It’s almost midnight when they leave the beach, tired, thirsty, still too high from the freely flowing weed. They’re jammed into Ed’s aging blue Volkswagen, Lisbeth up front, Jonathan and Denise crowbarred into the tiny back seat as they head onto the Mid-Cape Highway for the trip back to Manhattan from Truro. Each of them has finals in the morning, so they’re looking at an all-night drive to get there on time. There’s no choice. The Beatles are on the radio. Sometimes the Stones, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix. The era of psychedelic rock has just begun, and the dope is like an accelerant for them, heightening the rhythm, the chords, the weighty, counterculture lyrics of so many songs they hear and play endlessly. One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small, and the ones that mother gives you, don’t do anything at all.

“A New York beer container, four syllables.” They’re playing that rhyming game – hinky pinky – and Lisbeth, the English major whose poetry has begun to attract attention from the literary journals, throws out another killer challenge. She’s sure they’ll never get it. They’ve already missed “a sergeant penny, two syllables” (copper copper), “Father’s Day thief, three syllables” (pop-gifter shoplifter), and even “archival conundrum, three syllables” (history mystery).  Their senses are dulled.

Ed flails away at the word puzzle. “Greenwich Village lager fillage?” He knows it’s an awful guess as soon as he says it. He’s heading to Cornell Med School in the fall, doesn’t like losing at anything. There’s nothing between him and Lisbeth – they’re just good friends – but Jonathan and Denise are another thing entirely. They’re groping each other in the back seat and are only half-interested in the game.

“Come on guys, help me out here.” Ed is exasperated. “Didn’t you get enough on the beach?”

Jonathan comes up for air and laughs. “Yeah, yeah, yeah...” he starts in. “It’s not me, it’s the insatiable nymphomaniac back here.” He laughs again, a dope-filled wheeze. When Denise grabs him in the crotch and grinds him a little too playfully, he pulls her hand away. “Oh man, that hurts. I’m out of commission now.” She hates it when he calls her a nympho, even though she knows it’s true.

Right now, Denise hates a lot of things about her life. She realizes she’s not going anywhere with her history major. She’d like to write but is intimidated by Lisbeth’s talent. The idea of following Jonathan to business school to live with him, an exciting and rebellious thought, has gradually given way to a cascade of conflicting feelings. At first, she thought it inevitable and virtuous, selfless; now she sees it as shortsighted, repulsive, idiotic. She’s not even sure it’s going to be an option. He’s on the waiting list at three business schools and doesn’t know where he’ll be in three months. He calls each school every week for status checks on his progress up the lists, but there hasn’t been any. “They’re holding me hostage,” he complains angrily to Denise. To everyone else, he’s full of false bravado.

Her conversations with her parents, fewer and fewer each month, have all become short, sharp slugfests, a metronomic inquisition that chafes away at her fragile identity. “Have you thought at all about next year?” her mother asks. Denise’s silence speaks volumes. “You know Daddy and I can send you to any graduate program you want.”  Her father’s constant badgering about “after Columbia” seems increasingly impatient and accusatory. “You think I’ve squandered my college education, don’t you?” she asks, and gets nothing for an answer. Last summer she would often lock herself in the basement recreation room, ignoring their pleas to come out and talk, shouting at them through the door. “I hate living here! I hate it! Graduation can’t come soon enough!” Her focus, her only current bright spot, is a newfound quest for higher consciousness and spirituality, a quest that has taken her obsessively into mysticism. And drugs.

Jonathan’s thinking about the puzzle, trying to forget the dull pain in his genitals. “How are we going to get four syllables?” he asks Ed. “Lower East Side? L.I. Railroad? Keg of Miller? What’ll we do for the other half?” Ed throws his hands up in the air, pounds the steering wheel. “C’mon, Denise? You in the game?”

“Give up, guys,” she says. “Give up.” Lisbeth is cackling, making that playful sound she makes when she stumps them, something she’s been doing all day with frightening regularity. “It’s a Knickerbocker liquor locker, you dopes.”

Ed and Jonathan give out a tired groan. Denise reaches over, yanks Lisbeth’s hair lightly. “Way to go!” she applauds, even though she had no idea of the answer herself.

“Liz, you’re killing us. We accept defeat yet again. No more hinky pinky,” Ed pleads. “How about a round of Sequence? Keep us alert.” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll start. Aspic.” It’s a memory game they all know well. Each player repeats in alphabetical order the words called out previously, then adds a new word beginning with the next letter of the alphabet. Miss a word and you’re out.

Lisbeth’s next. “Aspic bayberry.” Then Denise, “Aspic bayberry cathedral.” Jonathan adds “dandelion.” “Aspic bayberry cathedral dandelion.”

Denise is still high, so much higher than all the others, her personal unhappiness exaggerated even further by the state she’s in. She sees it flying at her, a seething dragon of contempt consuming what’s left of her self-esteem. She’s desperate to flee from it, somewhere, anywhere. Suddenly she has something to say. “Do any of you ever wonder if there might be some sort of cosmic code that can unlock us from the world, let us travel beyond?” Her demeanor is strangely calm and controlled, almost serene. “Maybe a sequence of words or numbers, a set of tasks that needs to be done in some exact order until they click in like those little combination locks and – presto! – the lock is open?”

Lisbeth sighs. “Let’s not get started on this again Denise, okay? It’s a long ride home. Let’s just play the game.” Jonathan reaches for her hand, tries to pull her toward him, but Denise is already sensing his impatience. She knows he’ll just try to placate her, and she won’t let it go that easily. She won’t let it go at all.

“The cosmic code, it’s not just a numbers thing. I’m sure of it. It could be in the words too. It’s centered on the number twenty-six.” Denise is more animated than she’s been all day. “I’ve been researching it. Don’t you see? It’s so obvious. Remember the Golden Rectangle? The ultimate symbol of perfection. Classical and Renaissance Art. What were the dimensions of the Golden Rectangle? Eight by five by eight by five. Twenty-six. The right twenty-six words will open a portal to an alternate universe and away we go!”

Jonathan starts to say something, but Denise shushes him, clamps her hand over his mouth. “Twenty-six letters in the alphabet. Do you know how special the number 26 is? In Hebrew, the values of the letters that make up the word for God add to 26. If one of us gets all the way to Z, we’ll be closer to God. We’ve never done it before. But I’m going to get us there, I can just feel it. Salvation. I’m going to take us there tonight.”

Ed’s instantly in her face about this. “You’re going to take us where, Denise? To God? Me, I just want to get back to New York, take finals, sleep for the next two days. Where do you get this crap?” He turns and scowls at her. “You’re into numerology now? Man, you’re over the edge.” There’s genuine contempt in his voice, and Denise feels it.

“Actually, the numerology of 26 is quite intriguing, Ed.” Her voice has an amused quality to it; she loves to see him angry, especially when she’s the cause. “The numeral 2 provides balance. The 6 is the number of love, embodying harmony and beauty. A string of 26 words would be an achievement powerful beyond your imagination. Wouldn’t you say so, Liz?” Liz just nods and murmurs her assent; she knows at this point with Denise it’s better just to play along. Ed adds “echelon” to the word string and the game moves on.

They’re up to J quickly; Lisbeth adds the word “jacks.” “Aspic bayberry cathedral dandelion echelon felicity guru hijack ingenious jacks,” she recites, glad to have made it this far.

It’s Denise’s turn, but she’s preoccupied with her ideas about the cosmic code and doesn’t care if the game loses steam. She still wants to get everyone thinking about that escape route she’s after. “It’ll take us to the exit ramp,” she says. “Lead us all right out of here to the alternate universe. It’s the only way we’ll find it.” They don’t immediately recognize what she’s talking about. It’s a complete non sequitur.

Jonathan leans over, takes her face in his hands. “What are you talking about, Denise? You’re not making any sense.”

Denise looks hurt, numb. “Jonathan, the twenty-six words. The sequence. The cosmic code.”

“Here we go, again,” Ed jabbers from the front seat, “C’mon, Denise, add a word and forget the philosophy.” He’s impatient to get on with the game, eager to dominate, proud of his memory skills, honed razor-sharp by the complexities of organic chemistry and the other premed sciences. He always expects to win.

“No, put the game on hold for a minute, OK?” She’s petulant, irritated by Ed’s demeaning putdowns. “Don’t you think it’s possible? I mean metaphorically, at least, maybe not literally a strip of pavement somewhere where we can drive the car off the road and into the twilight zone, but a parallel universe or an alternate universe where there’s another you, someone who’s similar to you but isn’t exactly you and he or she is the you in that other universe?”

Lisbeth pipes in. “Sweetie, I think maybe you smoked a little too much dope tonight, that’s all I think.” She’s not looking for a response. They all overdid it, and they’re still jazzed up. Besides, she’s heard this from Denise before; they’ve been roommates for three years.  “Sure, it’s possible. Quantum physicists think it’s possible, for god’s sake. Didn’t you guys ever hear about the multiverse? Decoherence? The quantum foam?”

“Wow, where did that shit come from?” It’s Ed again, ever the skeptic. “The quantum foam? You mean there’s another me out there somewhere in “the quantum foam”? Let’s go, man. Lead the way.” He’s laughing now, looking for help from Jonathan. He won’t get it. They were best friends once, but Ed’s attitude toward Denise has soured the friendship badly.  “I want to meet the other me so I can kick his ass and send him packing. There’s only room for one of us and I’m it.”

Denise feigns pulling her hair out. She bangs the interior of the car’s roof, tugs on Lisbeth’s shoulder. “There could be many of you out there, Ed,” she taunts. She goes quiet for a moment. “You’re fucking hopeless, Ed. Hopeless!” Right now, she feels belittled, trapped in her own life, wrongheaded, even though it’s been her own decisions that have taken her to where she is, thinking about trailing after a boyfriend whose future depends on a waiting list. “You took the B school route because it looked like an easy path to a money career,” she told Jonathan a few days earlier in a fit of pique, “but now what?  Wait to get lucky in some last-minute admissions sweepstakes?”  Lately she’s begun to think of him as a loser, even when they’re in bed together and her breath is coming in short, sweet gasps.

Denise can’t get the word out of her head. Loser. It repeats itself like one of her Beatles albums stuck on a part of that song she doesn’t particularly like: Your mother should know...Your mother should know. She knows that once graduation is over, the relationship will be too.

She brings herself back to the word game. K. She likes Irish green. She spits out her word. “Kelly.” And then, before anyone can draw a breath, “Twenty-six. The only number between a square and a cube.”

“Denise, lighten up, huh? We left the multiverse ten miles back.” Jonathan chuckles, trying to alter the mood. He looks at Denise pleadingly, but sees she’s still upset. He adds “louse” to the word string, and they’re back in the game. She wishes the word he chose had been “loser.” Her private little joke.

Another round goes by. Ed: mesmerize. Lisbeth: noodle. Denise: octopus. Jonathan: practical. Ed again: quell. They’ve reached the point where they usually start to stumble, and sure enough, Lisbeth is the first to go out. She can’t remember the Q word, and she’s gone. She puts her head back to rest.

They’re up to eighteen words for Denise. “Aspic bayberry cathedral dandelion echelon felicity guru hijack ingenious jacks kelly louse mesmerize noodle octopus practical quell rotation.” She shouts out the last word triumphantly. When a heavy gust of wind suddenly comes up, Ed fights the wheel for a few seconds and barely avoids the guardrail. The pressure on the car vanishes quickly, but they all felt it. If it wasn’t a wind gust, Lisbeth observes aloud, then maybe the car’s steering system is failing, and they’re going to break down soon, spend the night on the side of the road and miss their finals. Her comments are meant to loosen the tension, but they cause Ed to break out into a sweat, his hands clammy, his face wet around the eyes like he’s holding back tears.

Jonathan forgets “echelon,” so it’s down to Ed and Denise.

“Still playing, Ed?” Denise jeers.

“You bet your ass I’m playing,” Ed shoots back.

Ed adds “sandman.” Denise struggles through, almost missing “practical,” then adds “tintinnabulation.” She touches Lisbeth on the shoulder. “Twenty words,” she says. She looks at Jonathan, pressing his fingers meaningfully. “Twenty words. We’re getting close.”

She squeezes Jonathan’s hand again, and then out of the blue she speaks a word none of them has ever heard. “Precipitevolissimevolmente,” she says. It’s not her turn, and it’s not a word for the game. But it’s a word she has known now for a year, a word that utterly fascinates her. Three times she pronounces it, as if to show them that she is, after all, capable of something complicated and erudite. If she had a wand in her hand, she might be a sorceress casting an obscure magic spell at her enemies, perhaps to immobilize them or to bind them to her as changelings. “It’s the longest word in the Italian language. Twenty-six letters. It means “as fast as possible.” Wherever we’re going, we’re going “as fast as possible.” In the darkness, Jonathan stares hard at Denise, wondering if she’s really serious about the things she’s saying or if it’s just the dope talking. He knows the marijuana high should have worn off, but now he considers the possibility that she’s dropped a tab of acid and is hallucinating. Lisbeth has started humming Amazing Grace. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see. Denise’s emerging self-image misguided and hopeless.

Ed’s ripping through the words quickly, trying to keep his rhythm going. He adds “undulation.” Denise follows with “verisimilitude.” And then the unthinkable happens. Ed’s stuck in the middle of the word string, fumbling for the L word. He starts back at the beginning, steps through the sequence twice more. The word has deserted him, and though they have no hard-and-fast rule about how long a player gets to run the words before being dropped, he knows he’s lost. He looks over to Lisbeth, resignation in his eyes. “Louse,” she mutters.

“How appropriate,” Denise says. Jonathan is clapping for her, a slow, solitary repetition, but she cuts him off. Her hands are at her temples, kneading in circles. “Ed,” she says, “now I’m taking us to the multiverse.” And even though she’s won and has no need to continue, she races through the words again, adding a twenty-third, “wombat.” Suddenly, it seems as if the sheer effort of concentrating on the game combined with the dope, lack of sleep, and dehydration from their long day on the beach has taken the last of Denise’s energy. Her head falls onto Jonathan’s shoulder and abruptly she is asleep.

She’s out cold for several hours, misses her turn to drive. It’s not until they’ve driven through the night and are leaving the Henry Hudson Parkway that a dream forms in her mind, eerily vivid and detailed. In it, they’re still driving in the car, but it’s impossibly dark, no moonlight, no stars, no other cars.  She shouts out the word “Wombat,” and Ed immediately begins to scream. He no longer has control of the car. The steering wheel won’t move, the gas and brake pedals are useless. “What the hell is going on? Jesus, what’s happening to us?”  They can feel themselves accelerating, lifting away from the road.

Denise says “Xenophobic,” and as soon as the word leaves her lips they’re accelerating again. Jonathan is crying from a deep, primal fear, the realization that he has no idea who this woman really is sitting next to him. Denise says matter-of-factly, “We’re locked in now. Can’t you feel it?” Lisbeth reaches back and the two women clasp hands tightly.

Suddenly, Ed and Jonathan lunge at Denise, their hands flying to her mouth to smother her words. They know it’s their only chance. Lisbeth tries to push Ed back, but it doesn’t matter; his body is contorted awkwardly in the front seat, and he can’t reach Denise as she twists away. She bites Jonathan fiercely on the hand. She fends them off and shouts out “Youthful.”

Ed is whimpering. The situation is impossible to comprehend. He’s begging her now. “Denise don’t do this. Just stop. Let us live in the universe we know. Bring us back. You know the words that work! Bring us back!”

In the dream, she hears herself enunciate each word precisely. “Aspic. Bayberry. Cathedral. Dandelion. Echelon. Felicity. Guru. Hijack. Ingenious. Jacks. Kelly. Louse. Mesmerize. Noodle. Octopus. Practical. Quell. Rotation. Sandman. Tintinnabulation. Undulation. Verisimilitude. Wombat. Xenophobic. Youthful.” She pauses for a moment. Collects herself. Ed’s powerless to stop her. She takes in a breath, and quietly mouths “Zookeeper.”

She becomes aware that Jonathan is violently shaking her. “Denise, wake up! Wake up!” The car is stopped, parked on a side street where Ed has been lucky enough to find an open space. She sees that she’s lying in the back seat, Jonathan, Lisbeth, and Ed like a surgical team peering down at her. The predawn light is familiar, slate grey and a slowly intensifying pink that pokes its way down into the streets and eventually through even the most heavily shaded student windows. Denise knows this time of day well, so often has she stayed up through the night studying, partying, smoking dope with Jonathan and Lisbeth. Recently, she’s contacted a more daring crowd experimenting with LSD, peyote, mescaline, tripping their way through one hallucinogenic high after another. It’s rapidly becoming a dominant factor in the plan taking shape in her mind.

Jonathan has a concerned look on his face. “You were talking in your sleep, but we couldn’t make out the words. We’re back and there’s about three hours before your first final. Come on, let’s get upstairs.” Denise sees now that they are indeed home. The dream is so fresh in her mind that she still remembers most of it. She can agonize all she wants for it to be real, but of course it is not. They are not on their way to an alternate universe. No one is closer to God. The word string has had neither magical nor transformative powers.

“Goddammit!” she screams out. She presses her eyelids shut as if to wish away the fact that they’re standing on 114^th street at 6 A.M. and she’s about to take a final for which she is ill-prepared. The day is already unseasonably warm and humid; it will be oppressive in the exam hall. She’s desperately trying to remember those last three words in the dream. At this moment, right this second, it’s the most important thing possible to her. She takes a notebook out of her bag, stops on the empty sidewalk. Ignoring Ed and Lisbeth’s questioning looks and Jonathan’s impatience to change their clothing and find breakfast, she pauses to write them down. Xenophobic youthful zookeeper.

*****

There is a nervous moment of transit across the podium when they hear their names called out, a handshake with a dean none of them has ever met, and then they are holding the flimsy cardboard that represents their baccalaureate degree. Their parents are all there, basking in the glow of the moment. And just as suddenly, there are the goodbyes as these four friends go their separate ways. Commencement is over.

Ed leaves immediately after the ceremony, back to Atlanta for a carefree summer before the med school grind begins. Lisbeth will head to Berkeley for the MFA program, determined to break in as a serious writer. She and Denise hug and hug endlessly before she drives home to New Haven. The last thing, the very last thing Denise says to Lisbeth before they part has nothing to do with congratulations or when they will visit over the summer, as they have promised themselves that they absolutely, definitely will. Instead, it’s the word string Denise wishes would have taken them all away. She repeats it into Lisbeth’s ear, just as she has insisted, they repeat it together every day since they returned from Truro. It’s a strange goodbye, Lisbeth thinks, but she joins in with Denise one last time, and then she’s on her way.

Denise has sent her parents off to Trenton, their car packed with most of her clothing, her books and belongings spilling out of odd little boxes and supermarket bags. She tells them she wants to use the day of grace before seniors have to leave the dorm to hang out with a few other friends who are also staying the night. In the euphoria of the day, they’re completely oblivious to her true state of mind. Her father will pick her up at the train station in Trenton early the next evening. And then there’s Jonathan. He’ll spend the summer at home in Philadelphia working a boring clerical job in his father’s business, hoping that one of the waiting lists will open up. Just before he leaves, he makes Denise promise that she’ll call as soon as she gets home. He wrestles with her playfully, trying to convince her to make love one last time in the dorm, but her mind is already elsewhere and eventually he gives up the pursuit. We’ll see each other every weekend, he says. Maybe more. It’s such a short drive. We’ll get an apartment where I get into B school. She lets him think whatever he wants.

When everyone is gone, Denise settles down to work. Her hair, a lustrous white blonde that she has been keeping long for over two years, has to go. She does her best to crop it short, close to her face, taking care not to be hasty so that it doesn’t look ragged or like an amateur chop job. In a few minutes, she’ll dye it a nondescript brown. She does not want to be conspicuous. She just can’t let that happen. She removes her make-up, tweezes out most of her eyebrows, cuts her fingernails short and takes off her rings and the oversized earrings she loves to wear. They might be one of the first things someone would mention in a description of her. She tosses these things into the plastic bag filled with the rest of her jewelry, a bag she will eventually discard somewhere far from campus.

The clothing she’s been accumulating from the city’s thrift stores is strewn across her bed – the sack dresses and tie-dyed T-shirts, the grubby jeans, the oversized Army jacket and rain poncho, items she’s been careful to keep hidden away so that none of her friends has seen them. She selects the items she’ll wear when she leaves the room and carefully folds the rest. It’s all got to fit into the one soft, small suitcase she’ll carry with her. The money is the most important thing of all. She has more than two thousand dollars from her now closed savings and checking accounts, and she’s carrying all denominations, even a few hundreds to keep down the bulk. She knows it’s a good cushion, but it won’t last long. Most of the money is hidden away in interior pockets she has sewn into one of the dresses.

The dorm is nearly deserted, as she knew it would be. The few lingering seniors are all out partying. She waits for dusk to settle on the city and then tucks on a Yankees cap and calmly takes the three flights of stairs down to the street.

She thinks about walking to the Port Authority bus station, a way to spend her last moments in New York on some of her favorite streets. But it’s impossibly far, the suitcase is heavier than she expected, and who knows who might see her? Instead, she descends into the subway station at 116^th Street and grabs the “1” train to Times Square. The underground passageway to the Port Authority is thronged with people scurrying in both directions well into the evening, so it’s easy for her to blend into the crowd. The walkway smells unpleasantly of imprisoned humidity and stale food and overheated human bodies.

At the ticket windows, Denise is well prepared. She has studied the bus schedules carefully and knows exactly the tickets she needs. She doesn’t want to be fumbling around and have the ticket sellers remember her. She thinks it’s important that she stick to the major cities where the bus stations will be full of people and anonymity is easy. Nor will she take one bus all the way across the country. That would help anyone who might be searching. There’s an overnight bus arriving later the next day into Chicago, where she’ll wait a few hours for another to St. Louis, then Denver, Los Angeles, and finally to San Francisco. She has researched the driving distances – 790 miles, then 297, 852, 1017, and 382 – hoping to find something in the numerology to reinforce her determination, provide assurance that she’s doing the right thing. There’s nothing special, but it doesn’t matter. Including stopover time between buses, she’ll be on the road three days. She’s going to the Haight.

There’s no one there she knows, all the better to help her disappear. She wants more than anything to be part of the counterculture society that’s taking her generation by storm. She envisions the following: that she will be welcomed warmly by the many like-minded ones already there; that she will change her name; find a group to crash with for a while, and maybe join a commune; that when her money runs out, she’ll get a job. Her college degree, she knows now, was her parents’ idea, not hers. She can’t believe she ever wanted it. She sees herself as a chrysalis, mature, glistening, emergent. The body known as Denise lies within it, gently beginning to probe the thin, translucent casing. What beautiful flower child will burst out? Lisbeth, she thinks, would do a lot with that.

The bus is ready to leave, half full at best. She drops her suitcase on the curb where the driver will pick it up and store it away in the undercarriage. As she steps up into the bus, she begins to whisper to herself, so quietly even she can barely hear it. The word string. She takes a window seat halfway back on the left side, her eyes darting everywhere, the words on her lips a mantra, starting with aspic, ending with zookeeper, over and over.

Suddenly, she’s aware that someone has taken the seat next to her. She opens her eyes for a moment, sees settling in beside her an older gentleman, possibly from India or Pakistan or perhaps Sri Lanka. He has an immaculate grey mustache and beard. She doesn’t acknowledge him at all. There will be no conversation, and he seems to sense this almost immediately. As the bus pulls away, Denise stares fiercely through the window, concentrating on the city images that present themselves, her last views of Manhattan.

Occasionally, her seatmate can make out one or another of the words she is muttering in her hushed, low voice. He suspects she’s afraid of something, maybe him, maybe whoever’s waiting for her in Chicago or wherever she is going. He couldn’t be more wrong. He wonders if she’s tripping on one of those hallucinogenic drugs the college students are using now. Perhaps she is one of the new waves of Hare Krishnas he sees so often on the city sidewalks chanting, dancing, endlessly clapping their finger cymbals together. She has the look, he thinks. He strains to make out what she’s saying. He hears the word guru. Louse. Sandman. A word that sounds like it begins with zero. Even after they’ve reached the New Jersey Turnpike, he can still hear the words, Denise’s irregular cadence. Soon, he picks up his things and moves to the other side of the bus. Still, every few minutes he looks Denise’s way. When they pass the exit for Trenton, he sees her breathe deeply, a measured sigh, and slowly close her eyes. Her smudged reflection in the window looks peaceful to him, untroubled, but her lips are pinched inward, restless, and they never stop moving.

*****

On a July morning when the summer fog still blankets and cools the city, Lisbeth and Helen stroll into a popular head shop on Clayton Street. Though she’s lived in the area for almost four years now, Lisbeth almost never finds her way from Berkeley across the bay. Her recent poetry reading at City Lights will change that soon; she’s starting to be noticed. Now she wants to write about the social upheaval that surrounds her, the fire in the streets, and even though there’s plenty of that in Berkeley, she wants to experience it in the location of its true genesis. It’s the Haight where she will immerse herself for the next few weeks and then begin to write.

Inside the shop there is paraphernalia everywhere. Rolling papers, rolling machines, roach clips in one aisle, hookah pipes, gravity bongs, serial thrillas in another. Zoom tubes. Artistic bubblers. Herb grinders. The unmistakable scents of cannabis and patchouli hang in the air. There’s no need to smoke to get high in this place. The magazine racks are full of counterculture magazines, alternate lifestyle journals, the “free press” newspapers that brazenly advertise to the drug culture and feature personal ads that are indecipherable unless you know the code. There are piles and piles of psychedelic clothing, T-shirts silk-screened with images of Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore West concerts. The Age of Aquarius is everywhere.

Two women staff the store behind a narrow counter, taking money, bagging purchases, answering quiet questions in careful, hushed tones. One of them looks stoned out of her mind, but it’s the other one who attracts Lisbeth’s attention. Her cheeks are sunken. The darkness under her eyes is so embedded it looks like she was born with it. The eyes themselves look hollow, the rest of her expression airless and vacant. She’s wearing a woolen cap that covers most of her dark, matted hair. It’s headgear that would be appropriate only for a New England winter. The sack dress she’s wearing is colorful enough but seems old and stained and hangs on her body in a way that makes it clear she has lost a lot of weight. Maybe the look is deliberate, but Lisbeth doesn’t think so. What Lisbeth thinks is, this woman is Denise.

They never found out what happened to her. When she didn’t meet her father in Trenton, her parents gave her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she’s staying with a friend in the city. She was a little moody at graduation. Give it another day. They couldn’t admit, not at first anyway, that the vague private concern they had harbored about Denise might be valid after all. Something was so deeply troubling their daughter that she would actually leave the life they had worked so hard to sustain? What would their friends think, their family? When they contacted Jonathan, he knew nothing. He hadn’t heard from her yet, he said. She had planned well. There was never a trail. The missing person report, the posters of her face, the search that stretched from days to weeks to months yielded nothing. She was vapor.

Lisbeth grabs a T-shirt and a dress she has no intention of buying and approaches the counter. The woman finishes with another customer and then turns to Lisbeth, taking the dress from her hand before she glances up at her face. “Cash or charge?”

“Denise?” Lisbeth is looking directly into her eyes. She thinks they’re the eyes of a truly lost soul. But if there’s a flicker of recognition, a moment of hesitation or a sudden intake of breath, Lisbeth can’t detect it.

The woman is folding the dress carefully, reaching now for the T-shirt. “Sheila. It’s Sheila. I don’t think we have any Denise here, do we, Angel?” The stoned one, Angel, shrugs her shoulders and steps out from behind the counter to straighten a rack of Beardsley artwork dresses.

Lisbeth is rarely at a loss for words. “You look defeated, Sheila. Defeated and hungry. Are you? I can help you.”

“Cash or charge?” the woman repeats, but there is something else in her voice, tiny and plaintive, like a door pushed open a fraction of an inch by the subtle shifting of air currents when a window is opened in a small, closed room.

“Forget it,” Lisbeth says. “I changed my mind.” She leaves the dress and the T-shirt on the counter and gathers up Helen to leave. “Maybe we’ll be back later.”

“Suit yourself,” she says, placing dress and T-shirt aside. Still, Lisbeth can sense the woman’s gaze lingering on her back until they have left the shop.

“You know her?” Helen asks the moment they step outside. “She looks like hell. She could be strung out on a dozen different drugs.”

“I told you about my college roommate who vanished? I think it’s her. She looks awful. She wouldn’t acknowledge me. She used to be gorgeous, incredible long blond hair. But wow, she looks awful. I can’t believe it if it’s her.” Hurriedly, Lisbeth explains how Denise disappeared after graduation. A crevasse in her parents’ life that swallowed them whole. She and Helen walk down the street no more than a hundred yards when Lisbeth stops and turns back. “Helen, wait for me a minute, okay? If I don’t do this right now, I know she’ll be gone.”

Lisbeth rushes back to the head shop. She’s thinking impossible thoughts. Angel is at the desk, Sheila or Denise, whoever she is now, is nowhere in sight.

“Sheila in there?” Lisbeth asks, pointing to the employee room in back. When she gets no answer, she heads behind the counter, Angel is too busy or too stoned to want to stop her. “Denise? Denise?” Lisbeth finds her slumped over on a chair, holding a joint in her hands. It’s obvious she’s been crying. There are dark streaks across her face, a tissue wadded uselessly in one hand. She takes a puff, then another, holds her breath as long as she can to keep the drug in her lungs. There is a pause that seems to go on forever as she looks up at Lisbeth, searching her eyes. There are demons here, Lisbeth thinks, so many demons. Oh, my dear God, Denise, where have you been? Give me a chance to help you. For a while, she’s not sure what to say next.

Finally, Lisbeth grabs her hand. “Aspic,” she says. “Aspic bayberry cathedral.”

The woman’s mouth is dried out from the smoke, her lips stuck to her teeth. She starts to say something, chokes, starts again. Her voice is raw and hoarse. Once, she thought the words she just heard would save her, lead her to an alternate universe. Perhaps it will turn out she was right about that after all.

“Dan,” is all she can croak out at first. It feels like her mouth is full of something hot and sticky, her tongue swollen and twisted in on itself. She licks her lips and swallows. She tries again. “Dandelion,” she says.