SUB ROSA AMERICA
and
The Fall
of the New Atlantis
by
Elana Freeland
Copyright © 2010 Elana Freeland
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Cover art by Louise Williams, "The Guardian of the Innermost," 1991
Sub Rosa America
Major Characters
Seven (Lilya Eliade)
Old when the novel opens in 2019, she flashes back to her early twenties in 1970 when she met Hermano and underwent an initiation in Santa Barbara. Nexus for all characters. Born in 1947.
Hermano
Eastern European Time-traveler known in past ages as the Comte de Saint-Germain and Christian Rosenkreutz. Traveling the Americas with Ghost Bear. Ultimately sets in motion the pilgrimage to Dallas.
Ghost Bear
Lakota Sioux Time-traveler medicine man traveling with Hermano. His son White Bull has been arrested.
Thomas Gardner
Seven’s true love, scientist and recluse on the run from the elite New England Gardner family and Dr. Greenbaum. Half of a Mengele twin experiment entailing his “dead” identical twin Didymus, now an intelligence agent being used to track him. Yale graduate, born in 1943.
Didymus (Didy) Hauser
Thomas’ twin brother taken at birth and reared under Paperclip Nazi MK-ULTRA. Programmed to be a CIA assassin. His unknown
assignment: to locate and kill his twin. Born in 1943.
Simon Iff
Didymus’ CIA handler with an FBI cover. Reports to Dr. Greenbaum and keeps a distant tail on the vehicles en route to Dallas. Born in 1927.
Ray Kofi
Black disillusioned Marxist graduate student at UCSB and Seven’s friend. Sought as a scapegoat for the April 18, 1970 shooting of student Kevin Moran. Born in 1944.
Mannie
Brooklyn Jew who arrives in California after a long bus ride and ends up going to Dallas with the pilgrims. Excited to participate in the Sixties Revolution but instead encounters the chaos of COINTELPRO. Naïve, Mannie sees into the heart of people and events. Born in 1948.
Baby Rose
Beautiful blond girl found wandering near Ojai who has escaped Jordan Ranch and is being sought by Dr. Greenbaum as an MK-ULTRA data bank. Has a variety of “alters” (“Alice”) her new friends are unaware of. Underwent programming with Didymus under Drs. Greenbaum and Gottlieb. Born in 1952.
Vicente Liputzli (Vince)
Timekeeper grandson of a powerful Mayan archaeologist Timekeeper. Sent north to chronicle the demise of el norte. With his grandfather’s Book of Days to guide him, he has been touring Southwest tribes and is hitchhiking back to White Sands to see where the worlds were torn apart when the pilgrims pick him. Born December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day.
Hiram Gardner
Thomas’ uncle. Raised between Scotland and America by fascist relatives and placed in key positions for the sake of the Enterprise. Ruthlessly dominates Thomas’ family; sacrificed Didymus at birth to MK-ULTRA. Elite gopher for Dr. Greenbaum. Born 1918, graduated Yale 1940. Lives in New York.
Laurence Gardner
Thomas’ father, dominated since childhood by his brother Hiram.Born in 1920, graduated Harvard 1942. Lives in Philadelphia.
The Colonel
Seven’s retired US Air Force neighbor, served in every major 20th century war up to Vietnam. He and his Cadillac join the pilgrimage to Dallas.
Dr. Greenbaum
An MK-ULTRA “spychiatrist” under Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, as well as a Paperclip Nazi. Programmed Didymus and oversaw Thomas underthe Mengele twin program. Programmed Baby Rose for sex and memory. Member of elite Satanic cult in Mexico. Lives in Washington, DC.
Magician/Sibelius/
Works for Dr. Greenbaum. Occult capabilities. By day, a corporate CEO; by night, a Jaguar Priest seer of elite Satanic cult in Mexico.
Kabbalist
Works for the Magician. Astrological capabilities.
Dedicated to the Three Kings
John F. Kennedy
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy
and what might have been, and may still, far in the future.
BOOK I
Gone to Croatan
Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.
Hamlet, II, ii, 207
Sherlock Holmes: We’ve unmasked madmen, Watson, wielding scepters, reason run riot, justice howling at the moon.
Murder By Decree, 1978
In the dark time, the eyes begin to see.
Theodore Roethke
Book I
Gone to Croatan
Table of Contents
Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma
The Gardner Brothers East Coast
Hiérarchie! Fraternité! Liberté!
The story is that human beings are parasites living off the good graces of Earth, a noble ancient, for millions of years, back to the Tertiary Epoch or since Adam, Adam meaning adamah earth and blood. We are Time’s translation spinning through space, keeping tempo to the Platonic count of 25,920 years, an aeonic waltz through the Zodiac wrapped in the arms of Solus Invictus, leaning out from his embrace no less than 21.8 degrees and no more than 23.4 degrees with a degree to spare before we burn or freeze. Magnetic pole shifts are thought to have tumbled mountains and boulders southward 335,000, 220,000, 127,000, and 11,600 years ago, the oceans sloshing mightily for days over future Europe, Canada, and the United States. Afterward, ice and rock and volcanic gas belts spent thousands of years raising mountain ranges all over again.
The last Flood 11,600 years ago rolled north over the plains of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Siberia to the Arctic Ocean at the end of the Pleistocene epoch— the flood that still pulsates through the myths of Atlantis for which science invented 20,000-foot-thick melting ice caps to cover over the grievous electromagnetic errors of mighty predecessors. But more of these men later.
By anno domini 1, two hundred million human beings were scurrying about, intent on what they couldn’t live without. War, famine, weather, murder, disease, and the Grim Reaper did what they could, but by the beginning of the third millennium Common Era, those two hundred million had become for the dominant elite a worrisome seven billion.
Homo sapiens sapiens’ life spans of little more than a Platonic day of 72 years mean starting over and over again to listen as a child, learn first to look and then to see, sift through the myths and rumors left behind by dusty millennia for what they hear faintly in the heart’s core, and behind bewildered eyelids to at last see through ever-changing worlds of appearance where wheat looks like chaff and chaff like wheat, planting and winnowing until the last breath for the sake of what stirs as a vague memory of past or future, they know not which. How in four score years can they ever hope to resurrect a true self-conception, whatever the epoch they awaken in?
It is thus that a consideration of sheer numbers sets the stage for contemplating the tangled skein of that most human of frailties, compassion.
1
Winter, 2019
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”
Old Seven was toiling her way up a narrow switchback along a shoulder of the Park Range in the Colorado Rockies, everything about her pointing to a trek of hard purpose: the brown and green thermal Goretex draped with cedar fronds over a high-tech space blanket, the size of her pack, the fact that it was nigh the dead of winter. A crossbow hung from her hunchback pack within easy reach, swinging in time with the pace set by her stout walking stick and hiking boots. It was late fall of the year 2019, and her step was slow but as sure as it was fifty years before. She had walked eleven hundred miles along the Oregon Trail, threading from one river to the next along a continuous silver cord that had bound east to west and inland to sea for thousands of years, from the rolling Columbia to the Snake, the Sweetwater, and now the Platte. At Independence Rock rising up from the prairie sea like a beached whale she had charcoaled GONE TO CROATAN upon the lip of a fissure that would fill with flowers come spring, then finally left the Trail to cut south along the North Platte.
She stopped to breathe in draughts of clean, piercing air and to rest her hunched back against the lichen-covered trail face. Hearing her own breath in the snow-muffled silence soothed her. She slipped off her mittens and instantly the blue veins under the thin skin on the tops of her hands shrank and buried themselves in her deeper creature warmth. Absent-mindedly caressing the silver bracelet inlaid with copper on her wrist that Thomas had crafted for her years before, she removed her Polartechs and squinted through the late afternoon glare toward the southeast. Her nut-brown eyes flecked with gold were old with the world; in the light the pupils expanded and contracted like a hawk’s.
Hearing an engine, she raised the binoculars and clicked onto day vision to scan the clear blue miles to the south and east, across the valley forming a V with the Medicine Bow Mountains. A white-hot knot leaped to her stomach. It was a squadron of seven black helicopters. Apaches? Kiowas? Surveillance or attack drones? Blackhawks might mean USAF Special Operations Command, SOCOM, seven combat troop assault choppers, eleven to twenty-two men each, floodlights, aerials, pylons, droptanks, in-flight refueling booms, unmanned A160T Hummingbirds with Forester radar and ARGUS-IS multiplex spy eyes—she checked off a mental list. From this distance, the dark red lettering was impossible to read.
America was crawling with UN peacekeepers, foreign troops without a stake. Were they out of Fort Logan? Carson? Peterson Air Force Base? Lowry? NORAD cached in Cheyenne Mountain, or Table Mountain just north of Boulder? Satellite Control monitored GPS from both Sunnydale and the Consolidated Space Operations Center at Colorado Springs, and the heart of Colorado and the guts of the American air and space war zone were now one and the same. Just a few nights before in a dream, she had encountered a massive gilded dragon above the Rockies whose size and cold eyes had taken her breath away, its shiny scales rippling electromagnetically as it stared steadily at her. Vince once mentioned a dragon known as Avanyu among the Pueblo Indians . . .
The approach was whisper-mode, with a barely audible whop whop whop from the mufflers on the tanks. They were definitely on patrol in imminent assault mode, their bearings north-northwest, toward Rawlins where she’d noted that the old Wyoming Frontier Prison was active again; it had closed in 1981, but from a distance she’d discerned platoons in UN blue on maneuvers. Was this patrol connected with those troops? They were gradually descending, perhaps for their heat sensors trying to separate out humans from other life forms. If they didn’t switch course, they would pass directly over her. She entertained no illusions that they were looking for her, but wondered briefly about the ones she had come to meet, or the militias holed up in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, preparing for decades for times such as these. All the same, she should take precautions, particularly if they had a remote viewer on board.
Lowering the binoculars, she felt for the Takyon amulet around her neck, warm to the touch. Closing her eyes, she contemplated Stone, only Stone, slowing her breath down down down, not sure if the granite standing behind her was k’an che, a stone of light, seat of a supernatural. She hoped so. Like St. Odilia in Alsace in 666, when a lichen-veiled rock had opened and taken her in, Seven concentrated, so that when the choppers whop whop whopped over, all she could hear was stone and all she could see was silence.
Closed, automated cyberculture had been quietly claiming the land since Seven’s birth. Those individually oriented like herself who had managed to avoid government-defined charges of terrorism had moved off the grid to become the last anachronisms upon which the very survival of the human soul might, in the end, depend.
As she came upon little towns and outposts, she was always on the lookout for TLOs, terrorist liaison officers with electronic eyes scanning for suspicious travelers or activities. TLOs could be anyone—police, firefighters, utility workers, librarians, ranchers, store clerks. Unobtrusively, they would point little RFID zappers to read your citizen ID, passport, driver’s license, anything you were carrying that said who you were. If they read nothing, they would get on an earpiece or implant and alert the fusion center to send in the helipolice or a drone. As early as 1992, she remembered hearing how Air Force surveillance aircraft over Santa Monica were practicing laser attacks on civilians in the name of national security, blanketing the area with a holographic fog.
TSA inspections and ITS tracking were why she’d avoided public transportation for years. She still carried the zapper that Thomas had made to sniff out electronic devices running SPOT programs (screening passengers by observation) measuring for facial expressions and voice tension at ATMs, cell phones, department stores, government buildings, traffic lights, etc. CTS pods (combat zones that see) were everywhere now, disguised as water fountains, trees, mailboxes, utility poles. Once something caught her image or voice, everything about her all the way back to Santa Barbara would come up. Attract their attention and she might be digitally strip-searched by a passive millimeter wave imager, then tracked by satellite.
Yes, towns were a problem. Miniaturized CCTV cameras in lamps, clocks, radios, televisions, purses or picture frames remotely directed to pan, tilt, zoom, or focus. Surveillance no longer needed warrants or formal investigations. Fingerprints, retinal patterns, and hand geometry were replacing passports. Expectation of privacy had long vanished; even in their own homes, children were accustomed to hidden cameras in the name of safety.
Then there was the LUCID smart dust, tiny particles communicating what they sense to receivers finely tuned to the frequencies in clothing, food, furniture, and the human body. Smart dust gets inside your head and speaks directly to brain neurons, listens to thoughts, transmits them to other smart dust. They talk to each other: a world once dumb now speaks. Monitoring health had come to mean listening to what the toothbrush said about cavities, what the mirror said about your eyes and diabetes and hardening of the arteries, what your toilet discovered by chemically analyzing your bowel movements, what your smart clothes said about your vital signs. A HOMER (holographic medical electronic representation) scanned your body and planned what surgery the surgical robot would perform. Even mail no longer traveled anonymously, thanks to the smart stamps introduced first by Executive Order and then by the Mailing Industry Task Force committee formed after 9/11—Hughes Electronics, subsidiary of General Motors; Perseus investment banking; Canon, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Pitney Bowes, Symbol Technologies and Stamps. Nine corporations.
The world State, with all of its surveillance networks, had become an omniscient, ever-hungry Egregore that had taken possession of those professing an orderly beneficent new world order while quietly culling entire human lineages with war, weather, and famine. Night and day, millions prayed to the elements and God or gods for a cataclysm that would send the cyberstate down, down, like Atlantis half a Great Year before.
Thanks to computers, the nine world State governors were acutely aware of the who’s and where’s of these obnoxious prayers against the State and had slated them for nonexistence. It was a tiresomely repetitive old story made unique this time only by the Second Coming now scheduled for completion on February 24, 2040. As Vince once understated, the Lords of Xibalbá would not easily allow ingress through their Nine Kingdoms. Since 1945, seven levels had capitulated, one every Jupiter cycle, and now the Earth Severer and Life Spirit were locked in immortal combat inside human psyches and the collapsing cultures surrounding them. Though total control of human biological life did not necessarily assure total control of each individual human soul, it definitely gave the Brotherhoods the advantage, and with the Second Coming in progress they needed every advantage they could garner or steal. It was balls out, full steam ahead, human dignity be damned. All natural powers of reason and feeling were to be twisted into a mechanized hive mind called Singularity. Free choice psychological and social values were falling away like the misguided centuries that had wrought them. It would be a mechanized structural reformation, a cybercultural revolution—or nothing.
But what the totalitarian elite did not realize was that the Egregore they didn’t believe in—into whose diabolical maws they had poured their wills, their families, their integrity, their imaginations and natural desires—would in the end claim the victory, not they or their Brotherhoods at all. The creation would devour the creators because they were striving for something out of its Time. Johan Galtung and Robert Jungk and their Mankind 2000 could exalt neurological surveillance and brain-computer interfacing all they wanted, but the Egregore was interested only in snatching the prize from the divine intent driving what Yogananda once called the cloud-colored Christ deep into the etheric Earth.
Old Seven stepped out of the granite face and continued her trek as the choppers disappeared in the northwest. Medicine Bow Peak was still visible in the north as she moved along the Michigan fork of the North Platte she’d picked up at Walden while making her way across the Kawuneeche Valley, birthplace of the infant Colorado River she and her friends had crossed so many years before, and into Rocky Mountain National Park founded by Enos Mills. There was barely a whisper of wind, as though all of nature was sucking in its breath. The silence of the elements struck her as odd, given that the valley was open to the north’s hurricane-like winter winds. Not that her walking stick would complain as it continued to poke out a sure way through the shallow snow. She continued to meditate on the Medicine Bow Mountains above and ahead, now dimly silhouetted in an electromagnetic haze but once named for when Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and Ute came together to gather mahogany for their bows.
Fifty years ago, it had struck Seven and her fellow travelers as significant on several levels that NORAD and its minions had entrenched in the remarkable power spot of the Medicine Bow Mountains and their lifeblood rivers. Rocky Mountain National Park itself hinted at this for those who paid attention, given that the magnetic Continental Divide snaked through it: rain falling into Poudre Lake flowed to the Atlantic while rain falling in Shadow Mountain Lake flowed to the Pacific. What had compelled Thomas and Vince to agree to setting their haven in this national park was not NORAD but the ancient Chamber of Dreams, which Vince was certain had not yet been discovered by the military initiates in quest of it.
After Dallas in 1970, they had all scattered to the four winds, knowing that success—if there was to be any—lay in living individually, randomly, and anonymously. Eventually, Thomas and Vince had found a way to meet and had gone in quest of the Chamber of Dreams and found it. After studying the cave itself, the floor, the markings and stains—the character of who and what had gone on there, conjecturing how long ago it had been a dwelling—they’d traveled to New England to study stone chambers the colonists from Europe had called root cellars. The construction of those not carved and gouged out or readymade was beehive: stones laid inward curving up to a capstone to make a flat roof.
They discussed how the massive capstones had been lifted and fitted exactly. Thomas had read in the book Magie Chaldéenne that priests of Heliopolis made high winds blow and raised heavy stones by means of low-frequency sound. Vince responded that his grandfather had heard from a Mayan priest that a vibrating condensed sound field could nullify the power of gravitation. The priest had traveled by yak to a Tibetan monastery in the early 20th century and insisted that Tibetan priests were masters of sound, like the Tibetan throat singers. Monks used the harmonic values of matter, gravity, velocity, etc. for building, much as a crane might be used today. He had watched as a block of stone 1 x 1.5 meters was moved by yak onto a polished stone of great antiquity with a cavity carved into it. Then thirteen big drums and Ragdon trumpets were set in an arc of 90º at an exact harmonic distance of 63.7079 meters from the slab and block. The drums, trumpets, and chants at a specified pitch and rhythm then created a terrible din. Slowly, the stone block began to sway, then took off in a parabolic path for the designated spot on the cliff.
As Thomas and Vince toured Mystery Hill near North Salem, New Hampshire—a 22-walled formation with roof slabs weighing tons, some sunk deep in the earth with high-arching underground vaults, structures said to be at least 4,000 years old—Thomas pondered harmonic unified equations tuned to matter, certain that they were the key to constructing sonically propelled anti-gravitational flying machines. Vince spoke of the Celtic and Phoenician mariners who had established settlements in New England, then moved west into Ohio and Oklahoma. Hebrews had come to Tennessee, Vikings along the North American coast, Welsh led by Prince Madoc at Mobile Bay in Alabama, and there was the seven-year voyage of St. Brendan and his scholarly monks in their 36-foot curragh. Thomas nodded, all the while contemplating building high-frequency sonic generators and discs that could lift from the center and resonate at frequencies in sympathy with unified fields.
Thomas had recounted to Seven how he and Vince had hiked up into rocky uplands in the Appalachians that had long ago been much higher, back when eastern Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma were still underwater. A great center of commerce and culture had once been in Illinois where the Great Lakes were, but the greatest center had been in the Rocky Mountains. From there to old Mexico, over the past 10,000 years, had been submerged four times.
But it was from a middle-aged Nebraskan named Bill that Thomas had gotten the idea of building an invisible Tesla dome over the cave, like the military’s electro-optical camouflage known as Project Chameleo. That night, the three men had shared a lean-to and Coleman stove in the shadow of an east ridge in the autumn hills of New Hampshire. Though Thomas and Vince followed a tight-lipped policy with strangers, they liked Bill and hung on his Ripley’s Believe It or Not tales of discovery gleaned from years of wandering. Bill described how west of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon had broken up when the mountains were pushed up not millions of years ago but only thousands, and his Choctaw grandfather said his father found ruins of a pyramid bigger than the Pyramid of Giza in an overgrown canyon. When he approached the ruins, he felt an invisible protecting wall of repelling frequency and was overcome with wooziness. Bill himself had discovered that buffalo wallows near Omaha were actually entries to underground dwellings dating back to the Tertiary period. In Blue Licks Spring, Kentucky, he’d seen the bones of a Pleistocene mastodon and a local archaeology buff had pointed out that there was stone pavement under the bones.
When the night reached the point it always does around a crackling fire away from human affairs, Bill was forthcoming about why he had itchy feet: his boy, the only family he had, had been killed in Vietnam. He jabbed at the fire. “It wasn’t just that he died, it’s that the military version of how he died made no sense.” His gaze sank into the flames, reaching down for what he’d lost. “I fought like hell for freedom in Europe and look at what it got us: rich men’s lies.” He glanced at the two young men, one light and one dark. “My boy was Special Forces. When you’re Special Forces, everything’s a lie. They had him where our troops weren’t supposed to be, in Laos.” He shook his head to throw off the pain. “Sons of bitches. And for what? Not freedom, not to eradicate Communism. For heroin. For the world drug business, that’s what my boy died for. The French weren’t quite brutal enough to get it set up, but the Americans were.” He looked up at Thomas. “A lot of people criticize your generation, saying you’re ungrateful for all we fought for. But I don’t know anymore. I feel like I’m waking up from a dream turned into a nightmare.”
Thomas and Vince knew very well what he meant.
Seven had visited the cave a half dozen times, witnessing the slow build-up of the shortwave, thermopowered batteries using nontoxic nanotubes, orgone energy “shooters,” oraccu blankets, etc. She herself had carried in a small 5-Kilowatt generator powered by permanent magnets that she’d found in a Macy’s shopping bag at her front door the very morning she was setting off, and so had dutifully added it to the cache. Books, obscure vellum manuscripts, clothing, bedding, sealed grains, beans, and teas, tools, gauss meters, laser discs, a GWEN-integrated compact LPI unit with stereo, computer, and telephone capabilities.
When bitter turns sweet
We’ll meet
Where three rivers nurse
At one mountain breast
Except for dreams, rumors, packages at her door, and cryptic bits of mail, it had been three years since her last clandestine meeting with Thomas and nearly fifteen since seeing Vince. Is Kay dead? Gerde asked. No, the roses answered, he is not dead.
Years before, she’d holed up for the winter in northern New Mexico without telling either Thomas or Vince and yet received a package containing the Takyon amulet she still wore around her neck. Vince’s ornate handwriting explained how the amulet created a three-foot protective force field vibrating at 1098 cycles per second to suck up electromagnetic field photons, disorganize the matrix of EM fields, and simulate Seven’s bio-field to deflect direct tactical and psyops assault modes. In other words, it was a cloaking device that transformed her into a chameleon blending into the environment around her. The note also mentioned that the amulet would now be necessary for accessing the Chamber of Dreams orgone dome.
The Colorado, the North Platte, the Cache la Poudre—yes, she was close now. She gingerly opened a vellum replica of a very old map, older by far than the United States of America. Across the top was the finely scripted word Amaruca, the A a flamboyant feathered serpent with a crown on its head. The Peruvian name for Quetzalcoatl had been Amaru. Amaruca, Land of the Plumed Serpent, Land of Quetzalcoatl. In 987 CE, King Topiltzin-Quetzalcoatl had been defeated by Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror war god and his military orders of the Eagle, Jaguar, and Coyote. After abandoning his city of Tula fifty miles northwest of Mexico City, the Toltec king had made his way through the mountains to the port at Coatzacoalcos, the Place of the Serpent on Bahía de Campeche, and set sail on a raft of serpents east through the Gulf of Mexico for the homeland, Tlapallan, the Red Land, promising the people he would return. Cortés would arrive 532 (66.5 x 8) years later and Madame Blavatsky 888 years later (44.5 x 8 since Cortés) before sailing to New York to found the Theosophical Society.
A refugee in quest of the Chamber of Dreams, Seven felt a kinship with the Incan king Tupac Amaru who, in 1533, with 40,000 soldiers, fled Pizarro. By the light of his priests’ memories, he and his troops descended into the Socavón del Inca, the vast primeval honeycomb of tunnels and caves weaving beneath Peru into Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile like one ancient, sacred tapestry. They traveled the subterranean labyrinth so long that they forgot what the Sun looked like, a last breaking the seal of the Earth’s surface and coming up into a pearl of a city cached among the mountains called Gran Paytite, a hoary Lemurian guardian of secrets from a far, far distant human past. Even present-day satellite tomography had been incapable of penetrating the pearl.
Old Seven stabbed at the snowy trail, recalling the deep earth tremors out on the Great Rift weeks before. Some great Earth event was on its way. She saw an eagle drop a snake, heard birds cry at night and the Earth growl beneath her feet. The spring she stooped to drink from yesterday was cloudy and smelled of sulfur, and the midday sun had a thick ring around it. Circulo en el sol, aguacero o tremblor, she’d chanted as Vince had taught her years before. Last night, the stars burned and wavered like tiny flames. Sighing, she cast her eyes over the ancient mountains surrounding her, absentmindedly wondering why in a white out people always walked in clockwise circles and not counterclockwise.
Pangaea! As a child, she’d yearned to be a mermaid swimming deep into a Mer-Kingdom among sea mountains, not yet aware that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge writhed north-south like a kundalini serpent, a scar that from time to time bled like stigmata, torn open again and again and washed clean by the salty deep. How the hot plasmic blood must have roared when it broke the surface and thrust the serpent’s scaly plates westward, ripping Pangaea like a chicken, tearing South America from the rib of Africa and North America from Europe, the Appalachians from the Alps. Two hundred million years and North America was still careening steadily north-northwest at the dizzying velocity of one or two inches a year, away from Europe, toward her rendezvous with Asia and Siberia—sailing like the Pequod, her prow slicing the waves, heaving up sediment onto the continental plate at the eastern slopes of the Canadian Rockies, then again onto the old continental plate at the edge of the West Coast to give birth to Mexico, Nevada, the coastal ranges of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, British Columbia, and Alaska. Islands, small continents, submarine mountain ranges, plateaus, the Great Plains—all driven down, down into the Mer-Kingdom, the Underworld, swallowed whole beneath the old sea floor now driven upward, forcing the North American plate eastward, up into the first Sierra Nevada.
Then, Time rested and it was good, until 65 or 45 million years ago when Hunahpú and Ixbalamqué were playing ball in the ball courts of Xibalbá and hit the ball hard, and the Lords returned it equally hard, nudging a South Pacific volcanic trench north-northeast while the old continental plate on the West Coast fractured vertically, horizontally, every which way, to shape the snaky mold of the Rockies and chain of ranges between Alaska and Mexico known as the Great Divide. Up, up they rose over the next 30 million years from the Earth’s crust three miles thick, the cauldron cooking fifty miles below.
Colorado reminded Seven of Tibet, another roof of the world like the Lower Forty-Eight with their 50-plus peaks towering more than 14,000 feet above sea level in the Sawatch, San Juan, and Colorado Rockies. As mountains go, the Rockies and Tetons were just babies, a mere five to seven million years old, while Yellowstone a little north was of another epoch entirely, its birth hearkening back thousands of miles beneath the Earth’s thin skin. The granite, gneiss, and schist of the Colorado Rockies had been cooked in the belly of the Old Continent, whereas the rock in the Rockies of Montana, Alberta, British Columbia, and Alaska was a tombstone of bodies left behind by seas receding 90 million years ago, transmuting into limestone, sandstone, quartzite, slate, gravel, and clay.
Did the Cordilleran Ice Sheet lie along the Rocky Mountains from southern Alaska through British Columbia, most of Alberta, Washington, Idaho, and Montana 12,000 years ago? Did the Sun rise in the Gulf of Mexico and set toward the Yukon while the broad ice-free corridor ran between Asia and Alaska? The oldest Earth rock dated by argon and potassium was 4,100 million years old and was still growing along the edges of continental plates sixty miles thick, like Scylla and Charybdis breakdancing. Were the tremors about the Old Continent breaking up?
In 79 CE, the city of Pompeii in the Bay of Naples on the Tyrrhenian Sea was buried in the blink of an eye by Vesuvius half hidden inside the broken remnant of Monte Somma. Never once had it been active within the memory of human habitation. What made this volcanic eruption so evocative was how suddenly, in the midst of their daily rounds, Roman citizens were encased in hot mud and lava with their homely artifacts left for other eras to contemplate as to the brevity and precariousness of life on Earth: frescoes and mosaics, bowls, spindles, shears, medical instruments, all whispering that the dead would return momentarily to pick up where they left off.
The submarine volcano Krakatau off of Java, once known as the mountain Kapi, last erupted and sank into the sea in 416 CE, leaving small islands on the rim of its caldera. Slowly, it crept up again, and on August 27, 1883, four detonations unleashed pyroclastic flows and tsunamis that drowned 36,000 people in a moment and dragged Kapi under once again. A 115-foot tsunami catapulted a steam ship two miles inland. Barographs around the world quivered in the aftermath, and the plumes of volcanic dust caused Tennyson in England to write, For day by day, thro’ many a blood-red eve . . . The wrathful sunset glared . . .
What would happen to the radioactive materials at Yucca Flats north of Las Vegas? Would they be swept west along fissure lines into Death Valley, south between the Spring Mountains and Spotted Range toward Devil’s Hole, or into the cauldrons beneath the Mono Lake Bulge along the path of least resistance? It was not difficult to imagine noxious gases arising one day from Lake Elsinore or the Salton Sea . . . Lake Elsinore, where Vince watched Hamlet just before they met him. Neutron beams could penetrate the largest and deepest bunkers and continue on to the planet’s interior to accelerate the decay of radioactive isotopes and generate more neutrons, more and more heat. Every major series of nuclear tests had been followed by increased seismic activity somewhere because the process of accelerating volcanic activity is nuclear.
She couldn’t help speculating on what all of nature said was coming, but must push on under the aegis of Pike’s Peak, known among the Ute as Ta-Va-Ah-Gath or Sun Mountain. Instinctively, she apologized to the mountain for the war machine grinding in its belly like an ill-gotten meal. Thinking of the world as a mix of violent and beautiful forces landed her in that night at Wheeler Springs in the slate gorge north of Ojai, when it all began. How naive they’d been about the rabbit hole they were about to fall into, and what it would cost them.
Wheeler, spin!
Treadle out the tale that five
and two in belly jelly within
did under midnight sky and Mars
share a vat of wet sulphuric heat
and wonder at and touch
Barbara’s beating drum
beating with someone floating
in Barbara’s floating while
we up to the dark miles looked,
floating . . .
2
On the Matilija, Spring 1970
Buried in the ground,
Mother Earth will swallow you,
Lay your body down.
- Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, 1974
Like a Botticelli still life standing in the close little wreck of a cabin at the hot springs in the canyons north of Ojai on the Matilija River, Barbara was cooking, folding carrots, onion, and cabbage in the wok, adding the seitan she had kneaded and rinsed earlier. Chumash ghosts haunted the talkative waters bearing messages from the Lords of the Underworld, older than the California mule train drivers and pioneers who had hiked that valley at the end of the 19th century, arriving exhausted and yearning for the healing water’s rejuvenation. Sulphur hissed up and out of the Earth’s healing veins in that exquisite slate gorge. The last time the two remaining cabins had been refurbished was in the early Twenties when the springs hosted a health spa for the rich, before fire destroyed both spa and hotel and a flash flood washed away an era. It might even have been the Chumash who sent fire and flood as retribution for the murder of Chief Matilija right there at Wheeler Springs.
Wheeler Blumberg’s ghost still lingered, picking among the charred remains of his dream. The skeleton of his great wood and stone hotel still stood, the pipes that once carried healing sulphurous waters into every room rusted. Bones of the adjacent lodge still stood, its smoky cellar cardrooms and mahogany bar barely reminiscent of luminaries like Jack Dempsey and the Costello gang who once stood there drinking their way through Prohibition.
Since Wheeler’s dream had washed out to sea, less well-heeled guests had been taking refuge there, squatters and campers like Barbara and her family, oblivious to phantoms, but still peering into the darkness half-afraid they might see something not quite there, the cataract’s roar sounding like old Rip Van Winkle’s Catskills bowling ball rolling down an invisible wooden alley to topple invisible pins.
This particular black velvet night happened in the spring of 1970, a year and a half after the Summer of Love and its subsequent October funeral in the Haight. A million stars hovered and hummed over the Matilija twisting around stones and slate plates littering the springs. After a tearful call from Barbara, Seven had driven down from Santa Barbara earlier in the afternoon with food and was now leaning against the door jamb of the tiny wreck of a cabin no bigger than a generous toolshed, watching Barbara make dinner in the soft kerosene light. Her husband Aaron had brought her and the children to these abandoned hotsprings because there was no money or food stamps left, no doubt due to some dope deal he couldn’t pass up, and this was their makeshift residence: a shanty of boards with a charred table, three dilapidated straight-backed chairs, a stained double mattress with a couple of torn sheets and blankets, a pile of diapers and clothes, and Barbara hauling water from the springs above where the hot springs belched sulphur. It hurt Seven to see her living like this, even though Rhea said that real hippies should be able to live anywhere.
Outside, a lantern stood sentinel on the dilapidated picnic table Aaron had scavenged from along the river. Seven listened to the symphony of camp life, the knocking of the wooden spoon against the wok, the sizzle of stirfry, the splutter of gas, the distant rush of water leap-frogging over stone, the counterpoint of little Ariel and Syd, naked and dirt-layered, shrieking as they hopped from rock to rock in quest of marshmallow sticks, and Aaron calling out as he gathered branches and charred timber flung onto the banks by the flash floods of a hundred winters and springs. Like the conductor, Barbara stirred, tall and dark, browned by the California sun, arms slender but not frail, hands muscular, blunt-fingered and large, nose straight and perfect, chiseled like her round, pure brow, her belly ballooned with yet another child beneath the Indian madras skirt and its thousand all-seeing Eyes of God peering at Seven. Barbara’s own eyes were blue and wry over some benign private joke she knew but never told, secretly laughing at how seriously human beings played their parts. Celtic Yeats had written of such a woman of so shining loveliness That men threshed corn at midnight by a tress, A little stolen tress . . .
Ariel and Syd rushed in and spun around their mother in the matchbox space, laughing, poking marshmallow sticks up to show her. Still stirring, her long dark hair in her face, she dutifully murmured, “Far out, far out.”
Seven joined Barbara to roast sesame seeds on the other burner as the children ran back out into the darkness. The two young women laughed and stirred, standing close, content to be cooking and eating back to the land like peasants, out under the fiery stars at the western edge of fat America, content that children should run free for a season. When the seeds popped, Seven ground them in the suribachi, tossing in a pinch of sea salt from off the coast of France, then taking them and the pot of brown rice outside to the table in the clearing where the children were already swinging their legs, Ariel shaving the end of her little brother’s stick with the tiny Swiss Army knife Aaron had taught her to use. Almost six, she relished the role of teaching Syd everything, benignly overlooking the brief moments of hating him for always dogging her wake. Syd had been named for Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd. Aaron had partied with the rock star and Alice Cooper a few years before in Venice. Barbara didn’t think Syd Barrett was much of a role model, but she liked the name.
While Aaron coaxed a fire from the dry wood he and the children had gathered, the women and children sat at the table and spooned seitan, vegetables and brown rice into wooden bowls, liberally sprinkling gomasio and tamari. Aaron was deft with his Taurus body, but Seven despised him anyway. How could Barbara put up with all of his infidelities? Maybe because he was Ariel’s second father or because he was good in bed. Women made and kept invisible choices. Seven had read that in Peru men like Aaron played music and fucked and talked in the shade while their colorfully dressed women hiked up the mountains with children on their backs to the terraces to hoe all day. Was it enough for those women that the men played the music of the gods, fucked all night, and made beautiful babies? Still, there were other ways to love than to have sex with every young body you took a fancy to. Seven would have told Aaron to pack up long ago. He could work hard, but mostly he smoked marijuana and planned his next liaison while Barbara and the children hitchhiked into town for the welfare check. If it weren’t for the State of California monthly check, where would they be?
Once, Aaron had cast his smoldering Semitic eyes on Seven and made her blush. Years later, after Barbara was dead, Seven finally found him and the children holed up in Oregon, along with a 17-year-old beauty not much older than Ariel. Aaron drank and wept and clung to Seven for the woman they both had loved, then snuck downstairs in the middle of the night to try to fuck her for old times’ sake. In Seven’s book, he was a trickle of a biological man who had had the good fortune to run off for a time into Barbara’s pure and mighty mountain lake.
Rhea didn’t think much of Aaron either, but her artistic eye was taken with his raw maleness. She painted him in all of his male glory next to a regal, long-necked goose, both in hot pink, both staring defiantly from the canvas. Aaron couldn't understand why she had added the goose and it bothered him that women smiled when they looked at the painting. Still, he wouldn't ask Rhea, and when he mentioned it to Seven, she too only smiled and passed on to other topics.
The children bolted their food, eager for marshmallows. Meanwhile, the deepening darkness and soft lantern light and fire melted adult differences and disappointments and moved them all toward the dreaming penumbra as day loosed its grip on them and glided west. Only dreams have the grace to receive unseen the tomorrow always walking backwards toward us. Aaron took a second helping and followed the children to the fire to supervise the art of melting creamy insides while Barbara and Seven took the lantern and bowls, chopsticks, spoons, and wok down to the Matilija to scoop sand and rub them clean in the cool water, much as Chumash women might have. Seven and bulbous Barbara paused to listen to the xylophone of shallow water play over the stones while Aaron’s sagelike marijuana curled around their nostrils. They gave each other a knowing look, then turned back for the clearing.
Barbara told her about when they had arrived at Wheeler Springs a week or so ago and had looked everywhere for the renowned nine-ton brass tub Jack Dempsey had soaked in, finally settling for an old 12x12x3 redwood tub Aaron found half-buried in the rubble of a mudslide. He’d worked all day at digging it out and reconfiguring the corroded pipes so the hot springs could again pump in and out. His labor had been a pièce de résistance.
And so in the sheen of the half moon rising, dishes washed and camp in order, they all shed their clothes. Aaron mixed hot and cold water in a bucket and poured it over the sticky children soaping up with Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap, laughing and shrieking until they were rinsed and could do the same to Aaron. Then the bucket passed to Seven and Barbara and once clean they all slid into the healing vat.
That was the moment they heard the drone of an engine and saw headlights casting silver cords of light through the darkness. Naked as a satyr and lantern aloft, Aaron picked his way toward the turnout where their cars were parked, light bouncing off his nakedness. Watching the lantern bob into the thick darkness, Seven mused on an Inuit story she had heard up on Vancouver Island during a Cedar Circle sweat about Raven coming downriver in a bidarka and the swish! slap! swoop! of his paddle, his voice singing, What is this dark village I am coming to? A child cried, Raven! Does he really exist? and the tiny bidarka went ping-crunch! as it scraped onto the riverbank.
The engine went silent and the headlights out. The jeweled dome hummed overhead with a million stars. Thrummed on ceaselessly by the drone of the cataract, the women and children listened intently to car doors slamming, the murmur of voices, and the rhythmic crunch of footsteps as the lantern picked its way back through the black. Unconsciously swirling the water with her fingertips, Seven watched a sun-browned Caucasian face with a salt-and-pepper stubble approach, his hair a shaved Druid tonsure arcing over thick, coarse dark hair cascading down his back. A knotted cord bound the solid middle of his thick muslin robe.
In a Slavic sotto voce, the tonsured man said, "Forgive us for disturbing you, friends, but my two companions and I"—he gestured behind him—"have lost our way and only need a place to rest and food for a woman with child. I am called Hermano, and my companions are Raven and her father-in-law Ghost Bear."
Emerging from the shadows was a tall Native American man of indeterminate age in bluejeans and a plaid Western shirt, his cheek-bones strikingly high and wide and framing sloe eyes, his black braids greying. The woman in buckskins beside him was dark, younger, and very pregnant. Her blue-black hair was also braided, her eyes and facial structure configured differently. Their faces were closed, perhaps embarrassed by easy wasichu nudity, but they nodded in greeting.
“They’re headed south to Indio and then to Four Corners,” Aaron announced as he put the lantern down.
Hermano’s Slavic accent spiraled Seven back to her childhood with her Roumanian grandmother reading tea leaves in a cup in the East Detroit kitchen while Eastern European immigrants on the back stoop rolled cigarettes, smoked and talked, waiting their turn with the old gypsy, anxious to hear about the family back in the old country, if they would get a job on the assemblyline, if their old mother or child would mend.
The Slav smiled. “If we may, we will wash and bathe as you do. And there is no need to be embarrassed by your hippie custom of nudity. In Europe, we bathe as you bathe.” He began disrobing while Aaron dipped the bucket in the tub and proffered the Dr. Bronner’s. Ghost Bear also undressed, and Raven down to her thin cotton shift.
Ariel, one arm around her mother’s neck, pointed to Hermano. “Look at his tattoos, Barbara.”
Laughing, Hermano pirouetted in the lantern’s light as Aaron threw the first bucket of water over him and he soaped up. “Yes, my body is a map of the entire world. See, on my back is the East—Russia, the Middle East, India, China, Japan, Africa on my left buttock, Australia on my right.”
Ariel and Syd clambered out of the vat to get a closer look.
“And on my front are your Americas, Greenland, Western Europe, with Eastern Europe under my arm making the bridge to the Middle East.”
“You’re like Bradbury’s Illustrated Man,” Aaron grunted.
Even in lantern light, the colors shone lustrous with a light of their own. Marveling, the children traced mountains, deserts, rivers, and oceans as Ghost Bear and Raven settled into the vat. Syd followed migrating birds, spouting whales, winds and currents blowing ships and aircraft over sea and land, all the way to the outline of the great tree sprouting up from Hermano’s groin and over his belly.
“Yes, child,” Hermano smiled, “the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Wakah-Chan rooted in the universe from which all living things grow.”
Syd traced the taproot down his left thigh to the tip of his big toe while Ariel traced the branches up to his heart and out along his arms to hundreds of pale green leaves burgeoning from his veins.
All business, Ariel turned Hermano around and leaped back with a shriek. Writhing up from his coccyx through Northern Africa and into the Middle East and Russia and up and over his shoulder blades toward the Arctic Circle was a two-hooded, two-crowned cobra. Hermano crouched down so both children could see the heads. Gingerly, Syd reached out to touch them but thought better of it.
From the vat, Seven pointed. “What is over your heart?”
Hermano beamed, pointing to his stomach. “Here is Mexico,” then moving his finger up to his heart, “and this is Four Corners on the Colorado Plateau, where the US Geological Survey crossed the heart of America with four states, exactly where the Hopi say their Emergence into the Fourth World occurred, a place not so far from where the antimatter bomb shattered Earth Time 25 years ago and resonated out through the cosmos.”
The magical moment turned ashen grey at mention of the Bomb, the Event no one wanted to remember so as to retain the illusion that it was over and done with and nothing could be done about it. Hermano followed Aaron and the children into the vat, still talking.
“We must not turn away from this fact simply because it is unpleasant. Under your 33º Freemason President Harry ‘True Man,’ those three acts at White Sands, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki constituted a three-fold alchemical ritual under Sirius known as the Creation and Destruction of Primordial Matter. The guns in Europe and the South Pacific were scarcely silent when the world’s womb was ripped open to give birth to Rosemary’s Baby. Your generation is the first to follow Antimatter’s opening of a kingdom historically consigned to the shadows of Nature’s counterspace.”
Seven recalled her neighbor the Colonel’s description of the V2 rocket traveling at 5,000 kilometers per hour about to fall on London in October 1944.
“What did about to fall mean?” the Colonel asked. “From the point of view of the radar operator reading waves that travel at 300,000 kilometers per second, the trajectory of the V2 was a fait accompli. For him, everything had already happened. Nothing could now intercept that engine of death, no warning, no second thoughts. For him, Time was different than for those about to die. In radar Time, they were already dead.”
She wished the Colonel could meet Hermano.
“I need a joint,” Aaron grumbled, sloshing out of the vat. Talk of the Bomb had awakened the ball of fire in his belly and made him yearn for the soothing, forgetful powers of mallihua. Aaron prided himself in not believing in anything, not in his family’s Jewish G-d nor the order of society. But talk about the Bomb had taken him by surprise.
As Aaron went in quest of his stash, Barbara explained. “He can’t handle bad trips very well.”
Ariel sidled up to the big brown man sitting quietly in the vat. “Why are you called Ghost Bear?”
The native man’s black eyes twinkled. “If I tell you, will you tell me why you are called Ariel?”
“Yes,” the little girl promised somberly, putting her hand on Ghost Bear’s shoulder as Syd inched up to his other side.
Ghost Bear nodded. “I am from Black Hills we call paha sapa—sacred, ancient hills that from the air have the shape of the human heart. Long ago, when the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho were all parts of the Star Nation, paha sapa was a Garden of Eden. Near the Belle Fourche River is a sacred mountain that was once a volcano. We call it Mato Tipi or Bear Lodge, though wasichus like the ones that mined and logged paha sapa like to call it Devil’s Tower. Its top is like a GI haircut,” he sliced the air horizontally, “and its steep sides are almost as straight as those of a skyscraper but have up-and-down scratch marks on them.” He scratched the air. “Mato Tipi, being the heart of the heart of paha sapa, has a strong medicine star story about how those scratch marks got there.”
Ariel and Syd had edged their way onto Ghost Bear’s lap. “Tell us, Ghost Bear,” Ariel commanded.
“Well, once there was a chief with seven beautiful daughters,” Ghost Bear drew his head back and looked at Ariel, “almost as beautiful as you. Every young man wanted to marry them, but the sisters could not imagine ever being separated. One night, as they danced in the moonlight by the Belle Fourche River, near where the great Cheyenne chief Sweet Medicine once lived, a grizzly bear saw them and decided he wanted to marry them all. Growling, he rose up on his hind legs and ran into the clearing. The girls bolted for the mountain, their long black hair flying behind them.”
Worried, Ariel pulled Ghost Bear’s chin around toward her. “He won’t get them, will he?”
Ghost Bear smiled. “The sisters ran toward the sacred mountain as to their mother and climbed her steep sides as nimble as monkeys with the bear right behind them. But when the grizzly began to climb, he was so big and heavy that he kept slipping, his sharp claws gouging the mountain. The girls made it to the top and cried out to Sky Father to save them. Just as the bear finally made it up to the mesa, the seven sisters were swept up into the sky. Even then, the grizzly didn’t give up. He leaped into the sky after them and chases them to this day.”
Pointing up to a tiny but brilliant cluster of stars, Hermano said, “There they are, up in what we call the Pleiades, a tiny dipper of girls riding the back of the Bull of Heaven, Taurus, just below the warrior Perseus’ foot.”
Ghost Bear swung his finger toward the center of the sky. “And there is the Great Bear with his long tail, Ursa Major, what you call the Big Dipper. It is the Great Bear’s fate to chase the beautiful Seven Sisters forever but never catch them.”
Ariel stared up at the Sisters forever safe in the bejeweled, humming heavens.
Ghost Bear smiled as he watched the little girl. “And I am called Ghost Bear because once I stood in the Bear’s Lodge, dancing the Ghost Dance with my people whose spirits still wander the Earth because they love it so.”
“How do you get up there to dance with them?” Ariel asked, thinking of the steep sides.
“Well, that’s the funny thing. Part of me flies up there while my body sleeps.” Ghost Bear chuckled. “That’s getting into a national monument the cheap and easy way.”
“I do that sometimes,” Ariel said excitedly. “I go and watch Barbara sleep, then sometimes I fly up by the Moon and take my little brother with me, don’t I, Syd?” Syd nodded vigorously. “Sometimes I’m afraid and wake up.”
She dog-paddled out into the middle of the vat, held her nose, and went under. Heartbeats later, Seven felt Ariel’s little hands moving up her legs. When she surfaced and blew out her breath like a baby whale, Seven pushed the blond curls out of her face.
“Now it’s your turn, Ariel,” Ghost Bear reminded her.
Syd dog-paddled over to his sister on Seven’s lap. Ariel smacked her lips self-importantly.
“My name is from the play called The Tempest about a shipwreck off the coast of America, down where Christopher Columbus landed—“
“In the Caribbean,” Barbara amended.
“Uh huh, the Caribbean. The magician Prospero was banished there and caused a storm to shipwreck the men who banished him so he could get even. Ariel is a spirit and has to serve Prospero until he lets him go. But that doesn’t happen until the end, right, Barbara?”
Barbara nodded.
Hermano said, “Indeed, Ariel, Prospero the European Druid was exiled to these shores long ago and grew ugly and devious here, as many Europeans have. The man who wrote The Tempest was staring Death in the face—not just his own death but the death of his long-cherished dream that beautiful Atlantis might be resurrected from her full fathom five grave in the Caribbean.”
On cue, Ariel began reciting—
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange…
The company applauded.
“Bravo, Ariel!” Hermano cried. “For so the playwright saw sunken Atlantis in the Caribbean. Prospero’s final speech indicates that he wisely let go his dream of an American Atlantis come again, unlike Freemasons who still pursue it—
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,