the steps.
She swayed, dizzy, and Knit Cap Boy reached to steady her.
“Here, let me,” the cop said, taking Alexis by the shoulder. “Are you okay, ma’am?”
The cop’s eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, and the dwindling trickle of pedestrians reflected in the twin black lenses. He slid his arm around her shoulder and guided her toward a concrete bench that was half-surrounded by low shrubbery.
She sat, gazing at the oak canopy above, the new leaves bright green in the sun. The clouds drifted by in a cotton-candy kaleidoscope.
As an undergrad, Alexis had eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms once, and this experience mimicked that trip. Her body felt simultaneously weightless and thick with fluid, as if she were a warm, water-filled balloon.
“Can you talk?” the cop said. His face was pocked with large dark pores, one side of his mouth drooping. The roundness of his shoulders suggested a former weightlifter whose muscles were now making their slow surrender to gravity and age.
Something about his demeanor tugged at her, but her sensory distortion prevented her from focusing. She noticed the books were gone from her hands. The grass of the courtyard buckled like the waves of a turbulent sea, the people crossing it bending and swaying as if made of soft rubber.
Oxygen deprivation. It’s making me hallucinate.
Yet she could feel air circulating in her lungs. Indeed, she could imagine the oxygen entering her bloodstream, flowing through her limbs, racing back through her system to be exhaled out her nostrils, laden with carbon dioxide. Her skin itched with cellular regeneration, and she was acutely aware of her saliva glands. This was no ordinary spider bite.
Clarity descended, and with it a deep unease, as if something had gone horribly wrong and couldn’t be fixed.
“Listen to me,” the cop said. He bent forward until she could smell his mint toothpaste.
I’m all ears, she wanted to say, and the image of her naked flesh, covered with aural cavities, made her giggle. If she could make her fingers work, she would get rid of these clothes. The sun was a glorious patch of golden pleasure, melting against her skin. The bright-green odor of spring was as thick as the curling clouds.
“Do you remember talking with Celia Smith?” the cop said, though his tone was not like that of a demanding interrogator working a victim behind a two-way mirror. This was no detective-show copycat, a type she’d found most university cops to be. Though trained and certified, they often had inferiority complexes that sometimes caused them to overstep their authority.
Not that a cop implied menace in her new, vivid world. She licked her lips and found they tasted of mangoes. A phrase, a name, niggled at the back of her mind like a thin wire trying to fish a wedding ring from a drain. Celia?
“Dr. Briggs wanted me to give you a message,” he said, maintaining his low, melodic voice. She gazed into his sunglasses, saw her own face doubled, both reflections smirking with swollen, leering lips.
Briggs.
The name stirred something inside her. Briggs had taken something from her, long ago. Was he some frat boy she’d dated? Someone who had treated her badly?
The cop’s head tilted toward the sky. The Bell Tower clock clanged in the distance, the vibrations tickling Alexis’s cochlea, digging into her skull like the fast, silvery bit of an electric drill.
The sudden pain caused her to clamp her teeth down on her tongue and the sensation was that of biting tinfoil. Her hands and feet, which had been so bloated and warm moments ago, now burned with static. The pain allowed her to focus, finally recognizing she was on a campus bench.
“Briggs wanted me to tell you this,” the cop said, leaning close enough that she thought he was going to kiss her cheek. Instead, he whispered, “The Monkey House is open for business.”
The man drew away, the dampness of his breath lingering a moment on her earlobe before evaporating. He stood, looked around, adjusted his sunglasses, and headed for the nearest building, his simian movement a reminder that evolution was an ongoing process.
Monkey House.
Alexis rocked back and forth, fever sluicing up her spine, the limbs of the nearby oaks swaying as if driven by a frantic, fierce wind. No, the limbs weren’t swaying. They were reaching, scooping down with spindly, cracked hands to claw at her, tangle in her hair, scratch her face and bare skin.
The roots lifted, shaking away dirt and the stiffness of long sleep. The nearest one stepped toward her, quivering with eagerness.
Nothing in her index of diagnostic manuals, textbooks, and clinical observations could explain away these hallucinations. And though her trained mind insisted trees could not walk, the massive oaks couldn’t care less about symptoms of delusion.
Crazy people always believed in the peculiar reality that imprisoned them, and Alexis understood for the first time that a delusion wasn’t just a distorted perception.
For the sufferer, it became reality. And even a delusion could make you bleed.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand. Students sat around the compound, oblivious to the monstrous miracle in their midst. A blackbird lifted from one of the tree branches, fought a waft of wind, and rose into the sky.
Alexis leaned back, shielding her eyes from the grasping limbs, the tannic aroma of green oak burning her nostrils. Her legs were damp sand, her throat a cold pipe, her lungs buckets of dead ash scooped from an ancient burial pyre.
The gathering oaks breathed, their whispered words taunting her in the voices of wood. Lumber creaked, sap spat, leaves rattled.
The Monkey House was real.
“You okay, miss?”
These trees, which had been young when the first English speakers had landed on the Eastern shore with their muskets and axes, had their own language. How could she reply in any way but a scream? She clamped her hands over her ears and wriggled against the unyielding concrete bench.
Nothing like the “brink of madness” existed. She understood now. No soft gray fog created a foreboding borderland between sanity and the land beyond.
The two states existed simultaneously, commingling in the same ether, built of common atoms. The stuff of stars was all the same, only some burned while some bled.
“Miss, you don’t look so hot.”
She blinked. Students crowded the sidewalk around her, moving in twin but opposing streams. The young man in the knit cap held her books, brows scrunched above the plastic frames of his glasses. Across the stretch of lawn, the trees stood majestic and gray, and a whiff of cigarette smoke trailed past as a student grabbed a nicotine fix before class. The sun reflected off the neat rows of windows, the bricks of the buildings as solid as the hands that had stacked them.
Reality.
It wasn’t a state of mind or an illusion of perception. It was nothing more than a shared and mutually accepted madness. An agreed-upon delusion kept the Earth fixed in the heavens and the trees knitted deeply into the soil.
And Briggs was no longer a fantasy. He had happened. The Monkey House had happened.
The Monkey House was real.
And she couldn’t let it show. No matter what, she had to maintain appearances. She was Dr. Alexis Morgan, respected neurochemist, not some trippy-dippy English professor.
“I’m fine,” she said, taking the books as she spied the knotted shoulders of the fullback bobbing above the crowd, hurrying away. From the concrete steps, the campus cop observed her behind frigid shades.
A fugue experience. Mind slip. Deja vu of an event that couldn’t have happened.
Yet the warm glow of a pinprick emanated across her back, and she was afraid the dizziness would return. Before the cop could climb down the steps, before the trees could walk, before the injected venom could taint her bloodstream, she smiled in gratitude at Knit Cap Boy and hurried across the compound, toward the center of campus and the safe, familiar walls of her office.
