«So there were still seven or eight hours left to enjoy. We listened to music, we laughed 'til our throats were raw, we made cookies for later, we pointed out pretty hallucinations to each other.
I remember looking at a book about wildflowers, illustrated with soft dreamy watercolors. I turned to a painting of a passionflower and it was a mandala, leading me deeper and deeper into some unvisited place of the mind. I saw into that painting a thousand miles. I can't explain to you what I learned but it made me better, more complete, happier.
«Years later I walked through a whole field full of passionflowers and none of them, for all their dewy pristine clarity, could compare with the one I saw that night.»
The old man's face was a skull, skin drum-tight over the bone. He wasn't getting much breath.
«You can tell me more later,» I said, though in truth I didn't want him to stop. I wanted the rest of his memory, second-hand though it was.
«Won't be any later, John; I have to hurry. At dawn we were coming down fast and there's this unpleasant thing about acid, a melancholy that comes with the physical exhaustion. The best thing you can do is get out and do something involving, something that forces you to maintain, so we decided to walk up to the Safeway on Colfax and get some breakfast stuff.
«It started to snow when we were halfway there and we were still a little strange. Walking through those thin drifting flakes, we met an old woman, out walking her old pug dog. Their faces seemed identical-crinkly and yellow-charming little antiques. Infinitely charming. Oh God....»
He stopped. His face glowed with light that didn't come from the hut's one bulb, and his chest didn't move for a long moment.
I stood over him. He saw me and the light went out, just like that, and he began to shout. «Sure, there were freezers full of bodies and worse, and maybe stopping those things was more important than the new worlds some of us got to explore. Maybe. But you'll never make me believe it! And look at us, Jesus, look at us....»
The old man was breathing like a faltering engine, shuddering, wheezing, cheeks sucking in, mouth full of blood. His eyes were stretched wide, as if to see everything, or maybe he was just fighting against the moment when his eyelids would sag no matter how much he wanted them to stay open.
«You should rest,» I said.
He quieted, until each breath was like a sigh. «Yes,» he finally said. «I'll rest.»
He had lost all interest in me. His eyes shut. He didn't die right away, but I don't think he was ever really conscious again.
Now I remember my own moment, though it can't compare with his.
I was eighteen and no wiser than any other person of that age. I went to a party off-campus and drank too much beer, until I reached that wrapped-in-gauze stage of drunkenness. A young girl took my arm and led me to one of the back bedrooms.
I thought I had forgotten all this. I now remember it perfectly, a memory far clearer than anything that happened yesterday, or the day before, or on any of the endless days since I came to the camp.
She was beautiful, I remember. She had long black hair and her breasts were soft and white inside the loose neckline of her blouse. She held my hand to her breasts; I trembled with the pleasure of that contact.
When I pawed at the zipper of her jeans, she laughed and pushed me away. «Wait,» she said, and produced a crumpled home-rolled cigarette. She lit it, eyes shining, and drew the smoke deep.
Her mouth was wide and red, one of those mouths that always look wet and always taste sweet. She said, «Take my breath,» and put her lips to mine. I knew what she was doing but I didn't say no.
The next day I was terribly frightened, though not because of the pot-I'd been too drunk to feel anything from the drug-but because I couldn't remember if we'd used a condom. When I tested negative at my next checkup, I gave thanks and forgot.
I forgot for more than twenty years. I did good work and raised a family. I never again used an illegal drug.
Once I asked Rob Owen how he'd avoided arrest for so long, since he admitted freely to a long history of drug use. That was when he was still a strong old man, who looked like he might outlive all the younger inmates. He'd smiled, slapped me on the shoulder. «Why, John, I was just like you, in the end. I married again, started a business-we had children, two boys and a girl. I turned into Mr. Clean. I just had too much to lose, too many hostages to fortune. Hell, I haven't smoked a joint in twenty-some years.»
We needed scapegoats, we really did. The country was sliding into ruin. The government was the largest employer and a large percentage of those jobs belonged to Good Warriors, who were no longer needed.
Once again technology came through for Stewart, who had a clear track to the White House if he could come up with one more good crusade.
A Good War thinktank discovered that the brain's receptor sites never forget, that their soft hooks are forever scarred by the not-quite-right shape of illicit molecules. They devised a simple test.
It became possible to tell if a person had ever used an illegal substance.
Stewart volunteered his staff for testing. Most of us came up dirty and Stewart converted that shock into the Unstable Persons Relocation Act.
And here we are.
In the morning the mirror-suited guards came to remove the body. They put it in a tight gray zipperbag, so that it looked like a pupating larva.
I remembered a thing he'd told me, not long after I arrived at the camp. «We were butterflies, once,» he'd said, in a voice full of sad wonder. «But somehow-I don't understand it-we changed back into worms.»
The End
Copyright 1990 by Mercury Press, Inc