This excerpt is from the forthcoming novel. Read our recent interview with Lance Olsen to learn more about the author and his work.

 Welcome to another episode of my own little pirate podcast coming to you semi-live and completely indirect every week from a different corner of the godforsaken Salton Sea, deadest body of saline solution on the deadest stretch of southwestern desert you’ll ever want to forget.

You’re listening to Jolly Roger and his whole sick crew…and that means you, too, baby.

Maybe a friend told you about my revolving Web site. Maybe you stumbled upon it late one night while looking for someone else’s entirely. Maybe something made you click that link at the bottom of that piece of spam you found in your inbox this morning that you just knew you shouldn’t open.

And here you are.

That Web site is where I keep my—let us call it, transitory cell-phone number. Scroll down to the lower left-hand corner to find it. Use it or lose it within twenty-four hours. I take your call, you’re on. I don’t and, well, try, try again. Jolly Roger plans on sticking around long enough to hear what everybody has to say, who Time and the Ordinary have put out of mind…

The clock over the sink tells me it’s a hair’s breadth past two in the a.m. I’m sitting at the kitchen table, which also happens to serve as the living room couch, in what for the rest of tonight we’ll refer to as my home. Actually, it’s a quote friend’s unquote…although he won’t exactly be in a position to figure that out till he returns from what I suspect is a brief but relaxing supply run into Calipatria.

Me, I’ve got a glass of whiskey in my left hand, a tasty Marlboro in my right. My laptop is glowing on the table before me. The front and back windows are shut. The air conditioner, such as it is, is on. The living room, which, I should mention, also serves as bedroom and closet, smells of fish and fungus. It’s piled almost to the low ceiling with bundles of old newspapers, empty cardboard boxes, jumbled clothes that stink of unwashed hair, and neatly stacked cans of beans, tomato soup, chicken soup, broccoli soup, and pureed carrots. Inside, it’s eighty degrees. Outside, I’m guessing eighty-five.

Walk through the rattly aluminum door behind me, and you will step onto a plot of dead earth perhaps one-hundred-feet long by one-hundred-feet deep. It’s surrounded by cyclone fencing on which is hung a sign, red lettering on white background, that sayeth: Don’t worry about the dog. Beware of owner. Turn around at that fencing and look back, and you will observe a peeling white outbuilding twice as big as your average phone booth. It’s empty save for a lone pitchfork leaning in a dark corner. In front, a little to your right, you will make out a wood-framework tower, maybe twenty feet tall, on top of which sits either a large propane or water tank. And in the foreground, notice a rusty, pale-green Airstream trailer partially surrounded by a rickety white picket fence.

Look through the closed front window, compadre, and you will see my back hunched over this table.

That Airstream resides on the corner of two unpaved streets a block up from the massive berm on the other side of which stretches the Salton Sea in an environmental calamity that, back in the fifties, developers marketed as a little piece of heaven. My closest temporary neighbors live in similar shacks maybe fifty feet away. Perhaps they think I’m someone else. Perhaps they don’t care. Perhaps they’ve left this place a long time ago.

Welcome to the land of tomorrow, folks. To my vessel. My luxury liner docked in Bombay Beach. The inside of my head for the next twenty minutes…

And now, without further ado, my first exchange with the Tribe …

Am I on the air?

Indeed you are, my good man. Let Destiny hear what you’re thinking.

I, uh…I just finished my latest project. I think I’ve got something important going on.

You’re an artist?

Engineer.

And your name is…

Josh. Joshua.

What do you have to share with us this otherworldly morning, Josh Joshua?

You know how we all sometimes feel like we’re suddenly cut off from everything?

Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?

How you’ll just be like sitting there in your room, or maybe walking down the street, and this like Saran Wrap of isolation will suddenly enfold you without warning?

We’ve all been there, friend.

I decided to build a remedy.

For solitude?

An anti-loneliness device. Yeah. It hasn’t been easy. The parts are hard to come by. I have to wait for them. But they always find me. People know what I need.

How long have you been laboring at this Suez Canal of belonging?

I, uh …  Time gets funny sometimes, you know?  Last week it was 1986.

And your device works … how?

The key is it’s designed to block out the loneliness waves. It goes right to the source. Others have missed that. It’s subtle.

How many ergs are we talking about here?

Thirty-five hundred. But that’s not the breakthrough. The breakthrough is it all comes down to…You listening?

We all are.

If it it’s broken, dude, fix it. And if you can’t fix it…make it SPIN.

You’re off the air with Jolly Roger.  Speak and we shall listen.

You know how you hate men, but you love ’em, too?

They’re bastards, honey.

They can’t help it. All that testosterone.  All that meanness living in their fucking bloodstreams. But those beautiful blue eyes, too. Jesus. They can burn right through a goddamn iron-plated heart.

Where are you hailing from this night-morning?

Minneapolis.

It’s later than you think out there, huh? Can you see the red sun beginning to rise outside your window? The first dog-walkers hitting the streets even as we speak? Sanitation trucks… Street cleaners…

They fucking treat you like mold spores.

Those Beelzebubs in guy-clothing?

They cheat on you with your best friends. Rob shit out of your drawers. Steal food and beer from the fridge. Tell you shit you want so bad to believe you say, “What the hell,” and do. 

Even though you don’t, not for a second …

You see the news last night?

Do you know what Lord Northcliffe once said about that illustrious subject? The news, said he, is what somebody else wants to suppress. All the rest is advertising.

I’ve been counting.

Have you?

In the last twenty-four hours alone? Some asshole torches his girlfriend’s house with three kids where they’re sleeping cuz she’d told him to go fuck himself. In a park in Laredo, eight teenagers rape this middle-aged chick out for a jog just to see what it feels like. In Hoboken, this housewife gets beaten to shit for telling her old man that Jon Bon Jovi is drop-dead gorgeous. See what I’m saying? The news ain’t the news no more.

It isn’t?

It’s a fucking Rolodex of assaults. Men against women. That’s what it is. And before any of you women haters out there start ranting about how many men get abused by women? Don’t even fucking bother. Cuz the ones who get pissed off? The ones who go on and on about how they’d never hurt a fly and all that shit? We ALL know better. You fuckers do exactly shit to stop other men from harming women. And you wanna know something? I’ll always fucking HATE you. I fucking hate you today. I’ll fucking hate you tomorrow. I’ll fucking hate you the year after that.

And love us, too, right?

Fucking A, man. I’ve got a knife. I’ll use it.

Glad to hear it, honey. We love you, too. Sleep well for me tonight, okay? May your dreams fill the room you inhabit.

From the area code, I’m guessing you’re coming to us straight from the rotten core of the Big Apple.

You’re the best, Jolly Roger. My name’s Mike.

Flattery will get you everywhere, Mike. Or at least another two minutes of air time in the netherglobe. What wisdom would you like to impart to us fellow Morlocks traveling side by side with you in the great time machine called Mother Earth this afternoon?

I’ve been thinking about how they’re all like totally Iraqed.

Who’s that, Mike?

The kids? In malls? You know, with their lip rings and tongue studs and the way they laugh at you by not laughing? You can see it in their eyes.

Not sure I’m quite following you here, Mike …

They don’t wanna do ratshit, ayte? Look at them irises. Fuckers go on and on about dismantling the system and burning the Man and blowing up their high schools and whatever? Only what they really want? What they really want is to sit around on their fucking asses all day watching SpongeBob SquarePants and snarfing Cheesy Poofs.

Why do you think that is, Mike?

This ain’t THINKING, Jolly. I’ve got one word for you.

One word?

Hormone deficit.

Help me out here.

Them birds in Lake Ontario? All of a sudden one day they can’t find no more mates, ayte? So the females? They start going gay. You hear about that?

I haven’t.

Shit, man. They start nesting with these other females, taking turns tending their infertile eggs. F that S. Know what I’m saying? Or them other birds? Cormordants? They got beaks so fucking twisted they can’t eat nothing. Six-legged frogs. Two-headed turtles. And that place in Florida? The one with all them alligators with dicks too small to fuck with? Tell me that ain’t like totally fucked up.

That’s totally fucked up, Mike.

So here’s what I want to know. Who gives a shit about like global warming and whatever when your dick’s too small to fuck with? 

Good point.

Lemme ask you something. How many sperm you think your average guy’s supposed to got in an average-sized sackload?

I’m just a lowly podcaster here.

Used to be close to a hundred million per milliliter. Word.

Used to be?

Couple years ago? These scientists? They studied like men from all around the world, and you know what they find? They find sperm counts’ve fallen by half in the last fifty years, ayte? HALF. You got yourself spunk levels that low, you’d be watching SpongeBob SquarePants.

You serious about all this stuff, Mike?

Alphabetical pollutants. PCBs. DDT. Plastics. Cosmetics. Paints. Detergents. They mimic the effects of female hormones, ayte? Screw with your reproductive and nervous and immune systems. Put that together with them tainted flu vaccines and you’ve got yourself a regular apopaclypse.

Tainted flu vaccines?

Serratia? Same shit the government released from this ship off San Francisco in the fifties to test whether an enemy could launch a biological attack from a distance?

Yeah?

Whole lots of them vaccines contaminated with it.

The U.S. government, Mike? Aren’t they supposed to be on our side?

Only they thought it was like this harmless microbe at the time, ayte? Turns out it causes this like avalanche of bad juju. Everything from heart-valve infections to peptic shock. You want one word for it? Chinese toothpaste. You think you’re being careful? You think you’re doing all you can?

I’m not sure I do.

Cuz walk around with fucking plastic bags over your hands? You’re still hosed. You wanna hint? The prognosis is always fatal, man. ALWAYS.

In cases of ingesting Chinese toothpaste, you’re saying?

In cases of being alive, man. Um, whoa. Thanks for the reminder, Mike. We can never hear that shadowy tune enough.  Duck and cover, you’re saying.

Word, man. Word.

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………  Welcome to lucky episode thirteen of my own little pirate podcast coming to you semi-live and completely indirect every week from a different corner of the godforsaken Salton Sea, deadest body of saline solution on the deadest stretch of southwestern desert you’ll ever want to forget.

I checked our download stats at what passes for the Internet café at the Fountain of Youth RV Resort down the road from glorious Niland yesterday afternoon, folks, and I’m happy to report our numbers have soared from one hundred sixty-six last week to a whopping one hundred eighty-seven as of 1:33 p.m. this day just past.

So it looks like the passenger deck on this ship of fools is filling fast.

Can fame and fortune be far behind? Almost surely not. But who the fuck cares?

Jolly Roger wants to thank you all for opening your ears, your hearts, your minds …

Remember: all you have to do to set sail with the whole sick crew is search out my revolving Web site. To find it, just listen to your closest friends. Surf the web with real curiosity. Open each and every piece of spam you receive. I plan on sticking around here for the great duration listening to what everybody has to say whom God and His Gofers have forgotten …

Speaking of which, imagine me tonight, if you will, sitting cross-legged on a deserted beach somewhere at the end of the world. The clock on my computer screen says 3:12 in the a.m. The temperature is a balmy seventy-eight. The forecast, like our government, is bland and predictable. A light breeze wafts in across the blasted water, on the far side of which hangs a stark low mountain range on the horizon. Stars are manifest in hazy profusion.  To coin a phrase.

Surrounding me is an abandoned playground, its swingless swing, broken seesaw, and monkey bars in the shape of a submarine’s conning tower half sunk in what at first glance you might mistake for white sand. You would be wrong. The granular substance, if you examine it closely, is in fact composed of myriad crushed fish bones from myriad fish kills. The air carries a salty piscine reek that you can taste on your lips, at the back of your tongue, deep in the intricacies of your sinuses. Leave here and drive to Niland, to Mecca, to Palm Springs, and that taste will dog you, friends, reminding you for hours post factum of this alcove in Nowhere’s Mansion.

Behind me looms the renowned, now-deserted blue and white Marina Hotel with its empty, graffitied swimming pool. The windows were long ago boardedup with plywood. The back door has been, let us say, renovated by indigenes to allow easy ingress by the odd intrepid traveler.

To wander past what once was a meat locker through what once was the bar, now a dark ramshackle cavern concretized with gull guano and atrill with the birds’ uncanny coos, is finally to understand Mr. Tom Waits’s voice.

To read the thoughts spray-painted along the swimming pool walls is to understand Mr. Lou Reed’s lyrics.

Your name means nothing, they say.

Hell’s cuties.

Nighttime flight.

Oh, yeah.

Make no mistake about it, friends. This is the zone of cars sunken nose first into the briny slush along the shoreline, back halves jutting above the surface like huge rusted fins. The zone of derelict cafés and dented golf carts propped on blocks in grassless yards. The zone two hundred feet below hope possessing a heat so malicious it can clear the searing streets for weeks on end, a pollution so ferocious it can evacuate the vast inland blue of every boat and swimmer for months at a stretch.

And you may ask yourself, as the Talking Heads do, Well, how did we get here?

At the turn of the last century, the story goes, the eminent California Development Company, seeking to realize Imperial Valley’s potential for unlimited agricultural productivity, dug irrigation canals from the Colorado River. When not-unexpected heavy silt loads commenced inhibiting the flow, engineers created a cut in the western bank to allow more water through. Jump to periodic Biblical rains. Jump to periodic Biblical floods. Jump to the breaching of the levees.

And witness, if you will, nearly all the river’s mighty flow rushing headlong into what till then had been known as the arid bowl-like Salton Sink.

By the time the breach was closed in 1907, the present-day Salton Sea had been formed: fifteen miles wide, thirty-five long, an average of thirty deep.

Instead of evaporating, as some innocents had predicted, it more or less maintained itself by massive agricultural runoff from the Imperial and Coachella valleys. Combine that with the its increasing salinity and inflow of highly polluted water from the northward-flowing New River, and witness a wild chemical broth that began to spawn monstrous algal blooms. Said blooms starved the water of oxygen. The lack of oxygen spawned voluminous fish die-offs. The voluminous fish die-offs spawned immensely elevated bacteria levels. The immensely elevated bacteria levels spawned massive bird die-offs.  And …

And what else could one possibly do when played such a surreal hand except make it all into a tourist attraction that failed almost as soon as it was imagined?

All of which is to say: welcome to Dreadland, friends.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

And welcome to my humble vessel. My listing luxury liner. The inside of my head for the next twenty minutes …

Yo, Jolly Roger. Dan here.

Where you phoning from, Dan?

Portland.

And what do you do there in the beautiful City of Roses?

I’m a member of this group of artists?

What kind of artists?

We’re called The Heraclitus?

As in the Greek river one can never step into twice?

Exactly.

And what, Dan, is your group’s medium?

Cells.

As in, small rooms in prisons?

As in, one or more nuclei surrounded by cytoplasm and enclosed by a membrane.

Human cells?

Human. Cow. Fish. A stem cell is pretty much a stem cell. It’s what you do with it that’s important?

And you’re doing what?

Biochemical engineering.

I sit before you, metaphorically speaking, deeply impressed.

We take these like, um … frames? Think of them as frames? Polymer scaffolds? And we grow the cells on them into … stuff. You differentiate the cells into whatever you want them to be. Bone. Muscle. Liver. Whatever. Then you cook them in a bioreactor for a couple of months.

A bioreactor?

Yeah. This, um, this device that supports a biologically active environment? They’re used a lot in tissue-engineering?

What sort of stuff are we talking about here?

Stuff that’s kind of unimaginable, but not really? You can, like, embed an iPod Nano into a, um, dog’s heart?

Say again, Dan?

Yeah. With this like hole in it for the dial and earphone jack and everything? That’s what I listen to you on sometimes. Or you can craft this bio-jewelry? Real goat eyeballs, maybe, that you can hang around your neck? Or say you want to decorate your computer with human teeth? Or make your trackpad out of cat-tongue tissue for better traction? You can do that, too. Except that’s not the really cool stuff.

It’s not?

We’re in the process of giving people the option to grow extra little things on themselves? On their, like, bodies? Not prosthetics or plastic surgery or whatever.  We can, like … Okay. Picture tiny devil horns for your forehead made out of real, you know, growing bone tissue? You have to get them filed down every once in a while, just like you get a haircut? Or instead of a tattoo of bat wings on your back? You can get small living batwings implanted? One on each shoulder blade? You can’t fly or anything, but still. It’s pretty cool. Or maybe a miniature set of gills just below your ears … or maybe, like, on the back of your hands? Or what about a squirrel’s eyeball on the tip of your dick?

Okay, Dan, now you’re starting to scare me.

Oh, no. There’s nothing scary here, Jolly Roger. I mean, no animals are hurt or anything? And if you’re uncomfortable or whatever, you don’t have to join in. But someday?

Yeah?

Someday we plan to make little chimera.

Chimera?

Little like fairy-tale creatures? One of Snow White’s seven dwarfs. An angel. A miniature Loch Ness monster for your bathtub? Stuff like that.  They won’t be alive or anything? They’ll sort of be like stuffed animals, only built out of real skin instead of cloth.

Won’t the skin go bad?

Nope. We treat it with a polymer. It’ll basically last forever.

You’re an aesthetic pioneer of the flesh.

I don’t know. I mean, actually, this whole thing’s a pretty old idea.

From back in the days when we thought science fiction was merely a literary genre?

You ever hear of FM-2030?

A radio station?

A futurist. His real name was Fereidoun M. Esfandiary. He was the son of this Iranian diplomat. He taught at the New School in the Sixties and wrote a book called Are You a Transhuman? He said he was really a twenty-first-century person who just happened to be born in 1930. He called himself temporally challenged. He always talked about how he had this tremendous nostalgia for the future. That’s where he got his name. He said he wanted to live to be a hundred years old so he could see the year 2030, which he thought would represent this like huge breakthrough moment.

Things just get interestinger and interestinger.

FM argued that we’re all transhumans, really. As in Transitory Humans? In the sense that we’re all always evolving? Not figuratively. Literally. Every species is an intermediary species. Meaning humans are just these always-already mutations waiting to happen. Except most of us don’t want to think about stuff like that too hard? We don’t want to contemplate the consequences of being in-process organisms?

So we’re back to your Greek river, only made of soft tissue.

Why settle for being who you were born as? Why settle for being the person you were ten minutes ago?

Thanks for your report from the epidermal front, Dan from Portland.

Hey, we all love your show up here. We tell everyone we meet to listen.

Well, you’ve certainly given us plenty to keep us awake tonight. Keep us posted, all right? Let us know when the lights have changed. Let us know when it’s time to cross the street, okay, Dan?  Dan?

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