The Children of Hamelin (29 page)

“Instinct, Harv,” I told him. “Be like an animal, you once said—that’s Total Consciousness. Okay, so maybe I don’t have Total Consciousness—but I’ve got this little core of instinct deep inside where I can’t see it and so I gotta work off that. Man, if you start distrusting your instincts, you’re distrusting three billion years of evolution.
That’s
real insanity in my book.”

Rich, Ida, Linda and Charley just weren’t on the right wave length; they all looked monumentally bored. Harvey was losing at his own game and trying hard not to show how little he liked it. Ted, and maybe Doris more than Ted, were digging the principles behind the actions of someone they had watched for years; they were thinking about it, anyway.

Ah, but Arlene was eating me up with her eyes, and why not: I had taken her insight into me and blown it up into just the kind of intellectual Empire State Building she grooved behind. The ultimate flattery—and ultimately scary for her because, building as it did on her own viewpoint, she had to admit to herself that I could be right. And it was that very inner certainty (or the illusion thereof) that she dug in me, and envied, and wanted for herself.

“And... and you think drugs have helped you to trust your own instincts?” she said.

“As much as anyone here thinks Harv has helped them to trust theirs. Isn’t that what you all want out of the Foundation—inner certainty? We’re all looking for the same thing, but we’re looking for it in different places, is all.”

Harvey started to fidget in his seat, stole a glance at his watch. He obviously wanted to end this mess as soon as possible, and, with the look on Arlene’s face, I found myself on old Harv’s side for once.

“And how do you know that you can find it your way?” Harvey said. “If you were really sure, you wouldn’t be here.”

I didn’t care for that thought, so I glided around it: “I don’t know why I’m here. Instinct maybe. Who knows? I still take drugs because the same instinct that keeps me coming back here tells me to.”

“You think that
drugs
can give you the same thing as the Foundation?” Arlene said wide-eyed, as if looking through a peephole into a whole new world. Harvey also winced; then stared back at his watch for an overlong moment, obviously for our benefit.

“Don’t knock it ‘til you try it,” I told her.

She was silent, but her eyes said: “Maybe I will.”

Harvey took another look at his watch. “Well I’m afraid we’re about out of time,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve gotten any answers, but at least we’ve defined the major area of Tom’s problem.” He looked at me, forced a smile. “I think you’ll find the regular groups much more meaningful now, Tom,” he said. Was there something ominous in the way he said it?

On the street outside, Arlene, bundled up against the cold in her green toggle-coat, caught me by the elbow as I started toward Second Avenue and the bus home.

“Look Tom,” she said, “about Saturday night... I acted as badly as you did... I should’ve understood—”

“That I was a crazed dope-fiend and you had to make allowances?” I felt too cold to be patronized.

“No, no,” she said, her eyes furtive, her lips hesitant, as if there were something ugly in her mouth she was afraid to spit out, “I mean about... Robin. You were right. I had no reason to expect you to be... faithful to me or anything when... in a different way, I couldn’t be faithful to you. I was jealous and had no right to be.”

I touched here gently on the cheek; we both shivered—her cheek and my hand were both ice-cold. “Jealousy isn’t a matter of right, it’s a feeling,” I told her. “If you felt jealous, you had a right to feel jealous. What you didn’t have was the right to dump your feeling on me. But even that was more good than bad, because for once you were acting from the gut.”

She smiled; I smiled back. Possibilities
were
still alive between us. All of a sudden, it didn’t seem so cold.

“Can I ask you something I... don’t have the right to ask?” she said. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to...”

“Ask away.”

“What do you really see in Robin?”

Ooo-hoo! Must admit that naked jealousy
does
turn me on when I’m the object. I laughed, trying hard not to chortle like a miser. “Robin acts from the gut.” I told her. “She’s a feral creature. Makes life mighty interesting.”

“You mean... Robin acts on instinct, the way you do?”

I nodded. I didn’t really believe that
I
was such a Chile of Nature, but Robin
—oh yeah!

“And I don’t,” Arlene said sadly. “I know I don’t. That’s why I turned down the key. I wanted to take it, but... I started thinking... and... Have you offered a key to Robin?”

Shit, no chance I’d trust
that
chick that far! “No,” I said, “and I don’t intend to.”

“But if you did, she’d take it, wouldn’t she?”

“I haven’t the slightest—” then I saw what she was getting at.

“You mean, would she take it if she felt like taking it, without consulting her navel?”

A nod.

A nod back.

“I wish I could be like that,” Arlene said.

“So do I.”

Arlene nibbled her lower lip. “Do you suppose... do you suppose drugs might... let me act... freer?” she said softly.

“You’ve never even smoked pot?”

“I’ve always been afraid.”

“Are you afraid now?”

She took my hand, squeezed it hard. “Yes,” she said, “but... but I think it’d be all right if I smoked some with you.”

I looked at her jaw set in grim determination, her eyes like the eyes of a virgin asking for it for the first time. Yes indeed, I must’ve been rapping out some really heavy stuff in there.

“Are you asking me...?”

“I’m asking,” she whispered.

Robin had left half a cube of hash in my pad and I had an old hash pipe somewhere. “All right,” I said, “I’ve got some hash. How about Friday night after the group?”

She shook her head. “You know what group does to me. I’d be afraid to do it then. Besides, I could change my mind a hundred times between now and Friday. My instinct says do it... don’t let me give my mind a chance to argue me out of it... Please...?”

I felt an overpowering wave of affection for this poor fucked-up chick diving into the center of her fear; at that moment I would’ve fought the world for her.

“Now?” I asked.

“Now.”

“Ooooh... shit!”

Arlene coughed another half-lungful of smoke into the musky air of the living room. The blue-gray haze-layer drifting above us in the orange light created the feeling of sitting on the banks of the Ganges watching an oriental sunset.

At least for me, anyway. Arlene was having trouble keeping up. “I don’t think I’m really getting any,” she said. “This stuff is burning my lungs out.”

I took the hash pipe from her, knocked out the residue, flaked a fresh piece of hash off the cube with a razor-blade, put it in the pipe, held it to my lips, placed the flame about a half-inch above the little bowl, said: “Dig. Take a lot of little puffs and hold the pipe loosely in your mouth so you get plenty of air with it.” I followed my own advice, inhaling the hot smoke in little sips like scalding coffee. My full lungs fought against a burning spasm.

“Hold. It. Down. Fight. The Cough,” I wheezed around the lungful of smoke. I handed the pipe to her, held the match over the bowl as she sucked in little bursts of smoke, her brows furrowed in concentration. She put the pipe down. My lungs ached. I could see her on the verge of a cough: her lower lip sucked in, her nose wrinkled, her shoulders hunched forward and inward.

“Come. On. I. Dragged. First,” I wheezed, fighting the hot balloon in my chest. “Don’t. Let. Go. Before. I. Do.”

She stared at me in tense concentration. I stared back. I smiled. She smiled back at me with her mouth, but her brows were doing their best to meet the tip of her wrinkled nose. If I could only get her to keep one good toke down....

“Contest,” I wheezed. “Don’t. Leggo. First.” My lungs were exploding. Head pounding like a drum on the inside. Hold it in! Our eyes locked in a Junior High School staring contest, lungs locked into the contest-circuit. Hold it in! Hold it in!

Whoosh!
The bubble in my lungs finally exploded sensuous smoke billowing up my throat out my mouth in a spasm of ecstatic release.

A moment later, Arlene exhaled a huge quick sigh of smoke. But no cough this time.

She sighed, and her body relaxed against the back of the couch. Breakthrough! Now she should be relaxed enough (stoned enough, that is) to really keep some hash down.

I stuck the pipe back in her mouth. She grimaced. “Come on,” I told her, “it gets easier and easier from here on in.”

I held a match over the bowl. She sucked in bursts of smoke and held it, nose not nearly as wrinkled this time around. I took a long slow drag myself. Time seemed to inch by as I let the pressure of the smoke in my lungs sweep away into the heart of the rich orange sunset...

Whooosh!

Whooosh!

Now her eyes were wide as saucers and she grinned lazily at me as I passed the pipe to her again. We took big drags, held them for what seemed like five minutes, exhaled in sweet unison.

“Feel anything?” I asked her.

She smiled dreamily. “I feel all sorts of things... feel so strange... elongated... like a piece of taffy melting in the sun—”

“Like it?”

“I don’t know... it’s relaxing... but I don’t feel like me... So how can I know if
I
like it...?” She giggled. More wordgames. Had to get her beyond word-game level.

“One more round,” I said. We both took another drag. No big deal this time. She collapsed dreamily against my shoulder, warm and soft and breathing easy in the oriental sunset, essence of coziness, just the two of us together breathing together like OM... OM... OM... OM....

“Is it always like this?”

“Like what?”

“Oooh... like... being inside my own body...” She rippled her flesh against me like a stretching cat. “Feeling the blood flowing... heart beating... so strange—” Her mouth opened; her wet pink tongue circled her soft lips. “Like being my own body... never understood before... it’s always there, you know that,
it’s always there.
Flesh... flesh... it’s weird, I’m flesh all the way through, you know that? All that blood just flowing around and around and around... Ooooh....”

“I do believe you’re stoned.”

“It’s funny, so strange... I don’t feel drunk... or fuzzy or anything... Just the opposite, like I’m in focus for the first time—”

She took off her glasses, sat up and looked at me with huge shining green eyes through which a million years of god-knows-what seemed to be bubbling up from the back of her brain. This was not the same Arlene, oh no, this was the Arlene inside. “You know what I want to do?” she sighed. “I want to touch your body.”

“By all means,” I said, and started to draw her to me. But she pulled away.

“No,” she said. “I want to
really
touch your body. I want it to be... I want to feel your body the way you feel mine....”

She frowned at me. “If I ask you to do something really strange, will you...? I mean....”

“It’s your trip, baby,” I said. My cock was beginning to throb and every word she said seemed to stroke my balls; I had set some magic creature free and god knew what it would do.

“Take another puff,” she said, holding the pipe to my mouth. “Take a big one.” She held a match over the bowl for me, and as I toked, she said: “I... I want you to go into the bedroom and take your clothes off. And then come back. Like Adam and Eve.... That’s not... I mean I’m not acting... crazy?”

“You’re beautiful,” I said around a cloud of smoke. “It sounds like a groovy game.” I got up and started for the bedroom, taking the hash pipe with me.

“Could you leave that here?” she asked. “I... I’d like a little more first—”

I handed her the pipe. Man, you never know, you just never know....

I suppose she needed the pipe more than I did at that point, but alone in the bedroom taking my clothes off, high as I was, I did wish I could get a wee bit higher. What hath hash wrought? The chick waiting to do her thing (whatever it was) in the next room was no old head like Robin but uptight wordgame first-time-high Arlene. This was a chick with some strange sex hangups and now she was going to... what the fuck
was
she going to do? More important, which way would her mind blow? Man, if she freaks out on me....

I stood there stark naked with only a half-hearted hard-on. I was really bringing myself down. And if I walked in there projecting uptight vibes I could
really
mess up her head... even thinking about being uptight was putting me more uptight and if I walked in there uptight and put her uptight...

Shit man, get a hold of yourself! You got a chick in there wants to play dirty games with your body and you’re winding yourself up into a responsibility bummer! And right now, being hung up on responsibility is the most irresponsible thing you can do...

So, shivering a little, and not from the cold, and getting a flash of how an aging hooker must feel with a sixteen-year-old virgin, I walked into the living room.

Arlene was standing in front of the couch with the hash pipe in her mouth. Her clothes lay in a heap on the table. Her long, loose blond hair flowed like hot bronze over her pale bare shoulders in the warm orange light. Her nipples were sunset-painted a light rusty brown. Her green eyes flashed orange fire-highlights. Her lips shone with her own clear sweet juices. Between her legs, a tawny mane of lioness-fur. She smiled at me, showing cat-tongue between glistening teeth and blew a long, languid plume of hash smoke in my direction.

I laughed with joy inside, and between my legs was a furnace; no problem, no bring-downs, just a beautiful, beautifully stoned chick with hunger for my naked bod in her eyes.

Somehow sensing it was what she wanted, I just stood there displaying my nakedness for her eyes like the mother and father of all Greek statues and let her come across the room to me.