Contours of Darkness (22 page)

'Conrad?' Cynthia said, the name catching her attention.

'He's our dealer,' Jackie told her.

'Is he a young man, about twenty, blond hair, with a small scar on his right cheek?'

'That's him,' Jackie said as she poured the tea. 'Do you know him?'

'He's a neighbour,' Cynthia replied. She hesitated on the brink of telling them the story, but did not want to inject more of her concern into the mood of the afternoon.

'Berkeley's a small town,' said Maureen as she opened the lid to reveal several ounces of light brown leaves. 'It's flower tops from a delivery of Jamaica tan,' she went on, 'sprayed with psilocybin,' She filled a large pipe with the weed, lit a match and held the flame over the bowl and sucked the smoke in. As Cynthia watched her, Jackie put a teacup in her hand. She sipped the brew as the pipe went to Jackie, and put the cup down when it reached her. Tve never had psilocybin,' she said. 'Will it get me very high?'

'You won't want to go anywhere for four or five hours,' Jackie told her.

'What time is it?' Cynthia asked.

'Time is an illusion,' Maureen said. 'You're letting the pipe go out.'

'I think I'm afraid,' Cynthia told her.

'Fear? It's a thing children feel. But if it seizes you, then give yourself up to it completely. Let yourself be afraid. Shake and cry, and we will stay with you until it passes.' Maureen struck another match and held it over the bowl. Cynthia took a puff and began to pass the pipe to Jackie. But Maureen waved it back. 'No, no,' she said, 'not like that. Here, I will show you how to smoke, and then the fear will disappear.'

'Perhaps I should be thinking about getting back,' Cynthia said.

'Perhaps you should,' Jackie cut in. 'But stay here while you do it. There's no rush, is there?'

Cynthia pictured the apartment in her mind, saw Aaron sitting in the living room. For a moment she felt a pang of compassion, imagining him in pain, waiting for her, and in the next instant cursed herself for falling back into the same pattern which had been choking both of them, the inability to let the other have his or her own life.

'I can stay the night,' Cynthia said.

'Then put your attention here,' said Maureen, holding yet another match over the treated marijuana. 'First empty your lungs,' She waited until Cynthia had complied before continuing, and gave all her instructions slowly, pausing to insure that Cynthia followed each one along the way. 'Hold the tip of the pipe at the edge of your lips so that when you inhale you take in some air with the smoke; it will make the mixture less harsh. Then take a deep, deep breath, sucking the smoke inside you until there is no more you can take in. When you are filled with the smoke, close your eyes and feel it in your lungs. Sense it entering your bloodstream, making your body ring like a thousand little chimes. Can you feel that? And now let it rush like a geyser to your brain, changing the way the whole world is for you.'

The words and smoke danced in her like twin melodies which gathered instruments and voices until they culminated in a mighty crescendo. She felt the roof of her skull lift off and a waterfall of silver light shimmered against her closed eyelids. When she opened her eyes she was rocking back and forth on her haunches and the whole scene seemed to have been covered with a fine sprinkle of diamond dust.

An arc of elation braced her with buzzing pleasure. The future joined the past in the realm of nonfunctional existence, and then she returned to the colours and sounds and smells of the room. Through the french windows she could see only green, and was struck by the silence of the place, removed as it was from the raw screech of traffic. The mirrors above and around her reflected the three of them from a score of angles and she felt surrounded by beautiful bodies. She brought the pipe to her lips and repeated the procedure, this time avid for the scintillating effect it brought about. A thought like a cloud drifted through her mind, suggesting that where she was at the moment was the most perfect place in the world to live and she would be a fool to go back to the cramped life she had been living which now seemed to have absolutely nothing left to offer her but the prospect of having a child, which would only nail her down in the trap more securely.

Maureen smiled lazily.
^£
Yes,' she hissed, 'into the present.'

The pipe came and went, floating around the circle of their hands. Cynthia filled herself with its magic fumes six times before it was filled again, and then she counted two more before numbers ceased making any sense to her. All external considerations faded, and she entered a deep communion with the chemicals which were penetrating her system and altering her very perception of reality. She was not sophisticated enough about drugs to be familiar with the quality of emergence and disappearance, as the different objects and entities of her inner and outer environment shifted in relation to what was figure and what was ground at any given time in her consciousness. But she was relaxed enough that nothing disturbed her, and like a child with a kaleidoscope who watched the different elements of existence coming together and falling apart, always in new shapes and with changing connotations of importance. At one point the pipe stopped coming to her and she sank back onto the mattress, aware of nothing but the waxing and waning of awareness in her body, as she shrank to zero point and swelled to a mammoth figure of archetypal thighs and mythic breasts.

A deep glow suffused her and she brimmed with the beauty of energy. She curled her right foot to her left calf and flexed the muscles of her legs. Her hands reached up as though beseeching someone to hold her, and then came down flat at her sides, the fingers curled like claws. She dug her nails into her thighs until the skin held their imprint, and then slid her hands up her body until she had cupped her breasts. She touched each nipple lightly. She simmered with sensuality.

Something touched her and she knew it was not physical. She opened her eyes and through a striated mist she saw Maureen sitting like a figurine, her legs folded under her, her hands on her knees, her torso erect. She seemed to be straining forward, reaching toward her, like a dancer tingling tautly on points. There was a beam that went from her mouth to Cynthia's left breast, and it was there that she felt the sensation. She leaned into the flow and yearned toward Maureen, suddenly wanting her desperately, desiring to mingle with her in the overflow of energy that enveloped the two of them.

But Maureen did not move and Cynthia turned her head to see Jackie sitting crosslegged on the other side of her, exerting the force of resistance that kept Maureen from coming forward. Jackie's eyes burned into Maureen's forehead and held her as surely as if she were keeping her pinned down with a pole. Then, with an inner shift Cynthia did not understand, Jackie was looking at her without changing the focus of her gaze.

It's not very mysterious,' Jackie said, the words coming out slowly, with effort, as though she were carrying a heavy weight. 'The eyes have more than one channel, and I can emit energy toward Maureen while taking in visual impressions from you.'

'But what are you doing?' Cynthia asked.

'Be it to understand it,' Maureen whispered. 'The body itself is the language. The words it shoots out are only the echoes of things already said in silence.'

Cynthia squirmed as the tension built. Every time she tried to figure out what was happening, a pressure like a band around her head forced her to stop thinking. She felt as though she were in a lift whose cable had snapped and was plummeting to the ground far below with accelerating velocity. They were screwing her up to a pitch of need which, when snapped, would hurl her into a frenzy. But she could see none of the intention behind their actions, and began to thrash about, caught in the strong force field like a fly in a web. She shut her eyes and rolled to her stomach, and found that when she changed her direction, her discomfort decreased. She adjusted herself until she lay like a line between them, her head near Jackie's cunt, her legs spread around Maureen's knees. She snuggled into the sheet like a person worming into a trench to escape the strafing planes overhead. She could feel the waves of energy passing over her; her skin glowed with heat and her anus tingled. Her rational mind melted and she became a palpitating organism writhing without sense. And when she was returned to herself, and her body lay before the two women like a sea before a diver, Jackie snapped the psychic rubber band and Maureen shot forward.

She fell with her mouth between Cynthia's cheeks, her tongue already reaching down into the cunt beneath. Jackie fell to one side of them and, grabbing Cynthia by the hips, turned her to her side so that she came at her cunt from the front. Without prompting, Cynthia buried her face between Jackie's thighs and sucked at the cunt between them. They clung to one another like iron filings to a magnet, the power of their pull erasing all distinctions. Each of them imploded with a quiet lust, and they dropped all manipulations of who did what to whom. It was no longer Cynthia being initiated, but Cynthia as a woman among women following the unfolding of a passion that needed no fuel except its own will to endure, heeded no laws except the elegance of necessity. They were three cunts, and three arses, and six breasts, and six hands, and six feet, and three mouths, and brains and hearts. They were a movement moving, a sigh escaping, a climax gathering itself.

'Oh my God, it gets more,' was the last thought that went through Cynthia's mind before the upward shooting glory of the beginning orgy propelled her past the grey semaphors of conscious thought.

Sweet Satori Blues

The dream had the clarity often found in those who fall into a profound sleep after smoking marijuana. Conrad's body rolled on the meat which lay on the floor of the van, shifting with the rhythms of the rubber tires slapping agianst the concrete highway. In the front seat sat Jerry, driving through the night, enjoying the hallucinations which time and again tricked him into a false perception of turns in the road, and pondering that, in the face of death, illusion and reality had absolutely the same weight. They were on their way to Nogales to buy dynamite.

In Conrad's mind, a room appeared, and he viewed it with the ambivalence of one who knows he is dreaming and yet can do nothing but be a passive observer of the inner drama, watching it as one does a movie, with a blend of identification and detachment. It was a dark Victorian drawing room with eighteen-foot ceilings. All the angles were distorted as in a German Expressionist set. The walls were ochre, the woodwork mahogany. Thick drapes smothered all the windows, and the single massive door was locked and bolted. The furniture was ornate and overstuffed, deep armchairs, a pile rug, upholstered lamp shades. Only one light shone, from a lamp at the edge of the desk which dominated a whole corner. It had the quality of being underwater.

On the long couch lay a woman of about thirty, her slim form enveloped in voluminous skirts and accented above the waist by a starched bodice. Her left arm lay at her side while her right forearm was flung over her eyes. Conrad peered through the gloom and looked at her face. It was Cynthia's but transformed through the alchemy of subconscious distortion so that it kept changing aspects. Just behind her shoulder, one leg folded over the other at the knee, his hands in his lap, his lids lowered, his breathing calm, sat a bearded man of almost fifty. He wore a black suit and showed no signs of movement.

'It's Freud,' Conrad said aloud. The man turned to him and held one finger to his lips so as to silence him.

The woman tossed restlessly, her clothing rustling silkily in the quiet air. There was a compelling suggestion of thigh sliding against thigh, of soft moist under-things, and secret places yearning for a hand to enter.

'I can't,' she said aloud, 'I don't have anything to say. Nothing comes to my mind, nothing.' She lay still for a moment, only her heaving breasts showing her agitation; her cheeks were flushed. 'Why don't you speak?' she cried. 'Why do you torture me like this?'

The man in the chair showed no reaction except for the slight twitch by his left eye. He looked down at the form in front of him and an expression of sadness darkened his face. 'It is all so clear,' he sighed, 'and yet she cannot see any of it.'

'It is all useless, senseless,' she said.

The man rolled his eyes toward heaven. This was the ninth month of analysis. Every day, six days a week, an hour each day, for three quarters of a year, and she was still not bringing forth any material he could work with. He was prepared to wait indefinitely for he knew with deep certainty that if she did not quit, she would have to break through. 'The clouds must gather a long time before they release their rain,' he thought, 'and when they do, we can expect a flood.'

As though taking the suggestion from his mind, the woman began to weep, tears trickling from her eyes and down into her hair. Conrad tried to step forward, to go to her and comfort her, but the man motioned him back. 'You do not help her by interfering,' he said. 'She must taste her sadness until the bitterness of it chokes her, and then she will find her own way to herself. You would only make her situation more complex, and distract her from her own feelings.'

'What is wrong with me?' she asked. 'Why am I so empty inside? I have everything a woman is supposed to want, a husband, children, a home. But it is all dust in my mouth. Am I just an ungrateful wretch as my mother told me? Am I really evil?'

The man lifted his head. The contours of the room shifted, and a sound like crackling leaves sounded outside. 'Evil,' he said. 'What does that word suggest to you?'