From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [327]
Angelo Maggio grinned apologetically. “I’m only tryin to lay it out for you. You got to remember it aint near as hard as it sound.”
“Yes,” Prew said.
“I get to seein all kinds of food, big meals all laid out on a big tablecloth with silverware and glasses and candles and all that like in the magazine advertisements. I’silly, ain’t it?”
“Yen,” Prew said. “I like to eat too.”
“Another thing is sex,” Angelo said delicately. “You want to stay away from thinking about women too. You see they strip you and put you in there naked and you get to thinkin about women you come all apart at the seams and be floggin your meat all a time which ony makes it worse instead of relievin it and makes you get wilder. Berry does that sometimes. It happen to me onct.” Under the coat of the gray rock dust he blushed deeply.
“What the hell do you think about?” Prew said tightly, “for Christ’s sake?”
“Well,” Angelo Maggio said, “thats the catch. According to The Malloy you dont think about nothing. The Malloy says he can lay in there for three or four or five days, or however long he’s in, without thinkin a single thing. He says he read it in some Yogi books when he was a lumberjack up in Oregon one time, how to do it. Some old guy working up there had them who use to be a Wobbly. Malloy says he tried it but he never could do it until he got in the Black Hole. You concentrate on a black spot inside your head in front of your eyes and whenever a thought starts to come in your mind, you kind of push it away from you, sort of, and dont think it. After a while, you do it long enough, they stop coming and all you see is just light, kind of.”
“Jesus Christ!” Prew said tightly. “I cant do stuff like that. You mean he goes into trances like them mediums and talks to dead people and all that kind of stuff?”
“Nah,” Angelo said sheepishly, “nothin like that, nothing supernatural. Its just mind control. A way to control your mind.”
“Can you do stuff like that?” Prew asked incredulously.
“Nah,” Angelo said. “He tried to teach me, but I couldnt cut it. Maybe you could, though.”
“Not me; not that kind of stuff.”
“You never know till you tried it. I tried it.”
“What do you do?”
“Me? I got two ways. I alternate them. One way is I make it to myself a game, see?”
“A game!” Prew said.
“Between me and them. They’re tryin to crack me up and I aint going to crack. They can see me, but they’ll never see me saw. I play the game with them and lay there, and take everything they got to give.”
“You make it a game!” Prew said.
“Thats one way. The other way is to remember things out of your life. You remember nice things, pleasant things.”
“I might be able to do that one,” Prew said tightly.
“But they got to be things with no people in them,” Angelo warned him quickly. “And they got to be about things that you dont want.”
“How?” Prew said. “Why is that? I dont get that.”
“Because thats the way the mind works,” Angelo Maggio said. “Dont ask me why it works that way. I dont know. All I know, it does. When you start thinkin about people, then that reminds you of things you done with them or because of them, things you wish you could do again. That brings you and where you are back into it.”
“Yes,” Prew said, remembering Violet Ogure and Alma Schmidt. “I can see that.”
“And when you think about things you want, you already are in it, see? You want those things now, right then. And you cant have them. The main thing is to keep you out of it.”
“Yen,” Prew said. “But how?”
“I think about scenes of Nature,” Angelo Maggio said. “Woods I been in. Trees is awys good. Lakes and mountains you’ve seen. How it is in the fall, with all the colors. The way it is in winter with snow all over everything. I saw an ice storm onct—” he said eagerly and then stopped. “Anyway,” he said sheepishly, “you see what I mean.”
“I see,” Prew said.
“Then,” Angelo said, “when the people begin to come into it, like they awys do, sooner or later, I switch to the game a while, until I can go back where there aint no people in it.”
“What was the longest