by T. C. Boyle
Already he was so used to the dark glasses that when Joanie kidded him about them—her bare legs stretched out before her on the blanket, bologna sandwich in one hand, bottle of Bud in the other—he had to reach up and feel the frames to know whether they were there or not. “Jesus,” she said, laughing, “you’re really a member of the club now. Or gang. It’s a gang, isn’t it, like in West Side Story, us against them? Jets and Sharks, right?”
“Right,” he said, picturing the actors circling each other and waving their knives. “And we’re the Jets because the rest of the department, McClelland and Kellard and the rest, they’re Sharks. Definitely Sharks.”
Corey was a hundred yards off, a moving shadow flinging the ball up as high as he could and then running to catch it, over and over. The sun was a steady presence, promise of the season to come. There were birds, squirrels, children, couples with picnic baskets and transistor radios.
“You ought to get a pair for yourself,” he said. “You’re part of the gang now too.”
“Absolutely,” she said, raising a hand to shade her eyes. “I really do need something to hide behind.”
“I’m not hiding,” he protested, swiping the glasses from his face and immediately regretting it. He felt as if he’d just stepped out of a closet.
“Speaking of which,” she said, drawing her knees up to her chin and at the same time reaching down to slip off her sandals, “shouldn’t there be another session coming up?” She paused to rub the bridge of one foot, looked beyond him to where Corey was chasing after the ball, then dropped her hand and raised her eyes to his. “If we’re part of the gang now, shouldn’t we act like it?”
They went to Tim’s the next three Saturdays in a row. There was no hesitation, no awkwardness—as soon as they stepped in the door they felt a sense of belonging, of rightness, that superseded everything. This was where they were meant to be and these people, the inner circle—the gang—were their closest friends on earth because they shared in a communion no one else, least of all the stiffs in the Psych Department, could begin to imagine. And if their weekday routine was dull the Saturday night get-togethers let them blow off steam—and more, much more, to open their minds to all of creation, to get loose, go deep, inject a little adventure into their lives. Joanie needed it even more than he did. And he’d held out on her, which only made him feel bad, as if he’d betrayed her, and he hadn’t, or not that he could remember.
Joanie was outgoing, creative, bright, as bright as anybody he knew—probably, IQ-wise, brighter than he was—and she needed more engagement with life than sitting in a gloomy back room typing out cards for the catalog and filing the same books on the same shelves day after day, as she’d let him know on a regular basis over the course of the winter (“Christ, Fitz, work bores me to tears, you know that?”). He hadn’t wanted to hear it—better for him if she just put her head down and brought in the paycheck until he got his degree—but he could see that now in a way he couldn’t before, as if the drug had opened his eyes. She’d been a mother since she was nineteen and motherhood didn’t allow for much sowing of wild oats or even social life. And, of course, he’d been in the same boat, forced to grow up the instant she came to him at the beginning of their sophomore year and told him she was pregnant. It was life lived in the traces, nose to the grindstone, everything in abeyance till the goal was achieved. That was why they went to Tim’s, that was why they were there week after week, stepping across the threshold into a new life that made the old one seem like so much worn carpeting.
Tim wasn’t there the second weekend—he was in New York with the other blonde, Peggy, who aside from being beautiful was heiress to some sort of staggering fortune, the rumor of which had just begun to sift down to the inner circle—but the session went on without him, Dick and Hollingshead presiding. It was an act of defiance really, since not only had the department slapped their hands and shackled the project, but the press had got hold of the story, which was reported first in the Harvard Crimson and then jumped to the Boston Herald, a disaster all the way around. The Herald was the worst sort of rag, interested only in selling copies and distorting the truth, and the headline it ran—HALLUCINATION DRUG FOUGHT AT HARVARD, 350 STUDENTS TAKE PILLS—was not only inflammatory but inaccurate and an embarrassment for the department and the university. Tim laughed it off. Dick got angry. People began to look over their shoulders, but the sessions went on.
And while Tim might not have been there that weekend, Maynard Ferguson dropped by, along with his wife, Flora Lu, and her pet monkey. The monkey—a rhesus macaque, same as the ones used in research—had a rhinestone collar and a little leash and she dosed it with a few grains of psilocybin and called it Thelonious Monkey. Which would have been a bit much—excessive, really—but for the fact that she was one of the most stunning women Fitz had ever laid eyes on, a celebrity’s wife who traveled in celebrity circles, leagues ahead of Joanie or Fanchon or practically anybody else, and it was a certifiable fact that whatever a stunning woman did or said was intrinsically fascinating. And right. And correct. And inarguable.
The trips—three trips, three weeks running—were as powerful and transformative as the ones that had come before, though God remained elusive, at least for him, even if He did play a prominent role in Charlie’s and Alice’s experiences, and to hear her talk of it in the aftermath, Flora Lu’s as well. For her part, Joanie seemed to negotiate her own trips with equanimity, never experiencing any strong negative reactions (Charlie was calling them “freak-outs” now, a whole new vocabulary replacing the standard Freudian lexicon) and if she climbed the heights or embraced the Light, she kept it to herself. And there was no sex, both of them gone so far inward their bodies were no more than afterthoughts. Husks, just husks.
“So what was it like for you?” he asked her after the second Saturday, the one on which the monkey tripped with them.
“I don’t know,” she said, “it’s hard to put into words.”
“Ineffable, right?”
She smiled, a soft compression of her lips. “Isn’t that the whole point?”
There was no session scheduled for the fourth week, though by now Tim wasn’t so much presiding as participating and on any given day someone at the Homer Street house would likely be tripping, so Saturdays didn’t hold quite the significance they formerly had, at least not for the members of the inner circle. In this case, though, the Saturday party was upstaged because of Walter Pahnke’s Good Friday experiment, for which Fitz intended to live up to his promise to serve as a guide though Joanie had been unhappy about it when he’d first mentioned it to her and was just as unhappy now. There were two complicating factors. The first was that Joanie (who hadn’t, thankfully, found out about his post-meeting trip and the essential part Fanchon had played in it) was becoming increasingly possessive over the drug experience and resentful of anyone’s excluding her. The second was that the experiment, by design and of necessity, excluded her. It was science, he kept telling her, it was controlled, academic, a study, and she wasn’t a grad student and she wasn’t a prof and, as he’d told her from the beginning, this would involve males exclusively. Which, of course, only made the situation worse.
“What’ve you got against females?”
“Nothing.”
“Aren’t there any women in the seminary?”
“Apparently not.”
“All right. Great. Then you tell Walter—and whoever, Tim—that when they want to do a double-blind psilocybin experiment on librarians, I’m their girl. Or woman. I’m a woman, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” he said, “all woman, a hundred percent,” and he’d tried to take her in his arms but she pushed him away.
The day of the experiment—Good Friday—dawned clear, though a chance of rain was predicted for later in the day. It was balmy. It was spring. The air was dense with the scent of flowers, and the animal world, from pigeons to squirrels to house sparrows and the ducks and geese on the river, was busy processing hormonal urges in a
flurry of wings and blurred paws. Which didn’t mean a whole lot to Fitz, who’d had to put up with Joanie’s silence at breakfast and actually left the house half an hour early just to get away from her incinerating gaze. He sniffed the air, registered springtime, slammed into the car and shot up the street, irritated by the fact that the muffler seemed to have developed another perforation and the gas tank was all but empty.
Everyone had agreed to meet at ten A.M. at the Andover Seminary in Newton Center, not far from Tim’s, where the ten guides and twenty theology students would be given identical envelopes containing a powder that was either a 30-milligram dose of psilocybin or a like dose of nicotinic acid. Each envelope was stamped with a code number, and no one, not even Pahnke himself, knew which contained the drug and which the placebo. Just before noon, once the drug had had a chance to come on, they would all be driven to Marsh Chapel on the B.U. campus for the Good Friday mass featuring a sermon by Reverend Howard Thurman, the thesis being that those under the influence of the psychotropic drug would be more likely to have a religious experience than would the control group, with the further implication that divine states—religious ecstasy—could be achieved chemically, just as Tim theorized and a number of the inner circle had begun to discover for themselves.
Though it was Walter’s experiment, it was Tim who greeted him at the door (and Tim who’d obtained the drugs, sidestepping the department’s new strictures and churning through his ever-widening circle of acquaintances till finally a psychiatrist in Worcester supplied him at the last minute). Fitz greeted Ken, Charlie, Dick, Hollingshead and the other guides, then went round to each of the Andover students, most of whom were younger than he and understandably a bit ambivalent as to what to expect, and said a word or two of encouragement, feeling very much the veteran. Which in itself was odd. He’d had all of six trips while Tim had had well over two hundred and Hollingshead—who knew how many he’d taken? Still, he was experienced, on a whole other plane of consciousness from these students, who were, after all, to borrow a phrase from Tim, squares.
Walter and Tim passed round the envelopes, Walter recording the number of the envelope beside each name, then everyone dissolved the contents in water, and after a brief prayer, ritually drained the glasses and settled in to wait for the effects to take hold. Half an hour later Fitz began to feel a familiar stirring or buzzing, as if his body were hooked up to an electric current, but he couldn’t be sure yet whether this was the effect of the drug or the placebo. He’d been seated on a bench in the back of the room with Ken, talking, of all things, about baseball (Ken was a Sox fan and convinced the team was going to have a mediocre season; he himself didn’t have much to say about it except that his hometown Yankees were the ordained power and Ken should just get used it), when all at once he felt restless and got up to pace round the room. His skin began to prickle. He felt hot, so hot in fact that he pushed through the door and went out into the fresh air, depressed all of a sudden because the overheating and prickling were indications that he’d got the nicotinic acid when what he wanted—what he’d been craving, he realized—was the real thing. If he was going to give up his morning and afternoon in a good cause—and this was an eminently good cause, not just for science or Tim or Walter or the project, but for him too, as a participant, as a guide—then he figured he might as well enjoy the experience.
He was standing there on the lawn in the shade of an oak glistening with minuscule new leaves when all at once the leaves turned to scales and the oak wasn’t an oak but one of the dinosaurs from Wells’s fantasy and he knew he’d got the real thing. It was only a glimpse—the tree was a tree again—but it made him laugh aloud. He was at the beginning of a journey, just strapping himself in, and now there were the colors too, so intense he had to reach for his sunglasses, which didn’t help at all. He was wondering about that, enjoying himself by pushing the sunglasses up and down the bridge of his nose, now you see it, now you don’t, when he heard a voice call out behind him and turned round to see Tim standing just outside the door of the seminary. “Hey, Fitz, time to go,” Tim said, and here was the whole group filing out the door and into the cars parked along the street.
Was he okay to drive? Nobody asked, the presumption being that half the drivers would be feeling the effects and half wouldn’t—and at this juncture no one could tell the difference. He climbed into his car along with Ken and the four students whose trips the two of them would be responsible for monitoring and though Ken didn’t say anything about any subject other than baseball the whole way over, Fitz could see that he too was one of the lucky ones. As for the students, he’d forgotten their names the minute he’d been introduced to them, and they all seemed to look alike too, but for the one in the middle of the backseat whose eyes were like black sinkholes and who seemed strung together with wire, everything tightened to the breaking point, even the navy-blue tie he wore like a noose. Okay. Here we go. The car knew the way, the drug subsided and rose again in a roil of foaming waves, Ken talked of nothing but Yastrzemski and the students, clutching their Bibles, never said a word.
For evident reasons, Walter had arranged for their group to be separated from the Good Friday churchgoers, who would be seated in the main chapel in the presence of Reverend Thurman, while they would have the smaller basement chapel to themselves, the sermon to be piped down through the loudspeakers in the corners of the room. They arrived in a convoy of six cars and parked in the spaces reserved for them. Fitz pulled up to the curb with a blast of exhaust and shut down the engine, his shoulders squeezed between the door and the student who’d sat up front with him and Ken. “Well, here we are,” he said, stating the obvious.
In the next moment the doors gaped open and the students climbed out, squinting against the sunlight, while up and down the line, the guides clapped on their dark glasses. He had to smile: this was called experience and if Professor Kellard were here he would have told him as much. What do we gain from experiments? Knowledge. What’s the opposite of innocence? Experience. Simplest thing in the world, Professor. Meanwhile, they were out in the full blast of the sun and everyone’s shadow stood upright as they milled around, trying to gather themselves, and the congregation—all those women in bonnets and pearls, the men in their dark suits and the children polished like apples—climbed the steps to the main chapel and the air grew fulsome with the downward drift of perfume.
They were following Walter and Tim up these same steps, with the difference being that they would descend to the basement immediately on passing through the main doors, when Fitz caught sight of Walter’s wife and daughter picnicking on a bench in the stippled shade of a tree not a hundred feet away, and that made him think of Joanie. Here was Walter’s wife and his little girl on hand to wait out the experiment and no doubt join in the festivities afterward at Tim’s while Joanie was stuck at home, brooding. And what were her plans for the day? She hadn’t said. Hadn’t said anything, in fact.
A dank odor rose to his nostrils as he followed Walter and the students down into the basement chapel, a big spacious room that featured a single stained-glass window and a statue of Jesus holding an open Bible with the legend AND YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE inscribed beneath it. There were pews, an organ, icons of one saint or another. Someone had set a vase of flowers on the altar and he could smell them now, lilies, Easter lilies, a scent to drive down the smell of mold and the Clorox used to combat it. The students shuffled in and took seats, a few of them making a feint at genuflecting and crossing themselves. Most were utterly calm—they were divinity students, after all, and this was their natural habitat—but a few, including his charge in the navy-blue tie, seemed agitated, jerking their necks around and darting their eyes to and fro, as if seeing things the others weren’t. All right, he said to himself even as the statue of Jesus began shape-shifting before him, I’ll have to keep an eye on that one.
The service began on the stroke of the hour with a distant organ roll and a disembodied female s
inging in a dragged-down lugubrious contralto that was like a heavy dose of codeine cough syrup, and then the music faded away and the reverend came in with his basso profundo that sent up corresponding vibrations in the long boards of the pews. It was a voice you felt first in your buttocks and thighs and then in your gut and finally in the space between yours ears, each word offered up like a hymn in itself. Fitz did his best to resist it—he was a scientist, not a worshipper, and while Walter and his students might have been susceptible to all this calculated claptrap, he wasn’t, not at all. Or so he told himself.
The reverend intoned the old Bible stories, Jesus and his temptation by the devil—Be gone, Satan! For it is written, “You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve”—and slowly worked his way through the Easter passion to his thundering climactic injunction to Go out in the world and tell everyone you meet, “There’s a man, a man on the cross!” All of which would have been fine—it was nothing to him whether the statue of Jesus came to life over and over and the organ sounded and Thurman’s voice dug in and clung to him like a parasite—except that the student with the blue tie, the one he and Ken had especially to watch, was on his feet now, waving his arms and delivering a counter-sermon in a language he seemed to be inventing on the spot.
All right. Clearly, he was one of those who’d gotten the drug, and so was this other one two pews up—one of Charlie’s wards—who rose suddenly, stared wildly round him and charged the altar, halting ten feet from the statue of Christ and flinging something (which later was discovered to be his dental retainer) at Jesus himself, whether as an offering or an act of violent discord no one could say. Another student went to the organ and began playing spontaneously while Tim, who as it turned out, had gotten the nicotinic acid, gestured to his guides to let him go because whatever he did, short of harming himself or someone else, was all part of the experiment.