Chapter 5

Voidboy

10/06/46 Commodore William S. Parsons recommends that the Navy facilities at Salton Sea be retained by the Los Alamos Laboratory for use as a field test range.

11/15/45 Glenn A. Fowler reports favorably on proposed use of Navy facilities at Salton Sea.

9/21/46 Navy divers recover classified materials from the bottom of the Salton Sea.


From Highway 86 the only evidence of anything is a battered and faded sign that says, “Salton Sea Test Base. No Trespassing”. But as the local teenagers looking for a place to smoke pot and drink beer could attest, there is no barrier preventing entry to the area. Sam Bauer followed Samantha Turing onto the rolling two-lane dirt road that led down towards the shoreline, either side of the route lined with sand dunes. Consequently, large parts of the road were covered with shifting sand, making some parts almost impassable. He passed through was left of the front gate, the only recognizable structure being the guard shack. To the right Sam could see the crumbling barracks and low-lying administrative buildings.

The Salton Sea Test Base was a facility that from 1945 to 1962 had been used as a field test range by the Army and Navy for the first couple of years, with jurisdiction finally transferred to the Dept. of Energy in 1947. A large floating target was permanently moored right off shore and when Atomic Bombardment Squadron from Wendover Field in Utah would make their bombing runs the whole southern half of the lake was closed off. Much of the activity there was classified, with the occasional vague DOE press release such as “classified material recovered from the bottom of the Salton Sea”. But by the early 60’s, the increased development around the lake was complicating activity at the base. In addition, the same rising water that was curtailing development of the Sea as a tourist destination was also playing havoc with the base. Earth dikes were built to stave off the encroaching water but soon the base’s airstrip was underwater, eventually followed by many of the administrator buildings. The last major activity there was the splashdown testing of the Project Mercury space capsule. Finally in 1961 all the camera and tracking gear was packed up and transferred to the Tonopah Test Range outside of Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

Samantha’s car stopped at the edge of the water. She stopped the car by the water’s edge and got out, climbing up the ten-foot earth dike that lined the abandoned base along the shoreline. Since traveling down to the lake from the highway was like going down into a bowl, Sam had hung back far enough to where he was still far enough up the hill to see over the earth dike. Sam could look out across the whole lake. The sky was bright blue and cloudless, the sea was still, but rank – the smell of rampant and pungent algae growth. In front of him was a sunken concrete blockhouse, the water halfway up the side of the structure. To the right were the remains of a pier, all that was remaining were the salt-encrusted pilings, now lined with small barnacles. He was much farther back this time. There was no way to get any closer than a quarter of a mile without looking suspicious. No matter, he could see everything he needed to with binoculars. He’d have to use a telephoto to take pictures. She was once again opening the trunk and laying out a multitude of plastic panels. As with the last location at the abandoned Salton Bay Yacht Club, many panels were already in place, considerable more, in fact. Sam was shocked at the size of this art installation. The words seemed to connote a bored, rich housewife doing her art. It was already taking up a few acres. Some rich wives did pottery, others painted in a room of the house that was indulgently set aside as a studio and Samantha Turing liked to do outdoor conceptual art. If these sojourns are what got her husband suspicious he will be pleasantly amused to find out the truth. But why would she keep this from her husband? Maybe the marriage was in trouble for completely different reasons.

The radio was on so low that the only sound was sharp static clips and pops. He took some more pictures, then pulled out the Coachella Tribune and started looking for a news story he didn’t want to find. He found it in the back in the section devoted to accidents and low level crime, “Farm Worker Dies in Traffic Mishap”. There wasn’t much, maybe fifty words, just a couple of inches. The man was still unidentified, no mention of how horrible his death was, no mention of how solitary an act death was. Of course this guy was going to die, but Sam had hoped otherwise, deluding himself that he maybe the guy had pulled through. Maybe if Sam would have stayed just minute longer. But to do what? You don’t just tuck somebody’s guts back inside and hold the opening shut until help arrives. He saw ambulance pulling up in his mirror as he left. Perfect timing. But Sam hadn’t known that the ambulance was there until he was already leaving. The truth was that he had freaked and bailed out without knowing when the ambulance would get there. But that lady was helping out… she was still there when Sam left. He certainly would never have left that poor guy by himself. He kept repeating that to himself.

He fell asleep. After some indeterminate time had passed, he bolted awake. Shit, he wasn’t supposed to do that. Maybe fifteen minutes… He looked up and she hadn’t moved.

He had searched her name on the web and could not find anything. He had run a background check for defaults, felonies and bankruptcies and found nothing. There was no evidence of previous marriages – at least in the United States. He had submitted a request for a copy of her birth certificate to the Office of Vital Records in Sacramento and would be receiving a copy in a few days.

Two hours passed. She was now pounding stakes into the latest batch of panels, securing them to the ground. She stopped, looked back at her work. She had increased her sea panels by an additional quarter. It was then that he noticed some kind of pattern. He was on a shallow incline looking down and this time he could that the various painted shapes on each panel melded into the other. It was coherent, though what it was was unclear. The difference between this set of panels and the ones he saw back at the old Yacht Club was that there was almost no green interspersed among the brown here. It was almost all brown, various shades and shapes, but all brown.

A car tore past him on the dirt road, kicking up a curtain of dust behind it. There was no peripheral vision looking through binoculars and so the speeding car caught him by surprise scaring him for a moment. The adrenaline chilled him. He caught his breath and put the binoculars back up to his eyes. The speeding car was an old Nissan hatchback, light blue. It reached the bottom of the hill and slowed down veering to the left of Samantha some hundred yards. He could see that Samantha was watching now too. Two men in suits, one black, the other an ugly blue, got out of the car a looked around. One was on the phone. The other reached back into the car and fiddled with something. In a second loud music started blasting from the car. It was hard to hear from this distance but it seemed like some kind of choral music, gospel or something. Sam turned his binoculars back over to Samantha. There was a look of bafflement and disgust on her face. She turned and grabbed her tools and threw them in the trunk. She would be driving back up this way in a moment and Sam was going to have to scramble in order to not be seen.

Sam sped up the dirt road back to the highway far enough ahead of Samantha. When he reached Hwy 86 he pulled out onto the road and drove north towards Palm Springs a quarter of a mile then pulled over. In his mirror he could see Samantha’s car appear at the base entrance and pull out onto the highway. After she passed by him he surreptitiously pulled in behind her some 200 yards back as he normally did. Typically he would continue to follow Samantha back to the house and park down the street until Mr. Turing returned from work. But now she was slowing down, some 20 miles per hour below the limit. It would be impossible to remain behind her and not look suspicious, so he passed her, looking straight ahead as much as he was tempted to get a good close-up view of a woman he’d only seen through a telephoto. Sam was in front of her now, his eyes glued to the rear-view mirror, making sure to appear to be moving but not moving out of sight of his quarry. If he did lose sight of her, the procedure was to turn around, backtrack, then once past her, pull back in behind her but from greater distance. Suddenly he could see her make a hard right and disappear. Sam made a fast U-turn and raced back to where she had turned off the road. She had pulled off into Salton City Estates. She was probably going back to her first site by the Yacht club. But by the time Sam had reached intersection he sailed through just in time to see Samantha pull into Meridian Place.

She stopped the car across the street from the house on the dead-end, leaving the car idling. Sam was parked way back at the corner. He took a picture. She had done nothing for ten minutes now. She didn’t leave her car and no one came out of the house to meet her. Sam copied down the house address, 1223 Meridian Place. A man walking his dog by Sam’s car was the only activity to be seen. Samantha’s car door opened. She stepped out and moved to the front door of the house. Ten seconds passed and the front door opened. Even from this distance the awkward body language was apparent. She entered the house, the door shutting behind her.

A half hour passed before Sam got the nerve to get out of the car, grabbing his camera. This was his job, he’d done it before, intruding on another’s privacy, but now completing and succeeding at his job was something he was more reluctant to do with each passing day.

Sam walked to the side of the house and then slid along the wall to the first window. He didn’t try to peek inside; he knew he’d be seen in the daylight. Instead he held his camera in front of the window and clicked away, having no idea whether he was getting anything usable or not. He guessed the required exposure, held his breath and clicked several times,. He then ducked under the window and went some fifteen feet to the next window. He raised the camera above his head and clicked another several shots.

Samantha was asleep underneath Doug. He was thinking about when was last time she might have slept with her husband – this morning? Doug imagined his sperm mingling inside with his, two competitor’s fluids intertwining. He stopped suddenly, disturbed by this crudeness. So, Samantha was a repository for his sperm and that of any other male that fit her gene’s wet algorithms? He was being too reductive. He then threw himself to the other extreme, thinking of Samantha’s beauty as an idea, the precise combination of curves and spheres, zero tolerances. Her beauty is an idea existing from the beginning of time when the cosmic background radiation squirmed in a compact ball. He was in love with an idea that preceded them both. This stuff seemed brilliant in the half-light of dreaming. Through the window he saw a camera, floating by itself, weaving and bobbing slightly, along with the muffled clicking sounds. Jarred from his reverie, Doug grabbed his clothes, only bothering to put on his jeans. The camera suddenly dipped out of sight below the window. In ten seconds he had gone from a totally relaxed state to one of adrenaline pins poking through his skin. He was immobilized for a moment, not sure if he should he call the police or pursue the guy. He ran out the door, the bright desert daylight emboldening him.

Sam moved to the next window on the front of the house. He walked softly so his shoes would make no sound on the small ¼ screened Madison Gold rocks that bordered the house. He crouched beneath the window, held his camera pointed on yet again another window. Sam heard a door slam, like the crack of a rifle report. Sam’s head snapped to left. Somebody was running right at him. Sam ran towards the street, towards his car. “Who the fuck are you?!” his pursuer yelled.

Sam said nothing, concentrating on running. His pursuer was getting closer. He hit his car keychain lock button. The car door opened, he slid in and was accelerating towards the cul-de-sac before he realized that he had started the car. He made a large U-turn and was doubling back towards the house. The cliché would be for the pursuer now to be standing in the middle of road defiantly aiming a gun at the oncoming car, or maybe just standing there convinced that their moral imperative was enough to stop the car by itself. Instead, the man stood on the curb, watching the speeding car as he receeded in Sam’s mirror.

At the Hwy 86 stoplight Sam turned his head every few seconds, so paranoid that he didn’t trust his rearview mirror to detect anybody coming up from behind. As he turned his head to the left he could see to the south a thin column of smoke rising high into the sky. It was coming from the direction of the Navy base. The smoke was intensely black, the type he remembered from when he burned plastic car models as a kid. The light turned green but instead of going north he turned left. The black smoke column grew larger as he drove down 86 towards the Navy base. He turned left at the sign and drove on the dirt road until he was at the lip of the hill that descended down to the remaining buildings of the base and the lake. Down below was the burning wreck, flames and black smoke curled around it like a protective coating, a constantly shifting skin. Sam sped down the hill, the rocks on the road flying up underneath car sounding like nails in a can. As he closed on the burning wreck Sam could see glimpses of the vehicle through the thick smoke. It was the light blue hatchback that had sped past him earlier. He opened his car door and felt like he had just opened an oven door. He could feel the heat from the blaze at least five hundred feet away. There was no one around the car, either the occupants got out or they were dead. There was music emanating from the burning wreck, the same music that he had heard earlier, but he could tell what it was now. It was church music, not like Bach or Black Gospel, but those kind of clunky, plodding hymns he remembered from Lutheran Sunday school, “…Jesus loves me, yes I know, cause the bible tells be so…” He pulled out his phone and dialed 911, the dispatcher telling him a police and fire truck was on the way. Now with nothing to do but wait Sam turned up the radio and watched, transfixed by the swirling flames. Gaps would open up, exposing sections of the car whose blue had turned to a scorched black. An overheated engine perhaps, but Sam knew that overheating occurred when the engine was running. From his vantage point up on the ridge Sam remembered hearing the car being turned off.

Sam hit the station buttons, landing finally on an old-style Musak station. Some Montavani type thing oozed into the car. There weren’t many of these old format easy-listening stations left since fake-jazz stations were now filling that niche for baby boomers, but leave it to Palm Springs to have one of the last lucky survivors. Sam was going to turn it off when he started to find the bizarre juxtaposition between music and visuals too intriguing to let go. Music to watch burning cars by.

There was another breach in the smoke. Sam could now see through a hole in the flames that there was a body inside slumped over the dashboard. Sam squinted. There was something moving inside the burning car – no – there was something flying around inside the car, bouncing off the inside. But there was something wrong. As horribly ludicrous as the scene before him was, there was something gnawing at his brain telling him something wasn’t right...

Sam slowly inched the car forward. As he inched up closer and closer he could see that the thing throwing itself wildly around the inside of the burning car did not resemble any bird. Indeed, it looked more like a football or a melon. Suddenly from a grove of trees a figure struggled out into the open, clothes torn and burnt in several of places. He staggered forward. Sam stared for a moment but was able to shake off the trance, forcing open the car door and leaping out. “Get down! Roll on the ground!” Sam yelled. The man remained motionless, staring at Sam. He was holding something in his hand.

“‘I, Yahweh, am in the midst of the earth’”.

Sam started to run towards the man. Sam then suddenly stopped. There was something in the corner of his eye; it was movement from the burning car. Abruptly, through the flames it came flying, charging right for the burning man. The object was moving at the speed of a fastball and it hit him in an instant. Like a punch. The melon slammed itself into his head, snapping it back, dollops of blood splattered to the side, his body falling in a compact heap. The melon rose a few feet, and then dove down on the man again and again until the screaming stopped. The object then rose to a level of ten feet above the ground and hovered. In a moment of clarity Sam spun around and reached in for his camera sitting on the dash. Without looking through the viewfinder he aimed the camera in the general direction of the object and clicked, wound, clicked, wound... In an unreal instant the object accelerated to a clip of several hundred miles per hour, arcing high into a parabola and instantly disappearing over the sea. As his eyes lost their point of focus, Sam realized that he was staring at the sharp brown cutouts of the Chocolate Mountains on the east shore. The music from the burning wreck cut-off abruptly, ending in a dissipating static.

Sam was agape, immobilized. Everything had become absurd. It was as if the laws governing everyday events had been usurped by some new paradigm. In an instant, it seemed that Newtonian mechanics had been thrown out the window in favor of some Druid world-view. Reality had lost its center of gravity. Maybe this was entropy. Sam leapt out of the car and ran towards the fallen man. He was dead. Through the blanket of blood Sam could see the huge neck wound where blood was still draining. The gash was disorienting, not an injury from a catastrophic collision with a fast moving object, or even a sharp one – this injury was rough, uneven. He realized that he was looking at a bite wound. The object in the man’s hand had fallen several feet away. Sam reached over and grabbed it, not realizing until much later that it was a camera.

A blade drove twisting into Sam’s brain, the type of panic that kills your ability to focus. You stare at nothing in particular and your vision blurs as if someone had grabbed your ankles and was spinning you in a tight circle. Sam dropped the phone, threw the car into reverse and flew backwards through the mud some twenty feet. The engine revved, the Muzak version of Herb Alpert’s “Lonely Bull” played on the radio and in a few seconds Sam’s Saturn had backed violently into the concrete blocks of what had been a mess hall. Sam pulled his foot off the pedal and the engine fell back into quiet idle. He slowly lifted himself off the seat and looked over the dashboard oblivious to the damage in the rear. The car was still burning and Sam had a soundtrack to go with it.

Sam tried to put his mind into a detached mode that could ferret out order and determine what to do next. The Saturn sped back up the dirt road. Coming over a rise Sam sped by a police car going the opposite direction. The Saturn plunged down the gradient then rose up the next hill. Sam wondered about how suspicious he looked leaving the scene of a burning wreck. But he was the one who called it in. If he is pulled over that’s what he will say. He comes to the top of another rise and can see the cop car again. The brake lights are no longer on and it is continuing to move in the opposite direction. Sam pulls out onto Hwy. 86 and heads north.