The Far Himalaya, page 12
Ben stood for a moment, holding the door open, staring up into Boylan’s eyes, then stepped forward and let the door close behind him with a soft clicking thud. In the space to his left, he felt Malhotra standing close, against the wall, but did not look at him. In the dim fluorescent light, Boylan sucked his cigarette, which crackled softly and glowed; then he reached between the two horizontal bars of the metal guardrail and flicked the ash into the triangular shaft round which the staircase centred.
Ben slipped off his knapsack and put it down on the floor to his right with a little thud. “So what’s up, assholes?” he said cheerfully, arching his eyebrows and finally shifting his gaze to include Malhotra, whose broad dark face was illuminated by the same chimpanzee sneer it had worn on the morning Ben had first seen it, and again at a later time, in the light of the dim sparse lamps of Queen’s Park at midnight.
“Oh, nothin’ special,” said Boylan. “Me ’n’ Ganesh are just hangin’ out. We’re old buddies, we go way back.”
Malhotra chuckled.
“Hm, me ’n’ Ganesh go way back too,” said Ben, looking at Malhotra.
“So I’ve heard,” said Boylan, taking a drag. “So tell me,” he said in a tone of innocent curiosity, “how does it happen that a little street-trash pretty-boy whore who sucks cocks in Queen’s Park at midnight comes to be the PhD student of the most eminent professor of Sanskrit in the land? We were just trying to figure that out.”
Malhotra chuckled again.
“That’s a tough one, I admit,” replied Ben, still smiling and supercilious, “almost as tough as the mystery of how the catfish-ugly offspring of illiterate, dypsomaniac trash comes to be the head of the most eminent Sanskrit department in the world. Sorry, the former Sanskrit department. Formerly eminent.”
“You know,” said Boylan, laughing slightly and adding just a shade of menace to his voice, “you may not be quite as invulnerable as you obviously think you are. There’s still an unsolved assault waiting to get pinned on some suitably suspicious person. And Ganesh here has been seeing you sleeping on campus park benches for years, and even lying around on the lawn dead drunk a few times.”
“Yes, and shoving his rubbery smegmatic two-inch dick in my face,” said Ben, turning to Malhotra, grimacing with loathing and disgust. “You worthless trash, you worthless trash ...” he almost whispered.
“You are the trash,” said Malhotra, his voice almost trembling with conviction. His grin had decayed into a menacing oval of hate.
“Brilliant,” said Ben, turning away, restored to composure by Malhotra’s clownish pathos. “I stand refuted.”
He leaned his hip and hand on the guardrail’s metal bar, facing Boylan. Boylan took a final suck on his cigarette, flicked it into the void, and rose to his feet on the first step down, exhaling fangs of smoke from his nostrils, putting his hands into his jacket’s side-pockets as if casually checking their contents. He descended the four steps, looking down at his feet, and came and stood beside Ben, putting his left hand round his back to press his left shoulder in a comradely manner, and with his right patting and gently squeezing Ben’s right arm. Ben felt himself engulfed in Boylan’s aura of smoke, booze, and body odour. He could smell his unwashed white locks at his shoulder.
“I think we understand each other,” Boylan said softly, with the familiar ironic lilt, gently turning Ben so that they were both looking over the metal railing. “What’s your name, anyway?”
Ben realized how limited Boylan’s knowledge of him must really be, despite his genius for intrigue. “My name is for my friends,” he said, smiling superciliously, holding the guardrail with both hands now as he let his gaze slowly drop down the shaft’s vertiginous open wall of bars and concrete ledges to the floor fourteen storeys below. A surge of cold fear welled up from his gut and spread through his limbs. He was about to step back.
“Well, my nameless little non-friend,” said Boylan, “I think it’s important for you to know at this point,” his hand sliding gently from Ben’s shoulder to the nape of his neck, “that you are fucking with the wrong person.”
At these last words, his voice hardened, and he gripped Ben’s neck with surprising strength, forcing him to bend over the bar and look straight down. Ben grasped the rail and tried to step back, but Boylan held him hard, muttering fiercely into his ear: “You really think you’re something, don’t you, coming out of nowhere, wowing the big professor emeritus and screwing my PhD student, going straight to the top without even getting a BA. You think I don’t know?”
Ben gripped the bar savagely, clenching his teeth, bracing himself against Boylan’s weight and the tremendous gravity he felt sucking him over the edge. Electric terror pervaded his body. He felt as if his feet were slipping on the smooth concrete, lifting off ... If he unlaced his hands from the bar, Boylan could hurl him over before Ben could seize him, or hit him, or thrust him back.
Through the metal doors, faint, muffled: The library will be closing in fifteen minutes. Please bring all books you wish to sign out to the loan services desk immediately.
“You really think you’ve got me by the balls, don’t you, you little half-dick bum-boy street trash nutcase loser, you and your Oxbridge gentleman-pedophile surrogate daddy, and your bony-ass slut of a girlfriend, whose PhD you wrote, didn’t you. Didn’t you.”
Boylan thrust down on Ben’s neck. Ben half-groaned, half-shouted, and with tremendous effort loosed his right hand from the bar, thrust it back and seized Boylan’s crotch, squeezing it in a desperate crushing grip. Boylan roared, staggered backwards, releasing Ben’s neck and arm and seizing his wrist with both hands. Still gripping the bar with his left hand, Ben twisted round, coming face to face with Boylan, pop-eyed and grimacing with agony and hate. He could feel the hard and soft little bundle of Boylan’s genitals through his pants as he gave one climactic squeeze, then loosed both hands to brutally thrust him back. Boylan bounced off the concrete wall, tumbled diagonally down the stairs, thudded with his shoulders against one of the guardrail’s vertical bars, and lay on his side with his head hanging over the stairs’ edge.
Stunned, he looked up at Ben. Then he grinned, grasped the guardrail’s lower horizontal bar with his left hand, pressed the edge of the stairs with his right, and launched himself into space.
Ben shouted in horror. Through the echo of his shout and the continuous roar of the air conditioning came the soft thud of Boylan’s body from fourteen storeys below.
Ben whirled round to look for Malhotra, but he had disappeared. He grasped the guardrail and looked over. Boylan was lying on his side on the small distant triangle of the shaft’s floor. Ben cried out again, seized and strapped on his knapsack and, gripping the handrails on both sides, began scrambling down the stairs two and three at a time, despite the pounding weight on his back and the dreadful magnetic pull of the yawning centre.
At the bottom of the last flight of steps, he stood and looked at Boylan. He was lying still, on his side, with eyes closed, as if he had collapsed there in his usual intoxicated stupor, except that the side of his face was mashed against the concrete floor, and his mouth was open in an unnaturally asymmetrical gape, with bloody lips and teeth. Blood had begun to pool round his head. Ben was staring, open-mouthed, scarcely breathing.
Boylan opened his right eye and looked up at him. He made a gurgling, snuffling sound, and the upward corner of his smashed mouth twitched into the suggestion of a mocking smile.
Ben uttered a strangled shout, turned, rammed the handle of the emergency exit, burst through the door. The alarm’s bell and throbbing siren screamed, following him as he scrambled down the metal stairs of the fire escape outside, and fled wild-eyed and open-mouthed into the cool summer night.
13
“B-ben, has something happened? You d-d-don’t look good.”
Ben looked up with a start from where he was sitting on the detached rear car seat that served as a sofa for the carwash’s workers. It was Peter who had asked him, Peter the painter, tall, good-looking, incongruously neat and proper and well-trimmed, who lived with his wife in a cheap above-store apartment on the opposite side of Spadina. Ben had been staring straight ahead, at nothing, holding his rag between his knees. He wasn’t sure how bad he looked. He must look tired, but perhaps also a bit mad.
“No ... no, I’m alright, really,” he said, slowly and softly, unable to force himself to smile. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
Peter smiled. “I h-h-hope it was for a good reason. Were you inside last night? With ... Adeeti?”
“No, I wasn’t with A-diti,” Ben said, smiling at last, but weakly, unconsciously correcting Peter’s only very slight mispronunciation of Aditi’s name—it was always impressive if people were able to remember it in any form at all. “It was one of my nights out. There’s just some ... family trouble. Nothing serious.”
“Oh,” said Peter, looking down.
The small, rudimentary washing machine next to the seat, for the rags, had entered its spin cycle. Larry the hunchback, the most senior of Malcolm’s employees in age and historical priority, was standing against the wall smoking, apparently not listening, waiting for the cycle to end. From one of the tall grimy windows, a slash of sunlight fell into the sepulchral space.
“Your mother lives not f-f-far from here, right?” said Peter.
Ben winced slightly. “Yes,” he said.
Peter’s face always reflected a gentle, sympathetic intelligence, so it would have been difficult to say whether there was now more sympathy in his smile than usual. “Why don’t you c-c-come over after work this evening,” he said. “And we’d love to m-m-meet Aditi too, sometime.”
A car was heard moving slowly into the back entrance, and the first components of the washing machinery’s gamut stirred into noisy action. Larry took a rag from the now still washing machine and stood watching as the car inched through the first set of whirling, clattering brushes.
“Thanks, Peter,” said Ben, smiling more naturally this time, “but tonight I have to be with Aditi. But we’ll definitely take you up on that soon. That would be lovely ... for all four of us to get together, finally.”
The cycle’s midsection came alive with sounds of hissing water and rumbling machinery. As the headlights loomed through the darkness and rain, Ben slowly turned towards them with harassed eyes that stared as if they could not anticipate what banality or horror they would see.
“Baby, I’ve never seen you in this state,” Aditi said, frightened, as she caressed his head pressed against her breast.
She was lying on her back on the bed, and he was clinging to her, violently, trembling, staring. Since entering the apartment, he had not said a word. When she had opened the door, he had met her with terrified eyes, grasped her hand with both of his, and moved straight towards the bedroom without removing a single article of clothing, his own or hers, a sure sign that something must be terribly wrong.
“What happened?” she said now, stroking his head. She paused. “Did you see your mother?”
She felt his embrace tighten. Then he raised his head and stared into her eyes.
“Help me,” he whispered. “Help me to know ... what is real.”
He thought he felt her stiffen. Ben’s psychological problems had always been a dark zone for her. A major component of their love had always been their shared sense of outsidership. But she knew that Ben’s alienation went much deeper: he had been locked up in a mental hospital at fourteen for a suicide attempt, and had been homeless since he was fifteen. And the phobic terror of his mother that had still been riding him when he met Aditi was different not only in degree but in kind from the fears she had known. She studied his face.
“Baby, what kind of help do you need? Why are you doubting reality? What seems unreal to you? Before anything, what happened? The only thing I can think of is that you must have seen your mother.”
“I did,” he said, and an encouraging element of reflection now entered his staring eyes. “I saw her ... and ... something else ...” He looked down, thinking. “I ... woke up on the porch of her house, at dawn. I ... don’t remember going there.” His eyes glistened with terror. “I had seen ... something so terrible in the department last night.” He again raised his eyes to hers, which were now also wide with dread.
“Call Boylan,” he whispered urgently. “Call him.”
“Ben, it’s past midnight,” she said.
“What the hell difference does that make to him?” said Ben, a growing excitement and hope in his voice. “Call him! I know he must be there! I need to know right now!” He raised himself from her, got off the bed and took her hand, trying to pull her towards the living room. “I just need to hear his voice. I know he must be there, on the floor of his office, like he always is. He won’t know it’s you phoning him! Aditi, please do this for me. It’s literally a matter of life and death.”
She allowed him to draw her from the bed to the living room, where the phone sat on its little table next to the sofa. She sat, raised the receiver, and punched in the number as he stood in front of her, arms crossed on his chest, anxiously looking on. She listened for a moment, then handed the receiver up to Ben.
“It’s ringing,” she said. “Just don’t say anything.”
He stood listening for about half a minute.
“Ben,” she whispered, “he’s not there, or he’s unconscious.”
Ben glanced at her and raised his finger to his lips, shushing her, then turned aside and continued to listen as she leaned her cheek on her fist, looking resigned. The seconds ticked away as he stood listening, hunched with the receiver in his right hand and his left arm crossed over his chest, visibly growing more and more desperate to hear the receiver picked up at the other end.
Finally, after what may have been a full three minutes, he raised his head with a jerk, beaming beatifically, as a sharp burst of enraged squawking was heard from the receiver. He looked down at Aditi with real joy and triumph, and she smiled back at him, looking perplexed but gratified, as another paroxysm of almost discernible obscenities emerged from the phone.
Stooping to lightly put down the receiver, he straightened himself and began to pace around the room, head bent, with his left arm still over his chest and his right fist pressed against his chin. He was smiling tightly, in the grip of the upsurge of some indeterminate emotion of which the main element was joy. He felt tears spill from his eyes as Aditi watched, a look of shock coming over her face. Spinning round at the end of one lap of his frenetic pacing, he burst out in a trembling voice that threatened to collapse into hysterical laughter.
“I could never have imagined ... that I would ever be so glad ... to hear that that dollop of demonic scum wasn’t dead!”
And now the wave broke, and he threw back his head and began to laugh, sitting down at last on one of the steel and plastic chairs.
“Dead?” said Aditi, sounding frightened. “Why would he have been dead?”
Ben rapidly composed himself. “Listen, I’ve seen ... last night, in the faculty, I saw ... I saw something I couldn’t believe, couldn’t bear to believe. All day I was wondering ... how much of it was true, could any of it have been true ... I could feel that it hadn’t been real, or entirely real.”
He paused, leaning forward, hands clasped between his knees, and looked up into her eyes.
“I saw Boylan. I saw Boylan and Malhotra, together, in Robarts, in the fire escape stairwell. Boylan ... attacked me. And I defended myself. And then ... he killed himself! He pushed himself off the stairs and ... fell to the bottom of the stairwell.”
“Oh my god!” whispered Aditi. She stared at him, stunned. “But ... just now you heard him answer the phone ... ?”
“Yes!” said Ben, again beaming with joy and relief. “What I saw... was a hallucination! I know now what has happened. Moksha ... Baby, do you know anything about acid, LSD?”
She shook her head, still staring.
“Look,” he said. “Moksha has LSD. A lot of it. I can’t explain right now, but ... Moksha has LSD, and so does Boylan. Moksha thought that I should do acid with him, he offered acid to me. I refused, but ... ”
“But you think ... that he somehow gave you some without your knowing it?” said Aditi softly, staring, horrified. “Oh baby, what is it going to do to you? It’s still working, then? Are you going to have more hallucinations? When will it be out of your system? And how could he have done this? When? It’s a week since we took him up there.”
“I don’t know,” said Ben, shaking his head, looking down. “I don’t know much about LSD, I don’t know how it works, or for how long. But I’ve heard that it doesn’t always take effect as soon as you’ve taken it, that the effect can stop and start, that there can be what they call ‘flashbacks,’ episodes that come long after you’ve taken it, months or even years. I really just don’t know, this is just stuff I’ve heard, mainly from Moksha.”
“But ... what happens during these episodes?” she said. “What happened to you last night? Were you just sitting somewhere, or asleep, and you had this vision that seemed so real that you remembered it as a real event? So it just makes you hallucinate? I mean ... it doesn’t make you dangerous in any way, does it?”
He looked up at her, and in her face saw fear struggling with love.
“I ... don’t think so,” he said. “I just don’t know. I’ve never heard of anyone committing violence while on an acid trip. Apparently it’s not like alcohol or cocaine, it’s not a stimulant like that. It’s a hallucinogen, so, yes, I have the impression that it generally just makes you quite passive, it turns you inward, while you see visions, experience hallucinations. I think the worst that can happen is that you can see something terrifying, and you’ll just end up, you know, curled up on the floor, babbling or screaming.”
