Entry #12: Bloody rituals in the night
The tale of Two Pigeons continues. If you’re new to this start with Entry #1: The Job.
Was supposed to meet up with Brett, an old journalist friend of mine, at the bar down the street. But a closure order kicked in. A high altitude radioactive dust cloud was headed our way, kicked up by a sandstorm that had been raging for weeks in the Negev Desert — in the epicenter of the Dead Zone. “PUBLIC SAFETY ALERT! SAN FRANCISCO EMERGENCY GOVERNMENT. DANGEROUS LEVELS OF FALLOUT EXPECTED AT 8:00PM (PT). FIND SHELTER. STAY IN DOORS. SEAL LIVING SPACES. ALL NON-ESSENTIAL BUSINESSES ORDERED SHUT. CONDITIONS EXPECTED TO CONTINUE INDEFINITELY. CHECK SF.GOV/EMERGENCY FOR MORE INFO.” Last I heard the cloud was supposed to turn north into Canada. I guess not… I watched the radioactive cloud moving towards us on the rad app on my phone. It was spread over the ocean now…stretching for thousands of miles from Sakhalin into the Pacific Ocean…crawling towards us like a galactic amoeba…it’s tendrils searching us out. I toggled through the different layers…the strontium and cesium concentrations were coded with a deep purple…the highest possible. It was a bad one. We’d probably be locked down for days — or could be weeks.
I looked out my window. People were scurrying around, getting everything ready. Those with leaky seams were taping up their window frames. My neighbor Tom from across the yard was checking the seals on his greenhouse. He had a small operation growing potatoes and tomatoes and selling them to the neighborhood. It had been running since that first post-war fallout year, back when all the crops failed and food was being rationed. He saw me looking out the window and waved. I waved back.
I put on my full head mask on and went to the grocery store down the street. There was a huge line and almost all the fresh produce was already gone. I picked up some bread flour and whatever wasn’t canned or dried — a couple of apples, a bag of potatoes, an ear of corn. No one was panicking. We’ve all gotten used to it. At home I ran the filter diagnostic, checked the oxygen tanks, and tested the window and door seals. Then I turned off the fresh air intake valve on my unit and put it on internal circulation. I’d be able to live off them for a month or more without opening my windows.
I popped the last of Misha’s pain pills and made popcorn and mixed myself a vodka with juice. I usually watch Total Recall on lockdowns like this…it’s become a tradition for me. This time I got as far as Douglas Quaid landing on Mars…but my mind kept drifting…first to my interview with Moishe…and then Boris called.
Boris said he was sorry he couldn’t call earlier. But now that he was on lockdown stuck in his resort in Calistoga he had a moment to talk. “Good of you to show how much you care about your old friend,” I said, teasing him. He laughed. “We haven’t been close since the war,” he said. “And anyway…the guy left his wife and kids. What do you want me to do about it? Stop him? Force him to come back home? You’re the one meddling in his affairs dude.”
Boris then launched into his story. I’ll streamline it as best I can.
Ritual on the mountain.
“I hadn’t heard from that dude in a long time and then suddenly I get a call…like out of the blue,” Boris said. “He wasn’t interested in catching up or anything like that. He wanted to know if he could book out our entire resort for a few days. I told him, sure, we do that sometimes. What for like a wedding or something? He told me, ‘No. It’s a study group I’m in these days. I didn’t think anything about it at the time. Actually I assumed he was talking about renting it out for a corporate event for that startup of his, like a team building thing or something. We get those sometimes. Executive level retreat type situations. We just added an exotic hunting package where the mascs go out in special lead-lined suits looking for mutated animal freaks to shoot…while the fems hang out in the resort and do mud baths and massages. Very lucrative stuff let me tell you dude. I told Misha about the packages and he said he didn’t need all that. I said sure, no problem, and told him I’d pass along his info to our booking manager and that they’d get in touch…and that I’d get him a discount. That was probably six, no, seven months ago. I didn’t think anything of it.”
I was on the couch, drinking. Boris was on my phone screen. There was a pastel painting behind him…a coastal landscape scene of some kind…probably from Northern California. He had an elongated face and looked he was always smirking, even when he was serious. It was because of his jaw, which was slightly lopsided, with one corner of his mouth always higher than the other.
Boris said he hadn’t talked to Misha much at all after the war but that he had reached out to him when he was remodeling and rad-proofing Indian Springs. “Misha had just started that company of his…what’s it called—” “Ark,” I said. “Yeah that’s right. Ark. I wanted to see if we could partner up. Like he could provide some units for our bungalows. Indian Springs would be able to advertise that we’re using the latest in filter tech out of Silicon Valley. He’d be able to use our resort for R&D and for advertising his company to investors. He’d benefit. I’d benefit. It would be win-win. But he said he didn’t have anything that was commercially available and he didn’t seem all that excited. It’s like he wasn’t interested in commercial partnerships, which I found strange.”
Then Boris talked about Ark. “I didn’t really get what his company was all about. I mean, dude, I’ve been neck deep into remodeling and the market is full of companies making filters and all that crap. Huge European players involved that dominate the business. What was the angle for his startup. What was he disrupting? What niche was he going for?”
“Did you ever figure it out?” I asked.
“He told me they were making tech that would work in super radioactive zones…zones closer to the blast sites,” he replied.
“In the dead zones?” I asked. “Like the Negev Desert that spewing all this dust around us?”
“Yeah exactly,” Boris replied. “And that’s the thing, dude, I asked him why anyone would want to be in a place that would be hot for another three generations. He didn’t answer…he just said something about ‘planning for the future.’ But who would buy your products? He told me that I’d be surprised…that it wasn’t a niche thing at all. Misha said to me, ‘There’s more interest in these kind of spots than you realize.”
“Hold on dude,” Boris said as he got up and walked to the bathroom and put his phone on the sink while taking a piss. I watched myself on the screen. Gray hair and beard, bald spot, nose jutting out like a bird’s beak. I needed a haircut and a shave.
“At first I didn’t make much sense but dude later it clicked,” Boris said, talking over the gurgling water. “Misha was thinking about the future. All these radioactive zones would have to be settled sooner than later. Look at the mess we have here with the refugees. We need to put people somewhere. Why not start to reclaim some of this lost real estate…sooner than later? Whoever claims it first will keep it. Dude it’s what we’re already doing with our resort. When people start moving back up here in large numbers my kids will already own all the land.” He laughed. I laughed, too. But inside I felt very small. I had been struggling and failed at the only thing I tried to do in life. Meanwhile, Boris was succeeding in what seemed like third or fourth career — moving from working as sys admin to running bars and restaurants and now to hotels and real estate, making greater and greater sums of money while I’ve had to live off the inheritance my parents left me.
Boris and I went way back. We became friends in my senior year of high school. We met through some friends and started hanging out and doing acid together and stayed close for years, long after I had dumped most of my other immigrant friends. Back then, when I was just starting college, he was already working full time for a tech company. He had taught himself how to code as a teenager and at nineteen was making high five figures…an incredible amount of money I thought. He had moved to San Francisco just a few years earlier…from Israel, where he and his parents and sister had lived after leaving Odessa. They couldn’t handle it in Israel, though. It was the First Intifada back then and they were disturbed by constant violence. When they imagined life there, when they were still in Ukraine, it wasn’t something they expected to encounter in what they thought was a stable western country — the stabbings, the bombings, the constant sense of danger, the sense of never feeling safe. So they moved again…to America. Boris had always impressed me with the amount of things that he had cooking. In Berkeley I was barely able to get through my classes. Meanwhile he was working a day job at a tech company in Berkeley, too, while also running a Russian-themed bar with his fiancee. Things just came effortlessly to him… And now he was snapping up radioactive real estate, thinking of the future, generationally.
“Then a month ago I get a call from one of the manager at the resort,” Boris was saying. “‘You got some weird friends,’ she says to me. Obviously I didn’t have any clue what she’s talking about. ‘Remember your friend Michael who booked the resort a few days ago? He and his buddies just left here this morning. They’re into some freaky shit,’ she told me. At first I thought she meant they had girls around and had an orgy or something. Which is fine. Why not? They’re paying for the whole hotel. That shit is not cheap. Let them have their fun. But no, that wasn’t it.”
I laughed. “You’re really teasing this story out,” I said.
“Dude I’ve been in the hotel business for a decade now and this is one of the top stories I have. Let me take my time with it.”
“So where was I,” Boris continued. “Yes that’s right. So I forgot to say that my booking manager informed me that Misha rented the whole resort but said there would only twelve people in his party. Indian Springs can hold about 200 people. So most of the rooms would be empty. On top of that they declined our restaurant services. They said that they’d bring their own food. It was a bit weird but I figured it was just his executives and big investors or something and they’d do their own catering. I gave my kitchen staff and half my people a few days off. Left only a skeleton crew. I didn’t think anything of it…until the manager called. She said that the party showed up in their own convoy. There were a couple of heavy duty off-roading jeeps, all modded up to spend days in the wilderness. And they had a truck that was souped up for off-roading. And the people…she said, they are all dressed in this hippy kind of wear. Colorful cloaks, caftans, head wraps, hemp cloth, that kind of thing.”
He continued: “Basically everything was okay in the day. They hung around the pool, used our conference room for a meeting. One of the workers noticed something strange, though. He heard movement in that truck of theirs. He came closer and heard something stamping around in there. Then sounds like “maaa” or “baaaa” like there was a goat inside or something.”
“A goat?” I said.
“Yeah, a goat. A fucking goat. Actually she said it sounded like there was more than one goat,” he replied. “Or sheep. Maybe it was sheep. Dude don’t interrupt. Let me tell the story.”