5

NOW THAT Cassandra was back, I figured we better get our asses out of Ethan and Terry’s, right? I hadn’t been dealing much lately, so I was tapped out. I knew Cassandra had some bread left, but I didn’t feel right asking her, so I did the only thing I could think of—fell by to see my old pal Bobby Lyons. I hadn’t caught his act lately. I’d been trying to stay clear of him. He’d moved, got himself a HUGE apartment on Beacon Hill with an even BIGER stereo, and even MORE fish tanks, and THOUSANDS of super-freaky day-glo fish swimming like nowhere, and a BRAND-NEW hippie girlfriend, one of the improved models, younger and prettier and even farther out in the galaxy.

Lyons liked to have people around, so I walk in and there’s a whole bunch of the new girlfriend’s spaced-out little friends, and there’s some GIs along with the chicks they’ve picked up, and there’s an entire rock band called Trackless Waste with some groupies attached, and everybody in the whole damn place is whacked right out on whatever substance they dig the most. Lyons is always glad to see me. He’s picked up this high-pitched goofy way of talking—like a bat squeaking. “Well, what the fuck’s happening, Tommy boy?” Then he does one of those weirdo things he’s gotten into, like he gives me a big wet kiss on the ear. Oh, yeah, crystal does wonders for you. “Shit, Robert,” I say, “you sure are looking good.”

I lay it on him that I want to have some WORDS, so we go in his bedroom. Yeah, he might like having people around, but I do note the fact that he’s got a big motherfucking lock on his bedroom door. I tell him I’ve got to get out of Ethan and Terry’s.

“Well, why don’t you crash here, Tommy? Hee, hee, hee!” He knows that Cassandra hates his guts.

“Now, Robert, that’s not what’s happening. Here’s where it’s at. I’ve got to make some bread. So I was kind of wondering . . .” I just let it hang. Either he’s got something for me or he don’t.

“You’re in luck, Tommy boy. I really need somebody I can TRUST, you know what I mean?”

Yeah, I did know what he meant.

So I drive over to Dorchester in the middle of the night, and some huge dude meets me in an alley, hops in my car, and we float around here and there and everywhere, and end up in some other alley, and slide into a garage and the door goes down, and there’s a bunch of other huge dudes, and not one of them looks like a hippie to me. They put a suitcase in my car, and I’m off to New York. And all the way down there, I’m thinking, why the fuck am I driving a ’59 Cadillac?

Guess what? My connection, somewhere the hell and gone in Brooklyn, is another huge dude who hops in my car. And there’s more driving around in mysterious ways. And there’s another fucking garage with the door shut behind me. This time they let me come into the house. I’m sitting in what looks like an ordinary living room. This huge motherfucker and a few of his pals take the suitcase and go off somewhere. After a while, they come back, and they’ve got another suitcase. The one I had was big and brown. The one they’ve got is small and blue. They slap it down on the coffee table and pop it open. It’s full of the good old US dinero, and I’m thinking, fuck, what is this, some ridiculous movie off the late show? They’re all standing around giving me the hairy eyeball, and it finally flashes on me that I’m supposed to count the shit.

I figure if I’m in a movie, I might as well give them a good show. “Hey, dig it,” I say. “I just drive cars. What’s in the car, I don’t know. You follow me? . . . I don’t see nothing. I don’t hear nothing. I don’t remember nothing. If you guys ain’t cool, you’ll probably hear from some people, but I won’t know a thing about it.”

I was a real hit with that one. They thought I was the funniest thing since Syd Caesar. Out comes the whiskey, and we all have a snort, and then I’m driving back to Boston with the blue suitcase in my trunk, thinking, why the fuck am I driving a ’59 Cadillac?

I deliver the blue suitcase to Lyons, and we go in his bedroom so he can count the bills. He’s giggling away like a bona-fide cretin. “Delicious,” he says, “nutritious. Good old US lettuce. You know, Tommy, you should get in the game with me. Like partners, right? Forget that petty-ante grass bullshit, we’re talking BREAD, man.”

“I’m a small-town boy from the Far West,” I tell him. “I dig petty ante. Besides, GRASS IS GOD. Not that I don’t appreciate the offer, Robert.”

He says, “Hee, hee, hee,” and counts out a thousand bills and hands it to me. “Come back in a couple days. I got some dynamite Magical Michoacan coming in. I’ll front you a key of it.”

So I should have been off to rent an apartment, right? Well, on my list of things I hate to do, renting an apartment is fairly high. It’s the thought of me standing there while some prick in a tie checks me out, and I just know he’ll be thinking, oh, sweet Jesus, WHY does this bizarre freaky-looking grotesque asshole want to rent an apartment from ME? And then there was something else happening too. Once I get an idea stuck in my head concerning motor vehicles, it’s hard for me to shake it, so I bought a Volkswagen camper. I just couldn’t pass it up. I mean it was clean, the engine was in good shape, and they’d even fixed up the back with a stove and an ice chest and some foam mattresses and curtains for the windows, and I thought Cass and I could live in it for a while—you know, roam around the country free as little birds. I got screwed on the trade-in for the Cadillac, but them’s the breaks.

Once again, Cassandra was not delighted with me. “It’s motherfucking beautiful, Tommy. Sure, we can go floating off any time we want to check out the groovy wonders of nature. But, in the meantime, there are certain things I wish to see appearing before me. My own bathroom, for starters. My own bed . . . in a room with a door that shuts. And you might find this hard to believe, but I wouldn’t even mind my own fucking kitchen . . . you know, where it might be possible to fry up the remains of dead birds and animals, something that is definitely not possible at the moment. So you just keep right on in motion, old buddy, and come back and tell me about apartments. Pick up the Boston Globe, and I’ll give you some pointers. Have you thought about Somerville?”

By now, I was checked out on the workings of Cassandra’s mind, so I said, “You bet, sweet stuff,” but, with one thing or another, I never got around to it.

• • •

IT HAD started out with the uncanny juxtapositions—induced by the devastating Mexican weed, “Magical Michoacan” Tom had called it, “some of that one-toke stuff,” and for once, he hadn’t been exaggerating. As John had drawn in his first toke, that fatal one toke, Tom had said to Ethan, “Look at him, the poor fool. Doing it right up. Whew, he’ll never know what hit him.” The lift had been instantaneous, and John, of course, hadn’t stopped with one toke. He’d soared, melted with the shift in the light values. His brains had bubbled and spurted like magma. He’d felt the dope push through his veins like fiery golden wires. Transfigured, he’d thought how the pothead’s phrase “behind the grass” was absolutely inadequate—he was certainly behind it, but more than that, inside it, this singing drug that could terrify him if he let it, but there was too much fascination for terror because he’d fallen out by Zen accident at a perfect location, sitting exactly where he should be (halfway down the kitchen table), looking at exactly what he should be (the Tibetan demon on the wall), and so he was hearing what no one else could hear.

The demon was black, possessed many heads and arms, wore a necklace of skulls, and danced upon skulls. The demon was surrounded by smaller demons, each possessing many heads and arms and wearing necklaces of skulls. If it wasn’t for the edge of the poster, the smaller demons might have gone on forever; in fact, John was certain that in the realm where they lived, they did go on forever, becoming smaller and smaller the farther they got from the central demon—finally as small as gnats, a cloud of them in the air, wearing tiny gnat skulls around their innumerable tiny gnat heads. And, at a still higher level, this whole population was just the one demon, the central demon, with his (her?) shimmering manifestations—this deity with whom John was now sharing a comradely and cheerful joke (despite the skulls), because of all the people in the room, he was the only one who’d been given the secret, the key to the puzzle, for if he sat balanced carefully enough, if he looked steadily at his old buddy the Black Demon—

The six people were sitting at the one rectangular table. A line of force that connected John’s eyeballs to the demon divided the table—to the right were the men; to the left, the women. The sound of the Jefferson Airplane from behind John’s back rode down the line of force, thickened it, and made it impossible for the men and the women to hear each other even though they were only a few feet apart. John, sitting on the dividing line, could hear both sides in stereophonic reality.

And so the right channel brought him:

TOM: Whatever you might think, like it’s the first line of defense, or the big retaliatory force the country has . . . well, that’s wrong. And they lay it on you right away. The air force’s primary mission is to fly and maintain aircraft capable of flying.

ETHAN: (flat) Right, right.

And from the left channel:

TERRY’S SCISSORS ON CASSANDRA’S HAIR: Snip snip.

CASSANDRA: I think it started out . . . you know, back in the stone age or whenever the fuck it was . . . It was just because they’re bigger than we are.

PAM: That’s absolutely true. Engels talks about that shit.

TERRY: But we’re different from them. They’re afraid of us, you dig? We’re cyclical. We bleed to the moon. We wax and wane. We got tides in our bodies. There’s small cycles and big cycles, dark phases and light phases . . .

CASSANDRA: Jesus, Terry, what is this off-the-wall shit? I mean, what’s that got to do with anything? If some big hairy asshole wants to fuck you, he’s just going to kick your head in, and you can take your cycles and . . .

PAM: No, she does have a point. You see, there’s different lines of development. There’s the hunter-gatherers and then there’s the agricultural . . .

CASSANDRA: Oh, lines of development, huh? Jesus. There’s only one thing I know for damned sure. I got fucked over from day one because I was born female. And I’ve been fucked over ever since.

PAM: (excited) Right. That’s exactly right. That’s where we’ve got to start.

TOM: So once your ass is in the Air Force, it turns out that your number-one priority is to keep airplanes flying at all times, and anything additional is like . . . well, you know . . . not where it’s at.

ETHAN: Right, right.

TERRY: (in her oracular voice) But there’s only one society in which women have been free . . . only one society in which women have had power . . . only one society in which women were on top. And that society goes back thousands of years in an unbroken thread . . . It’s the society of witchcraft.

CASSANDRA: (laughing) Jesus, Terry, you’re so full of shit.

John, looking only at the face of the Black Demon, could see all of the people at once, hold each distinct and perfect, memory opening like a door to an inner peripheral vision, lucidly, as he couldn’t have done if he’d been using his ordinary outward-directed eyes. Cassandra, navy blue from neck to toe, was sitting upright on a kitchen chair, a towel tucked around her neck, as Terry cut her hair. The wickedly bright scissors with their hurtful points were passing in front of Cassandra’s closed eyes, safely, guided by Terry’s ringed fingers. Sure, deft movements. SNIP SNIP. Cassandra wrinkled her nose as the wet reddish-brown hair fell away.

Pam, the smallest and thinnest, was sitting with her elbows on the table regarding the other two. She was wearing plum-colored hair ribbons and a plain grey shirt bought in the boys’ department of Filene’s Basement.

PAM: Yeah, it’s like that rap Snyder lays out about the age of the Golden Emperor. Whether it’s witchcraft, or the Amazons, or the Matriarchy . . . It doesn’t matter whether we have any evidence that these cultures really existed because we project them into the future, you dig? They’re useful. As myth. The ground of future heresies. So, yeah, what would a progressive society run by women look like?

CASSANDRA: Run by women? Dream on, baby doll.

Ethan, hunched forward, block shoulders in flannel shirt torn out at the elbows, was rolling a joint in hands thick with callus, yellow as horn. He blew through his teeth; his Charlemagne mustaches flared outward. He licked the joint finished, winked, passed it to Tom who took it with short spatulate fingers, grease from the camper engine under his nails.

TOM: (with all the time in the world) So the air force is like a self-sufficient entity, right? It can maintain itself, feed itself, repair itself, keep itself going no matter what’s happening. Even if the economy collapses, even if there’s rioting in the streets, all them black dudes out there shooting it up, the air force is going to maintain strike capability.

ETHAN: Right, right.

TOM: That’s the only thing they’ve got covered.

PAM: But we’ve got to try to do something more than just . . . well, imitate men, try to be like men. We’ve got to look at all the things they’ve hidden from us all these years, things we’ve repressed. We’ve lost our own history.

CASSANDRA: (laughing) Hold it, folks, what’s this “we” business?

PAM: (earnestly) We’ve got to start saying “we” even if it doesn’t feel right yet. We’ve got to start talking to each other. It’s going to be all of us or none of us.

CASSANDRA: (still laughing) How about them crazy dudes? The ones with the dongs hanging down?

PAM: (laughing too) Yeah, it’s got to be them too . . . eventually. But not now. We’ve had too many years of not talking to each other.

CASSANDRA: You know, Pamela, everything you’re saying is right, and I’ll probably join up with you after I start losing my looks. But right now I’m living off men, so it’d be kind of hypocritical of me. (All three women laugh.)

TOM: All them planes up there, man, just maintaining strike capability, man. And no matter what anybody does about it, they’re going to be up there.

ETHAN: (finally getting it) Right, right.

• • •

John felt the joint pressed into his right hand, took it, inhaled.

TERRY: You want any more off?

CASSANDRA: Cut it all off. I don’t give a fuck.

PAM: Don’t kid yourself, Cass. You still give a fuck.

CASSANDRA: (annoyed) Oh, you know what I want, do you?

PAM: (looking straight into Cassandra’s eyes) Yeah, I do know what you want . . . If I could, I’d do it for you.

CASSANDRA: So tell me.

PAM: (to Terry) Give her bangs in the front and take it all off the back . . . I mean all of it.

TERRY: Shit. What do you say, Cass? It’s your hair.

CASSANDRA: (looking away) Yeah, OK, do it.

The music ended. The tone arm hissed a moment in the static of the blank grooves, then lifted, turned, settled to the side: CLICK, CLICK. The dividing line fell away, and in the silence Tom’s voice boomed out, full of laughter: “They’re up there right at this very minute with their motherfucking nukes,” and, simultaneously, Pam was saying, “To transform reality, we’ve got to start with real transformations.”

“It’s just a haircut, for fuck’s sake,” Cassandra said.

“Yeah.” Ethan’s deep voice rumbled out of his beard. “Yeah, right. Heavy.”

I’ve got to remember this, John thought. The Secret Book of the Black Demon—meanings so complex he’d never possibly figure them out; too beautiful, too perfect—like a poem. All he could do was laugh. “Just look at that crazy fucker,” Ethan said to Tom. “He’s so fucking nuts it’s a wonder he keeps on walking around in the world.”

And, yawning, Terry was saying, “Keep on keeping on. Yeah. We keep on keeping on with this shit, we’re going to crash like a bunch of junkies.” She pushed Cassandra’s head down toward the table, began shearing the nape of her neck.

“Hey, pretty lady,” Tom said, “you been to barber college or what?”

Terry glanced over at Tom and smiled. John felt the energy coming off that smile—a round ball of heat that shot across the table right into Tom’s eyes. “I come from a big family,” she said. “I cut all the boys’ hair.”

Ethan, with a lurch of his chair, pushed back from the table and–reached for the record. “Hey, man, leave it,” Terry said. “You can’t hear yourself think.”

Then, in the howling silence, John realized that he hadn’t outrun his paranoia after all and even the Black Demon couldn’t help him. With a buzz like angry bees swarming under the oppressively hard carapace of his skull, he was painfully aware of sound: the idiot child’s voice in the rolling boil of the water on the stove, the threatening creak of the chair under all of Ethan’s male weight and muscle, the sinister snake’s hiss of Terry’s gypsy skirt, the silvery deadly snicks of her scissors. He was sweating like Judas.

Everything the least bit out of the ordinary was terrible. His own hair falling around his shoulders was terrible—in fact, what in God’s name had he been thinking to let it get so long? And Ethan, of course, was even farther out of bounds; didn’t he know how close he came to death at every moment? That the ordinary sane and sensible people who walked the streets of America might rise up and, with hateful thick bricks, hard pointed rocks, stone him out of existence? And Terry? John couldn’t even look at Terry—her erectile nipples clearly visible for anybody to see. Didn’t they know how dangerous this masquerade was? Didn’t they understand how it had to end? One of these days, with no further ado, they’d be exterminated like vermin.

And now John’s fried brains were presenting him with an additional convolution of vileness—that the women were spinning off onto their own insane direction, separating themselves, and soon they’d realize just how much they hated men—including him—and then it wouldn’t do any good to try to justify himself—no, not any more than it would do any good to argue with the black youths preparing to cut you to ribbons on a street corner, tell them that you hadn’t had such a fucking wonderful life yourself, that you’d been screwed around pretty badly too, and, of course, that you’d always been for civil rights. He saw his own doom coming with an awful fatality, the ultimate twist of sadistic humor, that now, just as he was on the point of—well, maybe just on the point of, finally, goddamn it, after all these years, having some kind of sexual life with a woman, that woman might—for perfectly sound historical reasons—be on the point of repudiating him along with the entire male population of North America and their annoyingly demanding penises.

“Tea time,” Terry said, throwing down the scissors. “Anybody got the munchies?”

“Oh wow, look at Cass,” Tom said, “shorn like a little lamb. How you doing, little buddy? What’s happening?”

“Shit, I couldn’t tell you.”

“Fuck, I thought you could.”

Pamela stood up, walked around the table, and slid into the chair next to John’s. She touched him on the back of the hand. “Hey, where have you got yourself to, man?”

Relief sang through him, immense and corny as a thousand violins. “Whew,” he said. His jaws had been clamped tight; they ached with release. “I don’t know. I was just off . . . sort of running around in my head.” Act normal, he told himself.

“If you don’t know, and I don’t know,” Tom was saying to Cassandra, “then who the fuck does?” Terry set a teapot and a huge hot loaf on the table. Ethan immediately seized the loaf, sawed off a huge piece of it, and shoved it into his mouth. Glancing up, John was caught by Tom’s amused eyes. Gesturing with his head toward Ethan, Tom mugged amazement—“Can you believe that animal?” John laughed.

Then Terry, with no warning at all that she was about to do anything the least bit unusual, in a single dramatic gesture, smeared a deck of cards from one end of the table to the other. John felt his body jerk back as if he’d been stung. “Pick yourself,” Terry said.

“Shee-it,” Ethan said, laughing, “now we’re getting down to it.”

No one spoke. No one moved. “Pick yourself,” Terry said again. They were Tarot cards.

“Seven come eleven, baby needs a new pair of shoes,” Ethan said, chuckling.

“Is this . . . ? Are we supposed to . . . ?” Pam said.

“Pick yourself,” Terry said, looking up and away, not meeting anyone’s eyes.

“Hey, dig it,” Ethan said, addressing the table, “seriously, she’s far out with this shit. She’s got the gift big time.”

“Pick yourself,” Terry said.

John had seen Tarot cards before, but he’d never really looked at them—their sinister faces as evocative as masks. And so what the hell was he supposed to do? He’d seen himself in the cards the first time Terry had said it; now he couldn’t stop seeing himself. Any minute now someone would say, “Hey, man, that’s your card.” But maybe not. The point of the game seemed to be that you had to do your own choosing—anyhow, that was the way Terry had phrased it. Well, shit, no one else was making a move—in fact, the people seated around the table were starting to look like a waxworks display, so maybe he should be the one to break the spell.

He drew the card out of the deck and handed it to Terry. She would surely see how perfect it was: an old man, a wanderer with his cloak and staff and lamp, staring down, lost in thought. John hadn’t been able to read the name of the card, but he saw now that it too was perfect: The Hermit. “Far out,” she said and gestured with her head: “Come on.”

“Wait a minute . . . What?”

“We’re going to find out what’s going down in your life, man,” Terry said.

“You the one,” Tom said, laughing, “check it out.”

“I don’t know,” John said. Everybody was looking at him.

“That one step you been looking for?” Ethan said. “Well, it’s stepping on you, man . . . Seriously, Raymond, when you been offered a righteous gift, you take it.”

• • •

THERE WAS nothing for John to do but stand up and follow Terry into the bedroom she shared with Ethan—a space he’d never seen. Saying nothing, she began lighting candles—lit them with ritualized concentration as though timing her actions to intoned words he couldn’t hear.

Spooked, smoldering with apprehension, a fuck of a lot more stoned than he’d even thought, he hovered already halfway trapped inside this hippie melodrama—yeah, it could be as ridiculous as Alfred Hitchcock Presents or the prodigious unfolding of an inscrutable mystery—and, in the wavering candle-light, images were emerging from the walls (yikes!), almost like tapestries, something like a unicorn, and then a man with glaring eyes sprawled on one side staring upward at a woman wrapped in a diaphanous blue gown; she was turning her head, painfully, inhumanly, to stare back at him, holding something upraised that looked like an open book, as the doubtful forest lowered around them. Before John could meander away into that kitschy landscape, Terry gestured him to an old carved table; he sat down at it. She lit incense—four tapers—and the small chamber (no, not simply a “room”) began to seethe with the most dismal of Oriental fumes. It was all a load of crap, of course, but he was freaked right out of his goddamn skull.

Terry placed his card, the Hermit, in the center of the table, handed him the rest of the deck. “Shuffle the cards till they know you,” she said.

His hands were greasy with sweat. He had to wipe them on his pants. He shuffled the cards a good dozen times. “OK,” she said, “now cut them into three piles. Use your left hand . . . Yeah, man, we’re invoking the left hand of darkness.”

Trying to get a flicker of humor back into the murk, he said, “Do we want to do that?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s the heart line, the female line, the unbroken line that goes all the way back to Egypt.”

He cut the deck; she swept it up instantly and began to snap the cards down, making a pattern. “This covers you,” she chanted, “this crosses you, this is behind you, this is beneath you . . .” and he imagined himself standing up without a word and simply walking out. Yes, he could do that—walk easily enough through Ethan’s living room and not say a word, walk past everyone still sitting stoned at the kitchen table (although that would be harder), and walk right out of this cryptic nightmare to arrive safely at home once again in the Holy Land of Canada. “Oh, fuck, man,” Terry said, “that’s heavy.”

“What’s heavy?”

“The whole fucking thing’s heavy. I’ve never seen the cards so clear, man. Whew. Your power’s in the Page of Cups. That’s the fish rising up from the Deep Mind, and that’s how you know things . . . like out of nowhere. Things you’ve got no right to know. That happens to you, doesn’t it?”

She was right. He was horrified. “Yeah,” he said.

“Well, trust that shit, man. Don’t push it away from you. OK, and you’re crossed by the Hierophant. That means you’ve got to work through all the old crap. All the old authorities, you dig? The heavy straight dudes telling you, ‘Do this, do that.’ You’ve got to get clear of that shit, make your own rules, but that’s already what you’ve been doing, right? So just keep on keeping on.”

Whatever was pulsating in what was left of his mind was keeping him stuck, stowed in an indeterminate anteroom, not believing a damned word of this shit, believing every word of it, compelled by Terry’s glittering eyes, by the urgency of her voice: “The Ten of Wands is behind you, so you’re just leaving a time of danger and disguise . . . like hiding out, creeping around in the shadows, staying one jump ahead of the Man. Well, that freaky time’s almost over, but not just yet. But see there? The High Priestess is before you, so your future’s going to be full of mystery. You can’t try to think your way out of it. If you walk out of here and you remember only one thing, that’s it. Don’t try to think about it. You with me, man? Just let yourself dissolve in the weirdness.”

What if she knew something? (Sweat scalding his armpits.) What if this was something more than cheap-ass stoned-out hippie melodrama?

“And look at the outcome card, man. The Hanged Man. That’s going to be you, Ray . . . John. You see, I don’t even know what to call you. But it’s all going to get clear. You’re going to get clear. You’re going to prophesy. You’re going to glow with a weird light. You’re going to speak the truth. And this is how you’ve got to get there, man. The Six of Cups is beneath you. It’s back there in the past somewhere. There’s something in your childhood that’s really heavy, right?”

“Yes.”

The flare inside his dried-up skull—awareness. He couldn’t avoid it—not when it had just flashed on him as heavy as that. In Morgantown, he’d stared at that image of himself until it had burned itself into his psyche—or until what was already in his psyche had risen up burning to meet it.

“It’s not like . . .” Her hands made swirling motions in the air, describing convolutions of smoke. “It’s solid, right? Real. You know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“How old were you?” she asked him.

“Seven.”

“Yeah. I was seeing you about seven. Well, you remember that place where the world cracked open? Right under your feet? Well, that’s like that Don Juan thing . . . ‘the crack between the worlds.’ You’ve got to slide back through that crack.”

Oh, my God, it was true. She really was a witch. He stared at her, trying to reorient himself in this newly flung dark. She’d always been just as disguised as he was, but he saw her clearly now—how she could, in a flash, pounce on the tiny mouse of his mind and claw it to the marrow. “We think time’s going in a straight line,” she told him, “but that’s not where it’s at. We just see it that way because our perceptions have been clouded. There’s no past and no future. All times exists all the time.”

“Jesus, Terry, how the hell . . . OK , our perceptions may be clouded, but how the fuck do I go back there and slide through the crack?”

“Shit, man, I can lay it down for you, but you got to pick it up. You can look at it this way,” aiming the back of her stiffened hand at his chest, “or this way,” turning her hand over, offering him her cupped palm. “Every nowhere’s a somewhere, you dig? . . . But just let it be right now, OK? Look at what’s in your home. It’s the Page of Swords. That’s Pamela, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure, you do. Don’t bullshit me.”

“Yeah, it’s Pamela. Of course it’s Pamela.”

“Well, dig it, she’s already there in your home . . . Yeah, I know you want to know what’s going to happen with her, but the cards don’t want to tell you that . . . But is there anything else you want to ask me?”

“Terry . . . What the hell am I supposed to do? ”

She laughed. “That’s like . . . Well, say you got a huge power line with all this current running through it. That’s like one little electron asking, ‘What am I supposed to do?’”

He could almost see it—enormous forces converging, conflicting, making a pattern, himself at the center, perpetually right on time, skittering along like a ping-pong ball down a raging rapid—and, looking, he saw the watery womanliness of crazy Gypsy Terry with all her talk about cycles and phases, how she was timed to the moon, and something else—arcane, oscillating, veiled, esoteric, sinuous, sphinxlike, labyrinthine, and every other silly-ass portentous word he could dream up. And powerful as all hell. Yes. He wanted her for an ally. Maybe she had enough power to save him.

“There’s just one thing more, man,” she said. “You’re crowned by Zero the Fool.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Nobody knows. It’s called ‘Zero’ because it’s outside the deck.”

• • •

SOMETHING WAS up with the chicks. I mean the whole women’s liberation thing was just boiling away in Boston, and like I said, Pam was heavy into it. She belonged to this women’s group that everybody said was the meanest outfit in town, and she was always trying to convert Terry and Cass, and even if she never got them to heed the altar call, she sure left them with plenty of shit to think about. And besides, they didn’t need Pam Zalman to ORGANIZE them. It was just in the air. And us men—and we’re all porkers at heart no matter what we might say up front—were getting worried, just the way we were supposed to, each in our own way. For Ethan what it meant was that women weren’t going to screw anymore, and therefore he was against it because he figured everybody ought to screw as much as possible or they were ANTI-LIFE, and besides, he didn’t want Terry to stop screwing HIM. But I knew it wasn’t that simple. Like the chicks did have a lot to complain about—any idiot could see that—but the rap that some of them were laying down was just SO DAMNED WEIRD that all you wanted to do was back off them quick.

I’d always had it in my head that if I ever got to the point where I gave a shit about anything again, I’d probably get married and have a family. It wasn’t like I was in a great rush to get there, it was just something I was pretty sure would catch up with me sometime, like dying. But the way the women’s libbers were talking, getting married and having a family was definitely not where it was at. It’s crazy, because when Cass and me first got together, if she’d said to me, “Hey, Tom, why don’t we get married and have a kid?” I would have said, “Christ, are you fucking nuts?” But now she was saying she was NEVER going to do that, and I kept thinking, hey, why not? And I can remember thinking, well, fuck this bullshit. One of these days I’m going to kiss good-bye to Boston, Massachusetts and all these insane bizarre freaky weirded-out people and go back to North Dakota and marry a girl who thinks being liberated means wearing a miniskirt.

So anyhow, Cass and me crashed on that big foam-rubber pad covered with burlap that Ethan had put down on the living-room floor for him and Terry to lay on when they were stoned and listening to records and watching the picture roll on the tube. So when they flaked out, we flaked out, and when they got up, we got up, and seeing as it wasn’t us who was paying the rent, we did our best to fit into their space. And all the time we were there, Cass was laying it on me how Ethan was a male chauvinist pig, and she was right, that’s what he was. Shit, he was ten times worse than me. When Cass had been off in New York, Ethan and me had got into the habit of doing our dope runs together, and we kept on doing that after she came back, and he made it real clear that this was MEN’S BUSINESS and he was not big on Cassandra coming along. For a while I’d pretend I didn’t notice, so I’d say to her like, “Come on, old buddy, let’s put it on the road,” but he made her so uptight she just gave up—“Well, I guess I’d better stay here with Terry tonight,” with this bitter little smile. And that left the chicks exactly where Ethan wanted them to be. Yeah, it was all going down just the way the women’s libbers said it always did.

So pretty soon it’s running like a clock with Ethan and me stumbling out of bed at noon every day, and Terry the witch makes our breakfast appear magically on the table without us having to do anything about it, and then she makes the dishes magically disappear, and guess what? Those dishes end up washed and dried and put away without us having to think about it. And Cass, who is just about the most undomestic chick you can possibly imagine, is out in the kitchen helping Terry do it. And Ethan and me retire to the living room to have our morning smokes and cups of coffee like a couple of four-star generals and plan our major strategy for the day—mostly rapping about our latest ventures in the import and retail business. And I heard all about the LIBERATED ZONE he had up there in New Hampshire, and how he figured one of these days he’d move his ass back up there permanently, cool out, finish building his house, get out of the freaking evil city, man—like the tribes were coming together, and we’re a new people, and all that shit. And somebody else could run the Weasel. Like John maybe. And of course that would mean John and Pam running the Weasel, and then, lined up right behind them on the flight line, that uptight SDS guy, Phil Vance—but I don’t think that ever crossed his mind.

OK, and I should tell you this other little thing that went down one night. Now when Cass and me first got together, one of the things I’d noticed instantly was that, when it came to sex, she could pretty much take it or leave it. Not that she was down on it. When we did get to bed, she seemed to enjoy herself, but it was obvious that it wasn’t something real high at the top of her list. And the way that Cass and me generally decided to screw was me saying something like this—“Hey, old buddy, don’t you think it’s about time to get a fuck in?” or kidding her about it, like, “I don’t really want to fuck you, sweet stuff, I just want to put it in to SOAK,” and I’d get her laughing, and we’d go to bed laughing, and laugh our way through it, and get up laughing. But Ethan and Terry played it different.

Terry was one of these girls that . . . OK, I know I’m going to sound like a total male chauvinist pig, but shit, it’s THE TRUTH, you know what I mean? There really are girls who get just as horny as guys, and they like to get fucked, and if they don’t get fucked, they get bitchy and weird. And Terry was like that. And so when she was feeling a bit on the deprived side, she’d start sending Ethan THE MESSAGE. Like she’d come drifting by and stick her tongue in his ear. Or run her hand up the crack of his ass. Or the clothes she wore. Terry always looked like she was going to a Halloween party anyway, but when she was sending him THE MESSAGE, there was usually some other little thing, like maybe a skirt and no panties, right? Or one of those flimsy little blouses imported from India and no bra. And she had, believe me, a real healthy set on her.

So one night Terry’s doing her number and so far Ethan hasn’t detected a thing. He’s just plunked down like a mud fence, sucking away on the water pipe and telling me AGAIN about being in the Merchant Marines. And meanwhile Terry is getting more and more upfront until I’m getting really itchy and embarrassed, and I think even Cassandra’s embarrassed—although she’s pretty hard to embarrass—but she’s looking at me and laughing, like, can you believe this shit? And finally it hits Ethan right in the middle of his dope-fried brain: WHAMMO. Oh yeah . . . TERRY. WOMAN. NEED SEX. NEED SEX WITH WOMAN. GOT WOMAN HERE. FUCK WOMAN NOW. You know, like that. And so quick and hard that he just goes nuts, and they can’t even make it into the bedroom. Yeah, before you know it, there’s Ethan and Terry fucking on the foam-rubber pad right next to us. I look at Cass, and she looks at me, and we’re going, what the hell? So we rip our clothes off and then we’re all screwing away on the floor, the two women on their backs and the two men on top like billy goats pumping away and maybe a foot between us.

Pretty soon we’re all yelling and screaming and having orgasms and looking good, right? And then we’re all crashed out on the floor, intermingled and panting and blown away, right? Like my head is resting on one of Ethan’s big hairy arms, and Terry is sprawled out mostly on top of Ethan, but partly on top of me, and Cass is sort of layered in on top of Terry. We’re all a bit surprised. Nobody says anything for the longest damn time, and then Ethan says, “Well, that was friendly, wasn’t it?” and we get up like nothing much has happened and Terry makes some tea.

OK? Now I realize there’s some information about this that I haven’t laid out yet, so let me go back and do a rerun. When Terry would do her numbers on Ethan, it might take him a while to get THE MESSAGE, but I usually got it pronto. And there was this one thing that got stuck in my head like a hunk of film I couldn’t shut off. Terry’s long smooth legs, and her feet pushing on the floor, and she’s still got her skirt on but it’s hiked up around her waist, and Ethan’s between her legs, and she’s shoving her hips up into him, and she’s grabbed ahold of his ass and she’s pulling him into her, and she’s panting, and when Terry comes, she yowls like a goddamned cat. It gets next to me, buddy, I’ll tell you.

• • •

BUT ANYHOW, here’s what’s happening. Ethan never hits the sack before three or four in the morning, but Terry crashes about midnight, and that gives Ethan an excuse to turn up the stereo as loud as he’s been wanting to all along, which is FULL TILT, so Cass and me are stuck there with our eardrums getting beat to shit until he decides he wants to cash it in. And this don’t really bother me because after four years of living with a bunch of animals in a barracks I can sleep through anything, so when the next morning rolls around, I sleep till noon the same as Ethan. But Cassandra is a real light sleeper, and Terry’s up in the kitchen banging away at the crack of dawn—making bread and all that other good shit witches do—and Cass is wide awake. So she’s getting cut off at both ends and only grabbing like four or five hours sleep at the most, besides which she’s doing a pack of smokes a day and all the dope she can get her hands on, and I guess that’s how she got sick with bronchitis.

One morning I touched her and she was like something that had been left out in the sun too long. She seemed really young, like ten years old, and said in this little-girl voice, “Hey, Tommy, I don’t feel very good.” I brought her some orange juice, but she couldn’t drink much of it because her throat hurt too much. She went back to sleep. I wandered out into the kitchen, bouncing off the walls, and Terry said, “What’s the matter?” so I told her. Ethan had crawled out of the sack by then, and Terry said, “Cool it, man. Cassandra’s sick.”

“Oh yeah?” he says and goes in to look at her. “She don’t look too good.” He’s got that one right. She’s goddamned WHITE. And Terry’s bending over to wake her up and get her temperature.

I’m getting that old gnawing-on-a-dry-bone kind of fear. It’s like when you have one of those premonitions that something awful is going to happen and you’ll take any excuse to think THIS IS IT. “Far out,” Terry says, “it’s damned near a hundred and four.”

“Is that bad?” I say.

“Not exactly the picture of health. I’d better break her fever.”

I say, “Break her fever? What is that?”

“Cool out, Tom. Sit down. Relax. Smoke up or something.”

But I can’t relax. You don’t know how much somebody matters to you until they ain’t around anymore, and that’s an experience I’ve had a little too much of. It’s not like I thought Cass was going to die or anything, but weird shit goes down all the time, and you can’t really predict it. “What are you going to break her fever with?” I say.

“Catnip.”

“Catnip?”

In the living room Cass says: “Catnip?”

“Look, Tom,” Terry’s saying, “you want to do something, you get the vitamin C and you count out twelve grams and you put them in the blender with some ice and honey and orange juice and you blend them up.” And she’s grabbing a couple jars. One’s labeled catnip and the other one wormwood. I say, “Wormwood?”

In the living room Cass says: “Wormwood?”

“She knows what she’s doing,” Ethan says.

Well, Terry did break Cassandra’s fever, knocked it down to a hundred, made her sip that vitamin C drink, and finally just let her sleep. Then she told Ethan and me to haul ass. “Huh?” Ethan says.

“Out,” Terry says.

So Cass was sick for a few weeks. First it was in her throat. Then it moved down into her lungs and turned into bronchitis, and she had this horrible cough that would just damn near tear her apart. And forget about us getting out of there. Cass wasn’t going anywhere. And all that time, Terry took care of her. The first thing she did was move her into the bedroom, which Ethan didn’t much care for because it was HIS bed. And he kept trying to crank up the stereo, and Terry would turn it down and say, “Come on, man. Grow up.”

That first night Terry read the Tarot to see why Cass had got sick. It was real complicated, and I can’t remember most of what she said, but there was a knight riding along on a horse at full tilt with a big stick in his hand, and Terry said that was me riding into Cassandra’s life and putting her through some heavy changes that put a strain on her spirit. And there was another card that was a picture of a woman blindfolded and tied up with a bunch of swords stuck in the ground around her. Cass tried to laugh at that one. “She looks like something out of a porn book,” she said in this raspy little voice.

“Yeah,” Terry says. “That’s exactly right. She’s in bondage. And that’s where you’re stuck at the moment . . . but dig it, that won’t last forever.”

She said that Cassandra would only be real sick for two weeks and then she’d start getting better, and that turned out to be true. And she said that Cassandra was about to go through a whole bunch more heavy changes—like no R and R on the horizon for mucho moons. And I remember the last card. It was the Star. Terry said that if Cassandra didn’t lose her courage, she’d eventually get through all this shit and end up clean and clear and simple like bright water. I don’t know if that turned out to be true or not, but I sure hope it did.