The Fourth Angel

by John Rechy

  To Jerry, Cob looks totally isolated sitting there by himself as if determined to stretch the moments of superficial intimacy.

  When the others begin to move out of the room, Cob looks about him in bewilderment. His world, shadows. Quickly, like a child afraid of the dark, he follows them out of the house.

  Cob in front with her, Shell drives swiftly in deep silence.

  They're at Manny's. Before the shabby house, Manny gets out. ‘Later—tomorrow,’ he says eagerly, as if that prospect makes the entrance into his own house bearable.

  Before they drive away, they hear a woman's badgering voice.

  Shell, Cob, Jerry. All in front.

  Then Cob realizes with resentment that Shell is going to drive him home first. Already they're in his neighborhood, a middle-class cluster of houses. Already Shell is stopped before his house.

  Jerry is relieved he'll be alone with her.

  Cob's house is lighted inside.

  Cob blurts bitterly: They're still up, my mother … and her. They stay real late …’ His hand grips the door as if to postpone something inevitable and terrible. Then he says incongruously: ‘Some day I'd like to do so much dope I'd fucking get so fucked up—so ripped and messed that I'd just wander all over the fucking world and get lost and not even know who I fucking am!’

  ‘There isn't enough dope in the world to do that,’ Shell says soberly. Quickly: ‘I'll pick you up tomorrow morning,’ she tells him, as if to break his abrupt intensity.

  And she did. Defiantly Cob opens the door of the car, gets out. He adjusts the purple glasses like a protective shield before his face.

  Advancing toward what? Jerry stares after Cob. And so the drug left them exactly where they were before. His disappointment grows.

  Shell drives away quickly.

  Jerry, Shell. Alone. The moment when he brushed her arm, barely touched her hand in the dark house—he remembers that out of the night's experience now. He tries to forget the other incidents and the coldness of her flesh.

  ‘Cob can't stand his sister,’ Shell tells him. ‘And he's so bummed out over it that it hangs him up.’ Then she blurts bluntly: ‘Like you about your mother.’

  The awareness of being alone with Shell shatters into the stunning awareness of loss and death—love smeared by death. ‘Suddenly she's not here,’ he says in wonder, the recurring amazement of each moment's awareness. Absence has physical dimensions.

  ‘You can't let it bring you down,’ Shell says, her voice so controlled it comes as a whisper.

  Again, he has the feeling that she understands, that she wants to bring him out of the black void. But what can she know of such loss? No loss in the world equaled it.

  ‘Once you say “No,” it's okay!’ Shell says.

  ‘How the hell can you say no to death?’ Jerry asks angrily.

  ‘By being strong—then nothing can bring you down,’ Shell says.

  ‘By torturing others?’ Jerry hears himself say.

  ‘We didn't torture anybody,’ Shell says firmly.

  Jerry looks at her in surprise. Stuart's terrified face haunts him.

  Shell's voice is commanding: ‘We didn't fucking torture anyone,’ she repeats.

  ‘I thought that's what you wanted,’ Jerry says in genuine surprise.

  ‘No!’ she says forcefully.

  “Then what was it all about with Stuart, Shell?’ Jerry asks.

  ‘Getting strong,’ she answers immediately. ‘Us and him! He'll be stronger, next time he won't …’ She stops abruptly. She looks at him intently. They've reached his sister's house. ‘You need us,’ she tells him unexpectedly.

  He stares back at her. Does she need us? he wonders. The smile on her face stirs echoes of the night's cruelty. Does she really believe she helped Stuart? Or, the thought shatters Jerry, is this her way of getting to him, into his head? Is he part of her search for frantic experience? I won't be, he tells himself. He answers her finally. ‘Maybe, maybe not.’

  She laughs. Released by her laughter, he laughs too, mirthlessly. Their laughter is forced, forlorn.

  ‘Okay, so we put each other on,’ she says, as if to obliterate all seriousness.

  ‘Yeah.’ Jerry accepts the release.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ she says.

  He wants to break through her shield, to pay her back for her flashing cruelty—and to touch her. ‘Okay,’ he agrees.

  ‘And don't eat breakfast!’ she calls after him. ‘You've got to be pure for the acid.’

  Jerry hears the roar of her departing car. Tomorrow.

  He goes into the dark house. His sister is asleep.

  Tomorrow.

  He falls asleep listening to the soft sounds of the radio, and Creedence Clearwater Revival singing:

  ‘Someone told me long ago

  There's a calm before the storm

  I know

  I've been waiting for too long

  I wanna know

  Have you ever seen the rain?’

  He woke to the news on the radio, he turns it off quickly. Immediately—the black awareness of death. He dresses hurriedly. His sister is gone—there's a note. He rushes out of the house, anxious. Yes! he needs them!

  It's a clear, pure, azure day.

  He sees Shell's car approaching. Instantly he feels let down. Manny is already with her and he had looked forward to being with her alone again even for the moments before they picked the others up. Greeting the two, he doesn't let them know he's disappointed; but he sits alone in back.

  Before Cob's house a feline young woman of twenty stares at them.

  ‘That's Janet, Cob's sister,’ Manny explains. ‘He really hates her.’

  Shell blares the horn.

  The youngwoman looks directly at her, smiling; there's a trace of challenge in the smile.

  Shell doesn't glance at her.

  Now Cob rushes out of the house. He doesn't acknowledge the youngwoman, who only smiles harder at Shell.

  In the car Cob is very quiet behind the shield of sunglasses. Then his anger erupts. ‘Fuck it if I go to work so Janet can go back to school! … My old lady, man, she laid down that she fucking expects me to get a job the rest of the summer. But Janet can sit on her ass all day. Fuck them!’

  They drive silently, accepting Cob's outrage; driving on Mesa toward the desert, which gleams white in the gold heat and azure sky.

  Soon the mood among them relaxes, and they're laughing.

  ‘We're going to trip at Shell's place,’ Manny is explaining to Jerry. ‘Her old lady's at the beauty farm, and her old man's in Europe, so we like can have the place to ourselves cause Shell told the maids to split! And wait till you see her pad, man—outasite!’

  Off Mesa now. Up. Along new elaborate houses invading the pristine desert. Houses a studied distance from each other in nervous luxury.

  Now they're in the driveway of a sprawling white house. A brilliant glassed breezeway like a huge square diamond connects two sections of it. A rock and cactus garden courts the desert's natural beauty. In one garage there's a Cadillac like a haughty black animal; a Mercedes, sullen, aloof, is in another.

  They enter the sprawling house.

  Shell looks at it with contempt.

  9

  They pass large amber-glazed rooms expensively furnished, walls hung with paintings in gilded frames—a house like a cold museum in which each object is carefully assigned its studied, unyielding place. They cross the breezeway, glistening in the blue morning like an icicle, into another section of the house. This is Shell's apartment.

  As if in reaction to the frozen props of the other rooms, the rooms here are deliberately, lovingly trashy, papered outrageously, intricate shapes and patterns zigzagging in and out of each other in loops, curves, circles. Carpets turn the floor into a sea of patched colors. Posters explode at odd angles. Cushions are tossed on the floor like dyed mushrooms. Even the walls of the kitchen—and there's a private kitchen in Shell's apartment—are covered with pop posters.

&nb
sp; In a rectangle about the table in the kitchen, the four sit like an intense war council. There will be no preliminaries to taking the drug.

  ‘We've got acid, mescaline, psilocybin,’ Shell is announcing, as if tallying a treasure.

  ‘Acid,’ Cob chooses.

  ‘Acid,’ Manny echoes.

  ‘Acid,’ Jerry says.

  ‘Okay—we'll all do the acid,’ Shell says. She goes to the refrigerator and brings out a small sheet of paper.

  ‘See, man, we'll all do the same shit, and then we can like be in on each other's trip,’ Manny is explaining knowledgeably to Jerry. ‘Diggit, when people are tripping together—and they're righteous friends like us—you're all into the same trip. Like being in the same airplane—and like if it's smooth, everyone's grooving; and if it's bad, everyone bums.’

  As intently as she separated the cocaine last night, Shell is cutting tiny squares from the sheet of paper; on it, very faintly, are just slightly gray smears, like dried raindrops. Careful not to touch the smears, she passes one of the tiny squares to Manny. Manny places the paper acid in his mouth, sucks on it, chews it. Cob does the same. Jerry imitates the others, sucking on the paper, then eating it. Shell takes hers.

  Now in an extension of the recurring ritual of intimacy, they sip milk from the same glass, to settle their empty stomachs, the glass passing from mouth to mouth, like the joints of weed, the pipe of hashish: a surrogate touching of lips.

  They move into the living-room. Shell lights some incense, its delicate perfumed smoke floating into the air.

  Through a window leading to a small balcony, the barren desert is gold, the mountains magnificent in their aloof splendor.

  Jerry waits tensely. He feels nothing, but it's too soon. Still, he's apprehensive. Will the acid let him down? Despite the sudden rush and the stoned numbness, even the cocaine disappointed him. It left him intact—and he craves total Escape, to be led away from the scarring initiation of death's totality; he craves the jarring of his world out of the quagmire of sorrow.

  The stereo is on loudly. The sweet, harsh, tragic voice of Janis Joplin; a voice laughing and crying in the same note.

  Minutes pass. A half hour. Shell begins to sway slightly to the music, as if it's passing gently through her. Slowly Cob joins her, but apart, sharing only sounds, as they did last night when they danced at The Seed. Now Manny is swaying too.

  Determined to enter the current that is clearly propelling them, Jerry sits down with them. A profound disappointment. He still feels nothing. Nothing.

  The stereo. Now the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger. Sounds of willing rape.

  ‘Fucking Jagger really fucking knows where the fucking shit's at!’ Cob says admiringly.

  ‘Right on,’ Manny approves, raising a clenched fist.

  ‘Oh, shit, man,’ Cob derides good-humoredly, ‘did you dig the Chicano dude telling me to right on?’

  ‘And doing the power fist!’ Shell laughs.

  Cob joins her laughter.

  Manny roars. He thrusts his fist higher: ‘Power to the stoned people!’

  ‘Right fucking on!’ Cob approves.

  ‘Fucking right-fucking-on!’ Shell doubles over with laughter.

  Still feeling nothing, Jerry watches them. Clearly, they're getting off on the drug. An incredible mellowing change is occurring in them; it's almost physical. The trace of anger, bitterness which stamped their faces earlier even when they smiled has faded. Now they smile innocently, with extravagant joy.

  ‘Hey, where's that book with the pretty pictures, Shell?’ Manny asks.

  From a shelf filled with books, Shell brings out a large, expensive one of colorful, liquidy posters. Manny flips the pages, stops on one, staring at the melting colors. ‘Oooo, oooo,’ he coos, ‘here come the pretty things!’ His hand touches the page, and he laughs deliriously.

  In fascination Jerry stares at Manny, then at the poster: a lush garden, arched walls leading past blazing flowers into clouds of tinted cotton. Beyond, in a deepening sky, dazzling stars.

  Now Cob moves toward Manny and the picture. The two peer like conspirators at the page. A total transformation has occurred in Cob as he hovers over the page, his long hands moving playfully over the poster as if he were skipping through its world. Amazingly, he's a carefree child. Now Shell crawls to join them over the book, knitting an instant but still untouching closeness among the three. But Jerry is not a part of it.

  ‘Diggit, Shell, right here!’ Manny is pointing to the page, where arches lead past the garden into the universe. ‘Zoom!’ he says, as if plunging through its surface, his mind on a roller-coaster ride.

  Shell flips the pages: ‘This is the one I dig!’ she says, pointing to a poster depicting a man flying through a star-spangled path of sky.

  ‘I diggit, I diggit!’ Cob approves.

  And so, suddenly, they're gentle children playing gentle-children's games; the astonishing transformation by the drug is complete. But Jerry has not been touched by it; the disappointment grates. He wants to be a part of their released, pristine happiness; he kneels on the floor with them, studying the posters.

  Shell's eyes are liquid, staring at his face. She's more radiantly beautiful than ever, her eyes gleam like amber marbles.

  Still nothing. Impatiently, Jerry moves away. From them and their happy world. Is he to be left out of it? He feels marooned in a sea of reality whose surface is death. Will he ever Escape then? He wanders into Shell's bedroom—away from the happy liberation of which he's not a part. He glances about the room. More posters. Elaborate prints of mythical kingdoms. Tacked to closet doors, cards with words—poems?—and line drawings printed on them. If he hadn't witnessed the Shell released by the acid, he would have wondered at the seeming incongruity of this room, the whole apartment. But it matches the gentle, awed child playing with Cob and Manny in the other room. He glances at the yellow bedcover on her bed. It's bordered with fragmented flowers, like burst stars.

  Flowers. Burst stars.

  Walls, striped colors, blue, red, yellow.

  Walls. Striped colors. Blue. Red. Yellow.

  Walls striped colors blue red yellow.

  Wallsstripedcolorsblueredyellow.

  Blue! Yellow! Red!

  Yellowwwwwww…!

  RED!

  BLUE!

  YELLOW!

  BLUUUUUUUUUUUUUUE!

  RED!

  YELLOWWWWWWWW…!

  Suddenly the deep-blue part of the stripes plunges back, the red dashes at him. Quickly the movement is reversed, red retreats, far, far back, the blue lunges. The yellow holds, quivering. In a moment the room is transformed as if every object in it—in the world!—has turned crystal, lit luminously by an inner light.

  Suddenly Jerry sees the shape of the Stones’ music coming from the other room. Sound invades the lunging colors, colors coat the flowing sound, sound melts on the colors into a visible symphony. Now they—sound, colors—contain him. No, he is the music, the music is profoundly him. And Shell's bed has become a yellow tide of waves breathing mysteriously. The room expands, outward, upward, into space, an expansion ruled by each beat of his heart.

  And so he's been freed by the fantastic drug to enter a staggeringly beautiful world where colors and sound live!

  Exploring that magnificent, outrageous world, he looks down at the fleecy rug on which he stands. It's a sea of motion, too—beautiful yet turbulent. Experimentally, he moves his feet over it; the fleece sighs. He sees each fiber tumbling down slowly in a whispering protest of motion.

  Excitedly, he walks out of Shell's room, into the other. He isn't even dizzy. Floating, he's in perfect control in this new world ruled by spiraling visions. The room greets him like a live, glowing, crystal painting into which he's being allowed entry.

  The three others still hover fascinated over the book of posters. They seem enveloped in a fragile halo of yellow brightness.

  Jerry laughs gloriously, laughs with the intense sense of discovery of the beauty—un
seen till now—surrounding him. His lips open, to form what words? He doesn't know. Words which will shout the liberating discovery. The unexpected words finally erupt out of him: ‘I love!’ he shouts.

  Words without focus. I love…

  ‘And I love!’ Manny shouts exultantly.

  ‘You love,’ Shell conjugates the verb softly.

  They love,’ Cob finishes the wayward conjugation in a sigh. Suddenly his hand moves out slowly before him as if to clear his vision. Instead he wipes away the solemn mood. He removes the dark sunglasses.

  The movement of Cob's hand! For Jerry it had broken down into a million intricate maneuvers, the vast intricacy of a hand, moving! He had never seen it before. Nor any of this radiant world. Until now without the drug had he been totally blind? ‘It's beautiful!’ his own words come from a myriad directions.

  ‘We're all beautiful!’ Manny shouts. He stands. He raises his hands over his head as if to drape himself in the vibrations of joy, and he spins around.

  ‘Yeah, we're all beautiful!’ Cob joins him.

  ‘Beautiful!’ Shell's voice bursts.

  Their words and his come at Jerry like colored winding forms. ‘We're all beautiful!’ he's repeating.

  Cob's face! Peeling in layers of moods, it changes a dozen times before Jerry.

  Knowing the drug's distortion of faces, ‘What is my face doing?’ Cob asks Jerry in amusement.

  Jerry looks seriously at him. Cob's face changes swiftly from a long, angular, harsh, sinister face—and Jerry thinks, You look like death, and flees quickly from the thought—to that of a laughing, joyful child—to, finally, the face of an eager, desperate boy. Jerry nods at him, welcoming the latter.

  ‘Look at my face!’ Shell is giggling.

  Jerry looks at her. A myriad transitions occur in a split instant, from hard, cold, brutal to peaceful, gentle, lovely. Stop there! Jerry feels the words, unspoken.

  ‘What is my face doing?’ the gentle face of Shell asks him delightedly.

  Jerry merely laughs with the glory of discovery.

  ‘What is it doing?’ Shell insists laughingly.