Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die (8 page)

A DOG

He lived and he died

Just like everyone else.

“What did you do to those girls, Dan?”

“What girls?”

“The ones who visited you at the cabin.”

“Whaddaya mean, what did I do to them? Nothing. Nothing they didn’t want to happen, anyway.”

“I was thinking about the dog. You got the feeling he was hanging you up, so you carried him off—twice. Why?”

“I didn’t like his habits. He was a meat eater.”

“And the girls, what were they?”

He laughed. “I guess they were too—in a different sense.”

She lit a cigarette and leaned back in the secretarial chair, turning her face toward the window. He saw the faint pink flush of a new sunburn on her forehead; her eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep. She’d worn a dress for the first time, and her nylon-sheathed legs stretched under the table.
Is this for me?
Don’t ask—he told himself. Just enjoy the effect. Her voice no longer echoes the dead metronome beat of the institution. It bounces, jumps, sparkles with the electricity of life. Maybe she is beginning to divorce herself from the machine …

Abruptly she swung around to face him. “Look—when you dropped acid with those girls, were there times when you lost touch with reality?”

“Well, there were times when I wasn’t sure which reality was mine.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“We’d pick up each other’s visions, ways of looking at things.”

“You mean—like this cigarette—you’d each see something different?”

“We’d see it in a different way … like Christina was always seeing things in shifting, writhing shapes, and mine were hard and angular. That’s when I knew I was into her head, everything would start writhing … hurting. Chris was in a lot of pain.”

“Why?”

“She’d always loved her parents and followed their advice, and here she was twenty-five years old and nothing they said had worked out. It was a major crisis.”

“But she solved it?”

“She thought she had it solved when she left.”

“Do you remember the last time you saw her?”

“Sure. I started to walk up the trail with her to the highway, she was planning to catch a ride. About … oh, a hundred yards from the cabin she said she wanted to say goodbye there. I think she’d suddenly gotten the feeling she might never come back.”

“Why was that?”

“Because of the way she said it. She wanted to remember me in that context, with the cabin and the forest in the background. Like this would be an encapsulated part of her existence, she could box it up and keep it in her memory, so it wouldn’t affect the rest of her life. I think she had the feeling she couldn’t get loose from … whatever she was hung up with.”

“Then … tell me what you did.”

“Kissed her, then turned and walked back to the cabin. We just walked away from each other.”

“You didn’t see her again?”

“No.”

“What did you do with her child?”

“She didn’t have a child.”

“You said she gave birth to a baby in the woods.”

“Oh, but it never lived—”

“What did you do with the corpse?”

“We buried it in the dam. Actually it was a grave. The dam was a later idea.”

“What gave you the idea?”

“I wanted a place to swim.”

A look of pain crossed her face. She lowered her eyes, and rolled the pencil between her palms. A muscle jumped in her jaw. On a sudden impulse, he reached out and touched the satiny skin below her ear. She jumped, her eyes shooting fire:

“Don’t DO that!”

He leaned back, his nose smarting. “You want to pry into my mind, right—but you don’t want me to even get a peek into yours. You want to hide behind your goddam institutional curtain and watch me balling all these chicks, and you don’t want one cubic centimeter of your own skin to be touched. You know what you are? A voyeur, and not a damn bit more.”

“I’ve got to go, Dan.”

She started stuffing papers into her folder. Dan got up and turned off the machine, started coiling the black cord around the mike. He felt a hard hot lump in his throat. They seemed to be lovers who had just had an argument, and were parting because neither wanted to say they were sorry.

She tucked the folder under her arm and looked up at him, level-eyed and grim. “I want you to think, Dan. Remember. The girls, the situation … remember the conditions under which they left. Believe me, it’s going to be very important.”

“Important, you mean at the staffing?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “At the Staffing, and to yourself. Consider the possibility that you just might be—excuse the expression—mentally ill.”

“Ah. I’m supposed to believe in mental illness, right? That’s one of the conditions for getting out of here.”

She turned at the door leaned against the wall. “Don’t you believe in mental illness?”

“No, I think it’s an illusion. I’m not sure how you do it but it’s damn good. I’ve been trying to find the seam, you know? That place where you spliced this little illusion into the big one.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’ll cut it back and splice myself in at the right place.”

“The right place. You mean where you slipped off the track?”

“Yeah, I think it was Vera Cruz, during that acid trip with Jo Anne. That’s the part that got
zzzzzt!
burned out between the electrodes. No, wait. If this is an illusion, then I’m still lying in that shack while Jo Anne whimpers on the pallet. Her voice kind of rode the edge between laughing and crying, I couldn’t figure out what she was doing. She lay there a couple of hours until I smelled urine and I saw that she’d pissed her pants. That’s because I told her to let go of everything … no wait, if the drop-out really happened then, I’d have no memory of the event to be destroyed by shock treatment, would I?”

“Dan—you lost me on the far turn.”

“Yeah. It goes round and round. It’s even possible that I’m still lying in the bush at Pleiku, and the bullet severed my spine instead of just punching out a piece of neck muscle. In that case I can be thankful because I’ve had a lot of good times handed to me free of charge. Maybe that’s why this seems like such a long drawn-out process, this gray eternity stretching on and on … because it’s death, really. Do you ever get the feeling you’re dead?”

“I never felt it in those terms, no.”

“What terms?”

“I suppose I would describe it as utter boredom, when the future looks as bleak as a moon landscape.”

“That sounds real as hell. What do you do about it?”

“I sit and wait for it to go away.”

“What if it just hung on and on?”

“Then I think I would seek expert assistance.” Her cheeks dimpled in a faint smile as she opened the door
and stepped through it sideways. “See you tomorrow, Dan. Think about what I said.”

Thinking. His brain was like a hard-packed swirl of sand. He looked out on the lawn and watched the night shadows take on substance and form.

The eyes are everywhere. The nightmares of the patients leak out through the bars and hump across the lawn. In the women’s section I see Wanda bending over a water fountain, her head falls in, the severed stump spurts high, blends with the light. Not my vision.
Whose?
Chauncey’s maybe. I see him two windows down, his skinny legs bent like a kangaree’s inside his baggy shorts. Chauncey DePugh is a gentleman born, but he has a weakness for what he calls “Pretty Ladeez.” In his weakness he sneaks up behind them and pinches their tits, then runs.

A dog slinks under the hedge—no, it’s a prince bewitched, locked in a dog’s body, waiting for the love-kiss which will give back his beauty. Whose is that? Pat’s probably. Shankara speaks to her at night.
You are frightened of snakes which do not exist
, he says.
Once you see they are merely frayed ropes, you will realize that your fear is baseless
. Yes! Says Pat. Yes! Yes! She calls aloud in her sleep: They are ropes, only ropes! But they keep biting her.

The loud ringing in my ears is Edgar’s. He’s a civil engineer, got papers to prove it. The dent in the back of his skull looks like a catcher’s mitt. It’s been there since his car jumped the guard rail on the Clark-Street overpass. Twelve years now, and his head is still full of white light.

Squeak-squeak. Gentleman Jack has worked his hands free of the straps. They told him when he was a child that excessive masturbation would drive him crazy. Now he is where he always expected to be, so he has nothing more to lose.

Alvin moans. He used to get slapped for crapping in his rompers: now he sleeps with his anal sphincture clenched. Every few days he is sedated, and a special spoon used to dig the impacted feces out of his colon.

Ashcroft tosses and turns, while hunger pains growl in his stomach. He’s scheduled for E.C.T. at dawn tomorrow, and his bowels must be kept empty because when the juice hits your skull everything goes …

My fellow patients: I feel like winter has come outside, because here there is no light, no joy. Where are my friends from the dawn of the New Age? Stillborn. A message for humanity. Get this, you cocksuckers. We came bearing flowers, you gave us murder and brutality.
Now you can just wallow in your own shit …

Behind him, Loren Grooms got up from his cot and marched toward the bathroom. Hup-two-three-four. Grooms was a war hero. He didn’t look it though: narrow skull patched with gray hair, yellow bleached-out skin drawn tight across his forehead and around his eyes, the mark of a schizo. Grooms won a silver star and a bronze star, killed a helluva lot of Nazis and would’ve knocked off a few Japs too if he hadn’t started getting headaches. Grooms often saw Japs and Germans out on the lawn at night. He got furious when Danny didn’t follow hospital rules.
You folla orders, Mac, and nothin’s gonna happen to you
.

Grooms stood at attention outside the latrine. Danny called: “Col’m right, HARCH!” Grooms entered, dropped his shorts, and lowered himself to the commode stool, keeping his spine straight at a forty-five degree angle.

Is Grooms psychotic?
He won’t obey a command to walk into a brick wall, I’ve tried.
Well then, am I?

Monkeys in a cage. Who built the cage?

He pushed himself away from the window and walked into the dayroom. Darby, sitting at the table with his diagram spread out before him, turned the sheet over and spread his palms flat on the paper. Darby was building a rocket ship. He had copies of his plans secreted around the hospital. He had to keep moving them because of the CIA. But the day would come, and Darby knew it well. He could close his eyes and see the ships shooting between Mars and Venus, and in the luxury saloon the sleek
women would sip their drinks and say, “We wouldn’t be here without the Darby Drive.” And then the blonde would smile and unzip her tunic …

“What happens if they find those plans of yours, Darby?”

“They’ll put me in Alcatraz for a hundred and ninety-nine years.”

“Jesus, you’d be an old man when you got out.”

Steven Poole looked up from his cards and laughed. He was an old man with a two-week stubble of white whiskers and a pair of glittering blue eyes. He sat alone at a table in the corner, cheating himself at solitaire. Steven had told Dan not to worry about good and evil, or even about death. “I’ve been through it seven times.” And Dan asked: “What did God look like?” The old man had rubbed his whiskered chin, looked up at the ceiling. “One hundred and forty-four thousand golden balls!”

A good Zen answer, thought Danny, sitting down across from him. “How come you came back to earth, Steven, if you went to heaven?”

“Well …” the old man shrugged and picked up a card. “You get bored.”

Indeed you do
. Dan watched Chauncey shuffle in and squat in front of the tv.
Might as well go talk to Elizabeth
, he decided. He got up and walked toward the staff room …

“I’m supposed to remember those girls, right? Well, I guess the first one was Virginia, wife of an artist I’d known in Mexico. She came with him and didn’t want to leave—he was going into some turned-off job of teaching, and she couldn’t stand it. She stayed about three weeks, then split. Her last name was Harris, Hollis, something like that. We never used last names. He taught someplace like West Platte, Nebraska. After her there was, lessee … I’m not sure of the sequence. I manage to identify these girls with some seasonal change, like I remember Ginny smelling the dogwood blossoms, so that means she came in the spring. Then in the summer there was Betty. She
was a go-go dancer, not much brain but good bod. She had a habit she hadn’t told me about, she couldn’t go to sleep without a handful of downers, and she liked her lush too well. She got to walking out to the highway and hitching into town, lushing it up at the honky-tonks and then having some drunk-ass redneck haul her home. She went out one night and didn’t come back, and that was fine with me. You have to understand that I didn’t have any emotional ties with these girls. I just invited them to share the peace of the forest In some cases they did, in other cases they just pretended. After Betty I was cooled off on women for a good four months. Then I ran into Magda at a rock festival. That would be about eight-nine months back. She was a nurse. I remember she was there as a volunteer, and there were some freak outs, a couple of OD cases—I always get curious about people who choose to hang around fucked-up people. Like I’m curious about you, Elizabeth. So I invited her out into the woods to rest up, and she dropped acid for the first time. After that she used to drop by every couple weeks—she was a traveling nurse working about a three-state territory for this syndicate of retirement homes—and then finally she just quit coming. I figure she got out of the racket and settled down somewhere, she was always talking about how she’d like to have a go at marriage. She gave up on me, which was just as well. So now, lessee … I think the last one was a sorrel-haired girl, Patricia—she broke horses in Texas. Kind of a gamy huntress type, Diana of the Forest. She liked to be on top, if you know what I mean. One day she packed a lunch and walked off in the woods. She didn’t come back that night and I figured, well, I oughta do something. So I tried to follow her trail and got lost for a whole day. But she knew the woods as well as I did, so I’m sure she must’ve got out. I wasn’t surprised that she left without warning, she said she always did it that way …”