"The Acid Test" (2017) by Livia Llewellyn

Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales (2017)edited by Ellen Datlow

Readers unfamiliar with "The Acid Test" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.

"Even the most vague desire is a fire...."

In "The Acid Test" Livia Llewellyn returns us via first-person present-tense to the carefree idyll of a late 1960s college campus. And demonstrates the nighttime scene was often a benighted "legend trip" where answered prayers and accomplished facts were workings toward acid-borne victimization and death.

The story begins and orbits a crowded rave:

[….] there’s so much smoke in the room from all the grass and cloves and hashish that I’m already seeing dragons in the air, great snakes coiling and rippling against the beaded curtains and velvet curtains, horses with wings and beautiful birds with long hooked beaks whose wings brushed against the bookcases, knocking down textbooks and sending onionskin sheets of poetry floating through the air like large autumn leaves; or maybe that’s just everyone turned on and dancing, or knocking up against the shelves as they gas on and on about Chomsky and Searle and Leary and Marcuse. And the theatre kids talk about Sartre and Godot and a group of the really weird kids argue at the edges of the room about Heinlein and Ellison.... 

The narrator has accompanied her roommate, Suzanne.

[….] I’m an Ed major and no one wants to talk with me about Montessori education versus Waldorf, but I’d tried for the sake of beautiful Suzanne who’d been begging me to come to one of these stupid dorm mixers for a month now, and I didn’t have anything better to do tonight. And anyway there was a guy I’d seen, a guy who always hangs out at the edges of the theatre actors groupies at plays and mixers, never talking but only watching like a beautiful predator, tall and thin with the grooviest clothes and these huge brown eyes and jet-black hair, and I figured maybe he was a grad student because he just seemed so cool and calm and above it all so he probably wouldn’t show....

The narrator's fortunes suffer several reverses, though we get the sense this is not because she dropped acid in the first sentence. Sober or on a trip, she  plays spectator to her own life.

Suzanne attracts the predator dream-boat our narrator came in search of.

[….] Where did you say we’re going, I hear her [Suzanne's] soft pretty voice say, and I imagine how his face looks as he replies a secret spot in a basement of the dorms called the Purple Room, and oh how purple it is, ripe like grapes bursting on the killing floor of a distant sun, those long brows arching under the black fringe of his silken hair, as he licks his marble teeth and grins his thin-lipped grin, and Suzanne laughing and saying oh, see, everyone said you were such a square but I knew you always had it in you, languid stone fox, secret garden, murderer of possibilities, and he replies, and his reply is lost in all my pyroclastic-cold and clammy dreams.

*   *   *

Llewellyn employs a formidable voice in "The Acid Test," bent on alienating and enticing the reader by turns. The coming-of-age campus story is successfully estranged, and we witness a young woman succumbing to a call. We are not sure whether the call emanates from her desire for her "beautiful predator" or the hidden room. Either, she apparently thinks, will make a sanctuary against bourgeois domesticity and "family romance."

[….] we’re astronauts riding in rockets of acid and mushrooms, traversing the vast cosmic expanse of our own uncharted unexplored selves, and I wonder out loud how far we’re willing to travel within ourselves to find something new and astonishing event if it’s terrible and not who we thought we were at all or who our parents tried to raise us to be, but maybe that dark place inside isn’t a new discovery but the oldest truest part of ourselves finally set free, free of rules and morals and culture, the primal original ur-self let loose after a lifetime of false and flaccid chains to be one with a world in which all these traps and trappings around us this furniture these clothes these sentences are infestations that keep us from taking our place within the universal mother god node of creation and destruction and deconstruction and rebirth. And some people nod and others disagree and others just stare up at the beams that cross the ceiling like the ribs of a landlocked ship, and everyone’s thoughts and words fill the air, sparking like the glowing embers of a contented and tired fire, and then someone asks the question, and I’m fairly certain that person is me, hey, have you guys heard anything about a place in the dorms called the Purple Room?

[….] the guy next to me with the long sideburns and wispy moustache who keeps grabbing the knee of his wild-eyed girlfriend nods for a long time as if the motion is dredging up the information like an oil derrick, and finally he says, yeah, man, I think I heard something about that my freshman year, I think, I think, yeah man, it’s some old basement storage locker or laundry room that a couple of dudes on the basketball team turned into this wild sex pad, yeah, yeah man, with carpeting and mattresses everywhere and they painted the walls and ceiling with all this black light paint and shit and they replaced the fluorescents with black lighting and the whole room was like, whoa man, so when you were making it with your woman and you were coming it was like you were tripping into another dimension or something with all the purple lights flashing and glowing, yeah. His girlfriend nods the entire time, mouthing the words no way man over and over again in between drags on her cigarette and pulls on a bottle of whiskey, and when her boyfriend is finished she stubs the cigarette out on the sofa arm and says you are so way off you’re not even on the planet anymore, man, not even in the fucking planetary system, I heard a bunch of religion students spent the summer in Tibet back in ’64, and when they came back they made a meditation room in the basement of their dorm with purple walls and lotus flowers and lidless eyes everywhere, and when you’re in the room and you start meditating and chanting, it helps you astral project right to the pyramids or wherever you want because it’s built in the middle of a power line, man, this line that’s part of a network of psychic rivers that run all over the planet and flow through time and space and all these dimensions, and you connect your pineal gland to the road, you just hit that astral road, man, you just chant your spirit straight to Stonehenge or some temple on the moon. She pauses to catch her breath and take a long swig of the whiskey while her boyfriend shakes his shaggy head and mutters no way man, no fucking way, and I ask her if she’s ever seen the room, does she know which dorm it’s supposed to be in, but she’s already deep in disagreement with the boy....

[….] I turn to the woman sitting in the chair to my right, all limp brown suede and faded paisley cotton under a body-length cocoon of half-removed parka, a beaded fringe tied across her head weeping bright glass seed beads into her damp flat hair, who’s been quietly listening to us the entire time with a growing furrow between her barely open eyes, and I ask her if she’s ever heard of the room. She blinks slowly, several times, and says in a low monotone, yeah, maybe, I think so, it’s one of those things everyone hears about but no one’s every met anyone who’s been there, one of those campus stories everyone tells each other, and every time someone tells the story a little bit changes, like those round robin gossip games we used to play at summer camp, remember those? Yeah, but the story I was told was that it’s a nest, a nest in the basement of one of the dorms, a room with purple walls all slick and wet and waxy-soft like a honey bee hive, with a door made out of twigs and branches and lost laundry and old books no one reads anymore and worn-down candles and incense sticks and glass sun catchers and the rib cages of lost chicks who stayed up too late and wandered through the halls past curfew, a jumble of things people threw away that block the door to protect the room, dead and lost things that warrior raptors who cry like sea gulls and fuck like wolves place against the door as protection for the void-queen that lays pulsing and birthing behind it . . . it’s holy work . . . we have no choice . . . Her voice trails off and her head rolls back against the chair, tiny seed beads scattering across her cheeks and shoulders as she passes out or trips into oblivion, and a delicate ribbon of stamps falls from her uncurling hand, and I realize as I reach over and slide the ribbon from her fingers and pop one square onto my tongue that I’ve come full circle and am right back where I started from.

*   *   *

The fabled Purple Room's lore reduces it to three shorthand caricatures: fuck pad, meditation chamber, and finally: something's nest. At this moment the narrator's own acid test commences: 

[….] the one thing I wanted that night was to make it with that beautiful grad student, the one with the ragged black hair like torn silk brushing against his snow white forehead and cheeks and wide thin mouth, the iridescent mysterian who shows up in all my trips and nightmares and dreams, the black-eyed raptor in burgundy velvet who’s across the room opposite me right this moment, sitting on an olive green couch between a guy with one hand underneath the skirt of his wriggling girlfriend and an older woman with graying hair who’s hunched over and weeping into her hands, and I know he wasn’t there a moment ago, that the spot was empty, that he fizzled into life only when the acid disappeared on my tongue, as if he’s just always there waiting behind the high.

Once she succumbs to the beautiful predator's offer to become a render of veils, the narrator's experience of the Purple Room is as an abattoir. Fear of adulthood's yawning oblivion is suppressed.

[….] you see beyond the surface of all this, and he presses his fingertips together, as if revolted at the touch of his own flesh, the same way you see me as I walk through the campus and through this dimension but also the real me, the multiple being folded and clipped and hobbled in this pellet of a body that seems to set all your hearts racing so, the body that has to work so hard to keep this little egg of a world intact and separate from all the other eggs of our greedy mother void-queen, and he moves from the window over to my bed, standing over me as I stare up into his face like a blade, and he leans down and grabs my breast with a grip so tight it makes me gasp as he whispers into my open mouth, don’t worry, I’ll teach you how to rid yourself all of this, and then I’ll teach you how much of them you can hold, and then I’ll show you all the other purple rooms, all the other doors….

Characters confronting cosmic horrors have already sapped their own defenses in myriad skirmishes with the horrors of everyday life. Hence the running, gibbering, and surrendering when the real thing arrives.

Jay