Rivers of the Mind Episode 8: A Different Mind

Episode 8: A Different Mind

I curled into a ball, growing with every instant smaller and smaller, first shrinking into the size of a small rat, then a beetle, then an ant, then a bacteria, until I was falling through layer upon layer of an atoms shell, in a raging torrent of light. He kept trying to talk to me. My physical body, of which I was only able to become intermittently aware, stared on, my pupils the size of pins and my breathing almost stopped. I tried to pull back, to latch onto the idea of being a person, somewhere, who existed. I felt myself pull away from the subatomic hell in which I was falling, my astral form glowing and filling with energy. I rose from off of the ground, and in that strange, black-skied world in which I found myself, took hold of him by the shoulders. I remembered the terror that the manager had felt at being trapped inside of my head. Now I was in his shoes. Trapped in an alien world. A place Mick had known. Mick had a soul, but it was a different soul. He had a mind, but it was a different mind. His consciousness, all the machinery of his brain, worked towards one common goal, unmoved by emotion, or sympathy, or attachment. And so I'd slipped in, unaware. Callaway had wanted to be this sort of person—but he couldn't. He retained a sense of guilt, and it was onto that that I had been able to latch. But there was nothing in this world inside of Mick I could identify with. He froze as he felt me touch him. I pulled him out of his body. “What the hell?”, he said. The two of us, physically, only stood in the middle of the pasture, unmoving. I stood on top of him, and held him down, before he threw me off, catapulting me across the farm. Both of us could see our physical forms, like holograms, in the space between us. “Who are you?”, he asked, enraged yet terrified.

“My name is John.”

I shut my eyes and breathed slowly, trying to understand the place in which I found myself. Before I could manage to, Mick threw a punch at the side of my face, sending me careening for the ground. He kicked me, over and over, as I lay there twitching. “I know about Carla.”, I said. He froze. “Who the hell told you about that? What did you put in my drink? Is this...LSD? What is this?”

“I'm inside of your head.”, I told him, “I know everything about you.”

He started shaking, and lifted me over his head, throwing me towards the old barn. Landing just beside the entrance, and wincing with pain, I struggled to pick myself back up. The only way I could defeat him here was if I could somehow bend the contours of his mind. But it was all so foreign to me: a bleak and uncontrollable landscape.

He threw me back through the doors, and retrieved a pitchfork leaning against the wall. “Look, I don't know who you think you're fucking with, but you've got ten seconds to get out of here before I call the cops and get you thrown in jail for possession with intent.” I slowly stood up, feeling myself weak in the knees. He was feeding off my emotion. Feeding off my desire to help him, or to hurt him. To have anything to do with him. I needed to establish the boundary between our minds. I pushed outward, with all the force that I had in my body, beginning to open up a small field of normalcy amongst the blank white and red interior of the barn. My body turned back to normal. His pitchfork melted as he shoved it through to me. Calming myself down, and emboldened, I stretched out the extent of my mind inside his. I could feel him grow terrified, feeling invaded and deeply threatened. He backed away slowly from the growing boundary line. “Get out of here.”, he said, throwing a shovel my direction. Again, it melted. I had him in a corner. Only a small radius extended from me, and, though it successfully contained him, its maintenance took the full extent of my energy. “What do you want?”, he asked. I hadn't considered the question. I didn't know. “Well. Uhm.”, he bit his lip, expecting me to blackmail him with the information about the affair, “Well, here's how it all started”, I sat down, and motioned for him to do the same, “I fell asleep in the bushes by your dad's ranch. And when I started to dream, my consciousness left my body, and I flew around town for a little while. Eventually, I came back, and I saw a cow. The cow looked really neat, and so I touched it, and it ran to the pasture where all the mushrooms were growing. The mushrooms thought I was an evil spirit, but they eventually realized I was just a unique sort of human, since they recognized the ancestral presence of the ergot fungus, which people can use to make LSD. The mushrooms made me talk to your dad about coming out and spending more time with the cows.”

“So what do you want?”, he demanded, impatiently.

“I wanted to see if you were taking good care of your dad.”

“Why? Are you after his money?”

“Is that all you think about?”, I asked, “For the last time, I don't want any money.”

“Look”, he stood up, “As far as I'm concerned, there's two things that make a guy want to do something. Either he wants to fuck or he wants money.”

“Don't you ever get exhausted of thinking that way?”, I asked, trying to press outward and bring him into my mind, where I felt sure I would have the upper hand. He could see my boundaries growing, and felt himself become defeated. Mick felt certain that if he could give me money, I'd cut with the crap, and leave him alone. “I gave up on money.”, I said, trying to transmit my memories into his mind. He felt completely baffled. “God. You must be so miserable.”, he said, as the heat of the boundary line singed his feet, backing him further into the corner. “You must just be some kind of psycho, who gets off going inside of people's heads and torturing them like this.” I felt his own resolve weaken, and with one, intense push, I forced myself outwards. In a brilliant explosion of color and light, I felt myself bursting out of his head, carrying his consciousness along with me. He looked around him with dread, and screamed as he entered my mind. Falling down an endless tunnel into the heart of my brain, he shrieked and flailed for the walls. Now fully in control, I tried to release memories, hints of past crimes, hints of the damage he'd done to other people. I tried to force him to feel something. Anything. He only screamed, falling deeper and deeper, his mind with no greater thought than that, somehow, I'd bested him.

It wasn't working. Trying a new approach, I wrapped my mind around his consciousness and drug him into a place I'd retrieved from his memories. His office. He lifted his head slowly from his desk. Certain, suddenly, that it had all been a dream, he rubbed his forehead. Surrounding him as an omniscient force in the dreamworld, I made his phone ring. He picked it up, heart still pounding from the awful nightmare. “Hello, this is Mickey Parker from Sacred Mercy Federal Credit Union, how can I help you?”

“Hey Mick. This is Miranda.”

“Miranda? What are you—what are you calling me for?”

“Look, Gavin and I are heading to town. We just talked to dad. He wants to make things right with Gavin. We were going to have a family meeting.”

Mick froze. This meant that not only would Gavin be added to the will, but probably Miranda.

“What do you mean a family meeting? Gavin turned into a pervert, and you enabled him. I'm--”

“Please, Mick. Don't make this difficult.”

“Don't make this difficult—I--”, a knock came at his door. “Just a minute”, he said, breathing heavily and switching his voice to a whisper, “Listen Miranda, I don't know what you're trying to.”, the knock came again, louder this time. “Just a goddamn minute, I'm on the phone”, he shouted. “Miranda. I've been here, bending over backwards trying to take care of dad, while you've been out there in--”

“Oh really, Mick? Really. You've been bending over backwards huh? Then why did Dad tell me you keep forgetting to bring him the right food?”, she asked, “I just talked to him. You know, you'll be lucky to stay on the will at this rate”, Mick's heart began pounding, and he hyperventilated, enraged. “Police. Open up.”, a voice behind the door said. “I need to go. Call me in fifteen minutes.”

The room seemed to stretch as he approached the door. He felt like he might be going crazy. A million thoughts raced through his mind at once. He couldn't keep track of them. Trembling he reached for the doorknob, and, turning it with an eerie creak, opened the door to see two police officers, along with a crowd of the workers at his office, intermixed with people he'd tried to destroy. His intern stood in front, crying. “Mickey Byron Parker. You are being arrested for sexual harrassment, securities fraud, embezzlement and tax evasion. Your intern here told us everything.”, his eyes went wide, as the crowd of people before him started to boo and the police read him his rights. Two cold steel handcuffs went around his arms, as he was led outside. His wife, and another mistress, sat solemnly watching him march towards the police car.

He woke up, pulling himself out of bed, in a motel room. It was only a dream. His heart still pounded. He still trembled, and felt a strange, empty feeling in his stomach. I spoke to him, closing in on him from all sides. “You're dead, Mickey.”, I whispered. His eyes darted back and forth. “Who's that?”

“You know who I am”, I said, his mind filling in the gaps, “You're dead.”

“H—h—how?”

“Your wife found out what you'd done.”, I said, “She found out you were cheating on her with another woman. The two of them worked together.”

“N—no--no this can't be--”

“If you don't believe me, why don't you go take a look at yourself?”

Unsteady, he got out of bed, looking in a shattered mirror to see no reflection staring back. A bloodstain spread out into the mattresses blankets. He cautiously moved towards the bathroom, at which point a wretched and putrid stench overtook his nostrils and made him almost gag. “Go in”, I urged him, “See it for yourself.” His heart pounding, and his mind overcome with dread, he slowly opened up the door to the bathroom. Inside the tub, a corpse, riddled with stabwounds, a plastic bag over its head, reclined. It was him. “I wouldn't look in the toilet”, I said, “They cut...well. You can imagine.” He ran out of the bathroom, screaming, and headed for the door. “You can't leave.”, I said, “You're a ghost now. Every day, you'll relive the way you died. It's three pm right now. You have two hours.”

“Let me out! Let me out!”, he screamed pulling on the door. Another guest, looking suspiciously at the muffled, ghostly sounds coming from the room passed by.

“This is a dream!”, he said, “I'm dreaming. I'm dreaming.”

“Then what does that make me? You don't mean to say you feel guilty?”

He looked around, suddenly cognizant of the hallucinogenic nature of his surroundings. Everything began to melt, and he was standing alone in a pale grassy field inside of my mind. He could remember the dream, and knew that he was trapped inside me, but he couldn't fathom how he could escape. I approached him, cautiously, grimly aware that little had changed within him. He pointed at me. “You--”, and began to run towards me, holding a knife in his hand. Terrified, I released him—a great wind pushed him skyward and ripped him into the night sky. He catapulted out of my head and into his own, in a flurry of red shapes. Unwittingly, I found myself pulled along—I struggled against his gravity and tried to reach back for my own head. The two of us were strung out between one another's eyes like tangled yarn, both of us bordering on convulsion as we fought for control over our bodies. I caught the rim of my skull to pry myself back into my head, gripping the edges of my eye socket and pulling with all my might back into myself.

Something gave way behind me—what felt like a knot suddenly coming untied—and I shot through a tunnel of blinding fractal light until I reached the center of my consciousness, where I gradually gained control of my body. All over my skin, what felt like infinitesimal shards of burning hot glass shredded through my arms and legs and chest in searing waves of pain. I forced my way against the paralysis, the sounds of screaming filling my senses on all levels. Overwhelmed, I drifted above my body—completely dissociated—and the pain subsided. I watched my physical form convulse underneath my glowing astral form. I was a galaxy of cosmic light—the world around me teetered between hideous and beautiful, painful and ecstatic—waves of color and sound shimmered in the air around me. I observed Mick slowly coming to his senses. Falling to his knees, hegritted his teeth down against each other; he couldn't stop himself, he couldn't control any of his actions. His stomach sank with the unease of serontonin sickness, his breathing was labored and his heart pounding. Behind his bloodshot eyes, an animalistic and primal rage loomed. “Honey?”, called Cassandra from the house, seeing that the two of us both had suddenly collapsed. She was nervous, but on another level, almost glad to think of Mick suffering.

Eager to awaken myself to try to cover up what had happened, I drifted downwards to my body, settling on my skull and pressing inwards. I began to draw into myself, before something pushed me out. I tried again. This time, an even greater resistance. Pushing up on its arms, my body began to stand, it's knees shaking. I rose up, looking down on the scenario and trying to understand what had happened. A thin, barely perceptible red line swung between Mick's head and my own. I peered through Mick's mind—it was overwhelmed with a wordless rage, a viciousness even more savage than it had been before. My own mind, on the other hand, cooed with inchoate words, pleasantries--”Hmm---babadada--madabada--Good neighbors—say, isn't that wonderful—ha! Imagine that!--No--weaker--” Coming to its feet, my body stared down at Mick. “Me. Me. That is me.” It helped Mick up. He breathed heavily, thirsty for blood. The two of their eyes locked—Mick recognized what it saw behind them. A piece of himself, inside of another body. “Honey, are you okay?”, Cassandra called out. Mick roared, flipping her off. “Go to hell!”, he said. My own body stared solemnly at Mick as he did so. Cassandra had never seen this part of her husband. It terrified her.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

Mick picked up a stone from the ground and threw it at her. She squealed, scurrying out of the way before it could hit her. Instead, it bounced through the door and hit the leg of the table. One of the children, inside, screamed. “Mick! What the hell are you doing?”, she yelled, red in the face. Mick charged towards her. Gerry, uncertainly, peeked out the window, as Cassandra dove inside. “Call the police, something's wrong with him.”, she said. I watched helplessly as my own body grabbed Mick by the arm. Mick glared at him, before leaning back to punch my body in the face. Foreseeing his move, my body, controlled by some other part of Mick's mind now detached from his brain, stepped back and kicked Mick in the shin, catching him off balance. “Stay away from her”, it said from my body. Panting, Mick stared up at my body's eyes with hatred. I floated in between them. Still no discernable thoughts could be found coming through Mick's head. On the deepest level, it was only a thirst for blood, for violence, for power. Within my own body, there now lived something Mick had only once pretended to be—an amalgamation of acceptable behaviors and deceptions now blessed with a physical shell. Inside of my brain, the fragment of Mick's consciousness had found ample ground in which it could live. The two were still connected by that tiny red line, sharing memories but now with entirely separate identities. They hated each other. A suddenly animate persona, staring at a wild, unrestrained subconscious. The persona thought Mick was a monster. Mick thought the persona was pathetic, weak. From the ground, Mick shot up, diving for the persona, which dodged out of the way and bolted for the house. Mick reached into his back pocket for a knife, and followed. As the door locked behind the persona, Mick pounded against the door with his knife. “Let me in you stupid bitch!”, he shouted, foaming at the mouth, “Let me in!”

Inside of the house, Cassandra's senses of compassion began to give way into panic. Her whole world began to crumble, her sense of security and trust in her own senses. Mick's persona looked at her through my eyes with deep concern—I seemed more friendly than I'd let one, she thought, and maybe I had seen something in Mick. But no, she bit back against this thought. I was from the devil. That's who'd sent me. Lucifer. She could see the demons in my eyes, she could feel them coming the moment that she saw me. My body, Mick thought, was younger. He thought he percieved lust in Cassandra's eyes, but, longingly, knew he could not touch her. He helped the children take cover in the room. “Your daddy looks like something happened to him.”, she said, “Grandpa's trying to talk to them.” Her heart pounded as she studied the persona up and down, catching sight with wariness of its longing and trembling dark eyes, what almost seemed like a demonic energy eminating from it. Mentally, she tried to figure whether or not Gerry had a gun in his house.

The persona's senses were becoming quickly overwhelmed as it began to take control of my body—the full range of power now available to it came rushing forward in a flood of images, uncontrollable thoughts. Every flailing grasp the persona tried to make to gain control over the racing energy only worsened the situation. The thoughts of others rushed into his mind in their raw form—not as coherent sentences but as muffled words, impressions and images—understanding the feelings of others, empathy, could not be pretended into existence—it was a skill that needed to be developed. From the outside looking in, I could see that, without an awareness of feeling, an ability to understand others, the power could rip a mind in two. The persona curled into the fetal position as the strength of the power began to take hold. Shutting it's eyes, it saw swirls of colors and fractals which seemed unequivocably horrifying, the same images which had, in my memory, brought me a sense of wonder and peace. I was comfortable with mystery, comfortable with myself, wanting to bring joy to others—that was the essense of who I was. He was a new soul in a new body, wanting to exist—to escape his original self. And so the same forces which had helped hold me together began to, violently and inexoribally, tear him apart.

In the house, Gerry, finding his shotgun, decided to keep it on his side. His son didn't seem to be having a stroke like he knew to recognize one, but figured he needed some talking down. He didn't want to call the police. He didn't want to hurt his son. He wanted to calm him down, so he could get him an ambulance. Gerry gave me the benefit of the doubt in someway. But he also feared that I had done something terrible to his son, and regretted that he hadn't been more forthright about his son's behavior—even with himself. Having hidden it from his mind, the thought was so dormant as to have blended into the rest of the unconscious milleau. His wife, he thought, would have known how to handle this. Whenever Mick used to get into trouble as a kid, she'd always sit him down and giving him a talking to. Gerry thought, for a long time, something might have been wrong with Mick. But his wife never thought he was quite right in thinking that. Accidentally, Gerry imagined, I'd uncovered the truth—vindicating him in a sense—but also unleashing a monster which for 38 years had rested dormant inside of his son.

I floated downwards, closer and closer to Mick. I had no notion of how to handle him—the fullest extent of my ability had only made matters worse, separating him from even the illusion of a conscience. He kicked at the door. Gerry urged the children, along with Cassandra and my body, to take shelter in one of the rooms while he got the shotgun.

“Friend of the Old One. We percieve you are in a great amount of distress”, I heard the voice of the mushrooms call out to me. Relieved, I told them, “The man pounding on the door with the knife has locked me from my body! He wants to kill the old man, and slaughter all the kind buffalo. You must help me to stop him”

“The bald monkey with the knife once communed with us, the Lords of the Field, and we found him to be arrogant and dull.”, the mushrooms said, “The kind buffalo do not like him, either, nor his partner, nor his spawn. We shall teach him.” Moved into action, the mushrooms began to glow, sending shimmers of light dancing around the field in a brilliant aurora. All at once, the cows lifted their heads from the grass and moved, slowly, towards the porch, mooing ferociously. Mick backed up against the door, his eyes darting back and forth. Enraged, he lashed out with the knife, stabbing one of the cows in the eye. The cow screamed in pain, and the mushrooms became enraged, darkening the skies and sending bright purple lighting shooting across the pasture. Mick yanked the knife out, and slashed another cow across the face. The herd circled away, forming a line and running around the house, kicking up a cloud of dust. The injured cows joined them.

Mick no longer needed to be taught. He needed to be punished. It was not ordinary for the mushrooms to punish a human, to interfere in their affairs. It was punishment enough, they supposed, to not be able to commune with them, and when a human angered them, they would at times refuse to protect them from the Beyond and other interdimensional enemies. But they would go to great lengths to protect their flocks; such senseless violence and anger required deep retribution, especially when it came from one who had, in the past, communed with the Mushrooms and let their lessons lie fallow. Feverishly, I heard the mushrooms begin to chant, reaching into the deepest depths of their ancient magic, calling up a long forgotten rite of the first bald monkeys to commune with the mushrooms in order to conjure an accursed fire. A rift appeared in the sky—tiny blue flames peered out of it. The sky above, to those not privy to the ways of the mushrooms, only began to grow slightly more cloudy. I felt my own form, as a consciousness free of a body, flicker like a candle—I struggled to take cover. Mick felt his own mind begin to be sucked into the vortex, hypnotized by the swirling colors of the circular stampede. Mick stepped out into the field and roared. The mushrooms fired at him with their bright purple lightning, which amplified his senses, sending shoots of blinding light and crippling pain every few seconds, and making his anger grow.

Just then, Meagan pulled up in front of the house, waiting. She watched, confused, at the strange parade of cows, and the man holding a knife in front of the house screaming at them. Strange, she supposed. But the fact that I was no where to be seen led her to conclude she must have been going insane, anyway, and was probably imagining all this. The dream last night, and the horrific feeling of drowning that she had felt when she woke up, and now this, whatever it was, all led her to that dismal conclusion. She was losing grip. Hallucinating. Maybe it was all the weed. Or the mushrooms. Or any number of other things she'd tried Faced with the looming death of her grandmother, many of her high school friends overdosing on heroin and the breakdown of her family, she'd searched the ends of the earth looking to understand what would happen when she died. It had turned her, for a while, into a bit of a psychonaut, before she'd concluded, last year, that it was not for her. Now, she was convinced that everything from all those years had finally led to her complete and total insanity. I watched with sorrow as a tear rolled down her cheek and she carefully took the tourmaline crystal down from the rear view mirror.

Commentary
In the beginning John is accidentally entering Mick's mind, but because Mick has a different mind than anything he has encountered before, he doesn't realize it. John probably could help Mick if he had more experience using his powers, which are difficult to use.

Streaming Links

https://riversofthemind.libsyn.com/a-different-mind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmDsyKfLna8&t=806s
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/rivers-of-the-mind/id1278391177
https://play.google.com/music/m/I5obttfukzok6ggklvb5umo2mgq?t=Rivers_of_the_Mind

All episodes by Timmy Vilgiate. No drugs harmed in the making of this podcast. Nothing in this is real. Nothing at all is real. Everything is a lie.