Everyone else in the car ignored me. Dave was sitting next to me slowly nodding his head as he mouthed the lyrics to Jet Airliner. Danny was in the passenger seat rolling a joint by the dashboard light.
“Marty,” I asked the back of his head. “Did you see that?”
He was calm, probably thinking about the casino takedown we were about to pull off, and the fact that we were about to make a fortune over the next few days. “It’s not what you thought,” he said.
“No?” I asked.
“No. I end up fine.”
A slug-like eel slid up onto his left shoulder, around the back of his neck, and disappeared over the other shoulder.
“What the hell?” I said. I think it was the psilocybin, but it could’ve been the diatomic particles too, either way, that was the first time I saw one out of the tank.
“Just focus on the program,” Marty said.
“Right… Yeah.”
We’d decided to call it the program when we got out of the tanks. It was Marty’s idea. “A plan,” he said, “is just that. A list of steps that with preparation fall into order, a mere intention. The program has already happened. All we need to do is show up.”
We didn’t quibble with him. There was no point. We were broke, just enough for gas, but that was okay. We would drive to the casino. Danny was going to play a few rounds of roulette. We would all be hungry and tired so he wouldn’t waste time. A few spins, enough for breakfast and a suite and then we’d rest, save the next day for the big money and comps.
And that’s how it went.
And it was eerie.
Danny put his chips on the red box with the number twenty-three and when the wheel finished spinning the little ball landed in the corresponding pocket.
“A winner,” the croupier yelled, and then raked a stack of chips over to Danny. “Place your bets,” he continued without missing a beat.
“Red five,” Danny said. The croupier raked the two stacks across the felt table to the red box marked five, spun the wheel, and tossed the marble. When the wheel finished spinning, the marble landed on red five.
“Another winner,” the croupier called out.
To see it happening again was mind-boggling. We knew the winning number so he picked the winning number, and we always saw him pick the winning number. But which came first I couldn’t figure out, and when I tried, when I thought about it too hard, I just lived it again.
Over the next few days, I felt like I was a character strolling through someone else’s movie. The dealer or waiter or bartender would say his line, and then I’d say mine. I had a starring role, and my costars had their parts to play as well. The words didn’t seem forced or contrived. I said what was on my mind even though I knew ahead of time what I was going say, always surprised at the words as they came out. It was natural, yet not.
Dave and I both won big at roulette and the casino version of High-Low, Acey-Deucey. That card game was on the floor. Marty and Danny were the only ones to mess with the poker lounge. They both avidly enjoyed gambling and, Marty more than Danny, basked in the attention of the winning seat. Danny played the role with a bit of realism, dark sunglasses, keeping quiet to himself. Not Marty, the higher the stack of chips, the more flamboyant he became. I was tempted to go in and warn him to keep his cool, but the poker lounge was loaded with flying eels and tentacle clusters. I wasn’t going in there. He was handing out chips to every girl that walked by and it wasn’t long before he had a thin blonde on either side. It was his parading that got us our comp though, a suite that made our first one look like a pillbox – grand piano, master staircase, pool table, hot tub, the whole bit.
We let Marty take the master bedroom. He was making use of it with his newfound friends. I didn’t want to look through the bedroom door, but I was compelled to, I had before. My fate was determined. And I did see him, with the two naked girls, on a writhing bed of tentacles, just as I saw in the tank, but I really saw them that time, and time again, and what I’d interpreted as a death scene was some other sick thing.
That’s another weird thing about déjà vu. Something that’s disgusting the first time is still disgusting the next. Marty made that palace of a suite so uncomfortable that we just went back to the floor and made a few million more. Of course, we knew we would.
As much as we did see, there were still things that we couldn’t. Like when I crashed out Sunday afternoon and woke up freaking out. I’d seen myself sit straight up, my t-shirt soaked, the late afternoon light creeping around the curtains. What I didn’t see before is what happened in my sleep. It’d been the same as the tank. I’d seen another week out. No, more than that, two maybe. The diatomic molecules were flop flipping all on their own.
I went to the suite’s bar, poured a tall glass of water, and guzzled it down.
“We don’t need another dose,” Marty said.
I spun around to find him standing at the end of the marble bar. “The diatomic molecules,” I said.
“You’ve got enough to last.”
“How long?”
“Don’t know.”
I misinterpreted the conversation the first time I saw it; often seeing is not processing. I thought it meant that I didn’t need – as in shouldn’t have – another dose. But he meant that I had enough diatomic quantum flop to last me a while. Perhaps a long while. Not from the dose we took the Friday before, or the next, or the next. It was the fifth trip to the tank that made the state permanent. I was there now, in the tank for the third, fourth, and fifth time. I was also at the bar of the suite. I felt a pressure push into the center of my forehead, an invisible thumb pressed up against my flesh, into my pineal. My hair ripped at my scalp, threatening an exodus. The room changed around me, the colors became brighter, the edges sharper.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” I said. “You’re not here.”
“But I am,” Marty said. And he was, but he wasn’t. I was talking to a future Marty.
“Quantum superimposed,” we chimed together. I didn’t know what that meant yet, but I did, because I would soon learn that since the past, present, and future were just different states of the same time; I could willfully traverse them. Absorbing those states into my present mind — the mind that was in the suite — was a dizzying echo of the tanks, a flash of surreal.
A long, iridescent blue snake-like eel came up from behind Marty’s back and slithered down around his chest and up behind his arm.
“Do you see that?” I asked.
“Uh huh,” he said. “There’s one on your arm too.”
I looked down and sure enough, a long, thin eel was coiling around my forearm. “Hell!” I yelped, and then time slowed to a crawl. Simultaneously the blue eel slithered through the air and the water glass dropped. The glass exploded on contact with the floor and shattered into countless shards. But I could see each one twinkling, individually rising from the point of impact, blossoming out and away.
I must have seen that glass shatter a dozen times. More than that, I’m sure, because I want to put a number on it. A linear number. But all of those times were the same time and I was viewing it again in a constant, still frame loop. I just processed little snapshots, slow still frames of a grander movie. Is the cat dead or alive? It’s both until you open the box. My observation, my presence of mind, was no longer passive as it’d been a few days before. Observation had become an active process, a superposition of realities. I could see what was happening in the box.
“The riddle,” I said. “It’s a paradox, a mirror.”
“There is nothing that is not known,” Marty said.
“And you, you were the one that told yourself about the diatomic molecules.”
Marty appeared stunned; he was travelling. “I didn’t tell, exactly,” he said, staring off, most likely watching the event. “No. I gave myself the eureka moment.”
And it all made sense to me in a way beyond words. I experienced a new clarity of encompassing time, was aware of my immersion in it,
as I never had been before and with all of the knowledge I was yet to learn accessible to me, I immediately possessed the benefits of living in the past, future, and now.
And then he said the most dangerous thing, “We’re gods among mortals.”
And in an epiphany – both physical and cerebral – as if spoken to by a god, there were further revelations.
Marty shared the experience.
He must’ve, because his face lost expression in synch with my realization that with all of the money and the power we could, would acquire, that would not be enough for him, that one day we would confront each other.
And that was the beginning of the chess match. For years, we played our roles politely, evenly matched in forecasting the outcome. Until our confrontation. Until his accident.
A freak accident I suppose he didn’t see coming.
* * *
Dave has always had the best handle on the flop. He went to Dharamsala to meditate with the Dalai Lama and learn the advanced tantric of Kalachakra. He shared some with us, then he went to Arizona and opened an Ashram.
Danny Wong used it to his advantage. I guess we all did, but he was creative. He expanded his parents’ restaurant business and turned Wong’s Wok into the national chain it is today. You know the jingle, You can’t go wrong with Wong. Everybody loves their crispy lo mein. I know, Chinese restaurant, that sounds cliché, but keep in mind he had a secondary study in business. You may be thinking he uses the flop for the fortune cookies, and I wouldn’t blame you.
But that’s not what he’s doing.
Ever wonder how they deliver so fast?
He precogs all of the delivery orders each day for the entire chain and has them ready to go when the customers call, actually set them up long ago. He told me that everything has been entered into a computer for years to come. We’re talking zero waste, bulk buying, and optimum staffing. When he goes public, we all make a killing. There’s a tip for you.
And Marty? Marty was bright and would have received his PhD regardless of the flop.
His downfall was his hunger for power, over the world around him, over himself. He alienated everyone with his thirst to know what he couldn’t see and the compulsion to control what he could. In his aspiration to be a god he leveraged everything he saw, but you can’t know what you haven’t seen. Marty was ultimately rejected by the world as a recluse and a fool.
On numerous occasions I’ve caught myself thinking of Marty and wondering how often Marty visited his inevitable end, if he thought he could avoid it, overcome it, see past it. And then I’ve pondered if Marty’s gone at all. We’ve all seen our mortal end. He has no future or present but his past exists alongside mine. Like the hooded figure on the bridge, he could go forward and backward in time at will, whenever he wanted. Maybe he just traveled back to his youth, or some other time, and in that way is still alive. I would have liked to have asked him, but I never did, and I never do. I wonder if he’d know the answer.
By knowing past, present, and future, we are removed from our lives. We were all cursed, not blessed. We play walk-on roles in a moving picture. No surprises, no unknowns. There are no wives or children, just visitations with our past and future selves. I suppose that’s because life became less interesting. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Me, I don’t travel much anymore. Not physically anyway. There are too many tentacles. I rarely leave my brownstone. It’s in a part of Manhattan that will remain safe and undisturbed for some time. I play the market, if you can call it playing. I buy and sell things, commodities, stocks. While Marty may have dwelt near the end, I visit the beginning, that house and our youth in the student ghetto. And I eat a lot of crispy lo mein.
You can’t go wrong with Wong.
A Word from Daniel Arthur Smith
Meta fiction, magical realism, slipstream, science fiction, speculative fiction—literature that leads the reader through a maze of reality has always intrigued me. We can accept plainly that a maelstrom can cast a very old man with enormous wings from the sky, that a blight can make the population blind, or ponder whether androids dream of electric sheep.
Recently I read, for the countless time, Philip K. Dick’s We Can Remember It for You Wholesale where false and real memory distort reality for the protagonist and the reader. On that story’s heels I serendipitously read Robert Coover’s contribution to the New Yorker, “Going for a Beer” (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/03/14/going-for-a-beer) a tale that utilizes Meta Fiction to offer the reader a visceral nonlinear perception of the narrator’s life, outside of space and time.
I was inspired. A question I’ve pondered is what would happen if someone achieved the level of enlightenment that gave them full perception. The story “The Diatomic Quantum Flop” references the Dalai Lama, the Kalachakra Tantra, and touches on his said capability to see the states of past, present, and future at will.
What if that’s true? And what if a regular person, a college student, suddenly possessed such a power.
The mystique of the psychedelic trip is ripe with the mythos of aliens and time travel. Throughout history, people have endeavored to break through the doors of perception. Many religious traditions involve a journey to the other side, to a place of enlightenment and transcendental awareness.
Freud and Jung mimicked Shamanic rituals to further understand the conscience, as did Carlos Castaneda and Terence McKenna. Timothy Leary inspired generations of hippies and college kids to Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out.
But transcendental experimentation has not been limited to intellectuals and psychedelic astronauts. The CIA-run Project MKULTRA manipulated the mental states of the unsuspecting by altering brain functions with psychedelics and sensory deprivation tanks. And the Nazi’s were rumored to have traveled to Tibet to learn about the Kalachakra Tantra and how it related to time travel.
Recent scientific understanding (or gaps in our understanding) of Dimethyltryptamine, more popularly known as DMT, has led scientists and pseudoscientists alike, to speculate what exactly this chemical can unlock. In my novel Plane Drifters future agents of the Homeland are modified with cyber technology similar to that in “The Diatomic Quantum Flop”, and with its assist are able to traverse to planes beyond our current perception, and to see those resident beyond our peripheral. But the agents of Plane Drifters only touch on premonition, never achieving full omniscience. This story was my experiment into the implications of that omniscient perception.
In this story a riddle is asked, and a possible answer is given at the end. The better question asked throughout the story is whether the lives of the characters are determined before, or after, they first drank the vials. And what is not discussed, are the implications. What does it mean to at will see a pleasure repeated? Or a horror? Did our characters affect the world around them, past, present, and future?
Do we have free will or is the quantum structure of time determined? If the past, present, and future exist, could it be possible that those thought dead are alive? Does that change our definition of death? Are we only designed to perceive a fraction of reality? If there is more to reality than we perceive, how much more is there?
We should be careful not to bring up what we cannot put back down.
These questions and themes have long taunted me and appear consistently in my work. You can find my works in speculative fiction, slipstream, action and adventure on my website http://www.danielarthursmith.com or you can also subscribe to my newsletter http://www.danielarthursmith.com/newsletter to receive news and Advanced Reader Copies before anyone else.
Red Mustang
by Michael Holden
COMING DOWN OFF THE ESCARPMENT above Collingwood, I glanced over at the old woman and down at her liver-spotted hands resting on her purse. The joints on her fingers were swollen with arthritis, and she rubbed anxiously at the clasp where the gold paint had partially worn off. Seeing me looking, she crossed her arms protectively over the handbag. She didn’t trust me. That much was clear.
I remember feeling pretty good that morning as I drove up her laneway. She was waiting on me, standing on the porch looking down toward the side road as if she was expecting somebody. I grabbed my work gloves and got out.
“Come inside, Jimmy,” she said from the porch and slowly led me in, pushing the inner door open with her cane.
That’s when I heard the other car. “Have a seat,” she said, “we need to have a little talk.”
Uh-oh.
So I sat on her chesterfield with my gloves on my knee, listening to somebody getting out of their car and knocking on the door.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, already on her way. I turned to look and in comes that big bull cop, Palmer, with a cheesy grin on his chops.
They had me dead to rights. Laid out photos of me in Keady reselling the stuff I had stolen out of her barn. She also knew, to the penny, how much had been in the change jar she kept in the high kitchen cupboard. Set it all out like a lawyer, plain as day. Said she would lay charges unless …
“You ought to lay charges, no matter what, ma’am,” Palmer said. “We’ve had him in before, more times ’n I can count.” He turned to me. “Ain’t that right, Jimmy? Jesus, this lady here gives you a job—and there aren’t many would do that with your record—an’ you treat her like this here. He shook his head. “Man your age, stealing from his employer—”
“Well, be that as it may, Jimmy and I have to talk,” she said, cutting him off. “I’m not yet ready to lay charges. There’s some nice fresh ham in the fridge and some bread I baked yesterday. Why don’t you help yourself to a sandwich?”
“You sure about this?” Palmer said. “He ought to be locked up for good—”
“I’m certain, Officer,” she said, smiling at him.
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