The clarity of his vision, impressed upon her when she was sensitised by the hashish, had radically altered
her
vision; she was indelibly stamped with the power of his worldview. Later she was able to dissemble, the super-ego pointing out that his speech was merely the product of a youthful idealism coupled to extremist thinking, and her id providing the energy for enough guilt to allow her to dismiss the contents of what he said. But the effect worked inside her, beneath all her conscious shufflings. She continued to use both marijuana and hashish and she found her feet pointing more and more in the direction of what was nebulously termed The Movement.
'It's a weird thing to listen to,' said Conrad as he filled the pipe again. They had slumped into their chairs and were enjoying the release of tension throughout the muscles of their bodies; their eyes were already bloodshot, and their pulses raced with the accelerated beat of their hearts.
It's all he plays anymore,' Cynthia said. 'I heard it stoned one night with the earphones on. It was beautiful. It was like Bach and Casals became one person, and the music didn't belong to one or the other, but both of them at the same time. It was as though their souls blended together in the music.' She lapsed into a revery of memory and sound, sinking into the dream that she and Aaron had fashioned from their incom-pletion and need. Conrad spun off into his thoughts, speeding down the ski slopes of his mind in great powdery rushes that distracted him from all external stimuli. They took on the roles of strangers with each other, as impersonal as people in a waiting room, tied together only by the common purpose of attending the same event. It was a precious moment in which communication ceased, and a blessed communion enveloped them.
'You know,' she said, her words distant, 'there's more to Aaron than you might think. Maybe he does wear a suit and has short hair and isn't hip to all the latest movements, but he's really very deep and can be incredibly sensitive. And more than all that, he's a good man. You should go see him at his work sometime. He's the only teacher in the school who cares about the kids.'
T know all that,' said Conrad. T wouldn't have kept coming around if I didn't see what's inside him. And I wouldn't take a night to guide him through an acid trip if I thought he was a waste of time. He's a beautiful cat, but he's still swimming around in a lot of shit.'
'Don't you?' she asked.
'Sure. And he gives me as much as I give him. The only difference is he doesn't know yet what he's got to give. I'm still a kid in many ways, but in some areas I don't have any confusion left.' He kept talking but his attention went inward again, and his words came out hollow, disconnected. 'I want him with us.'
Cynthia started. 'Us? Who is
usV
'The people,' Conrad said. 'The real people.'
Something in his tone called forth a quality of conditioned hysteria that manifested itself as an attitude that might be found in one of the news magazines. His choice of terms gave rise to visions of conspiracy in Cynthia's consciousness and she recoiled slightly from the man who had so suddenly come to assume a demonic form, an agent from a dark underground. She wondered whether association with Conrad was dangerous, whether she and Aaron were being watched because of it, whether they could be arrested. The whole world of wire-tapping and midnight seizures, of narcotics scandals and bombs in cellars, which had been to her a dim tabloid melodrama, came to life in the form of a slender boy, someone who just six months earlier she would have called a hippie.
'Who are you?' she said.
Conrad laughed. It was a rare expression for him. 'I'm just me,' he said. 'I don't represent anybody, I don't belong to any organisation. I'm just one of the people. Us. There are no membership rolls or rules. There's just people. People who are alive. People who know, and don't keep pretending that the world is something other than it is. And we are the revolution, because we aren't dedicated to anything except life. All life. You know that if the oxygen-carbon cycle of the atmosphere is thrown too far off balance everything will die except certain primitive forms of moss. When Jesus said that the meek would inherit the earth he included more than just human beings in his vision.'
She shook her head, she had no experiential tools with which to grasp the concept he was shaping. 'It doesn't make sense,' she said.
He thought a moment and then laughed again. Think of the Mafia,' he said. They call their operation
"our
thing" and recognise one another by sight. Only we aren't interested in amassing power and wealth. We just want to derail the train the species is taking to its own doom.' He looked across the table and watched the woman with the wrinkled forehead and wondered how much of what he said could possibly penetrate the web of prejudices she had concerning his way of life, in what ways she was translating his words into ideas that did not accurately reflect the reality he was describing. 'We're just friends,' he said at last. 'We live any place, and we do many things. Some are farmers, some blow up banks, some run book stores, some deal dope. There are mothers and children. You know, we are a society. A network of friends. And when we meet one another, even though we've never met before, we know who we are.' He put his elbows on the table. 'The FBI now has special schools to teach their agents how to act like us. As though having love in your heart and intelligence in your eyes was something you could achieve on the basis of attempting to deceive your fellow human beings with the purpose of jailing them. They're incompetents who haven't worked out the principle of cause-and-effect on any higher level than by understanding that pulling a trigger will fire a gun.'
He sat back in his chair, his breath heavy in his chest, his golden hair shimmering like a halo and tumbling to his shoulders, his face glowing with exalted purpose. 'And when we meet people who want to break out of their bags, we help them. Only because we want life to continue.'
'You make it sound very altruistic,' she said. 'I thought you were doing this because you wanted to ball me.'
'Sure/ he shot back. 'It's part of the same thing.' His eyes burned into hers, and for the first time since he had met her, he let the full blaze of his desire be visible. He had confessed and she had heard, and now they were ready for the act for which all the palaver concerning the state of the species had been a necessary foreplay. In an age when fucking grew boring either through fidelity or unbridled promiscuity, he had learned to infuse his lust with a sense of context and purpose, guarding against the horror of the aimless orgasm. In the same way that certain esoteric eastern sects laced their sex with the spice of mysticism, Conrad had come to surround his erection with the garland of social significance. When Cynthia finally did spread her legs for him to enter, she would be taking in not only a man, but the vanguard of the entire liberation front. The uncomic purity of his motivation and the actual deadly seriousness of the world condition saved him from ludicrousness. She hadn't had another man in over three years, and she yearned to define herself in some other way than was possible within the parameters permitted by Aaron's body. She was not unfulfilled in the areas in which she and Aaron romped together, but she had become aware that was only one small section of the universe of her sexual potential. Without saying it to herself in so many words, she wanted to find out what lay beyond her role as a complement to a single man. She had the smallest intimation that to give in to Conrad's request was only the introduction to a path whose development she could not foresee. But already the walls of her secure self-definition were crumbling.
The sonorous lines of the music swelled throughout the house as she rose from the table and walked deliberately to the window, turning her back on Conrad, and stood looking out into the night. Her head was swimming and her knees were weak. She knew that she had taken the first step, and wondered whether he would understand her silence and stance as an invitation.
She waited a long time, unknowing of what went on behind her, feeling the backs of her bare legs tingling, her arse trembling, her spine poised in a delicate curve beneath the thin fabric. She strained without movement, attempting to sense the presence behind her, and just at the moment when she was sure she had misread the mood, his hands rested on her hips, paused, and then slid surely and softly around front, over her belly, and up to her breasts. She sighed, closed her eyes, and collapsed against him.
All softness and shaking, she melted into the hard flat chest, the muscled thighs, the half-erect cock. And like a skilled danseur he spun her around, catching her about the waist, and gently crushed her to him. She wobbled slightly, at once afraid and committed, and then flew against his body, her arms circling his neck, the length of her clinging like wet cloth around his frame.
All considerations, all questions of age and loyalty, all problems of time and place, disappeared, and they became male and female simply, exulting in the shared beauty of their union. Conrad nuzzled her throat, worked his mouth under her chin, and onto her lips, where they were swept up into the unique rapture of the first kiss, the first meeting of breath and tongues.
For its duration, they were eternal. The long months of preparation for the massive turmoil of energy, built by disciplined denial and released by the mutual permission to ecstasy, found their culmination in the embrace. They dived into the tingling awareness of their deed.
Like a wave that has been called from the deep ocean by the far-ranging attraction of the moon, swelling into fuller and more perfect form until it sweeps majestically in upon a rocky shore and there breaks with a roar of triumphant power into a turbulent splatter of shimmering white foam and disappears as though it had never been, so their kiss rose to its cataclysmic climax as their stretched lips sought to swallow one another's mouth and their lungs like bellows sucked the air from their chests and discharged it through their nostrils, leaving them cemented by the force of the single vacuum they had become.
Externally, there was no movement; their hands were still, their eyes closed. All the force born of their contact was inside the bubble created by the intensity of exchange. And to an outside observer, their separation would have seemed violently abrupt. They just burst apart, stood back a foot and stared wildly at the mystery they had helped to create, already propelled back into context, but still trailing a wake of strangeness. And then they clung to one another tightly, like people who had jumped at the last minute from a car that had gone on to plummet over the edge of a steep precipice. They found no comfort in one another's arms, only the imperative to push on further into the void.
Aaron lay on the couch and pondered the question of self-honesty. He had read almost a dozen books on LSD and felt prepared for the experience that was about to begin. And yet knew that no amount of intellectual prestructuring could contain an episode the very purpose of which was to transcend the limitations of the conscious mind. Given the circumstances under which he took the drug, the paramount issue in his mind was his relationship with Cynthia.
They could be fucking on the kitchen floor right now,' he thought. 'And I'm not even interested in going in to find out.'
Foremost among his ruminations was the understanding that there was no way to keep Cynthia from having sex with Conrad without continuing to sacrifice a great deal of his autonomy. She would be faithful, but only at a price, the price he had been paying for three years, serving as the reservoir she went to to fulfil all her needs. They were together as often, as much, as a parent and a small child, and more than once he had reasoned that they were playing out childhood patterns upon one another. He blocked out the details of the movie which starred Cynthia, cunt agape, slobbering into Conrad's mouth. There was something about her, more than with any other woman he had been with, that made her nakedness seem precious. When he fucked her and slipped his hand between her buttocks, the crack slimy with her secretions, it was unthinkable that another man should know that, or that she could let herself be touched in that way by anyone but him. And because it was impossible to acknowledge, he could let himself enjoy the fantasies of her in that role. But with his most erotic daydreams about to materialise, perhaps in his own house, he pulled the plug on his interior projector. He wondered whether the acid would force him to face what he now so easily put aside, and whether it would push him into areas of disclosure that were even more volatile, those parts of him that wanted to be rid of Cynthia, to have her gone and not acting as a constant drain and distraction, compounding his basic confusion. It occurred to him that under the influence of the drug he might even be moved to tell her of his excursions.
His thoughts sped back to a night several weeks earlier when Cynthia had gone to spend the night with a friend. He had found himself walking towards the bay, through the black neighbourhood, when the sound of jazz hit his ear, and he stopped to listen to the cool, sweet, wise music dance through the salt air. On impulse he went into the place, a long narrow room with a bar, a stage, and two dozen round tables. He waited until his eyes adjusted to the dim light, nodded to the bartender, and went to sit by the wall, ordering a bourbon and spring water when the waitress came by. Three musicians played, a piano, a bass, and drums. They operated like people who knew one another and their world so well, who had come to such a thorough acceptance of life, that they need pay no heed to where their playing led them. They spun out run after run with no rehearsal, no forethought; with nothing but sheer elegant style. They produced lines and harmonies that they would never reproduce, and which would never be recorded.