Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (27 page)

“Let’s go see the big fella,” Steve suggested.
   It took ten minutes to walk to the Man, seventy feet of two-by-four planks and neon tubes atop a wooden ziggurat four storeys tall. We climbed the ziggurat and edged through the crowd atop it until we stood directly beneath the Man’s gigantic wooden bones, looking across the desert night at the vast glittering arc of Black Rock City. After a little while we descended into the ziggurat, where tiny clumps of dirt and grass hung suspended on ropes from the top rafters. In the desiccated desert air the grass’s rich thick smell, the smell of life, was overpowering. I admired the solid carpentry and wondered how the constructors felt, spending weeks building this structure and then, after only a week, on Saturday night, watching it burn.

 “Do you know where Hatter is camping?” Talena asked on the way back to camp.
   We had one friend here, Chris Aanansen, aka the Mad Hatter. He had been here for nearly two weeks already because he was a member of the Department of Public Works, the mostly-volunteer crew who built the city’s infrastructure from scratch every year.
   “A camp called Crackhaus.”

“Sounds charming. Did he say where?”

“He said they’d be registered at Center Camp and we could look it up.”

“Don’t suppose your friend Zoltan will be registered too,” Lawrence said. “International House Of War Criminals And Heroin Dealers, maybe? It’s got a ring to it. We should suggest it when we find him.”

“Finding him could be tricky,” Steve said. “This is a bloody big place.”
   “We came prepared with a plan,” I said. “You know that poster tube we brought?” Lawrence and Steve nodded. “Well, finding Zoltan sounds like too much trouble. Much easier to make him come to us.”

Up close, the pixillated images of Zoltan blown up to 2-foot-by-3-foot poster size looked like abstract art, but from ten feet away or further his grim features were recognizable. Lawrence, Talena and I took two of our four copies to Center Camp Café, Burning Man’s nerve center, while Steve and Saskia set up the honey-pot camp. An odd combination; Saskia looked like a pygmy next to Steve.

It was only ten in the morning and the heat of the sun already felt like a physical weight. We had been driven from our tents an hour earlier thanks to their tendency to turn into ovens in direct sunlight. Again I wished for a shade structure. At least we had brought hats and sunscreen. I wondered how long it would take to die of exposure out here, if you were abandoned naked in the desert. A few days at most.
   By night, Black Rock City was a phantasmagoric, glittering wonderland; by stark colour-draining sunlight, it looked like some kind of avant-garde apocalypse, Mad Max meets Mardi Gras, as if all of America’s colourful mutant social subspecies had been driven into the desert by some disaster. Pierced and tattooed people with unnatural hair colours whizzed by on bicycles already thickly tarnished with pale dust. We passed a row of blue Porta-Potties. The heat and stench inside those plastic cubicles guaranteed that people with delicate sensibilities steered far clear of Burning Man. People were lined up, mostly in pyjamas or jeans, most of the men and some of the women topless, but even by day there were many retina-scarring outfits. A couple of men wore nothing at all. I wondered how much sunscreen they went through. Talena and Lawrence and I were hopelessly mundane in yoga pants and halter top, shorts and T-shirt, and sweat pants and no shirt, respectively.
   Center Camp Café had room for maybe a thousand people. Long lines stretched up to the coffee bar. A couple of dozen near-naked men and women, several of them elaborately tattooed, did yoga on the performance mat. A woman played an accordion on one stage, and a man ranted on the other, each amplified just enough that they wouldn’t interfere with one another. There were massage tables and feathered art installations and heaps of benches and couches and cushions and chairs, and the ground was covered by hundreds of overlapping carpets, and there was shade, for which I was very thankful.
   “Look at this. We’re surrounded by dozens of fit half-naked women,” Lawrence said. “That’s morally wrong. They should be fully naked.”
   “Some of them are,” Talena said, nodding towards a tiny, pretty, and natural blonde chatting with a man in leather hot pants.
   “Ah. Well. I suppose that’s a start.” I think Lawrence was a little shocked. I know I was. Topless women and naked men were common Burning Man sights, but full female nudity was unusual. He changed the subject quickly. “Where do you think we can put up our Wanted Dead Or Alive posters?”
   “Maybe we should ask the coffee people,” I suggested.
   “Ask someone in charge if it’s okay,” Talena said, amused. “How Canadian.”
   “You think it’s easier to ask forgiveness then permission?” I asked.
   “I think it’s anarchy and there’s nobody to ask. One on the wall, here, and then one on the other side.” She led the way, posters in one hand, duct tape in the other.
   My plan was a variant of what the hacking world called a “honey pot”: set up an invitingly open computer system that would-be intruders will flock to, not knowing their every move is tracked. For our honey pot we had annexed a second patch of real estate, across the street and down about fifty feet from our real camp. Steve had erected a tent there and affixed one of Zoltan’s posters, a pad of paper, and a pen. The two Zoltan posters in Center Camp Café were adorned with with helpful Magic Marker captions: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? COME TO GOSPEL AND 5:10! TELL US WHERE AND WHEN!

With any luck people would interpret it as a weird social-art piece and enlist themselves in our hunt, recording Zoltan sightings for us. But what we were really counting on was that Zoltan or Zorana themselves would see the poster and come investigate. One of us would keep a discreet eye on the honey-pot tent at all times. Between turning our hunt for Zoltan into performance art, staking out the honey pot in case they showed up in person, and the high-tech toys I had bought in San Francisco’s International Spy Shop, I figured our chances were pretty good.
   We purchased iced lattes – when in the desert, ice seems like the apotheosis of all human endeavour – and went back to our camp to deliver two to Steve and Saskia as a reward for their work. Zoltan’s mug was securely taped to the honey-pot tent, and its odd blown-up-tiny-picture appearance serendipitously made it actually stand out a little in the sea of visual stimulation that was Burning Man. A pad of paper and a pen were lashed securely to the honey pot’s tent pole.

Steve had even managed to rig a kind of shade structure for us between the tents and the car, made out of tent flies. It wasn’t much compared to most of the camps we had passed – even the humdrum ones generally had a geodesic dome, covered in parachute fabric and decorated with couches, chairs, carpets, pillows, and mountains of water – but it sure beat sitting in the blazing sun.
   “Now we start sitting around watching?” Talena asked.
   I nodded. “I was figuring three-hour shifts.”
   “I’ll start,” Lawrence said. “It’s noon. I’ll expect reinforcements at three.”
   “Try not to get distracted by the naked ladies,” Talena cautioned.
   “Never,” Lawrence swore unconvincingly. “Where are your James Bond toys?”
   “In our tent,” I said.

San Francisco, like London and New York, boasts a branch of the International Spy Shop. Its Folsom Street store sadly does not sell poisons, explosives, or Aston Martins outfitted with laser beams; it does not even sell guns; but it does sell tear gas and gask masks, plus powerful binoculars and shotgun microphones with which one can watch and listen from hundreds of feet away. Another authorized expenditure of Sinisa’s blood money.
   “Maybe I stay here,” Saskia said. She seemed a little overwhelmed and unsettled by Burning Man. I couldn’t blame her.

“Let’s go find my friend,” I said to Steve and Talena. “He’s all plugged in, he can tell us where we should go. The Mad Hatter.”
   Years ago I had worked with Chris Aanansen, universally known as the Mad Hatter, or just Hatter. Back then it said “guru” on his business card. Testament to the excesses of the dot-com boom, yes, but also accurate; Hatter was a brilliant programmer. Unfortunately he hated programming. So when boom went bust he turned his back on computers and morphed rather bizarrely into an adrenalin junkie. Now he made his living as a smokejumper, parachuting out of airplanes to fight forest fires, arguably the world’s most intense job. Like Steve, Hallam, and many other of my friends, Hatter would have made me feel incompetent, inadequate, unmanly and inconsequential, if he hadn’t been such a helluva nice guy.
   He was also a hard partier. When we showed up at Camp Crackhaus it was littered with discarded beer and whisky bottles, empty nitrous oxide canisters, and unconscious semihuman forms sleeping off the night’s revelry. There was an art car parked out front, a straight-out-of-Mad-Max pickup truck, painted to look like a postapocalyptic relic, armed with a pair of turret-mounted propane-powered flamethrowers. Excessive pyromania was apparently a signature element of Burning Man from the name on down. The art car’s engine seemed to have fallen victim to dust, mortal enemy to all moving parts; its hood was up and two men dressed in black looked into it and muttered grimly to one another.

Hatter, a tall, lean, cadaverous man with a lined face that made him look older than his thirty years, sat slumped on a folding chair, sipping from a can of beer, smoking a cigarette. A large patch of the left side of his face appeared to have been scraped off with a cheese grater. One of the many spectacular hats he owned, hence his nickname, sat on the ground next to him, two feet tall and zebra-striped. A walkie-talkie rested atop the hat.

“Hatter! What happened?” I asked.
“Paul!” he exclaimed, pleased and surprised. He leapt up and hugged me. “I didn’t know you were coming! And Tally, right?” They had only met a couple of times.

“Talena,” she corrected him politely. She didn’t like the diminutive.

“This is – where’s Steve?” I asked.

Talena pointed to the broken-down art car. Steve’s blond, smiling face appeared for a moment from behind the hood. “Just having a bit of a go,” he called out, before diving back into the engine. There was nothing that made Steve happier than fixing a broken machine. The two black-clad men next to him looked on with bemused awe as he worked.

“What happened to your face?” Talena asked Hatter.

He waved dismissively. “I fell off an art car. At the DPW party. Hurts like a sonofabitch, but we’ve got plenty of illegal analgesics around here. So what made you come? When did you arrive?”

“Last night. Kind of a last minute decision,” I said, avoiding the whole story. Hatter was a good friend but not a tribal brother; I couldn’t enlist him the way I had Steve and Lawrence.

“And how are you liking the playa?”

“The what?” Talena asked.

“Playa. Spanish for beach. This whole desert was a lakebed, a few million years ago. Burners call the desert the playa.”
   “Burners,” I said cautiously.
   “Right. Sorry. You’re new around here. ‘Burners’ means anyone at Burning Man.”
   “Oh. Okay. Anything else we should know? Advice for newbies?”
   “Sure,” Hatter said. “Let’s see. Hydrate. That’s the most important thing. Keep water with you at all times, and keep drinking it. What else…It’s a gift economy out here. The only things you buy are coffee and ice. Otherwise, just ask for stuff, and people will probably give it to you, if it’s at all reasonable.”
   “And then you give them something back?” Talena asked.
   “Gift economy, not barter. Giving back is nice but not necessary. You’ll even find random people walking around giving you things.” He shrugged. “Crappy little trinkets, mostly, but the symbolism matters. I don’t mean to get all hippie on you, but honestly, out here there really is a genuine general sense that sharing is good, and you take care of everyone, neighbours, strangers, anyone. It’s pretty amazing.”
   I nodded, though I wasn’t all that amazed. I had travelled enough to know that this attitude was common to all desert cultures.
   “Did you bring bicycles?” he asked.
   We shook our heads.
   “Too bad. Best way to get around. You’re not supposed to use any non-art-car after you’ve arrived. You can hop rides in art cars, but it’s not like they follow any kind of route or schedule.” He grinned. “That’s what makes them fun.”
   “What happens if we do use our car?” I asked. “Do we get kicked out?”
   “It’s happened.”
   “Who does the kicking? Who runs this place?”
   “Runs is a dangerous word,” Hatter said cautiously. “This is more an anarchic bazaar than a structured event. But there is a group that orchestrates it, organizes all the volunteers. If you manage to really piss a lot of people off, the Black Rock Rangers will throw you out. They make sure everybody plays nice. Volunteers. Like the rest of the infrastructure people. DPW, the lamplighters, the coffee people, the medical centre, the firefighters, the post office, the cleanup crew, almost everyone’s a volunteer. Hey, what time is it?”

I glanced at my watch. “About eleven.”

“Eleven? Shit. I should get going. I’m supposed to be jumping in half an hour.”

“Jumping?” Talena asked.

“Skydiving. World’s greatest hangover cure. But, shit, I don’t know. It’s a long walk on a hot day. The Deathguild boyz were going to give me a ride on Rogue, but it’s busted.”

“Rogue? Deathguild?” Talena asked.

“Deathguild is the big goth camp on the Esplanade,” Hatter said, gesturing vaguely towards the Man, whose wooden form was visible from most of Black Rock City by day. “They run Thunderdome. The big bungee-fighting place. Rogue is one of their art cars. But her engine crapped out last night and nobody here knows how to fix it.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I said. “Steve! How’s it looking?”

“She’ll be right in a minute, mate, no worries! Just need to grease the wurblesnatcher and cobblegrind the ozone belt!” Steve called back, or might as well have for all I understood him.

Hatter nodded as if Steve’s response had made sense to him.

“Maybe we’ll ride along with you to the airstrip, if that’s okay,” I suggested.

“Sure, yeah. I mean, if the Deathguilders say it’s okay. It’s their car,” he said, motioning to the two men wearing far too much black leather for this heat.

“Give her a go, mate!” Steve said to one of them. He blinked, obviously not accustomed to being so addressed by gigantic blond Australians, but once he deciphered Steve’s meaning he went to the driver’s seat and turned the key. Rogue’s engine roared into life. Wide smiles broke out on the faces of two Deathguilders before they remembered they were goths and recomposed their expressions into menacing gloom.

“You blokes mind if we borrow your ute for a bit of a recce?” Steve asked.

They looked at one another.

“Sure,” one of them said cautiously, almost as if he had understood.

“Outstanding. Paul! Talena! Hop in!”

“Come on,” I said to the Hatter, “you’ve got yourself an airport limousine. Do those flamethrowers actually work?”

“Like a charm. I’ll show you.”
   The two goths drove. Steve, Talena, Hatter and I perched atop the back, occasionally startling those around us with Rogue’s twin turret-mounted flamethrowers, each of which belched flame about twenty feet.
   “Bit of an amateur job, this,” Steve said reflectively as he examined the pipes, valves, tubes and Zippo lighters that comprised the flamethrowers. His hands were dark with grease.
   “Please try not to blow yourself up,” I said. “It would be hard to explain to Hallam.”
   “I reckon that’s just how Hallam figures I’ll buy the farm,” Steve pointed out.
   I chuckled. “True. But still. Try not to make a down payment while you’re here.”
   Burning Man’s airstrip was some distance southeast of the two-thirds torus that was Black Rock City. The city proper was only a fraction of Burning Man’s geography, which in turn occupied only a tiny patch of the desert. The playa. The border between Burning Man and raw desert was demarcated by a three-foot-high orange ‘trash fence’. Beyond that fence, the lone and level playa, one of the most visually barren landscapes on the planet, stretched far away. The jagged, arid hills that surrounded the desert, thirty miles distant, looked close enough to touch. The wind was beginning to pick up and in the distance I saw a vortex of dust easily a hundred feet tall.