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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Alice
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She was not a typical girl you would find in Portugal. Her parents were from Sweden, and her light blonde hair and pale blue eyes were exotic amongst a sea of blacks and browns. I called her by the Portuguese form of her name, “Alícia.” Our lives seemed intertwined, from the day we became friends when my mother forgot to send me to school with money for milk, and her mother had forgotten her cookies- to college where we roomed together.
I teased her, because I thought her professor wanted to sleep with her- but she said he didn’t, twirling gracefully before the mirror as her dress fell to the floor. “And what would be the matter if he did?” I called her a slut, and we laughed, but then her jaw became taught. “No, really. So what if he wants to sleep with me?” My jaw hit the floor, and my protest had barely formed words before she batted them away as she walked into our bathroom, pealing away her underthings. “I’m not saying I will or want to- but I don’t understand why there should be a problem if he wants to.” We had taken one of Dr. Lutwidge’s introductory psychology courses together, and she was interested enough to take some of his higher level classes. I knew she liked his teaching- and I suspected that she liked him personally- but I didn’t realize she was becoming his protégé, until her name appeared on a paper he published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. She didn’t say anything, just smiled coyly, when I asked about it. And then one golden afternoon, she told me she was leaving for several weeks. She was taking part in his latest experiment. It drew on ideas from Timothy Leary’s Concord prison experiment and Phil Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment. His idea was more ambitious, taking actual parolees and students, and imprisoning them in a mock prison (housed inside a closed insane asylum). They were randomly assigned the roles of prisoners and guards, then given LSD, to the end of engaging in life-altering group therapy. The idea was to at once introduce the kinds of radical drops in recidivism rates seen at Concord, as well as to limit the sadistic behaviors from Stanford. The experiment terminated early, as apparently even our country’s lax attitude to drugs couldn’t shield the research. One of the subjects had escaped, and in a drug fit, run naked through the town, blowing a bugle and screaming about what was taking place in the asylum, causing enough of a stir that the authorities couldn’t leave it alone. He cryptically repeated the phrase, “If I or she should chance to be involved in this affair, he trusts to you to set them free, exactly as we were.” What they found at the asylum was confusing, more than anything. The building was destroyed, with several small fires still smoldering when the police arrived. Lutwidge had encouraged his subjects to graffiti the walls, and “Down the rabbit hole” had been spray-painted in red over the entrance (which, in the dim evening light, the police initially took for blood). The disarray seemed to point to debauchery and hedonism, but the subjects, both prisoners and guards, seemed perfectly relaxed and rational, albeit high as kites. Alice was still stoned when she got back to our apartment. She remembered thinking of Lutwidge as a giant caterpillar, always in the center of the room but somehow seeming elevated above the conversation, and always, always asking questions. The one he’d asked most often- and each time he asked it she had less of an idea how to answer- was, “Who are you?” And she remembered his hands- so many hands, constantly moving and gripping the air, holding his hookah up and gesticulating, scribbling notes and holding hands, but always busy, always moving, mesmerizing. She told me the acid had expanded, and shrunk, her consciousness. “It seemed to fill my head with ideas- only, I’m not entirely sure I understand what they are.” She started packing another bag; she said Lutwidge had planned for the contingency, that he had secured a separate, private residence away from the public to conclude their experiment. I asked what had happened to the first bag she took, and she said simply, “The Jabberwock snatched it.” As she zipped her new bag I contemplated going with her, if only to ensure her safety, but I knew she wouldn’t have tolerated it. I told her, “I don’t like it, Alícia. It all seems like madness.” “We’re all mad, Lorina,” was the last thing she said as she walked out. |
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