“Three days,” Christian assured him. “Just give me three days.”
“You’re on, brother. We’re gonna pick up the stash tomorrow evening. Can you hang out for a few days?”
“Yes,” Christian nodded slowly, wanting to get into a headspace, simply listen to the music and meditate with the outrageous stone.
“Until then …” Dharma held out his hand. There were three tablets on it. “Sandoz,” he told Christian.
Ah! They want to know me. A different evening, then.
Christian reached out and picked up one of the tabs. Sandoz. Pure, pharmaceutical LSD. He put the pill on his tongue, swallowed, and grinned. Bob and Dharma followed him.
“Welcome to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love,” Dharma smiled with him.
Christian’s body was beginning to overheat. His eyelids were heavy and he had some trouble opening them. Blinking, he tried looking at his watch, but it jumped and moved. He thought maybe he was forty minutes into the trip. The music on the stereo had changed and pulsed with his body, touched him physically. A tingling began that closely matched Peter Townsend’s guitar. He shook to the sound.
An unconscious grin stretched across his face, his lips felt fuzzy, his stomach tight, and he wished he’d fasted before dropping.
The large floor pillow beneath him was comfortable, and he melted into the fabric. The last threads holding his body together dissolved. New pulsations traveled up his legs and arms, shimmering, light filled, his limbs shaking with a life of their own. Patterns began to unfold, forming, moving, reforming. Suddenly, it was impossible to keep his eyes open. But it didn’t matter anymore. Open or closed, eyelids or ceiling, both were only movie screens.
A good dose, he realized, as he continued to slip farther and farther away.
An oscillating noise started low, grew greater, filled his ears—music combined with sound that would not stop. The sound tickled him. He slipped off the pillow to become a part of the floor, everything tremendously funny. Patterns continued shifting rhythmically, filled with vibrant, changing color, a swell of sensation.
The music came to him louder now, a wall of feeling, sound, and color. He heard it, not with his ears but with every part of his body. He floated on it, and it lifted him, played with him. His laugh was silly, childlike, and he swam in a sea of sensation, his hair flowing everywhere, crackling, standing on end with electricity produced from his own body, his own psychedelic generator.
Where does my hair begin or my face end? he thought. What do I see? Is it ceiling or hair or air?
He lay on his back, stretching out his hands, feeling the carpet melt under his touch, heard his own laugh come to him from far away. The floor, the rugs, the pillow, his body—all electrical, all transmitting energy.
This floor! It connects me to the earth, anchors me. Gives me a platform, a stage on which to exist, a focal point in time and space.
His pores began to open, his nose to run, his eyes to tear. Mucous began moving, part of the sacramental cleansing.
Absently, his hand brushed an abalone shell, and he gasped. Where had it come from, this prop on his stage? Everything else forgotten, he gingerly touched swirls of blues and greens tinged with pink.
How can I name this object? It is … elusive, without boundaries, continuously shifting, creating and re-creating itself, never ending.
Lost in moving colors for a long time, he was finally distracted by the tremendous heat radiating off his body. He crawled from the pillow and abruptly pulled off his T-shirt. Again, his hair slipped over his face.
I’ve got to get serious about tying back my hair, laughing and laughing at the thought that anything could be serious, sending the pulsating energy roaring through his body and rushing through his ears.
With deliberation, he pushed himself to a sitting position, holding up his arms to open his lungs. The air became a swirl of color in his brain.
Remember the lessons Lama Loden taught, he reminded himself. Breathe!
Oxygen steadied his body. Even though his cheeks hurt from his smile, he could not lose the grin. Consciously, he made his breath a pattern, following the air into his lungs, traveling through blood vessels, into every cell. At his stomach, the food was heavy, solid, sickening. He wanted to vomit and tried to remember whether he was inside or outside.
He was gaining some visual control, but his limbs were still weak and trembling. Across the room, he recognized the entrance to a hallway. Standing unsteadily, he looked around from his new height. A whole new world became visible, overpowering, and if he did not move quickly, his overly stimulated legs would collapse.
He’d forgotten the other people in the room. The girl who was playing music was again changing records on the turntable. She smiled at his broad grin, getting off on his high. “Can I help you with something, brother?”
Her face was changing like everything else—ruddy, reddish, pulsating with her breathing. He could lose himself in that face for a long time.
Instead, he shook his head and made his way down the hallway until he found the bathroom, concentrating, holding to his purpose.
The light was brighter here, things more obvious, and he smiled shyly at his image in the mirror. The face was red cast, transforming second to second, his pupils dilated, pulsing.
Again the nausea tightened his stomach. He turned to the toilet and vomited, then blew his nose with shaking hands. His glands expelled sweat and oil. His pores opened, breathing. His cells constricted, excreting waste, the acid cleansing his body.
Christian turned on the water and let his fingers run through it, wetting his face, rinsing his mouth.
The water intrigued him. He wanted to crawl into it and splashed it over his arms with such vigor that it fell on the table next to the basin. Gingerly, he touched the spilled water on the wooden stand, felt the table’s firmness, its shape, understood the entire amount of mind energy needed to conceptualize and create its reality, from the first piece of wood used by man, the alteration of wood to create something new, the properties of different kinds of trees, tools, glue, nails, design, woodworking passed through millennia, thousands of years of human endeavor and history all bound in this one piece.
Pulling a leather tie from his jeans, he held back his hair, tied it, and looked again at the face in the mirror. The face was no longer his. Instead, he was disturbed to see his father. He didn’t want to think of his father, felt the flow of energy catch in his throat.
But the face changed rapidly to that of his grandfather, and he knew tenderness. Then his grandfather was gone, and the face in the mirror became that of Bob, then that of Matt, then others he knew, his emotions changing as quickly as the pictures in the mirror.
Wondering at the images, he tore his eyes away from his face and looked down at his body, took a deep breath, saw his chest fill, noticed the hair, then the muscle of his arms, knew his manhood. A hard erection pushed against the zipper of his jeans.
His limbs ceased shaking. Before entering the bathroom, he had been a baby searching for a way off the floor. He had crawled, taken shaky steps as a toddler, had walked the hallway to this room an adolescent. But now, he was a man.
Christian opened the door and looked out into the living room. Only the girl who played music was still there. She smiled, lightly, smoothly.
“Hello,” she whispered gently.
The look she gave called to him. In the music, he heard his heartbeat, his pounding blood. His sexuality was alive and raw. The base grabbed him in his loins. The touch was deep, primitive, pulsing. He laughed into her eyes, his body ignited by her form, her hair, the shape of her mouth, her clothes mixed with the smell of incense.
“Everyone’s gone to their own rooms,” he heard her say.
The music held him, the beat undulating, pushing him to move, to dance, and she moved with him, caught in the rhythm. His muscles tensed, hard throughout his body. Nothing else mattered but the woman and the rhythm.
Now Christian reached for the tie holding back his
hair and pulled at it, letting his hair fall, rub against his shoulders. The sensual feel of it, the silky smoothness added to his already heightened sensuality. Moving with her, matching palm against palm, the intimacy was rare, encouraging him to draw her closer, lock her body against his.
“Come,” she said softly into his ear, took his hand, and gently pulled him toward the stairs.
A candle was waiting in her bedroom, and the woman knelt to light the wick, and with that, a stick of incense. The rising sweet scent mixed with the diamonds and colored jewels and paisleys of his vision. The tapestries of the room moved, color and pattern vibrantly bouncing from the walls. The Asian carpets swirled about his feet.
Christian wanted to throw himself into the pool of melting colors but dared not move. Instead, he stood breathless as the girl opened the sliding door to the deck and the night air, her head outlined by stars. In the magic of the vision, she was more than beautiful, but Christian could not give her body words, could only stand where he had entered, looking at her, grinning softly. The stars moved into her face where candlelight touched—the glistening of her eyes, the moistness around her mouth. Diamonds and gently moving spirals played in her dark hair.
“I’m Amy,” she whispered.
Slowly, she lifted her blouse over her head and cast it aside, removed her skirt. Long hair covered her shoulders and breasts. Taking his hands, she pulled him down to kneel with her, face to face, on the rug.
Christian reached toward her breasts, gingerly, filled with too much feeling, unsure what to do. Amy helped, cupped her breast and pulled his head toward her nipple, arched her back, ran her fingers through his hair.
She’s exquisite, Christian thought, not of this world.
He wondered if he would be able to make love to her or whether he would get lost in a maze of feelings he was finding harder to sort.
He moved his hands around her curves, her skin smooth, hard, brown, found that each touch called him deeper into feeling, pushing him to want more. Her eyes drew him, her face smiling, changing. A caress of her thigh, and she opened her legs to him. He was suddenly overwhelmed, confused by her smells, her beauty, the sensations that pounded through him.
But the girl moved for him, pushing him back, slipping off his jeans, so that he was naked and free and erect. The warmth of her body touched him. She kissed his neck, chest, stomach, her kisses exploding the fire already too hot. When she touched his erection, a bolt seared through his body, so strong he hardly knew where to put the sensation. Surely, it must go somewhere. But before he could find a place, another raging fire passed through him. And another. And another.
Her touch was soft and firm and constant, and he could not release himself from her motion. Slowly, she sat on him, slipping him inside, their bodies no longer separate. Together, they stepped into a place of intense pleasure, and suddenly, he turned, the woman beneath him, and was lost to her warmth, searching.
The rhythm began to build, accelerate, slowly, and they danced, his push and pull matching her movement, deeper and deeper. Being centered in his pelvic area, a life force extending outward. He knew the universe to be one giant pulsating motion of push and pull, of electrical energy, and right now he was igniting the spark that made creation. All things were a loving positive or negative, searching endlessly through time to merge, to be complete, to be one through love. The act he performed was a small microcosmic morality play, teaching the essence of God. He was Shiva, pure Being, timeless perfection, eternal, wisdom, Logos. She, Shakti, the power of Becoming, the creative energy of time, the joy and love of self-expression, Eros.
Christian drew on the life force with every capability, and when he exploded, it was the primal scream, the primogenitive om, the hum of electricity running through the universe, the vibration of the sacred drum, the music of the spheres. He made love into the Void, into the darkness before night and day, and created a million stars in a new galaxy. Within him was the power of life, of godliness. He knew that being, orgasm, and creation, were inseparable, the mystery of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—the three persons in one Godhead. And the mystery was so simple to understand.
He lay, breathing heavily, trying to orient himself.
I’ve traveled so far, he thought, as he lay with her. What am I doing? Where am I? What am I?
He looked at the girl and smiled, gently placed his hand on her belly, his limbs still quivering, his mind still blown.
“Thank you,” she whispered, low, soft, and she reached up to touch his face. “You still pretty stoned?”
Christian could only smile and take great deep breaths to fill his lungs, wondering whether he’d ever come down or whether, this time, he’d really taken too much LSD. But as time passed, Amy’s steady hands anchored him to the earth, his breathing finally stilled itself, and he no longer felt as if he would cry. They lay together, a thin breeze from the open deck door blowing across their bodies. Slowly, he came back to his own ego.
“Want to shower with me?” Amy sat up, smiling. “It’s been hot today. The night’s still too warm. Come. You’ll love the water.”
From the closet, she grabbed loose-fitting, cotton meditation clothes, and pulling gently, kissing his neck and shoulders, led him into the bathroom. In the light, Christian could tell that the intensity of shifting patterns had ceased. He knew he’d peaked. Everything was remarkably clear.
They washed each other, returned to the bedroom, and smoked hash from a pipe, Christian grateful when the smoke eased the hurt from his grinning cheeks. Talking, touching intimately, the hash increasing the depth of colors, Amy finally fell asleep, her long wet hair covering only a fraction of her nakedness.
Far from sleepy, Christian went back downstairs to the living room, wearing only the white, cotton drawstring yoga pants Amy had given him. The music had changed again. The mood was different. An Indian raga was playing, the music just loud enough to focus the mind. Bob and Dharma were back together, sitting on the rug, talking quietly. Christian sat down beside them and smiled into Bob’s face.
“Yes, brother,” Bob grinned.
Christian wanted to stretch, to move his body. He bent toward his feet, breathing easily, deep and regular, automatically leaning into yoga postures. The more he stretched, the more he knew his body. He followed the path of his breath into his lungs and went with it throughout his veins and arteries. He understood the machine-like nature of his lungs, pulsating in and out, again with a rhythm. He turned his attention to his heart, felt it pump, knew the muscle, became the heart. Traveling, he reached each organ, each part of himself, knew how a yogi could control the heart, or another organ, or a muscle.
As he moved further inward, into his nervous system, he heard the electrical hum flowing along the chain of nerve cells toward the spinal cord, and from there, sensory stimulation to his brain. At the tips of his nerve cells, where he gathered feeling, he felt a spark igniting a signal, sensed the flow and exchange of data between synapses.
Deeper still, he knew the billions of cells as single cells—each one a living being with its own life, its urgent assimilation of food and air, its excretions, its reproductions, its age.
I am a man, yes, but ancient. Three and a half billion years of continued creation … all toward this body.
Racial memory rushed at him. He gasped, overwhelmed.
Mind and body slowed. No longer was he infant or child, adolescent or virile man, but aged. The time of the exchange between synapses lengthened. Sensory information collected at the base of his spine, warm, heavy—a ball of energy, stored, waiting.
Slowing down, he thought. I am so old. What if I stop feeling—stop passing information to my brain?
He sat with his eyes closed, cross-legged in full lotus, the position automatically forcing his back straight. Outwardly, he seemed perfectly at peace, yet a shaft of fear pierced his composure.
If the sensory data stops, I will die. Without information, without knowledge, without thought, I will have no
consciousness. I will not exist.
He began to pull away from his death. The shaft of fear widened into subdued panic. His mind longed to run away somewhere, to hide. Perhaps if he moved his body, he could save himself. But the body was too old, too enfeebled to move.
I will die, he thought again, opening his eyes, trying to turn to Bob for help.
But Bob was at least two feet away, and they would have to link their minds to understand what Christian was feeling.
Even then, Christian’s thoughts were slow in forming.
There is no hope, he realized. My mind is going.
Losing it … can’t hold the thought … what was … I … thinking …
Moments later, he could not hold to a single word. He sought to push against what he knew would be his death, but there was no energy left, even for this last fight.
Then … die.
And he stepped forward, embracing death.
The ball of energy at the base of his spine rushed up his spinal column and flashed into his brain. All sound, color, sensory feeling, all thought and identity, all that made up ordinary or extraordinary consciousness, melded into a tremendous burst of light. With eyes open or closed, Christian was aware only of a bright screen of wholeness, of complete peace, complete understanding, complete knowledge. In that moment, he knew the entire spectrum of existence—past, present, and future, the same, without beginning or end. Total Being.
The Source of all things! There is no death!
Yet, with that thought, the vision faded, and slowly, the nervous system started transmitting again. All the information he had lost with his death began to be replaced. Carefully, one by one, items were returned to his brain. The sorting began gathering momentum, moving faster, a wheel turning and picking up speed. Single items, tens, then hundreds, thousands, countless numbers. Things around him began to segment, to have names and functions. His mind began to think in words, then phrases, then sentences, until his personality reintegrated into something resembling Christian.
A bird’s song called from outside. Night had passed. Morning. He awakened to the sound just as he was reborn.
A Nation of Mystics Page 5
