“What, Van Vote? Don’t be an idiot. I bet you still say Submareener.”
“My point—,” I said.
“And ‘Mag-net-o.’ ”
“—is that Bertram thinks Van Voggatuh used fiction to cloak the truth.”
“As opposed to, say, your friend P. K. Dick, and Whitley Strieber, and—”
“Streeber.”
“And L. Ron Hubbard, who just made up shit and said it was the truth.”
“Exactly.”
Lew nodded. “I find your ideas intriguing, and I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter. What’s the name of this fine organization?”
“It gets better,” I said. “The Human League.”
“No way.”
“I’m not sure they realized the name was taken.”
“My God,” Lew said. “It’s the perfect cover for an elite fighting force—an eighties New Wave band! This is so Buckaroo Banzai.” He refolded his legs, no easy task in the Audi. “So this Bertram guy must have been thrilled to meet you, one of the pawns of the overlords. Did he explain why the masters of Earth would bother possessing an underemployed graphic artist and not, say, the national security advisor?”
“Oh yeah. He was convinced that my possession—well, all the showy possessions, like the Captain?—were for the entertainment of the other slans, kinda like theater for superhumans. The slans came to power in the forties, and they’re long-lived, and that’s why so many of the demons are so old-fashioned. They like their old radio shows and comic books—the Shadow, Captain America.”
Lew snorted. “Sure, that makes sense. They keep it a secret that they’re running the world, then they blow their cover by playing dressup like Trekkers?”
“Only Trekkies say Trekkers,” I said. “There must be two types of slans—the responsible, world-dominating type, and the role-playing, geek slans.”
“White-boy racist geeks, judging from how my black friends reacted to the O. J. killing.”
I snorted. “Like you have black friends.”
“So did you tell Bert your theory that you’d trapped a demon?”
“We had a lot of time to talk.”
Lou sighed. “Well no wonder.”
“No wonder what? And it’s not a theory.”
“Say the slans are in charge,” he said. “These telepaths can invade any mind they want, bouncing around people’s heads like packets on a network. They go wherever they want, dropping into your personal hardware like a virus. But you, you’re special.”
“I’m antiviral?”
“Not exactly. You didn’t kill the demon, you just quarantined it, like a sandbox that keeps Trojan horse programs from dialing out.”
“You really gotta work on your metaphors,” I said. “How’s a sandbox supposed to stop a Trojan horse?”
“Shut up,” he explained. “The important thing is that you’ve trapped one. It can’t get out and infect other people. If you could teach people how to do that—”
“I don’t want to teach people how to trap one. It’s awful. Even if I knew what the trick was, which I don’t, nobody would want this thing in their head.”
“It can’t be worse than being possessed,” he said.
“You don’t get to have an opinion.”
“Okay, okay. Fine. But say that once you get this thing out of you, you could use the same trick that kept it in to keep it out. You’d own the world’s only demonic firewall.”
I rolled my eyes.
He pointed at me. “You, my friend, may be the ultimate weapon in the war against the slans.”
“Oh my God,” I said, my voice going spooky with awe. “That would make me . . .”
“The Chosen One!” we said simultaneously.
We rode in silence for a while. Then Lew said, “But seriously. Bertram can’t come to the house, not while Amra’s there alone. You gotta call him and tell him to cut that shit out.”
“I told you, I’ll call him.”
“Okay,” Lew said.
“Okay.”
We made great time crossing Ohio and Pennsylvania. My thoughts kept jumping from Dr. Ram to Valis to Mother Mariette. Lew distracted me by reading from some of the more tangential web pages we’d only skimmed the night before when we were looking up the priestess. Then he started streaming music from his laptop to the car radio.
“You got to hear this one,” Lew said. It started with a U2 guitar
blast from “Vertigo” overdubbed with their spoken intro to “Helter Skelter,” which abruptly became Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl.”
And all the chords matched. I hadn’t realized they were so similar.
“Hey, that’s cool,” I said, and then shut up, because suddenly Paul McCartney was singing “Lady Madonna” over that thrash of Jet chords, and it sounded like those two songs were meant for each other. And then as soon as I settled into that, a guitar riff from the Joe Walsh song kicked in—that one about “life’s been good to me so far,” I couldn’t recall the name. And then it was all three—Beatles, Jet, and Joe Walsh—punctuated at random by distant shouts of “What the fuck is going on!” that sounded like snippets from a Sex Pistols track. I couldn’t stop giggling.
“Holy shit!” I said to Lew. “Where did you get this stuff?”
“Downloaded it. They call ’em mash-ups.”
“I think I’m in love.”
He had hours of this stuff on his hard drive. We cut northeast into New York, and Lew played me Doors versus Blondie, Depeche Mode versus Marvin Gaye versus Cypress Hill, Madonna versus Sex Pistols, and on and on. It was like these DJs had tapped into all the pop songs in my brain, into the collective radio in all our brains, and remixed and relayered until the songs were having sex and making strange, beautiful babies.
Eventually we left the interstate behind and the music ran out, along with Lew’s cell phone service. For the past few hours we’d been twisting and bobbing along two-lane back roads, rollercoastering through pitch-black forests. And now we were lost. Or rather, the world was lost. The GPS told us exactly where we were, but had no idea where anything else was.
Permanent Global Position: You Are Here.
I walked away from the car, toward the trees, sucking in cold air. A few feet away from the headlights, it got very dark. I stood there, letting my eyes adjust. What had looked like a solid wall of shadow resolved into individual trees, evergreens interspersed with bare-limbed things with interlocking branches. Snow was still mounded under some of the trunks. Somewhere out there was a town called Harmonia Lake, and presumably a lake to go with it, and a house or trailer or tent that might have been, and might still be, Mother Mariette O’Connell’s home.
I crossed my arms against the cold, turned my back to the woods, and started back to the car. Lew, illuminated by the dome light, was flipping through pages of printouts and cursing. Suddenly a light above the billboard sputtered to life, silvering the grass. I realized I wasn’t alone, and looked up. A gray-green humanoid monster reached toward me with huge webbed hands. It was hairless, with a wide, pale belly like a toad’s, caught
