Shooting in the Dark

Fantasia of the Unconscious, preferring the more obviously flawed reasoning of Freud. But since meeting Miriam I have had to reassess Lawrence’s opinion. The physical body is an older and deeper mechanism than the human mind and it contains a primal knowledge that is equal to the sum total of our experience.
    Miriam finds enjoyment and fulfilment in pain because it is more real than pleasure. What we euphemistically call pleasure is a fleeting emotion. It is something that barely touches us. But pain is far-reaching. It lasts much longer, sometimes for ever.
     
    *
     
    Drugs are wonderful things. And Viagra is one of the best. When I took it (for Miriam, of course) the result was a dark, cruising sexuality, which lasted, quite literally, for hours. It was not particularly good or bad, it was interesting. Now we know what it is and what it can achieve, we won’t bother with it again.
    In my profession there has been a predictably mixed reception for the drug. Most of them think it’s wonderful. They point to the benefits that it will bring to the impotent. I do not subscribe to that view. What we have in Viagra is a drug that acts by forcing a chemical reaction in the body. It does not act on the mind.
    It is a sex drug. And having taken it, you are expected to have sex. You are expected to have lots of sex. Great sex. If you take Viagra and refuse to have sex, or decide that the drug isn’t working for you, you are, clearly, a failure.
    Who would do that, anyway? Who would take a dose of Viagra and then turn round and say, ‘No, I don’t feel like it tonight’? The only person who would say that is a wimp. Someone who looks around him and sees the expectations of the world and immediately begins to crumble. That man would probably be impotent.
    This is how we are organized. We take a man who can’t manage an erection because of a psychological problem, we give him a chemical stimulant and tell him, ‘There, now you can easily get an erection, go and use it, you sexual beast.’ If he doesn’t use it, he’ll feel guilty, which in turn will enhance his original psychological problem.
    This is our world. This is how we do things. We live in a surrealist universe.
     
    I took the impostor. He was no problem. As is usually the case, the world had prepared him for me. I live close to my feelings and I listen and respond to the subtle messages of my body and am at one with the world. When I fixed on that man, or perhaps as early as when he fixed on me by using my name, our personal ecologies became intertwined. That spiritual, etheric, astral world by which my life is surrounded sent out messengers, like invisible fingers, to search out the spiritual, etheric, astral world which surrounded him. Our worlds became united, like the worlds of lovers or of the hunter and the hunted, the master and the slave.
    We were, for a time, inextricably one.
    The tape is wonderful. The sound of the nails driving home. The words he spoke and tried to speak as the drug overcame him are poignant. They will live with me for ever.
    Now I am alone again, except for Miriam, my handmaiden; and my enemy, the blind woman.
     

44
     
    For once Echo was sleeping. Janet had fallen asleep with her arms wrapped around Geordie and it had felt good while she was still awake, the way the contours of her body used every inch of his back. But now she was sleeping he felt confined by her nearness.
    He managed to struggle free without waking her and crept down the stairs to talk to Venus and her kittens. He found a can of Caffreys in the fridge and popped it, sitting on the base of his spine next to the cat’s basket. Venus kept all of the kittens close to her, occasionally eyeing Geordie with a look that could’ve killed.
    He hoped Ralph would get in touch again. Not straight away, there’d have to be a gap, let things settle down. He pictured him back home with his family in Bristol, a wife and three kids according to Sam. Nice for the kids, that, getting their dad back for Christmas.
    I hope it works out for you, he thought, that you all live together and don’t split up again. And then when we meet it’ll be like it should’ve been this time. Ralph with his family and Geordie with Janet and Echo. They could swap houses in the summer, stay in a different town for a couple of weeks. And Echo’d have real cousins...
    Geordie took another swallow from the Caffreys can. No point in going back upstairs yet. He was tired as hell but nowhere