Gods Without Men

1971

The raid, when it came, was sudden and brutal. They arrived at four-thirty in the morning, a convoy of trucks and Crown Victorias bumping up the dirt road in the predawn. Two girls were awake, coming off a trip, sitting up on the rocks and waiting for the sunrise. Afterward they told how they’d seen it go down, the dull gleam of rifles and shotguns, the men rousting people out of the dome, lining them up on their knees in the dust.

Amerika.

Dawn was inside, snuggled next to the older of the Sky Down Feather Brothers. The cops burst in, kicking and clubbing people, no warning, no time to react or do anything at all except try to keep hold of a blanket to cover yourself as they pushed you out the door. They were dragging guys by their hair, shining powerful cop flashlights on naked girls, grabbing tits and ass as they took them out for the lineup. Sheriff Waghorn stood up on the kitchen table, which creaked under his bulk as he yelled orders into a bullhorn. You could hear crashes as the pigs searched, the shatter of glass. They were making sure nothing stayed in one piece.

They were searching for drugs and weapons. They found them. Knives from the kitchen, a hunting rifle, pills and grass. There was other stuff too, but that was all safely buried out in the desert.

They arrested thirty people. Six went to jail. Turned out the town had gotten themselves Donny Hansen, all six-foot corn-fed octopus-handed QB1 of him, as their star witness. Donny was one of the beer drinkers, the catcallers, big butch high-school heroes who felt like shut-out little boys when they looked over the fence at all the lights and singing and pretty girls on the other side. His dad owned the gas station, the hardware store and a few hundred acres of range to the south of town. He’d hated Dawn ever since he tried to get his thing into her mouth at the drive-in and she fought him off and went to sit in Robbie Molina’s truck.

One night Dawn had found Donny inside the dome, dressed in some kind of “undercover” fringed buckskin jacket, picking his way between groups of people, trying to score. He was patting shoulders, offering handshakes. Hey man. Got any stuff? No one was biting; he sounded like an actor in a public-education film. She ran to find Wolf and Floyd, who agreed he was behaving like a narc and threw him out. Donny swore he was on a dare from some of the other football guys. They didn’t believe him, but what could they do? When nothing happened for a week or so, they told themselves they’d dodged a bullet.

Turned out he’d been sent by the Rotary. She could picture the scene. The boys in the back room of Mulligan’s, working on a bottle of Four Roses and a big bowl of chips, throwing out names of who to send on their dirty little mission. Donny looked up to all those guys, those Rotarian guys. He cared about their good opinion. He’d eventually go and get himself killed for it over in Vietnam, but that was a couple of years later.

Donny said on the stand that he’d bought LSD from Floyd, and that was how they got the warrant. At the trial there were a few photographers around, trying to get pictures of the crazy hippies in their crazy outfits. The Command tried to get the underground press on their side, but none of them would bite. Those so-called hip assholes. Either they couldn’t be bothered to get in their cars and drive out of town, or for some reason they didn’t dig the Command’s thing, which kind of weirded Dawn out, since she’d thought most everyone was on their wavelength. Wasn’t it what the counterculture was about, working for the Light? And here they all were printing words like cult.

She sat on the public benches with six other girls, dressed in home-sewn silver minidresses, with tabards saying the names of various Ascended Masters who were acting as celestial witnesses for the defense. Korton, Cassion, Soltec, Andromeda Rex, Goo-Ling, Blavatsky—she was The Count of Saint-Germain. Everyone was staring at them, but that was the point. They were an official protest against the court for not recognizing the Masters and allowing their channels to testify as to how Floyd was set up by Donny and the Rotarians. She looked down at all the suits and ties and thought to herself, Well, Dawnie, here they are, the Forces of Darkness. Here they are in the flesh.

Floyd’s sentence tore the heart out of her. Ten years. Ten years because Donny Hansen said so. What a good day for the boys at Mulligan’s! Oh, they had right on their side! A good day for Mulligan’s, for bastards who pushed people around by saying they built stuff and others were lazy, when actually that was just a barefaced lie and they didn’t build a thing, not a damn thing, just balled their fists and made their backroom deals and planned how to keep hold of what they or their daddies or their daddies’ daddies had stolen from everyone else.

They went to all the trials, not just Floyd’s, and it was a horrible time. Seemed like they were always on the bus going into the city, watching the buildings get closer together, the concrete spreading over every patch of open ground. It was exhausting, heartbreaking. Walking up and down with placards, sitting through hours and days of Dark Side agents reciting so-called evidence. A couple of defendants drew five years, the rest two to five. Turned out Marcia had an outstanding federal warrant and she ended up back in New Jersey on some kind of armed-robbery charge. It was political, so Dawn heard; seemed she’d been in a branch of Chase Manhattan with a sawed-off and a bunch of black radicals wearing luchador masks.

A lot of people didn’t want to be out at the Pinnacles anymore. Every day, one or two more packed up and moved on. Hugging and kissing and making her friends promise to write, Dawn felt scared. The rocks were the people, and if they all vanished she’d have to vanish with them, because otherwise it’d be her against Donny and Uncle Ray and the sheriff and Mr. Hansen and Robbie Molina and all the other bastards, young and old, a whole town of men who wanted to put her down. She’d lose that fight, didn’t take a genius to see it.

There was so much broken. They’d have to fix up the kitchen and the workshop almost from scratch. They’d a guard posted now, day and night. No weapons, just a lookout, give them a chance to run if the town came for them again. Clark and Maa Joanie had gone into their cabins and weren’t coming out. Judy was marching about with a strained grin on her face, saying positive uplifting things like a person who’d temporarily lost her red shoes and yellow-brick road. Pilgrim Billy said they should dissolve the commune, just become nomads. You can live off the desert, he said. He was a city boy. Boston, as she remembered.

Wolf had an answer. We should hold a session, he said. That’s the way to cleanse this place.

It was the one time she ever saw the inflatables in use. They belonged to an art collective who’d abandoned the air for the sea and gone off to commune with dolphins; for some reason they’d left their prize possessions with Coyote. Wolf took everyone out to the middle of the dry lake. The light was blinding. They formed a ragged procession, their feet crunching over the crust of salt. They blew up the inflatables with giant pumps, two fifty- by fifty-foot silver pillows, a soft city tethered six feet off the earth. They were the most beautiful things in creation, the most beautiful things Dawn expected ever to see.

For twenty-four hours they stayed out there, naked, hooked up to the Tronics, playing music to rid themselves of the raid’s negative energy. When they were tired they climbed on the bubbles and lay looking out at the flat white world. It was clear now: They were living at the end of time. Dawn would remember being high above the ground with the Sky Down Feather Brothers, crawling over a gleaming surface, her vision a mess of reflected light. It was a world of pure beauty, the holy beauty of Light, and afterward, when she went into the darkness, it was this memory she tried to hold on to of the Ashtar Galactic Command: the great drone of the Tronics spiraling up into her body as she tumbled over the holy beauty of Light.

A couple of days later she was squeezed into an orange VW bus and driven to L.A. They called it a fishing mission. They sent her and three other girls, with a tall Texan, name of Travis. Officially he was there to make sure nothing bad happened to them, but he had another thing going, which she wasn’t supposed to know was a heroin deal. He talked to Clark on the phone at least once a day. But she wasn’t to worry her pretty little head, oh no. Fill up the bus, Clark said. Get them to come. We need to grow again.

To her dying day she’d wish she’d never even seen Sunset Boulevard. She was just dumped there, right on the sidewalk outside Tower Records. Walk up and down, Travis told her. Talk to people. Travis made the girls dress sexy, hot pants and halter tops. They’d stand on the corner and cars would go by honking their horns. The point was to meet prospects, boys mainly — going in and out of the record store, hanging outside the Whisky or Sneeky Pete’s. If you got one talking you had to try to sell him the LP and engage him in conversation about the Light. Have you ever thought about smog? That was one of her openers. You know smog’s negative energy, right? It’s not a question of believing me or not believing, because you can see it up there, right above your head. What else is it if it ain’t negativity?

“You could say you’ll go with them,” said Travis, “if you think it’ll get them to come out to the rocks.”

“Go with them?”

“Don’t act dumb.”

If one bit, you could take him to the house. It was a rotting Victorian in Echo Park. It had a lot of bedrooms, but they all smelled of dead things, and the neighborhood was full of junkies and Mexicans who made obscene gestures and called out after you in Spanish. She got followed a couple of times. At night she’d sometimes stop by a diner and take out a hot black coffee just to have something to throw, maybe give herself a head start.

If they needed to crash, you let them stay. You cooked a meal (mac and cheese, said Travis, something homely) and introduced them to the others. All four girls were young and pretty and they never had trouble finding men to sit on the ratty couches in the living room and listen to their pitch about the Command. She fucked some of the guys she brought back. She fucked some of the guys the others brought back. Travis would usually be upstairs. Sometimes you’d have to go up and be with him.

It was like time stopped when you were in that house. It was exactly the same, day or night. The sound of top-forty music on a transistor radio, the swish of the plastic-bead curtain leading into the kitchen. Her room was painted dark red, lit by a bare bulb on the ceiling. Someone was always talking to someone just outside the door, telling them about the evacuation. Think about it. About earthquakes. You want to run the risk? The Command has been monitoring the West Coast for generations. They can evacuate the entire population within sixty seconds. They know where every one of us is at any time.

Fuck me you little bitch come on fuck me.

the ships are beautiful

the ships are full of joy

Clark wanted money. It wasn’t just that you had to go find recruits. You had to sell them the LP. Every afternoon, before they left to go to the Strip, Travis drummed it into them. How many would they sell that day? Think of a number, visualize that number. One night, Travis sat her down and made a suggestion. “Selling the record’s one thing,” he said. “There are others. I ain’t asking you to do nothing you ain’t already doing for free.”

The LP had seemed like such a wonderful idea. It was made from a tape taken off the desk at one of the sessions. Somehow Clark had persuaded Coyote to hand it over and announced in a meeting that from now on they were going to reach out across the airwaves of the world, bringing news of the coming crisis to anyone with an inquiring mind and five bucks in their pocket. At a joyous meeting in the dome, the remaining Lightworkers sat down together in a spirit of unity to put forward their ideas about how the sleeve should look and what should be written on the cover. They were disappointed when Clark played the tape. It sounded like it had been recorded through a sock. Coyote wasn’t around to shout at and Clark argued that sound quality didn’t really matter, because the Command’s message was coded into the carrier wave of the music. People would get it without having to get it. That was cool, but the record didn’t give a shadow of the real feeling of the Tronics. They’d hoped for more.

She never could explain how Coyote got on the sleeve. Everyone assumed there would be a picture of Judy looking positive, or Clark and Maa Joanie in their robes. The drawing was by a girl called Kristel, who liked to call herself ChrisTele, which she said meant “The Vision of Jesus-Sananda.” She drew Coyote getting electrocuted, standing in front of one of the Command’s spacecraft. Clark didn’t put up any resistance. Perhaps he was trying to get everyone to think he was sharing the Light.

Clark wanted them to sell the LP, so they sold it. Whether anyone ever listened to it more than once was another thing. The boys who paid their money and came back to eat the homely mac and cheese and liked the sound of a place out in the desert where sexy girls wanted to make it with you all day and night got put on Travis’s bus, or else were trusted to find their way on the Greyhound, carrying parcels wrapped up carefully by Travis with the promise of a special thank-you at the other end. Dawn would wave to them as they set off with their kit bags and backpacks, like circus performers getting into a cannon and being shot up into the air. Yes, baby. I’m coming in a few days. Don’t you worry. The ships are beautiful.

the ships are full of joy

She got gonorrhea, and Travis took her to a clap doctor, who gave her antibiotics and a lecture. At night she stumbled along the Strip, joining the swarm of kids trying to get in to see bands, eating from food trucks, tripping on the sidewalk outside the 76 station and looking up at the billboards. Come to Where the Flavor Is. There was a giant statue of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Bullwinkle’s shirt changed color depending on the outfit of the girl on the casino billboard on the other side of the street. At the co-op, she lined up dirty and barefoot, paying with the food stamps Travis gave them in return for the LP money. After a while she lost track of time. To the store, back from the store, to the Strip, back. She watched crabs crawling over a stained mattress like a platoon of soldiers, counting them off, counting them off; she went with Kristel and Maggie to score at an all-night drug store and noticed the dealer had a wooden hand. They couldn’t stop laughing. She was sitting in someone’s office doing her first blow, saying have you heard of the evacuation and remembering the dealer’s wooden hand and laughing laughing laughing and going to the store and back to the Strip and taco stands and coffee shops and topless bars and passing cars and passing cars and passing cars and passing cars.…

She stayed three months, through the spring and early summer of 1971. Though she didn’t think so at the time, it took something out of her. A freshness. She rode back into the desert sitting on the floor of Travis’s VW bus, bumping shoulders with her latest pickup, a red-haired boy from Iowa who didn’t know he was carrying almost half a pound of Laotian number-four heroin in the lining of his bag. Through the smeared little porthole windows the Ashtar Galactic Command’s primary Earth base looked meaner, more beat up than she remembered. The dome still loomed over it, but its panels were rusty and dull. Maa Joanie’s shack had caught fire, burned right down. It was all anyone could talk about: Who’d set the fire, was it the FBI or the town or the Forces of Darkness operating through an agent in the compound. Far as Dawn could see, it could have been anybody. The place was full of strangers. She and the other fishing girls had sent maybe twenty pickups out there, but there seemed to be all kinds of other people who didn’t look like they were passing through. A lot of tattoos. One or two obvious runaways, at least three guys walking around with Gypsy Joker patches. The first night all she could hear was the sound of bike engines, people smashing bottles, raising hell. Round about two in the morning some girl started screaming. No one sleeping near Dawn in the dome seemed bothered by it. No one even sat up. She went outside and poked about with a flashlight, but the screaming stopped before she could find where it was coming from.

The next morning she saw the red-haired boy thumbing a ride by the side of the road. He had a black eye. When she said what’s up, he told her to go to hell. You promised me this place was cool, he said.

A lot of faces were missing out of the old crowd. That night at dinner (which had gotten worse, if that was possible — a scoop of rice and a slop of flavorless lentils served in institutional metal trays) Dawn caught up on the news. None of it was good. The town had been tightening the noose. People from the Earth base got refused service in most of the stores. They had to drive twenty miles to get gas. The boys from Mulligan’s had hit them with every legal trick they could think of. Building code, sanitation. They’d declared the dome a hazardous structure, wanted to send in the bulldozers and clear it away.

Clark wanted her to come see him. He made her kneel down and once she was finished told her to be careful because walking among them were some who were not part of the Brotherhood of Light. “They are emanations of the Left Hand, little Dawnie. Their rays fall upon us as a weight, a kind of depression. If you feel such a weight, you let me know the name of the person. The Command will send help. You just tell me right away.”

Afterward, she picked her way up onto the rocks. As she sat, thinking and smoking a joint, she heard someone climbing the path toward her. A figure wrapped in a djellaba came into view, the pointed hood pulled down low over its face.

“Is that you, Dawnie? It’s me. Judy.”

Judy rushed into her arms like they were long-lost sisters, hugging her and covering her face in kisses. It was a clear night and the moon was full. Dawn was shocked. The girl looked like she was a thousand years old, her sunken eyes twin boreholes in her face, as if someone had pressed two thumbs into white clay.

“What’s the matter? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know, Dawnie. It’s all falling apart.”

Judy had a way of saying things like she believed them and didn’t believe them at the same time. When she got emotional, you’d suddenly feel part of her was completely detached, watching herself being happy or crying or interested in your day. Sometimes it seemed like she was just copying other people, as if she hoped that going through the motions would supply the feelings she didn’t actually have. That night was different. Her hands were freezing. She was quivering like a cornered animal.

They climbed up to the base of the tallest of the three Pinnacles, where there was a circular hollow, like a dry hot tub, in which you could sit and be sheltered from the wind. Judy pulled her knees up to her chest and rocked backward and forward. She shook her head when Dawn offered her the joint.

“Dawnie, they’re going to kill me.”

“What?”

“I know it. They’re going to do away with me.”

“What do you mean, kill you? Who?”

“Maa and Mr. Davis. They’re working themselves up to it. They pulled me out of the flow, now they’re throwing me back.”

She had that strange tone again, that sarcastic tone. Dawn fitted the roach into a clip and hunkered down, trying to light a match.

“I don’t understand you, honey. I don’t think anyone’s out to get you.”

“It’s all such a worry, what with the town hating us so much. Mr. Davis is looking into getting proper sewage laid, but that isn’t going to hold them for long.”

“Judy?”

“You don’t know. You haven’t even been here.”

“Try and keep your mind on one thing. Talk to me.”

“I was her little girl. They said that, over and over.”

“Judy, they worship you. They hold you up on high. You’re the one’s been to the ships. They wouldn’t harm a hair on your head.”

“Mr. Davis has got guns, you know. Stashed out in the desert. He’s got people training.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“You should be scared. He’s giving out radiation badges.”

“Clark’s doing this?”

“So you can detect it. It’s colorless and odorless. You have to wear the badges.”

“Is there something radioactive here, Judy?”

“Must be. Mr. Davis wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.”

“Judy, has Clark got something radioactive?”

“It’s the Dark Forces, Dawnie. The Left Hand. You can feel it, can’t you? It’s all over this place. Mr. Davis keeps talking about sacrifices. How we need to make them. For the Light. He goes on and on. It’s like he can’t think of anything else.”

“And you think he means you?”

“Why would he kill me, Dawnie? When he found me and took me up and looked after me for so very long?”

“I don’t know. I can’t believe he wants to hurt you — wait a minute. You said he found you?”

“In Salt Lake. That’s all I remember. I was just a little kid. He picked me right up off the floor like a shiny penny.”

“I thought you walked out of the desert. Maa Joanie waited for you and you came back to her.”

“I was the answer to her prayers.”

“Are you saying you’re not her daughter?”

“Dawnie, there are things that are over and done. We don’t like to talk about the things that are over and done.”

She leaned forward and hugged Dawn tight, pressing in, molding herself to her body. Help, Dawn thought. If you’re out there, Ascended Masters, help me. This is my distress call, my beacon.

No one came. No higher presence, no lights in the sky. Do not fear, she told herself.

do not fear

Rumors. You had to look out for the cigar-shaped craft, the ones with the insignia on the side. They were the dark ships. If they were invisible, you’d still feel their energy, the negativity directed at the Earth base in a great black beam. There was radiation everywhere, in the menthol cigarettes, the purple aum blotter acid, the water, the lentil stew. There were people who couldn’t be trusted, aligned to the Left Hand. They’d buried sources around the compound. Pellets of uranium. They were signaling to their masters using infrared.

She found Wolf and Coyote in a wickiup, singing rebel songs. The air was full of mesquite smoke. They’d sewn rainbow patches onto their clothes.

Everyone knew there’d soon be another raid. FBI, CIA, some clandestine government agency without an official name. Didn’t matter: The government was at the bottom of it. They were rolling up the Brotherhood. Ultralow mental frequencies. Secret offshore prisons. Lightworkers tortured, disappeared. Plausible deniability. COINTELPRO. How much radiation? Terrestrial or etheric? Who could say? They were in a remote area, free from the psychic vibrations of major cities. Maybe the Pinnacles had been chosen as an experimental site.

By whom?

“What are you doing?” she asked Wolf.

“I’m cleaning my gun.”

“Why?”

“So it can speak.”

Coyote slumped down next to her and held a Zippo lighter over the crotch seam of his jeans. He farted loudly. A little greenish puff of flame spurted out.

“It only takes a spark,” he said, “to light a prairie fire.”

“You’re disgusting.”

He laughed, showing a mouthful of yellow teeth. “You know there aren’t any ships, right? No ships filled with joy?”

Rumors. There were agents up on the rocks with masks and protective suits, sweeping, searching, combing the area. Clark was collecting the dosimeter badges for testing. The darkness coiled its way through the camp, rising up between people, causing fights. Coyote built a Geiger counter. A little box with a handle and a microphone on a rubber cord. When he held up the mike, a needle jumped across the dial and clicks and pops stuttered out of the speaker. In our food, our skin, our blood, the marrow of our bones. Everyone with their own decontamination regime. Scrubbing and gargling. Rose crystals, aluminum foil, lemon verbena tea. Was the whole site infected? In the chickpeas. Sprayed into the air from crop dusters. Fine droplets. Microscopic scale. Coyote, throwing lumps of quartz, snickering about background radiation, cosmic rays. Ten, twenty parts a million. The Tronics were broken. Sabotage? They had no protection. The darkness, getting into the circuits. The violet ray, the green ray, the black ray of despair.

Every day more people left, others arrived. Drifters, bikers, informers, agents. Every morning Dawn woke up and looked for Judy. Until she saw her she couldn’t relax. The camp had split into two factions. The radiation freaks clustered around Clark and Joanie; the others were with Wolf and Coyote. You saw people carrying rifles. A new phrase, a new philosophy.

Armed love.

Off the pigs! Strike terror into their plastic hearts. Clark and Joanie walked about, dressed like Christmas trees, shouting at people about the Command. The Ascended Masters were looking down on them in horror. Wolf and Coyote were taking their orders from the black ships. Kill their gods, whispered Coyote. Rise up and be free. It was a declaration of war. Angry scenes in the dome, radfreaks versus armed lovers, shouting, finger pointing, clenched fists punching the air. Clark tried to bring order. The hierarchy existed for a reason. Not everyone could send messages through the sacred channel to the sky. The fate of the Earth was in their hands. Unity was everything! His voice was high and cracked. No one seemed to give a damn. Coyote squatted down and pissed up against his throne. Wolf called out from the floor. Armed love! Only one division, one barrier — between the living and the dead. Time to break it down. Time to storm heaven.

Great liberation on hearing. The dead were tunneling through, slithering under the wire. Where were the ships, the beautiful ships filled with joy?

Now death was inside the dome, a skeletal communard breaching the citadel of the living. Clark was brandishing a pistol. Shots were fired. People ran for cover. Dawn didn’t know the name of the young man who fell. Blond hair. Death’s blue-eyed boy, clutching his chest. We aren’t settlers, he’d said, rapping round the fire. We are unsettlers. We want to learn water, learn animals fire sun moon edible plants. We want to be a dropout nation, living wild and free. Rattle the bones. Bones and stones. Ancient, futuristic. Red rose blooming through his shirt. Just a boy, shivering, bleeding out. He couldn’t speak. He was heading into the bardo. How it was decided, Dawn would never know, but instead of taking him to a doctor, they all gathered around with their instruments. Coyote was scurrying here and there, dishing out squares of blotter, connecting cables, getting mixed up in the paths and flows. And so they hooked the boy up to the Tronics and began the final session.

This was the bardo of the moment of death.

There was no chanting, no prayers. Just the drone, unfolding, opening up a doorway between the lands of the living and the dead. Merge with the Light, urged the drone. Know that you are part of the clear light of reality. Let go of all else.

There were guns. There were knives and machetes, duct tape, a saw. There was a car battery, jumper cables.

The dead boy was pulled down to the second bardo.

It was the scariest night of Dawn’s life. It was like finding yourself at the bottom of a cold, dark well. How long did it last? Days? Weeks? She fell away from the Light into visions of hell. Blood and darkness. Writhing snakes, like intestines. The boy’s body was wrapped in a tarp and carried out into the desert. Figures digging a hole, throwing him in.

When the sun rose over the mountains, and a wedge of watery orange daylight started pushing its way through the doorway of the dome, Dawn wept with relief. That morning, as people stumbled, blinking out into the light, she packed a bag and headed to the highway junction. She didn’t say good-bye to anyone. Not Judy. Not anyone. All she could think of was getting away.

She thumbed a ride from a trucker who was going to L.A. and, like water heading downhill, soon found herself back on the Strip. She spent a few nights on the street, a few more nights with a pickup, then found a job dancing in a cage at a bar where the girls served drinks in superhero outfits. She crashed at a place in West Hollywood, then another in Santa Monica, owned by a Hasidic Jew who had a chain of dry cleaners and was happy to take favors for the rent. Time passed. She made the glitter scene. She never talked about Ashtar or anything like that. Ancient history. She wore hot pants and five-inch space boots and hung around with nymphet girls and faggoty boys outside the English Disco, trying to meet musicians. For a while she followed bands, fucked roadies and booking agents, trying to get close to Bowie or the Stones. One of them took her to Vegas, where she got raped by three guys in a hot tub to the sound of the Doobie Brothers and things kind of slid from there, five shifts nightly, topless, full nude, no touching, touching, until she was giving head in the bathroom at an all-night coffee shop in return for food, her arms and legs a mass of bruises, her mind shot to hell. One night she headed down a rabbit hole following a line of cocaine and by some miracle emerged alive to find it was 1986 and she was sitting on a bed in a Miami hotel room with a hundred and eighty thousand dollars cash and a lot of smashed furniture and the memory of something bloody and violent she’d promised never to speak about again.

She bought the motel with that money, and only when she was painting the place, using healing lilac and purple, did she start to have doubts. Had that last session in the dome ever really ended? Was the life she’d led just another bardo, another intermediate state? Waking consciousness was a bardo, between past and future existences. Dreaming was a bardo. Was she dreaming? Or was this one of the bardos of death? She could feel herself falling away from the Light. She could feel the drone, still working inside her.