The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [66]
The blanks were a lot like the voices: it’s hard to say exactly when they started. At first there’d be only an instant or two I couldn’t account for. Later I’d be missing whole days. I’d feel myself going away and then I’d feel myself coming back. I had no way to gauge how much time passed during the blanks. When I came out of them anybody could have told me anything. I wouldn’t necessarily have believed it but there was no way I could count it out either.
Sometimes when I got back from my little cosmic jaunts it looked like no time at all had passed in my absence, but so much had happened to me that I felt I must have managed to cram a year or more into an instant of everyone else’s time. Other times when I came back it was as if I had been in some sort of suspended animation. Years had passed for everyone but me. One way or the other I was out of step. That much was clear.
I don’t understand. I don’t understand what it is that I don’t understand. Whatever it is, it’s something I have never understood. I don’t understand why it’s all of a sudden so important that I don’t understand.
I didn’t exactly lose contact with objective reality. There was just so much more going on.
Had someone asked me about what was going on, I would have had quite a bit of trouble taking the questions seriously and even more trouble getting my voice and words to work right. I would have been much more interested in their clothes or face than the questions, and would have thought they were really asking something much deeper. I was on my way to Vancouver, and knew it most of the time, but if asked where I was, that would have been a long way down the line of answers that came to mind.
I can probably tell you as much or more about what really went on those days than lots of people who were sane: the comings and goings of people, the weather, what was on the news, what we ate, what records were played, what was said. My focus was a bit bizarre. I could do portraits of people who were walking down the street. I remembered license numbers of cars we were following coming into Vancouver. We paid $3.57 for gas. The air machine made eighteen dings while we were there.
We arrived in Vancouver in the late afternoon. At that point I knew very clearly that the world was ending and that it was my fault. The only hope was for me to get out of the car and drown myself in the harbor. But somehow in downtown rush-hour traffic Simon managed to stop me and the voices seemed very disappointed with me for not trying harder. I had really really really fucked up big big big. I was sure that the next stop was hell and even more sure that I deserved it.
The next stop was really the Stevens Street apartment, where I had said good-by to Virginia only two weeks before though it seemed very much like lifetimes. Everyone but Sankara was out. Sankara seemed to be looking at us like we were ghosts, but he was trying to be cool about it. I muttered something about having to lie down and went into one of the bedrooms and lay down, trying very hard to get some sort of grip on myself.
I spent the next few hours desperately trying to figure out what was happening to me and how to clue Sankara in on it. I’d come up with something that seemed right, get up and go into the living room, where Simon and Sankara were talking, and try to explain everything. Sankara would just say, “Sure, far out, that’s cool.” I obviously wasn’t putting it right, so I’d go back to the bedroom and try again.
Somewhere in there Sy and André came home and I tried to explain it to them too. They had similar reactions. I became more and more alarmed at how these people could go on like nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
“You know you’re in hell, don’t you?” The voices said that a lot.
“All I know is that I don’t like it much.”
“You know Virginia’s dead. You know your father’s dead. You know the world is ending. You know you’re dead. You know you