Chapter 5

FRAZIER

In one of the big old wood frame houses on lower Elm Street, in the first block off Main, Frazier Nunley lived with his mother and father. His father had bought the place at the end of World War II with his GI loan. That was when he and his wife planned a large family, before Orva Nunley discovered that Frazier was the only child she could ever have.

The house was clearly too large for the three of them, but it would have been more expensive to move somewhere else than it was to keep it. During the summer they kept two of the upstairs bedrooms closed off. When the school year began, the extra rooms were rented out to students at Harvey College, the small liberal arts school at the edge of town.

This year the new dorm had gone up out on the campus, so the two upstairs rooms were not in use. The extra income was missed, for although Ellis Nunley was head of the English Department at Harvey, his salary was not large.

On this first Saturday of September, Frazier Nunley lay on the narrow bed in his upstairs room trying to keep his mind occupied by solving chess problems from a book his father had brought home. He enjoyed the intellectual challenge of the problems, but he never played the actual game. That was because there was simply no one in Wolf River good enough to play him.

One quick glance at the board layout was all Frazier needed for the hypothetical problems. He usually worked on several in his mind at the same time. When they were difficult enough, Frazier found some satisfaction in solving them quickly and systematically. Today, however, the mental exercise gave him no pleasure.

Through the window of his bedroom, even though it was tightly closed against drafts, he could hear the kids down on Main Street calling to each other, driving back and forth or strolling along the sidewalks. It was that way every Saturday of the school year, but especially the first. Frazier could lie here and listen to them talking and laughing and having a simpleminded good time.

Sure it was simpleminded, and pointless, but they were having fun. In the life of Frazier Nunley, straight-A student, chess master, acknowledged class genius, there was precious little fun. He would have given a lot to be a part of the foolish revelry on Main Street today.

At fourteen, Frazier was much younger than his senior classmates, to say nothing of being smarter. He had skipped three grades in elementary school but was still far ahead of the class in brain power. He could easily have passed the exams right now to get into Harvey. His father, in fact, was in favor of such a move. Frazier's mother, however, thought her son should not be too far removed from the ordinary experiences of the young, and wanted him to have a reasonably normal senior year in high school.

Normal my ass, thought Frazier. There was no way he would ever fit in. The other kids treated him with a certain respect for his mind, but he knew full well that privately they thought of him as the school nerd. Some, he knew, even thought he was queer, but in that they were dead wrong. Frazier Nunley's loins surged with as many heterosexual yearnings as any of his classmates. He daily lamented his lack of a chance to prove it.

Part of the problem was the way he looked. Forced to wear glasses since the first grade, his eyes were big and froggy behind the thick lenses. His body was lumpy and soft, bulging out like a girl at the hips. With his coarse, mud-colored hair and his pimply complexion, it was small wonder he had never had a real date.

Then there were his allergies. Hardly a pollen or an animal existed that did not set Frazier to sniffling and sneezing. The windows in his house had to be kept tightly closed. He took pills to alleviate the reaction when he did go out, but he still went through a big box of Kleenex in the course of a school day.

Frazier hated his body. He hated the way it looked, and he hated the way it was allergic to damn near everything. He could not blame heredity. His father was lean and wiry, a fraction under average height, but well proportioned and fiercely healthy. His mother was a tall, beautiful woman with the classic features of a Greek statue. No, for his physical flaws at least, Frazier had nobody to blame but himself - his fondness for candy bars and sweet soda, and his abhorrence of exercise. He was solely responsible for the way his body looked, but that didn't make it any easier to carry around.

Sometimes Frazier hated his mind, too. He would have liked to struggle along with the other kids over the problems that he sailed through using a fraction of his brain. At least in that he could be one of them. Sure, being a genius made school easier, but it also made him different. To be different in adolescence was to be shunned.

But much as Frazier enjoyed an occasional wallow in self-pity, he recognized it for what it was and snapped himself out of it when he figured he'd had enough. Now, with the laughter of his classmates still ringing outside, he wiped the chess problems out of his mind and filled it with a happier image, one he often summoned when he was depressed: Lindy Grant.

Lovely, laughing, popular, unattainable Lindy Grant. Last spring she had replaced Natalie Wood in Frazier's sex fantasies. Seeing Lindy in his mind was not quite as satisfying as covertly watching the real article in class, but it was better than nothing.

During the long summer, while Lindy was out of town, Frazier had filled the tedious hours with vivid, sensual mental pictures of her. Lindy, he had decided, was absolutely the most beautiful, most desirable creature he had ever seen. The first glimpse of her last week after the summer's drought had hit him like a punch to the stomach. She was in two of his classes. Unfortunately, her desk was located some distance from his in both classes, but at least she was in a position where he could get a good look at her.

Frazier lay on the bed and let the vision of Lindy Grant fill his mind. He slid a hand down inside his jockey shorts and felt his erection grow. He began a slow, purposeful stroking.

"Frazier, what are you doing?"

His mother was a loving, well-meaning woman, but she seemed to have some sixth sense that enabled her to intrude on Frazier's most private moments. He snatched his hand away as though she could see through the wooden door.

"Nothing," he said.

"I have a new record of the Bach-Busoni Chaconne. It's by Alicia de Larrocha. Would you like to listen with me?"

Orva Nunley was an accomplished musician herself, who once seriously considered a concert career. Wolf River, however, offered little opportunity for serious music. She loved her husband dearly, but Ellis was strictly a literary man with a tin ear. So she relied on her gifted son as someone to share her music with.

Frazier loved and understood his mother's music, and usually enjoyed their sessions together. But right at this minute, he would rather be left alone.

"I'll be down in a little while," he said.

"All right, dear," his mother said.

She never pressured him, never urged him to undertake anything he did not want to. Nor did his father. They were both a little in awe of the genius child they had produced.

Frazier lay back on the bed and drew in a series of deep breaths. He closed his eyes and imagined a blue dot directly in front of his forehead. The dot expanded into a window that irised open like a camera shutter. As he relaxed, the aperture grew larger. On the other side lay a soft blue sky with cottony clumps of white clouds. Frazier could hear tender, seductive sounds - the sighing of a gentle breeze, a girl's laughter. He focused his concentration on the spectral window, shutting out all external stimuli. Then, slowly, gently, he floated up and through the opening into the outside world.

This was Frazier Nunley's secret. No one - not his talented and loving mother, not his fond but preoccupied father, certainly not his classmates, knew what he could do. And Frazier was not about to tell anyone. They had reasons enough to laugh behind his back without thinking he was a certified wacko.

The marvelous power had come about almost by accident, and Frazier himself was much surprised at the discovery.

It had happened the first time three years ago, when Frazier was eleven. He was in bed, sick with the flu. Frazier always caught whatever form of flu was "going around." He lay on his back dreamily watching a spider spin a web at the junction of two walls and his bedroom ceiling. Such a beautiful construction for the single deadly purpose of entrapping an unwary fly. In Frazier's feverish mind the spider took on a mystical significance. The great Builder and Destroyer.

He followed its labors intently as each delicate strand of the web was spun out and attached at precisely the right spot to another strand. A work of art with a lethal intent. The construction was a miraculous and wonderful thing to watch, all the more so because Frazier knew it would not last out the day. No fly, even had one found its way into the Nunley house, would be ensnared there. His mother, for all her appreciation of the arts, would see the spiderweb only as something unclean, to be swept away. It would not long escape her eye, and that would be the end of both the web and its creator.

In his half-dozing, dreamlike state, Frazier urged the spider on. It became crucial that he see the web to its completion before the cataclysmic broom swept it away.

With every fiber of his concentration zeroed in on the tiny insect, Frazier became gradually aware of a change in his perspective, along with a pleasant floating sensation. The pain and fever of his illness drained away. Up and up he rose, silently, gently, like a helium-filled balloon, until he was right there with the industrious spider. He found he could examine at microscopic range the dainty filaments of the web, glistening with the sticky secretion that would ensnare the unwary fly.

His hearing, too, was unnaturally acute. As the spider moved delicately along the strands of the web, apparently unaware of his presence, it made soft, harplike twanging sounds. The sensation was exhilarating beyond anything in his limited experience.

The real shock came when his vision swiveled to survey the rest of the room from his new vantage point. There below on the bed lay Frazier Nunley. The detested pudgy body was awake, but unseeing and unfeeling. The pimply face was flushed and shining with perspiration. The eyes were closed. A beatific smile lay on the lips.

Frazier lost control then and felt his mind, his essence, whatever it was that floated free, sucked down from the ceiling and back into the body. The brief flight had exhausted him, and he slept the clock around.

When he awoke, the fever had broken, and his sharp young mind was completely lucid. He examined his adventure coolly and rationally to determine whether it had actually happened or, what seemed more likely, it had been a product of delirium.

In his parents' library he sought out articles concerned with astral projection - the so-called out-of-body experiences. A child of logic, Frazier had always considered the reported experiences to be self-hypnosis, if not out-and-out fraud - material for the sensational tabloids, along with reports of hitchhiking on flying saucers.

Now he read everything he could find on the subject, looking at it with new eyes since his own experience. When he had exhausted the materials covering the subject in their home, he persuaded his father to take him to the college library. There he pored over the works of philosophers, psychologists, scientists, and mystics. The opinions were many and varied on what made up the essence of a human being, or mind, or soul, and how it was linked to the corporal reality of the body. He studied them all, weighing their merits and mistakes relative to what had happened to him.

Frazier distilled the knowledge gained from the disparate sources and began to practice as he might at some new physical task. At first his efforts met with failure, but he persisted. Then, gradually, he began to achieve partial success in setting free his spirit. At last his efforts were rewarded as he recaptured the precise state of mind that had allowed him to float free of his body and join the spider on the ceiling.

Methodically at first, then more quickly, he learned the techniques of breaking away from the bonds of his flesh. He noted the similarities and the contradictions between his new reality and the reported experiences of others.

As was frequently described in first-person accounts, he found he could look back and see his body exactly where he had left it. He could move through space, including solid barriers, without hindrance. Time had no meaning in his astral state.

In the floating condition, he could see and hear with outstanding clarity, but his other senses were left behind with the body. No taste, no touch, no smell. But that also meant no pain.

The major difference he found between his own experience and many of the reports was that there was no "silver cord" connecting his astral being to the flesh-and-blood self left behind. That, he assumed, was an invention of some imaginative writer with an Oedipal hangup, and had been picked up by suggestible "experts" who followed.

As he became more adept at disembodied journeying, Frazier ventured outside his house and along the block of Elm Street on which he lived. Theoretically, there was no limit to the distance he could travel, but in the early days of his experimenting Frazier never went out of sight of his house. He had a vague but powerful notion that he must not venture too far from his body. Although astral travel brought an overwhelming sense of freedom, there was always the underlying anxiety about the body left behind. A poor, shapeless, unlovely thing it might be, but it was home.

Now, on this Indian summer Saturday, the mind of Frazier Nunley floated up and away from the body on his bed, through the ceiling of his bedroom, up through the rock wool insulation and the attic filled with dusty memorabilia, through the shingled roof, and free into the September sky.

Down Elm Street he sailed to the intersection of Main, where, unseen and godlike, he could watch the revelry of his classmates. He settled down, down toward the slow-moving candy-apple Chevy owned by Roman Dixon. Roman, handsome, athletic, popular - all the things Frazier was not. More than once Frazier had thought how willingly he would give up his straight A's, his certain acceptance at any college of his choice, his string of academic awards, just to change places with Roman Dixon.

Roman drove with one tanned forearm resting carelessly on the windowsill. Beside Roman, his acolyte, Alec McDowell, talked with exaggerated liveliness, making sure he was part of the action. In his loneliness, Frazier would even have traded places with McDowell.

He moved in closer to listen.

"What time did you tell Lindy we'd be there?" Alec was saying.

"I told her to expect me when she sees me," Roman said.

"You tell her I was coming?"

"She won't care. We're not doing anything special."

As casually as that these two were preparing to enter the temple of the goddess. They would simply drive up to Lindy Grant's house, probably honk the horn, and she would come out and get in the car. Maybe she would sit between them. Her silky thighs would brush against theirs.

The picture was too painful for Frazier. With a groan no one could hear, he willed his mind up and away from the happy cruisers, over the sturdy elms, back up the street to his own house. In through the glass pane of his window he flew, and back into the doughy body that lay on the bed in its underwear.

There, alone, Frazier Nunley the young genius cried silently into his pillow.