“Crrrrrrystal,” he said under his breath, and grinned. It seemed that he had been sitting here and going over one thing and another for a very long time, but no ash had grown on his cigarette at all. He was astounded. He had another puff.
“Bart?”
He looked up. It was Mary, and she had a canapé for him. He smiled at her. “Sit down. Is that for me?”
“Yes.” She gave it to him. It was a small triangular sandwich with pink stuff in the middle. It suddenly occurred to him that Mary would be frightened, horrified, if she knew he was on a trip. She might call an emergency squad, the police, God knew who else. He had to act normally. But the thought of acting normal made him feel stranger than ever.
“I’ll eat it later,” he said, and put the sandwich in his shirt pocket.
“Bart, are you drunk?”
“Just a little,” he said. He could see the pores on her face. He could not recall ever having seen them so clearly before. All those little holes, as if God was a cook and she was a pie crust. He giggled and her deepening frown made him say: “Listen, don’t tell.”
“Tell?” She offered a puzzled frown.
“About the Product four.”
“Bart, what in the name of God are you—”
“I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” he said. “I’Il be back.” He left without looking at her, but he could feel her frown radiating out from her face in waves like heat from a microwave oven. Yet if he didn’t look back at her, it was possible she would not guess. In this, the best of all possible worlds, anything was possible, even crrrystal staircases. He smiled fondly. The word had become an old friend.
The trip to the bathroom somehow became an odyssey, a safari. The party noise seemed to have picked up a cyclical beat, IT SEEMED TO fade in and FADE OUT in syllables OF THREE AND even the STEREO faded IN and OUT. He mumbled to people he thought he knew but refused to take up a single thrown conversational gambit; he only pointed to his crotch, smiled, and walked on. He left puzzled faces in his wake. Why is there never a party full of strangers when you need one? he scolded himself.
The bathroom was occupied. He waited outside for what seemed like hours and when he finally got in he couldn’t urinate although he seemed to want to. He looked at the wall above the toilet tank and the wall was bulging in and out in a cyclical, three-beat rhythm. He flushed even though he hadn’t gone, in case someone outside might be listening, and watched the water swirl out of the bowl. It had a sinister pink color, as if the last user had passed blood. Unsettling.
He left the bathroom and the party smote him again. Faces came and went like floating balloons. The music was nice, though. Elvis was on. Good old Elvis. Rock on, Elvis, rock on.
Mary’s face appeared in front of him and hovered, looking concerned. “Bart, what’s wrong with you?”
“Wrong? Nothing wrong.” He was astounded, amazed. His words had come out in a visual series of musical notes. “I’m hallucinating.” He said it aloud, but it was spoken only for himself.
“Bart, what have you taken?” She looked frightened now.
“Mescaline,” he said.
“Oh God, Bart.
Drugs? Why?”
“Why not?” he responded, not to be flip, but because it was the only response he could think of quickly. The words came out in notes again, and this time some of them had flags.
“Do you want me to take you to a doctor?”
He looked at her, surprised, and went ponderously over her question in his mind to see if it had any hidden connotations; Freudian echoes of the funny farm. He giggled again, and the giggles streamed musically out of his mouth and in front of his eyes, crrrystal notes of lines and spaces, broken by bars and rests.
“Why would I want a doctor?” he said, choosing each word. The question mark was a high quarter-note. “It’s just like she said. Not that good, not that bad. But interesting.”
“Who?” she demanded. “Who told you? Where did you get it?” Her face was changing, seeming to become hooded and reptilian. Mary as cheap mystery-movie police detective, shining the light in the suspect’s eyes—
Come
on,
McGonigal, whichever way you want it, hard or soft
—and then worse still she began to remind him uneasily of the H. P. Lovecraft stories he had read as a boy, the Cthulu Mythos stories, where perfectly normal human beings changed into fishy, crawling things at the urgings of the Elder Ones. Mary’s face began to look scaly, vaguely eel-like.
“Never mind,” he said, frightened. “Why can’t you leave me alone? Stop fucking me up. I’m not bothering you.”
Her face recoiled, became Mary’s again, Mary’s hurt, mistrustful face, and he was sorry. The party beat and swirled around them. “All right, Bart,” she said quietly. “You hurt yourself just any way you like. But please don’t embarrass me. Can I ask you that much?”
“Of course you c—”
But she had not waited for his answer. She left him, going quickly into the kitchen without looking back. He felt sorry, but he also felt relieved. But suppose someone else tried to talk with him? They would know too. He couldn’t talk to people normally, not like this. Apparently he couldn’t even fool people into thinking he was drunk.
“Rrrrreet,” he said, ruffling the r’s lightly off the roof of his mouth. This time the notes came out in a straight line, all of them hurrying notes with flags. He could make notes all night and be perfectly happy, he didn’t mind. But not here, where anybody could come along and accost him. Someplace private, where he could hear himself think. The party made him feel as if he were standing behind a large waterfall. Hard to think against the sound of all that. Better to find some quiet backwater. With perhaps a radio to listen to. He felt that listening to music would aid his thinking, and there was a lot of think about. Reams of things.
Also, he was quite sure that people had began to glance over at him. Mary must have spread the word.
I’m worried. Bart’s on mescaline.
It would move from group to group. They would go on pretending to dance, pretending to drink and have their conversations, but they would really be observing him from behind their hands, whispering about him. He could tell. It was all crrrystal clear.
A man walked past him, carrying a very tall drink and weaving slightly. He twitched the man’s sport jacket and whispered hoarsely: “What are they saying about me?”
The man gave him a disconnected smile and blew a warm breath of scotch in his face. “I’ll write that down,” he said, and walked on.
He finally got into Walter Hamner’s den (he could not have said how much later) and when he closed the door behind him, the sounds of the party became blessedly muted. He was getting scared. The stuff he had taken hadn’t topped out yet; it just kept coming on stronger and stronger. He seemed to have crossed from one side of the living room to the other in the course of one blink; through the darkened bedroom where coats had been stored in another blink; down the hall in a third. The chain of normal, waking existence had come unclipped, spilling reality beads every which way. Continuity had broken down. His time sense was el destructo. Suppose he never came down? Suppose he was like this forever? It came to him to curl up and sleep it off, but he didn’t know if he could. And if he did, God knew what dreams would come. The light, spur-of-the-moment way he had taken the pill now appalled him. This wasn’t like being drunk; there was no small kernel of sobriety winking and blinking down deep in the center of him, that part that never got drunk. He was wacky all the way through.
But it was better in here. Maybe he could get control of it in here, by himself. And at least if he freaked out he wouldn’t—
“Hi there.”
He jumped, startled, and looked into the corner. A man was sitting there in a high-backed chair by one of Walter’s bookcases. There was an open book on the man’s lap, as a matter of fact. Or was it a man? There was a single light on in the room, a lamp on a small round table to the speaker’s left. Its light cast long shadows on his face, shadows so long that his eyes were dark caverns, his cheeks etched in sardonic, malefic lines. For a moment he thought he had stumbled on Satan sitting in Wally Hamner’s den. Then the figure stood and he saw it was a man, only a man. A tall fellow, maybe sixty, with blue eyes and a nose that had been repeatedly punched in losing bouts with the bottle. But he wasn’t holding a drink, nor was there one on the table.
“Another wanderer, I see,” the man said, and offered his hand. “Phil Drake.”
“Barton Dawes,” he said, still dazed from his fright. They shook. Drake’s hand was twisted and scarred by some old wound—a burn, perhaps. But he didn’t mind shaking it.
Drake.
The name was familiar but he couldn’t remember where he had heard it before.
“Are you quite all right?” Drake asked. “You look a little—”
“I’m high,” he said. “I took some mescaline and oh boy am I high.” He glanced at the bookcases and saw them going in and out and didn’t like it. It was too much like the beating of a giant heart. He didn’t want to see things like that anymore.
“I see,” Drake said. “Sit down. Tell me about it.”
He looked at Drake, slightly amazed, and then felt a tremendous surge of relief. He sat down. “You know about mescaline?” he asked.
“Oh, a little. A little. I run a coffeehouse downtown. Kids wander in off the streets, tripping on something ... is it a good trip?” he asked politely.
“Good and bad,” he said. “It’s ... heavy. That’s a good word, the way they use it.”
“Yes. It is.”
“I was getting a little scared.” He glanced out the window and saw a long, celestial highway stretching across the black dome of the sky. He looked away casually, but couldn’t help licking his lips. “Tell me ... how long does this usually go on?”
“When did you drop?”
“Drop?” The word dropped out of his mouth in letters, fell to the carpet, and dissolved there.
“When did you take the stuff?”
“Oh ... about eight-thirty.”
“And it’s ...” He consulted his watch. “It’s a quarter of ten now—”
“Quarter of
ten?
Is that
all?”
Drake smiled. “The sense of time turns to rubber, doesn’t it? I expect you’ll be pretty well down by one-thirty.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. I should think so. You’re probably peaking now. Is it very visual mesc?”
“Yes. A little
too
visual.”
“More things to be seen than the eye of man was meant to behold,” Drake said, and offered a peculiar twisted smile.
“Yes, that’s it. That’s just it.” His sense of relief at being with this man was intense. He felt saved. “What do you do besides talk to middle-aged men who have fallen down the rabbit hole?”
Drake smiled. “That’s rather good. Usually people on mesc or acid turn inarticulate, sometimes incoherent. I spend most of my evenings at the Dial Help Center. On weekday afternoons I work at the coffee house I mentioned, a place called Drop Down Mamma. Most of the clientele are street freaks and stewbums. Mornings I just walk the streets and talk to my parishioners, if they’re up. And in between, I run errands at the county jail.”
“You’re a minister?”
“They call me a street priest. Very romantic. Malcolm Boyd, look out. At one time I was a real priest.”
“Not any more?”
“I have left the mother church,” Drake said. He said it softly, but there was a kind of dreadful finality in his words. He could almost hear the clang of iron doors slammed shut forever.
“Why did you do that?”
Drake shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. What about you? How did you get the mesc?”
“I got it from a girl on her way to Las Vegas. A nice girl, I think. She called me on Christmas Day.”
“For help?”
“I think so.”
“Did you help her?”
“I don’t know.” He smiled craftily. “Father, tell me about my immortal soul.”
Drake twitched. “I’m not your father.”
“Never mind, then.”
“What do you want to know about your ‘soul’?”
He looked down at his fingers. He could make bolts of light shoot from their tips whenever he wanted to. It gave him a drunken feeling of power. “I want to know what will happen to it if I commit suicide.”
Drake stirred uneasily. “You don’t want to think about killing yourself while you’re tripping. The dope talks, not you.”
“
I
talk,” he said. “Answer me.”
“I can’t. I don’t know what will happen to your ‘soul’ if you commit suicide. I do, however, know what will happen to your body. It will rot.”
Startled by this idea, he looked down at his hands again. Obligingly, they seemed to crack and molder in front of his gaze, making him think of that Poe story, “The Strange Case of M. Valdemar.” Quite a night. Poe and Lovecraft. A. Gordon Pym, anyone? How about Abdul Allhazred, the Mad Arab? He looked up, a little disconcerted, but not really daunted.
“What’s your body doing?” Drake asked.
“Huh?” He frowned, trying to parse sense from the question.
“There are two trips,” Drake said. “A head trip and a body trip. Do you feel nauseated? Achey? Sick in any way?”
He consulted his body. “No,” he said. “I just feel ... busy.” He laughed a little at the word, and Drake smiled It was a good word to describe how he felt. His body seemed very active, even still. Rather light, but not ethereal. In fact, he had never felt so
fleshy,
so conscious of the way his mental processes and physical body were webbed together. There was no parting them. You couldn’t peel one away from the other. You were stuck with it, baby. Integration. Entropy. The idea burst over him like a quick tropical sunrise. He sat chewing it over in light of his current situation, trying to make out the pattern, if there was one. But—
“But there’s the soul,” he said aloud.
“What about the soul?” Drake asked pleasantly.
“If you kill the brain, you kill the body,” he said slowly. “And vice versa. But what happens to your soul? There’s the wild card, Fa ... Mr. Drake.”