Adventurers Anonymous

Steps 1 and 2. Acceptance and Hope

I decided to travel to another dimension the day after my first meeting. I’d got up, said my name, and right from the chest I’d admitted I was an alcoholic. I was expecting applause, but instead, them gaunt water drinkers and paracetamol poppers just gave me nods and murmurs. And the next morning, for the first time in months, I woke up without a headache and a taste in my mouth like someone had spilled a bottle of old vinegar inside me. I got out of bed on feet, not knees, not elbows. The sun had risen and was projecting rainbows out of a crystal glass on the window sill.

And then it hit me: feverish, intense reality, this multitude of mundane wonders I’d been living beside for so long. I raised the glass and stared into its secrets. The shimmering fabric of the universe started to expand and beckon.

Fine, so I may have been delirious. If you think it’s easy to give up alcohol and wake up entirely sane on day two, lest ye be judged, arsehole. Delirious or not, it didn’t make me any less right.

Step 3. Faith

I was tempted to follow the Christian god, the one who died and sprung up again three days later, but the idea seemed quite smelly. Both figuratively, and literally. He read like a lackey on the paycheck of a more powerful boss, and it was that master I needed to serve. Just in case he wasn’t a fairy late.

So instead of Jesus, I considered the god of the Old Testament and his accolades: an arsonist, narcissist, control freak with a penchant for locust, infanticide, and floods. This suited me much better. Here was a being who could demand his servants’ children as sacrifice, who could take everything away, and bring it all back at a whim. I would be Job. God may have struck me down, but I would persevere.

And then, there was science.

Step 4. Understanding

Of course, I had been drinking before the accident. Of course, I would occasionally drive home from the pub, especially on Fridays. Everyone did it, and most drivers knew to take extra care on Friday night, even look out for those who might be meandering in and out of their lane.

Except trees can’t get out of the way. I bet they would if they could. Perhaps in one alternative universe, trees can burrow underground in response to an approaching threat. Like I was that night, a reckless drunkard with a justly petrified passenger. Or maybe there exists a dimension where trees are made of cotton candy, and so all furniture is sticky. Or maybe instead of this sticky wood, they use stone.

So fine, like I said, everyone drove drunk. But if I was to be fearless in this step of my recovery, I had to search deeper than a justification. So I read, esoterically, homeopathically, philosophically, and the Bible, too. I read on how to travel from point A to point B in an instant, about the speed of light, about lucid dreaming. I procured substances, the names of which I couldn’t pronounce. None of the reading answered my central question on how to travel beyond my own galaxy directly, but I armed myself with tools and techniques. In another meeting, I said I had the courage to breathe instead of drinking, and them heavy heads, so heavy without the substances to make them airy and empty, nodded vigorously around me. Someone cried.

And so I started the weirdest journey, and hoped it would only get weirder, and curiouser, and curiouser. To start, I popped as much acid as was respected by even the most hardened user, drop by drop.

I saw patterns where I thought they were none. I wrote everything down as it came, hoping to make sense of things the next day. I saw people for what they were. I saw myself for what I was, and it didn’t surprise me. Failure doesn’t preclude growth. I saw dust swirling all around me, covering me. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, the dirt covering me in layers like soil over a dead body.

I put gloves on and cleaned the entire house top to bottom. What a waste of a trip, I thought. Just as I was scrubbing the toilet, putting my own universe upright, I felt a pull in my balls. I flushed the toilet, and it bubbled up with chemistry. I sat down, and kept the gloves on while I worked myself, thinking about her. In a bikini, in a nightgown, naked under the sheets. In summer, in winter, at daybreak and dusk. Younger, older. Smooth forehead, wrinkled brow. Distant sirens, stillness.

Afterwards, I took the gloves off, sat back against the bathtub, and cried for three hours.

Step 5. Acknowledgment

They called me out by my Christian name, and so I went up. I breathed in for seven, breathed out for fourteen. Then I told them the truth, them solemn surfaces of sickly planets hovering above emaciated earthly bodies, all about what happened exactly.

That Friday, she came looking for me down the pub. She was on her bike, and wearing black to top things off, which upset me greatly. We had a small fight, the kind that wouldn’t linger into Saturday hopefully, and I folded the bike, put it in my trunk, told her to get in. She said no, I’d had too much to drink. Let’s walk, she insisted, but I had a point to prove. You won’t be in any more danger than on this here scrap metal, I pointed to the bike, without any lights, I said, and she laughed politely, to stop the fighting, and off we went.

And much more I didn’t remember, as if my brain had identified a fatal error and put a blanket over it, so heavy I couldn’t lift it. On acid, I felt it move, but I decided not to peek under. I saw the police pictures, and that should be enough. The moment I needed to find in another universe was when she found me at the pub and I decided to drive back.

Of course, I left those last parts out. They nodded at my story. The craters on their faces deepened in sorrow. I sat back down, and felt like I’d dropped off a big backpack full of body parts.

Step 6. Freedom

After five months, I’d still not had a single drink. I would swing by the pub sometimes and look through the smudged windows, but my feet never itched to enter. I’d breathe in for ten, breathe out for twenty, and be on my merry way. It was easy. I had a goal. To be free, not just of alcohol, but the trappings of my lonely reality.

Step 7. Growth

Every night, I’d set an alarm through the deepest of my sleep, and practice lucid dreaming to mould my mind to the task I’d eventually have to achieve awake. I took drugs with names I still couldn’t spell. I read about leaving my body behind in our dimension. I practiced slowing down my heart rate until finally, it registered 30 in a day-long meditation. When I came to, I found I’d pissed myself, and the room smelled like ammonia.

I prayed, too, out of habit now more than anything. Dear cruel lord, please beam me down this miracle. Dear father of all tragedies, please support your semi-faithful servant on this leap of a journey.

Of course, he never said anything back. But as I understood it, he wasn’t the most talkative kind.

Steps 8 and 9. Reflection and Forgiveness

If I learned one thing on my trips, it was that those who I’d harmed were too generous in numbers to imagine. I know it’s not easy to see what I mean. New Age drivel, sure. But what about the children we never had? Wouldn’t they be mighty pissed with me? What about all her family, all her dead ancestors whose line had now ended in this world? My wife was an only child.

I drank toad venom from a faraway desert, and met with them all. Some of my wife’s great-great-greats couldn’t speak any English, so I just held their hands and nodded apologetically. I never knew she had roots in Africa. I made a mental note to tell her when I saw her again, if I could still remember this life.

I met with our unborn children. Those I hoped to recreate in another dimension, free of alcohol, Friday night pubs, and resentment. They weren’t a perfect blend of the two of us, more like sculptures crafted entirely by her, with my very occasional and small request. They had my hands, my eyebrows. Squiggles of paternity on a vast painting of motherhood.

Step 10. Continuity

I was barely eating, deep in meditations on the universe and its legionous nature. I was barely attending meetings, until I got a call from my sponsor, anxiously relieved to find I was sober and well.

I started eating more, though food had lost all its appeal, and attended more sessions of earthly lamentation.

Step 11. Connection

My mind began detaching, though I knew that inevitably, it would return to its host every time. I needed to fall through once and for all.

I prayed more vigorously. Lord, help me carry this cross. Help me do what no body is designed to. And forgive me for if I err.

Step 12. Helping others

I left all my notes, organised by theme, on the desk. In big, green letters, I wrote “AA — Adventurous Anonymous. How to travel in time” on the front page of the folder. I hoped someone might be able to use the knowledge and instructions I’d gathered.

Then I rode the lift to the top of my building, and climbed onto the roof. There were multiples of me out there, calling from numerous undone stitches in the fabric of reality. I needed find one of them, just one, for her, and for myself. To fulfill the vows, in health and in sickness, in death and life again. To see her laugh once more.

I stood on the edge of the roof without looking down. The world sounded distant at the bottom of the road, like I didn’t belong already. I closed my eyes, and let go. The air whooshed. I waited, and waited, until there was nothing but swirling darkness and peace.

Then, I opened my eyes.