“Oh, a little. A little. I run a coffeehouse downtown. Kids wander in off the streets, tripping on something . . . is it a good trip?” he asked politely.
“Good and bad,” he said. “It’s . . . heavy. That’s a good word, the way they use it. ”
“Yes. It is.”
“I was getting a little scared.” He glanced out the window and saw a long, celestial highway stretching across the black dome of the sky. He looked away casually, but couldn’t help licking his lips. “Tell me . . . how long does this usually go on?”
“When did you drop?”
“Drop?” The word dropped out of his mouth in letters, fell to the carpet, and dissolved there.
“When did you take the stuff?”
“Oh . . . about eight-thirty.”
“And it’s . . . ” He consulted his watch. “It’s a quarter of ten now-”
“Quarter of ten? Is that all?”
Drake smiled. “The sense of time turns to rubber, doesn’t it? I expect you’ll be pretty well down by one-thirty.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes, I should think so. You’re probably peaking now. Is it very visual mesc?”
“Yes. A little too visual.”
“More things to be seen than the eye of man was meant to behold,” Drake said, and 262
offered a peculiar, twisted smile.
“Yes, that’s it. That’s just it.” His sense of relief at being with this man was intense.
He felt saved. “What do you do besides talk to middle-aged men who have fallen down the rabbit hole?”
Drake smiled. “That’s rather good. Usually people on mesc or acid turn inarticulate, sometimes incoherent. I spend most of my evenings at the Dial Help Center. On weekday afternoons I work at the coffee house I mentioned, a place called Drop Down Mamma.
Most of the clientele are street freaks and stewbums. Mornings I just walk the streets and talk to my parishioners, if they’re up. And in between, I run errands at the county jail.”
“You’re a minister?”
“They call me a street priest. Very romantic. Malcolm Boyd, look out. At one time I was a real priest.”
“Not any more?”
“I have left the mother church,” Drake said. He said it softly, but there was a kind of dreadful finality in his words. He could almost hear the clang of iron doors slammed shut forever.
“Why did you do that?”
Drake shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. What about you? How did you get the mesc?”
“I got it from a girl on her way to Las Vegas. A nice girl, I think. She called me on Christmas Day.”
“For help?”
“I think so.”
“Did you help her?”
“I don’t know. ” He smiled craftily. “Father, tell me about my immortal soul. ”
Drake twitched. “I’m not your father.”
“Never mind, then.”
“What do you want to know about your ‘soul’?”
He looked down at his fingers. He could make bolts of light shoot from their tips whenever he wanted to. It gave him a drunken feeling of power. “I want to know what will happen to it if I commit suicide.”
Drake stirred uneasily. “You don’t want to think about killing yourself while you’re tripping. The dope talks, not you.”
“I talk,” he said. “Answer me.”
“I can’t. I don’t know what will happen to your ‘soul’ if you commit suicide. I do, however, know what will happen to your body. It will rot.”
Startled by this idea, he looked down at his hands again. Obligingly, they seemed to crack and molder in front of his gaze, making him think of that Poe story, “The Strange 263
Case of M. Valdemar. ” Quite a night. Poe and Lovecraft. A. Gordon Pym, anyone? How about Abdul Allhazred, the Mad Arab? He looked up, a little disconcerted, but not really daunted.
“What’s your body doing?” Drake asked.
“Huh?” He frowned, trying to parse sense from the question.
“There are two trips,” Drake said. “A head trip and a body trip. Do you feel nauseated? Achey? Sick in any way?”
He consulted his body. “No,” he said. “I just feel . . . busy.” He laughed a little at the word, and Drake smiled. It was a good word to describe how he felt. His body seemed very active, even still. Rather (fight, but not ethereal. In fact, he had never felt so fleshy, so conscious of the way his mental processes and physical body were webbed together.
There was no parting them. You couldn’t peel one away from the other. You were stuck with it, baby. Integration. Entropy. The idea burst over him like a quick tropical sunrise.
He sat chewing it over in light of his current situation, trying to make out the pattern, if there was one. But-
“But there’s the soul,” he said aloud.
“What about the soul?” Drake asked pleasantly.
“If you kill the brain, you kill the body,” he said slowly. “And vice versa. But what happens to your soul? There’s the wild card, Fa . . . Mr. Drake.”
Drake said: “In that sleep of death, what dreams may come? Hamlet, Mr. Dawes.”
“Do you think the soul lives on? Is there survival?”
Drake’s eyes grayed. “Yes,” he said. “I think there is survival . . . in some form. ”
“And do you think suicide is a mortal sin that condemns the soul to hell?”
Drake didn’t speak for a long time. Then he said: “Suicide is wrong. I believe that with all my heart.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
Drake stood up. “I have no intention of answering it. I don’t deal in metaphysics anymore. I’m a civilian. Do you want to go back to the party?”
He thought of the noise and confusion, and shook his head.
“Home?”
“I couldn’t drive. I’d be scared to drive.”
“I’ll drive you.”
“Would you? How would you get back?”
“Call a cab from your house. New Year’s Eve is a very good night for cabs.”
“That would be good,” he said gratefully. “I’d like to be alone, I think. I’d like to watch TV.”
“Are you safe alone?” Drake asked somberly.
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“Nobody is,” he replied with equal gravity, and they both laughed.
“Okay. Do you want to say good-bye to anyone?”
“No. Is there a back door?”
“I think we can find one.”
He didn’t talk much on the way home. Watching the streetlights go by was almost all the excitement he could stand. When they went by the roadwork, he asked Drake’s opinion.
“They’re building new roads for energy-sucking behemoths while kids in this city are starving,” Drake said shortly. “What do I think? I think it’s a bloody crime.”
He started to tell Drake about the gasoline bombs, the burning crane, the burning office trailer, and then didn’t. Drake might think it was a hallucination. Worse still, he might think it wasn’t.
The rest of the evening was not very clear. He directed Drake to his house. Drake commented that everyone on the street must be out partying or to bed early. He didn’t comment. Drake called a taxi. They watched TV for a while without talking-Guy Lombardo at the Waldorf-Astoria, making the sweetest music this side of heaven. Guy Lombardo, he thought, was looking decidedly froggy.
The taxi came at quarter to twelve. Drake asked him again if he would be all right.
“Yes, I think I’m coming down.” He really was. The hallucinations were draining toward the back of his mind.
Drake opened the front door and pulled up his collar. “Stop thinking about suicide.
It’s chicken.”
He smiled and nodded, but he neither accepted nor rejected Drake’s advice. Like everything else these days, he simply took it under advisement. “Happy New Year,” he said.
“Same to you, Mr. Dawes.”
The taxi honked impatiently.
Drake went down the walk, and the taxi pulled away, yellow light glowing on the roof.
He went back into the living room and sat down in front of the TV. They had switched from Guy Lombardo to Times Square, where the glowing ball was poised atop the Allis-Chalmers Building, ready to start its descent into 1974. He felt weary, drained, finally sleepy. The ball would come down soon and he would enter the new year tripping his ass off. Somewhere in the country a New Year’s baby was pushing its squashed, placenta-covered head out of his mother’s womb and into this best of all possible worlds.
At Walter Hammer’s party, people would be raising their glasses and counting down.
New Year’s resolutions were about to be tested. Most of them would prove as strong as 265
wet paper towels. He made a resolution of his own on the spur of the moment, and got to his feet in spite of his tiredness. His body ached and his spine felt like glass-some kind of hangover. He went into the kitchen and got his hammer off the kitchen shelf. When he brought it back into the living room, the glowing ball was sinking down the pole. There was a split screen, showing the ball on the right, showing the merrymakers at the Waldorf on the left, chanting: “Eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . ” One fat society dame caught a glimpse of herself on a monitor, looked surprised, and then waved to the country.