Bit imagines a great hand descending from the sky and smashing the revelers like a bad boy smashing a trail of ants. Ashamed, he tunes back in to Hannah. But the heat is brutal; even Bit is sickened and can’t listen as deeply as he’d like to her story. He notes that there are his slides and Verda’s voice unreeling into the dim from a recorder.
Hannah looks out, sees how her audience, though brave, has wilted. She says a little sadly, And here we are. Not unlike the Divinists, idealistic, hardworking, spiritual. Unlike them, she says, we know enough to learn from history and change before it’s too late.
She pauses to gather herself, and in the pause something explodes outside, a green firecracker snaking up into the dimming midsummer sky and bursting into red sparks. She turns to look behind her. Her golden hair is full of glints. And when she turns back, Bit can read on her face that she has decided to end it there.
Thank you, she says. Now let us all enjoy Cockaigne Day. And though they applaud her as greatly as they can in the echoing empty Proscenium, his mother’s shoulders slump as she walks down the stairs.
Outside, the air is cooling a little, the grass sweet-smelling, crushed. A wallpaper of people has spread across Arcadia House lawn, a shifting mirror game of hippies in their gauzy white dresses and halter tops and full-body denim. A long line from the kitchen moves the food out to the fold-out tables. There is lemonade for the kidlets. There is a great barrel of popcorn with nutritional yeast topping, mangled lettuce salad, tomato salad, tempeh salad. Bulgur wheat and bean salad. Spicy tofu salad. Yegg salad. Pasta salad. There are heaps of bread rapidly depleting. Rice and beans. Salsa. A vat of yam stew. So many pies that they will have no more preserves until harvest. Soy cream in pistachio, vanilla, chocolate, strawberry. Some of the day visitors are not so bad: some have come back from various towns laden with grapes and bananas, crates of oranges, celery sticks, great cans of peanut butter, industrial bread, which tastes like paper to Bit. Huge bags of crinkled things someone calls chips that are so salty they make him gasp. Cookies from huge boxes that taste the way batteries do when licked.
As usual, the kids and Pregnant Ladies and Trippies go first, even though some of the new men are high enough to crash the line. When everyone has gone through, there is still some food left over. For a day, everyone eats their fill, then beyond until they can eat no more. Even Bit, who resists the excitement with the solid moral core of himself, relaxes when he is full and lets the summer night in.
Music begins in the Sheep’s Meadow amphitheater. Handy’s voice rises into the air, scratchy and magnificent, the Free People Band in fine form, banjo and fiddle and accordion each taking long, luxuriant solos. Tarzan, the drummer, is eloquent in this, his only language. The day darkens, and the joints and cigarettes outshine the fireflies. The kidlets are high on unaccustomed sugar and chase one another. Bit’s lungs burn with running, with laughing, scooping up the wee ones and throwing them in the air, catching them, wrestling his friends. Cole and Ike and Helle and he sneak to the vat of acid-spiked Slap-Apple and dip out four hurried mason jars. They take them behind the Octagonal Barn. Helle bites the rim of her jar with her smile and closes her eyes to down it. Bit watches her; he wants to smash it into her face, then, maybe, lick it off her chin. She looks at him and says, daring him, Scared?
He is. He likes his brain. He does not want to end up like Kaptain Amerika, forever tweaked. There are over sixty walking cautionary tales in Arcadia, burnt-out Trippies, their psyches gone rogue.
No, he says, and tosses it back, the alcohol burning his throat. Helle takes Bit’s hand as they come out from behind the barn to wait for the acid’s slow seeping in. Her fingers are cool in his, and though he wants to pull away, he doesn’t. As they walk, she squeezes.
Down at the concert, Handy is leading the whole bunch in “Goodnight, Irene.” In the little side area of Christmas lights, Astrid and Lila lean against one another, their eyes closed, swaying. Saucy Sally is tiny, clutched to Titus’s chest. Somebody whispers about a party at the Runaway Quonset, and the Ado Unit begins to trickle down that way. Bit and Helle pass the Pond, where puddles of clothes await the splashers who have gone in, naked. It is as full as the Pond generally is during a summer afternoon, but with adults, in the moonlight. Bit and Helle and Ike and Cole pass a group of four little kids who look up fearfully at the Ados going by, then go back to portioning out what Bit at first thinks are pebbles. He looks closer, sees blue pills. He tries to say something, but he has lost his words somewhere, and so he scoops up the pills and shoves them into his pocket. Some little kid kicks Bit’s ankle; he is showered with gravel as he walks away. The Runaway Quonset blazes with kerosene light, blasts with someone’s radio. Beside the crooked woodstove, there is another barrel of liberated Slap-Apple. There are so many people moving here that they become one shouting mass, a many-armed monster.
Helle whispers in his ear, and Bit doesn’t catch what she says. When he turns his face to her, his anger with her must be suddenly apparent. She jerks backward and disappears.
Now people sharpen into individuals. Little Pooh is dancing, throwing her arms up in the air. One stranger with teardrops tattooed on his face leans back on his arms and watches her; his friend, also in a black leather jacket, is pressed up against some Runaway chick on the wall. Bit looks at the jacket and sees a dead pig, and almost throws up when he passes by and smells an animal musk. Strange, he thinks, to find men here when most in this place are kids.
He loses this thought with a shock: on a cot, Jincy makes out with one of the Runaways, a chiseled black-haired boy with a vulture feather in his hair.
Hey, Jincy, Bit says, shaking her shoulder, and she looks up, smiling, says, Hey, Bit, and goes back to kissing. Let her get bird lice, who cares.
Ike puts in a tape, and new louder sounds roar into life. Misfits! he screams and bashes his head against the sound. He is sweating so much he has hoops under his arms. Bit’s own shirt is stuck to him.
Helle reappears, dreamy, confused. Hey, she says so softly only Bit can hear. That’s my tape? He wants to bite her lips. His body would like to melt into hers. He reaches up to her face, but when his hands get there they have turned into someone else’s and Helle is no longer before him, she is gone.
The acid has begun its work. Inside the universe he can feel something white and warm, pulsing. Time slows, stretches, becomes a spiral. The Runaway Quonset is full of beauty and it is terrible and Bit knows he is weeping: he knows what everyone is thinking because he has thought it himself, how Cole can feel the earth throbbing beneath his feet, how Helle’s body is warmed against Harrison’s as they press together, dancing, how Armand Hammer can feel Helle’s ribs as he, too, presses close from behind. How generous, he thinks, the boys are to not look at one another, how gracious it all seems to him. The faces around Bit begin to make such grotesque shapes that he can hardly believe a thing. No! he thinks, watching Cole’s eyeballs grow as big as his ears, No! Pooh’s lips swing to her knees, No! Helle’s face whittles away to a pinprick, to nothing. Everything is rich with the incredible.
The music splinters into fragments of light that he can catch with his mouth. It is so much, too much, overwhelming. He crawls to one corner and closes his eyes and whispers his own name, over and over and over, until someone picks him up and carries him away.
Somehow, he is outside, and the metal of the Runaway Quonset is cold on his back. Ike is beside him, and they are passing a joint back and forth. The earth burbles underfoot, he can hear the roots of the trees rubbing sexily against the dirt like legs rubbing against legs. Cole is against the Quonset, his lips locked onto the face of a pretty, tiny girl, his hand under her skirt. Bit peers and peers until he can make out Pooh. When Bit can winch his head around, Ike is blinking very fast and hard a few inches from Bit’s face.