Academy of Human Potential?”
The room erupted again, shouting. When Swan finally managed to shut everyone up, she said, “We never say that name around here. Now please answer my question. Can you drive a stick-shift car?”
“Sure,” I said. “Until recently I drove a manual VW bus.”
Swan clapped her hands together. “Perfect!” she said. “Let’s eat, what do you say?”
Suddenly everyone was being cordial and helping me with my coat, showing me to a place at a table. Swan sat on one side of me, Nick on the other. One by one the other members of the group introduced themselves. They all had animal names. Muskrat, Squirrel, Crow, Salmon, Bear, Owl, Horse. From upstairs came big bowls and platters of food, that good hippie food I’d grown to love. Emboldened by the sudden change of tone, I asked Swan who they were.
“We’re the dropouts,” she said. “Dropouts from that institution you mentioned.”
“So it does exist,” I said.
She said, “Of course it exists. It’s a foundation, an incubator designed to cultivate inventors. Those who have the potential to bring about paradigmatic change. It seeks to direct the course of history by coordinating the efforts of individuals who fit certain profiles. It brings these individuals together in the hopes that when they work collaboratively, the magnitude of the historical shifts they bring about will be greater than if these individuals had been working alone.”
“Like gestalt theory.”
Swan rolled her eyes and said, “Yeah, something like that.”
“Why did you drop out?” I asked.
Swan avoided the question. “You do realize your life with Wyatt and Erika is over, don’t you?” she said. “That you’ve chosen to pursue this path again, and that your efforts must now be synonymous with the efforts of the collective?”
I said sure, whatever. The hokey SLA mind-trick shtick wasn’t working on me. Maybe if they’d had submachine guns shoved at my ribs I’d have felt differently but for now at least all I saw were young leftists eating hummus and talkin’ ’bout a revolution. I’d been immersed among these types for years in the Bay Area. A lot of talk, little to no action. I knew I’d be able to return home anytime I wanted, regardless of what these blowhards were saying. For all I knew the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential was one of those night-course places upstairs from a Korean grocery store offering certificates in “business studies.” So I just went along with the game and said, “Yes, I know my old life is over.”
I think Swan could tell I was bullshitting her but she continued. “Have you ever met a slave, Luke?” she asked. The question took me aback, coming from a black person. I stammered out a no. She said, “Really? You’ve never been to a mall? You’ve never watched shoppers with their carts piled with soda and microwavable food? You’ve never stayed in a hotel where a fifty-year-old Mexican mother of six scrubs your shit stains off the toilet bowl? You’ve never watched TV for five hours straight?” She went on to explain their theory, sort of a pseudo- Marxist vision of the
There was a noise upstairs, the front door opening. Everyone in the basement got excited, saying, “They’re home! They’re home!” I started to ask Swan who they were talking about but she motioned for me to be quiet and listen. I heard the door close, people’s voices. I mouthed “Who is it?” to Nick. He whispered back, “The Millers.”
I whispered, “You guys are hiding in the basement of a family’s house?”
Swan shushed me. A couple pairs of footsteps creaked overhead. A girl’s voice. Swan said in a low tone, “They’re our test family. Jim and Helen Miller. They have two daughters, aged nine and six and a half, Melissa and Gina. Would you like to observe them?”
I said sure, why not, and followed Swan upstairs. We came up from the basement as Helen Miller was coming through the front door with a bag of groceries. I made a little startled jump, but Helen Miller walked right past me like I wasn’t there. Like one of those movies where the unseen dead observe the living. She put the groceries on the kitchen island and Jim walked into the room, gave her a kiss, and asked her how her day had been. Then Melissa came through the door, carrying her sheet music from piano class. Swan and I stood off to the side in the kitchen watching this whole scene go down. Was it some weird brand of street theater? Were these actors? They absolutely ignored us, going about their business in what was ostensibly their home, the basement of which was occupied by some fringe anarchist movement. I wondered if I was the target of an elaborately staged practical joke. I actually looked around the room trying to find cameras.
“The reason I asked you if you can drive a stick is that we need someone to steal the Millers’ Mazda,” Swan said. “The rest of us can only drive automatics. You’ll take Frog with you. He knows where you need to go.”
You have to remember that this was a day in which I’d met Chewbacca, gotten puked on, run into Nick after years of not knowing his whereabouts, and enjoyed some vegetarian fare with people with animal names in the basement of a painted lady outside Berkeley. I was seriously questioning my sanity. Swan seemed to recognize that I was going through some variety of psychic crisis and laid her hand on my shoulder. “You’re not crazy,” she said as the Millers removed a casserole from the microwave and sat down to eat. She told me that I was already involved, whether I wanted to be or not. There’d been a time, she said, when I had my life to myself, when I was merely curious about the academy, but now, after helping decipher the document Erika had channeled and by writing a pseudo-academic paper on the Bionet and qputers as a lark, I had entered the labyrinth. I was a fly, she said, a fly crawling down the throat of a Venus flytrap, my path heading in one relentless direction. That was my new name, she said. I was no longer Luke Piper. My name was Fly. I watched the Millers talk about baseball scores and weather reports, their silverware clinking on their plates. And even though I was standing in the same room, I was no longer part of their world, if I ever had been. This was what I had been yearning for all along: a secret mission, a purpose so mystifying I might only learn of its nature in the process of fulfilling it. I had no choice in the matter. I asked Swan where I could find the car keys.
I picked the keys up off the kitchen island, went out to the curb with Nick, got in the driver’s seat of the Miata and backed out. Just like that. As we left the neighborhood I asked him where we were going. He told me Arizona, to someplace far from civilization. We left the Bay Area like we were escaping the looming wave of a tsunami, both of us laughing, suddenly embedded in these lives where there was no distance between impulse and experience. Fuck, I can’t tell you how liberated I felt! To just leave. And the farther away from the city we got, the more Nick emerged from his shell, like he needed to be outside the blast zone of those crazies to get back his old personality. I still had so many questions for him but figured I’d give him whatever time he needed to regain my trust. Finally, over burgers at some roadside place, at around midnight, he told me something that made me take this trip more seriously. “Your friend,” he said. “The girl? Erika? She visited the seed ship today.”
I asked what he meant. He described a project the academy was working on, to build a space ship that would contain the basic ingredients needed to terraform a hospitable planet. He called this the seed ship. According to Nick, the drug Squid gave Erika operated as a delivery method to the ship through time. After she’d erroneously received the transmission about the future of life in the universe, her writing had been misplaced on the seed ship. So the dropouts had to send her there to retrieve it. The whole thing sounded completely nuts to me but I couldn’t explain how he could have known details about Erika’s trip unless he’d been spying on us. Which he had, actually, though he never got close enough to see Erika tripping or hear her version of the trip. When we’d received the drug from Chewbacca at the park, Nick had been watching us and followed us home. He’d been assigned this duty by Swan, who wanted to make sure everything went all right with Erika. He’d watched the house from the cafe across the street and followed me when I went to do my errand.
He needed to get confirmation that Erika’s trip had been a success. And he needed to get the key that she’d vomited up.
