chapter 8
Above Nate, a fan spun noiselessly. Pain stretched up his right side from his waist to his shoulder, and his head ached. Looking to his left, he saw a man with his back to him standing at the window dressed in suit pants and shirt. Instantly, his stomach clutched tight, the constriction spreading into his chest and throat, making his heart thud.
He tried sitting up, but dizzy, lay back onto the pillow again.
"So. You mind telling me what you're doing in my house?" the man asked, without turning to face him. His hands jangled keys or change in the pockets of his trousers.
"I ... I was just cutting across the yard - "
"And you wound up in my bedroom?"
"I shouldn't have, it's just - "
"Cutting across the lawn from where?"
"Next door."
He turned back into the room now and looked directly at Nate.
"From that woman's house? You were in there?"
He had shiny black hair cropped short, a wide jaw, and a dimpled chin. He was six-one at least. The muscles of his chest and shoulders, evident beneath the fitted shirt, torqued his upper body forward slightly, like a boxer leaning in to his opponent.
Online, there were plenty of men whose pictures made Nate go dreamy and hard, in a melancholy sort of way. But they were otherworldly.
"I asked you a question," the man said.
"Ms. Graves. She's my tutor."
His eyes narrowed, his lashes bunched at the tips as if wetted, as if he'd just stepped from the shower.
"She sent you over here, didn't she?"
"No. I swear. I was just curious. That's all."
"You do this often? You just wander into people's houses?"
"No."
"You could have been killed. You realize that?"
Nate nodded, holding his breath.
"Are you hurt?"
"I don't think so."
"All right, then. Let's go."
He led Nate along the hallway and down the curved front stairs, which brought them into the hall Nate had passed through less than an hour before. This was it, he figured; he would be told to leave now. But rather than heading for the door, the man kept going into the giant kitchen. From the fridge, he took a bottle of vodka and poured himself a glass. Leaning against the counter, his legs slightly spread, he swirled the clear liquid with a tight little motion of his hand. To each of his gestures there was a precision, a kind of surface tension to the way his body moved. He had a cocksuredness about him that the jocks at school could only hope to emulate. A cool, level stare that announced straightaway he needed nothing.
"I guess I should call the police now," he said.
"You're kidding, right?"
"You live in Finden?"
"Yeah."
"You think this town's just a playground for you? You can just do whatever you want because it's all safe and cozy in the end? You were trespassing. You were breaking the law." The cuff of his shirt sleeve slid back from his wrist as he raised his glass to his mouth.
"I didn't take anything," Nate pleaded.
For a minute or more the man made no reply, all the while staring directly at Nate. There was a perversity in his silence, a gaming of discomfort. Nate could sense it in the air between them. And yet there was something else too, something tantalizing: being looked at this hard, with that edge of threat. Part of Nate wanted to shut his eyes and let himself be watched, but he didn't dare.
"That tutor of yours, she's out of her mind. She thinks she owns this place."
"Yeah. She mentioned that."
"And you say you were just curious. About what?"
"That it was so grand, I guess. And empty. I didn't think anyone lived here."
The man glanced across the room, as if noticing its bareness for the first time. In profile, he was even more gorgeous, with his five-o'clock shadow and his perfectly shaped nose and his full, slightly parted lips. Entering the house had woken Nate's senses but what he experienced now was of a different order, as if the whole physical world had been made exact, sharpened by the knife of desire.
"I suppose I could use some furniture," he said, finishing his drink and setting it down on the counter.
"I think it's kind of cool the way it is."
"Yeah? Why's that?"
"I don't know. It feels open, I guess. Like you could do anything you wanted to."
"What's your name?"
"Nate."
"What are you, a high-school student?"
"I'm a senior. I graduate in a few weeks."
"Well, Nate, I've got stuff to do, so I think it's time for you to leave."
Pointing the way out, he followed Nate from the kitchen.
"You're not going to call the police?"
"Frankly, I don't have the time."
As the man held the front door open, Nate could see the electric orange of the streetlamps flickering on up along on the road. If he left now, like this, with nothing more said, how would he ever get back here?
He hesitated on the threshold a moment. Then he blurted out, "I could help you."
"What do you mean?"
"If you needed to know stuff. About Ms. Graves. About her lawsuit."
The man's lips parted, and he smiled for the first time, a look of conjecture playing across his face.
"Interesting," he said. "And why would you do that?"
For all his effort, Nate couldn't stop the blood from filling his cheeks now.
"I don't know," he said. "Just because."
For another long moment, the man was silent.
"Sure," he said, finally. "Why not? I'm usually home about ten thirty. Try knocking next time."
NATE JOGGED the half mile to Jason's house and arrived in a sweat.
"Where the hell have you been?" Emily shouted over the sound of the voice booming from the stereo in Jason's room. She lay on the unmade bed, leafing through a copy of Harper's.
"Sorry. I got held up."
The evening here was still getting under way. Jason sat at his desk, parceling out whitish-brown stalks and heads into small glass bowls. In the corner, Hal, who'd apparently taken the liberty of showering, sat lounging in Jason's blue terry-cloth bathrobe, an unlit cigarette in one hand, an empty pack of matches in the other.
"You know," Hal said, "I was thinking - "
"Quiet!" Jason insisted. "It's almost over."
Obediently, they all listened to the voice on the speakers as it swerved back and forth between reasoned calm and a kind of prophetic verve. A professor, it sounded like, a researcher on some very extended leave.
"So you see," the voice continued, "the entirety of human history has been acted out in the light of the traumatic severing of our connection into the mother goddess, the planetary matrix of organic wholeness that was the centerpiece of the psychedelic experience back in the high Paleolithic. In other words, the world of hallucination and vision that psilocybin carries you into is not your private unconscious or the architecture of your neural programming, but it is in fact a kind of intellecti, a king of being, a kind of Gaian mind. Once you sever from this matrix of meaning, what James Joyce called 'the mama matrix most mysterious,' once you sever yourself from this, all you have is rationalism, ego, male dominance to guide you, and that's what's led us into the nightmarish labyrinth of technical civilization, all the ills of modernity. We must import into straight society almost as a Trojan horse the idea that these psychedelic compounds and plants are not aberrational, they are not pathological, they are not some minor subset of the human possibility that only freaks and weirdos get involved with but rather the catalyst that called forth humanness from animal nature. That's the call I'm making."
The audience applauded as the volume of the recording faded out.
"Where the f*ck do you get this stuff?" Emily asked.
"Interesting," Hal allowed. "If nothing else, it's a good highbrow excuse to get wasted."
"That's not the point. We're not 'getting wasted.' This isn't a party."
"Sure," Hal said. "We're widening the lens."
"Exactly," Jason said, rising from the desk to pass them each their dish. "We're taking what he calls the 'heroic dose.' The dose where you can't be scared anymore because there's no ego left to be frightened."
The shrooms had a stringy, dirt-like texture that made Nate gag. The Brita was passed around and it took them a glass of water each to swallow down the bitter mush. Ingestion complete, Jason slipped on some panic-retarding French pop, all mild falsetto and ethereal synth. The night's opening gesture made, they recommenced their lounging. Half an hour or so passed as the disco scrim luffed in the air about them.
"One day," Hal said idly to Jason, "I think you'll run a cult. Not in a bad way, at least not at first. We'll read about you on an island with lots of women and children, all of you awaiting some astral bus. My career will be over by then, at twenty-eight or-nine, and I'll wonder if I should join you."
"Listen," Jason said, "here's a public service announcement, okay? The free-association thing - it can be a problem. I mean, 'astral bus'? That's the kind of thing someone could just catch on, and before you know it, we're lost. Think of it like meditation. The thought comes and the thought goes. You're not the thought."
"I'm just saying I think you'll run a cult."
"Okay," Jason replied, "okay."
Heavy liquid began to pool at the back of Nate's skull. He lay down beside Emily and closed his eyes, the afterimage of the ceiling lamp burning like an eclipsed sun on the backs of his lids.
"Shit," Emily said to no one in particular.
The music came in waves now, cresting in the middle of the room, sloshing against the walls, and dripping onto the floor before rising once more above their heads.
"Dinner's almost ready, guys."
Seeing Mrs. Holland standing in the doorway, the four of them came to shocked attention. "Why don't you clean this place up, Jason? Your friends don't have to put up with your laundry, do they?"
She wore a white rayon dress belted with snakeskin and sipped a clear liquid from a tumbler held firmly in both hands.
From across the room, her son glared at her.
Smiling vaguely at the other three, she laughed, as if to say, Isn't he a card? and then turned away, leaving the door open behind her.
"Now that," Hal said, "is the mama matrix most mysterious."
"Save it," Jason snapped, rising to close the door. With his back to it, he made as if to address them, though as he parted his lips to speak, something on the carpet hauled his attention off, and like a general trying not to evidence distress before his troops he had to master himself anew before speaking "We've got a situation," he announced. "There's less time than I thought. We need to get down there and we need to consume some of that food in an orderly fashion. You understand? It's early going. We can handle it. We just need to act quickly."
Hal stood, tightened the belt of his bathrobe, and shouted, "I'm ready."
"This is a very bad idea," Emily said.
But Jason was already out the door and they were following him down the curving staircase.
THE HOLLANDS' KITCHEN appeared roughly the size of a tennis court. Seeking a base of operations amidst this vastness, they made for a distressed farmhouse table on the far side of the room. When they got high in the car, Nate could let sensation spill over with no interference from the world. Not so now. Circumstance had forced him to his own personal battle stations, where he waged a desperate campaign against the inner flood.
"I'm on this wacky Listserv," Mrs. Holland called out from the range, "with these old friends of mine, and who knows who else for that matter - anyone, I suppose, everyone - the terrorists!" She cackled. "Anyway, someone sent out this crazy thing professing to be a Sumerian cookbook. Can you imagine? Julia Child running around Mesopotamia four thousand years ago. Lunatic really. But I thought I'd give one of these cold dishes a try. Lucky for you Whole Foods didn't have yak. I used venison. With this river grass they're all enthused about. None of you are on a silly diet thing. Emily, you're not doing one of those, are you?"
"No," Emily said, her hands clutching the edge of the table. "I'm on a regular-food diet."
"Well, consider it part of your multicultural education," Mrs. Holland said, pouring herself another drink. "You know Jason's father is all in favor of that sort of thing. Such a progressive man."
"She's headed for a meltdown," Emily whispered to Nate. "I've seen it happen."
Nate glanced at the other two, trying to gauge their coordination, affect, and overall cogency. He watched, stunned, as Jason, eyeing a fly that had settled on Hal's face, said, "Hold on," and then took a walnut from a bowl on the table and whipped it at Hal's forehead, missing the insect by three or four inches.
"Oh f*ck," Hal said, unresponsive to the nut, but smiling broadly now. "We're out of time."
Slowly, Jason's eyes fluttered shut. Their boat's only rudder was coming loose.
Suddenly, Mrs. Holland placed a bowl of some dark, vaguely living substance on the table in front of Nate. He stared up into her blazing eyes and heard her say, "You guys look like you just ran a marathon. Should I turn up the air conditioning?"
Atop the mush in his bowl, Nate saw a mucus beginning to form, suggesting the larval stage of some dreaded prehistoric creature. What rough beast, he wondered, had come round at last, unborn since these ingredients had last mingled in some glade of the ancient world?
"Keep it together over there!" Jason whispered harshly, bringing Nate into sudden awareness that only an inch separated his face from the gestation unfolding before him. He sat quickly upright, trying not to cry with fear.
"You all go ahead and start," Mrs. Holland said, miles away again. "I have to get this grain paste sorted out."
Emily's neck stiffened. "Something," she said, "something has to be done."
Nodding vigorously, Hal reached under his robe into his trouser pocket and somehow managed to make his cell phone ring, a call that he promptly answered.
"Oh my god," he said, loud out of all proportion. "You're kidding? Our family kitten? Out there on the highway? Right now? Oh, Mom. What can I do? You want me to come right now?"
He glanced at Jason, who turned quickly to his approaching mother and, looking somewhere over her shoulder, said, "Gee. I guess, well, so Hal - it looks like he's got this ... situation. I mean, this pet. This family pet cat. It looks as if it needs help."
Forgetting the premise of the ruse, Hal placed his phone down on the table.
For a moment the only sound was the crackle of insects being burned to death by the caged blue light on the porch.
"And what about your dinner, mister?" Mrs. Holland said.
At that moment, Nate realized he had been drafted into a kind of psychic air traffic control, minus training or any chance of success. Mrs. Holland's final, bitter word had dropped from beneath the clouds like an undetected passenger jet sailing straight for the terminal.
"Come on, Mom. This stuff looks like shit."
Her groggy eyes narrowed.
"Is that so? I'm glad you've learned to be so honest, Jason. It's a great quality in a man. I suppose you've told your friends that you've failed too many classes to graduate. Have you told them that?"
"F*ck you," he said, rising from the table. "Come on, guys, we're leaving."
He crossed the room and walked out the back door, the screen slapping behind him. Sheepishly, Emily followed.
"You know, Mrs. Holland," Hal began, spotting a box of matches by the salt and pepper and finally lighting the cigarette he'd been holding between his fingers all evening, "I appreciated the Sumerian angle. It's always interesting to consider the origin of things. Particularly in these times. That sounds like a really wonderful Listserv you have there." He inhaled, blew the smoke up toward the ceiling, and then, pushing his chair back, exited in the opposite direction from the others, back into the front hall.
Alone with her now, Nate watched as the viscosity in the air, which he had prayed was just a passing warp of his eye, began to leak openly into the world, the ceiling above Mrs. Holland becoming a slick, throbbing ooze, the lights in the room starting to pulse, bleeding along the edges of her rigid mother body, and then within her as well, her whole form glowing a dim orangey-red, the ember of some slowly dying need.
"I'm sorry," he said, standing up from the table. "I'm really sorry."
HE HURRIED ACROSS the yard trying to catch up with the others, relieved by the lack of brightness on this darkened stage of willows weeping branches into pools of lamplight, the air about him soft and damp. He could hear Jason up ahead, and then he saw them as he rounded the turn and came up alongside them, no one taking any notice. They walked for what seemed a long while down Chandler Drive and onto the college campus. Making their way into the woods, they followed the path to the round stone terrace and stepping onto it saw the expanse of the lake stretched out before them, black and smooth under a dome of stars.
At the railing of the terrace the four of them stood, passengers on the prow of a stilled ship.
Jason slipped his sneakers and shirt off and walked down the steps, wading into the water up to his chest. He turned to the three of them, reached his arms into the air and lay back, falling into the bed of water, his head and body disappearing beneath the dark surface long enough for the vibe to reach uneasily toward after-school specials in which wasted kids drowned and the town held a candlelight vigil, their night on the verge of becoming one of those earnest, tragic affairs covered by local news, involving ribbons and flowers, yearbook snapshots, hope snuffed, etcetera, actual life and grief cheated and frozen by the arrogance of sentiment, and then his head and shoulders appeared again a few feet farther out and Emily laughed.
Stepping out of her sandals, she climbed down to join him.
"This," Jason said, floating on his back, "this is the matrix most mysterious. And you know what? It doesn't give a damn about us. It could care less if we even existed."
He began a slow backstroke away from the shore.
Nate remained at the railing, the visible world trailing out behind itself and stretching forward, the glow at the tip of Hal's cigarette and Emily's bobbing head becoming the blurred average of the still-discernible past and the imminent future, the sky likewise a series of white lines sketching themselves back and forth across hundreds of bright centers. Making him wonder if a feeling could have such a pattern: want crossing over fear crossing back over longing crossing menace, the bright center of it all being the awful urge he'd felt standing before the man in the front hallway of the mansion just a few hours ago, wishing the man would just put him out of his misery and touch him.
How did people bear it? Needing to be saved so appallingly.
"The professor's right," Emily shouted. "Kill the ego! Let the world in!"
"Come on," Jason called, "swim!"
Shedding his bathrobe and draping it on the rail, Hal leaned down to remove his shoes and trousers. His bare back was pale and narrow. A boy's body, Nate thought, gangly, uncertain, a protector of nothing.
"You coming?" Hal said.
Nate stripped to his briefs and from the bottom step made a shallow dive, his thin form slipping into the water, the day, the drug, all of it, washed for an instant from his mind by the cold rush, gills opening in his chest as he let it all go. Rising again to the surface, his head was encompassed once more by the warm night air as he turned onto his back, a blazing zigzag of starlight pouring into his eyes.
They swam a few feet apart out toward the formal garden, Jason reaching the white balustrade first and lifting himself up to sit on its wide top. Behind him, on a steeply raked hillside, stood the fancifully clipped trees and hedges, topiary in the shapes of cones and boxes, a few cypress intermixed, all of it seen as much from memory as through the layers of shadow covering it now. He helped each of them up in turn and they crossed the path onto the lawn. On a terraced stretch of grass halfway up the rise, they sat, still dripping, beneath the large pyramid of an evergreen, looking back across the lake to the campus and beyond it to the lights of Finden.
"It keeps coming," Emily said, resting her head on the ground.
"Let it come," Jason replied. "Just let it come."
___________
MANY HOURS LATER, after the drug had at last worn off and he'd snuck silently back into his house, Nate undressed in his room and put on an old pair of boxers before brushing his teeth. In the mirror over the sink, he looked scrawny, his arms thin like Hal's, barely any muscle on his chest and hollows in his shoulders above the collarbone. Nothing, he thought, like the body of the man he'd met that day. None of his thick presence. Lying in bed with the lights off, Nate pictured the man upstairs in that huge house of his, taking off his tie, his pinstripe pants and pressed white shirt, a perfect strength exuded into the perfect dark behind Nate's eyes, squeezed shut by this waking dream, as he moved his fist up and down on himself, trying hard to fill over the dry silence of the house with the flood of that other, imagined place, shorn of everything but a pleasure so keen it might just have the power to obliterate him. Then, for two or three ecstatic seconds, the obliteration came, its flood receding too quickly, leaving behind the wrecked old world of things as they actually were.
He lay still now. Along the bottom edge of the shade, he could see the faint, bluish tinge of the streetlight. A pile of clothing was dimly visible on the chair in the corner, the spine of a textbook sticking out over the edge of his desk. He closed his eyes again but the fantasy was gone and he was wide awake.