The wind was still blowing when he stepped from the apartment, and it nearly wrenched the doorknob out of his hand, but it had died down by the time he’d walked six blocks to Roosevelt Street, where he stood by the curb with his thumb out. Dust hung in the air under the streetlamps; soon the stars would burn clearly above the city. Not many cars drove past tonight — it occurred to Burris he might step inside somewhere for a drink and ask among the other customers for a ride. It amazed him how simple it all actually was: he only had to go to her and tell her he was ready, that she could come back to him now, and everything would be returned to sanity. Pride had blinded him in the past, and a pain that eluded him tonight, and an anger he didn’t feel toward her anymore. Freed of negative energies, he moved easily toward solutions.
A pickup truck went past him, and in the back of it a man with his pants down stood up and pointed his naked buttocks at Burris. Somebody said something he couldn’t make out, and the truck disappeared around a corner. He was astonished and disgusted. Suddenly his heart ached. And as if this humiliating affront to him had jostled the facts in his memory, he understood that this time wouldn’t be any different from the half-dozen others when he’d set out to bind up the injuries of his love. Eileen wouldn’t be home, or he would never get there, or, at the worst, it would turn out as it had the single time he’d actually confronted her: wearily she had called Critter to the door, and Burris had tried to get past him to explain himself to his wife. “Honey?” he’d kept saying. “Honey? I’m here, get your shit.” At first Critter had done only the bare minimum necessary to restrain him, but it had all ended terribly, with Burris bloody-faced and hysterical and handcuffed to metal rings in the floor of a squad car. He hadn’t even grasped that violence was being done — he was so intent on what he wanted to say to her — until he’d settled down at the police station, where blood dripped from his nose onto his bluejeans.
Standing now on Roosevelt Street while the evening steadily cooled off around him, he began to burn again with resentment. What had made him think he might ever forgive her? And how could she have done it to him, unless she felt only hatred of his very face? He turned this way and that on the sidewalk, completely helpless to find the right direction. Motels, gas stations, and corner lamps swung through his sight. And how could she hate him now, when she had loved him then?
“You’re like an alcoholic,” Jeanine remarked. She was watching Burris shoot up.
Burris found it impossible to reply. The relentlessness of what he took to be Jeanine’s stupidity always unnerved him.
“In your current material existence, what you’re doing is, you’re making all the wrong choices. We’re here to make choices,” she said. “You know what the Japanese say? First the man takes a drink. Then the drink takes a drink.” She leaned forward. She was sitting on the divan. “Then the drink takes the man. Or maybe the Chinese, or somebody.”
“If you make me spill this,” Burris said, twisting together three paper matches, “I will beat you till I feel no anger.” He struck the matches and, holding them in one hand as they burned, raised up the spoon with the other.
“Burris, let me talk to you just a few minutes before you — you know, before you get off.”
“You wanna talk? Talk.” Burris blew on the liquid in the spoon carefully to cool it.
“Talk is all I can do,” Jeanine told him. “I can’t do anything else.” She reached to her big blue book beside her on the divan — and for an instant Burris sensed her, in the corner of his vision, as a poised and gracious white presence in the room, but kept the main of his attention on his spoon of liquefied heroin. Turning the pages of her book, Jeanine wrinkled her nose. “That stuff always smells like the inside of a cigaret when you get it cooked. Now. Lucifer, by rebelling against Christ Michael, became one of those who has succumbed to the urge of self and surrendered to spurious personal liberty.”
“What the fuck?” Burris said. “Oh.” He saw that she was reading.
“See? That’s just where you’re at, honey. Running up money in the wrong bank. You’re opting for extinction every time you do up. You’re kissing death”—and she began to read again: “‘Rejection of universe allegiance and disregard of fraternal obligations. Blindness to cosmic relationships.’ Hey — I thought you were going to listen for a minute.”
Burris pitied himself immensely even as he tapped the needle into the vein of his arm, because twenty dollars’ worth was only a feeble joke, an almost pointless medicinal gesture, a parody of intoxication that might, nevertheless, help him sleep for a few hours. “I’m listening,” he told Jeanine. “Fuck. Wish we had a fucking phone,” he said absently.
“I’m just telling you what Lucifer was into. You know Lucifer? The Devil? But actually, the one we call the Devil is named Caligastia. He was a prince, it says, a deposed planetary prince of Urantia.”
From his association with Jeanine, Burris understood that Urantia was the planet Earth. “You’re so insane,” he said, not without affection. As the heroin reached him, he could feel the sinuses at the back of his nose opening up.
Jeanine held the big Urantia Book in her lap, perusing it gaily like a family album. “The Lucifer Rebellion was a big flop. But it says, right here on page 609—listen: ‘While Lucifer was deprived of all administrative authority in Satania, there then existed no local universe power nor tribunal which could detain or destroy this wicked rebel.’ And then it says here that he’s still operating, Burris—‘Thus were these archrebels allowed to roam the entire system to seek further penetration for their doctrines of discontent and self-assertion.’ It says here, ‘They continue their deceptive and seductive efforts to confuse and mislead the minds of men and angels.’ They’re still operating a big business right here on Urantia.”
“Well,” Burris said, “I ain’t exactly about to OD, but it works.” He released a sigh as if he’d been holding his breath past any endurance. His sinuses were completely free. The gratitude of the survivor, the melting feminine gratitude of the saved, lit every follicle from within. “You look like an angel yourself, right now, you know that? In that white raincoat,” he said. Suddenly nauseated by the taste of beer, he held out to her his half-finished Schlitz.
Jeanine came over and sat on the floor by the wicker chair, and took the beer and drank from it. He kissed her on top of her head, and she rested her head on his knee, putting her arms half about his waist. “I get contact vibes off you,” she said to him. “When you get high, I get high.” Peace settled down upon the midnight. Burris sat back into the silence and blindness of the heroin of Mexico: the silence that isn’t empty and the blindness that isn’t dark.
4
Jamie stood in the middle of the yard, apparently not quite sure of the direction of the house, which was ten feet away, or perhaps a little nonplussed, somewhat taken aback, possibly, by the platter of fried chicken Bill Houston had just handed her. She and Burris had been eating up those pills of his. It ran in the family. Even Mrs. Houston herself, as she observed her son’s woman friend from the living room, was sipping from a large glass of V-8 juice with vodka in it.
In the pitiless downpouring light of afternoon, Jamie’s aura was plainly visible to Mrs. Houston as an atmosphere of haze surrounding her, and Mrs. Houston caught her breath. Without the tiniest avenue for escape, without the smallest meager hole through which the nourishment of God might find her, Jamie was hemmed in and completely owned by the Evil One. In this absolute bondage, Mrs. Houston saw clearly, her possible future daughter-in-law was permitted to live and move amid a trumped-up psychic ectoplasm of unconscious grace, because ultimately it was the black darkness of Satan that possessed her, and he bided his time. He was keeping Jamie for later. Jamie was going to be his dessert. Mrs. Houston began a prayer for her: only the ceaseless cries of those already saved might pierce the walls imprisoning this young woman who stood in the back yard obliterated on pills and red wine, looking ridiculous in her short cut-off jeans and purple high-heeled shoes, trying to decipher a tray of chicken.