She got up finally and went back inside the hut. She felt an odd, tingling euphoria mingled with a sense of dread Something was about to happen—that was her feeling, yet she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just the uncertainty of being in a new place, with strange new smells and new life rhythms …
She dreamed that she was trapped in the slime-glistening coils of a gigantic sea creature. Reptilian tentacles enwrapped her, smothered her, penetrated her body in its most intimate places. She fought herself free and discovered that each tetacle was a phallus tipped with a leering, malevolent human head.
She sat up and looked over the edge of the platform. On the floor writhed the creature of her dream. Men and women writhed with naked limbs intertwining, wet mouths groping, fingers probing, white buttocks humping, twisting, turning. A yellow flame curled from a rag stuck in a beer can, casting a flickering smoky light over the slithering mass. She tried to locate the Learned Doctor, failed to find him—which for some reason pleased her—and settled back to watch. The movement became hypnotic, the fountains of her own desire began to flow, she trembled with an urge to throw off her clothes, climb down the ladder, and surrender her body to the sensual beast. The desire became irresistible, so she moved her sleeping bag to the rear of the platform and lay down with her face to the wall.
She stayed for three days without turning on. Each night she watched the Learned Doctor pass the pipe around the little group, felt the silence descend like a mist while their faces took on an inward quality. Then Frog would rise and lurch back into the hut. Soon Lona would follow, leaving Liza and the Learned Doctor sitting alone, watching the dying fire, wriggling their bare toes in the warm sand.
She couldn’t figure out what sexual arrangement prevailed between the Learned Doctor, Frog and Lona. The needs of the Learned Doctor were not great, she assumed—at least judging from the thoughtful reflective way he looked at her, she deduced that he was not being torn apart by unrequited desire. Of course he could be sending signals she didn’t pick up. She wasn’t sure yet what sexual customs prevailed among expatriates living in the tropics. So much of courtship in the temperate zones involved finding a place where you could take off your clothes and be alone with somebody. You needed an apartment, or a car, and that’s how economics got into it. Here it was simple; Lona dropped her shorts and lay down, Frog kicked his off and lay down beside her. Bang-bang, nothing to do but have another joint, eat a mango or a bully-beef torta, and sleep.
Across the fire the Learned Doctor got up, coughed, threw another chunk of driftwood on the embers, and sat down again. Liza stretched out her legs and felt the warm sand lumping between her thighs. It would be simple for her too. She had given up trying to keep her underwear clean by washing it in the river. Now, like Lona, she wore nothing under her shorts. Simple, and a foregone conclusion, therefore dull …
She realized he was watching her across the fire, but when she looked up his gaze shifted to some distant horizon. The Learned Doctor—now that she knew him she felt the term to be ludicrous, a putdown of himself in order to avoid trouble—wore his usual look of puzzled perplexity, as if he were trying to locate some distant object once glimpsed, then lost. A prophet whose religion had become … not successful, but popular—and profitable.
She chuckled softly, and he turned his eyes to her slowly, like sliding oil. “What’d you pick up?”
“You—the guru. It doesn’t wash.”
“What does?”
“I don’t know. You don’t seem to belong in this century. I don’t know what you are, actually. A decadent aristocrat—not that exactly, possibly an alienated intellectual.”
“Lotta words,” he grunted.
“What else do we communicate with?”
He walked over and sat down beside her, held out the pipe. She shook her head, and for several minutes there was silence. Then he began talking, in a bored, school-masterish manner …
“Time is the killer, Liza. You can defeat disease, injury, you can avoid the big waves, you can watch where you put your feet, you can stay away from violent people—but you can’t avoid getting old. What you’re into is suicide, killing yourself by following rules. You’ve got to find you own way, Liza. You follow somebody else’s pattern and you’ll never find out what you are because when it’s over you’re just like anyone else.”
Feeling uncomfortable, she chose to be flippant. “You think there’s still a chance for me?”
“Oh yes. You’re trying to understand our scene instead of flushing it all out of your mind. But what are you really looking for?”
“I don’t know. What?”
“Your lost innocence.”
“I don’t recall that I ever had any.”
“Come now.”
Into her mind came a vision of a lawn sprinkler going brrrp-brrrp-brrrp, shooting out gouts of spray … herself and a neighbor boy running through the icy downpour, their play suits tossed on the sandpile, unaware that they were naked until his moma came out and reminded them, with the sharp slap of palm against buttock …
“A long time ago,” she said musing. “Tell me, is that what Danny was doing down here, Looking for his innocence?”
He was silent a minute, dipping up handfuls of sand and letting it drift down into little cones. “What Danny was doing … what we were all doing at that time, was pushing back the border of human consciousness. You know? Cracking the nut of the ego. Freeing the Self from the prison of the self. It was the only frontier we had. So we threw ourselves against it, and a lot of us died. I remember one single month in ‘66 I had three friends wiped clean off the board, and a lot of others who wigged, and a few who got thrown in the slammer and wound up playing a lifelong game of cops and robbers. It all seems a long time ago. I took my first acid trip when I was a psychology professor, and I haven’t been inside a classroom since. I turned into a purist, a moralistic sonofabitch. I was a peyote saint before Castenada ever pulled the fuzz off his first button. Then the whole drug scene started going pop, and all this young gash with itchy clits started trooping south of the border, and some of it got blown my way. At first I went complete ape and built myself a nice little private harem, it was easy, but the care and feeding of even one chick seemed like too much hassle, let alone three or four. Also it was too damn easy to see where it was leading given the fact that I’ve dedicated my life to being uncommitted to anything. A dude with three chicks and no bread is eventually gonna hit on the fact that the quickest and easiest way to make it is pimping, but I dunno, seems like you get hung up with losers, female type, and I wasn’t cruel enough to make it work. I mean, what do you do when they get a little bit spavined? Boil ‘em down for soap? Or you get one that’s a little obese, so you gotta control her diet. I could even see myself feeding ‘em aphrodisiacs so they’d enjoy their work more … well, anyway I didn’t do it, but I sure as hell fantasized it out all the way. So … what were we talking about? Oh yes, Danny. You know we never used given names, we always laid on one of our own, and sometimes we’d try several before we got one to stick. Danny went through a couple, but these were related to the changes he was going through. When he came he was Savage, a distinct case of post-combat paranoia. I never expected him to take to psychedelics. He was like a man who’s trying to sit still with a hot wire up his ass. Carry the ball from here to there, and take it back again. Impatient with talk, hadda have action. First time he dropped acid he sat like a stone for six hours, then he jumped up, wild-eyed, grabbed a knife and ran off into the jungle. I pictured him going berserk, hacking up women and kids in the bush. Two days later he came out of the jungle with a glow around his head. He gave me this walking stick.”
She hefted the wooden staff, felt its heaviness, turned it in her hand, felt the satin finish sliding against her palm. The head of the stick was a tapered, phallic knob; somewhere near the middle it evolved into a snake with its tail coiled around the throat of a woman. Although she was being strangled, her face wore a look of serene contentment …
“Did he tell you what it meant?”
“No. He doesn’t remember carving it. He was … you know, under the spell.”
She handed the stick back to him. “Go on. What happened then?”
“Well … looking back, I remember that period as a time when we were really together. Like we lived at the center of the universe, and everybody else was skulking around in the outer darkness. I guess we ignored our community relations. We started getting heat from the locals. There was a group came through—not our tribe, a bunch of assholes from California—and according to local gossip raped a girl from one of the ranches. They were long gone by the time the soldiers got here, all gringos look alike, I guess—anyway they took off with one of our guys who fit the description. He never got back, we never found the body, never found out which group of soldiers took him away. Figure he got blown away in the jungle somewhere. Danny just got cold and quiet for about a week. Then he told me, The machine has a long arm. We’ve gotta destroy it.’ “
“I see. He blamed the United States.”
“Well sure, where do you think the pressure comes from? To keep you gringo cunts fresh faced and innocent, they gotta purify the whole fucking world, stop the Turks from raising opium, stop the Andeans from raising cocaine, stop the Indians from eating peyote, stop the Mexicans from raising mota—Jesus, it wouldn’t be so bad if your motives were pure. But you’re just substituting your laboratory junk for the junk that nature provides. You take a man off heroin by putting him on methadone, which is ten times more addictive. The only trouble is it’s a government monopoly, and believe me that’s something they’re gonna have to worry about—” He shrugged. “But later. Anyway about this deal … it wasn’t enough that they blew away one of our guys. They came back later and pulled us all in. In the jug, Danny started doing meditation. He’d just go out of his body and leave it sitting there, all on its own. He also got the idea he could communicate by mental power. We played with it—nothing else to do. Like I’d send him a mental picture, a clump of coconuts in a palm tree. Shrunken heads is what he’d get, hung up in the top of a grass hut. Well, he’d picked up my subconscious thought—not what I actually saw, but what it signified to me. That’s one of the common problems you run into with telepathy, you don’t know what level you’re connecting with. A novice sender—or say an untrained mind—will send a confusion of images, all piled up and superimposed. But somebody who’s mastered mind control filters out the subimages and sends just what he wants to send. It’s like somebody is telling you something, and while he’s talking you hear his gut-rumbles, you pick up his heartbeat and the squirt of blood in his veins. Or say you’re dealing with somebody who hasn’t made it—so you’re always making contact with the answering service, and you never get in touch with the man in charge. Most people I talk to, I just talk to the guy in the front office. God is my copilot, that’s a bunch of bullshit. God is not only the pilot and copilot, he is the whole plane and the air through which it flies and the ground underneath and the flames which will consume you if you crash …”
Another long silence, then:
“Anyway his sister came down and sprung him—she sprung all of us, actually, though I don’t think she ever told her old man that. I think if Danny hadn’t gone back with her she’d have stayed. But for some reason he didn’t want her in our group. He told me he wanted to see if he could go and live right in the middle of the machine, and not be noticed. I thought if anybody could do it, maybe he could, No, I take that back. I suspected he had a naive idea of what he was up against. One of the interlocking wheels of the machine would catch him, crunch him up into fine sausage, and turn him into one of their pattymen. You don’t have a melting pot up there, you’ve got a meat grinder. Anyway I guess that’s what happened, isn’t it? He got his anatomy caught in the machine, and he couldn’t get out. Now it’s gonna chew him up …”
He paused, using the end of his walking stick to push a charred butt end into the fire. “I went up to visit him while he was in the woods. He was uptight, doing his yoga six hours a day, meditating the rest of the time. I didn’t know where his head was at anymore. He’d gone off into some alleyway I couldn’t follow. Things he was doing with his body—it was like flagellation, you know. Punish the flesh for these horrible, sinful desires it gives you … I started sending chicks up to see him, figuring they’d pull him out of it, but …” He stood up suddenly. “I think I’ll walk down to the beach. Care to come along?”
The steep path was treacherous, splotched with inky patches of moon-shadow. He took her hand and guided her, talking as he walked …
“I went up there, planning to help with his trial. The minute I saw what the legal system had turned into … Jesus, I’d been out of the country for ten years! You can always tell which side is losing, because they’re the ones who get nailed with the blame for starting it. That’s why we get the idea that justice always triumphs, you know. Because you gotta have power to handcuff a man and drag him up in front of the judge. Then you gotta have all these cops hanging around making everybody be quiet. Without the cops, what’s a judge? Just an old man picking his nose. And even the cops are nothing without their guns …”
“You said you went to the trial. Did you talk to him?”
“No, but I saw him while they were taking him in to hear the verdict. Bollinger, the Cabin Slayer. Young kids with cameras crowded up close. Teevee trucks, two deputies in front and two behind, and the state patrol crowding around in their blue stetsons. Everybody wanted to get in the picture. He got to the top of the steps and somebody yelled, ‘Give us a smile, Danny!’ He turned and I saw his hands were cuffed in front of him, with the chain running through his belt. He looked out over the crowd, and I thought he recognized me—but no. He was locked in, sitting up inside his mind, unaware that his body was chained up and surrounded by the dogs of law who would keep the sheep at bay while one of their number is led to slaughter … and not one of them would even think about the injustice of it, but would go home feeling warm and secure inside because he wasn’t the one who’d been caught …”
They reached the beach, and walked along the ridge of sand thrown up in front of the coconut grove. The surf unrolled in luminescent coils, the ripples flashed and glittered in the moonlight. She sat down in the sand, still warm from the day’s sun, and looked at the sky which was not dark, but a deep glowing purple.
The Learned Doctor began asking her about the place where Danny was being kept, what his fellow patients were like, what provisions were being made for his health and exercise. His questions were those a father … no, correct that, questions a MOTHER would ask: What kind of food was he getting? Was it hot or cold when delivered, how often did he see the shrink, how good was his medical care, were there any windows in his room, what hours did the shifts change, how often was he allowed visitors …?
“Tom,” she asked finally. “Are you thinking of busting him out?”
“Busting him out?” He chuckled as he lit a twisted cigarette. A spark of glowing paper flew away in the wind. “You’re trying, Liza. I give you credit.”
“You are the most exasperating person I ever met. Don’t you ever answer a direct question?”
“In my own good time, by a labyrinthine process of logic which you could understand instantly, if you chose …”
He held out the cigarette. She started to shake her head, then decided there was no way to break through the shell; she would have to get inside the egg with him. The first hit caught in her throat; she broke into a fit of coughing, tears streaming from her eyes. She took a timid drag, and felt the smoke fill her lungs. She took another, slightly larger, and wondered what she was supposed to feel, telling herself: The mind will carry you through. Analyze, reconstruct, examine, and this way you will remain intact …
Intact. Intact. The word sounded strange in her brain. Could she have it reversed? Tact-in. No, that wasn’t right …
“Hey, don’t Bogart the thing. That’s heavy
stuff, kid.”
She looked over at him. He looked sinister, wolfish. Wanted his cigarette back. She felt impish, perverse. She took another long pull and held it out to him. “How long’s it take this stuff to come in?”
He blurted a laugh. “If you could hear yourself you wouldn’t have to ask.”
“I can hear myself.”
Self-self-self … The sound echoed around her, as if her head had been shoved in a barrel. She looked at the sea, and it seemed to be a many-toothed beast, white dentures flashing, chewing at the sand on which she sat.
She felt a lurch, like the shifting of some great mass beneath her buttocks. She stood up and gazed around her in amazement. Everything looked light and airy, all was surface without substance. She could feel the earth tilting beneath her feet, she looked up at the stars spread out like a jeweled fan, like diamonds on velvet, palm trees fluttering. She looked down at Tom, who sat with his hands folded over the head of his walking stick, his chin resting on his knuckles. He was aware of her; she knew without hearing the words that he wanted her, and the knowledge did not displease her …
She walked toward the surf not wondering why, aware only that her feet had started moving. Her flesh seemed swollen and tender; the wind in her face was an excruciating caress. The sinuous waves of the sea, the sway of the palm leaves overhead, all movement stirred ripples of force which penetrated her body in waves of sensual feeling. The sea was a great black organism which had crawled up from the ocean depths and was eating up the land, gnashing its teeth and growling. She decided to give herself up to the foaming beast, walked out into the surf, felt it frothing, hissing, swirling around her. A dark wall towered over her, thundered down, knocked her off her feet, filled her nose and mouth with unbreathable substance, dragged her helplessly across the rippled bottom.
Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die Page 16