Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

So Sam’s line on the boiled baby story was fairly predictable: it was just one more proof that the idea of a wise, loving, all-powerful God was a crock of the ripest bullshit, and that anyone who believed in Him was mentally deficient and in dire need of counseling. We’d heard all this before, and duly nodded, murmured “Right on!” and reached for another beer. Then Larry, who hadn’t said anything much up to then, suddenly broke out, “I believe in God anyway.”

For a moment no one said anything. We were too stunned. If Larry had remarked that personally he enjoyed eating boiled baby, maybe with a little relish on the side, that would have been fine. But this abrupt declaration of a faith whose existence none of us had imagined left us deeply shocked. It was uncool.

“Anyway, it’s all like a matter of faith,” Larry went on a little sheepishly. “I’m only saying there’s no way you can prove God doesn’t exist just ’cos bad stuff happens.”

We belatedly realized that Larry must have been suppressing this statement for a long time, not wanting to challenge Sam on the sore point of his mother’s death. But this was neutral ground, and the time had come to take a stand.

“Sure, you’re right,” Sam replied in a slightly patronizing tone, as though he was managing Larry the way you did someone who was having a bad trip. “All it proves is that if God does exist, then He’s an evil fucker.”

“God is love,” Larry retorted heatedly. “Evil is the work of Satan.”

Years of Bible study had left Sam well prepared for an argument such as this.

“That’s the Manichaean heresy, Larry,” he replied cheerfully. “Couple of hundred years ago you’d have got burned at the stake for dividing up good and evil like that. Listen, according to the Scriptures, God is all-powerful, right? ‘I am the Almighty God,’ Genesis seventeen, verse one. ‘The Lord God omnipotent reigneth,’ Revelation nineteen, verse six. But we are also expected to believe that ‘God is love,’ First Epistle of John, chapter four, while Psalm Thirty-four tells us that ‘the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in Him.’ All I’m saying is that you can’t have it both ways. If God is all-powerful, He could have saved that baby. If He is good and loving, He would have.”

This broadside understandably left Larry reeling. Apart from a theological expertise which none of us had suspected Sam possessed, we’d each had about fifteen beers by this time, to say nothing of the joint we’d passed around in the car on the way there.

“Religion isn’t about that, it’s about eternal salvation,” Larry protested. “It’s about the soul, not the body.”

Sam rolled his eyes and nodded earnestly. His lean, angular face and sharp, close-set eyes made him look like a ferret going in for the kill.

“I see! So our pain doesn’t matter to God, that’s what you’re saying. Have you ever stuck your hand in boiling water? Can you begin to imagine what that child must have suffered? But of course that’s as nothing in the eye of eternity. Probably the kid hadn’t been baptized. That would explain everything. Original sin. It’s going to burn in hell anyway, so why not boil it up a little first, get it used to the idea. Right?”

“It’s not for us to judge the Almighty!” Larry broke out.

“Why the fuck not?” Sam shouted. “What would you have thought of Phil here, or me, or Vince, or Greg, if we’d been in that apartment and just stood there and watched the kid stew? Would you have got down on your knees and worshiped us? No fucking way! You’d have called us sadistic perverts who should be locked up forever. So where does that leave your just and loving God?”

An embarrassed silence fell. We knew Sam as a good-time guy, laid-back, mellow and very funny, someone for whom nothing was worth hassling about. This was a Sam none of us had glimpsed before: engaged, angry, articulate, dominating. He seemed to pick up on the vibes himself.

“What do the rest of you think?” he asked with a visible effort to lighten up.

Greg scowled into his beer.

“I think this whole thing’s a downer,” he said.

“I think we should get stoned,” added Vince.

“We could go home and smoke some more,” I suggested.

Vince stood up.

“I mean really stoned. I’ll go see what I can score.”

Just then the band came back for another set, we all sank a few more beers and Greg launched into a story about a cheerleader who’d reportedly been slamdunked by the entire U of M basketball team after their recent triumph over a rival institution out in the sticks known around campus as Moo U. By the time Vince returned, the earlier incident seemed to have been forgotten. We had blowups like that all the time, and they didn’t faze us too much. Worse things happen when you’re stoned. Straight people might get hung up on disagreements and dissent, but we knew it was all in your head.

Vince had bought six tabs of what was billed as “organic mescaline.” This evoked a round of skeptical groans. Ever since Huxley and Castaneda, mescaline was the buzzword in drugs, but the chances of being sold the real stuff was just about zip. This almost certainly wasn’t mescaline at all, and sure as hell not organic. What we’d scored was most likely some cocktail such as acid cut with downers. Vince said he knew the dealer, though, and it was bound to be good shit whatever it was. That silenced any complaints. Another aspect of drug etiquette was that it was a point of honor never to refuse anything supplied by a friend of a friend. If Vince’s buddy said it was OK, that was good enough for us.

Riding home in the car, we passed another joint around and fiddled with the radio. Larry sat up front beside Greg, who was driving. Sam, Vince and I swayed from side to side in the back, singing along to the Allman Brothers’ “Whipping Post” with Vince playing a mean air guitar. Suddenly a flashing blue light flooded the car.

“Holy fuck!” said Greg, glancing in the mirror. “It’s the pigs.”

We totally lost it. Some friends of ours had got busted a couple of weeks earlier. They were only holding a couple of grams of hash, but they’d been charged with possession and were in jail awaiting trial. We had six tabs of some unknown psychedelic plus a whole bag of weed. To make matters worse, the thought flashing through each of our drug-and-booze-hazed brains was that Vince’s “friend” had done a deal with the nares. How else could they have got on to us? It all made sense. The dealer had copped a plea in return for fingering his clients so that the cops could bust them on the way home. Now they would strip-search us, do a rectal frisk and pack us off to the state pen where we’d be buggered and beaten up by redneck cons who thought hippies were faggot commie scum.

“Open the windows,” said Sam. “Vince, pass me the shit.”

Vince handed Sam the stapled plastic pouch containing the tablets. As the car slowed to a halt, we wound down the windows in an attempt to flush out the sweet, herby smell of marijuana. The police cruiser came to a stop right behind us, lights still flashing. Greg turned off the radio and took a deep breath.

“Jesus Christ,” said Larry quietly.

The patrolman sidled up to the driver’s door and asked for Greg’s license. We all sat very still while he scrutinized it.

“Get out of the car,” said the cop.

We obediently opened the doors and struggled out. The policeman stared at us irritably.

“Not all of you!” he snapped. “Just the driver.”

We climbed back into the car again. The patrolman led Greg away. I thought about another night, when I’d been driving from one party to another with some people I didn’t even know. We’d done some speed before leaving, so we drove very carefully, chanting “Take it easy!” like a mantra. We thought we were maintaining really well until the State Patrol pulled us over on the highway. “You know how fast you were going?” the cop asked. “Gee, officer,” said our driver, “I was just keeping up with traffic.” “You were doing ten miles an hour,” the guy replied. That time, fortunately, we were clean.

After a few minutes, Greg reappeared and the police cruiser pulled out and roared away. We all stared at him as though he’d come back from the dead.

“What happened?”

“What did he say to you, man?”

Greg got back behind the wheel.

“One of the taillights is out,” he announced laconically. “He gave me a ticket.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Far out!”

We laughed like maniacs all the way back to the house. We’d beaten the system yet again, put one over on the whole Establishment crock of shit. The episode just confirmed our conviction that we were cooler, smarter and better adapted for survival than our enemies. They got so obsessed with their uptight rules and regulations they didn’t even notice what was going on right under their very noses! There we were committing a major drug offense, and the dumb patrolman cites us for a traffic violation!

It wasn’t till we got inside the house that someone sobered up enough to ask, “So where’s the mescaline?”

“I ate it,” said Sam.

There was a stunned silence.

“I thought the guy was going to bust us,” Sam went on calmly. “A few ounces of weed we might talk our way out of, but not the tabs.”

“You ate them all?” asked Greg incredulously.

Sam nodded.

“What strength were they?” I asked Vince.

He shrugged.

“Who knows? Couple of hundred migs, the guy said.”

“We’ve got to get him to the hospital fast, get his stomach pumped.”

“No way!” said Sam forcefully.

“Sam, you’ve just dropped over a gram of whatever that shit is. You could die.”

He shrugged and smiled.

“We’re all going to die, man.”

“For Christ’s sake, Sam! This is serious. Even if it doesn’t kill you, it’s going to screw your head up completely!”

Sam stared at me.

“You figure I can’t handle it?”

There was nothing I could say to that. Our cardinal rule was that drugs don’t fuck you up, hang-ups do. An oft-repeated story described how when the Beatles made their first pilgrimage to India to see the Maharishi, he noticed that they were stoned and asked to see the stuff they’d been taking. They hand over their stash and the guy swallows it like candy right in front of their eyes. Fifty tabs of acid, man! Grade A, unadulterated, full-strength sunshine, nothing but the best for the Fab Four! And the Maharishi gobbles the lot and then sits there all night, calmly discoursing on the Path of True Knowledge until the sun comes up! Even a dose big enough to turn on a small town couldn’t disturb his Inner Peace and Purity, dig?

So while in a similar situation nowadays someone would have dragged Sam off to the hospital, by force if necessary, back then it was out of the question. If I’d attempted to press the issue any further I would have risked being branded a power-tripper, projecting my own insecurities and anxieties onto Sam. Certainly none of the others would have backed me up. Their attitude was pretty well summed up by Larry’s response when Sam assured us grandly that he would be all right.

“Sure you’ll be all right, man, but what about the rest of us? How are we supposed to get fucked up now you’ve cleaned out the stash?”

“Don’t heavy me out, man,” replied Sam, closing his eyes.

Vince suggested dosing him with orange juice to bring him down, but we didn’t have any in the house and Greg wasn’t too crazy about driving after what had just happened. Anyway, Sam said he didn’t want to come down.

“I’m kind of looking forward to it. I’m tired of low-level tripping. I’ve always wanted to go to the limit, and this is my chance.”

“Maybe you’ll have an out-of-body experience,” said Greg, a trifle enviously. Everyone had read about out-of-body experiences, but no one we knew had actually had one.

“Maybe you’ll see God,” added Vince.

“If I do, I’ll ask him why he let that kid boil.”

The fact that he could joke about it made us feel more relaxed about the whole thing. Sam was an experienced tripper, and the dealer had probably been lying about the strength of the tablets. We smoked another joint and listened to some music, and then one by one people drifted off to their rooms. Sam lay stretched out on the sofa, his foot tapping in time to the music. I was the last to leave. I asked Sam if he was OK. He didn’t reply.

“You want someone to stay up with you?” I asked.

His eyes opened, big and blank, but there was still no reply. I didn’t insist. I had an early class I couldn’t afford to cut, and I knew from experience that even good trips are bad trips when someone else is having them.

By the time I got up the next morning, Sam had crashed. He didn’t surface again until late that night. I was sitting in an attempted lotus position on a beanbag, making notes for a paper I had to write. The others were out somewhere.

“Hey, man!” I said. “How did it go?”

He looked at me in a strange, expressionless way.

“Phil,” he said flatly, as though recognizing someone from the distant past.

“What happened?”

He frowned.

“Nothing.”

“Last night, I mean. You dropped all that shit.”

A ghostly smile appeared and disappeared on his lips.

“Oh, that. The usual stuff, man.”

I shrugged and got back to my paper. Everyone’s trips were their own responsibility, but also their own business. If they wanted to share them with you, fine-unless of course they carried on about them at excessive length, as though they were somehow better and more interesting than yours. But if they chose not to talk about them, you had to respect that too. A fundamental tenet of our shared philosophy was that language was a highly suspect medium of communication, clumsy and imprecise, a tool used by the straight world to impose its rigid, normalizing concepts on the infinite, threatening freedom of the human spirit. We weren’t any more consistent about this than about anything else. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one frequently went on and on about at ball-breaking length. But Sam had chosen to exercise his right to remain silent, and anyone who questioned him further would stand revealed as an undercover agent for the thought police.

Within a few days, the whole episode had turned into the stuff of myth, one of the heroic exploits to be celebrated whenever members of the tribe gathered late at night and the communal joint passed from hand to hand. Its connection with real events became increasingly tenuous. Before long we were telling people how we would have been busted by a crack narcotics squad that night if it hadn’t been for the quick thinking of Greg, or maybe Larry, who’d dropped the whole stash of twelve-count ’em! — twelve tabs of high-grade acid, and how we’d worked all night to keep him together while he went on about the wall-to-wall shag being a heaving mass of maggots.