'And then it came to me, and I was appalled at the baseness of the desire. I wanted to reach a climax, some kind of explosion. It's clear now that I had taken all the anger I was feeling for all the shit I had to put up with that day, and channeled it into my sex. But right then I just needed to blow apart, and she was willing to be the fuse and the receptacle for my eruption.'
That's a thing with chicks in this culture,' Conrad said. 'They're trained to sacrifice themselves. I'd like to know what was going on in her head all this while.'
'She told me that the last thing she remembered was realising that she wanted to be murdered, and asking herself whether I would actually kill her. She said it felt like her cunt had begun to peel backwards, covering her arse and her legs and her body until she had become nothing but a huge vagina, and absorbing me in as though she were a pool and I were diving into the water.'
'She's a Scorpio, isn't she?' said Conrad.
'I think so,' Aaron answered. 'Her birthday is November sixth.'
'Right,' said Conrad. 'And you're an Aries. It all comes together on that level, too.'
'So I put all my attention into coming. I blotted out everything else except what happened between my cock and her cunt. My legs started to shake and I had to grip her to keep my balance. She was ravishing, her long legs stretched and bent at the knees, her arse like a table, her breasts hanging like tits on a cow, her head covered with hair inside the black oven. She had stopped making any sounds. I leaped into overdrive and pumped everything I had into her, all the frustration and grief and rage and sorrow, all the repressed feelings that were keeping me from coming alive. And she absorbed it all, and I loved her for doing that. You know? I was loving her for letting me kill her.
'And then I felt it, the great boiling release, the cataclysmic breakthrough, the terribly fleeting solution to all the contradictions. I was coming inside her. My entire body flew apart at once, my legs buckling, my pelvis flapping like a loose sail in the wind, my arms flying, my head jerking back and forth. I felt the sperm shoot out, and I could see it - I mean actually see it, I don't know how to explain this - spilling into her cunt, splashing against the walls, bursting into the deep crevices in the back chambers. And it was as though I were defiling her, committing some heinous sacrilege. Even as I experienced that I knew that was all wrong, but there it was, unavoidably actual. The expression on my face must have been hideously ugly.'
Conrad stared into the images that Aaron's narrative had conjured up. He was translating the story into the scenario he would have played had he been in
Aaron's place. Having seen through the artifacts of sadism and masochism and understood their functions as means to release life energy, he was comfortable in either role, and chose his attitude in relation to the predilections of whatever partner he was with. Although the dominance-subservience game was not one he preferred as a steady diet, when he did indulge in it he approached it with a sense of style. As Aaron spoke he saw Cynthia with her hands tied behind her back and to her ankles forcing her to kneel with her arse raised. He would tickle her cunt with a feather until she begged piteously to be fucked, and then have her list the abominations she would endure for the privilege of receiving his cock. The excitement would come from the degree of desperation she reached and the frenzy with which she kicked about in order to present herself in the most lewd and inviting postures. His cock wallowed in a lazy erection.
'Right afterwards I pulled her back and lifted her to her feet. The thing became a person again, the anonymous woman became Cynthia in my arms. She sagged against me a long time and I could feel a thousand subtle tremors ripping through her. I was poised between joy and regret and didn't know what to say or do. And then she turned slowly, her face mottled and bruised, swam up to me from whatever depths she had descended to, and covered my lips with her mouth. It was like death coming to get me. And I stood there petrified while she silently moved me with kisses.' He passed his hand across his eyes. 'And clanging in me like a fire bell was the single clear desire to hit her.'
'But you didn't,' Conrad suggested.
'I didn't have the courage, not after what I had just put her through.'
'You're an idiot,' Conrad said, his tone sober. 'She was using you just as much as you were using her.'
'But what would be the point in slapping her?' Aaron asked him.
'No point. It just would have been the proper thing to do.'
Something about the incongruity of the phrase, calling up as it did echoes of Emily Post, tipped Aaron into a peal of full rich laughter. He saw the seriousness on Conrad's face and laughed all the harder, for the younger man's earnestness reminded Aaron that he was a generation older and could take solace in the fact that no matter how much more Conrad knew, there were still areas in which he was a child. His inability to laugh at himself was one of those. Conrad waited until Aaron's mirth had subsided, welled up again, and fallen away entirely. Then he spoke.
'By "proper" I mean "organic",' he explained. 'Sometimes you have to do things which outrage your reason, but you have to recognise which of those have to do with your survival, and learn to follow those instantaneously, without questioning or looking back. You have to trust that there's a force operating in you which knows more than all your ideas put together. And you begin to test it in small things, like telling somebody to fuck off if they lay shit on you; or slapping a chick when her emotional strength is killing you and you have to defend yourself physically.'
'You sound like you're making a case for murder,' Aaron said, reflecting the sombre tone of Conrad's direction.
'I killed a man once,' Conrad replied. 'And I've been trying to get straight behind it ever since. In fact, everything I know comes from thinking about the night I did it.' He paused. 'I was sixteen,' he added.
'What happened?' asked Aaron, immediately fascinated by the turn the conversation had taken. Like two lovers who lock themselves to one another by revealing the deepest secrets of the heart, the men hung the first strand of the bridge they had begun to build between them. After Aaron's admission of his selfish bestiality, Conrad felt the burden of unburdening himself.
'I left home at fourteen/ he said. 'My father was some kind of chairman-of-the-board type for a subsidiary of an aircraft company. My mother was into barbiturates and booze and fucking the latest stud to make the circuit of the Palo Alto rich bitches. I was about nine when I began to dig what was happening, and after I figured it out, it didn't bother me, except the fact that they were pretending that they weren't doing the things they were doing. She used to throw lines about going to the hairdresser every time she left to get laid; it was easy to tell because she always did a big scene with perfume and tight dresses; and my old man had his name on all the church functions and fashionable charity organisations, and I knew he didn't give a shit about anything except money and power.
'So I split. I hitched a ride to New York and lived in the East Village until the winter came, panhandling, crashing. I found out you don't need much just to survive. When it got cold I came back west, stopping in at different scenes and farm communes, going from connection to connection, discovering what was later called the underground. I was so young and lost that most people felt sorry for me, and I was even taken in by straights: once I stayed for days with a Navy captain and his wife, who was a Pepsi addict. And then made it to Berkeley, and learned how to live on the street.'
'Fourteen!' Aaron mused. 'When I was fourteen I was a sophomore in high school and trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.'
'Yeah, well, I learned all at once. The one thing I wanted to be was alive. That's the most important. Everything else is a tool for survival. I got very tough and lean, and I had the one quality my parents had instilled in me: I was ruthless. I fell in with some people who were calling themselves revolutionaries but were mostly into speed and danger. I felt like a wolf who had found his pack, and we spent a lot of time shooting up, and pilfering grocery stores, and writing slogans on walls.
Then one of them suggested a hold-up. He said a friend of his had worked at a small gas station in the Sunset District for a few weeks, and knew that the money pick-up was made every Thursday night at ten. He figured we could grab off two thousand dollars -which sounded like a fortune when I used to go days at a time without a penny in my pocket. We decided that two of us should go, and I was one of the ones chosen.'
Conrad straightened his spine. He looked at the other man to see what effect his words were having, for he wanted the perspective of Aaron's instinctive reactions. 'We were very high when we hit the place, and it all went smoothly up to a point. As soon as the man got out of the car, we walked right behind him and into the manager's office. We jostled him in, pulled handkerchiefs up over our noses, and whipped out the two big Bowie knives we were carrying. We planned to tie them up, split in the pick-up man's car, and ditch it a few miles away. The manager had the leather bag ready and my partner picked it up. He opened it to look inside and I flicked my eyes over just to see if I could glimpse the money. But as I did so the messenger, a man in his forties, wearing a black suit, with a pencil-thin moustache, jumped back. I spun around and fixed him with my consciousness. The amphetamine had operated in such a way as to speed up my physiological processes exactly enough to match my mental functions, so there was no lag at all between what I saw and what I did. At that moment, for me, to see was to do.
'It was as though he were moving in slow motion. I watched him as he yanked his jacket open, reached across his belly, flipped up the strap which held the revolver in place, and closed his hand over the butt of the pistol. In that instant the whole scene was frozen. I heard a woman talking in the street, and realised that outside that small building the world was going on as usual. The stupidity of my situation, and the senselessness of what was about to happen, seared themselves into my brain forever at that moment. And at the same time a voice in my head was saying, "He's reaching for a gun, you didn't consider that he might have a gun, he's going to shoot you with the gun, and you are going to be dead."
'At once, the whole tableau sprang into normal speed again, and as he began to swing the weapon around toward me, I was on him, and the knife buried in his belly.'
Conrad sniffed. 'He said, "Ughn", like a bad actor in a third-rate film, and then slid to the ground. The manager staggered back, the front of his coveralls wet with urine. My partner just looked at the dying man, his eyes bulging. "Oh God, why?" the man said and closed his eyes. I watched and could see the soul disintegrating and frothing out of his body like champagne bubbles.'
'Do you want me to believe all this?' Aaron asked.
'It's absolutely accurate,' said Conrad in a flat voice. 'And my first feeling was a strange kind of dry anger, because he had thrown himself away to save some pieces of green paper, money that didn't even belong to him, the company's money. I got all my lessons in history right on the spot.'
Aaron attempted to integrate what he heard. He told himself that he should be shocked, but he felt nothing but a friendly interest in the rest of the story. Its most cogent effect was to make his own tale seem less extraordinary, less fearful.
'The first thing I did with my share of the money was to buy dope. We got away clean, the murder turned out to be nothing more than a footnote to the caper. The cat who was selling me the speed asked me if I wanted acid. I was very unsophisticated about drugs at the time and thought that it would just be a different kind of high than I was used to.
'So two nights later, I dropped over a thousand micrograms on the Point Reyes beach.' He nodded at Aaron. 'What you had last night was about three-fifty.' Aaron blinked, trying to imagine an experience three times more intense than what he had just gone through, and coming right after he had killed someone. Conrad pursed his lips.
'You might say it was pretty heavy,' he said. 'I was by myself, and I went a lot of different kinds of crazy. I saw everything, you dig,
everything
, all at once. And when I had it all together, I saw myself disappearing over the horizon, going someplace where my mind just couldn't follow, like a little kid running after a train that's picking up speed.' He shook his head. 'Our consciousness and our intelligence is less than a grain of sand on the infinite beaches of eternity. Ever since that moment, I have not once forgotten how ignorant I am and always will be when it comes to what creation is all about.
'The next thing I remember is hunger. I had been on the beach for five days, my mind totally blown. I've tried to pull out some memory of what happened, but all I can remember are the waves, and thinking that the waves never stop, never stop.'
He smiled to himself. 'It was only astral travel,' he said. 'I learned about that later, when I started reading again, and worked my way through every title in the Shamballa book shop. But it turned me a hundred and eighty degrees around from the direction I was taking. I started travelling with a different kind of people, people I recognised only by seeing that they were serious in an indefinable way, even though they might laugh a lot. You have that kind of seriousness, and that's what my instinct is following.'
The conversation had gone full circle. They had traversed the past, found the structural similarities in their travels, and surfaced once again in the present, aware at once that they had, through all their talk, never left the moment. There was a change in atmosphere, and they felt it the way certain old men can feel the distant onset of rain in their joints. A cycle had ended and a new one had not yet begun; they sat in a blue interface, waiting, looking like two monkeys on a high plateau smelling the breeze for its messages of life and death.