My ex came by on Thursday with her boyfriend—excuse me, partner—to drop off some microwavables. She left him in the cruiser with the engine idling. “You’re painting again?” she said. I could hear her shuffling through my canvases, even though she knows it annoys me. “That’s good. They say abstract art’s good therapy.”
She was looking at “The Lattice of Light”; or perhaps “Spinners.” My ex thinks all art is therapy.
“It’s not therapy,” I said. “Remember the experiment? The dreams? The professors at Duke.” I felt a sudden foolish impulse to explain myself to her. “And it’s not an abstract, either. In the dreams, I can see.”
“That’s nice,” she said. “Only, I had those two checked out. I have a friend in the dean’s office. They’re not professors. At least, not at Duke.”
“They’re from Berkeley,” I said.
“Berkeley? That explains everything.”
On Monday at ten, Sorel picked me up in the Honda. I offered her my hand, and from the tentative, almost reluctant way she shook it, I could tell that our sexual encounter had taken place in another realm altogether. That was fine with me. I found the university’s FM station on the van’s radio and we listened to Shulgin all the way to Durham.
“The Dance of the Dead.” I was beginning to like the way she drove.
DeCandyle was waiting impatiently in the launch lab. “On this second insertion, we’re going to try and penetrate a little deeper,” he said. Click.
“Deeper?” I asked. How could you get deeper than dead?
He spoke to me and the tape at the same time. “So far on this series we have seen only the outer regions of LAD
space. Beyond the threshold of light, there lies yet another LAD realm. It, also, seems to have an objective reality. On this insertion we will observe without penetrating that realm.” Click.
Sorel entered the room; I recognized the swishing of her nylon jumpsuit. I was strapped into the car and my hand was guided into the glove—and I recoiled in disgust. Something was in there. It was like putting my hand into a bucket of cold entrails.
“The handbasket now contains a circulating plasma solution,” DeCandyle said. “Our hope is that it will keep a more positive contact between our two LAD voyagers.” Click.
“You mean necronauts,” I said.
He didn’t laugh; I hadn’t expected him to. I slid my hand into the handbasket. The stuff was slick and sticky at the same time. Sorel’s hand joined mine. Our fingers met with no awkwardness; even with a kind of comfortable, lascivious hunger. DeCandyle asked: “Ready?”
Ready? For a week I had thought of nothing but the intensity, the excitement—the light of LAD space. The lab’s machines started with their low harmony of hums. It seemed to be taking forever. The solution in the glove began to circulate while I waited for the injection that would free me from the prison of my blindness.
“Series forty-one, insertion two,” DeCandyle said. Click.
Oh death, where is thy sting? My heart was pounding.
Then it stopped.
I could feel my blood pool, grow thick, grow cool. My body seemed to elongate—then suddenly I was gone; peeling away, up from the car, away from my body, into the light.
I was rising as if being pulled. There was no time to look back at my own body, or the mountains. Faster and faster, we were ascending into the realm of the dead: LAD space. I say we, for I was a shadow pursuing a shadow, yet together we were a circle of light, spinning in a dance harmonious. I ached for Sorel as a planet aches for its sun. The light loved us—and we spun basking in its sweet climactic endless glow, luxuriating in a nakedness so total that the body itself has been stripped off and set aside. I felt like the gods must feel, knowing that the world we lurch through in life is only their cast-off clothes. We rose into the lattice of light and it opened before us…
And I felt a sudden fear. It was slight, like the chill on the back of your neck when a door opens that shouldn’t be opened. The light was darkening around me and the presence at the end of my fingertips was suddenly gone. I was alone. I thought (yes, dead, but I “thought”!) something had gone wrong in the lab.
All was still. I was in a new darkness. Only this was a darkness unlike the darkness of blindness: here somehow I could see. I was alone on a gray plain that stretched forever in every direction, but instead of space I felt claustrophobia, for every horizon was close enough to touch. The chill had become a deep, cruel, vicious, bone cold. I tried to move and the darkness itself moved with me…
“Retrocution at three oh seven,” DeCandyle was saying; Sorel was slapping my cheeks. “We lost contact,” I heard her say.
I wasn’t in the car; I was lying down on the wheeled gurney. I was freezing. “Duration one hundred thirty-seven minutes,” DeCandyle said. Click.
I sat up and held my face in my hands. Both cheeks were cold. Both hands were shaking.
“I’ll drive him home,” Sorel said.
“Where were we?” I asked, but she wouldn’t answer me. Instead she drove faster and faster.
My studio was cold and I knelt to light the space heater. I fumbled with the damp matches, afraid she would leave, until I felt her hand on the back of my neck. She was undressed already, pulling me toward the bed, toward her plump, taut, cool breasts; her opening thighs. I forgot the chill I had felt in her womb, as cold and sweet as her mouth.