Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

“Saw me what?”

  “Kissing. Making out. With Ken, Charlie and who knows who else? Tim. Did you do it with Tim yet?” His voice had tightened till it was almost a snarl.

  “That’s different,” she said, “we’re different.” One hand rose unconsciously to her hair to tamp it in place though it hadn’t come loose at all. “We’re adults. We’re all in this together, this experiment, you know that . . .”

  “Yeah,” he said, “well, I’m different too and so’s Nancy.” He was on his feet suddenly, brushing by her and heading for the door, and it occurred to her in that moment that he was taller than she was, taller by an inch, maybe more, and how could she have missed that?

  “I don’t mean it that way,” she said. “Corey, come back here, I’m talking to you—”

  He turned at the door to give her a look. “No, you’re not,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  Halloween was on a Thursday that year, which meant that for all practical purposes the party was going to be a four-day affair, and the big question was how they were going to pace themselves. Fanchon argued for a group session on the night itself—“For the feeling of the spirits on the true date, the veritable date, no?”—and then maybe following it up with another session on Saturday, when the main influx of guests was expected. Charlie pointed out that a lot of people he’d talked to were coming for the weekend, which meant they’d be arriving on Friday and expecting the fullest efflorescence of Millbrook hospitality, and Paulette said, “That’s fine. If they want to trip they can trip,” and Tim, who was presiding over what amounted to an impromptu meeting in the kitchen over cocktails and the sweet sustaining scent of the bread Paulette and Susannah had been baking all afternoon, said, “Okay, that’s it then—group consensus. We play it by ear.”

  The real problem at this juncture was the question of supply. Though LSD (the sacrament, as Tim called it, or, alternately, heavenly blue) was legal, it was almost impossible to obtain after all the negative publicity surrounding Harvard and Zihuatanejo and the way the drug had jumped out of the lab and onto the front pages of the tabloids. Sandoz backed off, no longer offering free samples, but charging now, as with any other drug. Tim and Dick, seeing which way the wind was blowing, managed to come up with ten thousand dollars, which Tim sent in the form of a personal check to the Sandoz affiliate in New Jersey, along with an order for enough doses to keep half the Eastern Seaboard seeing visions for the next five years, but Sandoz returned the check with a terse note indicating that the drug would henceforth be made available only in small quantities and only to qualified researchers, which apparently was a status Tim and Dick no longer enjoyed. The solution? Dick, who was an amateur pilot in possession of his own plane, flew to Canada, where the authorities weren’t yet infected by all this negativity, and obtained what they needed—not through Sandoz but a Czech company that was producing its own iteration of the drug and didn’t much concern itself with what Sandoz did or didn’t do.

  Which amazed her, the whole thing, beginning to end. That the government, the federal government, the FDA, Sandoz, whoever, would want to prevent people from exercising their right to the Fifth Freedom—their right to absolve themselves, become one with creation and maybe even look on the face of God—was simply beyond comprehension. Harvard had turned on them. The Mexicans. The press. Everybody seemed to be against them—and for no other reason but ignorance. As Tim said, they were like the mental midgets of Galileo’s day who refused to look through the telescope when the evidence was right there staring them in the face.

  But then there was Dick, the shining light in all this—he had all these revelatory facets about him, each one illuminating the other, right down to the core, which was as resilient as the core of a golf ball and would just bounce all the higher the harder you hit it. Dick the professor, Dick the advocate of mind expansion, Dick the guru and housekeeper who was more a father—and mother—to Suzie and Jackie than Tim was himself. And he was a pilot on top of it? He was. And that was all it took. Dick. In his plane. And after that?—the party was on.

  All four of the older boys, Corey included, dressed as hoboes. This had the virtue of being simple—old clothes from the Salvation Army in Poughkeepsie and a few strokes of eyebrow pencil for whiskers—and it enabled them to present a group front as they went trick-or-treating in town. Bobby, the youngest, had his heart set on being Tigger, from the Winnie-the-Pooh books, so she helped Susannah sew him a playsuit out of an orange-and-black-striped pattern they found on the top of the back shelf at the fabric shop. She herself dressed as Jackie Kennedy, in a white skirt, white top, white gloves and a black pillbox hat perched on top of her sprayed-up hair as if it had floated down from the sky. Everybody had an early dinner—a dunch, as Fitz called it—and by the time it got dark and the kids trooped up the long drive and down into town to ring doorbells and smash pumpkins, Tim went around to each of the adults and delivered the sacrament, LSD-25, in 250-microgram doses.

  They were in the library, lights turned low, the fire glowing in a bed of ash and one of Tim’s eternal ragas on the stereo, just settling in, just waiting for the neural fireworks to start, when an unaccountable sound—a buzzing, it seemed like—began to intrude itself under the cascading flights of the sitar. She heard it and then she didn’t. Heard it again and then didn’t. She was sitting cross-legged on the carpet with Ken, Fanchon and Susannah in a little group apart from the others and they’d been talking about the Light, the ecstatic allbright light that obliterates your field of vision and announces the presence of God, a light each of them in turn admitted they’d never yet seen, but were hoping to, maybe even tonight—when the buzzing started in again and she interrupted Susannah, who was saying that it wasn’t the First Light you were ultimately seeking but the one it gave rise to, the Second Light, which appeared only to the very highest adepts and opened up God and the universe to them for all of time and the time beyond that. Which seemed to Joanie a dubious proposition, as if you could put God on order, and of course to do that would mean that He actually did exist, for which she’d yet to see the evidence—or intuit it. But anything was possible . . . wasn’t it?

  “Do you hear that?” she asked, interrupting.

  “What?”

  “Oh, wait,” Ken said, “I hear it—a buzz, right? Or is that just the drug coming on?”

  Something made her push herself up and go out into the hall to investigate. It was supremely interesting to be on her feet—she felt inexpressibly light, as if her shoes weren’t touching the floor at all, as if there were no floor or ground beneath it either. There were shadows everywhere. Cutouts of witches on brooms ascended the walls and a pair of jack-o’-lanterns glowed on either side of the door. Jack-o’-lanterns. With slit eyes and pointed fangs. Inside them was molten lava, a whole volcano’s worth, and suddenly it was pouring out all over the room and she realized that she was in the experience now, deep in it, except for that buzzing, which was . . . which was . . . the front door! Wasn’t it? Yes. The front door. Definitely the front door.

  No one had expected trick-or-treaters. Here they were all the way up at the far end of the village and with a mile-long drive to boot, but wouldn’t it be a surprise—a treat, a gas, as Charlie would say—to see kids in costumes? That would be the ultimate. She would love that. She went to the door expectantly, took hold of the handle, which seemed in that moment to be melting under the touch of her skin, and pulled it open.

  Standing there on the doorstep was a girl of Suzie’s age or maybe a little older, who could tell, since the girls in this town all looked as alike as pennies. This girl was dressed in black, all black, in a skirt that fell to the ground and a tight black blouse unbuttoned partway down to expose a black brassiere and the tops of her breasts. On her forehead, centered precisely, was a third eye reproduced in acrylic paint, or maybe that was a hallucination too?

  “Hi,” the girl said, in a voice that had too much air in it, a kind of a squeak of a voice, “is Nancy in?”

  “Nancy?”
she repeated, as if she’d never heard the name before in her life.

  “Nancy Eggers? She told me to meet her here at seven, I mean, if this is the right place?”

  She was about to say something in response, to say yes, when the girl said, “Wow, I love your costume,” making a gesture with one hand as if to indicate the whole picture, the doorframe, the jack-o’lanterns, the white gloves and pillbox hat and the shadows warring beyond. “Jackie Kennedy, right?”

  Despite herself, despite the fact that she was just beginning to feel untethered, she was pleased, as if she’d been transformed into a girl herself. “Yes,” she said, and felt herself smile.

  “Cool,” the girl said, looking beyond her into the depths of the hallway before coming back to her. “As a goof, right?”

  “Right,” she said. “As a goof.” Though that scrambled things further, because her intention hadn’t been satiric at all—she admired Jackie Kennedy, the First Lady, the woman who’d brought some style to the White House after the relentless dowdiness of Mamie Eisenhower and the dreariness that seemed to radiate outward from her till it swallowed up the whole country in nonentityness, if that was even a word. But that didn’t matter now. What mattered was getting back to the circle and the trip and the opening up of all her senses, including the ones she didn’t yet know she had. “I think Nancy went into town with, with—”

  “I’m right here,” a voice intoned behind her and she turned round on Nancy, who was dressed exactly like the girl on the front steps, right down to the third eye, and looking not at all like the sixteen-year-old she would be in two weeks’ time but a girl—a woman—already in her twenties. She was showing her bra too—and what it supported—and that was wrong, that was inappropriate, and before she knew what she was saying she said, “You look nice. What’re you dressed as?”

  Nancy gave her an even look. “Same as Lori,” she said.

  “Really?” The jack-o’-lanterns had begun to exude hot lava again until the whole house crackled with flames and the world beyond rushed away from her and then jerked back again till it was right there trapped inside her skull. “And what would that be—a witch?”

  Nancy shook her head.

  “Vampire?”

  Lori—the girl on the steps—answered for her. “We’re both Jackie Kennedy.” She made a circular motion with one hand. “Just like you.”

  This time was different—deeper, more immediate, more powerful—and she had neither the leisure nor presence of mind to wonder whether the formula was skewed or if the dosage had been miscalculated in the lab or if it was just her. She went down hard and fast. She remembered sitting on the floor with her back propped up against the couch and Ken on one side of her and Fitz on the other and Ken saying You are too perfect, and don’t you know it, because, really, no joke, I’ve always wanted to make it with Jackie Kennedy—what about you, Fitz? You want to make it with her too? Then she was locked up inside herself for the longest time, just feeling the music and the texture of the carpet beneath her as if it were the portal to the center of the earth and she was dropping down the molten sides of it over and over again, a thousand times, ten thousand, and everybody kept joking and calling her Jackie until she was Jackie and nobody else, Jackie presiding over a televised tour of the White House, Jackie smiling into the camera, hosting Girl Scout troops and sewing circles and all the foreign dignitaries and their foreign wives and all of them gabbling in their foreign tongues. At one point, Hollingshead showed up in a rubber mask and she was sure he was Nikita Khrushchev until he took it off and said, Nyet, nyet, I am only Mickey Mouse, and everybody was laughing and laughing until she had to go someplace quiet, all by herself—the bedroom, somebody’s bedroom—and hold on tight to the wooden post there while all the trains in the world rushed by one after another, slamming at the air and then taking it all, every breath of it, away with them. She choked, she gasped, stroked the carpet—another carpet or was it the same one?—and fell down the very same hole again, right to the center of the earth, and yes, there was someone there with her, a man, a male Homo sapiens, representative of her very own species and a very good friend and true, somebody she loved very, very much, and Jackie Kennedy had the time of her life.

  Maybe it was nine o’clock. Maybe Fitz was in another room with another person, with people, lots of people, and she was out in the hallway watching the front door pull open and shut on four hoboes and a very small tiger—a Tigger—with shopping bags that bulged and sagged and gave up their contents in multiform array (You want some candy, Mom?), until she was alone there once more with the taste of chocolate in her mouth and the door was opening again, this time on two girls, two young women, dressed like vampires, like streetwalkers, like presidents’ wives, if presidents’ wives were tramps.

  6.

  For days after the party—the main party, the big one on Saturday night—she kept running into people she’d never seen before in the hallways or the library or one of the twelve bathrooms, as if the festivities were still in full swing. It was disconcerting, to say the least. And annoying, that too. One couple (the man turned out to be a psychologist friend of Tim’s who was dosing himself with LSD in the hope of recovering from an addiction to amphetamines and alcohol) seemed to have moved into one of the vacant rooms on the second floor with a steamer trunk and a dozen cardboard boxes of belongings, which they promptly scattered all over the house. They appeared only at meals, sitting passively at the end of the table among the children, waiting to be fed, and the thing was, both of them had long beaky noses and feathery hair so that they looked like nothing so much as baby birds in a nest—nestlings, that was what they were, and that was how she wound up referring to them for the first week or so, as in, Anybody seen the Nestlings yet?

  And Hollingshead—it was clear he was here to stay as well. He’d brought a sour-faced woman with him who’d dressed as a pussycat at the party—or maybe it was a Playboy bunny—and he went around telling everybody he was with her for the sex only and that when you came right down to it, he didn’t even like her. Well, fine. Nobody else liked her either. She was a complainer, nothing about the house or the food or the noise level or the frequency of the sessions or the quality of the marijuana or even the martinis quite up to her standards. Charlie called her a downer, another descriptor he dug out of his Beat dictionary, and the whole household had to put up with her nagging presence—three meals a day and right there in your face every time you turned around—till at the end of the week somebody drove her to the station in Poughkeepsie and she was gone, never to be seen again.

  Twelve bathrooms. Somebody had to clean them and it wasn’t going to be Hollingshead or the amphetamine addict or the amphetamine addict’s wife or girlfriend or whoever she was. More food was needed too, which meant more money and more trips to the supermarket in the station wagon, which really—and she was being honest here—made her rethink, or at least put limits on, the concept of brother-and sisterhood. And while the rest of the hangers-on had eventually left once they saw that the party had played itself out and Tim wasn’t the walking drug dispensary he appeared to be, one guest, if you could call her that, didn’t seem to have gotten the message. That was Lori, Nancy’s smart-mouth friend, who as it turned out was eighteen and not in high school at all—she was a freshman at Bennett, who should have been in her dorm room, should have been studying and joining the Thespians Club or whatever else she was meant to do, but seemed always to be sitting in a prime spot in front of the fire in the evening and at the breakfast table in the morning.

  Joanie asked her about it one day, not meaning to be confrontational, or not exactly. She was just curious, because college life for her—at least until Corey came along and she had to drop out—had been very different, with a full class schedule five days a week and enough homework to keep her busy most weekends too. What was this girl thinking, that was what she wanted to know. How had she insinuated herself here? What did she expect? More importantly: When was she going to leave?
/>   It was just after breakfast. Nancy, Corey and the other kids had left for school and she and Susannah had done the dishes and fed the animals and the house had settled into a profound morning silence. This was her favorite time of day, some people not up yet, others off in the woods or sequestered in one nook or another and all the excitement of the group experiment tempered in the simple routine of being alive in the world till it would build to climax again in the evening when there’d be dinner, discussion, music, sometimes a film on Tim’s brand-new projector and on Saturdays the weekly group session everybody looked forward to. She found Lori in the library with Fitz and Ken, who’d started a fire there to take the chill off the room. They were all reading, Fitz and Ken absorbed in the newspaper, Lori in a book of what appeared to be poetry.

  “Oh, hello, all,” she said, settling into the couch beside Fitz but looking only to Lori, who was sprawled on the other side of him with one of the cats—a bloated tabby with a head the size of a cantaloupe—asleep in her lap.

  Ken, who was occupying one of the armchairs in front of the fire, said “Hi” and Fitz murmured a greeting, but Lori said nothing.

  A moment ticked by, the only sound the hiss of the fire. She picked up a section of the newspaper and scanned the headlines, only to set it back down again, the news of the outside world—a volcanic eruption in the North Atlantic, Malcolm X’s speech, a train disaster in Japan and a coup in Vietnam—as remote and meaningless as if she really were on a spaceship floating in the void. But this was a private spaceship, wasn’t it? She’d thought so. Except that now she had to adjust to the Nestlings and Hollingshead—and on top of it she had to see this girl slumped there on the couch as if this were her own house, as if she belonged, as if the inner circle were open to just anybody now no matter their age or experience. “So, Lori,” she said, after the silence had simmered a moment, “how are you?”