Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  The girl—unbrushed hair, chewed nails, skin as white and featureless as a sheet of Fitz’s Corrasable Bond—just gave her a look and shrugged.

  “I was just wondering how school was going?”

  “Fine.”

  Fitz looked up, smoothed out a wrinkle in the newspaper and said, “Have we got any coffee left? I could really use a cup of coffee—anybody else? Joanie? Ken? Lori?”

  No one answered him, so he pushed himself up and went off in the direction of the kitchen, pausing in the doorway to say, “Last chance,” before Lori murmured, “No thanks,” and he was gone.

  “Because,” Joanie said, taking up the conversation where she’d left off, “it’s really none of my business, I guess, but shouldn’t you be in class?”

  Another shrug. Lori’s feet were bare, her nail polish chipped and dull.

  “And your dorm,” she went on, “what about your dorm—and your roommates? Aren’t they missing you, because it’s been over a week now, or more—?”

  “Susannah said I could stay as long as I want”—that little squeak of a voice, as if there were a bicycle pump inside her. “And Tim. And Fitz too. Is there a problem with that? Ken?”

  Ken turned his head to look over his shoulder, his hair struck gold in the sun through the windows.

  “Ken,” Lori repeated, holding the book open in one hand and stroking the ears of the cat with the other, “do you have a problem with me being here?”

  “No,” he said, “no, not at all. You’re—nice. A nice person. And it’s nice to see such a beautiful smile around here, right, Joanie?”

  To this point, Lori’s face had been about as expressive as a stone, but now she did smile, on cue, and it was as if she were doing one of those toothpaste commercials you saw on TV, her lips pulled back to show off her healthy pink gums and flawless teeth. The smile invested her eyes, brought out a display of dimples, lit her up till she was beautiful and no doubt about it.

  “Right,” she heard herself say, but she said it perfunctorily because she was trying to get at something here. She turned back to the girl. “And maybe it’s just me, but aren’t you afraid of getting bad grades and didn’t I hear something about your college president declaring the Hitchcock estate—us, that is—out-of-bounds for all you girls? Which isn’t right, I’m not saying that, but—”

  The smile vanished. “He’s a jerk,” she said.

  “Well, that may be, but he’s the jerk in charge.” Something in the girl’s face told her to stop, that it was none of her business, but of course it was, if she was living here now. Living here and influencing the other kids. And Fitz. And Ken. And Tim. “Maybe it’s not for me to say—”

  Lori’s mouth hardened.

  “I mean, I’m not your mother.”

  “No,” Lori said, “you’re not.”

  Tim was gone intermittently during that week and the next, traveling back and forth to New York to lecture on the psychedelic experience, sit for interviews and drum up financial support for the Castalia Foundation while managing both to play down and capitalize on the press hysteria over LSD, which seemed to be everywhere now, not just in the tabloids. The New York Times had done an article on Tim’s and Dick’s move to Millbrook (and, of course, their unceremonious departure from Harvard) and The Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek and Esquire ran sedately sensational stories about psychedelic drugs and the revolution they were fomenting not simply among psychologists but the general public as well. The big news? That the drug had escaped the lab and people were beginning to use it indiscriminately—not under a psychiatrist’s direction or in controlled studies or for any purpose any reasonable observer could deem legitimate. And that they were courting trouble, like the group of college students who had stared so long and hard at the sun while under the influence of LSD as to scorch their retinas and become permanently blinded (a story that turned out to be untrue, ridiculous really, but stood in vivid testimony nonetheless).

  Joanie didn’t like any of this one bit. It just called attention to themselves and what they were trying to accomplish here—and what they were trying to accomplish demanded privacy because you didn’t entertain visitors on a spaceship, did you? Wasn’t that the whole point of blasting off into space in the first place? And look what had happened in Mexico. Did they really want a repeat of that?

  She brought it up during a group meeting one night when Tim was back from New York and the martinis were flowing and the children, under Lori’s and Nancy’s direction, had prepared the evening meal of tuna casserole blackened around the edges and broccoli so overboiled it had the consistency of pudding, a meal everyone had felt obligated to praise, right down to the dessert, which was three pans of fudge brownies topped with cream cheese and walnuts.

  “I don’t know,” she said, leaning into the table to address Tim, who, as always, was talking nonstop, and she waited till he paused and lifted his eyes to her before going on. “What I’m saying is I don’t know how much good all this publicity is really doing us—”

  “We need money,” Tim said, giving her an even look. “If for nothing else”—he tapped his glass—“for gin alone. You have any idea how much gin we’re going through here?”

  “I’m serious, Tim. I mean, the kids are even hearing about it at school. The other kids are calling them names, mind-benders, freaks, astronauts—”

  “Astronauts?” Ken said, grinning. “Hairy women I can understand, but astronauts?”

  Charlie, seated across the table from her between Alice and Fanchon, cut in to say, “The proper term is psychonauts, and we ought to get them all to wear jumpsuits or sweatshirts or something with THE PSYCHONAUTS emblazoned on them in big red letters, with maybe a red light bulb underneath it, shooting out rays, what do you think?”

  “Perfect,” Ken said. “I can see it already. The school mascot is just a big glowing bulb dancing around the field. Or no, a brain. Pink, of course. With all the convolutions pulsing.”

  “The Millbrook High Convoluters,” Charlie said. “That ought to put a scare into the opposition.”

  What she thought was that they ought to get serious here a minute, just once, just for a minute, and was that too much to ask? She felt a flash of anger with Charlie, who always had to make a joke of everything. “Easy for you to say, but you don’t have any kids.”

  “I do,” he protested. “Every kid in this house is my kid.” And here they all looked down the table to where the children had abandoned the field, all except for Lori, who didn’t really qualify, though she slept in Nancy’s room and always seemed to be slipping in and out of one doorway or another in the company of Nancy, Suzie or one of the boys. “And that’s another thing,” he went on, “—I just don’t see how we can pretend to be so concerned about the kids, about us as a family, when we keep denying them the sacrament. It’s hypocritical. Why shouldn’t they have that experience, like Susannah said last time? Talk about school, it’ll give them an advantage, that’s what it’ll do. And that’d shut the naysayers up faster than anything.”

  It was an idea that had been floated before and she was of two minds about it. On the one hand, she wanted Corey to have that advantage, to see through the veil, enrich his mind—and his IQ; she was sure it would boost his IQ even higher than it already was—but by the same token she was afraid for him, afraid of what a bad trip might do to somebody so young, whose personality wasn’t fully formed yet. “What about Bobby?” she said. “He’s only eight.”

  Fitz—he was sitting beside her, sipping from a glass of brandy—said there ought to be a cutoff age. “Just in terms of brain development—the stages of it, I mean. All the literature—”

  “Literature,” Hollingshead interjected bitterly. “Textbooks. Papers, articles, The New England Journal of Medicine. All written by academics who wouldn’t know transcendence if it bit them in the ass.”

  “I’ll second that,” Charlie said. They were beyond academia now, into a new realm in which they were the pioneers and the masters too, n
ot McClelland and Kellard or even the neurologists in the medical school, who, as Fitz himself liked to point out, knew the brain only as an organ, anatomically, but didn’t have a clue as to what thought was—or what it was capable of either.

  Royce—he was Bobby’s father, after all, and so it was his decision, his and Susannah’s—tilted his head and gave Charlie a quizzical look. “I don’t know,’ he said. “He is awfully young. Just a little kid, really . . .”

  “Hypocrisy,” Hollingshead said, shaking his head, and Susannah, who was seated between him and her husband, leaned forward so she could look past him to where Tim sat in his usual spot, at the head of the table, and said, “A microdose. A hundred micrograms or even less. What do you think, Tim?”

  Tim was beaming. This was the kind of question he lived for—if they were going to get the word out to the world, it had to start right here, at home. He tipped back his glass, looked round the table. “It’s all in the family,” he said.

  Ultimately it was decided that the following Saturday the entire household would trip together, with the exception of her and Fitz, who volunteered to act as guides, and Bobby, who was deemed too young to process the experience, even if he was limited to so small a dose it was barely viable. She saw the sense in that—what was the rush? Give him time to grow into his body. And his mind. With the other kids, it was different—they were all in their teens, and she half-suspected Tim had dosed Suzie and Jackie at some point, though the subject hadn’t come up and nobody had seemed eager to ask about it.

  Whether that had ever happened or not didn’t really matter—all that mattered to her was Corey. He’d been sleeping in his own room again, as far as she knew, and he was doing fine in school—no complaints there—but he felt excluded, she could see that. Every time she thought of the way he’d reacted when she’d confronted him over Nancy she felt as if she were being attacked all over again. He was an adolescent, yes, growing away from her and Fitz, testing the limits, but the depth of his bitterness had shocked her—and the way he’d judged her too, as if she’d done something to be ashamed of, as if giving herself over to the experience had somehow diminished her love for him and Fitz, when nothing could be further from the truth. But then how could he understand what this was all about if they kept him from it? And that was true of the other kids too. It was time. Past time. But still, still—and this was why she and Fitz had volunteered to abstain and guide him through the process—she was worried about him. How could she not be? She was his mother. She’d always be his mother. And as much as she gave of herself to all of them, to everybody at Millbrook, adults and children alike, that would never change.

  She waited till the morning of the session before saying anything to him. She could have broached the subject earlier—or Fitz could have, but Fitz was so wrapped up in his books and papers he was barely present half the time, and she hadn’t wanted to burden Corey unnecessarily or build up his expectations or even to make the session sound like anything out of the ordinary. He had school to worry about. And sports (he’d gone out for the soccer team at the urging of Tommy Eggers, who was the center forward, and to his own surprise—and hers—he’d made it). Better, she thought, just to mention it casually, as in By the way, we’re having a session tonight, like every Saturday, only tonight’s going to be a little different. So she stayed in the room, reading, until Fitz had gone off to get his coffee and a couple slices of the homemade bread he liked to dunk idly in it (“You want coffee?” he’d asked and she’d shaken her head no), then got up and rapped lightly at the door that connected their room and Corey’s.

  “Can I come in?” she asked, projecting her voice through the door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Me—who do you think?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing, it’s just”—and here she pushed open the door to see him sitting up bare-chested on the edge of the bed, though the room was like an icebox—“I wanted to say good morning. Pancakes for breakfast today. With those sausages you like—the links?”

  “It’s Saturday,” he moaned. “I just want to sleep, okay?”

  She noticed that the window was open and so she crossed the room to pull it shut. “God, it’s freezing in here,” she said, turning round on him and shaking her head, but fondly, and with a smile. “I guess you’re just like your father, because he likes it cold enough at night to freeze Nanook himself. And all the sled dogs too.”

  His clothes, including his soccer things—jersey, sweat socks, jockstrap—were piled up in the corner, which gave the place a feral smell. The sheets could have been cleaner and she made a note to herself to ball everything up and stick it in the washing machine, though she’d been trying not to interfere. What he did in his own room was his business (as long as Nancy wasn’t involved). On the dresser stood the twenty-gallon aquarium her mother had bought for him, and it was lit now and burbling and as clean and well maintained as the ones at the pet shop. Fish in every color imaginable rose and fell and darted in and out of brilliant green clumps of plants that rocked gently in the current generated by the filter. It struck her as intensely beautiful, a beautiful thing—a world—he’d created all on his own.

  “The fish tank looks nice,” she said. “How are they doing—the fish, I mean?”

  He shrugged. “All right.”

  “Listen, you can sleep in if you want. I’ll set aside a plate for you. We can heat it up in the oven whenever you want, okay?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, and he drew up his legs and got back under the covers.

  “All right, then.” She made her way back across the room, pausing with one hand on the door before turning round as if she’d just remembered something. “Oh, I wanted to say we’re having a session tonight. Just us. No visitors coming up from the city, as far as I know.”

  He said nothing, just stared at her, his head propped up on the pillow with its beige pillowcase that could have been cleaner.

  “We—we’ve all been discussing it,” she said, fumbling over the words. “And everybody thought it was time you kids joined in—all of you except Bobby, that is.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I know.” She must have looked surprised because he added, “Everybody knows. Lori told us.”

  “Good,” she said, “fine,” trying to cover herself though she felt a jolt of anger. Lori. What business was it of hers? “I just wanted to tell you, that’s all, because it’s going to be special, you’ll see, and there’s nothing to worry about, because your father and I’ll be right there the whole time.”

  The room held its odor. The tank gurgled. His voice, when he finally spoke, was so soft she barely heard him. “You’re not going to do it?”

  “No,” she said. “Not this time. This time is for you.”

  They had their big meal in the afternoon, a pair of overstuffed tom turkeys with all the trimmings—it might have been two weeks yet till Thanksgiving, but who could resist the sale price, turkey flesh so cheap they were practically giving it away? Afterward they all went outside to take advantage of what turned out to be a fine clear high-toned day with barely a trace of a breeze. Nearly everybody, herself included, participated in a touch football game that went on, with various substitutions and a wildly fluctuating score that had one team up by three touchdowns only to end in a tie or a draw or whatever you wanted to call it, until it was too dark to see the ball, after which they showered, changed clothes, stoked up the fireplace and settled in with martinis while the kids had hot chocolate and turkey sandwiches and Tim put on the MJQ to get everybody in the mood for what was to come.

  A few visitors did show up—Peggy and her brother Tommy, who’d been initiated in Mexico and was as enthusiastic as any of them about the ongoing experiment they were all committed to and sometimes spent the weekend in his own house on the property in any case, so he wasn’t exactly a visitor—but Tim had let it be known that this particular Saturday session was going to be a family affair, and so they were spared the influx of guests
the weekends had been increasingly attracting. Which was fine with everybody. This session, above all, was for the dedicated members of their little colony—and their offspring, because without the next generation, where would you be?

  At seven, Tim and Dick went around dispensing the drug, the adults to get 250 mics, which had become the standard dose, the children a beginner’s dose of 100. The adults, seasoned voyagers all, just threw back their pills and went on waving their martini glasses and chattering away as if this were just another session, which in a sense it was, but the children, especially the Roberts boys and Corey, seemed solemn—or maybe even a little frightened. “It’s okay,” she kept saying, “it’s going to be fun,” but they just stared at her. Corey, especially, seemed to be holding himself in, as if he were resisting what hadn’t yet happened. Which was all wrong, because if you went into this with a negative mind-set you were just looking for trouble, she knew that as well as anybody.

  It was Tim who came to the rescue. He saw right away what was happening and took over, just like that. He spent a few minutes with each of the kids, calmly explaining what was happening and what to expect and how marvelous it was going to be, how right and necessary and enduring. “Any of you worried about higher math?” he asked. “There is no higher math than this. Just don’t tell your teacher, that’s all—he’ll say you’ve got an unfair advantage.”

  Half an hour later, Corey was in the nook beside the fireplace, sitting on an Indian blanket spread out over the floor, with Richard and Ronald on one side of him, Nancy and Lori on the other. They had their legs pulled up to their chests and were staring vacantly into the flame of a big columnar candle Lori had dipped and scented herself with vanilla extract she’d borrowed from Fanchon’s limitless supply. The other kids—Jackie, Suzie and Tommy Eggers—were sitting in front of the fire with Tim, Dick, Peggy and her brother, while Bobby was hunched over the coffee table, absorbed in building a shiny silver robot with the Erector set Royce had picked up that morning to occupy him.