Chapter 36

Liam Stump was gone. The lesbians had all twisted themselves taller, reached their arms up towards the diamond sky, grown leaves and branches sticky with sap. 

“Come on,” Randy said. 

He was leading Gavin down a dark forest path. The trees swayed and moaned in pleasure.  The wind spoke in voices, calling him by name.

Gav-in.

Gav-in.

What do you see?

Randy floated ahead of him, like all the thorns and branches and thick ropey roots sticking up out of the ground weren’t bothering him at all.  Gavin was stumbling, falling, brushing leaves and sap and spider webs off his face.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

Ga-vin.

What do you see?

Tell me what you see.

Randy turned, still gliding, frowned a frown that wasn’t his.  “I think that’s Rona,” he said.

Gavin’s foot caught on something, his knees hit soft mud, his face fell into a pool of sticky fluid that felt like it went downward forever.  He swam down into it, flipped over—hard to do, with the liquid so thick—kicked his way up to the surface.

Rona. What was she doing here?

“You must really be scared to talk to her,” Randy said, as Gavin’s head emerged.  “All these branches.”

Gavin braced his hands on the side of the puddle, pulled his body free from the goo, thwack. Up ahead, there was a lot of fuzzy noise and something glowing. Brighter, brighter, louder, roaring in Gavin’s ears and blowing the branches back.  He walked towards it, right into the center of it.  Randy wasn’t there anymore. Just Gavin and the roaring brightness and the branches slapping his face as he struggled to move forward, into it, with heavy, lunging steps.  

The brightness was so sharp that he closed his eyes against it, covered his face.  Step. Step. Don’t look, don’t think, just walk and listen for the voice past the rushing loudness.

There it was.

Ga—

vin.

His eyes opened, and he was in a room.  It was bright, still, but the brightness had distributed itself across the painted walls, the high domed ceiling, every electric inch glowing and humming.  The trees were still there, crowding against each other, twisting around and in on themselves like pole dancers through a kaleidoscope.

Rona was up in the branches, a wise owl watching him.  He wanted to tell her something, something interesting to make her want to stay and talk to him.

“I saw Liam Stump.”

She nodded, that makes sense.  She was high above him, but he felt like he was falling right into her eyes. 

“He said. Um.” Her eyes. deep, violet, dark and still. All of her was purple, her pale skin, her dark hair falling over her shoulders, the shadowy hollows of her neck. What was it Liam Stump said?

“He said.”  He really wanted to tell her.  She was so beautiful up on her perch, feathers rustling from the movements of the tree, the gyrations of branches around her.  He needed to give her something, a gift. This was the only thing he had to offer.

Think. His mind had turned all external, stuck in the dancing of trees.  He couldn’t control it.  But it has to be in here, somewhere. He checked the trees, the dirt, the tall arched roof.  Ah, there it was!  Written in squiggles and symbols across the ceiling, but he could read this language.  It must have been one of those codes he learned at summer camp.

“I cannot fall apart.  That’s what he said.”

Rona nodded. Of course.

“No. I don’t get it.”

“You cannot fall apart,” Rona said.

“But he made me fall apart.  Look.”

He pointed at his chest. On the left side, there was a murky patch, a body-fog where you could see his anatomy had been disrupted.

“He scratched holes in my heart.  He licked pieces of it off his fingernails.”

Rona’s eyes spread wide, big, purple eyes that could see right into his mind.  Since his mind was outside of him, written across the dome behind and overhead, it wasn’t hard to see.

“Yeah, you totally didn’t get it,” Rona said.

“I know,” Gavin said.  “What does it mean?”

She stretched her arms over her head, making rainbows with her fingertips, yawned a beautiful, sleepy yawn.

“You can’t fall apart because you’re not one thing. You don’t have a border.”

Don’t have a border?  Then what was his skin? He looked down at his hand, wiggled it, snaked it around in an S.  Color bled out from his flesh into the air around his fingers, traced a rippling path wherever his hand had been.

“But I think I usually do,” he said.

“No,” Rona said.  “You’re porous.  When you breathe, you change molecules with the air.  When you move, you shed your skin and hair into the dirt.”

She stretched, grew, blurred into the tree that held her. It wrapped its arms around her and they became her arms, her leaves.

“Then I am falling apart,” Gavin said.

“It’s like water.” Her voice was getting softer around the edges, blending into the roar of noise circling into the dome above them. “Water can’t fall apart into water.  There is no you to fall apart.”

Of course there’s a me.

He could feel it, the border where he hit the air around him. Soft skin, scratched heart, fingertips, leaves, branches.  He looked down at his body: bark, breasts, feathers, blood, oxygen.  Rona’s body, a towering maple, a moving, breathing tree, an alien being, Randy Ledbetter on his throne.

Don’t hold on so tight. Rona’s voice, echoing from the ceiling, the sky, his own body.  You can’t lose yourself it said. There’s no yourself to lose.  

We are all part of the same big thing.

He could feel their molecules mingling, entwining, water droplets in space, carbon, air.  Atoms, electrons.  His electrons, hers, sparks of electricity, the unknown thing that made them alive.  The soup of their bodies, the ecosystems and universes that lived inside of them, that traveled in and out.

Gavin. 

The voice echoed in every molecule across the giant room, the ones in him and the ones out of him and the ones in between. Ga-vin.

The ceiling was spreading, receding at a thousand miles an hour, becoming the sky.  Becoming a grid of darkness and stars, snowflakes and flowers, moving backwards, becoming new and different stars, becoming complicated flowers with stars for centers.

The flowers spread like antique wallpaper across the ceiling of Dean’s room. Flowers on the purple batik, the walls, bookshelves, ivy.  Across Gavin’s body. It lay on the mattress, but he couldn’t figure out how to get into it.

Wiggle your fingers. That always seemed to help, whenever he had lost his body. Wiggle. Wig-gle.  There they were, his fingers, his arms and feet and stomach.  He held his hand up over his face, watched the flower patterns spreading over it, watched them appear and disappear and regroup.  Tried to pin them still with his gaze, but it didn’t work.

Rona was leaning over him, touching his shoulder.  Her hair was tangled, cheeks flushed, eyes drowsy but wide, a little worried. She was touching his shoulder, shaking him the tiniest bit.  Sending sparks of electricity down below his belly button.  

“Gavin,” she said.  “Tell me what you see.”

<Chapter 35

Chapter 37>

Chapter 35

Behind Randy there was a lesbian orgy.

It was six lesbians. No maybe four. All greased and shimmery-skinned. Seven? Of course Gavin wouldn’t have known they were lesbians except they were all women, writhing together in a naked pile, licking each other’s nipples and vaginas.

“That’s not real,” Randy said, stroking his fire-beard. “It’s coming from your unconscious.”

Gavin didn’t believe him, exactly.  It looked real, like it was right in front of him.  He was pretty sure he could walk right up to those lesbians, all four or seven of them, and touch their sweaty, undulating buttocks.  But he didn’t want to argue with Randy.  

Randy turned, crossed his thick arms, watched the women fucking each other with giant glowing dildos like light sabers. He let out a satisfied kind of chortle.  

“So, you don’t enjoy this.”

It wasn’t really a question, but Gavin nodded. Understatement of the year. He hated it.  All those hungry vaginas and giant beach ball breasts, so much squirming and bouncing.  And the part he hated most was how horny it made him, in a scary way like getting an erection from walking past a prostitute.

“Your unconscious is kind of a mess,” Randy said.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.  It doesn’t bother me. Just remember: this is a world of your own making.”  He stood watching the orgy, purring a bit, his edges blurring and fuzzing out and then regrouping. “I mean, the other one is, too, of course. But not in such a literal way.”

He turned to face Gavin. Then he sat down in a giant sparkling chair like a throne.

“People are going to tell you that this is an experience of another dimension or some kind of interplanetary communication.”

Interplanetary communication. It wasn’t the kind of phrase Gavin normally used, but when Randy said it, it sounded like the exactly completely perfect expression to describe what was happening. Interplanetary communication. Yes.

“Well, it’s not,” Randy said.  “What a bunch of horseshit.”

He shifted around on the chair, settled himself in a nest of puffy jackets and blankets whose colors reflected the burning reds and purples from the orgy in front of him.

“Can I sit on your lap?” Gavin asked.

“That’s fine.”  He pulled one especially puffy blanket from the pile, straightened it out, spread it neatly across his lap. “Come on up.”

It was more complicated than Gavin would have thought, a long climb involving lots of tricky handholds and hoisting himself up onto ornate ledges.  But the top was so worth it. He sank into the puffy safeness of the blankets and Randy’s broad arms and jolly round stomach, curled himself up like a kitten.

“This is nice.”

“You know.”  Randy was looking down at him like a kindly giant.  “Eventually you need to face your fears.”

Gavin had been worried he’d say something like that.  It was like Randy Ledbetter could read his mind.

“It’s part of being a man,” Randy said.  “Not a child. You do want to be a man, don’t you?”

Gavin looked down from the high perch at the writhing mass of bodies below.  The orgy had grown in size, grown a lot, enough lesbians to fill a plaza.  All naked and beautiful and mounting each other like rutting antelopes. Okay, maybe.  Maybe he could, if not enjoy it, at least appreciate how someone might find it beautiful, or interesting at the very least.  He just needed to control his fear.

“I do want to be a man,” Gavin said.

“Of course you do.  Let’s go.” Randy bundled him up like a sleeping baby in his arms, and they glided down, crackling like static through the air, right into the center of the orgy.

There they were, all around, waving their electric dildos over their heads like samurai swords.  He could smell the heat rising from their bodies, feel it on his face. Mostly they didn’t look at him.  They were too busy satisfying each other in ways that far superseded his own ability to give or even receive pleasure.  But their voices murmured insults at him, Just so we’re on the same page, they murmured and buzzed, we don’t want to fuck you. Voices rising like a fire around him, don’t want to fuck you, don’t want to fuck you!!!

“Calm yourself!” Randy said.

That’s right.  Gavin was freaking out.   He needed to slow his heart.  Slow.

Slower.

His heart.

Wow.

“Too slow,” Randy said.  “Bring it back up.”

And he did, he could do that.  Just bring it back up, control his own heartbeat.  Slower.  Okay, faster.

“Stop fucking around,” Randy said.  “I need to introduce you to somebody.”

One of the lesbians climbed out of the pile, naked, pale, long hair tangled and sticky, face a little red and scratched from all the friction. Muscles slack from repeated straining and release.

She looked right at Gavin, met his gaze with her own weary, perceptive eyes, that haunted stare.  He would recognize it anywhere.

It was Liam Stump.

Sure, it didn’t look much like Liam Stump on the backs of books, on the top of the Liam Stump Society website.  That wise man with the hollow cheeks and bushy white brows, thin Irish lips pursed, a lifetime of bitter disappointment.  But of course he hadn’t always been that old man.  Gavin looked at the person in front of him, full breasts, slender waste, thighs slick from fornication.

This must be how Liam Stump looked as a young lesbian.

She reached out her hands, clasped them around Gavin’s hands.  They were soft, sweaty, intelligent and human. When she looked at Gavin, it was like the storm settled around them, became a sweet, quiet rain.

“I can tell you what it all means,” she said.

“Please tell me what it means, Liam Stump.” His voice was an echo through raindrops.  He wondered if she could hear him, or whether he was invisible like a ghost.

She blushed flower red, her cheeks and breasts and belly and knees.  “A name is such a crass thing,” she said.  “Listen, here it is: you cannot fall apart.”

I cannot fall apart.

“Like this.” She reached her hand towards him, touched the fuzz on his chest, the skin, the blood vessels, the layer of fat, the ropey pectoral muscles, the chalky ribs. She wrapped her fingers around his heart, squeezed it hard. Poked her fingers into his atria and ventricles, wiggled them like worms in sand.

Liam Stump has come to kill me.  It was only fitting it would all end this way.  His heart smashed by Liam Stump, the lesbian. Of course he should have seen this coming, known it years ago.

But she pulled her hand out, dissolved through him, pulled it out bloody and pulsing with his life force.  He wasn’t dead, yet, as far as he could tell. Everything felt the same as before.

She held her hand in front of his face.  His blood coagulated in the lines of her palm. Chunks of heart muscle were stuck in her fingernails. 

“Do you understand?” she asked.  She cleaned her nails with her teeth, chewed thoughtfully on his tissues, swallowed. “You cannot fall apart. That’s what I came to tell you.”

She stuck a finger in his mouth.  With her body so close, taste and smell blended together,  the iron of his own blood, the salt of her skin, the sweetness of her sweat, the softness of her hair.  

“Are you following all this?” Liam Stump asked.  She moved her finger in his mouth, stroked his tonsils, tickled his uvula. “You cannot fall apart. It’s very important that you understand.” 

Gavin nodded, but he didn’t understand. Not at all. 

<Chapter 34

Chapter 36> 

Chapter 34

“Oh, no.”  Rona grabbed Gavin’s arm, protective, a girlfriend move.  “Gavin’s not gonna do DMT.”

He wanted to be annoyed that she kept touching him, the hopeful shiver it sent up towards his heart.  But then there was Dean, filling the doorway all muscly and half-naked.  Gavin liked the idea of being touched by Rona in front of him.

“It’s fine.”  He tried to sound relaxed. Which he was.  He was fine. Except he was sitting so, so still, scared to breathe, like Rona’s hand was a kitten asleep on his elbow.  “I want to do it.”

She pulled her hand back and rolled her eyes, like she was the adult and he was the child instead of the other way around.  “Have you ever even, like, smoked weed before?” 

Hadn’t everybody? What a stupid question.  

“Of course I’ve smoked weed.” 

Not for a long time, though.  Not since his friends had been grown up enough to buy good weed, the kind that made him bump into walls and doorframes as he stumbled to the bathroom, locked himself in, drank ten cups of warm water and peed twenty times and napped in the bathtub, ignoring all the banging and yelling, until it wore off enough for him to go back out and be at least sort of normal.

Maybe Rona was right.

“You should totally try it,” Sinder said.  He was sitting on his heels on the other side of Rona, grinning and bouncing, like he was about to show Gavin some really sweet girl-on-girl porn that Gavin would totally hate.

“You freaked out in an isolation tank,” Rona said.  She shrugged: sorry but it’s true. 

Gavin was starting to get that dread feeling, turning in your exams, asking a girl out, that sick stomach feeling.  He hated that feeling.  He was never going to be able to go through with this if they didn’t all just shut up already.

Dean went over to his desk in the corner, put down the pipe, picked up his laptop.  He sat down with it on the mattress, right next to Gavin, so close their thighs were touching.  It was like how you would sit next to a girl you were trying to sleep with. Four people is too many for one mattress. He smelled like some kind of spicy oil, cloves maybe. Gavin could see the meaty thigh muscle where his kaftan was riding up. Put on some pants.  He turned to his other side, towards Rona, to see if she was checking out Dean’s leg, maybe trying to see up his skirt.  But she was looking at Gavin, frowning, a more-than-usual frown.

“Here, check this out,” Dean said.  The computer was open on his bare knee.  He typed, squinted at the screen, clicked a few times.  He put his arm around Gavin’s shoulder, like you’d do to your best buddy out at the bar when you were telling everyone how much I love this guy, and handed him the laptop. “Some info.” 

Demonica, the website was called, and below that, a title for the page. DMT: The Cosmic Voyage.  Along the sides of the screen there were glowing blue shapes, twisted, with wings and arms and claws.  No heads or faces.

“The description on that site is pretty good,” Dean said.  “So you’ll know what you’re getting into.”

Actually Gavin didn’t want to know what he was getting into.  But he scrolled down the screen, all polite, while Dean stretched out on the mattress and put his fucking head in Rona’s lap. Seriously.  Right in her fucking lap, like she was some kind of fucking buckwheat pillow he bought at the Tibetan store.

Sinder didn’t seem to care.  He leaned towards Gavin and looked at the computer like it was way more interesting than whatever was going with Dean’s head and Rona’s upper thighs. Gavin tried to read what was on the screen.  It was a blur of phrases and blue demons.  The most powerful hallucinogen known to man.  Shamanistic ritual.  Edges of the universe. Life-transforming visions. 

Rona’s leg, Dean’s face, Rona’s crotch. She didn’t seem to notice, was staring up at the purple cloth on the ceiling, still frowning.

Sinder pointed a skinny finger at a bullet point on the screen.  “Hey, look.”  

The intensity will be overwhelming. You must try not to be amazed. 

“That’s right,” Sinder said. He was nodding so hard it made the mattress vibrate. “That’s totally what it’s like.” 

It’s like “try not to be amazed”?  That’s where Sinder was pointing.  Right at that sentence, as though it made sense.

“Okay.”  Gavin flipped the laptop shut, put it on the floor next to the mattress.  He couldn’t handle any more preparation. “I’m ready.”

He mostly said it so they could get this thing going, get it over with, no more research and debate or he was going to possibly throw up from nerves.  But it also got Dean up and out of Rona’s lap.

“All right! The man has made an informed decision.” Dean was at the desk, gathering up the pipe, a lighter, a small bag of powder.  He brought it all over to the bed on a silver tray with handles, like you’d use for a tea party.

“Ladies first?” Dean kneeled on the mattress and packed yellowish chunks of powder into a hole in the pipe.  It looked puffier than the metal pipes Gavin had smoked from in the past, a cartoon of a pipe, transparent glass with smoky swirls running through it.  They might have been purple swirls, or maybe they just looked purple under the light through the batik fabric on the ceiling.

Rona shook her head. “I’ll go after Gavin.”

“Okay, cool. Gavin first.” Dean was messing with the pipe, using a little stick to push the powder farther in. “Oh, wait.  Water.”  

He jumped up from the mattress, ran out of the room. No one said anything while he was gone. What was there to say in front of a pipe, a lighter, a bag of chunky yellow powder. No sound except the uneven drone of electronic music drifting in from the living room. Sinder was grinning, eyes big, like a teenage boy at a strip club or something.  Rona was frowning hard.  They both looked kind of purple.

Dean came back with a plastic bottle and put it on the tray next to everything else.  “Now we’re ready.”  He picked up the lighter, a crappy orange one you’d buy at a gas station, and flicked his thumb over it a couple of times until he got a small blue flame.  He didn’t light the pipe, just held the lighter under the bottom of it until the glass filled with swirls of white smoke. When it got really good and smoky, he passed it to Gavin.

“Take it in slow and hold it in as long as you can.”

So this was it. All that smoke, circling in lavender swirls through the clear glass.  The chunkada-chunk of bass through the wall.  It was just like he would have imagined, but no lava lamp or anything.  More like one of those after-school specials about peer pressure.

He put the opening of the pipe to his lips and sucked out as much smoke as he could fit into one breath. It tasted like a toxic waste disaster. Like an oil slick on fire. It tasted like burning tires inside your trachea.

He was choking. Rona’s hand on his arm again, on his back.

“Yeah, the smoke’s nasty,” Dean said, passing the water bottle. “But you read that on the website.”

Gavin couldn’t stop coughing.  He drank more water, all the water, turned the bottle upside down.  Where was the pipe? The walls were buzzing and turning into diamonds, grouping into octagons, breaking back into diamonds. 

Something something another toke said Dean. 

Glass against his lips, more smoke, not so bad this time. 

Yeah good hold it said Dean Rona Sinder one of them he wasn’t sure.  What was the difference?  He could almost remember it. Names matched with people and you usually knew who was who.

What was…the difference…between people…again? 

Noise like the ocean surrounded him, loud, irresistible vibration loud, shaking his whole body.  So loud it was distorting the fabric of the air around him, fuzzing everything out like TV static.  Those people with those names got blurred into the fuzz, became shifting patterns in the atmosphere.  He was travelling into patterns, dissolving at his edges, fast-forwarding past normal time, upwards to where time was only a pattern of diamonds under your feet.

Then, bump. He was in a place.  It was a place made of patterns, but they locked together, loosely and ever-changing, to make a temporary chamber for his consciousness.  And at intervals the patterns clustered into dense centers that were actually beings, some kind of pattern-beings with loose borders. They had formed in this chamber to bestow him with gifts of knowledge.

One of the beings came closer to him.  It didn’t have a face or hands or a body.  It greetedGavin through vibrations in the patterns.  It was the most amazing thing he had ever seen.

The being stretched and expanded and looped in on itself, and then it grew a face. It was a welcoming face, with red cheeks and a fire-beard.  Its eyes twinkled, but literally, twinkled with shifting pixels of arranged and re-arranged light.

Gavin was made to understand that, in order to comfort him during their time together in this chamber, the celestial pattern being had taken the form of Randy Ledbetter.  Randy Ledbetter smiling, blinking, glowing like he was a beam of pure solar energy.

“Try not to be amazed,” Randy said. 

<Chapter 33

Chapter 35>