With astonishing ease he was able to put together all the strands of all the incomplete insights which had plagued him over the years, and at a stroke differentiated between the organic sense of himself and the education that self had received from the moment of conception. The genetic programming which determined everything from his height to his quality of voice, and the social training which infused him with everything from language to food habits, were illuminated, and what was left was an amorphous throb that could not be identified or defined. He conceived of his ego as the full-dress costume of his soul, and saw that his soul was a quality of nothingness, an empty mirror eternally reflecting itself.
'So that's how it goes,' he said out loud.
Unused to the workings of the drug, he stood up quickly and started to walk across the floor to the kitchen. Like most neophytes, his first impulse was to share his grand revelation with others, feeling that he had a message of crucial importance to impart to the race. But the startling physiological changes occasioned by the move, which ordinarily would have gone unnoticed, registered with shrieking impact upon his sensitised system. What had just seemed so stable and rational went tumbling topsy-turvy before the rush of blood and pounding thud of his heart. His body image, to which he was normally unattuned, flared in his consciousness, and the evidence of his senses notwithstanding, he felt himself to be ten or twelve feet tall. All sense of control disappeared, and the calm reality of what he had known while lying on the couch exploded into a nightmarish fancy. The familiar was shown to be intrinsically mysterious. Panic flooded his mind and he stampeded, stepping blindly in front of him, and with an audible crack slammed his shinbone into the sharp hard edge of a glass-topped coffee table.
'What was that?' said Cynthia.
In the sculptured silence following the end of the music, she and Conrad had listened for sounds from the next room. Their second embrace had led to a spasm of clutching, and Cynthia had reached down and run her palm lightly between Conrad's legs, trembling as she pressed the turgid cock which bulged against his jeans. Part of her aware that Aaron might walk in at any moment, part of her anxious to leap into the unknown, she began to sink, going to her knees, ready to fumble with the zipper, ease the thick shaft out, and take it in her mouth. She had smoked enough, and talked enough, and pondered enough, and now wanted to be filled. That her desire coagulated as a prescience of pungent sperm on her tongue was an accident of more factors than she could tabulate. Like an infant groping for the full breast, she yearned for the loaded cock.
Conrad grabbed her by the wrists and held her up. 'We promised Aaron we wouldn't fuck tonight,' he said.
'You promised,' she amended. She covered his mouth with hers and moaned into his throat. Her hands flew like butterflies over his buttocks. She came close to frenzy and perilously skirted that terrible point at which a woman loses awareness of the man and becomes awash in her inner turmoil. The more she attempted to prompt him, the more distant he became, until at last he stood back from her. He was not prepared at that moment to plunge into chaos with her.
Hurt exploded in Aaron's consciousness with the force of a heavenly visitation, shattering his leg and sending bursts of fire into his hip and side. In his heightened state, he felt the pain both as an experience and as a phenomenon independent of him. The speech he was about to deliver to the others skidded from the field of importance and was replaced by a throbbing meditation on the nature of pain. He remembered reading the Buddha's first precept that existence itself is pain, recalled that he was able to make no connection with the words, and now understood their meaning with crystal clarity. The truth screamed through him like the roaring whistle of a jet screeching low over an Asian village to drop napalm and steel-frag-mentation bombs. Scraps of videotape footage were projected from his memory bank and his living room became a tumultuous horrifying battleground filled with half-naked human beings frozen in the avenue of the descending flaming juggernaut.
In a flash which permanently imprinted the knowledge on his mind, all the cruelty of the species throughout its entire history catapulted from the background of inattention into sharp focus at the centre of his consciousness. With extraordinarily wrought tunnel vision he seized upon this single aspect of human nature and invested it with singular importance. At the precise instant when, according to the infantile directions of the so-called LSD gurus, he should have been transported by galleons of bliss, his mouth was filled with the bitter taste of a less disneyesque aspect of life: its implacable brutality. Like the goslings who fixated upon the laboratory assistant who happened to be the first moving thing they saw. Aaron was stamped with negativity as he took his first acid-permeated step into psychic space. Everything else which was to happen during the following twelve hours would not obviate that initial turning.
'We are insensate maddened animals,' he thought, and all the enigmas which caused his frustration seemed solved by that one insight. The conflux of events and ideas which was his life, infused with the energy released by the drug, opened a great silence within him. Everything he was capable of knowing appeared in a vast mosaic before his mind's eye. As though he were a giant who had once been a man, he looked down on the maze he had been stumbling through and could see at a glance the nature and location of all the obstacles which had stymied him. He wished the moment could last forever, that he would always be able to perceive so clearly.
But as he watched, it changed. A palpable awareness of time overtook him, and he saw himself as but one of its fleeting structures. The span of his life became a single entity, as concrete and finite as the arc of a bridge cable. His individual existence was a strand inextricably woven into the tapestry of history. And as he followed its course, he reached a point where it ended. He stared with amused horror at the spot where his life finished, came to an abrupt halt, was intersected by another line which cut through the very space he would have gone on to occupy. Death, which had heretofore had only a literary reality, came upon him with its actuality, stunning him into sobriety. Mortality, which had been a word, was seen as being as much a part of him as his fingernails. The acceptance of the fact radically reversed all his acquiescence at being subservient to the will of any other human being, and his job, his standing as a citizen, his role as a lover, all emerged as forms of bondage.
Then, like a man sweeping the horizon through a telescope, he turned his gaze to the left and overlooked the past. He was appalled by the chilling simplicity of what appeared. Everything he had been up to that point was nothing but a conditioned reflex which responded to the countless stimuli that had been fed into him from his first moments of being: the chemistry of his mother's bloodstream, the religion and nationality foisted upon him, the thousand little correctives issued daily for years until he was totally programmed to act the way his civilisation deemed he should.
'But there is no freedom in any of that,' he thought. He saw destiny as a blind weaver, a dotty craftsman using the available materials to spin a fabric of unintelligible design. 'I'm a slave,' he said to himself. 'The whole universe, including the very structure of my body, is just one way of defining my complete limitation.'
'He's probably getting his first rushes,' said Conrad. The entire revolution had gone through Aaron's mind in less than a second of chronological time. Td better go see how he's doing.'
He checked her once with his eyes, the glance of a soldier saying goodbye to his lover at the train station, forced to pull the shade down on softness and intimacy in order to join the troops boarding to reach the battleground, and walked quickly into the living room. Aaron was bending over, his trouser legs up, checking the damage to his shin. He looked up and saw Conrad coming toward him, stood up quickly to regain his composure, and before he knew what was happening found himself holding on to the young man, his arms around his shoulders, his head on his chest, and the tears spilling unashamedly from his eyes.
There was no need to talk. Conrad understood that deep within Aaron some long-locked spring of feeling had been released, and what memories or forms of ideation or prompting toward action it engendered were of no real concern. It only mattered that the man would weep; from that all freedom followed. Aaron felt the blessed relief of not being embarrassed at what he had always thought was a weakness, and was amazed through his tears that he could accept the embrace of the man who just a half hour earlier had appeared as a threat to his peace of mind. He laughed as he cried, reflecting that the stability he was so frantically holding on to was actually the rigidity born of fear, and for this brave instant, there was nothing to be afraid of. For the first time in his adult life the arms which held him were the powerful arms of a man, seeking nothing but to feed back to him his sense of himself, and not the arms of a woman, which always implied a contract, and could comfort, but could never reassure.
Cynthia, hearing the unaccustomed sound, stepped into the room; and assailed by the unexpected sight of the man she lived with and the man she had been just making love to now locked in a circle of feeling which totally excluded her, was faced with her own crisis. Deeply repressed attitudes of rejection, instilled during the days when six siblings vied for a harried mother's affection and a tired father's attention, marched to the forefront of her perception. She wrestled with a sense of betrayal.
Conrad stepped back, the single most valuable action he had learned during his precocious adolescence. He stood sideways so that the straight line of energy which had gone from Cynthia on one end to him and Aaron on the other became a triangle. Veteran of over a hundred acid and mescaline episodes, his instincts for emotional dynamics were honed to a fine edge. He rarely bothered with content, and addressed himself to structure.
It's getting a little heavy,' he said. He looked from one to the other. 'Everything that's happening is real, but it's not all there is.' He went to the window and pulled the blind. At once, the ambience altered. 'We're still a couple and their neighbour spending a quiet evening at home. All the shit that's working in our systems gives it a,peculiar twist, and that's what we learn from, but we need to stay straight. Otherwise we'll wind up all knotted together in a colossal bummer.'
Aaron listened to the words as though they were in a language he didn't understand. Already he was speeding to another nexus of internal confusion and clarity, the liberated elements of his mind forming and reforming to shape new perspectives. He tried desperately to remember what it was that had just made so much sense, why his tears had felt so good. But his eyes were dry, and the first tinges of nausea were colouring his outlook. Cynthia looked grotesque, a cubist melange of angles covered with melting flesh, a surreal gargoyle. He was certain he was going to vomit.
Conrad led him to the centre of the room and helped him to lie down. 'Whatever you think, whatever you feel, whatever you understand, don't hold on to it,' he said. 'You're just a river, and you're going to assume ten thousand shapes before the night is finished. Don't identify with any of them. Just keep flowing.' His voice, low and lulling, put Aaron in a state of relaxation, and he closed his eyes. Immediately the feeling of illness passed, and he entered a state of consciousness for which there was no conceptual expression. He let go of his environment, of his awareness of Conrad and Cynthia, and sank into himself, to mine the rich lode of his long untapped unconscious mind.
Cynthia sat in the large chair, her lips and hands trembling. She had received the waves of revulsion that had poured from Aaron when he last looked at her, and coupled with her burgeoning feeling of insecurity, they undermined her sense of well-being. She opened and closed her eyes rapidly, and finally looked at Conrad imploringly.
'Why don't you make some tea?' he said, directing her toward an activity, knowing that to be the best therapy for her current state. And as she moved about the kitchen, working slowly and exactly, holding on to the familiar routine of boiling water, washing dishes, clearing the table, sweeping the floor, Conrad sat cross-legged a few feet from where Aaron lay, and took several deep breaths, finding himself keenly aroused by the developments of the evening.
For three hours there was little movement. Aaron lay like a man in a coma; Cynthia shared her time between dozing on the couch and prowling around the back yard; Conrad sat like a stone statue, lost in his mescaline revery. In each of them solitude sang like a loon; there are some places which can only be got to alone, and to these three products of a culture which did not prepare its members for communion with that god who can be found only in the chambers of the heart, the loss of social amenity produced various stages of oppressiveness. Aaron felt as though he had been buried alive, and lived for most of the time with a sharp awareness of the walls of the crypt which contained him. Oscillating between stark terror and currents of omnipotence, he churned silently within the tomb that was his mind. Conrad sailed similar seas, but his experience allowed him to accept the voyage for what it was, a passage through forces which gave man a taste of his utter insignificance in the face of the enormity of creation. Cynthia was cast into paroxysms of paranoia; the stoned withdrawal of the men at a time when she was negotiating her own high reaches threw her mercilessly onto her own resources, and she discovered, with angry amazement, that up to that moment she had defined herself entirely in reference to whatever man she was with, and had no sense of herself as an individual, as a person, except in the sociological role of woman. She saw that her relationship with Aaron comprised only one and a half people, neither of them ever able to attain fullness, except at the expense of the other.