The section of the night from ten years ago when the highlighting of Keith’s memory began in earnest was several hours before The Wondrous Moment, when the three friends stood in the kitchen of Zack’s apartment and stared at the psychedelic mushrooms spread out on the white laminate countertop. Keith remembered being awed to silence, like monks in front of a ceremonial relic.
He had a good life now, cool and spacious. He rode his bike to his airconditioned office and stayed in the bright green bike lanes. What had reminded him of The Wondrous Moment and ignited this whole obsession was when he’d pulled an e-bike out of its dock and saw that it was almost out of battery. There had been no other bikes available and he was running late for work. But then, just as he’d start peddling, the battery display had jumped to full, as if the bike had been struck by a thunderbolt. This meant nothing to him and made him feel no particular way, but it had reminded him of The Wondrous Moment.
About three hours after ingestion on that night ten years ago, him, AJ, and Zack had rolled around in a bedroom the size of a suburban walk-in closet on a floor of old, chipped wood. There was no AC in Zack’s apartment. The window, which faced another wall of windows close enough that you could reach out and open them if they were unlocked, could just open a crack until it jammed. The only real cooling on that sweltering night came from a standing fan which Zack had bought used and which didn’t look like it had been cleaned in his period of ownership, or possibly ever. Air still blew out of it, at least on the maximum setting of “Power Cool”, and it was this fan they relied on to whisk the rivulets of sweat off their foreheads. They stared at the walls, which had probably pressed in at least one whole inch from every direction after layer on layer of landlord special paint jobs, and the dried drizzles of white goops seemed like the beads of sweat they saw on one another’s foreheads.
TWM occurred when Keith watched Zack hobble over to the window and pull halfheartedly, knowing it was useless, but then suddenly there was a click and the window slid all the way open. Keith lumbered over and leaned his head out of the sweaty room into the cool night air, and nothing had ever tasted as sweet. It was like bathing his head in a mountain stream. But TWM had been not this moment, but instead when Zack looked back at him with an expression of deep, full-body gratitude. Keith would have called it “childlike glee,” except that Zack’s expression was too worn; it seemed to acknowledge that such brief moments of respite from life’s petty torments were rare. Zack had looked to AJ and the two of them back to Keith, and their minds might as well have been melded. There was no need to say anything at all. Keith took TWM as the universe tipping its hand, showing its secret benevolent intentions. That image of Zack with one knee on the windowsill and his shaggy hair flapping over his face, AJ sitting cross-legged on the floor looking up in wonder, was something that Keith would have painted with oil on canvas if he could paint or practice any art form at all.
Obviously the drugs had been a part of it. He understood this. In his endless fruitless attempts to recreate TWM, he had always started by trying to obtain the same mushrooms. But this was impossible, because Zack had of course gotten them illegally from someone he didn’t even remember. Sometimes Keith thought the secret was not so much the breed of the mushrooms themselves as the detritus on the cheapo kitchen countertops that had been doubtless swept up and ground alongside—the bagel crumbs, the unpopped popcorn kernels, the smears of cookie dough—in the same way he suspected that the unique taste of hole-in-the-wall restaurants was dependent on the proximity of the bathroom to the kitchen. Though none of these mushroom mix-ins were illicit, trying to recreate their exact ratios proved impossible, like trying to brew Coca-Cola in your bathtub.
This possibility exhausted, he considered whether the presence of good friends was what was truly necessary to recreate TWM, sober or otherwise, and so took friends out to bars where they each drank 1-2 IPAs, at which point he would try to engineer some Wondrous Moment artificially. He might say he was going to the bathroom, but actually stop to ask the bartender to deliver a basket of fries and say they had an extra order, or to deliver another round of beers and claim it was on the house. But the servers’ performances were never convincing, and even if they were, Keith’s friend would often just mumble some word of thanks before slathering the “free” fries with house ketchup.
Keith next considered whether he might have more luck with a stranger, and started hanging out at a bar across the street called Wonderbar, which spelled out its name in old-timey brown letters, as if it were a medieval inn. The dive was darkly lit and not too loud and actually drew regulars like a TV bar. Through repeat visits, he eventually fell into conversation with several of the regulars, including a man a little older than him named Frank who sat a few stools down and wore a Cincinnati Reds cap, the white “C” of which had turned fishtank grey and which was unsnapped almost entirely in order to accommodate his enormous head.
Keith grew closer with Frank. He was initially reticent to share too much about his life with random barflies, but Frank was easy to talk to and unassuming. He drank well rum rocks but never seemed drunk. The whole time, Keith wondered how he might recreate TWM with Frank. Keith’s plan was to pay a nearby doughnut shop to deliver several dozen donuts to the bar and say how they had extra or wanted to treat the Wonderbar’s loyal customers. But before he could enact this plan, one time in idle conversation he mentioned the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, and this gave Frank just the opening he needed to talk about his theory that all the brave men had rushed the gunner nests and gotten themselves mowed down while all the cowards had huddled back and pissed themselves and survived, and this was why America was now a nation of cowards and pants-pissers. He gripped the bar while his knuckles turned caulk-white as he expounded on this theory, and his eyes darted back and forth, looking at no one in particular. Keith pushed back as gingerly as possible, only for Frank to slap a meaty palm on the bar and declare that of course this was true, all civilizations were like this, and he went on to elaborate on his grand theory of genetics, the racial components of which silenced everyone in the Wonderbar, and suddenly Keith realized why no one else ever talked to this guy who seemed so easy to get along with and he paid his tab and never returned, and in fact sometimes crossed the street to avoid walking past the bar, fearful that Frank would see him and feel betrayed, and suddenly all the stuff he’d told Frank about how he lived so close and when he’d even (he shuddered to think about it) showed Frank a picture of his unofficial girlfriend like fucking Jonathan Harker to Nosferatu didn’t seem so harmless anymore. One time he did actually see that Reds cap bobbing along on its way to Wonderbar, and Keith, who was on a collision course straight for him, noticed that Frank luckily was staring down at the pavement and muttering to himself, and so Keith turned around and walked right back the way he came. As he approached the corner to turn out of sight he felt like red ants were crawling up his neck, like any second a meaty hand would grab his shoulder and twist him around, and his relief when this did not happen was the nearest he’d come to recreating TWM yet.
This close brush forced Keith to undergo a kind of reckoning, and he decided to see a therapist in order to shut everyone up. After what felt like endless unanswered voice messages and emails, he eventually found himself in an uptown office talking to a kindly older woman who wore wrinkled indigo sweaters and ran her fingers over her wrist as he spoke. He explained his predicament, partially hoping for some simple capital letter diagnosis he could wave around. This went on for several sessions until at the end of one she departed from her normal routine of leaning excessively forward on her couch to make eye contact and “sincerely” wish him a good week and instead cleared her throat, clearly to say something she’d prepared in advance. Keith thought she might be sending him off to a psychiatrist or finally awarding The Diagnosis, but in fact she said that she didn’t think she could help him. She was very careful not to say that she was in any way implying that Keith wasn’t suffering from something, but instead that she didn’t think she possessed the skills his case required. Keith was in no way fooled by the therapist’s clumsy attempt to pretend to put the blame on herself. While in a way he was flattered by not having such a simplistic problem as to make a therapist yawn with its tawdry familiarity, he found it deeply mortifying for his therapist to throw her hands in the air and essentially break up with him.
And so his attempts continued. Considering that perhaps he needed just the right environment rather than his climate controlled, sterile apartment, he joined a student housing Facebook group for a nearby university and arranged a deal with a clearly bewildered undergrad to sublet his room for one single night. Keith offered to pay him as much as he would have for a week so that he didn’t have to answer any questions, and so one morning Keith went to the address and on the stoop met a clearly freaked out puny student wrapped in a North Face jacket who handed over his ID card and room key while saying the fewest amount of words possible.
The student’s room was just as Keith had hoped. It was small and cramped and there was a small trash bin with a Cool Ranch Doritos bag in the corner and an empty Gatorade bottle balanced on the windowsill. But then Keith saw something that nearly stopped his heart: the same white standing fan that Zack had had in his room. In what was surely a sign of Fate’s graceful hand, this one was also set to “Power Cool.”
Keith ingested his mushrooms at 11am. He’d entertained what he’d known were fantasies of having the student’s roommates join him, but when in the hallway he passed by an Asian teenager in sweatpants clutching a silver MacBook under his arm, the student stared at him like Keith was a knife-wielding intruder.
He knew that this was an exercise in desperation, and that the chances of success were slim to none without Zack and AJ, but nevertheless he closed the window so that it would be all the more refreshing when he opened it at the height of his trip.
What unfolded was a night of psychic torment that likes of which Keith had never experienced.
Out of options, Keith considered his most desperate plan yet: to reunite with Zack and AJ, neither of whom he’d seen in years. From the little he’d seen on social media, he knew that AJ lived a busy, clean life and took his girlfriend on cruises. Zack, having scrubbed his digital existence, was more of a mystery, but Keith knew he needed all three of them to have any hope of recreating TWM. He had delayed this plan as long as possible because he knew what would be necessary to enact it. And so, two weeks in advance, he invited them to early evening Friday drinks at an Irish pub.
Keith made sure he arrived first. He stared at the kitschy Guinness posters on the wall and listened to the moronic top 40 music as he patted his jacket pocket and waited.
AJ arrived next. He wore a zip up fleece with his company’s name printed in block letters over his heart. Keith got up and they did an awkward hug/shoulder slap before he asked a question just to make small talk, not wanting to really get into things before Zack arrived, but AJ took this as a prompt to recite his recent biography. It was impressive. He adjusted his glasses up and down as he dutifully went through the bullet points, and Keith realized that no matter how many times their waiter/server came by AJ wasn’t going to order a beer until he finished talking. He was one of those single-minded guys who could only focus 100% on one goal at once. Keith had forgotten how this charmingly sincere aspect of AJ warmed him. This did, however, mean that all his timelines were shredded.
The type of acid you could order on the dark web was in some ways even more sketchy than buying it from a dealer, or at least more dangerous. There was something about the European superlabs where this stuff was supposedly made that suggested a freakish level of chemical intensity. Corroborating 5-star reviews claimed it hit in about an hour, which was explained as being related to its scientific European engineering. The description stated that it needed to be handled with gloves, which was a little frightening for something that was supposed to be ingested.
“So I just wanted to say thanks for organizing this,” AJ said. “I guess we haven’t really talked since grad school.” He paused a moment and Keith could see his mind casting a fishing line back in time, eventually getting a bite. “That was a crazy time, actually.” AJ smiled, as if acknowledging a shared embarrassment. “Not something I need to go back to.”
This did not make Keith regret this reunion, because of course it wasn’t working without Zack, that would be like expecting a tripod to stand on two legs.
AJ’s attention, meanwhile, was focused with laser-like precision on analyzing exactly where Keith was in his life and how to act towards him. He was completely unsure how much beer he was expected to drink, especially once Zack arrived. His basic plan was to order one beer and nurse that the whole night, and he absolutely under no circumstances would go to a second location. Even just imagining it he could feel his phone vibrating against his thigh, his girlfriend asking him when he was getting home. The last time he’d had more than one beer or $21 cocktail he’d gotten drunk and peed his pants. This was the realization of a fear that he’d discovered ten years ago.
AJ had convinced himself that that entire night had been a kind of put-on, in the sense that Keith and Zack had actually been secretly making fun of him the whole time, and that this had been the real purpose of the entire escapade. Sometimes he wondered if the other two had even been tripping at all or just faking it. Throughout the night his mind was occupied with one task, which was trying to deduce if he had peed his pants. There weren’t any smells in evidence, but he had a vague feeling of liquidity and warm sensations around his general groin and leg area. There was no comment or look from his two friends that could not be interpreted as being in reference to this humiliation. It was the story of the night, as far as he was concerned. Every time he would toddle to the bathroom and drop his pants, there was no pee. But far from reassuring him, this instead caused him further distress, as it proved his loss of reality and general befuddlement, or sometime was even interpreted as meaning that he couldn’t find the pee or it had already dried up or been absorbed by his boxers or something, which was, if anything, more concerning.
Once he sobered up and realized this fear had been a delusion, he felt not relief but instead grew deeply worried about how weird he’d been about it the whole night, and that in fact the other two were sharing looks about him, albeit about how weird he was being and not because he had peed his pants. He never brought this up. This paranoid experience went on to greatly inform his identity to a degree he was never consciously aware of. And in his corporate career, it was this general social paranoia and anxiety that determined that he was the kind of employee who was always convinced he was about to be fired, or that everyone secretly thought was incompetent or annoying, and the fact that he could not figure out in what way he was incompetent or annoying was just further proof of his incompetence or annoyingness.
Keith saw AJ’s face light up as he looked over Keith’s shoulder and knew that Zack must have arrived. AJ had always seemed a bit enamored with him, as if Zack represented that sort of life he wanted to live, even though Keith didn’t see what there was to be so envious of. Zack was a fun, easy going guy, the kind you couldn’t piss off if you tried, but he also had no job or girlfriend and lived in a studio apartment with his parents, and if he had any ambitions other than general life enjoyment Keith could not have named them.
“Gentlemen, it is truly excellent to reconvene,” Zack said with his arms spread wide as a goalkeeper’s. He had brought his hair in from its old, tangled mess into a top knot. The three of them found themselves smiling irrepressibly; it was just that good to all be in the same physical space after all these years.
It wasn’t easy to separate out the European superlab tabs because they were all so tiny. You didn’t want to hack away at them with a desk scissors or, even worse, a kitchen knife. There was almost no container small enough to store them in without risking losing them or everything falling on the floor when you opened it. And you never had gloves when you were out of the house.
They went to get beers, Keith making sure he was first. AJ got back to the table next and twisted around in his seat to watch Zack at the bar.
“Looks like the same old Zack,” AJ said. His beer wasn’t anywhere in his field of vision.
“We’re all basically the same, aren’t we?” Keith floated this like a trial balloon.
AJ scowled, as Keith remembered him doing whenever he tried whiskey. “Feels pretty different now.”
Keith could see that AJ had taken this as insulting, as if Keith was implying that they hadn’t matured or progressed. AJ always wanted to be going somewhere.
“So guys, guys,” Zack said as he stumbled back to the table, foam spilling off the side of his mug. “It’s been like forever. How did we let this happen?” He looked up as if casting his gaze to the cruel gods.
Keith was considering that maybe it wasn’t a period of their lives so much as this specific combination of them that made them act a certain way, like you needed Zack to get that dopey smile out of AJ and you needed AJ to sponge up Zack’s manic energy. He was still patting his pocket.
“When would have been the last time we were together?” AJ asked.
Keith waited patiently as the other two batted around different possibilities of their last meeting.
“It was the trip,” he finally said, unable to restrain himself.
“Nifty. To where?” Zack asked.
“The mushroom trip. In your apartment.” It was finally on the threshold of discussion.
“Oh my God. Dude, dude, you mean that one with the Chinese takeout?”
“What?” Keith had no idea what he was talking about.
“The time where we ended up with that guy’s Chinese food.”
For a moment Keith wondered if he’d gone insane. “No. There wasn’t any Chinese food. We were in your apartment.” Keith assumed the tone of voice of a spy imparting classified information. “The window opening?”
“Window?” Zack acted like Keith had spoken a foreign language.
“Yes! It was so hot in that room and you said the window wouldn’t open, but then you pulled it and it did.” He tried out a line he’d worked out with his ex-therapist. “It was a moment of shared gratitude and understanding.”
“Yeah, those rooms were hot,” AJ said. “I don’t know how you guys survived.”
“But do you remember when the window opened?”
“Uh, no.”
Keith looked imploringly to Zack.
“But dude did I tell you about the Chinese food?” Zack said to AJ and then the whole thing was shot.
Zack didn’t remember that evening in specific because he’d had so many ones like it that that one wasn’t particularly noteworthy. Since then, he’d if anything taken more drugs, such that he didn’t have any kind of magical nostalgia for that period. It was sad for him to see AJ and even Keith become these worker drones, although it caused him to once again appreciate his situation and how his freelancing was lucrative enough to keep him afloat while flexible enough timewise to essentially let him do whatever he wanted. In their prior discussions he’d been a bit put-off by Keith’s obsessions with psychedelia and the gravity with which he treated what to Zack had the philosophical weight of a carnival ride.
AJ went to the bathroom while Keith and Zack went for another round. Zack got served first, and then turned away from his glass to flirt in his usual effortless manner with the bartender whose sleeves were rolled up to show the tattoos on her skinny arms.
Engineered super tabs might do strange things in liquid, especially something highly acidic and carbonated like beer, but according to kitchen table testing the type of beer was key. IPAs and above you could forget about; they were so full of bitter hops that they denatured all the active components in the tabs. But other beers less so. Some beers were low enough in hops and carbonation that they could dissolve the tabs without destroying their active properties. Particularly dark stouts, particularly if they were stabilized with nitrogen. Particularly Guinness.
“And how’s our Loverboy?” Zack asked AJ back at the table. “Are wedding bells in the future?”
“Actually, we’ve been talking about rings,” AJ said.
AJ’s coldly stable relationship was discussed and celebrated but Keith couldn’t concentrate. The conversation he’d been waiting years to have had been exhausted within thirty seconds, and the dissonance between how he and his friends remembered TWM had started to feel very alienating. But AJ and Zack were still working on their beers. There was plenty of time.
But not much later AJ telegraphed checking his watch like a bad stage actor.
“I need to head out soon. Sarah and I are supposed to spend the weekend at her parents’ place upstate.”
“What?” Keith felt like a water balloon had burst in his face. “We just got here.”
AJ lifted his beer mug and his eyes gleamed like he’d just discovered something. “That’s why I can’t really drink tonight, because I have to drive three hours.”
“You’re driving?” Keith asked, stupefied.
“Yeah, sorry to be a downer.”
“You’re not being a downer!” Zack cut in. “Why say such things? I’m going to see my sister and her new baby after this, we’re all family men now.”
“Your sister and her baby?” Keith repeated idiotically. He hadn’t thought it would be unreasonable to block out one Friday night every ten years. He’d imagined a second location before the third and final location of his apartment, where he’d already turned off the AC hours ago and had wedged rolled up foil in the tracks of the living room window. They’d arrive just in time.
“But this was fun,” AJ said, sounding surprised. “We should do this again. We could even make it a regular thing.”
“Yeah, like a weekly appointment!” Zack said.
“I was thinking more like monthly.”
“OK it could be monthly but there could be extra ones sprinkled it.” Zack mimed salting the table. “We could take some lazy Sundays and riff like we used to. Keith, are you down?”
He opened his mouth to speak but shut it because nothing could be done. Tacked to the wall was a poster of Betty Boop-style cartoon Guinness mugs gleefully sacrificing themselves by pouring their heads out into voracious cartoon mouths.
At least they didn’t leave until they fully drained their beers, which they did almost exactly an hour after Zack’s arrival. The negotiations over who would put their card down and who would Venmo felt a little circuitous to Keith, and the other two seemed to be wiping their foreheads and swallowing a lot, but it was hard to say. They left in three separate Ubers.
He returned to his hot apartment, knowing he would be unable to sleep or do much of anything aside from checking the stopwatch on his phone that he had already set, and soon not even that. He wondered if it was possible that all three of them might have separate Wondrous Moments, regardless of their contexts, and if this very night would mint another moment he would spend the next ten years attempting to recreate, and if he was destined to repeat this experiment every ten years until he ran out of decades.
His one-bedroom wasn’t large, but it was practically cavernous compared to Zack’s old bedroom, which could only fit a twin bed and a white Ikea desk. Tomorrow was Saturday, which meant he would see his unofficial girlfriend, who was cute and kind and the weekends they spent together were unquestionably the highlight of his week. He had never attempted to recreate TWM with her because he could not bear to see her fail. She would sometimes cook for him at her place, and while she chopped vegetables he would sit on her couch and play videogames with vast worlds. His goal was to exhaust all dialogue and events and transform what had once been bright vibrant lands crackling with life into cold dead worlds where nothing new could ever happen. He would feel mournful once this had been accomplished, yet if he found out that there was still a hidden side quest or cutscene to unlock he would extinguish these pockets of life with the same fiery determination as before, as if it meant anything at all.
