Waiting for the Galactic Bus (33 page)

Charity needed no great mental leap to know that for truth. When she’d thought of God before, she always saw Purdy Simco, and maybe Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus, but always Roy as John the Baptist. As the cab turned into Main Street, Charity wasn’t all that sure whether she was glad to be in Plattsville again, except Woody would be there.

And yet... something else, something once a part of her but gone forever now. “I feel like I lost something, Simmy.”

“Not to worry; quite natural.” He patted her hand. “One of your ancestors felt the same way. But you’ll manage. Never fails, Char: every so often at the beginnings of your kind” — Coyul kissed his fingertip and transferred the blessing to the tip of her nose — “comes one smart little monkey. There.”

Once again, as at Club Banal, Charity experienced an almost subliminal frame of memory — a pool of water, a dim image reflected... then nothing.

“But I do apologize for the theatrics at the White Rose.”

“I think you should, Simmy. I might have had a real heart attack.”

“Look at it this way,” said the Prince of Darkness as the cab slid to the curb before McDonald’s. “If I’d knocked on the door in a pinstripe, what could I sell you? Goodbye, Miss Stovall.”

“Ms.” Charity corrected him. “I just got liberated, remember?”

Jake alighted to open her door, but Charity lingered long enough to give Coyul an impulsive kiss and a squeeze. “Listen: if you have to pull this on anyone else, don’t use the horns, okay?”

“I give you my word, that was an absolute first. If it’s any consolation, tomorrow I may be out of a job altogether.”

She cocked her head quizzically. “Would God let that happen?”

“He’s in trouble, too. It’s all very involved. Go on, now. Have talented children. At least one musician.”

“Bye, Simmy.”

Jake lounged against the front fender, hands in his pockets. “I suppose I’ll miss you, Char.”

“Don’t say that,” she said with no exaggeration. “I’ll be wishing I was dead for real.”

“Not you; not with all that living to do.”

“Tell the truth, Jake, I almost —”

“No.” He stopped her, pulling Charity close to him. “Never mistake compassion for something else. You could end up making a career out of it like Mary Magdalene,” he recalled. “Always getting had and left. But she was that sort, an injury collector.”

Charity understood him with canny female instinct. “You want to be alone always? I don’t think so, Mr. Iscariot.”

“It suits me.”

Her affection just then was not at all myopic. “You haven’t burned all your old vanities, Jake. There’s a few left.”

“Well.” Jake opened the cab door brusquely.

“Don’t tell me.” Charity held on to him. “You’ve got a call.”

He seemed anxious to be gone, glancing both ways along the street. “Maybe. Hate to deadhead all the way back.”

“Wait, will you?” Charity pulled his head down to hers and kissed him. No, he wasn’t good at it as Woody, but still almost worth being dead for. “I don’t care if Simmy is the Prince and all that. Take him at gin rummy. He’s a pushover.”

“So are you.” The sudden, urgent pressure of his embrace surprised Charity; dead or alive, still a definite hunk. “An abyss of sentiment.”

“Go to hell,” she murmured against his cheek.

“On my way.”

Charity watched him slide across the front seat and drive away, turning at the next corner, cruising, ready to stop for a fare.

My God, I’m alive. I remember the water hole and being lost and afraid. I remember someone making me somehow human, and the other one who took my fear of the face in the water and made me laugh at it. If that’s the truth under all the Sunday-school trappings, I guess I can live with it. Have to.

A little giddy; she’d never had thoughts like that or so easily expressed.
They’ve kicked me upstairs, just like they did at the water hole. Please, Simmy, help us to keep laughing.

When Charity turned to go into McDonald’s, the first human being she saw through the windows was Woody Barnes, looking alive as she felt.

    35   

The higher education of Roy Stride

— fucker!”

The blow launched at Barion found nothing to land on, threw Roy off balance. He sprawled on oily, stinking gravel. Roy blinked, shook his head, stared groggily at the man-made hills of the Plattsville garbage dump and up at the universe.

“I’m not dead. He said I’m not dead.”

He lurched up, brushing garbage from the SS uniform; they’d left him that. They left him a lot more. His head hurt. His mind felt like a push-button FM tuner punching back and forth between two stations, two voices, his own and the scary one.

And the nightmare visions: pure mind again, watching from a great distance as the planets, from blistering Mercury to the dark ice ball of Pluto, wheeled about the roaring sun.

... worlds beyond worlds, nothing finite or contained but opening out forever in an infinite process of becoming. Intelligence subjective, flawed, needing ever to renew itself, cleanse vision, reform with no truth ultimate.

No!

Roy squeezed palms to his ears to shut out that serene, cruel voice.
NO!
he defied the broken refrigerators, plastic food containers, greasy tinfoil and rusted, skeletal Chevies. “It ain’t like that. You can look it up in the Bible —”

Consider “Aryanism “first as a careless misinterpretation of a blanket term for a prehistoric people, later as an apology for white supremacy. This compounded error served as dogma for the diseased pseudophilosophy of Adolf Hitler, itself based on his severe paranoia.

“I don’t know these words,” Roy bellowed to the sprung-out sofas, broken kitchen chairs, pyramids of Hefty-bagged garbage and the incurious rats. “I’m alive. What you doing to my head?”

The visions would not leave him alone any more than the voice. Longer view now, beyond the solar system to the cold, bright stars, other systems whirling indifferently about the driving furnace of their suns.

Paranoia, the common cold of neurosis. The paranoiac, perceiving all external stimuli as threat, needs to see his enemies, not merely sense their external presence. Being imaginary, these threats must be fleshed out to visible targets, the more clearly defined the better. Thus the emotionally defeated German worker was given the Jew. His disadvantaged, disenfranchised American counterpart is offered not only the Jew but the Negro and Catholic — together with any group, way of life or system of belief not harmonious with his own, stamped with the label enemy in large red letters.

“You stop!” Roy sobbed to the microcosmos of broken Styro-foam, spent toothpaste tubes, Tampax, condoms, Kleenex and the small, night-foraging animals surviving now as his own kind once did. “Holy Jesus, get out of my head... STOP.”

With his whole shriveled soul, he begged the voice to leave him alone. Against that gigantic clarity, he struggled to regain a small, neat box for a cosmos to believe in, with strong walls to contain all the truths he lived by, but the walls caved in under the pressure of what he knew and could never again deny.

He saw other systems now, the whole galaxy revolving with its own motives, rank with hatreds, vibrant with love, brilliant with alien striving in which he had no place or dramatic destiny, all wheeling ponderously through impersonal space and time.

Subconsciously aware of the fragility of his artificial reality, the paranoiac must ever reinforce its defenses with more and more elaborate rationale. His virtues must be defined, his enemies painted in primary colors. The basic motive of fear is raised to mystic proportion: a cause, a uniform, a symbol. He proclaims his purposes one with God’s.

“NO —”

The central infection inflames and eventually mortifies the entire psyche until any healthy stimulus becomes alien.

Roy stumbled through the reeking, rusted mountains of garbage toward the lights from Plattsville.

The fundamental problem of identity —

“I got no fuckin’ problems, man. None!”

— reaches to the core of being until even sexuality may be stunted. In males the basic relationship to women becomes dysfunctional. Commonly the subject may not be able to separate pleasure from guilt, and therefore pays with pain, quid pro quo. When this compensation becomes an intrinsic part of the natural pleasure principle, there can be no gratification without pain or defilement.

“This is... insane.”

No, just reality. Being finite and wholly fallible myself, I have my own prejudices. What you call hang-ups.

“Why do you hate me?”

Because I’m subjective enough to be disgusted with a flaw in my own work. Because I’m in trouble, too, but you I can deal with. Live with it, Roy.

“That’s right, live!” Roy hurled to the uninterested stars. “I’m alive. Nothing’s changed. I win, you fuck.”

Infantile, needing to be the center and reason for creation, the less educated or advantaged subject needs a distorted miraculous theology to support a perilous existence, externally and constantly threatened as it is by “them.”

Howl.

Tightening, darkening, narrowing in ever-smaller circles —

Howl.

— until as your human joke puts it, the paranoiac eventually flies up his own metaphorical ass and disappears.

Roy reached the limits of Main where it became a feeder road to the Interstate. He hooked his arm around a lamppost, tottering, while the brutal light in his brain grew brighter and brighter.

Can you cut it?
the cruel voice challenged,
or just give up?

    36   

Perks for the upwardly mobile

Woody it was, solid, warm and alive in her arms, with all the customers in McDonald’s gaping at them, some of the vocal opinion that young people had no manners, and if they wanted to make out they should go home or to a drive-in.

Charity came up for air somewhere around the fifth kiss. “Woody, we’re alive.”

“Promised you, didn’t I?” he murmured into her hair. “Nothing will happen for me that you won’t share.”

She still hung on to him for dear life. “You did. You promised. Gol-lee, I must be alive for sure or I wouldn’t be so hungry.”