“That’s the weird part? That it wasn’t you?”
“It was you. In this dream, I was you. I was in your head, seeing through your eyes, but it was unmistakably you.”
Nash shook his head and then let out a short laugh. “Well, it was a dream, wasn’t it?” Nash said. “An immaterial, unreal, fantastic dream. You read about this stuff and then you dream about it. It’s a projection.”
Henry rubbed his bloodshot eyes.
“Not a memory or experience,” Nash said.
PART FIVE. 1973–1980
Bellatrix
THE BUS LEFT Berry and Caroline ten miles west of Little Falls. They waited for three hours as drivers from the broken-down Erie Canal industrial towns sped past the two freak chicks hitchhiking. Caroline had asked Berry to help her dye and cut her hair. A new look for a new place, she told her. After they dyed it (a so-called auburn, an unfortunate synthetic beet tone), Caroline pulled her hair up and tied it in a topknot. Berry said cutting the topknot off would instantly give her a shag haircut, just like Jane Fonda in Klute. Caroline pulled some strands at the nape of her neck out to keep the back a little longer and then let Berry hack away at the ponytail. With some struggle it was cut through, leaving an uneven, layered, but undeniably shaggy hairdo. Berry left her hair as it was, curly and long, but let Caroline pile it up in a loose bun. Berry’s nose and upper lip were still swollen, but Caroline helped her cover the bruises with makeup.
“You want to make a good impression, don’t you?”
“I guess.”
Caroline looked in the mirror at every rest stop. Her hair looked awful, but she certainly looked different. She put on a crocheted floppy hat, large-framed sunglasses, opaque lipstick, and decided not to care too much. Eventually, walking and hitching, they made it up into Herkimer County, a swath of sparsely populated farmland hills that rose up from the Mohawk River, part nineteenth-century ghost town industrial, part bucolic country utopia, green and almost obscenely lush and dense. They stopped at the New Harmon General Store, picking up two six-packs of beer, a sack of rice and a large jar of peanut butter. Caroline took out her county map.
“We just follow Hurricane Brook north, stick to the left bank, and we should be there in two hours.”
“I have to carry this beer for two hours?” Berry said. She shook her head and then took two beers out and handed one to Caroline.
Eventually they came to a dirt trail. There was a sign at the foot that said,
No visitors. No tourists. No exceptions.
Then another sign under it, apparently hammered onto it later, read,
This means you, freak!
They ignored these injunctions and continued on the path. A couple of hundred yards up the trail, another sign,
Keep out!
with another addendum sign; this one read,
Whose sister are you?
Caroline couldn’t tell if the question was addressed to the interlopers coming up the trail or was a response from them.
At last they saw the woods open up to a clearing. Glinting in the sun was a dome composed of multifaceted pieces of hard-enameled metal, all different colors — most shiny, some rusted at the edges, some primer matte — welded somewhat sloppily at their interstices to create a large, ragged futuristic dwelling. A painted sign said,
Harbinger Hut, Version Two
“Turn around, both of you. Slowly.” From behind them. They turned slowly toward the voice. A woman with a rifle and a yellow white-chick ersatz Afro faced them, barrel pointing. She wore what looked to Caroline like a Brownie uniform, including the kneesocks but without the sash and the badges. Her large army boots somehow emphasized rather than disguised the shapeliness of her long legs.
Berry started laughing. Caroline squeezed her arm hard to make her stop.
“What are you doing here? Can’t you read? This is a closed community. We got no room for new members.”
“Yeah, so we gathered,” Berry said. “So much for communal spirit—”
“Look, fat chick, look at this in my hand and shut up. This isn’t a commune, it is a community of women.”
Berry’s mouth dropped open, and she began laughing even harder.
“Hey, it’s okay. We’re here by invitation. We are here to see Mother Goose,” Caroline said.
“You know her? She knows you’re coming?”
“Not directly, but yeah, she knows we are coming.”
She lowered the gun. Flashed a two-fingered V at them and waved them toward the dome.
“Sorry. I have to be vigilant in the summer or we get overrun with every speed freak and junkie moocher the city can spew our way. They come and piss in your streams and you’re supposed to mop their brows and nurse their strung-out, parasitic hearts until the whole place becomes a flophouse, you know, Bowery in the foothills, right?”
She stopped at the entrance to the dome. “I’m Jill, by the way. Hill Jill, I watch the perimeter. Come on in and I’ll get you some food.”
“We brought beer.”
“Not allowed.”
Berry looked at Caroline and raised an eyebrow.
“So let’s get it inside and drink it quick,” Jill said.
Hill Jill’s dome was as comfortable and airily spacious inside as an omnitriangulated polyhedral dwelling could be. It had a rose-stained, translucent resin skylight, handmade simple wood furniture and a wood-burning cookstove. There were macramé decorations and many brightly colored yarn god’s eyes strung from the ceiling. The dome apparently also ran on electricity: Jill used a small refrigerator and a state-of-the-art, vinyl-veneer-encased hi-fi stereo system surrounded by stacks of records. Her platform bed was covered in Indian blankets, and an entire “wall” was hugged by a curved bookshelf full of books. Caroline could see books on Eastern religion and the requisite copy of the Whole Earth Catalog. Several panels of scratched and cloudy Plexiglas embedded in the sides of the dome served as the only windows. Through the Plexiglas they could see the hills and woods beyond the trail.
“Nice space in here,” said Caroline.
“I built it myself out of abandoned car parts. Reclaimed from the refuse of industrial society. Everyone builds her own house. You can’t stay if you don’t.”
“Are they all domes like this?”
Hill Jill shrugged and slammed the bottle cap off the beer on the edge of the cookstove.
“Some are. There are your usual Buckminster Fuller dome freaks up here. You can just follow a recipe and build a home out of junk. Put a little resin sealant on the seams, caulk it with tar. Some of us are more elaborate. I’m tied in to the grid with electricity. I used fiberglass insulation, PVC pipe. Plastic sealants. I have a well with running water. But every woman does her own thing.”
“They let you decide, huh?” said Berry.
“Technology will set you free.”
“You could spend all day hauling buckets of water. Or keeping a fire going,” Caroline said, flipping open a beer.
“Exactly. Technology to eliminate drudgery. We are right in the midst of hardscrabble nation, twenty below in winter. I am no primitivist.”
“What’s this community called?” Berry asked. Jill ignored Berry and continued sipping her beer. Berry repeated her question.
Jill glanced at her finally and smirked. “This is Total Bitch Ranch, sister, Full-Tilt Pussy Ridge. This is High Daddy Farm, you dig? Heretic Homestead, Come-Down Campus, Hepatitis Hill.”
“C’mon.”
Jill cocked her head and gave Berry a slow once-over.