Aug. 10. Sick with anxiety—it is one o’clock in the morning, and André, who is driving from New York, is not here. I think that something dreadful has happened. I am waiting to nurse Percy, with the wicked old nurse guarding him in the other room. What has happened? It is too terrible. The whole day has been ghastly, and I don’t know what to do. I can’t sleep, can’t wait, and yet I feel I shouldn’t wake Mummy and Daddy. I can’t even imagine what has happened to André, but I don’t think he will come now. At moments like this, my love for him is crushing, and I know I could not survive without him, much less raise the children on my own. Also Charlie is very worrying still and keeps me up nights fretting. I am very far from him. He seems grown up and yet discontented. There seems to be no way to reach him, and he is not really interested in anything. Mummy says he might be jealous of the baby, but I don’t think so, for if he softens toward anyone, it’s Percy. If André is not here in a half hour, I’m calling the police.
Aug. 20. A happy few days. I went to buy chrysanthemums (coral pink) and put them in the garden in the evening. The baby has eyes as wide awake as stars at night, and when I feed him, he locks eyes with me and I am everything and give him everything he needs. He is so like Charlie as a baby that it is strange. To think that only a few weeks ago I was dreaming of ways to escape him—and now he feels as much a cornerstone of my life as anything else, for truly a baby of that age is part of yourself. It is easier to love him completely than it is to love a child who is a person on his own and who angers and provokes you and is constantly struggling to be free or not to be. A baby is utterly good with no power to hurt anyone. Everything you do for it is good. There is no agonizing choice, no reasoning, and yet with its pathetic powerlessness, it is the beginning of everything. Already I see in the intense blue eyes someone eager to know the world. Already, he follows me with his eyes. It is more intense than any joy I can find in flowers and the sea, or even good conversation or great books. It draws a circle around us that no one can disturb. Caroline is like a little mother, fetching diapers and hats and whispering secrets in the baby’s ear. André arrives tomorrow by dinnertime, as long as no one else has a heart attack he has to stay for. I’ve told him he must call next time he’s running so late or risk
my
having a heart attack from worry. The patient from the other week survived. That André has such power to heal and help dazzles me when I let myself think of it, which I don’t often do. It unsettles me terribly to think of life hanging by a thread. I would prefer him to do more research and less private practice, both for my nerves and because I think research is where one can ultimately have a greater effect.
Today I love Ashaunt—my first true love—and it is physical pain to imagine leaving it. The world is so uncertain that perhaps we should just stick to what we have, like Percy sleeping in the moonlight in the next room, or Caroline with her red hairband and long brown hair. I think sometimes that I should stay here forever, stop striving, find meaning close at hand. But is this a cowardly philosophy? I don’t know.
S
OMETIMES HE WENT
to break windows. Sometimes, once summer was in full swing, he went to read, bringing along a book and a Coke or beer he’d taken from one relative or another’s fridge. (Stolen? Gifted? Doors were open. Help yourself.) Mostly, stepping over the collapsed barbed wire that had once kept the army in and the summer people out, Charlie went to look for things: in May, prairie warblers and quail nests, windflowers, wood anemones; in midsummer, wood lilies and pearly everlasting; later, bayberries that he dropped into his pocket, hoping to melt them into candles (they ended up in the wash and turned to gray, clotted clumps, leaving a waxy stain on his pants). Sometimes he brought his camera, an old Canon his father had given him after his own camera was stolen. It was slightly broken, so that what you saw was not always what you got—a cluster of leaves transformed into a green clipped corner, a cloud turned into empty sky. Still, he liked how the camera narrowed his field of vision and gave him something to do with his hands, which, like his jaw, still shook if he let them go slack.
Sometimes he went to make out with a girl in the grass, or in the one remaining barrack with its rows of corroded metal beds, or in the open crow’s nest of the concrete radar building, the only problem being that there was no girl, just the bright throb of his body, just his own tongue inside his mouth, his own hand down his shorts. Just (it was how things were, then, at the best of times; at the worst, no throb at all) the bright throb of his thoughts. Some of the others—Rusty, Phillip, even Will, if he was to be believed—had taken actual, real girls who were neither their cousins nor sisters to the base and done things that seemed to Charlie like the primitive and miraculous acts of feral monkeys. His own penis looked remarkably like a stinkhorn mushroom—a
Phallus impudicus
or
Mutinus elegans
(its head picked clean by insects, a delicacy in China, edible if you could get past the smell), and while he was not yet the mushroom expert he would later become, he knew a fair amount and noticed mushrooms everywhere, just as he noticed bones half buried under leaves, a fox’s bleached white pelvis, the fissured skull of a rabbit or weasel.
It was 1970. The summer before, he had graduated from St. Mark’s School in the bottom third of his class and gone to Woodstock, where he took photographs of garbage for an hour and left, fleeing the mud, the crush of bodies, the throngs of people losing themselves in addled celebration while he, watching himself watching, watched. That fall, he went off to a middling (by his mother’s standards) college in Ohio. To escape the draft, he supposed. To escape the draft, or something else? His destination proved problematic in a number of ways: (1) Ohio was landlocked; (2) his college was in a city; (3) in order to attend college, you had to bring yourself along. He applied too late to get on-campus housing, and although his parents would have paid for something better, he found a dirt-cheap basement studio on the edge of the ghetto and didn’t lock the door, and it was with great detachment and a certain amount of curiosity that he watched a burglar in a ski mask enter the room one early November Friday night and steal his camera and wallet as he lay not-sleeping in his mummy sleeping bag, which smelled of soil, salt and sea.
It was on the Saturday following the burglary that he first did LSD, though his therapist’s later attempts to string the two events together into cause and effect would not convince. He was at a dorm party, vaguely trying to get into the spirit of the times and conquer a dim sense of malaise, when he accepted a tab from a guy in his Greek class: Check it out, man, this is the real goods. Even in the moment, part of him knew it was a terrible idea. The tab was small and delicate, a mouse’s pocket handkerchief; he set it on his tongue and sent it down. For the first hour or so, it had no effect at all, but then he smoked a joint on top of it and it took him up and tumbled him, filling his lungs, his thoughts, his every cell, then spitting him out, leaving him shipwrecked, shorn. A week later, he did it again, convinced, through a sort of desperate, inverted logic, that the second pill might take him backward and so undo the damage of the first.
Peeling, he thought instead as the drug took hold—or did not think, exactly, he
registered
, witnessed—his brain peeling back and back and back, and at the center, nothing. No me, only an I—a consciousness, an I without a Me, except that there he was (and there he knew himself to be), crouched in terror on the floor of the dorm lounge, bent over his knees, wrapped around himself but also disembodied, a batch of molecules coughed into the air. Johnny, someone said to him at one point, or was it Charlie or Jimmy (each name arrived as unassigned and tinny as the next), and Hey, Cat, you don’t look so hot, and he was rocking underneath a chair; they might have been poking him with sticks, the other students in the room; he needed to be gone from them, to cross the wall, the fluorescent lights grown too bright, the ceiling sunk too low, its lines unpeeling, running through him as if his body occupied no space. His self (despite the fact that it, when skinned, parsed and set in wobbly view, did not exist) was shuddering. There was laughter in the room, too loud, and the magnified weave of a girl’s wool sweater coming toward him (briefly, it was beautiful—how he could see every color, twined shades of brown, rust, green, blue, how he could
see)
, and then the arm swung away, and he was shuddering and shuddering and gone.
FIVE HOURS, IT WAS SUPPOSED
to last, then back to ground control clutching the keys to the kingdom, only it didn’t work that way for him, not once, not twice. (You
idiot
, his mother would say to him later, sympathetically, cruelly. Why take a chance like that? Why, for once in your life, did you decide you had to be like everyone else?) After the first trip, he’d woken on a floor, groped his way to his apartment and slept for two days. This second time, someone got him to the college infirmary. He awoke to learn that they’d prescribed him a supposed antidote to the acid that made his entire body break out with a rash like poison ivy. He didn’t mind, even, the itchiness on his arms, the sight of the welts rising up, how distracting it was and how familiar, and he could look at the arm and think
arm
, could feel the itch and think
itch
. He was grateful to be in a hard, high bed under a white sheet, tucked in so tightly his legs were pinned.
“
W’ll it turnit ’round
?” he asked the nurse bent near his bed, surprising himself with both the slurred quality of his own voice and the phrase itself, old-fashioned, as if out of his grandmother’s mouth (and Charlie as a boy, distraught over something—a broken bike, a wounded bird, his mother in a rage because he’d bombed a test or built a bomb—and Gaga, always calm: “Don’t worry, Charlie, we’ll turn it around”).
The nurse looked over the expanse of bed. “What you asking me about?”
Her skin was light brown, her accent lilting, reminding him of Belle, his Haitian nanny for a time (she had married a postman, moved to Queens, sent his family annual Christmas cards of three scrubbed, clear-eyed sons in light blue suits and dark blue ties).
“What they gave me—” He lifted an arm, displayed the rash. “Willit make it go away, whah-I . . .” He shook his head. His tongue was pickled, floating in a jar of brine.
Damn fool thing to do, Belle would have said. Throwing away your future. Wasting your fancy education. She’d been strict with them but also kind. She had believed in both Jesus Christ and voodoo, and in the power of Special Milk to put a child to sleep (it worked).
“Might.” The nurse took his chart from the end of the bed, glanced at it and put it back. “Sometimes it helps. Won’t nothin’ turn it around for sure, save for you and your Maker.”
“I don’t believe in a Maker.”
Charlie was expecting a lecture, wanting one even—to be chastised like a child, set on a path—but instead the nurse turned toward the sink, washed her hands and dried them briskly with a paper towel. He tried to speak, but his jaw was trembling, his hands shaking. It was not over—once again, it did not seem to be—and as it started up again, the mind withdrawing, the body bucking (he kicked off the sheets, drew up his knees, grabbed hold), he had his first real glimpse of how far this day would stretch into his future, even as it looped insistently into the past.
“Easy, child.” From some unseen place, the nurse produced a brown paper lunch bag and held it open to his mouth. “Breathe.”
Not until then did he notice that there was a person in the bed to the left of him, and another in the bed to the right, both watching him with open interest. He ducked his head away from the bag. Was the nurse trying to suffocate him? He was—would be, intermittently, for the rest of his life—jumpy. Do not touch me without warning. Do not send me to closed spaces. By then her hand was on the nape of his neck, half forcing, half guiding him.
“In and out,” she said. “That’s it. Slow down. Go nice and slow.”
He inhaled into the bag and felt his own breath come at him, dark, papery and sour. He jerked his head away; she brought it back.
“Breathe in,” she said. “Breathe out.”
LATER, IN A SMALL OFFICE
down the hall from the room where he’d woken, a doctor called his parents in New Jersey and handed him the phone. First, his mother’s anger, shrill enough that Charlie held the handset away from his ear while the doctor shuffled paperwork on his desk. Really, really stupid, I mean
asinine
, his mother said, and then (how fast her mind moved, skittering from room to room, slamming, opening doors along the way), but we’re willing to forget about it, we won’t tell anyone, just get yourself out of the infirmary, put this behind you . . . come home for a few days to find your balance . . . don’t fester . . . worst thing you could do for yourself . . . bad element . . . think about transferring, I’ll make some calls . . . Columbia . . . Astonishing lack of judgment.
At one point Charlie put the receiver down on the doctor’s desk, but the doctor, smiling slightly, gave it back.
“If you won’t come here, we’re coming there,” his mother said finally after he refused a plane ticket home.
“Don’t,” blurted Charlie. “You’d only make things worse.”
HE STAYED AT THE COLLEGE
infirmary for two nights, hardly the only drug-addled student there, and then there were the ones who’d been tear-gassed by police or had burned their arms in protest, and a few vets, and a clean-cut, anachronistic girl—she might have been his mother or Dossy twenty-five years ago—with a velvet headband and Peter Pan collar and a petite sprained ankle up on ice.