God in a Pill

“What if God was one of us?” Lee Anne said, hurling her golden hair back as it sparkled in a thousand different glimmers of golden blonde.

              “Jesus Christ,” Pierre’s face turned up in disgust, sending a jolt of terror down the nerve endings in my neck, “That’s so frikking lame.”

              “Come on angel,” Lee Anne raised an eyebrow, “Lighten up, you’ll have more fun that way.”

              I trembled, in dread, my jaw starting to crunch in its sockets.

              “We’re not here to party like some first year tweenies fresh out of mom’s diaper bags or whatever.” Pierre’s eyes were wide, burning fiercely, ready to consume any cognition unworthy of his attention. “We’re here for real Tim Leary style neural rewiring. You want to talk God? Let’s talk archetypes.”

              “What would your mother say Bee?” Lee Anne said. “Probably something like…” she scrunched up her face and puckered her lips. “We don’t talk about bronze age goat herder fantasies around the table, thank you!” The inflection on the last bit was dead on, but so sharp I felt like it was cutting right through me.

              Pierre chuckled. “Yeah and her dad would be like uh…” he faltered, he was never good at improvising, “well some Alan Watts inspired you are God type bullshit…or whatever.”

              I felt incredibly vulnerable in that moment, as if I was made of shards of glass, as if they could see right through me.

              “You alright Bee?” Lee Anne turned her warm, but penetrating gaze on me. She waved. “Helloooooo.”

              Pierre shot me a jagged stare “I think she’s got the fear and loathing.”

              I fumbled for thoughts, but a current was taking hold, an ocean teaming with sharks, threatening to tear me up. In that moment my two closest friends seemed to be the most dangerous people in the world. They had the ability to break me down into tiny bits from which I would never return to my true form. The light from the fire that flickered across them seemed to highlight only malevolence on their faces. Pierre got up and threw a log in the fire. The flames exploded in an enormous explosion of crackling.

              “I can’t,” I screamed, “I just can’t.”

              “What?” Pierre said.

              But it was too late, I turned and ran.

              The voices that followed me were like multiphonic squealing. I grasped for my ears as I ploughed through the dense thicket, ripping off branches. Thorns tearing at my clothing. I was drowning, gasping for breath. Leaves brushing over my skin like crashing waves. 

              Had I discovered Hell instead of Heaven?

              I tripped as I burst through the forest and out into the open plain, taking an enormous breath as I crashed towards the damp grassy ground.

              My head was racing, my eyes darting around wildly, heart thudding in my chest. Would I die out here? At least I’d get some answers. And when I met God I had a whole heap of questions that needed some damn good ones. 

              I needed to make this stop. How could I force myself to come down, to snap back to reality?

              I turned on to my back and tried to focus on my surroundings. I used a grounding technique I’d researched on the internet to help with my panic attacks, instead of going to see a therapist. Five things I could see: Moon, stars, fence, trees, ground. Four things I could hear: crickets, wind, uh…nothing…no mustn’t stop just move on. Three things I could smell: grass, smoke…smoke? Was the hellfire and brimstone in my head driving me insane? Was I having olfactory hallucinations? Was it real? There shouldn’t be anyone out here. We had chosen this spot, a reserve, untouched, isolated. A place where no one was allowed to live or even camp. We were breaking the rules. Would the cops come after us? 

              My eyes shot open as I desperately searched for the source of the fire. I saw black clouds billowing off in the distance, somewhere near the high cliffs under the rising moon.

              Was the forest on fire? Had my madness turned visible?

              I had never done this stuff before. Pierre was the expert. He had promised me it would open my mind to a world of possibilities. As theology and philosophy majors, he had said, it was our job to explore the limits of the mind. He had sworn that I would come face to face with the divine, have the beatific vision.

              I had never quite agreed with either of my parents. My father was too lax about it, and my mother too militant. Growing up with conflicting and equally extreme ends on different sides of the spectrum I had been really confused. I never knew what to think. I felt like a deep abyss inside me empty of any conviction either way.

              As my mind drifted towards this realisation I sat up, and took in the night sky. A hundred billion stars, as many galaxies, an incomprehensible amount of other solar systems and planets that could be harbouring life. What was the point of it? Why did the universe spew out creatures who could feel, and some who could think and reason? Why was there consciousness? 

              Those were type of questions science could not answer. The entire reason for spirituality of all kinds. From the moment human beings were capable of ‘rational’ thought they had been drawn to what lay beyond the realm of everyday experience. From animal spirits to all powerful deities, we had come up with who knew how many ways of reaching something that seemed unattainable. Was it just a curiosity, or a quirk, or an evolutionary by product, with no real function or basis in reality?

              I was glad to feel the silence, to be away from the others. Pierre would shoot down my thoughts with his own dogmatic brand of critical thinking, always correct, and others always wrong. Lee Anne would be equally dismissive, albeit in a playful, silly kind of manner.

              Something in me was drawn towards the smoke. It was quickly becoming my primary reason for existing. Just feeling it made me lucid. But more than that I was overwhelmed with an ecstasy that I had never felt before. I felt intensely satiated just thinking about it. So I sprang up and started to drift towards it, swaying with the rhythm of my hips, smiling softly as I felt the ground surging through my feet and up my torso, bursting out the top of my head and connecting with the dome of space above it.

              While the smoke had appeared far off to my intoxicated mind, it was really closer than I thought. I slid through the lightly wooded area at the base of the mountain and followed the black plume, mind emptied apart from anything necessary from my body to get there, like it was a mantra.

              The trees became slightly denser as I moved through them, they began to close in around me. One sprang up in front of me, as if it had suddenly shot upwards from the earth, and my forehead bashed into its rough bark. I rubbed it and noticed that the sky had flickered into a navy, and the greyish blue seemed to pulse lighter as I walked on.

              Yet they still grew thicker, bushier. Was I entering Dante’s Inferno? Or was this more like The Magical Faraway Tree? I did not know, but I was sure that the stillness was preternatural, and the changing heavens above me was marking some sort of shift towards a new fantasy. Even the crickets had stopped chirping.

              Then everything stopped. I was in an open clearing, the trees bordering the area in a perfect circle.

              A large bonfire lay at the centre, around which half sawn logs rested a safe distance away from the flames.

              But it was empty. Maybe whoever had been here had moved on already.

              So I sat down on one of the logs and basked in the warmth.

              I had not noticed the chill till that moment.

              My fingers, nose and bare feet were frigid, stiff. I had been able to ignore it with everything going on. But now I began to shiver. I rubbed my extremities in an attempt to generate some heat. The fire at this distance was not enough. I stared into it. Watched it dance and delight. I felt so drawn to it, so hungry for the powerful energy it was emitting. I started seeing shapes, vague ones, but familiar.

              So I took a closer look, not even blinking my eyes.

              Suddenly it burst with an aura, from where I didn’t know. Everything around me disappeared as it consumed all of my peripheral vision. There was only flame, and in it, a thousand lives. And they were all mine. Some flashed by like shooting stars, hardly recognisable. Images from a past I did not know. Was it reincarnation? Then focusing on my known life. A girl slumped in a corner in ballet class, while the others shot her malicious grins. A beautiful blue-eyed boy left a teenage girl naked by the beach, no way to get home, having gotten what he wanted. And older women, was it me? Her hair was thin and scrumpled, her face blistered with sores, teeth ravaged by meth. I just knew it instinctively. There was a baby wailing, there were sirens and handcuffs and brute force and the whole of existence just wanted her to come to harm and…

              “Don’t go into the light.” The fire said.

              “Whaaaaaa…” I crooned.

              “I said…goddammit…”

              Suddenly I was jerked away from the visions and lying on my back.

              “Fire bad.” The fire said again, chuckling.

              I was losing my mind. I squirmed on the ground, feeling like I was pinned there, unable to operate my arms.

              A hand reached out to me.

              I took it.

              As the world rose around me, lifted up by a puff of air, as if the swirling vortex of life were rotating around me instead of the sun, the galactic centre, and the universal core, a face came into view. A long beard, black but speckled with grey, unruly hair which I could’ve sworn had twigs sticking out of it but later came to realise it was just a phantom of my addled brain. The eyes of this creature were a cutting green, but lighted by a soft kindness. He wore ripped jeans, not the kind you buy but the kind you make, and a mud-stained olive hoody.

              “What you doing tryna touch the fire like that?” He grumbled.

              “I uh…” I was about to say what I had seen, but was realising I would sound like a lunatic. “I don’t know really.” I mumbled.

              “What you doin here?”

              “I could ask you the same. The park supposed to be closed.”

              He cleared his throat. “Not what I meant.”

              I didn’t quite know what he meant.

“Do you live out here?” I asked. 

He shot me a quizzical stare, but didn’t answer. Then he reached for a pot down on the ground and placed it gently down on the fire.

“What’s that?”

“Tonic.”

“For what?”

“What’s tonic for, she asks.” He chuckled. 

Hurt I felt my face scrunch up into a childish pout. He laughed heartily at this. “If you don’t know what a thing is, no use in explaining.”

He stirred the pot carefully, his eyes transfixed upon it’s contents. It was blueish, teaming with plant matter. I saw little orange streams rising like a fountain from the bottom.

“What do you mean there’s no use in explaining?”

He rubbed his beard, his eyes narrowing then opening as thoughts seemed to bubble up in his brain. He did this for a while before answering.

“What’s that?” He asked, pointing to a tree.

“A tree,” I said, frustrated.

“What’s that?”

My eyes thinned. “It’s a…thing with bark and leaves and roots. Birds sit in it.”

A gleeful grin flashed across his face, highlighting the scars I was just coming to see. “That’s a thing like we see. What is that?” He pointed more forcefully towards the tree.

Frustrated, I groaned. “It’s a multicellular organism that has evolved on earth without consciousness to recycle usable air!”

His smile was deadly this time. “That’s a thing like from a book. What is that?”

Thinking I was smart, I answered, “It’s my sensory perception?”

His laughed bellowed throughout the clearing. “Thinking too much. Like all those people. What is that?”

              Exhausted I yelled, “I don’t fucking know then!”

              His face suddenly became quite serious. “That’s a good place to start.”

              “Do you know what it is though? If it’s not anything I’ve described?”

              He shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you if I did. Wouldn’t help things.”

              “So you’re like an agnostic or something?” I asked.

              He frowned. “I don’t think so. No. Whatever that is.”

              I groaned in frustration. “You’re insuf…insufering…insurrefed…insuff…” My tongue had suddenly gone limp. I knew the word in my mind, but the wire between my speech centre and my mouth seemed to be malfunctioning. I sucked on its insides for a while. “You’re difficult.” I managed.

              “There can’t be easy with out difficult,” he said, matter of factly.

              “I don’t understand.” I screeched.

              “Good, don’t.”

              I slumped onto the bare earth, holding my head in my hands. Don’t. Don’t understand. What is that thing. The words bounced around in my brain like a pinball machine, smashing into neurons and causing a headache.

              “My head is sore.” I said.

              “Tonic almost ready.” He stirred it a bit more, his back to me.

              “Do you know why I am here?” I ventured, wondering if he was some sort of mystical shaman.

              “No.”

              “I was supposed to find God,” I muttered, “But instead I think I’m going crazy.”

              “Didn’t say I want to know.” He frowned.

              “Well screw you then.” I hissed.

              He guffawed loudly, clutching his chest, almost falling down.

              “If you can’t help I’ll just go find my friends only…” I paused. “only I think they make everything worse. That’s harsh to say I think, maybe wrong of me, but its how I feel right now.”

“You’ll never find anything by searching.” He said, rubbing his beard, then pointed to the sky. “Like mistaking the finger for the moon.”

My mouth dropped open, I felt my eyebrows raise. I gazed up and held my finger to the sky. Staring at it, I rose to my feet. “That makes sense, that’s the first thing you’ve said that makes any sense.”

He smiled, the skin around his eyes crinkling.

I’d been searching so hard I’d missed something.

“How do I find out then?” I asked.

He swayed on his feet. “Listen,” I stopped.

“There’s nothing but silence.” I said.

“Hmmm. I think this silence is everythin.”

I listened to the stillness. A thousand pathways in my brain had been connected by this chemical. I was using capacities I had never been able to access before. To listen to the silence. It descended on me like a torrent, a tsunami of nothing but pure bliss and being. I twirled and dropped to the ground again, swimming in the nothingness.

“So you’re like a zen buddhist or something.” I asked. 

“How d’ya know these worz?”

“I read them,” I said, to which he cocked an eyebrow. Feeling like I had to explain for some unknown reason I said “In a book.”

“Never read a book this one.”

“Then how…”

“Come out here, live alone, try not to think to much.”

“You’re a hermit sage!” I squealed in delight.

A painful expression crossed his face. He took a small sip from the pot. “Just a man, man.”

“Is it ready?” I said gleefully, “Can I have some?” I was positively brimming with joy.

He eyed me up a bit. “Hmmmm.” He grunted.

“Please? I’ve got to. I’ve got to drink a brew with the sage!”

His body tensed up, quite visibly. Shoulders squeezing together, buttocks tight, neck cricked.

“Alright, nice to share.”

He poured the mixture into a earthenware mug, and offered it to me. I beamed at him.

It tasted floral, and was quite pungent, like drinking perfume. It was quite unpleasurable to drink, though incredibly strange and therefore fascinating, so I slurped it down quickly. He poured a mug for himself and sipped it.

His eyes widened, but he said nothing.

He began to draw strange symbols in the dirt, but when I questioned him he only grunted.

Then it hit me. 

              Panic, coursing through me, I jolted upwards and began to scream, completely consumed.

He lurched towards me, then grabbed my shoulders.

It was the last thing I remembered about that night.

I woke up to the smell of wet grass, little rain drops pattering my bare skin. At first I felt fresh and rejuvenated. But then I noticed that I was wearing only my underwear.

Had he…

I looked around.

There were no log seats. Where the fire had been there was not one speck of ash. Only dirt.

“Jesus Christ Bianca,” Pierre said, “Where the hell have you been?”

“We were so worried,” Lee Anne warbled. “So worried Bee!”

My clothes lay next to me, covered in stains. I smelled it. It was rancid.

I must have thrown up.

Pierre looked around at my clothes and my semi naked body. “Looks like you had fun.”

Lee Anne’s face was uncharacteristically concerned. “What happened Bee?”

I stood up and looked around at the empty space.

“I have no fucking idea.”

It seemed like a good place to start.