Think of New York with its supply routes cut off,' Jerry replied. 'Or of San Francisco with the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges blown up.'
Conrad imagined the span from the city to Marin and the tens of thousands of cars which crossed it each day, feeding the complex of businesses which directed the flow of labour in the area. The most chilling thing about the vision was its feasibility. He shook his head. 'It's not my scene,' he said.
Jerry smiled. 'Give it a few years,' he said. 'After you try feeding Cynthia on cock and dreams for a while.' He put his hands behind his neck, arched his back, and yawned. 'You probably need to get it out of your system,' he added.
'You don't even know her,' Conrad said, surprised at the petulance in his voice.
'You see, hanging around with the middle class is fucking your mind. You're bringing it down to the level of personalities. If she's a woman and you're a man, there are certain programmed rituals you will have to play out with each other. And you'll go through hell if either one of you doesn't understand that, and thinks you should spend your time trying to fight what's been destined in your genes and prescribed by your culture. It's just biology, Conrad. Why are you trying to make something special out of this woman?'
'There's something she has . . .' Conrad began.
'She has a pussy,' Jerry cut in, 'a hairy slit between her legs, and two tits hanging off her chest, and a mouth to stick your cock into, and an arsehole to use when you get bored with the other holes. She's just a thing, no different from you and me. And she's useful and pleasant sometimes, and a big drag other times. She's not an angel and she's not a devil, she's just a human being.'
Is that how you think of Susan?' Conrad asked.
'Susan's dead,' Jerry said.
Conrad's jaw dropped. 'Dead?' he repeated. 'What happened?'
'I think it was a heart attack.'
The words expanded into the night, their meaning reaching as far as the physical vibrations carried. And when the sound was absorbed in the wide spaces beneath the sky, the silence rushed in and the thousand voices of the shore could be heard, the rustling of the leaves, the insects launching their message through the grass, the waves carving caves into the cliffs. The mood of the night deepened, and at a stroke Conrad felt himself as nothing more than an infinitesimal glimmer of consciousness at the edge between a sweeping continent and a mighty ocean, on a globe of rock where untold trillions of entities swam and crawled and flew. He was stung by the awareness of his own insignificance beneath the stars which seemed to mock anything a man might aspire to, and beneath death, which laughed at all the human virtues and vices. He had known Susan, tripping with her on two of the times he had seen Jerry, and had made love to her once, an idylic dance in a redwood grove near Lagunitas. He tried to grasp what it meant for her to be dead, but his mind could not penetrate past the word.
'We were on Steven's farm in Minnesota,' Jerry went on. 'We had been on the move for almost half a year and needed to hang out for a while. We spent a week just sleeping and fucking, and then Bob showed up with more dope than I have ever seen in one place before. He had everything. We dropped acid that night, and the next afternoon, and before I knew it we were shooting speed and smack and everything except peanut butter. I don't know why I got on such a trip, I usually need to keep my head straight. But it just got to be the thing that was happening and I thought, 'What the fuck, I'll just let myself move with it. More and more people kept showing up and by the fourth day it started to look like one of those trips that never end. Some strange collective spirit took hold and we got unbelievably high. At one point there were about seven of us watching Steven fuck a sheep and none of us could talk anymore; all we could do was grunt. It was very freaky, but beautiful. I mean, it was as heavy as anything I ever saw in India. We were blowing all the repression loose, shitting out accumulated karma all over the place.
'I lost track of Susan and didn't see her for a day or two, and then I found her in the cellar chewing on mushrooms that Steven's old lady was growing there. When she saw me she said, 'Look what I found,' and pointed to a gallon jug of homemade amyl nitrate. Just the thought of all that juice made my knees weak, and she pulled me down on top of her, right into the dirt. We began grinding against each other, very slow and hot. We were so fucking close to each other. I could feel her against me, but I was also inside her feeling me. I was loving her so much I thought I would burst open. We had been together for five years and there wasn't anything we hadn't gone through.
'Then she reached over and tipped the bottle and spilled some of the liquid onto an old rag that was lying nearby. Just smelling it from that distance made me dizzy and I could feel rushes beginning inside me that were stronger than anything I have ever had to handle. She put her mouth over mine and pulled the cloth between our noses. Her eyes were swimming inside mine and her lips kept moving as though she were trying to tell me how much she was feeling and how much of it she was giving to me. Her cunt was so hot that I felt like I was pressed against a radiator.'
He looked up from the ground and at Conrad who watched without blinking as the tale unfolded. 'I don't remember the next few minutes. I went into a spin that took me someplace I couldn't even perceive. Susan was moaning, "Put it inside me, please, Jerry, put your cock inside me." I was at a point where I didn't even have a body. But I knew what she was feeling, and I reached down inside myself to the spot my guru had helped me find, and through sheer will I made my cock get hard.' His eyes searched Conrad's to be sure that the other man understood fully. T did it for her,' he said. 'I have never used that power at any other time in my life.
'My cock went inside her and she melted all over me. She stopped being a person and became pure protoplasm, pulsing and oozing under me. I sank into her and what we did wasn't like anything I had ever called fucking. We were in an entirely different world.
'And then she pulled out of it and whispered, "I'm almost there, Jerry, I almost made it all the way," and she tipped the bottle onto the rag again, letting the stuff soak in. "Give it to me," she said, "give me all your strength. I want to touch the bottom." And she clamped the cloth over her face, breathing it in through her nose and her mouth. I felt myself going under and I fought against it. My cock was screaming in her cunt and my mind was roaring like a hurricane at full force and my heart was bursting like an exploding star. And through it all Susan was calling me, pulling me into her. She was all the woman I ever hoped to know in this life and she lay in
my
arms like an open wound yearning for me to become one with her. My will braced itself and held. Like a man being burned at the stake I felt the flames consume me, but I would not give myself up to them.
'And then, something strange happened. I began to come but instead of the sensations of expansion and feelings of ecstacy, a cold horror gripped me. I wrapped my arms around Susan but she had become something beyond my power to know. I looked into her eyes and I could see
her
, I mean, her herself, the woman she was. And then she began receding, slowly at first and then with terrible speed, moving away into distances that seemed infinite. "Jerry, save me," she said. And then she was gone.'
He liked his lips. 'At that instant I came inside her, bubbling over and bucking into her. I lay still on top of her a long time, and when I roused myself I tried to shake her awake. I called her name. Something clicked inside me. And I knew.'
'She was dead?' Conrad whispered.
Jerry did not speak for a few minutes, and when he did his voice had returned to its usual dry quality. 'The next morning we dug a hole on the side of the hill overlooking the fields and buried her there/ He glanced at Conrad's pipe. 'I haven't been able to take any drugs at all since then.' He frowned. 'Or any woman,' he added.
'Jesus,' Conrad said.
Jerry reached over and grabbed his arm, a rare gesture for him. 'Listen,' he said, 'there's one thing I learned in all of that, and I'll tell it to you now, and probably never say it to anyone else again. When you start to love a woman, you have to be ready to die with her. Otherwise it's all lies. Don't use the word love unless you have accepted death.'
Conrad's eyes glowed. 'That's it,' he said, 'that's the thing I feel with Cynthia, but I didn't know how to explain it to myself. She makes me want to die.'
Jerry regarded the young man gravely. A dozen evaluations ticked through his eyes. He took a breath and then broke into a slow rueful smile.'Well, then,' he drawled. 'I take back everything I said.'
'Don't laugh at me, Jerry,' Conrad said. 'I need to understand it.'
'You'll find out,' Jerry told him. 'Maybe I'll come visit you in Idaho.'
They stood up, brushed off their trousers, and climbed back into the van. Conrad drove and Jerry sat crosslegged in the front seat, his attention removed from the past and cast into the future, where it curled around the five thousand sticks of dynamite they were on their way to pick up.
The Frigid Orgasm
Florid fantasies flushed through Aaron's mind. It was one in the morning and there was no sign that Cynthia had been home at all during the day. He arrived at the house petulant with paranoia and defensive from the guilt he felt at fucking the girl in Conrad's living room. He suffered the letdown which follows a period of concentrated drug use, and was shaken by the startling arrival of the short man with the black hair, and his own subsequent fumbling flight from the scene. As he walked hurriedly back to his own place, he soothed himself by concluding that he had fallen into a world that was too dangerous and fast-moving for him, and formulated another resolution to discipline himself in the virtues of what he had defined as normal living: the work which give him security, the woman who shared his bed, and the apartment where nothing unruly entered. All the insights which had thrilled him now showed their subversive underbellies; all the glimpses into freedom whirred about him like ghosts, mocking him with what they had earlier used to tempt him into renunciations of his life style. The previous five months of relationship with Conrad and their culmination the night before were placed under the heading of irresponsible flirtation with insanity, and in the firmness of his putting it all down, he nimbly neglected to acknowledge the deep frustrations which led him to search out new modes of understanding and action.
It had not occurred to him that Cynthia would not be in the apartment, and it took him several minutes to assimilate the fact. He went through all the rooms, seeking not her so much as her presence. He poured a glass of milk and took it into the bedroom, where he kicked off his shoes and lay back on the mattress. His proclivity was to lie back and play a rerun of recent events through his head, transforming his experience into a kind of filmic narrative and thus gaining some perspective on it. But the very absence of Cynthia, which gave him the time and space to reflect on his situation, deflected his energy into brooding on her whereabouts. It was not long before his mood coagulated into a jealousy of activities which, so far as he knew, had no basis except in his imagination. But the power of that function has been able, throughout history, to seduce men away from the actual and into the swamps of the speculative.
He reached for the glass on the table next to the bed and noticed that his fingers were still trembling. He recalled the scene in Conrad's living room, and the wild man who had burst in, looked once at Aaron, and jumped back as though he had stepped on a snake. Aaron, the impress of the girl's kisses still on his lips, naked and smelling of sweat and saliva and vaginal secretions, had been seized by an atavistic embarrassment, and could think of nothing but getting his clothes on. The man looked like pictures of radicals he had seen in the newspaper accounts of revolutionary violence; he had, to Aaron's eyes, none of Conrad's gentleness, but seemed capable of killing without qualms. He had turned to Conrad, only to find him smiling as the girl slept with her head on his belly. He felt instantaneously excluded and left abruptly, his thoughts stampeded by panic.
'He's never been interested in me,' he said to himself as he walked down the dark street away from Conrad's house. 'He's just been trying to soften me up so he can get to Cynthia.'
Now, as he recalled the scene, the memory of what Cynthia looked like as she lay between Conrad's legs, her lips wrapped around his cock, flashed in his mind and erased all the channels which led toward Aaron's spending his time in ruminations about the past forty-eight hours; he lurched into the theatre where Cynthia starred in a tour de force performance on the explication of the obscene. He saw her in a hundred positions of abandon, each following the other with the rapidity of rippling playing cards.She was surrounded by men who strained toward her, slobbering to reach her body. And in the scenario he wrote, unaware that it was his need for purgation which shaped Cynthia as the whip with which he would flog himself, she opened herself everywhere to let them in. She lay in the classic pose of lasciviousness, her legs spread wide, her knees in the air, her arms out at her side, her mouth pursed, her eyes smoldering and wanton.
'I don't know where she is,' he said to himself, switching back to the Cynthia of space and time, and not the movie star of his mind. He realised that it was the first time in years that he was not either with her or cognizant of her location. That he had not the slightest idea of how to reach her staggered him, and braced him with the awareness of how much he had come to take her for granted. 'Right now she could be on her back with someone working his way inside her,' he thought. The words danced over the tender tissues of his brain. 'On her back ... on her back ... on her back,' went the refrain, the phrase hypnotising him with its suggestion. And then the others came. 'On her knees ... on her knees ... on her knees,' and 'in her mouth... in her mouth ... in her mouth.'