The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [71]
“Look, sweetheart, I don’t give a shit what you say.”
“OK, pops, snap-fizzle-crack-pop. Sure, War.”
Nothing pissed Warren off more than my calling him War, but I didn’t dig his calling me sweetheart much so I figured we were even, at least on that score.
Disbelief, naked terror, frustration, towering rage. This can’t be happening. I have to sit here and take this shit? I was furious at Simon. I had put him in charge of reality and he had really botched it. Judas? Was this what he had been up to all along? To deliver me into the hands of War? All that feigned fuzziness, leading me along? What was in it for him? Could I come up with a counteroffer? He wouldn’t look at me. He had the look of a guilty child.
From not eating for quite a while I had developed a facial tic to go along with the general shakiness of my whole body. I was confused, upset, scared. Warren did everything he could to amplify all this. He challenged me to try to stop the tic in my face. He seemed to be trying to impress upon me the fact that he and not I was in control of my body.
“You are dust dust dust. You will die and nothing will remain.” True enough, but not really what I needed to hear at the time.
Someone from the Stevens Street apartment had briefed him about me. He used the information as if he had just divined it clairvoyantly.
“You had a girl. She is not with you now.”
War was hooked on notions of spiritual power, satanic or angelic didn’t make much difference to him. If I had had an inclination to believe that maybe he was somehow hypnotizing me or in control of my heartbeat or an important part of some cosmic plot—candy to a baby, dope to an addict. He did everything to expand and amplify such notions.
He talked about earthquakes and other cataclysmic events. “All this will pass away. There will be nothing left. Nothing.”
He kept changing subjects so often or jumbling them all together that it was hard to keep anything straight.
“Do you see the way the light comes through the curtains? Mountains will crumble into the sea. You had a girl but you didn’t love her, all you wanted to do was fuck her. I have the mayor in my pocket. I know the Koran backwards and forwards. The forests are burning out of control. The Kennedys will all be dust…”
There was a long, long recital of my sins and transgressions. Lust was the biggie. Maybe he was going to straighten everything out by slipping me a whomping dose of acid. There was a direct link between my fuck-ups and mountains crumbling, forests burning, and all of human suffering.
Everything was dying outside. The earth was passing away. Like the tic in my face, it was something I could do nothing about. The only safe place was in Warren’s rinkydink temple. It was like what happened when Atlantis sank, the end of the land of Mu. I had a feeling Warren and I had both been there and had more or less the same conversation. It would probably happen again at the next apocalypse. What a bore.
I looked around the room. No women and no blacks. A petty point, I suppose.
Warren was real. I wasn’t hallucinating him. The other people were acknowledging him as real. If Warren was real, anything was possible. His antics made my hallucinations pretty pale. The voices were the soul of rationality, salt-of-the-earth common sense, next to what he was saying. My wildest thoughts suddenly seemed much too conservative to deal with what was really happening.
If I had been difficult to deal with before Warren, it was nothing compared to what I became afterward. A nuisance turned menace. There was indeed something very heavy and of vast proportions going on. All those thoughts, the voices and the visions, weren’t just ways to while away the time, things that I might some day turn into short stories. There was, in fact, a danger, and I was an important player in whatever was being played out.
A clinical psychologist’s view of the situation might be that before