Boulevard (20 page)

“This is a nice house.”

What did he mean by that? Why was his face so flushed? Or was it flushed, was it actually shimmering? They had come to do something. Newell was watching him. Newell still smelled like sex even after the bath. That was all Mark could smell now that they were inside. But Mark's cock felt sore and tired. He would not be able to do anything no matter how excited he got. He sat at the desk. He had moved there for something, to get something, and Newell sat politely and waited.

“You're supposed to be getting me some of this drug. But you keep spacing out.”

“Right.” Mark turned to the desk, opened a metal box. Tore off a tab with a red rooster stamped on it. “You think you should take a whole one?”

“I never did this before. What did you say it is?”

“LSD. Man, what a farm boy.”

“I never lived on a farm.”

Mark handed the tab to him. Tip of finger to tip of finger. The tiny white square. “Chew it up good, till the paper is soft. Then swallow it.”

“It's paper?”

“It's blotter acid. They drop it onto the paper, one drop.”

“That's it?”

“Believe me, that's enough.”

Newell shrugged, touched his finger to his tongue, drew the tab of acid inside his mouth and chewed.

Satisfaction warmed Mark through. To watch this child of the country now, to look into his eyes and watch the change, the secret of the chemical and the secret that the chemical would reveal.
How long does this take?
Newell asked, but Mark could only nod at first, so taken was he with the thought of what he was privileged to witness, on the same night that he had drawn a razor blade lightly across a woman's breast, now to watch a soul cope with the knowledge that consciousness can be adjusted like the tuner of a radio.

“Did you hear me? How long before I feel this?”

“Maybe an hour. Maybe sooner.”

“That long?”

“You have to digest it.”

Newell nodded. Sprawled in a soft chair nestled under the sloped ceiling. Trusses ran the length of the room.

“You read all these books?”

“Sure.”

Newell ambled in front of the shelf reading the titles. “How do you say this?”

“Nee-chee. He's a philosopher, like Sade.”

Newell shook his head and put the book on the shelf again. “I thought you said you studied history.”

“I did. I took a lot of other stuff, too.”

“You like school?”

“I did.” He turned away. Newell had begun to sound thickheaded, stupid, to become boring, but a moment later Mark had to look at him again, to see the creamy skin, the dark hair, and eyes. Maybe just the acid making him see too much.

“I liked it, too,” Newell said.

A moment later, Newell in front of him and the touch of Newell's hands on his thighs sent him backward and before he knew it he was on the bed, not in the chair, lying back along the bed with the quilt pulled smooth across it, the bed neatly made because that was always the first thing he did when got out of it, like a monk or a boy scout. He lay back and let Newell have his body, slow sensations so liquid along him, as if the sex were a puddle he lay in, as if it immersed him. Oh, oh, he said. Oh, oh. Otherwise the room was quiet. The top of Newell's head moved up and down, up and down, such a careful man.

Yes, Newell, yes, this is a worthy journey we are undertaking, yes, as I strive to rise to the challenge of the moment, and yes the flesh is weak and less than willing at the moment, pleasant to receive such ministrations, my
dear Newell, but maybe a little frustrating for you, since nothing happens, really. But you are starting to feel something, too, aren't you? A change in your eyes, a cast of seeing inward. Of looking suddenly inward at an open door.

“My stomach,” Newell said. “Wow.”

“That's where it starts.”

Newell had a look in his eyes as though something were blossoming inside him, as though a space were opening in his gut, as if he were about to rise off the floor. A light of wonder and an edge of fear. “How long does this last?”

“A long time. You'll feel it really strong for about six hours or so and you'll feel a lot of effects till tomorrow about this time. Or even longer, depending on your brain.”

“Oh, this is weird.” Newell touched his stomach as though something were inside it. “I have to work tomorrow night.”

Mark wanted to say, you'll be fine by then, wanted the words to come out, but there was suddenly some need to grind his teeth, to close his eyes. He made a low sound and realized he was still lying on the bed, shirt shoved up his belly, his pants tugged open and his soft wet cock feeling like a flap of string. He had been lying here like this and Newell had turned away now, was drifting in the room, reading the titles of more books, humming some sound, making some rhythm under his breath, and Mark sat up to listen.

“I can tell an Eskimo's cold,” he was singing, “all you got to tell me is go.”

Mark tucked his shirt in, fastened his pants, between each gesture feeling the lag, the need to stop moving.

“Let's go for a walk,” Mark said. “You should be outside when it hits you the first time.”

“I don't know.” Newell was already somewhere different, the light in his eyes, the glow of his skin.

“You'll be fine. We'll be together.”

“This is so strange. My feet feel so far away.”

Mark laughed, and heard the sound echo. Newell turned to him puzzled, drifting past to a Mardi Gras poster on the wall, a fabulous mask trimmed with feathers and sequins, with blank, cut-out eyes.

“Let's go walk,” Mark said. “I want to sit at the river.”

That time, when Newell looked at him, a feeling in Mark, something turning over, the memory of Leigh, that Newell had metamorphosed into Leigh once already tonight, in the bathtub, and that he might do it again. Might become Leigh again. Crazy. But the skin was the same, smooth as cream, without the creases of age that had begun to change Leigh.

Before they walked out of the room, Mark slipped another tab of acid onto his own finger, contemplated it, the fuzzy white paper that could alter the way he saw the world, and he ate it, to make the night go stranger still.

At times he would forget he was walking with Newell, the cool late-night air on his skin, the passing traffic and
noise of horns, walking past an open door from which music was rushing out, pooling in the street, a dim interior, figures lining a bar. Shadows waiting for a drink. Walking under the galleries trying to imagine two hundred years ago, when the streets were mud and the houses hardly ran much farther out than Ramparts, named for the place where the fortifications used to run. Walking under the galleries, peering into the carriageways, occasionally seeing someone following him out of the corner of his eye and, recognizing Newell, remembering. “I love the way the streets are,” Newell's voice distant and echoing oddly, as if he were speaking in a bottle underwater. So much noise all of a sudden—they were walking by the Bourbon Pub, all the gallery doors open and the dim lamps burning inside, the beat from the upstairs disco like a pulse. One of the songs he liked to dance to, “Contact.”

The sensation in his head became overwhelming and he had to remind himself that he was all right, that more than likely he was walking without any sign of the drugs in his head, more than likely nobody could tell that the smell of the hamburgers from the Clover Grill, the smell of the potatoes frying in grease, made the top of his throat go tight. But he was still breathing, in spite of the feeling of a weight on his ribs, the sudden smell of vomit from the gutter, somebody growling words from a shadowed entryway. Still Mark kept on breathing and walking, people passing, some of the men looking at him as usually happened in this part of town, but looking at him
so fiercely in the wash of the drug. Newell said, “It feels like the top of my head is about to come off.”

“Oh boy.”

“But we're almost to Jackson Square. Pretty soon we can sit down.”

“I need to,” Mark said.

Newell took his elbow and steered him. The Café du Monde was full, the sound of voices lively, a tired, big-boned horse standing in front of a carriage at the curb. They crossed the strip of land where the oyster sellers used to set their tents in the early days of the city, crossed the levee and looked across the batture the river had formed over the years. Mark smelled the dusky scent of the Mississippi, feeling the breeze pour across the water, rippling and dark, the river riding low.

“I need to sit down,” someone said, and it was Newell, sitting, blinking, and Mark noted the change in his demeanor.

“You all right?”

Newell nodded his head, looking at something. He never bothered to answer.

But Mark was watching Newell's creamy face, turning lazily to look Mark in the eye, Newell gritting his teeth, working his jaw muscles. Throwing back his head to expose his white throat, the skin alive with some energy that rippled across it, Newell sitting up, eye to eye with Mark again. “I never had anything like this before.”

“You like it?”

“Oh,” Newell said and shivered, “too much,” and
leaned forward and stared into the river, where the lights of a barge were moving.

“Just take a breath when it gets like that,” Mark said.

Newell was staring, though, in a halo of soft blue light, and when he took a breath the sound was low. He had begun to smile.

“You like to try things,” Mark said.

“Try things.” He ran his fingers through his dark hair. “Yes. This is nice.”

“New sensations.”

“Shut up,” Newell said. “I don't want to talk, I just want to look at the river.” And Mark laughed and shut up and looked at the river, too.

“Shut up,” Leigh had said to him, in the same tone of voice, the same languid heaviness to her lids. “You do nothing but talk and I get so tired of it. Just pour me a drink.”

He had been telling her about the research he was doing. Papers inherited from two maiden great-aunts, sisters of her grandfather, not even named Duval or directly related to Mark at all, who had lived in modest houses in Metairie side by side, identical houses in identical yards. They died within months of each other, and Leigh was heir to both, Aunt Kit and Aunt Tit, she called them, and laughed, and never would explain the reason. With boxes of papers in the attic, family archives dating from the nineteenth century and even, as he found, some fragments of the Duvals in the eighteenth, a copy of a letter to Aldonse Duval from an uncle in France who wanted
money, a list of household expenses from 1794, a news clipping from a paper of the day about a fire in the French Quarter. She had showed him the boxes of papers stored so carelessly with a slight curl of the lip, and every time he came to study them she gave him the same look. The more he learned, the more he bored her—she told him so in dry tones. “I'm tired of talking about it, sweetie. Really, I am. My family is so old sometimes I feel like I'm its asshole dragging the ground behind.”

She had barely consented to meet Mark at all when he first got in touch with her, but once they came face to face she spent the evening telling him what a handsome young man he was and seemed actually surprised by that.

“The men in my family were never very good looking. But they were all named Robichaux, not Duval. I was glad to get married to a man who could give me a more interesting name. Pendergrass. In fact, I liked marrying a new name so much I did it twice more. And now I have three more names than when I was born. I think that's very interesting. And I believe I changed into a different person every time my name changed. The differences were subtle, but a person who knew me could tell.”

“Is Jack your husband?”

“No.”

Jack wants things. Asks me to do certain things. Acts of courage, is the way I think of it. Acts of personal responsibility and moral courage. He feels a certain responsibility to vary the course of events, he says. He has a way of making you want the same thing he wants.
You'll see when you meet him. I promise I'm going to let you do that. Introduce you. I want to be there the first time you see him. I know what your taste is, Mark dear
.

Newell said, “I think I can walk now.”

“Walk.”

“Didn't you want to walk somewhere?”

“Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Oh, yes,” Newell said, “I've found a new best friend.”

“Can you move? I'm not sure I can move.”

This melting self was what Mark loved, this feeling that when he closed his eyes he was sliding farther into darkness than usual, that the space in his mind was beyond mere consciousness and had become something else, a newly unfolded universe. Every time he closed his eyes he felt as if his eyes were dissolving, and at the moment before the darkness, the world transformed into something more. This was the effect of tripping that he craved, the feeling of a darkness within himself, of rooms constructed within the darkness, of a self elaborated through all these rooms, random lights across his retina shifting and swirling, an aurora of the interior. A field of shimmering lights. Standing in the dreaming place but awake, with a sense of knowing the world as though he had constructed it himself.

Leigh had given him the acid and watched. She liked to watch his skin flush with color, his eyes go radiant, as the drug immured him; she told him so as he was chewing the first of the small white tabs. Jack had picked up the acid
earlier from Mac in the French Quarter, along with the black beauties that Leigh liked, and cocaine for Jack, and pot for them all. But Leigh had made Mark drop his first tab of acid in front of her. Because she wanted to witness the change. It was like watching a light come on, she'd said, but very slowly.

They talked for a while about a movie she had seen. After that she said, “I want you to do me a favor.”

By then the lining of his stomach had become a fluttering inside him. The first edges. He knew already the nature of what she wanted. “What you talked about before?”