eventual inter–life form communion. The science fiction genre, Michael explained, was a means by which humans were coming to internalize, through myth, knowledge of the existence of other sentient life forms. By the time this communion occurred, humans would be psychologically prepared to embark on an interplanetary collaboration to spread life through the universe.
Yes, exactly.
What?
Disbelieve all you want. What do I care?
Continue.
You asked for my story, didn’t you?
I did. Carry on.
I really don’t feel like continuing.
You have no choice.
I may not have a choice, but you—you can’t fuck with me like this. You can’t—
No. No, I’m—
I need some water.
Sorry. Okay. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Okay, so let me—okay, so that’s the moment Erika gasped and returned to the patio behind the house and threw up on me. Then later, after she told us what had happened in the cylinder, she went upstairs and resumed work on the novel she’d stopped midsentence some months before. The old boxing match with her keyboard started up again. I had these vomited-on clothes that needed washing so I put them in a garbage bag and dumped them in the sink in the laundry room. As I was rinsing out my clothes, something caught my eye amid the chunks of potato and scrambled eggs. A little key, like the kind used for safety deposit boxes.
Well…
I would have. Just—let me back up. I didn’t tell you about the Chinese herbalist. I’d had this rash on my right ankle, a sort of psoriasis thing. I had an MD I went to who gave me some steroid ointment but that didn’t do any good. So Wyatt suggested I see his Chinese doctor. He’d cleared up this wicked sinus infection Wyatt came down with one time. So I went—this was weeks before the meeting with Chewbacca—and it was this cramped little place in Chinatown, drying herbs hanging from the rafters, a couple of ninety-year-old Chinese women sitting at a little table in the front drinking tea. Dr. Wu was the doctor, middle-aged man, glasses. He parted some curtains and had me come back to the exam room and show him my tongue. Anyway, whatever, he sent me home with some herbs that were supposed to be infused into a tea. And by herbs, I’m not talking about basil and oregano. These looked like twigs and bark and stuff dug up from the floor of a forest. Horrific-tasting shit. But the rash started to disappear. So it happened that on the day Erika took her trip, I had to go back to get more herbs. By this time it was afternoon, she was upstairs, banging away on her keyboard, and Wyatt was doing yoga or something, so I thought I might as well go do my errand. On my way through North Beach I started to feel like maybe I was being followed, like I was in a movie. There was a big black woman with a kid in a stroller, an old man listening to an iPod, some teenage girls talking loudly on their phones. Then about half a block behind me there was this skinny homeless-looking dude, huge beard, sunglasses, floppy hat. If anyone was following me, it had to be that guy. Sure enough, he stayed behind me for several blocks. I stopped a couple times pretending to look at window displays and he did the same. Then I’d continue on and he’d follow. Whoever he was, he wasn’t trained to follow people. I started to wonder if this was Squid, but Squid had spoken in an African American guy’s voice, and my stalker was white or Asian as far as I could tell. I made it to Dr. Wu’s and got my refill of herbs. When I came out of the shop there he was, standing a few storefronts away, gazing at red-glazed Peking ducks hanging like violins in the window. That’s when I did something out of character. I walked up to him. When I was a few feet away he saw me and sort of jumped, then turned to walk away. I lunged and grabbed his shoulder and yanked him around. He fell to the sidewalk. I yelled at him, demanded to know why he was following me. He took off his sunglasses and said my name. It was Nick.
I couldn’t believe it. He said he wanted me to meet some people. So I went with him. I wanted to ask him so many questions, find out what he’d been doing the last five years. He was both as I remembered him, underneath that scraggly beard, and also someone new, some kind of mad street prophet. He struck me as someone who’d
We left Chinatown and hopped on a series of buses that took us to Berkeley. He didn’t say much during the ride. Just stared straight ahead mostly. I decided I’d keep my mouth shut and let this play out. I’d abandoned my search for him and gotten rich, found myself unemployed, and now here was the path again, intersecting with my life when I least expected it. We got off in Berkeley and walked for what felt like a mile, into a typical residential neighborhood. Little Victorians in various states of renovation. Dogs and flower beds, barbecues, that kind of place. We came to a red house with a door that had a little slot where the peek hole was supposed to be. Nick texted someone and a few seconds later the little slot slid open and two eyes stared out at us. When they saw me, they widened, and the slot slammed shut. Nick appeared to text someone back and forth for a while, angrily muttering the whole time. Finally the door opened and a guy grabbed both Nick and me and pulled us in. Big dude, wearing a UC Santa Cruz sweatshirt, red afro, handlebar mustache. He dragged us to a door leading down to a basement. As we descended we were hit with these really bright lights and all these voices yelling and arguing. I could only make out silhouettes at first but it sounded like twenty or so people.
The voices calmed down as a woman yelled for them to shut up. Then she said, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Frog?” It took me a second to realize that Frog was Nick. Nick unshielded his eyes and spoke in a stammer. He said he’d brought me here because we had taken an oath of brotherhood years before and he knew he could trust me.
“This wasn’t the protocol,” the woman said.
Nick said, “I understand that, Swan. But the plan had to change. He spotted me.”
Swan said, “Well you know he can’t go back to his natural habitat now, don’t you? Now that you’ve brought him here?”
I spoke up and said, “Look, I’m not sure who you people are but can someone tell me—”
The woman commanded me to shut the fuck up. Now my eyes were starting to adjust and I could see that Swan was a black woman about forty years old. You could have passed any of these people on the streets of Berkeley and not looked twice. I wondered if this was some new offshoot of the Symbionese Liberation Army or some other kind of revolutionary group. I was scared, I really was. Hours before I’d been sitting in the comfortable house I shared with two of the kindest people I’d ever known, and now I was back together with Nick, wondering if my ass was about to get handed to me.
Nick said, “He has 12.7 million in the bank.”
Then me, dork that I am, trying to dig myself out of whatever hole it was that I’d found myself in, said, “I’d be happy to loan you folks some money to help, you know, your cause or whatever this is.” I was thinking this might be a way to get me out the door.
“It’s not money we need,” Swan said, then leaned in close to me, staring so intensely I felt I was being audited. “Can you drive a stick shift?”
A stick shift?
A stick shift, yeah, that’s what she asked. Whether I could drive a stick. And I have to say I laughed. Suddenly this didn’t seem like a revolutionary group. It was just a bunch of punks, probably dealing acid and worrying about getting busted. So I said, “What, they didn’t teach you how to drive stick in the Kirkpatrick Driving
