The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  “Or vice versa.”

  “I don’t understand...”

  “Look, if what you’re looking for is real human contact, how about splitting with me right now? Forget therapy and pick up on a human being for a change.”

  “You’re disgusting!” she said “Can’t think about anything but sex, can you?”

  “I said something about sex?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “You ever been on junk, baby?”

  “Certainly not!”

  I had had it. “That’s what you think,” I said. She stared at me for a long moment; furious but not quite sure what she was furious at.

  Fortunately, at that point there was some kind of commotion at the doorway to the hall. A lot of people seemed to be clustering around someone I couldn’t see. Ted was looking around the room. He spotted me, yelled: “Tom! Tom! Over here!” It was a convenient out. “Later,” I grunted, getting up and walking toward the tumult.

  Ted grabbed me by the arm, pulled me into the mystic circle at the center of which was a short, balding man of about fifty in a faded white tieless shirt and baggy gray pants with a soft, pallid pudding-face and watery mild eyes behind brown-rimmed glasses—just about the grayest cat you could ever hope to meet.

  “Harvey,” Ted said, “this is Tom Hollander, I told you about.”

  This was the great Harvey Brustein? The Black Villain or the Living Buddha, depending on which side you were on? This... nothing? This... this schmoo?

  “Uh... yes...” Harvey said in a bland dentist’s voice. “Pleased to meet you... uh... Tom...”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. It was all wrong. A cat who looked like a scruffy accountant had all these people enthralled? How did he do it? How could Ted and Doris take this creep seriously?

  “Well... uh...” Harvey said. “We... ah might as well get started.”

  He made his way to the dais, sat down on the folding chair. People began to settle themselves on the floor. I sat down on the floor near the back of the room with Ted and Doris. Good old Linda sat a good distance away. In a few minutes of shuffling around, the whole floor was covered with silent acolytes waiting eagerly for pearls of wisdom to fall from the mouth of the gray little guru in the folding chair.

  Old Harv fished in a paper shopping bag under his chair, shuffled some papers, put them back. It got quieter and quieter. Harvey took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, put them back. People hunkered forward. Ted’s face was tense, his blue eyes strangely blank. Linda nibbled her lower lip. I began to take old Harv a little more seriously; he was doing that old Man number—make ‘em wait—and he was doing it well.

  Harvey opened his mouth. Everyone tensed. “Ashtray?” he said.

  Almost an audible moan. He was really stretching it out, seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, making us wait, making the very corpuscles of our blood hunger for that dirty old surge. Old Harv knew his business, yes!

  Someone handed him an ashtray. He put it down beside his chair. He took a pack of Winstons out of his shirt picket. It took him a full ten seconds to get one out and stick it in his mouth. Uptight! Uptight! What a pusher old Harv would’ve made! Everyone was twitching. Harvey reached into his shirt pocket for matches; they weren’t there. Into the shopping bag. Shuffle, shuffle. Pack of matches. Pulled off a match. Struck it. Nothing happened. Jesus! Struck it again. Another match. This one lit. Sucked smoke. Exhaled. Sighed. Crossed legs.

  “Why can’t you all relax?” Harvey said in a soft, totally humorless voice.

  Christ, was that whole number planned?

  “Human beings consider themselves the most highly evolved form of life on Earth. A dog can relax. A cat can relax. Even a lizard can relax. All the way, thinking sweet no-thoughts. So why can’t you do what a dog or a cat or a lizard can? Why can’t you relax?”

  Harvey took a long drag on his cigarette, drawing out the silence. A simple trick—uptight people, then tell them they’re uptight. I tried to relax, just to show the bastard—but try not to think of a red-assed monkey. See the mind-game he was playing?

  “You think too much, that’s your problem,” Harvey said. “You watch your own minds. An animal doesn’t do that. An animal experiences its environment directly. It feels imperatives and it acts or feels no imperatives and relaxes. Animals can be frustrated, but if you eliminate the frustrating condition, the animal relaxes. Because animals have no time-sense, no worlds of memory. Animals experience no interface between inner and outer realities, no ego watching itself and remembering old frustrations, anticipating new ones. No hangups on things that have no present reality. Are you animals? Wouldn’t you like to be animals?”

  He paused again. I found myself drifting in a half-remembered dream... calm... blank... not caring... no hang-ups... like lying on the bed with Anne for hours, not moving... swathed in the soft sweet cotton batting of heroin... yes, there had been good times too that I had forgotten... when we were lush and torpid sunning ourselves like lizards on a rock in the timeless tropical sun....

  “Sure,” Harvey said, “you’re animals. But animals-plus. Plus that cerebral cortex that makes a man something more complex than an animal. What’s in that lump of gray jelly? You are. The you that thinks of itself as ‘me’. Ego, memory, time-sense, fears, hopes, hangups. Total Psychotherapy concentrates on that cerebral cortex. It’s all we have to worry about—the rest of us is pure animal, continuous with the environment.”

  He paused again, took another drag. I was beginning to understand why everyone around me was leaning forward, hanging on his words. Harvey was into something all right, something big. I found myself wanting to believe... in what? But I was also afraid... of what?

  “Scary, isn’t it?” Harvey said, as if reading my mind. “It’s scary because it means that you’re all unhappy, every one of you, simply because you’re human beings. It’s obvious. You all have memories. You’ve all experienced frustrations. Remember? Remember being a fetus floating in an environment designed for perfection... you were an animal then. And then you were ejected from paradise and everything since has been a downhill slide because it’s less than the perfection we all remember. So in times of stress, we curl up into a fetal position, don’t we? Don’t we all love a good dreamless sleep? Because we’re like animals then—no interface between external and internal realities, between desire and fulfillment, between the me and the it. No ego watching itself. The truth we all refuse to face is that the thing we love most—our ‘me-ness’—is the source of all unhappiness. The goal of the Foundation for Total Consciousness is first to face the truth and then to eliminate the interface, to become totally conscious not of the environment, but in the environment. Like an animal.”

  I felt as if I were alone in the room with Harvey, as if he were speaking directly to me, to a place inside me that was void. No longer did he seem gray or trivial. He was calling to something in me but somehow not of me. A blind something that yearned to throw itself into the arms of the infinite... the infinite what? There seemed to be something I should remember... had to remember, or be lost forever. And the feeling that this had all happened before....

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” Harvey said. “Can you face it? What do we all fear the most? Death. But an animal doesn’t fear death. Because it is the ego, that interface between the me and the it within us, which fears death—not the death of the body, but its own annihilation. Look at the promise of immortality upon which Christianity is based. The immortality not of the body but of the ego, the soul. That is the death we cannot face, the annihilation of the interface between external and internal realities. That’s why you all need Total Psychotherapy, whether you’ve been told you’re neurotic or not. Because the so-called normal personality is the disease itself. That artificial construct is the source of all unhappiness—and it defends itself with all the psychic resources at our command. So we must defeat our own innermost selves in order to be free. That’s why only Total Psychotherapy can free us from
the tyranny of our selves. You can’t do it yourselves—because it is the self which must be defeated!”

  And suddenly I understood. I understood it all. Harvey was pushing junk; he was pushing the very essence of junk, the void inside the needle, the end to pain and frustration and caring, the thing that makes so many terminal junkies finally give themselves the O.D., the last big surge, Dose Terminal.

  Harvey was pushing the very soul of junk. And every junkie knows deep down that the soul of junk is death.

  Oh yes, there was nothing trivial about what Harvey was offering. The straight, uncut stuff. And there were Ted and Doris, my friends beside me, and they were hooked, sucking at the teats of Kali, mainlining death.

  A whole roomfull of terminal junkies, really terminal, and the bland pudding-face of the creature on the folding chair was a face I knew all too well: the Man, Anti-Life, the Sweet Destroyer, Prince of the Final Darkness.

  Something human and screaming inside me moved my body and my mouth and I found myself on my feet shouting: “I know you, man, oh Jesus, I know you!”

  A whole mood shattered. The people on the floor were looking at me as if I were crazy, I mean conventionally crazy. Linda Kahn’s lips were curled in a grimace of disgust; Ted and Doris shook their heads at each other. And Harvey... Harvey was just a gray little man, not... not...

  “We’d like to hear your feelings,” Harvey said in that other voice of his, the dentist’s voice. And reality flipped over again for me: I looked at Harvey and saw the schmoo-mask. But behind it lurked the other reality: it was a mask, for wasn’t I standing in a room full of people who were being sucked dry by what looked like a nonentity? Maybe he was just a dirty little quack, maybe it was just money to him—but that didn’t matter, he was pushing death and they were buying. Some pushers are on the stuff and some wouldn’t touch it. It doesn’t matter to the clientele.

  “Can’t you see it?” I said “Are you all deaf? Didn’t you hear the man? He’s telling you to groove behind death—”

  Blank, vacant stares. Ted and Doris, my oldest, closest friends, and they didn’t really hear a word I was saying—they were hooked like all the rest.

  I was just making a public asshole out of myself. You can’t argue with junkies, not about their junk you can’t.

  “You see?” Harvey said. “That’s a very typical reaction. Your ego won’t accept the necessity for its own annihilation. But your hostility is actually a healthy sign—you’ve seen the truth and accepted it on a deep level and so you’re afraid. That’s the first step. Let me help you take the next one. Ask yourself: ‘Is my reaction that of a happy, tranquil man? Don’t I want peace? Real peace....’”

  “Shut up! Shut up! I told you, I’ve seen you a thousand times in—”

  Christ, I thought, I’m starting to gibber! I’ve got to get out of here or... or... A terrible fear came over me: that knowing what Harvey was, knowing what lurked in his therapy sessions and mutual assassination groups, I would still be unable to turn my back on it; the fear of the ex-junkie that he can never really turn his back on junk.

  I looked down at Ted, at Doris. Glazed junkie-eyes looked back.

  “I’m getting out of here,” I told them. “Now. Come with me.”

  “Tom...” Ted said, his voice full of genuine soothing concern, “take it easy man—”

  I looked around the room; empty eyes stared back with a loathsome pity. I looked at Linda Kahn; she looked away. I felt alone, terribly, finally alone. I turned, stepped over their bodies, making for the door and the long hallway back to reality. As I stepped into the relative darkness of the hallway, I heard Harvey’s voice behind me: “Don’t worry, Ted, it’s a natural reaction. I think he’ll be back—”

  Alone in the hallway, it was an effort not to break into a run.

  Outside, it was cold and it was raining. I shivered. I felt the dank rain soaking my hair. I was cold and alone in the middle of the night.

  And up there, in the warmth, were people who shared something I was not a part of, who had something to believe in—and who wanted me. I really believed that: they truly wanted me.

  So had Anne.

  Chilled to the bone, I began walking downtown in the rain, wondering what would happen if I met a pusher.

  2 - The Girl In The Rain

  The roach-end of New York: Second Avenue between the beginnings of the classy East Side in the upper Thirties and the outskirts of the East Village at Fourteenth Street after twelve on a November night in the rain. Gray and lifeless as an IND Subway tunnel—an open air Subway-street, one-way downtown. With the staggered lights, the traffic in the gutter shoots past you in a blur like the A-Train Express and the sidewalks are almost as desolate as an empty Subway station—hulking gray tenements, silent lightless groceries and fruit stores, garbage decaying in puddles along the curb—and the few people you do see are super-uptight, because who’s walking on a street like this except a mugger or a pervert or some kinda dope-fiend?

  So why was I walking downtown in the rain with eleven bucks in my pocket on one of the easiest streets in town to get a cab on and with the Second Avenue bus running all the way to St. Mark’s? Guess old Harv would call it a masochistic scene. Screw old Harv! What it really was was a playback of one of my old junkie numbers. (Junkies always feel they’re doing everything for at least the second time and usually they’re right.) How many times had I walked this street or a street like it (with or without Anne), having missed a connection for one reason or another with exactly the necessary $3.00 (usually in dimes and quarters) for a minimal bag in my pocket and afraid to blow a lousy 20 cents on the bus because I just might run into a dealer somehow in which case the difference between $3.00 and $2.80 would be all the difference in the world and you can never tell, I might run into a dealer, has been known to happen, better not take the chance.

  So that was the place good old Harv had shoved my head back into. Because if I didn’t play that mind-game, I would remember I had $11, would hail a cab, and once I got into it, would I be able to give the cabbie my home address or would I make it back to the Foundation where I knew I could score something to get me through the night? Old Harv expected me to come back, and I didn’t want to find out he was right the easy way. Yeah, he had gotten to me with his mind-game: at least he had started me playing evil mind-games with myself again.

  Therefore: walking home in the rain on Bummer Avenue. I remembered another mind-game. Once, when I hadn’t been able to score any smack, I had gotten really bombed on some awful combination—Romilar and speed or something equally foul—and had to walk a bummer street to get from here to there, and I felt I just couldn’t cut the trip between. So somehow (I mean I was really stoned) I had turned my mind off in one place, become a mindless walking robot for the duration of the trip, then woken my mind up again at my destination, thus cutting out the experience and the memory-track of the trip between. As far as my head was concerned, it was exactly as if I had teleported like some science fiction superman out of A. E. Van Vogt.

  A handy trick, and I tried to make it work now. But I couldn’t. I was all too straight, stuck on Second Avenue, in the cold, in the rain, on a bummer, thinking: “If this is reality, I’ll take vanilla.”

  Pissed-off, too. At whatever was wrong with me or the scenes I made that I always ended up defining my sanity in negatives: didn’t stay in the old parental looney-bin so I could finish college; didn’t let myself end up as a terminal junkie with Anne, whatever gutter she was flopping in now; didn’t let myself buy Harvey’s sweet shit; didn’t get into a cab which might’ve taken me back to the Foundation.

  What was wrong with me? What if I had made the positive decisions? Stuck it out at home. Finished college. Never left that Flatbush never-never land. Never kicked Anne out. Stayed a junkie. Given myself to Harvey and his Total Consciousness. Where would I be now? Living on Long Island married to a plastic virgin from Vassar? O.D.ed in a doorway with Anne? Hooked on Harvey Brustein?

  No, the hell
of it was that every damned choice I had made had been the right one. And where had all those cagey right choices gotten me?

  Soaked and cold walking alone down Second Avenue in the middle of the night.

  Nearing Fourteenth Street: to my left, blocks of red brick housing project, a universe of beery Post Office Foremen and their big-assed housefraus and cherubic brats. Yeah, and I saw through that stage-set, too, the way I saw through my parents, saw through college, saw through junk, saw through my silly-ass job, saw through Ted and Doris and their little tin god, saw through every fucking thing, dammit! Just once, I’d like to look out through the eyeholes in my skull and have something greater and wiser and more beautiful than Tom Hollander look back.

  Fourteenth Street—border zone. Below, the outskirts of the East Village. To the east, the street was the frontier between the housing project and some world’s champion Puerto Rican slums on the south, all the way to the East River. To the west, Fourteenth Street was Puerto Rican Disneyland: Spanish movie houses, Army-Navy stores, a couple of slimy Chinese restaurants, pawn shops, cuchifriterias, cruddy Nedickses, an old movie house converted to a supermarket—“Hamburger 35 cents” sharing billing on the marquee with “Maxwell House Coffee 59 cents lb.”

  Standing on the northwest corner, waiting like a good little citizen for the light to change, I played another mind-game with myself: the choice game. I could turn east toward the project and the Road to Levittown, west toward El Bario and the Proletariat, north back to old Harv and Total Consciousness of the Total Void, or south into the East Village and what passed for home. Existential choice, dig?

  Sure....

  Surprise, surprise, when the light turned green, I took destiny in my hands and opted for the East Village and home.

  Still, the scene really does change when you cross Fourteenth Street. There are people who say they never go north of Fourteenth and they mean it. Even on a crummy night like this, Second Avenue starts to come alive between Fourteenth and St. Mark’s. The weather kept the street scene down, but on those six blocks, you’ve got the Metro, a cheapo movie house, a library, two all-night candy stores, a brace of head shops, a late-night delicatessen, an Old Polacks’ Home, and assorted floating Villagey shops.