The Children of Hamelin (2 page)

The beer seemed to be the only honest game in town, so I went over to the table, opened a can, found Doris standing next to me.

“You’re really paranoid about the Foundation, aren’t you?” she said.

“I’m not paranoid, it’s just that everyone’s out to get me.”

Doris’ full lips began a Buddha-smile. She caught herself, looked solemn, said: “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that paranoia is the only sane reaction to this scene,” I said. “This is Losersville—one big bummer.”

“Harvey says that hostility is the natural reaction of the average individual to an environment of increased consciousness,” she said like a walking textbook (but something in her eyes gave me the feeling
she
knew how she sounded too).

“Aw, come off it, Doris, stop putting me on! You’re not really swallowing all this crap. You got too much horsesense.”

“It’s... it’s kept Ted out of other people’s beds,” she said softly. “Horsesense or not, that makes wifesense.”

“You mean old Harv lays on that Judeo-Christian ethic?”

“No... funny thing is, Harvey says it’s natural for a man who isn’t totally conscious to act out his fantasies. But since we’ve been coming here, Ted... hasn’t gone near anyone else.”

Maybe it was a touch of the old junkie cruelty, maybe just raw male reaction to the castrator’s knife.

“And how much have
you
been getting off him lately?” I said.

Direct hit! But the twinge of anguish in her eyes was turned off before she spoke. “Harvey says... Harvey says it’s a... necessary transitional state... a decrease in sexual energy while the choice of object is in the process of being transferred from fantasy to reality...”

“In other words, old Harv has messed up Ted’s head to the point where he can’t get it up.”

“Tom...”

“Look, let’s can the crap! I’ve been there, baby. Didn’t make it with Anne for weeks at a time. Know why? Because I was a junkie, that’s why. Crawled up my own navel and dragged my dick in after me. Junk cuts your balls off, and this Foundation
is
junk. It’s a rotten, evil scene.”

“Tom... you don’t understand, you really don’t. Wait till you hear Harvey.” It was obviously the last word; she started looking around for an excuse to be elsewhere. She opened two cans of beer, said: “Ted wants some beer,” and wandered away across the room.

I felt cruel and stupid and futile. I had told her the hardest thing any male can tell to any female, and all I had gotten was “Wait till you hear Harvey.” I took a drink of beer—it was lukewarm, of course—and studied the crowd, trying to spot at least one chick worth talking to. Anything to kill time—which was where the whole scene was at. Waiting for the Man.

Over in a corner of the room, a girl in a green sack dress was sitting alone on the floor, seemingly just watching and waiting, detached from the whole scene the way I was—I hoped. Long brown hair, regular features, nice skin, a decent figure. Nothing spectacular, but the best action around at the moment.

So I crossed the room and sat down next to her. Big frightened doe-eyes and she nibbled her lower lip, trying to ignore me.

“Been a member here long?” I asked.

“I’m not a member yet,” she said in a Bronx-intellectual voice just this side of being unpleasant. “I’m... just a guest.” She sounded positively apologetic about it.

“Well, then meet a fellow tourist,” I said. “Tom Hollander.”

“Linda Kahn. Have you met Harvey Brustein yet?”

“I’ve been spared that dubious pleasure so far.”

“Why are you so hostile?” she said belligerently.

“Hey...
I’m just trying to be friendly.”

“I mean about Harvey Brustein. Myra says he’s a great human being, he’s helped her more than any other therapist she’s tried. Why are you putting down someone you’ve never met?”

“Why are you defending someone you’ve never met?”

She bit her lip again. “Haven’t you ever wanted to believe in something? Haven’t you ever
needed
to believe in something? I’ve tried just about every kind of therapy there is.”

“What’s your problem?”

“What?”

“Why therapy in the first place?”

She stared at me as if I were crazy. “If I knew the answer to that, I’d be halfway there, now wouldn’t I?” she said.

“Sounds to me like you
dig
therapy.”

“I...” she paused, considering, then looked at me almost as if I were a human being. “I never thought of it that way before. But yes... it... gives me a sense of being human, you know, real contact with other human beings. That’s important, isn’t it?”

“Therapy is your idea of human contact? Telling stuff to some shrink that you should be telling to your lover?”

“I... I’ve never had what you’d call a lover. That’s one of the reasons I’m in therapy.”

“Or vice versa.”

“I don’t understand...”

“Look, if what you’re looking for is real human contact, how about splitting with me right now? Forget therapy and pick up on a human being for a change.”

“You’re disgusting!” she said “Can’t think about anything but sex, can you?”

“I said something about sex?”

“Didn’t you?”

“You ever been on junk, baby?”

“Certainly not!”

I had had it. “That’s what you think,” I said. She stared at me for a long moment; furious but not quite sure what she was furious at.

Fortunately, at that point there was some kind of commotion at the doorway to the hall. A lot of people seemed to be clustering around someone I couldn’t see. Ted was looking around the room. He spotted me, yelled: “Tom! Tom! Over here!” It was a convenient out. “Later,” I grunted, getting up and walking toward the tumult.

Ted grabbed me by the arm, pulled me into the mystic circle at the center of which was a short, balding man of about fifty in a faded white tieless shirt and baggy gray pants with a soft, pallid pudding-face and watery mild eyes behind brown-rimmed glasses—just about the grayest cat you could ever hope to meet.

“Harvey,” Ted said, “this is Tom Hollander, I told you about.”

This
was the great Harvey Brustein? The Black Villain or the Living Buddha, depending on which side you were on? This...
nothing?
This... this schmoo?

“Uh... yes...” Harvey said in a bland dentist’s voice. “Pleased to meet you... uh... Tom...”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. It was all wrong. A cat who looked like a scruffy accountant had all these people enthralled? How did he do it? How could Ted and Doris take this creep seriously?

“Well... uh...” Harvey said. “We... ah might as well get started.”

He made his way to the dais, sat down on the folding chair. People began to settle themselves on the floor. I sat down on the floor near the back of the room with Ted and Doris. Good old Linda sat a good distance away. In a few minutes of shuffling around, the whole floor was covered with silent acolytes waiting eagerly for pearls of wisdom to fall from the mouth of the gray little guru in the folding chair.

Old Harv fished in a paper shopping bag under his chair, shuffled some papers, put them back. It got quieter and quieter. Harvey took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, put them back. People hunkered forward. Ted’s face was tense, his blue eyes strangely blank. Linda nibbled her lower lip. I began to take old Harv a little more seriously; he was doing that old Man number—make ‘em wait—and he was doing it well.

Harvey opened his mouth. Everyone tensed. “Ashtray?” he said.

Almost an audible moan. He was really stretching it out, seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, making us wait, making the very corpuscles of our blood hunger for that dirty old surge. Old Harv knew his business, yes!

Someone handed him an ashtray. He put it down beside his chair. He took a pack of Winstons out of his shirt picket. It took him a full ten seconds to get one out and stick it in his mouth. Uptight! Uptight! What a pusher old Harv would’ve made! Everyone was twitching. Harvey reached into his shirt pocket for matches; they weren’t there. Into the shopping bag. Shuffle, shuffle. Pack of matches. Pulled off a match. Struck it. Nothing happened. Jesus! Struck it again. Another match. This one lit. Sucked smoke. Exhaled. Sighed. Crossed legs.

“Why can’t you all relax?” Harvey said in a soft, totally humorless voice.

Christ, was that whole number
planned?

“Human beings consider themselves the most highly evolved form of life on Earth. A dog can relax. A cat can relax. Even a lizard can relax. All the way, thinking sweet no-thoughts. So why can’t you do what a dog or a cat or a lizard can? Why can’t you relax?”

Harvey took a long drag on his cigarette, drawing out the silence. A simple trick—uptight people, then tell them they’re uptight. I tried to relax, just to show the bastard—but try
not
to think of a red-assed monkey. See the mind-game he was playing?

“You think too much, that’s your problem,” Harvey said. “You watch your own minds. An animal doesn’t do that. An animal experiences its environment directly. It feels imperatives and it acts or feels no imperatives and relaxes. Animals can be frustrated, but if you eliminate the frustrating condition, the animal relaxes. Because animals have no time-sense, no worlds of memory. Animals experience no interface between inner and outer realities, no ego watching itself and remembering old frustrations, anticipating new ones. No hangups on things that have no present reality. Are you animals? Wouldn’t you like to be animals?”

He paused again. I found myself drifting in a half-remembered dream... calm... blank... not caring... no hang-ups... like lying on the bed with Anne for hours, not moving... swathed in the soft sweet cotton batting of heroin... yes, there had been good times too that I had forgotten... when we were lush and torpid sunning ourselves like lizards on a rock in the timeless tropical sun....

“Sure,” Harvey said, “you’re animals. But animals-plus. Plus that cerebral cortex that makes a man something more complex than an animal. What’s in that lump of gray jelly? You are. The you that thinks of itself as ‘me’. Ego, memory, time-sense, fears, hopes, hangups. Total Psychotherapy concentrates on that cerebral cortex. It’s all we have to worry about—the rest of us is pure animal, continuous with the environment.”

He paused again, took another drag. I was beginning to understand why everyone around me was leaning forward, hanging on his words. Harvey was into something all right, something big. I found myself wanting to believe... in what? But I was also afraid... of what?

“Scary, isn’t it?” Harvey said, as if reading my mind. “It’s scary because it means that you’re all unhappy, every one of you, simply because you’re human beings. It’s obvious. You all have memories. You’ve all experienced frustrations. Remember? Remember being a fetus floating in an environment designed for perfection... you were an animal then. And then you were ejected from paradise and everything since has been a downhill slide because it’s less than the perfection we all remember. So in times of stress, we curl up into a fetal position, don’t we? Don’t we all love a good dreamless sleep? Because we’re like animals then—no interface between external and internal realities, between desire and fulfillment, between the me and the it. No ego watching itself. The truth we all refuse to face is that the thing we love most—our ‘me-ness’—is the source of all unhappiness. The goal of the Foundation for Total Consciousness is first to face the truth and then to eliminate the interface, to become totally conscious not
of
the environment, but
in
the environment. Like an animal.”

I felt as if I were alone in the room with Harvey, as if he were speaking directly to me, to a place inside me that was void. No longer did he seem gray or trivial. He was calling to something in me but somehow not of me. A blind something that yearned to throw itself into the arms of the infinite... the infinite
what?
There seemed to be something I should remember... had to remember, or be lost forever. And the feeling that
this had all happened before
....

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Harvey said. “Can you face it? What do we all fear the most?
Death.
But an animal doesn’t fear death. Because it is the ego, that interface between the me and the it within us, which fears death—not the death of the body, but its own annihilation. Look at the promise of immortality upon which Christianity is based. The immortality not of the body but of the ego, the soul.
That
is the death we cannot face, the annihilation of the interface between external and internal realities. That’s why you all need Total Psychotherapy, whether you’ve been told you’re neurotic or not. Because the so-called normal personality is the disease itself. That artificial construct is the source of all unhappiness—and it defends itself with all the psychic resources at our command. So we must defeat our own innermost selves in order to be free. That’s why only
Total
Psychotherapy can free us from the tyranny of our selves. You can’t do it yourselves—because it is the
self
which must be defeated!”

And suddenly I understood. I understood it all. Harvey
was
pushing junk; he was pushing the very essence of junk, the void inside the needle, the end to pain and frustration and caring, the thing that makes so many terminal junkies finally give themselves the O.D., the last big surge, Dose Terminal.

Harvey was pushing the very soul of junk. And every junkie knows deep down that the soul of junk is death.

Oh yes, there was nothing trivial about what Harvey was offering. The straight, uncut stuff. And there were Ted and Doris, my friends beside me, and they were hooked, sucking at the teats of Kali, mainlining death.

A whole roomfull of terminal junkies,
really
terminal, and the bland pudding-face of the creature on the folding chair was a face I knew all too well: the Man, Anti-Life, the Sweet Destroyer, Prince of the Final Darkness.

Something human and screaming inside me moved my body and my mouth and I found myself on my feet shouting: “I know you, man, oh Jesus, I know you!”

A whole mood shattered. The people on the floor were looking at me as if I were crazy, I mean
conventionally
crazy. Linda Kahn’s lips were curled in a grimace of disgust; Ted and Doris shook their heads at each other. And Harvey... Harvey was just a gray little man, not... not...