Between the Bridge and the River (21 page)

“I’m cold,” he said. “I suppose that’s because I’m dead.”

Jung smiled. “You’re not dead. Not yet anyway.”

“Well, I’m not dreaming and I’m talking to you and you’re dead.”

“Yes, I am,” agreed the doctor as he sipped his wine. He relished the taste and lifted the glass to Fraser. “You sure you won’t have some?”

Fraser shook his head sadly. “No, thanks. I’ve been hammering it too much recently. I think it’s time I gave it a miss for a while.”

Jung nodded, genuinely sympathetic.

“Look, if I’m not dead and I’m not dreaming, what exactly is happening?”

Jung sighed, put down his glass. “You’re in crisis, Fraser. This is a fork in the road for you. We are in your subconscious. You’re having a near-death experience but you’re not dead yet.”

“I’m in a coma?”

“No, you’re dying but you’re not all the way there. You are unconscious, certainly, but this is not a normal dream, if that is not too ludicrous a proposal. We are deeper and further in. We are not only in your unconscious, we are in the Great Unconscious. The Collective Unconscious, which, I may add, was my discovery and not something I stole from a student of mine.”

“Oh, yeah, I think I read something about that.”

“Enough!” snapped the doctor. “We are here to talk about you.”

And that’s what they did.

For the first time in his life Fraser totally opened himself up to the possibilities of himself. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been honest with Carl in the past, in fact he had, but he had omitted certain things and ignored others, dismissing them as unimportant. He freed himself from that quantitive judgment and just told the Great Psychotherapist everything, absolutely everything in his life he could remember, allowing the good doctor to interrupt him when he felt it was relevant, to point out something to Fraser, or to clarify a fact for himself.

They had all the time in the world. Not an engineer or a referee in sight.

Jung was particularly interested in a small point that Fraser had considered irrelevant.

It seemed that, when Fraser was three years old, his mother had fallen ill, developed some malignant growths in her uterus, and had to
have a full hysterectomy. The operation was difficult and involved enough complications for her to spend six weeks in hospital. Fraser’s father was embarrassed by the nature of the complaint and referred to the whole affair as his wife’s “women’s problems.”

Everyone thought Fraser too young to understand why his mother was going away, so they just didn’t tell him. One day she was there, the next day she wasn’t and Fraser had been farmed out to his maternal grandmother, a giant wide-beamed frigate of a woman, who was well past the time in her life when she was up to dealing with and entertaining an energetic toddler.

Fraser pined for his mother, he cried and asked questions, and he was told she was away with women’s problems. She would be back very soon.

The hospital had strict visiting rules. Scotland at this time was awash with ludicrous restrictions. It made people feel that order had been restored after the horrors of the bombing raids and mayhem of World War II. No children under five except in maternity, and even then only between four and five on a Sunday.

So when he was three years old, Fraser got an eye infection caused by standing at the letterbox of his grandmother’s house, lifting the flap with his tubby little fingers and peering out, hoping to see his mother return. The resulting draft blew pollen into his tear ducts, causing them to swell his eyes almost shut. He had looked like a midget prizefighter who had just lost a title bout.

When his mother eventually returned, no one mentioned her absence but Fraser sensed she felt deeply guilty about having deserted him.

Jung felt this was extremely significant.

“Why?” asked Fraser. “It wasn’t like she did it on purpose. She was ill, for God’s sake.”

“I’m not saying she was wrong to be ill but your family was wrong to not talk to you about it.”

“I was only three.”

“Exactly. Just as you are dealing with separation anxiety, your mother disappears. I am amazed you are not even worse.”

Fraser was skeptical. “I’m not going to blame all my problems on my mother. It’s a ridiculously simple cliché. I’m surprised at you.”

“Your mother is not to blame for all of your problems but it is extremely important to find out where the trouble begins, and I am fairly sure, for you it began with this event. You learned not to trust. If you can’t trust, you can’t be trustworthy. Nothing is reliable to you, and you in turn are not reliable to yourself or anyone else. This causes you to feel shame, terror, self-loathing, depression, even suicidal.”

“Come on, that’s a bit of stretch, don’t you think? You sure about that?” said Fraser. He felt that Carl was phoning it in sometimes.

Jung nodded, tapping his pipe on the fireplace to clean it. “Oh, yes, I’m sure—and I am not phoning anything in,” he grumbled.

And on they talked. Well, Fraser talked mostly, Jung listening intently as he smoked his pipe, the blue-gray smoke spiraling up the tower and collecting in the rafters. At last Fraser felt he was finished. Everything was out, there was nothing he could remember that he hadn’t mentioned or discussed with Carl.

The two men sat in silence for a while. At length Jung asked, “Do you believe in God?”

Fraser thought for a moment, then said that, in light of recent events, yes, he did believe in God. He had been hanging around with dead people for what seemed like days. That would imply there was an afterlife, which in turn suggested that there was a God.

“Why would an afterlife suggest a God any more than life itself?” asked Jung.

“I suppose they both suggest God,” said Fraser.

Jung agreed but then said that just because Fraser had been with Virgil and H.P. Lovecraft and Brinsley Sheridan and himself, it didn’t mean there was an afterlife. Perhaps he was imagining the whole thing. Perhaps everything was a dream and nothing was ever real or ever had been.

Fraser thought about that for a moment. “I think that’s a dead end,” he said.

“I’m inclined to agree,” said Jung. “Perhaps it’s more productive to say that all dreams are real.”

Another long silence stretched between them.

“What now?” said Fraser at length.

“Now you try to go back,” replied the old man.

“How? I don’t know where to start.”

“Get up. Open the door and start walking. There is no poet this time to guide you but you have a lot more information at your finger-tips. It’s a dangerous trip. Good luck.”

“Will I die?”

“Everyone dies, Fraser.”

Fraser nodded. He stood up, as did Carl, and the two men embraced. Before Fraser opened the door, he turned and looked back.

“Will I see you again?” he asked, sounding a little girly.

“I hope so,” replied Carl.

Fraser nodded and stepped outside.

Of course, the landscape had changed again, he had expected that much, but he had not expected what he saw before him.

Belgium.

AS ANY REPUTABLE PRACTITIONER
of medicine will allow, the human body is extremely complex and in many ways mysterious. Maladies and problems can spring up and/or disappear without any logical or scientific explanation. Strict scientists, those who study failure incessantly, say that this is for reasons that have yet to be discovered. Groovier, more shamanistic students of human biology will say that the body is intertwined with the soul and, even though science has as yet been unable to detect it, the soul is the single most important driving force in humans, controlling everything from the autoimmune system to the need to defecate.

In George’s case, there was certainly a mystery occurring. It had nothing to do with his cancer but, as he lay in a deep sleep next to the incandescent Claudette in the most comfortable bed in the known Universe, his body began to shut down.

He was dying.

Quickly.

He ran down the length of the trench, mortar shells exploding behind him with hideously workmanlike thuds, not the kind of showbiz special effects he had expected. The big noise came from the guns on
his own side and they seemed even more terrifying even though they were aimed at some poor sods miles away.

He stumbled just as he heard a bullet
swiss
neutrally by his head, missing by inches but murderously indifferent to him. He fell into a muddy hole on top of another soldier who was crouched in the fetal position with his eyes shut tight and his hands over his ears.

The fetal soldier opened his eyes for a moment and then a look of amazed and dazed recognition changed his expression from terror to bewilderment.

“George?” he whispered.

“Hello, Fraser,” said George.

CADENCE POWERS LOVED VEGAS HOOKERS
. They would suck the pleasure and money from you with a speed and efficiency that left you breathless. Getting a blowjob from one of these avaricious sirens was the sexual equivalent of a roller-coaster ride. It was artificially created excitement and that’s what Vegas is all about. Showbiz! Making something thrilling out of absolutely nothing. All smoke and mirrors, an entertainment resort in the middle of a deadly arid plain. It was fantastic. The devil’s delight, a thumbing of the nose at God with all his trees and rocks and little wildlifey squirrels and bunny rabbits, all that Disney bullshit.

Cadence knelt at the glass-topped coffee table and genuflected before the cocaine, sucking the white powder into his nose with all the joyless violence of a blowjob from Tiffany. Tiffany, the hooker, was in the can rinsing her vagina and preparing it for the next customer.
Sanitized for your convenience
.

She had had so much reconstructive surgery that she could probably make do with wiping herself with a damp cloth. She was nonstick.

Men walked on the moon to create this technology.

After Tiffany left, Cadence called Room 1153.

“Hey, dawg, wassup?” he said, in the strange way that white talent agents from Los Angeles do in an attempt to sound like young black men from underprivileged backgrounds. A linguistic fashion as peculiar as the lisp that everybody in medieval Spain had to adopt after the king developed a speech impediment.

“Chillin. Whas wit choo,” replied Rory, also a soft whiteboy.

“Jus watchin
Cosby
. Wanna get a drink?”

“See you in the bar in ten.”

“S’all good,” said Cadence and hung up.

Cadence and Rory were junior talent agents at CAM, Creative Artistic Management, an enormous Orwellian talent agency based in Los Angeles that represented movie stars and writers and directors and producers. They were in town for the Las Vegas Comedy Festival—a bull-shit junket that none of the senior agents would even think of attending.

Cadence had left his fiancée back in L.A. and took advantage of flying solo to treat himself to a gram or two of the old Bolivian marching powder and engage the services of Tiffany, whom he had found in the classifieds of
L.A. Weekly,
a free left-wing newspaper and listings mag that subsidized itself with, among other things, ads from prostitutes. He had booked her himself. He could have had his assistant do it but he didn’t trust the little shit. He didn’t trust anyone at CAM and that was one of the reasons he was a rising star at the organization. At twenty-five he was on the way up. This would be his last trip to one of these gnarly loser conventions, going to see fifteen stand-up comedians every night for three nights, with all of them doing their same tired shtick about alienation and airplane peanuts. From now on he was going to be at film festivals or fucking nothing. He would have to take Lauren with him, though, she was getting a bit pissed at him for being out so much, but she was so dull. All she could talk about was fucking aerobics and wheatgrass. She was so L.A. it made him sick.

He didn’t like Lauren much at all but he was marrying her because she was perfect for him. Looked great on his arm, knew the way he liked his dick sucked. What more could you ask?

He’d have to stop hanging with Rory, though. He creeped people out with all that phony ghetto-speak.

Cadence wanted to get ahead and get head and that was about it. He was a simple man, unpleasant but simple. A type that show business pulls to its ample prosthetic bosom and showers with glittering prizes.

He put on his jacket, checked his nostrils in the mirror, and stepped out into the night.

The comedians were worse than usual and he couldn’t figure out why anyone was laughing. The place was packed with the usual polyester retards that flock to Vegas for a little piece of glamour. Vegas, as glitzy as a trailer park at Christmas, called to the stupid, and that was what Cadence wanted to see. He was looking for someone who appealed to the masses. He was looking for a comedian whom he could package, someone who was lovable and moronic and safe enough to develop a prime-time situation comedy for.

He needed a guy who could be the comic anchor while his life went crazy with hilarious results. He needed a comedy Nemo, an every-man to put with his nagging wife/boss, his goofy brother/neighbor, his dorky friends/in-laws, and his adorable kids/dog.

A hit sitcom was the way to make a star, and making a star is what made a star agent. Movies were too tough and political but TV was a machine, it devoured product, it needed more talent every year, performers to be shaved and dieted into acceptance by the mob.

Sanitized for your convenience.

There was nothing here tonight, though. The customers were just laughing because they were drunk. Cadence could tell the difference; real laughs sounded a bit like music, drunk laughter sounded like dogs barking.

He was bored.

“Rory, let’s get the fuck out of here,” he whispered to his tubby bespectacled colleague.

“Fuckin A, dawg,” said Rory.

The two agents slipped out while the unfunny lanky doofus on the stage complained that bananas were too difficult to peel. They screwed up—the doofus went on to become the richest and highest-paid sitcom star America had ever seen.