CHAPTER III NEUROSURGEONS SCREAM FOR MORE! # THE REVENGE OF THE KILLER GLAUCOMA "W.C.Leadbeater!" A sweet she-bop in a nurse's uniform stood by the door to the examination rooms of Cashings Hospital, where I'd interrupted my busy schedule of learning to be the world's greatest science fiction author to have my eyes examined. She was calling my name. Ordinarily I would've noticed anyone so sexy, but...the dizzy spin I was in. The hot, black coffee you could get free at the desk didn't help, either. "W.C.LEADBEATER!!!" I snapped alert. The leggy thing, madeup like a zoccie, preceded me into an examination room where I sat on a little round stool & awaited the Dr. There was the merry ringing of elven bells. Pointy shoes, a floppy hat: It was a gnome. "What are you doing here?" I asked the wee elven-thing. "Just got out of med school. As the 1st gnome to become an MD, I am repaying the debt I owe to society, not to mention my student loans, by performing delicate eye surgery & saving little nerds like you from dread diseases which eat out their eyeballs like a dose of the clap. Now what's your problem?" As though about to get my ass fried for steakburgers, I replied, ~I...I think I have glaucoma...my father....he had it &...surgery...had it when he was 20...." "Relax, kid, the odds against your having congential juvenile glaucoma are about a million to one, but okay, we'll get your pressures checked." I sat down before the applanation tonometer. He put some anesthetic drops in my eyes so I wouldn't scream like a man possessed when he stuck the machine into my eyeballs. Then he wet a strip of fluorescent orange paper w/ some drops, poked it in my eye. I blinked: The pain had already started--my eyes felt like they were exploding in some vast nova conspiracy. Visions of the dread Trank Cops worming out my file from where I had hacked it into Data Void haunted me: I kept hallucinating Big Nurse coming at my butt w/ a syringe full of haldol. Instead it was a crazy gnome approaching w/ a purple fluorescent light bulb: The little tapered tube, contacting the day-glo orange that the mad elf has just put into your eye makes a circle of brilliance in the machine; the size of the circle tells him how high the pressure in your eye is--& it is the pressure which crushes the optic nerve, causing blindness. He fell off his stool, shouting, "Holy shit! It's 60!" I asked him, "Is that bad?" though I knew what he was going to say. "Hell yes, it's bad! 10 to 15 is normal. Up to 20 is okay--60 means...how can I phrase this politely? You are up shit creek, kid!" I looked glum. Then he said, "& remember--glaucoma is the disease for which Drs recommend marijuana most!" I looked on him w/ dread awe, nightmare insanity. "You mean it's actually good for me to play submarine?" Dr Fritz Kobold looked at me seriously, saying, "If necessary, we can get Dr Pothead to write you a prescription: He has a license to prescribe dope! "...& that's another thing," the gnome-Dr said, "I can tell you've been drinking: If you've got the killer glaucoma you've got to lay off the sauce...you want to be a real pothead, but ODs of liquids are very bad for you...." He went to a medicine cabinet to get some pills & eyedrops: The drops burned like acid, the pills were bitter as I swallowed them. My vision rapidly blurred over, as though I were Mr Magoo: pilocarpine, Dr Kobold explained, has this side effect. An androgynous nurse showed me to the door; her reflections were multitudinous in glass windows; her hair was cropped close, like a zoccie; her cleavage was undone & dusky; a crucifix disappeared between those massive mountains: I was dead & I hadn't died. This was actuality, there would be no demon to give me sweet succor in these sleepless nights.... I walked in silence. Squirrels ate nuts as I passed from Cashings Hospital thru dangerous streets back to the dorm where so much insanity lurked: Switten had some mad scheme going to dress Gail in falsies & a toga; Sam Shiner was collaborator in that plan--though I would have to see less of these people, rearrange my entire social life: There were submarine captains in that place, & a strange fire dawned--it was not the sun. It was a brilliance w/in my mind; strange days....I was a U-boat Captain now. Schizoid, I dismembered the Shiner dream & sought out Karmadharma for a submarine. George Karmadharma from now on would be my faithful Indian companion.... Karmadharma & the Bozo King were toking away on the thing ice of a new day, Little Loathsome Lonnie & the dis- tinctively brown U-boat forgotten for now. The Bozo King was after me as fast as he could run.... & I wasn't trying to escape. # DRUGZ & SECTS IN THE INVISIBLE LANDSCAPE I was a corpse in mind; in body The Purple Root quivered in oral affection: This is how I rise from the dead; for me, resurrection comes when I have delusions of dying. This hal- lucination was the culmination of a date w/ Rachel: I had finally called her--but not w/o some trepidation. Computers can be fooled by clever hacking; people who know you & know that you are mentally ill....She could turn me in...but she had quit work before I had escaped. When a theater had somehow caught on fire. The Roxy. But that's insanity for you. Yet even amid the caresses, thru the long, love-night, my sexuality was being warped, perverted by the psionic Achamoth--if indeed Achamoth was real; it seemed I recalled something about a schiz-virus--but it seemed like a dream; I did not know what. The wall on which the prophets wrote was cracking, crumbling....& there was the growing conviction that if I had 69 w/ a woman I'd change sex. Resurrection is One thing but Androgyny is another: Ever since the Invisible High, when I'd gone out w/ the tomboy Toni, I'd been cap- tivated by the androgynous woman: I was torn asunder by my own androgyny: I couldn't face the thought that inside this phallic Id a weak woman also existed: the anima. Rachel was sheer, chic, feminine. By dating a feminine woman I would compensate for the femininity of the Id; strangle my anima w/ a divine debutante. The visi-phone screen lit up w/ the image of a girl who had just stepped out of the shower; her hair was flat--it seemed almost like some hallucination. She stared at me in silence for awhile, then said, "So why'd you call?" "I have a license to smoke dope," I said, lighting a cigar-sized submarine. "You have glaucoma?" she asked, wanted to see my license to smoke dope. LICENSE TO SMOKE DOPE BEARER OF SAID LICENSE MAY SMOKE DOPE ANYWHERE, ANY TIME (Signed) DR POTHEAD "I'm not supposed to play U-boat w/ friends," I said. "But I might be willing to make an exception...in your case." She agreed to the Rastaman Vibrations. A few minutes later as I stood by the window, submarine in hand, I saw her aircar flutter to a landing in the Scoreland parking lot. A nice Mazda. Probably better than I'd ever be able to afford as an insane science fiction author. Science fiction just doesn't pay unless you're Arthur C Clarke or Isaac Asimov. A couple of minutes later she was in my room. Rachel suggested we go down to the beach & make out. The empowerment of the Id proceeded as the girly-girl & I crossed the foot bridge over Ocean Drive. Drugstore truckdrivin' men popped wheelies on the 8-lane highway side by side w/ the poor...those who could not afford to replace their groundcars w/ the new, turbo-driven, flying vehicles. Something inside me had just begun...the U-boat was emasculating me. I don't mean castration; I mean an anima-possession: In 2001 (a good year for a science fiction novel) Robert Fludd, the great Jungian psychologist, had shown that there are physical centers in the brain which modulate masculinity & femininity, their development is regulated by the sex hormones. Normally, the opposite centers show only vestigial development, but the schiz-virus had disrupted all that: It was the era of the Androgyne. You'd see the Dykesters on their sky-cycles, born to be wild; you'd see the transvestites in the A&P; you'd see horny young faggot stud buttfuckers in the bathrooms.... I was afraid I was turning gay. Rachel was going to liberate me from all that, here by the sea & sand where cold water crashed against the shore; where I died inside...I'd been off mental medication for awhile now; I wanted to drown in frigid water. Depression feels like, if only I could get laid, the sickness would go away.... Sickness will surely take the mind where minds can't usually go....We zocced to Tommy on my beat-box, the CD whirling like a wheel in a developmental lock....The rock opera could've been the story of my life; certainly I needed her at this moment to see, feel, touch, heal me. I put my arms around her shoulders. Rachel. The archetype of the feminine; I loved the way her hips curved, so sensuously; the sinuous undulations of her breasts; her pearl earrings, so precious.... My fingers traced out the bud of a nipple & I forgot Night as soon as I had Rachel's breasts in my hand. She said, "It's awful hot out here...I think I'm going to take off my shirt." She laid it out on the shore neatly, as though upon some invisible bed. 1 thing led to another & soon we were entwined. Strange delights... The fruit of passion, a bitter herb... All at once the gay androgyny I feared so much was back to haunt me: I had changed sex. At 1 point in my insanity, I would've supposed it to be the work of some mechanical device like an Orgasmatron in the repetitive behavior center; at this point I wondered if, indeed, playing submarine 24 hours a day was a good idea. Rachel w/drew from me in revulsion. "Ecch! Ecch! Ecch! I just did a queer thing." Now the Rootboy was a Rasta woman (naturally kinky hair) & also recoiling in revulsion from her kiss. The kiss of Death. Death drives a flying saucer: Saklas is Death. Although where that leaves Gerald Leadbeater, I'm not sure. So the mighty star-cruiser came drifting over the dunes. Zarathustra strode from the ship; behind him was an army of demon-angels. This was an evil beyond Hitler: This was the Dark Side of the Source. Achamoth, the left-hand of Saklas, walked at his side. Rachel shouted, "Quickly, Lead...use your magical ring to turn into the Id to stop these devastating titans!" "Do women even have Ids?" I asked, reaching for the magical ring. "Of course we do!" Rachel shouted against the fury of the engine of the gigantic spaceship, like a million vacuum cleaners. "Everyone has at the very core of their being a raging maelstrom of sound & fury!" "That would make a neat title for a book," I exclaimed. She said, "I think it's already been done!" even as the dreaded Zarathustra snickered, "We have come to steal your brains! (The brains of schizophrenics are a much sought after item.)" Instantly the ring transmuted me into a writhing Snake-lady. Or maybe it was the U-boat. I possessed a potent Shaft: A ray-gun. It emitted devolutionary force; the sinister Trinity from dark dimensions became children even as the ship reverted into an airplane. I held the Shaft upon the dreaded doers of wrong & the airplane crashed & burned even while the great Nazi evil which haunted the cosmos began an embryonic journey backwards into fetuses. The scions of the Cosmos devolved into germ plasm which divided like Eve being torn from Adam to become sperm & egg. "We've won!" I ejaculated, & the cosmic battle was over. # HOME IN A FARAWAY LAND Captain Strange took my suitcase from me. Dr Pothead was finally satisfied that my pressures were under control--though he had to raise my dose of dope a couple times--& I had been allowed to come back to North Dakota for the rest of the summer. Captain Strange said, "When the doobie's out, pass me the lighter...again." Captain Strange was a pothead now, too...the sinister, malevolent killer glaucoma had been diagnosed in every Leadbeater brother except Dick. Strange toked away while Bup Bupped It Up: "I am just a small, cute Bup. Uh-uh-ah, diddy uh-uh-ah." Dope affects some people real weird. Or was Achamoth doing this to him? When we got home Ma threw a big feast to welcome her son finally returning home from college. My family of superheroes sat around the table, dazzling hallucinations torn straight from the stoned mind of the Savage Id. "Oh boy! We're having dead cow flesh!" "Pass the roast beast." "Stand up & reach! Stand up & reach!" "Ma! Piggin' Biggolith is stealing all the potatoes!" "I am not! I am not! You've got more potatoes than I do!" Dinner was a free-for-all, each of the brightly-costumed superheroes concerned mainly w/ feeding his face. Pop sat silently thru it, drinking his powdered milk & eating his carrot. All at once the visi-phone rang. I answered. "Toni!" The oval of her face was still framed by the shortest haircut I had ever seen on a woman. Her hair was gold, reflecting invisible sunshine; a peak of hair hung down between her eyebrows. "What are you doing in Invisible?" "I work in the Invisible Hospital now. You want a date?" It was just like her to play the role of the phallic androgyne. My answer was immediate, unhesitating: "Yes." Immediately she said, "I'll pick you up around 8:00; we can go out to the Corner Bar. If that's okay w/ you." I agreed to the plan. The screen went grey. Love was the drug & I was going to score.... # BOY MEETS GIRL WHERE THE BEAT GOES ON The Corner Bar was a sleazoid place occupied by reptiles. A Snake-lady like some demon in a dark bra served up Mountain Fresh while Toni breathlessly asked, "So what're ya studying at the U of N? You were always going to be the great science fiction author & be the 1st to win the Pulitzer Prize for a science fiction novel!" "Philosophy," I replied, seeing serpent things doing the Bohu dance on the disco floor. "We were studying Liebnitz; the monad theory..." "What's a nomadis?" she asked, apparently a little descoobied herself. "The idea that the whole world is a hologram: The whole is contained in any of its parts. So if you could tear a quark apart into its sub-systems you'd have the World Equation, the super-reductionistic One Equation which governs the behavior of every entity in the material universe....& every system contains that lower-level hologram w/ varying degrees of resolution. "But alternate universes are also contained in each monad & if we could attain the monad we could alter ourselves at fundamental systems levels like the chromosomal or even the sub-atomic." Toni said contemplatively, "They don't teach us swell things like that in nursing school. You want to go out to the Invisible Badlands & park? The rust red rocks are real pretty this time of evening, like the heart of a serpent burning on an altar; we could sacrilige a virgin or something...." She leaned musingly on her chin, a typical Toni tease/flirt posture. "If we can find a virgin..." I started to say, when the bartender cried out, "Visi-phone for W.C.Leadbeater!" I went to answer it. "Be back soon!" She blew me a kiss. It was Ma. "Lead...your brothers have all been to the eye Dr...he says it's an emergency...everyone needs surgery...Pop is firing up the Fratmobile & he's going to be heading out to the City of Night in just a few minutes...Dr Wilkerson wants to get a pressure check on you; he's afraid your U-boat prescription may not be holding your pressure!" "Shit!" I said under my breath. "Shit, shit, shit! Ma, I'm on a date w/ Toni McDonald; you know, my old girlfriend, &..." "You'll have to explain to her that it's an emergency," Ma said. "The submarines haven't been helping your brothers &..." I looked out the window: The moon was surrounded by a silver halo, a rainbow which glinted w/ all colors. A subsuming, devouring Spirit. "I'll be right home," I said, hanging up. When I got back to the table I found that while I was gone Toni had ordered another pitcher. "We can't stay & drink this!" I exclaimed. "No time to explain now!" W/ that I dumped it over my head. Though I hated to do that to Mountain Fresh beer. I raced out of the Corner Bar trailing Toni. "Toni, you've got to give me a ride home! The whole family...all of us...have the killer glaucoma. We're going to be driving out to Night City for emergency surgery by the world-famous Dr Pothead!" Her eyes were wide. "Like, can't he just prescribe dope?" "He already tried that & it didn't work! When the doobie's out pass me the lighter, again. Drugz will tear us apart." "Again," she said, dutifully handing me the lighter. "But this means like...you know...I don't have time to fuck your little ass off?!" "3 minutes is all it takes!" I ejaculated. A few minutes later we were in Toni's car, lying low on a dark side street so as not to get busted for public fucking. If that was still a crime in the storm era. Toni started fumbling around in the glove compartment of her car. "Shit," she said, cursing softly. "I can't find my electric sperm coffin!" I handed her a condom. There was the inevitable fumbling to get the damn thing on w/o losing the moment to detumescence, then a fierce & savage thrusting like some mighty steam engine; like some aeroplane, no fear of flying.... I felt myself falling from an immense height.... I talked to a wind which did not hear.... When I got home Ma asked where I had been. "You know," I said. It was the only answer which I gave her. # YOU RAISE THE BLADE, YOU MAKE THE CHANGE Prescription pot: I toked away on the thin ice of the new day. The US govt makes the best weed. For years & years they were only getting white rats high, but since the organic weed had been found to quell the effects of the killer glaucoma, Rasta lived. I looked out the window to the ocean; cars crawled past in U-boat time-warp, moving down Ocean Drive as though it were the LSD of Chicago. The rising sun was caught & scattered by foaming, glittering wave crests. Pop moved w/ authority, like a Boy Scout Leader guiding his troop to the Fratmobile. In a few minutes we were cruising the streets of Night City in early morning. W/ my instructions Pop found his way to Night Hospital. I had given Rachel a call but had found her in the arms of a savage barbarian vorkler. The lunatic is on the grass.... I had been willing to forgive her but she didn't want--or perhaps didn't need--to be forgiven. It was all a teenage wasteland.... They're all wasted! (Specifically, myself & my stoned out brothers. Flying the astral plane & taking trips thruout the brain.) As we rode the elevator I had visions of dread Trank Cops pursuing me. Then in a moment black legs flashed beneath a white skirt--I caught sight of Nikki, my only love...since Toni.... She approached. I saw Nikki as Nekbael again; I could almost feel velvet perfection. In dread & fear I held my breath as she drew near--would she turn me in? "Lead?" "Yeah, hiya. I'm here for eye surgery; this is my Pop & my brothers." I wanted to voice the question, ask if she was going to turn me in--but that would mean admitting to Pop that I had been in a Bobo Boat; if I did that he would turn me in himself. She sighed. Then she came forward to hug me. "You're so cute, I could just cuddle you." There was undisciplined bondage between us; we clung to each other like atoms in a molecule: & all the children were insane. She finally released me, saying, "Just...drink more Prolixin Pop!" She turned to depart, casting a glance backwards over her shoulder; in that submarine daze our love became a funeral pyre. The elevator opened & Fritz Kobold stepped out wearing a surgeon's gown & the inevitable floppy hat & little bells. Fritz Kobold: The distinguished eye Dr had turned into a little gnome--that meant that Achamoth was near, perhaps even in the same building...! I reached for my decoder ring but it didn't change me into the loathsome Slime-thing. Either Saklas was jamming it or the damn Crackerjacks people had fucked up again. Boy howdy, if Saklas killed me while I was in the operating room I was going to sue. After I rose from the dead... "Pop! Quick! You've gotta change into Doodyman so together we can defeat the dread Achamoth! Even now, the white death-angel like some perverted heroine lurks w/in this very building, beamed down from Saklas' flying saucer, interstellar garbage dumped in space, like her consort Zarathustra, the living curse of Twosomeness!" "No...no!" Nikki backed away, even as I ran toward her. Suddenly she had her trank gun out, shot me up w/ a tranquilizing dart. Like some solar animal about to be taken by a cosmic zoologist I fell, 200 lb.s of walking, fearsome goop transmuted back into a fatso nerd. Consciousness ebbed even as the trepidation of Achamoth approached. In a glimmering moment she turned into Sophie Rosencruetz, hunchback for the lady vorklers (no matter how I loved her, she'd vorkle none but Brain O'Dick); all at once the appalling eeeeeevil of Achamoth was draino-ed out of her; she was just a swell Southern belle, a tomboy who played basketball, not the death-angel of some evil god. Her form shimmered & then everything merged w/ the night. I awoke in a hospital bed. "Okay, Leadbeater William Christopher, is 1 shot in the butt. Hold still, this is going to hurt, American homeboy." It was a cute Korean nurse.... I bared my ass & prepared to receive the sharp sting. For a moment I let myself fantasize--in Invisible dreamhomes she blew my woody & the question was--would she? Only her hairdresser knew for sure. Then I forgot it--just another fantasy; playing at love was another high.... The saurian-insectoidal world of Slimy & his feats of daring-do--not to mention the Root of the Id--dissolved into murk as sleep came down, dreamhome heartache veiled in psychedelic furs....Sleep fell like the earth turning her face to the moon. The nurse, Kwei Mei, saw the stacks of yellowing paper. "Is goudly American comic books? Authentic American pop art form? May I peruse such while am on break? + share a Prolixin Pop?" Sleep ate at my mind like a vulture; I yawned, then a moment later I was on the gurney being wheeled down the long corridors of Night hospital toward my confrontation w/...the knife.... In this soft gray morning Kwei Mei cried, "Here is goudly homeboy for surgeons!" A gnome...a grinding wheel...Achamoth was lurking--praying shadows, do they ask you why? Dr Kobold turned, spoke briefly to the anesthesiologist. An IV pierced my veins & then some acid dream encountered me, some drug rendering me unconscious: I saw an infinite vista: I saw towering cliffs, rushing away, & at the bottom consuming elemental furor, Chaos: air, fire, earth, water--balance of change gone from this raging maelstrom. The chaos continually rushed toward me as I fell & the cliffs receded as though I was falling, shrinking. Chaos, Abyss, whore-mother Night, this was what had preceded even God, a devouring evil, an immensity called: VOID # CUZ WHEN THE TRANKS BEGIN TO FLOW THEN THEY SHOOT UP TO A CENTER IN MY HEAD The sad, cold, sharp edges of a jagged splinter of crystal. A broken glass shard that was my mind. A kaleidoscopic tumult of images. A Scripture written in a foreign tongue, words which could not be translated. The glass melted in a crucible which was my brain; if my mind was a broken pellucid thing then my brain was the place where it was melted: But it was being reshaped, reforged, cast anew. Crystal recapitulated its ontogeny as sand & ash, melted in the crucible, was made whole again: a Phoenix emerged. A rainbow-bird. A dazzling display of brilliance. An arc, a nova, an aurora. I became aware that I was in an isolation room: There was an IV in my arm; some purple liquid dripped into my veins: Just love the way that stuff trickles itself down. For an instant my consciousness was contained solely in the IV....I was part of some experimental program carried out thru the van Hohenheim Act as I perceived that the IV was no ordinary bio-med machine--I was receiving poly-drug treat- ments--dangerous, because of interactions. The IV was wired to a computer--which undoubtedly controlled the complex flow of tranquilizing substances. Then I became aware of a nurse. I'd like to do the von Hohenheim Act w/ her: Cute. Blond. Hair the color of the sun on a July day or of wheat, the bread of life from which all True Communion came. Her thighs were pneumatic; they enslaved men like galley slaves on Sun Ra's funerary ship. I felt the 1st tinglings of an erection; I felt the 1st mad cravings of hypomanic hypersexuality--how can you explain the Id? It was as though the Id was driving like a piston shoving untiringly the Ego which flowed out of its brain-con- tainer; flowed into the Other--she possessed me w/ more than vampiric suction. "Hi--I'm Heidi Gallagher; I'm your nurse for the..." She stopped, stilled, silent: I was wearing an ill-fitting hospital gown; my erection was clearly visible thru it. & the honey-blond, breasts like melons sucked & drew at my mind like some demon beyond Achamoth--then in another instant a green liquid started trickling down into the clear plastic IV; the thoughts of seducing the white death-angel flashed off, & the erection died, even as she rigidly fastened her eyes on it: I thought she was going to drop her chart. "Come on, baby, wanna date? I'll show you sugar, candy..." Heidi was flustered. "No; not only would it be unethical but I just plain don't like you!" Even as anger coursed thru me like the burning of the brain 1 of the rows of drug ampules began injecting another weird chemical. "Have there been any problems, Heidi?" a man who looked like Colonel Klink said, swinging the door open. "Nothing I can't handle," Heidi said, looking like a 10-year old about to make a face. NOTE: THIS CHAPTER IS CONTINUED IN THE NEXT FILE. End of file Press RIGHT ARROW (#6 key) of the numeric keypad to load the next file.