Dan’s Notebook
No, I don’t think I’ve ever felt calmer.
It was a simple and courageous move: yesterday I ceased all medication, not only the sedatives but the megavitamins —and the antipsychotics. Slizard would be mad if he knew. But Slizard will never know. I am deprogramming myself, once and for all. From now on I will rely exclusively on insight. Already I can feel the symptoms pressing in on me, looking for an opening, seeking me out. Some are really rather bizarre, or they would be, if I had less insight.
Let me give an example. This afternoon I was lying on the living-room floor, watching the way the overhead fan deranged the rafter cobwebs (and I am surrounded here, you understand, by the usual furniture of lakeside life, with its shanty feel, the damp salt, the fishing tackle, the graphs of the screens charted by the corpses of bugs). Heralded by the familiar double shuffle, the sound of handsteps, kneesteps, little Harriet crawled in from the kitchen. She paused. I turned my head. The baby gave a smile of greedy recognition, and I guess she was about fifteen feet away when, “before my eyes,” she started to grow. Within a second she was as large as a five-year-old; within a second more she was the size of a pig. I lay there as she billowed like a circus fat lady, the face growing faster than the body until it filled the room, my whole vision, until it seemed to burst the bounds of the house itself. Alarming? Not really. A routine case of size-constancy breakdown. All the baby had done was crawl toward me. Our noses were almost touching, and I had a fisheye-lens view of her marbled eyes, her food-storing cheeks, her depthless teeth, and the ears, translucent, glowing like eyelids shut to the sun.
Dad was one of the fathers of the nuclear age. Then, when the thing was born, he became its son, along with everybody else. So Dad really threw an odd curve on that whole deal about fathers and sons. First he was the thing’s father, then he was the thing’s son. Great distortions and malformations should clearly be expected to follow on from such a reversal.
He worked in delivery systems, bus-and-warhead technologies, Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles—the MIRVS. My urine contains bufotenine, a chemical originally isolated from toad venom. Bufotenine shows mauve in certain tests. When I am hallucinating, there is more bufotenine, more mauve, in my urine than when I don’t. Tonight I will pour all my pills into Flame Lake, and go it alone. Tomorrow, perhaps, now that Fran has stopped dragging Uncle Ned off to their room the whole time for sex, I will tell them the truth about the baby. I will break it to them about the baby. Meanwhile I stare into the brilliance and burnish, into the mauve of the MiRved lake.
Ned’s Diary
July 24. No break in the weather. Dan continues to come on wonderfully well. He has bouts of agitation and gloom —but who doesn’t? No, he’s much, much happier. Those chance meetings you have twenty times a day in a shared house are no longer a matter of courteous disquiet. I’m pleased to see the kid, and he’s pleased to see me. We’ve put the baby back in her room, next to Dan’s. She’s a powerful little sleeper (twelve hours a night, plus naps!), and when she does wake in the small hours she just babbles to herself for a while and then checks out again. It doesn’t bother Dan. But the heat does. Instead of getting cooler it just gets hotter. Someone has his thumb on the controls. Fran handles it with cold baths and about fifteen dips a day. Otherwise she schlepps around in that youthful world of TV, radio, and photoprint. Actually I’m touched by her appetite for all that garbage. What the hell. Even the Trib reads like a shock-sheet these days. Maybe the whole world is just turning to trash. Dan won’t go in the water. He sits under the fan. I can talk to him now about his problem— the problem he has when relating to reality. And at last I have the freedom to address all my reality problems, the pump, the roof, the cesspit, the loose screens, that wreck of a jeep (I think I’ll take the plates off and use it as a tractor). I had Dan help me shift the logs from the turkey hut to the storeroom. He ran back and forth all afternoon and stacked wood till his fingers bled.