NINE
They’d been in London less than a month when he met the girl who offered him the LSD; met her as she was coming out of the Chelsea Drugstore, in fact. They had a good laugh about that as he chatted her up over Campari and soda. Jeff said he’d gone down to get his prescription filled and gotten exactly what he wanted. She thought that was funny, though of course she didn’t catch the reference; the Stones wouldn’t record that song for another year.
Her name was Sylvia, she confided to him, but everybody called her Sylla, 'like the singer, Cilia Black, y’know?' Her mum and dad lived in Brighton (she made a face), but she was sharing a flat in South Kensington with two other birds, and had a job at Granny Takes a Trip, where she could get all her clothes at half price—like the blue vinyl mini-skirt and the yellow patterned stockings she was wearing now.
'We’ve got just the closest gear there, y’know; lots closer than Countdown or Top Gear. Cathy McGowan shops there all the time, and Jean Shrimpton was in just yesterday.'
Jeff smiled and nodded, tuning out her mindless patter. It wasn’t her he was interested in, it was the drug; he had been for a long time, and hated to admit he’d always been afraid to try it. This girl seemed casual enough about it, hadn’t suffered any apparent ill effects (assuming she’d been born this vapid). He’d picked her up out of habit more than anything else, commenting on the new Animals album she had under her arm, and within five minutes she’d asked him if he wanted to drop some acid. Well, what the hell? Why not?
Back in the town house on Sloane Terrace, Sharla was asleep in bed with some guy she’d met last night at Dolly’s. Jeff closed the bedroom door, put on a Marianne Faithfull record at low volume in the living room, asked Sylla if she wanted another drink.
'Not if we’re gonna do the acid,' she said. 'They don’t mix well, y’know?'
Jeff shrugged, poured himself another Scotch anyway. He needed the alcohol to relax, to ease his nervousness over taking the psychedelic. What could it hurt?
'That your wife in the other room?' Sylla asked.
'No. Just a friend.'
'She gonna mind me being here?'
Jeff shook his head and laughed. 'Not a bit.'
Sylla grinned, tossed her straight brown hair out of her eyes. 'I never … did it, y’know, with another bird around. Except my flat-mates, of course, and that’s just 'cause we don’t have that much room.'
'Well, she’s my flat-mate, and it’s O.K. There’s another bedroom downstairs. Would you feel more comfortable in there?'
She rummaged in the yellow vinyl purse whose material matched her skirt, its color her stockings. 'Let’s do the acid first, wait for it to come on. Then we can go downstairs.'
Jeff took the little purple-stained square of blotter paper she handed him, washed it down with the last of the whiskey. Sylla wanted some orange juice with hers, so he fetched a container from the fridge.
'How long does it take before you feel the effect?' he asked.
'Depends. D’you eat lunch today?'
'No.'
''Bout half an hour, then,' she said. 'More or less.'
It was less. Within twenty minutes the walls had turned to rubber, had begun to recede and approach. Jeff waited for the visions he had expected to appear, but none did; instead, everything around him just seemed slightly twisted, indefinably askew, and sort of sparkly.
'Y’feel it, luv?' she asked.
'It’s … not what I’d thought it would be like.' His words came out distinctly but felt thick in his mouth. Sylla’s face was changing, flowing like hot wax; her lipstick and rouge now seemed obscenely garish, layers of red paint covering her flesh.
'Fab, though, innit?'
Jeff closed his eyes and, yes, there were patterns there, circles within circles, interconnected by a complex, shimmering latticework. Wheels, mandalas: symbols of eternal cycles, of illusory change that merely led back to where the change had begun and would begin again …
'Feel my stocking; feel that.' Sylla placed his hand on her thigh, and the yellow patterned panty hose became a landscape of textures and ridges, lit by an alien sun; that sun, too, a part of the endless cycles of being, the—
Sylla giggled, pressed his hand between her legs. 'Take me downstairs now, O.K.? Wait’ll you see what this feels like on acid.'
He complied, though he wanted only to lie back and give his mind up to these recurring waves of quietude and acceptance. In the small bedroom downstairs Sylla undressed him, ran her red-tipped fingers over his body, leaving a trail of cool fire wherever they touched. She stepped out of her mini-skirt and stockings, pulled her thin blouse over her head, drew his mouth to her right nipple. He sucked it with more curiosity than desire, like an infant suddenly aware of its place in the chain of existence, an omniscient child seeing its own birth, death, rebirth.
Sylla guided him inside her, and he grew hard automatically. Her wet inner flesh was like something ancient, something protohuman; receptive yang to his vital yin, together the creators of these endlessly regenerating cycles, these—
Jeff opened his eyes and the girl’s face changed shape again. It had become Gretchen’s face. He was fucking Gretchen, fucking his daughter: she to whom he had given life, yet who had never been.
He withdrew from her with instant revulsion.
'Awwrr!' the girl cried in frustration and reached for his limp penis, stroking it. 'C’mon, luv, c’mon!'
The waves within his mind no longer soothed; they battered his emotions with a vicious impact. Cycles, wheels … within that universal chain there was no place for him, no pattern that would fit his mutant existence out of time.
The girl parted her blood-red lips and bent to suck him. He pushed her face away toward the pulsing wall, tried to shut out what he had seen in her.
'Mind if we join the party?' Sharla stood in the open doorway, naked. Behind her was a skinny young man with long, straggly hair and a pitted face. Sylla frowned uncertainly at the newcomers, then relaxed and let fall the sheet she had pulled up to cover her breasts.
'Might’s well,' Sylla said. 'Acid didn’t seem to agree with your mate, here.'
'Acid?' the young man said excitedly. 'You got some with you?'
Sylla nodded, reached for the purse she’d brought downstairs.
'Here, give us a couple hits, willya?' he said. Then, to Sharla: 'You ever fuck on acid? It’s tremendous!'
They were on the bed, all of them, Sharla stroking Sylla’s hair, Gretchen’s hair—or was it Linda doing that?—and then the stranger became Martin Bailey, blood from the self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head spewing across the sheets, soaking the naked bodies of Jeff’s wife and daughter, they were dead all of them dead except for him and he couldn’t die no matter how many times he died. He was the wheel; he was the cycle.
Sharla tapped her foot impatiently as they waited in the first class lounge at San Francisco International. Her face was ghostly pale, after the latest mode, framed in the sleek straightness of her black hair. Her eyebrows were bleached to near-invisibility, her lipstick like a streak of chalk. The crazily zebra-patterned op-art print dress and white tights she wore completed the utter lack of color.
'How much longer now?' she asked curtly.
Jeff glanced at his watch. 'Should be boarding any minute.'
