The Color of Night (12 page)

Crunchy and Creamy made tea in the lodge, and all the People assembled to drink it. How did we all know to go there?

I had a pulse in the back of my head, the soft dark spot where tendon meets bone, that roused me from where I lay with Laurel, like a pair of lizards waiting out the afternoon heat. And I caught Laurel’s fingertips to bring her along, although I let go of her hand before we had gone far. Not so much to hide that touch from D——, who knew all about it anyway, but.

The People moved toward the lodge from various directions, drawn perhaps by the funky aroma of the tea. Or maybe it was the pull of D——’s intention. We could feel it, one could feel it, like a lodestone. The smell was stronger the nearer you got.

With a certain solemnity, Crunchy and Creamy ladled from their cauldron into Styrofoam cups. The tea was black and tasted smoky, musty. I must have been very distracted that day, because it wasn’t till my vision started to go strange around the edges that I knew we’d just been drinking psilocybin, and the People were all going off on a higgledy-piggledy trip.

D—— came downstairs then, wearing a blue-flowered kimono so much too long for him that the hem trailed behind like a bridal gown’s train. I thought he wore lipstick and painted nails but that might have been just an effect of the drug. He stitched himself through the People like a minnow through water. Here a touch, there a kiss. There a whisper. We were thirty or forty strong that day. Girls mostly, but a double handful of men. But some of the men were just there for the party.

D——’s voice began, rapt, sonorous. The voice didn’t seem to come out of his throat. It surrounded his whole body, like an aura. That might have been an effect of the drug.

It’s all starting to come down,
the voice said.

D—— began undressing Stitch, loosening the white buttons on her pale blue work-shirt—same shirt as Creamy and Crunchy wore under their vests. Stitch stood as passively as a child, except that in her smile I saw the points of her teeth.

Oh, yeah.
The voice.
We’ll break it down.

Like most of the women of the People (Laurel being a great blowsy exception to this rule), Stitch had a boyish build, next to nothing in hips and breasts—and yet her body was very well made. A sigh went all around the lodge when D—— had laid it bare.

O

O

The drug made it a yawning hollow, echoing, deep. Stitch tossed back her dirty hair, exposing her white throat. Soundlessly she sank down to her knees before him. But D—— connected her to another and moved on.

The voice.
Me.

At the fringes of my vision there began to be little cobwebs of op-art graphics. Not possible for me to blink them away. The drug, taking me into itself regardless of my will. Without further prompting, others, everyone, began to disrobe. I looked away from Laurel. The other way from her. A disposable person behind me assisted me with my clothes. It had taken him only a second to shed the ridiculous striped djellaba he always wore. So I must know him, though I didn’t know his name. Was he one of the People or just … there. For the ride. With Jesus hair like all the rest, but melting brown eyes like a puppy’s. A pulsing psychedelic cobweb crawled over the left side of his face. I looked away. D——’s hands assisted our connection.

Me. Me.

D——’s kimono had disappeared. He was half erect in that cloud of goat hair but otherwise only a certain tightness in his voice betrayed any sort of erotic involvement. He didn’t participate, directly. He conducted. Guiding, encouraging. Inserting. For the more difficult connections he had a prosaic little tube of KY jelly.

Memememememe …

The mushrooms turned it into a sort of cricket sound as I sank deeper. Bonelessly bending. All the sounds warped. D—— bent people to his plan. Like Gumby. What was the name of Gumby’s horse? The various noises of suction began to grow unbearably loud. That familiar sensation: the invasion of arousal. Willing or no.

Let go of me. Let go of mememe …

I agreed, I suppose. Or there was no longer an
I
to agree. Or suppose. A butterfly shutter wheeled over my vision. Darkness. Darkness. Light. More darkness. When it opened I saw or perceived that the People were linked into one great wriggling wreath around the central fireplace, which was cold and smelled of ancient ash. When it closed I saw eyelid movies of Day-Glo green and yellow fields, goats prancing, a woman turning into reeds.

My People. Be One. Be One.

A reduplicated compound. A beast of many backs. It hunched. It moaned.

Let go of meme. Higgledy-piggledy—let it all come down. Be One.

I was then unpleasantly penetrated by the thought that although Laurel was several places away in this vast fucking daisy chain, I was still most tangibly connected to her, through the transitive power of fucking. At the repulsion of this idea I groaned, which encouraged the beast, when I had no wish to encourage it. I could find no voice to say to Laurel that I really didn’t care a damn for O——, that I had gone off with him only to hurt her. There was only one voice in the bowels of the beast and the voice seemed only to speak to
mememe
though I knew it was meant for all the One People.

Hung up on each other. Hung up on yourselves. You can’t hear the gods’ great voices. You’re too busy—talking to yourselves.

In the midst of it all there was mere discomfort. Skin scraped across the splintery floor.

Can’t you hear the gods’ great voices—

The truth came through D——. Was not of him. Perhaps D—— didn’t himself understand it. Except for the special times when he did.

I wanted to say
I hear them, I do!
I hear gods’ voices. The words they shape around me like a door.
But I couldn’t, not only because some fleshy thing had stopped my throat.

I knew this bacchanalia was not what I had come for. This was not the bacchanalia I had come for. That was elsewhere. My frenzy. One’s frenzy. I knew that it had happened before, if I and I only heard the true voices, and I knew it was going to happen again.

Pauley’s rifle came in a long rectangular case like a guitar, with plush-lined compartments for the rifle itself and for the scope and the Starlite attachment and for the silencer, a big awkward thing, the size of a wine bottle. Out in the desert there was no one to hear, but one night I took the silencer with me, just the same.

It didn’t weigh a quarter as much as a wine bottle, but it did change the balance of the weapon. I practiced till I’d adjusted to the difference, finding targets but not firing. A point of stone or a fallen branch. Things already dead. That never lived.

To reach out with an invisible silent fatal touch …

Then, movement. In the scope a flicker of phosphorescent green. With the silencer the shot made scarcely any more sound than a sneeze, or the sound of someone spitting on dry sand. I
made
myself prop the rifle carefully upright against a stone before I fell on the coyote, my blade drawn. Coyote still kicking spasmodically, scuffing fine gravel with his claws. The dead jaws snapping.

Gutted it. Skinned it. As Terrell had taught me all those years ago, when we used to go out together to hunt deer. The knife I had now was not the best I had ever owned, and was getting dull by the time I got to the difficult part. I sharpened it against a stone, resumed the flaying. At last the head skin came off whole. I stopped, on my knees, propped up on my palms, panting like a dog.

Blood to my elbows. In the weak starlight, against the pale floor of the desert, it looked black. The sound of my breath like a rasp on dry wood.

I stood up slowly, raising the limp skin by its shoulders, and looked into the vacant eyeholes of the god mask. Presence in absence. The unavoidable fixed stare. If the features seemed to shiver it must have been because my hands were slightly trembling. The smile now curling fondly at the corners, peeled from its bloodstained teeth, which lay near me on the ground. At my feet the carcass was now still, wronged and irreparable, leaching its sticky fluids into the sand.

Facing the hum of light pollution on the horizon, I raised the skin above my head. Rank smell of musk and blood surrounding me now. Limp mask dangling before my face. I did not want the skin to touch me this time, to settle on my shoulders like a mantle. Awkwardly I held it up, over and away from me, balancing and aligning. To look back, through the eyes of the beast, at the dying glow of the mortal world.

Again, again I gazed at Laurel, on her knees, her crooked hands clawing at the sky. The bared throat and blind head tossing.
The place where pain and pleasure are one.

Just suffer,
I said, inside my mind.
Don’t try to make anything of your suffering.

Was I talking to Laurel, or myself, or to O——? There was a point where I differed from them. That had been O——’s big mistake, to believe that suffering could be redeemed, instead of polluted, by such a transformation.