by T. C. Boyle
He went toward the light, limping over the stones, and there was the dock, the path, the house, the bonfire. The first person he saw—the tallest one there, the one who stood out, who always stood out—was Ken. “Ken!” he shouted, “Ken!,” clutching at his arm now while the two women Ken was chatting up gave him big blissful smiles. “The police—we’ve got to call the police.”
Ken took a step back as if to get a better look at him. He was soaring too—they all were. “You been swimming, Fitz?” he asked, giving the women a sidelong glance. One of the women let out a short sharp bark of a laugh, the one with her hair cut close and the figure of a boy; the other one, busty and thick-limbed in a pink sundress that glowed and shimmered as if it were on fire, didn’t laugh at all, just stared. Fitz had never seen either of them before and he couldn’t understand what they were doing here or how they’d become part of this long howling interval that kept echoing and echoing inside his head.
“No, you don’t understand—”
“You’re shivering, Fitz—don’t you want a towel or something? Or here, come on”—taking him by the arm—“come closer to the fire.”
He snatched his arm away, shivering violently, and stamped in place to bring himself back to the now, to the situation.
“The police?” the boyish one echoed, tailing it with a laugh. “I didn’t know they were invited.”
“It’s Lori”—and here his voice broke. “She’s out there in the lake. I think she—she was out there in the lake and I tried to, to—”
“Come on now, it’s all right, Fitz, it’s okay,” Ken said, and then, sharply, to the woman in the sundress, “could you find us a towel or a blanket or something? Please?”
“Julius,” he said. “She was like Julius, remember Julius? She’s dead, Ken.” His voice rose, he couldn’t help it: “Dead, you get it? Lori’s dead!”
Ken didn’t move. He just smiled at him, and it was a condescending smile, the sort of smile you’d give to a child or to a friend and colleague whose wife you’d shared mutually and was showing every sign of hallucinatory derangement. “Hey, come on, old buddy,” he said, “calm down, everything’s all right—I just saw her five minutes ago. She was right here.” He turned to the boyish woman. “The dark-haired girl in the black bathing suit? The one who was a little out of it?”
“Oh, yeah,” the woman said, “yeah, of course, she was right here,” though Fitz was no longer listening. He just watched her lips move and her lips told him nothing he didn’t already know.
In the next moment he had hold of Ken’s arm and was insisting that he come down to the lake with him, because if he didn’t he was going to go into the house and call the cops himself, an ambulance, the fire department, people to dredge the lake, because he’d seen her, he’d seen her go down, and she was dead, she was dead and drowned and everything was so narrow and constricted, so foreordained, so wrong.
“Okay, okay,” Ken said, and here was the woman with the towel and Ken was wrapping it around his shoulders, “but only if you promise me you’ll get out of those wet Jockeys and put some clothes on, all right?”
“Later,” he said, his teeth chattering, “I’ll do it later,” and he was already moving and Ken was beside him and they were off into the night, the two women tagging along. The light of the fire receded behind them but somebody—Ken—had a flashlight and here was the path revealing itself as a pale line drawn down the center of a field of dark ragged grass. The crickets roared. Fireflies hung in the air. He was shivering, his feet were killing him, and Ken kept saying, “I swear it, Fitz, I swear I saw her, isn’t that right, Melanie?” And Melanie—the one in the sundress—kept saying, “Yeah, absolutely. She’s around here someplace.”
The lake was black. The dock hung pale above it. The other woman said, “God, it’s beautiful out here—isn’t it great to be out in the country?”
“Tell it to the mosquitoes,” Melanie said, slapping her forearm with a sharp percussive crack that echoed out over the lake.
They were on the dock now and there was something in the water, definitely something in the water, and it was no hallucination because they were there with him and they saw it too and if he snatched the flashlight out of Ken’s hand it was because he was in the grip of a dread beyond anything he’d ever known. The beam ricocheted off the surface, running every which way till he steadied it and focused it on what was there in the water, bobbing facedown just off the end of the dock.
“Oh, my God,” one of the women said, and it was the worst moment of his life, of anybody’s life, till the other woman said, “What is it?” and what had been Lori, what he was sure was Lori, transmuted itself into something else altogether, a primate, yes, but one that was so much smaller, one with fur and a tail and hands like fine leather gloves.
“Shit,” Ken said with real vehemence. “Oh, shit.” The beam wavered. He felt his throat clench. “Who’s going to tell Flora Lu?”
5.
Lori was at breakfast the next morning, barefoot, in a blue terry cloth robe, spooning up cornflakes as if nothing had happened. Her hair was snarled and her eye shadow so smudged she looked as if she’d been squeezed through a tube, but she was alive and whole and the sight of her there at the table surrounded by party guests who’d never left and in some cases hadn’t even gone to bed, made him surge with joy. He’d twice gone down to her room in the middle of the night, but she wasn’t there and that made him panic all over again, convinced that Ken had been wrong, that he’d never seen her at all—or he’d seen her earlier, much earlier, and just hadn’t realized it because of the condition he was in, that they were all in. He kept seeing the drowned monkey, the way it had given up its being to bob there in a spreading stain of its own fluids, and as he lay in his bed drifting in and out of consciousness, it kept sprouting Lori’s limbs and wearing her face and spinning round and round on him in mockery.
The table was crowded. Alice was sitting on one side of her, two people he didn’t recognize on the other. There was a low murmur of conversation, everything muted now, and he stood there a moment feeling foolish, wondering how much she knew of what had happened the night before. Had he really been ready to call the police? Or was that just another hallucination? And what about her? Whether she’d meant to or not she’d lured him into the water and they both could have drowned, in which case this wouldn’t have been a relaxed communal breakfast but a wake. So he didn’t go directly up to her, but got himself a cup of coffee and stood by the door chatting with Rick Roberts and Royce Eggers and waited until she’d finished, until she put her spoon down and lifted her cup to her lips and let her eyes rove round the room. He gave her a little two-fingered wave and she waved back and in the next moment he was tapping Alice on the shoulder and then drawing up a chair to squeeze in between her and Lori. Alice turned her face to him, smiling. “Quite a party, huh?”
“Yeah,” he said, conscious of Lori’s eyes on him.
Alice was having waffles, the breakfast du jour (Diana Westfall and Susannah were out in the kitchen, mass-producing them) and she took a moment to broadcast syrup over her plate with a flamboyant swirl of one elbow. “Too bad about Flo’s monkey, though. It’s a shame, isn’t it?”
He answered in the affirmative, though it was for form’s sake only: he wasn’t sorry to see it go, far from it. “Did you hear about it?” he asked, turning to Lori, who just shook her head.
“We think he must’ve got into the punch,” Alice said, pausing to cut into a waffle, raise a glistening morsel of it to her lips, then put it down again. “I mean, all he had to do was snatch up somebody’s cup, right? And I must have seen him ransacking the table a thousand times—”
“Something happened to the monkey?” Lori ran a hand through her hair and let it fall across her face so that each strand of it stood out electrified under the glow of the ceiling fixtures. He saw that there were flecks of weed in it, pond weed, dried now and so pale as to be almost translucent. A voice across the room said, “Badmint
on—anybody up for some badminton?”
“It drowned,” he said. “We—Ken and I—went down to the lake, looking for you, actually”—he stared into her eyes but her eyes didn’t register a thing—“and there it was, right there by the dock, floating facedown.”
“I thought monkeys could swim.”
“Not this one. Or maybe he was so far gone—”
“What,” Lori said, “monkey suicide?”
“Stranger things,” he said. “You were pretty far gone yourself.”
“Flo’s all broken up about it,” Alice put in. “She loved that monkey.”
“Badminton, are you nuts?” another voice rang out, and they all looked up briefly to see a balding man with a beard and pot belly who might have been Ginsberg, but wasn’t, striding across the room. “I haven’t even had my coffee yet.”
To Lori, he said, “You remember any of that?”
“I went swimming.”
“I thought you were going to wind up the same way as the monkey—I thought you were the monkey, at least at first—”
“Hah!” she said, and her face lit up for the first time. “Me a monkey? Monkeys climb trees, don’t they? And then they screw up there, way high up in the highest branches?” Her eyes fell shut, almost involuntarily, as if she weren’t even there, and then they snapped open again. “You want to climb a tree, Fitz? Is that what you want?” She pushed back her chair and rose, pausing a moment to glance round the table. “Urk, urk, urk, I’m a monkey,” she said, humping her back and scratching under her arms. “Monkey see,” she said, looking at him now, only him, “monkey do.”
That afternoon, after most of the guests had left or were in the process of leaving, he was out on the veranda with a set of mismatched tools, trying to repair a porch swing that had collapsed under the collective weight of half a dozen enthusiasts who’d apparently been trying to get it airborne the night before. It was a relatively simple task, which involved replacing a bent eyebolt and two slats of the seat, and he was thankful for it, thankful to be focusing for once on something other than himself. And Lori. Always Lori. In his clearer moments, which, regrettably, seemed to be increasingly rare, he’d tried to analyze it, this compulsion to be with her, to have her, to chase after her even if it meant alienating his wife and son and making a fool of himself in front of everybody else. And for what? She was nothing special, as Joanie had kept telling him, no different from a million other half-educated teenage girls out there in the world—but she wasn’t out there in the world, she was here, with him, and he’d gone to a place with her that week in the meditation house he couldn’t begin to describe if he wrote ten theses. And there was a subject: LSD-25 and Sexual Obsession. How would they like that at Harvard?
He was down on his knees, probing beneath the broken seat with a screwdriver, when he felt a tremor run the length of the veranda and looked up to see Ken Sensabaugh standing over him with a cold beer in each hand. “I thought you could use this,” Ken said, handing him a beer and easing down beside him.
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Hell of a party, huh?”
“I don’t know, I guess so. Tell you the truth, I could use a little less party and a little more purpose—whatever happened to that? Remember the way it was in Mexico? Or Newton? Remember Newton?”
No one wanted to admit there was anything wrong—they’d come too far for that—but there was a dawning sense that they were losing sight of what really mattered. More and more, they seemed to be going outward rather than inward, the parties become a raison d’être in themselves, as if they’d created all this for the benefit of celebrities, fashion models and Village types, as if they weren’t a community of brothers and sisters anymore but a kind of performing troupe—and the weekend seminars, which had started up again, were a case in point. And worse, if this was an experiment, if it had anything to do with the discipline of psychology, then they had to admit that increased dosages, both in terms of frequency and potency, were proving problematic. Tim’s son—Jackie—seemed barely able to speak anymore and he’d stopped going to school altogether back in May, Paulette was exhibiting signs of clinical depression and if she was taking incrementally larger doses of the drug it wasn’t for enlightenment but escape, no different from what people were doing with Dilaudid and heroin on the street corners in Harlem. Joanie was on hiatus. And Lori had gone so deep inside herself nobody could fathom what she was thinking—or even, half the time, what she was saying.
“I don’t know,” Ken said, “I guess it’s a work in progress.”
Behind him, down the length of the veranda, two of Maynard’s bandmates were pushing through the front door with their instrument cases and overnight bags, already on to their next gig, and if they were concerned with the finer points of the experiment under way here, they didn’t show it. In fact, one of them—the tenor sax man, flattop, sideburns—set down his bags and lit up a joint, took a drag and passed it to his companion, who in turn set his own bags down to take it in two fingers and put it to his lips. “Shit, they got a lot of trees out here,” the first one said. “I hear you,” the other said, squinting against the light before reaching into his breast pocket and digging out his sunglasses. Fitz watched them till they picked up their bags, descended the steps and started up the drive to the car waiting there for them.
“Agreed,” he said, setting aside the screwdriver in favor of an adjustable wrench, which seemed more adequate to the task, “but I wish it would progress.”
“If you’re talking about your thesis, don’t go there, Jesus, not today—”
“My fecis, you mean.”
“Right,” Ken said, laughing. “Mine’s made of shit too.”
“But what I mean is it’s coming up on a year now, ten months anyway, and I’m no closer to any sort of revelation—or breakthrough, maybe breakthrough’s a better word—than I was on the beach in Zihuatanejo. And some of us—I mean, Paulette—are starting to scare me.”
“You were pretty scary yourself last night.”
“Point taken, but then that’s what I’m saying: Where is this going? Is there any end in sight? Can we even call ourselves scientists anymore—or what are we, mystics? Partygoers? Bacchanalians?”
Ken raised the can to his lips and Fitz saw that he looked enervated, old, as if he’d aged a decade in a single night, the golden boy no longer—and not an adept either, just a weary explorer who’d all but given up on his degree to follow Tim, to be here, doing this. Like him. Just like him. “Come on, Fitz,” he said, “I’ve got a headache—or no, you’re giving me a headache. We’re here, in the moment, okay? Isn’t that enough?”
“Truthfully, no. Maybe Dick’s on the path to enlightenment, maybe Tim is, but me? I’m just”—and here he had to pause a moment to let his emotions catch up—“lost. More and more, that’s what I’m feeling, lost.”
Tommy Eggers slammed out the door then, heading somewhere fast with a transistor radio in one hand and a can of soda in the other, and they both paused to watch him hurtle off the porch and jog on down the drive past the sauntering sax player and his companion. Almost in sync, they both took a long swallow of beer, everything raw and exposed on the cusp of that admission.
“Speaking of lost, Lori’s still up in that tree. I don’t know what she’s on this morning, maybe nothing, and maybe it’s only the aftereffects of last night, but as Charlie would say, ‘She is out there.’”
As soon as she’d started in on the monkey routine at breakfast, she saw how much it embarrassed him in front of the others and just kept it up and kept it up, scratching under her arms and shuffling through the dining room and out the front door, chittering urk, urk, urk just to irritate him, until suddenly she broke away, bolted for the nearest of the maples lining the drive and hoisted herself up into its branches. And what did he do? He followed her like a supplicant and stood there beneath the tree, shading his eyes to peer up at her and trying to be a good sport, all in fun, and so what if Flora Lu was in mourning? It was
only a monkey, after all—the laboratories of America were full of them.
He watched her settle back against the trunk, her legs straddling a branch twenty feet up, the soles of her feet like big pale moths batting at the leaves, her face high-flown and remote. The robe had fallen open and he saw that she was wearing panties and camisole only, no bra, and that stirred him despite himself. “Very funny,” he said, bracing himself against the trunk. “Now come on down before you break your neck. Let’s go do something—like a ride, you want to take a ride? We could go out in the country—”
“We are out in the country.”
“You know what I mean. We’ve got the whole day ahead of us. Let’s get away from all this”—he gestured to the house, the circus tent, the strangers wandering across the grounds like the remnants of lost tribes—“and go someplace, just the two of us.”
“No, you come up here. Be a monkey with me.”
“I don’t want to play games. I’m tired of games. Last night, you . . . I was afraid you were going to hurt yourself, okay? If you want to know, my nerves are shot. So come down out of there. Now.”
In response, she rattled the branches and thrashed her feet as if she were about to lose her balance.
