RAYMUND FERNANDEZ
The time he tried it was all he needed to say: “Oh yeah, I tried that once. The mushroom is, of course, a substance. But does eating it qualify as substance abuse? What else do you do with mushroom but to eat it? Isn’t this its proper use?”
This is no argument for trying it. The use of substances to bring about what psychologists call “altered states of consciousness” has been so disparaged over time that mainstream thinking now calls it evil in a knee-jerk. Notwithstanding, so many stars of science and literature have used some substance or other: Van Gogh, Freud, Stevenson, Marley, Lennon, and so many others. But this was not the logic he used this night. There was the small party. Someone had it and gave assurance it did not kill him. So what else could he do but try? He was with his closest friends. And they had been drinking straight vodka, chilled with ice, bottles of it. The conversation was so lightheaded it flew high above the drudgery of a season of Christmas inside apocalyptic time.
And still he was surprised. How does it feel when the world looks different because you look differently? This shift so essential, you understand finally how your vision of the world is a function of the chemistry in your brain. The world becomes more colorful than you had ever seen. The expected alcohol-induced blurring of vision is no blur at all. You see images of the same object juxtaposed against each other so clearly, you can count their number — three.
And then he knew, he had entered another world; more exactly, he had entered another aspect of himself: his perception of the world — his sense of taste, touch, sight and sound — become suddenly sharper. And all this must have affected him beyond perception. The party suddenly ended, and he found himself driving home alone.
Driving down Jones Avenue, he felt for once the rapture of Christmas lights.
The ambient sound of the street at midnight became a song he sang to as he drove, the world looking to him exactly like a Van Gogh painting. At the corner, a wave and call from a streetwalker princess made him think of sex. He argued this with himself for only a quick instant. The thought of sex was all he really needed to take in the pleasure of it in totality.
He waved back smiling. His world was perfect. He was alive inside the organic throb of life. He felt this way even as he got home. He sat on the sidewalk taking in the lights and night sky until he realized the overcharge of sensation had worn him down. Sleep would now be perfect. Except, he could not. Sleep eluded him. When he closed his eyes, he could still see things in the darkness. His brain kept working in overdrive though he wanted it to stop. He downed glasses of orange juice. Took a shower and still he could not sleep. Three cycles of going to bed and taking a shower had no effect. And all this time, he felt weaker and weaker as his thoughts went even faster. Finally he found the thought of death strangely attractive. How comforting the dark would be. And then he thought: This was it! He was going to die now, right this very night.
He looked at his children. They lay fitfully asleep in their banig comfortably ensconced among pillows. He thought of waking them, perhaps to dispel the prospect of dying alone. But how could he ever explain to them why? He watched them instead as his life replayed in his head, beginning to end.
All his life, even he himself, was only his own invention, a story he remembers in his head. It was not a perfect story. Every wrong thing he ever did played in his head. Everything he ever did right lay right there in front of him sleeping in their own dreamworld entirely removed from his own. And he realized how happy he was for that. This gave him the sense of calm and peace he longed for all his life from as far as he could remember until this very moment. Right this very moment became all that life was for him. This single point of personal discontinuous time was all there was. It was, for now and for him, all eternity. He understood that now. A rooster crowed somewhere in the distance. It was the last thing he heard.