Brion Gysin - The Process

The Hymners, as I decided to call them, had rented a big old house it would take about ten servants to run and there was not one single servant in sight. The Hymners, in fact, kept a pretty seedy house. Piles of old magazines and tracts slithered about underfoot or slid from stacks, high in the halls through which they led us straight to the kitchen. You could see the Hymners liked that room the best. They had modernized it, as she said, with paint, plastics and appliances. Hymner got down to his chores without saying a word. Like a wizard, he whipped indented metal-foil trays of nameless foodstuffs out of a deep-freeze as big as a bank. Then, like a flash, he slid these through an infra-red ray oven on the wall and slapped them on the kitchen table in front of us piping hot but, before we could get down on all fours to gobble up this great chow, we had to say grace.

That is, Mrs. Hymner — call me Maya; like the Great Mother, she said, coming right out with it — Maya Hymner said grace wrapped in the endless yards of carbon-paper indigo-dipped blue material it takes to make a dress for a dancing girl in the desert. Some of those Guedra girls get so big they have to do their dance sitting down. Maya’s gown swathed her like a tent but, when I squinted up my eyes at her, she looked like a giant bluebell to me. She had blue donkey-beads and cowrie shells braided into a sort of wild Saharan hairdo she allowed it had taken three women a week to plait on her head, but she wore no jewelry at all and strictly no makeup; except she was all smudgy-blue around the edges from the indigo dip. Somehow, despite this disguise, Maya managed to look one hundred percent corn-fed, barefoot, big old American girl with enlarged pores and gray skin. I shot this good look at her as she bowed her veiled head in prayer, spilling out a long flowery oriental-type grace over the plastic-topped table. To my astonishment, if ever I can be astonished by Hamid, I heard him gabbling along after her in his best hobbled English. Hymner just stood there agape, wordlessly gazing on Hamid with the liquid look of a novice-master glowing over his latest Adept but there was still no word out of Him. I raised a tall eyebrow as Maya went on pouring out an entire seed catalogue of heavily scented flowers, endless bushel baskets of rare jewel-stones and piles of precious metals that clinked out of her like a jackpot of more than oriental confusion. At least, I knew where we were at: my mother once had a brush with Bahaï. Lest I be recorded as one of the heedless, when she finished I joined in: “ Amen! ”

All this time, Hamid is piously wig-wagging me to take off my shades. I can see how Hamid might ride right down the line with this Islamic splinter-group but I know it is too late in the day for me. I shake my head sadly at Hamid as I listen to Maya’s thick thighs slap-slapping together under her robe as she paddles over to get a bottle of boiled water out of the frig. No stimulants, ever, eh? OK. I adjust my shades with distinction, indicating that I am not about to take them off to look on the likes of this great bargain of his. I can feel that my stiffness excites him. I know my Hamid, after all; what odd commodities have we two not bought and sold? Here he is trying to sell me his Hymners: what is my price? I figure Hamid cannot possibly know what the real deal is about: I don’t know, yet, myself. I can see that reconnaissance conversation is not going to be easy. Unless we babble on about Bahaï, it is all going to be: “Have you read that book, whats-itcalled: The Confessions of Denmark Vesey? ” and guff such as that.

In some ways, Hamid’s take-over of the Hymner household was hellishly handy — and I mean it just like that. The Hymners were our meal ticket of the moment, feeding us both on their embalmed American food. Categorically, I refused to move in with them out there on the Old Mountain. I knew better even if Hamid did not. Anyway, he was used to living like a gypsy in seven different houses at once: they could never pin Hamid down the way they could me. I stayed on holed-up in my room at the Hotel Duende , letting Hamid break it to the Hymners just how much I owed in back rent. The going was not all that easy. That old meal ticket had to be punched and punched regular; a lot harder, too, than I had at first been ready to reckon. Happily, the local electricity went on the bum for a few days, during which time the Hymner’s endless stacks of nameless frozen foods melted and died in their silent food-safe. Hamid took over the cooking and it became really worth-while to drag my ass out there to eat. Their old bus was pretty much always at our beck and call to cart us around wherever we wanted to go: Maya Hymner always heavy behind the wheel of the Rolls, Him always silent in back. Hamid perched back there, too, on the very edge of his seat, straining his ear and his English to make out what she was saying to me; as, with her eyes fixed on the road ahead, she slurred their lurid life-story at me out of the side of her mouth.

This colorless couple from Champagne, Illinois, were living out a drama which they, at least, thought would yet shake the world. Her people were from Canada, originally, and the least said about that the better, I gathered. Was she “Colored,” I wondered? I took a squint at her hair and threw that thought out of my mind. The Hymners “had money.” They had once owned a sawmill someplace out West. “Him ’n’ Her,” had met at the home of some Bahaïs in Illinois: met, married and settled down in Champagne, as she said. They were both Adepts who hoped to be accepted into the Faith but a couple of things had gone wrong. She told me this when we were back at their villa in Tanja but I swear I could hear the old skeletons rattling in Maya’s voice, all the way from the great Middle-West. Hymner was grinning and nodding, eager to corroborate every word Maya said. Well, it seems that Maya, at the very instant of conception, when his diamond-headed sperm-adder pierced the delicate membrane of her egg, Maya knew — she just knew! She was shy, she said, to tell even Him, at first but, eventually, all their circle in Champagne, Illinois, knew, too: Maya was chosen to give birth to the Babe!

Now, not everyone in Champagne swallowed this tale and, when the day came for her to face her, well, her Trouble; why, she found herself absolutely alone. Everyone failed her; especially Him. Hymner, it seems, took advantage of her pregnancy to get himself picked up by an electronic eye in a public toilet, like a Presidential aide at the YMCA. When Maya turned on, tuned in and heard all about it over the local network, she went into the kitchen of their ultra-modern home and aborted herself with a fork. Two cops in blue brought Him to Her in the hospital and, there on her hospital bed, she forgave Him. She got out and got home before he did. When he got out, she took Him back. But — and that was a hell of a But! he could never become the father of the Babe, now, could he? He had to shake his head: obviously not. So, she sent Him to the hospital to have himself sterilized and the operation so affected Him that he lost all his hair and his voice. Naturally, they had to get out of Champagne overnight and that brought them to Tanja, where else? In Tanja, at least, no one put all your business out in the street; now, did they? He nodded and grinned, content as a capon, confirming all this.

They had now decided, she went on relentlessly, that the Babe should be Black. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that would be quite a trick, when I bit the words off with my teeth. So, a spot of my sperm was the price! One diamond-headed sperm-adder of mine was to puncture her egg and plunge on into the Stream of Life; was that it? And did he think he was going to get to watch this? Maya stood there like a sibyl beside the kitchen sink. This child was to be a Mahdi, it was promised: Emperor of Africa. “Togetherness,” I thought I heard her say: “You will all assist at the birth.” Great Ghoul! There was a silence, as pregnant as you wish.