Day After

From Altered States

His instructions were to sleep in – do not have any commitments the next day, do not set an alarm clock – and he kept to that assiduously. For the time being it seemed impossible that anything could go wrong, that anything would fade, but he knew from experience, and the collective psychonaut experience, that of course it would, the next day would be a down day, a blues day. They went to sleep in each other’s arms, kind of curling around each other, just as they had been doing the entire evening. Davina was impossibly soft, her long hair, her light palms, and it felt like just an endless expanse of skin, a meadow of skin, for his lips and hands and fingertips, most of all fingertips, the gentlest touch more than sufficient, to graze over. It was already light when they fell asleep, and, when they woke, having turned away from each other during the night, it wasn’t as late as expected, not the shutters-drawn, all-day druggie experience that Ed half-expected, as if they had been catapulted into another phase of life or into a made-for-TV movie.

Ed put together a kind of pantomime of who he had been, located his jeans and t-shirt in their disparate corners of the floor, checked his pocket for wallets and keys, it felt like he were Charlie Chaplin or Bud Abbott pretending to be a bourgeois, he could just as easily imagine reaching into his pocket and discovering a rose petal or a gaping hole or the ID and keys for somebody else’s life, anything seemed possible.

He walked floatingly to his usual coffee shop. This was a well-established ritual. He bought a coffee and pastry and brought them to the water. On the benches around him the world seemed to bifurcate. There were the hipsterites on their cell phones, talking into their earpieces, complaining about whatever problem it was that had most recently beset them. And then there was a woman in a blue top with her chin up like she was sniffing the sea air. And a couple of teenagers in football uniforms with full pads, they weren’t playing, they weren’t even on a photo shoot, as far as he could see they were just lumbering around like kids on a snow day. And, best of all, there was a guy, who looked like he was maybe a shade above being a street person, who had a speaker on his bicycle handlebars, was playing Nickelback and really terrible pop music, and dancing to it, which was more like shuffle-stepping in front of his bench, pumping his arms up to his wife-beater like he had invented a new form of calisthenics. This was what parks needed, Ed thought, they needed a viber, and, really, life seemed simple – be with the woman tilting her chin to the breeze and the teenagers in their mysterious football jerseys and the street man with his stereo; don’t be with the hipsterites tapping concernedly into their cell phones. He hadn’t had a full-fledged, involved thought in about 14 hours. This stuff was very different from acid where your thoughts sub-divided into about eleven different dimensions and you saw the world probably as the angels did and maybe much like the angels couldn’t hold on to any of it, this was very gentle and simple, rolling was a good word for it, at the party he had pretty much been dancing the entire time, it didn’t matter if anybody was close to him or not, if there was music or not, he was as grateful and unclouded as the park viber, this unsung saint now flexing out his triceps to something by Taylor Swift.

Time passed. Ed checked his phone, finished his coffee. He nodded to his vibing brother, who actually, just barely, nodded back from a place of deep understanding, he may well have been on his own molecular concoction. Ed went to the coffeeshop, and, as per ritual, placed his order to bring back to Davina in bed.

It was a different mood now. The coffee hadn’t necessarily been the right decision. And checking his cell phone was definitely a mistake. It wasn’t just the bank balance and the good news of other people’s successes on facebook and a rejection for a pitch in his e-mail, he was used to all of that, it was, worst of all, the calendar, just a steady ticking towards the first of the month and the rent that would clear out what was left of his savings – and that meant listing the apartment, that meant parents’ basement, a whole cataclysmic chain that, even when he was trying to be realistic, was difficult to envision. The molecule, and the party enveloping it, was actually, in a sense, a job interview, his host and employer-to-be studying him carefully as he swallowed the pill handed to him, as he went through the first dizzy-making, features-altering contortions of entering into the trip, and, then like a rocket ship breaking the atmosphere, hit a cruising speed, and he was lucid the rest of the night, swaying lightly as part of his private dance, gave the impression, he felt, that he was somebody who was down for anything but wouldn’t be intrusive, a perfect portable collaborator. He had passed the test, he was pretty sure of it, and had sent a very sweet thank you text just before falling asleep, which still hadn’t been responded to, and that was the real issue – on the one hand, the date moving towards the bouncing check, on the other hand radio silence in his text thread. The thing about people like that was that you couldn’t put a foot wrong – they materialized magically in your life, showed you all the crystal palaces, but if they got a hint of anything salesmanship or imposition or, horror of horrors, poverty, then it was back to Kansas for you.

He noticed his anxieties surfacing like soap bubbles and it was almost amusing, instructive, to watch them return. This was something that his employer-to-be had told him about, in the pedagogical shamanistic phase early in the trip, the way the molecule helps to dissect you so that you lose the unhelpful illusion of a unified self and become an archipelago of different drives, each one with its own wishes and desires, as sure of itself as a proud child. During the trip’s peak, it had been compassion, the heart-center, himself opened very wide, listening to music in a new way, like flotsam carried along on a wave, ever mindful of an overwhelmed tripper, a melancholic hedge fund manager, wandering forlornly on a rooftop. And now it was the percolating anxieties, like an old friend coming to crash and unload his stack of miseries.

The mature thing to do, as counseled by the experienced psychonauts and his solicitous employer, was to be understanding towards the anxieties, treat them exactly like you would a home-crashing guest, tolerantly but with firm distance. Although, unfortunately, at the moment, the anxieties were making a persuasive case for themselves and he didn’t have his employer’s nest egg to keep himself in a good humor.

He brought coffee and croissant to Davina, as per protocol, she twisted from the side she was lying on to her other side, ran her hand smearingly over Ed’s features. “You,” she said. “You.” They were still in the phase where touch was unusually powerful, skin was an opening to a very pure paradise. She drank for a bit and in a break when she’d put her coffee down he jumped on top of her and kissed her and they had their usual, baffling non-connection, and he lay on his back and as consolation she petted his forearm and flank. It felt like there was very little to talk about – she was in the glow he had been in a half-an-hour earlier, before his anxieties kicked in. “You’re feeling good?” he asked. “Oh yes,” she said. “Never never better.” As part of her magnanimity, she stroked the inside of his thighs and, through his underwear, his cock, which rose obediently to her touch. She was, as usual, amused and a little repulsed. Ed couldn’t contain himself. He pulled her on top of him, ostensibly to look her directly in the eyes and hold her tight but more accurately to feel her body flush against his cock.

“Can you imagine what that would be like,” he said. “Wake up, fuck first thing in the morning while we’re sleepy, before coffee. Then again, like unexpectedly, at some point during the day, when we feel it – or I just decide and take you. And then once more as we’re falling asleep, just kind of gentle, fucking our way into the night so that that’s our last memory of every single day.”

She looked at him while he was talking and stroked the back of her hand over his cheek but then she rolled her way to the side of the bed to have her croissant and the rest of her coffee. She padded naked to the bathroom and Ed listened, her electric toothbrush, the faucet as she rinsed her face, the stream of piss. That’s what the day was supposed to be, integration, silent reflection. He looked at the street tree outside their window, which was vibrating with life in a way he’d never fully appreciated before. There really was nothing for him to do in any case, he’d gone through the job posts for the week, there was nothing to do except to wait for his employer to actually hire him and then to wait for a wire from him, which might be some time if he couldn’t reply to a simple thank you text message.

Davina came back from the restroom and, as expected, let him have it about pushing their boundaries – the deal was, if there was any hope of resuscitating their sex life, that the ball would always be in her court, she would always be the one making the move. He tried to point out that he wasn’t suggesting anything, it was a longing for what would obviously never come to pass between them, and she closed the argument by saying that it wasn’t his intention, it was her reaction that counted. The way he grabbed her, the way he’d talked, created an aversion. And there was no coming back from that, they’d gotten to the point, in the deep relationship, where what a person wanted, how a person acted, didn’t actually matter, the only determinant was who a person was and there was just something about his presence, his touch, under certain circumstances, that made her close up like a flower shuttering its petals from a storm.

He lay back, in rebuke, and let the chorus of anxieties have the floor. She was taking an angry shower and then she was puttering to have a bit of cereal and fool around on her laptop. This is what it was like, he and the street tree thought together, this was a glimpse of her in her new life, whatever that would be, this was her playing her peppy morning music that always sort of annoyed him, her laughing out loud at something she saw probably on The Onion’s website, this is what it would be like, her morning music, the sound of her laugh moving farther and farther away, inaudible and then impervious to memory, and hovering over her breakfast, in the bed in the other room, somebody completely different – he had the outlines of that person etched vividly in his imagination, somebody sensual, hedonistic, a good lover, older, with enough money that she wouldn’t ever again have to be bothered by that – just about everybody at yesterday’s party would fit the bill, all the melancholy hedge fund managers. He would lose her – for many reasons, all self-inflicted, he would lose her, but, more than that, deeper even than regret, would be the issue that he was never a match for her in the first place. She had needed him at a certain low point in her life but she would trade up as, say the sages, all women do, and it is the prerogative for women to do, always and forevermore. The doors to crystal palaces, which had closed to him at 5am in the morning after a duly gracious goodbye from their host, would reopen for her whenever she said the words, whenever she asked for entry, and for him only on the off-chance that all his cards played right, that his employer gave him enough thought to bother texting back.

He had been warned of the heart-opening, emotional aspects of the molecule and now it was on him, and more wrenchingly than he could have anticipated. And this was not the chorus of anxieties or even the familiar constellation of regrets, this was another species of suffering, a kind of rent in the fabric of the world. He had had her – although not really, had her partially – and he had made her the center and would lose her, actually had lost her already, in a sense lost her from the very beginning, a certain hesitancy in her demeanor which he’d mistaken for mystery and charm but which was, on closer, post-mortem inspection, her seeing right to the essence of him and being aware of something lacking.

She came back to prettify herself – she had drinks with a couple of friends, she didn’t take the rest injunction as seriously as he did. His eyes were already watering. This wasn’t a trick, this was genuine, but it did persuade her to drape herself over him. She was proudly amoral and unethical, but she did have a compassion, a tenderness for broken things – even for what she herself had broken. “I think my higher self is a good-hearted whore,” she’d said at the party, soon after they’d met the genuine article. And he couldn’t disagree with that. She was a connection junkie, she had a certain curiosity towards any pain she caused. He had wanted to point out that if she truly were to follow her whorish calling then she would need to have sex on demand, even when she didn’t want to, but he had to accept that that was a weak argument – it was something specifically about him, he was beyond the pale. She lay on top of him like she were a drowning swimmer and he were the shore and then she lifted herself up to look at him. “When I feel your tenderness,” she said, “I like that, but when I feel your desire something tenses up in me, something in my core just pulls away.”

“I know,” he said. “I know.” There was no use reiterating it, they had been over this so many times, he felt like a schoolboy with a crush on an unattainable girl, and the dynamic never shifted even after all the time they’d been living together.

She was giving him her bad news through direct eye contact and instead of turning onto his side as he would normally have done, sulking, he kept the gaze. And, as on acid, or, in fact, just as it is by staring at someone for long enough, her face started to melt and dissolve, she flashed through different phases of life, she was sick, she was old, she was monstrous, devilish, a succubus, she was extraordinarily beautiful. He blinked and she returned to equilibrium, her deep brown eyes with worlds in them. She stared at him and kissed him gingerly. “I do love you,” she said. “I really do, just – ”

He didn’t want to hear it. He knew all the qualifications.

“Heartbreak is a good word for it,” he said. “You have this sense of things being whole and then they splinter and the trip is good for that, seeing how you can’t hold on to the feeling of a whole, how you just have to have these disparate selves, like the part of me that loves you completely, that wants to make you the center of everything forever, and then the part of me that has its own voice and logic and knows that nobody belongs to anybody, I have to let you go."

He was really crying now, wiping tears but unashamed of it.

“Which part wins out?” she asked in her composed way, the voice of detachment that, more than anything else, had been driving him crazy.

“I don’t know,” he said, “that’s what I’m saying, I don’t think anything wins out. I don’t think there’s a unity, there are just different selves and different possibilities, and the only thing is to surrender to life, let life sort it all out.”

She liked that, she kissed his neck, it was better than the recriminations, jealousy and fury, that he’d been whiplashing her with for so many months. She was late, she finished prettifying. He looked out at the street tree. Everything was falling apart, actually. Work was collapsing and that meant the apartment was collapsing and she wouldn’t follow him to his mother’s basement, why would she, and his employer still hadn’t texted back, which probably meant he never really would, people did things right away or not at all. She would be gone – they’d been through the reasons often enough, there was no wishing them away. There had been some prayer that the molecule would do that for them, apparently that had happened for other people, saved them, but it wasn’t the case. What it did do was soften the blows. He had been an edgy guy, edgy in his pitches, edgy with Davina, he’d thought that was what life demanded from him, intensity, cynicism, but that hadn’t worked so time to switch to something else. The side of the woman in the blue top, the street man with his stereo, an unassailable, untouchable bliss.