by T. C. Boyle
He’d stayed until the others had left, even the girlfriend and the Englishman (who kept glancing at his watch and finally at some point said, “Hey, Tim, I’m beat—see you back at the house, okay?” and Tim had said, “Take Brenda with you, will you?” and Brenda had puffed out her lips and Tim gave her a look and said, “Wait up for me, baby, I won’t be long. Promise”).
They sat in silence, both of them half-looped, or at least Fitz was, and listened to the footsteps recede down the hallway. The light on the desk held steady. Tim stretched, cracked his knuckles. He picked up his glass, set it down again, let out a sigh. “My guess is you’re here to talk about your initiation the other night, your experience—am I right?”
“It was everything you said.”
“No bumps in the road?”
“Not really. I mean, Joanie and I—”
Tim lifted a finger to his lips as if to hush him. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “That’s something, isn’t it? Really, God is in the fucking, isn’t that right? You’ve never had sex like that before? Pure magic, right?”
He nodded.
“How long you been married?”
“Thirteen years.”
The figure floated there a moment and he couldn’t tell from the look on Tim’s face whether he felt that was just a blip in history or a life sentence, whether he was jealous or maybe regretful over the way his own marriage had ended or simply relieved to be free all over again to have women like Brenda in his life. He began to feel uneasy. Should he have fudged it? Should he have said six? Or what, twenty? Of course the former would have abridged Corey and the latter would have made him a child groom. Not so long—he could have said Not so long—but then the truth was he’d been married for more than a third of his life.
Tim leaned forward to take up the pack of cigarettes on his desk, extract two and pass one to Fitz, who put it between his lips, though he didn’t really feel like a smoke and was trying to cut back, if only to save money. “You look starry-eyed, Fitz,” Tim said, producing a lighter and leaning forward to touch the flame first to Fitz’s cigarette and then his own.
For a moment, everything seemed to shift on him, the scotch inflaming his veins and fogging his head, and he looked down at his glass, which was empty, or all but empty, just the thinnest disk of amber liquid hugging the bottom of it. He didn’t know quite what to make of what Tim had just said so he repeated the phrase, stupidly, and that was all right because this was a Socratic dialogue he was engaged in here and Tim—despite the hour and the circumstances—was still in his classroom, still teaching.
“I’m talking imprinting, Fitz. Just like Konrad Lorenz and his goslings. I told you this drug was a tool, did I not? The most powerful tool psychology has ever been able to lay its hands on, if people would only open their eyes to it.” He tapped his cigarette over the empty bottle. “I’m the goose and you’re the gosling, just like Lorenz when he took the mother away and hatched the chicks into a world in which it wasn’t beaks and paddle feet and feathers that made a mother but white hair and a white beard and a belly full of what, Wiener schnitzel? That’s what this drug does, instantaneously—it wipes away all the games and roles and bullshit society’s imprinted you with, tabula rasa, and starts you out all over again, newborn. You’re a baby, Fitz. An infant. My infant.”
Tim let the notion hang there a moment. The deserted building, dense in its stillness, crepitated with the smallest noises, the forcing of heated water into the radiators, the hum of the fluorescent lights in the hall, an undefined ticking as of a clock hidden in a drawer somewhere—or maybe it was the sound of their own blood trickling through the resilient valves of their hearts. “You imprint on the one who gives you new life, gives you the drug for the first time”—he poked his breastbone, as if making a joke of it—“which in my case was Crazy Juana, the curandera down in Cuernavaca summer before last. But the point is, all of you—Ken, Fanchon, Charlie, the whole in-group—are opened up to your own inner selves now and not what society imposed on you. And if I’m the mother goose, so much the better. Or the male goose, what do you call it?”
“Gander?”
“Right, the gander. I’m the gander. Honk, honk.” Tim’s glass was empty too, a state of affairs that seemed to take him by surprise. He lifted it to his lips and rapped it with one long finger to get the last drop to descend, then he set it down on the desktop, took a drag off his cigarette, and stared into the null frame of the window as if it opened on a view only he could see. Was he drunk, was that it?
“Of course, that does mean I’ve got to fuck every woman who comes into the house because they fixate on me—and the drug, of course. I’m the source of the drug—and the fuck too.” He grinned, rolled his eyes. “What we have to do in the name of science, huh, Fitz?”
What could he say? He was having private time with the icon himself, the young Turk of psychology, the man who’d admitted him to the inner circle, and if he was still cautious, still unsure of his direction or what it all meant, he couldn’t help feeling the privilege of the moment—the prestige—and he grinned back and said something fatuous like, “Yeah, oh, yeah, I hear you.”
They were both grinning now, as if it were a ritual, and they both held their grins for what seemed a beat too long, a beat that began to make him uncomfortable all over again, until Tim asked, out of nowhere, “You know the term ‘entheogen’?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“From the Greek, meaning ‘generating the divine within.’ Éntheos, full of the god, inspired, possessed, plus genésthal, to come into being. That’s what we’re talking about here. We’re empiricists, we’re rational, we’re scientists, Fitz, but psilocybin—and LSD, Fitz, LSD—is opening up parts of the brain nobody even dreamed existed. This is where religion came from, mystical cults, the Eleusinian mysteries—tripping, that’s all it is. Did you see the Light?”
“No.”
“You believe in God?”
“No.”
“Me either. But I believe in something—call it brain chemistry. And you know what, Fitz?”
“What?”
“Next time we’ll up the dose.”
Yes, Tim was unorthodox, but that was the whole attraction, wasn’t it? How could you be an iconoclast without tipping over statues, stepping on toes, holding office hours whenever you damn well please? “Yeah,” he said, in answer to Joanie’s question or assertion or whatever it was meant to be, “of course he is, but most profs barely give their students the time of day and he truly goes out of his way, he does. But I really don’t have to defend him, do I? You saw him, you met him, you tell me.”
She dropped her chin and gave him a sidelong look, a jet of smoke issuing from her nostrils and her eyes catching the light of the neon sign so that they seemed to glow from deep inside her skull. “Did you talk to his girlfriend? Brenda?”
“Not really.”
“If you ask me, she doesn’t have a whole lot up here,” tapping a finger to one temple. “But Fanchon’s nice. Ken too. And smart, both of them.”
“Our kind of people?”
She smiled. “I don’t get a whole lot of stimulation stacking books at the library five days a week, if that’s what you mean. I liked them. I liked the whole, what do you call it, vibe Saturday. It was good to get out of the house, good to go to a party for a change . . .”
“But it wasn’t a party. It was a session.”
“Tell me about it.”
He reached across the table to take her hand again and give it a squeeze. He felt himself stiffening. “Right, you’re right, you’re always right—it was a session and a party too and a whole lot more. You know what Tim said? He said he’d up the dose next time because we just barely scratched the surface.”
“You’re kidding? If that was scratching the surface . . . But I thought you said you wanted to take it slow?”
“I’m not talking like next Saturday or anything—I mean, in a couple weeks, maybe. Or spring break. Maybe spring break. I m
ean, I’m intrigued, aren’t you?”
She let her thumb rove over the back of his hand, so soft, skin to skin, tracing a series of concentric circles that radiated all the way down to his groin. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “absolutely,” and then Corey was there, burning up with excitement, telling them the astonishing story of how he’d won two free games, his high fluting adolescent voice like a new kind of music created in that very instant while the pinball machines provided the beat and the counterman—Joey Carbone himself—called out their number, blessed forty-two, to say their pizza was ready, and all the while the neon sign blinked bright and cool and bright all over again.
3.
The weeks fled. Winter got grimmer and grimmer. Half the time the car refused to start, no matter how much dollar-twenty-five-cent ether it ate, and eventually it just sat there in the driveway like a hulking steel sculpture that had no function at all beyond bad art. So it was the bus for both him and Joanie, the pocketful of change that was always running out or insufficient, nickels when you needed dimes, dimes when you needed quarters, and it was the same students, the same courses, the same desk in the same library and the wooden rack of a chair that remade his lumbar region every time he sat down in it. If the weekdays were dull, the weekends were even duller—to have variety, to have fun, you needed money, and money was a commodity they were chronically short of.
It was February, then it was March, and if he’d stayed away from Tim’s sessions it was only because he was trying to exert a little discipline in his life, even if it meant tarnishing his status as one of the shiny new spokes of the inner circle’s wheel. Which is not to say he didn’t drop in on Tim’s office hours every so often or take lunch with Ken and Charlie or some of the others, but still he kept his distance from Tim’s house on Homer Street, which existed for him as a kind of seraglio of the mind, a temptation, and if he found himself nodding off over a case study and blinking his way into vivid fantasies of Brenda Maxxon and Fanchon with their clothes off and their focal points glistening, that was just harmless wish fulfillment. And safe. Safe all the way round. Better to be bored than distracted.
Then one afternoon he was coming down the steps of the library and there was Tim, head down, chugging up the stairs as if in a hurry, his overcoat flapping open and his scarf knotted awkwardly round his throat. “Tim!” he called, “hi,” but Tim just gave him a quizzical look as if he didn’t recognize him, which was odd and disconcerting and hit him right where his confidence lived. Tim was a blur. He was up at the top of the steps now, already reaching for the library door, and Fitz couldn’t stop himself from calling out again, louder now, calling “Tim!” in a voice that nearly broke on the wind rushing in off the river. A pair of undergraduates gave him a look and Tim paused at the door to cast a glance back down the steps at him, the wire of the hearing aid as vivid as a groove cut into his cheek. “What?” he said in a shout that drew all the white condensed breath out of him. He looked irritated. Impatient. Looked as if his customary bonhomie had deserted him.
“It’s me, Fitz,” he heard himself call out. “I just wanted to say, to say . . . hi.”
The undergraduates moved past him, their shoulders rollicking in the grip of their peacoats. The sky was the color of gravel. The wind dug at him. It was an early March day on the steps of Widener and Tim was all the way up at the top, looking down at him and frowning—was he frowning?
“All right, then,” Tim said, producing a halfhearted wave with one hand while pulling open the door with the other. “Hi,” he called, then the door swung shut and he was gone.
That might have had something to do with it, the way Tim had dismissed him, and whether Tim was distracted or not or whether it was a slight or just an oversight or any one of ten other excuses a psychologist might have been able to console himself with, the next night he presented himself at Tim’s office, if only by way of clearing the air. It was past eight by the time he was able to get there (after helping Joanie with the dishes and reading Corey a chapter of Jules Verne), and at that hour the building was deserted, his footsteps echoing in the stairwell as if he were alone in a mine shaft. He heard laughter as he came down the hallway, thinking some of the others must be there, the ongoing party in progress, scotch whiskey, Tim the impresario. But there was no party. Only Hollingshead, perched atop the filing cabinet like some gaunt carrion bird, and what was that all about?
There were rumors, of course, and they had to do with imprinting as much as anything else. Word had it that Hollingshead was the one who’d introduced Tim to LSD back in the fall, after Hollingshead, who’d held a hazily defined position in New York as part of some sort of cultural exchange, came to visit on the pretext of an introduction through a professor at Cambridge, who, as it turned out, had nothing to do with psychology or psilocybin research and had died a year before the date under the letterhead. Oblivious, Tim invited him to lunch at the faculty club, where the Englishman waxed enthusiastic over Tim’s research into the clinical uses of psilocybin, at the same time delivering a pointed message as to the infinitely more profound reach of LSD, to which he could personally attest. Apparently—and this was to become confirmed among the cognoscenti of the inner circle as time went on—Hollingshead had convinced an M.D. acquaintance to get him a full gram of LSD from Sandoz Laboratories, synthesized by Albert Hofmann himself, for use in medical research. As it turned out, there was no research, apart from Hollingshead’s own self-experiments, which, from all appearances, had put him out on the far burning edge of transformative experience.
Soon thereafter, Tim discovered that Hollingshead was all but indigent and invited him to stay in the rented house on Homer Street, along with Hollingshead’s wife and child (who left, permanently, ten days later), and if Tim had been content to this point with his psilocybin research and reluctant to move beyond it—especially with a drug that was two to three thousand times more potent—Hollingshead eventually wore him down. Hollingshead had mixed the entire gram of Sandoz LSD with distilled water and confectioners’ sugar in a sixteen-ounce mayonnaise jar, enough for five thousand doses, which he’d brought with him when he moved up from New York, and one night—after his wife and child had left and Tim’s own children, Suzie and Jackie, were in bed—he produced the jar. And a spoon. Tim watched him dig the spoon into the sweet paste, then lick it clean, and then Tim took the spoon and dipped it in the jar and within the hour fell under the grip of the most powerful mind-altering substance humankind had ever devised. He said later of that first trip that it was like hopping down from the seat of a buggy and climbing onto an Atlas rocket. Psilocybin was a toy compared to it. And really, there was no coming back, not once you’d been there.
That was the scenario. That was what Hollingshead was doing there in the office that night and the reason he was there every night, because if Fitz had imprinted on Tim—gosling and goose—then Tim had imprinted on Hollingshead. Of course, Fitz didn’t know how much of this was true or not as he came down the hallway, just the lineaments of the story and what he could glean from the hints Tim kept dropping about the new possibilities out there, the need to graduate from psilocybin, as he kept putting it, mysteriously, and sometimes not so mysteriously. He was feeling uncertain of himself and his status and beyond that the whole course of his studies and his degree and his plans for the future because now more than ever Tim was the key to it all and Tim could shift his allegiance, stall him, drop him, and while he told himself he was reading too much into a random moment on the steps of the library, he felt he needed a little clarity all the same.
Don’t press, he’d counseled himself on the way over in the car, be casual, but his intention was to bring himself back into Tim’s orbit and if possible steer the conversation around to Saturday night and the next session at Tim’s house. (Tim’s and Hollingshead’s, that is, because whether he was paying rent or not, which Fitz doubted, it was Hollingshead’s house now too.)
Tim had his back to the door, the chair swiveled round so he could see H
ollingshead, whom he’d been chatting with in the absence of any of the students, though when Fitz gave a formal tap at the doorframe, Tim—who was either clairvoyant or had caught a glimpse of his reflection in the windowpane—said, “Come on in, Fitz.” And then, swinging round, added, “Long time no see. What’s up?”
The room was overheated—all the rooms were, a feature of academe he’d first noticed as an undergrad, as if higher learning was as much a function of the sweat glands as the brain—and he was wet under both arms as he came through the door and shrugged out of his coat. “Oh, nothing in particular,” he said. “I just wanted to, I don’t know, touch base?”
He saw Tim exchange a look with Hollingshead, who had nothing for him, not a hello or even a nod of the head. “Touch away,” Tim said. “You can even steal second if you want.”
Hollingshead seemed to find this funny, though he couldn’t have gotten the reference. Fitz hadn’t known many Englishmen, but as a tribe they seemed supremely indifferent to baseball—or any American sport for that matter.
He was about to invent something, an imaginary problem he was having with the heavy Skinnerian emphasis of the required text for the Psych 101 course he was teaching, when Tim stood abruptly and lifted his coat down from the hook on the wall behind his desk, announcing, “Michael and I were just about to take a little stroll down to the Square for a drink.” He paused as Hollingshead slid down off the filing cabinet, buttoned his sports jacket (a houndstooth tweed, like Tim’s) and reached for his own coat, hat and muffler. It was an awkward moment and Tim kept him in suspense for the length of it, which only made him sweat the more, before adding, almost as an afterthought, “You’re welcome to join us—if I’m not keeping you from anything. You did want to talk, didn’t you?”