Dreams That Burn In The Night (11 page)

The man moaned
weakly and rolled over. Something was wedged between him and the wall. The man's breathing was
harsh, ragged. In the dim light of the alley, his wounds were hard to see but I knew he would die
from them. His face was torn in at least three places and one of his eyes was gone. I could feel
the life forces draining away. There appeared to be nothing further that I could do. I had come
too late. As I turned to leave, I sud­denly noticed the object between the wall and the dying
man's body. It was a severed head.

Just then the man's
soul rose unsteadily to its feet, glowing softly in the night mist. It reached out and touched my
hand and that touch was eloquent. I found myself seized up in a great mys­tery. I found myself
filled with the old hunger and, almost unbid­den, the blind womb, the cave mind, the dark part of
me opened in my mind and the telepathic gift that has been the curse and death sentence of my
life began in me again. A wave of lightning passed through me, thoughts tumbling madly in a
stream, a con­tinuum of shadings and nuances springing from the minds of those around me. The
dying man's soul hovered above the body, taking the last essence of his bodily life force as it
made complete its exit. There was a shimmering quality to the thought tendrils that streamed
toward me from the dead man's soul. As my mind opened, as the dead man's soul poured into my
mind, I began or­dering its perceptions, refitting its thoughts into a chronology, a matrix that
would allow me to read it. Each man in the world, each creature has its own mental language, and
I, and I alone of my kind, am doomed to know how to read them.

That is my curse.
My curse. I am an unwilling spy in the house of love, in the carnival of life. I have longed for
blindness. I long to be a blind cave fish who makes a career out of sleep. Gentle sleep. But not
for me. I prowl the night when all are snug in their beds except the creatures, the mad ones who
instinctively fear me. Night is a comforting time, for the great mass of them, the screamers, the
bleeders, the howling, insane, frantic insect cycle of them, are asleep. I take comfort in their
dreams, their night­mares, and in the day, I sleep, projecting my nightmares on them.

"I've put a bullet
hole in the wind," said the dead man's spirit. "My name is Carpenter."

My reordering of
his mind was far from complete. I found my­self as yet unable to reply.

"Come with me and
I'll tell you something," said the spirit. "Hold my essence together with your mind and I'll tell
you some­thing."

"Agreed." I could
now manage as I fitted him better into my thought stream.

"It was a black
night," said the soul of Carpenter, "and hot as the red suns of Ishi. I had a hot little woman
from Kroalian with me and we'd had a row. A blind, smashing fight and she ran from me, the little
bitch, she ran away and I'd paid my money."

"Please!" I
managed. "You must be faster, and more to the point. There is a limit to the time I can hold your
life force against dissipation."

"I ran blindly,
drunk as a space-happy harpy, in the dark, up this street and down that one. I guess I must have
passed out somewhere along the way. When one of my buddies found me, I was asleep in the street
outside our fleabag hotel. In a leather pouch beside me was this head."

"Faster! Speed!" I
cried as I felt the life forces beginning to leak, to diffuse within the circle I had made to
bind it.

With a kind of
panic, the dead voice of Carpenter continued. "I thought I would keep it as a souvenir. But I no
sooner got back to town with it than a Riyall showed at my door and offered me a thousand credits
for it. I refused and two nights later they mur­dered me for it."

As the diffusion of
the soul became more pronounced, the dis­tance into Carpenter's soul that I could reach began
shrinking. At the moment when I would have reached into the secret of the significance of the
head, Carpenter began fading, spreading into a color wheel of glowing light, thoughts scattered,
cut off from their center. I released the essence of him and, unbound, the soul of Carpenter shot
upward into the night sky to join the other loose molecules of the universe, the void.

I paused a moment
to reorient myself, to clean the shield away that I had used to hold Carpenter's soul together.
My eyes fell with curiosity upon the head. It was well preserved, showing no sign of decay. I
took hold of it by the hair and tucked it under my
arm. On my way home I met no one, and as I walked, the head beneath my arm stirred
with a restless energy, an energy unlike any that I have ever explored.

I put the head in a
glass bowl and placed it on the table in the center of my living room. I had detected a slight
tremor in the eyelids, a flutter as if they were on the point of opening. I in­tended to examine
it the next morning. For now I would sleep. And it was while I slept that the eyes opened and
moved in their sockets, watching.

(with Jim
Morrison)

"Conception," said
Peter Renoir, "like imagination, is automatic and runs in grooves. Creativity in sexual matters
is confined at every moment to the idiom it is creating."

Semina finished a
cigarette in a conventional manner and stubbed it out on the cover of a literary
magazine.

"I question your
wisdom. I would add that a lover is only faith­ful either by ignorance of all others or by his
own love of self."

"Nudity," continued
Peter Renoir, "is appropriate for Greek gods. But to us, it is repulsive. The influences of the
harmony of impressions that nudity provides us rob us of the veil that con­ceals natural
imperfections."

"Such as our
next-door neighbor who spends a lot of time locked in his bathroom and is fond of . .
."

"No specifics,"
snapped Peter Renoir. "I don't care how well built he is. This fatalistic seeking in you for
inordinate length is a piddling love of decoration."

"To love decoration
is to enjoy synthesis," she said. "It is to have hungry senses and unused powers of
attention."

Peter Renoir looked
at her and imagined her as the ideal Gothic church, enriched by forbidden altars, stalls,
chantries, and tombs—cunningly devised ornaments that were the reason for the whole
edifice.

They were sitting
in the back seat of a 1957 blue Chevy. It was the night of the senior prom. They were both naked.
She was a cheerleader and he had read too much Victor Hugo.

"I am experiencing
lust," said Semina, smoothing mustard on her hot dog with her finger. It was his first seduction.
It was her third hot dog.

"We should try to
restrain ourselves," said Peter Renoir. "Un­less, of course, you think you can arouse me yet
again and can justify it by animal sincerity."

"Acquaintance is a
necessary association between passion and a second erection. By this I mean arouse yourself. I
hardly know you. After all, this is only our first date."

Peter Renoir paled
slightly under the stars. He had stained the back seat and he knew his father would kill him.
This thought was an irrational fear that served as the springboard for the pre­vention of a
second erection. Then too, it was her period and it made her particularly abusive and given to
painful sermonizing. It was a case of arrested envelopment.

"Would you like a
cigarette?" he asked, offering her several.

"I would," she
said, "if I did not love you more."

"It's late and we
really ought to be going."

"It's early and the
picture hasn't even started yet," pointed out Semina, who had a flair for accuracy.

"Let's not argue,"
replied Peter Renoir. "It's fate. Kiss me. Arouse me."

"Don't get pushy,"
advised Semina. "We happen to breathe and on that account we are interested in breathing and that
is that. But sex is intentional. Besides, reproduction, like nutrition, con­tains a prophecy of
false triumph. Fat people give birth to thin children. What then of the lowly IUD?"

"IUD?"

"Rubber, then, or
diaphragm," suggested Semina. "There must be something worth wondering about. Our devisings have
become too intentional."

"We could wonder
about our future."

"Wouldn't that be
boring?"

"Perhaps," admitted
Peter Renoir.

She smiled at him
with all of her teeth. "There is so little of a percentage in it for us. The future, in any case,
is prerational. It is vigorous. It is unconvincing because it intends to be sincere even if it
winds up being second-rate. If we were wise, we should look at the future, and decide not to go,"
said Semina, spreading her legs.

"Let's screw," said
Peter Renoir, trying to come up with a via­ble alternative.

She looked like a
dollar bill, wrinkled and stuffed in some forgot­ten pocket.

He looked like a
hand that had never known work.

And they met
somewhere in the dark of the night in one of those lonely little places with bad lighting and
overpriced drinks.

And she said, as he
approached her, "This seat is taken." When it wasn't.

And he smiled with
very white teeth, apologizing. "Excuse me, sir, seeing as how you're invisible, perhaps you won't
mind if I sit on your lap."

And he sat down in
the seat beside her and they looked at each other.

After a little
while, when neither of them had made a move to say a single cliched thing, she sighed.

He noticed the sigh
but did not mention it.

"I guess I'm going
to fall in love with you," she said.

"I know," he
said.

"But you probably
won't fall in love with me."

"Probably not," he
admitted with rare candor.

"And you'll sleep
with me and tell me that you won't leave me."

He
nodded.

"And we'll sit in
bars and darkened theaters and hold hands like we were thirteen-year-olds about to steal our
first kiss. And we'll tell jokes in bed and eat crazy things like pizza with whipped cream at
four in the morning, and when I look in the mirror I won't see someone who's thirty-eight years
old with a body that's beginning to sag, I'll see a woman in love."

"All of those
things," he promised.

"And the first time
I touch you, the rough skin of your hand will make me jump with a secret thrill of, not pleasure,
no, not that, of discovery, I think. That first sense that another human body is touching mine.
And all the small moments we share will rise above us, somehow made monumental and larger than
our­selves."

He bought her a
drink. She bought all the rest of them. They drank quite a few.

"Maybe we'll go for
long walks and the rain will catch us and we'll huddle together in some doorway out of the rain
and we'll hold each other very tightly and the cold won't matter and the rain won't matter
because the only thing that exists is that feeling, that rosy glow that I'll have inside when you
put your arms around me."

"Don't forget the
boat rides in the lake. And picnics on sunny afternoons," he said, never looking in the mirror
hanging over the bar, never seeing his own face. He never had to look because he knew his face
was perfectly posed.

He said, "And don't
forget the nights beside the fireplace, our faces glowing with the wine and the cheery heat of
the flames."

"Never forget those
things," she agreed. "I'll not forget them."

She would pay for
the taxi. He didn't even offer because he knew she would.

"I'm rich," she
said.

"Good for you,
lady," said the taxi driver, who did not exist as far as his two passengers were
concerned.

"I knew," he
said.

"I knew you knew,"
she said. "It's the money, isn't it? That's the only reason, isn't it?"

Without hesitation,
he answered, "Shall I lie?"

"Yes," she said.
"Please do. This new honesty. I'm not sure I totally approve of it. I think I'd much prefer the
lies."

"As you please," he
said, smiling. She was no different from the others, just a little more shopworn.

"I've never met
anyone like you," he told her, one hand seek­ing hers.

"Dozens like me,
but go on," she said, watching the meter.

"Until I met you
tonight in the bar, I thought I'd seen all the beautiful women in the world. Now that I've seen
you, I've one more to add to the score."

"Yes," she said,
holding his hand.

"I've been lonely
in a thousand places tonight and I would have been lonely in a thousand more if I had not met
you. With you by my side I'll never be lonely again."

"Never be lonely
again," she said, picking up the last of his words as she dug the fare out of her
purse.

The taxi sped off
down the street. She nodded curtly at the doorman who held the door open for them.

She pushed the
button marked "Penthouse" and the elevator ascended.