Hellucination (Wrath Limited Edition)

by Stephen Biro

  “Let’s finish this,” he said.

  The whiteness of the room lurched backwards. It swished and flowed as reality began to shape itself into what it needed to be. Then…

  I suddenly find myself as a Zulu tribesman. I’m amidst a thousand other warriors listening to the chief of the tribe, and we scream the answers to his calls. I’m just part of the masses and enjoying the life I am leading with the friends and family that surround me.

  I step back and find myself in my village. It’s the village of my birth. People greet me, knowing me from childhood, and they respect me.

  A wave of time exerts itself, and I find myself on the plains of Africa. I have a spear in my hand and I am chasing an injured gazelle. I run as fast as I can until I trip over a vine. My prey continues to run away as I pull myself up, brushing off the dirt. I look around.

  (Here I was again, in another body, and it felt very natural. I stopped and looked at my hands and was just amazed. I couldn’t believe I was African. I couldn’t believe I was black! What the hell is going on?)

  I hear a rustling in the grass, to my left, and I crouch down quickly. My hand reaches for my dropped spear. Then the tall grass to my right begins rustling, and the crunching of the dry grass on my left gets closer. A lion’s tail sways in the air about ten feet away from me.

  I’m faced with three female lionesses moving in for the kill.

  “Big kitties,” I foolishly say aloud.

  (This was me saying it, not the body I inhabited, but little ol’ me. I could suddenly picture several of my pet cats getting ready to play with me, except I was 600 pounds smaller than the cats. It dawned on me to run!)

  I run so quickly I astonish myself. (And before you say it, it’s not because I was black, it was because I have never had three female lions want to eat me before!)

  So I run and I run and I run some more. I’ve only run about 50 meters when the first female lion tackles me. I can feel the claws dig into me at multiple angles. They either go deep or begin to shred. The smell of the cat is musky, too musky, as I grab a lungful of air. My lungs are expanding while spasms shake my body. Her teeth bite into the lower end of my spine but it doesn’t paralyze me. She must have been younger than most to not be giving me the deathblow.

  Another female lion bites into my leg, her jaws clamping down while slowly snapping upwards. Gnawing. Her teeth scrape my thighbone, and I finally have enough time to scream. The pain washes through me, and I feel numb. Pain and numbness are almost impossible to describe when they happen at the same time.

  A third lion approaches my face. It stops with paws on either side of my head. I can only see its broad, matted neck when she looks down, while opening her mouth. Her jaws wrap around my skull, and she bites down hard. The pressure begins to build when her fangs pierce the bone and drive home.

  Then…

  I abruptly found myself on my couch again.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked.

  My body was on edge, but I was emotionally calm. My physical self had reacted from dying twice in a row, but my mind had already come to grips with it. It’s hard to explain. I was elated while freaked out.

  I looked for Morpheus, but the bastard wasn’t there.

  I grabbed my cigarettes and decided to take a walk around the apartment building. I wanted to figure out what had just happened. I began to theorize to myself:

  “Okay, we have the same entity I met before. This time it was in the shape of Morpheus from The Matrix or perhaps just Laurence Fishburne, who played Morpheus in The Matrix.”

  Somehow the movie I was watching became real, or more likely, the character I was watching was hijacked by something else, using that form because of its familiarity to me, or because it was currently in my experience, and it needed an empty host to fill in order to show me things.

  I experienced a part of the movie, but it was different. Last time, it was in the form of Rob Zombie, because I was watching one of his music videos. It used the forms of what I was watching on the TV, so maybe it needs that—images I already have in my head—to make contact.

  I continued my cigarette while walking in circles in the apartment complex.

  “What was it that I just experienced?” I asked myself. “Was it reincarnation? That must have been reincarnation. But why would I experience that? Why did I just experience two different lives and then death so fast? I don’t believe in reincarnation. Never thought about it. Whenever someone brought it up, I couldn’t listen to them, I always thought it was pure silliness. But on the other hand, I just had a crash course in alternate lives.”

  “What the Hell was Morpheus doing talking to me about truth? When the Hell did a hallucination ever really interact with me to this extent?”

  I saw a nice big tree to the left. It was about 4 a.m., but nobody lived near this tree. I plunked my ass down against it, reached for another cigarette, and put my thoughts through a mental checklist.

  I knew, no matter how intense the experience, what I felt might not be the truth. But I knew something was there, talking to me. I found myself in either past lives or being reincarnated twice. It wasn’t really me, but I was somehow there experiencing it.

  Then again, maybe it was me. And was it God showing me this? Or was it something else? I tended to think though, that what I experienced was false. I mean a World War II fighter pilot and an African tribesman, both having thrilling adventures. How come I didn’t have boring moments in past lives? You never hear anyone say they know their past lives and they were boring.

  Was that the truth? We all reincarnate, and there is neither Heaven nor Hell? The Hindus believe a person can reincarnate up to seven times. They also believe in reincarnating as a bug.

  Seven is a holy number. I only experienced two, and this “Stephen Biro” life makes my third. What if I only have seven? Then I have four more to go, unless I was only shown two and not the rest. What happens when you get to seven? Is that when you go to Heaven or Hell? Did I already live seven lives and this is Hell? Was that God masquerading as Morpheus so my mind can wrap around it? Was he an angel? Shit, what if he was a demon? Couldn’t be a demon, because I was taught about reincarnation and other life lessons. What if it’s another marker or level meant to seem like an answer so searchers stop looking for God? It could be another personal truth that prevents me from persisting towards the ultimate truth.

  I’ve talked about the markers before, the ones that people reach and then either stop, turn around or keep going beyond. This wasn’t my marker. This wasn’t my reality. Maybe it is for Shirley MacLaine and the millions who believe in reincarnation, but it wasn’t mine. It would be too simple.

  Reincarnation has no bearing on my life. If it did happen before, if I did live those lives, well, cool. But that’s not what I was looking for. I know there is a Creator, and I want a true understanding. I refuse to be let off at a different stop when the train goes all the way to the end.

  I have endured mind fucks of physical destruction, but it wasn’t actually harming me physically.

  But then I quickly remembered getting killed by lions, crashing an airplane, being ripped apart by the Tree of Life and almost getting sucked into a black hole.

  Yes, I was still alive and unharmed but it’s just like every experience you have in your everyday life: You will always carry a memory of it, so these things may be damaging my psyche.

  But I didn’t care. I could live with it.

  At that time, it was plain to me: If you believe in God and trust Him, He would answer you. God answered many men and women before, and just because nobody claims meeting him recently doesn’t mean he won’t say, “Hello.”

  Every civilization has its beliefs and mystic encounters with their gods or God, angels or demons. Some societies used peyote or mushrooms, and I’m sure some of them had ergot poisoning as well.

  So I began to wonder: What if I killed myself doing what I was doing? Could I be sent to Hell, for dying while searching for God this way
?

  I decided no.

  I knew in my heart that if I put myself in spiritual or physical danger, God would step in. I’ve gone to different places with my mind because of drugs. But I didn’t create drugs or their interaction with my brain. God did.

  If God created drugs, mushrooms, cocoa leaf, poppy plants and marijuana, who am I to say this is not how He intended for us to contact Him? All I knew at the time was that LSD and mushrooms opened my mind to new thoughts. It is one of only two chemicals that produce the same results and that interact and fall into a specific spot in the serotonin receptors. It’s the two drugs that create an actual trip that doesn’t kill you.

  Nitrous intensifies the effects one thousand fold. Not everyone knows this, because it is a rare person who goes to the dentist for a tooth drilling while tripping on LSD or mushrooms!

  I began to take notes of what I was experiencing at this time. I knew what I was experiencing was not normal, so after each vision, I wrote on my computer exactly what I went through. I figured it would be helpful as the years progressed and the memories faded. I would have a diary of each hellish delight and every heavenly pursuit.

  Maybe someone would want to read it because they needed answers too? Maybe what I was trying to do was almost impossible to do in this day and age. Most people can’t take a year off from reality to find God and truths for themselves.

  So maybe, just maybe I was doing something important. Maybe my life would mean something after I was dead and buried. Maybe… (Okay, I’m saying “maybe” too often!)

  But hopefully, my time on this plane of existence will allow others to open the same door I passed through without having to do all the groundwork. They won’t have to build their own door because I left breadcrumbs to mine. They won’t have to find a key, because I made a copy. Writing out the experiences made my quest take on an even bigger purpose. I knew I would either find God or die trying.

  THE RESURRECTION CHAIR, SCHIZOPHRENIA AND THE FUTURE SELF

  The next weekend, I decided to do the same thing: Watch a couple of psychedelic videos and end with The Matrix.

  As the drugs took hold, the video cascaded all around my apartment. A flash enveloped me and then…

  I find myself in a chair in an immense futuristic auditorium. I am looking up at a huge concave screen in front of me. I notice my hands and legs are strapped to the chair. The straps aren’t too tight; they feel comfortable. I look around as far as my neck can stretch and see only darkness. But I hear shuffling noises behind me.

  Then the screen catches my eye with something shocking:

  There I am, on the enormous screen. I’m living my life normally, working out of the apartment, hanging with friends, having a good time.

  As I sit watching my life, I notice a metallic ring around my head that pulsates with a bluish hue. It’s almost like a halo, and it’s attached to the chair.

  I look back at the screen and watch myself sitting on the couch, taking acid and getting ready to do a couple of balloons of nitrous.

  “You have to find the answers,” I yell at the screen. “Don’t stop until you find the answers!”

  Behind me, I hear boos and catcalls. I crane my neck and can now see countless shapes, as if people are sitting in chairs behind me. I can hear soft murmurs of what they are saying:

  “He’s becoming self-aware.”

  “Why is he ruining his life for us?”

  “He better not screw this up. It was getting interesting.”

  “When is it my turn to sit in the resurrection chair?”

  “He’s not supposed to wake up while in the chair.”

  “No one ever has except for Him.”

  “No, there have been others.”

  A humming emanates from the chair. It becomes louder and louder as the seconds progress. I grit my teeth under a sudden intensity. Blackness envelopes me.

  Then…

  I found myself sitting on my couch in the living room again. I place my head in my hands and let out a huge sigh because I knew what I had to do.

  I started searching the messy apartment for the video cameras. I searched every corner, every cabinet. I got a screwdriver and pulled a chair over to the air conditioning vent. I undid the screws, popped the vent off and stuck my hand inside, almost certain I would pull out a camera.

  I pulled out a handful of dust bunnies instead. On my tiptoes, I peered inside the vent but saw no camera.

  I flopped down on the couch and thought. Where was I? Was that Heaven? Was God in the audience? It sounded as if people were watching my life for their own amusement. Was that chair a way for souls to relive life and give people entertainment at the same time? So if that was another reality, what did it mean?

  I continued looking around for cameras when I spied a fly in a corner of the ceiling. Then I thought: What if God used the eyes of everything as if they were cameras? Every insect, every animal and every human might be God’s eyes! If He did it this way, God could see everything everyone was doing by every perspective. Animals were everywhere, from the microscopic to the family dog. With that thought, I looked over to my dog, Mr. Biscuits.

  I rescued Mr. Biscuits from the humane shelter about a year ago. He was a mutt but the best mutt a man could have. I called him over because he was sitting in front of the TV. He jumped onto the couch, next to me. I reached over and took his snout, looking him in the eyes.

  “Testing… 1 2 3,” I said. I laughed, wondering if this is what schizophrenia was like. “Can you see me?”

  My dog pulled away and then gave me the biggest smile I have ever seen on an animal. His lips pulled back to resemble a giant, cheesy human grin.

  “Did you just smile at me?”

  Mr. Biscuits jumped off the couch and ran for his stick that was lying on the carpet. He picked it up with his teeth and pranced to the door. He turned around and looked right at me, still smiling.

  I guess God’s organic security camera wanted to play fetch. So we played fetch. In the darkness of night, I threw that stick until my dog was tired and thirsty. We had a great time together, but all the while, I wondered if I had lost my mind completely. Or was God actually using other’s eyes to see this world? And did God actually make my dog give that cheesy-ass smile as a cosmic goof because I discovered another universal secret? Or was I just slowly going insane?

  It was time for another round, time to open myself up to more possibilities. If I went nuts and lost my mind, so be it. I dropped more acid and got the balloons ready for another excursion into the netherworld.

  I popped in another videotape of more psychedelics and turned up the stereo. My dog rested beside me and went to sleep. I picked up one of the balloons and began pulling off the sweet nitrous oxide inside.

  Then….

  I find myself in a great hall. I’m much older, about 58. My hair is grey and thin. I wear the clothes of a priest. I hear thousands of people, waiting for me to take the stage.

  A very small dwarf walks up to me. He also wears the clothes of a priest.

  “Stephen, they’re ready,” he says.

  A sultry woman walks up to me. Her long hair is dark in the dim light. She wears long black boots and a black skirt. She also wears a black-and-white striped corset. Her arms wrap around me.

  “It’s time, lover.”

  She kisses me deep as another person walks up.

  “Stephen, we have all the gates closed, and security is on the watch for anything out of the ordinary. We don’t want a repeat of last time.”

  “Thanks, Jacob,” I say. “It means a lot to me.”

  Jacob turns and walks away. He wears a tactical military uniform but with bits of flair on it that makes me look at him questionably. I notice several patches for The Misfits and The Cramps on the back of his bulletproof jacket. I also see a tattoo that climbs up his neck like a jagged lightning bolt.

  (It was the same pseudo-out-of-body feeling I had with my past lives except this was in the future. I didn’t fight it; I just le
t the body do its work while I sat there, nestled in my brain and enjoying the ride.)

  Techno music plays as I stride onstage, in front of 20,000 people. The music goes up and down as if on a rollercoaster, and the crowd goes wild. There can be no way these people are all here for me, I think. I look into the crowd and notice a pattern: I could see the people are in revolt against what America had become (and what the world had too). As I scanned the faces, I see joy in their hearts but death in their souls. I see every single soul and what it wants to be, while seeing how torn and diseased it is from living on this planet. My mind begins to choke.

  I see several people hitting nitrous out of small-pressurized guns. I also see balloons in the distance, floating around. People hit off them too.

  “What the hell became of me?” is all I can think.

  I walk to the microphone stand and remove the mic. People suddenly stop moving. The techno music stops, and I notice a band behind me. They begin to play. It’s a heavy sound but not too overbearing. I lift the microphone to my lips and just hold it there. I see huge screens to my left and right, and I see monitors below me. They display scenes from other halls and other stadiums around the world.

  I’m nervous, but the onstage Stephen isn’t. He’s ready to spit fire and brimstone. The metal music goes to a steady, slow rhythm as the words flow from me.

  “Welcome my children. I welcome you with open arms and an open heart.”

  The crowd chants back, “And we welcome you!’

  “Today is the day! It’s July fourteenth, two thousand and twenty one! It’s Seven, fourteen, twenty-one. Seven plus fourteen equals twenty-one. Or how about twenty-one minus seven equals fourteen. Now, fourteen minus seven is seven. And take July, which is the seventh month, times it by the beginning number of the century and you get fourteen. Seven plus fourteen is twenty-one! Three sevens! You look at it: It’s divisible, it’s subtract-able, it’s added and it’s multiplied. Backwards or forwards, either way you look at it, seven is the holy number of the Lord, and three sevens is the ultimate number of God, while three sixes is the number of the beast.”