by Jack Dann
“Do you remember?” she asked, her voice only slightly muffled.
“Yes!” he said, his teeth clenched. When Faon struck him last, it was as if he were back in the tomb again, plugged into the dead man; and again he saw Josiane floating just below the surface of a dark sea, saw her staring unblinkingly at him, heard her voice calling him home. It was Josiane. It was. And home was New York. He resolved that he would return to the States. He would find her. She was there—he felt that—and she was alive.
Then Mantle began to shiver as if he had been thrown into icy water. Suddenly he knew he was going to have an episode. He could feel the pull of the dark spaces, the hollow places. It's going to happen again, he thought. Sonofabitch!
Faon pulled away from him and said, “You've had a rather rough time.” She looked at him with a directness that seemed to be hers alone. “I'm sorry. But the transition crisis which you've been experiencing will bring you closer to reality, to true seeing….”
Mantle's hands felt clammy and he was drenched in cold sweat. Faon's voice was echoing in the room, or so it seemed to him. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I think I'd like to go outside.”
Roberta took his hand, as if to draw him out of the room.
“It's close,” Mantle said to her. “I can feel it on me. Just leave me alone and—”
“We'll go upstairs right now,” Roberta said. “I'll see it through with you, share it.”
Mantle tried to control his anxiety and said, “I'll be all right on my own hook.”
“You don't have to be embarrassed, not here, not with us,” Faon said. “We've all been through it. You're not a freak here. Go with Roberta; it will make it easier for you.”
“Come on,” Roberta said. “Quickly.”
Mantle followed Roberta up the stairs, along a rather narrow hallway lined with paintings of dusty woodland scenes—some of which certainly had to be facsimiles, for Mantle saw a painting of trees bending toward swampy water that looked like the work of Van Ruisdael, a melancholy artist of the mid-seventeenth century. Even the paintings alarmed him, not because of the incongruity of possession, but because they seemed to reflect the tones and textures of his own thoughts, those thoughts which were driving him over the edge.
Roberta led him up another flight of stairs and into a room that was virtually empty except for a simple bed, chairs, and the ever-present computer console. This was more a monk's cell than a guest room.
“Take off your clothes and try to relax,” Roberta said gently. “Do you want a narcodrine?” Mantle shook his head: he had had enough drugs. He sat down on the bed, which was hard, and suddenly felt removed from Roberta and everything in the room, as if skeins of invisible material were separating him from the real world of people and things. It was almost as if he were in two places at once. He shuddered to think about the other place.
Roberta bent over the computer console; then, as if she had just remembered, turned to Mantle and said, “There's a dry shower in the bathroom, there.” She pointed to the door on the far wall. “Why don't you slip in; I'll follow you.” Then she turned back to the computer and keyed in a program. Mantle jumped as the room dimmed slightly and became full of colored streamers and splotches, bits of shells, string, and wire mesh; and he remembered Josiane with the clarity of hallucination, remembered her bending over him in their old bedroom (she a child with budbreasts and a tight, unwrinkled face) and screwing him, watching him impassively as he stared at the holographic objects of Pollock's painting hanging in the air.
“How did you know about that?” Mantle asked. The tremors were beginning again, even now, with the familiar all around him as if he had captured the past.
“Not yet,” Roberta said. “I'll tell you after we shower. Not a word until I'm clean.” She stepped out of her clothes, leaving them in a bunch on the floor, and went into the bathroom. Mantle followed, and, indeed, felt better after showering, although he still didn't feel entirely clean. His hair was fluffy and his skin tingled.
“There's a marvelous shower down the hall,” Roberta said. “A real antique with I-don't-know-how-many water nozzles, which spray you from every direction. It's better than anything we've got now, I don't care what anybody says.”
They sat on the edge of the bed. “Well,” Mantle asked, “how did you know about the painting?”
“I thought it would calm you. Doesn't it?”
“It was just a shock at first,” he said, as if from across an abyss. “But how did you know to pick that—”
“I read over your records. Joan made an entry about it. So…Raymond?”
“Yes,” he answered, feeling calm and deadened, not caring about Joan or Pfeiffer or Roberta; and Josiane was only a perfect idea, a form for his thoughts, as dead as he. He now felt that time was subtly, but definitely, slowing down, unwinding; and when it stopped he would be left in the eternal black and silver spaces with the dead.
Fight it, you sonofabitch, he told himself.
“Why didn't Joan come with you?” Roberta asked, as if she could not see that Mantle was losing it, slowly sliding over the edge into himself.
“I wanted to do this alone.” Talk to her, keep her talking, touch her, help me, Josiane.
“But she would have wanted to be with you.” Mantle didn't reply. “Do you love her?” Roberta asked after a pause.
“Yes, I suppose I do,” Mantle said, answering the question as if by rote, his thoughts far away, glimpsing shadows of Josiane, feeling time running down. “But in a different way.” He was talking as if to himself now. “Without the passion and longing, without the sickness.”
“Sickness?”
Mantle shook his head and touched her hand, which was resting on her lap. He ran his fingers over her knuckles and through her pubic hair.
“Do you think passion is sick?” she asked.
“No. That's not what I meant.”
“But what you said. Do you consider your feelings for your sister as being sick?” She turned to face him, and he touched her shoulders, her arms, her face. He noticed that her nostrils were flared. He felt slightly repelled. She was so far away now, mile upon mile; and yet he could touch her as if his arms were a thousand kilometers long and he could stretch them across the void. And he could answer her questions now, perhaps even more objectively than before. He was burning from the inside with thoughts and memories that he could not give form. But the outside still retained its appearance.
“No,” he said after a long pause. Time distending and contracting. “I don't think of my feelings for Josiane as sick.”
“Do you want me to call Joan for you?” Roberta asked, somewhat anxiously. “She could be here—”
“No, again.”
“It's like with Josiane, isn't it?”
“What do you mean?” Mantle asked, seeing the smooth pit before him, the silver and black exit inside him, that had always been inside him. He felt the burning, the cold fire, turning him to ash, giving him escape.
“Josiane serves to hide something; Joan was a way of finding it.” The words seemed isolated, a metallic mobile hanging in a dark room.
“I don't understand any of that,” Mantle said, and the room seemed elongated, hard and hollow, as he began to scam down, falling through the thinnest layers of the world as vision changed from eye to mind's eye, as colors faded to silver and passed into darkness.
Mantle caught himself, tried to hold himself back. A last clinging to the world.
“Where are you from?” he asked Roberta, as if the mundane could hold him back from the pit.
She smiled now, a nostalgic smile, that of one lover saying good-bye to another, and said, “I'm from Missiri, above Saint Raphael, but I grew up and went to school in England. But I am French….”
And it began. A long, rushing relief, a tearing away. Better to fall through the world and die, get it over with.
Then Roberta was on top of him. She felt cold as metal, as if she were a silver construct, a perfectly molded, moving
embracing icon of a woman. Her hair, now dark as the pit through which he fell, hid her face; and she made him hard and, without foreplay, pressed him into her, then pumped him, this strong metal being moving up and down upon him, a silver spider planted squarely above him, heavy as lead.
She watched him, her face impassive, and shrank into Joan. Became smaller, a child, and Mantle took her with him as he slowly fell.
And she changed again, into a woman thing with knots on her arms and face and body, and still she pumped, and changed again and again, as long as he watched: she became the leaden spider, and a scorpion, and then transformed herself into other women he had known; but the scorpions and spiders were wriggling inside them, only to crawl out their mouths in ecstasy.
Later that night, Mantle awakened. The room was dim, the videotect still hung in the air—a shadowy mass without weight—and still everything was black and silver and in between grays; still he saw with his mind's eye from one world into another. This was the real world, he thought, the bottom of everything, the inside, the underpinning, and on the outside was flesh and color and life—all sham, an intricate illusion. Here was where the Screamers lived, in the dead places, the empty places; but Mantle heard no voices, remembered only falling.
This episode was only emptiness. Where were the monsters of his soul, the phantoms, the demons, the seraphim and cherubim, the powers and dominions? Where were the apparitions, Josiane's face, and the Screamers themselves? Where were the voices, the whistlings and rustlings, the ululations, the glossolalia of words almost apprehended?
He tried to remember, but remembered only emptiness.
He tried to remember being plugged in. He tried to remember what had happened during this episode…. Roberta's metallic touch. Something about that….
Roberta moved in the bed beside him, both hands clasped together upon the pillow, her face resting on them. She slept in the fetal position, her knees together and just touching Mantle. He turned toward her and found her staring at him, her eyes as large and hard as the dark stones of an icon.
Again he awoke, and found Danielle in bed with them; Danielle, silver-gilded, with her long, dark hair and delicate, yet openly sensual, face. She and Roberta were beside him, facing and comforting each other, resting their weight on their knees, and they felt each other's breasts and sucked on each other's fingers and kissed.
Mantle propped himself up on one arm and watched them. He felt their distance—even though they brushed against him—yet welcomed their presence. He was seeing and reaching across an eternity, looking through a window into a world of flesh and life, even if everything around him was dead and silver.
He reached across the abyss and touched the small of Roberta's back, felt a tuft of soft hair, while Danielle leaned across her and took Mantle's penis into her mouth. Her lips felt cold as a crypt.
Mantle was not afraid. He had passed through life into death and found nothing: no Screamers, no specters, no horrors, just emptiness. Perhaps this would be an easy passage, even if he awakened to find that this episode was a blind, leading nowhere. He had no desire for the world. He wasn't falling anymore. He would simply wait out this episode, no matter how many subjective eternities it might take.
He was as hard as the walls now, a part of the underthings, no longer flesh.
As Danielle, who had a good, earthy, sour smell, ran her mouth up and down his penis, Mantle watched her work like some intricate machine, hard and impenetrable; and then she changed, became scaly, grew row upon row of teeth like a shark. She hurt him with her cold mouth, and Mantle, grateful for the emptiness and surcease, was carried through the dead places.
He swam through the dark spaces where everything drifted in an eternal Now, where past, present, and future were one and the same.
Josiane was calling him, or so he thought….
And he was an eyeless shark, caught, and being reeled in.
TEN
A man and a woman wearing identical cowled masks sat across from Joan and Pfeiffer. The partition had been slid back, revealing the oval shape of the gaming table and doubling the size of the wood-paneled room. The dealer and the gamesmaster sat on each side of the long table that lay between the opponents. The dealer was a young man with an intense, roundish face and straight black hair cut at the shoulders; he was most likely in training to become a gamesmaster.
The gamesmaster's face was hidden by a black cowl; he would be hooked into the game. He explained the rules, activated the psycondutors, and the game began. Joan and Pfeiffer were once again hooked in, but there was no contact, as yet, with the man and woman across the table.
Pfeiffer cleared his mind, just as if he were before lasers or giving an interview or teaching. He had learned to cover his thoughts, for, somehow, he had always felt they could be seen, especially by students and those who wanted to hurt him politically and on the job.
White thought, he called it, because it was similar to white noise; he had once told Raymond about his technique, but the crazy fool could only use it as a title for one of his techtonic sculptures.
Pfeiffer could feel Joan circling around him like the wind, but he could hide from her. Although he couldn't conceal everything, the most dangerous thoughts were safe: the psychs had given him a lock on his mind. Joan was a tough, elastic bitch, but Pfeiffer could use her, just as she could use him. They had reached an accord via mutual blackmail. Somehow, during their practice hook-in, Joan had forced herself into Pfeiffer's mind; shocked, he had attacked her.
So now they knew each other.
They built a simple symbol structure: he was the world, a perfect sphere without blemish, made by God's own hands, a world as strong and divine as thought; and she was his atmosphere. She contained all the elements that could not exist on his featureless surface. She was the protective cloak of his world.
They built a mnemonic in which to hide, yet they were still vulnerable to each other. But Pfeiffer guessed that Joan would remain passive: she had the well-developed conscience of a mystical liberal. She would not expose him to danger to gain her selfish ends. He had seen that—or thought he had.
Pfeiffer congratulated himself for being calm, reinforced his calmness. Perhaps it was Joan's presence. Perhaps it was the mnemonic. But perhaps not. He had the willpower; this was just another test. He had survived all the others, he told himself.
Joan rained on him, indicating her presence, and they practiced talking within geometric shapes as a protective device—it was literally raining geodesic cats and dogs.
When the gamesmaster opened the psyconductor to all involved, Joan and Pfeiffer were ready.
But they were not ready to find exact duplicates of themselves facing them across the table. The doppelgängers, of course, were not wearing cowls.
“First, Mesdames and Messieurs, we draw the wager,” said the dealer, who was not hooked in. The gamesmaster's thoughts were a neutral presence. “For each organ pledged, there will be three games consisting of three hands to a game,” the dealer continued. “In the event that a player wins twice in succession, the third hand or game will not be played.” His voice was an intrusion; it was harsh and cold and came from the outside where everything was hard and intractable.
‘How do they know what we look like?’ Pfeiffer asked, shaken by the hallucination induced by his opponents. But before Joan could reply, he answered his own question. ‘They must be picking up subliminal stuff.’
‘The way we perceive ourselves,’ Joan said. The doppelgängers became hard and ugly, as if they were being eroded by time. And Joan's double was becoming smaller, insignificant.
‘If we can't cover up, we won't have a chance.’
‘You can't cover everything, but neither can they,’ Joan said. ‘It cuts both ways.’ She noticed a fissure in the otherwise perfect sphere below, and she became black fog, miasma, protective covering. Pfeiffer was afraid, and vulnerable. But she had to give him credit: he was not hiding it from her, at least.
‘Did you p
ick up anything from them, an image, anything?’ Pfeiffer asked.
‘We've been too busy with ourselves, but they can't hide everything. We'll just wait and be ready when they let something slip out.’
‘Which they will,’ Pfeiffer said, suddenly confident again.
From deep inside their interior symbolized world, Joan and Pfeiffer could look into the external world of croupier, felt-top table, cards, wood-covered walls, and masked creatures. This room was simply a stage for the play of thought and image.
Pfeiffer was well acquainted with this sensation of perceiving two worlds, two levels: inside and outside. He often awakened from a nightmare and found himself in his living room or library. He knew that he was awake, and yet he could still see the dream unfurl before him, watch the creatures of his nightmare stalk about the room—the interior beasts let loose into the familiar, comforting confines of his waking world. Those were always moments of terror, for surely he was near the edge then and could fall, just as Raymond had.
The dealer combined two decks of cards and placed them in a shoe, a box from which the cards could be slid out one by one. He discarded three cards: the traditional burning of the deck. Then he dealt a card to Pfeiffer and one to his opponent. Both cards landed face up. A Queen of Hearts for Pfeiffer. A Nine of Hearts for his opponent.
So Pfeiffer lost the right to call the wager.
Just as the object of blackjack was to draw cards that added up to twenty-one, or as near as possible, the object of blind shemmy was to draw cards that added up to nine. Thus, face cards, which would normally be counted as ten, were counted as zero. Aces, normally counted as eleven, became one; and all other cards had their normal pip (or face) value—with the exception of Tens, which, like Aces, were counted as one.
“Monsieur Deux wins, nine over zero,” said the dealer, looking now at Pfeiffer's opponent. Pfeiffer was Monsieur Un and his opponent Monsieur Deux only because of their positions at the table.