by Marco Vassi
Some forty or fifty people were present. Most of them were already lying down so that most of the movement she perceived involved rolling and sliding instead of walking. More than half were naked. The lighting was a combination of candles and flashlights propped up at various points on the walls. All the necessities of an apartment seemed to have been jumbled into a single large space. A kitchen sink sat next to a velour couch. A shower stall stood by an ornate desk. Rugs and linoleum and hardwood floors merged into one another, and one corner held an eight-by-eight square of black earth and sand. The ceiling alternated wooden beams with plates of glass through which the stars could be seen. There were no walls on the section that contained the toilet equipment, so men and women peed and shit in full view of everyone.
When Lydia walked into the room, a spotlight went on, flicked over the floor, and settled right on her. For a few moments she was blinded, and Fred whipped the jacket from her shoulders. Suddenly, she was standing in front of a horde of total strangers, tits bare, while a wave of applause and whistles broke over her.
“What . . .?” she started to say.
Then everyone became quiet, and a slow drum beat began in the far corner of the room.
“You’re the star,” Fred said. “The stage is yours. So, begin the dance.”
She glanced over at Fred and did not recognize him. The lighting, the drugs, the heat in his eyes, all conspired to sculpt his face into a demon’s mask. “Perhaps that’s his soul,” she thought, remembering how Judy had painted her own face to match what she had seen inside.
“Na . . . ked . . . na . . . ked . . . na . . . ked . . . na . . . ked . . .” A chant began and picked up in volume and intensity in time to the ominous beat of the drum.
“Take off your pants, Lydia,” Fred suggested.
“I can’t. This is insane.”
“It’s all right to tell your patients to let themselves go, but you won’t do it yourself, will you?”
Suddenly, Reginald was standing in front of them.
“We’ve all seen pussy before, doctor,” he said. “Believe me, it’s not prurient interest that’s motivating us. We just want you to get it on.”
“Either this is the sickest thing I’ve ever been involved with, or the most liberating,” Lydia said to herself.
“Or just the silliest,” Reginald added, reading her mind.
“And what have you got to lose, except your pants?” Fred concluded.
Not even bothering the give a dramatically appropriate shrug, Lydia stooped forward and peeled the sweat-drenched jeans from her thighs. A chorus of hoots went up when her ass was revealed, and when she finally stood up straight again, wearing nothing, the drum began to speed up, to be joined by another, until the room was filled with the deep thrumming of African rhythms.
Lydia closed her eyes and practiced on herself the technique she had been using with her patients. She began to allow her breathing to assume a consciousness of its own, aware of the vital air as it filled her lungs, her belly, and then the idea of breath going into the rest of her body, mixing with her blood, making her one with the universal prana. She did not dance, but rather let herself be danced, led by the throb of human flesh against taut dried animal skin stretched over vibrating wooden tubs.
Her pelvis rocked gently, her hips swiveled, her breasts shook, her patch of curled black pubic hair thrust itself forward.
“Can I really be doing this?” she wondered, “shaking my cunt at this mob?”
Now her feet lifted and she started to cover ground, her arms joining in the general movement. Like a falling body accelerating in its sweep toward the earth, her dance gained momentum independent of her volition or thought. And so, physically liberated, her face a mask of a previously unrecognized soul, she exposed herself to herself and allowed the world to watch.
Then, in the middle of a gesture, a bizarre psychic occurrence froze her in place. She had not merely a vision of, but a complete sensory identification with Marsha at the moment she had jumped from the edge of the building. For an instant, she felt as though Marsha’s soul had seized her own, that the spirit of the dead woman, haunting the ether, had taken possession of her very faculties. Terrified, she opened her eyes, but instead of a room filled with lolling orgiasts, she saw New York City spread before her, and realized that she was actually looking through the brain of the woman who had killed herself four days earlier. Her skin swelled with tiny bumps as she felt the cold night air flicker in from the north. The moan of a mournful harmonica filled her ears.
And then she was falling . . . falling . . . falling . . .
The people at the party perceived nothing more than what seemed to be a strange dance: the naked woman slowly building to an erotic tempo, beginning to leap from the ground in a cunt-splitting arc, and then freezing as though she had turned to marble. But at that instant, the impact of what she was experiencing flashed through the collective consciousness of the room, and as one person everyone there suddenly was grasped by an unaccountable sense of hideous gaiety. They stared at her with the tense stillness and silence of a rabbit paralyzed by the coiled power of a snake.
At which point Lydia screamed at the top of her lungs, a rending, piercing cry which shattered the spines of everyone who had been mesmerized by her transmogrification.
Pandemonium blew three great blasts on its pipes, and the entire sea of bodies broke in a wave of surging flesh.
When Lydia came to, three men were fucking her. Reginald had wrapped himself around her from behind and was filling her ass with his hefty cock. Fred had taken her cunt for himself. And a third man, someone she didn’t recognize, was slipping his semi-erect penis in and out between her flaccid lips.
Next to them a boy of about sixteen, his eyeballs almost white with heroin, was mumbling in a hypnotic chant, “Fuck the dead, fuck the dead, fuck the dead.”
4
“Do you think a cow has fantasies of being an eagle?”
Doctor Monroe turned from the window where he had been following the unintentionally humorous self-importance of a helicopter buzzing across the panoramic view he commanded of the city from the sixty-seventh floor of the Chrysler Building where, for twenty years, he had maintained his practice. It was, in the eyes of his profession, an odd choice of location, but he maintained that the building was “the most beautiful example of religious architecture in America,” contending that since finance was the true guiding mythos of the epoch, the skyscraper had replaced the cathedral as the dominant form of collective aspiration. He had a singular passion for the building, daily relishing its extraordinary detail, down to the inlaid wood panels on the elevator doors and the silver scallops at its peak. The Empire State Building he considered majestic but pedestrian, and for the World Trade Center towers and all the other glass and aluminum boxes which had sprung up during the boom of the nineteen sixties he had such great contempt that he refused even to discuss them.
He was a spare, almost brittle man in his early seventies, a bit over six feet tall, with close-cropped white hair and a pencil mustache. He was never seen wearing anything but three-piece suits. He had been an intimate of all the great pioneers in analysis and therapy, having worked with Freud, Jung, Adler, Reich, Rank, and Krug. One shelf of his library held thousands upon thousands of letters to and from them, including his latest brief correspondence with Laing, in which he called the explosive psychiatrist “a psychotic chauvinist.”
It had always been difficult for Lydia, given Doctor Monroe’s imposing background, elegant personal manner, and massive academic credentials, to gain anything approaching a sense of equality with him. Invariably she left his office feeling like a little girl who had been either scolded or praised by her father. She both idolized him and struggled to free herself from that mixture of transference and objective reverence which kept her transfixed. The simplest thing would have been to stop seeing him, but she couldn’t t
ake that as anything but defeat at this point. And when she made her ambivalence known, he retreated into a noncommittal attitude, letting her have the burden of decision.
She’d introduced him to Fred a year after she began her affair with the writer, anxious to know how these two men who formed such a great influence in her life would get on. It is almost a truism that those who are closest to us rarely appeal to one another since our friends and lovers reflect disparate aspects of the total range of our personalities and introducing them to each other often involves a violent clash of colors. As she had feared, the two men disliked one another at once. Their lunch date ended with Fred’s calling Doctor Monroe a boring old fart, while the older man noted that since Fred’s head was up his ass it would be difficult for him to know whose farts he was smelling. It was the first time Lydia had heard Doctor Monroe use a vulgar word, and she took it as a measure of Fred’s influence that he was able to ruffle the venerable therapist. Oddly enough, there had been no real verbal contention, and the surface conversation had been congenial enough. But the men reeked with the rippling aggression of stud stags tangling horns over a doe in heat. Afterwards Lydia had returned home alone and almost immediately torn off her panties and masturbated to a rapid, shattering climax.
“I’m sorry,” Lydia was now saying. “I’m a bit fuzzy today. What about cows and eagles?”
Doctor Monroe settled himself in his chair and regarded her with volatile amusement. “After the weekend you described, I’m surprised you are even conscious, much less alert.”
Technically, the man was her control therapist. It was his function to listen to her problems concerning her work with her patients, and to make recommendations, to point out where she might be losing objectivity, or missing an aspect of the total picture. But over time, the distinctions between herself as therapist and herself as person blurred, and often they ended up talking about her without any reference to her patients. This afternoon she had walked in and simply spilled out the events of the previous two days.
After she had awakened to find three men fucking her, she had become hysterical, not only because of the bizarre circumstances but because she still felt the residual vibration of having been inhabited by Marsha’s ghost. Her thrashing and screaming had been taken as erotic frenzy, and within seconds a mammoth orgiastic horror show pitched its tents on the pegs of her torment. It had gone on for hours, until every person in the place was sated, had stopped twitching, and Lydia had been definitively defiled.
She and Fred had returned in deep silence, too stunned to speak.
“In some ways,” Lydia replied, “the weekend provided the most massive injection of awareness I’ve ever experienced.”
“Please don’t confuse stimulation with awareness, nor imagery with consciousness,” he told her. “All that happened was your own projection of supposed meaning into an otherwise purposeless event. I think that your fascination comes from the fact that you can’t decide whether or not you enjoyed it and, more, whether or not you’d like to repeat it.”
Lydia nodded. He’d yanked the covers off her psyche once again, and with an effortless flick of the wrist.
“My earlier question,” he went on, “has to do precisely with this issue. As far as we can tell, no other life form experiences discontent with the limitations of its structure and function. A dog does not yearn to be a fish, a tree has no hankering to become a bird. Only the smug ape, the human being, persists in searching for ways to break through the membrane of its inherent limitation. We do this through drugs, of course, through the orgy, through almost all the artifacts of our civilization which are not strictly utilitarian. And finally, most insidiously, we do it through art.”
Lydia groaned inwardly, for she knew what was coming. Each person, no matter how intelligent or sophisticated, contains within himself or herself the capacity to be a crank on one subject or another. For Doctor Monroe, it was art. He loathed literature, painting, music, sculpture. The only forms he admitted were architecture and dance, and these he saw not as art but as primary expressions of the organic human being. Even there, however, he could draw strange lines, and contended that dance was valid only as communal ritual; the minute one involved an audience, the form became decadent. And he had been heard to mention more than once that even living in caves was a sign of degeneracy, contending that the species made its first mistake by coming down out of the trees.
Today, however, he surprised her by saying, “But I don’t want to get into all that. I bring it up just to remind you that the entire weekend, with its experiences and insights and complexities can be understood quite simply as an attempt by a number of people to pretend that they are something other than people.”
“But isn’t that attempt the very thing which defines progress, evolution?”
“Evolution?” he repeated, his forehead darkening. “You mean the idea that everything began lower and is becoming higher? I’m surprised that you still have that sort of nonsense knocking about in your brain. Do you think that the planet has produced any life form more perfect than the tree, more burningly beautiful than the hawk, more precisely engineered for survival than the roach? Humanity is merely one of an endless variety of possible life forms, no better or worse than the rest. It is only our insufferable vanity which has us placing ourselves at the crown of creation, confusing cleverness with consciousness, greed with intelligence.”
He rose from his chair in a swift singular motion which belied his age and began pacing in front of the picture window.
“You’re a therapist, Lydia. And I am not suggesting that you limit the range of your behavior. Go to as many orgies as you want. But for God’s sake don’t let yourself be led down a primrose path of fantasy. You are exhibiting dangerous tendencies. One of your patients commits suicide, and you wonder whether jumping off a building doesn’t express some arcane truth concerning the nature of semantic reality. No! Jumping off a building is just jumping off a building. A human being falls a long way to the earth and her body is smashed beyond all comprehension. And she may have been wrapped in a delusion which made her last moments euphoric, but don’t translate that into a notion that she was somehow perceiving a reality beyond the common view. Then, another woman comes in and masturbates in front of you and finds it highly exciting. She’s bored with her husband and indulges in a bit of hanky-panky, complete with therapeutic approval. Well, she could get the same thing in a whorehouse, except it would cost more and lack comforting rationalizations.”
“It’s a shame he and Fred didn’t like each other,” she thought, “sometimes they sound so fucking alike you would think they were reading the same script.”
Doctor Monroe turned toward the city again. For several minutes he was lost in thought. These were the times she liked him best, for he alone among all the people she knew was able to pause in the middle of a conversation to consider what was being said, to reflect on it, to ponder the implications of a question. Of course, she was sure that half the time he did that he was only striking a pose, building a certain effect on his listener. But still, it was an impressive and refreshing mannerism.
Finally, he faced her again and walked over to sink once more into his deep chair. The office was very large, more than twenty by twenty feet in area, but it held only a rug and two chairs so that all attention had to be focused on the people in it and, when the drapes were drawn, the presence of the city.
“The view gives me perspective,” he liked to say. “When I get too far into a tunnel vision of my patient or myself, I look out and realize that there are several billion people on the planet, and at any instant millions are dying and being born, laughing, sobbing, starving, fucking, praying, killing, and carrying out their parts in the vast pattern of life in the universe.”
They gazed at one another, woman and man, teacher and student, therapist and therapist, human being and human being. They assumed all the roles necessary to continue the bu
siness of busyness while their biological clocks ticked relentlessly away. But beneath all that, what was happening? From a galactic viewpoint, two less than microscopic flecks of stuff were fluttering about making noises at one another. And, peculiar as it seems, taking one another seriously. Because no matter how insignificant the individual life is from the perspective of any other level, to the individual everything else totally and eternally revolves around the self.
“Look, Lydia,” he continued, his voice softer, “my approach is a non-approach. I’ve tried all the systems, known their founders, watched their results, and after a relatively long lifetime have come to the conclusion that nothing changes, nothing can be changed. A therapist can only be an empty vessel. In the old days, we would have been confessors. People come to us and bare their souls. And the single biggest trap we need to avoid is coming to imagine that this process imbues us with any special power or faculty. Oh, we can suggest, occasionally interpret, point out an aspect, and, if the situation calls for it, lend a shoulder to cry on, or give a reassuring embrace. And none of this requires elaborate theory or formality. It’s simply finding a strong, flexible center to relate from, and allowing the other person—the patient, if you will—to experience his or her storms of impacted personal drama which will, hopefully, after a while, spend their fury and leave the soul at peace.”
As he spoke, his voice became golden. “This is his vision,” Lydia thought. “While he stands there disputing my ideas with his words, he becomes the living reality of what it is I’ve been trying to show him.”
The moment slipped into one of those oblique corridors of interaction where two people seem to regard one another through eyes that have nothing to do with any of the physical organs of the body. It was akin to the hypnogogic state, that twilight realm between wakefulness and sleep when untranslatable truths are revealed. It was this very condition that Lydia strove for in her sessions, for she felt that that kind of mutual awareness allowed “for more penetrating communication than was ever possible through direct interchange of words. She had shied away from the concept of telepathy, because of its occultist overtones, but since the experience in Provincetown she had been converted to the idea that mind-to-mind contact was not only possible, but constituted the essential language of the species.