“That asymptotic line business was a mean trick,” Barbara said.
“I know. But anyway — then, for some reason, I told him that he wasn’t like an M&M — that he’d melt in my mouth and in my hands.”
“Did he yell at you? Did he chase you out?” Barbara asked.
I looked at her. “Why do you cover your neck. It’s either covered with your hair or you wear turtle-necks. Why don’t you either wear your hair up in buns or gathered, at least, in braids or ponytails and not wear turtle-necks.”
“Those … are your ideas,” she said bitterly.
I decided to consult a hypnotist in order to find out exactly what had happened. I picked one out of the yellow pages. He was located on Canyon Boulevard. He took me back into his apartment which he apparently used as his office. It was a mess.
“Before I got into hypnosis,” he said, “I used to run the Boulder Institute of Balneology. The science of baths. Everyone specializes these days. There aren’t any general balneologists anymore.”
“What was your specialty?” I asked.
“Cyst soaking.”
Then he said “Let’s get down to business.”
I inquired as to his methods.
“My method’s one of the latest. What I’m going to have you do, Mark, is to wash dishes until you fall into a trance,” he said, pointing to a sink full of dirty skillets, and saucepans and utensils, “If that doesn’t work we’ll have you vacuum and dust and do some laundry until the trance is achieved.”
“Well,” I said, “let’s get going,”
Two hours later, I’d cleaned the whole kitchen, made the beds, shampooed the rugs and straightened the book shelves and magazine racks.
“Well,” I asked, “what did I say?”
“Mark,” he said, plucking the check from my hand, “we’ve found that relating to the patient the details of what he’s said under hypnosis is generally contraindicated. Have a nice day.”
“You too.” I said.
When I got back to the apartment, Barbara was at the stove.
“I haven’t read about anyone being killed,” she said.
“How could you have — we never see a newspaper around here.”
“Well, we would’ve heard.”
“I think I heard about it — I think I heard one of the Tai Chi people talking — he said ‘Because of these murders, the whole Tai Chi community is very tense. And we hate being tense. And we hate ourselves for hating something. And we can’t stand the anxiety that brews in the self-hatred. So we’re all really unbalanced.’ And then they asked him what games Tai Chi people like to play with their kids when they get bored in the car on long trips — and he said, spotting the most license plates from a particular state, or naming state capitals, or the animal-mineral-vegetable game. Then he said, ‘Once, a Tai Chi person hit a toll attendant in the forehead with a quarter because he thought it was one of those change receptacles. We think that’s a funny story — and when we think something’s funny — we laugh.’ ”
Then the phone rang. It was Lisa.
“I can’t talk — I’m in the middle of shaving. Bye.”
Barbara started to tickle me. “Don’t,” I giggled. “I’ll keep doing it if you laugh.” I couldn’t stop laughing though — so she wouldn’t stop tickling me. I was in convulsions. At one point, she tickled me so well that my body had a great spasm and my head crashed through the television screen. Everyone was in there.
“I gotta get out of here for awhile,” I said, “while I’m gone I wonder if you could do that seam on my blue corduroy jacket.”
I kept trying to fly to the District of Columbia. But each time, the plane would take off from Denver, fly for four hours or so and then land in Denver — and the passengers would get up and stretch and reach into the overhead luggage compartments for their coats, queue up and deplane, as if we’d really arrived in the District of Columbia after all. But I doubt we ever had.
Each day I’d watch the newspaper boy arrive at my apartment and stand in the center of the complex’s vast atrium and toss the papers up towards the second and third floor balconies. But he could never reach the apartments and the papers would just fall back to the ground. And he’d throw them again and they’d fall short again. Then he’d throw them with more force and they’d land on the roof. Then he’d throw them a little softer and they’d hit the balcony’s railing and tumble back to the ground. Then much much harder and they’d fly over the roof. And finally he’d leave, not having delivered a single paper. So tenants were held virtually incommunicado from the world and not infrequently there’d be screams from apartment windows “Is it baseball season or basketball?!”
Another week began on the radio. Air blew through the heat vent and someone in an adjoining apartment was using their garbage disposal. These were things I noticed. Because in many ways I lived with my apartment and not in it, I knew its moods and habits. I thought the apartment was so horny. I looked for its diary everywhere. It must have longed for something as neuter and clean as it was. Within its confines, I could smell myself and vent in the inexpressible ways an unexpurgated hatred of the other women I wanted desperately desperately to just hold me and kiss me — that would be better than fucking — just being held. A friend lent me his guitar and one night I just played Under The Boardwalk. Under The Boardwalk Under The Boardwalk Under The Boardwalk “On a blanket with my baby …” These were the feelings I held. The walls of the apartment were covered with lipstick marks of big inhuman kisses. The next morning I woke up and began to live more realistically. I ate breakfast quickly and put my sweat pants and orange sweat shirt on and drove to the basketball courts at the Williams Village dormitories. As I entered the court, there was an almost unprecedented ovation and I sang the Everly Brothers’ “never knew what I missed until I kissed ya” as I dribbled. It was there, I think, at mid-court, beneath the clouds’ pink under-bellies, that I decided that the most prudent and expedient thing I could do was leave Boulder.
I made up my mind not only to relocate but to assume a new identity. To weather the future under cover. To lose myself in the great anonymity of the mid-west. I applied to an exchange program that would place me with a mid-western farming family. And with greater dispatch than I could have hoped for, I received notification that I’d been accepted and that I was to join my new family at the first opportunity. The speed with which my application was processed was due, I think, to the unassailable discretion with which I’d answered the application’s queries. Where it asked why I wanted to live with a farm family, I wrote, “Because I like farmers.” Where it asked why I liked farmers, I put, “First the farmers angered Washington residents by trampling the mall and driving their tractors into the reflecting pools, but then really charmed them by plowing capital motorists out from under that uncharacteristically heavy snowfall. And some farmers even sought a brief respite from controversy beneath snowy monuments and dashed off impassioned letters to wives and sweethearts.” And on the part of the application where it asked what kind of letters the farmers sent, I put: “Dear Helen, If you got telephone cable and wrapped it around all the planets and stars so that if you wanted to you could call other galaxies and universes you would not speak to a finer prettier best-cookinest gal than you are Helen. I mean it too, brown eyes.”
Needless to say, I was delighted at the sudden prospect of being able to live quietly, and without constant foreboding.