by Aaron Niz
Don’t worry, I tell myself. You didn’t consume enough to trip much at all.
Everyone ate like five times as much as you did. You probably won’t feel a thing.
I regret doing it just the same.
My heart’s beating rapidly in my chest and I’m all too aware of every thought in my head, and every nuance of how I’m feeling.
Walden comes into the room carrying a deck of cards, a big grin plastered on his face. “Trip motherfucker!” he screams, then abruptly sits down on the couch and starts shuffling the cards. Walden has curly blond hair, a thin and well-trimmed beard, and beady blue eyes that sit behind round, wire framed glasses.
He’s a strange mix between barefoot hippie and beer swilling townie.
“You feeling it yet?” I ask him. “I’m still not sure if I feel anything.” His grin spreads until it seems impossibly wide. “Maybe.”
“How long does it usually take to kick in?”
Walden just shrugs and riffles his cards. This seems funny to me. The look on his face, the way the cards sound. I get a little ripple of laughter that pours out of me, almost unwanted.
“Shit, I might be tripping already,” I tell him, and then we’re both laughing.
He keeps shuffling the cards as we laugh, which only makes me laugh harder. I point at him. “Why…why…are you still fucking shuffling…” His face turns bright red as he laughs, but still continues shuffling the deck of cards. “I can’t stop,” he gasps.
I sit up, my eyes tearing, and look at the deer head. It’s undulating on the wall, shaking back and forth as if telling me that it wants to get down from there.
“Shit, I really am tripping!” I cry out, mostly to myself. Time warps and shakes, an actual thing in the room. Time. Seconds. Minutes. Hours.
“How long have we been here?” I ask. The question hangs in the air, the meaning deepening as I think about it. Did I mean just how long we’ve been sitting in this room?
Or do I mean, how long have humans been alive on this planet? Did I mean our very souls? How old is my soul?
Walden doesn’t answer any of this. He smiles knowingly and then riffles the cards outward. They fly through the air and shower the floor, some of them face up and others face down. A Queen of Hearts smiles faintly at me.
Suddenly I feel nervous and claustrophobic. I mean, how can I already be this high when I only just ate the ‘shrooms a few minutes ago? But was it only a few minutes ago?
Last night is another lifetime and five minutes ago may as well have been a millennium.
I stand up and walk outside to the deck.
In the woods, I can vaguely see brothers running to and fro doing god knows what. A few brothers pass a football around. It occurs to me that they’re playing football with the trees and the trees are making interceptions and swatting the ball down.
I didn’t ever realize that trees like to play football but now it seems so obvious.
Voices are echoing and bouncing through the air.
Nothing makes sense and I feel at sea. I run my hand over my face and it seems as though my head has an eggplant shape to it. My head is bigger than I’d assumed previously.
“Calm down,” I tell myself. “You’re just on a drug. In five hours you’ll be normal again.”
But what’s normal? How do I know I’ll ever go back?
Randall throws the football in a huge, looping spiral, and Diggler pulls it out of the air and runs across the driveway, dodging cars, whooping and hollering.
Shit. I’m way too high. I’m starting to freak out. I haven’t officially gone off the deep end yet, but if I’m not careful, it’s going to turn sour fast.
I can’t stay outside. The wind is like ice and my cheeks are frozen.
Heading back inside, I hear music floating through the cabin.
Walden’s sitting on the floor, picking up playing cards and folding them in half, then into fourths. The pieces of laminated plastic grow smaller and smaller. Eventually each card is nothing but a tiny, crumpled thing, like origami gone horribly wrong.
Somehow, seeing Walden sitting cross-legged, grinning madly, surrounded by his little scraps of crumpled cards—It’s as if I’m seeing god playing with the universe.
Maybe god is nothing but a sad boy folding up scraps of paper.
This disturbs me. A whine starts in my throat.
Walden glances up at me. “It all makes sense now,” he says, his blue eyes blinking earnestly behind his glasses.
I quickly leave the room, my heart pounding. I was wrong to come back inside, I realize. The cabin is like a tomb, a place for madmen. The energy is wrong in here. I need to leave. I need to get the fuck out.
Walking through the rest of the house is like visiting Bellevue, everywhere I go there are insane people giggling, rocking, scratching at the walls.
Passing by one of the bedrooms, I see Tyler lying on his back in bed with his arms outstretched, as if trying to cradle an imaginary baby.
His eyes are closed and he’s smiling.
“Are you okay?”
He doesn’t open his eyes. “Everything is everything, dude.”
“Isn’t that a song by that band Phoenix?”
He shakes his head. “No. It’s an album by Brand Nubian.”
“Oh.” I slowly back out of the room. Got to get out of here.
I head out through the sliding glass door in the basement. The same room where Hetridge was fucking that girl. But now the room is empty and the couch where Neil and Hetridge were screwing the Big Ass Twin is just a ratty old couch again.
I get outside and the wind hits me like an icy slap. My eyes are watering.
Should have put on my coat, but the fear of going back inside the tomb of madness keeps me shivering, hands stuffed in my pants pockets. Everyone inside the cabin is crazy. Outside there is space, there is wind and clouds and trees.
There are five cars parked in the driveway. They look shiny and friendly, like warhorses waiting for battle.
Walking over to Tyler’s SUV, it seems to tilt crazily towards one side. Am I tripping that hard? Why does his car look like that? As I look more closely, I notice that all of the cars are sitting at strange angles.
Then my gaze moves down to the tires on the SUV.
“Shit. The tires are flat.” The words sound strange coming out of my mouth.
When I talk, I sound perfectly normal. It’s just my thoughts that are messed up.
I look to the next car. And the next.
Flat. All of the cars have flat tires. I kneel down and examine the SUV’s front wheel and see that it’s been slashed.
“Holy fuck.” This seems to temporarily bring me back to reality as I try to wrap my mind around the significance of it. Someone slashed ALL of our tires.
Natasha and her friends.
I know they had something to do with this. I need to tell the brothers what’s going on. Randall is jogging nearby with a football in one hand. His hair whips around his head. His nose and cheeks are red, but he looks happy.
“Randall!” I call out.
He glances over at me. “Catch!”
He throws it hard at my chest. Instinctively I react and as the ball thuds against my breastbone, I clutch it to me.
“Nice catch,” he says, holds out his hands for me to toss it back.
“Someone slashed all our tires.”
He doesn’t seem to register what I’ve said. “Throw it back, Gabe.”
“Did you hear me?”
“You said someone slashed our tires.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think Reyes did it?”
“Reyes? Why would he do it?”
Randall suddenly looks scared. He walks toward me, trying to whisper, but he’s whispering so loud it’s practically yelling. “Because. Reyes is fucking crazy. He probably wants to keep us here forever.”
“I don’t think it was Reyes.”
“No?” Randall seems relieved. “Black Ops then. Some kind of milit
ary training.
Diggler’s probably in on it. Ask him.”
Dirk was in the marines, but he’s been back from Iraq for more than two years now and he’s working as a graphic designer in New York. Besides, even if he was still in the marines, there’s no reason for them to be doing black ops at our fraternity cabin.
I have to remind myself several times that Randall, me and everyone else here—
are all on drugs. Nobody’s going to be able to make sense of what happened to our cars right now.
I turn away and Randall yells to me.
Startled, I realize I’m still holding the damn football. I toss it back at him.
He gives me a thumb’s up and sprints into the woods like a quarterback heading to the locker room for halftime.
***
Tyler is sitting on his bed rolling a joint when I break the news to him.
It’s been a few hours and the heaviest part of the trip is over for most of us, so I figure I may as well spill the beans now instead of waiting.
“Someone slashed your tires,” I say.
He keeps rolling the joint. “When? You never told me that story.”
“It’s not a story. I’m talking about right now. Your car. All the cars in the driveway. The tires are all flat.”
He’s got a magazine open across his lap and there’s a pile of green stems in the middle. Pieces of marijuana fleck the pages. Tyler’s fingers have stopped in mid roll and the joint sits in his hands as he stares at me. “Don’t fuck around man. If you’re trying to play some dumb prank on me right now…”
“I’m not. Come on, I’ll show you.”
“Why would somebody slash our tires?”
“I have a feeling it was one of the girls from last night. Or one of the guys who came and got her.”
Tyler picks up the magazine and puts his joint rolling materials on the bed next to him. “I’m going to fucking kill someone.”
We go out to the driveway and he kneels down to examine the tires. Tyler’s normally gelled and styled brown hair is in disarray. He’s sweating.
When he stands again, his lips are pressed tightly together and there’s a cold rage in his eyes. “I’m not kidding. I’m going to go fucking crazy when I find out who did this.”
“Just calm down.”
“How am I supposed to calm down when someone slashes my motherfucking tires, Gabe? Huh?”
“Don’t shoot the messenger.”
“What does that mean?”
We’re standing there, staring at each other. It feels like he wants to hit me, which pisses me off, because I haven’t done anything.
Sometimes Tyler can fly off the handle and when he does, people back down.
But I’m not going to back down if he tries to take his anger about the tires out on me.
I’m not sure how long we stand there staring at one another, but the tension is rising out of control. “Don’t look at me like that,” he warns.
“Don’t try and bully me.”
And then, before whatever was about to go down has a chance to happen, Neil comes stumbling out of the woods. “I almost got lost out there. I thought I was in The Blair Witch Project for a minute.”
Tyler doesn’t say anything and Neil’s too lost in his own world to notice the tension. But whatever was going to happen with Tyler and me is over now. He turns and heads back inside with Neil and me following behind.
Walden is sitting in a rocking chair in the living room, with a green and brown afghan over his lap, staring at the ceiling. “So many fucking peaks and valleys,” he says, marveling. His eyes are wide, his pupils as big as marbles.
Nearby, Stutty is sprawled across the floor with his shirt off. His back is white and hairy, and I can see the blubbery fat of his belly pressing against the brown carpet.
He looks over his shoulder at us and smiles.
Now that looks like a guy who might slash all of our tires, I decide.
Tyler shakes his head in disgust. “Is everyone too weak to handle their fucking drugs around here?”
Tyler and Neil are clearly not quite all the way back to Earth yet. Neil is basically not talking anymore and Tyler is just angry. As if his entire persona has burned down to nothing but a malicious voice croaking out of a face pinched with rage.
And then we find Hetridge.
He’s in the laundry room, sitting on top of the washing machine Indian style. His eyes are closed.
“What the hell are you doing?” Tyler says.
“Everything is circular,” Hetridge replies, his eyes still tightly shut. He has a peaceful smile on his face and his skin looks smooth and unlined. “Have you ever noticed that?”
“Not really.”
“Well it’s true. Think about the washer and dryer cycle. Circular. Round and round they go. Where it stops, nobody knows.”
“That’s a great philosophy but we’ve got a problem. A real life problem to deal with.”
Hetridge opens his eyes and smiles at us. “You’re all scared shitless.”
“Somebody slashed our tires.”
The smile fades. His eyes seem too aware now, like his little philosophical speech just now was all an act. Maybe he never even ate the mushrooms.
But no, I saw him toss a cap in his mouth and swallow it.
“Why would someone slash our tires? You sure you didn’t just hallucinate it?”
“Come on, we’ll show you,” I tell him.
He hops off the Maytag washer and quickly heads out of the laundry room, through the hallway, exiting out the basement’s sliding glass door.
Tyler, Neil and I silently accompany him.
Diggler’s in the driveway tossing the football with Randall. Why Randall is still playing football after being outside for hours, I can’t even begin to fathom. “Hey, did you see what happened to the cars?” Diggler asks.
“Yeah, we saw,” I tell him, as Tyler stands nearby with a scowl, his arms folded.
Hetridge gets down on his knees and examines the tires of Stutty’s car.
“Somebody really had it out for us,” he says, getting up and brushing some dirt from his jeans. “They absolutely shredded those tires.” We all turn and look into the misty forest, wondering who would do this and why.
“We should call the police,” Stutty says.
“No cell reception,” Tyler says.
“Well, what about the landline?”
“This place doesn’t have a landline.”
“Great idea to call the cops,” Hetridge says. “With the amount of drugs we have in this place? Underage drinking? Pot? Dudes on mushrooms? We’ll end up doing fifteen years in a state penitentiary,”
“Shit, he’s right,” Stutty says, and his face pales. “We can’t call the fucking cops.”
“Listen, whoever slashed these tires is obviously gone,” Tyler says. “Unless one of the brothers did it for some reason.”
“It wasn’t a brother,” Hetridge says. “Stop being such a pissy bitch.”
“Go fuck yourself, dude. I’m not putting up with your shit right now. My tires--“
“Everyone’s tires are fucked up, not just yours,” Diggler reminds him.
I clear my throat. “We’re not going to solve any of this by acting like idiots and fighting with each other. We need to figure out what to do.”
“Go back inside and drink,” Hetridge says, turning around. “I’ll figure the rest out tomorrow when my hangover wears off.”
I’m still looking into the woods, wondering if whoever did this is watching us right now. It gives me the chills, just picturing that someone might be out there laughing at our predicament. I’m starting to wonder why I even came on this trip. Everybody’s drugged out and stupid, and the situations we put ourselves in are unnecessary.
I’d just as soon be back in my Boston apartment reading a book or watching something shitty on TV. Didn’t I tell myself I needed to get more serious and stop the partying? Why couldn’t I have stood up to Tyler and made my sta
nd instead of caving in to come on trip? And now look at what I’m dealing with.
“I saw something out there,” Neil says from behind me, and I jump a little.
“Shit, you scared me,” I tell him, exhaling nervously.
“Sorry.” He grins his gap toothed grin. “But I did see something when I got lost in the woods.”
“What did you see?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. People in the woods.”
“What did they look like? How many were there?”
“I couldn’t tell. They were kind of far away, but they didn’t look like brothers.”
“Maybe they were campers,” I suggest, lamely. I don’t believe that and neither does he.
“Why is Tyler being such a dick to me?” Neil says, changing the subject as if it’s not worth speculating on any further.
“Because he’s a moody fuck.”
“I’m sick of him taking his bad moods out on me,” Neil whines.
I throw my arm over his shoulder. “I know how you feel.” I think about how Tyler seemed ready to fight me over the slashed tires earlier.
Neil smiles, and I ruffle his crazy long hair. “Look at your beautiful locks, dude.
Maybe Tyler’s jealous of your mane.”
“He is going prematurely bald,” Neil agrees.
I laugh. It’s the last time I laugh for a long while.
***
Something’s wrong.
Two of the brothers that went outside earlier haven’t come back to the house. It’s been hours since they left and nobody’s seen them.
“You think they got lost?” I ask.
I’m in the kitchen with Hetridge, Stutty, Tyler. Some of the other brothers are on the deck and still others are in the basement.
Hetridge takes a long pull from a beer. “Relax your balls, Gabe.” He follows that helpful statement with a long inhale from a fat joint. Stutty takes the joint from him, then passes it to Tyler.
“We’ve got cars with slashed tires in the driveway and Neil thinks he saw people in the woods,” I say, glancing out the window at the disabled vehicles. “Now there are missing brothers.”
“Not missing, just late,” Stutty corrects me with a self-satisfied little grin that makes me want to wring his neck.