Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  They’d been alone in Tim’s office and Tim had got up to shut the door for privacy. There was a window, a filing cabinet, and just enough room for a desk and two chairs. Tim let a beat go by, then leaned back in his chair. “You don’t want to be a pecker, do you?”

  Well, no, of course not, and he didn’t want to be hidebound or the brunt of a joke either, but he was reluctant—and beyond that, uneasy. He came from a long and undistinguished line of Irish drunks and he’d worked hard to get into the program, to get into Harvard, and he didn’t want to screw with that, didn’t want to have to worry about alcohol or this new miracle drug or anything else that could compromise what mattered above all else: the degree, the job, the house, a better life for Joanie and Corey. This was called ambition, class mobility, the American Dream, and he had it in spades. But Tim was persuasive, messianic even, and everyone in the inner circle had taken the drug—was taking it, regularly—and now, feeling left out, feeling pressured, he felt himself giving way.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of—you know that, right?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Then what’s the hang-up? This is nothing less than a revolution we’re talking about, Fitz. The first time I ate mushrooms, the real thing, obtained from a curandera in Mexico—you know what a curandera is?”

  “A shaman?”

  “Right, a shaman, and we’re talking a thousand years of history here, and you know what? I learned more about the mind in six or seven hours than in fifteen years as a psychologist. God’s truth. And what I’m telling you, Fitz, is that this is a tool we can’t afford to ignore, not as psychologists, not as human beings. You decide.” He tented the fingers of both hands in front of his face and peered through them. “Ball’s in your court, my friend.”

  So here he was, and here was the ball, and he was stroking it back.

  Or trying to. At the moment he was stalled on the fringes of the room, clutching Joanie’s hand like a child on a school trip. People chattered, the fire snapped. He had an impulse to back away, tug Joanie out the door, down the steps and into the car and just forget the whole thing, and he’d actually taken a step backward when Joanie’s grip tightened round his fingers and she hissed, “Fitz, what are you doing?” It was the moment of truth and it seemed to break the spell. Suddenly everything came into focus—he knew these people, or some of them, and this was where he belonged, this was what he’d come for. It was now or never.

  The better part of the inner circle was gathered round the fireplace, as well as a couple of people he didn’t recognize, including a blonde with an angelic face and a cheerleader’s figure who turned out to be Tim’s girlfriend (or, actually, his date for the night, since they’d just met the day before). The room itself, high ceilinged, wainscoted walls, period furniture, was casually elegant, presumably reflecting the taste of the owner, a prof on sabbatical who’d rented the place to Tim for the year, or at least that was what he’d heard. A prof in the History Department, he thought it was—or no, International Law.

  The bass thumped, the saxophone soared, and before he could think he was pulling Joanie across the room to where Ken Sensabaugh was standing with his back to him, waving a cocktail glass at two girls Fitz had never seen before and one he had—Ken’s wife, wasn’t it?—and then he was tapping Ken on the shoulder and Ken was swinging round on him and breaking into a grin. “Fitz, my man, you finally made it!”

  Ken was a head taller than anybody in the room, which made him stand out, which, he realized, was why he’d gone to him first. But that was all right, because Ken had been the first to befriend him when he entered the program, and though they weren’t exactly close, or not yet, he radiated a kind of energy and high spirits that were hard to resist, almost as if he were Tim’s doppelgänger. Careful not to spill his drink—a martini he held pinched by the stem between two fingers—Ken bent forward to take Joanie’s hand and bring it to his lips, as if they were all in some Noel Coward play, crooning, “And this must be Joanie I’ve heard so much about, Joanie Loney, Joanie, Joanie, Joanie Loney.”

  “The one and only!” Joanie said, grinning back at him. “And you’re Ken, right? One of Fitz’s classmates?”

  That was all it took. They were there, in the heart of it, and in the next moment someone took the wine off his hands and he and Joanie each had a martini thrust at them and Joanie was chatting up Ken’s wife, Fanchon, who had a pair of pillowy lips, spoke with a French accent and wore her black hair in a bouffant with the bangs hanging sexily in her eyes, like the girl in The 400 Blows. Some of the other grad students drifted over to say hello—Rick Roberts, Charlie Millhouse, a wife, a girlfriend—and make him feel at home when he was feeling anything but, and where was Tim? Wasn’t this supposed to be a session?

  Charlie—short, square shouldered, with an outsized head and eyes set too close together, which just managed to draw your attention to them all the more—had his arm around a redheaded girl Fitz hadn’t caught the name of because he was bad with names and introductions, too hung up on subliminal gestures and the pure animal presence of other people to focus his attention. Which was a failing, he knew it, and the reason he always felt uncomfortable at parties. Or part of the reason. His mother claimed he was reserved. Joanie called him shy. But the truth was it just took him a while to get a read on people. Or that was what he told himself.

  Charlie had a cigarette in one hand, the one attached to the arm thrown over the girl’s shoulder, and an empty glass in the other. “You like this music?” he asked, jerking his chin in the direction of the stereo while Coltrane floated his arpeggios just out of reach and the party buzzed around them.

  The answer was yes, a definite yes, but he couldn’t tell from Charlie’s inflection whether he was looking for affirmation or negation, so he just nodded and shifted his eyes to the girl, whose name popped into his head at that moment—Patricia—and tossed the question back at her. “And what about you, Patricia, what do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, turning her head to draw Charlie’s cigarette to her lips and take a quick puff, which she exhaled in a thin blue cloud. “It’s all the same to me. And the name’s Alice, by the way.”

  Charlie, still holding fast to her, leaned in, his cheek pressed to hers, to pull the cigarette to his own lips. “The reason I ask,” he said, exhaling, “is because to me this is exactly what Tim should play during the session, but he always goes for mellower stuff, string quartets, Satie, Debussy, and if it’s jazz it’s going to be the MJQ, you watch.”

  “Sorry, Alice,” Fitz murmured, though the moment had already passed. “I must have misheard,” he added lamely, and was his glass empty already? He hadn’t come here to get drunk, had he? And where was Joanie? All the way across the room with Ken and Fanchon and some people he didn’t recognize, her head thrown back, laughing at something Ken had just said. The sight of her reminded him all over again of how strange this was—and of what was to come—and he felt his stomach clench. “But yeah, Charlie, I don’t know what to expect—this’ll be my first time—so I can’t pretend to know what the music protocol is, but I agree about Coltrane. He’s our modern master, even beyond Bird or Miles or anybody.”

  “Pure mathematics of the soul, that’s what I say.”

  “Wait a minute,” Alice said, shimmying out from under Charlie’s arm. “You mean this is your first time? Really?”

  Fitz nodded.

  She let out a nervous laugh. “Mine too. Jesus, from what Charlie told me, I thought everybody here was part of the club—what about your wife? Her first time too?”

  “Yes, both of us,” he said, swallowing the words as if he were taking a breath instead of expelling it. Across the room, Joanie was still laughing, but it was a laugh with a ragged edge to it because she was anxious too, everybody was, and everybody was waiting for Tim, and where was he, what was taking him so long?

  As it turned out, Tim had been upstairs, preparing things, and now he appeared among them like an avatar, a
nd everybody—jazz, talk and gin notwithstanding—turned to glance at him as he bounced down the stairs, clean and athletic and wearing the big booster’s grin that never seemed to leave his face. He came straight up to where Fitz was standing with Charlie and Alice, pumped his hand and said, “Welcome, Fitz, welcome . . . and where’s—oh, this must be her, right, the pretty young woman in the black dress over there with Fanchon? Joanie, right? Hello, Joanie!” he called out, waving her over.

  Joanie wasn’t shy, that was for sure, and when Tim held out his hand she took it in hers and went up on her tiptoes to peck a kiss to his cheek and tell him in soft martini-inflected tones what an honor it was to finally meet him and even more to be invited for this—and here she faltered, just an instant, searching for the word—“this occasion.” And then she laughed and Tim laughed too before turning to the room at large and clapping his hands together twice to get everyone’s attention.

  “All right, then,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the cascading trills and hard punctuative blats of Coltrane’s tenor, “let’s gather round for the main event. And don’t forget the questionnaires, which is the whole point of this, you all know that,” gesturing toward the sideboard where the drinks were arrayed. “Over there on the bar, one each, and I want your impressions now and then after. And please answer all the questions, even if they don’t apply.” He grinned, held it a moment. “I mean, even if you have to write Doesn’t apply, okay? Are you with me? Everybody?”

  Officially, this was a session, one of an ongoing series in the study Professors Leary and Alpert were conducting to assess the potential of the drug for clinical use, but it was apparent that it was more than that too. All you had to do was glance round the room at the way people held themselves to see that. This was a ritual, a ceremony, and Tim was at the center of it, going round dispensing pills into upturned palms while the conversation died and the sub-zero vibe of the MJQ replaced Coltrane on the stereo, just as Charlie had predicted, and where was Charlie? There, off in a corner with his girlfriend, the redhead—what was her name?—swallowing pills, fifteen of them, because that was the standard dose, thirty milligrams.

  Tim came to him and Joanie last, lingering a moment to reassure them that he’d be there to guide them throughout the entire trip (as everybody was calling the experience now, as if it were a journey to some distant place, which, if you believed Tim, it was), just as he’d be there to guide everyone else so there’d be no worries and no hang-ups. “Just let it go,” he said, handing him and Joanie each a glass of water and slipping a brown prescription bottle out of the inside pocket of his jacket. The bottle had a black screw-off cap, no different from any other prescription container, except for the Sandoz label affixed to the front of it.

  “Could I see that?” he heard himself say, and Tim, grinning, handed it to him.

  INDOCYBIN, it read, and beneath it, (PSILOCYBIN), 2 MG, 500 TABLETS. Then the Sandoz emblem, a triangle with a single S emblazoned in the center of it, and beneath that, RESEARCH MATERIAL. CAUTION, NEW DRUG LIMITED BY FEDERAL LAW TO INVESTIGATIONAL USE ONLY, followed by the usual warning, FEDERAL LAW PROHIBITS DISPENSING WITHOUT PRESCRIPTION.

  “Well,” Tim said, looking first to Joanie, then to him, “satisfied?”

  He wasn’t, not really. It certainly looked official—the bottle, the description, the warnings—but who was prescribing it, Tim? Tim wasn’t a medical doctor. (Walter Pahnke, another of Tim’s grad advisees, was, but Walter was conspicuously absent on this particular evening, and whether his presence was needed or not, at least it would have been comforting.) Fitz nodded, then found himself grinning back. “Why am I thinking of Superman?”

  Tim laughed. “Everybody says that. It’s the big S, the triangle, the whole works, and I’m not promising you you’re going to be able to see through walls or mold diamonds in your fist or fly around the world at supersonic speeds—‘It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Fitz!’—but you never know, you just might.”

  Turning to Joanie, Tim said, “Ladies first,” and she held out her hand while he shook the bottle over it and counted out not fifteen but ten pills. “Beginner’s dose,” he said with a wink, then turned to him. Dutifully, Fitz presented his cupped palm, felt the fleeting tap of the bottle’s rim at the base of his thumb, heard Tim counting aloud, “Two, four, six, eight, ten,” while the MJQ tinkled through the chord changes of “Lonely Woman” and conversation started up around him again as if after a long withheld breath.

  Tim’s face glowed in the light of the table lamp, an Irish face, quintessentially Irish, right down to the cool hooded eyes and the faint twist of the nose. He’d turned forty-one back in October but looked ten years younger—no older than Fitz himself—and he was fit and handsome, his hair trimmed in the universal crew cut and hardly a trace of gray in it. He favored tweeds, like the suit he had on now, and he even managed to make the hearing aid he wore look stylish, its cord descending into the same inner pocket from which he’d extracted the pill bottle. “All right?” he asked.

  “All right,” Fitz heard himself say, and then he was throwing back the pills two at a time and washing them down with measured sips from the glass, all the while telling himself there was nothing to worry about—it was research, that was all, only research.

  “It’s like going to the doctor,” Joanie said, meaning it as a joke, a bit of levity to break the spell of the moment, but then she saw that Tim wasn’t laughing and her face went sober. Still, she was right: it was like going to the doctor, the only difference being that they weren’t sick and Fitz hoped he wouldn’t be, his biggest worry at this point (beyond losing his mind, that is) being that he would embarrass himself in front of everybody. The fact was that these little pink pills that looked so innocuous they might have been Pepto-Bismol tablets were a laboratory synthesis of the mushrooms the Indians called flesh of the gods, teonanácatl, and they were said to produce intense visions, synesthesia, out-of-body experiences—along with nausea, and in extreme cases, paranoid delusions and even convulsions.

  “A word of advice,” Tim said. “Don’t fight it. And don’t think nothing’s happening or you’ve got a placebo or anything like that because there’s no control group tonight—we’re just having an experience, okay? To initiate you. Both of you. And the drug takes a while to come on, maybe forty minutes, an hour? Just relax. And enjoy. You are about to have the single most significant revelation of your entire lives.”

  Joanie looked pale, as if she’d been drained of blood. She was nervous, though she tried to hide it, and he was nervous too. Joanie just nodded and a flicker of a smile jumped and died on her lips.

  “Trust me,” Tim said. “Really.”

  For the longest while, nothing happened. There was a small uptick of excitement after the pills had gone round, but then everybody settled into anticipatory mode and the party subsided till it wasn’t a party at all, just small groups of people quietly conversing in the corners—the darker the corner, the better. Light was oppressive all of a sudden, and Tim, in his wisdom, had gone round shutting off all the lamps and replacing them strategically with candles. At some point the jazz gave way to one of Bach’s masses, and he and Joanie, following suit with what the others were doing, settled down on the floor in a spill of pillows Tim and his daughter—Suzie, wasn’t it?—scattered round the room. He watched Tim’s daughter go from group to group, arranging things as if for a pajama party, and he wondered about that, about the propriety of an adolescent—a child—witnessing whatever was about to happen here, but then, once she was sure everyone was settled, she said good night in a soft fluting voice and drifted up the stairs to bed.

  Time elongated. Nobody was standing anymore. The pitcher of martinis on the counter went untouched, as if everybody’d had their fill of that particular form of stimulus, and when he glanced up at it—he kept glancing up at it, he couldn’t help himself—it seemed to glow like a crystal ball, as if the flame of the candle Tim had set beside it were in the liquid itself now, in
the gin, transfusing it with light. “You see that?” he murmured, sitting there beside his wife in their dark, dark corner and reaching out a finger to point to it, where it was whirling now, not on the counter or of the counter, but in the space above it, ginfire, whirling.

  “What?” she said and turned her face to him, her eyes gone huge as goggles.

  “Ginfire. The martinis.”

  Bach’s voices braided themselves, separated, braided again.

  She laughed. “I’m not thirsty.”

  “No, no,” he said, “that’s not what I mean—I mean, look at the pitcher, don’t you see it?”

  “I see it,” she said.

  “You see what it’s doing?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “oh, yeah,” her voice soft and distracted, barely there at all. “And the puppet,” she said, “you see the puppet?”

  He didn’t see the puppet, not that he didn’t want to, but now all at once every ordinary object in the room came alive just as if it had a heart inside it pumping blood—highboy, bookcase, Persian rug, rocker, armchair, the nautical scene hanging over the mantelpiece—everything stirring, buzzing, fracturing the room with light, and he said, “I think it’s coming on,” and she said, “Yeah.”

  Time must have passed—time always passes, the globe spinning through its diurnal cycle, elliptical orbit, axial tilt, clocks ticking, Big Ben, horology, Greenwich mean time—but he had no more sense of it than if he were locked deep in a dreamless sleep. Except that this wasn’t sleep but its opposite, a kind of hyper-alertness that set all his senses on fire till the MJQ replaced Bach and became his heartbeat all over again and every note had its own particular and individuated color shining through it and Joanie’s face was something she’d borrowed from Miró, from Picasso, and he wanted to tell her about that but he was pre-verbal now or maybe post-verbal. If he was speaking, if he could have spoken—or even wanted to—he would have said ineffable, would have said discontinuous, would have said wow.