Me: We’d been flirting all day. She lived in the exact opposite direction from you. I mean it’s understood, right, what offering to walk someone home in that context means?
Gaby: You thought the walk was a euphemism.
M: Indeed.
G: But then it wasn’t.
M: It was not. That is correct.
G: And when you realized it wasn’t a euphemism, was just itself …
M: Look, you don’t want to fall on either side. You don’t want to be the cynic who disallows the possibility of sincerity. You also don’t want to be the rube who doesn’t know when something’s a joke.
G: Mm-hmm.
M: I’m not going to lose sleep over it. We were in different stories is all.
G: It sounds to me like no one was going to lose any sleep over it. Everyone was going to get to sleep nice and early, and wake up refreshed and—
M: …
G: You were in different stories is all.
M: I was in a different story. I had to throw out the whole plot arc I was working with.
G: Which was?
M: I was talking in this gentle, breathy voice, trying not to say anything too weird.
G: The voice you do when it’s a girl on the phone.
M: The part of the dramatic structure narratologists call “rising action.”
G: Eww.
M: That was funny!
G: How many narratology puns do I get to look forward to in this conversation?
M: How many is too many?
G: So you’re walking along, telling yourself some story that ends in sweet, foreign, dawn-welcoming butt sex …
M: Go on.
G: And then you reach the front door, hang out there — what? — I’m guessing five, ten minutes trying to feel out the situation. And finally she says she’s tired, gives you a kiss on the cheek, and goes in. And you have to walk home. And your story has come crashing down. And your life has no point—
M: No, that’s where you’re wrong. My life was fine. I had to start telling myself a new story is all.
G: Which we do all the time.
M: Which we do all the time. And which is fine so long as the metanarrative endures.
G (a beat, squinting): And the metanarrative again, just so we’re clear?
M: What it sounds like, I think. The fundamental Platonic form of narrative. The prime fabric of meaning.
G: What has significance for us. What we’re about.
M: Yeah, sort of. Though maybe more like a scaffold. A particular shape in which any one narrative has to fit.
G: And how do we know if one fits?
M: That’s what I’m saying, I guess. It’s more like a feeling we get when something doesn’t fit. Then we worry the thing until it does. But some things come along, right, that just refuse to fit, and in defying the scaffold they wake us up to the whole apparatus.
G: Like you’ve been on autopilot, yeah, without taking the time to figure out what the metanarrative is, just sort of assuming that if you do more or less what other people seem to be doing it’ll figure itself out?
M: Right.
G: Then, boom! You just gave the ten best years of your life to corporate law.
M: And you realize nobody really cares. Nobody’s, like, proud of you. The world’s kind of done patting you on the back, scratching behind your ears.
G: But you’re not broke.
M: You’re not broke, it’s true.
G: You have a lot of television options to scroll through while you’re wondering if maybe musical theater wasn’t your passion all along.
M: Some totally decent scotch.
G: And you get drunk and bone a stranger who’s not your type and— Surprise, that didn’t help!
M: And you quit your job and travel in India.
G: Ashram, roshi, et cetera.
M: And you come back and volunteer at a hospice.
G: Which is actually a really great thing to do.
M: I have, you know, zero doubt.
G: But corporate law is just the low-hanging fruit, right?
M: Yeah, no, it’s all of us.
G: It just comes in different forms, at different times?
M: One that happens to most of us, I think, is the moment when you’re getting older and it hits you that you don’t really have a “home” anymore. And you think: What is a home, really? Did I ever have one? Do I need one?
G: The difference between a house and a home.
M: Mm … Say more.
G: The house is the physical object. The home is that object inside a narrative.
M: The difference between a walk and a walk.
G: Between mushrooms and mushrooms.
M: Are you feeling anything?
She nodded. I was beginning to feel something too. The psilocybin had begun gently thrumming the surface of the day. The field below us, blanched in sunshine, was not changing exactly, but it was taking on different emphases. The conceptual had begun to recede, so that the trees, for instance, appeared to me more as the visual elements that made them up and less as the thing we call “tree.” A patch of reddish berries, which I had never noticed in the leaves across the yard, were now the first thing I saw each time I looked up. They seemed to push into the visual field and as the effect deepened, faint mists transpired before me, as though a haze disclosed by the light, the day grew brighter, the clouds spun and broke apart, piercing white, an animate lace whose definition at their wispy edges could only be called preternatural. I laughed, and then I wasn’t sure why I’d laughed. Gabrielle said that it was in this state and this state alone that black velvet art began to make sense to her.
The thing that happens to me most profoundly on psychedelics, the reason I occasionally do them, in fact, and what happened to me that afternoon for a good two hours or so during the deepest part of the trip, is that my sense of connection to the metanarrative deserts me. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that in seeing the possibility of this connection foreclosed, I become aware of something I didn’t know was taking place, an unconscious process, a limbic subroutine, an autonomic checking-in the brain seems regularly to perform to square what you are doing with the context of the day, the week, the still broader context of the year, your life, what you care about and hope to achieve, how you see yourself and how you hope to be seen. It is in watching this process break down that you become conscious of it, the failure of some mechanism to catch at the appropriate point, and the sensation is not unlike waking repeatedly from a dream without having realized you were asleep.