It had been loaded onto one of the small cargo-haulers. Two battered hard shell cases full of paper and pharmaceuticals and digital memory. Still sitting there, abandoned.
"Run that gangway back," Jala said to the deck hands.
They blinked at him, uncertain of his authority. The first mate had left for the bridge. Jala puffed up his chest and said something fierce in a language I didn't recognize. The sailors shrugged and reeled the extendable walk back to the quay.
The ship's engines sounded a deeper note.
I ran across the gangway, corrugated aluminum ringing underfoot. Grabbed the cases. Took a last look back. Down at the landward end of the quay a detachment of a dozen or so uniformed New Reformasi began to run toward the Capetown Maru. "Cast off," Jala was shouting as if he owned the ship, "cast off, quickly now, quickly!"
The scaffolding began to retreat. I threw the luggage onboard and scrambled after it.
Made the deck before the ship began to move.
Then another Avigas tank erupted, and we were all thrown down by the concussion.
BY DREAMS SURROUNDED
The nightly battles between road pirates and the CHP made for difficult traveling at the best of times. The flicker made it worse. During a flicker episode any kind of unnecessary travel was officially discouraged, but that didn't stop people from trying to reach family and friends or in some cases simply getting in their cars to drive until they ran out of gas or time. I quick-packed a couple of suitcases with anything I didn't want to leave behind, including the archival records Jase had given me.
Tonight the Alvarado Freeway was clotted with traffic and I-8 wasn't moving much faster. I had plenty of time to reflect on the absurdity of what I was attempting to do.
Running to the rescue of another man's wife, a woman I had once cared about more than was really good for me. When I closed my eyes and tried to picture Diane Lawton there was no coherent image anymore, only a blurred montage of moments and gestures. Diane brushing back her hair with one hand and leaning into the coat of St. Augustine, her dog. Diane smuggling an Internet link to her brother in the tool shed where a lawn mower lay deconstructed on the floor. Diane reading Victorian poetry in a patch of willow shade, smiling at something in the text I hadn't understood: Summer ripens at all hours, or, The infant child is not aware…
Diane, whose subtlest looks and gestures had always implied that she loved me, at least tentatively, but who had always been restrained by forces I didn't understand: her father, Jason, the Spin. It was the Spin, I thought, that had bound us and separated us, locked us in adjoining but doorless rooms.
I was past El Centro when the radio reported "significant" police activity west of Yuma and traffic backed up for at least three miles at the state line. I decided not to risk the long delay and turned onto a local connector—it looked promising on the map—through empty desert north, meaning to pick up I-10 where it crossed the state border near Blythe.
The road was less crowded but still busy. The flicker made the world seem inverted, brighter above than below. Every so often an especially thick vein of light writhed from the northern to the southern horizon as if a fracture had opened in the Spin membrane, fragments of the hurried universe burning through.
I thought about the phone in my pocket, Diane's phone, the number Simon had called. I couldn't call back: I didn't have a return number for Diane and the ranch—if they were still on the ranch—was unlisted. I just wanted it to ring again. Wanted it and dreaded it.
The traffic was bad again where the road approached the state highway near Palo Verde. It was after midnight now and I was making maybe thirty miles per hour at best. I thought about sleeping. I needed sleep. Decided it might be better to sleep, to give up for the night and give the traffic time to clear. But I didn't want to sleep in the car. The only stationary cars I'd seen had been abandoned and looted, trunks agape like startled mouths.
South of a little town called Ripley I spotted a sun-faded and sand-blasted lodging sign, briefly visible in the headlights, and a two-lane, barely paved road exiting the highway. I took the turn. Five minutes later I was at a gated compound that was or once had been a motel, a strip of rooms two stories tall horseshoed around a swimming pool that looked empty under the flickering sky. I stepped out of the car and pushed the buzzer.
The gate was remote controlled, the kind you could roll back from a control panel safely distant, and it was equipped with a palm-sized video camera on a high pole. The camera swiveled to examine me as a speaker mounted at car-window height crackled to life. From somewhere, from the motel's bunker or lobby, I was able to hear a few bars of music. Not programmed music, just something playing in the background. Then a voice. Brusque, metallic, and unfriendly. "We're not taking guests tonight."
After a few moments I reached out and pushed the buzzer again.
The voice returned. "What part of that didn't you understand?"
I said, "I can pay cash if it makes a difference. I won't quibble about the price."
"No sale. Sorry, partner."
"Okay, hang on… look, I can sleep in the car, but would it be all right if I pulled in just to get a little protection? Maybe park around back where I can't be seen from the road?"
Longer pause. I listened to a trumpet chase a snare drum. The song was naggingly familiar.
"Sorry. Not tonight. Please move along."
More silence. More minutes passed. A cricket sawed away in the little palm and pea-gravel oasis in front of the motel. I pushed the buzzer again.
The proprietor came back quickly. "I gotta tell you, we're armed and slightly pissed off in here. It would be better if you just hit the road."
"'Harlem Air Shaft,'" I said.
"Excuse me?"
"The song you're playing. Ellington, right? 'Harlem Air Shaft.' Sounds like his fifties band."
Another long pause, though the speaker was still live. I was almost certain I was right, though I hadn't heard the Duke Ellington tune for years.
Then the music stopped, the thin thread of it cut off in mid-beat. "Anybody else in that car with you?"
I rolled the window down and switched on the overhead light. The camera panned, then swiveled back to me.
"All right," he said. "Okay. Tell me who plays trumpet on that cut and I'll spring the gate."
Trumpet? When I thought of Duke Ellington's midfifties band I thought of Paul Gonsalvez, but Gonsalvez played sax. There had been a handful of trumpeters. Cat Anderson? Willie Cook? It had been too long.
"Ray Nance," I said.
"Nope. Clark Terry. But I guess you can come in anyway."
* * * * *
The owner came out to meet me when I pulled up in front of the lobby. He was a tall man, maybe forty, in jeans and a loose plaid shirt. He looked me over carefully.
"No offense," he said, "but the first time this happened—" He gestured at the sky, the flicker that turned his skin yellow and the stucco walls a sickly ocher. "Well, when they closed the border at Blythe I had people fighting for rooms. I mean literally fighting. Couple guys pulled weapons on me, right there where you're standing. Any money I made that night I paid for twice over in maintenance. People drinking in the rooms, puking, tearing the shit out of tilings. It was even worse up on ten. Night clerk at the Days Inn out toward Ehrenberg was stabbed to death. That's when I installed the security fence, right after that. Now, soon as the flicker starts, I just turn off the vacancy light and lock up until it's over."
"And play Duke," I said.
He smiled. We went inside so I could register. "Duke," he said, "or Pops, or Diz. Miles if I'm in the mood for it." The true fan's first-name intimacy with the dead. "Nothing after about 1965." The lobby was a bleakly lit and generically carpeted room done up in ancient western motifs, but through a door to the proprietor's inner sanctum—it looked like he lived here—more music trickled out. He inspected the credit card I offered him.