The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  “You know,” Arlene said, making some kind of dialectical leap from indignation to crusading, “you’re really in a position to help people like this. Isn’t there some way you could refer at least the ones in New York to the Foundation for Total Consciousness?”

  Now there’s an idea! “Y’know, you may just have something there...” I said thoughtfully. “Dirk just might go for it—if you think Harvey would give him a kickback.”

  “A kickback!”

  “Oh, not a big one,” I soothed. “Dirk would probably settle for something like 5% of the first year’s take. He’d figure to make it up on the volume.”

  Ted couldn’t take it any longer. “Cut it out, man,” she said. “She thinks you’re serious.”

  “But I am serious, Ted,” I said with a big Dickie Lee shit-eating smile. “Dirk would go for it. Don’t you think old Harv would?”

  “Aw shit!” Ted said.

  “And as a side-deal, Harv would get 5% of the fees from all the twitches he could refer to Dirk.”

  “Are you equating this disgusting swindle with the Foundation for Total Consciousness?” Arlene practically shrieked.

  “Sure,” I said blandly. “Fundamentally, it’s the same con. Dirk and Harvey are both master bullshit artists. Same clientele, potentially. They’re both peddling answers to a lot of empty people. They’d get along fine.”

  A long, long, grossed-out silence. Ted, Doris, and Arlene exchanged shocked looks. Then the same kind of fever seemed to put a sheen on their six eyeballs: the intense rodent-mindlessness of a Salvation Army topkick in the presence of a sinner, the look of Dickie Lee about to persuade a neophyte fee-reader with delusions of conscience of the morality of the operation. Well, I couldn’t say I hadn’t asked for it.

  “Look, Tom, I didn’t really want to get into it,” Ted said unconvincingly, “but you’ve really got a crazy paranoid thing going about Harvey. You should’ve seen yourself last week, man!”

  I clocked Arlene; she was hunched forward like a rooting section. I was now damn sure there was more to this evening than met the eye. I was willing to bet the three of them had come here to play games with my mind. Okay, four can play that game too....

  “Will you admit one thing, Ted?” I said. “Will you admit that I should know a junkie’s face when I see one?”

  Another long awkward silence. Doris and Ted looked at each other uneasily, probably wondering how to sweep the subject under the rug. Arlene just looked puzzled. I was back out ahead of them.

  I looked straight into Arlene’s big green eyes. “I was a junkie, you know,” I said conversationally. “A pretty heavy habit.” Her eyes got wider, then seemed to narrow, and a muscle in her jaw twitched.

  “Yes, but he’s been off it for a long time, right Tom?” Doris said quickly.

  “Right,” I said.

  “How... how did you manage to stop?” Arlene said, suddenly the uptight square chick trying to make small talk with a Dope-Fiend. “Analysis...? Lexington? Synanon?”

  “Boredom,” I told her. “It got to be a drag, so I gave it up for Lent.”

  “Cold Turkey?” she said. “Just like that?”

  Oh WoW.

  “Just like that.”

  “But wasn’t it...? I mean, I’ve heard that junkies almost never kick it by themselves. The withdrawal symptoms...”

  “Are greatly exaggerated by bullshit artists who write about dope-fiends,” I said. “And by junkies who use it as an excuse to take the next shot. I did a certain amount of puking and shivering and sweating and screaming for a few days. Combine three consecutive days of the twenty-four hour virus with a migraine, malaria and a bad hangover and you’ll get the idea. Fun it ain’t, but honest, you can live through it.”

  Muscles all over Arlene relaxed; her eyes got warmer; I almost got the feeling she was undressing me in her mind. She was impressed. And no wonder—here was a chick who was convinced she needed a shrink because of penis-envy or some other Freudian fairy tale face to face with a junkie who had locked himself in a room and beat 99 to 1 odds by going “Cold Turkey.” Thanks to The Man With the Golden Arm & Co., I was now a bona fide existentialist hero in her eyes. God bless you, Otto Preminger.

  “But you couldn’t have been... the usual junkie,” she said admiringly. “I mean, it is true that most of them can’t stop.” Now I was reasonably impressed. Also, she had handed me the straight-line I was angling for.

  “Most of them don’t want to stop,” I said. “It’s not the withdrawal bummer—that’s just an easy cop-out. It’s why they become junkies in the first place. Most junkies become junkies because they’re junk-prone personalities. I became a junkie because I was living with a junkie and it was what came naturally. When I got good and tired of her bad scenes, I threw her out, and once she was gone, there was no reason for me to stay on smack. So I stopped. Because I’m not a junk-prone personality. You and Ted and Doris are.”

  “What???” More or less in chorus.

  “Man, that’s the Foundation! All of you sitting there and mainlining old Harv’s Total Consciousness junk.”

  “Bullshit, man!” Ted said. “You’re just playing word-games and you know it.”

  But Arlene seemed to be even more fascinated than before. “What do you mean?” she said earnestly. Old Ted had said exactly the wrong thing; the would-be writer side of her had been turned on. She leaned a little closer. I could fee the warmth of her body beside me know.

  I turned to her; Ted and Doris were strictly excess baggage now, whether they knew it or not.

  “Why do you go to the Foundation?” I said.

  “Why... ah... to achieve Total Consciousness...”

  “What’s Total Consciousness?”

  “I don’t know how to put it into words...”

  “You want to be a writer and you can’t put it into words?”

  She frowned, smiled, then shrugged and said: “Well... ah, Harvey says it’s... losing your ego hang-ups... being able to live totally in the immediacy of now... Kind of a Buddhist thing, the annihilation of the ego...”

  “Ego-death?”

  “Well... I suppose so, but I mean not as negative as it sounds...”

  “Ego-death doesn’t sound negative at all the way some people say it.”

  “You mean Timothy Leary and his acid cult?”

  “Uh huh. You could say they’re acid-junkies.” Did I really believe that? Was Robin an acid-junkie? Well, what the hell, true or not, it was the right move in the game.

  “But acid isn’t like heroin,” Arlene said. “Heroin isn’t a psychedelic.” Of course she was right; that was the difference: heroin turns you off, acid turns you on.

  “Neither is the Foundation for Total Consciousness,” I said.

  Arlene and I stared at each other, me projecting, she receiving, I thought. I hoped. Win or lose, she was at least giving me a good game.

  “Bull-shit it isn’t!” Ted said. “Total Psychotherapy is the only real consciousness-expander.”

  I kept my eyes locked on Arlene’s. “See?” I said, smiling at her, not bothering to answer Ted. “He admits it’s a drug.”

  “But not like heroin...”

  “Oh no?” I said. “It hooks you, doesn’t it? It changes your head like junk.”

  “Acid changes your... head too, doesn’t it?”

  “Sure, but the idea is to come back—it’s called an acid trip, right? But people who get hung-up on junk like the Foundation or heroin want their heads to stay changed.”

  “I think I see...” Arlene said slowly. “You’re right about one thing anyway... the Foundation’s thing is to make the change permanent...”

  The lines of relationship in the room were on the verge of shifting. Ted, Doris and Arlene had come in together; I was the outsider. With a little nudge, Ted and Doris would become the outsiders, and Arlene and I....

  “Aw bullshit,” said Ted.

  Now I looked at him, but it was a posture I made strictly for Arlene’s benefit. �
��You mean you don’t want the Foundation to change your head?” I said.

  “Well sure... but...”

  “But there are good changes and bad changes,” Doris said.

  “Yeah,” said Ted, “and the Foundation puts you through good changes.”

  “How do you know that till you’ve changed?” I said.

  Silence.

  “You don’t,” I said. “You know you don’t know—you just hope. Question is, Arlene Cooper, why do you hate Arlene Cooper so much that you’re willing to take the chance of letting some cat play with your mind when all you really know is that he’ll change you, for better or worse, in sickness or in health, till death do you part?”

  She stared at me as if I could be her next guru-candidate. Which, of course, was exactly the idea. “Sometimes... sometimes you’ve got to take that chance, I guess...” she finally said.

  “But only with someone who’s taking the same chance with himself on you,” I said. Our eyes bored holes in each other.

  “I... I suppose that’s one of the things a man and a woman want out of a relationship,” she said.

  I nodded. “I’d be willing to take that chance with you....”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Ted and Doris fidgeting, exchanging glances, realizing, I hoped, that it was time for a quick exit.

  “I... I... might be willing to take that chance on you too,” Arlene said. A jaw muscle twitched.

  “But you’re afraid.” I smiled at her. “I’m a little afraid too,” I said. “That’s a good sign.” I touched her hand lightly. She didn’t pull it away.

  “Maybe we... should... talk about it...” she said.

  “Well, uh, look,” Ted said loudly, “we gotta be going. Gotta make my private session with Harvey in about an hour. Coming, Arlene?”

  “I don’t have a session tonight,” she said. Aha!

  “It’s still pretty early,” I said. “Why don’t you stick around and we can....”

  She smiled at me, squeezed by hand.

  “All right,” she said, with just enough uptightness coming back into her voice to let me know that she knew that I had a bit more in mind than discussing the ethical structure of the universe.

  Check.

  And mate?

  6 - Belly to Belly

  I closed the door behind Ted and Doris, slid the policelock bar into place and walked back through the clutter of the kitchen to the doorway of the living room, where I stood quietly for a moment clocking Arlene Cooper.

  She was sitting up very straight on the edge of the couch, staring at the bookcases against the far wall, or maybe just staring. Her medium-length blonde hair looked coppery and sensual in the orange light, but the line of her jaw was firmly set, her eyes seemed withdrawn behind those glasses, and her fingers were toying nervously with the folds of her black skirt. Standing there, I got a cold feeling in my stomach, fighting the warmth in my groin; digging her in a just-the-two-of-us-alone situation, I was pretty sure this was going to be a lot more complicated than I had thought.

  Girding my equivocal loins, I entered the lion’s den, sat down beside her, smiled, and was surely about to think of a brilliant lead-in, when she began to knead her hands together and said:

  “Look, Tom, I don’t want you to think... I mean that I usually... put myself in this... kind of situation at the spur of the moment... I mean... I’m not...”

  Oh shit, I thought, honest baby. I’ll just respect the ass off of you! “Not what?” I said, with all the deep, serious concern I could muster.

  “Well... you know... I don’t usually go... hopping into bed with guys I’ve just met....” Smoothing the cloth of her skirt with her hands now.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Why not! What do you think I am?”

  “A girl,” I said. “What do you think I am?”

  Now at least she was puzzled instead of angry. She looked at me strangely, cocking her head to one side like a parrot.

  I took her hand. It was cold and sweaty and rigid in mine, but she didn’t pull it away.

  “Let me tell you my terrible secret,” I said. “Many times in the past, I’ve been perfectly willing to hop into bed with girls I’ve just met. In fact, I’ve done it on every occasion I could. Do you now consider me cheap? Am I just an easy lay? Will you now use me callously and then toss me aside?”

  She laughed; the lines in her face relaxed and her hand softened in mine. But it went rigid again and the muscles in her jaw tightened as the laugh passed and she said: “But you’re a man.”

  “Nice of you to notice.”

  “You know what I mean—”

  Oh WoW, did I know what she meant! I was getting the shitty end of Ye Olde Double Standard, only upside down and backwards.

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. “But do you really know what you mean?”

  “I know how men think.”

  “Really? Are you on the Pill?” (Might as well kill two birds with one stone.)

  “Of all the—” She pulled her hand away.

  “Take it easy. I’m not trying to be gross,” I said. “I’m just trying to show you something about yourself. Humor me for a minute. Are you on the Pill?”

  “Well... yes—”

  “Okay. Now, it’s logical to assume that you’re on the Pill because you don’t want to get pregnant, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And unless you really have delusions of grandeur, there’s only one way to get pregnant, right?”

  “So?”

  “So if you’re on the Pill, you’re walking around thinking it might happen at any time.”

  She cringed at the truth. I took both her hands. Her palms were stiff and sweaty.

  “You really don’t understand what I’m saying, do you?” I said. “Look, all I’m saying is it’s all right. I’m thinking about making it with someone I just met. You know that for openers, you expect it. You’d be insulted if I didn’t want to, wouldn’t you? You don’t think it makes me a shit, do you?”

  “Just a man,” she said.

  “Okay. So why judge yourself harder than you judge me? Fucking is fun. We both know that, I hope. You don’t put me down for wanting to enjoy your body. So why should you think I’d think any the less of you for wanting to do what I want you to want to do?”

  She looked at me wide-eyed. I could sense that I had gotten to her mind, but there seemed to be a whole lot of weird garbage between her head and her cunt. This was all really starting to bring me down.

  I smiled a mock-coy smile. “Okay,” I said, “so relax. I promise I won’t even make a pass at you. I dig you. We’ll forget about sex until we’ve come to a more complete understanding of the ethical structure of the universe.”

  “Very funny.”

  “No, I mean it,” I said soberly. “You’re a woman, but you’re also a human being. I’m not going to con you into doing something you don’t want to do. I’m perfectly willing to pass up a little fun to prove that to you.”

  She looked at me long and hard. She frowned. She smiled. Her lower lip trembled.

  “I... I think we’re starting to carry this intellectualizing a little too far...” she said. Paused.

  And leaned over and kissed me on the lips. My mouth was caught closed. Her mouth was open. She opened my lips with hers and jammed her tongue into my mouth, moved it around powerfully, almost athletically. Our tongues met for a moment, disputed the territory. Our lips parted. We looked into each other’s eyes.

  It had been a very clumsy kiss, but coming from this girl at this time, in this situation, I appreciated it for the brave and magnificent gesture it was, and in the brief moment when our lips parted, I loved her for it.

  “Arlene Cooper,” I said, “there’s a woman inside you.”

  She smiled a sweet little girl smile, took off her glasses, and placed them on the table. Somehow, in context, it was a terrifically sexy thing to do, turned me on better than a fullscale strip.

  We reache
d for each other, our lips met, and again her tongue forced itself into my mouth, huge and stiff and awkward. I forced it back with my own; she resisted for a moment, then understood. All at once, her mouth went nice and woman-soft, and her lips welcomed my tongue in, and my arms were tight around her, and her hands moved slightly over my back. I ran a hand over her breasts: full and sighing but constricted by her brassiere. I caressed her tongue with mine and stroked her outer thigh. She was wearing a girdle. She moved liquidly against me, moaned softly into my mouth. I pulled my lips slowly from hers and the kiss ended with the tips of our tongues touching outside our mouths.

  We faced each other inches apart. Her green eyes had gone soft. I had gone hard. Electricity at last in the air between us. She smiled shyly. I smiled back, squeezed her hands.

  “We could go into the bedroom...” I suggested softly.

  She looked down, squeezed my hands back and, without looking at me, nodded yes.

  “I’ve got a ten o’clock class tomorrow,” she said as we stood before the bed. “Could you set the alarm for 8:30....”

  A mood-breaker, but necessary, I suppose. “I’ve got to be at work by nine,” I said. “It’s already set for eight, okay?”

  She nodded, reached to turn out the light on the night table. I grabbed her hand before she could reach the switch. Our eyes met in argument. I won.

  I pulled back the covers and sat down on the bed. She turned her back on me and kicked off her shoes. I took off my shoes and socks. Still with her back to me, she unbuttoned her blouse, took it off, and tossed it over her shoulder onto the night table. Her brassiere was white and faded and cut deep into the pale flesh of her back. I took off my shirt and undershirt and threw them over her blouse. She undid her skirt, stepped through it and put it on the night table. I took off my pants and sat on the bed in my shorts digging her as she detached the tops of here stockings from her girdle and rolled them off her legs functionally and unsensually. She unhooked her bra, took it off. I could see the red marks across her back. I took off my shorts and enjoyed my nakedness as she struggled out of her girdle. More red welts above her soft, full ass.

  She paused, then turned, and I saw her nakedness for a moment: heavy full breasts with pale pink nipples, the slightest concavity to her belly, smooth firm thighs, whispy red pubic hair, an uptight smile as she looked at my body stretched out on the bed, a tremor in her lower lip as her eyes passed briefly across my hard-on.