He didn’t mind being able to exert a little influence now and again, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to lead anyone. So he said that everybody should get some sleep. This seemed a nicely modest first piece of leadership. Fat Les and Davey slept in the Beetle. Ishmael tried to sleep with Marilyn in the jeep. Sleep would not come. The front seats were too hard and the benches in the back were too narrow. So they had to talk to each other.
‘Alone at last,’ said Ishmael.
‘I wish we were in some cheap motel,’ Marilyn said. ‘I wish we had some shoplifted smoked salmon and champagne, and that I was showing you my tattoo.’
It sounded all right to Ishmael.
‘How do you want to die, Ishmael?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. I’m still trying to work out how to live. I don’t think about it.’
‘I think about it,’ she said. ‘I see my body thrown through the windscreen of a speeding car. They pull me from the wreckage, the jugular vein is severed but the face remains serene, the make-up; is still perfect.
‘I see myself slumped over a table in a waterfront bar. The body is ageing but it’s still appealing enough in tight black lace and fishnet. The face is wrinkled, but the eyes are as sensual and as beckoning as ever. There is an empty brandy bottle on the table. The regulars see me unconscious, ‘That’s Marilyn for you,’ they say with affection. ‘Dead drunk again.’ But then one of them touches my skin, as pale and cold as porcelain, and finds that I am just dead.
‘I see a hotel room, very modern, very dark. The curtains are drawn, the television is showing Pandora’s Box. The bed is tangled in an aftermath of passion. My beautiful corpse lies at an angle across the bed, in a posture that is at once impossible and yet impossibly provocative. My hair cascades over my face. One red high heel is still on, my red silk camisole seems perfect but for the one small bullet hole.
‘That’s the way I see it.’
‘I just want to die wise,’ said Ishmael, but he was more than half asleep.
♦
A television commercial. The funeral motorcade of Maxwell E. Staveley, whose will is being read out in voice-over. He leaves his wife a calender, his sons fifty dollars each in dimes, his business partner nothing. But nephew Harold who has oft times said, ‘Gee, Uncle Max, it sure pays to own a Volkswagen,’ gets the entire fortune of one hundred billion dollars.
Virtue rewarded — the American way.
♦
Next morning the four of them had breakfast together in a sea-front café. Ishmael found it a difficult meal to begin with. The others were still keen for Ishmael to do some leadership. But once he put his mind to it it wasn’t so very hard. He decided that Fat Les should teach Davey everything he knew about Volkswagens. He realized this might take years but they could start by rebuilding Enlightenment.
He decided Marilyn would not be at home in a railway arch, but also that the time was not ripe for a return to the commune, so they would stay in a boarding house. They would do a bit of touring around in the jeep even though he knew it would not be as meaningful as touring in Enlightenment. Then after a while they would return to Fat Les’s arch. He and Davey would have been working day and night and have built a very special machine. Then Ishmael and Marilyn would drive off together into infinity, or at least, if she really insisted, as far as Fox’s Farm.
They said their goodbyes. Ishmael and Marilyn checked into a boarding house. It was a warm, clear day. They decided to go to the nude beach and take some LSD.
‘Take some paper with you,’ Marilyn said. ‘You might want to make a few notes.’
Renata returns home. Her home is what she supposes a career-woman’s flat is supposed to look like. It is a studio apartment with modern furniture in primary colours, polished boards, a hand-coloured print of a ‘57 Chevy on the wall, a fair number of books, most of them read, a chrome drinks trolley, a discreet colour television, a hi-fi, a black Venetian blind.
She has been sent a record by a group calling themselves the Glove Compartment. The picture on the sleeve shows a photograph of the Ford works at Dagenham, and an elegant female hand holding a cocktail glass. Renata pours herself a tumbler of apple juice and steels herself to play the record. The music is young, brash, and not particularly in tune. A reedy teenage voice sings:
When I’m feeling troubled
When I’m not feeling free
There’s a weight on my shoulders
And it’s bothering me,
I go down to the garage
And I turn the key
Then I drive like a bastard
In my Ford Capri.
Ah well, she can give it an honourable mention in the news column. It could easily fill two or three column inches. But there are more pressing matters. She needs to wash her hair, do her nails, phone her mother and come up with thirty more things that you always wanted to know about the Volkswagen Beetle.
♦
Ishmael’s notes.
1 a.m. Call me Ishmael.
The beach.
The sun.
A few nude people — mostly men as a matter of fact.
1.30 a.m. The beach.
The sea.
The sun has gone in a bit.
Fewer nude people. One man has been staring a little unpleasantly at Marilyn but she doesn’t seem to object.
2 a.m. I say to Marilyn, ‘Have you taken LSD before?’
‘A few times.’
‘Will it be fun?’
‘Not fun exactly.’
‘Will it be a learning experience?’
‘Everything is a learning experience.’
The sea.
The beach.
The sun’s come out again. Not much seems to be happening to my consciousness. Maybe it wasn’t really LSD.
2.30 a.m. The beach.
The horizon.
The shape of the world is changed by the movement of pebbles.
The sky.
The DISTANCE.
Space that is limitless. Infinity in all directions.
We are each at the centre of the universe.
Looks like it really was LSD after all.
3 a.m. The beach.
Pebbles. They seem to move. They do move, of course.
The planet moves through space. Our bodies move in time to cosmic rhythms.
Bodies on the beach. Pale hieroglyphs. Their arrangement spells out messages when seen from above. A code? Who does the decoding?
3.30 a.m. All this time Marilyn’s been reading a book. It has an Impressionist painting on the front. The colours move and vibrate. There is writing on the cover, but I can’t read what it says. A code? What I can make out is a line of the blurb which says ‘this unique book’. I shall have to think about that.
3.45 a.m. The sea.
In what sense can a book be said to be unique?
Printed matter, mechanical reproduction, unlimited editions. Not much uniqueness there.
‘What makes a copy unique,’ says Marilyn, ‘is its position in space.’
4.30 a.m. Waves crash on to the shore.
The sky. The tides.
Lunar music that changes our positions in space.
5.15 a.m. The beach.
The wind.
The sun has gone in.
The beach is emptying. Ugly people. Grey sacks of flesh, open pores, moles that sprout hair. They speak out of the corner of their mouths. They talk dirty. They know something I don’t. About the code? They put their clothes on. They put their skins on. Their skins are suits made out of a kind of rubber, very life-like, a substance not found in nature. Inside the rubber skin there is a form of life — part insect, part vegetable, and too loathsome even to think about. They are changing the shapes of space. Of course — that explains Marilyn’s father’s strange behaviour.
6 a.m. I am sitting in the Neptune Burger bar.
I felt a bit bad for a moment back there at the beach. Better now, except I have trouble holding my cup of coffee. It keeps changing size.