by Neovictorian
~
The pink and orange of the sunset make James’ face look like some painting I’ve seen, I wish I could remember where, but though I have a great memory for facts, figures, numbers, formulae, and every scene of the movies I watch I can’t remember where, and it’s about to bother me when James thrusts the bag at me. Jesus.
“Psilocybe cubensis. It’s right for this moment, Cal.” The bag has some grey-brown lumps in the bottom of it, I laugh, I read about this shit in an old Doc Smith sci-fi story about some Nazis. It sent the hero into an alternate universe, if I recall correctly. He had a real hard time getting back.
“You haven’t eaten since breakfast, right?” I nod. I don’t feel the need to say anything.
“Here’s how it goes, brother.” He’s talking a little slower and looking me right in the eyes, unlike almost anyone else. Most people most of the time are so uncomfortable looking in someone’s eyes, hell they’re scared of it, not for what they might see but for what might be seen. I feel myself grey out a little, I can’t understand what he’s saying and with an effort I snap back to present time. “Sorry, what?”
“It’s okay,” he says. “You’re relaxed, you’re cool, so relaxed, everything is cool now, it’s the cool of the evening, we’re just going to go into light trance for a little while, together, you and me brother, for a minute, and then you’re going to be so relaxed, relaxed, and you’re going to eat this, drink some water, and I’ll be with you, I’ll guide, I’m not taking any, this time.”
“All right.”
“Some beautiful things may happen, some fun things, some strange things, but I’ll be here, you’re here, NOW.” I look around, I seem to have forgotten we’re out in the desert, it’s all sage and scrub and dirt, the blanket we’re sitting on is white with some kind of pattern of blue lines, a rectangle except most of the lines are broken, I wonder why James brought a white blanket to put on the desert dirt.
“It works best on an empty stomach, and in the dark, it’s going to be dark soon, but out here we’ll see the stars, all of them, all the stars there are to see. We have plenty of water, you’re not going to want any food, by dawn we’ll be up and out of here. You’re ready. Best just put it all in your mouth, chew it good and wash it down with the water.”
I pour them all in my hand, a pile of buttons and stems and dust. They’re completely dried. Desert dried. I stuff them in my mouth and start chewing.
17. 12 years ago, Black Rock Desert, Washoe County, Nevada May 30, 9:50 pm
I’m lying on my back in the dirt, looking up at the black night sky, so black yet around every star is a nest, a structure like dandelion seed about to blow away and the stars and sky are flat, two-dimensional they all seem the same distance away and I laugh because I know somewhere somehow that some are billions trillions of miles away nuts I can see that’s not true, they’re all right in front of me.
I could lift my hand and touch them, but I know I don’t need to, it occurs to me that I and me and Jesus, everyone all the time always feels driven, compelled, to do something and now I don’t have to do anything, don’t want to need to everything is enough and I realize that I’ve felt this before, a few seconds right after I’ve come inside a woman, Anna was the first time and in an instant a feeling flows from my toes and bursts out of the top of my head, raw energy as real and pure as diamond that I knew for the first time that day, and then I feel it flowing up, from the earth into my back in the dirt like tentacles from a vine, I close my eyes and let it flow, my body is liquid dust joining the earth and there’s no body anymore but I’m happy because I’m still here somewhere and there’s still a sound, the sss-sss-sss of a thousand thousand beetles’ legs rubbing as they search the land for the Thing they’re looking for. After a while I’m curious if there will be anything there if I open my eyes try to remember how but without effort they open and the sky is three dimensional again, or four because I find the brightest star and move it with my will, it gets bigger and smaller and turns in circles, whatever I want to make it do, and I laugh because it’s so easy, all those people forever trying to learn to affect things and all the sitting and thinking and meditating, it’s that easy I can move the stars with my mind, and once the laughter starts it goes harder, all those poor stupid insects trying to change the world and fighting over their puny religions, guns and bombs and people torn to pieces to prove that they have the power to do what I’ve just done with nothing, no try no hard. I’m laughing so fully that my core is just one hard spasm and my stomach muscles are armor, I can’t see anything through the tears except pieces of crystal-broken white starlight, Christchristchrist those people killing each other over nothing is the funniest thing that’s ever been or ever will be.
I’m discrete again separate another atom with a lot of space around it again I remember or imagine that if I was a hydrogen nucleus my electron would be Jupiter or something…and James says, “Cal, Cal” and I feel his hand on my forehead holding it steady, I can’t see him because of the laughing tears but I can feel him looking at my face and he says:
“I see you get the point.”
18. 12 years ago, Reno, Nevada May 31, 6:37 am
It’s a 90-minute drive back from the desert, and we hardly say a word. I don’t think I’m tired, not yet, but we get in the car and James says, “My experience, Cal, is that you should just rest for a while, kick the seat back, close your eyes. You may be able to sleep a little by now, but if not, no problem. Don’t try to think of anything special, don’t analyze. You’ll probably be hungry by the time we get back to town.”
It’s only half-dawn as we get in the old Mustang he showed up in a couple of days ago, and neither of us says a thing and I close my eyes and the next thing I know I’m hearing the noises of the city, there’s a deep, thumping vibration over all and I open my eyes and I can tell by the outline of the hills ahead that we’re somewhere on the east side of Reno, stopped at a red light and out the window to my right there’s a lowrider El Camino blasting hard rap. The words aren’t clear but the bass visibly vibrates the driver’s window. I look over at James.
“Welcome back to civilization,” he says, loudly enough be heard over the crap.
The light changes and the El Cam peels out with a puff of tire smoke. James turns left and in a couple of blocks we pull in to the parking lot of a classic Nevada ham and eggs joint. He kills the engine and we sit for a minute, I’m looking around and everything is terribly bright, the sun is up over the mountains and I can see the dust on everything, the window the asphalt the building the air itself, the dust motes are brighter than I’ve noticed before, I remember reading that some of them are stardust, pieces left over from the very formation of the earth…and my lids are drooping and I jerk back awake.
James gives me that reassuring, infuriating, shit-eating grin of his.
“You’re either hungry Cal, or you’re going to be once you smell that diner. Before we go in, let’s talk for just a minute.”
“All right,” I sigh. My breath has a strange quality going out, hot peppery. “Look, you know I want to talk about what I saw last night, what I felt. You’d done it before. I want to compare, I guess. But first, I want to know, man, where have you been for the last year?”
He looks thoughtful. “Of course I knew you’d ask that question. And I’m going to tell you everything I haven’t promised to keep secret.”
His face is really tanned, darker than I’ve ever seen it before, and in the glare of the desert sun reflecting off the building I notice for the first time a two-inch scar just above his left eyebrow, a little ridge one tint lighter.
“I went to a place to study what some people might call a martial art, Cal, full time, 24/7. It’s not open to the public, and well, I don’t suppose it follows every single law about licensing, registration, paying taxes and fees and inspections, wage and hour, OSHA safety rules, all that horseshit.”
He grins, happily, relaxing a little it seems, now that he’s told me this much.
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“So we don’t talk about where it is, exactly. It was by invitation, someone recommended me, and they sent someone to ask me if I was interested.”
And I think: Oh shit, this sounds like, it cannot be, what are the odds, is he going to ask me…all that in a split second, but he goes on:
“I thought of you while I was there Cal, thought you would have enjoyed some of it, but it’s probably not exactly your kind of thing. We’re closer to each other than either of us is to anyone else, maybe even our parents. For sure in my case.”
He scans the parking lot, squinting at the glare from the hood, turns way around to try and check the blind spot near the driver’s side rear wheels. He scans the three mirrors.
“I know we’ve both heard the saying about sheep, wolves and sheep dogs. You’re a sheep dog, Cal. I understand now, that I’m a wolf. But I don’t eat babies, or the three little pigs.” He grins. “Except when we go have breakfast in a minute.”
I sense something big behind this, a whole dark world, an underground vault full of terrible, wonderful inventions and devices and techniques, but the aftereffects of the psilocybin have me a little fuzzy and I don’t pursue it like I want to, like I should.
“Yeah, James, let’s go have breakfast. I need some coffee and a big stack of pancakes.”
He opens the driver’s door. I don’t get any more real details on “what some people might call a martial art.”
19. 8 years ago, San Jose, California April 19, 6:52 pm
“Let’s think about getting some dinner,” James says. He’s been driving since about four o’clock, down from Mendocino to pick me up at NASA Ames, and we’re on our way to Big Sur for a couple of days camping. I’ve been working ten and twelve hour days and I need some time outside.
“Okay, but first you have to tell me what you came to tell me.”
I’ve only seen James a few times in the last four years, and yet as soon as I get in the car and look at him, the connection is there again, we’re bound together across space-time, always will be. I remember what Mr. White said to me, about how future actions influence what happens today, about physics working both directions in time. I followed up on that, found out that there’s quite a difference of opinion among some of the smartest people in the world; the space-time diagrams a lot of physics students study make it look like it’s true—but we don’t live in the diagrams. Others think that time is so intimately tied to space they unfold together and that now, this instant, is just the evolving, expanding edge of the space-time universe. In which case, we do have free will, the future doesn’t exist yet, can’t influence the present.
I’m agnostic, as of now.
James is checking the traffic around us and doesn’t say anything in reply right away.
“James.”
He looks over, a little grin turning up the corners of his mouth. “I heard you, Cal. I’m thinking of the right words.”
“Ha. It would be the first time you ever had to think that long to find the right words.
“Listen, I just want to ask you something, right now. I haven’t seen you for eight months, but when I got in the car I felt like we’re still just as connected, really connected, like we’re always in touch and it never goes away or gets weaker. It’s like there’s a physical cord running between us, a silver cable that doesn’t get thinner with distance. Do you feel that too?”
He looks over and gives me a little raised eyebrows look. “Of course, Cal. The experiences we’ve had together, the words we’ve spoken together, they’ve synced certain patterns, physically in our brains. You give me certain look and it triggers a whole three-dimensional response, hundreds of thousands, millions of neurons, hell I don’t know how many, firing in a certain pattern, timing.”
He checks his mirrors, looks over at me and smiles.
“Every time, though, it’s slightly different. A few neurons not firing here, a few new ones firing there. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty expressed at macro level.”
He’s nodding his head. “In fact Cal, it ties in with what I wanted to tell you, what I know you knew was coming. It’s time to brief you in on what I’ve been doing for the last four years.”
I look at him, waiting. It’s a decisive moment. I’ll not ask any questions, let him say it his way, in his time.
“You know I went to school, a kind of school, during my ‘gap year.’ Those words crack me up, because it wasn’t any kind of gap. Only a Brit would think up something like that. I was at school to be a soldier, or really, an officer. So it is a martial art, in the true meaning. I did learn how to fight, Cal, with weapons, without weapons, with one hand tied behind my back, or actually to my belt.”
He chuckles, remembering. “That wasn’t the main part of the training, though. That was mental. Thinking clearly. Remembering. Noticing.”
He turns his head an inch in my direction, catches my eye out of the corner of his.
“Noticing, Cal. You and I noticed more than almost anyone, from the day we met, the first day of kindergarten. We knew, I know we both knew, five seconds after we said our names to each other that there was something different going on.”
I just nod, for him to keep going.
“Noticing has a bit of a different meaning for me now Cal. Yeah, we noticed a lot more than most, but there are other aspects of the world that we didn’t know about, that we can put under the label. Noticing. So I’ll tell you more. You’ve heard of ReHumanism?”
“Sure, I’ve heard a little bit. Seems to be bigger around here, in the Bay Area, than anywhere, probably because it was started here by that science fiction writer Phil Duke. Around ’75, right? I read a couple of his earlier books, from the 50s. Pretty good scifi, but not as good as Heinlein.”
James laughs. “I can’t say I disagree. But you never read Heights, his last novel?”
“No.”
“It was the origin of ReHumanism, Cal. The base. After that he wrote quite a bit more, but only a small portion was published outside.”
“Outside?”
“Outside of ReHumanism. Or just ‘ReHume’. It’s what we call it inside. I’m an officer, Cal.”
“Okay. Why?”
“I’ll tell you, Cal. It’s why I came down, it’s why we’re going to spend a couple of days camping out down at Sur. I’ve been waiting to tell you for four years.”
He drives and talks for the next 20 minutes, straight through, with me asking a question here and there. He speaks in paragraphs, it comes out like he’s been waiting for someone to really talk to, someone who can understand deeper. It’s clear, it’s organized, it’s almost scary how clear and organized, but then it’s James.
He ends a paragraph, looks over. “What do think, so far?”
“I think it’s fascinating, James. It could be huge. And I have a lot more questions. But you said let’s get some dinner when I got in the car, and that was half an hour ago. All this talking has just made me hungrier. And thinking. It burns a hell of a lot of energy.
“That mall at the next exit has one of those Outside-in steakhouses. I don’t know what you think of the chain, but there’s usually no waiting and they have a real bar. So what do you say to a couple real good Scotches and a couple of decent steaks? I’ll buy.”
“Hell, yes!” He laughs and starts working his way over to the right lanes.
“You’d better hurry or you’ll miss the exit and we’ll have to have pizza,” I crack, looking at his profile. The pinkorange glow of sunset is on everything, and as he turns to me, chuckling, the last shaft of direct sun disappears from his face, and he turns back to look at the road.
There’s a lot of traffic but he drives like a Californian, cuts off a hard-charging BMW and manages to make the mall exit at the last possible second.
20. 8 years ago, Cima Dome, Mojave Desert, California May 1, 4:52 am
I’ve been awake for half an hour, a kind of awake, twilight sleep that fades almost to black, then a sound. the faintest sound, a sound from inside o
f me, pulls me back again to some dim knowledge of here, then back again to dreams that start in the middle, just scenes and people, voices, James says something funny and I can’t make out the exact words, but it’s funny and I laugh, mouth open. James hasn’t really left since he talked to me after he was killed; he doesn’t say much, he doesn’t need to, but once a day or so, when it’s really silent, I hear him, faint and indistinct, but it’s the tone, like c’mon Cal, what the hell? And the grin is in the tone, oh yes, James is very amused at what happened after.
~
It turns out the mall is right on the San Jose city line but still inside, and the city cops take me to the mall offices at first for questioning, then after about 10 minutes a couple of blue FBI windbreakers show up and take over, somebody gets some ice for my hand, it’s not actually broken but it’s swelling nicely, then a Homeland Security team wants me and they argue briefly with the FBI about who has priority, then they decide it would best to get me somewhere more secure, the Federal building where their offices all are, so they lead me out the back door of a discount shoe shop, five guys and a woman surrounding me so that hopefully no one will see. They tell me there are media all over, and sure enough, when our two-vehicle black SUV caravan comes around the side of the building I can see a line of vans and trucks on the other side of the street, floodlights and cables and dishes pointing skyward.
We stop at a police barricade for a minute, and by the time we start through the mall exit there’s a pack of hyena-journalists sprinting toward the car, their shooters following as fast as they can but slowed down by the big video cams mounted to their shoulders.
One blond CNN infobabe is out ahead of the pack, mic in hand; their truck happens to be the closest to the entrance. I don’t think she knows who’s inside the SUVs but she starts screaming something about can you tell us anything further when she’s still 20 yards away. I recognize her from her “live” reports at the Oakland riots, but she’s fatter, and not nearly as pretty, as she looks on television.