Milo, not quite knowing how he'd gotten there, found himself at the doorway of the seedy tenement address Alphonse had finally, reluctantly spilled over the phone after the nineteenth collect call a half-week before.
"Another blank to add to the others," he thought absentmindedly, as he mounted the rickety stairs and wondered what the hell Alphonse was doing in such a place. His tastes were expensive; a dollar-a-night flophouse seemed to be more Milo's style than Alphonse's...
Little did he know that he was about to experience that bane of the 60's lotus-eater, that mortal plaque of the temporary gods: the... FLASHBACK. Halfway up the stairs to Alphonse's? Where else?
Milo quivered, prostrate, slowly crumpling and sliding toward the floor.
And the visions came: Waking up with the left side of his face in a moist gutter, spittle running from his mouth in the sun of late day. Sounds, quiet and soothing, of the Dead's 'Ripple' pouring through the swinging doors of the Hashbury bar from which he'd been so unceremoniously ejected by a steroid-choked, bald and tattooed bouncer, that morning. Or perhaps the night before...
So hazy... neon-coloured bubbles slowly crawling through the tubes of a 1959 Wurlitzer archtop jukebox... Box Of Rain... sitting on a dock on the bay on a warm San Francisco night... he dreamed he saw the bombers, riding shotgun in the sky... Woodstock... Wavy Gravy... Hot Tuna blues... Miles’ cool jazz... lemon saffron sky... meringue clouds on the horizon... circling the wagons on the Santa Fe Trail... terminal eyes... veal cuntlips... beef strokingoff... orange and pink and black mantra-matrix on the eve of destruction... the blue Canadian Rockies... Cripple Creek running cool down the cascades of the hills... prairie clouds... blood gouting from the necks of malletted steers in the middle of the Chicago stockyards... a magic mushroom cloud, beautifully, evilly, purpleandgreenandyellow, rising into the pure azure New Mexico sky, to irradiate sheep in a much-vaunted peaceful use for the atom... red and blue safety matches.... the Hallelujah Chorus sung by a heartbreakingly beautiful choir of winos and hookers in a striptease joint on the Lower East Side of New York... grey and blue dust in the sunset in Kansas... Toto, sniffing the ruby slippers after the Wicked Witch of the West melted, then thinking, doggily, "Oh, what the hell," and gorging noisily on liquid witch, slurping up the bellicose green ooze in one of the first applications of Technicolor... Humphrey Bogart telling Ingrid Bergman to fuck right off before she climbed on a DC3 to destiny....
... a-a-and fast forward at the speed of light back to the final bars of 'Ripple', just audible through the door at the next landing, as Milo snapped out of his reverie. He renewed his assault on the staircase, and the last note, sustained, cross-faded him to within a few milliseconds of being back in sync with The Now.
These moments were, as near as Milo could establish, the closest he had ever come to a turning point in the twilit haze of his semi-conscious attempts at either enlightenment or oblivion.
In Islam they call it Malmati, the Path of Blame: paradoxically, a person could step off of it simply by acknowledging that that was their path, merely saying it was so. Here in America, where officially nothing mystical is allowed to exist, where all relevant definitions are dispensed by lawyers representing the Metaphors of Production, Milo was just another rudderless ship drifting in a sea of despair. Except.
Except that invisibility is a power position...
He sensed that new Quantum Possibility twinkle and form, then rapidly grow to a black yawning tunnel, then reclose and seal itself with only a curl of smoke to mark its passage, before he could even think of stepping inside.
FLASHBACK
