Gods Without Men Read online

  ALSO BY HARI KUNZRU

  The Impressionist

  Transmission

  My Revolutions

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2011 by Hari Kunzru

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint

  of Penguin Books Ltd., London, in 2011.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kunzru, Hari, [date]

  Gods without men / by Hari Kunzru.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95749-8

  “Originally published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton,

  an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd., London”—T.p. verso.

  1. Missing children—Fiction. 2. Serendipity—Fiction. 3. California—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PR6111.U68G63 2012 823’.92—dc23 2011043447

  Jacket design by Jason Booher

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  For Katie

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1947

  2008

  1778

  2008

  1958

  2008

  1969

  2008

  1920

  2008

  1970

  2008

  1871

  2008

  1920

  2008

  1971

  2008

  1942

  2009

  2008

  2009

  1775

  Acknowledgments

  About This Reading Group Guide

  About the Book

  Questions for Discussion

  Suggested Reading

  A Note About the Author

  Dans le désert, voyez-vous, il y a tout, et il n’y a rien … c’est Dieu sans les hommes.

  —BALZAC, “Une passion dans le désert” (1830)

  De Indio y Negra, nace Lobo, de Indio y Mestiza, nace Coyote …

  —ANDRÉS DE ISLAS, Las Castas (1774)

  My God! It’s full of stars!

  —ARTHUR C. CLARKE, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

  In the time when the animals were men

  In the time when the animals were men, Coyote was living in a certain place. “Haikya! I have gotten so tired of living here-aikya. I am going to go out into the desert and cook.” With this, Coyote took an RV and drove into the desert to set up a lab. He took along ten loaves of Wonder bread and fifty packets of ramen noodles. He took whiskey and enough pot to keep him going. He searched for a long time and found a good place. “Here, I will set up-aikya! There is so much room! There is no one to bother me here!”

  Coyote set to work. “Oh,” he said, “haikya! I have so many tablets of pseudoephedrine! It took me so long to get! I have been driving around to those pharmacies for so long-aikya!” He crushed the pseudo until it was a fine powder. He filled a beaker with wood spirit and swirled around the powder. He poured the mixture through filter papers to get rid of the filler. Then he set it on the warmer to evaporate. But Coyote forgot to check his thermometer and the temperature rose. It got hotter and hotter. “Haikya!” he said. “I need a cigarette-aikya! I’ve done such a lot of hard work-aikya!”

  He lit a cigarette. There was an explosion. He died.

  Cottontail Rabbit came past and touched him on the head with his staff. Coyote sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Honored Coyote!” said Cottontail Rabbit. “Close the door of the RV. Keep it closed. Do your smoking outside.”

  Coyote began to whine. “Ouch-aikya! Where are my hands-aikya? My hands have blown off.” He whined and lay down and was sad for a long time. Then Coyote got up and made himself hands out of a cholla cactus.

  He began again.

  He ground the pseudo. He mixed it with the solvent. He filtered and evaporated and filtered and evaporated, until he was sure all the filler was gone. Then he sat down and began scraping matchboxes to collect red phosphorus. He mixed the pseudo with his matchbox scrapings and iodine and plenty of water. Suddenly the flask began to boil. Gas started to fill the air. It got in his eyes, his fur. He howled and scratched at his face.

  He choked on the poison gas and died.

  Gila Monster came past and sprinkled water on him. Coyote sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Honored Coyote!” said Gila Monster. “Use a hose. Stop your flask, fill a bucket with kitty litter and run the hose down into that. The gas will be captured. Trap it and watch it bubble and boil, there in the flask. Don’t breathe at all if you can help it.”

  Coyote began to whine. “Ouch-aikya! Where is my face-aikya? I have scratched my face off.” He ran down to the river and made himself a face out of mud and plastered it over the front of his head. Then he began again. He crushed the pseudo and evaporated it. He scraped the matchboxes and bubbled the flask into the bucket of kitty litter. He mixed the chemicals and cooked his mixture and filtered it and added in some Red Devil lye. He watched his thermometer. He was careful not to breathe. He cooled the mixture down and added in some camping fuel and shook it up and jumped up and down for glee when he saw the crust of crystal floating on the liquid. He started to evaporate off the solvent but was so excited that he forgot to keep his tail out of the fire. He was dancing round the lab, lighting everything on fire with his tail.

  The lab burned down. He died.

  Southern Fox came past and touched him on the chest with the tip of his bow. “Honored Coyote!” he said. “You must keep your tail out of it! That is the only way to cook.”

  “Ouch-aikya!” whined Coyote. “My eyes, where are my eyes-aikya?” Coyote made himself eyes out of two silver dollars and started again. He crushed the pseudo. He filtered and evaporated it, he mixed and heated and bubbled the gas. He filtered and evaporated some more, and then he danced up and down. “Oh, I am clever-aikya!” said Coyote. “I am cleverer than them all-aikya!” He had in his hands a hundred grams of pure crystal.

  And Coyote left that place.

  That is all, thus it ends.

  1947

  First time Schmidt saw the Pinnacles he knew it was the place. Three columns of rock shot up like the tentacles of some ancient creature, weathered feelers probing the sky. He ran a couple of tests, used the divining rods and the earth meter. Needle went off the scale. No question, there was power here, running along the fault line and up through the rocks: a natural antenna. The deal was done quickly. Eight hundred bucks to the old woman who owned the lot, some papers to sign at a law office in Victorville and it was his. Twenty-year lease, easy as pie. He couldn’t believe his luck.

  He bought a used Airstream off a lot in Barstow, towed it onto the site, and sat for a whole afternoon in a lawn chair, admiring the way the aluminum trailer reflected the light. Took him back to the Pacific, the Superforts on their hardstands at North Field. The way those bombers glittered in the sun. There was a lesson in that dazzle, showed there were worlds a person couldn’t bear to look upon directly.

  He didn’t sleep at all the first night. Lying under a blanket on the ground, staring straight
up, he kept his eyes open until the blacks turned purple, then gray, and the wool was frosted with little droplets of condensation like tiny diamonds. The desert smell of creosote and sage, the dome of stars. There was more action up in the sky than down on Earth, but you had to drag yourself out of the city to know it. All those damn verticals cluttering your sightline, all the steel pipes and cables and so forth under your feet, jamming you up, interrupting the flows. People hadn’t fooled with the desert. It was land that let you alone.

  He thought he stood a good chance. He was still young enough to take on the physical work, unencumbered by wife or family. And he had faith. Without that he’d have given up long ago, back when he was still a kid reading mail-order tracts on his lunch break, making his first tentative notes on the mysteries. Now he wanted no distractions. He didn’t bother about the good opinion of the folks in town. He was polite, passed the time of day when he went to pick up supplies at the store, but didn’t trouble himself further. Most men were fools; he’d found that out on Guam. Sons of bitches never would let him be, giving him nicknames, making childish jokes at his expense. Took all he had not to do what was on his mind, but after Lizzie he didn’t have the right, so he’d tamped down his anger and got on with fighting the war. Those saps had flown lord knew how many missions and with all those hours logged, all that chance to see, they still thought the real world was down on the ground, in the chow line, between the legs of the pinup girls they pasted over their rancid cots. Only person he met with a lick of sense was that Irish bombardier, what was his name, Mulligan or Flanagan, some Irish name, who told him of the lights he’d spotted when they were on their way to drop a load over Nagoya, green dots moving too fast to be Zeroes. Asked to borrow a book. Schmidt lent it to him, never did get it back. Kid went down with the rest of his crew a week later, ditched into the sea.

  Little by little, the place came together. The trailer was hot as all hell and he was trying to work out some way to utilize the shade of the rocks when he found the prospector’s burrow. Didn’t know what it was until he asked at the bar in town. Concreted over a few years previous when they flushed the old bastard out, some story about thinking he was a German spy. Crazy as a coot he may have been, probably starving to death since there wasn’t a cent of silver or anything else on his so-called claim, but he knew how to dig. A whole room, four hundred square feet, right under the rocks. Cool in summer, insulated against the winter nights. A goddamn bunker.

  After that it was all gravy. He graded an airstrip, sunk a gas tank into the dirt, threw up a cinder-block shelter and painted WELCOME in big white letters on the tin roof. Now he had a business. The café was never going to amount to much, but then he didn’t need it to be General Motors. He felt he could have gotten along without another living soul, but his savings weren’t going to last forever. He had another year, perhaps two, before money got tight, just about the right time for an enterprise like that to find its feet.

  There weren’t too many passing aircraft. About once a week someone would land. He’d serve them coffee, fry eggs. When they asked what he was doing out there he’d say just waiting, and when they asked what for he’d say he didn’t know yet but it sure beat sitting in traffic, and that was usually enough for them. He’d never take visitors down into the bunker. After a few months the numbers increased. Pilots flying to and from the coast began to hear there was a place to refuel. He bought some chairs and Formica-top tables, laid in a stock of beer.

  There were problems, of course. His generator broke down. There was a confrontation with some Indians he caught clambering about on the rocks, had to show them his shotgun. After they went away he found rock drawings up there, handprints and snakes and bighorn sheep. Another day a dust storm forced a plane down. The wind was blowing sideways across the strip at fifty miles an hour and the pilot did well to land at all—looked like it would pick up his left wing and flip him as he made his approach. Schmidt ran out to meet him, holding a bandanna over his mouth. Without thinking he took him underground, the logical place to shelter.

  The pilot was a young buck, twenty-one or so, head of dark hair, little dandyish mustache. Rich kid. As he stripped off his jacket and goggles, he looked around in wonder, asked where on earth he was.

  By that time the project was well advanced. Schmidt had built a vortical condenser to store and concentrate the paraphysical energies flowing through the rocks. A crystal was set into a gimbal on the tip of the tallest stack, angled toward Venus. He was developing a parallel piezoelectric system, based on his study of Tesla, but for now was sending signals using an old Morse key, with an aetheric converter to transform the physical clicks into modulations of the paraphysical carrier wave. He explained all this to the pilot, who listened intently, taking in the machinery, the piles of books and notes. He seemed impressed.

  “And what message are you sending?”

  There was a question. Schmidt’s message was love. Love and brotherhood to all beings in the galaxy. Two hours of redemption nightly, starting soon as the planet was visible over the horizon. Two hours of repeating his invitation: WELCOME. He didn’t want to talk about it, not with a stranger, made some joke about higher powers, more things than were visible to the naked eye.

  The pilot smiled. “Hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “We’ll see, I suppose.”

  From then on the kid would land his Cub at the Pinnacles every couple of weeks. His daddy was some big farmer down in Imperial Valley, but Davis, that was his name, wanted more out of life than orange groves and wetback pickers. Though Schmidt didn’t ask for a thing, he gave him money to buy books and equipment. Clark Davis was the first disciple, the first to understand the true nature of Schmidt’s calling.

  One night they flew over the Nevada state line, touched down at a ranch near Pahrump, a property with neon beer signs in the windows and a row of semis parked out front. Davis wanted to show him a good time, said it wasn’t normal to be on his own so much. Against his better judgment—the whole escapade was against his better judgment—Schmidt found himself sitting nervously, drink in hand, as the girls lined up in their silky nothings, pouting and sticking out their behinds. Davis acted all man-of-the-world, choosing a big-titted greaser and winking encouragingly as he followed her out, like Schmidt was some nervous teenager getting his dick wet for the first time. That got his back up. He downed his brandy, asked for another. He hadn’t touched alcohol since that last night with Lizzie and soon he remembered why; though the little blonde scrap he chose was cute and gentle as could be, he just felt angry at her, at himself, really, and she must have gotten scared and pressed a button or something because before too long he was outside with his pants in his hands, hunting for his other boot in the parking lot.

  He tried to explain it to Davis. How he’d been a wild boy, too much for his broke-down mother. How he didn’t care to know about school or a trade, just wanted a big canvas for his young life and air that didn’t taste of sulfur, so he hopped a freight and never once looked back at the smokestacks of Erie, Pennsylvania. By seventeen he was working the line at a salmon cannery in Bristol Bay, spending his pay in the bars and getting himself into every kind of trouble, which eventually added up to Lizzie, who was all of fourteen years old, half-blood native and crazier than he was. Took him in her mouth in the doorway of a warehouse on the docks and it was like a band started playing inside his skull. Before too long she was pregnant and then he really was in the shit because she had brothers and her father was some town big shot, more or less dragged the two of them to church just to save the family reputation. The old man hated Schmidt’s guts for obvious reasons but to do him justice he tried to be decent, set them up in a little place, even gave money for the kid. Catch was Schmidt didn’t like charity, and he certainly didn’t like to feel trapped, and because the little boy’s screams set him on edge and because he’d somehow lost his taste for her, he started slapping Lizzie around. Her menfolk warned him and each time it happened he cried in the gi
rl’s lap and swore he’d do better, but the arguments only left him feeling sore and cornered, and then one night he drank more than usual and she talked back and somehow he ended up tying a noose round her neck and dragging her half a mile behind his truck before he came to his senses and hit the brake.

  She survived, though she didn’t look the same after. In the lockup some boys held him down and messed with him and he thought they’d kill him because they said they’d been paid by Lizzie’s daddy, but they let up when they’d done their business and he pulled on his pants and lay down in a corner of his cell and was still lying there when the Russian came to bail him out. The Russian had owed him ever since Schmidt stopped him from putting some guy out of a third-floor window at the Friday-night card game. Think of all the years, said Schmidt, and the Russian, whiskey-deaf as he was, took heed. He was dangling the whimpering cheat by his ankles, about drunk enough to drop him, but instead he lifted him back in and gave him a couple of taps on the jaw and no more was said on the matter. Next morning when he sobered up he thanked Schmidt, said if he ever got into trouble he’d be there. The Russian’s two hundred bucks was Schmidt’s first stroke of luck. Second was when the police chief turned up at the door and told him that if he left the Territory that same afternoon, Lizzie’s old man wouldn’t press charges. Reputation again. Worth more to him than his half-breed daughter, it appeared.

  So Schmidt headed south, and though he tried to tough it out, told the story to men he worked or roomed with like it was some kind of joke, the guilt grew on him until it blotted out all happiness and he knew he’d kill himself unless he did something to get back right with the world. I’m just scum, he’d say to anyone who’d listen. Can’t help it, always been that way. And he thought he always would be, thought it was impossible to change, until he found out that impossible is a word found only in the dictionary of fools, which was a quotation, his first, the second being If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you, a saying he picked out of an old copy of Reader’s Digest and which gave him the notion, foreign to him until that time, that you could find truth in the written word. Thereafter he made a habit of seeking out such written truths and copying them down, first on scraps of paper, then in notebooks, until finally he realized he was working toward a system, such an understanding of the world as very few possessed. He read as much as he could, devoured books in every spare minute of his day, and never again touched liquor until Davis persuaded him into it, and only then out of some momentary wish to be like other people, a right he knew deep down he’d forfeited.