Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  But we reiterate: Wonder Decades have their glories—and they have their dark moments.

  The one that everyone knows from the thirties, of course, pierced even Shit and Eric’s attention.

  Three days after they came to Gilead Island to labor at construction work during the temporary closing of the Runcible Opera House, at four-forty on October 7, 2033—Shit was forty-five and Eric was forty-three—the largest single hour of man-made slaughter in human history occurred.

  We mean, of course, the Three Bombs.

  Their third evening on Gilead Island, Shit and Eric ambled into the dilapidated Kyle mansion living room. Both were looking puzzled. “Hugh,” Shit asked, “did you hear sumpin’ about somebody droppin’ a bomb on California? That’s what somebody called to tell Darlin’, out at the site earlier.”

  Hugh said, “Well, somethin’s wrong with the television. You can’t get no news at all. They’re just playin’ old programs, again and again. The computers are frozen up—course, mine’s about five years old. So maybe it’s just bein’ ornery.”

  “A bomb?” Jay said. “I don’t think so. Maybe that earthquake came that they all been talkin’ about forever and ever.”

  The news ban was lifted at nine o’clock that evening. What they were calling a “small nuclear device” had gone off in the middle of Los Angeles, still a media capital for the country. So had another in the middle of central India’s Mumbai, the hub of that nation’s Bollywood film industry, with its then eighteen-million inhabitants and still the world’s most populous city.

  Rumors of a nuclear explosion—fortunately false—had even trickled out of Nigeria’s Nollywood.

  The third “device” had, mercifully, been found and defused in Brazil’s São Paulo—which gave it a good run for its money as far as population, if not film production. But the initial report was that a third device had gone off there as well: the name “Three Bombs” was forever attached to the incident. (Briefly it was written “3D,” which soon became “3B.”) The US death toll alone was estimated conservatively at twelve million in the minutes after detonation, with another fifteen million dead over the next six weeks. A mass exodus of survivors, if that is the proper name for those scarred and ragged men and women and children who—most on foot—poured from a huge strip of landscape rendered unlivable by panic and human barbarism on a scale inconceivable by any not there. For the next fifty, seventy-five years, an entire genre of novels, films, stories, and plays about survivors and people in Nevada and Oregon and New Mexico arming to protect their homes from the herds of the starving, the terrified, the wounded and the ill covered the country.

  The death toll was forty percent higher in India, though the violence there was claimed to be less.

  In Brazil, people rioted and stampedes of poor folk from the favillas swarmed across the city so that for years some were sure a bomb had gone off there, anyway. Scholars have put the international total for the first month’s devastation at a figure higher than World War II’s estimated fifty-to-eighty million deaths—though others put it just under.

  The next morning, though Shit and Eric reported to the building site, only a third of the workers showed up. It’s often claimed that more than three-quarters of a paralyzed country—indeed, the paralysis was world wide—stayed home (schools were closed, factories shut) to watch and ponder and make sense of the horror and destruction revealed over the next days in California and adjoining states, like nothing ever seen in this nation—or any other—ever before.

  Since nobody was getting anything done on the site, Eric and Shit left to return to Jay’s at three.

  Hugh had moved his TV screen from his room into the living room, where it was playing two different online coverages, one on the left side, one on the right. Fourteen workers, ten of them women and four men, sat and watched the dual coverage, some on the couch, some cross-legged on the floor. Jay had gone out, rounded them up, invited them back to the Kyle mansion, and asked if they wanted to come watch, since, by now, it was drizzling outside anyway. Darlin’ wasn’t there—she’d gone back to the mainland to try and learn, fruitlessly, about her family. But, with her scarf around her head and her all-but-boyish breasts, Gus sat in what Eric years ago had come to think of as Shad’s corner. She looked over blankly, then seemed to remember she knew them and smiled.

  Eric smiled and Shit nodded back.

  Two people were crying—one young man and a middle-aged woman—who had come from, respectively, San Jose and San Diego, which the rioting had already mostly destroyed—

  A mad man from a small East Asian country had decided that he wanted to destroy the world’s entertainment industry and replace films and DVDs with tracts of religious instruction. Neither Muslim, Christian, Jewish, nor Buddhist, he was apprehended two days after the explosion—and probably torn to pieces during a transfer from one armored truck to another between jails. Nothing of him—or the truck in which he’d been confined—was ever found for certain.

  The Wonder Decade of the thirties also produced single inoculation birth control for both men and women, which was temporarily reversible with a pill, which both partners had to take, and which, by the ’forties end, brought the world population back down to twelve billion, then lowered it by a further thirty percent by the end of the fifties.

  (Though many, many young people who came along later assumed otherwise, deaths from the Three Bombs formed less than one hundredth of one percent of the world population regression brought about by the birth control method, which simply demanded that pregnancy be by conscientious mutual consent of both parties.)

  At that Wonder Decade’s end, in the U.S., many drugs—especially recreational—were now legal. Possibly that was because half a dozen miracle drugs were common by then, among them Fillonin, which made severe alcoholism—as well as many other chemical dependencies—a thing of the past (God, Barbara told Eric one afternoon, sitting on her back porch, looking toward the Runcible inlet, you remember how I used to drink, don’t you? And you never saw the worst of it. At least I hope you didn’t. Fillonin is the only reason I have a life today with Ron.), though it might have eventually contributed to her death. A side effect, especially in the first few years, was a near three percent rise in the chance of renal cancer—one of the few cancers that still had less than an eighty-five percent remission rate.

  Some readers will feel that my account hopelessly slights this one incident that, with the rest of the world, Shit and Eric paid serious attention to—the Three Bombs.

  But the bombs are a historical atrocity that cannot be described.

  However directly or indirectly they affected your life, many of you lived through them.

  You know what that day was like—and what the days just after them were like; and the months. And the years…

  Despite the many thousands on thousands of lives blighted by 3B, whether those lives went on for only hours, for days, for months, or for year after year, while the world sat and gasped and shuddered and wept, even the Three Bombs had already begun to become the past.

  * * *

  [73] THREE WEEKS LATER on the mainland, at the Opera—reopened now for two days—Eric vacuumed the upper balconies, while Shit swept the orchestra’s aisles. Then Eric took another walk down by the docks, looking for any regulars who had not yet returned.

  On the glistening boards—it had recently rained—Joady sat on an overturned barrel, leaning on his knees, looking at the sea.

  “Hey.”

  Slowly, Joady looked up.

  “You can come on back, if you want. I’m gettin’ some pizzas in.”

  “Them Bombs were somethin’, weren’t they?”

  Eric pulled himself up with a big breath. “Come on Joady—not you, too. Them things is all I’ve heard anybody talkin’ about all month now. They’re makin’ me a little crazy.”

  “Did you see some of the pictures—that shit is crazy! Can you imagine—?”

  Two weeks later, again finished with the upper two
balconies, Eric carried the paint-speckled ladder down to the orchestra and parked it under the back stairwell that was supposed to be closed—a black chain hung across the steps—though three sleeping bags and a blanket roll were pushed around under the stairs.

  Within three weeks, because of the Three Bombs, guys from California had started showing up…

  Not that they were a real problem, but they seemed depressed, and you felt bad about pushing them to work—though the ones who found their way to the Opera House generally seemed to know what the place was about already.

  Eric ambled down the side, and, six rows from the back, moved into a seat two in from the aisle. Five minutes on, coming from behind, Shit dropped down in the seat beside Eric and leaned toward him. “Hey, now—gimme some fuckin’ snot, nigger.” He twisted toward Eric, a rough hand gripping the back of Eric’s neck, the other cupped under Eric’s nose. “Block up a nostril and snort out a big one. I’m feelin’ real nasty.”

  Eric chuckled. “Too late. I got all the good stuff.”

  “Fuck you, then. Well, at least lemme have some salt.” He pushed Eric’s hand away, then slid a heavy middle finger into Eric’s nose. “Come on.” The finger twisted.

  “Hey, man!” Eric tried to pull away. “Come on, now. I always give it to you when I got it.”

  “I know you do. But next time, I ain’t stopping with the salty stuff. I’m gonna make you shit in my hand and feed it to me.”

  Eric shook his head. “You’re really gettin’ into that, aren’t you?”

  Shit sucked at his middle finger. The hand that had been behind Eric’s neck came forward and settled between Eric’s legs, to start rubbing. “Well, I’m gonna suck your dick at least—I ain’t done that in a while.”

  “Is this your fuckin’ change of life?” Eric asked.

  “Ain’t you glad I’m goin’ though it with you?” Shit squeezed Eric’s groin, which had hardened with kneading.

  Walking up the aisle, with his sports jacket and with his white fringe of hair, Dr. Greene saw them and slowed. Behind heavy glasses, he smiled. “I see you two are bolstering each other’s immune systems. That’s good—yes, that’s good.”

  One of the homeless black guys—it was Rube—was two steps behind. “Hey, Doc—why you always sayin’ that when you see them carryin’ on with their nasty stuff—huh?”

  The doctor looked over his shoulder. “’Cause that’s what yall doin’. Eatin’ dried mucus—even what you’re doin’. The dead viruses and bacteria make you make antibodies. And nothin’ lives too long in that stuff, anyway. Myself, I suspect it’s either a slowly dying or a fast emerging evolutionary survival trait. Which reminds me. Speaking of survival—Rube, take this damned humera medicine, will you, while I remember I got it for you.”

  “What’s that for?” Rube’s hair was thinning around his bald spot and his shirt was torn in three places.

  “Humera,” Dr. Greene said. “Humera’s what it’s for. Because of our damned breakfast club and our damned new friends, half the guys in here got it—well, six or seven of ’em.”

  “What is it?” Rube took the small brown plastic bottle and held it up in the screen’s light.

  “Intestinal parasites. See, you pick up that stuff as soon as we let you fellas out of here, where we can’t keep an eye on you. Thank god nobody picked up any amoebas or jardinière. At least I didn’t find any in Shit or Haystack’s crap samples—the two I ran tests for.” Again, the doctor reached into his pocket to take out another bottle. “This belongs to you two.”

  “Why do I need this?” Eric made a face. “I don’t mess around with you guys and that stuff.”

  “But you’re very close with someone who does.” Dr. Greene pulled his eyebrows together. “Close with several people who do, actually.”

  Shit chuckled.

  “Oh,” Eric said—as Shit took the bottle. As far as hair, Eric thought, Shit and Rube looked kind of the same. It was interesting that he still found Shit’s really sexy and Rube’s more or less indifferent.

  Dr. Greene walked on toward the theater’s back—presumably to distribute more pills.

  At this hour of the evening, probably drunk—his wine bottle’s copper cap stuck from his baggy hip pocket—Rube swayed in the light from the DVD on the screen. “Why can’t you two do ordinary stuff, like suck each other’s dicks or bang each other’s buttholes? I can get into all of that—if I have a little wine. If you did that, I could get to like you guys.”

  Shit said, “Oh, you’ll get to like us if you hang around here long enough.”

  “You want some of mine?” Rube asked. He shook the pill bottle, which chuckled dryly back. Then he put it in his pocket. “Snot I mean.”

  “Naw.” Eric shook head. “I think we’ll pass.”

  “Why not?” Rube frowned. “You suck my dick.”

  “’Cause your goddamn nails are so long, I’d poison myself with all the dirt you got under ’em.”

  “Mmm.” Rube nodded toward Shit. “I guess he don’t got that problem.”

  Shit chuckled again. “Go on take your medicine, Rube—so I can eat out your butthole again in a couple of days. And you don’t infect no more of the regulars than you already have.”

  “Oh…” In the quarter-light, Rube looked a little bewildered. “Yeah, okay.” Then he asked. “Who pays for the pills?”

  “They’re from the clinic,” Eric said.

  “Is that like the Chamber of Commerce?”

  “It’s the Kyle Institute,” Shit said. “Far as you’re concerned, that’s the same difference.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said.

  “It’s part of the arrangement for keepin’ the place open. We have to distribute free STD medication. And the clinic across the street can run tests. Or Dr. Greene can take swabs and stuff in here—for chlamydia and clap and stuff like that, which we are pretty fortunate not to have had no cases of since we done been here—and get back to us about ’em…”

  Rube, though, who had a pretty short attention span at the best of times, was wandering toward a seat in the front row.

  *

  On the sides of shuttle busses and on wall placards in the Hemmings Mall and on cardboard signs inside busses above the windows and on the middle pages of the Hemmings Herald, for the next few years Eric and Shit would see the cool green with thick red letters sloping down to the left:

  REMEMBER CALIFORNIA

  For years, probably, that was the most recognizable icon in the country—even in Diamond Harbor. Two months after the theater reopened, three black women and two young white men came by the Opera and asked Shit if they could put up a poster in one of the empty frames halfway up the steps from the lobby to the first balcony.

  Shit told them, “Sure. Put the thing on up there.”

  Downstairs, Eric stood with his arms crossed, watching them slip the yard-and-a-half rectangle of green oak tag with its blocky red letters into the frame.

  *

  After three weeks, in his hurried trips up and down the stairs, Eric ceased to see the thick, red reminder of the national—the worldwide—catastrophe. Possibly that’s why, on his way down one Thursday, for the first time he noticed, running along the bottom, in small letters, an internet address: NewOrderofHolyLuminecence.

  At the bottom of the steps Eric continued across the lobby and out the glass doors. He paused at the ticket booth, a hand against the curved wall, and called in through the grill to Shit: “Hey, I’m gonna run over and see Cassandra and Tank for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

  Up the street at Cave et Aude, Eric stepped over the puddle on the pavement from the lopsided air conditioner in the transom and pushed through the door. Cassandra was sitting at the glass counter in the front with an open sketchbook. On the wall across from the counter were reproductions of dozens of tattoos. She looked up. “Hey, there—you want to get another picture?”

  “Hi, Cassandra,” Eric said. “You guys got a computer in here, don’t you? You think you could let
me Google something?”

  Cassandra put her head to the side. “Google…?” she asked. Then she frowned. “When’s the last time you used one?”

  Eric frowned back. “I don’t know. Seven, eight years ago.”

  “More like ten or twenty,” Cassandra said. “You’re like Tank’s cousin, Pete. He won’t come near them things.”

  From the back, over her needle’s buzz, Tank called, “Hey, Eric. Good to see you.” She was with a customer.

  “Hey, Tank—”

  “But that’s all right,” Cassandra went on. “You two don’t believe in none of this modern technology, do you?”

  Eric chuckled. “It’s not we don’t believe in it. We just never got around to learnin’ it. You know Shit don’t have no readin’ or writin’.”

  “What you wanna look up?” Cassandra asked.

  “The New Order of Holy Luminescence,” Eric said. “And what it’s got to do with the ‘Remember California’ charities.”

  Cassandra reached up to run a heavy forefinger under the collar of her dress. “You gonna go to one of them rallies they’re always havin’?”

  “Naw,” Eric said, “I just wanna find out what they got to do with those REMEMBER CALIFORNIA signs you see all over.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Turn around. It’s right behind you.”