Chapter 11
A week passed. Then another. Before Lennon knew it, the second half of the semester was rapidly approaching. Lennon spent most of the time she wasn’t in class studying. It was not unusual for her to stay up through the better part of the night, reading material in metaphysics in preparation for their weekly exams, or meditating into the wee hours of the morning. The stress and lack of sleep would’ve been enough to send her reeling into a series of panic attacks and breakdowns, but Lennon remained surprisingly stable. It was not that she was getting any better—she didn’t think she was, or that she ever would. It was just that she was finally channeling her sickness into something that wasn’t herself. Her studies consumed her thoughts, so that she had no fuel for panic attacks or compulsions, the dark thoughts that used to send her reeling.
Of all the classes she was enrolled in, persuasion remained the most demanding. Their weekly classes consisted of gruesome exercises wherein they honed their will to a knifelike point and inflicted it on the innocent rats. Under Dante’s instruction, they learned how to lull the rats to sleep, calm their racing heartbeats, or drive them mad with rage. Lennon had come to dread these exercises not only because of her guilt about inflicting her will on Gregory time and time again, but because she was so terribly bad at it.
And that thought hung with her—a kind of gray loathing—as she settled behind her desk for class that night. Gregory approached the glass to greet her as he always did, rising up on his back legs, nose twitching, and it was stupid, but in the moment, she swore he was trying to cheer her up.
“Today, you’ll learn to lull your subjects into a state of total catatonia, which should not be mistaken with sleep.” Dante paced slowly between the desks as he lectured. “Unlike sleep—a state that is familiar, even comforting, to most of us—catatonia has to be forcibly maintained through constant psychic pressure.”
What Dante wasn’t saying was that catatonia in itself was a kind of torture. Lennon knew that because she herself had once entered into such a state, just before she’d dropped out of college. Her body had frozen in a kind of rictus, and for three days she remained totally despondent. She didn’t eat and barely blinked, and her sister, Carly, had to take family leave at the law practice where she worked, to camp out in Lennon’s dorm room and ladle broth into her mouth in a desperate attempt to keep her from being hospitalized (Lennon didn’t fare well in hospitals).
“Think of catatonia as the bedrock of our practice. It’s a versatile skill, one that can be used as a launch point for different persuasive strategies that range from the planting of memories to the removal of them. Catatonia, for our purposes here, becomes a way to manipulate time itself. It allows us to essentially shut down our subjects, subdue them enough to allow for the work we do. Think of it as general anesthesia for a persuasionist.”
The students got to work, several of them succeeding almost immediately. Ian and Nadine seemed particularly well suited to this task, lulling their respective rats into a deep and glassy-eyed stupor that seemed close to death. Lennon, however, struggled with the task of subduing Gregory, who was an anxious and unwilling participant. While she was successful in her attempts to suppress his brain function and induce a state of drowsiness, true catatonia remained well beyond her skill set.
“Shit,” she muttered, putting her face in her hands.
“You don’t want it enough,” said Dante. He was frustrated with her, had been for some weeks now, on account of her abysmal performance in his class. And maybe she was sick for this, but it made her skittish and hot when he was angry with her. “You’re still too timid.”
Lennon tried again. Two bright spots of throbbing pain pierced at her temples. She could smell the beginnings of a nosebleed high up in her sinuses, but she kept pushing, hunched over the terrarium, honing her focus, trying and failing to extend her will to Gregory.
Several fat droplets of blood struck the surface of her desk.
It was raining, and Lennon’s nosebleed had slowed to a dribble by the time she returned home to the doorstep of Ethos College. She found Blaine seated at the desk in front of the window, thumbing through the sun-dyed pages of a mass-market paperback from the ’60s. Its cover featured a shrieking woman in a metal cone bra caught in the vise grip of a tentacled alien. It was titled Invasion of the Octopi . Blaine looked up when Lennon closed the door. Her makeup was smeared and running, like she’d had a good cry and tried to clean herself up with a wad of toilet paper but had given up halfway through.
“What happened to your face?” Blaine blurted, snapping her book shut.
“I could ask you the same question,” said Lennon, and she kicked off her loafers. She stripped out of her pants and shirt and changed into one of the soft jersey T-shirts—embroidered with Drayton’s logo—that were distributed to all the new students as part of their welcome package. “And if you must know, it was persuasion with Dante—I mean Dr. Lowe.”
“You’re pushing yourself too hard in that class.”
“Well, according to him I’m not pushing myself hard enough. I couldn’t even get Gregory to fall asleep.”
Blaine raised an eyebrow. “Gregory?”
“He’s my rat,” said Lennon.
“You named yours?”
Lennon nodded. “I just feel like I’m oscillating between guilt and hopelessness.”
“Go easy on yourself. You’re still learning. We all are.”
“Ian doesn’t seem to be having any trouble.”
“Too bad you can’t absorb his skill by osmosis when you hook up with him.”
Lennon hurled a pillow at Blaine’s head, which she dodged with ease, laughing. “Shut up .”
Just then, there was the sharp rap of knuckles on wood. A tall blond boy nudged the door open. Lennon immediately recognized him as Kieran, one of the three students from Logos who’d been camped out in the waiting room outside of Dante’s office. Lennon wondered what he was doing in Ethos College. As a rule, the logicians kept to themselves. They were rarely spotted in the central dining hall, even though they had a table reserved for their use only.
Kieran’s gaze went to Blaine. “You still coming tonight? Emerson was asking.”
Blaine shrugged, noncommittal. “Can Lennon come too?”
Kieran’s gaze went to Lennon. “You’re Dr. Lowe’s advisee, right?”
“Yeah,” said Lennon.
“Bring her,” said Kieran to Blaine and then he shut the door.
The moment he was gone, Lennon turned on Blaine. “What the hell was that?”
“They’re throwing a party at Logos tonight,” said Blaine. “Invite only. I think it’s a way for them to scope out prospects.”
“I’m not going,” said Lennon, a little offended that she hadn’t received an invite. Not that she would’ve been expecting one. She knew she was solidly mediocre, if not less than that.
“Come on,” said Blaine, “have some fun for once. Don’t you want to know what’s going on in Logos?”
“Not really. Secret societies full of white people aren’t really my thing. Not a fan of the whole Eyes Wide Shut vibe.”
“It’s not like that.”
“How would you know?”
“I mean, first off, Adan’s a member.”
“Is that supposed to comfort me?”
“And secondly, Logos is primarily an academic society. They take the best of the first years.”
“Did you read that in their welcome pamphlet?”
“I’m just saying it could be fun,” said Blaine, and she grabbed for the box of tissues on their shared nightstand, tossed it across the room to Lennon. “Clean yourself up. Let’s go out for once.”
Blaine convinced Lennon to put on an oversized white button-down, styled as a dress, over a pair of sheer black stockings. Somehow, she’d procured a tube of lipstick, which she used as blush, rubbing it furiously into Lennon’s cheekbones, and a pencil eyeliner, which she painstakingly smudged and blurred into Lennon’s waterline until she was satisfied.
“It’s really not fair,” said Blaine. “You look unreal.”
Lennon laughed her off. But when she turned to look at herself in the mirror, she saw that Blaine was right. There was something unreal about her. Something changed. A vacancy in the eyes that made her believe, for a split second, that her own reflection didn’t belong to her. That the girl in the mirror was not really her at all, but a replacement, like the aberration. But the reflection in the mirror had eyes, and when she smiled it smiled obediently back at her.
“That’s it,” said Blaine, grinning. “Now you’re ready.”
It was nearing midnight by the time the girls left Ethos College. Blaine, who linked arms with Lennon, adopted a fairly brisk pace because it was cold out and neither of them was wearing much. Eventually, they reached the deep of Drayton Square, which to Lennon looked less like a garden and more like a dense forest of moss-draped oaks and magnolias.
It was here that Lennon first laid eyes upon the notorious Logos House, standing in a small square clearing. The house was tall and narrow, its red bricks grown over with ivy. It had several large windows, lit from the inside, curtains drawn shut over all of them. The front door was painted with a crest, one Lennon remembered being embroidered on the pockets of the students whom she’d chatted with in the waiting room outside of Dante’s office: a snake eating its own tail with relish, one red eye open wide.
“I’ve seen this house before,” said Lennon. “In a dream.”
“If you’re developing psychic powers I’m going to need some lottery numbers. Quick,” said Blaine and she opened the front door and ushered Lennon into a dim foyer with a high ceiling, and dark hickory floors. A pall of cigarette smoke hung blue on the air. For a party, it was surprisingly quiet, the sound of voices was muffled and hushed. From the adjacent sitting room, a record player loosed rambling chords of staticky jazz.
Blaine walked them through the house like she knew where she was going—past a parlor and dining room—and through to the kitchen, where it seemed like the bulk of the party was assembled. There were about twenty students there, some that Lennon recognized, others that she didn’t. Ian and Nadine were present, which wasn’t particularly surprising given their excellent performance in Dante’s class. Sawyer was there too, nursing a watery cocktail at the far corner of the kitchen, his back pressing into the cabinets in what seemed to Lennon a pitiful attempt to make himself small and ignorable.
But there was one person in particular who caught Lennon’s eye: Emerson O’Neill, the president of Logos, sitting cross-legged on the dining table. Her white shirt was fastened closed with two buttons, just above the navel, and offered a glimpse of her sternum, the hard plate of bone impressing itself from the underside of her skin, a fossil emerging from limestone.
When Emerson raised her gaze, Lennon would see—through the sharp glare of the glasses that sat perched on her nose—that one of her pupils looked like a pierced egg yolk, the black bleeding into the pale blue of her iris. She held a cigarette pinched between her knuckles and smoke hung on the air around her in tangled ribbons, like the threads of a torn spiderweb. As Lennon stepped into the room, they moved—wending and curling in on themselves—in such a way as to spell out a single word in cursive: limerence .
Lennon watched, awed, as the word tore and faded, the hooked r that held the word together tearing clean apart, the tatters of the other letters fraying, then fading until all that remained on the air was a faint haze where the word had hung just moments before.
Emerson stubbed out her cigarette on the edge of the table, where there were already a number of charred semicircles burnt into the wood. She flicked the butt into the kitchen sink with frightening precision. “You brought a plus-one?”
“Kieran said I could.” Blaine sidestepped out of the way, as if to show her off to the room. “This is Lennon.”
“I’m familiar,” said Emerson, and then to Lennon: “We share an advisor. Dr. Lowe. He told me about you.”
The idea that Dante had been talking about her sent a strange little thrill up her spine. “Good things, I hope?”
“Mostly,” she said, and any interest she had in Lennon must’ve died there, because she turned away and started chatting with Blaine. Feeling awkward—and a little abandoned—Lennon found her way across the kitchen to Sawyer.
“I didn’t think this was really your scene,” said Lennon, edging up beside him.
“It’s not. But I’m not above being courted.”
“Is that what this is?”
“Of course, can’t you tell? All the drinks and the drugs and the finger foods and finery. We’re all being thoroughly groomed,” said Sawyer, and then, thinking better of himself, frowned and said, “Well, maybe not you.”
It was a known fact that Lennon ranked low among her fellow first years. At Drayton, grades were posted publicly on a bulletin board in the lobby of Irvine Hall, and updated weekly at nine in the morning, just before classes began. Perhaps it was meant to be motivating, but to Lennon it was nothing more than a weekly exercise in humiliation.
“At least you won’t have to deal with all of this,” said Sawyer bitterly. “All of us sycophants climbing desperately over the corpses of our lessers on the ascent to the top.”
“Poetic.”
“But sadly true. And it only gets worse with time. The competition. The desperation. I mean, look at them.” Sawyer gestured to the throng, milling around the dining table where Emerson sat, a few men engaging Blaine by the fridge. “They’re desperate and I can’t even blame them.”
When a fresh stream of students entered the room, Sawyer nodded toward the back door off the kitchen and Lennon followed him out into the courtyard, where the crowds were thinner.
On their way out, Kieran slipped something into Lennon’s hand: a small baggie filled with shriveled fungi. “On the house,” he said to her with a wink. “But if you want more, you know where to find me.”
They debated about whether or not to take the drugs. It had been a long time since Lennon had done any psychedelics, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to risk the headache of a bad trip. Ultimately, it was Sawyer who got them started with a whispered “Fuck it.”
He sprinkled a few of the shrooms into his mouth and chewed with a grimace. Then he held out the baggie to her. “Come on, don’t make me do it alone.”
“This is a bad idea,” said Lennon, but she took the shrooms anyway, chewing and swallowing as quickly as she could to get the bitter taste out of her mouth.
“How did you end up here?” Lennon asked, mostly to keep the new quiet between them from turning heavy and awkward.
“What do you mean?” Sawyer asked.
“Like how did you get invited to study at Drayton? And who were you before you did?”
“I worked as a librarian in Connecticut. And that’s where it happened for me…where I first found out I was being considered by Drayton. I was emptying the returns bin one morning, and on top of the stack of books there was an envelope, wax-sealed, with my name on it. Inside was a letter congratulating me on moving to the next round of my admissions process. I did my interview with Dr. Lowe, actually.”
“And how did that go?”
“Oh, it was brutal. He knew everything about me. Worse yet, I felt like he was taking things from me instead of just telling me about myself.”
“That’s how I felt when interviewing with Benedict,” said Lennon. “I became like an object. A box of junk—all these dreams and hopes and secrets—to be rifled through. It was horrible. It hurt.”
As they talked, they made slow laps around the courtyard. It was dark, but the waxy leaves of the magnolia tree were limned into brilliance by the moonlight, or maybe it was just the shrooms heightening everything. Walking with Sawyer, Lennon felt a kind of peace that she had only ever associated with being alone. It was as if Sawyer wasn’t a person at all, just an extension of her, or she of him. She felt delightfully less than real, like an airy figment conjured up from nothing, free of the horrible weight of being. In the garden she became like a fixture of the school—like the live oaks and the magnolias, the stone face of Irvine Hall half-hidden behind the trees. For the first time since arriving at Drayton, Lennon felt truly at home.
As the night dragged on, they traded stories about their childhoods. She learned that Sawyer had grown up in Connecticut, where his father ran a farm. His mother, a former rare bookseller, had immigrated from Taiwan. They were the only people in their rural town who were anything other than white. In turn, Lennon told Sawyer all about Wyatt and what she’d left behind in Colorado—an engagement and half-planned wedding and a life she was trying to make herself want.
“And what do you want now?” Sawyer had asked her, and his voice was husky, as if he was falling asleep or just waking up. When he laid down on the grass, Lennon laid down beside him, a slightly foolish decision given that the dirt around the green was thoroughly pocked with the hills of fire ants. But Lennon—made relaxed and romantic by the shrooms—did not think of that then. “Who did you come here to be?”
“I want…to be significant,” said Lennon, and even to her own ear, she sounded drunk. She wondered if she was even making any sense and decided that she didn’t care. “I just want to matter. But everyone who matters hurts people. It’s like you said…all of us tramping on the bodies of others to get to a place where we don’t actively hate ourselves.”
They went quiet for a while after that, watching the tiny leaves of the live oak trees shift and whisper high above them. Lennon could feel herself spilling out into everything around her, and everything around her bleeding into her. If dissociation was the feeling of being removed and disharmonized from reality, this was the opposite. And Lennon was relishing that feeling—wholly relaxed and satisfied by her own oneness with Sawyer and the trees and the dirt packed hard beneath her back—when the elevator first appeared, with the trill of a bell. Its doors materialized in the garden shed, replacing the single plank of rotten wood that had been affixed to its hinges just moments before.
“Holy shit,” said Sawyer, sitting up. He looked at Lennon to confirm that she was seeing the same things. “What the hell is that?”
The golden doors of the elevator opened to reveal an empty cabin, mirrored on all sides. A soft lullaby spilled out into the courtyard, which Lennon recognized as a made-up song her mother used to sing to put her to sleep.
Lennon stood. “I think it’s for me.”
Sawyer, still sitting, caught her by the sleeve as if to drag her back. But Lennon brushed him off, moving toward the elevator. As soon as she stepped inside, the doors snapped shut, and the cabin lurched into ascent.