In Touch (The Vassi Collection)

by Marco Vassi

  Now she danced with the euphoric transport of a dervish, her legs trembling with an energy that springs from the cosmic life force of which each body is but a momentary reflection and flares forth when one has gone beyond the six stages of exhaustion. Her tits bounced and flew as she moved and each slap of flesh against flesh seemed to whip her into an even more eruptive state.

  She had lost sight of Fred some time earlier, and she roamed the floor in narcissistic solitude, finding herself changing partners continually, if the kind of dancing they were doing even admitted of the concept of partner. Rather each was a flake of brightly colored stone in an undulating mosaic of everforming chaos. At times Lydia would be with a man, acting out in pantomime the most scintillating erotic scenarios, perhaps dropping to her knees, her head lolling, her tongue lapping, as the stranger pumped his pelvis at her face. Another time found her with a woman, wrapped in an ecstasy of kinesthetic stridency, building higher and higher levels of tension until the two of them flew into one another’s arms, their breasts crushed, their mouths merged. Again, and she was one of a group of five who had formed a circle, acting out a complex tribal dance which discovered its own structure as it went along. Time and eternity played sixty-nine, with each temporal crystal attaining immortal significance, and endlessness infusing itself with amusement at its own expense.

  Lydia was at the wildest discotheque in Province-town. On the Friday after she had seen Nora, she met Fred for lunch and told him of her experience.

  “I’m a little frightened. I became a therapist because I wanted to explore the depths of the human experience. But I really had nothing going for me except a random sprinkling of insights and a head stuffed with theories. But now that I am beginning to taste the terrible knowledge that everything which exists is nothing but a momentary whimsy bubbling to the surface of the essential mystery, I am filled with both horror and boundless excitement. I mean, consider our choice. To shuffle about the safe routines of the common social perception or to leap into the unknown.”

  Fred had yawned.

  “You remind me of a friend of mine,” he told her, “a man that keeps re-discovering the wheel. I give him credit because he insists on his originality, his insistence on finding out for himself. But then I see him as a total shmuck because he wastes so much time coming to things he could take as part of his cultural heritage, and go on from there. It’s like the Primal Scream nitwits who don’t realize that their discovery is nothing but a reformulation of a truth that’s been understood for thousands of years.

  And now you come along with your patient’s suicide and a woman who’s learned that it’s fun to masturbate in front of an audience, and think that you’ve descended into life’s deepest meanings.”

  He sat back in his chair, gazed at Lydia for almost a full minute, and then went on, “I think I’d like you to meet some people.”

  They’d made the five hour drive in a rented car, Lydia’s mood lightening as the city fell behind them, the dense concrete concentration of New York opening into stunted and sprawling suburbs, then into open stretches of land, interrupted-every now and then by a smaller city, a New Haven or a Bridgeport. And by the time they’d covered the length of the Cape itself, and reached the ocean, faced with the flesh-colored dunes, and she’d smelled the ocean air, her entire Manhattan existence had come to seem some kind of dismal prison term.

  The town itself shocked her. Commercial Street, the main drag, leapt at her with the crowded vulgarity of Coney Island, with thousands and thousands of people doing little more than rubbing against one another, working out some primeval herd instinct that the denizens of human civilization consider quaint in other species but do not recognize in themselves, and mask with oblique terminology, referring to parties, ball games, rallies, church-going and other rationalizations for carrying out the dictates of biology. The street was a mile-long strip of bars, restaurants, souvenir shops, bookstores, clothing boutiques, and quick-food shops.

  Fred took her to his friends’ place, a large subterranean apartment which looked like a museum, loaded with art deco pieces, feathers, broken mirrors, fantastic costumes hung carelessly on hooks. The scene could not have been designed, but could have reached its condition only through a process of accumulation. And yet, on closer inspection, it proved to be functional, efficient, continually gratifying to the senses with its colors, different textures and. motifs, and faint smells of incense, marijuana, and body oils.

  Within an hour, Lydia had met more than a dozen people, who bustled and wafted in and out in various states of consciousness. Men who looked like women, women who looked like drugged peacocks, people whose gender was totally indeterminate, and all of them involved in utterly unconnected and yet oddly harmonious activities. Somehow, food got cooked and the floor was swept and it was possible for some to sleep while others talked or listened to music. And at one point Lydia heard, the sounds of fucking coming from behind a screen. Fifteen minutes later she saw two young boys and a woman with nose rings saunter out, all smiling and sweating and naked.

  “Lydia, this is Reginald,” Fred said when a dark man with a full mustache walked into the place. “It’s basically his apartment.”

  Reginald wore skin-tight velour pants and a tattered, transparent Indian shirt. He had black coal under his eyes and a trace of lipstick on his full mouth. His right ear was triply pierced and carried a gold hoop, a diamond-tipped stud, and a hanging silver crescent. His body possessed that mixture of suppleness and rigidity often found in certain types of homosexuals, men who have resolved their entire psychophysical ambivalences into a fixed posture and then become comfortable within that frame. His walnut brown eyes did a quick scan of Lydia’s face, seemed to register a definitive impression, and then he smiled.

  “Well, basically I pay the rent,” he said.

  “Lydia’s a therapist,” Fred said. “She’s studying the relationship between fantasy and reality.”

  “Wow,” someone behind them said. Lydia looked over her shoulder and saw a black man, short and stocky, doing pushups, looking back at her. His eyes rose and fell as he worked himself up and down from the floor, and gazing at him gave her a feeling of vertigo. She knew she was being mocked, but somehow the tone was kindly.

  “Really, Fred,” she said, “I don’t think it’s necessary to go into any of that.” In that milieu, her words and diction sounded stilted and strained to her ears.

  “But that’s precisely the reason we came here,” he told her. “You see, they are living out, in their rather baroque fashion, some of the so-called discoveries you think you are making. He turned to Reginald and related the stories of Marsha’s suicide and Nora’s masturbation.

  “But that’s confidential material,” Lydia blurted out, and then put her hand over her mouth. In this atmosphere, the notion that what someone did with her or his body could be private emerged as a grotesque joke.

  “Don’t you know . . . “ said the man doing the pushups, “that we all . . . do the same . . . thing? I mean . . . there’s just so . . . many things you . . . can do with . . . the human animal . . . And what makes . . . people uptight . . . is thinking they . . . got something special . . . “ His phrases came out in spurts, in time with his exercise.

  “Well, that’s both too fast and too simple,” Reginald said. “The woman is from a different culture. Treat her as you would an anthropologist. Let her look around, pick things up at her own speed. And please, don’t put her on. This isn’t a pigpen.”

  Lydia retreated to a corner and tried to become invisible. For over an hour she did nothing but sit and look, attempting to make sense out of the kaleidoscope of impressions she was receiving, the comings and goings, the hierarchical structure she felt had to be there, the ultimate purpose of it all. She worked with calm, feverish commitment to fit this reality into the context of her own perceptual structures. And after a while, she hit upon her first insight.

 
“They have no time distinctions,” she said to herself. “Or rather, their sense of time has to do with their individual biological clocks and not with the clocks on the wall.” She looked around and saw that there were no clocks on the wall and that no one wore wristwatches. They had, as far as is possible, reduced time to two variables, the variation of dark and light.

  The next thing she noticed was that there was very little overt interaction. It was something like the psychotic wards she’d visited during her internship. But with a difference. These people were not withdrawn and apathetic; rather, they seemed interested and involved. But she couldn’t tell with what. On the one hand, there was continual movement; concurrently, the environment kept being taken apart and put back together. But she couldn’t find the connection between what the people did and what got done as a result. She put it together in a second formulation—the people were communicating with some other language besides speech, something even more subtle than body language.

  Even as she thought that, however, Fred came up behind her and whispered, “Telepathy.”

  Lydia almost fell from the chair.

  “I was watching you,” he continued, “and could tell you were trying to figure out how they operate. It’s a process of telepathy. They have learned how to be sensitive to one another’s auras, so that they can read one another directly, without having to go through the cumbersome process of communication.”

  Lydia turned to him. “But how did they arrive at that? What are the techniques? Why, if that can be studied and understood, it would revolutionize therapy.”

  Fred laughed. “Don’t you understand? Psychotherapy is a very low grade of behavior, the crude effort by a moribund society to pump life into its walking corpses. When you arrive at a state of pure mental interaction, therapy has all the appeal of an oil tanker. You won’t get anywhere if you try to translate this reality into your categories. What you need to do is to change your categories to encompass this reality.”

  “But from another level,” Reginald said, sliding up beside them, “we are just a bunch of sick, drugged, sex freaks living on the decaying edges of a decadent civilization.”

  Lydia looked at him with surprise. Reginald smiled.

  “Reg’s a Ph.D. He took his doctorate in history at Columbia ten years ago, and it’s left him with the habit of switching contexts.”

  “But which is real? I mean, for you?” Lydia asked.

  “I choose from whichever frame of reference allows me to move through the flux of creation with as much pleasure and meaning to myself and as little damage to others as possible,” Reginald replied. “Isn’t that what having flexibility of intelligence is all about?”

  “Have you no sense of an Absolute?” she asked.

  “You sound a little like the fish who went in search of water,” Reginald told her. “We are it.”

  “Then, according to you, Marsha’s jumping off that building . . . “ Lydia began.

  “Was just one way of looking at things,” Reginald continued. “To judge it as reality or fantasy, as sick or healthy, is to indulge in low-level—excuse the term—psychological masturbation.”

  “I can see what you mean,” Lydia said, “and in fact I’m beginning to understand its implications through some of the work I’m doing, but it’s frightening.”

  “No more so than that first day when you realize that your mother is just a little old lady living in the Bronx and no more capable of keeping you from dying than anyone else.”

  Lydia shook her head slowly and fell into silence.

  The two men drifted off, and the evening moved with startling rapidity after that. First the grass, which she was offered with amusement and diffidence and tried out of bravado. She’d smoked marijuana before, but not been aware that it had been a mediocre grade shared with people whose level of awareness was relatively low. Now she was toking on a murderously strong strand from the mountains of Peru among people whose idea of a good time was to go stark raving mad.

  After her second joint, Lydia was reeling, trying to catch her astral breath, while her physical body had developed into a switchboard of hot and cold flashes, tremors, hallucinations, and landslides of insight. She sat like someone just strapped into an electric chair, her spine rigid, her hands grasping the ribbed arms of the wicker chair.

  When Judy approached her, Lydia could not be certain for several seconds whether what she was seeing was an apparition or not. A tall, skeletally thin blonde wearing a sequined bikini pulled up a stool in front of her and proceeded to lay out an array of make-up utensils.

  “Want to make you look Venusian,” she purred, and for the next forty-five minutes worked on Lydia’s face with the intensity of an artist at her canvas. She plucked, stroked, rubbed in creams, drew lines, applied swatches of color, drew tiny designs, glued on bits of colored glass. And when she finished she held up a mirror, and Lydia found herself gazing into the face of a stunning serpent goddess, utterly alien, other—worldly, and irresistibly beautiful.

  “Me?” she mouthed with her lips.

  “I see your soul,” Judy said. “I make your face look like your soul.”

  Fred returned and stood over Judy’s shoulder, beaming down like a proud father.

  “What’s happening?” Lydia asked.

  “A party,” Fred told. “A perpetual awareness that reality is only fantasy’s special case. The courage to let go all the safe little moulds of perception you’ve been programmed with.”

  “This is my doorway,” Lydia said to herself, her words not audible to the others. “For Marsha, it was the leap; for Nora, the masturbation; and for me . . . what?”

  She felt as though she were about to lose her virginity. Despite her cerebral sophistication and growing understanding of the limitations of her intellectual orientation, Lydia was still caught in the habit pattern of trying to think through what was happening a few beats after it happened, instead of seizing on a single existential attitude and letting everything take place within the embrace of that one posture. If she were to analyze the condition formally, she would remark that the split was between Western and Eastern ways of thought, or between that of artists and that of scientists.

  Yet, the ambience and the grass and the wine worked their way with her. Lydia’s mind kept slipping notches, so that each time she tried to focus to figure out what was going on, she was in an entirely different world than she had been five minutes earlier. After several hours had passed, she couldn’t know that if the woman she had been when she walked into the place would be able to recognize herself. For, viewed from the outside, Lydia was a stoned freak, painted and smiling and moving with the same lassitude that the others had exhibited when she first began to observe them. Viewed from within, she had been converted, and had entered an exalted state of tribal consciousness.

  From there it was but a series of consistent steps to the point at which she was dancing barefooted and half naked at three in the morning, losing herself in the orgiastic abandon of the night.

  Fred suddenly loomed up out of the stroboscopic flicker of bodies and put his arms around her waist.

  “Come on,” he said, “we’re going.”

  “Where?” she yelped.

  “To a party,” he told her.

  “A party! For God’s sake, what’s this?”

  “Warm-up,” he said, and swept her out.

  Going out into the street provided a case of the cultural bends. Fred threw a jacket over her shoulders which barely protected her from the chill night air. But what struck her was the incongruity of the houses and shops, not to mention the people, with what she’d been experiencing. Again, she hadn’t realized how far she had been carried down the stream of dissolution until she tried to measure her present state with what she’d previously considered to be normality. Now, the entire edifice of her civilization appeared as a monstrous block against the flow of life
. The movement inside the dance parlor had been liquid, warm, sinuous. Out here she could see the crystallized anti-life tendencies of the ordinary world. Square houses lined perpendicular streets. People moved with an unconscious self-consciousness. The cars rolled past like deformed beetles, ugly and noxious, great wasteful carriers emitting poison gas. It was as though humanity were a single lovely body and civilization a straitjacket choking it slowly to death, a constraint constructed of time-clocks and rules which served the abstractions of finance rather than the eternal and infinite pulse of life itself. This was the reality, she suddenly saw, that she had been attempting to get her patients to adjust to. This was the reality which she had taken as a measure of health.

  A thousand glimmerings gathered over years of work coalesced into a fierce illuminating flame. She understood that neurosis was merely an unsuccessful attempt to protest the morbidity of the prevalent and triumphant worldview of a crippled species. People who were considered normal were almost always those too feeble to fight against the closing coffin lid that perpetually threatened to smother them. Neurotics were people who struggled but failed to get free, and were stuck in one or another of the tunnels that promised to lead out of the prison. Psychotics were those who had chosen pain as the only valid protest against the blindness of humanity. And only the artists of living somehow got out to the other side, into a space where the throb of life suffused inner awareness and external functioning in such a way as to create a seamless lifestyle which was at once pragmatic and fantastic.

  Lydia’s thoughts carried her through the night like a flying carpet, and before she realized how far she had moved in terms of her time/space matrix, she was inside the house where the party was being held. The scene blasted her clear out of her introspective reverie, almost singeing her eyelids with its heat and power.