16

WHEN, LATER, John would try to reconstruct the first few days, he wouldn’t be able to remember much except for a haze of pain. Just as he’d done in Morgantown years ago, he wrote himself a note and pinned it above Pam’s desk: FIND THE NEXT THING TO DO AND DO IT. But there was no next thing. After Pamela, there was nothing.

He would remember walking along the Charles River for hours. He would remember watching the tube for hours. When he did find something to do, that simple thing struck him with the force of a revelation—he would clean the stove. Then, as that one simple thing led to the next simple thing, he scoured the sinks, the toilet, and the bathtub. He washed the windows, swept and washed the floors. On his hands and knees, he waxed the hardwood where she’d practiced the Cecchetti Method. The morning she’d left, neither of them had been able to stop crying. “Oh, baby,” she’d said, “I knew it was going to be hard, but I didn’t know it was going to be this hard.” She’d driven away crying. As long as he could still smell her vanilla oil and her sweat and her sex in their bed, he would not wash the sheets.

He received, as they’d planned, the collect person-to-person phone call for Emma Goldman that meant, “I’m safe in New York, and everything’s fine.” As they’d planned, he said, “Emma’s not here right now,” and that meant, “I got the message.”

A dozen times, he sat down at her desk and tried to read The Critique. It opened with references to Vaneigem and Debord; in order to follow her writing, he would have to go back and read those obscure dudes again, and he wasn’t ready to do that yet. He flipped through her typewritten pages—three hundred and nineteen of them. The manuscript was divided into numbered sections—two hundred and four of them. On many of the pages she’d added handwritten notes to the margins. It was positively Talmudic. Although he wasn’t able to read more than a few random pages here and there, The Critique gave him the first suggestion of hope. Simply by looking through it, simply by handling the paper she’d touched, he’d found a purpose. He would respond to the The Critique—meet her subjectivity with his subjectivity. One day he would show her that everything she’d thought and written dovetailed beautifully with everything he’d thought and written to make a perfect whole.

• • •

ON THE seventh day after she’d left, he wandered around Harvard Square for a while, trying to look like someone cheerfully, aimlessly strolling. He was checking for agents. Then he walked to the phone booth that he and Pam had chosen—near the Square but not too near. He waited. She called exactly when she’d said she would. “Oh, baby, you should see it out here. It’s true . . . the light, the landscape, the feeling. God, I must sound like the most spaced-out little chickie, but it’s . . . transcendent. It’s mind-blowing.”

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m fine. I lost two pounds, but it doesn’t matter. I had that . . . like, you know, that extra cushion. I’m glad it’s gone . . . Hey, this is hard, isn’t it?”

Hard for you? he thought. I’m damned near dying.

“We’ve just got to keep moving forward step by step and see what happens,” she said in the crisp, matter-of-fact voice of the new Pamela, the one that drove him nuts. Maybe it was the crappy phone line, but he heard her New York accent as harsh, unfamiliar, almost alien. “When I get settled, I’ll stabilize my weight,” she was saying. “I think I’m going to keep it around 112.” He could hear, behind the words, something that wasn’t being said. Of course it wasn’t the time or the place to have an intense, meaningful conversation.

“Deb keeps telling me that my entire consciousness is going to change,” she was saying, “just from the light.”

Deb, he thought. Right.

“It really is the West out here. The women all wear cowboy boots. Can you see me in cowboy boots?”

“Oh, yeah, white ones.”

He heard her laugh—a sound like someone deciding to laugh. “Of course you’d like that . . . the ambiguity . . . So, are you ready to go?”

“Yeah, just about,” although he hadn’t even thought about leaving yet.

“Come on, baby, you’ve got to get your act together. You’ve got to . . .” He heard her hesitate. Even calling from one phone booth to another didn’t feel entirely safe. “ . . . get settled.” Back at York, she meant. “Listen. I told you. Just go through the motions, OK? That’s what I keep telling myself. You’re drowning in Romantic misery, aren’t you? I can hear it in your voice. Well, stop it.”

“I’m OK,” he told her. “I’ve been trying to read The Critique . . . Some of the entries are kind of . . . well, personal. It surprised me. They’re almost like journal entries. But not many. Most of it’s so damned theoretical . . .”

“What did you expect? I have a theoretical mind. You know that. You know me.”

He didn’t know what he was trying to say to her. Something important. The line, or series of lines, that connected them had a constant shush in it—a sound like distant traffic. He couldn’t let her go. There was no way he could keep her.

“Baby,” she said, “what are you doing? I can’t . . . I can’t tell where you’re at. I did what I had to do. Now you’ve got to take care of yourself. I can’t tell what you’re thinking. I know we can’t really talk, but . . . What are you thinking?”

He didn’t know what he was thinking. “Are you still there?” she said.

“Yeah.” There was something more he wanted to say to her.

“Come on, man, you’ve got to get the hell out of there. Call me when you’re settled.”

• • •

IT WAS like recovering from acid—and it wasn’t like that at all. He was trying to find anything he could use. Doing physical things had helped him before—sawing wood, driving nails—so he made himself go the Zygote office and work on the layout, and that simple mindless activity did seem to help. For months he’d been entirely focused on Pamela—his entire purpose in life to feed her, make her better, turn her back into a functioning human being. He’d succeeded, and the well-fed, thoroughly healed, and smoothly functioning human being had packed up her things and left him. She’d found her Sh’ma Yisrael—some kind of clarity. So where was his rock-solid foundation—the one simple thing he could count on no matter what?

He pinned up a note above his desk that said, DON’T DROWN IN ROMANTIC MISERY. He was probably feeling exactly what she’d been feeling after the riot—depressed. So what he had to do was follow her path out of it—follow it exactly, step by step. She’d gone back to her beginnings, reconstructed the entire world, had lain in bed day after day reading anthropology books. Now he would meet her subjectivity with his subjectivity. He combed through the used bookstores in Harvard Square, bought The Dharma Bums and Howl—but he knew he was really onto it when he found a collection of Rilke with both the German original and a reasonably good translation.

“Der Sommer war sehr gross,” Rilke reminded him. “Oh, Lord, it is time!” One year ago in August he’d been up at Ethan and Terry’s in New Hampshire, recovering from acid and reincarnating himself as a vegetarian. In August one year before that, he’d been in Toronto watching Chicago go down on the tube. Christ, it had been two years since he’d left Canada. Had he done anything to make love more possible? Well, he’d made it more possible for himself, and maybe that was enough—the personal is the political—but he was afraid that Pamela was the only person he could ever love truly. She’d warned him about that too.

He was stuck, not merely in Boston, but in the entire heavy, warped-out, used-up headspace that went with it. But the Movement was dead—dead for him, surely, and maybe even dead for itself—and now he belonged to a council that had only one member left in it. But no, he thought, there were still two members. He sat down at Pam’s desk. The Critique drew him into it—the fascination of seeing her mind at work. Some of her entries were whole, powerfully argued statements, absolute models of clarity, but others were nothing more than notes to herself. Entry 203, for instance, read, in its entirety: “Check out sexual dominance patterns in primate behavior.” Then, in handwriting, she’d added: “Arguments from nature dangerous. Lévi-Strauss.” Was he going to have to read all of Lévi-Strauss to figure out what she’d meant by that?

The most tantalizing writing was on the few pages that read like journal entries—like Number 83:

• • •

Could I do it, couldn’t do it, could do it, why? Not why but how. Cut through the breast bone. Thought fractured. The body remembers what the tiny rat forgets. Hot crappy little studio, rat dead. Sweat, taste sand. Black girls, Spanish girls. Standard question: why is this coming up now? Across the floor. Technique persists. Surplus. Fine work on hand axes far in excess of anything required for mere survival. Where were you trained? Good question. Why? I need, I need, I need. Old pain. Don’t forget. Theorize personal, personalize theory.

She must have made that entry the night after her ballet class in New York—the first class she’d taken in years. She’d told him about the black girls and Spanish girls in that class—and the old pain that had cut through her breast bone. The “tiny rat” was how she sometimes described the conscious mind. Reading her entry made him feel godlike—because he knew how the story would unfold. She was on her way to the theory of androgyny, on her way back to Boston, back to him. He wished that he could look at himself from the same all-knowing distance. What story was he writing? Where was he going?

• • •

HE KNEW that he had to make some effort to reconnect with the human race even if he was only going through the motions. He sat with Cassandra in the kitchen in the Shooting Gallery and smoked dope. It was the first time he’d been stoned in weeks; he loved the rush of it coming on, but then it just bummed him out. He couldn’t make himself talk. He sat sweating in the late-summer heat, intensely aware of the tension—the honest-to-God pain—in the muscles of his neck and shoulders, listening, fascinated, to the sound of boiling water on the stove. Lorraine was making tea. He’d wanted to see Cass alone, but she seemed as attached to Lorraine as a Siamese twin. What the hell were they doing?

“Motherfucking trip, man,” Cassandra was saying, “sweet Lorraine shows them some tit, and I show them some ass, and they salivate like Pavlov’s dogs. Yeah, come on, you got to check it out. Some real freaky chicks fall by there, even freakier than us, although you might find that hard to believe. It’s motherfucking boring, if you want to know the truth. What the fuck you still doing here, man?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, shit, old buddy, if you don’t know, and I don’t know, then who the fuck does?”

It was the same old jive. She sat sprawled back in her chair, her feet on the kitchen table. It was a very Cassandra-like pose, and he was flashed into one of those hideously poignant mind-feeling-things, the ones with no possible resolution. She was wearing an old minidress of Lorraine’s; it looked like something from ’67 or ’68—a white dress with a huge circle on the bodice like a target. Her bare feet were filthy. She’d shaved her legs all the way up to her white panties—a bit on the soiled side. He wanted to say, “Where have you gone, Cass?” but he didn’t.

The next day Tom fell by. “Cass tells me you’re kind of bummed out, old buddy. Thought you could use a pinch of smoke.” He tossed a baggie into John’s hands. “Magical Michoacan. Pure sunlight, trippy as all hell . . . No, no, no, don’t go reaching into your jeans. Coin is no problemo. Happy days are here again, and the bread’s falling out of the sky like Manna.” Then, with his Sunshine Superman grin, he was gone.

The grass was clean—not a stem or twig to be seen—and just as groovy as Tom had promised. Getting stoned with people might be a bummer, but getting stoned alone felt like exactly the right thing to do. Stoned, John could read The Critique for hours.

• • •

“THE PROLETARIAT must become conscious as in no previous time in history,” Pamela had always said, quoting somebody or other, and so of course that’s exactly the way The Critique opened. Well, he didn’t know about the proletariat, but he was certainly conscious, and she had made him that way.

But what was consciousness anyway? It was just a collection of words—like The Critique itself. Again that feeling he’d had so strongly on acid—or after the acid—that consciousness is nothing more than a symptom of animal jangle, but he kept sensing a greater meaning, an enticing shimmer that was only one jump ahead of him, nothing he could think about, something he would have to flash on. He wished that pure Sandoz acid was still available in the underground.

“You’re not a mistake,” he’d told her. It was the same thing he’d told himself when he’d been recovering from acid—it’s what he’d needed to tell himself if he wanted to go on living. But it hadn’t been true in either case; both he and Pam were mistakes, but when they’d been together, the mistakes had cancelled each other out and made something right. Now that they were separated, they were mistakes again— But no, she was probably doing just fine. She’d found a way to disguise herself. She could melt into the Women’s Movement and lesbianism, live there, disguised and safe, but where was he supposed to melt? Without her, he was a mistake, and he had nowhere to go.

Then, as he drifted into his second week of living alone, he began to feel that Pamela’s apartment was his apartment. He’d lived alone more than he’d lived with other people, so it wasn’t an unfamiliar state; if he used his time right, it didn’t have to be a mind-fuck, and that clean orderly space with its wonderful light was certainly the best place where he’d ever lived alone—even better than his apartment in the Annex. But he made himself get out of there at least once a day—just as he’d made Pamela get out. As he’d done all of his life, he walked. To have somewhere to go, he fell by Ethan and Terry’s.

Ethan was in New Hampshire, but Terry was at home, and it could have been tense, awkward, being alone with her, but it wasn’t in the least. “I wasn’t going to cook for just me,” she said, “but now I’ve got an excuse.” They smoked a whiff of grass—not in the single-minded way Cassandra went at it, to get totally blasted, but just to cut the edge. He sat at the kitchen table and watched her while she made curry and chapattis.

The acid trip they’d taken together seemed like a million years ago, another lifetime. How could his head have transformed her into a demonic figure, a Kali-like embodiment of the Terrible Woman? She did have a very womanly body, it was true—one that always looked better in Indian blouses and flowy Gypsy skirts than it did in jeans—but she was four or five years younger than he was, still a girl. Meandering away on a glimmering side strand, he thought how odd it was that what you looked like—something you were born with, something you couldn’t help—might determine not only how you saw the world but your very place in it. She did have a very sexy body.

“Lots of bad acid in the underground now,” she told him. “Not just twisted speedy shit like we dropped, but bad shit, evil shit. A lot of time, it’s not even acid. The kids are getting into death-trip drugs now, heavy into them, doing smack and reds and crystal meth, drinking booze again. Bummer. Hey, and the junkies are slamming each other out over bad dope deals. Have you heard that one? Like you put Drano in somebody’s shit, you dig? It’s a fairly horrible way to go out. Think what it must be like when you hit your next incarnation, all the pain you’re dragging behind you, whew.”

Unlike Cassandra, Terry actually listened to him. “Yeah, sure you’re bummed out about Pamela. What did you think, you wouldn’t feel a thing? But don’t get hung up on it. You’ve still got that expanded consciousness available to you. Once you’ve seen it, you can never have not seen it, you dig? It’s like that thing Don Juan told Carlos. ‘Go back to Los Angeles and surround yourself with familiar things.’ Yeah, make yourself a space to cool out, and shiver down, and just be there.”

It was good to rap with Terry; he felt almost like himself again. But afterwards, he still had to go home to an empty apartment—but that wasn’t too bad either. Pam’s desk was beginning to feel like his desk.

Sometimes he thought that The Critique was the only thing keeping him going; at other times he was afraid that reading it was like picking constantly at a wound so it could never heal. But this curiously detached slice of his life would have to end soon—Pamela had made sure of that. Her friends were taking over the apartment on the fifteenth of September. In the meantime, he had to find some way to connect with his own subjectivity because, right now, he quite profoundly did not give a shit.

Entry 108 made his scalp prickle. It was the only direct reference to him in the entire manuscript—in a paragraph that seemed as packed with meaning and as difficult as any of Pound’s Cantos. Pamela could have explained to him what she’d been thinking— exactly, step but step—but she wasn’t there to do it.

• • •

His words: “the whole track inside.” Divide in time as well as in space. The parallel girl. Separate but contiguous. Patterns of point distribution, mytheme distribution. The subjective, structuralism personalized: Tristes Tropiques. Mead: all cultures assign sex roles, remarkable differences from culture to culture. A revolutionary culture would be a metaculture. Sixteen, mad and bad, from Clara to locked ward, let out for the paintings in the Met, shock of recognition. Cavalier boys. Velvet and lace, silk hosiery, delicate slippers, long soft ringlets to the shoulders, lovelocks. I am a boy and I have a boyfriend. Velvet and iron. Snyder’s answer to Freud: “There is nothing in human nature or the requirements of human social organization which intrinsically requires that a culture be contradictory, repressive and productive of violent and frustrated personalities.”

• • •

THE MINUTE I walk in, I know something heavy’s going down because the usual crew of weirdoes ain’t jammed in there—just Lyons himself and Susie. He lays one of his usual raps on me, squeaking away—“Well, Tommy boy, you sure are looking good. But are you having a good time, that’s what I want to know.”

We plunk down at the kitchen table. Lyons gives Susie the eyeball and she’s gone. He shoves the papers and bowl of dope over to me and pours me a cup of joe and goes trotting off somewhere, and when he comes back, he lays this big motherfucking gun on the table. I mean it’s practically a field artillery piece. He says, “What do you think this is, Tommy?”

“Shit, Bob, it looks like a gun to me.”

He’s giggling away. “You got that one right, man. Them crazy radicals been saying we got to pick up the gun, right? Well, I picked it up. But not any old kind of gun, you dig? It’s a SPECIAL gun, hee hee hee. It’s a Ruger .44 Magnum Super Blackhawk.” And he’s laying it on me about how many grains in the goddamned slugs, and the muzzle velocity, and all that shit, right? I mean he sounds like the ad man for the Ruger company.

He says, “The important thing to remember about this gun, Tommy, is what it can do. This fucker will crack an engine block. This fucker punches out a hole in a man you wouldn’t believe. If I was to shoot a man with this thing and I got the shot in anywhere on his body . . . dig it, anywhere at all . . . that’d be all she wrote. Because the SHOCK would stop him. Even if I was to hit him in the hand with it, right? I mean it would just fucking well tear his hand right off. And if I was to get a shot into his body, well, shit, man . . . hamburger.

“There ain’t no running away from THIS gun, Tommy, no taking one in the shoulder and getting it dug out later. If you’re hit, you’ve bought it, the motherfucking end of the road.” And he’s laughing away, having a good time, talking in that high silly voice, not the least bit pissed off or anything. And then he peers across the table at me and says, sort of the way he might say “pass the salt” or “nice day today” . . . he says, “Did you sell me out, Tommy?”

I sit there and I don’t say a word. I just look him in the face. He looks back, and he don’t say a word. A lot of time passes. Finally he says, “A slug from a .44 Magnum causes what they call excessive damage to tissue. Yeah, I like that. Excessive damage to tissue.”

“Lyons,” I say, “you fucking asshole. We were in the war effort.”

“Yeah, I know that, Tommy.”

“You don’t have to tell me what getting shot means.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think I did.” He says, “Did you sell me out, man?”

I fix him with a good steady gaze the way my old man always told me to do when you’re having a DISCUSSION with somebody. “Lyons,” I say, “if you ask me that one more time, I’m going to take that motherfucking cannon and ram it right up your hairy ass.”

He rocks back in his chair and howls with laughter. Real off-the-wall shit, I mean, like INSTITUTIONAL. Then he pushes that Magnum across the table at me. “Check it out, man, it’s a motherfucking monster,” and goes off on another laughing jag. I’m thinking, shit, one of these days I’m going to come in here and find nothing left of him but one gigantic methamphetamine molecule. So I pick up the gun, and the first thing I do, naturally, is break it down. It ain’t loaded. Not bullet one. He’s grinning at me. I grin back.

I’ve never liked handguns. I’ve never liked the feel of them, never understood people who like the feel of them. I’ve never learned all the ways to talk about them the way a lot of guys do. I like rifles. A rifle will do anything a handgun will do, and do it better. There’s something about a rifle that makes you think a minute, but a handgun . . . Well, there’s something about a handgun. A kid I knew in high school shot his toes off playing cowboy with a handgun. With a handgun there’s something that makes you want to whip it out and start blazing away. I look over at Lyons and think, shit.

“What’s happening?” I say.

“They busted the Brookline operation. Then they tried to lay a bust on me. I’m out on what they call a motherfucking bond.”

“When was that?”

“About a week ago. They got no case. They fucked it up too bad. They’re going to get it in court and it’s going to look like a zip’s breakfast. They got no way in hell of proving there’s any connection between me and that frigging house. But it makes things a little difficult, man. It makes it difficult for me to get around town. It puts a strain on the old operations, if you know what I mean. You might say it’s pissing me right off. And I was set up, man. It was just too beautiful for it to be any other way.”

“Hey, Robert,” I say, “maybe the Maf set you up. Maybe they thought you was getting too big.”

“No,” he says, “I’m cool with them.”

Sure that’s what he’d say, but do I believe it? I don’t know. “OK,” I say, “like who was over there at the Brookline operation? Like what the fuck went down?”

He lays it all out, the whole picture, and I’m thinking about it. Suddenly I see where the weak link is. More than likely I should have kept my mouth shut, but it kind of fascinated me too. “Look,” I say, “Peter. The chef. Where the fuck was he when the bust come down?”

“He was taking a break. He was back home seeing his folks.”

“Well, doesn’t his timing seem a little bit too good to you?”

He taps his fingers on the table. He’s not laughing anymore. “I thought of that. Yeah, you better believe I thought of that. Except his old lady got busted.”

“How do you know?”

And he’s stopped. I mean he’s stopped DEAD, like motherfucking FROZEN. Then he says, “Shit. I know what they confiscated as evidence. My sleazy lawyer found it out. And I know how much there should have been over there. There’s a big fucking difference, man. Like maybe to the tune of thirty or forty thou. I’m talking street price now. So I want to know where that difference went. And you know what, Tommy boy? There’s two places it could have gone. The cops could have took it. Or the person who set me up could have took it.”

He jumps up and starts pacing around, swinging his hands in the air and kind of blowing off steam like a horse. His eyeballs are blazing in his head and he’s yelling, “that fucking little college punk. That goddamned little motherfucking punk. You know how these fucking college kids are, Tommy? They think GIs are fucking morons, right? Thinks I ain’t got brain one. Yeah, and he’s been to school for twenty motherfucking years. Thinks he can pull off this shit ON ME. Jesus, man, so clumsy a three-year-old would see through it.”

Yeah? Well, he hadn’t seen it till I’d pointed it out to him.

One minute he’s pissed and yelling, the next minute he’s giggling and squeaking at me. I mean it’s so quick it’s like throwing a toggle switch. “Oh well, you know, Tommy, if somebody gets busted they have to appear in court, right? I mean they don’t just DISAPPEAR. And goddamn it, that cunt better turn up in court or it’s going to be Peter’s ass. Yeah, he’s going to look like Charlie after a night with the question boys. What the fuck did he think? They was going to lock me up and throw away the key?”

And he blows me a kiss. “I love your fucking ugly ass, man. I love you like a brother. Yeah, we’re tight like a nut on a bolt, right? But life’s a little difficult right at the moment, you know what I mean? So why don’t we go straight to the source?” and he reaches in his jeans and pulls out his wallet and peels out something like a thousand bills and lays it on me. Of course I take it, what do you think?

Then he says, “Oh, by the way, Tommy, you know that loser pad where you’re crashed? They’re going to take it down.”

“Oh, yeah? When?”

“One never knows, do one? Could be next month or could be tonight, but down she’s going to go like a Tennessee whore, hee hee hee. So if I was you, I’d get your ass out of there. Like it could get a little hairy, man. They got every single one of you on CANDID CAMERA,” and he’s just laughing his ass off at that one. I’m thinking, thanks a whole fuck of a lot, Robert. You could have laid that on me weeks ago.

Well, of course I was planning to get out of that house, but it takes a while for a man to get his shit together even at the best of times, and a day or so later Lyons calls me up. Like late at night at three or four in the morning. He’s never called me up before, day or night, and I know he’s calling from a pay phone because I can hear the traffic. “Tommy!” he squeaks at me. “You remember our favorite chef. The king of the culinary arts?”

“Yeah,” I say, “I remember him quite clearly.”

“Well then, of course you do recollect his old lady?”

“Oh, yeah, she has managed to lodge herself firmly in my memory.”

“Well, Tommy, guess what I just found out? Hee hee hee. His old lady was not visited by anybody recently. NOT EVER, MAN. She’s out in California, walking around just as free as a little birdie bird bird bird. How you like them green apples, Tommy?”

That means Peter lied to him. That means Peter set him up. “That’s heavy, Bob,” I say.

“No, no, man. No, no, that’s not heavy at all. That’s just a little giggle between friends, right? And guess who calls me up? From Philadelphia? The chef himself. Clean-cut kid and been to college too. Had him a few fairy tales to tell this dumb old GI, right? Told me a few about Little Red Riding Hood and a few more about Cinderella.”

I don’t know what the fuck I can say and what the fuck I can’t. I’m pretty sure our phone’s tapped. “This is all very interesting.”

“Interesting?” he says. “Oh, that’s not the half of it. You know what, man? I don’t have to do a fucking thing about it. That boy’s going to come to me, Tommy. Yeah, HE’S GOING TO COME TO ME.”

• • •

THE LOCK on the front door had been broken for so long it felt normal. John hadn’t been planning to fall by the Shooting Gallery; he’d just been out walking, but his feet had carried him in that direction, and he’d thought, why not? It might be good to see Tom or Cassandra—either would do. He stepped inside, and the house seemed oppressively silent. He closed the door behind him and paused, listening. Maybe they were all on the nod. But no, he heard voices—distant, muffled. Feeling like an agent, he ghosted through the rooms on the first floor. Not a skaghead to be seen. He followed the voices upstairs to the closed door of the bedroom Lorraine shared with Garvin, knocked lightly. Cassandra jerked the door open, laughed at the expression on his face. She was wearing nothing but black panties and a pair of old-fashioned flesh-colored stockings held up with a black garter belt. He stepped back.

“Far out,” she said. “Here’s old Raymond Lee come to do some smoke with us.”

“What the fuck are you doing?” he said, still backing up.

“Did you hear that shit?” she said to Lorraine. “Is that any way to start a conversation? The dude sound a little uptight to you?”

“Oh, yeah, man,” Lorraine murmured. “Drawn straight out.” She was wearing a pink waist-cincher, shiny black stockings, and no panties at all. Both women were whacked out of their fucking gourds.

“Hey,” he said, “if you’re . . . like . . .”

“No, no, no, man,” Cassandra said, grabbing his hand and pulling him inside. “Dig the show. It’s for free. It’s just us, for fuck’s sake,” and then, in jive talk, “We just playing dress-up. Come on, man, join the parade. You androgynous now, right?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t mess with him,” she said to Lorraine. “He flips every way there is. Yeah, he’s trickier than a catfish. Come on, Raymond, do up a little smoke.”

She lit a match, held it under the bowl of a tiny brass pipe. He took the pipe, inhaled. “That’s not your ordinary hash,” he said.

“Can’t put a thing over on old Raymond Lee,” Cassandra said. “He’s got the taste of a connoisseur. He’s androgynous.”

“Oh, stop it,” John said, laughing in spite of himself.

“Hey, old buddy, you want to play dressup too? We got tons of groovy shit here. We could make you into the queen of the whole fucking world, man. Yeah, float around town and fuck people’s heads.”

“Fire him up again,” Lorraine said. “The dude ain’t off yet.”

“I can see that,” Cassandra said. “The dude ain’t getting the joke.”

“Yeah, I’m off.” But he took the pipe and did another toke. “What the fuck?” he said, pointing the pipestem at the two large cardboard cartons with their contents spilling out. Old clothes, dresses and slips, lingerie, boots and shoes, jewelry.

“My motherfucking ex gives me a shout, right?” Lorraine said. “Carl, the asshole. He says, ‘Lorraine, you come get you shit out of my motherfucking basement or it’s hitting the trash.’ Dig it, he’s making himself a rec room.”

“Ain’t it sleazy?” Cassandra said, pawing through a carton. “Jesus, man, sleaze don’t run no farther. Motherfucking end of the line.”

“You know what that mofo asshole used to say to me?” Lorraine was asking John just as though he might know the answer. “‘Lorraine,’ he used to say, ‘there ain’t nothing more boring than a naked woman.’”

“Here,” Cassandra said, “let’s get you really ripped.”

“No, it’s OK. Jesus.”

He could already feel the hash, or whatever it was, scurrying up his spinal cord like a tarantula, but Cassandra was pushing him backwards until he was forced to sit down on the bed. She tapped the pipe on the edge of the wastebasket, wiped the copper screen clear with her thumb, loaded it with a new chunk, fired it up, held the pipe under John’s nose, and blew into the stem. He inhaled, and an inexorable blast of blue-white smoke shot straight through his brain to arrive, baffled, at the executioner’s wall at the back of his skull. He jerked his head away.

“Come on, man,” Cassandra said, “more, more, more. No sense in half measures.” He tipped his nose back to the pipe. She blew the smoke into him until there was nothing left in the brass bowl but grey ash.

He hauled out his handkerchief and mopped his eyes. “What the fuck is that?”

“Well, you starts with hash. And then you throws in a chunk of that good old opium. And then you finishes it all off with a hit of crystal so’s you don’t nod out too bad. Motherfucking trip, man.”

He couldn’t move. Already the world was warping around him, growing multi-faceted, shearing off into bad science fiction— spaceship doors inside spaceship doors. Cassandra was checking out the sleazy clothes again. She came up with a black bra. “Too bad I haven’t got any tits.”

She thrust the bra at Lorraine who compressed her large breasts into it. Cassandra fastened it up in the back. Circles the size of fifty-cent pieces were cut out at the ends of the cups; Lorraine’s nipples thrust through the holes like the ends of popsicles. It wasn’t sexy. It wasn’t even satire. It was grotesque. He laughed.

“Hey, shit,” Cassandra said, “I think the man’s getting the joke.”

“Well, if he ain’t got it by now, he ain’t never going to be getting it.”

“Come here, pussycat.” Cassandra painted Lorraine’s nipples with a dark red lipstick. “Shit,” she said, “we too motherfucking cool for the Incision. Let’s fall by Daddy Imhoff’s. He’d really dig the show.”

“Who the fuck’s Daddy Imhoff?” John heard himself saying— already fragmented into a kaleidoscope of himselves. And the voices were murmuring, overlapping, reverberating—multi-tracked:

“Old-time dude from the good old days. Seen it all.”

“Yeah, man, motherfucking Imhoff, he always gets the joke.”

“Always got a pinch of smoke, maybe even a sniff of doogie for his little pals.”

“Digs the ladies, you dig?”

“Always slips a little something your way.”

“A little coin here, a little scratch there.”

“Slips it in your panties, in your bra.”

“Just like them dudes watching the belly dancer, you dig?”

Cassandra had gone back to rummaging in a carton. She was drawing out a long plastic boot. It seemed to go on forever like a strand of spaghetti. “Oh, wow. What do you think of this, Raymond? Shades of my misspent youth.”

“You never wore anything like that.”

“You right, man. Watched it flash by me though, at the time. You and me, buddy, sitting on the outside same as always. L’étranger. Hey, we gots the coin for the cab?”

“Zip,” Lorraine said.

“I’ve got some money,” John said.

“All we gots to do is get there, then we looking good,” and not supposed to nod out on this shit? But he’d been somewhere. Cassandra was clearly there, leering at him from behind the makeup. She’d painted huge doe eyes onto herself, a flash-pink cupid’s bow for a mouth. With her boy-short hair, it made her look like a parody of a twenties flapper. And John’s voice was going on and on. He didn’t have the remotest notion of what he’d been saying, heard the words: “Motherfucking space and light. Space and light. Space and light. Like . . . Shit. Did you call a cab? What did you say? What did you just say?”

Cassandra had found a fake leather minidress to match the sleazy brown boots. It was zipped up the front, short and tight, decorated with Indian-style fringe. She did a pirouette for him. “Don’t you just love me? Don’t you just want to eat me up like a scoop of ice cream? Jesus, Zoë would kill me, like strangle me with her bare hands.”

Then, with apparently no transition—like a jump cut from a Goddard movie—she was kneeling next to him, speaking from only a few inches away. Her voice had changed, weirdly, as though she’d grabbed up one of the accents available to her, something floating around like loose radio waves in the ether—as though she’d found a way to speak that matched, or parodied, her grotesque makeup. “We widdle ones needs a widdle mo’ smoke. Yes? No?”

He took the pipe she was offering and inhaled. “Don’t be so sad, honeysuckle. Come out and play wit us. Quit your moping over bad Pamewa. She’s a far-out chickie, but the world’s full of far-out chickies,” and then, like tuning in a radio station, that disturbing voice shifted back into her own: “Even androgynous ones, you dig?” She winked at him. Or he thought she did, and then he was paying the cab driver, and what the hell had happened to the time in between? Well, yeah, there were memories—broken pieces, flotsam, debris, a few bricks, a bit of mortar. He remembered getting into the cab. But, Jesus, time wasn’t supposed to collapse like that. He must have been on the nod.

“All time is no time,” he heard himself saying idiotically to Cassandra. “Everywhere’s a nowhere, you dig?” and the secret agent in him was noting the address for future reference.

Inside. A brown study in turn-of-the-century gloom. No, that couldn’t be right. That wasn’t what “brown study” meant. John felt himself phasing in and out. Focus, he told himself. It was funny how you could tilt words so they meant something they didn’t ordinarily mean. He imagined a whole sequence of them, each one tilted slightly, leading to the next one, so you could end up really twisted. “Hey, man, what’s happening?” Cassandra was saying. “This crazy dude is Raymond Lee.”

“Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee,” Imhoff said. Big broad hands, and Imhoff did that sneaky hermetic thumbs-up handshake and laughed—well, rumbled—a bass voice, phlegmy with a note like dirty foam. John couldn’t really be hearing the big man’s lungs moving like a set of bellows, could he? Especially not with the jazz playing—some kind of bebop or whatever it was that John didn’t know and didn’t care to know—and half a dozen men were sprawled about. No women but Cass and Lorraine; they drew the loose raspy attention to themselves like sugar water. Imhoff himself was tall and thick and old—goatee, scraggly grey hair, pot belly, broad cowboy belt, huge silver buckle with a screaming eagle on it. Oh, yeah, he was old. Everybody was old. Jesus, a beatnik’s convention from the class of ’49. “Ah, Mr. Lee,” Imhoff was saying as though sharing a smutty joke with John. “Ah, the ladies. What brings you charming ladies to my lair in the bowels of the darkest night?”

“Your sweetest self, Daddy,” Lorraine said.

To fall out, the dudes used the floor. Pillows flung around. John sank down, found the wall with his back. A cat passed him a joint damned near as big as a Havana cigar—a real honest-to-God doobie. He took it and dragged. They’d been eating Chinese takeout in the middle of the floor. Nothing was as revolting as the cold remains of Chinese takeout. Imhoff sat in one of the only chairs, and Cass sat on his lap, her tight skirt riding up, showing her stocking tops. Lorraine was curled up with another dude; she was wearing an old shawl around her bare shoulders. They’d been drinking coffee and tea; the cold cups lay on the floor. They were drinking port wine. John had the familiar sensation—all too familiar—of not knowing what the fuck he was doing there or how he was supposed to continue doing or not doing whatever it was he was supposed to be doing or not doing. The joint came around again, and he dragged. Fuck, it was strong dope. Like inhaling on a factory chimney.

Somewhat later, that Betty Boop cartoon, parody flapper, ingénue, Cassandra in disguise—her face hanging close to his, Sweeney turning into the moon at the window, Cassandra’s face turning into what, what, what? “ . . . asshole called my parents,” she was saying. “Same asshole called Zoë. Shit, man, I deeply do not appreciate that. Said he was a California pig, right? Well, shit, the pigs don’t call you up from California. They get their fellow pigs to call you up, like in whatever state you’re in, you dig . . .”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. What asshole?” Cassandra was the moon.

“That’s the right question, man. What asshole?” She leaned closer to him. She was speaking in a small, precise, breathy voice like a twelve-year-old reciting in church. “Somebody Sweet Andrew hired, right? Not the goddamn pigs. The goddamn pigs don’t call your parents up from California. They don’t call your sister in New York. Maybe it was even Sweet Andrew himself. I wouldn’t put it past him, the sick fuck. My old man was perfect. He said, ‘Oh, if you find her, can you let me know? We’ve been really worried about her. Haven’t heard from her in over a year.’ And Zoë said, ‘The last I heard she was in California. Who the hell did you say you were?’ And then they both called me up. Like they did not pass ‘Go.’ They hung up their fucking phones and they’re on the horn to me like instantly. The old man goes, ‘Are you in some kind of trouble?’ Zoë goes, ‘Cassandra, what the hell are you doing?’”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” John said. Jesus, he had to focus. Golden was the right word. No other word would do.

“I just did tell you.”

Fuck, he had to do something. They shouldn’t be calling Cassandra at the Shooting Gallery. Wasn’t the phone tapped? No, it wasn’t the moon at the window, it was the streetlight, and it wasn’t golden at all. It was harsh, carbon arc, through a slit in the drapes. The ceiling—cracks and cobwebs. Not like sleeping and dreaming. Worse. But he was coming down. Jesus, that must be what it was. Yeah, it was that simple. He was coming down. And where was Cassandra? She’d been there just a minute ago, her face like the moon reflected in the River Plate.

When John came off the nod again, he had a headache like vile death. God, he was thirsty. His mouth was burnt and dried. And then everything was coming back more quickly than he would have thought possible; he saw the streetlight burning outside the window, and it must be already far into the night. He heard traffic going by, and everywhere in the big Edward Hopper city people must be alive and doing something. Going somewhere, driving cars, walking. Lying around their pads watching television. Straight or stoned or drunk. A lot of them must have gone to bed by now, must be snoozing peacefully or not so peacefully. And even though he wasn’t there, his apartment near Harvard Square must still be existing out in the real just as inexorably as anything else; it was waiting for him, empty, with no Pamela in it. The Critique was in it. He could see, with perfect clarity, the veins in the back of his hand, the small hairs on his wrist. His muscles were stiff from lying sprawled against the wall. How long had he been out of it? Hours?

Then, drifting gradually sideways back into where he was, John became aware that he’d lost track of Cassandra and Lorraine. The skitchery jazz was still playing, was truly maddening, was poking little holes in his brain, and he seemed to be on his feet, walking. On his way somewhere? Maybe he was going into the kitchen for a drink of water. He looked behind him with what he hoped was a reassuring smile but saw that no one was watching. Many of the dudes had left, and the ones that were still lying around clearly did not give a shit. He opened the door in front of him, stepped through it, came upon a pre-arranged tableau—Imhoff sitting in a chair by a small table, Cassandra standing next to him, Lorraine off to one side. They all turned to look at him. John, not knowing what else to do, shrugged and grinned. It wasn’t like he didn’t know what was happening. Of course he knew what was happening. He’d seen Garvin fix Lorraine, had seen Garvin fix himself.

“Don’t worry, man,” Lorraine said, speaking quickly. “He’s just going to give her a taste. Just skin popping. Nothing to get uptight about.”

“Shut the frigging door,” Imhoff said quietly, then added—and it sounded like an apology—“Go on back out or come on in.”

John shut the door and reassembled himself inside the gradually assembling room. “Cass?” he said. Her eyes met his—grey fume— then looked away.

“She digs the point,” Lorraine said as though it explained everything.

“Yeah?” John said.

“Sometimes you’ll do water, you dig? Just for the point.”

“It’s OK,” Cassandra said to John. “It’s really OK.”

“He’s just giving her a taste,” Lorraine said. “No worse than sniffing it.”

“Um,” John said. He’d been planning to say something after that, but he’d lost it.

Imhoff turned his attention back to Cassandra. He opened a big hand and cupped her ass, squeezed on brown vinyl. “That’s where I ought to do you, babe. That’s the best place for bad girls, you dig?”

“Groovy,” Cassandra said.

“Oh, yeah?” Imhoff looked at Lorraine. She sent him information with her eyes. Like everything else there that night, it was in hieroglyphics and the Rosetta Stone had been lost thousands of years ago.

“I guess you must have been a bad girl,” Imhoff said to Cassandra.

“Sure,” she said with something like a smile—but no, not a smile, just a meaningless contortion of her face.

“Cass?” John said again.

Imhoff looked at John and said like an aside to the audience: “Nothing to get hung about. I know these chicks, you dig?”

Imhoff wrapped one of his arms around Cassandra’s waist and folded her gently forward. John saw her flare with surprise, saw her begin to resist, but then, falling into a what-the-fuck flaccidity, she allowed the motion to continue. Her face vanished on the other side of the chair. Her hands, palms open, landed on the floor, pressed down and held. Maybe all she needed was the commonplace reassurance of something solid, or maybe she was seeking the bottom of the world. Now she was lying prone across Imhoff’s lap, and he was regarding her with a complex gaze that looked like sorrowful amazement. Taking his sweet time, he pushed her skirt up, revealed four rows of lace on her ridiculous black panties. He slithered the panties down to just above her knees. “Yeah, I bet you been a real bad girl,” he said.

“Fuck that shit,” Cassandra said, “just do it, OK?”

It was twisted, John thought—to hear her voice and not be able to see her face.

Imhoff drew junk into the spike. “Easy,” Lorraine said. “Cherry.”

“Yeah, I know, baby. I know.”

Imhoff wrote lightly on Cassandra’s ass with the charged point. Then he lifted it away and waited.

“Fuck,” Cassandra said. John could feel her losing it. “Jesus, man,” she said.

Imhoff deliberately brought the point to rest lightly against Cassandra’s bare skin. John saw her wince. Deliberately teasing her, Imhoff held the point motionless. She began to pant; John could see it in the sharp rise and fall of her shoulders. She shifted in Imhoff’s lap, rolled from side to side, squirming. Her scissoring legs yanked the panties into tense stripes of shiny black bandage that bound her at the knee. John felt sick.

Imhoff pressed the point down. He was doing it so slowly John didn’t think he could watch anymore. But he couldn’t stop watching; it would be treasonous not to watch, not to suffer every moment of it with her. The spike penetrated Cassandra’s skin. She inhaled sharply. Her legs in Lorraine’s tacky plastic boots jerked upward. Imhoff continued to press down. He was still doing it so fucking slowly. John saw Cassandra’s entire body go rigid, fists clenching, legs contracting. A quarter of the steel point disappeared into her, then half. She released a clogged-up cry like thick sludge down a drain, and Imhoff smiled.

John felt Cassandra’s pain in his own groin. With half of the gleaming spike embedded in Cassandra’s ass, Imhoff paused once again and waited. If he’d wanted to, John could have recited “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in the time he waited. Then, just as slowly as before, Imhoff pressed the point down. Eventually it was entirely buried, but that didn’t seem to be good enough. Imhoff kept pressing until the tube that held the needle made a deep dimple in Cassandra’s flesh.

She emitted a heartbreaking sound—the first hint of a kettle boiling before you’re sure it’s really boiling—and that must have been the signal Imhoff had been waiting for. He compressed the plunger, urging the junk through the needle deep into Cassandra’s muscle. A single high-pitched infantile syllable was ripped out of her, immediately choked off. John was thankful he didn’t have to see her face.

Imhoff finished. He looked directly at John and nodded— something like: well, son, you see how it’s done—and, with a motion as delicate as a surgeon’s, slipped the needle out.

Breathing—that is, trying to breathe—John watched the energy drain from Cassandra’s body until she was lying, dribbled out, her hands spilled open, her legs gone to taffy, heels rolled out and toes pointing inward, limp as a dead cat. Imhoff slithered her panties up her thighs and stretched them into place. He tugged her tight skirt back down. He worked his arm under her waist and stood her up. For a moment she looked to John exactly like a life-sized doll someone was trying to arrange in an upright position. Imhoff obviously hadn’t yet found the proper angle for her small floppy feet. Her knees began to flex, threatened to unfold her, but she magically came to life, extended a hand, placed it on Imhoff’s shoulder. Her fluorescent pink mouth was hanging open, her eyes hazed into smudges of grey nothing. Tears had cut fine tracks down the makeup on her cheeks. “Aw, fuck,” she murmured.

“You off, babe?” Imhoff asked her in his sad basset-hound voice.

“Yeah.”

“You dig it?”

“Yeah . . . a muth . . . a muth . . .”

Imhoff levered himself to his feet, enfolded Cassandra in his arms, led her to the bed, and eased her onto it. “A mutha fuckin rush,” Cassandra whispered.

“Jesus, Imhoff, you’re an artist,” Lorraine said.

Imhoff used the same point on Lorraine—tied off her arm with a belt and did her with no ceremony at all. “Ah,” she said. Stepped across several feet of emptiness. To a chair. Sat in it.

“Want me to fix you?” Imhoff asked John.

John was too surprised to answer. He could see nothing on Imhoff’s face but a distant avuncular kindness. “No thanks,” he said. “Points make me . . . you know, kind of . . .”

“Have a snort,” Imhoff said.

John did it the way he’d seen it done—took a pinch of the white powder between his thumb and index finger, held it to his nose, and inhaled. Laconically, almost immediately, behind the last wisps of grass, behind the last wisps of hash, he sank into a sea of fluffy gently undulating pearly grey cotton candy bliss.