by T. C. Boyle
At the bar—raucous with students, rattled by the jukebox, suspended in smoke—Tim put an arm round his shoulder and told him to order anything he wanted and not to worry about it. “It’s on me, Fitz, because you don’t have to tell me what it’s like to have to live on a student income, and with a family too—been there, done that. Suzie came along when I was doing my doctoral work at Berkeley, did you know that?”
He hadn’t known. All he knew of Tim was gossip—the suicide wife, the heroic struggle, the peripatetic scholar with the two motherless children to raise and the shining aura of the crusader glowing round him with every breath he took.
“Marianne dropped it on me like a bomb.” He winced, mugged for Hollingshead, then laughed aloud. “But I survived it and you will too, believe me. Right, Michael?”
Hollingshead leaned into the bar, his bloodless face looming into Fitz’s line of vision. “My wife’s a bitch,” he said. “There’s no surviving that.”
“But not Joanie,” Tim said, his smile turned up to full power. “Joanie’s the soul of the operation Chez Loney, I can see that.” He lifted his glass—he was having a martini and Fitz was following suit; Hollingshead was drinking beer. Like an Englishman. “Here’s to Joanie,” he said. “You’re a lucky man, Fitz.”
“I am,” he said, ducking his head. “And she wanted me to tell you how much she enjoyed, you know, the last time at your place—?”
Tim was on his left, Hollingshead on his right. They were both watching him.
“And she was wondering, we both were, when you were planning on holding another session, because we’d both like to, or we feel we need to, really—”
“Saturday night, sevenish,” Tim said. “You’re always welcome, you know that, Fitz.”
There was no babysitter this time—they’d learned their lesson on that score—but right up to the minute they left the house he couldn’t help imagining the various disasters that were sure to unfold in their absence. What if Corey got hungry and decided to cook something on the gas stove, a can of soup, anything, and forgot to light the burner? What if he took it in his head to play with matches? (He’s never played with matches, Joanie countered when he brought it up for the third time. He’s not that kind of kid, you ought to know that.) What about the door? What if somebody, some salesman, some pervert, came knocking? Or the park. What if Corey snuck off to the park with some of the neighborhood roughnecks, like Nicky Bayer and whoever? (So what if he did?) Well, they’d get drunk, wouldn’t they? And then get run over in the street, or—
Joanie told him he was being ridiculous. Corey had a bag of potato chips and a quart of root beer and the Saturday night TV lineup on CBS, which was as dependable a hypnotic as you could ask for, Jackie Gleason, The Defenders, Have Gun—Will Travel, Gunsmoke, and after that he’d be in bed, asleep, where no one or nothing could harm him. He was going to be fourteen in a month. He was a steady, dependable, level-headed kid who’d never given them or anybody else any trouble. It was time to let go.
At quarter of seven he was still fussing over the last-minute details—obsessively, he’d be the first to admit it—and she was at the door in her heels and a tartan plaid skirt and nylons that showed off her legs, saying, “Come on, Fitz—you’re the one who’s going to make us late this time,” and then she started in on a mini lecture about how anal-retentive he was, because really, didn’t they have the right to go out and enjoy themselves once in a while without making a major production of it? Implicit in this, of course, was the promise of sex, the kind of unbounded primal sex they’d skyrocketed into the last time and hadn’t even come close to replicating since, and that was a mighty persuader, so that when he did finally usher her out the door the merest touch of her sent an electric jolt through him. Everything was settled, everything was fine. They were going to Tim’s. For a session.
The problems with the car were beyond counting, but he’d sprung for a tune-up and a new battery and with the coming of warmer weather the thing had started up more often than not, as it did now, gratifyingly. A rumble, two quick blasts of backfire, and they were off. Joanie insisted on stopping at the liquor store for the same label of wine they’d brought last time—low end, but French at least—and he didn’t fume over being late as he sat at the curb with the engine running and the black budless trees waving in the breeze because he’d seen how casual it all was at Tim’s, a party, a session, pairing off, the inner depths. Or heights. Definitely heights.
This time they didn’t bother with the doorbell, just walked right in as if they belonged. They slid out of their coats and dumped them without ceremony on the pile in the entranceway, then went on into the main room beyond, Joanie cradling the wine and he pausing to light a cigarette (not that he was nervous, he told himself, but just to have something to do with his hands). Chatter flew round the room. Everybody was here, though it was a bigger crowd than last time, and there were several faces he didn’t recognize. The fireplace was going—actually, he saw now that there were three fireplaces, all ablaze—though the day had been fine, with temperatures reaching into the mid-fifties. Was it too hot? Maybe. He felt a prickle under his arms, drew in the smoke to calm himself.
There was jazz, not Coltrane this time, but something else altogether, something he liked a whole lot less: a hyperactive horn, a big band, Stan Kenton? Or no: Maynard Ferguson. Word had it he was a friend of Tim’s, and why not? Ferguson had no doubt given him the album, one amigo to another, and what was he getting in return? The same thing they all were, a session, the chance to participate in an experiment with an agent that broke down the barriers and opened you up to yourself and the universe in a way that redefined consciousness. Fitz had no complaint with that, though if it was his choice he’d stick with a combo, absolutely.
Joanie crossed the room to set the wine on the sideboard and immediately a man he didn’t recognize took it up, applied a corkscrew to it and poured out two glasses, one for her, one for himself. Fitz was just standing there observing all this and trying to decide whether he should go to the bar for a drink or seek out Tim, who was all the way across the room in conversation with Brenda—or no, it was another blonde, not Brenda at all—when he felt a tug at his arm and turned round on Fanchon.
“Oh, good,” she said, her accent elongating the vowels, “good you are here. We missed you the last time. Or times, more than one, isn’t that right?” A wide smile. “Too busy studying?”
“I guess,” he said lamely. She smelled strongly of something, not perfume, something familiar, homey, and what was it? “I like the scent you’re using,” he said.
“Oh, this? It is just vanilla extract, that is all. Do you like it? Cheaper than Chanel—plus, in a pinch, you can drink it.”
“Maybe I should let Joanie know.”
“Good idea,” she said, taking a sip of her drink (a martini, from the pitcher on the bar that was only a pitcher and nothing more, at least not yet). “Always prudent to save on money, especially when you are a student and you have to live like a peasant, no? She’s looking nice tonight, by the way. I like how she did her hair. And her skirt, I love her skirt. Très chic.”
He didn’t know what to say to this, but he took it as a kindness: if Joanie looked good, so did he.
“But”—and here Fanchon dropped her gaze so the light caught her lashes and the black feathers of mascara at the corners of her eyes—“you had better watch out.”
“What do you mean?”
“For her.”
She lifted her eyes to his and he gave her a puzzled look. “I’m watching,” he said.
“You know who is this man pouring the wine?”
He looked over the stranger again, a man of his age or so, well built and dressed in a form-fitting suit, his hair brushed forward in a shag crew cut reminiscent of Marlon Brando’s in Julius Caesar. “No, we haven’t been introduced yet.”
“It is Maynard Ferguson—you know, the trumpeter? He is staying for the weekend with his wife.”
The ne
ws didn’t move him much one way or the other. This wasn’t Coltrane or Miles or even Gerry Mulligan or Herbie Mann, but still, he’d never been in the presence of a celebrity before, and there was something arresting in that. Ferguson was a big name. He toured all over the country. He got write-ups in DownBeat and the Times. And there he was, across the room, sharing a glass of wine with Joanie as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. But really, he thought, you had to hand it to Tim: no matter what anybody said, he was no ordinary professor.
“But you do not want a drink?” Fanchon asked, lifting her glass in emphasis. “Not even one—to put you in the mood?”
He was watching Tim and the new blonde, who was every bit as striking as Brenda, maybe not as tall or busty, but she definitely had the goods, and wondering if he should go over and butt in because he really did need to talk to Tim or at least show himself so Tim could appreciate that he was here—and willing, a loyalist and a follower and a member of the inner circle whether Maynard Ferguson qualified or not.
“A drink?” Fanchon repeated. She was wearing a black cocktail dress that left her arms bare. She’d pinned up her hair in back and teased out her bangs so they floated and bobbed with every movement she made.
“Yes, sure,” he said, “sounds good, but I can—”
“No, no,” she murmured, putting a hand on his arm, “I will get it for you. A martini? Yes?” Her smile was tight and self-satisfied and it came to him that she was burning to tell him something, which she wound up doing in the next breath. “You know,” she said, “I am the hostess now.”
The trumpet flared and then the drummer came in, too heavily, making a stampede of the tune thumping through the speakers, and because he was distracted—he needed to say hello to Tim—he just said, “Sure,” but when she didn’t drop his arm, he appended a question, “What do you mean?”
“Tim has no wife,” she said.
He looked to Tim again and now somebody else was there with him and the blonde—Ken—and he felt he’d lost his chance because he should have just walked right up to him and said, Hi, Tim, thanks for the invite, and gotten it over with. “It doesn’t seem to be slowing him down any,” he said, watching as the blonde, the new blonde, took his hand in hers and coiled herself under his right arm.
“No,” Fanchon said, “this is not what I mean.” Again that look, as if she had the latest news and could hardly contain it. She arched her back, balanced on one foot as if she were commencing a yoga exercise, then squared up and looked him in the eye. “What I mean is that I am the mistress of this house now. Didn’t you hear? Ken and I, we moved in. See the stairs there, at the top, first door on the right? That is our bedroom.”
The news came at him like a sack of stones flung out a window and he didn’t have time to duck or even wince before he was asking, “Why?” when the answer should have been obvious. But if it was obvious, then that gave rise to a whole new set of questions beginning with, Why Ken and not him? Did it have to do with Fanchon? Were Tim and Fanchon—? But Tim had all the women he could want and here was the new blonde to prove it—no, it had to be Ken, Ken as factotum and alter ego, the little Tim who would walk in the master’s footsteps, sing his hosannas, kowtow and brownnose and spread the word like the disciple he was. Still, no matter how you figured it, students didn’t live with their professors—that just wasn’t done. There were ethical considerations, weren’t there? An academic code? Fitz was dumbfounded. And jealous, instantly jealous. Which made him lose any semblance of tact he might have brought into the room with him. “Why?” he repeated, his voice a register higher than it should have been. And then, when she just stared at him, he dropped his voice. “Okay, well,” he said, “I guess that’s great, really great. What’s he asking for rent?”
The martini—and he was going to have one only, just one—loosened him up so that after a while he began to feel elastic on his feet, almost as if he wanted to dance, though he hated dancing. Dancing wasn’t his cup of tea. It was for show-offs and he most definitely was not a show-off. Somebody changed the record to Miles’s Kind of Blue, the antithesis of Ferguson, and he found himself nodding his head to the beat while Fanchon chattered on about what a saint Tim was because he was offering them the room gratis and how now they would finally be able to make ends meet (“Is that how you say: ‘ends meet’? Or is it ‘meet ends’?”). He liked her attention, liked her lips, liked the way her eyes searched his, and he felt his insecurity falling away, only to be replaced by, what—impatience?
He glanced at Joanie, who was apparently spellbound by the celebrity in the room, the man who at that moment lifted the bottle and refreshed her glass, and then at Tim, who’d been joined now by Charlie and Charlie’s girlfriend, the redhead, and he kept thinking it was like the last time all over again, a party, an excuse for a party, and where was the science in that? But then immediately he felt like a hypocrite, because what was he doing here himself? Was it really the science that attracted him? The need to kiss up to his professor? The high? The sex? The sex was what it had been about last time, hadn’t it? His mind—and Joanie’s too—had expanded into regions they’d never even dreamed had existed, sure, but in the end their trip had come down to the most elemental act there is, the act shared by all animals, whether their consciousness was expanded or not or for that matter whether they could be said to have a consciousness at all. A term came to his lips unaccountably, the name of a flatworm he’d studied in biology lab a thousand years ago: Platyhelminthes. Now there was a consciousness. He said it aloud—“Platyhelminthes”—and Fanchon, looking puzzled, said, “What?”
What? Yes, that was the question. He stood there a moment swaying on his feet and blinking his eyes as if he’d been gassed. He seemed to have another martini in his hand, delivered to him by who? Suzie, the fourteen-year-old who was morphing into an adult and slipping unobtrusively through the room like the hired help, a tray of glasses cradled in her arms. But he had to talk to Tim, didn’t he? Or show himself? Or—but then the music died and Tim was clapping his hands for attention and it was just like the last time and here was Joanie coming to his side and Fanchon crossing the room to her husband.
“We’re about ready to begin,” Tim announced. “Everybody get comfortable and I’ll be coming to each of you in turn, so be patient. Tonight,” he added, “will be a little different, as many of you already know, because the laboratories have finally sent me an adequate sample of Delysid, which, believe me, will enrich and extend the sort of experience you’ve had during the Psilocybin Project—which we’re not abandoning, not by any means, just expanding.”
Everyone in the room was focused on Tim. It was so quiet Fitz could hear the hiss and snap of the fireplaces and, somewhere in the distance, the faint moan of a siren. “It’s one pill only this time, standard dose, two hundred fifty micrograms, the merest fraction of the psilocybin dose, but this drug—lysergic acid diethylamide—is far more potent. And revelatory. As you’ll see.”
There was a sudden thump overhead and in the next moment Tim’s son, Jackie (slim, dark, the generic crew cut, Keds, blue jeans, twelve and a half years on this earth) was pounding down the stairs, across the room and out the front door and into the night while thirty pairs of eyes watched him go. The door slammed and everyone turned back to Tim.
“That was Jackie,” he said, “off on an urgent mission,” and he paused, grinning, to show that this was a joke and give people time to reward him with a rueful chuckle, the icebreaker, but Fitz wasn’t laughing: he was frozen in place by what he’d just heard. LSD? He’d barely had time to absorb his impressions of the last session and now Tim expected him—them—to try something infinitely more powerful, no matter how small the dose? The thing that had made Hollingshead Hollingshead? And where was he anyway? You’d think he wouldn’t miss this for the world.
“All right,” Tim said, “is everybody with me? As usual, I’ll be here throughout the session as your guide, and Walter—Walter, where are you?” Fitz saw now
that Pahnke was there, all the way in the back of the room, wearing his leather motorcycle jacket and looking less like a licensed M.D. and Ph.D. candidate in the Divinity School than a juvenile delinquent, as if that would inspire confidence. Of course, he did drive a motorcycle, but to Fitz’s mind the jacket and engineer boots were less about practicality than affectation. And ridiculous too, as if he were embracing academia and rejecting it at the same time. “And Walter’s here also to act in that capacity in case any of you should experience any rough patches—and you will, or you might, who can say, but my advice is to ride them out, that’s all, because you are in for the experience of your lives.”
He paused, glanced round the room at the expectant faces, couples holding hands, the shimmer of the cocktail glasses catching the light, everything ticking down to the moment of release, then added, “The questionnaires, please, as usual. And I’d appreciate your reports within the next forty-eight hours or so.” Another pause, the grin holding steady as if to say everything’s just fine, copacetic, and enjoy the trip. “While your impressions are still fresh, entendu?”
If to this point everything had been familiar, right down to Tim’s showing him the pill bottle and even the cardboard box it came in—DELYSID (LSD 25), it read across the label, PHYSICIAN’S SAMPLE, and below it, in capital letters, POISON—nothing beyond that felt even remotely recognizable. The lights dimmed. Tim switched the record to some sort of repetitive Indian music—a raga, somebody said—which was nothing but a nagging presence that went on nagging for what seemed an eternity, and then the drug began to come on, rolling through him like waves mounting successively along an infinite beach. Joanie was there and then she wasn’t, vanished into her own world. Things began to move, but in no delicate way, not the way it’d been the last time, but violently, in screaming ribbons of color, all of it slicing at him till everything visible was sucked down inside him in a free fall that would not and could not end. There was no sex. No touching. No bodies. He was all mind and his mind was a very rough customer, pounding his consciousness into submission, stingy with the glory, stingier with the heights, showing only what he’d suppressed all his life for the very good and excellent reason that to see it, know it, feel it in his innermost being, would destroy him. Images slammed down like heavy sashes shutting one after the other only to open up on the next and the next after that, control a joke, personality a hoax and schizophrenia the only realistic outcome because they didn’t call these drugs psychotomimetics for nothing, did they? Of course, of course. He was losing his mind and what other result could he have expected?