Jocastin’
Michael
On June 30, 1972, the final stretch of I-40 entirely within Arkansas, located between Clarksville and Ozark was opened; the last section to open in the state was the Hernando de Soto Bridge, which opened on August 2, 1973. The last segment in California to be completed was a short stretch in Needles, opened on August 13, 1973. The last original planned stretch of the highway in Tennessee, located east of Knoxville, was partially opened on December 20, 1974, and fully opened on September 12, 1975. The last section of I-40 in Oklahoma, a 17-mile (27 km) stretch near Erick near the western end of the state, opened on June 2, 1975. Wikipedia.
Leonard
That's America, baby.
Michael
Love how again and again this game implicates the National Interstate System as another lost artifact of American postwar boom infrastructure
Given it was finished right at the beginning of the neoliberal/petrodollar turn.
Leonard
(Not to be too fussy about this, but I think her plan was to take the I-20 at first, through Mississippi and Louisiana, and snuff Reinhardt somewhere around there, then take the 40 most of the rest of the way.)
She is probably going to be mainlining mods during this period to stay awake and drive most of the night. She's been having bad dreams lately.
It'll probably be somewhere around Texas or New Mexico where she starts talking to his corpse
After that, who knows? You go where the road takes you.
Michael
Friday. October 12, 1973. Midnight. Friday turns to Saturday. Jocasta Menos drives her purloined ambulance with the charred remains of Anthony Reinhardt zipped up in a body bag north towards Dallas-Fort Worth. The late-night AM radio is all Jesus; talk of the end of the world, the battle in Megiddo where the Antichrist's armies will be assembled and meet Christ the King. An overnight construction detour on the Interstate dumps Jocasta out on surface streets near the center of old Dallas.
Jocasta sits in Friday night traffic on Elm Street. Banks and petroleum companies and municipal buildings and squat skyscrapers; two blocks over, the burlesque district, the gaudy Hotel Adolphus—so much like the St. Francis, the former site of the Carousel Club. And coming down Elm, the book depository, the Dal-Tex building, the knoll.
The triple underpass. Dealey Plaza.
From the back of the ambulance, a thump. Some blood pressure cuff falling off the wall? Jocasta risks a quick look back as she waits to get back on the highway where Kennedy's ambulance headed to Parkland on Stemmons ten years ago. Jo's brain is feverish; the October night air in Texas full of insanity, war, blood, royal sacrifice.
"We did that, you know. Well, not me, but us." A voice whispers in Jocasta's ear, sounding like it's coming from the base of her skull, a vibration picked up somewhere near her throat chakra. Jo's eyes go wide. It's Tony's voice.
Leonard
"Sure you did," Jocasta says, pressing down a wave of fear and paranoia. "Say hi to him. You want a burger or something? Well done, ha ha ha." She dry-swallows another Modafinil.
Michael
"Wouldn't you like to go touch the fence at the grassy knoll over there?" Tony says, as Jo's gaze inevitably goes to the picket fence at the top of the small hill, separating the plaza from the parking lot and the railyards beyond. It's a mound too, Jo's subconscious says in casual shock. "Get to know the truth that only a handful of people on this planet know? This whole place is vibrating with psychometric energy; you could have the whole mystery of who shot JFK sussed out before the sun comes up."
Leonard
"You just said you did it. You and your little club. What's the big mystery?" Jocasta says, pressing on the gas to try and speed out of this haunted triangle soaked with the King's Blood. She avoids looking in the rear view just in case she sees Reinhardt as well as hears him.
She lights another cigarette, oblivious to the tin slide-out ashtray that's already overfilled with butts. "Listen, Tony. Do you remember Mitch? You should. He's the one who turned you into something a forest fire left behind. He once said something like 'If the rules you followed led you to this place, what good were the rules?'. That's what I think about you and your gang and all your grand plans. You think you're the secret masters, pulling the strings that wind the world. But you're just another ordinary man who lied about everything and then ran when things got hot. You're not special. I've seen dozens like you come and go."
Michael
"Well," sighs Tony, "by all indications your little 'Club' is about to become the next gang to pull the strings that wind the world. You can't kill an idea, after all." A low chuckle. "Nature abhors a vacuum, and power even more so. 'Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.'"
"And here you are, running away because you can see, sure as shit, what's coming. They're not your friends anymore, Jocasta. You were always just … the new girl in the office."
Leonard
This time Jocasta does look in the rear view mirror, scowling, seeing only her own eyes, the pale blue surrounded by streaks of blood. "I know that."
Passing the Trade Mart, she eases the ambulance onto the Stemmons Freeway, leaving the heart of Dallas with its banks and cheap hotels and heading towards the oily desolation of the Panhandle. "What are you, trying to make me cry or something? Will that make you happy in whatever hell they stick people like you? You don't think I know what they think of me? This is SANDMAN! You lived it! You made it happen! You've been steering me here since before I ever heard the words 'History B'. So congratulations, it worked. You stole my life and I stole yours. We both got what we wanted and we're still not happy. Great job."
You're talking to yourself, comes a quiet little voice. She swallows hard and ignores it. "I'm still going to send the rest of your pals to Hell with you, you know. They're too trusting. I don't care if it won't do any good."
Whatever he says back, it's not him. It's you. She breathes out hard, almost hissing 'shut up' at herself. She thinks about the Thompsonesque stash of psychedelics and weed in the doctor's bag behind the seat and shudders hard.
She glances back again at the body bag filled with what used to be her mentor, commander, and friend. "The last time I was in this state, I found you, Tony. Or you found me. And you knew just what to do with me. I wonder who's going to find me this time."
Michael
Saturday. October 13, 1973. Dawn. Jocasta crosses over into New Mexico at dawn on Saturday the 13th, following Route 66 across the Texas panhandle into the Land of Enchantment. The blinding sun's in her rear-view mirror as she proceeds west, west, west to the sea. Tony's been quiet since their Dallas/JFK conversation, but 24 hours awake, and 16 hours on the road, even with the mods still running strong in her bloodstream, is beginning to take its toll. Plus she's got to take a leak. Jo gets off in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, population 2,485, for some breakfast and road relief.
As Jo pulls the ambulance into a shadowy nook behind a Dumpster near a hotel-and-diner combo called the Sun and Sand, she lets the engine settle and enjoys the silence: no radio, no voices in her head, just the desert morning and the faint sound of the good old boys bullshitting with each other as they're leaving the diner and getting into their pickups.
In her liminal drug-addled state, she finds herself thinking about Viv of all people, and how she and Marshall were going to fly down here to look into the Solarans and then … that whole thing happened with Viv at Terence's party, and all of a sudden no one trusted her, not least of whom was Marshall. Charley's mom, Jocasta thinks. I promised Charley we'd find her. Jo looks at the AAA map on the passenger seat of the ambulance, folded over to show New Mexico, and US 54 is right there, leading from Santa Rosa down to Alamogordo and White Sands National Park, where the Solarans were last seen and where Agent RAVEN sent her last deep-cover postcard from.
Should I go? Jo asks herself. A quick side trip, just check it out, and I can be back on the road to California by the afternoon.
Tony remains ominously silent on this decision.
Leonard
Some help you are, she thinks, ordering a black coffee and an omelette. She makes her decision quickly: find a Woolworth or some other local drugstore, get refreshed and maybe fix her hair, and then head down to Trinity. They split the world down there, she thinks. Maybe they know something. She tries not to think too much about the habits she’s falling back into: running, drifting, fading away.
Michael
Santa Rosa to Alamogordo is about three hours' drive, putting Jocasta there right around noon. Alamogordo is squeezed between White Sands (the missile base, closed to the public, and the National Park, open to the public) and the Mescalero Apache Indian reservation. Alamogordo is a boomtown, having flourished since the Army Air Field (now Holloman AFB) was put here during World War II. The city now has a population of 23,000 people, most people either directly or indirectly involved with the work at the Missile Range or Holloman. Big-time Defense vibes in this town, Jocasta thinks. Bad juju. Why would those Solarans come here of all places? Images of nuclear bomb tests flash through Jo's head.
(This gives Jo a four-hour start on Marshall, Morris, and Dave; they'll end up touching down at Holloman at around 4 pm Mountain, so wherever Jo is going to head, I'm all ears.)
Leonard
After peeling off the I-25 around Santa Rosa, Jocasta drives south, her eyes reddening with lack of sleep. She briefly stops on the Mescalero reservation at an Indian store, buying some gas, a few packs of discount cigarettes, and a smudge stick. Uttering a small tsk at how dusty and battered with road debris the ambulance is, she gets back in and lights up, consulting a stained Chevron map.
Taking a marker and making some lines on the lower left-hand corner, she looks back at the body bag. "Strange territory, Colonel," she mutters. "Maybe I should leave you here. Let you have it out with the Apaches. You can tell them where all their brothers and sisters went."
She reaches back behind the seat and grabs the doctor's bag, taking out a few doses of LSD. "Still, first things first."
Jocasta's plan is to drive past Alamogordo and get as close to Holloman Air Force Base as possible without drawing the attention of the MPs, pull off to the side of the road, and sit in the back to meditate. Then she'll dose, light up the smudge stick, and when the acid kicks in, sink down into her middle dantian and try knissomancy. She will be focusing on three things, but with no specific agenda or questions she wants answered — just seeing what unfolds.
UFOs. They're part of what's happening, and there's been numerous sightings around here.
The natives. Their spirits are restless, and maybe they are trying to find a way to speak.
OZYMANDIAS. Even if URIEL has everything under control, they don't understand the threat.
Once that's done, and assuming she's not too high to drive and doesn't attract the attention of anyone who will need to be dealt with, she'll go back to town and crash hard at the Classic Inn.
Michael
(I will go ahead and roll Meditation-17, Perception-18, and IQ-15 secretly and put together results for you!)
For some reason, the acid on this sunny afternoon in New Mexico comes on strong... and quick. Parked across from the Air Force base, Jocasta's brain feels pulled toward the base, like a magnet, as she takes huge gulps of air to stay breathing. Meditating in this state might be near-impossible but Jo just lets the trip do what it must, keeping an eye on the smudge sticks and Sun 'n' Sand matchbook on her dashboard, making sure she can actually do some divination in the midst of all this. Fuck, what are they putting in this stuff lately? Jo says insouciantly to her government-supplied LSD.
The effects of the acid are much less visual than cognitive and sensory: the symbolic gravity that Holloman Air Force Base exerts on the noosphere around here isn't even the biggest void in the vibes. Northward, into the White Sands Missile Range, the birthplace of the Bomb beckons. The landscape is so... alien out here, Jo thinks to herself with flying saucers on her mind. If something were to come down on you from above, there'd be no place to hide. Jo then suddenly, as if this innocent observation were answered by some more knowledgeable, more intuitive, more ancient part of herself, speaks in tongues—urgently, with a poet's rhythm, insistent, a drumbeat in her ears:
"Kai hoi basileis tēs gēs
kai hoi megistanes
kai hoi chiliarchoi
kai hoi plousioi
kai hoi ischyroi
kai pas doulos kai eleutheros
ekrypsan heautous eis ta spēlaia
kai eis tas petras tōn oreōn,
kai legousin tois oresin kai tais petrais:
[in a different, pleading voice]
"'Pesete eph’ hēmas kai krypsate hēmas apo prosōpou tou kathēmenou epi tou thronou kai apo tēs orgēs tou Arniou! Hoti ēlthen hē hēmera hē megalē tēs orgēs autōn, kai tis dynatai stathēnai?!'"
Jo takes a few moments to breathe, her voice and throat cracked from this unexpected outburst that seemed to come from her heart and gut rather than her mind and throat. A transport plane comes in for a landing at Holloman, the roar of the engines breaking the spell of this unexpected bout of xenoglossia.
Leonard
You’re in no shape to be reading the dust, comes a voice from inside her head — or maybe it’s from inside Tony’s body bag. You’re wasting your gifts.
Another, more reckless voice inside her, the one she’s been listening to the most lately, strays elsewhere: So it’s all over? Just like that?
Something even darker teases at her as the Fear settles in. Shit, she thinks. I forgot about the Solarans. Her mind scrambles like she’s forgotten the words to a magic spell.
Self control.
>> SUCCESS by 0
Unable to focus any further on this scattered early evening, she at least tries to clear her head.
“My dad always said the end of the world would happen on California first, because it got to be paradise for such a long time,” she says to Reinhardt’s corpse, shoving a little of his ashes into a used coffee cup, which she tosses to the wind with a thought to the spirit realm. You take him, she thinks (or prays). I’m sorry I failed you.
Visibly shaken but trying to hold herself together, she drives back to the Classic Inn and abandons her plans for the night, feeling defeated and unsure who’s pulling her strings anymore.
She pays the clerk an extra $20 to keep the pool open and she collapses onto a cheap plastic chaise. She lets herself drift off, watching the skies. Maybe at least I’ll see it coming, she thinks, knowing no one ever does.
Michael
Out by the pool, the sun is low in the sky when Jocasta settles into her deck chair. The acid is still going strong, but there's been no further evidence of xenoglossia. The vibes at the Classic Inn are better than the ones right near the air force base and White Sands, but not much better. Jocasta slips into a semi-sleep punctuated by odd dreams that might be trip visions and trip visions that might be dreams....
Jocasta sits attentively with a dozen other Greek girls from all over the Bay Area in the pews of the Annunciation Cathedral. All the girls here are Maids of Athena, the girls' auxiliary to the Daughters of Penelope, which is the women's auxiliary of the American Hellenic Education Progressive Association. The boys' club, the Sons of Pericles, are meeting somewhere else in the cathedral complex, but here, in the heart of the church, the very founder of the nationwide Daughters of Penelope, Mrs. Alexandra Apostolides Sonenfeld, is due to speak with the Maids of Athena! And behind her, the old Father Basil Lokis, who rumor has it went off to Europe during the war and was actually a spy for the Allies in Greece!
Young/old Jocasta looks down into her hands. On her lap is the Orthodox Bible, English version, open to Revelations chapter 6 and in her right hand is the Artemis coin that Genevieve gave her... in 1973. I didn't have that as a kid. Am I a kid? What's happening here? Jocasta's gangly pre-adolescent limbs shudder as she experiences a profound sense of temporal and bodily dislocation. Fright Check, Rule of 14 (pass on 13 or less).
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 0
Michael
Jocasta gulps, trying to get her bearings, barely keeping herself together. The coin means it's a dream; you're not actually back at Sunday school. This isn't a Shasta situation. Watch for the signs, the messages … the secret meaning. Jo looks down at the passage her Bible is open to, and suddenly the xenoglossia she experienced while she was awake clicks. It was the final three verses of Revelation 6: the cadence is there, and Jo's limited exposure to Greek vocabulary allows her to see the corresponding English passage to what she shouted while the acid was kicking in:
Leonard
Jocasta puts a pair of cheap sunglasses on, trying to shield her eyes from the late afternoon desert sun. She remembers her grandmother Thalia, a tiny woman with a crystalline sing-song voice, reading this passage with her Thessaloniki accent. Probably where Dad got his apocalyptic outlook, she thinks. Well, and the war.
She absent-mindedly reaches for a joint before remembering that she hasn't got one. Her hand falls to one side and she rubs the ache on her palm against the warm concrete. So who are we? The kings and the princes? The slaves and free people? The ones on the throne or the wrath of the lamb? Maybe we're the mountains and rocks.
Her mind turns away from the calm she tries to feel at moments like this, becoming a whirl, processing everything she's learned about OZYMANDIAS and the mounds and the pocket subduction zones, about all the plans and plans within plans, that responsible part of her insisting that she use her skills and analyze this in a meaningful way. Do your job, Joey, it says. We need you.
"We," she says out loud. "We, ha ha."
She reaches into her bag and pulls out her small sketchbook. She starts drawing from memory everything she thinks might be a visual cue to the Solarans, and waits for the stern woman who checked her in to be relieved.
Michael
Jo exists in both places, both times: both in the trip/dream and outside of it. Bits of the Classic Inn pool deck in 1973 mix in and overlap with the interior of the cathedral in 1951 as Waking Jo sketches what Young Joey sees amongst the other Maids of Athena. Back in 1951, a bright pink parasol and patio table stand in the place of the cathedral's high altar; the desert wind blows heavy church incense into Joey's nostrils.
"Now girls," Mrs. Apostolides says, "I know you've all been hoping for good news. Well, I'm glad to tell you that thanks to all those cards and letters you wrote the Grand Lodge, starting next year, there will be a new program for academic and yes, athletic scholarships for girls headed to high school and college!" The rest of the Maids of Athena cheer and applaud. A few hug each other.
Young Joey's countenance is neutral; one might call it suspicious, even. She watches Father Lokis as he smiles beneficently and chuckles upon seeing this scene of celebration, and Joey levels her eyes at him.
"Girls, you're all dismissed," Father Lokis says in his deep, sonorous, kindly voice. "You've all done very well." Joey stands up to leave, but before she can, "Ah, ah, ah. Miss Menos. Would you join Mrs. Apostolides and me here? We have a few things we want to chat with you about." A couple of her fellow Maids make a "oooh, you're in trouble" taunt, but are quickly quieted down and dismissed by Mrs. Apostolides. "Now you girls, go, hush!" Father Lokis sits on the pew in front of Joey, turning and putting his arm on the back of the pew; Mrs. Apostolides sits a few feet away in Joey's row.
"Your letter to the Grand Lodge was good, Joey," Father Lokis says. "Convincing. Mature. You really want to play basketball in junior high quite badly, even if it would mean playing with the boys, hmm?" Mrs. Apostolides follows up and says, "Not acceptable, of course. But with this scholarship... who knows. It could be your ticket to a good private high school. And college, of course."
"You see, Joey," Father Lokis says, "your teachers and Mrs. Apostolides have told me how much they think of you. How smart and strong... and brave you are. The Grand Lodge is always looking for upstanding girls like yourself. And it's to both your and our benefit to get you started on this path early. One's μοίρα is assigned in moments just like these, moments of decision. It's time to start thinking about what you want to be." A pause. "What do you want to be, Joey?" Father Lokis's eyes are pleading, full of care and concern as he looks at young Joey; Mrs. Apostolides is sterner, watching Joey keenly for her response.
Back in 1973 on the pool deck, in Jo's sketch of the little Maids of Athena celebrating their newly-won scholarships, Mrs. Apostolides looks like Agent RAVEN and Father Lokis looks like Alpha Leonis.
Leonard
Behind the orange air-tint of the gas station sunglasses, Jocasta screws her eyes tight, fighting back the sun, tears, and any more of the world coming in. She has forgotten the power of the drug: that in its generosity it has opened her mind to its gifts, but that the visions it sends can't be turned away from.
I should have known, she tells herself, but the truth won't let her off the hook that easily. You did know, it says with a heavy finality.
She steadies herself and walks back to her room, the tan wallpaper crackled at the edges from decades of dry desert heat. She tries her best to re-draw the drawing of Alpha Leonis, hissing imprecations at herself and at it as she tries to keep hints of Reinhardt and Father Lokis out of it. She changes carefully into one of her good remaining suits and wanders over to the office, quickly flashing the man behind the desk her FBI badge and feeding him a loose line about some runaways. "Have you seen this man, sir?" she asks, trying to summon some of the old, easy authority back into her voice.
Michael
The motel clerk, an older, largely toothless man smoking a Camel, takes a good long look at Jocasta's ID, only deigning to very briefly then glance at the sketch of Alpha Leonis. "Can't say's I have," the clerk says. "Runaways, huh? I guess they musta crossed state lines for to get you involved." He nods at Andrea Schimmel's FBI badge.
Jocasta's Empathy, somewhat heightened by the acid still in her system, tells her without any fear of contradiction that this man is lying. Willfully so.
Leonard
"Sounds like you know the law, sir," Jocasta says calmly, but letting her jacket fall open just enough to show her sidearm. "So you probably also know that giving a false statement to a federal agent can get you eight years down at La Tuna." She pushes the sketch a little further across the counter.
"You wanna have another look?"
Michael
This is gonna be Intimidation, which defaults for Jo to a 13. I'm going to give you +2 for the cover ID and the RP, which brings you to Intimidation-15.
Leonard
>> CRITICAL SUCCESS
Michael
"Uh." The clerk puts out his cigarette in the glass ashtray on the counter; Jocasta can tell in an instant that he's done time—that crude tattoo on his forearm looks like jailhouse ink—and he's far too old to go back to prison. "Uh well. Yes ma'am. You don't forget a man like that. This was 'afore the hippies and such, you understand. Came into town... musta been the winter of '64, '65, something like that. Caused a hell of a ruckus in town. Back then a bunch of weird kids in robes begging and singing down the boulevard wasn't an everyday occurrence."
As Jo listens to the clerk suddenly freely spill the beans on what he saw nearly a decade ago, she feels another strong push from the acid. The fluorescent lighting in the motel office seems to flicker in Jocasta's periphery. The motel clerk continues.
"luKA'inima gal... ane ĝeš dug i'iz dameĝirene ga lukurene. Anzil."
What he's saying suddenly isn't English. Jocasta blinks, and the man is wearing quasi-Sumerian attire, the tattoo on his arm some sort of text in cuneiform rather than a crude angel. The motel office is now some kind of... stone outbuilding, lit from above by blue and purple crystals, not by tubes filled with mercury vapor.
Fright Check, Rule of 14 once more.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 6
Michael
Jocasta lets the vision of … History B?? fade from her vision, as the acid's edge recedes, the motel clerk is himself once more, the Classic Inn reassuringly American kitsch instead of occult Sumerian architecture. His voice continues in English, "Time was, a posse would run a false prophet like that out of town on a rail, but we live in 'civilized' times, I suppose. When I was a kid there was somethin' called the Mann Act, you could arrest a man for white slavery like that."
"Anyway, this was all nearly ten years ago; the story was they disappeared into the park out there, and never came out. Sheriff took a look for them after a few concerned citizens raised a stink, but then the Proving Ground took over the investigation. Apparently they wandered out onto the test range and the rumor 'round town anyway was, basically... 'kablooey.' They got spattered by a missile, all of 'em: the big man, his lieutenants, and all the girls."
Leonard
"Thanks for this information, sir. Citizens like yourself are a big help in our investigations," she says, both trying to put him at ease and remind her how easy it is to stick someone with the snitch label. "Just one more thing and I'll let you get back to your duties. Have there been any other, similar incidents since the time you saw this group? Anyone similar, any groups of people who dressed strangely or traveled with a lot of young folks?"
Michael
Jocasta detects, for a brief split-second, a moment of profound uncertainty on the clerk's face, like he truly does not know how to answer Jo. Jo's Empathy tells her this uncertainty is authentic and sincere; the acid, on the other hand, tells her it's related to that weird History B vision she just saw. What the fuck happened to this guy? Jo finds herself asking herself. "I... I don't think so. I mean, like I said, there's all kinds o' hippies coming down here now, is that what you're asking after?"
Leonard
"Just following up on a lead," Jocasta says confidently. "If you see anything that seems...particularly out of the ordinary, give me a call." She passes him a dummy card with her FBI info and a number (which, of course, routes right back to Livermore), and offers an ungloved hand for him to shake; if he goes for it, she'll try for a psychometric/empathic read.
Michael
The clerk shakes Jocasta's hand, warily.
(Go ahead and roll, IQ-15.)
(Of course Corruption is available to you.)
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 4
Michael
Lovely. Jocasta probes into this man's strongest emotional memory and between his stint in the state pen in Santa Fe about 30 years ago and his admittedly rotten life since then, she is able to hone in on one very specific set of emotions: dislocation, confusion, the feeling that his entire life's story was a false narrative meant to cover up the real story of his life. This happened around 25 years ago, after he'd gotten out of prison and after they'd tested the Bomb here. It only lasted a day and a night, but this man has never forgotten that feeling that he was promised something more, something different than … all this.
Observation-18 please.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 10
Michael
Jo spends a moment sorting through the assault of sensory inputs—the flashbacks to childhood, the momentary glimpse of Somewhere Else, the emotional confusion of this clerk who clearly has been through some kind of subduction event at some point in his life—in time to quickly look to the motel office window and see two figures walking across the boulevard towards the motel: Marshall, his head bandaged and his eye covered by a patch, and the taisher who was working with them in Ohio that Jo sensed during her last big acid trip last week, Morris Parks.
Leonard
"Keep those hands clean, pal," Jocasta says. "You never know who'll come calling."
And with that …