Only A Lower Paradise, Page 4

CHAPTER 4

  The next morning, Robert rose at six, as he did every morning on his way to work at the Post Office, and like the super-manager he yearned to be decided we should all go for a sunrise jog.

  He shook the dew off our tent and hollered, “Hey, lovebirds, get up. Time to shake those limbs.”

  Martha told him to shove off.

  Che-Maria was already up, whistling an old Disney song and rattling the pots and pans. I just groaned.

  It was inevitable that Martha and I were going to share a tent. We were, after all, posing as a couple. But that Martha and I were not “lovebirds” was understood, if only by the two of us.

  The night before, Martha had curled up in the corner of the tent in the tattered sleeping bag I had unburied from my basement, and I had sprawled across the centre of the tent under Robert’s camping blanket. It had been a warm night, typical of California in mid-July, and I had rocked myself to sleep, tossing and turning in the sandy darkness. At one point I kicked Martha in my stupor. She rolled over, raised herself up on one elbow, and looked at me with concern.

  “Maybe we can use this opportunity to discuss your insomnia,” she said.

  “Golden.”

  But she just nudged over and kissed me on the forehead.

  “But not now,” she yawned, and fell back into her pillow.

  I rolled over and began counting the number of mosquitoes that buzzed past my ears.

  As I heard Robert splash into the lake screaming for us to join him, the jog evidently put off until after breakfast. Martha rested herself on her elbow again and fixed me a stare.

  “How did you sleep?” she asked.

  “Fitfully,” I said.

  “Maybe you need a psychiatrist,” she joked.

  “But I have an angel.”

  “You’re so sweet.” She laughed, rubbed her eyes, and sat up cross-legged, straightening the sweatshirt she had slept in. It hung loosely on her supermodel frame, suggesting all the right curves and bumps. She brushed her hair back with her hands, pulling it behind her head, tying it with an elastic.

  She yawned.

  “Yes, I am an angel,” she said. “But I’m no longer a professional. Pull yourself up, there. Let’s go for a swim.”

  But before I could reach for my bathing suit, there was a terrified scream from somewhere out on the beach.

  “They’ve found us! They’ve found us! They’ve found us!” Robert yelled, and Martha, suddenly frantic, jumped over me and darted out the door.

  I peeked out and saw another van twisting through the trees towards our camping spot. Robert was making a great effort to get to shore, splashing and spraying water everywhere. Martha crouched behind Robert’s van, and peered out. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Che-Maria dart into the woods.

  Once he reached the beach, Robert rushed to his tent, emerging moments later with a shotgun. By this point, the other van was clearly in sight and heading towards us. It was an old model Volkswagen, brightly painted in pastel colours with flowers and hearts. False alarm, I thought. It’s only hippies. Martha should enjoy this.

  Six people piled out of the VW after it pulled up parallel to the van already on the beach. Martha was right there to greet them, sensing that these were not only safe people but also ultimately cool. She invited them to Che-Maria’s campfire and was pouring them coffee by the time I pulled myself through the tent door.

  Robert was still frozen in front of his tent, wielding his shotgun and daring anyone to grab him. When I waved to him that everything was alright, he ignored me and stood his ground.

  “It’s your life,” he said, mumbling through his teeth.

  I started towards them. Martha may have jived to the hippies’ groove, but I had a different opinion. My experiment with bohemia ended with Pique. That relationship had turned me off gambling with my karma, being true to my birth sign, rummaging through the drawers of my past lives, and generally using every trick in the book to escape from reality.

  I knew reality was depressing. I knew the system was stacked against you. Why would I want to remind myself all the time by pretending these things didn’t exist? I much preferred staring them in the face, daring them to blink. I knew also this was a paradox, that it was probably a lot more fun to react joyously to life and rollick in the pleasure of the moment the moment it struck you to rollick in the pleasure. I knew this was a sort of meaning, but I couldn’t drag myself away from the fact that life was made up of more than just fragmented moments and instants.

  Life was a story, a continuum. And stories had deep-rooted meanings — meanings that transcended time and space. This is the type of meaning Martha had been sent to uphold: the cosmic continuum. The history of the universe. The I-don’t-know-what-all-but-I’m-pretty-sure-it-exists ultimate purpose for everything.

  “Jon, Jon,” a voice called out from behind me. It was Che-Maria. “Is it alright? Is everything OK?”

  I turned around, but couldn’t see anyone.

  “Sure. C’mon out. Everything’s fine. It’s just a group of hippies.”

  “Oh, hippies,” said a bush. “Then that’s good.”

  Che-Maria appeared from the underbrush, and we walked towards the campfire. Martha was having an animated conversation with a long-haired, bearded man wearing only a leather vest and polka dot boxers. This was Yossarian, the leader. He appeared to be in his mid-forties, but his skin was tanned and tight. From his build, you could have easily mistaken him to be in his twenties, but the greying hair and the slightly sagging wrinkles under his eyes gave him away. He was gesticulating wildly and jumping up and down, talking emphatically. Martha smiled and flirted with him, throwing her head and shoulders back with laughter as his gestures became more exaggerated.

  When Che-Maria and I reached the campfire, Yossarian stopped gesticulating and introduced the other members of his gang: Sid, a sallow looking punk with short, spiky ink-black hair and a dog chain secured with a lock around his neck; Yvette, a frilly blonde woman in a flowing summer dress covered with vines, snakes, and apples; Morrison, a large youth with gnarly long hair and the beginnings of a beard; Joni, a short, perky red-head who said she was from Saskatchewan; and Ringo, a short, stumpy man with a large nose who stared off across the lake the whole time and took no notice of us.

  Che-Maria shook all of their hands, welcoming all of them to share our beach, but she passed on greeting Ringo, giving him a surly look instead. I nodded to each in turn.

  “This is Jon and Che-Maria,” Martha said.

  “Greetings,” Yossarian boomed. “Who’s the dude with the gun? You cats weren’t expecting company, were you?”

  Paranoid Robert still hadn’t moved.

  “That’s Robert,” I said. “Don’t worry about him. He’s just a little jumpy in the mornings. And, no, we weren’t.”

  “Groovy. Really groovy,” said Yvette, and then turned and wandered off in the direction of the woods, taking Ringo and Morrison with her.

  Sid plunked himself down in the sand beside the fire and began digging a hole with a frying pan he had pulled out of the container which stored all our utensils and cooking gear.

  Joni marched off towards Robert.

  “That’s cool,” Yossarian said. “Everyone’s doing their own thing. Man, it’s so hard to do your own thing when you’re cramped up in a van all the time. And it’s great to do it with new people. Fantastic, man. Excellent.”

  Do what? I thought.

  The sun was beginning to rise in the sky.

  “Yossarian offered to take us to his commune,” Martha said, excited. “It’s just a short hike through the trees.”

  I looked back at Robert. Joni was shoving a flower down the barrel of the shotgun, speaking to him in a soft, sing-song voice about how unnecessary violence was for solving conflicts. Robert said he wasn’t solving any conflict, only saving his ass. Joni began dancing in place, waving her arms to her own idiosyncratic rhythm.

  This was getting more interesting all t
he time.

  “Great,” I said.

  “Great,” said Che-Maria.

  “Don’t get us into anything stupid,” yelled Robert, who was beginning to suspect something was up.

  “Great,” said Martha, blushing.

  Yossarian said: “Cool, dudes. Just let us unpack first.” To Sid he added: “C’mon, man. Let’s get the gear together.”

  Sid, who was making some progress on his hole, set down the frying pan and rambled silently over to the van, following Yossarian and Martha as they continued their conversation about the place of field mice in the Master Plan.

  I returned to my tent for my bathing suit. I had decided to go for a swim after all. Robert drifted over to meet me at the tent door, ducked his head, and led me inside.

  “I ain’t never seen hippies around here before,” he said, worried. “They’ve always stuck pretty much to the coast.”

  “It’s cool,” I said.

  “I’m thinking something weird is happening,” said Robert.

  “More than you suspect,” I said, running my hand through my hair. “More than I suspect.”

  “Yeah. Sure, man. I know. Life’s confusing and all, but this is out of control.”

  “I think we’re going to their commune,” I said.

  “I hope not,” he said.

  “I think I’m sure we are,” I said, as if nothing could be more dangerous than taking off into the middle of the largest redwood forest left in California with a group of anonymous freaks, when all the while all you wanted was to escape from the Internal Disciplinary Squad of the Federal Postal Service. Not to mention the FBI or the cosmic mercenaries he knew nothing about.

  Robert peeked out the door, scanning the scene.

  “Your girlfriend’s hot for that surfer, Jon. You better convince her to stay here.”

  “It’s OK,” I said. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “No?” he said, turning around. I thought it was time for a little truth.

  “She’s my therapist,” I said, forgetting something important.

  “Therapist?” he asked, sharply. “Therapist?”

  I nodded.

  “I hate therapists,” Robert coughed, staring at me like a cat intent on pouncing.

  “I know,” I said, sorry I had chosen the wrong truth.

  Robert went quiet. The air chilled.

  “I think,” I said. It was suddenly became very hot in the tent.

  “You think what?” Robert demanded.

  “I think I know you hate therapists,” I explained.

  “Of course you know,” he said.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “But, yes,” he said, forcefully. “You do. I’ve told you.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, sitting down and crossing my legs. I dropped my head into my hands. Did I know that? Yes. Did I think I knew that? Yes. Did I think I thought I knew that? You bet. Did I think I thought I thought I thought I knew that? Ugh. I was starting to see the weakness of this line of thinking.

  I knew Robert hated therapists. He told me never to bring them up in conversation. I looked at him. He seemed too stunned to do anything violent. His mother had had a therapist who told her she was suffering from some grievous psychological complex because she had drifted through her life until her sixtieth birthday without once questioning what the people who controlled her life had told her. The therapist advised Robert’s mother to go on an extended vacation and find herself before it was too late. That was the last Robert had seen or heard from his mother, with the exception of a number of Christmas cards which had come for a couple of years after she left, but stopped arriving two years ago.

  Therapists, therefore, were Robert’s least favorite people and a topic to be avoided. I looked up at him and shrugged.

  “But it’s alright,” he said. “Martha’s alright.”

  Then an engine started and Che-Maria appeared at the doorway.

  “They’re taking Martha away!” she said, hysterical. “They’re taking Martha away!”