A menu popped up, offering him a choice of half a dozen views. He clicked on the great room and waited for the picture to focus.
Even though the transmission was encrypted, it hadn't made sense to keep it going twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Besides, in the standby state the pickups were immune to most bug sweeps.
He'd put up decoy cameras just so Blascoe could disable them. It let him think he was rebelling and gave him a false sense of privacy.
A wide-angle view of the great room, through the glass eye of the moose head, swam into view. When he saw the three figures seated in a rough circle, he realized his worst-case scenario had become reality.
He exited the program and kicked open the door to the next room.
"Hutch! Lewis! Get your stuff. Road trip!"
17
Cooper Blascoe leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head and started talking. He had a Howard Hughes situation going with the hair and fingernails, and smelled like a wet collie, but Jamie ignored all that.
"Well, seeing as you're here, and you found me like this, I guess I won't be blowing your minds by telling you that Dormentalism is all a sham, man. Just something I cooked up to get money, women, and drugs—not necessarily in that order."
Jamie checked to make sure she was recording. She prayed her batteries lasted. If she'd known she was going to wind up here tonight, she'd have come prepared with spares.
She turned her attention back to Blascoe. She still found it hard to believe that she was sitting with the supposedly self-suspended Father of Dormentalism. That was a coup itself, but to be recording the real story from the man who started it all…
Did it get any better than this? She couldn't imagine how.
"I wanted a rock star life, but I was a paunchy, balding thirty-year-old who couldn't play music for shit, so that was out. But it was the sixties, man, when all these nubile chicks were joining communes and that sort of shit, and I wanted in on some of that—not to be some worker drone on a commune farm or anything like that. Not me. I wanted my own.
"But I needed a hook to bring them in. I racked my brains and dropped a ton of acid hoping something would come to me—you know, pop into my head like divine inspiration—but nothing. Nada. Zilch. I was ready to give it up and go join someone else's gig when—I don't know, late in the winter of '68, maybe February, maybe March… all I remember is it was cold in Frisco when I had this dream about some guy from someplace called Hokano talking about—"
"Wait," Jack said. "It came to you in a dream?"
Blascoe shrugged. "I guess it was a dream. Sometimes, with all the drugs 1 was doing, the line got a little blurred, but I'm pretty sure this was a dream."
"Do you speak Japanese?"
He smiled. "You mean beyond konichiwa and arigato? Nope. Languages never were my strong suit. They made me take Spanish my first year at Berkeley—also my last year, if you want to know—and I flunked it miserably."
"All right then, this guy in your dream—what did he look like?"
"Like a dream guy—golden hair, golden glow, the whole deal. Like an angel maybe, but with no wings."
Jamie could tell from Jack's expression that this wasn't what he wanted to hear. It almost seemed as if he'd been expecting a certain description and this wrasn't it.
"Anyway," Blascoe said, "the dream guy was talking about my inner spirit, something he called my xelton, being split, with half of it sleeping within, half of it somewhere else.
"When I woke up I knew that was it: the calling card for my commune… like it had been handed to me. I mean, it was all there, and perfect. Finding the Real You, the Inner You sleeping in your mind—any pitch with "mind" in it was a sure grabber in those days—and achieving some sort of mystical natural harmony. Dynamite stuff. But I needed a name. I definitely wanted 'mental' in it—you know, for mind?—and then got the brainstorm of putting it together with 'dormant'—as in dormez vous, because the gals were gonna have to sleep with me to wake up their xelton."
Jack shook his head. "The waking involved sleeping with you… and you got takers?"
"Better believe it. It was before your time, I'm sure, but we called it 'sleeping together' back in those days. Now it's just 'fucking.' But anyway I put the two words together and came up with 'Dormentalism.' Pretty slick, huh?"
"Pretty clunky if you ask me," Jack said.
"Well, I didn't ask you. But Brady thought the same thing when he came along."
Jack made a face. "Swell. Just the man I want to emulate."
"Let's not get onto the Brady situation yet," Jamie said. "You came up with the name and the concept… then what?"
"Like you say, I had the name and the idea, now I needed to find a place to put it to work. I found this guy in Marin County who'd let me use a corner of this big tract of land he owned. I rented it for a song, even talked him into letting me put off the first payment for ninety days. Oh, I was a silver-tongued devil then. Next came the pamphlet. 1 wrote up a lew pages and called it Dormentalism: The Future Resides Within. Got it mimeoed, started handing out free copies in Haight-Ashbury, left them all over the Berkley campus. I even went to some established communes and passed them out there.
"Before I knew it, the whole thing took off, I mean, beyond my wildest dreams. People duplicated my pamphlet and sent it all over the country—there were Xerox machines back then, but no e-mail or fax yet, so they had to use the Post Awful. But that worked. And then the folks on the receiving end duplicated it, and they sent it around, and on and on. In no time I had hundreds of followers. Then a thousand. Then two thousand. Then… I stopped counting. They gave me their money—sometimes everything they had—and they helped build their own housing.
"And the sex… oh, man, helping those gals awaken their dormant xel-ton… so many of them." He grinned again. "I was so dedicated that I often 'helped' two, sometimes three, at a time… just incredible… in-fucking-credible."
"You had only female followers?" Jack said.
"Nah. All kinds."
"What about the men? Did you—?"
"Hell no! The 'awakened' women—the ones who'd had their 'breakthrough' with me—went out and 'awoke' the men. There was plenty to go around, believe me."
Jamie wanted to lean back and kick her feet in the air. This was dynamite. No, this was nuclear.
Jack looked at her. "Can we please get to Luther Brady?"
Before she could answer, Blascoe said, "Brady showed up somewhere in the seventies. He looked like a godsend at the time. I mean, I was spending money like there was no tomorrow. Fast as it came in, it went out. I'd been given pieces of land all over the country that I didn't know what to do with. The IRS was starting to sniff around, asking questions I couldn't answer—I wasn't a businessman, so what did I know? Anyway, I was too wasted most of the time to even care about it, let alone do anything. And then up pops Brady with his fresh new accounting degree and all sorts of ideas."
Jamie checked her recorder again—still going. She had a question and did not want to miss the answer.
"So Luther Brady joined and took part in the 'awakenings' of various female members?"
"Not that I remember. I didn't notice at the time but he was lots more interested in getting close to me than the women."
Damn, Jamie thought. JNot what she wanted to hear.
"Brady said he wanted to be my assistant. When I said all my assistants were of the female persuasion, he told me he could supply services they couldn't. Like getting me out of Dutch with the government.