Mislaid (18 page)

Meg wrote to Karen saying she would be staying on the Eastern Shore as much as she could, but would be back to pick them up at Thanksgiving. Dee was handling fall break.

Karen wrote to her mother at least once a week, usually on Sunday mornings, but more often if something interesting happened. The squirrel sanctuary’s address was general delivery, so her letters went to the little post office in the nearest town and waited there to be picked up. Meg always sat down at the lunch counter at the five-and-dime across the street and wrote a reply right away, to save extra trips.

That was the sum total of their communication. It was not very communicative. Karen did not write that Temple was struggling to keep up with his course work, and Meg did not write that she was in love.

P
arties at The University were considered a chance to blow off
steam. To be three sheets to the wind and not show it: That was the ideal, attainable only by the most accomplished teen alcoholics. Visibly drunk: undesirable. Sober: geekdom (undesirable). Enter Temple and Karen.

It was Halloween, their first away from home. They had never seen middle-class trick-or-treaters in a town with houses. Charlottesville featured elaborate jack-o’-lanterns with real candles inside and wreaths of autumn leaves on doors. Halloween was aromatic and beautiful, and obviously as big a deal as Christmas. They were excited.

They surmised that in wild, uninhibited C’ville anything goes. Yet the costumes they chose were in doubtful taste by any standards. Temple wore a three-dollar thrift-shop suit of beige polyester gabardine from the seventies with wide lapels and no shirt. On his bare, hairless chest, Karen painted a large swastika in Wite-Out. Her costume was more or less the same, except that she wore her blue interview suit, while her swastika was in black Magic Marker on a T-shirt. On her feet were ratty gray
Keds, her only shoes. There was a hole in the toe, but only on one side. Thus clad, they tasted a variety of miniaturized sweet cocktails at a progressive drinking party in Karen’s freshman dorm, telling anyone who asked that they were dressed as crypto-fascism.

It was Temple’s idea. It didn’t particularly make sense. But after eight weeks of self-imposed boot camp, he wasn’t expecting anyone ever again to notice anything he did. It was theater of the absurd, and its target audience was Karen. She was excessively amused. They collected stares and no comments of any kind, trawling the town and then the grounds for candy. At Temple’s request, they switched from saying “Trick or treat!” to singing “Here We Go a-Wassailing.”

Eventually they reached a brick mansion with a wraparound porch where there was clearly a party going on. They rang the doorbell. They swung their candy sacks from side to side in rhythm and started singing the song. A boy answered the door dressed as a wizard in a pointed hat and a long cape covered with stars. He gave them each a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and said, “So what are you? I mean, you’re obviously assimilationist self-hatred, like W. E. B. Du Bois, but what’s she?”

“She’s my shadow,” Temple said. It didn’t quite make sense, but Temple was not accustomed to having logical rigor enforced by anyone other than his conscience, and it had dozed off from exhaustion.

“Say, you guys want to come inside before somebody shoots you?”

The wizard opened the door on a room that was relatively quiet, relatively bright, and not the least bit smoky. There were many boys, and a few girls, sitting in costumes on sofas arranged in squares. Three boys were playing a complicated board game
while others looked on and commented. A handsome boy stood in a corner of the huge room by the fireplace, one foot up on the hearth, playing a Violent Femmes song on a baritone ukulele.

“We’ll come inside for a little while,” Karen said.

She and Temple set their candy bags down in an armchair to reserve it and went looking for the bathroom. They worked their way toward the back of the house all the way to the kitchen but didn’t find it. They climbed the stairs to the second floor and found only bedrooms. They stood in the hallway looking confused, which is easy to do alone at a big party wearing swastikas, and were discovered there by the musician, who had come upstairs to put his ukulele away. It was Byrdie Fleming.

“What are you looking for?”

“The bathroom,” Karen said.

“You can go in my suite,” Byrdie said. “The bathrooms are all between bedrooms. You can’t get to them from the hallway.” He led them down the hall and opened a door. There were about ten people in the room, an odd smell Temple and Karen didn’t recognize, and on the coffee table a black brick of compressed Afghan hashish that had seen better days. A girl was prying shavings off it with a cake knife.

While Karen went to the bathroom, Temple sat down. The discussion in the room revolved around Friedrich Nietzsche. “He was a radical feminist,” a girl said. “That’s proof positive that something is wrong with radical feminism. He’s just like them. He thought women need to be radically different from the way they are.”

“He thought everybody needed to change radically,” Byrdie said. “Except him. So calling him a feminist because he hates women is like calling him a leftist because he hates the working class.” He turned to Temple and said, “You’re obviously a fascist. You explain it to them!”

“I just want everything to stay the way it is and then repeat itself,” Temple said. “I call it eternal recurrence. Then there’s no way out for any of us.”

“That’s exactly right,” Byrdie said. “You can’t claim you have some kind of critical outsider perspective just because you hate the situation you’re in.”

“There’s a way out if you call Cthulhu,” another boy said. “Cthulhu destroys your world, and then you can start over.”

“Which parts of this are my world?” Temple asked. “I’d hate to have Cthulhu destroy my world and then it turns out nothing’s changed except the parts that were mine. So I’m still sitting here talking to you, but, like, where’s my pants?” He looked down.

“What about your friend? She must be from your world. We never saw her before.”

“Me and Shadow don’t live in the same world,” Temple said. Then he looked embarrassed. “I mean, nobody shares a world. We all have our own worlds.”

“World
views,
” Byrdie said. “I mean, it’s one world, but people have different perspectives on it. Otherwise I couldn’t change your world, and you couldn’t change mine. There’s advantages and disadvantages.”

Karen came out of the bathroom, occasioning a brief hush because you don’t see an outfit like that every day. Byrdie said, “Would you like a drink?”

“Maybe a beer,” Karen said. “I don’t really drink.”

“But by the way, I’ve been wanting to ask you,” Temple said. “Is that opium, or hashish?”

“It’s hash,” the Lovecraftian boy volunteered. “We burned through all our reefer this morning at the ounce blitz.”

“I’ve been fascinated by the topic of hashish ever since I read a certain masterpiece of black literature,
The Count of Monte Cristo
. And that was before I got turned on to Baudelaire.”

“My mom’s heavy into Baudelaire,” Karen explained, seeming embarrassed by Temple but not by her own mention of her mom.

“So I was just wondering, is it the kind you can eat?” Temple asked. “Because I don’t smoke. I mean, I tried smoking once, but I ended up coughing like crazy.”

“We were going to make brownies,” the girl with the cake knife said. “But we’re not getting very far. It’s hard as a rock.”

“Let me try,” Temple said. He accepted the knife and proved to be much stronger than the girl, able to cut slices from the block of hashish as though it were a fruitcake.

“Slow down!” the girl said. “You’re going to get us all fucked up. That is a lot of hash.”

“Is it? I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“This is plenty for brownies,” she said. “You want to hang out and help eat them?”

“Oh, Temple!” Karen cried. “Don’t you dare!”

“Just one little taste?” he asked her. “For Baudelaire’s sake?”

The whole room laughed.

“We don’t do illegal drugs,” Karen said. “Don’t you have, like, alcohol or anything normal?”

“This is the drug frat,” a boy explained. “Didn’t you see the sign?”

“There’s no sign,” the girl said, in an aside to Karen. “They lost their charter.”

“I didn’t want to join a fraternity anyway,” Temple said. “I was going to join a liberty first, and then an equality.”

“There’s punch downstairs,” Byrdie said to Karen.

“I’ll get you some punch,” Karen said to Temple.

Byrdie accompanied her down the stairs, admiring the deft way her sneakers skidded down the slick carpet below her short skirt. He thought: I know this girl. But how? He put the question out of his mind and led her to the back porch, where a plastic
garbage can stood filled to the brim with rum punch nearly invisible under rafts of floating strawberries that had been soaked overnight in grain alcohol. He dipped out two generous servings and watched her walk back upstairs.

About seven hours later, Byrdie thought to reascend the steps to his room. Temple was on his sofa. Something smelled bad, like bathroom. He looked closer. Temple had puked and soiled his pants. He tried to rouse him and got only groans. The others were gone.

But where? That motherly little girl wouldn’t have left Temple alone. The lowborn damsel who unleashed all the protective urges in Byrdie. He walked the length of his hall and then the length of the halls upstairs, and heard nothing. Then he walked the halls again, opening every door.

Finally he found people awake and switched on the light. Karen lay on her back on a bed that had been shoved into the middle of the room, at the center of a group of boys wearing only boxer shorts. They had swastikas drawn on their chests in Magic Marker. There was a smell of incense and sweat.

“What the
fuck
are you doing,” Byrdie said. “I mean, what the
fuck
are you doing?”

“We convened a fraternity council to assess her eligibility to become our fertility goddess,” a boy named Mike said.

“We’re casting lots for her garments,” another added. Karen didn’t move or make a sound.

“Get the
fuck
out,
all
of you,” Byrdie said.

“This is my room,” Mike protested.

Byrdie repeated himself yet again. Then he picked up a broadsword that was leaning behind the door because Mike was in the Society for Creative Anachronism. All the boys retreated to the hall. He closed the door, locked it, and turned to Karen.

She was fully clothed, which was a relief. He peeked up her skirt to make sure. On her T-shirt, below the swastika, someone had written “Sex Receptacle.” His eyes burned with shame. She was breathing evenly, with a slight gurgling sound. He turned her head and body to the side and a thread of drool trickled from her mouth. She made a humming sound and never opened her eyes. One arm reached out and touched his leg.

Byrdie hoisted her into the air easily, cradling her in his arms, and carried her down to his room. Her boyfriend hadn’t moved. He positioned her on his bed and poked Temple a couple of times in the side. “Yo, bleed, wake up,” he said.

“I can’t. I’m dead,” Temple said. “Where am I? Oh shit.” He choked out a strange sob and buried his face in the couch. Then he suddenly sat upright and said, “Where are those guys? Where’s Shadow?” He lurched into the bathroom and vomited, moaning. As he ran, Byrdie saw that his pants were stained brown in the rear. It was not Temple’s best moment.

“Your friend’s okay,” Byrdie called to him through the door. “Where does she live? I’m going to take her home if you don’t mind.”

“Get her out of here,” Temple said. “This place is cursed. It’s literally hell. I deserve to be here.” Another catastrophic heave took him by surprise, and there was a sound like a long, damp fart.

“Take your suit off and throw it away. Throw away all your clothes, man. Put them in the trash bag and tie it up real tight, and take a shower. I’m serious. Take some of my clothes. They’ll fit you.”

“Oh, God,” Temple said. “This is the worst day of my life.”

“Where does your girlfriend live?”

“Dabney three-oh-two,” Temple said.

Byrdie was surprised. He had figured she was a townie.

“Tomorrow I’m going to a revival and surrendering to Jesus,” Temple added, burping loudly and returning to the toilet.

“Stand in the bathtub when you take your clothes off,” Byrdie suggested.

“I’m so sorry,” Temple groaned. “I can never make this up to anybody, ever. This is rock bottom.”

Mike, the boy who had hosted the fertility ritual with Karen, spent most of the following day in a police station downtown. He was interviewed by two local police detectives, playing good cop and better cop. With him were two young criminal defense lawyers hired by his father. They occasionally resorted to holding their heads and gasping in horror. One of them eventually said, “Please can it and leave the talking to us. One more word and I’ll pop you this time for real.”

The reason was this: The Thetan House Halloween party had been the occasion of a very straightforward entrapment sting.

The political background of the police’s actions was unimpeachable. There were murmurings of dissatisfaction in the local black community that had spread to the Democratic Party, endangering the mayor’s reelection campaign. So many black people had been busted for crack cocaine while college students went on snorting the expensive stuff unimpeded. All sorts of hard drugs drifted around the college, nearly always ignored. A cloud of pot smoke at a concert on-grounds was a chance for campus cops to roll their eyes. The same cloud in front of a black nightclub in town led to convictions and ruined lives. It was high time, the liberals and the fuzz agreed, that some lives be ruined on the other side of the fence.

But it’s hard to catch someone in possession of a drug he takes once a month or so, bought in the quantity he’ll need for a
single evening. The dealers were impossible to pin down, because they seemed to overlap with the users. When one had drugs, they all had drugs, in uninteresting small quantities, and when the town was dry it was dry. Once you bust them, they get careful. They didn’t get into UVA for nothing. They’re smart.

Thus it was decided to run a sting. Armed with little more than longish hair and a superficial knowledge of Tolkien, a grown man moved in with the Thetans. It wasn’t a dorm, after all, or even officially a frat house anymore—just a big rented house, and he demonstrated his superiority to competing student applicants by laying claim to a reliable source of excellent LSD. To no one’s surprise on the official, organizing end of the sting, the students didn’t bat an eyelash. Why exactly it would be legal for him to do that—poison college students in their home—no one could say.

Mike had accepted three tabs of four-way blotter from the paid informant. The police knew that twelve hits of acid cut with methamphetamine is much too much for one person. It would make him feel desperately ill for a good long while. Thus if the next day he can’t produce it, yet walks and talks, he is—with near certainty—a dealer of LSD.