Transcendent Kingdom(62)

“I’ve been here for a while now, actually,” I said.

“I can see that.”

She had a couple of her friends with her but before long we had lost them. More and more people filed in. The room got darker, danker, the music louder. I had been nursing my drink for an hour or more, and finally, Anne took it out of my hands and set it down.

“Dance with me,” she said. And before I could say anything she was on a table, her hand outstretched. She pulled me up, pulled me closer. “Are you having a good time?” she whisper-shouted in my ear.

    “This isn’t really my thing,” I said. “It’s too loud; there are too many people.”

She nodded. “Okay. Quiet, uncrowded, got it. I’m storing all of this in my ‘How to Win Gifty Over’ file.”

“There’s a file?”

“Oh yes. A whole spreadsheet. You’d love it.”

I rolled my eyes at her as the song changed to something slower. Anne wrapped her arms around my waist and my breath quickened. On the floor beside us, a group of men dog-whistled.

“Do you like me better when I’ve been drinking?” I asked Anne, nervous to hear the answer.

“I like you best when you’re waxing rhapsodic about Jesus,” she said. “I like you best when you’re feeling holy. You make me feel holy too.”

I threw my head back and laughed.



* * *



—

A week later, the two of us borrowed one of Anne’s friends’ cars, so that we could drive to Harvard Forest in Petersham. The drive should have only taken an hour and fifteen minutes, but there was an accident on the highway and we’d crawled along in the car for two hours, just waiting for it to clear. When we finally passed by the wreckage, a hunk of metal that hardly even resembled a car anymore, I started having second thoughts about the mushrooms I’d agreed to do.

“The thing about it is, you just have to do it,” Anne said. “Like who knows what euphoria actually means until they feel it? It’s just a word.”

I mumbled noncommittedly.

“It’ll be beautiful,” Anne said. “Honestly, it’s like a religious experience. You’ll like it, I promise.”

    Anne had taken a freshman seminar that spent two weekends exploring the forest, and so she knew it better than most. She guided me off trail until we found a clearing, encircled by trees that seemed to me to be improbably tall. Years later, when I got to California and set my eyes on a redwood for the first time, I thought back to the trees in Harvard Forest, their height a toddling infant compared with the giants that lived on the other side of the country.

But that day, I was impressed. Anne spread out a picnic blanket and lay on top of it for a moment, just staring up. She pulled a crumpled plastic bag from her back pocket and shook the mushrooms into her palm.

“Ready?” she asked, handing me mine. I nodded, popped a gram into my mouth, and waited for it to hit me.

I don’t know how long it took. Time stretched out before me so slowly that I felt like an hour was passing between each of my blinks. It was like my entire body was made of thread wound tightly around a spool, and as I sat there, it unspooled, centimeter by centimeter, until I was a puddle on the blanket. Beside me, Anne looked at me with such beautiful benevolence. I took her hand. We were on our backs, looking at each other, looking at the trees, while the trees looked back at us. “Living-man trees,” I said, and Anne nodded like she understood, and maybe she did.

When I came down, Anne was already there to meet me. “So?” she asked, watching me expectantly.

“I remembered this story my father used to tell my brother,” I said. “I haven’t thought about that in years.”

“What’s the story?” Anne asked, but I just shook my head. I didn’t have anything else to give. I didn’t want to tell her my stories. I couldn’t imagine living the way she lived, free, like an exposed wire ready and willing to touch whatever it touched. I couldn’t imagine being willing, and even after those few stolen moments of psychedelic transcendence, nonaddictive, harmless, and, yes, euphoric, I still couldn’t imagine being free.



* * *



—

    By the end of that semester Anne and I were in the thick of a friendship so intimate it felt romantic; it was romantic. We had kissed and a little more, but I couldn’t define it and Anne didn’t care to. As her graduation loomed closer, Anne spent most of her time in my room or at the library, hunched over her MCAT practice books, her hair, still awkwardly growing out its old perm, in a disheveled topknot.

Samurai Anne I called her when I wanted to annoy her, or when I just wanted her to look up from her work and pay attention to me.

“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” she said. She took her hair down and twisted strands of it around her finger.

“Something you don’t know?”

“Yes. Please, save me from the boredom of this practice test. I might actually die if I have to do another one. Can you imagine? Death by MCAT as you strive to become a doctor.”

“I don’t have any good stories,” I said.

“So tell me a bad story,” she said.

I knew what she was doing. She was trying to get me to tell her about Nana, because while I knew all of Anne’s stories, she knew only a handful of mine, and I had always been careful to select the happy ones. She would at times try to get me to talk about him, but never directly, only in these foxy ways that I could always see right through. She would tell me stories about her sister and then look at me expectantly as though I were meant to trade. A sister story for a brother story, but I wouldn’t do it. Anne’s stories about her sister, about the parties they’d gone to, the people they’d slept with, they didn’t feel like an even trade for the stories I had about Nana. My Nana stories didn’t have happy endings. His years of partying, of sleeping around, they didn’t end with him holding down a job in finance in New York, as Anne’s sister’s did. And it wasn’t fair. That was the thing that was at the heart of my reluctance and my resentment. Some people make it out of their stories unscathed, thriving. Some people don’t.