The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [97]
It was harder and harder to concentrate. That was OK. Attendance wasn’t required. Everyone seemed to be drifting in and out of it. Eventually we’d all drift off to sleep. Tomorrow was another day.
Trying to pay attention wasn’t very rewarding. It made me feel sicker and there never seemed to be much worth paying attention to. Letting myself drift off seemed to make my stomach feel better.
I was in a drift-off that seemed to go on forever when suddenly a rush of glee seemed to sweep away all the nausea, all the stuffiness, all the fog. Then, “Oh, shit,” my heartbeat and the music were going together. Crazy silliness, but such an irrefutable fact that there wasn’t much point in arguing with it.
The next song was a little slower. I relaxed and felt much better. But what if it had been faster? All anyone who wants to kill me would have to do is flip that little lever to 78. The perfect crime. What if someone suddenly got it into their head they wanted to hear “Flight of the Bumblebee”? “Please, please. Anything but ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’!” But how could I say anything like that without everyone thinking I was nuts again?
All of a sudden I was somewhere without the faintest idea of how I got there. Remembering what a bitch it was philosophically to prove that there was anything but the present if there was even that. Not having the faintest idea what time it was. How long had I blanked? A minute, a day, years, millennia? Maybe I didn’t blank at all. Maybe I just think I blanked. But something’s out of tune. Either more has happened to here than me or more to me than here. One of us has changed.
When I was able to think at all, I’d go back over the evening, trying to figure out what the fuck had fucked up.
We’ve been talking about weird things, but lots of people talk about weird things, especially when there’s that much dope going around. Astrology, ESP, drugs, hypnotism, schizophrenia, etc. All perfectly standard-issue topics of conversation. Talking about weird things wasn’t enough to account for things getting so weird.
I talked less weirdly about the weird things we were talking about. I was the conservative, but conservative with a twist. Fuck me and my goddamned twists. Conservative with a twist, hippie with a twist, artist with a twist, crazy with a twist, everything with a goddamned twist. I couldn’t do anything straight to save my twisty life.
Maybe I saw the possibility of taking everyone up on all their weirdness and couldn’t resist. “So you like weirdness. Try this one on for size.”
Telling them about being in a nut house brought weirdness a couple of light-years closer to home, but how could I resist? This was my first shot at virgins. Everyone else I had talked to already knew about it. They had all had a chance to think about it some. This was my first chance to bring the news. And besides, it fit perfectly into all the other weird things they were talking about. All in all, I had shown great restraint in not bringing it up a lot sooner than I did.
They had so many misconceptions about insanity and seemed so interested I had to try to straighten them out. Maybe I let myself go nuts for the purpose of instruction: Mark’s Real Life University course in psychosis.
How much did I tell them about the Eden Express?
One way or another, the ball got rolling. Curiosities were pricked. Lots of private hazy hunches were confirmed and focused all at once. We saw doors we had never seen before and found keys we didn’t know we had.
We started off light, doing things like straightening out a kink in Joe’s back. Apparently he had been more or less in pain from it for years. It had something to do with his father but that’s another story. Then we got into some subtler things, like a kink or two in Joe and Mary’s marriage.
It’s hard for me to describe, because when I was at my best I wasn’t really there at all. We stumbled on