Forrest Gander - The Trace

Dale adjusted his sunglasses again so the pads wouldn’t leave those indentations on his nose that he’d noticed in the mirror last night.

“Here’s one I never told you. So. .”

Hoa adjusted her seat back two notches, feeling more comfortable immediately. For as long as she could remember, all Dale’s stories started with “So.”

Dale smiled to himself, scanning for the right details before he started.

“When I was in school in Williamsburg, Brady told us he’d heard of some naturally occurring forms of lysergic acid.”

“Yeah,” Hoa said, already more animated. “I remember reading about that.”

“Connected to witch burning in Europe, right?”

“It was like 60,000 people.” She had a good memory for round numbers.

“They think it was connected to hallucinations people had after eating bread contaminated with lysergic wheat fungus,” Dale said. “Hey, how do you know stuff like that?”

“Wait,” Hoa said. “I remember. It was Andrea Dworkin. She wrote about witch burnings. She said the most common accusation — did you know this? — was that men claimed the witches made their penis shrink? That’s what most of the women were burned for.”

Dale turned his face back to the highway. A long stretch of straight road and rocky hills far ahead on the left.

“Hawk,” Hoa said.

Dale couldn’t see it, the sun was everywhere. He raised the visor and searched through the tinted upper band of the windshield, and then he saw the hawk, a tiny cross idling in dry blue air.

“Halcón. That’s hawk in Spanish. It’s what drug dealers call their lookouts, their eyes on the streets. Halcónes.”

“So,” she said, trying to make her voice sound like his, starting a story.

Dale readjusted the visor and re-tracked.

“So Brady ordered a bunch of Hawaiian Baby Woodrose seeds from High Times magazine. And we followed the directions, which I remember were phrased carefully in pseudo-historical terms.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning it said something like: Although it’s illegal to sell these seeds for the purpose of ingesting them, blah-blah, they’ve been used in Hawaii and in India for centuries as part of spiritual rituals. And traditionally they’re prepared by scraping off the fuzz and grinding them into a paste that can be mixed with. . in our case, peanut butter.”

“And it tastes like?”

“Unbelievably horrible. The directions said eat six of them, but Brady heard we needed to eat ten or twelve. Which is what we did.”

“Smart.”

“And within an hour, everyone but me puked, and I was worried I was supposed to puke. To get the poison out. But I couldn’t.”

“Everyone being. .?”

“Just Brady and Mike and me. But it had a lasting effect on us, that night.”

He glanced her way. Her feet were crossed under her, and she was looking out the side window. Her black hair was gathered up and knotted with the bungee. He wondered how that could be comfortable when her head was against the headrest.

“It sounds corny, but I saw myself that night more nakedly than I ever had before. Or want to again. With brutal honesty. It was completely humbling. I’ll never forget it.”

This time she turned to look at him, but he was staring straight ahead and his sunglasses hid his eyes. She didn’t feel like talking, but to restart him she asked, “Ever do it again?”

“This started out in Brady’s dorm room, with candles and him playing guitar, and I began to have the sense that I knew exactly what Mike and Brady were going to say before they said anything. All three of us felt as though our minds had linked up. Mike would start to say something and then break into a huge grin because he could see that we already knew. It sounds bogus, but it was very, very real. We were communicating by intuition.”

Hoa registered a shift in Dale’s voice. Some diminishment of his presence as he excavated the memory.

“We had tickets for a Neil Young concert that night. On campus, so we didn’t have to drive. And I remember standing in line outside the auditorium, and the moon was leaping around in the sky. I ran into a friend from high school and I couldn’t talk to him. But I felt special, protected with Brady and Mike in this deep soft pocket of friendship and love. I was clear from any obligations and open to the world. Almost unbearably tender and receptive.

“And Neil Young came onstage singing ‘Like a Hurricane’ with monstrous industrial fans blowing out into the audience. A big wind inside the auditorium. From where we were sitting, it looked like the music was playing him . What those industrial fans did to the music, it was like the sound was coming from all around him, channeling into his guitar through his fingers. His skinny frame up there dancing around at the edge of the stage like a puppet hooked to a celestial current. And we felt it humming through us too.”

Hoa took off her sunglasses to check the actual color of the landscape. The hills had gone from ocher to almost pomegranate. It wasn’t the angle of the sun — it was still before noon. It was the rock, a different kind of rock, she decided. The geology was changing.

“Sometime later that night, after the concert ended or after we left, I ended up with Brady early in the morning on Dog Street near the Wren Chapel. There was something he wanted to show me, he said. And I trusted him. Everything, every word was brimming with meaning, every gesture a symbol, an omen, a promise. It was like we were beyond ourselves watching ourselves in a play in this parallel sphere.

“Brady showed me an iron manhole cover in the grass near the old stone wall and he said we had to lift it aside. There was just a finger hole and it was heavy, but once I lifted it a little, he got both his hands under the rim — perfect faith — and we slid the circle to the side and let her drop. In the hole, which was deep, maybe twenty feet to the bottom, there were these big horizontal pipes and a skeletal ladder next to a lit bulb on the wall.

“Brady climbed down and I was right after him. We were in a dark, narrow concrete corridor hung with sweating steam pipes, and everything — the walls, the floor, the air — everything was moist with condensed steam. It was like crawling through a cow — there was something maternal and uterine and nostalgic about the temperature and the moisture and the dim light. Along the corridor, there were light bulbs in metal cages about every twenty-five feet. Brady led the way and I didn’t ask if he’d done this before or who with. We were beyond words in a mutuality of movement and thought and love for each other, in what felt like an eternal rolling moment.”

Hoa liked it when Dale talked like this. She listened, scanning the road. There was a dark-green road sign ahead, but it was hard to read through the vaporous glare from the hood.

“We were walking along underground, parallel, I figured, to the stone wall in the courtyard, which meant when we took a right turn, we were headed for the Wren Chapel. The air was dark and breathy, like when you’re sick as a child and your mom puts a humidifier next to you and rubs your chest with Vicks.”

“Wrong culture,” Hoa said, yanking Dale out of his reverie. “My mom did gua sha, remember? She’d oil my back and scrape it down with a spoon.”

“The time you did that to me, I had a rash for days.”

“You felt better right away, didn’t you? So what happened in the steam tunnel?”

“So. We were mostly just walking through. I can’t remember if we were talking or not. It was exhilarating but holy-minded too. I think we were quiet. We walked along a few minutes and then Brady kneeled at a locked iron door in the concrete wall. Just knee high, like a doghouse door. When I was standing beside him, he showed me how the shackle on the lock had been sawed through and repositioned so the cut didn’t show. He took it out of the ring brackets and pulled the door open. I remember him hooking the lock back in the bracket on the selvage. I was thinking how careful, how really perfect his gestures were. And then he crawled through the opening, and I squatted down and followed him, pulling the gate closed behind me.