Lauren Groff - Arcadia

As usual, the kids and Pregnant Ladies and Trippies go first, even though some of the new men are high enough to crash the line. When everyone has gone through, there is still some food left over. For a day, everyone eats their fill, then beyond until they can eat no more. Even Bit, who resists the excitement with the solid moral core of himself, relaxes when he is full and lets the summer night in.

Music begins in the Sheep’s Meadow amphitheater. Handy’s voice rises into the air, scratchy and magnificent, the Free People Band in fine form, banjo and fiddle and accordion each taking long, luxuriant solos. Tarzan, the drummer, is eloquent in this, his only language. The day darkens, and the joints and cigarettes outshine the fireflies. The kidlets are high on unaccustomed sugar and chase one another. Bit’s lungs burn with running, with laughing, scooping up the wee ones and throwing them in the air, catching them, wrestling his friends. Cole and Ike and Helle and he sneak to the vat of acid-spiked Slap-Apple and dip out four hurried mason jars. They take them behind the Octagonal Barn. Helle bites the rim of her jar with her smile and closes her eyes to down it. Bit watches her; he wants to smash it into her face, then, maybe, lick it off her chin. She looks at him and says, daring him, Scared?

He is. He likes his brain. He does not want to end up like Kaptain Amerika, forever tweaked. There are over sixty walking cautionary tales in Arcadia, burnt-out Trippies, their psyches gone rogue.

No, he says, and tosses it back, the alcohol burning his throat. Helle takes Bit’s hand as they come out from behind the barn to wait for the acid’s slow seeping in. Her fingers are cool in his, and though he wants to pull away, he doesn’t. As they walk, she squeezes.

Down at the concert, Handy is leading the whole bunch in “Goodnight, Irene.” In the little side area of Christmas lights, Astrid and Lila lean against one another, their eyes closed, swaying. Saucy Sally is tiny, clutched to Titus’s chest. Somebody whispers about a party at the Runaway Quonset, and the Ado Unit begins to trickle down that way. Bit and Helle pass the Pond, where puddles of clothes await the splashers who have gone in, naked. It is as full as the Pond generally is during a summer afternoon, but with adults, in the moonlight. Bit and Helle and Ike and Cole pass a group of four little kids who look up fearfully at the Ados going by, then go back to portioning out what Bit at first thinks are pebbles. He looks closer, sees blue pills. He tries to say something, but he has lost his words somewhere, and so he scoops up the pills and shoves them into his pocket. Some little kid kicks Bit’s ankle; he is showered with gravel as he walks away. The Runaway Quonset blazes with kerosene light, blasts with someone’s radio. Beside the crooked woodstove, there is another barrel of liberated Slap-Apple. There are so many people moving here that they become one shouting mass, a many-armed monster.

Helle whispers in his ear, and Bit doesn’t catch what she says. When he turns his face to her, his anger with her must be suddenly apparent. She jerks backward and disappears.

Now people sharpen into individuals. Little Pooh is dancing, throwing her arms up in the air. One stranger with teardrops tattooed on his face leans back on his arms and watches her; his friend, also in a black leather jacket, is pressed up against some Runaway chick on the wall. Bit looks at the jacket and sees a dead pig, and almost throws up when he passes by and smells an animal musk. Strange, he thinks, to find men here when most in this place are kids.

He loses this thought with a shock: on a cot, Jincy makes out with one of the Runaways, a chiseled black-haired boy with a vulture feather in his hair.

Hey, Jincy, Bit says, shaking her shoulder, and she looks up, smiling, says, Hey, Bit, and goes back to kissing. Let her get bird lice, who cares.

Ike puts in a tape, and new louder sounds roar into life. Misfits! he screams and bashes his head against the sound. He is sweating so much he has hoops under his arms. Bit’s own shirt is stuck to him.

Helle reappears, dreamy, confused. Hey, she says so softly only Bit can hear. That’s my tape? He wants to bite her lips. His body would like to melt into hers. He reaches up to her face, but when his hands get there they have turned into someone else’s and Helle is no longer before him, she is gone.

The acid has begun its work. Inside the universe he can feel something white and warm, pulsing. Time slows, stretches, becomes a spiral. The Runaway Quonset is full of beauty and it is terrible and Bit knows he is weeping: he knows what everyone is thinking because he has thought it himself, how Cole can feel the earth throbbing beneath his feet, how Helle’s body is warmed against Harrison’s as they press together, dancing, how Armand Hammer can feel Helle’s ribs as he, too, presses close from behind. How generous, he thinks, the boys are to not look at one another, how gracious it all seems to him. The faces around Bit begin to make such grotesque shapes that he can hardly believe a thing. No! he thinks, watching Cole’s eyeballs grow as big as his ears, No! Pooh’s lips swing to her knees, No! Helle’s face whittles away to a pinprick, to nothing. Everything is rich with the incredible.

The music splinters into fragments of light that he can catch with his mouth. It is so much, too much, overwhelming. He crawls to one corner and closes his eyes and whispers his own name, over and over and over, until someone picks him up and carries him away.

Somehow, he is outside, and the metal of the Runaway Quonset is cold on his back. Ike is beside him, and they are passing a joint back and forth. The earth burbles underfoot, he can hear the roots of the trees rubbing sexily against the dirt like legs rubbing against legs. Cole is against the Quonset, his lips locked onto the face of a pretty, tiny girl, his hand under her skirt. Bit peers and peers until he can make out Pooh. When Bit can winch his head around, Ike is blinking very fast and hard a few inches from Bit’s face.

I think — Ike’s breath is humid in Bit’s ear — I’m gonna get lucky tonight, and he laughs and staggers back inside.

Bit only wants to be alone. He pushes off into the dark of the forest to find a warm spot of dirt under a tree to curl up in. He wants the hold of the woods on him, the animals to crawl over him, he wants to sink into the roots of the trees and become the earth.

In this little hole at the base of the hill, the old stories fill him up again, the forest thick with magic, witches sitting in the cruxes of trees. This happens whenever he’s not protecting himself; the dark bad fairies are dancing endlessly below him in halls filled with rush light, in fur coats made of squirrel tails, in little shoes whittled from bear claws. They are planning their tricks, the beasties. If they saw him, they would blow poison nettles at him and make him fall asleep there, to awaken a century later, Bit van Winkle, his life gone by in sleep. He is so terrified he starts to cry, then forgets his fear in the beauty of his fingernails shining in the moonlight.

He walks. He touches the bark as he passes each hulking dark tree, and each bulges and sucks itself in. When the sound of the Quonset dims and blends into the more distant sound of the concert and there rises the rushing of the stream somewhere ahead, he realizes he must piss.

It has to be the right place: he touches tree after tree, and none gives him permission.

A new sound arises out of the forest, a low groan that, at first, he thinks is the music of the spheres, the great cold stars singing, not at all as lovely as he’d imagined. But it is too close, and Bit freezes, waits to see where the sound is coming from.

There, he sees a pool of darkness, an oil slick that grows upward, becomes a black lump on the ground, lit in some places by unshadowed moon. Even in his off-kilter brain, he knows it is a couple of people having fun. Something isn’t quite right, though, with the way the bodies are. Bit squints through the pulsing fog in his eyes. There is a person on top of another, yet the head of the second is in the wrong place, yards away, as if the body is both enormous and bent. A quickening, a rattle in the chest, a raw bear growl, and then a belt buckle tingles, the fucker stands over the fuckee’s legs.