Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  For a long moment she said nothing, her breath steaming in the cold of the room that might as well have been a tent in the woods for all the heat the radiators gave up. “Corey,” she said. “I won’t have it. I won’t.”

  “Have what? What are you talking about?”

  “He’s going to get her pregnant, you know that, don’t you?” “Nancy?”

  “Who do you think I’m talking about, Queen Elizabeth? You know what he did?” Suddenly, angrily, she was shoving the sleeve of the sweater up her arm to reveal a dark seep of discoloration in the crease of her elbow and a matching bruise on her forearm. “He pushed me out the door! Pushed me!”

  He threw back the blankets and tried to pull her to him but she resisted. “No,” she said, “no! I have to tell you this, I have to—he’s too young, Fitz. Way too young. You’ve got to do something. Talk to him. And don’t give me that boys-will-be-boys crap either . . .”

  He had talked to him, back in the fall when they’d first discovered he wasn’t sleeping in his room, and if he hadn’t exactly laid down the law—that wasn’t his method, and besides which, it made him feel like a hypocrite—they’d at least come to an understanding. As far as he knew, Corey had been sleeping in his room ever since—he even checked on him every once in a while, just to reassure himself. When he thought about it, that is, and he had to admit he didn’t think about it all that often. Boys will be boys, that was how he felt, and girls will be girls, and the Alte Haus and the surrounding hills and fields featured a hundred places for private assignations, as he himself knew full well. Corey wasn’t the little boy he used to read aloud to, not anymore. And it wasn’t as if he was haunting dark alleys or taking the train into Harlem and soliciting prostitutes. Nancy was fine. Nancy was adequate. And Corey would outgrow her and go on to college—or she’d outgrow him. It was all the same.

  But Joanie wouldn’t hear of it. Her voice was bitter, her eyes burning. “I don’t want him to wind up like us.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I wouldn’t wish that fate on anyone.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “What do you mean then?”

  She looked away in exasperation. She was trembling, angry still—and cold, that too. Again he reached out for her and again she pushed him away. “I mean he’s too young.”

  Now, in the chill of the bedroom on the first morning of her exile, Corey slapped the loose-leaf rhythmically against his thigh and said, “I forgot to mention happy.”

  “Happy? What do you mean?”

  He gave a little smile, and he was still a kid, still and always. “One big happy family,” he said, and then he pulled back the door, slipped out into the hallway and was gone.

  What went on between Joanie and Fanchon was anybody’s guess and Joanie didn’t say much more than, “It was peaceful.” Apparently, they’d tripped every day, varying the dosages so that one day they took the minimum—the kids’ dose—and the next the 500 mics Tim was accustomed to. They read, listened to music, consulted the I Ching and never left the house or saw anybody except in the moment their meals were delivered by Susannah or Paulette, who set a tray on the table just inside the door, rang the buzzer and hurried away so as not to interfere with anything they might be engaged in, whether it be interpersonal relations, soul sharing or pushing beyond the First Light to the Second Light and the all-encompassing embrace of the divinity and the threads of consciousness that knitted the universe together. Or a shower. Or a bath. Did they bathe together, one body as convenient as another? Was he jealous? Did he miss her, miss them both? The more he thought about it, the more he realized it didn’t really matter because bodies were only envelopes of the mind and he was already picturing his own week in the meditation house—and not with one of the men, though that would be all right by way of Blutsbrüderschaft and all the rest, but with one of the women, like Fanchon or Alice. Or Peggy. Was Peggy in? And here he inevitably conjured up Flora Lu and felt a stab of regret.

  The second drawing, to everyone’s disappointment, paired two men—Hubert Westfall, the male half of the couple Joanie made a point of referring to as the Nestlings, and Ken. There was less excitement this time around, less frivolity, and though there was some grousing (“Why can’t we use two hats,” Charlie wanted to know, “—one for the men and one for the women?”), both the principals seemed to take it in stride and they went out to the meditation house, if not arm in arm, then at least shoulder to shoulder, and spent their week exploring what it meant to go free, the nights melding with the days and the days uncoupled from the rotation of the earth and the elegant elliptical orbit round the sun it took a full year to make, every year, from the beginning of time to the end.

  Then there was the third drawing. Everyone knew, theoretically, statistically, that there’d have to be a male/female pairing not only in terms of the odds but because that was what this was all about, that was why it mattered, because possessiveness—I, me, exclusivity, the marriage game, the property game—was the enemy of group consciousness and harmony. Or at least that was what Tim proposed. And Dick seconded. And everyone seemed to agree was a good idea, a very good idea. He’d agreed too, but as the third Saturday rolled around he found he was having second thoughts. Maybe he was just out of sorts that evening, not angry exactly, but impatient with the whole tenor of the exercise, all of them sitting around waiting for the sacrament to take hold and yet at the same time wrought up with the tension of this game—a game that broke down the conventions, but a game all the same—and all he could think was that it wasn’t right because it undermined the first principle of any session: mind-set. If you were wrought up you could hardly expect to soar. Set and setting. Wasn’t that the mantra? He made a mental note to question Tim about that, to modify the game, neutralize it, maybe do a private drawing and simply announce the names the next morning, because what was the point of putting everybody through this week in and week out?

  But then he was seated there on the carpet, a cognac in hand and the first stirrings of the drug coming on, and Tim reached into the hat and announced Lori’s name. Lori. He’d never even thought of her, nor, apparently had anybody else, given their reaction—no one applauded, no one laughed or whistled. He looked to her—they all did—where she was seated on the floor, barefoot, the whiskery head of Jackie’s dog in her lap and one shoulder propped up against Dick, who was seated, as always, in the lotus position. What was she wearing? A turtleneck, a black turtleneck that clung to her and defined her in a way a blouse never could have. He wasn’t blind, and his eyes had followed her across one room or another a hundred times, but he’d always thought of her as a girl, as one of the kids, the teenagers, and how old was she anyway—eighteen? Nineteen? She reddened and let her smile transform her but she didn’t get up to take a bow, mock or otherwise, or show herself off the way Fanchon had—she let her eyes jump to Tim’s, then shot a quick glance around the room and went back to stroking the dog’s ears. He did a quick calculation, he couldn’t help himself: he was thirty-five and she was nineteen. Or eighteen. Which was sixteen—or seventeen—years younger.

  Everyone exhaled. Lori had been chosen, and that was only fitting because Lori was one of them now and nobody could argue with that. Right? Duly noted?

  Yes, but that was just the preliminary to the main event, because Tim dipped back into the sombrero, took a second to unfold the slip of paper in his hand, then looked straight at him.

  The tradition, three whole weeks in the making, was for the selected couple to publically embrace or at least clasp hands, make a tour of the room to accept everyone’s congratulations (and relief?), then proceed through the library doors and out into the currents of the party-in-progress while Tim led the way waving a censer of Tibetan incense and Charlie thumped out a slow funereal march on a pair of bongos clutched under one arm. It was no different this time, the anti-game become its own game already. Fitz barely had a chance to register Joanie’s reaction—was she scowling or was that an ironic smirk?—before h
e found himself in the center of the room beside Lori, tiny Lori, Lori of the slumped shoulders and eyes that seemed always to be focused on something off in the distance, the drug coming on in a cascade of shattering reds and oranges and the carpet beneath him falling away as if he were in an elevator and present on every floor simultaneously. Lori moved into him, her hip pressed to his thigh, and gave him a noncommittal hug, the sort of hug she might have given her grandmother on the steps of the nursing home, and he felt as strange as he ever had. Then the bongos were bongoing and all the faces were parting and he was weaving out of the library and through the sitting room—more faces, grins, jazz like a horse collar—and down the hallway to the back door and the night, Lori at his side and her hand clutched in his as if she were a schoolchild on a class trip. But this was no class and she was no child.

  The night air hit him like a bucket of cold water and he must have frozen there on the steps of the porch, everything cycling back inside him again, because Lori, who’d removed her hand from his to slip on her mittens, said, “Well, are we going or not?” and her words hung there in front of him, written on the air.

  Behind them, behind the closed door, were the giddy faces of half a dozen people he loved as much as anybody alive (but not Joanie’s, or Corey’s, because Joanie either didn’t care at all or cared too much and Corey was downtown, at the basketball game in the school gym, isolated with the rest of the kids). The next thing that hit him was clarity, as if the scene had shifted and he was right there behind a camera, directing it. “Sure,” he heard himself say, “but watch out for the ice because these steps are—” and before he could pronounce the word his left foot went out from under him and he realized the movie he was directing was a Marx Brothers comedy, or no, Laurel and Hardy, and she was Stan and he was Ollie, and wasn’t that the funniest thing in the world?

  He didn’t fall. And it wouldn’t have mattered if he did—he was beyond hurt at this point, an adept, a master, and the universe existed for the sole purpose of orchestrating his needs and desires and preserving him from mishaps. She slipped too, in the very moment, and they both laughed but she was the one who shot out a hand to steady him—her tiny hand, electric, confident, sure—and not the other way around.

  The meditation house was warm, hot even. The fire had been stoked, candles lit, there was a bowl of fruit set out on the coffee table and a joss stick burning in the ashtray beside it, steadily converting itself into a fine pale ribbon of ash. He unbuttoned his coat and looked round him for a place to put it, a hook on the wall, a closet, the back of a chair, but that wasn’t really working for him so he just let it drop from his shoulders to the floor and eased himself down on the couch, facing the fire. She was there somewhere, Lori, just out of his range of vision, but he didn’t turn his head because all at once he was fiercely busy deciphering the message of the flames that kept grabbing and releasing the belly of the log laid out there across the andirons that weren’t solid inanimate things anymore but beings in themselves that never winced or complained no matter the heat or fury of the fire. At some point she appeared beside him, not on the cushions but on the floor, her legs drawn up to her chest and her back propped against the edge of the couch, and she wasn’t wearing the socks or shoes she must have put on for the trek across the yard. Her feet were right there before him, naked and glistening in the firelight, an understated miracle of skin, bone and tendon, her toes gripping the carpet as if she were high up in the canopy of a tree, and where was the monkey when they needed him?

  Neither of them said a word. Worlds collided, glaciers calved, civilizations marched across the landscape erecting temples and tearing them down and starting all over again. He heard voices though no one was speaking, watched the universe shrink to the size of a hard black rubber ball he could hold in one hand and then spit itself back out again. Then the images became the ghosts of images, the night deepened, the candles flickered out, the fire settled. And when he woke, at first light, she was curled up asleep on the couch beneath a knit comforter, her head resting on his shoulder as if they’d spent the night in a narrow seat on a Greyhound bus in the middle of nowhere.

  He was trying to extricate himself without waking her when her eyes blinked open and she asked, “Did you see him?”

  Her pupils were dilated still. She was inches from him. “Who?”

  “God. Did you see God?”

  He shook his head. He needed to piss, needed to find a bed—and what time was it anyway?

  “Do you even believe in God?” She was sitting up now, her legs crossed beneath her, her voice echoing as if she were talking from the bottom of a very tall and very deep urn. “Or anything? Beyond this?” She swept her hand to take in the room, the cold ash of the fireplace, the morning at the windows.

  “I believe in breakfast,” he said.

  “Don’t talk down to me,” she said. “Do anything, but not that.”

  “I’m not talking down to you. I’m just—it’s early, that’s all.”

  “What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China? We’ve only got a week—we can’t waste it.” She drew the comforter up to her throat. It was very still. A framed picture on the wall concentrated the light. There were beams, high ceilings, vases of dried flowers. “So do you believe in God or not?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, what about you?”

  “These drugs are entheogens,” she said. “Did you know that? Do you know what that means?”

  “Of course I do—I’m the one who should be telling you.” He was beginning to feel irritated—rinsed clean, as after any session, but ready to move back into the world, move on, recalibrate. “I’ve been with Tim from the beginning, or almost the beginning, and you’ve been here, what, a couple of months?”

  “Don’t talk down to me.”

  “I’m not.”

  She shut her eyes, as if in concentration or prayer, and began reciting: “‘I never saw a moor, / I never saw the sea; / Yet know I how the heather looks, / And what a wave must be. / I never spoke with God, / Nor visited in heaven; / Yet certain am I of the spot, / As if the chart were given.’”

  The house was utterly silent. The fruit sat untouched on the table, free of imprints, simian or otherwise. He needed to get up, needed to piss, start the fire, see about coffee, but there was something here that hadn’t been here before and the weight of it held him in place.

  She smiled at him then and it was like a leap into another dimension. “You want to go deep?”

  “Now? Again?”

  Her eyes were scorched, cored out, the blackest eyes, the deepest. “Think about it,” she said, “—we’ve only got a week.”

  She wasn’t really asking and she didn’t give him time to say yes or no or even get up to use the bathroom—she just rose from the couch with the comforter wrapped round her, drifted off to the kitchen and returned a moment later with two glasses of water and a bottle of the Czechoslovakian sacrament Dick had gone all the way to Canada and back to provide for them. Her eyeliner was blurred, her lipstick faded to pink. Her hair—she wore it like Joanie’s, like the folk singer’s—was a mess, shoved up in a tangle on one side, fallen loose to curtain her face on the other. As she came across the room to him he could see she was shivering—the house was freezing and what he had to do was get up and start the fire, make coffee, make sense of things, but before he could summon the volition she was handing him a glass of water and the pill bottle and settling back into the couch to study his face as if it were the text for the day.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s crazy. Shouldn’t we at least wait till tonight?”

  In answer, she took the bottle back from him and shook two pills out into the palm of her hand, holding them there a moment so he could see them, register them, contemplate them—one for him, one for her. Was she trying to goad him? Challenge him? Make up his mind for him in an unrelievedly childish way, as if it were a dare? It was morning. It was cold. He didn’t want to launch himself on another trip, not
on the contrails of the last one, and yet the way she offered it, her nonchalance, her certainty, gave him pause. They were on a mission here—he was on a mission—and what did he have to lose? It wasn’t as if he was going to spend the day typing up his notes or writing a book or comparing statistics on drug addiction in lab rats.

  And yet, and yet . . .

  That was when she showed him who she was. She wasn’t offering, she was taking. In that moment she clapped her hand to her mouth, snatched up her own glass of water and swallowed. Both pills. Both of them—and on top of what she’d taken the night before. The shock must have registered in his face because she gave him a long slow smile and said, “What?”

  “But that—you took both of them. That’s five hundred mics.”

  She shrugged, shivered again. “I want to see what Tim sees.”

  He didn’t say anything. He was shivering now too. He had to get up and start a fire and he had to make coffee and eat something—had Paulette or whoever dropped off their breakfast yet? Was that coffee he smelled? Or just the idea of it?