The Santaroga Barrier Page 12

  Dasein shook his head. He was tempted to try the door, resisted. He found himself frightened by what might lie beyond. Normalcy—a bed, a bath, desk and chairs—that would be the worst thing of all. The number plate—262—fascinated him. He toyed with the eerie sensation that he’d seen it before … right here. The door was too ordinary.

  Abruptly, Dasein whirled back and into his room, threw open his window. A look through the windows from the porch roof would solve the mystery. He started to climb out, stopped. A man stood on a rose-bordered walk beyond the giant oak tree.

  Dasein recognized Winston Burdeaux. He was pumping a hand sprayer that sent dust over the roses. As Dasein stared, Burdeaux looked up, waved.

  Later, Dasein told himself. I’ll look later.

  He nodded to Burdeaux, withdrew, pulled the curtain.

  So they’d cut a door through that wall, had they? What were they trying to do? Destroy his sense of reality?

  The sack on the bed caught Dasein’s attention. It drew him across the room. He saw it as an ultimate temptation. It was more than food. There was a hunger in him only the Jaspers could fulfill. Dasein felt abruptly that he was like Tennyson’s Ulysses, his aim “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.” Still, the thought of the Jaspers in that sack drew his hand. He felt the paper tear beneath his fingers.

  Jaspers cheese. That tantalizing aroma lifted from it. With a feeling of spiritual helplessness, he found a bite of the cheese in his mouth. The food radiated a sensation of warmth as it went down his throat. He continued eating, hypnotized by his own actions.

  Slowly, he sank back onto the bed, leaned against the pillow, gazed up at the ceiling. The wood grain in a beam wavered like the lifting and falling of the sea. It filled him with awe, undiluted and terrifying. He felt his own consciousness stood as a barrier opposing the external world, and that external world was a stupid mechanism without feeling or compassion.

  His own identity became a narrowing beam of light, and he sensed a massive, streaming unconsciousness growing larger, larger … larger … building up an intolerable weight.

  It’s a psychedelic, he told himself. Don’t let go.

  But there was no stopping the movement now. His awareness, exploding up and out, riding a geyser of sense revelation, lifted him into a state of floating consciousness.

  There was no inwardness now, only a timeless sense of being that existed without anxiety. Dasein found himself reveling in the sensation. His mind quested.

  Where are the children? he asked himself.

  It was a shocking sense of revelation for him to realize he’d seen no children or schools in the valley.

  Where are the children? Why haven’t any of the other investigators remarked on this?

  The other investigators are dead, he reminded himself.

  Death—that was an oddly nonfrightening thought. He felt he had risen through a consciousness decompression into a zone beyond all power struggles. The-valley, the Jaspers, had become a condition of his being. The room full of probing sunlight, the leaves of the oak outside his window—all was beauty, innocent, uncluttered. The external universe had become translated into a part of himself, wise, compassionate.

  Dasein marveled at the feeling. The universe out there—it was as though he had just created that universe. Nama-Rupa, he thought. I am Nama-Rupa—name and form, creator of the universe in which I live.

  The pain of his injured shoulder occupied his drifting attention momentarily. Pain, a brief crisis, something against which to project memories of pleasure. The pain faded.

  There came the sound of tires on gravel. He heard a bird singing. The sounds were a moire playing against his awareness. They danced and scintillated.

  He remembered Jenny’s probing stare.

  This was an ugly, shocking memory that jerked him up short, compressed him. He found difficulty breathing. There was a sensation that he had been caught up in history, but it was a kind of history he’d never experienced, peopled by goddesses and creatures of terrifying powers. It was a history moving at an astonishing speed, defying all preconceived notions of slowness. It was like a series of events that he couldn’t separate or distinguish. They flashed across his consciousness, leaving him irrevocably changed.

  The Jaspers, he thought. I cannot return … to … what … I was … before.

  Tears rolled down his cheeks.

  He thought of the way his bag had been searched. A sob shook him. What did they want?

  Dasein found himself believing there were demons around him, cunning, seeking his blood and being, hungry for his soul. They gibbered beyond the charmed circle of his lonely awareness. The sensation, primitive as a witch dance, refused to leave. They were robots, automata with grimacing malleable faces and headlight eyes.

  He began to tremble, knew he was perspiring heavily, but it was a distant sensation, something happening to a foreign person.

  Head whirling, Dasein heaved himself off the bed, lurched to his feet, stumbled across the room. At the wall, he turned, stumbled back—forth and back … back and forth. No hiding place existed for him. Sunlight streaming in the window took on grotesque forms—lizards with human faces, silvery gnomes, insects with clock-face wings …

  He slumped to the floor, clawed at the rug. A red braided pattern extruded claws that reached for him. He retreated to the bed, fell across it. The ceiling undulated with inverted waves.

  Somewhere, someone played a piano—Chopin.

  Dasein felt abruptly that he was the piano. The sounds struck a crystal brilliance through him, plucking out his anguish. Glaring white clarity began to seep over him. He grew aware his clothes were soaked with perspiration. His palms were slippery. He sensed he had come a long distance through a dangerous passage. The journey had leeched all strength from him.

  But he saw the room now with an uncluttered innocence. The ceiling beams were objects to be understood, their grain receding back into trees … to seedlings … to seeds … to trees. Every artifact that met his vision extended into past and future for him. Nothing remained static.

  All was motion and he was a part of that motion.

  Waves of sleep began creeping from the back of his mind—higher … higher … higher.

  Sleep enveloped him.

  In the darkness of his sleep, something laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed …

  Dasein awoke with a feeling he’d been asleep for a long time—perhaps a lifetime. A chuckle lifted from his throat. He heard the noise coming from himself as from a stranger and it frightened him. A glance at his wristwatch told him he’d been asleep more than two hours.

  Again, the stranger-chuckle teased his throat.

  He pushed himself off the bed, wondering at his weakness. His shoulder felt better, though, the pain diminishing to a dull ache.

  A rap sounded on his door.

  “Yes?” Dasein called.

  “It’s Win Burdeaux, sir. Miss Jenny asked me to remind you she’ll be here for you in about a half hour.”

  “Oh … thank you.”

  “That’s all right, sir. Hope you had a nice nap.”

  Dasein stood staring at the door for a moment. How did Burdeaux know I was asleep?

  Perhaps I snored.

  No further sound came from the hall, but Dasein knew Burdeaux had gone away.

  Thoughtful, Dasein stripped out of his wrinkled clothes, showered and changed. He felt angry, frustrated. They were watching him every minute. It would be so easy, he knew, to let his anger become rage. This was no time for rage, though.

  He wondered then if there was a season for rage.

  A sensation of wetness drew his attention to his right hand. He was surprised to find himself still holding a washrag. Innocent thing with a green and white braided edge. He threw it into the bathroom where it landed with a wet slap.

  Another rap sounded on his door and he knew it was Jenny.

  Decision gripped Dasein.

  He strode across the room, threw open th
e door. She stood there in an orange jumper dress with white blouse, a smile deepening the dimple on her left cheek.

  “I’m glad you’re ready,” she said. “Hurry up or we’ll be late.”

  As he allowed her to lead him out and down the stairs, Dasein wondered if imagination had played a trick on him, or had there been a brief moment of worry before she smiled?

  Jenny carried on a continuing babble of unanswerable conversation as they went down the stairs, through the lobby onto the porch.

  “You’ll love the lake this time of year. I wish I could spend more time there. You’re not favoring your shoulder as much as you did. I’ll bet it’s better. Uncle Larry wants you to stop by later for him to check you. All the gang are anxious to meet you. Here they are now.”

  The gang occupied a stake truck.

  Dasein recognized Willa Burdeaux’s pixie face in the cab. She sat beside a blonde, rather craggy-faced youth with large innocent blue eyes. As he looked at her, she winked slowly, deliberately. At least a dozen couples stood in the back of the truck … and there were odd singles: a tall, brown-haired man with fierce dark eyes—Walter Somebody; Dasein failed to catch the last name … a set of twin young women, plump with long sandy hair, round faces—Rachel and Mariella.

  Jenny performed the introductions too fast for Dasein to catch all the names, but he did focus on the fact that the young man with Willa Burdeaux was her fiancé, Cal Nis.

  Reaching hands helped him into the back of the truck, pulled Jenny up beside him. There were boxes around the edges for seats. Dasein found himself crowded onto a box with Jenny snuggled beside him. He began to absorb the carnival air of the people around him—uninhibited laughter, bantering private jokes.

  The truck rumbled into motion. Wind whipped them. Dasein had an impression of passing trees, patches of sky, lurching movement … and the omnipresent laughter.

  It grew on him that he and Jenny were being excluded from the laughter.

  Was it a sense of delicacy in the group? Were they allowing the stranger time to acclimate himself?

  He tried to see the situation as a psychologist, but his own involvement kept intruding. There was no way to focus his analytical eye on details without finding his own shadow across the scene. To cap it, his injured shoulder began to ache where Jenny pressed against it. Jenny’s wind-tossed hair brushed his face. Each lurch of the truck sent a twinge through his shoulder.

  The situation began to take on a nightmare quality.

  Jenny stretched up, spoke into his ear: “Oh, Gil—I’ve dreamed of this day … when you’d be here, one of us.”

  One of us, Dasein thought. Am I really one of them?

  Walter Somebody obviously had mistaken Jenny’s move toward Dasein’s ear. He waved and shouted from across the truck: “Hey! No smooching before dark!”

  This brought a short burst of laughter from the group, but no general shift in their attention. They continued to look and speak around Dasein and Jenny.

  Smooching.

  The word sent Dasein’s mind into high gear. It was a word no longer in common use outside, a word out of its time and place. On this Walter’s lips, though, it had carried the inflection of familiarity. It was a word they used here in the valley.

  Dasein began to see Santaroga in a new light. They were conservatives here in the true sense of the word. They were clinging to the past, resisting change. He modified this thought: They resisted some change. They were people who had made a judgment that some things from the past should be maintained. This was what made them foreign. The world outside was moving away from them. The valley had become a preserve for conditions of another time.

  The truck turned off onto another track through an avenue of overhanging sycamores. Great patches of maple-shaped leaves cast a green-gold aura over their world.

  A jolting bump made Dasein wince with pain as Jenny lurched against his shoulder.

  The truck emerged from the sycamores, passed through a stand of bull pine onto a grassy flat that merged into beach sand edging a cerulean lake.

  Dasein stared out the open rear of the truck, hardly aware of the cascade of people leaping down to the grass, ignoring Jenny’s urgings that they leave. Something about this lake—some sense of familiarity—had struck him with a feeling of beauty and menace.

  A narrow floating walkway reached out from the beach to a float and diving platform—the wood all dark silver-gray from the sun. There were rowboats tied along one side of the diving float.

  Beauty and menace.

  The sensation passed and he wondered at himself. He was seeing phantoms, focusing too much inward.

  “Is it your shoulder?” Jenny asked.

  “It’ll be all right,” Dasein said.

  He followed her down off the truck, wishing he could let himself go, become a laughing part of this group. They were having fun here—carrying boxes to tables set under the trees, preparing fires in rock pits. Some wandered off into the trees, returned in bathing suits.

  Jenny had attached herself to a group laying out picnic lunches on the tables. Presently, she joined the scampering movement toward the water, shedding her dress to reveal an orange one-piece bathing suit beneath. She was a naiad, limbs flashing brown and lithe in the sun.

  She waved to him from the float, shouted: “See you in a minute, darling!”

  Dasein watched her dive into the lake with a feeling she was suddenly lost to him. He experienced an intense jealousy, imagining himself a decrepit old man surrounded by playing children, unable to join them in their happiness.

  He looked around at lake and verging woods. There was a breeze across the water. The breeze had summer in it, fragrant with grass and evergreen needles. He wished suddenly for some drink with which to salute this breeze and day, some potion that would make him a part of the scene.

  Slowly, Dasein walked down to the floating walk and out onto the boards. There were fleece clouds in the sky, and as he stared down at the water, he saw those clouds floating on the lake bottom. Waves shattered the illusion. Jenny swam up, leaned her elbows on the boards. Her face all dripping water, smiling, had never seemed more lovely.

  “Darling, why don’t you come out to the float and sun yourself while we swim?” she asked.

  “All right,” he said. “Maybe I can scull around in one of those boats.”

  “You go easy on that shoulder or I’ll tell Uncle Larry,” she said. She kicked away from the walk, swam lazily out toward the float.

  Dasein followed, making his way through dripping swimmers running up and down the walk. It struck him as odd how this crowd saw him but didn’t see him. They made way for him, but never looked at him. They shouted across him, but not to him.

  He moved to the first boat in the line, untied its painter and prepared to get into it. Jenny was swimming some fifty feet out, a slow, smooth crawl that took her diagonally away from the float.

  Dasein stood up, moved to step into the boat. As he stepped, something pushed him in the middle of the back. His foot kicked the gunwale, thrusting the boat out into the water. He saw he was going to fall into the lake, thought: Oh, damn! I’ll get my clothes all wet. The stern of the boat was turning toward him and he thought of trying to reach for it, but his left foot on the dock slipped in a patch of wet wood. Dasein found himself turning sideways without any control over his motion.

  The edge of the boat, seen out of the corner of an eye, rushed toward him. He tried to reach up, but that was the side of his bad shoulder. His arm wouldn’t move fast enough.

  There was an explosion of blackness in his head. Dasein felt himself sinking into an enveloping cold, soundless, all dark and inviting.

  A part of his mind screamed: Beauty! Menace!

  He thought that an odd combination.

  There was a distant ache in his lungs and it was cold—terrifyingly cold. He felt pressure … and the cold … all distant and unimportant.

  I’m drowning, he thought.

  It was an unexciting thought
—something that concerned another person.

  They won’t see me … and I’ll drown.

  The cold grew more immediate—wet.

  Something turned him violently.

  Still, everything remained remote—all happening to that other being which he knew to be himself, but which could not concern him.

  Jenny’s voice broke on him like a thunderclap: “Help me! Please! Someone help me! Oh, God! Won’t someone help me? I love him! Please help me!”

  He grew aware suddenly of other hands, other voices.

  “All right, Jen. We’ve got him.”

  “Please save him!” Her voice carried a sobbing intensity.

  Dasein felt himself draped across something hard that pressed into his abdomen. Warmth gushed from his mouth. There was a blinding, terrible pain in his chest.

  Abruptly, he began to cough—gasping, the pain tearing at his throat and bronchia.

  “He swallowed a lot of water.” It was a man’s voice, almost vacant of emotion.

  Jenny’s voice came pleading beside Dasein’s ear: “Is he breathing? Please don’t let anything happen to him.” Dasein felt wetness on his neck, and still Jenny’s voice pleading there beside him: “I love him. Please save him.”

  That same unemotional male voice answered: “We understand, Jenny.”

  And another voice, husky, feminine: “There’s only one thing to do, of course.”

  “We’re doing it!” Jenny screamed. “Don’t you understand?”

  Even as hands picked Dasein up, began carrying him, Dasein wondered: Doing what?

  His coughing had subsided, but the pain in his chest remained. It hurt when he breathed.

  Presently, there was grass under his back. Something warm and confining was wrapped around him. It was an oddly womblike sensation.

  Dasein opened his eyes, found himself staring up at Jenny, her dark hair framed by blue sky. She managed a trembling smile.

  “Oh, thank God,” she whispered.

  Hands lifted his shoulders. Jenny’s face went away. A cup full of steaming brown liquid was pressed against his lips. Dasein experienced the almost overpowering smell of Jaspers, felt hot coffee burn down his throat.