Then something pulled me downward, and I was alone, unlinked (unwhole?) again, spinning away from the light, feeling the warmth fade behind. Life from here looked as dark and lonesome as the grave. As before, there was the shock, the insult of pain, the agony as the cooled blood with its cold understandings rushed in…
Bringing another darkness.
“Retrocution at five thirty-three P.M.”
I was on the gurney again. Sorel must have revived (or “retrocuted”) first, for she was helping DeCandyle. I sat dazed, silent, numb, while they recorded my vital signs. Her fingers felt familiar and I wondered if we had held hands while we were dead.
“How long?” I asked, finally.
“I thought we weren’t going to ask that question,” DeCandyle said. “I’ll drive him home,” said Sorel. She drove even faster than before. For the twenty-minute ride we listened to the radio—Mahler—and didn’t speak. I didn’t invite her in; I didn’t have to. We both knew exactly what was going to happen. I heard her steps behind me on the gravel, on the step, on the floor. While I knelt to light the space heater—for the studio was cold—I heard the long pull of the zipper on her jumpsuit. By the time I had turned around she was helping me with my clothes, silent, efficient, and fast, and her mouth was cold; her tongue and her nipples were cold; I was naked like her and falling with her into my own cold unmade studio bed, exploring that body that was so strange and yet so utterly familiar. When I entered her it was she who entered me: we came together in a way that I had forgotten was possible.
Forgotten? I had never known, never dreamed of passion like this.
Twenty minutes later, she was dressed and gone without a word.
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.
“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.”
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.”
“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
“Series forty-one, insertion two,” DeCandyle said.
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.
