He moaned and tried to kick the covers off, but he had no strength. Had he put himself to bed? He didn't think so. Someone or something had been in the house with him. Someone or something... he should remember, but he couldn't. All Bradenton could remember was that he had been afraid even before he got sick, because he knew someone (or something) was coming and he would have to... what?
He moaned again and rocked his head from side to side on the pillow. Delirium was all he remembered. Hot phantoms with sticky eyes. His mother had come into this plain log bedroom, his mother who had died in 1969, and she had talked to him: "Kit, oh Kit, I tole you, 'Don't get mixed up with those people,' I said. 'I don't care nothing about politics,' I said, 'but those men you hang around with are crazy as mad dogs and those girls are nothing but hoors.' I tole you, Kit..." And then her face had broken apart, letting through a horde of grave beetles from the splitting yellow parchment fissures and he had screamed until blackness wavered and there was confused shouting, the slap of shoe-leather as people ran... lights, flashing lights, the smell of gas, and he was back in Chicago, the year was 1968, somewhere voices were chanting The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world... and there was a girl lying in the gutter by the entrance to the park, her body clad in overall jeans, her feet bare, her long hair full of glass-fragments, her face a glittering mask of blood that was black in the heartless white glow of the streetlights, the mask of a crushed insect. He helped her to her feet and she screamed and shrank against him because an outer-space monster was advancing out of the drifting gas, a creature clad in shining black boots and a flak-jacket and a walleyed gas mask, holding a truncheon in one hand, a can of Mace in the other, and grinning. And when the outer-space monster pushed its mask back, revealing its grinning, flaming face, they had both screamed because it was the somebody or something he had been waiting for, the man Kit Bradenton had always been terrified of. It had been the Walkin Dude. Bradenton's screams had shattered the fabric of that dream like high C shatters fine crystal and he was in Boulder, Colorado, an apartment on Canyon Boulevard, summer and hot, so hot that even in your skivvy shorts your body was trickling sweat, and across from you stands the most beautiful boy in the world, tall and tanned and straight, he is wearing lemon-yellow bikini briefs which cling lovingly to every ridge and hollow of his precious bu**ocks and you know if he turns his face will be like a Raphael angel and he will be hung like the Lone Ranger's horse. Hiyo Silver, away. Where did you pick him up? A meeting to discuss racism on the CU campus, or in the cafeteria? Hitchhiking? Does it matter? Oh, it's so hot, but there's water, a pitcher of water, an urn of water carved with strange figures which stand out in bas-relief, and beside it the pill, no - ! THE PILL! The one that will send him off to what this angel in the light yellow briefs calls Huxleyland, the place where the moving finger writes and doesn't move on, the place where flowers grow on dead oak trees, and boy, what an erection is tenting out your skivvies! Has Kit Bradenton ever been so horny, so ready for love? "Come to bed," you say to that smooth brown back, "come to bed and do me and then I'll do you. Just the way you like." "Take your pill first," he says without turning. "Then we'll see." You take the pill, the water is cool in your throat, and little by little the strangeness comes over your sight, the weirdness that makes every angle in the place a little more or a little less than ninety degrees. For some time you find yourself looking at the fan on the cheap Grand Rapids bureau and then you're looking at your own reflection in the wavy looking glass above it. Your face looks black and swelled but you don't let it worry you because it's just the pill, only !!!THE PILL!! "Trips," you murmur, "oh boy, Captain Trips and I am sooo horny..." He begins to run and at first you have to look at those smooth hips where the elastic of his briefs rides so low, and then your gaze moves up the flat, tanned belly, then to the beautiful hairless chest, and finally from the slimly corded neck to the face... and it is his face, sunken and happy and ferociously grinning, not the face of a Raphael angel but of a Goya devil and from each blank eyesocket there peers the reptilian face of an adder; he is coming toward you as you scream, he is whispering: Trips, baby, Captain Trips...
Then murkiness, faces and voices that he didn't remember, and at last he had surfaced here, in the small house he had built with his own hands on the outskirts of Mountain City. Because now was now, and the great wave of revolt which had engulfed the country had long since withdrawn, the young Turks were now mostly old lags with gray in their beards and big coke-burned holes where their septa used to be, and this was the wreckage, baby. The boy in the yellow briefs had been long ago, and in Boulder Kit Bradenton had been little more than a boy himself.
My God, am I dying?