Heather's breath was hot in his ear, her voice hissed in her teeth. She buried her hand in his hair, jerked his head up.
"Watch!" she whispered. "Learn!"
The fat man sitting cross-legged under the ruby lamp was nude. His voice reached out like a long stick.
"Kat is the light and the way," he chanted. "I, Tuva, am the provider of kat."
"You, Tuva, O Father, are the provider of kat," 30 voices sang.
This mad litany would go on, Heather had told Jerry Reuter, for at least half an hour, longer if the Tuva willed it. Then, she said, he would be initiated and the wonders of kat revealed to him.
"Pot's for children," she had said. "Acid is for squareheads. Kat takes you to the real world."
"The way of kat," the Tuva rumbled, "is the only way." Paired, cross-legged on their double cushions, bare as bones, the congregation gave it back to him.
"The leaf is life, there is no other."
"Life is the leaf, there is no other."
On either side of the Tuva's dais, a ceramic cylinder held a bouquet of whips: short stiff riding crops, thin black dog whips, sole-leather paddles, cats, thongs, black, white, long, short. Brackish incense smoke drifted under the ceiling. White drapes squared the room and behind them somewhere was a door, Reuter knew, but his hands were tied, the leash looped around Heather Thompson's wrist. He remembered his first step toward this room. He had said to Heather, "I don't go to church, but I'm a practicing Christian."
"How can a grown man say anything so silly?" she'd said. "Are you some kind of moron?"
"Are you going to marry a moron?" he'd said, laughing.
No, she'd said, she was not. No moron, no squarehead, nobody hopelessly unenlightened.
"How can you be a practicing anything if you don't practice it?" she'd said. "Besides, Jesus Christ wasn't a Christian, he was a Tuvan, everybody knows that! Christ was the first Tuvan!"
Thus, willy-nilly, Jerry Reuter had come to Tuva the Provider and to kat, the forever-freeing African leaf.
"A kat trip," Heather had said, "is a twenty-four-hour trip. Twelve hours to go, twelve to come back. Then, we'll know. We'll know if you're worthy. We'll know if you can be received into Tuva."
Silence. The litany had ended: "Kat, O and O and O kat!"
"You understand, Jerry, dear," Heather had said, "that the flesh must first be put down, if the spirit is to rise. And I have to beat you, because I'm your guide and sponsor."
Trussed on his knees like a roasting fowl, he marveled at the flailing enthusiasm with which she swung the thong. He mumbled into his mouth, as the Tuva fed him the rough fagots of kat. He chewed, in desperation, while Heather, chewing, whistled the leather to him; and in the fullness of short time, all became one in the oneness of kat, he was in a lavender-mottled tunnel, deafened with the mad crump-crunch in front, the ziss-thunk-scream behind; but at the very white-hot monocular end of it, rounded on the lens, he could see, clear as egg white, Guaranty Trust of Boston and, nestled inside, the little bright toy in the Cracker Jack box, Heather's $20,000,000, give or take a couple of hundred thousand.
"Forgive me, Father," he whispered through the stale leaves crumbling in his mouth, "for I know only too goddamned well what I do. I have sinned, I am sinning, I shall sin. Forgive me, Father."
