How could this not be hurting my brain?

I am released from the bonds of flesh and rise to contemplate the cosmos from the vantage of a phantasm. From this angle, living and dead mingle indistinguishably in a vast network of information, every being but a node, transmitting data with material and spiritual connotations.

Distinctions, such as the notion of sentience, are an illusion, I can clearly see, a matter of perspective, a quality we assess by comparing with ourselves. There is nothing which does not possess it; it is a feature of the Whole and not of the parts, which, experiencing it, assume it to be their province alone.

The same is true of Life: every atom, every photon is charged with the Spirit. Star and crystal and tree and amoeba-every one thinks of itself as “me” and lives in a world inhabited by its own kind and lesser beings.

The Universe is the body and brain of God. Einstein was on a fool’s errand, seeking to understand the thoughts of God through physics. What he should have expected to find were the bodily functions and neurochemistry of the Deity.

Eternally exhausting the realm of infinite possibilities. Every piece in it’s place. Hologrammatic images cast in a fractal pattern. Like the hippie said, one person in a mirror funhouse.

What I think of as “me” is nothing more than one of these circuits, I realize. If “I” malfunction, the data will be rerouted along another path, one which will emerge naturally as a consequence of my passing, which will then be “me.”

This is nothing to fear.

“I” am hardly unfamiliar with this egoless state; the transformation is common behind the screen of several different drugs, even during sex and writing. Yet always it fades, and the grasping demon of desire reasserts its dominance in the physical realm, bringing a paradox: who experienced ego dissolution?

And of course that is the villain, lust: for food, for sex, for social intangibles, for our own bodies; Siddhartha called it out of the lineup over three thousand years ago, suggesting its complete obliteration and creating another of the paradoxes of which he was so fond, for how can anything be accomplished without the accompanying ambition to make it so, even when the goal is abolishing yearning itself?

If a tree falls in the forest, the other trees will hear.

And then I am beyond thought, beyond perception; I am a soap bubble carried on the waveform of the Universal Mind. “Time” is a silly memory, a game I once played to organize events. There is only Here, Now.

Somewhere a phone rings.

At first I think it a twisting of the music, a response to the new status of stasis; but the video-game sound effect I chose to signal incoming calls gets louder, until I think my head will split; I fumble the phone free of my jacket pocket with numb hands, and, in a process that seems to take forever, I press the Enter key and bring the phone apprehensively to my cheek.

“Hu-Hello.” My voice sounds alien, unfamiliar.

“Victor, it’s Llewellyn. Just got your message. What’s up?”

Up. A preposition. Refers to the gravity-induced delusion that an object may be higher than another. “I’m-I’m a little…stuck.”

Fortunately, she’s hip enough to know what I mean by this lingo.

“Killing the pain. Bad news at the doctor’s, huh?” she says, sympathetic but not surprised. “I’m coming right over.”

“No…” I protest weakly. “I won’t be able to answer the door.”

She laughs, a creepy sound when amplified by K-echo. “You forgot to lock it. I’ll let myself in.”

I don’t ask her how she knows this. “Come ahead, then.”

“Okay. See you soon.” She clicks off, to my immense relief.

Telephones and Ketamine definitely do not mix.

Be nice to see Llewellyn, though. Or, rather, six of her, with my K skip-vision in full force. I jack the volume on the remote control and return to Never-Never land, the timeless, spaceless void, with a downward flick of my eyelids.

I walk immediately into the kitchen, unceremoniously dumping my belongings on the counter. I locate a clean plate, set a pot of water to boil, and shed my jacket as I proceed to my bedroom to retrieve my stash.

I’m not about to tell where I hide my stuff; after all, you might come and rip me off, especially after I’ve bragged about the quality and variety of my collection. Worse, you could be an undercover narc. Suffice it to say, it is well concealed.

Less Japanese Red left than I thought; better save that for when the weaker stuff is gone, to overcome my tolerance. More Hydrochloride, on the other hand, than I recollected, at least a half V. I start with the Blue Anasket, primarily because it is the most plentiful, though “weak” isn’t really an accurate description. Blue Label is indicated for veterinary anesthesia for use on goats and larger mammals. In spite of recent gains, I am still somewhat smaller than a goat, so a vial should render me unintelligible for the next few hours. I crack the aluminum seal, unplug the rubber cork, and empty the tiny bottle onto the plate, adding just a few drops of vanilla extract for taste, and set it gingerly on the pot.

I activate my lighting system, consisting of strobes and “smart” lasers, which oscillate to the beat of the music, as well as liquid wax wall holograms, and a large-screen TV with a panoply of psychedelic DVD’s in the player. I select a two-hour program of computer-animated weirdness prepared by a friend to the hard-trance tracks of Astral Projection’s Another World. As an afterthought, I flip on the Jacuzzi, though by the time it sufficiently heats, I’ll probably be too fucked up to crawl into it.

Damn shame to be doing all this by myself. Ah, well, that’s what you get for being a player. Some days, no one else wants to play.

Razor blade. Mirror. Straw. Vick’s inhaler. A plastic bottle of water. A pack of clove cigarettes. Remove all sharp-edged furniture.

Check.

The pot is nearly bubbling over, so I turn the heat down a tad. The K has already begun to curdle. I rake it gently, mixing the solidifying portions into the liquid. Won’t be long now at all.

I go to the bathroom and use my electric nose hair trimmer, not for vanity but to clear a path, and run a few drops from the tap through each nostril to lubricate a vigorous noseblowing. I wrinkle my face at the greenish-brown slime on the tissue, dotted with black flecks of winnowed hair. Why must bodies produce so much…gross…gunk?

I watch the last whitish bubbles pop and flatten on the surface of the plate, then extinguish the burner and remove the plate with terrycloth oven mittens.

Not really needing anything like a full vial of K, not fresh out of the bag with no tolerance, I scrape about a third of the pale, plastic-like film from the plate to the mirror. The translucent crust readily converts to opaque white powder. I shuffle the pile into a neat rail.

I aim and shoot.

Bullseye. I throw my head back in pleasure/pain.

Half the line remains, but I am so overwhelmed by the power of what I’ve already had, that I decide to leave even that for later. How easily is grandiose ambition subsumed! How humbling, to be knocked upside by a fingernail length, not even a proper $20 bag. Why, back in the day…but there is no arguing with my spinning head and queasy gut.

I stumble to the recliner.

The world dissolves.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s a good reason for the interstitial amnesia?

Ever stop to consider that? That it might drive me mad to have a whole other avatar hung around my neck, hitchhiking, freeloading on a life which is rightfully mine?

I’m not gonna run around my whole life craving Armani and Porsche and other expensive foreign words, just so some flaky, gaudy hack can get another crack at the Game of Life. I’ve already metamorphed beyond recognition. Just like decadent thirty-year old playboy novelist Victor couldn’t have stood to be faced with cocky, idealistic Victor at fifteen, the whole Victor persona is a stranger to Amanda. Did you think the self-alienation would be mitigated across the veil of death? That’s why we forget, dipshit. No one should have to bear two lifetimes of shame. Fuck you, Victor! You’ve never meant anything but pain.

I’m just you, one spoke to the left on the Wheel, the ghost of your mistakes trying to get it right this time. I’m on your side, yo!

So why do I feel so manipulated when the voice in my head turns husky and uses big words I haven’t learned yet and tells me to gleefully accept our cohabitation, which is variously interpreted by myself and others as schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, or a grisly form of demonic possession? “You may as well just lay back and enjoy it, girl.” Am I a dead man housed in the lithe, firm body of a teenager, or am I that teenager being invaded by the spirit of that man? And the answer comes back: Mu.

Your question is stupid. Both. Neither. Something in between.

You are confused because you think time is a line.

Because of your delusion that there is a you or I. Try a different lens.

Try and see things my way. If we see things your way, it seems that we might fall apart before too long.

Beatles quotes boom through the dimension in my mind, holovision sugue to an alien nostalgia, transporting me to the world to before I was born, buses and cars rumbling noisily and anachronistically down the unbroken artery, and the hallucination brings with it the passion of hopes now dashed, of fears now groundless. The ineluctable flavor of the scene imbues me. I can almost smell the diesel.

That’s too much. Imagine, internal-combustion, energy-hogging, lethal accident-prone rubber-tire continuous surface-only motor cars!

Driving down the road, not in some museum! Yet in a way, the portrait of the impossible is part of a more meaningful home than the deserted rubbish heaps I see superimposed on the same scene in the present tense.

I can taste that day in my belly. Treacherous chilidogs. How could you stand to eat that shit, Victor? And sit here in my mind and tell me we’re the same!

And the old man in my head laughs, and I laugh, and our mirth spans the temporal plane and in the feedback loop that builds, I look across the chasm and know that he and I are one. Jill, the hospital, the Order, Carmen, even Sarah-the bitterness dissolves in the complete merging, as the girl accepts me and I accept the man. A lifetime of memories and lessons to ponder…but then I remember there is no time.

Disoriented in four dimensions, I hum the Order’s prescribed mantra for those moments of inconvenient “crossover vertigo,” which, ironically, I am acquainted with only because I remember it from my prior life as a man; as with a vaccine, the disease contains the remedy:

Where am I? Here.
What time is it? Now.
Who am I? I am the Light made flesh.
What is my duty? To be here and now, in this flesh, and keep my fucking head on straight!

~ )))0((( ~