by Lauren Groff
It is a swelter in here, a hundred twenty degrees. The stove is being fed with wood, and Hannah is in her knickers, soaked through with sweat. She has drawn the curtains and is reading by flashlight in the corner. Heaped on the screens are quantities of drying herb. But it doesn’t seem like very much to Bit. Not enough, certainly, to finance all of Arcadia for a year.
Bit says, Weird. Seemed like a lot more this morning.
Hannah says, That’s because it was. Now he sees what he’d missed in the gloom: Hannah is livid, her face trembling. I went out for a pee, she says. I didn’t bother to lock up. Ran back in a minute later and three fourths of the junk was gone. Gone. Like that. One pee, and thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of the best of our bud, gone.
Bit thinks of Helle looking at him from the corners of her eyes in the woods, biting her nails, just after he told her about the Pot Plot. He wants to shrivel into nothing. This is his fault. Something must cross his face, because Hannah says, Bit? Did you tell anyone about this?
The sudden divide, the seesaw, and he has only a moment to choose.
No, he says.
His mother turns away, nodding. Sweat trickles in the dark hollow between her shoulder blades. When Bit offers to stay up all night with the drying weed, Hannah says, thoughtfully, No. I don’t think so.
Bit waits outside her door, reading, but Helle doesn’t come back that night. When she staggers in at dawn, rum fumes precede her into the Ado Unit Common Room, and she is inarticulate. Bit helps Jincy and Molly put her to bed. He stands, watching her sleep, and Jincy squeezes Bit to her chest. Good, sweet Jincy, his first friend.
She doesn’t deserve someone like you, she says in his ear.
We’re just friends, Bit says.
Right, Jincy says gently. I’m kicking you out, friend Bit. It’s time for you to go to sleep.
Midmorning, Bit passes the open window of the Cannery, where a work crew is putting up raspberries. He overhears a woman saying . . . Helle. Acting out since she’s been back.
Another woman says, . . . a Trippie, if she isn’t . . .
Someone says, Georgia! then laughs.
I saw . . . a murmur.
Louder again, . . . like her father.
Too much, says someone, emphatically.
Bit looks in. The women wear men’s undershirts soaked through, identical blue bandannas on their heads. With the dimness, the distance, the uniforms, he can’t tell who they are. They could be the same anonymous woman. To Bit, right now, they are.
Bit rises, unable to sleep. Outside, the hundreds of extra people in Arcadia make a roar like what he imagines an ocean sounds like. Ike is snoring through his nose. There is a light under the door from the Common Room, and when he goes out into it, he finds Helle with a kerosene lamp. She’s sitting on the spavined couch, staring at a book. She looks up when she sees Bit and claps the book shut.
Hey, she whispers. Hey, he says. In his throat, his sorrow, thickening. He wants to ask her why she stole from them; why she wants Arcadia to starve. He wants to tell her that he knows. But she looks so sad that he can’t, not yet. She must be coming down from some high: her pupils are still huge, and the long rubber band of her mouth ends at the corners in bitter knots.
He sits next to her, and she puts her head in his lap. He can feel her breath warming his thigh, her eyelashes as they slide across his skin. He thinks of his hands washing dishes in the Eatery, sliding gunk off plates, scraping compost, the steam so hot on his fingers they feel like they’re blistering, anything to keep himself in control. He scratches her scalp, moving between the dreadlocks, her oils collecting in his nails. His hands move to her long neck, kneading the knots out of it, and he sees how small her ears are, tiny mouse ears, so delicate under her haystack of hair that he wants to gnaw them. With this thought, his penis gives an involuntary jerk. She must feel it. She sits up. The skin of her face looks loose, and there are shiny dark places under her eyes. She studies Bit for a moment. She clicks out her retainer, trailing silvery filaments of spit, and leans forward, and puts her mouth on his.
It’s a shock, this kiss. It is his first. To taste her breath, pungent with the anise seed some Arcadians chew after dinner. How rubbery her lips are, the strange slabby tongue in his mouth, their teeth clinking. He is shaking. He thinks about the Common Room door opening, someone seeing them on the couch. She takes his hand and slides it up her shirt to one of the dough lumps there. She takes her hand and unbuttons his jeans, her cold knuckles on his lower belly. It is too much for him. He gasps, there’s a great, woolly spasm, and his shorts have a hot wet spot in them.
He wants, badly, to cry.
She pulls away, and now her hand is under his chin. She brings his face up until he looks at her, pale, serious, determined. Let’s try again, she says and moves her mouth close. Her hands in the waistband of his jeans. Her hands against his skin, warming him. Bit lets himself go, sink into this strangeness. This is it, he thinks. This, Helle’s softness against his, her weight, the hard tailbone against his thigh, her legs lifting, and the sudden welcome, this, this, is the culmination of all good things he has ever known. There is a hunger in him to stay here forever, suspended.
And then the worry returns as she bites his lips to keep him from groaning: entering him as if from the depth of her mouth come the warring feelings, a ghost in either ear, that what she is doing to him just now is either a deep kindness or a deeper curse.
Midsummer, a tongue of heat in the air. Cockaigne Day is here.
Music squeals and bashes against other music: someone has plugged in an electric guitar down at the parking lot on the County Road, a ring of chanting men in saffron robes beside the Bakery. Three dueling transistors play at the Pond: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Cat Stevens.
Let me wander if it seems to be real switch on summer in your garden it’s an illusion from a slot machine . . . A chimera of song.
Someone has rented a huge white-and-red-striped tent, where they’re staging a love-in for peace. Anyone can go in who has proof of age, but Cole sneaks in to see what’s going on, and when he comes out, his cheeks are blown up like a puffer fish’s with hilarity. The smell of shit intensifies, people pooping everywhere, neglecting to bury their spoor: Bit can almost taste it when he eats his porridge.
Astrid, down in Tennessee, has sensed something, or someone has told her there is trouble brewing. She drove all night from the Midwifery School and arrived this morning to see what she can do. At breakfast she stands, her hands on Hannah’s shoulders, the two tall women speaking softly to each other. They could be sisters, though their blondes are honey and white: the Twin Towers, everybody called them when Bit was growing up. But as he watches, Astrid’s face closes down and Hannah turns abruptly, walks away. When Bit asks what happened, Hannah, who hasn’t spoken to him since the Sugarbush incident, only shakes her head.
Later in the morning, Bit passes a bush jostling wildly, someone fucking someone within. He wants to take a stick and beat them out of there like birds from a tussock. Instead he shouts, There are kids here!, and his voice is so high, so childlike itself, it must shame them into pausing because the bush stops shaking until he is past.
He walks up to Arcadia House with hot eyes. Someone built a badminton court among the lettuces, and the tender leaves are trampled. Dorotka is on her knees, sobbing in them (Forellenschluss, Red Leprechaun, Lollo Rossa, Amish Deer Tongue, Merveille des Quatre Saisons). He can hardly look at her, the granny glasses speckled with tears, the loop of her peppery braids, just as he can hardly look at the mangled ground when he puts his hand on her back, and pats and pats until she calms.
He is rolling vegegristle meatballs in the sweltering Eatery kitchen before lunch when he sees Helle go by the window. He is just in time to call out, Helle, wait, I need to talk to you, when she turns and flushes when she sees him, and gives a wave of her hand, and disappears into the thronging masses, some already drunk and dancing to music that Bit can’t, quite, hear.
/> They are gathered, at last, for Hannah’s Cockaigne Day address. The Proscenium blazes with light, the curtains are sodden with heat. A bead of sweat gathers on Hannah’s cheek and slowly trickles down her chin, although she has given only a few welcoming remarks. She has to shout her words over the noise rising up from the lawn outside.
In the past, people waited until after the address before they began the party.
In the past, of course, there was no flood of strangers to trample Arcadia’s etiquette; there were the stories that kept them in line. Cockaigne Day was just the twilight in midsummer and the Sheep’s Meadow mown so the rich green smell stirs them and the music and the love.
Still, something is going on that isn’t just the interlopers’ rudeness: tonight, the audience is pitiful. A stranger, wandering in, would never believe that Hannah had been here from the beginning, that to be invited to give the Cockaigne Day address is the greatest honor in Arcadia, that Hannah has been preparing for months. Bit writes the names carefully in his head: Abe, beaming with love; Titus and Saucy Sally and their many children; Sweetie and Maria and Ricky; Regina and Ollie; Astrid, looking especially grim. Marilyn and Midge, who fans herself, farting a little. Tarzan and Kaptain Amerika, Cole and Dyllie and Ike, Jincy, Fiona, Muffin. Helle sits beside Ike, smiling everywhere but at Bit. Late, in walk D’Angelo and Scott and Lisa. But that is it, that is it, that is it. No Dorotka. No Eden. Nobody else. No Handy, especially.
Behind Hannah, who speaks of the nineteenth-century Divinist cult that created Arcadia House, the lawns are roiling, masses busy with bongos or pot or bunched around a great trash barrel, which Bit suspects is Slap-Apple liberated from the Storeroom and laced with LSD. The Circenses Singers come white-robed over the lawn in slow-moving procession, the puppets doing their limber-jointed dances. Bit recognizes Leif’s blaze of white hair; he is operating the Fool puppet’s head. Adam and Eve waltz together, refreshed with a coat of peach paint. Even through the glass of the Proscenium windows, the song can be heard, the discordant tune, the drums, the hundreds of bells. A thick circle forms around the puppeteers, gawkers caught by their spell.
Bit imagines a great hand descending from the sky and smashing the revelers like a bad boy smashing a trail of ants. Ashamed, he tunes back in to Hannah. But the heat is brutal; even Bit is sickened and can’t listen as deeply as he’d like to her story. He notes that there are his slides and Verda’s voice unreeling into the dim from a recorder.
Hannah looks out, sees how her audience, though brave, has wilted. She says a little sadly, And here we are. Not unlike the Divinists, idealistic, hardworking, spiritual. Unlike them, she says, we know enough to learn from history and change before it’s too late.
She pauses to gather herself, and in the pause something explodes outside, a green firecracker snaking up into the dimming midsummer sky and bursting into red sparks. She turns to look behind her. Her golden hair is full of glints. And when she turns back, Bit can read on her face that she has decided to end it there.
Thank you, she says. Now let us all enjoy Cockaigne Day. And though they applaud her as greatly as they can in the echoing empty Proscenium, his mother’s shoulders slump as she walks down the stairs.
Outside, the air is cooling a little, the grass sweet-smelling, crushed. A wallpaper of people has spread across Arcadia House lawn, a shifting mirror game of hippies in their gauzy white dresses and halter tops and full-body denim. A long line from the kitchen moves the food out to the fold-out tables. There is lemonade for the kidlets. There is a great barrel of popcorn with nutritional yeast topping, mangled lettuce salad, tomato salad, tempeh salad. Bulgur wheat and bean salad. Spicy tofu salad. Yegg salad. Pasta salad. There are heaps of bread rapidly depleting. Rice and beans. Salsa. A vat of yam stew. So many pies that they will have no more preserves until harvest. Soy cream in pistachio, vanilla, chocolate, strawberry. Some of the day visitors are not so bad: some have come back from various towns laden with grapes and bananas, crates of oranges, celery sticks, great cans of peanut butter, industrial bread, which tastes like paper to Bit. Huge bags of crinkled things someone calls chips that are so salty they make him gasp. Cookies from huge boxes that taste the way batteries do when licked.
As usual, the kids and Pregnant Ladies and Trippies go first, even though some of the new men are high enough to crash the line. When everyone has gone through, there is still some food left over. For a day, everyone eats their fill, then beyond until they can eat no more. Even Bit, who resists the excitement with the solid moral core of himself, relaxes when he is full and lets the summer night in.
Music begins in the Sheep’s Meadow amphitheater. Handy’s voice rises into the air, scratchy and magnificent, the Free People Band in fine form, banjo and fiddle and accordion each taking long, luxuriant solos. Tarzan, the drummer, is eloquent in this, his only language. The day darkens, and the joints and cigarettes outshine the fireflies. The kidlets are high on unaccustomed sugar and chase one another. Bit’s lungs burn with running, with laughing, scooping up the wee ones and throwing them in the air, catching them, wrestling his friends. Cole and Ike and Helle and he sneak to the vat of acid-spiked Slap-Apple and dip out four hurried mason jars. They take them behind the Octagonal Barn. Helle bites the rim of her jar with her smile and closes her eyes to down it. Bit watches her; he wants to smash it into her face, then, maybe, lick it off her chin. She looks at him and says, daring him, Scared?
He is. He likes his brain. He does not want to end up like Kaptain Amerika, forever tweaked. There are over sixty walking cautionary tales in Arcadia, burnt-out Trippies, their psyches gone rogue.
No, he says, and tosses it back, the alcohol burning his throat. Helle takes Bit’s hand as they come out from behind the barn to wait for the acid’s slow seeping in. Her fingers are cool in his, and though he wants to pull away, he doesn’t. As they walk, she squeezes.
Down at the concert, Handy is leading the whole bunch in “Goodnight, Irene.” In the little side area of Christmas lights, Astrid and Lila lean against one another, their eyes closed, swaying. Saucy Sally is tiny, clutched to Titus’s chest. Somebody whispers about a party at the Runaway Quonset, and the Ado Unit begins to trickle down that way. Bit and Helle pass the Pond, where puddles of clothes await the splashers who have gone in, naked. It is as full as the Pond generally is during a summer afternoon, but with adults, in the moonlight. Bit and Helle and Ike and Cole pass a group of four little kids who look up fearfully at the Ados going by, then go back to portioning out what Bit at first thinks are pebbles. He looks closer, sees blue pills. He tries to say something, but he has lost his words somewhere, and so he scoops up the pills and shoves them into his pocket. Some little kid kicks Bit’s ankle; he is showered with gravel as he walks away. The Runaway Quonset blazes with kerosene light, blasts with someone’s radio. Beside the crooked woodstove, there is another barrel of liberated Slap-Apple. There are so many people moving here that they become one shouting mass, a many-armed monster.
Helle whispers in his ear, and Bit doesn’t catch what she says. When he turns his face to her, his anger with her must be suddenly apparent. She jerks backward and disappears.
Now people sharpen into individuals. Little Pooh is dancing, throwing her arms up in the air. One stranger with teardrops tattooed on his face leans back on his arms and watches her; his friend, also in a black leather jacket, is pressed up against some Runaway chick on the wall. Bit looks at the jacket and sees a dead pig, and almost throws up when he passes by and smells an animal musk. Strange, he thinks, to find men here when most in this place are kids.
He loses this thought with a shock: on a cot, Jincy makes out with one of the Runaways, a chiseled black-haired boy with a vulture feather in his hair.
Hey, Jincy, Bit says, shaking her shoulder, and she looks up, smiling, says, Hey, Bit, and goes back to kissing. Let her get bird lice, who cares.
Ike puts in a tape, and new louder sounds roar into life. Misfits! he screams and bashes his head against
the sound. He is sweating so much he has hoops under his arms. Bit’s own shirt is stuck to him.
Helle reappears, dreamy, confused. Hey, she says so softly only Bit can hear. That’s my tape? He wants to bite her lips. His body would like to melt into hers. He reaches up to her face, but when his hands get there they have turned into someone else’s and Helle is no longer before him, she is gone.
The acid has begun its work. Inside the universe he can feel something white and warm, pulsing. Time slows, stretches, becomes a spiral. The Runaway Quonset is full of beauty and it is terrible and Bit knows he is weeping: he knows what everyone is thinking because he has thought it himself, how Cole can feel the earth throbbing beneath his feet, how Helle’s body is warmed against Harrison’s as they press together, dancing, how Armand Hammer can feel Helle’s ribs as he, too, presses close from behind. How generous, he thinks, the boys are to not look at one another, how gracious it all seems to him. The faces around Bit begin to make such grotesque shapes that he can hardly believe a thing. No! he thinks, watching Cole’s eyeballs grow as big as his ears, No!, Pooh’s lips swing to her knees, No!, Helle’s face whittles away to a pinprick, to nothing. Everything is rich with the incredible.
The music splinters into fragments of light that he can catch with his mouth. It is so much, too much, overwhelming. He crawls to one corner and closes his eyes and whispers his own name, over and over and over, until someone picks him up and carries him away.
Somehow, he is outside, and the metal of the Runaway Quonset is cold on his back. Ike is beside him, and they are passing a joint back and forth. The earth burbles underfoot, he can hear the roots of the trees rubbing sexily against the dirt like legs rubbing against legs. Cole is against the Quonset, his lips locked onto the face of a pretty, tiny girl, his hand under her skirt. Bit peers and peers until he can make out Pooh. When Bit can winch his head around, Ike is blinking very fast and hard a few inches from Bit’s face.
