spread, he swirled the clear liquid with a tight little motion of his hand. To each of his gestures there was a precision, a kind of surface tension to the way his body moved. He had a cocksuredness about him that the jocks at school could only hope to emulate. A cool, level stare that announced straightaway he needed nothing.
“I guess I should call the police now,” he said.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“You live in Finden?”
“Yeah.”
“You think this town’s just a playground for you? You can just do whatever you want because it’s all safe and cozy in the end? You were trespassing. You were breaking the law.” The cuff of his shirt sleeve slid back from his wrist as he raised his glass to his mouth.
“I didn’t take anything,” Nate pleaded.
For a minute or more the man made no reply, all the while staring directly at Nate. There was a perversity in his silence, a gaming of discomfort. Nate could sense it in the air between them. And yet there was something else too, something tantalizing: being looked at this hard, with that edge of threat. Part of Nate wanted to shut his eyes and let himself be watched, but he didn’t dare.
“That tutor of yours, she’s out of her mind. She thinks she owns this place.”
“Yeah. She mentioned that.”
“And you say you were just curious. About what?”
“That it was so grand, I guess. And empty. I didn’t think anyone lived here.”
The man glanced across the room, as if noticing its bareness for the first time. In profile, he was even more gorgeous, with his five-o’clock shadow and his perfectly shaped nose and his full, slightly parted lips. Entering the house had woken Nate’s senses but what he experienced now was of a different order, as if the whole physical world had been made exact, sharpened by the knife of desire.
“I suppose I could use some furniture,” he said, finishing his drink and setting it down on the counter.
“I think it’s kind of cool the way it is.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. It feels open, I guess. Like you could do anything you wanted to.”
“What’s your name?”
“Nate.”
“What are you, a high-school student?”
“I’m a senior. I graduate in a few weeks.”
“Well, Nate, I’ve got stuff to do, so I think it’s time for you to leave.”
Pointing the way out, he followed Nate from the kitchen.
“You’re not going to call the police?”
“Frankly, I don’t have the time.”
As the man held the front door open, Nate could see the electric orange of the streetlamps flickering on up along on the road. If he left now, like this, with nothing more said, how would he ever get back here?
He hesitated on the threshold a moment. Then he blurted out, “I could help you.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you needed to know stuff. About Ms. Graves. About her lawsuit.”
The man’s lips parted, and he smiled for the first time, a look of conjecture playing across his face.
“Interesting,” he said. “And why would you do that?”
For all his effort, Nate couldn’t stop the blood from filling his cheeks now.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just because.”
For another long moment, the man was silent.
“Sure,” he said, finally. “Why not? I’m usually home about ten thirty. Try knocking next time.”
NATE JOGGED the half mile to Jason’s house and arrived in a sweat.
“Where the hell have you been?” Emily shouted over the sound of the voice booming from the stereo in Jason’s room. She lay on the unmade bed, leafing through a copy of Harper’s.
“Sorry. I got held up.”
The evening here was still getting under way. Jason sat at his desk, parceling out whitish-brown stalks and heads into small glass bowls. In the corner, Hal, who’d apparently taken the liberty of showering, sat lounging in Jason’s blue terry-cloth bathrobe, an unlit cigarette in one hand, an empty pack of matches in the other.
“You know,” Hal said, “I was thinking—”
“Quiet!” Jason insisted. “It’s almost over.”
Obediently, they all listened to the voice on the speakers as it swerved back and forth between reasoned calm and a kind of prophetic verve. A professor, it sounded like, a researcher on some very extended leave.
“So you see,” the voice continued, “the entirety of human history has been acted out in the light of the traumatic severing of our connection into the mother goddess, the planetary matrix of organic wholeness that was the centerpiece of the psychedelic experience back in the high Paleolithic. In other words, the world of hallucination and vision that psilocybin carries you into is