Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  “Come down,” he repeated.

  “No, you come up.”

  He felt a flash of anger. “Go to hell,” he said, and shoved himself away from the tree, which just stood there, immovable, locked into a being and purpose that antedated all this, the movement, the hunger, the eating, sleeping, shitting. “I’m going back in the house.”

  “Don’t you want to fuck me?” she called, and when he didn’t answer, she let out a long hoarse screech in perfect imitation of Flora Lu’s dead monkey.

  Now, draining the last of his beer and rising to his feet in the same motion, he said, “I’m worried about her.”

  And Ken, whose attitude all along had been why bother with a neurotic schoolgirl when you had Fanchon and Joanie and Susannah, not to mention all those women in bikinis out there sunning themselves by the pool, laid a hand on his arm. “You and everybody else,” he said.

  He was out in the yard one morning two or three weeks later, cutting back the high weeds at the edge of the lawn, glad to be doing his part—pitching in—especially since his contributions to the communal pot had been all but nonexistent in recent weeks, when he was distracted by what seemed to be the sound of a loudspeaker riding in over the treetops. He heard it—static, noise—and then he didn’t. His first thought was that some local politician must be rolling up and down the streets of the village in a convertible broadcasting the usual promises and lies, but then the political season didn’t arrive till fall, did it? Was there a mayoral race going on? He didn’t even know who the mayor was, not that it mattered, as long as he kept clear of the Alte Haus and reined in his police force. But there it was: a loudspeaker, intermittent noise on an otherwise somnolent day, and it was nothing more to him than a curiosity, a minor irritation, like the deer flies settling on the back of his neck or the wasps and poison ivy lurking in the undergrowth. He wiped the blade of his sickle and went back to work.

  There’d been a session the night before, conducted under the stars by Tim and Dick, and though it was almost noon practically no one was stirring besides himself. Somebody was stretched out on a chaise longue just off the front steps—was that Paulette?—and he’d seen a couple of the kids heading down the drive for town half an hour earlier, but that was about it, and if the sickle needed sharpening every once in a while and cabbage moths drifted through a shaft of sun like blotches on a movie print, it was all right, just another summer’s day. He’d done only half a dose himself the previous night, along with Lori, because they both agreed—or at least he’d made the case and she went along—that things had gotten out of hand at the Fourth of July party, and not just because of the dosage, but the scene itself. They needed to get back to the basics. To the meditative. The inner, not the outer.

  But here came that noise again, a crackling, a screech, a snatch of music, and he straightened up and looked off down the drive, but there was nothing there. Lori was asleep still, upstairs in his bed—their bed—and that was all right too. They’d come to an understanding in the aftermath of the party and scaled back not only the sacrament but the other amusements floating around the group—marijuana, hashish, amphetamine—and in the interval they’d spent most of their days and nights together, though she had a tendency to vanish without a word for hours or even days at a time, and where she went he didn’t know and kept himself from asking. All he knew was that when she was around he felt he was soaring, with or without the sacrament, and he’d even begun to see a way around his academic dilemma—or at least a way to sidestep it. He was going to write about this, about Millbrook. About an ongoing experiment like no other in the history of the world, and there were no lab rats involved, no monkeys, because they were the subjects themselves. The idea excited him—liberated him—and when he told Lori about it she clapped her hands and laughed. “Will I be in it?”

  “Of course, but all the names’ll have to be changed—”

  “What’s mine going to be?”

  “Yours? I don’t know—how about just L, period?”

  They were sitting on the edge of the bed in his room, and she gestured at his desk and the chaos of papers scattered across it, charts, diagrams, the abortive text and the thick sheaves of his notes, his endless notes. “What about all this? Your fecis?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s burn it.”

  As soon as she said it, it sounded like the best idea he’d ever heard, and he pushed himself up, went into the bathroom and returned with the cheap tin wastebasket that was half full of wadded-up Kleenex and set it on the windowsill. The window was already open. All he needed was a match—and brandy, two glasses of the cut-rate Korbel brandy he kept in his desk drawer, for a toast—and if the smoke was a problem and he damned near set the side of the house on fire, it was worth it, definitely worth it.

  But now the noise was inescapable, coming closer, booming, rattling, and he looked up to see a vehicle winding its way up the drive, a bus with some sort of cage or platform set atop it and people there, waving their arms and shouting. One of them began throwing things over the side—fuming cylinders that obliterated the air and bounced and rolled and drew a boiling green vapor out of the earth till it looked as if hydrothermal vents were opening up all over the yard. He just stood there, dumbfounded, while the noise came at him, clarifying until he realized it was music, or meant to be music, electric guitar, the screech of a flute, a bottom-heavy thump of bass and a superamplified voice crying, Earthlings, we’ve arrived! over and over. And here was the bus itself, bursting out of the trees in a skin of Day-Glo paint and shrieking past him and on up the drive to the house.

  He snatched a glance over his shoulder to see Paulette lurch up from the chaise and bolt for the front door and in the next moment he was running himself, not for the house but for the woods, because whatever this was, he wanted no part of it. He ran till his lungs felt sodden and then pulled up abruptly, cursing himself. Why should he run? He lived here, didn’t he? This was his property—or Tommy and Billy’s anyway. But what was this? Who were these people? The music held steady and now there was a new sound intermixed with it: the horn. Incredibly, the driver was leaning on the horn as if he were stuck in a traffic jam, as if this were the FDR Drive at rush hour. That was it, he couldn’t help himself, and in the next moment, outraged and baffled at the same time, he was circling back round to come up behind them, careful to keep his distance till he could begin to sort things out.

  He saw that there was a whole tribe of them, men and women both, shaggy-haired, loose-limbed, in striped shirts, serapes, big-brimmed straw hats and cowboy boots, filing off the bus to sprawl on the lawn and pass joints and cigarettes from hand to hand, while a contingent mounted the steps of the veranda and one of them—short, muscular, cowboy hat—banged on the front door as if he belonged there, as if he’d been invited. That was when the door swung open and Dick’s face appeared, flanked by Alice’s and Fanchon’s. Mouths moved, heads nodded, and then Dick and the women stood back and ushered them in, the whole mob—there must have been twenty of them, the ones on the lawn pushing themselves up to climb the front steps and disappear into the recesses of the house. The bus driver abruptly released the horn and a moment later he too headed up the steps and into the house—but the music, if you could call it that, never faltered. It just kept grinding on, a stew of feedback, static and distorted shrieks.

  It was bewildering—and wrong, that too. The noise, let alone the spangled bus and the cowboy garb and all the rest, had to be a magnet for the police. They’d just plowed their way through the village, hadn’t they? Shouting and waving and blaring their loudspeakers—and what if they’d tossed smoke grenades in the streets too? He snatched a glance over his shoulder, expecting to see the town’s two police cruisers charging up the drive, sirens wailing, but there was nothing there but the glowing white stones and the trees that overhung them. Finally—he didn’t want a confrontation; let Dick handle it, that was what he was thinking—he slunk around the side of the house an
d came in through the kitchen door, leaving it open behind him in case he had to make a quick exit.

  There was a smell of cooking, a pot of something on the stove, fresh-baked bread set out to cool. And Susannah, her hair tied up in a kerchief, sitting at the table with a knife and the cutting board, dicing carrots. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “Who are these people?”

  “I don’t know—the Pranksters.”

  “Pranksters?”

  “You know,” she said, “the writer? Kesey?”

  “He’s here? What’s he doing here?” Even as he posed the question he knew the answer—these people, these clowns in motley, thought they had something in common with Millbrook, thought they’d be welcome, but that wasn’t the case at all, not even close. Didn’t they belong in California? Wasn’t that where they’d come from? Well, let them go back there—and the sooner the better. He went to the swinging door and peered into the big room beyond and there they were, milling around, smirking, picking things up and setting them down again as if they were in a thrift store. He saw now that some of them were wearing face paint though it was three months to Halloween yet and that one—a man—had hair to his shoulders and a crow’s feather cocked behind his ear. Another, incredibly, had a movie camera balanced on one shoulder, recording every slouch and gesture.

  “So is Tim home?” the one in the cowboy hat asked. “I mean, can we see him? You know, get together?”

  “Wild times,” somebody said. “Let’s do it.”

  There was a burst of ragged laughter. They all seemed to be leaning on one another.

  Tim, as everybody in the house knew, was riding out the second day of a projected three-day trip by way of purifying himself and he’d given strict instructions that he wasn’t to be disturbed. Which made it difficult for Dick, who gave an equivocal answer and wondered if he could show them around the estate, the meditation house, the lake—did anybody want to see the lake?

  None of them seemed to care much one way or the other about the estate or the lake or anything else—they’d come for the party, only that—but then one of the women asked, “You got a bathroom in this place?” and everybody was laughing again. And not just laughing, but hooting, replete with catcalls and back-slapping and wiseacre jokes, and of course they were all stoned, all of them, because that was their business in life. At that moment, with Dick trying to make peace and distract them and get them back out in the yard, a tall broad-shouldered girl at the rear of the group swung round and spotted Fitz there at the door. “Hi,” she murmured, smiling wide and raising the index and middle fingers of her right hand in a V-for-victory sign, her hair in pigtails and her eyes drinking up the light. She was dressed like the rest of them, more or less, in a pair of cutoffs, a buckskin vest and Indian moccasins decorated with colored beads, and that really didn’t do much for him. It was childish, that was all. Like their bus and their rock and roll and their blissed-out smiles. They were like a negative image of the inner circle—or no, a cartoon version. He stared right through her and then, without a word, pulled the door shut, stalked through the kitchen and out the back door.

  Sometime later, after somebody had mercifully shut off the music and the whole mob of them had sauntered off in the direction of the lake with Dick, Alice and Fanchon leading the way, he slipped back in the house and went up the stairs and down the hall to his room, wondering if Lori was up and if so whether she knew about the cyclone that had touched down in their midst. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the bathroom or Corey’s room either. The bed still bore the impress of her and it was still warm, or maybe that was his imagination. He stepped out in the hall, called her name. Nobody seemed to be around. He thought then of the pool—she’d taken to swimming almost every day now, the activity imprinted on her after the night she’d almost drowned them both—and he went out to take a look, but she wasn’t there either. Three of the Pranksters were in the pool though, two men and a woman, naked and floating on the kids’ rubber rafts, their faces upturned to the sky. The woman—she was the same one he’d seen in the hall—held up a hand to shade her eyes and called out, “Hi, come join us!”

  The sun was a terrible thing. He reached in his pocket for his sunglasses—his shades—and realized that in the confusion he must have left them in the kitchen. Everything was ablaze, the whole world, even the water, and where was Lori? “No thanks,” he said, dismissing them with a gesture, and then, so as not to seem totally rude—like a shit, that is—he added, “Maybe later,” though it was hard to overcome his resentment. Didn’t these people realize what they were doing? The truce with the Millbrook Police Department wasn’t going to last forever and though he wasn’t the paranoid type he had noticed more airplanes buzzing the property lately, or at least since Ken and Charlie had drawn his attention to them. And that kid, Toby, he was a plant, a spy, Charlie was sure of it, though Lori denied it vehemently—and hadn’t he read of cases where the police busted somebody on a possession charge and threatened him with the worst if he didn’t go undercover and report back to them? Wear a wire? Tap the phones? The sacrament was legal still, but that wasn’t going to last, and then what were they going to do? So no, he didn’t like this, didn’t like it at all.

  “Who are you?” the woman called while the two men, one with a beard, the other without, floated around her.

  He stood there, squinting into the sunlight, feeling foolish, as if he were the stranger here, and that rankled him even further. “‘I’m nobody,’” he said, thinking of Lori, and the uncanny thing was, the woman threw it right back at him: “‘Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!’” She laughed then, a harsh gargle of a laugh that ricocheted off the water and chased him all the way across the lawn, past the meditation house and down the path to the lake.

  Lori was there, on the dock, the fated dock, surrounded by a dozen newcomers and a smattering of the inner circle too—Charlie, Alice, Dick, Fanchon—though most of the household was still keeping its distance. People were sprawled out in the sun, some of them wearing clothes, others not. Three of them were in the rowboat, horsing around, though it was still tethered to the dock, and everybody, including Lori, seemed to have wet hair. There was beer—six-packs that had magically appeared—and a brass hash pipe was circulating from hand to hand. Everything was convivial. A party. Another party.

  Lori—she was in her bathing suit, hunched over her knees, her back pressed to one of the pilings—waved him over. She had a beer in one hand, a joint in the other. “You know everybody, Fitz? No? Okay, well this is”—and she gestured to the man beside her, who was dripping and naked and grinning like a thespian—“Paul, right? You’re Paul?”

  He was. And he reached up to take Fitz’s hand, peering over his sunglasses as if to get a better look at him. “So I’m shaking the hand of a psychologist, right?”

  Fitz nodded.

  “So it’s true—you’re all psychologists, then? Jesus. I mean, you’ve got to see it to believe it, right?”

  “I’m not a psychologist,” Lori said.

  Alice, who’d had her back to them, chatting with two of the other strangers, turned round now and said, “I’m not a psychologist either.” She was barefoot, in a pair of wet shorts and a wet blouse. Her hair hung limp in her face.

  The guy looked up at her, grinning wider. “Whew,” he said, making a gesture as if he were wiping sweat from his brow, “that’s a relief. For a minute there I thought I was back in the bin again—” He took hold of the post and pulled himself up, his equipment dangling in a way that managed to be purely natural and offensive at the same time. “Relax, it’s a joke, man,” he said. “Us? There’s not a psychologist among us—or a shrink either. You know why? We’re as normal as normal can be.” And here he called out to one of the men in the boat—“Lee? Lee, you hear that?”

  “No, what?” the one in the boat said.

  “I said we’re as normal as normal can be,” and he tailed it with a laugh and Lee laughed too.

  In that moment, wh
ile the conversation jumped off in a whole new direction, the three in the boat all adding asides to show how witty and relaxed they were, how with it, how cool, Fitz leaned down to Lori and whispered, “I’m thinking of going into Poughkeepsie if you want to come along. To the record shop there? Remember, I promised you?”

  The look she gave him—and she wasn’t wearing her sunglasses so he got the full benefit of her big unadorned eyes—seemed to close everything down. “You mean now?”

  “Yeah,” he said, the sun punishing his eyes, “now.”

  She made no move to get up, but just stared at him. He heard Dick laugh and glanced up to see him standing in a group at the end of the dock, in congress with the one in the cowboy hat, who, he realized, must be Kesey, the novelist, the celebrity, and all he could think was where’s Maynard when we need him, match celebrity to celebrity, check and mate. He turned back to Lori. “Well?” he said, and she was already shaking her head.

  “No,” she said, “uh-uh. I don’t think so.”

  In the morning, the bus was gone. He woke alone, in a prison of latticework shadows, the sheets, which could have been cleaner, smelling of mold and sloughed skin and of Lori, who could have been cleaner herself. She went around barefoot all the time, her feet calloused, toenails chipped, patches of grayish dirt caught in the hollows of her ankles, and each morning she slipped into the same shorts and top she’d tossed casually on the floor as she climbed into bed and never gave it a second thought. When they made love he liked to kiss her there, on the roughened skin of her feet and toes and work his way up first one leg, then the other, till all he could smell was her, the way she was in her essence, but they hadn’t made love the night before. In fact, unless he was missing something, she hadn’t come to bed at all, and that bothered him more than he would have cared to admit.

  He found a few people sitting around the kitchen, looking fragile. Ken was there, hunched over his elbows at the table and staring into a cup of coffee, Fanchon on one side of him, Charlie on the other. Paulette was standing at the sink, mechanically working her way through the teetering piles of dirty dishes and crusted utensils that were the daily detritus of communal life, but then Paulette liked doing dishes because doing dishes was therapeutic—or at least that was what they all told themselves. He’d heard the hoots and jagged laughter of the carousal the night before, the sacrament circulating, the two tribes feeling each other out, but he’d stayed away from all that, from the commingling, the joints, the martinis, from dinner even (he’d taken himself down to the diner for meat loaf, mashed potatoes and wax beans, then to the local bar, where he’d lapped up generic brandy and watched a fuzzy baseball game on the television in the corner till things had had a chance to die down back at the Alte Haus and he could lurch up the stairs in peace and pitch blindly into bed). He had no use for these people. They weren’t advancing the research. The fact was they were delegitimizing it with every sunburst of paint they sloshed over the battered fenders of their bus, every shriek of their amped-up music and every frame of film they took.