Child of Fortune (47 page)

"The bodhis speak of a spiritual parameter to nirvana as well," I reminded him. "For surely there is more to it than endless toxicated carnival."

"Vraiment," Guy said. "Can you not smell the state of perfect spiritual harmony in which these fortunate people exist, the animal grace of every move, their beatific visages. Is this not the ultimate state all men seek?"

"Je ne sais pas ..." I said. "I see harmony and grace, vraiment, but I have no wish to become a member of this perfected company."

"Nor I, alas," Guy said quite regretfully, "for since we can never be innocently perfect Bloomenkinder, these cannot be our perfect flowers." His visage brightened. "But does it not promise a Garden of more sapient Perfection for such as we further on in the psychic interior? Ah, Sunshine, I can smell it on the wind ..."

Vraiment even I could at least dimly perceive the allure of this promise, for who could deny that I indeed beheld the possibility of a certain sort of human perfection?

For the Bloomenkinder, if one granted them awareness at all, must indeed exist in a state of perpetual bliss. Had not their desires been reduced to sex, food, drink, and repose, were these not met with immediate gratification as soon as they were aroused by the perfumes of the proprietors? Did they not sleep and eat and make love with the perfect wu of zen archers?

Which is to say that even masked I could feel the beneficence of the Bloomenveldt, the care it seemed to take for the animal happiness of its charges. Who was to say that somewhere deeper in its heart that puissant concern did not extend to the sapient spirit, for had we not already encountered flowers which would seem to have gifted the dying babas with the vision of enlightenment to illumine their final hours?

So did I slide into a dreamy state myself, so was I almost tempted to remove my filter mask and breathe the perfume of this fairyland garden, so did I consider asking now for my own turn as psychonaut, so was I all but seduced by the forest spirit.

Until at length we happened to pass close by one of the great rainbow-hued puffballs.

Upon close inspection, this flower proved to be compounded of thousands of tiny blooms of red, blue, green, yellow, or mixed tints thereof, gathered together to form a round fluffy hedge atop a short thick stalk surrounded by an apron of thick, mossy, yellow pollen.

Upon this floral blanket crawled two chubby, torpid, naked human infants, entirely unattended, which struck me as the height of parental irresponsibility and hardly indicative of enlightened beings.

But when I examined the stalk of the puffball more closely, I saw the ultimate extent to which the Bloomenkinder had surrendered their spirits to the flowers.

Around the circumference of the stalk grew a ring of bright pink mounded protuberances which dimpled out at their centers into tiny tubular carmine teats. And teats they were in more than metaphor, for suckling on three of them, eyes closed in gurgling pleasure and squirming slowly in delighted contentment, were three more human infants.

***

Upon confronting this ghastly example of vegetative motherhood, I fairly dragged Guy away from the flower. "Put on your mask!" I hissed. "We must talk at once in the cold clear light of day."

"I have no wish to put on my mask," Guy said airily.

"That is exactly the problem," I snapped, in no mood to take no for an answer, and I reinforced my words with tugs and kicks and frowns and gesticulations, as I shepherded Guy out of the village of the Bloomenkinder, and if he had not been persuaded by the agitated determination of my will, I might very well have essayed a resort to brute force.

"Mask yourself!" I demanded when I had gotten him to a leaf well clear of floral influences. "I do believe this has gone more than far enough!"

"Certainly not"' Guy replied in a tone of infuriating tranquility ."Indeed, why do you not toss aside your own forthwith, for upon so doing, you will never wish to filter out the perfumes of paradise again ..."

"Merde, Guy, just listen to yourself!" I fairly snarled. "Proof enough that it's time we gave over this mad quest and returned eastward to the coast!"

"Quelle chose!" he exclaimed. "Return to the coast? Give over our quest? When we are this close to attaining the ultimate object thereof!"

"To attaining what?" I snapped. "Surely not even you wish to become an empty Bloomenkind of the forest, blissfully content to mindlessly copulate, eat fruit, and sleep, while your sentience is given over to the pheromonic massage of your backbrain, and your offspring suckle at vegetative teats!"

"Of course not," Guy said airily. "Here I smell only perfect flowers for perfect Bloomenkinder. The Perfumed Garden of our perfection must surely lie deeper within."

"Phagh!" I snorted. "How much more such perfection do you require? Do not these Bloomenkinder satisfy your criteria of perfect symbiotic union with their flowers? They eat, sleep, and copulate at the behest of their floral overseers in a state of blissful surrender thereto, and rather than drink the milk of imperfect human sentience, they are weaned on the sap of the lotus!"

"Vraiment, the flowers lovingly husband the welfare of their humans ..."

"At the price of their human spirits, a pact known to be a devilish bargain since our ancestors climbed down from their trees!"

"Devilish bargain?" scoffed Guy. "Have we not seen flowers who offer molecules of enlightenment to dying humans in their hour of need? How much more proof of the Bloomenveldt's love for our species can you require?"

"Merde!" I exclaimed, having long since had enough of this futile dialectic. "Will you not return to the coast with me now?" I said, knowing full well the answer, for all too clearly his vaporous whim was set in iron.

"Will you now refuse to go forward with me into the glorious promise of the Bloomenveldt's heart?"

We stood there alone in the Enchanted Forest, each attempting to stare the other down at this fateful karmic nexus.

"If I insist on turning back, will you go on alone?" I at length demanded in a fury.

"If I insist on going forward, will you return alone?" Guy rejoined in a smug tone of tranquil sweetness.

"Will you not at least don your mask?" I pleaded despairingly.

"Will you not now doff yours so that as comrades, lovers, and true Children of Fortune, we may breathe the perfumes of paradise as a single perfect spirit?"

"Hijo de caga, nom de merde"' I snarled, admitting with as perfect a vacuum of good grace as I could muster that he had won.

For while Guy may have been bluffing, while he might in the end have followed me had I turned my back and strode eastward boldly, I knew full well that I could not fail to follow him if he turned his back on me. For not only did my cowardly aspect dread the thought of lone travel on the Bloomenveldt, but my more heroic nature could not abandon a comrade spirit in the jungle whether or not that spirit would have been ready to abandon me to follow his star, and no matter how much ire I now felt against him.

And to turn the screw of my frustrated fury a notch tighter, I knew full well that Guy had been able to win this contest of wills precisely because he knew this too.

***

And so I found myself following Guy ever deeper into the Bloomenveldt, or rather being dragged along like a small girl leashed to a large hound hot upon a scent.

For the rest of the day, Guy bounded along in great leaps to the west, pausing only to take his high hanging jumps from time to time to sniff at the air, like just such a hound following a pheromonic trail through a realm of perception wherein the bold relief of the olfactory topography belied the apparently featureless plain of the eye's vision.

By the time we stopped for the night, I was in a foul and sullen humor indeed and hardly in any mood for discourse with the likes of him, mystic or otherwise.

But Guy Vlad Boca read nothing of this in either my mien or my silence. Vraiment, he hardly gave over his blissful babblement even while eating and drinking, he noticed not the perfect one- sidedness of the conversation, indeed I could not be entirely sure that he even noticed my existence, so toxicated was he with the glories of the perfumed visions with which his brain was so thoroughly besotted.

"... I know it is there now, for I can taste it calling to me on the wind, faint but surging with power, as one may sense the life-giving waters of a mighty river flowing unseen and unheard not so far away in the forest, the great river of the Bloomenveldt spirit flowing around me and through me, carrying me away in the loving embrace of its clear blue waters ..."

Und so endless weiter. Indeed by the time we had finished our meal and I could look forward to the nighttime surcease of consciousness, it was hard to be sure who or what spoke, for Guy by now was not even looking at me as he declaimed, rather did his eyes abruptly shift randomly from focus to focus like those of a nervous rodent, or worse, like the eyes of a man in the throes of some arcane possession. So too did his voice take on a deep and almost syrupy timbre which I had never heard before, and the pronoun of the first person had vanished from the repertoire of his Lingo.

"... home to the spirit's safe harbor in the ancestral forest, back to the long-lost garden, forward into the perfume of perfect bliss, when you were Bloomenkinder of the Earth in the innocent spirit's grace, the great wheel turns, and the rain returns to the sea, and the many return to the one from whence they came and that moment is forever ..."

There I lay in the darkness longing for sleep while Guy, or whatever dybbuk of the wood spoke through him, assailed me and the night with these visions in a hypnogogic voice which at length had me finding myself hearkening to them, hearing in them the whispered blandishments of some long lost lover.

Vraiment, I found myself erotically aroused, as if about to be enthralled by some incubus. Alors, when I became aware of this state, my present distaste for the person of Guy Vlad Boca was overcome by both endocrine imperative and the need to do whatever had to be done to still that insinuating voice.

Which is to say, I thumbed on my ring of Touch and forthrightly applied it to the handle of the natural man.

But the same would not rise to the occasion, my own best efforts and the puissant craft of Leonardo to the contrary! For all my efforts, I might have been massaging a carrot. Indeed such a tuber would in fact have been an improvement when it came to firmness of form.

But when at limply endless length I had succeeded in falling into a frustrated, fearful, and petulant sleep, I was rudely awoken by Guy, who had already set to work with a virile vigor and not so much as a by-your-leave.

Never had Guy Vlad Boca been such a puissant lover, never had he taken unto himself such a machismo of command, for he persisted silently and remorselessly against my outrage, which was soon somewhat diminished in conviction by my hours of sexual constriction and the entirely uncharacteristic tantric mastery of his assault.

Vraiment it was an overweening assumption of the most primitive masculine prerogative, but under the circumstances, it became rather difficult to maintain the proper feminine outrage in the face of an endless succession of mighty ecstatic cusps, each one a greater relief than the last, each one propelling me further down the merciful black velvet path of sweet oblivion, until I expired into the arms of sleep and my demon Bloomenveldt lover.

***

The morning after, naturellement, it was quite another matter. "What got into you last night, Guy Vlad Boca?" I shouted at him upon awakening and disentangling myself from his embrace with a vigor that entirely disregarded the sanctity of his slumber. "How dare you force yourself upon me against all my protests to the contrary!"

Guy, upon awakening to this loud indignation, favored me with a smile of radiant innocence.

"Alors," I said angrily, but not without a certain ambiguous embarrassment, "now you will grin at me like a simian and tell me how much I enjoyed it!"

"Enjoyed what?" Guy said, regarding me with the same shining visage of innocent ignorance.

Could it be that this ignorance of all unchivalrous behavior was not feigned? Vraiment, did Guy Vlad Boca have this perfect power to artlessly dissemble under even the best of circumstances?

"It's really true, Guy?" I said, studying him closely for any sign of irony. "You remember nothing?"

Guy slowly rose to a sitting position. Still smiling the same bodhi smile, he turned his face from me to look westward across the endless ethereal Bloomenveldt, pastelled to ghostly luminescence as the rising sun only began to burn away the morning mist.