(12) Power


Snatchel was not interested in sex for pleasure. He was in it for the power, which had surrounded pleasure and now controlled it. "You want pleasure, you got to go through me." His soul had been captured by a ruthless pimp who lived like a leech off his desire to win her back again.

"Why are you telling me this?" the President of the United States was intensely aware of having no physical reality. His reality was instead being formed by the imposition of energy from other people, who were dreaming him. In their dream he was burdened with a cross on his back. Attached to the cross and making it torture to bear, was a coffin in which his lifeless body was composed in an absurd imitation of life. His face was made up and his lips were painted with blood and his eyes were glowing with the projections of the living eyes which might stray too near.

"I'm not telling you anything," Archer Prax said. The difference between the vague messages in visual and inferential form and the clarity of the god's voice in his sensory field was overwhelming. It pulled Snatchel right out of his inwardness and calculations and brought him into the present moment. He was without a body, without a country, without a container of any kind, and submissive to Archer Prax. He related to Archer in more or less the same way the Aztecs related to the pale and mounted Spaniards who incarnated from their mythology.

The problem the President was having was staying in touch with reality once he was not contained. He felt it as a relief to give up authority and let Archer Prax run things. "Do you want me to confess my sins?" he asked, his voice suspiciously hopeful.

"Please don't," Archer said. "We don't have that much time to piss away. I want to talk to you about drugs."

"I knew it," Snatchel shouted into the atmosphere. "I'm on something."

"Well of course you're on something," Archer Prax said. "You're on a spacecraft."

"No, somebody has slipped me a hallucinogenic."

"It's the same thing."

"That's not possible."

"As you wish. You have been given, against your knowledge and consent, a hallucination into which all your attention has flowed, and from which you cannot awaken.

"The hell you say?"

The grammatical logic resonance reverberated through the entire ship and it skipped like a stone three times on the logic pattern in which it was operating. "Watch your language," Archer Prax demanded. "This is a mathematical drive."

"Fuck this shit," the President whispered.

The saucer skipped again, causing a nauseous dread to permeate the field for a moment. There was an odor like a breeze coming off a sewage pond, a vague feeling of anger and a curse being sent on its way like a poisoned dart from a blowgun. "I'm just dreaming."

The field made a sickening swing into linear materialization and there was a smell of cordite mixed with the smell of blood. "Passing through Iraq now," Archer Prax said, like the captain on a passenger jet pointing out a geological feature. "Next stop, Afghanistan."

There seemed to be no connection between the disembodied state and this moment, when Snatchel was standing in the poppy field actually chewing the flower. He felt his feet firmly on the soil of the center of the international heroin trade and he tasted the actual flower from which it grows. Beneath the flower he felt the soil and the seed and the history back into pre-history. He felt the flower's fight for survival.

At first the simple fact of tasting the flower had seemed boring, leading nowhere. After all, everybody knew that the high was derivative. But something had changed him. He had become more sensitive to what was not contained by his body, and thus by his habits of movement. He felt an overwhelming sadness as the taste of the flower moved deeper into his refreshed receptors.

He felt her dismay at human addiction to her. They could not leave her alone. Outlaws, drifters, loners, soldiers, actors, poets, preachers, prophets playboys and pornographers, all dreamed of being transported out of the drab gray prospect of the ordinary. They were looking for new states of consciousness. They wanted to explore all the possible escape routes.

She was like Tralala in Last Exist to Brooklyn. She had no idea of how needy flesh could be when it came back in contact with what it left behind, back on earth. She had no understanding of the brutality of habituation. What had been lost, which fueled addiction, was respect for nature.

This was the wave of consciousness that hit Snatchel as he chewed the flower.

"I don't feel a thing from it except some damned soap opera," he said.

Posted: Mon - June 20, 2005 at 03:37 PM