To my brother, Bob,

  whose courage and humor are a constant inspiration,

  even if he catches fish like he catches cards.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  One: AIR

  Two: EARTH

  Three: WATER

  Four: FIRE

  Also available from Canongate

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  THOMAS PYNCHON

  If we accept the notion that using power against the powerless is wrong, a clear enough set of corollaries begins to emerge. We become able to distinguish, as populations (though not always their rulers) have usually been able to do, between outlaws and evil-doers, between outlawry and sin. Not much analysis is needed, because it is something we can sense in all its dead-serious immediacy. ‘But all they are are bandits’, the rulers whine indignantly, ‘motivated only by greed.’ Sure. Except that, having long known the difference between theft and restoration, we understand the terms of the deal whereby outlaws, as agents of the poor, being more skilled and knowledgeable in the arts of karmic readjustment, may charge no worse than an agent’s fee, small enough to be acceptable to their clients, ample enough to cover the risks they have to take, and we always end up loving these folks, we cheer for John Dillinger, Rob Roy, Jesse James, at a level of passion usually reserved for sports affiliation.

  Stone Junction is an outlaw epic for our own late era of corrupted romance and defective honour, with its own set of sleazy usurpers and Jacobitoid persistences – though the reader who’s expecting eighties nostalgia or, have mercy, some even earlier-type romp through the pleasures of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, should be warned that lurking herein, representing the bleaker interests of that consensus ever throbbing along despite and apart from all the fun and pleased to call itself ‘Reality’, are to be found some mighty evil contract personnel, who produce some disagreeably mortal plot developments. One of the book’s manifold graces is its author’s choice never to dance away into wistful gobbledygook, remaining, rather, conscientiously grounded in our world as given, where, as Pam Tillis, in a slightly different context, reminds us, Destiny turns on a dime.

  The other day in the street I heard a city policeman in a police car, requesting over his loudspeaker that a civilian car blocking his way move aside and let him past, all the while addressing the driver of the car personally, by name. I was amazed at this, though people I tried to share it with only shrugged, assuming that of course the driver’s name (along with height, weight and date of birth) had been obtained from the Motor Vehicle Department via satellite, as soon as the offending car’s license number had been tapped into the terminal – so what?

  Stone Junction was first published in 1989, toward the end of an era still innocent, in its way, of the cyberworld just ahead about to exponentially explode upon it. To be sure, there were already plenty of computers around then, but they were not quite so connected together as they were shortly to become. Data available these days to anybody were accessible then only to the Authorized, who didn’t always know what they had or what to do with it. There was still room to wiggle – the Web was primitive country, inhabited only by a few rugged pioneers, half loco and wise to the smallest details of their terrain. Honor prevailed, laws were unwritten, outlaws, as yet undefinable, were few. The question had only begun to arise of how to avoid, or, preferably, escape altogether, the threat, indeed promise, of control without mercy that lay in wait down the comely vistas of freedom that computer-folk were imagining then – a question we are still asking. Where can you jump in the rig and head for any more – who’s out there to grant us asylum? If we stay put, what is left to us that is not in some way tainted, coopted, and colonized, by the forces of Control, usually digital in nature? Does anybody know the way to William Gibson’s ‘Republic of Desire’? Would they tell if they knew? So forth.

  You will notice in Stone Junction, along with its gifts of prophecy, a consistent celebration of those areas of life that tend to remain cash-propelled and thus mostly beyond the reach of the digital. It may be nearly the only example of a consciously analog Novel. Writers since have been obliged to acknowledge and deal with the ubiquitous cyber-realities that come more and more to set, and at quite a finely chopped-up scale too, the terms of our lives, not to mention calling into question the very traditions of a single author and a story that proceeds one piece after another – a situation Jim Dodge back then must have seen coming down the freeway, because the novel, ever contrarian, keeps its faith in the persistence of at least a niche market – who knows, maybe even a deep human need – for modalities of life whose value lies in their having resisted and gone the other way, against the digital storm – that are likely, therefore, to include pursuits more honorable than otherwise.

  One popular method of resistance was always just to keep moving – seeking, not a place to hide out, secure and fixed, but a state of dynamic ambiguity about where one might be at any given moment, along the lines of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Modern digital machines, however, managed quickly enough to focus the blurred hyperellipsoid of human freedom down to well within Planck’s Constant.

  Equally difficult for those who might wish to proceed through life anonymously and without trace has been the continuing assault against the once-reliable refuge of the cash or non-plastic economy. There was a time not so long ago you could stroll down any major American avenue, collecting anonymous bank checks, get on some post office line, and send amounts in the range ‘hefty to whopping’ anywhere, even overseas, no problem. Now it’s down to $750 a pop, and shrinking. All to catch those Drug Dealers of course, nothing to do with the grim, simplex desire for more information, more control, lying at the heart of most exertions of power, whether governmental or corporate (if that’s a distinction you believe in).

  You look at Windows 95 blooming on to the screen, and you think, Magic. But for those who understand the system down to molecular level, nothing magical remains – all is revealed as simple repetitive drudgery, what we might even denounce as a squandering of precious operating time, were it not for Technology’s discovery of how to tap into the velocity situation prevailing down at the smaller scales – Nnggyyyyow-w-w! like the Interstate down there! – and leave all the kazillions of brainless petty chores to their speedy new little devices.

  Stone Junction’s allegiance, however, is to the other kind of magic, the real stuff – long-practised, all-out, contrary-to-fact, capital M Magic, not as adventitious spectacle, but as a pursued enterprise, in this very world we’re stuck with, continuing to give off readings – analog indications – of being abroad and at work, somewhere out in it.

  The fatal temptation for a fiction writer who must accept the presence, often a necessity, of magic in his own work, is to solve difficulties of plot, character and – more often than is generally suspected – taste, by conveniently flourishing some prop, some ad hoc amulet or drug, that will just take care of each problem as it arises. Fortunately for us here, Jim Dodge, by the terms of his calling, cannot indulge in that particular luxury. Magic is in fact hard and honorable work, and cannot be deployed at whim, nor without consequences. A good deal of Daniel Pearce’s character growth comes by way of learning the business and earning the powers – making Stone Junction a sort of magician’s Bildungsroman – in which teachers, more or less unorthodox in their methods, appear to Daniel one by one, each with particular skills to pass along, all linked in an organization known as AMO, the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws, a proto-Web that tends to connect more by way of pay phones, mail drops and ESP than linked terminals, and overseen by the enigmatic, not quite all-powerful Volta.

  Through all this meanwhile runs a second plotline – a whodunit, in which Daniel must solve the uncompromisingly earthly question of who murdered his mother, Annalee Pearce, in an alleyway in Livermore, California when he was 14, complete with multiple suspects, false trails, the identity of the killer not revealed till the final pages. The story traverses a map of some moral intricacy, sure-footed as Chandler, providing twists as elegant as Agatha Christie, as all the while Daniel’s education proceeds.

  Wild Bill Weber teaches meditation, fishing, waiting. Mott Stocker teaches Dope, its production and enjoyment. Ace safecracker Willie Clinton (yep) instructs the boy in how to get past all kinds of locks and alarms, rendering him thus semi-permeable to certain protected parts of the world, setting him on his path to total dematerialization. For a while Daniel teams up with poker wizard Bad Bobby Sloane, roving the American highways in search of opportunities to risk capital in ways that cannot be officially controlled, climaxing in a legendary Lo-ball confrontation with the cheerfully louche Guido Caramba, in a literary poker passage as classic as it is funny, and in its appreciative devotion to a game where the moral stakes are so high, ranking up there with comparable parts of Kawabata’s The Master of Go.

  The shape-shifting genius Jean Bluer teaches Daniel the arts of disguise – another illicit skill, given that it’s already forbidden to impersonate policemen, doctors, lawyers, financial advisors, and who knows what all besides, as if someday all varieties of disguise will be statutory offences, including Impersonating an Ordinary Citizen. At last Daniel comes circling back to Volta, by now also one of his prime suspects in Annalee’s death, who teaches him the final secret of Invisibility. None of your secular Wellsian tricks with refractive indices and

blood pigmentation here, but rather the time-honored arts of ceasing to be material.

  At last Daniel is ready to set off on the metaphysical Quest all these teachers have been preparing him for, which now swiftly unfolds as an elaborate techno-caper, with a mysterious and otherworldly six-pound Diamond as its target. Too early in those days for keyboard dramas, emergency downloads, and cyber-fugues to relentless countdowns at the corner of the screen, the technology Daniel goes up against is mostly of the analog sort – optical surveillance, strain-gauge sensor grids and thermostatic alarms – his non-digital responses to which include nerve gas, plastique, and invisibility.

  He takes the Diamond, and then the Diamond takes him. For it turns out to be a gateway to elsewhere, and Daniel’s life’s tale an account of the incarnation of a god, not the usual sort that ends up bringing aid and comfort to earthly powers, but that favorite of writers, the incorruptible wiseguy known to anthropologists as the Trickster, to working alchemists as Hermes, to card-players everywhere as the Joker. We don’t learn this till the end of the story, by which point, knowing Daniel as we’ve come to, we are free to take it literally as a real transfiguration, or as a metaphor of spiritual enlightenment, or as a description of Daniel’s unusually exalted state of mind as he prepares to cross, forever, the stone junction between Above and Below – by this point, all of these possibilities have become equally true, for we have been along on one of those indispensible literary journeys, taken nearly as far as Daniel – though it is for him to slip along across the last borderline, into what Wittgenstein once supposed cannot be spoken of, and upon which, as Eliphaz Levi advised us – after ‘To know, to will, to dare,’ as the last and greatest of the rules of Magic – we must keep silent.

  Thomas Pynchon, 1997

  This book is a work of fiction.

  FICTION.

  Believe otherwise at your own peril.

  One: AIR

  Unam est vas.

  —Maria Prophetissa

  Daniel Pearse was born on the rainy dawn of March 15, 1966. He didn’t receive a middle name because his mother, Annalee Faro Pearse, was exhausted from coming up with a first and last – especially the last. As near as she could figure, Daniel’s father might have been any of seven men. Annalee decided on Daniel because it sounded strong, and she knew he’d need to be strong.

  At Daniel’s birth, Annalee was a sixteen-year-old ward of the Greenfield Home for Girls, an Iowa custodial institution administered by the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin. She had been placed there by court order after attempting to steal an ounce bar of silver from a jewelry-shop display case. She told the arresting officer she was an orphan of the moon, and told the judge that she didn’t recognize the court’s authority to make decisions about her life. She refused to cooperate beyond giving her name as Annalee Faro Pearse. The judge sentenced her to Greenfield till she was eighteen.

  Her second month at Greenfield, Annalee confided her suspected pregnancy to one of her roommates. The next day she was called before Sister Bernadette, a small, severe woman of fifty with an office as meticulously spare as her heart, though not nearly as dour.

  ‘Sit down,’ Sister Bernadette said. It was a command, not an offer.

  Annalee sat down in the straight-back wooden chair in front of the desk.

  Sister Bernadette stared at Annalee’s face for half a minute, then shifted the gaze to her belly. A muscle twitched in the Sister’s flaccid cheek. ‘I understand you are pregnant,’ she said evenly.

  Annalee shifted her weight on the hard chair. ‘I think so.’

  ‘You were raped,’ Sister Bernadette almost whispered. ‘The child will be put up for adoption.’

  Annalee shook her head. ‘I wasn’t raped. I was fucked by a man I loved. I liked it. I want the baby.’

  ‘And who is this loving father?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know.’ Sister Bernadette blinked slowly, folding her hands on the desk. ‘Is that because you never got his name, or because there’s too many names to remember?’

  Annalee hesitated a moment, then said firmly, ‘Both.’

  ‘So,’ Sister Bernadette nodded curtly, ‘you’re a slut as well as a thief.’

  Blue eyes flashing, Annalee stood up.

  ‘Sit down, slut,’ Sister Bernadette screamed, slamming the desk top with her open hands as she jumped to her feet. ‘I said sit down!’

  Annalee, just under six feet tall and a little over 130 pounds, broke Sister Bernadette’s jaw with her first punch, a roundhouse right with every bit of herself behind it.

  Annalee spent three months alone in what the girls called ‘the blocks’ – a row of tiny cinderblock sheds that had been used for smokehouses when Greenfield was a pig farm. Except for the series of ventilation slits high along the roofline. Annalee’s room was windowless. Nor, with just a saggy cot and a toilet prone to clogging, were her quarters particularly well appointed. She received two meals a day, invariably thin soup, stale bread, and a withered apple. Once a week she was allowed a shower, and once monthly a visit to Greenfield’s doctor, a retired physician deep in his dotage whose main diagnostic technique was having patients do jumping-jacks naked in his office.

  For the first time in her life Annalee began a program of daily exercise, which did not include naked jumping-jacks for the doddering doctor. The exercise helped burn off the rancidity of confinement and answered some faint maternal intuition that she needed to be strong for this birth.

  Annalee’s regimen occupied about two hours a day. The rest of her time she daydreamed, long spiraling reveries. A week later she felt the baby move inside her for the first time, and her entire attention began a slow pivot inward. Using the spoon that came with her meals, working in the few minutes available between eating and the retrieval of her tray, she scratched what she’d learned into the cinderblock wall: ‘Life goes on.’

  When she returned to her dorm, she was welcomed as a heroine. Sister Bernadette was still eating through a straw, and it was rumored she was being transferred. Annalee didn’t particularly care about Sister Bernadette’s fate. She was worried about her own and her baby’s. The new Mother Superior – Sister Christine, who the girls said was ‘cool’ – told her that Sister Bernadette had decided not to press charges for assault.

  ‘Why not?’ Annalee demanded.

  Surprised by Annalee’s aggressive tone, Sister Christine sat up straighter at her desk. ‘Perhaps Sister Bernadette found some compassion in her heart.’

  ‘Only if you could find some in a mustard seed. And if there is any, it’s not much.’

  Sister Christine said softly, ‘It saddens me to hear you say that. I’ve given my life to Christ because I believe in His Divinity and His Wisdom. Central to both, in the heart’s quick, is the power of forgiveness.’

  Annalee leaned forward, conscious of her swelling girth. Just as softly, she said, ‘Sister, I’ve devoted half my life to survival because I’ve found life mean. Forgiveness is a waste of spirit because there’s nothing to forgive. I believe in the wisdom of what is and the power of right now. I’m pregnant. I intend to keep the baby. It’s my life and the only real power I have is taking responsibility for it. If you deny me that power, we go to war, hopefully on front pages and the six o’clock news. “Pregnant Waif Sues Catholic Prison.” “Little girl orphaned by murder/suicide of parents prays every night in tears: Please God, don’t let them take my baby, she’s all I have left.” Forgive me, Sister, but that’s how it is.’

  Sister Christine, eyes bright with tears, reached across the desk and gently squeezed Annalee’s shoulders. ‘Oh, I wish they were all like you. There are so many who must seek God; only a few whom God must find. I’ll do what I can, but beyond Greenfield my influence is minimal. And I do think you should consider adoption, because you have no way to support the baby once you leave here – assuming by some miracle you’re allowed to keep it here – no skills, no home, no family. If you think life is mean so far, try it with a kid. You’ll end up a thirty-year-old waitress with hemorrhoids and a third husband, so depressed that drugs don’t help, and a kid who hates your guts.’