John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

This conversation however took place the day after his photograph had appeared in the papers. Grissom therefore calmed himself. He watched the silent mechanical flash of the phone buttons. At last he shrugged. Look, he told the lawyer, the possible explanations for the prostitute’s behavior were endless. This much only was certain: she didn’t have to. By the time the hotel sheets had been heaped up round them like thunderclouds, the backs of Grissom’s knees had been going crazy, trembling with more than sexual fever. He’d bristled everywhere with his first rush.

After that, memory became spotty. What isolated moments he did recall were vivid, indeed far worse than vivid. But now Grissom had entered the mystery, a vastness complicated by a million wiry connections, and there not even his most enraged recent efforts to recall could fill in the blanks.

He could say, at least, that when TV or the movies handled this kind of experience they were way off base. The hallucinogen had never once caused Grissom to see things that weren’t “there” in some sense or another. The cow did not jump over the moon. Rather, every far-out vision had long psychic trailers rooted finally in some humble taste, some homely touch. Yes TV was way off base. TV started out to protect their viewers and wound up shoving everybody who watched into the garbage. TV went for the bright lights and never got at the truth, which was this essential combination of the homely and the psychedelic. It was because of that combination a person on acid knew the experience was real. And because it was real, it made you crazy. Madness therefore was a kind of ground pepper scattered over the experience, and though the bursts of memory could shatter Grissom like a sneeze, the grainy heaps of black to either side were just as large.

For example he could remember a time when the whore’s icy features had reddened and shriveled into those of the Devil himself, risen from his dark home. Her legs had run together into a ropelike tail holding him tight. Okay. Surely that guilty hallucination was only to be expected. Syl was, as he longed to tell her nowadays, in that hotel room with him. But then how, and when, had the prostitute become the Moon Maiden? How had her hair turned the consistency of cream cheese, and how had those tentacles sprung from her ribs to circle round him and tickle his spine so excruciatingly? All was doubtful, rough and tumble, transferences felt only in separated bits around the dark passage of asteroid chunks. Or never mind this woman and the million dreams that rode her skin. How in the world had Grissom come to spend so much time standing facing that hotel room’s mirror?

Yes that floor-to-ceiling vanity mirror, ow, ow. No sooner had Grissom put his fingers to the glass than he’d received a shock as if he’d been hauled upside-down off his feet and spanked. He snatched his hand back. On the spot he realized that he could have taken hold of any item from his young life — his first child’s first spoon, his wife’s jars of lotion, the ungainly watch his father had given him — any item, and not one would have devastated him so much as this deep stretch of reflecting glass. The rows of bulbs shining to either side pained his eyes. Of course, during this month just past Grissom had found out that his shock, too, had been part of the setup. The agency records explained how the surface of the mirror had been lightly electrified as a precaution. But knowing these things now didn’t change at all the cataclysmic feel of what he could recall from then. For instance he could remember also that at one point he’d thought of lowering his head and smashing on through. And this past month, he’d learned the agency types had been prepared for that move as well: he would have knocked himself cold against their protective steel supports. But knowing so now didn’t lessen the pervading weakness, like a steam leaking outward from his marrow, which had kept him from crashing through and which softened his bones all over again every time he remembered the moment.

So memory grew spottier, grainier still after that. Hours, young Grissom must have remained there, silently weeping. He had an odd recollection of pulling the hairs away from his navel and thrusting his reflected belly up towards itself, God knows why. He could be positive only that he’d been standing before the mirror when he’d seen his worst.

He had no idea just how far along it was. The woman had brought him a dripping facecloth. He hadn’t noticed her coming. But after that agony of wet and cold hit his forehead, instinctively he brought up his palm to cover the blazing damp spot and hold it there. The liquid streaming down meantime had forced him to blink repeatedly, lengthily, till under the pressure of light and dark the surface of his thinking had exploded and Grissom could see clearly at last that this “water” striping his skin was itself composed entirely of mirrors. He stopped blinking and watched. Tiny mirrors, these were, each no larger than the fragment of a tear. Like the row of black reflections he’d sometimes seen clinging to his windshield after a storm: tiny mirrors, all wriggling their tails. Yes and in this case they weren’t merely wriggling, either, but moving , actually moving with a purpose. Down from his enlarged eyes, down his cheeks and down, the mirrors traveled in linked chains, with a jerky sinuousness like something out of a cartoon. Grissom’s heart was going so hard he couldn’t move his eyes. He could just make out infinitesimal pairs of dirty bare feet. He could see finally the hemp ropes holding the mirrors in place. One wobbled for a moment; a black hand rose to steady it, the pressure of the fingers — minute as the hairs on a fly — making a small depression in the bulbous reflecting surface. Mirrors, lugging away on their backs what the larger mirror showed! Why, then, these germlike native bearers, these shimmery work gangs Grissom had wrung from the washcloth himself, why they were going to carry away his face . Even now his face was going, running down, in trapped particles of eyelash and eyebrow, bits of sideburn and lip beard stubble….

Grissom had got tough with himself. He whispered into his reflection that this was only another hooker’s trick, another slut way of getting him to spend the entire night and so pay more (why, if she succeeded in driving him insane for the rest of his life, just think what he’d pay). But he couldn’t remove his hand from the facecloth, nor his eyes from the glass. Desperately then he looked to the woman with him — in the mirror. He was startled to discover she stood beside him. She stood in an old-fashioned robe, fixing her face. And as she smeared on some ointment, businesslike but in no rush, he could see she was rubbing away not just the bags under her eyes but her eyes themselves, not just the lines round her nose but her entire fineboned nose itself.

Yet though she met his gaze, with the blank indentations where her eyes had been, she never offered more than a bored smile. Even when her mouth too was wiped away, he could tell she remained unperturbed. She didn’t see the damage done. So Grissom had understood, and thereafter the night was lost to memory. He had wanted to see what he was alone, what he was as an individual away from Syl or anyone else. And now he knew.

Afterwards, well. It was hardly anything you could confide in the wife. Grissom went on the wagon. No surprise, considering.

Also, more or less secretly, he went on the couch for a couple-three years. Syl knew, but no one else. It was Syl in fact who’d suggested Grissom start seeing a psychiatrist. She’d told him, at the end of one unending, weepy night, that some time with a headshrinker seemed to be the only solution to his problems. Syl was also terrific when it came to keeping the analysis a secret from Grissom’s father. The old man was from the old country; he’d never have understood. The two kids, as for them, weren’t even talking yet during those years. And the psychiatrist’s office was in the same crowded steel high-rise as Grissom’s dentist’s, so he always had a ready excuse. Yet a psychiatrist, too…Grissom could never see his way clear to telling a psychiatrist either. How could he? The doctor would stand over him and say: for a businessman in America, there is the work and there is the family, two very strong drives which often conflict. Then how could Grissom start to talk about microscopic native bearers carrying away his face?