White Tiger on Snow Mountain (16 page)

It was then that the world first revealed itself to me in all its awful beauty, rising up suddenly, like a lion in the path, like a
monstrous swan beating its wings to say: Everything you know and dream of is nothing, not even a speck of what is. The life of even the tiniest ant is as infinitely complex as a man’s and the life of a man is like a god’s. And even this vast whole is enclosed in my endlessness like the faintest glimmer of the first thought on the dawn of the first day of creation. Everything is still possible. You have not yet begun to live.

I Think of Demons

THINGS TO DO THIS SUMMER

Natural History Museum/Planetarium

Central Park

Subway

3-D movie

Camping

This list is taped to Philip’s wall, written in multicolored pastels and markers on thick paper torn from a sketch pad. In case his parents wander in, he has left off the end of the title: ON ACID. As it is, when we cross off an item, Philip’s dad grunts in approval and gives him more dough. There is a list of records too:

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
—Pink Floyd (with Syd Barrett of course)

Larks’ Tongues in Aspic
&
Red
—King Crimson

Bitches Brew
—Miles Davis

Metal Machine Music
—Lou Reed

There Comes a Time
—Gil Evans

The idea is to put on the record, or better yet pop in the tape so you don’t have to change it, then drop the acid. Lie back with your eyes closed, headphones on, and try your best not to move or stir or blink until the album ends . . . no matter what happens next. It’s harder than it sounds. Some records are interminable, the pressure builds, and your eyes burst open. You sit up, gasping, as if you were drowning in your own mind. Others bury you so deep in dreams you can’t get up at all. The record spins and clicks and ends, and you keep your eyes shut, afraid to open them, or forget they are even closed, as you wander, lost, trying to remember where you are, your name.

Then on July Fourth, the hottest weekend of the year, Philip’s parents drive us up to Harriman State Park to go camping. I let my parents think Philip’s family will be with us, but really they just drop us off with our sleeping bags and a cooler full of food. He brings paints, paper, charcoal, and pastels. I have a leather-bound notebook and a pen. I hope to be a poet, he an artist.

“No,” says Philip. “We already are. If I paint a stroke”—he blobs Kremnitz white on a tree—“then I am a painter. Just like when you write a word, you become a writer.” He taps my new book, leaving behind a white ghost of his fingerprint.

I nod but don’t tell him that all I’ve written inside is the date, now a couple of weeks old. We start setting the tent up, and two hours later, as it leans crookedly against a tree, we eat the acid, two hits of blotter each, and step out for a nice stroll in the forest before lunch.

We wander along, wading through the tide of old mulch, brushing back the branches that hide the inner, leaf-lit chambers,
chatting and chuckling, until we hear the silence and it shuts us up. I listen to it, that ocean of silence that is always back there, into which each birdcall and dying leaf falls. It is a presence, this quiet, a medium. I am struck by the fact that everything around me is alive. In the city everything is dead but us. It is a graveyard of ten-story tombs, and we are the ghosts who haunt it. In the suburbs the people are dead but don’t know it, and in the empty, groomed streets and blank windows, only cars and TVs move. Here the trees, the weeds, the hills are all breathing, and the air hums with insects. Even the dead matter, the torn leaves and rotten trees, the earth itself, is alive and seething with bugs, worms, microbes. Of course, I knew this before—but did I really
know
it? Did I sense it the way I do now, embracing the flanks of a roaring oak and feeling the power surge through me?

“Everything around us is alive,” I whisper to Philip, who is up ahead of me on the path.

“I know,” he answers flatly without turning around.

“But do you really
know
it?” I ask.

“Oh, I fucking know it all right,” he says, his voice choked with feelings. I realize he’s crying, clean streaks through the dust on his cheeks.

“What’s wrong?”

He wipes away the tears.

“Nothing. What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m thirsty,” I say, and it occurs to me, we have no water, no sunblock, no food. I look around: trees. The cicadas cough like throats choked with sand, dropping their discarded bodies. I see a skull full of pebbles.

“Do you know which is the way back to our camp?” I ask.

Philip stops and peers around, turning in a circle. The back of his neck is bright red. His T-shirt is soaked through with sweat.

“No,” he says. “Which?”

“I don’t fucking know. That’s why I asked you.”

“Asked me what?”

“Oh fuck,” I say, panic starting. “We’re lost.” I institute emergency survival procedures: preserve moisture by collecting saliva in my mouth and smear damp earth on my face to shield it from the damaging rays of the sun.

But Philip stays cool. He pats his pockets thoughtfully, looking for the cigarettes that aren’t there. “No problem,” he decides. “We merely ascend this hill and look around. The whole topology will be laid out before us.”

Comforted, I follow as he proceeds upward, beating his way through the brush. A cloud of gnats swirls around him, whining like static; I picture little helmets, goggles, parachutes. They buzz me and I try to wave them aside, but nothing happens. Are they only motes in my eyes? As the incline grows steeper, I begin to slip and slide in the loose earth. Crooked trees lurch at us like dying old men in the locker room at the Y, trunks covered in black goiters, moss hanging from their armpits.

Now I see: It is only language that separates, say, the tree from the earth that feeds it, or from the sky that it longs to embrace and lose itself in, if it could only tear free. The cicadas might as well be the leaves themselves, brushing together under the blanket of heat. Everything pushes toward the surface. You can smell the sun cooking on the skin of things, bubbling and
cracking, melting over the branches, sticking to the soles of your feet. It fills my lungs and eyes with gold. I hear the blood beating in my veins, shaking my hands like rattles. I hear the energy crackling in the twigs as I break their connections. I see the fire frozen in the wood.

“What fire?” Philip asks, turning to me with a wild look. Is he hearing my thoughts? I try another one, beaming him an image of a saint. Philip slaps the back of his neck.

“These fucking bugs are drilling right into me.”

Everything is alive, that is the horror of it. The grass screams when you tread on it, and the trees bleed when you snap their twigs, and the stream rolls over and rocks itself, crying in its sleep. The stones are watching your every move; it takes a thousand years for them to blink once. And the mountain? The mountain is the mind itself, the true and hidden mind. Everything is alive and dying.

We summit on our hands and knees. At the peak sits a boulder the size of a two-car garage—coarse, black, porous—thrown from a volcano on the moon. I read the alien inscriptions through my fingertips: A star is about to be born. The black rock breaks, like a giant egg, and blows light into my hair. My mind splits like a rotten peach spitting out its pit.

Philip screams. As I watch, a halo of white fire explodes around his skull, burning his hair like nerve endings. His voice is dust. His face is wind. The hill is heaving, throwing trees sideways and cleaving rocks. He sticks his finger down his throat, trying to puke up the poison.

Just then, lightning shoots from my hands, blasting trees
into flame. Struggling for control, I wrestle them into my pockets. Clouds rush into the sun and are burned away. I realize that my brain is now linked, as if by wired roots, to the world. I can’t tell the difference between thought and action, between the voices outside or inside my head. Anything I think will happen, so I must not think the wrong thing, the evil thing. I must hold still. I freeze my face, trying not to breathe, and follow Philip with my eyes as he crawls over.

“Evil,” he hisses, crouching like an elf in the shadow of the rock. His ears and nose grow points. “This place is fucking evil,” he whispers in my ear. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

He takes off, stumbling back down the mountain we just climbed. I rush after him. Shadows swoop and dive around me. Trees grab at my legs. We plunge into a swamp, and I stop short as Philip howls. He has sunk into the mud up to his knees. He thrashes around, grunting and baying, like a brontosaurus stuck in tar.

“Wait, don’t fight it,” I say. “The quicksand will pull you under.”

But he ignores my advice and plows through, leaving one sneaker in the sucking wounds. In their depths, eyes open for just a moment and then forever close.

Trying to circle the sinkhole, I quickly lose my bearings and tumble into a campsite. I crash blindly through a bush, yowling as switches lash my face, and there they are, squatting over a fire, a bald dad and his young son, limp wieners on the tips of their sticks. They stare at me, aghast, as if I were a Sasquatch: long hair full of leaves and twigs, body covered in cuts. The mud I’ve layered on my face for sun protection is flaking off.
But then again, who are they to judge? Look at their fucking faces—swelling horribly with pustules and throbbing rainbow colors. The little boy is actually aging, wrinkling right in front of me, while the dad morphs backward into a pudgy hairless baby. Somebody screams. It’s me. I turn tail and flee back into the forest, trying to outrun the screaming, which follows me like an echo. I’m dodging right and left, ducking the trees that keep throwing themselves in my path, when I collide with a deer. A fucking deer! At first I just see a brown blur, knocking me back as it darts by, startled no doubt by my idiotic thrashing. He brushes past, high chest blazed with white, antlers, neck, back, tail. So fast and so strong that I am left vibrating, like I’ve plunged my arms into the quick of a freezing river. Stunned, I sit in some mud. The deer stops and, as if taking pity on me, looks back to calm me with a noble gaze.

“Follow the drums,” he says. Or thinks. He seems to be licking a leaf, but his thoughts sound too deep and profound to be coming from me.

“Thanks, friend,” I say, rising slowly. But now there is a disturbance in the force field, angry crashings in the woods, like a giant hunting for meat. The deer starts.

“Don’t listen to the cat,” he whispers quickly and springs away. I cringe. The leaves tremble. Philip comes toppling out, dragging his shoeless foot.

“Hear that?” he asks. We listen. Far off. Drums.

The drumming is faint, and we can’t see where it’s coming from, but the sound is steady, like a beacon, and wherever there are drums, there must be people.

“It’s some kind of ritual,” Philip suggests as we hobble along. “A tribal gathering. We’ll be cured.”

That sounds good. There is definitely something wrong with me now. I don’t know how long we’ve been tripping, but I feel years older: half blind from sweat, swollen with insect bites, and limping painfully. The drugs and heat have cooked my brains down to where I can’t tell what’s real anymore. Trees mumble and sigh as I pass. Rocks squint in the sun. Nymphs flash and giggle nudely among the pines. Day and night rise and fall randomly, every few minutes, or is that just wind in the leaves? Maybe I’m laughing at the birds instead of them laughing at me. At first I think I see the deer again, following me, but it’s a satyr, grunting and thrusting with a girl down under his hooves. His horns tangle her long hair into a crown of fine-spun gold. He sinks his teeth into her neck. She moans and her eyes open, fixing me. I know her, but I don’t recall from where. She smiles, showing her fangs. The blood seeps out between them, purpling her mouth like wine. I wipe sweat from my eyes and walk faster and don’t mention it to Philip. I don’t want him to worry.

By following the drums through mud and brush and swarm, Philip and I reach paradise at last. Paradise, it turns out, is a man-made lake surrounded by a sand beach on which a hundred Puerto Rican families are picnicking. The ritual drumming is the sound of all their radios and boom boxes playing and echoing at once. Hitting the sand, we break into a run. We are alive. Philip peels off his shirt as he sprints toward the concession stand, and I do likewise. But I slow to a jog when I see him pulling down his shorts. I stop in horror as he makes a bee-line
for the water fountain, a fat, sunburned, sweaty white boy, covered in filth, wearing briefs and one sneaker, pushing and shoving little kids aside as he forces his way to the front.

“Cutter!” they yell.

“Water, water,” he moans, knocking a scared child to the ground. He guzzles from the tap, and then, as the passersby watch in disgust, he splashes the water under his arms and crotch. Now several burly guys in Yankees shirts and razored haircuts are being dragged over by their kids.

“Hey, man, what’s your fucking problem?” they want to know.

Philip bolts, and the angry dads chase him across the sand. The barking pack quickly outflanks him, but they pause when he charges into the lake, hesitant to follow a half-naked madman into water. A crowd gathers as he howls and splashes around. He blows waterspouts, snorting like a whale, and waves his sodden underwear over his head. Old women cross themselves. Mothers cover their children’s eyes. Philip begins to urinate, laughing tearfully at his own little stream, while swimmers panic, scrambling up the shore.

A park ranger’s truck and a cop car arrive, and the crowd parts. The officers sigh and shake their heads. They get the bullhorn.

“You in the water. Stop what you’re doing and come out.”

But they know there’s only one way this is going to end, and finally, resigned, they go in. It is a brief, disturbing struggle. They wade out and take him down, flailing and screaming. It takes four guys to drag him like a seal onto land and get him to the car, tears and snot streaming. He screams numbers between sobs.