The Devil Tree (2 page)

“I have no place to go to right now,” said Whalen, and he turned and walked into the heliport office, where the pilot was lounging in a metal chair and drinking a cup of coffee. “How many helicopters, would you guess, flew over New York at the same time we did?” Whalen asked him.

“Five or so,” answered the pilot.

“And how many people did they carry?”

“Maybe fifteen.”

“Fifteen people looking down at twelve million,” said Whalen. “That’s quite a ratio.”

The pilot leaned forward. “Pardon my asking, but what do you do for a living? There must be a secret—”

“There is,” answered Whalen. “Money is the secret. The bank we flew over keeps it in trust for me until I reach a certain age.”

“No kidding,” said the pilot. “And when’s that?”

“Tomorrow,” answered Whalen.

•   •   •

It was evening. Whalen walked through the bustling streets of the East Side, and wherever he looked he saw young men and women, sitting or standing in sidewalk cafés and bars; leaning against their motorcycles, scooters, or cars; talking, laughing, embracing. They all seemed to be at ease with themselves and each other. Eventually he would have to make his way in their midst; he would meet some of them, judge and be judged by them, befriend them and be befriended in return.

He knew he must make a decision. Would he place himself among such people as their equal, and by doing so, remain slightly ashamed of everything about himself that would set him apart? Or would he enter their ranks as one whose position was of a different longitude and latitude from theirs—as a person who was his own event?

A girl walked toward him, her skirt swaying, revealing the shape of her long, tanned legs. Aroused, looking at her, he became aware of the space that his desire had opened between her and him, a space that a simple act of his will could not span. Had she noticed him, smiled at him, he would have found the courage to follow her, even to arrange a meeting. But she did not return his look. Still, he thought, perhaps he should follow her. But he didn’t.

He walked into a restaurant. Mirrors reflecting the light from a crystal chandelier shot glittering prisms into even the darkest corners of the crowded room. Alone, he thought of Karen.

•   •   •

I’ve bought the smallest tape recorder available. It looks exactly like a match box, and it can record anything from a one-minute memo to a four-hour conversation. It operates on its own rechargeable battery, is activated by voice or hand, and contains an invisible condenser microphone that self-adjusts for voice distances even in a large conference room. I keep it in my pocket.

One day I might even want to leave it behind in Karen’s apartment, and then claiming I left it by accident, pick it up the following day.

An American friend of mine once shared his apartment with his Argentinean girl friend for four months without letting her know that he was fluent in Spanish. By means of a miniature tape recorder that he concealed in his pocket when they were together or hid in the apartment when he went out, he would record her conversations, whether on the phone or face to face with her Spanish-speaking friends, many of whom did not speak English. In these conversations, his girl friend often talked about how much she loved him and what an unusually good and considerate man he was. But once in a while, on the phone with an intimate girl friend in Buenos Aires, she would candidly describe his lovemaking and bedside manners and speculate about his sexual preoccupations, fantasies, and fetishes, some of which she found peculiar and not to her taste. After listening to many tapes of conversations recorded in his absence, he became convinced that she was in love with him and felt reassured that there was no other man in her life. Nevertheless, unable to erase from his memory some of the poignant remarks she made about him, he began to feel embarrassment when making love to her and eventually became not only self-conscious but impotent. One night while caressing her, to end his misery he whispered to her in perfect Spanish how sorry he was that he had deceived her, and then he proceeded to tell her about the tape recorder. Shocked, the girl began to cry,
and the next day told him that she felt betrayed. She said she could never forget that she had been spied on for months—and this by him, the only man she had ever loved and trusted. Soon after that, refusing to have anything more to do with him, she left for Buenos Aires.

•   •   •

“Look, man, I’m just trying to be friendly, that’s all. Just now, I was standing behind you in line at the bank, right? And I saw you writing ‘five thousand dollars’—not on a regular check or a bank form, but on a square little piece of paper—plain paper, nothing on it, right? Then you just signed this paper ‘J. J. Whalen’—wasn’t that your name? Whalen?—and you gave it to the cashier and he took that shitty scrap from you like it was pure gold. Then he comes back, all smiles, and just like that counts you out five grand all in that crispy cash! Now, man, I tell you, I been around banks, but I never saw a number like that: you sure got yourself some sonofabitch cash contact in that bank! Five grand for a shitty paper with ‘J. J. Whalen’ on it! Who are you, an underground numbers-game king?

“But listen, Whalen, let me clue you in on a truth about these sonofabitch bank tellers so they won’t try to hit you with it one day. You know what the motherfuckers got going on the side, don’t you? Some of them—like that fat black bitch who just gave you a come-on look—they take down the name and address of every old lady and widower, every faggy loner or rich bastard who comes in with a fat account. Then they sell the creep’s name to certain guys who want to know where those kind of rich numbers live. Some of these guys pay up to a hundred bills for one good name and address!

“And believe me, Whalen, these guys are good at
making their information pay off nicely. One day, all dressed up as insurance men, they’ll go see a sickly old lady, and they’ll pull her by her ears until she gives them all that cash she keeps hidden at home, and all those gold crosses and old diamond rings. And there is no way for her or anyone else to know why these guys went after her.

“And d’you know about those dudes who have a nice thing going for them in the ‘soul-saving’ business? D’you know that if you want to split forever from that chick of yours who’s got too sticky for your long hot finger, all you do is call a certain number, and they can save you a big hassle? You call that number and you tell the dude who answers that you’ve got a soul to be saved and he’ll tell you where and when you should deliver the cunt. Then you tell your chick that you and her are goin’ to look for a new place for the two of you. The minute you show up at that place and close the door, four motherfucking dudes will come in—and they’re big, really big guys. They’ll push you away like they’re really mad, and they’ll start playin’ with your broad, kissin’, nipple pickin’, jerkin’ off, and so on until you begin to fight them, just to show the chick you are all for her. The dudes will pick you up and take you out of there, but before you split they’ll lay an honest-to-God hundred or so bucks on you for deliverin’ that soul to them.

“After you split, the dudes will be pretty rough on your chick, particularly if she’s tightassed about spreading wide for guys she wasn’t properly introduced to, or if she doesn’t dig sucking big mamas she didn’t go to Sunday school with. Believe me, Whalen, she’ll be roughed up like a soul in hell, front and back, top and bottom, until she learns how much true love is worth in this apple pie of a city. After that, a nice big dude will pick her up in his Caddy. If the cunt is nice, and if she walks the streets like her new daddy tells her and brings him all the stash that true love can make, he’ll take good care of her. Got it?

“Listen, Whalen, what I’m telling you, man, is that—with your sonofabitch contact in this bank and mine with these dudes—you and I can score big.

“Now wait a minute. What’s that gismo you keep on playing with in your pocket? Is that a cassette, man? Are you working for the cops, Whalen? I ain’t saying anything more—and words ain’t no proof, you creep. Man, I’m splittin’ right now.”

•   •   •

A recent nationwide poll claims that one-fourth of this country’s adults believe that the position of the stars influences their lives. These people regularly read and consult daily astrology columns in newspapers, and they find purpose and meaning in the interpretation of their astrological sign. This is what the Astro Bio-Rhythm computer in the lobby of the American Museum of Natural History printed out for me after I fed a dollar into it, along with the exact moment of my birth.

Your fixed sign is Saturn. Saturn indicates feelings of separation and estrangement. You see humor where others don’t. Having to leave familiar surroundings may well be a part of your destiny. Saturn also makes you hard on yourself. You are impulsive and have difficulty sticking to things. You must acquire patience and stability. You must protect your mental, physical, and financial resources. You have great gifts: do not squander them.

So much for the computer version of my fate.

And here is what I know: I can’t decide whether self-awareness is a source of energy or of impotence. My real self is antisocial—a lunatic chained in a basement, grunting and pounding on the floor while the rest of my family, the respectable ones, sit upstairs ignoring the tumult. I don’t know what to do about my lunatic—destroy him, keep him locked in the cellar, or set him free.

Since I left home I have been a vagrant, an outcast, living always in the present. Often I have regretted I was not brought up in the Catholic faith. I have yearned to confess, to have my broken inner autonomy cemented by means of union with that two-thousand-year-old institution of moral authority. But I have also realized that, however mystical, no church and no sacrament can protect me against the ultimate threat to my vital existence: losing the sense of my own being. Now, back at home, therefore, I must confront my past. Karen told me that she envied other people their pasts; she did not say she envied me mine.

If focused on closely, any moment of my life—even the one that has just ended—telescopes all that I need to know about myself, contains all my chances for the present and my prospects for the future. My past is the only firmament worth knowing, and I am its sole star. It is as haunting and mysterious as the sky overhead, and as impossible to discard.

•   •   •

On the crossroads outside Bangkok, during my playful moments I used to wait for the villagers to drive their carts home from the market.

The drivers, who smoked opium all day, trusted their
donkeys to find the way home, so by the time the carts reached the place where I waited, the men were asleep. As each cart approached, I would leap out of my car and patiently turn the donkey around without waking his driver; then I would watch the donkey trot away with the cart. One day I turned twenty carts around. Was I an instrument of each driver’s fate, or were these drivers instruments of mine?

•   •   •

Some opium smokers rely only on raw opium; some mix it with dross; some, like me, have enjoyed both. Opium is unlike certain other drugs or narcotics in that one does not need to keep on increasing its strength or dosage in order to enjoy it. Whether with dross or without, opium gave me a sense of wisdom and balance, a spiritual tranquillity I had not known before I began to smoke and have not experienced since I’ve been disintoxicated.

Although smoking opium provides you with a sense that things are safe and predictable, the stuff itself seems crazy; it won’t light up near the sea, it loses strength in the snow, it drips when the air is humid, and its potency changes from day to day. Opium does other weird things. In a man, it slows his sex drive but speeds up his heartbeat. In a woman, it slows her blood but speeds up her lovemaking. With time no longer your jailer, each pipe frees you: you inhabit a space where waterfalls turn into ice, ice turns into stone, stone turns into sound, sound turns into color, color becomes white, and white becomes water.

Maybe because opium is so unpredictable—only one pipe in ten producing the effect one desires—you never feel like an addict when you reach for the pipe, for the stuff
might again refuse to please you. And when, like me, you don’t smoke it anymore, you are not a past addict; you have merely abandoned opium.

I met Barbara, a Princeton dropout, in Rangoon. I introduced her to opium and she introduced me to several American and British expatriates, among them a Mrs. Llewellyn, who had remained in Rangoon alone after her husband, a British civil servant, had died there. One day Mrs. Llewellyn invited Barbara and me to lunch at her house, which stood sheltered by tall trees on a hill overlooking the Gulf of Martaban.

During lunch Barbara complained to Mrs. Llewellyn about the hotel we lived in, and when the old lady suggested that we stay in her house while she went to visit an ailing friend in another town for two or three days, we gladly accepted her invitation. Once a week a Burmese servant and his helper would come to clean the house, the garden, and the swimming pool. Otherwise, we would be alone.

I helped Mrs. Llewellyn ready her car for the trip, and she left the following day. From her terrace Barbara and I watched the ships in the harbor and the yachts criss-crossing the bay.

In bed that night, Barbara said, “It would be nice to own this house. We could live here, smoke our pipes, and not be bothered by anyone.”

“I could easily get rid of Mrs. Llewellyn,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

I shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. She’s old and alone. No relatives, hardly any friends. And since she travels once in a while, no one would notice if she failed to come back.”

Barbara laughed. “Don’t be silly. This isn’t a Hollywood horror movie. Go to sleep.”

Later I tried to make love to her, but even though she had smoked a pipe shortly before we had gone to bed, she didn’t respond.

The day Mrs. Llewellyn was expected back we waited up past midnight, but when she hadn’t arrived by one we went to bed. An hour later we were awakened by the sound of a car. I told Barbara to go back to sleep; that I would help the old lady with her luggage.