“He did, however, call for the rejection of the established religious and moral practices at the time,” countered Hobbit.
“Yes—through more rigorous application of personal morals, not less rigorous!” Spencer almost wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it.
Fidgeting impossibly, Hobbit spoke. “We wanted to achieve a new level of consciousness.”
“Stop it, Hobbit, stop this nonsense!” That was Gabe. “Nihilism, ATWA, ANUS, Bane—just cut the bullshit. You were on a headlong acid trip. Two years running around the country, getting up to absolutely no good. We’re not your believing accepting nuns. What happened during your last peyote trip when you killed Lindsey?”
The twitching in Hobbit’s arms and torso became a convulsion. His eyes rolled up into the back of his head.
Spencer cast a troubled glance at Gabe. He said in a quiet voice, “Hobbit, were you all thrown out of the church with Milo?”
“We were with the Oklahoma Comanches for a long while. Sixty, seventy people. We sat around the fire, and the peyote was shared, and the amount each person was given was tiny. It wasn’t enough for Milo. So he got a great idea that we should go down to Nogales, Arizona, and have our own peyote hunt where we would find all the cactus we’d need just for the six of us.”
“What are you telling me?” said Spencer. “Peyote is not heroin.” Or alcohol. “It’s not addictive.”
“It’s not…” Hobbit paused. “But…everybody is different. The cactus just helps you see what’s inside you but what you cannot see on your own. The mara’akame, or the shaman, said that the visions you have when you take peyote are the visions you bring with you. And those visions are quite something. We all became enarmored of ourselves, we saw beautiful things, magnificent things, ourselves as eagles, as dolphins, as leopards. If you have never taken it, I highly recommend it.”
Spencer rolled his eyes in exasperation. “You know what, thanks for the advice. But I’ve got all the visions I can handle at the moment. Get on with it. You went to Nogales, and then?”
“That’s when Milo was thrown out of the church. He wanted to go for the hunt immediately, and he wanted to know where to go, but the mara’akame told him not everyone could go, not everyone was deemed worthy of freshly-found cactus. So the shaman, who was in contact with Tatewari, or the grandfatherfire, and who seemed wise and calm, said we had to wait, but Milo didn’t see it that way. He wanted to go the next day. That’s when the shaman deemed him not worthy. He said that Milo’s visions had nothing to do with becoming one with God, with ‘finding his life.’ He didn’t trust what Milo saw inside himself. He thought what was inside Milo should not be brought out. He said Milo was corrupting the peyote, he was not embodying the Creator’s heart. He said the contempt for all mankind inside Milo had no place in the Native American Church.”
Spencer appraised Jerry grimly. “Did Milo have contempt for all mankind?”
Hobbit didn’t answer. “We were all told to leave, there would be no peyote hunt, no more dance for us.” He was distraught as he spoke. “Milo went into a rage, and in a fit of this rage, he forced the shaman to take us into the desert at dusk to hunt for peyote.”
“Forced the shaman?”
“Yes. Took him against his will into Mexico. What is that called?”
“Aggravated kidnapping.”
“Urn. I thought so.”
“Did the police get involved?”
“I don’t know. This is the first time I’m talking about it. I don’t know if they got involved. I don’t remember everything that happened before, and nothing after. Didn’t the sisters tell you how long I’ve been here?”
“Five years.”
“Yes. Just the beginning of my penance, detective.”
“Penance?”
“Look, we were young and stupid, and unfortunately we made some irreversible mistakes. We got so involved in our philosophies, in our anarchic travels, in the things that the drugs helped us see clearer, better. So for one depraved flinty twirl of our free will, we forced the shaman to help us find the peyote in Mexico. We thought the church owed us that. We thought we could handle the peyote. Milo told us we could. He was extremely forceful, Milo; he was our mara’akare. He was like our peyote. He could convince the angels out of heaven. So we took the shaman and drove out into the northwestern Mexican plateau, not too far from here, and spent the early evening before the sun set hunting peyote. Have you ever seen peyote?”
“No.” Spencer had seen other things though, single malt, rare and magnificent from Speyside.
“It’s quite a thing to find it. A few miles south of Tubutama, we walked through the barren trees and the shrubs and in a matter of half an hour found a cluster of hundreds of them. Like tiny light-green pumpkins, each with a little white flower on top. It’s quite a sight. The shaman said to take only what we could carry in our hands, a few at most. But we brought sacks, and could carry everything. We took it all. The shaman said we were perverting, subverting the will of God.” Jerry lowered his head. He wasn’t looking out the window anymore, but at his gnarled hands. “After we got what we wanted, we let the shaman go—Milo wanted to kill him, but Amy talked him out of it. The shaman warned us when he was freed, he said, oh, the hubris of man, you think you can control the uncontrollable, the forces you don’t understand—but they will control you.”
Spencer got a chill down his spine on this hot day. He wished for a dusty breeze off the pampa grassland brush.
“We drove up north to the Superstition Mountains, a four-hour drive—”
Spencer interrupted. “Why so far? Why all the way to Phoenix?”
Hobbit smiled. His teeth were black. “Superstition, detective. We drove the Superstition Freeway, we went deep into the hills, in the night, along an unpaved trail called Massacre Grounds, and we had ourselves an all-night peyote dance. We built a fire, we broke apart the peyote and ground up its insides and caught its liquids in adobe crocks, we chanted and sang, and danced and prayed. We played the drums and the gourds, we confessed our sins, we worshipped…but I think back to it now, there was a point when all of us knew there was no return for us, and when we tried to turn away, it was too late.”
71
The Cancer Chick and the Revolutionary
When Lily came to, she was in a dank cold place and her limbs were aching. She was sitting unpropped and falling to the side against a cement basement wall. Milo was sitting on the floor across from her. They were in a hallway, the distance between them a few feet. There must have been a plumbing leak, or something else equally distasteful, because swampy water was pooled underneath them. The floor was uneven, they were in the hollow. He could have set them down a few feet higher where the concrete was wet but unpuddled. Milo, however, didn’t even seem to notice—the expression on his tattooed, tainted face was detached from this world.
Something was dripping from her mouth. Lily wiped it—blood from where he hit her. She was still attached to this world.
“What am I going to do with you, Lily? You were in your own home, we were sitting, chatting, and now look what you’ve done, calling the police. You’re wet, uncomfortable. And bleeding.”
“I need to get to the hospital,” she muttered.
“Oh, I know.” Milo said nothing after that, just eyed her. “But I think where I’m going to have to take you is to see your brother. Don’t you think? Do you have a cell phone? We should call him. Tell him you’re in great distress. Tell him you were abducted by Amy. See what he thinks of that.”
Lily licked her lip. Her blood was thick.
“Tsk, tsk,” he clucked, not sounding quite right when he did. “You think everyone around you is blind. But even the walls have eyes. Amy told me about your family. Your one sister is always working, the other is too busy with her halflings. Your mother doesn’t know who you are. Your grandmother has nothing to barter with. And so we come to your brother.”
Amy—her Amy—discussed Lily with this person. Lily’s feelin
g of violation was complete.
“What do you want, money? I’ll give you money for me. How much do you want?”
Milo laughed soundlessly. “Amy and I are revolutionaries, Lily. Revolutionaries are not interested in money. Did you ever read a book called Catechism of a Revolutionist by the Russian nihilist Mikhail Bakunin?”
She shook her head. They were sitting in sewage! What the hell was he talking about? It must be the H talking. When was that going to wear off? And when was her lip going to stop bleeding? She licked it again. Never, that’s when. Never. Until all the blood was gone, seeping drop by drop onto the foul basement floor.
“Bakunin was the antithesis of Marx, of Lenin, of Tsarism, Imperialism, Colonialism, Islamism, Fundamentalism, of every ism. He abhorred them all for their chains around man. In his book, Bakunin wrote that the revolutionary is a doomed man. ‘He has no private interests, no affairs, property, not even a name of his own.’ Which is why I became Milo, instead of who I was.”
“Who were you?”
Milo continued. ‘“His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion—the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose—to destroy it.’”
Lily sat up straighter. There was a tinge in Milo’s voice, a posture in his demeanor that spoke of something other than narcotics or homelessness. Whose world did this Milo want to destroy?
“That is who I am,” he said. “You want to know who I am? That is me.” He coughed. “With one proviso.”
Lily was afraid to hear.
“That’s right. Amy. She was my passion. She was my muse, my desire, my alms and my church. I could not live without Amy. I still can’t. Where has she gone to? Where has she disappeared to?”
“Whose world did you want to destroy, Milo?” whispered Lily. “Mine?”
He laughed. “You are so small potatoes. I was going to start with something a little bigger than you.”
Lily raised her eyes at him, she stared right through his wounds, through his mangled body. “I have to get to a hospital. Look, you broke my lip, and I can’t stop bleeding. My blood doesn’t clot. I’m sick.”
“Right now, believe it or not, this isn’t about you.”
“If I don’t get to the hospital,” she said, “you won’t have anything to barter with.”
“First we go see your brother. Maybe he can tell us where Amy is.”
“He doesn’t know.”
Milo emitted a hollow laugh.
“And if he did, he wouldn’t tell you. My brother loved her—”
Lily had to stop because Milo emitted such an excruciating groan that it seemed to come not from his throat but from his dissected spleen. The cry was so guttural that Lily, despite her weakness, tried to crawl in the standing water, away from the creature that could make so wretched a sound.
Unblinking, eyes as big as plates, Lily mouthed a conciliation, but it was too late—Milo, fully re-attached to his world, lunged for her, all filthy hands for her, grabbed her around her elongated, emaciated neck and started shaking her. “Don’t lie to me, Lily,” he hissed. “Why do you speak such lies?”
She tried to say, “All right…”
“They were not in love!” he cried. “She wasn’t in love with him! She was in love with me, do you understand? With me.”
“All right…let go…” Inaudibles.
“Say you understand.”
“I understand…let go…”
Milo brought his face closer, and opened his mouth and Lily’s angle was just so, and the dim light was just so, and when he opened his mouth and hissed, she saw that Milo had no tongue.
Lily screamed—mutely.
“She wasn’t in love with him,” said Milo in a sibilant groan. “She was going to kill him.”
72
The Peyote Dance
“What happened during the peyote dance, Jerry?”
“Milo kept telling us we weren’t taking enough. I don’t know how much we took in the end. The usual dose back in Oklahoma was tiny, micrograms. Very little. But we took…I don’t want to think about it, not now, not ever, but after what happened, I need to believe that our visions became distorted because we took too much. That we were misguided and behaved excessively.”
“Obviously that’s true. What visions?”
“Well, I suddenly believed that I was tall and lean, not short and squat like I am, and had wings and could fly.” He shuddered violently. Even now sometimes, a voice goes off in my head, and the voice is saying, can you fly, Hobbit? Did you ever want to? Did you ever think you could?”
“Whose voice is it?”
“Milo’s.”
Spencer sat like a stone on the bed. Even Gabe sat down next to him.
“I wonder if he plied us full of mescaline deliberately, poisoned us with mescaline…”
“Why would he do that? You were friends…” said Spencer.
“But what if he was done with us? Wanted us out of the way, perhaps was afraid we’d tell someone about taking the shaman, and other things we were up to? I know he and Amy wanted to return to New York, what if he didn’t want us running around the country knowing about him? I don’t know. But what remains, remains. Petra slit her wrists and watched herself bleed out. We all watched her. We saw her bleeding, believing it was right and she was dancing—or laughing—and we were dancing as she bled—and laughing. Simon beat himself with the gourds and rocks and then hanged himself off a dead mesquite tree. He was swinging so gently, he looked like he was in a child’s playground, on a swing, it was so calm and seemed so right, just the rope moving, his body moving, barely a night-time breeze, and we were still eating peyote.”
“Who were these people, Simon and Petra?”
“Don’t really know. Just some couple we picked up in Death Valley. He was from England. She was from Germany.”
“What happened to Amy?”
“Don’t know. In my memory she seems fine. I think Amy didn’t take as much as the rest of us. She seemed still in control.”
“Milo?”
“Milo—I can’t, no, I can’t.” Jerry suddenly fell to the floor from his chair, writhing, the stumps of his destroyed legs in a seizure, his hands over his face, his head shaking, his torso in spasms. “I can’t, I can’t. I can’t see it, can’t, please.”
Spencer was on the floor with him. “Tell me, talk to me. You’ll never have to talk about this again, but talk to me now.”
With his hands still over his face, Hobbit said muffled words that Spencer thought he had misheard. “Milo took the hunting knife Petra used for her wrists and cut out his tongue.”
He convulsed on the brown stone floor.
“But he didn’t end there. He pulled down his pants and sliced off his penis.”
It was Spencer’s turn to turn away from Jerry and stare with stupefaction into Gabe’s stunned face.
“After this the laughing stopped. That’s how I remember it. The laughing stopped, and there was screaming, Amy’s screaming. Milo was not, he was spluttering in his throat, there was a black fountain gushing out of his mouth, and I thought it was his tongue rising up to heaven, and Amy was trying to—I don’t even know—hug him, help him, stop the bleeding? I remember her pouring what was left of the peyote over Milo’s groin. I thought that was ingenious, like the starfish regenerating itself, the peyote is supposed to heal the sick. Her shirt was off, she was pressing it to his stomach, he was lying down on the ground, and she was bent over him, and we said, is the dance over, and she yelled something through my haze, something about driving him away. I think she drove us down the dirt trail back to the highway. She was a very good driver, Amy. And then she got out with Milo, left me and Lindsey in the van, somewhere on Highway 88. Lindsey and I drove off. We were still fully under the spe
ll. We drove up the winding Apache Trail, to get some more, to find some more, I don’t know. I think we were lost. I believed I wasn’t in a van but in a plane and we were so high up in the mountains, the oxygen was thin and it was going to my brain. I thought Lindsey and I were flying, you see. When I drove off the edge of the cliff, I had no fear, only exhilaration. We flew. I flew into the ravine with Lindsey.”
Hobbit’s hands remained over his face. “And here I am.”
Spencer could not believe what he just heard. “You know for sure Milo cut off his dick?” he said dully.
“I remember him throwing it in the fire and dancing around it and then dropping to the ground. I remember it falling in the flames and burning and how the human flesh smelled—pungent and bitter, a choking overbearing scent, and I can’t eat meat to this day—then him falling and I remember Amy trying to pull it black out of the fire and failing…and crying, Ben…oh Ben…”
“You were under an extreme hallucinatory spell. You could have imagined it.”
“Perhaps. But I’ve never smelled cooking human flesh before. And I didn’t imagine flying off that cliff.”
Spencer’s beeper went off suddenly, making Jerry shriek. It was the station. It said urgent.
73
The Lessons of the Russian Tsar
What are you talking about, kill him? But Lily couldn’t say it. She spluttered down, coughed down her fear and pain, sank down to the ground, coughed up blood with her terror. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve, felt fainter, fainter, more disconnected from him, as if her lifeblood were being drained from her body by leeches. Andrew! Her mind wasn’t working. Kill her brother? What was he talking about?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lily said. “Amy and he were…”
“They were nothing!” Milo hissed. “Nothing to the end. She sought him out, befriended him, for one purpose only.”
Once again—Lily’s whole life, all of the things she supposed and believed and accepted as true were being forcibly torn away in shreds of skin from her body.