He watched me take another lungful and then settled back onto the couch. He reached into kiss hair and brought out a home made joint.
`Got a match?' he said.
'If you're going to smoke, share mine,' I said.
He leaned over to take the pipe, but it was out, so I handed him the matches too. He lit up and for the next three minutes we passed the pipe back and forth in silence: He was staring at the ceiling as if its green cracks contained like the back of a turtle's shell, portents of the future. By the time the pipe ovens out a second time, I was pleasantly high. I felt happy, as if I were embarking on a new voyage that for the first time, even in my dice man life, represented real, rather than superficial change.
My eyes were focused on his face, which, under the influence of his high perhaps, was glowing. He smiled with a peacefulness well within my understanding. His hands were folded across his belly, and he lay like a dead man, but glowing, glowing. His voice when he spoke was slow, thick and gentle, as if it came from way off in the clouds.
`About three weeks ago I got up in the middle of the night when all the attendants were asleep to take a piss, but I didn't have to take a piss. I was drawn into the day room as if by a magnet and there I stared out through the window at the Manhattan skyline. Manhattan: the central cog of the machine, or maybe just the sewage system. I knelt and I prayed. Yeah, I prayed. To the Spirit, which had lifted Christ above the mass of men to bring His Spirit to me, to give to me the light that could light the world. To let me become the way, the truth and the light. Yeah.'
He paused and I emptied the ashes out into an ashtray and began refilling the pipe.
`How long I prayed, I can't tell. Suddenly, wham! I was flooded by a light that made an acid trip seem like sniffing
glue. I couldn't see. My body seemed to swell, my spirit swelled, I seemed to expand until I filled the whole universe.
The world was me.'
He paused briefly, the sound of the Jefferson Airplane coming from someplace up, the hall.
'I hadn't smoked a thing for three days. I wasn't loony. I filled the whole universe.'
He paused again.
`I was crying. I was weeping for joy. I was on my feet I guess, and the whole world was all light and was all me and it
was good. I stood with my arms outstretched to embrace everything and then I was conscious of this terrific mad grin I had on my face and the vision kind of faded and I shrunk back to me. But I felt that, I knew that I had been given a job … a role, a mission … yeah. This gray-green hellhouse couldn't be left standing. The gray factories, the gray offices, the gray buildings, the gray people .. . everything without light. .. has to go. I saw it. I see it. What I'd been waiting for had happened. The Spirit I'd been looking for, I . . . had . . . I know, I'm not for all men. The mass of men will always see and live in the gray world. But a few will follow me, a few, and we'll change the world.'
I passed him the relit pipe when he'd finished talking and he took it and inhaled and passed it back to me. He didn't
look at me.
`And you, what's your game?' he said. `You're not smoking pot, with me just because you feel like smoking pot.'
`No' I said.
`Then why?'
`Just chance.'
He stared at the green ceiling until I passed him back the pipe. When he finally exhaled he said again as if from very
far away: `If you want to follow me you must give up everything.'
`I know.'
`Pot-smoking doctors who get stoned with mental patients don't stay doctors long.'
`I know.'
I felt like giggling.
`Wives and brothers and fathers and mothers don't usually like my way.'
`So I gather.'
`Someday you will help me.'
We were both staring at the ceiling now, the hot bowl of the pipe resting unused in the palm of my hand.
`Yes,' I said.
`It's a marvelous game we'll play - the best,' he said.
`For some reason I feel I'm yours,' I said. `Whatever you want me to do, I'll want to do.'
`Everything will happen.'
`Yes.'
`The blind bastards [his voice was quiet and serene and remote] will panic and kill, panic and kill, trying to control the
uncontrollable, trying to kill what can only live.'
`We will panic and kill.'
`And I'll,' he interrupted himself with a chuckle, `I'll try to save the whole fucking world'
`Yes.'
`I'm Divine, you know,' he said.
`Yes,' I said, believing it.
`I've come to wake the world to evil, to goose mankind to good.'
'We'll hate you-'
`To slash the mash-potato minds until their sirs is seen.
'We'll be blind-'
`Try to make the blind see, the lame walk, the dead live again.'
He laughed.
`And we'll try to make the seeing blind, the walking lame, the living dead.'
I smiled.
`I'll be the insane Savior of the world, and you'll kill me.'
`Whatever you want will be done.'
I eased out a slow motion bubbling of mirth.
`I'll be…'
He was chuckling too, in slow motion. `I'll be . . . the Savior . . . of the world . . . and do nothing, and you .. .'ll kill … me.'
`And I . .' Goddam it, it was funny! How beautiful it was `… I'll kill you.'
The room was a beautiful blur bouncing up and down on the bubbles of our laughter. Tears were in my eyes and I took of my glasses and put my face in my folded arms and laughed, my big body rumbling from cheeks to belly to knees, laughing, tears wetting my jacket, the soft cotton material caressing my wet face like bear's bristle, and crying with an ecstasy that I hadn't known before that moment, and looking up because I couldn't believe I was crying and Eric's face blurred, blurred bright but blurred and I looked for my glasses - such terror that I might never see again - and after groping for forty days I found them and put them on and looked at the blurred brightness and it was Eric's holy face flowing tears like mine and he wasn't laughing.
Chapter Twenty-one
[Being an edited tape from one of the early analytic sessions given by Dr. Jacob Ecstein to Dr. Lucius Rhinehart, neurotic. We are cutting into the tape about half way through the analytic hour. The first voice is that of Dr. Rhinehart.]
- I'm not sure why I entered into this affair but I think it may partially be aggression against the husband. How have your relations with Lillian been? - Fine. Or rather, about as usual, which means up and down but essentially
happy. I don't think it was or is aggression against Lil. At least I don't think it is.
