“Where you headed?” Greg asked the character, having pulled onto the on ramp’s shoulder.
“North,” the man said in a nasal tone also to mimic Jerry’s slapstick, “Vancouver, eventually.”
“Guess I can’t do much for you,” Greg prepared to depart, Tm only going as far as Marinwood.”
“An inch is as good as a mile at this point,” the man sighed, “Can I stow my stuff in the back of your truck?”
“Sure,” Greg shrugged.
“The name’s John Kilroy,” he said, extending a hand as he climbed into the truck’s cab, “Thanks for the ride.”
“Don’t mention it,” Greg shook hands and clutched the truck into motion, “Sorry I can’t take you further. By the way, what exactly do you do?”
Tm, urn, an archeologist,” Kilroy said, waving a hand.
“Oh?” Greg glanced at him, “Amerindian remains?”
“Not exactly,” Kilroy was hesitant, “I’m a Biblical archeologist.”
“Guess there’s not much call for that around here,” Greg smiled, maneuvering in traffic.
“You’d be surprised,” the specter out of a B-movie comedy said.
“You Mormon or something? You believe that the lost tribes of Israel civilized pre-Columbian America?”
“Not at all,” Kilroy smiled, ironically, an expression incongruous for Jerry Lewis, “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to interest me around here.”
“Oh, and what might that be?”
“Eden.”
Greg tightened his hands on the steering wheel. Just his luck. He had picked up a real nutcase.
“Isn’t that located somewhere in the Middle East?” Greg was careful with his choice of words. He did not want to provoke the man.
“You might think so, but Eden’s location was purposefully left cryptic in the Bible,” Kilroy warmed to his subject, “Let’s see, how does the King James go? ‘And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison, that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold at that land is good: there is bdellium and onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel; that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.’”
“Well, that sounds pretty specific,” Greg said cautiously, “The Euphrates is in the Middle East.”
“And the river Hiddekel is commonly associated with the Tigris, both of which flow through Mesopotamia, or Assyria,” Kilroy removed his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief, “But take the Gihon. Its been associated with the Aras, or Araxas in eastern Armenia. So how can it encompass African Ethiopia? And the Pison. It’s associated with Joruk, the Acampsis, and Havilah with Armenia. But Havilah has also been associated with southern Palestine around present day Gaza and with northern Arabia around the border between present day Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. What’s more, while all four of these rivers encircle the sacred Mount Ararat region, they spring from no common river. No common source.”
“So the Bible’s inaccurate,” Greg got a little more feisty, realizing that this nut did have an education. “What else is new? It seems to me that what you’re saying is that Eden is just a myth.”
“Ninevah, Jericho, Babylon,” Kilroy ticked them off, “All were once thought legends, until Biblical archeologists proved otherwise.”
“And you intend to prove that Eden existed.”
“Yes.”
“But not in the Middle East.”
“The Bible’s description of Eden’s location is clearly not meant to be accurate. Perhaps elements of it are, but the whole thing, well, it conforms to no place in the Middle East.”
“Or anywhere else in the world.”
“Granted. But even if the Biblical Eden was intended to combine the geography of the four corners of the known world at the time, there remains the kernel of truth to the myth. A paradisiacal land of origins. California does have gold, and the resin and semi-precious stone mentioned in the Biblical passages. And many folks have considered it paradise.” Kilroy noted the look of humoring a lunatic in Greg’s eyes. “Actually, I do this as a hobby, between real jobs. I’m searching for Eden until I go off to excavate the tomb of a Hyksos Pharaoh in Egypt at the end of February. And you must admit, the idea would make a great coffee table picture book.”
Greg was glad to let the archeologist off at the Marinwood exit to speed back to the ASU campus. It was barely noon and already he had toured some political and religious fringes. He cracked the window to smell the coming rain, and cranked the radio.
He was a conventional agnostic. He had been raised Catholic by his parents through the sacrament of Confirmation, before it was no longer expected that he go to church. He had prayed for his uncle, but when the cancer took him, it also took God. This plus his scientific interests gave him a caustic skepticism that could not destroy all doubts however. Having been raised Christian, he was particularly susceptible to its mythology and images. And he had felt a resonance when Kilroy had talked about his search for Eden.
Smoke was another matter altogether. The man was proudly enigmatic, and not a little scary. His were post-political politics, making Greg’s look conventional by comparison. He returned the truck to the yard, recovered his car, and drove home. Andre worked in the garage, cleaning up, when Greg spluttered across the gravel drive. The pines above them sighed.
“Ready for a drive to the City?” the father asked.
“Sure,” the son replied.
They hit their favorite places—the Japanese Tea Gardens in Golden Gate Park, an off season Fisherman’s Wharf, and Chinatown. They browsed City Lights Books, the Farmers Market, and the Software Nexus. They had hot, light, deep-fried and powder sugared pastries from a street vendor off Market. Then Andre took Greg to a Basque restaurant on Potrero Hill, the Vizcaya, for a hearty, meaty meal and a view of the Pleiades Platform lighting up as the sun set. They talked about sports, politics, ideas that Greg had, places that Andre had been; mostly safe subjects. Andre did not talk about Janet with Greg, but he did watch his son, measuring his words and behavior. When the father was convinced that the boy was coping adequately with the breakup, he discussed his work schedule with Greg on the ride home across the Golden Gate home. It started sprinkling.
“I’ll be going to Australia Wednesday morning,” Andre steered easily down the highway, “Consulting on an international criminal law case in Sydney. I’ve already arranged for a satellite linked cellular line while I’m overseas.”
Thanks,” Greg said, finally catching his father’s concern, “I know you worry about me dad, but you don’t have to. I’m not going to slit my wrists over Janet or anything like that.”
The car’s wipers rhythmically slapped away a sprinkle become rain. Both Greg and Andre relaxed once again to enjoy the drive home. Greg faced a stack of homework once more in his room. But it was early in the semester. He could in theory choose an entirely new class line-up on Monday and still meet ASU’s administrative deadlines. As he listened to the rain on the roof, and imagined its waters sealing up a potential fission sun beneath his meadow’s green earth, he decided to fire up the lathe. He snagged a Guinness on the way to the basement. He spent the rest of the evening carving parts for an old gasoline engine with precise, incandescent green laser light, only occasionally utilizing virtual reality mapping for the small parts. Otherwise, he preferred to direct the machine by hand. Metal vaporized to his coherent photon touch, the basement’s air heating up with industrial odors. The rain crashed outside the basement’s windows.
***
DL left the Center in Hakim’s and Killah’s capable hands, the two arguing religion. What else? Killah Samuels was a natural atheist. Gut level. Hakim was devout, with the zeal of a reformed addict. They never settled much, and DL suspected they enjoyed arguing for
the company they shared.
He drove the Center car to a Safeway, coming out an hour later with five bags of groceries and one of household supplies. They bounced in the back seat as he maneuvered around potholes along a decayed suburban street deep in east Oakland yet another hour later. Old trees arched bare frames across old memories, brilliant and whole where all around him the world was broken and desiccated. The run down houses set back from run down lawns, the cracks and holes in the sidewalks, the hopeless people drifting and congregating; these grimy, tattered realities never failed to angrily crush the happy childhood memories he had of this neighborhood.
His mother had been alive then, and the family had taken spring evenings on the screened porch, chatting with other strolling neighbors. As he pulled into the driveway in mid-afternoon, past a gutter full of garbage, he noticed that the ivy had completely overgrown the porch, hiding much of the house’s collapsing front. He opened the side gate’s lock with a key from his chain, another key opening up the creaky back door into the kitchen’s back mop room. He heard a TV from the twilight inside, but first he hauled the six shopping bags into the kitchen.
Dark. When he turned on a light, roaches sauntered for cover. Dirty paper plates, mixed with empty food and beer cans, filled four large trash bags. Cigarette butts and ashes littered the floor. DL walked through the dining room shadows, following the TVs blue flicker into the living room. An old black man, hair gnarled up white, snored softly in an easy chair facing a rerun of I Love Lucy, surrounded by large mounds of empty beer cans and small mounds of cigarette debris. He did not wake Gabriel Logan, his father, but instead returned to the kitchen. Sometimes when DL brought the shopping, his father was awake. But only occasionally was he lucid enough to hold a decent conversation. Sometimes when he came in Gabriel woke with a start, asking: ‘‘Vivian?’’ DL methodically bundled up garbage with a quiet fury, then unpacked the groceries.
DL’s mom, Vivian, died of cancer while he was in prison and now, on the combined pittance that was his father’s union pension and social security, dad complacently drank and smoked himself to death in the shell of their life together. If DL did not buy food, Gabriel would not eat. All of his meager retirement was now spent on an all-too-conventional suicide.
Finished with all that he could really do, DL returned hopefully to the living room. But Gabriel was still deep into alcoholic slumber. You broken old man, DL thought, holding back tears. Mom had been the fighter, holding her cancer at bay for seven years after she had been given just one to live. Dad had given up long before she died, but the Grim Reaper was slow in coming. DL left the house without a sound, making sure to lock the back door and gate. He backed out of the driveway and drove for the nearest freeway. For home. The Center.
***
Peregrine made the FBI’s TMW list at midnight, while in the middle of robbing the General Store, the sundries and supplies coop on campus. He’d decided to concentrate on the ASU campus coops because they were both lucrative and easy to rob. The students who ran them didn’t know shit about security, Peregrine realized. The first week of the semester had been good for the General Store, and he collected $100 each from two cash registers, and $420 from the closet lock box. The rain pounded mercilessly outside.
TWENTY-FIVE
Excerpted from
“Nations and People of Earth,”
The Amok World Almanac and Book of Weird Facts
2010
(Electrostraca #: A/GR-010-367-582-2376)
The Mixtecan and Mayapan Liberated Territories are currently negotiating peace in a decade long war of secession that removed close to 260 thousand square miles and 20 million people in southern Mexico from Mexican central government control as well as from the North American Trade Zone. Combined US/Mexican forces still uneasily occupy a third of the Liberated Territories, and the US military continues a limited air war and partial naval blockade of the Zapatista revolution. But the tenacity of this libertarian society and its poor peasant peoples seems to be winning it the independence for which the Zapata liberation Front (ZLF) has fought so hard to attain.
The ZLF organized the Mixtecan and Mayapan Liberated Territories out of the countrywide August 2000 Uprisings, defending it up to the present under the US aerial holocaust and against the incursions of the combined US/Mexican/Guatemalan armed forces. The ZLF holds ground from the region where the Sierra Madre Oriental and Del Sur merge, around Oaxaca, through the Istmo De Tehuantepec to the Yucatan. This vast swath of self governing territory is run by village and town councils, workers collectives and syndicates, and peasant coops and communes. A half dozen libertarian labor unions, plus two socialist ones, form the Confederación del Trabajo. With several political parties—the Magonist Liberty Party, the conventional Mexican Social Democracy Party, a minuscule Communist Party, and a larger, weirder hybrid Trotskyist/Maoist amalgam called the Revolutionary Movement of the Left—the CT fronted the popular circle of southern Mexico’s liberation struggles; the grassroots level to the ZLF.
The actual running of the Liberated Territories is done in an extremely decentralized fashion, even in the small socialist zones. In the larger villages, and in towns and cities, factories were taken over by their workers. The workers in turn elected both technical and administrative management, all subject to recall at any time, and entirely accountable to the workers’ assembly. Problems beyond the scope of one factory are handled by local/regional economic and industrial councils. Close to 80% of the industry in the Territories is worker run.
The communal traditions of Mexico’s peasant life in the south are augmented by those still extant pre-Columbian native cultural institutions into a solid social base. As a consequence, collectivization came easily. Expropriated lands were taken over by the peasants, who pool not only their land, but tools, animals, grain, fertilizer and harvested crops, modestly in cooperatives and more radically in communes. Perhaps 7,900 agrarian cooperatives and communes carry out the bulk of the farming in the Liberated Territories.
Between twelve and fifteen million people participate in southern Mexico’s revolution in this manner, as well as through their village and town councils. In the larger towns and in the cities, neighborhood councils coordinate through a metropolitan council. These latter organs of self-government are broader and more volatile, for while much of the regions workers and peasants belong to the CT through one or another of its independent unions, “independents” and “individualists” flourish in the various village, town and metropolitan councils. Small farmers who do not wish to join a cooperative or commune are called “individualists,” and small shop owners who do not want to unionize are labeled “independents.” Both are permitted to continue, the one working the land and the other operating a business or industry, often as families as they are not permitted to hire labor. As a consequence a modest, better off sector of extended family farms and enterprises prospers. Not subject to competition from large landowners, industrialists, and other capitalists, domestic or foreign, as all have long ago fled, they are also protected by the Territories popular militias as far as is possible from the US/Mexican military assault.
The CT and its affiliated unions, the LP and the MSDP, are all run from the bottom up through conventions and congresses, ultimately coalescing in the sometimes unwieldy but always democratic federation that is the ZLF. Only the CP and the RML practice versions of tight, Leninist, democratic centralism and because of their relative lack of influence, they are tolerated as members of the ZLF.
Intersecting the ZLF, overlapping it in a number of areas, the Federación Anarchista Olmecan (FAO) is a network of groupos de afinidad most closely associated with the libertarian unions of the CT. They are more purely ideological within their respective unions at the same time they field the fighting groups and carry out atentados against military and ruling classes in those gray, boundary areas of the Territories. The FAO, together with the peasant and workers militias formed into columns, constitute the guerrilla Popular Revolut
ionary Forces (PRF), which defend the Liberated Territories through the strategy of a self-organized, armed people.
Sparked by the widespread corruption, intimidation and fraud of the PRI in the 1998 Presidential elections, and backed against the wall by the brutal failure of the 1999 country-wide General Strike, the 2000 August Uprisings, also called the August Revolution in the Territories, forged both the ZLF and the Territories, all in 20 breathtaking days of successful insurrection. Both the ZLF and the Territories have weathered years of US/Mexican government and military counter-insurgency, this revolutionary society basically intact despite all that reaction and imperialism can throw at it. US strategy against the secessionist south of Mexico involves unrelenting air war, smart weaponry, high tech special forces, and combined US/Mexican ground forces. US counterinsurgency escalated quickly from covert aid in 2001 through advisors in 2003 to troops in 2005. The Combined Forces draw a line from Acapulco to Vera Cruz, digging in behind it as well as along the eastern stretch of the Yucatan peninsula around Cancun. US military bases in western and northern Guatemala coordinate with the brutal Guatemalan military to secure the border and make occasional anti-guerrilla incursions. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff at first predicted a swift, surgical intervention of overwhelming US technologies linked to a sepoy army trained from the start in gung-ho, American-style warfare. Yet the US/Mexican war against the Mixtecan and Mayapan Liberated Territories has dragged on for years, with little success in converting areas sympathetic to the revolution let alone in defeating the revolution’s core areas.
Physically, on the ground, the US military does far better in holding territory and minimizing casualties than was the case during Vietnam. Spiritually, the US does little better in winning the “hearts and minds” of the populace than was the case in IndoChina. Now that the US and Mexican governments are tacitly acknowledging the Zapatista revolution by holding multilateral peace talks with the Mixtecan and Mayapan Liberated Territories in Paris, it is no longer that difficult to enter or travel about in southern Mexico...
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