The Last Ritual of Youth

Jamie was playing guitar and singing at the kitchen table. Kyle had gone out to the field to do Tai chi. Milo marched into the woods to write his masterpiece, but fell asleep. Horner wanted nothing so much as to fall back on the couch, crack a beer, and turn on a ballgame. But alas, every moment had to be packed with some kind of creative endeavor. So Hannah began entreating everyone to come back inside the farmhouse, announcing that it was “tea time.”

She had prepared the tea party on the floor in the living room, by the piano. First, she coaxed everyone to close their eyes, leading them in one by one to lie down on the floor while she read from Alice in Wonderland, speaking through a microphone that made her voice sound strangely metallic. Then she gestured for everyone to rise and sit. Before each person was a tea cup in a little saucer. In each cup was a bit of mushroom. Hannah moved solemnly among them, pouring hot tea into the cups, which they raised in both hands and sipped ceremoniously, fishing the mushroom out with a finger to chew and swallow. To ward off the evil taste, Horner crunched his along with a slice of pear from a tray of hors d’oeuvres set in their midst.

The effects came on with surprising speed; within half an hour they were writhing on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. Jamie reported an orgasm — at least that was what she called it — in her left foot, which reverberated for ten minutes. Horner felt a mild tingling all over, like an acid high. Some began singing, others dancing. Hannah tried bringing them down to earth by directing everyone to form a “silent pile” on the floor, but this ill-fated attempt quickly dissolved into giggles and squeals. Milo — the only one of the group who’d declined to partake of the tea, insisting he remain sober as a sort of witness to their derangement — was persuaded to put on a dress, and for a while became the object of their fun. The only check on their debauchery was a desire to keep cool in front of the other guests, who occasionally filtered in and out of the farmhouse.

Eventually, they exploded: outside, out of control, it was everyone for themselves. Horner took off his shoes and walked barefoot into the woods. He felt that his feet were touching reality. Reality, it seemed, was wet and prickly, squishing between his toes. He sat awkwardly on the knotty base of a tree and tried to meditate, then to write some poetry. Once again, it seemed as if the truth was open to him, but he could not speak its language.

Horner stomped back carrying a long piece of wood he found in a pile; he was Old King Log. He presented the log with a bow and a flourish to Rachel, who’d been sitting with Kyle watching his approach (they would later report that he’d been reading poetry to the farmhouse dog, who sat listening in rapt attention). Rachel and Kyle rose and did a sort of stylized, exaggerated Tai chi out in the field. Some of the other dancers put on dresses and sang in a bizarre kind of cabaret at the microphone set up in the “tea room.”

Finally, they organized into a party to trek down to the beach. It took a long time to get going. Everyone kept halting and circling back, having forgotten, with their mushroom-addled minds, some essential thing. At last they set out in earnest, but not twenty yards down the trail Kayla broke down in tears and laughter, collapsing between Hannah and Jamie. At first, Horner joined them in trying to comfort her, patting her head and telling her it was all going to be OK. Eventually, however, they kept moving down the trail. Milo had brought the video camera, determined to document their every move, and alongside him came Alan and Rachel. It seemed to take them forever to pick their way through the woods, and then under the suspension bridge that carried the coastal road overhead — stopping to throw stones at the supports — until the beach and ocean swam into view below them at the end of the trail.

They tumbled down to the sand in a sort of ecstasy. The beach was nestled in a cove, sheer cliffs on either side bracketing the sea, the bridge cutting dramatically across behind, the beach a warm, wet cup of sand that even now began filling up with the evening tide. Here was their destination at last; they shared a palpable sense of relaxation, some sighing down to the sand while others slipped off their shoes to stroll out into the water.

Horner, who had slid a small notebook and slim volume of poems into his pockets, walked alone. He’d also brought his small tape recorder, whispering into it as he walked. The wet sand felt like stepping on soft, mushy skin, or fresh dough, becoming indented but not quite breaking under his feet.

The water itself was shockingly cold. It slid shallowly along the surface of sand, warmer going out than coming in. The waves were not yet strong enough to reach all the way into the cove; later, when the tide was up, the water they carried would feed the small stream beyond the road, near the bridge. But every so often a wave pushed through, causing a strange effect: it drained not only back towards the ocean, but also towards the center of the cove from either side, perpendicular to the fresh waves rolling in. The effect was of curtains closing in a movie theater.

Horner, wading out a bit too far, was surprised by the sudden depth of the tide. One swell, then another, soaked him up to the waist, dampening his notebook and the book of poetry. He scurried back, sheepishly, watched by an old woman in rubber wading boots who stood on the wet lip of the beach. Coming down with the others a moment ago, Horner had seen her get swept off a log she’d been perching on by one of those unexpected swells; now it was his turn.

He staggered on the wet sand towards a craggy, wolf-shaped rock, which seemed to raise its wolf-like head to howl at the ocean sky, just below the cliffs at the outer edge of the cove. The rocks had been intricately chiseled by the endless onslaught of water, leaving marks and clefts all over it. Taking advantage of these, Horner climbed up the rock, standing astride the nape of the wolf-formation, where he threw back his head and howled at the sea himself.

His mind took a melancholy turn as he thought about himself and the others, though not in a wholly unpleasant way, wondering what it was they were all doing here. He felt a slow, woeful sense of a collective mind spreading out between them like a vast, diaphanous picnic blanket, their thoughts moving with geological slowness. Horner came to the tentative conclusion that they were performing a kind of ritual — most of them, now, past the midway point of their twenties — the experiments with drugs, the outrageous behavior, the self-conscious witticisms and verbal dares: this must be the last ritual of youth. Solemn ceremonies and acts their bodies could no longer fully commit to, but must perform one last time, he thought; like Catholics who continue to take the sacrament long after they’ve lost the ability to believe it’s the body and blood of Christ.

But perhaps this was only Horner’s melancholy.

Milo, though he had not taken the mushrooms, began to feel as though he were tripping, too, simply by virtue of tagging along and picking up on the group consciousness. As the sun began to sink in the haze of the ocean, he provided the definitive image of the weekend. Somewhere out in the water, he’d found a long, thick piece of rope, gathered up and bestowed by the tide. He dragged it back to the shore. At first, he tried to enlist Kayla and Horner to help swing it, making a giant jump rope dipped in the rippling waves. Even as they grappled with the rope, however, the tide rose higher and higher.

Eventually, he gripped it in the middle with both hands, so that the knotted ends extended evenly on either side, and began spinning around and around, swinging the rope and letting it swing him, centrifugally, in perfect balance, faster and faster, self-contained and yet completely open, around and around a center and yet flowing outwards in every direction.

“That’s beautiful,” observed Hannah.

For a moment, then, he was Rumi — a new-old poet some of them had been reading lately — a whirling dervish sprung to life in their midst:

Dance, when you don’t know your name anymore,
Dance when you’ve ripped the bandages off,
Dance, when you’re completely free.

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