In a
moment of complete and final despair, he swallowed the two hits of blotter acid
Klin had endowed him with. Could have been cyanide for all he cared. He sat
trying to read Eliot's The Waste Land while the drug's powerful electricity
spinal climbed. When it hit his head, he was punched outside of everything. The
song Tobacco Road was playing somewhere in the college residence and it told him
just how poor he really was. Then the universe staged a light and sound show
celebrating his exclusion. He put in a long-distance call to Mary who was at
another university. "I want to speak to Mary Dolan."The clicks and stutterings
of the phone line swarmed into him angry bee-like
as he waited. Someone picked up the other end of his life, the connection
was made."Hello" "Mary?" "Yes""It's Robert." "Oh hi". Robert didn't know what to say
to her. He left and went away for years, then all of a sudden he was back on the
phone, searching for something to say."I took some acid. I wanted to call
you." "Should you have done that? Don't you have exams coming up?""Next
week.""Oh" "Mary, I really like you." "I like you too, Robert." Robert found
himself drifting off again. His wildly electric mind. "What did you say?" "I like
you Robert but I'm not in love with you." He wasn't sure what had led her there
but she had said the very words he didn't want to hear. He was lost in the holes
she had opened, washed by the absences. The next thing he became aware of was Klin taking the receiver from his hand and hanging it up. "I was talking to
Mary." "She hung up thirty minutes ago and called me. She suggested I get over
here right away. It's one of my rules never to go near a phone while on acid.
The long distance charges are murder and you never remember what anybody
said." "I think I told her I loved her." "Well she said you had taken the acid and
were acting pretty strange. She likes you Robert but finds you a little weird
for her tastes." To return him from the dead end he had wandered into, Klin led
him to where the magic really was, maybe
was, in what he handed him, Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's
Garden of
Verses. Robert opened this leather-bound book that he
had never seen before at the page with a turned corner. When I was down beside
the sea A wooden spade they gave to me To dig the sandy shore. My holes were
empty like a cup In every hole the sea came up Till it could come no more.
Staring, playing with the words till his own holes. His own Marys. Digging
there. With his own poor twisted tool of a self. Till that sea, see. Whatever
hole he dug, on whatever shore, it was life, his life meeting him, he couldn't
escape it, accept it. Maybe during some other planetary trip he would have his
Mary.