The Comedown

  The plan had started as a joke: wouldn’t it be funny to see Leland Jr. tripping against his will? Then Tarz pointed out that Jocelyn would make a fine Useful Idiot if they ever wanted to make it happen for real. All they’d have to do was guilt her via e-mail into coming to campus and bringing her angry little husband. And what, Lee wondered. An eyedropper of acid in his coffee? Ground-up mushrooms in his rich-man’s kale shake? Something better, Tarz said: a hallucinogenic Shulginesque polymer that he had learned about in some chat room and ordered through the Silk Road. It was supposed to be a modification of a mood stabilizer called teraflin that was being prescribed in trial doses to unlucky bipolar patients across the United States. Tack on a hydroxy chain and the patient could be left hallucinating for weeks. Tarz couldn’t figure out how this worked and was within inches of trying the substance himself, but Lee knew that the Sith Lord would be a better guinea pig.

  Now, just hours before the Sith Lord’s arrival on campus, Lee and Tarz each took a small palmful of fungi and bottoms-upped. Lee texted Devi: k.

  Tarz, glassy-eyed and smiling, took Lee’s right hand in both of his. Another strange fact about Tarz: his nickname came from a wardrobe malfunction he’d experienced in a mandatory physical education class, when a spontaneous fight during a game of dodgeball had resulted in his shirt getting mostly ripped off his body. He seemed to like the name more than Edward Jonathan Phillips—who could blame him?—so it stuck. More facts about Tarz: he wore Cowboy Bebop wristbands to partially cover up giant scars on his wrists, and he had some nerve damage in his left hand. But none of that kept him from virtuosic mastery of the Zelda games, Grand Theft Auto, and Metal Gear Solid.

  Sooner than he’d expected, Lee’s brain experienced a surge of euphoria. The room’s colors became oversaturated and those with beards (Abel, Donny) looked bearlike. Lee excused himself, stood up, and took two steps back. There was a chorus of “Where are you going?” which he ignored. He went out, turned right, and walked just a few feet to the door with the whiteboard and pink pom-poms. Devi opened it.

  What made Devi desirable (his phone was ringing—it was Jocelyn, he ignored it) was just how far she hadn’t come since high school. She had the daisy bras and B-cups of a fifteen-year-old who still read Judy Blume. She straightened her hair mercilessly, just as the popular girls had done at Shaker Heights High, and she wore furry boots in the wintertime. Her taste in movies ran along the lines of Ryan Gosling, Zac Efron, Jake Gyllenhaal. She barely read—she was a prospective biology major and, to Lee’s disappointment, could not say with any confidence who Thomas Hardy or E. T. A. Hoffmann were. She was clueless about irony, listened to Maroon 5. Obviously she had done really well at some rural high school somewhere, but now it was clear she had missed the boat. Her glory days were over, and she was all Lee’s.

  Their encounters always ran like this: drunk/stoned/balls-out tripping Lee pressing sober Devi against the wall and being pleasantly surprised by the anger with which she shoved her tongue in his mouth. Then she would undress him and they would go to her bed. Her face never registered pleasure of any sort, but she had boundless energy, clawing at his chest as she screeched. Now, with his phone ringing again (“Jostle In”), and the oval in the next room and the dorm virtually unoccupied, she was scratching up his body. He imagined what this would be like if she were a boy—a frail, scarecrow-tall, lanky boy with long-fingered hands who sighed like a girl as he worked Lee over.

  He finished and she made no attempt to get off him. Seven missed calls. A text from Tarz: Get back here.

  Now would be the time to stand up, get dressed, cross the hall, and begin undressing again in his room. That would give everyone the unsubtle hint that the party was over. It would be faster and easier than wrapping his tongue around the words “You need to leave.” Devi was still on top of him and he was holding her, one hand at her back, one at her ass, as though she were in a front-slung papoose. He had the staticky, hippocampal impression that they were trapped in a snowdrift. She was breathing heavily. The room’s palette was set on a higher saturation than it had been when he and Devi had started, if that was even possible, and he had the vivid and rather uncomfortable impression that she was thinking about how fucked up he was, and how fake he was, and how little he deserved her. She was no doubt imagining what a kindness she was doing him, letting him rest her light and tight little body on top of his pale, loose one. He was getting a shitty Pygmalion vibe from the whole thing and gently pushed her off him.

  “Were you asleep?” he asked.

  She made a face at him, grunted, and got up, going to her vanity.

  Always fighting, always bickering, the goddamn chemicals in his brain; this he was being told by the two doctors he’d been forced to consult after driving his car into a ravine, both of whom seemed to agree that he had bipolar disorder. Watching Devi get dressed sent him racing back through the hypersaturated tunnel of his thoughts to the day when he was all wired shut in the psych ward in Shaker Heights. In the fucking psych ward because he’d totaled his car! With a wristband that claimed he was a suicide threat! All because his former best friend Max, himself barely recovered from being concussed, had told someone important that Lee was a danger to himself. And Maria had come to visit Lee—Don Timpano waiting angrily, no doubt, in his Honda Accord right outside Lee’s window—and give him back his sweatshirt with all the Bart Simpson heads and break up with him. There she was standing over him again, small and raven-haired, eyes blank and breath coming quickly.

  His jaw, shattered after making contact with his steering wheel, had been wired shut and he’d had to write out what he’d wanted to say to her that day. He’d written—laboriously, with his right hand—something for her about getting better. He’d written: this won’t happen again—it was a fluke. He hadn’t wanted to die so much as he’d suddenly found himself in the process of dying, and if he’d known a way to immediately reverse that process he obviously would’ve. He’d change now: for her, for Diedre, for Max, for all the other people he loved and who loved him.

  “I know,” she said, leaning over his face, her hair falling across his cheek. “Remember when we met in the band room?”

  He nodded and then winced. Of course I remember, he thought.

  “I really had no idea who you were.”

  I knew exactly who you were. I knew it instantly—I saw you and I knew it.

  “But right away I liked you—I still like you. You were a source of inspiration.” She bit her lip. “Which is why I wanted to tell you I’m going to do the philosophy PhD at Princeton.”

  He wrote something about being proud of her and loving her and knowing she’d always succeed no matter what she did. I’ll just move wherever you go. Fuck Southgate.

  “My parents don’t want me to see you anymore.”

  That’s their problem.

  “I’m really exhausted, Lee.”

  Of course. Me too.

  “I loved you,” she said.

  Oh fuck. That was past tense, wasn’t it? She loved me?

  Rethink it oh God Maria please rethink it.

  “I loved you so much. But you’re an addict and you have to stop doing drugs before you can give any love back. That’s basic human psychology. You can’t give real love back now.”

  The fuck? His body ached. (Even today, even remembering it, his body ached.) Addicted to what? He suffered hot splinters of pain as he tried to open his jaw.

  “You can look me up one day,” she said, her mouth shrinking in his vision, her chest shrinking, her body looking sunken and skeletal.

  You changed my life.

  But no, Maria, see—you completely changed my life.

  Maria, if you shrink and go away you know what will happen?

  Maria, we will both die if you shrink and go away.

  His phone rang again and shook him out of the memory, and he was shocked into a cold sweat. He answered it, watching as Devi reapplied her makeup.

  Jocelyn’s young Meryl Streep voice: “L
ee? I’ve been trying to reach you for about thirty minutes now.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” He realized with mounting anxiety that this conversation with Jocelyn was the only thing grounding him in bread-and-butter reality.

  “Your brother and I are actually just about to get off the highway at Janesville,” Jocelyn said. So we’re gonna be maybe another fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Leland’s had a rough day. He’s kind of tired. So we need you to be ready to get a pretty early dinner.”

  “At like three thirty in the afternoon?”

  “More like four thirty.” Her tone was sharp and exhausted. She sounded haggard. He understood that it had been an insolent question. He understood this through the kind of sad fog that had prompted him to long, cathartic crying jags as a child.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said.

  “Are you okay? You sound a little preoccupied.”

  He watched Devi, who was making a show of not watching him. “I’m looking forward to this,” he thought he said to Jocelyn.

  “Lee? Are you still there?”

  He hung up. That was going to make things worse. The last tie to the shores of sanity severed. Shit, that could’ve passed as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Now he had a very small window of time to recover himself—his superego—before Jocelyn called back. He would start by being honest with this girl-shape that was obviously Devi as a wolf, not a boy. That was her species—he couldn’t put his finger on it before.

  “I think you’re beautiful,” he said.

  She blinked those alien eyes and snarled her girl-muzzle as if to say, Go on.

  “I like sleeping with you. I could date you. It would really help me forget about someone else.” He shook his head, as if this would refresh the sentence. “I mean—I genuinely want to date you, sorry. But you don’t give me many concrete reasons why I should date you. You’re not in the reason-giving business, I guess.”

  This last line was especially Bogartian, and he regretted it, but he also didn’t. “As Time Goes By” began to run through his head—he’d seen the movie so many times. He was Rick and she was Ilsa. Casablanca with an all-alien cast.

  She grunted cheerfully, her face now totally transformed. He couldn’t expect a similar declaration of devotion from a wolf—that much should have been obvious. Still, he kept on watching, waiting for one.

  “Fuck off, parasite,” she said.

  His phone rang again and that set the ground pounding at the same rate as his heart. At an impossible-to-sustain rate. He left the room.

  He was in the hallway, on the wrong side of it. He had, he felt, exactly the same distance to cross as Hannibal had when he first surveyed the Alps on his Gallic campaign. The ground shifted and surged in a way that would have been pleasant had he not had to walk across it. A door opened down the hall and out popped Tarz’s head. His face was extremely sad. Cartoonishly so. It was clear he had really wanted to be with Lee for the entire time they were tripping, to sit side by side and talk about their sense impressions. He had wanted it to be their little secret: Them v. World.

  “I’m a bit ineebs,” Tarz called to him. “What about you?”

  Lee made a noise of assent. He looked at the ground.

  “Your phone’s ringing,” Tarz said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want me to get it?”

  Lee realized Tarz was approaching him and next thing he knew Tarz had answered the phone and was carrying on what appeared to be a lucid conversation with Jocelyn. Lee watched the ground rise and fall in a way that would’ve bewildered Hannibal’s elephants.

  “They’re basically here,” Tarz said, handing him his phone back. “They’re in Janesville.” When Lee said nothing, Tarz grinned and assumed a secretarial tone. “I’m sorry, ma’am. Your son can’t come to the phone right now. He’s tripping balls. Yes, most unfortunate. Thanks for calling and have a great day!”

  “Why are you not getting any of this?” Lee asked.

  “Any of what?”

  “Is like the ground moving up and down.” He’d forgotten how to properly inflect a question.

  “Yeah. It usually does.”

  “Is anyone any kind of animal or interspecies being.”

  Tarz let out a belly laugh that lasted too long for Lee’s liking. “This is like your second time doing this. Just calm down. It gets better.”

  Lee could feel himself metabolizing the drug. It was as though he’d swallowed a radioactive paste—the kind whose phosphorescent progress he could just as easily trace with his mind as with an X-ray machine. Tarz was hyperaware that Lee had done this only once before and that it’d had no effect on him: either he’d metabolized the psilocybin too quickly (was that even a thing?) or Max had gotten bad shrooms or they’d taken too little and because of that Lee thought he could handle it today, of all days. But now Tarz seemed worried.

  “I’m not her son,” Lee said.

  Tarz, who had been staring intently down the hallway, turned to face him. “What?”

  “I’m her half brother-in-law.”

  “Does that make me her fourth niece twice removed?” He paused, seeming to give it serious consideration. “Because you and I are nieces-in-law, right?”

  “Fuck.”

  “What?”

  “They’re coming soon. I have to get dressed. Get those guys out of my room.”

  Tarz did as he was told. Lee crossed the hallway using the surge of adrenaline his awful realization had prompted. The oval stood and dispersed, Tarz bidding them good afternoon as he ushered them out.

  “Want me to sit on this bed and tell you a few things about the real world?” Tarz asked.

  Lee nodded. He got corduroys and a button-down shirt from his bottom dresser drawer. He noticed that Tarz was messing with iTunes on a laptop that was probably Lee’s. Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” began playing, an embarrassing favorite of theirs. This was a good and old song. The happiness they felt about this song was genuine, earnest, unironic, and Lee repeated this to himself in his head. It made him sad to think there were so few feelings like this.

  He locked himself in the bathroom and began to change. There was no time to shower. As he changed, he listened to Tarz’s voice. It was talking about how they both had parents:

  “… moms and dads, and as far as I can tell they all love us a lot. That can be a pain in the ass, but it’s also pretty nice at times. There’s at least two people who guaranteed have to love you and two who guaranteed have to love me.”

  Lee felt something on his face that he suspected was a tear. He touched his cheek and confirmed his suspicion. Sweet Greenbaumish Tarzan understood so little about Lee’s life, his father.

  “And of course I love you, and of course I need not specify it’s not a romantic love, but I love you very deeply and care about your future and I don’t wish any car accidents or personal tragedies on you.”

  “That’s sweet of you,” Lee said. The bathroom was getting smaller. He was crying while brushing his teeth. The song started again.

  “There will always be a part of your brain that knows where it is, which is earth, and knows who you are, which is Lee. And that part of your brain can’t ever die, because it’s pretty much linked up with your soul.”

  Lee thought of the pineal gland, which he’d recently learned used to be the Cartesian site of the soul. His pineal gland was on fire right now. Thinking about it made it hurt. The room beat with his heart and breathed with his lungs. It would have been nice to vomit, but he’d never felt less nauseated in his life.

  “What part of my brain can’t ever die?” he called out to Tarz.

  “The one that’s linked up with your soul,” he heard from outside. He grabbed the edges of the sink and shook his head, still crying. He raised his eyes to the mirror but saw nothing.

  “Tarz!” he called.

  Tarz entered. “What’s up?”

  “Look in the mirror,” Lee said, his hand trembling and spindly
looking, a Dickensian villain’s.

  Tarz looked in the mirror and then looked back at Lee. “It’s you.”

  Lee looked again and there he was: giant-eyed, gray-faced, crying with relief. There were his fake front teeth, both bright white porcelain, hollow when he tapped them. He laughed. That had actually been pretty funny.

  Tarz ushered him out and they sat on the bed. The song was still playing. This made Lee feel better. As a matter of fact, this made Lee feel great, almost sober (or at least baseline—because he’d never really be sober again, he knew that much). Tarz produced a little baggie full of black powder.

  “That’s what it looks like?” Lee asked.

  “Yeah. They didn’t have any pictures of it online.” Tarz shook the baggie and they both watched the powder jump.

  “What does EDM stand for?”

  Tarz shrugged. “No one knows, at least not on the forums. Electro-something, I think.”

  Lee pocketed the baggie.

  They walked together to the student union, which was in a building called Cowling. Tarz was half skipping and focused not at all on their present task, saying instead how excited he was about having a black president, how appealing his politics of hope were. As a southern boy he’d caught a lot of flak around the water fountain for his infatuation with Obama bin Laden (his school was Republican, his bullies were conservative). Fuck you and your Muslim sympathies, and so on. Lee listened obediently. He wondered if he looked more like his mother than he usually did. She looked a little like Marlene Dietrich, who had the perfect face for an O RLY? image macro, the kind you used to see a lot of on Reddit. Marlene Dietrich, like his mother, gave zero fucks. But then Diedre had been born without fucks to give. Jocelyn, by contrast, had the kind of face that was all fucks-giving, like Oh yes thnx I am everso pleased to be at ur everso de-liteful dinner party lol. And Leland Jr. just basically had Lee’s same face, just on the body of a Sith Lord. Lee was so impressed by how real the faces of Jocelyn and Leland Jr. looked in his imagination that he was shocked to realize he was now, in fact, looking at Jocelyn and Leland Jr. themselves.