Chapter 1

Creation

They found the body sitting a wooden throne, half buried in sand, right outside of Yuma, on the California side. The three ATV’s rolled over the top of the dunes, the late afternoon sun making them appear totally white. Up, over and down over the sand, one arc would conclude as another arc began. The three of them had ridden for over an hour, no communication between the three, other than hand signals. When they had begun, throngs of dune buggies had surrounded them, ATV’s, and camps of RVs sprawled for several miles along Interstate 8, just to the west of the California/Arizona line. But as they drove deeper into the dunes, those other vehicles thinned out and along with them the vehicle paths that cris-crossed and scarred the dunes. The sand was now almost unnaturally smooth. From here on it looked as though a curtain of brown felt had descended and laid itself over rolling hills.

Each rider carried water. The heat was not abysmal this time of year, but a sun unobscured by clouds and the zero humidity can conspire to dehydrate you in an hour. After another twenty minutes, Darren pulled alongside Trevor and Aaron and waved. The three of them slowed to a stop. They sat there, their motors idling in a bowl between three dunes, each converging into and out of the other, co-hosting lines and arcs.

“I think it was around here…”

Trevor looked at Darren, feeling the same level of contempt as one might have towards a fishing partner who had put a mark on the boat to remember a great fishing spot.

“These dunes are interchangeable, Darren,” said Trevor.

“It was around here.”

“Even if you could remember these dunes, it wouldn’t matter because they shift so much.”

Darren turned towards Trevor, “So according to you there’s no chance of finding anything?” he asked testily. “Why’d you agree come out here then?”

“I thought you might have referenced some distant landmark like those mountains or something –” Trevor was pointing to a line of low peaks in the distance. “I didn’t think you were trying to remember a particular sand dune.”

“Maybe I did. They don’t change that fast.”

Aaron looked on, half-listening over the idling growl of the ATV’s, half messing with his helmet.

Darren pointed, “It’s over this dune. Let’s go.”

Darren jerked away, speeding up the steep face of the dune just ahead. He was halfway up before Trevor and Aaron followed.

Flying over the top of the dune and falling back down the other side created a one-second feeling of weightlessness more immediate than a roller coaster. Trevor couldn’t tell if perhaps if it was because he was in the driver’s seat or it was due to the more subtle realization that you were not safely locked onto some rail making disaster just a wrong move away. He looked up briefly, long enough to see something dug into the sand maybe half a mile away. Like a fleck of bread crust in cup of milk, anything that was not beige and made of sand, stood out. Darren gunned his engine and accelerated towards the object, closing quickly. Trevor could see that part of the half-buried object seemed to have a human shape. Revulsion drove hard into him. He tried convinced himself weakly that it must be a statue. This was no longer a lark to appease an eccentric friend, Trevor felt like he was being rousted out of bed in the middle of the night to be told some horrible news.

They were maybe one hundred yards away now. There was body sitting in a chair, a gigantic oversized chair. It was carved from dark wood, highly ornamented, red leather seat backs, arm rests a foot wide. It was a half-buried throne. If they had come just a few days later Trevor guessed that the whole thing would have disappeared beneath the sands. He remembered seeing paintings of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in the early 19th century, from the first time that Europeans had set eyes on the remnants of Egyptian culture, the now famous pyramids, temples and statues, so familiar now as to be cliches. These paintings depicted the famous sites as we see them at present day with great accuracy – but this was before the archeologists began streaming in to make their excavations and the one major difference was that each of the sites was half-covered with sand. When he saw these renderings Trevor remembered the bolt that snapped across this head. Seeing these great relics buffeted by the shifting sands made the romance of the place even more heightened. Trevor could imagine that here on the dunes, right off I-8, was also the site of some great lost civilization, this small artifact outcropping being only the tip of some mammoth temple resting quietly under the sand, a hundred feet down.

The three stopped in front of the desiccated figure slumped in the throne. The body was well preserved, the shirtless remains drying like beef jerky, the skin stretched taut, well on its way to being mummified. The facial features were barely recognizable. They turned off their engines.

“So, what do you think?” was all Darren uttered.

“Who’d drag a huge throne out into the middle of dune field?” said Trevor.

“This looks like those huge chairs they have at the Excaliber,” said Aaron.

Trevor got off his vehicle and walked right in front of the man in the throne. The dead man sat at attention, both arms on the wide rests. He stared straight ahead, the eyes gone. Any horror had already been sucked out, leaving just sadness.

“This is Sam Bauer. He was a detective in Mecca.”

“You know him?” asked Aaron.

“I'd see him around town,” Aaron replied.

“Like, you can tell who that is?”

“Yeah. It’s him.”

So this guy just decides he wants to just come out here and die?” said Darren skeptically. “Drag a throne out here, sit down and die?”

“I guess,” said Trevor as he circled the throne. His words were slow, “Why the hell would you do this?”

They drove the ATV's back to the car, loaded them up on the trailer and drove back to the Suzuki dealership in Brawley to call the police.

Chapter 2

7 Weeks Ago

Doug Albertson stood in the parking lot of the Palm Springs Wyndam Resort. It was 7:00 and still 106 degrees and he was lingering. The woman he was staring at definitely didn’t work for the paper. Blond, mid-length hair, dark green mini-dress, classy not trashy, one inch heels, very expensive. Must be an upper management spouse.

“That’s Turing’s wife.”

Doug responded too quickly, “—what?”

“That girl you’re looking at...”

“I’m not looking at her”, he said unconvincingly.

Doug continued his walk across the parking lot, speeding up to catch Denise, his co-worker and escort for the evening. Several nicely dressed couples were converging at the canopied area near the entrance of the hotel where a gaggle of valet parking attendants hung around a makeshift curb podium jetting back and forth across the parking lot with other people’s keys. Doug hated valet parking. There was always that one uncomfortable moment when you picked up your car and you were about to tip the guy and you didn’t know if it was enough. The parking attendant might give you a withering look or a snide comment that could wreck your whole evening.

Doug had caught up with Denise and the two were walking in tandem. “This is going to suck,” he mumbled.

“Just view it as work. If you view this as a wrecked Saturday night you’ll go nuts.”

The two entered the ballroom and took a seat out of sight at the back table. So far everyone was still milling around and most of the tables were empty. “Far enough back?” asked Doug.

Denise nodded. “Pretend I’m your date and get me a drink. Dewars and soda.”

Doug waved to his co-worker Susan and her husband Carl at the next table over. Susan was looking great in a floral print dress that reminded Doug how much time he spent being frustrated each week wishing she was still single. Doug walked to the side entrance of the big room. Up in front, hanging over a folding stage, was a large banner that read, “The Coachella Valley Tribune Pinnacle Awards”.

Three makeshift bars had been set up in the hallway to handle the throng. Each employee had been given three drink tickets, enough to placate the employee who might be a bit resentful at having to give up a weekend night to attend this event, yet not enough to get them too plowed and make the company open to a lawsuit should someone plow into a light pole on the way home. Doug was sure the paper had hired a consultant to figure out such a Golden Mean. Each bar was equally packed, the lines snaking so far out into the hall that regular foot traffic was essentially blocked. Tony from the art department waved from the end of one the lines.

“Doug, you finally showed up!”

Doug gave a neutral smile and walked towards the six foot-five, two-sixty Tony.

“I had to show up for one of these things – I’m up for one of these things”, said Doug as he got into line. Tony was irreverent, loud, loved pot, listened to indie label thrash-metal, hated the company, suspected and distrusted everyone. Though entertaining at first, Tony-types got old fast, constantly telling you what a wretched place you worked at, what wretched world you lived in and what a cruel series of defeats life always provided. Tony had originally been hired as a creative artist in the art department, but failing that, was bumped down to a production artist; bombing out there, Tony was demoted again, this time to digital scanning. Doug figured that at this rate Tony would be on the landscape crew within a year.

“You got nominated for a Pinnacle Award?” said Tony.

“I was strongly urged to attend.”

Tony looked at Doug with a mixture of awe and contempt, “Jesus, Doug what has happened to you?”

“I’ve become a pod person.”

Doug caught sight of the woman from the parking lot again. She was walking alongside her husband, Alan Turing, the paper’s associate publisher. They were moving through the foyer shaking hands with underlings and colleagues. He moved with the air of a man who knew that every male in the room wanted to sleep with his wife and understood the power implicit in that. She moved along with him, smiling and laughing at the little comments that everyone makes at functions like this; these false moments of intimacy that greased the wheels of social discourse.

“Tony, who is she?”

Tony turned to look, paused, and then let out a gasp. “Oh yeah, that’s her.” Tony stared with reverence. The long legs, the wasp waist, the breasts that were so well contoured that you didn’t notice if they were large or small. She moved with studied grace that didn’t look like studied grace. “Turing dumped his first wife of fifteen years and got himself an upgrade wife. I didn’t know how much of an upgrade it was.”

“I remember that… it happened right around the time he got promoted to associate publisher.”

“He got a new company car and a new company wife.”

Doug didn’t say anything, just kept staring. Turing and his wife were moving closer, talking to Jim Aldano in accounting. Doug found himself wanting to get the hell out. He felt stupid knowing he would have to make small talk with this same woman he had been staring at for the better part of an hour. He had violated her in his mind, over and over and he felt that everyone there knew it. He was almost up to the bar...

“Doug Albertson, I hear you’re up for ‘Rep of the Year.’”

Doug turned around and found that he was in handshake range of Alan Turing. Doug extended his hand, “Yes I am.”

“Doug, this is my wife, Samantha…”

She was three feet away. Doug had hoped that it would turn out that upon closer scrutiny she wasn’t that pretty. Doug had this happen to him many times before. You see a great looking woman and get horribly frustrated at having no way to meet her (she’s with a boyfriend or something). You hope that as you get closer it’ll turn out that she’s not that great. Oftentimes you’d be right – you’d be off the hook, breathe a sigh of relief and realize that you hadn’t missed anything. Tonight wasn’t one of those times. He also noticed that she was staring at him.

She shook Doug’s hand softly, “I’ve heard so much about you, Doug.”

Doug tried to come up with a witty rejoinder, “Oh, oh – that bad, huh?”

She laughed and it almost sounded genuine. Tony had reached the front of the line and was ordering drinks from the bartender. Turing leaned forward and lowered his voice to whisper, “Just between you and me, I happen to know that you’re the winner.” Doug was genuinely surprised. Generally a lazy rep, Doug had backed into some nice accounts that had been tossed his way. He thought that this had been obvious to all – but apparently not to management. This might look good on a resume, but on the whole Doug didn’t care, just skip the award and pay more money. It took a few seconds to muster up the impression that he was thrilled.

“Really, wow. Thanks for the news.”

Samantha was still staring at Doug. Realizing that he couldn’t continue to ignore it, Doug turned his gaze back to Samantha.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “you look like someone I know.”

“Who would that be, honey?” Turing said, caught off guard.

“Someone I used to know.” Her tone was flip but her eyes stayed locked. Doug felt uncomfortable. If he had uttered such a line to a woman it would be construed as a come-on. He wasn’t sure if that was the intent here, but if the two of them were having this discussion alone in the corner he’d have been thrilled. However, here in the presence of her husband, who also happened to be Doug’s supervisor three levels up, it was a completely different matter.

“Well, I hope he wasn’t a jerk.”

“No.”

Alan Turing was scratching his neatly trimmed beard nervously. When one is showing his prize possession you don’t count on her showing interest in someone you’re trying to impress. With a note of pique in his voice Turing said, “Dear, I think you’re making a Doug a little uncomfortable. This is his night, you know.”

“No, no …” Doug begged off with a tension-relieving laugh.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Turing grabbed her right elbow and was moving her along. “We still have people to meet – congratulations again, Doug.”

Samantha just smiled as the two of them walked off. Doug wasn’t sure if it was his imagination or not, but she seemed ready to cry.

Doug maneuvered his way back to the table carrying Denise’s Scotch and his own whisky sour. By the time he had returned to the table the remaining seats were filled and Denise was talking to Chuck Stevens in Classifieds. He handed Denise her drink and took his seat. Immediately, the lights went down. Suddenly, appearing on a giant big-screen TV was the various sales staff lip-synching to the Supremes hit, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Shot on video, each verse was lip-synched by a different staffer (Doug was lucky that he was out the day the video guy came by). The audience was roaring, every employee waiting for their ten seconds of in-house fame. In the context of this homemade video the song’s title was no longer an ode to insatiable love but was now transformed into a soundtrack of corporate achievement. Doug looked over at Denise, making eye-contract – she was rolling hers. Denise was one of those sales reps that made the job bearable, and occasionally almost fun. Hired six months after Doug, Denise had the same cynical attitude as Doug, making the rest of the “hard chargers” on the sales staff immediately suspicious of her. Doug had always wished she were attractive. Her overly fleshy proportions were qualities he desperately tried to overlook but, in the end, couldn’t. If she was twenty pounds lighter and had slightly less bulbous facial features he would have married her. There had been a company soiree ten months before that afterwards had found the two of them drunk at his apartment. He had desperately wanted to talk himself into sex, but couldn’t. Denise fumbled with his fly and tried to go down on him. After a few embarrassingly inebriated attempts she fell asleep and the incident was never discussed.

The video ended and associate publisher Alan Turing stepped up to the podium, “Welcome to the eighth annual Pinnacle Awards! Remember, whether you win or lose tonight, one day you’ll all have a chance to be at the peak! The room broke into applause. Turing went on with some formalities that found the audience distracted and talking amongst itself, but Turing plowed through anyway, oblivious to the lack of attention. “Tonight, our first category is Team Leader of the Year...” The candidates’ faces were flashed up onto the screen accompanied by more applause.

Doug leaned forward to Denise, “I’m getting another drink, want anything?”

“Dewars and soda, two of them.” Doug nodded.

Doug walked along the side of the big room. From where he was sitting one had to walk almost to the front of the room to exit to the hallway. Doug was a little self-conscious in sneaking out like this but he felt comfortable cocooned in darkness.

“Doug

Doug stopped and looked around, seeing only Turing on stage bathed in an oasis of light.

“Doug.”

Doug looked down. Seated at a small table near the wall was Samantha.

“Hi, where are you going?” Samantha was smiling. A wall of applause took over the room and drowned out Doug’s response. She was leaning over her table trying to hear. Doug finally pantomimed the act of drinking. She smiled and nodded. Suddenly Samantha stood up and made her way around the table towards Doug. Desire and terror hit hard. This woman couldn’t be seen following him out of the room. Pretending that he didn’t notice she was following him, he proceeded briskly to the door.

The lobby area was deserted now. Easy listening music was barely audible through the tiny hotel speakers in the ceiling. Only one of the bars was manned. Doug could hear a door to the lobby open, music and applause spilling out, ending abruptly as the door slammed shut again. Doug turned around to notice Samantha walking towards him. “Oh – I didn’t know you were coming out.”

“Of course, how else could I survive this?” She was right up to him now. She must have found him out. She must have seen him staring at her. “I’m having a gin and tonic,” she said.

He turned to order, one drink for the each of them plus the two for Denise. Doug handled the gin and tonic to Samantha. Doug tried to juggle the three remaining drinks, squeezing the third between the other two.

“That’s not going to work – let me carry the other one.” Without waiting for this response she took it out of his hands.

“Thank you...,” said Doug, “but I don’t know how it would look to have you carrying a drink back to my table.

“We can just slip in, that back door, no one will see us – I’ll drop the Scotch off at your table and go right by back to my seat.” Samantha was leading the way, walking slowly. “God, it’s been a long time…”

“Since what?”

“Since I saw you last. It’s taken me a long time…”

“Uh, look I would have remembered you.” He was feeling odd, this glamorous wife of Alan Turing pining away for him. Someone was playing a joke. Doug chose to not react.

They turned the corner and were in another empty corridor. The rear doors to the ballroom were up ahead. She stopped. Holding the two glasses and leaning upward, she kissed him slowly on the lips. Doug instinctively jerked his head both ways to look down the hallway. They were still alone.

“What are you doing?!” His full drinks were sloshing onto the carpet.

“I’m sorry.” She was looking right at him.

Doug was too terrified to be flattered by her advance. He looked awkward holding each drink out to the side to keep them from dribbling on him. In a beat he had pushed his way through the doors and was back in the ballroom. Darkness and noise enveloped him, he couldn’t see or hear. He froze waiting for his eyes to adjust. Applause was greeting the latest winner projected on the video screen. Doug recognized her but didn’t know her name. The single beam of the spot was following her as she made her way on to the stage.

“Doug!” It was Denise.

His eyes were slowly adjusting. He looked towards the sound of her voice; she was sitting only two tables away. Sliding into his chair he handed Denise her two half-spilled drinks. He would do without his.

“Doug, there’s no drink left.” It was hard to hear through all the applause.

“I tripped... who just won?”

“Somebody in Typesetting.”

The applause had died down and Turing had launched into another introduction. Doug leaned forward towards Denise, “When’s dinner?”

“After the final award. That could be you. ”

The one thing he had vowed never to be he had become – a salesman; a rep for a Daily covering Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Desert Palms, Cathedral City, Indio and the Salton Sea (the paper didn’t really acknowledge the Salton Sea area since there was no one really down there. Doug felt that people were in sales for one of three reasons: 1) they can’t do anything else; 2) they haven’t figured out what they really want to do; 3) they’re dumb. Doug liked to think that he was in the second category but as time went by and his temporary stint (he kept telling himself) in sales began to stretch out into a decade, he was beginning to wonder... Recently, he stopped going to bookstores, a favorite activity in earlier times. Back when Doug intended to be something great, he had found that being surrounded by the works of great minds and famous faces on magazines was inspiring. When he found himself slipping into his thirties it was becoming clear that his chances of great fame and success were becoming remote. Now going into a bookstore was a mocking experience; Tolstoy and Entertainment Weekly telling him he didn’t rate. Doug realized that this disappointment was turning into an obsession and obsession was turning into weirdness.

One of his big piques was the way rich and famous people hung together. The scenario that he was always hearing about was the newly famous actor or musician finally getting their chance to meet their idol. Mind you, these idols wouldn’t have given these newly minted stars the time of day prior to the new star’s recent success, but now they were hanging out at each other’s homes, basking in each other’s fame. Were these newly famous any less ingratiating a year ago when they were unknowns? Certainly not. But now they’ve earned the right to associate with the stars and they will continue to have this access as long as they maintain their success and keep the career missteps to the minimum. One day maybe their idol will fall out of the limelight, allowing the newly minted star the chance to snub and ignore their former idol. There maybe even the fringe benefit of pity, complete with all the power that implies.

“I need another drink,” Doug said to Denise, “Your turn to make a run.” His whisper sounded more like a harsh gasp.

“You just got one.”

“Not really... ”

“Don’t get too sloshed, you may have to pick up an award.”

“It’s for sure – I spoke to Turing earlier in the lobby– he said I’m getting it.”

Denise leaned back slightly. “Hey, congratulations! I’m impressed…” She then said, smiling, “Maybe he’ll let you have a crack at his wife.”

Doug jerked to his feet, “Jesus!” It was loud enough for the whole table to hear.

Denise flinched. “I was just joking – Christ, sit down...”

Doug was gone.

Samantha was walking out of the ladies room as she spotted Doug coming back out into the hall. She watched as he propped himself against the wall next to the ballroom door. Lightheaded, breathing hard, he stared at the carpet several seconds, and then looked up. When he finally noticed her looking at him from across the hall neither of them said a word. He stared at her in that green dress. Doug had always been convinced that female beauty was an absolute. Anthropologists would argue that standards of beauty are in a constant flux through history and differ from culture to culture. Doug had never bought in to those relativistic arguments. Female beauty was an idea that had existed in the cosmic ether from the very beginning, nanoseconds after the Big Bang. If there was intelligent life elsewhere, Doug was convinced that no matter what form they took – carbon-based, silicon-based, vacuum cleaners with tentacles, whatever – these creatures would immediately acknowledge the intrinsic beauty of the human female. The various cruelly efficient paths of evolution had led to beauty that Samantha Turing sported with a casual shrug.

“There’s no one in the bathroom,” she said.

As he walked towards her she remained perfectly still, arms at her side as if at attention. Suddenly, she ran across the hall towards him, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him into the ladies room door.

The bright fluorescent light was harsh. Doug caught himself in the mirror as they made their way to the last of the ten stalls. They fell into the door as Doug reached around and threw the latch. Her mouth was on him, her tongue intertwining with his. Her arm was around his neck, the other undoing his pants. Doug hiked her green mini-dress to her waist in one movement. She reached down and ripped a hole in her pantyhose. His penis was hard in her hands as he pulled her panties aside. In seconds he was in her. She was against the metal stall, his hands on her bottom, hers wrapped around his neck.

“I knew you’d love this dress...”

Doug was sure she felt fantastic, but he couldn’t feel her. Her grasp was as desperate as her words and the look on her face. He had wanted her and now he had her, but it was clear it hadn’t been his choice. He drove into her harder and harder. They were making noise now, the stall’s sides bending with every thrust. It was then that he realized he was pushed.

He heard the bathroom door open. The sound of woman’s heels clicked on the tile floor, then stopped. “Doug!” It was Denise. “Doug, you in here?”

Samantha grabbed him harder, her grip started to hurt. Their fury was making too much noise to not be noticed. Denise could obviously hear them.

“You’re on, Doug – they’re giving your intro!”

Terror turned on like a bulb. The look on his face went from orgasm to fright and it didn’t look that different. He exploded hard into Samantha, she burying her head into his shoulder as he climaxed.

“Don’t, not yet...”

As if giving up, Samantha released her grip. Doug fumbled with his pants, tucking in his shirt. He yanked the latch on his stall.

He pushed through the stall door. Waiting for him was Denise bathed in the loud fluorescent light. “This is the ladies room, Doug.” Her tone oozed contempt. Still fumbling with his pants Doug didn’t answer. He blew by her and ran out into the hallway.

Doug was running towards the ballroom doors. He could hear the muffled sounds of applause leaking out. He pushed through the door. He could hear Turing’s voice.

“— I know he’s here, I just saw him.” Laughter followed. Turing continued, “He looked a little nervous but I didn’t think he was this nervous.” More laughter. Turing was stalling for time.

Doug was running down the aisle now, towards the stage. Suddenly he was lit up, the spotlight had found him. The audience roared with applause and laughter.

“There he is!” yelled Turing. The theme from “Rocky” abruptly came on in mid-song. “Ladies and gentlemen, this year’s Coachella Tribune’s Sales Rep of the Year, Doug Albertson!”

Doug had reached the stage. He climbed up to the podium. Turing was extending his hand and smiling. Doug wasn’t superstitious enough to believe that Turing could see his guilt. There would be a day when Turing would look back on this moment and feel great anger that he was smiling at and handing an award to the man who had just fucked his wife. Doug could feel Turing’s anger coming back through time, crashing down on him from some indiscernible point in the future. Doug’s trot slowed to a crawl and he made the remaining distance to the podium slowly. Not making eye contact with Turing (oh, he’ll remember that part) Doug took the award, a bronze eagle, from his hand and turned towards the audience.

“Sorry, I was in the bathroom.”

More laughter. Doug paused. Because of the spotlight shining in his face he couldn’t see the audience. That was all right. He didn’t have anything in common with any of these people. He had developed that important ability to make meaningless small talk, create the illusion that he was connecting with his co-workers at something more than a basic level. But the amount of energy it took to produce such a lie, day-in and day-out, had exhausted him fully. It was quiet again.

“I wanna just thank all of you here for helping me make this possible. Alan’s right – we’re all winners tonight.”

More applause. Doug waved and walked away from the podium, down the steps to the stage and through the doors into the hall. Denise was waiting for him, holding a drink in his hand. The smile on her face was strained.

“You’ve had quite a night.”

Doug grabbed her arm and aimed for the glass doors that led to an outside terrace. Even at ten o’clock at night the hot air that greeted them was a shock. Denise yanked her arm away, set her drink down, facing Doug.

“What were you doing?”

Doug didn’t answer.

“You were fucking Turing’s wife.”

The hot air was starting to feel good after hours in the overly chilled hotel.

“I don’t know if those are the right words.”

“Don’t be disingenuous.” There was definitely a hurt tone in her voice.

“‘Fucking’ is a pretty crass word to describe it.”

“How else do you describe doing the boss’s wife in a bathroom stall?”

The outside door opened and group of five party-goers spilled onto the terrace, two of them were obviously drunk, screaming loud tirades at the heat while the remaining members of the party just laughed. Doug motioned Denise towards the parking lot. They walked silently in the dark until they reached his Infinity.

“Let’s go to Jack in the Box,” he said

“No, that’s okay.”

“You like the Chicken Strips.”

“No…”

Another pause. Doug was looking down at his keys. “I think she’s nuts, if that makes you feel any better.”

“Oh sure it does. I guess you’re off the hook... I’m not your girlfriend, Doug – I know that. I just don’t like seeing you behave like a frat boy. You always seemed better than that. I thought you liked women.

“I love women.”

“Yes, but I thought you liked them too. Shit, Doug, if Turing found out…”

Doug smiled. “Remember, I’m quitting – I’m invulnerable”. Then after a moment, “I’m going home.”

Doug drove Denise back to the door by the terrace and dropped her off. He then made his way out onto Palm Canyon Drive. He had a forty-five minute drive home. The traffic was still heavy despite the end of the tourist season. The radio was barely audible under the dull rush of the air conditioning; you could hear only bits and pieces of some old Boston song.

Chapter 3

Travelogue

Sam Bauer jarred himself back into the room. It was easy to lose yourself out here by the sea.

Mr. Turing squirmed in front of him. He turned his head towards the open window facing the Salton Sea. It was only the end of March but the intense heat that would mark the summer was already making itself known. The bright sun lay on the lake surface like a sheet.

Sam Bauer was the only private detective in the Salton Sea town of Mecca and probably the only one between Palm Springs and Mexico. Even that metropolis to the south, El Centro (birthplace of Cher) didn’t have one private detective. There was a part-timer in Borrego Springs but he had died that spring. Sam was on the third floor of an old date warehouse in Mecca, giving him an unencumbered view of the Salton Sea two miles away to the south. Being on the north end of the lake gave Sam a unique view of the sea at its thirty-three mile length, long enough for the southern shore to be lost over the horizon. From this vantage point Sam Bauer might as well have been on an ocean inlet staring out into a blue Pacific or Mediterranean expanse. In many ways there indeed was “no there there”, not because the Salton Sea lacked identity, but because it was easy to become disoriented here and believe you were somewhere else entirely.

There is no dramatic way to come across the Salton Sea from the south. You’re driving on Highway 86 up from El Centro and the road takes you through lush, vivid green flat fields that are crisscrossed with irrigation canals. The impression one gets is synthetic Southeast Asian rice paddies. Knowing that none of this belongs here in the desert gives the effect of the whole place being on life support. The parcels are small grids, unnaturally regular and neat, like fields grown in a lab. Once past Brawley the desert reasserts itself. Unlike the adjacent and relatively lush Sonoran desert of Arizona, with its Palo Verdes and iconic Saguaros, this part of the Mohave is barren with only a few Ocotillos and scrub to interrupt the sand and rock. Drive ten more miles, look to the right and you’ll see a big shallow plain that’s wrapped around a lot of water where you don’t expect any. The lighting in the desert is like the studio lighting of a local TV newscast – it’s glaring and there are no shadows. To wit, the small Chocolate Mountain range that runs along the eastern shore gives the appearance of being a giant cardboard cutout, its third dimension bleached out by the light.

The Salton Sea is a body of water 32 miles long and 17 miles wide, located 150 miles east of San Diego. It sits in desert basin two hundred feet below sea level. Not too many people have heard of it, including most Southern Californians. It's a noticeable feature in any U.S. atlas but try asking someone about it and you’re usually met with a blank stare. Though wedged between the well-ordered beauty of Palm Springs just 40 miles to the north and the fecund Imperial Valley to the south, the area around the Salton Sea is very depressed. Now ringed with failed housing developments, boarded up yacht clubs, marinas and supper clubs, there was a time in the early 60’s when it looked as if the Salton Sea would be a second California coast one hundred miles inland. But then the water started rising. It made perfect sense in its symmetry. The big salt lake hadn’t even come into existence until 1906. It was in that year that an above normal snowfall in the mountains had produced a record runoff in the Colorado River. A faulty flood gate that regulated canal water flow to the Imperial Valley burst open and flooded the plain, inundating the small town of Salton in the process. By the time the Union Pacific Railroad had stemmed the flow by dumping boxcars full of soil into the maw, a body of water had formed in the California desert whose length you could not see across. Because of its shallow depth, the sea should have evaporated in a few years, but irrigation runoff from the nearby farms of the Imperial Valley sustained it, even increasing its size. That same runoff, along with the three rivers that flow into the sea, has also been responsible for the ever-increasing salt content. The broiling Imperial Valley sun evaporates 18 percent of the sea’s volume every year, further concentrating the salt and pollutants.

Several resorts popped up in the late 50’s; housing developments followed, even a couple of yacht clubs. Game fish had been stocked in the years prior, turning the sea into a lucrative sports fishery. In the 1920’s it was trout and carp, but by the 1940’s an ever-increasing salt content killed off those freshwater species, forcing officials to introduce ocean fish such as Corvina and Sargo. By the mid 60’s rising water and constant reports of DDT and Selenium leaching into the lake dashed hopes that the Salton Sea would become a recreation and retirement paradise. It wasn’t long before the whole place went bust; the resorts, the clubs, the little two bedroom ramblers starting in the low 20’s – many are still here, abandoned, some underwater, mocking the dreams of those who thought they could give California a second coast.

Being down here in Mecca did not make for a big caseload. As a licensed investigator Sam’s job included helping investigate workers-comp claims for the plaintiff, interviewing co-workers, getting hospital records, help determine if the aggrieved party had a case. Sam could then turn around and call insurance companies and offer to investigate claims on their end. He could do surveillance work, flush out workers comp cheats, follow them around and catch them water-skiing while they were claiming to be crippled.

And so now Alan Turing sat in front of him, his expensive suit looking out of place in Sam’s office. Turing looked embarrassed; he never made eye contact, his hands never stopped moving. He made no effort at pleasantries.

“I’m afraid what I am asking you to do is a bit of cliché, Mr. Bauer.”

Sam smiled, “I like clichés. They’re a known quantity. Are we talking surveillance here?”

“Yes. My wife. I think she’s not being…” Turing paused, looking down at Sam’s desk. When he resumed he was still not looking him in the eye, “I married her a year ago. She’s beautiful, 20 years younger than I am…”

“You’re suspicious?” Sam said, trying to coax Turing gently and trying to spare his pride.

“Right. She has options – she might be using them with other men.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Do I have to say?”

Sam was taken aback. “Well, no… but I would think you would want me to have as much information as possible.”

“No. I just don’t want to say anything. I could be wrong and then what? Then I’ve just slandered my wife.”

“I’d be the only one who’ll know.”

“It never ends up that way. I’ve already given you too many details. Just follow her for a couple of weeks and tell me what you see. Take pictures. I could be completely wrong. She’s wonderful. I hate to be thinking anything bad of her. You used to be a claims adjuster…”

“Yes, for Aetna.”

“Joe Connell gave me your name. He was your boss.”

“He was several levels up, the Regional VP. I don’t think I ever spoke with him once.”

“He liked you. You made your presence known high up into management. That speaks well of you.”

“What can you tell me about your wife?”

“Well, um, very little. That’s part of the problem. I know nothing about her. I met her two years ago at the Bonaventure in LA. I was there for an industry thing; she was guest at the hotel. I still don’t know why she was there. She didn’t seem to have any friends, her parents dead for years, no family. She didn’t seem to work but lived comfortably in an apartment in Palm Springs.

“This didn’t bother you?”

“It does now. She was beautiful and I fell for her in a second. It’s only in light of my suspicions now that I’m starting to care. For the first time I’m starting to think about that detail – like it’s maybe a pattern.”

“It’s stuff you don’t know and now you wanna know.”

“Check her entire background. Just get me anything – boring, mundane, I don’t care. Follow her around every day when I’m at work then call me each evening.”

Sam nodded, looked at the man’s Hugo Boss suit and realized how stupid Mr. Turing looked in his third floor basement of an office. It made Sam uncomfortable and put his own lack of success into sharp relief. He could feel the depression coming on, the dark funk that would always hit him whenever he thought too much about these things. He had to get him out here fast.

“You know my rate – I’ll keep an eye on your wife for you,” Sam said, cutting to the chase.

“See, I told you this was a cliché case.”

Chapter 4

Epic Party


Department of Energy
United States of America Report


SITE REFERENCE NAMES:

Activity Data Sheet No.: 1336
Site No.: 157
Site ID.: 00158
RFA (RCRA facility assessment) No.: None


SITE DESCRIPTION:


Phil Pohl 7720 Record Center, Draft Preliminary
Assessment (PA) report.
TOP SECRET (in compliance with Executive Order 18356)



The following history of the SSTB was written April 1964:



A History of the Salton Sea Test Base
April 1964

By Phillip R. Dowen, Special Projects Division, 4133 SC-M-68-429, 7720 Record Center, Draft Preliminary Assessment (PA) report.


TOP SECRET (in compliance with Executive Order 18356)

Salton Sea Test Base (SSTB) is in the southeast corner of California and is under the command authority of the Eleventh Naval District, San Diego. SSTB was used for a variety of military training and weapons research, development, testing and evaluation activities. The base was used by numerous tenant and non-tenant military commands as well as by research divisions of government agencies and private companies working on government programs. From 1946 to 1961 Sandia National Laboratories (a subsidiary of Western Electric) operated a testing program at SSTB under government contract. Based on a Preliminary Assessment prepared by the Naval Energy and Environment Support Activity (NEESA 13-609), nine sites (of twenty-three total sites) will require investigation under the Navy's Installation Restoration Program to assess potential long-term impacts. These sites include landfills, USTs, asbestos, silver, lead and petroleum products.


1905-1907 Salton Sea is created by flooding of the Colorado River.

1944-1945 Water target at the Salton Sea Naval Auxiliary Air Station is used for practice drops by the Atomic Bombardment Squadron from Wendover field, Utah...



Doug Albertson looked out the window at what was left of his neighbor’s hanging blind. The storm, making its way across the sea from the east, was kicking up huge whitecaps making the sea’s usual glass surface look more like the English Channel. Almost everyone who still lived at Salton Sea Estates had hanging blinds on their patios to block the intense summer sun from coming through the large sliding glass doors identically situated in each of the “custom homes”. The winds had been smashing the neighbor’s blind to bits for the last half-hour, the pieces shearing off in ribbons, blowing around the yard and getting caught in shrubs. It looked as if someone had blown up a bamboo hut. Doug could have been neighborly and rolled up the blind himself, but it was too late and Doug thought it looked kind of neat getting smashed up like that.

The turn-off to Doug Albertson’s house is by a makeshift sign that says “Salton City”. The sign looks like it was hand-painted by the developer a generation ago. The intersection is dotted with a motel, a general store and a restaurant featuring an outdoor patio shaped like the bow of a boat. From here the land slopes gently towards the sea. Down this incline lay a gridwork of streets and street signs, with only a small portion of the total available lots actually occupied by houses. Mr. Rob Talley had first built Salton Sea Estates in 1956. When it opened it was billed as Palm Springs by the Sea, but for a whole lot less. It wasn’t long after that Desi Arnez and Bob Hope visited Salton City’s golf course. It was the same year that the North Shore Yacht Club opened on the northeast shore bringing in Jerry Lewis and other big stars to hang out in its VIP lounge before entropy got its fingers in the dream. By the time Talley was blown up in his Fleetwood back in Rockford Illinois in 1967, the Salton Sea had risen 15 feet and a third of the development was under water.

You turn right on Meridian Place and the street will go for several blocks but manage to contain only two houses on opposite sides of the block. Both are one story, flat-roof stucco ramblers that looks identical to the ten or so other surviving homes in the area. Doug’s house is blue. His is on the very end of the street. But there’s no rounded cul-de-sac, the street curb just come to an abrupt stop at the desert. Since his neighbor had bothered to do nothing with his yard other than put a non-working fountain in the front yard, Doug’s property contains the only plant life for what seems like miles – four large squat Canary Island palms ring the parameter of the front yard, shutting it off from the street. Three thirty-foot date palms line the driveway and the closely cropped green grass appears to have been watered regularly. His yard is an island of green surrounded by a desolate and flat expanse of brown vacant lots that you can’t even call desert – that had been cleared out years ago to make way for this aborted development. Not even thirty years is enough time for the desert to reclaim itself.

Fwack! Doug turned around and saw that a green and brown plastic panel had flattened itself against the kitchen window. What the hell was that? This weather reminded Doug of “Childhood’s End” when the last man on Earth is describing how the planet is being ripped to shreds by the Overmind. Trees and whole mountains are torn skyward, until finally the narrator himself is consumed. It was just like that, except not as bad.

Doug’s mind went back to the combination “good-riddance job” and theme party he had been planning since he had left The Coachella Valley Tribune a month ago. He had offered no explanation to his startled manager who couldn’t understand why such a “Top Gun type like you” would quit now, especially without another job in the wings. He seriously wondered how many of his former workmates and Palm Springs acquaintances (friends were difficult to come by in California but acquaintances were to be found by the truckload) would lower themselves to take the half-hour journey south to the decidedly downscale Salton Sea Estates. But he knew them as an ironic bunch and figured they would get off on the kitsch factor of Doug living in a botched 60’s real estate nirvana with the Pensioners and Canadians. He originally bought the house when he first moved out to California several years before, needing something ridiculously cheap. When he found himself staying in the house after he was making low six figures as an ad rep for the Tribune, he told himself and others that he was being ironic. Now he was back to living here because it was so cheap. It seemed clear now that this was his escape hatch for a job he knew he couldn’t stand forever. He was happy and proud that he wasn’t chained to a house payment that couldn’t be separated from his job.

In keeping with the spirit of the place Doug was going to have a concept party. Christened “The High Frontier Party”, it would take place on May 4th, 1961, the night before Alan Shepard was to make the first American sub-orbital flight. This was the heyday of the Salton Sea, when the developments were booming, boaters and water-skiers filled the water and the North Shore Yacht Club had Jerry Lewis sipping High-balls in the VIP lounge. The dress code would be Madras shorts, seersucker suits for the guys and belted sleeveless dresses for the girls (early 60’s hairstyles like The Flip or Bouffant was optional). The conversation would be restricted to the events of 1961 or prior. Doug had a feeling that the last request would be honored for the first hour or so and then quickly discarded – how many times could you work Kennedy and the space race into your conversation? The conceit was that you had to pretend that you didn’t know that Kennedy was going to be shot and that eight years from “tomorrow’s” sub-orbital flight we would actually land on the moon. Doug knew that his high-concept part was drifting dangerously close to being performance art (he was even putting a Ping-Pong table on the patio for Chrissakes), but he would risk it.


Doug spent the better part of the next day cleaning up the dead palm fronds strewn all over his yard from the storm. Doug threw the storm detritus into the vacant lot next door. Doug walked outside to move the water from his Canary Island palms to the bougainvillea on the side of the house. It was 7:30 in the evening. In the low light Doug could see his one other neighbor walking his English bulldog in the distance. Doug dragged the hose over to the side of the house with the water still running out of the hose and slapping onto the grass. After five years at Salton Sea Estates Doug had never met this neighbor. Each night the 50ish man would walk his dog, never getting any closer than the street corner two hundred yards away before turning back. Doug would wave and sometimes the man would wave back. He and Doug were one of only a few inhabited lots on this side of the development and Doug thought it stupid that they had never met. Doug could have taken the initiative and stopped by to introduce himself but he was too pissed that the man and his dog couldn’t bother to travel the extra two hundred yards to say “hi”.


Doug hadn’t spoken to Denise since he had left the company. He had been feeling guilty but then remembered that she had a phone too. There was a noticeable stiffness to her voice.

“So how are you enjoying dropping out?”

“I don’t know if that’s the right word...” mumbled Doug defensively.

“You quit your job with no prospects of finding another one. Sounds like dropping out.”

“I’m doing a job search on-line. I’ll find something. You’re coming, right?”

“I don’t know where I’m going to find this 50’s stuff, but I’ll figure out something.”

“It takes place in 1961 but 50’s stuff would be close enough. Ask your mom, she might have some old dresses.”

There was a pause on the other end, then,

“Doug, she called me – that Samantha woman called me.”

“She somehow found out that I was your friend – she didn’t know your last name and called me looking for your number.” Denise was a little hurt and offended that Samantha was assured enough to call her, as if the woman was somehow certain that Doug wasn’t already taken by Denise – was it that obvious?

“When did this all happen?” asked Doug.

“Yesterday.”

“Well, she hasn’t called me yet.”


The RSVP’s for the party came trickling in. Doug was heartened to see that most of his non-friends would be showing up, forty in all. It seemed a ludicrous expense in lieu of his job status. Doug ran into Indio to purchase party decorations; the only type he could associate with the 60’s was Japanese lanterns. He found a string of a hundred for 40 dollars. Afterwards he stopped off at Denise’s. Doug had been out of work so long that he momentarily forgot that most people are not at home 2:00 PM on a Friday. He wrote her a note that he pasted on her door; “I was here – your loss.”


Sam Bauer was in his maroon Saturn and headed out of town. Highway 86 ran around the sea on the western side, slicing between a low string of mountains to the west and date farms and the sea on the east side. Looking to the west he could see the Santa Rosa Mountains and the incongruously lush grids of the alfalfa fields in the foreground. The radio was on, the volume turned down as to be only a low-level buzz. The thick date palm groves that lined the side of the road created a canopy that shut out the light beneath. Sam had seen a picture of the inside of Chartes before – he told people that the groves looked just like that and they always said “neat”. A single ladder rested against one of the tall palms since the trees had to be fertilized by hand and the ladder was the simplest way to do it. His car pulled itself around the curve and suddenly the date palms fell away on the left side, revealing just the sea. The lack of waves on the lake allowed the desert sun to reflect off the water uniformly, the way sunlight reflects off a flat black puddle.

He was following a mauve BMW with Samantha Turing inside. He had followed her from her large Palm Springs home (he was guessing some 6000 square feet) since 9:00 this morning. Her journey had dragged him along to a hair appointment next to Sony Bono’s old tennis club, to a shopping trip through Nordstrom’s on Palm Canyon where he had to get out of the car and follow her around on foot for two hours, finally tailing her as her car headed 45 minutes south towards the decidedly more down-market Salton Sea. After the day’s previous stops, Sam was baffled by such a seemingly out-of-character destination.

Sam came to a stoplight at the intersection that led into Salton City. Turning right would take you on the Borrego Salton Seaway, a dramatic road that runs through the Carrizo Badlands, a landscape of rockforms and canyons so jarring that it makes a driver feel as though their Accord has been picked up and dropped onto Venus. This was still the only road through this area and it had only been as recently as 1968 that it had finally been paved. Instead the BMW turned left into the empty Salton City subdivision. The car drove past what would have been Doug’s street, through the empty lots towards the water. They passed several orphaned street signs that had names like “Coachella Way”, “Lancer Lane” and “Rockgate Circle”. The BMW pulled in front of an abandoned white circular building. He knew it as the old Salton Bay Yacht Club. Sam stopped his car immediately, some 100 yards back. Samantha got out of her car, walking up to the door-less front entry. The windows were blown out, the place hadn’t seen a member in 20 years but Samantha walked inside with a confident gait and sense of purpose of someone expecting to meet a group of friends for happy hour. She disappeared inside, exiting several minutes later, popping her trunk. She pulled out a four inch or so stack of what appeared to be plastic sheets measuring some four feet by three feet. She struggled to carry this pile, setting them down and went back and pulled out another stack of equal height. She repeated this two more times. It was then that Sam noticed that the ground surrounding this area was lined with similar looking sheets. From his distance and angle it was difficult to discern what these were. Some had green splotches, but the others were mostly brown.

The painted panels already on the ground covered an area approximately 40 feet by 40 feet. She took the new panels and one by one attached them to the array already on the ground. Sam noticed that she didn’t just place any panel anywhere. She referenced a sheet of paper before adding each new panel. She would then study the panel for several seconds before laying it next to the others. Often she would flip through the stacks before finding just the right one, pulling it out and placing it on the ground next to its compatriots. After she completed a row she went back to the car, returning with a big burlap bag and a mallet. She pulled from the bag a very thin stake with a very wide, flat top. She anchored each panel with two stakes, pounding them into the ground their entire six inch length. She repeated this action down the length of each row. Once completed, she began laying another row of mottled brown and green shaded panels, repeating the process for the next two hours. Sam pulled out his camera started taking pictures.
It was 3:00pm before Samantha returned to her car. He followed her back through the neighborhood but before they reached the highway, her car paused in front of the turn-off to Meridian Place for several seconds, then moved on to the highway.

It was already dusk when Sam was finally on his way home. Samantha had returned immediately to her house and for the next few hours stayed put as Sam observed the house from his car a block away. At 6:00pm he saw Mr. Turing’s green Mercedes pull into the driveway.

He was 10 minutes from home when Sam’s headlights caught a glimpse of something in the highway. When he noticed that it was moving he slowed to stop. A figure was standing in the middle of the southbound lane, slowly rocking back and forth, arms folded across his front, head down. Sam rolled down the window and yelled at the man some thirty feet ahead, “Out of the road!” The man said nothing. Sam could now see that the man was Mexican, Sam guessed this was one of the many farm workers working in the Imperial Valley. He was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, and as was now clear, covered in blood coming from a wound on his chest. He yelled at the man again and got exactly the same response. Sam pulled out his cell phone and called 911.

Sam pulled his car to the side of the road. He got out and approached the man warily. “Hello?” Sam heard the sound of a car coming up from behind him. He turned around as the headlights blinded him. He waved his arms furiously above his head. The approaching car pulled up along side him. A lady in 50’s rolled down her window, “What’s wrong?”

“There’s some guy up there standing in the road. I called the police. I’m trying to get him to move.” Sam turned and ran back towards the man. The lady had gotten out of her car and was now following. Sam was now standing within inches of the man in the road, resembling a drill sergeant addressing a recruit.

“Hey, guy – hey!” No response.

“My God,” said the lady, “he’s going to bleed to death. Maybe you should just grab him.”

“You help.”

The woman paused. The man was solidly built, outweighing her by 50 pounds. Even the two of them… “Let’s grab him on either side and push him over that way.” She pointed to the east side of the road. Sam nodded. The two of them maneuvered slowly, coming up on opposite sides. Sam could see the blood dripping from under the man’s shirt into a pool off his left foot. His car’s headlights reflecting off the puddle made it look like motor oil. The man in the road continued to stare straight ahead, his chest heaving. Sam grabbed the man’s right shoulder; the woman, taking the left. A cathedral-filling scream knocked them both backward. It never varied in pitch and the volume was shocking. The man was in a weakened state from the blood loss, but, nevertheless, the scream was stunning in its sheer heft. The man dropped his hands to his sides. There was the sound of paste being pulled from a jar. The woman too started screaming. They could hear a sickening thud as entrails thumped to the ground in front of them – then instantaneous silence. The man collapsed to the ground. From behind Sam could hear an approaching car. He turned, paused, and eyed the now crumpled farm worker. The car raced by, its sound receding as it disappeared around the corner. The man lay on his back facing up at the stars. An approaching siren could be heard. Sam turned and ran towards his car. The lady was still standing by the side of the silent man, a horrified look on her face that just shook back and forth vainly looking to ask some question. Sam ran back to his car, stuck the keys in the ignition and pulled away leaving the woman standing alone in the dark. In the rearview mirror he could see the lights and hear the siren of the ambulance pulling up behind him.

Sam’s head was cement, he couldn’t go home yet. What he had seen had been an assault on his system. He should have stayed just a few minutes longer, just wait for the ambulance. It wouldn’t have been that long, just a minute longer, but he couldn’t. There was one bar right in Mecca, the Seaview, just a mile from his home. It was a weeknight and there were only a few groups of people scattered around the room. Right next to the bar was the owner of the one video store in Mecca, Trevor Coleman, sitting with some friends. They were the only loud part of the room, drowning out the TV over the bar. Sam had no choice to block them out or listen.

“…I was taking a quick lunch break before opening the store at 1:00. I was like parked 50 feet from the drive-thru window. I was just eating and reading the paper, right? I was eating my burger – and I notice that there were a few cars in the lot, three in the drive-thru line. And all were white...”

“You got me riveted now…” said a table mate sarcastically.

“I don’t really pay much attention to this because white cars are pretty popular out here in the desert. So I turned my head back and kept eating and listening to the radio. A few minutes later I look up and see that almost all the parking spaces had filled up. The drive-thru line was now extended out of the lot and into the street for the lunch rush. All the cars in the drive-thru line were white! I then look around the rest of the parking lot and all the cars parked there are white!” The other five people at his table were quieter, politely listening, though obviously not in rapt attention.

Sam got his drink and turned himself towards the door. Through the window the parking lot was lit garishly from one side, bright on one side, descending into darkness on the other. Somebody was standing just at the edge of the window and he could just make out a rough shape. The figure in the light didn’t seem to add up. There should have a shoulder where there was nothing. The head didn’t seem to be where you would expect it. A car drove between the light and window, blocking the light momentarily.

“So I call Aaron at the store and tell him about what I’m seeing here and he could like care less. I think he said ‘Wow’ or something, in his sort of I’m-bored-with-life way …”

“Well, whatta you expect, Trevor, it’s not that amazing.”

“I don’t know, sounds pretty neat,” said another friend, “I mean, really, what are the odds?”

“Well, Aaron wasn’t impressed,” continued Trevor, “He then asks me why I wanted to stack all those Hal Needham videos in the Foreign Section and I told him that it was a joke.”

“I don’t get it either.”

“So I decide to call Channel 3, their ‘3 On Your Side’ or whatever. They always say they want you to call in with news ideas. And I get a hold of the assignment editor and tell what I’m seeing. I’m telling her that there’s some beautiful symmetry unfolding down here at the Whattaburger but she’s just not getting it.”

“She hung up on you?”

“No!” Trevor responded defensively.

“I would.”

“She says ‘That’s kind of a weird story you have there, Mr. Coleman…’ But she says that it’s not for her to decide so she bounces me to the city editor, his name is Jay. And he gets on the phone and I have to repeat my story and I’m emphasizing the ‘mystery of nature’ aspect to this and he says, ‘I can see that any day driving by the Toyota dealership in Thermal.’”

The rest of the table is snickering.

“He then says, “White cars are pretty common around here,’, “I’ve got a white car, myself, and so does my wife.’

“And so I yell, ‘So do I!’” I then ask him that if I got some footage of this event on my video camera, would he run it and he says maybe, ‘as a bumper’ or something. So I ran home got the camera and when I got back there were some green and blue cars in the parking lot. The moment was lost.”

“Wow…” someone said, the sarcasm obvious.

Trevor looks over at Sam sitting on a bar stool drinking a boilermaker and watching the proceedings. “Hey, Sam – it’s Sam, right?”

Sam smiles, “Right. You’re Trevor…”

“Yes I am. You and I are the only businesses in this town – other than this bar and that Chinese food place. It’s you and me who are propping up the tax base around here.”

“I’m afraid I’m not doing much on my end – how’s things with you?”

“So, so. It’s nice being the only video place around but that also means there’s no market to draw from either. And if someone really wants something they can drive 20 minutes to the Blockbuster in Indio.”

“– shit…” Sam looked down at this watch. It was past 8:00. It was agreed that he’d leave a voicemail with Mr. Turing at the end of every day. “Excuse me.”

Sam got of the bar stool and walked to an alcove by the front door that was semi-private. He dialed Turning on his phone and waited for voicemail. Through the window he could see out front to the street and the bar’s parking lot. A pickup’s beams whirled around like a searchlight as it made a wide turn in the parking lot. “Hello, you’ve reached Alan Turing, please leave your…” At the sound of the tone, Sam updated Mr. Turning on his wife’s travels, telling about him the plastic sheets and how he had no clue as what she was doing with them. Sam knew that Turing would be just happy to know she wasn’t with some other man. He turned his head towards the window as he was hitting the off button on his phone. He shuddered. A face stared at him through the window. It just stood there, maybe an inch from the glass. It was hard to describe it as a face. It was smashed in, dented, the eyes shut – swollen shut, maybe. He turned away, ignoring it. That was always the best thing to do with weird stares, ignore them. Eye contact can be combustible. He walked back to the bar aware of each movement of his legs, overly aware like you are when you’re drunk and you’re controlling yourself with great care denying to yourself and everyone else that you’ve had too much to drink. But just before he got back to this seat he bolted for the front door and ran around the side to the front window. There was no one there. He walked back inside, finished his drink and went home.


The Japanese lanterns were still in the car when Doug went back in the house sometime around 8:30. He threw a Stouffers pasta dish into the microwave and watched CNBC until about 10:00. He sat in bed reading his science fiction book about a right wing crank that builds a time machine so he can go back in time and kill Kennedy himself. After twenty minutes staring at the same page Doug flipped the book on the floor and turned out the light. His thoughts turned to self-pity as he pondered the fact that he hadn’t had a girlfriend for six months. Doug cursed that his relationship with Denise had been so platonic, but that couldn’t be helped – he just didn’t find her attractive. But now here at 11 o’clock at night he was wondering if he could lower his standards. She was available, anytime. What if she showed up right now? If the doorbell rang and she was on his front step? He’d sleep with her, wouldn’t he? Maybe. What if she had been working out since he last saw her and had lost twenty pounds? Denise always had a nice waist and now with that weight off her hips... Sure, it was possible. It had been a month and a half since he had last seen her... that’s enough time. Maybe in those intervening weeks she had gotten some plastic surgery for some of those potatoey features. He’d answer the door and there she would be standing in a tight green dress that displayed all the improvements. Her legs were slimmer and longer than you remember and her hair was blonder, a lot blonder. She looked just like Samantha Turing.

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.

Chapter 6

No Contrails over New York

4/1/47 - 10/31/47 Assessment and development of classified materials.

10/16/47 Jurisdiction of SSTB is transferred to joint control of AEC and The Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. Continuing development of materials. Analysis of technical range requirements made by Robert W. Henderson, Z Division leader.



Trevor hadn’t heard about these guys for years. All this time he hadn’t even thought about them once. But on Saturday afternoon he was free from the video store and was watching VH1. A rare video they had done in the early 80’s was shown and it was like getting hit with a Clorox bottle, “Oh, those guys…” How something so important could be blanked out for so long. Trevor had played Phlanx records all through his college radio career, their nasty, wry lyrics at odds with their bright, poppy sound. What he liked so much was the idea that some dippy co-ed from Beloit would put one on, start dancing around the room like it was one of her Sister Sledge records, listen to the lyrics and become completely corrupted. That was back when you’re young enough to actually believe rock and roll can change the world, but Pete Townsend doesn’t even believe that anymore.

Turned on like a switch he immediately had to find out what the brothers were doing, were they still together? What did they look like now? It was just two bothers, Jay and Craig Crondon (augmented by other musicians). One wrote, the other sang. One was doofy, sort of mad scientist looking, complete with shocked hair, the other with matinee idle good looks with dark, slicked back hair. The duo never had huge success, not much airplay, just sold enough records to maintain a record contract. I remembered that press coverage for the duo was constant during the mid-to-late 70’s. Not mentioned so much in magazines like Rolling Stone or Creem, the group was relegated to the fanzines like Circus or Raves. Book ended between Mott the Hoople and Queen puff articles, there were always at least a couple of Phlanx photos of Craig playing his neon blue Stratocaster and Brian leaning against the microphone in his standard retro-crooner pose. The fan base was small, but rabid. The few times they did play live, the venues were packed. But during the last twenty years there was nothing. Lost beneath the waves of endless industry fads, the never-ending parade of this month’s artist of the millennium, there had been nothing, no word from Phlanx.

Trevor went on the Internet and started searching, shocked to find over twenty fan web shrines to the band. Most contained discography and photos dating back to the early 70’s and 80’s. And they had a new record. This wasn’t some pathetic kind of return to music after years of selling real estate – they had been consistently making records every couple of years, for an indie label, but they had been here all along. Despite this admirable and consistent productivity, the most recent photo he could find of the brothers on any of the pages was 1983. Several of the Phlanx web pages referenced a fan email list one could sign up for and get updated information on the band from the Phlanx network of fans. Giddy at finding this long lost friend Trevor immediately registered for the list.

Trevor lived on the edge of a date grove halfway between Indio and his place of business, a video store, in Mecca. He had to admit that he was interested more in how the brothers looked 20 years later than what their music sounded like. The band’s image fascinated him, years before he had even heard the music. He had grown up in the Midwest and during the late 70’s rock radio was a horror show of tight programming, never deviating from the same three Led Zeppelin songs. Since Phlanx was never capable of being heard, it was the two brother’s image that was his primary perception of the band. When he finally heard the music (his college radio station library had their entire catalog) it was secondary – great shit, but it wasn’t how Trevor had been conditioned to relate to Craig and Jay Crondon.

When he checked his email the next day Trevor surprised to find ten messages from members of the Phlanx fan email list. Perhaps this deluge was intentional, designed to give a newbie like himself some exposure to the format, customs and procedures of what amounted to a private newsgroup. He opened the first note. It was from someone named EarlBigFan who wanted to know if anyone could help him find a bootleg live version of a song called, “I Know You’re My Robin”. Next was a letter was from PhlanxFanUK telling EarlBigFan that no such animal existed. LisaB chimed in the third email telling PhlanxFanUK to go fuck himself because she indeed owned such a bootleg. Asked if she would trade it for some rare footage of Phlanx on the Mike Douglas Show, she said no. When asked for a dollar figure, she said “a million billion dollars”. All Trevor wanted was to get periodic updates and instead he was feeling out of place in this hothouse of fan obsession.

Finally by the ninth email, someone changed the subject. FredGirl (a reference to a well-known Phlanx song), who was from Chicago, claimed to have seen Jay Crondon in an Evanston sports bar watching a Knicks game with a couple of average looking women. The last email was from CharlesNewYork with the latest information about plans for a fan club-members-only Phlanx gig to be held sometime this year. “Still talking to their manager, Eric Jenson, who says the band might consider but brothers haven’t played live for four years and are a little leery. Money still hasn’t been discussed. More info as I get it.”

After closing the video store, Trevor returned home from work at ten the next night. He went and checked his email and found that his mailbox in-box was now scrolling for three pages. He counted 40 some emails relating to the Phlanx mail list. He had had enough. Their obsession had more than burnt out his curiosity. He deleted the letters without reading a one. He then sent a request to the administrator of the mail list to immediately take him off it.

At ten-o clock he checked his email again. It was from the web site administrator who went by the name of JackieChan. He/she said that his name would be removed from the mail list as soon as Trevor gave them his address. Though he found that to be a strange request, it was desperate and Trevor immediately complied.

On Thursday evening at 6:30 Trevor was home. He had decided to take the night off, figuring that Aaron could handle the store without him. There was a knock on the door. Living as remotely as he did he avoided answering the door if not expecting anyone. He looked out the window onto the front doorstep and saw a girl in her early 20’s. She was wearing a baseball cap, long sweatshirt, black tights and flats. He opened the door.

“Hi, sorry to disturb you, but are you Trevor?”

He replied “yes” and she introduced herself as Jackie Chan. It was now apparent that she was at least part oriental with long black hair hanging down from her Phlanx baseball cap. He asked her to come inside. Trevor told himself that he would have been really mad and found her behavior to be really weird and obsessive except for the fact that she was really cute. Her personality exploded into the room. Bubbly, constantly inquiring about everything in my house – the furniture, the two De Chirico prints on the wall, his choice of track lighting, his TV, the Don DeLillo books and green patio furniture that he found behind a 7-11 in Joshua Tree. Her name really was Jackie and her last name was Chan. Her parents were first generation immigrants, both of whom had gotten teaching jobs at UC Davis as biology Profs. They had never heard of the Hong Kong martial-arts actor, Jackie Chan.

“Did you know”, said Trevor, “that pretty much after ‘Nostalgia for Infinite’ De Chirico spent the rest of his career ripping himself off? He’d paint forgeries of his own works and keep on selling them over and over.”

“No, I didn’t,” she said. “Have you heard about these guys going around saying they’re Lynard Skynard and they’re actually playing gigs, playing ‘Freebird’ and stuff?”

“No, but there’s a lot of tribute bands out there. There’s a Bachman Turner Overdrive tribute band called ‘Let It Ride’ that plays in Brawley every Wednesday,” said Trevor.

“No. These guys are saying they really are Lynard Skynard. They’re like performance artists or something. It’s a sort of an ironic ‘ha ha’ kind of thing. Doing Skynard covers completely straight, no parody. They look like them too.”

“Sounds like a tribute band.”

“No, it’s not because they say they’re the real band. It’s transference.”

“It sounds like a way for smart-ass art students to make fun of an uncool, down-market southern rock band.”

“You’re seeing it wrong. Have you ever been to New York?” she asked.

“No – by the way, just where are you from?”

“Seattle. Well, I haven’t been to New York either but I have this theory that there are no contrails over New York.”

“You mean from planes?”

“The white exhaust from planes – I’ve figured out that there shouldn’t be any over New York.”

“Something about the atmospheric conditions?”

“Nope. Contrails are caused by condensation of jet exhaust, something that only happens when a plane is flying very high. I figured that no plane over New York would be flying very high since the only planes flying over New York would be those landing in New York.”

“What about planes going elsewhere? They’d be flying high.”

“I looked on a map. Any planes coming from Europe and going elsewhere like Chicago, Dallas or LA would be flying farther north on the great polar route. I suppose there might be a Nairobi to Toronto route or something that might bring a plane high over New York on its way to another destination, but looking on the globe I just can’t see too many of those. Maybe Lagos to Chicago… but that doesn’t seem like a profitable route. I guess I won’t know until I go to New York and spend a week staring at the sky.”

“Oh,” said Trevor,” Let me change the subject – so just what are you doing here?”

She smiled, her eyes sliding off into a different direction.

“Well,” she said in a faux exhausted intonation, “you know how I made you give me your address before I’d let you off the Phlanx mail list? Well, I have been doing that with a lot of people. If they want out I make them give me their address. From this I have built up quite a database.”

“What are you doing with it?”

“I am looking for suitable site candidates for the Phlanx reunion concert. I checked the atlas and your address looked promising. It was an intriguing out of the way location that is still within three hours of a big city for easy access. I have always wanted to check out the Salton Sea. I also figured you’d have a big lot, living out in the boonies the way you do.”

“Wait wait… You want my place?! My place?! What happened to the reunion being in New York?”

“Fell through.”

“So this mail list was just a ruse to attract a database of Phlanx fans that would then be inundated with annoying email, all in hopes that it would make them want to quit. At that time you would then extort from them their street address as the price to be taken off your list.”

“Yep.” She smiled smugly.

“Why didn’t you just ask for their street address when they signed up? You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble.”

“Yeahhhhh, I guess….” She looked away towards the wall, “But it wouldn’t have nearly been as much fun – this took much more work.”


“So all these emails I got – they were created by you?”

“Oh no, those were real enough. Phlanx fans really are that weird.”

Now he was staring at the wall.

“Can we put on a concert at your house?”

“No.”

He gaze has returned to her’s and Trevor was sure he was in love.

“Your house would be perfect! You’ve got a big lot in the middle of nowhere. No one will complain about noise – “

“—how many people?”

“Probably no more than 400. There’s not that many of us. They’re great people. We’re kind of a big extended family, a lot of people know each other. You can be part of it. With me.”

“No.”

It went on for another five minutes. It was around ten that she left. He walked her to her car, she smiled and said that it was too bad. Trevor agreed. She asked one more time and he said no. She got in her rented Corsica and drove down the dirt drive, making a mistake by turning right on Hwy 86. If she wants to get back to LA she’ll soon figure out that she’s going the wrong direction. Trevor sat out on the front stoop waiting for her car to drive by again. It’s dark so all he can see are headlights going by, but he tries to imagine which one is her’s.