Contours of Darkness (6 page)

'And what if it never gets cool with me?' said Aaron, suddenly feeling anger.

'That's your choice, isn't it?' Conrad answered.

'And what about you? Do you want to fuck him?' Aaron turned on Cynthia.

She closed her eyes. After such a long time, the simple honesty of saying and hearing words that were not being used as evasive tactics was ravishing her soul. She had no alternative but to speak the truth. 'We're heading for a dead-end,' she said. Her voice came out as very old and very wise. 'We have to admit it. We've been trying to shovel ourselves into a comfortable grave. And I don't know what it is about Conrad. He excites me and frightens me, sometimes he disgusts me. But he makes me feel alive, so very much alive. And I'm beginning to think I really don't care about anything else except that feeling.'

'And you don't get that from me?' Aaron spoke, his voice heavy with anticipatory dread.

'Only when we fuck,' she said. 'And for the past few months, not even then all the time.'

'See it through,' Conrad whispered to Aaron. 'This is the chance to get into all the closets that you've kept locked all these years. Let everything out, let us see you, and then you can see yourself. And stop being so hung-up on whether that chick wants to fuck somebody else besides your precious self/ He waited for several seconds and then added the appellation with full irony. 'Man/ he said.

As though he had known it all along, as though he had been aware for years that he would be doing what he was about to do, with an air of mordant resignation, he brought his lips down and pulled the capsule off the palm of his hand and into his mouth. He had seen that in his profoundest part what he needed most was to take a single decisive step, to do something irrevocable. With a sense of rueful calm he picked up a glass of tea and cider and washed the drug into his stomach.

Little Signs In Lava Flow

They had been like a person in whom an infection was festering, but who was afraid to let himself be sick, to let the illness run its course so the body could rid itself of its poisons. They continued to shape their relationship into normative forms, wordlessly hoping that by assuming the social shapes of content they could bring their psychological states to heel. For Aaron, the need to identify himself with the image of success as defined by the worldview of his parents, warred with the impulse to break loose into some as yet unmapped territory of life. Like an explorer who follows a stream with desperate faith that it will lead him to an undiscovered realm, and yet fearful of luring himself into a savage place which holds nothing but a violent end, he navigated the cycles of his existence. Cynthia, whose origins lay in the sprawl of a large proletarian family whose children saw new clothing only at Easter, reached for the middle-class respectability her mother had held out as the greatest salvation she could aspire to in this lifetime. But she shared with Aaron the spark of rebellion, the sign that the truths born of exhaustion and struggle, the dim wisdom that the previous generation had fashioned out of its defeat, were not to be accepted, even if it meant years of wrestling with their total conditioning. Their move to Berkeley was the last effort to surrender to the patterns which had been programmed into them, a final attempt to escape the fierce worm of discontent that thrashed inside them.

They took a place in an old wooden house, a handsome building which had once embraced a single family in gracious style. Over the years, with the growth of the university, it had been bought by a developer and subdivided into four erratically shaped flats, one having access to the attic, one with a bath and closet tacked on like two snails to the outside of the structure, and the two downstairs apartments facing one another through a wall as dramatically incongruous as the one which sections Berlin. With the more recent onslaught of what had come to be called Man-hattanisation, the building had been marked for destruction, to be replaced by a six-storey square concrete tomb whose sprawl would involve the destruction of the spacious back yard, and all the trees, bushes, flowers, grass, insects, worms, and microscopic life it supported. A neighbourhood effort had, four years earlier, won a zoning regulation which temporarily delayed the victory of the bulldozer, but the owners still champed at the bit, pouring time and money into a constant corrosive effort against the status quo, knowing that sooner or later the people would drop their vigilance, and the proper city officials be persuaded; then the venerable home could be destroyed.

Their neighbours ranged from the very old to students; oddly, there were no children on the block. Bank tellers and radicals shared facing views of the street. Aaron and Cynthia were soon, like everyone else, nodding and smiling to the people they came to recognise through daily contact. On the third day they were approached by a grey-haired woman who confided that she was delighted to see nice young people moving in, for she was sick of students and blacks and girls with brassieres and men with beards.

But the tension of their own lives kept them from involvement with others, and the diversity of types precluded the establishment of any single dominant scene they could get into. It was Conrad who had come closest to entering their balance of exclusivity, one day helping Aaron to carry boxes of books up the flight of stairs, staying to talk, offering grass to smoke, receiving an invitation to dinner. They had accepted him as a good omen, a harbinger of the changes they were hoping for. But after a few weeks, when his influence started to affect their lives, they saw that he had a different meaning for them than they had at first suspected. For Cynthia he became a key to the freedom she had been only dimly able to conceive of, while Aaron understood that the slight young man with the angelic face posed a serious threat to the tenuous grip on conventional stability he had come to manage since his return from Egypt.

'What do I do now?' Aaron asked after swallowing the capsule. Cynthia looked at him as though he had just slashed his wrists. In her mind, LSD was still a thing of mythic proportions.

'The best thing is to lie and listen to music,' Conrad answered without hesitation. He had offered the drug spontaneously, but only after Aaron took it did he realise that he had been working for this moment for many months. 'These two must be part of my karass,' he thought. 'There's no other way to explain why I'm getting this much involved with them.' He watched Aaron for any signs of regret, and to his satisfaction, saw none. 'The acid won't hit for at least a half hour,' he went on, 'and it's good to be relaxed when it comes on.'

'And you're going to be my guide,' said Aaron, shaking his head, speaking half to himself. 'It's strange. I don't really trust you.'

'I'm just here to see that you don't panic and do something silly, that's all. It's your trip. And any shit you want to lay on me, just go ahead. When I gave you that tab of acid, I took on your karma for the next twelve hours. For me that's a sacred deed.'

Aaron stood up slowly. He looked at the two of them, his eyes questioning first one and then the other. 'I feel very much alone,' he said.

That's what it's all about,' Conrad told him. 'Go ahead, I'll be there in a while. I want to talk to her about what's going to happen.' He paused. 'She's real, too.'

Aaron began to get angry, and suddenly it didn't matter any more. At that moment he was truly most absorbed in his inner state, and actually didn't care what Cynthia and Conrad did together. It occurred to him that having Cynthia interested in another man was in many ways a blessing; it relieved him of having to be the only source from which she derived all her male energy. In a moment of relief he saw that her taking Conrad as a lover was a liberation for all of them. The jealousy and fear of loss which would assail him later were covered by the initial burst of insight. He smiled. 'I've been thinking about taking acid for a year. I can't believe I've actually done it.'

'Wait, man,' Conrad answered. 'In a couple of hours you won't believe anything of what you now think is so important.'

Aaron turned and went into the next room, ostentatiously swinging the door shut behind him. Cynthia half rose from her seat, following an impulse to go with him, but Conrad reached over and held her shoulder. 'Let him be,' he said, 'let him stand by himself.'

She sat down. 'I'm frightened,' she said.

Conrad fished into his pocket and pulled out a piece of hashish wrapped in tinfoil and a small brass pipe. 'What's the worst that can happen?' he said. 'He may find out he doesn't really want to be with you, or maybe you'll discover you don't want to be living with him. And then you'll break up and go on to something else. So what? That's all life is, coming together and splitting apart. What are you holding on to anyway?'

'I don't know,' she answered. 'I feel attached to him. I love him. We have a heavy sex thing between us.'

The young man lifted an eyebrow, the gesture making him appear cynical far beyond his years. 'I know that kind of sex trip,' he said. 'A lot of huffing and moaning, thrashing around, shouting "no", getting fucked up the arse and slapped in the face. It's very low-level, a dead end. Pretty soon you'll be using leather. It's because you aren't straight with each other and can't just fuck right out and dig it. It's just a lot of noise.'

Her lips tightened and her eyes narrowed. His dismissal of three years of intimacy with a few cold phrases infuriated her. 'How do you know that?' she said, her voice icy.

He crumbled a few pieces of hash into the bowl of the pipe. Without looking up at her he said, 'I listen outside your window, how do you think?' And before she could respond he glanced up and into her eyes and added, 'Several nights I've put a ladder against the building and climbed up to look at the two of you. And I know everything you do. I know what your face looks like when you're on your knees and getting rammed from behind, I know what you do with your mouth when he's sucking your cunt lips and can't see the expressions on your face, I know how you roll your hips when you're tired of fucking and are just trying to get him to come, I know that you don't always swallow his sperm.'

The room tilted crazily in front of Cynthia's eyes. His words had the effect of demolishing all the solid points of reference by which she manoeuvred through her perceptions of the world. In a stroke her privacy had been brutally invaded, its contents examined and evaluated, and the intruder had shown no more interest in having seen the most intimate aspects of her sexual and emotional being than he would in watching a passing cloud. She didn't know whether she hated him more for what he saw or for his refusal to be excited by it.

'You fucking faggot/ she said, not even aware that she was going to say those words.

From the next room came the opening strains of Bach's First Suite for Unaccompanied Cello, played by Casals, the resonant sound seeping through the walls. Conrad lit the pipe with elaborate slowness, holding the match over the deep brown chunks until they glowed, and then abruptly blew it out, and sucked the resulting white smoke deep into his lungs, holding it a long time, and exhaling with a soft explosive puff. He toked again, and held the pipe in front of him, offering it to Cynthia.

Resistant, on edge, she nonetheless brought her hand up and took the stem between her fingers, held it to her lips, and sucked a mouthful of the smoke. From the first taste of it she relaxed, and toked three times before sending the pipe back. She had smoked marijuana sporadically after being introduced to it at a party she attended with Aaron, and like most people under thirty accepted it as a staple, although minor, pleasure in life. But after smoking with Conrad, she began to develop a different orientation to the weed, using it as a tool for explorations into her psyche, allowing it to work its potent magic on her mind. It was through Conrad that she first tried hashish, and she rapidly became addicted to the sensation it produced. She entered into a battle with the entire army of inner prohibitions and outer regulations to have more of the drug. Mornings after a heavy smoking bout she would promise herself to use it no more, and like a Puritan after visiting a whorehouse, was filled with recriminations, wondering whether she was sliding down the path to ruin.

One night she had voiced her fears to Conrad, who brought her to a crisis by saying, 'Only you have the right to tell you what to do. Maybe you need to become a drug addict for a while. It might be just the medicine to cure you of having been a zombie all these years. Don't be afraid to kill yourself a little. It's just the bullshit part of you that's dying. Being real doesn't mean being nice.'

He had taken her for a walk and waxed on about the repressive nature of society, the monster which attempted to crush the freedom of the individual. 'Look,' he said, 'the buildings, heavy square concrete cages that keep the people from the earth and sky. The streets destroy all movement except along one of two axes. The streetlights destroy the softness of the night. Look at the tight constricting shoes. You know that old Sufi saying, "Wear shoes and the whole earth is covered with leather." And the clothes, all to insure that we don't get to see one another's genitals. It's a jail. And the whole thing is based on the fear of the body, of the animal that we are. And so we've become unnatural creatures, destroying ourselves and all the rest of life on earth. Did you ever read the line of Leary's? "I hereby declare that world war three is now being waged by short haired robots in an effort to destroy the web of free wild life on the earth by the imposition of mechanical order." '

He had stopped at the entrance to the campus and in a voice loud enough to be heard by the loungers and passers-by he said, 'This civilisation is all stupidity. All the rules, the explanations, the governments, the laws, the jails, the armies, the schools, it's all a power play, it's the game of masters and slaves. Listen to the voice inside yourself. When you smoke hash it's that voice that is set free. And then it's up to you to have the courage to hear what it says.'