Albert waved to someone walking past the car. “She secretly always wanted to be onstage, and now she is. But they want to keep her in a stupor.”
“She looked pretty.”
“This has flummoxed me,” Albert said. “She freaks out and what do they try to do? Give her drugs to stop her flights of fancy. Either way, they don’t want enlightenment, or enlargement. They want mind control. I didn’t O.K. the tranquilizers. I always sort of enjoyed her wild antics, her flippy phases.”
“My nose is blue,” Ann said, glimpsing her reflection in the shadowed window of the car.
Albert buzzed the car ignition. “Sorry. I was lost in thought. I just don’t want them to destroy her spirit.”
He said, “The other day this administrator at the hospital sat me down and tried to sell me on how modern the hospital is. It’s no longer an asylum! That used to be its name, but now it is a benevolent palace for the mentally unfortunate where they get pampered and loved on by a dedicated staff of angels. He told me some of the horror stories from long ago, to make me think we live in enlightened times now.”
“Tell me some.” The rush of cold air from the heater startled her. “I have a morbid curiosity,” she said.
“I know.” Albert patted her knee. He said, “This fellow told me that at one time the patients who couldn’t manage their bodily functions were put in sawdust beds. These were wooden boxes like coffins, with a layer of sawdust. The inmates—drugged out of their minds—just lay in these boxes of sawdust, and then all their waste was scooped out in the morning. It made me think of cat-litter boxes.”
THEY ATE STROMBOLIS at Pasquale’s and then smoked a joint in Albert’s kitchen. The smoke was relaxing. It made her feel Albert’s friendship more deeply. He was a person who embraced people without analyzing them. He always said people were doing their best, and she thought he had a way of bringing out the best in people. It was uncommonly interesting, although awkward, to be with her former professor in his ordinary life, in his house, with his pudgy cat, Peaches, and with the ubiquitous presence of his absent wife, whose clunky pottery and framed needlepoint samplers of Zen parables stippled and studded the house. “The Goose is out of the Bottle” seemed to float above the toilet-paper roller in the bathroom.
Two tokes were enough. Albert saved the rest of the joint in a little metal box. Then he set Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain on his stereo.
“What was the best and worst thing about your trip?” he asked after they had listened for a while.
“Waiting two hours at the Evansville bus station was the worst.”
“I meant your acid trip.”
“I wrote you about that.”
“What was the main thing about it?”
She thought about Jimmy, how something was lost between them after that trip. She knew her head was down, as if—out of modesty—she couldn’t face Albert.
She said, “Loss of context. It was like grass but extreme.”
Albert listened attentively as she described the trip. She tried to tell him in detail what she remembered, and he nodded frequently, recognizing the sensations she described.
He said, “I must have dropped acid every weekend when I was in California.”
He jumped up to turn over the record.
They moved to the main room. Albert sprawled on a yellow vinyl beanbag, and Ann sat on a ripped Danish modern chair. Peaches flew into her lap with a thud. The record had been popular when Albert was at Stanford.
“My life in California several years ago was a formative time for me, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It was such an important part of my life. It’s where I got centered.”
He lowered his head into his hands for a moment—hiding, or thinking. He lifted his head.
“The openness of California was exhilarating. It was where I was introduced to Zen and mythology, encounter groups. All the stuff I was hoping you would get into. And the Free University—that place was exploding with creativity. You have to be judicious about dope, of course. But it’s the place where you work on your head.”
“I need my head worked on,” she said.
She felt a small burst of courage. For the first time, it seemed to her that Albert had been as young and naive as she felt herself to be. He still possessed an untarnished optimism.
Now he seemed to be pacing the rooms, stumbling a bit to sway with the plaintive goat-herder melody Miles Davis was blowing. Albert slid into an enthusiastic monologue about California as the ultimate frontier. “You follow the sun, you breathe in the limitless possibility of the psyche of America.”
“But California ends at the beach.”
Albert patted her head.
“That’s the point. If all the travelers and seekers just stop at the beach and mingle together, then all that energy has got to explode. That’s what I saw in California. People with ideas, a belief in openness and expansion—mind and body. It was sheer excitement, partly the ebullience of youth, and partly real changes that were coming about.”
“That all sounds good.”
“It’s not the love beads and the sandals and the stuff that came after. That’s just trinkets, symbols, everywhere now. Long hair.”
“Except here in Kentucky.”
He laughed. “I’m doing my best to start the revolution.” He tugged at his ponytail and flipped it over his shoulder.
“Bear in mind that I was there long before the love-ins, the protests, the explosion of music. It’s exploding now, and maybe some of it is tacky, but I was there at the birth of the new consciousness. I was in on it at the beginning.”
Abruptly, Albert grabbed her arm. “Something’s got you down, Ann. What is it?”
It took a while, and she had to work up to it. If she said the word army right away, she would burst into tears. So she told him about Jimmy and how she fell in love and how they fit together. The Mustang. His trip to Chicago.
As she told him about Fort Leonardwood, Albert shook his head in disbelief.
“I can’t feature a young English major in this day and age saying he wants to go fight the Viet Cong.”
“He doesn’t. He just feels guilty.”
“I know what that’s like.”
“I don’t know what to think,” she said.
Albert changed the record, something softer than the screeching goat herder. He dimmed the pole lamp and sat on a hassock.
At the end of the first song, Albert spoke. “A young man like Jimmy is pulled in all directions. And he feels guilt if he refuses to go and guilt if he does go. It’s a powerful tension.”
“A friend said Jimmy joined the army because of a bad trip. Is that a possibility? Could it make you do things you wouldn’t have done otherwise?”
Albert shook his head. “That sounds like science fiction. You can make anything out of anything.” He laughed. “You won’t find platoons of hippies in the army. Of course, acid could open up his mind and allow him to entertain many viewpoints. He might have seen something he hadn’t seen before.”
“That’s what it seemed like.”
“I admit I’m surprised.” Albert frowned. “Most kids in college are desperate to avoid the draft.”