'When I withhold something from him, and he doesn't know I'm doing it, it makes me feel he's extremely stupid,' she thought.
'Fanatics are just people who take themselves seriously,' said Conrad, picking up the thread of Aaron's line which best served as a springboard for beginning a rap which interested him. 'After all, what's the difference between Lee Harvey Oswald and the Pope? They share the same ruthless conformity to the rigidity of an ideal, and all their sentiment to the side, have no actual concern for the damage their behaviour does to any life around them. Each serves a private solipsistic God.'
Aaron, who had been raised a Jew, bridled at the comparison. His years of religious conditioning still operated inside him, and while he could show the entire Roman position to be bankrupt in a rational conversation, his emotions still reacted with the reflexes that had been trained into them. 'I suppose we have to include the Weathermen in that group, then,' he said, once again argumentative.
But with the grace of a master in aikido, Conrad used the momentum of Aaron's thrust to throw the attacker off balance. 'Unless you accept the possibility that at least some of them are acting not out of principle but out of necessity. That they blow up banks for the same reason you breathe air. If they didn't, they would die.'
'It's interesting how you always find winning rationalisations for the actions of your friends, and deny the same niceness to those you think are your enemies.'
'A paranoid has to be good to his friends,' said Conrad. 'They're all he has to rely on, in the whole universe.'
'Oh, Conrad!' said Cynthia, her voice warm with tenderness, her heart touched by the sudden insight she had into the profound loneliness of the boy in front of her, so young, so brilliant, so terribly balanced. She needed to go to him and put his head between her breasts, for just then, and for a long time; what he lacked was the woman who would be his mother, the mother that for all the common complicated reasons he was not able to love when he was a child. 'He just needs to be held, that's all,' she thought.
But she projected into the future, wondered about Aaron's reaction, about what it would feel like to have Conrad's face pressed into her, and she checked her impulse. Conrad looked into the other man's eyes. 'Who are your friends, man?'
The question was like the golden ring one grabs for on the carousel. It was not the acquisition of the hoop that was important, it was the strength and steadiness necessary to reach for it that made the experience worthy. With unaccustomed candour Aaron replied, 'I don't think I have any friends. I was close to some people when I was young, but we grew up in separate directions. They all stayed back East, married the girls next door. I had three or four engagements, but none lasted. I went into therapy, found out a lot about my fears, and decided not to try to fight them any longer by exposing myself to the situations which gave rise to them. I decided to travel, saved money, and took off on a trip around the world. I made it as far as Egypt.'
Aaron raised his head and for the first time seemed to be aware that there were others in the room, that the voices he had been hearing were something other than the embodiment of his inner drama. He felt a peculiar lightheadedness, a combination of his strange reactions to the earlier fucking, and the food, and the odd emanations which were coming from the circle he sat in. Conrad hit the first full rush of energy released from the mescaline, and his body tingled as though he had just plunged into an icy pool after a long steam bath. He was able to continue the conversation, but he felt that he and Aaron were two jet pilots in parallel planes talking to one another as they hurtled forward, faster than the speed of sound. Cynthia, for the first time, saw that she would very much like to have both of them in bed at the same time.
'I went to see the Sphinx/ Aaron continued. As he spoke he went inward again, and Conrad shifted his gaze to Cynthia, who caught the full blow of his glance. They locked in on one another, and stared at the perfect nakedness of one another's being. It was an astral fucking, a revelation on the most exalted plane. The words that Aaron spoke fell into the space they all shared, and provided the framework within which all the other changes took place.
It transfixed me. I had been doing things like whisking through the Parthenon in forty-five minutes, and the Sistine Chapel in fifteen. But for the first time, when I saw that sculpture, I stopped. I stayed for eight days and nights, not changing my clothes, not shaving, barely remembering to eat. In the day I was baked by the sun, and at night chilled by the stars. And that statue came to life! I could see it dancing and flying. I could see it being built, and was transported back in time to when the Pharaohs ruled. I remember wondering whether I might die and be buried right there at the foot of the Sphinx. It seemed to me then the most beautiful thing that could happen to me. I guess I was mad. I had lost all touch with the twentieth century, or rather, I realised that time was not relevant to what I was.' He frowned, struggling for the proper expression. T mean, I saw that all time was the same thing, no matter what shape it took. It was just time. And then there was eternity. And for a while I was exhilarated by what I took to be a great truth. I sat in the hot sand and glowed for it seemed to me that somehow I had solved all the problems that man has ever faced. And a peddler came up to me, and scrutinised me until I was forced to look him in the eyes, and he smiled, the most knowing insinuating smile I had ever seen, and I was forced to drop my gaze before him. And in a wheedling voice which for the first time I understand as sopping with mockery, he said, "Perhaps the good sir would like some fruit while he sits thinking about the nature of the world." And upon his saying it, my mouth began to water. I had to have some fruit. When he charged me an exorbitant price, I didn't care. I pressed money into his unwilling hands. I heard what sounded like a great whistling wind and when I looked up, the Sphinx was laughing, in great sand-sweeping gusts. "There may be a storm," he said. But when I looked past him, everyone else in the area was walking about at their usual pace, and the day was absolutely still. The man next to me stood up abruptly and walked off behind me without a word. And the next day I collapsed. I woke up in a small American hospital, was treated for exhaustion and dehydration, and dismissed. When I told the doctor about my experiences, he explained it quite simply as a period of prolonged psychotic hallucination brought about by my debilitated condition.'
'What a load of shit,' Conrad said.
'Well, how would you explain it?' Aaron asked.
'Fuck explaining it,' Conrad replied. 'The real question is, did you learn anything from it? Did it expand your mind?'
'The only lesson that seems valid is that if you sit bareheaded in the Sahara desert and don't eat or drink for several days, you will have extraordinary experiences.'
'No wonder you don't have any friends,' Cynthia said. 'You don't have any imagination.' She was embarrassed to see Aaron, who was chronologically a man, appear fatuous in front of Conrad, whose younger mind seemed so much deeper. But to her surprise, Conrad defended him. 'He's got more imagination than he can handle,' he said, 'and he's afraid of it, so he holds it down.' He turned to Aaron again. 'I'd like to give you acid,' he said.
Aaron cocked his head. 'When?'
'Now,' said Conrad, and reached into his pocket to remove a capsule filled with white powder. 'Right now.'
Cynthia flashed a thousand scenes in which the machismo being enacted formed the central element, from John Wayne movies to fistfights in her old neighbourhood. It thrilled her to see two males in their essential maleness acting upon one another. In distinction to the competitive aggression that such a scene usually entails, the contest before her was benign, and all the aggression was dialectical. It was as though Conrad had issued a challenge which, instead of stating, 'Let's fight to see which shall win,' had said, 'Let's struggle with one another so we may get to understand our own and each other's strength.'
She was not surprised when Aaron reached over and picked the capsule up. 'What's the point?' he said. 'I'm sure everything I've read and heard about LSD is true. I will have insights and see sights and feel my feelings very profoundly. It's only the intensity of insanity, it doesn't point to a way of life.'
'What happened after you came back from Egypt?' Conrad asked.
'I decided not to go back to advertising. I moved to the coast and took a teaching job. I met Cynthia. Here lam.'
'That trip changed your life, didn't it?' Conrad said. He leaned forward and his energy flowed off him like water down a cataract. He was approaching the first peaking of the mescaline, a capsule given him by an acquaintance he had run into on Telegraph Avenue, which he had taken on a spur-of-the-moment impulse. He had wanted to go to Tilden Park and spend several hours with the trees which he considered to be the sources of his deepest relationships. His highest ecstasy was to take mescaline and lie for hours along the thick branch of his favourite oak friend, feeling the sense of ageless life that coursed through its centre, relishing the roughness of the bark, and wallowing in the dance of sunlight through the leaves, the liberating oxygen they released, and the rich smell of green. But he had decided to stop at his house first, and on the way had seen Cynthia sitting on her front stairs, taking the air while she waited for her rice to cook. She invited him in, and he found himself detoured.
Now his words fell with explosive weightiness. It's not what you
think
you understand when you take acid that counts. That part's already programmed. It's the actual chemical change that makes the difference, the re-circuiting of the pathways in your nervous system. Do you dig that? You don't
know
different; you
be
different. You're absolutely right about all the cosmic experiences; that's only a movie. Unless you fight it. And that's like fighting evolution. That's refusing to grow into what you were meant to attain.' He nodded at Aaron's hand. Take it. Don't be afraid to be afraid. Get dumb.'
'What about me?' Cynthia said.
The men turned in unison, homing in on her vibration. Conrad, thrown from the back of his bucking monologue, was at a loss for words and sat there blinking. His right hand fell into his lap and began inadvertently rubbing his cock. At the level of concentration they were operating at, his action was not relegated to the incidental. They all copped to the fact that Conrad's gesture was his actual answer to the question. Aaron watched the interaction as though it were a play in a foreign language.
The young man blushed, but he did not turn away from Cynthia's smile of warm amusement. She was regal in her regard, openly holding the power, the choice of saying yes or no at any time to Conrad's desire, and aware that if she admitted him into her, she would be agreeing to an opening of herself which would make her into someone very different than she now was. The glove was now thrown down between Conrad and her, and she understood that she could not take refuge in the fact of being a woman; the challenge to wrestle with herself by encountering him matched the one which had been offered to Aaron.
'He's really a revolutionary,' she thought. 'He is dedicated to change.' The idea of becoming lovers with him struck her as overwhelmingly attractive. Since their first casual contact as neighbours she had grown closer to him in a slow circular pleasant way, and now realised that she trusted him. He was able to bring out the most daring aspects of her without ever threatening or judging. And he was always straightforward about what he wanted.
Aaron saw in a stroke all the possible combinations in which Conrad and Cynthia could make love. He accepted that she could have a relationship with the youth that would rival, if not surpass, what she had with him. It was clear that it was his duty not to interfere with what she was having from Conrad. But his ability to swing free from jealousy when the situation was still in seed form had not stood the test of Cynthia's actual taking up with another man. He did not know whether he could withstand the experience without acting badly. And he could not conceive of humbling himself before the others; he was sure that Conrad would pity him and Cynthia would despise him, a combination his ego would not survive.
He felt a hand on his arm. 'I'm not cutting you out,' said Conrad, 'I'm dealing you into a different game. That's all. And you'll be confused, and you won't know what's happening, but that's only because it's new territory. And I've been to places that are just as fantastic as anything you can get to. We're both the same kind of thing. And I'll just keep reminding you that the panic you feel about to break loose is just the energy of the animal that's been penned up, whipped, caged, ever since you were born, ever since civilisation began. It's just the man in you wanting to come out all the way, and being afraid, because of all the voices whispering inside you, and all the policemen walking around outside you.'
'You're hypnotising me,' said Aaron.
'Just like the Sphinx,' said Conrad. 'Maybe you can explain to yourself what happened after you stayed in front of that thing, but you haven't come to terms with why you stayed in the first place, what its power was.' He squeezed Aaron's arm. 'I'm not out to hurt you, man,' he said. 'I just want to fuck your old lady, and I don't want it to be a bum scene. So I want us to get straight with each other. That's all.'
'Will you two fuck tonight?' Aaron asked, his voice ragged.
'Just with our minds,' Conrad replied. 'We won't do a cock and cunt scene until it's cool with you.'