Nothing happened. Odd, Coleridge had seen far-off lands, his imagination liberated by the stuff’s mythical ability to provoke, but I saw nothing. I blinked again, thinking, Opium: overrated.
And then . . . My, my, isn’t this interesting. It was a sense of pleasure that can only be called acute. My skin felt soft, my body warmed pleasantly. In a few seconds the acute metamorphisized to the chronic. Pleasure was general. I seemed to forget who I was and why I was there. I lay back and for a second believed I had found paradise. Drat! Too early to make such a claim, for the next second completed my journey through the upper levels of poppyland and brought me to the destination the opiate had selected for me.
I was in a concert hall, alone, though well dressed. Upon the stage was my sister. The applause was tumultuous, although again I was by myself in the ranks of red-plush seats, and I was not clapping. Lucy, the adored one, accepted the enthusiasm of the invisible crowd with grace. She was quite lovely, in a rather low silk gown, a small but firm bust with a string of pearls about her swan’s neck. There was serene confidence on her beautiful face.
She sang. An aria from Wagner, I think, though one of his gentler, more romantic ones, nothing with dark clouds and northern war gods bashing each other with sword and hammer. Her voice was exquisite, but the odd thing was that each note emerged shimmering from her throat and found a place in midair above her, moreover then transfiguring into a bird of bright plumage. I saw nightingales, peacocks, blue parrots, proud ocher hawks and falcons, even some prehistoric saurian birds festooned in the colors of the rainbow. In time an aviary of dazzling brilliance had taken grip on roosts above her beautiful head, and the radiance of the color had a kind of translucent sparkle to it, so that it caught, refracted, redirected, and amplified the lights of the hall.
She stood, crowned. The glory of the music was enshrined in the pigment of feathers above her, the whole thing rather awesome. It seemed to be a scene from some sort of devotional. It was whoever God may be, adoring her formally.
I had always hated her. Where I struggled, she soared. Where I bumbled, she triumphed. Where I was unloved, she was worshipped. She had been sent here, I was convinced, to make mockery of my many failings, my lack of talent and industry, my crude ways, my slithery mendacity, my awareness that the music that was the river of life in our family would not be my destiny, while it would be hers in diamonds.
The astonishment was how proud I felt. Shorn of my fury at her position of supremacy in the family, I felt the cascade of love. That was my sister, my flesh, my family, my blood up there, and it reflected so well upon me that I could not but take immense contentment from it.
Yet into this demi-paradise—my true expression of love for Lucy, which I have heretofore hidden from all, most especially myself, the depth of her talent, the perfection of her beauty unsnarled by jealousy and fear—came at last the snake, except it wasn’t a snake, it was a large brutish boar (an opium pun? bore? boor? brother?), horned and snuffling, grunting, leaking filth and offal, his unorganized ways suggestive of violence.
He wandered, sniffing, munching, probing his way across the stage. Lucy did not panic nor race to safety. Her love abideth. She reached to his hideous head and stroked it, knelt to it and switched to Brahms, something delicate and soothing. She tamed the savage heart of the beast, which happily went to knees and then full supine, placed its great snout upon the floor, and began to snore rapturously, lost, perhaps, in its own opium dreams. These images, I might add, were as vivid to me as any in reality. What they symbolized, I have no idea, if anything at all. Yet they have stayed with me and will, I believe, forever.
I blinked and found myself back in the den, in the drifting pall of red haze, watching as now and then someone drifted this way or that. I was sure my trip had lasted but a second or two. However, once reality more or less returned, I became bored. If one does not smoke opium in an opium den, what is there to do? There is otherwise no entertainment, so the answer is nothing, and I did nothing for an hour or so, pretending to draw a lungful of the gas into my system now and then. Generally, however, I was quiet, and after more than a bit of time, I felt secure enough to look about in the low light.
I could not see him, but I could not see anyone or anything except the seething red vapors. At a certain point, a fellow across from me decided he’d been voyaging through the universe enough for one evening, and rose and stumbled out. That opened a vantage, and across the room, at another grouping of four divans, I made out the silhouette of the colonel’s derby, read the shortness of his form, and by that method identified him. His face was still, somewhat blocked from view by a large bat that hung off his nose. He seemed oblivious, as oblivious as all of them, and I wondered if he were dead. But now and then I’d detect motion, see a pipe rise, its stem put to mouth, and the glow suffusing the air above the cup signifying a deep inward draw. He must have had big lungs, as his ingestions were heroic in their length and depth. He also must have had terrible dragons in his brain, if it took that much to soothe them.
More eons passed. In other words, ten minutes went by, even if those ten had no place in real time, and two of the smokers from the colonel’s little collection of four got up to stumble out. As they shambled toward the door, the Chinaman attended them, and in this brief little circus of activity, I slipped off my divan and took up one next to the colonel.
Finally I got a good look at him. His face was rather dour, as if gravity had a special grudge against him and pulled his flesh downward at twice the going rate. Morever, the large bat that dominated his lower half turned out to be a spectacularly droopy mustache. It must have weighed a stone three. His eyes were lightless, he stared at nothing, he looked at nothing, he said nothing. He was utterly still.
I lay next to him. He was in a very deep place. I did notice one hand was closed into a tight fist, suggesting it gripped something, proof of tension unusual for this place, since the point seemed to be languor as an expression of collapse and escape.
By now it must have been close to dawn. I hoped poor Ross hadn’t frozen himself stiff. It was getting to seem rather pointless, as one learns nothing from a man so far gone as the colonel. But at a certain moment, he stirred.
I turned upward to his face and saw what might be called a just-after-battle stare, the stare of a commanding officer who sees his men slain and gutted in the sun.
He sensed my attention; our eyes met. I could seen pain in his. The drug, which offered such merciful surcease, had at last worn off. He was naked to memory in that moment, perhaps not yet hunkered down behind the Spartan war shields of self-discipline and willed stoicism that kept him sane. It was a rare moment.
“The blood,” he said. “There was so much of it. Blood everywhere, the poor girl. You see, it’s on me. I was the one. Her guts, her face, all butchered up, all cut to ribbons. Me, see, I was the one who done it.”
“Sir,” I said, “are you all right?”
“I killed her, you know. No one else, me alone. God help me, it was a terrible thing, but I could not help myself.”
Though this confession should have stirred horror in me, it inspired compassion. He was so in pain.
“Sir, would you like me to get you some water? Perhaps you have a fever and need a doctor?”
He wasn’t listening. He opened his hand to examine what he gripped so hard in his fist, and I nearly fell out of my own divan. He held Annie’s rings! I had to make certain I wasn’t the one hallucinating, so I closed my eyes hard and long, then opened them and made certain I saw what I saw, which was indeed two rings in his large palm.
“She wore them both, you know,” he said. “It fell to me to take them from those still, bloody fingers. I am beyond damnation. Hellfire awaits, and rightly so.”