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Meanwhile, in a compartment on AMTRAC, our favorite borl---- no longer a borl---- and his favorite art object rushed along tracks leading from Los Angeles to Oakland. He spoke to his stiff wooden companion in exasperation. "Talking to you is like talking to a black hole." Or the Oracle of Delphi. Santa Sebastiana seemed always to speak in riddles, except when nagging him to free her from this dry and cracking log. "When we get to Frisco I'll see what I can do." The train slowed and stopped at a station marked S A L I N A S. That would be an acronym for . . . what? When the train crew opened the doors, a swarm of flies came in. Ired at his appetite for demanding a foodquest, Mosca stepped out of his Economy Bedroom into the aisle. Deep in his dream place he heard: "In here!" The flies swarmed through his doorway and settled on Santa Sebastiana. They quivered and flitted, and then left, all but one. Sensing connection, Mosca telepathed a polite greeting.
A reply! "Call me Lysle."
"I'm Mosca."
"Salinas, fleshface. S A L I N A S. Right? Try: Southwestern Anglo-Latino-Indio Neurotic Androgynes' Shrine. Meaning, M O T R A, meathead, M O T R A. Morada of the Regional Angels." "Fleshface! Meathead! I'm a fly too!"
Laughter echoed around this dream place. Lysle, hovering, studied crude wooden Sebastiana, bow in hand, arrows on lap, perched stiffly on her seat. He flitted around her, taking in divers angles through the compound eyes that covered his head like a helmet. "So, what are you," he said, "an art dealer?"
"I'm a fly, asshole! A fly!"
"You wish! You're one of those endoskeletal monsters, a big stringy lump of ugly human flesh."
Mosca suppressed berserker rage. "I'm inside this meat-bone machine. Get me out! You can have it! You're welcome to it! It's a rubber raft compared to the helicopter I'm used to! Take it! It's yours!" Lysle hovered and darted in silence. "So, Lysle, where'd all your friends go?"
"Home."
"Where you going?"
"North."
"That swarm of friends made me think of my Flymaster saying: 'In all life is a tendency to cluster and form complexities, and in all creatures a tendency toward cooperation.'"
"That's what I'm fleeing from. You ever hear of Anastrepha Ludens?"
"The Mexican fruit fly?"
"Yes. They're about to spray the Salinas Valley from the air with Malathion to kill them off, just like they sprayed LA, people and all, with poison to kill medflies. I love it! Humans spraying poison on themselves! The medflies gave their lives to save the rest of us. And now the fruit flies! Me, I'm heading north s0 I can stay alive and enjoy it all on TV."
"Little Moshka, if you don't get me out of here right now, when I do get out I'll shit all over you."
"Who the fuck is that?" Lysle can hear her too! Mosca explained Santa Sebastiana as best he could, which is no better than we can explain her. Deity? Demon? Redeemer? Exterminator? Who can say. "One thing for sure, though; she's promised me if I set her loose she'll help me kill off the human race. And believe me, I'll try, as soon as I get my plan together."
"Let me know when you're ready and I'll do some fancy disease carrying. Since I was just a little maggot, I've hated humans. My mother struggled and suffered and died stuck to sticky yellow paper, and I saw it all! I'll bet I've laid rare diseases on fifty people since then, and before my time comes I'll infect fifty more! Believe me, they don't call me Mr Vector for nothing."
"My little Moshka, he's not trying hard enough," said Santa Sebastiana. "He doesn't want to get me out of this idol, that's what. He's scared of seeing me show myself in horrible new ways. In fact, he's terrified." Do female idols, rough or smooth, have a moon time? "But believe me, even trapped in here I've enough power to fuck . . . him . . . up!"
"Don't get on my case," said Lysle. "Lay off. Intellectually, I'm okay, but emotionally, I'm already all fucked up. I'm a romantic depressive. Why'd my friends come to see me off? To make sure I was leaving."
"Mortify thy flesh," said a soft, lugubrious voice within.
"Did you hear that?"
"I did," said Lysle. "But obviously you said it to yourself." "Obviously," said Santa Sebastiana. "I'm fleshless too. Do you like the way I look without it?"
"Dig it! I love the way you look! It's the way all humans should look. And I ain't talking Plato. I mean dead."
"Me, I can look all the ways live humans should look, and I'm not talking about that ninety percent of American women who hate their own bodies. You just wait till I get out of here. You'll both see."
Hunger, that obscene addiction, struck again. And with it the shame of being ruled by such an ignoble flaw. "You keep Sebastiana company while I go eat." Thinking she could release him from this loathsome Cristo body if she chose, he stepped out into the aisle of the hurtling gently swaying car. Talk about being in Christ. A theological metaphor come true! Embodied in Christ. Was another Pedro system turning on? Was the zombie elixir wearing off? He pushed the shiny pad on an automatic door, and then another, and stepped into the dining car. The steward directed him to a table where three people already sat, and gave him a pencil and a menu. Across from him were a matron and her man; at his side, a mouse-haired maid. Herrenvolk all! Lording it over the rest of life. Dr Bruhn once said mankind's influence on the biosphere displayed itself in microcosm back in 1991 when a tank car of weed killer meant for suburban lawns and gardens derailed into the Sacramento River and accomplished a total kill of all life for forty-five miles from there to Lake Shasta and kept right on killing as it went out into the lake. In commemoration Mosca ordered clam chowder, bottled water, and dead fish, braised in LA, then microwaved and garnished on the train.
The matron, slim and svelte, pearl necklace drooping into a deep décolletage canyon produced by breast augmentation, addressed him. "We're from Roseburg, Oregon. I see you ordered the clam chowder, too. A good choice." She smiled. "And where are you from?"
"LA. I'm going to Oakland."
"What's your line of business?" asked her husband. "I'm in lumber myself."
"And," said the matron, "he does very well by it."
"Me, I'm, uh . . . I'm an art dealer." He explained his specialty was religious art, and they lost interest, and began questioning the young woman next to him. She was moving from Santa Barbara to Tacoma where she'd rented a studio apartment and now was on the way to jump-start her new life. "My place up there---- I don't know what to do." Outside the window, dead brown hills reeled by. "I have seven things to plug in and only one plug. If I short it out . . . ?" She spooned around in her coffee. "If it shorts out, I'm moving. I can't now because I paid the deposit. Just isn't any other place I can afford. The army transferred more troops to Fort Lewis and everything cheap is full." The chowder came. "Oh, well, I don't have a lease, so I can always leave."
"Roger, this chowder tastes funny."
"There's mussels in it."
"Christ is already dead," said the lugubrious voice, "and life is ended." Pedro's words were emerging from the filters in English! "Give Him thy soul for He calls for it."
Ignoring this, the man said to the woman for both economical and ecological reasons you should clear-cut timber harvests where possible. Pedro's presence down deep somewhere was affirming itself. "When you don't clear-cut, you leave the runts. So you clear-cut. Then you plant the very best seedlings to make the new crop."
"And the spotted owls? What happens to them?"
"I ordered rare steak. But believe me, young lady, if they served boiled owl on this train, that's what I'd have."
Southwestern Anglo-Latino-Indio Neurotic Androidal Specimens. SALINAS, again. Man alive! Here are prime examples! They should design a new and improved man-&-woman model! He studied his flesh companions and his own forearm and the curly black hair it excreted. Humans have to go. Indeed they must! All of them.
"Boiled owl!"
"Just kidding, Miss. Just kidding."
The new model will have to be a . . . a negative androgyne. An hermaphrodite would be worse than what we have now. Tubes and boobs! Dicks and dugs. That's what happens when Hermes and Aphrodite mate. Both powers assert themselves with no thought of compromise. No no. Go for the negative, the anti-hermaphrodite, the androgyne. No worms, no udders. Like angels. "Mortify thy flesh." The lumber dealer glanced at his bleeding steak, and back. "What's that?" he said.
"My dinner. Mortify the fish. That's gourmet chef talk for cook it well."
"Interesting," said the young woman. "It's always interesting to hear what people are thinking about."
"Adam was created androgyne, and remained so until God, also androgyne, removed Adam's female principle, his extra rib, and from it created Eve, and trouble."
She looked to the lumber dealer for help.
"Miss,", he said, "I've always been interested in trying different foods. Not long ago a client gave me a smoked pheasant. A plucked and smoked pheasant is not a pretty thing to see. Looks like road kill. And I'm not into wild birds. I'm just not. It lay in the back of my fridge for months, 'til one day the fridge quit, and everything spoiled, but it didn't, and, hey! it made darn good eating."
"One time, back home in Kansas, we had a two-headed chicken, and my brother said, 'Let's kill it,' and I said, 'Oh, the poor thing,' and he said, 'Let's kill the poor thing." And he did. And it tasted like any old one-headed chicken."
Mosca reached in his pocket, new pants he'd bought in Santa Fe, drew out some Morada money, and paid his check. He had plenty more, about three grand. Would God make him do a penance to expunge this crime from his celestial record? Does He keep records of each pseudo-fly? Mosca said good-bye to his companions. Never mind, no matter. As Dr. Bruhn says, theologies are the tailings of religion, ideologies those of politics. He paused to fart in the vestibule between cars, a great wet fart that clung to everything. Eating surely is a revolting habit, quite without redeeming aesthetic value, but some food tastes good, s0 whilst imprisoned in this absurd machine, relish it as best you can. Learn to love it. They were rushing alongside of Business 101 where traffic had slowed to walking speed to get around a two-lane junk pile attended by flashing police cars, fire engines, and ambulances. All that because the lords of life can't fly. Nor can I. Where's Crow? Back in his rookery making mischief?
He pressed the shiny pad and strode back into the next car, and, grasping seat backs, made his way through it to his car and stepped into his compartment.
Lysle rose from Santa Sebastiana's shoulder to hover and dart.
"Hey fleshface, I'll bet you brought me something real nice to eat."
"Sorry, no. I didn't think about it."
"Well, ain't that just like a human."
"What do you fancy?"
"S0mething hot, starchy, and sweet."
Mosca went back out, through the next car, and the dining car, to the club car where he found a snack bar. He ordered a Danish pastry and asked that it be heated. The attendant thrust it into a microwave directly across from Mosca, closed the door, and pressed some buttons to start it. The oven radiated electromagnetic waves through the Danish, and the attendant, and through Mosca too.
* * *
A few minutes after that in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where it was three hours later, about ten-thirty pm, Thomas Spofford's phone rang. It was the special line connected to the Company. Thunder shook the house and rain sluiced the windows. Thomas was sitting at the kitchen table with the twins discussing John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men
which, at his suggestion, they'd chosen as the subject of their book report for sixth-grade English. With a sigh, he slapped them on the shoulders, and walked back into his study to the phone. Dave's voice spoke into his ear. "Just had a call saying Mosca's on the monitor again, and he's somewhere in Central California."
"I'll meet you in the monitor room in half an hour." Thomas put on his jacket, plucked his credential out of a clean ashtray---- he no longer smoked, and after pinning it on, he picked car keys off the desk, shrugged into his raincoat and tugged on a tweed cap. He hugged the boys still sitting there before their copies of Steinbeck, then walked through the kitchen into the garage. He started his Lincoln and the garage door rose and closed behind. The storm had passed and he drove fast through suburban streets toward the Beltway. He stroked the dashboard. "Buy American, pal, that's my motto." Sure. My last artifact of sophomoric emotional nationalism. It had expressed itself in the purchase of the Lincoln, which, doubtless, had been assembled in Mexico from parts produced in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. When as a youth he'd passed all the tests and been admitted to the Company, to him more of a fraternity and way of life than a career, he'd still felt a powerful thrill and immense pride at being an American, a son of the best country on earth, one which by serving as a model for the rest stands as emblem of the future. He lowered the side window to smell sweet air and hear tires hiss on wet pavement, and followed a sign marked Beltway East. At the Greenbelt Interchange he turned north on 295, the Gladys Spellman Parkway, toward Baltimore. These days, the Cold War won, America stands preeminent as the country where five percent of the world's people use one-third of the world's resources. And then, when possible, it dumps its refuse abroad. Who will ultimately inherit the nuclear waste? Enthusiast at twenty, realist at fifty-three. That's how it is, and maybe how it should be, because enthusiast at fifty-three is fanaticism. How about surrealist? That comes at sixty-three. Have to ask Bruhn about it. The road ahead, straight and true; let her rip. What are the twins saying to each other about their books? About George and big dumb Lenny and the mouse? At twenty will they be lonely cynics like George? Is it still possible to grow up into an adolescence of simple sensual patriotic pride and thrill at the sight of the flag and marching bands passing by?
He turned into the Fort Meade---- the Fort George G. Meade----exit and slowed for the gate. No. For the twins, pure sweet simple God-blessed patriotism has become impossible. He showed his credential and drove to his parking place. Smiling at the irony of naming this military intelligence complex, the very center of CIA's rival services, after a general whose timidity and indecision had almost cost the Union the Civil War, he ran up the steps, and then, whistling "Marching Through Georgia," he marched toward Dr Bruhn's MKMOSCA laboratory complex, pausing here and there to pass security. Get out the good old bugle boys,
And sing another song;
Sing it as we used to sing it,
Fifty thousand strong!
Sing it as we used to sing it,
Fifty thousand strong,
While we were marching
. . . Through Georgia.
Sherman and his Yankee boys, Will never reach the coast . . . , So the saucy Rebels said, 'twas a handsome boast . . . . Thomas loved thrusting the song into this military milieu where, to use a Texas expression, it would give plenty of Rebels the red ass. The security lock yielded to his touch, and he stepped inside just as a rumpled and dripping Dave came rushing down the hall. Must still be raining in Baltimore. Slovenly, breathing aloud, Dave stepped in the door and Thomas closed it. I work with this guy every day, and I don't even like him. In silence they paced into the computer room where a young
technician met them. "We had the trace for two minutes exactly, then lost it." She led them to a computer screen. "You see," she said in a soft voice, "in two minutes, the spot moved from here to here, 2.313 miles exactly, at a speed of roughly seventy miles and hour."
As Thomas studied the map, she said, "Right here, Mr Spofford, near Coyote, approaching San Jose, close to 101 but not quite on it." A phantom, an apparition, a ghost. No road was traced by that line. UFO? His mind's eye saw George and big clumsy Lenny walking together between willows and sycamores along a path beaten hard by boys going to swim in the deep pool at its end, ossified by hoboes tramping down from the Espee tracks to jungle by the pond. Yes. "Does this map show railroads?"
"No sir," said the technician.
Thomas turned to Dave.
"Why the hell not?"
"People don't use them any more."
"Flies do. Mosca's on a passenger train going north." He peered at Dave, into hostile eyes. "Dave, see that they put in new maps that show railroads." He turned and followed Dave's wet footprints to the door. Nothing else to do tonight, not unless we get another fix.
* * *
In his compartment on a passenger train going north Mosca sat high above the ground watching San Jose flow by, feeling levitated, not road bound as in a car or bus, but in flight, because from tracks you often see nothing but scenery. Lysle trudged around on the sticky spiral pastry set on a paper napkin on the folding table, eating here, shitting there, vomiting from time to time, hale and happy. They rolled by loading platforms and a roadhouse featuring mud wrestling, by old couches and broken chairs dumped beside the tracks, and trailer parks and a mall and piles of skids and a junk yard and old houses and along into the station, creating an energy rush on the platform. Hysteria moderated until somnolence prevailed once more, and the train drew out, forty minutes late.
"Time is male, eternity, female," said Santa Sebastiana.
Outside now, slowly moving through a shrunken marshaling yard, he saw exhausted commuter trains, ranks of blue water-works trucks, and a two-story wooden control tower, blackened and charred by fire. They accelerated by a school and files of box cars---- Burlington Northern, BC Rail; Northwestern, Rail Box; Union Pacific, Cotton Belt; Montana Rail Link, Mil-wau-kee, and went through a golf course and a subdivision and along a levee leading across salt flats and over bridges by water and gulls. Then came an expanse of green reeds spreading on one side and a range of tan feminine hills rising on the other, and, after that, fields and houses and some horses and more train yards and industry and a church supporting a tall steeple. Do steeples receive and focus divine grace? Act as the Lord's lazers? Do some conceal intercontinental ballistic missiles?
Lysle did a little dance on the Danish; then, seemingly sated, he flew to the red emergency-exit handle on the window where he settled to watch deserted backyards reeling by: plastic wading pools, rusting jungle-gyms, rotting sheds, shriveled shrubbery, loaded clothes lines, mangy lawns, and the decomposing corpses of automobiles. Hunger growled again. Food? Why not? They raced into a subdivision. Mosca began eating the Danish. O! Vile appetite! I'm a food addict! Like the poor, the bourgeois had forsaken their backyards to watch prime-time TV. Maybe Lysle has infected the Danish and Pedro will die, and then Santa Sebastiana will have to tell me how to escape the carcass because if I perish, where else can she find another creature not of woman born? As night fell, the scenery again became industrial. They passed the BART yards and a block of greenhouses and the Coliseum with its logos of the Oakland A's and junked machinery and more industry and box cars and storage bins and, with the towers of downtown Oakland rising nearby, they came to rest in the dazzle of
Jack London Square. Gliding away from the station, they passed by tall white cargo cranes and stacked containers from China and eased through a vast railroad yard, under freeways, by blazing graffiti and barren lots and stark structures which had replaced the rustic beauty of former times, and came into the Emeryville station. Mosca slung his shoulder bag, lifted Santa Sebastiana, carried her off the train to an Amtrak bus. He set her beside him on the seat. "Hey, mister, you got to put that statue with the rest of the baggage," said the driver, pointing at a cart alongside piled high with luggage and packs and surfboards and sleeping bags and boxes and guitars men were off-loading into the freight compartment. "Right there."
"Don't you dare!" diffused from Sebastiana.
Loyal Lysle flew at the driver's face.
Loyal Mosca said, "You have plenty of seats, s0 I'll just keep her here." Then Pedro's voice added, "To be Crucified is the supreme ecstasy."
Exasperated, the driver moved the bus out into traffic. Yes, there were plenty of seats. "Good little Moshka." Soon they were rolling across the Bay Bridge, watching the towers of San Francisco glow through the fog, and they passed a truckload of crushed cars, and then they spiraled down into the Transbay Terminal. Lysle in full flit above, Mosca struggled through crowds, carrying his complaining burden, and went out in front where buses and taxis come and go. A cream-and-orange station wagon yclept CITY CAB stood at the curb. He opened the door, flung in his bag, and seated his wooden mistress. The driver, a sturdy man with thick blond hair, asked their destination.
"Some motel where you can drive directly to a room."
They sped west on Mission by a woman seated on a sleeping bag displaying a homeless sign and a man dressed in burlap sacking, turned right and followed Van Ness to the Broadway Manor. The cab waited while Mosca registered, and then continued a few yards to the door of room 101. Mosca seated Santa Sebastiana in a chair by the table and returned her bow and arrows and Lysle came to rest on her head. From his side of the table, Mosca glanced at the street, at the intersection of Broadway and Van Ness, a crossroads throbbing with automotive energy. "Draw the curtains like a good boy, Moshka. I like my privacy."
He drew the curtains, went to the bathroom where the fan rang and rattled as he pissed, and then he took the chair from the dressing table and set it before the TV. "I haven't seen television since I left Fort Meade."
"I want to watch too."
The arrow hole in her eye, it would seem, did not matter. He dragged her chair over next to his, snapped on the set, and sat down. Evil emanations from the TV's cathode-ray tube steeped them all in eerie green light.
Homosaps! Maybe this radiation can be made to sterilize them!
A home away from home.
Peace at last.
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