The Eden Express (30 page)

Kathy was looking at them too. “You know, Mark, this sort of thing is much more important and real than the farm.”

“Light under bushel burn house down?” I was trying to laugh. It was comforting that if I flunked farm I could be good for something else and that Kathy and others like her would see what I was doing as worthwhile.

 

Kathy tried to sleep. Her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open; she was breathing in gulps, the way I sometimes did. Virginia hated the way I breathed. She said it kept her awake and made her nervous. I was being piggy with the oxygen.

Kathy lying there all swaddled in that icy blue. I had always thought she was kind of pretty, but looking at her now she was exquisitely beautiful.

What a bitch Virge was not to like her more. Maybe it was the way
she breathed. Kathy wasn’t liberated enough or something. The couple thing she and Jack had going didn’t pass muster. Come to think of it, I couldn’t think of any couple thing Virginia approved of or anything that seemed to turn her on more than a marriage or a longstanding man-woman thing breaking up.

I got in my sleeping bag and tried to go to sleep but it was hopeless. I was wide, wide, wider than wide awake.

Kathy, my stomach feels all screwed up. Could you rub it? No, no. That was all wrong. It was clumsy and stupid. It was what I meant, but somehow there was no way for me to say it.

Was Virginia not thinking about fucking when she asked Vincent to rub her stomach? What a luxury. I couldn’t ask anyone for a glass of water without thinking about fucking. Men, women, children, dogs, goats, and on and on. Some part of me somewhere wanted to fuck everything.

And here I was in a situation that wasn’t half as kinky as some of my dreams and hallucinations. About my age, single, the opposite sex, someone I had known and liked for a long time. But I wasn’t any more sure that I really wanted to sleep with Kathy than I was that I didn’t want to hump alder trees.

Maybe if she rubbed my stomach she’d want to sleep with me and I wouldn’t want to sleep with her. And if we did make love, weren’t things complicated enough at the farm already? It would be doing to Jack what Vincent did to me or doing to Kathy what Vincent had done to Virge or doing to Virge what Virge had done to me and on and on. Not that those things had been bad. In fact it might be doing us all a world of good, but maybe it would be a good idea to let the smoke clear from round one before firing off round two.

Maybe a good toss in bed would do the trick. According to Freud, sexual repression was the root of mental illness. The sexual content of my hallucinations made it clear my crotch was somehow involved. If I
wasn’t such an uptight, hung-up, sexual prig, if I could just let myself go go go…but where would it stop stop stop?

If I gave in to all my sexual impulses, I wouldn’t have time for much else. Maybe Warren was right about lust being my big sin. Maybe I should be put away for the public good. If the choice was between spending my life in a padded cell and giving in to every sexual impulse, I’d just as soon one as the other and I could hardly blame the powers that be if they decided on the padded cell.

A possible alternative suggested by Jesus didn’t appeal much either. If your left hand offends you, cut it off. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.

The person I least wanted to know about my sexuality was Virginia. She might put it all together and figure out that my being monogamous with her was the sexual equivalent of what I wanted from an evening with Mary and Joe. I wasn’t following my “heart.” Had I followed my heart, I would have ended up exhausted and with some pretty strange bedfellows.

So there I was, going nuts again and pretty sure I was going nuts again. The voices were getting clearer and more insistent. The crazy taste was in the back of my mouth. Things were starting to glow and shimmer again. Thinking maybe if I could make love with someone it would defuse this whole damn thing, but it becomes too late too fast. As soon as it starts happening people are scared to death just to talk with you. For someone to be able to get into all the tenderness and unguardedness of nakedness and lovemaking with someone on the verge of a breakdown, they’d have to be either awfully brave or so dumb they didn’t realize what was happening.

What if I just laid it on the line? Kathy, I’m starting to crack up again. If you will just hold me and maybe make love with me, maybe everything will be all right.

What if she said yes and we made love and I still cracked up? She
might figure there was something more she could have done and just be one more person feeling guilty and helpless. Even if it worked, I’d spend the rest of my life wondering if I had cried wolf just to get laid.

If it worked, did that mean I had to go through life with this awful threat over my head? If I didn’t get laid every two days or so I’d go crazy? Maybe the problem would get more serious. It would get to be once a day and then once every twelve hours and so on till someone had to invent a twenty-four-hour-a-day fucking machine just for me.

Maybe the object of my affections would work the same way. Now I could stay out of the nut house by giving in to my sexual impulses toward Kathy, later I wouldn’t be able to resist chickens and get away with it.

 

I was supposed to take my immigration physical the next day, the same goddamned physical I was supposed to take when I went bonkers the last time. What is it with me and this physical, anyway?

Just a few hours earlier it was nothing to worry about. Just another dumb thing. Nothing very exciting one way or another could happen. But now all that was changed. My body was all fucked up again. I was hot when others were cold, cold when others were hot. I was going into faints and shakes bordering on convulsions. My heartbeat seemed all wrong. What would happen if I blanked and ran amuck or whatever it was I did in those blanks? My voice was unrecognizable and words were getting out of place.

Was the prospect of an immigration physical screwing me up this bad? What would happen if anything serious came up?

No matter what it was that was cracking me, there would always be fans, Joe and Marys, rain and wind and smoke in the air. There would always be weird conversations and immigration physicals and sexual confusion and all the other kinds of confusion. What bothered
me wasn’t so much the shit, but my low and getting-lower shit tolerance.

I got up and talked with Kathy. I got up and tried to read. I got up and found myself talking with Joe and Mary. Did push-ups, trying to exhaust myself. I tried yoga, meditation, drawing, writing, anything I could get my hands on, and then tried to sleep and then got up again.

I heard voices in the living room. There was light coming under the door. It was Joe, Mary, and Fan talking but their voices sounded strange. I tried to go to sleep.

Very low and wispy, like wind: “Mark, Mark, Mark.” Being polite, I got up and went into the living room. Mary was wearing some priestess-type outfit. She told me to sit down in a voice too low to be hers or anyone else’s for that matter. Her legs were spread and her crotch was glowing smoky Day-Glo orange.

Why couldn’t it be her fingers or something else? Why her crotch? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Don’t I have enough problems without Day-Glo crotches? I tried not to stare. It seemed an unnecessary touch. I wasn’t about to argue that whatever my problem was, there was a lot of sex involved. Day-Glo crotches seemed to be rubbing it in.

“Do we have time to move to higher ground?” There was that voice that wasn’t Mary’s coming from Mary again.

“Huh? Come again?” I had heard but was stalling for a little time.

“Do we have to move to higher ground?” She sounded impatient. The storm outside took on a new meaning, or rather a meaning I had been trying to push out of my mind.

“Higher ground?” I looked at her, trying to catch a glimpse of humor. There was no movement in her face.

“Higher ground is within.” It seemed to be the right thing to say. There was a long, long silence.

Well, these people need a prophet and I guess, times being what they are, short notice and all, I’m the best they could do. They seemed to
think I knew something they didn’t, that I had access to cosmic truths. So I started talking. I started teaching. I started preparing them and me for what we were going through. How to deal with the end of the world and how to deal with being crazy. There were plenty of parallels.

“The first lesson is about time. ’Cause time is what you’re about to run out of. The first lesson is no matter how little or how much actual clock-calendar time remains to you, there is enough. Enough to get done whatever you have to get done. So don’t panic. Even if it’s only a minute or even just a second, there is time. There is enough time.”

 

Back under my sleeping bag. Shaking, not knowing whether I was too cold or too hot. Cut off. The storm was raging. The fire was out. The heat I had was all there was. There was no way to move. I just lay there groaning trying not to. Way out at the end of Highway 101. A broken phone, broken plumbing, a broken furnace. Were the others dead? Why couldn’t I move? How long had I been lying there? Cabin fever. Jack London. The waiting, lying, trying to hold on to whatever so there would be something for them to save when they got there. Oh, shit, why did I ever leave Massachusetts? Trade the friendly, nicely scaled hills and plants for these monster trees, monster mountains, monster beauty where man didn’t really belong? Barnstable Harbor for Powell Lake? A rotten trade. Rock and water, no mud. I’d give anything for a little mud. Cut off. Shit, fuck, cunt, bitch, whore. Remember old rock songs and old friends to pass the time. Wait for the inevitable, the earth claiming back what was hers. The antibody systems of Mother Earth wiping me out. It made such sense. It was just surprising it hadn’t happened earlier. How long did I think I could get away with it? Stupid stupid stupid. I’d so much rather die in the Barnstable marsh instead of British Columbia. Why, when I got out, didn’t I head home? Talk about being willfully dense. Talk about being Taurus. Talk about being perverse. I’m sorry again, too late again.

When I was a child I fell thirty feet from a tree onto my head. I realized I was dying but wasn’t really very upset about it. I was dreaming, drifting back through my life like a cloud, and everything made perfect sense. The dream had given me promise that pleasant enough things were ahead, so I kept sinking back into that dream world. Why get sore? But gradually I wasn’t able to sink into the peace as deeply as I had before. I kept coming back to the very real pain. The pain became stronger, the dream weaker, and I realized I was going to live after all.

Darwinian explanation of why your life flashes before you just before you die is impossible. Evolution has no use for dying things. Since it can’t be an evolutionary thing, probably all organisms experience something similar. More complicated entities like friendships, love affairs, cultures and institutions seem to go through a comparable process. There’s something in consciousness that seems to favor neat endings.

I knew something was ending. The voices, the dreams, the visions and other wild things were all clues to what was dying, but I couldn’t put it all together.

 

“Let me go, Mark. Please let me go.” It was my father again, begging me, pleading with me, trying to explain, trying again to make me hate him. Again I got the feeling he wanted to kill himself.

“Don’t you see I’m responsible for all this pain you’re going through? How can you not hate me?”

“If you weren’t the fifteenth joker through here in the last few hours trying to claim responsibility for the hell I’m in, I might be able to take you more seriously. I admit you’ve got a better case than most. A lot of what’s going on certainly has your flavor to it, but there are plenty of others who have a reasonable case. Virge is pretty sure she
did it. Mother certainly had her hand in it. Bob Dylan, believe it or not, was just through to apologize and try to make it all better. He figured the whole thing was his fault. I told him to tell you that. Tolstoy was sorry I had taken his work so seriously. Said he was awfully sorry, he just couldn’t have known what would happen but all the same he’s glad to know how it turned out. Jesus said he’d do what he could but I could tell by the look on his face he wasn’t sure he could be of much help.

“The thing I’m telling them and want to tell you too is that it’s not all that bad. I’ve really had an awfully good life and don’t feel sore at anyone. I have a feeling that I’m somehow where all you big deals were afraid to go. Where you all drew the line and chickened out. That may sound grandiose but it certainly feels like that’s what’s happening. You all feel shitty because you figure that where I am must be unbelievably awful and that things you did steered me to this. It’s true I never would have gotten here without you, but it’s not all that bad. I’m finding out lots of interesting stuff. Doing lots of things I’ve always wanted to do.