“Thanks.” He accepted the glass and the white capsule; he drank the mescaline down, placed the glass back on the tray. “Aren’t you having any?” he asked her, feeling—belatedly—wary.
“I’m already spaced,” Alys said genially, smiling her gold baroque tooth smile. “Can’t you tell? I guess not; you’ve never seen me any other way.”
“Did you know I’d be brought to the L.A. Police Academy?” he asked. You must have, he thought, because you had the two records of mine with you. Had you not known, the chances of your having them alone are zero out of a billion, virtually.
“I monitored some of their transmissions,” Alys said; turning, she roamed restlessly off, tapping on the small enameled tray with one long fingernail. “I happened to pick up the official traffic between Vegas and Felix. I like to listen to him now and then during the time he’s on duty. Not always, but”—she pointed toward a room beyond an open corridor at the near side—“I want to look at something; I’ll show it to you, if it’s as good as Felix said.”
He followed, the buzz of questions in his mind dinning at him as he walked. If she can get across, he thought, go back and forth, as she seems to have done—
“He said the center drawer of his maple desk,” Alys said reflectively as she stood in the center of the house’s library; leather-bound books rose up in cases mounted to the high ceiling of the chamber. Several desks, a glass case of tiny cups, various early chess sets, two ancient Tarot card decks…Alys wandered over to a New England desk, opened a drawer, peered within. “Ah,” she said, and brought out a glassine envelope.
“Alys—” Jason began, but she cut him off with a brusque snap of her fingers.
“Be quiet while I look at this.” From the surface of the desk she took a large magnifying glass; she scrutinized the envelope. “A stamp,” she explained, then, glancing up. “I’ll take it out so you can look at it.” Finding a pair of philatelic tongs she carefully drew the stamp from its envelope and set it down on the felt pad at the front edge of the desk.
Obediently, Jason peeped through the magnifying lens at the stamp. It seemed to him a stamp like any other stamp, except that unlike modern stamps it had been printed in only one color.
“Look at the engraving on the animals,” Alys said. “The herd of steer. It’s absolutely perfect; every line is exact. This stamp has never been—” She stopped his hand as he started to touch the stamp. “Oh no,” she said. “Don’t ever touch a stamp with your fingers; always use tongs.”
“Is it valuable?” he asked.
“Not really. But they’re almost never sold. I’ll explain it to you someday. This is a present to me from Felix, because he loves me. Because, he says, I’m good in bed.”
“It’s a nice stamp,” Jason said, disconcerted. He handed the magnifying glass back to her.
“Felix told me the truth; it’s a good copy. Perfectly centered, light cancellation that doesn’t mar the center picture, and—” Deftly, with the tongs, she flipped the stamp over on its back, allowed it to lie on the felt pad face down. All at once her expression changed; her face glowed hotly and she said, “That motherfucker.”
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“A thin spot.” She touched a corner of the stamp’s back side with the tongs. “Well, you can’t tell from the front. But that’s Felix. Hell, it’s probably counterfeit anyhow. Except that Felix always somehow manages not to buy counterfeits. Okay, Felix; that’s one for you.” Thoughtfully, she said, “I wonder if he’s got another one in his own collection. I could switch them.” Going to a wall safe, she twiddled for a time with the dials, opened the safe at last, and brought out a huge and heavy album, which she lugged to the desk. “Felix,” she said, “does not know I know the combination to that safe. So don’t tell him.” She cautiously turned heavy-gauge pages, came to one on which four stamps rested. “No one-dollar black,” she said. “But he may have hidden it elsewhere. He may even have it down at the academy.” Closing the album, she restored it to the wall safe.
“The mescaline,” Jason said, “is beginning to affect me.” His legs ached: for him that was always a sign that mescaline was beginning to act in his system. “I’ll sit down,” he said, and managed to locate a leather-covered easy chair before his legs gave way. Or seemed to give way; actually they never did: it was a drug-instigated illusion. But all the same it felt real.
“Would you like to see a collection of chaste and ornate snuffboxes?” Alys inquired. “Felix has a terribly fine collection. All antiques, in gold, silver, alloys, with cameo engravings, hunting scenes—no?” She seated herself opposite him, crossed her long, black-sheathed legs; her high-heeled shoe dangled as she swung it back and forth. “One time Felix bought an old snuffbox at an auction, paid a lot for it, brought it home. He cleaned the old snuff out of it and found a spring-operated level mounted at the bottom of the box, or what seemed to be the bottom. The lever operated when you screwed down a tiny screw. It took him all day to find a tool small enough to rotate the screw. But at least he got it.” She laughed.
“What happened?” Jason said.
“The bottom of the box—a false bottom with a tin plate concealed in it. He got the plate out.” She laughed again, her gold tooth ornamentation sparkling. “It turned out to be a two-hundred-year-old dirty picture. Of a chick copulating with a Shetland pony. Tinted, too, in eight colors. Worth, oh, say, five thousand dollars—not much, but it genuinely delighted us. The dealer, of course, didn’t know it was there.”
“I see,” Jason said.
“You don’t have any interest in snuffboxes,” Alys said, still smiling.
“I’d like—to see it,” he said. And then he said. “Alys, you know about me; you know who I am. Why doesn’t anybody else know?”
“Because they’ve never been there.”
“Where?”
Alys massaged her temples, twisted her tongue, stared blankly ahead, as if lost in thought. As if barely hearing him. “You know,” she said, sounding bored and a little irritable. “Christ, man, you lived there forty-two years. What can I tell you about that place that you don’t already know?” She glanced up, then, her heavy lips curling mischievously; she grinned at him.
“How did I get here?” he said.
“You—” She hesitated. “I’m not sure I should tell you.”
Loudly, he said, “Why not?”
“Let it come in time.” She made a damping motion with her hand. “In time, in time. Look, man; you’ve already been hit by a lot; you almost got shipped to a labor camp, and you know what kind, today. Thanks to that asshole McNulty and my dear brother. My brother the police general.” Her face had become ugly with revulsion, but then she smiled her provocative smile once again. Her lazy, gold-toothed, inviting smile.
Jason said, “I want to know where I am.”
“You’re in my study in my house. You’re perfectly safe; we got all the insects off you. And no one’s going to break in here. Do you know what?” She sprang from her chair, bounding to her feet like a superlithe animal; involuntarily he drew back. “Have you ever made it by phone?” she demanded, bright-eyed and eager.
“Made what?”
“The grid,” Alys said. “Don’t you know about the phone grid?”
“No,” he admitted. But he had heard of it.
“Your—everybody’s—sexual aspects are linked electronically, and amplified, to as much as you can endure. It’s addictive, because it’s electronically enhanced. People, some of them, get so deep into it they can’t pull out; their whole lives revolve around the weekly—or, hell, even daily!—setting up of the network of phone lines. It’s regular picture-phones, which you activate by credit card, so it’s free at the time you do it; the sponsors bill you once a month and if you don’t pay they cut your phone out of the grid.”
“How many people,” he asked, “are involved in this?”
“Thousands.”
“At one time?”
Alys nodded. “Most of
them have been doing it two, three years. And they’ve deteriorated physically—and mentally—from it. Because the part of the brain where the orgasm is experienced is gradually burned out. But don’t put down the people; some of the finest and most sensitive minds on earth are involved. For them it’s a sacred, holy communion. Except you can spot a gridder when you see one; they look debauched, old, fat, listless—the latter always between the phone-line orgies, of course.”
“And you do this?” She did not look debauched, old, fat, or listless to him.
“Now and then. But I never get hooked; I cut myself out of the grid just in time. Do you want to try it?”
“No,” he said.
“Okay,” Alys said reasonably, undaunted. “What would you like to do? We have a good collection of Rilke and Brecht in interlinear translation discs. The other day Felix came home with a quad-and-light set of all seven Sibelius symphonies; it’s very good. For dinner Emma is preparing frog’s legs…Felix loves both frog’s legs and escargot. He eats out in good French and Basque restaurants most of the time but tonight—”
“I want to know,” Jason interrupted, “where I am.”
“Can’t you simply be happy?”
He rose to his feet—with difficulty—and confronted her. Silently.
20
The mescaline had furiously begun to affect him; the room grew lit up with colors, and the perspective factor altered so that the ceiling seemed a million miles high. And, gazing at Alys, he saw her hair come alive…like Medusa’s, he thought, and felt fear.
Ignoring him, Alys continued, “Felix especially likes Basque cuisine, but they cook with so much butter that it gives him pyloric spasms. He also has a good collection of Weird Tales, and he loves baseball. And—let’s see.” She wandered off, a finger tapping against her lips as she reflected. “He’s interested in the occult. Do you—”
“I feel something,” Jason said.
“What do you feel?”
Jason said, “I can’t get away.”
“It’s the mes. Take it easy.”
“I—” He pondered; a giant weight lay on his brain, but all throughout the weight streaks of light, of satori-like insight, shot here and there.
“What I collect,” Alys said, “is in the next room, what we call the library. This is the study. In the library Felix has all his law books…did you know he’s a lawyer, as well as a police general? And he has done some good things; I have to admit it. Do you now what he did once?”
He could not answer; he could only stand. Inert, hearing the sounds but not the meaning. Of it.
“For a year Felix was legally in charge of one-fourth of Terra’s forced-labor camps. He discovered that by virtue of an obscure law passed years ago when the forced-labor camps were more like death camps—with a lot of blacks in them—anyhow, he discovered that this statute permitted the camps to operate only during the Second Civil War. And he had the power to close any and all camps at any time he felt it to be in the public interest. And those blacks and the students who’d been working in the camps are damn tough and strong, from years of heavy manual labor. They’re not like the effete, pale, clammy students living beneath the campus areas. And then he researched and discovered another obscure statute. Any camp that isn’t operating at a profit has to be—or rather had to be—closed. So Felix changed the amount of money—very little, of course—paid to the detainees. So all he had to do was jack up their pay, show red ink in the books, and bam; he could shut down the camps.” She laughed.
He tried to speak but couldn’t. Inside him his mind churned like a tattered rubber ball, sinking and rising, slowing down, speeding up, fading and then flaring brilliantly; the shafts of light scampered all through him, piercing every part of his body.
“But the big thing Felix did,” Alys said, “had to do with the student kibbutzim under the burned-out campuses. A lot of them are desperate for food and water; you know how it is: the students try to make it into town, foraging for supplies, ripping off and looting. Well, the police maintain a lot of agents among the students agitating for a final shootout with the police…which the police and nats are hopefully waiting for. Do you see?”
“I see,” he said, “a hat.”
“But Felix tried to keep off any sort of shootout. But to do it he had to get supplies to the students; do you see?”
“The hat is red,” Jason said. “Like your ears.”
“Because of his position as marshal in the pol hierarchy, Felix had access to informant reports as to the condition of each student kibbutz. He knew which ones were failing and which were making it. It was his job to boil out of the horde of abstracts the ultimately important facts: which kibbutzim were going under and which were not. Once he had listed those in trouble, other high police officers met with him to decide how to apply pressure which would hasten the end. Defeatist agitation by police finks, sabotage of food and water supplies. Desperate—actually hopeless—forays out of the campus area in search of help—for instance, at Columbia one time they had a plan of getting to the Harry S Truman Labor Camp and liberating the detainees and arming them, but at that even Felix had to say ‘Intervene!’ But anyhow it was Felix’s job to determine the tactic for each kibbutz under scrutiny. Many, many times he advised no action at all. For this, of course, the hardhats criticized him, demanded his removal from his position.” Alys paused. “He was a full police marshal, then, you have to realize.”
“Your red,” Jason said, “is fantidulous.”
“I know.” Alys’s lips turned down. “Can’t you hold your hit, man? I’m trying to tell you something. Felix got demoted, from police marshal to police general, because he saw to it, when he could, that in the kibbutzim the students were bathed, fed, their medical supplies looked after, cots provided. Like he did for the forced-labor camps under his jurisdiction. So now he’s just a general. But they leave him alone. They’ve done all they can to him for now and he still holds a high office.”
“But your incest,” Jason said. “What if?” He paused; he could not remember the rest of his sentence. “If,” he said, and that seemed to be it; he felt a furious glow, arising from the fact that he had managed to convey his message to her. “If,” he said again, and the inner glow became wild with happy fury. He exclaimed aloud.
“You mean what if the marshals knew that Felix and I have a son? What would they do?”
“They would do,” Jason said. “Can we hear some music? Or give me—” His words ceased; none more entered his brain. “Gee,” he said. “My mother wouldn’t be here. Death.”
Alys inhaled deeply, sighed. “Okay, Jason,” she said. “I’ll give up trying to rap with you. Until your head is back.”
“Talk,” he said.
“Would you like to see my bondage cartoons?”
“What,” he said, “that’s?”
“Drawings, very stylized, of chicks tied up, and men—”
“Can I lie down?” he said. “My legs won’t work. I think my right leg extends to the moon. In other words”—he considered—“I broke it standing up.”
“Come here.” She led him, step by step, from the study and back into the living room. “Lie down on the couch,” she told him. With agonizing difficulty he did so. “I’ll go get you some Thorazine; it’ll counteract the mes.”
“This is a mess,” he said.
“Let’s see…where the hell did I put that? I rarely if ever have to use it, but I keep it in case something like this…God damn it, can’t you drop a single cap of mes and be something? I take five at once.”
“But you’re vast,” Jason said.
“I’ll be back; I’m going upstairs.” Alys strode off, toward a door located several distances away; for a long, long time he watched her dwindle—how did she accomplish it? It seemed incredible that she could shrink down to almost nothing—and then she vanished. He felt, at that, terrible fear. He knew that he had become alone, without help. Who will help me? he asked himself. I have to get away from these st
amps and cups and snuffboxes and bondage cartoons and phone grids and frog’s legs I’ve got to get to that quibble I’ve got to fly away and back to where I know back in town maybe with Ruth Rae if they’ve let her go or even back to Kathy Nelson this woman is too much for me so is her brother them and their incest child in Florida named what?
He rose unsteadily, groped his way across a rug that sprang a million leaks of pure pigment as he trod on it, crushing it with his ponderous shoes, and then, at last, he stumbled against the front door of the unsteady room.
Sunlight. He had gotten outside.
The quibble.
He hobbled to it.
Inside he sat at the controls, bewildered by legions of knobs, levers, wheels, pedals, dials. “Why doesn’t it go?” he said aloud. “Get going!” he told it, rocking back and forth in the driver’s seat. “Won’t she let me go?” he asked the quibble.
The keys. Of course he couldn’t fly it no keys.
Her coat in the back seat; he had witnessed it. And also her large mailpouch purse. There, the keys in her purse. There.
The two record albums. Taverner and the Blue, Blue Blues. And the best of them all: There’ll be a Good Time. He groped, managed somehow to lift both record albums up, conveyed them to the empty seat beside him. I have the proof here, he realized. It’s here in these records and it’s here in the house. With her. I’ve got to find it here if I’m going to. Find it. Nowhere else. Even General Mr. Felix What-Is-He-Named? he won’t find it. He doesn’t know. As much as me.
Carrying the enormous record albums he ran back to the house—around him the landscape flowed, with whip, tall, tree-like organisms gulping in air out of the sweet blue sky, organisms which absorbed water and light, ate the hue into the sky…he reached the gate, pushed against it. The gate did not budge. Button.
He found no.
Step by step. Feel each inch with fingers. Like in the dark. Yes, he thought. I’m in darkness. He set down the much-too-big record albums, stood against the wall beside the gate, slowly massaged the rubberlike surface of the wall. Nothing. Nothing.