The other pill was called Permanent Arrest, and differed from the pharmacopoeia of the Borgias only in its speed and lack of pain; it switched you off like a light bulb. Then they dropped you into the crematorium, or recycled you in a Mexican garden. It was the latter I had in mind when I took the train to San Miguel Allende. I had no interest in trying to resume my life in the twenty-eighth or thirtieth century; I would be happy to have my private collection of dancing molecules dance again as poinsettias.
When I got there a Oaxacan Indian in a blue jumpsuit showed me the storage chambers in an old pink church, with row after row of coffin-sized plastic cartons. “These are our Survivors,” he explained, in oleaginous English. There was a name stenciled in dark green on each box, a good many of them were Japanese. Hara-kiri?
“What about the dead ones? I mean permanently dead?”
“You mean our Terminates,” he said. He led me to a stone undercroft lined with bookshelves. These were about half filled with what looked like coffee cans, a name stenciled on each. I shuddered slightly. What a small space to contain a person! What compression of a body that it takes so long to grow and age and get comfortable in!
“What about the others,” I said, “the ones you plant?”
He took me up some stairs and out into a garden filled with flowers and trees, but my spirit did not rise at the sight. They were shabby trees and unkempt flowers, with a lot of insect damage and sunburn on their leaves. What a misuse of human resources! I decided immediately that I did not want to join that sad aggregation of cloistered plants. At least not yet. I would sweat it out for a few more years in human form and see what happened.
On the train back to Atlanta, where I was living at the time, I thought of how close I’d come to dying, and I felt relieved and clear in the head. I thought of how many people must kill themselves in midlife, by blade or chemical or leap, rather than give up their jobs or divorce their spouses or take up a wicked habit. It struck me that the thing to do was quit the job or slug the boss or whatever. If it didn’t work out, if you really fucked it up, then you could commit suicide. I went back to work in real estate and took up cigars and love affairs. The real estate did well for me and I doubled my fortune in eight months; the other two were less productive, but they did fill in some empty niches in my being and I forgot about suicide. Until now, on Belson, faced with starvation. What an outcome for a man who loves eating as much as I do!
I lay back in my chair and tried to relax, but my body was stiff with fear and anger and would not let go. A part of me wanted to die and another part was terrified of dying. I tried to generate Orbach’s voice in my mind, but nothing happened; there was nothing in my head but the fear of death.
And then I looked across the room and blinked. My mother was sitting near the far wall, on our old Ohio sofa. Her pink chenille gown was open at the top and her breasts were visible—waxy, shining with sweat. On each side of her, candles burned in Belson air. On her face was emptiness and despair. She looked up at me as I stared and her face broke into a weak smile.
Shockingly, I found myself drawn toward that couch, toward that ruined face and those breasts. Flesh of my flesh; that loosely tied chenille covered the belly where I had once dwelt. There was my first hotel, where I had begun as a coiled marvel of gestation. I sat and stared at her, feeling drawn toward her empty and lonely death, by alcohol and cigarette and self-hatred, wanting to throw my arms around her waist and lean my cheek against her breast. I reached a shaky hand toward her and then I heard myself shouting, “Goddamn you, Mother!” and I was out of my chair and running.
Where I ran to was the field of Belson grass half a mile from the shack. I stopped at the edge of it, out of breath and sweating in the noonday sun. I took off my shirt and pants, then my shorts. I was stark naked and covered with four days and nights of morphine perspiration. My muscles felt shriveled and my scalp itched powerfully with all the sweat in my hair.
The humming in my ears was loud now and it was no longer a humming in my ears. It was the grass. It was singing softly. To me. Who else? It was singing to me.
“Forgive me, Love,” I said, and walked gently on it. I looked down at my feet. The grass wasn’t bleeding. I walked farther, out into the middle of the field, surrounded by song. Tears were streaming down my face and my feet seemed to be damp with cool oil as they pressed the delicate flesh of the grass beneath them.
Without difficulty I found the place that was right for me, the center of the song and the heart of the field. I sat carefully at first, feeling the soft grass like a living carpet on my bare body; then I lay down on it, looking up at the hot blue spirit of Fomalhaut. The grass moved gently beneath my body, pressing my shoulders and back, my buttocks, calves and heels with a delicate massage. I felt a sensation of rocking and closed my eyes. Fomalhaut blazed on my body. The grass held and rocked me. I passed out.
When I awoke it was night and both moons were up. It took a few moments to realize that I was not hungry. Nor was I hung over, or sore, or frightened.
It was totally silent around me; the grass had stopped singing. At least it had stopped singing aloud; I felt that it might be singing in my veins—my healed veins. I felt awake, at peace, nourished, clean.
Eventually I raised my left arm to look at my watch, and as I did so I felt a series of tiny resistances against my skin and looked over at it by the moonlight: blades of grass had fastened their tips to the length of my arm, and as I raised it they fell away. I was like Gulliver with those Lilliputian ropes, except the grass did not really restrain me. When the arm was free I looked at it closely. There were little pink marks. I knew I had been fed that way, and cleaned out that way; my beloved grass had drawn the used morphine and all its attendant poisons from my bloodstream and replaced that detritus with nutrients of its own devising. I was clean. An interplanetary molecular wedding had taken place while I slept and the chemical soup that filled my veins had been filtered, strained, purified and replenished. It must have read my DNA like a helical braille with the fingertips of its filaments. This planet was a sentient being and it loved me.
Yet if Belson loved me, just who had wiped out my food supply in the first place? For a moment a shudder passed through me and I felt like the awakened Adam, not yet aware that both God and Satan watched his moves and laid their plans for him.
Fomalhaut had begun to rise and pale lavender spread itself across the sky above me. What the hell, I thought. I’m not going to die after all.
The feeding I’d received that night lasted me throughout the following day. I wanted to stay away from morphine but couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. I wound up shooting a half-dozen small fixes into myself during the day. I thought of taking my hammer and smashing the drug synthesizer, but I didn’t do that. I kept the machine turned on and myself too.