Club Vesta: Level II, Round 1.5 -- the Judgment and Assignment
Club Vesta:
A Journey Beyond the Mountains of Madness to Find a Sea of Stars
(Love-Letter to America)
Level II
Round 1.5 - The Judgment and Assignment
Then looking outward I made out a throng
assembled on the beach of a wide river,
whereupon I turned to him: “Master, I long
to know what souls these are, and what strange usage
makes them as eager to cross as they seem to be
in this infected light.”
. . .
“My son,” the courteous Master said to me,
“all who die in the shadow of God’s wrath
converge to this from every clime and country.
And all pass over eagerly, for here
Divine Justice transforms and spurs them so
their dread turns wish: they yearn for what they fear. . . .”
Dante, Inferno, III: 67-72, 118-123
Interlude: Two American Tails
So we went down to the second ledge alone;
a smaller circle of so much grater pain
the voice of the damned rose in a bestial moan.
There Minos sits, grinning, grotesque, and hale.
He examines each lost soul as it arrives
and delivers his verdict with his coiling tail.
That is to say, when the ill-fated soul
appears before him it confesses all,
and that grim sorter of the dark and foul
decides which place in Hell shall be its end,
then wraps his twitching tail about himself
one coil for each degree it must descend.
The soul descends and others take its place;
each crowds in its turn to judgment, each confesses,
each hears its doom and falls away through space.
‘O you who come into this camp of woe,’
cried Minos when he saw me turn away
without awaiting his judgment, ‘watch where you go
once you have entered here, and to whom you turn!
Do not be misled by that wide and easy passage!’
And my Guide to him: ‘That is not your concern;
it is his fate to enter every door.
This has been willed where what is willed must be,
And it is not yours to question. Say no more.’
The Inferno, V:1-24
“-Did I hear her say ‘Keyport,’ Lu’?”
“That’s what I thought I heard, too, babe,” Lu’ told me as we approached the door at the end of the passage. Behind us, the pretty little hostesses who had guided us this far waved and called out, “Have a good Tour, ladies!” Their voices seemed to fade away as if we were drawing away from them at great speed, even though we had gone at the most only a few dozen feet from their assigned area and the Third Vestibule.
The door, covered with intricate carvings which, on closer examination, presented beautifully detailed scenes that would have astonished both Larry Flynt and the Marquis de Sade, contained an elegantly inscribed glass panel in its top portion; the inscriptions, like the carvings in the wooden door, contained countless microscopically detailed scenes of events and activities which wouldn’t have been out of place on the Walls of Pompeii. But so dense were the carvings in the glass that no matter how I tried, I couldn’t see anything through it.
“But that’s - I thought that was a city in New Jersey! This is Washington State, after all.”
“Don’t ask me, babe - I just work here. - Why don’t you open it, Esh’?”
“Apres vous, si’l vous plaiz.”
“Mai non, apres vous, cheri!” she told me, grinning.
Turning, I stared hard at her. “You sure you want to go out that door? They told us -”
“Fuck what they told us! We’ve got several hours to kill, at least, before they can get that tow-truck in here, Esh’. We can check the scene out here and be over with it in a couple of hours, tops. Piece of cake. - Or do you want to sit back there with all those raving lunatics, spanking your lily with the best of them, until we can get the truck here?”
“Lu’ - “
“Yeah, well I don’t. So let’s go see what the rest of this place is like. Okay?”
So saying, she threw the door open and stepped out through it.
“Whaffuck -?”
“What’s wrong, Lu’?” Stepping through the doorway myself to see what the problem was, I found myself standing next to her on what seemed to be a plank walk. We had come out into a bone-chillingly cold fog so thick that even standing right next to her, I could barely see Lu’ at all.
“Uh - maybe you’re right, Esh’,” she told me, her teeth chattering from the cold. Starting to turn back to the door, she said, “At least they’ve got snacks and drinks and it’s warm back inside. Let’s go back in there and -”
The boom! of the door behind us cut her sentence off short as if by the blade of a guillotine.
For a moment, neither of us moved. That boom! had sounded so very, very final.
“Shit,” Lu’ said at last. Whirling on heel now in earnest, she threw herself at the door, trying to wrench it open by its great brass, oddly phallic knob.
No go. It refused to budge.
“Here, let me try it, Lu’,” I offered, coming back to join her.
“The hell you will! I’ve got something one fuck of a lot better,” she growled, drawing her Glock from her belly-bag. The fog was now curling around us like a shroud, obscuring what little we had been able to see before. The breath came from our mouths in great clouds of frosted vapor. Around us, nothing made a sound, nothing stirred. Save for our voices and the movements of our bodies, muffled by fog and dimmed by cold, it was dead silent.
The shots roaring from Lu’s gun were terrifyingly loud against that background of nothingness. “That ought to do it, you son of a bitch!” Lu’ snarled.
But I noticed that nothing had followed the gunshots, especially not the sound of bullets striking metal, wood, or glass. It was as if she had fired into empty air.
“Lu’ -”
“What?”
“Where’s the door?”
“What do you mean, ‘where’s the door,’ you idiot?!!” she yelled at me, reaching out for the door. “It was right here a min- -” Her tirade ceased abruptly. She uttered an odd sound, a cross between a moan and a yip! of surprise.
Now frightened, I reached out to the place where the door was - or had been. Grope as I would through the fog, my hands found nothing. I would have searched farther, but I was afraid of losing Lu’, the only familiar thing in all that silent world, if I moved away from her in the fog.
“Lu’, where are we?” I moaned.
“I - hush,” she suddenly ordered, reaching out to grab my arm.
“What is it?”
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what? I can’t hear anything other than you and -”
“Doesn’t that sound like water to you?” she hissed, her hand tightening on my arm so hard it hurt.
“’Water’? Where -”
Then I heard it: the low lapping of cold water against a breakwater and the pilings of a pier - the pier which, I suddenly realized, we’d been standing on all this while, ever since we’d gone out that door.
“You’re right. - Hey, we’re by the ocean!”
“But this is Washington State!” she cried, echoing my earlier outburst. “How the fuck can -”
“Si sempre muovere, or something like that,” I told her. “I guess we came out onto some sort of pier. How weird.”
“It sure is, right in the middle of Washington State’s central desert!”
“Maybe it’s some sort of ride, like in Disney World or something. Remember we went down a flight of stairs or so? This could be an underground type of ride. - Which means there’s got to be a boat nearby, if that’s what this is.”
“You’re out of your mind, Eshda Drake!”
“I may be, but this is sure an awfully solid hallucination, then!”
“What is?”
“This thing over here. Feels like the gunwale of a boat,” I told her, running my hands along the structure I’d just discovered next to the edge of the pier. Now, as the fog began to lift just a little, I could hear the creaking of timbers as whatever it was rose and fell in the gentle swells of the water below, and of the ropes mooring it to the side of the pier.
“C’n I help you, ladies?”
An old, old man was looking at us from the side of the boat which, as the fog thinned more and more, I could see was a huge old ferry-boat, a cross between the old Mukilteo that used to carry passengers and cars from Edmonds to Kingston, WA before they discontinued that run, and the harbor-boats I’d ever seen in every movie about New York City from Fiorello! to Doc Savage and the Beasts of Broadway. The old man, who was little more than skin and bones, was dressed in an ancient captain’s outfit, decorated with about two hundred pounds of heavily tarnished gold braid that could have been Civil War vintage. He had a long white beard clear down to his belt-line, and smoked a pipe that looked older than he was and smelled worse than South Bronx on a bad day. “What’choo want?” he prompted.
“Uh - we . . . uh . . . aren’t sure where we are,” I told him, before Lu’s temper could get the better of her. I was worried about her - this wasn’t like her at all. If anything, she was always cool, calm, and collected - I was the big bare bundle of nerves, never able to deal with shit at all. And here I was, acting as a buffer between her and the world, just as she had for me before.
“’S Keyport. Last stop before I enter the harbor. Next stop’s Ellis Island. Just stoppin’ here for fuel an’ supplies. You want on board, you better hop,” he told us in a high, cracked voice through what sounded like wooden dentures mixed with very, very bad teeth. Turning briefly to one side, he spat over the side, then, turning back to us, said, “Either git on board now or ye’ll be left behind, and they ain’t nothin’ by here for the next two weeks.”
“Where are we!” Lu’ cried.
“Yeah, is there a town or anything nearby?”
“Conaskonk P’int’s up t’ way,” he told us, pointing in one direction, “an’ o’ course they’s Union Beach. All you have to do is walk up First Street there -” pointing - “’til it turns into Florence, you’ll come right out. Or, you c’n turn around, go the other way, over to Cliffwood, take the same road until it turns into Front Street,” he said, pointing the other way. “An’ there’s always Mechanicsville,” he said, pointing in still another. “Thing is, though, gals, around here, roads ain’t always what they’s s’posed t’ be, and when you get where you’re goin’, it may not be the place you aimed at, know what I mean?” As he took a huge puff off his pipe, then leaned back, savoring the smoke, I shivered - not only from the cold.
“What’s the fare?” called Lu’. As the fog gradually attenuated away to nothing in the warmth and light of the morning (morning?), I could see the beginnings of panic in Lu’s expression as she looked around in all directions. Ahead of us was open water and the great boat tied up at the pier on which we stood; around us on every side was nothing but burned-out desolation, charred rubble, the blasted remains of what had once been oil tanks off in the distance. On the ground just at the place where the pier began lay a singed Big Bird doll, next to the smashed, charred remains of a GI Joe doll. The sky above us was now blue and clear, the sun in the east warm and friendly - but it wasn’t hard to imagine that not too long ago, a hideous toxic winter had covered this land.
“Whattaya got?”
We each peered into our money-pouches. As it happened, in addition to our credit-cards, I had about fifty dollars plus some odd change, while Lu’ had another hundred and change. “What’s your regular fare?” asked him.
“Two drachmae,” he told us.
“Two dr- shit!” snarled Lu’. “Don’t you take American money?”
“I - here, come on up the gangway, here, and let’s see what you got,” he told us. I had a feeling that that was a courtesy he didn’t often offer. Blunt as he was, somehow I knew he could have been a lot worse than blunt.
My reply was to do as he suggested. Lu’ followed with bad grace, grumbling all the way.
I held out the money I had to him.
Ignoring the wad of bills in my hand, deftly he picked out the coins, which included some dimes, pennies, nickels, two Susan B. Anthony dollars, a silver quarter I’d got from somewhere, and an old Eisenhower half-dollar.
As he raised the Susan B. Anthonys up into the light to see them more closely, I could see a sudden grin fill his face. “Well, well, well, what do we have here, dearie?” he chuckled. “Good Lor’, ain’t never seen the like o’ these! Eleven sides! What will they think of next? And what’s this on the back?” Turning one of the coins over to look at the reverse, he stared in wonder at the scene of the American flag and bald eagle above the Lunar surface, Earth hanging in the sky above.
Now even Lu’ was aware that something out of the ordinary had occurred, and that the coins so familiar to us had never been seen before by the old man. “Why, that’s a commemoration of the Apollo XI Moon Landing,” she told him, smiling.
“’Moon landing’?” he said, astonished, the grin becoming even broader.
“Yes, the first landing on the Moon, back in ’69,” I told him. “You know, when Buzz Aldrin and the others actually walked on the Moon for the first time.”
“Who - who were they? Never heard of ’em!” Lifting the coin up to his mouth, he bit into it carefully. “Hmm . . . ain’t never seen metal like this stuff before!” he muttered, half in disgust, half in wonder. “What is this shit?”
“I don’t know enough about numismatic metallurgy,” I told him. “A little of everything, though, somebody told me. These are for general circulation, and we haven’t been using silver in our coins for a long time - we don’t even use much copper in our pennies anymore, you know,” I added, thinking maybe he was from a foreign country of some kind, where they didn’t have television or much news of the outside. But how could he be that ignorant of such things as the first Moon Landing if he was captain of a boat that had come all the way over here, to the States? Surely he’d have heard some news of such things over all these years.
“Yeah, well, numis-whatics be damned, this is the strangest coin I ever did see. - Okay, you c’n come aboard, dear, for these two coins. An’ yer friend? What’ve you got, sister?”
The look on Lu’s face was peculiar - as peculiar, doubtless, as the look on my own. “Uh, I’ve got some Susan B. Anthonys, too,” she told him. “I keep some with me all the time in case I need to buy some stamps or pay tolls or something. Here, these okay?” So saying, she handed him two more of the 11-sided coins.
“You bet!” he cried, chuckling. “Never seen any like ’em! Betcha they’re worth more’n a coupl’a gold talents - I’ll have t’ show these t’ Midas, see what he thinks! Okay, ladies, you’re on! Just go on back there, inside there where the rest of the passengers are,” he told us, pointing toward the center of the boat, where the deckhouse loomed high over everything else. Its long rows of windows were lit, and within we could see countless people moving about. “Warm in there, and they’s even food and wine, courtesy of the house.”
“Okay, thanks. Come on, Esh’,” she told me, once more taking the lead, adjusting her backpack and the weight of her guns before starting off for the deckhouse.
“Yep. - Thank you, sir,” I told the old man as courteously as I could. “We appreciate it.”
“That’s all right, sister, you’re a good gal, glad to be able to,” he told me, a strangely kind, almost sad smile briefly tugging at his mouth, sparking in his eyes, before retreating to the depths below his curmudgeonly exterior.
Following Lu’, I entered the deckhouse, finding myself suddenly surrounded by a great crowd of people, who all seemed to speak a thousand different languages, dressed in clothing that could have been from as many different eras and cultures. Many of them were women, but just as many were men, and there were quite a few children of both sexes, as well.
“I wonder where they’re all going?” Lu’ said in wonder.
“And where they all come from,” I added. “The captain seems to speak English, but - I dunno, Lu’, I just don’t know . . .”
“Say it, asshole!” she growled happily.
“‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ Lu’ . . .” Then we both cracked up.
“Hey, didn’t he say they had food and drink aboard this tub?” Lu’ asked me, once she got her laughter under control again.
“He said food and wine. And I guess they probably have water. But I have the oddest feeling we aren’t going to find Coca-Cola or Jolt on board here.”
“Why am I not surprised? Well, let’s go get coffee and a donut, if they have them, and take a seat? Wherever this is going, it’s gonna take awhile.”
“I think that table over there is where they have the - good Lord, is that a centaur?” I cried, rubbing my eyes.
“Hunh?”
“I think I’m seeing things. For a minute there, I thought I saw a centaur, you know, half-man, half-horse, laying food out on that table. But it was just a steward of some kind.”
“Esh’, you sure you don’t have a - uh-oh!”
“What?”
“Whatever you have, I think it’s catching - I thought I just saw something like the hero of E.T. go by over there. - No, I guess it’s just a short guy in robes of some kind. Well, let’s hie over there and see what they have.”
Making our way to the table, we found a great many of the passengers, especially the women, were eyeing us the way they might large, dangerous animals. Women wearing robes or djeballahs drew away from us as if we were contaminated. Men in analogous costumes hissed, licked their lips, and looked us over with feverish eyes as if they weren’t sure whether to rape us or simply kill us right then and there - then drew back, turning away, as Lu’ carefully displayed her Bowie knife, its razor-edge gleaming under the gas-lights set high in the walls of the deckhouse, about one every two feet or so.
As we got closer to the table, the costumes began to change. More and more of the women were dressed in conventional American dress - or conventional at some time during the twentieth century, anyway - while the men were dressed in trousers, shirts, coats, ties, and hats, the styles all American, ranging from the late 19th century to the late 20th. Over in one corner there was an upright piano; playing it was a man who reminded me oddly of Rick in Casablanca, and with him was a woman who looked arrestingly like Lauren Bacall. Another man, leaning against the piano and taking an occasional swig from a tall, frosty mug of beer or ale, looked rather like John Wayne, dressed as he had been when he played the pilot of that plane in The High and the Mighty.
Suddenly a tall, courtly man, dressed in a gray suit, a black string tie, and a gray hat of the sort worn by gentlemen in America’s Old West at the end of the 19th century came up to us. He had a well-trimmed, handsome handlebar mustache, thick, dark blond hair cut long and brushed back, and hard gray eyes that could’ve seen through a brick wall. “Ladies,” he said in his resonant baritone voice, a soft Georgia drawl gracing his words, “very pleased to make yer acquaintance. My name’s John - John Holliday. And this here is my friend, Big-Nosed Annie. Annie -?”
A woman stepped forward. Wearing a red-and-white checked dress with a ruffled yoke that was cut in a style popular on the American frontier in the late 19th century, with petticoats which, though not heavy, managed to make the dress’s long skirt flare out prettily, she was tall and carried herself with an odd dignity. Her blue eyes hinted at a great deal of pain, yet she was no victim - even Lu’ looked at her with real respect, and the smile she favored us with was knowing and full of ancient wisdom. “How do you do, friends?” she asked us. “Of whom do we have the favor of making acquaintance?” Quiet laughter lilted her voice - whether at us, or herself, it wasn’t possible to be sure.
“Uh, I’m Mrs. Luciferia Blake Skua and this is my friend, Ms. Eshda Drake,” Lu’ told Annie, extending her hand. “And you are -?”
“Annie Jones,” the woman told her. “Miss Annie Jones,” she added pointedly, looking hard at Lu’. “You a widow, dear?”
“No, no - Erik, my husband, is back home, in San Francisco. I’m just visiting my friend Eshda, here.”
“Where’s ‘here’?” Annie asked her, curious. “I mean, where’d you-all get on board the boat?”
“Why - Washington State!”
“You’re a long way from home, girl,” Annie told her, almost grimly. “Ain’t that out in the Northwestern territories - you know, Oregon?”
“No, they made that into two-three states, dear,” her male companion told her. “Remember? Called one Washington - were gonna call it ‘Columbia,’ but didn’t want to get everybody confusin’ it with the nation’s capitol - an’ Oregon proper, an’ Idaho, I think. Washington’s the one way up next to Vancouver, British Columbia, isn’t it?” he asked Lu’.
“Yeah, that’s right. Oregon’s just below, and Idaho’s east of both,” she told him.
“I think Wyatt maybe went up that way - no, that’s right, he went on up to Fairbanks, him an’ his lady, before comin’ down to settle in Los Angeles. - Oh, I’m bein’ rude. Would the two o’ you like some o’ this here food? It’s mighty tasty. An’ the wine’s pretty good, too - mind you, I’d rather have whiskey, any day, but this ain’t bad at all, a good dark red from someplace in France, an’ lately they’ve had some from place north o’ San Francisco in California, real good wine country up there, I hear tell, an’ there’s some Italians moved there an’ started their own vineyards an’ winery. Here, let’s see what they got today.”
So saying, he stepped aside and waved us toward the table.
“Gyros!” exclaimed Lu’. “Oooo, I love ’em! But why are the pitas all red? That’s weird.”
“Look, Lu’, everything’s red here! See?” I told her, pointing. Sure enough, the table was covered with platters of red food of every description as to kind, but totally monochrome: hundreds of red fruits, from strawberries and boysenberries and pomegranates to apples and cherries; red bread and pitas; tomatoes and strangely dark-red carrots and hot little radishes and incandescently hot red peppers; even meats that had all been dyed red, from slices of roast beef and roast pork to ground meats for the gyros. More, even the platters that held the food and the jugs that held the wine were all either red or white patterned in red and black - and the patterns were ancient, images from Ionian Greece and ancient Egypt and Mesopotamian cultures.
“Is it good, do you think?’ Lu’ asked me nervously, holding a gyro that was filled with ground meat, sour cream, slices of peppers and tomatoes, and diced red cabbage, not quite daring to take a bite of it.
“Oh, it’s good, all right,” said Ms. Jones. “But you want to be careful - if you eat that, you might not be real happy with the consequences.”
“Annie!” chided Mr. Holliday.
“Somebody’s gotta tell ’em, why not me?” she retorted peevishly.
“It’s not as if they’re gonna be able to -”
“John Holliday, hush your mouth. You always was a mite fast on the draw that way, dear,” she said, affection returning to her voice and eyes as she turned to look over at him.
“‘Consequences’?” I prompted.
“Oh, it won’t poison you,” she told me. “It’s not that. It’s just - you may end up staying here a little longer than you planned, that’s all.”
“So?” said Lu’, taking a bite out of the gyro as if daring Ms. Jones to stop her. “As John, there, was just saying, we aren’t going to be going back any time soon - no way to. Looks as if all we can do is to go forward. So why not? - And why,” she added, having swallowed the bite of food, “would eating something here keep us from going back, anyway?”
“Oh, it’s not important. Like you said, missy, you can’t go back anyway. But mind you can go forward, if you know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t. And where’s forward?”
“Annie, let me, okay?” said Ms. Jones’ companion impatiently. “Look, my dears, Annie an’ I have been here quite a while. We enjoy it, I’m not complainin’, an’ the company is purely fascinatin’. It’s very comfortable. But I understand that the only way to get on where you’re going from here is to leave the boat when it docks there at the Island in a little while - an’ somehow, every time it goes to do so, I’m just too plumb comfortable to get off, an’ so’s Annie. Don’t know whether it’s the food or whatever that does that to you, but you might want to go easy on it. An’ the wine. Especially the wine.”
“Okay, thanks, we will,” Lu’ said, smiling. “-Lord, I’m thirsty, speaking of wine. Do they have any water, do you suppose?”
“Sure, jug of it right over there, next to that platter of fruit. And some mugs with it,” he told her, pointing.
“Great,” she said, reaching for a mug. “Esh’, how about you?”
“Yeah, I’d like some, too. Could you pour me a mug?”
“Comin’ right up.”
We sipped our water in silence awhile. Finally, I said, “Thank you, Mr. Holliday, Ms. Jones. All right if we sort of look around a little? There are so many people here, so much to see - I’ve never seen anything like this!”
“Sure,” he told me, laughing a little. “I agree - it’s a 24-hour-a-day circus, always something new to see! Mr. Barnum would’ve loved this - in fact, it’s a wonder we haven’t run into him yet! But mind some of the passengers - you two are a mite strange to most of ’em, they’ll never have seen anythin’ like you, an’ some o’ the women are touchy an’ more than touchy, an’ as for the men, let’s just say they don’t really cotton to women who . . . don’t act like the way women do in their own countries, followin’ their own customs.”
“We’ve noticed,” Lu’ told him, warily eyeing the crowd, many of whose members still watched us avidly, albeit surreptitiously, keeping a weather eye out for Lu’s knife and whatever else we might be packing.
“If you’re carryin’ guns, you might as well display them,” John told us avuncularly. “They know what guns can do - God knows, they ought to, I ended up keepin’ one dude from carvin’ some other fellow’s, er, family jewels off with a knife of his own by puttin’ a little .45 suggestion right by his ear, you might say,” he said, taking out a gigantic Colt pistol and displaying it with roguish pride, then putting it back in his hip-holster again. “I - oh, they’re startin’ up again.” Sure enough, the sudden throb of great engines began to vibrate through the floor of the deckhouse. “Let’s go find seats over there, by the windows, all four of us, why don’t we? You c’n see everything from there as well as anywhere, an’ you’ll be able to look out an’ see where we’re goin’, too. Nice view.” Not even waiting for us to say yay or nay, he began herding Lu’, Annie, and me toward the windows. Given the temper of many of our neighbors, I was just as happy to go along with his wishes. Lu’ started to bridle, then took another look at that crowd, and went along with better grace than she might otherwise have done.
[Continued in next post]