Initiation

[Contains sensitive description]

They’d blindfolded me, tied a silk scarf over my eyes and promised to return. 

I was left alone in nothing but darkness, nothing but the black shadows of an unknown whereabouts. And, after the first few days, I had felt strong. I knew I could continue. A resilience had grown in me – a deep resilience which relied on nothing. Without my visual awareness, I had mostly lost the use of my hands and legs, too. But I’d kept the blindfold on voluntarily, veering up against the darkness and trying to claim it as my own. 

By the second week, the weariness had begun to creep in. 

A day arrived when, screaming into the void, I had grappled with the scarf and tore it from my head. It grazed behind my ears, taking up skin, but I was free. I examined the house around me, found that its windows were boarded-up and its doors locked tight. I flicked the light switches and saw that there was no electricity, no light.

It was just me, a box full of non-perishable food and absolute silence.

Nevertheless, with my eyes free, I laughed, I sang, I jogged. I bounded around the house, finally able to move without tripping up. Everything was still shadows, but I’d become a cat: nocturnal and able to navigate in the absence of light. I didn’t know if it were AM or PM because my circadian rhythm had now centralised on constant darkness. 

That’s when the madness began to fester.

I knew that there were animals with no eyes, evolved over millions of years to suit the dark tunnels and night skies that they call home, but I was no animal. 

At least, not at first.

The third week was marked by a childish giggling. 

I’d shut down all the neurological pathways that had been constructed in my experience of adulthood – those of responsibly and morality, moulded and polished by the norms of life in the light. I began to piss wherever I wanted around the house instead of using the toilet and twitched whenever I felt a dust mote get too close. The hours no longer moved in cycles of twenty-four; rather, my days and nights had become marked by two-hour intervals of waking and napping. Even with free eyes, my sight diminished until eventually I was looking at the house through a very small, black ring. I lost my ability to smell, and then to taste. The dried seaweed in the box was the only thing that had any substance to it, even though usually I detested seafood. Everything else turned to bland mush in my cheeks.

Week four was the worst. 

My tongue felt like bark because I’d chewed on it too much and, in my mind, fantastic shapes and colours formed to entertain me: large, wafting shapes like the shadows of whales in water, only kaleidoscopic and insane. I spent hours at a time sitting and watching them float by, biting at my throbbing tongue and peeling the wood off the floor. 

I was kind of happy. 

There was a moment – maybe a few – when I was so enthralled, I pissed myself then and there, no longer able to remove myself from the lightshow that was going on inside my head. 

Physically, I was in pain. 

Piercing migraines bore through me like giant drills carving into a mountain of granite. I no longer wanted to move and so the blood had gone cold and stiff in my extremities, my bones ached and my muscles had become locked, rigid. I ground my teeth so hard they turned to chalky stumps in my mouth, exposing nerves which shocked me like lightning bolts. I didn’t recognise my own voice when I started screaming; I just heard the wailing going on and on like a siren. After a while, I wondered if I was in a war, if the house was going to be bombed.

Eventually, I fell quiet. 

Then I noticed the sound of my own sobs, but it wasn’t my voice. It was the voice of a tiny man at the end of time who wore a little trilby hat and played the piano. He was a 2D cartoon, drawn in black and white, but as he smiled at me, I felt how visceral and alive he really was, surrounded by the swirling redness of my mother’s womb.

On the last day, a key turned in the door.

As the cogs clicked and changed inside the lock, my mind envisioned a full cycle of the moon as if using an ancient method to assess time. I squirmed like an animal feeling the call of migration shaking through its bones. 

It had been a month. 

The test was over.

I stood up, my wobbling knees, numb beneath me, sending me straight back onto the floor. I tried again, managing to anchor myself to the wall. I heard voices, but I didn’t speak English anymore.

“Adam, how you doing?”

A man appeared and I could see in the dullness that he was looking at me with sympathy. I let out a strange sound, something animal-like or monster-like. As two other men filtered in, the first man sighed in sorrow.

“It’ll be over in a moment. Well done.”

I heard shuffling behind me and slowly turned to see what the other men were doing.

“It’s five o’clock, Adam. Sunrise. You ready?” 

I let out the sound again and held myself against the wall, facing them. I saw a crowbar raise above one of the men’s heads.

“Do it.”

There were a few moments, then, that turned in on themselves. 

Like a liquid universe being flipped in a pan, those moments washed through me with both an overwhelming sense of ordinariness and a suffocating absurdity. I watched the black figures of those men smash the walls of my new reality to pieces, and I did not want to do anything about it. I neither possessed the sense of justice and righteousness of a man, nor the instinctual dash of survival that defines an animal. 

I simply looked at them.

The men pulled the boards off the window.

Sunlight poured in from outside, splitting my head in half as it entered my grossly-enlarged pupils. Its rays set my soul on fire and burned everything I’d ever known right out of my brain, scorching my nervous system and cleansing me new.

I didn’t scream, although the pain was beyond words. 

I didn’t look away.

This is what I was here for.

This is what I needed to know.

I witnessed the birth and death of the universe a billion times over in the seconds that ticked by in that cataclysmic sunlight. I felt an iron grip secure my mouth shut, probably to stop the screams that I couldn’t hear, as I disappeared into the blinding whiteness of god, like a drop disappearing into the ocean and like an emerging germ saying goodbye to its seed.

“Thank you” I said at last, in English, to the men who held me up. They smiled like angels.

This was an ancient initiation rite of the Illuminati, designed to bring on an intense, psychedelic experience with nothing but the use of nature and determination. 

I had passed the test.

I had conquered life.

I had moved into the sublime.