Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die (19 page)

“I used to think that a man had just enough energy for one great deed. His main duty in life—that’s a stupid word, duty—was to find out what he had to do. But it’s not a matter of
knowing
because the thing isn’t complete until you do it. If you don’t push it, the whole purpose of life leaks away, and you find out you’re just another empty bag of wind.”

He set the bucket on the waist-high curb, filled the earthen mug, and held it out to her.

“Anyway I’ve got it figured now that maybe my job is to turn Danny loose. I know how it can be done, and
nobody else is gonna do it—so I guess it’s mine. Otherwise I’m just gonna blow away. One day I’ll be sitting out there on the point and I’ll feel the wind blowing through me and the sun will shine down and I won’t even cast a shadow.”

Liza felt thirsty enough to drink the whole bucketful, but as soon as she wet the inside of her mouth, her thirst disappeared. In its place was a craving for food, thick steaks sliced open, pink-white slabs oozing juice …

“If you’re asking for my help,” she said as they climbed on, “you won’t get it.”

“I wasn’t asking,” he said.

“Because its utterly futile.”

“You could say that about life itself.”

She stopped, and turned to face him in a sudden exasperation. “Dan and Debra are human beings, Tom. They’re not chess pieces that you move around on your board. You don’t understand the forces you’re playing with.”

“Do you, Liza?” In the darkness his face wore a mocking smile. The crinkled darkness around his head drew into lines of force. She could see a ghostly image of a skull rising up around his head, the mutilated bodies of victims grasped in his skeletal claws. She felt a shiver of cold dread. His eyes burned into her, and she could not at that moment imagine herself lying with him on the beach, riding his manhood with joy and complete abandon. She felt lost, and a long way from home. She turned and walked on, casting over her shoulder a statement that seemed lame, and oddly plaintive.

“Well, you can leave me out of it.”

He chuckled. “Whatever you say, Liza.”

She woke up alone. Sunlight steamed through the slatted palm ribs that formed the wall of the hut. She heard the shrilling of birds and the distant boom of the surf. Beyond that—nothing.

She tried to recall going to sleep the night before.
Exact details eluded her, fantasy and action had intermingled to the point where she could no longer separate them. She seemed to recall smoking with the group before going to bed—or
had
she gone to bed? There had been a dream of writhing orgiastic ecstasy—but was it really a dream?

Must have been
, she thought,
because 1 distinctly recall wallowing on the floor naked with Frog and Lona …

She sat up slowly, expecting the jolt of a crashing hangover. There was only a musty cobwebby feeling in her head, and a sense of flatness and depression …

She gasped when she saw the man standing in the door of the hut. She had never seen him before. He wore a low-crowned hat with a wide brim, and a rawhide thong running under his chin. A thick black moustache arched over the toothy whiteness of his grin.

But what really caught her eye was the gun—that mechanical protruberance which hung on his hip and destroyed the symmetry of his form. His shirt was tan gabardine with a faint touch of pink, tucked loosely under his broad leather belt.

“Como se llama usted?”
she said.

“Roberto.” He pushed himself away from the door and stepped inside. “My friend call me Bobby.” He pronounced it Boh-bee.

“Where is everybody?”

“Gone.” He made a wriggling motion with his palm. “New wave somewhere. They go. You got no money, no turista card, I take you back.”

“What?”

“You got no money, I take you back.” He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a folder, flipped it open. A gold badge glittered. “Mexican Secre’ Service. Is okay. I take you to the border.”

She grabbed her pack, pulled it toward her, clawed out the contents. The tape, the keys, all her clothes were there. Only her wallet was missing. “That sonofabitch!” She whirled and looked at the man. “You
knew
he ripped me off. Or did you do it yourself?”

“Nobody reep you off,
Senora.”
He patted a flat bulge in his shirt pocket. “I am
amigo
del Doctor. 1 take you to the border and give back everything. Trus’ me. 1 am also friend of Danilo.”

The chronic ward: Fourteen bundles of cast-off clothing enacted their pseudolife in a urine-smelling room. Light slanted down from high barred windows, expanded to glowing squares on the concrete floor. The silence was heavy; Dan was oppressed by the feeling that somebody had died, or was dying, or was about to die. He sat with his ankles crossed, his back forming a straight line parallel to the wall. An olive-drab army blanket cowled his shoulders and draped his upper arms, leaving his forearms free. He held his left hand in front of his face, fingers curved, thumb compressing the left nostril.

Up the pingali channel, hold, release …

He lifted his thumb, pressed his first two fingers against his right nostril, inhaled.

Up the ida channel, hold … CONCENTRATE!

The tv screen gave forth a dazzling pattern of blurred lines. Sylvester sat on the floor and stared with avid close-set eyes, small head thrust forward on humped soft shoulders. The tinny voice of a singer emerged from the set:
“You always hurrrrt … the wannnnnnn … you lahhhhhv
…” Sylvester threw back his head and crooned: “Arrrgh … annnngghhh … oooowwww—!”

Sitting in his high-backed rocking chair, Everett twitched his blanket over his knees and resumed his rocking. His eyes were bleared, watery, his features seemed about to melt and fall off his skull. Everett had been
rocking for three years, ever since one of the catatonics had been hauled out dead. The relatives had been notified and the death certificate signed before a nurse had put a stethoscope on his chest and discovered a heartbeat. They They would make no such mistake with Everett, he intended to keep rocking as long as he lived.

You see, Danny? The mind demands logic. Everything has to hang together.

And if it doesn’t?

Well it just means you’re missing the key.

Key-key-key-rist it’s cold in here.

He pulled his blanket together, felt the fabric prickle his skin. He dropped his concentration to the root chakram, felt the energy drawn out of his testicles, pulled up the length of his penis, centered in the area behind his navel. The kundalini fluttered like a trapped sparrow.

Frank shuffled across the room, sat down in a square of light, tried to imitate Danny’s posture. He wore a moth-holed army overcoat turned up around his Buddhalike ears; his narrow forehead bore the indented, livid scars of an ancient lobotomy.
Back to the old drawing board
, thought Danny. But there had been no way to stitch up the severed nerves in Frank’s brain, no way to reconnect him to his past …

Danny felt despair settle over him like fine gray dust. Ghod, it was hard to get off the ground on Thorazine. He’d been trying to get Dr. Kossuth to drop it. “Look, you saved me from the gas chamber, so what am I supposed to do, grovel? You’re just killing me in another way. This is the dry guillotine of drugs, where you cut a man off from his life by doping him to the point where he can’t even
feel
the cravings of his body, let alone act.”

That had been … when was it? Yesterday, or the day before—the same day he’d brought in the photograph of the mural on the cabin wall.

“Now let’s see what this represents. You have six women caught in the coils of the creature. Looking at the faces very closely, we might be able to identify four: Christina,
Magda, Betty, and …” He paused. “Isn’t it curious that the Mayas have a numerical system based on six? And there were six virgins thrown into the cenote each year at Chichen Itza, weren’t there?” He smiled. “Ah well, let’s continue …

“We’ll discount the baby. That didn’t belong except that it might have given you the idea to begin with. So … what we found were five corpses. Somewhere there is a sixth.” He looked sharply at Danny. “You remember where you buried her?”

Danny felt the medicine clouding his brain, he was tired of fighting it, tired of pushing against the institution, which absorbed his blows like a barrier of packed cotton. He quoted a line Burton had written: “I
am a flowing stream, stopped with mud”

Kossuth had offered to help him get at his memories, but Dan knew another way. Go out of the body and you’ve got it all, past-present-future, laid out beneath you like a road map. You just pick the spot and set yourself down.

Sometimes he went out through his right ear. Sometimes he projected himself through the center of his forehead. A region of dazzling light lay just above the surface of his mind, beyond a thin transparent skin of incredible strength. In order to break through, you had to concentrate your whole being to a needlepoint, and then push with all your will …

He pushed. BRRRRRANNNNNNGGGGG! The noise in his head rocked him, shocked him, left him dazed and trembling. It was like a steel gong dropped from a great height. Stay out! said the savage little creepy-crawly up inside his mind …

He pushed again, felt the sweat break out on his body and trickle down his back. Suddenly he was free, soaring through the air, the ground blurred beneath him …

A flash of white in the smoky twilight
.

(Man does not control his astral body, does not guide it like a horse, or drive it like a car. Try, and it will fall
to earth. Let it follow the current of its own attraction, ignoring earthly ties of marriage, family, politics, economics. Let it seek its own kindred who live in the twilight world.)

He drops, like a silent burning arrow, spreads himself in a glowing net upon the sand. A woman dances into him, toes light upon the pathways of his nerves. The palms flutter overhead. Chickety-tickety-tick. She whirls, spins, pirouetting; her feet strike fire in his brain. He is aware, without seeing, that the beach lies inside two curving arms of rock, and there are shacks on the cliff overlooking the bay. At first he thinks the dancer must be Lona (the setting is the same, thinks the thinker up inside his brain). But Lona’s breasts are small and cone-shaped. These are large, and round, tipped with coral. Her pubic wedge looks black in the moonlight. She is larger, heavier than Lona. At first she moves with awkward clumsiness, but then his energy pervades her, and her limbs flow like liquid. She spins, falls, the flower of her sex opens, sparkling with honeydew. He covers her (not with his own body, but with another, temporarily vacated, conveniently at hand) and feels the fever of her dance leak through her skin. Her breasts are pillowed against his chest, deep down the linkage is made, the age-old formula consummated: 1 + 1 = 1. He lifts his head and looks down into her face, sees her eyes fly wide in recognition …

Elizabeth.

The silver cord tightens, pulls him back. She fades. The soft lines of the chronic ward harden, take on shape and form and substance …

Dan blinked his eyes and looked around the room. An action had taken place which called for his attention. Frank had emptied his bowels in the middle of the floor. He was squatting over it, guarding it, grinning at Danny. It was the sincerest form of flattery, an imitation of Danny’s efforts. Frank had strained and grunted and
sweated and brought forth … a turd. Such is the way of good intentions.

If I don’t get out of here I’ll go crazy …

Next day he was moved.

He wasn’t sure of the exact location of the room. There was only one window of double-layered glass with wire mesh between the panes. Thick bars shielded it from the outdoors. He could stand on tiptoe and look out on a patch of dirt perhaps twenty feet square, with weathered brick walls rising on all sides. At midday the sunlight came down, moved slowly across the patch of lawn, then climbed the building on the other side. A maple tree grew in the center, reaching for a sky which was invisible to Danny. Snow drifted down, or some mornings a frost glittered on the tree limbs—but the prevailing color was gray.

Inside, the room smelled of fresh plaster and sawdust. The paneled walls were smooth beige plastic, they gave slightly beneath his fingers. The commode seat was shiny plastic, the sink had hard-rubber faucets. The mirror above it was a sheet of stainless steel set into the wall with countersunk screws.

His own face shocked him. It was gray, the color of a boiled potato. His eyes were filmed and heavy lidded. His lips moved stiffly when he talked, his voice was flat, devoid of emotion. “This is the way they break horses, isn’t it?”

Dr. Kossuth, sitting on his cot, lifted his brows in polite interest. “How do you mean, Danny?’

“The old rough and smooth. The carrot and the goad. That death ward was the goad, and this … is this the carrot? Or is there more? What happens if I cooperate?”

“We find out what’s wrong … and we cure it.”

“Then … do I get out of here?”

“I don’t see any other way, do you?” Jeff smiled and rose from the cot, his left hand in the pocket of his doeskin flannel trousers, right hand gesturing.

‘The brain is like flypaper, endlessly folded, convoluted.
Everything sticks, the good and the bad, nothing is lost forever. Your problem is that you’re trying to think around the bad spots. You’ve got them encysted, like orange pips. We need to break down the walls and let these become a part of your consciousness.”

“My problem is that you scrambled my circuits with electricity.”

“Ridiculous. The shock was good for you.”

“Did you ever shoot it into your own skull?”

“Why should I? I’m not mentally ill.”

“Oh Christ!” Danny grated his teeth in frustration. “You put up a goddam fence and you say, well, there it is, we’re just naturally different. You’re in and I’m out. How do you know it’s not the other way around? Maybe you’re nuts and I’m straight. You ever think of that?”

“Of course. But it has no relevance to the present situation.”

“What does? Tell me that.”

“This. And this. And this—!” Jeff slapped the wall, the door, and waved to the bars on the window. “If you could transform yourself into a cockroach, you could go right out under the door. And I’d give you everything I’ve got to find out how you did it. Meanwhile—while we’re waiting for your method to take effect, you might have the courtesy to try mine.” He knelt down and unzipped a small leather valise, took out a plastic vial. “This is pentothal sodium. You’ll be getting a two-percent solution, about half a cubic centimeter.” He punctured the vial with a hypodermic needle. “It will put you into a twilight sleep, open you up to suggestion …”

Danny sat down on the cot; his uneasiness grew as he watched Jeff milk the plunger of the hypo. “Why isn’t Elizabeth doing this? Why hasn’t she been to see me?”

“She’s on vacation.” Jeff drew out the plunger slowly, watching the markings on the cylinder. “Lie back now and pull up your sleeve.”

Danny lay back and looked up at the ceiling. He felt a bitter sense of having been abandoned, stood up, jilted …

The needle bit into his arm, and he heard the doctor’s droning, calm unexcited voice. “Now we’ll wait about five minutes. You feel any effects?”

“Not yet. Is there any risk to this?”

“None at all. Except you’ll actually be experiencing the events of the past. You may be in for some high-voltage shocks.”

“You bastard. Now I see what you’re doing. You’re trying to break down my will and put the idea in my head.”

“What idea?”

“The idea that I actually killed those girls.”

“Danny …” The doctor’s voice seemed to be slowing down, like a rundown victrola. “You … have to … trust me. You were headed for the gas chamber …”

“Yea verily, A great benefactor.” Danny’s lips felt swollen and numb.

“They threw you in with the chronics, old men staring at sunbeams. I took you out of that …”

Indeed, kindness flows from theee like the bitter sticky ooze of a milkweed
.

“… Gave you a nice quiet room of your own. Don’t you think you owe me a little trust?”

“I owe you my soul. Take it.”

“Ah … it’s not that simple. Are you getting any effect?”

“No … yes, my face feels hot. My ears are buzzing.”

“All right. Look at something. Concentrate on it. Keep looking at it.”

Dan tilted back his head, looked up through the window at a tree branch etched against the gray sky. He saw a knot, a circular pattern in the wood. It became an eye looking down at him, a vicious malicious, all-knowing eye … His arms and legs turned to stone.

“Now, you see it turning,” Jeff said. “It’s spinning, going faster and faster. Your whole body is beginning to relax. First your toes, let your mind go down there, into your toes. Now the relaxation is going up to your feet,
up to your calves, your legs; all the tenseness is draining away, draining away, you’re getting sleepy, sleepy …”

The monotonous voice droned. Dan felt his thigh muscles go limp and soft. He felt a sweet lassitude, it was like someone making love to him, the soft voice caressed his legs, his stomach, his chest. His arms felt numb; he couldn’t tell where they were, all sense of location was gone, he was almost detached from his body …

Suddenly he felt something stretch; there was a great burst of light, freedom, a vast billowing emptiness. There was no Danny, only a pulsating light which was neither black nor white, just a blinding brilliance. He felt a sense of release, of flowing, of limitless existence …

And Jeff’s voice droned on:

“You are going to grow younger now. You will go back into your past. There will be bad experiences there, but these are only a memory and nothing bad can touch you. Time is slipping back, back …”

Dan stood beside a river, the river was Time. He did not exist, except as awareness.

“I am going to count backwards now. Twenty-seven, twenty-six—When I reach the most important year of your life, tell me to stop. Twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one …”

Dan felt a muscle twitch in his arm.

“Twenty-one?” asked the Doctor.

“Nooo.”

“I’ll start again.” Dan heard him counting, and felt nothing except the flow of the river, then the count reached twenty-one …

“Ah …” he moaned.

“Twenty-one. You are now twenty-one years old. You can look around you and tell me where you are and describe what is happening to you. How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.” The voice sounded harsh and vaguely adolescent.