The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [98]
I remember Mary telling me I didn’t have to worry about any repercussions. The forces of darkness had thrown everything they had at me and I had won. My crackup was like a vaccination. I had rounded the corner and everything was going to get better and better for me.
“I sure as hell hope you’re right.” I remember thinking that the particular demons and spirits we had dealt with so far were small-timers and worrying that as soon as word got back to their big brothers it was going to be shit city again.
“How are we doing this?” Very straightforward question. I don’t remember who asked it.
I wasn’t sure, but I had some hunches. “I’m not sure, but I have some hunches. The potential is always there. You’ve got to somehow get a harmony going. It’s got to be exact. You have to have all the parts and nothing left over. Anything we need is here, as long as we maintain a closed system. Once we establish that, we can become anything. I know it helps to be cut off somehow to realize the necessary completeness and harmony. What we’ve become is a safety valve. We’re letting a lot of steam escape. Safely.”
I think most of the really heavy things happened after my first attempt to get some sleep and pretend nothing very extraordinary was happening.
Kathy and I had brought our sleeping bags with us. The room we were supposed to crash in was a little side room. It might have been an entrance at one point. It was hard to tell, it was such a crazy building. Crazy plumbing, crazy heating, crazy basement, crazy everything. There were piles of books and all sorts of other junk. We stumbled around making separate little nests for ourselves.
Parallels, parallels, parallels. There we were, crashing.
There was Kathy. There was me. Both with the sort of sleeping bags that could zip together to make a double. I was feeling a little sick and nervous and lonely and jittery. That was how it started with Vincent and Virginia. She was feeling bad and lonely and not able to sleep. Vincent rubbed her stomach for her and then one thing led to another. Understandable, even beautiful. But it never happened with me. I never got into these situations where it would be understandable, beautiful, poetic, loving, just what the doctor ordered. It sure would be nice to relax about this sort of crap. It would be a big help toward getting some sleep and feeling more like one of the gang. It made sense in every conceivable way, but I knew it wouldn’t happen. It wasn’t fair, but I couldn’t figure out who was to blame.
A rainstorm had started after dinner and was becoming increasingly violent. I heard someone moving around in the living room. Joe and Mary were saying something was all fucked up with the furnace. I went to use the bathroom just off our little side room. Just as I flushed the toilet, I heard Mary saying, “Don’t flush the toilet.” I confessed and asked if there was anything I could do to fix it. She said very tiredly it could wait till morning. Everything was falling apart.
In the little room where Kathy and I were crashing, I found a few ink and crayon drawings I had done on some earlier visit with Joe and Mary. They seemed terribly important. I sat there looking at them, trying to figure out their import.
I should have known or someone should have known. Known what? That I was nutty as a fruitcake? Trouble ahead? I should have left Virginia? I should have been a painter instead of doing the farm? The world was going to end soon?
Kathy was looking at them too. “You know, Mark, this sort of thing is much more important and real than the farm.”
“Light under bushel burn house down?” I was trying to laugh. It was comforting that if I flunked farm I could be good for something else and that Kathy and others like her would see what I was doing as worthwhile.
Kathy tried to sleep. Her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open; she was breathing in gulps, the way I sometimes did. Virginia hated the way I breathed.