8

WELL, YEAH, I might have been a little bit rough on Phil Vance, but I guess I must have lost it there for a while. In those days I was definitely not in the headspace where I could have a friendly little duke-out with some clown and RESTRAIN MYSELF, if you know what I mean. I brooded about it for a while, and then, like with everything else, I went, oh, what the hell—he was only in the hospital that one night, and they checked him out and there was no serious damage done to him, and I was glad to hear that because I had nothing against the guy. He just had no business fucking with me, that’s all. But I couldn’t run that one too long before some little voice in my head goes, “Come on, Parker, who are you kidding? You’re a MENACE TO THE CIVILIAN POPULACE.” It never would have occurred to me to go to the VA with any of this shit. What the fuck did I have to complain about? I’d been in field maintenance, for Christ’s sake.

Anyhow, I took the special issue in to the printer, and when it was ready, I picked it up and drove around town, delivering it to all the usual places, and so there it was, out on the street, and I figured that was pretty much the end of the line with me and the Weasel, so now there was absolutely nothing preventing Cass and me from going to see the sea. Well, what we discovered real quick is that they’ve got a conspiracy there in Boston, Massachusetts—like nobody wants you to see the sea, like every time you try, you run into a gate or a fence—so the first chance we got was in Marblehead, which they say is named for one of the early governors of Massachusetts. They’ve got sailboats in Marblehead, and they’re real pretty, and we stood there and watched them for a while, and then I got this profound idea. “Hey, old buddy,” I said, “why don’t we try some of that day-glo orange shit to see if it’s any good?” So we each popped a cap. That was the first mistake. We waited a while and all we could feel was speed coming on, so we figured it was nothing but icing sugar and candy color and a big healthy hit of crystal. That was the second mistake. Then we decided because the sea was so groovy in Marblehead, we should keep right on going up the coast to see how much more of the sea we could see. That was the third and final mistake.

There’s one good thing about me—no matter how ruined I’ve got myself, I can always drive. So the next thing I know we’re in North Dakota, except that somehow or other we’re in New Hampshire at the same time. I remember thinking, shit, it’s amazing I never realized before how easy it is to be in two places at once. And my Uncle Doc, the veterinarian, turned up along with some hitchhikers we picked up, and one of them was driving the camper for a while, and he was kind of an unusual dude because he had a Santa Claus suit on, and when I looked out the right window it was pine trees and New England, and when I looked out the left window it was dusty drab North Dakota with those low rolling hills. We did a lot of laughing through this shit.

It was kind of exhausting there for a while, but we did finally manage to pull over—you know, just off the main base flight line in Ton Son Nhut—and tried to cop some Zs, but then my father turned up. And you know what he does, the evil son of a bitch? He climbs right in the goddamned camper bed with us—like he pushes his way in between me and Cass—and I’ve got to argue with the old bastard all night long. Well, eventually we achieved unconsciousness. And when we woke up, we were in Maine of all bizarre places, and I drove into the nearest town and we had us a nice stack of hots. I bought the local paper and discovered that three days had vanished. Cassandra was coughing like she was going to die, so I turned around and headed back for Boston. Naturally we just had to drop another cap to get us back to town.

OK, so a few more days get lost somewhere out there in the far galactic regions of awesome cosmic black space, and then we’re coming down. Oh shit, I mean COMING DOWN. We’re parked in downtown Boston, and it’s very early in the morning, this cold grey spaced-out morning, and we’re sitting on the fucking roof of the camper, right? We’re sitting there cross-legged eating doughnuts. Cassandra looks at me and says, “Tommy, I think we better try to get straight.” She looks just GHASTLY. Her hair’s all stiff with dirt, and she’s wearing the same clothes she’s been sleeping in for a week— work shirt and jeans and her old beat-to-shit boots—and from the looks of her we might have spent a few nights in a hog wallow, and I’ve got a pretty good idea I’m not looking so fucking wonderful myself. I guess if the Wretched American came by right then and took our picture, we would’ve been perfect for one of their stories about the HIPPIE MENACE.

I say to Cassandra, “You’re right. We better get straight.” So we start talking about who’s the most soothing person we know and we decide on John. She says, “Yeah, we can depend on him. He’ll be the same goofy fucker he always is. That’s what we need. REALITY REFERENCE.” And all the time we’ve been rapping, the streets have been grey and blank and totally deserted. But suddenly, just like somebody threw a switch, there’s people hustling everywhere. There’s hundreds of them, and they’re all in a hurry.

Me and Cass look at each other and we both start to laugh. It’s the straights going to work. And they look so absolutely ridiculous we’re busting our guts. I mean it’s better than a Charlie Chaplin movie. So here comes this poor secretary up the street, and as soon as she gets a glimpse of us, her nose goes straight up in the air, and she starts really stepping it off, going faster and faster. Cassandra gives her this big wolf whistle.

Well, that poor secretary is just immaculate, man, she’s motherfucking CLEAN. If she’d had some flaw, Cassandra might not have gone nuts, right? But the poor secretary is just exactly the way she ought to be from top to toe. She shoots one glance over at us when she hears the wolf whistle, and I see her go like totally paranoid, and her nose is really up in the air, and now she’s really moving. Cass jumps off the camper and lands right behind her.

“Jesus Christ, Tommy,” Cass yells at me, “she’s beautiful. Not even a run in her stockings. Hey lady, you sure are looking good.” And the secretary is trying to pretend she isn’t hearing any of this shit. “Get a load of the shoes. Bonwit Teller’s, I bet. Right, lady?” The secretary sort of halfheartedly starts to run, her plastic heels banging down, PING, PING, PING. And Cass is running right along behind her.

I can’t believe it’s for real. Cass flicks up the poor girl’s skirt in the back. “Get a load of the slip.” And the secretary breaks into the closest she’ll ever get to a dead sprint. Cassandra can’t keep up because she’s started to cough. The secretary is at the end of the block by now, and she peers back over her shoulder to see if she’s safe yet, and Cassandra yells after her, “PLASTIC CUNT.”

I’m just blown away. Cass had started the whole thing laughing, but it’s not funny anymore. It’s absolutely vicious, like sheer hatred. And she walks back to the camper out of breath and coughing and I say, “Hey, wow. You were really hard on her.”

She says, “Yeah, I don’t know what got into me. Shit. There’s nobody in the world more fucked over than secretaries.”

• • •

SO, FOR our next trick, we go sailing over to John’s. He’s still in the sack, but he don’t give a shit. He’s been freaked for days, and he’s just DELIGHTED to see us. He even makes us a big mother omelet for breakfast. He’s got himself tied in a real knot—like he’s in one of those famous YOU CAN’T POSSIBLY WIN spaces. Seems like Pamela the Great has pissed off to New York, leaving him holding the bag over their COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY article, and all the heavies in town are out for his ass. And he sure ain’t working for the Weasel no more—like he can’t even go in the office or maybe they’ll lynch him. And this would be the ideal time to go skittering back to Canada—like all the signs are right—except he can’t do that because he’s waiting for Pamela to come back.

I say, “OK, old buddy, here’s the straight scoop. One thing you should never do with chicks is WAIT FOR THEM, you dig? Because once they figure out that you’ll WAIT FOR THEM, they’ll take all the time you’ve got.”

Cass says, “Jesus, that’s about the piggiest thing I ever heard in my life.”

I say, “Yeah, but ain’t it the truth?”

She says, “Well, I got to admit there’s a grain of truth buried in there somewhere.”

John says, “Fuck, Ethan and Terry invited me to go up to New Hampshire with them. Maybe I should do that.”

I say, “NEW HAMPSHIRE? Jesus fuck, man, we just came back from New Hampshire. You got to avoid that place like the plague. It’s real freaky up there,” so I get to tell him all our war stories about that ridiculous day-glo acid. I figured he could use a laugh or two, right? Like he couldn’t believe the guy in the Santa Claus suit. I say, “Shit, that dude was as real as anything else.”

Cass says, “That was no dude in a Santa Claus suit. That was motherfucking SANTA CLAUS.”

So we’re doing a little smoke, and we’re yucking it up and looking halfway decent, and even John kind of cheers up, like, “Well, maybe I will go to New Hampshire. Shit, I’m not doing anything here bouncing off the walls. You guys want to crash here while I’m gone?” Sure, we say. He calls up Ethan, worried, you know, that maybe they’d already left, but of course they hadn’t left. It wasn’t even noon yet.

“Terry said they were thinking of dropping some of that day-glo shit once they got up there,” John says. “It’s really some heavy shit, huh?”

“Like a stone,” I say.

“Like the anchor on a motherfucking ocean liner,” Cass says.

“Shit,” he says, “doesn’t sound like a game for beginners. Well, I guess I’ll play babysitter. I’m not going to go NEAR that shit . . . not on a bet. As long as I’m in the States, I’ve got to stay STRAIGHT.” That’s pretty funny, right? He smoked weed the way most people breathe air.

He throws some shit in his knapsack, and Ethan and Terry swing by and pick him up, and that leaves me and Cassandra. Home. I mean, it’s a fucking rat hole, but right at the moment it’s our rat hole. “OK, Tommy,” she says, “let’s do DOMESTICITY.”

So we made a run to Central Square and loaded up on the grub and came back and locked ourselves in and cranked up the shower full tilt, and we washed every part of each other there was to wash, and we kept wandering in and out of the bathroom—to cool off we’d go peek out the window—and then we’d jump back under the water, and you better believe we came out CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN. So eventually, Cass says, “Hey, we better knock this shit off. Zoë’s getting soggy.” Like all the pictures John had up on his walls were getting kind of steamed, and we were running out of hot water anyway, and then we got a fuck in, and that was nice, and I fried up a bunch of potatoes, and Cass made a big salad with some of that Greek cheese that smells like dirty socks, and we broiled up a couple of steaks—both of us heavy into the carnivore trip, blood running down our chins—and I dug out some hash, perfect for when you’re coming down, and we watched some dumb show on John’s old tube, and we were looking good, right? And then at some point, like on one of those flip-arounds you get on hash where you go, POP, oh, gee, I just thought of something weird, and it turns out to be REALITY, so anyhow, Cass does one of those pops, and she looks at me and says, “Hey, you know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Those assholes are going to get John up there in the woods and dump him full of that motherfucking freaky acid.”

• • •

JOHN DROVE north. They’d left the long hot summer behind; up here, climbing these narrow roads higher into the mountains, it was almost like fall. The sun couldn’t force its full energy through to the ground, could do little more than play a brilliant game of peekaboo through the top branches of the monotonous stands of pine. When they’d run out of freeway north of Boston, Ethan had said, “You drive,” a variation on his earlier pronouncement, “You know, man, the only way not to be hiding is not to be hiding,” so John had taken the wheel and driven the forking roads that led through neat, orderly New England towns. He’d watched the church spires drift by, the village greens designed for small-scale democracy, and he’d understood why this was country that had gone for Clean Gene the year before, why this was country that was sick of the war. And pushing on up into the wilderness of austere peaks, light as caustic as etching acid, drab Christmas-tree green that went on forever, he was returning Ethan’s pickup truck to the White Mountains where it had been registered, outfitted with license plates that carried the bitter message: NEW HAMPSHIRE—LIVE FREE OR DIE.

They’d been fifty miles north of Boston before John had remembered the simple fact that New Hampshire bordered on Quebec. If he’d brought not just some of his stuff with him, but everything he needed, this could be his getaway. He kept a knapsack at the back of his closet expressly for that purpose, so why hadn’t it even crossed his mind? There was no doubt about it—he’d run Boston out, used it up, used himself up, and for what? He’d written a few good articles that he couldn’t have written in Toronto, and for what? Well, if he was going to be back at York in September, he’d better let them know, but was he going to be there in September? He didn’t know anything. He wasn’t used to driving. He felt disembodied, almost depersonalized. His mind had been cut loose, left free to circle around in huge spacey loops, and all of those loops led back to Pamela Lynne Zalman. “Shit,” he said, “I need to cool out.”

“Fuck, man,” Ethan said, “don’t let it get next to you. We went out with a bang.”

“Yeah, it might have been a bang,” Terry said, “but it had a certain whimper quality too. A real bummer after all the energy we put into that cocksucker.”

“Art ain’t eternal, babe.”

“Don’t give me that Ken Kesey crap.”

The Weasel, they were talking about. With some surprise, John realized that he didn’t give a fuck. “You always told me there was no territory we had to defend,” he said.

“You got that one right,” Ethan said, “and ain’t it a weight off your mind? Just dig it for a minute. Don’t you feel lighter? Shee-it, moving into the liberated zone. That’ll rearrange your head for you, man. Check back in with the earth, right? Like, man, we grow food up here, can’t get any more revolutionary than that. And some far-out chicks thrown in for good measure,” with a chuckle, “and maybe we can even do us a hit of that old death and rebirth.”

“Not on a bet,” John said. But why not? One of those day-glo orange capsules might give him a fresh insight—and that was something he could certainly use at the moment. He’d been wanting to try acid for years, but he’d always known that dropping it in Boston would be suicidal. Off in the woods with Ethan and Terry, however—perfectly safe. Yeah, he couldn’t imagine a better place for his first trip. “How much farther?” he said. “You want to drive?”

“Shit, no. You can bring it on home, man.”

More head games. And it was silly and dangerous bravado, but John kept on driving, knowing he couldn’t afford to be stopped, not with a driver’s license that said he was Joseph Alfred Minotti. He’d bought the damned thing in the underground, had never tested it on a cop, but he had serious doubts that he could convince anybody he was a nice Italian boy from East Cambridge. The road forked again. “Left,” Terry said.

“I’ve had it,” John said.

More road, more trees. Every pine looked like every other goddamned pine. “This is it,” Terry said. “Up that driveway.”

John drove out of the trees, up a hill onto cleared land where a dome sat like a landed spaceship in the suddenly too-bright afternoon sun. He turned off the engine; it went on knocking for a moment, then fell silent. He let go of the steering wheel, sank back, let his eyes fall shut. He could still feel the road unwinding under him.

Ethan reached across Terry, grabbed John by the back of the neck, and shook him gently. “Guess what, motherfucker?” he said. “You’re here.”

• • •

ETHAN WAS snoring on the bunk. “Real head stuff, right?” Terry said. “Puts him right to sleep.”

John laughed, heard the sound of his scraped nerves—an annoying sound like the switch got stuck—and if he didn’t stop it, Terry would know he was scared shitless. He was waiting to feel some effect, any effect at all, from the capsule of day-glo orange powder he’d swallowed.

Terry pulled off Ethan’s boots and covered him with the sleeping bag. “Never know how he’s going to do behind any particular drug,” she said. “He’s ripped out so many of his brain cells by now, his head probably looks like an anthill.”

“You feel anything?” John asked her.

“No, just kind of edgy.”

“Yeah, me too. Like? Nervous?”

“Yeah. Feels like mescaline coming on,” she said, “but I can’t tell yet. Could be milk sugar and candy coloring and our heads doing the rest. You want to sit outside, man?”

John followed Terry outside. The day was cooling down; the red-gold light of the setting sun was long and slanting, and John felt it ignite something far back in his mind—the slow fuse of memory. Terry led him to the very top of the hill. “This is nice,” she said. “We can watch the sunset.”

Ethan had built two structures on his land. The first—a rough, hastily slapped-together cabin called “the shack”—was hidden by the trees at the foot of the hollow; it had been mere shelter, a base camp where Ethan had lived while he worked on “the house,” that spacious, breathtaking Buckminster Fuller dome. John was going to be staying in the shack, Ethan and Terry in the house. It hadn’t occurred to John that they would want their privacy, but of course they did—it made perfect sense—but he couldn’t imagine anything worse than tripping out all alone in that crappy little box in the dark woods at the bottom of the hill. They wouldn’t expect him to do that, would they?

Terry sat down on the ground facing west; he sat down next to her. “Jesus,” she said, “it doesn’t feel like ordinary acid. They must have cut it with speed or some damn thing, crystal maybe. I’m afraid we’re going to speed all night . . . you know, at some point just turn around and face the other way and watch the sun come up.”

“Yeah, I feel janglier than all hell.”

“Just sit here, man, and look out over the valley. Like there’s nothing you’ve got to do. Just wait for the twilight. Like Don Juan says, ‘The crack between the worlds.’”

John felt a chill of excitement deep inside his body—like a spray of ice water delivered by enema. “This is my first trip,” he said.

“Yeah, I know. Just trust your head, man.”

The rim of the sun was still visible behind the trees. John stared in that direction until his eyes began to ache, then looked away. The blue-green shadows had appeared, for a moment, curiously in motion. “No,” Terry said, “it’s not just speed. It’s a hell of a lot more than speed.”

“I’m scared,” he said. Shit, he hadn’t meant to say that.

“Just get behind it. That’s just the way it comes on.”

He felt as though each of his internal organs was being whisked, carefully, with an ice-cold camel-hair brush. He clenched his teeth and tried to get behind it—whatever the hell that meant. “I’m getting this horrible shaky feeling. Does it ever stop . . . the shaky feeling?”

“Yeah,” Terry said, “I’m getting it too. It’s just a part of getting off . . . like how you get off the launch pad, right? It should stop once we’re into the trip.” She smiled. “Either that or we won’t be able to notice anymore.”

It was nothing like grass. He’d hoped that’s all it would be—the same quality as a high on Magical Michoacan, only more intense, more profound—but everything was sharp, winding tight. He drew out his cigarettes, looked at the back of his hand. For a moment each of the tiny hairs was stiff with electricity. He looked up quickly. Amazing how long the sun could continue to hang behind the edging of trees, amazing that the wind was not the least abstract, was rather a clearly defined presence as it passed over the length of the valley with a sensuous stroking motion, turning back the hissing leaves. Unpleasant. Blinking, a bright flicker behind his eyelids, he’d seen for a fraction of a second a hand stroking a long sleek leg in a nylon stocking. He shuddered.

Immediately his mind was talking, generating a continuous stream of safe protective words—about how the city was evil after all, just as Ethan said it was, abstract and artificial. You learned concrete, subways, street patterns; you didn’t learn the names of the trees. You became a city boy, at home in any urban center in the world, foreign and uneasy the minute you drove a hundred miles out of town. And it was no wonder that Ethan didn’t give a shit about the Weasel anymore; looking down from the top of the hill, John could see Ethan’s mind at work. There was Ethan’s house like something out of the Whole Earth Catalogue, all glass and freshly nailed wood smelling like a clean new beginning. And there was Ethan’s garden, the neat rectangles of it—corn and beans, tomatoes and lettuce, radishes and onions and carrots. “A little slice of paradise”—that kitschy phrase—the Peaceable Kingdom, the New Jerusalem. The tribes were coming together, Ethan said, a loose anarchist structure. They were even getting the locals involved—and back in Toronto, people had been talking about doing the same thing in Northern Ontario. Yeah, that’s where it was at—not in the motherfucking city with its mad politics. Pamela’s mad politics.

But wait a minute—it had nothing to do with the city. What was he doing out here with some alien chemical, some unnamed day-glo powder, filtering out of his digestive juices and into his bloodstream and headed for his brain cells to fuck them up irredeemably? He wanted everything to fall into place—the whole huge demonic pattern. No, more than that, he wanted to come up with something even bigger than Pamela’s total critique—to transcend the pattern—but now he knew that his mind wasn’t going to follow any assignments. His mind was going to do what it fucking well pleased.

He found a cigarette in his hand. Lit it. Said again to Terry, “I’m scared.” Looked into her black gypsy eyes.

“It’s OK to be scared. Just don’t go away inside your head.”

“Do you really know anything?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yeah, I do. I’m in contact with some heavy entities. I can call on them if I need to. But listen. This is important, man. Don’t go away. Just keep in contact with me no matter what happens, OK?”

Her words frightened him profoundly. He couldn’t speak. Dragged on the cigarette. Felt the smoke all the way to the base of his lungs. Remembered Pam’s line—the personal is the political. Or was it—the political is the personal? Either way would do. That double-faced motto vibrated with power, hidden meaning. If he could pry it open . . . “I’m having . . .” he said slowly. “Well, I guess you could say . . . I’m having a profound case of misgivings.”

“A little late for that. We’re not exactly right around the corner from Mass General and their handy-dandy stomach pump.” She reached out and squeezed his hand. “Don’t worry, man. Just get behind it, whatever happens. Trust me. And Ethan brought something along in case you bummed out. I wasn’t supposed to tell you, right? He was hoping you’d do it on your head the whole way, but he’s got some thorazine. If it gets too dreadful, we’ll dump you full of it.”

“That’s comforting. How the fuck did Ethan know I was going to drop acid?”

“I don’t know, but he did.”

Jesus. That was heavy. Ethan and Terry had planned it. They’d worked out all the details ahead of time. It was some kind of horrible test—but no, that was crazy, just more of the old Boston paranoia. “Trust me,” she’d said, but could he do it? And the damned recalcitrant sun was still hanging behind the trees as though it had no intention of ever setting. Terry was sitting cross-legged, her back upright, her hands resting on her thighs, centered and one-pointed, in a perfect half-lotus like a buddha—if a buddha would have worn dainty hand-made leather sandals and a lavender miniskirt. He tried to connect back to the night she’d read the Tarot for him, the feeling he’d had for her then—that she was wise, sphinxlike, ancient, in tune with womanly forces far beyond his paltry masculine comprehension—but now she just looked like a pretty chick. Great figure, beautiful eyes, younger than he was. He hardly knew her. How the hell could he expect her to lead him through anything?

He watched as she linked her fingers, stretched her arms over her head until her elbows made tiny snapping noises, arched her back. She uncrossed her legs, slipped off each sandal—quick sliding sound of leather against bare skin. Maddening. Lay back on the ground and stretched. He thought he saw blue light, crackle of Reichian electricity down one of her long legs—tension crotch to knee, down the inner thigh. Once he would have known the name of the muscle. I sing the body electric, followed immediately by: we’re here to do a deed without a name. Shut up, shut up, shut up, he told his chattering mind.

Caught in a tangle of drawn and knotted sensations, disconnected mental fragments arriving without any warning. He’d trusted Pamela. He was in love with Pamela. Why the hell hadn’t she called him? What the hell was she doing? And a nasty flash of insight—that he was bouncing from girl to girl just like in his WVU days. A repeated pattern? Yeah, and Terry was supposed to be safe because she was somebody else’s girlfriend? But the only girl he could really trust was Cassandra, and now she was somebody else’s girlfriend too, and he was tripping out (oh, my God, he could feel it), alone with Terry—whoever the hell she was—on a hilltop in alien New Hampshire. Fear of getting lost (I’ve always wanted to ask you). Was he still smoking a cigarette? Yes, he was still smoking a cigarette. And he was saying it out loud: “ . . . to ask you what your real hair looks like?”

She laughed. She sat up and, for a moment, the entire world tilted with her like a gyroscope righting itself. “Christ, you’ve got eyes like a hawk. Yeah, old watchful Ray. My real hair’s mouse-brown and straight as a poker. Hey, can I do one of your smokes? Mine are in the house.”

She was talking, but he couldn’t quite follow her. “ . . . when I turned into Terry. Been stoned for days, man. You could still get pure Sandoz acid, like straight from Switzerland. Oh, incredible. Looked in the mirror, saw my eyes looking back. My dark eyes. Thought, that’s real, man. Not Maggie but Terry. Saint Terry. Saint Teresa. No, Saint Teresa’s shadow. Demon Terry. Terry the witch. Looked and said, you’re a gypsy child, they left you in that fucking awful nest like a cuckoo child.”

Listening, he tilted toward her. It was possible she hadn’t said a word.

Twilight was pressing in around them. Just a single line of light left of the sun. Trees going silhouette black. Clarity returning, making him remember the uneasy confusion where he’d just been. She was saying, quite distinctly, in an absolutely normal voice, “ . . . drinking beer with Jill, and there was Ethan staring at me. Like I’d never seen a man with so much motherfucking hair in my life . . . and giving me the look. You know the way he can stare at you like a goddamn madman? And Jill says, ‘You aren’t actually going to talk to him, are you?’ And I say, ‘Sure.’ And an hour later Ethan and I are floating around town in his truck, laughing like a couple of fucking idiots . . . just whacked out of our gourds on pure Sandoz acid.”

There was nothing the least bit strange going on here. John was merely asking her, “But how does Ethan handle it? I mean it’s a contradiction, isn’t it? With his naturalness thing?”

“Oh sure. He handles it by pretending it isn’t happening. Like I was born with black hair, right? I just go off and get it done in the daytime when he’s not home. He never says a word. It’s almost like he’s forgotten Maggie with her straight brown hair.”

And John was asking in a perfectly ordinary way, “Why do you dress like that?” Pointing with his glowing cigarette tip, in the increasing dark, to her flimsy Indian blouse, her tiny skirt, her bare thighs.

She grinned at him. He could barely see her. “I like fucking men up,” she said. And then her face took on a peculiar, comic expression as though she’d deeply surprised herself with what she’d just said. John began to laugh. Terry began to laugh. The laughter turned into solid blocks, a row of them like dominoes, and marched down the hill. Then they marched back up the hill again. Like a row of soldiers: HA, HA, HA, HA, HA. Don’t pay attention to that or you will go crazy. The inside of Terry’s mouth was pink. How could he see it in the dark? “It’s magic,” she said, and they both laughed again.

“Yeah, it was right after I dropped out of BU,” she was saying, “and I was working for this motherfucking insurance company. Boring? Jesus Christ, you can’t believe it . . . but the men in there . . . Oh, it was beautiful. I’d wear these miniskirts, like short, man . . . Show them my ass, and Jesus. I bend over the filing cabinet, see those dicks jump up in their pants all over the room. Oh, just fucking beautiful.”

John had never heard anything so funny in his life. He was rolling on the ground laughing. He was pounding his fists into the dirt. “I didn’t think you knew,” he gasped.

“Are you kidding? One poor asshole in there, man, I’d go bend over his desk, stick my tits in his face. No bra, right? And I’d just watch him go to pieces. And then I’d reach up to adjust the blind so my skirt rides up. He’s fucking foaming, man.”

The laughter was marching around in circles on the top of the hill, a regiment of Prussians—HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA. John knew he had to stop it. “And then in the bar I said to him, ‘Why are you so fucking lame?’” John was laughing so hard that the tears were streaming down. “‘You fucking limp-dicked dude,’ I said. Oh, man, you should have seen his face.” Terry was rolling on the ground laughing. Suddenly John knew that he had invented all of it, that she hadn’t said anything like that.

John and Terry were sitting cross-legged looking into the twilight. Neither of them was laughing. “What were you saying?” John said.

She turned her face toward him. Her eyes looked unusually large and bright, like great sheened pools of dark oil. Slowly and deliberately, with a ritualized mime’s gesture, she extended her hand, one lacquered scarlet nail, and touched him in the center of his lips. “Evil,” she whispered.

“What did you say?” John yelled, staring at her. “Terry? What have you been saying?”

“See the little boy, right? The little boy growing up in some pissy little mill town, right? See the dude who was in the Merchant Marines. It’s all still there, back of all that hair.”

She was talking quickly. John was rolling on the ground laughing. “He likes coming in the back way. Like dogs. Wiggle my ass. Say, ‘No, man, not in the mood right now.’ Get him so hard he’s dripping in his underwear. Can’t stand it anymore, rips my panties off, pushes me down, comes in the back way. I feel him coming in, man. So much of a hurry, man. And it’s a little boy coming into me so fast he can’t hold it back. Comes into me hard and squirts right away.”

Hey, this was private shit. John knew that he shouldn’t be hearing any of this private shit. “Terry,” he yelled into the dark.

“Maybe a week or so I don’t want to, right? Until he’s going fucking bananas. Say, ‘Oh, I’ve got cramps. Can’t make it.’ He’s getting nasty. I can see him start to itch, start to burn. Wake up in the morning with big fucking boners poking up. Say, ‘No, man, don’t feel very good yet.’ Oh, I love it, the way he starts looking at me. Then maybe we’re off at somebody’s house, lots of people around. He’s trying to do business, right? It’s a deal, takes time. We can’t leave. And I show him, just for a minute, just to him, that I haven’t got any panties on. ‘Terry, you fucking bitch,’ he says when nobody can hear him. I say, ‘Oh, daddy, I want it.’ When he sees me talking to another man, he goes nuts. His hands are shaking. He’s blown it. He can’t do a thing. One time can’t even wait to get me home. Right there in somebody’s yard in the dirt like a fucking goat.”

John knew he had to stop her from telling him any more of this private shit. But he was alone in the dark.

“Terry,” he yelled. “Terry, where the fuck are you?”

“I’m right here.”

No moon and the night was black from end to end. But he could just barely make her out. He ran toward her. She was standing under a tree, looking up into the branches, rubbing the bark with her hands. “This is sure some heavy shit,” she said. “This is stronger than any acid I ever took.”

“Terry,” he said, “I’m getting lost.”

John and Terry were crouched on all fours facing each other like two animals. He couldn’t understand why he’d thought it was dark; he could see her perfectly. He seemed to remember that he’d been barking. Had she been hissing like a cat? Her eyes were very big. “I can see into you,” she said, smiling. Their noses were almost touching. She hissed like a cat. She arched forward and licked him quickly on the lips. “You’re clear like glass to me,” she said. “You fucking love it.”

“Terry,” he said, “I can’t see.”

But he could see perfectly. She raised one hand, fingers arched. A cat’s paw. Sharply pointed scarlet nails. She batted at him with those shiny scarlet nails.

She turned away, still on all fours, and arched her back. She made a low resonant sound like a purr. He slipped his hand between her legs. She was sopping wet. “I’m going to make you squirm, man,” she said, “I’m going to make you suffer. Yeah, you’re going into hell, man. You’re going to cry and beg, but you won’t be able to do anything. Never, never, never. You do know exactly what I mean, don’t you?”

“Terry?” he said.

They were sitting cross-legged on top of the hill. They were nowhere near each other. John was staring straight ahead.

He closed his eyes a moment to try to orient himself. What if Terry had never said any of those things? What if he’d made it all up, been hopelessly lost inside his own head? He opened his eyes. The sun was still high on the edge of the horizon. Terry was sitting in a perfect half-lotus like a buddha, looking down over the valley. She wasn’t wearing red nail polish. Of course she wasn’t. In all the time he’d known her, he’d never seen her wearing nail polish.

“Terry,” he said carefully, “are you getting off on this stuff?”

She turned to look at him, her head strangely tilted. Where her eyes should have been were empty black pools.

John was crashing through the woods in the dark. He bumped into a tree, stopped, panting. “Terry!” he yelled. The night was moonless, and he couldn’t see anything but shapes.

“It’s all right, man, I’m right here.” He felt her hand on his shoulder. She was out of breath. “Here, let me lean on you,” she said, laughing. He felt her weight on his shoulder. She slipped her sandals on. “We’d better go back to the house,” she said, “or we’re going to get lost out here, and that’d be a real bummer, as whacked out as we are.” She took his hand. “It’s this way. Can you see?”

“Not a whole fuck of a lot.”

“It’s right there. That big black shape is the house. We should go in and make a fire. It’s kind of freaky out here.”

“You’re telling me.”

“How are you doing?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard for me to figure out what’s happening.”

“Just get behind it and keep in touch with me. Keep talking. I won’t let you get lost.” They were out of the woods now, holding hands, crossing the clearing toward the house.

“It’s an incredible relief just to be able to talk to you again,” he said. “You know, talk in a normal way.”

“I know what you mean. You can really go off into a weird space behind this shit. Look, the clouds seem to be clearing over there. Maybe there’ll be some stars.”

“That’d be good.”

“Are you hungry? We brought a ton of food.”

“Maybe a little. This drug is so crazy and jangly though . . .” He laughed. “Christ, Terry, I was having the most incredible hallucinations. I guess that’s what they were.”

“I thought you were. What were they about?”

“I thought we were pretending to be a dog and a cat.”

Deep in the back of her throat, she laughed. Then she mewed and, with a quick, deft motion, flicked her tongue across his lips.

He stopped, frozen to the spot. Everything remained precisely the way it had been a moment before. Still the same overcast, dark night, still the same black shape of the house a few yards in front of them. She was still holding his hand. “Terry,” he said, “what’s going on?”

“Meow,” she said, let go of his hand and jumped away laughing. The hair stiffened on the back of his neck.

Huge, windy slam in the dark. A crash and a howl like a hyena. Ethan’s voice. “Wow, man! Far fucking out!” Ethan seemed to be bouncing up and down. He seemed to be rolling in the dirt. He seemed to be crouched on all fours howling like a wolf.

Terry was meowing like a cat, and Ethan was howling like a wolf.

“Where the fuck’s Ray?”

“I don’t know. He was here a minute ago. . . . Ray . . . Hey, John. ”

Burrowing into the dirt. Hiding among the leaves.

“Hey, John. Come on, man. You’re going to freak us right out.”

He rose to his feet and walked toward the house. He knew he could manage to maintain, knew that he had to. “It’s all right,” he yelled, forced himself to laugh.

“Shit, what the hell you doing, man?” Looming just ahead, Ethan, the sharp male smell of him. Heavy male voice. John drew himself up inside, hard and careful. “You go running off into the woods, you’re going to bum yourself right out, man,” Ethan said.

John forced his voice to sound light and casual. “Having a great time. This stuff ’s really incredible. I was just going through a lot of shit in my mind . . . you know, like sorting it all out.”

“Come up to the house. We’ll have something to eat.”

“Think I want to be alone. All my stuff ’s down in the shack. Think I’ll just sit down there and meditate for a while.”

“Are you sure?” Ethan tilted forward out of the dark. John felt the large hand on his shoulder.

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“OK, but if you start to weird out, you either come back to the house if you can, or you yell if you can’t. Just yell in a loud voice, man, and we’ll be down that fucking hill quick as a wink.”

• • •

JOHN LAY on the floor of the shack in his sleeping bag. It was worse now, and he knew he could never get back up the hill. He also knew he was so terrified of Ethan and Terry that he could never, no matter how bad it got, yell for them to come down. He tried to light a cigarette, but stopped, afraid of the fire. But maybe he’d already lit a cigarette and forgotten it. He searched for it, felt nothing but the dirt under him, the rough wood of the walls.

Forgotten? What about the light? Now he was keenly aware of it. The low golden blaze of the late-afternoon sun was transforming everything, making even the dirt and wood astonishingly beautiful, and then, like the screwing down of an aperture, he was slowly squeezed back into the thick antique dark. He pulled the sleeping bag up around his ears. That chilled trembly feeling hadn’t gone away, and he heard the harsh sound of his own breath.

“Hi, do you want to dance?” Shimmering white solarized images of the park with the trees in full leaf, the hot summer sun of West Virginia, and her eyes impossibly brilliant, her hair streaming out behind her longer than in life. She’s never quite there, not quite in the sleeping bag with him, not quite in the car when he reaches for her, not quite at the side of the house where she’d been only a moment before. She leaves behind an afterimage, like that perfume called F Sharp; she’s just around the corner of the hallway, rock ’n roll playing, the high whining voice through a distant tinny radio speaker: “STAY . . . just a little bit longer. Well, your mommy don’t mind. And your daddy don’t mind.”

“Cass,” he said. “Cassandra. Please help me.”

She was immediately kneeling next to him in the dirt by his sleeping bag. She took his icy hands into hers. “Dig it,” she said, “the possible’s always intolerable.”

He saw that she was a beautiful boy. How could he have known her all these years and never figured that out before? “Cassandra,” he said, “how do I get off?”

“You don’t get off. You just hang on.”

“Help me. I’m lost.”

“No, you’re not. It’s the world that’s lost.” With birth, with aging, with death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.

John came back to find his lips moving. He’d been muttering to himself. In a briefly lucid flash, he felt the dirt under his fingers. He couldn’t trust what his hands might do the next time he was gone. They might gouge his eyes out or tear his balls off. His fingers were bleeding.

He unzipped the sleeping bag and ripped it away from him. Had to get some light in there—had to do it quickly while he could still think. He lit a match, saw the straight wooden lines of the shack swaying around him in the flame. He put the match to a candle on the shelf. For a moment he thought that he wasn’t tripping at all, that everything was perfectly normal. He pulled his boots on.

Then he saw the candle bend and rotate, a pulse of fire that could blot him out. He blew against it, and the dark closed him in like a hand. He jerked the door open and ran out into the night. The moon seemed to be chasing him up the hill, but he knew that it was only the clouds moving. He could stay on the trail, claw and scramble forward. He could get there on sheer will. He knew he had to be with people. His fear of Ethan and Terry was just another face to the demon in his own mind. “Ethan!” he shouted.

“Steady on there, big fellow,” Ethan seemed to be saying. But no, it wasn’t Ethan’s voice, and what was he doing wandering around on top of the hill again? Where had Terry gone? Why the hell wouldn’t that damned sun set?

He couldn’t understand how he could have been so confused. He wasn’t on top of the hill at all. The house wasn’t hard to find. He could see light pouring out from under around the edge of the door. Inside was safety—talk, food, thorazine—but he stopped, stood still, and strained to hear a sound, any sound, any ordinary human activity. He couldn’t hear a thing. What if they were fucking in there?

The door swung open. A girl was standing in the doorway. She was the dark center of an eclipse, a silhouette of the iconic. Jukebox laughter blurred and was gone, and of her dress, from the curve of it, he knew she was in disguise. Pamela? Rain, sweeping water, torrents down, but no, that was the sharp points of her nails—but, wait a minute, that wasn’t right. Nothing in his head was right. Jesus, he thought, I can’t deal with this shit.

The acid was rolling over him like a tidal wave—something like a road, bouncing over the railroad tracks, and if a road can— Heels and my prom dress? Cassandra, even further on the bus, ride jumbles it up, but wearing with— With nothing seriously left of him, death coming at any rate and slid off his lap, smoothed down her skirt, an itsy-bitsy voice: ice-cold, fallen, seen things, well, you’re stuck with it forever. Focus, asshole. Yes, he could—a nipped waist and a full skirt: “Come on, Alice, sit by me,” with a sensation like Zoë was the girl.

Flame of a match lit Revington’s dark face, flowed, and that’s what models did, disguised—incredible. The air was music. Yes, it was making him see things: she wore a classic ball gown with a should-have-known-years-ago. The divide in space, it can also divide in time, carried along on the deep fast channel; his life had divided at a crucial moment, and a (why don’t you ever listen to me?) whole between us and you; there’s a great gulf fixed, other life had been waiting for a shudder of brilliance, him, her, the entire—that is, from where it had lurked and had time. All he had to do was step back to that crucial moment, that crack between the worlds, and not chicken out, getting back there flying, just as easy as Alice stepping through: he’d been looking down at his feet so that laughter drifted across the water, and they which would pass from hence into muddy sleep. In black patent, he hadn’t known which or the girls, of as a man, and outside it was raining. She looked up now and saw. Took his hand. Come on. Alice. With me.

The train comes by every hour it seems like, where they’d played dolls and dressup, and with that, the whole track inside, and what must be the voices of children, open doorway, looking out. The relief was, of course, but let’s say there is a hell. She could see John Dupre at the end of the Purkinje Shift, shape of a girl, standing in, seen men shot, seen men burnt alive. She could feel how freaked, and that glittering mask, that she was dark sorrow, lips burning. Wir sindt nicht einig, she that was Nancy Clark thought, darkly as roses.

She knew she had to thrust her mind against the edge of real objects, trace her clearly defined, out in the sad muddy Ohio, try to maintain contact—they disguised themselves. The people are music, still stuck there in the dark that’d make you puke, with closed eyes, so tight she could feel pink and green and golden lights, she wore a classic ball gown, he knew he should recognize her, she wore a classic ball gown with a but-he-couldn’t-quite-remember, baby gets upstairs for a cold shower? No, he knew he had to get back, Cassandra said it was, she thought, biting into the palms of her hands, she’d gone the wrong way, but this acid thing we mistakenly call “life,” continue the way she’d been going—this time was easy, just as easy as looking glass. Confused, embarrassed—Way to go!—with the boys, Zoë dressed as a princess, she you can go so great he began to cry, crouch, staring in, of the past rewound, and she was terrified he was—the poor fucked-up, chilled by a draft of his old, to contact her own body, something outside his own mind. She clenched his fists, clenched—

John let his hands fall open, took a deep breath, and opened his eyes. He was crouched in the dirt just a few feet from the house. That goddamn freaky acid came in waves; he’d figured out that much. It had just rolled over him, but now it had left him free and clear—for the moment. He had to get to people before the next wave hit him. The door was partially open; he could hear Ethan and Terry laughing inside. He could feel the tears running down his face. He ran toward the light yelling, “Ethan? Terry?”—felt his body go rigid in the sleeping bag, the dirt under his fingers digging in, the pain and sticky warmth of his own blood. Oh my God, he thought, I haven’t gone anywhere. I’ve got to start all over again.