A Mirror of Before and After - CHAPTER XIII
By Frank Moore circa 1970s
You must be awake when the key comes. Stretching away out, out … go catch it, grabbing hard. When you have caught the key, you have to search for the right lock.
The lock that you tried to break is rarely the one that you really wanted open. You find that out when you catch the flying key.
Then you have to go down the hall under the rabbit hole, trying the key in every door you come to. The key comes to you, but then you have to work to use it, to make it matter at all.
When you come to the right door, the key turns into a light blue magic carpet. There is a trick to using this carpet … knowing when to lie back and let the magic carpet take you where it will, and when to force it by your will to take you where you desire to go …
Sometimes the carpet will just hover over one place if you don’t use your will. You will be trapped ninety feet in the air. But you don’t know the terrain. You have traveled this way a long, long time ago once, and have a vague idea where you want to go.
I was waiting for that key that would turn into a magic carpet that would take me to Santa Fe. And Carol, with her dog, Bo, came in bearing a box of home-made brownies and a fruitcake.
“Marry her!” Moe advised me when he saw the food. But he wouldn’t take a bite no matter how Carol tried to force a brownie into his mouth. He was on one of his week fasts. Drinking only chocolate milk and orange juice, he thought he was keeping fit. And at the end of the week, he would have an eating contest.
After Carol saw that Moe was both illogical and impossible, she pushed me outside to take a walk around the block to get away from a high school kid who somehow got the idea that Carol had some grass. She had gone to the wedding and had driven her brother to catch the plane to Germany. Now she had his car … or at least she had it when her mother didn’t get the whim to keep it in the garage until he came back three years from now.
The key. The magic carpet. She was like a princess locked in a tower and under a spell. She would slowly turn to stone, getting more and more rigid.
“I want to get back to my home, but I don’t have any way to get back. I do have money.”
Drive me. Take a risk. You are doing nothing here playing your guitar in your room … driving in the city where there is no place to go, walking that paranoid dog who can’t decide which side of the chair he wants to walk on. I wouldn’t live like that. I couldn’t. There was a time when I was living at home with my folks, and was going to college, that I wanted to go insane so I could hide in front of the TV without thinking that I should be doing more. I couldn’t figure out the trick of going insane. I saw many people doing it, and it looked simple enough. But I just couldn’t do it to save my life. I kept wanting sane things such as living away from home in a commune where there were many people so that I could live not depending on one person. One person can die, and where would I be then? That was the boat I was in then. My parents were getting old. When they died, where would I be … even if I kept getting straight A’s and got my PhD, I still would have to go to a rest home or a mental institution or to somewhere where the human vegetables are. Staring at a TV if I was lucky, staring at a bone white … cracked … stained … ceiling if I wasn’t lucky, for the rest of my life. My body would probably live long after I was gone. The more I learn, the more ideas I had, the more awareness I achieved, the bigger the bottomless pit there would be when I was finally forced into bed in front of the TV. I was working against myself, working so hard to be the real me, to learn things, to do things with people, pushing myself into them. One part of me kept looking down at what I was doing, saying and laughing, “You fool! Slow down so you won’t get whiplash when you smash into that stone wall. You better take some morphine so you won’t feel the shock when the rug is pulled out from under you. Kill yourself. Well, you might not be physically capable of killing your body, but you can kill your mind … your spirit.” The only problem was that I couldn’t turn my mind off or kill my spirit. I had gone too far into living for that. One of my friends talked to me about taking acid so that I could live in a spaced-out state where nothing could bother me. I could lie in bed and groove. Sounded great. But nobody would give me anything stronger than hash. When I was trapped into living until the end. I could keep on doing what I had been doing … going to college and living at home, having friends who wouldn’t go beyond a certain point with me. I could have done that and waited for my doomsday, or I could push out blindly in search of a loophole. Taking risks. I didn’t see them as risks because anything would be better than doomsday. I am not anything different than you. My problems, fears and doubts aren’t any bigger or littler than yours. I am the same as the guy who had to decide to get a job that he doesn’t like so he can live or turn to start hitching into the unknown. My life is more clear-cut, more obvious. Knowing that doesn’t soothe my aches, smooth my way any. Just makes me see an ache as an ache, not a human crucifixion. A hill as a hill, not an impassable mountain. What I am asking you to do is take a risk. Drive me to Santa Fe. I will buy a car for you. When you get there, you can see what’s happening there. On the way you might start to see me. Once there, you can decide if you will stay. Or you can go on to see your friends. The car will be yours. You could even turn around and come back to D.C. I hope you won’t do that. I am beginning to see what D.C. is doing to you. But if you don’t see what D.C. is when you get to Santa Fe … well, I will be wrong. I know you can’t decide tonight. And I know we will have to wait until your brother sends the deed from Germany.