Chapter 37: Math Club, or Mutationem motus proportionalem esse vi motrici impressae, et fieri secundum lineam rectam qua vis illa imprimitur

[For some reason the formatting here at blogger is all screwed up. It does not recognize paragraph separation markers, so this shows up as one long screed, as though in Biblical Greek. The Scribd post is much easier to read. Double click on this link to see it: http://www.scribd.com/doc/73074831/Chapter-37 Thanks for looking at it.] At the beginning of the year Stoney had gotten the Math club back together and we’d had several meetings. At the first one Leah showed up with a friend of hers named Michael Stewart whom she introduced with “This is Michael. He’s better than me.” My impression was that Stoney was in charge of membership so I wasn’t sure this was appropriate. It’s not like we had rules or anything, but if we let in any Tom, Dick and Harry mathematician who walked down the sidewalk, what kind of club would we be? Michael was short, wore stylish spectacles and very snappy, colorful, clothes, and couldn’t be mistaken for a straight person at a hundred paces. He was the first openly, exuberantly homosexual person I’d ever met. He was also incredibly cheerful. Stoney, as our leader, introduced Michael to the rest of us: “Michael, you know Leah, and this is Cecil, this is Raheem, and this is my gay friend Henry.” “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Michael. “Henry’s not gay.” “He’s not?” Leah and Stoney asked, at the same time. “I have the best gaydar in the world. Not a blip on Henry. I’ve heard about you, too,” he said to Stoney. “Did I guess right, that you took your nickname from the Stonewall riots?” Stoney kind of looked down, embarrassed, and damned if he didn’t blush. “No, no. Nothing like that,” he said, after a pause. “My real name is Thomas Henry Jackson, just like the Confederate general.” “Well, fiddle-dee-dee,” said Michael. Stoney blushed again. A man in his forties showed up with an order pad in his hand. “What you folks want to drink?” asked the waiter. “Where’s Robin?” Stoney asked. “Oh, I had to let her go. Turned out she was underage,” he said. “Underage, how?” Stoney asked. “She told me she was eighteen, but then I come to find out that she was really just fifteen. Sophomore at Hillsboro High. The state is very strict that people serving alcohol have to be over eighteen, so I didn’t have any choice. She was a great waitress, though. I really, really liked her. But. Can’t risk my license.” “Ah, fuck,” said Stoney. “Let me guess,” I said. “No please don’t” said Stoney. “Beer?” said the owner. “A pitcher of Heineken for me,” said Stoney. “And a Pitcher of Schlitz for the rest of the table,” said Cecil. “Can I get a Coke?” asked Leah. “And a glass of ice water?” I asked. He nodded and left. “So what’s going on at that end of the table?” asked Leah. “Stoner done tapped him some jailbait,” said Raheem. “I’d really rather not talk about this,” Stoney said. “She insisted she was eighteen.” “Tom, I think this is an opportunity for you to reflect on the decisions you make regarding the objects of your affection,” I said, which provoked a few laughs. “Oh, mistakes happen,” said Michael. Somebody else came back with our drinks. Stoney had managed to immediately gulp down two glasses of beer and was pouring another. “Goodness, how thirsty you are,” said Michael. “Oh, Stoner jus’ gettin’ started,” said Raheem. After we ordered pizza we discussed what problem to work on next and Leah suggested the Navier-Stokes equations. Stoney and Cecil immediately complained that this was another attempt to push us out of pure math and into physics. “I don’t think it’s even physics. I think of it as engineering,” said Leah. “That’s not the point. Mathematically, there’s no proof that, as three dimensional equations, the Navier-Stokes equations are smooth. Seems like nobody can demonstrate that there’s no singularity,” she said. There was a long pause around the table. To mathematicians, equations either work or they don’t. To physicists, they work until something that works better comes along. “How long have they been around?” asked Cecil. “Nineteenth Century,” said Michael. “There was a big engineering explosion in the 1920s, though, and that’s when they really moved into the mainstream.” “So you’re a homo?” asked Cecil, out of the blue. “Yes, I am,” said Michael. “Is this going to bother you?” Cecil thought. “No, I guess not. I just was never around a homo before.” “We’re okay, I promise. I won’t bite. Is it all right if I call you a Negro?” Michael asked. Cecil and Raheem both sat up at this. “I prefer Black,” said Cecil. “In exactly the same way, I prefer ‘gay’ to ‘homo,’” said Michael, then smiled. There was a pause while Cecil thought about this. “Okay. Gay. Gotcha,” said Cecil. There was a moment, then Cecil picked the conversation back up. “Okay, so the Navier-Stokes equations, everybody uses them but nobody’s figured out if they work?” “Nope,” said Leah, Michael, and Raheem, all at once. “How the fuck do you do this?” said Cecil to Raheem. “Do what bro? said Raheem. “Whenever I don’t know about something, you do,” said Cecil. “I had good teachers,” said Raheem. “Look,” said Michael. “I’m an Electrical Engineering major. We’re not like physicists or math majors. Engineers tend to work off of experience more than theory. People were building bridges millenia before there were Civil Engineers. If something works, we stick with it. If a theory comes along later that explains why it works, that’s great, but as long as it works, we’ll use it even if nobody understands why it works. Leah told me about you guys working through the Maxwell equations, which was tres cool but that was just his way of reducing his observations to math, which is why they make no sense at first. He’d observed without an underlying theory of what he was seeing, and he never really made sense of it. Kind of like Tycho Brahe.” “I love Tycho and Kepler,” said Stoney. Joseph smiled at him. “Okay,” said Leah. “So I’ll drop everybody some introductory materials about the Navier-Stokes equations through campus mail, and everybody can play with them, and maybe another meeting in two weeks?” “Scrumptious,” said Michael, looking at Stony. A few days later I was on my way to the dining hall at lunchtime with no specific plan other than lunch when I ran into Cecil, who high-fived me then would have continued the greeting into further steps if I had understood my part in the handshake dialogue. Cecil said he needed to drop in on Raheem because they usually took meals together. This was fine by me and we cruised by his room. The door was ajar, so Cecil knocked it open. Raheem was on the phone. I could only hear his part of the conversation. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, then listened. “No, ma’am. I’m not expecting any trouble on this exam. I’ve made mostly A’s on all the tests. Maybe I got a B on the one about Richard III, but the rest are all A’s and my papers are all A’s.” Pause. “Yes, ma’am. How is Auntie Pearl doing?” Pause. “Well, tell her I’m thinking of her and I’m glad it went well.” Pause. “Is Dad ready for the campaign?” Pause. “I hate to miss so much of it, but I really am pretty busy here.” Pause. “Well, that’s sweet of him. I’ll do what I can.” Short pause. “I love you too.” He hung up. “’S’up, dawg,” he said, standing, then he and Cecil did a fifteen-part handshake. “What the fuck was that?” I asked. “Wha’s what, Henry?” asked Raheem, as we left. “You, speaking the king’s English, to make your high school teachers proud.” “Yeah, well, my mama, she don’t allow no street talk.” The idea of a tough guy like Raheem being told what to do by his mother caught me by surprise a little. “So which way of talking is more normal for you?” I asked. “They both normal, Henry. I just ain’t like you. Le’s get some lunch.” I had become used to thinking of Raheem as a particular kid of person, so it was be hard for me to think of him as anything else. Tough guy? Street man? Black Panther? Yes, yes, yes. Mama’s boy? Well… not before now. After lunch Raheem and Cecil went off to do whatever they had next on their agendas and I went to Probability 201, a silly class that could just have easily been called “Statistics for Social Science Majors” and may well have been called that at one point. Gauss’ functions (think bell curve) are in no way complicated. All the course does is convince humanities majors that there must be a mathematical basis for the statistics that they spout but don’t understand. Psychologists propping up their theories with statistics is like linguists or sociologists supporting their theses with books from a different language: if you don’t understand what it says, how can you argue about what it means? They were all learning statistics the way that they’d learned their times tables. Almost none of them got the sense behind the math. For the next Math Club meeting, Stoney told me he’d pick me up in front of the dorm at a quarter to seven. It was October, so it was dark. Usually up to this point I’d had to track him down or wake him up and then he’d drive me there, but this time he said he’d pick me up. Right about on time he pulled up and came to a stop. Michael hopped out of the front seat, said “Bonjour, Henri!” and folded down the front seat for me to take the back seat. I’d never been in the back of Stoney’s car before. It was small. It occurred to me as we drove over to House of Pizza that Stoney hadn’t been around much over the last week or so. I don’t keep tabs on my roommates, but I hadn’t come home to Stoney and Milton stoned to their gills and listening to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway at ear-bleeding levels for more than a week. Stoney hadn’t been a part of our dining hall forays for several days. It looked, though, like he and Michael had become good friends. Stoney was driving, and he and Michael were talking, Michael a little animatedly, Stoney somewhat less so, but they were both engaged in their conversation. Stoney also appeared to be even more sober than he’d been in Chattanooga. In Mrs. Wertheimer’s house he hadn’t had access to any of his counterculture pharmaceuticals but he’d been drinking pretty much all day every day. I couldn’t really see him from the back seat, but it was possible that he was stone cold sober. The notion was shocking to me. Something must be wrong. As soon as I was beginning to conclude that Stoney had turned a new leaf, though, he pulled a silver flask out of a coat pocket and took a long pull as he turned left off of West End. He handed the flask to Michael, who took a smaller swallow, and he offered the flask to me. “Henry doesn’t drink,” said Stoney, to Michael. “Well, bless your heart,” said Michael. “You were brought up this way?” “No, no, it’s an occupational thing.” There was a long pause, and when I looked back at Michael he was still looking at me with an inquisitive look on his face. “I used to play pool for a living,” I said. “It kind of changes your views on the decisions people make when they’ve had a few drinks,” I said. “Certainement, when people get drunk, they make foolish decisions,” he said, taking another sip of what smelled like Bourbon, then handing the flask back to Stoney. Stoney took a gulp that was less voluminous than the last, then Michael took it back and recapped it and screwed back on the silver shotglass overcap, which neither of them had used, and Stoney returned it to his jacket pocket. “They don’t have to be drunk,” I said. “A guy who can play good pool with one beer in him is still a worse pool player than he was before he had that beer. Not by a lot, but if you’re the only guy in the room who hasn’t had a beer, it’s noticeable.” Michael and Stoney looked at each other and shrugged. We were getting near the House of Pizza, and conversation turned towards spotting parking places. When sharp-eyed Michael spotted one, he briefly placed his hand on Stoney’s knee and pointed. Stoney found a rare break in traffic and managed to negotiate the Volvo through a high speed U-turn to cruise gracefully into the empty spot. When we got to the restaurant Leah and Cecil were already there. We all sat down and said our hellos. A new waitress came by to take our drink orders, and for the first time in my memory, Stoney did not order separately for himself. She asked if we were ready to order. “I think we’re still waiting for one,” said Michael. “No. Sorry, I should have said. Raheem’s not coming tonight,” said Cecil. Leah ordered a ‘Pizza With Everything Including Anchovies’ for both of us as usual then swapped seats with Cecil so we’d be sitting next to each other when our food came. Everybody else placed their food orders. “So where’s Beanie?” asked Michael. Leah and Stoney both laughed, mid-swallow, and beer may have passed through Stoney’s nose. “Who?” asked Cecil. “Beanie.” “Don’t know Beanie,” said Cecil. “Your friend. Raheem.” He thought for a few seconds. “Where you get ‘Beanie?’” Cecil asked. Leah and Stoney stared at the ceiling. I didn’t get it. “Sorry. I always see the two of you together. So if you’re Cecil, he must be Beanie. ” Cecil got it then and laughed, then frowned. “No, no. This is totally uncool,” he said. “Raheem’s really not going to be cool with this at all.” ‘Oh, it’s just a little joke, a nickname,” said Michael, pouring himself another beer. “No, really. Raheem works really, really hard on his street cred. He really ain’t gonna like being tagged with a kid’s cartoon name.” “We’ll keep it to ourselves,” said Leah. “It’s not just that,” said Cecil. “Between him and me, he’s like the leader and I’m like the follower. Between us I’m like taking his lead and he’s like helping me through this all.” “Oh, for heaven’s sakes. You’re equals,” said Leah. “Students. Frat brothers. Math Club members.” “Yeah, sure, but … I really don’t want to show him up in … any … way,” said Cecil. “Oh, you’re not showing him up. He gets to be the big green dragon. You’re the little boy, said Leah.” “I’m just not sure he’s going to see it this way,” Cecil said. “So where is Beanie?” asked Stoney. “He’s got a bad stomach flu, or something. He started puking at about three and went over to Student Health. That whack-job doctor from Viet Nam was on duty and when he asked Raheem his symptoms the first thing the doc axed was ‘Did you have he spaghetti at Rand for lunch today?’ and when Beanie said ‘yes,’ the doc just shook his head. Said he couldn’t do anything for him, he just needed to drink lots of water and tough it out.” “Anybody taking care of him?” asked Leah. “No. I’m sorry, but I just got tired of listening to that shit.” We all nodded our heads in agreement. It’s not like he was going to die. “Anybody else eat the spaghetti at Rand today?” asked Cecil. We all shook our heads. “The Red Death,” said Stoney. “I never touch it.” We all nodded. “Yeah, well, tell Beanie we miss him,” said Leah as our pizza came. We all nodded. We all dug into our pizza, and Leah started talking about the equations. “Anybody play with them?” she asked. Everybody nodded, and the subsequent discussion suggested that textbook problems about flowing streams or rivers or liquids moving through sewer pipes of different sizes at various angles were all fine and good but were a little like homework problems, not so much like fun stuff for Math Club whizzes. As we talked through the problems and what they suggested, Cecil and Stoney kept noting diversions that suggested there was a turbulence problem, but nobody knew what to do with it. In retrospect, I would wonder whether or not fluids subject to irregular forces, or under pressure in irregularly-shaped spaces, aren’t always subject to turbulence, and that the necessary turbulence this implies isn’t the singularity at the heart of the equations. We just don’t understand turbulence as yet. It took us about three meetings to come to the conclusion that we were not going to get to the bottom of he Navier-Stokes singularity problem. Math didn’t get there when we were undergraduates and it might not have gotten there now, but I don’t think the problem is calculus singularities. I think the problem is the other way around. Turbulence isn’t insoluble, but we haven’t solved it yet. Until we do, I think it will insert itself into our solutions like the most rigid singularity, but that’s just me. Still and all, it was kind of hard for me to give up on those equations I was about to voice this when Stoney, dejected, opened up. “Guys, this is just awful,” he said. Everybody looked up. “Why?” asked Leah. “I just don’t like giving up,” said Stoney. “Nobody does,” said Cecil, “we just aren’t going to solve this one.” “Oh, man, there’s no problem that’s actually insoluble,” said Stoney. “I’ve worked out Fermat’s last theorem twice.” “And what was it?” asked Leah. “Yeah, well, I don’t remember. I was pretty loaded. But the second time I dictated the whole deal to this good-looking dark-haired chick who was pretty friendly and taught me all about the Russell Saunders coupling theory.” “The what?” asked Cecil. “It’s a physics deal,” I said. “What are you telling us, Stoney?” “I don’t want to give up!” “I’m with you,” said Leah, “I can’t stand not solving a problem. But we don’t even agree on what the problem is. Henry thinks it’s turbulence, and he may be right. There are no ways to describe turbulence.” “Not entirely true,” said Stoney. “Mrs. W says that there’s a new discipline emerging that’s organized around chaos. Finding relationships between things like turbulence and fractal geometry.” “Yeah, well maybe she can come up and explain it to us, or we can all go down there sometime, but for now, I think we should pick a new problem.” “Ah , shit,” said Stoney. “Call to a vote?” said Leah. “Oh, no need for that,” said Stoney. “It’s just that…” There was a pause. “If we’re going to do something … remarkable, we’re going to have to do it here. Back on campus they just want us to learn what they already know. Ah, shit. What’s next then?” “There’s the Poincarré conjecture,” said Leah. “Fuck that. No topology,” said Raheem. “And an anti-torus prejudice rears its ugly head,” said Thomas, sipping his beer. “Why no topology?” Leah asked. “Ain’t got no numbers,” he said. He’d had his hair braided into corn-rows, which I’d never seen before, and I wanted to stare at it and figure out how it was done, so I couldn’t really look at him. “Yang-Mills existence?” I asked. “I don’t know what that is so I’m betting it’s another one of your physics deals,” said Stoney, and sipped his beer, but he didn’t drain it. “How about the Hodge conjecture?” asked Thomas. Stoney sat up. “Anybody good with number theory?” he asked. Leah, Raheem, and I raised our hands. “You’re not good with number theory,” he said to me. “I know it better than you do.” “No, you don’t,” I said. “I was doing Diophantine geometry in high school,” said Stoney. “I see your Diophantine and raise you an analytical object and a Riemann zeta function,” I said. “Oh, don’t start with your Peano arithmetical bullshit,” he retorted. “Ladies,” said Cecil, “Can we return to the task at hand?” “Actually,” said Leah, “watching them bicker over arithmetic is pretty entertaining.” There was a pause. “So. The Hodge conjecture?” said Thomas. “Re-educate me,” said Cecil. “For projective algebraic varieties, Hodge cycles are rational algebraic combinations of algebraic cycles,” said Leah. “What is a Hodge cycle, anyway?” asked Cecil. “Is this a homology deal?” asked Stoney. “Yes,” said Leah and Thomas at the same time. “Okay, we can do this,” Stoney said to me. “Okay, so think Hk(V, C) = H where V is a non-singular complex algebraic variety or Kähler manifold.” “Don’t know Kähler,” I said. “Okay,” he said. “Then think manifold with unitary structure keepin’ an integrability condition. A Riemannian manifold, a complex manifold, and a symplectic manifold, with all three structures mutually compatible.” “Fuck!” I said “Slow down! Riemannian manifold?” “You remember Riemennian geometry?” “Yes, of course,” I said. “So a Riemannian manifold is a real differentiable manifold “M” in which each tangent space is equipped with an inner product “g,” a metric, which seems to vary smoothly from point to point.” “Wait, wait. This is stacking up too fast.” I had to think. “I think I get where you’re going, but I’ll need to work this through.” “So there’s a problem here that we can chew on?” asked Leah. “Oh, yeah, there’s a problem,” I said. “I guess the problem, or one of them, will be making sure we all understand what we’re working on. Once we figure that out, we’ll have to think about whether it’s soluble.” “Oh, it is. Everything is,” said Stoney. “Okay, it may be that I’m the member of this illustrious group who’s the most familiar with Hodge, so I’ll pull together some introductory materials, then I’ll hand them over to Miss Leah, who is so efficient at distributing info, and we’ll have another visit in two weeks?” said Thomas. We all agreed. A few nights later, Milton and Cisco and I went over to Rand at about dinner time. We took our place at the end of the shorter of the two lines, but for some reason the lines were both really long and didn’t seem to be moving very quickly. “Fuck this. Let’s go somewhere else,” said Cisco. “No, let’s stay here,” said Milton. “Why?” asked Cisco. It’s going to take thirty minutes to get through the line.” “And the tables are all taken, too,” I said. “After we get our food, we’ll be looking for a place to sit and our food will get cold.” People were wandering around with full trays, waiting for a group to get up to leave so they’d have a place to sit. “And you think cold Rand food is worse than warm Rand food?” asked Milton. “Besides,” he said, under his breath, “did you get a look at the tits on that girl right in front of us?” Cisco, who had been smoking a Marlboro, took one last drag and dropped it to the floor and put it out with the toe of his Topsider. He looked at the girl ahead of us in line. He cocked an eyebrow and studied her from behind for a minute. “Mandy?” he asked. She turned around, somehow understanding that he was talking to her. “Excuse me?” she asked. “Gosh, I’m so sorry,” he said. “From that angle you looked exactly like my friend Mandy. I haven’t seen her since I graduated from high school. Really, I apologize,” he said, and smiled at her, looking into her eyes. “From that angle?” she asked, smiling wisely at him. “I’m sorry, I’m Frank Atwater,” he said, taking her hand as if to shake, but not shaking, just holding it. He still seemed to be staring at her, and smiling, as though captivated. “I’m Jessie Wilcox,” she said, smiling back, a bit reluctant, but not discouraging him. “Well, Jessie, until I met you my friends and I were about to give up on this line and walk over to the D-School to see if the line isn’t shorter. Would you care to join us?” “D-School?” she asked. That she did not know what this meant suggested freshmanhood. “The Divinity School,” he said. “Next to the library. They have a smaller cafeteria there, but the line is always shorter because they don’t allow underclassmen.” “I’m a freshman,” she said. “I’m a sophomore,” he said. “They don’t card. Let’s go.” She grabbed her friend, who also got Milton’s attention, and we left for the D-School. Milton was as alert as a dog expecting a Milk-Bone for the first few steps out of Rand, expecting that there would be at least one girl to spare for him, but they both clustered around Cisco, one left, one right. “I am never gonna get laid,” he said, morosely, and lit a cigarette. The D-School cafeteria was much smaller than the others on campus. It had one much shorter line, with fewer selections at the exact same price. You could glimpse into the dining room from the end of the line, and there, at a small square table, dinner complete, Stoney and Thomas were holding hands over their dinner trays. “Henry?” Cisco asked, shooting me a look. “Yeah, that’s my take, too,” I said. Cisco looked at Milton but he was too mesmerized by Jessie’s friend’s behind to have noticed anything else, and the line quickly moved forward to a point where we couldn’t see Stoney and Thomas. “Milton?” asked Cisco. “Introduce me to her friend,” said Milton. “You don’t need both of them.” “Okay, let’s ease up on the stupid a little bit,” said Cisco. “Has Stoney been acting weird recently?” “Oh, yeah. He really hasn’t been around much the last few weeks but last week he was in his room studying one afternoon and I asked him if he could tell me where to score some weed and he said there was more to life than weed.” “Stoney said that?” I asked. “And he was studying?” asked Cisco. “Yeah. Sure. I found the whole exchange unfathomable,” said Milton. “Introduce me to her.” Cisco kind of put one hand on her shoulder and the other at her waist on the opposite side in a way that would have gotten me arrested but she looked up at him with a surprised smile. “Wendy,” said Cisco, “I’d like to introduce my friends Henry Baida and Jimmy Milton.” “So you’re the philosophy major Frankie was telling us about?” asked Wendy speculatively. “Yes, ma’am,” said Milton said, bowing slightly. “I think I’m going to major in philosophy, too,” she said. “I am absolutely fascinated by the Existentialists.” She looked him over. “Didn’t I see you smoking a cigarette on the way over here?” “Possibly,” he said. “I hate cigarettes,” she said. “My parents and my brothers all smoke. It makes me gag.” “I’ve just been trying it for the last few days because Sartre and Camus both seemed to enjoy it. I don’t think I really like it.” She nodded and shrugged. He followed her into the line, saying Simone de Beauvoir was his favorite, which struck me as a pretty good stab at a pickup line based on the available information. Jessie led Cisco into the cafeteria’s tray rails, and I brought up the rear. “How did you do that with Wendy?” I asked. “Do what?” “Get her to take an interest in Milton.” “Oh, I just talked him up a little,” Cisco said. “Well, that was nice of you,” I said. “Not really. Only way to shut him up. Otherwise he’d be tripping over his dick trying to talk to Jessie and Wendy both. And I kind of like Jessie.” I nodded. “He’ll fuck it up anyway,” I said. “No, I think he’s in,” he said as he got roast beef. “She’s naïve and he can talk philosophy well enough that a small-town freshman won’t know he’s full of shit.” “Harsh,” I said. I got the chicken-fried steak. “Money talks,” he said. “Twenty says no within the next two weeks.” “I say she lets him in, and double if he hits it within a week,” said Cisco. He got spinach and mashed potatoes. “Done. How are we going to know?” I asked. “We sure can’t trust him to be honest.” I got turnip greens and pinto beans. “Jessie will tell me when it happens,” he said. “You do have big plans,” I said. I got a corn muffin. I have to say, they made really, really good corn muffins at the campus eateries. “Deal?” he asked. “Deal.” He got pecan pie and when they got to the cashier he held up two fingers to indicate he was picking up Jessie’s dinner as well, and she was utterly charmed. I paid for mine, and when I got into the dining room, the table where Stoney and Michael had been was empty. “I have to say, your man Stoney continues to impress with is ability to surprise,” said Cisco. “What are you surprised by?” asked Wendy. “We think we’ve just discovered that one of our roomies is queer,” said Cisco. “Really?” she asked. “We didn’t have any queers in Dadeville. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one. “Oh, I bet you have,” said Cisco. “They just might be a little reluctant to raise their hands. But when we came in our roomie Stoney was holding hands with some guy.” “His name is Michael. He’s in Stoney’s math club,” I said. “He prefers to be called ‘gay.’” “I can deal. And?” Cisco asked. “He’s bright. Well-educated. Went to one of those up-east prep schools. Andover, maybe? Or Tabor?” “Stoney went to Lawrenceville?” “Yep. Did you say Dadeville?” I asked, turning to Jessie. “Why yes. I did.” “Dadeville, Alabama?” I asked. “Why, yes. You know of it?” she asked. “I do. Do you by any chance know a girl named Beatriz Fonesca?” “Sure. We were at Wadley High together. Dark-skinned Brazilian girl.” There was a pause. “Kind of … different. And I know she’s here, but I haven’t run into her.” Neither, it appeared, had she made any effort to look Beatriz up, since they both lived in the Branscomb quad. I alternated between listening to Milton blather to Wendy about Existentialism and Cisco charm Jessie. I didn’t think I was going to be friends with either. And Cisco was right about Wendy and Milton. He got there, but it took ten days, so I owed Cisco twenty, but not forty. If you win them all, you’re not betting enough. Cisco broke up with Jessie immediately after he got the news about Milton and Wendy. I can’t remember the pretext he used but he said she was a tremendous bigot, and he was surprised to find he didn’t like having sex with a bigot. “Great in the sack, of course, but it turns out I’m a liberal,” he said. “Who knew?”

Chapter 35: In which the checkers are returned to the checkerboard for college

The next day Stoney and I went to the Math building to talk to Dr. Ladd about the courses we’d chosen. Neither of us had taken any of the prerequisites for anything we wanted to take.

Our suite was four bedrooms in a row with a bathroom in the middle. The four-room suite had been originally designed to be shared by two people who used the inner rooms as sitting room and the outer rooms as bedrooms, but not now. I had the outside room at one end, by agreement with Cisco, and Stoney had the outside room at the other, by luck of the draw.

I swung by Stoney’s room just after lunch and he still wasn’t awake. When I knocked and came in he woke up with his sunglasses on and even in his own room managed to convey a sense of confusion as to where he was. He lit a cigarette and mixed a Bloody Mary before he would let me talk. He had a larger refrigerator than most dorm residents and it had a large freezer compartment with a ten pound bag of ice inside.

“We’re supposed to meet with Ladd at two to get approval on our registration cards,” I said.

“Is there coffee?” he asked.

“No. Get cleaned up.”

“You’re so abrupt, Henry,” he said, but trudged off to the bathroom, drink and cigarette in hand. Because he was in the bathroom, I had to go back out into the hall and unlock the door to Cisco’s room to get back to my own. Stoney showed up at my room about twenty minutes later showered and shaved but clad in a red tee shirt with a Chinese character on the front and a portrait of Mao Tse Tung on the back, faded jeans held up by some kind of knotted macramé sash and rubber flip-flops like you buy at the beach.

“How do I look?” he asked.

“You need a haircut,” I said.

“I’m letting my freak flag fly. Let’s go.”

“No. Go put on a real shirt and some shoes and find a belt,” I said. “You’re not going to a hipster pride parade, we need permission.”

“God almighty what a fucking Nazi,” he said, but he returned to his room and returned wearing an Alligator shirt, a belt, and Weejuns. I’d never seen him wear penny loafers before.

It was only a block or so to the building where the math profs had their offices. Once we got there we passed a door marked “Faculty Break Room” and without saying anything Stoney veered off, opened the door, strolled in to the faculty break room, waved blithely to the middle-aged men conversing inside, poured himself a large Styrofoam cup of coffee, gave the professors a Boy Scout salute, and left, closing the door behind him. He stopped in the hall to take a few sips of his coffee.

“Okay. Let’s do this,” he said, coffee in hand.

Ladd was expecting us.

“Gentlemen!” he said, smiling but without asking us to sit down. “So how did you spend your summer?” Stoney slurped his coffee.

“Mainly on differentiation and integration, but with lots of analytical methodology thrown in,” I said. “She said to tell you we’d covered everything in the Nehari book and went beyond it, although we didn’t go into all the engineering applications with fluids and fields.”

“In three dimensions or two?” he asked.

“Mainly in two, although sometimes that was a two-dimensional mapping of a three-dimensional problem,” I said.

“The what book?” Stoney asked.

“The Nehari book,” I said.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” asked Stoney. “We didn’t use any fucking books.”

Dr. Ladd pulled a green volume off of a shelf behind him and handed it to Stoney. Stoney put his coffee down on Ladd’s desk and took the book with a skeptical expression. “The Nehari book,” said Dr. Ladd, frowning at Stoney’s coffee. “It was quite popular in the sixties, when I was getting my undergraduate degree from Carnegie, where Dr. Nehari was a professor.” Stoney flipped through it, nodding equivocally. He took a sip of his coffee and put the cup back on the professor’s desk. Ladd frowned at it again, and again Stoney didn’t notice. “That book provided the material for a two-year course that I completed as a senior. It was considered quite rigorous. And you gentlemen claim to have learned all of it in one summer.”

“Yes, sir, but in fairness, you were taking lots of other courses, and we were studying just math. All day every day,” I answered.

“This is the right shit, man,” said Stoney. He took out his cigarettes absently and made like he was going to shake one out as he leafed through the book. I took the pack away from him and put it in my own pocket. He looked at me, surprised, then realized I was not letting him light up because it would be rude. He nodded and looked back at the book, taking another sip of coffee. “Remember this fucker?” he said to me, pointing. “Took all day. Oh, yeah. Here’s your old buddy Poisson. That’s us, man,” he said to Dr. Ladd and handed him back the book. Ladd flipped towards the back and stood as if to write something on the blackboard, then decided better of it and sat back down. He shook his head.

“What do you boys want to take?” he asked resignedly.

“Differential Geometry?” I asked. He nodded.

“That would be a logical next step.” He looked out the window and thought. “That’s a very hard course,” he said. “You will be the only underclassmen in it.”

“I’m a junior,” said Stoney.

“Even you, a junior, have not taken the prerequisites. It is all but impossible to do so at this university before your senior year. Some of your classmates will be graduate students.”

“I’m perfectly okay with that,” Stoney said.

“Mr. …” Ladd said, looking at Stoney.

“Jackson. But you can call me Stoney.”

“Mr. Jackson it is extremely important that you do well in this course. I know you have made good grades thus far, but if you fail to do so in this instance I will not approve any further prerequisite waivers for you. Do you understand?”

“Yeah. Sure. Totally. That’s cool. Sir.”

“And you?” he said, looking at me.

“Yes, sir.”

“There are a lot of students who would like to skip prerequisites. I can justify it in your cases because you appear to be unusually good mathematicians and unusually well prepared. But if you fail to produce good marks in this course not only do your own academic records suffer, but I look bad for letting you leapfrog over other, arguably more qualified students. I don’t care if you look bad, but I care very much if I look bad. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Yeah. Sure. Cool,” said Stoney. “Sir.” Dr. Ladd held out his hand for our registration cards and filled them out with the course number and scribbled his initials in the “approval” column. He returned our registration cards and gave each of us one of his business cards.

“Good luck, and tell the registrar to call me if she has any questions.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

“Yeah. Thanks, bud,” said Stoney, giving a smile and a kind of abbreviated ear-high Black Power closed fist salute that I’d never seen him use before. We turned to leave and Stoney opened the door.

“Oh, Mr. Baida,” he said. I turned. “You’re interested in physics, no?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Assistant Professor Wolffe, whom you gentlemen know, has gotten interested in knot theory, which no one’s studied in any depth for a several decades. He’s begun to speculate about a new approach to physics in which particles are analyzed as strings. He doesn’t have anyone to discuss it with. An iconoclast like you might understand what he’s talking about. None of us in the Math department can really follow it.”

“Like strings, you said?” I asked.

“Yes. It’s the damndest thing. He seems to tinker a lot with dimensions, too. I don’t really get it, but he’s all excited about it.

“Strings like strings of variables?” I asked.

“No, like thread, or yarn, or rope.”

“I’ll drop by his office and say hi,” I said.

“What do you think of the idea?” Ladd asked

“You know, hard to say at first blush. Doesn’t sound promising to me but I haven’t talked to him.”

“Thanks. I’ll tell him you’re coming,” said Ladd. “Good afternoon.” And with that we left. I gave Stoney his Winstons® back as soon as we closed the door behind us and he immediately fired one up. He also took a large gulp of his coffee, some of which dribbled down his chin.

“Well, that was relatively painless,” he said. “Memorial?”

“Let’s go.” We walked the few blocks to Memorial Gymnasium, where registration was taking place. “What are you taking?” I asked, on the way. He handed me his registration card. In addition to analytical geometry, Stoney was taking a matrix theory class that did not interest me in the least, advanced macroeconomics, a German literature course, and a very specific-sounding European history course. I was planning to take second year Greek, an introductory quantum mechanics course, nonlinear dynamics and an English course on Shakespeare.

“What’s your minor?” I asked.

“Economics, if they’ll let me not take any of the business administration bullshit, but so far the answer on that is no, otherwise German. You?”

“Don’t know. I’m a double major so far, but I think I still need a minor. Greek, maybe.” As we walked through the doors of the gym we were immediately greeted by Toni and Rob. Ah, shit.

“Henry. Finally. What are you taking?” demanded Toni. She was wearing a very small tank top, cutoff jeans, and lace-up tennis shoes. Her hair was tied back under a navy blue bandanna. She was getting lots of looks from male passers-by to which she was oblivious. Rob was in khakis, a button-down shirt and running shoes and could have been a frat boy.

“Why do you care what I’m taking?” I asked.

“Because Rob and I have to take the same courses,” she answered. Ah, shit.

“You can’t take second-year Greek or Analytic Geometry,” I said. “And since when are you interested in Shakespeare?”

“No, she means the physics courses,” Rob said.

“Maybe I’m not taking any physics courses,” I said. I really had no interest in another year of sitting between the two of them.

“Henry, even if you don’t tell me I’m going to find out and we’re going to transfer in. My aunt Angie works in the Provost’s office,” she said.

“Is her last name Cuneware, by any chance?” she asked.

“You know her?” asked Toni.

“We’ve met.” I sighed. No escape. Okay. “I’m taking quantum mechanics and nonlinear dynamics,” I said.

“Cool,” said Rob.

“We guessed the quantum mechanics but not nonlinear dynamics,” she said. “Thank you Henry.” She smiled and they walked off to stand in their appropriate enrollment lines. Stoney watched passively and finished his coffee.

“Who were they?” asked Stoney.

“Rob and Toni. What did you think?”

“Nice knockers,” said Stoney. We stood in our respective lines. When I got to the front of the line, I handed the assistant registrar my card and she made all of the appropriate marks on all of the appropriate pieces of paper. She filled out a schedule for me and handed it to me with a smile, expecting me to move along.

“Can I ask a question?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“So I’m taking the right number of courses, right?”

“Sure. You’re on course to graduate in four years for sure,” she said.

“But I could take more courses if I wanted to?”

“Sure! Nothing but your schedule limiting your courses,” she said.

“So if I wanted to take another course, there’s nothing to say I can’t?”

“No, not at all. You’re a full-time student. You pay your tuition, you can take as many courses as you can fit in!” she seemed happy to pass along this news.

“So will the course on advanced optics and electromagnetism schedule for me?” I asked.

“Sure! Let me check!” She flipped through her schedule cards and smiled, then frowned.

“Okay. So. It will schedule for you, but it’s limited to Physics majors,” she said with a frown.

“I’m a Physics major,” I said.

“Really? As s sophomore?” she asked, and flipped through some cards again. “So you are! You want to take that course?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Sounds great.”

“You know, you keep this up, you’re going to graduate early,” she said, filling out the papers to enroll me in the course.

“What?” I asked.

“Well, you’ll get your credit hours early. You know. Won’t get your four years of college,” she said, smiling.

“You can graduate early?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “You don’t have to go four years,” she said. “As soon as you have 120 hours and 120 points, you can graduate.”

“How do I get points?” I asked.

“Well, if you get a C average or better, the points kind of take care of themselves.”

“So if I double up on my courses I get out early?” I asked.

“Sure!” she said. “But then you don’t get to have your full four years of college. Do you really want to do that?”

“Is there any other Math course I can fit into my schedule?” I asked. She made a finny expression and looked at her catalogue of courses. She scowled for a few minutes, shook her head a few times, then looked at me speculatively.

“There’s this advanced statistics course,” she said. “Eight a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“Any prerequisites?” I asked.

“No. But that may be an oversight. Have you taken some … basic statistics …deal?” she asked.

“Not really. But it’s just numbers,” I said.

“So you’re on some kind of … math trip?” she asked.

“Not really. I just get along with math really, really well,” I said.

“Sure. Okay. Like, I was a psych major because I really liked Oakley Ray’s Drugs and Human Behavior class and really got so much out of it but then I took Cal Izzard’s seminar on the expression of emotions and it was all this looking at Russian actors and stuff and I was so totally out of my depth so I dropped the course and still graduated on time,” she said.

“Sure,” I said.

“So what I’m getting at is that since you’re taking like this enormous … shitload of courses anyway if you get into this advanced stats deal and realize that just maybe you shoulda taken the basic sophomore level statistics course first then you drop it don’t worry ‘cause you’re still like making progress to your degree. And you can drop pretty late. Here’s my phone number. My work one, too,” she said. “I can help you drop it if you realize you’re in like over your head. And there’s like no shame in that because you’re really biting off a lot here. Are you really just a sophomore?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “You can see by my card.”

“Sure. But you seem so confident and grown up. I look at these kids all day.”

“Well, thanks. So I’m signed up for the statistics course and the optics one too?” I asked.

“Sure. Just call me at this number, or one of these numbers, if you want to drop one,” she said, and smiled.

“Thanks, Miss …” I started.

“Julie,” she said. “Miss Julie.” She smiled again and I left. Stoney was waiting by the door.

“What were you doing back there?” he asked, with a complaining tone. “That took forever.”

“I signed up for some extra courses,” I said.

“Cool,” he answered. We walked back to the dorm room.

“So who were those guys again?” he asked, halfway home.

“Which guys?” I asked.

“The physics people. The girl in the Converse low-tops.” I looked at him blankly. “The boy had a good haircut and was in all Brooks Brothers except for the Adidas shoes.”

“I need better clues,” I said.

“She had big tits.”

“Oh. Toni,” I said.

“And him?”

“He’s Rob. She’s crazy and he puts up with it because she’s a nymphomaniac.”

“I see. And you never noticed the way she looks?” Stoney asked.

“Yeah, well, she’s okay. She’s not Melissa pretty, but I can see where people find her attractive.”

“And that whole buxom, tiny tank top, high-cut shorts, long shiny hair, free spirit in a come-fuck-me way doesn’t appeal to you?”

“Stoney, she’s barking mad.”

“Since when did that get in the way of a red-blooded American boy’s sexual impulses?”

“How about mad as a hatter? Mad as a March hare?”

“You know nothing of March hares, Henry. And you’re ignoring the larger point to immerse yourself in details, as is your wont. As is sometimes your wont, I guess.”

“Crazy as a bedbug?”

“You know nothing of bedbugs, either. Think of Rob. Did he ever strike you as … queer?” Stoney asked.

“Queer funny? Queer strange?” I asked

“Queer gay,” he said.

“I don’t really think about that kind of thing a lot. What he thinks and does is his business and none of mine. Plus, I’m not good at thinking through that kind of speculation.”

“No one is. That’s why we all do it. Mother Nature made it fun to think about what other people are thinking. Otherwise we’d never do it and we’d have killed each other off back in the Rift Valley,” he said.

“Yeah well they both act like they’re pretty … engaged, sexually speaking. If’ Rob’s gay he’s doing a pretty good straight imitation to her and to us, isn’t he?” We’d reached the front of our dorm, almost the exact spot where Rachel had kissed me one night freshman year. Stoney paused, and we stopped walking for a minute and he looked at me speculatively.

“You never know what’s going on in another person’s head, Henry. He can look like he’s completely one thing and then he turns out to be something else completely. No matter what you think you know about somebody, you never really know what’s going on in his head. So you can never really be surprised if he does something … unexpected. At least I would never be surprised if … anybody … did something surprising.”

“Are we still talking about Toni and Rob?” I asked.

“Of course. You said it never occurred to you that Rob might be a sword-swallower?”

“No, not at all. He’s fucking Toni morning, noon and night,” I said.

“Even though he has that precious haircut and those precious Brooks Brothers shirts and slacks, so carefully ironed in his dorm room?” Stoney asked.

“How do you know where he ironed them?”

“Those were definitely not professionally laundered. So he had to have an ironing board and an iron in his dorm room,” Stoney said.

“So?”

“Where do you keep your ironing board, Henry?”

“I don’t have one,” I admitted.

“Neither does anybody else you know. Let’s go!” he walked into the dorm. He had his keys out as we approached our doors so we went in through his end of the suite. Milton was listening to rock music at high volume and smoke was thick in the air as though there had been a marijuana forest fire. “Come to papa,” said Stoney to Milton’s joint, and Milton handed it to him.

“Later,” I said, as Stoney took a deep toke.

“Dinner later?” he croaked. I nodded.

I got back to my own dorm room but didn’t have a lot to do. I wasn’t reading a novel, schoolwork was a few days off, I hadn’t bought my books, and I hadn’t bought a newspaper. I sat down at my desk. There was a sheet of graph paper sitting in front of me and I started to idly fill in a checkerboard.

There’s a thing about checkerboards. If you start at just one point and alternate black and white, or whatever colors you like, and radiate out from your one point, you get the familiar checkerboard pattern known to linoleum floors everywhere. If you start with not one point but two, and radiate out from both of them in the familiar checkerboard pattern, half the time they’ll mesh smoothly and unite into one even checkerboard and no one will be able to tell there were two points of origin. The other half of the time, though, the patterns won’t mesh, but collide. The two checkerboards will form two checker boards separated by an uneven wall of light or dark colored squares, depending on how you decide to color them in. If you start from four or five different points of origin, the whole thing becomes more chaotic. The boundaries between the different checkerboard patterns wander around like fracture lines. If you happen to have pens of three different colors, say blue, purple, and black, and you start several checkerboard origin points with each different color, your results are, well, interesting. But the most interesting thing is that the result is not at all chaotic or turbulent. It’s very ordered. It’s just a complicated kind of order. And when you realize you’ve made mistakes, you’ll need to find a red pen to isolate those. So while your friends are smoking dope and arguing about why a carrot is more orange than an orange, you end up with



which may not look like much, but its an interesting way to look at what happens at complex margins that result form consistent application of simple rules. If you’re thinking as you’re drawing, you begin to think that areas of irregularity tend to isolate themselves from each other, sealing themselves off.

There was a knock at the door. It was open, so Cisco walked in nonchalantly.

“Yo,” he said, in greeting. “What’s that?” he asked, looking over my shoulder at my graph paper.

“It may be a representation of what’s going on in small regions of the universe where the laws of physics don’t apply uniformly,” I said, cautiously. I don’t always get a good reaction when I talk about this stuff. “Or a randomly ordered checkerboard.”

“Cool. Dinner?” he asked.

“Sure.” I shrugged. I got up to follow him out. We cut through the bathroom to Milton and Stoney’s side of the suite. They were listening to “Journey to the Center of the Mind” by the Amboy Dukes at ear piercing volume.

“Dinner?” shouted Cisco.

“What?” they shouted back.

“Do. You. Want. Dinner?” he shouted.

“What?” Cisco bent over the turntable and lifted the tone arm from the vinyl.

“Hungry?” he asked in the silence.

“Whoah. Man. That was like, so, kind of, assertive,” said Stoney.

“Action-oriented. Awe-inspiring, like. Cool,” said Milton.

“Do you gentlemen want dinner?” Cisco asked.

“Oh, God, yes!” Milton said. “I’m fucking starving,” he said, as though making a discovery.

“Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Sure. Food,” said Stoney. I opened the door, Cisco turned off the turntable, and we left.

“And you’re saying he wasn’t high when he did that?” Milton asked, as we left.

“Yeah, yeah. He claims he doesn’t do drugs at all,” said Stoney.

“But the album cover has like pipes and things all over it. Hundreds of different pipes,” said Milton, bleary-eyed.

“Fuck! You’re right. Maybe it’s just extremely effective marketing. You know. To, like, make the album more attractive to guys like us.”

“Or maybe he’s a complete stoner who lied in the interview,” said Milton.

“I don’t know, man. You’re accusing a fellow longhair of being a liar. Doesn’t that break some tribal rule?’ Stoney asked.

“No, no. I’m a philosophy major,” said Milton.

“I’m still going with Ted,” said Stoney.

“Let’s put it to a vote,” said Milton. He looked at Cisco, who pitched the butt of his Marlboro.

“Gotta go with Milton on this one,” said Cisco. Milton looked at me,

“Looking at the odds, chances of a lead guitarist in a famous rock band who’s never smoked reefer have to be pretty small,” I said.

“So you’re going with Milton, too?” Stoney asked me.

“Aftraid so.”

“How could you do this to me? I thought you loved me,” Stoney said.

“I do. Deeply.”

“Yet you have betrayed me. How can I ever learn to trust you again?” Stoney asked. We’d reached the dining hall and Cisco held the door open for us. We crossed the hall to stand in the far line, which always seemed to be shorter. Maybe the freshmen didn’t know. We fell into line behind two slender girls wearing skirts (one madras, one denim) and cotton shirts. The skirts were tight through the bottom and Milton was captivated by the view.

“So your Dodgers are still in the hunt,” said Stoney, morosely.

“They’re looking good,” I said. “Pittsburgh’s tough, though.”

“You have a team?” he asked Cisco.

“Braves,” Cisco answered.

“You?” he looked at Milton.

“I tend not to identify with sports teams too much. It seems too totemic. I think.” Milton began. The girl in the madras skirt turned around when she heard Cisco’s voice.

“Frankie!” she said, excitedly. Cisco smiled.

“Hello, June,” he said. She kind of leapt towards him to give him a big hug.”

“Hello…” Milton began, extending his hand to June.

“Muffy! Look who it is,” June said to her denim-skirted companion, who interrupted her animated conversation with someone in front of her in line to turn around, then squealed with delight when she saw Cisco.

“Frankie!” she exclaimed, and gave him a hug. Each of madras skirt and denim skirt took one of his arms and they turned away from us, not intentionally, but to talk amongst old friends. Milton made as if to tap one of the girls on the shoulder.

“Uncool,” said Stoney, stopping him in his tracks. After we’d all selected our dinners and paid for them in the odd scrip that was meal points, the three of us sat at a table for four. Cisco and the two pretty girls had gone elsewhere.

“I am never going to get laid,” said Milton, morosely. We all ate our dinners in silence for several minutes. I had a piece of ground beef that was labeled chopped steak, a salad, and some green beans. “How does he do it?”

“Who, Cisco?” asked Stoney.

“Of course, Cisco. Who did you think I was talking about? Reggie Jackson?”

“Yeah. So despite your pontificating you’re an A’s fan?” Stoney asked.

“Sure.”

“They’re still in the hunt, too,” said Stoney.

“I know. Stay on point,” said Milton.

“What’s the point?” asked Stoney.

“Why girls are always circling around Cisco.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, like, there are, like, some differences between us and him that, like, girls might notice,” said Stoney.

“Anything important?” asked Milton.

“Yeah, like, well, he sorta shaves everyday. He’s got, like a haircut. And his clothes are clean. He wears khakis and shit.”

“Girls don’t care about that kind of stuff,” said Milton.

“What do they care about?” Stoney asked.

“Dick size. Henry, does Cisco have a big dick?” Milton asked.

“They tell me size doesn’t matter,” said Stoney.

“Henry?” Milton asked me.

“Couldn’t tell ya’” I said, a little worried about having this kind of discussion in the campus dining hall.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Henry,” said Milton.

“You know, Cisco and I don’t hang around much. And we don’t really hang out at all naked,” I said.

“I don’t know why you have to be so difficult about this,” said Milton.

Look. I’d like to say that college was sitting at the feet of masters absorbing knowledge, but really, most of college was like this. It occurred to me that the Milton checkerboard might be the one causing the discontinuities, but for that matter, the Henry checkerboard could be, too.

Chapter 34, in which Henry and Stoney hit the road, and encounter Ed along the way

In what seemed like just a few days the summer was over. Nixon had resigned, tears in his eyes, and flown off to San Clemente. Gerald Ford, about whom most of us knew only that he had an interesting wife, a pretty daughter, and a hound of a son, became president. The summer’s mathematics, like its politics, had gotten less and less rooted in reality, but the math was a lot of fun. Then all of a sudden the summer was over and we were loading up Stoney’s car. Like everything else that feels like it should last forever, it didn’t.

Oddly, there was lots less stuff to put in the car on the way back than there had been on the way down. Partly this was because Stoney had given his piranha and both aquaria to Clarence, a gift that did not seem to please Clarence’s mother, and partly because, being sober, or at least not stoned, Stoney had managed to organize his clothes into two suitcases and a box. Why this should take up less space than the other configuration was not immediately obvious to me.

Clarence was watching glumly as we packed the car and Stoney was promising to visit and write letters.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“What don’t you get, Henry?” asked Mrs. W.

“Why Stoney’s stuff takes up so much less space than it did three months ago.”

“Because it’s organized,” she said, lighting a Benson & Hedges.

“So?” I said. “It’s the same mass.”

“Yes, but it’s organized,” she said. “I made him wash it all, and because he’s got a pretty buttoned-down brain, he folded it all so it wouldn’t wrinkle and put it away. It’s all in neat stacks. A lesson you could pick up, a little,” she said.

“I keep my stuff clean and neat,” I said, surprised and a little defensive.

“Yes, you do but you don’t really own much stuff, so you don’t need to organize it particularly well to fit it in a suitcase. This is, well, partly, anyway, because your wardrobe may be just a little bit limited.”

“Really? How so?”

“Well, you really don’t own much that you couldn’t wear to change the oil in your car. Eventually you’re going to need slacks and blazers and real shirts and ties and stuff, but you don’t really need it now because of the way you kids are dressing. Stoney has some of that kind of stuff, although he generally wears it in … non-traditional ways. He also folds his tee shirts and jeans in a … pleasingly ordered way.”

“Let’s get back to the other issue,” I said. She cocked an eyebrow at me but smiled. “Why is it that a mass that’s organized occupies less space than a mass that’s less organized? I’m not sure I even know what ‘organized’ means in this context.” In my defense, I was aware that, outside of Mrs. W’s presence, Stoney was an unpredictable if engaging hellion who might do anything at any moment and so I was having trouble with her characterization of his brain as “buttoned down,” but I still think I had a point.

“Okay,” she said. “Imagine the Sunday paper.”

“Got it,” I said.

“Will it fit into that box next to the car?” There was a smallish box next to the left rear wheel of Stoney’s car. It had an image of a moving van in orange and “book box” in black letters.

“Sure,” I said.

“How much of the volume of the box would you say would be occupied by the Sunday paper?”

“I dunno. Less than ten percent. Maybe less than five.”

“You’re imagining the paper flat, as it’s delivered, as you’d find it in the driveway if you were ever up early enough to go get it,” she said, taking a drag and tapping her cigarette ash into the azaleas.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, with a quizzical expression.

“Imagine yourself sitting in a chair with that box at your feet, taking every sheet of that Sunday paper, wadding it up into a ball and tossing it into that box. Would the entire paper fit into the box, my sweet brilliant chump?”

“No, ma’am, I guess not.”

“You’re going to run into this over and over again. Disorganized things take up more space than organized things, and make it harder to tell what’s going on. You can wad up paper to cushion your glassware when you move but it makes it harder to see what’s in the box. The same principle applies to Stoney’s tee shirts, to transport of crops and fuel by rail, to legal briefs, to politician’s speeches and to your money. Which is doing fine, buy the way. But somebody who doesn’t know what he thinks will take twice as long to express himself as someone who does. Free molecules bouncing around as a gas take up many orders of magnitude more volume than those same molecules bound into a liquid or a solid. The atoms in a diamond take up less volume than the same atoms lying around as soot.”

“Okay.”

“If you organize yourself, you will occupy much less time and space. You’ll waste less.”

“Okay,” I said. I had no idea what she meant, but she was almost always right.

“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?” she asked. Stoney was handing Clarence a card with his college address and phone number written on it.

“No, ma’am.” She lit a new cigarette and watched Stoney take down Clarence’s address, on a dollar bill, which he folded and placed in his billfold somewhere other than the bill compartment.

“You find Clarence irritating,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. Doesn’t everyone?”

“No. Stoney doesn’t, at all. I do, but not like you do. What you’re reacting to is the fact that he just gloms on to the last thing he heard as the best thing the world has ever come up with.” I thought about that for a few seconds.

“Well, he does that, for sure,” I said.

“That’s the adolescent intellectual version of the Sunday paper fitting into the cardboard box,” she said. “All those ideas rattling around like that with no intellect sorting through them they take up so much space. But he’ll settle down. Stoney sees that and connects to it. You’re out there on your own.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of this. “I’m sorry,” I began.

“Oh, heavens, nothing for you to apologize for, she said. “I was just trying to give you a frame of reference. I like you, so I guess I … I talk to you like I talk to myself. But did you notice that when Stoney organized Clarence’s thoughts for him, when he told Clarence he was playing with puzzles he was doing math at four to five years above grade level? And the last few crosswords were mostly in German.”

“I wondered what they were talking about,” I said.

“Stoney’s brain is organized like a mathematician’s but he still has … something big to work out, I think. But inside here—” she tapped her temple, “he’s sorted through a lot already.”

“And you don’t think I have?”

“I didn’t say that, exactly, but I think you changed from being a hustler to being a student in a very short period of time, and you’re trying to deal with school like it was a series of pool sharks—you’re sizing things up all the time. It works, but I don’t think you think much about what you feel. That’s where most people start in this day and age, and if it feels good they give themselves permission to go ahead. On the one hand, I find your resistance to the hedonism of the day refreshing, on the other hand, you may be missing something.” I was a little taken aback. “Oh, don’t worry about it. I just like you, so I worry about you.”

“Thanks,” I said. Stoney and Clarence returned to the front porch. From somewhere in Stoney’s possessions he’d produced two martial arts-style belts. Stoney was wearing a red one and Clarence was wearing a black one, both neatly tied.

“Well, chief, I think it’s time to hit the dusty trail, said Stoney, probably to me, but he was wearing his dark aviator shades and I couldn’t see where he was looking.

“You boys come back any time. Together or as unbonded ions,” said Mrs.W. Stoney gave her a hug. Both of them had cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, but somehow nothing caught fire. She held out her arms to hug me, something we’d never done before, but it would have been more awkward not to than to do so, so I hugged her back. I will admit I was worried about the cigarette close to my ear. Stoney and Clarence were involved in a lengthy, multi-step handshake.

“See ya, little buddy,” he said.

“Later, Clarence,” I said. He waved to us, but seemed too choked up to talk. We walked to the car without saying much. I had the keys. It looked like we were going to get to Nashville by lunchtime.

‘I’ll drive,” said Stoney.

“How much have you had to drink?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Stoney, a little indignantly. I gave him a few seconds to think. “Well, I sweetened my coffee with a little brandy.”

“Each cup,” I said.

“Well, yeah, but that’s not much. And then I guess when I was packing there was so little Cuervo in the bottle it seemed dumb to pack it so I drained that and threw the bottle away. Just to save space.”

“And aren’t you going to want to have a drink on the way?” I asked. He looked at his wristwatch.

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said. He shrugged and got into the passenger seat. We waved and pulled out of the driveway. Mrs. W looked proud but sad, Clarence looked heartbroken.

“Clarence really likes you,” I said, as we pulled away.

“Yeah, well, he’s smart, but the other kids don’t like him and he hasn’t connected with his teachers. They think he’s a problem and he doesn’t get any of the gifted kid attention. He’ll settle down this year and get better grades in a few subjects and teachers will start to notice how smart he is.”

“In math?” I asked.

“Math may be kind of dull for him for a few years. He’s good with literature, too. He reads faster than you think. I told him how to game literature classes. His teachers are going to love it.”

“How do you ‘game’ a literature class?” I asked.

“You look for a symbolic subtext in everything you read, from the stupidest, which I would say is Shirley Jackson, based on my high school literature reading, to the most sophisticated, which is Shakespeare. If an author force-feeds the symbolism, like maybe T.S. Eliot, you just make like you think he’s a genius and not plodding and pedantic and over-wrought.”

“Gack.”

“Literature’s easy. You just have to know what the teacher’s looking for.” We were about to pull onto the freeway. There was a long acceleration ramp. There, about halfway up, was Ed Bork, with his right thumb out in the recognized gesture, a miniature American flag stapled to a quarter-inch dowel in his left hand, and a large aluminum-framed Boy Scout backpack at his feet. Of course I stopped. Stoney rolled down his window. “Howdy stranger,” he said. “Want a drink?” Ed smiled in a tolerantly Christian way.

“Hello, Stoney. Hello Henry,” he waved at me. “No, but if you’re heading north, I’d like a ride, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“We are. No trouble,” I called out to be heard over a truck passing us. “Hop in.” He picked up his backpack, which seemed to be heavy, Stoney opened his door and folded down his seat to let Ed in, and Ed wrestled his pack into place on the back seat then climbed in and sat next to it.

Stoney returned to his seat, closed his door, then scooted his seat up a few inches to give Ed more room. “Thanks guys, I really appreciate this,” Ed said.

“Where you headed?” asked Stoney. I presumed he was not asking me. He lit a Winston.

“Not sure. North, though,” said Ed. I merged onto I-24 and nobody said anything for a while.

“So are you on a sabbatical?” Stoney asked. There was a pause. I couldn’t quite see Ed in the rear view mirror.

“What’s a sabbatical, exactly?” Ed asked.

“A hiatus?” Stoney suggested.

“Sorry. Don’t know hiatus, either,” Ed said. He shifted slightly in his seat and I could see most of his face in the rear view mirror some of the time. He had a kind of glum expression. He hadn’t shaved for a week or so and had a kind of flamenco goatee growing in, with very sparse whiskering on the rest of his cheeks and jaw.

“A vacation?” asked Stoney, tapping his cigarette ash into the Volvo’s front seat ashtray.

“I’m sorry,” said Ed. “Are you asking me if I’m on vacation?” he asked Stoney. He was confused, not irritated.

“Well, sorta,” said Stoney. “You were all strong on the Vine Road Jesus Community last time I talked to you,” he said.

“Yeah, sure,” said Ed.

“And so are you still?” There was a really long pause. More than a minute.

“No, I’ve left the Vine Street Christian Community. For now.” I couldn’t see him in the rear view mirror. The seconds ticked by. “I don’t think I fit in there,” he said. Another long pause. We were well past Moccasin Bend before he said anything more. Stoney had turned sideways in the passenger seat so he could look at Ed, and was tapping his cigarette ashes into the Volvo’s ashtray. “I really liked all the positive energy. All the teamwork,” Ed said, eventually. There was another long pause. We were almost into Georgia. “I was raised by my grandmother. She’s Catholic. They were always telling me what to do. I didn’t like it. Gramma could get me to school and church and all, but I was a lot of trouble. I got into witchcraft mainly to piss her off, I think. It was mean. I shouldn’t have done it. But once you get into it, witchcraft actually makes a lot of sense. There aren’t many other witches in Chattanooga, so it’s not like we were going to start a revolution or something. Most of the people who’ll tell you they’re witches are big girls who like wearing capes. But Gramma made me go through parochial school and put me in Notre Dame High and I was going to church and all but then one of the nuns heard I was doing witchcraft and they threw me out. So I showed up at City High in the middle of junior year. Not a good way to start.”

“I wondered about that,” I said. “Jack and Joe showed up from Baylor, and some other guys from McCallie, and the rumor was they all got thrown out for drugs. Sorry, but I assumed that was your story too.”

“Oh no need for an apology. I did do a lot of drugs. Especially after Gramma died.”

“She died? Oh, jeez, that’s awful,” said Stoney. “What happened?”

“She pissed me off so I cast a spell on her,” said Ed.

“What?”

“She really was a pain in the as,” said Ed.

“Wait. So you killed her?” asked Stoney.

“Depends on who you believe,” Ed said. “I’ll confess, and have confessed to Jesus and anybody else who will listen that I cast a spell on her and meant to do her harm. I feel kind of bad about that now, but a man can only take so much nagging.”

“I can’t fucking believe you killed your grandmother!” said Stoney.

“So you believe in witchcraft?” asked Ed.

“No. Not at all,” said Stoney.

“All I did was cast a spell on her. She had a heart attack all by herself. I was off with a girl in Mentone at the time. But to believe I killed her you have to believe in witchcraft and you just said you didn’t.”

“I need drugs for this,” Stoney said. There was another long pause. Minutes.

“Why’d you leave Vine Street?” I asked.

“You know, when I first started talking to them they were all so full of good will and cheerfulness. They were all working so hard. They all had this message about how I needed to open myself to the Gospel. When I was growing up there was this deal where the church hierarchy told you what to believe and how to experience your religion through all these different rituals and things you were supposed to do. But here were these people who were telling me to interact directly with the Word of God. It was … exhilarating. Exciting. No barrier between me and God. A religion based on personal experience. My conversion. Personal revelation. If God is revealing Himself to each of us through His gospel, then I am partaking of God directly from God. What could be better than that?” he said.

“So you cast a spell asking demons to kill your grandmother?” asked Stoney.

“Something like that,” Ed answered. “But the idea of directly connecting to the living God was almost, like, intoxicating. You can’t imagine what it’s like to feel directly tapped into the omnipotent force at the center of the universe.”

“I feel that all the time,” said Stoney. “I’m usually pretty fucked up at the time, of course.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s impolite to quiz people about their religion?” Stoney asked. He’d reached around to rummage through a box in the back seat and returned with a quart bottle of Jack Daniels. “Any coffee?” he asked.

“There’s a Thermos® in the back seat,” I said. Ed handed it up. Stoney uncapped the Jack Daniel’s and was about to pour some straight into the Thermos.®

“Wait,” I said. “I want a cup.” Stoney shrugged and was about to pour me a cup into the cup-shaped plastic cap when Ed leaned forward with a larger yellow enameled cup.

“Wow,” said Stoney. “Where’d you find this?”

“It was on the seat,” Ed said.

“It was my great-grandmother’s,” Stoney said. “There’s some kind of pioneer story that goes with it. Not a Conestoga wagon but that same kind of shit. My mom was mad as hell when I lost it.” He peered at it like a pawnbroker looking at a gold-plated wedding band. “Looks pretty clean, Henry. Okay?” I handed him my handkerchief.

“Wipe it out for me if you don’t mind,” I said. He sighed deeply.

“Talk about a fussy asshole,” said Stoney, but he polished it up. “How do we know this handkerchief is any cleaner than my great-grandmother’s cup? That handkerchief has been riding around in those jeans right next to your ass for God knows how long.”

“I’m just gambling that it’s cleaner than the shoes of everyone who’s sat in the back seat of your car since you lost it,” I said. He poured me a cup of gratifyingly hot coffee and topped off the Thermos® with whiskey. He replaced the stopper briefly to shake the jug, then proceeded to sip straight from the jug.

“So where were we?” Stoney asked.

“I think you were telling Henry that it was impolite to ask me about my religion,” said Ed.

“Oh, right. What were you thinking?” Stoney said to me, crossly. “Were you raised in a barn? What did you ask, anyway?” asked Stoney after a pause.

“I have no idea,” I said. We were passing the exit where the Highway Patrol office was, where I got my first driver’s license. I took a sip of coffee. It was cooling fast in the metal cup.

“What did he ask?” Stoney asked Ed.

“I think the question was ‘So what happened?’ which I think was his way of asking me why I’d left the Vine Street Christian Community.”

“Oh, okay,” said Stoney, taking a slurp from his Thermos.® He thought for a minute. “Okay, so what happened?”

“I guess the problem is that I thought I was getting into this because of the personal revelation thing. If you think about it, what Jesus tells us to do is to buy into the whole Christian trip personally. We have to personally accept Jesus Christ as our lord and savior. I really like the personal revelation deal. I found the whole idea that God had chosen to reveal Himself to me personally very appealing.”

“Okay…” said Stoney.

“I know it seems funny, but when I was a little kid my mother sang this song to me” and here he sang:

“Jesus loves the little children
All the little children of the world
Red and yellow, black and white
They’re all equal in His sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world.” Stoney looked at me quizzically.

“People sang this song in your youth?” he asked me.

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“In Tennessee?”

“All over. Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida. I don’t remember California well enough to say.”

“Sorry for interrupting,” said Stoney. “So as a kid you liked the idea that Jesus loved you.”

“Yes, very much. I also liked the idea that Jesus was nice.”

“Makes sense.”

“But what started to worry me abut Vine Street Christian Community was that they didn’t seem to want me to be personally experiencing Jesus at all. Usually when I did they told me I was going off in the wrong direction. It was like they wanted me to have this personal conversion experience, but they wanted me to have it in the way they wanted me to have it. It was weird. There was this thing we did like every week, or maybe it was every few days. It was hard to tell. I was working like eighty hours a week at the Yellow Deli and then when I was back at the house I wanted to sleep a lot, but generally we had a lot of Community stuff to do, and one of those was this thing called Critical Mass. They’d get us all in this room and we’d talk about how we thought the others in the group were performing. When they explained it to me they said the idea was to encourage each other to be good Christians, but really what they were talking about was whether you were a good member of their particular little group. Whether you were working hard enough at the deli, putting enough hours in. One girl got in trouble because she didn’t move all of her inheritance into the Community’s hands. It was weird, some of the time.”

“You didn’t like it that they were grasping?” Stoney asked.

“Grasping?” asked Ed.

“Trying to take away your possessions,” he said, taking a gulp from his Thermos.®

“Oh, no. I had nothing. What did I care? What I didn’t like was that I wasn’t supposed to be asking questions. I was just supposed to accept the Word of God as they delivered it to me. See, what I’d liked was that God was showing Himself to me, this whole one-on-one trip, but what they were telling me was that I shouldn’t rely on the personal part of it so much once I’d connected with them, that it was far more important that I do what they told me to do than to think for myself. Or even to point out problems. Once in Critical Mass they were explaining where the name had come from and they said they’d borrowed the term ‘mass’ from the Catholics, which they said was a ceremony where the participants did a soul-searching examination of themselves, or something like that. I raised my hand and said that’s not exactly what mass was and I didn’t even get to say why before I wash shushed and told that it was unseemly for me to be questioning Community teachings that way. So far as I can tell, they don’t have a lot of Catholics in the Community. I may have been the first. I seemed to be the only one around that day.”

“To be stifled that way must be very frustrating,” Stoney said.

“My grandmother was lots worse. But the deal was that they didn’t want me to think much. Which seemed to me to mess with the whole personal revelation thing. Once in one of those meetings somebody asked me why I was so worried about being taught, rather than just figuring it out for myself. They were saying that the Bible was all perfect and everything. And the only thing I could think of to say was that when I was in high school everybody’d told me Shakespeare was this genius good writer, and Mrs. McCrary and Mrs. Johnson made us memorize all these verses and stuff. But I bet if you sat down and you tried you could pick and choose lines from Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth and then stitch them together to tell a completely different story that didn’t have anything to do with any of those plays.”

“Sure,” said Stoney. “Add Othello, too.”

“What’s Othello?” asked Ed.

“The Moor of Venice,” said Stoney.

“What’s that?” asked Ed.

“Never mind. So you think you could put lines from Shakespeare together to make a different play?” asked Stoney.

“Sure. Anybody could, if he had some time. But the Community people didn’t like me saying that. They said that I didn’t have to worry about somebody stitching together Bible verses into a different story than Jesus meant because our leaders were so tight with Jesus that there was no way they’d make that kind of mistake. I had to trust them, to have faith that we were on the right path.” Ed didn’t say anything for the next few minutes. I finished my coffee and placed Stoney’s great-grandmother’s cup on the console between the two front seats. Stoney drank down some more of his coffee. Judging from the angle of the Thermos® as he drank, he was getting towards halfway through with the jug. “Isn’t that what everybody thinks?” asked Ed.

“What’s that?” asked Stoney.

“That you should trust their particular leaders, their particular interpretation of the scriptures. Don’t all religions think they’ve come up with the One True Way?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“Maybe except for the Unitarians,” Stoney said. “They seem to think that even they are wrong.”

“Yeah, so, I was looking for personal revelation, and I got shoe-horned into being told what to do and what to think. It was my grandmother and her priest with no costume. I have to take my personal conversion experience the way some other guy tells me to. And he seems to be a guy that doesn’t show up for Critical Mass that much. I’m taking somebody else’s word for the fact that he really knows what he’s talking about and God has chosen him as His messenger. That’s the Pope. That wasn’t what I was going for. Once you’ve done nine hits of Purple Haze and fucked a majorette you’re looking for an intense kind of religious experience—going straight for the mind of God.”

“I understand completely. I think. Majorette?” asked Stoney.

“Being fed Jesus in spoonfuls and told to toe the line isn’t the kind of personal experience I was looking for, anyway,” said Ed. “I still want to find a group that lets me personally experience Jesus. That’s what Paul talked about.”

“Not in the pastoral letters,” I said. Stoney looked at me in frustration.

“Henry, what in the fuck are you talking about?”

“He’s right,” said Ed.

“What?” asked Stoney.

“St. Paul has a lot of letters that go in a different direction. It’s almost as though somebody else wrote Timothy. And Second Thessalonians. They just don’t tell the same story as most of the books,” Ed said.

“And what’s up with Hebrews?” I asked.

“Shut the fuck up, Henry. What were you saying, Ed? And don’t forget to explain about the majorette.”

“I was getting to what I liked about St. Paul was that he’d been one kind of person then he had this conversion experience on the road to … somewhere …”

“Damascus,” I said. Stoney frowned at me. I aimed the car at a mile marker and he made an apologetic gesture.

“Damascus, right. So what I wanted was to have the scales fall from my eyes and then have this intense personal relationship with Jesus. One on one. Personal conversion. But instead, I had this extreme born-again experience then all these people started telling me what to do. Not Jesus. All these other people. And if I read the Bible and had questions, they all told me to shut up and listen. Not what I was looking for.”

“What was the deal with the majorette?” asked Stoney.

“Jessica. Long blonde hair. She was very sweet,” Ed said.

“You’re saying you had sex with Jessica Chester?” I asked.

“On acid. Yeah. It was intense,” said Ed.

“Wow. So about the witchcraft deal,” said Stoney. “How’d that work?”

“It’s hard,” Ed said. “There aren’t many practitioners in Chattanooga. Or even in Tennessee, so far as I could tell. I bought some books, and there were some books on Magick in the library, but it was hard to put together. A lot of the popular books are pretty stupid, and Aleister Crowley is all about himself. One of the problems with Magick is that there’s not really a Bible. I’m not sure it really matters, though, because the Bible is all about Jesus and Paul, and in Magick there’s not really a Jesus or a Paul. There’s not a story about people that led to this strange ritual that we do every Sunday, like there is with Christianity. Anyway, the big weakness with Magick and witchcraft is that there’s all this elaborate ritual, but no real explanation of why it works.”

“Spirits?” asked Stoney.

“Yeah, maybe,” said Ed. “Nobody really talks about what a spirit might be, though, or why it is that a high school kid and some naked cheerleaders might be able to make it want to do something. Say I chant something in a language I don’t understand. Is there some reason that would make a spirit wake up and do what I wanted it to do? At the end of the day, it didn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Did you say naked cheerleaders?” asked Stoney.

“It’s not like you understand what you’re doing with witchcraft. Even if you find a really thorough book, all’s it tells you is what incantation to say and what you’re supposed to do in the ritual. It doesn’t explain why any of this stuff works. Crowley is big on adding sex to everything, and that’s always fun, but why should getting laid make your spell more likely to come true? He says it releases some kind of energy that you can learn to harness, but it doesn’t really make much sense.”

“So what kind of spells did you cast?” Stoney asked.

“Oh, all kinds of stuff. To pass my history test. To fix the radiator on Gramma’s car. I told you about Gramma’s heart attack. To have some money in time for my date wit Allison. To have Abbie fall in love with me. You know, just stuff.”

“Abbie who?” I asked. Stoney frowned at me but drained his Thermos.®

“Abbie Norman,” he said.

“Abbie Norman the cheerleader?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure. She’s very sweet. Cheerleaders seemed to be very susceptible to the dark arts.”

“Christ on a crutch,” said Stoney.

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, please,” said Ed.

“I don’t remember hearing anybody talk about you dating Abbie Norman,” I said.

“We had to hide it from her parents,” Ed said.

“Because you were a witch?” asked Stoney.

“No…” Ed answered.

“Because you killed your grandmother?” asked Stoney.

“No,” Ed said.

“Why, then?” asked Stoney.

“Because I was a Catholic,” Ed said.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Stoney.

“Did you cast a spell on Mrs. Wertheimer?” I asked.

“No. You know, I meant to, but before I got to it Abbie took me to a Campus Crusade for Christ meeting and I got saved. Besides, isn’t Mrs. Wertheimer still up and around?”

“Wait—why did you get saved? You were a witch,” I said. He thought for a minute before answering.

“Honestly?” he asked.

“Sure,” said Stoney.

“Abbie got saved first and told me she was going to cut me off if I didn’t accept Jesus as my personal savior. I was kind of going through the motions that first few days, then I met somebody from Vine Street. Once school ended I wasn’t sure where I was going to live. They sold Gramma’s house. The Vine Street guys took me in. And like I said, they just had this happy enthusiasm about the whole Jesus deal. Plus, Abbie got all worried about not repenting the lusts of the flesh, so I got cut off anyway.”

“Is it more comfortable being a Christian than a Satanist?” Stoney asked.

“I was never a Satanist. Anton LaVey is a gibbering idiot and incapable of telling the truth.” Stoney and I looked at each other and shrugged. “Besides, nobody would worship Satan. That’s just dumb. But what I like about Christianity, or what I thought I liked about it, seems a little harder to find than I thought.”

“But all that casting spells and incantations and stuff, you were okay with all of that black cat kind of stuff?” Stoney asked.

“I don’t know why people get so hung up on that. I would get together with some friends and cast a spell that would help a girl do good on her SATs. Or to make it rain the night of the Hi-Y Club’s outdoor party. Or to make it snow in April when I didn’t have my term paper ready. Catholics are always praying for specific things. If I’m not mistaken, the Vine Street guys were praying for something bad to happen to Pastor Ben Hayden because he was preaching against them. I don’t understand how it is that Christians praying for God to intervene in current events in some really, really specific way is any different than me asking some different kind of spirit to do the same thing after a different kind of ritual.”

“Did all that stuff happen?” Stoney asked me.

“I remember it snowed in April one year,” I said. “I don’t know about the rest of it. Why the Hi-Ys?” I asked.

“They were a bunch of jocks. All jerks. Plus Abbie used to date the president and he was mean to her.”

“Ed,” I said, “How do we know you’re not making this all up? Is there any way to objectively verify any of what you’re telling us?”

“Have I ever lied to you Henry?”

“How would I know?”

“It’s not nice to accuse someone of dishonesty, Henry. Especially when you have no reason to believe he’s not telling the truth.” I could see his face in the mirror again and he looked hurt.

“I mean no offense,” I said. “But some of this is pretty wild. Kids talk about who’s dating who all the time and I never heard anybody say you were going out with Abbie or Jessica.”

“I didn’t really date Jessie,” he said. “That was kind of a one-weekend fling.”

“But I never heard about any of this,” I said.

“Henry, you weren’t really the most socially connected guy,” he said. “Plus I found Jesus and everything. Renounced my sinful ways.”

“So?”

“Lying would be sinful. I’ve moved on from Vine Street, but that doesn’t mean I’m a sinner like you and Stoney.”

“Yeah, right. Still, I don’t have a lot of ways to connect any of what you’re saying with things I’ve seen with my own eyes.”

“Well, if you’re ever close to Abbie, she has a little birth mark in the small of her back shaped like a little mitten,” he said. He seemed to sigh wistfully.

“Ah, shit,” said Stoney. “Like Michigan?”

“No, the other way,” he answered. “Thumb on the left.”

We got off the freeway at the Nashville exit. We left Ed there to thumb further north. He strapped on his backpack and took out his little American flag. He waved and smiled. “Thanks again, guys,” he said, and walked for the light. No, I have no idea how much of what he said was true.

When Stoney got out of the car to let Ed out, I noticed that he was still wearing his red martial arts belt.

Chapter 32: Coffee, Trouble, More Trouble, Unexpected Visit, Leftover Pizza, a Reduction in Household Entropy Level

The next morning I assumed I’d be last down as usual but no one was in the kitchen. There was no newspaper. Usually by the time I came down somebody had already brought in the paper, but since this had always happened before I got there I was unclear on the process. Maybe today I was first up. I started a pot of coffee in Mrs. W.’s ancient percolator then retrieved the paper from the driveway. As I was returning to the house I thought I heard a coyote but shook it off as a misperception. There were no coyotes in Tennessee in 1974.

When I got back to the kitchen, the coffee was perking and Clarence was pouring himself a bowl of cereal.

“Where’s Stoney?” I asked.

“In the garden,” he said.

“Why?” I asked. Stoney wasn’t much of an outdoorsman.

“Don Juan said a man must return to his plants,” said Clarence, somberly.

What kind of plants?” I asked.

“The Datura will become his friend,” said Clarence.

“Datura?”

“Yes. It will teach Stoney to fly,” he said, ladling maybe half a cup of sugar onto his Cheerios® and cracking open a Coke.®

“Fly? Like a bird?”

“Don Juan refused to answer this question.”

“Is this the guy from that Carlos Castaneda book you talk about all the time?” I asked.

“When a man has been enlightened he seeks others that share his path,” he said, between mouthfuls of highly sugared Cheerios®.

“‘Yes’ and ‘no’ are your options on answering that question,” I said.

“You Americans are so limited in your outlook,” he said, slurping back his Coke so fast that he coughed with his mouth closed and a lot of it sprayed out of his nose.

“Thank you for the insight, professor,” I said. He was looking at the mess he’d just made and thinking through whether he wanted to eat his Cheerios®, now bathed in Coca-Cola® and snot. He decided not, and moved his current breakfast to the sink, took out another bowl, and started afresh. Again he put at least half a cup of sugar on his Cheerios®. I looked out the window and Stoney appeared to be hopping around the garden like a frog. He tried to hop off after a squirrel but hit his head on a hardwood tree, which caught him up short. He looked at the tree in some confusion, as though it were not supposed to be there, then hopped off in the other direction.

“What have you done to Stoney?” I asked.

“Following the example of my own tutor, I have instructed Stonewall in the ways of the Datura.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A tool of enlightenment. A friend for Stoney,” he said. I had no patience for this.

“Okay, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to grab your ear and hold it really hard and tight so you can’t get away and then I’m going to beat the living daylights out of you until you tell me what’s going on with Stoney.”

“You’d never do that,” he said.

“Yes I would.” I asked. Stoney came back in from outside, holding his hands in front of him in a chipmunk-like way and sniffing at everything.

“Where is he?” Stoney asked.

“Who?” Clarence and I asked.

“The bearded dwarf in the wheelchair,” he said. “He was here just a few minutes ago. Before I went outside. He was singing ‘Free Bird.’”

“Would you like to sit down, Stoney?” I asked.

“Oh, fuck no. I need to fly.”

“Clarence said something about that,” I said. Stoney darted off and I could hear him gallop up the stairs. “Okay,” I said, grabbing Clarence’s ear. He stood. “So Stoney is non compos mentis but has no drug dealer here.” I had his ear pretty tight.

“So?” Clarence asked, worried.

“So you have introduced him to something weird,” I said.

“This is a journey for Stoney,” said Clarence. “None of your bee’s wax.”

“Also a journey for you,” I said.

“How so?” he asked. I pulled up on his ear a little bit.

“Ow!” he said.

I looked down and he was standing on his tiptoes. I pulled up the tiniest bit more. I wasn’t actually going to hit him, of course.

“The longest journey starts with a single step,” I said.

“Don Juan said something like that,” he said. I lifted his ear a fraction of an inch higher. His tippy-toes rose a bit. I wasn’t really hurting him, nor would I, but I’d had about enough of him.

“What did you give Stoney?” I asked.

“It’s just jimson weed!” he said. I let him go. “Don Juan gave it to Carlos Castaneda lots of times.”

“Where did you find it?”

“It’s growing in the back yard,” he answered, exasperated. Stoney, barefoot, came bounding down the stairs, hopping from a crouch, more kangaroo than frog now. Frogs land on their front legs, kangaroos don’t, and he was managing to hop around using only his legs despite the fact that he lacked a kangaroo’s tail for counterbalance and stability. He took the last six stairs in one hop and landed on a throw-rug that immediately slipped out from under him, causing him to fall flat on his back with an enormous crash. Clarence and I hurried over to see if he was okay.

“That was fucking amazing,” he said, to the ceiling.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I will never be the same again,” he said.

“Move your toes for me, handsome Stono,” I said. He did.

“I must have been flying for hours,” he said.

“No, you hopped down the stairs and fell on your ass. It lasted at most four seconds.” He looked up at me quizzically.

“Your reality is so …” he began.

“Reality-based?” I asked.

“Constipated,” he said. Still lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling, he retrieved a crumpled pack of Winstons from a pocket and tried to shake one free. Three or four fell out but he only seemed to notice the one that made it to his mouth. He had difficulty with his lighter and never got it to flame but thought he’d actually lit the cigarette, taking long drags from it and making like he was blowing smoke rings.

“Wow—that one bounced of the ceiling,” he said. “I’ve never seen that.”

“It happens,” I said. After a few seconds of contemplating imaginary smoke rings he appeared to pluck something invisible out of the air and put it in his mouth.

“What was that?” I asked.

“One of them turned into a Life Saver®,” he said, then looked at me and smiled shyly. “I knew you thought I was handsome,” he said. I left him to his reverie and looked up the Poison Control hotline phone number in the Yellow Pages. Somebody picked up after two rings.

“Poison Control Hotline,” said a low voice. “Who’m I speakin’ to?” He had a very East Tennessee accent.

“Henry Baida,” I said.

“What can I do you for, Mr. Baida?” he asked, then made a sound somewhere between a hiccup and a burp.

“I have a friend who may have eaten some jimson weed,” I said.

“Ah, shit,” he said. “How much?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“It doesn’t really matter. It wouldn’ tell me much even if you knowed. So he’s been readin’ Carlos Castaneda?” asked Poison Control, then made that noise again.

“Well, he’s got a friend who put him up to it who’s always quoting that damned book.”

“What’s he doin’?” asked Poison Control.

“Hallucinating. Hopping around like a kangaroo. Seeing things that aren’t there,” I said.

“How long ago’d he take it?” asked Poison Control.

“Hang on,” I said. “Yo. Einstein,” I said to Clarence. “How long ago did Stoney eat that stuff?”

“Maybe two hours?” he answered.

“My sources say about two hours ago,” I said to Poison Control.

“Really, that doesn’t much matter, either,” he said. “If you was to catch it real early you might could get him to puke it back up, but by the time you starts seein’ pictures, there’s nothin’ to do but ride it out.”

“How long will that take?” I asked.

“Well, assumin’ it’s not fatal, four to eight hours, as a rule, but a guy once tol’ me he’d tripped for two whole days on that shit.” He hiccupped again.

“Is there an antidote?” I asked.

“Nope.” I could almost hear his sadly shaking his head.

“What are the effects like?” I asked. There was a pause while Poison Control considered his answer.

“Well, it reminds me of taking a bunch of Benadryl® and then drinking a bottle of codeine cough syrup, only wif’ shimson weed you get hallucinations kindly like that blue blotter acid that was around in 1970,” he said.

“I see.”

“If’n it don’t kill him, tell him that there’s some good acid out there that won’t fuck him up nearly as much as that Datura shit. It looks like a Anacin tablet with a pink dot on it, but it’s a king-hell acid and you don’t do crazy shit like you do on the Datura. It’s lots safer’n eatin’ shit outta the back yard. Plus, when you eat weeds off the ground, how d’ya know a dog didn’ just piss on it?” I heard the sound of something falling in the living room.

“Hang on,” I said. “I need to go check on something. Don’t hang up, I have some questions.” I put down the phone and ran over the living room to find Stoney, flushed and red, trying to balance a ladder-back chair on his chin. Clarence was looking on with something between concern and alarm. I took the chair from Stoney.

“Talk to him when he’s doing something stupid,” I said to Clarence.

“About what?”

“Anything except Carlos Castaneda. Try baseball.” I ran back to the phone.

“Okay, so how many people die from this?” I asked Poison Control.

“Oh, wow, man, not sure. Not lots, I don’ think. Some. What was he doing when you checked on him?” He hiccupped. “Scuse me,” he said.

“He was trying to balance a chair on his chin,” I said.

“Oh, that’s not gonna go well,” he said. “You’re real uncoordinated and clumsy when you’re on that shit. Drop stuff all the time. But you think you’re Superman and you don’t understand why you keep fuckin’ up.”

“Any tips on how to get him through this?”

“Not really. Jush gotta live through it. Don’t let him pick up anything expensive, ‘cause he’ll break it.”

“Okay,” I said, preparing to hang up.

“I can tell you what not to do,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, hesitantly.

“I got this friend Junior down in Wadley. You know Wadley?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, unsure where this was going.

“Well when Junior did jimson weed he got so crazy I decided to start feeding him tequila figuring it would calm him down a little and thinkin’ he might get so drunk he’d pass out and sleep it off. But after maybe a pint of tequila he decided to go for a motorcycle ride. We stopped him, but he’s a big guy and was pretty determined and I think he may have broke a couple of Earl’s fingers in the ensuin’ melee. And then we went back to the house to watch the Alabama/USC game and nobody was watching Junior and then not ten minutes later we seen him sailing off down the back yard in his colors and motorcycle helmet on his little sister’s teeny pink Barbie® bike and damned if he didn’t go straight into the fish pond helmet and all so we had to run down there and pull him out so we missed most of the second half. It was one of the Bear’s last games, too.”

“Okay. So no tequila,” I said.

“No liquor of any kind. Maybe some beer. Or white wine,” he said.

“But no red wine?”

“No, no, no. Red wine would be a big mistake,” said Poison Control.

“Why is red wine a mistake but white wine is okay?” I asked.

“Because red wine will stain the carpet.”

Okay, bud. Gotta go.” I hung up.

“Good luck.” I returned to the living room. Stoney was sitting on the couch, sunglasses on, with a cigarette that was actually lit. Clarence was looking at Stoney with rapt attention.

“Which brings us to doggie style,” said Stoney.

“What are you guys talking about?” I asked.

“Stoney’s explaining the birds and the bees,” said Clarence.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Clarence. I told you to talk about baseball.”

“But the Tigers lost. Haven’t been the same since Denny McClain flamed out,” said Stoney. “Don’t wanna talk about baseball.” The doorbell rang.

“Oh, Lord. What now?” I asked no one. “Stay here. Watch Stoney. Keep him occupied.”

“Okay, so you were saying doggie style?” Clarence asked, as I left the room.

“No. Stoney, talk about anything else in the world.” I walked the few feet to the front door and opened it. There on the front porch were Ginny and her mother.

“Hello, Mrs. McColl. Hello Ginny,” I said. “Come in!”

“We’re just returning from a tournament at the University of Georgia and thought we’d come by and collect Clarence,” said Mrs. McColl. “We’re going to be in town for a few days and I’m sure he’d like to see his friends on Lookout Mountain,” she said, smiling. “How have you all been getting along?” At this point Clarence wandered into the entrance hall. He did not look especially happy.

“Clarence and Stoney have become fast friends. Clarence can do the crossword in less than seven minutes,” I said.

“Hi, Mom,” he said, sullenly.

“So what do you say to spending a few days at your own house?” she asked, beaming and obviously happy to see him.

“I actually kind of like it here,” he said. “Stoney’s been teaching me stuff.”

“Who’s this Stoney?” she asked.

“My friend Thomas Jackson from college. Mrs. Wertheimer is teaching us higher math this summer,” I said.

“Like … tutoring?” asked Mrs. McColl.

“Sort of, I guess, yes ma’am.” At this point Stoney came into the hall. He was doubled over, arms wrapped around his shins and hands clasped to his ankles, face between his thighs, lit cigarette between his lips, walking backwards, so that both his ass and his upside-down face were advancing in the same direction. When he reached us in the hall, he kind of tilted over backwards so that he rolled over his shoulders and ended up standing, in a graceful, gymnastic motion, cigarette still between his lips. He bowed slightly and smiled.

“Hello Clarence’s mom,” he said, and politely shook her hand. “He looks just like you. Good kid. You should be proud.” He turned to Ginny. “Hello pretty Peabody girl from near Campus Grill. Nice to see you again.” He still had his sunglasses on and a Winston dangling from his lips, but was otherwise almost courtly. Then he turned suddenly and ran out the back door like a scalded cat.

“What a strange young man,” said Mrs. McColl.

“He’s pretty cool. He’s just having a Yaqui visionary experience,” said Clarence. Ginny reached over and smacked him on the back of the head with a frown.

“When’s Margaret going to be back?” Mrs. McColl asked.

“Yes, ma’am. She’s at a bridge tournament in Callaway Gardens,” I said.

“Oh, she told me. I just can’t remember when she’s supposed to be back,” said Mrs. McColl.

“Sunday or Monday, depending on when they play Sunday,” I said.

“Well, I think we’re in town until Tuesday, so thank her for me and tell her if she doesn’t mind I’ll bring him back then.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s really okay if you want to leave me here,” said Clarence. At this point there was the unmistakable sound of a coyote from the back yard.

“What was that?” asked Mrs. McColl.

“I’ve been hearing coyote sounds the last day or so,” I said, “which is odd, because I don’t think we have coyotes here.”

“Come along, Clarence,” said Mrs. McColl.

“Really, Mom. I’m fine here,” said Clarence.

“No, you should come home,” she said.

“All right,” he said, glumly. There were smiles all around except for Clarence as the McColls made their good-byes and left. In the back yard, Stoney was crouched like a dog and was yip-yip-yipping like a coyote. The back door was still open. It was oppressively hot outside, and Stoney was perspiring heavily. I crossed the yard to talk to him as he barked.

“Come inside, Stoney,” I said.

“But I’m hungry,” he said. “I need to catch the squirrel who lives in this tree.”

“What would you do with a squirrel?” I asked. He stood and pitched his cigarette butt contemplatively.

“Well, we could get a chicken and some beans and tomatoes and corn and make a Brunswick stew. Or add some pork to that and we could make Kentucky burgoo.

“Come back inside, Stoney.”

“But what will we eat?”

“Cold pizza,” I said.

“Oh man, that’s like, wow, like, so cool.” He flopped straight onto his back. I cigarette popped out of his pocket. He held it at arm’s length and contemplated it carefully before lighting it. He then carefully inserted the coal end into his mouth and blew through the cigarette backwards so that a column of blue smoke rose straight into the air before developing chaotic curlicues about six inches up.

“Jesus, Stoney, be careful!” He replaced his cigarette to his normal, yellowed smoking fingers, raised his sunglasses and winked, something I’d never seen him do.

“It’s cool,” he said, and knocked out a smoke ring that seemed to sail up at about seventy miles per hour. He smiled beatifically at it and seemed to contemplate the beauty of the universe. “So on a non-logarithmic scale of one to ten, how handsome do you think I am?”

“Stoney—”

“No, you’re right. I should go first. I think you’re…” he seemed to scan me up and down for a few seconds. “Oh shit!” he exclaimed, leaping to his feet and pitching his cigarette butt.

“What?”

“I forgot about the yogurt!” He squared his sunglasses resolutely and sprinted towards the back door. I followed at a walk. I found him in the kitchen, stirring a half-gallon sized plastic picture of what looked like buttermilk, only without the flecks of butter.

“You’re making yogurt?” I asked.

“Oh sure. You ever been to Greece?” he answered.

“No…”

“Well, they have this way cool, far-out, kick-ass, take-no-prisoners yogurt that’s parsecs better than the jelly-sweetened stuff they sell here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. It’s just fantastic.”

“Okay…” I said.

“By experimenting with buttermilk cultures, temperatures, and times, I found I could make it pretty well even though there was nothing like it in the store. But until it stiffens you need to keep it pretty well-stirred or it will clabber. Which is cool in one way because you can make some pretty good cheese out of it then, but you have to start over on the yogurt. He stirred patiently for several more seconds, then seemed to freeze up, staring at some odd place in the middle distance. “Holy shit!”

“What?”

“Stir this for four more minutes, gently, not the way I’ve seen you beat pancake batter, then replace it in the warming compartment of this fine old stove.” He handed me the spoon and left the kitchen towards the dining room.

Okay. I did as told, listening for strange noises or indications that he was going outside again, but didn’t hear anything. After stirring for the requisite time I put the yogurt in the stove’s warming compartment and went looking for Stoney. He wasn’t anywhere to be found, but there was a new diagram on one of the blackboards:



I wasn’t sure what he was up to. There were some formulas written underneath, but I didn’t stop to look at them because I was worried about where he might have gone. I found him lying on the living room floor, drooling on a beautiful Persian rug that Mrs. W. later told me was a silk rug from Qum. His arms were outstretched and his legs were spread, so he looked like that pentagram drawing of Man by DaVinci.

“You okay?” I asked. No response. “Is this due to the figure you just wrote on the blackboard?” He lit a new cigarette off the old one even though the old one was only half gone. I brought him an ashtray from one of the end tables. He didn’t ditch the old cigarette, but held one in each hand, puffing quietly, alternating between them for his drags, but taking two drags from the long one for every one drag on the short one. Whether this was intentional only Stoney could say. I watched him in silence for a few minutes.

“You are one perceptive rectangular asshole,” he said, after a while, without looking at me.

“Excuse me?”

“Yes, yes, of course that figure reminded me of Leonardo, so I had to come outside and try it. I’m glad I did.” He took a drag off his left cigarette.

“You’re in the living room, Stoney,” I said. He ignored me.

“And the oddest part of the trip is … my clean, warm, soulful recognition that no one else in the world would have noticed that resemblance. Plus, I think you’re handsome, too, in a wiry, medium-sized kind of way.”

“Stoney—” I began.

He waved me off with his right cigarette. “I know. It embarrasses you to talk about your feelings, especially about The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. I understand.”

“That isn’t what I was going to say,” I answered.

“What were you going to say, mon petit chou?”

“Did you just call me a Brussels sprout?” I asked.

“Mon lapin, then,” he answered.

“I’m a rabbit?”

“Of course. A cute, medium-sized bunny rabbit who has an amazing predilection for math and recognizing patterns.”

“I had no idea you knew French,” I said.

“Naturellement je sais le Français, ” he answered. “In der Tat spreche ich Deutsch, auch. ”

“That sounded like German,” I said.

“Ja, Schatzi.”

“I don’t know any German,” I said.

“Sie don’t sprechen spanisch, irgendein, das ungerade ist. Aber Sie kennen Latein und Griechen, den ich nicht tue. Ich weiß, dass Sie, mein Schatz intelligent sind,” he answered.

“Not following you,” I said.

“Oh, never mind all that, Schatzi,” he said. “You were about to explain your feelings for me, but you were being … reticent.”

“No I wasn’t,” I said. He took a long drag off of his left cigarette.

“If this datura shit Clarence made me eat wasn’t so gonzo over-the-top mind-blowing I might be just as reticent as you. But fuck a frog on the Fourth of July, this stuff is insane. So what were you saying?”

“Let’s eat lunch. We still have pizza.” He propped himself up on his elbows.

“There’s pizza?” he asked.

“Yes, of course. Remember? We went to Pizza Hut Last night?”

“Is there beer?” he asked. I think if he hadn’t been wearing Ray-Ban Aviators his expression could have been recognized as intense.

“There’s a six-pack in the pantry, but it’s not cold. I caught Clarence trying to filch one last night.” Stoney leapt to his feet and pitched both buts with a simultaneous flick of the index fingers of both hands as though he were outdoors. I scrambled to retrieve them. Luckily they landed on the hardwood floor and I got them to the ashtray before they did any harm.

“Lead on Macduff. But I’ll hear naught of this eating cold pizza. The only logical way to deal with pizza leftovers is to manfully re-heat them in an oven, my gay friend Henry. Let’s get to it. Portez-moi à cette pizza que vous parlez de et je traiterai elle immédiatement. ” He marched off towards the kitchen and I followed.

He got progressively calmer as the day went on, although after lunch he claimed to be a bloodhound named Amos Moses and went sniffing through the closets upstairs. I settled in in the dining room to work through the problems Mrs. W. had left us. They were all multi-variable problems and they were tough, but there’s something inestimably appealing about working out the details of an infinite series. It’s always interesting to think about infinity. The problems all seemed similar until I realized that some of the series had sums and some did not, which was of course her clever way of teaching us to recognize the difference. After about an hour Stoney, still claiming to be named Amos Moses but now walking upright came downstairs with a box labeled “2000 piece puzzle” and a picture of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” on the front. He smiled at me and dumped the contents onto one of the tables and busied himself with turning them all right-side up and smoothing them out. After that was done he got himself a beer. I worked through the first three of the six problems Mrs. W. had left, and he steadily built the perimeter of his jigsaw puzzle. Neither of us said a word. By around midnight I’d solved all of Mrs. W’s problems and Stoney appeared to have solved about a third of his jigsaw puzzle. He had the rectangular outline al the way around, six or seven sun-like yellow objects, and a broad wavy stripe of yellow put together, but it was unclear how they’d fit together even though I’d seen the picture on the box just a few hours before.

“Stoney—” I began, in a conversational tone of voice. He jumped, startled, as if the creature from Alien had suddenly leapt out of its egg and through his visor.

“Fuck!” he shouted.

“Sorry. You’ve seemed pretty calm for the last few hours.”

“I have been! But that’s because I haven’t had fuckers yelling at me every few seconds!”

“So you’re still not okay?” I asked. He pondered his answer for a few seconds.

“Your question reveals a deep prejudice, nay hostility, against those who use drugs. You will never understand what it is like to be an oppressed minority in a non-drug-using society.”

“Ah, shit,” I said.

“What, my little cabbage?” he asked, returning his attention to his puzzle.

“I’m tired and want to go to bed.”

“Then bring me a bourbon and soda and go,” he said.

“You’re still fucked up,” I said.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I was tres clumsy when I was on the datura, and I don’t seem to be having any trouble handling these little puzzle pieces. My perceptions are a little off but I don’t seem to be having any trouble lining up the lines and colors on them. The yellows are a little intense but my reasoning appears to have returned to non-datura levels.” He fitted a small blue and white piece into a larger group of similar pieces that appeared to be one of the swirls in Van Gogh’s night sky, then suddenly wheeled back to me. “Where did that dwarf come from?” he asked.

“What dwarf?”

“The bearded dwarf in the wheelchair.”

“You said something about that, but I assumed it was the drugs,” I said. He thought about that with a semi-dubious look on his face.

“No little person of any sort in a wheelchair?” he asked.

“None.” He frowned and thought a minute more.

“Did anyone small, or with a beard, come over to sing ‘Free Bird?’” he asked.

“No. It was just you, me and Clarence until about eleven, then his mother and Ginny came by to pick him up…” I started.

“Fuck! That’s right! Clarence is missing! I never even noticed! Gack, what a terrible parent I’d be!”

“Did you just say ‘gack’?” I asked.

“You and Mrs. W. use it all the time,” he said, a little defensively. “Is it some kind of personal code?” he asked.

“No, no. You used it perfectly appropriately. I’ve just never heard anyone but Mrs. W. use that word.”

“You use it all the time.”

“Really? Are you sure?” I asked.

“Positive.”

“Okay. So you’re not going to go galloping out into the night to chase squirrels?” I asked.

“No.” He smiled and returned his attention to his puzzle. “I am unaware of any species of nocturnal squirrels.” He matched two puzzle pieces and looked back up. “And there was nobody over here in a wheelchair, or with a beard?”

“No.”

“Weird,” he said, looking back down.

“Why?”

“Because it seems like the experience was all drug. Usually drug experiences are part drug, part reality. Each informing the other.”

“(A), from my experience of you over the last ten months, I get a keen sense that drugs influence your reality experience, but no sense at all that reality influences your drug intake, and…” I began.

“Harsh,” Stoney interjected.

“(B), the guy on the Poison Control hotline indicated that people die every year from this stuff,” I sad.

“Who called Poison Control?”

“I did,” I answered.

“What’s the lethal dose?” he asked.

“No way to know. Apparently all parts of the plant are toxic. Impossible to determine what amount will kill you. Next time you take a tiny nibble and I could be singing hymns at your funeral.”

“What will you sing?” he asked.

“Whatever’s in the service.” He nodded.

“Oh, well. Go on to bed. And don’t worry, I won’t run off and do anything fucked up. It was … an interesting trip, but as I’m coming down I’m remembering it wasn’t much fun. Did I at any point climb up a tree thinking I was a cat?”

“Not that I could see.”

“So it goes without saying that I didn’t turn into a coyote.”

“No, but you really, really sounded like one,” I said.

“That’s reassuring. Go on to bed, but not before you bring me a bourbon and soda,” he said.

“Why does your drug experience lead to me serving you bourbon and soda?” I asked.

“Oh, it doesn’t, not at all,” he said.

“So why do I need to do it?” I asked, confused.

“Because I want a drink, I’m lazy, and I’m interested in this puzzle,” he said. “Particularly the pieces with yellow.” I got him a drink and went to bed.

The next morning when I came down the whole house smelled like biscuits and coffee. Still-warm bacon was draining its excess grease onto newsprint on the counter next to the stove, and Stoney was reading the Sunday Chattanooga Times sports section, resplendent in his sunglasses, jeans, a tee-shirt, and his purple bathrobe.

“Hi, bud,” he said. “Bacon biscuits and coffee comin’ up. Actually, coffee’s done. Help yourself.”

We had bacon and biscuits for breakfast. He’d made two-inch wide biscuits, which we split and buttered and turned into bacon sandwiches. Really good stuff. At the end I cleaned up, then wandered into the dining room. Stoney was sitting there staring at the blackboard where Mrs. W. had set out our six homework problems. The Starry Night puzzle was complete.

“These fuckers are hard,” he said.

“They look hard, but it’s just new limits, and then dealing with convergences and limits that increase or decrease. It kind of builds from there. So if…” and I began talking him through my solution to the first problem. He stood at a blackboard and reasoned out each step without any help from me as to the calculations, although I suggested the process at each step. It took about three hours to work through the problems this way, although it had taken me two days to work through them by myself. It felt odd. I was almost Stoney’s teacher, and I’d always been his collaborator before. He didn’t seem to notice. We were done by about one p.m. and Stoney made us bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches with some of the breakfast About five I heard the front door open and came downstairs. I found Mrs. W in the dining room staring at the blackboards.

“Hello, Henry,” she said, without looking at me. She was looking at the figure Stoney had drawn on the blackboard when he had been at his craziest the day before:




Underneath was written a formula: Area ACDA = (sorry, but blogger doesn't allow for math notation) in Stoney’s distinctive handwriting.

“Damn, he’s good,” she said.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“Stoney’s given us an elegant new solution to the volume of a cylinder problem we started with at the beginning of the summer. He’s turned it upside down, for some reason, but the math is easy enough to apply to the other part of the circle.” She then turned to the blackboards on which Stoney had worked out all of the homework problems. She looked back at me with a frown. “What happened? Did you have something else to do?”

“No, ma’am,” I said.

“Honey, this is strange. It’s not like you to let somebody else do all the work. What happened? Have you reached the end of your string?” she asked, looking at me, worried.

“Hey, Mrs. W.,” said Stoney, walking into the room with some kind of drink in hand, which he immediately handed to Mrs. W. “I think I heard most of that. Henry figured all of that out while I was messing around with Clarence, then he walked me through it yesterday. It looks like my handwriting, but it’s really all Henry. Another drink? I’ve made a decent gazpacho and really, I think if we have some cheese and bread with that, we’ll be good. Wine?”

“Where is Clarence?” she asked.

“His mother and Ginny came to puck him up yesterday. She said they would bring him back here Tuesday, if that’s okay.” She nodded.

We had a fun night, but about a week later Mrs. W pulled me aside and said “Henry, all of the upstairs closets have been re-organized. All of the fragrant objects in each closet have been gathered together. What happened? My sister said you and Stoney were acting really oddly when she came to pick up Clarence.”

“I’m sorry, but this makes no sense to me. Fragrant objects? Like what?”

“Cedar blocks, lavender wands. An old box of Constant Comment tea. All kinds of stuff. But the closets have been tidied and everything aromatic gathered in one corner.” I suspected this had to do with Stoney’s canine impulses while he was on the Datura, but couldn’t make sense of it. I tried to think it through but got nowhere. “While I was at the bridge tournament, were the rules of the house violated?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “Not as I understand them. Nothing illegal took place.” I was thinking this through.

“Henry?”

“No, ma’am, not at all, but next time we do this I’ll suggest a refinement to the rules.” She thought, then she smiled.

“Fair enough.”