Bedlam and Other Stories

by John Domini

  But to root Astral Projection in mud and sand provides a foundation of a mere few million years. If someone should care enough—if you and I would just care enough—we could link the magic up with the very system of the earth in the sky. Because when I hear these stories about dismembered existence, in two places simultaneously, I am hearing about the moon. The moon is dismembered night by night. Part of it exists forever in darkness and part in light. When a boy and girl join hands while looking up at the moon, without realizing it they chase down the first thrill that passes between them with harder stuff: the sky’s luminous proof of decay.

  WHAT I DID

  AN EXAMPLE YOU COULD GIVE

  “Listen honey: nothing is going to convince me you can do Astral Projection.”

  …

  “Listen, you can do all the reading you want. Oh yeah, you’re very good at that. But honey babe, no way. It’s like asking me to care about somebody when I’m not even sure what happened to him.”

  CONNECTIONS

  And Astral Projection is often compared to sex. I’m thinking again of Plato, and of those other classical thinkers who claimed that during a kiss the soul went out at the mouth. And Dante also comes to mind, naturally. John Donne, Walt Whitman, some passages from the chapter “Night Watch” in Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood. Possibly also the contemporary writer…or is Djuna Barnes still contemporary? Alive or dead? Whatever, I believe these authors all speculate along the same lines. Leaving your own body, entering another body….

  Now there is a man, a contemporary, who claims to have had sex while in the “Astral body.” His name is Robert Monroe. He’s not a writer, but rather a successful business executive. Yet since his first out-of-the-body experience back in the ‘60’s he has conscientiously investigated Astral Projection, journey after journey, and he claims that his work has involved a great deal of sex. He has a theory. We in this world of physical details are overstuffed sexually, he explains (“the one satisfaction most often denied us”). Therefore upon reaching the other world, our first need always is to unload. What precedes sexual fulfillment in the Astral sphere Monroe doesn’t hesitate to label Hell; Heaven lies beyond any lover’s desires that might be left over from the physical plane.

  Yet Monroe too, for all his experience, in the end leaves us confused. He says that during Astral intercourse he feels no tug on the heavy overlapping muscles of the penis, no tightening of the scrotal sack, in fact no rush of blood or any other sensation whatsoever in the area of the male genitals. Then is this describing sex at all? He says that a person experiences Astral encounters more or less in the upper trunk, and that they are “like an electrical discharge.”

  Connections? But how can I pin it down?

  Sex is compared to so much, so much: playing cards, a Chevy Corvair, the sort of close reading generally associated with poetry, playing chess, a Ford Edsel…. Except that we actually do it from time to time, we might lose track of what sex was altogether, in an oblivion of comparisons. And along with it, Astral Projection. I remember that once, several years ago now, a Newsweek critic wrote: “Sex hovers over the movie Five Easy Pieces.” But, suggestive as the phrase is, he wasn’t thinking of Astral Projection.

  PHYSICAL DETAIL

  There are, in the last analysis, no physical details in Astral Projection.

  AN EMOTION

  fear

  WHAT IT IS

  Yes fear. “This soul of yours,” Dr. Joy says, “whee! Have no fear—” stop stop, I want to say, or scream. I want to punch out the radio’s clockface. Because on all the talk shows, all the phone-in shows, all, they take our ghosts and turn them to clowns. Yes fear, because their yammer even now fills the dial. Repeats endlessly, as we run the needle round the cycle. We run faster and faster and get nowhere. Don’t pretend you don’t hate them the same. Gum chewers, bonehead goobers whose idea of passion is going one-on-one for a Michelob Light. As for what can be discovered in the gray weekly newspapers, in the hollow behind the checkout counter, it’s too painful even to think about. Only keep searching through the dismal closed circle of stations and we will find them. Oh, on that you can rely. And then, finding them, I find what I fear: the insinuation of their voices. Powerful voices, an undertow of tongues, something logy and liquid and flattering that hauls you in deeper. I hate them, but I pay attention to them. Though they cut against the grain with every vapid word. I think they must deliberately pitch themselves off-key, in order to project in a way that’s so habit-forming, in order to engage your curiosity and get you drowsy at the same time, in order to send such unlikeable yet spellbinding voices over the incalculable miles of airwaves, in order to continue sounding alien even as their whispers penetrate deeper and deeper into our ear as we doze off with the sleep-switch set. Weird saturation. Painful to keep listening and yet we keep listening; weird weakness. The outsider gets let in as the rest of us tumbles away and down into the distant parts of sleep, until that voice seems to have threaded the very wrinkles of the brains, though we know it’s talking trash, idiocy, babytalk, like singing babybabybaby…and the talk runs wild like a strip of golden infection out even to the barely sensory palms of our hands, as if we could hold the sound, feel its weight, and it runs farther because we’ve nothing left to resist…and therefore fear, yes, fear is just the word.

  WHAT I DID

  ANOTHER EXAMPLE YOU COULD GIVE

  “Hey, nobody dies of a broken heart. Don’t give me that. It’s not like Humpty Dumpty around here.”

  …

  “I mean, look, I read about that Robert Monroe. They had an article about him—it was in Penthouse. Now look, what do you think he does, once he gets back in his body? I mean, he could have been to Hell, honey babe, it’s still the same old story. Robert Monroe comes back, he picks up the phone. ‘Hi. What’re you doing tonight?’”

  PLACES

  Monroe has written a book, Journeys Out of the Body (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1971). There, he separates the Astral world into three distinct “Locales.” Each Locale has its own set of rules and creatures, and its own threats. Locale I is here, meaning right here and now, but made for another set of hands. The walls, for example, become like erect sheets of water, that effective and that much fun, and within your own familiar walls there may be other “non-physical beings.” Ghosts, those would be. Locale II is the dominion of Heaven and Hell, the place where Monroe had all the sex. Locale III is another universe, which he believes is composed of anti-matter. This third Locale possesses unusual tools and no electricity, but while visiting the place Monroe experienced adultery (in this Locale sex occurs without electricity), loneliness, failures to communicate, and the pain of growing old. He concluded that in all important respects it was a universe the same as our own.

  Monroe…hold on to him a while longer, a moment longer please. Granted, he’s a terrible writer, but please.

  Certainly we have no way of demonstrating once and for all that he’s wrong. At least not so long as we remain in this world, in this body, asking ourselves what’s the physical proof, asking in which incident can we at last get hold of the proof and cuddle up to it tight, tight—in what incident, what detail? Certainly, against the unrelenting static of such doubt this man Monroe’s worth another moment at least. Just imagine, he travels alone. What a person. A star of the strangest magnitude. In his case there is something incredible about Astral Projection. He discovers: demons like immense hard-muscled thumbs; angels as ready to roll in the sack as any whore; the Cheshire cats of previous incarnations, grinning and grinning; the barrier at the end of the universe where all travelers, even the most sophisticated, come crashing to a stop; and other people’s dreams, which he can visit like the recurring image of a lover. He has rested in the infinite chamber that waits, reserved eternally, as his personal heaven. Granted, granted, the man then ruins the effect by comparing nirvana to a heated swimming pool, with colored lights and underwater stereo speakers. But…just the idea that we each have one…. And Monroe
has braved the worst inferno of all, the whirlpool of armless sharklike souls. These spirits will remain forever unfinished, alive or dead, and they seek forever to mutilate like themselves any whole being who wanders too close.

  Places, connections. Time goes by and these joints become curiouser and curiouser. I wanted to weight my story like lead holds down a line, but by moonrise I find that the harder I try to reel in the taut nylon, the faster I’m circling round it, hooked and circling round a metal I managed not long ago to carry out here inside my coat.

  PLACES

  I wanted to send up my life like a kite made from Scripture, but now the Gospel itself has turned to papier mache—half the King James edition was used to make the feminist erotica I saw at the Institute for Contemporary Art. Was that my own drama, embalmed inside those vulva-shaped pages?

  But you’ve worked at your habits, sinking habits through the visible hours like the Times sculpts a Sunday. The habit of reading, the habit of sitting studying some unknown woman when you should be reading…. Myself, actually the voices on AM spook me too badly; actually when that clockface lights up, I’m a man for the FM. “The More The Music Changes The More You Need WBCN.” Oedipus cues the local group, Shane Champagne, “(Living In The) Shadow World.” This weekend they’re at The Underground, used to be called Lucy’s In The Sky when I went there, now it’s got a new form…Oedipus speaks “you” into his mike and that hooded syllable becomes “me,” someone that wasn’t meant yet has been made from the name, like the Mock Turtle…

  What proof? What incident? What detail?

  Places. Outdoors at the seashore, nearby here, on a rare afternoon with a powerful cold wind but a brilliant hot sun, with the moon so visible it was as if the sun were shining in the middle of the night, I once encountered a man and woman together, on the ground. I have a habit of walking alone, compounded by a terrible habit of not watching where I’m going. The woman was naked only from the waist down. Blonde and healthy, she wore a sweatshirt with a brand name printed across it in French. He wore a gray gym T-shirt marked between his large back muscles with dark smudges of sweat raised, even in this weather, by the exertion of the act. They’d had a blanket but they’d kicked it off. The air thickened with their odor. They lay in the hollow behind a dune crowned with short blasted yellow stalks. Yet this was a historic site; nearby the couple stretched the shadow of the new wooden tower commemorating Marconi’s original iron one, out of which he’d sent the first transatlantic wireless message, a flowery address filled with philosophy. A message from a President, for a King. Only the roots of the old tower remain, the stubs of iron and concrete nearly out of sight in the sand at the edge of the sea. Therefore it must have been a sightseeing impulse that had brought the man and woman out here originally, but then one or the other had felt the lowdown and habitual tug. Now they’d finished, and their hands lay curled for warmth under each other’s armpits, so that for a moment they seemed nothing but two empty shirts: still soggy from the wash, still connected by the bit of colorless line that had been torn free, with them, by the wind. I got out of there before she recognized me.

  So…I say “so,” but rhetorical connections drop off to sleep as well…rhetoric and logic and argument as well. Without a move we slip into the tick-tick-tick.

  So…and…have I stiffened in my habits till I’m some kind of human playing card, finished while half-formed? Would a kiss flesh me out beneath the belt? Just a kiss, just a sigh…no. You must remember: this is no Disney. Nowadays I don’t even care for Disney. My ears howl with the sea wind. So…and…have I broken up now, here even before my next part, my Part Thirteen (won’t it at least contain bad luck, my Thirteen? at least never repeat, like AN EMOTION, so many stiff pages back?)—have I broken up now and here into my last locale? A conte a clef in which the clef is a cunt. Squirrel away the memory, fish it out for a cold night beside the radio. Any hand which once held that spot soon enough holds nothing except its own.

  Places, places.

  In Locale II, according to Robert Monroe, there stands the Sign In Space. “Stands” is the wrong word, granted, “sign” and “space” also wrong, all three imply physical existence. And how fill a ghost? But:

  It seems that an almost measureless time ago…

  Those are the correct words, I mean those are the words that Monroe uses. “Almost measureless”—such a tin ear, I’ve fallen in love with the man. His prose feels like he ran chewing gum through the typewriter, but I did read his book. That, I did.

  It seems that an almost measureless

  time ago a very wealthy…woman

  wanted to ensure that her son would

  get into heaven. A church offered

  to guarantee this to her, provided

  she paid the church an enormous sum….

  The woman paid but her son did not get

  into heaven. In…revenge she used up

  her remaining wealth to have a sign put

  up in the skies of heaven so that throughout

  all eternity those who saw…

  Yet this sign is unreadable. I can’t imagine a more hogwild hope, cartwheeling and cranky like a child’s, and at the same time I can’t imagine one more meanly and permanently gutted, betrayed behind the back. But I can imagine, nonetheless, the way the dead and their visitors come to see it.

  Yes imagine, because I never saw that sign. I never traveled so far. But the ghosts…see them come to see it. All assemble out of far places, blots and shafts of deeper darkness approaching across a dark muculent expanse. The dead world’s atmosphere hangs in thick dollops of goo, so that when the faces at last appear they’ve pressed through these treacle curtains unexpectedly, and very close. Faces—faces I know at once I’ve encountered only through the reflecting plastic of my radio dial, through their distant living voices that changed shape at a touch of my fingers. These people come, press past the curtains, come. Awkwardly they plump down beside me or rise like erratic bubbles, unfinished souls of every description gathering closer, feebs and jerks—grotesques maybe, stained with the slime of their locale, satanic or drab or…my hands are trapped, my chest pinned and caving in…their hard surfaces are decaying till, like honey, like gum, we bend in the brainless wobble of a wave, pressing nearer still, and my heart itself caves in, at which moment we’re made over finally together into a single uncomprehending whirl. We move in a circle around ourselves.

  Before us dangle the undying figures of the sign. Hieroglyphs in limitless frieze, a bedlam of wrinkles and typefaces steaming from the imprint, bodies themselves. Feel the pieces shiver, the tremors sap the ground surface. Hear…the roar, the static and roar…

  WHAT I DID

  YOUR LAST EXAMPLE (written in lipstick)

  “From the first big moment to the last big moment—from the first little moment to the last little moment—

  Honey babe—we had our chances but I just couldn’t care. I’m not even sure what happened.’’

  PHYSICAL DETAIL

  At times these days I’ve felt as if I had a third hand. I’ve felt it between my other two. This third hand is visible only in unpredictable glances, glances off-angle, and it floats unattached at the wrist. Yet I will itch with its presence for hours. Time and again my senses are betrayed; time and again when I try to catch the ghost it breaks apart. Yet I continue to glimpse it, the freak, the further apprehension. If my eyes have started to water for some reason, I can just make out the hollowed palm, the winking lines of heart and fate. Fifteen separate fingertips wave across a murk of sleep-sand and tears. So a girl shrinks out of reach beyond a mirror that once tricked you with her reflection; dark men shape love songs round their cracked voices and without a move, without a move we slip into the tick-tick-tick. What is all our caring but these vacant and half-connected hands?

  At the Dig

  Now, unexpectedly, Pinnerz found himself swamped. His son was no longer in town to help. Now, no question, he had to go wangle with the construction crew. He waited ti
ll he saw the men break for morning coffee. Then he hurried up the plankway from his dig to the crew’s worksite, squeezing sideways through the gap between the granite walls of the condemned warehouse and the 4-x-4 that anchored the plywood partition against the downtown traffic. He announced that he’d need another day at least.

  “Another day.” The crew foreman measured Pinnerz with a look that could be taken two ways. “Another day.”

  “That would pretty much kill the week, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it Bud? We couldn’t get that cable in this week if we took off another day.”

  But that second speaker was the nervous one in the crew. Italian or Greek, he could be seen jawing every time a person looked over from the dig. Pinnerz knew he could be ignored. But the crew foreman, though he didn’t look at the talker, didn’t change the way he was sizing up Pinnerz either.

  “I could talk to somebody else,” Pinnerz began, “if—”

  “No call to do that,” the foreman said.

  Pinnerz couldn’t believe he’d made such a bonehead move.

  “I make the decisions here,” the foreman said.

  “Yeah, hey. Bud makes the decisions here.”

  Nod. “Sure.” Nod and smile. Pinnerz realized that the uproar about his son, especially since the girl involved was still staying at Pinnerz’s house, had thrown off his concentration.