The Electric State Read online

  Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

  * * *

  Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

  They’d put us on a railroad

  They’d dearly make us pay

  For laughing in their faces

  And making it our way

  There’s emptiness behind their eyes

  There’s dust in all their hearts

  They just want to steal us all

  And take us all apart

  But not in

  Love my way, it’s a new road

  I follow where my mind goes . . .

  So swallow all your tears, my love

  And put on your new face

  You can never win or lose

  If you don’t run the race . . .

  The Psychedelic Furs,

  “Love My Way,” Forever Now, 1982

  The war had been fought and won by drone pilots—men and women in control rooms far from the battlefields, where unmanned machines fought each other in a strategy game played over seven years. The pilots of the federal army had lived a good life in brand-new suburbs where they could choose from thirty kinds of cereal on their way home from work. The drone technology was praised because it spared us meaningless loss of life.

  The collateral damage was of two kinds: the civilians unfortunate enough to be caught in the crossfire, and the children of the federal pilots, who, as a concession to the godheads of defense technology, were all stillborn.

  MOJAVE DESERT, PACIFICA, USA

  SPRING 1997

  May is the time of dust. Gusts of wind rise and ebb through the haze, carrying huge sheets of dun-colored dust that seethe and rustle across the landscape. They slither across the ground, hissing among the creosote bushes and on until piling up in billowing dunes and waves that wander unseen and grow in the constant static.

  Lighthouse keepers were once warned they shouldn’t listen to the sea for too long; likewise, you could hear voices in the static and lose your mind.

  It was as if there were a code in there—a code that could, as soon as your mind detected it, irrevocably conjure demons from the depths.

  I DIDN’T HEAR the wind anymore. My shoulders ached from carrying the heavy shotgun, and my feet worked mechanically, as if they didn’t belong to me. My thoughts were meandering away into a daydream: I thought about Ted under the beach umbrella in Soest as he lay there with large colorful birds in his arms and dreamed of something. His mouth was moving.

  I noticed something soft inside my mouth. I stopped and spat out a gray lump of rubbery saliva. Skip came up to me and looked at the lump on the ground. It looked like a furry caterpillar. I stomped on it and tried to smear it into the sand, but only managed to roll it out into a long string of spaghetti. Skip looked at me.

  “It’s the dust,” I said.

  I took my water bottle out of my backpack, rinsed my mouth, and spat a few times. When I put my pack back on, I saw something in the distance: a pink piece of cloth protruded from a sand dune, billowing in the wind like a small parachute. I walked over and poked it with my foot. It was a pair of panties.

  THE PINK PANTIES had been blown from the roof box of a black Oldsmobile in a parking lot nearby. The box was open to the wind, and the parking lot was littered with clothes. Apart from being covered in dust, the car seemed fine—no flat tires or broken lights, and the windows were intact.

  It looked like an expensive model, and the owners sprawled in the sand next to it must have been an elderly couple. There were two oblong cardboard boxes on the backseat, and the seat cushions were covered in Styrofoam peanuts. Other than that, the inside of the car was spotless and lovingly cared for. I rummaged through the couple’s pockets, hoping to find some cash. The woman’s pockets were empty, but in the man’s left pocket I found the keys to the car and a folded envelope. The envelope contained a city map with notes, a ten-dollar bill, receipts for two Sentre Stimulus TLEs, and what looked like two entry permits to Canada. I got behind the wheel, inserted the keys, and turned them. The car emitted an electronic whir, coughed, and started. The dashboard lit up with digital symbols, a synthetic clock chimed, and green text scrolled across a display underneath the speedometer: GOOD AFTERNOON. I leaned forward and kissed the steering wheel, and I realized that, with any luck, this might be the last car I drove until we reached the Pacific.

  Walter, you once asked me what they need him for. The boy, that is. If I should say it out loud, I fear it will sound like madness. How can I explain this?

  Do you know how the brain works? Do you have any idea of what we know about how the brain and consciousness work? Us humans, I mean. And I’m not talking about some new-age hocus-pocus, I’m talking about the sum of the knowledge compiled by disciplined scientists over three hundred years through arduous experiments and skeptic vetting of theories. I’m talking about the insights you gain by actually poking around inside people’s heads, studying human behavior, and conducting experiments to figure out the truth, and separating that from all the bullshit about the brain and consciousness that has no basis in reality whatsoever. I’m talking about the understanding of the brain that has resulted in things like neuronic warfare, the neurographic network, and Sentre Stimulus TLEs. How much do you really know about that?

  I suppose you still have the typical twentieth-century view of the whole thing. The self is situated in the brain somehow, like a small pilot in a cockpit behind your eyes. You believe that it is a mix of memories and emotions and things that make you cry, and all that is probably also inside your brain, because it would be strange if that were inside your heart, which you’ve been taught is a muscle. But at the same time you’re having trouble reconciling with the fact that all that is you, all your thoughts and experiences and knowledge and taste and opinions, should exist inside your cranium. So you tend not to dwell on such questions, thinking “There’s probably more to it” and being satisfied with a fuzzy image of a gaseous, transparent Something floating around in an undefined void.

  Maybe you don’t even put it into words, but we both know that you’re thinking about an archetypical soul. You believe in an invisible ghost.

  I SAT AND STUDIED Skip’s map, the car’s engine idling. He had drawn a red circle in the sea a bit north of San Francisco Memorial City, right outside a cape that reached into the sea like a long finger. There was a small community at the end of the cape, Point Linden, and Skip had marked it with a messy red spot. Clipped to the edge of the map was a Realtor’s brochure for a house on 2139 Mill Road.

  It wasn’t easy to figure out where we were, but I suspected it was somewhere west of Pacifica’s state line, probably around Interstate 15. Most of the roads in southeastern Pacifica were probably unserviceable nowadays because of the dust, but I really wanted to avoid the major cities and the densely populated areas to the west for as long as possible. One thing at a time. First, we simply had to go west until there were better roads. With any luck, the 395 up north would be open, and we could move through the rural areas east of the Sierra Nevadas. That’s what we would do.

  Interstate 15 was barely discernible under a soft cover of dust, and visibility was really low. Now and then abandoned cars would appear in the road, so I didn’t dare go faster than twenty-five miles per hour. I was leaning forward, concentrating on distinguishing the edges of the road below the dust, but I was soon exhausted. Later in the afte
rnoon the wind picked up, and visibility was so low that we had no other choice than to wait out the storm. I took the first available exit and stopped in what I assumed was a rest stop. Outside, the wind whipped ferociously through the shrubs, and a tide of dust and sand swallowed them until I couldn’t see anything.

  When we fell asleep, the car was engulfed by howling darkness. It rocked in the wind, and I dreamed I slept inside the belly of a giant.

  IN THE MORNING, the wind had abated, and outside the car stood a number of huge yellow ducks. For a moment I thought they had arrived with the storm during the night, but the place we had slept in turned out to be some kind of shooting range, and all the ducks were riddled with impacts from various kinds of large-caliber rounds.

  We spent a few hours exploring the abandoned range. We found a complete set of tools in a toolbox and a half-full box of shotgun cartridges, and on a mattress in a toolshed we found something lying on its back, vacantly staring at the ceiling. It looked like a homebrew. The red-painted mouth on the large face gaped emptily into the gloom. The thought of what had been shoved into that hole made me cringe. I grabbed its torso carefully, my hands protected by my shirt sleeves, and turned it onto its side. I opened the back hatch using the screwdriver from the toolbox and pulled out three large Vanadium redox batteries. They were warm.

  Back in the car, I was about to turn the key when something made me stop. That something was gnawing at the back of my mind. I released the seat belt, grabbed the shotgun, and got out. I told Skip to stay in the car and lock the doors, then I carefully shut the door and walked back to the shooting range.

  I found the owner of the sex robot in a derelict trailer on the other side of the compound. He was toothless and bearded, and gasped for breath beneath his neurocaster. His body was emaciated and shriveled, and the place reeked. A tube in his arm snaked around an IV stand to a huge tank in the ceiling that had once been full of something yellow and gooey. The old man was completely incapacitated, and it was impossible to say how long he had been there. I found two hundred dollars rolled up in a glass jar underneath his bed. I took the money and left.

  WE SPENT TWO NIGHTS driving out of the restricted zone. I wanted to avoid being seen when we passed the roadblocks, so I waited until the middle of the night before driving the last distance to Barstow. I had hoped to stop for gas and food there before we turned onto 395 North, but the drought had edged west the last few years and swallowed Barstow completely. The dust and the sand had wandered far into town. Apart from a few vagrants dragging their carts through the dunes, the city was completely deserted. If we wanted to refuel, we would have to get to Mojave, which was tens of miles farther west than I was comfortable with.

  The car moved through the pitch-black desert night like a submarine in a deep-sea trench. The dashboard clock said it was three thirty in the morning when we first saw the lights of Mojave on the horizon. When we got closer, I killed the headlights and drove as slowly as I could until I saw the flashing yellow lights of the roadblock. I stopped on the shoulder of the road and turned the engine off. Skip was asleep, and I had to wake him up. He sat up and stared out the window for a long while. I explained that I needed help with the roadblock, and then we got out of the car and walked the last few hundred yards. Together we managed to move the barriers enough to get the car through, and once we had driven past the roadblock we got out, walked back, and replaced the barriers. I didn’t dare turn the headlights on before we were in the town.

  We found a parking lot at the edge of Mojave and stopped there. When I lay down on the backseat and closed my eyes, I saw the storm recede behind us like a giant wall of brown cotton.

  I MANAGED TO get a lot of things done in Mojave. I washed my clothes, bought food, put gas in the car and washed it, and even managed to find some comic books and Kid Kosmo action figures for Skip.

  The town was emptying out. There were heavily loaded cars everywhere. Beds, couches, and large TVs were carried out and lashed to trailers and car roofs. The supermarkets were chaotic and crowded, and the shelves were mostly empty. The long lines of shoppers shivered with anxiety and apprehension, people glancing at one another like they were waiting for looting to break out.

  I saw bloated, nervous men everywhere, barging through, trailing their wives and kids. Outside an electronics store, a group of boys wearing body armor stood guard, holding automatic weapons and walkie-talkies. They tried to look serious and stern, but their practiced expressions fooled no one; they were loving this.

  I sat by myself for a while outside a Burger Box and ate a piece of apple pie. The patio was empty and quiet, apart from a boy bouncing dejectedly up and down in a yellow inflatable castle outside the entrance. I noticed he had peed himself: a dark stain stretched down one leg of his pants all the way to his shoe. He saw me, and our eyes met. He grinned, with more teeth missing than was normal.

  “Jump with me,” he yelled.

  I looked around. We were all alone.

  “Where are your mom and dad?”

  “Everywhere,” the boy replied.

  I saw a guy get shot during the war. He was named Max, and we were smoking on the terrace behind the B pavilion at Fort Hull, talking about lasagna. Max loved lasagna, and when the bullet hit he was in the middle of a recipe for béchamel sauce. One of ALA’s black assault ships had slipped up above the horizon, and no one had noticed. It was a short burst—three rounds, two of which hit the concrete wall behind us. The third hit Max just next to the cheekbone, close to his nose. I don’t want to go into unnecessary detail, but details about the physical realities of this world are exactly what this is all about, so you’re just going to have to deal with it. The bullets fired from the assault ship were very special: magnetic neodymium, traveling at over twelve thousand feet per second. The kinetic energy was beyond belief. The bullet took off everything above Max’s mouth.

  Afterward, I was curled up on the ground and saw the pink chunks spread across the flagstones around me, and before Fort Hull’s alarm system started blaring I had the time to think: That’s it, right there! The recipe for béchamel sauce. But even if I did my utmost to scoop up the pieces and put them back in the pit that used to be Max’s skull, his recipe would still be lost. Max’s lasagna existed in the intricate way those pink chunks had been assembled, just like love and hate and anxiety and creativity and art and law and order. Everything that makes us humans something more than elongated chimpanzees. There it was, spilled across the flagstones, and no technology known to man could ever put it back together. It was incredible.

  That was my materialistic revelation. What I’m trying to say is that what we call lasagna is simply a phenomenon that arises somewhere between the physical parts of the brain and in the way they’re put together, and anyone claiming lasagna is something more has underestimated how complicated the brain is and in how many ways its parts can be assembled. Or they have overestimated the phenomenon of lasagna.

  WE HAD LEFT the town behind and traveled out into the desert. North of Mojave, the 395 was almost entirely empty of traffic and cut through the barren landscape in a ruler-straight line. The view outside the windows made me uneasy. After three weeks in the Blackwelt badlands, where visibility never went beyond a few hundred yards, we were suddenly distinct in the great void, the car crawling like a black bug across a vast sheet of white paper.

  I had been here before. When I was fourteen, Ted and Birgitte drove us through this very desert. They had bought me a camera. Their working hypothesis was that some artistic creativity would do Michelle good. My first idea was to take a series of photos of roadkill, but Birgitte refused to let me ruin the trip with my morbid obsession with destruction, as she called it when I wanted to stop by a coyote that had been run over.

  They said that the whole point of the trip was to spend time together and get to know one another and have a merry ol’ time, so I was not allowed to wear my headphones. Birgitte kept turning down the radio and talking about how Pacifica had fallen apart
since they started coddling the neurine addicts. She talked a lot about self-respect and taking responsibility, and how addicts usually lacked the capacity for that. Like my mother, for example.

  LATER WE VISITED a national park. The patio outside the gift shop was full of blond teenage girls who looked just like me and a lot of moms and dads who looked just like Ted and Birgitte, and they were all annoyed with one another and argued about jackets and baby carriages and sunscreen lotion and when and what to eat and how expensive it was, and when Birgitte went to order food I told Ted I wanted to dye my hair black, and Ted told me he had had long hair in the sixties and we talked about how the Beatles had influenced Kurt Cobain; and when Birgitte came back with our food Ted said do you think Michelle would look good with black hair and Birgitte chuckled:

  Oh no, sweetheart, you really must take better care of your appearance.

  I said nothing and escaped to the bathroom, and after a while I thought my rage had subsided, but when I walked up to our table again I grabbed a food tray someone had left on the table next to ours and smacked it into the back of Birgitte’s head, sending saucers and plastic containers and half-eaten sandwiches flying around the customers. I don’t know where I found the strength, but I grabbed her hair bun and slammed her face into the table hard enough to break her nose.

  Back then I felt bad about what I had done. Now as I drove past these places and thought about what had happened, I didn’t feel even a trace of shame. Birgitte had deserved it, and everything that came later. You don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone. True. Birgitte was a fucking asshole and she was gone, and I felt nothing.