by John Domini
And Grissom knew also he wasn’t your standard executive geek, high-powered and homeless. He’d been through all that crap already. He’d started out in consulting, one of the real ballbuster firms. But shortly after his experience with the whore, he’d switched to a job where it wasn’t the Sharks vs. the Shits all the time. He’d gone to a place near Batavia, in the jet-aircraft line. In those days—Grissom wasn’t then thirty-five—he’d told people in his circle he switched because the cross-country running around a man had to do in consulting took too much time from his wife and kids. And his wife and kids had been, in fact, part of Grissom’s reasoning. Grissom’s father had always said, in his heavy-tongued immigrant accent, work eats the legs but the family feeds the soul. Then surely, after all that and more, Grissom felt comfortable with himself. He was pushing sixty by now.
But the whore and her people, no denying, had thrown him badly. It hadn’t been just the woman herself. The bottom line was, just when Grissom’s career had been getting started, he’d been forced to step down to a position that cost him a minimum of $12,500 in salary and benefits alone over the first two years. The exact figures were important. He’d gone over them carefully with his lawyer.
The woman herself, well. When he had seen her alone in that hotel bar, the young Grissom had felt only the old and simple deepdown tug. He didn’t try to fight it. The woman fit his imaginings. When she lifted the veil they wore in those days, by the flame of his lighter Grissom saw icy, dark features, the fineboned quality he’d always pictured on European women. And that bar where they met was of course nowhere near his brown home in Lake Forest, nor even near Chicago. This had all happened on his very first extended executive-level trek. Even when he and the woman were discussing money, him showing off his pre-credit-card wallet as hefty as the wrought-iron elevator they rode in, even that came out sounding to Grissom like avant-garde poetry fresh in from the Continent—or wherever, in the suddenly very wide world, they got avant-garde poetry from.
Grissom of course drank. A good Scotch firmly in hand could practically launch a career by itself, in those days, and the place he worked for was a world-class ballbuster. Afterwards (no surprise, considering) Grissom went on the wagon.
And she next did something strange. Yes, something as strange by its own lights as anything that followed. The woman actually let him have what he’d gone up there for. Together they got the juices going and took turns leering at each other from top or bottom. She let young Grissom have his satisfaction even though it was she who’d mixed the drinks—even though, in other words, she must have slipped him the stuff right away. She must have slipped him the stuff before he’d so much as got his shoes off. And naturally Grissom had belted down as many shots of courage as an empty stomach would allow. Moreover he did remember, odd detail, that the drink had left a coating of silt on the ice He remembered, because after the last swallow he’d held the glass up to one eye in order to watch her undress. He’d felt very lightheaded already. That nightelubby suit she wore, like Peter Gunn’s girlfriend’s, had seemed to blur with the fineness of her skin, which was sometimes indistinguishable from the ghostly ice. Yet the woman did strip, in silence. Soon enough she stood unusually naked, a glistening silt-creature he’d tuned in from a world of icebergs and runny, elongated stars. And then, still silent, she held out her hands to him.
He’d been looking for an adventure, sure. That much Syl could have understood. She could have appreciated her husband’s yen for a night’s adventure maybe twenty-five minutes after the fact, let alone twenty-five years. Sure. But also young Grissom had wanted…so many times, especially during this month just past, he’d tried to put this idea into words…he’d wanted to come by means of this experience to a more complete, more substantial idea of himself as an individual. Grissom alone, he’d wanted to see. Grissom as a separately defined person, as an intensely, separately defined person, something as unique and identifiable as a planet in a pale sky. That too was what he’d wanted from this woman. And given all the facts about what had happened, certainly in time he could have put the idea into words. He could have gentled the lonesome wanderer he was trying to define, and so in time he could have shared the whole experience with Syl.
Unfortunately however young Grissom had not merely been led into a whore’s hotel room. The room and the lady had been a trap. Worse luck, it had taken all these two and a half decades to get at the truth of the matter.
Finally, now when he was pushing sixty, the story broke. Grissom had first seen the news on TV. It seemed that a couple of those hush-hush, top-level intelligence agencies in this country occasionally used to slip unsuspecting victims a drug, an hallucinogen. CIA, Army, whatever. They would drive somebody clear out of his mind for a few hours, as an experiment.
While “the project was in operation,” Grissom had learned, these agencies had sometimes hired prostitutes to “administer the substance.” Thereafter, an agency man would sit behind a two-way mirror and “monitor the session.” Oh, Grissom had come to know their bald lingo well, this past month. The agency records had been subpoenaed, and he’d seen his own name in them. He’d seen the faraway date and verified it against his old business records. He’d seen, he’d seen.
And so Grissom and his lawyer arrived at the troublesome business of the whore’s actually going through with her original job. Why had she let Grissom have her? The two men had discussed the question one afternoon a couple weeks ago, in the lawyer’s office. The woman’s motives might prove important if the suit came to court. The office was bright, with buttons flashing red and yellow on the enormous desk phone. The lawyer raised the question in a friendly way, but Grissom at first kept quiet. Since he still couldn’t find the words to explain it to his wife, Grissom figured, no way he could talk it out with a lawyer. In silence he watched the phone buttons flash. Eventually, calmly, the lawyer tried out an idea of his own. He hypothesized that the agency had wanted a subject who would truly feel guilty, in order for the experiment to be more, more—the lawyer frowned, searching for the expression—more emotionally impactive.
Now Grissom frowned. Emotionally what?
So, the lawyer finished with a grin, the girl had let Grissom zap her as part of their research.
Grissom found he couldn’t sit still. That kind of talk, he’d said loudly, shaking his head and striding round the office, that kind of talk—. His lawyer was looking at the wrong side of the picture entirely. The drug’s effects, Grissom said, were way more complex than that. Instead his lawyer should look at the other end of the picture, the human element. One way or the other, Grissom suddenly started shouting, you have to join the human race. One way or the other!
Bad idea, getting so fired up. The next day the Sun-Times carried a photograph of him throwing a fit in the public corridor outside his lawyer’s office. As he’d jumped round screaming about the human race, a camera-flash had caught him. The picture showed a heavy-bodied man in late middle age, with one knee raised in mid-stomp. The other foot, in its elegant European boot, was actually off the ground. This leaping person had an intelligent forehead, broad and pronounced, but at that moment it was cracked into so many wrinkles it looked like intestines caught in a vise. That morning (only a couple of weeks ago, now), Grissom had come into work and found the paper on his desk, folded open to the page with the picture.
He’d jumped back into his car, that morning, and driven the thirty miles to his home at well past the speed limit. He thought somehow he could pick up the house copy before Syl saw it. No dice. He found his wife at the kitchen table, with the paper open to his photograph in front of her, murmuring wearily over the phone to someone in her family. Her body sagged in its chair. After the first startled glance, she wouldn’t look at Grissom.
Revenge, Grissom thought. The whore had let him have her as a means of revenge. The drug after all was too freaky, too mysterious for anyone to go predicting its effects. Therefore you had to look at the person, not the apparatus around the person. So t
his woman, Grissom explained later to his lawyer, had wanted a hooker’s revenge: her own special way of showing her ass to the men who gave her their grubby orders and then sat, smug and above-it-all, behind the mirror.
The lawyer had looked sincerely surprised to hear Grissom come up with such a subtle theory. The lawyer took off his glasses and touched a stem to his lower lip. Grissom, in turn, could only give a disgusted half-smile. He would never get used to these narrow preconceptions people outside of business had about those on the inside. A man could work as an executive and nonetheless perceive the soul. Grissom had imagination enough to appreciate what must happen to a whore’s spirit while her body rang up trick after trick. For a moment he felt like jumping up and shouting again.
This conversation however took place the day after his photograph had appeared in the papers. Grissom therefore calmed himself. He watched the silent mechanical flash of the phone buttons. At last he shrugged. Look, he told the lawyer, the possible explanations for the prostitute’s behavior were endless. This much only was certain: she didn’t have to. By the time the hotel sheets had been heaped up round them like thunderclouds, the backs of Grissom’s knees had been going crazy, trembling with more than sexual fever. He’d bristled everywhere with his first rush.
After that, memory became spotty. What isolated moments he did recall were vivid, indeed far worse than vivid. But now Grissom had entered the mystery, a vastness complicated by a million wiry connections, and there not even his most enraged recent efforts to recall could fill in the blanks.
He could say, at least, that when TV or the movies handled this kind of experience they were way off base. The hallucinogen had never once caused Grissom to see things that weren’t “there” in some sense or another. The cow did not jump over the moon. Rather, every far-out vision had long psychic trailers rooted finally in some humble taste, some homely touch. Yes TV was way off base. TV started out to protect their viewers and wound up shoving everybody who watched into the garbage. TV went for the bright lights and never got at the truth, which was this essential combination of the homely and the psychedelic. It was because of that combination a person on acid knew the experience was real. And because it was real, it made you crazy. Madness therefore was a kind of ground pepper scattered over the experience, and though the bursts of memory could shatter Grissom like a sneeze, the grainy heaps of black to either side were just as large.
For example he could remember a time when the whore’s icy features had reddened and shriveled into those of the Devil himself, risen from his dark home. Her legs had run together into a ropelike tail holding him tight. Okay. Surely that guilty hallucination was only to be expected. Syl was, as he longed to tell her nowadays, in that hotel room with him. But then how, and when, had the prostitute become the Moon Maiden? How had her hair turned the consistency of cream cheese, and how had those tentacles sprung from her ribs to circle round him and tickle his spine so excruciatingly? All was doubtful, rough and tumble, transferences felt only in separated bits around the dark passage of asteroid chunks. Or never mind this woman and the million dreams that rode her skin. How in the world had Grissom come to spend so much time standing facing that hotel room’s mirror?
Yes that floor-to-ceiling vanity mirror, ow, ow. No sooner had Grissom put his fingers to the glass than he’d received a shock as if he’d been hauled upside-down off his feet and spanked. He snatched his hand back. On the spot he realized that he could have taken hold of any item from his young life—his first child’s first spoon, his wife’s jars of lotion, the ungainly watch his father had given him—any item, and not one would have devastated him so much as this deep stretch of reflecting glass. The rows of bulbs shining to either side pained his eyes. Of course, during this month just past Grissom had found out that his shock, too, had been part of the setup. The agency records explained how the surface of the mirror had been lightly electrified as a precaution. But knowing these things now didn’t change at all the cataclysmic feel of what he could recall from then. For instance he could remember also that at one point he’d thought of lowering his head and smashing on through. And this past month, he’d learned the agency types had been prepared for that move as well: he would have knocked himself cold against their protective steel supports. But knowing so now didn’t lessen the pervading weakness, like a steam leaking outward from his marrow, which had kept him from crashing through and which softened his bones all over again every time he remembered the moment.
So memory grew spottier, grainier still after that. Hours, young Grissom must have remained there, silently weeping. He had an odd recollection of pulling the hairs away from his navel and thrusting his reflected belly up towards itself, God knows why. He could be positive only that he’d been standing before the mirror when he’d seen his worst.
He had no idea just how far along it was. The woman had brought him a dripping facecloth. He hadn’t noticed her coming. But after that agony of wet and cold hit his forehead, instinctively he brought up his palm to cover the blazing damp spot and hold it there. The liquid streaming down meantime had forced him to blink repeatedly, lengthily, till under the pressure of light and dark the surface of his thinking had exploded and Grissom could see clearly at last that this “water” striping his skin was itself composed entirely of mirrors. He stopped blinking and watched. Tiny mirrors, these were, each no larger than the fragment of a tear. Like the row of black reflections he’d sometimes seen clinging to his windshield after a storm: tiny mirrors, all wriggling their tails. Yes and in this case they weren’t merely wriggling, either, but moving, actually moving with a purpose. Down from his enlarged eyes, down his cheeks and down, the mirrors traveled in linked chains, with a jerky sinuousness like something out of a cartoon. Grissom’s heart was going so hard he couldn’t move his eyes. He could just make out infinitesimal pairs of dirty bare feet. He could see finally the hemp ropes holding the mirrors in place. One wobbled for a moment; a black hand rose to steady it, the pressure of the fingers—minute as the hairs on a fly—making a small depression in the bulbous reflecting surface. Mirrors, lugging away on their backs what the larger mirror showed! Why, then, these germlike native bearers, these shimmery work gangs Grissom had wrung from the washcloth himself, why they were going to carry away his face. Even now his face was going, running down, in trapped particles of eyelash and eyebrow, bits of sideburn and lip beard stubble….
Grissom had got tough with himself. He whispered into his reflection that this was only another hooker’s trick, another slut way of getting him to spend the entire night and so pay more (why, if she succeeded in driving him insane for the rest of his life, just think what he’d pay). But he couldn’t remove his hand from the facecloth, nor his eyes from the glass. Desperately then he looked to the woman with him—in the mirror. He was startled to discover she stood beside him. She stood in an old-fashioned robe, fixing her face. And as she smeared on some ointment, businesslike but in no rush, he could see she was rubbing away not just the bags under her eyes but her eyes themselves, not just the lines round her nose but her entire fineboned nose itself.
Yet though she met his gaze, with the blank indentations where her eyes had been, she never offered more than a bored smile. Even when her mouth too was wiped away, he could tell she remained unperturbed. She didn’t see the damage done. So Grissom had understood, and thereafter the night was lost to memory. He had wanted to see what he was alone, what he was as an individual away from Syl or anyone else. And now he knew.
Afterwards, well. It was hardly anything you could confide in the wife. Grissom went on the wagon. No surprise, considering.
Also, more or less secretly, he went on the couch for a couple-three years. Syl knew, but no one else. It was Syl in fact who’d suggested Grissom start seeing a psychiatrist. She’d told him, at the end of one unending, weepy night, that some time with a headshrinker seemed to be the only solution to his problems. Syl was also terrific when it came to keeping the analysis a secret from Grissom�
��s father. The old man was from the old country; he’d never have understood. The two kids, as for them, weren’t even talking yet during those years. And the psychiatrist’s office was in the same crowded steel high-rise as Grissom’s dentist’s, so he always had a ready excuse. Yet a psychiatrist, too…Grissom could never see his way clear to telling a psychiatrist either. How could he? The doctor would stand over him and say: for a businessman in America, there is the work and there is the family, two very strong drives which often conflict. Then how could Grissom start to talk about microscopic native bearers carrying away his face?
Nonetheless he was grateful for the time. Grissom progressed soon enough to a point where he was able to ask for the less demanding job, in the jet-aircraft line, without shame. Once there, also, he found himself prospering. After he reached middle age, after his father had died, Grissom didn’t bother keeping his work with the doctor a secret any longer. Indeed he became a regular advocate of analysis for management-level employees. Couple years on the couch, Grissom took to saying, and you’ll die a rich man.
But he suffered, nevertheless, some lower-grade infections left from his night before the prostitute’s vanity mirror. These remained hard to put into words. Really, the slack hell of the last twenty-five years was rendered best, in capsule version, on the night of his return from that first executive-level trek. Oh, he could say he’d done some other things in the interim. He’d remained faithful to Syl. He’d gone back to the Church, finding his place among those crowds whispering to themselves with eyes closed. He’d raised two sons during the 1960’s, he shouldn’t forget that. Yet really, it had all been in the return.
