MAY 22, 2014
1
SONIA
You are hereby formally invited to a reunion of the Midnight Brunch Club. October 27th through 31st, 2014, 12 Railroad Street in Dunstan, Vermont.
Come to celebrate the life of Jennifer (Jennet) Sherilyn Stark (1967–89) and revisit our shared past through the elixir of the pines. There are still secrets to be discovered; the past is not even past (Faulkner); we are boats against the current (Fitzgerald). Leave all doubts and inhibitions at home. RSVP to Auraleigh Lydgate.
The first time Sonia ever received an invitation from Auraleigh Lydgate was in the Dove-Cat room freshman year, on the first warm spring day in Vermont, forsythia bursting forth on the quad.
Sonia was bent over a Mac Classic when Auraleigh swept in, wearing a leather jacket and drop-waist minidress, and noisily slid out a chair. “Oh my God, I’m dealing with a roommate nightmare! Marina got this brilliant idea to backpack in Europe, so now Paul and I are short a person for the townhouse.”
“Paul Bretton?” Sonia couldn’t hide her surprise. He was the newly elected editor of their lit magazine—quiet, earnest, and formidably intellectual. Auraleigh was rich and from LA and had a husky laugh that made boys’ eyes glaze over. They seemed like a complete mismatch.
“Yeah.” Auraleigh grinned. “No, we’re not dating. I like his espresso machine, and he likes my cooking. Hey, wait—do you have housing for next year?”
“I was just going to do the lottery.” This was only their second or third conversation, and Sonia, the daughter of an itinerant hippie who could only afford the college because of her mom’s job in the admin office, could barely understand why Auraleigh would talk to her to begin with.
When Auraleigh spoke again, Sonia almost thought she was hearing wrong: would she like to share the townhouse with them instead?
It cost more than the dorm, but Sonia barely hesitated in saying yes. She was tired of studying alone in the library and coming back to a silent room. She was tired of feeling like she didn’t belong.
Never mind that Auraleigh later admitted the invitation had been spur-of-the-moment, based more on what Sonia wasn’t than what she was. (You seemed quiet. I figured it would balance out my loud.) In that instant, whether Sonia realized it or not, she became part of a circle she would never quite be able to leave.
Crossing the campus of the New Mexico college where she had taught for the past decade, Sonia no longer felt the desert heat. Here was another invitation from Auraleigh, twenty-seven years later, but Sonia wasn’t the same person she’d been back then.
She climbed the library steps in a daze. At the entrance to the stacks, she pressed her ID card to the sensor. The light blinked red. She tried it again, then handed her card to the circulation assistant, a hungover-looking student who put down a copy of Teaching to Transgress to examine it.
“Semester ended yesterday.” The student had bangs in her face, too many barrettes doing too little work. She typed a number into her computer and peered at the screen. “This is invalid. Did you just graduate?”
“No, I’m faculty.” Were those bangs keeping the kid from seeing the fine lines and sags of middle age? But then Sonia understood. “I... My contract wasn’t renewed for next semester.”
The student handed her back the ID. “That’d be it.”
Sonia took the meaningless laminated rectangle that had given her access to every campus facility. She’d hoped to use the job databases that were only accessible from terminals in the chilly bowels of the library. To reach them, she would have traversed the concrete gallery hung with mementos of faculty achievements—including a one-sheet for the 1998 semi-cult film Retrophiliac, with her own name right after the director’s.
Instead she felt like a criminal. “I didn’t realize it would be invalid this soon.”
“You could apply for
a temporary pass,” the girl said.
But Sonia was already headed back outside, through two sets of hissing doors and down the stucco steps into the furnace heat. She just needed to rest for a moment before cleaning out her office.
She found a shady table on the quad, sat down, and pulled out the mail she’d stuffed in her bag earlier.
The invitation.
Sonia turned over the heavy, cream-colored card and really read it this time.
You are hereby formally invited to a reunion of the Midnight Brunch Club. October 27th through 31st, 2014, 12 Railroad Street in Dunstan, Vermont.
Come to celebrate the life of Jennifer (Jennet) Sherilyn Stark (1967–89) and revisit our shared past through the elixir of the pines.
Of course—today, May 22, was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Jennet’s death.
The “reunion” was five days in October in Dunstan. Auraleigh had moved back to their college town to watch over her daughter, who was now a freshman there, and had gotten busy transforming a rundown Victorian into a cozy home. The reno must have gone well, or Auraleigh wouldn’t have invited all of them to stay there in high-foliage season.
Still, the invitation came as a surprise, because Auraleigh hadn’t called Sonia since December. During their last phone conversation, she’d grown borderline huffy when Sonia failed to show interest in the intricacies of spray-foam insulation. Since then, there’d been pictures on Facebook of the evolving home/ B and B—gables, bathroom fixtures. Sonia had commented on a few of them, then gotten bored and stopped.
October was midterm season, packed with grading and tearful emails from students begging for conferences. Where would Sonia be next October? In a month, she would have no campus mailbox, no email address, no health insurance.
Take it as a sign from the universe! Auraleigh would probably say, flinging her arms out. Go back to LA! Follow your dreams!
Sonia tried but failed to tear the card in half. When you followed your dreams, you ended up like her mother—moving seven times in ten years, from the shabby-chic environs of Morningside Heights to the Vermont wilderness, always chasing a great love or transcendence in a commune’s soybean field. When you reached a certain age, you realized that the real dream, the only one that mattered, was safety.
As she shoved the card back into the envelope, her eyes again ran over the lines: There are still secrets to be discovered; the past is not even past (Faulkner); we are boats against the current (Fitzgerald).
Auraleigh had used only half the quote from The Great Gatsby; the next part was borne
back ceaselessly into the past. Borne back into the past, against the inexorable current of time, by an elixir of the pines...
Sonia rose, her heart racing. In December, Auraleigh had asked if she remembered the boy with the time travel drug. Sonia had laughed and said, “Don’t be silly. That was a campus myth. There was no time travel drug.”
But she knew exactly who—and what—Auraleigh was talking about.
There was a way to go back, if you really wanted to—an elixir of the pines. People just weren’t supposed to know about it.
Sonia, who did know, had spent the past twenty-five years trying to forget.
VOLUNTARY MEMORY
March 1988 (sophomore year)
SONIA
A time travel drug. That was what Auraleigh called it as she tried to persuade Sonia to leave campus for a townie party in a place called Belle Venere, which was a hole in the landscape, not even a town. She’d heard they would find a boy there who sold a drug that showed you your “bright, bright future.”
“Remember that weirdo story about time travel that someone submitted anonymously to the lit mag last fall?” she asked, sprawling on the battered couch in the townhouse they shared with Paul Bretton. “Well, I asked around, and someone told me the guy who wrote it will sell you the stuff.”
Sonia remembered the story; it was fiction. “Why do you want to see your future, anyway?” she asked. “Don’t you want to be surprised?”
“I don’t believe I’ll actually see the future, dummy. It’s probably just your garden-variety psychedelic. But Toddy Kuller’s going—he’s the one who told me about it—and he’s being so elusive.”
“I’m not taking any psychedelics,” Sonia said, wiping down the kitchenette counter. More than a semester into being roommates, they’d turned out to be surprisingly complementary: Paul made espressos for anyone at any hour, Auraleigh cooked, and Sonia cleaned obsessively. Her fear of insect infestation, learned in New York apartments, was something she didn’t discuss with the other two, who’d both grown up in nice suburban homes.
Auraleigh rolled her eyes dramatically. “You’re so pure. Fine. Come for moral support.”
Sonia had no interest in townie parties. Thanks to their inopportune move to Vermont a decade ago, she was practically a townie herself. In those days, though, she would follow wherever Auraleigh led, because Auraleigh still seemed like a miraculous vision that one breath might dispel. Was she allowed to have friends like these?
That night, with Sonia in the passenger seat charting their course using the state atlas and a flashlight, they drove five miles up and down a washboard road through gnarled thickets of bare buckthorn and maple. Belle Venere contributed only a trickle of students to the county high school Sonia had attended, but she’d heard kids talking about beer bashes at someone’s farm up there, far from parental eyes.
“It’s dangerous to see the future,” she yelled over the roar of Auraleigh’s Jeep, hoping it was clear she was being ironic. “There are paradoxes.”
Auraleigh passed Sonia her flask. She wore a tiny camo mini, a safety-pinned jean jacket, and ripped tights, but her baby-fat cheeks and corn-silk hair softened the effect. She said, “I think it’d be a trip.”
Sonia took a careful drink. Auraleigh had started plying her with Stoli back in the apartment, telling her to loosen up; it was working. “Why’s Toddy at a party in this dump?”
“Beats me.”
Dump was not a word Sonia would have used when sober—too crude. She’d learned to choose her words carefully as a child who had trouble pronouncing certain sounds (Rs, mainly) and was often mocked into silence. Even now, with speech therapy far behind her, she always ran a sentence in her head before saying it.
But dump felt like the right word for their destination: a rambling complex of slumped roofs and peeling paint that could have been the residence of Leatherface’s slightly more presentable cousins. There were no streetlights or other signs of a town, only a steeple poking the sky.
The music flooding the cold March air was stupidly jubilant hair metal. Inside, the house was lit by cockeyed floor lamps and stank of stale beer and smoke and mildew. It was packed with current students and recent alumni of Sonia’s high school: bellowing boys in soccer jerseys and stout girls in chamois shirts and patterned turtlenecks. The floor was crusted with mud from their hiking boots, the Lamoille County footgear of choice.
Sonia stuck close to Auraleigh. When a couple of people from high school yelled,
“Hey, Sonia!” she smiled at the floor, a flicker of panic running through her. These people had not been her friends; a few had even called her names. What if they told Auraleigh who she really was—the awkward girl who never made eye contact and wore corduroy pants with ankle zippers to school? Maybe it was an irrational fear, since Auraleigh was a city girl herself. But the old feeling of not belonging bubbled back up.
She asked Auraleigh for the flask and paused beside a leaning china hutch, drinking so deeply that everything quivered and liquefied. When the room straightened out again, Auraleigh was already over on the far side of the room. Sonia watched her step out a side door onto a deck where a row of girls perched on a railing. Their thick parkas made them hard to tell apart, but one sneer was unmistakable: it belonged to Kim Gardner, aka Red Nikes, the most dangerous Kim in the class of ’86.
Those girls had hated Sonia. No, not even hated, because you didn’t bother to hate someone like her—a flatlander, an outsider.
The vodka made time slippery along with everything else. Sonia darted away from the Kims, through a door that brought her to the foot of a staircase. From above came a thumping rhythm that clashed with the hair metal, and she made out the discordant licks of the Pixies.
She didn’t stop to wonder who was playing college rock here. She fled up two flights of stairs into an attic jammed with boxes and stinking of mothballs, the walls bleeding cotton-candy insulation.
Eight or nine people her age were smoking under a bare bulb. They looked like students. One tall boy even had a blazer and moussed hair. Toddy! She made her way to him, relieved. Once he and Auraleigh connected, maybe they could get out of here.
The boy beside Toddy turned toward her, and she stopped short. He was a tow-headed townie with raw pink eyelids—Scott Lemorne, known for dealing drugs and whispering obscenities to any girl who got within earshot. Like the Kims, he knew her true identity as an outcast.
Toddy noticed her presence, proffering a joint and a gleaming smile. “Hey, Sonia.”
“Hey.” Sonia took the joint, barely inhaled, and handed it back. She kept her distance from Scott Lemorne. “I came with Auraleigh. She’s downstairs.”
Toddy said something, showing his dimples, but Sonia was too close to the speakers to hear. She nodded and smiled. When a girl in knock-off Calvins grabbed Toddy’s elbow and murmured in his ear, Sonia edged back toward the stairs. If Auraleigh wanted Toddy, she could come and get him.
“I know you.”
The deep voice came from a tall boy who leaned against the window frame, squinting through the smoke. Another student: Sonia recognized him from campus, his lank black hair and long, angular face like an actor on Masterpiece Theatre. He wasn’t smooth or pretty like Toddy. He was beautiful.
She swiveled a hip toward him, letting the wave of vodka carry her, and said in what she
hoped was an Auraleigh tone of voice, “Oh, do you? Because I don’t know you. Are you on the Dove-Cat?” she added a second later, embarrassment catching up to her. “I’m Paul and Auraleigh’s roommate.” Everybody at Dunstan knew one or both of them.
“No,” the boy said. “I’m from the future.” He didn’t sound like he was joking. “Toddy, got a smoke?”
Toddy tossed him a pack and lighter.
“People still smoke in the future?” she asked him.
“They’re not any smarter, that’s for sure.” The future boy lit the cigarette and let it burn between his fingers. “I know you,” he repeated. “I’m Hayworth.” A grin, as if to acknowledge his name was a mouthful.
“Hayworth’s on something stronger than us, man,” Toddy said and strolled off toward the turntable with the girl. Scott disappeared downstairs, and Sonia relaxed a little.
She and Hayworth stood alone now, at the fly-specked window. His shoulders were broad and loose at once, his elbows bony. She imagined cupping those elbows in her palms—couldn’t help it, he was just so tall.
You’re out of your depth, warned a voice inside her.
But Sonia didn’t feel out of her depth. She felt in control. She’d just put two and two together. “You’re the one. You wrote that story, ‘The Warning.’ You sell the drug.”
Hayworth’s face closed. “I don’t sell anything.”
“But you said you’re from the future.” Sonia took another swig from the flask. “Does the drug show it to you? Or are you an actual time traveler?”
She meant this to be arch and witty, but Hayworth didn’t smile. He stubbed out the cigarette, and his sleeve rode up, exposing a striped oxford cuff and a Movado museum watch like the ones she’d seen advertised in her dad’s New Yorkers. He didn’t seem like the Scott Lemorne kind of dealer, if he was a dealer.
“Nobody can time travel,” he said. “My body is stuck here, just like yours. I have memories of the future, that’s all.” And then, before she could ask questions: “At the PFA, that’s where I saw you. They were showing Tokyo Drifter.”
“What?” Sonia could feel the static off his tweed jacket, though they weren’t touching—a delicious shiver that traveled over her from head to toe.
“Pacific Film Archive.”
“I didn’t—I don’t know what that is.”
“That’s because it hasn’t happened yet.”
“Oh, right. The future.” Sonia gulped some vodka and managed not to choke. She was acutely conscious of him there, close enough to reach out
and brush her hair out of her eyes. “What else do you see in the future? How to get rich off stocks?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Hayworth said. “It comes in bits and pieces, not enough for you ever to get the whole picture. It doesn’t allow you to see enough to know to change things, or how they should change. And you don’t choose what you see, so you can’t even really try to put the pieces together, either.”
“You can’t change the future? What’s the point, then?” She probably sounded like an idiot.
A teasing hint played around his lips. “You don’t want just a peek?”
She couldn’t tell him that when she tried to think about the future, she found only a quivering, abject mass of fears. Please don’t let me die tomorrow. Please let me get out of Vermont. Please don’t let me be a sad little mousy hanger-on to Auraleigh forever. Please let me be a real person someday.
She said, “My mom raised us to think we wouldn’t live to see the year 2000. You know, the nuclear-doomsday clock.”
“Your mom’s wrong,” Hayworth said. “I’ve been to the twenty-first century.”
The room wobbled and telescoped. Warm light bouncing off the black window, distant thump of music. “I thought you weren’t a time traveler.”
“I’m not.” His tone was casual. His eyes focused far off. “Everything we’ve ever experienced or will experience is locked up inside us somewhere, and sog unlocks it. When you’re young, it shows you your future. When you’re older, it shows you your past.”
“So I would see my future?”
Hayworth laughed, a hoarse sound that made Sonia tingle lightly all over. Black stubble stood out on the pale skin of his neck. “You have to be thirty or forty before you sog backward. My memories got mixed up with some of the memories of the older me, and you’re in those memories. You’re different in the future.”
“Different how?” He was talking nonsense, but she still wanted to know.
“Pretty—no, wait, I don’t mean that.” He held up a hand. “I don’t mean you’re not pretty now. I just mean that in the future, you’re more...finished. Right now you’re only half here, same as me.”
A shudder gripped her shoulders. He was putting into words what she’d always known, what Scott Lemorne and the Kims knew: all those moves during her childhood, having to continually adjust to a new place and new school and new culture, had left her raw, unfinished, a collection of fragments. “I don’t belong anywhere,” she said. “Do you feel that way?”
He nodded. “I feel like a ghost—maybe that’s because I have these pieces of the future in my head, or maybe I’ve always felt that way.”
The words sank into Sonia’s skin. Like a ghost, someone people looked through. A latchkey kid with ragged bangs, high-water pants, dirty nails. A girl whose hippie mom dated a million freaks. A college sophomore who still got nervous talking to boys.
Paul and Auraleigh had taken her in, and these days, when she was drunk or feeling unusually confident, she liked to think of herself as the elegant one in their group—not the prettiest, no, but attractive in her own serene way, as long as she didn’t smile too much. She was the only
one of them who knew anything about film; even Paul listened attentively when she talked about Ugetsu or My Beautiful Laundrette.
But none of that was enough to make her belong with them, not really. She wanted to be stunning, brilliant, unmissable. What she wanted from the future was a bolt of electricity to galvanize her into motion, to give her the trajectory of a shooting star.
The record ended. She heard it revolving, then the click of the needle withdrawing, the turntable stopping.
“Can I try it?” she asked.
Hayworth’s gaze came unfixed again. “You sure? Gas prices keep going up, and there are a bunch of wars coming. It’s messy. Worse. Always worse. Or that’s what people say.”
A future where people bought gas and saw movies still seemed manageable. “Please,” she said, the word slipping out.
Hayworth gave her another glance, then pulled a jam jar from his jacket and unscrewed it. Inside was a half-inch of what looked like low-grade maple syrup or bacon grease about to congeal.
He held it up to the light. Black flecks floated in the golden-brown liquid. Sonia’s stomach clenched.
“Don’t worry, it can’t physically hurt you.” He stuck a finger in the jar. It came out glossy brown, and he popped it in his mouth as if he couldn’t resist a taste.
The liquid stank like a pine forest rubbed on the inside of your sinuses, like the essence of this soggy, rotting county. When Hayworth leaned toward her, the jar seemed to vibrate between them. But he didn’t pass it to her, only said, “Cup your hand.”
Right then, Sonia believed it all: that he was from the future. That he was half seeing her now and half seeing her as she’d be someday—brave and glowing, finally belonging in some indefinable way.
“I’ll go with you,” he said, dribbling dark liquid into her palm. “We won’t actually go to the same place, though. We won’t see the same things.”
Sonia raised her hand to her mouth and licked off the sticky stuff. She tasted Pine-Sol, only sweeter, and gagged before finally getting it down.
“We need to lie down,” Hayworth said, leading her into a dim space between high stacks of boxes. “Don’t worry. Just like a nap.”
Sonia stretched out and closed her eyes. Were the others all gone? It was so quiet; no one had put on another record.
Tension drained out of her, leaving only a heavy sense of well-being. She forgot about Auraleigh, about Scott and Toddy and the most dangerous Kim, even about Hayworth. Her head buzzed. The air weighed on her, moving rhythmically like a great bird beating its wings.
In the darkness, she saw and felt...
Herself in a car. On a highway. A yellow desert landscape flickering past, impossibly bright.
Cool rush of air on her bare legs. Afternoon sun on her bare arms. A hammer-shaped cloud on the horizon. Beside her, a voice speaking—tinny, as if from the radio.
Throat tight. Eyes blurred with tears. The sense of something roaring up all at once, life sharpening to a point. Things becoming clear.
life sharpening to a point. Things becoming clear.
In the rearview, blue lights flashing. A black car, tall as a military tank, stopped on the shoulder.
In the back seat, cardboard boxes and a vase with a Navajo pattern.
Foot on the pedal, easing. Her own voice replying to the tinny voice. Her voice saying Yes. Her eyes following the curve of the road between enormous banks of brightness, taking it in without being blinded. Brightness without end.
Later, she would remember the vision as a slideshow—each image sharp-edged, saturated with color, indelible. As quickly as the pictures came, they vanished, leaving only the relentless buzzing in her head.
Eventually, she floated upward, through liquid blackness into wan electric light. She sat up with a jerk. Where was she? Who was she?
For an instant, no answers. There was only a thudding beat, rattling old walls, and a tightness in her throat. Beside her, stretched out on his side with one cheek against the boards, lay a tall, black-haired boy.
Then, all at once, her memories snapped back. The party. Dunstan College. Sophomore year. Auraleigh, downstairs. Hayworth.
Sonia was afraid to know what would happen when he woke up. Maybe he’d only wanted to get her hooked on the drug; maybe he didn’t like her at all. She scrambled to her feet, dead sober again, grabbed her backpack, and took the stairs.
The party was winding down. She hurried from group to group until she located Auraleigh—not with Toddy, but with a bearded, twinkly-eyed townie who was funneling a Jell-O shot into her mouth.
Sonia watched them as if from a great distance. She had seen the future. She would live in the desert someday, out west, in brightness. Maybe in Hollywood. Maybe she could start writing screenplays—maybe, maybe.
After consuming two more Jell-O shots, Auraleigh gave the guy her number, and he wandered off. “You drive,” Auraleigh said to Sonia.
On the way home, they talked about Auraleigh’s new friend, who was apparently a bow hunter. Sonia said, “I told Toddy you were downstairs,” and Auraleigh screwed up her face and said, “Toddy’s such a tool.”
Back in the three-bedroom townhouse, Auraleigh went upstairs to watch TV. In the downstairs bathroom, Sonia pulled off her tights and everything else and put on a bathrobe and washed off the eyeliner and drank three glasses of lukewarm water.
She found Jennet in her bed, curled in a nest of blankets, reading an English translation of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies. She had the spare key to the townhouse, so you never knew when to expect her. “My hallway was having another kegger,” she said by way of explanation.
Sonia was always on her guard with most of her friends, but Jennet’s presence was like another layer of her own skin. “Auraleigh and I went to a townie party,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d want to come.”
“I can’t believe you went.”
Sonia turned her back to Jennet and slipped on pajamas under her bathrobe. Jennet never mocked her modesty; they were both that way.
“Barthes says we’re all inoculating ourselves against the urge to rebel,” Jennet said, adjusting her oversize round glasses. “We get a smidgen of freedom and bolt back to our cozy conventionality. Is that why I hate parties?”
“No. Parties are terrible.” Sonia sat opposite Jennet and propped a pillow behind her head. Sometimes they slept this way, head to toe in the single bed, each with a book under her cheek or balanced on her chest. It reminded Sonia of childhood sleepovers—the giggling, the ghost stories, the aimless talk with no expectations.
The heater ticked. Sonia was no longer staggering around a party in itchy tights. In the warm yellow puddle of light from her gooseneck lamp, everything that had happened with Hayworth seemed far away.
On the ride home, she’d tried to memorize each image she’d seen in the sog. They shone inside her like stained-glass windows or illuminated posters outside a movie theater. ...
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