Wichita (9781609458904) by Thad Ziolkowsky

Lewis read and liked that one, the spell it cast: for a day or two he was a compassionate Tibetan Buddhist.
    He hides the money behind the jacket flap of
When Things Fall Apart
and puts the book back on the shelf and stands reading the other titles. There’s an awful lot on psychedelics here: Salvia Divinorum: Shamanic Plant Medicine
;
The Apples
of Apollo
;
Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion
. It goes on for shelves. The thought that Abby might be into a drug phase—“exploration,” she would call it—causes a wavelet of worry to crest in him. She tried and liked Ecstasy, he knows that. But Ex is not a psychedelic. Maybe it’s just an armchair thing; it’s not like he’s found a sack of magic mushrooms under the bed. But it also can’t be ruled out that she’s brewing up mail-order ayahuasca. When she was married to Virgil, she contented herself with reading. Post Virgil, if she took an interest in reincarnation, she hired a past-life regression therapist; if she fell under the spell of a new-age guru du jour, she booked a berth on that guru’s cruise/seminar series. Now, if she takes a fancy to storm-chasing, she orders the software and starts a business. She does whatever the hell she wants and that’s great, good for her. Still, the image of his mother sprawled on the living room couch eyes aflutter, with Donald or someone comparably clueless as trip-sitter, quietly freaks him out.
    So does the idea that she might be keeping it from him. Unless leaving all these books in his room is her way of breaking the news. But indirection is not Abby’s style: she tells Lewis if anything more than he wants to know, the sort of male body she finds attractive, for instance (like Donald’s, big and fleshy), or how at the start of her relationship with Rennie the plastic surgeon, she was having sex “around the clock” (which Lewis, helplessly grossing himself out further, found himself thinking of as a sexual position:
around the clock
).
    He pulls down the tome-like
PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story
by Ann and Alexander Shulgin and fans through it. There are recipes for designer drugs in a kind of index, someone’s cryptic marginal notes, chemist’s symbols. Did she buy it used? He flips to the front, where there’s a book plate:
Ex Libris
Bishop Furlow, a boyfriend. He must have left them here when he moved out. Calming down, Lewis checks in a sampling of the other drug books and finds the plate.
    He was a lovely guy, Bishop, smart, goofily sweet, game for anything: not one of the conventional primitives Abby tends to bring home and attempt to mold. He teaches chemistry and “future studies” at Wichita State University. He was probably, in that way, too much like Virgil, something he compounded by smoking a lot of pot, asking Abby one too many times whether she’d seen his wallet or car keys.
    The image on the bookplate is a medieval alchemical painting of a beaker set in the foreground of a landscape. Inside the beaker, at the bottom, a man and woman copulate, watched by four floating heads; in the neck of the beaker an angel, who seems to be sipping a cup of coffee, it’s hard to make out, looks on; and sprouting from the mouth of the beaker, buds that look like wild onions. At the bottom the words “Solutio Perfecta.”
    To the right of the bookshelves are marks of his time here that haven’t been effaced: nicks in the plaster from posters he put up using double-sided foam tape—reproductions of a Hopper cityscape and an Ellsworth Kelly abstraction he found at the Whitney Museum on a visit to New York at Christmas when he was fifteen. It was mainly to impress Virgil and Sylvie that he bought them. They looked on coolly, winter light bathing the severe little museum shop. Should they take him up, was he worth grooming? But that wasn’t correct, he realized later: they were probably just thinking