Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  “Well, I can see I’ve held the floor too long,” he said, “forgive me, but I just want to make one more point.” He looked to Mortenson then, smiling serenely on him as if they were not simply colleagues but the best of friends. “Lloyd, I want to thank you again for bringing up the medical issue,” he said, “but let me assure you that we are taking every precaution.” He paused to glance round the room; everybody’s eyes were on him. “The fact is that we are working closely with a distinguished psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Gerald Klinger, who is acting as adviser to the project.”

  At that moment, there was a sharp squeal of chair legs on the linoleum floor and suddenly a small man with a receding hairline and an overcoat slung over his right arm was standing in the rear of the room, crying out in a shrill voice, “What is this? What are you saying?”

  Tim, taken by surprise, let his smile waver. “I’m sorry,” he said, “and who are you exactly?”

  The man had come forward two or three rows now so that he was standing directly in front of where Fitz, Ken, Fanchon and Charlie were sitting, and he seemed worked up over something, his chest heaving and his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose. “I’m Gerry Klinger,” he said, and then looked round him as if he didn’t know where he was or how he’d gotten there. “And I’ve never laid eyes on you before in my life.”

  Afterward, Tim couldn’t seem to stop laughing about it. “The joke’s on me, I guess,” he said when they were all back at the house on Homer Street and the first round of martinis was already circulating, because if ever they’d been needed they were needed now. “I mean, really, who would have thought Klinger would be there—did you see him? Just another lab rat like all the rest of them. Klinger! Jesus! Are you kidding me? He looked like he got off the bus at the wrong stop.”

  It was ten past six and the sinking sun was throwing trembling patterns on the wall behind him. Everyone was gathered round in an extended circle. Ken had lit a fire and Charlie put Coltrane’s Lush Life on the stereo, the music meditative and warm and creeping in under the conversation in a consolatory way. Not that Tim seemed to need consolation—no, he was absolutely lit up with a kind of frantic joy, the life of the party, irrepressible, unbowed, and so what if a stake had been driven through the heart of the Psilocybin Project? What was it to him? Yes, McClelland was calling for all psilocybin samples to be turned in to him so he could monitor them and dole them out as he deemed necessary, but it was no secret to anyone in the room that the psilocybin phase of the research had been laid to rest when Hollingshead had showed up with his mayonnaise jar.

  “They’re all lab rats,” Ken said, standing tall beside Tim, a band of light flickering across his chest, the branches in motion outside the window and making a shadow play of the wall. “I hate to say it but it’s the truth.”

  Charlie joined in, his voice narrowed to a plaint: “They don’t understand, that’s all, they just don’t understand.”

  “You can say that again,” Tim crowed, clinking glasses with him. Then he raised his own glass and everyone looked to him. “A toast! To the lab rats—may they stay mired in their mazes forever!”

  “Hear, hear!” Fitz cried, the blood rising to his face. He felt exhilarated, vindicated, as if he himself had been on trial. It was all right. Everything was all right. Lewiston wasn’t his mentor or even his friend, or Kellard or McClelland or any of the rest of them. No, Tim was—Tim and Tim alone.

  After the second round of martinis, somebody mentioned pizza. It was getting late and no one had eaten, let alone Suzie and Jackie, who were immured in their rooms and presumably getting by on the sort of junk food adolescents preferred (in Corey’s case it was Cheez Doodles, M&M’s and red licorice whips), and so everybody tossed a few bills on the coffee table, preferences were noted and Ken and Charlie volunteered to go pick up the pizza. The door slammed. The record changed. The wall went gray and then it went dark. Tim was deep in conversation with Rick Roberts, Dick and one of the blondes—not Peggy this time, but Brenda again—and Fitz found himself thinking about Joanie, who he really should call to tell her he wouldn’t be home for dinner, but Fanchon was right there beside him on the couch, and Alice, who’d mysteriously appeared, was beside her and everything began to feel so absolutely tranquil after the tension of the meeting he couldn’t help pushing it to the back of his mind.

  Fanchon was sitting with one leg folded under her and the other stretched out on the carpet. She’d been talking about a film she’d seen recently—one he hadn’t seen and had already forgotten the title of—when she shifted closer to him and dropped her voice. “Tim is thinking of holding a session tonight, for all of us, because—well, because the time is right, n’est-ce pas?” She let out a soft purring laugh. “And I, for one, am more than ready. What about you, Fitz?” And without waiting for an answer, which was going to be no, definitely no, because he had a ten o’clock class in the morning and he had to go home to his wife and his son, she turned to Alice. “And you, Alice? What about it? You don’t have work in the morning, do you? It is Friday, end of the week, no? What do you say, T.G.I.F.? Or E.F? Is it E.F.?”

  Alice, her hair catching the light of the lamp in streaks of individuated color, red, red-gold, strawberry, blonde, said she didn’t know. Then she laughed and said, “Make that a strong maybe. I actually don’t have to be in tomorrow till half-past ten—”

  “And you, Fitz?” Fanchon said, shifting her face to him now and casually laying a hand on his thigh, just above the knee, as if his thigh were the arm of the couch and not his thigh at all, not at all flesh and blood and susceptible to touch, pressure, suggestion. “Tonight is a special night—call it a what, a graduation ceremony?”

  He looked into her eyes, then away again. The room was different than he remembered it, more cluttered, messier, as if the research didn’t extend to anything as earth-bound as housecleaning. There were pill bottles scattered around—on the mantelpiece, the side table, even a few on the floor. And the wall behind the couch now sported a decoration done in careful vibrant orange brushstrokes, and what was it? A square with four openings and a circle in the middle.

  Fanchon saw him studying it. “You like it?”

  He didn’t know really. It was carefully done, not an errant drip of paint, but somehow it offended his sense of proportion because this was an old house, a beautiful house, the sort of house he envisioned himself living in one day, and now the wainscoting was ruined—or desecrated anyway.

  “This,” Fanchon said, and her hand lifted from his thigh to gesture at the design and then float back down again so that he was all the more conscious of it, conscious to the point of feeling himself begin to stir, “is my handiwork. It is copied from a book of Tibetan patterns. You know what it is called?”

  He didn’t have a clue.

  “A mandala. The circle inside a square is meant to represent the universe. Isn’t that lovely?”

  He supposed so, though to his mind a period print, Degas, Renoir, even Currier and Ives, would have been more appropriate—and less permanent. Fanchon was searching his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Very nice.”

  She clapped her hands, delighted. “And there,” she said, pointing across the room to where Tim was seated on the floor now, in the lotus position, as were Rick Roberts, Brenda, Dick and one of Dick’s young protégés, the five of them hunkered over their drinks and cigarettes. “You see that boring, boring wall behind Tim? I am thinking the same pattern there, but maybe in a shade of canary, or how do you say it, this jaune fruit from Hawaii, very prickly on the outside?”

  “Pineapple,” Alice put in.

  “Yes, yes! This is it exactly!” Fanchon exclaimed. “Pineapple. What do you think?”

  At some point the pizza arrived, four square boxes that might as well have had mandalas painted on them too, though there was no need because all you had to do was flip back the lid of each and there were the pizzas revealed, each a perfect circle inside a perfect square, the universe laid out
on a slab of hot dough. The smell was irresistible—it was pizza, after all—but after drifting into the kitchen to take a look at it, he resisted. Tonight was special. Tonight—Fanchon had called it—was a kind of graduation, another graduation, and it didn’t take him long to make up his mind. He was going to stay on, come what may, and whatever Joanie might have been thinking or what Corey might have wanted faded away into the fumes of the gin rising from his second martini. So what if he’d had a bad trip last time out? He owed it to Tim—to himself—to push beyond that and discover what the others kept talking about, the Light, the vision, the melting away of the ego and the awakening of the innermost mind. The boat had been rocked, the project attacked, but here they were—here was Tim, unfazed and unyielding, more determined than ever to push the boundaries. Fitz couldn’t go home. Not now.

  And so the pizza went untouched—he didn’t want anything on his stomach to weigh him down. Actually, hardly anybody seemed to want any, except Tim’s kids and Ken, who fed slice after slice into his mouth before excusing himself (“Big day for me tomorrow”) to mount the stairs to his room. Fanchon went round lighting candles and flicking off the lights. Charlie laid more wood on the fire. Then an unseen hand changed the record and Tim got up and circulated the Delysid samples. “Great, Fitz,” Tim said, standing over the couch where he’d settled himself back down beside Fanchon and Alice. “Great,” he repeated, handing over the pill as if it were a sacrament—and it was, it was—“because this is the true path to enlightenment and enlightenment is something you have to work at, right? No fears, no worries. Just sit back and relax.”

  Fitz swallowed and watched Fanchon and Alice do the same as Tim looked on, smiling his unflagging smile. “Great,” he repeated again.

  “What about the questionnaires?” Fitz asked, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the sideboard. The music—another raga, or maybe the same one—jumped and whined and tap-tap-tapped through the speakers.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Tim said, grinning down at him, hands on hips. “I don’t think we’re going to need them tonight, do you?”

  This time, though the drug took hold of him with the same propulsive rush of color and image as if a movie were playing in his head at double speed—two movies, three—he wasn’t afraid, or not primarily, but just . . . expectant. There was the first phase, people laughing, everything convivial, hilarious, Fanchon leaning forward to light a cigarette and the smoke spinning her head round on her shoulders as if she were riding a carousel—as if she were a carousel, a human carousel, whirling and whirling—and he laughed at the sight of it, laughed aloud, and Fanchon laughed right back at whatever she was seeing in him, and Alice . . . there was Alice way out there at the end of the couch that was like the far end of a pier, and she was laughing along with them.

  Then it was the second phase, the phase that could go either way because the laughter died and the shared experience too and everybody went deep, the drug like a firm hand at the back of your neck, pushing you deeper, and all he could think about—all he could see—were the depths at the bottom of the lake back at home after he’d left the diving board and driven himself down into the cold and the blackness, ever deeper, yet it wasn’t mud down there, not today, but a whole glittering gilded city, faces in the windows, carnival time, a cheer rising—for him, for him!—and then he was coming up for air and there was a woman right there beside him, flesh to flesh, arm to arm, thigh to thigh, and she was exquisite, insuperable, soft and hard at the same time, and he was feeling her, running his hands over her, and she was feeling him and she parted her lips and found his tongue and he went diving all over again.

  There came a point when he found himself alone on the couch. He was fully dressed, his tie still knotted, his wallet in his left front pocket, the car keys in his right. The candles had burned down to stubs. There were shapes scattered about the room, people there still—or some of them—but no one was moving. He was thirsty suddenly and so he pushed himself up through all the whirling lariats of color and made his way to the kitchen, where the light blinded him as if it weren’t a sixty-watt bulb but a klieg light fixed overhead. He couldn’t find a glass and so for a long while he just ran the faucet over his cupped palms and bent to drink, until finally—the waves receding—he heard a sound behind him and turned round to see Suzie there, Tim’s daughter, in a pair of flannel pajamas decorated with the figures of ponies and cowboys and prickling green cactus. She said, “Oh, hi,” and went sleepily to the cabinet to extract a glass, pour it full of clean white milk and shuffle back out of the room. He returned her greeting—“Hi”—but she was no longer there.

  Sometime later—minutes, hours?—he made his way out the front door, into his car and down the street that took him to another street and another until he was home.

  When he woke in the morning, Joanie and Corey had already left. The house was utterly still, the curtains drawn and the sun just barely making the faintest inroads. He was wrapped up in a tangle of sheets and a comforter that smelled of Joanie’s perfume—or no, the Noxzema she used to remove her makeup—and the instant he opened his eyes, he knew everything there was to know. Joanie, far from being angry, or demonstrating it anyway, had evidently tiptoed around him in the morning, and Corey, his model son, had gone his way without thumping around the living room and slamming the outside door behind him. There would have been dialogue, sotto voce: “Is Dad still asleep?” “Shhh, yes, he had that meeting last night.” Of course, when he’d finally got in it was past four in the morning, but he’d been stealthy about it, barely breathing, and who was to say he hadn’t come in at ten or eleven? Not from the meeting, which had been over by five-thirty, but the post-meeting, which—and the words were already forming on his lips—was really a kind of ad hoc strategizing session because the idiots in the Psych Department were all but shutting down the Psilocybin Project, can you believe it?

  He had cold cereal for breakfast—Corey’s Froot Loops, which were 97 percent sugar and stuck to his teeth—and a cup of warmed-over coffee Joanie had left behind. Maybe he was a bit tired, a bit sleep deprived, but he felt fine, better than fine—energized all over again. His trip had been glorious, heaven, all the heights, and only temporarily infested with what Charlie had begun calling “downers,” or negative thoughts and associations. He’d felt exceptionally close to Fanchon, and that was certainly a help, though he was fairly certain that whatever had passed between them fell into the category of mutual stimulation, of kissing—making out—and not anything more involved than that. Though really, all that was hazy, the least part of the experience, and there was no reason to mention it when he gave Joanie his rundown of the evening, which she was sure to demand when she got home. He spooned up the cereal, sipped the coffee. Unfortunately, he saw by the clock built into the stove that he’d missed his ten o’clock class, but if he got himself moving—and he felt chockful of energy suddenly—he’d make his noon class easily.

  He dressed in a hurry, grabbed his briefcase and stepped out on the porch in a rising inferno of light, the sun somehow positioned perfectly to blind him though he turned his head aside and shaded his eyes as he went down the stairs and headed up the street to the bus stop. Joanie had the car weekdays because there was free parking for her at the library and her hours were more demanding than his, which was fine with him. She put in a lot of hours, never refusing overtime, and if it weren’t for her income—and what they’d put away for school the previous few years—he’d never have been able to afford the luxury of being a full-time student. He pictured her then, in her work clothes—skirt, blouse, flats, maybe a scarf or pin to lend a little color—and he saw the library too, hushed, reeking of floor wax, dust motes hanging in the air, and for an instant, just an instant, understood how dull her life must be, but then, gazing out the window as the bus lurched toward the next corner, he noticed a Rexall wedged between a shoe store and a diner and on an impulse pulled the cord and got out.

  The sun was blinding. It wasn’t especially
warm, forties maybe, with a breeze, but the sun seemed intolerable, blazing down on him as if it were mid-July instead of mid-March. Just inside the door of the drugstore was a rack of sunglasses, a miniature oblong mirror set in it at eye level. The first pair he tried on—Ray-Bans, with metal frames and teardrop lenses—made him look vaguely insectoid, and clearly that wouldn’t do. Plus, even under the weak illumination of the fluorescent lights, he could see that they made no provision for light coming in from the sides, only the front. Wraparounds, that’s what he needed. And the next pair he tried on—Polaroids, black plastic, all black—made the world go away. He wore them up to the counter to pay. And when he stepped outside, out on the street with its rush of bicyclists and pedestrians and the metallic glint of the passing cars, the sun really wasn’t a problem anymore.

  6.

  He stayed home that weekend, though Tim was holding the usual Saturday night session—just two days after the graduation party, as they were all calling it now—and he spent most of it catching up on his work. If he felt any guilt about Thursday night it was only because he hadn’t exactly been forthcoming with Joanie, giving her a blow-by-blow account of the faculty meeting and all the high drama it involved, yes, but glossing over the details of its aftermath at Tim’s, particularly—and most damningly—the fact that he’d taken the drug without her, the new drug, the one that was remaking him even now. He told her about the martinis and the pizza and how vital it had been for him to be there because the whole future of the project was at stake and by extension his place in it and the first stirrings of an idea that had come to him for a psilocybin study that might fall somewhere between Tim’s prison work and Walter Pahnke’s upcoming experiment with the divinity students. Saturday night they ate macaroni and cheese and watched Gunsmoke together and on Sunday afternoon they took a picnic lunch to the park and he played catch with Corey, who, though his loyalties lay with the Yankees still, was skyrocketing with excitement over the upcoming baseball season and the prospect of seeing the Red Sox at Fenway. All he could talk about was Frank Malzone and Carl Yastrzemski and how they were going to smash homer after homer and really challenge the Yankees—and wasn’t that something, Dad, wasn’t it?