Melancholy Elephants Read online

  And it was peaceful enough to be an ideal place to linger after the last set, to recover from the enormous expenditure of energy, to enjoy the first tasted drink of the night, to hide from those dozens of eyes half-seen through the spotlight glare, to take off the sweat-soaked image and lounge around in one’s psychic underwear. The north door led to the parking lot and was always locked to the outside; the south door opened onto stage right, and had a large sign on its other side that said clearly, “If the performers wish to chat, sign autographs, accept drinks or tokes or negotiate for your daughter’s wedding gig, they will have left this door open and you won’t be reading this. PLEASE DO NOT ENTER. DON’T KNOCK IF YOU CAN HELP IT. RESPECT US AND WE’LL MAKE BETTER MUSIC. Thank you—Finnegan.”

  It was sanctuary.

  Zack customarily came offstage utterly exhausted, while Jill always finished a gig boiling over with nervous energy. Happily, this could be counterbalanced by their differing metabolic reactions to marijuana: it always gave Zack energy and mellowed Jill. The after-gig toke was becoming a ritual with them, one they looked forward to unconsciously. Tonight’s toke was a little unusual. They were smoking a literal cigar of grass, GMI’s newest marketing innovation, and assessing the validity of the product’s advertising slogan: “It doesn’t get you any higher—but it’s more fun!”

  Zack lay on his back on the rug, watching excess smoke drift lazily up from his mouth toward the high ceiling. An internal timer went off and he exhaled, considered his head. “Let me see that pack,” he said, raising up on one elbow. Jill, just finishing her own toke, nodded and passed over both cigar and pack.

  Zack turned the pack over, scanned it and nodded. “Brilliant,” he said. He was beginning to come out of his postperformance torpor. He toked, and croaked “Fucking brilliant,” again.

  Jill managed to look a question while suppressing a cough.

  He exhaled. “Look,” he said. “‘Guaranteed 100% pure marijuana.’ See what that means?”

  “It means I’m not crazy, I really am stoned.”

  “No, no, the whole cigar business. Remember the weather we had last spring? Half the GMI dope fields got pasted with like thirty-two straight days of rain, which is terrific for growing rope and rotten for growing smoke. Stalks like bamboo, leaves like tiny and worth squat, dope so pisspoor you’d have to smoke a cigar-full of it to get off. So what did they do?” He grinned wolfishly. “They made cigars. They bluffed it out, just made like they planned it and made cigars. They’re pure grass, all right—but you’d have to be an idiot to smoke a whole cigar of good grass. And by Christ I’ll bet they pick up a big share of the market. These things are more fun.”

  “What do you think that is?” Jill asked. “Why is it more fun? Is it just the exaggerated oral trip?”

  “Partly that,” he admitted. “Oh hell, back when I smoked tobacco I knew that cigars were stronger, cooler, and tastier—I just couldn’t afford ’em. But these aren’t much more expensive than joints. Breaks down to about a dime a hit. Why, don’t you like ’em?”

  She took another long toke, her expression going blank while she considered. Suddenly her eyes focused, on him. “Does it turn you on to watch me smoke it?” she asked suddenly.

  He blushed to his hairline and stammered.

  “Honesty, remember? Like you said when you sang our song tonight. Trust me enough to be honest.”

  “Well,” he equivocated, “I hadn’t thought about…” He trailed off, and they both said “bullshit” simultaneously and broke up. “Yeah, it turns me on,” he admitted.

  She regarded the cigar carefully, took a most sensuous toke. “Then I shall chain smoke ’em all the way home,” she said. “Here.” She handed him the stogie, then began changing out of her stage clothes, making a small production out of it for him.

  Eight months we’ve been living together, Zack thought, and she hasn’t lost that mischievous enthusiasm for making me horny. What a lady! He put the cigar in his teeth, waggled it and rolled his eyes. “Why wait ’til we get home?” he leered.

  “I predict another Groucho Marx revival if those things catch on.” Her bra landed on top of the blouse.

  “I like a gal with a strong will,” he quoted, “Or at least a weak won’t.” He rose and headed for her. She did not shrink away—but neither did she come alive in his arms.

  “Not here, Zack.”

  “Why not? It was fun in that elevator, wasn’t it?”

  “That was different. Someone could come in.”

  “Come on, the place is closed, Finnegan and the Shadow are mopping up beer and counting the take, nobody’s gonna fuck a duck.”

  Startled, she pulled away and followed his gaze. A shining figure stood in the open doorway.

  She was by now wearing only ankle-length skirt and panties, and Zack had the skirt halfway down her hips, but she, and he, stood quite still, staring at the apparition. It was several moments after they began wishing for the power of motion that they recalled that they possessed it; moments more before they used it.

  “It was true,” the old man said.

  He seemed to shine. He shimmered, he crackled with an energy only barely visible, only just intangible. His skin and clothes gave the impression of being on the verge of bursting spontaneously into flame. He shone as the Christ must have shone, as the Buddha must have shone, and a Kirlian photograph of him at that moment would have been a nova-blur.

  Zack had a sudden, inexplicable and quite vivid recollection of the afternoon of his mother’s funeral, five years past. He remembered suddenly the way friends and relatives had regarded him as strangers, a little awed, as though he possessed some terrible new power. He remembered feeling at the time that they were correct—that by virtue of his grief and loss he was somehow charged with a strange kind of energy. Intuitively he had known that on this day of all days he could simply scream at the most determined and desperate mugger and frighten him away, on this day he could violate traffic laws with impunity, on this day he could stare down any man or woman alive. Coming in close personal contact with death had made him, for a time, a kind of temporary shaman.

  And the old man was quite dead, and knew it.

  “Your song, I mean. It was true. I was half afraid I’d find you two bickering, that all that affection was just a part of the act. Oh thank God.”

  Zack had never seen anyone quite so utterly relieved. The old man was of medium height and appeared to be in robust health. Even his huge ungainly mustaches could not completely hide the lines of over half a century of laughter and smiles. His complexion was ruddy, his features weatherbeaten, and his eyes were infinitely kindly. His clothes were of a style which had not even been revived in years: bell-bottom jeans, multicoloured paisley shirt with purple predominating, a double strand of beads and an Acadian scarf-cap sloppily tied. He wore no jewelry other than the beads and no make-up.

  A kind of Hippie Gepetto, Zack decided. So why am I paralyzed?

  “Come in,” Jill said, and Zack glanced sharply at her, then quickly back. The old man stepped into the room, leaving the door ajar. He stared from Zack to Jill, and back again, from one pair of eyes to the other, and his own kindly eyes seemed to peel away onion-layers of self until he gazed at their naked hearts. Zack suddenly wanted to cry, and that made him angry enough to throw off his trance.

  “It is the custom of the profession,” he said coldly, “to knock and shout, ‘Are you decent?’ Or didn’t you see the sign there on the door?”

  “Both of you are decent,” the old man said positively. Then he seemed to snap out of a trance of his own: his eyes widened and he saw Jill’s half-nakedness for the first time. “Oh,” he said explosively, and then his smile returned. “Now I’m supposed to apologize,” he twinkled, “but it wouldn’t be true. Oh, I’m sorry if I’ve upset you—but that’s the last look I’ll ever get, and you’re lovely.” He stared at Jill’s bare breasts for a long moment, watched their nipples harden, and Zack marvelled at his own inability to muster ou
trage. Jill just stood there…

  The old man pulled his eyes away. “Thank you both. Please sit down, now, I have to say some preposterous things and I haven’t much time. Please hear me out before you ask questions, and please—please!—believe me.”

  Jill put on the new blouse and jeans, while Zack seated himself from long habit on the camel-saddle edge of his guitar case. He was startled to discover the cigar still burning in his hand, stunned to see only a quarter-inch of ash on the end. He started to offer it to the old man; changed his mind; started to offer it to Jill; changed his mind; dropped the thing on the carpet and stepped on it.

  “My name is Wesley George,” the old man began.

  “Right,” Zack said automatically.

  The old man sighed deeply. “I haven’t much time,” he repeated.

  “What” the hell would Wesley George be doing in Halifax? Zack started to say, but Jill cut him off sharply with “He’s Wesley George and he doesn’t have much time” and before the intensity in her voice he subsided.

  “Thank you,” George said to Jill. “You perceive very well. I wonder how much you know already.”

  “Almost nothing,” Jill said flatly, “but I know what I know.”

  He nodded. “Obviously you’ve both heard of me; Christ knows I’m notorious enough. But how much of it stuck? Given my name, how much do you know of me?”

  “You’re the last great dope wizard,” Zack said, “and you were one of the first. You used to work for one of the ‘ethical’ drug outfits and you split. You synthesized DMT, and didn’t get credit for it. You developed Mellow Yellow. You made STP safe and dependable. You develop new psychedelics and sell ’em cheap, sometimes you give ’em away, and some say you’re stone nuts and some say you’re the Holy Goof himself. You followed in the footsteps of Owsley Stanley, and you’ve never been successfully busted, and you’re supposed to be richer than hell. A dealer friend of mine says you make molecules talk.”

  “You helped buy the first federal decrim bill on grass,” Jill said, “and blocked the cocaine bill—both from behind the scenes. You founded the Continent Continent movement and gave away five million TM pills in a single day in New York.”

  “Some people say you don’t exist,” Zack added.

  “As of now, they’re right,” George said. “I’ve been murdered.”

  Jill gasped; Zack just stared.

  “In fact, you may have noticed it done,” Wesley said to Zack. “You remember Sziller, the bearded man who spoiled your last solo? Did you see him write this?”

  George held his left hand up, palm out. A black felt-tip pen had written a telephone number there, precisely along his lifeline.

  “Yeah,” Zack agreed. “So what?”

  “I dialed it a half hour ago. David Steinberg answered. He said that once he had a skull injury, and the hospital was so cheap they put a paper plate in his head. He said the only side effect was that every sunny day he had to go on a picnic. I hung up the phone and I knew I was dead.”

  “Dial-a-Joke,” Jill said wonderingly.

  “I don’t get it,” said Zack.

  “I was supposed to meet Sziller here tonight—in the bar, after your set. I couldn’t understand why he came into the music room and tried to talk to me there. He knew better. He wanted to be shushed, so he’d have to write his urgent message on my hand. And the urgent message was literally a joke. So what he really wanted was to write on my hand with a felt-tip pen.”

  “Jesus,” Zack breathed, and Jill’s face went featureless.

  “In the next ten or fifteen minutes,” George said conversationally, “I will have a fatal heart attack. It’s an old CIA trick. A really first-rate autopsy might pick up some traces of a phosphoric acid ester—but I imagine Sziller and his people will be able to prevent that easily enough. They’ve got the building surrounded; I can’t get as far as my car. You two are my last hope.”

  Zack’s brain throbbed, and his eyelids felt packed with sand. George’s utter detachment was scary. It said that Wesley George was possessed by something that made his own death unimportant—and it might be catching. His words implied that it was, and that he proposed to infect Zack and Jill. Zack had seen North By Northwest, and had no intention of letting other people’s realities hang him out on Mount Rushmore if there were any even dishonourable way to dodge.

  But he could perceive pretty well himself, and he knew that whatever the old man had was a burden, a burden that would crush him even in death unless he could discharge it. Everything that was good in Zack yearned to answer the call in those kindly eyes; and the internal conflict—almost entirely subconscious—nearly tore him apart.

  There was an alternative. It would be easy to simply disbelieve the old man’s every word. Was it plausible that this glowing, healthy man could spontaneously die, killed by a bad joke? Zack told himself that Hitler and Rasputin had used just such charisma to sell the most palpable idiocies, that this shining old man with the presence of a Buddha was only a compelling madman with paranoid delusions. Zack had never seen a picture of Wesley George. He remembered the fake Abby Hoffman who had snarled up the feds for so long. He pulled scepticism around himself like a scaly cloak, and he looked at those eyes again, and louder and more insistent even than Jill’s voice had been, they said that the old man was Wesley George and that he didn’t have much time.

  Zack swallowed something foul. “Tell us,” he said, and was proud that his voice came out firm.

  “You understand that I may get you both dipped in soft shit, maybe killed?”

  Zack and Jill said, “Yes,” together, and glanced at each other. This was a big step for both of them: there is all the difference in the world between agreeing to live together and agreeing to die together. Zack knew that whatever came afterward, they were married as of now, and he desperately wanted to think that through, but there was no time, no time. What’s more important than death and marriage? he thought, and saw the same question on Jill’s face, and then they turned back as one to Wesley George.

  “Answer me a question first,” the old man said. Both nodded. “Does the end justify the means?”

  Zack thought hard and answered honestly. Much, he was sure, depended on this.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Depends on the end,” Jill said. “And the means.”

  George nodded, content. “People with a knee-jerk answer either way make me nervous,” he said. “All right, children, into your hands I place the fate of modern civilization. I bring you Truth, and I think that the truth shall make you flee.”

  He glanced at his watch, displayed no visible reaction. But he took a pack of tobacco cigarettes from his shirt, lit one, and plainly gave his full attention to savoring the first toke. Then he spoke, and for the first time Zack noticed that the old man’s voice was a pipe organ with a double bass register, a great resonant baritone that Disraeli or Geronimo might have been proud to own.

  “I am a chemist. I have devoted my life to studying chemical aspects of consciousness and perception. My primary motivation has been the advancement of knowledge; my secondary motive has been to get people high—as many people, as many ways as possible. I think the biggest single problem in the world, for almost the last two decades, has been morale. Despairing people solve no problems. So I have pursued better living through chemistry, and I’ve made my share of mistakes, but in the main I think the world has profited from my existence as much as I have from its. And now I find that I am become Prometheus, and that my friends want me dead just as badly as my enemies.

  “I have synthesized truth.

  “I have synthesized truth in my laboratory. I have distilled it into chemical substance. I have measured it in micrograms, prepared a dozen vectors for its use. It is not that hard to make. And I believe that if its seeds are once sown on this planet, the changes it will make will be the biggest in human history.

  “Everything in the world that is founded on lies may die.”

  Zack gro
ped for words, came up empty. He became aware that Jill’s hand was clutching his tightly.

  “‘What is truth?’ asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for answer. Neither will I, I’m afraid—but I ought to at least clarify the question. I cannot claim to have objective truth. I have no assurance that there is such a thing. But I have subjective truth, and I know that exists. I knew a preacher once who got remarkable results by looking people square in the eye and saying, ‘You do too know what I mean.’”

  A spasm crossed the old man’s face and his glowing aura flickered. Zack and Jill moved toward him as one, and he waved them away impatiently.

  “Even those of us who pay only lip service to the truth know what it is, deep down in our hearts. And we all believe in it, and know it when we see it. Even the best rationalization can fool only the surface mind that manufactures it; there is something beneath, call it the heart or the conscience, that knows better. It tenses up like a stiff neck muscle when you lie, in proportion to the size of the lie, and if it stiffens enough it can kill you for revenge. Ask Richard Corey. Most people seem to me, in my cynical moments, to keep things stabilized at about the discomfort of a dislocated shoulder or a tooth about to abscess. They trade honesty off in small chunks for pleasure, and wonder that their lives hold so little joy. Joy is incompatible with tensed shoulders and a stiff neck. You become uneasy with people in direct proportion to how many lies you have to keep track of in their presence.

  “I have stumbled across a psychic muscle relaxant.”

  “Truth serum’s been around a long time,” Zack said.

  “This is no more Pentothal than acid is grass!” George thundered, an Old Testament prophet enraged. He caught himself at once—in a single frantic instant he seemed to extrude his anger, stare at it critically, tie it off, and amputate it, in deliberate steps. “Sorry—rushed. Look: Pentothal will—sometimes—get you a truthful answer to a direct question. My drug imbues you with a strong desire to get straight with all the people you’ve been lying to regardless of the consequences. Side effects include the usual accompaniments of confession—cathartic relief, euphoria to the point of exaltation and a tendency to babble—and a new one: visual colour effects extremely reminiscent of organic mescaline.”