Kirsten, during this period following Jeff's death, showed progressive symptoms of a deteriorating physical condition which, finally, the doctors diagnosed correctly as peritonitis, from which you can die. The bishop paid all her medical expenses, which came to a staggering sum; for ten days she languished in the intensive care unit of one of the best hospitals in San Francisco, complaining bitterly that no one visited her or gave a good goddamn. Tim, who flew all around the United States lecturing, saw her as often as he could, but it was not nearly often enough to suit her. I came over to the city to see her as frequently as possible. With me, as with Tim, it was (in her opinion) far too inadequate a response to her illness. Most of the time I spent with her amounted to a one-way diatribe in which she complained about him and about all else in life. She had aged.
It strikes me as semi-meaningless to say, "You are only as old as you feel" because, in point of fact, age and illness are going to win out, and this stupid statement only resonates with people in good health who have not undergone the sort of traumas that Kirsten Lundborg had. Her son Bill had disclosed an infinite capacity to be crazy and for this Kirsten felt responsible; she knew, too, that a major factor in Jeff's suicide had been her relationship with his father. That made her bitterly severe toward me, as if guilt-her guilt-goaded her into chronically abusing me, the chief victim of Jeff's death.
We really did not have much of a friendship left, she and I. Nevertheless, I visited her in the hospital, and I always dressed up so that I looked great, and I always brought her something she could not eat, if it was food, or could not wear or use.
"They won't let me smoke," she said to me one time, by way of a greeting.
"Of course not," I said. "You'll set your bed on fire again. Like you did that time." She had almost suffocated herself, a few weeks before going into the hospital. Kirsten said, "Get me some yarn."
"'Yam,'" I said.
"I'm going to knit a sweater. For the bishop." Her tone withered the word; Kirsten managed to convey through words a kind of antagonism one rarely encountered. "The bishop," she said, "needs a sweater."
Her animosity centered on the fact that Tim had proved able to handle his affairs quite well in her absence; at the moment, he was all the way up in Canada somewhere, delivering a speech. It had been Kirsten's contention for some time that Tim could not survive a week without her. Her confinement in the hospital had proven her wrong.
"Why don't Mexicans want their children to marry blacks?" Kirsten said.
"Because their kids would be too lazy to steal," I said. "When does a black man become a nigger?"
"When he leaves the room." I seated myself in a plastic chair facing her bed. "What's the safest time to drive your car?" I said.
Kirsten gave me a hostile glance.
"You'll be out of here soon," I said, to help her cheer up.
"I'll never be out of here. The bishop is probably-never mind. Grabbing ass in Montreal. Or wherever he is. You know, he had me in bed the second time we met. And the first time was at a restaurant in Berkeley."
"I was there."
"So he couldn't do it the first time. If he could have, he would have. Doesn't that surprise you about a bishop? There are a few things I could tell you ... but I won't." She ceased speaking, then, and glowered.
"Good," I said.
"Good what? That I'm not going to tell you?"
"If you start telling me," I said, "I will get up and leave. My therapist told me to set clear limits with you."
"Oh, that's right; you're another of them. Who's in therapy.
You and my son. You two ought to get together. You could make clay snakes in occupational therapy."
"I am leaving," I said; I stood up.
"Oh Christ," Kirsten said irritably. "Sit down."
I said, "What became of the Swedish mongoloid cretin who escaped from the asylum in Stockholm?"
"I don't know."
"They found him teaching school in Norway." Laughing, Kirsten said, "Go fuck yourself."
"I don't have to. I'm doing fine."
"Probably so." She nodded. "I wish I was back in London.
You've never been to London."
"There wasn't enough money," I said. "In the Bishop's Discretionary Fund. For Jeff and me."
"Oh, that's right; I used it all up."
"Most of it."
Kirsten said, "I got to go nowhere. While Tim hung around those old faggot translators. Did he tell you that Jesus is a fake? Amazing. Here we find out two thousand years later that somebody else entirely made up all those Logia and all those
'I am' statements. I never saw Tim so downcast; he just sat and stared at the floor, in our flat, day after day."
To that I said nothing.
"Do you think it matters?" Kirsten said. "That Jesus was a fake?"
"Not to me it doesn't," I said.
"They haven't really published the important part. About the mushroom. They're keeping that secret for as long as they can. However-"What mushroom?"
"The anokhi. "
I said, incredulous, "The anokhi is a mushroom?"
"It's a mushroom. It was a mushroom back then. They grew it in caves, the Zadokites."
"Jesus Christ," I said.
"They made mushroom bread out of it. They made a broth from it and drank the broth; ate the bread, drank the broth. That's where the two species of the Host come from, the body and the blood. Apparently the anokhi mushroom was toxic but the Zadokites found a way to detoxify it, at least somewhat, enough so it didn't kill them. It made them hallucinate."
I started laughing. "Then they were a-"
"Yes, they turned on." Kirsten, too, now laughed, in spite of herself. "And Tim has to get up every Sunday at Grace and give Communion knowing that, knowing they were simply getting off on a psychedelic trip, like the kids in the Haight-Ashbury. I thought it was going to kill him when he found out."
"So then Jesus was in effect a dope dealer," I said.
She nodded. "The Twelve, the disciples, were-this is the theory-smuggling the anokhi into Jerusalem and they got caught. This just confirms what John Allegro figured out ... if you happened to see his book. He's one of the greatest scholars vis-a-vis Near Eastern languages ... he was the official translator of the Qumran scrolls."
"I didn't see his book," I said, "but I know who he is. Jeff used to talk about him."
"Allegro figured out that the early Christians were a secret mushroom cult; he deduced it from internal evidence in the New Testament. And he found a fresco or wall-painting ... anyhow, a picture of early Christians with a huge amania muscaria mushroom-"
"Amanita muscaria," I corrected. "It's the red one. They are terribly toxic. So the early Christians found a way to detoxify it, then."
"That's Allegro's contention. And they saw cartoons." She began to giggle.
"Is there actually an anokhi mushroom?" I said. I knew something about mushrooms; before I married Jeff, I had gone with an amateur mycologist.
"Well, there probably was, but nobody today knows what it would be. So far, in the Zadokite Documents, there's no description. No way to tell which one it was or if it still exists."
I said, "Maybe it did more than cause hallucinations."
"Like what?"
A nurse came over to me, at that point. "You'll have to leave, now."
"Okay." I rose, gathered up my coat and purse.
Kirsten said, "Bend over." She waved me toward her; in a whisper directly into my ear she said, "Orgies."
After kissing her good-bye, I left the hospital.
When I arrived back in Berkeley and had made my way by bus to the little old farmhouse that Jeff and I had been living in, I saw, as I walked up the path, a young man crouched over in the corner of the porch; I halted warily, wondering who he was.