Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  He was scared, only that. Terrified. And if someone was there pushing down on him—Tim, with hands of stone, Tim murmuring Don’t fight it, just let go, it’s going to be all right, all right, all right—it meant nothing to him. There was no God—that was the bedrock certainty of everything he knew—but he prayed to Him now, Our Father who art in heaven, the cant of his Catholic youth come back to him till he was staring into the slit eyes of the Devil, some devil, all the devils, and the void that preceded consciousness and would ineluctably snuff it out absorbing him into its pure black nothingness whether his eyes were open or not. Somebody said that he’d been outside, running, that he’d stripped off his jacket and pants and slammed so hard into the inanimate world that there were bruises up and down his legs and a gash just above his right hip that might or might not need bandaging, but he didn’t believe a word of it because when he thought about it very hard, when he really concentrated, he knew he hadn’t been there at all.

  4.

  One bad trip, Fitz, don’t let it throw you—it happens to us all. The point is revelation and there’s no promise of that—or that it’ll be all milk and honey either. Read Huxley—you know Huxley? Sometimes it’s heaven, sometimes it’s hell. It just comes in its own way and of its own accord and our job is to be patient and follow it where it wants to lead us.”

  Tim was talking as he walked, striding across campus with his arms swinging jubilantly and his hands rising and falling to frame his words. He himself was trying to keep up, trying to make sense of what had happened to him on Saturday night, trying to fit in and stay focused at the same time. “So was it some kind of breakthrough, is that what you think?”

  Students milled, assembled, drifted past in groups. They didn’t know anything, couldn’t imagine. Those were real bruises on his legs and this was his mind taking him through the day, sharper and clearer than it had ever been in all his life. It was as if he’d had a tune-up, a mental tune-up, and all his cylinders were firing for the first time. The trees were like people, the people like trees. The sky ached. A voice shouted, “You just wait!” and another shouted back, “I’m still waiting!”

  “The Catholic game, Fitz,” Tim said, the wind ruffling his hair like an unseen hand, “the priest-haunted past letting go. You don’t think I went through the same thing, all that Sunday morning gibberish and my mother and my aunt May sitting rigid in the pew beside me, murmuring the old rote incantations, believing?” He juggled his hands, gestured at the sky. “It’s hard to let go, hard to evolve, but that’s what we’re doing here, that’s what the project is all about. We’re explorers, right? Going where nobody has gone before.”

  “Except Crazy Juana. And the Greeks at Eleusis.”

  Tim stopped so suddenly he almost collided with a bicyclist who’d swung out to pass them on the left. “Correct,” he said, giving him an appreciative look, a fraternal look, as if he were reassessing him moment by moment. “But they didn’t have Albert Hofmann and Sandoz Laboratories to provide for them. It’s a new world, Fitz, and you better believe we’re going to map it all out, right down to its core. And if that’s God, then so be it.”

  Just as suddenly, he started off again and Fitz had to jog the first few steps to catch up with him. For a moment they were silent, matching each other stride for stride, before Tim swiveled his head round to search out his eyes. “Walter wanted to bring you back down with a shot of Thorazine, did I mention that?”

  He felt as if he’d been slapped. “What do you mean?”

  “It was an intense experience,” Tim said, never breaking stride. “Which is fine, which is okay, just what we want, really.”

  “Was I that far gone? Did I, I mean, I didn’t—do anything, did I?”

  “I nixed it. And Dick, Dick was there—did you see Dick? Dick agreed with me, one hundred percent.”

  He had no recollection of Alpert being there, or he hadn’t until this very moment. Now it came to him, a shimmering image of Dick with his arm around a beautiful young man, the two of them appearing there in the firelit room just as the drug was coming on. Both were grinning and looking down on him and Joanie as if they were subjects in a lab somewhere. It gave him an odd feeling to recover the memory now because he’d never studied with Professor Alpert and barely knew him and because Professor Alpert was known to be a homosexual. He’d never encountered a homosexual before and the whole concept of men wanting other men was alien to him, and while he’d read case studies and Havelock Ellis and Freud (it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation), he didn’t know how he felt about it down deep, especially at a time when he’d been so vulnerable, so open and defenseless and uncertain. And Pahnke too. Yes, it was a comfort to know he was there, a medical doctor, but he was also a fellow student—a competitor—and to think Walter had even considered sticking a needle in him, of violating him, made him feel ill.

  “It was our feeling that you should work through it,” Tim was saying, “because it’s the only way to really open up and strip away all those layers of societally imposed crap—I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “Tell you the truth, I don’t really have all that clear a recollection.”

  “You got out into the backyard for a while there, dropped an article of clothing or two”—a laugh—“nothing essential, just your jacket. And trousers. But Walter and I were there with you and we got you back inside and settled in front of the fireplace and that seemed to do the trick. Your wife? She was fine, by the way. Just went deep and didn’t move a muscle all evening. She did write up her report, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. And I’ve been meaning to get it to you. My report too, but I don’t know how coherent it’s going to be—”

  Tim’s hand rose and fell in dismissal. “Don’t worry about it, I’m sure it’ll be fine. As I say, it’s all part of the catalog we’re building.” They’d come to the end of the walk and Tim stopped again. “I’m heading this way,” he said, pointing to his left. “A meeting. But we’ve got a date for Saturday night, right?”

  “Saturday? I don’t know, I was going to, I don’t know—Corey, my son? I promised to take him to a movie.”

  “Fitz,” he said, shaking his head, “you have to realize you’ve started something here, you’ve embarked, and you can’t just jump off the boat in the middle of the deep blue sea. Especially since you’re coming off a bad trip, and it doesn’t make the least particle of sense to leave it there. Saturday,” he said. “Seven. You with me?”

  The wind chased a scrap of paper across the dead yellow lawn. Fitz hunched his shoulders and put a hand to his throat to pinch his collar shut. He’d wanted Tim’s attention and now he’d got it. Ken and Fanchon were living in the house on Homer Street, along with Hollingshead and Dick Alpert and maybe the new blonde—Peggy, her name was—and who knew who else? It was a club, an exclusive club, and he was a member. He was going to say, I’ll ask Joanie, when Tim forestalled him. “Jesus, I hate this weather,” he said. “You know what I find myself thinking about, all the time, day and night?”

  “What?”

  “Mexico, Fitz. You ever been to Mexico?”

  The next morning there was a note from Tim in his departmental mailbox. Tim wanted to know if he’d stop by his office around four, if that was convenient, because he had a proposition for him—what the proposition involved was left unsaid. Throughout the day, though he was so busy with his classes and his own office hours he barely had time to think beyond the next sixty seconds, the mystery of that summons kept haunting him. Proposition? What did that mean? Did Tim want him to go out for drinks again, help him type up session reports, book tickets on the next liner to Veracruz? He couldn’t imagine. And what made it even more mystifying was that Tim had never dropped him a note before. Tim was his adviser, yes, but he’d been strictly hands-off to this point, and since Fitz was still at least a year away from coming up with a thesis topic there’d been no pressing need to confer—in fact he’d sought out Tim on his own initiative just to make the connection,
and, of course, for the comfort of knowing Tim was there to provide guidance if the need should arise.

  When he arrived he was surprised to see Walter Pahnke sitting there across the desk from Tim, his legs stretched out casually before him and crossed at the ankles. “Fitz,” Tim said, rising from his swivel chair, “you know Walter, of course? And, Walter, I think you know Fitz.”

  Walter wasn’t in his motorcycle regalia—he was wearing a blazer and button-down shirt like anybody else. He looked like a student. He was a student, Fitz reminded himself. Walter didn’t bother getting up. “Thanks for coming,” he said, and that only deepened the mystery—why was Walter thanking him when it was Tim who’d asked him to come?

  “No problem,” Fitz said. He was going to say “My pleasure,” but whether or not it was a pleasure depended on exactly what the expectations were here. And of course there was the complicating factor of Walter having witnessed his moment of crisis the other night, whether he’d viewed it with medical sangfroid or felt compelled to ply his hypodermic or not.

  “Well, listen,” Tim said, “I’ll leave it to you two,” then he lifted his coat from the hook and slipped out the door and down the hallway.

  When his footsteps were no longer audible, Fitz, still standing there in the middle of the room, looked to Walter. “So what’s this all about?”

  In that moment and that light, Walter bore an uncanny resemblance to Maynard Ferguson, same haircut, same features, same eyes even, and Fitz found that somehow unsettling, though why he couldn’t have said. Walter glanced up. “An experiment,” he said, leaning back in the chair so that his cuffs rode up to expose the tops of his shoes—desert boots, and why was everybody wearing desert boots? “But why don’t you have a seat?” He gestured to Tim’s chair, and feeling awkward, Fitz obliged. “This’ll only take a minute.”

  Walter was younger than he was and already an M.D., which gave him a gravitas none of the other grad students could begin to match. And the way he was lounging there, legs outstretched, as if this were his office and Fitz the petitioner, only seemed to emphasize the gulf between them. “Good,” Fitz said, “because I really—”

  “We’re all busy, I know that,” Walter said, waving away the objection. “And I appreciate this, Fitz, I do—but yours was one of the first names Tim brought up, along with Ken’s and Charlie’s. And Dick’s, of course. And there’s no obligation, none at all—”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, impatient suddenly. “Just tell me what you want.”

  Walter held his gaze, let a beat go by—he wasn’t going to be rushed. “What I want, what I’m asking, is for you—all of you—to act as guides in a psilocybin experiment I’m putting together for my thesis in the Divinity School; you know I’m not in the Psych Department, right?”

  Fitz nodded.

  “Okay. Good. So I’m trying to arrange a session at Marsh Chapel for twenty students from the Andover seminary, who presumably are more attuned to religious experience than students of psychology or history or whatever discipline. What I’m interested in is the religious aspect of the psychedelic experience—that is, whether or not these drugs, psilocybin in particular, can facilitate the kind of transcendence or agape the saints and mystics experience. Sadhus, yogis, priests, the Vedantists, Joan of Arc. I mean, Tim goes so far as to claim all religion derives from pharmaceutically assisted visions, whether it be from ergot, peyote buttons or psychoactive mushrooms.”

  “But I’ve—I’m not qualified, really. I’ve only had two experiences, two trips, and you saw, well”—he felt the color rise to his face—“what happened the other night.”

  Walter wasn’t listening. He was staring past him now, focused on the wall, as if working through a problem. “What I’m saying is people claim this is a shortcut to religious awakening, as if God is just a function of the neurons, a presence in our own brains and not some overarching deity, and if that’s the case, what does it say about our world religions, all our gods, our need for them, for explanation, for purpose?”

  The Light, that was what this was about. After that first session, Tim had asked him if he’d seen the Light. But of course he hadn’t, because there was no Light and there was no God. “Listen, Walter, I’d like to help but I’m really just an amateur at all this—I’m following Tim’s lead, is all, and I’m curious, I am—”

  “That’s just why I want you. You’ve had the experience but you’re not biased one way or the other, am I right?”

  “You want the truth? God is the least of my concerns.”

  “Okay, good. That’s just what I want to hear because, after all, this is my thesis, not yours. And the fact is I’ve never taken the drug myself, though Tim keeps pressuring me, insisting that I absolutely have to in order to know what it’s like for my subjects, that somehow I’d be inauthentic, even dishonest, if I didn’t. But I disagree, absolutely. I want to go into this—and it’s going to be a double-blind experiment, so neither the subjects nor I will know who’s getting the psilocybin and who the placebo—without even the slightest hint of bias for or against, you understand?”

  Yes, he understood and he understood too how persuasive Tim could be, but his instinct was to say no. Walter had said it himself—it wasn’t his thesis, so what was in it for him? Why should he care even? But then Tim was the one who’d put him forward, and if Tim was on board with this, maybe he’d better be too.

  “So, Fitz”—Walter drew up his legs and leaned into the desk—“what do you think?”

  “I don’t know—when is it? In case I have a conflict or anything—”

  “Next month, April twentieth, Easter break.” Walter was watching him carefully now, as if the point was won and any further objection all but useless. “It’s Good Friday, actually.”

  Joanie didn’t like the idea. She thought Tim was manipulating him, using him, and didn’t he have enough obligations as it was? Wasn’t he always complaining about how overworked he was? And what about her? What about Corey?

  “But it’ll only be that one morning—and afternoon. And all I have to do is be there, really, in case anybody, I don’t know, has a bad reaction or something.”

  They were in the kitchen, moving around each other, sharing a quart of Budweiser and working cooperatively to put together the evening meal, which was going to be spaghetti and meatballs, with a side salad. Joanie was molding meatballs in her cupped palms and dropping them one by one into the pan on the front burner; he was dicing carrots and onions and deconstructing a head of lettuce. In the living room behind them, Corey was sunk into the couch, doing his homework and watching a western with the sound turned low.

  “Like you, you mean? Like the other night?”

  He looked up, then away again, focusing on the knife, the vegetables, the cutting board. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess so. But I won’t be taking the drug, or not necessarily—”

  She turned to him now, poised over the pan, the meat sizzling, the windows steamed over. From the other room came the muted sounds of gunfire and galloping horses. “What do you mean, what are you talking about?”

  “The chances are fifty-fifty, because half of us, of the ten guides and the twenty students, that is, will be getting the placebo, which is nicotinic acid—and by the way, I heard both Ken and Charlie have already signed on, because this could wind up being an important study, I mean, groundbreaking, and everybody wants to be in on it.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. You mean the guides take it too?”

  “Well, yeah, you know how Tim feels about cutting through the doctor/patient game—”

  “Tim,” she said. “It’s all about Tim, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s about science. About psychology, clinical psychology—you know, like the whole idea of what we’re doing here in Cambridge?”

  She didn’t answer. The aroma of the cooking meat and of the garlic, oregano and seasoned bread crumbs she’d suffused it with filled the room and made him realize how hungry he was. He set down the knife and took anoth
er sip of his beer.

  After a moment he said, “I’m really thinking of saying yes, if only for my career. It’ll be a learning experience and it’ll make Tim happy—and Walter too, one hand washes the other, right? And maybe, who knows, I’ll pick up some ideas about my own thesis—or how to go about it anyway. It’s not a big deal. Really.”

  “After what you went through the other night? You told me it was pure hell—you were out in the yard, Fitz, out in the yard in your underpants, slamming into things, and you tell me you’re going to be a guide? What if you get the drug, which by the way, I resent, because I’m not invited, isn’t that right?” She shoved the pan angrily to one side, all elbows, and set a pot of water on the burner with a stark clatter of metal on metal. For a moment neither of them spoke. He watched her go to the sink to rinse her hands, then take up her glass and drain it in a single swallow. “And if you do get it,” she said, “and you have a reaction like the other night, what then? Who’s going to be your guide?”

  “I don’t know, Tim, I guess. Or Ken or Walter or anybody. Besides which, it’s only going to be psilocybin and only thirty milligrams—”

  “Jesus, you sound like a chemistry major. ‘Only thirty milligrams’—isn’t that more than what we got the first time? A full third more?”

  “If I get it,” he went on, “which is take your pick, roll of the dice, fifty-fifty chance, and even if I do, I can handle it, I’m sure I can—”