The Eden Express

I Think the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Jr., and war and assorted other goodies had so badly blown everybody's mind that sending the children naked into the woods to build a new society seemed worth a try. In 1970, like a lot of people our age, some friends and I started a commune. Ours was in the wilds of British Columbia, 12 miles by boat from Powell River, the nearest town.

I doubt that the commune drove me nuts, but a lot of people seem to like to look at it that way. I'm pretty sure I would have cracked sooner and more permanently had I tried to stick it out working in Boston. It was very "in" to not like cities back then, but my reaction had advanced well beyond distaste. The noise, bright lights, hustling, bustling people marginally aware of their own helpless suffering, oblivious to that of others, and a few similar goodies were quite literally shaking me apart. I was sick to my stomach a lot. I couldn't sleep much. I spent more and more time crying. Taking off for B.C. brought a terrific sense of relief. For the first time in years, I actually felt some hope and peace of mind.

Virginia. When we started the commune, Virginia and I had been lovers for almost two years. There was something about us that fit. Tumblers moved and we locked together. There were some dreadfully unhappy times, but we both needed other things more than happiness. It was those other things that we were all about.

Virginia, Virginia, Virginia, how did my life get so mixed up with yours?

You were very different from other women I had been attracted to. Had I met you earlier, I would have thought you were almost ugly--nose much too big and poorly defined, narrow, low forehead, cheekbones high and spread-- but you carried it all with such grace and dignity. Most women seemed to be either attractive or unattractive and that was that. I have never before or since met anyone who was as beautiful to me when you were beautiful or as ugly when you were ugly. Your awesome range transfixed me, and always those legs, which were too perfect to be quite human.

I wish I could remember more about what role Vincent played in bringing us together. Vincent had known Virginia for quite a while. He hinted that at one time there had been more between them than friendship but that it had ended disastrously.

Jack and Kathy signed on shortly after Simon got to the commune. We were all Swarthmore class of '69. Simon helped pay for the land. Jack and Kathy had both lived in the same house I had my last two years at Swarthmore, but I still can't say I knew them very well. They were good friends of Simon's. Kathy had a Wisconsin-farm-girl wholesomeness that years of heroin addiction wouldn't have put much of a dent in. Jack was into Zen and mountain climbing but in a very nonflaky way. If there was anyone at the farm with his feet firmly on the ground, it was Jack. He had the most tangible reason for being there. Jack was our official draft dodger.

•

Rugs. Most of the people at the farm were well-seasoned trippers. People were always a little surprised to find out that I wasn't. My first experience, about a year before starting the commune, had been a disaster. It was pure "bad-trip-proof" mescaline, with people I knew well and trusted, and in an idyllic and familiar setting. I was shaking, I was crying. I was scared. Not the whole time, but for quite a bit of it. A few days later, after many cold showers and lots of staying in bed, it started slowing down and then went away.

I was different from other people. That was the meat of it. It wasn't just the psychedelia that hit me differently. Enough speed to keep most people up one night spaced me out for three. Amyl nitrite was a fine two-minute high that blasted me for hours. I couldn't even do grass right. Everyone else would get drowsy and mellow, while I'd become hyped. Grass was still pleasant for me, so I smoked my share, but I couldn't help worrying about what the hell made drugs so different for me.

And then it happened. Just after Christmas, a year and a half after my mescaline disaster, I had a "normal" acid trip. I went up, got high and came down just like my fellow trippers, Virge and a couple from another commune. The farm or simply the passage of time had cured whatever it was that made me so different from my friends.

A few weeks after my normal acid trip, Vincent paid us one of his several visits. His life seemed to have become an unending route among three communes, ours, one in California and one in Vermont. The people at each place assumed that his real home was at one of the others.

The people in California had been good friends of Virginia's at Swarthmore. She and I had been talking about taking off from the farm for a bit. It was too wet and cold to do much outside and not much needed doing inside. There were some heavier things involved as well. She thought she was getting too ego-involved with the farm and wanted to see how things would go without her. I felt the same but wasn't really up for a trip to California. One way or another, it was decided that Virge would catch a ride with Vincent and I'd stay at the farm.

At that point, we were better than halfway through our first winter and things had gone far better than any of us had dared hope. We had had no major disasters and were well stocked with food and firewood. Our new roof was holding up beautifully under what the locals were calling the worst winter in years. Life in the wilderness was turning out to be pretty cushy and could only get better and better. I almost wished it had been harder. I had expected to bust my ass for a good ten years or more to feel that good, and there I was in Eden before I knew what hit me.

About a week after Virginia left, the winter drear lifted and we got some weather appropriate to my sense of glee. The temperature jumped about 20 degrees. The cloud cover we had resigned ourselves to till spring was replaced by unbroken blue. The snow was melting and a few patches of grass could be seen poking through. A hint of spring was in the air. I was ecstatic, but Simon, Kathy and Jack seemed strangely stuck in some winter rut. They just dragged around business-as-usual-like. On the second day of our January thaw, just to make sure they didn't miss it altogether, I suggested we all drop a little mescaline. It didn't change my mood much, but it did wonders for them.

After some sun-bathing on the roof, fun and games with goats and countless other diversions, we were all together, looking at the fields, the mountains, the stream running through the orchard.

"This is Eden," I said. Nobody disagreed.

No doubt about it, looking around at the farm, at the people, at everything. It had finally gone somewhere. Kathy and Simon and I were crying and laughing for joy. It had really happened. Everything confirmed it. We were dumfounded with joy. A day later, my friends and the weather returned to normal. For me, things just got better and better.

•

The Face. And then one night, as I was trying to get to sleep, marveling at the fullness of every moment of the day, I started listening to and feeling my heartbeat. Suddenly, I became terribly frightened that it would stop.

And from out of nowhere came an incredibly wrinkled, iridescent face. Starting as a small point infinitely distant, it rushed forward, becoming infinitely huge. When I first saw the face coming toward me, I thought, Oh, goody. What I had in mind was a nice reasonable conversation. My enthusiasm was short-lived. He, she or whatever didn't seem much interested in the sort of conversation I had in mind. It also seemed not to like me much. But the worst of it was that it didn't stop coming. It had no respect for my personal space, no inclination to maintain a conversational distance. When I could easily make out all its features, when it and I were more or less on the same scale, when I thought there was maybe a foot or two between us, it was actually hundreds of miles away, and it kept coming and coming till I was lost somewhere in some pore in its nose and it still kept coming. I was enveloped, dwarfed.

"So you really want to go on a trip, do you? OK, punk, now you're really going to fly." Or words to that effect. Not words, exactly, more like thunder.

I lay rigid all night, listening to the sound of the stream, figuring that somehow, by being aware of sounds and rhythms outside myself, I could keep my own bodily rhythms going. Losing consciousness of something outside myself meant that I would die. I realized that this meant I could never sleep again.

The sun came up as I was lying quietly, listening to the stream. Everything seemed fine. Jack had told me that according to the Zen Buddhists, after enlightenment you go back to doing whatever it was you did before--selling shoes, farming, whatever. It seemed like pretty good advice, so I tried to keep doing all the things I had always done around the place. But it became increasingly difficult and finally impossible to keep functioning.

Small tasks became incredibly intricate and complex. It began with pruning the fruit trees. One saw cut would take forever. I was completely absorbed in the sawdust floating gently to the ground, the feel of the saw in my hand, the incredible patterns in the bark, the muscles in my arm pulling back and then pushing forward. I began to notice that the trees were ever so slightly luminescent, shining with a soft inner light that played around the (continued on page 218)Eden Express(continued from page 120) branches. I'd get all hung up on how perfectly beautiful one muscle was, exactly what it did and getting it to do it just right. But then all the others would go off on their own little trips. I nicked my ankle with the chain saw. I was losing my coordination as well as my concentration.

Sometime in the next few days I gave up food.

I remember trying to eat some bread. It had a sharply bitter taste. It stuck to the top of my mouth, almost suffocating me, sticking to my teeth and gums, making my whole mouth burn and itch. It made awful squishy sounds. I had to spit it out.

There were times when I was scared, shaking, convulsing in excruciating pain and bottomless despair. Most people assume it is very painful for me to remember being crazy. It's not. The fact is that memories of being crazy give me an almost sensuous glee. Part of the pleasure I derive from them comes from how much I appreciate being sane now; but most of what's so much fun is that when I was crazy, everything I did, felt and said had an awesome grace, symmetry and perfection to it. My appreciation of that hasn't vanished with the insanity itself.

The Letter From Virge. On the back of the envelope in a barely legible scrawl was, "This is a terrifyingly incomplete letter." I should have sent it back unopened and told her to send me a complete one.

"Dearest darling Mark. Some of this letter is for you and some is for everyone. You decide what's what." Fat chance of that. For the past few days, I hadn't been able to tell the difference between myself and the trees, let alone the people. There was some description of the land and the farm in California. And then some stuff about going off pills and getting a new I.U.D. coil and feeling much better. Then there was the part about having slept with Vincent. And being sorry about hurting me and crying and shaking in Vincent's arms. It came right after the part about the coil. Well, I guess you get a new machine, you want to try it out right away.

Was I hurt? I really had to think about it. I found the idea of giving a shit about who puts whose thing in whose thing absurd and degrading.

She said she wanted to come shake and cry in my arms. Was this maybe some new position or something Vincent had taught her?

There was no way I could write back to her. All I could do was sit and wait for her return. Wait for her to complete the letter. OK. One more time, Virge, I'll play. Let's see the new Virge. I hope you're ready for the new Mark. Let it all hang out. This train is bound for glory. The brakeman has resigned.

Fear and pain would be everything and then nothing. My happiness and sadness were all out of proportion to anything that was happening. Having their feelings make sense is how people get their kicks. I'd come to myself from time to time and realize that I was walking, half stumbling, through the woods. I'd wonder where the hell I was going, what I was doing. I'd take handfuls of snow and press them to my face, trying desperately to get some sort of hold on myself.

By the time Simon took me, Jack and Kathy to town, where we kept a car, ten days after our mescaline trip, I hadn't eaten or slept for at least four days. Everything was glowing with such an eerie light and trembling so that doing even the simplest thing was incredibly difficult. One foot in front of the other, step two follows step one, I can do it.

Twelve miles from anywhere by boat, and such a laughable boat on such an unlaughable lake: over 30 miles long, one of the world's deepest, over 1500 feet in places. Everything was zipping past us at incredible speed. There was still some light and the sky and the water, the sounds, the colors, everything was plastic and water, all flowing together and too real or unreal. ... "I want to go back. Simon. Let's turn around," I screamed, but my voice came out all funny. It was too fast or I had said it backward or something. I couldn't make my voice sound right. Simon looked at me helplessly and shrugged his shoulders.

"We can't go back now, Mark."

"Help, pleh, pleh!" What's happened? Why can't we go back? What have I wandered into? What have I dragged Simon and God knows who else into?

And the mocking hateful contempt of the face earlier: "Now you're really going on a trip."

"Trip, pirt, help, pleh," as the sardonic wind and its accomplice, the Day-Glo water, rushed by in an eerie chuckle.

Town. We went to The Works to get a little something to eat. I sat there sipping coffee, feeling warmer and safer than I had in quite a while, still a little shaky but pretty sure everything was going to be all right, and then something new happened.

I started falling very deeply in love with the waitress and everyone else in the place. It seemed that they, in turn, were just as deeply in love with me. What would Virge think about all this? I had somehow fallen in love with Simon, Jack, Kathy, the waitress and assorted passers-by more powerfully and completely than I ever had with her.

Falling in love with everyone I see. Oh, Christ, what will those jokers from the Pentagon come up with next, the fun-loving boys in biological-chemical warfare? I understand that good old American technology has developed a scanner that can discriminate on the basis of race as to whom it kills. The ideal thing would be something that automatically rewarded good and punished evil. Something like what we had hoped acid was.

Maybe the Germans are putting something in the VWs they send over here. Maybe the Japanese are doing something with transistors. Sometimes I think it's timed to go off someday, sometimes I think it's going off all the time.

Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.

Insanity is the price of eternal vigilance.

As soon as I started driving. I felt much better. Driving along deserted Highway 101 at night. On to the Prior Road Commune to crash. I had put it off as long as I could, but everything was closed and Simon was very tired.

A Half Dream. I am in heaven, where the senselessness of pain is clear. The feeling of peace, the fullness, the slight giddiness just below my chest, the magic place of no shadows. Then an incredible pain in my foot, a small bump on the sole, between my toes, like a plantar wart. Picking at it. Little by little, I separate it from the surrounding skin. It's a plug about a quarter inch across. I pull at it. Pain. It seems to have some sort of roots reaching up into my foot. I've pulled about six inches of foreign growth out of my foot and there's no end in sight. A feeling of relief, making my foot all warm and tingly; the more I pull out, the higher the warmth and relief spread. After each six inches or so, I rest, basking in the warmth and relief, letting each part of my body feel its new freedom, past my knee, up to my thigh. There seems to be a particularly tight concentration around my groin that makes it feel all the better when I pull it out. Down my left leg, until my left toes turn warm and free, and up my torso, bringing peace and warmth to my belly and my lower back. At my solar plexus, the resistance increases again. I feel the roots pulling on my heart and stop, but only for a moment. I can feel the tentacles being pulled through my whole body: Out it comes, more and more. I am ecstatic as the peace passes up my throat, over my mouth and through my nose to the top of my head. Ecstasy.

That's what all the rushes of fear and pain were. Just getting free of the shit. Nothing, but nothing, is going to turn me around. Pain? Fear? Fuck 'em; this shit has got to go. I've seen heaven and nothing's gonna turn me around. What is it that wants to turn me around and make me crawl back into believing all the sham about pain's being unavoidable, utopia impossible? I'm a freight train, baby, don't give me no sidetrack. I want your main line, baby. Climb aboard the Eden Express. This train, this train is comin' through. This Train is Bound for Glory.

So we kept moving toward Vancouver. I think the basic idea in both of our minds was still to find Virginia and hope that that would somehow straighten everything out. I also thought that I had become a hydrogen bomb and that someone in Vancouver could defuse me.

On the way to the ferry: "Mark, you know there's been an earthquake in California?"

"Yes, I know that, Simon." That Virginia had been killed in it was obvious.

We got to the ferry landing in plenty of time. I spent most of the ride clutching my knees to my chest, trying to keep my body from turning into light. I'd feel unbearably hot and sweaty and Simon would say he felt cold. Ten minutes later, the situation would be reversed. After fighting off the most powerful rush yet and just lying back, completely exhausted, trying to get my breath, I glanced over at Simon. He was looking at me with utter bewilderment.

"You know, Mark, this is certainly turning into a strange trip."

"You ought to see it from here, Simon. You ought to see it from here."

"You know, Mark, this whole thing is really giving me a new outlook on mental illness."

"Yes, I expect it would." If Simon wanted to think that that was the explanation for what was going on, it was fine with me.

"It's giving me a whole new respect."

"It's been a very well-kept secret. No one talks about it at all. It makes sex and drugs look like apple pie."

The Voices. By this time, they had gotten very clear. At first I'd had to strain to hear or understand them. I broke the code and somehow was able to internalize it to the point where it was just like hearing words. Once you hear the voices, you realize they've always been there. It's just a matter of being tuned to them.

The blanks were a lot like the voices: It's hard to say exactly when they started. At first there'd be only an instant or two that I couldn't account for. Later I'd be missing whole days. I'd feel myself going away, and then I'd feel myself coming back. I had no way to gauge how much time passed during the blanks.

I didn't exactly lose contact with objective reality. My locus was just a bit bizarre. I remembered license numbers of cars we were following going into Vancouver. We paid $3.57 for gas. The air machine made 18 dings while we were there.

We arrived in Vancouver in the late afternoon. At that 'point, I knew very clearly that the world was ending and that it was my fault. I was sure that the next stop was hell and even more sure that I deserved it.

The next stop was really the Stevens Street apartment in Vancouver, where I had said goodbye to Virginia only two weeks before, though it seemed like lifetimes.

"You know you're in hell, don't you?" The voices said that a lot.

"All I know is that I don't like it much."

"You know Virginia's dead. You know your father's dead. You know the world, is ending. You know you're dead. You know you've killed a lot of people. You know you're responsible for the California earthquake, the death of the planet. You know you have a mission. You know you're the Messiah."

"I know I feel that way. But I'll be damned if I'll take my word for it. People think a lot of screwy things."

Astral Sex. For one reason or another, sex as I had known it was no longer possible, I had some cosmic clap that had to be quarantined. So, for compensation, severance pay or whatever, I got astral sex. I wondered how I had ever worked up so much enthusiasm about regular sex.

I was electric with sexuality. Breathing gave me orgasm upon orgasm. I can't begin to describe what dancing with angels was like.

I had earthly sexuality, too, but like the rest of my earthly life, it had become twisted, disjointed and horrifying. My penis would seem monstrously huge. I'd get hard-ons that wouldn't go away. I'd try to masturbate to defuse my earthly sexuality but couldn't come. I feared that something was trying to turn me into a homosexual. It's possible that those feelings represented the break-through of represented homosexuality, but I have my doubts. Food was horrible to me, too, but I have yet to hear anyone say that schizophrenia is a repressed fear of food.

Down from 155 to about 125 pounds, deaf, dumb and blind, convulsing in my own puke, shit and piss. If something wanted me to suffer, how much more could it want?

At some point, I gave up clothing. It was just too sticky and confining, almost like drowning. Somewhere in there, I threw a huge rock through the living-room picture window. Gradually, it became clear even to Simon that they might have to put me into a hospital, if only to save their own sanity.

Twelve days without food or sleep, 12 very active days, hadn't done wonders for my physique. As we found out later, death by starvation wasn't a farfetched possibility. Stop eating, make it a 24-hour, no-time-outs day, and you've got one hell of a quick-weight-loss program. According to doctors at the hospital, another week, maybe less, would have done the trick. My sense of taste was as badly screwed up as all my other senses, which had a lot to do with my giving up food in the first place and is also why so many schizies think they're being poisoned. I don't care how much you trust the people around you, you trust your own senses more.

•

"Good night, sweet prince, whoever you were or thought you were. Please let me go, Mark." Dad.

Of all the awful news I was dealing with--Virge's death in the earthquake, impending nuclear holocaust--my father's suicide hit me hardest. From as early as I was old enough to worry about such things, I had worried about his either drinking himself to death or blowing his brains out. He had hinted at it fairly broadly from time to time. Sometimes I thought the only thing holding him back was fear of how it would affect me. Sons of suicides find life lacking--Rosewater.

Being still able to talk with him took some of the sting away. He actually seemed pretty cheerful. Maybe he had somehow driven me nuts just so he could say goodbye and explain a lot of things he hadn't been able to before.

"I'm sorry about this, Mark, but think how hard it would be for me to resist this sort of thing. I just wanted to dance with you once before I left." We had some substantive talks, mostly about World War Two, for some reason, but most of it was dancing and giggling. It was lots of fun.

My father and others had wanted to tell me, but things moved too fast. There was no way to get word to me through normal channels, but somehow I had caught on.

"I thought you guys would never get here." Simon and my father, or damn convincing hallucinations, were holding me up and talking about getting me the hell out of that apartment.

I'd give almost anything for a tape of my ride to Hollywood Hospital near Vancouver. My father had a lot on his mind, but still, not to have brought long a recorder verges on criminal neglect. It was bop talk. Like a Fifties d.j. Words a mile a minute. I wasn't thinking, it was just all there. One thing a tape of my ride to the hospital would show was how I was responding to outside events. It was a dialog. Jackhammers had some very encouraging things to say.

When my father and Simon left, me, when three guys dressed in white started walking me down that long hall, half holding me up, half holding me down, I understood. I had gone too far.

Clunk, into that little room. Cuzzzunk, a huge mother bolt ran the width of the door.

If you were terribly confused, desperately trying to get your bearings without the faintest idea of where you were or what was happening, if you finally got your mouth, and tongue to work right and finally managed to ask "Where am" I?" what would be the worst possible thing someone could tell you? I would have anagrammed almost any name into something perfectly wonderful or perfectly terrible. But Hollywood? That one didn't need much work. It didn't call on my knowledge of medieval mysticism or Russian lit. After chewing on that awhile and getting my words to work right again: "Hollywood where?"

"Fifth Avenue. New Westminster."

"Tower of London, man for all seasons." At last, a use for my liberal-art; education.

If being in Hollywood on Fifth Avenue in New Westminster isn't being caught in a time-space warp, what is?

For a while, I was convinced that the whole thing I was going through was my father's way of helping me give up cigarettes. Some lesson.

"Cigarettes, Dad?"

"Cigarettes, Mark."

"Shit, Pa, who would have guessed?"

"Well, it took you quite a while, Mark." But then, when I said I wouldn't smoke anymore and they still wouldn let me out of my little room, I got suspicious that cigarettes weren't the whole story. Little by little it sank in. It was all on the level. This was a real menu hospital with real doctors and nurses.

•

The Doc. I have a fuzzy recollection of walking up to some doctor-looking person and being totally absorbed by his gold tie clip. I suspected it was the button to end the world, so I didn't touch it. I'm pretty sure it was Dr. Dale, I don't know who else could be so taste less as to walk around a mental hospital wearing the button to end the world.

I often look on him as one of God's little jokes on me. When I was in desperate trouble, what saved me from a fate worse than death? To what do I owe my life? Was it love, affection, understanding, friends, wisdom? No, no, no. It was biochemistry and a man who looks like a poor copy of Walt Disney, drives pink Cadillacs, wears baby-blue alligator shoes and appears to have the emotional depth of a potato.

I was back to being polite, the well-tempered paranoid. It seemed to take them forever to believe that I was capable of keeping clothes on or not being combative or able to go anywhere without an orderly watching over me. The doctors are always the last to catch on. The first to realize you've gotten better and to start to treat you accordingly are the other patients. After the patients catch on, then the maintenance staff and the lower orderlies realize you're OK, and so on through the various orders of nurses until the news reaches the doctors. It works the same for relapses.

As soon as I was OK, I was bored. Most of the time, I just sat around and tried to figure out what had gone wrong. I had blown my cool. The world wasn't ending. Virginia hadn't died. My father hadn't died. I had been mistaken. OK. I realized I was wrong. I just wanted to get out of there.

My father flew up from the "real" Hollywood, where they were making a movie of Slaughterhouse-Five, and spent a day visiting and taking me out to lunch. He, like everyone else, seemed to think the whole thing was very heavy. I was feeling OK and wished everyone would just forget about it or treat it like a broken leg. Mark went bonkers. What does it mean?

I just couldn't get into thinking about it much. Maybe that was because of all the Thorazine they had pumped into me. Thorazine makes thinking a pretty unprofitable proposition. It has lots of unpleasant side effects. It makes you groggy, lowers your blood pressure, making you dizzy and faint when you stand up too quickly. If you go out in the sun, your skin gets red and hurts like hell. It makes muscles rigid and twitchy. The side effects were bad enough, but I liked even less what the drug was supposed to do. No doctor or nurse ever came out and said so in so many words, but it was an antihero drug. Dale kept saying to me, "You mustn't try to be a hero." Thorazine makes heroics impossible.

On Thorazine, you can read comic books and Reader's Digest forever. You can tolerate talking to jerks forever. Babble, babble, babble. The weather is dull, the flowers are dull, nothing's very impressive. Muzak, Bach, Beatles, Lolly and the Yum-Yums, The Rolling Stones. It doesn't make any difference.

•

Getting Out. Dr. Dale, who was in charge of me, had to go to some conference in Hawaii. In the meantime, Dr. McNice was in charge of me. Dr. McNice was a soft touch for mysticism and literature and had a bit of sympathy for hippiedom. A liberal. If there was one thing my life had taught me, it was how to manipulate liberals.

After some long, urbane chats about medieval mystics, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jung and the fallacies in Freud's essays on religion, we decided my brain was in working order.

Virginia was going to pick me up in the morning. Back to the farm, back to where life made sense. It was March seventh. Three weeks of Hollywood was plenty. If disease was a cleansing process, I was some clean.

•

After I'd been back on the farm a few days, my resolve to forget about the whole thing, never terribly strong, crumbled completely. It started as a very reasonable attempt to figure out what had happened, so that I could avoid its happening again. As I began to fit things together, it became more and more apparent to me that there was very little, if anything, delusional about my thoughts or inappropriate about my behavior. There was too much confirmation from too many sources that something momentous had happened and that I had responded at least appropriately and very possibly heroically.

Sex had never been very carefree or playful between Virginia and me. Recent events were hardly calculated to improve matters. Getting back together was tentative and gingerly. We were two very scared china dolls. Sex had less than ever to do with biological desire and was more than ever a garble of symbolic proofs and deeper needs. It was a desperately important hurdle.

There was so much to say that neither of us said anything. The first couple of nights, we just rubbed and clumsily hugged each other, pulling back every five minutes or so and looking into each other's scared, pleading eyes, trying to figure out what, if anything, was understood between us.

We finally made love. Considering what we had been through, having any kind of sex was plenty ambitious; but, at the same time, having been through all that shit somehow raised the ante. For it to have been good, it had to have been much better than before, and it wasn't. In fact, it seemed that nothing had changed.

Somehow, ten days went by and it was time for me to go into town and take my immigration physical so I could stay in Canada. Kathy, having set a record of two months straight on the farm, decided to go with us. In midafternoon, we all tromped down to the lake, list in hand, with a couple of bags of laundry, letters to be sent, library books to be returned.

On to the laundromat. While Kathy and I were folding clothes, Joe and Mary, a couple we had met, came in. They had had it with the Powell River area and were about to head for the interior. They asked us to come to dinner.

Driving out to good old Joe and Mary's, taking each hill as it comes, each curve is it comes, in tune with the car and the road. I usually found an evening with Joe and Mary just the change of pace I needed. It was a vacation from hipness. There were times when I wanted some hot tea, central heating, electric lights, a nuclear family. Innocence. I wasn't looking for a place to get the Eden Express rolling again.

"There's this guy with us who's a big fan of your father's and is dying to meet you," Joe said. "I hope that won't be too big a pain in the ass."

Greetings, greetings.

"Mark, this is David."

"You've probably heard this a million times before, but I've read everything your old man's written and really dig his stuff. I'm really a fan." I just smiled and nodded. Fan seemed like a nice enough kid.

It went so nicely. I was getting exactly the kind of Joe-and-Mary evening I had looked forward to.

In a matter of a couple of hours, may-be less, everything changed. I think most of the really heavy things happened after my first attempt to get some sleep and pretend nothing extraordinary was happening.

Kathy and I had brought our sleeping bags with us. We were supposed to crash in a small side room. I was feeling a little sick and nervous and lonely and jittery. That was how it had started with Vincent and Virginia. She had been feeling bad and lonely and had not been able to sleep. Vincent had rubbed her stomach for her, and then one thing had led to another. Kathy lying there all swaddled in that icy blue. I had always thought she was kind of pretty, but looking at her now, she was exquisitely beautiful. Kathy, my stomach feels all screwed up. Could you rub it? No, no. That was all wrong. It was what I meant, but somehow there was no way for me to say it.

Was Virginia not thinking about fucking when she asked Vincent to rub her stomach? What a luxury. I couldn't ask anyone for a glass of water without thinking about fucking. Men, women, children, dogs, goats, and on and on. Some part of me wanted to fuck just about everything.

So there I was, going nuts again and pretty sure I was going nuts again (the voices were getting clearer and more insistent; the crazy taste was in the back of my mouth; things were starting to glow and shimmer again), thinking, maybe if I could make love with someone, it would defuse this whole damn thing. But even if it worked, I'd spend the rest of my life wondering if I had cried wolf just to get laid.

I heard voices in the living room. It was Joe, Mary and Fan talking, but their voices sounded strange. Very low and wispy, like wind: "Mark, Mark, Mark." Being polite, I got up and went into the living room. Mary was wearing some priestess-type outfit. She told me to sit down in a voice too low to be hers (or anyone else's, for that matter). Her legs were spread and her crotch was glowing smoky Day-Glo orange.

Why couldn't it be her fingers or something else? Don't I have enough problems without Day-Glo crotches? I wasn't about to argue that whatever my problem was, there was a lot of sex involved. Day-Glo. crotches seemed to be rubbing it in.

"Do we have time to move to higher ground?" There was that voice that wasn't Mary's coming from Mary again.

"Higher ground is within," I said and faded out again.

"Let me go, Mark. Please let me go." It was my father again, begging me, pleading with me, trying to explain, trying again to make me hate him. Again I got the feeling that he wanted to kill himself.

"Don't you see I'm responsible for all this pain you're going through? How can you not hate me?"

"If you weren't the fifteenth joker through here in the last few hours trying to claim responsibility for the hell I'm in. I might be able to take you more seriously. A lot of what's going on certainly has your flavor to it, but Bob Dylan, believe it or not, was just through to apologize and try to make it all better. He figured the whole thing was his fault.

"The thing I'm telling them and want to tell you, too, is that it's not all that bad. I have a feeling that I'm somehow where all you big deals were afraid to go. Where you all drew the line and chickened out. That may sound grandiose, but it certainly feels like that's what's happening."

In the morning, the trees were green again. Somehow, the destruction had been reversed, the earth reprieved. There was still time.

Joe and Mary talked about some nice doctor who had taken care of something for them. Joe drove his Microbus. Then the sun came out and everything got bright, too bright. The road was shaking and everything on it started to fall apart. Joe pulled up to the hospital. The big red sign, Emergency Entrance.

"What seems to be the problem?". Good question. Here I was in the emergency ward; just what was the problem? Why hadn't someone asked me that before? It seemed so straightforward. What was the problem?

One way or another, I found myself back in the front seat of the Microbus. There was a little piece of paper. It was a prescription for pills I was supposed to take "if the going gets rough."

Back to Joe and Mary's cabin. Everybody seemed to be all right.

Fan David's was the most persistent "Far out, that's cool," etc., I have ever run into. I remember how I finally shook him up. I went into the room where he was sleeping. He started up, per usual, being enthusiastic about how far out I was. His dog was lying next to his bed. I reached over and jacked his dog off. Fan got very upset. I guess everyone has a limit.

•

A Walk with Fan. I must have been gritting my teeth or shaking or something. It was a pretty rough time just about sunset of the second day. David came up to me. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Come on, brother, don't hold it all in. Let some of that energy go. There are lots of people who could use some of it."

"No one wants this shit."

"No, you're wrong. It's just that you've got too much. Give some to me."

"You really want it?" I was incredulous. "I really don't want to put anyone through this shit."

"No, really. I could use it. Give it to me."

I wasn't sure how to go about it, but I put both of my hands on his head. "OK, you want it? Here it comes." I felt a rush of relief as something went from my hands into his head.

He stepped back; his eyes were wide. "Wow, you're not just fucking around, are you?" I just sort of nodded and shook my head all at once. That something real had happened was both frightening and comforting.

I said, "Let's go for a walk."

"Sure," he said, half in a daze, and we headed down a little two-rut dirt road that ran toward the woods behind the cabin.

"I think I'm starting to catch on," he said.

"Well, it's a funny thing. Once you start to get it, you won't be able to figure out why you never saw it before. It's really so simple."

"Has your father been here?"

"No, I don't think so. But he knows or strongly suspects it's here. For some reason, he couldn't make it or didn't want to. He sort of decided to send me instead."

It was the first rational conversation I had had in a long time. Actually, just about a day or so, but it seemed much longer. I felt relaxed and not half so lonely. Fan was catching on. There was someone to talk to. I started crying softly.

"What's wrong, Mark?"

"Nothing's wrong, really. I just sort of wish he were here. I wish I could talk to him here like this. I mean, with his body here like mine. I mean, I can talk to him like this now, but if he were here, if he brought his body along, all we'd be able to talk about would be Mickey Mantle or something neither of us really gives a shit about."

"You mean he's here now?"

"Yes. Dad, we know you're here. Why don't you bring your body along sometime?"

"Hi, Mark."

"Hi, Pop."

"Hey, Mark, did you ever think that maybe I'm writing this script?"

"Hey, Pop, did you ever think that maybe you're not?"

"I mean, Mark, did you think that maybe I'm a good enough writer to write what you're going through?"

"Frankly not, Pop. I don't think anyone could."

"Well,- Mark, you're probably right. I couldn't write what you're living, not even begin. But there were guys who were really good. It's incredible some of the things people have written."

"You mean like Tolstoy and Dostoievsky?"

"Ya, and there were some others, too."

"Well, Pop, guess what your college-educated son just happened to pick up fresh out of the nuthouse? I just happen to have a copy of The Brothers Karamazov right here in my pocket."

"Oh, shit, Mark, was that ever a mistake. But what a beautiful one. I mean, really, first thing you picked up when you go out?"

"Yup, Dad, you guessed it."

"Well, Mark, let that book fall open." I let the book open. About halfway down the right-hand page, one sentence stood out, glowing from the rest of the print: The End of Time Will Be Marked By Acts of Unfathomable Compassion. [Though that is what the author saw, the quote does not appear in The Brothers Karamazov but is an amalgam of thoughts expressed by Dostoievsky--Ed.]

"Thanks, Dad." Then I started to laugh in spite of myself, just a slight chuckle.

"What's funny, Mark?"

"Not much, Dad. I was just thinking what shit I would have gotten if I had Cat's Cradle or something instead."

"You don't have to rub it in. There's just one thing I'd like to ask you, Mark."

"Fire away, Pop."

"Well, Mark, just how, exactly, did you get here, anyway?"

"Well, Dad, that was the one thing I thought you probably knew. After all, it was something I sort of picked up from you. It's really amazingly simple. Just never turn down an invitation."

"Bye, Mark."

"Bye, Dad. See you around and thanks for dropping by."

•

"Mark, I've never read much." Joe talking.

"Well, old man," I said affectionately, putting my arm around him, and started reciting Moby Dick from memory. I had read Moby Dick only once and hadn't made any effort to memorize it. I had been going on for about five minutes before I realized what I was doing.

I remember feeling his hand on my arm. shaking me.

"But I can't let you go on. I'm afraid of what it's doing to you. Take this." He handed me one of the pills that the doctor had prescribed if things got rough.

The pill went down easily and took effect quickly. "Everyone was swell." My last breath, last whisper, and I lost consciousness.

"Mark." Joe was tapping on my shoulder.

"What is it, Pops?"

"Mark, you've had a relapse. Listen to me. We're going to have to take you back."

"Back to my little room? Back to Dr. Dale?"

"Yes, Mark. But you'll get out again, just like you did before."

"And after I get out again, will I have to keep going back and keep going back over and over again? Mary said that I had already been down as far as I could go. Why would she lie to me?"

"It's OK, Mark. It'll be all right. You'll get out again. You'll get well again."

"Promise?"

"Yes, I promise, Mark. A lot of people love you and are behind you. No matter what's wrong, we'll find a way out. When this is all over, I'll come and get you."

"And we'll go fishing and play some chess?"

"Well, I'm not much of a chess player, Mark. But, yes, I'll take you to some of my kind of country and we'll fish as much as you want. I'll take you fishing up in the Kootenays."

"Can't I come with you now? Can't you take me with you now?"

"No, Mark. I'm sorry. I can't explain it all now. But as soon as things get straightened out, I'll come get you and we'll go fishing."

"OK, Pop, I'll go back. It's not really so bad. Easter break is coming up pretty soon. I have a feeling this is going to be one hell of an Easter."

A cop on either side of me. Half holding me up, half holding me down. Virginia behind me, saying, "Walk, Mark."

"What the fuck you think I'm trying to do, bitch?" That's the last thing I remember for quite a while.

When I recovered enough to care about where I was, my first reaction was to be pissed off at the hospital. If only they had given me a few pills to take along, this whole thing could have been avoided. If anything, I was less patient than before. There wasn't much magic about pills three times a day. Why don't they just give me the fucking pills and let me the fuck out of here?

Then they seemed to loosen up a little. Dr. Dale told me what he thought was wrong with me, what could be done about it, what the pills did. What I had was schizophrenia. It was probably genetic. It was biochemical. It was controllable. It might have something to do with adrenaline metabolism. There were dietary adjustments I could make that might help. Dope wasn't such a hot idea for someone like me.

I also found out that my legal situation was quite a bit more complicated than it had been last time around. My first stay I was, technically at least, a voluntary patient. This time I had arrived in a strait jacket, accompanied by four Royal Canadian Mounties. They could lock me away for years. I decided to work on patience again.

I worked my way out of the locked wards. Even got all my own clothes back. I was in one of the best rooms. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, all hell broke loose again and I was back in that fucking little room. No visitors, no clothes, no one would even talk to me through the little hole, no nothing.

The power phenomenon--the idea that I was responsible for earthquakes, the course of history, the end of the world--had a neat, almost ceremonious ending that set it apart from other things. The voices, visions, misperceptions, irrationality, bizarre behavior all faded fuzzily, much the way they had come. Milder versions still come to visit occasionally. I'd just as soon they didn't, but as long as the powers stay away, I don't mind too much.

It was a few days before Easter. I had been in the little windowless room for what seemed like forever. The door opened.

I was taken into the room diagonally across the corridor. It had windows, curtains, flowers, paintings, books, paper, pens. It was all anyone could ever ask for.

"Sit down, Mark." I sat down. "My name's Walter. Call me Wally."

Most of what he said wouldn't have made much sense to anyone but me. It would have been just another poor crazy person raving his brains out. What it boiled down to was that I was being divested of my power.

"You're not a conductor anymore. Someone else is in charge of the train." He seemed to be congratulating me for having done my part well and saying that now I could relax. It worked like a charm. I don't think I did any raving after that. I had no more power. I could now be just one of the fellas.

Easter morning I was sitting just outside the little room rolling a cigarette, still trying to put together some of the things Wally had said and who the hell he was. According to the nurses, Wally was just another patient.

A breeze came through the ward. It smelled like spring. It was the first smell I had noticed in months that hadn't been death. Something was saying goodbye to me.

"Goodbye, sport. Who would ever guess?" And it was gone.

Tears started streaming down my face. They tasted sweet. I sat there smoking a cigarette through the tears, tasting them both, and how good they were.

•

On The Loose Again. When I was finally released from the hospital, I bore little resemblance to the dynamo of assertion I had been on my first release. I had nothing but a feeling of extreme fragility and vulnerability and a little hope that someday things would be different. It was hard to be graceful.

I don't think I had any real hope of making the farm my life anymore. It was like getting back up onto a horse after you've been thrown. It was like a lot of things, but it wasn't much like Eden. It was the best of a lot of lousy alternatives.

Three months later. I headed East. I still had to keep taking Thorazine. Philosophical niceties were swept aside. Biochemistry and those funny guys who called themselves orthomolecular psychiatrists were my new buddies.

It took quite a bit to convince us that anything as pedestrian as biochemistry was relevant to something as profound and poetic as what I was going through. But the idea had a lot to recommend it. The hopelessness of dealing with it on a poetic level was the start. The poets in the business gave little hope and huge bills. The chemists fixed me up with embarrassingly inexpensive, simple nonprescription pills. Vitamins, mostly. The biochemists said no one was to blame. The poets all had notions that required someone's having made some mistake. The A.M.A. had no particular affection for megavitamin therapy. That was something. Anything the A.M.A. hated couldn't be all bad. The more research I did, the more impressed I was. I remain converted.

When I finally left the farm and went East, it wasn't to get away from painful memories or a lifestyle that might drive me nuts again. I felt stronger than ever before. I was curious about this new strength and there wasn't enough variety at the farm to give it a thorough testing.

It seemed that virtue was no longer compulsory. I had spent a lot of my life trying to figure out what "good" was and trying to do it. It had seemed that my state of mind, my mental health, was directly tied to how much good was in my life, which would have been fine if the process hadn't been such a progressively demanding, implacable one.

In the beginning, I couldn't take physical violence. In the end, I couldn't cut firewood. I didn't want to move or breathe for fear of harming microbes. My life became more and more an instant-karma replay. There was no way to be good enough. My friends had gradually become as monstrous as the SS and the farm as hectic and frightening as New York City.

But gradually all this was turned around. The more the vitamins took hold, the less my mental health depended on how good I was. Before, I had had a fairly simple, if tyrannical, guideline for how to run my life. Anything that rattled me was bad and to be avoided. The world's horror and sinfulness matched my constantly deteriorating stress tolerance. In any event, my mental health doesn't give me many clues about how to act anymore. It's kind of nice to be back on my own.