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Ten

I DESPAIR OF describing the Tree House. You have nothing to compare it to. The Gingerbread House was an eccentric enough structure, but the Tree House made it look like a Levitt tract home.

It was never designed; it simply occurred. Over a period of three years or so, five or ten talented and twisted minds had, with no plan and little consultation, simply done whatever stoned them, as materials or tools or willing labor became available, or as their individual spirits moved them. If a contribution by one of them foiled another's plan, he looked upon it as a bonsai challenge and rethought his concept. Three of these minds belonged to expert carpenters, one of them world class. Another co-creator couldn't have driven a nail if it had automatic transmission. The taste of all of them differed widely but not sharply. As near as I can see, the only thing they all had in common was that each carefully considered the effect his efforts would have on the tree.

A man Snaker's height could have just managed to walk underneath the house upright with a top hat on his head, though there were substantial areas where he could have safely used a trampoline. (Of course the main floor was not level. What fun would that have been to build?) Above the more-or-less first floor the house bisected. Two asymmetrical structures wound up into different parts of the mighty rock maple tree: a substantial section of two additional stories, and a slimmer but taller one that had a tiny fourth-floor meditation chamber. One could travel between the two third-floors by stepping up onto a window ledge and swinging across on a rope. There were strategically placed hand and footholds on the intervening tree trunk in case of screwups, and the drop to the roof below was not severe.

The tree itself was magnificent. It continued on up another fifteen or twenty meters above the highest point of the House, its two mighty arms in the attitude of a man caught yawning. There was not another tree that size in the Holler, and I'll never understand why the loggers passed it over decades ago. Just possibly they had a sense of poetry in them somewhere.

A tree has always seemed to me a sensible place to keep a house. You don't think so? Consider: in the winter you have plenty of sunshine, in summer plenty of shade. You have partial protection from rain and snow. There is never any standing water in the basement. When it's summer and the windows are open, birds wander in and out, cleaning the kitchen floor. In winter, it takes one holy hell of a snowdrift to block your door. And you can haul up the gangplank if you want . . .

I watched Rachel as we approached the Tree House. It's always interesting to catch people's first reactions to it. She had not commented on the Gingerbread House; perhaps "odd" and "quaint" and "funky" were not concepts that traveled well across the centuries. But I was willing to bet that any denizen of any human culture would find the Tree House striking.

I was not disappointed. Her jaw did not actually drop, of course. She stopped walking and her nostrils flared. She raised first her right eyebrow, then her left, and stared at the place for a long twenty seconds. Snaker and I left her alone with it. Finally she smiled. It was the broadest, happiest smile I had seen yet on her face.

She turned to us, her eyes shining. "Thank you, my First Friends. This is a good place."

We smiled at her, and then at each other, and then at her again. Snaker took a last puff on his smoke and put it out. We moved on.

When we were close, Tommy's voice rose faintly above the rushing streamsound. She was singing that John Prine song about blowing up your TV. As we passed between pilings and under the House, it emitted a man. Well, part of one. The cellar door dropped open suddenly and I was looking right into the merry eyes of the Nazz, no less unmistakable for being upside down, from a distance of perhaps twenty centimeters. He was grinning hugely. (In future, unless I say otherwise, assume Nazz is always grinning hugely.)

"Visual interface," he told me joyously.

I couldn't argue.

"Excuse me," he said. One arm emerged from the house, carrying a long peavey. He reached down with it and opened the hatch of the root cellar by our feet. Then most of his torso emerged from the House; he made a long stretch and came up with a bag of turnips on the end of the peavey. He removed half a dozen or so, tossing them back over his head, up and into the house. "Gotta soak overnight." He dropped the sack back down into the root cellar, tipped the lid shut, sealed the anticritter latch, and hauled himself partway back up so that he was at eye level with me again. "Pictorial, really. Evolved versus learned, right? Self-evident. Groks itself! Completely new operating system." The house reabsorbed him, with a sound exactly like the one Farfel the dog used to make at the end of the word "cha-a-w—clate" in the Nestlé's commercials.

Snaker and I looked at Rachel. She looked at us. We resumed walking. The Nazz reappeared briefly behind us, said, "Hello, pretty lady," and was gone again before we could turn.

There are several ways into the Tree House, but we took the elevator. It's a simple open-air affair. You haul yourself up on a good block-and-tackle. We got on, I put my hands to the rope, and feeling faintly silly as always, joined Snaker in the ritual shout that politeness demanded.

"Umgawa!"

And we hauled away, as the shout echoed through the Holler.

Okay, it's dopey. When in Rome, you shoot off Roman candles. To an inhabitant of the Tree House, that shout means, "A fellow hippie is here." Rachel made no comment.

We stepped off onto the porch, whacked snow from our pants, scraped and kicked it from our boots, untied our laces and entered through the keyhole-shaped door. Snaker and I each took an armload of wood in with us from the stack on the porch, and Rachel followed our example. Just inside the door we stepped out of our boots. There was welcome warmth, good smells of maple syrup and woodsmoke and reefer, the sound of crackling fires.

From the cheaply carpeted living room I could see Tommy working in the kitchen. She was cleaning the sap taps. There are eight set into the living wood of the kitchen wall, hoses running in parallel to a boiling pot on the stove. At the end of a day's run it's a good idea to wash out the hoses.

She turned and saw us through the kitchen doorway. "Howdy," she called. "Far out—good to see you, Sam. Be right there."

We added our firewood to the box by the living room stove, standing a few of the more snow-soaked sticks on end on the front of the battered old Franklin to dry. Rachel examined the room. It was furnished in Rural Hippie. Kerosene lamps. Candles. Psychedelic posters. Several mandalas. Macramé. Plants. An enormous and functional brass narghile with four mouthpieces. Cushions. Cabledrum tables. A superb old rocking chair painted paisley. Zen epigrams printed on the walls here and there. An arresting painting of Ruby's, a portrait of Malachi. A wrinkled print of Stephen Gaskin leading Monday Night Class at the Family Dog. A hand-sewn sampler depicting a field of daisies and bluebells surmounted by the legend: flowers eat shit. Along one wall a shelf was lined with paperbacks that all concerned cosmic consciousness and how to achieve or sustain it.

Tommy came in, wiping her hands on her shirt. "Hi," she said to Snaker and me, and then a separate, friendly "Hi," to Rachel. "What's happening, guys?" she went on. "Was that one of them damn hunters again? We thought maybe y'all got shot for a moose."

(The Sunrise Hill Gang don't seem to have the custom of introductions. A newcomer is welcome to introduce herself, or not, as suits her. If she chooses to wait a bit, perhaps pick a name that's not being used already, that's her business.)

"Naw," Snaker said. "It was Blue Meanie throwing a shoe."

"Far out," she said, grimacing sympathetically. "Looks like it was a good landing; you walked away. Is it in the ditch?"

"Happened just as we were slamming the doors, thank you Buddha."

"Wow. That's far out." Her eyes sparkled. "What a trip."

"Tire's a total, no spare, so I guess we hike to dinner."

She shrugged, a gesture that thrust her chin out and flounced her red curls. "Far out. I don't know if I'm into dinner—"

"Ruby's making chili."

"Hey, Nazz! Quit doodlin' and get your coat. Ruby's making chili tonight!"

The Nazz's bushy head appeared around the kitchen doorway. "Out of state," he called. "Just a third." When Nazz uses clichés they come out all wrong. He doesn't do it to be cute, it's just a mental short circuit.

Tommy was already half-dressed for outdoors. "Did you bring your guitar, Sam?"

"Left her in the truck."

"I'll help you carry it if Snaker'll take my flute. You look real cute with your hair short like that, hon—I think I might try that myself."

When two women meet, they size each other up. It's not necessarily a competitive thing. They just take each other's measure. Men do it too, but they do it differently, and I'm not sure how it's different. Women seem to take a little longer. They don't rely as much on sight, but I don't know what they use in its place.

"It will look very good on you," Rachel said, and I knew they were going to be friends.

Which was nice, because Tommy weirded out a lot of women, particularly ones as emphatically feminine as Rachel. Even with her long and curly red hair, Tommy could easily have passed for a teenaged boy; her flat-chested hipless body, her manner and many of her mannerisms were masculine. She blended right in with a construction crew. She was by no means a lesbian. She was the only true neuter human I've ever known. She had absolutely no sex drive whatsoever, and by that point in her life, her mid-thirties, she had long since given up pretending—or minding. She told me about it the night I made my pass. No physiological dysfunction, no horrid childhood trauma—she simply wasn't interested. She was quite capable of orgasm—an experience she likened to a sneeze, both in intensity and desirability. She was baffled and amused by the importance everyone placed on it, convinced that it was enormously overpriced at best.

This placed a certain basic gulf between her and many other women—not to mention many men. City-folk in particular, sex-charged to the point of frenzy by media hype, frequently resented her. But Rachel seemed to take to her instantly, and Tommy, once she was sure it was genuine, responded.

(I was slowly getting it through my head that Rachel was not what I thought of as "city-people," that in spite of the logic of a million science fiction stories, the future was not necessarily going to urbanize to the point of inhumanity. Whatever it was like when she came from, they were still flexible and tolerant—which city folk, in my experience, were not. Including myself when I first came up here.)

The Nazz came bustling into the room, beaming and brandishing computer paper. Lord Buckley once said of his namesake, the carpenter-kitty from Bethlehem:

 

Nazz had them pretty eyes. He wanted everybody to see out his eyes so they could see how pretty it was.

 

and it suited this Nazz as well. He sweetened the climate where he was at. He waved two sheets of computer paper at us. "It just now came to me," he said. "Check 'em out." He handed me one. "Find a letter that was sent to Hewlett-Packard on February 18."

I looked at the sheet. It was a printed list of about fifty computer files, displaying title, type of file, date of creation, last modification and size in bytes, arranged alphabetically by title. I ran my eye down the list: there were ten files with "Hewlett-Packard" or "HP" in their title, six of those were letters, the second from the bottom was dated "18 Feb."

"Right here," I said, pointing.

"Four point nine seconds," Nazz announced happily, looking up from a stopwatch. "Gravy. Here. Find it again." He handed me the second sheet.

I blinked at it. It was hand-drawn. The same approximate number of files were represented—by arrays of little pictures in groups, with meticulously printed labels beneath each. Little three-ring binders indicated reports; little tear-sheets were article extracts; the little envelopes were obviously letters. My eye went to them at once. Beneath the pictures were names; "HP 18F" leaped up at me. "There," I said.

"One point eight. Sixty-three percent faster. Far fuckin' up."

"Visual interface," Snaker said wonderingly. "Pictorial, really."

"Hard on," Nazz agreed. "See, the ability of the brain to interpret text is learned behavior, no older than the pyramids. But the brain has been interpreting pictures from in front. Much older circuitry, much faster traffic-flow, much more information-density. It's why movies kill books. Your face and breasts are extremely beautiful."

This last, obviously, was to Rachel. She was not at all taken aback. "Your hands and mind are extremely beautiful," she said.

They smiled at each other. Two more friends.

"Let's go eat," I said. I was starving.

"Remind me to call Palo Alto when we get to the Hill." Nazz said. "Couple of guys I want to mention this to. Less intimidating than a bunch of text in the damn ugly computer font; it's friendlier. Need a whole new language, though, and one of those new eight-bit chips—"

"Christ, i'nt he something?" Tommy said admiringly. "Gets such a kick out of little pictures."

"They're going to change the world," he assured her.

"For sure. So is Ruby's chili. Come on!"

We filled up the Franklin while Nazz found his poncho, and all left together.

 

The sun was below the trees on our left, throwing long shadows across the Wellington Road to the trees on the other side. We walked in the ruts that trucks and cars had made in the snow. Usually there were just the two, right down the center of the road, but infrequently there was a place where two vehicles had met and managed to pass each other.

The trip from the Holler to Sunrise Hill can be done in five minutes, if you don't mind falling on your face on arrival. It took us nearer twenty. It was beginning to get cold out, making the footing slippery. Gertrude the Guitar slowed me down. And the Nazz lit a joint, an enormous spliff which he said he had been saving for a special occasion. He always says that. Always means it, too. To pass a doobie on slippery surface, you have to stop, so everyone else has to stop to wait for you, and eventually it seems sensible to just form a circle. So we did. Rachel joined it, but politely refused the joint. "Perhaps later," she murmured, and the Nazz beamed at her. The rest of us shared it in silence.

The forest on either side of me began to sparkle. The random dance of shadows on branches suddenly became a pattern, that teetered on the edge of recognition. I was suddenly aware of my position, clinging to the face of a vast spinning planet, whirling through the universe. I heard the stream behind me, every leaf that fluttered for a hundred meters in any direction, the sounds of birds and a deer to the north. My friends became Robin Hood's Merry Men. And I was very hungry.

"Good shit, brother," I said to Nazz. My voice came from a hundred miles away through a filter that removed all the treble.

He beamed. "Xerox PARC."

Snaker broke up. "Xerox Park? Like, where people go to reproduce?"

We all cracked up. "No, man," Nazz said, "Xerox pee eh are see. On the Coast, man, Palo Alto. Dude that gave me this weed works there. Synchronicity, man—he'll freak when I tell him about my flash. All I need now is a way to point to stuff on the screen . . . maybe that weird rat thing Doug came up with . . . only make it a one-eyed rat—"

None of us had the slightest idea what he was talking about. But you don't have to understand joy to share it. We congratulated him, and finished the joint, and resumed walking.

The Wellington Road was a fairy wonderland, a winter carnival. Magic was surely in the air. And soon enough, we came upon some.

Mona and Truman's place came up on the right. Mona and Truman Bent were locals in their mid-forties, products of a century of inbreeding and poverty, and some of the nicest people I knew. (If you are going to giggle about the name Bent, would you please do so now and get it over with? It is an extremely common and highly respected name in Nova Scotia, as are Butt and Rafuse and Why-not.) Their home was a small showpiece of rural industry, ingenuity and courage, inside and out. It sat close to the road, with a little bit of a lawn and a swing-set out front. A driveway led past it to the big tired-looking barn in back. Truman's immense one-ton truck was pulled halfway into the barn so he could work on the engine out of the weather. As with many properties on the North Mountain, the area around the barn was littered with almost a dozen wrecked vehicles and their guts—but the garden beyond the barn and the area around the house itself were neat as a pin. Mona is a fuss-budget, and tough as cast iron.

And a sweetheart. When we were close enough to recognize what was lying in the center of her driveway, right by the road, we stopped in our tracks.

"Oh wow, man," Tommy said.

"Is that far out or what?" Snaker agreed.

Nazz shivered with glee. "Rat own, Mona!"

The Bents kept a pair of old tires on either side of the driveway, with flowerboxes set into the hubs. In summer they brightened the driveway considerable. In winter they were usually buried under snow. Mona had evidently had Truman dig one up, remove the empty flowerbox, and leave the tire in the middle of the drive.

"I don't understand," Rachel said.

"They heard our tire blow," I explained. "That one's for us."

"How do you know?"

I shook my head. "I just do. Come on, I'll show you."

Sure enough, there was a note stuffed into the hub:

 

This ai'nt much but it wil get you to the gas station I guess

 

"See, there she is in the window," Tommy said. We all waved our thanks to Mona. She gave a single wave back. Snaker pantomimed that we would pick the tire up on our way back from dinner, and she waved again, then closed her curtains.

"Wow," Snaker said. "We gotta do something nice for those people."

"Right field," Nazz agreed. "Let's get the whole family thinking on it."

We trudged on. "Mona and Truman are amazing people," I told Rachel. "They can't have kids, so they foster parent. Constantly. There's always five or six kids around the place. She's strict as hell with them, and they always worship her. She'll take retarded kids, kids that are dying, kids that are crippled, whatever the agency sends. There are a couple of social workers that would die for her."

"And as you can see," Snaker called back over his shoulder, "she's adopted the whole goddamn Sunrise Hill Gang."

"I look forward to meeting her," Rachel said.

"She's a trip," Nazz called. "You'll love her."

"I already do," Rachel said, so softly that only I heard.

It was only another half a klick before the forest on the left side of the road ended and we were come to Sunrise Hill.

We all came to a halt again, because the sun was just setting over the Bay. Rachel took my hand and Snaker's.

After a time we roused ourselves, trudged past an acre of snow-covered garden, and came to Sunrise itself, also called The Big House.

It was a simple wood-frame two story perhaps fifty years old, a much more conventional structure than either the Gingerbread or Tree Houses, and larger than both of them put together. Unlike them it stood right by the roadside, in the middle of five or six more or less cleared acres. The only external signs of hippie esthetic were the small sprouting-greenhouse built onto the house in front and a solar shower in back. Fifty meters back from the house, and about the same distance apart, stood a small cedar-shake toolshed and a smaller outhouse. Between them was an ancient Massey-Ferguson tractor covered by an orange tarp, and next to that an even more ancient one-lung make-and-break engine under a black tarp.

We entered through the usual woodshed airlock, which also contained a wheezing old freezer and huge sacks of grains and beans. Inside, the Big House looked much more like a hippie dwelling. The downstairs was a single enormous room, with a giant front-loader woodstove at either end. The bare wood floor was completely covered with a once brightly colored painting, now faded, involving rainbows, dragons, and an immense myopic eyeball that stared biliously at the ceiling. The parts that Ruby had done looked great. On the left, a J-shaped counter and a small cookstove defined the kitchen. On the immediate right, a stupendous table which had begun life as the west wall of a boatshed defined the dining room and conference area. On its surface was painted a large vivid sunrise. Assorted wretched chairs lined one side of it; on the other was a single homemade bench three meters long. Beyond that an open staircase took two zigs and a zag to reach the upstairs. Past the staircase was open area. Beanbag chairs, ratty cushions, cable-drum tables, shelves of hippie books, milk crates full of this and that, drying herbs hanging in bundles from the overhead rafters, a bunch of Ruby's canvases arrayed by the east window, a small shrine to the Buddha in the far right corner.

The kitchen window was the only one on the north or Bay side. It let in enough of the glory of sunset to make the enameled sunrise on the table even more vibrant, but it was getting time to fire up the kerosene lamps. Both fires were roaring away, with a lot of birch in the mix, and the whole building was suffused with the overwhelming fragrance of simmering chili.

Ruby turned as we entered, left off pumping water and made a beeline for Snaker, drying her hands on her apron as she came. I liked to watch those two meet. Their joining was like slapping together two chunks of uranium: the energy levels of both went through the ceiling. I envied them.

When they were done hugging and kissing and making small sounds of contentment, Ruby backed away. She looked Rachel up and down, smiled and opened her arms again. Rachel took the cue. "Hi, I'm Ruby," Ruby said over Rachel's shoulder. "Hi, I'm Rachel," Rachel said over hers. They disengaged in stages, first pulling back to hold each other by the upper arms, then backing away further until their hands joined, then separating altogether, a spontaneous and oddly graceful movement.

"Welcome to Sunrise Hill," Ruby added. "That's a beautiful headband." Rachel thanked her gravely. "Hi, guys," she said to the rest of us. "You're just in time; dinner's nearly ready. Somebody set the table, a dishtowel for everybody, somebody else pump water and get the cider, somebody give a hoot out back for the others. Rachel, you sit, you're a guest. Sam, I could dig some music; would you mind pickin' a little?"

"Not if the Snaker can join me."

"Well," she said, glancing at him, "I had some other uses in mind for his hands. But that's a choice I'll never confront him with. Go ahead, babe. Oh, yeah, was it the Beatles?"

Snaker pulled a blank. So did I. And it was up to Rachel to save the situation. "I think we are agreed it is not. The drumming is too good to be either Pete Best or Ringo, and the accents are wrong. But it's an excellent fake."

Ruby nodded, said, "Too bad," and went back to the kitchen area. Snaker and I exchanged a glance and mimed sighs; we had forgotten the excuse we'd originally used to get Snaker over to my place. "Well," I said, unpacking my guitar, "there's the old philosophical question as to why a near-perfect forgery isn't as good as the real thing."

And we jawed about that while Snaker and I got tuned together and warmed up with instrumental blues in E. Ruby scatted along with us. As Tommy came in with her younger brother Malachi and Sally and Lucas, we were just starting that Jonathan Edwards song about laying around the shanty and getting a good buzz on, and everybody joined in on that one. When it was done, the table was set, Ruby was in the final stages of her magic-making, and there was barely time for a verse of Leon Russell's "Soul Food" before supper was on the table. As the lid came off and the smell reached us, Snaker and I stopped in the middle of a bar and put away our axes.

There were four loaves of fresh bread, two whole wheat and two rye, baked Tassajara-style. There were about fifteen litres of cider in one of the ubiquitous white buckets, with a dipper. There was an equal amount of well water in another bucket. There was a bowl big enough to be the hubcap off a 747, overflowing with lettuce-based salad; another full of carrot flake and raisin salad. Four homemade dressings. There were great bulk-purchase slabs of margarine (the Sunrise Gang were strict vegetarians). There were tamari and brewer's yeast and tofu and peanuts and sprouts and tahini and a little bit of soybean curry from the day before. To accommodate all this there were plates and bowls and mugs and silverware (no items matching). And in the center of the table, in a pot large enough to boil a missionary, were about thirty litres of Ruby's Chili.

When we dug in, the table was groaning and we each had a dishtowel of our own. A while later the dishtowels were all saturated with sweat and we were doing the groaning. And grinning.

"Is there a recipe written down for this, hon?" Snaker asked his lady, gulping cider.

"Sure," she said.

"Better destroy it. It's evidence of premeditation." She threw a piece of bread at him.

Between the happy cries of the scorched and the clatter of utensils and the roar of eight conversations going on at once and the growling hiss of the stoves and the thunderous volley of farts that attends any gathering of vegetarians, we made the rafters of the old house ring. Nonetheless most of my sense-memories of the occasion are oral. Ruby made good chili, so good I actually didn't miss the meat. I never did get to observe Rachel meeting Malachi, Lucas or Sally; it must have occurred at some point when my eyes were watering and the wax was running out of my ears. (I did notice that while Rachel shoveled in chili as rapidly as the rest of us, she didn't begin screwing up her face in Good Chili Spasm until all of us had been doing so for a while, and didn't begin to sweat until a few minutes after that. By the end of the meal she had it down.)

We drank the cider and water buckets dry, and another bucket and a half of water. We ate everything on the table, save for perhaps five litres of chili, which tomorrow would be folded into chapatis for lunch. And then the conversations all trailed off into heartfelt compliments to Ruby, and there was a moment or two of silent respectful appreciation, a contemplation of contentment and a sharing of that awareness. Shadows danced by kerosene lamplight, the simmering of dishwater on the stove became the loudest sound in the house . . .

Lucas broke the silence, with a diaphragm-deep "AAA-OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMM—" Malachi and Snaker picked it up at once, an octave higher, Malachi on the tonic, Snaker on the dominant. The rest joined in raggedly in whatever octave was easiest for them, and the sound swelled and rose and steadied as we all sat up straighter and got our breathing behind it.

Have you ever done an Om with a large group of people? Large enough that the drone chant takes on a life of its own, and doesn't ever seem to change as individual chanters drop out to inhale? If you have not, put this book down and go find ten or fifteen people who aren't too hip to learn something, and give it a try. So many things happen on so many levels that I'm not sure I can explain it to you.

On a musical level alone, the experience is edifying. The harmonics are fantastic, and they actually get a little better if one or two folks can't carry a tune so good and the note "hunts" a little.

On a physiological level, there is a surprisingly strong tranquilizing effect. The AAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMM syllable is the oldest breath-regulating chant on the planet, basic and irreducible and autohypnotic.

On an emotional level, it's together-bringing and happy-making. It's proverbially impossible to get any three people to agree on what time it is; to get ten or fifteen together on even something as simple as a single pure sound is exhilarating. If you Om with people you don't know, you'll be friends when you're done. If you do it with friends . . .

On a spiritual level—well, if you're alive in the Eighties you probably don't believe there is such a thing, so I won't discuss it. Just try an "Om" sometime before you die. Come to it as cynically as you like.

Sunrise Oms were just a trifle frustrating for me, though, at that point in history. When the group had first spontaneously formed, a few years before, the Oms were the best I've ever been in, before or since. Partly because we had more participants, nearly thirty that summer, but mostly because the Oms were freeform improv, an unrestricted outpouring of the heart. Those who were not musicians—the majority, of course—held onto the tonic or dominant to keep us all centered, and those with musical talent jammed around the basic drone, sometimes adding harmonies to make chords, then spontaneously mutating them in weird shifting ways; sometimes throwing in deliberate and subtle dissonances, then resolving them creatively; sometimes doing raga scales, or Ray Charles gospel riffs, or whatever came out of our heads and hearts and mutual interaction. The results were always interesting and frequently breathtaking.

But of late the Sunrise Gang had, typically, gotten a little too spiritually conservative (read: "tight-assed") and had decided that having people chant all over the place offered too much encouragement to Ego (a word which had for them roughly the same emotional connotation that "Commie" held for their parents). Surely Ego was out of place in a spiritual event. So the current Agreement was to limit the Om to the tonic and dominant notes. That was more democratic. More pure. More basic and simple.

Also more boring—and as a guest, I was of course required by politeness to conform, and listen to my own solos only in my head. It itched me a little—and I knew it itched Snaker too, because we'd discussed it. Still, any Om is better than no Om, and I was simply too well-fed to sustain irritation. So I settled into contemplation of the sound we were making—

—and Rachel began to improvise—

—brilliantly, from the very first riff, I hadn't been fully aware until then that she was participating in the Om but Jesus you couldn't miss her warm-honey alto when she started to blow, it was something like the sudden appearance of a darting trout in a pellucid pool, and a shared thought-chain flashed around the table in an instant, what the—? Oh, it's cool, she's a stranger, doesn't know any better; Jesus, listen to her do it, as she wove a strange liquid melody line around her drone, and after a very slight staggered hesitation the Om steadied and came back in strong behind her.

Well. The ice having been broken by the guest, I wrestled with the part of me that Malachi insisted was my ego . . . and went into the tank. When my current breath ended, I sucked in a joyous deep new one, paused an instant, and took off after her. Her eyes met mine, and we both thought of our lovemaking that afternoon, and wrapped our voices around each other. We did a modal thing, started it simple, cluttered it a bit, brought it home again—measuring each other, feeling each other out, alto and my baritone seeking harmony—

—and I caught Snaker's eye and lifted my brows, and he took a deep breath and jumped in an octave above me, duplicating my line to show that he understood what was happening—

—Ruby hesitated a few seconds and then began to parallel Rachel's line—

—and we all looked to Rachel, and at her signal we banked sharply and cut in the afterburners, riding that magic carpet of drone like the Blue Angels, heading for the clouds in perfect wordless communication—

 

—and a long happy indescribable time later it was over, the statement was made, it hung in the air and in our minds' ear like a skywritten mandala, hung and spread and drifted and dissipated as the last breath of the last voice—Tommy's—ran out.

We all smiled in silence together for a long time, too happy to speak. It was clear to us that God had been here and gone, but that was okay: He'd be falling by again sometime.

"Wow, that was far out," Malachi said at last, and from the tone of his voice I knew we were in for a session. Well, Rachel had to meet him sometime or other.

"It sure was," Ruby said, ignoring the subtext of his tone with the long practice of an ex-lover. She was smiling dreamily at Snaker. He was going to be very glad he had been a good boy at my place earlier.

"Right up," Nazz agreed, also oblivious.

Malachi pounced. "It's far out how something can happen spontaneously like that and it's a stone, that one time, because it's like perfect for the moment, you know?" Malachi had the mad burning eyes of a born saint or poet or revolutionary, though he was none of these, deep-set eyes smoldering under shelves of forehead like banked coals at the back of deep caves. He could disappear into the woodwork when he wanted, but when he put on his guru voice, he drew attention effortlessly. "Rachel didn't know our custom about not hamming up the Oms but that's far out, because she brought good vibes to the party and that's what counts. Even if we wouldn't want to Om that way all the time."

"I'd like to Om like that all the time," Snaker said with just a little edge.

"I think we have Agreement on that," Malachi said softly.

To my surprise, Lucas spoke up. "Maybe we should examine the Agreement." He was staring at Rachel.

Malachi rolled with it. "Far out, maybe we should."

Lucas was wearing weights strapped to his wrists and ankles, for three reasons. Because it was good physical exercise, because it was good spiritual discipline, and because it hurt. Any of the three would have sufficed. "I could dig some more Oms like that. Once in a while, anyway." He looked away from Rachel suddenly. "I think I'd give my right arm if I could make my voice do that stuff."

"Uh huh. Isn't that kind of why we made the Agreement?" Malachi asked, and one or two people began to nod.

"What exactly do you mean by 'agreement'?" Rachel asked.

Malachi turned those eyes on her. When she didn't flinch, he seemed to smile slightly. "See, we're a spiritual community, so we have to make some basic Agreements to live together, and then stick to them. Like, it's our agreement to be strict vegetarian, and you can rap for days about whether that's far out or misguided—and we have, still do—but meanwhile it's our agreement to do that thing, so we do. And if that's a drag for some of us—" Snaker squirmed. "—well, hopefully the spiritual solidarity from the Agreement is worth the drag. The way you were Oming—please don't think I'm laying blame, it was beautiful and you didn't know—but we used to Om that way here, and we found that it was easy for it to turn into a kind of exclusive thing, almost an elitist trip. Like it divided us up into the talented and the drones, if you dig. It brought us apart instead of together, and we wanted an Om that was more symbolic that we were all doing the same thing here, so we made that Agreement. You see?"

I'd been subconsciously expecting something like this for hours. I'd always found Malachi infuriatingly difficult to argue with—as they say around the Mountain, he's slick as a cup of custard—and I just knew that Rachel was a match for him, that she was going to lay him out, stop his clock with some splendid zen epigram. And she sideswiped me.

"I think that is a wise decision for you," she said. "I will make that Agreement with you all."

Snaker's jaw dropped too. Ruby gave Rachel a Closer Look. Malachi blinked.

Irritated at how often and easily Malachi could make me irritated, I spoke up. "Look, I have no Agreements at all with you guys except the ones that come under being a good neighbor, but I'll tell you this: while that Om was happening I was part of God and totally stoned—"

"Me, too," Snaker said.

"—and that seems like a silly thing for a spiritual community to turn away from."

"That's the trip, Sam," Malachi said with exasperating compassion. "You were totally stoned. Not everybody was. We want to all be part of God."

I could see myself responding, but we were all stoned, and then going around the table, you were stoned, weren't you? only by that time half of them would be wondering if they had in fact been stoned, Malachi had that effect on them, and I had climbed these stairs before. So had Snaker; he shot me a look that said, thanks for trying, brother.

"Far out," I conceded reluctantly.

"Clean-up crew," Ruby said loudly and clearly.

People began scraping plates, and stacking them. I caught Rachel's eye and stood up. She took her cue and followed me to the sink. She was supposed to be from the city, so it was okay for me to lecture her on the art of dishwashing without running water. I don't think she'd ever washed a dish under any circumstances, but she was a very quick study. At one point she should have burned her wrist on the hot water kettle, but the skin declined to burn. Malachi was nearby, scraping leftovers into the compost bucket, but he didn't seem to notice. She and I traded off washing and drying while others cleared and washed the table and put away the dried dishes and stoked the fires and adjusted the lamps, and Ruby watched in regal contentment. (One of the commune's more sensible rules is that whoever cooks dinner gets to fuck off the rest of the night.) (Except that Ruby wasn't fucking off; she was, ninety-five percent certainty, thinking about her next painting.)

Though she was concentrating on the dishes, Rachel managed to take in the whole scene. One of her rare smiles lit her face. "This is beautiful," she murmured to me.

I looked around to see what she meant. I got it at once. Many people working in concert, with no wasted words, moving at high speed but never bumping into each other, a marvelous improvised choreography. Calmness in activity, a perfect Zen dance. It was what attracted me to Sunrise Hill, this quality; if the place had been like that all the time, perhaps I'd have moved in. My irritation with Malachi leaked from me, and I began to enjoy myself again almost as much as I had during the Om. And then a strange and terrible thing happened—

 

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Framed