John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

WHAT I DID

ANOTHER EXAMPLE YOU COULD GIVE

“Hey, nobody dies of a broken heart. Don’t give me that. It’s not like Humpty Dumpty around here.”

…

“I mean, look, I read about that Robert Monroe. They had an article about him — it was in Penthouse . Now look, what do you think he does, once he gets back in his body? I mean, he could have been to Hell, honey babe, it’s still the same old story. Robert Monroe comes back, he picks up the phone. ‘Hi. What’re you doing tonight?’”

PLACES

Monroe has written a book, Journeys Out of the Body (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1971). There, he separates the Astral world into three distinct “Locales.” Each Locale has its own set of rules and creatures, and its own threats. Locale I is here, meaning right here and now, but made for another set of hands. The walls, for example, become like erect sheets of water, that effective and that much fun, and within your own familiar walls there may be other “non-physical beings.” Ghosts, those would be. Locale II is the dominion of Heaven and Hell, the place where Monroe had all the sex. Locale III is another universe, which he believes is composed of anti-matter. This third Locale possesses unusual tools and no electricity, but while visiting the place Monroe experienced adultery (in this Locale sex occurs without electricity), loneliness, failures to communicate, and the pain of growing old. He concluded that in all important respects it was a universe the same as our own.

Monroe…hold on to him a while longer, a moment longer please. Granted, he’s a terrible writer, but please.

Certainly we have no way of demonstrating once and for all that he’s wrong. At least not so long as we remain in this world, in this body, asking ourselves what’s the physical proof, asking in which incident can we at last get hold of the proof and cuddle up to it tight, tight — in what incident, what detail? Certainly, against the unrelenting static of such doubt this man Monroe’s worth another moment at least. Just imagine, he travels alone. What a person. A star of the strangest magnitude. In his case there is something incredible about Astral Projection. He discovers: demons like immense hard-muscled thumbs; angels as ready to roll in the sack as any whore; the Cheshire cats of previous incarnations, grinning and grinning; the barrier at the end of the universe where all travelers, even the most sophisticated, come crashing to a stop; and other people’s dreams, which he can visit like the recurring image of a lover. He has rested in the infinite chamber that waits, reserved eternally, as his personal heaven. Granted, granted, the man then ruins the effect by comparing nirvana to a heated swimming pool, with colored lights and underwater stereo speakers. But…just the idea that we each have one…. And Monroe has braved the worst inferno of all, the whirlpool of armless sharklike souls. These spirits will remain forever unfinished, alive or dead, and they seek forever to mutilate like themselves any whole being who wanders too close.

Places, connections. Time goes by and these joints become curiouser and curiouser. I wanted to weight my story like lead holds down a line, but by moonrise I find that the harder I try to reel in the taut nylon, the faster I’m circling round it, hooked and circling round a metal I managed not long ago to carry out here inside my coat.

PLACES

I wanted to send up my life like a kite made from Scripture, but now the Gospel itself has turned to papier mache — half the King James edition was used to make the feminist erotica I saw at the Institute for Contemporary Art. Was that my own drama, embalmed inside those vulva-shaped pages?

But you’ve worked at your habits, sinking habits through the visible hours like the Times sculpts a Sunday. The habit of reading, the habit of sitting studying some unknown woman when you should be reading…. Myself, actually the voices on AM spook me too badly; actually when that clockface lights up, I’m a man for the FM. “The More The Music Changes The More You Need WBCN.” Oedipus cues the local group, Shane Champagne, “(Living In The) Shadow World.” This weekend they’re at The Underground, used to be called Lucy’s In The Sky when I went there, now it’s got a new form…Oedipus speaks “you” into his mike and that hooded syllable becomes “me,” someone that wasn’t meant yet has been made from the name, like the Mock Turtle…

What proof? What incident? What detail?

Places. Outdoors at the seashore, nearby here, on a rare afternoon with a powerful cold wind but a brilliant hot sun, with the moon so visible it was as if the sun were shining in the middle of the night, I once encountered a man and woman together, on the ground. I have a habit of walking alone, compounded by a terrible habit of not watching where I’m going. The woman was naked only from the waist down. Blonde and healthy, she wore a sweatshirt with a brand name printed across it in French. He wore a gray gym T-shirt marked between his large back muscles with dark smudges of sweat raised, even in this weather, by the exertion of the act. They’d had a blanket but they’d kicked it off. The air thickened with their odor. They lay in the hollow behind a dune crowned with short blasted yellow stalks. Yet this was a historic site; nearby the couple stretched the shadow of the new wooden tower commemorating Marconi’s original iron one, out of which he’d sent the first transatlantic wireless message, a flowery address filled with philosophy. A message from a President, for a King. Only the roots of the old tower remain, the stubs of iron and concrete nearly out of sight in the sand at the edge of the sea. Therefore it must have been a sightseeing impulse that had brought the man and woman out here originally, but then one or the other had felt the lowdown and habitual tug. Now they’d finished, and their hands lay curled for warmth under each other’s armpits, so that for a moment they seemed nothing but two empty shirts: still soggy from the wash, still connected by the bit of colorless line that had been torn free, with them, by the wind. I got out of there before she recognized me.

So…I say “so,” but rhetorical connections drop off to sleep as well…rhetoric and logic and argument as well. Without a move we slip into the tick-tick-tick.

So…and…have I stiffened in my habits till I’m some kind of human playing card, finished while half-formed? Would a kiss flesh me out beneath the belt? Just a kiss, just a sigh…no. You must remember: this is no Disney. Nowadays I don’t even care for Disney. My ears howl with the sea wind. So…and…have I broken up now, here even before my next part, my Part Thirteen (won’t it at least contain bad luck, my Thirteen? at least never repeat, like AN EMOTION, so many stiff pages back?) — have I broken up now and here into my last locale? A conte a clef in which the clef is a cunt. Squirrel away the memory, fish it out for a cold night beside the radio. Any hand which once held that spot soon enough holds nothing except its own.

Places, places.

In Locale II, according to Robert Monroe, there stands the Sign In Space. “Stands” is the wrong word, granted, “sign” and “space” also wrong, all three imply physical existence. And how fill a ghost? But:

It seems that an almost measureless time ago…

Those are the correct words, I mean those are the words that Monroe uses. “Almost measureless”—such a tin ear, I’ve fallen in love with the man. His prose feels like he ran chewing gum through the typewriter, but I did read his book. That, I did.

It seems that an almost measureless