Saline Solution (7 page)

The only advantage homosexual sex seemed to have over all this was that it took place between people who had a more precious understanding of one another's desperation. I have punished women, and meant it; I have punished men, but never forgotten it was theatre. For me, the man who slaps my face is helping me to get my scene together; the woman who rakes my back wants literally to destroy me.

Desire turns appreciation into exploitation, which destroys the sensitivity of perception. And desire lives in a cave, and rarely sees the stars.

When Lucinda and I began living together, she closed off all the other avenues of her life. She stopped doing her photography ('I dig you so much that I don't even want to look at my cameras anymore.') and gave up all her lovers ('You're all I need baby.') and in general acted as though all the problems of her life had neatly been solved by my arrival. I understood that she was, as we all are, the victims of historical conditioning, but that didn't make her any easier to live with. In order to have my own freedom, it was imperative that she have hers, even to the point of fucking other men. I was willing to accept the pain of jealousy in order to escape the grey suffocation of exclusivity.

But I was not as strong as my word either. For every time she lapped my cock with her half-open mouth or subtly invited me to fuck her in the arse, I betrayed my position for another go-round on the sensation carousel. When I fucked her, I gave her everything I could muster at the moment, and in my head was the single vibration of possession: '
This is mine.
' I stayed with her through all her changes; I took everything, inhaling her through my pores. I installed myself with my cock and fingers and tongue. I blew her mind and blasted her body and she became so absorbed in the process that she forgot who she was.

I knew what was happening and I played the game. For what man doesn't like to have a woman melt into him after orgasm and say, 'There has never been a man like you?' I accepted her adulation each time I fucked her well, and then would complain because my intensity robbed her of her centre.

With me, after the initial period of infatuation, a good fuck with the woman I'm living with becomes just that. It's no different, in its way, from a fine meal or a stunning sunset. But with her, whoever she happens to be, fucking gets all entangled with emotions. And, of course, the practical result of fucking: children.

'I don't know,' I said to Lucinda. 'It's as much your baby as it is mine. Why do you keep looking at me for a final decision on the matter? What do you want to do?'

'I won't know until the last minute,' she said.

'The last minute!' I shouted. 'It's already past three months now. In a while they won't even do an abortion. You'll have the baby by default.'

She looked very sad.

'There's a way,' she said. 'It's a thing they do with fluid. They can abort you even into the fifth month.'

She looked at me, waiting for me to say the words which would redeem the child, but I shivered inside myself.

'I'll make reservations at the hospital,' she said.

She dressed and left the bedroom. I lit another cigarette and sat on the window ledge. The thoughts came succinctly, a collage of the day's events.

'Am I a criminal if I refuse to assume the role which is necessary to give Lucinda the support she needs to have the baby? Not in any judicial sense, but existentially. If I knowingly commit the act, or omit the act, which leads to having the baby flushed out of the womb, I have ended the life of another human being.'

And then, 'And if I follow that path, doesn't a new door open for me in the corridors of action? For if I kill my own child, why should I hesitate at obliterating any of the monsters who strangle freedom in the name of authority?'

I thought of the arrest, and the next morning's trial, and the condition of the species, and of Lucinda's pain, and of Dante's poor chances of survival, and murder formed in my heart.

'I have burst quietly past almost every boundary,' I thought. I was at a point where I could find no reference point for value, and was fast slipping into the stream of my own nameless becoming. From time to time I would leap like a salmon into the turbulent air and flash on the delineation of my condition, and find that I had transmogrified into a revolutionary, or a homosexual, or a junkie, or a heretic, or any one of the thousand things my civilization said I should not be.

I thought of the reactions of the several people who had learned of the pregnancy. 'Oh,' they said, 'a baby! How wonderful.'

There must have been an age, perhaps only in fantasy, when the birth of a child was in the natural order of things and was as much a cause for joy as the first sprouting of the winter crop in the spring. But the crops were now heavily dosed with a poison spray, and the imminent birth of a child only served to underscore the essential horror we had all done our best to make of this world.

VI

The ocean had become too heavy for us to bear. The days of listening to its restless, pitiless changes had taken their toll on our fragmented and shallow sensibilities. Also, I was detoxifying too quickly, and I found myself smoking a great deal, almost as though my body had adjusted to a certain level of atmospheric evil, and to drop too soon into an area of fresh air provided a shock to the system. I decided to go back to the city again, leaving the others to their own devices.

I rode back on the Expressway, zipping past the impacted ugliness of Long Island into the slate grey cloud in the distance. For more than thirty miles the great miasma over New York City dominated the horizon in a virulent evocation of decay. As I got closer, and the density of concrete and steel increased, the number of buildings per unit of space multiplied, and traffic built to the choked snarl where Bruckner Boulevard meets the Cross Bronx Expressway. On the West Side Highway I watched the curve of the Hudson shore fade abruptly in the black air over the infested waters of what had once been a beautiful river.

The city was in full decline. It merely needed its Hogarth to capture the idiosyncratic manner in which it festered. From day to day one wondered how it could survive another twenty-four hours: the filth in the streets, the constant screech of the cars and buses and trucks, the insane hustling from nowhere to nowhere of the grey-skinned people. The place was run by a hostile amalgam of racial power groups, construction companies, finance and transportation monopolies, and a laughable city government. It was like a speed-freak nightmare, and no one showed the slightest understanding of what was necessary to keep the deadly proliferation of new buildings, more cars, extra people, increased business from swamping every last vestige of humanity. And permeating everything, everywhere, the thick sulphurous air, the sickening water, the constant diet of dead food, in cans, in boxes, in frozen containers. What would come first? A plague? A war among the many furious factions? The destruction of the subways or bridges? Or just the continuation of a lifelessness that had become the style of life?

I glowed with exhilaration. I was free to prowl in the richest, most powerful, most decadent city in the country which was my jungle. I throbbed with pure perversion, the sense of singeing evil which the metropolis spawned like a culture in a test tube. I went to Lucinda's pad, one of those architectural whorehouses which squat over Central Park West, and paid my emotional dues to get past the doorman. He seemed instinctively to hate me, perhaps because of my hair and dress. The man was over sixty, decrepit, and so bored with standing in front of a revolving door for forty years that he had completely forgotten he was born free.

I began to feel sick to my psyche and remembered Francis's words as I had got on the ferry: 'You'd better bring along an extra set of filters for your mind.' After half an hour in New York, all of one's antennae are clogged with confusion and hatred, and in short time you have joined the other seven million zoombies in their sense-less stumblings about the streets.

From the edge of hostility I receive from the man who sells me a newspaper, to the war in Vietnam is simply a matter of quantity. The conflict is internal with each individual as well as external in the world. The war my myriad selves carry out is mingled with the power syndrome inherent in authoritarian government structure, and neurotic anxiety translates to global conflict via the power of technology.

I reached the deepest understanding of myself when I saw that I was a clever killer ape, one of a species whose ferocity is destroying an entire planet. And while the liberal in me was horrified at the spectacular atrocities committed by the military, the observer in me pointed out that not a day went by in which I didn't kill with a thought or a gesture. The reality of hatred and violence in the simplest human regulations was clear.

Being a thoroughly conditioned and civilised monkey, I refused for a long time to admit the truth of my perception. On the one hand there were the police monkeys with weapons and prisons to ensure that I behaved; on the other was the imprint of so-called Christian conscience which had been burned into me from infancy.

But I couldn't for long escape the fact that the really cunning monkeys, the apes who run the machinery of the social world, the bankers, the statesmen, the generals, the religious leaders, the finance barons, stay where they are through brute force, via their armies and their systems of law, via their institutionalised religions, via the power of their hypnotists, the advertisers, and via the submissive nature of the vast majority of human monkeys who perform the countless daily deadening routines which keep everything going. In a flash I saw all of our history as a parade of concentration camps, regulating the lives of the

inmates, and periodically warring against each other.

I showered and smoked a joint, and found myself enjoying the solitude and silence of the apartment. I remembered that I hadn't spent any time alone for months, and I decided to pass the evening by myself, getting my head straight. I took out a shoe box filled with photographs that ranged back to when I was two months old. It had pictures of me and my family, neighbourhood friends, scenes, women. As usual I began to float back into the levels of historical awareness I had about myself, remembering at what points in my life certain influences entered and how they shaped me. I was working up a pretty good memory when I came to the nude photo of Miriam. It was the first such shot I'd taken after discovering the miracle of Polaroid. Instant Grecian Urn! For she still lay there, her lips parted, her eyes unmasked, her cunt wet and dripping from the fuck we'd just finished.

I was twenty-five when I met her. I held an oppressive job as a junior editor on a two-man literary newspaper, and she was an apple-cheeked, sensitive-nippled, brilliant young girl from Sarah Lawrence. I was underpaid and worked long hours, but I was still in a career bag and took this as a step in what seemed to be the right direction. She came to work part time and we began a pleasant enough little soap opera, featuring the starry-eyed student and the esoteric businessman.

She was under five feet tall, a mouth barely large enough to get a medium-sized cock into, and an enormous globular arse. She radiated an aura of innocence which was electrifyingly erotic when I had her sprawled across the bed, her skirt hiked past the tops of her school-girl stockings and her fists clenching and unclenching with desire. When we fucked her eyes lost their air of childhood and became concentric rings of pure Aries power. She would do anything sexual as long as it was coated with a palatable literary jacket.

Our first few months were perfect. We could meet only on weekends, she lying to her parents about her location and coming to my pad in Brooklyn Heights where we embarked on forty-eight hour fuck marathons. Occasionally I visited her at the school, sleeping illegally in her room, snatching delicious sex from under the prowlings and patrollings of the campus guards, and becoming dizzy with the sweet stench of so much young articulate cunt in one place.

But at that moment in every relationship when one must decide whether to stay or go, I let lust cloud my judgement and started to have thoughts of a permanent union. Since neither of us really wanted that, but did not know how to cut loose, we began to hate each other secretly. And we began to feel the pressure from her parents. Her father was a Ph.D. historian who now worked as an assistant principal in a junior high school; her mother was a librarian. Both were, on the surface, pleasant and intelligent people, second-generation Jews who had moved to one of the Protestant-style swimming-pool ghettoes of New Jersey. As Miriam and I became 'serious', it became obvious that I would have to meet them.

They didn't like me at all. I was a gentile, I had no solid financial prospects, and I smelled like an adventurer. But they were civil.

I put on, as I was wont to do then, the costume and mask I thought would least threaten them. I made all the necessary placatory gestures, and left their home with all of us feeling that we wouldn't have to go through that again. But we had no way of knowing how naive we were.

At that time,
Stranger in a Strange Land
was making its first big impact on the American consciousness, and Miriam and I were infected with the notion of group love, although neither of us had any sense of what a complex and dangerous ground that is for us who have been sexually crippled by our civilisation. We were at the stage where we were chanelling all the frustrations, and dishonesties of the relationship into sex, with the result that our sex was reaching frantic levels. We mistook that for ecstasy.