She woke at dawn, rose and stepped outdoors to greet another day. One day drifted into another. The days became weeks, became months, became years, became decades.
There were no weekends or holidays here, just days. Days and days and days. This was Sarah's last day on Earth. Tonight she'd retire at dusk as usual, fall asleep, then simply expire.
A long time ago, she gave an offhand interview to one of the last underground newspapers. A nobody, she was only being interviewed because a writer friend had a lot of space to fill. The draft was history. Vietnam was over. Carter was ascendant. Abortion was legal. Alaska decriminalized pot. Who needed an underground newspaper?
The Weather People and their ilk still ran around bombing things, but for most hippies and students these times were "mellow," bordering on apathetic. A vacation. A party.
Sarah Blankmann had been living with Larry, sharing an apartment in a neighborhood in Boston that had seen grander times but was still passable. They'd met at Boston University, she a liberal arts major, he a grad student in chemistry, until he had a nervous breakdown and dropped out. She loved him once, very much so, even through the breakdown and its long aftermath. But this last year or two he'd grown remote; they no longer shared the same bed. Now he snored away on a foldout futon in their living room.
One day, while Larry was at work, stocking shelves and mixing large batches of granola at the health food co-op, she packed a few possessions and some clothes into her army-surplus knapsack and sat at the kitchen table to write a farewell note. She dreaded, with a passion, face-to-face good-byes, let alone arguments. Best to write something. But words failed her, so she left a blank piece of paper, shrugged into the knapsack, headed out the door, took the elevator down, stepped out of the 1950s apartment house and entered the smoggy spring morning noise of the Bay State's capitol and made tracks to the bank. She withdrew all of her savings, except a few bucks, just to keep the account open, to not burn the bridge. An option. You never know, right?
She put her wallet, now fat with cash, into a front pocket of her denim bells, and hoofed it to the bus station, bought a ticket to Denver.
Jenny, Sarah's best friend from high school, had moved to the outskirts of Denver after college. She was in a commune that managed to, more or less, function. Jenny worked part-time at a bookstore and, knowing the problems Sarah had with Larry, offered her a chance to jump ship, start afresh and live at the commune and take a job with Jenny at Bartleby's Bookshop.
Sarah was many miles west when Larry returned to an empty apartment and a blank piece of paper. In the bathroom, he saw her toothbrush and comb were missing. A look in the closet showed her clothes, or at least enough to stuff a knapsack, were gone.
He sat on the futon, lit a joint and muttered, "Dammit! Now how am I gonna pay the rent! Dammit all to hell! Bitch!"
Without her temp jobs and proofreading he was sunk. He couldn't afford this place on his own. "Dammit!" He abruptly stood and punched a hole in the wall. When he realized he'd broken a bone doing so, he marched to the nearest emergency room. "Dammit all to hell!"
Sarah sat next to a spade chick with an oversize Afro. After a bit, they managed an awkward sort of conversation. Night fell and they slept as the Greyhound rolled along. In the morning, the gal got off in Cleveland, after which Sarah sat alone, taking the window seat, watching America unfold. She daydreamed, napped, smoked an occasional Salem. She wished she'd thought to pack a paperback. She found a newspaper on an empty seat, read it thoroughly. From a rest stop newsstand, she bought a book, the thickest one.
"Well, the break's not bad, this should do it," chirped the young doc after bandaging Larry's hand. "I'll give you a prescription for a painkiller, that paw's gonna cause you some vexation, suh. And I'll prescribe codeine, the real stuff, not the laboratory junk, so to speak, heh heh. Just go easy on 'em. One at a time should do the trick." On the way home, Larry stopped off at his pharmacy, left pocketing a small plastic container of pills. Once back to the empty apartment he washed down a pill with the last Michelob in the fridge, and fired up a "doobie." He put a record on the stereo, a fusion LP, and waited for the codeine to kick in. After a bit, impatient, he took another. Then two more.
He opened a groggy crusty eye, peered at the clock: 2:13. And it was daylight! He cursed a blue streak and called work. A co-worker picked up and, before handing the phone to the manager, said, "Brother, you are one cooked goose."
The manager roared, "Hey, Larry, old chum, old pal! I've got some news for you: don't bother ever showing up here ever again! Ever! You're kaput, schmuck!" With that, Larry heard a dial tone.
His first impulse was to punch the wall. But he sighed and refrained. Instead, he made a beeline to the medicine cabinet and took the remaining pill.
Jenny was there to greet Sarah at the Denver bus station. In the parking lot, Jenny led her to a beat VW bus. Getting in, Jenny said, with a toss of her long straight hair, "Don't let its looks fool ya! Gil is our resident mechanic, and he keeps this thing spinning like a top. He's a Zen mechanic, man! It may be rusty, but it goes!" With that Sarah crunched the gears into first, the bus backfired a plume of blue smoke and they beetled their way to the commune.
Sarah's new room was on the top floor of a ramshackle Victorian. Much of the house's interior, dark old mahogany, was painted over, sloppily, in Day-Glo. Her room's furnishings consisted of a mattress, an old dresser and a reading lamp beside the mattress. She opened a window and a tattered Hendrix poster tacked to a wall fluttered. A big Day-Glo pacifist symbol had been painted on the peeling ceiling. She stared at it for a long while that night before turning out the light.
Sarah put in a couple of years at the commune. And Bartleby's. She worked there, off the books, for a generous sum. In reality, it was a front for a marijuana smuggling enterprise, a stop along the way from Mexico to points east. She had nothing to do with that however; she manned the register, selected inventory.
While at the commune she visited Denver's free clinic, twice. It was a freewheeling household, arguably too much so.
When Sarah met Larry in 1969 he was contemporary, but not a hippie. A confident grad student steeped in Russian literature who, for a wedding, would be found in a white turtleneck and a double-breasted navy blazer. His hair was longish, but not crazy. If we judge a man by his record collection (and we most assuredly do), we'd judge Larry by The Association, The Zombies, Herbie Mann, Vivaldi, The Critters.
Sarah's record collection had a bit more bite: Dylan, The Byrds, the San Francisco groups, Ives. But at the bottom of her record stack, Larry found a Monkees LP, the first record Sarah bought with her own money. He teased her about it. "Damn, I must really be robbing the cradle. My girl's a teenybopper!" She threw a pillow at him.
Larry and Sarah spent a lot of time with Phil and Maggie. Phil was Larry's lab partner and best friend. After Phil found a recipe for LSD via an ad in an old copy of Avatar, he got the idea of cooking up a batch after hours in the chem lab.
The first time the two couples tripped together, it was on Phil's home brew. They dropped a relatively small amount, 250 mics. A glorious and enlightening time was had by all in Phil's BU dorm room. Sarah kept saying, "Wow... oh, wow..."
The second time, in Larry's dorm room, was to be more of the same, except Larry decided to up his dose to 1000 mics. And all went well—up to a point. And that point was when Larry began to see the creepy-crawlies. At first a few, glimpsed to one side, then suddenly, hundreds, nay thousands, undulating masses of insect-like things, waves of them coming at him, across the floor, the walls, the ceiling, under his clothing, crawling up his nose, into his ears, boring into his brain. Then all he saw was white light. All he heard was a roar, the sound of being trapped in the curl of a tsunami. He just sat there, on the floor, mute, every fiber of his being experiencing excruciating terror, cut off from everybody and everything.
When Sarah met Larry, she was impressed with his easy manner and work ethic. He grew up in a split-level in Allendale, NJ, his dad an ad exec, his mom a homemaker busy in community affairs, organizing church white elephant sales, den mother to Cub Scouts. Larry was the eldest of three siblings. Despite a comfortable existence, the honor student mowed lawns and shoveled driveways until he was 16, at which point he always had a job, weekends and summers, earning enough to buy his second-hand but mint-condition 1965 Mustang, as well as pay toward college expenses. In the Mustang, he drove Sarah all about Beantown and beyond, even to Stowe Mountain for ski weekends. There was nothing reckless about his driving, but it wasn't timid. She began to fall head over heels. For the first time, Sarah was in love.
In high school, Sarah had a boyfriend, and was on the Pill, just to be safe. But had never gone past third base. She liked Jeffrey, but didn't love him. He was kind of blah.
Then she met the charmed grad student the autumn of her freshman year.
On an idle afternoon in bed, a Saturday, Sarah asked Larry, while twirling a lock of his hair, what his professional ambition was. Without skipping a beat he replied, fingers laced behind his head, eyes staring into the future, "I'd like to invent something to replace plastic. Something just as inexpensive, durable and useful, but not made from oil."
One day Sarah woke up in Denver and said genug, packed her knapsack, made a hasty formal good-bye to the Denver commune, took a taxi to Stapleton International Airport and flew to Los Angeles, logged a year or two on the Coast, before hopping a freighter to the Philippines, just for the freaking hell of it. She lived in Manila for a year, hung with a jolly group of ex-pats, before a friend, Brenda, told her about a Buddhist community, one that was centuries old, in the foothills of a mountainous island nation, Sirkilanya. It wasn't a hippy-dippy commune; it was serious.
Curious and fascinated, Brenda and Sarah went. In Manilla, they'd taken up meditation, sworn off drugs, studied Buddhist texts, attended a Buddhist temple. This community promised to be an important place to witness and, possibly, settle into. Sarah had no living family. Her dad died when she was a junior in high school, a massive coronary while screaming into the phone at his desk in his office in the garment district. Someone had messed up an order. And her shrew of a mother kicked the bucket shortly after Sarah had arrived in Los Angeles. Sarah didn't bother attending the funeral; good riddance.
Maybe she could enter this Buddhist community and say one final good-bye to life as she'd known it. And who would notice?
After a boat trip, a cab ride, and climbing a half-mile of rugged and rocky path, the two women arrived at the community. Despite a handful of European and American members, the sprawling compound was entirely indigenous, not to mention extremely efficient. The outsiders had separate facilities, their own grass huts. That said, the Westerners shared chores with the locals: milking cattle, shearing sheep, weaving, cleaning, maintenance, planting, yogurt making, harvesting. At night, tired to the marrow, people slept soundly.
Marriages were arranged and limited to the islanders. This meant celibacy for the outsiders. Now drug- and sex-free, Sarah wondered if she had become a "straight."
One of the first things Sarah noticed was that everything was made out of something real: wood, stone, wool, silk. There was no plastic anywhere.
The community was nameless, but it did have a monarch, a king, his queen and their many children. When the ruler died, about seven years after Sarah and Brenda's arrival, his eldest son took the helm and all continued seamlessly.
Over the years, Sarah learned enough of the local language to be able to communicate basics regarding work and such. But as the Westerners either drifted off or died, one day she found herself with no one to carry on a real conversation with, no one to laugh with about the joy of buying and listening to, of getting lost in, the first Monkees album in her bedroom of a raised ranch in Valley Stream, her parents upstairs raging, accusations flying, her father stomping out of the house, her mother slamming doors, smashing plates. In the midst of such storms, Sarah would quietly close her door, put on the headphones, sit on her bed, close her eyes and rock back and forth to Davy, Peter, Mickey and Mike.
It was in 2012 that Sarah's interview resurfaced, online. In the interview, while smoking weed, Sarah had parroted the radical boilerplate of the day: United Fruit, the CIA, Che, the FBI, assassinations. It lacked nuance; it was just the zeitgeist. But then she took off on a tangent, decided to add some spice, forge a new path. She began riffing like Charlie Parker in 1948, crazy stuff about Mossad and JFK and LBJ, and of course, good ol' Nixon. And Vietnam, the UN, the Vatican, on and on. Dow Chemical's deal with IBM! Xerox and the Rockefellers! Rand Corporation, the Masons, the CFR! "Did you know..."
Gaining traction on sites and blogs and social media, the lost-and-found interview seemed to add substance to sundry conspiracy theories, as well as open new avenues. People on the fringe began to wonder: Who is Sarah Blankmann?
Or was. Is she still living? There were few clues as to her existence, or whatever had happened to her after this interview. Okay, Long Island born and raised, she'd attended BU. There was a rumor about Denver, someone named Jenny, but no photos.
Someone presented a blurry group pic, the Capitol Records tower in the background. They said they'd met her that day, but knew nothing about her, except she seemed nice. And there the trail went cold.
Her small sum of money still sits in an account at a branch of the First National Bank of Boston.