Rivers of the Mind Season 2 Episode 6--And then, light

The door. The stairway and the house peeled back and I saw the door, alone in the center of a thousand pointed star, printed like never ending graph paper that flowed out of itself, and only outward, so wide that I could not see the ends of its of its points. I could only know that they were there, that they flowed towards an unseen and distant, four dimensional pyramid of indeterminate size; the deep inevitably of these unseen formations was instinctive, unquestionable. From here, everything looked as though I sat in the base of an valley—though tempted to look up, to look away from myself, this body I knew to be mine, this self I knew to be imperfect, I focused my attention away from the unknowable shape and curvature of that which was—and instead, I focused everything, all my senses, on the door—the door. The Old Door. The Weathered Door. The Door with Keyholes Rusted and Hinges Peeling From Their Arches. The Door That Smells of Sanitized air and Wet earth, the Door That Masks Unspeakable and Unknowable Fears. I touched the handle. The nerves in some distant, massive form lined up with my own—all across the endless, spherical body, the thousand pointed star that stretched so far around the horizon that it swallowed the horizon whole—I saw that I existed only as one tiny cell of something massive—I was one of 9,999,999 points in a network that existed here at this door across all times, all universes, all existences—I could see myself there at the door, my hand around it, turning it slowly with my wrist. And then--

Light.

          I shut my eyes in pain, and when I opened them again, my vision had split into scattered, staggered frames that vaguely reflected some distant, fishbowled universe, like I was seeing through the eyes of two people at once. I blinked, and the world staggered back into focus with a  flickering afterglare. My bloodshot eyes, which wrenched themselves open, and I felt my own body fall back into itself, yet at the same time, I also felt myself breaking away from a much larger whole. As I fell backwards out of my eye, I could see the hospital lights like bright, rectangular suns reflecting my pupils, which seemed like an immense black lake. And all at once I remembered what I needed to...wait...No. Nevermind. I forgot...uhm... whatever it was I was trying to remember. And by the time that I remembered I'd forgotten, I'd forgotten to remember. The cycle stretched on in perpetuity until forgetting had become an excuse to remember, and remembering an excuse to forget. There, in the tenuousness of memory, I felt myself reborn as someone who had somehow always known exactly what and who he was, if only because I'd forgotten everything I didn't know.

          I peeled back from my eyes towards far corner of the hospital room as a reborn, amnesiac spirit. The eyes of what felt like eight and then four and then two people overlapped into a singularity; down below, I saw a body, shaggy-haired, dark, and lean, a body that stared at me with mortified devastation through tortured, pinprick eyes. It saw me--I was a thought that he'd lost—another memory torn from him by a vicious, sadistic captor. I kept drifting back towards the ceiling. Was I real? I reached back to see if I could feel the jagged cement texture on the wall behind me and...I could. Could I feel my face? I could. Could I feel my shoulders? Yes. Could I feel my heart, my stomach, my legs—? Yes. Everything.

          I didn't remember how I got here, though. I didn't really remember anything—I only remembered, vaguely, that falling backwards out of my own eye as multiple people at once was not a normal thing to do. Perhaps after all that I'd been through I'd thrown a part of myself away, perhaps I wanted something, anything, to be preserved outside of my brain so that one, tiny piece could be left pure and unbroken, a part of me that I could retrieve if I ever remembered where I'd left it. I had no memories of how I arrived in this hospital room, no memories of what had brought me here, even though I felt certain that I could remember, if I'd wanted to. Whoever I was in this form, I felt like more than a memory—I felt like a mirror image of that much larger self lying there on that bed, even if I was quite different. The pupils in my physical body's eyes suddenly dilated, and slammed shut, in defeat. I felt that defeat in my core, I could feel them as my feelings, but still somehow I recognized its feelings as entirely separate from me.

          Meagan, who I knew somehow, heaved to the left as though her jaw had been hit by something massive, and then suddenly gasped for air, staring transfixed at the wall. She was interrupted by the entrance of a tall, African American woman, with a pair of hornrimmed glasses and a serious expression. This woman shut the door behind herself and muttered something to Meagan that I couldn't quite hear. I settled on the ground, and grew to my normal size. I had to warn them. I had to tell them about Ryan. I tried to follow them, to get their attention. I steered around the hospital bed and reached out for Meagan's shoulder, but it passed through her. The door passed over me indifferently, almost mockingly, and slammed shut. I was now alone—there was nothing in the hospital room but myself and my physical body—my heart rate hovered around 140, my breathing quickened, but my eyes remained shut.

          It was then that I slowly came to the realization that I couldn't see myself, not even if I looked for myself. I knew I was there—my sense of touch told me so—I knew that I—I had a body with hands and arms and legs and a face. But I couldn't see myself. I backed away from the door, with resignation, and heard a faint sound of trembling. My physical body convulsed in the hospital bed, as from out of its eyes rose another copy of myself, sound asleep. The mirror image hovered above the hospital room floor for just a moment with white flowers blossoming upwards from the pits in its eyes and then disappearing like mushroom clouds. In the darkness, they seemed to glow. “Get down. Duck.”, a voice chided me from behind. I fell to my knees, and shrunk. Opal-colored tendrils, perceptible only by flakes of white and green and blue suspended in dense aether, swirled around the holographic version of myself as its body hovered about, stalking over the hospital room like a helicopter might stalk the hills of some nameless tropical landscape in a newsreel. They danced over the room and poured out into the darkness like flashlights, lapping out at the surroundings like a thousand tongues of fire.

          Eventually, my double or whatever was controlling it decided that I was nowhere to be found, and hovered, still sleeping, into the hallway. I took a puff of a cigarette and then—hmm. What was I saying? “Haven't won yet, John.”, a voice spoke inside of my head. A familiar voice. Ryan. I remembered him from...uhm. From his house? Oh...yeah. It seemed like it must have been five minutes ago, I guess. Suddenly I remembered everything. Everything... “Here, John, have the illusion of a beer.”, he said. I didn't know what he meant. I'd been holding a beer this whole time. I took another puff of my cigarette and sipped the beer. It was suprisingly good. I returned to my regular size and took another drink.

          My brain felt super foggy. If I remembered right, I'd been listening to a voice remind me about what had just happened. But I don't remember when or where exactly. “Well, okay, so for the ninth, but for you basically the first time.”, Ryan, the unseeable and timeless entity groaned, “...thats because I'm drawing on sheets of graph paper, but because I am not bound by time, I am conscious of all of the sheets of graph paper that I could be drawing on at once. Now the shape you saw is a hexateron...it's like a...okay. Honestly, I give up. You're the one who looked up, it's really a bitch to try to explain, but—ok moving on.” I think that answered my question, but I forgot what I'd asked. Ryan manifested itself in the corner of the room, as a thousand pointed star that seemed indeterminately far away, folding in on itself in a swirling pinwheel of graph paper and pulsing graphite around a baffling and hypnotic shapeshifting pyramid.

          “Right now, John, you're effectively a ghost, ok? A detached spirit. People can only see you if I make you visible, but that takes a lot of energy.  Ghosts are—well, I'll put it this way so I don't hurt your feelings. They...feel just like the people they think they remember being. But they're not. They're the little splinters of what happens when a soul explodes. They keep burning as long as there's, well, I mean, like fire needs heat and oxygen and fuel, ghosts will just keep burning and burning until they run out of...whatever they're feeding off of—sometimes that only takes years, sometimes centuries—depends on how much they have to burn. Guilt. Insecurities. Anger. Love. Curiousity. Longing. Those are the things a ghost can feed off of. But every emotion eventually runs out, though right? That's why he had you trapped in there, repeating your memories—its to feed and to make ghosts that he can use as part of his plan. Your double that you saw, he might be a puppet. But he's got an endless supply of food, and you're running on uncertainty, and existential dread, which only lasts a day or two, tops. I can try to feed you some memories to try to keep you going, but I can't do too much.”

                   “But—what's the point? Why am I even here?”

          “Hey! That's the spirit. Keep that existential dread going, buddy. Alright, now, can you follow some very simple instructions?”
                   “I—I—I don't know if--”
          “I am asking nicely. If I weren't Good Ryan, I wouldn't even bother. But I need you. And you need me. No pressure, man, but, I mean....seriously. Please.”
                   “Okay.”
          “Ok. So, what you gotta do...hmmm. Where did I start last time? Fuck, nevermind, they actually launched the damn thing last time. I started—Okay. So come out into the open.” “Okay” “Sip some of that beer...Aww, who am I kidding, you should probably just chug it, man...Alright? Feel drunk? Or kind of drunk, like, in theory? Whatever, just pretend your drunk. Now run into that wall. Yeah. Don't look at me like that. You're a ghost. Run bitch. Run. Okay! Welcome to the supply closet! And...yeah. Wait....let me remember....I think down was the cooling system, up was the laundry room, the corner...yeah. Okay. Move to the right...no...yes. Right corner. Right corner. Right...there. Good job. Okay. Now just like...walk into that. No, don't run. I'm sorry. You didn't really have to run that time. You could have just walked. I kind of wanted to lighten the mood, since, I mean, like I always say, you should space out your existential dread with some gentle slapstick comedy every once in a while, just to stay healthy. Okay. Alright...yeah. This is the boring part. Just...keep walking through these cables for a while. They'll all live without internet for a few minutes. Good work. Thanks. I know, it sucks, but so far this route has been pretty good at not getting you killed. Hey, slap the ceiling real quick.” “Why?” “Just do it, it's important.” “Um...okay.” “Someone was sitting on the toilet reading the newspaper up there, I think he just about shit himself. Okay. Now—go down. Down! Welcome to the token crippling design flaw in the thirteenth most secret military installation of the 21^st century! Hooray! Time to blow shit up! Just kidding, none of those levers do anything, this is just a regular old mining tunnel. Just...yeah. Walk that way. Okay. There we go! Turn to your left. Go down that long, wet hallway there. Keep going. That is a river! They use it to power the base. Isn't it pretty? Think of how immense it is. How endless it is compared to your mortal self. All the answers you wish you had. All the explanations. Give it a minute.” “You know, that was suprisingly filling.” “Good. Now lets keep moving. There is a door on your right. Remember where that room is, but don't touch the door. Okay. Now walk backwards four steps. Big steps. No. Too many. That is a hidden observation room. Just sashay yourself right in there and...alright! We did it! And you only managed to get yourself killed a couple hundred times or whatever. Nice. Look through that window over there. What do you see?”

          “I see myself. Myself and...a couple of...of...”

                   “That's right John...Ghosts. Real ghosts. Don't think too much about their scars, John. You don't want to know where they came from. Can you tell I was in a mid-2000s emo band or what? Anyway. Watch them. Carefully. Eh, who am I kidding, you can still read their minds, you'll figure this shit out.”

          Shrinking myself down to an almost microscopic size, I landed on the edge of a narrow, heavily polarized observation window and moved towards its brittle glass with uncertainty. The other me was slumped against the wall, muttering something under his breath. A woman sat next to my duplicate, with matted brown hair, a wide, crooked nose, and dilated blue eyes. Her neck was covered in bruises. A few months ago, in 1966, she'd been traveling with a few college friends in a van across the country. They stopped at a bar. While they were hanging out, some cool long haired guy had come to sit next to her, and she'd gone on a walk with him. As soon as they were alone, a hand slipped over her mouth, and pressed a rag against her nose. Quickly, she fell into a haze, and awakened later in a military holding cell. Her real name was Mary Ann, but she went by Sapphire, her birthstone. Her dad used to beat her; she'd run away from home at 17. Her friends probably thought she was dead. But she was—she'd killed herself in 1967.

          A dark skinned boy named Carlos, face half purple, with veins bulging out of his neck, and eyes bloodied and black, sat on the other side of my body and tried to support my head. He wondered what they gave me—and feared that they'd give it to him next. Only a few days after he arrived, he'd overdosed on a chemical intoxicating agent, so even if he couldn't remember that, he was justified in his fear. He got picked up by a stranger while he was hitchhiking to a farm his uncle had told him about, a place he heard he could find work to send money back home. The family needed to buy some good farm equipment after all, and even if Eisenhower had closed down the official guest worker program, there were still plenty of farmers in need to help around Southern Texas. The stranger, who seemed nice at first, offered him a puff of a cigarette; he accepted, and fell unconscious within seconds. He woke up in a cell, a rearranging maze that they had constructed for test subjects to try and navigate while on various substances. He was thirsty, not having taken a drink in days. “You can't have water until you get out of the maze.”, a voice on an intercom told him in poor Spanish. The next day, he had to solve it again, this time on a large dose of LSD. The process repeated until they tried the experimental agent that killed him before he could find his way out. But he didn't remember that. He only knew that this was a dangerous place. A very dangerous place. Both of the ghosts felt so—Ryan had manipulated their memories so that they could all remember, distinctly, that the year was 1969, and that they had all been moved into the same cell as part of a new  experiment.

          None of them had met John yet. He'd been deposited there right after the guards took another one of the prisoners out of the room for questioning, a “young hippy girl from Austin” named Meagang. As John slowly came back to his senses, he hallucinated that the strangers were all demons, gnawing at him. He did not recognize himself, not his body, not his arms or legs. Everything felt unreal. He remembered living an entire life, one which had seemed totally realistic, but as he slowly emerged from unconsciousness, he recalled two doctors tying up his arms, and shooting them full of some kind of experimental drug. All of it had been some kind of strange, intensely vivid hallucinatory dream. None of it was real—but, I mean, of course it wasn't. The year 2017? How ridiculous. We'd all be lucky if we were all still alive in 1970, let alone 2017, and if America hadn't gone to war with the Soviet Union by then, John hoped things would be...you know. More advanced. Space ships or something. And fracking? Come on, that was obviously made up.

          Now John had had some bum trips, but that last one really took the cake. An entire lifetime lived as another person? And a geologist of all things? Who in the hell spent their whole life wanting to be a geologist? Ryan convinced this ghost as he scrambled for answers that he'd been trying to dodge the draft by heading down to Mexico—so that's what he remembered. On the way down, he stopped for a rest somewhere at a truck stop when a big bag had slid over his head, and everything went dark. He woke up here maybe six months ago. And what a shit place it was. As the acid wore off, he came to terms with the unreality of everything he'd just experienced. But breathed a sigh of relief at least all this was real. Like, it was definitely real, right? But who knows. Since he arrived in this base, the doctors had been shooting him up with every drug they could think of—truth serums, panic inducers, sleep agents—he remembered days spent in front of screens watching the same film, patriotic messages blaring in his ears, unable to sleep but not fully awake. He remembered being asked about his life for hours as interrogators made note of which drugs got the most out of him. He remembered being tested and testing on his personality, his intelligence, his stamina—hours upon hours of seemingly aimless sadism. All of it he remembered clearly.

          But something had changed. Whenever he looked at someone, his brain seemed to coil itself around them, and squeeze out every single detail of their lives. He knew what people would say before they said it, so that their voices almost felt like they came through a psychedelic tape echo. He felt like he was still tripping, maybe not as hard as he had been, but still tripping. Perhaps, he speculated at Ryan's direction, the Government had made a mind-reading drug, . Perhaps that was what it all was for—to make him into a weapon. For example, just by looking at him, he knew that Carlos came from Mexico, and he'd wanted to find a way to make money to send home to his family in Chiapas. He could hear the stories that Carlos' grandmother would tell him, he could see Carlos' childhood memories of playing outside with his sisters. And then when he looked to Sapphire, he knew that she was really named Mary Ann; he knew that her dad used to hit her, something she'd never told a soul. Mary Ann loved art, and music, and walking through the desert—she'd driven in a van through the Arizona desert with a few other hippies to get here.

          As I watched my double interact with these people, the distinction between us gradually became less and less clear to me—our minds, both powerfully telepathic, pooled into one. He or I knew that Ryan was a heroin addict from San Antonio, who'd been lured here by his drug dealer and forced into a slow, painful withdrawal; we knew Ryan played guitar, and that his favorite band was the Monkees, as he was eternally ashamed to admit. I'd never met these people. But he and I knew them inside and out instantly. I—he? I looked at the faces of my fellow ghosts with terror, breathing heavily. Carlos' veins submerged beneath his skin and his eyes reverted to a thoughtful brown, framed by patchy brown facial hair. Mary Ann pulled her hand away from his shoulder, slowly and gently. The bruises around her neck disappeared, and her skin cleared up—two enormous blue eyes now glistened with sorrow and life. My heart started to calm down as I looked at her—I could sense an invisible and shimmering light quivering behind her pupils. I knew that I had met her, I felt, for some reason. And likewise she felt like she had met me.

          “Are you alright?

          I blinked rapidly to try to clear the haze out of my eyes, searching for words that did not exist. Ryan sat back, deciding not to insert himself into the situation. Let them form a bond, he decided. I dissociated from my double, shifting my attention to Ryan. My other ghost was blocked off from seeing the scheming side of his brain, which watched like an indifferent cameraman already tired from filming the fiftieth take of a scene. But this was the first time his ghost had looked at Mary Ann that way, and perhaps that was what had been missing from the other tries. “I just...It was fucking terrifying. I don't even know how to describe it man--”, started the other me, “I just...lived an entire life...as like...a different person.” Sapphire's eyes grew wide, and she shared a worried look with the others in the room. Ryan played along haphazardly, able to make them hallucinate genuine emotion. A silence fell upon the room. But Ryan felt like they were getting somewhere, so he decided to jump in with some developing action. “I think I heard the guards say he got shot up with Salvinorin A.”, he said, hoping that no one noticed his anachronistic reference to a chemical not identified until 1982. They all did. “You know, from Salvia?”, he said, inserting memories in everyone's minds of salvia.

          All of us had heard of salvia, of course, but none of us had ever tried it. I... **rewind sounds** “I think I heard the guards say he got shot up with PCP. Wait, nevermind, fuck that, that's stupid.” **rewind sounds** “He got...you know what, fuck you assholes. I am a GOD and you will BOW BEFORE ME” **three gunshots, rewind sounds** “I think I heard the guards say he got shot up with some kind of new chemical or something.” There, decided Ryan, that should be good enough. Mary Ann bit her lip. “What do you think it was?” Carlos looked back at Ryan, not quite understanding what either of them were saying. “Who knows, man. And they just took Meagan, too. They're probably gonna give it to her next”

          Meagan. I remembered her from the dream—I'd met her towards the end, when, in the dream, I ended up taking LSD in a field, and I started to read minds. But I'd never met her in real life. Perhaps I'd heard her name while I was under or something, Ryan hastily suggested to me. Mary Ann remembered, with Ryan's assistance, that Meagan had been one of the first people to have been brought to stay with her in this room, and she'd been so incredibly nice. The two of them sat in the dark room at night talking for hours about President Johnson, about the war, about their whole lives—this conversation had actually been with Ryan, and he'd actually been more interrogating her than really making pleasant conversation with her. Carlos thought he remembered seeing Meagan too. She'd tried to speak Spanish to him, even if she did it poorly—he thought she was cute, and he wanted to try to teach her more, if he ever got the chance, so that maybe he'd have someone to talk to. That, again, was Ryan, who had actually been trying threaten him as he regreted having been around for one trillion years and never learning Spanish.

          Ryan grew tired of our silent fear and decided to pretend to panic in order to move things along, “I don't know man. I don't know. I don't want them to fucking give me any of that shit. Fuck no, man.”

          “It's going to be okay”, insisted Mary Ann, embracing me tightly to try and comfort me. I stared forward toward the observation slit, not wanting to respond to her, wondering if someone was watching this, taking notes on what I did, listening to what we said. Did they expect something to happen between Mary Ann and I? Was this what they wanted? From outside of my other body, I sighed, since I quite frankly didn't want to break it to myself that I'd been forced by a meddling time traveler to become suddenly smitten with a 78 year old dead hippy for his own personal amusement. “Thank you.” I mumbled.

          “We've got to get the fuck out of here.”, Ryan exclaimed, before turning to face us. We all looked back at him, against our will. The other Ryan covered my eyes. When I opened them, all of the ghosts were paralyzed. Ryan collected them one by one, picking each one up, and tucking them under his arms to carry them down the long abandoned hallway like strange syrofoam mannakins. I followed him close behind. “Oh wait. The other way. Dammit.” He turned around, grumbling, “Where is it...Hmmm. I think I said...” Another duplicate of Ryan appeared at the other end of the hallway, in the shape of a non-euclidean white flower crisscrossed with tiny, almost invisible blue lines. “It's a three way intersection, bro. Down the hall, take the stairs to the left, go through the supply closet.”

          “Thanks man, you're the best.”

                   “No, you're the best.”

          “All hail”

                   “All hail. But be careful. Meagan is more dangerous than we had foreseen.”

          “She will crumble before us.”

          The Other Ryan, the fisherman, hurried along, hastily crafting memories for the ghosts of discovering that the door had been, foolishly, left unlocked. Meagan was almost to Dr. Whitebalm's office. He planted a memory in each ghosts head that the four had snuck into the hallway, and ducked into a nearby office to hide. While there, my double and the other ghosts discovered Meagan's case file laying on a desk. “Reprogramming—successful.” Ryan then invented some memories for us about a conversation we'd had, hastily filling them with canned dialogue. After searching for hours through the offices on the top level of the secret facility, they found where they'd taken Meagan. A large chemical laboratory. She sat in conversation on a dimly lit couch, opposite a doctor, who rested in a recliner. Ryan positioned the ghosts in a neat row, and then, after flipping all of them off and screaming some profanities in their ears to get the urge out of his system, he unfroze them. “What is she doing?”, asked Sapphire, wide eyed. The conversation was, strategically, just out of audible range.

          “The file was right. She's a fucking turn coat.”, spat Ryan.

                   “more privately. I've been trying to piece everything together, but somethings just aren't fitting”, the Doctor could be barely overheard saying.

          I moved away from the team of ghosts, carving a path behind the high florescent lamps so that I hovered just slightly above them. The doctor to whom Meagan was speaking was named Dr. Whitebalm. She was a quantum physicist, who could see and manipulate all spectrums of electromagnetic radiation as a result of the accident that had killed the rest of her team and given me my abilities. She wanted to make sure that Meagan's kept her powers secret from the government. Before I could listen to the rest of their conversation, the Good Ryan appeared to me as a star, an indeterminate distance from my face. “Shhhh. This is going to make sense in a moment. I swear.” Against my will, my body expanded, my hands reaching down and grabbing the edges of a flourescent lamp. Controlled by Ryan like a puppet, I rocked back and forth. The fisherman, leading the ghosts, froze time for an instant and caught sight of me, his face spreading with a scowl. The Good Ryan, or...what I had thought was the Good Ryan...frantically tried to explain, “Okay, let's see if it works this time. Three things. Remember what I told you about ghosts. Second thing. Think of the house. Don't stop thinking of the house. Last, make eye contact. Also! Remember what I told you about ghosts. Did I already say that? I did...fuck.”

          “What the fuck are you--”
          “Turn around and make some fucking eye contact.”

Rivers of the Mind Season 2, Episode 5: The Stairway

I stared forward with a marked deadness in my eyes, hoping that my silence was enough of an answer. He stared back at me equally dead. He knew the feeling, he seemed to tell me with a sympathetic smirk; a smirk, though, because he was much, much older than me, and had endured much worse. Walking towards him with suspicion, I stumbled slightly up onto the curb. Ryan's eyes rapidly scanned back and forth, uncertain if another one version of him from a rival timeline was after him. Or perhaps, he'd already been killed several times before I could reach the house, and we were one of few timelines that had survived. He was, after all, the oldest in a long line of others, all with competing objectives—his objective, after all of these years, had dwindled down to just one—to find a reality where he could be killed—completely killed. He stared me in the eyes, seriously, waiting to feel the strong pull of gravity inwards, hoping it would suck him down and obliterate him, but it didn't come through. Sighing, he rolled his eyes and turned to enter the house.

Inside, I saw a dimly lit room with a yellow rug and an orange couch with a reddish quilt pattern, inhabited by a lonely brown haired shaggy dog whose eyes leered up at the stairway with knowing worry. Ryan went to the fridge and retrieved a beer. "This timeline has way better Coors Light than yours, you should try it." I didn't feel like drinking, and quite honestly, I didn't understand...how he was drinking—you know—did he have...hands? What would it mean to drink? If I drink seven dimensional beer, would that have lasting effects on my health? He handed me one anyway. I stared at it, not comprehending. Ryan massaged the back of his neck and took a long sip of his beer. [long sigh of relief] Ryan spread his arm over the side of the couch and rested his legs, angling so that I was backed somewhat into a corner. The two of us looked into the TV, seeing nothing but a blank screen. Deciding to let myself imagine we were now just two bros hanging out drinking beer, I opened the can and took a slow drink. None of the food I'd eaten for the last eternity had had any taste whatsoever., and this had a taste, so I sucked it down, rapidly.

"Yeah, I remember my first time figuring that out. I just about drank every beer in this stupid house. Doesn't really have too much of an effect, since you're basically just pouring it onto the couch right now. Every time the timeline resets, the beers respawn, and I've probably drank like...well. I don't know. The house is...probably flooded. I mean. Not just with alcohol. Blood probably too."
I glared up at him, warily. I had thousands of questions, but no way to put them to words. Ryan had anticipated this. "We just watch here. We're fixed in space, but our minds aren't bound by time. That clock up there--", he pointed, "Has ticked once. I saw it tick. I just about pissed myself."
"How did this happen to you?"
"I was being a dumbass. You ever heard of Datura? Jimsonweed? My friend told me it could get you high so I tried it out in our backyard, and while I was out there, I saw this big flash of light. I started freaking out, I thought I was being followed by all these people and everything seemed like it was moving slower, so I went upstairs, and—thats when it really hit. The pain. I realized that I took too much, so I started dying. I felt my soul start leaving my body, my life flashed before my eyes and then—bloop. I come out of my body, and I just float away. I went back in time, through years and years of history until I was watching dinosaurs crawl backwards into salamanders crawling backwards into plankton crawling back into alien terraforming pods. Just kidding about that last one. Not in this timeline at least. That’s why the Coors Light here is so good."
"How many of you are there now?"
He looked off at the clock, and his eyes glassed over with terror. Counting, and counting, he eventually could only collapse into hysteric laughter. After all, there were new people every moment. There was no end to them. Pieces of his mind might brush up against each other as they dissolved across time, but they never knew one another completely. It was a stupid question for me to ask.
"As many as there are of you now. Maybe more. Your friend, Meagan, the cute one from the Walmart, she's fighting me right now. Is she single now, by the way?--Don't give me that look, I mean, she's cute, right?--I mean obviously I'm not gonna like...make a move on her. Whatever. She's fighting me, and it's paralyzing me. Well, its paralyzing part of me. One of me. Douchebag me; aka the fisherman, which may or may not be the name of his emo band, who knows. He's like three trillion years old or something like that. Typical young asshole. Popped up in this universe a little bit ago and now he's getting...dangerous.", he sipped some of the beer, or, rather, poured it onto the couch, "You're the only thing that can get him out of his mind, and into other minds. That's why he found you. Meagan's throwing a bit of a wrench in that.", his face went blank, staying still for a few seconds. He looked back and forth, trying to remember the last thing he said, "That's why he found you. Meagan's throwing a bit of a wrench in that. A wrench?...oh yeah. A...wrench. Hmmm."
"What is she doing?"
"There's not enough time to explain. I mean there is.", he became gravely serious as he repeated himself, almost horrified at his own words, "There's plenty of time. There's literally nothing but time. But, I mean, we're cutting it close to the order I have to do this in. I need to get you out."
"How?"
He sipped the last of his imaginary beer, which at this point, had become completely invisible, and tilted the unseen can towards the stairway. "Stand up." Not quite understanding, but not wanting to disobey, I stood and unconsciously raised the beer to my lips—as its cold, non-existent aluminum touched my mouth, I felt the alcohol within come to life and transmute into white hot energy between my teeth, running in between my cells and washing over the cracks in my eyes with a shimmering vibration. What looked like graph paper—endless, blue gridlines over a blank white page, rolled out like fresh carpet over every surface in the home, except for myself and the stairway, which now stretched miles into the sky. A single door repeated on the stairway every ten or twenty feet.

“I didn't want to let you in on this until I'd explained a little bit. I had to get you here first.”
My heart started pounding—but what could I do? I gave in with resignation to the inevitability. Tiny grey dots circled around my feet, leaving faint, ever disappearing pinpricks of light grey. They danced away from me, tracing paths across the floor that looked like veins of silver being passed over by a flashlight. Sliding past the edge of the stairway, they seemed to go through the monotonous graph paper wall, and, right in front of my eyes, the silver dots sketched out another copy of myself, and then  the stairway, working like tiny graphite ants—they duplicated the scene again and again, until I could not see the end of it—I looked back and realized that I was only one of thousands of sketches drawn onto a graph paper reality, that bled into itself and encompassed me from every side—a world with no definite shape, only blank blue lines of indeterminate distance over a blank white expanse. A voice pressed in against every side of every one of my psyches. “Chill.”, it said, “I know it seems like you're hallucinating and shit, but this is like...the first time you haven't been hallucinating in a long ass time. Except those stairs. Those are total bullshit, but I mean, the metaphor's helpful so...I don't know. Time travel is hard to understand, and I like visual aids. So, just bear with me, I guess. Here's what you gotta do...dammit. Sorry. My memory is blanking again. Gotta retrace my steps. Monarch butterfly...Atlantis sinks...Hitler lost World War II. Okay! That's right. Okay. I remember. You gotta go up those stairs. Go into the third door on the left. Do not look to the right. And...oh! Do not look up the stairs. That would be really bad. Just...yeah. Don't look up. Just look at your feet, and count to 33. Eleven steps to each door. I really am not good with counting, so that's pretty much up to you. Like, just count. 1, 2, 3, you know, 33 steps. Do not look up. Do not look to the right. Third door. The third door ON THE LEFT. Ok?”
I tried to walk—instead of moving, they seemed to draw the stairs closer to me, like I'd zoomed in with a camera. My muscles croaked with an inexplicable agony, shot with pain and exhausted like I'd run an entire mile. 33 steps. I moved closer to the stairs, so that the rail was almost close enough to touch. I wanted to look up, to see what lay at the end of the infinite stairway, to see if it was a trap, but I did not. Nervously, Imoved closer to the stairs, and felt the cold wooden railing touch my hand. The nerves in my body seemed to connect with it, a feeling like electricty pulsing through the seams between my flesh and my bone. The stairway shivered, and the world, almost magically, reverted to the living room, where Ryan still sat crosslegged on the couch, finishing a beer that did not exist in the periphery of my vision. Before I could look at him, I heard the same voice in my head as before. “Do not look to the right.” My heart filled with dread, and I looked down at my feet, taking the first steps up the stairway. 1. 2. 3. I winced, a sharp pain shooting through my legs. Only thirty steps like this left to go. 4. 5. 6.

Suddenly, I caught a glimpse of something I remembered—my heart filled with an ecstasy—a memory, a real memory—pure, untouched, like new. Like a long lost photograph, it dangled about my mind, teasing me—I reached into it, I tried to hold onto it, to cherish it... 7. 8. 9. It fluttered away. The memory, it—couldn't—I couldn't bring it back. I couldn't even remember what I'd forgotten. I gritted my teeth with unspeakable loathing, and took the next step. 10, 11--”You don't really trust him, do you John?”, a voice whispered to me from behind the first door. A palpable heat came from behind it; a light became visible from under a door to the left. I looked towards it. “Don't you see what he's trying to do?”, it asked, almost grinning with amusement. I trembled. I did not. Of course I did not trust him. “He wants you to keep looking down. He doesn't want you to see what's at the top of the stairs.” My eyes twitched, paranoid and disturbed.
“Shut the fuck up.”, I spat at the voice under my breath. “Shut the fuck up.”
12. 13. 14. I could feel something driving its way down my backbone, I could feel the presence of some invisible steel wedge piercing through the center of my body, not quite numb, but somehow without pain all the same—an anti-numbness—the presence of feeling. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. My skin seered with a heat, an energy tried to lurch its way out of my body—my skin felt on the verge of bursting, 20. 21. The world seemed impossibly bright. I'd forgotten all that had happened to me before—I felt almost like I was falling backwards, but I did not know how I could be—I was standing still on the stairs—a number was in my head, emblazoned, almost branded onto my mind. The next number I had to count. I knew what it was—I knew it—22.

An avalanche of gravity peeled itself off of me, and I sank down towards the ground—my body felt light, my skin tore away and burst with fiery flares and arches that soared over my newly exposed, star-like flesh. I was rising, and rising—suddenly, rather than shrinking I convinced myself I was growing to incredible size. I did not remember who I was, but I did not need to remember. I'd been counting, but I didn't understand why—I was a smoldering piece of fire at the base of an immense door, alone on an endless, flat wooden plain underneath a white sky crisscrossed with blue lines. Do I keep walking? Do I keep counting? Ahead of me rose a high wall, striped red and yellow and brown, and tinged with spots of the deepest black I could comprehend. I wondered at the world around me, feeling a supreme, nearly divine peace; I had always been, and I always would be. As I glowed brighter, I poured my light into the darkness of the great, incredible wall that stretched beyond my vision. I held up my hands so that the light grew brighter still, flames shooting from my body into the heavens. The earth shook. I became an infinite light.

Tiny white squares with blue edges began falling from the sky, covered in flames. I looked up. A fire began to spread across the white, seamless sky, carving open what looked like an ever expanding set of parted lips that concealed an endless and eternal black. Thousands of white flowers streaked with barely perceptible blue grids hung in the sky like dancing bells, descending upon me. I stared upwards at them, transfixed by their gentle and seductive forms. The sky above engulfed my senses, my own light felt incredibly dim as I faced the infinite and collosal nothingness of something even more eternal than myself.
A sheet of graph paper slid from over the edges of the night sky, taking up the whole horizon for uncountable miles with a hissing sound that seemed to blanket the entire universe. “Run!” I did not know how. I looked back at my feet—they were hardly feet at all—they looked like faded pencil marks—oh God—I was—it had made me—and now it had begun to erase me. I ran and ran towards the distant wall in the horizon—the white flowers merged into one great rectangle high above our heads, and the burnt night sky crumpled itself into a ball some distance  to the side. The ruined sky, which I knew somehow to be friendly, folded inwards and rotated like a freshformed planet, contorting into a fractal vortex, a never ending, swirling snail's shell surrounded by a growing disk—paper rippled away from this perplexing, anti-geometric figure in crisscrossing waves shaped like diamonds to form a saw blade that tore against the edges of the invading sky.
The invaders, meanwhile, regrouped to the side—the colossal white flowers lined their mouths against one another, and swallowed each other up, with an effect that looked like a finger passing underneath a mirror. The reflections then reappeared about half a mile away from each other and hurtled back together to repeat this process of collision, dissolution, and remanifestation. As this pattern repeated and repeated in front of my helpless eyes, the flowers arranged themselves into two immense rectangles that around one another in perfectly executed yet seemingly impossible orbits. The diamond sawteeth at the edge of the end of the friendly  friendly sky extended into the invading sky, driving it back, as the two collosal rectangles swung towards the massive sawblades—this took place over what seemed like eons, a movie taking place outside of my sunlike sky—eventually, I was removed from the scene entirely, only watching myself watch the sky; watching myself see the two immense rectangles coalesce into strips and coil around each other like two pythons trying to swallow themselves. A pyramid, rotating, and peeling out from itself to attack the rectangles with endless rows of neat white squares, cast brilliant, parasol shaped circles across the sky like a confusion of monochromatic umbrellas. The two skies grew larger, and larger until they collided—I watched myself, watching a stranger crouched underneath a massive step in a staircase, staring at a flickering graph paper chaos—I walked away from him, towards another stairway, much like the one I'd just left, which waited for me at the far side of a blank void.
I opened my eyes. Fuck, dude. This was a crazy party. I shook my head. My stomach trembled. What was I seeing? I heard music. I smelled beer. I heard food. I mean I...wait. Fuck man I must be really fucking high right now. I opened my eyes again. Was I tripping? I was lying on the stairs, looking down. Fuck dude, this was a crazy party. I shook my stomach. My head trembled. I opened my eyes. My head shook. My trembled stomach—became—I opened my eyes. All at once I remembered I was a prisoner. The lights from the party became grey. The door at the base of the stairs rattled with the furious wind and pounding rain. The river had started to rise up into the city and cover the floor. I remembered what I had to do. I had to keep going.

23. I looked down at my feet—or where I knew that my feet should be should be. With no light, after all, I couldn't quite see myself very clearly. As I moved towards the shadow, my atoms lost their form, my essence lost its being, there was no more sight, no more to be seen. I remembered what I had to do. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

The door. The stairway and the house peeled back and I saw the door, alone in the center of a thousand pointed star, printed like never ending graph paper that flowed out of itself, and only outward, so wide that I could not see the ends of its of its points. I could only know that they were there, that they flowed towards an unseen and distant, four dimensional pyramid of indeterminate size; the deep inevitably of these unseen formations was instinctive, unquestionable. From here, everything looked as though I sat in the base of an valley—though tempted to look up, to look away from myself, this body I knew to be mine, this self I knew to be imperfect, I focused my attention away from the unknowable shape and curvature of that which was—and instead, I focused everything, all my senses, on the door—the door. The Old Door. The Weathered Door. The Door with Keyholes Rusted and Hinges Peeling From Their Arches. The Door That Smells of Sanitized air and Wet earth, the Door That Masks Unspeakable and Unknowable Fears. I touched the handle. The nerves in some distant, massive form lined up with my own—all across the endless, spherical body, the thousand pointed star that stretched so far around the horizon that it swallowed the horizon whole—I saw that I existed only as one tiny cell of something massive—I was one of 9,999,999 points in a network that existed here at this door across all times, all universes, all existences—I could see myself there at the door, my hand around it, turning it slowly with my wrist. And then--


Light.

If you're reading this message....

....it's because I have neglected this blog and only just now posted the scripts for Season 1.5 and Season 2 Episodes 1-4. The production in those episodes improved greatly over the first season and a lot of improvisation and experimentation took place, which means that the scripts here don't actually match the episodes. That actually makes this really interesting though, since, by reading the script, you can see which scenes were improvised and which scenes were actually in the script. You can also see places I called for specific sound effects and hear how what I envisioned when I wrote the script actually manifested itself in real life.

Season 2 has been more successful than the last few seasons, and if you'd ever like an easy way to catch up that doesn't require listening through the production fiascos that were Episodes 1 and 4, you can do that here. This season is also a little bit darker, and its where the events in Season 1 come full circle. The themes of compassion and love become complicated somewhat, since John and Meagan are both confronted with a fairly sinister situation. It also becomes clearer that the series is about drugs in the same sense that Spiderman is about spiders. If that makes any sense.

Instead of recording the episodes on the UCCS Radio computers, I recorded them in soundproof pods in University Hall, and edited them on the UCCS Radio computers. I also only lead about half the episodes--Meagan really becomes a main character here. She also might arguably be more powerful than John since she can absorb the "language" of any chemical, plant, animal, or being.

Links to streaming websites are going to be omitted, mostly since I am finishing up my MA degree and working one full time job and a part time job that mean I really only have time to finish the episodes and copy/paste the scripts. I've also minimized commentary. There are more motifs and repeating themes or images in the writing that might be easier to pick up on in this blog, but I don't want to be too overbearing. The meaning you take out of Rivers of the Mind might be more interesting than what I envisioned when I wrote the episodes.

I've written a lot of drafts for Season 3, but I'm still plugging away at it. As far as I can see, I have at least ten more seasons of plot. Will this story still be as interesting to me when I am in my thirties? Who knows! I am hoping so. But since I'm planning on sticking with it for a while, I am pretty sure some of the voices will be changed around, and the audio quality will continue to improve. I've had ideas for several other radio shows or stories too, and I'd like to find time to write them out.

Rivers of the Mind Season 2, Episode 4--Up. Down. Up. Down.

Up. Down. Up. Down. Up...Down...the oars rose and sunk rhythmically into the water, as the Fisherman sat behind me, tearing bits of bread and scattering them into the river. Up...down. Up...down. We inched along the river, a tremendous expanse with a surface like a glass eye—my arms and my shoulders ached—I did not know how long I had been rowing. It seemed like it had been day time for an eternity. Up. Down. Up...down. Up...[[[Clunk]]]

I winced, in fear of the fisherman's net, that it would again bear down on my back—but he did not move. The bread ceased to drop from between his weathered fingers. The air ceased to move. The sunlight ceased to burn. I stood up. My name...I remembered it...my name...was John. A mouth and eyes tore openings from the sunken, skinned over pits in my skull—memories flooded back into my brain, and I looked up at the sky. The inside of my own head became suddenly awash with colors and realizations. Voices. My own voices. How long had I labored here-- Months. Years. Even longer—I remember my memories used as playthings, each on taken  and handed back to me used, so that it no longer smelled, felt, or sounded clean and familiar, like if a friend borrows a jacket and forgets to wash it. He took them from me—the fisherman—I could remember it all. Yes--I could remember everything now. Every single piece...
He torpidly hunched over the water, his body locked in place like the jaw of a rabid dog around the neck of its prey. My body filled with adrenaline as I clutched the oar in my hands, raising it up over my head. He'd taken everything from me--everything that I had. I swung the oar as hard as I could, and knocked his frozen body out of the boat and onto the water. He bounced and slid absently down the frictionless river. As he slid away, his face turned towards me-- gaping black pits took the place of where his eyes should have been, and with a ring of hooked teeth appeared around his mouth. I shuddered in seeing his true form before I managed to avert my attention to more pressing matters. Here I was, alone in an empty, frozen, and lifeless world—all around me, night, beautiful and perfect night, had fallen on the river banks, and I was a stranger in own mind. More than anything I wanted to get out of here. Out of this boat. Out of this river. Out of my brain. My powers came back in full force—I pulled against the spaces between my neurons, hearing them bend and screech like breaking steel. Suddenly, I became conscious of the rest of my brain—I percieved myself as an infinitisimal part of it, and knew that, somehow, he had been expelled from where I was—but there were others like him, others hidden elsewhere inside my head. Others just like me remained trapped in a different parts of space and time--somewhere else in my brain the fisherman stayed alive, conserving his energy around whichever parts of this invasion he deemed most critical to his ultimate objective. Around those pieces of brain, there was a stubborn wall, wrapped tight like a python suffocating my will to resist. It was hopeless to fight against it, being but one, lonely fragment of a personality—and I knew if I rattled on the bars of my cages anymore, I might draw his attention back to my apparently discarded reality.

Watching the emptiness above my head, I gently stepped my foot out onto the water. I remembered the countless times that I had been thrown into the river's surface, hundreds of them materialized all together in a poison that now pressed against my ears, and my veins, drowning out my own heartbeat, as I fell down into my imagination--falling again, and again, and again. But I did not fall this time. I only stood, my feet resting on the water gently. I focused on my feet—left. Right. Left. Right. I carefully crept along the frozen water, which was eerily flat, and completely endless. I could hear my footsteps clap back to me against a wall which felt incredibly close, yet which never made itself appear to me, hidden beneath the horizon. Left. Right. Left. Right. I continued on.

Real Life felt like an impossibly far away place, a stupid dream. I knew that I was the person who I thought I was, but I didn't believe it. It was like...like when I was in kindergarten, and a new teacher named Ms. Grey (she got hired after the last teacher brought some grownup drinks to the school), read me a book about dinosaurs. She told me that right where we were in California, there were dinosaurs that were taller than the ceiling. I tried to picture it, but I really never could, even when I grew up, and I learned more about dinosaurs—I learned to harvest their bones to power cities, in fact. I'd always try to picture it, and I'd always know that they were real once upon a time, but in my mind, I could never make them real. Just like that, I could never make that person I remembered, all that time ago, real to me again. I felt old, older than I could have possibly been, as distant from who I knew that I was as I was from the dinosaurs. Old enough that any happiness I remembered became irrelevant, that any sadness I had ever felt had been outweighed by the repetition of this psychic prison, that any debts I owed no longer mattered. There was only this intrustion into my mind, this war that had last for what felt like an impossibly long time....Left. Right. Left...

Walking gave me a certain kind of comfort now--after all, it's half of what I...think I remember, and the only thing I can know for sure that I really remember. I'd been forced to relive so many of my memories again and again that I didn't know for sure which ones were real. Months passed spent reliving the day I first thought about running away at work, for example—years passed doing nothing but falling down into the mouth of a white flower, its petals wrapping itself around me like a silk blanket until I—land. My foot touched...the land...I jolted up, almost falling over. I'd reached the end of the river. It seemed that it had happened in a blink of an eye, in retrospect, even if I knew that it shouldn't have. I looked back, and the boat seemed to be only a few feet away. But I knew it wasn't somehow, intuitively. Perhaps I was walking into another trap. But if I was...I suppose I had no choice.

Dense fog hung between the buildings in a decidedly non-descript town, its streets lined with quaint two story buildings and enveloped on all sides by forest. Frigid, dense air filled my lungs as I stepped up to have a closer look--Cars had stopped in the middle of traffic, their headlights peering out through the fog. People had frozen in the midst of crossing roads. An old woman in a shop held her hand up to turn off an open sign—a younger boy to the back of him had been caught in the middle of a bad sneeze. All of it felt real. The boat, and the memory of what exactly the boat looked like, both vanished; the river now seemed so tiny it was barely even a stream. My footsteps tossed dry echoes against the walls in the city that quickly became lost in the impenetrable, unreal silence. Was this another trap? I didn't remember seeing a place like this before—and perhaps that was the best sign of one of his traps. What was more, I could read all of these people's minds—or, well, I could read whatever vowel or consonant or color they were thinking of. They were all real people. All of them. I weaved through the crowd, and inspected their faces with pity and concern. None of their....um....sounds really gave me any idea where I was, or where I ought to go. Nothing about this place gave me any sense of an answer. Perhaps my tormentor had died, and my rescue had been overlooked. Or perhaps I was so distant from the real world that a second out there would feel like a million years in here—by the time my rescue had been finished, maybe there wouldn't be anything left of me.

But I couldn't dwell on it, I couldn't get my hopes up. That was just was what he would have wanted. This town was probably just another trap, and I should know by now I'd never escape into any kind of real world. I kept walking, with my head down, but with every muscle in my body ready to jump and run at the slightest sign of danger.

A pair of marshy, heavy footsteps in the distance caught my attention. Though I recognized the mind they belonged to as that of my captor, he did not seem quite like the fisherman I remembered. I froze still; the world felt like it was spinning. As the enemy mind grew nearer, shadows fell over the walls of brick buildings and doors of passing cars. I was torn between running away, and hiding. Deluding myself into believing that I had a chance, I chose to hide—to at least make an attempt at suvival, delusion or no delusion—and so I dove into a nearby alley way, finding shelter behind a dumpster. His footsteps came closer, perilously closer. For an instant, I caught a glimpse into his thoughts and his memories, with no interference or distortion. His name was—Ryan. He crept along, in a dissociated and delirious haze, himself worn thin from millenia of pain. Though he seemed much different from the fisherman, I could tell that the two at least came from the same place, if they were not the same person entirely. I pondered whether I should attack him, or maybe even try to speak to him, but I did not want to do anything foolish. Instead, as he grew further away, I latched onto his mind so that I could track him from a distance, and I tried to understand his thoughts. His mind certainly remembered more than I could even fathom—it had seen more time, it had been caught in more loops, it had lingered for more years in the same place. There was no bottom or top to his memories, but instead they formed a numinous, and infinite space. He walked along stiltedly, with no purpose nor reason entering his mind.

Once I was sure I'd be out of sight, I slid out of the alleyway, and hunched down behind a car that was frozen in the process of parking. Ryan shot a glance over his shoulder with bloodshot and paranoid eyes, his enormous pupils darting back and forth in search of an unseen attacker. Stifled as it was by years and years of abuse, I felt a compassion for him—a feeling I thought I had lost a long time ago. After all, he could have been the only one in the world who had gone through what I had gone through. I thought back to what the fisherman said. A lonely God, he'd said he was. And indeed he seemed a lonely God now that I'd seen this other part of him. He was less grandiose, less purposeful; millions upon billions of years of wandering through time, witnessing the passage of various histories across an almost boundless multiverse, had rendered him too apathetic for sadism. But his apathy had never overcome his fear; he was still afraid and I understood why. You never get over your first few times dying—not really, at least, and he'd died thousands more times than I had As I followed along, I almost felt a trust growing for him—but I did not want to feed into it—I couldn't trust him. But it was worth it, at the very least to follow him and see what he did.

He moved more and more frantically as he went on, winding through alleys and streets, ever more suspicious that he was being followed by another younger and more nefarious version of himself from a different timeline. He let his mind become dominated, almost willfully, it seemed, by the remembered image of a blue-grey house, with two stories and a fresh painted white deck. In this memory, a teenager, who looked just like him, sat hunched over a desk adjacent to the window, his eyes glazing over at a sheet of graph paper. A familiar scene. He could not could how many times he'd relived it. He knew that there'd been at least a million where he'd tried to attack that foolish, stupid teenager snipping seed pods off of a strange, white-flowered, and he'd  even managed to kill himself in more than half of those attempts, only to wind up back in the same spot, remembering everything, forced to start from scratch. This infinitisimal moment that we now entered 11 years in the past was only the fraction of a split second that had gone by since he'd taken the seeds. It would take another three days of real time, said the newsreports he'd read about his death, for him to die, and by his count, that meant it would take around 400 septillion years for his consciousness to enter death. But time was only one of seven dimensions he could perceive beyond height, width and depth--he always checked his last words in the paper to see what kind of a reality he was starting out in—since it changed whenever he died. His last words changed, depending on the timeline. In some, he just screamed, and screamed, begging for it to stop. Others had him boasting through maniacal cackles that he was the devil, and we were all his slaves. In some he whispered some dreamy words about angels, universal peace, castles of light--once, they said he didn't even say a thing—he just stared, and stared, and stared at the wall until his heart stopped beating. This walk down the city street appeared linear on the surface, but actually took place across thousands of timelines as he dodged attacks, made preparations, and shifted his focus between possible outcomes.

The house he remembered cowered meekly beneath a half lit streetlamp trapped in the middle of a flicker. The grass died back softly as his feet touched it—leaves clattered to the ground from the bushes. His hand gently grasped the doorknob, preparing to turn it with a morose, dried-out despair. But he paused for some reason. Like he'd forgotten something. He cleared his throat. "Well.", he muttered, "Aren't you going to come in?" He looked over his shoulder. "Come on. You realized I'm doing this on a constant loop and you didn't figure out I already know you're here? Geez. He must have really done a number on this version of you, huh?" I emerged from behind the car. Haphazardly, he waved, "Hey!"
"Hey."
"How's it going?"

Rivers of the Mind Season 2, Episode 3--If You Stopped Running

“Do you ever wonder what it would feel like if you stopped running? If you took the fight to them, like you thought about doing the night before you left.”
“I—I've dreamed about it before.”
“What happens?”
“I pull out my gun. I don't even think. I don't aim. I just pull the trigger. I run through the offices, and I track them down. I can't stop myself. I want to stop myself. I don't want to do it, but I can't stop. I keep going—and eventually—the only way I can stop is...is...”
“Is what, John?”
“You know what.”
“But you wanted to do it. Somewhere deep down, didn't you?”
“No. (Time reverses) No! (Time reverses) NO! (Time reverses multiple times over a crescendo of screams) Of course I did.”
“Why don't you try it now, John?” (slides gun across table) “Go on. Take it.”
A long, winding series of hallways intervened between the medical wing and Dr. Whitebalm's private room, tangled snakes of dreary clanking corridors and stairwells with phantom blood stained into their walls, walls pulsing with the memories of disasters and traumas hidden underneath thin coats of fresh paint. Now I was in her room, but the endless turning and pacing, opening and shutting of doors, chattering voices and bleak echoey hallways had taken a toll on me. I felt motion sick from it, my eyes were filled with the afterglows of doors and stairwells and passageways, one on top of the other, which now seemed to trail behind me in the periphery of my vision.“How are you feeling?”, Dr. Whitebalm asked as we entered her office and she drew the door shut behind her. Honestly, you know, I wanted to just SCREAM the truth at her. The truth being that, well, I'd just fought an transdimensional battle against a flower that was living inside my friends head, but, whatever, “I'm fine.”, I said,  “I've had a long day, but I'm fine. I'd like to sit down, if that's okay.” Still a little bit shaken up, I backed slowly away from her, wary of the possiblity that she could turn out to be a teenager in a grey hoodie disguised as the professor, getting ready to stab me. Eventually, my knees met with the couch cushion and I let them collapse in on themselves and relax. I had not yet sat on a couch since I got my superpowers and it was amazing. So comfortable. Like sitting on a giant marshmallow. I never wanted to stop, ever. Sitting was the best. Dr. Whitebalm circled towards the kitchen, keeping her eyes fixed on me with with an intense and calculated demeanor. The professor reached the kitchen and carefully poured herself a cup of coffee. Sipping it lightly, she turned, and poured a strange white powder into it from a bulky metal tin. I could barely make out a small warning label on the tin—the powder was radioactive.
“I was hoping we could discuss the accident more privately. I've been trying to piece everything together, but somethings just aren't fitting.”
“There was a—a--a--a--was a--we--”, as I tried to think of a lie my words and thoughts slipped off of each other, and so I aborted the ploy at deception, took a deep breath, and tried to latch onto the ambient noises in the room to help me let go of everything else—I listened the air conditioner click and clank weakly against the faint hum of electricity running through gas in long glass tubes—I heard the steam from her coffee cup rise softly into the air with a faint, gentle hiss as Dr. Whitebalm moved across the room—more collected now, I focused my attentions on her. I had not yet determined if she ought to be trusted. On a gut level, I felt that I could trust her, at least to a point, but on the surface I was more paranoid. This government scientist that had taken us to this underground lab, one that we might never be allowed to leave—that had seperated us from our families--who knew where they thought we were now—and perhaps most egregiously, she—I mean, she torn a goddamn hole in the universe. The mushrooms would have wanted me to kill her, and I knew I could do so...quite easily, in fact. But when I looked into her eyes, my paranoid ideations softened—I could peer through the anxiety and distrust I felt to reveal a real person in front of me, imperfect, but, well...alright, when you got down to it. Uncomfortably curious about me, dreadfully and grimly serious, and somewhat arrogant, but not untrustworthy—she sympathized with me. I resolved to tell her the truth.

“Last night I had a dream. In my dream, my dream, uhm, John, he—he's the guy whos in the coma right now—--who's asleep--he was in my dream. And he said to meet him outside the house the next day—which is today.”, she seemed to follow, stroking her chin studiously with one hand, “Well, when I got there, someone was—you know, someone was, screaming at the cows, and waving a knife, and John's voice came in my head and said, 'I'm trapped outside my body, can you help me?', so I got out of the car, and went to help him. I was pretty stoned, so it freaked me out to hear his voice and stuff, but I was worried about, you know, not helping him if it was real. You know”, she listened more intensely, her hand now almost over her mouth, “It was, it turned out. After he was back in his body, we went outside and, uhm—and—uhm...we went outside, we left the house, we stepped into the field. All of the sudden, he looked in my eyes, and like...bam! I was tripping, and I could saw Icould see the mushrooms were opening a gate to XIBALBA! Well, the mushrooms tried to fight the sky, John got attacked by a flower, and so....not so, then... the mushrooms gave the gift of language to me! But John didn't wake up, you see, he got hurt by this flower, and it's got him now, stuck in his brain, and it wants to kill everything! That's basically it.”
Dr. Whitebalm burst into laughter, “Oh boy.”, she nodded, unsure of what to tell me. “So, you—hmmm. Okay”
“It's a true story. I wasn't even that high before I went into the field. John can do it with his mind.”
“He can do it with his mind, huh? Well. That's—alright. Well. And how do you know John?”
“John came into the Walmart where I work one day to buy some vitamins. About a week ago. About a week and a half ago. No—it was Monday the 6th.”
Just then, she made a connection—the night of the accident—that was February 6th, 2017. Suddenly taking what I said seriously, she leaned in, “What do you--I'm sorry, can you tell me more about John?”
Before I could respond, the florescent lamp dangling behind our heads started to tremble. Dr. Whitebalm turned around, confused. My face froze still, caught somewhere between fear and wonder.
“You didn't do that, did you?”. I read into the contours of her face—it was like a great desert streaked with canyons, flicking with barely perceptible beads of sweat. Somewhere in her countenance, I could trace that, by asking “You didn't do that, did you?”, she thought, somehow, I had caused the light to flicker. But I hadn't. “No, no, no. I can't do that. I think that was John. Or maybe the flowers.”
“Tell me about the flowers. What flowers?”
“They're evil flowers. They want to...”
I reached down to my side for a cigarette, bringing it up to my lips, only to realize, with surprise, that there was nothing there. What had we been talking about? The two of us looked at each other with unease. Somehow the last few seconds of conversation had slipped by us. “What were you just saying?”, she asked.
“Uhm...”, I tried to remember our conversation, “I was just telling you about where I went to college.” Confused, Dr. Whitebalm looked back and forth—of course. She remembered that. College. Duh. “That's right. What were you saying?”
“I only did a semester of it, at Texas State in San Antonio.”
“And you wanted to be what, a doctor?”
“Yes, surely, absolutely, good enough, that's right.”
Something felt strange, but I couldn't place my finger on why. “Do you mind if I make myself some coffee?”, I asked. “Be my guest.”, Dr. Whitebalm said, “Just...don't use the creamer in the metal tin, please.” As I stood up and walked towards the kitchen, I tried to make sense of my surroundings. Something was off; I knew that deep inside—I could tell that something from my brain had been taken from me. Warily, I shifted from English into the mushroom language. At once, two ghosts in the room made themselves visible to me, glaring with suspicion as I became visible to them. I was another one of the test subjects, they thought. Probably seeing the look of terror on my face, Dr. Whitebalm grew worried. Quickly, I darted into the language of the grass—a simple language—idyllic and calm—then into the language of the cedar tree from the field—until I finally reached the language of the white flower in John's mind. Immediately everything made sense—the memory of our conversation had been stolen from me, and a false one planted in its place. A faint giggling came from the ceiling and the walls—the spirit of the flower seemed put down roots there, and was taking delight in the mischief it had caused.
As I grew more and more on edge, Dr. Whitebalm's emotions seemed to mirror my own. I didn't remember what we were talking about, only that the conversation I thought I remembered was not a conversation either of us had ever truly had. The real memory had been stolen from our brains. Taking advantage of the language's temporal looseness, I slid backwards through my memories, until I could see the same two ghosts from before crouched down with John behind Dr. Whitebalms round wooden dining room table. The teenager in the grey hoodie watched from the side, listening in on Dr. Whitebalm while she tried to figure out what I saw during the explosion. Up above, a tiny version of John gripped the sides of a hanging florescent light and shook it back and forth. Relieved, if not even more confused than I'd been before, I snapped back into the present.

Dr. Whitebalm stared forward blankly, her eyes wide and mouth frozen agape. Unwittingly brought into the language of white flowers with me, she had watched helplessly as all timelines flashed by her at once, all possible presents running together in a paralyzing chaos, an infinite and writhing tangle of memories so impossibly dense that she had not even the remotest sense of what she was or who she was for what had seemed like an eternity. I pulled her into English—the junctions between her nerves and her muscles suddenly snapped back into place and her mind returned to its default perception of reality. Heart racing, she collapsed back into the couch and, lost  in an overwhelmed stupor, she struggled to digest what she had observed. The mysteries of the universe, which had been expanded and elaborated on through the voices of plant languages through which I carried her, collapsed crudely into the confines of English, quantum physics and calculus, all of which seemed altogether inadequate to chart the impossibilities of what she had witnessed. Her worried eyes met mine, her jaw locking back against her teeth and her brow wrinkling with vaguely defined uncertainty. “Did you—do that to me?”
We stared at each other; our distrust of one another stubbornly resisting its gradual dissolution. I poured myself a cup of coffee, and nodded, slowly and uncertainly. “You asked me a question. But the flowers made us forget.”

____________
Narrator: Meanwhile, the medical staff at the base examines the other victims of the accident.

Cassandra
“How are you feeling?”
I stared up at the nurse, dumbfounded. Not dumbfounded that he'd ask but, well, I didn't know how to respond. I guess I felt fine. But I shouldn't have been feeling fine, right? After all, my husband was dead. I should not feel fine—not at all. But I felt, well, honestly...just fine. Electrified by the days events, I guess, but...fine. Sure, I felt worried for the children, but apart from that, I barely felt that the Mick and I had even been friends— it was always a war to please him, to make him happy. Naively, I guess, I always imagined he had been a perfect husband, and that it was me who was the problem. Today, though, I guess it clicked. He ran across the field, screaming, ready to kill me and his entire family, and I wasn't actually surprised. Did this mean I hated him? All along? Well...no. Of course not. Well, I mean, I didn't want to hate him. Who knows. Maybe I did. Maybe did hate him. Before I could respond, the nurse answered his own question. “I suppose I shouldn't ask. I can't imagine what you're going through.” Blankly, I looked up at him, a single tear forming at the corner of my eye as I realized, with terror, that I...really did feel absolutely nothing—just a blank space, a blank space where I knew that words and feelings should be.
Everything felt like it would be okay if I just sat still and waited for it to pass. If I just forgot about him, forgot all the terrible nights I'd spent with him pretending to be happy, forgot the time I'd wasted trying to make myself enjoy being around him; to wake up and cook him breakfast in bed on his birthday—all the time I'd spent trying at all. There had been a moment back at the house that I still don't know how to describe—John almost...took control of my mind—I felt myself peel away from my body like a balloon lifting into the sky—the room warped like the inside of a fishbowl, and all of my memories, the best ones, the worst ones, the mediocre ones, all flooded out of my head, displayed on tiny living postcards, and I could see them, all at once, from a distance. I knew that I could let go of them, if I wanted—but really I didn't know how to do that—to let go. John had me look upwards and pray—he didn't make me—I suppose its hard to explain— and just thinking about it makes me think I'm going crazy—but I looked up, and as I started to speak, I saw the ceiling unfold. All of the memories flew up into a city made of trillions of jewels, plucked from the sky by a being with thousands of eyes, who soared through the air on an immense, fiery cloud—and it loved me—it knew me—it recognized me, and I recognized it somehow.
But even if I thought I let all everything go and float up to God right then and there, I didn't forget a thing. It came back, piece by piece, bubbling up in my skin; the earth shook, and I shook with it, as one by one the memories I thought I'd released into the sky popped back into my head. And sure, Meagan, whatever the hell she'd done, had helped—I'd felt my family come back together, but now it was back. Again. I wanted to forget it—to forget it forever. To stop remembering. I didn't feel hurt about Mick dying. I felt hurt that I had seen that monster lurking somewhere underneath his eyes and I was stupid enough not to run the hell away. I knew that everything would be fine if I could forget.
“I...I hate to put you through this again, ma'am but I just want to make sure everything is right on the charts. Your full name is Cassandra Louis Parker?”
“Yes.”
“And how old are you?”
“37.”
“Do you have any known allergies to medications?”
“Not that I know of.”
The nurse continued with this line of questioning. I'd done it before that day, but this was a different nurse, and we were entering a new facility, and I suppose they needed to double check their notes. I didn't really mind, though. It was almost sort of nice to think that my whole life could all fit into some little document, and be stowed away somewhere. Plus, I mean, I was perfectly healthy, wasn't I? I only drank once or twice (well---maybe three or four or five times) a week, and I hadn't ever smoked. I had no heart conditions, although I did take something for my thyroid. As he proceeded down the chart, I felt a growing, albeit weak, sense of satisfaction and pride in my physical condition.
The door swung open about halfway through the chart—a Mexican looking doctor with dark brown eyebrows came to the door, his shoulders hunched slightly, and his eyes half-glazed over. “I'm sorry to interrupt, Adam. I just had a question for Cassandra.”
“Go ahead”
“Your father-in-law. He is—how old?”
“87 years old.”
“Well—thats—thats what he said too—hmmm.”
“Is something wrong with him?”
“No, no, no. He's actually—uhm—really good. Like. Really good. Healthiest 87 year old I've ever seen in my life.”
“Huh. Well, you know, he does like to mind his health, and he gets on his feet a lot.”
“Yeah....yeah. Of course. That—uh. Makes sense, I guess. Hmmm. Well. I'll let you to get back to it.”
“Thanks Dr. O.”
I waved goodbye, and the nurse turned to the counter behind him to retrieve a stethoscope. “Alright, sorry about that.”
“No, no. You know, old people can get senile, it doesn't hurt to check.”
“Definitely, yeah. Anyway, I'm just going to listen to your pulse here real quick—Hmm. I can't quite hear it too clearly here. I'm gonna try the back, is that okay? Alright...lets see here...Ouch! Shit.” He tore his hand away from the stethoscope. It swung from his ears as he shook the pain out of his fingers.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, it's just my hand, it—cramped up or something.”
“I'm sorry!”
“Oh, don't apologize, it's not your fault. Let me try again—Jesus fucking Christ! I don't know what's wrong with my hand today.”
The lights in the room flickered, as the computer screen wobbled and waved. He looked around warily, before rolling his eyes. “Sorry, you'll get used to it. This is a Deep Space Laboratory, I don't know if they told you about it. Some of the experiments take a lot of power.”
“What are they doing?”
“Nothing interesting. All I know is its dry enough to lower the sea levels if it ever gets out of these walls. Here—let me try that again--”

TO GERRY
Dr. Oregano or Oregon or Oregami whoever the hell stomped back into the room and sat down across from me, looking my charts up and down. Same damn thing. You sure you really 87 years old? Shit. I know, can't believe it myself. He was having such a hard time with this that he went to go ask the daughter in law. She told him the same thing. Wouldn't be surprised if he tried to carbon date me.
“You must—uhm. Get a lot of exercise, Gerry.”
“Yeah, I mean, last week or so, I've been trying to spend me some time out with the cows. Uh. Arthritis used to act up, but I uhm—I just figured it was time to, you know. Keep them company.”
Don't know what was so difficult for this doctor to wrap his head around. He could probably stand to just, I dunno, feel happy for me. The pain from the hip had gone down pretty good. I actually wasn't feeling too bad. Maybe I was right all along, and red meat and eggs is the key to a long and happy life. Maybe I'll write a book. Go on Dr. Oz.
“Well, based on the scans we took of your hip, and your blood work, you're---I mean, honestly, you can hardly tell the hip was even broken.”
“Tell you what, it sure as hell felt broken.”
“I believe you, I believe you, but you're...honestly the healthiest person of your age I've ever seen. I mean your liver works better than some of the grad students here, your heart's... practically perfect, your blood sugar is amazing, your brain doesn't show any signs of deterioration, I mean—I just don't know how to--“
He'd said that about eleven times or so. He'd run just about every goddamn test he could think of trying to find some sign that I was, in fact, not just a senile old coot who was also a 35 year old pro-athlete in disguise. But to hell with all this crap. I was getting tired. Hungry. Didn't know what the hell I was supposed to think about any of this. God damn government tearing holes and god knows what in the universe or whatnot. Don't reckon how they can somehow round up the money for all this time wastin', pasture wreckin' coverup nonsense but Mr. Trump has to go beggin and pleadin for the money for a wall. Wish this doctor would hurry up.
But I guess I wanted to be alone too. Just have some time to think through things. Can't help but admit it-- I was pretty frustrated with Mick. I honestly did the damn best I could with him, but he was always a monster. Can't help but admit it, especially in hindsight. Seems kind of stupid. Hell, I remember one time, I caught him in the barn when he was seven torturing squirrels with the blowtorch. And he kept getting kicked out of school., too Age sixteen, he even tried to lay hands on a little lady in gym class—I just about let her brothers have their way with him too, but I didn't. Maybe I should've. But he was my son, so you know, I was gonna love that kid whether he tortured critters, or picked fights, or...disrespected women, or even if he voted for Hilary Rodham Clinton. Guess I paid for it though, in the shape of big damn hole in the back of my property and whole field of concussed, lonely bovines. I just hoped that the government would let me get back to them soon. They were probably all sorts of worried.
Things were getting pretty strange. To be quite honest, the weirdest thing I've ever experienced was, was back in 66 when I headed down to a 13th Floor Elevators concert out in Austin. Pretty looking hippy girl asked if I wanted to smoke some marijuana, but I kindly declined. To be quite honest, I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about with that crazy hippy music stuff. My friend Caleb decided he'd try it out, but he didn't really think it did all that much apart from it making the music sound a little bit better. Went to a Grateful Dead concert in Houston, too, but really just to say that I'd gone, and we didn't stay too long. But since last week, I'd met a homeless fellow who uses LSD to read minds, watched psychedelic mushrooms control my cows, and witnessed the government poking holes in the sky.

John was nice and always seemed like a good listener. Reckoned he needed a father figure of some kind in his life, not to mention I sort of missed having someone to talk to. I've got friends, I mean...Jill stops by sometimes and brings me eggs, and I kind of have taken a liking to her, but I figure she kind of thinks I'm just a boring old man. We never have that much conversation. She does look mighty fine for a lady in her sixties, and...well that's all I'll say about that. But having someone around to talk to sure was nice, and John seemed like he liked it too. The kid was weird, sure, and smelled a little bad when he first got there, but he was a nice boy. Sure hoped he wasn't dead, or, I don't know, vegetable-ized, however you call it.
The Doctor sighed, concluding a long monologue about how damn healthy I was, and how damn upset that seemed to make him. “Well. I'm sorry about that doc.”
“Don't be sorry. It's just—incredible. I—don't even know what to think.”
“Well—you got me there. Uhm.”, the two of us looked at each other awkwardly, “Guess if I'm doing fine, I can go ahead and...skeedaddle on out of here, huh?”`
“No—no, we can't let you leave until we're sure the radiation isn't going to cause any complications.”
“Seems to me like the only complications are giving me the body of a 35 year old with a functioning prostate.” Heck. That'd make a hell of a comic book. It'd be a real hit in nursing homes, I'll bet ya.
“We can get you into a more comfortable room, would you prefer that?”
“That pretty little oriental nurse still gonna come bring me my food?”
“Well, if you aren't going to be in the medical wing, I can't really ask Leah to--”
“Just pullin your leg, Doc. Just pullin your leg.”

____
“So, this whole place...it used to be what—a secret prison?”
“No, they did—um, tests. Experiments with LSD, stuff like that.”
“I can't imagine tripping down here. It must have been terrifying.”
“Yeah. They don't let anyone down here, but I mean, who cares, right? I've been coding algorithms like all fucking day.”
“This is awesome. Hello! Can you give us a sign of your presence?” (other guy laughs) “Oh my god, don't tell me you watch Ghost Hunters too...”
“E'er day.”
“Great minds think a--”
(loud clammoring sound)
“What the fuck was that?”
“You should have seen the look on your face, you just got white as a sheet. Hey—if that was you, can you--” (loud clammoring, closer this time)
“Holy shit. It's haunted. It's fucking haunted. This is awesome.”
(loud clammoring, again closer) “Hey! What's your name?”
“Oh hell no. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Look behind you. Look behind--”
“Oh my god. Oh my god. Hey, is that... that....
“John. My name's John”
(sounds of psychic terror)