The Children of Hamelin Read Free Page B

goal of the Foundation for Total Consciousness is first to face the truth and then to eliminate the interface, to become totally conscious not of the environment, but in the environment. Like an animal.”
    I felt as if I were alone in the room with Harvey, as if he were speaking directly to me, to a place inside me that was void. No longer did he seem gray or trivial. He was calling to something in me but somehow not of me. A blind something that yearned to throw itself into the arms of the infinite... the infinite what? There seemed to be something I should remember... had to remember, or be lost forever. And the feeling that this had all happened before ....
    “Do you understand what I’m saying?” Harvey said. “Can you face it? What do we all fear the most? Death. But an animal doesn’t fear death. Because it is the ego, that interface between the me and the it within us, which fears death—not the death of the body, but its own annihilation. Look at the promise of immortality upon which Christianity is based. The immortality not of the body but of the ego, the soul. That is the death we cannot face, the annihilation of the interface between external and internal realities. That’s why you all need Total Psychotherapy, whether you’ve been told you’re neurotic or not. Because the so-called normal personality is the disease itself. That artificial construct is the source of all unhappiness—and it defends itself with all the psychic resources at our command. So we must defeat our own innermost selves in order to be free. That’s why only Total Psychotherapy can free us from the tyranny of our selves. You can’t do it yourselves—because it is the self which must be defeated!”
    And suddenly I understood. I understood it all. Harvey was pushing junk; he was pushing the very essence of junk, the void inside the needle, the end to pain and frustration and caring, the thing that makes so many terminal junkies finally give themselves the O.D., the last big surge, Dose Terminal.
    Harvey was pushing the very soul of junk. And every junkie knows deep down that the soul of junk is death.
    Oh yes, there was nothing trivial about what Harvey was offering. The straight, uncut stuff. And there were Ted and Doris, my friends beside me, and they were hooked, sucking at the teats of Kali, mainlining death.
    A whole roomfull of terminal junkies, really terminal, and the bland pudding-face of the creature on the folding chair was a face I knew all too well: the Man, Anti-Life, the Sweet Destroyer, Prince of the Final Darkness.
    Something human and screaming inside me moved my body and my mouth and I found myself on my feet shouting: “I know you, man, oh Jesus, I know you!”
    A whole mood shattered. The people on the floor were looking at me as if I were crazy, I mean conventionally crazy. Linda Kahn’s lips were curled in a grimace of disgust; Ted and Doris shook their heads at each other. And Harvey... Harvey was just a gray little man, not... not...
    “We’d like to hear your feelings,” Harvey said in that other voice of his, the dentist’s voice. And reality flipped over again for me: I looked at Harvey and saw the schmoo-mask. But behind it lurked the other reality: it was a mask, for wasn’t I standing in a room full of people who were being sucked dry by what looked like a nonentity? Maybe he was just a dirty little quack, maybe it was just money to him—but that didn’t matter, he was pushing death and they were buying. Some pushers are on the stuff and some wouldn’t touch it. It doesn’t matter to the clientele.
    “Can’t you see it?” I said “Are you all deaf? Didn’t you hear the man? He’s telling you to groove behind death—”
    Blank, vacant stares. Ted and Doris, my oldest, closest friends, and they didn’t really hear a word I was saying—they were hooked like all the rest.
    I was just making a public asshole out of myself. You can’t argue with junkies, not about their junk you