Read Online Amnesia Moon by Jonathan Lethem - Free Book Online Page A

bereft in the mountains; he wanted his cigarettes and his booze. He gave up and walked back, curled up around the girl, and went to sleep.
    The hippie in the pickup—Chaos thought of him that way from the moment he saw him: the hippie in the pickup, like the beginning of a joke—woke them up some time in the late afternoon. They’d slept straight through the day; Chaos, as far as he could recall, dreamlessly. The man stopped his truck on the highway a few feet ahead of them and walked back to where they lay on the grass.
    â€œHey! Wow! What are you cats doing out here?”
    He had a droopy blonde mustache and a fringe of long yellow hair around a reddened bald spot, and he wore bleach-spotted jeans and a loose, flowery shirt. A hippie, Chaos recognized, and the fact that he knew what a hippie was, he thought, was more proof against Kellogg’s theory about there not having been a disaster, a change. There hadn’t been any hippies in Little America or Hatfork. Something had at least rid the place of hippies.
    Chaos waved his hand. Melinda was still asleep.
    â€œHey, where’s your transport? This is like, nowhere, you know. What, did you just come out of the Emerald City? Hey, that is one hairy chick, man.”
    Melinda, woken by the sound of his voice, sat up and stared. The man shambled up to within a few feet of them, took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. “Hot, man. Hey, she’s just a girl. That’s jailbait.”
    â€œEmerald City?” said Chaos. “You mean back there?”
    â€œYeah, the Green Meanies, the Country of the Blind. What’s the matter, you couldn’t get with Elaine’s program? I don’t blame you.”
    â€œYou used to live there?”
    â€œNah. I got a problem with The Man—all that dreamstuff doesn’t work on me. I’m immune, got a built-in bullshit detector. I used to live in California”—he pointed his thumb over his shoulder, at the mountains—“but I headed out this way after the big bust-up. Needed elbow space.” This he performed for them, a brief knock-kneed dance with swinging elbows. “Bumped into Elaine’s boys at the border, saw the way they were sniffing their way around with dogs, got the scoop on the green. I couldn’t relate to that scenario. So I set up back here, on the Strip. Nobody here but me and the McDonaldonians. Maximum headroom, you know?”
    â€œYou can see in the green?”
    â€œTold you, I’m immune. Use to go in there just for laughs, steal food and stuff in front of their noses, but a couple of times they almost caught me. Now I just leave them alone. We got nothing to say to each other.”
    â€œDo you—have any water in your truck?”
    â€œOh, sure. Stay there.” He turned and jogged back up the embankment. Chaos turned to Melinda, who smiled weakly. Before he could say anything, the man was back with a camouflaged canteen. Chaos and Melinda both drank, and the man went on talking.
    â€œâ€”got everything I need on the Strip, anyway. But I ought to go in there with a shotgun sometime, the stores on the Strip are full of them, you know, one behind every counter, and pick off Elaine, blam! See what happens after that. Probably some other dumbshit setup, you know? Because those cats were just born with their heads naturally up their assholes.”
    â€œWhat happened in California?”
    â€œOh, you know, same thing as everywhere, only weirder, since it’s California. You from there?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œYeah, I understand. There’s a lot of that going around. Well, you sound like it to me. You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”
    â€œWhen you say what happened in California is the same thing as everywhere”—Chaos felt a little embarrassed about the question—“what is it that happened?”
    The hippie shrugged. “You know, the weirdness