After three days in Omaha we went on to Denver, to a suburban house owned by people recommended as devoted and discreet. Tari seemed quite her usual self, though more silent than usual, but my nerves were not good. We came safely to the house after nightfall, and after washing we sat down to supper with our two hosts in an upstairs room, when from below came a sudden tumult, followed by the sound of feet pounding rapidly up the stairs. We had scarcely time to stand before the door burst open and two masked men wearing dark suits rushed in. They aimed large automatic pistols at us and opened fire. Dreadful pain exploded in my head and I lost consciousness.
And that was that.
26. Visions of Rose, Mud of the Road
It was not the end of the world, nor even of Gilbert.
At four o’clock one chill March morning fifteen months later, I sat in the coffee-shop at the Greyhound bus station in Salt Lake City, nursing the cup of lukewarm brown stuff my last dollar had bought. I stared numbly at the flashing lights of advertising displays. I was ragged, half-mad, without prospect, caught in a dream of frozen anger—and I was about to meet Bobby Fiorelli.
Two things have happened here.
One, last night Ursula Greene rang Mr. Griffith, asking him to turn me out. This morning through the fog he came, most embarrassed. He spent five minutes muttering about the weather and such before managing to say it. Evidently he too wants me on my way: he may or may not know of his son’s visit and threats, but I’m sure he feels the mounting pressure of family and local disapproval. So, I should never have called Grace at all, but to hell with that! I’m glad I did, and what odds does it make?
“We got a call from the Professor’s wife last night,” he said, looking away, “wondering how long you’ll be here. See what I mean? Somebody else wanting the place at the weekend, like.”
A lie, I thought, and asked:
“You didn’t personally speak to Professor Greene yourself?”
“She said he’s very poorly.” He darted a quick shrewd glance at me. “You’ll know about that, won’t you?” And his glance said that Ursula managed to imply my guilt for Michael’s illness.
“I’ve heard,” I said in a flat voice. “I’m very sorry about it. As for myself, I plan to be gone by the weekend anyway.”
He eyed me sharply, saw no guile, then nodded in quick and surprised relief that I made no fuss. He nearly smiled, but caught it, then muttered something about, “Well, then, I have to be up on the top pasture,” and with his black-and-white dog barking loudly he took off over the field in his landrover, lumping and splashing away through puddles into the fog. Well, he has to make a living.
He was surprised at my calm. I was not.
The fear is gone.
Last night, driving myself to write of Denver, it was painful until I surmounted it and it was done, whereupon a great soft sadness welled through me like a pearly grey cloud. With this came a lethargy and peacefulness at last, as of something letting go. With tears in my eyes I turned off the lights and pulled an easy chair into the warmth of the stove, and must have been quickly asleep—for the next thing I knew I was sitting up and looking round, and there was Tari!
She stood, misty and faint, and had a bloody wound on her breast, and behind her was the shining door with the passage beyond. She was so wraithlike I could scarcely make out her face as she pointed at the floor between myself and the gate.
“Humfrey, look!” Her voice was a far-off winter wind from the north. It chilled me. “Look what we have here!”
I looked and saw, and shot to my feet, then froze colder still. “In the Name of God!” I hissed. “I’m a dead man!” For there on the floor before me I saw the ghost of myself; stretched out, a corpse, head torn by a ghastly wound. At that horrid sight I had no feeling at all but for the throbbing of the scar at my hairline; I could not take my eyes from it until diverted by another voice.
“So what you gonna do about it, Humf? Just stare?”
I swung, violently. It was Herbie.
He was a mess too, but he grinned, and shrugged.
“No big deal, Humf. Happens to us all. So how about it?”
I simply goggled and could find nothing to say at all.
“The gate,” came Tari’s grave whisper. “Humf, come through!”
They said no more, but turned and went through. Somehow I followed, over my dead body. It seemed the best thing to do.
I found no footing, there was a wrenching-apart. I fell a great way, losing consciousness. I fell all the way back to the coma I was in for days after Denver, to what happened when I was nearly gone—which I had not remembered at all until now!
I seemed to be in an open coffin or sarcophagus with the chill of death on me. There was only a pale blue light, barely sufficient to hint at stone sphinxes supporting the columns of the crypt where I lay. And as I lay I saw the scenes of my life flit before me in rapid phantom succession, until at last I saw the masked men burst into that room and shoot us. At this, all dissolved and fell apart. I lost all connection with my body, not knowing who or where I was. Yet it was strangely serene, there seemed to be music, and then there was a shining point of light. This swiftly grew larger into a flashing five-pointed star with rainbow-colours streaming from it. The heart of this star was incandescent, a pure whiteness too dazzling for any form to exist in it until at length it began to fade, to be replaced by a flower that formed in it, or from it. And the flower was a scintillant white rose that unfolded with utter tremorous delicacy. Yet soon it too began to evaporate, sending out a marvellous perfume as it did, and assuming many transient forms which I could not understand nor clearly see until, from the condensation of its subtle coilings of light, a human figure took shape, of a woman, smiling and radiant, slender form shining through the layers of the veils of light upon her. This was Mery-Isis, yes, and more: a veritable visitation of that Great One she served that shone through her! Most beautiful and tender and awesome! And her perfume breathed knowledge and great lightness of spirit through me as she came and showed me the book—the one with blank pages and my name on it that she showed me before I began all this a month ago. Now there was writing in it, but still blank pages, many of them! And she said:
“I am your sister and your soul, and here is a life. You are not yet at the end of that road you began so long ago, so record it all, good and bad, then be done with it and start out again. There are new doors to open and pass, and one day, at the end of your journey on the boat of millions of years, you’ll come to know them all.”
So, this morning I awoke, and found the fear gone… well, almost.
After Denver was a man who forgot everything and felt little for a long time, except for the frigid angry impulsion to keep going.
Again the first memory’s of swimming back to the world in a bed. Very far away through a window like a tunnel I saw snow-boughed pines, great white mountains, an infinite pale blue sky.
It was only after a week or so that the elderly couple who had agreed to look after me told me about it. I had been unconscious nine days since the shooting and emergency operation. They said the gunmen had killed Tari and one of our hosts, critically wounded our other host and myself, then got away, unidentified. Well, we knew, but it was too late now. And, ugly irony, the cost of surgery and shut mouths was met out of the sale of the Interferon Tari had carried all those months. The rest of the profit, over three thousand dollars, had been turned over to these two folk for the risk and cost of looking after me.
They never touched a penny. When I said I must go they insisted I take it, and when I refused, they outwitted me. They were a fine couple, very strong in themselves, and I wish I’d been in better state to appreciate their kindness and who they were, for both had lived adventurous lives of the politically radical sort, the old man being a great populist orator of his time. So, I’ll say no more of the who and where, for these are no times to be loose with names.
I was abed a long time, in shock and weak, bandaged in terrible dreams, una
ble to read or do anything but hazily wonder why I was still alive. The bullet had ploughed into the top of my skull, making a great mess while destroying no critical part of the brain. But I remembered nothing before Denver, and for a time it was also feared my left side might be paralysed. Yet gradually motion came back, and more memory than I wanted. By late February 1986 I was out of bed for short spells, listening to the old man’s tales of Wobblies and McCarthy and the Murmansk Run in World War Two, and towards the end of March I was taking brief walks outside. We were still cut off from the outside world by snow (I heard I’d been brought up the mountainside in a machine called a Snocat), and I think the mountain air must have been as great a tonic as the silence up there. Yet I felt and smelled nothing at all, until in April I was taken by an increasingly impatient urge to leave, to wander, to forget and be forgotten and swallowed completely in the world. So, though my head still ached, I told them I must go.
They asked me, Where? I said I had no idea. They said, Please stay, you are under no obligation. “Thank you,” I said, “but I must go, my legs demand it!” They accepted it sadly, and when the snows were melted they drove me to the bus station in a town called Golden. I had refused the three thousand, but they prevailed on me to take five hundred at least. Later that day, on a bus going west, I found the other twenty-five hundred rolled up in a sock in my pack… and I think my rueful smile was the first since Denver.
That first night I stayed in a motel. It was strange. I could make no sense of anything, but at least when I left in the morning I had the money divided into three rolls—one in my left boot, the second taped to my thigh, and the third, never more than a hundred bucks a time in small bills, in a wallet in my jacket pocket. This precaution was to prove intelligent.
I don’t know what was on my mind. All I wanted to do was walk and walk and walk, and so I did, all summer, another drifter on the roads. I remember little, but I know I never told anyone who I was and where I’d been. I slept out as often as I could, saving money, avoiding company, half-starving myself, gazing at the distant stars and mountaintops, walking northwest until one day I was in sight of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, high on the Continental Divide. There on the road I met a wanderer who told me to turn back, because of the Idaho Leak and the ugly mood of people there against strangers. Without asking myself what I was doing I turned south, and in time came to New Mexico. By then winter approached. I thought of trying Mexico, but had no papers, and feared the desert crossing, so that in due course, still aimless, I found myself in Arizona. One cold night I sought shelter with a hobo desert camp. They were suspicious at first, but shared their food and fire… and after the sparse meal I heard a man speaking of the Hopi, the People of Peace!
I remembered Masanva, Azurara, Utak! I felt a sudden painful flood of hope! Perhaps the Dancer was with the Hopi!
Fired with what I told myself was a sense of purpose, on through the desert I went until I came to the Hopi reservation.
Perhaps Masanva could tell me what I should do! I came to a village called Oraibi that sat on the lip of a mesa, and found federal troops guarding it against any attempted reoccupation by its inhabitants. They had been driven out to make way for a mining consortium. In a fever I went on to the villages of Moencopi and Shongopovi, asking for the Dancer, but the wrinkled old men with their names like Macdonald and Adamson just stared silently at me in my madness, and the children chased me until their mothers called them away, laughing.
That killed my false hope. Driven by anger I did not even know as such I wandered on. Sometimes I’d stop and say, “I am Humfrey Gylberte!”—but it meant nothing, and I could not quite believe the past any more than the present. With little money left I went south to Flagstaff, and in hotels asked for work washing dishes. Yes, I know about the bum’s rush. Somehow I got through that winter. For a time I was with some other down-and-outs: one night near the Grand Canyon a man beat and robbed me while others stood by. So I went on by myself, in any direction, stiff and thin, until with my last bucks I took a Trailways bus from somewhere to elsewhere. Thus I found myself in Salt Lake City in the early hours of a March morning in 1987.
There was no coffee-shop at the Trailways terminal. I walked down the street to the Greyhound station. So I met Fiorelli.
I had grown suspicious of people, wise in ways I hadn’t known before, but he fooled me. I let him take me. I had exhausted all options, and from the moment he saw me he knew me as a particular sort of angry man for whom he could find an angry use.
Simply put, he came and sat at the table where I moodily stirred sugar into coffee, and he started talking. He was slim, bearded, about thirty, sharply dressed in a suit of crushed black velvet. He told me he was waiting for the San Francisco bus, and that I looked an interesting sort of guy, and that he wanted to talk, if I didn’t mind. “Talk all you like!” I said, glaring. He warned me not to go out on the Salt Lake City streets. “This place is just incredible, man,” he said in his slow drawl. “You know every morning at dawn they bring out teams of convicted juvenile delinquents and make ’em lick the sidewalks round the Temple clean? Hawhaw. Only joking. But it’s weird here. Weird graffiti too. WOMAN IS THE WORK OF SATAN, shit like that. Makes me shudder. Hey, don’t mind my asking, but you look down on your luck. Where you headed?” Quickly he learned what he had already guessed: that I was a desperate man. He smiled, and bought me a good breakfast.
“Hey, I like you,” he said, “and maybe I can help you out. Why don’t you come along with me to San Francisco?”
I shrugged.
“Why not?” I said.
27. What Humf Did in the Steamhouse
Every paradise has its ugly side, and San Francisco is no exception. My benefactor turned out to be a procurer for a most unpleasant trade. What he meant by saying he could help me out was that, in return for allowing myself to abuse and be abused by insane and violent individuals on a regular nightly basis, he would find me a place to stay and pay me four hundred dollars a week, no questions asked.
I knew none of it until we reached San Francisco. I gaped when at last our bus came over the Bay Bridge into the city. The towers were ablaze with the light of the sun setting out to sea beyond the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a beautiful sight, and vaguely I knew it as such. It hurt me, and I hated it for being beautiful.
“Listen, Humf,” said Fiorelli when we reached the terminal at last, “I can see you’re pretty whacked out, and we’ll get you some food and a bed, but first I wanna show you something.”
He made a call. Soon a black car driven by a black man wearing black leather with silver chain wrapped tight round his body came and picked us up. He also wore a black peaked cap which from my modern education I recognised as a Nazi cap. Even in my dull state I found this all most fascinating.
“Why this uniform?” I mumbled.
“Hold it, Humf,” said Fiorelli. “You’ll find out.”
In silence we were driven through a bleak industrial part of the city to a dirty alley, to a door in the alley. The door had a barred grill over it. Mr. Black Leather unlocked grill and door, and into the dim red light of a musty interior we went.
Fiorelli wrapped an arm round my shoulder and steered me past a scarred black leather curtain into a room from which came grunts and groaning male voices. And when I saw what was going on, I stopped dead. Even in my numb state I was quite astounded. For some seconds I gazed at the uncouth activities without taking in what they were doing to each other. I looked up and met the eyes of a hooded man hanging upside down in chains, naked. He winked at me. Opening and closing my mouth, I looked about again. “Interesting, eh, Humf?” said Fiorelli, guiding me on through busy torture chambers that would not have disgraced Torquemada, past racks and Iron Maidens and other gear. “We get guys here who’d be out on the streets hittin’ on innocent passers-by if they couldn’t get it off here. We’re legit, we pay our taxes, y’know, First Amendment, just like the churches.” And so saying he led me into a small room that was bare but
for a whipping-post. “The moment I saw you,” he said conversationally as he started removing his clothes, “I thought, ‘Now there’s an angry guy that hates just about everything he sees. He’d like to beat the shit outa someone.’ Right? Well, here’s your chance!”
Must I say more? Supervised, so that my rage might not fly fatally out of control, I passed that test splendidly, and Fiorelli, grunting with pain, hired me on the spot. And I went with it. How could I sink so low? I have heard of karma. Perhaps that’s what it was. Once in my enthusiasm I willingly sold the clothes off my wife’s back. Now for the sake of survival I sold the skin off my own, and not willingly! I drew the line at some of the games Fiorelli suggested might double my pay, and the details of such often deadly pursuits as fist-fucking may, I think, be left out of this account with no loss to anyone. When he suggested it I threatened him with a fist in the face! “Hey, Humf,” he said cordially, not in the least put out, “take a tip. You could retire in a year if you used your assets right. A lot of the trade really got this thing for you. It’s that classy accent, and the Man-of-Mystery bit, and the impression you put over that you really despise ’em. Gets ’em hot. Just aim to despise a bit more and you’ll be Big Time!”
The club, called the Steamhouse, was situated in the dangerous South of Market district. Scores of winos and bums lived and died on the streets about, life was cheap, and though nightly I took a bus from my one-room apartment on Valencia Street, still I had to walk several of the roughest blocks in town. My built-up rage was astonishing even to me; it was in these months I often let ranting hate overwhelm me, and met William Yeats Butler, and kicked in a TV-set when I heard Thaddeus Carpenter preach his Plutonium Power for Christ insanity. It was too much to bear, it drained me, soon I could not be sure I was still human, and reaction set in. I saved money, and it was with unutterable relief that finally, in July, I began to cut down the number of hours I spent in that foul place. A long time had passed since I had allowed myself any feelings at all, but now at last I began to feel I must mend my ways. Enough is enough! I began to explore this most energetic and beautiful of cities, taking ferry-trips out to Angel Island in the Bay, visiting the parks, walking briskly up Twin Peaks from the top of which the view of all the hilly districts is so superb. I began spending time in the Public Library, thinking of Vulcan again, finding out what I could about it from back-issues of newspapers and magazines. I went to movies, and to art-galleries, and sat in coffee-houses, eavesdropping and learning all I could, and sometimes talking with people almost like a normal human being.
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