by Nell Zink
“We convened a fraternity council to assess her eligibility to become our fertility goddess,” a boy named Mike said.
“We’re casting lots for her garments,” another added. Karen didn’t move or make a sound.
“Get the fuck out, all of you,” Byrdie said.
“This is my room,” Mike protested.
Byrdie repeated himself yet again. Then he picked up a broadsword that was leaning behind the door because Mike was in the Society for Creative Anachronism. All the boys retreated to the hall. He closed the door, locked it, and turned to Karen.
She was fully clothed, which was a relief. He peeked up her skirt to make sure. On her T-shirt, below the swastika, someone had written “Sex Receptacle.” His eyes burned with shame. She was breathing evenly, with a slight gurgling sound. He turned her head and body to the side and a thread of drool trickled from her mouth. She made a humming sound and never opened her eyes. One arm reached out and touched his leg.
Byrdie hoisted her into the air easily, cradling her in his arms, and carried her down to his room. Her boyfriend hadn’t moved. He positioned her on his bed and poked Temple a couple of times in the side. “Yo, bleed, wake up,” he said.
“I can’t. I’m dead,” Temple said. “Where am I? Oh shit.” He choked out a strange sob and buried his face in the couch. Then he suddenly sat upright and said, “Where are those guys? Where’s Shadow?” He lurched into the bathroom and vomited, moaning. As he ran, Byrdie saw that his pants were stained brown in the rear. It was not Temple’s best moment.
“Your friend’s okay,” Byrdie called to him through the door. “Where does she live? I’m going to take her home if you don’t mind.”
“Get her out of here,” Temple said. “This place is cursed. It’s literally hell. I deserve to be here.” Another catastrophic heave took him by surprise, and there was a sound like a long, damp fart.
“Take your suit off and throw it away. Throw away all your clothes, man. Put them in the trash bag and tie it up real tight, and take a shower. I’m serious. Take some of my clothes. They’ll fit you.”
“Oh, God,” Temple said. “This is the worst day of my life.”
“Where does your girlfriend live?”
“Dabney three-oh-two,” Temple said.
Byrdie was surprised. He had figured she was a townie.
“Tomorrow I’m going to a revival and surrendering to Jesus,” Temple added, burping loudly and returning to the toilet.
“Stand in the bathtub when you take your clothes off,” Byrdie suggested.
“I’m so sorry,” Temple groaned. “I can never make this up to anybody, ever. This is rock bottom.”
Mike, the boy who had hosted the fertility ritual with Karen, spent most of the following day in a police station downtown. He was interviewed by two local police detectives, playing good cop and better cop. With him were two young criminal defense lawyers hired by his father. They occasionally resorted to holding their heads and gasping in horror. One of them eventually said, “Please can it and leave the talking to us. One more word and I’ll pop you this time for real.”
The reason was this: The Thetan House Halloween party had been the occasion of a very straightforward entrapment sting.
The political background of the police’s actions was unimpeachable. There were murmurings of dissatisfaction in the local black community that had spread to the Democratic Party, endangering the mayor’s reelection campaign. So many black people had been busted for crack cocaine while college students went on snorting the expensive stuff unimpeded. All sorts of hard drugs drifted around the college, nearly always ignored. A cloud of pot smoke at a concert on-grounds was a chance for campus cops to roll their eyes. The same cloud in front of a black nightclub in town led to convictions and ruined lives. It was high time, the liberals and the fuzz agreed, that some lives be ruined on the other side of the fence.
But it’s hard to catch someone in possession of a drug he takes once a month or so, bought in the quantity he’ll need for a single evening. The dealers were impossible to pin down, because they seemed to overlap with the users. When one had drugs, they all had drugs, in uninteresting small quantities, and when the town was dry it was dry. Once you bust them, they get careful. They didn’t get into UVA for nothing. They’re smart.
Thus it was decided to run a sting. Armed with little more than longish hair and a superficial knowledge of Tolkien, a grown man moved in with the Thetans. It wasn’t a dorm, after all, or even officially a frat house anymore—just a big rented house, and he demonstrated his superiority to competing student applicants by laying claim to a reliable source of excellent LSD. To no one’s surprise on the official, organizing end of the sting, the students didn’t bat an eyelash. Why exactly it would be legal for him to do that—poison college students in their home—no one could say.
Mike had accepted three tabs of four-way blotter from the paid informant. The police knew that twelve hits of acid cut with methamphetamine is much too much for one person. It would make him feel desperately ill for a good long while. Thus if the next day he can’t produce it, yet walks and talks, he is—with near certainty—a dealer of LSD.
But instead of claiming to have lost the LSD, or even to have consumed it, Mike reasoned that if possessing a substance is illegal, the best thing to have done with it would be to have gotten rid of it ASAP. So he said, “I didn’t have that acid for more than five minutes. I gave it to somebody else.”
His lawyers groaned. “What’s the big deal? There was this girl at the party, too young to be drinking, so we—”
One of his lawyers reached over and slapped him, gently.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded to know. “What am I saying wrong?”
“You didn’t give acid to an underage girl,” the lawyer hissed. “Try to remember what really happened.”
“Giving drugs away is dealing,” a detective said. “You may not be aware of this, but if there’s a marijuana cigarette going around the room and you touch it, you’re guilty of possession. If you pass it on, you’re guilty of distribution. That’s the law of the land. And that makes you a dealer.”
“I didn’t sell it! I gave it away!”
“Did you have any more contact with the girl? Did you try to get it back?”
“She was in my room passed out the whole time.”
That’s when the lawyers begged him to shut up.
“I don’t get it!” Mike wailed. “All I did was take drugs, I mean accept them as a gift, from somebody I don’t even know, and only because he was driving me crazy, begging me to take this acid off his hands. And he was working for you the whole time, and now you’re acting like I’m the drug dealer here! It’s not fair!”
“You gave that girl enough LSD to poison the water supply of the entire campus.”
“What are you talking about? Twelve hits is twelve hits!”
“LSD is an extremely potent substance. According to our records, a typical square of four-way blotter weighs at least a gram.”
“Of paper! That’s the weight of the paper!” He appealed to his lawyers for help. They shook their heads. “This is way fucked,” he said. “I have no chance. They’re insane.”
Conferring with him privately, his lawyers explained that he would be well advised to identify witnesses who might contradict his story—particularly the girl. But he could barely remember Karen. His memories of the evening were all rather hazy. He knew she had blond hair. He couldn’t say how tall she was. “She was lying down when I met her,” he explained. The part he remembered best was being herded out of his room with a claymore.
Byrdie Fleming: That’s who ended up with the girl and the drugs. But rat out a brother? His own beloved hegemon?
The police typed up a summary of his inadvertent remarks, and he signed it so he could go home.
When Karen woke up, it was midafternoon. She was on her bedspread, still wearing her suit, but her T-shirt and her shoes and socks were gone.
&nbs
p; She checked her jacket pockets and found a handwritten note. “Dear Shadow—,” it read. “If you’re missing any stuff, it’s probably at Thetan House, or I know where to find it. Your friend Temple stayed over there last night. He was not feeling too well. Thanks for a very interesting evening. Very truly yours, Thetan Hegemon.”
She remembered the hegemon well. He had been smart without being nerdy. That was something new to her. Intelligence paired with dignity, a stark contrast to Temple, especially as his behavior became more embarrassing over the course of the evening. She hadn’t dared leave him alone. It shamed her to think that the hegemon had found them “interesting.” What a condescending term. Yet there had been something pleasant and dreamlike about her night—but she couldn’t say what. She recalled the hegemon’s face opposite her own in dim shades of gray, like a face in a dream.
With the note were three squares of thick paper that resembled markers from a board game, each printed with four tiny yellow kangaroos. Other than that her pockets were empty. She stood up and looked around her room. There was no sign of her coin purse or Halloween candy, but her keys were in the door.
She thought hard. What had gone on? Why did she have no shirt? How did she get home with such clean feet, if she’d lost her shoes?
She went looking for Temple. He was in his dorm room, suffering. His roommate was watching a movie on video, and every word of dialogue seemed like a dull knife sawing at Temple’s brain. He willingly followed Karen outside. They walked to a little planting of trees with a bench.
“We are not telling anybody about this,” Temple said.
“Damn straight,” Karen said. “That was the top secret night from beyond. Never again.”
“It’s top secret even to me,” he said. “I remember going to their party, and I remember coming home.”
“I found this in my pocket.” She showed Temple the squares of paper with the kangaroos.
“Blotter acid?” Temple said. “Get it away from me. Like, hide it, right now.”
Karen was intrigued. She had overheard Lomax and Meg talking about LSD once. Meg had said there were few more delightful things in life. Meg had been treated to some real Owsley acid from San Francisco by a famous poet, dribbled by the poet himself on a sugar cube, and had never forgotten how the swallows looked swooping over the yard at dusk. Billions of them. Karen remembered the sugar cube part vividly—nothing about paper. “How could I have bought LSD?” she objected. “I only had two dollars! What makes you so sure?”
“Blotter is cheap. I read about it in a book on Jimi Hendrix.”
“What should I do with it?”
“Throw it over your left shoulder. Shake the dust of it from your sandals. Except you don’t have shoes on. Put it down.” Karen placed the acid on the damp sand in front of them. Still sitting, Temple slammed his shoe heel down on it and twisted around. “Get thee behind me, kangaroo Satan!” he said. The soft paper sank in shreds into the dirt. Temple smoothed the surface of its grave with his hand.
“Mom always said acid is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It’s supposed to be valuable.”
“Your mom! Acid was really great in 1968. I bet she took pure pharmaceutical-grade acid dropped on sugar cubes by Allen Ginsberg.”
“God, how did you guess?”
“Maybe she told me. Now it’s just this dirty crap cut with crystal meth. Cheeta”—that was Janice’s boyfriend—“told me whatever you do, never shoot up anything, and never take anything that’s not available by prescription and been tested for safety. If you can’t find it in the Physician’s Desk Reference, leave it alone.”
“But I could have traded it back to them for my sneakers!”
“Trading that much acid for your sneakers would evidence a lack of business sense. Plus it would be a felony, sort of like even owning that much acid.”
“There was a note with it from their hegemon saying ‘thanks for an interesting night.’ Maybe it was, like, payment for an interesting night?”
Temple’s eyes narrowed.
“Not that interesting. I mean, I was missing my shirt and my shoes and socks, but nothing happened.”
“How can you tell nothing happened?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’m on my period, and my tampon string was still—”
Temple grimaced and said, “Ugh! Stop it!”
“You asked.”
“What about your shirt?”
Karen frowned.
Up to that point Temple had been thinking grateful and admiring thoughts about Byrdie. Now he declared to Karen that instead of laundering Byrdie’s clothes and returning them to Thetan House, he would keep them in trade for her sneakers, his undershirt, and the mortal affront of saddling her with illegal drugs.
The police told Mike to go back to the house and relax. For him it had been a confusing day. The law was so friendly, and his own lawyers were so hostile. The police made him feel important, caring about what he said. But his supposed allies kept calling him stupid and saying he should shut up.
Back among his brothers, he saw an opportunity to be a hero after all. They all knew Byrdie had humiliated him by driving him from his room and refusing to hear him out, but he could still take the moral high ground. He bragged that he could have saved himself by naming names, but instead he protected Byrdie. He had not told the police it was Byrdie who ended up with both the teenage whore and the large quantity of drugs she had accepted in payment. He, Mike, had taken full responsibility for the events of the night. The buck stops here.
“That was right Christian of you,” Byrdie said. A short time later he sidled out of the kitchen as though to take a leak, crept up to his room, and called Lee.
Lee praised his presence of mind, set his alarm, and went back to sleep.
Byrdie regarded his large block of hash and several lesser items. He wished they were somewhere else. They had to vanish. But not by leaving the house on his person. It might be staked out. And not on his girlfriend’s person. That was too much to ask. Thinking of Grandma Fleming, he went to the refrigerator.
His solution was loosely based on her trademark dumplings. Ground beef, hashish, raw egg, and a little pancake syrup, rolled in cornflakes for a better grip. At the center of each ball, a peyote button and a cannabis flower, finely crushed. Five of them, baseball-sized, on a plate, looked to Byrdie like something raccoons would eat.
He carried them up to the meditation room on the top floor and softly opened the half-moon window. He could hear the ruckus from the kitchen below. His waited until his eyes adjusted to the dark. He positioned himself away from the window to make sure his movements didn’t attract attention and threw sidearm, hard. The first ball vanished invisibly into the night. He didn’t hear it land, but he felt sure it had crossed the garage roof next door and landed at least two hedges away. He heard a dog bark. He launched four more.
After meditating briefly, he returned downstairs to call his girlfriend. He asked her to come over, saying he needed “sexual healing.” That was in case his phone was tapped. When she arrived, they began cleaning his room.
Lee drove to Charlottesville at first light. He picked Byrdie up from a nearby gas station in silence. No one in the house had been awake to see him leave. Even the cops in the stakeout van missed his tiptoed exit through the bike room. Lee drove out to the bypass and checked them both into a nice motel.
Around nine A.M., the police cordoned off the house and began a comprehensive search. They interviewed every boy individually, except Byrdie, who was nowhere to be found.
The informant had lived in the house for months, so the boys naturally assumed he had witnessed every drug transaction during that time, along with a majority of instances of drug use. To preempt his accusations, they came clean. They were chatty as sparrows, convinced cooperation buys leniency. They detailed others’ narcotics-related activities and even their own as though they’d never heard of jail. You had to bar
k “Shut up already!” to get a chance to read them their rights. They would get bored waiting for their lawyers to show up and tell the investigators funny anecdotes about the time they dropped acid and swam in a fountain and campus cops took their clothes. They would get in this angry mood like they wanted their clothes back and could the FBI get on the case.
The Commonwealth’s attorney was getting frustrated. Their crimes were so petty and selfish. Buying a joint to smoke alone in your room! A single hit of ecstasy! He was almost ashamed for them. Had no one taught them to share?
He was the democratically elected head prosecutor of the city of Charlottesville. Since victims outnumber criminals, he favored victims. He knew there is no such thing as a victimless crime, whatever casual drug users might say. A person whose harmless actions are criminalized becomes a victim of the law. That paradox helped him out every day by showing him the unreality of his job.
Mike had confessed in writing to serious crimes. He had given a young girl twelve hits of acid. He had even conspired, he admitted somewhat bashfully, to bestow on her the honors due a fertility goddess, though nothing had come of it. Absolutely no one else had been at fault in any way. His confession was typed and signed, if only because he didn’t believe he had done anything illegal.
Mike was unknowingly committed to civil disobedience. He sincerely believed his persecutors would be exposed as criminals.
But then his parents showed up—nice, working-class folks from Long Island who had sacrificed much to send Mike to a Public Ivy to major in accounting. They alternated standing outside the house in tears and calling the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office from a pay phone to beg for mercy.
Mike asked if he could make another statement. He said he was very sorry for providing false information, but in fact it was Byrdie who had done all those things.
Mike’s fingering Byrdie was the first good news the Commonwealth’s attorney had heard all day. At last a credible suspect: the frat president who had waltzed off at the end of the night with the girl and the drugs, who was incommunicado and well known to the informant as a connoisseur of organic psychedelics.
