Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  He turned his head and gave her a long look, as if he’d never seen her before—or no, as if he were seeing her suddenly in a whole new light. It took him a moment, his eyes fixed on hers, working things out in his mind, and then, his voice soft, he said, “What will your mother say?”

  “I don’t care what she says.” She was conscious in the moment of a multiplicity of things, the way the light caught his eyes when he wasn’t wearing his glasses, the breeze, the smell of chemicals from the company’s smokestacks, two toddlers with their mother, a dog running free at the edge of the grass, clouds, shade, the world as it is.

  “You mean you won’t tell her?”

  “No, I’ll keep it a secret.” She hesitated. “Between you and me.”

  He let out a laugh. “Right, and Professor Stoll, Professor Rothlin, all our colleagues, all their assistants, the janitorial staff, and, and—”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I want to be part of this.”

  He shrugged. He was leaning back, bracing himself on both elbows so that you could see the muscles of his chest stand out against the fabric of his shirt. “Today?” he said. “Would you like to try it today—just a moderate dose, nothing like what I ingested, but more than Stoll and Rothlin and the others, say one hundred micrograms? Just to be sure you’re going to fully experience the effects?”

  In answer, she just smiled.

  It felt almost illicit, just the two of them there in the lab at four in the afternoon, he measuring out the dose and mixing it with water, just as he’d done two months earlier on the day she’d chased him down Bottmingenstrasse on her bicycle and gone into his house and seen him transformed. “Are you ready, Fräulein?” he asked, just as he’d asked on that chaotic day, the same words exactly, only now he was holding out the glass to her and he would be the observer and she the subject. Was she frightened? A little, she supposed. She couldn’t quite suppress the image of him as he lay there helpless on the sofa and how he’d cried out and how frightened she’d been, but she had confidence in him—he’d taken an enormous dose, an overdose, that was all . . . and if old men like Stoll and Rothlin could go ahead and take the drug, well, she could too.

  She drank, conscious of his eyes on her. The lab was quiet. The sun, which had shone so brightly at lunch, had disappeared behind the clouds and the room darkened a shade. She gave him a smile and handed back the glass. “No taste at all,” she told him, and they were both smiling now.

  “Good,” he said, “good. And please remember to record all your impressions and keep as accurate a time line as you can. You shouldn’t feel anything for perhaps forty minutes to an hour or even longer, depending—”

  “Depending on what?” Her smile vanished, just like the sun. It came to her—again, but thunderously now—that she’d just poisoned herself.

  “Each person’s chemistry is different,” he said, studying her closely. They were standing there casually at the counter, as if they’d met at the bar of a hotel or a ski chalet in the Alps and weren’t in the office at all. “So, and you must know this from our animal trials, each individual’s reaction time—and the reaction itself—is going to be different. Especially with women. Women are different from men, I don’t have to tell you that, different in every way, and there’s no saying how you’ll process this . . .” He trailed off, and she wondered what she must have looked like just then, her limbs rigid, her face clenched, a shrill pharmaceutical alarm ringing through her body. “Which won’t be a problem, Fräulein, not at all, so please don’t worry. The dose,” he said, “the dose is so very small, ja?”

  She tried to smile, but her heart was in her throat: What had she done?

  “Just think,” he was saying, and he had his hand at her elbow, leading her back to her desk, “you have a distinction now, you among all the other women in the world—you’re the first, Susi, the very first.”

  He was right. He was always right. Her reaction was mild, to say the least. Within the hour she began to see colors in everything, an intensity of color she’d never dreamed was there, and things began to shimmer as if in a reflection off a wind-rippled pond, but it was pleasant, all pleasant, and more than that, beautiful beyond compare. At six, she insisted she was all right—and maybe she felt a little giggly, like a girl in a horde of girls at a school party, but that was all right too. “Are you sure, Fräulein?” he kept asking her when she told him she was perfectly capable of getting home under her own power and she kept saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” and giggling, and in the end—she was going to show him what she was made of—she wouldn’t even let him take her to the tram stop but managed everything on her own, even if the ticket taker’s face devolved into a clown’s mask and the woman behind her had a voice that came to her in the brightest colors, bright green, vernal green, banana yellow, a voice like a glade in the deepest jungle in a country far from her own. Then she was home and she was sitting down to the evening meal with her parents and her brothers and no one questioned her and no one knew that anything had changed at all. She didn’t see heaven, she didn’t see hell, there were no demons, there was no God, just . . . color, vivid jolting gorgeous color that took her up the stairs and into the enclosed nest of the bed in her room, where the ceiling came to life and all the stars burned right through the roof.

  She took the drug twice more in the course of the next year and dutifully recorded her reactions, which were more or less the same each time and more or less pleasant—more pleasant than less, actually. Toward the end of that year she was in the grocer’s one evening when she ran into a boy from the neighborhood who’d been away in the army and just come home the day before. She hardly recognized him because he wasn’t a boy any longer but a man, and if he bore a resemblance to Herr Hofmann, if he was trim and neat in his uniform and wore wire-framed spectacles, all the better. Three months later he asked her to marry him and she gave her notice at Sandoz and never went back there again.

  Part I

  Cambridge, 1962

  1.

  He didn’t believe in God, because God didn’t make any sense to him, and what he was hearing from some of the people in the Psych Department made even less, if that was possible. Rational people, grad students every bit as serious and committed as he was, suddenly seemed incapable of talking about anything but the oneness of being and the face of the Divine, as if they were mystics instead of scientists. He hadn’t come to grad school for God or mysticism or mind expansion or whatever they were calling it, but for a degree that would lead to a job that would pay his bills and get him a house and a car that actually started up when you inserted the key and put your foot down on the gas pedal. Unlike the piece-of-crap Fairlane he was sitting in at that very moment, which he’d coaxed to life with a judicious blast of ether down the throat of the carburetor and had to be goosed every five seconds to keep from dying, and that had nothing to do with any deities except maybe the ones sitting in the board rooms in Detroit. Of course, the car was eight years old, with tires worn as smooth as the sheets of Corrasable Bond he typed up his class notes on and rusted-out rocker panels and springs so worn you hit bottom every time you went over a bump, which was just another kind of humiliation, and where was she? Jesus. To be late—late for anything—was totally unacceptable, not to mention rude and unprofessional and about twenty other adjectives he could summon, but tonight of all nights?

  It was cold, somewhere down around zero, but he was sweating because he always sweated when he was nervous—or worked up, as his father liked to put it—and he was nervous now. And late. He jerked his head around to stare up at the window that cut a glowing rectangle out of the void above him, no curtains, no blinds, everything open for everybody to see—and no Joanie and no babysitter either. The car sputtered, caught again, and he brought his hand down on the horn and hammered it, twice, till Joanie appeared in the window with her pale pinched face and gave him an irritated flap of her hand that could have meant anything from Go crawl off and die to I just broke my wrist, and then she w
as gone and he immediately hit the horn again and kept hitting it until a new face thrust itself through the blinds of the apartment next door—Mrs. Malloy’s, with her jaws clenched and her hair flattened to one side of her head—and he eased up.

  What he felt like doing was just driving off and leaving her there, but that wouldn’t work, of course, and he’d never do it anyway, because then there’d be a whole long soap opera of tears and recrimination to get through when he came back. Plus, Tim had insisted he bring her (“This isn’t just for you, you know”), and the last thing he wanted was to disappoint Tim. Or countermand him, or whatever you wanted to call it. On top of it all, he was feeling increasingly ambivalent about the whole thing—scared, that is—and he needed her. Now more than ever. And where was she?

  He was turned sideways, feeling around on the floor for something to pin down the accelerator so he could go up there and drag her out of the house if that was what it was going to take, when a shadow drifted up the dark tube of the shoveled walk and suddenly cohered into the shape and form of the babysitter, Mrs. Pierzynski, and he caught his breath. He watched her come lumbering past the car without even realizing he was there—knock-kneed, rubber boots, scarf, mittens, knit hat—and then stamp up the steps, the door opening and closing in a quick flash of light and the figure of Joanie replacing hers on the landing. In the next moment there was a rush of cold air and Joanie was sliding into the seat beside him, smelling of the perfume her mother had given her for Christmas.

  “Jesus,” was all he said, and then he put the car in gear and lurched out onto the icy street, feeling the wheels slide out from under him for one terrifying moment before finally taking hold where the plow had scraped the pavement.

  “What?” she said. “Don’t blame me—you’re the one who insists on treating him like a child. Fitz, Corey’s thirteen years old, thirteen. He doesn’t need a babysitter—it’s just a waste of money we don’t have.”

  “You’re the one who infantilized him.”

  His wife’s face, elaborately made up, false eyelashes, lipstick so red it looked black in the dim glow of the dash lights, hung there beside him as if it were floating free, one more satellite in orbit. “How would you know? You’re always at the library.”

  “You baby talk him.”

  “It’s not baby talk—it’s a code, we have a code between us, okay? Mother and son? Our own special vocabulary.” He heard her purse snap open, the rattle of the cellophane on a fresh pack of Marlboros. They were silent a moment, then she said, “Don’t blame me. It’s ridiculous, is what it is—you tell me he can’t be home alone for a couple of hours on a Saturday night?”

  The heater was up full, roaring against the windshield. Sweating, he turned it down, and when he tried to shrug out of his overcoat she was busy lighting her cigarette and didn’t even make a pretense of trying to help him. “Keep your hands on the wheel, will you?” she snapped in an irritable little buzz of a voice that brought his anger right back up again. He was going to say, It’s not just a couple of hours, but the thought came like a punch in the stomach, and her whole attitude—and the fact that they were late—made him go on the attack instead. “Screw you,” he said. “Really, screw you.”

  The upshot was that when they finally came up the front steps of Tim’s house (after the added tension of driving around the same block three times, squinting at numbers on dimly lit mailboxes), they were angry, pissed off, stewing, in exactly the wrong mood for the session he’d let himself get talked into, which he, in turn, had talked her into. And if that wasn’t enough she’d insisted on bringing along a bottle of Bordeaux they couldn’t afford, as if this were a suburban dinner party with the local minister and the superintendent of schools and the guy who owned the car dealership. He felt ridiculous, the vise tightening one more twist in the fraught moment he found himself standing there in a sudden blast of wind, cradling the wine and pushing the doorbell nobody was answering.

  “You always bring wine,” Joanie said, her voice flat and instructional. She’d spent half an hour on her hair and makeup and she was wearing her best dress, her best coat and a pair of black pumps that were new last fall. “It’s expected. It’s civilized. And you hand it to the wife, not him—”

  “Hand it to whose wife?”

  “Your prof’s—Tim.”

  “His wife’s dead.”

  “What are you talking about—I thought you said he had kids?”

  “You don’t need a wife to have kids, not once they’re born. She killed herself is what I hear, I don’t know, before he even came here . . . Out west. In California.”

  The wind was bitter, riding a dank undercurrent of moisture off the sea, and he shivered in his blazer, cursing himself for leaving his overcoat in the car. He pressed the buzzer again. From inside came a low murmur of voices rising and falling in conversation, a snatch of laughter, the low-end repetitive thump of the bass line of a jazz record, and that was a surprise—he didn’t know Tim was a jazz buff; he would have figured him for Bach, Handel, Mozart, maybe Shostakovich if he really got adventurous.

  “Still,” Joanie said, because she always had to get the last word in, “you don’t come empty-handed to somebody’s house.”

  That was when the door swung open on a tiny moon-faced girl who looked to be Corey’s age but for the breasts that swelled the fabric of her white turtleneck. “Hi,” she said, smiling dutifully at them, “come on in. I’m Suzie, by the way, the daughter,” and then, before he could hand her the wine or even calculate if it was appropriate to present it to a child, she’d turned and padded away on her bare feet and he and Joanie were left standing there in the entryway.

  The house was warm, the voices louder now, the jazz defining itself as John Coltrane’s latest LP, which he himself didn’t have the money for though he was dying to have it and could see the cover in his mind’s eye, all blue, the saxophonist’s head looming over the neck of the instrument as he lost himself in a passion that was as evident on his face as a sexual climax. It was a profound, aching kind of music, and he’d fallen under its spell at the record shop one day, listening to it over and over when he should have been elsewhere, should have been studying. He looked at Joanie. She looked at him. He shrugged. “I guess we just go in?”

  In truth, she was the one with the confidence in this relationship, not that he felt in any way inadequate, just that sometimes in social situations he tended to try too hard and that left him off balance, at least until she took charge. Which she did now, leading him by the hand through the foyer and into the living room, where there was a fire going and twenty people standing around with drinks in their hands as if they were at a cocktail party. If he hung back—just briefly, just for an instant—it was because this wasn’t what he’d expected at all. What had he expected? Something more intimate, more clinical, monkish even. This was supposed to be his initiation into the inner circle, not just another cocktail party.

  It was no small thing either—the inner circle was the only circle as far as Tim was concerned and if you weren’t part of it he didn’t have much use for you. The Psychology Department (and its offshoot, the Center for Research in Personality) might have relegated Tim to a converted closet on the second floor as befitting his beggar’s status as visiting lecturer, but no matter the size or location of his office, he was the shining star everybody wanted to study with. Half the students in the grad program were already on board, gravitating to him and Professor Alpert (Dick) because they were the young guns, the ones with the fresh approach, espousing a whole new methodology that was transactional rather than authoritative and hierarchical. Tim described it as a partnership with the patient, as if you were sitting across the kitchen table from him having a beer instead of laying him out on a couch and probing him like an Inquisitor. His first book, Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, had appeared five years earlier and it came down like a hammer on behaviorism and the traditional model of Freudian analysis. People were still buzzing about it. Tim was hot, red
-hot, and Harvard was lucky to have gotten him.

  The story had it that he was in Mexico writing his second book when by chance he stumbled across a new tool he couldn’t stop talking about, a tool he insisted would revolutionize psychotherapy. It wasn’t a theory or a method, but a drug—psilocybin—which had been synthesized by a chemist at Sandoz Laboratories from the so-called magic mushrooms of Mesoamerican culture, and it had powerful psychoactive properties that could dissolve a patient’s defenses in a single session. Along with an earlier synthesis, lysergic acid diethylamide, it was just then being used in clinical trials as a potent new means of disarming the control tower of the brain, as Tim put it, thereby freeing the subconscious and letting all the unfiltered sense impressions of the world come winging in. No one knew quite how it worked, but the attraction was magnetic. You didn’t need psychotherapy anymore, that was the implication. You didn’t need books and study and lab rats—all you needed was this, a little pink pill, as if it were magic.

  He himself had been on the outside of all that, new to the program in September and one of the last of Tim’s advisees to resist taking that particular flight, and three days ago Tim had put it to him bluntly: “Listen, Fitz—can I call you Fitz or do we have to keep up with these Doctor/Mister games? Fitz, you’re going to have to decide if psychology is really for you, or even what century you’re living in, whether you’re going to be transactional and experiential or go the crusty old Freudian way—or what, play with Skinner’s white rats till you become expert in the psychology of rodents? Or pigeons, maybe pigeons is the way to go, operant conditioning, peck, peck, peck.”