Mushroom.Man

  I put my head back and stared at the ceiling. The fire was casting extraordinary patterns of lights that moved and melded, changed colour and intensity, exploded and imploded. I listened to the music for a while, enjoying the way the notes altered the pattern of the firelight on the ceiling. I remember that rather casually I wondered where the music might be coming from, but it didn’t seem important. I felt no sense of surprise when I saw someone sit down in the armchair alongside the fire. I think that I simply accepted that it must be the mushroom.man and went back to staring at the ceiling. I remember a slight feeling of surprise that I’d never noticed before how music can change patterns of light and shade.

  After a while I focused on the armchair. It took a while before the image in front of me resolved into anything coherent. A man with black hair, dressed completely in black, sat there. His face was startlingly clear against the dim background. His eyes seemed enormous; as I stared into them they became like whirlpools of darkness, sucking me into their vortex. I felt a little uncomfortable in his gaze and I tried to go back to watching the ceiling.

  ‘Look at me,’ he said.

  His voice had an odd timbre. It was brown and gravelly, but deeply sonorous. Only three words, but I sensed a comforting presence from them. When I looked back he was standing, staring down at me. A yellow glow extended all around him for about five inches. While I watched, the glow began to oscillate and move. Slowly the outline changed from that of a man to that of an egg. I could no longer see his legs and the effect was to make him appear to float. I felt the beginnings of a wave of panic. Suddenly I realized that the mushrooms were taking effect, that these strange twistings of reality were beyond my control. I looked around me; wherever I cast my eye it was as though a crystal skin, thin and fragile, covered everything. I felt myself being pulled to my feet.

  I heard a voice say ‘Come with me’. I made no resistance and followed. Outside the moon was just visible behind a thin layer of cloud, casting enough light to make out the shape of trees and fields. I could see the shape of a man beside me.

  ‘Are you the mushroom.man?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you real?’

  ‘The question is, are you?’

  There are moments when even the most banal of questions shakes you to the core. I felt my consciousness teetering on the brink of some impossibly deep and dark abyss. I could find no trace of certainty in any thought, no sense of purpose, no centre to my being. It was as if I had suddenly been placed in an infinite void, a place where I had never been, but which somehow was not unexpected. I could feel myself shaking as I tried to find a part of my consciousness that I could get a grip on. Until I could, the question couldn’t be answered. Adam’s voice was in my ear.

  ‘This is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. In the cosmos of quanta there exist all possible universes. Each and every one is as possible and as probable as any other. Every time you use your consciousness to make a reality of one of them, by definition you exclude the others. It’s the choice that’s scaring you.’

  ‘You seem real enough.’

  ‘Only because you’re hearing my voice.’

  He started to sing a strange, sinuous melody. The notes hung in the air between us, as real and as palpable as anything else. They began to form a mosaic, or rather a tapestry. Slowly, as he continued to sing, I began to make out the shape of a mushroom. I reached out to touch it, but my moving hand deformed the image, making it look like a billowing flag. When I took my hand back, the image settled down again. I tried again to touch the mushroom, fascinated by the effect my hand had on the tapestry. It was like shaking a silk screen upon which an image was projected. The song stopped, and at once the mushroom disappeared.

  I saw Adam about two hundred yards away, ahead of me on the path. I tried to catch up, but the going was hard in the dark, the path uneven and stony. On either side of it tall spruce and fir were discernible against the sky. Orion’s belt was directly above me. I stopped and listened. The trees creaked and groaned in the light breeze. It was a sound that I was not conscious of having heard before. It was the sound of complaint; as though the wind was disturbing their rest. I tried to ascertain how I felt – neither cold nor warm. I rubbed my hands together and was startled by the red glow that the friction caused. My mouth felt dry. I called loudly for Adam and a rush of movement in the trees startled me. A deer jumped onto the path, and in the starlight I could see it clearly, watching me. It was a stag with a massive set of antlers, big, strong, and with a thick russet ruff of winter coat around its shoulders. As I stared at it I began to see that, like Adam, it had an aura-like glow around it. We were both motionless, frozen still in time. I began to experience a strong sense of stag; and how different it felt from my own sense of being. I counted its points – twelve. For a moment it occurred to me that if it charged, those points could do a lot of damage, yet I remained calm. I felt almost god-like in my serenity. I could smell its musk, a strong smell of sex. I remembered that this was the time of the rut. A sudden hand-clap made the stag start and run. Adam came up to me.

  ‘That’s the bastard who’s destroying my vegetable patch. I’ll get him before the season ends. Come on, we’ve a way to walk yet.’

  I found it hard to engage. I had been completely immersed in my communion with the stag. There was a hard-edged cruelty in Adam’s tone that disturbed me. I wanted to savour all these experiences without anger, pain or distress. It began to occur to me that although the mushroom experience was different from anything I had ever experienced it was not what I had expected. I was seeing no great display of visual pyrotechnics or trans-sensual stimuli, but finding it to be a more cerebral experience than I was prepared for. I wanted to talk about it.

  ‘Adam, I feel that my mind is in complete control of my body, I mean that everything I feel or want to communicate is under the total control of my mind. Does that make sense?’

  Right now you’re in a world of your own creation. Of course you’re in control of it, you made it. I can make some sense of what you’re saying, but it’s probably not what you mean.’ He stopped and turned to me. ‘There’s no way that I can enter your world. The best I can hope for is the assumption that it can’t be very different from mine. If it is very different, then there’s not much future for communication.’

  ‘I feel really good. I feel like this is the way that I should feel all the time. I like this total awareness of the body. I’m sure that I can see the effects of a force-field all around me. I feel completely in touch with my body.’

  ‘It makes for great sex.’

  ‘I sort of had the impression that sex wasn’t a big issue for you.’

  ‘Never believe everything you read.’ He burst out into a loud, incongruous guffaw which convulsed his whole body. I could feel the waves of the laugh like a buffeting wind. I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I should never have said what I thought of his sexuality. As I thought upon that, the waves of laughter began to seem hurtful, as though he was laughing at me, not at what I’d said. The waves of laughter kept coming, pushing harder and harder into my belly. I felt I might collapse, like a pricked balloon.

  ‘Adam, stop. It hurts.’

  ‘Keep yourself together. Stop falling apart. It’s nothing but self-indulgence. You’re a fool if you think you can find truth in the written word.’ He gripped my arm. ‘Come on, we’re not there yet.’

  Then I remembered. I had something to tell Adam. Searching the net I had come across a list of poisonous fungi and some case-histories of victims. The name Greg Holder was among them.

  ‘Adam?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know how Greg died.’

  ‘What?’ He stopped and turned.

  ‘He ate six amanita phalloides; death-caps. His autopsy showed catastrophic liver damage from phalloidin poisoning.’

  It was hard to concentrate. My mind kept wandering, but I knew that this was information I had to impart.

  ‘There’s something else
I found out.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Your friend Hartfield Stanley used to run a big software company. He sold out some years ago. Greg used to work for him.’

  Adam stared at me. I felt uncomfortable and I had to look away.

  ‘Are you sure of this?’

  ‘I’m not sure of anything right now, but I felt that I should tell you. I found out about it on the net.’

  Adam was standing directly in front of me. I looked at his face, lit by the ethereal light of the moon. I became entranced as varying emotions came and went across his face, like a slide show. Once again my mind wandered. Suddenly he spoke.

  ‘So maybe it wasn’t suicide.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe he wanted the mushrooms to take him beyond this life. Into another. I mean, is it suicide if you believe you’re just moving from one state to another? Is it?’

  He looked at me as though expecting an answer, but there was nothing that I could say. After what seemed an eternity he moved off. We walked through the night, Adam saying little, as though he was saving himself for some special place or appointment that he had prepared for me. Even though the path was uneven and stony, I found that I could put my legs into a kind of auto-pilot that dealt with the business of movement, while my mind was free to wander. In the silence of the night I felt a growing sense of oneness with all that surrounded me. Not just the forest and the undergrowth, but with the stars, with the heavens. For the first time in my life I felt connected to it all; a profound feeling that by being a part of it, all my thoughts and all my actions made a difference. I was not an insignificant nonentity in the enormity of an infinite universe, but a consciousness that could mould and shape the matter of chaos into sense, into comprehension. That was the power of thought.

  We were out of the forest and climbing, gently but relentlessly. I felt as though we’d been walking for many hours, even though I felt no tiredness in my legs. I looked at my watch and was surprised to see that it said half-past eleven. Suddenly I began to feel tired.

  ‘Adam, I need a rest.’

  ‘Nearly there. Just over this rise.’

  Ahead of us I could clearly see the brow of a hill, lit from behind and below by a silvery light. It had the effect of giving the hill a halo. The last few hundred yards were hard; unyielding, high heather made walking exhausting. At the summit a large, flat granite boulder lay, little mica flecks glinting in the moonlight. As we sat Adam said, ‘Look. We can watch the moon set behind that mountain.’

  A waxing gibbous moon hung low in the sky. The hills and valleys were bright and clear in the ethereal light. I realized that I’d never watched a moonset. Once again I looked at my watch. Ten to twelve. The setting moon was closing in on the mountain.

  ‘What time does it set?’ I asked.

  ‘Just watch.’

  My eyes hopped between the moon and my watch. The last speck of the moon disappeared at midnight. I looked at Adam and he smiled.

  ‘Now comes the long, dark night of the soul.’ He lay back on the rock and laughed. ‘The sun will rise over that hill at twenty-past seven. We’ll wait here.’

  Stars began to show themselves where the moon had been, their shy light no longer eclipsed by the moon’s brightness. I lay back and scanned the night sky. I found the Great Bear and remembered what my old geography teacher had told me about the pointers. I found Polaris and oriented myself. The moon had set in the south-west, to my right. The dawn would be to my left. I turned to Adam, but he had his eyes closed; asleep, I thought.

  I was a long way from home, I had no idea where I was, I was tired, cold and uncomfortable. I had followed a complete stranger to the top of a mountain without even asking why. I was a fool, I told myself. A fool to think that this might have a purpose. And then I began to laugh at the absurdity of it. Why should it have a purpose? Nothing else in my life did. And anyway, what sense could I make of anything while my mind was somewhere it had never been before? I lay back and felt my body sink into the rock, as welcoming and as safe as a mattress.

  I woke to see the first spidery rays of light breaking over the top of a mountain. A red sky filled the south-east. I felt refreshed and alert. I sat up to watch the dawn, while vague memories of the night formed. Adam. He’d brought me here, Adam the mushroom.man. I called for him: my voice echoed emptily across the valley in the still morning silence. I breathed deeply of the fresh mountain air. I decided to walk towards the stone circle in the distance.

  Copyright

  First published 1998 by

  THE LILLIPUT PRESS

  62–63 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill Dublin 7, Ireland

  www.lilliputpress.ie

  Copyright © Paolo Tullio, 1998

  ISBN 978 1 84351 244 8

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

  A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library.

  The Lilliput Press receives financial assistance from An Chomhairle Ealaíon / The Arts Council of Ireland.

  Set in Cochin and Bembo Italic with Ergoe Regular display heads.