Drop City

hardware store--on Norm's dollar--but that all seemed pretty useless now. He ducked his head, depressed suddenly, and scratched at his beard, wondering vaguely if he'd caught ringworm from the big orange cat that lived atop the refrigerator. He'd wanted to build something--he was twenty-four years old and past the age of butting his head up against the establishment--but it wasn't going to happen at Drop City. He felt heavy all of a sudden, immensely heavy, as if he could crush the car beneath him and plunge down through the blacktop and into the ancient rivers that ran under the earth. He wanted to kick something, wanted to get out and clear his lungs or maybe his tear ducts, and he had his fingers on the door handle when Norm grabbed him by the wrist.
    Hot in that van. And Norm: the black clunky plastic-frame glasses, gold teeth flashing in his grin like a prospector's dream. He was holding up the thermos as if it were the solution to every problem they'd ever known, the key, the prize, the grail brought back home on a silver salver. Marco relaxed, accepted the smudged white cup with the screw tread worked into the rim. “One for you,” Norm said, pouring till the cup would hold no more. “And one,” he said, tipping the thermos back so that the white plastic aperture was swallowed up in the dark accumulation of his beard, “for me.”
    On the way back, Marco didn't feel stoned at all, and then abruptly he did. There was no tingling in his extremities, no dislocation, no sudden infusion of light or loss of personality--it came over him as if he'd been draped in a blanket, swaddled and pinioned and laid out in a crib, as if it were night and he was dreaming somebody else's dreams for them. Norm, for once, was quiet. And Marco--he couldn't have spoken if he'd wanted to. He wasn't in the front seat of a VW van hurtling down a country road with the river trailing along behind him like a bright fluttering banner, but in a room, in a farmhouse or a rent-controlled apartment maybe, and the room was swollen with inherited and hoarded things, sideboards, stuffed chairs, a chest of drawers, quilts, antimacassars, bibelots, bric-a-brac. There was a bed in the room--a four-poster swamped with blankets--and in the bed, an old man, wasted and white, with a nose that climbed up out of his face as if it didn't belong to him. It was a conventional scene, a deathbed scene, somebody's future or past, utterly conventional, but for the single incongruity of a pair of snowshoes fastened to the wall above the bed. The conscious remnant of his mind drew him back: Was this a photo he'd seen somewhere? A scene from childhood? TV? Or was he outside of himself and powerless to get back in? That was the thing with acid. He didn't like acid, had never liked acid, even when he liked drugs a whole lot more than he liked them now.
    Norm murmured something--a snatch of nonsense, or no, he was singing, soft and low, lyrics like a private language--and here they were again, under the trees and then out in the open, moving through the sensory world as if they owned it. “You feel anything yet?” Norm wanted to know. “Because I don't feel a thing, or maybe just like the _beginning__ of something, but what I'm wondering is did they forget to juice our juice or what?”
    Marco was about to tell him he was feeling plenty himself, feeling possessed almost, feeling stacked up and wrung out, but he never got the chance--another vision sprang right up alongside the road and flung itself in front of the van, a huge dark blur of motion that wasn't a hallucination at all but the real and actual thing that was suddenly defeating Norm's white clenched hands and seriously dislocating his intentions. What was it? The horse. Charley Horse. The very animal, laying claim to the road and shivering its head stupidly as Norm ran his hands helplessly round the wheel and the van did a kind of stock-car trick on two thin wailing tires.
    There were two lanes to that road, and the other one, the oncoming lane, instantly became a place of violent contraction, Norm's sidelong van and a pickup truck featuring a pair of startled faces, one male, one female, closing fast on the same space. Thunder and lightning: the van skewed violently to the left and Marco saw the horse loom up on his right before he felt the jolt of the first collision, the one that swatted the animal off its feet with the open palm of a big steel hand, and then the more substantial one, the one that