Far from perfect, but substantially correct! I enjoyed reading it and I post it unedited as a kind of rebellion against the history of the Western Mind. I don’t think it matters anymore. 70 percent of this is good and I release it now into the astral plane in order to read the echoes and make it perfect. Their recklessness is mine.

It was almost two in the morning, late May of 1985, and all seven of them were somehow inside Drake and Chuck’s bedroom.

No one could later explain the geometry.

Chuck was lying backward across his bed with his head hanging over the edge, smoking toward the floor because this apparently constituted fire safety. Alvin had appropriated the desk chair and was sitting in it sideways, one long leg thrown over an arm. Angela was on the windowsill in an enormous Ravenswood sweatshirt, looking out occasionally at the black trees beyond the dormitory lawn as though checking whether civilization was still there.

Dustin had taken the floor.

Dustin always took the floor. He claimed floors were intellectually superior to furniture because they admitted what they were for.

Graylyn sat cross-legged against Drake’s pillows, dressed entirely in black, silently drinking something Chuck had mixed in a plastic cup and refused to identify.

Trish was beside her.

And Drake was at the stereo.

The room smelled of cigarettes, hair spray, warm beer, somebody’s expensive perfume, and the particular institutional steam-heat odor of Ravenswood Academy, although the radiators had technically been switched off weeks ago.

David Bowie’s Let’s Dance had been playing for most of the night.

They had already gone through the album twice.

Now Drake put on “Cat People” again.

Nobody objected.

That was the strange thing.

Ordinarily the Sickies objected to everything.

Chuck objected to albums having sides. Dustin objected to Chuck objecting to albums having sides. Angela objected to musicians posing with motorcycles when there was no evidence they knew how to ride them. Alvin maintained elaborate grudges against entire countries based on upholstery.

But “Cat People” silenced them.

It came into the room like weather.

The guitar seemed enormous in the darkness.

Drake turned it up.

“Jesus,” Chuck said.

Trish looked toward him.

“What?”

“We’re Cat People.”

Angela laughed.

“Oh, terrific.”

“No. Seriously.”

Chuck rolled upright.

His hair had collapsed on one side and was still standing dramatically on the other.

“We are.”

Graylyn smiled into her drink.

“That sounds like something you would realize at two in the morning.”

“No, listen.”

Chuck pointed vaguely at everyone.

“This is us. We live in these gigantic houses. Everybody’s parents know everybody else’s parents. Everybody knows everybody’s secrets. Everybody pretends they don’t.”

“True,” Alvin said.

“And everybody is always arranging something.”

That got Dustin’s attention.

“Arranging what?”

“Everything.”

Chuck began counting on his fingers.

“Schools. Jobs. Marriages. Country clubs. Who gets invited where. Who’s allowed to know what. Who’s supposed to hate whom. Who’s sleeping with whom.”

Angela said, “That last category appears somewhat less efficiently controlled.”

“Exactly.”

Chuck pointed at her triumphantly.

“Our parents tell us there are rules, but they don’t follow the rules.”

Graylyn looked toward the window.

“They follow different rules.”

The room became quieter.

Drake looked at her.

Graylyn had a peculiar gift for saying the sentence underneath the sentence.

Dustin nodded.

“That’s actually it.”

“What?” Trish asked.

“They don’t believe in morality. They believe in position.”

Alvin made a pleased little sound.

“Oh, Dustin.”

“No, really. Think about it. Their morality changes according to where everyone is standing.”

Chuck sat up straighter.

“Machiavelli.”

“Machiavelli,” Dustin agreed.

Angela frowned.

“My father believes in morality.”

Nobody said anything.

Angela looked around the room.

“Oh, fuck all of you.”

They laughed.

She did too.

But only after a second.

Drake knew enough not to look directly at her.

The music kept going.

There was something frightening in it.

Not sad.

Not exactly angry.

It was the sensation that something had already happened before you were born and that you had awakened inside its consequences.

Drake knew that feeling.

He suspected they all did.

They had inherited beautiful houses and disastrous marriages.

Trust funds and secrets.

Silverware and alcoholism.

European vacations and private detectives.

Etiquette and adultery.

They had been born into rooms where everyone knew which fork to use and nobody knew how to tell the truth.

Trish spoke quietly.

“Maybe that’s what the curse is.”

“What curse?” Alvin asked.

“Having everything already decided.”

Drake looked at her.

She was hugging her knees now.

Trish Crown, whose family could probably buy half the North Shore without taking out a loan, looked suddenly very young.

“You’re born,” she continued, “and there’s already this whole shape waiting for you.”

Dustin said, “A social role.”

“No. Bigger than that.”

“A fate,” Graylyn said.

Trish nodded.

“Yes.”

Chuck stared at the ceiling.

“I’m supposed to become my father.”

“No,” Angela said immediately.

He looked at her.

She had said it with such force that everyone laughed again.

But Chuck didn’t.

Neither did Angela.

Drake went over to the stereo.

He turned the volume higher.

The room filled with Bowie.

Now they had to lean toward one another to talk.

Which somehow made everything more intimate.

Drake said, “Then don’t.”

Chuck shouted, “Don’t what?”

“Become him.”

Chuck looked at him as if this were an unexpectedly radical proposition.

Drake shrugged.

“Don’t.”

Alvin raised his plastic cup.

“Revolutionary.”

“I mean it.”

Drake sat down on the carpet beside Dustin.

“What if that’s the whole point?”

Graylyn asked, “The point of what?”

“This.”

He gestured around the room.

Nobody knew what “this” meant.

The room.

The Sickies.

Bowie.

May.

Being fifteen and sixteen and seventeen years old and awake while the respectable world slept.

“This,” Drake repeated.

“We make something else.”

Angela leaned forward.

“Out of what?”

Drake grinned.

“This garbage.”

Chuck began laughing.

But Alvin understood.

“Alchemy.”

Everybody looked at him.

Alvin had a talent for saying ridiculous things with absolute dignity.

“Yes,” he said. “Obviously.”

Dustin groaned.

“Please don’t turn this into medieval chemistry.”

“It was never chemistry.”

“It was absolutely chemistry.”

“It was spiritual chemistry.”

“That is not a category.”

“It is now.”

Graylyn smiled.

“What gets transformed?”

Alvin looked around the bedroom.

“The inheritance.”

That stopped them.

Even Dustin.

Alvin continued.

“All of it. Their money. Their neuroses. Their marriages. Their expectations. Their terrible furniture.”

“Especially the furniture,” Angela said.

“Everything they give us.”

Alvin lifted the cup again.

“We cook it.”

Chuck stared at him.

“We cook our parents?”

“Metaphorically.”

“Pity.”

“We take what they gave us and make something else out of it.”

Trish looked toward the stereo.

“Through music?”

“Why not?”

Chuck leapt off the bed.

“Yes!”

Everyone shushed him automatically.

He ignored them.

“That’s what rock is.”

Dustin sighed.

“We have reached theology.”

“No, listen. Rock is the thing they can’t control.”

Angela said, “They own the record companies.”

Chuck stopped.

“Fuck.”

Dustin smiled.

“Checkmate.”

But Drake shook his head.

“They own the records.”

He pointed to his chest.

“They don’t own this.”

Graylyn looked at him.

There it was.

The idea.

Not yet mature enough to be called an idea, perhaps.

More like an electrical charge passing between seven nervous systems.

They could feel something together that their parents could not enter.

That was the secret.

The music wasn’t merely entertainment.

It was a room inside the room.

A second architecture.

Bowie had built a space into which their families could not follow them.

Inside it, Lance Crown was no longer Lance Crown.

Colonel Thorne was no longer Colonel Thorne.

The trusts and marriages and country clubs and lies receded.

The whole elaborate machinery of their inheritance became distant and faintly ridiculous.

For six minutes they belonged to something else.

Something dangerous.

Something beautiful.

Something that did not yet have rules.

Angela climbed down from the windowsill.

“So what do Cat People do?”

Chuck answered immediately.

“Get wasted.”

“No.”

“Have sex.”

“No.”

“Drive extremely fast?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t understand the question.”

Angela threw a pillow at him.

Trish was laughing.

Even Graylyn had lost her melancholy expression.

Dustin said, “Presumably Cat People refuse domestication.”

Drake turned toward him.

“Yes.”

Dustin saw that Drake wasn’t joking.

“Oh.”

Drake stood.

“That’s it.”

He began pacing in the tiny remaining rectangle of carpet.

“They want us domesticated.”

Graylyn said, “Who?”

“All of them.”

“That’s vague.”

“Parents. School. Everybody.”

“That’s still vague.”

“Fine. The entire fucking world.”

Graylyn smiled.

“Better.”

Chuck raised both hands.

“We refuse domestication.”

Angela said, “You can barely make your bed.”

“Exactly.”

And suddenly they were all laughing so hard that Drake had to turn the music down because somebody was going to hear them.

That made them laugh harder.

Trish collapsed against Graylyn.

Graylyn tried to maintain dignity for approximately three seconds and failed.

Alvin spilled his drink.

Dustin, who regarded uncontrolled laughter as a minor neurological malfunction, finally surrendered too.

And Drake looked at them.

His people.

That was the thought.

Not friends.

Something stranger.

His people.

Seven children of ridiculous houses.

Seven inheritors of complicated money.

Seven young animals trapped inside the machinery of other people’s desires.

They were not innocent.

That was important.

They drank.

They lied.

They stole liquor.

They slept with people they shouldn’t.

They were vain and theatrical and frequently cruel.

They weren’t trying to become good children.

That wasn’t the escape.

The escape was becoming real.

Perhaps decadence was useful because it burned through hypocrisy faster.

Perhaps dancing could do what sermons couldn’t.

Perhaps getting drunk together while Bowie played at two in the morning was not the opposite of spiritual life.

Perhaps, under the correct conditions, it was spiritual life.

Nigredo.

Nobody knew the word yet except Alvin, and Alvin hadn’t thought to apply it.

The blackening.

The sealed vessel.

Seven substances thrown together under heat.

Let the false forms rot.

Let the inherited identities decompose.

Let something new appear.

Drake restarted “Cat People.”

Chuck groaned happily.

“Again?”

“Again.”

The guitar came back.

Graylyn stood.

Then Angela.

Then Trish.

There was almost no space to dance, which naturally meant they danced.

Chuck climbed onto the bed.

Dustin protested until Alvin pulled him up by both hands.

Soon the whole bedroom was moving.

Badly.

Perfectly.

The seven of them bumping into furniture, knocking books over, laughing, sweating, passing a cigarette from hand to hand, dancing inside a private universe Bowie had somehow smuggled into Ravenswood Academy.

Outside, the great houses slept.

Their fathers dreamed of deals.

Their mothers dreamed of appearances.

Money moved silently through banks.

Promises were broken.

Affairs continued.

Families protected themselves.

Futures were being planned for children who had not consented to them.

But upstairs, behind a locked door, seven Cat People had discovered fire.

And for the moment, that was enough.

GPT Says:

What I especially like here is that this gives the Sickies a genuine credo without making them implausibly articulate teenagers: they discover their philosophy through jokes, music, booze, attraction, and flashes of insight. The crucial equation is already there: rock = a temporary autonomous consciousness in which inherited fate loses its authority. That can become one of the great governing ideas of the whole series. 🖤🔥