We turned off on El Camino, heading south. We saw the usual urban detritus: painted-brick dive bars, car-wash strippers shilling to the employed and mobile. Employed and mobile - the working poor, the temporarily employed. An audit here, an urgent contract delivered there, pet sitting, relief for the lonely-hearted, whatever it took, but mostly there was no work, no money for cars.
When the UN speech exposed the robots, there were too many blue people to confront, here in the digital technology hub of the world.
I turned my head and watched Melpomene, intent on her driving, anticipating the flow of cars and trucks around her, like surfers claiming a wave. She was extraordinary. She was smiling, sort of, but biting her bottom lip at the same time. She lived her life at the edge of the blade, up close, the point of the ice skater’s gleaming, steel blade in a pirouette.
MouthBreather was telling us about the time he wet his bed at summer camp. His face was red - I think he was drunk on self-love. I could feel the capillaries in his brain stressed with pressure, not to the breaking point, but searching for a weak spot. The human male - and the Shaulan male for that matter - is an unexpressed blackhead. But MouthBreather was almost feminine, in his awkward, jejune way.
HippyChick was in the back seat. She had been dozing off, leaning into the door, but she was awake now. I asked her to think back on her life and recall a happy memory, to pass the time.
“Piece of cake. Summer of sixty-seven, San Francisco. I bummed a ride from Cimarron, Kansas, and they let me off near Golden Gate Park, at the foot of Haight. Instant bliss. Instant fucking bliss. In our minds, we were the perfectible future. Realized godliness. Everything was going to be different. It was so simple - why had no one thought of this before?
“Sure, it was crap, later. But there was a time, a year, maybe two, when we were changing the world, forever. Everything was going to be different. Now, all these years later, thinking back, I believe we were right. Everything did change. Racists didn’t go away, but their voices were internalized. War didn’t go away, but now it’s waged by frat-boys with too-low SATs, sending death with mouse-clicks to distant theaters of war, indiscriminately killing babies, freedom fighters and the occasional villain on a video screen.”
HippyChick was getting quite worked up, but she stopped and checked out for a moment, to center herself.
“But for that one summer, music was everywhere, inside us, outside, it flowed from the city streets, from the sun, it drizzled down on the panhandling hippies on the sidewalks. Everyone had heard the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Dylan, Bonzo Dog, Big Brother, all those cats. It was the tribal language - by listening to the same music, we all spoke to each other, even before we met.” HippyChick sighed, and closed her eyes again.
In the trailer, Thalia was quiet in her equine thoughts. She was bonding more with the other horses than with us. But her spirit held strong. She was much the same on Shaula, dependable, no ambitions, fierce as a hellcat when riled.