Contours of Darkness by Marco Vassi Read Free Book Online

mind?'
    'The only lesson that seems valid is that if you sit bareheaded in the Sahara desert and don't eat or drink for several days, you will have extraordinary experiences.'
    'No wonder you don't have any friends,' Cynthia said. 'You don't have any imagination.' She was embarrassed to see Aaron, who was chronologically a man, appear fatuous in front of Conrad, whose younger mind seemed so much deeper. But to her surprise, Conrad defended him. 'He's got more imagination than he can handle,' he said, 'and he's afraid of it, so he holds it down.' He turned to Aaron again. 'I'd like to give you acid,' he said.
    Aaron cocked his head. 'When?'
    'Now,' said Conrad, and reached into his pocket to remove a capsule filled with white powder. 'Right now.'
    Cynthia flashed a thousand scenes in which the machismo being enacted formed the central element, from John Wayne movies to fistfights in her old neighbourhood. It thrilled her to see two males in their essential maleness acting upon one another. In distinction to the competitive aggression that such a scene usually entails, the contest before her was benign, and all the aggression was dialectical. It was as though Conrad had issued a challenge which, instead of stating, 'Let's fight to see which shall win,' had said, 'Let's struggle with one another so we may get to understand our own and each other's strength.'
    She was not surprised when Aaron reached over and picked the capsule up. 'What's the point?' he said. 'I'm sure everything I've read and heard about LSD is true. I will have insights and see sights and feel my feelings very profoundly. It's only the intensity of insanity, it doesn't point to a way of life.'
    'What happened after you came back from Egypt?' Conrad asked.
    'I decided not to go back to advertising. I moved to the coast and took a teaching job. I met Cynthia. Here lam.'
    'That trip changed your life, didn't it?' Conrad said. He leaned forward and his energy flowed off him like water down a cataract. He was approaching the first peaking of the mescaline, a capsule given him by an acquaintance he had run into on Telegraph Avenue, which he had taken on a spur-of-the-moment impulse. He had wanted to go to Tilden Park and spend several hours with the trees which he considered to be the sources of his deepest relationships. His highest ecstasy was to take mescaline and lie for hours along the thick branch of his favourite oak friend, feeling the sense of ageless life that coursed through its centre, relishing the roughness of the bark, and wallowing in the dance of sunlight through the leaves, the liberating oxygen they released, and the rich smell of green. But he had decided to stop at his house first, and on the way had seen Cynthia sitting on her front stairs, taking the air while she waited for her rice to cook. She invited him in, and he found himself detoured.
    Now his words fell with explosive weightiness. It's not what you think you understand when you take acid that counts. That part's already programmed. It's the actual chemical change that makes the difference, the re-circuiting of the pathways in your nervous system. Do you dig that? You don't know different; you be different. You're absolutely right about all the cosmic experiences; that's only a movie. Unless you fight it. And that's like fighting evolution. That's refusing to grow into what you were meant to attain.' He nodded at Aaron's hand. Take it. Don't be afraid to be afraid. Get dumb.'
    'What about me?' Cynthia said.
    The men turned in unison, homing in on her vibration. Conrad, thrown from the back of his bucking monologue, was at a loss for words and sat there blinking. His right hand fell into his lap and began inadvertently rubbing his cock. At the level of concentration they were operating at, his action was not relegated to the incidental. They all copped to the fact that Conrad's gesture was his actual answer to the question. Aaron watched the interaction as though it were a play in a