Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  “It’s the wheel of time, man.”

  Yeah, he really said man. And then he pulled a hit from the bong. We were in college. Anyway. After he blew out a billowy white cloud of stinky smoke, he went on to say, “It’s Tibetan, you’re in the present, but there can’t be a present without a past and a future. So you’re there too. Time is like a wheel.”

  At that moment, I thought what he said was stoner talk, nothing more. Armchair philosophy. So I said, “Riiight,” all drawn out, and reached for the bong.

  “No, serious. That’s how the Dalai Lama can see if a person that is good right now is really a bad person or vice versa.”

  “What?” Danny asked.

  “He can see the future and the past and the present, all at the same time. He’s nonlinear.”

  “Like outside of time?”

  “Exactly,” Marty said. “It’s outside of time. What if I told you guys I’ve found a way to do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Step outside of time. See the slices of past, present, and future at will.”

  “Time travel?”

  “Yeah. Time travel.”

  “It’s possible,” Dave added, “but very tantric, takes lifetimes to learn. I mean, the Dalai Lama is centuries old.”

  Marty shrugged his forehead, all sure of himself. “I found a shortcut.”

  It was my turn to take a long pull from the bong and I about choked up a lung. You see, Marty worked in the psych lab below the science building, and they did all kinds of messed up stuff down in that basement. Mice, mazes, and shit like that. The last time he lured us down there he talked us into eating a bunch of shrooms and then locked each of us in a deprivation tank.

  I tried to bellow out a plea, “Don’t tell me this involves the tanks?” but all that came out were some hisses and a ton of smoke.

  “No,” Marty said. “Of course not.”

  An hour later, we were in the forgotten back corner of the science building’s basement, next to the deprivation tanks. Marty’s office was actually the storage area behind the animal pens and sweetly smelled of shredded paper and rat piss. Marty’s TA-ship involved administering a cornucopia of pure grade chemical cocktails to the rats and monkeys and log what happened next. He walked a lot of the good stuff out the door, which was cool at the time. I mean he had access to government grade shit. Phenomenal.

  Dave was into it. He went right to work cranking open the warm water faucets to four of the five metal tanks that lined the back wall and Danny and I began dumping in the large plastic bags of Epsom salts. These weren’t the new age float tanks they have at the spa today, no, these were the old school metal boxes that they used to test out the effects of sensory deprivation way, way back. True government-sponsored chaos.

  Danny pulled his t-shirt over his head and then asked the magic question, “So what are we supposed to do for this to work?”

  “Just free your mind,” Dave said. “And it will all become clear.” Then he heaved a bag of salt into a tank.

  “Free my mind?” I said. “That last time I was in this thing I fell asleep and had a nightmare that I was being suffocated by tentacles.”

  “Use a koan,” Dave said.

  “No,” Marty said. “This isn’t a one hand clapping kind of thing.” He went over to the desk against the side wall, slid open the pencil drawer, and removed a yellow Pokémon keychain.

  Danny scrunched his nose in delight. “That’s Pikachu,” he said, then added in a high voice, “Pika, Pika, Pikachu.”

  Marty forced a grin back and then put the key into the tall beige plastic cabinet next to the desk.

  “That’s your security system?” Dave asked. “A key in the drawer next to the cabinet.”

  “I only lock it to keep the door closed,” Marty said. “It swings open otherwise.”

  The cabinet was stocked with lab supplies. Beakers, scales, rows of white plastic jars lined up by same color lid. Smaller cabinets filled the two chest-high shelves. Marty opened a drawer to one of those.

  “We’re not doing shrooms again are we?” I asked. “That’s what brought on those tentacles.” A chill ran down my neck as I again thought of a hundred little slimy tendrils encircling my arms and legs, the tips tickling. Ugh. I shuddered.

  “No shrooms,” Marty said. He held up four vials.

  “Is that the liquid LSD you had last summer?”

  “No,” he said, handing one to each of us. “This is totally different.”

  “You’re taking one too? Aren’t you going to keep watch?”

  “Nobody is coming around. This’ll be fine.”

  I guess that was enough for us because we each swilled one.

  “This tastes like battery acid,” I said. “Whadja mix in here? Aluminum?”

  “Well there’s some psilocybin—”

  “Oh man!” I said. “You said no mushrooms.”

  “Just a trace. It’s mostly diatomic molecules.”

  “What? What are you trying to do? Kill us?”

  “No. It’s cool, relax, oxygen is a diatomic molecule.”

  “Liquid oxygen?”

  “No, I was just saying that oxygen is diatomic. That’s iodine and hydrogen coated in zinc.”

  “What?”

  “It’s cool, really. They wouldn’t let me give it to the animals otherwise.”

  “Right,” Dave nodded.

  How Marty thought that was a selling point I don’t know, but he had a way of talking people into whatever. “They’re little nanobots,” he said, “they’re like five micrometers thick. Nothing, really.”

  “Really,” I asked. “You’re sure.”

  “Yeah, they’re medical. The real deal. They’re designed to deliver a medical payload. In this case, diatomic molecules.”

  “And what do they do?”

  “The diatomic molecules produce a rapid phonon reaction. They’ll slightly shift your perceivable spectrum.”

  “How’s that?”

  “With the DMT.”

  “You put DMT in here?”

  “No, no. They leverage your own biological DMT to produce the phonon reaction, along with the slight quantum mechanical oscillations of the diatomic molecules, the diatomic quantum flop.”

  “Like when you die?” Dave said. “And your whole life flashes before you.”

  “Right. Your brain floods with DMT and you see a white light, or whatever else.”

  “You are trying to kill us,” I said.

  “You came up with this?” Danny asked.

  “I found some old files on DMT experiments and what the subjects had to say. And then, like serendipity someone came up with this for the monkeys, and it sort of came to me, like a eureka moment, getting off on our own DMT. So I swiped some for us.”

  “How long before this kicks in?”

  “It’s time released. It will take them a good fifteen minutes to get where they need to go. But it’s a good trip. You’ll see.”

  And it must have been, because a shudder amped up from the base of my skull and for a second my scalp felt like it was peeling away, and I realized, even though I was still talking to Marty, that I’d already been in the tank and out again. The conversation I was having was déjà vu, but at the same time I was already into tomorrow, and back to earlier in the evening walking up Marty’s porch, looking at the huge Om symbol on the psychedelic tapestry that curtained his window. And then I was gazing up at their ceiling of colored Christmas lights through a cloud of pot smoke. Dave squealing, “Pika, Pika, Pikachu,” and Marty saying, “It’s all about the trip across the bridge, the diatomic quantum flop.”

  ***

  It was crazy because there was a four-day stint that all happened in the same slice. I mean I saw myself going about my business but not in a linear way. I saw the whole period at once, a blur of scenes overlapping with more tentacles and a few flying eels thrown in. It was too much to take in.

  Then I came down.

  My mind chilled back to the present, began to p
rocess the world around me as it was designed to, one frame at a time. I thought that was it—that was the trip. It was over the course of the next two days that the result of our little experiment became clear. It was two days of déjà vu, the tentacles and eels from the initial vision were gone, they’d only been there at the peak, but everything else, knowing what people were going to say, knowing what was going to happen next, every instant a repeat of the tank.

  But that wasn’t the most eerie part. The wild thing was that it was like we were acting on privileged information, that by somehow knowing what was going to happen, we had changed the future. I mean things happened the same as I saw them, but they never should have went that way.

  Danny Wong was the first to act on it. And we knew he would be because we saw him tell us about it, and it played out just like he said. The night after the tanks was Friday. Danny worked a shift at his parent’s restaurant, Wong’s Wok. There was only one of them then, not the chain Danny runs today, but I’ll get back to that. Marty and I were at his place with Dave when Danny came home. It was after midnight. He had a box of that delicious Wong’s crispy lo mein, and just like I saw in the tank, he threw a fat wad of cash on the table.

  We repeated the conversation the four of us already knew word for word.

  “Those guys have a serious addiction,” he said. We knew who he was talking about.

  “The Chinese guys in the kitchen didn’t hold back. They kept doubling the pot.”

  Marty asked, “You were gambling?”

  It was like an echo.

  The other three of us answered at the same time. “High-Low.”

  And then our eyes met and I remember asking myself if that had happened the same way as we saw it, the three of us saying the words at the same time. I guess it had. It must’ve.

  “Yeah,” Danny said slowly. “High-Low, and I knew what the card was going to be each time. I’d still be there but I cleaned them out. The further I went the more they threw into the pot.”

  Marty’s face went blank. And we knew what he would say next.

  “No,” I said. But then he said it anyway.

  “We have to go back to the tanks.”

  “This is a fluke,” I said. “Just because he saw it happening doesn’t mean he affected it. How do you know he wasn’t supposed to win anyway?”

  “C’mon,” Marty said. “You know what the odds are of guessing the right card every time?”

  “No,” I said. “But neither do you.”

  “Did anything happen to anyone else?”

  “Yeah,” Dave said. Déjà vu again. “In the tank I saw Veckner giving a pop quiz today. So this morning over coffee I looked up the answers. Sure enough, she gave the quiz, and it was fill in the blank.”

  “That can’t be right,” I said. “I mean, Veckner teaches Eastern Religion right?”

  “Tradition.”

  “What?”

  “Tradition, not religion.”

  “Whatever, Eastern Tradition, Eastern Religion, you know it like the back of your hand.”

  “Not this material I didn’t.”

  Or did he? I was becoming confused.

  “If you saw the answers to the quiz why did you bother looking them up?”

  “I saw myself taking the quiz, and studying beforehand. But the quiz would have been a surprise otherwise.”

  Marty’s tongue was rolling across the top of his lip, and if the room hadn’t been soaked in patchouli and pot, I’m sure I would have smelled the gears grinding. “We have to go back in,” he said.

  “We can’t,” Dave said. “Remember.”

  This was scary because I did remember. This is what Dave had said—was saying—about what Marty was going to say next, only Marty hadn’t said it yet, but then he did.

  “Right,” Marty said. “We have to wait til our systems build up more DMT.”

  ***

  By Sunday things were back to normal. We hadn’t seen any further ahead. Danny used some of his winnings to spring for a feast of wine and flaming cheese at the Greek restaurant in Old Town, a real treat since I was living mostly on burritos at the time. We talked a little bit more about it over dinner. Dave suggested we all abstain from anything over the next week and to practice some basic lotus position stuff. Apparently he and Danny had processed the whole trip a lot better because they meditated. I was surprised to discover that Danny was into that too, but then again we were all dabbling in transcendental mind expansion. It didn’t seem like a bad idea. I was a bit strung out from the last trip, so drinking a lot of water and juice over the next few days wouldn’t be horrible.

  The last trip had been okay for my schedule but Dave and Marty had gone to class the next day, so we all agreed to meet on Friday after Danny’s shift.

  Everything went down about the same, except I admit we were all a bit more excited.

  I say about the same because Marty altered the mix a bit.

  “Don’t take these until you’re ready to close the lid,” he said. “They’re more potent.”

  “Whaddaya mean?” I asked. I was concerned, of course, about the psilocybin.

  “I added DMT to the mix. So the molecules don’t deplete your own.”

  That somehow made sense, I figured he wanted to be able to try again sooner rather than later and that with the extra dose he wouldn’t have to wait. I knew better, but a dose was a dose. It was after I drank the vial that I realized why he really wanted it. It was the holiday weekend and he wanted to see further ahead than two days. I realized that fairly instantly because we were on the way to the Indian reservation casino and he was explaining in the car. And then we were at the casino. And then I was back in the Greek restaurant the week before, and there were tentacles at the restaurant, and there were eels on my date with Julie the past Tuesday, and then Marty was dead.

  That caught me off guard.

  I should mention that I couldn’t quite nail down how long I was in the tank. I didn’t have the discipline that Dave and Danny had. I had two weeks of information happening at once, fast forward, rewind, freeze frame, and then I was in the back seat of Marty’s red Mazda.

  Steve Miller was cranked up on the stereo, and it was black outside.

  I’d been calm, but then, with the realization of Marty’s demise, a course of adrenalin shot through me. “You guys didn’t see that?”

  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 Danny 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. I had a starring role, and my costars had their parts to play as well. The dealer or waiter or bartender would say his line, and then I’d say mine. 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.