by Ali Benjamin
“She never told me any of that.”
Maddy eyes him. “It’s possible, Ethan…that you and your wife don’t exactly tell each other everything.”
Well, yes. That seems true.
* * *
—
Maybe yes to weed, maybe, if Maddy has any? He hopes she has it, he’d like to feel that carefree rush, the it’s-all-good mellow.
Maddy shakes her head. “Sorry. But if you want, I can text Arlo, tell him to bring some samples over.”
“No.” Ethan says it too quickly, but there’s no way Arlo O’Shea is coming over tonight. Ethan waves his hand, all casual, dismisses the whole idea. “Never mind, it was just a thought.”
Maddy brightens. “Actually, hold on. I know what we should do.”
She pulls herself up to a standing position, feet on the counter, and reaches for a ceramic crock sitting on top of the cabinet. The crock is left over from Zo’s fermenting phase. She’d read a book about gut bacteria and the human immune system, then ordered some expensive, hand-crafted crocks from a ceramicist in Ashfield. Zo filled the crocks with homemade sauerkraut and kimchi, pickled cabbage and radishes. For months, the house reeked of decay. Fortunately, she’d abandoned this effort, and now the crocks sit, unused—not unlike the mason jars from Zo’s hand-canning phase, or the bag full of yarn from her knitting phase, or the gardening equipment from her grow-your-own phase, which failed to last even a single season.
Maddy climbs down, lifts the lid. “This is what we should do.”
Ethan peers inside. There are a bunch of plastic snack bags, something gray and shriveled inside each: animal droppings, it looks like, or maybe desiccated corpses from the animals themselves.
“What’s this?”
“Psilocybe cubensis. Picked by yours truly.”
“Sillo-what?”
“ ’Shrooms, Ethan. You know: magic mushrooms? Keeper of secrets? Revealer of wisdom?”
Oh, that. He tried mushrooms, once, back at Kenyon. He remembers an absurdly long walk down Middle Path, as if time and space had been stretched like taffy. But the effect didn’t last long, and looking back, he wonders if the whole thing had been in his head, some kind of placebo effect.
Maddy opens the bag. “How much you want? Two? Three?”
Does she mean two or three baggies, or mushrooms, or what? He tries to remember how much he’d taken, once upon a time, but all he remembers is laughing with Randy as gravel crunched beneath their feet. Had he chewed those dried mushrooms? Steeped them like tea? God, it was so long ago.
Maddy’s waiting for his answer. Does he want two? Three? More? Maybe he should say two and take his chances? Two sounds like a good number. Reasonable. Not the lowest of the low, but it doesn’t sound too risky.
But Maddy apparently takes his idiot silence to mean something else. “What, you want a heroic dose?”
Heroic. He smiles. He likes the sound of that.
“Yes,” he says. Whatever the night brings.
Maddy raises her eyebrows. “Mmm-kay. So I’d better do just one or two. Can’t have both of us out of our skulls.”
Maddy gets to work, the way a professional might: she gets out a coffee grinder, a Pyrex cup, a bunch of lemon juice. Some sort of technique, she explains, to make them kick in sooner. She works efficiently, and before long, she’s stirring the whole concoction into a glass of water.
“Don’t worry,” Maddy assures Ethan as she hands him the cup. “I’m a great fucking babysitter.”
He knows from experience that this isn’t remotely true. He drinks anyway.
Then yes to the waiting, and the creep of anxiety, the jittery fidgeting, the What have I done? and Is this it? and Do I feel it yet? and What if Zo calls?
“Relax,” Maddy tells him.
“I am. I’m relaxed.” His foot is jiggling a million miles an hour.
Maddy assures him it’s okay, that scientists are doing research with mushrooms at places like Harvard and Johns Hopkins now, that the chemical inside them, psilocybin, is a breakthrough treatment for PTSD and anxiety. They’ve done studies with cancer patients, with alcoholics, he’s going to be fine.
“Yeah, okay,” Ethan says. Nods too fast. Cracks his knuckles. He feels sick to his stomach, maybe nerves, but maybe she poisoned him.
Wait. What if she poisoned him?
“Dude, you need to focus on something else. Here.” Maddy bends at the neck, so all he can see is the top of her head. “Feel my hair.”
He hesitates. Looks at the dark stubble on white skin. There’s something vaguely indecent about seeing her scalp, like he’s glimpsing something his eyes weren’t meant to see.
“Come on, Ethan, it’s just hair.”
He places both hands lightly on her head, begins to rub.
Maddy was right. This helps. The stubble is softer than it looks. Velvety. Ethan moves his fingers apart, then together. In his mind, he hears Alex’s voice, a joke she used to tell. Know what this is? A brain sucker. Know what it’s doing? Starving.
He closes his eyes, feels Maddy’s warmth, all that silky fuzz.
“Mmm,” Maddy says. “That feels great, actually. Keep doing that.”
He moves his fingertips over the curves of her scalp, down toward her ears, her neck. He imagines he’s running his fingers through long locks. Above him the light fixture hums.
Maddy lifts her head. He opens his eyes and is surprised by how close her face is to his own.
God, he had forgotten what it felt like to desire someone like this, had forgotten that it’s possible to feel your whole self hurtling toward another soul. He thinks again of those underground particles, just two bits of matter, whizzing around at light speed, ready to collide, to smash together, creating an impossibly vast explosion of energy, Maybe this is what the end of the world looks like.
He could declare himself post-faithful.
“Let’s do you,” says Maddy. And when he doesn’t understand, not completely—when he stands there frozen and dumb—Maddy adds, “Let’s give you a shave, I mean.”
He touches his beard.
“No,” she says. “I like the beard. I mean your head. Come on, you’ve got a few minutes before the ’shrooms kick in for real. And when they do, you are going to love how a shaved head feels.”
He tries to imagine what Zo would say if she came home from Boston and found them both with buzz cuts, like that cult from forever ago, the one in California, all those tech nerds in Nike sneakers who were so certain the aliens were planning to beam them up. What was their name? He considers asking Maddy, then realizes she probably wasn’t even born yet when that happened.
“It feels good?” he asks. “A shaved head?”
Heaven’s Gate. That was the name. Bunch of lonely-heart computer programmers in sweatpants.
Maddy grins. “Feels like freedom.”
* * *
—
At first it’s lovely. He sits on a stool in the bathroom, eyes closed. Maddy presses her body into his back as she works. The electric razor tickles his scalp. He opens his eyes, head down, sees a clump of hair land on the floor. He smiles, closes them again. The razor moves from the back of his neck to his forehead, from his ear toward the center of his scalp. He imagines his hair like an overgrown summer lawn, the razor a mower that leaves neat, satisfying tracks.
His spine tingles. It’s a pleasant buzzing, a warm whir. It hits his solar plexus and expands outward, into his chest. And then, in an instant, everything changes. The buzz is a dentist’s drill, then a jackhammer, and then worse, torturous, like some sort of demon.
“Stop,” he says, and then he says it again, panicking now. He waves Maddy away, puts his fingers in his ears. He begins to rock. Stop. Stop. Stop.
Maddy kills the razor. Ethan inhales the silence, feels it cooling him, calming him,
“Ethan,” Maddy says.
A wave of nausea, of motion sickness, it’s the stars, they’re too fast, he wants to stop this ride.
“Open your eyes, Ethan,” Maddy tells him, and when he does, the room looks different. The colors have gone Day-Glo, electric. The blue of the towel, Alex’s clothes on the floor red sweatshirt, green T-shirt, blue jeans, rainbow socks. All of these things are saturated to the point of surreal.
Ethan? And this time Maddy sounds different. She’s an aria, a thousand voices at once, a choir in a cathedral. He turns to her. He feels an urge to giggle like a child. Giddy, this feeling, euphoric, something he hasn’t felt for years, and there is the music again, that swell in his chest.
Ethan, the music says, you’re only halfway done.
The words come to him through a tunnel, he doesn’t know what they mean, and that, too, strikes him as hilarious.
Ethan, your hair. Maddy runs her hands over his buzz cut on one side, air cool, then through the chunks of hair on the other. He understands now, she’s only shaved half his head, she wants to finish, but all he can think about is how good her touch feels, magnificent, he can feel every nerve ending, millions of neurons every square inch, he knows this as a fact but he’s never known it before, not like he does right now, my God. He rolls his head around beneath her fingers.
I guess you’re feeling it, her voice explodes into color, sound is sight and sight sound, and people should touch each other more, should touch and touch and touch and touch, and now the hexagonal tiles are moving, shifting back and forth like connected gears. Ethan laughs because it’s spectacular.
His heart pumps blood through his body, he can feel the liquid rushing, can hear it. He laughs again, because all this time he’s never noticed this, that he can hear his own blood, and now the wall is vibrating, rippling like waves, the floral pattern of the old wallpaper turning into waltzing couples.
He closes his eyes: Stars. Opens them: Waltzers.
Stars. Waltzers. Stars. Wal—
And then the walls melt away. White-hot energy, some sort of electric jolt, ripples up through his spine. It is a cosmic big bang, this, and it’s an absolute fucking miracle.
* * *
—
Light rains, droplets from the fixture, photons made visible, at last.
Ethan holds out his hands, palms flat and facing the ceiling. Particles move through his body, glittering ghosts passing through and beyond his skin. So beautiful, he says, not so much to Maddy, or even himself, but to some Other, and did he say it out loud? If he did, the words aren’t right, they’re not enough, they’re just sounds coming from a hole in his face, from skin and saliva and muscle, a strange, inadequate monkey-mouth. Words can’t convey what he means, can’t possibly.
In the living room, pictures disintegrate, reassemble.
In the kitchen, he sees Zo’s crock, still on the counter. He picks it up, holds it in his hands, feels the cool ceramic. The crock is saying something, or maybe something is speaking through it to him, but then it’s not in his hands anymore, it’s shattered, it’s all over the floor, and so are all the plastic bags filled with those gray organic lumps.
He stares at them. I need to go lie down, he says, or maybe he doesn’t.
* * *
—
In the beginning, there were single-celled creatures. They were alive, but they perceived nothing: not light from dark, one color from the next, even their own movement through the expanse. The difference between no-perception and perception isn’t incremental, it’s existential, it’s everything, and it’s happening again right now. Ethan’s crossing some threshold, moving from one way of being into another, like stepping through a door into a place that was always there, always around him, but that he’d never noticed.
It’s some kind of super-vision he’s gaining: a super-understanding, some new language that’s flooding from the deep, dark empty.
* * *
—
Maddy stands in the half-light of his bedroom. Doing okay? Energy comes off her in rays, glistening and golden.
Ethan hadn’t known he loved her, but he does. He loves her. He loves everyone, maybe. Maddy’s smile is so beautiful it is a wound.
She is Maddy, but she is also more than Maddy. She is the force that flowed through Aphrodite, Venus, Freya, she’s the pulsing of life itself. He knows if he could be with her, if he could touch her, move with her, that they would combine to become something holy. He imagines the sweat that would pour from them, the way their perspiration would slickly mingle, every drop a tiny sparkling jewel.
He longs to reach out to her, but he cannot move.
I guess you are, she says. She slips out of the room, and when she disappears, he is more alone than before. Also, it is so hot.
* * *
—
On the coffee table,
the one on the floor,
not the one that is part of the monstrous stack of furniture looming beastly in the corner, don’t look at that, don’t, but the other one, safe,
there is a New Yorker magazine, pulp with markings: color and form, lines and dots, stripped of all meaning.
He sits on sofa number two, turns the pages. He looks at the ads: eyelashes like insects. Faces contorted into distortions. Grotesque, he thinks. They are on this page, these faces, because they are supposed to be beautiful, but they are all wrong, disfigured somehow. Twisted, overdone.
Hideous. Does no one see how hideous humans are?
He doesn’t know where Maddy is, if Maddy is. Maybe he is the only one.
* * *
—
Silver hole in the bathroom wall, beast in the mirror, gray skin like pockmarked plastic, beard a disgusting tangle, made up of a thousand twisting creatures. His head is uneven, one half a forest of stubble, the other half writhing like the beard. This is what you are, the image in the mirror tells him. You are an ugly thing, and weak.
Lower than low.
* * *
—
Bathmat beneath him, curled and crying, who knows how long he’s there, a small child weak and scared. Maybe it’s time to get up and walk around. That voice again, hers, thank God.
* * *
—
Outside is an alien planet, at once cartoonish and exquisite. Rounded edges, ballooning middles, shimmering light. He wishes the world always looked like this. He understands the world always looks like this, it’s his fault for missing it.
He walks to the edge of the place reached by the light of the house. Then he steps beyond it. He has the sense of being absorbed into some Other. He doesn’t so much dissolve as he does become part of everything else, things seen and unseen.
The trees are breathing. Everything out here: breathing, for him and with him, a single organism.
In. Out. Expand. Contract.
He runs his hands up and down the bark of the tree, You are me and I am you and we are breathing as one. His fingers come across something: initials, carved in bark, EF + ZF 2003, and it is so jarring. He’d put those letters there himself, years ago, when they’d moved here. He’d done it with his monkey body and his monkey understanding, done it with a pocket knife in the middle of winter as he and Zo held mugs of coffee even though all those things—knife, winter, mug—emerge from some half-remembered dream he’s not even sure is his own.
He is ashamed of these initials, this casual violence. He puts his forehead against the bark, feels himself breathing with the tree. I’m sorry, he says, not with words, I promise we won’t be around much longer. By we he means people, and as soon as the thought exists, he knows that it’s true. There’s some cataclysmic event, some apocalyptic transformation that has not yet happened and yet somehow a
lso already has. The entire human enterprise, from knuckle-walks to the coding of machines that will outlive us all, is on a collision course with some final Unspeakable. Ethan feels himself hurtling toward it right now, even as he can already see glimpses of it, like lost memory.
He knows what he said was true: we won’t be around much longer.
He feels ripples of sadness rising from the ground, like shockwaves, like the heat that rises from asphalt on a summer day. These sadwaves are coming from every living thing, they move through him, and he releases his own waves too. Their collective sorrow drifts into the sky, beyond it, disappears.
It’s around then that the beast appears.
* * *
—
It is lurking: a wolf, not a wolf. A coyote, not a coyote. Something else, something he sees when he closes his eyes, but which is there even when he cannot see it. A jackal, like a creature he remembers from some long-ago life, a lonely creature adrift in a sea of blue.
The jackal tells him to come forward. The animal doesn’t say it with words, he knows only the false things have words, the true things are untranslatable.
You are a god, the jackal tells him with a voice that isn’t a voice.
I am a scared animal clinging to a rock, he answers.
Also true, says the jackal.
What is this experience? he asks the jackal.
This is all there has ever been, the jackal answers.
I am alone, Ethan says.
The jackal does not say yes or no.
* * *
—
Ethan made up everyone else, invented them from whole cloth. It was always just him, him and the jackal. Anyone else, everyone else, was a wish, an illusion, a delusion. Everything he ever thought happened to someone else had been happening to him all along.