The Saline Solution

by Marco Vassi

  “It’s better that I leave,” I said, cursing myself for the quality of dialogue, blaming it on the television bath of the night before.

  “Next time I want you really to hurt me.”

  I decided I would not go out alone late at night again on Fire Island. It was too easy to get raped.

  XII

  The price for pleasure is certainty. Perhaps that is too flip. Pleasure underscores the reality of dying, for the same process of letting go takes place in both manifestations. But of course, the French refer to orgasm as the little death, and the Tibetans picture their Tantric deity with a string of skulls hanging from his scrotum.

  My life is plagued by a conditioned search for the ultimate. My mind has been made hierarchical by the frocked fiends who seized me when I was totally vulnerable to impressions and fed me with winged strictures. The journey has been an odd one, although reducible to statistical normalities, and has led me into the arms of women who wondered at my desperation. Understanding that no final solace lay in any woman’s arms was the most difficult disillusionment.

  Prior to that I went the conventional route, first seeing the priests and politicians as playing the most ancient and sweeping of con games, pretending to represent a power greater than themselves. But so many of them are ugly in their eyes and mouths that a direct glance is enough to unmask their rhetoric and perceive them as hollow and vicious tricksters.

  More subtly, I yearned toward the abstract as the end of my quest. I phased through the appreciation of pure thought, or truth, or beauty, or Absolute Reality, as the ideal. It took a while to learn that I was merely kneeling before the rationalizations of my own projections.

  Finally, I fell into the swamp of experience. If, I concluded, I experienced the fact of existence for myself, if I knew terror and joy and bliss and boredom for myself, through experience, then I would know all that it it possible for a person to know. Naively, I neglected to come to terms with the “I” who was experiencing. When “I” knew something, I had to ask myself, “Which ‘I’ is this?”

  At which point I cursed the Pope and all his legions, and surrendered to a state of vacuous vibration, disdaining all the products of my mind as so much read-out having to do with nothing except the internal state of the think machine. Practically every value held by the moiling majority of my species, I have discarded as worthless, only to rediscover the organic immediate basis upon which the phony historical morality is based. I have let all this learning be fired with a river of LSD, and become transmogrified. I am now a mutant. The soft machine is still the same as all the others which walk around and practice the dances of their days, but the person inside has become alien, essentially other than those who gave him birth.

  “Daddy, why is the grass green?”

  “Why is an inadmissible question except as used by Heidegger in ‘Why are there essents rather than nothing at all?’ If you wish to understand the how of grass and green, look to science.”

  The son of the mutant grows up.

  Now the summer vacation was over, and it was time to center ourselves once again in the city, amidst the decay, the poisoned sky. Lucinda had gone in earlier to take care of business and now three of us sat on the train, Francis and Bertha in glum hostility. The air conditioning in our car didn’t work, and we were too steeped in the undulating frisson of masochism to change cars.

  I went for some water and met Patricia, the dark and sharply-molded airline stewardess I had met on the island. We rapped for a while. We flirted with our eyes. I went with her back to her seat and for a few minutes we shared the view of auto graveyard and sooty lumber factories which line the route of the Long Island Railroad.

  We traded body cues across the space between the seats, and at one point she slipped her hands between her legs and bounced her thighs from side to side. I took a number of quick polaroid shots of her, the delicacy of her upper lip dewdropping forward at the center, the dark spaces under her blouse which show the size of the aureola around each nipple, the curve of one cheek bulging out where she sits. I noted the long fingers, and the suppleness of her waist as she twisted around and bent slightly to one side. She was an exquisite morsel, her flesh alive, and she being chatty, intelligent, and familiar with the major cities of the world.

  I fantasized spending an evening with her, but within a flash comprehended the totality of the night. I realized that there would not be one unrehearsed word, not a movement which sang with spontaneous passion. We were both very hip, chic, sophisticated, jaded. We understood the intricacies of pseudo-intimacy perfectly. I would be thrilled at discovering the texture and smell and sound of her, but I would not be surprised. I was almost stunned by my own ruminations. In an instant I had reduced her to an old movie, pleasant enough to see again, but only if one had nothing else to do.

  And what else was there to do? I suddenly seemed to be staring down a long narrowing tunnel which had a brick wall at its end. I looked down the abstract contour of my own life and found it empty. And the only thing to relieve that emptiness would be the conflict I might find in engaging myself in some project with another, in some war. I had come to the end of my tether, and even the prospect of twelve hours of fresh, never-before-tasted, hot and dripping cunt left me uninterested.

  “Then how will I amuse myself?” I thought. And then, “What a shallow epicure I have become.”

  I sighed and found myself looking into Patricia’s eyes. She smiled coolly, as though she were reading my thoughts. I lit a Gitanes. We became very suave for a while, sharing our effete mutual self-consciousness.

  “One can always take refuge in boredom,” I said. “If we had a closed car, you would kneel before me and take my limp warm penis in your mouth, and lap at it gently until it became firm, and then nibble until it was hard, and then suck until I sprayed your mouth with sperm. And all the while I should continue to smoke, and gaze out the window, gently contemplating the destruction of a civilization, the end of the culture, the curtains on history.”

  Her breathing became ever so slightly more quick and her lips glistened. She looked quickly around the car without moving her eyes. I saw the non-movement and flashed that she was looking for some safe spot where we could go for the few minutes necessary.

  “Yes,” I said, “our grey convoluted lives sparked only by the most tawdry petty spectacles. If I had you alone I would insert my entire clenched fist into your cunt and punish you with my wrist.”

  Her jaw went slack. She was already on the edge of a mild hypnotic stupor. I stood up abruptly. “Forget everything I have said,” I said.

  Francis looked up from his bout of hatred with Bertha. They were in the ninth round of a scheduled fifteen-rounder. “If I were a shallow and utterly worthless hedonist,” I said, “against what criteria could that be measured?”

  “Importance is just a matter of timing,” he said. “When the connection happens, it’s all there. When it doesn’t happen, there’s nothing you can do about anything. Then it’s best just to sit down and read a book.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Bertha.

  XIII

  For a few brief weeks in the fall New York is habitable. The hot air masses are sharply cut through one night by a clean chill wind from the North. And for a time the negative ion content increases, and one can almost smell the air which usually serves as nothing but a cushion for the clouds of death which spew from cars and factories. People walk more briskly but are in less of a hurry. And a sense almost of what used to be called humanity pervades the town.

  There must be an instinct in our species which tends us towards the destruction of the weak. Before the junkyard of civilization was organized to insure that the aged and infirm are at least physically taken care of, those who could not keep up on the hunt were killed or abandoned. Now, living our lives of concrete cycles, we roar down trails of psychic exploitation, and the hunt has shifted its milieu. Food
is brought in by ship and truck and train from farms and slaughterhouses thousands of miles away. And we in the capitol have nothing more crucial to do than maintain the equilibrium of the zombies and cripples who perambulate this great buzzing crypt.

  The basic human emotion is terror, which sometimes softens to poignancy. All but the tiniest percentage of our business each day is a millennia-bound routine to mask that state. We keep busy so we have no time to perceive the truth of our cosmic condition. And leaders, the boss monkeys, of any circle, exploit the blindness and fear of the millions, the sleepwalkers, sending them into carnage and bondage, buying them with paper and promises of paradise.

  The night after returning to the city, I received an invitation to Jessica’s birthday party. She was one of a group that had come together to launch one of the new growth centers which are rapidly replacing revival meetings as America’s number one religion. Since they were New Yorkers, however, they had accrued enough layers of cynicism concerning the entire process of cash-on-the-line help-for-your-soul scene to make interesting company. They were fairly unsophisticated game players, and their success in manipulating groups of people came largely from the hunger of their customers to be had. Lucinda was doing battle with nausea from the pregnancy and opted to stay home.

  Jessica was twenty-four that night, a tall, flaxen-haired Virgo who had very early tripped over the problem of discerning illusion from reality, and had not yet tired of the guessing game to settle into the final understanding that what is subsumes all dualities in an inexorable present tense. Dan and Jean hosted, and provided the context for the evening with the solid vibrations of their two-year marriage. Dan had been heavily into politics and had come to the conclusion that the only meaningful political statement left was dynamite, and not wanting to take that route, had lapsed into the sensitivity syndrome, and was planning to open a place “in the country”. John was there, a true innocent from Minnesota all caught up in the complexities of his genius, and his old lady Janet, who could still blow everyone’s mind by idly reaching over to John while he was rapping with someone, to take his prick out of his pants, and nonchalantly suck him off. Hal rounded out the company, going on endlessly about the play he was writing which concerned his vision for an encounter Utopia. We smoked parsley flakes sprayed with PCP.

  “Everyone’s two-dimensional,” I said.

  “No, you’re two-dimensional and you’re projecting,” Jean said.

  After that, chaos seized the time.

  John put on a reel of eight millimetre pornography, seemingly shot sometime during the ‘30s. It showed a heavily made-up woman being fucked by two men. They went through the routine with frozen expressions. He swung the projector over to show the film on Janet’s belly and thighs.

  I faded again, blinking into invisibility, letting the thereness of the others spring into fullness of focus.

  “What odd animals they are,” I said to the silence. “How they bruit about and sweat all over their skins and make noises with their mouths. They live in a perpetual excitement, an inability to lie down except to become unconscious. I see them in their shuffling nakedness, and in the stench of their decomposition.” I jumped up. “Giddy fucking bacchanalia!” I shouted. “Overripe and rotten fruit. Sweet decay.” I took my shirt off and staggered into the bedroom. The synthetic cannabis had stunned my body into numbness and no censor guarded my tongue. I fell across the bed and watched myself in the mirror nailed to the ceiling. My body sprawled, not belonging to me, the sensuality of the tripping decadence of drugs and dying city life making my cock tingle with a thousand pinpoints of disgust. The stench of existence exploded in my nostrils. I was ready to be the corpse served, still twitching, to the fat baron.

  “I’m trapped in illusion again,” said Jessica as she stalked into the room, her eyes wide with horror. Behind her the ragged laughter of demented people.

  “Stop that,” I said.

  “I’m at the edge,” she said, and licked her lips. Her cunt poked its way through the air as she walked toward me. The din swamped my mind. All control was lost. The focus of my eyes unscrewed and the impressions flew in unstructured. Her face kept changing. Innocence peaked and crashed into nostrils of a leper. Flawless skin, prodding me, torturing my balance, my precarious equilibrium in the nothingness.

  “Where’s Lucinda?” she said.

  For a moment the words rasped across my eyes in a loathsome ugliness. I snapped back to the surface. It was Jessica, twenty-four years old; this was her birthday party; we had fucked three times over the past year; in the context of consciousness, I knew her. “Is Lucinda coming?” she said.

  The searing guilt of the impending abortion and my inability to feel anything about it except impatience cut at me. I began to sob. I curled inside myself and brought my knees to my chest.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know, I just came in to talk to him and he started crying.”

  “Is he crazy?”

  The voices of the people buzzed around and around. I spun more deeply into the sticky blackness of my pit and strained to make sense of the sounds.

  “It’s almost as though he can hear us,” said Jessica, and then I knew. She was in my head too. She saw, and she kept two levels going. She kept saying the words which had meaning. John sat on the bed. “Sliding into the slough of despair again, eh?” he said, poking me in the ribs.

  Groups splintered, conversations flowed and waned, dope made the circuit once more. I sucked greedily on the pipe, yearning desperately for the solace of madness to take me once more into the torment of certainty. It was a party, a birthday party. Jessica put her right hand on my crotch and began fondling my genitals. Swiftly, gently, she prodded and touched, she drew the concentration of pleasure to the tip. She seduced me from my jagged solitude and while I succumbed I hated her. She licked my nipples, she gave me promises with her lips. Her cunt grew enormous and threatened to swallow my entire body. I braced myself against the entrance to her womb.

  I slapped her. She fell face forward and huddled there. “I want you to come home with me tonight,” she said. “You have a girl friend staying with you,” I said. She looked hurt.

  I raked her face with my fingers and drove them into her mouth. She whimpered and licked at them with her tongue. I bent forward and chewed at her chin and neck, taking painful bites. I ground my knuckles into her nose, mashing it against her face.

  “The next time I fuck you I want to kill you,” I said. “You know that. Having someone in the room who doesn’t understand the game will prevent me. What’s the point?”

  “The Game,” she whispered, and her face went white.

  “Yes,” I hissed into her ear, “You want to play the Game too. More than anything else. Everything else is shallow, is stupid.”

  In one stroke I had regained my autonomy. From deepest madness I sprang instantly to perfect reason. And with that, she capitulated. I grabbed her hard by the cunt, bunching the lips in my fingers. “Don’t hurt me,” she moaned. I twisted. “Oh, please hurt me,” she whispered.

  John and Janet came in. Confusion multiplied. Each of us began looking to the others for a clue as to what to do next. We were the shock troops for a bloody orgy, but we had to get ourselves in sync.

  “Everybody say what they want,” Janet said. “I’ll start.” She paused. “I want to fuck,” she said. “That’s all I really ever want to do.” John nodded. “I want to sleep and fuck, not necessarily in that order.” They looked at me. “I want to crash for the rest of the evening. I don’t care where. If you all stay here, I’m going back up to Lucinda’s pad. If you go to Jessica’s, I’ll ride with you.”

  “Let’s go to my place,” Jessica said.

  We made our farewells and went out into the street. I felt as though I were covered with thick cotton gauze. Dan and Hal walked us to the car, since St. Marks Place at two in the morning had the ambience
of a crazed speed freak slashing at the air with a razor. We drove to the West Village where the liberals and the homosexuals still kept the peace.

  I entered into a state of powerlessness, a wood chip on a stream. I basked in the rare space of active will-lessness. We piled into the tiny room, startling Kay, the girl from California staying with Jessica, and in a few moments had the stereo working and more dope passing the periphery of the circle. All the threads of my psyche were becoming unravelled and I just wanted to lie down and peé in my pants. I was stoned on regression.

  The sofa was opened into a bed and it took up almost all the available floor space, so the five of us piled onto it. We made some cosmic chitchat and listened to McCartney play McCartney. John sat at the edge of the bed, trying to get into Kay’s cunt via eye twinklings and flat-palmed touches. I lay back, with Jessica on one side and Janet on the other. I lolled back and forth, from the tall clean girl on my left to the short rapacious witch on my right. I was the ridgepole delineating yin and yang.

  The three of us got into one another’s breathing and body sense, and as we listened to the music that magic moment happened when we all knew we were hearing and responding in exactly the same way. Jessica moved over and lay on her back between my legs, her coccyx pressing into my pubic bone. She and Janet held hands.

  When the drum-and-breathing solo came on, I flipped out into a non-verbal awareness and began to wail, flailing my thighs and running my hands over Jessica’s body. She pressed herself into me, but stilled my fingers. I let my arms drop and immediately became quiet. With that, she let a series of small shudders go down her spine, and I felt myself closing around her. For an instant it seemed that she was a man lying face down on me, fucking me, and I was responding with the most delicate of pressures. Meanwhile, Janet and I had got into perfect head contact, matching the astral velocities as we skiied downhill at faster and more reckless speeds. The two women welded the triangle shut, and the three of us sailed into a superb dance, with the energy flowing physically between me and Jessica, emotionally between Jessica and Janet, and cerebrally between Janet and me. We rode together to the end of the cut, and rose to a three-way climax that was split-second perfect.