Five Great Novels Part 16

"She's probably at work." His voice tnembled."The perfume stone. The number is--" He couldn't keep his voice steady, and he couldn't remember the number. The h.e.l.l I am, he said to himself. I'm not Bob Arctor. But who am I? Maybe I'm-- "Get me Donna Hawthorne's number at work," Hank was saying rapidly into the phone. "Here," he said, holding the phone toward Fred. "I'll put you on the line. No, maybe I better not. I'll tell her to pick you up--where? We'll drive you there and drop you off; can't meet her here. What's a good place? Where do you usually meet her?"

"Take me to her place," he said. "I know how to get in."

"I'll tell her you're there and that you're withdrawing. I'll just say I know you and you asked me to call."

"Far out," Fred said, "I can dig it. Thanks, man."

Hank nodded and began to redial, an outside number. It seemed to Fred that he dialed each digit more and more slowly and it went on forever, and he shut his eyes, breathing to himself and thinking, Wow. I'm really out of it. You really are, he agreed. s.p.a.ced, wired, burned out and strung-out and f.u.c.ked. Completely f.u.c.ked. He felt like laughing.

"We'll get you over there to her--" Hank began, and then shifted his attention to the phone, saying, "Hey, Donna, this is a buddy of Bob's, you know? Hey, man, he's in a bad way, I'm not jiving you. Hey, he--"

I can dig it, two voices thought inside his mind in unison as he heard his buddy laying it on Donna. And don't forget to tell her to bring me something; I'm really hunting. Can she score for me or something? Maybe supercharge me, like she does? He reached out to touch Hank but could not; his hand fell short.

"I'll do the same for you sometime," he promised Hank as Hank hung up.

"Just sit there until the car's outside. I'll put through the call now." Again Hank phoned, this time saying, "Motor pool? I want an unmarked car and officer out of uniform. What do you have available?"

They, inside the scramble suit, the nebulous blur, shut their eyes to wait.

"It might be I should get you taken to the hospital," Hank said. "You're very bad off; maybe Jim Barris poisoned you. We really are interested in Barris, not you; the scanning of the house was primarily to keep on Barris. We hoped to draw him in here . . . and we did." Hank was silent. "So that's why I knew pretty well that his tapes and the other items were faked. The lab will confirm. But Barris is into something heavy. Heavy and sick, and it has to do with guns."

"I'm a what, then?" he said suddenly, very loud.

"We had to get to Jim Barris and set him up."

"You f.u.c.kers," he said.

"The way we arranged it, Barris--if that's who he is--got progressively more and more suspicious that you were an undercover police agent, about to nail him on use him to get higher. So he--"

The phone rang.

"All right," Hank said later. "Just sit, Bob. Bob, Fred, whatever. Take comfort--we did get the b.u.g.g.e.r and he's a--well, what you just now called us. You know it's worth it. Isn't it? To entrap him? A thing like that, whatever it is he's doing?"

"Sure, worth it." He could hardly speak; he grated mechanically. Together they sat.

On the drive to New-Path, Donna pulled off the road where they could see the lights below, on all sides. But the pain had started for him now; she could see that, and there wasn't much time left. She had wanted to be with him one more time. Well, she had waited too long. Tears ran down his cheeks, and he had started to heave and vomit.

"We'll sit for a few minutes," she told him, guiding him through the bushes and weeds, across the sandy soil, among the discarded beer cans and debris. "I--"

"Do you have your hash pipe?" he managed to say.

"Yes," she said. They had to be far enough from the road not to be noticed by the police. On at least far enough so they could ditch the hash pipe if an officer came along. She would see the police car park, its lights off, covertly, a way off, and the officer approach on foot. There would be time. She thought, Time enough for that. Time enough to be safe from the law. But no time any more for Bob Arctor. His time--at least if measured in human standards--had run out. It was another kind of time which he had entered now. Like, she thought, the time a rat has: to run back and forth, to be futile. To move without planning, back and forth, back and forth. But at least he can still see the lights below us. Although maybe for him it doesn't matter. They found a sheltered place, and she got out the foilwrapped fragment of hash and lit the hash pipe. Bob Arctor, beside her, did not seem to notice. He had dirtied himself but she knew he could not help it. In fact, he probably didn't even know it. They all got this way during withdrawal.

"Here." She bent toward him, to supercharge him. But he did not notice her either. He just sat doubled up, enduring the stomach cramps, vomiting and soiling himself, shivering, and crazily moaning to himself, a kind of song. She thought then of a guy she had known once, who had seen G.o.d. He had acted much like this, moaning and crying, although he had not soiled himself. He had seen G.o.d in a flashback after an acid trip; he had been experimenting with water-soluble vitamins, huge doses of them. The orth.o.m.oleculan formula that was supposed to improve neural firing in the brain, speed it up and synchronize it. With that guy, though, instead of merely becoming smarten, he had seen G.o.d. It had been a complete surprise to him.

"I guess," she said, "we never know what's in stone for us."

Beside her, Bob Arctor moaned and did not answer.

"Did you know a dude named Tony Amsterdam?"

There was no response. Donna inhaled from the hash pipe and contemplated the lights spread out below them; she smelled the air and listened. "After he saw G.o.d he felt really good, for around a year. And then he felt really bad. Worse than he ever had before in his life. Because one day it came over him, he began to realize, that he was never going to see G.o.d again; he was going to live out his whole remaining life, decades, maybe fifty years, and see nothing but what he had always seen. What we see. He was worse off than if he hadn't seen G.o.d. He told me one day he got really mad; he just freaked out and started cursing and smashing things in his apartment. He even smashed his stereo. He realized he was going to have to live on and on like he was, seeing nothing. Without any purpose. Just a lump of flesh grinding along, eating, drinking, sleeping, working, c.r.a.pping."

"Like the rest of us." It was the first thing Bob Arctor had managed to say; each word came with retching difficulty. Donna said, "That's what I told him. I pointed that out. We were all in the same boat and it didn't freak the rest of us. And he said, 'You don't know what I saw. You don't know.'"

A spasm pa.s.sed through Bob Arctor, convulsing him, and then he choked out, "Did . . . he say what it was like?"

"Sparks. Showers of colored sparks, like when something goes wrong with your TV set. Spanks going up the wall, spanks in the air. And the whole world was a living creature, whenever he looked. And there were no accidents: everything fitted together and happened on purpose, to achieve something--some goal in the future. And then he saw a doorway. For about a week he saw it whenever he looked-- inside his apartment, outdoors when he was walking to the store or driving. And it was always the same proportions, very narrow. He said it was very--pleasing. That's the word he used. He never tried to go through it; he just looked at it, because it was so pleasing. Outlined in vivid red and gold light, he said. As if the sparks had collected into lines, like in geometry. And then after that he never saw it again his whole life, and that's what finally made him so f.u.c.ked up."

After a time Bob Arctor said, "What was on the other side?"

Donna said, "He said there was another world on the other side. He could see it."

"He . . . never went through it?"

"That's why he kicked the s.h.i.t out of everything in his apartment; he never thought of going through it, he just admired the doorway and then later he couldn't see it at all and it was too late. It opened for him a few days and then it was closed and gone forever. Again and again he took a whole lot of LSD and those water-soluble vitamins, but he never saw it again; he never found the combination."

Bob Arctor said, "What was on the other side?"

"He said it was always nighttime."

"Nighttime!"

"There was moonlight and water, always the same. Nothing moved on changed. Black water, like ink, and a shone, a beach of an island. He was sure it was Greece, ancient Greece. He figured out the doorway was a weak place in time, and he was seeing back into the past. And then later on, when he couldn't see it any more, he'd be on the freeway driving along, with all the trucks, and he'd get madder than h.e.l.l. He said he couldn't stand all the motion and noise, everything going this way and that, all the clanking and banging. Anyhow, he never could figure out why they showed him what they showed him. He really believed it was G.o.d, and it was the doorway to the next world, but in the final a.n.a.lysis all it did was mess up his head. He couldn't hold on to it so he couldn't cope with it. Every time he met anybody, after a while he'd tell them he'd lost everything."

Bob Arctor said, "That's how I am."

"There was a woman on the island. Not exactly--more a statue. He said it was of the Cyrenaican Aphrodite. Standing there in moonlight, pale and cold and made out of marble."

"He should have gone through the doorway when he had the chance."

Donna said, "He didn't have the chance. It was a promise. Something to come. Something better a long time in the future. Maybe after he--" She paused. "When he died."

"He missed out," Bob Arctor said. "You get one chance and that's it." He shut his eyes against the pain and the sweat streaking his face. "Anyhow what's a burned-out acid head know? What do any of us know? I can't talk. Forget it." He turned away from her, into the dankness, convulsing and shuddering.

"They show us trailers now," Donna said. She put her arms around him and held on to him as tightly as she could, rocking him back and forth. "So we'll hold out."

"That's what you're trying to do. With me now."

"You're a good man. You've been dealt a bad deal. But life isn't over for you. I care for you a lot. I wish . . ." She continued to hold him, silently, in the dankness that was swallowing him up from inside. Taking over even as she held on to him. "You are a good and kind person," she said. "And this is unfair but it has to be this way. Try to wait for the end. Sometime, a long time from now, you'll see the way you saw before. It'll come back to you." Restored, she thought. On the day when everything taken away unjustly from people will be restored to them. It may take a thousand years, on longer than that, but that day will come, and all the balances will be set right. Maybe, like Tony Amsterdam, you have seen a vision of G.o.d that is gone only temporarily; withdrawn, she thought, rather than ended. Maybe inside the terribly burned and burning circuits of your head that char more and more, even as I hold you, a spark of colon and light in some disguised form manifested itself, unrecognized, to lead you, by its memory, through the years to come, the dreadful years ahead. A word not fully understood, some small thing seen but not understood, some fragment of a star mixed with the trash of this world, to guide you by reflex until the day . . . but it was so remote. She could not herself truly imagine it. Mingled with the commonplace, something from another world perhaps had appeared to Bob Arctor before it was over. All she could do now was hold him and hope. But when he found it once again, if they were lucky, pattern-recognition would take place. Correct comparison in the right hemisphere. Even at the subcontical level available to him. And the journey, so awful for him, so costly, so evidently without point, would be finished. A light shone in her eyes. Standing in front of her, a cop with nightstick and flashlight. "Would you please stand up?" the officer said. "And show me your identification? You first, miss."

She let go of Bob Arctor, who slid sideways until he lay against the ground; he was unaware of the cop, who had approached them up the hill, stealthily, from a service road below. Getting her wallet out of her purse, Donna motioned the officer away, where Bob Arctor could not hear. For several minutes the officer studied her identification by the muted light of his flashlight, and then said, "You're undercover for the federal people."

"Keep your voice down," Donna said.

"I'm sorry." The officer handed the wallet back to her.

"Just f.u.c.king take off," Donna said. The officer shone his light in her face briefly, and then turned away; he departed as he had approached, noiselessly. When she returned to Bob Arctor, it was obvious that he had never been aware of the cop. He was aware of almost nothing, now. Scarcely of her, let alone anyone or anything else. Far off, echoing, Donna could hear the police can moving down the nutted, invisible service road. A few bugs, perhaps a lizard, made their way through the dry weeds around them. In the distance the 91 Freeway glowed in a pattern of lights, but no sound reached them; it was too remote.

"Bob," she said softly. "Can you hear me?"

No answer. All the circuits are welded shut, she thought. Melted and fused. And no one is going to get them open, no matter how hand they try. And they are going to try.

"Come on," she said, tugging at him, attempting to get him to his feet. "We've got to get started."

Bob Arctor said, "I can't make love. My thing's disappeared."

"They're expecting us," Donna said firmly. "I have to sign you in."

"But what'll I do if my thing's disappeared? Will they still take me in?"

Donna said, "They'll take you."

It requires the greatest kind of wisdom, she thought, to know when to apply injustice. How can justice fall victim, even, to what is right? How can this happen? She thought, Because there is a curse on this world, and all this proves it; this is the proof right here. Somewhere, at the deepest level possible, the mechanism, the construction of things, fell apart, and up from what remained swam the need to do all the various sort of unclean wrongs the wisest choice has made us act out. It must have started thousands of years ago. By now it's infiltrated into the nature of everything. And, she thought, into every one of us. We can't turn around on open our mouth and speak, decide at all, without doing it. I don't even cane how it got started, when or why. She thought, I just hope it'll end some time. Like with Tony Amsterdam; I just hope one day the shower of brightly colored sparks will return, and this time we'll all see it. The narrow doorway where there's peace on the far side. A statue, the sea, and what looks like moonlight. And nothing stirring, nothing to break the calm. A long, long time ago, she thought. Before the curse, and everything and everyone became this way. The Golden Age, she thought, when wisdom and justice were the same. Before it all shattered into cutting fragments. Into broken bits that don't fit, that can't be put back together, hard as we try. Below her, in the dankness and distribution of urban lights a police siren sounded. A police car in hot pursuit. It sounded like a deranged animal, greedy to kill. And knowing that it soon would. She shivered; the night air had become cold. It was time to go. It isn't the Golden Age now, she thought, with noises like that in the darkness. Do I emit that kind of greedy noise? she asked herself. Am I that thing? Closing in, on having closed in? Having caught? Beside her, the man stirred and moaned as she helped him up. Helped him to his feet and back to her car, step by step, helped him, helped him continue on. Below them, the noise of the police car had abruptly ceased; it had stopped its quarry. Its job was done. Holding Bob Arctor against her, she thought, Mine is done, too.

The two New-Path staff members stood surveying the thing on their floor that lay puking and shivering and fouling itself, its arms hugging itself, embracing its own body as if to stop itself, against the cold that made it tremble so violently.

"What is it?" one staff member said. Donna said, "A person."

"Substance D?"

She nodded.

"It ate his head. Another loser."

She said to the two of them, "It's easy to win. Anybody can win." Bending down over Robert Arctor she said, silently, Good-by.

They were putting an old army blanket over him as she left. She did not look back. Getting into her car, she drove at once onto the closest freeway, into the thickest traffic possible. From the box of tapes on the floor of the car she took the Carole King Tapestry tape, her favorite of all she had, and pushed it into the tape deck; at the same time, she tugged loose the Ruger pistol magnetically mounted out of sight beneath the dashboard. In top gear she tailgated a truck carrying wooden cases of quart bottles of Coca-Cola, and as Carole King sang in stereo she emptied the clip of the Ruger at the c.o.ke bottles a few feet ahead of her can. While Carole King sang soothingly about people sitting down and turning into toads, Donna managed to get four bottles before the gun's clip was empty. Bits of gla.s.s and smears of c.o.ke splattered the windshield of her can. She felt better. Justice and honesty and loyalty are not properties of this world, she thought; and then, by G.o.d, she rammed her old enemy, her ancient foe, the Coca-Cola truck, which went right on going without noticing. The impact spun her small can around; her headlights dimmed out, horrible noises of fender against tire shrieked, and then she was off the freeway onto the emergency strip, facing the other direction, water pouring from her radiator, with motorists slowing down to gape. Come back, you motherf.u.c.ker, she said to herself, but the Coca-Cola truck was long gone, probably undented. Maybe a scratch. Well, it was bound to happen sooner on later, her wan, her taking on a symbol and a reality that outweighed her. Now my insurance rates will go up, she realized as she climbed from her car. In this world you pay for tilting with evil in cold, hand cash. A late-model Mustang slowed and the driven, a man, called to her, "You want a ride, miss?"

She did not answer. She just kept on going. A small figure on foot facing an infinity of oncoming lights.

14.

Magazine clipping thumbtacked to the wall of the lounge at Samankand House, New-Path's residence building in Santa Ana, California: When the senile patient awakens in the morning and asks for his mother, remind him that she is long since dead, that he is over eighty years old and living in a convalescent home, and that this is 1992 and not 1913 and that he must face reality and the fact that A resident had torn down the rest of the item; it ended there. Evidently it had been clipped from a professional nursing magazine; it was on slick paper.

"What you'll be doing here first," George, the staff member, told him, leading him down the hall, "is the bathrooms. The floors, the basins, especially the toilets. Thene'ne three bathrooms in this structure, one on each floor."

"Okay," he said.

"Here's a mop. And a pail. You feel you know how to do this? Clean a bathroom? Start, and I'll watch you and give you pointers."

He carried the pail to the tub on the back porch and he poured soap into it and then ran the hot water. All he could see was the foam of water directly before him; foam and the roan. But he could hear George's voice, out of sight. "Not too full, because you won't be able to lift it."

"Okay."

"You have a little trouble telling where you are," George said, after a time.

"I'm at New-Path." He set the pail down on the floor and it slopped; he stood staring down at it.

"New-Path where?"

"In Santa Ana."

George lifted the pail up for him, showing him how to grip the wire handle and swing it along as he walked. "Later on I think we'll transfer you to the island on one of the farms. First you have to go through the dishpan."

"I can do that," he said. "Dishpans."

"Do you like animals?"

"Sure."

"On farming?"

"Animals."

"We'll see. We'll wait until we're acquainted with you better. Anyhow, that'll be a while; everyone is in the dishpan for a month. Everyone who comes in the door."

"I'd sort of like to live in the country," he said.

"We maintain several types of facilities. We'll determine what's best suited. You know, you can smoke here, but it isn't encouraged. This isn't Synanon; they don't let you smoke."

He said, "I don't have any more cigarettes."

"We give each resident one pack a day."

"Money?" He didn't have any.

"It's without cost. There's never any cost. You paid your cost." George took the mop, pushed it down into the pail, showed him how to mop.

"How come I don't have any money?"

"The same reason you don't have any wallet on any last name. It'll be given back to you, all given back. That's what we want to do: give you back what's been taken away from you."

He said, "These shoes don't fit."

"We depend on donations, but new ones only, from stones. Later on maybe we can measure you. Did you try all the shoes in the carton?"

"Yes," he said.

"All right, this is the bathroom here on the bas.e.m.e.nt floor; do it first. Then when that's done, really done well, really perfect, then go upstairs--bring the mop and bucket--and I'll show you the bathroom up there, and then after that the bathroom on the third floor. But you got to get permission to go up there to the third floor, because that's where the chicks live, so ask one of the staff first; never go up there without permission." He slapped him on the back. "All right, Bruce? Understand?"

"Okay," Bruce said, mopping. George said, "You'll be doing this kind of work, cleaning these bathrooms, until you get so you can do a good job. It doesn't matter what a person does; it's that he gets so he can do it right and be proud of it."