But what did it matter, really?
But it happened a long time ago. Like in the twelfth century.
Better to drift. Vicky was looking troubled again.
Suddenly music began to flood down from the speakers in the ceiling, and that was nice… much nicer than thinking about charley horses and leaking eyeballs. The music was soft and yet majestic. Much later, Andy decided (in consultation with Vicky) that it had been Rachmaninoff. And ever after when he heard Rachmaninoff, it brought back drifting, dreamy memories of that endless, timeless time in Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh Hall.
How much of it had been real, how much hallucination? Twelve years of off-and-on thought had not answered that question for Andy McGee. At one point, objects had seemed to fly through the room as if an invisible wind were blowing-paper cups, towels, a blood-pressure cuff, a deadly hail of pens and pencils. At another point, sometime later (or had it really been earlier? there was just no linear sequence), one of the test subjects had gone into a muscular seizure followed by cardiac arrest-or so it had seemed. There had been frantic efforts to restore him using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, followed by a shot of something directly into the chest cavity, and finally a machine that made a high whine and had two black cups attached to thick wires. Andy seemed to remember one of the “grad assistants” roaring, “Zap him! Zap him! Oh, give them to me, you fuckhead!”
At another point he had slept, dozing in and out of a twilight consciousness. He spoke to Vicky and they told each other about themselves. Andy told her about the car accident that had taken his mother’s life and how he had spent the next year with his aunt in a semi-nervous breakdown of grief. She told him that when she was seven, a teenage babysitter had assaulted her and now she was terribly afraid of sex, even more afraid that she might be frigid, it was that more than anything else that had forced her and her boyfriend to the breakup. He kept… pressing her.
They told each other things that a man and a woman don’t tell each other until they’ve known each other for years… things a man and a woman often never tell, not even in the dark marriage bed after decades of being together.
But did they
That Andy never knew.
Time had stopped, but somehow it passed anyway.
13
He came out of the doze a little at a time. The Rachmaninoff was gone… if it had ever been there at all. Vicky was sleeping peacefully on the cot beside him, her hands folded between her breasts, the simple hands of a child who has fallen asleep while offering her bedtime prayers. Andy looked at her and was simply aware that at some point he had fallen in love with her. It was a deep and complete feeling, above (and below) question.
After a while he looked around. Several of the cots were empty. There were maybe five test subjects left in the room. Some were sleeping. One was sitting up on his cot and a grad assistant-a perfectly normal grad assistant of perhaps twenty-five-was questioning him and writing notes on a clipboard. The test subject apparently said something funny, because both of them laughed in the low, considerate way you do when others around you are sleeping.
Andy sat up and took inventory of himself. He felt fine. He tried a smile and found that it fit perfectly. His muscles lay peacefully against one another. He felt eager and fresh, every perception sharply honed and somehow innocent. He could remember feeling this way as a kid, waking up on Saturday morning, knowing his bike was heeled over on its kickstand in the garage, and feeling that the whole weekend stretched ahead of him like a carnival of dreams where every ride was free.
One of the grad assistants came over and said, “How you feeling, Andy?”
Andy looked at him. This was the same guy that had injected him-when? A year ago? He rubbed a palm over his cheek and heard the rasp of beard stubble. “I feel like Rip van Winkle,” he said.
The GA smiled. “It’s only been forty-eight hours, not twenty years. How do you feel, really?”
“Fine.”
“Normal?”
“Whatever that word means, yes. Normal. Where’s Ralph?”
“Ralph?” The GA raised his eyebrows.
“Yes, Ralph Baxter. About thirty-five. Big guy. Sandy hair.”
The grad assistant smiled. “You dreamed him up,” he said.
Andy looked at the GA uncertainly. “I did what?”
“Dreamed him up. Hallucinated him. The only Ralph I know who’s involved in all the Lot Six tests in any way is a Dartan Pharmaceutical rep named Ralph Steinham. And he’s fifty-five or so.”
Andy looked at the GA for a long time without saying anything. Ralph an illusion? Well, maybe so. It had all the paranoid elements of a dope dream, certainly; Andy seemed to remember thinking Ralph was some sort of secret agent who had wasted all sorts of people. He smiled a little. The GA smiled back… a little too readily, Andy thought. Or was that paranoia, too? Surely it was.
The guy who had been sitting up and talking when Andy woke up was now being escorted from the room, drinking from a paper cup of orange juice.
Cautiously, Andy said: “No one got hurt, did they?”
“Hurt?”
“Well-no one had a convulsion, did they? Or-”
The grad assistant leaned forward, looking concerned. “Say, Andy, I hope you won’t go spreading anything like that around campus. It would play bloody hell with Dr. Wanless’s research program. We have Lots Seven and Eight coming up next semester, and-”
“Was there anything?”
“There was one boy who had a muscular reaction, minor but quite painful,” the GA said. “It passed in less than fifteen minutes with no harm done. But there’s a witchhunt atmosphere around here now. End the draft, ban ROTC, ban Dow Chemical job recruiters because they make napalm… Things get out of proportion, and I happen to think this is pretty important research.”
“Who was the guy?”
“Now you know I can’t tell you that. All I am saying is please remember you were under the influence of a mild hallucinogenic. Don’t go mixing up your drug-induced fantasies with reality and then start spreading the combination around.”
“Would I be allowed to do that?” Andy asked.
The GA looked puzzled. “I don’t see how we could stop you. Any college experimental program is pretty much at the mercy of its volunteers. For a lousy two hundred bucks we can hardly expect you to sign an oath of allegiance, can we?”
Andy felt relief. If this guy was lying, he was doing a really superlative job of it. It had all been a series of hallucinations. And on the cot beside his, Vicky was beginning to stir. “Now what about it?” the GA asked, smiling. “I think I’m supposed to be asking the questions.”
And he did ask questions. By the time Andy finished answering them, Vicky was fully awake, looking rested and calm and radiant, and smiling at him. The questions were detailed. Many of them were the questions Andy himself would have asked.
So why did he have the feeling they were all window dressing?
14
Sitting on a couch in one of the smaller Union lounges that evening, Andy and Vicky compared hallucinations.
She had no memory of the thing that troubled him the most: that bloody hand waving limply above the knot of white tunics, striking the chart, and then disappearing. Andy had no recollection of the thing that was most vivid to her: a man with long blond hair had set up a folding table by her cot, so that it was just at her eye level. He had put a row of great big dominoes on the table and said, “Knock them down, Vicky. Knock them all down.” And she had raised her hands to push them over, wanting to oblige, and the man had gently but firmly pressed her hands back down on her chest. “You don’t need your hands, Vicky,” he had said. “Just knock them down.” So she had looked at the dominoes and they had all fallen over, one after the other. A dozen or so in all.
“It made me feel very tired,” she told Andy, smiling that small, slantwise smile of hers. “And I had gotten this idea somehow that we were discussing Vietnam, you know. So I said something like, ‘Yes, that proves it, if South Vietnam goes, they all go.’ And he smiled and patted my hands and said, ‘Why don’t you sleep for a while, Vicky? You must be tired.’ So I did.” She shook her head… “But now it doesn’t seem real at all. I think I must have made it up entirely or built a hallucination around some perfectly normal test. You don’t remember seeing him, do you? Tall guy with shoulder-length blond hair and a little scar on his chin?”
Andy shook his head.
“But I still don’t understand how we could share
“Isn’t it more likely that we just discussed the same fantasy and then forgot we did?” Vicky asked. He agreed it was a strong possibility, but he still felt disquieted by the whole experience. It had been, as they say, a bummer. Taking his courage in his hands, he said, “The only thing I really am sure of is that I seem to be falling in love with you, Vicky.”
She smiled nervously and kissed the corner of his mouth. “That’s sweet, Andy, but”
“But you’re a little afraid of me. Of men in general, maybe.”
“Maybe I am,” she said.
“All I’m asking for is a chance.”
“You’ll have your chance,” she said. “I like you, Andy. A lot. But please remember that I get scared. Sometimes I just… get scared.” She tried to shrug lightly, but it
