Day 52 #3
“I think I know what you’re going through.”
Jesse felt nauseated. “You do?”
“I do,” Randall confirmed. “But you all don’t realize the answers to everything are not…” He pointed at the sky.
Some sort of desert dweller made a plaintive wail, and Jesse took an involuntary step closer to Randall. “So where are they? Down?”
“Underground. For regular folks, like us, anyway.”
Jesse took issue with “like us,” as he struggled to imagine any categorization that would group himself and Randall together.
Even a neighborhood association, if they had one, would be hard-pressed to agree they belonged under the same banner, what with Jesse’s life in his grand architectural marvel and Randall seemingly squatting on property, possession being nine-tenths of the law.
But Randall was like a thresher shark that way, tail-slapping its prey with something benign to stun it into submission before going in for the kill.
“Have you heard of the third alternative?” And there it was. You can see someone in a new light, but lighting only changes a subject’s appearance, not their molecular structure.
“The third alternative?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ve not heard of the first or second alternatives, so let’s for the sake of argument say I haven’t. Alternative to what?” He immediately hated himself for buying into the premise.
“Look, we’ve long agreed that overpopulation and environmental degradation will be the downfall of humanity.”
Jesse once again wondered who the “we” was; it was hard to see much agreement in the world today. And while he didn’t disagree, he looked at the land around them, free of people as far as they could see, and said, “Oh, we have, have we?”
Randall ignored him and pressed on, as if it were his experience that all people would understand if only he could educate them.
“Soon the planet will be uninhabitable, or if not uninhabitable, unable to sustain human society as we know it. The ruling class knows it. The politicians know it. That’s why they’re building rockets. That’s why they’re colonizing Mars.”
Jesse laughed and once again looked at the sky for the reddish dot he’d spotted earlier.
“They’re colonizing Mars,” he repeated incredulously.
Might Randall—of all people—hold the key to Norman’s whereabouts?
What if his husband wasn’t abducted by aliens, but rather the government or some asshole billionaire who needed architects for their new colonies?
While that seemed unlikely, nothing seemed implausible. Not anymore.
“Well, Mars is hard to get to, I’ll grant you that.
First they’re building clandestine bases on the dark side of the moon.
Which they can’t do without Russia, which is why that lizard Elon is so involved.
He has his head so far up Russia’s ass. You ever notice his eyes are really far apart?
If his eyes were any farther apart they’d be close together. If you gather my meaning.”
“Rarely do I gather your meaning.”
Jesse turned to face his neighbor for the first time in this conversation. Randall made a gesture about Elon’s eyes being so far apart they were in danger of meeting on the back of his head.
“Randall, I’ve met maybe five truly crazy people in my lifetime and you’re easily four of them.”
If Randall was offended by this, he didn’t allow himself to falter. In fact, Jesse was almost certain he detected a smile. “People thought Pythagoras was crazy. Isaac Newton, too. Visionaries are always challenged.”
“Oh, now you’re Isaac Newton?”
Randall outright laughed. “Maybe not Newton. But stop for a second. You honestly think the rich and powerful aren’t working on ways to survive a climate disaster?
” It was clear from the tone of his voice that he didn’t think he was the crazy one.
And in this regard, maybe he wasn’t. But Norman did not leave because of a climate crisis.
“And that’s the first alternative? Mars? Then what, Saturn and Jupiter?”
“No, no, no. The first alternative is a series of strategic nuclear detonations.”
“Of course,” Jesse said, even though that seemed more frightfully immediate, and not just because it was labeled the first. Depending on who was detonating these bombs, he could easily imagine New York destroyed, or perhaps Moscow or Beijing.
“Where?” he asked in a way that made it clear he didn’t necessarily want the answer.
Before they had moved to the desert, Jesse had googled whether Joshua Tree was outside the blast radius if North Korea decided to take out L.A. (It was.)
“In the atmosphere.”
This, for some reason, was a relief. “In the…atmosphere,” he repeated slowly to make sure he understood.
“That’s right.”
“What did the atmosphere ever do to us?”
“Trapped in pollution and heat for one. Want me to go on?” When it came to Earth’s atmosphere, Randall seemed to have a list of grievances.
“I’m probably going to regret asking, but what’s the second alternative?”
“Ah. This is why I brought it up. The second alternative was put into place in the fifties and sixties, up until 1969, when we went to the moon. The second alternative is underground.”
“Like the Underground Railroad.”
“No, literally underground. I know it sounds silly now…”
Now.
“…as enlightened eyes look beyond Earth. But in the 1950s we were building. Cities, freeways, there was just a lot of digging. You know how our dipshit president brags about being a builder? He hasn’t built shit.
We used to build everything. Eisenhower?
He was a builder. So no one even batted an eye when the government was constructing huge subterranean habitats for the elite. People were so used to construction.”
“The elite wanted to live underground.”
“The elite wanted to escape underground. That’s why there was so much food that wouldn’t go bad. Spam. Canned vegetables. Aspics. If it didn’t spoil, Betty Crocker had a recipe. I bet we’re standing on top of a huge bunker right now.”
This was starting to concern Jesse. The desert was exactly the kind of place you would build something you didn’t want others to see, especially in the days before satellite surveillance.
But wouldn’t the desert’s soft ground and dry sand collapse in on itself if one started digging too deep?
Jesse stomped his foot three times as if some sort of sonar or echo might detect if any serious concrete lay underneath. “But now people are going to Mars.”
His neighbor nodded.
“So why do you say answers for us lie underground? The second alternative, if you will.”
Randall shrugged. They had no golden ticket.
“We’re not going to be invited to Mars. Unless you have some launchpad in your backyard that I don’t know about.
” Jesse’s mouth was instantly dry, and he struggled to swallow.
But it might have been the most salient point Randall had ever made.
The third alternative was never going to be available to them; they would be lucky to somehow access the second.
But still, Jesse was not convinced the answers he sought were right beneath his feet.
“What if the answers I’m looking for are for questions that are…” Jesse didn’t quite know how to finish that sentence. “Bigger.”
“What if the pyramids are just the tip?”
“The tip of what?”
Randall looked at him like he finally understood. “Exactly.”
Jesse had heard it referred to as ontological shock, the state of distress people fall into upon the discovery of nonhuman intelligence and learning that humans may not be the apex predator.
In some ways, Jesse had been experiencing this phenomenon since the night that Norman left.
There was a clear delineation: before and after.
And standing in the far reaches of a national park in the middle of the night Randall had somehow made it worse, exacerbated his need to question everything.
Up was now down and so down was now up? The way he thought about everything would have to change.
He thought of a trip he and Norman had once taken to Pompeii.
The city ruins, buried under ash and pumice in AD 79, were unearthed in the mid-eighteenth century in what became the start of modern archaeology.
Now a monument to the people who died in the aftermath of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, it drew visitors from all over, including two Americans on their honeymoon who were staying on the nearby coast. Jesse and Norman thought it would be eerily romantic, roaming the streets where lovers perished, their remains found clinging tightly to each other, embracing for eternity.
Unfortunately it was the opposite; much of it in fact was quite grim.
To cope, they traded in jokes that day, which caused the two of them to erupt in laughter at the back of their tour group.
How was your visit? A blast! This heat is making me impatient.
Don’t blow your top! I’ll bet Pompeii was a party town.
How do you know? The people are stoned! Despite the fits of giggles that followed them all the way back to their hotel in Sorrento, it was a somber day.
Most interesting, Jesse thought, was the fact that Pompeii, a thriving city of twenty thousand, was itself built on top of another, much older city, built substantially by the Greeks following the Battle of Cumae a few hundred years before Christ. Remembering that now made Jesse wonder what they were standing on top of.
Maybe not government bunkers—Randall could not possibly be right about everything—but the ground held some secrets, the fossil fuels for instance that proved the dinosaurs once roamed.
Indeed, what if the pyramids were just the tip?
“Randall, am I crazy now, or do you actually make sense?”
Randall shrugged and offered a wry smile, then invited Jesse to look at the digital screen at the photo he’d just taken.
Breathtaking. A photo made up of questions.
“I’ll make you a copy,” Randall offered, and Jesse offered his thanks.
But he couldn’t stomach the photo in his house if that’s what it represented.
Uncertainty. Longing. Confusion. No, the photo would have to represent this night.
The beginning of a real search for answers.
The end of his grief-stricken, half-hearted attempts and his efforts to merely cope.
He could no longer bear the vastness of everything he did not know.
They drove home mostly in silence listening to a cassette Randall had of John Denver as the rattle of the uneven roads lulled Jesse to near sleep.
The radio reminds me, of my home far away.
John Denver, too, met his end in the sky.
But Norman hadn’t perished. Something drew that light to their yard that night; Norman wasn’t targeted at random.
As sleep took him, he realized that Lally was right.
He was a passenger. In his relationship, in life, and now in Randall’s truck.
But now Norman was a passenger, aboard god knows what and who knows where.
That left Jesse to drive. There was a job that lay ahead of him.
It would be strenuous, it would be weird.
People wouldn’t understand. But it needed to be done and he was the only one to do it.
There were times when Jesse felt disconnected from his professorial self—the rational thinker, the reasonable actor, the imparter of wisdom—more and more as of late.
He was becoming someone new. Norman looked to the skies.
But did he find answers? He would have to take a different tack.
There was something buried deep underground, and he needed to know what it was.
Jesse was going to dig.