The Western Lands (30 page)

"Got some light here. Want to trade it for shit."

The boy's eyes are going from the continual darkness. You don't know what darkness is until there isn't any light. No light from anywhere. He blinks in the dim light with heavy shades. All he cares about is light enough to shoot by. He'll be blind soon and need a Light Boy to lead him around.

You can make a certain amount of light from your own substance, if you have any left, and light transfusions can be had for a price. Politicians is trying to convince the public they got a system for eating votes and shitting out light. But the light is running out and everybody knows it. It's leaving this planet at 186,000 miles a second and nothing can bring it back. The time is coming when no amount of light units will buy any light.

Day is done

Gone the sun

From the lake

From the hills

From the sky.

Joe's first encounter with the Land of the Dead: the first thing he notices is oil patches in the dim streets, or perhaps just patches of greasy darkness, but the feel of oil is there, and the smell of coal gas. The sky is black and dark green.

He comes to the house at Pershing Avenue. His mother is there and a long reptilian neck rises up out of him, curls over his mother's head and starts eating from her back with great, ravenous bites, some evil predatory reptile from an ancient tar pit. His mother rushes in from her bedroom screaming, "I had a terrible dream! I dreamed you were
eating
my
back!"

Smoker, the gray cat, is an ally in this dim, oily area. The night Ruski got lost and I was thinking I shouldn't have brought him out here, Smoker found him and brought him out, just as Fletch brought the Russian Blue kitten down from the tree.

There are many other places ... a restaurant/hotel/station area, where one is always in doubt about his room reservation and rarely able to find his way back to his room if he leaves it in search of breakfast, which is always difficult to locate.

Le Grand Hôtel des Morts:
escalators, stairways, a multilevel complex of rooms and restaurants and shops. I glimpse Ian Sommerville several times on an escalator, or passing in the corridors and waiting rooms. There is a long line of people at a reception desk waiting to get rooms. I have a reservation for room 317, but can't be sure of it with all these souls pouring in. Many of them look American, with crew cuts and rucksacks, undoubtedly servicemen from Vietnam. I hear there was a terrible pile-up.

This area is a vast airport, seaport, train station, hotels, restaurants, films, shops. I find Ian on a mezzanine in front of a boutique. He is vague and wispy and cool. . . excuses himself and goes inside. He is a curious combination of a mathematician (he really understands things like quantum theory) and a cold, bitchy woman. Being older and wiser, he is willing to leave it there. But I follow after a moment and ask the girl for Ian Sommerville.

"Oh, yes," she says and he comes out. We exchange a few dead sentences. It doesn't matter who says what.

"Is Brion here?"

"No. He's not coming."

"I wonder if my room is still reserved?" I moan plaintively. Ian does not have an opinion.

"Last night I slept on a couch in a room with four or five other people."

"Well, that's pretty frank," he says flatly, and turns away.

The boutique is an arrangement of booths according to some cryptic design. Several black girls enter, and Ian is talking shop with them but it is a shop I don't know . . . wrong turnings, tracks lost, bring us to this boutique on an alien planet where he is at home and I am not and nothing can ever bridge the gap. He has business here of which I can have no conception.

The name of the hotel is La Farmacía, but I can't find a
farmacía
to buy codeine. Seems to be a European city. . . . Looking for a place to eat breakfast. This always poses a problem. Wander around out to the end of a subway line, then back to the hotel. It must have a restaurant. Go into one, fairly full, and the waiter tells us, "This is not really a suitable place. Not very distinguished." I am somehow reminded of the Madame Rubenstein anecdote:

"Ah, Richard, so sorry you weren't at my party last night."

He walks right into it. "But, Princess, I wasn't invited."

"It was a very
distinguished
party."

A neat little fillip of insolence from the waiter, who is an ugly, angular Italian with bony knees and sunken chest and rank chest hair sprouting out between the shirt buttons, long scruffy hair, a filthy black suit.

Find my way back to the hotel room. Two little dogs in the corridor follow me into my room. One is brown and one is gray. Obviously these are Door Dogs, but since I am in the Land of the Dead I don't have to worry.

The Land of the Dead: a long street with trees on both sides that almost meet overhead. He walks to the end of the street, where there is an iron stairway going down. On the stairs he finds money, which he dutifully deposits in a trash receptacle as he intones, "Littering is selfish and dirty. Don't do it."

In the Land of the Dead quantitative coinage is worthless, and anyone proffering such tender would reveal himself as totally unchic. But at the bottom of the stairway, which leads to a stone promenade by a river, I spot a coin about the size of a silver dollar. The coin is of silver or some bright metal. Two shoulder blades in bas-relief almost meet in the middle of the coin, just as the shoulder blades of a Russian Blue cat almost meet if the cat is a star. This is a Cat Coin, more specifically a Russian Blue Coin, for in the Land of the Dead coinage is qualitative, reflecting the qualities the pilgrim has displayed during his lifetime. A Cat Coin will only be found by a cat lover.

There are Kindness Coins: the bearer has helped someone without consideration of payment, like the hotel clerk who warned me the fuzz is on the way, or the cop who laid a joint on me to smoke in the wagon. There are Child Coins. I remember a dream child with eyes on stalks like a snail, who said, "Don't you want me?"—
"Yes!"

There are Tear Coins, Courage Coins, Johnson Coins, Integrity Coins.

Are there things you would not do for any amount of money? For any consideration? For a young body? The Integrity Coin attests to the bearer's inaccessibility to any quantitative bribe. The coin certifies that the bearer has definitely refused the Devil's Bargain.

A coin cannot be stolen or transferred to anyone who has not earned the right to use it. They cannot be counterfeited. A stolen coin will often tarnish and blacken. It will always ring false on the fork. Every shop and innkeeper has a tuning fork to test the coins proffered in payment. A true Cat Coin will ring out harmonious purrs. A false or stolen coin will hiss and spit. So each coin rings with its special quality.

The Coin of Truth, on which is inscribed the Chinese character of a man standing by his word, rings with truth. You don't need a receipt. If false, it rings hollow and false as Jerry Fàlwell. The lies slither out.

"Receipt please."

"I'll put it under your door."

"Excellent. I will give you the money at that time."

Certain coins are prerequisite for obtaining certain other coins. Only the coinage of cowardice, humiliation and shame can buy the Coin of True Courage. Child and Cat and Kindness Coins can only be bought with Tear Coins, and Cat and Child Coins can, in turn, buy the very rare Contact Coin. This coin attests that the bearer has
contacted
other beings. There are coins attesting to Cat Contact, prerequisite for the Animal Contact Coin.

Coins of the Long Chance, the horse that comes from last to win in the stretch, the punch-drunk fighter who comes up at the count of nine to win by a knockout, Samson pulling the pillars of the temple down. The expendables, the last desperate gamble, the Coin of Last Resort. It's a one-time coin.

So many coins, and none that can be bought with money or any quantitative factor. The Devil deals only in quantitative merchandise.

"Anything you wouldn't do for money? For a young body? For
Immortality?"

"Yes—dig out a cat's eye . . . and a lot of other things."

Immediately the deal is off. "Well, if you are going to be like
that."

I am. I'd rather slug it out in my seventy-year-old body than agree to some shabby fool's bargain.

Another store is there. Kiki, what house? Half-club interruptions. Renew an alliance which does not amuse?

Aquaintance circumstances a police informer.

(Pause for word from me.)

The dream
pensions
whisper out from Mexico to Paris . . . dust of nights without sleep.

(The Indian is out.)

Lymphatic gray winter walk in the season of pause.

I go in for rat thick boy.

"Hisss." Animal slob planet.

Hummingbird spirit, you have made no fruit.

(A little cold snigger.)

They are gone away, leaving a shutter clattering in the wind.

Tire tracks in freezing mud.

A bandana stiff with jissom in a dry drawer of the empty hotel with the desiccated corpse of a cockroach.

Rain in cobwebs, empty lavatories of summer schools.

Eggshells, wet bread crusts, hair combings.

A large empty loft: a dust of plaster falls on my shoulder like the first stirring of a sail in a storm gathering out of dead sick calm. Plaster is falling all over the room now. Get out quick!

With a boy from the magazine making it in a ditch. Summer night breathes through salt-encrusted gills, the porous taste on his tongue in the rubble of wing sheaths and shells, rose-patterned stone under the archways, blue shadow cool on the silken bed, the scent of hyacinths. Mother and Dad will drive me to Liberty, Ohio, a student town. Kiki doesn't like it.

A warm wind winter stubble

Late afternoon in the 1920s 

Room over the florist shop by the vacant lot where I could find

snakes under rusty iron

A little green snake nuzzles lovingly at my face.

A whiff of speakeasies, white silk scarves, tuxedos, 1920

wraiths that fade from the paper. 

Christmas was warm soot on melting snow

walking by granite walls on Euclid

and I said to my cousin

"I can't believe it's Christmas."

The night before Christmas

And all through the house

Not a creature is stirring

Not even a louse.

A room with high ceilings

Lobsters in a room with

high ceilings

There's a party down the road

had to be restrained

Mick Jagger and I think

pulled the curtains closed

There was more

I am off to a hunt

Remember it

Last night dogs howling

A dog to feed

Lightning in the south of Spain

Let me tell you some crystal

and pineapples . . . lobster last

have a lobster?

Make luff with you

in a room with high ceilings

Sweet rosebuds dear old prince

Fat and twinkly in his shades

Dead on the toilet seat

Selective historians, come on

Don't be touchy

Umbrageous in the apartment

I glimpsed obligingly a modicum of central heating

A modicum whippet and the central heat

Honky foolery yet if I could

The telephone's ringing through the sky

Littered with silver and BOOM BOOM

Giff any champagne?? When did I?

My God it's all so—

Lobster. . . .

White bears graze in lush green meadows. A shrieking black boy dances around in civilian bones . . . emerald whirlwinds. 

"It's always her toes to be left alone."

These magical visions are totally devoid of ordinary human emotion and experience. There is no friendship, love, hostility, fear or hate. There are no rules, no series of steps by which one can be in a position to see. Consequently such visions are the enemy of any dogmatic system. Any dogma must postulate the way, certain steps that will lead to the salvation which the dogma promises. The Christian Heaven of pearly gates and singing angels, the Moslem paradise of eternal whores and plenty of water, the Communists' heaven of the worker state. Otherwise there is no place for a hierarchical structure that mediates between dogma and man, that dictates
the
way.

To endure in time, any structure must present predictable recurrences. The visions, the glimpses of the Western Lands, exist in space, not time, a different medium and a different light, with no temporal coordinates or recurrences. The medium bears some relation to holograms.

I remember seeing an exhibit of early holograms, mostly chess pieces in little glass cases. There is something strangely oppressive about these objects, a feeling of something that doesn't belong there. The vision medium can be faked. A hologram can fake it. But when faked, it becomes quite disorienting and unpleasant. A hologram is the illusion of magic without magic.

One of the rarest of all spirits, and the most difficult to see, is the Deercat, half deer and half cat. The grass-eater and the flesh-eater are united in this spirit. It is a bright green color with the head and horns of a deer and the claws of a cat. It can climb trees and run with great speed. It can eat flesh or grass at will. When it eats flesh, it has the teeth of a cat. When it eats grass, it has the teeth of a deer. Jt can be seen only in forest glens in a black-green light, tornado green.

For the Deercat is a spirit of tornados and whirlwinds, with the agility and strength of a cat and the speed of a deer. Its eyes are green-black and crackle with lightning. It has the power to move any weight of despair and hopelessness, of fear and apathy and death. Once evoked, all the weight of black magic and negative forces are whirled back to the source and sucked up into a black funnel. There are no words to evoke this spirit, only total emptiness.

You must find a small, round glade surrounded by bushes and trees, but open at the top. In the center of the glade place a barometer of crystal on a pyramid of black stones. The stones are smooth and polished with dream semen. Stand now at the northern edge of the glade. Empty all thought and all feeling, voiding thought and feeling out through the tail of the spine. This will leave you a skeleton of crystal bone. As the flesh melts into moss the temperature will drop 20 degrees in 23 seconds and the barometer will drop and drop and finally implode in black light. Then you will see the Deercat, in the green-black tornado light.

He stands there for a second of arrested time. Then you will hear the wind whistling through the trees with a cat's whine rising to a shriek as the black stones break free and whirl around the Deercat. Sky and trees, lake and river, are pulled into the whirling funnel. Not one stone will be left standing on another. The Deercat is the spirit of total revolution and total change. The Deercat is the spirit of the Black Hole.