Contours of Darkness, page 8
“What was that?” said Cynthia.
In the sculptured silence following the end of the music, she and Conrad had listened for sounds from the next room. Their second embrace had led to a spasm of clutching, and Cynthia had reached down and run her palm lightly between Conrad’s legs, trembling as she pressed the turgid cock which bulged against his jeans. Part of her aware that Aaron might walk in at any moment, part of her anxious to leap into the unknown, she began to sink, going to her knees, ready to fumble with the zipper, ease the thick shaft out, and take it in her mouth. She had smoked enough, and talked enough, and pondered enough, and now wanted to be filled. That her desire coagulated as a prescience of pungent sperm on her tongue was an accident of more factors than she could tabulate. Like an infant groping for the full breast, she yearned for the loaded cock.
Conrad grabbed her by the wrists and held her up. “We promised Aaron we wouldn’t fuck tonight,” he said.
“You promised,” she amended. She covered his mouth with hers and moaned into his throat. Her hands flew like butterflies over his buttocks. She came close to frenzy, and perilously skirted that terrible point at which a woman loses awareness of the man and becomes awash in her inner turmoil. The more she attempted to prompt him, the more distant he became, until at last he stood back from her. He was not prepared at that moment to plunge into chaos with her.
Hurt exploded in Aaron’s consciousness with the force of a heavenly visitation, shattering his leg and sending bursts of fire into his hip and side. In his heightened state, he felt the pain both as an experience and as a phenomenon independent of him. The speech he was about to deliver to the others skidded from the field of importance and was replaced by a throbbing meditation on the nature of pain. He remembered reading the Buddha’s first precept that existence itself is pain, recalled that he was able to make no connection with the words, and now understood their meaning with crystal clarity. The truth screamed through him like the roaring whistle of a jet screeching low over an Asian village to drop napalm and steel-fragmentation bombs. Scraps of videotape footage were projected from his memory bank and his living room became a tumultuous horrifying battleground filled with half-naked human beings frozen in the avenue of the descending flaming juggernaut.
In a flash which permanently imprinted the knowledge on his mind, all the cruelty of the species throughout its entire history catapulted from the background of inattention into sharp focus at the center of his consciousness. With extraordinarily wrought tunnel vision he seized upon this single aspect of human nature and invested it with singular importance. At the precise instant when, according to the infantile directions of the so-called LSD gurus, he should have been transported by galleons of bliss, his mouth was filled with the bitter taste of a less disneyesque aspect of life: its implacable brutality. Like the goslings who fixated upon the laboratory assistant who happened to be the first moving thing they saw, Aaron was stamped with negativity as he took his first acid-permeated step into psychic space. Everything else which was to happen during the following twelve hours would not obviate that initial turning.
“We are insensate maddened animals,” he thought, and all the enigmas which caused his frustration seemed solved by that one insight. The conflux of events and ideas which was his life, infused with the energy released by the drug, opened a great silence within him. Everything he was capable of knowing appeared in a vast mosaic before his mind’s eye. As though he were a giant who had once been a man, he looked down on the maze he had been stumbling through and could see at a glance the nature and location of all the obstacles which had stymied him. He wished the moment could last forever, that he would always be able to perceive so clearly.
But as he watched, it changed. A palpable awareness of time overtook him, and he saw himself as but one of its fleeting structures. The span of his life became a single entity, as concrete and finite as the arc of abridge cable. His individual existence was a strand inextricably woven into the tapestry of history. And as he followed its course, he reached a point where it ended. He stared with amused horror at the spot where his life finished, came to an abrupt halt, was intersected by another line which cut through the very space he would have gone on to occupy. Death, which had heretofore had only a literary reality, came upon him with its actuality, stunning him into sobriety. Mortality, which had been a word, was seen as being as much a part of him as his fingernails. The acceptance of the fact radically reversed all his acquiescence at being subservient to the will of any other human being, and his job, his standing as a citizen, his role as a lover, all emerged as forms of bondage.
Then, like a man sweeping the horizon through a telescope, he turned his gaze to the left and overlooked the past. He was appalled by the chilling simplicity of what appeared. Everything he had been up to that point was nothing but a conditioned reflex which responded to the countless stimuli that had been fed into him from his first moment of being: the chemistry of his mother’s bloodstream, the religion and nationality foisted upon him, the thousand little correctives issued daily for years until he was totally programmed to act the way his civilization deemed he should.
“But there is no freedom in any of that,” he thought. He saw destiny as a blind weaver, a dotty craftsman using the available materials to spin a fabric of unintelligible design. “I’m a slave,” he said to himself. “The whole universe, including the very structure of my body, is just one way of defining my complete limitation.”
“He’s probably getting his first rushes,” said Conrad. The entire revolution had gone through Aaron’s mind in less than a second of chronological time. “I’d better go see how he’s doing.”
He checked her once with his eyes, the glance of a soldier saying goodbye to his lover at the train station, forced to pull the shade down on softness and intimacy in order to join the troops boarding to reach the battleground, and walked quickly into the living room. Aaron was bending over, his pants legs up, checking the damage to his shin. He looked up and saw Conrad coming toward him, stood up quickly to regain his composure, and before he knew what was happening found himself holding on to the young man, his arms around his shoulders, his head on his chest, and the tears spilling unashamedly from his eyes.
There was no need to talk. Conrad understood that deep within Aaron some long-locked spring of feeling had been released, and what memories or forms of ideation or prompting toward action it engendered were of no real concern. It only mattered that the man would weep; from that all freedom followed. Aaron felt the blessed relief of not being embarrassed at what he had always thought was a weakness, and was amazed through his tears that he could accept the embrace of the man who just a half hour earlier had appeared as a threat to his peace of mind. He laughed as he cried, reflecting that the stability he was so frantically holding on to was actually the rigidity born of fear, and for this brave instant, there was nothing to be afraid of. For the first time in his adult life the arms which held him were the powerful arms of a man, seeking nothing but to feed back to him his sense of himself, and not the arms of a woman, which always implied a contract, and could comfort, but could never reassure.
Cynthia, hearing the unaccustomed sound, stepped into the room; and assailed by the unexpected sight of the man she lived with and the man she had been just making love to now locked in a circle of feeling which totally excluded her, was faced with her own crisis. Deeply repressed attitudes of rejection, instilled during the days when six siblings vied for a harried mother’s affection and a tired father’s attention, marched to the forefront of her perception. She wrestled with a sense of betrayal.
Conrad stepped back, the single most valuable action he had learned during his precocious adolescence. He stood sideways so that the straight line of energy which had gone from Cynthia on one end to him and Aaron on the other became a triangle. Veteran of over a hundred acid and mescaline episodes, his instincts for emotional dynamics were honed to a fine edge. He rarely bothered with content, and addressed himself to structure.
“It’s getting a little heavy,” he said. He looked from one to the other. “Everything that’s happening is real, but it’s not all there is.” He went to the window and pulled the blind. At once, the ambiance altered. “We’re still a couple and their neighbor spending a quiet evening at home. All the shit that’s working in our systems gives it a peculiar twist, and that’s what we learn from, but we need to stay straight. Otherwise we’ll wind up all knotted together in a colossal bummer.”
Aaron listened to the words as though they were in a language he didn’t understand. Already he was speeding to another nexus of internal confusion and clarity, the liberated elements of his mind forming and reforming to shape new perspectives. He tried desperately to remember what it was that had just made so much sense, why his tears had felt so good. But his eyes were dry, and the first tinges of nausea were coloring his outlook. Cynthia looked grotesque, a cubist melange of angles covered with melting flesh, a surreal gargoyle. He was certain he was going to vomit.
Conrad led him to the center of the room and helped him to lie down. “Whatever you think, whatever you feel, whatever you understand, don’t hold on to it,” he said. “You’re just a river, and you’re going to assume ten thousand shapes before the night is finished. Don’t identify with any of them. Just keep flowing.” His voice, low and lulling, put Aaron in a state of relaxation, and he closed his eyes. Immediately the feeling of illness passed, and he entered a state of consciousness for which there was no conceptual expression. He let go of his environment, of his awareness of Conrad and Cynthia, and sank into himself, to mine the rich lode of his long untapped unconscious mind.
Cynthia sat in the large chair, her lips and hands trembling. She had received the waves of revulsion that had poured from Aaron when he last looked at her, and coupled with her burgeoning feeling of insecurity, they undermined her sense of well-being. She opened and closed her eyes rapidly, and finally looked at Conrad imploringly.
“Why don’t you make some tea?” he said, directing her toward an activity, knowing that to be the best therapy for her current state. And as she moved about the kitchen, working slowly and exactly, holding on to the familiar routine of boiling water, washing dishes, clearing the table, sweeping the floor, Conrad sat cross-legged a few feet from where Aaron lay, and took several deep breaths, finding himself keenly aroused by the developments of the evening.
For three hours there was little movement. Aaron lay like a man in a coma; Cynthia shared her time between dozing on the couch and prowling around the back yard; Conrad sat like a stone statue, lost in his mescaline revery. In each of them solitude sang like a loon; there are some places which can only be got to alone, and to these three products of a culture which did not prepare its members for communion with that god who can be found only in the chambers of the heart, the loss of social amenity produced various stages of oppressiveness. Aaron felt as though he had been buried alive, and lived for most of the time with a sharp awareness of the walls of the crypt which contained him. Oscillating between stark terror and currents of omnipotence, he churned silently within the tomb that was his mind. Conrad sailed similar seas, but his experience allowed him to accept the voyage for what it was, a passage through forces which gave man a taste of his utter insignificance in the face of the enormity of creation. Cynthia was cast into paroxysms of paranoia; the stoned withdrawal of the men at a time when she was negotiating her own high reaches threw her mercilessly onto her own resources, and she discovered, with angry amazement, that up to that moment she had defined herself entirely in reference to whatever man she was with, and had no sense of herself as an individual, as a person, except in the sociological role of woman. She saw that her relationship with Aaron comprised only one and a half people, neither of them ever able to attain fullness, except at the expense of the other.
Finally, Aaron stirred. His eyes opened slowly and with the sense of being entombed still dominant, acknowledged his actual physical environment. Like a person who has lived for months on amphetamines and has come to accept that psychic state as permanent, and then stops injecting the drug and descends to the chemically normal equilibrium only to find it massively depressing, Aaron stepped into the world he had created for himself out of the pitiful tools he had been given as a birthright and saw it to be absolutely stifling. Forgetting that the power of the perception was due to the increased energy released by the acid, he thought he would have to live for the rest of his life with this frightful aspect. And with an elegant leap of rational intelligence he understood that the awesome immediacy of the insight would be tempered by time, but that its factual reality would continue. In sum, in a few days he would feel better about his condition, reverting to his customary level of consciousness, but his condition would continue to be a denial or a translation of the fierce life energy inside him.
“It’s all true,” he said aloud.
Conrad blinked and looked at the inert form. “How you feeling, man?” he said.
“I’ve been under a long time,” Aaron responded.
“About three hours,” said Conrad.
“About thirty-one years,” Aaron said.
“Ah.” Conrad added, “You’ve seen all that.”
“Yeah,” Aaron said in a low vibrant voice, “I’ve seen all that.” He stared at the ceiling. The conversation lifted much of the weight from his chest; they were two solitaries sharing the darkness of the night, the way wolves howl to relieve their plaintive loneliness under stark moons over frozen hills. “You are my comrade,” he said.
Conrad cocked his head. “I don’t know what that word means,” he said. “All I know is friends and strangers. And you aren’t a stranger any more, and I don’t know whether you’re my friend.”
“Are you all right?” said Cynthia.
“I feel like the past few hours have been one long breath,” Aaron told her. “And I’ve filled my lungs and can be here for a while, but soon I’ll be letting it all out again and breathing it all in again.”
“The next cycle will be less intense,” Conrad said. “And the one after that even less so. Until you’ll be breathing normally again.”
“Will I go back to the way I was?” Aaron asked.
“No point in talking about that,” Conrad answered.
Aaron closed his eyes again, but instead of sliding back into the austere realm of cerebration, he fell into a pool of sensuality, his brain retiring to the task of sorting all the new data and structuring new gestalten to pattern it. He descended into his body.
It was as though a spirit entered the room, changing the very molecules of the air.
There was no change immediately observable to gross perception. Aaron seemed as still as he had been earlier, but to one who could read the language of the body, the difference was marked. Whereas his energy had been flowing up into his brain and inward toward his center, giving him the appearance of a man in shock, and instilling that feeling of constriction which he had translated into an image of the grave, it now moved downward and outward, charging his pelvis and legs, so that he seemed to swell and radiate; to the degree he had appeared deathly, he now was seen to overflow with life. His thoughts became, instead of the laboratory of crucial considerations, like the delicate riffs of a piece by Mozart heard in the background while fucking. No intimation of sex as such intruded into the atmosphere, for the other two had not yet moved into that realm of expansion which now transformed Aaron and imparted to him a radiant beauty.
Conrad was the first to be affected, noting with an almost cynical satisfaction that the contours of the trip were developing along expected paths. The realization caught him in a bind, for he knew that in a short time the scene would move into the area of orgy, and to succumb to that temptation was too easy for his liking; it also carried the threat of repercussions from Aaron. He did not wish to subject their relationship to more strain than the older man could assimilate, especially under the influence of the drug. In the outlaw life-style that had become his role it was more important to be secure within a narrow ground with people than to indulge in far-ranging romps over untested terrain. Aaron and Cynthia were as much a possible source of help in a crisis as people he wanted to become more intimate with. The two functions were reciprocal, but to pursue one at the possible expense of the other was foolish.
He began to detect the changes in himself which enticed him into the world of sucking and licking and sighing. His legs grew heavy, his groin flushed with heat, his shoulders slumped and his fingers curled and uncurled, as though he were bunching silk into his palms. He looked at Cynthia. She sat sprawled in the large chair, her shirt unbuttoned to her chest, the tie-dyed fabric a frame for the swell of her breasts. The bottom of the garment had ridden to the tops of her thighs and her pubic hair was a black shadow deep between her legs. His cock stirred. With the knowledge born of patient observation he could now read the alterations in her attitude; she was coming undone.
“She’s ready for anything,” he thought, and wondered whether she had the power to be wanton. A woman come upon with a passion could stand five times the number of men presently in the room on their ears, making them perform like so many trained lions, leaping through the hoops of their own desire and over the poles of their own erections, all the while allowing them to think it was they who were running the show. But it would take a woman with absolute confidence in the sublimity of abandon; one slip and she would become the wretched object of a shoddy gang-bang. Conrad made peace with his ambivalence by deciding to remain passive, taking whatever sensual gifts were handed him with gratitude, but doing nothing to structure their flow.
