Contours of Darkness (14 page)

Both he and Cynthia had called their respective jobs to make excuses for not going in, and Aaron had had a taste of what it felt like to lie on acid. He had difficulty in getting the words out of his mouth. Cynthia lay naked next to him as he called, and when he finished had cooed, 'Let's spend the whole day just making love, we haven't done that in such a long time.' But he could not stay with her and almost panicked when he got up to dress and she grabbed his arm. He couldn't bring himself to say what burned inside him, that after having satisfied himself on her body, he found no further interest in being with her. It was as though he needed the other man to help him confirm some aspect of his identity which close unbroken association with a woman had done much to undermine. He did not have the tools to formulate his problem in historical terms, and did not understand that the unnatural intensity bred in the marriage form had to lead to suffocation. For the second time in their common law marriage he wondered why she had no intimate girlfriends. He had mentioned that to her once and she had put her arms around his neck and said, 'But I don't need anyone but you. Aren't you happy with me?'

Like a puff of smoke that evening appeared in his mind. He saw her again in the bath, suffused with the projected glow he surrounded her with in the early days, the room thick with steam, the water frothy with scented bubbles. He flushed as he recalled the way her long legs cantilevered out when she did a favourite trick of hers, opening her cunt lips with the fingers of both hands and peeking up at him from under her fine golden hair, affecting the leer so popular in sex magazines, but with a gleam of humorous intelligence in her eyes to replace the dull slack stare which mottled the faces of the models.

'I can't get enough,' she had whispered, and cupped one breast with her hand.

He drove into the past, surfacing with memory after memory of that night. They had, as couples often do after skirting an issue, chosen to romp into a bacchanalian mood and each drank a pint of narcotic cough syrup, sinking into a hazy seaworld of blurred perceptions. They fucked once and then slept, and when Aaron awoke she was lying spreadeagled across the bed, breathing regularly in her drugged sleep. Her body had an air of unreality, and the phenomenon kept propelling his mind through a revolving door. He crawled between her legs and spent a long time gazing at her cunt. The lips were flung about in disarray, lettuce leaves of pink and purple, wrinkled and crushed, with his recently discharged sperm oozing out from the bottom and into her hair.

Tt's an absurdly ugly thing,' he thought, and saw it as though for the first time, stripped of its connotations. He peeled back the folds of flesh and peered into the small serrated opening, where inside and outside joined. 'This is where the cock goes in and the baby comes out,' he said in a low voice. And then, 'I wonder what my mother's cunt looks like.' It was there, he saw, that the whole problem of sex lay for a man, the need to dissociate the thing he fucked from the thing he issued from. Underneath, her white buttocks spread out like an inviting cushion. And from the centre came a smell like the rotting columns of wood which support wharves in saltwater rivers.

'Cunt,' he said. 'Cynthia's cunt. If Cynthia had no cunt, what would there be of Cynthia?'

The matted hole appeared to look back at him, as though it had its own consciousness independent of any other centres of the body. The importance of that one bit of anatomy to his entire appreciation of her startled him, for he admitted that in any broad view of life the heart and liver and lungs and spleen were all more precious organs, more necessary to her sustenance and well-being. To his drooping mind came the realisation that except for her use in satisfying his sexual needs, she lived as a two-dimensional character in the scenario of his days.

'She is a woman,' he said to himself. 'What does it mean, to be a woman?'

But even as he pursued the train of thought, the brute power of the playground between her thighs captivated him, and he brought his lips forward to kiss the crack, feeling it cold and damp against his mouth. A sheet of energy flapped through him from the point of contact and a deep rumble broke the skin of consciousness, a turmoil of blunt desire which swamped the tentative understanding he was reaching for. His cock got hard.

With none of the common libidinal stirrings he beheld the person beneath him. He had made no special effort to imbue the cunt with any sexual magnetism, and yet it served as a stimulus for lust in and of itself; he needed no fantasy in order to have it arouse him. Since she was unconscious he was able to maintain a rare objectivity while he went about performing the act, and studied his reactions closely. He drew himself over her sleeping form and with great care and patience brought his stiff member up against the soft receptive zone.

Thrills of vegetative ecstasy ran through him and he whimpered as he watched his cock nudge the opening, enter, be swallowed by the hairy mouth, engulfed in its folds, and then slide penetrating all the way into her. She seemed to be at once asleep and responsive to what was happening. Tiny reflexive motions of fucking caught her pelvis up as he drew himself out and thrust himself in, tasting the deliciously small variations in temperature and texture abiding in the different levels of her cunt. For a few seconds it mattered to his enjoyment whether she was awake or not, and then he shifted into a purely behavioural response, satisfied with the simple fact of the action. She lay open and removed, the perfect vehicle for his detached desire. It was a form of fucking that puzzled him, lying in some shadow area between masturbation and actual intercourse. Looking down on her expressionless face, holding his torso up with his arms, his pelvis swung back and forth easily, his knees serving as the fulcrum. She sighed once and he felt her cunt quicken.

For many minutes he rode her as the herald of the coming orgasm. He did not hold back or rush, but remained in the mood of stillness, watching the development of the physiological changes. He saw the act of fucking as a quietly rapturous meditative dance which attained to the perfection of fullness. Then, like a tree running with sap, when the springtime of his seasons sounded its call, he spilled over, lavish in the river of rich white seed which bounded from the pulsating cock into the silent labyrinth between her thighs.

'Berkeley Barb!'
a girl shouted. She was nineteen or twenty, barefoot, a complexion already spoiled through bad diet, with stringy hair. She wore a costume of poorly matched pieces, giving an impression of destitution which clashed with the air of insouciance she affected; a thin note of desperation infected her being. The index finger of her right hand was orange from nicotine. Aaron was snapped from his re very and stared at her. In his abstracted state, he beheld the girl without preconceptions and for a jagged second saw himself as her boyfriend; with that, the hundred differences in their stations in life melted away and he felt a rush of affection for the stranger before him. She looked at him with open distaste. His entire appearance seemed to revolt her, and she ran her eyes from his patent leather shoes to his short hair, taking in the stiffly-creased trousers and white shirt.

'Or would you rather have a
TribeV
she said, her voice tinged with sarcasm. The second of the two papers had been born when a large part of the
Barb's
staff revolted against its owner who, they claimed, was a capitalist counterrevolutionary not interested in the true needs of the community of radicals and who, perhaps more pointedly, underpaid his workers. They formed a commune called the Red Mountain Tribe, after the wine of that name, took a strident line on all political issues, and emerged as the foremost example of left-wing yellow journalism on the west coast. The vendor's offering it was a sneering commentary on Aaron's sartorial style and what she imagined was his concomitant value system.

He responded only to her words, too taken by his surprise at the way he had perceived her to react to such an esoteric innuendo. 'I'll take one of each,' he said and handed her thirty cents. Upon taking the money she erased him from her concern.

He continued his walk and the street opened itself at its edges, chic head shops, definitive book stores, restaurants which specialised in one or another type of cuisine, clothing emporiums, shoe palaces. Aaron floated along like a man who had never been there before, for always when passing through on Telegraph he had viewed the street as a jangle of commercialism and unruly people; this was the first time he was able to breathe in the richness of the milieu. Dogs ran loose. Grim old ladies and grimy faced teenagers shared the air that was still sweet enough to provide a contrast to the exhaust fumes of the cars which geared by in chrome contempt.

He entered the Mediterraneum, a coffee house run like a cafeteria in which all the elements of Berkeley's city life could meet over the neutral ground of Italian pastry. It was like Switzerland and no single group was allowed the privilege of claiming it as its own turf. Periodically it would run with disfavour with the street regulars who were put off by the large numbers of straight people who went in, but the management continued its glacial policy, and the place gained in respect for having refused to take its tone from any single faction. He picked up an espresso at the counter and sat down at a round table to leaf through the papers, amazed at the openness of political and sexual rhetoric; one article which explained the servicing of small arms astounded him and the chill wind of revolution whistled into his soul. The print began to swim before his eyes and he covered them with his hands, attempting to stay steady as his reality rocked under him. The last rushes of the acid spun him into an unaccustomed state of consciousness and he lost all context for what he experienced; he felt like a stranger to his time. He wished desperately he could find Conrad, for it seemed there was no one else in the world who would understand his condition as precisely and sympathetically. He took a number of deep breaths, filling his lungs and emptying out, and became aware of his heartbeat once more, of the blood coursing through his veins, of the tingling where thousands of hairs grew out of his scalp. He came to himself and as the external noises fell away he tasted the peculiar flavour of timelessness, that odd experience in which the functioning of the analytic mind is momentarily suspended and the world of mundane perception is suddenly charged with an intangible beckoning presence which seems once and for all to confirm its existence as the true face of the real, against the outraged sensibilities of the scientific paradigm, and the arcane tipsters of the transcendental.

When he looked up again, he saw Conrad, sitting several tables away, deep in conversation with three other men who, except for minor variations, looked exactly like him: the style of clothing, the boots, the long hair, the sinuously cautious movements. He caught himself just as he was about to call out his name and had risen half out of his seat to go over to him, when he judged that such an intrusion would be gauche. In relation to them he felt like a man from a foreign country, speaking a different language. His only connection with them was through Conrad's puzzling interest in him, and he suddenly saw that he and Cynthia must constitute an aberration in Conrad's overall life pattern. He felt foolish and ready to repudiate the past twelve hours as a spell of psychosis. 'I should be home with Cynthia,' he thought, and his eyes were stung with tears as he was gripped in a spasm of sentimentality. Leaving his newspapers on the table, he rose and started to walk toward the street, looking straight ahead; but just as he reached the door Conrad's voice lashed out and caught his attention.

'Hey, Aaron,' he said.

He turned and found the young man grinning at him while the others at the table exchanged glances; Aaron was sure that Conrad had been telling them about the night's events. He felt himself blushing with heat, furious that Cynthia should become the object of smirking small talk.

'Why don't you sit down with us,' Conrad said.

'I've got to be going,' Aaron replied in a curt tone.

'Christ, he's uptight,' he heard one of the men say to the others.

'I'll come with you,' Conrad shot back, leaving his chair and walking from the table without looking back. He put his arm around Aaron's shoulder and went out the door onto the erupting street.

'Is Cynthia all right?' Conrad asked.

'Cynthia's just fine!' Aaron said, his voice sharp with anger.

Conrad read the tone and decided that anything he said would provoke a hostile response. 'Let's go over to my place,' he said. 'I think we need to talk.'

Except for the kitchen, Conrad's flat did not have a piece of furniture in it. The place was a sea of rugs, cushions and hangings, strewn with books and papers, water pipes, clothing. Even the ceilings were covered with fabric, and the overall effect was that of being in a gaudy tent. Aaron was instructed to take off his shoes as he entered, and as he padded down a long hallway with doors lining either wall he glanced into one of the rooms and saw a naked girl who looked fifteen lying sprawled asleep in a purple hammock. They came to a large room in which the three tall windows were stocked with plants that sat on shelves which ran from bottom to top so that the light in the space had the same quality as that one finds in the forest. Just stepping into it was enough to settle most of Aaron's agitation.

Conrad sat on a pillow and rummaged around until he found a small teak box, fished out rolling papers and marijuana, and proceeded to roll several thick joints. He did not say a word, but lit one of the cigarettes and passed it to Aaron, then lit another and began smoking it himself, inserting it between the pinky and ring finger of his right hand which he curled into a fist, and sucking the smoke from the hole formed by his thumb and curled forefinger. By the third toke Aaron was rushing dizzily into the realm of heightened perception; his body grew heavy and he became intensely aware of his physical sensations. Once again, everything but the immediate environment faded into unreality,and only the room, the moment, and Conrad assumed significance. Cynthia and his job and the parameters of his daily life appeared like comets shooting away from him at great speed into space. A cold shiver of fear rippled down his spine as he stepped once more into that awareness of aloneness which he both sought and shunned. The high levels of the previous night were activated by the grass and he took control, for a time, of the choice he had in the mode in which he saw things. He decided what was important, and shucked off all problems whose weight derived from the influence of other people. He finished the first dope stick and Conrad gave him another. They continued to smoke in silence, embraced by the soft oxygen-saturated ambience of the room. And when the proper pitch of attention had been attained, the talk started of its own accord.