Shift: A Novel

He caught a last glimpse of the station’s facade in the rearview mirror, five hundred feet of Doric columns stretching out like God’s own picket fence. It really was impressive—more imposing than the biggest monuments in Washington—but he thought he remembered hearing talk of tearing it down. But in truth BC was less concerned with the possibility of New York losing its grandest edifice than with his own loss of a smaller piece of property. Not his briefcase: his bookmark, which, like his house, his name, and his sense of revulsion at the crude workings of the human body, he’d inherited from his mother. Thus are history’s losses measured: eight acres of stone and glass and steel on the one hand; on the other, an ivory sliver no bigger than a driver’s license. Both smudged from years of contact with human hands, and even more obscured by the shroud of sentiment that makes it difficult for us to see clearly the things we hold most dear. It would be the bookmark BC missed more in the years to come, Pennsylvania Station having played a significant role in the life of New York City but not in his.

But all that was in the distant future. Right now he had to get to Millbrook,⁹ to something Director Hoover had called an “experimental community” run by a Dr. Timothy Leary.⁶ He had no idea what was so important that both the FBI and the CIA had to send men to investigate. All he knew was that he had to get there before Melchior.

Millbrook, NY

November 4, 1963

Chevy’d added an optional 150-hp engine to the ’62 Corvair, but the Bureau’d clearly stuck with the 98-hp mid-range model. BC could’ve sworn the little engine cursed at him, and carbon monoxide spewed from the heater vents in visible gusts, but the little minx did what she was told. The posted limit on the Taconic was sixty-five; BC stamped both feet on the accelerator if the car dropped below ninety. He had to fight the Corvair’s tendency to oversteer, a consequence of its unusual engine placement over the rear axle, and on top of that rush hour had begun. Despite this, BC covered the fifty-mile shot up the curvy, car-choked parkway in thirty- two minutes.

Once in Millbrook he had to find Dr. Leary’s community—Castle or Castille, Castalia, something like that. The directions had been in his briefcase (along with the files on Project Orpheus), but even without them he had no trouble locating his target. At the edge of town he saw a large hand-painted sign in multicolored bubble letters:

YOU ARE ON THE PATH TO TRUE

ENLIGHTENMENT

(JUST TURN LEFT!)

Beneath that, someone had added in smaller but significantly clearer letters:

FREAKS GO HOME!

BC knew nothing about either the freaks or their detractors, but his initial reaction was to side with the latter, if only for their penmanship.

A mile down the road he came to an absurd fieldstone gatehouse, complete with a turret peaked like a witch’s cap and something that looked a lot like a portcullis. Another half mile of curved driveway led to an enormous and extravagant building, a Lilliputian dollhouse swollen to Brobdingnagian proportions, with towers and gables and hundreds of feet of porch wrapping around the whole thing. Glasses and plates were strewn around the unmown lawn that stretched in front of it, along with a truly remarkable number of wine and liquor bottles, while a glowering pine forest encroached on the back. The dense trees, already losing their color in the failing light, made the giant house seem two-dimensional, as if you would open the front door and emerge on the other side of a theatrical flat. With the exception of the dishes and bottles and a few items of clothing, the place seemed to be deserted.

The Corvair sighed in relief when he killed the engine, and a moment later BC heard the sound of a distant jackhammer—woodpecker, he realized a moment later, and chuckled at himself. It had been a long time since he’d been in the country. The things of nature sounded like the things of man to his ears, when even he knew it should have been the other way around.

All at once he felt his shirt plastered to the small of his back, realized he was still sitting in the car with both hands glued to the wheel. Somewhat sheepishly, he opened the door. It was hardly better outside. A cool, cloying haze pressed wetly down on everything. Even the blades of grass sagged beneath its weight.

It was only after he was standing on the bent grass that he realized he hadn’t wanted to leave the relative safety of the car. He was a boy of the suburbs. He liked trees and grass and birds just fine, but he liked them regimented, the grass mowed, the trees planted a uniform distance from one another, the birds regulated by local ordinance. But it was more than that. There was something unnerving about this place—something distinct from the humidity and the litter scattered over the lawn and the ragged curtains flapping from the open windows like a hydra’s tongues. Something that had to do with the glowering pine forest on the far side of the house, which, like a painting by Magritte, seemed to suck up what was left of the sunlight even as each needle remained as sharply outlined as a syringe. The house was his immediate objective, of course (assuming these people hadn’t taken to living in trees), but somehow he sensed that the forest was his ultimate destination. He cursed himself for getting sucked into Melchior’s contumely instead of reading the files in his briefcase as he should have done. The scattered, spooky phrases Melchior had tossed around flitted through his head—“sleeper agents” and “psychological experiments” and “Manchurian candidates” and “mental powers.” A few solid facts would have gone a long way toward easing his nerves. As it was, he was going to have to rely on his wits and—he squeezed his arm against his side, as if it might have disappeared with his briefcase—his gun.

The woodpecker drilled, paused, drilled, paused. There was a longer pause, then a bout of drilling so sustained that BC half expected to hear the crack of falling timber.

Centering his hat firmly on his head, he began to walk toward the porch. Before he’d gone five steps the front door opened. BC stopped short. So did the girl on the porch. BC wasn’t sure why she stopped. He was wearing a normal suit, after all, whereas she was wearing a pair of denim pants that had been cut off all the way to the crease of her pelvis and—he squinted—yup, nothing else. He had to squint because the girl had exceptionally thick, long, dark hair pulled forward over her shoulders as in portraits of Lady Godiva. BC thought perhaps she was wearing a French bikini top. But no, her upper body was bare. The skin visible on the sides of her breasts was as evenly tanned as her arms, suggesting this wasn’t the first time she’d walked outside so sparsely attired, and when she lifted her right arm to wave at him, her hair fell to one side and there, as full as an apple and brown as a piece of toast, was her breast.

The closest BC had ever come to seeing a naked chest was in the intimate apparel section of the Sears catalogs he hid in his bedroom closet. Their chaste airbrushed photographs of bullet bras made a pair of breasts look as geometrically pristine as side-by-side snowcapped mountains, whereas this was a sac of living, quivering flesh—not symmetrical at all, but gently sloped on the top and softly curved beneath. At the sight of it, BC’s fingertips tingled and for some reason he found himself imagining how it would feel in his hands. Like a dove, he thought. Warm and soft, the heartbeat faintly palpable in his palm. Another man might have envisioned a less delicate animal, a more vigorous touch. Might have felt the tingle in a part of his anatomy other than his fingertips.