Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (74 page)

I cannot reach him through the sound and silence, distant sound and deepest silence, like a thick glass barrier between the world of the living and myself, as if I were wandering on an earth which had suddenly died, or in a Purgatory, myself already dead.

There is something that you have to understand.

Now look what’s happening – can you see? It’s Him, the Dead Man. Resurrection. Rising out of bed. Not suspecting that I am already dead, he will attempt to kill me.

He stops:
StopshoutinforChristasake!

Here he comes, intent on the kill. He has broken the glass wall. He drags me across the room. He has a costume, he is all dressed up like a soldier of fortune, he is very hip; but see the rosy cheeks behind that beard? An enormous child!

‘You are an Enormous Child!’

See the pale face in the glass! The face is rigid, and the eyes are dark and huge. Over the left eye drifts a dark shadow, like a hand. There you are, I see you now, and the bearded man, your warder. He knew his lucidity could not last, and because he had taken too much, he dreaded going under again, and he started to ask Wolfie for help. ‘Hey,’ he said. But he could not ask, he had never asked in all his life, and even if he asked, what could poor Wolfie do? There were no sedatives in Madre de Dios; sedation was superfluous in a graveyard. He pushed away and tottered toward the window, where he fell across the sill. The dog and the vulture were gone. The light was tightening in the way it always did before the sudden jungle night, and down the center of the street a solitary figure walked away. The bottle stood open upon the sill; he drank it to the bottom.

He crouched beside the window sill, his back to the world without, and far away he heard them coming, the marching of huge nameless armies coming toward him, and once again his hands turned cold. He felt very cold. On the wall of the room, over the door, he saw a huge moth with a large white spot on each wing. It palpitated gently; he could hear the palpitations, and the spots were growing. And there was a voice, a hollow voice, very loud and very far away, calling through glass, and there were hands on him and he was shaken violently. The voice rose and crashed in waves, rolling around his ears; it was getting dark.

He looked at the man and the man’s head, fringed with hair; the head shrank before his eyes and became a
tsantsa
. He could not look, and turned away. A figure crossed his line of vision, moving toward the door. The door opened and light came in. The voice said
Thisisnowheremanl’vehadenough
.

Don’t go . . . I need . . . Don’t go. I need . . . But he could not hear his own voice, and he could not have said just what he needed. From over the man’s head the large white eyes of the moth observed him; they pinned him, like incoming beams. The music crashed, the wave . . . The door was dark again. He pushed himself to his feet and stared out of the window. The dark was rolling from the forest all around, and the sky was so wild as the sun set that it hurt his eyes. He reeled and fell, then thrashed to his feet and fell again, across the bed, and was sacked down into the darkness as the music burnt the walls and overwhelmed him.

His body diffused and drifted through cathedral vaults of color, whirling and shimmering and bursting forth, drifting high among the arches, down the clerestories, shadowed by explosions of stained glass. In the dark chapels of the church was a stair to windy dungeons, to colors rich and somber, now, and shapes emerging; the shapes lowered, rose in threat and fell away again. Fiends, demons, dancing spiders with fine webs of silver chain. A maniac snarled and slavered, and rain of blood beat down upon his face. Teeth, teeth grinding in taut rage, teeth tearing lean sinew from gnarled bone. Idiocy danced hand in hand with lunacy and hate, rage and revenge; the dungeon clanked and quaked with ominous sounds, and he kept on going, down into the darkness.

He opened his eyes, gasping for breath; he drifted downward. Once the abyss opened out into air and sunlight but there were papier-mâché angels, and again he broke off chords of music from the air like bits of cake: the Paradise was false and he went on. A spider appeared, reared high over his head, then seized, shredded and consumed him. Voided, he lay inert in a great trough, with molten metal rising all about him in a blinding light. SO THIS WAS BRIMSTONE. The missionary’s pasty face peered down at him over the rim:
This is a proud day for the mission, Lewis, and a proud day for your people. We all count on you
.

Eyes. Eyes. He struggled to free himself, but the stake held in his heart, the hole in his heart; even breathing hurt him, even breathing. He clawed at his own chest to ease it. If only he could get that pain out, then his heart would bleed his life away, but gently.

A roar of trapped insects, flies and bees, and he among them: mad drone and bugging and brush of hairy, viscous legs scraping toward remote slits of air and light, of acrid insect smell, of flat inconscient insect eyes, unblinking, bright as jewels, too mindless to know fear, oh Christ, how mindless. Humans . . . A human mob, pounding its way into the bar, in search of – what? It did not know. It had no idea what it was hunting, but was hunting out of instinct, with myriad flat insect eyes, trampling everything underfoot; he shook with fear. Like a rat he was; a famine rat of broken cities, a quaking gut-shrunk rat, scurrying through the wainscoting of falling houses. His skeleton flew apart, reassembled in rat’s skeleton; his spine arched, his tiny forefeet and long furtive hand, the loose-skinned gassy belly; he poised, alert, hunched on his knees upon the bed, hands dangling at his navel; long nose twitching. In the mirror across the room he saw the hair sprout on his face and the face protrude.

He found his way across the room and stared so closely into the glass that his nose touched it; he watched the face wrinkle and turn old; he saw his own raw skull again and groaned. Then another mask, a new expression, hard and sly and cold. As he watched, it softened and turned young and wide-eyed, gentle; the muscles in his stomach eased, and he recognized the self of boyhood mornings. He was touched by this last face and grinned at it in embarrassment; but just as he grinned, self-consciousness returned to poison him; and the boyish face turned hard again and mean, and the lips drew back upon sharp teeth and the eyes glittered, and the whole body tensed with an anger of such murderous black violence that he recoiled from his own hate, falling back again across the bed. A huge dead dog had its teeth locked in his throat; and the metal bar dragged at his chest again, and when he closed his eyes the Rage descended, a huge and multilimbed galoot in hobnailed boots and spurs, eyes bulging, teeth grinding, cigars exploding in its mouth and flames shooting from its ears, bearing a club spiked with rusty nails, wearing brass knuckles and outsize six-guns; in its blind snot-flying rage, it blew its own head off by mistake: This thing came stomping down out of his mind, and he gasped, Look at that guy, that guy is so mad, he blew his own head off by mistake! His body relaxed and he howled with laughter, lying now with his back on the floor and his feet on the bed, and as he laughed, the gnawed and painful stake which had pierced his chest as long as he could remember cracked and opened like an ancient husk and turned to dust, and he could breathe again.

Here was Rage again, exploded now, hung up like an old scarecrow, like a big broken toy with one loose eye and loose old parts and springs and stuffing every whichy-way-all hung up on itself, poor critter. Rage danced somewhat sheepishly to guitar and wind, as if to say: Well, just because I’m
angry
doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a dance or two . . .

Lucidity. He sighed. He lay there all laughed out and loose, loose as a dead snake slung on a rail, lay there drunk with gentleness and pleasure.
Be a good boy, Lewis, do not hate so much
.

Oh good old Wolfie, Wolfie would die laughing. The thought of the Old Wolf laughing,
dying
of
laughing
, set him off again, but this time, even as he laughed, an apprehension came.

He crawled to the corner of the room, where he crouched low, watching both door and window. The noises were surrounding him, there was something happening to him, something
happening
and he felt too tired now to deal with it. If he could only stop his laughing, but he could not; his laughter grew louder and louder, and when he tried to stop he could not close his mouth. It stretched wider and wider, until he swallowed the ceiling light, the room, the window and the night; the world rushed down into the cavernous void inside him, leaving him alone in space, pinwheeling wildly like a jagged fragment spun out from a planet.

A terrific wind blew, and his ears rang with the bells of blueblack space; the wind sealed his throat, his flesh turned cold, his screams were but squeaks snapped out and away by the passage of night spheres. Nor could he hear, there was no one to hear, there was no one where he had gone – what’s
happening, what-is-happening
 . . .

He had flung himself away from life, from the very last ties, had strayed to the cold windy reaches of insanity. This perception was so clear and final that he moaned; he would not find his way back. You’ve gone too far this time, you’ve
gone
too far . . .

As he whirled into oblivion, his body cooled and became numb; inert, like a log seized up and borne out skyward by a cyclone; he struggled to reach out, catch hold, grasp, grip, hang on, but he could not. He could not, he was made of wood, and there was nothing to hang on to, not even his own thought – thought shredding, drifting out of reach, like blowing spiderwebs. He was gone, g-o-n-e,
gone
, G-O-N-E, gone – and around again. The howling was in his head, and all about lay depthless silence. His screaming was ripped away before it left his mouth, and the mouth itself was far away, a huge papered hoop blown through and tattered by the gales. The air rushed past, too fast to breathe; his lungs sucked tight, shriveled like prunes, collapsed. He died.

Death came as a huge bounteous quiet, in the bosom of a high white cloud. The wood of his body softened, the knots loosened; he opened up, lay back, exhausted, mouth slack, eyes wide like the bald eyes of a corpse. He glimpsed a hard light lucid region of his mind like a lone comet, wandering far out across the long night of the universe.

At the end of his long night of uproar and hallucinations, Lewis Moon had a dream. He dreamed that he walked homeward up the bed of an empty river and out onto a blasted land of rusted earth and bones and blackened stumps and stunted metal, a countryside of war. In the sky of a far distance he saw a bird appear and vanish; but no matter how far he walked, the world was one mighty industrial ruin, a maze of gutted factories and poisoned ground under the gray sky. He came finally to a signpost, and the signpost had caught a fragile ray of rising sun. He ran toward it, stumbled, fell and ran again. The signpost pointed eastward, back toward the sun, and it read:
NOWHERE
.

Very tired, he turned back along his road, crossing the dead prairie. Though he had not noticed them on his outward journey, he now passed a series of signs all pointing eastward. Each was illuminated by a ray of sun, and each bore the same inscription:
NOWHERE
.

The terrible silence of the world made him move faster, and soon he saw, on the eastern horizon, the dark blur of a forest. He ran and trotted weakly, bewildered by the crashing of his feet upon the cinders. Another sign, and then another, pointed toward the wood.

As he drew near, the wood became a jungle, a maelstrom of pale boles and thickened fleshy leaves, shining and rubbery, of high, dark passages, and hanging forms, of parasites and strangler figs and obscene fruited shapes. But even here there was no sound, no sign of movement, not even a wind to stir the heavy leaves, sway the lianas; there was only the mighty hush of a dead universe.

He started forward, stopped, started again. Too frightened to go on, he turned around and saw what lay behind him; then he sat down on the road, and this time he wept.

When at last he lifted his eyes, he saw a signpost at the jungle edge; it was obscured by weeds and leaves and the tentacles of a liana, and at first he thought that its inscription was identical to all the rest. But this sign did not point anywhere, and as he drew near and stared at it he saw that its inscription was quite different. It read:
NOW HERE
.

Astonished, he ventured on into the darkness of the jungle. Soon he came to a kind of clearing cut off from the sky by a canopy of trees, a soft round space like an amphitheater, diffused with sepia light. Everything was soft and brownish, and the ground itself quaked beneath his feet, giving off a smell of fungus and decay. In the center of the clearing he strayed into a quagmire; very quickly he sank, too tired to struggle. But as he passed into the earth and the warm smells of its darkness, he was still breathing without effort, and soon he dropped gently into a kind of earthen vault. Though closed off from the sky, this cave was suffused by the same soft brownish light as in the clearing far above. Here was a second sign, which read:
NOW HERE
.

The passage through the soil had cleaned him of his clothes, and he was naked; as he stood there, small black spots appeared in pairs upon his skin. He pressed at them and discovered to his horror that the black spots were the tips of snail horns; at each touch a naked snail slid out through his skin and dropped to the cave floor. His hands flew wildly about his body, and the snails slid out and fell, until finally the earth at his bare feet was strewn with slimy writhings. Now, from the darkness near the wall, numbers of salamanders crept forward; each salamander grasped a snail behind its head and writhed in silent struggle with it, the soft bodies twitching back and forth in rhythm.