The Bog by Jonathan Raymond

The Bog
Fiction by Jonathan Raymond
Originally appeared in issue #1 of 2 Gyrlz Quarterly

    Adam is the sexy one, who's driving, and Eric, the smart one, is in the back seat. It's his mom's house we're going to, out on the Olympic peninsula. Brad is the funny one, who comes up with most of our names for things, and finds most all of the music.

I'm not anything, really.

Maybe I'm the cynical one, I guess. But for some reason I get to be with them, sitting in the passenger seat, flipping the tapes when they end.

The rest of them are in other cars. Hunter, from Australia, Scott, Ed, Craig, no better than me. Brian, Chad, with Kirsten and Rachel, who I sometimes fall asleep with at these things, but who generally won't take off her pants.
We pass scalped earth, brown heaps of lumber and ripped up stumps. The sun splits on the windshield like a spiderweb. They keep talking, saying funny things, moving words forward. They keep rearranging them until some new meaning comes out. 

    "Come on, Chimp. Chimp it up."

    "Don't chimp on me. Chimp."

    Chimp is one of our words. I think Brad thought of it, the author.

We go over a long bridge, over grey water tippled with milky white, and through a dank forest of fir trees, until we reach the house, a little one story shack beside a man made lake about four feet deep. It used to be a cow pasture but now its a lake, a mile from the ocean, which is down a sandy road.

    "The Bog," Eric says, as the cabin appears. He named it the Bog.

    "The Bog," I repeat. The other car pulls up behind us, grinding the gravel under its massive weight.

The first thing is to prepare. We set up stereos in each room, unpack all the food. Doritos, pasta, lunchmeat, bread. In the smaller bedroom, Brian takes out a bag of glo sticks and ties a string to their ends, then cracks them in half and spins them around his head, so the greasy stuff spatters against the walls and ceiling. This will be the star room tonight, where calm, amoebic music will play. Hugo Largo and This Mortal Coil and Jesus and Mary Chain.

The front room will have the harder stuff. Sonic Youth, Dinosaur, Husker Du. Religious music. Also Throwing Muses, who are crazy. It will be trying.

At about dusk we all drop the acid. Hunter pulls it out of a ball of aluminium foil, sugar cubes, though usually we have paper. But whatever, we're game.

The acid comes on pretty quick. We've all taken enough at this point that the synapses are ready for it. The skin tightens, the mouth waters, the taste for beer or cigarettes expands. Everyone starts killing the time in different ways, moving around, combining and recombining. Drifting from one conversation to another. Changing reality.

The acid comes on like a glass wall wrapping over my face. The space in my head blows out and echoes start to occur.

Out on the deck, Ed proves that the Fat Boys are not Socrates, but that Socrates was a fat boy, by dropping a glass of water into another glass of water. We all laugh because it makes sense. He's a philosopher.

In the yard people play baseball with croquet mallets, not caring who they are. They just pick up whatever part comes to them.Scott made the rules of the game, I'm pretty sure of it. It has the chaotic thing of his mind.

A few of us walk down to the beach, where the sun disappears and the stars come out in thick congestion. The rocks down the beach form a huge maw, beneath the even huger maw of the sky. Some lights twinkle coldly in the distance.

Eric shakes his fist at the sky and says something dramatic.

Some more people come, and some of us return to the Bog, where the order of things has changed. The baseball game is over and pasta is boiling on the stove. Some people are lying on the floor drawing pictures, others are talking out in the back.

I wander around from room to room. Sonic Youth makes me feel like murder, beautiful murder, and the Hugo Largo begins to cloy. Outside, without music, the air feels empty and raw.

I go back inside to the star room and lie down with Rachel in a corner and begin rubbing her pants. She lets me feel her tits and we kiss each other's tongues but after awhile someone else comes in and we stop, and wander into different places.

The chaos is getting tough to handle now.

I walk outside onto the porch, and Brad comes at me from the water and begins talking excitedly, staring at me with a crazy, funny look in his eyes.
"I had to get out of here," he says. "So I went out on the boat. Drifted out onto the water through the reeds. I was like, yes, finally away from the Bog. And then I heard this beautiful music out there. So I followed it. I paddled towards it, like these harps in the clouds. I could see light shining through the fog and when I got closer the mist parted, the lights shone down on me." Brad pauses for dramatic effect.

    "And it was the fucking Bog! It was the Bog. Right where I came from! Fucking Galaxie 500 playing on the stereo!" He laughs.

Chad is up in a tree, where he starts making the branches rap.

    "Hey, it's me. Up in the tree. It's Chad, the man, 40 in hand." I'm seeing tracers. I need to change the scenery now.

Adam comes by and catches my eye, and I follow him out to the car, where we smoke some pot and listen to a tape, some hard music. Layers of thunder, softly churning, pink and chalk blue quickening in the folds like lightning. Out the front window, a manzanita bush begins glowing like pale neon. A burning bush.

    "Whoa," Adam says, and I know what he means.

I listen to the music awhile longer, and then open the door and stand there a minute. Everything is glowing now, just a little bit, from the inside. An ominous kind of glow. It's tempting.

I look out into the shadows, and realize that I could walk away from the car if I wanted to, and keep walking forever without ever coming back. I could start over again without any name. I could just keep walking, and change course only on the most random of instincts, and if I did the world would keep glowing like this from inside forever. In a terrifying way I could be free. The light from the bush is like something from the ocean, and the music on the stereo is almost just static, pulsing and throbbing, keening sometimes, howling. Or I could stay here.

______
Jon Raymond is the author of The Half Life (Bloomsbury, 2004) and the associate editor of Tin House. He edited Plazm magazine, and his work has appeared in Tin House, Bookforum, and other publications.