Chapter 10 - Swords in France, 1967
The bar-tender pauses in the motion of drying the inside of a glass as he stares in disbelief at the clown who has just walked in. Straight off the pages of a medieval comedy the stranger is striding around in green, fuzzy tights and a yellow shirt with white frills around the collar. His hair hangs long and poorly maintained and he wears Kung Fu slippers which are hardly in fashion in the South of France. Most disconcerting of all is that this clot is carrying a sword in a simple leather scabbard and is acting as if he's forgotten all about it.

Worse yet, he seems to have ideas about ordering a drink he's now swaggering up to the bar with a suspiciously cheerful determination about him. He's not even walking properly but prances around like the place was some kind of a ballet hall. He lands at the counter, props his sword against the ledge as if it were nothing more than an umbrella, and is mouthing something in English that suggests he expects to be served - Homosexuals from England can return to their pathetic little island and stay there.

The bartender is about to suggest as much and hopes that the newcomer doesn't speak French, so that he has an excuse to make a physical translation of his message - When a new face enters the frame: A pretty female face, in fact, which chirps in a placatory tone with winks and smiles that the cheese-ball behind the counter is unable to resist:

"Il n'y a pas probleme, monsieur! Merci!" And she leads the foreigner in tights over to a side table where her friends are sitting. She hisses in his ear: "Terree! You make trouble for yourself looking like this! This is not California!" But she is giggling in between her admonishments and so the weight of her reproach is lost.

Just now life is a ball. Terry is now three months in Europe and is blissful about being an Atlantic distance from a neurotic America that he has come to loathe. The mere sound of every psychoanalyst-junky's voice was more than his opened ears could stand.

Before acid, he'd never paid enough attention to everything going on around him to be affected by it. But now he saw all the Jesus Loves You car bumper stickers all too clearly; heard too well the endless baseball statistics as to which pitcher got consistently better average in months beginning with the letter 'r'. He even began to smell the desperate hysteria of a nation obsessed with drowning out their fears under a forced programme of Progress, Accumulation, Despair and Death.

Plastic politicians with Colgate smiles. Families taking week-long holidays at glitzy shopping malls. Redneck hog farmers lynching their wage slaves. West Coast macrobiotic astrologers trying to thrust their birth charts down his neck whilst colonics freaks are attempting to thrust enema tubes up his anus. All for his own good, too. Everyone has his best interests at heart if he'll only shake himself up, straighten out, come around, tune in, drop out, hold on, let go, knuckle down, fly high and just do his own thing.

He has left behind Michelle. She had come back a long way from the Abyss but the return journey was slow and it seemed as if she had left some vital luggage in the bus station somewhere over the Edge. The mischievous glint in her eye had given way to a brooding doubt as she distrusted all that went on around her - She had been fooled once by Reality and didn't intend to be tricked again.

He had begun to see other women and Michelle sank into herself with a sulking wince if she chanced to meet Terry when he was with them. That left him feeling heartless and so he'd endeavoured to make his affairs more clandestine. But though everyone tried to be discreet, Michelle was sensitive to the awkwardnesses in atmosphere and could guess what was going on. However, she no longer had either the power or the will to express the contents of her mind in words.

Terry had become increasingly nervous of the long searching looks she steadfastly cast upon him and he could not meet her eyes for long. Love had been replaced by a Duty that dragged its heels in the past with more resistance each day. If they were still the same actors, then for sure the play had changed. They felt foolish dressed in costumes and scripts in their hands clearly meant for another stage.

Eventually, their time together came to be such a dread and a burden for Terry that he was unable to fulfil Michelle's silent need. It was easier just to leave the whole thing behind. With the help of grass and acid he was able to space himself out enough that he could forget about any obligations to her. Only when he heard the excitement in her voice as he'd finally make the long-postponed telephone call, would the guilt descend upon him and he'd feel like an asshole.

She did not show up for the final farewell and refused to come to the phone when he called the house. There was nothing more he could do and it was with relief that he stepped out of the emotional contract Fate had made him sign.

He has also left his mother behind on her hospital bed. His family cast him the blackest of looks when he announced his imminent departure.

"Great things were expected of you!" His father growled " And now you're throwing away your promising career to chase after some French floozy!" Terry's dad has never quite recovered from the shock of waking up one morning to discover with terror that both of his sons had grown too large to be cuffed around the ears. Since that time his spare thinking moments have been filled with the terrible vision of the beating he might receive if his own flesh and blood turned against him.

His brother had just shaken his head sadly, assuming the stoic gravity of the honourable brother guessing that the Prodigal Son would come to a bad pig-tending end.

"I just don't know how you can do this to Mom!" He pronounced with regret.

Mom, however, took a different perspective. Ignoring the long faces of the family members just mentioned, she smiled at Terence warmly and pressed his hand against her cheek and simply said:

"Of course you must go, my dear! Anna sounds like a very nice girl and the French are very sophisticated people - You can eat frog's legs together! And snails!" She said in a loving attempt to be enthusiastic. Her hand rose to stroke his chin and her eyes filled with tears. She drew his head close and, perhaps intuiting that this would be the last time that she would see her wayward son, she whispered tenderly, "Whatever makes you happy!"

Terry forever remembers this as the defining expression of a mother's love, rising clear above possessive sentimentality and wishing only the best for the soul she had nourished with her own flesh and blood.

In later years, Terry came to learn the words of the Prophet Muhammad who was asked:

'To whom do we most owe our love?'

"Your mother' he answered.

'And then whom?'

'Your mother.'

'And after that?

'Your mother.'

So Terry finds himself across the Atlantic in pursuit of a pair of French breasts which he embraced all too briefly during the girl's one month stay in California. He presumes that it's these kind of clues that one follows so that life moves: Donkeys and carrots.

He lives in an apartment with three students who, poverty not withstanding, share Terry's taste for excess. Not an evening passes without the consumption of kilos of cheeses, strong enough to kill the cow from which they came and bottles of fermented grape blood that fill them with wild hunger for life, just like the traditional Sufi alcoholics of Iran. Each night they trip upon the dose of these French sacraments alone. With heads of lead balloons they slump for dear life upon the breakfast table and attempt to peace together the sins of the previous evening (And the retribution that may soon be upon them). This they attempt merely on the basis of the physical debris they find themselves wading through.

"Does anyone remember eating - Never mind buying - three entire cherry chocolate fudge cream cakes?" Someone asks in disbelief, holding up the discarded cardboard packaging.

"I remember alarms going off and hiding underneath a van - Maybe we stole them?" Another suggests. Anna walks in, her thin black hair complaining down the side of her face.

"Can someone tell me, beecause ah don't know, who is the girl asleep without her clothes on the chair in the main room?" There is a pause as all the male minds in the room work hard, then:

"Does she have chocolate around her lips?"

And so they live with an admirable dedication to decadence beyond the will and strength of most. Fortunately they are all young and their bodies still have good credit from the banks of Health Recovery - At least they never wake up with sufficient regret to prevent them from going out to do it all again come the evening.

Terry is happily squandering the back-pay from his past-life involvement with the Nuclear programme and is also exploring the limits of the bank cards so foolishly issued to him on the basis of his ostensible clean-cut college kid character. Yes, if he could be caught in a sober and erstwhile mood he might admit that the Free Lunch is unlikely to last forever and may, in fact, be in danger of irrevocable severance. But just now he's having too much fun with his new discoveries to be bothered with something as mundane as economic survival.

He's discovered the sword. As a welcome present from Anna (whose appeal still penetrates his hazed hung-over mornings), he received "The Book of Five Rings" by Musashi. This is an epic of the Way of Strategy written by a medieval swordsman who never lost a fight nor took a bath - Allegedly because he never wanted to be caught without his trusty wooden sword within reach. However it's in doubt how many people heard this explanation as his ferocious body odour usually cleared his Way five minutes ahead of him.

Musashi tends to offer well-meaning advice such as 'When striking the opponent with the Void, wait until he attacks and then attack first without hesitation. Study this well.' Advice beyond all beyond critique and comprehension - in fact, perfectly suited for Terry in his out-there state of mind. He has read and reread the tome maybe ten times and bought himself a sword which he came across in an antiques shop.

He now spends every morning combating his heavy head with calisthenic swishes, lunges and stabs with his new blade in the communal back garden, frightening the shits out of the elderly neighbours who daren't say a word in protest. Terry has discovered the delight and mystery of concentrating all awareness to a single point on the wrist and then channelling it all back again. The sword adopted as a long-lost limb. The weight of the raised weapon yearns to embrace gravity and Terry allows it to take the lead as it falls, guiding his body through the stances of least resistance dictated by the blade. He could not wish for a better dancing partner and it seems to take pleasure in making full circles, looping arcs and in slicing the air in half as if that was all it was ever forged to do: The spirit of the sword celebrating its freedom in the hands of someone who appreciates and shares the love of motion.

And so Terry learns to allow one manoeuvre to follow the next without plans or routine, allowing the poise of each moment to suggest the next movement. He prances around the un-mown garden, thigh-high in weeds and wild grass that soak dew into his ridiculous outfit and he pauses only to wipe the sweat from his hands, when the sword is in danger of slipping out of his grasp.

Fond as he is of the sound of swished air and the gleam of sunlight upon the metal, Terry intuits that the sword is not of prime importance itself. If, in the middle of an evening of drunken revelry, he is requested to give a demonstration, then he provokes disbelieving laughter all round by the seriousness with which he will strike a martial pose with a straw swiped from a glass of coke. He's usually rescued from his fanatical lecture on Musashi's Way of the Sword by Annie's loving bare arms, dragging him towards her chair and away from the jester's spotlight of the party.

And in the midst of his ecstatic sword-play, something else comes singing to him with words scarcely audible above the tongue of the blade licking the air. The voice vanishes the moment he breaks his trance to listen more carefully. But the longer he remains in a whirl of motion, drifting closer and closer to union with the sword so that finally it might as well be his own nose cutting up the night-time. Then the song grow in volume, vibrating around the base of his neck and spreading like a veil over the back of his head.

The feeling is of Something Other yet it seems utterly familiar, as if it were the call of a best friend from childhood forgotten in the rush of recent life - Yet how could they ever have been separated? Trouble is, he can't quite remember their name and of course it can't be… No, that really would prove that his weekly sacrament of acid is pushing him over the Edge. Besides, he's never really swallowed the image of the Jesus Christ/Santa Claus saviour come from the fringes of far-out consciousness to cleanse all evils.

Still, there's something in the song that teases his ears, hinting of something he must find and which is not within the realm of the glitzy bars and muddy festivals of Europe. Either way, he intuits with a gulp, Fate clearly has Plans for him and will call to him with hurricane force when it's good and ready.

So for now he contents himself with playing the musketeer in the back garden, slaying defenceless leaves on the branches within reach and beheading the daisies around his feet - Hopefully without severing his shoelaces. He spends entire LSD nights whirling his sword in diamond nets around his head, dizzy with the entrancing beauty to which he becomes only an observer, as though something else were coming through him to create a perfection of motion which he could never achieve on his own.

All this guiding force lacks is a name. Although for now he is content to just dance with this mysterious Source - She seems coyly veiled in this prolonged and unpresuming blind date in the shadows. He's dazzled even by a fleeting glimpse of the eyes beneath. They threaten to expose the whole show and it's a revelation that Terry would rather keep at sword's length just for now.