"Go on." Drake was unsmiling but undisturbed.

"The King of Swords and the Knight of Wands are both very active. You could do all this harmlessly, by becoming an artist and showing this vision of the jungle. You don't have to create it literally and inflict it on your fellow human beings."

"Stop preaching. Just read the cards. You're better at it than I am, but I can see enough to know that there is no such alternative for me. The other wand and the other sword are reversed. I can't be satisfied to do it in symbolic form. I must do it so that everybody is affected by it, not just the few who read books or go to concerts. Tell me what I don't know. Why is the line from the Fool to the Tower completed in the Lovers reversed? I know that I can't love anyone, and I don't believe that anybody else ever does, either-that's more sentiment and hypocrisy. People use each other as masturbating machines and crying towels, and they call it love. But there's a deeper meaning. What is it?"

"Start from the top: Death reversed. You reject Death, so the Fool cannot undergo rebirth and enter the right-hand path when he crosses the Abyss. Therefore: the left-hand path, the destruction of the Tower. There is only one end to that chain of karma, my son. The Lovers means Death, just as Death means Life. You are rejecting natural death, and therefore refusing natural life. Your path will be an unnatural life leading to a death that is against nature. You will die as a man before your body dies. The fire is still self-destructive, even if you turn it outward and use the whole world as a stage for your private Gotterdammerung. Your primary victim will still be yourself."

"You have the talent," Drake said coldly, "but you are still basically a fraud, like everyone in this business. Your worst victim, madam, is yourself. You deceive yourself with the lies that you have so often told others. It's the occupational disease of mystics. The truth is that it doesn't matter whether I destroy myself alone or destroy this planet-or turn around and try to find my way to the right-hand path in some dreary monastery. The universe will roll blindly along, not caring, not even knowing. There's no Granddaddy in the clouds to pass a last judgment- there's only a few airplanes up there, learning more and more about how to carry bombs. They court-martialed General Mitchell for saying it, but it's the truth. The next time around they'll really bomb the hell out of civilian populations. And the universe won't know or care about that either. Don't tell me that my flight from Death leads back to Death; I'm not a child, and I know that all paths lead back to Death eventually. The only question is: Do you cower before him all your life or do you spit in his eye?"

"You can transcend abject fear and rebellious hatred both. You can see that he is only part of the Great Wheel and, like all other parts, necessary to the whole. Then you can accept him."

"Next you'll be telling me to love him."

"That too."

"Yes, and I can learn to see the great and glorious Whole Picture. I can see all the men defecating and urinating in their trousers before they died at Chateau-Thierry, watching their own guts fall out into their laps and screaming out of a hole that isn't even a mouth any more, as manifestations of that sublime harmony and balance which is ineffable and holy and beyond all speech and reason. Sure. I can see that, if I knock half of my brain out of commission and hypnotize myself into thinking that the view from that weird perspective is deeper and wider and more truly true than the view from an unclouded mind. Go to the quadruple-amputee ward and try to tell them that. You speak of death as a personified being. Very well: Then I must regard him as any other entity that gets in my way. Love is a myth invented by poets and other people who couldn't face the world and crept off into corners to create fantasies to console themselves. The fact is that when you meet another entity, either it makes way for you or you make way for it. Either it dominates and you submit, or you dominate and it submits. Take me into any club in Boston and I'll tell you which millionaire has the most millions, by the way the others treat him. Take me into any workingman's bar and I'll tell you who has the best punch in a fistfight, by the way the others treat him. Take me into any house and I'll tell you in a minute whether the husband or the wife is dominant. Love? Equality? Reconciliation? Acceptance? Those are the excuses of the losers, to persuade themselves that they choose their condition and weren't beaten down into it. Find a dutiful wife, who truly loves her husband. I'll have her in my bed in three days, maximum. Because I'm so damned attractive? No, because I understand men and women. I'll make her understand, without saying it aloud and shocking her, that the adultery will, one way or another, hurt her husband, whether he knows about it or not. Show me the most servile colored waiter in the best restaurant in town, and after he's through explaining Christianity and humility and all the rest of it, count how many times a day he steps into the kitchen to spit in his handerchief. The other employess will tell you he has a 'chest condition.' The condition he has is chronic rage. The mother and the child? An endless power struggle. Listen to the infant's cry change in pitch when Mother doesn't come at once. Is that fear you hear? It's rage- insane fury at not having total dominance. As for the mother herself, I'd wager that ninety percent of the married women in the psychiatrists' care are there because they can't admit to themselves, can't escape the lie of love long enough to admit to themselves, how often they want to strangle that monster in the nursery. Love of country? Another lie; the truth is fear of cops and prisons. Love of art? Another lie; the truth is fear of the naked truth without ornaments and false faces on it. Love of truth itself? The biggest lie of all: fear of the unknown. People learn acceptance of all this and achieve wisdom? They surrender to superior force and call their cowardice maturity. It still comes down to one question: Are you kneeling at the altar, or are you on the altar watching the others kneel to you?"

"The wheel of the Tarot is the wheel of Dharma," Mama Sutra said softly when he had concluded. "It is also the wheel of the galaxy, which you see as a blind machine. It rolls on, as you say, no matter what we think or do. Knowing that, I accept Death as part of the wheel, and I accept your nonacceptance as another part. I can control neither. I can only repeat my warning, which is not a lie but a fact about the structure of the Wheel: By denying death, you guarantee that you will meet him finally in his most hideous form."

Drake finished his coffee and smiled whimsically. "You know," he said, "my contempt for lies has an element of the very sentimentality and foolish idealism that I have been rejecting. Perhaps I will be most effective if I never speak so honestly again. When you hear of me next, I might be known as a philanthropist and benefactor of mankind." He lit a cigar thoughtfully. "And that would even be true if your Tarot mysticism is correct after all. If Death is necessary to the Wheel, along with all the other parts, then I am necessary also. The Wheel would collapse, perhaps, if my spirit of rebellion were not there to balance your spirit of acceptance. Imagine that."

"It is true. That is why I have warned you but not judged you."

"So I am, as Goethe says, 'part of that force which aims at evil and only achieves good'?"

"That is a thought which you should try to remember when the Dark Night of Sammael descends upon you at the end."

"More cant," Drake said, with a return to his previous cynicism. "I aim at evil and I will achieve evil. The Wheel and all its harmonious balances and all-healing paradoxes is just another myth of the weak and defeated. One strong man can stop the Wheel or tear it to shreds if he dares enough."