by Alan Osi
I couldn’t say why I decided to return to the world at that moment. It had been natural, like coming up for air when swimming underwater. The sound of the busy city behind me came back to me first, constant as the whisper of seas in a sea-shell, punctuated by the occasional siren or horn. The gloaming had fallen, street-lights glinted, and the sky was laced with blood orange.
I saw a man sitting on the other bench, wearing a suit which looked like it had been on him for days, giving it a limp quality of defeat, incongruous with the man himself.
He sat rod straight, hands on his knees in a pose reminiscent of Egyptian pharaoh statues, eyes closed. His hair danced in the wind, the only thing on him moving; he sat as still as the dusk. Perhaps it was the tranquility. But, he had an air about him. It made his rough appearance seem a sort of disguise.
While I was staring at him, he opened his eyes, blinked twice, and then looked over at me. I smiled briefly and averted my gaze. His did not waver.
He stared at me long enough to make me nervous, and then crossed the small park to come and sit beside me, on my bench.
“Hello,” he said. “May I ask you a question? Did you ever wish you could experience being with God?” I felt immediately sick.
Somehow, even when speaking directly to the reporter who had told me about the drug, there had been a cloak of unreality around the problem of moondust. That was suddenly stripped from me, and I’d not realized how much comfort I derived until it was gone.
In his eyes burned passion and insanity, and up close, he smelled of an unwashed body. His disheveled appearance now seemed menacing. I prayed to God for strength.
“I know what you are offering me. But, it is not the experience of God. Quite the opposite.”
It did not seem like he’d taken any real attempt to shift his personae. But, rather that it happened naturally. Rage flooded from his subconscious the way a river swells in heavy rain.
“You are mistaken,” he said. “You know nothing.”
“I know who you are. And I know you have something called moondust, which you are giving away. You think you are doing so to unite people with God. But, you are deeply mistaken. I’ve spoken with people to whom you’ve given the substance. Nearness to God does not do to people what your drug has done to them.”
“And you think you’re an authority?”
“I am a priest,” I said, attempting to match the intensity of his gaze. He sneered.
“You know nothing.”
This repudiation evoked a reciprocal anger in me. He turned to begin walking away. But, I shifted to block his path. Words tumbled.
“I know that I have been called by God to do His work on earth and that I’ve been doing so for ten years, which is ten years longer than you have. I know that God is beyond any sensual pleasure. And I know that I’ve seen what you’re doing to people, and it’s destroying their faith and their connection to God. How could God destroy godliness? You are serving Satan.”
“You know only your own lies. Speak to me of Satan again, and we will beat you.”
“Strike me if you must,” I said. My voice shook. But, I was not ashamed of it. “But what you are doing, you must not do. I have been sent here by God to tell you this. In the name of Jesus.”
“You have been sent by your church. By the lies they have told you for your whole life. A life you wasted, thinking you were serving God, actually serving an idea that you confuse for God. If you ever want to know the truth, take this.” He put another baggie of powder into my hand. “Your church has been lying to you. And I feel sorry for you. I am here to bring the truth to everyone.”
He walked by me. This time I let him, knowing there was nothing to be gained by confrontation. Instead, I put the baggie he gave me in my pocket, automatically. I let him go a little ways, and then I followed him.
I trailed him to an area of higher pedestrian traffic, keeping lookout for a policeman. The moondust man walked west for a few blocks toward the park, which was perfect in that the police were usually posted near it.
I trailed him by about three-quarters of a block. He did not look back, walking with a shuffling gate that spoke either to poor shoes or psychosis. He seemed very out of place in this ritzy section of Manhattan, lacking the ability to become part of the city like most homeless. Instead he stood out like a lodestar, receiving wide berth even from the most jaded Manhattanites.
He took a left, and began walking toward the nearest park entrance.
A policeman stood about half a block away from the entrance, idly talking to a woman with a small dog.
I skipped to a jog. “Officer,” I shouted, “officer.” Everyone in hearing distance turned their heads toward me, conscious of a breech in public protocol and wary of the possibility of danger.
The messenger turned toward me as well. Rage bloomed on his face when he saw me, running at him, now only a few yards away. I prayed the policeman watched. If he attacked me, my body would suffer, and I might even die. But, my purpose would be fulfilled. The other people near to us shied away, terrified. I pointed at the shabby looking evil in front of me and shouted, “Stop him! Please!” Closing my eyes against the fury burning from the messenger, enemy of the faith.
God protect me.
80. HAROLD
When I, the messenger, left the park a sound behind me exploded. “Officer,” he screamed, “Officer, please stop that man,” and I turned. The man from the park was screeching at me—the Catholic betrayer.
I turned on him, first. But, then I backtracked, because a police officer was running at me. There could be no escape, now. If it was the Lord’s will to martyr me, then I could be strong, strong enough to stand in the fire. My work already spread.
With my hands in the air, I turned to face the officer. He would find the moondust and would mistake it for other things, like so many had, and I would be arrested. They would try everything to stop me. But, Jonah got swallowed by the whale, and Pograu got eaten by the great wolf, and so was I going to be consumed by the government’s NYPD.
But all the world lived in God’s eye.
Thursday, October 5, 2006
81. PETER
Whale hunt today. But, the sky looked wrong. I had wine rocks in my brain as I gauged the winds. I often did. Didn’t stop me from judging. Seemed the clouds raced to the west, the dangerous direction. But they lay high, so it was hard to tell what would come. Perhaps a storm. Perhaps just soft rain, perhaps nothing. But sunlight burning through clouds.
It was the high season. Come what may, we couldn’t afford to stay ashore, we needed the hunt. The blue ones, the huge ones, migrated through our waters. The chase rose in my blood, the anticipation of it. Life and death, blood in the water, boats in the froth, us or them.
I checked the spears and the ropes. I checked the hulls, the wetness of the pitch, and the oars. It was my ritual. The old ways said you had to do it. But my son’s generation often skipped parts. We had three of everything, and if you went out enough, you knew how your gear fared. But, some actions held import beyond the obvious. The young tend not to understand until they suffered for their carelessness. On this island, we plied the most dangerous trade—preparation like my daddy taught was overkill, except the time it saved a life. On the day the life was mine, I swore to always follow the old ways. I kept the oath.
Above me, clouds raced across the sky. Some like egg-whites tumbling over each other, other clouds thin wisps of steam. In places, they clumped thickly, like a layer of wool between earth and sky.
The variation told of a sea in Great Spirit. Sometimes such a day worked in our favor, forcing our prey to surface. But, on bad days, the waves swatted us as if we were mosquitoes. We prospered or died by whims of sea-nymphs.
Maurinio appeared on the hill, coming down to the wharf from town. Defined by his stooped, knotted back and scars, he was an old sea fighter. He walked with a cane and puffed pipe-smoke like the continental machines of legend, trains.
He didn’t go to sea any
more. My retirement approached, too. But, I couldn’t imagine letting it go. The smell of it. The roll of the waves. The contrast. But, time came for us all, like the tides. The trick was picking the right day. Without the experience of dogs like me, the young ones would never make it. Their blood would get high, and they’d make some damn fool mistake—never to come back.
“Morning, Nes,” Maury said. He hadn’t shaved today, and I noticed.
“Morning.” I looked skyward again. “What do you think?”
“Hard to read.”
“Yeah.”
“Day like today, either whales will be right where you want ‘em or the sea will make you sorry you ever learned to row.”
“Hell of a choice.”
“Not mine to worry over any more.”
I looked at him, studying him for the answer to my next question, the way I studied clouds.
“You miss it?”
“You will, too.”
With that he started walking away, continuing his constitutional, saying, “If you go, make sure you come back.”
It was a tough choice. We’d make it together, and I had a feeling most of the boys would be gun-ho. Worrying over the power of the sea would be left to codgers like me.
I came back to myself then. It took a moment to get my bearings and remember me. It was Thursday and I was Peter, a chemist. Five seconds ago, I had been a whaler on an island, likely in the Azores. What had made that possible was a powder called moondust, given to me by a reporter named Max. Moondust changed my life and would continue to do so.
I was crying the grit out of my eyes so I wiped my face, and for good measure, I went to the bathroom and splashed water on it. Next I looked in the mirror.
A drug-induced hallucination was the result of upset brain-chemistry. The active chemicals in drugs flood neural pathways and functionally impersonated the natural neurotransmitters in the brain. Those transmitters created perceptions, thoughts, and memories by signaling our brain-cells to fire. So the brain was fooled by the drug into firing in ways that were caused not by one’s relationship to the outside world, but by the drug. Of course, the fact that one had taken the drug in the first place was a part of one’s relationship with the world, so there was a bit of recursion in that.
Hallucinogenic experiences were similar to dreams that way. Scientifically, dreams were considered random firing of brain-cells during sleep. As hallucinogens created a situation where brain-cells were basically fooled into firing in unusual and randomized ways, you could say that the two experiences were closely related.
And for this simple reason, there tended to be a mixture of the mundane and the fantastic in both experiences. Your everyday experience was a result of neurons firing in rote patterns. Signals travelled the neural net the way cars travel roads in a city in conventions, such as rush hours. But, the brain, during the experience of hallucinogens, was akin to a city in which a segment of the population decided to leave their homes or offices all at the same time and drive in completely random directions, with or against the usual flow of traffic, ignoring red lights, street signs, and speed limits. That is a city in anarchy, and this was your brain on drugs.
Moondust did not fit that paradigm at all. This was the basis of all my current problems. If one could say that hallucinogens functioned by flooding the brain in certain neurotransmitters, one could not call moondust a hallucinogen. It changed the brain into a different brain. When I took moondust, I was no longer me. I was no longer in my brain. That was how it felt, and I couldn’t find an explanation for it.
While the first moondust experience I had was intense, it was explainable under modern scientific theory. It felt like a particularly joyful out-of-body experience. Likely, my brain had been flooded with dopamine or an imitation, so that the experience of pleasure overtook all perception.
But, in subsequent usage, I’d perceived life as a number of different people: a Japanese girl, an older man in the Azores, a pregnant woman in India, a washerwoman in France. If these had all been hallucinations stemming from the same chemical, that chemical would have to be able to act on my brain in such a way that existing pathways of my synapses would randomly fire in such specific ways as to convince me that I was not myself, but someone else multiple times. The likelihood of a hallucinogen creating this perception once was astronomically slim. But, multiple applications of the same substance randomly acting on my brain in ways that convinced me I was a different person every time—this simply could not happen.
In the bathroom mirror, my face looked the same as it always did. My double chin hadn’t shrunken or grown, and my eyes were still brown. There were a few gray hairs around my temple, my mouth had a pinched kind of look, and my jaw was square-ish. Since I was already in the bathroom, and it was morning, I brushed my teeth and decided to shower.
But, my thoughts returned to moondust. It was constantly in flux, and when it came in contact with a human consciousness, that consciousness went into flux, also. As if a person was no different than an element. When you tested moondust it could be boron or oxygen or hydrochloric acid or a billion possible and impossible permutations of protons, neurons, and electrons. When you took moondust, you could be Spanish or German or Thai or any of billions of possible permutations of humanity. Did this suggest that on some level, we were no different than the forms of matter and energy that made up our world? Of course, we weren’t different. We were simply larger and more complex permutations of protons, electrons, and neutrons, making up proteins, and cells, and organs. We were the matter and energy created by the interaction of these things in large groups.
But even the purest scientist tended to imagined humanity was more. We imagined we were the apex of evolution and human consciousness was something greater than the sum of its parts. Moondust had no such illusions.
What did it all mean?
82. CHESTER
Days later, I still couldn’t forget what I saw when I used my university’s science lab to study that stuff the damned reporter gave me. Betsy thought I was being more moody than usual for no reason; she took to calling me “Professor Doom.” I chose not to correct the mistake in her comic-book reference. She probably had a point about the moodiness. But, I couldn’t tell her the cause. I only hoped time would help me forget, and I drank a lot of beer these days. This did little for my dough-boyish figure. But, I hoped that with enough consumption, the memories would get blurred.
I already gave the reporter what he wanted, namely a summary of my findings about the chemical makeup of the substance, not that I had anything conclusive to say. So there was really no point in my remembering any of this. I’d always been critical of willful ignorance until now, when I so needed its bliss. Instead, I learned I was the type of guy who—if a little green man jumped out from behind a tree and told me he came from a distant galaxy and wanted to be my friend—would walk away as quickly as possible and pretend it never happened. The occult might exist. But, it certainly didn’t need my attention.
It was another day at the university. I held office hours again, and I decided I needed something to distract me from the moondust problem while I waited for my ignoramus students to come barreling in to my office. So I went on Google news and read random articles from around the world. It helped. But, not that much.
83. HAROLD
“State your name, for the record.”
“I have no name.”
“Everyone has a name, genius.”
“I no longer do.”
“Are you trying to be uncooperative?”
“You haven’t told me why you arrested me. You ignore your own laws.”
“As long as you’re in the beautiful state of New York, they’re your laws too, buddy boy. Unless you’re a foreign dignitary. And by your smell, you ain’t.”
“Nevertheless. I am here without cause.”
“I’m a cop, I don’t like you, and I have suspicions. But, mostly it’s the stuff we found on you. I’m guessing anthrax?”
“It was not.”
“The lab will tell me soon enough.”
“So you say.”
“Last chance. What’s. Your. Name?”
“We are the messengers.”
“That’s not a name, genius. And what’s with the royal ‘we?’ You the king of Spain?”
“I have no name.”
“Anyone ever call you a broken record?”
“No. As I said, I am called the messenger, and I have no name.”
“And I’m going to call you a psych consult, you fruitcake. But, after you spill. If you cooperate, you may see the light of day again.”
“I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Genius, once again, you got caught handing out white powder on public streets. White powder. In what world is that not a crime? At best, it’s a public disturbance and believe me, other charges will stick, too. Since you’re gonna be here for a while anyway, why not just tell the truth? You expect me to believe you’re carrying talc? Either it’s a drug or it’s a poison. Okay, maybe I was wrong about it being Anthrax. I don’t know.
“What I do know, beyond a doubt, is that you’re up to no good. If you keep being uncooperative, then you could find yourself calling a very deep and dark hole home. So I suggest you play it straight.”
“I have been alerting people to the existence of God. We are the new church. This is beyond your jurisdiction.”
“Come again?”
“My powder is a holy substance, a miracle. It is a gateway to Heaven.”
“You are a total wacko.”
“One day, you will see.”
“Whatever. Let’s backtrack a bit. Tell me more about… you say you’re in a religious group?”
“We are legion.”
“Okay, yeah. You should know saying stuff like that’s going to move us in the wrong direction here. Now, I’m going to ask you, again. What’s this group called?”