“Here’s the thing,” she said. “Normal sex with boys doesn’t really interest me. The usual stuff, I mean. Most boys treat sex like it’s a pinball game. Like it’s a matter of whapping the same levers again and again and again. It’s boring.”
“I’ve never played pinball.”
“You’re missing the point. Okay, different analogy: Imagine everyone was eating this cake. And they told you how good the cake was. And when you tried the cake, it tasted, you know, like paper and cardboard. It was terrible. And yet all your friends loved it. How would you feel?”
“Disappointed, I guess.”
“And crazy. Especially if they told you it wasn’t the cake’s fault. That the real problem was you. That you weren’t eating it right. I know I’m stretching the metaphor pretty thin.”
“So I’m a new piece of cake for you?”
“I just want to be made to feel something.”
“Have you told your friends about me?”
“Hah. No way.”
“I embarrass you. You’re ashamed of me.”
“Listen, in real life, I’m an antiauthoritarian anarchist. And yet, there’s this electric part of me that also wants to be dominated sexually by a cop. I prefer to go with it and not judge. But I don’t think my friends would understand.”
“All these things we’re doing,” he said, “the handcuffs, the rough stuff. Are they, you know, are they working?”
She smiled. She touched his cheek lightly, the most gentle touch she’d ever administered. “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.”
“Don’t say that. You know I hate that.”
She kissed him on the top of his head. “Go fight crime.”
She felt his eyes on her as she left. She felt his bruises on her neck and cheek. As she walked away, she felt a great cold glob of him sliding out.
6
IT WAS A WHISPER on campus, spread between one turned-on student and another. It was a secret not shared with the pro-war ROTC cadets, nor the fraternity jocks, nor the husband-seeking debutantes. Only the most committed, only the most sincere were allowed to hear it: On certain days, in a certain classroom, deep within the bewildering labyrinth of the Behavioral Sciences Building, for an hour at a time, the war was officially over.
Vietnam did not exist during this hour, in this class. Allen Ginsberg, the great poet newly arrived from the coast, led them, beginning each class with the same words: “The war is officially over.” Then the students repeated the words, then repeated them again, in unison, and the fact of their voices harmonizing made the words more real. Ginsberg told them how language has power, how thought has power, how releasing these words into the universe could begin a cascade that would make the words facts.
“The war is officially over,” Ginsberg said. “Say it until the meaning disappears and the words become pure physical things that erupt from the body because the names of gods used in a mantra are identical with the gods themselves. This is very important,” he said, raising a finger into the air. “If you say ‘Shiva’ you are not calling for Shiva, you are producing Shiva, creator and preserver, destroyer and concealer, the war is officially over.”
Faye watched him from the back of the room, where she sat, like everyone else, on the dusty linoleum floor—watched his swinging silver peace-sign necklace, his eyes blissfully closed behind horn-rimmed glasses, and all his hair, that scrum of black and tangled hair that had migrated from the now-smooth crown of his head down to his cheeks and jowls, a beard that shook as he shook, rocking and swaying during the prayer chanting like congregants did in the more exuberant churches, his whole body getting involved, his eyes closed, his legs crossed, he brought his own special rug to sit on.
“A body vibration like they do on the plains of Africa,” said Ginsberg, who with a harmonium and finger cymbals played the music they notched their chants to. “Or the mountains of India, or any place absent television machines that do the vibrating for us. We have all forgotten how to do this except maybe Phil Ochs singing ‘The War Is Over’ for two whole hours once, a mantra more powerful than all the antennas of the Columbia Broadcasting System, than all the broadsides printed for the Democratic National Convention, than ten full years of political speech yakking.”
The students sat cross-legged on the floor and rocked themselves to some private interior tempo. It looked like a room of spinning tops. The desks were shoved to the outer edges of the class. Someone’s jacket hung over the window on the door, blocking the view into the room, in case of passing administrators or campus security or some of the less-hip professoriate.
Faye knew that the war-is-officially-over chant would eventually give way to “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama,” and then they would end their hour together with the sacred vowel: “om.” This was how each of their classes had gone so far, and Faye felt crushed that all she might learn from the great Allen Ginsberg was this: how to sway, how to chant, how to growl. This was the man who’d written poems that burned her right through, and sitting in her chair on the first day of class she was worried she’d be struck dumb in his presence. Then she saw him and wondered where the nice neat man from the author photo had gone. No more tweed jacket and combed hair—Ginsberg had fully embraced the counterculture’s most obvious emblems, and at first Faye felt disappointed at the lack of creativity this implied. Now her feelings were closer to plain annoyance. She wanted to raise her hand and ask “Are we ever going to learn about, you know, poetry?” if it weren’t such an obviously unwelcome question. For the students in this class didn’t care about poetry—they cared about the war, and what they wanted to say about the war, and how they were going to stop the war. Primarily, they cared about the war protest at the upcoming Democratic National Convention, now only days away. It would be a mighty thing, they all agreed. Everyone was coming.
“If the police attack,” Ginsberg said, “we must sit on the ground and say ‘om’ and show them what peace looks like.”
The students rocked and hummed. A few opened their eyes and exchanged looks, a kind of telepathy zapping between them that said, If the cops come, I’m not sitting, I’m fucking running.
“It will take all the bravery you can muster,” Ginsberg said, as if reading their thoughts. “But the only answer to violence is its opposite.”
The students closed their eyes.
“This is how to do it,” he said. “Let us practice. Do you feel it? Obviously it is a subjective experience, which is the only kind that matters. Anything objective is not really feelable.”
Faye held straight As in her other courses. In economics, biology, classics—she’d yet to miss a question on the weekly quizzes. But poetry? It did not appear that Ginsberg intended to grade them. And while most of the students found this liberating, it roiled Faye’s equilibrium. How was she supposed to act if she didn’t know how she was being measured?
So she tried to be as committed as she could to the meditating while also feeling acutely self-conscious about what she looked like meditating. She tried to chant and rock in a fully committed, one hundred percent way, to feel what Ginsberg said she should feel, a deepening of her soul, a freeing of her mind. And yet every time she began the meditating in earnest, a small thorny idea popped into her head: that she was doing it wrong and everyone would notice. She feared she’d open her eyes and the class would be staring at her or laughing at her. And she tried to bat the thought away, but the longer she meditated the stronger it grew, until she couldn’t even properly sit anymore because she was overwhelmed with anxiety and paranoia.
So she opened her eyes, realized that she was ridiculous, and then the whole process began again.
She vowed this time she would do it right. She would be in the moment without feeling inhibited and insecure. She would pretend she was totally alone.
Except that she was not totally alone.
Among the anonymous strangers in the room, about five paces to her left and up a couple of rows, sat Sebastian. It was the first time she’d seen him since his arrest a few days earlier, and now she was profoundly aware of his presence. She was waiting to see if he’d noticed her. Each time she opened her eyes, this is where they were drawn, to him. It did not appear that he’d seen her yet, or if he had seen her, it did not appear that he cared.
“How do you deepen your soul?” Ginsberg asked. “This is how: You feel your feelings truly, then repeat. You chant until the chanting is automatic and you feel what’s been lying underneath all this time. By ‘deepen your soul’ I don’t mean you add to it, like putting a room on a house. The house has always had that room. But this is the first time you’ve gone in it.”
She imagined what would happen if Ginsberg wandered into one of her uncles’ Iowa garages, with that big ridiculous beard and peace-sign necklace. They’d have a field day, her uncles.
And yet she was being persuaded, despite herself. Especially by his exhortation to calmness and quiet. “You have too much in your heads,” he said. “It’s too noisy in there.” Which Faye had to admit was true for her almost all of the time, all day long, her constant prickling worry.
“When you chant, think only about the chanting, think only about your breath. Live in your breath.”
And Faye tried, but if it wasn’t worry that brought her out of the trance, it was the impulse to glance at Sebastian, to see what he was doing, if he was succeeding, if he was chanting, taking this stuff seriously. She wanted to stare at him. In this group overflowing with the counterculture’s ugly flair—wiry beards, spit-flecked mustaches, sweat-stained headbands, torn jeans and jean jackets, dark sunglasses stupid-looking indoors, fucking berets, that smell of secondhand-store musk and tobacco—Sebastian was easily the good-lookingest guy in the room, Faye thought, objectively. Gentle hair carefully careless. Clean-shaven. That dab of infant cuteness. Toadstool head. The way he tightened his lips while concentrating. She gathered all of this and then closed her eyes and tried again at achieving perfect allover mental peace.
“Stop being so interested in yourselves,” Ginsberg said. “If you’re interested only in you, then you’re stuck with you, and you’re stuck with your own death. It’s all you have.”
And he tapped his finger cymbals and said “Ommmmm” and the students repeated it, “Ommmmm” they said, raggedly, discordantly, out of sync and tune.
“There is no you,” Ginsberg said. “There is only the universe and beauty. Be the beauty of the universe and the beauty will get in your soul. It will grow and grow there, and take over, and when you die, you’re it.”
And Faye was beginning to visualize (as instructed) the all-white pristine light of total awareness, the peace-nirvana when (as instructed) the body is no longer producing sound or meaning but rather perfect bliss-sensation, when she felt the presence of someone nearby, very close, sitting down annoyingly within her personal-space bubble, breaking the spell, lifting her once again to the mundane level of flesh and worry. So she breathed a heavy, passive-aggressive sigh and wiggled her body hoping to broadcast that her mental flow was indeed broken. She tried again: the white light, peace, love, bliss. And the room was saying “Ommmmm” when she felt her new neighbor draw even closer to her, and she thought she could feel a presence in the area around her ear, and she heard his voice, a whisper, saying, “Have you achieved perfect beauty yet?”
It was Sebastian. The shock of this realization made her feel like she was, momentarily, filled with helium.
She swallowed hard. “You tell me,” she said, and he snorted, a contained and muffled laugh. She’d made him laugh.
“I’d say yes,” he whispered. “Perfect beauty. You’ve done it.”
She felt a warmth spread across her face. She smiled. “How about you?” she said.
“There is no me,” he said. “There is only the universe.” He was mocking Ginsberg. And how relieved she felt. Yes, she thought, this was all very silly.
He drew closer, right up next to her ear. She could feel it, that electricity, on her cheek.
“Remember, you’re perfectly calm and at peace,” he whispered.
“Okay,” she said.
“Nothing can disturb your perfect calmness.”
“Yes,” she said. And then she felt him, his tongue, lightly lick the very tip of her earlobe. It almost made her yelp right there in the middle of meditation.
Ginsberg said “Think of a moment of instantaneous perfect stillness,” and Faye tried to compose herself by focusing on his voice. “Maybe in some meadow in the Catskills,” he said, “when the trees came alive like a Van Gogh painting. Or listening to Wagner on the phonograph and the music became nightmarishly sexy and alive. Think of that moment.”
Had she ever felt something like that? A transcendent moment, a perfect moment?
Yes, she thought, she had. Right now. This was that moment.
And she was in it.