Dark Specter by Michael Dibdin Read Free Book Online

with orange juice to bring him down, but we didn’t have any in the house and Greg wasn’t too crazy about driving after what had just happened. Anyway, Sam said he didn’t want to come down.
    “I’m kind of looking forward to it. I’m tired of low-level tripping. I’ve always wanted to go to the limit, and this is my chance.”
    “Maybe you’ll have an out-of-body experience,” said Greg, a trifle enviously. Everyone had read about out-of-body experiences, but no one we knew had actually had one.
    “Maybe you’ll see God,” added Vince.
    “If I do, I’ll ask him why he let that kid boil.”
    The fact that he could joke about it made us feel more relaxed about the whole thing. Sam was an experienced tripper, and the dealer had probably been lying about the strength of the tablets. We smoked another joint and listened to some music, and then one by one people drifted off to their rooms. Sam lay stretched out on the sofa, his foot tapping in time to the music. I was the last to leave. I asked Sam if he was OK. He didn’t reply.
    “You want someone to stay up with you?” I asked.
    His eyes opened, big and blank, but there was still no reply. I didn’t insist. I had an early class I couldn’t afford to cut, and I knew from experience that even good trips are bad trips when someone else is having them.
    By the time I got up the next morning, Sam had crashed. He didn’t surface again until late that night. I was sitting in an attempted lotus position on a beanbag, making notes for a paper I had to write. The others were out somewhere.
    “Hey, man!” I said. “How did it go?”
    He looked at me in a strange, expressionless way.
    “Phil,” he said flatly, as though recognizing someone from the distant past.
    “What happened?”
    He frowned.
    “Nothing.”
    “Last night, I mean. You dropped all that shit.”
    A ghostly smile appeared and disappeared on his lips.
    “Oh, that. The usual stuff, man.”
    I shrugged and got back to my paper. Everyone’s trips were their own responsibility, but also their own business. If they wanted to share them with you, fine—unless of course they carried on about them at excessive length, as though they were somehow better and more interesting than yours. But if they chose not to talk about them, you had to respect that too. A fundamental tenet of our shared philosophy was that language was a highly suspect medium of communication, clumsy and imprecise, a tool used by the straight world to impose its rigid, normalizing concepts on the infinite, threatening freedom of the human spirit. We weren’t any more consistent about this than about anything else. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one frequently went on and on about at ball-breaking length. But Sam had chosen to exercise his right to remain silent, and anyone who questioned him further would stand revealed as an undercover agent for the thought police.
    Within a few days, the whole episode had turned into the stuff of myth, one of the heroic exploits to be celebrated whenever members of the tribe gathered late at night and the communal joint passed from hand to hand. Its connection with real events became increasingly tenuous. Before long we were telling people how we would have been busted by a crack narcotics squad that night if it hadn’t been for the quick thinking of Greg, or maybe Larry, who’d dropped the whole stash of twelve—count ’em!— twelve tabs of high-grade acid, and how we’d worked all night to keep him together while he went on about the wall-to-wall shag being a heaving mass of maggots.
    Sam never contested this version of events, or talked about what had really happened. In fact he rarely said anything much any more. He had changed, becoming quieter, more serious and withdrawn, less accessible to our noise and nonsense. The reason seemed obvious. A month or so earlier, Sam had received his “Greetings from the President” letter from the draft board. He had been shocked at the time,