The Passenger

When the passenger, carrying a leather knapsack with the gold initials FK on it and a passport sticker showing the bearer was traveling from Prague to San Francisco, departed the train onto a rickety platform separating the tracks from a one-story, faded wood plank station, with no other buildings in sight, eerily identified by a sign hanging at a cockeyed angle, that read Desert^ion Springs; the “ion” added, to affirm what was plainly obvious.

If a rattlesnake greets the passenger on the platform, but the passenger, not seeing the snake, goes into a minor trauma when the snake says, “That your name son, FK? That’s what it says on your knapsack.”

If the passenger, who appears to be in his mid-twenties, dressed in a three-piece Edwardian suit, soiled from his long sea and land passage, having never seen a snake before except in old scripture paintings, says, “FK are my initials, not my name but I fear what you have to say will be the words of a serpent of ill will, but I’ll answer to FK, just the same just to bring a sparseness to our conversation.”

And if the snake now pleased with the passenger's arrival in Desert Springs, tells the passenger he’s been waiting what seems to be an eternity for his advent, or so it looks like from the snake's point of view. Then the snake begins to loudly, using a colorful language spoken exclusively in the Southwest, weave the story of the fortune of the town, which spellbinds the passenger so that he becomes oblivious to the train leaving the station and now stands alone listening to the snakes tale of the magic found in the deserted town of Desert Springs.

When FK wants to wait for the next train at the station, the snake answers, “There will be no train, but there is a means of travel much swifter, wild as the wind, the lickety-split of a coyote, through the magic of the peyote cactus.”

“And how do I travel on a peyote cactus?” the passenger inquires.

“Not on it, but in it, or the other way around, it’s in you. Well, once you drink the nectar of the peyote, it is, and then you’re a magic traveler, of course, I’ll be with you all the way, I can ride in your knapsack.” And the passenger followed the snake to a cluster of green ball-shaped cactus plants; some topped with pink blossoms and others with small dried out heads, which he told the passenger to promptly eat if he wanted to get on with his travels.

If the passenger, now eager to continue his journey picks two small dried peyote heads and chews them even though they were very bitter and felt like his stomach was turning against him. With the coaching of the snake, he managed to keep them down for the thirty minutes that the snake said was needed for the magic to happen. The passenger did look at his watch and as the snake predicted when the thirty minutes passed everything in his stomach came back out of him leaving only the magic behind.

When the passengers thinking processes is altered, by the magic of the peyote, rearranging his sense of time and space, opening and closing his eyes, colores blinking distinctively appearing brilliant and intense, while the snake circles around him, undulating and multiplying his form as if he had no distinctive form.

Suddenly, the passenger's presence closed up; reality was not reliable, could anything be real from this point on. Then he braced himself for a surge of movement; his muscles tightened, his body tingled, he gasped as the tingling grew more intense.

The snake says, “Sometimes, it helps to speak aloud about what you are feeling. It helps your mind register these new experiences and then let go. Trust me, FK.”

The passenger inhales sharply as all his senses fire hot—and then separate and float away with a pleasant heat surging up and down his consciousness.

The snake says, “FK, let me know what you feel. Shall I make it more—pleasurable for you?”

The passenger not sure about the feelings of pleasure, lost memories swirl around his brain’s pleasure centers, he is swept up into a vortex of color, he howls with laughter,  “I am rushing down a raging colored river, a wild kaleidoscope, the colors—they’re flooding my whole body, so many colors, how can they all exist? How do they get in me? There are colors I can't see, but I can feel. So now they’re pushing out of me, taking me apart. Oh, God, I’m breaking into pieces, like beads becoming unstrung and spilling out onto the desert floor, mixing with the grains of sand.”

When a coyote emerges from a swirl of colored dust, the snake hisses at the intrusion. The coyote joins the passenger in a dance, in slow, tantalizing motion, each cell of the passenger’s body rubs against the coyote and then pushes away. His cells are colored dots in a flash of intense feeling, much like an orgasm—an orgasm of light that illuminates the glowing coyote like a ghost coming out to a full moon.

The passenger says, “The rainbow of light—I’m wet with it, with no perception of embarrassment,  I apologize I’m hardly myself anymore.”—he was the light. “These pinpricks of light—they are me, rubbing, rushing, writhing over me, again and again, can you join me?”

And again. The rhythm of the movement mesmerizes the passenger, a wave breaks over his most sensitive places and then breaking again like an ocean set; until he thought even his consciousness would unravel in the exquisite pulsing.

The coyote screams, moans, cries out, Stop; to the passenger, “Join me, unite with me, take me,” and yet still, the experience is prolonged.

The passenger hears the coyote’s invitation, her solicitation, enticing him with her colorful coquetry, to be master of her den, but now inundated in a deluge of colored dots, dots swelling up over him, the smell of friction from dots colliding that reeked like an infinite number of dying flowers mixed with stink of unwashed dogs.

The snake says, “Beware FK; the coyote is out to transform you, reassemble your kaleidoscope of colored dots, remake you, disrobe you, dress you in gray fur, with legs that run like the wind across the desert, you will catch fast-moving rabbits, and tear them open with canine teeth made for ripping flesh, that’s what will become of you, is that your destiny?”

That could not be the truth, that could not be real, the passenger could not see that, and yet the flowered colors surged and changed, regrouped, wrenched apart, morphed into small fruits that matured in a twinkling—strawberries turning white, green, red, then redder and into the deepest, most luscious red; lemons greening and then yellowing to the most exquisite yellow of the coyote’s eyes. The sweet and then the sour filled him—taste had returned. He gathered the richness of flowers, fruits, and vegetables, experiencing their smells and tastes and colors in a fast-motion harvest, from new buds to dying leaves at a winter burial, and what of this female suitor, that beacons him? How will he respond to the warning of the snake?

A skeletal structure of light that the passenger knew was the coyote appeared before him, gently gathering up the dust and dirt of the beautiful fruits and blowing them away. The passenger watched sadly and then in fascination as they turned into multicolored sparks and then winked out. The passenger held the coyote in his arms. The snake hissed a threatening lyric while two Red-Tailed Hawks screech a melody.

The coyote pleads, “It’s time to let go, FK, stop resisting. You need to flow with the changes that come.”

The passenger sniffed. “But… I’ve just never felt this way before. So—complete.” He let out a long and slow breath, yielding, the blue of his eyes flowed out of him, and yellow flowed in. The coyote vibrates against him, and then the passenger is vibrating as if they are becoming one, and maybe they are, or perhaps the passenger only wishes it.

His glow diminishes as the dots of light slowly leave his body. What remains is the afterglow of goosebumps, like tiny lanterns of phosphor on a moonlit sea, disappearing in the fast-growing fur growing on the passenger's body. Soon the coyote will have her mate. She pauses to howl at the moon. The snake becomes restless, knowing he must strike the coyote and the passenger. The passenger struggles with the peyote mescaline that is transforming his mind and triggering his metamorphosis into a coyote, even though he begins to recognize his growing love for her and has already imagined the cubs they will have together.

The coyote sees the snake who was lifting his head and most of his body out of the top of the passenger's knapsack. The coyote knows the snake is up to no good but needs to convey that message to FK. The coyote knows she must kill the serpent, knowing the risk of the snakes deadly venom, but she must get the snake in position, the transforming passenger lunges at the snake as the coyote clamps the flaring teeth of her jaw around the snake's neck.