Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (15 page)

20

The mescaline had furiously begun to affect him; the room grew lit up with colors, and the perspective factor altered so that the ceiling seemed a million miles high. And, gazing at Alys, he saw her hair come alive…like Medusa’s, he thought, and felt fear.

Ignoring him, Alys continued, “Felix especially likes Basque cuisine, but they cook with so much butter that it gives him pyloric spasms. He also has a good collection of
Weird Tales
, and he loves baseball. And—let’s see.” She wandered off, a finger tapping against her lips as she reflected. “He’s interested in the occult. Do you—”

“I feel something,” Jason said.

“What do you feel?”

Jason said, “I can’t get away.”

“It’s the mes. Take it easy.”

“I—” He pondered; a giant weight lay on his brain, but all throughout the weight streaks of light, of satori-like insight, shot here and there.

“What I collect,” Alys said, “is in the next room, what we call the library. This is the study. In the library Felix has all his law books…did you know he’s a lawyer, as well as a police general? And he has done some good things; I have to admit it. Do you now what he did once?”

He could not answer; he could only stand. Inert, hearing the sounds but not the meaning. Of it.

“For a year Felix was legally in charge of one-fourth of Terra’s forced-labor camps. He discovered that by virtue of an obscure law passed years ago when the forced-labor camps were more like death camps—with a lot of blacks in them—anyhow, he discovered that this statute permitted the camps to operate only during the Second Civil War. And he had the power to close any and all camps at any time he felt it to be in the public interest. And those blacks and the students who’d been working in the camps are damn tough and strong, from years of heavy manual labor. They’re not like the effete, pale, clammy students living beneath the campus areas. And then he researched and discovered another obscure statute. Any camp that isn’t operating at a profit
has
to be—or rather had to be—closed. So Felix changed the amount of money—very little, of course—paid to the detainees. So all he had to do was jack up their pay, show red ink in the books, and bam; he could shut down the camps.” She laughed.

He tried to speak but couldn’t. Inside him his mind churned like a tattered rubber ball, sinking and rising, slowing down, speeding up, fading and then flaring brilliantly; the shafts of light scampered all through him, piercing every part of his body.

“But the big thing Felix did,” Alys said, “had to do with the student kibbutzim under the burned-out campuses. A lot of them are desperate for food and water; you know how it is: the students try to make it into town, foraging for supplies, ripping off and looting. Well, the police maintain a lot of agents among the students agitating for a final shootout with the police…which the police and nats are hopefully waiting for. Do you see?”

“I see,” he said, “a hat.”

“But Felix tried to keep off any sort of shootout. But to do it he had to get supplies to the students; do you see?”

“The hat is red,” Jason said. “Like your ears.”

“Because of his position as marshal in the pol hierarchy, Felix had access to informant reports as to the condition of each student kibbutz. He knew which ones were failing and which were making it. It was his job to boil out of the horde of abstracts the ultimately important facts: which kibbutzim were going under and which were not. Once he had listed those in trouble, other high police officers met with him to decide how to apply pressure which would hasten the end. Defeatist agitation by police finks, sabotage of food and water supplies. Desperate—actually hopeless—forays out of the campus area in search of help—for instance, at Columbia one time they had a plan of getting to the Harry S Truman Labor Camp and liberating the detainees and arming them, but at that even Felix had to say ‘Intervene!’ But anyhow it was Felix’s job to determine the tactic for each kibbutz under scrutiny. Many, many times he advised no action at all. For this, of course, the hardhats criticized him, demanded his removal from his position.” Alys paused. “He was a full police marshal, then, you have to realize.”

“Your red,” Jason said, “is fantidulous.”

“I know.” Alys’s lips turned down. “Can’t you hold your hit, man? I’m trying to tell you something. Felix got
demoted
, from police marshal to police general, because he saw to it, when he could, that in the kibbutzim the students were bathed, fed, their medical supplies looked after, cots provided. Like he did for the forced-labor camps under his jurisdiction. So now he’s just a general. But they leave him alone. They’ve done all they can to him for now and he still holds a high office.”

“But your incest,” Jason said. “What if?” He paused; he could not remember the rest of his sentence. “If,” he said, and that seemed to be it; he felt a furious glow, arising from the fact that he had managed to convey his message to her. “If,” he said again, and the inner glow became wild with happy fury. He exclaimed aloud.

“You mean what if the marshals knew that Felix and I have a son? What would they do?”

“They would do,” Jason said. “Can we hear some music? Or give me—” His words ceased; none more entered his brain. “Gee,” he said. “My mother wouldn’t be here. Death.”

Alys inhaled deeply, sighed. “Okay, Jason,” she said. “I’ll give up trying to rap with you. Until your head is back.”

“Talk,” he said.

“Would you like to see my bondage cartoons?”

“What,” he said, “that’s?”

“Drawings, very stylized, of chicks tied up, and men—”

“Can I lie down?” he said. “My legs won’t work. I think my right leg extends to the moon. In other words”—he considered—“I broke it standing up.”

“Come here.” She led him, step by step, from the study and back into the living room. “Lie down on the couch,” she told him. With agonizing difficulty he did so. “I’ll go get you some Thorazine; it’ll counteract the mes.”

“This is a mess,” he said.

“Let’s see…where the hell did I put that? I rarely if ever have to use it, but I keep it in case something like this…God damn it, can’t you drop a single cap of mes and
be
something? I take five at once.”

“But you’re vast,” Jason said.

“I’ll be back; I’m going upstairs.” Alys strode off, toward a door located several distances away; for a long, long time he watched her dwindle—how did she accomplish it? It seemed incredible that she could shrink down to almost nothing—and then she vanished. He felt, at that, terrible fear. He knew that he had become alone, without help. Who will help me? he asked himself. I have to get away from these stamps and cups and snuffboxes and bondage cartoons and phone grids and frog’s legs I’ve got to get to that quibble I’ve got to fly away and back to where I know back in town maybe with Ruth Rae if they’ve let her go or even back to Kathy Nelson this woman is too much for me so is her brother them and their incest child in Florida named what?

He rose unsteadily, groped his way across a rug that sprang a million leaks of pure pigment as he trod on it, crushing it with his ponderous shoes, and then, at last, he stumbled against the front door of the unsteady room.

Sunlight. He had gotten outside.

The quibble.

He hobbled to it.

Inside he sat at the controls, bewildered by legions of knobs, levers, wheels, pedals, dials. “Why doesn’t it go?” he said aloud. “Get going!” he told it, rocking back and forth in the driver’s seat. “Won’t she let me go?” he asked the quibble.

The keys. Of course he couldn’t fly it no keys.

Her coat in the back seat; he had witnessed it. And also her large mailpouch purse. There, the keys in her purse. There.

The two record albums.
Taverner and the Blue, Blue Blues
. And the best of them all:
There’ll be a Good Time
. He groped, managed somehow to lift
both
record albums up, conveyed them to the empty seat beside him. I have the proof here, he realized. It’s here in these records and it’s here in the house. With her. I’ve got to find it here if I’m going to. Find it. Nowhere else. Even General Mr. Felix What-Is-He-Named? he won’t find it. He doesn’t know. As much as me.

Carrying the enormous record albums he ran back to the house—around him the landscape flowed, with whip, tall, tree-like organisms gulping in air out of the sweet blue sky, organisms which absorbed water and light, ate the hue into the sky…he reached the gate, pushed against it. The gate did not budge. Button.

He found no.

Step by step. Feel each inch with fingers. Like in the dark. Yes, he thought. I’m in darkness. He set down the much-too-big record albums, stood against the wall beside the gate, slowly massaged the rubberlike surface of the wall. Nothing. Nothing.

The button.

He pressed it, grabbed up the record albums, stood in front of the gate as it incredibly slowly creaked its noisy protesting way open.

A brown-uniformed man carrying a gun appeared. Jason said, “I had to go back to the quibble for something.”

“Perfectly all right, sir,” the man in the brown uniform said. “I saw you leave and I knew you’d be back.”

“Is she insane?” Jason asked him.

“I’m not in a position to know, sir,” the man in the brown uniform said, and he backed away, touching his visored cap.

The front door of the house hung open as he had left it. He scrambled through, descended brick steps, found himself once more in the radically irregular living room with its million-mile-high ceiling. “Alys!” he said. Was she in the room? He carefully looked in all directions; as he had done when searching for the button he phased his way through every visible inch of the room. The bar at the far end with the handsome walnut drug cabinet…couch, chairs. Pictures on the walls. A face in one of the pictures jeered at him but he did not care; it could not leave the wall. The quad phonograph…

His records. Play them.

He lifted at the lid of the phonograph but it wouldn’t open. Why? he asked. Locked? No, it slid out. He slid it out, with a terrible noise, as if he had destroyed it. Tone arm. Spindle. He got one of his records out of its sleeve and placed in on the spindle. I can work these things, he said, and turned on the amplifiers, setting the mode to
phono
. Switch that activated the changer. He twisted it. The tone arm lifted; the turntable began to spin, agonizingly slowly. What was the matter with it? Wrong speed? No; he checked. Thirty-three and a third. The mechanism of the spindle heaved and the record dropped.

Loud noise of the needle hitting the lead-in groove. Crackles of dust, clicks. Typical of old quad records. Easily misused and damaged; all you had to do was breathe on them.

Background hiss. More crackles.

No music.

Lifting the tone arm, he set it farther in. Great roaring crash as the stylus struck the surface; he winced, sought the volume control to turn it down. Still no music. No sound of himself singing.

The strength the mescaline had over him began now to waver; he felt coldly, keenly sober. The other record. Swiftly he got it from its jacket and sleeve, placed it on the spindle, rejected the first record.

Sound of the needle touching plastic surface. Background hiss and the inevitable crackles and clicks. Still no music.

The records were blank.

PART THREE

Never may my woes be relieved,

Since pity is fled;

And tears and sighs and groans my weary days

Of all joys have deprived.

21

“Alys!” Jason Taverner called loudly. No answer. Is it the mescaline? he asked himself. He made his way clumsily from the phonograph toward the door through which Alys had gone. A long hallway, deep-pile wool carpet. At the far end stairs with a black iron railing, leading up to the second floor.

He strode as quickly as possible up the hall, to the stairs, and then, step by step, up the stairs.

The second floor. A foyer, with an antique Hepplewhite table off to one side, piled high with
Box
magazines. That, weirdly, caught his attention; who, Felix or Alys, or both, read a low-class mass-circulation pornographic magazine like
Box
? He passed on then, still—because of the mescaline, certainly—seeing small details. The bathroom; that was where he would find her.

“Alys,” he said grimly; perspiration trickled from his forehead down his nose and cheeks; his armpits had become steamy and damp with the emotions cascading through his body. “God damn it,” he said, speaking to her although he could not see her. “There’s no music on those records, no me. They’re fakes. Aren’t they?” Or is it the mescaline? he asked himself. “I’ve got to know!” he said. “Make them play if they’re okay. Is the phonograph broken, is that it? Needle point or stylus or whatever you call them broken off?” It happens, he thought. Maybe it’s riding on the tops of the grooves.

A half-open door; he pushed it wide. A bedroom, with the bed unmade. And on the floor a mattress with a sleeping bag thrown onto it. A little pile of men’s supplies: shaving cream, deodorant, razor, aftershave, comb…a guest, he thought, here before but now gone.

“Is anybody here?” he yelled.

Silence.

Ahead he saw the bathroom; past the partially opened door he caught sight of an amazingly old tub on painted lion’s legs. An antique, he thought, even down to their bathtub. He loped haltingly down the hall, past other doors, to the bathroom; reaching it, he pushed the door aside.

And saw, on the floor, a skeleton.

It wore black shiny pants, leather shirt, chain belt with wrought-iron buckle. The foot bones had cast aside the high-heeled shoes. A few tufts of hair clung to the skull, but outside of that, there remained nothing: the eyes had gone, all the flesh had gone. And the skeleton itself had become yellow.

“God,” Jason said, swaying; he felt his vision fail and his sense of gravity shift: his middle ear fluctuated in its pressures so that the room caromed around him, silently in perpetual ball motion. Like a pourout of Ferris wheel at a child’s circus.

He shut his eyes, hung on to the wall, then, finally, looked again.

She has died, he thought. But when? A hundred thousand years ago? A few minutes ago?

Why has she died? he asked himself.

Is it the mescaline? That I took?
Is this real
?

It’s real.

Bending, he touched the leather fringed shirt. The leather felt soft and smooth; it hadn’t decayed. Time hadn’t touched her clothing; that meant something but he did not comprehend what. Just her, he thought. Everything else in this house is the same as it was. So it can’t be the mescaline affecting me. But I can’t be sure, he thought.

Downstairs. Get out of here.

He loped erratically back down the hall, still in the process of scrambling to his feet, so that he ran bent over like an ape of some unusual kind. He seized the black iron railing, descended two, three steps at once, stumbled and fell, caught himself and hauled himself back up to a standing position. In his chest his heart labored, and his lungs, overtaxed, inflated and emptied like a bellows.

In an instant he had sped across the living room to the front door—then, for reasons obscure to him but somehow important, he snatched up the two records from the phonograph, stuffed them into their jackets, carried them with him through the front door of the house, out into the bright warm sun of midday.

“Leaving, sir?” the brown-uniformed private cop asked, noticing him standing there, his chest heaving.

“I’m sick,” Jason said.

“Sorry to hear that, sir. Can I get you anything?”

“The keys to the quibble.”

“Miss Buckman usually leaves the keys in the ignition,” the cop said.

“I looked,” Jason said, panting.

The cop said, “I’ll go ask Miss Buckman for you.”

“No,” Jason said, and then thought, But if it’s the mescaline it’s okay. Isn’t it?

“‘No’?” the cop said, and all at once his expression changed. “Stay where you are,” he said. “Don’t head toward that quibble.” Spinning, he dashed into the house.

Jason sprinted across the grass, to the asphalt square and the parked quibble. The keys; were they in the ignition? No. Her purse. He seized it and dumped everything out on the seats. A thousand objects, but no keys. And then, crushing him, a hoarse scream.

At the front gate of the house the cop appeared, his face distorted. He stood sideways, reflexively, lifted his gun, held it with both hands, and fired at Jason. But the gun wavered; the cop was trembling too badly.

Crawling out of the far side of the quibble, Jason lurched across the thick moist lawn, toward the nearby oak trees.

Again the cop fired. Again he missed. Jason heard him curse; the cop started to run toward him, trying to get closer to him; then all at once the cop spun and sped back into the house.

Jason reached the trees. He crashed through dry underbrush, limbs of bushes snapping as he forced his way through. A high adobe wall…and what had Alys said? Broken bottles cemented on top? He crawled along the base of the wall, fighting the thick underbrush, then abruptly found himself facing a broken wooden door; it hung partially open, and beyond it he saw other houses and a street.

It was not the mescaline, he realized. The cop saw it, too. Her lying there. The ancient skeleton. As if dead all these years.

On the far side of the street a woman, with an armload of packages, was unlocking the door of her flipflap.

Jason made his way across the street, forcing his mind to work, forcing the dregs of the mescaline away. “Miss,” he said, gasping.

Startled, the woman looked up. Young, heavy-set, but with beautiful auburn hair. “Yes?” she said nervously, surveying him.

“I’ve been given a toxic dose of some drug,” Jason said, trying to keep his voice steady. “Will you drive me to a hospital?”

Silence. She continued to stare at him wide-eyed; he said nothing—he merely stood panting, waiting. Yes or no; it had to be one or the other.

The heavy-set girl with the auburn hair said, “I—I’m not a very good driver. I just got my license last week.”

“I’ll drive,” Jason said.

“But I won’t come along.” She backed away, clutching her armload of badly-wrapped brown-paper parcels. Probably she had been on her way to the post office.

“Can I have the keys?” he said; he extended his hand. Waited.

“But you might pass out and then my flipflap—”

“Come with me then,” he said.

She handed him the keys and crept into the rear seat of the flipflap. Jason, his heart pulsing with relief, got in behind the wheel, stuck the key into the ignition, turned the motor on, and, in a moment, sent the flipflap flipflapping up into the sky, at its maximum speed of forty knots an hour. It was, he noted for some odd reason, a very inexpensive model flipflap: a Ford Greyhound. An economy flipflap. And not new.

“Are you in great pain?” the girl asked anxiously; her face, in his rear-view mirror, still showed nervousness, even panic. The situation was too much for her.

“No,” he said.

“What was the drug?”

“They didn’t say.” The mescaline had virtually worn off, now; thank God his six physiology had the strength to combat it: he did not relish the idea of piloting a slow-moving flipflap through the midday Los Angeles traffic while on a hit of mescaline. And, he thought savagely, a big hit. Despite what she said.

She. Alys. Why are the records blank? he asked silently. The records—where were they? He peered about, stricken. Oh. On the seat beside him; automatically he had thrust them in as he himself got into the flipflap. So they’re okay. I can try to play them again on another phonograph.

“The nearest hospital,” the heavy-set girl said, “is St. Martin’s at Thirty-fifth and Webster. It’s small, but I went there to have a wart removed from my hand, and they seemed very conscientious and kind.”

“We’ll go there,” Jason said.

“Are you feeling worse or better?”

“Better,” he said.

“Did you come from the Buckman’s house?”

“Yes.” He nodded.

The girl said, “Is it true that they’re brother and sister, Mr. and Mrs. Buckman? I mean—”

“Twins,” he said.

“I understand that,” the girl said. “But you know, it’s strange; when you see them together it’s as if they’re husband and wife. They kiss and hold hands, and he’s very deferential to her and then sometimes they have terrible fights.” The girl remained silent a moment and then leaning forward said, “My name is Mary Anne Dominic. What is your name?”

“Jason Taverner,” he informed her. Not that it meant anything. After all. After what had seemed for a moment—but then the girl’s voice broke into his thoughts.

“I’m a potter,” she said shyly. “These are pots I’m taking to the post office to mail to stores in northern California, especially to Gump’s in San Francisco and Frazer’s in Berkeley.”

“Do you do good work?” he asked; almost all of his mind, his faculties, remained fixed in time, fixed at the instant he had opened the bathroom door and seen her—it—on the floor. He barely heard Miss Dominic’s voice.

“I try to. But you never know. Anyhow, they sell.”

“You have strong hands,” he said, for want of anything better to say; his words still emerged semireflexively, as if he were uttering them with only a fragment of his mind.

“Thank you,” Mary Anne Dominic said.

Silence.

“You passed the hospital,” Mary Anne Dominic said. “It’s back a little way and to the left.” Her original anxiety had now crawled back into her voice. “Are you really going there or is this some—”

“Don’t be scared,” he said, and this time he paid attention to what he said; he used all his ability to make his tone kind and reassuring. “I’m not an escaped student. Nor am I an escapee from a forced-labor camp.” He turned his head and looked directly into her face. “But I am in trouble.”

“Then you didn’t take a toxic drug.” Her voice wavered. It was as if that which she had most feared throughout her whole life had finally overtaken her.

“I’ll land us,” he said. “To make you feel safer. This is far enough for me. Please don’t freak; I won’t hurt you.” But the girl sat rigid and stricken, waiting for—well, neither of them knew.

At an intersection, a busy one, he landed at the curb, quickly opened the door. But then, on impulse, he remained within the flipflap for a moment, turned still in the girl’s direction.

“Please get out,” she quavered. “I don’t mean to be impolite, but I’m really scared. You hear about hunger-crazed students who somehow get through the barricades around the campuses—”

“Listen to me,” he said sharply, breaking into her flow of speech.

“Okay.” She composed herself, hands on her lapful of packages, dutifully—and fearfully—waiting.

Jason said, “You shouldn’t be frightened so easily. Or life is going to be too much for you.”

“I see.” She nodded humbly, listening, paying attention as if she were at a college classroom lecture.

“Are you always afraid of strangers?” he asked her.

“I guess so.” Again she nodded; this time she hung her head as if he had admonished her. And in a fashion he had.

“Fear,” Jason said, “can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you’re afraid you don’t commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.”

“I think I know what you mean,” Mary Anne Dominic said. “One day about a year ago there was this dreadful pounding on my door, and I ran into the bathroom and locked myself in and pretended I wasn’t there, because I thought somebody was trying to break in…and then later I found out that the woman upstairs had got her hand caught in the drain of her sink—she has one of those Disposall things—and a knife had gotten down into it and she reached her hand down to get it and got caught. And it was her little boy at the door—”

“So you do understand what I mean,” Jason interrupted.

“Yes. I wish I wasn’t that way. I really do. But I still am.”

Jason said, “How old are you?”

“Thirty-two.”

That surprised him; she seemed much younger. Evidently she had not ever really grown up. He felt sympathy for her; how hard it must have been for her to let him take over her flipflap. And her fears had been correct in one respect: he had not been asking for help for the reason he claimed.

He said to her, “You’re a very nice person.”

“Thank you,” she said dutifully. Humbly.

“See that coffee shop over there?” he said, pointing to a modern, well-patronized cafe. “Let’s go over there. I want to talk to you.” I have to talk to someone, anyone, he thought, or six or not I am going to lose my mind.

“But,” she protested anxiously, “I have to get my packages into the post office before two so they’ll get the midafternoon pickup for the Bay Area.”

“We’ll do that first, then,” he said. Reaching for the ignition switch, he pulled out the key, handed it back to Mary Anne Dominic. “You drive. As slowly as you want.”

“Mr.—Taverner,” she said. “I just want to be let alone.”

“No,” he said. “You shouldn’t be alone. It’s killing you; it’s undermining you. All the time, every day, you should be somewhere with people.”

Silence. And then Mary Anne said, “The post office is at Forty-ninth and Fulton. Could you drive? I’m sort of nervous.”

It seemed to him a great moral victory; he felt pleased.

He took back the key, and shortly, they were on their way to Forty-ninth and Fulton.