Falconer

With the exception of organized religion and triumphant fucking, Farragut considered transcendent experience to be perilous rubbish. One saved one's ardor for people and objects that could be used. The flora and fauna of the rain forest were incomprehensible, but one could comprehend the path that led to one's destination. However, at Falconer the walls and the bars had sometimes seemed to threaten to vanish, leaving him with a nothingness that would be worse. He was, for example, waked early one morning by the noise of the toilet and found himself among the receding fragments of some dream. He was not sure of the depth of the dream-of its profundity-but he had never (nor had his psychiatrists) been able to clearly define the moraines of consciousness that compose the shores of waking. In the dream he saw the face of a beautiful woman he enjoyed but had never much loved. He also saw or felt the presence of one of the great beaches on a sea island. A nursery rhyme or jingle was being sung. He pursued these receding fragments as if his life, his self-esteem, depended upon his bringing them together into a coherent and useful memory. They fled, they fled purposefully like the carrier in a football game, and one by one he saw the woman and the presence of the sea disappear and heard the music of the jingle fade away. He checked his watch. It was three-ten. The commotion in the toilet subsided. He fell asleep.

Days, weeks, months or whatever later, he waked from the same dream of the woman, the beach and the song, pursued them wit h the same intensity that he had in the begi

This happened again and again and perhaps again. The time was not always precisely three-ten, but it was always between three and four in the morning. He was always left irritable at the tact that his memory could, quite independently of anything he knew about himself, manipulate its resources in controlled and repeated designs. His memory enjoyed free will, and his irritability was increased by his realization that his memory was as unruly as his genitals. Then one morning, jogging from the mess to shop along the dark tu

"Knock, knock," said the Cuckold. It was late, but Tiny hadn't called lockup. Chicken Number Two and the Mad Dog Killer were playing rummy. Television was shit. The Cuckold came into Farragut's cell and sat in the chair. Farragut disliked him. His round pink face and his thin hair had not been changed at all by prison. The brilliant pinkness of the Cuckold, his protuberant vulnerability-produced, it seemed, by alcohol and sexual embarrassment-had not lost its striking hue. "You miss Jody?" he asked. Farragut said nothing. "You score with Jody?" Farragut said nothing. "Hell, man, I know you do," said the Cuckold» "but I don't hold it against you. He was beautiful, he was just beautiful. Do you mind if I talk?"

"I've got a cab downstairs, waiting to take me to the airport," said Farragut. Then he said, sincerely, "No, no, no, I don't mind if you talk, I don't mind at all."

"I scored with a man," said the Cuckold. "That was after I had left my wife. That time I found her screwing this kid on the floor of the front hall. My thing with this man began in a Chinese restaurant. In those days I was the kind of lonely man you see eating in Chinese restaurants. You know? Anywhere in this country and in some parts of Europe where I've been. The Chung Fu Dynasty. The One Hung Low. Paper lanterns with teakwood frames all over the place. Sometimes they keep the Christmas lights up all year round. Paper flowers, many paper flowers. Large family groups. Also oddballs. Fat women. Square pegs. Jews. Sometimes lovers and always this lonely man. Me. We never eat the Chinese food, we lonely men. We always have the London broil or the Boston baked beans in Chinese restaurants. We're international. Anyhow, I'm a lonely man eating the London broil in a Chinese restaurant on the strip outside Kansas City. Any place that used to have a local option has a place outside the town limits where you used to have to go for liquor, cunt, a motel bed for a couple of hours.

"The place, this Chinese restaurant, is about half full. At a table is this young man. That's about it. He's good-looking, but that's because he's young. He'll look like the rest of the world in ten years. But he keeps looking at me and smiling. I honestly don't know what he's after. So then when I get my pineapple chunks, each one with a toothpick, and my fortune cookie, he comes over to my table and asks me what my fortune is. So I tell him I can't read my fortune without my glasses and I don't have my glasses and so he takes this scrap of paper and he reads or pretends to read that my fortune is I am going to have a beautiful adventure within the next hour. So I ask him what his fortune is and he says it's the same thing. He goes on smiling. He speaks real nicely but you could tell he was poor. You could tell that speaking nicely was something he learned. So when I go out he goes out with me. He asks where I'm staying at and I say I'm staying at this motel which is attached to the restaurant. Then he asks if I have anything to drink in my room and I say yes, would he like a drink, and he says he'd love a drink and he puts his arm around my shoulder, very buddy-buddy, and we go to my room. So then he says can he make the drinks and I say sure and I tell him where the whiskey and the ice is and he makes some nice drinks and sits beside me and begins to kiss me on the face. Now, the idea of men kissing one another doesn't go down with me at all, although it gave me no pain. I mean a man kissing a woman is a plus and minus situation, but a man kissing a man except maybe in France is a very worthless two of a kind. I mean if someone took a picture of this fellow kissing me it would be for me a very strange and u