THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
797
imposed pattern of drunkenness; having learned that he is the Surly
Drunk, the Maudlin or the Lustful, one imitates, even past the will's
collapse, his last time's self, is, hopelessly, the expected clown, the
looked-for animal. But there is another dimension-
If
one is lucky, he may make once, no more, the pure Adamic
fall; know the headlong tug of that unspeakable gravity of which
our earth's pull is the mere metaphor and the endless falling of
dreams a hint only: the abominable beauty of assent to evil and the
obverse of terror and contrition, what I chose to call then a hangover,
and what was, after a little, just that. For in time, we ,are too atom–
ized, too harried, too distrait even to sin purely; demons no longer
tempt or torment us, but leave us contemptuously to habit's turgid
allure, the dull reproach of our viscera.
And we haunt mechanically the unretrievable revelation, to know
again good ,and evil, to be assured that we shall surely die-but are
merely drunk, laid, hated or hanged. The boy's orgy at Carrie's was
for me, though it is only now that I know it clearly, such a vision;
and the war, strangely familiar, verified its intuitions; that the face
of the comrade blurred to the assassin, the face of the assassin to my
own could not surprise me, and I woke from the war as one wakes
from the familiar, dank bed of his drunkenness.
But not yet-Not until I had left San Francisco, its rock angled
upward from the tenderly possessed waters of the bay, acute almost
to hysteria under asphalt and past the elegant bars, the untidy bo–
hernias with a view; not until the train had made the noise of its
passage among the unnoticed, night-time mountains, while we threw
from the doors our empty bottles, imagining their long pointless arc
into the black, and the rabbit's small leap of fear at their splintering;
not until we had swarmed, sung and sweated the train's innards into
a world for our four days' waking and sleeping.
We ate seldom, for the lines in the Diners were too long and we
were done with waiting; but we drank when we could, timing the
M.P.'s passing or huddled in washrooms, without love or good humor.
At the longer stops, we would race to buy liquor up the melancholy
alleys that reached vaguely toward the heart of an unrecognized city,
the anonymous lanes of violated snow between warehouses and all–
night restaurants; or sometimes we would dose ourselves with the
acrid coffee of station lunch-counters, endlessly mopped by the grey
