That night he had managed to catch Kesey for a few minutes away from his followers, and he had told him about the magical kingdom of the American West, and how the current king—a castrated transplanted Frenchman!—could surely be overthrown when that cycle came around again, at Easter in ’69, five years hence. And he had told Kesey about the supernatural power he would have if he took the throne, how he would be able to shackle and control the god of earthquakes and wine as the present king was doing, and raise ghosts to do his errands, and live forever. Omar Salvoy would be King Kesey’s advisor.
But Kesey had just laughed and, as Salvoy recalled, had said something like, ‘And if I jump off a cliff, angels will bear me up lest I dash my foot against a stone, right?”—and he had walked away. Salvoy believed it had been a quote from the New Testament, when Jesus was refusing to be tempted by Satan. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had been full of Christ-figure imagery. Salvoy had driven home over the mountains in a humiliated rage, and never returned. Later he had seen a photograph of Kesey’s bus in Life magazine—someone had painted FU over his A on the destination sign, so that it now just read, idiotically, FURTHUR.
Salvoy had abandoned college, though he’d kept studying the plays of Shakespeare, and he began to sample the strange cults that were springing up in the Bay Area in the mid-sixties. From a splinter group of the Order of the Knights Templar he learned about the uses of the Eye of Horns symbol, the udjat eye that looked like a profile falcon, in countering the influences of the feminine Moon Goddess; and that it was possible actually to become the human father of a living, absolving fragment of the god who died with the grapevines every winter and was reborn in them every spring, by impregnating a dead woman; and for a few months he traveled up and down the coast on Highway I, from Big Sur to the state beaches between Santa Barbara and Ventura, with the agricultural human-sacrifice cult that was then still calling itself the Camino Hayseeds, not for two decades yet to be internally reorganized and have its name changed to the Amino Acids.
And then toward the end of the year he had found the Danville-area commune known as the Lever Blank, whose secret and very old real name was L’Ordre du Levrier Blanc, which meant The Order of the White Greyhound. The name had apparently been chosen as long ago as the thirteenth century as a repudiation of the dog that appeared on the Fool card in the tarot deck, which was always a mongrel and generally black. The Lever Blank grew vegetables and marijuana on part of its land, and dispensed food to indigent street people, and talked a lot about harmony with nature and celebrations of life; but the Levrier Blanc was concerned with the grapes that grew on the rest of the commune land, and with re-establishing the carefully preserved old pre-phylloxera vines that had borne Dionysus’s sacramental wine before the French Revolution, and with the supernatural kingdom of the American west which Salvoy had already perceived. Salvoy had decided to join them and become the king, the earthly personification of the sun-god, himself. And, based on what he had learned from the Order of the Templars, he had resolved too to father an incarnate piece of the earthbound, annually dying vegetation god. He had failed at all that, then. This year he would do it.
But it would be a risky and probably one-shot procedure. He would have to learn from Armentrout how to exit a body without hurting it—he wanted to leave the Plumtree body alive, healthy, and fertile. The Koot Hoomie boy would have to be comatose, flat-line brain-dead; Salvoy would take the ventilator out of the boy’s throat and then lean over him and jump across the gap in a moment when Koot was, ideally, inhaling. At that point, with no tenant-mind to overcome, Salvoy would simply have Koot Hoomie’s body.
And Salvoy would quickly have to kill Armentrout, whose goal in all this was to have a perpetually flatline brain-dead king. If Armentrout were actually present, Salvoy would have to remember to put a gun or a knife into the boy’s limp hand before throwing himself out of the Plumtree body into Koot Hoomie.
He punched the doctor’s number into the telephone, and when the querulous voice said, hoarsely, “Hello?” Salvoy forgot diplomacy and just said, “You tried to kill Koot Hoomie, you fat freak!” He did remember to keep his voice down.
“But I failed,” said the doctor quickly. “My mother—Muir—my ghosts are still around, they haven’t been banished! The boy must still be alive—healthy, even!—I’ve been searching for him with the shadow of a pomegranate, but there’s been so little sun—”
“Yeah, he’s alive. He’s with us, still. I’m in the same house with him right now! But I ain’t tellin’ you dick if you’re just gonna try and kill him again.” He bared the Plumtree teeth and spat out, “You fucking block, you stone, you worse than goddamn senseless thing!”
“No, I won’t, I was desperate that day—of course I want to, we both want to, get him onto the perpetual life-support arrangement, brain-dead—but, try to understand this, my mother’s ghost had found me! I was desperate—I was only thinking about—if I killed him outright it would at least get rid of her.”
“You fucking dumb—didn’t you think Koot Hoomie’s ghost would come after you?”
“It would have been a reprieve—and he’s the king, and I think the king’s ghost would have bigger concerns than to go after his murderer. Crane didn’t come after your girls, did he? Anyway, I didn’t kill the boy.”
“Well, you’re on my shit-list, ipso fatso. The good news is that they did the restoration-to-life trick all wrong, and this Koot Hoomie boy is the king if anyone is. Anyway, nobody else is. Look, I’ll cut the boy out of the pack here, but before I let you anywhere near him, you’re gonna have to tell me everything you know about transferring a person from one body to another.”
“Why would you need to know that? All you need to know is that a dead Fisher King is a heat-sink.” Armentrout giggled breathlessly. “He takes the heat.”
“Tell you what, why don’t I just go find another doctor? There’s gotta be more than one psychiatrist in this country who’d like to have in his clinic an engine for… for eliminating the spiritual consequences of sin.” Salvoy clunked the receiver against the wall as if about to hang up—and then he heard a knock at the bedroom door.
IT WAS recognizably Cody who pulled open the bedroom door after Cochran’s knock, and she was holding the telephone receiver to her ear against the spring-tension of the stretched-out cord. Her face was spotty, and she touched a finger to her tight bloodless lips as she held the receiver out toward him.
Cochran twisted his head to listen, with her—and he heard Dr. Armentrout’s unmistakable fruity voice coming out of the earpiece: “—can hear you breathing! You need me, Salvoy, don’t kid yourself! What other psychiatrist is going to know that mind-shifting trick you want? Hah? Asymptotic freedom, remember? How to pick up your ass and tote it out of there? I’ll tell you how to do it—I’ll help you do it. I was just curious why you wanted to, that’s all. Arid I’m her physician-of-record!” Armentrout was panting over the phone. “You’re listening, right? So tell me where you are, where he is.”
Cochran ventured to make a gravelly “Hmm,” sound.
“You say they did the restoration-to-life trick all wrong,” said Armentrout, catching his breath. “Are you afraid they might do it again, and do it right this time? I don’t know why you should care about that, but if you want to screw them up, I can certainly help you, you know. You could use the physician-of-record being present. Is that Cochran guy there too?”