by Alan Osi
Max ended the article this way:
There have, to date, been no neurological, psychological, or medical studies of the effects moondust on a human brain. The only lens available to study it is experiential. It is possible that the experiences reported by the users are complex hallucinations, although it is unheard of for the same hallucination to be experienced by multiple substance users at the same time, which did happen with moondust.
If the experiences it provides are real, moondust could not only rewrite the rules of science, but religion. Users experience being in the presence of a divine unlike any the world knows. One described it as “the sum-total of all consciousness, past, present, and future in the entire universe.” Others simply refer to it as, “The alien God.”
This is not the God written or spoken of in any of our major religions. All our deities are, to a degree, anthropomorphized: in words or actions, they express themselves in ways humans understand. They give us moral codes based upon seeming parental-style concern, they become angry, vengeful when we misbehave, and generally love us in the way our fathers and mothers did when we were small.
Whatever is experienced when taking moondust is not this Being, but something far more foreign, so beyond the human our minds cannot conceive. Therefore, it is hard to imagine of the moondust experience neatly integrating into any of our major religions, which all serve to give us a God to which we can relate. This is a recipe for cultural upheaval.
I expect this issue will be fully explored by journalists, scientists, clergy, and moondust users alike. Furious debates will arise, fights will break out, reckonings will be had, questions of what it means to be human, questions of identity, questions of religion and spirituality will be asked repeatedly, most likely never to be satisfactorily answered.
Once, I dreamed of having a role in these discussions. I imagined breaking this story and keeping a corner on the market, so that in all the myriad parsing of the various angles, nooks and crannies of moondust’s explosion into our collective consciousness, you would see my shining face speaking out of your television as a consummate expert.
But that was before I experienced it myself. Now, I am content having told the story of what happened to us. This has not been a journalistic retelling. I’m not sure journalism, as an idea or vocation, makes sense to me anymore. Observation without influence on the observed is impossible, and my attempts at doing so had a large deterministic impact on these events. In short, I was naïve.
Instead, I have attempted to record the events as honestly as possible, including my sizable impact on them. To give you, the reader, a sense of the unimaginable, the feeling of what happened to us, something so apart from our everyday experiences, so much larger than what we are, what we have been.
Where will it take us? How will this experience shift our lives, and in what direction? It is impossible for me to say.
Try this: imagine a supercomputer uploaded with human consciousness, hundreds of lives. Now imagine downloading it all, every thought from every life. Memories so vivid that the only thing differentiating theirs from yours is the body in which they occurred. Whole lives: thoughts, beliefs, scars. Warts and all.
How would that change you? Would it warp you? Would it make you a better person or would it cripple you? Would you quit drinking or drink to forget? Would you be haunted by the memories of other people, their tragedies and pains? Or, would you be buoyed by having lived other lives? Would you share in their triumphs or lament that now, located once again in your own life, those triumphs could never be yours? If you had access to a hundred sets of memories, full copies of a hundred lives, who would that make you? What would you become?
This question, for those of us who attended that fateful party, is not at all academic. This is a very real question, and one for which I do not yet have an answer. I expect time will help me sort out who I am now, how I have grown or shrunk, how to apply what I’ve learned, where I want to go. But, for now, I am left treading water, fighting to keep my head above a tidal wave of others’ memories.
There is one thing I was inspired to do. I apologized to Sonya, now my ex, whom I treated very poorly. I did so over voicemail, and she has not returned my call.
It ended there. After I finished I sat for a minute, just taking it in. The enormity of it all: Maxwell was right. The world would never be the same. While I was in the mix, trying to survive the situation, any concern I had about that took a backseat to the need not to have my face bashed in. But, now that it was over, I could look at what I’d done. It scared me a little.
Strange that I hadn’t really thought about this before. I’d spent most of the last two weeks with June, and we talked about what happened to us, sure. A lot, even. But, we talked only about what it meant to us, never about the implications. I think maybe June was saving me from that conversation, until I was ready.
June and I had a unique relationship of total intimacy; she and I, probably a first in the world. I know every couple who really loved each other kind of felt that way. But, in our case it was true. Because before we’d even gotten a chance to sleep together, we’d looked deeply into each other’s souls. I’d been her, and she’d been me. We truly merged, not in the cheesy sense bad love songs talk about. But, actually in real life. Who else could say that?
And on that night I’d fallen in love with her, a union of desire and true knowledge.
So we were giving it a shot. I couldn’t say what could happen, we both knew I hadn’t exactly been relationship material. But, this was something different: There would be no surprise ex-boyfriends, no unveiling of annoying habits, no sudden need to get this person out of my space and be alone, myself. My weaknesses and faults were known, as were hers. The only question was whether our bond could withstand time.
It didn’t hurt that the sex was incredible. She knew everything I liked. I knew the spots on her body connecting her with the ocean or the moon. It was like we combined the best parts of the falling-in-love phase with the having-been-together-twenty-years phase. We were lucky.
June finished with her shower, and dried her hair while I sat here, thinking about her, about moondust, and the world. She came out of the bathroom wearing one of my T-shirts, with her makeup done, and her hair dry, looking fresh and striking and gorgeous, like magic or faith or happiness. She saw the way I drank her in, and her head tilted in curiosity.
“You okay, babe?” she asked.
“Max’s article posted this morning, on some website. I just finished it.”
“Oh,” she said, and came over to the bed. “How is it?”
“See for yourself.” I handed her the laptop.
153. JUNE
I read the article Percival gave me, by the reporter, Max. I knew of Max from when we all became one thing on moondust, that absolutely magical experience from which none of us completely recovered. Max had been outside the party, fall-down drunk, and had somehow been sucked into what happened to us. We never met face to face.
Percival took a shower while I read. I found it interesting, but necessarily disappointing in that it contained no new information. I already knew all the facts, after all, and most of Max’s conclusions mirrored those I came to myself. I had only one question, a big one, and Max didn’t address it at all.
Mickey Percival took his turn in the shower, and was still in the bathroom when I finished reading. Mickey Percival wasn’t his official name, just what I liked to call him. Mickey was his real name, Percival was the one he’d chosen. Both kind of fit. But, when forced to choose, I preferred Mickey.
I got up off the bed and got dressed, thinking about my one big question until he came out of the shower. And by the time he finished, my plan was formed.
“What did you think?” said Mickey.
“I think the cat is out of the bag,” I said. “That’s what you wanted.” Then, because of the look on his face, I added, “Isn’t it?”
“It was what I wanted, yeah. But, now…”
“But no
w, the world will change, and you don’t know how. And you feel responsible.”
“I do,” he said.
I said, “Well, that kind of brings me to something I was thinking about. Someone gave this stuff to you. And someone gave it to that other guy who was handing it out, the one who called himself the messenger. Whoever gave the stuff to you probably gave it to him too. That guy caused this, the one who found you while you were all tripping and handed you a bag of moondust that may as well have been a loaded gun.”
I let that sink in for a second. Mickey Percival sat down on the bed, thinking about it. Then I said, “I want to know why he did it, who he was. Don’t you?”
“It’s not like we can go ask him. I don’t even know what he looked like.”
“I have an idea. Moondust.”
He looked at me quizzically.
“Hear me out,” I said.
154. PERCIVAL
June told me that wherever we had gone that night was beyond space and time. That made sense to me: It definitely had existed on another plane of reality.
If it was beyond space and time, then the being we all became when we merged was still out there. Even though for us it happened weeks ago. We may still be able to reach it.
It had saved Vonnie, and probably Max, who was close to alcohol poisoning. Vonnie survived an OD without medical attention, and this was a miracle. We all had vague memories of the united reaching out to her, across unimaginable distances, doing something to her body.
So, said June, what if we could tap into it again, that power? What if we took moondust with the intention of seeing from the perspective of the person who had given the stuff to Hailey, Mark, and me? It had saved Vonnie’s life, so couldn’t it direct our moondust ride toward the person we wanted to experience?
I did want to know. So much had happened. But I didn’t understand why, and I felt the lack. So I agreed. It might not work. But trying was harmless, although I didn’t take moondust anymore.
Relapse didn’t worry me, I didn’t rule out taking it in the future. But I felt as if I’d been stargazing, when suddenly the telescope I used pulled me into itself and, mimicking a cannon, had shot me into a deep space.
Now I was back on the ground again, and I never wanted to see another telescope. I wasn’t even sure if I was ready to look up yet.
But June urged me on, and I did want to know. So I said, “Okay.”
I found my last baggie of moondust in the back of my desk’s bottom drawer, went over to the couch, sat down, and opened it. June was already sitting, and I sighed, getting myself ready to be shot into the stars again.
I grabbed a bit of moondust and pinched it tight, and handed the baggie to June. I held my pinch above my eye, waiting for June so we could drop it together.
She wanted us to do it at the same instant, so she counted down.
At zero, I rubbed my fingers together, to release it into my eyeball.
That bitter sting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Osi brings vivid images and characters to life through the lens of an edgy urban-based literary style. He weaves his insights for what makes people tick together with their yearning to know the unknowable. This is his first novel. Alan is enjoying bachelorhood and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Timothy Staveteig, Paul Huckelberry, Anita Howard, Donielle Howard, Elizabeth Greenwood, and Brandy Psychopath Unicorn Ice-cream Princess.