It’s a fantastic scene. Kids sell them.” He nibbled another portion. “The better they are, the more blue. Sometimes the kids who sell them take blue dye and color them.”
She shook her head.
“I’ve been sick.”
Dieter took the bowl away and went back to his console while she coasted among the ceiling rafters.
“What are you doing?” she asked him suddenly. “How can you concentrate if you’re stoned?”
“I can play polo stoned,” Dieter said.
From somewhere in the valley, a trumpet sounded four wavering notes. The striking of colors, an alarm.
Marge smiled when she heard it.
“It’s the trumpet of the Mexican infantry,” Dieter told her. “A very tragic sound. It calls huge numbers of Mexican soldiers into battle against tiny determined bands. The tiny bands hold them off for three months and kill half of them.”
“Does it mean someone’s coming?”
He put the wires aside, picked up a pitcher of wine from the stone floor, and sat down at the edge of her blanket.
“I don’t know what it means. It has something to do with the fiesta.”
“What’s the fiesta like? Is it nice?”
“They take a lamb up on the pinnacle and sacrifice it.”
She looked into his saintly long-lashed eyes. They were naked, comically blue. She laughed.
“To you?”
“Obviously,” Dieter said, “you insist on misunderstanding. They sacrifice it to its heavenly father. They crucify it.”
“Really?”
“Sure,” Dieter said.
“And they do psilocybin?”
“The psilocybin they got from me.” He turned his gaze toward the ceiling beams. “They get high and crucify it, and they ask, Little Lamb Who Made Thee?”
“And what does the lamb say?”
“The lamb says baaa.”
Marge shook her head.
“They got a lot of nerve,” she said. “So do you.”
She stretched out across the floor and thrust her clasped hands between her knees. Dieter’s red swollen face hovered above her.
“You’re a Jew,” she heard him say.
She stiffened and stared up at him.
“Am I? Does that make us buddies?”
Dieter eased down beside her, still holding his wine.
“I detect a certain astringency in your manner. I thought it might be Jewish.”
“Because Jews dislike bullshit?”
“That’s not my experience. They’re just fussy.” His flowing red face was close to hers; she could smell the
wine on his breath. She thought that he was going to kiss her, but she did not move. He pulled back and removed himself from her space, crawling off the blanket.
“I was not always as you see me now,” he said.
“Me neither.”
“I know what you want from him,” she said a little later, “but what does he want from you?”
“He wants to sell me three kilos of heroin. That’s all he wants.”
“No,” she said, “he has some hit on you.”
“I suppose it’s that I’m part of his history. That’s the way his life has been — he takes his history seriously. He takes people seriously.” Dieter began to laugh. “He takes everything seriously. He’s a serious man, like your President— un homme sérieux. He’s a total American.”
“You’re being snotty.”
“Not at all. I know him very well. I was his first master.”
“That’s a funny thing to hear somebody say,” Marge said.
She saw that Dieter was not listening to her. He was staring past her with a smile still on his face.
“He was beautiful. He was your natural man of Zen. You could have done anything with that guy.”
“What does that mean?” Marge asked. “What do you mean, you could have done anything with him?”
“He was open. He was there. He was. When I called it Those Who Are, it was him I thought of.”
“Those Who Are what?”
Dieter discovered her in front of him.
“He was incredible. He acted everything out. There was absolutely no difference between thought and action for him.” He clapped his hands and held them together in a grip that whitened his fingers. “It was exactly the same. An enormous self-respect. Whatever he believed in he had to embody absolutely.”
Marge put a hand to her face and laughed.
“Wow.”
“Wow,” Dieter said. “Wow is right.”
He looked about his chamber fondly.
“You have to know what it was like here then. We didn’t drink — we didn’t do up. We washed our dishes in the stream and listened to the birds. Just… clarity.” He held out his hand and formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger to indicate clarity. “It was before Christine flipped. She was very happy then.”
“I didn’t know happy was part of it. I thought you weren’t supposed to think in those terms.”
“Let’s face it,” Dieter said, “we were happy.”
He took a sip of wine from the pitcher and fixed Marge with his Himalayan stare. She had no idea how many mushrooms he might have eaten. They seemed to have no effect on him.
“I went down all the rivers,” Dieter told her. “Like a prospector. I knew all the gurus and poseurs. Fuji. Mount Athos.” He numbered Fuji and Mount Athos off on his fingers. “But I succumbed to the American dream.”
Marge laughed.
“You don’t seem to me,” she said, “like someone who succumbed to the American dream. You seem more the opposite of that.”
“Not at all,” Dieter said. “When I came I was naïve. I believed all the old bullshit. Innocence. Energy. I believed it so much that for a while it came true for me. Christine and I moved up here — others came. Ray and others. Marvelous things happened to us. We were levitating, we were delirious.”
He farted loudly and without embarrassment.
“Then it occurred to me that if I applied the American style — which I didn’t really understand — if I pushed a little, speeded things up a little, we might break into something really cosmic. The secular world was falling apart. Nobody knew what they were doing or what they wanted. There was a great ear open. Waiting for something.”
Dieter closed his eyes and put clasped hands over the top of his head.
“I was sitting up here hearing it! What they wanted” — with a thrust of his chin he indicated the world below — “I had. I knew! So I thought, a little push, a little shove, a little something extra to shake it loose. And I ended up as Doctor Dope.”
He opened his eyes and shrugged.
“It’s a fucked-up world. One’s a weak vessel.”
“Everybody came down.”
“Nobody came down,” Dieter shouted at her. “We disappeared without a trace. We haven’t been seen since.”
“Look at Ray,” Dieter said. “He’s trapped in a samurai fantasy — an American one. He has to be the Lone Ranger, the great desperado — he has to win all the epic battles single-handed.” He stood up wearily. “It may not be a very original conception, but he’s quite good at it.”
Kjell came in from outside carrying an armload of kindling and set it down next to the fireplace.
“We gonna play Go tonight?” he asked his father.
“We’ll see. Why don’t you go and wake Ray up.”
“He’s awake,” Kjell said. “He’s washing.” He turned to Marge.
“Play Go?”
“I’m sorry,” Marge said, “I’ve forgotten how.”
“Myths,” Dieter was saying. “Phantasmagoria. Projections.”
Hicks came in, drying his face with a towel.
“It was all shit,” he declared. “Wasn’t it, K-jell?”
“Shit as opposed to what?” Dieter asked. “If it was shit, what was the good stuff?”
“It was a flash.”
“It was our responsibility. We should have stayed with that flash forever.”