People said it was like a haphazard combination of LSD and crystal meth and heroin and psilocybin, but with the sight-and-sound dial turned down to manageable levels, but they were so wrong: it wasn’t, it had nothing to do with LSD or meth or heroin or manageability; it was made of invented vagabond molecules meant to rip a hole in quantum fields. It would dement you but in a good way.
Her high, however, was making her slightly more unsteady than she would have liked: right now, her thoughts had grown marquee-gigantic and were appearing on a jumbotron overlooking a huge empty stadium, which was her mind.
Another woman dressed in tank top and tights, hair snarled in an unkempt ponytail, very homecoming-queen-on-a-bender, came into the ladies’ bathroom and looked at Christina with a split second of quasi-sympathy before racing into the toilet stall, from which ugly sounds emerged.
Christina dried her hands on a…what was that? An old roller towel? Did they still have those anymore? Who made them? The same company that made manual typewriters and vacuum tubes? She pulled it down and dried her face on the cloth, and when she stepped backward, she saw that the towel had streaks of blue from her eyeliner, and the blue streaks seemed to be forming into words and sentences, and the sentences were speaking aloud, criticizing her, finding fault. Water from somewhere was dousing the sparklers of joy.
Very untrustworthy, this drug. Also: the warm, you-have-a-fan-base feeling, the everybody-loves-you feeling, the highlight-reel feeling, all of them were creeping away and leaving behind a skid-row emptiness with several blocks of tenements and trash can fires and no plumbing and rats crouching over stale sandwiches.
Time to return to the yoga studio. Time to straighten up. The session would begin in a few minutes. She would have to look normal. No more thoughts, not now, and no more voices. She would have to get her mind back inside her head, pronto, like toothpaste back into the whatchamacallit, the tube. No more conversations on the Blue Telephone. Got to hang that receiver up right now.
But what a relief it was to be stupid for a while.
Walking out of the ladies’ room, she made her way down the corridor, floating an inch or two above the surface of the floor, inasmuch as the soles of her feet were numb, to the entryway outside the studio. Two benches were arrayed on either side and, underneath the benches, discarded shoes. They were multitudinous. All the beginning, middle, and end-stage yogis had left their footwear out here in the hall, as if somehow the shoes were safe from theft, because anyway you couldn’t take them into the studio on your feet. That was a rule, being barefoot, the first one in a long list.
Christina gazed down at the shoes. They reminded her of the shoe bin at Goodwill, where the Authorities of Charity kept in the center’s northeast corner a big gray box of harvested unmatched shoes for mismatched feet. Looking at all the footwear now outside the studio, mostly women’s sneakers and running shoes and one pair of hiking boots, she began to cry, because…well, because they had been left behind, and it was exactly like an orphanage, except of shoes. Also the brogues, sandals, clogs, sneakers, oxfords, ballet flats, and wedge pumps were huddled down there on the ground, mewling. She dried her eyes on her sleeve. Things were getting a bit out of hand. A soupçon too much Blue Telephone was coursing through her bloodstream for her own good, the jumbotron was blowing a few cherry bombs here and there, sorrow was being thrown around like inkblots splattered on the studio wall, invisible people were sobbing, and perhaps the time had arrived to sober up and straighten out.
She set her shoulders, slipped off her sneakers, and strode with a thoughtful, determined air into the yoga studio carrying her yoga mat, which had materialized from somewhere.
* * *
—
In the dim light from overhead and from the streetlights outside on Third Avenue, Christina unrolled her mat on the wood-slatted floor and began her stretching exercises. The streetlights gave the room a golden crepuscular glow that caused everyone to radiate with a warm physical aura as if they were lit from the inside. Yoga studios always had this apparitional sexiness, this heat; you could feel it. On either side of Christina and in front of her were the solid-citizen-in-tights brigade, the svelte young women who looked as if they could command the world with their power and strength and suppleness and beauty, and then there were the guys, always in the minority, typically rather wiry and stubble-bearded and New Agey and lacking authority, but given to the occasional sidelong wolfish predatory glance, especially when upside down.
Directly ahead of her was someone she’d never seen here before. When he turned, she got a good look at him. He was quite noticeable: he wore sweatpants and an orange T-shirt with some sinister cartoon robot on it, and on his left bicep was a tattoo that said YOU’RE WELCOME! in Baskerville typeface—Christina knew her fonts—and above the sweatpants and the shirt and the pleasingly broad workingman’s back was a face that…well, you didn’t see eager faces like that often anymore, at least not on men. He possessed two raffish blue eyes, widely separated, and, below the high cheekbones, what used to be called a strong jaw, but the sum total of this face was that of an innocent warrior, a boy in a man’s body, because the eyes looked out at the world with a warrior’s fierceness but were also blank, as if he didn’t know what he was fighting for and possibly didn’t care. Maybe he was looking around for someone who would lead him into battle, someone who could give him some sensible orders to follow.
She thought: I want that man in my army.
But then he boldly stared in her direction for a moment, more knight than pawn, and very nonprotocol for yoga sessions, before raising his arms above his head, a stretch but also a display, an invitation, a come-and-get-it. With the supreme confidence of immaturity combined with male beauty, he turned around and gave her a view of his back before getting down on the floor to do a left twist with his left leg bent. Despite his strength he seemed unsteady, as if he hadn’t had a meal all day. He was trembling and doing his best to cover it up; the Blue Telephone, though fading away, helped Christina see within him, through his skin to the wall behind him. With sudden X-ray vision, she noted his frailty; she could see it through his solid musculature. She could see the hunger in his bone marrow.
The yoga teacher entered the room, greeted everybody, rang her little Buddha bell, and started the session after lighting a candle. Concentrating on her poses and slightly hypnotized by the enforced, strained peacefulness of a yoga workout, Christina momentarily forgot about the boy warrior until in the middle of a handstand, his body propped up against a wall, he seemed about to fall, not a controlled fall but a collapse. Waving back and forth like a reed in a high wind, he tipped backward, and at that moment the residual effect of the drug she had taken caused the jumbotron to light up in some lower region of Christina’s consciousness, and she got to her feet and stood over him as he slowly crumpled into a non-yoga position on the floor.
The staticky thought occurred to her, as if broadcast in shortwave from an asteroid, that this guy was weakened by malnutrition, and he was here to be picked up, in every possible sense. Or maybe it was all an act. You couldn’t tell with people like him.