Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.
This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 27-28. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!
Summary
“All the power in the world just to keep things like they are. I mean. I guess.”
After escaping the Green Glass City, the alt-riders travel through grasslands populated by giant insects. They gas up the Challenger in a rusted town (they call it Quarantine) but don’t stay the night – Sarah and Ramon sense the hovering presence of the cowboy, and the place may not be as deserted as it looks. The roads running to the lake are suspiciously well-maintained. Ramon glimpses something moving beneath the foul waters, one huge thing perhaps, or “a body composed of many parts, the way a city would look from high up.”
Zelda guides them through alts until they find a circle of vehicles set upright on their bumpers. Not our Nebraska “Carhenge”; ideas recur across alts. They camp within. Here, far out on “the edges,” Ish says that you can feel the rot, eating away at everything. June frowns, but doesn’t take open exception. That Ish later converses with June as she sketches may mean he’s reconciling with her, but Ramon feels Ish is trying too hard to seem at ease.
The next morning Ramon finds Ish exercising his wounded shoulder and asks if he’s okay. “There’s not a lot of okay going around,” Ish says. Look at the way the cracks in the sky are growing together into gaps of “pure absence.” And—does Ramon think Zelda really wants to stop Sal? Or will she do anything to get Sal back, as Ish would if his beloved were lost, even though he knows what’s “out there.” He’s known ever since his childhood battles with bullies. Out there is sheer “power and will. Whatever its flaws, their own world isn’t that.
Their own world is that, Ramon says angrily, and Ish’s work has worsened the problem. Their choice isn’t between “cages and the rot,” for all that Ish narrows his worldview to visions of a golden day in college when he was unafraid, believing he and Zelda could cure the world.
* * *
The alt-riders travel on toward Elsinore. Zelda’s wounds are slow to heal; she takes Sarah’s pain-pills to sleep but can’t afford woozy mistakes while alt-hopping. Despite a growing storm-tension in the air, Zelda feels her party’s rising excitement—they’re like retired greyhounds who see the metal rabbit again. They reach the Mississippi and follow it south.
Elsinore appears in the distance, looming on a hilltop over barren land, “swollen with battlements and silence…more tumor than structure.” Zelda hoped that the rot might ebb from Elsinore, but even from afar she sees how its stone bubbles. Its windows move when unobserved. Where did the people go, June asks. The rot took them, Ish answers. Zelda tells herself she has a chance to banish the rot, to fix her mistake, but what then? Without the mistake, will she become “a witch after the end of magic,” whether in a world renewed or in one as messed up as ever? Still, there has to be something better.
The night before they reach Elsinore, the alt-riders debate how to get through the castle to the watchtower from which the way to the crossroads will open at “high midnight”. Then, if they make it to the crossroads, they’ll “wall away the rot.” Which, June says, will also wall away Sal and whatever else is out there. And so save their world, Ish says, which is a better place than any they’ve seen in the alts.
Like June, Sarah’s dubious about the “better” place. To find something in the alts, you have to be able to see it, and she’s hard-pressed to “even think better in a way that does not make [her] flinch.” Her mind returns to her kids, and she knows they must do whatever they can to save them.
The conversation shifts from the uncertain future to the past when Sarah says she’s glad they’re all together; whatever the dangers, this beats the ten-year college reunion she attended. They reminisce about Yale and try unsuccessfully to remember a school song. Ramon sings not a school song but one he heard freshman year, Paul Simon’s “The Obvious Child.” It made him think, even then, that he and his friends had “a huge pit of time” ahead of them. He knew they “were children and that [they] weren’t anymore, and [they’d] never be again.” He “was remembering us, even when we were still there.”
No one wants to “go to sleep, after that or ever.” They tell stories until dawn and, staring into the campfire, they don’t “see the sky broken overhead.”
This Week’s Metrics
Fighting the Cowboy: This week, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg shared cool stuff in her newsletter, including a much-appreciated introduction to Siberian folk-rock band Otyken. Have some joy for the road.
What’s Cyclopean: No coincidence that it’s Ish who points to “the gunshot glass sky”.
Libronomicon: “The river could boast a handful of novels—a form whose name meant ‘new.’” June quotes East of Eden on “how hard it is to get anything to grow anywhere.”
Ruthanna’s Commentary
There’s something wrong with time in Quarantine… okay, yes, when I typed it out that way I got the joke. But there is, really. Gasoline goes bad, unusable, in 3-6 months. Twinkies get moldy—insert half an hour of rabbit hole research here—somewhere between the 45 days at which they are officially “no longer at their best,” and the 8 years at which scientists became interested in the Mysterious Fungi that got into one abandoned package, or maybe the 30 years and running that a Twinkie has sat unmolested under glass at the George Stevens Academy in Blue Hill, Maine.
My point is that in a world not shaped by the expectations of visitors, moldy Twinkies do not go with usable gasoline, any more than well-tended roses go with rotting wood and looted stone and pothole-free roads and abandoned fields. Either someone has been very selective with a decay-spewing raygun, or something else is going on.
And something else is certainly going on. Ish tells a story about how he knows “what’s out there, beyond the firelight.” It’s a story of purely mundane childhood horror, and what happens when someone with no stops is told that in order to deal with bullies he needs to learn to hit back. “Whatever’s true about the world back home,” he says, “it’s not that.” But it’s a story of that very world! Even beyond Ramon’s arguments about sheltered privilege and kids in cages, this is literally something that happened to Ish on Earth. Not in the alts, and not due to the Rot.
Throughout this week’s chapters, people point out that the alts are an “out there” based on what the travelers have already experienced “in here.” “The alts are paths we can see. Like dreams,” Zelda says, and Sarah says that “If you want to find something in the alts, you have to be able to see it.” And yet, they keep drawing big general conclusions from what they find. Only June suggests that this is a strange and miserable sort of solipsism.
So if the alts are the limits on what a bunch of quest-seeking Yalies could imagine, they aren’t yet beyond the firelight at all. What is beyond the visible? Sal says that after you get past its tentacular appearances the Rot is beautiful – but is that the only option for real change? Some weeks it feels like the incarnation of a desperate “anything would be better than this”. Is there a secret third thing, other than the Cowboy’s status-quo-protecting lies and the Rot’s roll-a-die deadly change?
Ramon says so. And Zelda sees dimly the existence of other options, even if they “hold their tongue” with her. She talks about older stories, indigenous ones, in a gorgeous paragraph about adaptation and survival: “Legends and myths, jokes and tall tales and memories, stories for children and stories old women told to other old women, a whole ecosystem of breathing, fluttering, bright-plumed stories ancient before the first Viking touched this continent.”
And Chapter 30 dives into the true sources of the “rules” of the alt-riders’ road: jazz and blues and hip-hop, poets and storytellers, Mark Twain and Brother Blue, Arlo Guthrie (okay, really Steve Goodman, but I can’t help my roots) and Clearance Clearwater Revival (though I also have to hat-tip Tina Turner’s “rough” version of “Proud Mary”). And not coincidentally, this discussion opens up American stories beyond the road trip: trains and steamships and anti-capitalist ballads.
But the alts are all built around pothole-free roads through apocalypse: even fields of molten magma are crossed by usable highways. In a weird way, it’s cars beyond which they can’t see. It’s the myth of individualism, the great sacrifice of lives and ecologies for a “freedom” bound to specific paths.
Zelda suggests that the alt-riders are held back, in part, by the fear that they’ll put themselves out of jobs—which is supposed to be what activists are going for. A witch after the end of magic should still have plenty to do. But like too many others, the gang’s gone from imagining a better world to imagining keeping the status quo from getting worse.
At least the apocalypse is better than a class reunion.
Anne’s Commentary
Here are another two chapters in which our heroes, having fought their way through perilous encounters, alt-hop onward while licking their physical and mental wounds. Either they’re mired in introspection or they’re splitting into pairs to hash over chronic traumas and to express doubts about the outcome of their quest. As usual, Ramon can divert himself by tinkering on the Challenger, June by drawing in her sketchbook, but when Zelda’s not guiding the party, she’s left to brood and blame herself for getting them into this whole mess to begin with.
Get over yourselves, I want to tell the variously fretted crew. Keep focused. Carry the hell on. The best parts of these connective chapters are the bits of weird travelogue, like the description of the “rusted town” where they stop for gas. Choice details abound. The neighboring lake is “green and greasy, and under its surface something moves, either “one huge twisting thing” or “a body composed of many parts.” The latter could be a horrible composite monster, like the giants of Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities.” Or it could be what Ramon’s reminded of: a city seen from high above. That could explain why all the town buildings made of stone appear to have been taken apart block by block, and yet none of these blocks remain. Given the roads to the lake still run “straight and clear,” the missing stone could have been transported to the foul mere to construct an underwater town. An underwater town for aquatic invaders? For formerly terrestrial townspeople turned aquatic?
More choice details: A Care Bear sits on the counter of the abandoned gas station, where junk-food offerings have shelf-squatted so long even the immortal Twinkies have molded. One house, decently shuttered, boasts “a full glory” of roses, which suggests a constant gardener remains in what Ramon dubs “Quarantine, Wisconsin.” The town might have been quarantined at the onset of this alt’s troubles, while its inhabitants succumbed to some deeply transformative illness.
That’s the story I’ve come up with. Doubtless this brief but intriguing morsel of road-narrative could inspire a dozen others.
To return to my cri de coeur above. When I go from a chapter like 28 to ones like 29 and 30, I do get jolted by the sudden braking between action and transition. I do get impatient when the alt-riders wallow again in their past and present woes. Upon reflection, I realize that words like “jolted” and “wallowed” are unfairly derogatory, and that impatience with the characters is unproductive.
Unproductive? Of what? When Ruthanna first proposed Last Exit for the blog, I remember her saying she felt there was something in the novel she wanted to get at. Having read this far, I better understand what she meant. There is something here, as much in the angsty-talky bits as the action sequences and concept explication.
The alt-riders huddle around their campfire on the night before embarking on the last act of their quest. Zelda attempts to put their plan of action as simply as possible. When the path to the crossroads opens, they’ll walk it. They’ll get to the crossroads. They’ll wall away the rot. June doesn’t buy this plan, since it would mean walling away Sal and the Beyond itself. Ish backs Zelda, equating the “walling out” with saving their world. June persists in quibbling: “Their” world may be better for Ish, but what about everyone else? Sarah intervenes. Could they have found a better world, when to find something in the alts, you have to be able to imagine it?
I think Sarah means that in the alts—all the possible worlds—one must be able to imagine a world before it can exist: Mind creates world, the interior the exterior. But can one imagine something never seen, never experienced, something conjured ex nihilo? Doctor Sarah must appreciate the complexity of interactions between an individual and their environment. Interactions between all individuals and the macroenvironment must be astronomically complex; Sarah finds it hard to even “think better in a way that does not make [her] flinch.”
Why should she flinch? I believe it’s because she and her friends are united in a conviction amounting to this: The perfect world must be one of equity. How is one person to imagine this? Is a collective imagining even possible, and if so would the collective need to include every individual in the broken world?
Sarah concludes that even the grossly imperfect wastelands they’ve traveled are easier to bear than the struggle for One Good World. “Sick, but easier.” She’s sure of one thing: Even if they all die tomorrow, she’s glad they’re together now . They’re the people in the Paul Simon song Ramon remembers during their nightlong “reunion,” the ones “The Obvious Child’s” Sonny recalls while thumbing through his yearbook:
“Some have died
Some have fled from themselves
Or struggled from here to get there”
But they’re also the ones who:
“…said these songs are true
These days are ours
These tears are free”
I’m still figuring out what the “something” is in Last Exit that makes the “rumination” chapters essential rather than overdone. It may involve the balance of introspection and action, interior and exterior, the necessity for the reader to dwell in the characters’ minds long enough to make that campfire coming-together truly poignant. To make us care what becomes of these people because however fantastic their situation, they are real.
They are real.
Next week, join us for a cryptozoologically tasty treat, in Sara Omer’s “Marshman.”
