The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  I glared at him. I had by now decided that he hadn’t really given me LSD, that this was one of his fucking little tests designed to reveal my true character, in all its outstanding flaws. I leaned against the brick wall and folded my arms and sneered.

  ‘It’s starting to take effect, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’

  ‘You’re thinking that I’ve tricked you, that it wasn’t really LSD, that I’m trying to make a fool of you.’

  I looked at him in stunned surprise. Did the creep have uncanny powers of perception from his idiot training after all?

  ‘I’ve had enough LSD to float a battleship,’ he informed me, appraising my reactions from my shifting facial expressions. ‘The general pattern is usually pretty predictable, allowing for variations introduced by personality differences. So please spare me the boring details of your miraculous visions in the upcoming hours. Other people’s drug trips, like other people’s dreams and other people’s romances, are unremittingly tedious for non-participants.’

  ‘The thing I hate most about you,’ I replied calmly, ‘is that you’re such a goddam hypocrite. You said you no longer approved of artificial means for altering states of consciousness.’ The bricks of the arched ceding were starting to rearrange themselves. I decided to pretend not to notice their antics, preferring not to expose myself to Hawk’s ridicule by claiming to be experiencing hallucinations. I could picture him returning to his deserter friends and regaling them with the story of my hallucinating after drinking plain water. I could see the entire radical world snickering.

  ‘I don’t believe in it just for kicks.’

  Never before had I noticed how his mouth pursed in slow motion as he talked, like a landed fish gasping for air.

  ‘This isn’t for kicks. This is for a specific purpose, administered by someone who can guide you through it and indicate significant aspects.’

  His eyes were two ice-blue mentholated throat lozenges. His tangled beard was thousands of matted spiders flailing their snarled legs. The arched bricks had turned to streams of rainbow colors.

  ‘Are you feeling anything yet?’ boomed a hollow voice like the surf crashing in an ocean cave.

  ‘No.’

  In fact, I wasn’t feeling anything. How could I be? I no longer possessed any sense organs. That unattractive husk of flesh I had formerly been so pleased to refer to as ‘me’ lay limp and flabby beneath me. What possible contact could that stinking chunk of decaying meat ever have had with wonderful me? Why, I had no more relation to it than I did to that other disgusting mound of tissue and cartilage that lay propped against the wall watching “my’ body out of ice-blue lozenges.

  I started giggling. It was so ludicrous. Here I had spent a lifetime feeding and clothing and adoring that hunk of flesh — and all along, it had been dead! What a joke! I screamed with laughter. The blob of adipose against the wall smiled tolerantly, not knowing that it was dead, too. I knew that it was true — that that other blob had drugged me in order to ship me to Morocco — but the joke was on him. He’d be selling a twitching corpse! I howled with glee.

  Hawk was slowly removing his blue work shirt. This operation required several hours. I scrutinized it, absorbing every detail — his fingers fumbling with the buttons, his arms moving up and out of the sleeves; the fur on his flexing chest muscles waved like prairie grasses in the wind. He stood up. And up and up and up, like Jack’s beanstalk. The tiny cubicle was a hundred yards deep. Hawk strutted across this expanse like a minstrel in a Cakewalk.

  Eventually, he was sitting next to me. Who was? What was he sitting next to? What was this? He was trying to show me something. Me, who already saw all? How could he be bothering me with such a petty topic as his tattoo.

  Hawk kept thrusting his arm into my face, flexing and unflexing his bicep so that the tattoo swam and trembled and quivered. Soon my eyes fixed on its outer borders. I stared at the filigreed circumference with wonder. Hawk was right to insist. It merited my attention after all. It was alive. The elegant etched pattern breathed and shuddered and throbbed and swirled. All the colors of the spectrum, one after another, wound their way through the maze of filigree, like visible electricity through electrical circuits.

  My attention jumped abruptly to the bands of stylized flower petals just inside the filigree. The variegated colors were still with me; but in this context of soft unfolding petals, the colors didn’t snake, they swept — in dizzying waves, one color after another illuminating the undulating petals.

  Suddenly I found myself enmeshed in the grid of interlocked triangles. Here, the geometric shapes popped out at me, ablaze with constantly shifting colors.

  This was neat, but suddenly I felt wary. It was all a trap. I was being led, like Hansel and Gretel by the witch’s candy cottage, into the center, toward the fetid jaws of the grotesque monster who lived there. I understood in a flash of insight that that hideous ghoul had spewed out of his bloody craw these charming patterns of shifting colors, solely in order to lure me into his lair…

  ‘…be aware of the different levels of organization,’ Hawk was saying. His voice boomed as though from a vast underground cavern.

  And Hawk was in league with that monster! After all, the monster lived on Hawk’s bicep, didn’t he? I snarled at Hawk and turned my head away from his repulsive arm. Safe! I hadn’t looked!

  I felt a hand on my face, and found myself once again staring at the quivering tattoo, being sucked in past the cunning filigree and petals and triangles to the monster at the center.

  ‘No!’ I screamed. Or thought I screamed.

  ‘You must look at it!’ a voice boomed, bouncing off the walls like shock waves in the Major’s blast chamber.

  ‘But I don’t want to.’

  ‘You must!’ the voice commanded, with the intonations of a Wagnerian deity.

  I closed my eyes obstinately. A chaos of color swirled across the black behind my lids. I felt nauseated. Watching the riot of colors with no framework to organize them was making me dizzy and unspeakably anxious. I tried to stack the colors as though they were Wendy’s blocks, but I couldn’t hold them still, couldn’t control their wild dance.

  Just as I felt I was about to start retching, my eyes popped open wide. My attention was dragged rapidly past the snaking filigree, past the freshly opened petals, past the disciplined but playfully throbbing geometric grid — right into the gaping jaws of the monster. I screamed with terror. The soft moist black of its cavernous mouth was flooded rhythmically with molten streams of blood that spewed up from its craw. In the pulsing red glow, I could see sharp white fangs, poised to crunch down on me. From this perspective I could see that the elaborate outer patterns of the tattoo were nothing more than congealing swirls of gore.

  ‘Shift your focus,’ a hollow voice was roaring urgently. ‘Make the blue-black the background. Look for the pattern formed by the flesh tones.’

  I could feel my eyes, of their own accord, squinting and opening wide; my head was thrashing from side to side. I couldn’t see any flesh tones; all I could see were constantly changing swirls of color.

  All of a sudden the monster was gone. In its place was a pale grinning death’s-head, similar to those on Father Bliss’s tombstones. It had a round face and wide surprised eyes. Where the monster’s skull crown and flaying knife had been were a pair of graceful, fanciful, dappled wings.

  I studied the grinning death’s-head with delight. How could I ever have been afraid of this kindly creature, I wondered. Its eyes blinked at me in sympathy. Under its gaze, I found I could step back and look at the tattoo as a whole — the way the bands of design set each other off to advantage by contrast.

  ‘…the upended and right-side-up triangles suggesting yin and yang, active and passive, masculine and feminine…’ the annoying voice was booming didactically.

  ‘Shut up, Hawk,’ I suggested gaily, and returned to my private study of the patterns of organization, patterns too profound and complicated to sul
ly with those absurd jabberings known as words. I contemplated the subtle ways in which the variegated bands drew attention ever inward toward the center.

  ‘…the three corners of the triangles representing the intellect, the emotions, and the physical function…’

  ‘Fuck you, Hawk!’ I shrieked, laughing wildly. I felt I really owed it to him to discuss the topic of his overweening ignorance. But to cross such a vast quagmire, where did one begin? Besides, I was too caught up in the impressions that were cascading down on me as though from a towering waterfall. I smiled at the friendly death’s-head, acknowledging its clever device of disguising itself as a monster in order to frighten off the unworthy, of which I was clearly not one.

  Just then the amiable death’s-head receded and was swamped by the returning monster. I screamed and shuddered and cowered under its gleaming fangs.

  I remembered the trick. It had worked before. Maybe it would work again. I opened and squinted my eyes, and moved my head side to side. After several years of effort, the monster vanished and the death’s-head reappeared, and with it the atmosphere of giddy joy. But this time, the giddy joy was no longer comforting, even in contrast to the monster. It grated and jangled. It made me want to leap up and dance crazily like a puppet with high-voltage power lines for strings. I no longer knew which was worse — to cower with terror, or to twitch with undirected glee. I swung crazily back and forth between the two for at least a millennium, dreading to stay with the monster, but dreading equally the jangling death’s-head. The dread being equal, which, I wondered, was ‘real’?

  Then I understood what had happened. Neither was ‘real.’

  Both were real. I had finally cracked up. I was now diagnosably schizophrenic. And as a schiz, I was for the first time gaining insight into the nature of ultimate reality.

  Then it occurred to me that maybe I could run the entire show. Maybe I could find some measure of relief in at least being in control of this bedlam. And eventually I discovered that I could manipulate the monster and the death’s-head at will. All that was required was a shift in focus. When I made the flesh tones serve as a backdrop, the monster appeared, and I collapsed in quivering terror. When I made the blue-black tattoo ink the backdrop, the smirking death’s-head appeared, and I twitched and jangled with giddy exuberance.

  After several dozen journeys back and forth, I made an interesting discovery: The appearance of these two had ceased to trigger the accompanying emotions. This was the next phase in the etiology of my schizophrenia: Part of me had become a spectator, an overseer of the pathetic mound of tissue that was witnessing monsters and death’s-heads. I was now of an altogether higher order of existence, where emotional reactions were regarded with the same measured concern as a child’s queasy stomach, upset from gobbling too much ice cream.

  In several staggered flashes of insight, like flashbulbs popping around a celebrity, I understood the Cartesian mind/body split. I also understood Beauty and Truth and Ultimate Reality. Unfortunately, I lacked the words to explain it all to poor Hawk, who sat huddled in woeful ignorance beside me. In fact, I concluded that there was nothing that I didn’t now understand. My thoughts raced and swirled like darting birds, linking up in ever more intricate patterns and tying all existence into one neat bundle of interchangeable subatomic particles, all activated into the appearance of a cosmos by…me! In short, I was God. I could create and destroy this world by nothing more taxing than a simple act of will. I laughed munificently, as befits a resident deity.

  Then I stopped laughing. Yes, it was true: I had transcended even laughter. With serene clarity, I surveyed all that I had created, and I found it good. Never mind trivia like wars and poverty and injustice. They were merely chimera. Bishop Berkeley in Philosophy 108 had been right all along. I had conjured up the entire world for my private entertainment. Rape and murder were merely my divine stag films. Only I existed. Neat and marvelous me! Oblivious to piddling human emotions, able to regard the multiple miseries of existence with detached amusement, I had clearly arrived at the pinnacle of spiritual evolution, and was in imminent danger of becoming the world’s leading citizen.

  After several centuries, spent basking in the glow of my moral perfection, I happened to glance up and see Mr. Army Deserter himself, hiding his shame behind his bushy beard, swaying above me and holding a gleaming syringe the size of a Nike missile. He reached down and unzipped my jeans. I shrieked with laughter at the idea that he thought he could screw God. He had had his chance when I was a mere mortal, and he had turned me down. Now that I had become a deity it was out of the question. I pushed his hands away.

  ‘I’m going to inject this in your hip to bring you down,’ he thundered, jabbing me through my jeans.

  Down it did bring me. Down and down and down. Spiraling down from heaven and into the murky twilight depths of hell. A fashion show was in progress, featuring the Seven Deadly Sins — Miss Malice, Miss Greed. They were all actually me. Coal miners were being crushed in roof falls, runaway slaves were cowering in subterranean chambers, soldiers in army fatigues were lined up to rape young Oriental girls. I was right in the thick of it all, unprotected by my celestial mask that had enabled me to see it as constructs of my mind. I was trapped in my sodden body. Each thought felt as though my brain was wearing Joe Bob’s wrist weights. I fell asleep.

  When I woke up, Hawk handed me two pills and a glass of water and said, ‘Take these. They’ll make you feel better.’

  The only thing that would have made me feel better, I was convinced, was a cyanide capsule. Hoping that in fact Hawk was murdering me so that he could loot the house, I washed them down.

  Within a few minutes, I had returned to ‘normal.’ I sat up abruptly and said, ‘Oh God! I forgot all about Wendy! Poor Angela!’ I glanced around frantically and leapt to my feet. I had told Angela Wendy would be there only for the day, not for supper and the night as well.

  ‘Relax,’ Hawk drawled, glancing at my Lady Bulova. ‘You’ve got all afternoon.’

  I sat back down on the cot, bewildered. As far as I was concerned, at least a decade had elapsed. I had a throbbing headache.

  ‘God, it was amazing…’

  ‘Please,’ he said, closing his eyes and shaking his head, so that his bell jingled. ‘I’d really rather not hear about it.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘Don’t marvel, damn it! The mechanism is really quite simple, as you must know from college courses. The reticular formation at the base of the brain is a kind of filter that governs the number and nature of sensory stimuli allowed to enter the brain proper. Hallucinogens dismantle that filter, and your consciousness is swamped in sensation. Perceived duration of time is directly proportional to the number of sensory impressions being received in the brain. If you’re being flooded with sensations, more time will seem to have elapsed than if you’re deprived of sensations. Big deal.’

  ‘But if it’s no big deal,’ I growled, unhappy to have my mystical experience reduced to the level of physiological filters, ‘why did you bother slipping me the LSD cocktail?’

  ‘Because if I’d just explained the arbitrary nature of time to you without your having experienced it, it would have been meaningless.’

  I decided not to confess that it still wasn’t particularly fraught with meaning. I was sulking. If I couldn’t be God, then I wouldn’t be anyone.

  ‘The thing is,’ Hawk explained, rolling over on his stomach by the pool later that afternoon, ‘I can’t decide whether to have my novel be a comedy or a tragedy.’

  I looked at him blankly, not remotely interested in the agonies of artistic creation. ‘Does it make any difference?’

  ‘Of course it does. It determines the whole structure. The essence of comedy is that life goes on; the main characters are survivors. They keep popping back up whenever they’re knocked down. In tragedy, though, the heroes usually die and drag kingdoms down with them.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ve lost me,’ I said yawning. ‘I mean, it s
ounds as though you’ve got it all figured out, even if I don’t understand you. So what’s the problem? Aren’t those categories irrelevant to science fiction?’

  ‘Oh, not at all. I’ve barely begun. I can see it being at least ten volumes. I still have to trace the origin of man, of life, of the earth, of the sun, of the elements, of the atom. I’ve got billions of years still to cover. And the comedy/tragedy question is crucial. Picture the universe contracted into one solid mass, which is a possible scenario for its end. Two things can happen: The fusion reactions can produce a gigantic explosion that would spew all the particles outward again, reversing time. That would be a comic ending. Survival would be the keynote. The end of one universe would signal the beginning of another. Or else all the particles could collapse in on themselves to form a body with such immense gravity that not even light rays could escape. Any residual matter in the universe would be slurped into it. This Black Hole scenario would be the tragic ending — destruction of Matter as we know it.

  ‘I’ve already rejected a second tragic ending — the Entropy one. It would have required the universe not to have contracted but to have continued expanding. In order for movement — change of any kind — to occur, an energy process must take place. But any energy process forfeits a tiny portion of the energy produced, in the form of heat, which dissipates at large. Heat flow is a one-way thing — from a warmer body to a cooler one, never the reverse. So picture a universe in which nothing is hotter or colder than anything else. The stars would have radiated all their heat and warmed the black void between them by the most minute fraction of a degree. Planets would have fallen into their suns. Eventually suns would fall into the centers of their galaxies, and galaxies into the centers of their galaxy groups and so on, until we would be left with one big burnt-out cinder in a vast cold black void.’