Someone seized her belt, lifted her, set her on her feet, helped her stagger up through the surf. She fell forward, plunged her arms into the sand, and rolled over, looking up at the sky and laughing, crying, unable to stop …
She felt something pluck at the snap of her jeans, reached down and caught his hand.
“Just getting these wet clothes off. You’ll get a chill.”
“I’ll do it.” She stood up and unzipped her shorts. “I’m not doing this to entice you.”
“Fucking is like any other human activity. You get out of it what you put into it.”
She pondered that while she took off her shorts and unbuttoned her shirt. It made a lot of sense, the more she thought about it. She lay back and let her shoulders sink into the warm sand, spread out her legs and watched the moon drift through the fringing palms. Follow the bouncing ball, sing along with Mitch … She looked over at Tom, saw that he was sitting looking at her. He was in no hurry. She tried to imagine what it would be like to live here one year, not to mention ten, but found it impossible to imagine more than the moment. It was totally full and overflowing. She sat up and looked at the bay, the palms, the sea and the little huts peering over the dark cliff. They were all part of a scene inside a little glass ball filled with transparent liquid. She lifted her arm and saw that her movements left bubble tracks in space. She got up and began dancing, whirling and leaping in the sand. The patterns of her movement left a glowing tracer of blue lines which curved, interlocked, blended. Another figure joined her, his lines were red, spiraling and blending with hers, forming a coruscating brilliance of purple. She knew exactly where to put her feet, and where he would put his; she felt herself seized by the pattern of force, whirling in circles which grew smaller and smaller until at last they were locked, and she and Tom fell together on the sand.
Afterward she asked: “Is it always this impersonal?”
“How impersonal?”
“I don’t feel that I made love to anybody. Just that … I made love.”
“Good.” He held out another cigarette but she shook her head. She sat up and felt the wind against her bare flesh. It felt cold, but the chill didn’t penetrate her body. Inside she was still hot, the sensual currents moved, swirled, twisted in gyrating patterns. She looked at the beach and saw their footprints in a vast spiral which narrowed down to the plot of pummeled sand where their bodies had at last met and interpenetrated …
“What were we into?” she asked.
“The main current. Heaven’s hotline. Life-force. It’s got a lot of names.”
“Is it always there?”
“Here, there—wherever you find it, that’s where it is. I used to be in it all the time, but somehow I drifted out, got caught in some kind of eddy. I can sit for a whole day and not do a damn thing. And I remember that’s the way my Aunt Mabe did the last ten years of her life, just sat by the stove and kept the fire going. I guess that’s what I’ve been doing for the last three years. Tending the fire.”
“You talk as if nothing had happened since Danny left.”
“Well, nothing has.”
“And while he was here, what?”
“Most of the time, nothing. But he had the spark. He asked me questions, and I looked for answers. Nobody asks me questions anymore, so I don’t try to find the answers.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I’m just not curious any more.” He got up, brushed the sand off his buttocks, picked up his shorts. “Listen, we’d better get off the beach. You may not have noticed, but the bugs are eating us alive.”
She jumped and pulled on her damp clothes. She felt calm and infinitely relaxed as they walked along the beach, but a nagging horror seemed to hover, just beyond her Consciousness. They stopped at the well, and only then did she realize that her mouth was parched and dry. He talked as he hauled up the rope.
“I used to think that a man had just enough energy for one great deed. His main duty in life—that’s a stupid word, duty—was to find out what he had to do. But it’s not a matter of knowing because the thing isn’t complete until you do it. If you don’t push it, the whole purpose of life leaks away, and you find out you’re just another empty bag of wind.”
He set the bucket on the waist-high curb, filled the earthen mug, and held it out to her.
“Anyway I’ve got it figured now that maybe my job is to turn Danny loose. I know how it can be done, and nobody else is gonna do it—so I guess it’s mine. Otherwise I’m just gonna blow away. One day I’ll be sitting out there on the point and I’ll feel the wind blowing through me and the sun will shine down and I won’t even cast a shadow.”
Liza felt thirsty enough to drink the whole bucketful, but as soon as she wet the inside of her mouth, her thirst disappeared. In its place was a craving for food, thick steaks sliced open, pink-white slabs oozing juice …
“If you’re asking for my help,” she said as they climbed on, “you won’t get it.”
“I wasn’t asking,” he said.
“Because its utterly futile.”
“You could say that about life itself.”
She stopped, and turned to face him in a sudden exasperation. “Dan and Debra are human beings, Tom. They’re not chess pieces that you move around on your board. You don’t understand the forces you’re playing with.”
“Do you, Liza?” In the darkness his face wore a mocking smile. The crinkled darkness around his head drew into lines of force. She could see a ghostly image of a skull rising up around his head, the mutilated bodies of victims grasped in his skeletal claws. She felt a shiver of cold dread. His eyes burned into her, and she could not at that moment imagine herself lying with him on the beach, riding his manhood with joy and complete abandon. She felt lost, and a long way from home. She turned and walked on, casting over her shoulder a statement that seemed lame, and oddly plaintive.
“Well, you can leave me out of it.”
He chuckled. “Whatever you say, Liza.”
She woke up alone. Sunlight steamed through the slatted palm ribs that formed the wall of the hut. She heard the shrilling of birds and the distant boom of the surf. Beyond that—nothing.
She tried to recall going to sleep the night before. Exact details eluded her, fantasy and action had intermingled to the point where she could no longer separate them. She seemed to recall smoking with the group before going to bed—or had she gone to bed? There had been a dream of writhing orgiastic ecstasy—but was it really a dream?
Must have been, she thought, because 1 distinctly recall wallowing on the floor naked with Frog and Lona …
She sat up slowly, expecting the jolt of a crashing hangover. There was only a musty cobwebby feeling in her head, and a sense of flatness and depression …
She gasped when she saw the man standing in the door of the hut. She had never seen him before. He wore a low-crowned hat with a wide brim, and a rawhide thong running under his chin. A thick black moustache arched over the toothy whiteness of his grin.
But what really caught her eye was the gun—that mechanical protruberance which hung on his hip and destroyed the symmetry of his form. His shirt was tan gabardine with a faint touch of pink, tucked loosely under his broad leather belt.
“Como se llama usted?” she said.
“Roberto.” He pushed himself away from the door and stepped inside. “My friend call me Bobby.” He pronounced it Boh-bee.
“Where is everybody?”
“Gone.” He made a wriggling motion with his palm. “New wave somewhere. They go. You got no money, no turista card, I take you back.”
“What?”
“You got no money, I take you back.” He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a folder, flipped it open. A gold badge glittered. “Mexican Secre’ Service. Is okay. I take you to the border.”
She grabbed her pack, pulled it toward her, clawed out the contents. The tape, the keys, all her clothes were there. Only her wallet was missing. “That sonofabitch!” She whirled and lo
oked at the man. “You knew he ripped me off. Or did you do it yourself?”
“Nobody reep you off, Senora.” He patted a flat bulge in his shirt pocket. “I am amigo del Doctor. 1 take you to the border and give back everything. Trus’ me. 1 am also friend of Danilo.”
Twelve
The chronic ward: Fourteen bundles of cast-off clothing enacted their pseudolife in a urine-smelling room. Light slanted down from high barred windows, expanded to glowing squares on the concrete floor. The silence was heavy; Dan was oppressed by the feeling that somebody had died, or was dying, or was about to die. He sat with his ankles crossed, his back forming a straight line parallel to the wall. An olive-drab army blanket cowled his shoulders and draped his upper arms, leaving his forearms free. He held his left hand in front of his face, fingers curved, thumb compressing the left nostril.
Up the pingali channel, hold, release …
He lifted his thumb, pressed his first two fingers against his right nostril, inhaled.
Up the ida channel, hold … CONCENTRATE!
The tv screen gave forth a dazzling pattern of blurred lines. Sylvester sat on the floor and stared with avid close-set eyes, small head thrust forward on humped soft shoulders. The tinny voice of a singer emerged from the set: “You always hurrrrt … the wannnnnnn … you lahhhhhv …” Sylvester threw back his head and crooned: “Arrrgh … annnngghhh … oooowwww—!”
Sitting in his high-backed rocking chair, Everett twitched his blanket over his knees and resumed his rocking. His eyes were bleared, watery, his features seemed about to melt and fall off his skull. Everett had been rocking for three years, ever since one of the catatonics had been hauled out dead. The relatives had been notified and the death certificate signed before a nurse had put a stethoscope on his chest and discovered a heartbeat. They They would make no such mistake with Everett, he intended to keep rocking as long as he lived.
You see, Danny? The mind demands logic. Everything has to hang together.
And if it doesn’t?
Well it just means you’re missing the key.
Key-key-key-rist it’s cold in here.
He pulled his blanket together, felt the fabric prickle his skin. He dropped his concentration to the root chakram, felt the energy drawn out of his testicles, pulled up the length of his penis, centered in the area behind his navel. The kundalini fluttered like a trapped sparrow.
Frank shuffled across the room, sat down in a square of light, tried to imitate Danny’s posture. He wore a moth-holed army overcoat turned up around his Buddhalike ears; his narrow forehead bore the indented, livid scars of an ancient lobotomy. Back to the old drawing board, thought Danny. But there had been no way to stitch up the severed nerves in Frank’s brain, no way to reconnect him to his past …
Danny felt despair settle over him like fine gray dust. Ghod, it was hard to get off the ground on Thorazine. He’d been trying to get Dr. Kossuth to drop it. “Look, you saved me from the gas chamber, so what am I supposed to do, grovel? You’re just killing me in another way. This is the dry guillotine of drugs, where you cut a man off from his life by doping him to the point where he can’t even feel the cravings of his body, let alone act.”
That had been … when was it? Yesterday, or the day before—the same day he’d brought in the photograph of the mural on the cabin wall.
“Now let’s see what this represents. You have six women caught in the coils of the creature. Looking at the faces very closely, we might be able to identify four: Christina, Magda, Betty, and …” He paused. “Isn’t it curious that the Mayas have a numerical system based on six? And there were six virgins thrown into the cenote each year at Chichen Itza, weren’t there?” He smiled. “Ah well, let’s continue …
“We’ll discount the baby. That didn’t belong except that it might have given you the idea to begin with. So … what we found were five corpses. Somewhere there is a sixth.” He looked sharply at Danny. “You remember where you buried her?”
Danny felt the medicine clouding his brain, he was tired of fighting it, tired of pushing against the institution, which absorbed his blows like a barrier of packed cotton. He quoted a line Burton had written: “I am a flowing stream, stopped with mud”
Kossuth had offered to help him get at his memories, but Dan knew another way. Go out of the body and you’ve got it all, past-present-future, laid out beneath you like a road map. You just pick the spot and set yourself down.
Sometimes he went out through his right ear. Sometimes he projected himself through the center of his forehead. A region of dazzling light lay just above the surface of his mind, beyond a thin transparent skin of incredible strength. In order to break through, you had to concentrate your whole being to a needlepoint, and then push with all your will …
He pushed. BRRRRRANNNNNNGGGGG! The noise in his head rocked him, shocked him, left him dazed and trembling. It was like a steel gong dropped from a great height. Stay out! said the savage little creepy-crawly up inside his mind …
He pushed again, felt the sweat break out on his body and trickle down his back. Suddenly he was free, soaring through the air, the ground blurred beneath him …
A flash of white in the smoky twilight.
(Man does not control his astral body, does not guide it like a horse, or drive it like a car. Try, and it will fall to earth. Let it follow the current of its own attraction, ignoring earthly ties of marriage, family, politics, economics. Let it seek its own kindred who live in the twilight world.)
He drops, like a silent burning arrow, spreads himself in a glowing net upon the sand. A woman dances into him, toes light upon the pathways of his nerves. The palms flutter overhead. Chickety-tickety-tick. She whirls, spins, pirouetting; her feet strike fire in his brain. He is aware, without seeing, that the beach lies inside two curving arms of rock, and there are shacks on the cliff overlooking the bay. At first he thinks the dancer must be Lona (the setting is the same, thinks the thinker up inside his brain). But Lona’s breasts are small and cone-shaped. These are large, and round, tipped with coral. Her pubic wedge looks black in the moonlight. She is larger, heavier than Lona. At first she moves with awkward clumsiness, but then his energy pervades her, and her limbs flow like liquid. She spins, falls, the flower of her sex opens, sparkling with honeydew. He covers her (not with his own body, but with another, temporarily vacated, conveniently at hand) and feels the fever of her dance leak through her skin. Her breasts are pillowed against his chest, deep down the linkage is made, the age-old formula consummated: 1 + 1 = 1. He lifts his head and looks down into her face, sees her eyes fly wide in recognition …
Elizabeth.
The silver cord tightens, pulls him back. She fades. The soft lines of the chronic ward harden, take on shape and form and substance …
Dan blinked his eyes and looked around the room. An action had taken place which called for his attention. Frank had emptied his bowels in the middle of the floor. He was squatting over it, guarding it, grinning at Danny. It was the sincerest form of flattery, an imitation of Danny’s efforts. Frank had strained and grunted and sweated and brought forth … a turd. Such is the way of good intentions.
If I don’t get out of here I’ll go crazy …
Next day he was moved.
He wasn’t sure of the exact location of the room. There was only one window of double-layered glass with wire mesh between the panes. Thick bars shielded it from the outdoors. He could stand on tiptoe and look out on a patch of dirt perhaps twenty feet square, with weathered brick walls rising on all sides. At midday the sunlight came down, moved slowly across the patch of lawn, then climbed the building on the other side. A maple tree grew in the center, reaching for a sky which was invisible to Danny. Snow drifted down, or some mornings a frost glittered on the tree limbs—but the prevailing color was gray.
Inside, the room smelled of fresh plaster and sawdust. The paneled walls were smooth beige plastic, they gave slightly beneath his fingers. The commode seat was shiny plastic, the sin
k had hard-rubber faucets. The mirror above it was a sheet of stainless steel set into the wall with countersunk screws.
His own face shocked him. It was gray, the color of a boiled potato. His eyes were filmed and heavy lidded. His lips moved stiffly when he talked, his voice was flat, devoid of emotion. “This is the way they break horses, isn’t it?”
Dr. Kossuth, sitting on his cot, lifted his brows in polite interest. “How do you mean, Danny?’
“The old rough and smooth. The carrot and the goad. That death ward was the goad, and this … is this the carrot? Or is there more? What happens if I cooperate?”
“We find out what’s wrong … and we cure it.”
“Then … do I get out of here?”
“I don’t see any other way, do you?” Jeff smiled and rose from the cot, his left hand in the pocket of his doeskin flannel trousers, right hand gesturing.
‘The brain is like flypaper, endlessly folded, convoluted. Everything sticks, the good and the bad, nothing is lost forever. Your problem is that you’re trying to think around the bad spots. You’ve got them encysted, like orange pips. We need to break down the walls and let these become a part of your consciousness.”
“My problem is that you scrambled my circuits with electricity.”
“Ridiculous. The shock was good for you.”
“Did you ever shoot it into your own skull?”
“Why should I? I’m not mentally ill.”
“Oh Christ!” Danny grated his teeth in frustration. “You put up a goddam fence and you say, well, there it is, we’re just naturally different. You’re in and I’m out. How do you know it’s not the other way around? Maybe you’re nuts and I’m straight. You ever think of that?”
Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die Page 17