All around and beyond you … all of you … was prairie or desert, I couldn’t really tell which … a primeval desert of stones like the Sahara, perhaps, with a skyful of stars tied down tight like a tent, to fit the rounding horizon. Campfires were extinguished … blotted out by a great storm of mushrooms blowing up like sudsy detergent … or a hail of pale pumice stones hurting me horribly as they hurtled through me. Nameless nomads went streaming past on the edge of the dark … starving. They flapped by like rags in the wind smeared over with blurry vague features which ran in the rain of mushrooms bleeding like ink. Doll-like dead pot-bellied children blew past like overripe puff-balls whose spores exploded in dust. Survivors struggled up to collapse at my feet like a muttering pile of old rotten sacks. The air was so sudsy and thick with transparent mushrooms dancing like jellyfish that it was getting harder to breathe. I sniffed the back of my own hand and … with horror, my armpits. My flesh was raw mushroom! When I tried to spew out the smell I saw I was all mushroom … even my lungs. I reeked from inside! In despair, I threw myself down on a bed of moss … mossy muskeg of North Manitoba … I was all sewn up in sour-smelling furs. I had all the flat places of Earth in my memory … snow fields behind me … Asian steppe … chains of deserts ringing the planet all the way to the south Saharan sands. From as far away as all that, a jackal came loping straight at me like a mistimed missile … from a long way off still, I knew who it was … Peter Paul. It took him so long just crossing that steppe that he had the time to grow up before he could get to me. You could see he was destined for me. He was lost out there, the last of his tribe but coming on fast … determined to hang onto life by all of his teeth … so deprived in his singular struggle to survive that it was costing him quite literally everything to get there! I was all for him … he had no other choice … but I did, I thought. There he was scrambling up that last cliff on which I was standing and, as I thought for a minute of kicking his head in, like a “punkin,” he suddenly came sliding down cascades of mirrors at me … on me … something was breaking.… We were together in bed.
Are you feeling the Borbor, at all? Or do you go on smoking your keef as an antidote, Hassan? Nothing will help you now, Hassan … you simply have to listen to the rest of my tale. Don’t yawn! Don’t you ever take off those dark glasses of yours?
Well, right after graduation, PP and I got very quietly married in Saskatoon … under the not quite legally correct names of Peter S. Blood and Mary B. Foote. I added that “e” to be fancy and it cost me a lot of legal pain later … when we came to divorce. I didn’t know a damn thing about PP, really, when I married him. After the mushroom-event I had an even later menstrual period than usual so I guess I mumbled something dark to him about marriage and PP just said: “Sure. OK. Why not?” I didn’t know, then, that his father had chopped up his mother with an ax in the shower of a motel near Medicine Hat and been mowed down by the Mounties. He said both his parents were dead, “in an accident,” so I guessed from that and some things he did that he must have some money … but I had no idea how much! In all the time I’d known him I’d never seen PP pull one single penny out of his pocket … never, under any circumstances did he touch money. We didn’t go Dutch: I paid for everything … everything! … out of my scholarship money or money from working weekends and nights. At the mere mention of money, Peter Paul used to pull out a switchblade he always carried on him, mumbling about how he was “going to take care of his guardians” … so naturally, I thought someone was keeping him short. That “someone,” I soon realized after I married him, was PP himself … and, after all, I didn’t really know who he was!
That came out when we went to apply for our passports and were told by some little local official in the capital city, Regina, that Blood Indians and their spouses were not eligible for passports at all! We were members … and in Peter Paul’s case the very last one … of an independent but unrecognized nation which had never signed treaties of reciprocity with the Canadian government. We had no status at all. “Are you trying to tell me I don’t exist!” I menaced the man. “Oh, no, Madame,” he protested. “You can have bank accounts, driving licenses, dog and hunting licenses but no liquor license, nor even a permit to drink liquor at any time; neither vanilla extract for cooking nor after-shave lotion are you permitted to buy or consume, nor wood alcohol nor anti-freeze may be sold to a Bounty Indian but you can get onto public relief at a pinch, since you’re residents, or so I think. Here, let me just look that up in the book a minute. In any case — and I’m quite sure of that — passports, no!” Peter Paul was so cowed, he didn’t even want to go to the papers with this. He was ready to call off the whole trip to Basel … my post-graduate year of fellowship study with Dr. Forbach, imagine! … not me! I simply sailed into the offices of the Saskatoon Sketch with the story and it hit the front page. It hit the front page not only locally but all over the world as the wire services got hold of it. Peter Paul Strangleblood, the Richest Little Boy in the World Denied Passport. Deny Passport to Red Indian Oil Heir … and on and on … ever since.
At least I knew who I was married to … at last! It’s sort of funny … now that I come to think about it.… I’ve often enough in my life found myself in quite deep with a man before I even found out who he was … really. The next one … a little over a year later … was Thay. I’ve told you how that happened: I simply flew over to New York to look into GRAMMA after I’d knocked poor PP flat on the floor with it … him and his lack of “havingness!” … and I swooped back with Thay Himmer to get him to “grammatize” my husband into some money sense. I felt at the time that he had to be cured even if it meant taking all of his money off of him. … It wasn’t doing him … or anybody else … any good … and I told Thay as much. Thay, as you know by now, loves to come on as a magician and … I must admit … he does pretty well. Can’t you just hear him saying: “A magician? I am!” He took hold of our household in Basel … but quick! Thay was “running” PP four to six hours a day on his “havingness” and he “ran” everybody else in the house: Rolf Ritterolf, my Swiss lawyer running Fundamental Funds; Fraulein Freulich, my Swiss tri-lingual typist: even the cook. When he got to me, he soon turned up the fact that I wasn’t in contact with Dr. Forbach … badly out of communication, in fact. Thay Himmer got Dr. Forbach to come over to tea and … like a good Swiss grandfather, come to make peace.… The professor brought along his unfortunate granddaughter whom Peter Paul had once slapped around in a rage … for making fun of his money, he thought.