The first installment in a series of lightly fictionalized encounters with drugs and mental illness.
Caves in Guilin, China.
The next step in a jerky, frantic dance engineered by a sick puppeteer came hardly three weeks later, when Bryce and Jamie were sipping cheap, strongly mixed rum and cokes as they evaluated their Friday night prospects. Midterms had just ended, and neither of them felt up to the shlep to Brooklyn for the warehouse party that most of their friends would be at. Instead, they headed down the hall to visit their senior friends, Gracie and Sana. (Jamie was pining after Gracie, a waifish Jewish girl from Boston who studied econ and spoke like a sailor).
“Weak,” Gracie declared contemptuously as Bryce and Jamie declined to join the tail end of the girls’ Power Hour.
Instead, they watched the girls as they took a vodka shot every six minutes, plus or minus a few (mostly plus) for various prizes and penalties.
“Lame,” Gracie judged half an hour later as she pulled out a small jewelry bag containing a strip of five hits of acid. She and Sana each placed one on their tongues, smiling expectantly.
Bryce had agreed to accompany Jamie down the hall on the condition that his roommate would join him for an eight-a.m. gym session the next day, so he was surprised to see his stolid best friend turn to him a moment later with a supplicant look in his eye. His first thought was of the ghost soundtrack that he had been hearing of late; a frigid hand grasped his guts as he contemplated twelve hours of diesel hallucinations. His next thought, however, was that it had been a long time since Jamie was so interested in a girl.
His best friend had a news anchor’s Chad-ish good looks. However, the opposite sex often misinterpreted Jamie’s distance as tantalizing aloofness, whereas Bryce knew the truth: that beneath Jamie's handsome, self-possessed façade was a gangly geek whose most prized possession had once been his botanical journal. Maybe it’ll help me to trip, lean into it rather than staying stuck in fear and denial, Bryce rationalized. Get whatever this weirdness is out of my system.
“Legit!” Gracie exclaimed as Bryce and Jamie partook in the unholy communion a moment later. The four donned peacoats and scarves, prepared for a walk through campus as they waited for the drug to take effect.
This wasn’t a come-up; it was a rocket launch. The withered, trampled grass of the quad rippled beneath Bryce, heaving up and down sinusoidally as his long legs stretched forward with each uncertain step. He shot his hands out in goofy confusion, a toddler mimicking an airplane (vrr) as he tried to steady himself, his limbs transformed into the same taffy that his thoughts were made of. They stretched and snapped, stretched and snapped as he ventured tremblingly forward. A few paces ahead, Gracie and Sana had collapsed into a giggling heap, Sana sipping from a silver hip flask illuminated from within, as by myth or moonlight. As Bryce drank in its ethereal glow, he became convinced that the flask held the antidote to this madness. One sip and he would be healed, not just of this chemically orchestrated madness, but also of the other, more insidious companion who had stalked a few paces behind him for weeks.
They took a brief rest, during which Bryce discovered with deepest despair that the flask was empty. Then, they continued on through the Gothic passages of the humanities quad. Above them, its stone arches expanded and multiplied, soaring upward and vaulting outward like a great, heaving rib cage. The vrr of the plane reached him again as it circled back, trailing a banner with God knew what message encoded in God knew what hermetic tongue. In another instant – and never before had Bryce been so cognizant of the utter fallaciousness of linearity, the divine supremacy of the now – the sacred arches shape-shifted into charcoal renderings of themselves, the spaces between them smudged and blotted by a careless creator. Bryce froze for a moment, paralyzed by the thought that he (not He) was the Creator. What if it ended with him, that this was all there was?
Bryce paused, agape. As if aware of their awed observer, the still black-and-white arches reconfigured themselves into great trees intertwining overhead. Each pillar contorted wildly as it twisted itself through a series of incarnations (chestnut, cherry, evergreen) before settling into the truest expression of its tree-self. In a moment, gentle tendrils of pea green sprouted from the ground, hundreds of them winding themselves around the trees’ thick, black trunks, climbing quickly upward into the endlessly dividing and subdividing branches of this forever forest. The vines’ serpentine progress culminated as they met overhead, interlacing from left and right, binding together hunched-backed firs and proud oaks. All sound was sucked from the scene as the color of the vines intensified and differentiated, swelling with the sacred spectrum of summer verdure as the rest of the scene, too, exploded with life (barky brown trunks clambered up by exuberant squirrels, gracefully bowed limbs adorned by chorusing technicolor songbirds that perched along the uppermost branches at scientifically precise intervals). As another interminable now arrived, the green hues disappeared into a great conflagration of brilliant oranges and yellows shooting up around the trunks and into the branches as the incandescent revolution spread down the passageway. Finally, these fiery hues smoldered, real ashes drifting down and flecking Bryce’s black coat with gray as the trees screamed and spasmed, their roar dying down into a hoarse moan as they faded into the bare, battered remnants of old age.
Looking down at his hands, Bryce witnessed a parallel progression. The youthful smoothness of the skin on the back of his hands, the tight-rope tautness of the tendons that moved his fingers, waned and weakened as it gave way to graying parchment marred by the wrinkled, sallow sagginess of old age. From some scenic overlook buried deep in his innermost psyche, Bryce painted these scenes on a canvas of metamorphosing, impossible proportions, desperate to record this glory before now became then and it was lost to him forever.
Next, their foursome returned to the girls’ apartment. Sana put on an Eagles record from her vinyl collection as they sat on the floor, spreading their sodden feet toward a radiator that stretched accordion-like along the living room wall. Bryce observed it shift itself from right to left, left to right in the manner of a discontented caterpillar. Jamie rested his hand on Bryce’s shoulder for a moment, grinning as he delivered a word salad containing the ingredients promise, not, Buzzy, you, fucking, stuff, man, rows, bad, tomorrow, love. Bryce asked Jamie to repeat himself, this simple “say it again” requiring a tremendous input of communicative energy. Jamie repeated himself, presumably, although this time the message was even more garbled. Struck with inspiration, Bryce asked Jamie to repeat himself a third time, focusing on his friend’s turgid, purple lips in an attempt to read what he was saying. With mounting frustration, Bryce discovered that the scene was now progressing in stop-motion, one now supplanting the next without the continuity that should have been implied by Reality’s now derelict projectionist. This rendered his attempt to understand his best friend’s message as pointless as if it had been delivered in the same language as the banner, which – now cut free from the plane that had towed it – drifted aimlessly toward the misty grime of Manhattan’s predawn streets.
With a surging panic, Bryce grabbed Jamie by the shoulders, suddenly sure that it was time for them to get out of there. They would return home, he decided, to their cozy, threadbare refuge where no harm could befall them. He thought he announced this aloud as he stood up and addressed Gracie and Sana. They studied him with strange expressions. Beneath the quizzical looks that they shot first each other and then Jamie, Bryce was now aware, lurked something more sinister. Whatever had been pursuing him these past few weeks was here, now, and the girls had something to do with it, whether they knew it or were simply convenient vessels to be hijacked. He had to get Jamie out of here. Bryce attempted a smile as he pulled Jamie up, gesturing toward the coat rack. As he moved to grab his scarf, however, Gracie stepped between him and the coat rack.
“The fuck is your problem,” Bryce understood her to say. He couldn’t be sure whether she spoke it aloud or not.
“Not feeling well,” he muttered to deflect the dark menace concentrated in Gracie’s preternaturally dilated pupils. As she opened her mouth to reply, he noted something odd about the creases where her upper and lower lips came together, which remained peculiarly immobile as the rest of her mouth stretched into a horseshoe. Never had reality been simulated so cartoonishly; this was a clip that should have been left on the cutting room floor. He glanced toward Jamie again, jerking his head toward the door. It was time to get out, now. Why the fuck couldn’t Jamie see it?
Beneath the kaleidoscopic distortions of his senses, Bryce absorbed Jamie’s confusion and irritation like UV radiation. Nevertheless, Bryce handed him his jacket and continued begging them off with a word salad comprised of vague expressions of unease. Even Gracie seemed to accept that they were leaving as Jamie mumbled his apologies and promised to meet up with her the next day. Bryce returned a perfunctory hug from Sana, cringing as he realized that he was also embracing whatever the hell was inside of her, while Jamie and Gracie said goodbye. In a moment, Gracie stood before Bryce, staring up at him thanks to their ten-inch height difference.
“Take care, kid,” she said with poorly feigned concern as she wrapped her arms around his back and leaned in. Then, as Bryce rested his head on her shoulder for the briefest of moments, she moved her mouth closer to his ear. She filled it with a crass, rapid-fire whisper, promising things so darkly, deadly descriptive that they fled his mind before he could encode them into memory.
Bryce jerked backward as he shoved Gracie away. She caught the push on her shoulders, tripped as she was propelled backwards into the couch. She fell just as she reached it, so that her tangled legs and awkwardly askew pelvis ended up on the ground while her head collided with the chair’s armrest, her back twisting against its base.
“What the fuck!” Sana exclaimed as she rushed to Gracie, who was staring at Bryce as though really seeing him for the first time.
“He’s fucking crazy!” Gracie shouted, assuming the role of the shocked victim quite convincingly as she looked back and forth between Jamie and Sana. Everyone was looking at each other, it seemed; no one paid Bryce any mind. There was another interminable series of stop-motion instants, a montage of bad feeling, as Jamie dragged Bryce out of the doorway and down the hall without another word. A comical pantomime of an endangered marriage ensued when the acid had finally worn off a few hours later and Bryce, returning partially to reality with a surge of shame and adrenaline, found his friend asleep on the couch rather than in his bed.
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