Shift: A Novel

and chairs and carpets. One blissed-out bohemian lay stretched on the long trestle table with various glasses and candlesticks and religious tomes crowded around him (leading the doctor to wonder if the sleeper had climbed over them to get to his berth or if the other occupants of the room had placed them there after he was already ensconced). The sleeper had covered his face with a cloth napkin on which the first hexagram of the I Ching—creativity in its purest and most powerful expression—had been drawn in six rainbow-colored lines. The doctor took the fact that he could see all six colors as a sign he was coming down, although why they were blinking like a neon sign was anyone’s guess.

He gazed at the snorkeling forms. At least half the people hadn’t been here at the beginning of the week. They were growing all the time, his little band of colonists, drawn here in flashes of intuition and inspiration like lightning to a rod spiking from a church steeple. And for every one of them here, there were ten or a hundred or a thousand out in the world, turning on to the new layers of consciousness that an ever-growing assortment of psychedelic drugs was revealing to the world. The doctor envisioned these new levels of mentation like an enormous reservoir of water pooling behind a giant dam—like, say, the dam the Russians had recently begun building for the Egyptians on the upper reaches of the Nile. The world’s longest river and, in historical terms, the oldest. For thousands of years it had served its population. The annual flood deposited silt along its banks, making it possible for the Egyptians to grow their famed cotton and wheat, while the water itself provided transport, both for people and for the enormous slabs of stone the pharaohs’ engineers floated down its surface to build the pyramids. Now in the twinkling of an eye its offering was being augmented to an almost unimaginable degree. It was estimated that the dam, when completed, would double the energy output of the entire nation. Whole towns, lit previously by candles or gas, would suddenly burst into light. To the doctor, the new drugs were transforming the brain on a similar magnitude. The sleepy current of human consciousness was being amplified into a raging torrent as it sluiced through the turbine of the psychedelic experience, and soon the whole world would be turned on to …

The doctor pulled up short. The thought of turbines had nudged something in his brain. Water. Rushing. Breathing. Breathing? Ah yes. That was it. Not snorkeling. Snoring.

Heh.

Meanwhile Morganthau strode ahead, as oblivious to the doctor’s musings as he was to the sleepers around him. He seemed deliberately to make as much noise as possible—stiff leather soles clomping on the parquet, fingers jingling the change in his pockets, breath whooshing from his mouth like water through the aforementioned turbines. Even from the back you could tell he was pure Company Man. The pristine crease that went up the back of his trousers, as if he never sat down to rest or shit or gaze up at the stars. The boxy jacket, cut wide at shoulders, waist, and hips to conceal any hint of anatomical curve. Over it all the broad-brimmed hat pulled low to cover the head—the brain, the mind—and conceal the eyes. This was not a person. Not a body. This was a suit. A suit with a mouth. A mouth that didn’t ingest but only barked: orders, complaints, sarcastic asides. If you wouldn’t mind sparing me the blue show, Doctor?

But, Company Man or no, he was also the liaison between the doctor and the people whose money and connections made all of this possible—the sleepers, and the room they slept in, and the chemicals that coursed sweetly through their veins—and so the doctor hurried after him, being careful to place his feet in the agent’s steps in order to cancel out the man’s presence in the room. Fortunately the agent left glowing red footprints behind him, so it was easy to know where to step. Toward the end, however, the agent’s stride grew longer: three feet, five feet, a dozen, till he was leaping across the room like the monkey god Hanuman jumping through the heavens. The doctor leapt from hillock to hillock, mountaintop to mountaintop, from the Berkshires to the Catskills to the Alleghenies, from the Rockies to the Sierra Nevada and across the Pacific Ocean to the Kunlun and the Hindu Kush and the great Himalayas, where Everest itself towered snow-capped and cloud-shrouded over the world.

So intent was the doctor on not slipping off the sheer slopes that he didn’t realize the dark silhouette ahead of him had stopped to pull open the front door, and he crashed into its back. Morganthau spun around, his right hand reaching reflexively inside the left panel of his jacket. But then he saw it was just the doctor, and, scowling with distaste, he stepped back and motioned him through the door.

The doctor regarded the portal. All he could see was a bottomless darkness swirling with razor-sharp snow crystals blown about by a howling gale. He shook his head and smiled, as if to say, You can’t fool me that easily.

“Oh no, after you.” Let him plunge a thousand feet over the precipice.

Rolling his eyes (the doctor could see this despite the hat’s shadow because the pupils were emitting a green glow), Morganthau stepped outside. Floorboards materialized beneath his feet, then the rest of the large covered veranda that stretched the length of the house. In another moment the Himalayan vista had disappeared, and the doctor could see acres of lawn gleaming silver in the moonlight. Laughing a little, he stepped outside. The cold air of a New England summer night was bracing, not to mention the dew-slicked floorboards beneath his one bare foot and the novel sensation of damp air moving around his genitals. Sobriety settled on his head like a hat, only slightly askew. A shame a pair of pants didn’t come with it.

Morganthau was stamping his foot on the porch just as he had outside the door to the doctor’s bedroom. His deeply dimpled chin, less Rock Hudson than Rock Quarry, the Flintstones version of America’s most eligible bachelor, protruded from the shadow of his hat brim, a puritanical frown pulling down the corners of his thin-lipped mouth.

The doctor shrugged at the eyeless face.

“Aftershock.” The doctor waved a hand back at the living room they’d just passed through. “You and I just circumnavigated half the globe.”

Morganthau’s upper lip twitched. “By definition, Doctor, circumnavigation requires a complete revolution. ‘Half the globe’ is simply a very long trip.”

The doctor’s eyes twinkled. “You can say that again.”

Morganthau seemed about to make some peeved rejoinder, then broke off. He fluttered his hands in the direction of the doctor’s waist. “Dr. Leary, please. If you would kindly adjust your, ah, shirt.”

The doctor looked down and saw that the tails of his shirt had parted around his penis like a waterfall around a rock (although, on closer inspection, he realized the protuberance was actually the bottom of his tie, but he decided against pointing this out). Chuckling slightly, he pulled his shirt closed and fastened the bottom button, then hurried off after Morganthau, who had already descended the stairs and turned toward the right. He walked quickly, as if more comfortable having the doctor’s genitalia behind him, and soon they’d rounded the northeast corner of the Big House and were heading toward the thick stand of pines that crowded the back of the building, and which sheltered—the doctor suddenly remembered why the agent had roused him in the first place—the coach house, i.e., the gamekeeper’s cottage.

“Has something happened?” he called after Morganthau.