Contours of Darkness (24 page)

Conrad pondered Jerry's question as he lit the pipe, and relaxed into the aroma of the resin as it mingled with the damp green smell of the forest and the rich salt air from the ocean. The spirit of the night was vast and far removed from the concerns of the men who travelled through it. He handed the pipe to Jerry, but to his surprise the other man waved it away. Conrad looked at him questioningly. Jerry was dark-skinned with curly black hair that covered his head like a giant pom-pom. Just a little over five feet tall and perfectly erect from the two hours of hatha yoga he practised daily, he struck a sharp contrast to Conrad's tall blond sloping California look. Conrad had known him for several years, seeing him sporadically and never knowing in advance when he would pass through. They had taken LSD together a number of times and shared the intimacy of men who are willing to fight and die for a way of living that neither, if asked, could have articulated to the satisfaction of the other. They were brothers, and that subsumed the rest. Now Conrad attempted to focus on his feelings for Cynthia, analyzing the complex pattern of behaviour he had exhibited since meeting her. He found it more accurate to observe what he did, and from that deduce his motivations, rather than attempting to rely on introspection.

T don't want to just fuck her,' he said. 1 could have done that months ago.' He held the pipe toward Jerry once more, who again indicated he wanted none of it.

'Are you off smoking?' he asked.

'I don't do dope any more,' Jerry told him.

Conrad blinked. 'What brought that about?'

Jerry ignored the question. 'So, if you don't want to fuck her, what do you want to do with this chick?'

Conrad took another deep toke before answering. 'I'm sick of the city,' he said. 'The more I'm around people the more I'm getting to hate them. The whole scene is just getting so sick I can't cope with it any more.'

'You're telling me,' Jerry said with a trace of sarcasm.

'You want to blow it up,' Conrad went on, 'I want to get away from it. Trees are the only things I can really relate to any more.' He paused. Tm thinking of splitting.'

There's a few communes I can turn on to,' Jerry said.

'Farther than that,' Conrad replied. 'I know where there's a cabin in Idaho. Fifty miles of forest in every direction. Even the rangers don't know about it. I can pack in brown rice and soy beans, and eat off the land. There's enough nuts and berries and greens to feed a million people who know how to eat right. Plus all the game. And a stream nearby with water so delicious you never want to drink anything else.'

Jerry smiled. 'And what are you going to do there?'

'Do?'
Conrad said. 'I'll just
be.
What is there to do? Run round like crazies trying to score all the time? All you need is food, water, air, and shelter. I'll just get stoned and stay stoned and spend my life digging creation.' He ran his fingers over the grass in front of him. 'Everybody's insane,' he went on. 'You know that. Why hang around any longer?'

Jerry sucked air in through his teeth. 'And this Cynthia, you want to take her with you?'

Conrad frowned. He had never formulated the question so baldly even to himself. But now that it was presented, there was no way to step around the awareness of the intention that had been propelling him for several months. He nodded. 'I think I want to live with her,' he said.

Jerry stood up and walked to the very edge of the cliff and stared straight down. Conrad's stomach lurched, for the ground was soft and it would not take much for it to give way and send his friend sailing into space, his body breaking on the boulders beneath. 'Do you know,' Jerry said suddenly, 'when we blew the bank in Santa Barbara, it was the clerks who put us down the hardest?' He snorted. 'Can you imagine? The clerks. People who spend their lives pushing pieces of paper around so the Giannini family can own more of the world than it already does. It was a real kick in the arse to be attacked by the people we were trying to wake up to freedom. It changed our heads a lot.'

Conrad listened to the monologue, wondering where it was leading. Jerry walked back from from the lip of the cliff and sat down in front of Conrad. 'This woman is straight, isn't she? She must be, to have an old man like that.'

'Well, that's the thing,' Conrad began. 'I said the same thing to myself. But there's something different about her. I mean, she really is unhappy with how she's living, and she's looking for something more.'

'Enter our hero,' Jerry said. His voice became sharper. 'Everybody wants to change. But how many are ready to risk their suffocating security to make it happen? How old is she?'

'Twenty-eight,' Conrad told him.

Jerry sighed. 'A stiff cock hasn't got any ideology or common sense,' he said. 'She's too old, man,' he continued. 'At that age very few people have enough honesty left to radically alter their lives.' He looked down at the ground and did not speak for a long while, and then peered into Conrad's eyes. 'You must be really hung up on her,' he said.

'I think I love her,' Conrad whispered, the word sounding strange in his ears. He had not ever used it to describe his feelings for another person.

'You're such a fucking kid,' Jerry said, but his voice was warm. 'So hip, but still hungry for romance.' He cocked his head. 'And you've never fucked her?'

'No,' Conrad said. 'I had a scene with her and Aaron the other night. I gave him acid for the first time. I had a beautiful thing going with her in the kitchen, but then I had to take care of him. And by the time he was cooled out, the two of them started working out a lot of shit. She gave us both head, and then followed him into the bedroom.'

Jerry fixed Conrad with a glance. 'Look,' he said, 'you want to poke your cock into that lady's cunt, and that's a healthy American impulse. Nothing to be ashamed of. And you're getting to an age where you're beginning to scratch around for a mate. And that's cool. But for Christ's sake don't get the two things confused. You're a revolutionary, and she's a nice mid-die-class chick who's opened up your nose. And you want to take her to go do a Tarzan and Jane trip in a broken-down shack. How can you even think of living with somebody until you have it cooled out with them all the way down the line? How many changes does she have to go through before she even understands where you're coming from? And how the fuck do you think you can take on a grown woman? You're a bright boy, but if you get locked into a scene with her, she'll be having you for breakfast within a month. Living with a woman is the hardest thing a man can do. Don't stack the odds against yourself.'

'I really haven't thought it out that far,' Conrad said. 'The idea of making it into the woods isn't something that's going to happen for a while. And I hadn't connected it with her before just now.' He picked up two stones and hit them against each other. 'I don't want to hurt anybody,' he said.

Jerry took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. The black between the stars was pregnant with revelations for whoever was ready to gaze into it long enough and with the proper spirit. But he brought his eyes back to earth, where he was capable of exerting an influence. He had spent most of his early twenties in an ashram in India, practising asceticsm and following the precepts of a teacher. But the string had run out and one day he realised there was nothing in that place for him any longer, and had returned to the United States to become involved in the world of radical politics, his predisposition for the most rigorous wing of any given involvement leading him directly into the company of the Weathermen.

'They're hurting us,' he said, 'all the time. The wars and the stealing were bad enough, but now they're actually poisoning the fucking air, killing the oceans, wiping out species after species. You want to get away from it. How long do you think there'll be any place left? That little paradise of yours will probably have a Holiday Inn on it in ten years. And that precious forest of yours will be cut down and covered with concrete. And what are you going to do about it? Spend your time trying to convince one chick that she'll have better orgasms with you than with her boyfriend?'

Conrad opened his mouth but Jerry swept past. 1 know the scene with straight chicks who are just starting to come out. It's really delicious to give them an education. You get to be the first one to show them what real ecstasy is. You get to be the first one to fuck them on acid. And while they're learning, there's part of them that's still really scared, and so they hold on to you, making you feel like the biggest man in the world. And nine times out of ten, all you get is a slave on your hands. Is that what you want?'

'What else should I do with my time?' Conrad responded. 'Blow up banks? You yourself see how useless that is.'

You can join us in our next stage of operations,' Jerry told him. He pursed his lips and waited a moment before continuing. 'Most of the people haven't evolved to a new understanding yet, but a few of us see which way the wind is blowing for the seventies. The trip was to make use of symbolic violence. We figured that if we hit a few office buildings or draft boards the old folks would wake up and ask themselves what was wrong with their society that their children had to protest with dynamite. But after each hit, there would be a blurb in the paper and a mention on the six o'clock news, and everybody would go back to watching the ball game. The only results we got from that was to draw the feds down on us and to turn the people we were trying to communicate with against us. They picked up the slogans that the media fed to them and we were branded as madmen and criminals and agents of a foreign power.'

Jerry rubbed his beard and inched forward. Conrad listened to the words with reserve. He understood and respected Jerry and his people for the chances they took and the fervor that moved them. They were part of his family. But he had never been inclined to join their activities past acting as one of their drug connections and occasionally helping to procure explosives for them. The reasons he had been thinking of retiring from all society, for he felt a kinship with only the most radical members caught in the middle of his context was what drew him to Aaron, for he recognised that the older man had the same problem in an entirely different dimension.

'Six of us met a few months ago to rethink our objectives, and decided that it was too late to salvage anything. I don't know if the species has come to a dead end or it's the period of Kali Yuga, but it's bleak everywhere. Even the socialist countries have become just another form of power trip, hierarchies with different criteria for dividing master and slave. With the current drift of things, it seems the only alternatives are war, pollution, or worldwide dictatorship.
And that's what the people want
. I mean, that's the explanation we finally came up with. It isn't a bunch of bad guys keeping everybody else under their thumbs. If the people wanted to be free there wouldn't be the armies that are used for repression. We came to the conclusion that protest can't help because the ones we are protesting to, the people themselves, are asleep in their chains.'

Conrad slumped down and relit his hash pipe. The words were articulation of thoughts he had spun out himself. But to hear them spoken so forcefully by someone whose very life was a dedication to changing the conditions of society was oppressive. 'So, what is there to do?' he said at last.

'Destroy the machine,' Jerry said flatly. 'Destroy their technology.'

Conrad looked at his friend and wondered whether, in his intensity, he had lost his sanity. He had come to his own conclusions that the whole world of political society was a simple-minded game of cops and robbers, and the people who played it were, no matter how high their IQs, functional imbeciles. He had stepped free of it one night when the acid he had taken opened his heart to the reality of the infinite universe, and the blazing mystery of existence once and for all reduced the feverish machinations of manwomankind to a dull dangerous charade. Part of him beat in sympathy with Jerry's ideas, and yet another part speculated that he might be deluding himself with his apocalyptic vision.

'I know what you're thinking,' Jerry said quietly. 'And nobody knows better than I do how hopeless the whole thing is. The old civilization is dying and the ones who own the deeds to its empires and dogmas won't let go, and they will kill without compunction anyone who tries to take the reins of history from their hands. But we have no choice but to try. It's our actions that define us, so we must act according to what we understand.'

'What kind of things did you have in mind?' Conrad asked him.

'If we can get it together,' Jerry said, 'we plan to go after bridges, tunnels, dams, reservoirs, power stations, computers, anything that holds the nation together technologically. We figure that once the brothers and sisters get the idea, there will be thousands of us working to destroy the functioning of the cities and towns.' He spat on the ground in front of him. 'The next step is to tear the whole fucking country down to the ground, make centralization of power difficult or impossible, and let the people sort it out for themselves, without governments, and armies, and mammoth industries that amplify their basic stupidity. The only thing wrong with America is the civilization that lives here, so all we have to do is destroy the civilization. And for us, that means the machines.'

Conrad let the words sink in before formulating any response. He was able to see that the notion was utterly unrealistic, and yet knew that empires had crumbled and been toppled before. There was no good reason to believe that America's time hadn't come, and Jerry's vision might very well be the way it would come about. 'A lot of people will die,' he said.