Chapter 18

“No, Leland, not you. You, and in fact quite a lot of your generation, have in some way been exiled from that particular sanctuary. It’s become almost impossible for you to ‘go mad’ in the classical sense. At one time people conveniently ‘went mad’ and were never heard from again. Like a character in a romantic novel. But now”—And I think he even went so far as to yawn—“you are too hip to yourself on a psychological level. You all are too intimate with too many of the symptoms of insanity to be caught completely off your guard. Another thing: all of you have a talent for releasing frustration through clever fantasy. And you, you are the worst of the lot on that score. So ...you may be neurotic as hell for the rest of your life, and miserable, maybe even do a short hitch at Bellevue and certainly good for another five years as a paying patient—but I’m afraid never completely out.” He leaned back in his elegant Loungeo-Chair. “Sorry to disappoint you but the best I can offer is plain old schizophrenia with delusional tendencies.” Recalling this, and the wise doctor’s words, I relaxed my grip on the armrests and pulled the lever to recline the seat. Hell, I sighed, exiled even from the sanctuary of insanity. What a drag. Madness might have been a good way to explain terror and excuse anarchy, I mooned, a good whipping boy to blame in the event of mental discomfort, an interesting avocation to while away the long afternoon of life. What a crashing drag . . . But then...on the other hand, I decided, as the bus thundered slowly through town, you never can tell: it might have constituted as bad a drag as sanity. You would probably have to work too hard at it. And at times, almost certainly, a little sneak of memory would slip past your whipping boy and you would be whacked just as hard as ever by that joker’s bladder of reality, of pain and heartache and hassle and death. You might hide in some Freudian jungle most of your miserable life, baying at the moon and shouting curses at God, but at the end, right down there at the damned end when it counts ...you would sure as anything clear up just enough to realize the moon you have spent so many years baying at is nothing but the light globe up there on the ceiling, and God is just something placed in your bureau drawer by the Gideon Society. Yes, I sighed again, in the long run insanity would be the same old cold-hearted drag of too solid flesh, too many slings and arrows, and too much outrageous fortune. I reclined my seat another notch and closed my eyes, trying to resign myself that there was nothing I could do about this runaway anarchy I had hold of but wait for the pharmaceutical pilot to come on and take over the controls and let me sleep. But the pills seemed uncommonly slow in coming on. And in this ten- or fifteen-minute wait—the billowing; the ringing; the bus, empty but for its solitary passenger in the back, huffing and whooshing through the town—before the barbiturates took effect ...I was forced at last to consider those questions I had been skirting so skillfully. Like: “What in the shit you hope to accomplish running back home?” I knew that all that obscure Oedipal pap I had fed Peters about measuring up or pulling down might be approaching some kind of truth...but even if I were able to bring off one of these coups, what did I hope to accomplish? And like: “Why should one want to wake up dead anyway?” If the glorious birth-to-death hassle is the only hassle we are ever to have...if our grand and exhilarating Fight of Life is such a tragically short little scrap anyway, compared to the eons of rounds before and after—then why should one want to relinquish even a few precious seconds of it? And—thirdly—like: “If it’s such a goddamned hassle—why fight it?” The three questions lined up in front of me, just like that: three insistent bullies, hands on their hips and sneers on their faces, challenging me to meet them face to face, once and for all. The first one I made a little headway with, owing to its more pressing nature and the help I had during the trip. The second didn’t receive satisfaction until weeks later when circumstances following that trip happened to occasion another challenge. And the third still waits right now. While I take another trip. Back into the memory of what happened. And the third one is the toughest bully of them all. But that first question I set to work on straightaway. What do I hope to accomplish going home? Well, myself, for one thing . . . my little old self!” “Man,” Peters says over the phone, “you don’t do that by running off someplace. That’s like running from the beach to go swimming.” “There are beaches East and beaches West,” I let him know. “Crap,” he says. Looking back on that trip (and forward on this one), I can calculate and know it took four days (the thing about being removed, thanks to modern technique, is, while it may afford objectivity and perspective—with all events tunneling back from this point like images in opposing mirrors, yet each image changed—it presents a tricky problem of tense) ...but looking back I remember the depot, the gas, the bus trip, the blast, the disjointed narrative to Peters on the phone—all these scenes as one scene, composed of dozens of simultaneously occurring events . . . “Something’s wrong,” Peters says. “No, wait ...something’s happened, dammit Lee; what? You’re in New York to identify what? But man, that’s more than a year ago.” I could now (possibly) go back and restretch those shrunken hours, flake the images separate, arrange them in accurate chronological order, (possibly; with will-power, patience, and the proper chemicals) but being accurate is not necessarily being honest. “Lee!” This time it’s Mother. “Where are you going? Are you ever going anywhere?” Nor is chronological reporting by any means always the most truthful (each camera has its own veracity) especially when, in all good faith, one cannot truthfully claim to remember what happened accurately.... The fat boy turns to leer at me from the pinball machine. “You can win ’em all but that last one, hot shot.” He grins. Stenciled on his T-shirt is tilt in large orange letters outlined in green. Or accurately claim to remember what happened truthfully ... And Mother plummets past my bedroom window, forever and ever. Besides, there are some things that can’t be the truth even if they did happen. The bus stops (I hang up the phone and hurry out to the car and drive to the Campus Diner) and starts again, jerkily. The diner is crowded but subdued. The people remote. A film of tobacco smoke drawn over the faces makes them look like displays behind glass. I peer through this film and see Peters sitting at his table back near the cigarette machine, sharing a beer with Mona and someone who leaves. Peters sees me coming and licks the foam from his mustache, the surprising pink of the Negro tongue darting out at me. “Enter Leland Stanford, stage left,” he says. He picks the candle from the table and lifts it toward me in a theatrical gesture. “Rage, rage and remember Dylan Thomas,” he says, and Mona says, “When you get home, Lee, look around and see if you dropped it back there somewhere.” Sweetly. I tell them I have just failed my tests again. Peters says, “Crap. Is that all?” And Mona says, “I saw your mother fall past.” “Oh,” says Peters. “And guess who was with us? He left when you came in, still naked.” The pinball machine goes rigid with light and I hear Peters breathing into the receiver, sympathetic and waiting for my fits to finally cease. “Nobody, man,” he says sadly, “can go home again.” I want to say something about my family. I tell them, “My father is a filthy capitalist and my brother is a motherfucker.” Peters says, “Some people have all the luck,” and we laugh. I want to say more but at that moment I hear Mother enter the café. I recognize the loud stab of her heels against the tile. Everyone turns and looks, then goes on drinking coffee. I can’t find a dime and Mother stands at the door, looking back and forth through the people at the walls. She touches the black hair with her hand, and it is painful for me to look because then she turns into chromium and cosmetics. She walks briskly to the counter, puts her purse on one stool and her car coat on another, and seats herself between them. “Anyway, man...what to accomplish?” I watch Mother pick up a cup of coffee ...her elbow resting on the countertop, fingers dropping to close over the cup . . . now she crosses her legs beneath the gray skirt and swings the fulcrum of her elbow to her knee and is revolving slowly around on the stool. I wait for the arm to lower and the hand to empty its load into the waiting truckbed. But she sees something that startles her so she drops the cup. I turn, but he’s already gone again. I ask for a glass of water. The postman brings it and the loudspeaker calls for all aboard. The postman says, “Well, one thing you’ll accomplish when you get back there: you’ll find out if it’s true or not.” “What’s that?” I ask, but he goes somersaulting away. I guess that’s a postman’s system. The phone rings and it’s that horrible greened-over preacher friend of Mother’s calling me from New York to tell me what happened. And how upset Mother has been by the news that I failed my exams. And how sorry she has been for failing me. And how sorry he is. And how desperately griefstricken he knows I must be and then offers the consolation that we are all of us, dear boy . . . trapped by our existence. I tell him that this is neither very profound nor very consoling but when I lie on the bed with the moon jigsawing my body I keep seeing this picture of a tiny birdcage inlaid with rhinestones chugging along a little track, mother trapped inside performing the feeble repertory of her movements as the cage moves along the track round and around up the concrete to the forty-first floor where the rails stop out in space. “Who trapped her?” I scream and the postman rushes in to hand me the card again. “Message out of the past, sir,” he says, giggling. “A pastcard.” “Crap,” says Peters. It occurs to me...that...if I am as vulnerable to this world of the past as she has been...then perhaps I am being screwed out of everything I was ever to have—Peters, listen!—because I have always felt compelled to measure up to a memory.” “The same crap,” Peters says at the other end of the line. “No, listen. This card came just in time. Perhaps he is right. Perhaps I am a Big Enough guy now, don’t you see? a Strong Enough guy to demand the return of the sun I’ve been cheated of ...a Desperate Enough guy to see that my demands are met even if it means eradicating this specter casting this shadow!” Excited by this possibility—and by the incessant honking as the bus tried to goad a cautious milk truck away from the stop sign ahead of us out into the heavy traffic of the highway—I jerked momentarily awake. I was drowsy and dopey as hell, but the strange billowing sensation had ceased. And the feeling of terror had given way to a kind of capricious optimism. Because, by George, what if Little Leland were a Big Enough guy now? Wasn’t it possible? Ah? Just on the basis of years? Hank was no young buck any more. A lot of water had flowed past since those days of stud prizes and swimming trophies. Here I am, just approaching my prime; Hank is past his—bound to be! Can I possibly go back and wrest from my past some remnant of a better beginning? Some start toward a better scene? That would be worth running back to accomplish, Lord knows . . .