I nodded and spoke thoughts as quickly as they came to my mind. “So we’re ascending to heaven now?”
“In that general direction.”
“Well, I appreciate the opportunity to see perfect forms and all,” I said. “But metaphysically riding a chariot to heaven while my body is lying in a footlocker the size of a coffin creeps me out. I’d like to go back down.”
The man shrugged his shoulders. “Suit yourself,” he said. “Take the black horse.”
I looked at the empty space around us, the stars, and the shrinking globe. “You mean just climb out there onto its back and ride it home?”
The man nodded. That’s exactly what he meant.
“I’ve never even ridden a horse,” I said weakly.
“You’re an American living in the 21st century. You’ve been riding metaphysical horses your whole life. This should be a piece of cake for you.”
So I trusted him. I climbed along the leather strap and onto the horse’s back. She was connected to the chariot by straps and buckles that were all easy enough to maneuver. I unbuckled everything buckled and untied everything tied until it was just me, bareback on this horse, hanging onto the coarse hair of her mane because I’d accidentally untied her rein. As soon as she felt herself free, she turned and raced back toward earth. I held on.
The horse brought me somewhere far away from Oak View. It was a dense, old growth forest. The ground was carpeted with fallen leaves. My horse slowed to a stop and looked to her left. An anthropomorphic coyote stumbled on two legs. He was covered in feces, blinded by it. He held a small box in one paw. With each tree he approached, he asked, “Please, tree, tell me which way to the water.” The trees guided him from oaks to willows to the stream. Coyote stumbled like the last patron let out of a bar that over-serves. The horse and I followed. Coyote jumped into the water and scrubbed at his fur with a porous rock, cleaning off all the feces. My horse headed for the stream, too. I stopped her and climbed off. She went upstream for a drink. I stood on the shores, watching Coyote clean himself and clean the box and clean the penis inside the box and reattach his penis. An elderly, dark-skinned woman came up behind me. She wore a dress with a broad sash around her waist and necklaces that hung nearly to the sash. Long ribbons and decorative patterns adorned the dress. “So, you’ve met the Trickster,” she said.
I nodded. “He’s in a bad way.”
“For now,” she said. She smiled as she watched him shake the water out of his fur and walk out of the stream on the opposite bank. “He’ll forget this soon enough and get wrapped up in further madness.”
Which is what I knew to be true about Tricksters. I asked her, “Can you guide me around here? Help me understand this place?”
She shook her head. “I only tell a specific type of story. It’s rooted to the land. It teaches you to live a way of life you don’t live anymore.” She waved her hand to point out the space left by the now-vanished Coyote. “That’s all I can do.”
I climbed atop my horse, waved to the woman, and headed west, hoping that metaphysical space didn’t take as long to traverse as physical space. We passed through high plains and mountains and desert. The air was full of songs in 3/4 time. The ghosts of slaughtered Native Americans and cowboys and coal miners floated around. I tried to comprehend it all, but my horse ran too fast and everything was too fleeting.
Finally, I made it back to the meadow near the cottage. I saw the bearded men in the distance, and all around the meadow, little groups of mostly children gathered around teachers. I dismounted. The horse headed back to where she’d come from. I wandered from group to group, catching bits and pieces of lectures. An Elizabethan man waxed poetic about love and treachery with a candle in one hand and the hilt of his sword in the other. A 17th century aristocrat discussed gravity, etching a diagram in the ground in which the dot falling on the stick figure’s head extends to the core of the Earth and the moon above. A Renaissance man explained the mathematical calculations showing that the sun was the center of the solar system while in front of him models of six planets spun in a heliocentric system around the model of the sun. An unkempt German physicist discussed time and space; the children seemed to understand time’s relativity only by recognizing how slowly it passed when he spoke. An African woman sang songs of pain and redemption. Some clapped along. Some danced. Some stared at their feet and shook their heads. The circus of the mind continued farther up the hill, where the teachers seemed more ancient, more Roman, then more Greek. I followed them up to the crest and looked down on the other side. Most of the teachers down there were women in clothes I couldn’t recognize, outlining the rituals and festivals that ran through all the world’s religions, hanging bells on trees, dancing around maypoles.
Somewhere among all of this had to be Dr. Bishop. Wouldn’t she have come in here with me? Surely she didn’t send me in here to fly around on horses and watch a coyote take a bath. And these teachers all around me were certainly brilliant, but I’d heard it all before. It all seemed a bit obvious.
In a way, that made sense. If this really were the land of our shared thoughts, then I would’ve been through all of this before. This would be the core of what our culture is. Of course I’d recognize it. I would’ve been one of the children gathered at the feet of the teachers. The child in me probably still attended these lectures on some level. The child in all of us probably does.
I strolled down the hill, back to the door I entered from. I thought to just head back, to tell Dr. Bishop, “Okay, I’ve seen it. It does exist. Now creep back into my mind and convince me that I dreamed all of this.” I even spoke aloud into the meadow. I said, “I don’t want to be here.”
My words echoed throughout the meadow. The teachers behind me stopped their lectures and all looked at me. They nodded. I think they knew I was lying, that I couldn’t wait to come here again with no one waiting outside the door, no one to judge me if I lingered among it all for hours and days and weeks.
I went back in the door from which I’d come. The hallway was dark. Clint Dempsey panted at my feet. I called out, “Dr. Bishop?”
I was answered by a light. A dull yellow bulb over a door, about fifteen feet down the room and to my left. I walked toward the light. Clint Dempsey walked by my side. When he got to the door, he scratched on it. “Why not?” I said. We walked in.
The door opened into the Williams Building. I followed the hallway away from my office and toward the basement. I’d never been down to the basement of the Williams Building. For some reason, it struck me as off limits. I didn’t hesitate this time. I headed straight for the staircase and descended.
Dr. Bishop was down there. She sat atop a bed in an examination room. The room looked like one in any American medical doctor’s office. She wore a white hospital gown open in the back. I stepped up behind her and tied the strings of the gown in shoelace-type knots. She looked over her shoulder and smiled. I took a seat in the generic plastic examination room chair. A doctor walked in. He flipped through the chart and looked everywhere but at me or Dr. Bishop. He said, “This is never easy.”
Without having to listen to what he said, I knew. He was there to tell her that the cancer had spread into her bloodstream. It was time for her to get her affairs in order and make peace with whatever God or loved one could help her into the next world. This stunned me. It was all too clear. I even said aloud, “Cancer? This can’t be!”
The words echoed in the examination room. They banged on the door. They shook the world around me. The banging got so loud that it yanked me out of this room and this world and landed me back into the footlocker. Total darkness once again.
I tried to stand and bumped my head against the top of the locker. That was all I needed to know. I was back.
I opened the top and climbed out. Dr. Bishop stood above me, shining her penlight in my face. She was sweating, exhausted. She said, “Stay out of my mind.”
I hugged her. My fingers rested in the spaces between her ribs, just shy
of where the rib cage tied into her spine. Dr. Bishop hugged back. So that was it. Cancer was in her bloodstream. Now it was up to Eric and me to bury her life’s work and throw Walters off the trail. Dr. Bishop released me and said, “Let’s go.”
She led me back up the stairs and through the cottage and outside again. I waited in the arboretum while she locked the cottage door with her ancient key. She put the key into her pocket.
I walked down the needle-strewn path with Dr. Bishop. We took slow, careful steps. At times, she hung onto my bicep for balance. We didn’t talk. Late springtime breezes fluttered through the oaks. I wrestled with a thousand thoughts. What I’d been told. What I’d seen. What lay before me. I tried to make sense of it all. The answers were far from forthcoming. Dr. Bishop slipped once. I was too lost in thoughts to see her slip, but I felt it. She caught herself by grabbing onto the pocket of my slacks and held on for a second. I reached out to help her keep her balance. She took two deep breaths. Her hand was still halfway in my pocket. I waited. She recovered. We walked on.
We met Eric at the end of the trail. He nodded to me. I nodded back. Dr. Bishop and Eric walked in one direction. I walked in the other.
When I got to my bicycle, I reached into the pocket of my slacks for the key to unlock it. I felt the cool brass of the long, slender cottage key. Dr. Bishop must have faked her stumble on the pathway and slid the key in. It was a smart move on her part. I never would’ve taken the key if she’d simply tried to give it to me. Now I had it, though, and I had a sense of what I had to do.
26
Perhaps it’s time to explain how I knew Dr. Bishop way back when. I’ll rewind back to the summer of 1991. I had just finished my junior year at Fresno State. Nietzsche was a pup. The woman who became my ex-wife was my girlfriend, and we had a future instead of a past. I also played drums in the band Pop Culture and the References. We had big plans for the summer. We would record five songs, release a seven-inch record, and tour the West Coast. The cost of recording was covered. Our guitarist Brandon—also known as Fester back in those days—worked at a little studio in Fresno. As long as we recorded between the hours of 2 and 6 AM and paid for our own tape (which Fester had filched, anyway), the studio was ours. We also figured that we’d be able to pay for the tour with the cover charges at shows and record sales. What we really needed, though, was six hundred bucks to press the records. Two hundred each. These were the days when two hundred bucks was a very difficult sum for me or Pop to raise, particularly when it came on top of things like food and rent. Fester had his share covered.
Pop and I had another plan, though. Pop had come across an ad in the back of the student newspaper soliciting human research subjects. He called the number. A one-week gig. We could take the week off from our regular campus jobs and do the study. If everything worked out, we’d have enough for the seven-inch and the tour. The three of us—Pop, Fester, and I—piled into the band van and headed to Stanford for the week.
We arrived at the testing facility at the prescribed time. A research assistant interviewed us. She told us that she couldn’t use any of us in the study. They needed anorexics. Clearly, we didn’t qualify. “But,” she said, “we also need more proctors: people to oversee the study, keep it running smoothly. The pay is the same. It’s one week of work. If you’re interested, you’re hired.”
The three of us nodded along. We produced pens and scribbled signatures on respective contracts. The research assistant led us to our rooms in the testing facility. We took a side entrance that led us up a flight of concrete stairs and into the blank hallway of a dormitory, low rent by Stanford’s standards, swank compared to what we were used to. We passed the doorway to a communal bathroom, followed by rows of doors that led into box rooms, each with little more than bunk beds, a pair of metal dressers, and a pair of desks. There was a common room at the end of the hall, with couches darkened by the oils and dirt of a generation of students, but still in one piece, stuffing still stuffed and springs yet to have sprung. We sat on the couches and the research assistant explained our jobs.
The study explored a new approach to treating anorexia. The goal was to change the patients’ relationship with food, to make food desirable again. In order to do that, the patients, or, in this case, research subjects, were housed in the dining room at the end of the hall. The research assistant pointed at the hallway that we hadn’t walked down. The research subjects camped in the dining room, lived among the kitchen smells, and watched as proctors like Pop, Fester, and I ate elaborate meals. All the while, the subjects were not allowed to eat. The hypothesis, the research assistant told us, is that anorexia is a control issue. Anorexics stop eating because eating is one area in their life that they can have complete control over. If that control is wrested from them, they’ll look for autonomy in a different arena and begin eating again.
Fester was the first to reframe this. He said, “So, basically, our job is to pig out in front of a bunch of starving people.”
“Yes,” the research assistant said. “That, and make sure the starving people don’t eat.”
I was a little stunned, not at all sure that I could be a part of this study. Fester, on the other hand, said, “How’s the grub?”
The research assistant smiled and stood to leave. “Delicious. We hired the sous chef from Antonio’s downtown.” She winked at Fester. “Don’t be shy. Ask for seconds.”
She disappeared down the hall from which she came. Pop, Fester, and I headed to the dining room for a bite.
The study was already in progress. A group of proctors sat at a large table, serving themselves from communal trays of shrimp fra diavolo, eggplant parmesan, chicken cacciatore, sausage and peppers, shrimp and scallop scampi, puttanesca, various pastas in marinara or alfredo or olive oil and garlic sauce, rolls, loaves of bread, and a spinach salad. The proctors piled their plates high. The sous chef kept working in the open-air kitchen adjacent to the dining room. More food was on its way. Between the smells and the sight of those mountains of food, I wanted to eat like I’d never eaten before. I wanted to make a Thanksgiving feast feel like a light lunch compared to what I was going to do to those trays of food.
Then I saw the research subjects, gathered on their cots, staring at us with those hungry eyes. They were so skinny. Starving, really. Literally. One young woman among them called out, “Come on. You can’t toss me a roll? One goddamn roll?”
One of the proctors looked me in the eye, shook his head, and said, “Fucking guinea pigs.” He reached over to a tray I hadn’t noticed yet and scooped up a lobster tail dripping with garlic-butter sauce.
I spent the rest of that night and all of the next day reading everything I could about anorexia, treatments, and this study. By dinnertime, sitting down to my fourth feast that would put the digs at Versailles to shame, barely able to touch any food, gazing into constellations of starving eyes, I decided to sabotage the experiment.
I borrowed the band’s van that night, drove to a local bagel shop, ordered a sandwich, and chatted with the lone girl working. I told her about the experiment. She looked at me like she was unsure of what to believe. I asked her when she would dump the day-old bagels. She said, “When you’re ready to leave, I’ll give you a bag.”
She gave me a few tubs of cream cheese to go with them, warning me to make sure I ate the cream cheese in the next week or so. I got the sense that she didn’t believe me about the experiment, that she thought I was just hungry and had made up a clever story for free bagels.
At eleven o’clock that night, after the proctors were done with their gelatos and cheesecakes, I snuck into the dining room with my bag full of bagels and cream cheese. I crept into the middle of their circle of cots and knelt among them. “Okay, guys,” I said, even though most of them were girls. “I know it’s not as good as the food they’re feeding us, but it’s what I can bring you.”
The research subjects looked at each other. For the first time, none of their hungry eyes would meet mine. Finally, the
one who had called out for the roll the day before said, “Dude, you’re crossing a line.”
I stood. “It’s okay by me,” I said. I left the bagels and cream cheese on a little table among the cots. I crept back out of the room.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I just kept thinking about the research subjects—the guinea pigs, as the proctors called them. I knew enough about anorexics to know they wouldn’t tear into the food like a pack of wild animals. I didn’t expect them to be ravenous. I did expect starving people to react more favorably to food, though. At least one of them should’ve reached out for a bagel. And that’s when it occurred to me that the guinea pigs weren’t that skinny. They were skinny, sure, but not anorexic skinny. There was something fishy going on. I thought about the proctors, too, because all of us seemed to have been hired on the spot, when we were signing up to be research subjects. I spent a lot of time that night lying on my dorm bed, staring at the underside of Pop’s bed, wondering who the real guinea pigs were.
At about four in the morning, Pop got up to use the communal restroom. When he came back, I said, “Pop, does something seem fishy here?”
“Yeah,” Pop said. “It seems fishy that it’s four in the morning and you’re trying to talk to me.”
I didn’t shy away, though. I said, “You remember freshman comp, when we read that essay about Stanley Milgram?”
“I didn’t read anything for freshman comp.”
“Well, we were assigned to read it. It was all about this experiment a guy did to gauge how far people would go in following orders. He hired people to administer dosages of electricity to other people, like shock treatments, to see how much electricity someone would pump into another human being just because they were hired to do so.”
“Okay, right. I remember talking about that shit in class. The teacher said that we all would’ve been Nazis if we’d been in Germany in the late ’30s.”
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