Then the rain fell on him.
Left thus to himself, the John drank another beer. He saw a tipsy woman with many parallel scan across her wrists (her face like one of those squarish bark baskets with rounded corners for winnowing rice) and he remembered how last night his companion's wife had said: Funny things happen in this town. Like my cousin Maisie. She kept tryin' to kill herself. Gash her wrist so many times with a knife, try to jump off a bridge, all that stuff. Well, she wanted to commit suicide, but she didn't have to. She died in her sleep.
Did you love her very much?
Her? I hate her guts! she'd laughed.
Now finishing the bottle, he went to the woman and said: What's your name?
Maisie.
I thought you died in your sleep.
I did, she muttered. Then the security man came and pushed her out.
It was night now, and he was alone. One tubby girl went up for another beer, and he saw the bartender take her lovingly by the shoulders, kiss her neck, and begin to push. He pushed her down the corridor that led past the hotel desk to outside, and then he came back. The lonely man went out to see what had become of her. She was on the street trying to hail a cab but forgetting in mid-gesture what she was about. — Everyone's hassling me tonight, she wept. And now I can't get a cab. I need a fucking cab. Call me a fucking cab! I need to eat! I wanna pee! Find my shoes for me, please.
Her asymmetrical purple mouth imploded, slobbered and kissed him.
The late darkness of summer had begun to dim the hot gray night. On Main Street sat a drunken Indian panhandler, and when he gave him change the panhandler stared at the coins adding up on his palm without comprehending; and he walked past three staggering Indian boys in baseball caps, and came to the old Indian hooker who had to hold onto a lamppost to keep from falling down, her tongue the brown, black-banded furry ovoid of a queen bee hibernating in the dirt under the snow of men's mouths, and after her he kept passing Indians leaning in front of hotels that served beer downstairs and a piece of thistledown blew against his face from a vacant lot full of puddles and frostcracked mud and beer bottles and planks and dandelions and camomile and horsetails, and it began to rain again. The vacant lot was a slice of muskeg, and muskeg was an Ojibway word. Across the street, an Indian in a blue cap walked head down, kicking something, and then he turned and kicked it back the way he had come. An Indian in a fringed leather jacket strode energetically, swinging his arms. Three Indian boys came. One said: Why you fellas fuckin' whinin'? It's time for another fuckin' round, so let's fuckin' go.
He remembered how his companion's wife (who was on probation for assault) had said to him: We have our traditions, aye? We have our power. Like, suppose it's stormy outside in the morning and we want it to be calm weather. All we got to do is say: I want it to be a nice day, and then smoke a pipe, and pretty quick it calms down.
He saw the woman who had died in her sleep and said to her: Can you stop the rain?
Sure, she said. Anytime. As long as it's not raining beer. A Mountie came to shove her along and she said: Did you notice there's a red stripe on your leg?
Oh, fuck off, the Mountie said.
Did you notice that you're wearing a bulletproof vest?
Yeah, I noticed that all right, Maisie.
Are you wearing bulletproof trousers, too? Ah, hah, hah, hah!
A VISION
Big Bend, California, U.S.A. (1994)
* * *
Big Bend, California, U.S.A. (1994)
Some sit in darkness and gloom, says Psalm 107, and I was of them but I didn't know it more or less than a tree knows why he shakes his green-hung arms in an evening breeze. I'd seen and heard them die, an old friend and a new friend, just outside that city whose huddled steel doors had been so many times pierced by bullets that they resembled Go gameboards overwhelmed by the round black empty stones of Master Negativity. Just outside that city whose sandbagged and boarded-up windows were ringed around their frames with jagged silver ice, outside that city of scorched chair-skeletons and fresh-nailed coffins ran a river where my friends died. I think I met their murderers afterward, although in war nothing is clear. Or maybe they were Samaritans, those quiet ones with machine-guns who helped me pull my friends from the car and later tried to use their credit cards. I did what I could for the dead, which was nothing, and then I strove to guide myself back to the light.
It was a month later that I ate the psilocybin mushrooms, in the Sierras near Donner Pass with Jenny, whom I loved, and Paul, who was my friend. It was not my intention to have a vision, which must have been why I had one. Some people go to seek out hallucinatory novelties, as if the usual blue sky pasted upon the lenses of their spectacles were an annoyance, but I have seen enough, thank you: visions tend to trick me, backstab me, or rape me. Last night, for instance, I had a hideous dream that life was but a show in a dingy theater of stale air, the actors dully or busily traversing an immense map laid out upon the stage; and because the tale went on so fruitlessly, no one bothered to watch; semicircular rows of worn seats gaped like half-open mouths; but at the righthand extremity of the front few rows some observers sat in black raven costumes, with raven masks and long beaks. Whenever one of the poor souls on stage would say something like I feel sick or I'm going to kill you or I insist that we fight to the last man then the ravens would clap their wingtips daintily. They sat interested, amused, aloof, like Thoreau brooding over Walden Pond. And when each sad life upon the wide atlas page drew to its close, the ravens would caw until the rafters trembled with the shrieking echoes, then launch themselves into the dusty air, wheel, croak, swoop, and tear that doomed soul to pieces. So when Paul gave me some of his mushrooms I believed with confidence that no transfiguration would occur. The leaden wall between myself and all the dead people in my years of life would not be breached. Alcohol clouded it into a creamy graphite haze. Lovemaking swiveled it downward, making it a solid stone to lie and dream upon. No doubt the mushrooms would make it funny. Too much contemplation of any object, however unwilling the gaze, may reveal a secret. Better to change the angle of view as often as possible. — That was why I so frequently ascended mountains without seeing inside them. (In the Norse sagas people go "inside the mountain" when they die.) Whenever I began to fear that the Gray Wall was becoming smoky, translucent, almost transparent, it obligingly changed its skin. Once, for instance, I visited Ellesmere Island, which is colored a pale icy-blue in my atlas, so the Gray Wall became a slope of pebble pavement set in mud: jet-black rocks with sunbursts of orange lichen, smooth tan pebbles, golden rocks lichened blue like cheese mold, and as the slope continued gently up, my feet sank into the clean soft snow and it was a warm 3° C. Grasses and three-leaved plants, their leaves an autumn orange, poked up here and there like reaching fingers. Musk-oxen dung stood in little mounds, little pyramids of buckshot; and the hill steepened into a snow-covered ridge. — Another time the Gray Wall was a jungle mountain at whose base skinny-legged barefoot kids sucked from plastic bags of sugared ice. Mornings and evenings its mass of forest was tea-colored and indistinct. A dog barked at a horse under a thatch roof who neighed and rang his bell. In the afternoons, ladies in shirts gray and black with grime, with raised yokes of embroidery once black or white, sat gazing up to see if they could spy their husbands returning from the opium fields. The Gray Wall fed them. I saw a basket of bright green vegetables, saw everywhere babies sucking at the reddish-brown breast. — Today the Grey Wall was in the Sierras. A cool noonish breeze perfumed by resins and bees' nests swirled about us as our footsteps rimmed dark ponds, Jenny running ahead, too busy and excited to notice the flowers. (Later, mushroom-drunk on the way down, she'd sway and giggle in amazement: Look at that blue one! See that yellow one? Oh, God, why do I keep falling down?) Congregations of pines presented their thin and branching fingers to the air, growing them downward like roots. Because I still understood where entities started and stopped, I saw each thing as its own thing, which is the way we build walls by mo
ving individual stones. There is nothing wrong with this. A dermatologist sees the freckles, not the face, and we do not fault him for it. But Paul and I continued up the mountain path, beginning to get the drunken feeling, eating those delicious vegetables of the inner ear, and then suddenly there came what I call the mushroom laugh, which always happens in an unexpected manner. This time it struck from the stones and boulders around me, all their freckles and granules and pixilations of texture flying out in a swarm of deep mirth whose sound was not quite a buzzing thrumming G-major chord. The main thing about the mushroom laugh was its inhumanness. I had chosen to eat the mushrooms, and that was the last choice that I could make. The mushroom laugh would now take me and do whatever it wanted with me, no matter whether I enjoyed myself or was hurt. I was nothing to the mushroom laugh.
The mushroom laugh was the crowd of raven masks. By the time we got to the first lake, where Jenny was waiting with the picnic, it had started to devour me.
Paul, that gangly mushroom veteran, wanted to help, and assured me many times that day that I could control the laugh and do what I wished with it. That had certainly been my experience with psilocybin before. But on this occasion the mushrooms were very strong; and perhaps there was some poison in them. My joy sneaked off, and up strode an immense pain which convulsed me into a ball, like a wolf in a strychnine cramp. I lay on my side at the edge of a lake which continually changed its shape. When I closed my eyes I saw sickening neon lines as in some hellish disco, which would not remain still or even unique; they doubled and tripled nauseatingly, remaining one even when they were three; and it was only later that I thought of Catholic theology. When I opened my eyes I was compelled to watch the shelf of rock I lay on changing color from pink to green, while my jacket did likewise, and its camouflage blotches crawled, oozed and contracted. I thought that if I observed any of these phenomena very long I'd go mad. The state I was in already resembled madness. My existence therefore became a constant struggle to change my perceptions, to focus my senses on something new which the mushrooms had not yet contaminated; of course this battle could not be won because whatever I found the mushrooms immediately seized. There was one stem which I had eaten only recently, and I knew that this stem was inside me, laughing the mushroom laugh, waiting to wrestle with me in its own time even as I fought with the others.
There's something in this batch that we have to fight, Paul was saying, his face pale.
I could not answer him.
Jenny, who had not yet been affected, came and put her arm around me. After a long time I was able to say to her: I love you. — These words were a leathery thing, part boat and part seedpod, which came out of my mouth and crossed the space between my understanding and hers. I felt that we were falling farther and farther away from each other, dwindling out of each other's souls.
Lifting my watch in an attempt to learn how long I'd have to wait for the drug to wear off, I saw the minute hand, pure black on the golden dial, contract into its own shadow, turning inside itself and passing through the center of the watch until it pointed to a different plane than the hour hand.
He's curled into a salamander, I heard Paul say to Jenny. He's watching the bugs in his head.
This terrified me. I believed then that Paul could see everything about me, that he could look into my head where my soul lay curled on its side, and my soul was a huge, fat, bewhiskered white maggot which Paul despised.
I tried to eat a biscuit to help absorb some of the drug, but it was all I could do to chew. The lump of sweetened starch tasted hideous under my tongue; everything nauseated me. It refused to dissolve, crouching under my tongue, soaking up saliva until my mouth was a desert; it was another inimical foreign thing that I had to war with. Raising my head in an attempt to swallow, I saw Paul, and his face dissolved into a pale white cheese as he soundlessly screamed backwards into space, leaving a contrail of black blood in the air before his mouth. Even as this happened I was aware that Paul had not been hurt, that this was a memory of my two friends who'd died outside that city of scorched silence.
Paul and Jenny wanted me to get up.
I knew that I was in a place I was a part of, so much a part of that I could never find my way out; there was not any in or out. I'm sure that this must be the way that animals perceive, this experiencing without reasoning. I don't mean to say that reasoning is good or bad. I enjoy my ability to reason, and yet I also recognize that reason is a prison. With great effort I was able to find rags of that shimmering tent of conventions I lived in. For example, when Jenny asked me if I could remember the name of a certain mountain in Tasmania, I thought for a long time, then finally was able to uncover half the name, which I thought might be helpful. I wasn't certain whether this was the first or last word in the mountain's name (which I did know was composed of two words). The word was peak. And I could not understand why Jenny laughed after I thought that I had helped her.
Jenny has a dog which is not very intelligent. Sometimes when I call the dog it will come a few steps, then get distracted by some sunny spot or rotten smell, and I'll have to call it again. That was how I was on this day. Jenny would call me and I would follow her; sometimes she would take my hand or even push me, and I'd know that she was there and react to her, but in the fifteen-second intervals between her calls or touches she would cease to exist for me. It was not that I ever forgot her; her reappearances never surprised me; nor did I stop walking, but she was no more or less important than everything else. This is true and not true. In some way she was very important to me, but without being in my mind except when she called to me. I did not want to hurt her or make her anxious. This in turn increased my own anxiety, because I wanted to do whatever she wanted me to do; and at the same time I knew that her sense of direction was very bad and that she might very well get us lost in the forest, but I was unable to explain to her why she should not be leading me further into the mountains—or perhaps she understood well enough that I did not feel right about going with her, but Jenny can be very obstinate and anyway she was my guardian; I could not reason, so it did not matter what I thought.
I felt terribly alone. Even though she was not far ahead of me on the trail, continually calling to me from just out of sight, I felt that she had let me go. (Paul I could not see.) There was no blame attached to this. I did not feel that she had deliberately rejected me; it was simply that we were drifting farther and farther apart. Often I would look around me and see only trees and rocks and lake and sky, all alien and borderless and vivid like those paintings of dense dark forests in old Canada; and I would feel so alone and believe that I might possibly be there alone forever. So I was freed from the cage of rationality, and imprisoned in the cage of brutishness. Then Jenny would call my name again, and I'd understand that I was not alone after all and that I was still walking. Then I could not understand what the trail was anymore. I heard her calling my name over and over from not very far away, and after an immense struggle I succeeded in saying that between every two trees was a trail. I stood staring at those hundreds or thousands of trails in front of me, and finally Jenny had to come to lead me by the hand. Then she was gone again, and I passed through the forest, which I experienced in a low wide way like a four-legged beast. I was alone, and I always would be alone—and not just always, but also forever and infinitely. I had already been alone forever—so alone!—and this grieved and exhausted me beyond description but I understood that I could do nothing about it but struggle to endure. My soul was maimed and suffering. God was all around me but I felt no less alone. The twisted silvery trees were all growing toward and inside God, conscious of Him as He was of them and me, but they could not reach me as I could not express myself to them because only the relationship with God was real and I could not get at God or come to grips with Him because He was everywhere and I was only toiling through Him, just as a person can walk all day and never put the sun behind him. And I strained to speak with God. It was no easier to express myself to Him than it had been
to Jenny, but no more difficult. I was burdened with sadness and also with pain from the mushroom poison which resembled a steel spider with scorpion claws crouched inside my rib cage, pinching from my heart all the way to my belly; and the pain was the same as the sadness. I was crying for my dead friends, and I asked God whether what I was now suffering, which seemed more intense than any other agony I'd ever felt, was worth having been spared in Bosnia. And God was in the trees and between them; I was speaking with God and walking with Him, asking only this question, and only once; it echoed like a note on the piano when the reverberator pedal is pressed; and then I asked Him why He created people only to shatter them. I was so sad and I had no answer but I knew that He heard me and I was going on; I would go on until He smashed me to bits, and I accepted that. There was a moment when I was able to pray for my friends and also for Jenny and Paul and for myself. Hours later, when the drug let me go with a snap of its claws, I was surprised to find that I felt calm and at peace. I think it was because I'd been heard, had asked and accepted the fact that there would never be any answer, that I must go on in my solitude just as I'd had to do in the car when my friends slumped dead and bleeding and I waited for the next shot.
The Atlas Page 32
