Jamie read swiftly. He should
have been slowed down by the quiet sobbing that he could almost hear coming out
of the bathroom, and/or slowed down by the throbbing of his tailbone as he tried
to sit on the chair, sit on the open couch bed, and then stood shifting from
foot to foot.
He wanted the play
to be great. It wasn't. There was a spot of wonderful dialogue here and there.
And the story unfolded as it should, and the characters declared themselves. But
these were rough pages. But it was a play, Jamie could see. Or would be a
play. If it was muddled, there was still somehow the sense that there was much
more to come. this writing was a construction site of the ascent of an arch that
a whole play is. Jamie was amused that Adam had notes for the play about
paternity blood testing. the year before, Jamie's niece had suffered through a
paternity suit she'd waged against her baby's father. Adam and Jamie had held
her hand through the sad matter. Jamie was also suddenly stunned to realize that
he had known Adam was working on a play from the moment he'd seen him at the
word processor. But Adam hadn't said so. Jamie didn't have proof until now,
reading these pages. It was just high time for it, Jamie concluded. And Adam was
different. Under control.
In the
tub Adam was keening. Now for his Uncle Robert. Now for Kiki. Exhausted from his
night's writing, in mild shock from the gash on his wrist, Adam wasn't even
aware of his low wailing. His senses were dominated by images of Robert and
Kiki.
One day when he was seven,
upon finding himself alone in the kitchen during a visit with his father to his
Uncle Archie's house, Adam did something that he had planned from time to time
for a few years. He hoisted himself in the dumbwaiter that connected the kitchen
with Robert's room, which had once been a second floor sitting room. Adam's
though was to spring out of the little elevator and delight Robert. First Adam
had had to lower the elevator and take out Robert's untouched breakfast tray.
Then he raised himself to the second floor, wondrous and pleasantly terrified by
the ugly viscera of construction in the shaft. He flung himself through the
little doors into Robert's room. But there was no one there.
Dismayed for only a moment, Adam
followed the sound of dripping water to the doorway of Robert's bathroom. Adam
had hesitated there a moment or two, dickering over bathroom proprieties, and
then he had thrown himself through the door.
Robert was black. Dead in the tb.
From the hand that dangled from the tub there was a huge red Japanese lacquered
fan shaped thing oozing over the floor.
Adam screamed. He screamed while
the King of Giggles and Archie and Archie's wife and a visitor ran to Robert's
locked door. He screamed while they screamed at him to let them in. He screamed
during all the minutes it took the maid to find the key. He screamed while the
adults all screamed "Oh my god" upon seeing Robert. He screamed as his father
carried him downstairs. He screamed as police, ambulance, coroner and doctor
came. He screamed for three hours. He screamed until the accumulation of enough
injections of sedatives to make two men sleep for two days made him stop.
Keening with great intensity,
thirty-five year old Adam yearned now for a sedative as he reclined in his bath.
Many sedatives. Well, no, not so many, he amended. Not so many as to die.
Just enough to blot out the notion of death. But there it was. Death. The thing
itself. He had the black thought and image of it. He stopped keening abruptly.
He hadn't screamed much with
Kiki. Just once upon finding her in the morning in their motel room bathroom in
Nashville. then he was mute except for half-whispered answers smothered as he
was immediately with cop questions.
Several days before Kiki had
killed herself, Adam had gone momentarily insane on the campus of a small
college he was visiting in Nashville. After having left the commune in Kentucky
for the last time, after the last confrontation with Angelo McGuire, Adam had
been drifting through Tennessee. He had gone to the small campus upon learning
of an opening for a drama instructor. But while strolling the grounds, he saw a
table with literature on it and spokesmen behind it. Suspended from the card
table by scotch tape was a banner that read "Jews for Jesus". Adam felt as
though he had been punched in the face by this notion that was news to him. His
blood boiled proverbially. He saw red, proverbially, as if the boiling blood
were expanding and overbrimming his eyes. He proverbially went in blindly
swinging, first throwing over the table. Somehow in his madness he heard the
rocks that had anchored the literature knock onto the pavement and saw the
pamphlets take tentatively to the wind while he was wildly but effectively
beating the two men who had been attending the table. Students tried to subdue
Adam. But it took several of them and the Jews for Jesus and two trained
policemen to pin and handcuff him.
Adam had shakingly, numbly paid
the last of his cash for costs and a bribe to be enabled to make a long distance
phone call from the jail after being booked. He had called Kiki at the commune.
There was only one phone at the commune and messages were left with whoever
happened to answer. And messages were relayed at whatever speed and accuracy the
senile gods of latter-day hippiedom happened to be ordaining of late. Kiki found
Adam's message by accident in the gatehouse trash she was disposing of two days
after Adam had called. It took her another day to get the money to bail him out.
She got the money from Angelo's other "wife" on the condition that she never
return to the commune again.
It
took Kiki yet another two days to get to Tennessee from Kentucky because she was
robbed and raped while hitch-hiking. She called her parents. She hadn't seen
them or communicated with them in eight years. And before they would send her
the money she had to denounce her crazy hippie ways, make many confessions of
her improvidence, swear she hadn't slept with any Black men or Jews, and promise
to come home. And so Kiki made her sad, desperate odyssey to bail Adam out.
And they lay in the muggy, cheap
motel room. Adam snored happily, retrieved after five hellish days in jail. And
Kiki was in his bed! A glory for him. A venue for a suicidal nightmare for her.
She saw with maximum distortion
the twisted intensities of her life. She couldn't go back to the commune. She
had only attained number two status in the hierarchy of Angelo McGuire's wives
at her pinnacle anyway. Her parents were the same unrepenting, bigoted,
sniveling middle class cardboard cutouts that she remembered; and what was
worse, she longed for them and their environment and ways. But she was
disconnected from her childhood by drugs before the commune. By soaring,
confusing, leaping conversations with Adam over the years that seemed to be gone
into just for fun. And the contrasting serious, seemingly straightforward but
even more confusing doctrine of the commune. And none of all that language had
anything to do with what her perception might have been all that time if she had
allowed herself to have any thoughts of her own as Adam was always urging her.
And her last hope was crushed.
She had expected Adam to lead her. She had expected him to rise up and take
command of her, her insanity and all, in exchange for her self-sacrificial act
in coming to him. She had expected him to know without telling him that she had
been raped. She had expected him to save her. She didn't know what form the
salvaging would take, but it would be more powerful than LSD, she would be
someone else, lifted to a permanent new plane of existence. Adam would be
revealed as a god. But all Adam had done was eat dinner, make love and fall
asleep. After her orgasms, Kiki was plunged back into her accustomed despair.
Adam wasn't the messiah. That is what McGuire had in the negative suggested by
his latest theory and attack on Adam: McGuire maintained that all male Jews had
messiah complexes; that Adamsky was a prime example. But Adam was not Jesus,
Kiki blackly surmised as the air conditioner sputtered impotently away in the
night.
In the heart of that
night, while Adam slept, Kiki had crept from the bed, drew a bath and slashed
her wrists. Just as Adam had seen some time before that there was a vacuum in
her, nothing but a void in the machinations of the commune, Kiki saw a deeper
black hole and toppled into it. Unautomized by the rhetoric benign or malignant
from Adam or Angelo, or sustained by the mindless prattle or haughty/humble
manners of the commune members, Kiki was undosed that night in the motel.
Without others' madness she was bereft of years of some daily form of emotional
arsenic. She died from having to fall back on her own madness, a madness too
poisoned to be vital.
Now Adam in
his bath dryly guessed well at the depth and darkness of the rent in sense that
had beckoned to and gotten his uncle and Kiki.
Tears of rage washed away the
black thing. He was supposed to be a writer. But with the exception of his two
plays he had been a master of ineffectual speech and understanding all of his
life. His life was flooded, drowned in babble. Like he had gone babbling to
Felix Lord the day before. Like the night's babble on the computer.
"But there's something else," a
different corner of his brain called to his ragings. He studied the bathtub
knobs that were gleaming white, four point stars that read "Hot" on one and
"Cold" on the other while he waited for the cool part of his brain to tell the
hot part what else there was besides death, anger and futility. At last the cool
part of his mind said, "There is hot and cold, black and white. But they can be
mixed. Sorted. Blended. Arranged. Changed. Contained. Made hospitable to
humans." And then all of Adam's mind as one said, "And there is this: Pull
yourself together and act like a man."
Adam sat bolt upright in a siege
of great sloshings. His and the water's movements might have startled him if the
commandment hadn't made him feel so well. He said it to himself out loud. "Pull
yourself together and act like a man." He sniggered. He hadn't been living in
any kind of a world where such things were said. Only in old movies were such
things said, and comic books. But even cynicism chose more sophisticated hosts
these days than such a sentiment as this.
But the effect on Adam was
decidedly favorable. It seemed to put iron in his blood, calcium in his teeth
and bones, and a supple steel in his spine. He decided it was a superior
concept. And he knew he would finish the play and that it would be good. "It's
that easy?" he asked himself: "Pull yourself together and act like a
man?...Alright..." He washed, then dried, dressed and went out to his bed and
laid down.
"Get out of here," he
growled at Jamie. But Adam was asleep the moment after he covered himself with a
blanket and commented in his basic mind that it was fitting to sleep in t-shirt
and jeans because pajamas ought not to be used in day sleeping.
"All right. Just a minute," said
Jamie, not knowing Adam couldn't hear him. Jamie went on then making adjustments
to the telescope that he had brought into Adam's apartment and set up in front
of the great windows. Adam was snoring like an oaf when Jamie was done. Jamie
exited the apartment with many worries about Adam and the play roiling in his
mind; but he exited impaled on a compulsive smile for the joy of it all, too.