I decided we needed a temporary break from the Drive. I pulled around the corner to a donut shop that I knew would be open. It always was. It took about half an hour of drinking cups of strong black coffee and eating jelly-filleds before I felt ready to get back in the car.
Walt had seemed remarkably unperturbed throughout this entire encounter, but he did seem to enjoy the donuts. I was so caught up in myself that I realized that a jelly donut was yet another in a long string of firsts for him.
By the time we had gotten back to where we had started on the Drive, for it runs in a loop, the sky was on the indeterminate edge between dusk and full dark. I turned off California, went down a block, then turned left onto Sacramento. This was the same hill we had rolled backwards down only a few hours before. In some ways I was hesitant to give the car back, it had been lots of fun to drive. But then I imagined trying to park a Ferrari in my neighborhood. That would simply not do. There are some types of insults of being that are too much for people to excuse. A car like that parked outside my building would be an affront to everyone who lived there. The urge to kick out a window or scratch the paint or stab a tire would be too great.
Besides, keeping the car would violate my tacit agreement with Jose, and would probably get me in a lot of trouble. Police Headquarters is located at Seventh and Bryant, about four blocks from my place, and I do not think it would take them too long to find me if they set their minds to it.
This mental deliberation took well under a block of traveling up the hill. The garage was rapidly approaching me on my right. Even from this distance, I could hear a great commotion coming from inside. The noises were not any that I really could identify, but I did not like the sound of them.
Amazingly, miraculously, there was a parking spot just outside the garage. I cut the lights and turned off the engine while we were still rolling, hoping to come in unnoticed. This was a brilliant plan, but I had forgotten one thing. The steering wheel locked up as soon as the key was turned off. We hit the curb quite a bit harder then I had intended, and the front end of the car went up onto the sidewalk diagonally. That was not exactly what I had in mind, but it would do. I yanked on the emergency brake and jumped out over the door of the car. I whispered to Walt to be quiet and follow me.
We walked down the hill about half a block before crossing the street. We then walked back up the hill. Instinctively I knew that this was probably a bad idea, but I had to find out what was going on inside the garage.
When we had reached to a point where we could see inside, I could hardly believe my eyes. A whole group of men with shaved heads dressed in purple robes and yellow sashes seemed to have invaded the garage. Jose was surrounded by these men, many of whom were playing drums or cymbals or long alp-horn-looking things. The rest were chanting and droning in a most peculiar way.
There was also a very distraught woman there. She did not seem to be on the same mission as the men with the shaved heads. She wore a tailored linen suit and several strands of pearls. She was screaming.
I looked at Walt and he looked at me. Walt’s system had rapidly become accustomed to being shocked. Any one day in San Francisco could provide him with several lifetimes worth of stories to tell back on Tristan, if anyone would listen. This scene, as we both could tell immediately, went well beyond our normal level of everyday weirdness. I knew I was curious, but I could not tell what Walt was feeling.
He was halfway across the street before I decided that I wanted to go over there, too.
As we crossed the street I had a difficult time picking out what the woman was screaming, but when I did I was glad that Jose had created a diversion for us. She was nearly incoherent, shouting that no one could seem to find her Ferrari, her beautiful Ferrari. She shouted about her being a dermatologist, and a good dermatologist at that. She had gone to school for twelve years to become a world-class authority on zits. Her education was wasted, she said, on pimply teens. Her research had gotten her nowhere, the only thing she needed to know for her practice was how to spell benzoyl peroxide, and whether to recommend a 5% or 10% dosage. The stuff did not even require a prescription.
She was really losing it. She went on to say, or scream rather, that her one joy in life, her single consolation for a lifetime of healing acne sufferers was her Ferrari, and now it was GONE!!! The last word came out more as a howl than an articulate word. She was sobbing hysterically now, a splatter of tears streaking her glasses.
This was not going to be easy.
We had been in the garage for few minutes now, and I had given practically all my attention to the yelling lady dermatologist whose Ferrari we had used. I was startled when I noticed Walt had gone off somewhere by himself. I looked around and spotted him speaking to one of the men in robes. I went over to join them.
The man was speaking very excitedly, and in a very thick accent, but I was able to get the gist of what he was saying. He claimed that Jose, King of the Parking Lot was in fact the Panchen Lama, the second-highest ranking member of the Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy.
I was skeptical. The monk, at least that is what he told me he was, said that the Panchen Lama had left Tibet at the same time the more famous Dalai Lama had. They both served for several years during the 1950’s on the Steering Committee of the People’s Republic of China. The Dalai Lama had left his Panchen colleague in China for a return to Tibet before finally settling in exile in India.
Until today, the Panchen Lama had never been heard from again. The authorities in Beijing had claimed for years that the Lama had stayed in China and renounced his vows as a monk. Government reports claimed that he had married and started a family, and was a very loyal communist.
The monks claimed that all this was untrue. They said that this Jose/Panchen person had escaped from China and come to San Francisco. For an unknown number of years he had held a job as a parking lot attendant to conceal his identity.
I asked the monk how they knew to come here to look for their long lost leader. His answer really scared me. He said that the abbot of their monastery in Dharamsala, India had heard strange music in his head that reminded him of the Panchen Lama. He instructed this group of monks to come here to San Francisco to look for him. They had found him in only six weeks of wandering around the City.
That did it; it was time to get out of there.
I went over to the dermatologist and tried to get her attention. I was altogether most anxious to leave that garage far behind me forever. I was not very patient with the screaming doctor. When she finally looked at me I told her that these Tibetan Monks could often be part of miraculous occurrences. I suggested that she look around, and maybe even outside, to see if her Ferrari had somehow materialized since they had arrived.
With that I grabbed Walt by the sleeve of his sweater and we both took off running down the hill.
XIV
W
alt had done so well
with the Drive that I decided to take him riding on the N Judah the next day. I thought the form of riding meditation would be good for him, and it certainly was cheap enough.
We had already been out walking for several hours when we caught the N at the corner of Cole and Carl in the Haight-Ashbury. We rode out towards the beach. I had long since modulated the intensity of the transmitter, but Walt and I still spent most of our time in silence. We rode together, looking out the window.
I became interested in the scenery inside the car, the ebb and flow of the people, while Walt watched the streets go by outside the window. Passengers got on and got off, but we stayed in our seats, going all the way to the turnaround at the extreme edge of North America.
The train turned around and headed back across the city. The reassuring clack of the wheels helped me to attain the state that I always seem to reach on Muni. My head felt at the same time heavy and very clear. In my unattention, I was acutely aware of everything occurring in the City. It was an exhilarating feeling and the streets passed quickly.
It should be noted here that the Muni in San Francisco runs both above and below ground. Downtown, where traffic is the most condensed and space is at a premium, the trains run in subway tunnels. As they go out into the neighborhoods, the trains pop up from the ground and run like streetcars. It is a nice system.
I probably should have paid more attention to the fact that, as we went on, more and more people seemed to be getting off the train. Normally an inbound train gets progressively more crowded as it comes in from the beach. Our train was an exception. By the time we got to the mouth of the tunnel, Walt and I were the only ones aboard except for the driver, whom we could not see.
I took in the rising clatter of the wheels as we began our descent. I have always enjoyed the way the train gently rocks back and forth, having to find its footing, so to speak, as if it had never been underground before.
We had only been underground a few moments when Walt fell out of his seat. It was not too unusual for him to do something like this, but I knew immediately that this was different. He lay flat on his back, rigid somehow. Pivoting on his ankles, his body swung into an upright position; a motion of which no human, even a Tristanian lobster fisherman, is capable.
At that point I became aware of another presence on the streetcar. Something like a person or a group of people, but somehow neither, was in front of us in the aisle. No one had gotten on or off the train for the last three stops. This amalgamation in front of us, again I want to call it a person or people, though it obviously was not human, had made some kind of dramatic contact with Walt.
Walt’s eyes were fixed on the ever-shifting mass. Walt appeared to be engrossed in some sort of deep conversation. He had the expression that I had seen a number of times on the faces of very learned men and women at parties when, engrossed at last in some tremendously serious academic conversation after several hours of frivolity, with the slightest bead of a drink hanging from the lower lip, they breathe in, fix the gaze, and prepare to expound.
Walt’s mouth never opened. He just maintained the expression of thought ready to spring into action. It/they seemed to be concentrating its/their attention(s) on Walt. I was being ignored.
As quickly as the interchange had begun, it ended. The whole thing lasted no more than fifteen seconds. I would have attributed it entirely to the sorts of hallucinations that occasionally accompany my meditations on the train but for the fact that Walt fell back again, hitting his head rather hard on the floor.
Walt was still barely conscious when I hustled him off at the next station, Castro Street and got him up the escalator and into a cab. He passed out just blocks from home.
XV
I
t took several days
of talking and piecing together before I really understood at all that had occurred in the tunnel. I realize that I may never quite get all of the parts together perfectly, but the following is the basis of what Walt told me.
Walt had been contacted by an alien intelligence. This race did not exist as individuals or groups as we understand the term. In the mass of information relayed to Walt during this short encounter, no attempt to elucidate this point was made. The race was called the Easybeats.
For many of our years, the Easybeats had been involved in an experiment similar to my own. The main function of their entire society was to search for intelligent life through the use of music. So far, and this after a very long time, they had not found any.
They had left their standard beacon “Friday on my Mind” on Earth some years before. By rebroadcasting this song, I was in effect relaying their signal. It was the first lead that they had had in over five hundred grolnoks. Walt was not able to tell me just how long a grolnok was, but he assured we that it was a very long time indeed.
The Easybeats had come to Earth immediately to investigate my signal. But, of course, the signal I was broadcasting was not penetrating the atmosphere. They only received the transmission after it had been relayed by Walt’s elaborate dental work.
Thus had they come to the conclusion that, themselves excepted, Walt was the only intelligent life-form in the universe. Walt said that the Easybeats were more different from us than any human could imagine. Their perception of life, and especially of humans, was much different than any of us would have expected. The Easybeats had an apartment. They even had a job. Still, all this interaction with humans had not convinced them that our species even qualified as a life form, let alone an intelligent one.
The Easybeats could only live underground. They felt sure that exposure to the surface of the planet would be instantly fatal. Thus they found the basement on Tehama alley. They had also, in a fit of exuberance, found a job at the all-night Japanese poolhall. The Easybeats were fantastically adept at tunneling. They had quickly established a network of tunnels leading from their basement apartment to the poolhall. They had also made extensive use of the tunnels belonging to the Municipal Railway, even going as far as hiding their space vehicle in a seldom-used shaft at the Embarcadero Station. They had apologized for not making direct contact sooner, but Walt had not previously gone underground.
They also gave the impression of being highly
impatiens
. They told Walt that they had left their home planet as soon as they received his message. This seems to have been about the time he initially boarded the
San Geronimo
. They were able to extrapolate from his course that he was headed for San Francisco, so they came here and got ready to meet him. They were irate when his magnetic field started to throw the ship’s navigational instruments off. Unwilling to move to a new city, they instead contacted him in his sleep to give him a revised, and not quite so agonizingly slow, course.
They had also invited Walt to return with them to their home world. This seemed to them to be a reasonable offer; that the universe’s two sentient species should cohabitate. They said that they realized such a decision would take some deliberation on his part. If he wanted to go with the Easybeats, all he had to do was show up at the Embarcadero Station in seven days. If he were not there, they would leave without him. They did not explain why they were not willing to be more patient.
I was alarmed. I was alarmed that I believed Walt’s crazy story unquestioningly. I was alarmed that he was taking seriously their offer to go to their home planet. I was not alarmed, but I was jealous and somewhat angry that, if it had not been for wave-skip phenomena and some half-baked lobster fisherman’s dental work, the Easybeats would now be considering me the universe’s only other sentient life form instead of Walt. It must be said. I was pissed.