jabbed toward Mike with the broad meat-slicer’s blade.
“Honey!” Dad cried, startled, but Mike was already moving, deflecting and taking his mother’s cutting hand, using her own momentum against her the way the Christian Martial Arts teacher at CHU had showed him. He brought his fist up and slugged his own mother hard on the jaw before he really knew what he was doing. The blade skittered across the floor. She crumbled against one wall and burst into tears.
Dad put a restraining hand on his shoulder. Mike shrugged it off.
“You only waited on us hand and foot to bind us hand and foot to you,” Mike said bitterly, bending down to pick up his rucksack as his mother sobbed and maoned against the wall. Behind him, his younger brother Ray was witness to it all, but Mike had been too angry to say anything to him, too angry for farewells.
He regretted that now. Who knew what kind of tweak seeing such things might put on his younger brother’s head? But Mike had to get out. Living at home had been like living underwater. Each day he felt his airflow being cut off a little bit more. Soon he would have woken up dead and not even noticed.
No, there was no going back. Not since his car had broken down east of Wendover, Utah. Not since he’d had no choice but to sell it to the Salvia div-chewing mechanic/tow truck operator who had hauled him and his vehicle into town. Not since he’d stuck out his thumb in the late-afternoon light and gotten picked up by an ancient four wheel drive station wagon hauling a rental trailer.
At the other end of the station wagon’s bench seat now sat a heavy-set guy with steel-rimmed specks and long gray hair down to the middle of his back (but was, nonetheless, also scrupulously clean shaven). The driver, which he was, had recently become an ex-Information Technology administrator from the university in Bozeman. Mike didn’t catch his full name—Brewster, Schuster, something like that—but the gray-haired man in plaid shirt and brown pants and blue gimme cap was clearly trying to forget his own woes through permanently altering his state of consciousness.
“I took it with what grace I could,” said the defrocked administrator, passing Mike a burning flat-pipe of marijuana somewhere between Elko and Winnemucca. The gray haired man suddenly laughed. “The university bureaucracy is a real hippo hierarchy.”
“How’s that?” Mike asked, curious despite himself, absently scratching the brownish-blonde goatee he’d begun growing not long before he left home and which was still at the itchy (or at least unfamiliar) stage.
“Hippopotami range themselves in a river current according to status,” the older man explained. “The highest ranking individual takes a position alone and furthest upstream, facing upstream. The rest of the hippos fall into tiers and denser numbers downstream, though they’re facing upstream too. Each hippo has a short, flat, paddle-like tail which it spins like a propeller when it defecates. That breaks up its dung into a cloud of fragments.”
Mike laughed at the image, but didn’t quite get it.
“How’s that fit a university bureaucracy?” he asked.
The man with the long gray hair inhaled deeply from the pipe and held the smoke a moment before answering in a constrained, smoke-conserving voice.
“The lower the rank of a hippo the more dung comes hurtling at it from upstream,” he said, exhaling at last. “When the hippo shit hits the propeller, the consequences flow downstream.”
They laughed at that. Mike guessed it was pretty much true of hierarchies everywhere.
“How about you?” the man with the long gray hair asked, uncapping a bottle of vodka. “What’s made you a gentleman of the highway?”
Mike told the older man more of his own story than he had initially intended to: his troubles at home, his father’s psychological problems, his decision to transfer to a different college out of state and away from home—as well as the crisis that decision had precipitated. The gray-haired man remained quiet until they were well west of Winnemucca.
“Here,” the driver said at last, breaking up a capsule and tapping its contents into the vodka. He swirled the bottle. “I put a little KL in this. Good for what ails you. It’ll help you forget about the latest explosion in your nuclear family.”
Mike didn’t know what “KL” was, but he took a healthy swallow of the vodka. It had an unexpectedly bitter, alkaline taste.
“That phrase, ‘nuclear family,’ is more descriptive than you might think,” the older man continued. “If you head just about due south of here you eventually cross into what used to be the Nevada Nuclear Weapons Test Site. E = mc2 and all that. In most ancient creation myths, ‘energy’ is male, and ‘matter’ is female. Yang and yin. Bright and dark. Even the words: ‘energy’ is from Greek roots meaning ‘at work,’ and the Latin root of ‘matter’ is mater—mother.”
“Yeah?” Mike said, not making the connection. “So?”
“So Einstein’s mass-energy equivalency is a real gender-bender,” the driver said. “Energy, the male principle, is equivalent to mass, or female matter, times the constant of the unbreakable law, the speed of light, squared. Maleness is femaleness raised by the Law times itself.”
“And the Test Site?” Mike asked, wondering what he’d gotten himself into, hitching a ride with this guy.
“The detonation of the first nuclear device—at Trinity site in Los Alamos, not Nevada—that was a supreme yang moment,” said the older man. “Manipulate enough female matter in the right way and you can produce a blast of male energy. All the Nevada nuclear blasts were little boys emulating the Fat Man, our own little Test Site imitations of the primal wank, the Father-spurt of the Big Bang.”
The driver gave him a sly, sideways glance. Mike laughed.
“I don’t think you can gender-blenderize it quite that much,” Mike said, trying to be serious.
“Why not?” the driver asked. “Humans sexualize everything, especially since Freud. Do you think it was just a coincidence that when human beings first set foot on the Moon—a heavenly body associated in most cultures with goddesses and femaleness—all the original explorers were male and the program was named after Apollo, a sun god? The Apollo astronauts were white-garbed priests of the Sun God, arriving in burning chariots to claim dominion over the female Moon. Yang over yin, see?”
Weird stuff, Mike thought, but what he said was, “One person’s technology is another person’s symbol, I guess.”
“Exactly,” the driver said, nodding. “When I lived in San Francisco, there were these big round-topped concrete pillars that were put in place as barriers to traffic flow, near parks and such. South Asian immigrants began garlanding these traffic piers with flowers and pouring offerings of milk over the tops of the damn things. Know why?”
“Not a clue,” Mike said. Whatever it was the driver had put in that vodka, it had begun to make him feel woozy, disoriented.
“For those immigrant folks, the traffic piers were lingam symbols and became impromptu shrines,” the driver said. “Or just look at the cross. For the Romans crucifixion was a capital punishment technology. The Christians made it a sign of martyrdom and resurrection, the central symbol of faith. Kind of like worshipping an electric chair or lethal injection table.”
In the rock-of-ages Rocky Mountain states where Mike had been living most of his life,
