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“Zyprexaolanzapinezydiswithfluoxetinesymbyaxothan.” She pronounced this word with familiar ease. “This drug was recalled from the pharmaceutical market, but I still have a renewable prescription. The doctor said it works best for me, regardless of the side effects.”
Why are smart people always so fucking crazy? Or maybe it’s not that smart people are crazy, it’s just that crazy people present themselves as being super-duper smart. She did. She clung to the notion of her genius like her life depended on it. But you know, if I pull it apart, nothing she ever said was really that smart.
“Geniuses are always considered a little crazy by their generation,” she told me. She told me she had a photographic memory, then she recited the names of the presidents in alphabetical order, then in the order of their presidencies. Then she did the same with the names of philosophers from Aristotle to Žižek.
But that’s not really genius, is it? That’s just memorizing needless shit, which I now know she probably does to keep herself from picking her toenails down till they bleed or shaving all the hair off her entire body for the third time in one day. She told me she can feel it growing.
Kali also told me she has two alternate personalities: a man whose name she doesn’t know, and he is very shy, and a woman named Rose, who is a very horrible person, who slugged her first boyfriend in the face once. But she never remembers anything Rose does.
She said when she becomes these other, more horrible people, it’s like a door closes in front of her and she can sometimes peek though the keyhole and see the blurred images of Rose doing things to people she knows, and she hears the muffled noises from outside, but she can’t quite make out anything clearly, and she certainly can’t control anything they (she) do(es).
She told me she was terrified of worms, and that at night she had dreams that copper worms were eating their way through her skin. That’s why, Kali said, she could never make it through Dune—because of the worms. I said that probably wasn’t the only reason.
Kali told me she could talk to turtles and smell architecture. She tried to make me register Libertarian. She told me she had a feeling about me. The first time we made love, she told me that a blinking red light named Alganon had been visiting her in the night. Alganon blinked to her from the upper corners of the bedroom as a means of communication. Alganon said that I should move in with her.
It’s not like no one told me to stay away from her. Everyone who knew her, and come to think of it, even my friends upon first meeting her, told me I should run as fast as I could in the opposite direction. But Kali knew this would happen. She’d warned me.
“People don’t like me,” she told me. “People think I’m crazy.”
“Are you?”
I guess her eyes were always a little dilated and her mouth was always smiling, especially when she was upset. She was thinner than a skeleton and cold. I don’t know what that feeling was that I had for her. Was it love? Was I just mesmerized? Maybe I wanted to save her from something. Or maybe, most likely, I, like everyone else who let themselves get close to her, believed her insanity was some kind of genius. Her family sure did. They all thought of themselves as geniuses. I guess that’s a big part of why it was so important to her. I guess that’s why her whole identity depended on it.
Jesus. Now I’m picking my nails. My bags are all packed in the backseat. She didn’t hear me leave, I don’t think. It’s three in the morning. I’m just driving around East St. Louis, aimlessly. There’s a line of whores waving at me from the side of the road. They all have really impressive jewelry that glints in my headlights as I pass. I’m just sort of circling this strip. It’s disgusting. There’s like a little minimall of peep shows and porn stores and strip clubs I keep passing, right before or after I get to the whores, depending on my direction. The peep-show mini-mall wouldn’t be so bad, if it weren’t placed directly beside what is obviously a grade school, which shares a playground with the parking lot of the sex strip mall.
I guess I could go live in my dorm. I can’t go there tonight, though. It’s late and my roommate is scared enough of me as it is, even though she’s only met me four times.
I have a dorm at a university in Southern Illinois. It’s part of my package. I haven’t even spent one night in it. I got this college package before I met Kali, when my family was still going to help me pay. They already knew I was a dyke. But when I put a face on it, her face anyway, they stopped helping me pay for anything. Not that they had it to give at all, anyhow. So now I have this stupid dorm I never used that I probably won’t ever be able to pay for, or that I’ll be paying for forever. God. Just crossing the river from St. Louis to Illinois: East St. Louis, what a shithole. And she’s still there, freaking out in our fancy apartment in the West End, the one I lived in but never paid for.
Funny, I’m paying for the crappy dorm I never lived in and not paying for the fancy place I’ve actually been living in for the past year. I should have known, when she asked me to move in with her and I told her I couldn’t afford it because of college and the dorm and all, and she said, “Don’t worry about the rent,” I should have known she needed me too much. Why else would a rich, straight girl overlook the three major facts that (a) I’m a dyke, (b) I’m poor as hell, and (c) I have a small drug problem?
Her parents have lots of money and a fancy house in the city, and she has a fancy apartment in a neighborhood too hip for her. Her mother is a failed actress with stock in Walmart and a permanent glass of red wine attached to her right hand. She’s the spitting image of Shirley MacLaine.
When her mother met me, she asked me if anyone had ever told me that I was also the spitting image of Shirley MacLaine; a young Shirley MacLaine. I said yes, that I had heard that a lot.
She said, “Oh yes, well, women always seek out women like their mothers. Isn’t that what they say? Or is it something else they say?” She asked me this with a resentful grin blooming on her face and a sarcastic lilt in her voice. She’s a little passive-aggressive about her daughter’s newfound lesbianism.
The first time I met her parents, they were hosting a Mensa party in their home. Mensa is a club for people with high IQs. They take a test, pay a due, and then hang around upper-middle-class dinner parties with a bunch of academic liberals who have no social skills. It’s great.
Her mother and father are both members of Mensa. The first time I came to one of their dinner parties, I found fifteen middle-aged frumpies sitting in a circle passing around a helium balloon and reciting dirty limericks in high-pitched voices. Ahh-ha! I thought. This is why she’s terrified of worms and drinks soap.
When we moved in together, she told me two things. One: she told me there was a headless woman in our kitchen who paced back and forth swinging her own head by its hair (which she always sees in kitchens, but only ever in kitchens), and Two: she told me she didn’t want to take her medication anymore because she didn’t need it. “I probably just needed to come out as a lesbian,” she told me. “Denying that big of a part of yourself can cause serious problems,” she told me.
For a while, I thought maybe she was right. When she stopped taking her medication, at first she seemed better. She didn’t mention the headless woman again. She didn’t vomit in the mornings. She stopped shaving every day. She even started talking to people her own age, making some friends at her college and hanging out in the radio station after classes. For a while there, yeah, when we went out, I enjoyed having fairly normal conversations that didn’t involve detailed global statistics, the sniffing of old buildings, or cryptic discussions of the possible repercussions of her having been named after an ancient god.
Maybe, I thought, the medication was the problem after all. But something did bother me about the fact of her diagnosis. I hadn’t really ever heard anyone complaining that schizophrenia was an overdiagnosed disorder. And there were still moments, even during those peaceful times, I noticed her staring intently at nothing, moving her lips softly, or squeezing her wrist till it bruised. Once, I asked her if she was really feeling more mentally stable, or if she was still seeing and hearing things, but trying to hide it. She snapped out of it, held my hand too hard and explained to me that this (I) was her first real relationship, and she wasn’t going to fuck it up. She wasn’t going to let me get away by being crazy. She didn’t want me to get away at all. She never wanted me to go anywhere actually, and if I did, not without her.
My sort of unyielding urge for danger was probably what attracted me to her in the first place. Our codependent, peaceful life wasn’t enough excitement for me. After five months of living with her in close-quarter domesticity, I started going out with my friends again. I think it was spurred by the big Y2K party. Everyone was sure it was going to be the end of the world. So we all totally obliterated ourselves. It felt like the end of the world that night. But other than everybody getting obliterated, nothing happened.
I took massive amounts of hallucinogens, stayed out partying until the sun came up, and returned home smelling like Vicks VapoRub. She hated it. She wanted me with her all the time. She said she didn’t understand why I wanted to go to parties with my dumb friends, who, incidentally, think she’s too dorky for words. And she thinks they are not intelligent enough to have the privilege of my presence.
That’s the other thing she started doing when she stopped taking her medication, obsessing over calculable intelligence levels, namely, her IQ. She’d been dragging me to at least one Mensa dinner a week, most of which are held at her parents’ house. She started threatening to take the Mensa entrance test a few weeks ago. But then, she ruminated that she didn’t need to take the test because she’s already an unofficial member. The truth is, she was terrified to take the test . . . terrified she might fail. Everyone just assumes she is an out-of-the-ballpark genius. Her parents excuse her schizophrenic tendencies, which mostly show up as small moments of quirky darkness or anxiety in their presence, as side effects of her genius. If she took the test and failed, her insanity would no longer be viewed as the residue of a great mind at work, but just what it was—crazy for the sake of crazy. And I knew being exposed in this way would totally unhinge her.
I never encouraged her one way or another. She could take the stupid test or not. I openly found the whole idea completely dull.
Earlier today, Kali asked me to go to a Mensa party with her, but I had other plans.
“Please,” she begged. “It’ll be different this time. It’s gonna be wild.”
“It’s never been wild, honey, come on. The wildest it’s ever gotten was when they decided to play strip Trivial Pursuit, and that was really just kind of uncomfortable.”
“No,” she said, “I promise, it’s gonna be wild. The guy at the radio station gave me something. I’ve been saving it for tonight.”
“What did he give you?”
“It’s a surprise. I’ve been saving it for tonight. Please. Just this once? I promise you, this thing he gave me will make the conversations much more interesting.”
I guess she thought she needed to make her life more interesting to me in order to keep me in it. I was sure she had some coke or maybe pot or something, trying to lure me away from my drugged-up friends by becoming my drugged-up girlfriend. But hey, it worked. I thought it might be kinda funny to interact with the Mensans high. So I went with her.
I grabbed a hitter and a mirror just in case Kali didn’t have the foresight, and we drove to her parents’ house.
The party was already under way when we pulled up. A few of the Mensans were still filing into the small, near-mansion, colonial-style house, which she said smelled like grapes (colonial architecture, that is). The lights were all lit up and I could hear the sound of drinking songs coming from the living room. They were singing, “A ghost that’s meshugenah makes Mendelssohn go drown.”
She turned to me and held out her tiny closed fist. “You ready?”
“I brought a mirror, and a hitter,” I told her. “Which is it?”
She opened her hand. Sitting in her palm was a small, folded piece of tinfoil.
“Oh my god, you’re not serious.”
She opened the tinfoil. Inside were two little stamps bearing images of the pink elephants from Dumbo, which smiled up at me.
“Acid? You want to do acid at your parents’ dinner party?”
She smiled excitedly at me. “Yeah. What? You’ve done it before, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, I’ve done it a lot. Enough to know you shouldn’t do it at your parents’ dinner party.”
“Oh, but cocaine would have been all right?”
“Yeah, somehow, it would. I mean, it’s very different. Have you ever even done acid?”
“Yeah, I did it once. It wasn’t intense. It didn’t really even have any effect on me. Everyone else was tripping but, I don’t know, I have a high alcohol tolerance. Maybe I just have a high tolerance in general.”
“For acid? An acid tolerance?”
“Yeah. It had virtually no effect on me. Everything was just black and white for five hours. But other than that, I felt totally normal.”
“Mmmm-hhhhmmm.”
“Listen, we don’t have to stay the whole time. If it gets too weird, we can go for a walk or just go upstairs and hang alone.”
We put the little papers on our tongues and let them dissolve. I wanted to stay outside for a while, smoke a couple cigarettes and prepare myself. But in the time it took to “prepare myself,” the acid started kicking in. And I realized, as I always do the first ten minutes of a trip, that there is no way to prepare oneself for tripping. You can tell yourself all sorts of dumb shit like, Just keep quiet and no one will know. Or, use the drug, don’t let it use you . . . la-di-da. But acid always surprises you. It always comes up with something you had no way to prepare yourself for. My friend Rob swore acid never got the better of him, swore to all sorts of meditation techniques that helped him get the most out of his trips, “to control it,” he said. Why, then, did his mother find him barreling naked through a cornfield on all fours, the words jesus christ why? written backward on his forehead in red lipstick?
Because there is no way to foresee that these sorts of things might happen. And if there is, how can the before-acid-you tell the post-acid-you not to do these things, no matter how much you want to? How can you foresee that you might want to strip naked and etch the words jesus christ why? backward on your forehead in red lipstick? How can you control that kind of insane wanting? There’s no way to explain this, really. Let’s just say, there is no way you can prepare not to react to self-inflicted schizophrenia.
Self-inflicted schizophrenia. That’s what tripping is. I never saw it so clearly before that night. But seeing it as such brought up in me a big question, which I probably don’t really want to know the answer to: What is insanity?
When we walked into her parents’ house, everything was normal. And that’s what I kept telling myself, This is normal, and this feels normal. I’m still acting normal.
Jan, her mom, came up, handed me a glass of wine, and kissed me on both cheeks. “That’s normal.”
“What’s normal?”
Fuck did I say that out loud?
“It’s normal . . . in Europe, to double-kiss like that,” I told her.
“Mmm. You’re so worldly, aren’t you?” She never missed a chance to make me feel dumb. “Come in here then. There’s something I want to show you. I think you’re really going to be intrigued by this. You just can’t believe it.”
The way she said it, I thought she might be leading me into a secret laboratory, and perhaps we would find Dr. Strangelove sitting there with the red button. Whatever it was, it seemed very important the way she kept turning to me and nodding, saying, “Yes, yes, it’s coming any minute now,” and smiling with pride and anticipation. “I’ve got this really terrific thing, you just have to see it. And tell me what you think. Don’t be afraid to give me your real opinion,” she said, an eerie, almost ravenous smile spreading across her face.
All this anticipation culminated in her taking me into the den and showing me an antique lampshade.
She talked for literally ten minutes about the history of the lampshade, the design, where she bought it, who owned it before her, and why it was a relevant historical piece. Rich people are hard enough to deal with not on acid. The things that excite them are confusing and hilarious enough without a psychedelic lens magnifying everything. As she went on about the lampshade, I was biting the inside of my cheek very hard to keep from laughing, and I suddenly realized I’d bitten it too hard and I could taste blood in my mouth. My eyes opened up very wide and I said, “Oh!” She thought I was pleased, so she moved on to the cabinet the lamp was sitting on. At this point I became worried that my feet might be melting.
“This, on the other hand, is not actually an antique,” she said of the cabinet.
I made some sort of very surprised expression, because I had just relearned how to cross my toes.
“I know,” she said. “It’s amazing! Jerry made this. He just finished it yesterday. I didn’t know my husband was such a wonder with wood. He stained it this way and la-di-da, and the cut is intended to represent designs from the something-something era.” (I wasn’t totally listening.) “And do you know what we’re going to do?” I stared at the cabinet blankly. “We’re throwing a birthday party for the cabinet.” She laughed gleefully at herself. “We’re having a birthday party for it next week!” she repeated.
“I’m sorry.”
She took this as if it were a question: a request for an explanation. But it was very simply an expression of the deep and pressing sorrow I felt for her at that moment.
“A cabinet birthday party!” Liz boomed, suddenly beside me. Liz was a soft-spoken poetic type who always had to wear something purple. Even if it was “just a dash,” she never, and I mean never, left the house without at least a bit of purple. She was a rich, pseudo-hippie, Buddhist, Jewish journalist. She possessed all of the categories that, at least one of which, most people at the party fit into. “A cabinet party for the cabinet!” she squealed, excitedly, clapping her hands. “I’m wearing my new purple dress.” She was so excited, her oversized tits were shaking beneath her purple sweatshirt. I stared too long at them.
“Are you coming?”
“No!” I said, too forcefully.
“Why not? Do you have other plans?”
“I don’t know what my plans are,” I said, anger showing in my voice. “But I’m not coming.”
I usually had an all right time at the parties, but I never felt a connection with these people like my girlfriend did. Mostly I just drank wine and made sarcastic comments when they hurled their trivia disguised as conversation at me. They seemed to like me, though. They were always sort of awed by the fact that I have no interest in appearing super smart, and I can’t quote statistics, but I can quote Skunk Anansie, Warhol, Bill Hicks, and Jello Biafra. My clothes always fit me, and I do my hair before I leave the house. I am the cool kid come down among them.
It always gets tired for the cool kid, though. Tonight, I worried my sarcastic comments might soon become too close to just being out-and-out malicious. This sudden burst of irrational anger startled Jan and Liz, probably even more than the time I freaked out on Walter, the linguist pedophile who showered his undying affection on me until I turned nineteen.
He’d given me a piece of manganese with the word “Manganese” inscribed on it from his actual elemental table. That’s right, he kept a real elemental table in his house. It took up an entire room, the table laid out as a vinyl print on the floor and actual samples of all of the elements in the appropriate place, with the exception, of course, of a few radioactive ones. It was rumored, though, that he had two of the minorly radioactive elements locked in a safe by the dresser. He’d cornered me at every party for three months (during the time I was only just eighteen), attempting to deconstruct the origin of my strange name. He’d begun invoking some sexually explicit phrases from Africa, and I finally told him, in so many words, to go fuck himself, loudly. Speak of the devil.
There was a tap on my shoulder. It was Walter; the sixty-twoyear-old self-admitted pedophile with a PhD in linguistics. It’s not like he’s constantly proclaiming his pedophilia. He just lets it slip from time to time toward the end of some of the more drunken dinner parties. He has no children of his own and has placed a swing set in his backyard for the neighbor kids. He justifies this action by saying he never actually interacts with the neighbor children, he just watches while they swing. So no one gets hurt. It’s a win-win. After he lets shit like this slip, he always finds some “clever” way to remind everyone that he has a PhD in linguistics, like it’s okay to be a pedophile as long as you are very smart.
“What’s that joke you told me last time?” he asked me, pinching the end of his greasy gray beard. “Ladies,” he said, motioning for the two other women to pay attention, “she told me this amazing joke last time, did you hear it? It goes, A Buddhist walks up to a hot dog vendor and says, ‘Give me one with everything on it.’”
The ladies looked very contemplatively at him and, I suppose, because he had a PhD in linguistics, they were wondering if perhaps it was just that his joke was over their heads and he was very smart, or if it was that I was very dumb and he was just being nice by retelling my ignorant joke.
He seems like a really skilled pedophile compared to his skills in linguistics. The joke was supposed to go, A Buddhist walks up to a hot dog vendor and says, “Make me one with everything.”
I tried to correct him, but the walls were melting, as were my feet. I shook my head slowly, no. It took me several long seconds to force out the words, “Make me one with everything,” slowly . . . loudly . . . meaningfully. And I am not sure anyone connected my statement with the joke Walter had just told incorrectly, or if my statement existed autonomously, in their minds, from that conversation. “Make me one with everything,” a desperate plea I was suddenly lobbing at them. Jan raised an eyebrow at me, and nodded.
There was the sound of an elephant honking from the other room. I jumped. Jan and Liz made disgusted faces. “Why do we invite him?” Liz whispered to Jan.
“He’s a chapter member,” Jan said in a singsong tone, throwing up the hand that was not attached to the wineglass, as if to say she had no power over the situation.
The sound of the elephant booming had come from Ed. He was an obese math wiz with Coke-bottle glasses who had recently been fired for excessive flatulence from his job in military intelligence.
“I swear to god, if he eats all of my penguin hors d’oeuvres, I’m going to kill him.” He’d also once been kicked out of an allyou-can-eat buffet for pulling his chair right up to the buffet and eating directly out of the food bins.
Jan tugged on my shoulder. “Have you seen the penguin olives?” I shook my head no. She led me excitedly out of the den and into the dining room where a statue of Bacchus laughed down at the table, joyfully watching over the impressive spread of cheeses, mini-sandwiches, and fruit. Kali came up beside me and took hold of my arm. Her eyes were wide and she was smiling an oversized smile. She was also sweating. Her mom asked if she was feeling all right. She replied too happily that she was a little nauseous, but it was probably just the medication. (She hadn’t told her mother she’d stopped taking her medication nearly a year ago.)
Jan ran her finger around the rim of her glass and swayed her hips proudly. “These took me hours to make, but I did it myself. Have you ever seen anything like this?” she asked, holding up an olive that had been cut to resemble a tiny penguin. “I just cut the stomach out and made it the head. It’s stuck on with a toothpick, see. Then I stuffed the stomach with cream cheese. The beak is a carrot, and the little wings are easy to make, just two slits in the sides.” The penguin was flapping its wings and waddling in her hand. It squawked at me. My stomach turned queasy. “Here,” she said, “try it.”
“I’m a vegetarian,” I told her.
“Oh, it’s not really a penguin! Don’t be silly!” Then she grabbed the bottom of my chin and literally shoved the penguin hors d’oeuvres in my mouth. “I spent nearly three hours making these,” she told me as she shoved it in. “You have to try it.”
I closed my mouth and tried to chew while she watched with near reverie, but I could feel the oily flesh of the penguin struggling against my tongue. I heard the miniature penguin squealing and squawking in there. It was too much, I opened my mouth and spit it out into my hand, the black-and-white muck of it just lay there, immobile. Jan let out a long disgusted “Ewwwee,” and backed slowly away from me.
My girlfriend started laughing uncontrollably as I dumped the remains of the dead penguin into the trash can. “Sorry,” I told Jan. But she just shook her head at me and left the room. This wasn’t going well.
My girlfriend took my arm. “It’s okay. Let’s go sit with them.”
I protested but she pulled me in. We sat on the couch with Liz, across from Walter and Jerry, my girlfriend’s father, and some others. “So, when are you going to take the test?” Liz asked, patting her on the knee.
A look of horror struck her face. She looked to me for some answer, pulled her shoulders up and down, and let out a long sigh. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I’m not taking it,” she said. “I probably wouldn’t pass anyway, and I’m fine being an unofficial member of Mensa. You guys are my family, anyway. You’re my best friends.”
I scanned the room, Ed, Walter, Liz, her father, and two frumpies in the corner playing chess, only taking a swig of their gin and tonic when they lost a piece, and something in my stomach flipped.
These were her parents’ best friends.
These were her best friends.
These were the people who saw her most and never see her at all.
These people were all at least twenty years older than her.
These were the only people she wasn’t terrified of.
Except for me.
I was her lover.
I was the only peer she ever interacted with on any intimate level.
“Nonsense. You would pass! You are so obviously smart. Gee, just becoming a lesbian . . .” she motioned to me and winked. “To hell with men. That’s just smart,” Liz said.
“That is smart,” one of the frumpy hippie-dippies told her.
“I wish I had thought of it, don’t you, Jan?” Liz asked Kali’s mother, who’d come to stand in the doorway. Jan took a big gulp of wine and nodded with a passive-aggressive, not really, but really kinda homophobic, “liberal” clench-toothed smile.
“I don’t feel well,” Kali told them. “It’s the medication. It’s giving me a headache.”
“Well, you do look a little clammy,” her mother told her.
It had been about thirty minutes since we took the acid. We were just getting to the top of our climb. We both desperately needed to get away from them. Everything was getting too meaningful, and for me at least, it was still also melting. We excused ourselves to go upstairs.
In the guest bedroom I immediately got very caught up by a piece of rogue taxidermy mounted on the wall—a deer head with a red bulb in place of its nose. “Rudolph,” they always joked, “a smallgame prize from Christmas Eve, 1976.” I sat on the edge of the bed, wavering and pondering the fate of dead things.
She sat next to me with her hand on my knee. I thought she was staring into my ear, but she was probably trying to get me to look her in the eye.
“Could you imagine,” I asked, “if someone made a joke of your dead body like this?”
“I can’t imagine, ’cause I wouldn’t know. I’d be dead. Anyway, who’s to say that gravestones and mausoleums aren’t funny?”
I looked into her eyes. They were dilated and shining, almost completely black.
“Think about it,” she said. “It’s kind of hilarious.”
We sat there thinking about the hilarity of gravestones and mausoleums.
“All the giant gray angels.”
“The Taj Mahal.”
“The Louvre.”
“The Pyramids.”
“The Pyramids.” We took up with a laughing fit that sent us into tears and collapsed us on the bed.
“You know,” she said, “I was named after an ancient god of destruction?”
I laughed harder. “Oh no, really? You’ve never mentioned it. Not once. Not every other day.”
I was on my back, holding my stomach because it hurt from laughing.
Her laughing had settled. She rolled over on top of me and bit at my neck. She whispered in my ear in a voice that did not differentiate between malice and seduction.
“You know, the French call orgasms ‘a little death.’ Why don’t people build monuments to really good orgasms?”
She grabbed my nipples with her thin fingers and twisted. All of her touches felt distant and abstract. I thought she could twist my nipples off and it wouldn’t matter. It would just be my body. Maybe it would even look pretty, my little pink nipple resting hard in the palm of her hand. I grabbed at her wrist and held her hand up to my face, inspecting it. Was there a nipple there in her palm? I saw it for a second, but then it disappeared. She rubbed my forehead. I was sweating.
“Are you tripping hard, baby?”
“Yeah. Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know.” She wiped the sweat off her forehead. “Maybe I can’t tell the difference. I just know I want you really badly.” She sucked her fingers and pushed her hand down the front of my pants. Then she pinched my clit between her thumb and finger and tugged at it with little tugs. “You like that?” she asked.
I nodded yes. I did like it, but not in the way I usually did. I liked the thought of it—the image it put in my head—a little pink pebble between two little fleshy things. It looked like a Dalí painting. We were moving, and I was on a ship traveling to Egypt. I was a slave lying on my back at the bottom of the boat, and there was an Egyptian god in the shadows of the ceiling laughing at me.
She had gotten us both undressed somehow, and was pulling me under the covers. I felt like I was sinking below the waves. It was all happening to me. I wasn’t doing it. There was wetness in my ears, her tongue, and something moving inside me to the motion of waves. I felt suddenly panicked and out of control. I looked to the shadow god on the ceiling. It spoke. You have free will, the Egyptian god told me. Become . . . become.
I grabbed her hips and flipped her on her back, placing myself on top. We stared into each other’s dilated pupils. She slipped one leg between mine and the other around my hip. My clit was sliding against hers and she was moaning. I fucked her like that for a few minutes, but again, it didn’t necessarily feel sexual or even physical. I just saw it. I saw our two cunts together sliding and pushing. They looked like two flowers smashed together on a rainy sidewalk. Hers was swollen. Mine was flat. It wasn’t hot. It was just kind of sad and pretty.
Then I got the thought that it didn’t matter what I was feeling. That this was something I had begun, and I had to finish it, like a monument. My purpose was to make her come.
I put two fingers inside and circled her walls methodically. She was shaking and tears were coming from her eyes. Good, I thought. It’s working.
I sat up and she raised herself halfway to my mouth. I bowed down and let my tongue go fast as I could, keeping my fingers pumping inside her, my tongue like a little paddleboat engine against her tip. She got very wet till it was dripping down my wrist, which felt very strange. She smashed herself against my face. This move completely overwhelmed me.
It was as if a giant pink butterfly had landed in my mouth and was beating its wings frantically against my face. But it wasn’t just as if that were happening. I was tripping. It was happening. Its little bug body was in my mouth. Its giant wings were beating my face. It was a sort of terrifying ecstasy. This must be the beginning, I thought. We are beginning to change, “to become.”
The thing about acid is, your perception of what you’re doing and what you are actually doing are often two very different things. I thought I was kneeling in a field with my hand inside a plump yellow melon, a frantic butterfly in my mouth, and an Egyptian god watching over me.
I was actually kneeling on the floor in front of her parents’ guest bed, motionless for the past minute, with my motionless fingers in my girlfriend, whose cunt was in my open, motionless mouth, and I had apparently begun humming in one loud steady “Ohmmm” tone. In short, she had kept having sex and I had begun meditating.
“What the hell are you doing?” She pulled away from me and sat up.
I opened my eyes. We were still in her parents’ guest bedroom. I shook my head and let it drop into my hands. She came over and held me. “Are you okay, baby? What’s going on? What are you thinking? What did you feel? You can tell me.”
I tried to explain the haze. “I just thought,” I told her, “that if I made you come, you would turn into something. You know, whatever you really are, what best represents you. Like a monument.”
Her face grew cold, grave. “And what exactly did you think I would turn into?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me,” she insisted very intently.
“I guess I thought you would sprout wings or something. You know . . . like a gargoyle, or like . . .” I searched for words, “a demon.”
“A demon?” she squealed, angry and accusatory.
“That’s not what I meant. No, never mind. Wrong choice.”
She stood and started pacing. “So you think you know everything now, huh?”
“What are you talking about? Just calm down.”
“You think you know what I really am?”
“Aw, come on. I didn’t mean demon, exactly. I mean, I guess it kind of is—”
“What else did it tell you?” she shouted.
“What else did what tell me?”
“What else did he tell you?”
“Who?”
She pointed to the ceiling. “Him.” Then she said some Egyptian name I don’t remember and my hairs jumped off my body.
The Egyptian god on the ceiling was my hallucination. I hadn’t shared it with her. I stared up at the Egyptian god and she stared at him too. We both saw him there, hovering above us, growling through angry brick teeth with a face that kept turning to sand and reconstructing itself. It’s very off-putting to share the same hallucination with someone. It makes you wonder whether it’s really a hallucination.
“This is getting too crazy,” I said, collecting my clothes. I didn’t dare make eye contact with her. I just headed to the bathroom and locked myself in. It probably took me twenty minutes to get dressed. I splashed some water on my face and checked to see if I looked presentable. But there was really no way to tell, the way my face kept shifting and changing color like that. How long had we been up here? An hour? It felt like about an hour.
When I came out, she was seated in a chair in the hallway. She must have been waiting for me, but she didn’t turn when I came out. She just stared straight ahead at the wall, keeping her hands folded in her lap and her back upright, ridged, like she was in a trance. But she was whispering to something. I knelt beside her. “Baby, it’s gonna be all right. You just need to act fairly normal for the next ten minutes. We’re gonna get out of here and take a little walk. We’ll come down in a couple hours. Then we can go and eat cheese sandwiches.”
She stopped whispering to whatever it was and tuned her head mechanically to face me. Her eyebrows twisted into a point reminiscent of Joan Crawford as she intoned, “Cheese sandwiches? Cheese sandwiches!!!” like these two words together created the most hateful and absurd of concoctions.
“All right. Here we go.” I lifted her by the shoulders, keeping my grip on her as we headed down the stairs. We’d have to pass through the kitchen, the dining room, and the hall before we were out. We’d also have to say goodbye to her mother, and for her part at least, I could blame any strange behavior on the medication her mother did not know she’d stopped taking. I was getting it all planned out. It seemed doable.
We reached the bottom of the stairs. As we turned into the kitchen I felt her tiny arm begin to tremble under my grip. She set her pointed gaze at the far corner of the room.
“You see her?” she whispered.
But I tried to ignore her inquiry. “Just in one door, out the other, babe. Just say bye-bye to mom, and here we go.”
She turned on me, tearing her arm loose from my clutch. “I’m not fucking tripping!” she said, sort of stage-whispering, like a whispering scream. “I have to live with this every day. Now you’re in my world, apparently. You can see it too, so try. She’s right there!” She pointed to the corner.
I knew who she was talking about, the headless woman she always saw in kitchens. I glanced over quickly. Maybe I could have seen her too if I’d tried, but I really, really didn’t want to. I shook my head no. “No, I don’t see anything.”
She tapped my arm. “She’s coming over here. She sees me too. Oh god. She’s never looked at me before.”
“How can she be looking at you if she doesn’t have a head?”
“She’s carrying her head!” she snapped, as if it were obvious.
“Honey, this is just a bad fucking trip. Calm down. Remember what I told you. Use the drug, don’t let it use you.”
“Don’t give me that raver shit. The headless woman can see me. This is fucking serious.” She grabbed her chest and gasped.
“What?”
“She’s right here in front of us, next to you. She’s talking.”
At this point there was nothing I could do but watch her listen. I was absolutely tripping hard myself, but trying not to show it. I had my own problems, like the way the yellowish kitchen light was sliding down the walls and dripping from the cracks in the paint, and, as always, my melting feet.
I guess I must have been pretty distracted by this sort of stuff, ’cause when I started paying attention again, my girlfriend was holding a butcher knife.
There’s nothing like the sight of a person on acid holding a foot-long knife that brings you that sobering feeling one so often longs for just after their peak.
I swear to god, I flew four feet to the opposite door, away from her. She was holding the knife up by her head like she was Elmer Fudd hunting rabbits.
“Honey, whatcha doing?”
She didn’t look at me. “She put her head back on her neck,” she told me. “She wants me to cut it off again, or wait, no, she’s shaking her head no. What’s that? What?”
“No, honey. Don’t cut it off again. Just leave it on. That’s the nice thing to do,” I tried.
“No, no. She’s speaking.”
“What’s she saying?”
She turned her black eyes to me and smiled like she was one of those women on a cooking show and she was about to show me how to bake a cake . . . made out of children. “She wants me to cut off someone else’s head,” she told me.
I took another step back, literally straddling the doorframe, ready to bolt. “You fucking ignore her, do you understand me?”
She tilted her head like she was trying.
“Good,” I continued. “Now one of two things is going to happen: either you are going to put down the knife, or you’re not going to put down the knife, but I’m gonna leave you alone here with your mom and your headless friend, and you are never, do you understand me, NEVER going to see me ever again.” That was the best I could do.
She stood there pondering her options.
“You have three seconds to put it down or I (pause) am (pause) gone (pause) forever!”
She looked from me to the headless woman.
“One.”
She shook her head no in the direction of the headless woman.
“Two.”
She tilted her head at me again, like a puppy, and nodded.
“Two and a half.”
She laid the knife on the counter.
“Walk over here, slowly. Don’t look at her.”
She came over slowly like she was walking a tightrope. When she was finally within my reach, I grabbed her, tugged her out of the kitchen, and hugged her hard. She buried her head in my shoulder and breathed slowly, deeply. We stood there wrapped in each other like we’d just escaped from a horror movie, our eyes shut tight from whatever might be waiting for us.
The terror wasn’t in any way gone from me. I couldn’t help wondering what exactly it was acid did to your brain, and wondering how she’d been able to see the same impossible thing I saw. Were these things really there? She said she could see them all the time, but acid just opened up the possibilities for normal people, like me.
While I was thinking about all this, I became aware of another presence in the room. An invasive, cold, ominous presence. I opened my eyes. Her mother was standing in front of us sipping her wine and watching us like we were a bad stage performance, as we were deeply entangled, shaking and petting each other.
“What is this, The Children’s Hour? What’s wrong with you?” She raised her right eyebrow at her daughter. “I’ve been looking all over for you. I thought you were upstairs.”
“I’ve just been having a headache, Mom.”
I realized that she must be used to her daughter’s bouts of . . . whatever, but she treated her daughter’s apparent disarray with nothing more than a little annoyance and feigned ignorance.
“Well then, have a seltzer. You’re probably dehydrated. There are some bottles in the fridge.”
“I’ll get it,” I said abruptly, and skipped back into the kitchen.
I heard her mother through the door. “Pull yourself together. We’ve been planning a surprise for you. I mean, you don’t have to do it, even though we’ve been planning it all week. I mean, if you really don’t feel like it, dear.”
“Planning what?” I stepped back in and handed her the seltzer. She unscrewed the lid, gulped down half the bottle, then burped.
“There, that’s more like it,” her mother encouraged her. “Have a seat.” She walked her daughter over to the dining room table and dimmed the lights. Waving her hand in the air at no one, she hollered, “All right! She’s ready!”
What ensued was the strangest and dorkiest ritual I have ever been privy to, live or on video, ever. Ten Mensans marched in slowly, in single file, singing the philosophers’ drinking song from Monty Python’s Flying Circus at the speed and tone of a druidic hymn. It was creepy. They then found their places standing around Kali, who was seated at the table. She was smiling her overwide smile and laughing a silent laugh that looked like little convulsions. When they had all made their way in, they stopped singing and declared happily, three times in unison, “One of us! One of us! One of us!” before placing the twenty-page IQ test on the table in front of her. This IQ test would decide if she could become an official member of Mensa or not, and I knew this was the single most important thing in the world to her: to be acknowledged as a fellow genius by her parents’ friends. I just didn’t think this was something she should undergo while peaking on acid.
Liz handed her a pen. Her mother nodded approvingly. “I don’t think you should do this right now,” I tried. “You’re not feeling well.” Her dilated eyes smiled up at the Mensans. Totally ignoring my comment, she tore open the paper that kept the sides of the booklet sealed, then beamed up at them, shaking with apparent joy and surprise. “Of course I’ll do it,” she said. “I am. I’m one of you.”
I’m still circling this East St. Louis strip. I’ve taken to waving back at the whores. They are very polite. This is my last time around, though. I’m gonna go ahead and drive to my hometown for the night. To hell with this.
She failed the test, of course. And the rest, it’s hard to explain. She just sat there quietly in the car as we drove away from the house and the scene of her worst embarrassment. When they tallied the results and announced them, her mother just quietly excused herself from the party. She started trembling, and the other guests comforted her, saying that she could try again soon, that she just wasn’t feeling well. But she bombed. Of course she did. She was tripping. I drove her home in a drug haze, finally starting to come down, and she didn’t say a word until we got into the apartment, and then, well, I finally got to meet Rose, the person she becomes who does things she doesn’t remember doing.
The apartment is destroyed. Most of her breakable things are broken, in pieces. There is a golf-ball-sized welt on her head (her own doing, not mine) and I have a swollen jaw, and she is sleeping now, as a result of many anti-anxiety medications I insisted she take so she would stop ramming herself headfirst into the walls and tearing her things to pieces. I am driving this disgusting strip of a road, over and over again, trying to figure where to go for the rest of the night . . . for the rest of my life.
There’s that fucking song playing on the radio, the one that always made me think of her, even when I was with her. I should have noticed this as a sign before tonight—“Where all the bodies hang on the air”—that’s not a sweet song at all. The fact that this is the song I most associate with my romantic relationship, there is definitely something very wrong with that. She’s gonna miss me. She destroyed everything else. She’s gonna tell me she can’t go on without me. And she probably can’t. Pretty soon now, though, I won’t really care. I crossed the waters. I’m gonna go home through the town. I’ll pass the shadows that fell down from when we met. But I’m gone from there.