Margaret and Frank Roberts had moved out of their graduate student apartment and were living that summer in a house they rented in a very classy part of town. There was no furniture with the rental, and since, like other graduate students, they bought gas five or ten bucks at a time, they sat on the floor, though the floors were hardwood. At some point, Margaret and Frank had decided that Ed and Megan, his live-in, were, as Margaret put it, simpatico, so they traded visits now and then for dinner.
    Ed, in fact, had met Margaret in one of his first graduate school classes. After class she asked him a perfunctory question about parking regulations, and while she did, she touched his wrist and held his look just a trifle too long, such that Ed wondered, though she wore a wedding ring, if she was coming on to him. He found out soon enough that she was, because she came on to everyone. She posted notes on bulletin boards all over campus organizing meetings for this, that, and the other, and she put her phone number on the notes. She could then follow up with whomever she found attractive among the callers.
    But Frank and Margaret had turned a corner. Frank was in business school, and he'd landed an internship with a brokerage house that had a whole new way of doing things, and it looked like they were in on the ground floor – thus the rental. There'd been several approving stories in the local business section about the firm. They had so many new customers coming in the door that they'd hired Margaret as a summer worker, too.
    So in the course of things, they invited Ed and Megan over to bring them up to date. It was going to be a get-together over dinner, but with a new twist: Frank had scored some grass. He wasn't making a whole lot of money at his internship, but apparently it was enough for that. Ed had smoked a lot of dope in college, but he'd pretty much outgrown it. Megan, on the other hand, had never done anything like that before in her life. This was going to be a special occasion.
    Frank and Margaret weren't exactly flower children. The get-together might have been organized by some minimalist Martha Stewart who, without furniture and with no budget for decorations, nevertheless made things look as if they'd been intricately planned. Ed had an unsettling sense that the incense burner and candlesticks, on the floor like everything else, had nevertheless been selected with a coordinated pattern. The munchies were broiled mushrooms stuffed with cheese. He'd found the college drug scene congenial in large part because it was something different from his parents' world of calculated impressions, yet this was exactly what Frank and Margaret were apparently trying to bring off.
    The stuff Frank had scored wasn't good. From the first time they passed the bong around, Ed felt little tendrils of paranoia trying to gain control. The conversation was irritating: Frank kept wanting to talk about the brokerage house and the business it was doing. Ed couldn't escape a sense that there was an agenda behind everything that was going on, and he couldn't just let go and let the evening or the music fill him with good feeling.
    Beyond that, it was starting to become plain that Megan's reaction to her first experience with marijuana was going to be a problem. First-time reactions are hard to predict. Often people will seem to have no reaction at all, then suddenly burst into uncontrollable giggling and laughter. Megan wasn't acting this way. Instead, she seemed to be studying Frank and Margaret carefully, then deliberately aping whatever they did, as if the whole point of smoking weed was to behave in a certain approved way. If there was anything Ed didn't feel qualified to do, it was micromanage someone's drug use -- nor did he want to do it. But if the point of doing drugs was in some way to have your own experience, Megan was certainly missing it. On the other hand, there was no way Ed could tell her to have her own experience if she didn't know what that meant -- she'd simply interpret it as Ed telling her what to do.
    Margaret and Frank kept chattering about their new employer. "We're putting every penny they pay us back into investments," she said.
    "That's why we're living here," said Frank. "They're giving us this place rent free while we work for them." The weed must have loosened their tongues; that wasn't how Ed had originally understood the deal. It sounded like what was really happening was they were working without pay, but they were being given living quarters of a sort.
    "This must be a really good investment," was what Ed actually said.
    "It is," said Frank. "You wouldn't believe how people are coming in the door and putting their money into it."
    "I'm wondering, though," said Ed, "what if you just wanted to save up to buy a new car? You put some money in, and a couple months later, bang, you've got enough for a BMW. How easy is it to cash out?"
    "Who'd want to do that?" Frank sounded irritated. "I mean, if you stand to make millions, why pull out for a lousy BMW?"
    "Maybe you're right," said Ed. He thought, though, of his father, who'd refinanced the family house and put the equity into a multi-level marketing scam. He lost the whole bundle. Ed reflected briefly that Frank was studying for his MBA.
    Megan, meanwhile, had lost interest in the discussion. Her expression wasn't good. "I'm not feeling well," she said eventually. "I think we'd better go home."
    By the time he'd gotten around the car and into the driver's seat, Megan was gripping the brake level in one hand and the handhold on the door with the other in white-knuckled terror. Her face was a rictus, the cords standing out on her neck. "How should I act?" she asked. "I don't know how to act." Marijuana is usually thought to be milder in its effects than LSD, but Megan, for whatever reason, was reacting as badly to it as he'd ever seen with someone on acid. It reminded him of the memorable bummer his friend Mickey had when they were in college.
    Pretty much from the time the acid began to take effect, the sudden little tingles, the random noises from outside that you begin to notice, Mickey was terrified. His hands grabbed the arms of the chair he was sitting in, the tendons standing out. "Is this what's supposed to be happening?" he kept asking. As far as Ed could tell, it was.
    "You mean," Ed asked, "does the music sound much slower, much more intricate, much deeper?"
    "I guess," he answered. But it was, Ed could see, something deeply disturbing. "Is this what's supposed to be happening?" It was plainer and plainer that he expected a set of instructions. He wanted to follow instructions, and there weren't any, except what Ed might be able to give him, but Ed suddenly realized that wasn't going to be enough.
    Mickey was frozen in angst. He kept telling Ed everything he was seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, smelling, and asking him, directly or by implication, if that was OK. Somehow he couldn't even let himself have his own experience. It was as if he lived his whole life one step removed from reality, having only acceptable thoughts, acceptable reactions.
    The fellow seemed to have no originality, and his agenda for Ed was that Ed should spend his time telling him what to do, what to think, what to say, what to feel. He'd been a friend, and now Ed realized that he could no longer stand to be around him. (To allay any concerns the reader may have about how Mickey was affected, I should point out that despite his bad acid trip, he completed his PhD in political science and is a tenured professor at one of our great universities.)
    The normal answer to Megan's question regarding how she should act, of course, would be "Just be yourself". Ed indeed said this, but with no real conviction. Her actions, in the sense she meant them, had never been anything but a repertory of responses calculated to be either ingratiating or manipulative. If she went looking for a self, it was like peeling back the layers of an onion, with nothing left in the center.
    The best he could manage was to let the effect of the drug wear off, which took an hour or two. At that point, she understood that to dwell on her terror in the face of an abyss would only be embarrassing, and she never brought it up. Nevertheless, the next day, she did say, "I thought that investment deal that Margaret and Frank were talking about was really interesting. I have a few thousand dollars in savings. I think I'd like to invest with them."
    "That would be a really bad idea," said Ed.
    At that she was highly indignant. "How on earth can you say that?"
    "It's too good to be true. Think about it."
    She shook her head. "I don't see how you can say that about Margaret and Frank." But her indignation went only so far. The money was hers; she and Ed weren't married; all it would take was her own signature to withdraw it. And they both understood this is an enlightened age, where women, married to men or not, aren't required to obey them.
    "Why argue about it?" was what Ed said. "I can give you advice, but I can't stop you if that's what you want to do." He kicked himself inwardly: it had completely escaped him that the whole visit to their place had been a sales pitch.
    "If you won't let me do it," she answered, "then I can't." Ed tried to explain one more time that there was no way he could not let her do it, but then he realized that wasn't the point. She needed an excuse, someone to blame, and he was it. It was no doubt in this context that she conveyed her regrets to Margaret. At root, Megan was, if not always prudent, at least consistently pusillanimous.
    When the whole investment scam collapsed, Margaret and Frank turned out to be fish too small to indict, though they apparently had some anxious moments in the prosecutor's office. Having a friend who tries to screw you out of serious money ought to be a sign that you don't really have a friend, but Megan continued to be big buddies with Margaret. I guess she enjoyed hearing the soap opera over Frank's and Margaret's complicated love lives, and for that matter, she likely admired how Margaret was able to bring it all off.
    Half a dozen years later, Ed ran into Frank at a bar, long since divorced from Margaret. He'd finsihed his MBA, he'd gone on to get a law degree, and he was on track to becoming a tax partner at Deloitte. Not long before, Ed had been back down on campus, and there were still little notes from Margaret on all the bulletin boards, setting up meetings for one thing or another.



About the author:
John Bruce's writing has appeared recently, or will appear, in Backhand Stories, Byline Magazine. Cantaraville, The Cynic Online, Dark Sky Magazine, DOGZPLOT, Hobson's Choice Zine, Holy Cuspidor, The Journal of Truth and Consequence, Literal Translations, Pear Noir!, Press 1, and Written Word. He has degrees in English from Dartmouth College and the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. His web site is http://mthollywood.blogspot.com

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