Unassigned Territory (32 page)

“If those fuckin’ niggers from outer space don’t fix them, I will,” Floyd croaked as loudly as he was able while the nurse pushed on his chest.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to go now,” the nurse said to Rex over her shoulder. “I’m going to give him something to make him sleep.” Rex Hummer backed from the room and into a dank, foulsmelling hallway at the far end of which the sun was like a dull red flame in a distant window. He could hear the nurse talking once more as he walked away. “Really now, Mr. Hummer, where did you say these brothers were from?”

•     •     •

Where, indeed. The sun was dying quickly by the time Rex reached his truck. It lay gut-shot and bleeding upon the western horizon, losing mass even as Rex watched it until there was nothing left but a blood-red stain upon the evening sky.

The Denny’s sign was lit now, casting a yellowish glow, and past that Rex could make out a pair of golden arches and the Spanish-style facade of a Taco Bell. Rex stood watching, letting the hunger work on him. He felt slightly light-headed after his talk with Floyd. The pavement hummed gently beneath his feet. At last he climbed into the pickup and drove east, putting the neon at his back and opting instead for a small bag of Planters peanuts and a pint of Jim Beam purchased at a liquor store on the edge of town.

He drove into a gathering darkness, thinking of how it would be with Floyd. He could see him now, back of the bar, explaining to anyone who would listen how the Negroes who had kicked his ass and burned his truck had only appeared to be Negroes. He would spill his guts to one incredulous listener after another, but looking them in the eye, his flattop and boxcars shining mean and black, daring them to call it bullshit. And who would there be to call bullshit on Floyd Hummer? And so the story would take its place in the canon of the other desert tales, stories of Indian ghosts, UFOs, wrinkles in time, one more in a long line of tricks played upon the mind by a hostile land, something to be marveled at over a campfire and a pint. Rex Hummer was at the moment missing the campfire but in possession of the pint.

The bottle was empty by the time he reached the public library in the city of Victorville. It was dark. The building was a large concrete box of a building with windows running up and down in tiny narrow slits and there were yellow lights back of the narrow black pieces of glass. Rex Hummer got out of his truck and went into the building. It was almost closing time and except for two lady librarians and one black janitor, the building was empty.

Rex went to a desk and stood before it. The woman behind it wore a gray suit and glasses with mother-of-pearl above the lenses, flaring out into little wings. “Yes?” the woman asked.

Rex took a piece of yellow paper out of a small box on her desk. On it he wrote the word
psionic.
“I want to know what this means,” he said.

The woman looked at her watch, then she looked in a dictionary. The word wasn’t there. She looked in a couple more books.

“Psionic,” she said aloud. Eventually she told Rex that she was unable to help him.

He walked from the desk, swaying slightly as he went. The whiskey made it feel like his feet were not properly connected. As he neared the door he was taken by the arm by the janitor he had passed on his way in. He was an older man. His hair was flecked with gray and the whites of his eyes were the color of egg yolks. He smelled of disinfectant and cheap wine. The hand with which he gripped Rex’s arm was unusually strong. “Psionic device,” the janitor said, “is a device which derives its power from the mind of its operator.”

Between Victorville and the junction Rex pulled in part of a talk show on the radio. It sounded as if the program was coming from a great distance. You often, Rex had found, got things like that out on the desert at night—programs so laced with static it was difficult to hear, just bits and pieces of music, or faint, metallic voices which sounded as if they had wafted across the blackened plains all the way from Texas, or someplace beyond it. “Psionics,” explained the narrator, “means psychic electronics.” After that, the program faded from the air.

When Rex reached his trailer and went up the steps the first thing he found inside was the piece of mail he had taken from his box just before Tom Shoats had given him the news concerning his uncle. He looked one more time at the message stamped in red on the manila envelope:

The customer named below

has been singled out for a rare

opportunity...

quite possibly, unlike anything

ever seen or heard about before.

Rex’s name was indeed on the envelope. When he opened it, however, he found nothing more inside than someone trying to sell him something. It became clear to him that the message on the front and what was inside had nothing to do with each other. His mail had been tampered with.

Before dawn a vision had manifested itself to him. It had come with the muted chorus of a song and in it he had seen everything—each aspect of his life in relation to every other aspect in complete clarity—a web of dazzling intricacy.

•     •     •

By midmorning the sunlight clung once more to the land like honey, and Rex Hummer was once more behind the wheel of his truck. The entire Hum-A-Phone lay disassembled, packed into the bed beneath the camper shell behind him. The gun rack behind his head held Sarge Hummer’s twelve-gauge shotgun. Rex himself was dressed in the white buckskins he’d purchased from a thrift store in Goldfield, Nevada, with the reopening of the Desert Museum on his mind. He had a window down and the wind whipped the leather fringe about his sleeve. The sunlight sparkled in the rubies of cut glass arranged to decorate his cuff. He had seen Tom Shoats once more on his way out of town and he had heard about a man in a yellow car nosing around the museum in his absence. He was a big man, Tom had said, big as the Sarge. A sign, no doubt. A man as big as the Sarge. Rex sought to interpret the sign. Would the man oppose him or aid him? In the end the sign went unread. It was best, Rex decided, to concentrate on the vision. There was a certain fragility about the thing—as about a pressed butterfly, and it was Rex’s fear that exposure to sunlight would damage it in some way. Already the yellow-eyed janitor, the voice out of the radio, and the vision itself had become slightly blurred, as if the lines of demarcation between the three had begun to bleed into one another like the colors of a sunset. And so Rex thought no more about the man. He rested in the knowledge that to every thing there is a season: “A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted...” It seemed to him that Roseann Duboise, the Buffalo Woman herself, had in fact brought this text to his attention: “A time to mourn, and a time to dance. A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together...”

W
hen Obadiah was a boy, there was a girl in the congregation who developed a curvature of the spine. Her parents had elected to try to cure the girl with chiropractic treatments, as opposed to the more conventional surgical technique. They apparently found a chiropractor willing to tell them this could be done. He was wrong; the girl wound up a hunchback.

You couldn’t exactly blame this error in judgment by the girl’s parents on the organization. They had not, as far as Obadiah knew, been advised against the more conventional treatment. And yet it had seemed to Obadiah later that a willingness to go against the conventional wisdom was one of the side effects of looking at the world in a particular light.

It began when you realized the churches had been lying to you about the contents of the Bible. If clergymen were willing to send their flocks to war, educators, to whitewash history, politicians, to break promises, and so on, it followed there were not many you could trust—a kind of vision in which the world took on the look of one huge used-car lot, a place where phony deals shimmered in the lights and men with polyester sport coats and forked tongues waited in smoke-filled closing rooms. If the cynicism was understandable, however—and to Obadiah it was—what had always perplexed him was the innocence which seemed to accompany it, the willingness to pay attention to nearly anything which started out by saying the conventional wisdom was wrongheaded. It was something which led down a peculiar road along which one might pause to dabble in everything from colonic irrigations to brain breathing.

Now Obadiah had often, even when among the faithful, sneered at the girl’s parents. It was a sneer born of disbelief at the willingness to take such a risk in the face of such odds, to proceed without better information. And yet it seemed to him now, bouncing on his tailbone in the back of Bill Richards’s Land-Rover as it bucked across a steep stretch of bad chalk-white road, that there was a lesson somewhere in that which he seemed to have missed, that searching for gateways to other dimensions in the Mojave Desert was not what grown men did with their time.

When he tried to imagine what it was that grown men did do, he was inclined to think of men like Harlan Low, or even of his own father. Grown men Were hardworking. They were serious. They would tell you right off that looking for time portals in the desert was a fool’s errand. On the other hand, the grown men Obadiah had looked up to in his life were Christians and lest he feel too guilty he was inclined to remind himse’lf of the words of Paul: “If in this life only we have hoped in Christ we are of all men most to be pitied.” In which case someone like Harlan Low, courageous as he may have proven himself to be, was really just one more in a long line of saps. The trick, of course, was in figuring out who was right and who was wrong. At times he wondered where you even began. There was, for instance, this business of information theory: “The surprising conclusion of information theory,” he had once copied from a textbook,

... is that experiments done within a system can never increase total knowledge of that system at the most fundamental level. All knowledge is counterfeit. Acquisition of knowledge about one part of the world requires equal sacrifice about other parts. Ignorance can at most be shifted around.

He would cop to not knowing exactly where that left you. You might decide that since the big questions appeared unanswerable it was a waste of time to ask them—a position seemingly taken by a certain Delandra Hummer, though he doubted her conclusions were in any way the results of considering the philosophic implications of particle physics. But then, what did Obadiah Wheeler know of particle physics? The stuff about information theory was just something he had copied out of a book. And where, he wondered, was his field of expertise—something he might at least rummage around in for some serviceable set of metaphors with which to frame his questions? He supposed he knew more about the Bible than the man on the street but even that advantage—if in fact one could think of it as such—seemed of late to have soured on him as well, until at last here he was, slightly nauseous from the effects of doughnuts and coffee on an empty stomach shaken by miles of washboard roads, bound eventually for the sight of Ceton Verity’s Electro-Magnetron because just possibly the key to its secret meaning had turned up in the bathroom of a run-down rest stop on the side of I-15.

And yet even that was not the worst part. The worst part was that he had undertaken the mission at the risk of great personal loss, because it did not appear that Delandra Hummer would be waiting for him in the Blue Heaven Motel. He had made his pitch. He had shown her the crystal. She had called his bluff. He, of course, had called her bluff as well. He’d walked out the door leaving her seated on the dresser, the guitar case at her feet, the early morning light streaking her hair, and her lashes, beneath which her eyes had acquired a certain haunted quality he did not believe he had seen there before. It was a look, was all. But it had sufficed to weaken the backs of his knees as he made his way toward Bill Richards’s Land-Rover. And it was what he rode with.

“Do you know what Lyle said?” Obadiah asked. He was looking for diversion. Beyond the window the desert was white and dusty; alone with the monotony he was inclined to feed his depression.

“No, what?” Judy asked. She feigned boredom but Jack and Lyle were a sore spot with her and Obadiah could generally get a rise out of her by mentioning them. He didn’t know what was so great about getting a rise out of Judy Verity. It was admittedly a pathetic pastime. He felt that he did it now in honor of Delandra Hummer, and this in fact only fueled his depression after all. Still, he had started.

“He told me your father was Jesus Christ.”

Judy turned a palm toward the sunlight which filled the windshield. She spoke to Richards rather than Obadiah. “What did I tell you?” she said.

“He wasn’t Jesus Christ?” Obadiah asked.

“He was a scientist,” Judy replied. “His ideas were not conventional, so of course he was never accepted by the academic community. But he certainly never claimed to be Jesus Christ.”

“He believed,” Richards said, “that evil was the direct result of electromagnetic manipulation. He believed that without this interference man might soon achieve a godlike state. But he also believed that even with the interference people could better themselves. He developed a series of mental and physical disciplines aimed at freeing the thought processes. Eventually he believed that people would find a way to put an end to the manipulators themselves.”

Obadiah had seen mention of the manipulators in the introduction to the
The God Within.
But that was as far as he had gotten and he was still a bit unclear as to just who they were supposed to be—apparently some ancient race of gods determined to fuck with people’s heads, something like the demons of a more conventional Christian theology.

Richards, however, had resented the reference to traditional Christian anything. “I’m afraid he hadn’t much use for Christianity per se,” Bill said. “Which of course is why the suggestion that he was Christ is so absurd.”

“He wasn’t very big on the pie-in-the-sky approach,” Judy added. “He believed that if man was going to be saved, he would have to do it himself.”