Читать книгу Everything We Don't Know - Aaron Gilbreath - Страница 8
ОглавлениеWe reached the Canadian border at two a.m. with the PCP hidden in Dean’s insulin syringes and the weed buried in the peanut butter.
During the previous three weeks that July, Dean and I had driven my dad’s minivan from Phoenix up the Pacific Coast. Unshaven, studded with mosquito bites, and stinking of alder wood smoke, we hiked and camped in Redwood, Mt. Rainier, and Olympic national parks. There, far from humanity, we scaled precipitous sea stacks, touched orange sea stars in tide pools, and watched seals watch us from the breakers. While tripping on mushrooms near what was then the world’s tallest tree, I perched atop an enormous fallen redwood log whose upturned trunk stood ten feet off the ground and studied a deer browsing the tangled understory. When I slipped on the mossy bark coming down, I fell face-first into ferns. Dean crouched on a nearby log, snickering maniacally. “I am tripping so hard,” he said.
We were close friends, in our early twenties and halfway through college. This was precisely why we’d come: debauchery and comic misadventure. But also, the more time I spent outdoors, the more I realized that nature was more than scenic beauty and the physical challenges of rugged topography. As strange as it sounded even to me, being in wilderness awoke me to something woven into the fabric of the universe. The air in natural areas like Redwood National Park felt threaded by an enigmatic buzzing, not a measurable force like wind or gravity, but the nagging, low-frequency suggestion of scenery within the scenery, a secondary landscape. I told no one about this sensation other than Dean, and even then I struggled to describe it.
“It’s the sense that there is more to reality than what we see,” I kept saying during the trip. “That some meaning lurks behind the obvious phenomenological level.” Dean nodded and asked questions, but my explanations failed to clarify. “It’s like peripheral vision in the mind’s eye,” I explained, “out there on the cusp of perception. Like shadows. Rustling leaves.”
Hearing myself say this aloud, I feared it sounded nuts. Back in Phoenix, I’d sometimes wondered if thoughts like these signaled the onset of a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia. But when I stepped back into a moist old-growth forest, the sensation returned and dispelled my concern. This perception of a nonphysical component of the physical world was real. Was it God? Heaven? Parallel dimensions? Had I been gifted with the powers of a seer?
As a friend, Dean tolerated my incessant yammering. As a fellow outdoorsman, he was attuned enough to nature to entertain challenging cosmological possibilities. “I don’t believe in God per se,” he said. “I do believe that things have a spirit, a life force, if that makes sense.” His mom attended church every Sunday but didn’t raise him Catholic. Yet, he was adamant: “There is definitely a larger force in the universe. I just don’t know if it’s a Christian-type god.”
Whatever it was, I wanted a direct encounter with it. So when the people we were staying with in Vancouver came home with PCP on our last night in British Columbia, Dean and I bought some.
Twenty Canadian dollars got us two gelatin capsules of white powder. My friend Christie’s roommates sold it to us. They’d let us sleep for three nights in their white weathered bungalow. It had tilted front columns and a warped, creaky porch. They listened exclusively to techno music by day, hit after-hours clubs at night. Dean and I could do without the techno, but Vancouver was beautiful, our hosts friendly, and we didn’t want to leave. But with seven days to drive back to Phoenix and funds evaporating, we had no choice. We devised a plan. That night we would travel as far south of Bellingham, Washington as our weary bodies would allow and then sleep in the van in a hotel parking lot. We’d been doing this the whole trip to save money: sleep in the van, “shower” in gas station bathroom sinks, cook food on our camp stove. After three weeks on the road, we’d paid for only two motel rooms.
We bought the PCP after midnight and started the long drive south. The van’s wheel wells, spare tire, and carpeting seemed the most obvious hiding places. Dean figured the last place border agents would look was inside his insulin syringes. At a gas station along the highway, he removed the needles from two of them, placed the inch-long capsules at their tips, then slid the orange caps over the capsules. Positioned in the center of a bag among a hundred other syringes, chances of discovery seemed slim. It was genius. I reciprocated by scooping a space in the center of our peanut butter jar, stuffing the bag of weed inside and smoothing a lid of leguminous brown over top.
A type one diabetic, Dean tested his blood sugars every few hours and gave himself shots throughout the day. On hikes, he refrigerated the glass vials in a specially fitted ice pack which he carried in his blue daypack with the bag of syringes. We were walking down the vacant shore of Washington’s Olympic Coast one day, dark water lapping to our right, when he spotted a huge raven hunched over his daypack, picking through the spilled contents by our tent. At our approach, the bird leapt into flight with Dean’s only bag of syringes in its beak. Waving his arms and screaming profanities, Dean ran after him. Some twenty vertical feet up, the raven dropped the bag on the gravel, cawing as he went. We retrieved them unharmed.
Dean wasn’t scared of death. He’d accepted mortality while I was still playing with Star Wars figures. He had no choice. If his diabetes didn’t kill him in his youth, it would likely get him before he got old. The injection of insulin caused spikes in blood sugar levels that often led, more than the diabetes, to debilitating complications: blindness, kidney failure, heart disease, impotence, stroke, reduced circulation, numbness in extremities, infection, gangrene, amputation. Maybe that was why he wasn’t afraid of catching rattlesnakes. On weekends he scooped them up with hooked poles in the desert outside Phoenix and slipped them into gossamer nets to get a closer look. He once caught a Gila monster, North America’s only venomous lizard, with his bare hands; he pinned its head with four fingers so it couldn’t turn and bite him. Bad dates, boring weekends, living his whole life in Phoenix—those things worried Dean, not death.
The previous week on Mt. Rainier, I’d asked him if he thought death was the end or if something followed after. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m suspicious of heaven, but reincarnation seems possible. It’s an ancient tradition.” I nodded my head, staring into the forest.
I didn’t know what I believed. Some days I was a deist, others an atheist, most days an animist. My mom’s side of the family was Jewish. When I was a kid, Mom wanted me to appreciate the basic aspects of our heritage. So I attended a Jewish elementary school, and Mom and I lit the annual Chanukah candles, but she and I never went to synagogue, and I abandoned my bar mitzvah study halfway through. Age thirteen seemed too arbitrary a number to signify anything, and tradition didn’t require I know the English translation of the Hebrew I was supposed to recite. How could mindless repetition of a cryptic language make me “a man,” especially when the only hair on my body was a blonde peach fuzz? Clearly I had become spiritual by age eighteen, but what sort of spirituality wasn’t clear. I had no plans to practice yoga, or study Kabbalah, or read Buddhist texts. I knew only one thing: I needed a sign.
“God is a mystery,” my Grandma Silvia always said. “That was Einstein’s view. Maybe God is a man, and maybe a being, but to us down here, he’s first and foremost a mystery.” I didn’t want to be worrying about God on a decadent roadtrip, but I couldn’t help it. Wilderness made me think about design, which made me think about cosmology, which made me wonder if we were alone in the universe and if human existence had any purpose or not. Life and death were everywhere in the lush coastal forests. Young hemlocks grew from the soft innards of rotting tree trunks. Green shoots poked from the furry remains of decomposing animals. Death and its fertility were as in your face as trail-markers, and it all led back to questions concerning creation and meaning: why were we here? What would become of us when we were gone?
When I looked around, I found distressing potential answers: a soaring hawk carrying a wriggling snake in its claws; spawning salmon with tattered gray skin dying in streams after laying their eggs, and the way ravens and raccoons tugged at their flesh when the fish washed ashore. Was this the heartless universe that God fashioned for us? Part of me loathed any divinity who built us this way, able to question our own existence but access no answers, just carbon machines blind to our purpose, built to lay eggs, eat each other and die. It seemed cruel.
When the Peace Arch at the Canadian border came into view, Dean said, “Here goes nothing.” Darkness spilled like Alaskan crude around the brightly lit station, a darkness so thick it gummed the edges of my peripheral vision.
I checked my eyes in the mirror for redness, and wiped my palms on my shorts. Canadian and US flags flew side-by-side atop the arch’s crown, with the words “Children of a Common Mother” etched in the gray cement. A rattling in the van’s tired engine mixed with the drone of crickets, and I’d wondered about the condition of prisons that drug smugglers were sent to, and whether we’d pay bail in American or Canadian currency. Dean cleared his throat.
The agent rattled off questions with a surprising indifference:
“Where are you coming from?”
“What was the purpose of your trip?”
“What is your destination?”
They seemed the sort of questions a spiritual leader would pose, which made me want to ask him the same things. I also wanted to blurt: that’s it? All that preparation, the digging and stashing and answers Dean and I had rehearsed, for that? The agent didn’t request ID. He didn’t look in the van, the interior of which was stacked floor-to-ceiling with plastic bins full of clothes, canned food, river rocks, and camping gear. He simply stared puffy-eyed and dangled his arms out the station window, then he said, “Safe trip guys.” We were the only car in line.
Sometime in my late teens, I’d started my wondering. All our struggles, accomplishments, heartbreak—for what? What was the point? I didn’t understand where we as human beings came from, where we were going or why we were here. Where was here anyway? If the universe sat within another universe, where did that sit? Nothing made sense. When I started taking weekly hikes by myself at age eighteen, it was because the wilderness seemed to offer a more direct, unbiased source of existential information.
The outdoors had always been a presence in my life. My parents didn’t hunt or fish, but as a kid they sent me to sleep-away camp in northern Arizona and Colorado, and back home, we hiked. Phoenix contains numerous desert mountain parks, and we visited many of them. We picnicked at South Mountain Park, climbed Squaw Peak, saw petroglyphs on A-mountain. Mountains piled upon jagged mountains along the brown horizon. My dad, who was raised in a small town in southern Arizona, taught me the names of rivers, mountain ranges, and plants, and about regional history. “See that?” he’d say on family outings. “That’s a palo verde tree. It means ‘green wood’ in Spanish.” And: “That there’s Picacho Peak. It’s the sight of the only Civil War battle fought on Arizona soil.” My dad was a diehard Arizonan, enchanted by the desert, proud of his state, and he imparted this passion to me. But it was an entry-level college geology class that got me fixated.
Geo 101 was mind-blowing. Caldera-complexes, plate-tectonics, fossilization—the field’s fundamentals forced me to look at landscapes as not just scenic backdrops, but as the result of the earth’s dynamic physical processes. Concepts like volcanism, hydrology, ecology, and decay also brought to life the great sweep of time preceding my brief existence. Our planet was 4.5-billion-years-old, the universe 13.7. Six thousand years of recorded human history didn’t register as a blip on that grand a scale. And if the mundane components of my daily life—term papers, unreciprocated crushes, which scent of detergent to buy—meant nothing measured against epochs and millennia, what was I?
When the geology professor described the Superstition Mountains east of town as “a collapsed volcano,” I drove out to see them. I’d lived in Phoenix my whole life yet had never thought of those mountains as anything but the home of the storied Lost Dutchman’s Mine. I parked in a lot and took a National Forest trail. The fall air was warm, the sun bright but comfortable. Native creosote bushes scented the air with a clean, medicinal fragrance, and tall saguaro cacti towered around me as I navigated the rocky slopes.
I started hiking a new local mountain range almost every week: the Goldfields, Sacatons, White Tanks, Usery Mountain. Yellow brittlebush flowers bloomed, sweetening the air with pollen. Coyotes darted between bushes and hummingbirds buzzed my head. Obsessing in a way drug counselors might describe as typical of the addictive personality, I started reading natural history, biogeography, and field guides to learn the names of local plants and animals. In turn, this led me to nature writers such as John Muir, Thoreau, Terry Tempest Williams, and Edward Abbey, which led me to introductory texts on Native American culture, and to Western existential and moral philosophers such as Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, and Hume, and later, to mysticism.
As a budding mystic, I had long been attracted to certain oddball terms: “astral glow,” “dark arts,” “the seventh son,” “spirited away.” Certain movies, too: Journey to the Center of the Earth, Planet of the Apes, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Here kids turned into blueberries. Giant lizards filled the frame. Colors flared to artificial shades of near solar-intensity then smeared across the screen, leaving tracers. Watching them as an adult, I could almost feel the tab of lysergic acid on my tongue.
After I’d started smoking pot at seventeen, I noticed a warping of my sonic predilections. The long, hypnotically repetitive instrumental end of the Butthole Surfers’ song “Pepper” mesmerized me. So did the trailing echo-effect on Perry Farrell’s voice in early Jane’s Addiction. And Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. Many Meat Puppets lyrics expressed an acute awareness of nature, like the chorus on “Leaves” where the lead singer, Curt Kirkwood, sings: “Something that’s been around for so long . . . Every minute on the calendar is wrong.” And lines like in the song “Things”: “Ancient things’ design.” Whatever that did or didn’t mean to the band, I knew what it meant to me: nature was big, human life small, the scope of time too great to comprehend.
As my THC-intake increased, so did my reading of anything that sounded remotely “mind-expanding”: Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, the Tao Te Ching, Castaneda’s Teachings of Don Juan, William Burroughs. When I stumbled on the term mysticism somewhere around 1995, it confirmed what I’d secretly hoped: that potheads weren’t the only ones who sensed the supernatural. People around the world from all cultures had apparently been seeking insight into their surroundings for centuries. Loosely defined, mysticism was the awareness of, and attempted union with, an ultimate reality or spiritual truth through heightened awareness and direct experience. Mystic sub-traditions existed within many popular religions: Vedanta within Hinduism, Kabbalah within Judaism, Sufism within Islam. Even Christianity had Christian mystics. While I wasn’t concerned with the complex historical details, I was interested in the tradition’s accessibility: regardless of your religious affiliation, the experiences of enlightenment, divine consciousness and union with God were available to anyone willing to practice a specific mystical discipline. This was a huge relief. I already practiced my own system of psycho-pharmacology. Rather than doing yoga or meditating, I continued on the lazy route of self-medication.
In one of my many surveys of Native American culture, I’d read that Native peoples had used certain psychoactives, particularly hallucinogens, for religious purposes since prehistoric times. Peyote use dated as far back as 5700 years. Yokut and Chumash Indians shamans in California had administered parts of a flowering plant called sacred datura to induce visions. The Mazatec of Oaxaca used morning glory seeds and psilocybin mushrooms for divination. The Urarina of Peruvian Amazonia used the drug Ayahuasca for ceremonial rites, same way prehistoric Europeans used the amanita mushroom. It worked for them. Couldn’t it work for me?
I started small. After college classes ended for the day, I frequently climbed atop one of Phoenix’s desert mountains, like Camelback or Papago, smoked a bowl of weed and stared into space. High above the city, my mind was flooded with abstract thoughts. Bright geometric patterns appeared and shifted into glorious abstractions at speeds so fast they were difficult to track. I filled spiral notebooks with environmental diatribes, seasonal observations, ideas for books I should write, digressions on ecological principles I’d just read about in Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, and hummed the melodies of music I didn’t know I could compose. Seated in the sunlight on pink granite outcroppings, these moments were monumental. When I reviewed my notes later in my bedroom, I mostly found cryptic ramblings: “Values, morals, ethics, belief system,” and “Life exists → evolves to fill niches & utilize available life sustaining properties.” What the hell did that mean? Trying not to despair, I would flip the journal page, light a joint and start a new entry. I did this for nearly two years. By the time Dean and I took our trip in the summer of ninety-five, I had begun suffering the law of diminishing returns: the more I smoked, the less I felt, and what I felt when I felt anything was confused, numb, and unenlightened.
Every drug I took failed to deliver mystic insight.
Mushrooms amplified colors and produced amusing tracers, but portals never opened inside bedroom closets as in the film Poltergeist.
Acid made wallpaper patterns swim like living MC Escher prints, but whatever world it hurled my friends and I into, I wasn’t disembodied enough not to feel the strychnine in my achy spinal column, and police still left tickets on the windshield of my Volkswagen that I illegally parked on a busy commercial street while we stumbled around high.
The mescaline I once ate while camping near Sedona made me see red eyes in the forest all night. But the mythic creatures I hoped they were attached to never emerged to deliver wise messages, and the one other person who thought they saw those eyes was tripping on acid. Still, I always stayed on the lookout for new interdimensional transport.
After crossing the border, Dean and I drove through the darkness past Bellingham, looking unsuccessfully for places to sleep. The air was cool and moist, the night still. Vast networks of tiny country roads filled the woods, but we found no overnight options. The trick, we discovered, was to locate a hotel in a relatively safe neighborhood whose lot was filled with enough cars for ours to blend in. We needed to roll in, park between paying customers’ cars and rearrange the luggage to make room for our beds without attracting security guards’ and other patrons’ attention; otherwise, guards tapped on the window and kicked us out.
That night nothing felt right. What chain hotels we found along I-5 were largely empty. Gas station parking lots were either too small, too vacant or too exposed to truckers, travelers and highway patrol. The forest roads we found outside small towns had gates on them, preventing access to the secluded spots deep in the woods. Sleeping on the shoulder wasn’t an option. Two summers before, Michael Jordan’s father had been shot to death while he napped in his car at an Interstate rest area. We kept driving.
The serrated points of evergreens loomed on the roadside. The tops of firs, cedars and spruce were black silhouetted against black. My eyes itched from fatigue and my calves ached. Dean drank Diet Coke to stay awake. I slumped in the passenger seat.
I hadn’t stayed up all night since I was a kid, and even then it was only to consume countless sodas and watch horror movies until my middle school friends and I passed out on the living room sofas at dawn. This was different. Here we moved in a hushed, eerie realm of limited-visibility populated by truckers, druggies, coyotes, and those damned to the graveyard shift. Who else walked the earth at this hour? In European folklore, this was the witching hour, the period after midnight when supernatural creatures were thought to be at their most powerful. Tearing down the highway as the rest of Skagit and Snohomish counties slept, I felt like an undercover operative, someone with a mission and an accumulation of secrets. I savored the feeling.
I needed to feel this. Already my routine was: eat, sleep, watch TV, go to school, drink on weekends, week after week. I could see the writing on the wall: two more years of college and it was off to the work force. A nine-to-five job. A cubicle. Florescent bulbs hanging from the office ceiling. Then what: marriage? Mortgages? Kids? Then cancer treatments, bladder control issues, erectile dysfunction?
There had to be more to life. We weren’t tadpoles, we were humans. Yet even something as atypical as a roadtrip got mired in the mundane: find food, get sleep, pump gas, brush your teeth. I wasn’t sure what I expected, only that I expected more.
Thin clouds formed a sheet over the highway, blocking the stars. Dean said, “I bet there are tons of bats out tonight.”
With all the farms in those fertile volcanic lowlands, I said he was probably right. What else was out there? I stared into the darkness. A semi’s headlights passed. A large tractor sat dormant in a field. I said, “You ever wish there were goblins and griffins and all those mythical beasts?”
Dean looked over smirking, scrunching his brow. “Are you high?” he said. Tarantulas, hawks, Gila monsters—was a horde of natural wonders enough to satisfy him? I turned to the window and rubbed my red eyes. “I just think the world must have been a whole lot more magical in ancient times.”
In Medieval Europe, common people suffered the black plague, Inquisition and poor sanitation. But they also believed in elves, luminous fairies and nymphs. I’d explored caves, soaked in springs, slipped inside the dank cavities of hollow trees, and I had never seen any of these creatures.
I imagined forest hovels, warlocks tending wood fires, concocting potions, casting spells. Roots, herbs, and berries. A broth filled with charms. Bats flapped overhead on the night of the full moon while knotted hands stirred iron caldrons.
Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.
I thought of the witches of Macbeth:
Double, double toil and trouble.
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
I unrolled the window and hung my hand outside. Chilly wind battered my palm, sweeping the sweat aside. At seventy miles per hour, momentum resembled time speeding forward, hurtling us toward the smothering repetition of home. My dry eyes searched the sky for the moon but couldn’t find it.
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
I set my head on the window sill and let the wind ruffle my hair. It seemed the world’s magic lessened with each year we aged. Childhood had been filled with it.
When I was nine, I woke up every Saturday morning to watch the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. Based loosely on the role-playing game—which, at the time, had a harmful, occult reputation among parents—the cartoon series aired on a local TV station from 1983 to 1985. The premise was fascinating. During a casual day at the fair, a group of young friends got pulled from their rollercoaster ride into an alternate dimension: the “Realm of Dungeons and Dragons.” Without reason or warning, the rollercoaster broke free from its track, disintegrated, and hurled the kids into an alien land where a longhaired elfin man named the Dungeon Master assigned them each weapons suited to their talents and temperament. One was a Ranger who shot magic arrows; one a teen wizard who pulled items from a hat; the eight-year old barbarian had a club that produced shockwaves when it hit the ground. Like most kids, all they wanted to do was return home. As they searched for a way back, they stumbled from adventure to adventure, rescuing the unfortunate and battling the dimension’s many evil forces: swine-faced soldiers named Orcs, skeleton warriors, and a demon named Vengar. The show had true bottom-of-the-barrel geek appeal, and I ate it up, because beneath the mundane setting of these ordinary kids’ lives lurked an exciting ulterior world, a world where they had superpowers, a purpose, a chance to be heroes and no clue about any of it until a portal spirited them away.
In Episode 11, “The Box,” the mythological Greek character Pandora appeared in the altered form of Zandora. In Greek mythology, Pandora’s box—originally a jar—wasn’t a force of liberation, it was the source of the world’s troubles. Zeus gave Pandora the jar and instructed her to keep it shut. Since she had also been given the gift of curiosity, she inevitably opened it, and out rushed ills the world had not previously known: various evils, disease, burdensome labor. The story goes that Pandora hadn’t acted out of malice, only curiosity, and when she saw what she’d unleashed, she quickly closed it. Hope, apparently, also laid at the bottom of the jar. I felt the same way at age twenty while out in the woods. And watching Episode 11 as a kid, I knew that, had I found a box in a canyon, I would have opened it, too.
“Let’s not go back,” I told Dean. We could ditch everything, live in the van, get crappy jobs, sleep in National Forests, travel city to city, park to park, and be free.
“I agree,” he said. “I could do this forever.”
He steered the van between the straight yellow lines. I looked at my watch. We were well past the witching hour.
By the time we reached the town of Everett, the dark eastern sky was turning light blue. We wanted to see Possession Sound, that narrow stretch of water between the mainland and Whidbey Island. Instead, we watched the sun rise behind the Cascades from a window seat at McDonald’s.
Pink. Lilac. Shades of ghostly lupine.
Four sausage and egg breakfast sandwiches.
As enchanting a sight as sunrise was, I wanted nothing more than to find a place to curl up in the passenger seat. Dean assured me we would sleep soon, and drove us to a nearby convenience store. We looked disheveled. Mud splattered Dean’s hiking boots and socks, and the hole in the bottom of my black Converse All-Stars kept letting in tiny pebbles. Blearily, we pulled caffeinated sodas from the store cooler as a frantic woman in her mid-twenties begged the clerk to use his phone. “Please,” she said. “I don’t have any money.” The clerk refused.
When we found the women by the gas pumps, pacing in the yellow dawn, Dean asked if she needed help. She said she was trying to get home, then tailed us to our van and climbed into the passenger seat. “Hurry,” she said, “they’re following me.”
Her long brown hair twirled as she scanned the perimeter. I didn’t see anybody. A single car sat in the lot. It was probably the clerk’s.
Dean took the seat behind her and unfolded his pocket knife, in case she tried something.
She directed me down the street. “Go left.” I steered the van down a two-lane road. Her long nails dug into the arm rest, and I wondered how we’d ended up entangled in a stranger’s drama.
“Turn there,” she said. We veered into a residential neighborhood. White, manicured houses lined the green, narrow streets.
I studied our passenger sidelong. Trim waist, small nose, pink lips—had Dean and I seen her in a bar, we would have both wanted to talk to her. But in this frenzied state, she could have just robbed a store, fled the scene of an accident or had a pistol in her shirt.
Eyes bulging, she said, “They’re right behind us!”
I glanced in the rearview. There weren’t any headlights. Was she hallucinating?
Dean’s aunt was schizophrenic. She refused assistance, quit taking her medication, and lived on the Phoenix streets in and out of homeless shelters.
My stomach knotted from adrenaline.
“Hurry,” the woman said. “They’re right down that street.”
I looked out. The street was empty. Just rows of unlit houses, rose bushes and parked cars.
I tried to think up ways to get rid of her. Yet another part of me feared she might really need our help. Her behavior, as strange as it was unsettling, mixed with the adrenaline and sleep-deprivation, awoke something in me that all the weed and shrooms could not.
Dean tried to extract information, but the woman only screamed, “They’re catching up.”
No one knew Dean’s aunt’s exact location day-to-day. Sometimes she called the family house to berate Dean’s mother, claiming she’d hired people to kill her. Other times she called to rant about demons who were pursuing her. Demons—that was a recurring obsession. As we sped through Everett, Dean’s aunt was somewhere lost in Phoenix.
I repeated Dean’s question. “Who’s following you?”
“Some people,” the woman said in a loud, labored voice. “They’re jealous. They always are.” She looked around but wouldn’t make eye-contact. “Keep going straight.”
Dean caught my eye in the rear view. The dull two-inch blade hung by his knee.
I floored it, as much to calm her as myself. Was this a lesson the spirits were trying to teach Dean and I? Keep doing drugs and you could end up losing your mind. If there were spirits, maybe this was a warning, their way of asking if I was prepared for the answers that I sought. Could I handle the truth? I’d never previously considered it. Maybe I would fall apart and want my ignorance back—too much fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Or maybe I would melt like the Germans in Raiders of the Lost Ark when they laid eyes on the contents of the Ark of the Covenant. Then again, maybe I had it backwards: couldn’t Dean and I be winning karmic points by helping a troubled stranger?
I steered our crowded van. Wasn’t I doing the same dumb thing that I always did: looking for meaning where there wasn’t any? Why did my mind always go for these outlandish supernatural explanations, rather than the most reasonable? Maybe I had tripped one too many times. One day I might take a trip and never come back, go over the deep end, like her. But it wasn’t just me; it was a generalized problem with the human mind, the downside of cognition: the need to find order in disorder, to make sense out of the inexplicable, even if we imagined it.
As my mind buzzed with debate, the woman motioned with one hand. “Right here.”
I parked in front of a large home set back on a verdant yard, expecting her to dart from the car and run to safety. Instead, she hung her right leg out the car door and paused. “Okay thanks,” she said. “We should hang out sometime.” She scribbled her number on a scrap of paper that she fished from our ashtray. “Call me.”
Dean climbed into the passenger seat as she sauntered up the front steps. He pocketed his knife. “My God,” I muttered. “What a trip.” I began mulling over theories as to what we’d just experienced: was she running from a rapist? An abusive boyfriend who threatened her? Was she suffering from amphetamine psychosis?
“You know there was nobody following us,” Dean said, “right?” I nodded then admitted I wasn’t entirely sure. He snickered at my naiveté. “She’s totally schizophrenic.”
I trusted he was right, but I didn’t want him to be. While the empirical side of me favored scientific thinking, the whimsical side resisted the idea that medical science could classify and explain away the complex and sometimes troubling nature of human behavior. I thought I’d read somewhere that certain scholars believed many of the great Biblical prophets’ visions resulted from seizures. What modern doctors would diagnose as epilepsy was, back then, perceived as the frightening ability to channel divine messages. When prophets spoke, ancient people listened. Now prophets and believers got tranquilizing prescriptions.
We debated calling the number to see if the woman was alright, then we stored the paper in the ashtray and headed out of town.
I steered us down the winding roads and onto the interstate, merging with the stream of morning commuters. The sun rose over the Cascades, blinding my tired eyes. Dean sipped his soda.
“I can’t believe you thought she was serious,” he said further down the road.
“Hey, what do I know?” I shrugged and put on my sunglasses. “She was scared. I mean, anything’s possible.”
Dean shook his head, sucking on his straw.
We slept in a south Seattle motel that morning: checked in during rush hour, checked out at 6:30 p.m. For the next two days we drove through Washington and Oregon into Northern California. As exhaustion set in not long after sunset, we agreed to sleep in the next town we hit. Twenty-nine miles northwest of the town of Weed, and several hours before bedtime, we arrived in Yreka.
Next to a pasture beyond the glow of lights, we emptied the capsules onto a CD case and cut the PCP into lines with a credit card. Unsure of the proper dosage, we did it all, snorting it through a rolled dollar bill until our eyes teared up and noses stung. I wanted to sneeze but feared expelling the precious powder.
We sat in the van wiping our eyes. I cut the engine and rolled down the windows. The smell of dry grass mixed with the glue-like odor caking my nostrils. Crickets chirped in the field. Our arms rested on the warm metal frame.
“This stuff sucks,” I said. Knowing we’d be too many hundreds of miles away to complain, our Canadian hosts had probably cut the drug with something to keep the bulk for themselves.
“Maybe it takes a while,” Dean said. We decided to drive around.
Searching for a safe place, still hoping to lose our minds without attracting police, we headed west. Like the rollercoaster in D&D, the narrow country road buckled, lifting free of the golden valley and hurling us into the mountains. Thin pines crowded around, deepening the already deep night. On a curve in the road, I eased the van into a dirt pullout tucked against a hillside. We stepped outside. A fine patina of stars dusted the heavens. I looked up and my head spun so fast I thought I was going to puke. Dean said he felt the same. I looked down, hoping to dull the motion sickness, but the dizziness remained. Squinting didn’t help, or drawing breath.
One of us said, “I need to lie down.” For some reason we chose the middle of the road.
Stepping from the shoulder, we laid on our backs on the warm blacktop. Feet to the east, heads to the west, Dean sprawled on one side of the lane line, I on the other. We folded our hands across our chests like mummies and set our shoulders a foot apart.
The chirping crickets grew louder and warmth rose through the back of my shirt. Following teenage drinking protocol, I focused my eyes on something fixed: the stars. They glowed between the dark treetops but were not staying still. They seemed to be slowly rolling over, the night sky’s entire surface slewing to the right. I watched the celestial film drift southward as if atop a body of water, pulling me with it as it spilled over the trees. I pinched my eyes shut, trying to halt the world, but it revolved within the darkness under my eyelids.
“I’m getting sick standing still,” I said. Dean too. We were in the foothills of the Klamath Mountains, in one of the West Coast’s most Eden-like and least populated areas, and we couldn’t do anything but close our eyes.
The hills were quiet enough that we assumed we would hear a car approaching. Or, with our eyes open, at least see the headlights reflected on the pines. We wouldn’t be able to test this theory until a car drove up from either direction, and it didn’t matter. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. My chest pounded and pulse thumped in my neck. Pressing my fingers to my temples, I awaited the pang of expiration.
I had long wished I shared Dean’s quiet acceptance of death. Heaven sounded wonderful, reincarnation better. I wanted to imagine that, upon dying, our spirits were ferried into another dimension where our minds lived on—our conscious selves, with all our memories, personality, and sense of humor intact—so that, even if reincarnated as a Skagit Valley farm cat or a Snoqualmie Pass huckleberry bush, we would forever remain ourselves. Aaron, always Aaron. I just kept thinking of what my dad believed. “When you die,” he’d said on numerous occasions, “you die. That’s it.” He’d been raised Baptist but later forsook it as “Fear of fire and brimstone.” Many people, some in our own family, spent their whole lives preparing for the afterlife—penance, church services, no drinking, no dancing, frequently giving alms. But what if, as I feared, their conception was wrong and my father’s was right? That we were doomed to lie in the dirt until we became indistinguishable from it? Lying on that mountain road, I thought we were resting in our graves, that if a car didn’t kill us the PCP would, leaving us for the animals to pick apart. Foxes would emerge from the forest to tug at our flesh. Coyotes would drag an arm in one direction, a rib in another.
During my elementary school, a recurring sensation often washed over me. For that brief moment right before sleep, I drifted through space in a universe without planets. Nothing in the distance, nothing in every direction. For one overwhelming second my primate brain grasped the elusive notion of death as a long, black, empty forever. That’s what awaits us, I’d think: eternal nothing, infinite blackness. The sensation never lasted more than two seconds. Then my eyes jolted open, and I pressed my face into the pillow to silence my sobs.
I opened my eyes while lying on the road and felt sick.
After untold dizzying minutes, Dean and I decided it was best to try to get some rest. We had a full day of driving the next day, and staying in the hills wasn’t easing our discomfort. With wobbly legs and dilated pupils, we stood up and drove down the mountain.
None of the town’s few gas station and grocery store parking lots felt safe, so we parked on the dirt shoulder of a rural road. Neither of us knew if angel dust precluded sleep, but we lowered the front seats anyway, spread blankets over our partially dressed bodies, drank a beer, and closed our eyes.
Right as I started to doze, Dean nudged my shoulder. “Did you feel that?” he said.
I looked out from under the pillow, said, “What?”
“The car move.” He sat up. Blankets fell around him. “It felt like something rammed the car, like another car.”
We cupped our hands on the cool glass and stared through the windows without unrolling them. Darkness spilled around us. Cows. Fences. “The whole van moved,” he said. “You didn’t feel that?”
I hadn’t felt a thing.
