Sherri resists me, though, when I try to pull her closer.
“Not now,” she says. “Kevin could come back at any time.”
“Does that matter?”
“Yes. I'm not that coked up. Not yet.”
“So what do you want to do while weâ”
But I never get to finish that sentence because the front door barges open, and here comes David carrying a rolled paper bag.
“The asshole just a got a bunch of new shit,” he explains to us.
Sherri smiles. “This is going to be so much fun!”
I feel like the odd man out here, like a third wheel who stumbled into all this by accident. Neither of these dudes probably want me here, and Sherri seems flaky enough to change her mind anytime.
But still, somehow, everything is good.
And apparently it's about to get even better.
TWENTY-THREE
W
e're sitting in a makeshift square on the floor. A white plastic plate sits before us, and on this plate lie a pile mushrooms. I don't know what I expected them to look like, but this isn't it. They look like a pile of dead weeds and grass.
There are some big chunks and a lot of small ones. They're kind of beige-brown and don't smell particularly good.
On another plate stands a jar of honey surrounded by folds of ginger. Each of us has poured a glass of orange juice.
“They won't taste very good,” Sherri says. “If you don't have a strong stomach they can be difficult to keep down.”
David divides the various pieces.
“Thomas, this is a little less than an eighth. You'll probably trip pretty hard since this is your first time. If I were you, I'd dip the pieces in honey so you don't taste them going down. You can also try some ginger to keep your stomach from freaking out.”
The ginger is soaking in lemon juice, just so you know. This is supposed to help with something.
“You think there would be a better way to do this,” I say, and they all look at me like I couldn't have said anything dumber had I tried.
“Anyway, Thomas. You can also wash it all down with some orange juice, which is supposed to help the trip along.”
“Are we all going to do it?” I ask.
“I'm just going to eat a little,” Kevin says. “Someone has to be responsible in this group.”
It's weird to look at these three and not imagine myself as the most responsible among us. But that's the whole point, right? That's the reason I'm here. To do something different. Right?
I pick up one of my pieces. It's dry and papery. I hold it up to my nose, and my first instinct is to not put it in my mouth.
“Go ahead,” Sherri says. “You'll love it. I promise.”
I dip the piece in honey until it is completely coated. I pop the whole thing in my mouth and try not to chew. I can barely taste anything other than honey. Maybe a hint of sunflower seed shells, but that's it. The others are eating theirs, too, and after a moment I grab more of my pieces and dip them in honey. I keep eating them this way until my portion is gone. My stomach doesn't seem offended, but just in case, I use a fork to fish a chunk of ginger out of the lemon juice and eat it. This tastes worse than the honey-covered mushrooms did.
“Now you wait,” Sherri says, and eats the rest of her share.
Kevin and David both work on their mushroom pieces as well, and pretty soon we're all done, sitting around, waiting. My stomach still grumbles a little but otherwise the whole event was rather humdrum.
I mean, this is totally normal, right? Two days ago I saw something strange in a church, and since that time I've lost my job, my wife, and now I'm sitting on a stranger's living room floor, eating magic mushrooms. The funny thing is, until this week, my life wasn't really informed by drama. Yes, my mother was an alcoholic and occasionally abusive. My dad cheated on her and she tried to kill him with a broken beer bottle. But she didn't try that hard. One day my dad's girlfriend called her, guilt-ridden, crying, and afterwards my mom went out on the porch and drank too many beers. She always drank on the porch, under the lazy helicopter spin of the ceiling fan, listening to the drone of the air conditioner and the pool pump, staring into space. When my dad got home she threw a beer bottle at him and then pretended to attack him with one of the shards. But she quickly gave up and collapsed into his arms, sobbing.
Sherri looks up at me, smiling faintly, and I realize again how blue her eyes are. Blue eyes like Gloria's, like the orb I saw in church on Sunday. They are glowing, her eyes, glowing and spinning. Or so it seems. Like they are tiny blue planets rotating on their axis (axes? ak-seez?).
“Thomas?” Sherri asks. “What do you see?”
She must be asking me this because of the little people I see in those cold blue pools of her eyes. Little Roman men fighting battles with swords and helmets and shields, riding on chariots andâ¦and then all this disappears and I see two FBI agents in a brown sedan, following me on the freeway. I see them in a police station, interrogating me. I see them handcuffing me in a house in Berkeley, California. I realize I have seen these law enforcement officers many times. Many, many times. Their names are Scruggs and Smith, and they have followed me for as long as I can remember. They will follow me for as long as I can imagine. They inhabit a wheel of sorts, a wheel that could be the world, a wheel of all possible worlds.
Sherri's face is angelic. Her skin is pearlescent, creamy marble. I swear if I reached out and touched it, it would feel like the smooth texture of a pearl, like a bathroom floor in the Bellagio. My head feels warm and electric, the way your tongue feels when you touch it with the leads of a nine-volt battery.
“You're tripping,” Sherri says. “Is it okay? Do you feel okay?”
“I feel great.”
“What do you see?”
“Everything.”
And I do.
Her body glows blue, like an aura almost, like the color of her eyes. It's very faint, but it's there. And it's crawling with something akin to noise, a random pixelization. The lamp and other lights in the room emit a steady stream of pixels, particles that glow like grains of electric sand. I know this is just an effect of the mushrooms. I am not really seeing the component particles of matter and energy around me. But the suggestion is very strong, and it sure
feels
like that's what I'm seeing.
I try to explain this to the three of them, and before I'm done, David is nodding and smiling.
“Sure, man. The universe is particles, flying around, bouncing off each other, vibrating. There really are only a few types of particles that make up all the matter and energy we can see. So it's not just a clichéâ¦everything really is connected. In a way we're all one. As far as the universe is concerned, there's not much difference between you and the air in front of you. Your body is made of higher density matter, more organization. But
you
, who
you
are, the concept of selfâ¦that's just a human construct.”
Everything is beautiful. From here I can see into the kitchen, the digital clock on the microwave, and those blue numbers are like artwork. I stare at them, transfixed. They seem to detach themselves from the microwave and begin to smear into the air, flaring out at the bottom, streaming into everything. My head feels like a football being inflated.
“More people should do this,” David says. “If they did, the world would be a better place.”
Sherri begins to giggle. At first it's just a random sound, a lonely spark of laughter, but then the sparks multiply, packed more and more densely until she nearly ignites, giggling and giggling like a school girl.
“It's good times like this,” David continues, “that make it obvious how fucked up everything is. Everything is backwards. Everyone always in a hurry, and for what? So we can sit still? Gotta get to work and sit in front of the computer. Gotta get home and sit in front of the TV. Hurry up and go to the movie, to the ballgame. It's all so wrong. Life is meant to be lived, man. Experienced. There's a whole universe of amazing shit out there, and half the people in this country think some crazy guy with a white beard made the world in seven days.”
“Dude,” Kevin says. “Don't start with this again. 'Shrooms are supposed to make you happy. Relax.”
It might interest you to know that both of their voices are saturated with reverb, as if they are conducting this conversation in a cathedral.
I can hear the ambient sounds of the room: the drone of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the ticking of a clock, David's fingers tapping on a small table beside the sofa. But all these sounds are all embedded in a larger metasound of static that has been rising since Sunday, that has become constant and unwavering.
In fact I can almost
see
the static, a panorama of black and white particles, across my entire field of vision, like what you might find on an old TV tuned into nothing. Imagine those black and white particles as a salt-and-pepper beard.
David says, “Stephen Hawking theorized a universe that is not eternal, but also possesses no creation event. It simply exists.”
“It must have come from somewhere,” Kevin says. “It must have a beginning.”
“Temporal human existence forms the context for your belief. The universe is under no obligation to obey your narrow worldview.”
If I look closely enough at the static I can see shapes. For instance what looks like a bed.
A possible human form lying beneath a stratum of covers.
Beside the bed perhaps a box of some kind. It may or may not house an electronic display.
And a man's face.
His faceâ
Obliterated by static. By uncertainty.
“So, Thomas,” Kevin says. “Let's say the entire world is an illusion. It's all a game. That would mean everyone is a part of it, but none of us can know that, because we can't see it from the outside.”
“Right,” I say.
“So who cares?”
“What?”
“If the whole world is a simulation, how is that any different than it if weren't a simulation?”
Some time passes while I mull this over.
“Actually,” David says. “He has a point. Everything you see, everything you know, all of it, everythingâ¦it's all filtered through your senses. Sight, sound, touch, smell, tasteâ¦these are the ways we know the world. We have no other ways to know anything. So whether it's all real or just bits and bytes being fed to you in a computer, it's all the same.”
“This is why we like Philip K. Dick,” Sherri says, still smiling but somehow stifling her giggles.
Kevin makes a sound of exasperation.
“Well,” she goes on, “Kevin likes arguing
against
Dick's work. He's not a big fan of Gnosticism.”
“I don't know what Gnosticism is.”
“It's the idea that our world is flawed,” David says, “because it was fashioned by a flawed creator. God as we think of him is not the one true, perfect God, but something less. We're all trapped in a material world of his creation. Dick called it the Black Iron Prison. We're all living in this prison, but none of us knows it.”
“It's a bullshit religion,” Kevin says. “It's like a conspiracy theory.”
David ignores him. “And the only way to break out of this prison is through gnosis, which is the Greek word for knowledge. In this case it means knowledge of the divine.”
“You should hear all the dumb stories and ideas that came out of this bullshit religion,” Kevin tells me. “I mean, if you're going to pick on Christianity, what makes Gnostics any different? You've got your Archons and your multi-level gods, like Sophia, or Yahweh the demiurge, who may or may not take the shape of a lion. How realistic does that sound? Does it hold water better than stories in the Bible?”
But I'm only partially listening to these politicians spin their arguments, because I'm thinking about the ants, how they suffered because of my imperfect design.
I say, “The
Ant Farm
game is like Gnosticism, isn't it?”
“It sure sounds like it,” David says. “Hell, it even grades the creator on his level of imperfection. But did it offer a way for the ants to communicate with you?”
“They could pray to me.”
“What kind of prayers?” Kevin asks.
I briefly explain the requests and concerns generated by my ants.
“That's not really gnosis,” David says. “Those simple requests, I mean. But it's pretty impressive the game could do that, though.”
Sherri asks me, “How did you find out about the game?”
“The guy who was with me earlier,” I say. “Dick.”
“His name is Dick? Like Philip K. Dick?”
“Funny, huh?”
“What did he think about all this?” she asks.
“Well, I told him a more complete story than I've told you guys.”
All three of them look up at me now.
“Something happened to me in church the other day.”
“What happened?” asks Kevin.
“I had a vision of some kind.”
“And?” Sherri prompts.
“It sounds stupid. You're going to think I imagined it.”
She doesn't answer this. None of them do. They all just sit there, looking at me. Waiting.
So I tell them about the blue orb in the church, the way it approached me and entered my forehead.
Sherri's smile has softened a little, and still no one says anything. It's very quiet, so quiet I realize I'm hearing music in my head again. A section of violins playing something discordant, something frightening.
“I freaked out and went to the bathroom. While I was standing at a urinal, some old guy walked up and used the one next to me. He spoke to me. He said I am a prisoner, that everything I know is a lie. And that I was being watched.”
“You didn't recognize him?” David asks.
“He looked familiar, like I've seen him somewhere before. But I have no idea where.”