Through Nature to Eternity

When I knew Annie had a few days left to live, I decided to tell her what really happened to James, something I had never told anyone before. As far as she knew, my old college roommate had jumped from the apartment balcony our third year of school, our tenth year of friendship, and three years before I married her. She had thought he was morbidly depressed since that’s what I told her, but that wasn’t true. 

“James had tasted death and wanted more.”

I remember how she looked at me. A pale, half-beautiful corpse, blinking almost in time to the accelerating EKG pulses, her dead eyes alive with shock and wonder, yellowish and flecked with tiny red veins. The hospital bed crept mechanically into a more upright position at the emaciated push of a button.

“More?”

I nodded gently. The words didn’t want to come. Just seeing her like that all I could think is how frayed the thread of her life was, how close it was to snapping, how near she was to slipping away, how few moments I had left to watch her face flush with fresh breath. 

And I knew she knew it, too. The more the possible gave way to the inevitable, the further she passed through the fabled five stages. All living things have a certain degree of thanatophobia, almost tautologically, but Annie made clear she excelled in it. No thought aroused her more to panic and tears than that of personal extinction or worse. Through the obsession of terror, the possibility of timeless agony festered in her mind. The same dread that withheld her sleep and seemingly seeped from each atom of the hospice, invaded every cell and process of her body and life, even her appearance. 

She had become anti-radiant, the light of any room vanishing in her presence, collapsing into her anguished greyness. It took everything in me not to look away. Her former joy and beauty transparently and mentally superimposed by memory over her now grotesque and hollowed features. The mental cacophony that raged in my head with each glance that landed on her was enough to drive a lesser man mad with grief, or horror, or even violent rage. But not me. I could manage it, channel it, put it to a purpose. 

Annie had never known James. To her, he was just a name, a character, a story. He could never be that for me. His memory wouldn’t even die with me. It was amalgamated into me, as intrinsic to me as my identity. What are we if not the memory and effect of our experiences, after all? I couldn’t give her my experience of James (as I cannot give it to you, whoever you are), so all I could do was tell her another story about him.

James and I had been inseparable since high school. I taught him about weed, and he taught me about Zen. He was always interested in spiritual, philosophical stuff. Every time we smoked in his room, I’d just stare at the stacks and shelves of all the books he’d pillaged from used-book-stores. It was hard to believe he had read even the half he claimed to, but, then again, he was always reading. In class, on the train, even walking. We talked for hours about everything: astrophysics, cryptozoology, Buddhism, pornography, existentialism. He was an encyclopedia of the weirdest shit. You always felt like you had to cut him off at some point because he’d start leading you places you were afraid to go. 

Often I wonder if I’m to blame for how fascinated he became with psychoactives. He never used them for recreation or self-treatment, though, always experimentation, investigation. First, it was weed, then mushrooms, then MDMA. Beyond that, you'd need a degree to decipher the alphanumeric, decasyllabic names. Each one, he said, was a different key into the world, a different set of lenses to see through. In his words, as I can’t help but remember, they were “quasi-orthogonal projective eigenspaces of the meta-Hilbertian domain of conscious existence.” As he explained it to me, each chemical was sort of like a different light that cast a different shadow, the way a cone looks like a triangle from one side and a triangle from another. His explanations made a sort of half-sense to me.

Two sorts of packages would regularly arrive for him. One sort was small, with handwritten return addresses from Chile, Switzerland, Hong Kong. Another sort was book-shaped, some mere pamphlets, others the heft of encyclopedias. Each weekend, he'd hole up in his room, emerging only briefly for digestive functions only. I wasn't allowed inside, but each time his door opened, I could see the faint light of grow lamps, catch the pungent whiff of fungal dampness. I had an idea of what he was doing only from looking at his trash: he was Every so often I'd hear through the wall, breaking the perfect silence before and after it, the thin crack of breaking glass or the pop of a fuse, followed by low muttered curses. 

To everyone else, he was just an eccentric recluse, as so many college boys are. To look at him, you would only see an underfed, well-dressed, brooding young man, always a bit under-groomed. But I knew and told no one. Truth is, I wanted to know myself. He had tried submitting his research into the substrata of consciousness to journals. He only ever got accepted by the esoteric and occult, and these, he said, "would only attract the wrong attention." 

I was the only one he told, then, the only one he could trust. More often than not, he told me merely as a subject to articulate his thoughts toward, the way you might talk to a nonplussed cat. At the time, the least part only made the least sense, but it was clear he didn’t mean for me to understand it. From what I remember, he spoke of the “bipartite noumena,” of “oneiric Everettian stereo-isomerism,” and of “Plotino-Hegelian monadic meta-synthesis,” and something about “the degree of self-measured by physio-psychic self-ability” and “the Platonico-Spinozan tathata.” Needless to say, it was scarcely more than so many words, at the time, yet the germ of what he meant didn’t fully wither in my brain. Later, with his help, they would become more intelligible.

His self-experiments grew stranger and less comprehensible. I know he took combinations of stimulants and sedatives, deliriants and antipsychotics, oneirogens and naloxone. After a two day absence, he emerged on a Monday and disposed of multiple used catheter bags, and I knew he had last been conscious Friday evening. He was convinced that hallucinations and dreams offered key tools into the probing of the origins of awareness and of nature and reality itself. Consciousness, life, the cosmos, the irreducible basis of all reality, all could be gotten at by pulling at the roots of where our own minds attach to it. The neuro-biologists and philosophers of mind were both taking an incorrect approach, you see: objectivity was absurd by definition but experimentation was nevertheless necessary. 

Then, in February of the year he died, he asked for my help for the first time. He wanted to die, though not in a permanent way. More specifically, he wanted to have a near-death experience. An entire bookshelf of his room had become dedicated to studies, accounts, theology, and speculation on the subjective phenomena of dying. It’s the same principle as a particle accelerator, I suppose: you find out what something is made of by destroying it and seeing what’s left over. In the case of consciousness--the union of structure and process--destruction is most cleanly achieved by disruption of the process. He wanted me to strangle him. Not in any violent way, though: he had found a suitable hypoxant, and merely needed me to apply the aerobant at the correct time. It was important I do it at the correct time. 

The following snowy Sunday, he lay in my bed and died. He had taken a dose of datura and salvia orally and self-administered the hypoxant, plunging the murky brown mixture into his arm. When his pulse dropped below 30, I started the timer. Outwardly, he seemed only sleeping, only slightly more motionless. Yet the stone stillness of his chest made me sweat and retch. I had to leave the room to keep from passing out. The seconds scraped by like footsteps in a fathomless corridor. Finally, the alarm sounded, and with shaking haste I pressed the syringe of opalescent fluid into his veins. With a start, his eyes shot open. I screamed for the first time I could remember, the second I can, now. His eyes were not the ones he closed. They were wide, vacant, piercing. When he looked at me, I felt like he could see even the part of me that I kept from myself. He spoke, or perhaps muttered. It called to my mind fantastical sleepless nights overhearing clandestine rumors in a forgotten tongue in an ancient land, secrets pregnant with suggestive terrors. He had assumed a demeanor of one who knew what was not meant to be known, a truth that a human mind was not designed to hold. 

Slowly and with great coaxing, I got him to speak. His accent was unrecognizable, somewhere between Hebrew and Peruvian. He seemed to have forgotten English speech, though not fully. Slowly, like a small child, he regained some ability over the course of weeks. But he was not silent during these weeks. Day and night he muttered and gibbered. He never slept, not in the way you and I sleep. He’d lie in bed, as still as death, eyes open, mouth moving, conversing with the walls and stars. Loudly. Each night of my sleep, around three in the morning, of my sleep had even odds of breaking to the insensate verbal tapestry he unconsciously enunciated, or to the frantic groans and cries of yet another vivid dream.

When he could finally make himself understood, the linguistics were the only issue to resolve: now it became a matter of semantics. He was simultaneously reluctant and desperate to say, yet seemed to think it was hopeless to try to explain. “We are the all-dreaming all,” he repeated monotonously, “pieces of the indivisible one. The in-looking eye, darker than darkness, more quiet than silence. No beyond. Eternity in neverness. We are florid annihilation. All emerges, all returns.” He was overflowing with these contradictions. I quickly regretted restoring his English, as soon his dream-noises only became more of this self-negating logorrhea. Before long, he had developed his mantra, which echoed perpetually in our apartment: “The whole is whole”. The whole is whole. Is whole the whole. Whole is whole the. I will never un-hear the countless repetitions and permutations of those four words, dripping between my eyes like an oriental torture, pounding feebly but incessantly against my eroding skull. 

Then, April first, it ended. He jumped. The police asked me a few questions, the mess was mopped up, a cursory funeral, and then he was gone. Vanished like an ant under the sole of a cosmic shoe. To this day, it still hasn’t fully hit me.      

Annie was more than upright. She grasped the bedrail and leaned her weight onto her arms. I expected the mention of death would transfix her. With great effort, she choked out the obvious question. 

“But why?”

I had already told her. He wanted more. He had left no note, but it was obvious to me. Ever since his experiment, he had not fully come back. Some part of him had escaped the mortal coil and was pulling the rest of him toward it. The whole is whole, and he needed to return to that whole. He had become a vagrant spirit, trapped in a body, and he found his means for release. Whatever lay beyond death, whatever nirvana or Elysium he had found, the thought of waiting for it was too much. He wasn’t insane, as you may think. I could tell he had full control of his faculties. That piercing look was not one of disorder but of an order magnified and perfected. Perhaps to the merely sane, super-sanity is confused for insanity. 

I cleaned out his room, boxing what wasn’t incriminating and incinerating the rest. Most of the books were beyond me, or would take years to learn to the extent James had. In my numbness, all I could do was move my eyes over the worn bindings. I wish I could say what I found revealed the truth behind his nonsense. That would certainly be dramatic, or satisfying, and yet reality is rarely so contrived. I like to think we need look no further than that tetralogical koan: the whole is whole. The whole is whole.

When I looked up Annie had sunk back against the cushions. For the first time, in months, an air of hope had found refuge in her expression. A trickle of tear had curved down into the upturned corner of her mouth. Her eyes were closed, her breathing evened.

“The whole is whole,” she whispered. No words had ever brought her greater comfort. 

From my pocket, I took out the syringe of murky brown liquid. Noiselessly, I slipped the needle into her IV line and emptied the tube. Never would she be more receptive to what lies beyond. The story had allowed her what she wanted, what she needed: peace. I owed her that much. Euthanasia, a good death. Almost nonsenical. Good and bad imply values, and values imply a valuer. But who is there to value death? Annie, like James, and all the innumerable dead before them, she’d know. She’d know in a way no story could ever describe. Stories are what we tell each other, what we tell ourselves. Experience is what the world tells us, and the world never lies. 

All stories are lies, after all. Some more than others, but that’s only a matter of degree. Truth is beyond any of us to fix in words. A lie is only a different story than the one the liar believes. But why should that make it any less true, or any more false? Is invention any worse than memory? Are we not all dreaming with our eyes open? Annie needed a story the way sleepers need good dreams. 

Did it matter if James ever existed? The world didn’t seem to notice. Did it matter that James didn’t kill himself? Only I seemed to notice that. A truth confined to a single skull changes when that skull shifts its contents. They do better in firmer mediums. James did want to die, he just didn’t know it yet. Why else would he have gibbered like a delirious prophet? Why else would he have mentioned that name so incessantly? Whole. Whole. Whole. Whole. He chanted it, mumbled it, intoned it. The whole is whole. The hole is whole. The whole is hole. He must have known it would break me down, reduce me, subjugate me. Surely he knew it would free him of his nightmares. The ones he awoke from screaming, pleading, sobbing. The timeless annihilation he felt every night, awakening from what he said felt like a thousand years of his soul burning in the conflagration of the Whole. He had been right. He had proved it with experiment. We are all Whole, the great Oneness, forever emerging, forever returning. White-capped waves in the ocean of Whole totality. We can serve this whole. Speed the return. The all-consuming mother of all, hungry to feast on her children. James has been sped. My grandparents and parents, too. Now Annie, polonium-fat Annie would speed along to rejoin the Whole. The All. What exultant despair! What unending destruction! Life longs to un-live, thought longs to un-think, being longs to un-be. The infant self emerges in instantaneous peace, thus we must all return in the timeless anguish of annihilation. 

A blue light flicked on the EKG and a buzzer broke in angrily. Annie’s pulse had dropped below 30. Reaching behind the bed, I fumbled carelessly to unplug it. Soon peace returned, and Annie’s chest slowed its oscillations. 

I got up and kissed her forehead, then leaned over to whisper into her ear.

“The whole is whole.”