The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  The room seemed to flare up with bright yellow light of sunshine—by digging the essence of the evil in Dope, I was free, not just free from the danger, but free to take hash, pot, even acid, free to take the Middle Path between Condition Terminal and gibbering East German anti-Dope paranoia, free to snatch as many goodies as I could from the hands of the Devil inside as long as my reflexes held. Free! Free! Free!

  “You seem to have come to some conclusion,” Harvey said.

  My lips laughed like the grin of the Cheshire cat suspended in nospace. “Yeah, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no conclusion. Secret of the universe, man—don’t look for Final Conclusions. They’re just not there.”

  “But there is a conclusion,” the Harveybear growled softly. “And it’s nothing if not final. And we don’t have to look for it. It’s called death.”

  From the corners of the room, shadows advanced, devouring the light. The Harveybear grew dark shaggy fur, long yellow teeth; its eyes became hollow sockets.

  “Don’t talk to me about death!” I screamed. “I’ve seen too much death tonight too much—”

  “But you haven’t experienced it,” the shaggy thing in the black chair said, licking its sharp teeth.

  “Of course I haven’t experienced it, you asshole! I’m sitting here talking to you ain’t I?”

  “But don’t you want to experience it? Get it all over with? Find out all there is to know?” It wasn’t making sense! The Harveybear was gibbering slavering scraps of white leather coats rising sun of blood hole into final darkness forever and ever who the fuck wants to know about death the end of everything long black slide into sleep with no bottom... And who the fuck has a choice?

  “Every true mystic has said you must die to be born again in one way or another. Don’t you think there might be a truth in there somewhere?” said the Giant Polar Bear God of endless frozen desert.

  “Pie in the sky in the great bye and bye...”

  “Let’s bring it down to Earth. As far down as we can. Let’s talk about fucking. Ever meet a girl who was afraid to have an orgasm?”

  “If you’re half the shrink you think you are, you know that Arlene—”

  “I know. I wanted to be sure you did. What is she afraid of? Not pleasure—but of surrender. Not surrender to anything in particular, just surrender itself.”

  “Keep going,” I found myself saying. Shadows seemed to soften. The light from the floor lamp bathed Harvey in gold. The words poured from his calm Buddha-lips like living glass butterflies. He was right about Arlene, and it wasn’t just sex. That was why she was afraid of a real relationship—it meant surrender of a piece of her destiny to an outside force. He had it—the worm at her core. I felt myself in the presence of Truth...

  “Surrender to what?” the Gray Buddha said. “What is there to fear surrendering to if the fear has no specific object? How about surrender to reality itself, to give oneself to the unknown beyond your control and let it take you to the hidden shore?”

  “Sure, sure, that’s why Dope too—cast yourself into the arms of the great unknown. But why be afraid of it...?”

  “Because,” said Harvey, “the ultimate reality is death. That’s where we’re all going. Control is an illusion the unconscious individual erects to hide the unfaceable. Surrender control, and you lose the illusion and you see that the ultimate reality is death. Who does not fear death?”

  For an instant, the room seemed to go black, totally, finally, ultimately black like the hole at the bottom of Dope of sex of rising suns of blood on white leather of sleep without bottom or end and I heard my blind voice mumbling: “We all know about death... can’t do anything about it can’t face it why—”

  The calm, soft, sweet gray voice of Harvey pulled me back from the bottom of the lightless void; all the light in creation seemed to gather like a cloak about his shoulders and head.

  “We can’t do anything about it, so we’re afraid of it,” the voice said. “And because our ultimate reality is our ultimate fear, it fathers a million little fears—fears of getting too close—like fear of the orgasm, fear of love, fear of all consuming emotion, fear of passion, fear of commitment, even your own fear of the Foundation...”

  “Spare me the sales talk,” I protested wanly.

  Harvey smiled an all-knowing, all-forgiving Buddha-smile. “You see?” he said. “You do fear the Foundation, because it demands a commitment to something outside yourself, a force beyond your control. And that is the primal terror of our egos—fear of surrender to something beyond our control. Because our egos are the interface between external and internal reality; to destroy the interface and let in the ultimate reality is a kind of death.”

  I tried to tell myself it was just parlor Buddhism—but it had the feel of reality, the taste, the touch. Shit, he was admitting the ultimate put-down of his own Foundation—admitting that the goal was a kind of death! As if those gray eyes saw something beyond...

  “I was right about you,” I said. “You’re pushing death.”

  Harvey smiled a sad, strong smile. “Yes,” he said. “But what kind of death? Yes, Total Consciousness involves a kind of death. But what dies? The ego dies. And with it, all fear. Because fear is the tension between the way things are and the way we want them to be. You’ve got to die to be born again. If you go through that death, the death of ego-desire, real death will never have a hold on your life again.”

  Oh God, how I wanted to believe that! Harvey seemed so calm, so sure, so cosmically certain, so above and beyond it all. “How do you know all this?” I said. “Have you—”

  “Gone through to the other side? Yes. Look at me: I’m a middle-aged, middle-looking man with a middle intelligence, nothing more. But people listen to me and they follow me and I will get to them to go to San Francisco as you rightly say I want to. Why? Because I have gone through, and they can sense it and they want it, and so they believe...”

  Goddamn, look at him sitting there so sure, being totally humble and cosmically arrogant in the same breath. I did believe. I believed he believed. I believed what I wanted to believe. But...

  “But why don’t I believe...”

  Harvey shrugged. “Perhaps it’s the drugs. You’re closer to breaking through than any of them, and because you’re closer, your ego sees rather clearly what breaking through means and it’s fighting back hard. You have a very strong ego precisely because you’re so close to the truth and your sickness has grown huge muscles to fight it. Your greatest strength is your worst enemy.”

  Every word seemed to pulse and quiver with the truth. The only kicker was that it was a truth from either side: if my ego was me, Total Consciousness was its death; if I died, I had no guarantee the me I had been would dig the me that was reborn. Death was discontinuity. Discontinuity was death. I wanted to trust him; if I could believe he had gone through, I could make the leap myself to the freedom I saw could be beyond my me.

  But I saw that the essence was trust—I saw why the Foundation demanded total Surrender. It had to. There was no other way through... If there was a way through and Total Consciousness wasn’t just another dealers’ con... But he had just admitted—

  “You just admitted the whole San Francisco business was a con!”

  Harvey sighed heavily, then smiled, as if his very special pupil had finally achieved his first minor satori. “You finally noticed,” he said. “Of course it’s a con. It has to be. I found that out the hard way. After months of trying, I finally understood that you can’t talk people into taking that leap into the center of their own fears. You’ve got to push them into the water and let them learn to swim—with a lifeguard around, of course, just in case. So I give them hope in the Foundation, the only hope they’ve ever found, and then I force them to leap into the unknown to keep it.”

  “And make them think it’s their own idea to make sure they do it?”

  Harvey nodded, a cosmic weary nod made it seem like the whole universe rested on his shoulders. Maybe it did
?

  “That’s a cruel thing to do.”

  “It’s a cruel task to be set,” Harvey said. “Besides, I’ll be there to catch them on the other side.”

  “What about those who might not make it through?”

  “Every meaningful act involves risk.”

  He was so right! If he wasn’t the cleverest incarnation of the Devil yet, Harvey had to be some new kind of unclassifiable saint. But wasn’t that just the final word-game cop-out? He was dead right about the core of things—it was the leap that counted, the kamikaze dive into the unknown. Could any means that achieved the highest end really be bad?

  I looked at Harvey with new eyes; saw a man I couldn’t understand, a man with the total arrogance to force people into their final fears, the total certainty that he was right, the total courage to make the decision alone.

  “Maybe I’ve misjudged you, Harvey,” I said inadequately.

  Harvey smiled a tired, warm, almost humble smile. “I’m used to that,” he said. “The questions is, what do you do now? I can’t help you any further—you know too much to be pushed. You’ve got to do it yourself.”

  “How do I do it myself?”

  “Only you know that. It’s got to be some action, a headlong leap into the center of your fears. Only you know where that center is.”

  Harvey stared at me, not smiling, not blinking—a hard unwavering stare that saw through layers and layers of flesh and bone and being, down, down to the center of my fears. He knew where that center was; I knew that he knew. And knowing that he knew I knew, I was forced to admit to myself that I had known all along that the thing I feared most was giving myself to something greater than myself, trusting in the great unknown, trusting in something with mortal power for good or evil, life or death.

  Trusting in him.

  I stared back at him begging with my eyes for him to tell me to do what I knew I had to do. But his face was a Buddha-mask and I knew he would never tell me, knew that he knew I knew exactly what I had to do.

  I felt ultimately terrified and ultimately brave as I said, “I’m gonna vote to go to San Francisco and I’m gonna go with you.”

  As I said it, I felt an enormous weight lift off my shoulders and head for the stratosphere. I knew dead certain that I had leaped through the very center of my fears because now I was on the other side: there was nothing left to be afraid of. I was free! At last my fate was in the hands of an unknown destiny, a force far, far greater than myself. I had dared the unthinkable and now I no longer needed to think—I could just be!

  Harvey smiled what seemed like a much less weary smile, as if now he were not quite so alone. “I think you’ve taken the important step.”

  “So do I,” I said, feeling it with every ounce of my being.

  We smiled at each other for a long silent moment. We smiled at each other as friends. I had won the final victory over myself: I loved Harvey Brustein.

  22 - The Path to Consciousness

  A weird five days since Magic Friday, five days I seemed to drift through like the ghost of Tom Hollander past, going through the motions of eating, sleeping and writing fee-letters, round and round the great circle of karma, while my consciousness chased its mystic navel around the outer reaches of the Great Beyond.

  Thing was, memory was playing chicken with my gut. I could reel off the film of Friday in my mind, recall every external event that had occurred. And on the ultimate cosmic level, I remembered a whole chain of feelings whose memories still tasted true. Yes, I had an event-track and a feeling-track; it was the certainty of the connection between them that was lacking. Could I trust in the truth of my acid visions? For that matter, could I trust my non-acid self? They were obviously in a knock-down drag-out with each other. Here on the straight side of the universe, I was finding a new faith in Harvey harder and harder to support as the days flickered by towards Thursday night and the Foundation vote on San Francisco and what had to be my real external moment of truth.

  Doubts... Yeah, I had doubts, but something had changed inside: now I did trust Harvey; it was not him I doubted but my lingering doubt, the shrill mocking voice of my ego. Thursday night, I had to make a decision which would bring me either salvation or damnation; trouble was I couldn’t be certain which. Like poised on the brink of jumping from one reality to another and though I knew which way I had to jump, I couldn’t rid myself of the notion that the jump was still blind.

  Aw bullshit! I was just conning myself again with that. My gut knew which way to jump—the memory of the great surge of freedom I had felt when I made up my stoned mind to trust my fate to Harvey and vote for San Francisco was still bright in my mind. Yeah, I had really made my decision already and I would damn well stick to it! Trust your instincts was the old party-line, and acid was the voice of instinct, and instinct told me to leap through the center of my fear, and I had, and instinct had been right, instinct had told me that Harvey was a strange kind of saint I might never really understand, and I had leapt into the arms of his truth, and the feeling it had given me was pure and clean and good.

  Shit, it was just the courage of that perfect moment that was eroding away. But I wouldn’t let it happen! I wouldn’t let fear force me into one more negative anti-life decision. I had put Robin and the whole ugly dope-dealing scene behind me, half my life; I had Arlene and the Foundation and the freedom of surrender to the impulse to Total Consciousness ahead of me, and all it took to keep it was one more moment of courage and then I could relax forever and just be. I had already made the right decision, a positive one for a change, and I wouldn’t let my dirty old ego psych me out of it. Now I understood my fear...

  So I had told myself on Saturday, on Sunday, on Monday, on Tuesday, and now I was giving myself the pep-talk again on Wednesday afternoon as I sat dreamily in front of my typewriter letting myself get further and further behind on the week’s quota. I understood why I was letting myself get so far behind and it seemed healthy—my instinct’s way of cutting through the tortured maze of my ego straight to my fingers, telling them to fuck up, don’t give a shit about a job you’ll soon be leaving, burn your bridges, baby. So, points, schmoints, what the fuck...

  “Oh Jesus!” Bruce moaned beside me, “this thing is just too much...”

  Mechanically I turned to Bruce—he already seemed like part of something I was leaving, there had been a pathos in the banter back and forth all week, an emptiness inside me that seemed both a gain and a loss.

  “What are you bitching about now?” I asked, pro forma.

  Bruce put his hand on a thick manuscript in a gray cardboard binder. “Another freak thinks he’s written the Bible,” he said.

  He handed me a letter—suddenly my gut dropped out from under me as I recognized the Foundation letterhead! “Dig this,” Bruce said. With a horrid empty bubble building inside my gut and reaching for my brain, I read:

  Dear Mr. Robinson:

  Here is my check for $35 and my book, The Path to Consciousness. I make no pretense at being a professional writer. But The Path to Consciousness was not written with literary intent, nor as a means of making money. This book represents the distillation of my life’s work with human consciousness through the Foundation for Total Consciousness, an institution which I founded and of which I am the head.

  Mr. Robinson, I’m confident that when you read this book, you’ll agree that the world at large must have access to it. I am willing to work with a professional writer to polish the prose. I am willing to do anything short of violating the integrity of the book to get The Path to Consciousness published. My commitment to my work is total, and I think you’ll feel the same way once you’ve read this book. This is a book the world must read! Sincerely,

  Harvey Brustein

  The bubble exploded in my brain. Harvey Brustein taken in by the old Dirk Robinson con! And yet... and yet, why not? If Harvey had put it all into a book, Dirk Robinson was the logical place to send it—Dirk had sure seen to that! The bubble passed through me leavin
g an expectant hollow—almost the feeling you get when you know some chick you’ve wanted to ball for months is about to strip naked before you. Because I had read enough fee-crap to know that it was here that people did strip their heads naked. Like, the Mad Dentist functioned well enough as a dentist in the external world to be able to afford Dirk Robinson—but his fee-shit revealed the gibbering paranoia of the madman inside.

  Staring at the gray binder—I could now read the white label pasted on the cover that said: The Path to Consciousness by Harvey Brustein—I felt a sudden dread. Here would be the real truth, Harvey’s real truth, and I had all the experience I needed in this line of evil to read every twitch of emotion or madness between the lines of a fee-creep’s swill. I would know, not feel, know.

  Was I ready for that? Was I really ready?

  “Read any of it yet?” I asked.

  “Do I really have to?” sneered Bruce. “You read the letter. This cat is a nut.”

  Yet another fear in my gut—fear that Bruce would see what was inside of me, that I believed in this “nut.” And yet... and yet if there were forces of destiny at work behind the stage-set of reality, this moment was proof. Bruce hadn’t read it, he didn’t want to read it, I could con him out of it and do it myself. I was meant to read this book; it was a message from whatever gods there be. I had to know. “Uh... look Bruce,” I said with tension-feigned casualness, “I’ve been kind of fucking up all week. Is that thing an eight-pointer?”

  “Five,” Bruce said glumly.

  “Well, what the hell, a five-pointer is better that five ones. I wouldn’t mind taking it off your hands...”