• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Virginia and Simon let me play captain. I was grateful, as I had been grateful for their letting me drive my car alone. Nick didn’t say much. His face was as clueless, as warmthless as ever. He seemed to be looking at me contemptuously, wondering what the hell I thought I was proving, waiting for me to show my weak spot, for me to fuck up.

Just ’cause I’ve been nuts, just ’cause I weigh a hundred and thirty pounds, don’t get any ideas that I’m not still someone to be reckoned with.

Jumping gracefully to the dock and moving well and organizing the boat, packing exactly right. If just Simon and Virginia had been there I might have acted very differently. But here was this new element, this unknown who felt like bad news. I piloted the boat perfectly, docked it without a mistake, sprang ashore and tied it up.

Up the beautiful path to the beautiful farm. Back to life, back to my dreams. Back to home and friends. Back to where I was before I was so rudely interrupted.

Kathy was there alone. Jack was in California and she had held down the farm all by herself for a couple of weeks.

She hadn’t been off the farm since before I cracked up. For the first time she really felt that the place was home, that she belonged there. She was radiant. It was good to see her that way. She deserved it.

BRAKES. Maybe Nick was there to make me behave. Brakes. The same way Virginia had, the same way I had hoped getting to town with Simon when I had so obviously stopped behaving would. I wasn’t supposed to be in Eden. Something didn’t want me there and there was obviously nothing in myself that would hold me back, so I needed brakes. I had given up or thrown away my own brakes a few years back. For one thing, Virginia and other things were such good brakes that mine had just sort of atrophied. It was a nice feeling that I could rely on others’ brakes. It was a little unfair to them but they didn’t seem to mind, or maybe they just didn’t notice. So I just set my sights on Eden and put my foot on the floor.

To get to Eden with Virginia and Simon and Kathy, I really didn’t have to start from very far away. So much was understood. We were pretty close to the take-off point, where the acceleration gets pretty hairy. But with Nick there it was back to ground zero and lots to be filled in, lots to be established before I got anywhere near take-off again. That many steps away from being an organism, from Eden, from cosmic orgasm. Simon’s brakes, Kathy’s brakes, Virginia’s brakes? I had burned them all to frazzles. They couldn’t have stopped a toy truck going uphill.

So it was getting to know you instead of getting to Eden. How old are you? Where are you from? Did you go to school? What made you drop out? Etc. Very safe stuff.

In a way, I felt like a diabetic who had to explain to those around him what they should do if he went into a coma. It was trickier than that. Much less for sure is known about my thing than diabetes, and I knew just about nothing then. Dale had been planning to fill me in when he got back from Hawaii. I knew that if I could eat three times a day and get to sleep every night it would help. I knew I had been given heavy doses of vitamin C, vitamin B3, and other vitamins. I didn’t know how they worked if they worked at all, or whether they were just a shot in the dark. I didn’t know whether these were things I needed to take just in rough spots or all the time. The tranquilizers were another mystery. I hated Thorazine. I figured it was just a chemical straitjacket to make me less trouble to the staff.

The funniest mistake I made was that I figured grass would help in a pinch. So when I felt myself losing ground I figured I could just do lots of dope and be fine. I remembered hearing that grass had once been used fairly extensively in mental hospitals.

One of the problems was believing that my problem had anything to do with these pedestrian things. There was such poetry in the disease, it felt only right that there be poetry