The Other by David Guterson

re-embracing that perception in much of its original intensity (this happened to me while watching diners through the window of a restaurant one night in the University District, where I’d gone to meet cousins at a tavern that didn’t card). Yet, when my blisters had healed, and I’d eaten myself, once more, into arrogance, I happily recovered my old manner of being, though not without adding what I thought was a new layer of wisdom, and not without talking about those woods so much they palled at the same rate at which words about them formed in my mouth. I mangled and then annihilated our whole passage through the North Cascades by engaging in braggadocio about it for hammer-swinging Countrymans, and my sensation of loss was immediate and visceral and left me wistful for what I’d had before. When I mentioned this to John William a month after our deliverance, he said he knew what I was talking about because he’d tainted our journey in something of the same way by writing about it at school. Then he asked me if I wanted to go on another expedition, under similar circumstances, immediately after graduating, this time without a map or matches, relying instead on memorizing our path and making use of a flint and steel. I said yes. Pete Jenkins declined.
    John William and I celebrated our release from high school by dropping, each, a tab of acid. Things went well, for me at least, as we wandered on foot through downtown Seattle, with cars passing us or coming toward us in the early-film-era style of moving objects in a stereopticon, and with every citizen on the sidewalks emotionally transparent. I had a mental battle with an alley cat—an eye-to-eye contest of wills I won with my third eye—and stopped a bus with a spread hand. All sound approached slowly and in increments, then left the same way. I knew who was dangerous and who wasn’t, effortlessly. However it was—and not to make too much of the experience of psychedelia—at some point John William’s sobbing registered with me as something not to be absorbed any longer. I’d watched his tears, even gathered a drop from his cheek on a scrap of paper so as to examine its stain; nevertheless, his crying had seemed not only distant but, however unhappy, required. With every wail, more grief passed out of him, permanently expunged, I felt—in fact, for me this was tangible, and his escaping sorrow had a color, a darkly burnished orange, that I perceived as an emanation. I saw his sadness as a bloodletting, and I was happy for my friend. But then things changed. The working of lysergic acid in the brain can produce dramatic shifts, and I came into an awareness of John William’s nightmare. A shroud descended, and the cast of things altered. I found myself beneath the glass roof of the iron pergola in Pioneer Square, with my back against a stanchion, looking north toward the Seattle First National Bank Building at Fourth and Madison—Seattle’s first skyscraper, and at that point its only one—and it terrified me, this dark monolith. All night, John William had been mumbling something under his tears, and now I finally homed in on his mantra as he curled on the cobblestones a few yards away from me with his hands clutching his face, as if in so doing he could hide from the truth of things—“No escape from the unhappiness machine…No escape from the unhappiness machine…No escape from the unhappiness machine…No escape from the unhappiness machine…” I started chanting that, too.

 
     
    2
     
     
    N OW T HEY W OULD H AVE THE R UN H OME T OGETHER
     
    E ARLIER THIS SUMMER , for the first time in eleven years, I hiked in the valley of the South Fork Hoh, where John William and I went without a compass or matches two days after our acid trip, and where John William spent seven years living alone. The trail passes under Sitka spruces, some more than five hundred years old, and under bigleaf maples hung with club moss. You would have to say that, given the