Contours of Darkness (13 page)

He flicked his gaze across the room and saw Conrad still sitting there, his limp cock hanging from his fly. He looked down at the woman begging him, with her noises and actions and glances, to do it to her, to make her a receptacle. She didn't care what he deposited in any of her openings, she was urging to be filled. He was struck by the younger man's restraint, and wondered why an acid-head would be practicing delayed gratification. He was annoyed that he had become so active, and judged that he had lost face before Conrad, who hadn't once lost his cool. He hated Cynthia then for having seduced him to this role of ogre, straining his cock into her, gripping her forcibly to him.

'You bitch,' he said. 'Is this what you want? A cock in your mouth while he watches, sees you rolling naked on the floor. You miserable cunt.'

The words were whips across her soul, for they were spoken in honest anger, not the stage voice Aaron fell into when he tried to lash her verbally. Also, it was the first open acknowledgement that there were three people in the room. She grasped that what she had been trying to do was be the bridge between the men, while they, after that initial embrace, had lost all functional interest in one another, in their apathy leaving her stranded, unable to relate to either. The animal in her sprang loose and she let out a long, low growl, arched her back, and snapped her head up, her face a mask with slit eyes and bared teeth; her fingers curled and her nails quivered like knife blades just thrown and sunk in hard wood. Feelings so massively repressed they did not have names bubbled to the surface to show themselves in terrifying expressions and orgiastic contortions. She twitched and jerked and stretched like an epileptic cat.

The effect on the men surpassed all their nicety of intellect. They exchanged a lightning glance which communicated the harsh jungle reality of their condition the primacy of male and female. In an unspoken stroke, Aaron released both himself and Conrad from the social contract in which Cynthia was
his
woman; she became simply
a
woman, and they were two men with precisely the same instinct, now whipped to a thrashing frenzy - to fuck her. They moved simultaneously and fell upon her, the last shreds of Aaron's reserve and Conrad's strategy burning in the heat that erupted from her body. They silenced their perspective with snarls.

As they touched her, she began to fight, her legs thrashing and her mouth and hands seeking targets to bite and scratch. The three of them rolled around the floor like cats doing battle, knocking over furniture, banging and bruising themselves. She was no match for their strength and weight, and they jerked to a halt wedged against the couch, Cynthia's arms pinned by Aaron and her ankles held tightly in Conrad's grasp. She twisted and squirmed, all the parts of her which enflamed the men made more prominent by her exertions. Her breasts rolled and juggled, her cunt flared, her arse tightened.

Aaron brought her wrists together and held them with one hand and with the other rolled her to her stomach; when Conrad saw what he was doing he assisted in the movement, and in a few seconds she was prone before them, more vulnerable now that she could not attack them with her eyes. But as Aaron's free hand swooped down to her buttocks and Conrad inched his way up to a point where he could slide his cock under and into her cunt, she found her voice.

'All right, Aaron,' she said in the kind of voice a mother uses to an unruly child, 'what do you think you're doing?'

In a twinkling the jungle disappeared and they were back in the living room, their social roles grafted instantaneously back to the burgeoning energy, quieting it, making it ashamed. Aaron was once again a schoolteacher who did not know what direction his life should take, and Cynthia was the woman he was thinking of marrying, and Conrad was a strange radical from down the block whom neither of them knew very well. With her tone she injected the air of responsibility into their activities, thus robbing them of their unbridled fullness.

As though on signal, the men looked at one another questioningly and Cynthia stopped struggling, her lax muscles providing a greater dampening of their lust than all her strength could manage. She presented them with indifference, the very quality that they had shown to her when she was attempting, earlier, to prompt them into action. Aaron let her go and turned away, getting to his feet and walking stolidly out of the room, past the kitchen, and into the bedroom.

Conrad, at the very edge of coming, passed his hand once over the head of his cock and the sperm spurted out, providing only relief from the fierce tension, and no pleasure at all; it fell in gooey drops on the carpet. Cynthia, something in her snapping, began to sob.

She stopped after a while, and like a woman coming out of a waking dream, rubbed her eyes. She got to her feet. Conrad sat as he was sitting earlier, cross-legged, his eyes closed. She shook her head and with a gesture so feminine it brought her back to herself, she spread her fingers and ran them through her hair, smoothing it and dropping it behind her shoulders so that it fell down her back.

'Where's Aaron?' she said.

Conrad opened his eyes and looked at her. He almost gasped at the sight. Flushed from the struggle, flowing with the freedom she had found in so fully playing so many roles, she glowed with a strange beauty. Her nakedness made him blink, for it was not only that she wore no clothes, but that she wore no artifice which suffused her with brilliant openness. Despite all his experience, despite the fact that he had seen women in their glory before, he felt, for the first time in his life, that awe-filled and dizzying sense of capture which has, from time immemorial, been called falling in love. And that her first action was to ask for Aaron tore a gash of envy across his soul. For he saw with certainty that she would go to him, and they would claim all the energy which had been liberated, and fuck with such totality and concern as to transport them into a searing paradise of ecstasy.

'It's what I get for getting mixed up with a couple,' he thought, ruefully acknowledging that he had faced this possibility very early in his relationship with the two of them. Simultaneously, he told himself that the wheel turns many times, and one day it would be he who was blessed with the overflow.

'He went into the bedroom,' he said.

She looked down at her body, and back at Conrad, and the problem was clear to her. 'I think I'd better go to him,' she said.

He nodded. He was already seeking refuge in indifference. She walked to him, knelt down, and tenderly kissed him on the mouth. It was a kiss of regret and promise, but it pointed to a future time, another place. She turned, stood, and strode from the room, her cheeks wobbling as she walked. Conrad felt a pain in his chest.

He rolled another joint, smoked it steadily, and collected his thoughts. In a while the sounds began, the soaring cries of Cynthia's lovemaking, and the groans of Aaron's pleasure. His lips twitched and he smirked at the wall. And as a few others have done on the sad downward glide of a mescaline ride, he consoled himself with the truth that it was not easy to learn the lessons of life; one had to live them and not know till afterward why one did what he did. And more than anything else Conrad felt that all he went through was in the way of preparation for some test or for some decision, the nature of which he was just beginning to suspect.

'Oh sweet Jesus fuck me,' Cynthia cried out.

Conrad gathered his dope and walked crazily out the front door into the cool sweet-smelling air. it was almost four in the morning. He strolled to his house, picked up his bicycle, and pedalled at a contemplative rate to the Marine, where he sat watching the wide expanse of dark blue water, and the harsh yellow lights of the Golden Gate Bridge, until the sky grew pink and the clouds began to show. He was blissfully alone.

The Driven

Not a person on the street seemed sane. The mid-morning sunlight froze the pageant of types in their sparkling diversity. Even those who were only there to stroll and absorb were transformed into spear-car-riers in the opera of Telegraph Avenue, and Aaron watched the scene unfold as he walked, searching for Conrad, and tried to formulate some conceptual structure which would subsume the disparate and complementary forces of the world he saw with eyes that still glowed with acid rushes.

The most apparently bizarre were the Hare Krishna singers, young men mostly, with shaved skulls and foreheads painted white, wearing orange robes and blue basketball shoes, pounding drums and chanting their single mantram until their minds were dulled through repetition and their eyes came to see the entire complex multiform reality of life through the inverted spyglass of a senescent worldview. They danced in front of a table with pamphlets praising the benefits of their brand of enlightenment, and under a photograph of their founder, a sallow old man with liver-coloured lips and eyes like snub-nosed bullets. The picture showed him adorned in flowing robes and seated on a red velvet throne covered by a yellow silk canopy, and surrounded by forty to fifty of his followers, all earnest American boys and girls.

As though to offset the gaudy diffusion of that exotic sideshow, stolid blacks stood heavily on the edges of the sidewalks and sold the Panther newspaper, in which angry warlords and ideological chieftains thundered their pronouncements and called for the redress of grievances with painfully clumsy articulations. Aaron bought a paper. On the inside front page was a letter from a leader in exile who asserted that 'proof of the pie is in the action,' and warned against all tendencies to get involved in theory to the detriment of practice. Aaron leafed through the pages which detailed prison atrocities, sudden murders by bands of police, and twenty-six rules which had to be followed by all members of the Party.

Leather craftsmen sat up on the concrete, sewing, tapping holes, cutting, piling their inventions in animal skin on blankets, turning the street into a brief imitation of an Eastern market. Occasionally one of them sold something, and completed the exchange of goods and money without the smile which has become almost compulsory in California whenever business is done. These were people who, for the most part, had reduced their physical needs to bare essentials and lived in loose family groupings in old wooden cabins in one of the patches of woods still extant around San Francisco, perhaps in Marin or in the Santa Cruz mountains. They could subsist on a few dollars a day, supplementing their meager incomes with food stamps. They described themselves as righteous dealers and felt they owed no gratitude to their customers.

The walls of the street shrieked with slogans and posters, demanding that political prisoners be released, that the pigs be offed, that the war be ended, that women be liberated. Aaron drank in the jangling panorama of protest and need in a way that he would not have been capable of just two days earlier. Where he had seen what he called undergraduate officious-ness he now beheld the immense outpouring of energy and effort these proclamations gave evidence of, and received his first vision of what could be effected if the exuberance of youth were given healthy channels to flow through. But there was no place for it to go, except the deadly route of school, military, and servile employment, and so they frothed with perpetual indignation, and hatched wild schemes to overthrow the existing order. A few small cards, stapled to a wooden partition, proclaimed, with suspicious simplicity, that Jesus saves. Thousands of cardboard sheets of widely varying size and colour offered hundreds of things and services for sale or barter: massages, rides, poetry readings, ecology meetings, opinions, rooms, ideas, food. And thin, drawn young men and women slid up and down the length of the street whispering, 'Acid, grass, speed.'

'Spare change, brother,' a voice said to him.

Aaron looked at him carefully, his reactions measured and gentle as one's tend to be at the tail end of a trip. He noted the disconnectedness of the eyes, the vagueness which comes of living too long without any sense of purpose. He estimated that the man was somewhere between twenty and thirty; he wore his hair and beard that had been growing for several years; he seemed, due to a severe slouch, shorter than his six feet. Over his shoulder the Avenue emptied onto the campus, with its tremulous mixture of eucalyptus groves and squat stone buildings. It galloped over several hundred acres before beginning its stepped climb up the Berkeley Hills, culminating in the great cement Physics building and the guarded Radiation Laboratory which commanded a total view of the majestic valley, the shimmering bay with its elegant bridges, the gaping gateway to the Pacific, and the spiny mountains ranging north and south into distance, mist, and the first grey swatches of polluted air.

'Why do you call me brother?' Aaron asked.

The man answered him automatically. 'We're all brothers in God,' he said.

'And if there is no God?' Aaron went on.

'We're all God, man,' came the reply. 'The universe is one, don't you know? And we're all a part of that.'

He smiled, pleased at his own loquaciousness, as though he had made an irrefutable point.

Aaron turned and walked away, forgetting that the man had asked him for money. He was intent on finding Conrad. After he and Cynthia had finished fucking, he was stung by a whiplash of guilt, a sense that he had somehow betrayed a trust that had begun to form between him and the other man. The sex had been the finest since the early days of their living together, when they were still in the phase of discovering one another's bodies, but several times during the welter of feeling he had drifted into the notion that Conrad was still there watching them, and each time that the illusion had burst, he had been filled with a poignant sense of loss. Somewhere a corner had been turned, and, while high energy still flowed through him, he wanted to track down the significance of the night's events.