Maybe exterminating an insectoid shoggoth with bug spray wasn't absurd. Perhaps the rational was finally beginning to reassert itself. "Or maybe," Bill said, "it's a trap. To make sure we traveled to New York. All your other cross-country trips just petered out, after all." It was absurd to travel to New York now--every face belonged to Neal. He melted in and out of the expressions of the people we hurried past, his visage slipping around the back of heads, nestling in hairdos and flowing over sweating red necks to stare at us. Sometimes he was gloating, his eyes burning with a nameless evil, other times his face was plaintive and biblical, like some prophet watching his ancient city reduced to rubble by his angry loverboy God.
"Sympathetic magic. Sometimes it is Neal, sometimes his doppelgangers, animated by horrible marionette magics." Bill was on his back, in the train yard, speaking through raspy gasps. What was really absurd was our attempt to escape Chicago. It's just twelve hours on a flatout night run to Manhattan, but we couldn't lift a car to save our lives. Maybe it was Neal at work, his great criminal mind finally turned to the service of keeping cars where they were parked, rather than liberating them. Hangers, slide hammers, nothing worked. Some of the sweetest rides were under guard, cultists snoozing within, crumpled in the front seats, fogging up the windows. We didn't have any money for gas anyway. It was absurd, almost as absurd as trying to hop the rail with William S. Burroughs in tow.
Here is how it worked, or didn't work. A train growled up to life, and slowly squealed down the tracks. We waited behind some crates, looking for an inviting train car, and then ran for it. I matched speeds, flung myself into the gap, and scrambled onto the car. Then I turned back to see wheezing Bill, arms flailing, trying to keep up. "Jack, Jack!" he called out to me. "Can't do it!" I jumped off the train and tumbled back onto the gravel of the yard. Bill finally made it up to me, swayed dramatically, and then crumpled to his knees. We did that 'til about two o'clock in the morning, for train after train.
The leaving trains were getting scarcer so I took to grabbing Bill by the collar and the back of his pants and running him up to the train. The idea was to throw him aboard and then jump after him, but we either got our legs tangled and the two of us just collapsed into a dusty heap while the train pulled away triumphantly, or otherwise I mistimed the throw and ended up tossing him against the side of the train car rather than through the gaping open door of one. Then he'd bounce off, seeing stars, and fall into me, arms and legs akimbo. So that's why Bill was on his back, explaining the metaphysics of Neal's kidnapping and Cthulhoid physiology to me. The concussions of enlightenment, there's nothing like them in the world anymore. I threw Bill up against another hulking turtle of a train car, but by dawn he wasn't getting any smarter. "Good Neal, or evil Neal? Which one are you even trying to save . . . or to destroy? There's a battle in each of us, you know. Reason versus madness, base matter and dreamy illusion, perception and memory. He's transcended the real now, you know. We can't go to New York to save Neal, for he is all around us, sitting naked on our forks with every bite of meat--" Eventually he nodded off.
The flats heated up quickly under the sun. We hid under a tarp as the few night shift guards sauntered out and were replaced by an army of foremen, Pinkertoon goons (real goons with black pebble eyes and arms as long as apes') and freight haulers. I briefly considered sauntering on up to a gang of workers and blending in, then hopping a freight, but I was sporting a few too many bruises for that, and Bill had even more, plus his wrinkled pimp suit. "Just act natural," I could tell him, and I knew he'd blow our cover in a minute with some obnoxious rant or mouthful of vomit landing on the wrong goose-stepping boot.
It was Neal who found us. Some thug of a man, more fireplug than primate, shuffled up to our hiding place backwards, and on the back of his head was Neal's face. The worker's hand ducked behind his back and wiggled its fingers at us, like a television maître d' looking for a few bucks in exchange for a decent table. I made to move but Bill put a hand on my shoulder. "You're still a mark for that character, you know? You don't know whether this mugwump might lead you--right to the slaughterhouse as likely as anything. Are you ready to be Vienna Beef, eh? The mark inside is the mark you can't beat, Jack. Neal knows it, now the damn mugwumps know it."
"We can stay here 'til we get caught by someone who doesn't even pretend to be friendly," I reasoned. Then I laughed out loud. It was horrible. Bill and I were every movie serial hero and sidekick. "It's a trap!" some underfed faggot actor cries (his voice cracks professionally, so the rubes who paid their two bits for a picture show will think he's a kid), but the square-jawed protagonist can only squint into the distance and declare, "That's a chance I have to take." Cut to titles, then on to the newsreel. Denver is now the West Coast, millions lost beyond the sea, their souls imprisoned on old R'lyeh. Sounds like something Neal would crib for his book. So I went and Bill followed, muttering and wiping dust from his knees. Was this the feature, or just the cartoon?
We were led to a distant corner of the yard, Neal's plaintive face stamped into the hair of the shuffling fellow we followed. He brought us to a funnel flow tank car, the sort of thing you might use to transport kaolin clay slurry, molten sulfur or the horrid ichor of the earth's very bowels, and in his weird backwards way gestured for us to climb and see if we couldn't squeeze in through the top valves.
Even if the car were empty now (Bill rapped on the side of it experimentally, but didn't come to any conclusions) it could be filled at any stop. We'd be alone in the dark, huddled together, probably bruised and battered from rolling around all over the slanted belly of the tank, when corn syrup or even hot asphalt pours in. We might not even be awake for it. But Neal, oh Neal . . . I looked at what I could see of his eyes, which weren't much as they were just molded hair on the back of some mugwump head. Would he really betray me so utterly? Wanderlust is what led him to dump me down in Mexico years ago; he ran off, following women and his muse while I broiled alive with a fever on a stained cot. And from that expression, even obscured by the media of skull and hair, I knew this was the real deal Neal, not just some haunted chimerstry. But, he did drive off and leave Nelson to die, when was it--a week ago? two?
I left him to die too, didn't I? I hadn't even thought about him since then, and now he's not just dead, he's deep under the burgeoning Pacific in Cthulhu's dark embrace. Trust this Neal doppelganger; damn, I was barely sure I was human myself at that moment. Luckily, in the next moment, a growling pickup truck pulled up and idled. Bill rushed up to it and grabbed the driver by the ears and started yanking, while I grabbed the body. Neal's face shimmered and shifted into a horrible tusked boar, but I kept low as a barbed prehensile tongue spilled forth from the boar head. The human slab of man was belching for help too, and trying to jerk free, but I kept low, wrapped my arms around his thick waist and finally threw him onto the ground. I jumped over the tangling whip of a tongue and ran to the truck.
Bill hadn't gotten the driver out, but managed to shove himself in through the open window. His legs were sticking out and flailing like he was trying to swim for it. I rushed up to the door, opened it and helped pull the driver out, then slid into the driver's seat, yanked Bill over my lap and dumped him, crumpled and upside down, into the passenger seat and punched it. We were off in a roar of dust, whooping and shouting and flipping the old bird to the backwards boar-faced thug and the chump we just rolled for the ride.
We blasted over the border and through the steel tentacle buildings of black Gary, Indiana. Bill stayed twisted like the letter C, but upside down and backwards, till we had hit the heartland, then finally snaked into seat properly. "Look, a farm," he said, nudging me with his elbow. The highway was a knife's cut through endless fields of blasted grain, sprinkled with skeletal cows. Only Bill Burroughs could look out at that landscape and see a farm. I saw poisoned earth and chewing machines swaying in the air-warped heat. The silent, sleepy, staring houses far from the roadside could tell all that had transpired here in these late days, but they were not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness that helped them forget. It would have been merciful to cut the wheel hard and drive right up to the front stoop, and to throw a flaming thatch of blackened wheat through the window, to kill these houses, to end their haunted dreams. But Bill nudged me again and smiled and said, "Look, a farm." It wasn't getting any funnier, not the next twelve times he said it either. "Look, Dachau," he should have said. "Look, the moldy tainted heart of our heartland. The nation's breadbasket with a clicking mandibled-chin head in it rather than a sweet loaf," he should have said.
"Look, a farm," again. Then, "I need to take a fucking leak. And we need gas too."
There were rest stops on the highway, but on this fatal plain we had to be careful. Slow down when we see one on the highway, try to spy with my little third eye the taint of extradimensional evil, but then it may already be too late. Grease monkeys swarming on our car, smashing the windows with tire irons, dragging us into the local diner for deep frying. So no, you don't slow down at the first truck stop you see, that's where they are waiting.
But you don't just zip past it either, not when your pickup is already coughing out black exhaust. The beetlemen behind the counters or a pear-shaped goblin waitress peeking through the venetian blinds in a little side window spot you half-dead on the road, acting all casual, and call ahead to the next rest stop. Pull in there, fast or slow, and they're waiting for you. All smiles, all lips twisted and hardened into thick chitinous hooks. All service too. Sure, fill the tank, have a cup of joe (on the house even) with two lumps of sugar, one for the coffee and one for the gas tank. Then, three miles down the road, when the truck wheezes and fails just over the horizon, we come for you, drag you out of the cab, slice your vocal cords and listen and laugh as we drag you over the hot asphalt back not to their stop but to the one before. What's left of Jack and Bill, bloody and stained roadkill, served up as Sunday hash in two different diners.
Maybe the third stop, if you have enough gas because you sure as hell don't want to be walking the shoulder alone with nothing but an empty gas can, if this purloined jalopy even has a gas can, because you won't even be able to throw a punch before they get you. And at that third rest stop you don't slow down, you blaze on in, tires squealing and red hot. You grab the gas quick, at gunpoint if you have to, if guns even work on these shambling monsters, and shove a wedge of apple pie in your mouth, roll out on the bill and hit the road before the cops or great tentacles made of bright noonday sky itself come to claim your soul.
"There's a rest stop," Bill said. I slowed down and pulled in without incident, and haggled for some gas. The gas man was a good old boy who'd seen better days. He had a Bible in one hand, a whittling knife in the other, and was just leaning and looking, his eyes little pebbles. I walked right up to him and told him that I'd stolen the car, that I was a great horrible beatnik and that if I didn't get to New York and soon like, the stars would align and the world would be consumed by great Cthulhu, or maybe just destroyed by Azathoth.
"Have you been washed in the blood of the lamb?" he asked. "Have you been slain in the spirit?"
"Sure." What else can you say to that? And there was that one time when a hobo preacher laid hands on me and I whooped it up for nearly an hour, in the grasp of some golden fist, though that could have been a parlor trick. I meditated for days after, searching for that elusive clump of nerves or spiritual door that would make it happen again, but I never found it, except in the tickytack of the Underwood. Anyway, we really needed gas and the fellow liked Bill's watch, so we filled the tank and two five-gallon tanks we found in the back of the truck, plus a redneck blessing written into the dust on our hood with his finger.
I pushed the truck hard and it ate highway like a rattling monster. The steering column was a thing of primitive beauty, a divining rod. Ease up now, then punch the gas hard, Jack, it told me with faithful vibrations. We skirted the edge of the performance envelope, goading the engine on with pumping splashes of hot gas and then easing up just before something might start to smoke. The last I wanted was to crack the head in Indiana and wait on the road for the cult of Cthulhu to skin us alive, or for that matter, for the goddamn Pacific Ocean to show up. The jalopy loved me though; like the sweetest girl it guided my hands to the sweet spots and we drove on with a fierce energy. Bill slept, head cocked to the side like a dead man, a string of drool writing spirals on his lapels.
Indiana was gone by the time I had to pull over and pour one of the emergency gas cans into the tank. The sun was high and a sunset red. The sky looked like orange juice; what Outsider Being had spilled his brunch mimosa on the terrarium dome of our sky? It was hot; I was probably going mad at about that point, but since Bill was such an old lady of a driver, I dared not wake him and have him take over. He would have stopped at every bathroom and corny roadside attraction on the way. Ancient genuine pointy rocks labeled "Indian Arrow Head" under glass; skinned monkeys stuffed and displayed as stillborn freak babies; two-headed calves with heavy industrial staples glinting along the seam of the sinister head's neck. Who said America is in the grip of a weird evil now; we've always been fascinated with it ever since the first burly settlers chased sweet squaws into the woods, and came out smiling and dripping with sex and a bloody scalp. Even this Beat thing just led to what: a lot of bastard kids, bad poetry, and the junky faggot next to me who snored like he was percolating coffee in his sinuses.
Neal was still everywhere. Silvery Greyhound buses matched speeds with us and his face leered out in the flesh of tourist jowls from every window. He smiled, he commanded a hearty thumbs up from enslaved old men, he melted and attacked the bus driver, then tried to run me off the road, but my stolen truck could gun past an overstuffed bus any day. Other Neals waved from the roadside and left cans of gas and bags of little white pills; I filled up and munched them down by the handful. Eventually, my hands were shaking so much they vibrated through the steering wheel. I needed to switch off on the driving duties, quick like.
"Bill!" I tried to shake him but my fingers flowed like water through the fabric of his jacket and dribbled onto his shoulder. I turned back to the road just in time to see it cut hard to the left. I wrapped my arms around the wheel as best I could, my shirt and flesh splashed against my chest. We drove into the cliff face wall that bordered the highway and melded into it, driving through stone and roots.
"It's a Stanley blade," the man named Gin said. He was a weird one, old Gin. Skull like a bird with eyes set so deep in his head he always looked scared and always scared me a bit, whenever he turned my way. Gin's thin fingers wrapped around the little knife and sliced through the newspaper headline. "And it cuts so easily, so well." He was English, his voice lilted. All his features lilted, the little bird man. Gin's hands, thick green and black tattoos spiraled and pointed their way up his well-veined arms. His shoulder rolled like a swimmer's when he moved.
Even his cut-up was like a ballet, beautiful to behold. Not much else was in this dusty room, dark and with yellowed newspapers stacked to the stamped-tin ceiling. Even the window was gray with dust and outside I saw a street corner like the black hoof of a great beast. I knew the rest of the town--though I didn't know what alien city it was supposed to be--would be rich with filthy bums and piggish slavers, married whores and deep black rivers stained from the crushed bones of the earth. What mountain of corpses was this built on? Indians, diluted and destroyed by hot firewater, stooped over Negroes toothless from sugar and beatings, or just plain old white folk huddled in the corner of their huts, hiding from the leaping shadows and dance of firelight? Taxman was always coming, pulling behind him his cart of war--
I looked up and smiled at the applause. "Pulling his cart of war," I repeated and nodded, because that's what intellectuals do even when the clappers are just stooped-over roaches with out-of-fashion hats balanced on their heads, and a few slick trained seals in the cheap seats by the kitchen. I looked down at my notes and saw only the gibberish of dreams. "Or just on the road," I read, squinting, trying to fool the letters into coherence. "Carrying garden tools for no good reason to anyone but Neal, looking to get back to Denver or New York. I nearly cried at the thought of missing him, and bit my lip hard, 'til my mouth filled with tired blood in the game." They applauded anyway, the way Auntie applauds her Mongoloid neighbor boy for singing "Happy Birthday" wrong.
"Off to he who called himself Doc. Bury a body in the desert, or dig a tunnel to a sweet freedom underground and away from the blasphemous sky. Neal announced who he was to a wall, and shoved an old feller, extinguished, thin, and named Howie at me, foreign cigarettes on me and Howie smiled and chest until I showed off a gap them what they wanted."
After. Or waiting for my show to begin. At the bar. With a drink. Tasted like broken glass, like warm ice that won't melt. Tentacles, flippers, hot human hands patting my back as if to say "Better luck next time, chump." Once after drinking sixty great rounds in 1942 I found myself wrapped around a porcelain toilet, vomiting so hard that I didn't just stain the bowl, I chipped it. I spat up my soul and stayed tied to the commode like a dead vine while three days and nights of winos and sailors did their business over, around, and on me until I was entirely encased. I could have stayed there 'til this day and just woke up this morning and walked into a whole new world that had already passed me by. Then I'd expect someone to walk up to me in shimmering space armor or a Mao jumpsuit and tell me, "Better luck next time, chump." Not today though, not when I was in The New York Times, not when I had the word visionary stapled to my name like a second head. Something from my drink was sharp against my tongue. I reached into my mouth and pulled out the swift triangle of a Stanley blade. I put the point to my wrist and cut, up--
"Aigh!" Bill cried out, throwing his hands and elbows up into his face, "I can't stand this goddamn car." I lolled my head and lifted one eyelid. The yellow road lines were drifting into the view of my window on the passenger side. Quite a trick. Bill was a better driver than I thought, going sideways and all.
A million Greek relatives spun in lazy snake circles, out the door of the VFW and then back in to the hoots and gasps of the few white friends Memere invited. Stella was radiant but I really wanted to marry the puddle of sticky whiskey at the bottom of my glass. Bouzouki music trilled endlessly under stomping and applause and tinkling glasses and forks. I looked down, my rented lapels were out to here; I could have flown off and escaped if I had a running start out in the parking lot. The purple tentacles in my salad writhed suggestively to me, but I couldn't find the proper fork to stab them with. I never wanted a formal wedding, too square even if the dances were all group rounds. I could die right here, hand my soul to Stella and have her eat it with the cake. She had a tv, she had some money, she had a couch. I'd be fine. Just leave me alone, I'll tell her five days a week, and two days a week I'll lay her and that will keep her quiet and purring, so I can die in the living room, a moment at a time, like I want to.
Gin poked me hard and got my full attention. His hand wasn't in front of my face, it was somewhere in the inside of my face, his fingers in my eyes and nose like they were the triple holes of a bowling ball. I could still see though, see those deep-set coal eyes demanding my whole world from me. "The cut-up is a random event, but that doesn't mean you have to accept any snowflake lattice of word and image, Jack. You're still in the driver's seat, you and Bill together. Remember what Neal did to your old immortal town of Denver; he tore it apart right in front of you. So are the beings from beyond--he's nothing but the teeniest phalange of their might and chaos, a finger dragged along the dust of an antique market." He pushed the knife into my hand and nodded towards the newspapers. "Cut again."
The clicking of the blinker woke me again for a moment. "How long have you been trying to turn?" I muttered to Bill, who explained that the road was a spiral sinking away from the surface of the planet and that it was only headed in one direction. Down. He'd been making a left-hand turn for hour after hour. Our land was being torn apart, its remains washed away in a rain of black spirits from the darkening sky. Reputation aside, I never traveled directly from end to end of this great country--there were always false starts at rainy bus stops, big times missed thanks to some cotton picking adventure, or a premature end to my journeys thanks to fistfights and fevers. My trip through the American Dream was never made in a bee-line, how could it be?
Marie's secret enlightenment, her last-minute whisperings, saved me again. Do the absurd thing. I looked in the glove box and found an AAA map in folded tatters. I tore the pieces apart and shuffled them atop the dash. Bill didn't even look at me, he was leaning over the steering wheel like The Red Baron in his Fokker. I built Ohio and Pennsylvania a new system of veiny highways, and I cheated. I threw half the map out the window, extinguishing hundreds of miles; it would have been bad news for thousands of ordinary folks if they weren't all mugwump slaves already.
"Make the next right, Old Bull," I told Bill, and suddenly, like a spotlight on a dark stage making that golden saxophone shine, there was a right turn to be made. We hit the turnpikes in Pennsylvania and Jersey and I paid the tolls in bewildering haiku. My kireji shocked the poor late-night bastards. "Earth burns, becomes smoke," I told them, then I said a secret line that explained it all. I don't remember those seven syllables to this day, but it beat trying to pay with tainted change. One toll booth operator looked like a mandibled Neal but old Bill just screamed like a woman, floored it and blew right through the gate, taking the yellow and black beestriped guard arm with us for half a mile after. "How ya like that, you goddamn sumnabitch! This is my fucking world, and I'll stomp my feet wherever I like, over and through every magic circle your Wall Street wizards make! Notional boundaries, conceptual traps, I'm destroying all rational thought, and taking your ugly shit stalls with me!" The next booth, this one also holding a Neal doppelganger, Bill just rammed right into over and over, and when it collapsed we drove over it. "Now that, my friend," I howled, "is the spirit!"
That was a fine truck we stole.
I drew new highways in the blood from my well-chewed fingernails on the glove box's map and scraped a free road from central Pennsylvania and parallel the Jersey Turnpike. No man's cosmic enthusiasm could endure that labyrinthine road, but the force of Buddha's palm guided us along a new path. It steadied our backs. Up through the pine barrens, past the flaming chemical plants that really burned earth into poison smoke (and made us beg, each and every day, for more plastic marvels, more disposable moments, more dead tv dinners), and into the squalid Negro cities. By dawn, we were in Hoboken, where the air smelled of factory coffee from Maxwell's down on the far end of Washington Street.
We switched off again and drove us through the mile square city. The dregs of society lived here; Negroes were but shadows and the poor whites starving Dachau ghosts. The bars never closed in Hoboken; I could taste beer on my tongue with every breath. Morning ferries were pulling out, loaded high with miserable drunks trudging back to Manhattan--they came here at two when their bars closed and stayed 'til dawn, then shuffled to Charon's own barges. Back to their newsstand kiosks to hawk disaster for two bits. To Bowery factories, to slap together industrial ovens. Floors needed sweeping, shirts needed stitching. You want a night sweeter than wine, you pay for it in the morning, with a hangover, a stiff workaday shift, and a little chunk of soul carved right out of you with a sharp Stanley knife.
But across the river, topping the brown Hudson like a crown, was Manhattan. Buildings stretched to the heavens, whose brothers the mountains are. It was not like any city on earth, for above purple mists rose towers, spires and pyramids which one may only dream of in opiate lands beyond the Oxus. Majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks rising flowerlike and delicate from pools of mist to play with the flaming clouds and last stars of morning.
But threaded through this beauty were the dark tentacles of great Cthulhu. He had beaten us home, the prize was in his grasp already. The heart of the world, concrete and fleshy, green money blood pouring in and out from every corner of earth though arteries of commerce and culture, all but choked up and poisoned with the madness of dead gods' dreams. I wanted closure, I wanted to walk on the water and run howling through my old streets, looking for the last big time but instead all my senses screamed a single word--Horror!--an oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me.
Bill parallel-parked badly and rubbed his eyes. He left the truck behind without a word and followed his nose to some hash browns and scrapple. Turning away from the skyline I remembered I was hungry for breakfast too, and followed Bill into the diner.
Chapter Eleven
Hoboken is the pus-filled appendix of Manhattan, a crushed city of filthy puddles and horrible caramelized smells (coffee in the mornings, Tootsie Rolls afternoons when the factory starts up). Nobody lives here, everyone is on pure survival mode. Even the little Puerto Rican girls who jump rope two at a time give you the ol' slit-eye as you walk past them. Horrible people, all of them. When I followed Bill into the diner it was just in time to see the waiters hustle and push the tables around a screaming hulk of a man with a head like a cinderblock. From behind the counter the fry cook, howling to himself in some ululating language, jumped into the ring of tables and put up his dukes. They started circling each other seriously, both calm except for the shouting, bobbing and rolling their fists in slow motion.The fry cook wasn't five and a half feet tall, and Squarehead was more like seven, but the big man took the little bantamweight seriously. The cook swung hard to the body and got inside Squarehead, peppering his stomach and ribs with rock-hard rockets--he was a little guy but his arms were like suspension bridge cables.
Squarehead raged and swung his huge oak arms but the little guy squeezed in right up against his brick wall of a torso and started laying in heavy shots, backing the big man up against the edge of one of the tables. Cookie must have been a club fighter and a good one, but he was too confident and ate one of Squarehead's chaotic haymakers. A waiter waltzed up behind the barricade, pulled out a blackjack and smacked Squarehead right on the top of the head with it, and when he didn't immediately go down, started drumming him down, each blow taking an inch or two off Squarehead's height 'til the crazed giant reached his knees and then keeled over at the fry cook's feet. He shouted again in curlicue language (Greek, Italian?) and the waiters and busboys quickly shifted the tables back to their old positions on the dusty floor, then picked up Squarehead (it took all five of them to get his carcass into the air) and tossed him out into the street. Bill and I were the only customers in there and the way the fry cook was looking at us as he resumed his place behind the counter didn't make me want to insult him by backing out and looking for some other greasy spoon, so we walked up to the counter, Bill's hat in his hands, and took a seat. The old cook licked the pink right off his split knuckles and nodded. "So, my friends," he asked over the squealing of heavy tables being dragged back into place, "what will it be?" as friendly as all get out, except that he'd probably call the man who raped his daughter "my friend" too before pounding him into a meat sauce.
I had the spaghetti with meat sauce and loved it. I loved it like I loved Hoboken and all these slimy little lives in the shadow of the haunted skyscrapers across the gray river. At least they were human! Even Squarehead, even the Negro who relieved himself against the balding tires of our truck, even the squinty-eyed Mongoloid kids who chewed lead like candy never sold their souls for some dubious starry wisdom. Death filled the spoiled air in Hoboken, but it was a natural death, the death of attachment, the death of fill-in-the-blank. I could feel a balloon over my head, tethered to my own mortality, whenever I turned to the east and saw the city on the opposite shore. We spent a week in Hoboken, plotting. Gathering intelligence.
We held court every night in the diner, after spending our days wandering the few streets here to find our fellows. The beatniks had already been chased out of the West Village, their apartments torn to shreds by bankers driven insane by Cthulhu-tainted money. Some had been to the city, wading through the dark and flooded Hudson tubes--the trains stopped running weeks ago. Others took rafts at dawn and paddled across the Hudson to see what was what, or chugged up north then walked across the George Washington Bridge.
"We're invisible," a girl with kohl-stained eyes told me over tea and reefer. "Like a hand in a beehive, if you don't bother them, they don't notice you. Not these mad mindless cultists. They walk the streets in robes, ten abreast." She didn't smile, it was like those muscles had been pulled from her face. She wouldn't smile if you tickled her feet or hugged her tight and told you you loved her. She wouldn't smile if you meant it.
"There are mundanes too--you'll see them when you go ashore. They sit by their windows, an eye peeking out between the ribbons of their blinds, waiting for their world to return." She took a long drag and then said wistfully, "I wonder if anyone has starved to death yet. Cats eat their dead owners, you know. They only wait a few hours to do it. With a dog, they'll sit there and watch a corpse, whimpering and waiting to be fed. Cats get hungry."
This girl was a serious head. I just now noticed that for as good-looking as she was (ironed hair, dainty nose, sweet round chin), near everyone else in the room had given her five feet of leeway in every direction. They crowded in the corner to talk to Bill, or hung out by the door.
"Are you a cat or a dog, old Jack?" she asked me and before I could give her a witty answer, she cocked her head, peered at me with those black and rounded eyes and said, "You're a cat person. That's good, I don't want to get too attached to someone who is going to die soon." She leaned forward, took the back of my head in the palm of her hand and kissed me like a man would. Heck, she kissed me like I kissed so many girls with her haircut and a tenth of her brain. We spent the night together in some moth-eaten sleeping bag in a broom closet while Bill did the brain work with the gang outside. Just as well, my heart wasn't in this adventure anymore.
In the morning after the kohl-eyed girl skulked off looking like a raccoon, I poured a cup of coffee (Where was I? Some artist's loft? Everyone else had split anyway) and stepped outside onto the roof and saw Manhattan again. I poured the coffee out (caffeine is a drug--I needed to be utterly straight) and settled down onto the tar beach to meditate so that I might peer beyond the purple veil of haunted smog that rested over the island like a shawl on some withered old lady's shoulders.
In the reflection of the new glass and steel buildings, in the shadow of old baroque bones, I saw it. The deus ex machina. Manhattan was it, the God of the machine, pumping out horror after horror. Every postmark on stamps meant for Big Sur, all the lucky train cars and sloshing tanks of gas, all to drag me across the country without just giving up to the drunk or to the sweaty arms of some girl (I could still smell the kohl-eyed one on me, on my neck and fingers, she was unripe like a March peach). Cross-country travel wasn't even that hard, really. Neal was there to tear up the landscape in Denver, sweet and convenient beer there to deaden my senses from the madness of the skies in Kansas. We kicked through challenges like bathroom doors but it was all thanks to deus ex machina; the unexpected yank of a lever, the dark man with his gun, the party gone on just a minute too long.
Another realization in a month of realizations: it needed me. Whatever it was, whatever sinister force was the real Prime Mover of all this clockwork grue (Cthulhu, the shoggoths, they were mere shadows on the wall of this cave, I knew), to the almighty It, little Ti Jean had cosmic significance. Have enlightenment, will travel.
I struggled to detach myself from the marionette strings of self, to dance free and off the beaten path, but it lead me right back to my buzzing morning thoughts. Was it September yet? It was warm, but not so hot as summer. Rivers had a cooling effect on nearby land, like bodhisattva's smile on a crowded battlefield. The cuts grew kinder. I found myself wishing for my Underwood so I could write Neal a letter about all these crazy times, the realization between syllables of haiku, but then I remembered that he probably knew all this stuff already. He always lived life on a string, but he was no holy fool; Neal Cassady was a cosmic dupe.
The systems for planning always fail. Everything, anything, we all fall to dust at the end of the day. That's why I never cared if any of my trips across the ribboned highway of America ever made it all the way; you can't succeed for failing anyway. Denver, Frisco, a hot couch in New Orleans, drippy automat New York, it's all the same, nothing but "Here I am!"
With a steel and concrete scraping, Maxwell's on Washington started up again. It didn't take five minutes for the smell of coffee grounds to sweep up the street like a hobo's blanket. I was agitated suddenly, up from half-lotus and pacing. Guns? Bug spray? The force of Buddha's palm? Caffeine was in the air and it tasted like war on my tongue and sweaty skin. The poetry of war, and me without a typewriter or even a chewed up pencil behind my ear. Bill was probably up now. He was always an early riser--a bizarre habit for a junky fag--I went to collect him so that together we could strike at the dark heart of America's nightmare.
The skinny Puerto Rican grinned and held out his bony Charon hand. The little outboard motor was already belching blue smoke, ready to push us hard across the river. We paid him with grass wrapped in butcher paper and he smiled and nodded. "Amigos, amigos! You're trusting men, strong boys I can tell. But I'm not coming back for you, I'm not going to wait for you either. If you get back, you get back on your own." He sat astern, opened the paper and starting running his finger through the weed, looking for seeds and stems, and didn't help us aboard. I jumped for it then held out a hand for Bill, who was weighed down by two huge containers of bug spray strapped to his back. We had that, I had a butcher knife tucked into my work boot with a spare sock wrapped around the blade, and I had woken up with a feeling that the stars were right. That's what we had. "And you swim the last twenty yards, I'm not going to moor either."
I swam in the Hudson once, back when the river was still blue with tiny teardrop waves goading me on, back when even the fog was a warm embrace and leaves spilled from the parks of Washington Heights and floated under the docks. Even then as a stupid college kid I could feel my eyes burn whenever I dunked my head. Now the river was black and had an almost solid topography; our old Charon swung and moved the rudder to avoid hunks of steaming waste the size of couches.
And it wasn't the cult that did this, the filth here was all natural, all man. We had everything already, the altar had been laid out, sacrifices prepared. Charnel pits in Europe, hills of dead babies, bombs that could take this city of money changing temples out in a flash of light; the concrete and steel wouldn't even last long enough to crumble down to the ground. We're all so rich now that we're one step away from holding out the begging bowl and blinking away hungry flies. How could the elder gods resist such a morsel--we'd stuck the decorative toothpick in ourselves.
I turned back to look at Charon. He had a firm grip on the outboard's rudder and a deep smile. Bill sat across the bow, tilting forward to keep the cans from pulling him overboard and into the brown wake. "There is no way we can swim twenty feet in this filth, much less twenty yards. And we have the tanks to carry," I said. Bill said "Yeah. We have a better chance of hopping across the shitty little islands. This is like sailing through a goddamn rectum."
"That's right. So you're taking us to shore, or we'll just knock you right off your own motorboat and let you swim half a mile back to Jersey." Hoboken life was really starting to grow on me, or maybe it was the fecund stink of the world rotting around us. Charon laughed, one of those proud American laughs, and said "What an idea! I had the same." He pulled a pistol, a shiny little dame in a noir flick keeps me in her handbag number, right out of his pocket and leveled it at me. "You two, empty your pockets and jump. Better the river than the lead, no?" Bill shrugged out of one of the shoulder straps of his tanks and got the gun in his face instead, "No, you keep that. Just everything else you have. This isn't a cheap trip junky--you can't take nothing else with you."
I didn't have a thing in my pockets and turned them inside out to show him, "We're just wandering fools, you know. Looking to save the world a bit?" Bill grunted, his face granite. "I'll drown with these things on." For a second I considered rushing the guy--maybe Bill was on the same wavelength. His junky body was tense suddenly, all the reserve morphine pooled up in his muscles had been burned out by adrenaline and fear. But he emptied his pockets with a futile defiance. He threw a worn wallet to the bottom of the boat, a tangle of string, a few soggy cigarettes, a bottle cap, a slim paperback from his jacket pocket, what looked like a chicken bone, and he reached into his pockets again before Charon, "All right, don't empty your trash out! Just jump!" He put the gun up to Bill's stone face. "Get your boyfriend to hug you. Two maricons together should be able to float."
I pushed him, with my brain. The boat, the gun, the river itself. Nothing came--the enlightenment well had run dry. No more miracles, just two sweaty and unimportant little men being poked at by a nasty little deathshead Puerto Rican. I so wanted to rush him but my limbs were heavy and Bill wasn't with me. He was on his feet, half-staggering. He slipped an arm around my waist almost too comfortably.
"Muchachos!"" the ferryman said, "Listen, no hard feelings? Better you take your chances now than face the terror ashore. They might just keep you alive forever, to see your faces when the world turns to dust beneath your feet. Swim to shore, then walk all the way up The Bronx. That's what I would do if I were you!" Then he kicked me square in the stomach, lightly really, but between Bill, the tanks and the rocking boat I lost my balance and fell headfirst into the drink. The bow of the motorboat loomed overhead as Charon cut hard to get back to Jersey, so we had to put our heads down into the foul water. It was like going headfirst down into a pile of compost, warm and viscous. Bill was a millstone around my waist, holding on tight like I was moored to something. My mouth was sealed, so vomit poured out of my nose and probably my ears as well, as the propeller ate through the water an inch from my face. We burst through the surface and gulped sweet city air. Bill spit up on my shoulder like a newborn and shrugged an arm out from under the shoulder strap of the bug spray cans. As he pulled away, our Charon waved at us, picnic-friendly.
We swam hard for shore. The river was against us, not the current, but the density. Swimming was like making snow angels in the drifts, and Bill could barely swim as it was. "Shit pudding!" he shouted. "This is nothing but shit pudding!" and then he vomited again through his nose because he was so busy yelling and carrying on with his cavern mouth and got it full of shit pudding.
I wanted to ask Bill to just dump the cans but my mouth wouldn't open for the stench, and it was so hard to even breathe with the heavy river wrapped around my chest. A big wave came and baptized us, slow and heavy. We fought back up to the surface, Bill suddenly stronger than I with his thick fingers wrapped right under my chin. He cursed like a moviehouse cartoon with every stroke, all rassin' frassin' umpin' jumpin' through lockjaw. I paddled after him, got one of the tanks up over the water, and eventually we hit silt and dragged ourselves up to the pier, a rotting wooden ladder, and finally under the eerily empty West Side Highway. We stood on cobblestoned West Street where it usually rained crashes and noise from above, where junkys and she-hes lurked by the pillars holding up the highway; but it was all empty, blank as pages.
"Wooo!" I shouted. I was covered in river slime and embraced it. "Better a filthy hog than a death cult bean counter any day, right, Bill!" I danced around him--Old Bill was back on his knees, sighing and raking a shit-stained handkerchief over his shit-stained face--his teeth were blacker than usual. "Stand up!" I called out, and he said, "Shut up. I had to drag you through that muck. I'm going to vomit up everything I've eaten for the past month." He stretched out right in the middle of the street and turned onto his belly, and heaved a bit, one more comma in his long retch-inten-sive life.
I started walking, confident he'd pop up and follow me. I wanted to find a YMCA, spend six or seven hours in the steam bath, get some grub in me, and then reconnoiter. There were sure to be some friendlies around, in the old Beat hangouts, the old man bars, the libraries up at Columbia or down by Washington Square Park. Bill wasn't moving though, so I walked on back to him. He was unconscious in a puddle of brown muck. The streets were still quiet but there was no telling when a huge caterpillar the size of a train car would come rumbling down the street to claim him, or if a bacchanal of cultist insurance adjusters, teeth and nails red with the blood, would appear in a blast of screams and naked limbs to set Bill to rights with Accounts Payable. I looked around, found a small puddle of clear water between two broken cobblestones, cupped as much as I could into my hands and walked it over to pour it over Bill's mouth, then waited for him to recover his strength.
Chapter Twelve
It took us four starving days to find anyone left with a soul. Most of Manhattan seemed utterly deserted and the ripe smell of recent death hung on entire blocks. Like they had said back in Jersey, we'd sometimes catch a yellowed eye peering out from between curtains or a weak and shaking hand quickly pulling down a blind, but people had either evacuated the city or were right behind us and would duck, a hundred thousand at a time, behind one lamppost whenever Bill or I turned to look over our shoulders. The Y on Twenty-third Street Street was abandoned, but the water ran, so we could drink. We armed ourselves with bricks and went hunting for food, but most bakeries and butchershops we came across had already been looted. At night when the moon never came out, we'd hear the laughter of breaking glass and occasional howls of animal satisfaction. The red stars in the sky kept me from venturing outside. Bill found some toothpaste, and being faint, ate it all without sharing with me.There weren't even any pigeons, or squirrels, or rats. The former two I would have eaten. I tore my thick right sock and made a sling of it and took to the streets at the crack of dawn, the lone hunter. The sling would do no good if I ran into any cultists, or any horrible clicking beetlemen or great beasts too horrible to describe, but I was ready for any squirrel the good Lord might send my way. There was nothing for me, and no food in any stores and not even a trail of ants on the sidewalks to follow to a spilled ice cream cone or piece of bubblegum. Leaves curled up all black on the trees, never flaming into autumn or falling. The morning searches made me hungrier too, and my belly growled in inchoate rage at me. I chewed on my fingers, eating little bits of my own salty skin, weak and humbled by mere waiting.
I kicked myself all the way back to the Y, so furious at myself I forgot to keep an ear out for the flap of wings in formation or for a roll left unscavenged from an overturned bread truck. Four days with no food was a cinch. Kids in China did it all the time, and still grew up strong enough to march in place and shout out Red slogans on television. Women in Africa with babies on their withered breasts did it too, and made it to the relief station without so much as a swoon. Indians too did it, I'm sure, trapped on the reservations away from their ancestral hunting grounds. I let out a war whoop to be just like them. If I were an Indian with face paint and feathers I'd fit into this fatal city better. Anything but a plain old white man, demoralized and too clumsy to starve with honor.
Bill met me at crepuscular Washington Square Park that day. He'd had better luck. "I found a guy up in Hell's Kitchen manning a hot dog stand. There was no street traffic, and of course no cars that were still in one piece, but he was a wrinkled little man who told me that he'd been there for ten years and he wasn't about to stop now. 'The game's crooked, but I'm the only game in town now,' he said, and he laughed like a black lung miner."
"Did he want money? How did you pay him?"
"I filled out an I.O.U." He fished a grayish hot dog on a stale bun out of the pocket of his wrinkled suit jacket, all neatly wrapped in a paper napkin, and handed it me. "He wanted the top pocketknife stories of the Chrysler Building, but I talked him down to the top seventeen. And after this all blows over, I have to spray his flat for free." I laughed at that, almost spilling my awful bite of frankfurter, but then stopped when Bill said, "He didn't want the first few floors because they're filled with human skin. All the bones from the bodies stacked up like bolts of fabric were pulled out of their eye sockets and assholes, he said. I double-checked his story. The vendor was mostly right."
"What was he wrong about?"
"I wouldn't call the first ten stories of a skyscraper a 'few,' " Bill said, casual as weather. "So, you ready yet, or do you need to digest?" I wasn't hungry anymore, but ate anyway and my wiener was gone in three bites. He nodded towards the south and we walked out of the park and down Thompson Street.
"What do you think those hot dogs were made out of?"
"Don't ask stupid questions, Jack."
Our determined tromping down to Wall Street to obliterate the Great Elder God who drowned California for appetizers and killed Manhattan as a sorbet stopped at Canal Street, because rather than the garish storefront signs with bold streaks of neon Chinese there was nothing but a wall of cold black flame rising from the yellow traffic lines. Bill just laughed and said "After you, Jackie!" ushering me towards the fire with the wand of his spray tank. I just ran east all the way to the Manhattan Bridge and back, huffing, to Bill. He shrugged and followed me at a more leisurely pace over to the west side. Even exotic Chinatown was abandoned, fish left to stink in the stalls, the ice having melted into slippery puddles already. The payphones still had little pagoda-style roofs, like altars lining the street, but there was nothing holy about that wall of black fire, fire that didn't cast a shadow on the sidewalks.
The flames sealed the street off from rivers East to Hudson, and neither of us was ready to jump back into the groaning and awful river, which had started bubbling with either life or boiling heat anyway. I tossed a traffic cone into the wall. It sailed right through and to the other side, making the local flames go translucent just long enough for us to see the frozen rubber shatter into a billion needle-thin shards.
"Under ground," said Bill.
"Under ground," said I, and we rushed to the nearest manhole and worked together to pull it up. The manhole cover came up easily, as it was already resting a bit off the lip. I rolled it to the side as Bill stuck his head down the manhole, stuck his arm down into the dark and lit his Zippo. "All clear!" he called out while picking himself back up; he ended up shouting "clear!" in my ear. I swung my legs over into the manhole and slid right down the ladder, landing with a neat splash. The tunnel stank, of course, but not any worse than topside, probably because toilets hadn't been flushed all that much for the past couple of weeks. All the rats were gone down here, too. Bill took the ladder carefully, holding on to the rungs with white knuckles and placing a shaky loafer down, then another, onto the same rung before moving down at all. The cans of bug spray were heavy, but he was really just mincing. We walked along the narrow ledge of the tunnel, not quite single file. We could have shared a jacket for all the room we had.
"So," Bill finally says after we walked a block or three in the dark that was more a silence of light than any real darkness. "If it is that easy to get around the firewall, why bother with it?"
"Well, the killers, the cultists, even the monsters, they have to travel too." Then I realized that we might not be alone in the tunnel and stopped coming up with clever ways to describe a dark hole and started paying attention for distant footfalls.
"No they don't. Whole towns can live in the area under Canal."
"Maybe it's not for us then. Sometimes it seems like the Elder Gods are fighting one another, or at least brushing up against one another and sparking huge waves of etheric lightning, just from that moment of stray contact. Is there a rival cult in Inwood or Harlem? Jets to Cthulhu's slimy Sharks?" Christ, I was so damn wordy that night.
"I bet some of these monstrosities can fly. Hell, Jack, you were able to erase seventy-five miles of interstate highway in your sleep. No, I think the flame is another thing entirely."
"What?"
"Landing lights. Cosmic runway. The cargo cult is asking for a palette full of baked beans and damnation." I was so hungry, I could smell the beans sizzling in their reddening tin can over fire and open air. They balanced so good on a pocketknife, baked beans did, salty and sweet at the same time, it was surely the cuisine of trickster gods. I slept so many peaceful nights with a full belly under moral stars, drifting off to the sound of some sage scraping the bottom of a can with the tip of his blade for that lucky blob of pork or a refugee bean. Manhattan, the center of the world maybe, but just a turd floating on the edge of America's great spirit. A melanoma maybe, or a wart to be lanced, to make way for more wandering poets and thick-fingered fur trappers. Anything but office work under buzzing lights and society parties held by celebrity couples with dead loins. My stomach shouted at me to pay attention to the tunnels, to listen for chants and distant screams. Bill was still going on about something, though.
"We didn't see anything like them from the boat last week. Those flames are new, spewing out god-knows-what kind of radiation that only three-lobed burning eyes can see." He looked at me, Zippo right under his chin, to cast his face in Bela Lugosi shadows. "The stars are right," he intoned, right from the bottom of his register. "This is the night for a proper sacrifice. But are we in time to stop the ritual and save the world, or are we just pawns sliding our way to a fatal black square?"
I had just enough and lost my bodhisattva grace right that second. I shoved Bill hard up against the sloping sewer wall and grinned at the ringing of his skull meeting pipe. "Bill!" I shouted, and winced, half-expecting an eruption of rat squeals and scampering that never came. I just heard myself, a tinny AM radio echo bouncing down the labyrinth. "I am going to bash your goddamn skull in! I cannot take another minute of this warped and filthy planet! How many people drowned in California, how many skins did you count up this morning without shedding a single tear, you twisted junky piece of shit?" He opened his mouth, showing me his rotten little teeth, but I just clamped my hand over it and squeezed his cheek and jaw. "Not another word!" I barked, like a sergeant. My brain was just floating in blood and hunger; I could have chewed off and eaten strips of William Burroughs' pasty white face like fatty bacon right in the tunnel. It was getting to me, the death we had just missed but only saw hideous hand traces of. I wanted it real, hot blood in my face, the look of desperate struggle fading to shame and then dismembered peace. Then Bill twisted his arm, put the wand in my face, and gave me a blast with the bug spray. I screamed as the stuff burned through my eyes and filled my sinuses and hit something hard with the back of my head. I think it was the planet Earth.
Long fingers prodded me awake. Neal's. Not from Neal's writerly hands, the thin fingers that were too fine for honest work but just excellent for writing letters that went down like tubes of bennies and for getting locks to open. The fingers on this Neal were longer, like drumsticks tipped with pointed nails. He was the same otherwise, except distant, as if I were staring at him through the bottom of a glass.
"You're here," he whispered. "Finally, ol' Jack Kerouac has found me. The cult has changed me. Baked my bones and rolled them thin, my skin is like baked potato now. Be gentle, gentle." He picked me up off the ground, gently. I wasn't sure if he was addressing me or just talking to himself like a person who has finally and utterly lost his mind. I didn't feel too good, I could feel bruises everywhere. We were in a little room, still in the sewer, and some blue night sky light was spilling through a sewer grating a few feet over our heads.
I moved to hug him and grunted as I stretched my arms, but Neal shrank back, slide-bouncing back like a marionette. "No no." I followed him as he drifted away, wiggling like bait. Around a corner and the walls around us fell away utterly. We were on a stone path twisting and spiraling towards some deep white light a mile or more below. Great bedrock walls, the very base of Manhattan, stood firm on my left as I jogged after Neal who oozed down the spiral like quicksilver. Heading down to the next lowest circle of hell, leaving Bill behind, following yet another doppelgänger, it didn't make much sense, but I felt the pull of that light from far below. I wanted to saunter towards my destiny, to greet it with a lopsided smile and my hands in my pockets. The quiet desperation of the dead and the hidden topside in Manhattan frightened me more than torture and death.
It was a long trip down, like that last note from a trumpet. My legs ached but Neal's ophidian slipslide mesmerized me, like a snake charmer in reverse, so I moved on, the no-mind ignoring the pain of my calves and poor blistered feet. I didn't even blink when it began raining screaming beetles. They'd been crawling down the face of the bedrock, even over the toes of my boots, heading straight down the tunnel instead of taking the curves of the tunnel, but now they fell like rain, howling puny "Noooooos" and "Jeeeezzzuuuus" all the way.
I glanced up and saw Bill, a pale white dot, tromping down the spiral path himself, killing bugs all the way. Neal paid no mind to the hail of insects, but slid so easily over the path that none of their little bodies were crushed into juice until my boots got to them. I shed a tear for their screams but knew they would live again.
The world shifted within me; from down the spiral I suddenly felt that I was walking up towards the light, which spilled down onto me as I slouched towards it, sweating, hungry again, the hot dog long gone and this morning's breakfast of puddle water now stagnant and half-foul. Far below, Bill clanged and cursed his way behind us, carrying a Holocaust on his back.
A horrible, beautiful luminescence spilled forth from the entrance of the temple. A three-stoned arch, two pillars holding aloft a pitted marble lintel, beckoned to me. Neal slid in and I followed, feeling tingly and snowblind. It took a long moment for my eyes to adjust. The temple was whiter than an office; the light came from everywhere but buzzed like fluorescents. Desks filled the space, with enrobed beetlemen tapping away at thick slabs of adding machines in front of them. A mail cart rattled its way autonomously down the aisle between two rows of desks, and there was even a water cooler filled with a horrid yellow bile. And shuffling, so much shuffling and pushing of papers, into folders, then into the jewel-hinged jaws of gleaming file cabinets stacked five high (tentacles were handy for reaching up top). There wasn't a sound other than the rhythms of work, not even a lonely scream.
There was a great statue at the far end of the hall, though statue suggests a volition that the sculptor probably didn't have. It was a mass of impossible corners, crawling tentacles, hideous faces frozen in screams in relief over planes, abstract but feminine crazy-eight curves, forty feet high and twice as wide. It smiled like the Buddha.
The tapping was a counterpoint, a staccato disaster beneath the whirling dynamism of the crawling stone over temple walls. I felt it in me, like the thumps of a bus on a pitted road, my heart in the hands of mugwumps. The inevitability of destiny called me again, like when I walked the spiral, but I found a koan Marie left in a corner of my brain and asked myself what my face looked like before my ancestors were born. It was sufficient to defeat a bunch of adding machines, anyway.
"Behold!" Neal said, "the core of the cult! The stars are aright, Jack, only one thing yet remains." The beetlemen rose and from their robes pulled clubs of bleached bone to fondle. They shuffled across the drab business carpeting and stood in formation behind the still shimmering and shifting Neal, and presented a baker's dozen of evil scowls at me; their mandibles looked like obscene parodies of businessman smiles.
I laughed! Loud enough it echoed, probably all the way up the corkscrew spiral and to the dead surface world. It was an American laugh (I finally had one of my own). "Is this it? All that death, all these cosmic powers, and the temple of Cthulhu is a boiler-room accounting operation?" I giggled, like a girl, uncontrollable. Heeheeheeheehee- heeheeheeheehee. "This is ridiculous." Neal smiled too, a real smile. The mugwumps chattered and coughed up powder uncomfortably. One began slapping his bone against his palm, cop-style. In the distance, the ping of a carriage return sounded diligently.
"The world is an absurd place," Neal told me, his voice languid like old gin. "You know that, right? Of course you do. But it's dangerous too, problematic. Overdetermined. Everything causes everything, like a game of billiards with a million players going at once with their cues at a billion balls on an infinite field of velvet. Who can comprehend, much less protect, a dharma like that?" There were mutters of approval from the mugwumps. More slapping of bone and flesh too, in a stilted meter more Morse code than bebop. I would have been intimidated had my spirit not shifted two inches to the left of my body. The scene unfurled like a scratchy newsreel, Neal's voice the bellow of an Edward R. Murrow or Weegee.
"We need you to join our little operation, Mr. Kerouac. All this terror couldn't stoke half the haunted dreams we need to finally rend the veil between worlds, to let the starry wisdom of the Great Old Ones descend unfettered onto our fair cities. But you're a battery, a dynamo. Tying your shoes is an adventure; when Jack Kerouac finds a parking space, saints weep. Your soul can rewrite the world for us, just like a book. That's why you struggled across the country, squeezing out ghosts from your own past to push and prod you on, to make here. To be acquired by our concern." The beetlemen clicked with the forced glee of an office Christmas Party.
"I have kids now, Jack. Kids I love, and it's rough being a working man, being a drone before the queen. I need a book, a bestseller, an On the Road for the Age Of The Elder Gods. And you're going to be my main character!"
"Swell, Neal. That's real swell." The statue begin to shift and move, spreading over the blank white walls, casting snakey shadows everywhere. My grin was bigger than Christmas. Neal slid on up to me, his own smile wide too, the ends of his cheeks pinched into embryonic mandibles. "A book about two best friends. For years, they were best friends! Tilting at windmills, looking for love but finding only wet and smelly sex. Living the American Dream, masters of their fates while the drones who man the offices drive the nation into a dusty death. How's a book like that gonna end, Jack?"
"Well," I said, "when it was my book, it ended with you leaving me in Mexico with the runs."
Betrayal. The word hung in the air. Neal didn't quite say it, but he and I and every mugwump in the room and probably the protean statue thought it all at once. So we were agreed. I hoped Bill would get here soon.
"Yes, yes," Neal said through deformed lips, his esses already sinking into a queer lisp. "Yeth. Betwayal." Distant echoes came closer and I smiled a little bit more. Between my feet frantic beetles flowed like streams, searching for a place to hide. Neal's jaw finally hardened into thick mandibles. If they were antlers, they'd be twenty-point numbers, the kind hunters would wait years to bag and spend a lifetime bragging about while bloating up with beer and venison jerky and finally dying in front of their grandchildren. Huge mandibles, open with pincers ready on either side of my face, the cover of a pulp magazine if only I were a curly-haired buxom girl threatened by the four-color Monster In The Mountaintop.
"Yeah Neal, but you betrayed me already. In my book. If you're doing your book, doesn't that I mean that I get to betray you?" I laughed again, "Wouldn't you betraying me again be a little, you know, derivative? Pulp fiction. I mean really, I saw it coming from a mile away. The top of the spiral, even."
The mugwumps slapped their bones into their palms as one, like savages calling for the hunt. Neal, the part of his face that was still Neal, his sweet eyes, stared at me so plaintive and wanting. "No, I'm not betraying you. I want you to come along with me, to the next great adventure. We explored this world already, conquered it, but there is a new one waiting to be born. A safe world, a world far away from frantic bourgeois thought. There's no need to search for God anymore, or to chase after enlightenment or race to the bottom of degradation just to see how it feels, to see if we're still human afterwards, because we'll know. The higher power. Join us. Join me, Jack! You can rewrite the universe, along with me!"
For that moment, I wanted to. I was getting old. I felt it all throughout this trip. The road I'd taken was already gone, and the moon I'd made so many girls under already blasted to powder by missiles. Even my dear party cities of Frisco and Denver were underwater, never to rise again, though R'lyeh rose a lifetime ago. Forms like dark shadows twisted against the walls, pushing like a newborn chick against its shell, in indescribable Moebius-strip ways. More tiny beetles crawled in, but twitched and died at my feet, sweet poison coating them like perfume.
Then I ducked, just as Neal's pincers snapped shut and took the top of my hairdo off. A hot stream of bug spray hit Neal and burned him horribly; his face went up in a howling smoke. The mugwumps converged on me, bone-cudgels raised high, but Bill was already among them, handling his wand like Doc Holliday, and one after one beetlemen fell, fell and collapsed into scatterings of beetles, the scuttlebugs bursting from their mouths and assholes. They fell easy, like drones do; the few Bill left standing I took down with quick rabbit punches and knee lifts, Jap-style.
Neal was up at us again, waving his arms, his cruel face zipping itself back into shape, human shape, as crunchy exoskeleton fell away smoking. He was standing still but still running at a hundred miles an hour. "Fellas, wait, you gotta understand. You don't see what's really going on! You're from the wrong side of the river on this one. I've been to the golden shore, and it really, truly is better this way. Destroy all rational thought, right? Well these blind gods have done that, with a greater understanding. You're not fighting me, you're clinging to mama's pussy lips and trying to shove your heads back into her warm little womb, get me?"
He went on, his speechifying hitting the intensity of Satchmo's scats. Bill didn't put much truck in with glossolalia though and raised the wand to spray Neal again, but got only an impotent little squirt. "Well, fuck," he said and a massive bedrock tentacle lashed out from the far end of the wall and smacked Bill to the ground like a rag doll.
The transformation of the temple was complete. The soothing (to the mugwumps) office setting crumbled like so much chickenwire and papier mâché and the gaudy horror of it all was revealed. The walls were made of stars and a billion fathoms of void. The statue was still huge, dominating the scene behind Neal, but it stretched off into infinity in two arbitrary directions, for it was axis mundi, the evil core of creation. The center of the universe waiting for collapse and heat death. Hungry for it. The cosmos itself was hungry for oblivion, the rush of stars and fruitful worlds spinning themselves to cinders and then spiraling down to a dusty death.
And there was Neal, and I. We weren't even standing on the smartly carpeted floor of the office temple anymore, instead we hung our legs over the pier of infinity.
"Behold," Neal said again, casual and smiling rather than dime-novel ominous.
"There's a quality to this oblivion that's a little unsettling," I admitted.
Neal nodded. "It's desirous. An evil desire. Here's a koan for you: What is the difference between having no desire and having desire for nothingness?"
"No. It's just that desire is what is evil."
We looked about the empty universe. "What do you miss the most?" he asked me. And I told him. Everything. The smell of a girl's hair. My thumb, throbbing four hours after a wayward hammer smack. The chuckle after a good lay. Ham sandwiches. The hollow call of the bull-roarer over the outback. Keats. Pencil tips breaking in frustration and rage. Barbed-wire war. Even smug preachers fondling the leather of their family Bibles like it was a woman. I went on and on, pouring out everything I could remember about the world: The smell of beer. The nostalgic horror of a green plain seen through prison bars. Dead children, all bones and parchment skin, in India or old Hoboken. Soybeans spilling through gnarled fingers at market day. The first gold stamped into coins. Puffing Russians calling for nuclear holocaust as a matter of stubborn principle. It took forever to list everything I missed about the world, and there was still plenty of time left.
"Brains small, universe big." I wrote that down once in a notebook. My brain was too small to rebuild the world; I could barely do justice to the highway system and my friends. But there was something deeper in me, the divine spark Neal knew so many years ago, the one his kind face hoped to bring here, even as the dark lust for matter within him lured me to this same blasted corner of the cold infinite. I turned to him. He raised a finger and I was enlightened.
In every raindrop there is an ocean, and every salty ocean is a teardrop. I felt my mortality rise again, like a balloon, like it did in Hoboken as I watched man-animals pummel and betray one another for moldy bread and futility. Without that mortality, that self-imposed time limit, I could do it. My Buddha nature presented itself and the universe was reborn. Reordered. Beetles scurried back up an orderly bedrock spiral and into the mortal city to refill their skins and disentangle themselves from the stacks in the lobby of the Chrysler Building. Buddha gathered up moondust and pressed it like dough back into smiling silver. Oceans receded, Allen pulled himself up from the sewers and spit out gallons of sewage, able to breathe again.
I nearly gave it all away, but under the world I made, I saw the one Neal made: drowned coasts, the dead everywhere, clicking beetlemen working in their dark, satanic mills, illusions of gilded trade laid bare. Was it any less beautiful? Of course not--misery is mayfly, beauty dross. Only the spirit, ineffable, remains eternal. There was a choice though; I was given a coin and just had to flip it. And there was a choice for me too.
To be Buddha, to embrace bliss, and leave the world as I'd left it after my travels, in ruins. Or to cut loose the silver chord, to set the world alight by offering up my own divine spark, my chance for escape from suffering. Psychic suicide, that's what it was, nothing less. I'd pour every single joy I ever had into Creation, or it would collapse back into Neal's nightmare. Or I could wring myself dry like a dishrag, and walk the earth dead inside, the neighborhood dog-catcher or the blocked writer in front of an eternally blank and unspoiled page, without even the buzz of sweet Marie in my ear anymore.
What's the difference between having no desire and having desire for nothingness? Neal didn't know; that's why he threw his lot in with late-night poker games and cross-country chases for his own tail. He loved his own Nealness too much to lose it without wanting to take the rest of us with him. He desired nothingness, but thought he had no desire. How could the Dark Dreamer not awaken from his feverish sleep and embrace the poor boy? I wasn't too clear on the distinction between the two choices myself, really, but rational thought isn't the key to answering the irrational question, is it?
I offered up everything I was, all I could and ever would create, and swore never again to even glimpse the infinite. The world was born again, the stars all in their place, and as I separated dark from light, I pushed the dark down below the face of the deep.
Cthulhu wept, lost again to strange aeons. Office walls and windows returned, and the statue withered and died like December grapes. The mugwumps were gone, as were their robes, but Neal was there, standing before me, plain.
"Jack!" he said, his face experimentally trying out his old trickster smile. Then it faded. Neither of us had anything to say. He looked down at the carpet, awkward and confused. A breeze riled up some papers on the desk and sent them tumbling down. Neal's reform-school chicken scratch was all over them.
"Your book?"
"The first two thirds of it," he said. I glanced outside and saw that we were still in that bizarre null-space, the bit between a mad dreamer's eye spasms. It just looked dark really, like a moonless night. We heard a groan; Burroughs wasn't looking too good, but he was alive, conscious, his face a pomegranate bruise. I walked over to him and behind me Neal rushed after his papers. "Drop it," I barked, and he let some of the pages go, but about half were still crumpled in one nervous hand, hugged to his chest. I hoisted up Bill, and we began our long walk back to New York.
Epilogue
"Mah!" I called out. "Can I get another beer out here? And a little tuna fish sandwich, with mayonnaise?" It was Indian Summer in Northport, too hot to move. I was sweating so heavily that I was stuck to the couch. The tv buzzed at me, I Love Lucy. The grape-stomping episode in Italy. My own trip there was pretty neat, for a book tour, but I think I liked the black-and-white backdrop Lucille Ball danced around in front of better. Funny stuff. I swallowed the last gulp of beer and sucked fumes from my bottle, and called for Memere again, but she didn't answer. Probably napping upstairs. Or maybe she left to run some errands in town while I was dozing.The main door was open so the latest troupe of Dharma Bums (this group actually had the T-shirts printed up with puffy letters and everything) ogled me for a bit through the screen door, which didn't keep the bugs out either. I threw the bottle at them, and it bounced off the distended belly of the screen, but they didn't leave. "I'll call the motherfucking cops if you don't go home right now, you fucking faggots!" That got 'em running, but they hooted and high-fived each other as they picked their way down the drive. Jack talked to me! they'd say later on back at Stony Brook, and freshmen girls would unzip their pants like it was a magic word, open sez me!
I worked on my baseball scores for a bit too, in my notebook. Pictorial Review Jackson was getting on in years, and feeling every pitch in his shoulder and elbow. They cracked when he opened up a can of peanuts, his knuckles were thick and arthritic too. But I knew he had one more good season in him, and he smoked batter after batter in the Summer League. Jackson was going to go out on top. My pen ran out of ink, and when I shook it, it exploded just to show me that it had enough ink left to ruin two pages and dye my hand red. I couldn't very well wipe my hand on Memere's couch, so I carefully tore a piece of paper out of the back of the composition book (I hated to do it, as it usually makes the page on the opposite end of the spine fall out too, but what could I do), blotted as much ink as I could, then finally ripped myself up off the cushions and went to the bathroom to scrub my hands. I came back, found a bottle of Jim Beam (the beer was all gone from the Frigidaire), changed the channel on the television set (I was right, Memere was gone. I hoped she was out getting a roasting chicken for dinner) and settled back down. It was getting dark so early these days, but it was too hot to enjoy. The news came on. More war stuff. Disgusting un-American hippies chanting with just enough power to keep us from really pushing into North Vietnam and handing those slants the thrashing they deserved. They were cruel little yellow things, they looked like bugs, even their women, crawling over the brush with near-featureless faces. And like roaches, they just kept coming out of the woodwork. Allen was on television too, embarrassing himself and me both. Faggot commie; I bet they wouldn't be so quick to stick him in front of the cameras if they knew how young his tastes ran.
There were so many different stories on the news that night, but in the end they were all the same. If the Negroes were rioting, it was because of the war when you got right down to it. They want all their rights now, just like white people, because we're fighting for freedom. Bodies were coming home, the chinks acting up, the Russian bear posing and growling. One of The Beatles farted again, that was news too.
Memere came home, but with hamsteaks and not chicken. I ate well though, and had a piece of bread after wiping my plate clean with it. I was going to go down to the bar and see what was up, but Memere asked me not to, so we had ice cream and watched the late movie together. Then she went to bed, and I flipped through the channels for a bit, then fell asleep on the couch.
In the morning I received a letter from Neal. He was fine, he said. He did that bus-driving thing and was going to be in another book, but still hadn't quite figured out the ending of his own opus. He had trouble with endings, he explained in twenty-five single-spaced pages, and I wrote "No kidding!" in the margins of page twenty-four. He didn't even end the letter really, his typewriter ribbon just gave out. Neal didn't seem to remember a thing; he just kept doing the same old stuff over and over. Make and impregnate a girl. Steal a car. Taunt the cops and then whine when he got busted or otherwise in trouble. Neal was a goldfish, forgetting his whole world every seven seconds and surprised to see his little plastic castle in the middle of the bowl. "All mine, all mine!" he says in the glub-glub voice of fishies, then he forgets he has a place to live again.
I went to Gunther's for a few drinks and brought my mail with me because I didn't want to talk to anyone, and keeping busy with a pencil and paper was a good way to get some space in this town, and a free beer or two from an admirer who just wants a peek at my pages. I got about a quarter of a buzz on, borrowed some change and went to the post office for stamps, but it was too close to the end of the day and they were out. I was outraged; how does a post office, even a Podunk little colonial set-up like my local, run out of stamps. It was ridiculous, but the hangdog man behind the counter could only say to come back tomorrow or to write my Congressman. Damn right I'll write my Congressman, and I'll have my stamps and hang-dog's job too.
I spotted some more fans milling about near the lawn, so doubled back and hid out at Jim's. Jim was a wonderful artist, he did tons of seascapes and looked like a pirate with his beard and broad shoulders. He had a chipped tooth too, and a scraggly beard, and plenty of gin. We split a tab of LSD and talked for most of the night about painting and jazz and The New York Times. I read the book section, but Jim couldn't stomach the op-ed pages. "Propaganda," he said, rolling his r's like the second-banana heavy in a spy movie. "Sinisterrrr prrrop-a- GAHN-duh!"
"I bet they drop the big one," Jim said.
"Never happen. One, there's no need for it. All we need is for everyone to show a little unity, to show some goddamn respect for this country, and we can get out of there by Christmas."
He laughed at me, cruelly. "Jack, those are your people, those kids out there on the street."
"Those little faggots have nothing to do with me. Anyone with a beret and a scarf can be a so-called bohemian these days. If they find something in my writing they can hang their commie theories on, that's not my fault."
"Sometimes it's like you're from a foreign country, Jack. A foreign time."
"All of life is a foreign country," I said.
I went home and ate leftover pasta in the light of the open refrigerator, right out of the bowl, with my fingers. The next morning I woke up with heartburn and just wanted to stay in bed but Memere was changing for laundry day so I had to get up. I caught the news at noon. "The war rages on . . . ," the newscaster, some local square from the Hartford station across the sound said, but the film didn't show any raging at all, but just GIs smoking and draping themselves over Jeeps like they were cherubs snuggling up in fluffy clouds while Venus was born in the foam below. Their drug-dead stares said it all.
There was a knock at the door but I didn't answer it. Then he tried calling out to me, a yipping society poodle. "Jack! Jack! I drove out all the way from Oregon to meet you! Are you home, Jack? Are you in there? I'm going to leave something on your stoop, if that's all right. It's some poems, and a short story. Maybe if you have the chance you can read them and write to me, okay Jack?" Ol' whoever-he-was rustled around in the bushes for a second, trying to peek in through the window, but he just yelped as he met the local shrubbery's thorns and ran off.
Some guru was on the television now, all smiles and a beard like gnarled roots. A sitar started up, high and teasing like the wave of a sly gypsy girl. It reminded me of something but I couldn't recall it. I was agitated enough to go back up to my room and dig though some of my Buddhist books. It was a koan, and a pretty good one. The answer wasn't satisfying, but it was important, consolatory. I was mad for a little consolation. I read it aloud. "There were two wandering friends in China once," I said, addressing the rest of my bookshelf. "One of them was an excellent harpist, the other a great listener. When the first friend played songs about mountains shrouded in regal clouds, the second would say 'Wonderful! There is a mountain before us, we can climb to its peak.'
"When the first friend played about a fresh stream, the second would bow down low and exclaim, 'Ah, a stream! We can quench our thirsts with clear water!'
"But the second man, the listener, fell sick and died. The harpist cut his strings and swore never to play again. Cutting the string is the sign of the most intimate of friendships."
I had forgotten about that last bit. The phone rang and I ran downstairs to get it. It was my editor, calling about some paperback rights. We jawed for a bit, too, about city gossip; everyone was rushing around collecting money to take out full-page ads against some latest outrage, or in favor of it, whistling and erupting like roman candles burning bright exploding spiders in the sky, all to say "Look at me! Here I am, little world below!" Pshew pshew, burning up in the sky for you. All of it was just useless words. I was pretending to care, writing dialogue for Jack Duloz and mouthing it into a phone. I would have hung up on him, but I needed the money. My trunk full of old writing was running low, there was nothing more I could sell, nothing more I could pretend was new enough to care about.
The news was on again. I watched it on the couch while Memere read under her lamp. They showed the sweating jungle, leaves so green they bled into the blue sky, and someone off-camera talked about the possibility of dropping the big one. That would end the war but good, but what would the chinks do? What would Russia do? Fire their own missiles out of spite, wrap strings of smoke around the world like a bakery box and deliver us all, a care package destined to hell. That was the best they could think of, you know. Not today perhaps, but maybe tomorrow or in some other stumblebum conflict between freedom and misery.
Go ahead. Blow it all to hell. Crack the planet in half and let red magma pour out into limpid pools over the ruins. Deep underground, scientists say, the core of the earth is solid, because of the crushing pressure of the whole world wrapped around it. Like a rare black pearl in an oyster, it waits, shiny and smooth down to the last molecule, hoping for its time to float under the sun without the encumbrance of its old skin, of our little flea-bitten existences.
Let it happen I say. The world's been saved once, while every ungrateful son and daughter slept and dreamt their baseball and apple pie dreams. And all they can do when they wake up is raise the chant for death again. They miss their sleeping world so much. Good for them. Better to desire nothingness than to have no desire for anything, like me. I didn't even want the drinks; I just had them.
Memere looked up at me with worried eyes. I couldn't bring myself to smile at her. I excused myself and took a long bath with my notebook so I could figure out the Summer League's next set of games and scores.
The next morning I had to get up early, find the rake, pull it out of the garage, and clean up all the windblown pages on the lawn and branches that some jerk had left behind.
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