Kinflicks (75 page)

‘Nothing happened.'

‘Would you know if something happened, if something
did
happen?' he asked, gazing at me with an irritating serenity. ‘In your current crude state, the subtle ranges of impact aren't available to you. You're expecting immediate and dramatic results, but it doesn't work that way. That was how I approached drugs in Montreal — for on-the-spot enlightenment. You're so fucking goal-oriented. If you have sex, you want an instant orgasm.'

‘Not necessarily,' I protested, injured by his mistaken estimate of my character. How many Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights had I spent pleading with Ira
not
to force me to have an orgasm? ‘Maybe you're just projecting your personality quirks onto me.'

‘I
do not project. I have subdued my personal desires to such an extent that I no longer
have
desires. If one is empty of desire, one has no need to project it onto other people.'

‘How do you know when you're empty of desire?' I asked, genuinely perplexed.

‘You
know,'
he promised me, crossing his eyes and closing them, and rotating his stomach muscles like twiddling his thumbs.

He stood up and assumed the semen retention posture, motioning for me to copy him. I did so, confused, since I had no semen to retain. Wendy wandered over, her wet diaper drooping, and tried to imitate us, sticking one chubby leg behind her and reaching intently for her big toe with her nose. She tumbled over and hit her head on the concrete and began howling. Hawk looked up at her angrily, while I cradled her and rubbed her bump. His expression said clearly: You must make the break with these distracting worldly ties. I turned my back on him.

During Wendy's nap, Hawk led me to a spot in the back yard near the Bliss family graveyard. He thrust four sticks into the ground to form a square. On them he placed a stiff straw place mat from my kitchen table. Then he scooped up some topsoil and carefully picked out all the clods and sticks and stones. He placed a mound of this sifted topsoil on the mat. Using a smooth stone, he leveled off the mound into a plate-sized disk.

We sat on the grass a couple of yards away and stared at this mud pie through half-opened eyes. Hawk said we were trying to summon up within ourselves its spiritual image. He mumbled lover's endearments to it like, ‘Vast Expansive One, Fruit Nurturer, Concealer of Subterranean Secrets.' And I contemplated the phrase ‘dust to dust' as he had instructed. I was trying to decide through how many human and animal and plant bodies the material in the mud pie had been recycled since its creation.

Eventually Hawk and I began opening and closing our eyes, like camera shutters, trying to imprint its spiritual image on our retinas. Finally, Hawk grabbed my arm. At last, I thought, as he dragged me across the lawn toward the pool. This is it!

He pushed me down by the pool and threw himself down beside me and closed his eyes. ‘Do you see it?' he demanded urgently.

I closed my eyes expectantly. But I saw the usual uninspired black. In desperation I searched the black for even the faintest flicker of illumination. I saw nothing. Should I lie? Would Hawk be likely to perform ritual coition with a devotional dunce?

‘See what?' I asked noncommittally.

‘The luminous disk, purified from all its gross material imperfections.'

‘Uh…'

Just then Wendy, bless her heart, tottered through the gate, saving me from having to reveal to Hawk that he'd chosen a spiritual pygmy as his celestial sex partner.

That night after Wendy was in bed, I hunted out our Christmas tree lights in the attic, at Hawk's request. We fixed up two strings, one all red and the other all blue. With an elaborate series of extension cords, we managed to hang the red one around Hawk's basement room. Then we both sat in the lotus position on his cot. He was wearing my twenty-one jewel Lady Bulova. He instructed me to concentrate on the topic of the passage of time, with my eyes open, and to notify him when I thought that half an hour had gone by.

It seemed a simple enough assignment. I slouched over in my lotus position and braced myself to count to sixty thirty times. This time I would not fail Hawk.

After counting to thirty ten times, I became bored and decided to drop it. I let my thoughts wander randomly.

Finally, deciding that half an hour had to be up, I signaled to Hawk. He glanced at my watch and made a notation on a piece of paper. Then he took down the red lights and strung up the blue ones, and I repeated the tedious exercise.

Then the blue light came down, and the red ones went back up. And then vice versa. I was finding the whole thing pretty dumb. There had to be easier ways to find extramarital sex.

After the fourth round, Hawk said, ‘All right. That's enough.'

I sighed with relief.

‘Under the red lights you called twenty-four and a half minutes and twenty-seven minutes half an hour,' he informed me. ‘And under the blue lights you called thirty-two and thirty-three minutes half an hour.'

Oh dear, I had flunked again. I couldn't even judge time accurately. What hope did I have of ascending into heaven? I looked at him and shrugged apologetically. I
had
tried.

‘If this doesn't suggest any conclusions,' he said testily, combing his fingers through his matted beard, ‘then I'm afraid I can't help you.'

I skulked upstairs to my lonely king-sized bed.

The next morning, after breathing exercises, the verya stambhanasana, and mud pie contemplation, Hawk said wearily, ‘I was hoping that this wouldn't be necessary, but I'm afraid it is. Can you send the baby out for the day?'

Off Wendy went to Angela's, and back I raced with Ira's siren whooping to insert my diaphragm.

I found Hawk waiting for me on the cot. A glass and a pitcher of water sat on the tray. I cleared my throat alluringly in the doorway.

Hawk looked up, his bell jingling in his ear lobe. He gestured to me to lie on the cot beside him. Demurely, I did so. He looked down at me. I closed my eyes, waiting to be kissed.

He got up and started rifling his pack.

‘It's okay,' I whispered. ‘I have my diaphragm in.'

‘Pardon me?' he said, extracting a small plastic vial from the pack. He poured liquid from it into the glass and filled the glass with water and handed it to me.

I drank in little uninterested sips. ‘What it it?' I asked, hoping it was an exotic aphrodisiac from the French section of Montreal.

‘LSD-25.'

‘LSD?' I shrieked, sloshing the liquid onto the cot.

‘Just relax and finish drinking it.'

‘But I don't want LSD.'

‘Do you or don't you want to participate in the Maithuna?' he inquired coolly.

‘Yes, of course. But I don't see what LSD has to do with screwing.'

His face behind his shaggy beard flushed bright red. ‘Goddam it! How many times do I have to tell you that it's not
screwing?
It has nothing whatsoever to do with the filthy disgusting bumping and grinding you're accustomed to!'

‘How do yow know what I'm accustomed to?' I shot back, furious at allowing myself to be drugged and sold into white slavery so trustingly.

‘I
don't
know, and I'm not remotely interested. What I've invited you to undertake with me has no relation to your past seizures of lust, whatever form they've taken. I am
trying
to teach you to think of yourself as other than a physical body to be “satisfied.” You are the eternal feminine principle. I am the eternal masculine principle. As we mate, we will balance opposing forces and requite our longing for wholeness.'

In a fit of fury at his pomposity, I tossed down the rest of the liquid. Where did blue balls fit into all this, if orgasm wasn't our goal? Had I sacrificed my virginity to a myth?

‘And besides, the fact that you are unable to entertain the notion that there might be some connection between LSD and what you so repulsively refer to as “screwing” is exactly why we're having to go through all this tedious preparation.
I've
been ready for the Maithuna for weeks.
I
certainly don't need this. I'm doing it for you. So that you can experience transcendence, too.'

I glared at him. I had by now decided that he hadn't really given me LSD, that this was one of his fucking little tests designed to reveal my true character, in all its outstanding flaws. I leaned against the brick wall and folded my arms and sneered.

‘It's starting to take effect, isn't it?'

‘No.
Absolutely
not.'

‘You're thinking that I've tricked you, that it wasn't really LSD, that I'm trying to make a fool of you.'

I looked at him in stunned surprise.
Did
the creep have uncanny powers of perception from his idiot training after all?

‘I've had enough LSD to float a battleship,' he informed me, appraising my reactions from my shifting facial expressions. ‘The general pattern is usually pretty predictable, allowing for variations introduced by personality differences. So please spare me the boring details of your miraculous visions in the upcoming hours. Other people's drug trips, like other people's dreams and other people's romances, are unremittingly tedious for non-participants.'

‘The thing I hate most about you,' I replied calmly, ‘is that you're such a goddam hypocrite. You
said
you no longer approved of artificial means for altering states of consciousness.' The bricks of the arched ceding were starting to rearrange themselves. I decided to pretend not to notice their antics, preferring not to expose myself to Hawk's ridicule by claiming to be experiencing hallucinations. I could picture him returning to his deserter friends and regaling them with the story of my hallucinating after drinking plain water. I could see the entire radical world snickering.

‘I
don't
believe in it just for kicks.'

Never before had I noticed how his mouth pursed in slow motion as he talked, like a landed fish gasping for air.

‘This isn't for kicks. This is for a specific purpose, administered by someone who can guide you through it and indicate significant aspects.'

His eyes were two ice-blue mentholated throat lozenges. His tangled beard was thousands of matted spiders flailing their snarled legs. The arched bricks had turned to streams of rainbow colors.

‘Are you feeling anything yet?' boomed a hollow voice like the surf crashing in an ocean cave.

‘No.'

In fact, I
wasn't
feeling anything. How could I be? I no longer possessed any sense organs. That unattractive husk of flesh I had formerly been so pleased to refer to as ‘me' lay limp and flabby beneath me. What possible contact could that stinking chunk of decaying meat ever have had with wonderful me? Why, I had no more relation to it than I did to that other disgusting mound of tissue and cartilage that lay propped against the wall watching “my' body out of ice-blue lozenges.

I started giggling. It was so ludicrous. Here I had spent a lifetime feeding and clothing and adoring that hunk of flesh — and all along, it had been dead! What a joke! I screamed with laughter. The blob of adipose against the wall smiled tolerantly, not knowing that it was dead, too. I knew that it was true — that that other blob had drugged me in order to ship me to Morocco — but the joke was on him. He'd be selling a twitching corpse! I howled with glee.

Hawk was slowly removing his blue work shirt. This operation required several hours. I scrutinized it, absorbing every detail — his fingers fumbling with the buttons, his arms moving up and out of the sleeves; the fur on his flexing chest muscles waved like prairie grasses in the wind. He stood up. And up and up and up, like Jack's beanstalk. The tiny cubicle was a hundred yards deep. Hawk strutted across this expanse like a minstrel in a Cakewalk.

Eventually, he was sitting next to me.
Who
was? What was he sitting next to? What was this? He was trying to show me something.
Me,
who already saw all? How could he be bothering me with such a petty topic as his tattoo.

Hawk kept thrusting his arm into my face, flexing and unflexing his bicep so that the tattoo swam and trembled and quivered. Soon my eyes fixed on its outer borders. I stared at the filigreed circumference with wonder. Hawk was right to insist. It merited my attention after all. It was alive. The elegant etched pattern breathed and shuddered and throbbed and swirled. All the colors of the spectrum, one after another, wound their way through the maze of filigree, like visible electricity through electrical circuits.

My attention jumped abruptly to the bands of stylized flower petals just inside the filigree. The variegated colors were still with me; but in this context of soft unfolding petals, the colors didn't snake, they swept — in dizzying waves, one color after another illuminating the undulating petals.

Suddenly I found myself enmeshed in the grid of interlocked triangles. Here, the geometric shapes popped out at me, ablaze with constantly shifting colors.

This was neat, but suddenly I felt wary. It was all a trap. I was being led, like Hansel and Gretel by the witch's candy cottage, into the center, toward the fetid jaws of the grotesque monster who lived there. I understood in a flash of insight that that hideous ghoul had spewed out of his bloody craw these charming patterns of shifting colors, solely in order to lure me into his lair…

‘…be aware of the different levels of organization,' Hawk was saying. His voice boomed as though from a vast underground cavern.

And Hawk was in league with that monster! After all, the monster lived on Hawk's bicep, didn't he? I snarled at Hawk and turned my head away from his repulsive arm. Safe! I hadn't looked!

I felt a hand on my face, and found myself once again staring at the quivering tattoo, being sucked in past the cunning filigree and petals and triangles to the monster at the center.