The next thing I knew, we were on one of the rollercoaster streets. The rain had stopped, but it was nighttime. How could that have happened? I wondered. Where did I put the time? Hadn’t it still been daylight when I stepped into the café?
I was astonished to see the streetlights fallen into rain puddles, their green, red, and gold reflections pulsing and glowing. I bent down, trying to scoop them out of the water, but the boy-man pulled me, and I snapped back into his smile like a stretched rubber band.
I laughed, weaving between people on the sidewalk. His shiny eyes reminded me of a seal.
I pointed to a man with a briefcase, whose hat was a pointed pyramid. “Why is that man staring at me?”
The boy-man tugged me in the other direction. “He’s not real. Don’t look at him, Dolly Girl. Don’t look at any of them. They’re in another dream. Come on, come on, come with me.”
***
We were inside a great spaceship. No, said the boy-man, no, it’s a ballroom. Hear the music? Of course—the music. Liquid candy.
We were dancing then, all of us. Colors brighter than poppies, so many people pulsing together, ventricles in a massive heart. I grabbed hold of him and shouted, “I’m dancing in the Eye of God!”
He laughed and hugged me, his face both young and old, and in that moment, I knew he was my true love. Lips and Eyes and Souls. I love you, I told him with my mind. What are words? They float, you can’t catch them, but the mind holds forever. I felt his love return as he pulled me to him, his hands on my thighs, his fingers.
A shining girl danced between us, cutting us in two. She shimmied up to me, filling my ears with a silver tinkling as she wound around. The sound came from hundreds of bells sewn onto her dress, and I hugged her close to hear them better.
She had a red flower in her hair, like the beautiful girl’s—a flower with a center like dark parted lips. For just a second, I thought I saw something like a pale tongue flick out between the petals—or perhaps a tiny white worm—but before I could look closer, the boy-man yanked her away. She jangled as he plucked her, and in his motion, I imagined the harsh tug of a leech pulled from a wound.
He gave her a hard shove into the crowd. In the ocean of dancers, she drowned.
I tried to follow her, the burn inside my bones driving me forward, but he pulled me back to him. Then the music was inside me, and I was drowning too.
The night rolled on, and my head burst bright with dying stars. People shivered and quaked, but gradually—I began to sense God’s Eye closing. The music turned violent, pow and bam, fists on drums slamming inside my head. The dancers howled, their movements twisting into something tortured, as if they were dancing on a hellish floor. I think I screamed.
He told me to sit down, and gradually, the music became sand in my head.
The next thing I remember was sitting on the floor, realizing I was cold. The boy-man said his name was Danny and that he knew a place where we could crash. “We’re coming down,” he said. As he leaned close, his breath smelled like an electric cord freshly pulled from a socket.
He grabbed my hand again, and we wove through the gyrating crowd. Their faces were contorted, twisted with what looked like terrible pain, and the music—it wasn’t coming from the stage anymore. Was it in their heads? It must have been.
The ballroom was encircled by gilded columns supporting a balcony, but the floor—there was something pink and viscous. Vomit. I stepped over it.
The door to the ballroom was open now, and cold grey light streamed over me. It was dawn.
I looked at Danny, his face sallow and flecked with acne. The sullen light illuminated the pillar beside me, and something floated there—or so I thought. A mist, a cloud, but more substantial. A sick, pale glob. Not floating anymore, but crawling, inching toward my ankles. Up, down, hump, hump. Grub. Maggot.
I grabbed Danny’s arm, trying to get him to look, but he pulled me through the lobby and out the door.
Outside, in the damp gray dawn, I looked back over my shoulder. There was nothing. No—there was something.
I unclasped my hand from Danny’s.
“Don’t. Leave it,” he said.
But I bent down, picked up the strange red flower, and tucked it behind my ear.
***
The morning sun was a pale disc in a boil of clouds. Others stumbled outside behind us, mingling with pedestrians on the sidewalk—men in suits, women in dresses and white gloves. A cable car clanged down the street, and car horns blared.
I felt faint, dizzy. Danny shoved me into a taxi cab, the black leather seat cold against my back. It smelled of spilled coffee, cigarettes, and the driver—a man with greased-back hair and a dark ring around the collar of his shirt. Danny rattled off an address and pulled me close as the taxi’s brakes screeched down a hill. The cab shuddered as it climbed another.
Danny kept talking to me, but his words wouldn’t stick in my head.
The taxi stopped in front of a tall Victorian house, its flaking yellow paint dulled by time. Similar houses flanked it on either side, though they were less brightly painted. The windows of the yellow house gleamed darkly, as if repelling the daylight.
“Come on,” Danny said, unlocking the door.
Inside, I heard people but didn’t see them. Somewhere, music played faintly. A girl and a boy stood beside the staircase, pressed against the wall. At first, I thought they were lovers about to kiss passionately, but instead, they were locked in deep conversation.
“Hello,” I said, but they didn’t look at me.
“Commies.” Danny laughed, pulling me up the stairs to a room at the back of the house.
It was tiny, with a worn and scratched wood floor and a mattress on the ground. Danny flopped onto the mattress. “Come here,” he said.
I glanced around the room. The walls were blank, except for a poster of a crimson-colored naked woman standing among the shards of a broken cobalt-blue egg.
Behind me, Danny turned on the radio. Eight Miles High, they sang. He handed me a bottle, and when I took a drink, the back of my throat caught fire. I wiped my mouth with my hand, and he laughed.
Danny plucked the red flower from my hair and made to toss it across the room, but I grabbed it back and tucked it behind my ear again. Then, I marveled at his hair—curls pale as dandelion fluff.
I don’t remember taking off my jeans and sweater or seeing him take off his clothes. We were just cold skin against skin. Light filtered through the one window, softened by a purple batik scarf, casting lavender bruises on Danny’s torso. I think I fell asleep beside him, breathing in his electric scent. He was my true love.
While I slept, I dreamed of Calvin—his fingers thick as snakes, his smothering mouth. With my jagged, broken tooth, I chewed right through to his bones. I tore through his skin, stretched tight as a drum, gnawed down to the shiny pink and red. I lapped him up, swallowing the sour liquor of his juices like a thirsty dog.
When I woke, the sun was in my face. The scarf had slipped from the window, and the glare stung my eyes. I sat up, disoriented by time, by day or week. My fingers were smeared with something viscous and sticky, and I wiped them on the grimy sheet.
I was alone. The little room was empty.
The radio was playing Sunshine Superman. I had the record back home in the brick ranch-style house with the walnut tree out front. Did they wonder if I was dead? But they were dead to me, I thought as I got up off the mattress, put on my clothes, and wiped more of the sticky stuff from my face.
My sweater was dirty, so I pulled it off, and red petals floated to the ground. From my hair, I plucked the stem of the denuded flower.
“Ow,” I said out loud as it pricked my thumb. I sucked the blood, wondering how I hadn’t noticed the thorns.
I picked up a checkered shirt—the type a cowboy might wear—from Danny’s floor. As I did, something pale squirmed beneath it, then inched quickly behind a small chest of drawers.
I put on the shirt and ran out of the room and downstairs.
In the kitchen, a woman in a long, fluttery dress was making scrambled eggs.
She didn’t know Danny, she said; she’d just moved in the night before. I asked a girl with a kitten, a boy with a little girl, and a fat bald man with a beard if they knew where Danny was. No one did.
The woman in the kitchen offered me some eggs, and I ate them, hoping to dull the strange taste in my mouth—a taste like licked nails.
“Aren’t you going to the park?” she asked. The sun was bright through the window. “That’s where your boyfriend probably is.”
***
Ginsberg was coming. Maybe the Beatles. That’s what they told me on the way to the park. These people, like the ones from the cover of the magazine—dressed in mad colors, long-haired, short-haired, brown, black, and white. Smiling, laughing, flowers in their hair, flowers in their hands. Babies, children, barking dogs.
I was one of them now. My heart was full. Soon, I would find Danny, and we’d dance like dervishes. My one true love.
In the distance, the drums called to us. We passed houses, shops, and restaurants. A dog I’d petted a moment ago had attached itself to me, and together we danced up the street with the others.
Suddenly, the dog shot down an alley and began barking furiously. I turned, looking for its owner, but the crowd just smiled and surged around me. The dog kept barking, a sharp, distressed sound—a something’s wrong bark.
I stepped away from the crowd, leaving the bright shine of the sun and entering the deep dark of the alley. The smell of garbage hit me hard, visceral, making me gasp.
I walked deeper, toward a row of dented trash cans. The dog was whining now. “It’s okay, boy. It’s okay,” I kept saying, but in my deepest self, I knew it wasn’t.
Déjà vu. The feeling of time slipping was so intense it twisted my gut. As I approached the dog, I was overwhelmed by the certainty of what I would find. The leaning walls of the dim alley, the slick slime on the damp cobbles—I’d seen it all before.
And the smell. It was vile, putrescent, sickening. Yet—there was something else. An overtone so sweetly sensual, like pursed red lips, like the musk of lovers. It was this last scent that drew me forward, toward whatever the dog was pawing at.
The dog whined. An insect droned—a wasp, I think. I should have been afraid; I’m allergic to their sting. But my mind was too busy trying to sort out what lay stuffed between the metal cans.
A raw roast? A side of beef? The crisscross of pink and white over bone, pale sausages—a discarded butchered carcass.
Then, a breeze lifted a dozen red petals into the air. I caught one and watched another slowly drift downward, landing atop a blonde-haired head.
I stood staring as the breeze stirred that hair, so pale it might have been made of dandelion fluff.
I turned and ran, my mind blank. I don’t know how long I ran—only that when I stopped, I was at the park.
I convinced myself it was just a drug-fueled hallucination. It wasn’t Danny. Danny had disappeared, abandoned me. Used me up and left me all alone. Another Calvin. Faithless.
So I danced, a tambourine on my hip, with men, girls, and a child I swung in the air like a helicopter. How it laughed!
Alan Ginsberg read a poem. I sat at his feet, but his words twisted and melted, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pull any meaning from them.
I wandered through the park. I petted a goat, ate an apple, kissed a man with a long black beard.
Music drew me to a grove of trees, where two beautiful girls with red flowers in their hair danced to the sound of a sitar and tabla played by cross-legged men in crimson robes.
The girls crowned me with red flowers. They took my hands, and I swayed with them like corn in a long-ago field.
The one with blue eyes told me to look to my right. I turned, my gaze falling on a woman seated on a camp stool beneath a eucalyptus tree.
It was the old woman from the café. She wore the same tattered dress and was smoking a cigarette.
“Mother Merry wants to meet you,” said Blue Eyes.
We had stopped dancing, the two girls and I, though all around us, music and frolicking continued.
“That old lady? She’s your mother?”
“Ours,” said Blue Eyes.
“Ours,” echoed the other girl, holding my hand.
Mystified, I followed them to where the old woman waited. Her eyes were milky, opaque—there were no pupils. She blew smoke from her cigarette into the leaves of the tree and then into my face.
“Excuse me,” I said, but the two girls were on either side of me, and with surprising strength, they forced me to my knees.
I struggled, but they pinned me, and when I tried to speak, no words came—only red flower petals falling from my mouth.
“Soul to soul?” croaked the old woman.
I think she laughed, but it might have been the screech of metal dragged across concrete. She scooped up the petals that had fallen from my mouth and held them in her palm.
The petals began to twitch, then stood upright, tumbling and rolling themselves into little red worms that crawled up the length of her scrawny, bare arms.
This isn’t happening, I told myself. I’m just high.
One of the girls, the blue-eyed one, bent close to my ear. “Yes. Oh yes, it is.”
I tried to rise again, but the harder I struggled, the more force pinned me down. Once, years ago, I had been held beneath the water in a swimming pool. I had splashed and thrashed, desperate to break free, but the hand holding me down was relentless, and I had known I would die.
Now, it felt as though I were looking up through that rippling water again, but it was the old woman staring down at me.
She pressed her hands to either side of my head, pushing hard on the crown of red flowers. The thorns were sharp as barbed wire, piercing my skull like teeth chewing through bone. I could feel them gnawing, grinding through calcium and cartilage.
My scream erupted as a vomitous spew of red petals.
The old woman gripped my chin and turned my face toward the park. It was as if I were looking through a fine-mesh screen. The dancers, poets, and musicians—the beautiful people—were shriveled, their skin puckered and stretched thin over bone, as if drained of every drop of life. They whirled and leaped, but their movements had turned to anguished hops, like blistered feet forced to dance.
I turned back, and the old woman no longer sat on her camp stool. Instead, she perched on a grotesque throne of gristle and bone.
She was a massive, pale thing, eyeless and lipless. Atop her monstrous head sat a crown of blinking eyes and screaming mouths. Around her neck was a wreath of flowers—petals red as severed flesh. From the stamen of each bloom crawled pale grubs, their writhing forms draping her in a squirming robe.
She held out a hand devoid of fingers, and when she touched me, there was a buzz of electricity, a sharp crackle as her flesh met mine. The air filled with the sickly-sweet stench of burning skin as it blackened and charred.
Lipless and blind, the Fallen One sang:
I am your soul-scorching love
My flower, your mouth
Your mouth, my flower
Will you be my girl?
Yes.
It was the Summer of Love.
I wore flowers in my hair.
