Brian, the first guy who’d spoken to us, led me to a barn where this big brawny guy was busy doing something, and left us alone. Paul, that was his name, behaved toward me as if we’d known each other forever. His long hair and beard made him look older than he was. He complained, though without any rancor, that he was the only guy in the commune with a bit of muscle, which meant that he was given most of the physical chores. He looked me up and down and tapped me on the shoulder.
“You’re a godsend. I have a mile of fencing to put up to keep the sheep in. And they’ve bought these really high posts. I have to get up on a crate to hammer them in. That’s the problem with barter, you swap what you have for something you don’t necessarily want.”
The posts came up to my waist. We loaded them, along with the wire netting, a crowbar and a sledgehammer, onto a two-wheeled cart pulled by a docile-looking horse. Placid as it was, it recoiled for a moment when it saw me. The human beings it was used to obviously weren’t as big as me. Paul immediately realized I had farm experience. I told him about my early years in Montana, and all the school vacations when my mother had stuck me on a ranch with people who had lost the habit of talking because they lived so far from anywhere. We set off for a huge meadow from where you could see the ocean in the distance, gray with white flecks, flinging itself at the deserted beach. The ocean air reached us and mixed with the smell of the joint Paul had rolled while we were talking. As often happened when I’d spent a day in a state of uncontrollable nervousness, the following day I felt strangely calm. I was breathing normally, thinking normally. I was determined to take advantage because I knew this sense of peace never lasted more than a day or two, and that was the time limit I’d set myself to stay here. We got to work. Paul would make the hole and hold the pole while I drove it in. After a while, we took a break. He rolled another joint, lit it and offered it to me. I refused, saying I never touched the stuff.
“You’re right, nobody knows where it leads. Apparently in people who smoke a lot, there have been cases of dissociation. You know what that means?”
“Yes, I do,” I replied. “I used to work in a psychiatric hospital.”
“Fuck, man, you’ve sure done some jobs. All I ever did was two things: study math, and kill people for two years.”
I let him just keep on talking.
“Imagine we’re both here, laying our fence, and we hear the noise of a plane along in the distance. A minute later, this plane empties its load over us, and we’re turned to dust. A dust even thinner than the one we’re promised in the Bible. There’s nothing left. It’s the Apocalypse. Not a single living soul, not a flower. I spent two years in those planes as a navigator. Of course, I’m not responsible. That’s what I tell myself whenever I think about it. And I think about it all the time. But I can’t convince myself, so I light a joint to get away from the memories. Two years of war without seeing a corpse, can you imagine that? But I know we burned thousands of men, women and children to cinders, and I never even knew what they had against us. I contributed to a statistic, my friend. And with all the goodwill in the world, I can’t get over it. Were you in Vietnam?”
“I tried, but they didn’t want me because of my height.”
“Fuck it, man, you were lucky! Don’t feel sorry about not going, we’re not doing any good over there even though the people in Washington say the opposite. It’s like the end of the world, it really is. I came here when my time was up. I never had the guts to desert. If this commune hadn’t taken me in, I’d be on the road. Ted’s a good guy. He really helps the others. He has theories that add up. He says the source of all problems, the thing that’s leading us to disaster, is that we want what other people have. Nobody thinks about anything except extending their own territory and grabbing other people’s money and women. He’s some kind of Taoist. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I think it has something to do with getting away from your own ego, your own past, your own upbringing and just going back to nature. And that’s fine with me. We’re working hard to get somewhere. It’s a race against the system. The cops have their eyes on us, but apparently the worst thing is the IRS, which is demanding a ridiculous amount of back taxes on our barter. You planning to stay?”
“No, I just came to drop off a girl who wants to try it out, and to find out about two co-eds who may have come through here in the past two weeks.”
To underline what I was saying, I took the photos from my pocket. He looked at them for the longest time, then sighed.
“I’m high so much of the time I couldn’t swear it, but the blonde looks familiar. The other’s more ordinary. They look like model students. Why are you looking for them?”
I rehashed the same old story. “They disappeared from the campus in Santa Cruz. And as there was a killer on the prowl around the same time, their parents are worried.”
“I can understand that. They may well have come through here. But one thing’s for sure, they didn’t stay. And if they didn’t stay, where would they have gone?” He laughed. “My God, when I think about all those cops in California who must be after that killer of yours. I mean, rightfully so. But I pulverized thousands of Vietcong and I have a medal for it. I should have thrown that fucking medal in the toilet at my parents’ house. My poor parents thought they’d welcomed back a hero. Sometimes I tell myself I would have preferred to kill those Vietcong in hand to hand fighting. Then at least I could have claimed it was self-defense. But from up there in the sky, Jesus, man . . .”
Paul wasn’t a bad guy, but he was starting to make my head spin. I picked up the sledgehammer and one of the posts to signal that we were starting again. The lunch break wasn’t a long one. A little soup in the communal room. I wasn’t used to having a meal without meat. I thought for a moment about going out and buying myself a hamburger. Work resumed after an hour, and an hour and a half later we hit an area where there was a layer of stone under the topsoil and even when I hit the poles with all the strength I had they wouldn’t go in more than an inch. That riled Paul, but it wasn’t my problem anymore. It meant the shape of the pasture was all wrong and the fenced-in space was smaller than it should have been, but it was better than nothing.
That evening—they’d already lighted the oil lamps—Paul was so full of praise for my work that Ted suggested I stay. I replied that I wasn’t ready to live in a commune, that I didn’t like other people enough, and that I thought their utopia would melt away like spring snow one of these days. As we were talking, I could sense everyone getting excited. It was time to decide who was going to sleep with who. I realized it was kind of an obligation. One of the unwritten rules of the commune was that it didn’t accept people who were already in couples, and that it was forbidden to form long-term couples while there. According to Ted, that was the only way to ensure they wouldn’t fall back into the mistakes of the traditional possessive family model. I talked with Ted for a good part of the night. I saw Susan move away, followed closely by a not very handsome guy, and I told myself she was finally going to do what she’d been itching to do. Ted explained his whole philosophy to me as if he was trying to sum it up for himself and reassure himself that he was on the right track. The stunning blonde was waiting for him. It was obvious she didn’t dare go to bed alone for fear someone other than Ted would slip in beside her. I wasn’t too bothered about the way they’d dropped out, or their threadbare philosophy, or the fact that they were doomed to extinction. What made me nauseous was how they treated women, making them pregnant without really knowing who the father. That struck me as really disgusting. There weren’t as many women in the commune as men and, every evening, there were always two guys who didn’t make the grade, like two men who have to keep watch when the rest of the crew of a ship are asleep down below. So that night, there were three poor solitary guys surrounded by moaning coming from every direction. Not many couples closed their doors and sometimes they swapped in the middle of the night. And the reason the two guys who were keeping me company were there was because they wanted to be. A girl came and joined us, it wasn’t a good day for her, her period had started and she’d only just realized. All these people who were trying to escape man’s primitive instincts ended up with even fewer taboos than primitive man himself, which made them real savages when it came to sex. They didn’t give a damn because they were all off their heads with drugs. Around two in the morning, I saw Susan come out, stark naked, dragging a little woolen blanket along behind her like a floor cloth. She asked me if I wanted to join her. I wasn’t obliged to sleep with her, she said, there were other girls in the room. That was when I decided to leave. I pretended I was just going into the fields to relieve myself, and that was the last they saw of me.
In the van, I knocked back two of the bottles of wine and set off. I was relieved to be alone again. For no particular reason, I thought about Charles Manson and his gang who had murdered Sharon Tate. I could have done the same thing in that commune. All I had to do was take out my 9 mm pistol and start shooting, just as if it was the shooting range at the fair. But why? There’s no logic to these things. You either want to or you don’t. I didn’t feel the need, even though those people disgusted me. When I got to the village, I left the coast road on the right and drove straight on in order to get back onto the 101.
When I got back to my room I drank two more bottles to help me get to sleep. It’s unusual for day to break before I’ve slept.