band, particularly this one song. She’d even wanted to get the chorus as a tattoo, in a coil round her arm:

Got to have faith in believing in faith in believing in faith .

But that was a year ago and lately the tattoo idea had begun to seem sort of lame. It was only a dream, of course. In reality she’d never be allowed to get a tattoo.

Now that she came to think of it, she’d always thought the guitarist was cuter than the singer.

Her uncle started the car. Samir and Auntie Sara waved at them from the porch. Weakly, Laila waved back. She felt as if she was looking out at the world from inside a plastic bubble. Imagine if the only thing keeping you alive is this car, because outside the atmosphere is unbreathable for a creature as delicate and advanced as you . Auntie Sara adjusted her scarf to protect her honor from the rapacious gaze of the neighbors, then waddled indoors. Samir gave her the finger. She stuck her tongue out at him. She was just a visitor in this world, a stranger. She looked through the pile on her lap until she found the Ashtar record. It wasn’t a roller-disco compilation or some strange soul album with fat black men in nasty-colored tuxes on the cover. It was even better than that. She’d already looked it up on the Internet. Nothing. No mention, not a single hit. She wasn’t used to invisible things. It was like finding something out of Harry Potter, something with secret powers.

There was the jackal-headed man, the lines of force. There was a spaceship.

The crackle, then the first tone.

music is the message

The back of the sleeve had writing on it, the purple type so smudged that it had taken her ages lying on her bed to decipher it.

Listen. We repeat, listen. This is the voice of the Ashtar Galactic Command. We speak in the names of all sentient beings in the thirty-three sectors of the Universe, in the name of the Ascended Masters and the Conclave of Interdimensional Unity. We bring this music to you, the Star People, so that you may understand more fully your place in the cosmos. The AGC is an ensemble composed of humans and higher-density beings. As Children of Light, we employ electronic instrumentation and processing modules that allow us to tune our output to the harmonic vibrations of the Universal Field. Know that attempts have been made by powers on Earth to persuade you that your reality as Star People is false. These powers, strongly magnetized to the Darkness, must be resisted at all costs. They seek to destroy you, and plunge you into the brute negativity of matter. This message goes out to whosoever will listen and understand. In the name of the Great Master Jesus-Sananda and of Ashtar, Commander of the Brotherhood of Light, Adonai!