'Good for you,' he said. 'You're just as smart as I thought you were. I knew you'd figure it out, sooner or later, that's what I've told the others all along.'

The darkness hung about our tiny circle of lamplight as heavy and palpable as a curtain. With a rush of what was almost motion sickness, I experienced for a moment both the claustrophobic feeling that the walls had rushed in towards us and the vertiginous one that they receded infinitely, leaving both of us suspended in some boundless expanse of dark. I swallowed, and looked back at Henry. 'Who was it?' I said.

He shrugged. 'A minor thing, really. An accident.'

'Not on purpose?'

'Heavens, no,' he said, surprised. W 'What happened?'

'I don't know where to begin.' He paused, and took a drink.

'Do you remember last fall, in Julian's class, when we studied what Plato calls telestic madness? Bakcheia? Dionysiac frenzy?'

'Yes,' I said, rather impatiently. It was just like Henry to bring up something like this right now.

'Well, we decided to try to have one.'

For a moment I thought I hadn't understood him. 'What?' I said.

'I said we decided to try to have a bacchanal.'

'Come on.'

'We did.'

I looked at him. 'You must be joking.'

'No.'

That's the weirdest thing I've ever heard.'

He shrugged.

'Why would you want to do something like that?'

'I was obsessed with the idea.'

'Why?'

'Well, as far as I knew, it hadn't been done for two thousand years.' He paused, when he saw he hadn't convinced me. 'After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,' he said. 'To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.'

'Like what?'

'Well, it's not called a mystery for nothing,' said Henry sourly.

'Take my word for it. But one mustn't underestimate the primal appeal – to lose one's self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time. That was attractive to me from the first, even when I knew nothing ahont the topic and approached it less as potential mystes than anthropologist. Ancient commentators are very circumspect about the whole thing. It was possible, with a great deal of work, to figure out some of the sacred rituals – the hymns, the sacred objects, what to wear and do and say. More difficult was the mystery itself: how did one propel oneself into such a state, what was the catalyst?' His voice was dreamy, amused.

'We tried everything. Drink, drugs, prayer, even small doses of poison. On the night of our first attempt, we simply overdrank and passed out in our chitons in the woods near Francis's house.'

'You wore chitons'?'

'Yes,' said Henry, irritated. 'It was all in the interests of science.

We made them from bed sheets in Francis's attic. At any rate.

The first night nothing happened at all, except we were hung over and stiff from having slept on the ground. So the next time we didn't drink as much, but there we all were, in the middle of the night on the hill behind Francis's house, drunk and in chitons and singing Greek hymns like something from a fraternity initiation, and all at once Bunny began to laugh so hard that he fell over like a ninepin and rolled down the hill.

'It was rather obvious that drink alone wasn't going to do the trick. Goodness. I couldn't tell you all the things we tried. Vigils.

Fasting. Libations. It depresses me even to think about it. We burned hemlock branches and breathed the fumes. I knew the Pythia had chewed laurel leaves, but that didn't work either. You found those laurel leaves, if you recall, on the stove in Francis's kitchen.'

I stared at him. 'Why didn't I know about any of this?' I said.

Henry reached into his pocket for a cigarette. 'Well, really,' he said, 'I think that's kind of obvious.'

'What do you mean?'

'Of course we weren't going to tell you. We hardly knew you.

You would have thought we were crazy.' He was quiet for a I moment. 'You see, we had almost nothing to go on,' he said. 'I ^ suppose in a certain way I was misled by accounts of the Pythia, ™ the pneuma enthusiastikon, poisonous vapors and so forth. Those processes, though sketchy, are more well documented than Bacchic methods, and I thought for a while that the two must be related. Only after a long period of trial and error did it become evident that they were not, and that what we were missing was something, in all likelihood, quite simple. Which it was.'

'And what might that have been?'

'Only this. To receive the god, in this or any other mystery, one has to be in a state of euphemia, cultic purity. That is at the very center of Bacchic mystery. Even Plato speaks of it. Before the Divine can take over, the mortal self- the dust of us, the part that decays – must be made clean as possible.'

'How is that?'

'Through symbolic acts, most of them fairly universal in the Greek world. Water poured over the head, baths, fasting – Bunny wasn't so good about the fasting nor about the baths, either, if you ask me but the rest of us went through the motions. The more we did it, though, the more meaningless it all began to seem, until, one day, I was struck by something rather obvious – namely, that any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to see past it to a deeper meaning.' He paused. 'Do you know,' he said, 'what Julian says about the Divine Comedy'?'

'No, Henry, I don't.'

'That it's incomprehensible to someone who isn't a Christian?

That if one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours? It was the same with this. It had to be approached on its own terms, not in a voyeuristic light or even a scholarly one. At the first, I suppose, it was impossible to see it any other way, looking at it as we did in fragments, through centuries. The vitality of the act was entirely obfuscated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.' He took one last drag of his cigarette and put it out. 'Quite simply,' he said, 'we didii I believe. And belie! was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender.'

I waited for him to continue.

'At this point, you must understand, we were on the verge of giving up,' he said calmly. 'The enterprise had been interesting, but not that interesting; and besides, it was a good deal of trouble.

You don't know how many times you almost stumbled on us.'

'No?'

'No.' He took a drink of his whiskey. 'I don't suppose you remember coming downstairs one night in the country, about three in the morning,' he said. 'Down to the library to get a book.

We heard you on the stairs. I was hidden behind the draperies; I could have reached out and touched you if I'd wanted. Another time you woke up before we even got home. We had to slip around to the back door, sneak up the stairs like cat burglars – it was very tiresome, all that creeping around barefoot in the dark.

Besides, it was getting cold. They say that the oreibasia took place in midwinter, but I daresay the Peloponnesus is considerably milder that time of year than Vermont.

'We'd worked on it so long, though, and it seemed senseless, in light of our revelation, not to try once more before the weather turned. Everything got serious all of a sudden. We fasted for three days, longer than we ever had before. A messenger came to me in a dream. Everything was going beautifully, on the brink of taking wing, and I had a feeling that I'd never had, that reality itself was transforming around us in some beautiful and dangerous fashion, that we were being driven by a force we didn't understand, towards an end I did not know.' He reached for his drink again. 'The only problem was Bunny. He didn't grasp, in some fundamental way, that things had changed significantly.