Llewellyn gazes at me quizzically. “I just composed the first line of Ulysses,” I explain.

She looks thoughtful. “James Joyce. I can see it. Desert Trance is very stream of consciousness. Maybe like Joyce on acid.”

Not only that, I realize. “The books are structured alike, too. Eighteen tracks, eighteen episodes. A triad of protagonists made up of two of the author’s alter egos and his faithless love. Christ, I even had a Molly! Why didn’t I see it before?”

I did see it, though. I wasn’t the only one. “A Joycean masterpiece,” one reviewer had commented, noting the parallel. And I had had a fanciful conversation with Molly-my Molly, the model for the character in Desert Trance, where I had gone so far as to teasingly suggest that she was the reincarnation of Nora Barnacle, comparing her promiscuous ways and writer-groupie status with those of Joyce’s albatross-love.

She had, naturally, done me the same as Leopold Bloom-the very same day I closed the novel I had written her as a love-offering, breaking my heart and leaving me to muse on the peculiar ways life imitates art imitates life imitates art…

I never talked about the real Molly in interviews, and as far as I could tell, no one realized she was drawn from reality, without very much alteration at all. I passed the character’s name off as a symbol for Ecstasy,
the drug-molly is a slang term for pure MDMA, also called “molecule” to distinguish it from the adulterated pressed pills.

Everybody wants Molly.

She was, after all, the hottest thing that had ever happened to literature.

Twice.

Desert Trance now seems to be a somewhat inferior epic.

I can hardly regard it as my greatest work, with the lofty company of Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. Somehow my rave novel seems trivial by comparison.

On the other hand, thanks mostly to the interceding invention of the aforementioned personal computer, I had kicked it out it in a three-month orgy of psychedelic frenzy, instead of seven-to-seventeen year schedule my predecessor had kept. What this incarnation had apparently lost in quality and scope could be compensated by prolificity and comprehensibility.

I am, after all, a young man. I can fill a shelf in the time I have left.

Of course, I understand that I am not precisely “James Joyce,” just as a wrinkled octogenarian is not identical to the toddler of eight decades prior. Our gulf is even greater, having not one, but two interstices of amnesia between us. Rigorous Jesuit indoctrination has given way to secular Jewish indifference. Modernist literature has come and gone. Psychedelic drugs have become widely available. Somewhere along the way the bottle had been replaced by the bong.

Yet apparently some things stick, such as an ironic interest in reincarnation, a mania for innovative prose, a taste for untamable fireballs named-

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Llewellyn’s job is to sort and search these files, divining interconnections between them and leading the mouse pointer to the likeliest prospects. It is an inexact science, to say the least-but, with history to corroborate recollections of notable avatars, it is actually less so than, say, psychology, in which my past-life regression therapist holds a distinguished Ph.d.

I sit crosslegged with my back to the couch and throw myself into a mild trance, savoring each inflation and reduction of my chest, slowing time, until I reach that place between breaths. Emptying my mind, balancing
precariously on the crack of the Yin-Yang, the pinnacle of not-doing where striving momentarily ceases, and the body and soul are free from the interminable struggle to either engage the rich nourishment of air, the most fundamental good, or to extirpate the poisonous waste, the anti-air that embodies our most basic conception of evil.

Both are fiction; good is that which benefits us and evil that which is to our detriment. Plants have the opposite perspective on gases, water creatures still a different one. And hardly any ever consider the symmetrical duality of this seminal interaction with nature: ingesting life, expelling death.

In,

-Eternity-

Out.

Somewhere an angel is softly chanting mantras. “ ‘…either on the Bus or off the Bus…’” Llewellyn, reading key phrases from her notes.

No good. If I can consciously hear her, I’m not deeply enough under. The suggestions are intended for the subconscious. I’m thinking too much, and the problem will only compound as my lysergic-charged internal
monologue obsessively echoes every tangent. Meditation on acid is a superior achievement. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. I open my eyes.

Llewellyn stops reading. “Here, let’s try something else. Lay down.” I hear the rustling of her clothes as she rises and walks to the stereo, replacing the quiet ocean sounds I’d been barely hearing with something
like ambient trance.

“Focus on the music,” she advises. “It’s special.”

I know what she means-it’s spiked with subliminals-but try not to be aware of them, lest my attention undermine the suggestions. Relax.

Innnnn

–

ooooout.

darkness. the world is soft, wet, and free of discomfort. Life enters and death departs though the connection at the Center.

Between breaths.

alone in the universe but I don’t mind. It has always been thus.

there is only One.

the firmament quakes, and I am thrust into a new dimension: cold, and glaring. Pain; something assaulting my backside. I wail. What nightmare is this?

Rough surfaces abrade my untouched flesh. This new world, along with its other evils, is a desert.

I spit and gibber the fluid from my mouth. A new ether flows in.

With that first hit I am hooked.

Then, a disruption at the Center of things. The happy stuff is no longer flowing in. Omigod, they cut the Cord!

They-the Others. The inhabitants of this mad realm, who as part of some sinister design have forced me from paradise into what I can already see is a pretty shitty place.

Slappers of asses, clippers of cords. What other tortures do these beasts have in store?

I take my first step on all the lands of the Earth.

I utter my first word in all the languages of man.

I am educated in the fashion of every culture.

I lose my virginity to the entire world.

My hand is quivering, my eyesight poor. A hazy page before me.

Destiny. Best goddamned sentence I’ve written my whole life. I squint, to lovingly stare again at my handiwork.

The inelocutable modality of the visible…

“Holy shit!” I exclaim. “That explains a lot.”

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