"There were several American Indian tribes that used to make ‘having a vision' an integral part of their manhood rite. When it was your time to become a man, you were supposed to go out into the wilderness unarmed. You were supposed to make a kill, and two songs-one about the Great Spirit and one about your own prowess as a hunter and a rider and a warrior and a fucker-and have that vision. You weren't supposed to eat. You were supposed to get up high-mentally as well as physically-and wait for that vision to come. And eventually, of course, it would." He chuckled. "Starvation is a great hallucinogenic."
"You think Mother sent us out here to have visions?" Ralph asked.
"Maybe to gain strength and holiness by a purging process," Glen said. "The casting away of things is symbolic, you know. Talismanic. When you cast away things, you're also casting away the self-related others that are symbolically related to those things. You start a cleaning-out process. You begin to empty the vessel."
Larry shook his head slowly. "I don't follow that."
"Well, take an intelligent pre-plague man. Break his TV, and what does he do at night?"
"Reads a book," Ralph said.
"Goes to see his friends," Stu said.
"Plays the stereo," Larry said, grinning.
"Sure, all those things," Glen said. "But he's also missing that TV. There's a hole in his life where that TV used to be. In the back of his mind he's still thinking, At nine o'clock I'm going to pull a few beers and watch the Sox on the tube. And when he goes in there and sees that empty cabinet, he feels as disappointed as hell. A part of his accustomed life has been poured out, is it not so?"
"Yeah," Ralph said. "Our TV went on the fritz once for two weeks and I didn't feel right until it was back."
"It makes a bigger hole in his life if he watched a lot of TV, a smaller hole if he only used it a little bit. But something is gone. Now take away all his books, all his friends, and his stereo. Also remove all sustenance except what he can glean along the way. It's an emptying-out process and also a diminishing of the ego. Your selves, gentlemen-they are turning into a window-glass. Or better yet, empty tumblers."
"But what's the point?" Ralph asked. "Why go through all the rigmarole?"
Glen said, "If you read your Bible, you'll see that it was pretty traditional for these prophets to go out into the wilderness from time to time-Old Testament Magical Mystery Tours. The timespan given for these jaunts was usually forty days and forty nights, a Hebraic idiom that really means ‘no one knows exactly how long he was gone, but it was quite a while.' Does that remind you of anyone?"
"Sure. Mother," Ralph said.
"Now think of yourself as a battery. You really are, you know. Your brain runs on chemically converted electrical current. For that matter, your muscles run on tiny charges, too-a chemical called acetylcholine allows the charge to pass when you need to move, and when you want to stop, another chemical, cholinesterase, is manufactured. Cholinesterase destroys acetylcholine, so your nerves become poor conductors again. Good thing, too. Otherwise, once you started scratching your nose, you'd never be able to stop. Okay, the point is this: Everything you think, everything you do, it all has to run off the battery. Like the accessories in a car."
They were all listening closely.
"Watching TV, reading books, talking with friends, eating a big dinner … all of it runs off the battery. A normal life-at least in what used to be Western civilization-was like running a car with power windows, power brakes, power seats, all the goodies. But the more goodies you have, the less the battery can charge. True?"
"Yeah," Ralph said. "Even a big Delco won't ever overcharge when it's sitting in a Cadillac."
"Well, what we've done is to strip off the accessories. We're on charge."
Ralph said uneasily: "If you put a car battery on charge for too long, she'll explode."
"Yes," Glen agreed. "Same with people. The Bible tells us about Isaiah and Job and the others, but it doesn't say how many prophets came back from the wilderness with visions that had crisped their brains. I imagine there were some. But I have a healthy respect for human intelligence and the human psyche, in spite of an occasional throwback like East Texas here-"
"Off my case, baldy," Stu growled.
"Anyhow, the capacity of the human mind is a lot bigger than the biggest Delco battery. I think it can take a charge almost to infinity. In certain cases, perhaps beyond infinity."
They walked in silence for a while, thinking this over.
"Are we changing?" Stu asked quietly.
"Yes," Glen answered. "Yes, I think we are."
"We've dropped some weight," Ralph said. "I know that just looking at you guys. And me, I used to have a helluva beergut. Now I can look down and see my toes again. In fact, I can see just about my whole feet."
"It's a state of mind," Larry said suddenly. When they looked at him he seemed a trifle embarrassed but went on: "I've had this feeling for the last week or so, and I couldn't understand it. Maybe now I can. I've been feeling high. Like I'd done half a joint of really dynamite grass or snorted just a touch of coke. But there's none of the disorienting feeling that goes with dope. You do some dope and you feel like normal thinking is lust a little bit out of your grasp. I feel like I'm thinking just fine, better than ever, in fact. But I still feel high." Larry laughed. "Maybe it's just hunger."
"Hunger's part of it," Glen agreed, "but not all of it."
"Me, I'm hungry all the time," Ralph said, "but it doesn't seem too important. I feel good."
"I do too," Stu said. "Physically, I haven't felt this good in years."
"When you empty out the vessel, you also empty out all the crap floating around in there," Glen said. "The additives. The impurities. Sure it feels good. It's a whole-body, whole-mind enema."
"You got such a fancy way of puttin things, baldy."
"It may be inelegant, but it's accurate."
Ralph asked, "Will it help us with him?"
"Well," Glen said, "that's what it's for. I don't have much doubt about that. But we'll just have to wait and see, won't we?"
They walked on. Kojak came out of the brush and walked with them for a while, his toenails clicking on the pavement of US 70. Larry reached down and ruffled his fur. "Ole Kojak," he said. "Did you know you were a battery? Just one great big old Delco battery with a lifetime guarantee?"
Kojak didn't appear to know or care, but he wagged his tail to show he was on Larry's side.
They camped that night about fifteen miles west of Sego, and as if to drive home the point of what they had been talking about in the afternoon, there was nothing to eat for the first time since they had left Boulder. Glen had the last of their instant coffee in a Glad Bag, and they shared it out of a single mug, passing it from hand to hand. They had come the last ten miles without seeing a single car.
The next morning, the twenty-second, they came upon an overturned Ford station wagon with four corpses in it-two of them little children. There were two boxes of animal crackers in the car, and a large bag of stale potato chips. The animal crackers were in better shape. They shared them out five ways.
"Don't wolf them, Kojak," Glen admonished. "Bad dog! Where are your manners? And if you have no manners-as I must now conclude-where is your savoir faire?"
Kojak thumped his tail and eyed the animal crackers in a way which showed pretty conclusively that he had no more savoir faire than he did manners.
"Then root, hog, or die," Glen said, and gave the dog the last of his own share-a tiger. Kojak wolfed it down and then went sniffing off.
Larry had saved his entire menagerie-about ten animals-to eat at once. He did so slowly and dreamily. "Did you ever notice," he said, "that animal crackers have a faint, lemony undertaste? I remember that from being a kid. Never noticed it again until now."
Ralph had been tossing his last two crackers from hand to hand, and now he gobbled one. "Yeah, you're right. They do have sort of a lemon taste to em. You know, I kind of wish ole Nicky was here. I wouldn't mind sharing these old animal crackers a little further."
Stu nodded. They finished the animal crackers and went on. That afternoon they found a Great Western Markets delivery truck, apparently bound for Green River, pulled neatly over in the breakdown lane, the driver sitting bolt upright and dead behind the wheel. They lunched on a canned ham from the back, but none of them seemed to want much. Glen said their stomachs had shrunk. Stu said the ham smelled bad to him-not spoiled, just too rich. Too meaty. It kind of turned his stomach. He could only bring himself to eat a single slice. Ralph said he would have just as soon had two or three more boxes of animal crackers, and they all laughed. Even Kojak ate only a small serving before going off to investigate some scent.
They camped east of Green River that night, and there was a dust of snow in the early morning hours.
They came to the washout a little past noon on the twenty-third. The sky had been overcast all day, and it was cold-cold enough to snow, Stu thought-and not just flurries, either.
The four of them stood on the edge, Kojak at Glen's heel, looking down and across. Somewhere north of here a dam might have given way, or there might have been a succession of hard summer rainstorms. Whatever, there had been a flash flood along the San Rafael, which was only a dry-wash in some years. It had swept away a great thirty-foot slab of I-70. The gully was about fifty feet deep, the banks crumbly, rubbly soil and sedimentary rock. At the bottom was a sullen trickle of water.