Ecstasy

by Beth Saulnier

  “He won’t really talk about it, but I think it has him really freaked out—wondering whether maybe he would’ve died too, or maybe if Shaun’s tab had been split in half, they both would’ve been okay, just maybe got a little sick or something.”

  “And do you know where the guys got the stuff they took?”

  “At Melting Rock? Could’ve been from a million people.”

  “Well, who did they usually get their drugs from?”

  “Different places. I don’t know.”

  “Where do you get yours from?” She stared at the tabletop. “Come on, Lauren. Just tell me.”

  “I don’t know if I should.”

  “Why not?”

  She extended an index finger and traced the shape of the question marks embedded in the glass tabletop. “Because.”

  “Because why?” I was starting to feel like a twelve-year-old myself.

  “Because …you’re not supposed to, you know, speak ill of the dead.”

  “You got it from one of the boys?” She nodded. “Which one?”

  “Shaun.”

  “Shaun Kirtz? He was a dealer?”

  “Oh, God, nothing like that. He just knew what to buy and where to get it.”

  “And what about now?”

  “I haven’t …Since it happened, I haven’t done anything.”

  “Because your parents threw it all away?”

  “That,” she said, “and because it just doesn’t seem like fun anymore.”

  CHAPTER9

  After the first round of stories about the effort to track down the source of the drugs, things died down. There just wasn’t that much to write about. Since no new cases had been reported, no other jurisdictions had gotten involved. And when a bunch of drunken students got into a bloody brawl during a Freshman Week party at Bessler College—the tiny liberal-arts school that languishes in Benson’s shadow—Melting Rock wasn’t even the most recent example of youthful self-destruction.

  The deaths did continue to inspire a commotion from the Gabriel activist corps, which mounted an educational campaign warning of the various dangers of LSD. But, like at the festival itself, those efforts varied widely, from “Just say no” to “Just make sure your drugs are kosher.” I hadn’t realized it until then—mostly because I’d always been wildly uninterested in such things—but apparently LSD still has quite a following. For some people, it’s a recreational matter, while for others it’s positively messianic.

  San Francisco is, naturally, known as the LSD capital of America. But there are still plenty of sixties holdovers in Gabriel, some of whom (literally or figuratively) participated in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test all those decades ago. This may be a small town, but it’s a pretty funky place.

  And as far as I’m concerned, nothing demonstrated said funkiness quite as pointedly as the two informational tables that cropped up on the Green after the three kids died. One was sponsored by the fire department and offered cautionary literature complete with skull and crossbones; the other touted LSD as a potential cure for everything from alcoholism to criminality.

  “You know,” one fellow from the latter table was telling me and my notebook, “acid’s gotten a way bad rap.”

  The guy was around sixty, sporting a gray ponytail pulled together over a balding pate. His first and only name was Sandy, which he said was short for “Sandman,” and though he was the only person sitting at the table, he wasn’t exactly alone. Standing off to his left was Joe Kingman, a Gabriel alderman and Benson law professor who was there to protect Sandy’s right to free speech. If the cops tried to get rid of him, he told me, he had an injunction request all ready to go.

  Although Sandy was (unsurprisingly) doing a brisk business, he was more than happy to take time out to educate me. LSD’s ability to treat various disorders had only begun to be explored in the sixties, he said. And although a number of bona fide doctors and psychologists thought it had terrific potential to help humanity, he told me, “their work was quashed by a small-minded government afraid to have its citizens fully aware of their mental and emotional power.” Then he gave me a copy of The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience and a homemade granola bar, which he told me was, quote, “clean.”

  I’d happened upon the tables on my way to lunch, which meant that when I returned to the newsroom I had both a gooey slice of white pizza with broccoli and the makings for an equally tasty news story. I dispatched the two inside of twenty minutes, thanking the journalism gods that I’d been coming back out of the Center Gabriel food court just as Sandy was calling his counterpart at the other table a “pea-brained fascist drone.”

  After lunch I had to turn my attention to something a lot less fun: the open house for Deep Lake Cooling.

  What, you may ask, is Deep Lake Cooling?

  Allow me to begin at the beginning.

  Three years and $150 million in the making, Deep Lake (as we hipsters call it) is the largest single infrastructure project in Benson University history. And though Mad is the science guy, I’ve covered the thing enough that I can give you the basics.

  It all started when an attractive-but-hirsute Benson engineer named Glenn Shardik woke up in the middle of the night and realized that the university was sitting right next to a honking-big body of water. And not only is Mohawk Lake long, it’s really deep—maybe four hundred feet—so the water at the bottom stays something like 38 degrees all year round.

  Now, although the subject of air-conditioning is not a particularly sexy one, apparently it’s rather important. Cooling the campus costs big money, particularly when you’re talking about upgrading from all those nasty, ozone-killing CFCs. And although the powers that be may be perfectly happy to let the undergrads swelter, the fact is that computers and labs need to be kept comfy, or else.

  So the solution that Shardik came up with was this: If the campus is hot and the bottom of the lake is practically freezing, why not put them together and—like the TV commercial where the chocolate gets jammed into the peanut butter—create the perfect combination? Suck up some cold water, run it alongside the water from the university’s cooling system at a so-called “heat-exchange facility” on the shore, and presto: free air-conditioning.

  It wasn’t a completely original idea; the city of Stockholm was already doing something like it, and Toronto was thinking about it. But such a thing had never been tried in the United States; now all Shardik had to do was get the university to invest millions, talk the city into letting Benson dig a massive trench from campus to lake, and convince local environmentalists that the whole thing wasn’t going to make the water turn purple.

  On the first two counts, he succeeded handily. That last one, however, proved to be not so easy.

  Now, if you ask me, the Gabriel tree-hugging set would’ve been foursquare in favor of Deep Lake—if it’d been proposed anywhere but here. Sure enough, Shardik was constantly flogging the project’s environmental value, how it’d mean a significant reduction in the university’s production of greenhouse gases. But local activists decided early on that if Benson was in favor of it, it had to be fundamentally evil.

  They argued that it would raise the lake temperature and cause some hideous algae bloom; Shardik hired a team of independent consultants, who found that the overall increase would be roughly equal to one extra sunny day a year.

  They worried about the effect on tiny misis shrimp, who could get sucked into the intake pipe; the experts countered that they were so photophobic, all you had to do was put a ten-watt lightbulb down there to scare them away.

  And so on, and so on. If you think it sounds tiresome, well… you’re right. Try covering it for three straight years.

  To be honest, when I first heard about the project, I thought there was no way it’d ever go through. But every time the local government or its citizenry put up a hurdle, Shardik and his team jumped over it. Construction straddled two summers, ripping up umpteen streets and making Benson commuters curse his name. The same Tuesday that I
took Lauren to Café Whatever, a state judge had refused to grant an injunction barring the system from being turned on; the following afternoon, Deep Lake Cooling was finally being unveiled.

  The occasion was an open house at the heat-exchange facility, located behind a high fence on a knoll at the edge of the lake. Space being tight, reporters and local dignitaries were bused there from downtown—a trip that ended abruptly when we got to the protesters blocking the gate.

  There were maybe twenty of them, a scraggly bunch carrying signs like DEEP LAKE = DEEP TROUBLE and the far less original IT’S OUR LAKE, NOT BENSON’S. The bus driver honked, but it was no go; the news service flack who’d handed out fact sheets on the project’s environmental bells and whistles looked like she wanted to fall under the wheels.

  Finally, we all got out and tried to hoof it—whereupon the protesters put down their signs and linked arms to form a human chain. I shook my head and wondered what it’d be like to be a reporter in a town where civil disobedience wasn’t considered a goddamn art form; more work, maybe, but a lot less annoying.

  I surveyed the members of the impromptu kick line, most of whom I knew. A few months back, several of them had been all fired up about genetically engineered food. Before that, it was… Hell, I couldn’t remember. I was just about to try to talk one of the usual suspects into letting me by when I realized that the oddly dressed blonde at the end of the line was Guinevere, the air-reading weirdo from Melting Rock. I went over to talk to her, but it was no use; her eyes were shut tight and some vague chanting sound was emanating from her throat. I shook my head and moved on, and two seconds later, I recognized someone else: Axel Robinette, Dorrie’s scab-kneed sweetie.

  He was wearing cutoff shorts and a black T-shirt with a drawing of a sturgeon on it; on his head was a red bandanna tied Aunt Jemima style. His knee was healing, but it looked like he was going to have a nasty scar. There was already a vintage one around his hairline, and under his lower lip was a little square of fuzz the Gen Yers call a “soul patch.” Yuck.

  To his left was someone else I recognized, but whom I hadn’t actually met: Axel’s slightly scary-looking buddy with the shaved head and the surfeit of earrings. The guy was wearing an identical sturgeon T-shirt, though he’d cut off the sleeves to better display a pair of beefy biceps.

  Axel didn’t seem to recognize me, but I guess that wasn’t surprising; I’d only interviewed him briefly, and he’d likely been under the influence of chemistry. At the moment, though, he seemed generally sober.

  “Axel, right?” He blinked at me. “I’m Alex Bernier from the Monitor, remember? I talked to you when you won the Hacky Sack thing at Melting Rock.”

  “What? Oh, yeah, I guess.…”

  I turned toward Jesse Ventura Junior. “And your friend would be…?”

  The guy smiled, which didn’t manage to make him look much less intimidating. “Robert Adam Sturdivant,” he said, aiming his gaze directly at my cleavage. “But you can call me ‘Sturdy.’ ”

  I flipped open my notebook. “So you guys want to tell me why you’re here?”

  Silence, until Axel finally spoke up. “Um…We’re protesting Deep Lake.”

  “Yeah, I got that. But why? I mean, how come you’re willing to get yourself arrested over it?”

  Axel’s eyebrows went up. “Arrested? You think, like, the cops are gonna show?”

  “You’re blocking the entrance to the big party. Of course they’re gonna show.” The twenty-something woman on his right made noises that said she agreed with me.

  Sturdivant raised his eyebrows, which made his forehead go all crinkly. “No shit?”

  “I bet you a buck they’re here inside of five minutes.”

  “Whoa,” Axel said. He looked deeply contemplative all of a sudden, and I thought he was going to bolt. But then his scruffy face exploded into a wide grin. “Guess if they’re gonna come, they’re gonna come.”

  “You’re willing to get busted over this?”

  He shrugged, pretty comical considering the linked arms. “Doesn’t hurt a bit.”

  “You mean you’ve been arrested before?”

  “Nah… but I mean, what are they gonna do? Kick our ass?”

  “Not too likely.”

  “Gotta stand up for what you believe in,” he said, then turned to his friend. “Right, man?”

  Sturdivant stuck out his chin. “Fuck yeah.”

  “So come on,” I said, “answer the question. How come you feel so strongly about this?”

  “About Deep Lake?”

  “Of course about Deep Lake.”

  “Oh…I mean, it’s just totally wrong.”

  “How come?”

  “For, you know… for a lot of reasons.”

  This was less than quotable. “Could you be more specific?”

  His back straightened, like he was about to give a speech. But all he said was, “It’s goddamn imperialism.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Benson thinks it’s like some royal kingdom.” He looked to his pal, whose head nodded on his thick neck. “They think they can come down here and fuck up our lake and nobody’s gonna stop them.”

  “Why do you think it’s going to fuck up the lake? I mean, to play devil’s advocate, didn’t all those ecologists sign off on it?”

  His expression indicated that he was starting to think I was very stupid. Hopefully, I was managing to conceal the fact that the feeling was mutual.

  “That doesn’t mean shit,” he said. “Benson’s got deep pockets. They can get anybody to say whatever they want.”

  More agreement from his companions, right and left. Farther down the line, Gabriel’s own Mayor Marty was trying to talk the protesters into packing it in, with no visible success.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s assume for a second the environmental reports are flawed. What do you think it’s going to do to the lake specifically?”

  “Jesus,” he said in a tone I generally reserve for three-year-olds. “What do you think it’s gonna do? You dump a whole shitload of hot water into a lake, it’s not gonna do it any good, now is it?”

  “But according to the Environmental Impact Statement, it’s only going to be a couple of degrees warmer than when they pull it out.”

  “Fuck the Environmental Impact Statement, okay? And besides, what we’re talking about here is the process.”

  “What about it?”

  “Come on, the process was a joke from the beginning. You think the state isn’t gonna do whatever the hell Benson wants? I mean, Christ, they’re the biggest employer in the county. You really think the state wants to piss them off?”

  I never got a chance to answer, because the Gabriel cops showed up then and hauled the protesters off in recyclable plastic handcuffs in record time. Within minutes we were inside the building, where we were greeted by big tables laden with apple cider, yummy-looking cookies, and chunks of cheese from the university dairy store. The Benson news service definitely knows its way to a reporter’s heart.

  In the name of research, I availed myself of all of the above. Then I wandered around the rapidly filling building, whose mammoth pipes and flashing indicator lights looked like a combination of the Enterprise bridge and Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. A Benson student group was singing a cappella, and it took me a minute to recognize “Cool” from West Side Story. Clever.

  “What do you think?” said a voice from behind me. “Pretty neat, huh?”

  I turned around, and there was Lenny Peterson from the news service. Lenny is a nice guy, but he’s not what you’d call a heartbreaker. He’s nearly as short as I am and he has a serious overbite, so the overall picture is of a socially inept bunny rabbit. He’s had a crush on me for a while, and though it’s definitely unrequited, I haven’t been above exploiting it if the situation requires. It’s not nice, but there it is.

  “Hey, Lenny,” I said. “What’re you doing here? Deep Lake’s not in your beat.”

  “Whole office is
here. Putting on the big shebang.”

  “I’ll say. Cookies are good, huh?”

  He eyed my plate longingly. “We only get to have some if there’s leftovers.”

  I aimed a double-chocolate chunk his way. “Go ahead, knock yourself out.” He looked over at the news service director, who was introducing Glenn Shardik to a reporter from the Syracuse public TV station. “Come on, go ahead. The coast is clear.” His hand darted out like a cobra and snatched the cookie, which he folded in half and jammed into his mouth. “Some crowd out there, huh?” His mouth was too full to answer; he just chewed and made rapturous noises. “You guys expecting any protesters?”

  He grunted a “no” through the remains of the cookie, and I waited while he finished chewing. “Who’da thought they’d try and block the buses?” he said. “But I guess we shoulda known, huh?”

  “It’s not exactly unprecedented around here. Those guys been giving you a lot of trouble?”

  He shook his head. “Not up at the news service or anything. I mean, nobody but you reporters even know we exist, right?” He sounded vaguely melancholy. “But, you know, security’s been pretty tight down here at the site. Didn’t want to let anybody throw a wrench in the works.”

  “Tell me something, Lenny. You’re a science guy—”

  He started to blush about the gills. “I just cover science for the news service. I write press releases and stuff. I’m no scientist.”

  “Yeah, but…you have your ear to the ground a lot. Tell me the truth. You think all the environmental stuff about Deep Lake was on the up-and-up?”

  “Huh?”

  I leaned in closer, in case my cleavage might help loosen his lips. “Come on, you know….All the scientific review about how the project isn’t going to hurt the lake or the environment or anything; you think it’s for real?”

  Now he looked vaguely scandalized. “You mean do I think the university doped it?”

  “More or less.”

  “Why? Did somebody say that?”

  “One of the guys blocking the gate.”

  He rolled his bulgy eyes. “Yeah, like they’d know.”