What Is Growing Inside Maria

by Heidi King

Rites at the Blue Rock

  By Mathew Hope

  We caught stares as the six of us filed past the coin operated video porn. “From the profane to the divine,” Dr. Mike said, gesturing to the group screaming and shouting at the cock fight. We had to pass through this discothèque in the town of Caldera to arrive at the cattle pasture, our destination. We disappeared out the back, past urinating drunks, and slipped through the barbed wire to an open field in search of our next sacred temple for rituals. It seems Dr. Mike always chooses places that invoke fear. This time fear’s name was a black bull staring at us silently as we marched to the far end of the field.

  I kept my flashlight to the ground. Creeping vines caught my eye in the light and I constantly thought I was seeing snakes. I hadn’t noticed that María was walking beside me without a flashlight. She was carrying a black garbage bag and staring at the night sky.

  None of us could see the Elephant Stone engraved with pre-Columbian hieroglyphs, so we spread out like a search party and kept walking. We searched for twenty minutes before we reconvened, and Dr. Mike decided he wanted to open the sacred circle. María protested and said that the rock was essential to her ritual. We compromised by starting my ritual first. Later, we would continue the search for the Elephant Stone.

  Before Dr. Mike opened the sacred circle, María said she had a surprise for us. She asked everyone to gather around her, and then she reached into the garbage bag.

  “Gifts,” she said, and handed a colorful robe to each of us. These were the robes she stole from the Rosicrucian Temple in David. She seemed to have chosen specific colors for us. Mine was purple. “The color of Easter,” she told me. Then we formed a circle and Dr. Mike drew the sacred pentagram in the air with his hand and prayed to the five elements. “To earth,” he said, “and the philosopher’s stone, to sky and the crescent moon of Isis, to fire and the sword, Excalibur, to wind and the crown of the king.” This was the first time I heard him cleverly combine the elements with the symbols we had chosen to draw on our hands for lucid dreaming. They seemed to fit perfectly. The coincidence, I know Dr. Mike would say, was not a coincidence, but the will of our collective unconscious.

  Dr. Mike had secretly rehearsed my ritual with everyone the day before, so that everything would be a surprise for me.

  “Brothers and sisters,” he shouted into the air, “this sublime degree has been calculated to bind us together by mystic points of fellowship. It points to the darkness of death and to the obscurity of the grave. It is a forerunner of a more brilliant light, which shall follow at the resurrection, when these mortal bodies shall be awakened and clothed with immortality.”

  Usnavy stood in front of me in her yellow robe. She held up a strip of cloth and blindfolded me.

  “Matthew Bernard Hope, you are Hiram. You are the Osiris in the Temple of Solomon, here to pay your respects to the Holy Goddess Isis.” His volume and tone then drastically changed. He shouted ominously, “But three fellow craftsmen barred the south, west and east entrances to the holy of holies, the shrine of the Holy Grail. At the first entrance you met your first assailant.”

  At this point Steve put his hand on my shoulder and whispered in a poor attempt at sounding intimidating. “What is the sacred word of the resurrection?”

  I stuttered a moment. In my dream I had said nothing, so now in the ritual I assumed that I should do the same.

  “Hiram refused to divulge the sacred word, and his refusal was met with a sharp blow to the head with a plumb rule.”

  Someone tapped me in the middle of the forehead. I almost snickered. I tried to remember my dream. But standing in the middle of a cattle pasture, knowing everyone was watching me, made it hard for me to get back into the ambiance, the feeling of my dream.

  It must have been Steve who pushed hard on my shoulder, and someone else who gently tapped me behind my right leg, indicating that I should go down on one knee.

  “Faint and bleeding he ran to the east gate where he met his second assailant, who struck him with a level.” Okay, whoever hit me next, I wish I knew who it was, because it was hard and made me snap out of any kind of vibe I was experiencing going back into my dream.

  “Hiram lay lifeless on the ground.” Two people now eased me onto my back. I understood now that I just had to passively allow myself to be handled like a puppet. They covered me with a sheet and pulled my right hand out from under it. Someone, a girl I think, maybe María, took my hand but then let it slide through hers and drop to the ground.

  “The entered apprentice grip seems to slip,” Dr. Mike shouted, sounding as though this was nearing a climax.

  I was on the ground for a bit. I think I was supposed to be contemplating my afterlife. I remembered the blue bus from my dream and wondered why that was a reappearing motif. Dr. Mike mentioned nothing of this in the dream analysis he emailed me. The blue bus couldn’t really be an archetype from the collective unconscious, could it?

  Then María grabbed my hand again and jerked me up to my feet.

  “The Lion’s Grip,” Dr. Mike cried, signaling my resurrection and the end of the ritual.

  My blindfold was removed, and everyone around me clapped. I was grateful. It was an earnest attempt, but now it seemed like I was the only one that didn’t have this kind of mystical experience where I connected with my unconscious by acting out my dream. For me, the lucid dream felt even more real, more vivid, than this rehearsed ritual.

  I was a Freemason now, I guess, and I felt Dr. Mike searching my face for something. I would answer his questions later, but the truth was that I felt nothing. The mood crashed right after. Maybe because of my reaction, I don’t know. Without The Elephant Stone we were left with nothing to do. Dr. Mike attempted to salvage the night.

  He arranged for us to lie in a circle with each of our heads resting on the stomach of the person next to us. So each of us rested our heads on a stomach and each of us had a head on our stomach. Then we just waited for Steve to say something.

  “Let’s tape a piece of buttered bread to Rocky’s back, butter side up. And then let’s see what happens, butter down or Rocky’s feet.”

  It started with snickers, but when you have a bobbing, snorting head on your stomach. you can’t help but laugh. We all erupted. I wondered what my Roman Catholic mother would have thought, seeing me in a robe, participating in a pagan ritual and then laughing like a madman.

  Steve stood up all of a sudden because he had rolled onto a cow pie. Then he made a discovery. “Mushrooms!” he shouted. “I know these. For sure they are magic mushrooms.”

  Despite Dr. Mike’s elder voice of reason, Steve popped a little blue capped mushroom into his mouth, offering himself up as the sacrificial guinea pig. Five minutes later he assured us that he knew these mushrooms, and Dr. Mike couldn’t stop the others from going to town. In the end, he ate some, too.

  We lied out there in the field, and for a moment I got lost staring at the sky before I realized that María was lying beside me. I wasn’t tripping yet. My stomach hurt, like the mushrooms decided to kick me in the gut before opening up out the top of my head.

  “They are so amazing,” she said to whoever was listening.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The mountains,” she responded, but she said it a kind of detached melancholy. Not like the awe she expressed when we laid on the beach in Bocas and stared at the rising moon. She rolled over and turned toward the mountains. But it was too dark to actually see them -- just the jagged edges where the star lit sky ended and darkness began, as if earth’s dark fangs were taking a bite out of the constellations.

  “It’s beautiful,” Maria said. “These mountains were once one -- until great forces ripped them apart. There is great power when standing between two forces that were once one. Out here we are stone immaculate.”

  There seemed to be a hazy film over everything. I became acutely aware of my own face -- it felt like there were a
thousand needles jutting out the pores of my skin. My face was hot, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Colored robes flashed as if we were illuminated by a great strobe light.

  Dr. Mike, never missing an opportunity to lecture, broke the moment of silence. “We are opening the gates. The collective unconscious is rising uncensored. It’s like our dreams. When we take psilocybin, repressed images from deep within us, images that we all share, bubble forth. And the doors of perception are cleansed as we see everything as it is -- infinite.”

  I was really tripping now. As I lay staring at the stars I felt as if the earth moved. Then I heard Usnavy. “Oh my god!” she shouted and pointed toward a light in the distance.

  What I saw can only be described as a blue light shooting up from the ground around a massive rock. We all stood up and slowly walked toward it. When we got closer we were all struck silent in awe. It was the Elephant Stone, lit by some mysterious light emanating from underneath. The hieroglyphs on the sides were strange two dimensional carvings of the faces of the gods. A round radiating face smiled at us from one, and from another a tear dropped from a face of pure despair. The carvings were filled in with white chalk that seemed to glow under the blue light pouring from under the stone.

  Suddenly María appeared, naked, on top of the rock. I felt something tugging at me in my memory. It was a strong sense of déjà vu. She stood before us and lifted her hands into the air. Then I remembered my dream… more than remembered… I was in my dream. She held out her hands like she was welcoming the wind and I couldn’t breathe.

  “I will drink from the cup, and find salvation in the resurrection,” she said. Her eyes widened as if she was watching a train speeding toward her.

  Usnavy was sitting in front of the rock, humming like child and playing with something that looked like a wooden idol with wings. She was flying it back and forth like a toy plane, seemingly unaware of anything else around her. Dr. Mike sat down beside her.

  “Usnavy?” he asked. “Who is the shaman of you island?”

  “Meeee!” she giggled gleefully.

  The wind seemed to pick up and blow through Maria’s hair. She slowly lowered herself to her knees. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head and I saw the whites of her eyes like she was a feeding shark. I was paralyzed. María slowly eased back and laid flat along the curve of the Elephant Stone’s spine, with her limbs dangling on either side of the stone.

  I felt a sudden shock. I can’t explain it. A sudden shock and then I felt week in the knees. As I fell to ground, the last thing I heard before I blacked out was María, repeating listlessly, “I’m flying, I’m flying on the blue rock, I’m flying.”