The pills kicked as a field reporter outside some Illinois emergency room with his collar up around his trench coat, a drizzling rain collecting in droplets on his brow, claimed on the TV that Kennedy was dead. Side by side, like two teenage kids, they kissed each other and felt the immensity of the new situation, the taste of it, the long stretch of nerves to the surface of fingers and leg. He felt hard against the empty air. He could feel her tongue and her fingers, and at the same time he wasn’t there at all, feeling nothing except the charge of energy from the pill, and then she was whispering nonsense to him, right into the buzz. She got on top of him — he was lifting, pushing his palms to receive her weight, and then there was a zero-gravity sensation, her motion matching his motion on what seemed to be totally equal terms. (His cock searched the wetness for a space of nothingness where love seemed to reside — and his mind, oh Jesus Christ, his mind was in a glorious sustained suspension, no thought, nothing but a blank.) She slid away to one side and he rolled with her and got behind her with his hands holding on, as if holding the gunwales of a rocking boat, and then, as she tossed her head and hair, he began to come and to see the vision, and to smell a familiar smell, ashen and chalky, limestone and mortar; he was inside the vision and the vision was of a man, a soldier named Billy-T, with a radiophone to his mouth, calling in coordinates, his voice lisping as he shouted the numbers, and the man named Rake (again), his face intense, and then the flash of heat and fire and a far-off scream and the word Hue, and from Wendy a coo that sounded like water over stones.
After a while, she said, fearfully, “Oh, God, God, I hope that wasn’t too much, too far.”
“Vision not complete but vision beautiful, man, beautiful. Rake and a man named Billy-T and fieldphone and flame. A battle. In Hue, for sure. He called in an air strike and it hit too close. A ball of fire and then a fizzle. A fizzle out.”
“I’d like to do it again.”
“But I can’t,” he said. He located an ability to reason inside his high, a rip current countering the tidal pull of the drug. (Later, when he went back and tried to imagine how it had felt on the blue pill, he found himself thinking of the easy, persistent flow of water, following the easiest path.) He had an awareness of the fuzzball of lost memory smoothed and spread from ear to ear. He was still hard. If they did it again it would be even better. He’d go double and unfold the unfolded until a chain reaction began. Already he could see the blue flashes in the pleasure of touching her neck — small sparkles out of his fingers. She was saying she was sorry, sorry. He heaved himself up out of bed, pushing through the high, and then she was behind him, kneading his shoulders. They were both in a zone of mutual pleasure beyond anything they had felt before, but it dissipated almost as quickly as it had arrived, with a kind of pop of the eardrums and a quick return to reality: the smelly room in a cheap boardinghouse and, outside, the firecracker snap of gunfire, the spiral of sirens, and the cellophane crackle of fire.
THE PLAN
It’ll be even harder now that you have a better sense of your real self, now that you have some sense of your past. Harder to go back and act like Old Meg, because I’m seeing you right now and what I’m seeing isn’t just New Meg but a new New Meg, he was saying, poking the fire. They had hiked a few miles along a footpath through the pine needles and a grove of trees planted in a neat formation, with the light shafting through the rows. On the beach, when she had cried in her hands, he had resisted the urge to question. When she looked up, Hank knew, just seeing her face, her teary eyes, that she had had a vision, caught sight of something that had been enfolded in her, the source of her trauma, and he could see it in the way she was walking, the shift of her gait, her toes pointed differently — with more assurance, he thought, a nimbleness on the trail, a sense of how to walk in the woods. The waves had seemed indrawn when he glanced back one last time, a looming quality in relation to the ones that hit the shore, shoving the stones in with a roar.
When a tree is damaged it forms a knot. You’ll do the same, he told her. Not the old adage about a broken bone being stronger, but something different than that. Up the path, she led the way, as if they had a plan, but they’d didn’t. Behind them clouds were gathering in the west and the wind was rising and the undersides of leaves were showing. The canopy overhead was shuddering, making long beautiful sighs, lifting and falling. She led the way to their old campfire — dead, a blank eye of coals surrounded by stones — and the flattened spot where the tent had been and, without a word, she began to roll out the tarp.
We’ll stay here tonight and then we’ll head back, he said. Rake’s going to return soon.
He was shaking out the canvas, sweeping it clean with his palm, and he stopped and watched as she got a tent stake out of the canvas bag and held it the way you’d hold a knife.
Back on the beach, she said, I became aware of the sound of a wave. Did you hear it, too?
I’m sure I did, he said. Her statement was strange but not that unusual. Her senses would be improved with each unfolding, until, if she went too far, she went over some edge into an acuteness that was beyond normal. Then she’d be raging around like Rake, seeing portents and signs in the way a dog shook his leg when he pissed, of the angle of a doorjamb, or whatever … it didn’t really matter, he thought, looking at her.
Well, I mean I was aware of the sound it made, coming in low in a shush from one side and then sliding to the other.
They built the fire together, gathering wood and piling it neatly. He showed her the best way to get the kindling, small curls of bark, not too much to hurt the tree. It has a desire to burn because the tree has a desire to help, is the way I see it, he said.
You’re weird, she said. I mean you’re really, really weird.
You’re getting better, he said. That’s a good sign, hearing you say that.
So you’re not going to deny it?
What you have with me is a man who has given himself the treatment but who was probably weird before he had it. Which is to say, before I treated myself I was still able to smell trees and to lumber run with the best of them, but I was too busy with violence of one kind or another to properly attend to my obligation to nature herself. I hate to put it that way, but that’s the way I put it.
They boiled some water and cooked pasta and he found a can of sauce in his bag and pulled it out and they heated it. When they were finished eating, they waded through the brambles down to the stream and cleaned the pot and plates.
This used to be a famous fly-fishing river, he said. No one really fished in it, but a writer used it in a story and made it into something it wasn’t, so for a few years people would come and give it a try, but it was too brambly, too rough, and you couldn’t cast far enough without getting snagged unless you knew the exact right spot.
He resisted mentioning the balsam willow until later that night, when they were holding each other, drinking whiskey, watching the fire and listening to the flames. Then he told her — clearing his throat, taking a deep gulp of whiskey — that he had wanted to say it back on the beach, right after she came out of the water, that she was like a balsam willow, or maybe a sandbar willow, or better yet, a tree that you can’t even find here in Michigan, but the guys — the grunts, or whatever you want to call them — have in Nam a tree called sao den, or better, its nickname, “black star,” because that’s a tree that somehow resists termites, he said.