Union Atlantic (13 page)

Finally, he managed to get his phone out and dial Sabrina.

“Call the garage for me, would you?” he said. “Have them bring up my car.”

By the time it appeared in front of the building, he felt lucid enough to take the wheel. He headed for Storrow Drive thinking maybe he would walk along the river to clear his head, but the mere thought of it tired him further and so he kept driving, exiting onto the Pike, where the lanes were clogged with traffic. It took him twenty minutes longer than usual to reach the house. Tossing his keys on the kitchen counter, he headed up the stairs to his room and flopped down on the bed, not even bothering to remove his shoes.

On the verge of sleep, he heard a sound behind him, coming from the bathroom.

He opened his eyes and remained perfectly still. Listening intently, he discerned two cautious footsteps. The house contained nothing worth stealing but the televisions; they were still here. Whoever it was had been waiting. Slowly, very slowly, he moved his hand to the floor. Reaching under the bed, he fingered the steel crosshatching on the butt of his pistol and coaxed it into his grip. Between the next footstep and the one that followed, he counted five seconds. The sound was just a few yards from his shoulder now. When he heard it again, he grabbed the gun up off the floor, cocked it, and swiveled upright, shouting, “Back it up!” just in time to see the young man’s knees buckle as he fainted, falling into the room with a thud.

Coming up off the bed, Doug strode to the door, checked the hallway, and then crossed the room again to the window to see if there was anyone in the driveway or yard. Finding them clear, he turned back to the boy slumped in the bathroom doorway. He had disheveled brown hair and was dressed in frayed jeans and a sweatshirt. Doug nudged him with his foot but he was out cold.

Squatting down, he reached one arm under the kid’s knees and the other beneath the middle of his back. He was heavier than Doug
had anticipated, his head lolling backward, his waist sagging between Doug’s arms. An odd sensation—that warm, unconscious body pressed up against his chest. Crossing the room, he set him down on the rumpled sheets. He looked peaceful lying there. Unsure what to do, Doug stood over him awhile, experiencing something peculiar, a feeling of sorts. A passing sorrow as he watched the boy breathe.

Chapter 8

Above Nate, a fan spun noiselessly. Pain stretched up his right side from his waist to his shoulder, and his head ached. Looking to his left, he saw a man with his back to him standing at the window dressed in suit pants and shirt. Instantly, his stomach clutched tight, the constriction spreading into his chest and throat, making his heart thud.

He tried sitting up, but dizzy, lay back onto the pillow again.

“So. You mind telling me what you’re doing in my house?” the man asked, without turning to face him. His hands jangled keys or change in the pockets of his trousers.

“I … I was just cutting across the yard—”

“And you wound up in my bedroom?”

“I shouldn’t have, it’s just—”

“Cutting across the lawn from where?”

“Next door.”

He turned back into the room now and looked directly at Nate.

“From that woman’s house? You were in there?”

He had shiny black hair cropped short, a wide jaw, and a dimpled chin. He was six-one at least. The muscles of his chest and shoulders, evident beneath the fitted shirt, torqued his upper body forward slightly, like a boxer leaning in to his opponent.

Online, there were plenty of men whose pictures made Nate go dreamy and hard, in a melancholy sort of way. But they were otherworldly.

“I asked you a question,” the man said.

“Ms. Graves. She’s my tutor.”

His eyes narrowed, his lashes bunched at the tips as if wetted, as if he’d just stepped from the shower.

“She sent you over here, didn’t she?”

“No. I swear. I was just curious. That’s all.”

“You do this often? You just wander into people’s houses?”

“No.”

“You could have been killed. You realize that?”

Nate nodded, holding his breath.

“Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

“All right, then. Let’s go.”

He led Nate along the hallway and down the curved front stairs, which brought them into the hall Nate had passed through less than an hour before. This was it, he figured; he would be told to leave now. But rather than heading for the door, the man kept going into the giant kitchen. From the fridge, he took a bottle of vodka and poured himself a glass. Leaning against the counter, his legs slightly spread, he swirled the clear liquid with a tight little motion of his hand. To each of his gestures there was a precision, a kind of surface tension to the way his body moved. He had a cocksuredness about him that the jocks
at school could only hope to emulate. A cool, level stare that announced straightaway he needed nothing.

“I guess I should call the police now,” he said.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“You live in Finden?”

“Yeah.”

“You think this town’s just a playground for you? You can just do whatever you want because it’s all safe and cozy in the end? You were trespassing. You were breaking the law.” The cuff of his shirt sleeve slid back from his wrist as he raised his glass to his mouth.

“I didn’t take anything,” Nate pleaded.

For a minute or more the man made no reply, all the while staring directly at Nate. There was a perversity in his silence, a gaming of discomfort. Nate could sense it in the air between them. And yet there was something else too, something tantalizing: being looked at this hard, with that edge of threat. Part of Nate wanted to shut his eyes and let himself be watched, but he didn’t dare.

“That tutor of yours, she’s out of her mind. She thinks she owns this place.”

“Yeah. She mentioned that.”

“And you say you were just curious. About what?”

“That it was so grand, I guess. And empty. I didn’t think anyone lived here.”

The man glanced across the room, as if noticing its bareness for the first time. In profile, he was even more gorgeous, with his five-o’clock shadow and his perfectly shaped nose and his full, slightly parted lips. Entering the house had woken Nate’s senses but what he experienced now was of a different order, as if the whole physical world had been made exact, sharpened by the knife of desire.

“I suppose I could use some furniture,” he said, finishing his drink and setting it down on the counter.

“I think it’s kind of cool the way it is.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. It feels open, I guess. Like you could do anything you wanted to.”

“What’s your name?”

“Nate.”

“What are you, a high-school student?”

“I’m a senior. I graduate in a few weeks.”

“Well, Nate, I’ve got stuff to do, so I think it’s time for you to leave.”

Pointing the way out, he followed Nate from the kitchen.

“You’re not going to call the police?”

“Frankly, I don’t have the time.”

As the man held the front door open, Nate could see the electric orange of the streetlamps flickering on up along on the road. If he left now, like this, with nothing more said, how would he ever get back here?

He hesitated on the threshold a moment. Then he blurted out, “I could help you.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you needed to know stuff. About Ms. Graves. About her lawsuit.”

The man’s lips parted, and he smiled for the first time, a look of conjecture playing across his face.

“Interesting,” he said. “And why would you do that?”

For all his effort, Nate couldn’t stop the blood from filling his cheeks now.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just because.”

For another long moment, the man was silent.

“Sure,” he said, finally. “Why not? I’m usually home about ten thirty. Try knocking next time.”

N
ATE JOGGED
the half mile to Jason’s house and arrived in a sweat.

“Where the hell have you been?” Emily shouted over the sound of the voice booming from the stereo in Jason’s room. She lay on the unmade bed, leafing through a copy of
Harper’s
.

“Sorry. I got held up.”

The evening here was still getting under way. Jason sat at his desk, parceling out whitish-brown stalks and heads into small glass bowls. In the corner, Hal, who’d apparently taken the liberty of showering, sat lounging in Jason’s blue terry-cloth bathrobe, an unlit cigarette in one hand, an empty pack of matches in the other.

“You know,” Hal said, “I was thinking—”

“Quiet!” Jason insisted. “It’s almost over.”

Obediently, they all listened to the voice on the speakers as it swerved back and forth between reasoned calm and a kind of prophetic verve. A professor, it sounded like, a researcher on some very extended leave.

“So you see,” the voice continued, “the entirety of human history has been acted out in the light of the traumatic severing of our connection into the mother goddess, the planetary matrix of organic wholeness that was the centerpiece of the psychedelic experience back in the high Paleolithic. In other words, the world of hallucination and vision that psilocybin carries you into is not your private unconscious or the architecture of your neural programming, but it is in fact a kind of
intellecti
, a king of being, a kind of Gaian mind. Once you sever from this matrix of meaning, what James Joyce called ‘the mama matrix
most mysterious,’ once you sever yourself from this, all you have is rationalism, ego, male dominance to guide you, and that’s what’s led us into the nightmarish labyrinth of technical civilization, all the ills of modernity. We must import into straight society almost as a Trojan horse the idea that these psychedelic compounds and plants are not aberrational, they are not pathological, they are not some minor subset of the human possibility that only freaks and weirdos get involved with but rather the catalyst that called forth humanness from animal nature. That’s the call I’m making.”

The audience applauded as the volume of the recording faded out.

“Where the fuck do you get this stuff?” Emily asked.

“Interesting,” Hal allowed. “If nothing else, it’s a good highbrow excuse to get wasted.”

“That’s not the point. We’re not ‘getting wasted.’ This isn’t a party.”

“Sure,” Hal said. “We’re widening the lens.”

“Exactly,” Jason said, rising from the desk to pass them each their dish. “We’re taking what he calls the ‘heroic dose.’ The dose where you can’t be scared anymore because there’s no ego left to be frightened.”

The shrooms had a stringy, dirt-like texture that made Nate gag. The Brita was passed around and it took them a glass of water each to swallow down the bitter mush. Ingestion complete, Jason slipped on some panic-retarding French pop, all mild falsetto and ethereal synth. The night’s opening gesture made, they recommenced their lounging. Half an hour or so passed as the disco scrim luffed in the air about them.

“One day,” Hal said idly to Jason, “I think you’ll run a cult. Not in a bad way, at least not at first. We’ll read about you on an island with lots of women and children, all of you awaiting some astral bus. My career
will be over by then, at twenty-eight or-nine, and I’ll wonder if I should join you.”

“Listen,” Jason said, “here’s a public service announcement, okay? The free-association thing—it can be a problem. I mean, ‘astral bus’? That’s the kind of thing someone could just catch on, and before you know it, we’re lost. Think of it like meditation. The thought comes and the thought goes. You’re not the thought.”

“I’m just saying I think you’ll run a cult.”

“Okay,” Jason replied, “okay.”

Heavy liquid began to pool at the back of Nate’s skull. He lay down beside Emily and closed his eyes, the afterimage of the ceiling lamp burning like an eclipsed sun on the backs of his lids.

“Shit,” Emily said to no one in particular.

The music came in waves now, cresting in the middle of the room, sloshing against the walls, and dripping onto the floor before rising once more above their heads.

“Dinner’s almost ready, guys.”

Seeing Mrs. Holland standing in the doorway, the four of them came to shocked attention. “Why don’t you clean this place up, Jason? Your friends don’t have to put up with your laundry, do they?”

She wore a white rayon dress belted with snakeskin and sipped a clear liquid from a tumbler held firmly in both hands.

From across the room, her son glared at her.

Smiling vaguely at the other three, she laughed, as if to say, Isn’t he a card? and then turned away, leaving the door open behind her.

“Now
that,”
Hal said, “is the mama matrix most mysterious.”

“Save it,” Jason snapped, rising to close the door. With his back to it, he made as if to address them, though as he parted his lips to speak, something on the carpet hauled his attention off, and like a
general trying not to evidence distress before his troops he had to master himself anew before speaking “We’ve got a situation,” he announced. “There’s less time than I thought. We need to get down there and we need to consume some of that food in an orderly fashion. You understand? It’s early going. We can handle it. We just need to act quickly.”

Hal stood, tightened the belt of his bathrobe, and shouted, “I’m ready.”

“This is a very bad idea,” Emily said.

But Jason was already out the door and they were following him down the curving staircase.

T
HE HOLLANDS’ KITCHEN
appeared roughly the size of a tennis court. Seeking a base of operations amidst this vastness, they made for a distressed farmhouse table on the far side of the room. When they got high in the car, Nate could let sensation spill over with no interference from the world. Not so now. Circumstance had forced him to his own personal battle stations, where he waged a desperate campaign against the inner flood.

“I’m on this wacky Listserv,” Mrs. Holland called out from the range, “with these old friends of mine, and who knows who else for that matter—anyone, I suppose, everyone—the terrorists!” She cackled. “Anyway, someone sent out this crazy thing
professing
to be a Sumerian cookbook. Can you imagine? Julia Child running around Mesopotamia four thousand years ago. Lunatic really. But I thought I’d give one of these cold dishes a try. Lucky for you Whole Foods didn’t have yak. I used venison. With this river grass they’re all enthused about. None of you are on a silly diet thing. Emily, you’re not doing one of those, are you?”