The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [100]
If it worked, did that mean I had to go through life with this awful threat over my head? If I didn’t get laid every two days or so I’d go crazy? Maybe the problem would get more serious. It would get to be once a day and then once every twelve hours and so on till someone had to invent a twenty-four-hour-a-day fucking machine just for me.
Maybe the object of my affections would work the same way. Now I could stay out of the nut house by giving in to my sexual impulses toward Kathy, later I wouldn’t be able to resist chickens and get away with it.
I was supposed to take my immigration physical the next day, the same goddamned physical I was supposed to take when I went bonkers the last time. What is it with me and this physical, anyway?
Just a few hours earlier it was nothing to worry about. Just another dumb thing. Nothing very exciting one way or another could happen. But now all that was changed. My body was all fucked up again. I was hot when others were cold, cold when others were hot. I was going into faints and shakes bordering on convulsions. My heartbeat seemed all wrong. What would happen if I blanked and ran amuck or whatever it was I did in those blanks? My voice was unrecognizable and words were getting out of place.
Was the prospect of an immigration physical screwing me up this bad? What would happen if anything serious came up?
No matter what it was that was cracking me, there would always be fans, Joe and Marys, rain and wind and smoke in the air. There would always be weird conversations and immigration physicals and sexual confusion and all the other kinds of confusion. What bothered me wasn’t so much the shit, but my low and getting-lower shit tolerance.
I got up and talked with Kathy. I got up and tried to read. I got up and found myself talking with Joe and Mary. Did push-ups, trying to exhaust myself. I tried yoga, meditation, drawing, writing, anything I could get my hands on, and then tried to sleep and then got up again.
I heard voices in the living room. There was light coming under the door. It was Joe, Mary, and Fan talking but their voices sounded strange. I tried to go to sleep.
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? Why her crotch? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Don’t I have enough problems without Day-Glo crotches? I tried not to stare. It seemed an unnecessary touch. 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.
“Huh? Come again?” I had heard but was stalling for a little time.
“Do we have to move to higher ground?” She sounded impatient. The storm outside took on a new meaning, or rather a meaning I had been trying to push out of my mind.
“Higher ground?” I looked at her, trying to catch a glimpse of humor. There was no movement in her face.
“Higher ground is within.” It seemed to be the right thing to say. There was a long, long silence.
Well, these people need a prophet and I guess, times being what they are, short notice and all, I’m the best they could do. They seemed to think I knew something they didn’t, that I had access to cosmic truths. So I started talking. I started teaching. I started preparing them and me for what we were going through. How to deal with the end of the world and how to deal with being crazy. There were plenty of parallels.
“The first lesson is about time. ’Cause time is what you’re about to run