Basil found himself shortly crying out, and more than once at that, but for answer got only the wind and rain and the creaking of trees in the wind and rain. To the west he could see the void that was the lake, black as the hole of his hurt. Lights winked at its edges, a perforated thread which for now was all that stood twixt the town and its destruction.
Basil began to shiver. At first he managed to contain his fear, but as it all continued to mingle and grow, his loneliness and guilt and disconsolation, so too did its outward display. Something had been taken from him, that much he knew, and yet precisely what he couldn’t explain. Or perhaps he was simply lost. He knew only that with the ferocity of some malevolent germ the sense he’d been living a protracted mistake was devouring what little of him remained. And then he wept into oblivion.
When he came to, he said, he was so cold that should someone so much as tap him, his body would shatter like an effigy of ice. But the longer he waited, the more deeply he’d be lost. He didn’t have his hatchet. He didn’t have even a knife.
And so visions of catastrophe rollicked through his mind. Any minute now a tour-bus jammed with cultic octogenarians might descend on him, strayed from the path to some Lawn Bowling Tournament for Abused Geriatrics. They’d have painted faces and doctor’s smocks, wooden dentures and powdered wigs. They’d sport bifocaled pince-nez, diapers by the ream, and with their embroidery needles tipped in poison they’d set to work on his flesh as though a hopelessly imperfect doily. Or maybe something worse, a heretofore undiscovered tiger perchance, the last of its kind pouncing from the dark with nuclear fangs. Or maybe a swarm of winter-loving bugs, clawing through the earth to feed on his brain. But worst of all, he fantasized, much worse, he said — and here, at this possibility, Basil felt what he only later realized was the essence of panic, of real human terror — a colony of Lilliputian Deadheads might emerge from the boroughs of patchouli they’d fashioned in the trees about him, roaring about in a murder of Lilliputian schoolbuses, each painted in patterns of red, white, and blue, replete with toupéed death-heads, all of the groupies with their nasty feet and rastafied haberdashery, macraméd roach clips, earthenware bongs, Moosewood Cookbooks and astrology charts, organic cottonwear, dreadlocks, Greenpeace and tarot cards, too, and the diminutive women with their hairy legs and bushes, and the men with their John Muir beards, they’d all truss him up and cram his gullet with Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia while around him, from the multitude of Lilliputian tweeders and woofers they’d have installed on the roofs of their Lilliputian busses, the anthemic “Truckin’” would blare, each and every one of these fiends, man, woman, and Muckluckian brat, flailing about in terpsichorean frenzy, The Wiggly-Womp Dance of the Dead. Basil wanted to run but his feet had sunk to the ankles in sludge. Sad but true, the bastard was stuck.
Directly after our conversation that early April afternoon, I walked into the sun to contemplate whether Basil had found any pleasure in his despair. Because now and then, I’ve heard it said, it’s in despair we find our deepest joy, and more so yet when we see the hopelessness of our state. But who’s to say? None of us really knows that much.
That night in the rain nearly four days had passed since Basil had slept. The meth was at best a ghost in his veins, and he’d been heavily drinking. Going underground was not an option. He may’ve been wretched, but he wasn’t a mouse. And yet neither was he any longer the man he’d been, if ever he was that man. He didn’t know who he was anymore, or what. He knew only that once upon a time he’d scoffed at the delay of action, because delay implied thought and thought, in short, was for pussies. And this for Basil was so. He’d never measured the cost of his deeds — what might happen should he bash this nose or snap that arm, say, or ingest this drug, or bang that drunken lass. Never once had he agonized before probable litigation, damage to the brain, unwieldy prophylactics. All these things Basil would do in a flash, especially if the man was blocking his yen, or the drug could bring him up or down, or the lass was there for the taking. Because Basil too had adopted The Cry of Twentieth-Century Solipsism, come straight from the mouth of his sometime-significant other. Hang the cost! he’d shout, and leap into the fray. Never once, in truth, had Basil considered even the notion of consequences, not, at least, insofar as that thinking concerned the philosophies of action and reaction, how in his moments of resolution he, Basil, functioned merely as a catalyst for the further realization of as-yet suppressed events.
And so he was trapped in this limbo of grey. He could stay where he was, he thought, and maybe, though more probably, die — a not unattractive notion on the chance we buddies viewed his death as martyrdom — or chase after Super, or return to the cabin to plan new modes of breaking away. But the deeper his reflection, the greater his fear. He couldn’t free his feet, much less reach them to touch. He’d grown too stiff, for that matter, even to touch his knees. That was when the panic engulfed him, he said, that was when he fell. So brightly excruciating was his pain that at first he thought it rapture, though it wasn’t, of course, or anything distantly like it. Pain pure and simple had struck him, such terribly horrifically appalling pain that the cry he let out could as easily have been heard as rhapsody than ecumenical howl. He pulled his dogs clear of both boots and mud and curled up like a question mark in tears, wanting nothing then but oblivion, or some place instead with quiet and warmth, and a beautiful girl, and booze…
BOOZE. BOURBON TEA. GIRLS…
The girls had gone to make bourbon tea, and Basil had left with Super. The door swung open, the door clunked shut. All lay in silence, they were gone.
But then I heard voices, and then a frisky tune, both jovial and odd, bopping to lyrics odder still.
When my baby makes love to me, the woman sang, it’s murder.
Dinky lay on the bed, mumbling against this scene, which by now had become a cinema of useless torture. Nor could I shake free of his mantra. Like evil vines, it had grown purchase in my head: Dinky’s sick, he must die — Lard, have mercy on us!
The man didn’t even seem real anymore. Or maybe he was realer than I could take. I held his hand. I stroked his head. His face felt clammy and hot. Above us, the clown looked content as a louse on a kid, staring with that sinister smile, its carnation, withered and doomed, the fucking thing. To hear the timpani of his heart I lay my head on Dinky’s chest, but in my ears sang scratching claws. If in that moment a single word could’ve peeled away all the pretense and falsity behind which our lives had till then squirmed, I would’ve said that word, and said that word, and said that word again.
When my baby makes love to me, it’s murder.
The night itself had become a lamentation, the dawn, trudging our way, its unshed tear. I wanted so badly to make up for all I’d done and been. But first I had to make myself, whoever that was, happy, whole, something. How I was to accomplish that, though, redeem myself, when that redemption hinged on so many needs, some impossible giving away of self, only doom could say. When my life amounted to a spoil of fits and starts? When I myself was a fake, if that, endlessly tangled in my web of fear?
I dropped into a chair and let it fade…
Down a slope of brush I tumbled, into a wasted canyon. A host of women rose from the banks of some dead river, their hair, like queens’, in chignons pierced by sticks. They had elongated waists and statuary thighs, and their faces were veiled as in some ritualized state of mourning. Bangles and bands and bracelets of steel adorned their arms and wrists. I’d never seen something at once so beautiful and inert, postures, it seemed, intended as much to seduce as repel. I was negotiated through these idols like some apathetic hero, never touching them or land. I didn’t speak to them, either, nor did I hear them speak. They were cold, these women, queer, and yet somehow I knew they’d gathered to keep me safe. And then a mouth opened up, the canyon was ending, and I hovered at the breach while a woman’s voice sounded in my ear, just a word: Keys… I was vomited toward a lifeless plain. Among the rubble of some great alluvial fan I lay until with horror I saw that what had looked from above to be a knoll of rock and wood was in truth a mound of bones. I began to laugh. And when my laughter was exhausted, I fell into a swoon…