By the time I am ready to leave the compound my money has totally run out, but a man invites me into the back room for a complimentary I Ching reading before I go. He has a handmade badge indicating his status as an authentic I Ching reader. After the consultation, he gives me an orange-red translucent marble as a parting gift and wishes me safe travels. Now it’s just my father and I, riding motorcycles between northern California and Oregon on the road to Seattle. He’s lost an arm at some point, but he keeps the severed limb hanging from his rear-view mirror. After some distance, we pull off the highway into an industrial city and enter a multi-story parking garage. There, we witness a shoot-out between a colorfully dressed all-female biker gang and the local law enforcement, in which the police are at a clear disadvantage. One of the bikers curses violently and spits on the ground when she hears more sirens approaching. My father is excited by this. One scene later, we walk together with the biker gang across some vacant lots. Once we’ve crossed the border into Washington State, I stop in the city of Olympia. I need to complete some final credits at The Evergreen State College, before I can finish my PhD. My former teacher M.B. has started some new interdisciplinary courses in semiotics here. I enroll right away. The courses involve different modes of transportation. In the first course, I live in a cramped train car with only a small air hole, where it is difficult to breathe. I can’t see much through the hole, but I observe that the train is only doing circles. I lose consciousness at times while trying to get a better view, forgetting how long I have been on this cattle car. All the other passengers are covered in lead blankets, like the ones the dentist puts on you before the X-Ray scan. We try to roast a trout over an open fire inside the train car, but this proves to be both difficult and unwise. It is a train for prisoners – this train is only the introduction to Foucault’s The Order of Things, I realize, not the whole book. I decide to tell the conductor we are going in circles, but before I can reach him I see another train, which is the whole rest of The Order of Things, rushing down the same tracks toward us. I jump out and push the train car off the tracks onto its side. The other passengers barely escape the car, before the other train demolishes this one completely. The only real loss is the trout, I reflect. The whole thing has a very Italo Calvino feel about it. It was a difficult course. The next course takes place on a sailboat. The secret unpublished last manuscript of Jacques Lacan can only be read on this white sailboat and I am at sea, trying to read it. It reads differently at bow and stern, because it has to be read through these differently shaped distortional glass bowls embedded in the hull, and the sun is so bright out here at sea and magnified in the glare of the bowls that it is painful to look at. Lacan himself is with me on the boat, along with his beautiful wife. He watches disapprovingly as I try to decipher his manuscript. Lacan’s wife is so tall, she’s wearing a white bikini, and she reads pieces of the manuscript nonchalantly in the sun, working on her tan. Out of nowhere, Lacan douses the manuscript, as well as his wife, with a beaker of molecular acid. I have only the time before the manuscript dissolves to uncover its hidden meanings. He douses himself in the acid as well. The acid is eating through the hull of the boat. Famously, this is how Lacan died. He’s pretty calm, but his wife apparently did not expect this when she agreed to come on the boating trip. She shrieks and writhes in rage and agony as the acid burns through her and she dies. I am not sure that I passed this course. After class, we stop off at the university cafe for ice creams. The automated ice cream dispenser has a video display with cute dancing Japanese anime figures and Chinese ideograms. I study the display, but a girl behind me in line scolds me for taking too long. She knows I don’t belong, asks what am I doing here. I tell her I study semiotics. She knows semiotics, and she laments that no one here reads the most important semiotician. And who is that? I ask. “JU LI A KRI STE VA, you idiot.” She enunciates every syllable sarcastically. It was still sunny when we got here, but dark clouds now block out the sun, blown by the warm winds of a tropical storm. I open a newspaper on the table. Its moving diagrams show the path of the storm and the general weather pattern, in color-coded circles. It says the storm is being caused by some celestial body passing close to the earth, magnetic disturbances, or solar flares. After all of my courses are complete, I have a student progress review meeting with M.B. She invites me to the most splendid hidden off-campus bistro. Between dishes she tells me she likes the direction I am taking, but I may have to pursue my work independently for some time after graduation. “And you’re not much of a writer,” she says as she shrugs and finishes her glass of pink wine, “but that’s not the most important thing.” The storm has fully moved in, but before leaving Olympia I must visit my exgirlfriend M.S. and her friend C.M. It’s raining heavily now that night has fallen and we wait together outdoors in a cue to see a long-awaited performance by our favorite rock band. I go on an impassioned monologue to M.S. I expound, the highest secret of occult initiation is that there is nothing evil about it at all. The oath of secrecy is a promise to never deny accusations of wrongdoing. This is why everyone believes Crowley really was evil. So why would anybody swear an oath when they can just figure this out by themselves? I turn back to M.S. and see that her long black locks of hair are moving and curling upwards like the snakes of the medusa. Her eyes are blacker than usual. Behind her, bits of trash swirl slowly and float in midair. Lightning cracks on the horizon. I think I may have crossed the line with her this time. I must get back on the road to Seattle, however C.M. insists on taking me to a rural state fair before I go. He has something to show me that may be crucial to completing my dissertation. By all appearances, the fair is a low-class event. A beer-drinking, gun show kind of event. There are many booths with all sorts of attractions, but C.M. has a specific booth to which he takes me. The vendor offers Tarot card readings. Everything is traditional and old-fashioned, except that there is a holographic display that magnifies and projects what is happening in a small shallow pool of water controlled by the Tarot reader. Inside the pool is a series of interconnected sememe tree diagrams, like from Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics. The man in charge of the booth is covered in low-quality tattoos. He does not want to give me a reading, but after some quiet words with C.M. he consents. He creates the flow of the circles by dripping thick red and black liquids into the shallow pool. The points of intersection of the expanding circles are the places where one card in the Tarot reading is supposed to link up to the next. The circles are like Rorschach ink blots in water. As they expand, the querent may choose to allow the reading to proceed to the next card, or break it off at the current position. I have never seen a method of divination like this. As C.M. chats with a friend on the side, they talk together casually, but I see his hands are shaking as he takes another drink of his beer. The rain only gets worse. It’s really time for me to leave, but C.M. insists that we visit one more place. It’s the hidden western estate of the Charles Peirce Society. The women working behind the counter are dressed up in old-timey costumes, big ruffles in their hooped dresses and large feathers, and they squabble together about something. I think it might be a performance, because they watch me from the corners of their eyes as I inspect an ivory medallion in the case beneath the glass. The medallion depicts two creatures in combat, in the open square of an ancient city. One appears like the Predator from the famous movie, with mandibles and fangs, and wearing the uniform of a cosmonaut. The other is an octopus, but it stands on its tentacles upright. On the back of the medallion the same scene is depicted in three different iterations. I want to make a necklace out of the medallion; I fear that wearing the necklace will invite the Predator god into my mind... “It’s not for sale,” the woman behind the counter brusquely informs, when she sees me coveting the medallion. Next to the medallion are some Tarot packs. One of the packs only consists of two cards, which are the base sequence of a larger new Tarot that has not yet been constructed. One of its cards depicts a female humanoid creature with a frog’s head. The two women at the counter now have stopped talking and are watching me intently. “You have met the frog woman before,” one of them says ambiguously. They remind me that none of these decks are complete. I explain that I am interested in creating a new deck that would map the sixty-six types of signs to the seventy-eight cards, using the Sephir Yetzirah of the cabala as the basis for a “Peircean semiotic Tarot” – as I pronounce these last words one of the women finishes my sentence in unison with me. Apparently she had the same idea. Okay, now it’s really time for me to get back on the road. At this stage, the arms of the spinning super storm stretch across the entire continent. As I ride over the bridges of Seattle traffic begins to stack up. Everything comes to a standstill and I see the police have erected a barrier and are questioning travelers entering the city. The bridge sways back and forth in the wind. Frustrated people start getting out of their cars. I leave my bike and find some stairs leading off the bridge, just as it starts to collapse in the distance and cars plummet into the water. I escape into the sprawling homeless encampments beneath the bridge. At the immigration and homeless population processing center, a young entrepreneur explains that he has developed an innovative new solution to the population crisis. He has a machine that will sterilize you in exchange for guaranteed shelter and employment, all for a reasonable price, just step inside. Two young people ahead of me accept without scruple. I reject his offer, but I’m funneled into the machine nevertheless. First it scrubs my asshole and balls. Then it declines my credit card. The entrepreneur assures me that an equitable payment plan can be arranged. Instead of accepting this accommodation, I opt to continue on to my old home neighborhood. Of course, we sold our old house here years ago and my father is long dead, but some of our belongings are still here in boxes. The living room has a higher ceiling than before. The old wood stove is larger than it was, and now has a huge flat mantle made of uneven lava rock. The coals emit a powerful heat which is difficult to approach, warming the brass implements. The stove, the objects on the mantle, the hardwood furniture, the old maps in the drawer of the end table, all have a dignified aura from before the decline of the family. One item which I recover after long searching is an oval brass plate that looks like a photo frame, except in the frame there is no picture, just a glowing red-orange space that is so hot and bright that it burns even to look at. I look anyway. My sister joins me here, we sit around the fire in the back yard while some science fiction show plays in the background, and we reminisce about this old show we used to watch together as children, and about our travels. As we talk, it is not clear who is doing the speaking and who is listening. “I am so glad they decided to make new seasons of this show.” One of us steps away from the fire. A space shuttle circles overhead and lands in the driveway. Many of our old friends step out of the shuttle and gather with us around the fire. Our father greets us at the door and says something trivial and kind. We have difficulty relating all the details of our trip. “I arrived at Helsinki and transferred from there to one of the distant arms of the delta quadrant. What was the name of that sector? Anyhow, I’ve been on a lot of trips, but nothing quite like that. For a while I thought I might never make it back...” My sister and I alternate positions rapidly, in flashing oscillations close and away from the fire. “You were out there for a long time. What do you remember? Did you see anything? What did you see?” A long pause, then one of us answers, “There were many underground rooms stocked with emergency supplies, and huge silos filled with grain.” It has stopped raining. The clouds have broken. We stare up at the crisp stars, searching for something more concrete. “That’s it. That’s all I remember.”
