The Children of Hamelin Read Free Page A

into hours, making us wait, making the very corpuscles of our blood hunger for that dirty old surge. Old Harv knew his business, yes!
    Someone handed him an ashtray. He put it down beside his chair. He took a pack of Winstons out of his shirt picket. It took him a full ten seconds to get one out and stick it in his mouth. Uptight! Uptight! What a pusher old Harv would’ve made! Everyone was twitching. Harvey reached into his shirt pocket for matches; they weren’t there. Into the shopping bag. Shuffle, shuffle. Pack of matches. Pulled off a match. Struck it. Nothing happened. Jesus! Struck it again. Another match. This one lit. Sucked smoke. Exhaled. Sighed. Crossed legs.
    “Why can’t you all relax?” Harvey said in a soft, totally humorless voice.
    Christ, was that whole number planned?
    “Human beings consider themselves the most highly evolved form of life on Earth. A dog can relax. A cat can relax. Even a lizard can relax. All the way, thinking sweet no-thoughts. So why can’t you do what a dog or a cat or a lizard can? Why can’t you relax?”
    Harvey took a long drag on his cigarette, drawing out the silence. A simple trick—uptight people, then tell them they’re uptight. I tried to relax, just to show the bastard—but try not to think of a red-assed monkey. See the mind-game he was playing?
    “You think too much, that’s your problem,” Harvey said. “You watch your own minds. An animal doesn’t do that. An animal experiences its environment directly. It feels imperatives and it acts or feels no imperatives and relaxes. Animals can be frustrated, but if you eliminate the frustrating condition, the animal relaxes. Because animals have no time-sense, no worlds of memory. Animals experience no interface between inner and outer realities, no ego watching itself and remembering old frustrations, anticipating new ones. No hangups on things that have no present reality. Are you animals? Wouldn’t you like to be animals?”
    He paused again. I found myself drifting in a half-remembered dream... calm... blank... not caring... no hang-ups... like lying on the bed with Anne for hours, not moving... swathed in the soft sweet cotton batting of heroin... yes, there had been good times too that I had forgotten... when we were lush and torpid sunning ourselves like lizards on a rock in the timeless tropical sun....
    “Sure,” Harvey said, “you’re animals. But animals-plus. Plus that cerebral cortex that makes a man something more complex than an animal. What’s in that lump of gray jelly? You are. The you that thinks of itself as ‘me’. Ego, memory, time-sense, fears, hopes, hangups. Total Psychotherapy concentrates on that cerebral cortex. It’s all we have to worry about—the rest of us is pure animal, continuous with the environment.”
    He paused again, took another drag. I was beginning to understand why everyone around me was leaning forward, hanging on his words. Harvey was into something all right, something big. I found myself wanting to believe... in what? But I was also afraid... of what?
    “Scary, isn’t it?” Harvey said, as if reading my mind. “It’s scary because it means that you’re all unhappy, every one of you, simply because you’re human beings. It’s obvious. You all have memories. You’ve all experienced frustrations. Remember? Remember being a fetus floating in an environment designed for perfection... you were an animal then. And then you were ejected from paradise and everything since has been a downhill slide because it’s less than the perfection we all remember. So in times of stress, we curl up into a fetal position, don’t we? Don’t we all love a good dreamless sleep? Because we’re like animals then—no interface between external and internal realities, between desire and fulfillment, between the me and the it. No ego watching itself. The truth we all refuse to face is that the thing we love most—our ‘me-ness’—is the source of all unhappiness. The