Move Under Ground | Page 3

a few
days at least.
She was a humble girl, like deities should be, and humored me by
frying up the salt pork and licking thick sour mash off the side of my
bottle hours after I'd spilled some, and she even pretended that I was
ready to go back to New York with the three hundred dollars I was
saving in the crack between logs in the wall against which I stacked all
my scrolls for insulation against the wind. "You could buy a car," she'd
say happily, a kicky little roadster and take the direct route back to Neal,
who was probably just there waiting for me in Washington Square Park.
I called her Marie. Marie smelled of sage and crushed grapes and told
me that I wasn't long for the world, but not because I'd be going
anywhere. I'd have to go somewhere in order to save the world, she
said, then she'd pull me back down onto our little mattress and kiss me
so hard it was like swallowing an ocean of her. It was a languid week
of attachment. I couldn't so much as leave sight of the cabin for fear
that Marie would be gone when I returned, even as she warned me

again and again that I'd soon be on the road. It was a test of my strength
and I was failing miserably 'til I ran out of liquor and finally had to roll
back into town to get supplies.
Neal's third letter was waiting for me. It was a package of a roll of
paper like Larry sent me, but this one was covered on both sides with
writing, some typewritten, much of it scrawled in lead, pen or blood.
Much of it was smeared but I didn't wait to read it. I hiked back up the
little dirt path to the cabin on the bluff with the scroll in my hands, the
paper tossed over my shoulder and unwinding in the dust I kicked up
behind me. It was some brilliant stuff, a melding of past and present
and dark future. Bill doing his old William Tell routine in a fit of
Mexican madness. Me and him in Denver, trying to throw a party.
Some haiku. My haiku. The scroll was my writing, at least forty
percent of it, transmitted across the aether, painstakingly copied in
blood and cut-up between paragraphs and sentences, buried under
Neal's own blabbering about Al-Azif and the mad blind
tentacle-bearded spawn of the Dreamer of the Deep who were waiting
for their old god, nearly dead, to rise again. This could only mean one
thing. I had to get to San Francisco. Neal probably wouldn't even be
there, but maybe Larry or some benny-addled homosexual would have
seen him on the streets, shivering with DTs like a dowsing rod close to
a salty marsh and headed somewhere where I could find him.
I tore up to the cabin and threw Neal's roll into the fire where it went up
in a belch of black slime and smoke. Marie was there sitting in a full
lotus, back arced and humble little breasts presented for me, but I
couldn't even bring myself to turn to her. If I did, I'd succumb to
attachment. I went to my own wall of scrolls and started taking it apart
to get the cash I'd hidden in the cracks of the cabin wall, but found only
green and brown shreds of the stuff, wet pulp and rat droppings. I
swallowed the curse because bodhisattva was watching and managed to
calmly worm a few tired bills, the ones just nibbled a bit, out of the
wall. Seventeen dollars. I'd gone further on less, and I grabbed a
random scroll for New York to slice into domesticated pages; they
could wire the money to Larry for me while I hunted for Neal. Marie
transformed into a honeybee, and buzzed a sutra into my ear as I

packed my little rucksack. We left together out the door, she hovering
about my collar, whispering wisdom and secret knowledge directly to
my brain. I didn't even lock up the cabin behind me. The bee once
named Marie, also the bodhisattva Kilaya, zig-zagged off in every
direction at once.
The day was hot and I was slick with sweat even before I got to the
highway. Blisters formed and burst on my soles, then the wounds
swirled with my salty perspiration. It was only a mile and a half to the
road, but I had been lazy with fat sex and ambrosia for nearly ten days,
and played a haggard beatnik bank clerk chained to my typewriter for
the month prior, so it was a harder stroll than I remembered. The woods
were against me too. A canopy of