Weird Scenes Inside the Godmind, excerpts from a novel by Douglas A. Mackey

"Doug Mackey is a genuine free spirit. Weird Scenes Inside the Godmind is wonderfully witty, invigorating, high-spirited, inventive—and very sexy too. This is a really unique book, and a lot of serious fun. If Philip K. Dick and Rudy Rucker turn you on, read this now.”

Standing in the Jim Morrison Memorial Soul Kitchen, Mark Carnival pressed his mouth against a halved orange. His senses rode the wild, wild juice wave. He announced:

“I suck, therefore I am.”

Propelled by a vitamin C high, he shot into the William Shakespeare Memorial Living Room. Mary Anna Cinna, his girlfriend, sat on the couch engrossed in a book. She glanced up to see before her, not a human face, but legs, bare, hairy, sticking up straight and motionless like two Doric columns, embedded in a pair of gray cotton running shorts.

Standing on one’s hands is good exercise, if you can do it. Mark was in great shape. He had to be. He was an actor.

His face, upside-down, looked tranquil. Maybe life would be better if it could always be looked at that way, she thought. We tend to view things opposite from the way they were intended. Maybe life was really as beautiful as the Mona Lisa, only people insist on looking at the back of the picture, so all they see is the nails and the wire. Not the enigmatic smile, the signature of the Mother in all creation.

She peered at the cyclopean navel staring at her from his bare torso. “You want something?” she said.

“The New Dispensation: Where You Fit In,” said Mark, looking at the title of her book. “What’s it about?” He righted himself, his dark curly hair and flashing actor eyes, like lightning before a storm, coming into focus before her.

“There are 144,000 psychically attuned people in the world who are going to enter the fifth dimension soon, all together. We’ll all have our minds melded and our bodies will coalesce into a giant etheric superbeing. Then we’ll telepathically communicate with similar entities from other galaxies. Maybe even have sex with them.”

“Can you have sex with a non-material body?” inquired Mark.

“You bet your astral,” she said. “I think that sex probably exists in some form in every state of being. Even God has to have sex with himself, or herself, in order to create the universe.”

“Isn’t that incest?” said Mark. “But what about angels? They’re supposed to be sexless.”

She shrugged. “Maybe they merge their subtle bodies with each other. You might not call it sex, but it gets them off.”

Was the sex life of angels, he wondered, as academic a problem as speculating as to how many of them could dance on the head of a pin? Mary Anna, as a therapist, might be predisposed to see them as psychosexual creatures. For his part, he considered the problem pragmatically, from a theatrical point of view. If you’re an angel, what’s your history, sexual or otherwise? What motivates you? Where does your pain live? Do you even feel pain, dancing away like a madman on that pinhead?

He walked over to the window and stared out at the night. He lived on the third story of an elderly building, and below he could see the bright lights of Goodlove. The Midwest has a number of such small cities, homes of handsome state universities, reputable for being reputable.

He could feel it: someone, somewhere, was out there. Someone was trying to make contact. A distant ringing: the bell that tolls for us all.

No, it was not outside. It was inside his house. It was inside his head. No, not quite that close. It was outside his head but inside his house. His phone was ringing, but very, very quietly, because he had turned the ringer down to avoid distraction from his exercises. Mary Anna was continuing to read, oblivious.

“Who’s there?” he said smartly, picking up.

“Nay, answer me,” was the reply. “Stand and unfold yourself.”

“Long live the king!” Mark shot back.

“I intend indeed to live long and prosper.”

“Then you are the king?”

“The same.”

“How is it then,” Mark said, “that your voice resembles that of a lowly and villainous player of my acquaintance, hight Smythe?”

“Have you not heard, then, of the Player King?”

“I have heard of such a one, but doubted his existence.”

“Why, prithee?” The voice acquired a petulant tone.

“No man can play the king longer than the hour on the stage in which he struts and frets and maybe even gets crowned. But when the lights go out in the theatre, and his audience goes home, he is king of nothing, and must return to his lonely room.”

Mark’s interlocutor, Eric Smythe, was a theatrician of the first water. Playwright, actor, director, producer, designer, scholar of all aspects of the theatre past and present, he had a long and illustrious history in Goodlove as a reliable purveyor of outrageous cultural experiences. His personal life was often as explicit and unpredictable as his art.

“How do you know my room is lonely?” said Eric.

“Are you trying to tell me that it is not?” said Mark.

“I have a guest tonight.”

“Male or female?”

“Female. I think. I suppose I should check.”

“Does she have a name?” Mark probed with perfect casualness.

“She does. But for now, that will remain my little secret.”

“So, why did you call, Eric?”

“We haven’t talked in awhile. Like Nature, I abhor a vacuum.”

“So it would seem, from the state of your carpet.”

Eric took a beat. “I’ve called to tell you I’ve written a new play, my dear.”

“Congratulations. I was wondering when that slut your muse would strike again.”

“Are you coming to the audition next week?”

“Haven’t you already lined up an acting company to perform it?”

“Oh yes. The Waiting for Goddam Players.”

“You know I can’t stand those people, Eric.”

“Why? I thought their last production was rather good.”

“You liked their gay Hamlet? Christ, you’re a sucker for all that role reversal stuff. I’ll admit that there were some interesting scenes, like the part where he drowns the queen, who really is one, in her bathtub. But don’t you find those people rather precious?”

“They did have the good taste to select my play.”

“So what’s the title of your latest masterpiece?”

Eric paused for effect. “Izz.” He spelled it: “I-z-z.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Mark. “What does it mean?”

“Well, yes, it all depends on what the meaning of Izz is, doesn’t it. ‘Is’ refers to the state of being, of course. But the intentional misspelling gives it an ambiguity that makes the ontological status of the play, and by implication of life itself, verge on the nonsensical.”

“Ah. Does this have some connection to Izznt?”

“It’s the sequel,” said Eric.

In Izznt, several years in the distant past, Mark had played the main character, Jay Jay (Jay was both his first and last name, but everybody called him Jay Jay, rather than just Jay). Jay Jay was the world’s biggest loser. Everything wrong happened to him, but somehow something of him always survived to get crushed again. Izznt was the ultimate in black comedy. It was irony extracted from the deepest and darkest irony mine imaginable. It had not been a popular success.

“Why would I possibly want to play Jay Jay again?” he said.

“Because you are Jay Jay, Mark. No one else could ever play him. I wrote him for you.”

“Do you really think that little of me, Eric?”

“What do you mean?”

“Jay Jay is a jerk. A hopeless schlemiel. I’ve heard of antiheroes but this is ridiculous. Like that scene where his girlfriend covers him in honey, like she’s going to lick it off, except then once he’s all slathered up and gooey, she just walks out on him? Leaves him standing there looking like a complete idiot.”

“But you did it with such conviction and believability, night after night. Your naked body, gleaming like gold in the spotlight, was as eloquent a sight as I have seen on the stage.”

“What I did for love,” muttered Mark.

“Your love was returned, dear. But I’m happy to inform you that Jay Jay has come a long way in the years since Izznt. You’ll like him. He’s acquired competence.”

Mark glanced over at Mary Anna. She was putting her book down and moving towards the Jean Cocteau Memorial Bedroom. All Mark’s rooms were named after somebody. “Okay, I’ll read your script,” he told Eric. “Drop me off a copy. But don’t get your hopes up about my reprising Jay Jay.”

“You’ll love it.” Eric made a clicking sound with his tongue, which was his way of communicating enthusiastic approbation.

“And I don’t do naked. Not no more,” said Mark. “I’m forty-something now. My behavior is more seemly than of yore.”

“Goodnight, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

“Goodnight, you great pretender.”

Mark put down the phone and went into the bedroom. Mary Anna lay on the bed in her sweater but no pants. He lay down next to her, head by her feet, in only his shorts. The asymmetry was pleasing, as well as being reminiscent of the last scene of Joyce’s Ulysses.

He watched her lying there, her muff waiting mysteriously for him like a primeval black forest. Her fingers slipped under the thin fabric that protected the world from his manhood.

“What did Eric want?” she said, coaxing the central pillar of his existence into preeminent posture.

“He has a new play he wants me to do. Interesting . . . he had a woman over there. He wouldn’t tell me who.”

“Not usually his preferred gender, is it?”

“No. But then Eric is not too orthodox in any area.”

“Neither am I,” as she swung a hip over his head.

“I know that,” he said. But he could say no more.

* * *

Mary Anna’s first clients of the next day were a couple, Glen and Glenda Bast. They were having problems communicating. Glen had joined a men’s group of the sweat-lodging, drum-beating variety. They bonded several times weekly by watching football games together, drinking beer, and complaining about their wives. Although the benefits of such camaraderie were theoretically supposed to spill over into the marriage, for Glen and Glenda, they hadn’t. Glenda had at first encouraged him when he joined the group, hoping that Glen would become less of a wimp. Now she realized she had created a monster. It seemed the only kind of sex he cared about anymore was nonconsensual.

They met in Mary Anna’s small office. The couple sat on opposite sides of the couch in front of a Magritte poster. Mary Anna sat cross-legged on a hassock, facing them.

“So, Glenda,” said Mary Anna, “what is your response to Glen’s sexual advances?”

“Is that what you call rape? What do you think my response is? I never come or anything. It’s all for him.”

Glenda was a small, blonde woman who sounded like she was about to choke most of the time.

“Glen,” said Mary Anna, “can you take that in, what she just said?”

Glen relaxed, stretching his long, muscular legs out towards Mary Anna. His eyes became glassy as he assessed his inner state. Some time went by. Glenda fidgeted. Finally he replied, “No. It doesn’t really fit into my conception of reality.”

“What conception of reality do they teach you in Triple-M?” asked Mary Anna. Triple-M was the men’s group, actually part of a national movement, founded by human potential guru Mack Master. Thus, Mack Master’s Men.

“Well, they always emphasize the importance of turning a negative into a positive.” Glen cocked his baseball cap at a rakish angle.

“And how can rape be considered a positive for Glenda?” said Mary Anna in a non-threatening tone of voice.

Glen sighed. “That’s a feminist term.”

“What would you call it, big guy?” said Glenda.

“Normal, healthy sex,” replied Glen.

“Glenda does indicate that she has trouble reaching orgasm,” interjected Mary Anna. “Isn’t that a legitimate concern?”

“Are we going to get into why female bodies do or don’t do what they do?” said Glen. “Nobody knows that. Not even the scientists.”

Glenda said acridly, “I’m sure Mack Master doesn’t know. Or care.”

He looked at her pointedly. “Your satisfaction is your own responsibility. Remember, the Bible says God created our bodies, male and female, with minds of their own.”

Mary Anna’s attention was drifting to the poster, as it often did when clients started rambling. It was that famous picture of a painting of a landscape, sitting on an easel but blending in perfectly with the landscape behind it, implying that many levels of reality coexist within the one we inhabit.

Someday she would explore those other dimensions. Now she had to placate the woman on the couch, who was looking like she was about to explode.

“Glenda,” Mary Anna said, “has it ever occurred to you that Glen’s behavior, brutal and inarticulate as it is, may be his way of expressing affection?”

“Well . . .”

“And that what he might really be trying to say through all this is, ‘Hey, I love you. How about raping me?!’”

Glen was nodding. “That’s right. I never thought of that. That would be cool, too.”

Glenda looked thoughtfully at her husband. “Maybe you’re right. I’d like to make you suffer for a change!”

“Now this,” said Mary Anna, “is the beginning of communication.”

Chapter 2

When Mary Anna returned home that evening, Mark was reading The New Dispensation: Where You Fit In. “What do you think of it?” she asked him.

“I like it. Who is this guy, Clarence Clapper?”

“The author of the book.”

“I know that. I’ve heard that name before.” He thumbed through the back of the book. “There’s no biographical information.”

“So call Ronan.”

“If anybody knows, he would.” Mark picked up the phone and dialed.

Ronan Sayles, Ph.D., was a literary scholar, not currently affiliated with any academic institution. He lived alone in an old Victorian house full of rooms of fine antique glass bookcases all burgeoning with odd and unusual books. As a specialist in the esoteric and the abstruse, Ronan would probably not have fit in well at Goodlove State University, whose department of English was a stronghold of Destructionism, the current fashionable literary theory imported from France. That philosophy, which held that all writing is an expression of power and therefore detestable, was not in keeping with Ronan’s enthusiasm for the book as a religious object and his nostalgia for the outré. Fortunately a legacy from an eccentric uncle had relieved him of the need to prostitute himself at the portals of academe.

Ronan was at home. He rarely wasn’t at home. “Clapper? Of course I know him. I have all his works. He’s a special interest of mine. In fact I have collected virtually every word written by him and even about him. Of which there is a great, great deal.”

“What kind of bird is he?” said Mark.

“Absolutely unique,” said Ronan. “That’s why he fascinates me. He’s mostly known for his science fiction. He’s written sixty or so novels, starting out in the 1950s. They all deal with alternate realities. Or with the idea that the reality that we know is not the real reality. Listen, when you read them all in a row, like I have, your mind gets permanently bent. Maybe you’ve heard of First Cause, Final Effect. That was my favorite. The main character is God, born into a human body in the far future. He finds Himself traveling on a spaceship to a distant star with twelve gorgeous babes. One of them is the Devil. He doesn’t know which one. If He goes to bed with the wrong one, He’s in deep shit.”

“What happens?”

“You don’t care if I spoil it for you? He has sex with all of them except two. There are two left, a spiritual-looking blonde and a sultry brunette. He chooses the blonde. Wrong! The blonde was the Devil after all, and the universe blows up.”

“Have you read The New Dispensation?”

“Sure. Read it a year ago, before it was published in book form. It was serialized in an obscure fan magazine, Claptrap. A magazine devoted to the study of Clarence Clapper and his works. You see, Clapper, who recently died, had been experiencing mystical visions which he called Reality Checks. You could say even his fiction is prophetic. Some people might think The New Dispensation is fiction. It’s not. Not in the sense of fiction being something untrue, anyway.”

“You believe it, then.”

“I don’t know if I believe it or not. The important point is, it’s a self-sufficient version of reality that has its own integrity. Perhaps more integrity than reality itself.”

* * *

After he hung up the phone, Ronan went to the window. The night air had a sweetness to it, like a combination of spices and roses and incense, that recalled to his mind some vague impression or memory. Rather like that madeleine in Proust, he thought.

What was it that smell reminded him of?

And then he knew. Because something had blown into the room and now somebody was standing behind him.

“Cora,” he said, without turning around. “You’ve come back.”

“Hello, Ronan,” said Cora Xann.

A long time ago she had disappeared without a word. He knew she did things like that, but he had missed her dearly, for only she delved the secret mines of his heart. He loved her with a low, smoldering flame that did not dare to express the pent-up fury of its longing, for fear of burning itself out and thus cutting short its own agony.

As he slowly rotated to face her, he knew what he would see. He was right. She looked not a day older than when he had last seen her ten years ago. Yes, she was just the same. The redness in her cheeks and lips that owed nothing to makeup, her skin smooth as alabaster, the green of her eyes and golden brown of her long hair, the silver Celtic cross around her neck, the flowing pre-Raphaelite dress, the British accent, nothing had changed. Everything about her that he loved was still intact. Which was everything about her.

“Cora,” he started, “I thought you were . . .”

“Dead? That wouldn’t be too likely, would it?” she said with amusement.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?”

Cora Xann walked over and took his hand. Her eyes were deep with incomprehensible memories, with feelings that Ronan could not guess at. “I was called away suddenly,” she said. “I’m sorry about that.”

Ronan was not always facile at communicating his feelings, but he found tongue to say, with tears in his eyes, “It broke my heart.”

She acknowledged his pain with a flicker of sadness in her eyes. “I know. I’ll make up for it now. You’ll see. But sit down. I have a lot to tell you. It’s important.”

She closed the window. The room became still, unpermeated by the sounds of the night. There was only the low glow of the lamp and Cora’s voice.

“You remember me talking about my Tibetan master?”

“Sure. What was his name?”

“Arartik. He’s the one who has taught me everything I know, who has kept me on a spiritual path all these years, despite all the temptations to the contrary. When he calls, I have to go. Immediately. And it happened he kept me for ten years. There was a lot to learn, this time.”

“Can you tell me about it?” Looking at her looking at him, time had come to a complete halt for Ronan. There was only the two of them, wrapped inside a moment that was infinitely warm and ample.

“You see, Ronan, time is different there. It could have been one day or a thousand years. I wouldn’t have known the difference. Time ceases to be relevant in terms of duration. It is experienced more as a plastic medium, that you shape and that shapes you.”

“I know what you mean. Well, actually I don’t have a clue what you mean, but I would like to know.”

“Arartik’s field is so powerful,” she continued, “one’s whole reality gets completely suspended. In that suspension, I reflected on my life. I thought of all the years it has taken me to develop, understand, and master my powers. What has it been leading up to?”

She paused significantly.

“Arartik made me see it has been just a preparation,” she said. “There’s a threat—I don’t know the exact nature of it yet—but we have to be ready.”

Ronan said, “The way you describe his effect on you, that overwhelming power—that’s how you affect me.”

She smiled and shook her head. “Thanks, but there’s no comparison. You’re stronger than you think. But one thing I want you to know. You’re going to need to get a lot stronger, because this thing I’m talking about threatens me and everyone I know, including you.” Her voice was quiet and serious.

“What are you talking about?”

In the pause between long moments, she breathed a single word: “Evil.”

He let it sink in. “My problem is, I’ve never directly experienced, um, evil before,” said Ronan. “I can only talk about it theoretically. Like the Nazis, concentration camps, and such. But it’s not real to me, personally.”

“Oh, but you have experienced evil, “ said Cora with assurance. “You’ve just repressed it, and for good reason. I’m going to help you remember. This is necessary. Are you feeling brave?”

“No, not particularly. But I trust you, Cora. Really.”

“Good. Put your hand on my heart and look into my eyes.”

Being invited to touch her perfectly round breast would ordinarily be an erotic event nonpareil, but in this case he felt fear, and hesitated.

“I’ll protect you,” she said.

As his gaze locked with hers, she took his hand and held it to her heart. At that instant he stepped out of his body. The boundaries of his world exploded as he looked down an abyss of unfathomable pain. Billions of tiny souls, naked bodies being fried in a sea of acid, were howling, cursing, and crying. Their skin formed bubbles of blood that burst as they screamed and writhed, rolling onto the bodies of others and clawing in vain at their flesh. Ronan viewed the agony from a great height. Cora was on his left. He heard her voice in his mind: “This is human life in its real state.”

“This is evil,” he thought.

“Yes. Now look upwards, and you will see the cause of it all.”

Ronan slowly turned his head directly above, expecting to see the red, glaring eyes of Satan filling the sky. What he saw was utterly, immeasurably worse.

There was nothing there. Absolutely nothing.

His heart filled with the pain of understanding the nature of suffering. Tears filled his eyes.

“There is no reason for them to suffer,” he thought.

“That’s right,” came Cora’s reply. “And that is the greatest evil of all.”

Chapter 3

Among the scores of neopsychedelic guitarists in Goodlove, J’ai H’ai Deva reigned supreme. Certainly he was unique. His dreadlocks suggested Caribbean, his skin was coffee, but con leche. His accent was reminiscent of a Scottish John Lennon. For that reason his speech was a bit hard to understand. But, his playing . . . the soul of Jimi Hendrix fused with the spirituality of Bob Marley and the spaciousness of John Fahey.

The miracle of it all is that the record companies had not yet discovered J’ai H’ai. Nor did he want them to.

Mark Carnival was surprised to find the musician at his door at nine o’clock in the morning. For one thing, he had never before seen J’ai H’ai in the daytime. He presumed the guitarist, like other musicians, only came out at night.

Of course, maybe this was evidence that J’ai H’ai never slept at all.

J’ai H’ai glanced at Mark to identify his coordinates in the here and now, and handed him a tape cassette.

“What’s this?” asked Mark.

“Music of the spheres. Was communicated last night.”

“Do you want me to play it?”

“At your leisure, yes, sir.” J’ai H’ai called everybody “sir,” male or female.

“What do you call it?”

“I call it,” replied J’ai H’ai simply.

“Why are you giving me this tape?” said Mark. “You don’t ordinarily show up at dawn to lay sounds on me.”

“Soundtrack of the play.”

“What play?”

“Play of Maya. Eternal play of creation.” J’ai H’ai grinned. “Also that other one, of Eric.”

“You mean Izz?”

` “You are right, sir.”

“I didn’t know Eric had you working on the play.”

“All of us working on the play. Maybe we know it, maybe we don’t. When you hear the music, you know.”

Mark stuck the tape in his deck and turned it on. As the first transcendental tones radiated from the speakers like sound transforming itself into light, Mark turned to express his admiration. But J’ai H’ai was gone.

It was fitting. Whatever the mystical musician had come to express, his music was already saying.

The swell of cascading guitar sounds caught Mark right in the throat. The style was unmistakably J’ai H’ai—the smoothness of it, the rhythmic sensuality combined with tranquillity—the blues as if played by angels. But here was something else Mark had never heard before, a sound that brought back memories of a state of mind.

He had not remembered until now, hearing this sound, that as a child he would occasionally feel a power surge through him, an immense force, like the deep unexpressed energy of a wave on the ocean before it breaks.

He was forty-one now and had not felt that power in at least thirty years.

* * *

Ronan had loved Cora as long as he had known her. They had met when he was an instructor in the English department back in the 60s. She was not an enrolled student, but she had turned up auditing one of his classes on the literature of fantasy. He was fascinated by her. That she dressed oddly, with her long antique embroidered gowns, was less outrageous in that time period than it might have been in others. But she exuded otherness and mystery. She knew by heart scores of poems by W. B. Yeats, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, Thomas Hardy, Lionel Johnson. Over long cups of oolong tea, she recited with an authenticity of sound and feeling that left him gaping in wonder.

He wanted to take her to bed. Badly. Then she revealed the fact that she was a lesbian, “mostly.” But she wanted to be friends, and in fact to love him with love that was more than love. Because with her, no relationship was ordinary. That was okay with him. He would take what he could get.

However, when she let it slip that she was also a vampire, his need intensified.

Ronan, who had all his life collected and steeped himself in weird fiction, was especially susceptible to the idea that it would be romantic and ecstatic to be swept away by a beautiful lamia, a “belle dame sans merci.”

On the several occasions when he had suggested that she might like to vamp him, Cora had gently declined, pleading her sexual preference and reassuring him of her undying friendship. In her case that really meant something, he consoled himself. After all, he loved Cora to the depths of his being and no sacrifice was too great.

In return, he was privy to her true feelings about her lovers, or “victims,” as she called them, and fascinating glimpses into her more than a century of life experience.

The reason she dressed with a decadent etherealism, like a woman out of a nineteenth-century painting, was that the formative experiences of the fin-de-siècle had impressed her with a style that, she felt, did her beauty aesthetic justice. Ronan could not have agreed more.

That Cora wore a cross and was, in fact, a devout Catholic might have contradicted more than a few preconceptions, had her true identity been widely known. Who knew? Her victims, of course, and Ronan. That was all.

Cora used to confide in him explicitly. “She was a good vamp,” she would say, “warm and sweet.” Or, “The blood doesn’t lie. She drinks cheap wine. I’m not vamping her anymore.”

The type Cora particularly disliked were the would-be vampires, who had read too many novels and were fascinated by “the dark side.” “If they ever had a clue about what the dark side really is, they’d run screaming,” Cora averred.

She was irresistible to all women, gay or straight. Prior experience mattered not a whit. Sexual background was irrelevant, in fact, to this kind of encounter. There was nothing that could prepare you for your first good vamp. And once you knew how good it was, girl—were you a goner!

“What’s the difference between sex and vamping?” Ronan once asked.

“None. Vamping is a form of sex. My preferred form.” She shrugged. “After they’ve tried it, most of the women I’ve vamped agree that it’s the best. No offense to your own kit, now.”

He asked her if she’d ever tried plain old heterosexual intercourse.

“When you’ve lived as long as I have, you’ve tried everything. Oh, yes, I’m quite experienced in all the highways and byways of conventional sex. You might be surprised, in fact, who appropriated my virginity.”

“I give up,” said Ronan.

“Oscar.”

Back then that could have only been . . .

“Wilde? But he was gay.”

“And so am I. So what? I used to look rather boyish.”

“I can’t imagine that,” said Ronan.

“Look at me,” she told him. He stared into her eyes, suddenly aware of a male face staring back. Yet she had not changed physically in the slightest respect!

“Androgyny is not in the body. It’s in the soul. I can remember past lives as both sexes as clearly as I remember yesterday. I have no problem with my identity as a woman this time around, but I don’t feel limited by it.”

It was true that there was an aggressive, masculine side to Cora’s nature. Ronan imagined it rather than saw it explicitly, when he thought of her vamping one of her lovers, penetrating the willing victim, not with brutality, but with a desire that would not be denied.

So why had she deprived him? He could never understand. While he aspired to victimhood, she seemed perfectly content with friendship.

Ronan had never actually seen Cora’s fangs. She explained to him that they only extruded when she was about to vamp. She described other things that happened at that time. Her eyes would bug out, her nipples would become unnaturally distended, and her hair, already as curly as the Medusa, would stand out as if electrified.

Basically, she would have scared the shit out of just about anybody. However, the person being vamped (luckily for her) would at that point generally have her eyes closed in exquisite rapture. But if Cora ever saw fit to give someone the horror movie treatment, she could definitely deliver.

“You know that Hecate Jones?” she once asked Ronan.

“The one who dresses in black all the time and is into all the neopagan stuff? Yeah.”

“I gave her the works last night.”

“What did you do?”

“I let her see me before I vamped her.”

“You mean . . .”

“The fangs, the hair, the nipples, the whole show.”

“What’d she do?”

“She freaked. Totally lost it. Then I pinioned her on the bed and vamped the hell out of her.”

“Why did you scare her like that?”

“Poetic justice.”

“Did she survive? Does she still haunt the coffeehouses of Goodlove?”

“Unfortunately, she does.”

“And will you vamp her again?”

“Not a chance! I won’t give her that satisfaction.”

* * *

As Mark put on J’ai H’ai’s tape for the tenth straight time, he was flying. The music had deranged his usual norms of spatial perception. It had broken down his sense of linear time. He had fully entered into J’ai H’ai’s visionary world, where the Void played an eternal game of hide and seek with itself.

There was no amount of “getting into the moment” exercises prior to rehearsal that would have better prepared him to play the part of Jay Jay in Izz. In his music, J’ai H’ai had captured what Being was. Mark was now imbued with Being. This was “the moment,” if anything was.

Mary Anna walked in just then and said something that caused him to put him the moment on “pause.”

“Would it be infidelity if I had an affair with another woman?”

An interesting question. Mark struggled to bring his consciousness back to a level where he could intelligently respond.

“Not another woman, since I’m a man,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Never mind. If I understand you correctly,” he said, “you want to get it on with some chick and am I okay with it.”

“That’s right.”

“Depends on who it is.”

“Cora Xann.”

“Cora. Far out. She hasn’t been around for years.”

“She’s back in town. Ran into her at the Elsinore. I always had a crush on her, but I wanted to run it by you first.”

“I don’t suppose she’d want to do a threesome.”

“I don’t think she’s bi, Mark,” said Mary Anna.

“No, I suppose not. Rats.”

“Sounds like it’s okay with you, then.” She went into the kitchen.

“What if I wanted to have an affair with a guy?” he said reflectively.

Mary Anna came back out eating a banana, smiling knowingly. “Isn’t that an academic question?”

“I guess. Seeing that I’m straight.”

“Except that as an actor you’re by definition a slut.”

“How do you figure that?”

“You want to crawl into the skin of your characters. You want to merge with their identity. It’s a sexual thing.”

“Fair enough,” said Mark. “By the same token, all therapists are whores.”

“Well, that’s a given,” she said.

“I’ll tell you what really concerns me.” He walked to the window, looking for a clue to his feelings in the muted light of the muzzy afternoon. “That Cora will be so good that she’ll turn you off men. Which would include me.”

“Don’t worry, dear,” said Mary Anna, kissing him very tenderly on the lips. “That’s not going to happen.”

She went back out of the apartment.

In her wake, the William Shakespeare Living Room hung in suspension. “Well, tell Cora hi for me,” said Mark to the silence.

He pressed the tape button and suddenly was transported far from the confusion of emotions and relationships. “J’ai H’ai, your groove is golden,” breathed Mark, dissolving into the cool ocean of the absolute sound.

The first ClapperCon was to be held in Goodlove in four weeks. Ronan was planning to attend, but he had misgivings about the type of person (other than himself) who would be interested enough to devote several days to meeting with others about the strange books and ideas of Clarence Clapper. Ronan had read each of Clapper’s novels several times, and published articles on him in the journals of science-fiction criticism, but he was not a Clapper zealot who saw him as a prophet.

That Clapper was dead made him even more appealing as a quasi-religious figure whose fictional works held coded messages about the nature of reality, and whose non-fictional works, such as The New Dispensation: Where You Fit In, assumed scriptural authority.

Of course, Clapper might not even really be dead. He had died (supposedly) in France under mysterious circumstances, like Jim Morrison, and just as there were people who believed Morrison was still alive, there were those—maybe the same people—who had not accepted the fact of Clapper’s demise. The Doors freaks had no doubt made Clapper’s novel End of the End their bible. It was about Morrison being reincarnated as a fifty-foot giant, who struts around in his leather pants knocking over buildings and looking for a woman who will accommodate his expanded dimensions. He never finds one, but he scares hell out of a lot of twentieth-century foxes in the process.

At the time of his purported death, the sixty-year-old Clapper had been living with a twenty-one-year-old French girl named Sylvie LaBlonde, who had attested to receipt of Clapper’s ashes after he was found dead in Père-Lachaise cemetery, doing homage at the grave of Oscar Wilde. But many did not believe her. After all, she didn’t speak a word of English.

So Clapper himself had joined other literary luminaries in Père-Lachaise. It had occurred to Ronan, although he had never voiced his suspicions, that there was another coincidence too uncanny to be coincidental. For who else was buried there?

Could Clapper have had some kind of psychic connection with the dead lizard-king? And if so, what could the two of them be up to now?

As regards rock stars, it was the female variety that Clapper had definitely been more interested in. For a while he had been infatuated with the beautiful British songwriter and artiste Kate Bush. He wrote her innumerable fan letters, which she never answered. They were published posthumously as Gaffagrams: Clarence to Kate.

Clapper’s style was the antithesis of Morrison’s, of course. Clapper was no shamanic showman, no Dionysian daemon. His was a head trip. He transcended consensual reality by tying the mind in knots, like a Zen master, but keeping you in full consciousness while he did it.

A good example of this was one of his novels, Earth—You’re Out! In the future, all of the nine planets in the Solar System are settled and terraformed, and they play a cosmic video baseball game with an alien star system that also has nine planets. Everybody in our system participates through computer linkups and mathematical consensus determines the strategy. However, the aliens, because they are telepathic, have a huge advantage.

When Pluto strikes out and subsequently is blown out of the sky, the humans realize the aliens are taking the game much more seriously than they are. The aliens are playing for keeps.

Things get worse for the humans. One by one, the planets are destroyed until only Earth is left. Trillions of lives have been lost. And unfortunately, all the people left on Earth are those with the lowest IQs, because the smarter ones all had moved to the other planets. Why? Because only those with the highest intelligence had been allowed to go to them. Earth was left to the dregs and the droogs.

Somehow (despite the misleading title of the book) the dregs prevail, because their very lack of predictable response allows them to score a home run, causing the alien sun to explode, annihilating every last one of those telepathic insectoid baddies, and winning the game.

The thing that made the book a cognitive Zen trip was the nature of the game itself. The rules were the same as those familiar from baseball, except for these wrinkles:

The evening after Ronan had the vision of ultimate evil, Cora appeared again in his study.

“What are you going to do?” Ronan said, hesitantly. “She doesn’t know . . .”

“No,” Cora replied. “She hasn’t a notion. Oh, I’ll give her what she wants, and a good deal more. Don’t worry, Ronan. This won’t break up her relationship with Mark.”

He was sheepish, then forthright. “Of course I am. How could I not be? You know I’ve always loved you. I do enjoy being your friend and confidant—that means everything to me. But how could I not desire you, and want to be wanted by you too?”

Cora was quiet for a minute. “I’m in telepathic contact with Arartik. He is informing me that you need to open up psychically. You have a part to play in fighting this evil, I’m not sure what yet. The best way I know how to open you up is to vamp you.”

“There are different kinds of vamps,” Cora went on. “The one I use most often is, of course, the pleasure vamp. The one I’m being guided to use on you though is called the knowledge vamp.”