The Eden Express Read online

  I believe now that if I placed a twelve-gauge shotgun in my mouth and pulled the trigger, I would cease to have consciousness. I find it a comforting belief. Much of the terror of then was that I had done that or the equivalent and it hadn’t worked.

  Before the crackup, suicidal impulses had been prodded by my mortality: Since some day, why not now? But suicide now sprang from desperate fear of immortality. I kept dying and maintaining some form of consciousness.

  Down from one fifty-five to about one twenty-five pounds, deaf, dumb, and blind, convulsing in my own puke, shit, and piss. If something wanted me to suffer, how much more could they want? If there was a finite amount of suffering in the world, I was sparing someone somewhere something. I was a first-rate safety valve.

  I don’t pretend to know any more than anyone else about what happens after death, but if there is such a thing as hell and it’s anything like some of the things I went through when I was nuts, and you can avoid it by doing things as pretty as not coveting your neighbor’s ass, by all means, DO NOT COVET YOUR NEIGHBOR’S ASS.

  At some point I gave up clothing. It was just too sticky and confining, almost like drowning. No clothes would have maybe been OK if I hadn’t taken it into my head to make a break for it. André and Simon tackled me before I got very far, but a neighbor saw me and told them if he saw me anywhere near his kids, he’d shoot me. Other neighbors were going to call the cops about all the noise I was making, but the Sunshine Boys always managed to calm them down. Somewhere in there I threw a huge rock through the living-room picture window.

  Gradually it became clear even to Simon that they might have to put me in a hospital, if only to save their own sanity.

  TEA PARTY. Twelve days without food or sleep, twelve very active days, hadn’t done wonders for my physique. Even when my eyes were seeing fairly straight, I had a hard time recognizing myself in the mirror. I looked a lot like pictures of refugees from Hitler’s concentration camps. I wasn’t as alarmed by the weight loss as amazed and curious. But there were so many amazing curious things happening that I didn’t spend much time on it.

  My friends were alarmed. Mental illness being a myth and schiz a sane response to an insane world was all well and good, but this kid’s about to starve to death.

  As we found out later, death by starvation wasn’t a far-fetched possibility. According to doctors at the hospital, another week or two would have done the trick. In the good old pretranquilizer days a fair number of schizies went that way. A few still do. Your brain, only about 2 percent of your body weight, consumes 20 percent of your energy. No one’s brain is moving like a schizophrenic’s, not to mention the calories burned running amuck. Stop eating, make it a twenty-four-hour, no-time-out day, and you’ve got one hell of a quick weight-loss program.

  How to get some food into Mark? Their opening ploys were simple enough. Cook food for everyone, give me a plate too, and make like it was a normal meal. The funny thing was how uninterested they were in their own food. All I had to do was shift my weight slightly or lean forward, all eyes would rivet on me and my plate. I teased them some. Pick up the fork, get a little rice on it, start bringing it toward my mouth (you could have heard a pin drop), drop the fork back on my plate, and roll on the floor laughing. It was just too damn funny. Besides, I knew full well that thousands of Bengalis bit the dust for every bite I took. Besides, there wasn’t much point in eating when I wasn’t really hungry.

  Having everyone so eager to have me eat might have very logically led to thoughts of poison, but it didn’t. Even though it smelled a little strange, I knew it was real food. To have eaten it would have proved I was just another jerk raving his brains out, that the world was unsavable, that humanity had no class. Explaining how would take a lot more space than it’s worth. Take my word, it was crystal clear.

  Later, when I did feel sure they were poisoning me, I hummed down my tea without a second thought. Refusing the poison would have been exactly like accepting the food.

  Since the communal dinners were such a flop, they tried a few more things and eventually arrived at the tea party. The tea parties were anything but casual. They were ceremonial rituals. Everyone had his assigned place. The furniture was arranged just so. Seven yellow candles, no electric lights. I sat dead center on the big couch in my sheet, which was the most they had been able to get me to go along with by way of clothing for some time, Simon on my right, Sankara on my left. Sy and André had the seats on either side of the couch. The tea consisted of one huge mug placed in front of me. After a bit of ceremonial rambling I’d gulp down the tea and spit back the last swallow, which was then passed around and theoretically drunk by the others.

  That the tea tasted a bit strange wasn’t wholly attributable to my disordered perceptions. It was loaded with vitamins, protein concentrate, brewer’s yeast, and anything else they could think of. My sense of taste was as badly screwed up as all my other senses, which had a lot to do with my giving up food in the first place and is also why so many schizies think they’re being poisoned. I don’t care how much you trust the people around you, you trust your own senses more. It sure don’t taste like tomato juice.

  I was very grateful that they were poisoning me. As usual, I was looking at things in more than one way, but I couldn’t see anything but good coming from it. First, I had reached the point where whenever I could think straight enough to want anything, I wanted to die. They were putting me out of my misery.

  Second (a bit more complicated), at each tea party they concocted a new and yet more deadly poison. Each segment of humanity mixed up what to them was “poison” and flew it into Vancouver. If I drank it and survived they’d come over to our side, they’d believe that pain and fear were unnecessary, that nothing was poisonous. Some of the poisons were of the pedestrian sort, like cyanide and arsenic, but more often I was drinking distilled hatred and guilt, racism, greed, and the like. My body might be useless in terms of the things I wanted to do with it, but it had been transformed into a filter through which all the poisons of the Earth could pass and come out sweet and pure as spring water.

  This of course was all beside the point to my friends. They were just grateful to have stumbled on a way to get some nutrients into a starving friend.

  FATHER. “Good night, sweet prince, whoever you were or thought you were. Please let me go, Mark.” Dad.

  Of all the awful news I was dealing with, Virge’s death in the earthquake, impending nuclear holocaust, my father’s suicide hit me hardest. None of my friends came right out and told me. Things hadn’t exactly been going my way and it looked like I’d pretty much had my quota of news. But I knew.

  From as early as I was old enough to worry about such things I had worried about his either drinking himself to death or blowing his brains out. He had hinted at it fairly broadly from time to time. Sometimes I thought the only thing holding him back was fear of how it would affect me. “Sons of suicides find life lacking…”—Rosewater.

  Being still able to talk with him took some of the sting away. He actually seemed pretty cheerful. Maybe he had somehow driven me nuts just so he could say good-by and explain a lot of things he hadn’t been able to before.

  “I’m sorry about this, Mark, but think how hard it would be for me to resist this sort of thing. I just wanted to dance with you once before I left.”

  How can it be true

  That I’m talking to you

  In a way so like never before

  It’s a trick

  It’s a snap

  Someone saw through the crap

  We’re in a whole nother ball game

  I’m calling on you

  With a Jewish Hindu

  I forgot to use the phone

  There’s nothing to do

  The shit’s hit the fan

  Would you rather waltz or cancan?

  I don’t understand

  How I’m holding your hand

  But it sure beats being alone

  I cheated I lied


  Found what’s inside

  I broke all the rules

  Used illegal tools

  It should have been done long before

  I was always convinced

  That my words should be minced

  But now it seems things have changed

  The thought that it matters

  Gives my heart patters

  Who’s trying to tell me it’s so?

  That there’s something to gain?

  From this ass-busting pain

  Is a thought I’d rather not think

  That the world could be saved

  By the terrors I’ve braved

  Is worse than the terrors I’ve braved

  I finally said fuck it

  I don’t want to buck it

  I’m tired of being alone

  We had some more substantive talks, mostly about World War II for some reason, but most of it was dancing and giggling. It was lots of fun.

  Even then, a few days away from death by starvation, having zilch earthly control and quite a bit of earthly pain, lots of very nice things were happening. I could hallucinate my saxophone and any side men I wanted. Coltrane, Philly Joe, Cannonball, Paul Chambers, Bill Evans, and I whiled away many an hour with the most nectar-sweet, hard-ass-funky music ever. I did some solo stuff so beautiful I couldn’t stop crying. Monk and I funked out some lovely duets. Dylan dropped in one day, Mose Allison the next. With them I just lay back and listened.

  And it wasn’t just music and musicians. Poets, painters, writers, historical figures, movie stars, old friends. Some I invited, some showed up all on their own.

  Pain and anguish was all that came from trying to maintain contact with the world as I had known it, a world I was no longer able to do anything or be anything in, a world where Virginia and my father were dead and all sorts of other awful things were happening. The nice thing happened when I just gave up on all that.

  TIME TO GO. My father and others had wanted to tell me but things moved too fast. There was no way to get word to me through normal channels, but somehow I had caught on. Not fully maybe, but enough.

  One big clue was a line in my father’s last letter to me. He was talking about his teaching at Harvard and how he was giving it up. “At least it gave me a chance to get to know people who are at home on Earth.” If he wasn’t at home on Earth, then where was he at home? Was I too not really of the Earth? Did he owe allegiance to some other place? In the crunch, would he sell Earth down the river? Was I going to have to choose between Earth and my father?

  The overall tone of the letter was apologetic. His overall tone for the past couple of years had been apologetic. What was he apologizing for? He knew I didn’t dig his New York City fame and fortune bit and the shit he was putting Mother through. He was always saying he had been a not so hot father, which was absurd. But there seemed to be something else he was apologizing for. Something much bigger.

  He and some of the other voices kept trying to get me to curse him. There were numerous indications that that would make things a lot easier for me, but I couldn’t get into it. There’s a Thoreau quote I like: “No man ever profited by cursing his father, no matter how much a curse his father was to him.” And my father has been anything but a curse to me.

  It was time for everyone who wasn’t really at home on Earth to split. If only we could get the hell out of the way and let things take their course. We were nuns milling about in between two opposing armies, keeping both sides from seeing each other except through our eyes. Between man and God, between the living and the dead, the past and the future, between blacks and whites, young and old, men and women.

  Maybe a good battle would clear the air. After the dust settled something better could be built. But no matter what side I chose, no matter how the lines were drawn, I was pretty sure that I’d be purged afterward. My interests were in the ambiguity. I had nothing to gain by things becoming clear and everything to lose. That’s why I was milling around unarmed in the middle of all those battlefields.

  But the time when ambiguity could stay was past. I either had to be as big a jerk as everyone else or get the fuck out of the way.

  FEBRUARY 14: VALENTINE’S DAY. Oh, God, it was awful. The end. So fucking hopeless, so fucking lonely. And getting more and more so and worse and worse. And harder and harder to hang on. And oh, Mother, how did your poor son end up in such a depressing hopeless meaningless mess? And oh, Father, what’s gone so terribly wrong?

  No more chances. No more people, trees, music, dogs. No more anything.

  But then suddenly I had allies. “I thought you guys would never get here.” Simon and my father, or damn convincing hallucinations, were holding me up and talking about getting me the hell out of that apartment. I hadn’t been allowed outside since my nude sprint around the block.

  We were in a car going somewhere. The fuckers didn’t have me yet. My waiting game had paid off. I had allies.

  I’d give almost anything for a tape of my ride to the hospital. My father had a lot on his mind, but still, not to have brought along a recorder verges on criminal neglect. My finest rave is lost forever unless you believe in that big cassette in the sky.

  I didn’t think my rave was being lost at the time. I didn’t know it was just a normal day with a normal father and a normal friend of his son taking his son who had gone crazy to the sort of place you normally take someone who’s gone crazy.

  It was bop talk. Like a ’50s DJ. I wasn’t thinking, it was just all there. Words a mile a minute. No second thoughts. No need or time for them. Music.

  Wazzzzzzzzzzzz Wassa what I thought my rave-a-rap a’ doin’. Passwords. Getting through to different teams and getting them to climb aboard. Start a bandwagon. For what to start a bandwagon? For to show those fuckers for to keep life going. I had something that made H-bombs look like ladyfingers. I had rhythm. And ain’t no mother fucker nowhere nohow gonna take it away.

  “Hey Giuseppe, how good you think that joker swim with some nice new cement booties?”

  “Get the fuck out of the way. The team is coming together, coming through. Anybody I ain’t talkin’ to ain’t gonna get talked to by nobody. Climb aboard or get run the fuck over, Jack. Get with it, Jack, or get off it.”

  I had some modest goals. Like letting a few people know I wasn’t dead, that I was still in there somewhere. That I was salvageable. I had some immodest goals, like saving the world.

  One thing a tape of my ride to the hospital would show was how I was responding to outside events. It was a dialogue. I’d give some sort of a blues rap and then there’d be some horn or something which was a “yes” or “amen” from all blues freaks. I’d do a Mafia thing and they’d answer a woman’s thing and they’d say yes yes. A video tape would be even better. Flashing neon signs and I had some very good raps. Jackhammers had some very encouraging things to say. And big diesel trucks and fire sirens. Who would be dumb enough to try to mess with me and Mack trucks, sirens, electricity, jackhammers, and traffic lights all on my side?

  Hospital. Back at the apartment Simon had asked me if I was ready to go to the hospital. Sure I’m ready to go to the hospital. I’ll go anywhere. Father seems very worried, very nervous. I guess there’s no time to ask questions. Maybe everything will be explained at the hospital.

  Remember Lot’s wife. Full speed ahead. This train is bound for glory. Simon’s driving beautifully, the car’s running perfectly. Who’s against us? How can we lose? We’re on our way, great God, we’re on our way.

  The shifting is music to my ears and the lights are all turning green. Hold on tight, we’re goin’ to make it. We’re passing everything on the road, and I hear myself rapping, cursing nonstop, hitting every password just right.

  And Simon gives a “Wa hoo,” double-clutches down to third, and passes another car. What a ride!

  Why are they taking me to a hospital? Why is everything whizzing by faster and faster? Why am I holding my breath? Why do I feel so strange? Whatever is wr
ong is very strange. This will doubtless be a very strange hospital.

  When the car finally came to a stop, the place looked like the Hyannisport Kennedy compound. I complimented Simon on his driving. My father and Simon turned and looked at me somberly.

  When they left me, when three guys dressed in white started walking me down that long hall, half holding me up, half holding me down, I understood. I had gone too far. I was putting too much on the line. Simon and my father couldn’t go the whole way with me.

  In a way, it was a relief not having any allies any more. Now if I fucked up, I fucked up on my own. I wouldn’t drag a lot of people through the shit with me. But maybe it was just a holding action. They were putting me in cold storage and going out to get more allies.

  Clunk, into that little room. Cuzzzunk, a huge mother bolt ran the whole width of the door. A separation chamber? No one could breathe the sort of stuff I had to breathe to keep alive.

  A soft voice through the door: “Mr. Vonnegut, would you like something to eat?”

  “If you can cook it, honey, I can fuck it.”

  One of the many worst things about being nuts was being so goddamned important. Who was I that such powerful mysterious forces were buggering around with my life? One team would come through cramming my head full of new knowledge, the next would sneak in and erase all the new stuff plus a lot of the old. I’d be crucified and resurrected several times a day.

  If I died lots of wonderful things would happen. If I died lots of awful things would happen. I was a rag doll between two bull mastiffs with very little way to know which one I wanted to get me, let alone have any say in the matter.

  NOW IS THE TIME FOR GODS TO STAND UP FOR BASTARDS. The voice didn’t even have the courtesy to tell me it was Shakespeare.