“You’re a mean, old broad,” Marvin said, with a certain affection.
She snubbed out her cigarette, kissed him lightly on the lips, rolled toward him.
“One more for the road, Billy-boy?”
Diffidently, he took her tired flesh in his arms. “Oh, you’re golden!” she sighed as she moved against him. And he realized that she had been hoping for a synesthetic flash to give her a bit of the sharp pleasure that he alone could not.
But he could hardly feel anger or disgust, since he had been looking for something more spectacular than a soft human body in the darkness, too.
Strolling toward his cabin near the sea cliffs in the full moonlight, Bill Marvin saw Harry Krell emerge from Lisa Scott’s cabin and walk down the path toward him, more rapidly and surely than he usually seemed to move in broad daylight. They met in a small grove of trees, where the moonlight filtered through the branches in tiger-stripes of silver and black that shattered visual images into jigsaw patterns.
“Hello, Marvin,” Krell said. “Been doing some visiting?”
“Just walking,” Marvin said neutrally, surprising himself with his own desire to have a civil conversation with Krell. But, after all, strictly as a curiosity, Krell had to be one of the most interesting men on earth.
Krell must have sensed something of this, because he stopped, leaned up against a tree, and said, “You’ve been here a week now, Marvin. Tell me the truth, do you still hate my guts? Are you still out to get me?”
Glad to have his reaction masked by the camouflage-pattern of moonlight and darkness, Marvin caught his breath and said, “What makes you think I’m out to get you?”
Krell laughed, and for a moment Marvin saw a bright blue cataract smashing off a sheet of glass in brilliant sunlight, “I heard the look on your face,” Krell said, “Besides, what makes you think you’re the first person that’s come here trying to nail me?”
“So why’d you let me come here?”
“Because half the Golden Groves regulars come here the first time to get the goods on that phony Harry Krell. If I worried about that, I’d lose half my trade.”
“I just can’t figure where your head’s at, Krell. What do you think you’re doing here?”
“What am I doing?” Krell said, an edge of whining bitterness coming into his voice. “What do you think I’m doing? I’m surviving as best I can, same as you. You think I asked for this? Sure, a lot of nuts come through here and convince themselves they’re getting religious visions off of me, a big ecstasy trip. Great for them! But for Harry Krell, synesthesia’s no ecstasy trip, let me tell you! I can’t drive a car or walk across a street or go anywhere or do anything. All I can do is hear the pretty colors, smell the music, see the taste of whatever crap I’m eating. After three years, I got enough experience to guess pretty well what’s happening around me most of the time as long as I stay on familiar ground, but I’m just guessing, man! I’m trapped inside my own head. Like now, I see something blue-green off to the left—probably the sea I’m smelling—and pink-violet stuff around us—trees, probably eucalyptus. And I hear some kind of gong. There’s a moon out, right? If you’re saying something now, I can’t make it out until I start hearing sound again. Man, I’m so alone here inside this light-show!”
Bill Marvin fought against his own feelings, and lost. He couldn’t stop himself from feeling sympathy for Harry Krell, locked inside his weird private reality, an ordinary slob cut off from any ordinary life. Yet Krell was entirely willing to put other people into the same place.
“Feeling like that, you still don’t mind making your bread by sucking other people in with you…” he said.
“Jesus, Marvin, you’re a pornographer! You give people a kick they want, and you make your living off of it. But does it turn you on? How’d you like your whole life to be a pornographic movie?”
Bill Marvin choked on a wisecrack which never came out, because the deadening quality of what his life had become slammed him in the gut. What is the difference between me and Krell? he thought. He gives the suckers synesthetic flashes and I give ’em porn. What he’s putting out doesn’t turn him on any more than what I put out turns me on. We’re both alone inside our heads and faking it. He got hit on the head by a surfboard and got stuck in the synesthesia trip, and I got hit on the head by Hollywood and got stuck in the porn trip.
“Sorry to put you on such a bummer, Marvin,” Krell said. “I can smell it on you. Now I can hear your face. What…?”
“We’re both alike, Krell,” Marvin said. “And we both stink.”
“We’re just doing what we gotta do. You gotta play the cards you’ve been dealt, because you’re not going to get any others.”
“Sometimes you deal yourself your own lousy hand,” Marvin said.
“I’ll show you lousy!” said Krell. “I’ll show you how lousy it can be to walk just from here to your cabin—the way I have to do it. You got the guts?”
“That’s what I’m paying my money for,” Marvin said quietly. He began walking back up the path. Krell turned and walked beside him.
Abruptly, the darkness dissolved into a glowing gingerbread fairyland of light. To Marvin’s left, where he knew the sea was crashing against the base of the cliffs, he saw a bright green-yellow bank of brilliance that sent out pulses of radiance which struck invisible objects all around him, haloing them in all the subtle shades of the spectrum, forming an infinitely complex lattice-work of ever-changing, intersecting wavefronts that transformed itself with every pulse from the aural sun that was the sea. Beside him, Harry Krell was a shape of darkness outlined in a shimmering aurora. He heard a faraway gong chiming pleasantly in the velvet quiet. He tasted salt and smelled a rapidly changing sequence of floral odors that might have been Krell speaking. The beauty of it all drenched his soul through every pore.
He walked slowly along, orienting himself by the supposition that the green-yellow brilliance was the breaking surf, that the areas of darkness outlined by the living lattice-work of colored wavefronts were solid objects to be avoided. It wasn’t easy, but it was somehow enchanting, picking his way through a familiar scene that had transformed itself into a universe of wonder.
Then the world changed again. He could hear the crashing of the sea. On his left, he saw a thick blue-green spongy mass, huge and towering; on the ground, the path was a ribbon of blackness through a field of pinkish-gray; here and there fountains grew out of the pinkish-gray, with grayish stems and vivid maroon crests, tree-high. He smelled clear coldness. Krell was a doughy mass of colors, dominantly washed-out brown. Marvin guessed that he was seeing smell.
It was easy enough to follow the path of dead earth through the fragrant grass. After a while there was another, subtler transformation. He could see that he and Krell were walking up the path toward his cabin, no more than twenty yards away in the silvery moonlight. But his mouth, was filled with a now-winey, now-nutty flavor that ebbed and flowed with an oceanic rhythm, here and there broken by quick wisps of spiciness as bird-shapes flapped from tree to darkened tree. The only sound was a soft, almost subliminal hiss.
Dazed, transported, Marvin covered the last few yards to his cabin open-mouthed and wide-eyed. When they reached the door, the strange tastes in his mouth evaporated, and he could hear the muffled grumble of the pounding surf. He laughed, exhilarated, refreshed in every atom of his being, alive to every subtle sensory nuance of the night.
“How do you like living where I live?” Krell said sourly.
“It’s beautiful… it’s…”
Krell scowled, snickered, smiled ruefully. “So the big wise-guy turns out to be a sucker just like everyone else,” he said, almost regretfully.
Marvin laughed again. In fact, he realized, he had been laughing for the first time in over a week. “Who knows, Krell,” he said, “you might enjoy living in one of my pornographic movies.”
He laughed one more time, then went into his cabin, leaving Krell standing there in the night with a dumb e
xpression on his face.
Later, when he got into bed, the cool sheets and the soft pillow were a clear night full of pinpoint-bright multicolored stars, and the darkness smelled like a woman’s perfume.
The world went livid red, and the wooden slats beneath his naked body became a smoky tang in his mouth.. Marvin felt himself glowing in the center of his being like a roaring winter fireplace, heard Dave Andrews’ voice say, “Really sweats the tension out of you.”
The flash passed, and he was lying on the wooden bench of the sauna shack, bathed in his own luxuriant sweat, baking in the heat given off by the hot stones on their cast-iron rack. The fat towel-wrapped man on the bench across from him stared sightlessly at the ceiling and sighed.
“Phew!” Andrews said as his eyes came back into focus, “I could really hear my muscles uncoil. Twooong!”
Marvin lay there just sucking up the heat, going with it, and entirely ignoring Andrews, who was some kind of land speculator and a crashing bore. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the waves of heat which he could all but feel breaking against his body, the relief of the grain of the wood against his skin; the subtle odor of hot stone. He had learned to bask in the world of his senses and let everything else drift by.
“I tell you, old Krell may be charging a pretty penny, but it sure cleans out the old tubes and charges up the old batteries…” Andrews babbled on and on like a radio commercial, but Marvin found little trouble in pushing the idiot voice far into the sensory background; it was easy, when each sense could become a universe entire, when your sensorium was no longer conditioned to sight-sound dominance.
Suddenly Andrews’ voice was gone, and Marvin heard a whistling hurricane wind. Opening his eyes, he saw wispy white billows of ethereal steam punctuated by the multicolored static of Andrews’ words. He tasted something like curry and smelled a piney, convoluted odor.
When the flash passed, he got up, slipped on a bathing suit, dashed out of the sauna, ran across the rich green grass in the high blue sunlight, and dove straight into the swimming pool. The cool water hit his superheated body with an orgasmic shock. He floated to the surface and let the little wavelets cradle him on his back as he paddled over to the lip of the pool, where Karen sat dangling her feet in the water.
“You’re sure a different man than when you came here,” she said.
Looking up, Marvin saw her bikinied form as a fuzzy vagueness against a blinding blue sky. “Well, okay, so Krell’s got something going for him,” he said. “But at these prices, he’s still a crook, and, the funny thing is, he thinks he’s even a bigger crook than he really is…”
She didn’t answer for a long moment, but stared into the depths of the pool to one side of him, lost in the universe of her own synesthetic flash.
When she finally spoke, it came out as a gusher of glistening green-black oil emerging from soft lavender clouds, while Marvin tasted icy cotton-candy. Judging from the discord of her lace jarring the soothing melody of the sunlit sky, it was probably just as well.
Marvin luxuriated in a shower of blood-warm rain, saw a sheen of light that pulsed from sunshine-yellow to sea-green; then the flash passed. He was sitting on his cushion on Harry Krell’s sunny porch, in a circle around Krell, along with Tish, Andrews… and Karen.
Strange, he thought, I’ve been here nearly three weeks, and I haven’t had a booster group with Karen yet. Stranger still was the realization that this hadn’t seemed peculiar or even significant until this moment. Like the rest of the outside world, his former relationship with Karen seemed so long ago and far away. The woman to his right seemed no closer to him emotionally than any of the other residents of Golden Groves, who drifted through each other’s private universes like phantom ships passing in the night.
Harry Krell took a deep breath, and the vault of the sky became a sheet of gleaming brass; below, the sea was a rolling cauldron of ebony. The porch itself was outlined in dull blue, and the people around him were throbbing shapes of yellowish pink. To his left, the odor of fading incense; across the way, rich Havana smoke, and the powerful tinge of ozone pervaded all. But the smell that riveted Marvin’s attention was the one on his right; an overwhelming feminine musk that seemed compounded of (or partially masked by) unsubtle perfume, drying nail polish, beauty cream, shampoo, deodorants—the full spectrum of chemical enhancers which he now realized had been the characteristic odors of living with Karen. Waves of nostalgia and disgust formed inside him, crested, broke, and merged in a single emotional tone for which there was no word. It simply was the space that Karen occupied in his mind, the total image through winch he experienced her.
Another change, and he saw light pulsing from yellow to green once more, tasted a salty tang. From his left, he heard the ricky-tick of a funky old piano; across the way, a staccato metallic blatting; over it all, the brassy, hollow, melancholy wailing of Harry Krell. But once again, it was the theme on his right that vibrated a nerve dial went straight from his senses through his brain and into the pit of his gut. It was as if a gong were striking within an enclosure that rudely dampened its vibrations, slamming the echoing notes back on each other, abruptly amputating the long slow vibrations, creating a sound that was a hysterical hammering at invisible walls, the sound of an animal caught in some invisible trap. Ironically, the smell of a woodland field in high summer was heavy in Marvin’s nostrils.
After a few more slow changes, Krell brought them flickering back through the sequences: blood-warm rain, a sheet of gleaming brass over an ebony sea, the smell of feminine musk and body chemicals, light pulsing from yellow to green, rich Havana smoke, peppermint and red wine, high summer in a woodland field, flat highballs, melancholy wailing, ricky-tick.
Then Marvin was seated on his cushion next to Karen’s, while the sea grumbled to itself below, and Harry Krell breathed heavily and wiped sweat out of his eyes.
Marvin and Karen simultaneously turned to look at each other. Their eyes met, or at least their local plane intersected. For Marvin, it was like staring straight at two cold green marbles set in the alabaster face of a statue, for all the emotion that the eye-contact contained. Judging from the ghost of a grimace that quivered across her lips, she was seeing no less of a stranger. For an instant, he was blinded by yellow light, sickened by the odor of her chemical musk.
When the flash passed, he saw that she was in the throes of one of her own; her eyes staring sightlessly out to sea, her lips twitching, her nostrils flaring. For a moment, he was overcome with curiosity as to how she was experiencing him; then, with a small effort, he put this distasteful thought from his mind, knowing that this was the moment of true divorce, that the alimony was now the only bond that remained between them.
A moment later, without a word to each other, they both got up and went their separate ways. As Karen walked through the glass doors into the house, Marvin saw a billowing spongy green mass, and heard her hysterical trapped hammering beat time for her march out of his life forever.
And time became the flickering procession of sheets of flashing images. The sun set over the cliffs into the Pacific, now a globe of orange fire dipping into the glassy waters and painting the sky with smears of purple and scarlet, now the smoky tang of autumn fading into the sharply crystal bite of winter night, now a slow-motion clap of enormous thunder dying slowly into the velvet stillness.’ The morning light on the porch of the beach house was a shower of blood-warm rain, a field of orange radiance shot with mists of cool blue, a humming symphony of vibrating energy.
For Bill Marvin, these had become the natural poles of existence, the only time-referents in a world in which night might be the toasty woman-smell of his bedroom darkness, the brilliant starry night of cool sheets against his body, or the golden light of anonymous female flesh against his, in which day was the coruscating fireworks of food crunching between his teeth, the celestial chime of his hot body hitting the cool water of the pool after the curry flavor of the sauna, the billowing green clouds of the surf breaking
against the foot of the cliffs.
People floated through this quicksilver wonderland as shifting, illusive constellations of sensory images. Ricky-tick piano. Chemical female musk. Cloud of Havana smoke. The wail of an electric guitar. Peppermint and red wine. Hysterical, confined gonging. Smoked chili peppers. Garlic-and-peptic gall. The melancholy wail of a gypsy violinist playing hot jazz on a tuba. The sights and sounds and tastes and smells and feels that were the sensory images of the residents of Golden Groves interpenetrated the images of the inanimate world, blending and melding with them, until people and things became Indistinguishable aspects of the chaotic whole.
Marvin’s mind, except in isolated moments, consisted entirely of the combination of sensory impulses getting through to his brain at any given time. He existed as the confluence of these sensory images; in a sense, he became his sensory experience, no longer time-bound to memory and expectation, no longer a detached point of view sardonically bouncing around inside his own skull. Only in isolated stretches when his synesthetic flashes were at momentary ebbs did he step outside his own immediate experience, wonder at the strangeness in his own mind, watch himself moving through the trees and cabins and people of Golden Groves like some kind of automaton. At these times, he felt a certain vague sense of loss. He could not tell whether it was sadness at his temporary fall from a more sublime mental state, or whether his ordinary everyday consciousness was mourning its own demise.
One morning, when the granola in his mouth had scattered jeweled images of sparkling beads as he crunched it against a coffee backdrop of brown velvet, Harry Krell held him back as he started to walk out onto the porch for his morning booster session.
“This is day thirty for you, Marvin,” Krell said.
Marvin stared back at him dumbly, hearing a hollow, brassy wail, seeing a rectangle of blight orange outlined against deep blue.
“I said this is the last day you’ve paid for. Either pony up another five hundred dollars, or send for someone to take you back to L.A. You won’t be in any shape to drive for about a week.”
No Direction Home Page 22
