Truly Like Lightning Page 6

  Jackie’s Pearl looked older than seventeen, with her mother’s long black hair, large green eyes, and defiant set to her strong jaw. Unprompted, Pearl elaborated, “We don’t need purification, we are already pure. The body is all of the soul that the senses can access in our fallen world. The only way to God is not through faith, but through our bodies. The body isn’t a wall, it’s a portal. The body is the only God we can touch, God trapped by time.” She set her chin high and smiled.

  The children stopped singing and the room fell quiet, their little heads pivoting to Bronson to see his response. You could almost hear dust motes landing. Yaya seemed for a moment to want to silence Pearl, but that was something she would never do to her students. Bronson nodded for a few moments longer than was customary; it almost seemed as if Pearl had entranced him, short-circuited him. Mary saw in Bronson a look that he used to give Jackie sometimes when she teased him, a discomfited delight. Bronson inhaled deeply. Young Joseph picked his nose nervously. Bronson exhaled audibly, then stood up and left the room.

  Moments later, they heard a man yell a command and a horse speed off. Yalulah handed Deuce the well-worn copy of A People’s History of the United States, its broken spine duct-taped many times over, and told him to read the next chapter aloud. He thumbed through to find where he’d last been.

  “Chapter fourteen,” he began, “‘War is the health of the state’…”

  4.

  THE DRIVE FROM the Praetorian offices in Santa Monica to Joshua Tree National Park takes about three hours. For Maya, this meant three hours of riding in the back of a black Mercedes G-wagen inhaling an unholy combination of exhaled weed and Cuban cigar smoke that framed the words out of the mouths of the Praetorian Young Turks. They played the music du jour at ass-tickling volume. Rapping along with the misogynist, money-centric, status-obsessed lyrics was one of the last refuges where Caucasian men could freely and enthusiastically refer to women as bitches and hoes. It was truly a modern blackface. The Turks were able to voice things, even JJ, who was African American on his birth certificate—it was a veritable minstrel show for him, too—that they could never get away with coming out of their privileged white faces. The Turks were indulging in a philosophical nostalgia of sorts as they threw up incoherent and incomplete gang signs and chanted along en masse: “I ain’t sayin’ she a gold digger / But she ain’t messin’ with no broke niggas.”

  At least she didn’t have to golf with them tomorrow. The Young Turk weekend plan was twofold—a Friday night of epic drinking and drugging with trust building, tall tale telling, and desert spitball sessions while slumming in one of the Joshua Tree campsites, followed by a late Saturday check-in to recover at the Mojave Hotel, while the boys hit the links and Maya hit the spa. Sunday they’d all meet up and drag their ruined body chemistry, dry mouths, and dried-out spinal fluid back to the real world. Sure, it was conforming to sexist role-playing to skip golf, and even though Maya knew a lot of business got done on the course and the lame nineteenth hole, she fucking hated that game, everything about it—the clothes, the visors, the pace, the lingo and time-suck; plus, her toes were a mess. She’d be more than fine hydrating on cucumber-infused water all day and getting a mani-pedi after a wild night.

  The G-wagen pulled up to the Black Rock campsite, four thousand feet above sea level, around 7 p.m., as the sun was beginning to sink and turn the desert postcard pinkish. They unloaded the tents from the car and set to work. At twenty bucks a night, at least Black Rock had water, flush toilets, and fire grates. To the Turks, its low-tech accommodations passed for slumming irony for one night. Once the tents had been secured, out came the peyote, the Molly, and the ayahuasca—the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost du jour of the modern desert vision quest. Each picked their poison.

  Maya had done Molly in college at Penn, and liked it, but associated it with dancing all night and love feelings, and she didn’t want any love feelings in her tent tonight. She’d heard a lot recently about ayahuasca, but was pretty sure it was a good idea to have a mediator there or some kind of shaman to see the trip through. She’d taken an intro to anthropology course (known as “Easy-A 101”) at Penn where they read Carlos Castaneda and learned about the peyote culture. She chose the dried little Lophophora williamsii cactus button and awaited the thirty-minute ETA of mescaline in her blood.

  In Easy-A Anthro, she learned how mescaline works chemically, and she liked the idea of a serotonin agonist. Her Econ. major’s understanding of the drug’s mechanism was shaped like the chemical that was supposed to lock up and inhibit serotonin. Serotonin she understood to be a kind of a happy, up-mood chemical, but that too much of it was not great for focus. So if you had too much serotonin you wouldn’t be able to prioritize or hierarchize reality or your senses—the sounds and colors and taste and feel would all be present at maximum intensity; all life and sensation would attack at once. So her takeaway (given to her by a friend who was fulfilling his science requirement by taking the soft “Physics for Poets” class) was that this was not a trip that added anything to what was there, it simply made you unable to edit the world. Whereas you lived the rest of your life in a diminished sensual prison of your own making improvised through generations of chemical survival mechanisms, what you got when you tripped was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, the chaos of the world all at once.

  She wasn’t feeling all that much, so she grabbed another button, washing the bitter pill down with some lukewarm rosé. By the time the drug came on for real, the Turks were blasting a confusing mélange of Jay-Z and Florida Georgia Line. They had moved, though she didn’t remember moving, out to the fire grates, and the games had begun under a clear cold night sky that looked too big to be true.

  There was a hodgepodge, Lord of the Flies element to the night’s proceedings, in that the Turks seemed only half educated as to what they were supposed to be doing, like they had recovered the ritual on ancient stone tablets in a language they didn’t understand. They knew this was supposed to be sacred or sacredish, but they had no idea how to proceed. At its best, this was gonna be like a really good TED talk, but Ted himself, or any kind of visionary leader, was nowhere in sight.

  They began with a trust-building exercise that was most probably lifted from acting classes, in which one person would close their eyes and blindly fall backward, trusting that the person behind them would catch them. They called it the “Catcher in the Rye game,”’cause each time someone caught a falling comrade, the falling one had to take a shot of rye. Get it? They did this for about three days, it seemed, and Maya realized that her sense of time had fled.

  When it was Maya’s turn to be the catcher, she let this annoying, know-it-all dude, JJ, drop and smack his head on the ground. She hadn’t made the decision beforehand, but, as JJ was falling, she stepped back and made a flourish like a matador sidestepping the bull. The rest of the Turks gasped and laughed.

  “The fuck, Maya, what the fuck?” JJ said, as he cradled his head.

  Maya didn’t apologize. “You see that? ’Cause that’s the way it is out there, homie.”

  “In the desert?” JJ whined as he checked his fingers for blood from his scalp.

  “No, not the desert, JJ,” Maya preached. “The trust part here is me letting you know how it really is in the big out there, the macro out there—it’s dog eat dog, but you can trust me to always tell it like it is, I’ll always have your back.”

  “Bullshit, you literally just didn’t have my back.”

  “But in a larger, macro sense, I did. I do.”

  JJ wasn’t convinced. He said, “I think I’m bleeding.”

  “I think you’re a pussy.”

  Well, maybe that wasn’t very Ted of her, but, game, set, match—Maya.

  This wasn’t really in Maya’s character; in fact, if one of the men had done it, she would have shunned him. But she knew this was the type-A behavior she had to exhibit if she was going to be accepted as one of the guys, as a shark. She knew that it was JJ
who had coined the office nickname for Maya—HH, for Hope Hicks. And she knew why. Hope Hicks, Trump’s trusted press aide before he became president, had model good looks and a high-class-escort fashion and outer-borough makeup sense that no doubt made Donny Drumpf feel sexy. Without any apparent qualifications aside from her pretty face and loyalty, Hicks ended up working at the White House, in a position of influence with global power and ramifications. Hope, like her boss, was hopelessly underqualified for her job once Trump upgraded from being a reality TV actor and real estate money launderer to the president of the United States.

  That’s what JJ was saying when he called Maya “Malouf’s HH.” And even though Maya secretly felt that Hicks was more of a tragic figure than the one so easily derided, trapped by over- and underestimation by both men and women, she still had to distance herself from any whiff of being an ornament. So tonight, Maya knew, if she wanted to shed the HH moniker forever, she’d have to humiliate JJ, she’d have to skew her nature to outman the men, to err on the side of asshole by being the non-catcher in the rye.

  “Jesus, JJ, stop being such a whiny little bitch.” One of the other Turks, perhaps the alpha, Darrin, chimed in, the rest of the men guffawing like a morally stunted and inarticulate Greek chorus.

  Maya extended her hand down to a still stunned JJ on the ground. He looked at the hand as if he wasn’t sure she was going to pull it away and Lucy/Charlie Brown him again. She winked and smiled. He grasped it and she helped him up to standing, patting him condescendingly on the top of his head for good measure, like a primate grooming another primate to welcome him back into the fold after an altercation. Mission accomplished.

  Darrin stood up. “I got it. Check it out. Here at Praetorian, we are doing God’s work. What’s the best real estate scam of all time?”

  Turks started answering—Manhattan, the Valley, the Hamptons, or maybe that halcyon day in the aughts in Georgia when the Turks had descended, like Bluetoothed, bespoke locusts, on county courthouses and snapped up over one hundred foreclosed homes in one morning. Darrin had been in one of those courthouses that bright day, all of twenty-three years old, his briefcase bulging with cashier’s checks, and he smiled at the memory of youthful conquest. But still, he waved off all their answers. “Heaven,” he said, his pupils so expanded that his eyes appeared entirely black. “The Catholic Church says, ‘Yo, there’s this place called Heaven where everything is perfect and you can go live there after you die if you join this club called the Church and pay your dues year after year’—you’ll get a little piece of land in heaven, and there’s no end to the real estate up there ’cause it’s fuckin’ made up—they can keep selling it till hell freezes over, the bubble never bursts. Best Ponzi scheme ever. The Vatican are straight-up pimps with inexhaustible inventory, yo!”

  “Heaven! Heaven! Heaven!”

  The Turks shouted like Heaven was a football team.

  Maya watched the men bark in approval of Darrin’s perception. And she agreed, it wasn’t a half-bad insight, but she found herself struggling for air. She knew the mescaline could cause respiratory tightness, so she was trying not to panic about it. She worried that her breathing was no longer part of her autonomic system, but rather was dependent on conscious effort; that is, she felt like she had to think to breathe, and by consciously controlling her breath, she was, in fact, starting to hyperventilate. She wretched. She vomited. The Turks applauded. “Good out!” one called, which is what you say when someone hits a nice golf shot out of the rough. Ha ha ha. They began chanting “Semper Re-Fi! Semper Re-Fi! Semper Re-Fi!”

  They looked ghoulish laughing in the firelight. Her trip took a turn.

  She felt some panic sweat cold on the back of her neck, but she didn’t want to be perceived as weak, didn’t want to ask for help. Her breath got tighter, labored, and even though she was outside, she felt claustrophobic. The sky looked too low to her, like she might bump her head on it. She had an image that if she could just take off in a car, the wind would force air down into her lungs if she drove with her head out the window, much like a shark must continue to swim to run oxygenating water over its unmoving gills. That’s the last coherent thought she could recall until she found herself behind the wheel of a car speeding along a desert road, her foot plastered down on the pedal with her mouth open out the window like a happy dog. The speedometer hit 85.

  She didn’t know this car. This wasn’t the G-wagen. It struck her as universally humorous that she was driving a vehicle unknown to her. But it had serious pep. Had she stolen it? she wondered. She’d certainly never stolen a car before. No, she or the mescaline reasoned, she had not stolen it, because there was no such thing as personal property, everything belonged to everyone, all is all for all, therefore theft is a chimerical, capitalist, bourgeois designation. She didn’t need to know how she came to be behind the wheel or where she got the keys. All she knew was that the difference between what was outside and what was inside, the native and the foreign, the desert air and the air inside her lungs, was being erased by the holy serotonin lingering overlong. She felt the tightness leave her chest like a bird taking flight, and she could breathe again, she was breathing again. A bug flew in her wide-open mouth—“Protein,” she thought, “we are all one, thank you for your sacrifice, sir”—and swallowed. The speedometer hit 100.

  She had no idea how long she’d been driving, but at some point, she had to slow down because of the road. If there was a road any longer, it had gotten more grabby, soft, and treacherous. In her expanding mind, she had switched to “automatic pilot”; that is, she had stopped driving consciously and relegated the act more to a more basic bodily function akin to breathing or blinking or her heart beating. And the move had worked; she was alive and at one with this gleaming machine, and she was driving in complete darkness somewhere off-road deep in the Mojave. The wheels spun out and lost traction as the car fishtailed sideways, spraying sand and small rocks, and stopped. Maya inhaled.

  It felt like the end of a movie, but she was still climbing higher; the second peyote button, like a booster rocket piggybacking upon the first, ignited and kicked in with a silent roar. Maya pictured herself wrapping her arms and legs around a rocket as it blasted into space, waving a ten-gallon hat like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove.

  Maya got out of the car and took in the sky. She had driven so far from road lights or ambient civilized light that the stars were bright hieroglyphs, blinking like cursors waiting to be lettered. She saw a curving cluster of stars that looked to her like a chevron or an arrow or a greater-than sign or the logo on the Star Trek uniforms pointing in a certain direction. Her feet began to move where the chevron pointed her. She walked fast, even faster when she closed her eyes, following the sign in the sky in her mind. Gradually, she heard music. Must be the music of the universe, the theremin music the planets made as they danced around each other, the music of the spheres. She took her eyes off the stars and followed where her ears led. She could only handle one sense at a time, it seemed.

  As she crested a rise, her dime-size pupils tried to contract against a dancing light on the ground a couple hundred yards ahead. Her first thought was—downed UFO. But, as her eyes focused and she calmed down, she saw that it was a bonfire, and she could make out human shapes clustered around it. Something told her to hide, so she hunkered down. She heard the music of the spheres morph into the Beatles—the Na na na / Na na na na refrain of “Hey Jude.” She vomited again till she was empty. When she finished, the music had stopped and she could hear human voices carrying on the cold air.

  A thought dawned that she had stumbled upon a lost tribe of humans, perhaps even prehumans or desert Neanderthals. How they came to know the Beatles music catalogue, she left for some other time. Now and then she peeped her eyes up above the rise to get a better look at the primitive humanoids. She surmised that it was probably an extended family of early primates, like Homo habilis or Homo erectus—goddamn “Easy-A Anthro” coming in clutch with the terminology again
! Looked to be about fifteen of them, though every time she tried to count past ten, she failed and had to start over. The group consisted of three or four adult males and females and a cluster of mostly younger ones closely resembling modern human children and adolescents. She saw the male one she took to be the leader rise and speak. “We are the bad animal created in the image of the baddest cosmic ur-animal. We are the naked apes,” it said. Maya nodded her assent. Wow, she thought, either these strange beings speak English or I can understand their primitive tongue.

  Behind the alpha male, she noticed some rocks stacked as if to make a headstone, and then a couple smaller stacks nearby, like graves for pets, a couple of mini-graves; this struck her as both sad and cute. “Aw,” she said to herself.

  Then the male continued, “When I was learning stunts, Dar told me to hang around with the animal trainers, study the animals, how they move. I always got along better with people who got along better with animals. This one trainer had a crescent-shaped scar on his cheek where an adolescent male chimp had attacked him while he was driving. He had a male and a female in the back seat. The male was grooming him, you know, going through his hair looking for bugs, which is a submissive act, but it was a ruse in this case, ’cause all of a sudden, the chimp got him in a headlock—they’re five times as strong as a man, so he’s got him in an iron grip and he full-on bites his cheek, right here. Removes flesh, a real bite, blood everywhere. The female is screaming, upset, but not helping. He didn’t blame the chimp, that’s what a chimp does—challenges the dominant male. He was able to stop the car and run out, the chimp followed him, ready for the finish, and my friend ran back in the passenger side and slammed the door before the chimp could kill him or rip his balls off. That’s a move they like, very effective. We are about ninety-eight percent identical to chimps. The other two percent is God. Without God, we’re all chimps. So, I got my eye on you, Deuce.” They all laughed, some, it seemed the younger males, uneasily.