Our Lady of Darkness

9

There was so much stuff in Saul’s room and such a variety of it, apparently unorganized (in this respect it was the antithesis of Gun’s), that you wondered why it wasn’t a mess—until you realized that nothing in it looked thrown away or tossed aside, everything looked loved: the stark and unglamorized photographs of people, mostly elderly (they turned out to be patients at the hospital, Saul pointed out Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Willis); books from Merck’s Manual to Colette, The Family of Man to Henry Miller, Edgar Rice to William S. Burroughs to George Borrow (The Gypsies in Spain, Wild Wales, and The Zincali); a copy of Nostig’s The Subliminal Occult (that really startled Franz); a lot of hippie, Indian, and American Indian beadwork; hash-smoking accessories; a beer stein filled with fresh flowers; an eye chart; a map of Asia; and a number of paintings and drawings from childish to mathematical to wild, including a striking acrylic abstraction on black cardboard that teemed with squirming shapes and jewel and insect colors and seemed to reproduce in miniature the room’s beloved confusion.

Saul indicated it, saying, “I did that the one time I took cocaine. If there is a drug (which I doubt) that adds something to the mind instead of just taking away, then it’s cocaine. If I ever went the drug route again, that’d be my choice.”

“Again?” Gun asked quizzically, indicating the pot paraphernalia.

“Pot is a plaything,” Saul averred, “a frivolity, a social lubricant to be classed with tobacco, coffee, and the other tea. When Anslinger got Congress to classify it as—for all practical purposes—a hard drug, he really loused up the development of American society and the mobility of its classes.”

“As much as that?” Gun began skeptically.

“It’s certainly not in the same league as alcohol,” Franz agreed, “which mostly has the community’s blessing, at least the advertising half of it: Drink booze and you will be sexy, healthy, and wealthy, the ads say, especially those Black Velvet ones. You know, Saul, it was funny you should bring paraldehyde into your story. The last time I was ‘separated’ from alcohol—to use that oh-so-delicate medical expression—I got a little paraldehyde for three nights running. It really was delightful—the same effect as alcohol when I first drank it—a sensation I thought I’d never experience again, that warm, rosy glow.”

Saul nodded. “It does the same job as alcohol, without so much immediate wear and tear on the chemical systems. So the person who’s worn out with drinking ordinary booze responds to it nicely. But of course it can become addictive, too, as I’m sure you know. Say, how about more coffee? I’ve only got the freeze-dried, of course.”

As he quickly set water to boil and measured brown crystals into colorful mugs, Gun ventured, “But wouldn’t you say that alcohol is mankind’s natural drug, with thousands of years of use and expertise behind it—learning its ways, becoming seasoned to it.”

“Time enough, at any rate,” Saul commented, “for it to kill off all the Italians, Greeks, Jews, and other Mediterraneans with an extreme genetic weakness in respect to it. The American Indians and Eskimos aren’t so lucky. They’re still going through that. But hemp and peyote and the poppy and the mushroom have pretty long histories, too.”

“Yes, but there you get into the psychedelic, consciousness-distorting (I’d say, instead of -enlarging) sort of thing,” Gun protested, “while alcohol has a more straightforward effect.”

“I’ve had hallucinations from alcohol, too,” Franz volunteered in partial contradiction, “though not so extreme as those you get from acid, from what they tell me. But only during withdrawal, oddly, the first three days. In closets and dark corners and under tables—never in very bright light—I’d see these black and sometimes red wires, about the thickness of telephone cords, vibrating, whipping around. Made me think of giant spiders’ legs and such. I’d know they were hallucinations—they were manageable, thank God. Bright light would always wipe them out.”

“Withdrawal’s a funny and sometimes touch-and-go business,” Saul observed as he poured boiling water. “That’s when drinkers get delirium tremens, not when they’re drinking—I’m sure you know that, too. But the perils and agonies of withdrawal from the hard drugs have been vastly exaggerated—it’s part of the mythos. I learned that when I was a paramedical worker in the great days of the Haight-Ashbury, before I became a nurse, running around and giving Thorazine to hippies who’d O.D.’d or thought they had.”

“Is that true?” Franz asked, accepting his coffee. “I’ve always heard that quitting heroin cold turkey was about the worst.”

“Part of the mythos,” Saul assured Franz, shaking his longhaired head as he handed Gun his coffee and began to sip his own. “The mythos that Anslinger did so much to create back in the thirties (when all the boys who’d been big in Prohibition enforcement were trying to build themselves equal narcotics jobs) when he went to Washington with a couple of veterinary doctors who knew about doping race horses and a satchel of sensational Mexican and Central American newspaper clippings about murders and rapes and such committed by peons supposedly crazed with marijuana.”

“A lot of writers jumped on that bandwagon,” Franz put in. “The hero would take one drag of a strange cigarette and instantly start having weird hallucinations, mostly along the lines of sex and bloodshed. Say, maybe I could suggest a ‘Weird Underground’ episode bringing in the Narcotics Bureau,” he added thoughtfully, more to himself than them. “It’s a thought.”

“And the agonies of cold-turkey withdrawal were part of that mythos picture,” Saul took up, “so that when the beats and hippies and such began taking drugs as a gesture of rebellion against the establishment and their parents’ generation, they started having all the dreadful hallucinations and withdrawal agonies the cop-invented mythos told them they would.” He smiled crookedly. “You know, I’ve sometimes thought it was very similar to the long-range effects of war propaganda on the Germans. In World War Two they committed all the atrocities, and more, that they were accused of, mostly falsely, in World War One. I hate to say it, but people are always trying to live up to worst expectations.”

Gun added, “The hippie-era analogue to the SS Nazis being the Manson Family.”

“At any rate,” Saul resumed, “that’s what I learned when I was rushing around the Hashbury at dead of night, giving Thorazine to flipping flower children per anum. I couldn’t use a hypodermic needle because I wasn’t a real nurse yet.”

Gun put in reflectively, “That’s how Saul and I met.”

“But it wasn’t to Gun I was giving the rectal Thorazine,” Saul amended. “—that would have been just too romantic—but to a friend of his, who’d O.D.’ed, then called him up, so he called us. That’s how we met.”

“My friend recovered very nicely,” Gun put in.

“How did you both meet Cal?” Franz asked.

“When she moved here,” Gun said.

“At first it was only as if a silence had descended on us,” Saul said thoughtfully. “For the previous occupant of her room had been exceptionally noisy, even for this building.”

Gun said, “And then it was as if a very quiet but musical mouse had joined the population. Because we became aware of hearing flute music, we thought it was, but so soft we couldn’t be sure we weren’t imagining it.”

“At the same time,” Saul said, “we began to notice this attractive, uncommunicative, very polite young woman who’d get on or off at four, always alone and always opening and closing the elevator gates very gently.”

Gun said, “And then one evening we went to hear some Beethoven quartets at the Veterans Building. She was in the audience and we introduced ourselves.”

“All three of us taking the initiative,” Saul added. “By the end of the concert we were pals.”

“And the next weekend we were helping her redecorate her apartment,” Gun finished. “It was as if we’d known each other for years.”

“Or at least as if she’d known us for years,” Saul qualified. “We were a lot longer learning about her—what an incredibly overprotected life she’d led, her difficulties with her mother…”

“How hard her father’s death hit her…” Gun threw in.

“And how determined she was to make a go of things on her own and”—Saul shrugged—“and learn about life.” He looked at Franz. “We were even longer discovering just how sensitive she was under that cool and competent exterior of hers, and also about her abilities in addition to the musical.”

Franz nodded, then asked Saul, “And now are you going to tell me the story about her you’ve been saving?”

“How did you know it was going to be about her?” the other inquired.

“Because you glanced at her before you decided not to tell it at the restaurant,” Franz told him, “and because you didn’t really invite me over until you were sure she wouldn’t be coming.”

“You writers are pretty sharp,” Saul observed. “Well, this happens to be a writer’s story, in a way. Your sort of writer—the supernatural horror sort. Your Corona Heights thing made me want to tell it. The same realm of the unknown, but a different country in it.”

Franz wanted to say, “I had rather anticipated that, too,” but he refrained.