“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.
No comments:
Post a Comment