Audio: Jennifer Egan reads.
Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a forest. It’s gone now (burned), and the four men walking in it are gone, too, which is what makes it far away. Neither it nor they exist anymore.
But in June, 1965, the redwoods have a velvety, primeval look that brings to mind leprechauns or djinns or fairies. Three of the four men have never been in these ancient woods before, and to them the forest looks otherworldly, so removed is it from their everyday vistas of wives and children and offices. The oldest, Lou Kline, is only thirty-one, but all were born in the nineteen-thirties and raised without antibiotics, their military service completed before they went to college. Men of their generation got started on adulthood right away.
So: four men moving among trees whose trunks resemble the muscular thighs of giants. When the men throw their heads back to search the sunlight for the trees’ pointed tips, they grow dizzy. That’s partly because they’ve just smoked marijuana, not a common practice in 1965 among squares, which anyone would agree these four are. Or three of them. There is a leader—there is usually a leader when men leave their established perimeters—and today it is Quinn Davies, a tanned, open-faced man accoutred with artifacts of a Native American ancestry that he wishes he possessed. Normally, Quinn would wear a blazer, like the rest of them, but today he’s donned what strikes his pals as a costume: a purple velvet coat and heavy moccasins that prove far better suited to navigating this soft undergrowth than the oxfords they’re sliding around in. Only Lou manages to keep pace with Quinn, despite the fawnlike skittering this feat requires of him. Lou would rather look spastic than risk falling behind.
These men all moved to California recently, driven by a hunger for space that couldn’t be satisfied by old cities, with their tinge of Europe and horse carts and history. There is an ungoverned feel to California’s mountains and deserts and reckless coast. Quinn Davies, the only bachelor in the group, is homosexual, and was on the lookout early for a graceful exit from Bridgeport, Connecticut, where his family has lived for generations. After the Navy, he followed the Beats to San Francisco, but, now that he’s here, they’ve proved maddeningly elusive. Still, there are always sailors who share Quinn’s view that a man can be a multitude of ways, depending on the circumstances. He has a flickering hope about one of the other three men: Ben Hobart, from Minnesota, married to his high-school sweetheart, a father of three. But it’s too soon to tell.
All four work in San Francisco in banking, doing their part to feed an expansion that will draw more restless folk like themselves to the city. Over drinks on Montgomery Street a few weeks back, they got to talking about “grass,” as marijuana is known even to those who have never seen it. They know that grass is around, but what is it, exactly? What does it do? All four like to drink. Quinn Davies drinks so that those around him will drink, too—which occasionally makes possible unexpected adventures. Ben Hobart drinks because it subdues a greedy energy that can find no outlet around his wife and kids. Tim Breezely drinks because he’s depressed, but that isn’t a word he would use. Tim drinks to feel happy. He drinks because, after several bourbons, he’s overcome by a sensation of soaring lightness, as if he’d finally set down a pair of heavy valises he didn’t realize he was carrying. Tim Breezely has a complaining wife and four complaining daughters. Inside his small Clement Street house, he floats in a tide of shrill feminine discontent that followed him here all the way from Michigan, ranging from aggrieved and exhausted (his wife) to shrieking and infantile (the baby). A son would have made the difference, Tim is convinced, but drinking helps—oh, it helps. Well worth the two bent fenders, the broken tail-light, and the multitude of dents he’s made in the Cadillac.
No matter how much Lou Kline drinks—and he drinks a lot—a part of him is always removed, watching with faint detachment as the men around him get plastered. Lou is waiting for something. He thought it was love until he met and married Christine, whom he worships; then he thought it was fatherhood; then moving West, as they did two years ago. But the sensation of waiting persists: an intimation of some approaching change that has nothing to do with Christine or their kids or the house in Belvedere on a man-made lake, where Lou swims a mile each morning and sails a little Sunfish. He’s become the social impresario of their cul-de-sac, organizing cookouts and cocktails, even a dance one night last summer, dozens of neighbor couples swaying barefoot by the lake to Sinatra and the Beatles. At Christine’s urging, he unearthed his sax and played it that night for the first time since his jazz-combo days at the University of Iowa, mildly electrified when everyone clapped. Life is good—it’s perfect, really—yet Lou is haunted by that sense of something just beyond it, something he is missing.
Charlene, whom they call Charlie, is six. This morning she scrutinized Lou, wrinkling her sunburned nose, and asked, “Where are you going?”
“Short trip north,” he said. “Some fishing, a little duck hunting, maybe.”
“You don’t have a gun,” Charlie said. She watched him evenly, her long tangled hair raking the light.
Lou found himself avoiding her eyes. “The others do,” he said.
His little boy, Rolph, clung to him at the door. Pale and dark-haired—Christine’s coloring, her iridescent eyes. It’s the strangest thing when Lou holds his son, as if their flesh were starting to fuse, so that letting go of him feels like tearing. He has a guilty awareness of loving Rolph more than Charlie. Is that wrong? Don’t all men feel that way about their sons—or, at least, those lucky enough to have sons? Poor Tim Breezely!
There will be no fishing, no hunting. What Quinn divulged, that afternoon on Montgomery Street, as they drank and smoked their Parliaments and roared with laughter before driving their big cars home to their wives and kids, was that he knew of some “bohemians” who grew grass in the middle of a forest near Eureka. They welcomed visitors. “We can go overnight on a weekend sometime, if you like,” Quinn said.
They did.
How can I possibly know all this? I was only six, and stuck at home, despite my fervent wish to come along—I always wanted to go with my father, sensing early (or so it seems, looking back) that the only way to hold his attention was to stay in his presence. How can I presume to describe events that occurred in my absence in a forest that is now charred and exudes an odor like seared meat? How dare I invent across chasms of gender, age, and cultural context? Trust me, I would not dare. Every thought and twinge I record arises from concrete observation, although getting hold of that information was arguably more presumptuous than inventing it would have been. Pick your poison—if imagining isn’t allowed, then we have to resort to gray grabs.
I got lucky; all four men’s memories are stored in the Collective Consciousness, at least in part—surprising, given their ages, and downright miraculous in my father’s case. He died in 2006, ten years before Mandala’s Own Your Unconscious was released. So how could my father have used it? Well, remember: the genius of Mandala’s founder, Bix Bouton, lay in refining, compressing, and mass-producing, as a luscious, irresistible product, technology that already existed in crude form. Memory externalization had been whispered about in psychology departments since the early two-thousands, with faculty speculating about its potential to revolutionize trauma therapy. Wouldn’t it help you to know what really happened ? What you’ve repressed ? Why does my mind (for example) wander persistently to a family party my parents took me to in San Francisco around the time this story takes place? I remember scrambling with a bunch of kids around the roots of an old tree, then being alone in someone’s attic beside a white wicker chair. Again and again: scrambling with those children, then alone in an unfamiliar attic. Or not alone, because who took me there, and why? What was happening while I looked at that chair? I’ve wondered many times whether knowing the answers to those questions would have allowed me to live my life with less pain and more joy. But by the time one of my father’s caregivers told us about a psychology professor at Pomona College who was uploading people’s consciousnesses for an experimental project, I was too wary to participate. A gain is also a loss when it comes to technology—my father’s imploding recording empire had taught me that much. But my father had little to lose; he’d had five strokes and was expiring before our eyes. He wanted in.
Rolph had been dead for years, and my other siblings were elsewhere. So it fell to me to greet the young professor, who wore red high-top sneakers, along with his two graduate students and a U-Haul full of equipment, early one morning at my father’s house. I parted the sparse remnants of my father’s surfer shag and fastened twelve electrodes to his head. Then he had to lie still—asleep, awake, it didn’t matter and there wasn’t much of a difference at that point—for eleven hours. I’d moved his hospital bed beside the pool so that he could hear his artificial waterfall. It seemed too intimate a process to let him undergo with strangers. I sat next to him for most of the time, holding his floppy hand while a wardrobe-size machine rumbled beside us. After eleven hours, the wardrobe contained a copy of my father’s consciousness in its entirety: every perception and sensation he had experienced, starting at the moment of his birth.
“It’s a lot bigger than a skull,” I remarked as one of the graduate students wheeled over a hand truck to take it away. My father still wore the electrodes.
“The brain is a miracle of compression,” the professor said.
I have no memory of that exchange, by the way. I saw and heard it only when I reviewed that day from my father’s point of view. Looking out through his eyes, I noticed—or, rather, he noticed—my short, uninteresting haircut and the middle-aged gut I was already starting to acquire, and I heard him wonder (but “hear” isn’t the right word; we don’t hear our thoughts aloud, exactly), How did that pretty little girl end up looking so ordinary ?
When Own Your Unconscious came out, in 2016, I was able to have the wardrobe’s contents copied into a luminous one-foot-square yellow Mandala Consciousness Cube. I chose yellow because it made me think of the sun, of my father swimming. Once his memories were in the Cube, I was finally able to view them. At first, the possibility of sharing them never crossed my mind; I didn’t know it was possible. The Collective Consciousness wasn’t a focus of early marketing for Mandala, whose slogans were “Recover Your Memories” and “Know Your Knowledge.” My father’s consciousness seemed like more than enough—overwhelming, in fact—which may be why I began, with time, to crave other points of view. Sharing his was the price. As the legal custodian of my father’s consciousness, I authorized its anonymous release, in full, to the Collective. In exchange, I’m able to use date and time, latitude and longitude, to search the anonymous memories of others who were present in those woods, on that day in 1965, without having to invent a thing.
Let us return to the men scrambling behind or (in my father’s case) alongside Quinn Davies, their guide. The introduction to grass took place at the trailhead, where Quinn passed around a small pipe, refilling it several times. Most people didn’t get high on their first exposure. (This was good old-fashioned pot, mind you, full of stems and seeds, long before the days of hydroponic sinsemilla.) Quinn wanted to get this first smoke out of the way, to prime his pals—Ben Hobart in particular—for getting well and truly wasted later on.
A river flashes in and out of view far below, like a snake sliding among leaves. As the men climb, their stumbling and guffawing yield to huffing, wheezing, and struggle. All four smoke cigarettes, and none exercise the way we think of it now. Even Ben Hobart, one of those preternaturally fit guys who can eat anything, is breathing too hard for speech by the time they crest the hill and glimpse A-Frame, as the house is known. Tucked in a redwood clearing and built from the cleared redwood, A-Frame is the sort of whimsical structure that will become a cliché of seventies California architecture. But, to these men, it looks like an apparition from a fairy tale: Is it real ? What kind of people live here ? Compounding the eeriness is Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” eking from hi-fi speakers facing outward on the redwood deck. A-Frame’s mastermind, Tor, has somehow managed to get electricity to a house in the middle of a forest, that is accessible only on foot.
Hello, darkness, my old friend . . .
A hush of awe engulfs the men as they approach. Lou falls back, letting Quinn lead the way into a soaring cathedral of space whose vast triangular windows reach all the way to its pointed ceiling. The scent of redwood is overpowering. Quinn introduces Tor, an austere eminence in his forties with long prematurely white hair. Tor’s “old lady,” Bari, is a warmer zaftig presence. An assortment of young people mill about the main room and deck, showing no interest in the new arrivals.
This odd setup leaves our three newcomers unsure what to do with themselves. Lou, who can’t tolerate feeling like a hanger-on, is abruptly angry with Quinn, who speaks quietly and privately with Tor. What the hell kind of greeting is this ? Nowadays, a man ill at ease in his surroundings will pull out his phone, request the Wi-Fi password, and rejoin a virtual sphere where his identity is instantly reaffirmed. Let us all take a moment to consider the isolation that was customary before these times arrived! The only possible escape for Lou and his friends involves retracing their steps through the forest without bread crumbs to guide them. So Lou paces around A-Frame in a way he cannot seem to help (though he feels its disruption), barking occasional questions at Tor, who sits aloft on a tall wooden chair that looks irritatingly thronelike: “Nice place, Tor. What sort of work do you do? Must’ve been hell getting pipes laid this far out.”
Lou opens doors and peers inside redwood-smelling nooks that are what pass for rooms in this kooky place. He’s stopped cold in one room by the sight of a dark-haired girl sitting naked on the floor, cross-legged under a small window, her eyes shut. Tree-filtered light dapples her flesh and the dark spread of her pubic hair. Her eyes open slowly at the intrusion. Lou chokes out, “Beg pardon, I’m awfully sorry,” and slinks away.
The desultory group begins, at last, to congregate around Tor in preparation for getting high. The Yardbirds are playing, but the world of their music is too far from Lou’s own world for him to enjoy it. Still, he welcomes the sense of incipient coherence, a fresh structure of meaning. Tor has a knack for orchestrating such moments. Intimate of Kerouac, occasional lover of Cassady, future provider of LSD for Kesey, Gravy, Stone, and the rest, Tor is one of those essential figures who catalyze action in other people and then fade into nonexistence without making it into history.
By my count, there are seventeen revellers: Tor and Bari, our four, the naked girl Lou was surprised by, now clothed in a loose flowered dress and meeting his gaze without embarrassment, and sundry others who look to be in their late teens and early twenties, who live in A-Frame’s several outbuildings and farm Tor’s marijuana crop.
Lou vastly prefers Tor’s totemlike bong to the diminutive pipe he smoked with Quinn. In the course of an hour’s communal smoking and record changes, the group drifts into a state of blinkered absorption that is unprecedented for Lou, Tim, and Ben, who until now have known only booze as a means of consciousness alteration. Basic exchanges elongate like time-lapse fruits ripening and dropping into outstretched hands.
“This . . . grass . . . was . . . grown . . . around . . . here?” (Ben Hobart asking Tor.)
“Yeah, the . . . crop . . . is . . . walking . . . distance.” (Quinn answering Ben Hobart.)
“You . . . live . . . up . . . here . . . full . . . time?” (Lou asking Tor.)
“We . . . finished . . . building . . . a year . . . ago.” (Bari answering Lou.)
Tor, you may have noticed, says virtually nothing. He has a story, too, but I can’t tell it—he and Bari are childless, and there are no intimates’ memories in the Collective to scavenge from. Since Tor will pass away long before the era of Own Your Unconscious, we have only these glimpses of him through the eyes of his acquaintances.
There are still some mysteries left.
When a widespread high has been achieved, the group gathers at a long table. Or, rather, the men gather. Bari and the other women ferry to and from the kitchen a lavish vegetarian meal in bowls and on platters. To Midwestern men whose days start with pork sausage and end with beef stroganoff or corned-beef hash (or, better yet, steak or roast), the term “vegetarian meal” is an oxymoron. What can it mean? For Lou, it means the most delicious repast he has ever consumed in his life—although, given the stoned arousal of his appetite, hardtack and warm water would have prompted similar raptures. Bari serves squash and turnips and tomatoes from her garden, along with “tahini sauce,” something our visitors have never tasted but can well believe was harvested from the Elysian Fields. Then come bowls of sorghum and buckwheat, chewy and wet and warm, served in towering piles that they devour in spoonfuls, together with tufts of alfalfa sprouts and sliced avocados and Bari’s fresh-baked whole-wheat bread.
As I watched all this through my father’s eyes, I found myself asking a question he was likely too stoned or disoriented to ask for himself: Why ? Why are Tor and Bari—and Quinn, for that matter—giving the red-carpet treatment to three squares who are entirely on the consuming end of the business? Well, how many reasons could there be? Money or sex: pick your poison! For Quinn, it’s sex, which he’s had before with men at A-Frame (including Tor once) and which he’s hoping he’ll have tonight with Ben Hobart, based on nothing more than a hunch. For Tor, it’s money. He’s run through most of his inheritance building this place and planting ten acres of marijuana; he could use an investor or two. But there’s a deeper reason: Tor has thrown himself into creating an alternate world, but hardly anyone has seen it. As a person who feels most alive in the act of awakening others, he longs to witness his vision ablaze in new eyes.
Toward the end of the meal, the sun drops behind the mountains, leaving the redwoods silhouetted like iron cutouts through the windows. As if at a signal, the young denizens of A-Frame leave the table and begin removing instruments from the nook where Tor and Bari stow them: bongos and castanets, shakers and recorders and ukuleles, plenty of options for those who can’t carry a tune. The formerly naked girl appears with a clarinet that must be her own. Several people have guitars, and Tor carries a flute. They begin to leave the house, walking in twos and threes along a path that leads uphill through the redwoods. Lou and his friends are swept along into the cool, fragrant woods. Quinn dares to sling an arm around Ben Hobart’s shoulders, causing a rogue flash of electricity to judder down Ben’s spine. He glances at Quinn, deeply startled, and doesn’t move away.
Tim Breezely trudges along at the rear. He’d like a drink. Smoking grass has drained his energy, and added to the weight of his invisible valises is that of a mandolin that someone handed him to carry. He’s the last to reach the hilltop. When he does, the redwoods give way to cleared land and it’s sunny again, the final rays browsing among the serrated leaves of a waist-high marijuana crop. Tim Breezely’s mood lifts in this openness and light. The air has a dry, tart snap. A circle has already been cleared for bonfires on cold nights, and the group assembles there as if by habit, each putting down instruments to take the hands of those adjacent to them before they sit. Emboldened by his earlier success, Quinn seizes Ben Hobart’s hand, eliciting jolts of sensation in Ben that approach the orgasms he has with his wife. Lou happens, just happens, to find himself beside the formerly naked clarinettist, but his legs won’t really cross; he hasn’t sat “Indian style” since boyhood.
Once seated, they all close their eyes as if in meditation. I’ve witnessed this silent period from every available consciousness in the Collective, and I have glints of what ran through each mind as they sat together in the dregs of sunlight: First Communion on a rainy morning; scooping black goldfish from a pond; a ringing in his ears; the sensation of landing a backflip. But my problem is the same one that everyone who gathers information has: What to do with it? How to sort and shape and use it? How to keep from drowning in it?
Not every story needs to be told.
Tor breaks the silence with the first and only sustained utterance his guests will hear from him today. In a thin voice, he asks them to feel the presence of a higher power in the food they’ve eaten, in the land beneath them and in the sky above; to feel the uniqueness of this moment of the twentieth century—to forget, briefly, the scourge of wars and apocalyptic weaponry in favor of this beauty, this peace. “Feel it, my friends,” Tor says, “and be grateful for our blessed convergence.”
A vibration seems to roll up from the warm earth. The sun slips behind the mountains with a click of cold, an intimation of the Pacific Ocean snarling at cliffs just a few miles west. Tim Breezely finds that his eyes are wet. He wipes them discreetly as the others begin to play their instruments, and then he gives the mandolin a tentative strum. A guitarist with a fledgling beard leads the group, along with the clarinettist, through “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.” It’s a song these two know from the church they went to as kids. They’re an older sister and younger brother, like Rolph and me.
The array of instruments and harmonizing voices has a rousing effect. Bari floats to her feet and begins to dance. The others do the same, still playing their instruments. Quinn and Ben Hobart dance together, hands fiercely clasped; Tim Breezely sways with his mandolin. All of them move, together and apart, in the fading light.
Lou and Tor alone remain seated. For Lou, my father, the music and the dancing provoke a riot of alarmed awareness, as if he were remembering a flame left on, a door left open, a car left running beside a cliff. With a prescience that will distinguish him to the end of his life, Lou understands that the change he’s been awaiting is upon him now. He has reached its source, can feel it in the soles of his feet. But he knows that he’s too old to partake. He’s thirty-one, an old man! Still, Lou Kline won’t tolerate being left behind. He must catapult himself into a producer’s role, like Tor—who’s older than he is, for Christ’s sake! Not by growing grass; agriculture is too redolent of the Iowa landscape he left behind. But the music—there he can do something. He remembers the night in his cul-de-sac when everyone danced by the lake. Different dancing, different sound: the Yardbirds and their ilk have nothing to do with the life Lou Kline planned for himself, the one he’s living now. They belong to the life he’ll live next. He watches the brother-and-sister musicians and imagines them together on a stage. He thinks, I can put them there. And he does. We all know their music today.
Late that night, after Tor and Bari have gone to bed and Quinn Davies and Ben Hobart have disappeared to parts unknown and some others have returned to the cleared land to make a bonfire (fire danger being a threat even then), Lou and Tim Breezely and the sibling musicians and their young friends descend the mountain to the river for a night swim. Lou leads the way—he has always been drawn to water. He goes barefoot, a big improvement over his oxfords and downright sensuous on this carpet of velvety decay, as if sharp objects didn’t exist.
The river is smooth and still, pressed between walls of redwoods and so cold that their fingers throb when they dip them in. Could swimming in it harm them? Lou has heard of very cold water causing heart attacks, and feels responsible, having led everyone here. As they’re mulling over the safety of submerging, Tim Breezely suddenly strips off his clothes and dives from a log, buck naked. The smash of cold stops his breathing; he has a brief blackout sensation of death. But when he surfaces, howling, what has died is his sorrow—he’s left it on the river bottom. Freedom! Joy! Tim Breezely will soon divorce—they’ll all divorce—everyone will divorce. An entire generation will throw off the fetters of rote commitment in favor of invention, hope—and we, their children, will try to locate the moment we lost them and worry that it was our fault. Tim Breezely will become a dedicated jogger before anyone jogs without being chased. He’ll write books about exercise and mental health that will make him a household name, and will receive thousands of letters from people whose lives he has transformed, even saved.
Cursing himself for not having jumped in first, Lou sloughs off his clothes and hurls himself into water so frigid it sends his nuts into his throat. There are splashes and screams as everyone follows him in. But, when the agony passes and they’ve paddled around a bit, the cold reverses itself and becomes radiant heat. They leave the river tingling and euphoric, bound by their adventure, and scramble back up the mountain to A-Frame, naked and unashamed.
We waited at the window, Rolph and I, for our father to come home. Eventually, we went outside into our cul-de-sac. Our mother let us go barefoot, although we’d already had our bath. It was a warm summer twilight. I wore a paisley brown-orange bathrobe, but I don’t think I truly remember that. I have “memories” that are really just pictures from the albums our mother loved to make, telling our family story in small square photographs, still mostly black-and-white, with an occasional blaze of color as if everyone had woken up in Oz. That paisley bathrobe came back to me only when I watched our father’s approach to the house through his eyes. I felt him note the blue beauty of the hour and experienced the surge of love that overwhelmed him at the sight of Rolph, in his cloth diaper, running toward him on stumpy three-year-old feet.
We seized our father’s legs, and he put a hand on each of our heads, cupping Rolph’s and holding it against him. Then he looked up at our mother, Christine, who smiled at him from the front door in a blue sweater, her dark hair falling from a clip. All around her were the spindly saplings they’d chosen together at a greenhouse and planted outside their brand-new California home, assuming that they would live there forever. ♦
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