22.

This stretch of street was seedy with drug dealers and filthy prostitutes. None of the girls here were good looking or tempting either--they were used up. They had skin as hard as that of a convict. There was a gritty look even to the concrete of the sidewalk, as it scraped against Joshua's shoes with a grainy, coarse sound. Soiled napkins, crumpled cigarette wrappers, bits of paper, the ripped plastic of bags and packages lay strewn about the sidewalk and street. Joshua kept moving forward, his eyes glancing at as few of these people as he could manage--roughnecks, whores, addicts and dealers were all around. He kept his gaze forward and away from any of them--he met no one's eyes.

When he came to a bus stop one of the hookers propositioned him. "Looking for a date?" she said. She was not as ugly as most, and her body held a certain thrill--held?--rather gave off. But Joshua said simply, "No," and walked on.

Just then a bus pulled up and stopped. "This kid's mine," he heard a gravelly female voice say, and he felt himself being taken by the arm onto the bus. He was already on board before he saw who had taken him up. She was old--an old whore--bent vertical wrinkles encircled her mouth, the crow's feet on her eyes going all the way to her temples. She was short too--short and thin--her hair black but no doubt dyed. Her garb was not exactly flashy, as if she'd given up caring how well she plied her trade.

Joshua found himself sitting next to her on the bus, as it rolled along down a street whose name he didn't know, through a city that was strange to him, in a region he knew nothing of.

"Aren't you a little old--old for me?" asked Joshua of the whore. He'd meant to ask if she were old to be a hooker, but somehow it came out wrong.

"That's not what you want to know," she said through her gravelly voice. "You don't even know the question you want to ask. So I'll ask it for you--you want to know how someone comes to be a hooker, how I can do this to myself."

Though he didn't realize it, Joshua had always wondered that about hookers, wondered this but accepted that he could not know.

"Well?" he said.

Her voice filled with cheer.

"We share a common sun in this world," she said. "The same moon up in that sky is this very moment shining on El Salvador peasants and South American presidents. The air we breathe--it's been breathed in and breathed back out by thousands of people, constantly coming into our bodies, our cells nourished by molecules that have nourished thousands of others, again and again. Who's to say what we are? Who's to say I am more the neurons in my brain than the oxygen in the cells of my skin? I'd say I'm equally both--which means I'm equally all those people whose bodies held that oxygen formerly.

"Ah, I've always wanted to hook, since puberty. To be in that mess, that ripe stew that is humanity, feel it in its most physical, concrete, real way--the way of guts, blood, filthy flesh--the biology of it, the solidity of sex organs and seminal substance. I'm more in touch with the soul of things from here--and the soul of things is not found in some airy principle, but in the entrails, the shit, the repulsive biology of ourselves. When a perversion spreads throughout society--and believe me, sexual perversions come in waves, I've seen it--when a perversion spreads out over us, I'm the first to know it. I've got my hand on the pulse of humanity closer than you think--I feel Man's very heart in my hand. Not the heart where heart means love--the heart meaning blood, that gory, disgusting muscle without which nothing could exist. When some disease gets into the system of life, I'm the first to know it, and suffer it. It is sweet to suffer, when it means you're alive. When it means your breath is the breath of everyone and your body is passed around from hand to hand. Some people travel, see the world, want to expose themselves to the thoughts and notions of all the earth. Well I've bettered them--I've known the bodies, the meat of hundreds of men--I know what it is to be alive and suffer as a living thing. And I love to suffer when it means I know what is real and solid and true better than any philosopher with some principle held in his mind. When you live in reality as solid as a fleshy cock--when you know things in a way that hard and real, principles and thought are like empty wind compared. The body needs its filthy parts just as much as its clean ones--it needs a stinky rectum every bit as vitally as it needs a heart and brain. Society is the same way--it has its filthy needs as well as its noble ones. I am as indispensable to this world as some physicist or philosopher, as indispensable as the noblest teacher or novelist. Am I dirty then? Is my life vulgar? Yes! yes! And the vulgarity in this world is heavier, more solid, more real than anything else. Can a little dust on your finger arouse your emotions--get your heart racing with dismay and disgust--as much as someone's shit smeared there? There's a power in the repulsive that clean things just don't have. Ah, my life is true, vital and full. Flesh is heavy--it carries a weight. No one is more in touch with the intensity of life, reality and God than when in passionate ecstasy, orgasm, flesh entering flesh, absorbed body-in-body--and that means soul, if anything does."

Joshua looked at her, not saying a word, thinking. He wanted to sit with her, he wanted to sleep with her--he was falling in love.

"When men finally make this world a heaven," she said, "I'll be the last to enter that heaven, I'll be the last to rise up off this bewildering, lovely state of perdition. Prostitutes are always the first to know when society becomes corrupted, and the last vice to leave when a land becomes wholesome. Is this not noble of me? Holding the door as I am to the heavens, and being the very last to enter? Ah, now you want to sleep with me--old whore that I am--you've become enchanted. But no--I'll let you dream--you'll find more pleasure in the dream than you would in the reality."

Instinctively, without her saying a word, as the bus stopped Joshua stood to let her by, and she moved past him into the isle. She moved to the door with a few others, then she turned to him as he hesitated, wondering if he should follow her out.

"No, you're not to get off here. You go on--go on dreaming, my child."

Joshua sat back down, leaned against the window and shut his eyes. He felt the vestiges of a headache coming on. He was dizzy too--and nausea crept up from his gut. It's got to be over soon, he thought--the Dreamtime can't go on.