Between the Bridge and the River Read online

  LAS VEGAS.

  LA VIE NOUVELLE

  AFTER THE DEATH OF HER LAST LOVER, Bruce, the Australian diplomat who had drunkenly stumbled in front of a Metro train, Claudette had felt she had to clean out her life and make it simple to the point of monastic.

  She had lived in the large, rambling apartment she had inherited from Guillame, and over the years she had filled it with knickknacks and books and sofas and paintings and elastic bands and cotton buds and pieces of string and pamphlets and all the other rubbish that builds up in a home the longer one stays in it.

  When Bruce died, she rented a room at the nearby Hôtel l’Abbaye and had contractors come and put all of her possessions, except for one framed photograph of each of her lovers, and all of her furniture into the back of a truck and take them away and sell them or burn them or dump them, she didn’t care.

  She just wanted everything gone.

  Guillame had left her wealthy and she hadn’t been foolish enough to give away the money. She loved the apartment and could not bear to part with it, so once it was cleaned out, she hired a decorator, Monsieur Garrido, a dark, squat man who was originally from Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, to completely redecorate the place under very strict instructions.

  The floors were sanded, the walls painted white, and she bought one large comfortable bed that she never slept in with any man. Her sheets were expensive white linen. She had one dining-room table with one chair, one bookcase, one reading lamp, one easy chair, one knife, one fork, one spoon. One cup.

  She had one wall decoration. A wooden crucifix that she had bought in one of the many neighborhood stores that catered to the pilgrims who flocked to the nearby Saint-Sulpice. It hung above her bed.

  Long, thick white curtains hung on each of the tall windows. The effect was meant to be stark and sad. Claudette wanted to enhance her solitude, she wanted the place to look as bleak as she felt, but in fact the result was completely the opposite. The old French apartment was so artfully constructed and had been lived in so much that Claudette’s spartan style change had only improved it. It was breathtaking. Without clutter, the cornicing on the ceilings stood out, the marble of the fireplaces shone, and the sanded wooden parquets looked rich and warm.

  Claudette’s enforced period of minimalist solitude had only made everything more beautiful.

  They kissed all the way to the fifth floor—the tiny elevator familiar to many old Parisian buildings seemed to insist on it—and when Claudette unlocked her door and let George enter, he felt a rush of adrenaline and approbation.

  The Paris night filled the apartment with a dreamlike glow.

  What they both failed to see was the ghost of Guillame, who had haunted his old home for the years since his death. He had been standing by the window in the living room, and when he saw Claudette enter with George, he smiled softly to himself, blew a kiss to the new lovers, and left, never to return. George and Claudette kissed in the hallway and the heat and joy of their passion began to turn to sex. Somehow, awkwardly and with some laughter and stumbling, they managed to make their way down the narrow hallway to the bedroom and remove their clothes at the same time. They both lost breath at the feel of each other’s flesh for the first time, then they inhaled each other, and when Claudette put her small, cool hand around George’s hot, hard cock, he had an overwhelming feeling of safety. Which surprised him a little but delighted him more.

  Claudette parted from George and crossed the room. She drew the thick curtains closed and George gazed at her body, the most desirable and most female sight he had ever seen, backlit in the drape-muted halogen glow from the street. She turned and smiled at him and as she walked toward him he felt thrilled and nervous.

  Claudette felt potent and fragile all at the same time. She could see the effect she was having on George and she could feel the effect he had on her. She had been wet since her hand touched his in Les Deux Magots.

  Somehow this was to be her first time and somehow this was to be his first time.

  They were hopelessly aroused and tumbling deeply into the physical manifestation of the biggest love either one of them would or could ever experience.

  They were Holy Virgins.

  All the ghosts of Paris gathered that night.

  In the moonlit gardens of Luxembourg, the dead waited for the consummation of the Passion of Claudette and George. They stood by the statues or in the fountains, on the rides in the children’s playground, or on the water of the large octagonal boating pond in front of the palace itself. The sweet suicide girls of the Resistance, the missing Jews, the Protestant heretics, the Catholic philosophers, the soldiers, the pox-ridden prostitutes, the betrayed revolutionaries, the murdered aristocrats, and the neglected children. The drunken drivers and the car-crash princesses. The divine Danton and the crones of the guillotine. The vomit-covered rock stars and the true Communists from the barricades.

  All of Claudette’s lovers.

  Guillame Maupassant stood among them at last.

  George’s parents drifted shyly through the big green iron gates into the garden and took their place with the others.

  And in the darkness and the silence as George and Claudette came together, the dead were set free.

  * * *

  Lovemaking took hold of George and Claudette and became like a third entity. They kept changing position and going through the moves that they had both learned in their respective sex lives but the lovemaking kept returning them to the missionary position, where they could look each other in the eyes as they climaxed.

  They fucked and rested for a few moments, and fucked again, then rested, then fucked again. They made love three times before cock crow, when they both eventually lay exhausted, wrapped in each other.

  Morpheus transported Claudette to the shadows and peace and dopamine-inducing, restorative slumber of God’s favorites, whereas George began a tumble into dreamland.

  As the lovers slept, millions of George’s sperm died in Claudette’s vagina and fallopian tubes.

  Millions.

  But not all.

  THE TOWER

  IN HIS LIFETIME, Carl Jung purchased a small tower on the shore of Lake Zurich, and as the years passed he added rooms and wings to it until eventually the place was much more elaborate and grand than it had been originally but it always remained his private place, his haven, his getaway from the world with all its questioning neurotics and judgmental academics. It was where he felt most at home.

  Fraser read a biography of Jung after he started meeting him in dreams, and he identified very strongly with the doctor’s desire to build a safe haven, a place of refuge from trouble. When Fraser was exposed as a kinky sex maniac in the tabloid press, he had wished he had his own little Bollingen to run off to, so he felt strangely at home as he walked along the shoreline of the lake with the poet Virgil as they headed to Jung’s tower.

  It seemed, as they got closer, that the tower was in the simple condition it had been when Jung purchased it, and Fraser saw that they were not in fact on the shore of Lake Zurich but actually on the edge of Hogganfield Loch, a small, shallow man-made boating pond in the downscale Riddrie area of Glasgow.

  As they approached the door it was flung open by a delighted and slightly tipsy Jung, who had resumed his easily identifiable elder statesman guise. He strode purposely across the lawn and gave Fraser a bear hug.

  “Fraser! How delightful! How delightful! I was wondering if Virgil would ever get you here.” He winked at the poet, who laughed.

  “He’s a grumpy little spud, isn’t he?” chuckled the poet, nodding at Fraser.

  “He can be,” agreed Jung, “but he doesn’t mean it. He’s just conflicted.” Jung held out his hands as if trying to gauge the weight of two very similar-sized grapefruits.

  “Sacred . . . profane . . . sacred . . . profane.”

  Jung and Virgil both had a good laugh at that and Fraser felt excluded. Jung noticed.

  “Oh come, Fraser, don’t pout! Come
in, come in, both of you. I’ve made blackberry wine, and Toni and Emma are off hang-gliding, we have the place to ourselves. Just the boys.”

  “I can’t,” said Virgil. “I’ve got a doctor arriving. You know how arrogant they can be.”

  “Watch it, cheeky,” laughed Jung, and the two great men hugged before Virgil took his leave.

  Before he left, Virgil also hugged Fraser, who noticed the poet was now a full foot taller than him and at least ten years younger.

  “See you.” Virgil smiled through his now-perfect white teeth. “Don’t be too tough on yourself, okay?”

  Fraser nodded dumbly and the poet was gone.

  Jung put an arm around Fraser’s shoulder and ushered him into the tower.

  Fraser and Carl sat in leather armchairs facing each other in front of the blazing log fire burning in the grate. The flames crackled theatrically but didn’t give off much heat, and Fraser still felt cold in the circular, bare-brick-walled room.

  “I’m cold,” he said. “I suppose that’s because I’m dead.”

  Jung smiled. “You’re not dead. Not yet anyway.”

  “Well, I’m not dreaming and I’m talking to you and you’re dead.”

  “Yes, I am,” agreed the doctor as he sipped his wine. He relished the taste and lifted the glass to Fraser. “You sure you won’t have some?”

  Fraser shook his head sadly. “No, thanks. I’ve been hammering it too much recently. I think it’s time I gave it a miss for a while.”

  Jung nodded, genuinely sympathetic.

  “Look, if I’m not dead and I’m not dreaming, what exactly is happening?”

  Jung sighed, put down his glass. “You’re in crisis, Fraser. This is a fork in the road for you. We are in your subconscious. You’re having a near-death experience but you’re not dead yet.”

  “I’m in a coma?”

  “No, you’re dying but you’re not all the way there. You are unconscious, certainly, but this is not a normal dream, if that is not too ludicrous a proposal. We are deeper and further in. We are not only in your unconscious, we are in the Great Unconscious. The Collective Unconscious, which, I may add, was my discovery and not something I stole from a student of mine.”

  “Oh, yeah, I think I read something about that.”

  “Enough!” snapped the doctor. “We are here to talk about you.”

  And that’s what they did.

  For the first time in his life Fraser totally opened himself up to the possibilities of himself. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been honest with Carl in the past, in fact he had, but he had omitted certain things and ignored others, dismissing them as unimportant. He freed himself from that quantitive judgment and just told the Great Psychotherapist everything, absolutely everything in his life he could remember, allowing the good doctor to interrupt him when he felt it was relevant, to point out something to Fraser, or to clarify a fact for himself.

  They had all the time in the world. Not an engineer or a referee in sight.

  Jung was particularly interested in a small point that Fraser had considered irrelevant.

  It seemed that, when Fraser was three years old, his mother had fallen ill, developed some malignant growths in her uterus, and had to have a full hysterectomy. The operation was difficult and involved enough complications for her to spend six weeks in hospital. Fraser’s father was embarrassed by the nature of the complaint and referred to the whole affair as his wife’s “women’s problems.”

  Everyone thought Fraser too young to understand why his mother was going away, so they just didn’t tell him. One day she was there, the next day she wasn’t and Fraser had been farmed out to his maternal grandmother, a giant wide-beamed frigate of a woman, who was well past the time in her life when she was up to dealing with and entertaining an energetic toddler.

  Fraser pined for his mother, he cried and asked questions, and he was told she was away with women’s problems. She would be back very soon.

  The hospital had strict visiting rules. Scotland at this time was awash with ludicrous restrictions. It made people feel that order had been restored after the horrors of the bombing raids and mayhem of World War II. No children under five except in maternity, and even then only between four and five on a Sunday.

  So when he was three years old, Fraser got an eye infection caused by standing at the letterbox of his grandmother’s house, lifting the flap with his tubby little fingers and peering out, hoping to see his mother return. The resulting draft blew pollen into his tear ducts, causing them to swell his eyes almost shut. He had looked like a midget prizefighter who had just lost a title bout.

  When his mother eventually returned, no one mentioned her absence but Fraser sensed she felt deeply guilty about having deserted him.

  Jung felt this was extremely significant.

  “Why?” asked Fraser. “It wasn’t like she did it on purpose. She was ill, for God’s sake.”

  “I’m not saying she was wrong to be ill but your family was wrong to not talk to you about it.”

  “I was only three.”

  “Exactly. Just as you are dealing with separation anxiety, your mother disappears. I am amazed you are not even worse.”

  Fraser was skeptical. “I’m not going to blame all my problems on my mother. It’s a ridiculously simple cliché. I’m surprised at you.”

  “Your mother is not to blame for all of your problems but it is extremely important to find out where the trouble begins, and I am fairly sure, for you it began with this event. You learned not to trust. If you can’t trust, you can’t be trustworthy. Nothing is reliable to you, and you in turn are not reliable to yourself or anyone else. This causes you to feel shame, terror, self-loathing, depression, even suicidal.”

  “Come on, that’s a bit of stretch, don’t you think? You sure about that?” said Fraser. He felt that Carl was phoning it in sometimes.

  Jung nodded, tapping his pipe on the fireplace to clean it. “Oh, yes, I’m sure—and I am not phoning anything in,” he grumbled.

  And on they talked. Well, Fraser talked mostly, Jung listening intently as he smoked his pipe, the blue-gray smoke spiraling up the tower and collecting in the rafters. At last Fraser felt he was finished. Everything was out, there was nothing he could remember that he hadn’t mentioned or discussed with Carl.

  The two men sat in silence for a while. At length Jung asked, “Do you believe in God?”

  Fraser thought for a moment, then said that, in light of recent events, yes, he did believe in God. He had been hanging around with dead people for what seemed like days. That would imply there was an afterlife, which in turn suggested that there was a God.

  “Why would an afterlife suggest a God any more than life itself?” asked Jung.

  “I suppose they both suggest God,” said Fraser.

  Jung agreed but then said that just because Fraser had been with Virgil and H.P. Lovecraft and Brinsley Sheridan and himself, it didn’t mean there was an afterlife. Perhaps he was imagining the whole thing. Perhaps everything was a dream and nothing was ever real or ever had been.

  Fraser thought about that for a moment. “I think that’s a dead end,” he said.

  “I’m inclined to agree,” said Jung. “Perhaps it’s more productive to say that all dreams are real.”

  Another long silence stretched between them.

  “What now?” said Fraser at length.

  “Now you try to go back,” replied the old man.

  “How? I don’t know where to start.”

  “Get up. Open the door and start walking. There is no poet this time to guide you but you have a lot more information at your finger-tips. It’s a dangerous trip. Good luck.”

  “Will I die?”

  “Everyone dies, Fraser.”

  Fraser nodded. He stood up, as did Carl, and the two men embraced. Before Fraser opened the door, he turned and looked back.

  “Will I see you again?” he asked, sounding a little girly.

  “I hope so,” replied Carl.


  Fraser nodded and stepped outside.

  Of course, the landscape had changed again, he had expected that much, but he had not expected what he saw before him.

  Belgium.

  POPPY SEEDS

  AS ANY REPUTABLE PRACTITIONER of medicine will allow, the human body is extremely complex and in many ways mysterious. Maladies and problems can spring up and/or disappear without any logical or scientific explanation. Strict scientists, those who study failure incessantly, say that this is for reasons that have yet to be discovered. Groovier, more shamanistic students of human biology will say that the body is intertwined with the soul and, even though science has as yet been unable to detect it, the soul is the single most important driving force in humans, controlling everything from the autoimmune system to the need to defecate.

  In George’s case, there was certainly a mystery occurring. It had nothing to do with his cancer but, as he lay in a deep sleep next to the incandescent Claudette in the most comfortable bed in the known Universe, his body began to shut down.

  He was dying.

  Quickly.

  He ran down the length of the trench, mortar shells exploding behind him with hideously workmanlike thuds, not the kind of showbiz special effects he had expected. The big noise came from the guns on his own side and they seemed even more terrifying even though they were aimed at some poor sods miles away.

  He stumbled just as he heard a bullet swiss neutrally by his head, missing by inches but murderously indifferent to him. He fell into a muddy hole on top of another soldier who was crouched in the fetal position with his eyes shut tight and his hands over his ears.

  The fetal soldier opened his eyes for a moment and then a look of amazed and dazed recognition changed his expression from terror to bewilderment.

  “George?” he whispered.

  “Hello, Fraser,” said George.

  THE ROAD TO GOD: FIVE

  CADENCE POWERS LOVED VEGAS HOOKERS. They would suck the pleasure and money from you with a speed and efficiency that left you breathless. Getting a blowjob from one of these avaricious sirens was the sexual equivalent of a roller-coaster ride. It was artificially created excitement and that’s what Vegas is all about. Showbiz! Making something thrilling out of absolutely nothing. All smoke and mirrors, an entertainment resort in the middle of a deadly arid plain. It was fantastic. The devil’s delight, a thumbing of the nose at God with all his trees and rocks and little wildlifey squirrels and bunny rabbits, all that Disney bullshit.