Unfortunately however young Grissom had not merely been led into a whore’s hotel room. The room and the lady had been a trap. Worse luck, it had taken all these two and a half decades to get at the truth of the matter.
Finally, now when he was pushing sixty, the story broke. Grissom had first seen the news on TV. It seemed that a couple of those hush-hush, top-level intelligence agencies in this country occasionally used to slip unsuspecting victims a drug, an hallucinogen. CIA, Army, whatever. They would drive somebody clear out of his mind for a few hours, as an experiment.
While “the project was in operation,” Grissom had learned, these agencies had sometimes hired prostitutes to “administer the substance.” Thereafter, an agency man would sit behind a two-way mirror and “monitor the session.” Oh, Grissom had come to know their bald lingo well, this past month. The agency records had been subpoenaed, and he’d seen his own name in them. He’d seen the faraway date and verified it against his old business records. He’d seen, he’d seen.
And so Grissom and his lawyer arrived at the troublesome business of the whore’s actually going through with her original job. Why had she let Grissom have her? The two men had discussed the question one afternoon a couple weeks ago, in the lawyer’s office. The woman’s motives might prove important if the suit came to court. The office was bright, with buttons flashing red and yellow on the enormous desk phone. The lawyer raised the question in a friendly way, but Grissom at first kept quiet. Since he still couldn’t find the words to explain it to his wife, Grissom figured, no way he could talk it out with a lawyer. In silence he watched the phone buttons flash. Eventually, calmly, the lawyer tried out an idea of his own. He hypothesized that the agency had wanted a subject who would truly feel guilty, in order for the experiment to be more, more — the lawyer frowned, searching for the expression — more emotionally impactive.
Now Grissom frowned. Emotionally what?
So, the lawyer finished with a grin, the girl had let Grissom zap her as part of their research.
Grissom found he couldn’t sit still. That kind of talk, he’d said loudly, shaking his head and striding round the office, that kind of talk—. His lawyer was looking at the wrong side of the picture entirely. The drug’s effects, Grissom said, were way more complex than that. Instead his lawyer should look at the other end of the picture, the human element. One way or the other, Grissom suddenly started shouting, you have to join the human race. One way or the other!
Bad idea, getting so fired up. The next day the Sun-Times carried a photograph of him throwing a fit in the public corridor outside his lawyer’s office. As he’d jumped round screaming about the human race, a camera-flash had caught him. The picture showed a heavy-bodied man in late middle age, with one knee raised in mid-stomp. The other foot, in its elegant European boot, was actually off the ground. This leaping person had an intelligent forehead, broad and pronounced, but at that moment it was cracked into so many wrinkles it looked like intestines caught in a vise. That morning (only a couple of weeks ago, now), Grissom had come into work and found the paper on his desk, folded open to the page with the picture.
He’d jumped back into his car, that morning, and driven the thirty miles to his home at well past the speed limit. He thought somehow he could pick up the house copy before Syl saw it. No dice. He found his wife at the kitchen table, with the paper open to his photograph in front of her, murmuring wearily over the phone to someone in her family. Her body sagged in its chair. After the first startled glance, she wouldn’t look at Grissom.
Revenge, Grissom thought. The whore had let him have her as a means of revenge. The drug after all was too freaky, too mysterious for anyone to go predicting its effects. Therefore you had to look at the person, not the apparatus around the person. So this woman, Grissom explained later to his lawyer, had wanted a hooker’s revenge: her own special way of showing her ass to the men who gave her their grubby orders and then sat, smug and above-it-all, behind the mirror.
The lawyer had looked sincerely surprised to hear Grissom come up with such a subtle theory. The lawyer took off his glasses and touched a stem to his lower lip. Grissom, in turn, could only give a disgusted half-smile. He would never get used to these narrow preconceptions people outside of business had about those on the inside. A man could work as an executive and nonetheless perceive the soul. Grissom had imagination enough to appreciate what must happen to a whore’s spirit while her body rang up trick after trick. For a moment he felt like jumping up and shouting again.
This conversation however took place the day after his photograph had appeared in the papers. Grissom therefore calmed himself. He watched the silent mechanical flash of the phone buttons. At last he shrugged. Look, he told the lawyer, the possible explanations for the prostitute’s behavior were endless. This much only was certain: she didn’t have to. By the time the hotel sheets had been heaped up round them like thunderclouds, the backs of Grissom’s knees had been going crazy, trembling with more than sexual fever. He’d bristled everywhere with his first rush.
After that, memory became spotty. What isolated moments he did recall were vivid, indeed far worse than vivid. But now Grissom had entered the mystery, a vastness complicated by a million wiry connections, and there not even his most enraged recent efforts to recall could fill in the blanks.
He could say, at least, that when TV or the movies handled this kind of experience they were way off base. The hallucinogen had never once caused Grissom to see things that weren’t “there” in some sense or another. The cow did not jump over the moon. Rather, every far-out vision had long psychic trailers rooted finally in some humble taste, some homely touch. Yes TV was way off base. TV started out to protect their viewers and wound up shoving everybody who watched into the garbage. TV went for the bright lights and never got at the truth, which was this essential combination of the homely and the psychedelic. It was because of that combination a person on acid knew the experience was real. And because it was real, it made you crazy. Madness therefore was a kind of ground pepper scattered over the experience, and though the bursts of memory could shatter Grissom like a sneeze, the grainy heaps of black to either side were just as large.
For example he could remember a time when the whore’s icy features had reddened and shriveled into those of the Devil himself, risen from his dark home. Her legs had run together into a ropelike tail holding him tight. Okay. Surely that guilty hallucination was only to be expected. Syl was, as he longed to tell her nowadays, in that hotel room with him. But then how, and when, had the prostitute become the Moon Maiden? How had her hair turned the consistency of cream cheese, and how had those tentacles sprung from her ribs to circle round him and tickle his spine so excruciatingly? All was doubtful, rough and tumble, transferences felt only in separated bits around the dark passage of asteroid chunks. Or never mind this woman and the million dreams that rode her skin. How in the world had Grissom come to spend so much time standing facing that hotel room’s mirror?