But it was better in here. Maybe he could get control of it in here, by himself. And at least if he freaked out he wouldn’t—
“Hi there.”
He jumped, startled, and looked into the corner. A man was sitting there in a high-backed chair by one of Walter’s bookcases. There was an open book on the man’s lap, as a matter of fact. Or was it a man? There was a single light on in the room, a lamp on a small round table to the speaker’s left. Its light cast long shadows on his face, shadows so long that his eyes were dark caverns, his cheeks etched in sardonic, malefic lines. For a moment he thought he had stumbled on Satan sitting in Wally Hamner’s den. Then the figure stood and he saw it was a man, only a man. A tall fellow, maybe sixty, with blue eyes and a nose that had been repeatedly punched in losing bouts with the bottle. But he wasn’t holding a drink, nor was there one on the table.
“Another wanderer, I see,” the man said, and offered his hand. “Phil Drake.”
“Barton Dawes,” he said, still dazed from his fright. They shook. Drake’s hand was twisted and scarred by some old wound—a burn, perhaps. But he didn’t mind shaking it. Drake. The name was familiar but he couldn’t remember where he had heard it before.
“Are you quite all right?” Drake asked. “You look a little—”
“I’m high,” he said. “I took some mescaline and oh boy am I high.” He glanced at the bookcases and saw them going in and out and didn’t like it. It was too much like the beating of a giant heart. He didn’t want to see things like that anymore.
“I see,” Drake said. “Sit down. Tell me about it.”
He looked at Drake, slightly amazed, and then felt a tremendous surge of relief. He sat down. “You know about mescaline?” he asked.
“Oh, a little. A little. I run a coffeehouse downtown. Kids wander in off the streets, tripping on something ... is it a good trip?” he asked politely.
“Good and bad,” he said. “It’s ... heavy. That’s a good word, the way they use it.”
“Yes. It is.”
“I was getting a little scared.” He glanced out the window and saw a long, celestial highway stretching across the black dome of the sky. He looked away casually, but couldn’t help licking his lips. “Tell me ... how long does this usually go on?”
“When did you drop?”
“Drop?” The word dropped out of his mouth in letters, fell to the carpet, and dissolved there.
“When did you take the stuff?”
“Oh ... about eight-thirty.”
“And it’s ...” He consulted his watch. “It’s a quarter of ten now—”
“Quarter of ten? Is that all?”
Drake smiled. “The sense of time turns to rubber, doesn’t it? I expect you’ll be pretty well down by one-thirty.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. I should think so. You’re probably peaking now. Is it very visual mesc?”
“Yes. A little too visual.”
“More things to be seen than the eye of man was meant to behold,” Drake said, and offered a peculiar twisted smile.
“Yes, that’s it. That’s just it.” His sense of relief at being with this man was intense. He felt saved. “What do you do besides talk to middle-aged men who have fallen down the rabbit hole?”
Drake smiled. “That’s rather good. Usually people on mesc or acid turn inarticulate, sometimes incoherent. I spend most of my evenings at the Dial Help Center. On weekday afternoons I work at the coffee house I mentioned, a place called Drop Down Mamma. Most of the clientele are street freaks and stewbums. Mornings I just walk the streets and talk to my parishioners, if they’re up. And in between, I run errands at the county jail.”
“You’re a minister?”
“They call me a street priest. Very romantic. Malcolm Boyd, look out. At one time I was a real priest.”
“Not any more?”
“I have left the mother church,” Drake said. He said it softly, but there was a kind of dreadful finality in his words. He could almost hear the clang of iron doors slammed shut forever.
“Why did you do that?”
Drake shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. What about you? How did you get the mesc?”
“I got it from a girl on her way to Las Vegas. A nice girl, I think. She called me on Christmas Day.”
“For help?”
“I think so.”
“Did you help her?”
“I don’t know.” He smiled craftily. “Father, tell me about my immortal soul.”
Drake twitched. “I’m not your father.”
“Never mind, then.”
“What do you want to know about your ‘soul’?”
He looked down at his fingers. He could make bolts of light shoot from their tips whenever he wanted to. It gave him a drunken feeling of power. “I want to know what will happen to it if I commit suicide.”
Drake stirred uneasily. “You don’t want to think about killing yourself while you’re tripping. The dope talks, not you.”
“I talk,” he said. “Answer me.”
“I can’t. I don’t know what will happen to your ‘soul’ if you commit suicide. I do, however, know what will happen to your body. It will rot.”
Startled by this idea, he looked down at his hands again. Obligingly, they seemed to crack and molder in front of his gaze, making him think of that Poe story, “The Strange Case of M. Valdemar.” Quite a night. Poe and Lovecraft. A. Gordon Pym, anyone? How about Abdul Allhazred, the Mad Arab? He looked up, a little disconcerted, but not really daunted.
“What’s your body doing?” Drake asked.
“Huh?” He frowned, trying to parse sense from the question.
“There are two trips,” Drake said. “A head trip and a body trip. Do you feel nauseated? Achey? Sick in any way?”
He consulted his body. “No,” he said. “I just feel ... busy.” He laughed a little at the word, and Drake smiled It was a good word to describe how he felt. His body seemed very active, even still. Rather light, but not ethereal. In fact, he had never felt so fleshy, so conscious of the way his mental processes and physical body were webbed together. There was no parting them. You couldn’t peel one away from the other. You were stuck with it, baby. Integration. Entropy. The idea burst over him like a quick tropical sunrise. He sat chewing it over in light of his current situation, trying to make out the pattern, if there was one. But—
“But there’s the soul,” he said aloud.
“What about the soul?” Drake asked pleasantly.
“If you kill the brain, you kill the body,” he said slowly. “And vice versa. But what happens to your soul? There’s the wild card, Fa ... Mr. Drake.”
Drake said: “In that sleep of death, what dreams may come? Hamlet, Mr. Dawes.”
“Do you think the soul lives on? Is there survival?”
Drake’s eyes grayed. “Yes,” he said. “I think there is survival ... in some form.”
“And do you think suicide is a mortal sin that condemns the soul to hell?”
Drake didn’t speak for a long time. Then he said: “Suicide is wrong. I believe that with all my heart.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
Drake stood up. “I have no intention of answering it. I don’t deal in metaphysics anymore. I’m a civilian. Do you want to go back to the party?”
He thought of the noise and confusion, and shook his head.
“Home?”
“I couldn’t drive. I’d be scared to drive.”
“I’ll drive you.”
“Would you? How would you get back?”
“Call a cab from your house. New Year’s Eve is a very good night for cabs.”
“That would be good,” he said gratefully. “I’d like to be alone, I think. I’d like to watch TV.”
“Are you safe alone?” Drake asked somberly.
“Nobody is,” he replied with equal gravity, and they both laughed.
Okay. Do you want to say good-bye to anyone?”
&nb
sp; “No. Is there a back door?”
“I think we can find one.”
He didn’t talk much on the way home. Watching the streetlights go by was almost all the excitement he could stand. When they went by the roadwork, he asked Drake’s opinion.
“They’re building new roads for energy-sucking behemoths while kids in this city are starving,” Drake said shortly. “What do I think? I think it’s a bloody crime.”
He started to tell Drake about the gasoline bombs, the burning crane, the burning office trailer, and then didn’t. Drake might think it was an hallucination. Worse still, he might think it wasn’t.
The rest of the evening was not very clear. He directed Drake to his house. Drake commented that everyone on the street must be out partying or to bed early. He didn’t comment. Drake called a taxi. They watched TV for a while without talking—Guy Lombardo at the Waldorf-Astoria, making the sweetest music this side of heaven. Guy Lombardo, he thought, was looking decidedly foggy.
The taxi came at quarter to twelve. Drake asked him again if he would be all right.
“Yes, I think I’m coming down.” He really was. The hallucinations were draining toward the back of his mind.
Drake opened the front door and pulled up his collar. “Stop thinking about suicide. It’s chicken.”
He smiled and nodded, but he neither accepted nor rejected Drake’s advice. Like everything else these days, he simply took it under advisement. “Happy New Year,” he said.
“Same to you, Mr. Dawes.”
The taxi honked impatiently.
Drake went down the walk, and the taxi pulled away, yellow light glowing on the roof.
He went back into the living room and sat down in front of the TV. They had switched from Guy Lombardo to Times Square, where the glowing ball was poised stop the Allis-Chalmers Building, ready to start its descent into 1974. He felt weary, drained, finally sleepy. The ball would come down soon and he would enter the new year tripping his ass off. Somewhere in the country a New Year’s baby was pushing its squashed, placenta-covered head out of his mother’s womb and into this best of all possible worlds. At Walter Hamner’s party, people would be raising their glasses and counting down. New Year’s resolutions were about to be tested. Most of them would prove as strong as wet paper towels. He made a resolution of his own on the spur of the moment, and got to his feet in spite of his tiredness. His body ached and his spine felt like glass—some kind of hangover. He went into the kitchen and got his hammer off the kitchen shelf. When he brought it back into the living room, the glowing ball was sinking down the pole. There was a split screen, showing the ball on the right, showing the merry-makers at the Waldorf on the left, chanting: “Eight ... seven ... six ... five ...” One fat society dame caught a glimpse of herself on a monitor, looked surprised, and then waved to the country.
The turn of the year, he thought. Absurdly, goose bumps broke out on his arms.
The ball reached the bottom, and a sign lit up on the top of the Allis-Chalmers Building. The sign said:
1974
At the same instant he swung the hammer and the TV screen exploded. Glass belched onto the carpet. There was a fizz of hot wires, but no fire. Just to be sure the TV would not roast him during the night in revenge, he kicked out the plug with his foot.
“Happy New Year,” he said softly, and dropped the hammer to the carpet.
He lay on the couch and fell asleep almost immediately. He slept with the lights on and his sleep was dreamless.
Part Three
JANUARY
If I don’t get some shelter,
Oh, I’m gonna fade away ...
—Rolling Stones
January 5, 1974
The thing that happened in the Shop ’n’ Save that day was the only thing that had happened to him in his whole life that actually seemed planned and sentient, not random. It was as if an invisible finger had written on a fellow human being, expressly for him to read.
He liked to go shopping. It was very soothing, very sane. He enjoyed doing sane things very much after his bout with the mescaline. He had not awakened on New Year’s Day until afternoon, and he had spent the remainder of the day wandering disconnectedly around the house, feeling spaced-out and strange. He had picked things up and looked at them, feeling like Iago examining Yorick’s skull. To a lesser degree the feeling had carried over to the next day, and even the day after that. But in another way, the effect had been good. His mind felt dusted and clean, as if it had been turned upside down, scrubbed and polished by some maniacally brisk internal housekeeper. He didn’t get drunk and thus did not cry. When Mary had called him, very cautiously, around 7:00 P.M. on the first, he had talked to her calmly and reasonably, and it seemed to him that their positions had not changed very much. They were playing a kind of social statues, each waiting for the other to move first. But she had twitched and mentioned divorce. Just the possibility, the veriest wiggle of a finger, but movement for all that. No, the only thing that really disturbed him in the aftermath of the mescaline was the shattered lens of the Zenith color TV. He could not understand why he had done it. He had wanted such a TV for years, even though his favorite programs were the old ones that had been filmed in black and white. It wasn’t even the act that distressed him as much as the lingering evidence of it—the broken glass, the exposed wiring. They seemed to reproach him, to say: Why did you go and do that? I served you faithfully and you broke me. I never harmed you and you smashed me. I was defenseless. And it was a terrible reminder of what they wanted to do to his house. At last he got an old quilt and covered the front of it. That made it both better and worse. Better because he couldn’t see it, worse because it was like having a shrouded corpse in the house. He threw the hammer away like a murder weapon.
But going to the store was a good thing, like drinking coffee in Benjy’s Grill or taking the LTD through the Clean Living Car Wash or stopping at Henry’s newsstand downtown for the copy of Time. The Shop ’n’ Save was very large, lighted with fluorescent bars set into the ceiling, and filled with ladies pushing carts and admonishing children and frowning at tomatoes wrapped in see-through plastic that would not allow a good squeeze. Muzak came down from discreet overhead speaker grilles, flowing evenly into your ears to be almost heard.
On this day, Saturday, the S&S was filled with weekend shoppers, and there were more men than usual, accompanying their wives and annoying them with sophomoric suggestions. He regarded the husbands, the wives, and the issue of their various partnerships with benign eyes. The day was bright and sunshine poured through the store’s big front windows, splashing gaudy squares of light by the checkout registers, occasionally catching some woman’s hair and turning it into a halo of light. Things did not seem so serious when it was like this, but things were always worse at night.
His cart was filled with the usual selection of a man thrown rudely into solitary housekeeping: spaghetti, meat sauce in a glass jar, fourteen TV dinners, a dozen eggs, butter, and a package of navel oranges to protect against scurvy.
He was on his way down a middle aisle toward the checkouts when God perhaps spoke to him. There was a woman in front of him, wearing powder-blue slacks and a blue cable-stitched sweater of a navy color. She had very yellow hair. She was maybe thirty-five, good looking in an open, alert way. She made a funny gobbling, crowing noise in her throat and staggered. The squeeze bottle of mustard she had been holding in her hand fell to the floor and rolled, showing a red pennant and the word FRENCH’S over and over again.
“Ma’am?” he ventured. “Are you okay?”
The woman fell backward and her left hand, which she had put up to steady herself, swept a score of coffee cans onto the floor. Each can said:
MAXWELL HOUSE Good To The Very Last Drop.
It happened so fast that he wasn’t really scared—not for himself, anyway—but he saw one thing that stuck with him later and came back to haunt his dreams. Her eyes had drifted out into walleyes, just as Charlie’s had during
his fits.
The woman fell on the floor. She cawed weakly. Her feet, clad in leather boots with a salt rime around the bottoms, drummed on the tiled floor. The woman directly behind him screamed weakly. A clerk who had been putting prices on soup cans ran up the aisle, dropping his stamper. Two of the checkout girls came to the foot of the aisle and stared, their eyes wide.
He heard himself say: “I think she’s having an epileptic seizure.”
But it wasn’t an epileptic seizure. It was some sort of brain hemorrhage and a doctor who had been going around in the store with his wife pronounced her dead. The young doctor looked scared, as if he had just realized that his profession would dog him to his grave, like some vengeful horror monster. By the time he finished his examination, a middling-sized crowd had formed around the young woman lying among the coffee cans which had been the last part of the world over which she had exercised her human prerogative to rearrange. Now she had become part of that other world and would be rearranged by other humans. Her cart was half-filled with provisions for a week’s living, and the sight of the cans and boxes and wrapped meats filled him with a sharp, agonized terror.
Looking into the dead woman’s cart, he wondered what they would do with the groceries. Put them back on the shelves? Save them beside the manager’s office until cash redeemed them, proof that the lady of the house had died in harness?
Someone had gotten a cop and he pushed his way through the knot of people on the checkout side. “Look out, here,” the cop was saying self-importantly. “Give her air.” As if she could use it.
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