9

THORAZINE. JOHN didn’t know where Ethan had got it, and he didn’t care. When he’d been able to convince himself that it really was dawn and not just another fake version, John had crawled on his hands and knees out the door of the shack and into the cold low-lying mist of a morning that had seemed almost real enough. He’d been able to see the ground, the trees, the sky again in something close to an ordinary way, and he’d been so thankful that he’d kissed the dirt in front of him. He’d scrambled up to the house. Ethan and Terry had still been asleep. “Hey, sorry. I’m kind of bummed out. Thorazine?”

The trip had left him with unpredictable chilly events he would later call “images,” although they weren’t entirely like things he saw; he knew them as internal, mental, like skips on the record of his memory or misfires in the engine that generated his thoughts; if he took enough Thorazine, it seemed to erase those errors, but he could feel it erasing something else too—maybe something essential—and it didn’t even touch the jangle. John walked for miles around Ethan’s property, up and down the hills, trying to damp down the fire of an animal life that was threatening to consume him. He didn’t know how many days had passed. The jangle kept getting worse. He had trouble with words. His mind was still full of them, but he couldn’t control them and they resisted being transformed into spoken language. He paced up and down, woke time after time to discover that once again he’d been hopelessly lost, muttering to himself, that once again he’d been staring at something—a bit of bark, a tree at the edge of the skyline—his eyes so fixed that they burned like hot augers turned in against him.

He thought about the rope so much he forgot that there had ever been a time when he hadn’t been thinking about it. The rope was in the back of Ethan’s truck—good thick sturdy rope—and the roof of the shack was crossed by a single fat beam. There was even an old wooden kitchen chair, so he had everything he needed. He didn’t know how to make a hangman’s knot, but he was pretty sure that if he tied a loop at the end of the rope and secured it with a series of half-hitches, ten or twelve of them, and then threaded the rope through the loop, that would do the trick. He’d read somewhere that it helped to rub the rope with lard so it would slide more easily, and Terry, of course, didn’t have any lard—it was an animal product—but he decided that butter would probably do the same thing. He would spring up from the chair, kick it out of the way. He would do it in the very center of the ceiling so, as he was dangling, he wouldn’t be able to reach any of the walls. He would wait until Ethan and Terry drove into town—they kept talking about it—so if he screamed, they wouldn’t hear him. If he screamed, it would be a simple animal reaction. And then the mistake would be erased.

He listened to Ethan and Terry talk. Sometimes their voices made sense and sometimes they didn’t—drifted in and out of comprehension like an untrustworthy transmission crossing a star-smear of static. “That was some evil shit,” Terry said—or something like it. “The trippy part was really heavy, but way too much speed.”

“Yeah, whoa, way too much speed . . .”

“Kind of like mescaline.”

“You got it, babe. Not quite, but almost. Warped. Kali emanations, you dig? Shee-it. Heavy.”

Terry made tea out of catnip, hops, chamomile, linden flower, and motherwort. She and Ethan drank it; she made John drink it. “We got to get you off that motherfucking Thorazine. You keep on taking that shit, it’ll turn on you.”

For the first time since he’d come back, John felt something that was almost like a real emotion, something that generated a single consistent line of thought. They didn’t understand. They couldn’t take his Thorazine away. When it got really bad, Thorazine eased it, smoothed out its edges. They had no idea how horrible it could get without Thorazine. And consciousness was an animal byproduct anyway, certainly not something one should be attached to—particularly seeing as the “one” that was thinking about being attached to it didn’t exist in any meaningful way—but, at any rate, one could certainly not be aware of not having consciousness—and all of that crap was just words going around anyway. Words came and went. They did funny things. They turned into each other, wouldn’t sit still, melted away into static and somebody yelling. He took the rope from the back of Ethan’s truck and hid it under his sleeping bag. He had to get the mistake erased while he still remembered how bad it was.

“How much of that shit’s he been taking?” Ethan said.

“I don’t know, man. He’s been popping it like candy.”

One morning when he woke up, there wasn’t any more Thorazine. “You got to get back, man,” Terry said. “You got to deal with it, that’s all.”

He knew she was lying. She’d hidden the Thorazine somewhere. Ethan caught him going through their knapsacks. “She chucked it in the woods, man.”

“Where?”

“Shit, buddy, gone. Into nowhere. Vanished without a trace. No more motherfucking Thorazine, you got that?”

John jumped up and down and screamed: “I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it, can’t stand it, can’t stand it, can’t stand it can’t stand it can’t stand it . . .”

“Hey, steady on there, big fellow.”

John batted Ethan’s hand away, ran outside. Waving his arms in the air, he jumped up and down and screamed, jumped up and down and screamed, jumped up and down and screamed. He fell over onto the ground. He’d screamed himself hoarse. He was crying. Ethan offered him a hand. John took it, allowed himself to be hauled to his feet. “Come on, motherfucker,” Ethan said, “you’re going to learn to drive nails.”

• • •

NOW JOHN couldn’t tell how much of the weird shit in his head was left over from the day-glo acid and how much was from coming down, cold turkey, off the Thorazine. Driving nails was good. So was sawing wood—and carrying wood, and holding it in place while Ethan drove the nails. So was hoeing weeds in the garden, picking vegetables, hauling water up to the house from the well. So was walking endlessly around and around, and up and down the hill behind the house. He remembered quite clearly that these were things he ordinarily would not do, things he ordinarily would not have enjoyed doing, but he did them anyway and began to find comfort in them. His mind was beginning to organize itself again—he felt it fighting to recreate itself in a way that resembled what it used to be—and he knew that working with wood could be called “a Zen exercise,” but there was a problem with names. The names that were ordinarily attached to things weren’t the real names. Shit, he knew that much. He remembered Bill Cohen. Words were no damned good.

John had already left behind the mechanical infantile mannequin that had jumped up and down and screamed, jumped up and down and screamed—couldn’t quite remember, in any convincing way, what it had been like to be that thing. He wasn’t as jangly as when he’d been on the Thorazine, but he knew he had to keep moving. He felt bursts of electrical energy—a million tiny burns, in motion, terrifying—like ants skittering, biting, down his neck, up his back, along his arms, between his legs. Things that shouldn’t move sometimes moved; the motion of the wind through the trees spilled over into the house, and the entire wood and glass construction rippled with it. Shadows were bad; they slithered. Colors weren’t stable; if he stared at them too long, they went cobalt blue or canary yellow on him. But the worst were “mind-feeling-things” (he couldn’t think of any other name for them): sometimes like a draft of dark sorrow—like the sudden recollection of a dear one’s death—at times so sweet and poignant they were unendurable. The mind-feeling-things were not attached to images or memories; they simply appeared, related to nothing, and carried with them a hint of a greater meaning—infinitely complex yet simple as water—that he could grasp if he could only move forward half an inch through some dense mental fluid.

He could talk again. “Non-existence . . . kind of generates existence. And the other way around too, like . . . OK , so how could something cease to exist that used to exist? And how could something come into existence out of nothing? Do you know what the fuck I’m talking about? . . . And it’s like kind of pointless to pick one or the other.”

“Oh, yeah,” Terry said. “You’re there, man. Like this,” and she aimed her hand at his stomach palm down. “Go ahead and kill all those motherfuckers, they’re dead already. And that’s true.”

She turned her hand over, making her palm into a cup. “But OK, this is the other side. And it’s true too. If you check out, man, you’re just going to blow your incarnation. Do you want to come back as a maggot and have to work your way all the way back up again?”

John wondered if she knew about the rope. If the world was still operating the way it was supposed to, she couldn’t possibly know about the rope, but shit, he wouldn’t put it past her. He hid the rope in the woods. He knew in his heart that it was not possible to live without Thorazine. It was too much work. In the shack, he stood on the chair, reached up and over the crossbeam. He lifted his feet from the chair, allowed his entire weight to hang from the crossbeam. He wanted to know for sure that it was strong enough to erase the mistake.

• • •

JOHN MET the neighbors. He didn’t talk to them and didn’t bother to remember their names. He helped Ethan finish an entire section of the house. He helped Terry cook, learned to bake bread in the wood-burning stove. Kneading the dough was good. So was batting it down when it rose. Every day Terry made him drink a mixture of brewer’s yeast, raw wheat germ, and blackstrap molasses. It tasted like shit. She made him eat raw vegetables. He ate carrots and tomatoes and onions and lettuce and parsley—all still warm from the sun. At night, the three of them sat down together like a family and ate brown rice and lentils. Terry taught him how to season the lentils with mustard seeds heated in oil until they popped, with whole cinnamon and cloves, with cumin and turmeric and coriander and chilies, with sea salt and a pinch of raw sugar. The sun was making him darker, lightening his hair; he was getting thinner. He had to poke a new hole in his belt. One night as he lay in his sleeping bag in the shack, the terror came back. It arrived on the voice of the mosquitoes buzzing around his ears, then swelled into a howl. It rolled over him, wave after wave, as he shook and wept. He brought the rope back from the woods, untied the loop in the end, and returned it to Ethan’s truck. He walked up to the house. “Hey, do you guys mind if I sleep in here?”

“Hell, no, man. There’s plenty of space.”

If he wanted to live, he had to put up with the jangle. It was an animal thing. He knew that wanting to live was stupid, pointless, and hopelessly mired in ordinary human consciousness, but he was terrified of that rope now, that crossbeam; the thought of what he’d almost done iced his guts until, for minutes at a time, he couldn’t breathe. If he wanted to live, he’d have to learn again to do what he’d done his whole life—hide the mistake so no one could see it. He stripped to the waist, tied his hair into a ponytail the way Ethan did, and sweated in the sun. They made a new fence. Glad to find out how bone-grindingly hard it was, John dug post holes. To keep the sweat out of his eyes, he tied a bandana around his forehead the way Ethan did.

He began to look forward to the evenings. He would have worked himself into exhaustion by then. His mind would have cooled by then. He didn’t dare to smoke dope, but he liked it when Ethan and Terry did—how silly it made them. He drank the truly vile tea she brewed for him—skullcap and valerian root—and felt almost peaceful, almost at home. He liked Terry’s freshly made bread without any butter on it. He liked the light of the kerosene lanterns. Ethan had an old cracked Stella guitar; it was a piece of shit, but John tuned it and played it. He didn’t sing, just picked out old tunes that felt right for the place—the mountains of West Virginia folded into the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The Dupres must have lived much like this in the old days. He played “Reuben” and “Spike Driver’s Blues” and “Bonaparte’s Retreat.”

“Hey,” Ethan said, “you ain’t half bad, you know that?”

John began to enjoy falling asleep—the way he often used to, as he realized now, back in Canada, and even further back, in West Virginia. No location was ever simple; just as he could turn New Hampshire over and find West Virginia embedded in it, he could turn West Virginia over and find Canada. The last time he’d felt fully and completely all right had been in Canada, where he would return—as his mind, drifting away, always told him. The images that slipped in and around him now were no longer menacing because the central mind-feeling-acid-thing had come out of hiding—from where it had lurked and had time. Yes, time was not a simple one-way flow any more than location was a simple point on a map. It was true that his life had divided in time as well as in space. If he went far enough back along the track, there was no mistake. Getting back there was just as easy as flying in dreams. You run gently forward. You leap up. And then you’re airborne. You sweep your arms like a swimmer.

One morning Terry said, “I’m going to drive back down to Boston. You want to go back to Boston?”

“Sure,” John said, although he didn’t know what the fuck he was going to do in Boston. He’d been in New Hampshire for nearly six weeks.

• • •

AUGUST IN Boston is a bitch. It’s like that summer-in-the-city song—I kept hearing it in my head, clanging away. And the weird thing about John’s apartment was that what made it unfit for human habitation—like being underground with no light—made it NICE in August. It never got too hot down there, and you never had to notice that the sun outside was baking the piss out of everything, so we spent a lot of time not going anywhere, and Cass got heavy into DOMESTIC, so pretty soon we’re sleeping on a brand-new foamie with SHEETS on it, and we’ve replaced his old beat-to shit TV with an up-to-date model, and we’ve even bought us a little stereo and a few records. The old weird hashish seemed to go perfectly with the space we were in, so we got ourselves an honest-to-God hookah to do it in, and I filled the bastard up with Napoleon brandy. You better believe it was mellow.

For a while there we were looking good. It’s not like we never went anywhere. When the evil sun fell behind the tallest buildings, we’d emerge like a couple of skunks into the cool of the evening and drift around town because I had to stay in the game, you know what I mean? Like checking in with Lyons and moving a few ounces. But anything else . . . Well, there was this music festival happening, the one they called Woodstock, and we almost went to it, but when we got right down to the full horror of maybe packing up the camper and driving all the way there, we just couldn’t quite get it together, so I won’t be able to tell my grandchildren I caught the big show. And you know what Cass likes to do? Cass likes to lay around and READ BOOKS. Well, shit, I’ve read a book or two in my time, but as to spending day after day LAYING AROUND READING BOOKS, that’s a whole other matter. We had to keep going over to Harvard Square so she could buy more of them.

I didn’t know when the hell John was coming back. For all I knew he’d pissed off to Canada and was never coming back. The Lord of the Land—slimy little fucker—showed up, and he was kind of surprised to see that Mr. Jones’s act wasn’t playing, so I laid the bread on him for August AND September, hoping he’d go away, which he did just happy as a clam, so there was no reason why we couldn’t stay there right on into the fall, LAYING AROUND READING BOOKS. When John finally showed up, I’d never been so glad to see anybody in my life.

I noted right off the top that Terry was with him and Ethan wasn’t, and I filed that one away in the back of my brain for later contemplation. John had turned into one of these spacey Macrobiotic back-to-the-land freaks, brown as a nut and skinny as a stick and wearing some bleached-out old Mexican shirt that was probably Ethan’s, hanging open so you could count his ribs if you felt inclined to do that. I noted that he was real quiet, even more quiet than usual, and he’d got that ten-mile stare like the guys who’ve been out humping the boonies too long. And when you asked him anything, there’d be like this . . . I don’t know, this take-up time before it all clicked into place and he’d say something back to you. “I’m all right,” he kept saying, but I didn’t think so. I knew he’d dropped that fucking day-glo acid before he even told me.

Well, Cass was all concerned with the state of John’s head, and she had to hear all about it, and Terry looked kind of jumpy, like twitchy and irritable, and she says, “Well, I got to split, folks, catch you later,” but not before she gives me THE LOOK, and all of a sudden I’m left standing there holding up the wall, thinking, hey, wait a minute, why did I just get THE LOOK? I say, “Hey, old buddy,” to Cass, you know, like, “you and John catch up on the state of the cosmos and maybe fire up that old hookah and like . . . and maybe you could start getting our shit together, because I’m going to go see if I can find us a place.” She just laughs at me, but my show’s already on the road.

Ethan and Terry’s door was standing wide open so I walked right in. Terry didn’t seem the least bit surprised to see me. She closed the door and locked it. She says, “You hungry?”

So we do some smoke and she slices up some of that fine bread she bakes. She tells me that the folks on the next farm over laid some far-out blackberry jam on her. She shoves the jar at me and says, “Yeah, man, take a little hit. A ray of sunshine in every bite. Homemade by honest-to-God hippy-trippy-dippy assholes just like out of the newspapers.”

I don’t know where she’s at. I’m just sitting there trying to catch it as it goes by. She says, “You know, if any of us had any morals left, we wouldn’t be selling that heavy mind-fuck day-glo shit on the street . . . like to any dumbass fourteen-year-old with the bread to pay for it.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“But we transcended morals, right? That’s death-trip talk, right? We’re a new people, right?”

“You the one, babyshake.”

“Oh, Jesus, Tom, I can only do Earth Mother for so long and then I’ve got to feel pavement under my feet. I used to wear stockings to work, can you believe that? Weird, huh? Every fucking day. And you know what’s even weirder? It wasn’t that bad,” with this hard little laugh. She says, “Tom?”

“Yeah?”

“Fuck me.”

Well, I did just that, and it was pretty damn spectacular. Then we had us some more smoke and some more bread and jam and tea. She says, “Ethan may be a crazy old fucker, but he’s MY crazy old fucker.”

I say, “Yeah, right. And he’s a friend of mine.”

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “If you asked him, he’d say that too. You know, Tom, this state of affairs does not exactly fill me with joy.”

“Well, me neither, sweetheart.”

“You know what? It’s so easy, it’s disgusting. There’s no reason in the world you shouldn’t fall by here any time you feel like it. Either you got Cassandra with you or you don’t. And either Ethan’s here or he isn’t. You see how motherfucking easy it is?”

Yeah, I did see how easy it was.

I hightailed it out of there. I figured if I was gone too long, it’d look kind of weird, and I should have been headed straight back to John’s but I didn’t do that. I just drove around. I don’t even remember where, but I just drove around. And I came THIS CLOSE to aiming it all west. Like there was nothing at John’s place really I needed, and I had coin in my jeans—plenty for gas and hamburgers and even checking into a motel along the way, if that should turn out to be my inclination. And if you like to drive, it don’t take that long to drive from Boston to North Dakota. I like to drive. I can drive for days, man, and not think twice about it.

But here’s what’s happening. There had to be some reason for all this shit, you know what I mean? Some PURPOSE. Like why was I at Ton Son Nhut when Tet came down? Like why did I go to Nam at all? Like why didn’t I stay in Hubbard when I got out of the service, and why the fuck did I go to Boston, and why had I been hanging out with some crazy anarchist draft-dodger from West Virginia, and why was I living with Cassandra and screwing Terry? You see what I mean? It was all just too nuts not to MEAN SOMETHING.

• • •

IT WAS weird to be back inside a small box at the bottom of a large box located near Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States of America, in the belly of the beast, but it wasn’t any weirder than being anywhere else. Whenever John looked at the pictures of the girls he’d taped to his walls, he felt his old familiar dark sorrow—but now it was so intense that he almost ripped those images down. Instead, he forced himself to look at them until he caught up with the thing that had lurked and had time—or until it caught up with him. It wasn’t just girls in general, it was Zoë—like she was the entrance to a seriously heavy mind-time-place-thing. He took down all of the pictures but hers.

Back along the time track—it was not far at all; it was gone and lost—he swung gently on the front porch glider with Zoë and remembered Rilke’s German. She sat next to him with her back straight and her knees together, in a posture that was almost prim. She was so different from Cassandra. He remembered remembering the rain at the end of that summer—and taking rollers out of Zoë’s hair, the way each section sprang back into a perfect cylinder once it had been released. He’d never taken rollers out of a girl’s hair before, but it had felt like a perfectly natural thing to do. So had separating her eyelashes with a pin—individual hairs, each growing out of sensitive living tissue—but the summer had thinned out, given up its stifling heat. The summer was so full, John thought, Rilke’s words coming to him now in English.

It wasn’t just poetry, or memory, resonating in a mind-feeling-place; Boston itself was drifting into melancholy autumn. Tom had paid John’s rent for September, so there was no reason for him to go anywhere—just as there was no reason to stay where he was. Ethan had given him the old Stella guitar. “Yeah, man, that poor fucker would get lonely if it didn’t go home with you.” He restrung it with light-gauge strings, sanded down the bridge. It was still a piece of shit, but he’d transformed it into a somewhat more useful piece of shit. He played for hours. He never would have guessed that he remembered so many tunes. Some of them didn’t even have names. He never sang. He thought at first that it was because he couldn’t trust his voice, but then he amended that formulation: it was because he didn’t want to hear his voice.

He ate the vegetables Terry had given him. He drank Terry’s herb teas. Using a bit of the money Cassandra had given him from the hash deal (he’d stashed it in Memoir of a Revolutionist and had almost forgotten it), he bought more vegetables. He bought lentils and beans, split peas and tofu, brown rice and miso. Maybe he’d been reborn as a vegetarian. He ate as much as he wanted, but he kept getting thinner. None of his clothes fit. He bought a new pair of Levis. His waist had shrunk from thirty-four to thirty—a loose thirty. He bought a pair of lightweight hiking boots and walked for hours along the Charles River. Thinking of Bill Cohen, he walked around and around Harvard Yard. He hadn’t been that thin since high school. He felt like he was fourteen again—but not like it at all. He felt like he was back in Morgantown again—but not like that at all. Each time he remembered remembering, it thickened the depth of the central mind-meaning-thing. He wanted to talk to Pamela. He asked himself if he was still in love with her. He wasn’t sure now what “in love” meant—a metaphor for something he could almost grasp if he could find some way to move toward it.

• • •

JOHN RAN into Phil and Karen Vance in Harvard Square. He was about to cross the street to avoid them when they called out to him, “Hey, Raymond. What’s happening, man?”

There was no reason not to talk to them any more than there was a reason why he should. He waited for them to walk up to him. “My God, man, have you lost weight,” Phil said. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

They were dressed like twins—same checked shirts, same baggy pants, same construction worker’s boots, same chopped-off hair. Phil was shorter and thicker, was bald and had a beard—those were the only differences between them. “Great to see you, man,” Phil was saying. “Where the hell you been?”

It would have been impossible to answer a question like that in any kind of concise way—certainly not using ordinary words—but John had learned by now that when people asked things like that, they didn’t really want to know. “Up in New Hampshire with Ethan and Terry,” he said.

Did he want to have lunch? they asked him, smiling and smiling. It took him a moment to realize they meant right now. He couldn’t find any reason not to, so they went into the nearest box where food was sold to people. He didn’t want anything made of ground meat, but that’s what they sold in that particular box, so he ordered a cheeseburger. He couldn’t understand why Phil and Karen were being so friendly. Had they forgotten the newspaper seizure? Being with them was forcing him to play a difficult old tune with his mind, and it had been so long since he’d played it, he kept missing the strings.

“You should call Pam,” Karen told him. “She’s worried about you.”

So they still liked Pam too, did they? Maybe politics didn’t matter as much as it used to. Or maybe it was when he and Pam had taken Phil to emergency—maybe that had made them all friends again. And of course Karen and Pam were in the Collective together. “Is she back?” he said.

“No, she’s still in New York.”

Karen wrote Pam’s father’s phone number onto the back of a leaflet she’d been carrying in her knapsack. The front of the leaflet said: WARGASM.

“I dropped acid in New Hampshire,” John heard himself saying, but why shouldn’t he say it? “Like heavy. Like one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. I’m just coming down from it now.”

He thought they weren’t going to say anything to that, but then Phil said: “You ought to come to Chicago. Roast some pig. That’ll put your head back together.”

“Chicago?”

“Yeah, man, you know, the October action. The Four Days of Rage. It’s going to be so fucking far out, man. Thousands and thousands of kids. We’re going to kick out the motherfucking jams. Going to trash that fucking pig city.”

Now they were both talking to him. They took turns. When one stopped, the other one started. Lots of jailbreaks happening now—going into high schools and giving the kids the straight scoop on the revolution. Slapping around a few pig teachers if they got in the way. And so-and-so had trashed some pig center at Harvard, far fucking out, man. Yeah, getting into some serious anti-imperialist ass kicking now, bringing the war home to the mother country. They were living in a collective in Dorchester, relating to working-class youth, trashing the pig inside themselves, getting rid of the last of that wimpy Movement shit, doing karate every morning, getting toughened up.

Tough enough to take on Tommy Parker? John wondered. He didn’t think they had a chance. And John took one bite of his cheeseburger—the sadly congealed animal cells created by murder, the sleekly globular fat, the hot orange slime, the rasp of salt, all of it pressed between a puffed-out white paper bletch. He couldn’t eat it. He’d be lucky if he could retain what was already in his mouth and swallow it. And trying to chew that dead mass of protein flipped him elsewhere—to a noble section of gleaming track at some considerable distance—and he saw that what he’d mistaken for two people sitting with him were really chilly images. The rubbery horizontal slots in the lumpy pinkish balls were continually moving, continually emitting streams of ordered sound that appeared to be designed to imitate human speech. Each entity had two shiny wet globes set above the slots; the globes kept rolling around. One entity picked up the hot stinking thing in front of it and thrust it into its slot—and then, just as quickly, the images shivered and he saw them again as people. Oh, my God, he thought, they’re Weatherman.

“I’ve got to go,” John said, “got to meet somebody. I almost forgot. Running on a tight schedule.”

“Fall by the office,” Phil said. “Get into the paper again. We’re doing some far-out shit. We’d be glad to have you, man. You could really make a difference.”

John knew that he had to walk to burn off the jangle. He aimed himself toward Central Square in the heat of the afternoon. All those words coming out of Phil and Karen—the thick dense code of the Revolution—but he’d cracked that code a long time ago, and now he was remembering. Yeah, he was remembering everything. What was he feeling? Was it anger? By the time he got back to his place, he knew that he could still make words happen. He wrote in a fury:

• • •

SNCC, the Resistance, the Old Mobe, the New Mobe, Women’s Lib, BRWC, SDS, PLP, WSA, RYM I, RYM II, Weatherman. As the technique of production progresses, the worker on the assembly line makes an increasingly smaller segment of the finished product. Mirror image of automated technology, our opposition becomes increasingly fragmented as we create smaller and smaller interest groups competing with each other for the goods of the world AS IT IS. Each fragment--in danger of splitting into yet smaller fragments--tries to struggle harder for REAL power, entering competition with such worthy opponents as the Oil Lobby, Crest, Carl Oglesby, General Motors, the Anti-Defamation League, Mao Tse-Tung, Coca-Cola, and Colonel Sanders’ Southern Fried Chicken. Black power, red power, gay power, Jewish power, student power, women power, power to the people, a powerful new washday whitener, a new car with the power of a thousand horses under the hood, your perspiration worries are over with a NEW REVOLUTIONARY PRODUCT MORE POWERFUL THAN A SPEEDING BULLET—but THE power is unitary, maintained by the powerlessness created by such fragmentation. Soon riot police will become obsolete, for, even now, magicians a thousand times more clever than Henry Kissinger wait in the wings for their chance to adjust the social order. They will have degrees from Harvard, they will be masters of technique, and they will cast no shadow at all.

The next day he needed to confirm what he already knew, so he walked over to the Weasel office. It was the same familiar box where he’d spent so many hours, with the same tables and desks and chairs, but now Ho and Fidel and Che looked down from the walls. Somebody had put up a hand-painted banner that read: LONG LIVE THE VICTORY OF PEOPLE’S WAR. Phil was sitting at what used to be Ethan’s desk. “Hey, man, great to see you. You want to help us lay out?” The place was packed with SDS kids. “No,” John said, “not this time. I’m out of practice. I’d just fuck it up.”

He sat down at what used to be his desk and read the LNS packets he’d missed while he’d been gone. He read what used to be New Left Notes but was now called Fire. He read the issue of the Weasel that was spread out on the layout tables. WARGASM . . . BRING THE WAR HOME . . . SDS IS CALLING THE SHOTS THIS YEAR . . . WE ARE WINING.. . . PART OF A WORLDWIDE STRUGGLE . . . SMASH MONOGAMY, SMASH RACISM, SMASH IMPERIALISM, SMASH PIG AMERIKKKA . . . MAKE YOURSELF INTO A TOOL OF THE REVOLUTION.. . . SMASH THE PIG IN YOURSELF. It was all aimed at the October action: FOUR DAYS OF RAGE. As he was leaving, he saw an image he’d missed. From around a corner, on the side wall next to the lay-out tables, Comrade Stalin was staring down at him.

Back in his small box, he read what he’d written the day before. It wasn’t direct enough, clear enough. He tried again:

• • •

Heroes, machismo mongers, revolutionaries who’ve never been in a fist fight! BRING YOUR BALLS TO CHICAGO! SDS is calling the shots this year. We’re going to fuck the city up for a few days, get ourselves beaten up, jailed, tear-gassed, and probably this time around some of us killed. Oh, wow, real death! We haven’t got anything to offer YOUR head. You don’t count, being white middle-class assholes, but you’ll have a great chance to work out your wet-dream fantasies of violence right there on the motherfucking street. And of course we’ll get a lot of press coverage.

That was as much as he could do. He was afraid that now he could only write in short bursts, that he couldn’t finish anything. And who would publish it? Nobody.

He thought of calling Pamela at her father’s, but what could he possibly say to her—using words that were no damned good? Some words were even worse than no damned good; they were lies. But then, later, as the evening cooled, he heard Rilke again, sounding, and spoke the words aloud, quietly—words written in another dense code, but words that were the opposite of the crap they were pumping out in the Weasel office. Rilke’s words didn’t lie, didn’t hide, didn’t snap viciously shut to kill off any chance of possibility.

It was amazing that he could still remember so much German after all that time, and surely he must be remembering it because each word was perfect. Du im Voraus. How could Rilke have found each word, so exquisitely right that no other word could possibly replace it? Verlorne Geliebte. You couldn’t translate Rilke. Maybe you could get the raw meaning, but you couldn’t get the music—the way each word fell into place with absolute inevitability. Nimmergekommene, nicht weiss ich, welche Töne dir lieb sind. And with that, the door opened to the dark sorrow—unbearable, unbearable—and Rilke’s German resonated, opened door after door after door.

He’d told Phil and Karen that he was coming down from the acid, but was that true? Yes, so far as he could tell, it was true. Soon he’d be normal again—as crazy as everybody else. That day-glo orange powder had given him an experience so intense he couldn’t hold it—like sitting next to his father’s bed while his father died—but it hadn’t added anything new. It had rearranged things, intensified things, but everything that was happening now had always been happening. Each night, just at the edge of sleep, he heard voices far behind the blur of words. “The whole track inside” wasn’t its real name, nor was it what we mistakenly call “life.” Back of all that—before the track had divided, before the great gulf had been fixed, before the mistake had been made—the train would always come by for him in the extinguished lamplight just at the edge of sleep. It was as easy as flying.

• • •

SOUND. BY now he was sure that he could tell the difference between what was real and what was not, and this was a real sound—hard leather heels walking quickly down the narrow hallway past the furnace, approaching his door. Not a cop’s walk—too light and rapid for that—but someone who didn’t care about making noise, and he caught up to the full inevitability of it: of course he would know her sound; he’d been waiting for her so intensely he’d almost forgotten he’d been waiting. He opened the door before she knocked. “Hey, man,” she said, and the jangle poured over him like napalm.

He contracted back into himself, withdrawing from the doorway. He didn’t know what to say. Maybe he should try her name. He said it. “Pamela.”

She took two steps inside. She turned toward him, then stopped, her feet in shiny black boots planted firmly on the floor a foot apart—a karate stance? She took a deep breath. He saw that she was shaking all over—just slightly, just enough to give her away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“I’m sorry I ran away. I freaked, man. You probably felt deserted . . . Shit, you were deserted. And I did it,” and then, like an aside to an audience, “That’s me trying to own my actions, right?”

He could feel his heart tripping out. Adrenaline. The living animal. He should say something.

“I did desert you,” she said. “I couldn’t . . . I didn’t have any choice, but I felt like shit about it. I still feel like shit about it. You don’t run out on . . . I can’t even say the word with a straight face, but we haven’t got another one. You don’t run out on your comrades.”

Maybe it was comrades, or the long swingy navy coat, belted at the waist, or the knee-high boots worn over her jeans, or the way she’d just burst in and delivered her speech with no preliminaries: she seemed too flamboyant to be real, like a character out of Dr. Zhivago—but then the hard-edged immediacy of her, the astonishing unpredictable presence of her, made her perfectly real. She wasn’t wearing ribbons in her hair, had brushed it straight back, Alice-style, and secured it with a plain black band. Simplicity. But it was the most eye makeup he’d ever seen on her—dancer’s eyes, meant to carry all the way to the back of a darkened theater—and inside that fabulous artifice, the corneas of the speckled hazel he remembered remembering. Alive.

He watched her breathe. Deliberately. Telling herself to breathe? She stepped forward, reached out, and ran a gloved finger over his cheek just under the cheekbone. “Oh, baby,” she said, her voice changed, now singing and sorrowful, “what are you living on? Air?”

He stepped back because he didn’t have any choice. Air? He couldn’t get enough of it. He was gobbling it up, trying to drink it down like a milkshake. He withdrew until the wall stopped him. Through a twist of the kaleidoscope, he saw her another way—she wasn’t merely giving him a highly mannered performance, she was like a little girl giving a performance and nearly perishing of stage fright, a far younger Pamela embedded in the current version.

He couldn’t very well say, “I forgive you.” People didn’t say things like that anymore. He said what he could. “It’s OK.” That sounded all right so he tried it again. “It’s OK.”

“I called you and called you and called you,” she said.

“I was in New Hampshire.”

“Yeah, Karen told me that.” She shrugged—another apology. “I just got in last night. I called her . . . I didn’t want to call you. Like it’s been too long. Like it couldn’t just be a phone call. She told me you’d dropped acid and it was . . . A bummer? Is that right? Jesus, man, how are you?”

“It was, yeah, a garbage trip. It was like . . .” Stick to formula words. “It was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. But I’m all right.”

She was studying him. God knows what she was finding or how she was translating it. She undid the belt on her coat, unbuttoned it, shed it, and threw it onto the one and only chair. He could see that she’d been eating. She looked healthy. She was wearing a pink sweater. Pink! She didn’t take her gloves off.

He knew that she’d dressed for him. He saw her knowing that he knew it. “Yeah, check me out, man, brand new from top to bottom. My father said, ‘Pamela, what are you doing schlumping around like that? You look like a DP. Go buy yourself some decent clothes,’ and he hands me the charge card. Like a year ago I would have told him to shove his charge card, but . . . I don’t know, man, I’ve changed my ways . . .

“Oh, baby, you look . . .” She shrugged, exasperated with herself. “You look kind of scary . . . I don’t mean . . . You look cute that thin, but . . . Shit, I shouldn’t encourage you . . .”

“Have you been eating anything?” she said.

“Oh, hell,” she said, “I’m saying all the wrong things. I know that nobody can make us eat if we don’t want to, but . . .”

She had to be as frightened as he was. Even her legs were shaking. “I’m talking about your head, man. What the fuck are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I have been eating. I’m not . . . Yeah, I have been. For real. And trying to write an article. It’s not . . .” That was as much as he could say right now.

“What’s it on?”

“Oh, shit. Just another critique. I guess it’s supposed to be a critique of Weatherman. It feels kind of futile.”

“Yeah? Well, our critiques will always be futile until futility writes the critique.”

“Do you think that way naturally, or does it take an effort?”

He saw the surprise on her face. Then she laughed—a sharp, brief, staccato sound. “Glad you still got your sense of humor, man.”

“I don’t know if it’s humor.” He hadn’t been trying to be funny. He’d really wanted to know.

She walked to his desk. “Mind if I look?”

“Oh, hell no.”

She read through it quickly. Of course there wasn’t much to read—his pathetic two paragraphs. “Right on,” she said in a bugle-bright voice. Then, turning to find his eyes with her eyes: “It’s good. It’s necessary. I can see what you were trying to do . . . where you were going. It doesn’t have to be long. Another two or three pages. Do you want me to finish it?” Meaning: Are we still a council?

“Yes,” he said, “you finish it.”

She nodded. What needed to be done, would be done. Like Lenin. No, not Lenin, God forbid. Like Rosa. She took off her gloves. Another pair so tight she had to tug at each finger. She flattened them, folded them, laid them on her coat. Now he knew why she wore gloves like that—although he couldn’t have found the words to explain it to anyone who didn’t already know. He saw her start to say something but give it up before she could find the words.

Instead, she paced. Looked at his guitar. Looked at his notes on the walls. Could she be doing it simply by walking, taking a quick tour of the inside of the box—finding a way to deal with the jangle, taking it all as it came? (He could never do anything that simply.) She circled away, passed the partially open window. It was raining—he’d been aware of the steady autumnal sound of it since morning—and he caught himself in the act of inhabiting his own small space. Some of his notes were on the walls; others he’d rejected, crumpled up, thrown into the corner. He was one of his own notes—infringed, taped, and baffled. He was a Charlie Chaplin hobo, scrabbling over scree and escarpment to vanish into an airy nothing.

“Wer jetzt allein ist . . .” a voice in his head reminded him. But he was not alone, at least not at the moment, and Pamela was talking about New York. The Movement fragmenting even worse than in Boston. A lot of Leninist bullshit, everybody talking about cells, cadres, revolutionary violence, Weatherman. She’d seen some SI people, but they were paranoid and jumpy and didn’t want to talk to her. Women were leaving the male-dominated groups—a good thing—and there was a lot of terrific women’s lib organizing, the only hope on the horizon. And she’d taken some ballet classes, the first time she’d set foot in a dance studio in eight years. “So fucking weird, man. I thought I would freak, but I didn’t. Well, not too much. Just wanted to see where I was at with it, if I could do it . . . a lot of my psychic energy still tied up in that shit. Even took pointe classes, if you can believe it. I thought I was in good shape, but oy, was I sore. I couldn’t walk the next day.”

Now she was looking at Zoë. Watching her look, he could feel the energy crackling off the wall where Zoë, undeviating, was multiplied— What was it Debord said? Where Zoë was mediated by images. “Are you close to her?” Pam said. He’d known that she was going to ask him about Zoë.

“It’s not . . .” He wanted to draw a curtain over the images—but then, no, he didn’t. “Yeah, I guess we’re close . . . Well, not really close, but . . . It’s hard to . . . She isn’t just Cassandra’s little sister. She’s my little sister.”

Pamela looking at Zoë—it was a mind-feeling-thing.

“John?”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, sure, I’m fine.”

“How much weight have you lost?”

“I don’t know.”

“Haven’t you weighed yourself?”

“No. I haven’t got a scale. It doesn’t matter a damn anyway. Look, Pam, I haven’t been fasting. I swear to God I haven’t.”

Her level stare said: I don’t believe you.

“I was in the hospital a motherfucking week, man,” she said. “As soon as my doctor weighed me, ZAP, there I am, back in again. The son of a bitch. I said, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, give me a break. I’m only a couple of pounds under.’ He said, ‘That’s, good, Pamela. That means you’ll only have a short visit . . . ’ And I’ve been really careful. I mean really careful. I’m healthy as a horse. Yeah, pink-cheeked and rosy, a hundred and twelve pounds.”

As she talked, she was moving closer. “And my head too,” she said. “Like I saw Martha twice a week. Whew, did some really good work, man, and like . . . It was a quantum leap. I can’t wait to tell you. I’ve changed my ways, man. I’m at a whole new level.”

She was waiting for him. Impacted, he couldn’t do anything but watch her. She shrugged. “I stayed with my father and his new . . . It was the best time I’ve had with him for years. Shit, if you didn’t know better, you’d think we were two normal human beings. Yeah, and his new wife. She’s only ten years older than I am, and she was scared shitless of me, you know, that I’d fuck up her scene . . . like, ‘What are you doing with my father, you goddamned little girl?’ And of course she’s heard all about the hysterical crazy daughter . . . mad and bad. So I got her alone and said, ‘Look, Elaine, I’m not going to give you any grief, mazel tov and all that . . . like we’re going to get along just fine,’ and we did get along just fine. You would have thought we were a nice normal family. He even lent me one of their cars.”

She stopped. He could see her frustration. He knew he had to give something back to her. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.”

“Hell, I even had tea with my mother. That’s how fucking noble I am. I ought to get some kind of award. I couldn’t eat for twenty-four hours afterward, but other than that, I was perfectly fine. Hey, don’t just stare at me with those big sad eyes.”

“I should have put the whole poem up,” he said suddenly, the words blowing out of him with no warning. “I don’t know why I didn’t. Jesus, it’s kind of obvious . . . Rilke. Did you ever read Rilke? I just put up the end part . . . the part that says, ‘Whoever’s alone now is going to stay alone for a long time.’ But the damn poem starts with, ‘Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr gross.’ Yes. That’s so heavy. ‘Lord, it is time. The summer was so full.’ Yes. That’s like really important. That’s like, you know, really heavy . . .” He shrugged. He couldn’t begin to tell her how heavy it was.

She was giving him a different look now. He saw the tension in small muscles around her eyes: Yes? OK, you can tell me everything. He couldn’t do that. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, it was that words were no damned good.

“No, I’ve never read Rilke,” she said. “I never read any poetry. I never have time. Like where we’re at now, the only possible art is political art . . . But I don’t know. It’s too easy to get arrogant on that shit. Maybe I should . . . Should I?”

“Should you what? Read poetry? Yeah, sure . . . How can you live without poetry? Rilke? I don’t know. Maybe you’d like him, maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe it’s just my thing. For me, he’s like the poet of the past. There’s . . . About the only good thing I got out of that acid trip . . . It’s hard to explain. There are these mind-feeling-things . . . like really intense. And Rilke’s one of the ways back into them.”

She seemed to be waiting for something more. He’d thought for a moment that he’d clarified everything; now he saw that he’d clarified nothing. All he could find were shifting fragments, glass shards shaken in a glass bowl. Well, no, there was one other thing—what he’d guessed. Sisters? Cassandra’s little sister? What he’d been afraid might happen, had happened—he saw Pamela now as his sister; that is, he saw her plain little face as entirely beautiful. “Jesus, it’s hot in here,” he said. He was sweating out of every pore.

He stepped toward the gas stove to turn it off. Saw a flash of it—clear and brilliant—the flame sodium yellow and copper blue. Then he was stopped, staring at the radiator. There was no gas stove. There was no Rilke poem taped to his wall, and there never had been. This was not Morgantown. This was Cambridge. “Pam,” he said, frightened, “I’m still kind of out of it.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Again he fled to the far side of the room. To feel space between them. Nowhere near enough space. Unbearable bursts of electrical energy—a million tiny burns—down his neck, up his back, along his arms, between his legs. This is dangerous, he thought. I’ve been here before, and this is dangerous.

“How out of it?” she said. “Where are you? Come on, man, talk to me.”

He felt the same luminous— Whatever it was, it felt much the same as when she’d walked into the Weasel office for the first time, but now, while he hadn’t been paying attention, she must have slipped by him on one of the strands, because he met her like someone who’s been for miles, who didn’t have time. Transcribed by his own notes, he felt himself tipped, body over time—

“Say anything,” she told him. “I don’t give a shit what it is. Whatever’s in your head. Anything at all.”

He could have sworn he was seeing her and not his own mind stuff. “I’m glad you don’t wear lipstick,” he said. He saw that surprise her. It had surprised him too.

“Well, nobody does right now, but that’s just . . . OK, it’s too big a symbol for me. Way too heavy for me. Lipstick is my mother, you dig? I could wear a dress before I could wear lipstick. Come on, what else?”

“There’s something really fluid about you . . . alive about you. The way you move . . . even just the way you sit . . . You’re always graceful.”

“Thanks. That’s nice. That’s a nice thing to tell an ex-dancer.”

She stepped toward him; he saw her blur into a mind-feeling-space he might have been able to call “anguish” if he hadn’t known that words were no damned good. It was impossible to separate his feelings from hers; he saw a stutter of incompleted motion rippling out from her, a strobe-light image he was afraid was more mental than real, and he knew that there was only a limited amount of time he could go on doing this. “Do you still love me?” she said.

He answered without hesitation, “Yes. I love you.”

Then he could hardly believe it—although he wanted to believe it. He could see her relief. It made him want to cry. And, with a painful thud like a dislocated joint finding its way home, he was back. He was nowhere else but here. He was right here.

“That’s good,” she said. “I’m glad. I was afraid you’d stop.”

“No, I didn’t stop. Were you really afraid?”

“Yes, I really was afraid. Fuck you, man, I have feelings. I throw up words around myself like . . . you know, to protect myself. But I have feelings. Like strong feelings. Pack up your shit, man, we’re getting out of here. This place is weird.”