There’s naught to do. I always knew there’s naught to do—but what to do, ought to do, once you know there’s naught to do.
I had hoped that if we could just get to the bank where we had all that money—lubrication to throw at obstacles—it would compensate for my growing inability to deal with things. But money seemed to be cracking up as badly as I was. Prices all screwy. Where is the fucking bankbook? How do I sign my name?
We had always felt vaguely shitty about that money anyway. Capitalism, parents, etc. And to use it now when things were breaking down was obscene.
Simon decided we should switch over to his theoretically more reliable vehicle. He didn’t want to drive Car Car and was probably losing faith in my driving. But his car needed some work, so Car Car and I trailed him to the gas station where we said loving good-bys while Simon got his car fixed.
The last day on earth and here we were using blood money to make some poor slob fix our carburetor instead of spending his last day with people he loved.
But there were signs that it was all right. It even seemed at times that people were dying gladly to be able to make some contribution to our progress. Knowing winks. Light rays through the clouds. An old guy in a gas station cashed an old crumpled-up traveler’s check I found in my wallet without asking for any identification or even checking my feeble attempt to remember my signature.
“Simon, let’s go back to the farm.” I was in tears about what people were doing for us. I could do without using the precious last bit of gasoline. I could do without getting a place on the last ferry. I could die without seeing Virginia or my family.
But somehow my willingness to turn back was part of what made me such a good carrier of everyone’s hopes and fears. It seemed they all wanted me to be them. I did the best I could, packing up all their hopes and fears, bruising and pushing them out of shape as little as possible, expecting that somewhere up the line I would run into a better messenger, for whom I would die and pass on all my gathered hopes and fears.
So we kept moving toward Vancouver. I think the basic idea in both our minds was still to find Virginia and hope that that would somehow straighten everything out. I also thought that I had become a hydrogen bomb and that someone in Vancouver could defuse me or fly me to New York or that Simon and I had somehow become capable of traveling backward in time and were going to go back and straighten out the things that were about to result in the end of everything or…or… Simon was also thinking that in Vancouver he’d have a lot more help managing me, and that from there we could get hold of my parents. Neither of us had had any practice with what was going on and were just stumbling along. Vancouver seemed the best direction to stumble toward.
On the way to the ferry, “Mark, you know there’s been an earthquake in California?”
“Yes, I know that, Simon.”
Did I know that? I probably would have answered yes to almost anything anybody asked me if I knew. Almost everything seemed like something I knew. That it was somehow connected to my scream the night before was obvious. That Virginia had been killed in it was also obvious. Simon apparently didn’t know that yet or was trying to keep it from me.
How did Simon know about the earthquake? Was he beginning to be able to know things in my way too?
I was in the land of light without shadows and Simon was in some sort of twilight. He was the link between me and the darkness. I couldn’t deal with the darkness so Simon was in charge of all that. I was afraid that if he caught on to too much then he wouldn’t be able to deal with the darkness either and then someone from the darkness might do something bad to both of us. Simon had to find someone else and bring him into the twilight before he could come into the light. I hoped he understood that.
There were lots of people back there whom I loved, lots of people I wanted to have with me in the land of light, and if I lost Simon there would be no way for me to get back to them or for them to get to me.
We got to the ferry landing in plenty of time. There was only one car ahead of us, a beat-up station wagon with a middle-aged man and a little girl. I wondered if they were traveling backward in time too, but most of the time I spent clutching my knees to my chest, trying to keep my body from turning into light and trying to make the ferry come and trying trying trying.
Things were happening faster and heavier than ever. Every moment an odyssey. I was beating off wave after wave of screaming flesh-tearing and constantly trying to make Simon feel that everything was OK.
I’d feel unbearably hot and sweaty and Simon would say he felt cold. Ten minutes later the situation would reverse. After fighting off the most powerful rush yet and just lying back, completely exhausted, trying to get my breath, I glanced over at Simon. He was looking at me with utter bewilderment.
“You know, Mark, this is certainly turning into a strange trip.”
“You ought to see it from here, Simon. You ought to see it from here.”
I hoped that all the terrors were simply a matter of earning a place on the ferry, that God or whoever simply didn’t want me in the Powell River area. But once we were on, the shit didn’t stop, it just got worse. Maybe the next ferry or getting to Vancouver would do the trick, but I was fast losing hope that whatever was going on was going to have a nice simple answer.
“You know, Mark, this whole thing is really giving me a whole new outlook on mental illness.”
“Yes, I expect it would.” If Simon wanted to think that that was the explanation for what was going on, it was fine with me. Whatever model he wanted to use was fine.
“You know, I don’t think I ever really understood it very well before. This puts a whole new light on it.”
“Doesn’t it? Even though I worked in the hospital and have dealt with it and thought about it a lot, I never really caught on before.”
“It’s giving me a whole new respect.”
“It’s been a very well-kept secret. No one talks about it at all. It makes sex and drugs look like apple pie.”
That crazy people were into something very real, some sort of truth, was not a very original thought. The only thing that had kept me out of the nut house till now was a certain form of denseness and/or cowardice. That the truth was what was driving me nuts, followed.
In my more lucid moments I realized that insanity was a fairly reasonable explanation for what was happening to me. The problem was that it wasn’t useful information. Realizing I was crazy didn’t make the crazy stuff stop happening. Nor did it give me any clues about what I should do next.
For me to have sat around calling the crazy stuff “crazy” would have been the most wasteful, unimaginative thing I could have done. There were so many much better things to do with it. Like acid revelations, some of it now looks trivial or meaningless, but much of it remains as valuable to me now as it was then.
The trouble was that there was much too much, much too fast. A lifetime course in sexuality crammed into five minutes, followed immediately by all of Russian literature and a career as a prizefighter, playing in stereo with an exhaustive study of medieval imagery related to theories of higher math. No five minutes to get from class to class, let alone evenings to think it over. What I suspect about most of the stuff I’ve thrown out as nonsense is that if things had gone a little slower, if I had had time to copy over my notes and get the right perspective on it, those things too would have been important.
I was thrilled to be picking up so much so fast, but always in the back of my mind was the ominous: Something’s trying to fill me in on everything at once. There must not be much time.
THE VOICES. Testing one, two, testing one. Checking out the circuits: “What hath God wrought. Yip di mina di zonda za da boom di yaidi yoohoo.”
By this time the voices had gotten very clear.
At first I’d had to strain to hear or understand them. They were soft and working with some pretty tricky codes. Snap-crackle-pops, the sound of the wind with blinking lights and horns for punctuation. I broke the code an
d somehow was able to internalize it to the point where it was just like hearing words. In the beginning it seemed mostly nonsense, but as things went along they made more and more sense. Once you hear the voices, you realize they’ve always been there. It’s just a matter of being tuned to them.
The voices weren’t much fun in the beginning. Part of it was simply my being uncomfortable about hearing voices no matter what they had to say, but the early voices were mostly bearers of bad news. Besides, they didn’t seem to like me much and there was no way I could talk back to them. Those were very one-sided conversations.
But later the voices could be very pleasant. They’d often be the voice of someone I loved, and even if they weren’t, I could talk too, asking questions about this or that and getting reasonable answers. There were very important messages that had to get through somehow. More orthodox channels like phone and mail had broken down.
The blanks were a lot like the voices: it’s hard to say exactly when they started. At first there’d be only an instant or two I couldn’t account for. Later I’d be missing whole days. I’d feel myself going away and then I’d feel myself coming back. I had no way to gauge how much time passed during the blanks. When I came out of them anybody could have told me anything. I wouldn’t necessarily have believed it but there was no way I could count it out either.
Sometimes when I got back from my little cosmic jaunts it looked like no time at all had passed in my absence, but so much had happened to me that I felt I must have managed to cram a year or more into an instant of everyone else’s time. Other times when I came back it was as if I had been in some sort of suspended animation. Years had passed for everyone but me. One way or the other I was out of step. That much was clear.
I don’t understand. I don’t understand what it is that I don’t understand. Whatever it is, it’s something I have never understood. I don’t understand why it’s all of a sudden so important that I don’t understand.
I didn’t exactly lose contact with objective reality. There was just so much more going on.
Had someone asked me about what was going on, I would have had quite a bit of trouble taking the questions seriously and even more trouble getting my voice and words to work right. I would have been much more interested in their clothes or face than the questions, and would have thought they were really asking something much deeper. I was on my way to Vancouver, and knew it most of the time, but if asked where I was, that would have been a long way down the line of answers that came to mind.
I can probably tell you as much or more about what really went on those days than lots of people who were sane: the comings and goings of people, the weather, what was on the news, what we ate, what records were played, what was said. My focus was a bit bizarre. I could do portraits of people who were walking down the street. I remembered license numbers of cars we were following coming into Vancouver. We paid $3.57 for gas. The air machine made eighteen dings while we were there.
We arrived in Vancouver in the late afternoon. At that point I knew very clearly that the world was ending and that it was my fault. The only hope was for me to get out of the car and drown myself in the harbor. But somehow in downtown rush-hour traffic Simon managed to stop me and the voices seemed very disappointed with me for not trying harder. I had really really really fucked up big big big. I was sure that the next stop was hell and even more sure that I deserved it.
The next stop was really the Stevens Street apartment, where I had said good-by to Virginia only two weeks before though it seemed very much like lifetimes. Everyone but Sankara was out. Sankara seemed to be looking at us like we were ghosts, but he was trying to be cool about it. I muttered something about having to lie down and went into one of the bedrooms and lay down, trying very hard to get some sort of grip on myself.
I spent the next few hours desperately trying to figure out what was happening to me and how to clue Sankara in on it. I’d come up with something that seemed right, get up and go into the living room, where Simon and Sankara were talking, and try to explain everything. Sankara would just say, “Sure, far out, that’s cool.” I obviously wasn’t putting it right, so I’d go back to the bedroom and try again.
Somewhere in there Sy and André came home and I tried to explain it to them too. They had similar reactions. I became more and more alarmed at how these people could go on like nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
“You know you’re in hell, don’t you?” The voices said that a lot.
“All I know is that I don’t like it much.”
“You know Virginia’s dead. You know your father’s dead. You know the world is ending. You know you’re dead. You know you’ve killed a lot of people. You know you’re responsible for the California earthquake, the death of the planet. You know you have a mission. You know you’re the messiah.”
“I know I feel that way. I know I think that might be so. But I’ll be damned if I’ll take my word for it. People think a lot of screwy things.”
ASTRAL SEX. What can I tell you about astral sex? There was a lot of it and a little goes a long way. I remember thinking at the time that if nothing remotely sexual ever happened to me again I’d have no grounds for complaint.
Like lots of what I ran into in my strange journey, it seemed like compensation. For one reason or another sex as I had known it was no longer possible. For the best for all concerned, men and women weren’t going to be allowed to see each other any more. I had some cosmic clap that had to be quarantined. I was going backward in time and didn’t have a body any more. I couldn’t be unfaithful to Virginia or she’d kill herself. I couldn’t make love to Virginia or the world would end. So for compensation, severance pay, or whatever, I got astral sex.
Like all the other compensations for the various disabilities I suffered, it was more than a fair deal. I wondered how I had ever worked up much enthusiasm about regular sex.
I was electric with sexuality. Breathing gave me orgasm upon orgasm. I can’t begin to describe what dancing with angels was like. Occasionally the puritan in me would try to worry about having to pay for this some day, but the pleasure was so all-engulfing there was very little room for second thoughts.
I had earthly sexuality too, but like the rest of my earthly life it had become twisted, disjointed, and horrifying. My penis would seem monstrously huge. I’d get hard-ons that wouldn’t go away. I’d try to masturbate to defuse my earthly sexuality but couldn’t come. I feared that something was trying to turn me into a homosexual. I feared that I was turning Simon into a homosexual and teasing him horribly. There were no nice warm sex feelings, just fear and exploitation.
It’s possible that these feeling represented the breakthrough of repressed homosexuality that’s terribly clinically significant, but I have my doubts. Heterosexuality was no less threatening to me than homosexuality. I remember telling a voice that seemed to be Virginia, “Sure I can see how it would be frightening being a woman. Penetration, violation, invasion. It would terrify the hell out of me. But to tell you the truth, every time I put it in I was never all that sure I’d get it back. That was scary as hell too.”
While I had never had homosexual relations, I had felt physical attraction to men and recognized as much without getting upset about it. I was also attracted to a lot of women I never slept with. My sex life with Virginia was hardly the greatest and represented a general sexual repression, but I can’t help thinking that those who blame sexual problems for mental illness are putting the cart before the horse. It would be foolish to deny that sex affects frame of mind but even more foolish to overlook that one’s sex life is also, if not more, a consequence of one’s frame of mind. Food was horrible to me too, but I have yet to hear anyone say that schizophrenia is a repressed fear of food.
HEADLINES. “California Earthquake.”
The voices. “It’s all right, Mark. Just don’t do it again.”
“I don’t know if I can help it!” I cried. “It’s such a bitch.”
“It??
?s the only way. Only someone like you could do it. Only someone who wanted so badly to never hurt anyone would ever find the key. It’s poetry. If you don’t understand it now, maybe you will later. Maybe it’s the way to hurt the least number of people.”
“Sometimes you voices sound a lot like Nixon. I promised I’d never hurt anyone. Please put me somewhere where I can’t hurt anyone. Please.”
Simon was perfect. The farm was perfect. Virginia was perfect. My mother was perfect. My father was perfect. I was perfect. Lucky Strikes were perfect. The switch to MacDonald’s Export and then settling in on Sunkist and Sportsman tobacco was perfect. All the things that were green couldn’t have been otherwise. The radio was playing perfect songs. Everything everyone said was perfect. Everything came together just right.
Perfectly awful. Perfectly wonderful. Heaven. Hell. The intention changed, the next effect changed, but never the awesome symmetry, the dazzling perfection of it.
The further down the road I went, the more dazzling the perfection and symmetry. I was riding an exponential curve. I reached critical mass.
It started when I was a little kid. The all-absorbing rush of seeing something just right. Just-right Mommy things, just-right Daddy things, round things, red things, tree things, food things. And they acted like seed crystals. One just-right red thing led to more and more and the crystals grew and grew. And the bigger they were, the more things fit and the faster they grew. These ever growing crystalline perfections were every bit as much a part of me as my arms and legs and infinitely more precious.
Now the crystals were growing at a fantastic rate and all piling into each other. The Bible, concrete poets, and nuclear physics crystals collided, made perfect sense, and became one. The Simon crystal piled into the Virginia crystal into the Zeke crystal ad infinitum. It was like a monster seventy-five-car accident on the New Jersey Turnpike in heavy fog. And they all made such dazzling beautiful sense together. No more dry spells. No missing links. Punctuation became more and more difficult and then just plain silly.