Season 2 Episodes 7-10

Episode 7: Into the Ocean

My head snapped around, making the world spin, until my eyes and the eyes of Ryan latched on to each other. The black of his pupils rolled back against his irises like Persian rugs being spreading over clean marble floors. Hooked blades appeared, ringing each of his hollow, black eyes. The darkness within in them spread out from all sides—without blinking, I stared back at him, as thousands of illusions swarmed at the peripheries of my vision to try and distract me. I maintain a hawklike focus—he tried to push me away—I felt gravity tug on the back of my brain, gravity that rivaled that of the earth's. My body grew, even if my field of vision did not change. I thought about the house, and it flickered into reality, forming a shared image between both of our minds—even as the Fisherman tore at the edges of my memory with thick, burning heat, I held firm, letting his efforts wash around me like water pouring around the islands in an estuary—I teetered back and forth between enemy tides, my gaze remaining fixed. The Fisherman's face transformed into a thousand tangled and indefinite strings that reached back into infinity—the world around graphite constellations onto a wide graph paper emptiness. I kept thinking about the house. I felt the strings that made up Ryan become parts of me—I became knit into them—I struggled to focus on the house—the lines pulled through me, moving in divergent, nonsensical directions, so that my body tightened and loosened like an unwinding sweater, and drifted towards the house.


    Ryan: Hey, but check this out, guys! Lets take a detour. Oh, yeah. I'm Good Ryan! You remember me. From the episode with the tuba space war? Oh that's right, different timeline. Kind of jumped the shark in that one, wouldn’t be surprised if they just cut it, so…hopefully they just edit that reference out. Anyway, sorry. Let's do a dramatic slow pan from the scene you were just witnessing to a quiet office, where a man in a white coat sits intently clutching a book. His name is Doctor Jules.
    Doctor Jules works here. He's an older dude, I think Indian or hispanic or something, I don't know. [whispers] he's kind of fat for a doctor, I guess, but doctoring is hard and pizza is delicious so no judgement here. [normal voice] He wears a white shirt and a yellow tie underneath his labcoat. There's a spaghetti sauce stain on his left nipple, if that interests you. Not that it would. Why would it? Sorry. Anyway, he's on duty right now, but there's not that much to do so he's just playing Sudoku and listening to Beyonce. Meanwhile, I'm still getting the hang of using John's mind or whatever, so I'm not sure how to do this...He can't see me but I'm down on my knees underneath the book looking into his eyes. Okay here it goes. So I just like...lean in and....suck... I guess? Ugh, telepathy is hard, man—uhm—how about... “Hey asshole.”, I whisper. Dr. Jules looks around. “Hey! You recognize me. I'm, uhm. Your conscience. You're having a really important intuitive feeling right now that...uhm...”
    “No I'm not.”
    “Yeah you are, bitch. Shut the fuck up. You're having an intuitive feeling about the patient in the coma. You feel like you need to go...uhm...go see if he's having a seizure. It's cause...uhm...he's having a seizure.”
Dr. Jules starts rambling or...no wait he's thinking. He's trying to remember if he read any side effects like this from that herbal aphrodisiac he bought online. Does John always have to hear people think about sex? It's kind of weird. Sorta cool. But. In a weird way.
    “Go check on him. Do it. Do it now...you know what? I didn't want to do this, but...look. I can control your limbs if I want to, but I'm trying to be polite. Can you like...put down your suduko puzzle and go check on him please?”
    Dr. Jules stood up and looked around the room for the source of a voice. He didn't feel different, and honestly the herbal supplement hadn't really worked that well. I hope that on some other timeline, I had convinced him to go check on John faster, cause the timing with this shit is sort of hard. Anyway, he eventually decided that, hell, maybe he really was having a weird revelation. Walking down the hallway, Dr. Jules strode intensely to John's room. Through the window, he could see the patient moving—he opened the door quickly, and flicked on the lights. John convulsed, his eyes wide, his mouth mumbling a confused jumble of words. His heart rate, already pretty high while he was just sleeping there, had shot up to 180. For a moment, John's eyes drifted over to me; the fisherman hiding within recognizes me and scowls. “Needs sedation”, Dr. Jules wrote on his clipboard, before hurrying off.

______

John
I cascaded from the sky, crushing it like a cardboard box and settling on the roof of the house.  All of the strings that I had followed led back to the house—each one represented the start of a new timeline. A howling and ferocious wind rippled the sides of surrounding buildings and tore at the sky. “Remember what I told you about ghosts.”, Ryan had told me. Well I did, I guess. They were—they needed—emotions to survive. Right? Emotions. Memories. They burn memories. I looked around me. So many strings, diverging in thousands of directions. But all of them, all of them came back here. Every single thread, every single path, he always started again from here. His existence was like a tree—hundreds of branches all stemmed from larger branches, which came from larger branches, which came from the trunk. I was at the trunk, or at least near the trunk. I looked around. I needed to find his food source and cut him off. I needed to find his memories.
    Not exactly sure what to do, I ran towards the end of the roof in the front of the house and hung from the rain gutter. Dangling in front of a window, I swung my legs to kick through, and plopped myself down in Ryan's parent's bedroom. There was a neatly made bed flanked by pictures of Ryan, and his brother on either side, and in the corner, a suitcase sat filled with decades of festering and spoiled vacations. The wind poured in through the opening of the window glass, and peeled sheets of graph paper off of the floor. Like lazy paper boats, they floated into the hallway. I sprinted towards the stairs. At the top of them to the left sat Ryan's room. A faint chill emanated from the brass doorknob and numbed my hands when I reached out to touch it. Grimacing, I clutched the handle, and turned it. Ryan sat at his desk, surrounded by piles upon piles of graph paper, upon which there were intricate and bloody drawings. Nations being slaughtered. Houses burning underneath radioactive explosions. Slaves marching to his orders. A tiny pool of blood had begun dripping from his nose, frozen in mid flight. I spun his chair around and looked into his eyes. Helpless, he stared back at me, and a wave of intense fear came over him. The wind tore at the walls of the house in a continuous gale, splintering off their components and sending them careening into the tangled mess of threads and timelines left by Ryan's various duplicates—I started to grow weaker, if only because he was shifting himself to be here, and not out there in the world, shifting himself back to this place to defend himself. Our eyes locked together, and the world froze. No wind. No sound. No motion. I had him.
Sapphire

    John and Ryan both suddenly stopped moving—Carlos and I shared a long, disturbed glance as Meagan stood up to fetch some coffee. As she weaved her way through the boxes, her hip passed through my shoulder. I did a terrified double take only to fall over into the crate against which I'd been leaning. When I stood up my body was submerged in the crate. Or...no. It wasn't a crate, but a table. I couldn't remember how I got here...was this all a hallucination? Was I on whatever they gave to John just now? I remembered—the—no. I couldn't be. That wasn't real...it must have been a dream.  See, I knew though that... last night I'd wanted to hang myself, But no. No. I remember...I remember clear as day that I actually had hung myself. And if I hung myself...that must mean... I'm a ghost.
    Who knows how long I'd been dead for-- Hungry for answers about what had happened, what was going on, I slipped out of the table, and inspected John, who had frozen like a statue. I reached out to touch his as ice cold face, which broke out into crisp crackles as I pressed my fingers against its surface. I didn't know anything for certain, but intuitively, I anticipated with every second a hand wrapping around my throat, a chemical stained rag smothering my face, the impending buzz of an electric wire, the slap of an interrogator, the splash of icy cold water, the stereo recordings of messages--
    I must have been dreaming about these two strangers. Yes. Of course. And John was a part of my dream—Ryan was too, right? Weren't they? I didn't really remember them, so obviously, and people don't just...freeze, at least not in Texas, so they couldn't really be there. I approached Ryan, and tried to see if he felt as cold as John, but when I tried to brush off his face, his eye fell backwards into his head. I jolted back, and my stomach sank. No, that's not what happened... it didn't fall. It floated...it just came loose, and fell backwards into what looked like a night sky without a single prick of light showing through. My finger stretched, turning to fog as it was sucked into the depths of Ryan's colossal, hollow skull. I pulled it away. Carlos glanced at me, his face turning back to its normal shade of blue, and his eyes starting to rot from whatever chemical had killed him. We were ghosts, and surely we had always been ghosts. But we never came to this part of the base. We didnt remember it. We started to feel ourselves fade. Had that been what happened to them? I touched John's eye. It was hard, frozen like the rest of his body—He wasn't like Ryan. But what was Ryan?


RYAN: Striding down the hallway, Dr. Jules hurried to John's room. He could see the patient moving through the window, so he flicked on the lights and quickly opened the door. His eyes wide, and his mouth mumbling a confused jumble of words, John's limbs and body quaked. Heart rate 180. He caught sight of me and immediately recognized me, shooting me a bored scowl. “Needs sedation”, Dr. Jules wrote on his clipboard, before hurrying off. I grabbed him by the shoulders and drove myself into his head, not willing to let him fuck this up again. “Alprazolam this time, you idiot. And give him enough to knock him out cold.”

    He entered the room where they kept the drugs and prepared a nice needle full of Alprazolam, I mean, uhm. Xanax, which is one of the most common benzos. I've only done it like two or three times, and I stole it from my mom both times. Thinking that the idea had been his the entire time, Dr. Jules fumbled back towards John's room, and shouted for a nurse for good measure. The nurse helped to hold his neck while the doctor quickly injected the tranquilizer into one of John's veins. The other Ryan could come after me however he wanted to try and stop this—but even if he succeded across one thousand out of one thousand and one timelines, it only needed to work once.

John
    I pulled Ryan into my mind—he was filled with a terrible, existential fear as he looked into my eyes. The earth around the house crumbled into a blue and white plain underneath us. I flew back into the heavens, shooting out of Ryan's head and up over the ocean of dreams. Layers upon layers of my self that had been split apart to pull Ryan into this dream world became reconstituted all at once. My vision staggered, blurring in sets of fifty and thirty and ten until it got down to its normal shape. I held a small, doll like version of Ryan in my hands, and lifted with it a web of interconnected dopplegangers from the waters, who formed a singularity of minds all thinking in tandem across timelines. Two hands grasped my shoulders, and I jumped. “Boo! Ha. Good job. Sorry, when I tried to explain it, you started thinking too loud and he read your mind. Come on.”
    Ryan moved downwards towards the water. “This is dimension Five A. Welcome. This is where like...I mean, we're like halfway between consensus reality and whatever weird space shit they got going on in Dimension 6.” The two of us walked quietly over the ocean's surface, and he pointed down through the water. “If someone dreams about you, you can pull them here. Now, we just killed off all uhm...the Fisherman's projections. But it won't take too long for him to rebuild, and then you'll have until the Xanax wears off to get ready. Go back down with the ghosts. You've got 12 hours or something. When the timeline reseals, he'll think he can control you, but I'll be the one feeding you, and he won't be able to hurt you. Does that make sense? I mean, I feel like it might have not made sense? I don't know. Basically, when I tell you to, you just have to attack him. He could kill the others, but not you as long as I keep you fed and you don't think about...or he'll be able to do the same thing to me.”
    “What don't I think about?”
    “I already made you forget it. Try to remember it, it makes it sound like I said absolutely nothing. See? Okay. Anyway. Follow my directions. This could go like a hundred different ways, and I need you to be flexible. Whatever you do, don't let him hurt Meagan? Okay? Cool. Now...uhm. Go forth, and I'll go...do some...time stuff.”, he gave me a cheesy thumbs up and, smiling and staring at me with no interruption, walked backwards across the water.

Episode 8: Lockdown

Something felt weird, but I couldn't place my finger on what was causing it. “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 understand my surroundings. Something was…not…on…you could even say…off…I knew that viscerally—I could sense that something from my brain had been stolen from me. Cautiously, I shifted from English into the mushroom language. At once appeared two ghosts, leering 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 cedar tree from the field--then into the language of the grass—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 untrue one placed in its plant…planted in its place.... A distant giggling came from the ceiling and the walls—the spirit of the flower seemed put down roots there, and was enjoying the chaos it had wrought.
    As I grew more and more on edge, Dr. Whitebalm's emotions seemed to mirror my own. I didn't recall 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 gray (spelled with an a and not an e in this timeline) 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 miniature version of John clutched the sides of a hanging florescent light fixture 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. You wanted to know about the explosion.”, I said to Dr. Whitebalm, sipping my coffee quietly. A language that sounded like a shivering tree filled my chest— it spread through my arms and into my brain like a gentle wind before a storm. Coffee seemed like a nice plant—if I closed my eyes, I could see it—industrious, practical, not altogether intelligent, but persistently friendly. Another sip, and the shivering intensified. I felt awake—vigorously awake. “I don't remember that—but--”
    “The white flowers can--”
[[alarm sounds]]]
    I jumped,  spilling my coffee onto my shirt as screeching red lights filled the air, running in circles like a stampede of panicked cats. A booming mechanical voice came over the intercom. “Attention. Horizon is now in lockdown. Please shelter in place. This is not a drill.”
        “You can tell me later.”, she said, quickly heading to her computer.
Had the white flowers done this? Were they trying to keep me from telling her about them? I rapidly switched to the mushroom language, careful to leave Dr. Whitebalm out of it, so I could see if the ghosts were still present—the teenager had vanished, but two of the spirits remained, inspecting John's now frozen face. I returned to English, stumbling across the room towards Dr. Whitebalm to see if I could help her with whatever she was doing, or if, possibly, she could help me feel a little bit less afraid of whatever was going on. Mostly the last one. Computers intimidated the beshroomed side of my brain. Hunched over her keyboard, Whitebalm rapidly tapped the bottom row of keys to wake up a set of three monitors. Frantically, she typed in a long and complex string of twenty seven characters, and opened an application displaying security camera footage from around the base.
    “What's going on?”
        “Shhhhh. Look.”
    On the screens, we watched soldiers creep through darkened hallways, made visible by wandering beams of pale white lights affixed to their weapons and occasional flashes of bright red from the alarms. Doctors rushed towards a door with a “no personnel beyond this point”, sign, following a shell-shocked scientist with blood gushing from his nose, eyes and ears. “Hmmm.”, Dr. Whitebalm cocked her head and quickly logged out of the computer. Crouching down to reach below the desk, she retrieved a long, heavy lead apron and half-forced it over me, followed by a protective facemask. “Step back a little bit. Bit further. Good.” Frantically, she searched through her drawers and pulled a small piece of metal from a bag marked “radioactive”, around which she clenched  her fist. A flurry of calculations raced through her mind, in a complex and exacting language of particles, waves, and momentums before she tapped the metal against the ground. It emitted a cascade of radio waves that bounced off the walls—a brief pause later, and she concluded-- “Our hallway is clear. Should be for the next...three to five minutes, I'd guess”, she tapped the metal again, to get a clearer image, “Looks like they're checking the rooms for weapons.” Standing up, she put the metal back into its pouch, and tore the apron off of me, throwing it to the side, “Come on, lets go.”
        “So something happened to you in the--”
            “Shhh.”
        “I'm sorry, I was just--”
            “Shhh. Quiet.”
    Dr. Whitebalm cautiously opened the door and led me around a corner into a long dark hallway. Holding her hand up, her skin glowed a deep yellow. I followed her carefully into the hallway, unable to see past the tiny point of light where the two of us stood. “With these people, you need to make sure you see things for yourself. Half the debriefings are bullshit. Especially since the accident.” I stared at her in silence, unsure of what to say or how to respond. “If anyone asks, tell them I was showing you around when the alarms went off, and we got lost. It's easy to do that around here. Don't show anyone what you showed me.”
    “What--”
    “Whatever you did back in that room. If you ever want to leave, do not show that to anyone.”
I nodded. Pausing for a second, Dr. Whitebalm's hand pulsed softly. “What are you...?”
    “Quiet!....there. Okay. We're going to turn left in a little bit.”
We kept walking. I stared, confused, at her hand. “I was using radio waves”, she said, “It takes a lot of focus. I didn't mean to be harsh when I told you to be quiet.”
        “It's okay, I understand.”

---

(The scene of an emergency. Dr. Whitebalm and Meagan walk towards it)

    “Hey! You aren't supposed to be out here.”
        “We got lost when the lights went out. What's going on?”
            “Let them through.”, Colonel Imes ordered. He peered over the shoulder of a doctor, who inspected a bleeding and shivering man huddled next to a stairway marked “no trespassing.” Dr. Whitebalm nodded politely yet indifferently to the security guards, and strode to the stairway. “What's going on here, sir?”
            “We don't know.”
Whitebalm stood next to Imes, and silently cleared her throat to get the colonel to explain. “He and his friend went down into the old lab to do a ghost hunt. They say someone attacked them.”
        “They were attacked? With what? By who?”
    “Well that's where it gets weird. They say it was the guy from the sinkhole, and he did it with his mind. But Martin was with him when it happened, and he was still in bed, having a seizure.”
        “A...a seizure?”, I asked, thinking about the ghosts that I had seen in the room—John had abruptly disappeared just moments before the sirens went off.

    I knelt down next to the doctor to get a better look at the patient. He was barely breathing, his trembling mouth bubbling with incoherent and slurred words. Blood gushed from his nose, his ears and his eyes. His skin had turned a deep purple. A nurse tried to hold his arm still, while another doctor administered some sort of drug from an intravenous drip. I shut my eyes to listen to the languages in his mind. There were two languages other than English. The first, the one just injected by the needle, looked like thick red plasma that bloomed outwards—when I let myself slide into it, all of my muscles relaxed into a gentle euphoria, like I had become a hot air balloon, and I was floating into the sky. There were two words in this language. “Yippeeeeee” and “Ahh!” The other language was the one from John's mind, the unending kaleidoscope of pyramids and spheres. The language manifested itself here as a mess of tangled, snake-like vines covered with blue flowers, vines wrapping themselves around the scientist's legs so that his veins felt like they could burst, wrapping around his chest and digging into his heart. Tightening his veins, the vines had penetrated and strangled layers upon layers of the brain, turning it into a bleeding and disjointed pulp—his consciousness, his english consciousness no longer knew what he was or who he'd been before he was attacked.

    I opened my eyes. “She doing Reiki or something?”, asked one doctor. “What's wrong with him?”, demanded Dr. Whitebalm, ignoring the medical team's questions so as to ask her own presumably much more important questions.
    “We don't know. His blood pressure is through the roof. His veins are so tight he's starting to bruise. We think it might be poison”
        “You shouldn't be anywhere near this right now.”
    “Let me see John.”, I demanded. One of the doctors looked back at Colonel Imes. “He's fast asleep right now.”
        “Only if someone goes with her.”, Imes conceded.
    “Martin! Martin. Can you take over here for a second?”
Another doctor, who'd previously been glaring very intently at a page of sudoku, looked up from his book, and rushed over to us. I stood up as Dr. Whitebalm moved in to ask the man in the suit more about the incident. Martin led me away from the scene.

    “My name is Dr. Jules, by the way. Nice to meet you.”, he said, as if to remind me not to call him Martin. The faintest hint of white flowers still lingered in his brain. My shoulders grew tense with worry and fear, as the memory of seeing the shattered universe the white flowers wished to create shivered through my brain.  “What do you think about all this?” He grimaced,  torn between expressing his real fears and maintaining professional detachment. “Well, it's certainly unsettling, but I don't think its anything to be concerned about [underneath what she says: There's a lot of chemicals in the old lab, which is why we don't go in there, and I'm sure they got into something they shouldn't have]...” Impatient, I pulled him  into the alcohol language, which I'd heard earlier that day. He stumbled, wondering why he felt so drunk all the sudden, but suddenly not giving as much of a fuck about telling me what he thought. I mean, his thoughts were important, right? He was a fucking doctor. People should listen to him. His vision started swirling, and his stomach started to burn with a nauseated fire—I imagined. “Well, you know, baby...I mean...Huh...It's been weird here since the election I mean the accident. And it creeps me the hell out that they'd say Joe would attack them, cause...I mean...”
    “John.”
        “Yeah whatever. I mean he was all like”, the doctor awkwardly flung one limp wristed hand up to his chest as he made a face to imitate John convulsing “[makes obnoxious drunken seizure noises]”
    “Did anything...happen? Before John had the seizure?”
He felt like it would be too insane to tell me. He'd sound like a nutcase. I pulled him more insistently into the alcohol language. His knees grew weak and his eyes started to flutter, “Fuck did I--I think I...I think I need to like...lay down or something.” He looked me over, confused. “Did anything happen before he had the seizure?”, I asked, flatly. “Yeah...yeah. Like...I heard this voice, Ben, it was so weird. I've been trying to tell everyone but I'm just scared, I mean, what if he did it you know? Man, fuck medical school. Did I ever tell you what I really wanted to do? I wanted to be a cryptographer.”
    “You heard a voice?”
    “I wanted to...solve...number puzzles and spy and shit but then the fucking soviet union had to...collapse...assholes...”, he started to feel like he could vomit, so I returned him to English. He stumbled. Suddenly not drunk, he looked around, puzzled. “You were saying you heard a voice?”. He squinted, embarrassed, trying to search for a medical explanation for what he'd just experienced.
    “Crazy, right.”, he said, looking off to John's room, brow furrowed and mind racing.
    “What kind of voice, Doctor?”, I half-spat out, awkwardly clenching my words so as to not sound overly demanding.
    “Like. Almost a kids voice. Or maybe older than that, I don't know. Teenager maybe. It was weird.”

    The White Flowers. I knew it right then and there...they had attacked him. I felt certain of it. A few steps from John's room and I could see his comatose form in the darkness through the slits in the blinds, swinging just impercetibly back and forth. The warring languages in his mind had been overshadowed by something new—something fearsome and domineering-- a silence. A silence that thought, spoke, dreamed, and decided without words. A language, a sentience, with one voice, completely and eternally silent, like the sound you would hear inside your ears if you were immersed entirely in a pool and left to dream—an incredibly loud silence, through which nothing could pass. I could not see into John's emotions, or the doctor's or my own. There were no emotions, no traces of wandering thoughts. There was nothing but silence, blank, sleeping silence. The white flowers were covering their tracks. “How do you know him?”, asked the doctor. I glanced back at him, uneasy yet growing increasingly bored. “He's a friend.”
    “His bloodwork says he was on LSD, do you know anything about that?”
I glanced back at him, stoically. “No. That's strange.”
     I walked closer to the bed and the uneasy coolness of the silence drained my heart of feeling or meaning or concern, leaving me only quieted—not quite at rest, but...quiet. The only word. The only thing that kept me from falling asleep in the silence was the pounding overstimulation of the day, its aggravating assault on my senses which grew dimmer and dimmer as the silence enveloped me. “You don't think he did it, do you?”, I asked to the doctor, my own words barely audible to me—maybe I didn't even say them—but I didn't care.. “I mean, he's been here the whole time.”, I could hear him say in a muffled voice. I stared back at him. I had to remind myself what Dr. Whitebalm said, that I couldn't trust these people, but perhaps I couldn't  trust John, or her, or even myself and my own intuitions, my own sense that John couldn't have been responsible, even as I realized that only he could have done that to those poor scientists. Perhaps the White Flowers already controlled me...
    All of these thoughts, ordinarily terrifying, floated through my mind atop the silence, over my head like ships on top of oceans. Here in this silence, I didn't really care. I stepped away from the room, having found more questions than answers. A tear formed in the corner of my eye, but I tried to hold onto that sense, that sense that I really didn't care, that I was at peace. Another step, back towards the door. A tear slid from the corner of my eye down along the side of my nose, meeting the surface of my lips. A stretcher came down the hallway. “Listen to me! Listen to me! It was him! It was him!”,  a man screamed. I stepped out from the room, watching the doctors roll the scientist into a hospital room. One by one, tears stained the sides of my cheeks, as feeling slowly returned to my body. And I hated it. Shutting my eyes, I returned to the silence. It embraced me like an old friend, and I teetered on the edge of unconsciousness—any further into the silence, and I would have fallen fast asleep. I was kept awake by one singular fact—there was no safe place for me to hide. The White Flowers had John, and they would use him to kill me, or worse.

________

Episode 9: Outside

    The ocean of dreams stretched on for miles, filled with pale images of the real world underneath. I looked between my feet to see alarms sounding throughout the base below, as soldiers wound their way through the hallways. I found my physical body frozen next to a pair of confused and panicked ghosts frantically searching through Dr. Whitebalm's kitchen and living room. Carefully, I floated downwards—the part of the facility where the ghosts had been hiding was right underneath a local Arby's, so I awkwardly slid between a woman filling up an extra large soda and young couple kissing next to the trash can. From there, it was almost a mile of bedrock, sewer systems, and power cables to Dr. Whitebalm's private room. I reached out for my own body, and felt my skin stretch to pool with the frozen features of my double until we became one. The feeling of muted, ghostly tangibility returned to my hands and arms. Control over my memories and the memories of the other ghosts, passed from the Fisherman to Ryan— reality almost imperceptibly shifted—Ryan drafted a new, parasitic timeline within the one that surrounded that which existed inside of the Fisherman's mind. The paradox formed by his death meant that the Fisherman would, sooner or later, return, but for now we were safe, so long as my physical body lay asleep. Whenever I awoke, the Fisherman would be released from my mind, and we would wait as a temporal trojan horse, essentially invaders, living in a unique dead spot crafted by Ryan's dream harpoon.

    Sapphire jumped when she noticed that I'd come unfrozen. “He's back!”, she shouted. I turned to face her; her trembling eyes were wrecked with existential dread. She'd just seen on Dr. Whitebalms calendar that it was 2017. That meant she'd been dead for almost fifty years. She should have been seventy four now, if she'd made it out alive. Her parents had probably died—her friends had probably all but forgotten her, and worst of all she would never escape this place. She would never get to see the sun again, to see those long, beautiful stretches of desert and mountains that she remembered; she would never get to hear music. She would be trapped here until she finally dissipated from reality. I wanted to reassure her, but there was no reassurance—at least I could return to my body someday. She had truly lost hers—her feelings were no overreaction but the simplest possible statement of our reality. I didn't know what to tell her. I didn't know how to comfort her soul in the weight of this revelation. I'd never spoken to a ghost.
    “Are you okay--?”, she asked me. Her question caught me off guard. Was I okay? Shouldn't I be asking her? Didn't I look like I was okay? She imagined that I'd had the same revelation, though, a revelation that I'd died fifty years before, that I was going through everything she was, but I wasn't. I walked closer to her, passing through Dr. Whitebalm's dining room table to come to her side. I knew what I had to do, but everything about it seemed wrong. I wanted to help her. Her memories, her thoughts, her feelings, her wants, everything flashed through my mind as I looked into her eyes, and I couldn't stop thinking that once this was all over, I'd have to leave her to be a ghost. “John?”, she asked, “Are you okay?”
    “Listen. I'm not a ghost.”, I said, “So I can't say I understand how you're feeling, any of it. But--” I ran out of words. What could I say to someone who had suffered this much, who had glimpsed so much inhumanity? “Are you a demon?”, she asked, “Not to be weird or anything, but, hell man, are you? Is this hell?”
    “No, no. I'm, I'm still alive.”
    “So you're like, a psychic or something?”
    “No. I mean. Yeah. I guess.”
    “What do you want from us?”
    “I need your help...Ryan...Ryan is...he's a, uhm. A psychic too. About 10 years ago, he tried to get high off of datura...you know...uhm...its like...”, I tried to look through her memories of the experiments to which she'd been subjected, “That drug they gave you that made your mouth get all dry and made you forget everything. And he ended up getting detached from time, because of an opening in the universe. He's...taken over my mind now. I guess I should clarify. I took acid in this field like, a week ago. A week and a half. And the government...they don't use this place for mind control now by the way, just for space stuff...they had torn a hole in the universe with a wormhole machine, so I had the same thing happen to me, only I can read minds and pull people into my head. Which Ryan wanted to steal to make himself into a God. Right now, there's another version of Ryan, though, who helped break us free of the evil Ryan.”
    Sapphire tried to piece together what I'd said and to discern whether or not it could be trusted. She studied my face—I looked like I could be alright, she guessed. But so did the guy who'd brought her here. She didn't trust men—she never did. I seemed different, but plenty of people had seemed different to her. And what I said sounded bizarre enough for her to wonder if this was all part of some experiment. “So what do you want us to do?”, she spat.
    “I need you to help me. In about twelve hours, he's going to come back, and he's going to expect us to have forgotten everything that happened before. But the Good Ryan is going to keep us from forgetting. We have to keep the evil Ryan—he's called the Fisherman-- from hurting Meagan. That girl. He was trying to turn us against her since she's the only one who can kill him.”
        “And you trust this...what. This Good Ryan?”
    “I don't have a choice.”
        “Look, John, if that is your name, no! I'm not going along with any of your shit. I don't know what the fuck is going on, but I don't believe a damn word you say. And if you can read my mind, like you say, then you know I have some good fucking reasons not to believe you. You can stop your simulation, you fuckers! You're not fooling anyone”

    She slammed her hand against the table, scattering various papers, coffee cups and candles from its surface onto the floor, and then kicked one of the chairs, before turning away to continue yelling at the unseen government monitors. Before she could, I grabbed her by the arm—she tried to pull back, but instead I quickly forced my consciousness over hers. She shut her eyes. Piece by piece, I showed her my life—my home in Sacramento, memories of rockhounding as a little kid, my first years of college, the time I worked as an intern at a research station by a volcano, going to the oil fields and running away from them, selling crystals and arriving here in Texas; I showed her my meeting with Meagan, the fight with the mushrooms in the field, my efforts to help Gerry, and the hole that the mushrooms had torn into the universe; I showed her what Ryan had done to me and then showed her my escape into the real world. Stupefied, she opened her eyes and fumbled for words. She wanted to apologize, but didn't know how. She didn't know how to speak to me—she'd never spoken to an LSD psychic (although she had been forced to play one in a sadistic government experiment). As much as she wanted to apologize, she didn't understand—she didn't understand me, or the future that I lived in, or the things that I had seen. Meekly, she came closer, and gave me a hug, trying to comfort me, a reasonable reaction, I guess, to learning about someones experience of decades of imprisonment in a psychic prison. I would have been a flower child if I'd been alive back in her time, she knew; she could imagine sharing a joint with me in the back of her friend's van, driving through Arizona, or dropping acid out in the National Forest around a campfire with me. She wished she would have known me before she died, and she wished she would have been kinder to me, now that she could see what I'd been through.
    “How long do we have until he comes back?”
        “12 hours. So until sunrise.”
    “And what do we do when he does?”
        “When he comes back, we have to go along with what he says until the Good Ryan gives us the signal to turn against him. He can't hurt us as long as the Good Ryan is there to protect us.”
        “And until then, we just...”
    “We have all night to...watch after Meagan, I guess. Or get ready. I don't know. We can see how beer tastes in this timeline, or maybe steal some cake from the kitchen. Honestly no idea. He just said to follow his instructions so that's all I know.”

    She pondered it for a moment, looking sentimentally over at Carlos, and around at the old, decaying base. Somehow, the fact that the base no longer served the purpose it had served during her time gave her a weak sense of closure. But it was only a half-freedom. She wanted to see the forest. The stars. The moon. “Can we go outside?”, she asked. I gulped, since I knew that as much as I should say no, I would have felt terrible to tell her that. “Of course.”, I said, turning to Carlos to invite him along. He didn't speak English—I sent him an image of the moon. “Usted es de la luna?”, he mumbled, aghast. I didn't know quite what he said, I only got the impression that he thought I was from the moon. “No”, I said, “We are going outside.”, I tried to project the image into his thoughts. Somewhat confused, but not knowing exactly how to ask me to clarify, he reluctantly followed Sapphire and I up through the ceiling.

    The three of us made our way away from Dr. Whitebalm's room, towards the front entrance of the facility. I freely gazed into the minds of those below in order to learn more about the place we were flying over. The Horizon Deep Space Exploration Lab was collosal, with thousands of square feet of different hallways, with five levels of office and laboratory space. The first level of it had been built in the 1940's. Later, in the 1950's, the area north of San Antonio became home to a number of bases for the development of secret technologies, processing of Soviet intelligence, and covert detention of spies. When the CIA began its MKUltra program, which experimented with LSD and other drugs in order to unlock secret potentials of the human brain, to develop enhanced interrogation techniques, and to control minds, the lab expanded and merged with several others. A scientist named Ray Treichler oversaw a long list of projects—numbers 136, 145, 146 and 172 came to the minds of the people below the most often—most of the records of the ones Sapphire had taken part in were destroyed, living only in the minds of ghosts. A steady flow of migrants, homeless, and hippies provided the lab with a large population of human subjects. The lab was left in decay for a decade after the Cold War, until an incident in 2006 led to increased governmental interest in developing Deep Space technologies, and in renovating parts of the lab. The first experiments were dedicated to replicating reverse engineered technology from alien wreckage, which could later be tested in the desert southwest near Colorado, but this was not especially fruitful. Dr. Whitebalm was hired as a consultant and later a chief scientist in 2014. Today, it employed 2,500 people, with secret entrances spread out over four different towns.

    Eventually, we came to the entrance near the water treatment center, which was concealed so as to be entirely invisible from above—all that we saw as we drew near was a pair of railroad tracks that inclined sharply upwards, illuminated barely by the light of the moon. Sapphire's heart sung as she caught a glimpse of the moonlight, her face feeling the open air for the first time in half a century. Her stomach trembled, as memories buried in deep wounds warned her that it was all a trap, that it was still 1967, that this was just another experiment. She shut her eyes and pulled herself from these fears. Meanwhile, Carlos' stomach sank into a pit—he dreamed of running home to Mexico, and seeing what had become of his hometown, if things had gotten any better, if any of his brothers or his sisters were still alive. He imagined that, the moment he saw the sky, he would fly up into it, and rise over miles upon miles of desert as an invincible spirit, never to return to this awful place again. I didn't know how to tell him that we would all be forced back into the same place once the timeline resealed but the only time I've ever spoken Spanish was when my cousin Andre told me to say something to this girl I had a crush on in elementary school, and she ended up knocking out two of my teeth. My Spanish time travel vocabulary was very limited, so I supposed I would let him be. Both of them. I'd let them enjoy whatever there was out there, and then, when the time came, we would return to our bodies, and help Meagan kill the Fisherman. Then, I supposed, I could set them free.

    As she emerged from the end of the tunnel, Sapphire dashed up the hill and into the open air, letting out a joyous shout that echoed across the hills. I followed her, lackadaisically. Carlos trailed behind, eyeing the tall electric fences, and wondering if I'd try to stop him from running away. His hair stood on end as the moonlight shone down on him, the night sky filling him with wonder. He was free. “You can fly away tomorrow, when we've killed Ryan, and we're safe.”, I tried to say. He looked at me, puzzled by the strange words appearing in his head. I showed him a picture of what he was contemplating, and said, softly “Not now. Manana.” “Platanos? Que? No me diga…” Vaguely comprehending, he grimaced, and nodded, turning to walk in private through the field. Sapphire, who had been out staring at a tree, looked over at me.
“It's so beautiful out here.”
The moonlight painted her eyes into gemstones, and casted the crisscrossing shadows of pine needles over her skin. She smiled, her teeth glowing with an unearthly sheen. The forest seemed to breath with life—even more so to us ghosts.
     “I know, it's real nice out here.”
    “You camped out here?”
    “Down the hill a little bit, yeah. Someone said that I might see aliens.”
    “Far out, man. I probably would've done the same thing if I didn't know the kind of shit they do to people here”
She ran her hands over the tree bark, studying its tiny, winding canyons, and the sap that dripped down along their surface.
    “What ended up happening with Vietnam?”
    “Nixon ended up pulling us out.”
    “Really? Was he like...the president?”
    “Yeah”
    “I thought he would have given up after losing to Kennedy.”

I didn't really know that much about it, or what to say. She moved along.
    “How about segregation? Like, what ever happened with the civil rights stuff?”
    “Yeah. I mean...well. Segregation's over for the most part, yeah.”
    “For the most part.”
    “They ended segregation and the white people all moved to gated communities in the desert basically, so its like the same thing.”
    “I remember hearing something like that. Just so you know, I mean, I know you can read my mind, but I was totally down with all that civil rights and stuff. I had lots of colored friends back in California. How about the Russians? Did they ever attack us, or...?”
    “No, no. They ended up losing the whole Cold War thing.”
    “That's crazy, man. How did they lose?”
    “I'm kind of fuzzy on the details, but I think Ronald Reagan managed to like...uhm...outspend them? Or that's what my grandpa says.”
She gulped when I said that word—she liked me, but she couldn't help but remember she was at least fourty five years older than me in real time. She'd learned to hate old people when she was a teenager for being so out of touch and backwards. Now she felt like she was the backwards one.
    “Oh, huh. Ronald Reagan, he was the governor right? The one who banned LSD? Right. Well, anyway. I guess I should ask you, like, uhm...what do the kids like to do in 2017?”
    “Well. We got this really cool...thing called the internet. You can get information about anything you want any time of day, and talk to people from halfway across the world like...instantly, using um...satellites. Like sputnik, but bigger. So a lot of folks like to...uhm. Play games online. Or chat with their friends. But I don't know, it depends. Some people go to music festivals, some people like to read, stuff like that.”
    “What kind of music do they listen to?”
Rather than trying to explain, I showed her one of the music festivals I'd gone to, where a DJ had been playing a dubstep remix of a Beatles song, which I thought she might have heard. She looked confused so I tried another one, which was my friend from Philadelphia's band. She thought it sounded like the Beach Boys, but weirder. Like weirder than Pet Sounds weirder. The future was a strange place.
    “What about like...you know, folk songs. Like”Hey Mr. Tambourine man, play a song for me...”  You know that one?”
        “Yeah, it's the one that's like...”It's not...doo-doo, and I don't got not place dun-da-dundundun”
    “I'm not sleepy and their ain't no place I'm going to.”
        “Yeah! I've heard it. I just didn't know the words.”
    “So they still listen to Dylan, that's cool.”
        “Well, yeah. He's like classic. No offense.”
    “What about the Monkees? They don't listen to the Monkees do they?”
        “I haven't heard of them, actually.”
    “Good. Fuck the Monkees. Fucking corporate trash.”
        “What did you guys do when you were on the road back in '65?”
    “Oh, like. You know. We'd all smoke a few joints and jam out whenever we could. Or if we could score some acid, we'd trip. And like, all of the others were really into the whole free love thing, and like, we all really liked...I guess expanding our mind and trying to be spiritual. Ben was the oldest and he wrote poetry. His lover Willow would knit. I'd make little sculptures. And then Moonbeam and Jimmy liked to draw.”
        “How'd you meet them?”
    “Just like, I mean, I knew Willow and she introduced me to Ben, and he had this idea that we'd all pitch in for a van and go around the country like the Merry Pranksters. We picked up Moonbeam on the way to San Francisco and she met Jimmy somewhere in Ashbury and like...they were soulmates. Instant soulmates, seriously.”
   
    Sapphire and I wandered deeper into the forest, until we came to Blackberry creek, which bubbled out of a spring in the hillside. I told her about the geology of the area, and the way that the spring would have formed, as she taught me more about the sixties, and life on the road with her friends. Before we knew it, both of us had forgotten we were ghosts from different years, both of us had forgotten our suffering, if only for a while, and had become lost in conversation. Before long, the sun started to peek over the horizon—it cast an omnipresent blue over the forest, and brought the birds out to sing. The two of us gazed into the woods an uneasiness settling into our limbs. What if this was all another one of Ryan's tricks? I wondered. What if this was all another experiment? She thought. A faint smile spread across her face, and she chuckled, starting to tell me a story, almost whispering it to herself: “The worst trip I had before I came to this place was in Oregon. We were camped out in the woods, and I decided to take four tabs instead of two. It started out fine, until—I don't remember why, but I—I forgot what my face looked like. And I wanted to go find out what it looked like. So I went to this little creek, just like this one, and I sat down and my face looked totally different. I started freaking out and I went back to the campsite and I asked Jimmy 'Hey, what does my face look like to you?'. And he tried to describe it, but like, Moonbeam had this idea that she and Jimmy would just draw my face together.
    Well they both were on acid also, so one of them drew me as this kind of like...demon looking thing, and the other drew me as this weird looking fairy, and I freaked out, and I like...insisted that I get into the car to get a mirror, but they wouldn't let me, because they said I was ruining everyone's vibe and I needed to chill. So I sat in the tent for at least eight hours freaking out about my face before I had this vision, of like...of like a jewel, in the sky, folding in on itself, filled with all these different animals, and castles, and buildings. And it was me. And I told myself that I had all this wonder inside of myself that I could let out into the world, that I might look different to different people, but it didn't really matter, because they didn't really get it. You know? And someday, someone would. I was lucky I talked myself out of it, but it was honestly so horrible when it happened. And—then, I mean, I died at 24 and never got to do...you know. Fucking anything. And that trip was peanuts compared to what I went through here. It just...” She wasn't sure why she was talking about it.
    “My worst trip before this was in high school. My friend, he was really stupid, I think he's in jail now or something, well, my friend, he reads on the internet that you could get high off of cough syrup, so we went store to store trying to buy some. And we figure it would be pretty stupid and lame, cause, you know, it was cough syrup, we just really thought we had to take a lot to actually do anything. An hour in, I started seeing double, and everyone's voices sounded like they were faster than their mouths, if that makes sense. The world started flickering, and when I sat down, I felt like I'd melted into the couch. I was convinced I'd overdosed and I was going to die. My friend says that if I smoke weed I should feel better. After that point, I don't remember anything, just thinking I'd died and gone to hell for hours and hours until I woke up, maybe around 2am, and I was still tripping. I walked outside, into the road, and everything looked like it was curving. It was in a suburb, so all the houses were just...repeating, and I felt like I was in a never ending loop. Eventually, I came to a park, and I threw up in a trash can and my friend's big brother came to pick me up. Every time I look at cough syrup now I feel like I'm going to throw up.”
    She smirked, on the verge of laughing, but not quite relaxed enough to do so. The two of us looked out to the horizon, where traces of orange light made their way through the blue, surrounding us in sunlight that made our faces barely visible. “Should we go inside?”, she asked.
    “I don't think we need to.”
        “Good. Lets just wait.”
The two of us joined hands, our fingers first barely touching, and then wrapping around one another. The sunrise poured savory and rosy light over the earth. Any minute now. “John.”, Sapphire interrupted, her hands starting to shiver.
    “What?”
    “We might die after this. I mean. We might...really die. Right?”
I gulped, too afraid to answer honestly.
    “If—if I die—can you do something for me?”
        “What is it?”
    “I never got a funeral. I—I don't know where my body is. They probably burnt it or something. I don't know, I just—I want you to give me one. If that's okay. Go out into the desert, plant me a flower, and sing me a song. Mr. Tambourine Man, I guess. Although...well that one might not be good. But something pretty. I don't care what. You can even sing me one of your dubsteps. I mean...all my friends are probably dead, right? Or senile. Or they don't even remember me. No one probably ever bothered to look for me or give me a funeral or anything. You're the first friend I've had since I died, and--”, she started to choke on her words, her eyes visibly glassing over with tears.
        “I will.”
She held onto my hand tighter. “Thanks.”
        “And if I die—my rock collection is buried up in Bismark, North Dakota thirty paces downhill from the apartment complex on Chestnut. If you can tell them, somehow, I don't know how, to bury me there with my crystals.”
    “Of course.”
        “Thank y--.”
Before I could finish her sentence, everything froze still—a bird hung in the air, its wings back in preparation for landing—the stream turned to ice—our hearts ceased to beat. A sinister aura overtook the world, as the hills burst forth with a ghostly roar. We had lost—no voice in my head needed to tell me so—devastated, I watched Sapphire's face crumble inwards like a tiny clay vessel, as my vision faded to black.

Episode 10: The Hall of Venerated Ancestors

    I rested my head on my pillow, disturbed and exhausted what had happened through the day, and desperate for rest. A thousand thoughts and anxieties puttered about my aching head. Had John done that to those men? He couldn't have could he? It must have been—that thing—that thing with those awful black eyes and those strange hooked teeth, the one who spoke through the white flower. I could not help but fear that he'd attack me as I lied there; I lost count of how many times I got up to check my locks or to peek underneath the bed. I turned over and over, rocking the mattress like an unsteady boat, straining to keep my eyes shut. It was no use. Midnight came, and I was still awake my hair matted over my irritated face, my blanket clutched in between my hands over my mouth as I tried to stop myself from sobbing. But I couldn't let it see me cry. It couldn't let it even see me blink—
    Though I consciously dreaded shutting my eyes, my bones and my muscles and my heart and my stomach all yearned to sleep, to plop down. Hours passed pacing around the room until I finally collapsed backwards into my bed, my head pounding. Just when I let myself, I started to think about my family. My grandmother was close to death. They were moving her into hospice. I couldn't bear thinking that she would die and I would not be there to say goodbye to her. Tears started rolling down my face, staining the pillow—why couldn't I go home? To stop myself from screaming, I slid into the language of silence. At once, nothing seemed to matter. The room felt emptier, my body—not more secure, but more comfortable with the danger all around me. I felt my eyes lean back...and the silence roll over my arms and legs—I felt it—a real and palpable thing, a numbness that spread like wildfire. And suddenly, the silence seemed sinister. It began to draw me into a sleep—a deep and lifeless sleep—I pulled away—the silence pulled back at me.
    I struggled and struggled to peel myself away from my paralysis until, like someone digging their way out of quicksand, I gasped awake, again in the English language, but even there, I still felt some part of my brain longing to return to the silence. What about the mushrooms? I supposed I didn't know too many other options, so I switched into the language of the psilocybes. Quickly, the austere white walls of the room shifted into red and blue colorized panels, coated with jeweled reflections which seemed to flow into each other and out from one another all at once. The night sky—I could see it through the ceiling—waiting for me. Cold and distant yet enchanting—I wanted to see my grandmother—and I would, I felt certain—I felt certain that I could know this without knowing—even if I couldn't before she died, than in spirit--even if it all broke down, this universe would right its own course—and perhaps, I could visit her even, in her dreams, as John had once done to me.
    The idea enraptured me, and I wasted no time shutting my eyes. The jeweled reflections that I had seen in the walls, dove in and out of one another, crisscrossing  my eyelids like fireflies in mason jars, long and spindly shapes as beautiful as they were hypnotic and monotonous. Austere--- drenched in the poetry of simplicity, singing words that had never been written, they stretched into an infinite horizon that in its size and shape seemed to cover and exceed the whole earth. My hands and legs became bones wrapped in flesh and my eyes became lenses that I'd grown to filter this all to my spirit—a spirit which lifted from its vessels like so many drops of water, a spirit which held onto itself and only itself as it lifted into the unknown air. Language had no use—all at once, its machinery melted into base metals, leaving all that I was as something inexpressable, almost forgotten. I leaned forward to kiss the universe, and it kissed me back---I was the universe, and it was me, and so much more than me—the crystallizing shapes lost their geometry and refracted across dimensions, untying themselves into trillions of photons crisscrossing an infinite plain, over which I soared breathlessly and lifelessly and dreaming soundly. Canyons and mountains and open fields manifested themselves in the wrinkles of a new reality from all sides, alive with the pulsing vitality of an unwritten and unwriteable essence, swirling about like hot plasma—I felt myself become electricity, running through a wire—a sense of form returned to my being—the sights and sounds and smells and tastes became a blur of indescribeable colors—my hands stitched themselves back together as a resurrected new body. At last there was peace.
    “Hello, you have reached the Great Realm of the Ancestors.”, a booming voice announced. All froze still, “To remove or inflict a curse, please return to your physical body and visit world 3-B. World 3-B can be accessed through nightshades, the eyes of catfish, and all standard methods of astral projection except the West Lemurian method. All Fourth world based visitors seeking to appeal for rain and/or a successful harvest, please return to your physical body and visit World 6H, accessible through any Guardian Plant at the nearest sacred mountain, lake, forest, or stone circle. To speak with your next available ancestor, please remain present, and we will connect you shortly.”, the voice paused. Apparently, I was on some kind of psychedelic, interdimensional hold. It was completely accidental, to be honest, but I didn't know how to hang up, “You have 1 venerated ancestor, 6 general ancestors, and 919 specialty ancestors available at this time. To speak with a venerated ancestor, say or think “venerated ancestor” in the language or emotion of your choice. To speak with a general ancestor, say or think “general ancestor.” To speak with a specialty ancestor, please say or think “specialty ancestor.”...Alright. Please give us a moment while we search through your 1 venerated ancestors...” I waited, awkwardly. I really didn't know what to think to the machine, or if I was even thinking to the machine, if that's really what it was, correctly. Existentially, as interesting as it was, it was kind of disappointing that the previous ecstatic moments had actually been a psychic dial tone, “We're sorry, but all of your venerated ancestors are currently assisting other visitors. Please remain in the Great Realm of the Ancestors, and your ancestor will be with you shortly.”
    The voice faded, and I stood there. A person came up next to me, a shimmering purple form, who looked at me with a faint smile and nodded, before looking away. What felt like a minute or so passed before I heard them speak, almost sighing as they did so. “First time here?”
    “Yeah.”
They nodded slowly, looking back off towards the infinite fractal distance, which seemed to sprout with colors and fluid organic shapes. A visual form of hold music, apparently. I was not sure, though. Maybe this was just the default scenery of this particular dimension.
    “You know who you're visiting?”
        “A venerated ancestor.”
    “Oh really? Hmm.”
I gulped, nodding self-consciously. I didn't know what there was to be self conscious about. I was a semi-humanoid mass of blue light, and they were a semi-humanoid mass of purple light, awash in an infinite plain of nothingness.
    “Not that many people have one of those, you know.”
        “Do you?”
    “One. Who knows, maybe we have the same one. He served his people well for many years—he died so that they could escape the guns of the invaders.”
        “I've never met mine.”
    “Are you nervous?”
        “I—yeah.”
    “Don't be. It's a very welcoming place. After all one must be generous and kind to be venerated.”
<<<an awkward silence>>>
        “What brings you here?”
    “Some people in my town, they want to let a company come to build a resort, so I am coming for advice. Many have stopped believing in the old magic, but there are still those who know and trust the name of my grandfather. And you?”
        “I—just--I mean. I fell asleep, and I—I don't know.”
    “You don't know? No one trained you?”
        “No. I was just—last night, someone came to me in a dream, and they said to go to this...uhm...this field. So I went there, and when I got there, the government had torn a hole in the universe. The mushrooms, the mushrooms in the field, they gave me the gift of language. I couldn't get to sleep because I was so worried I hadn't gotten to see my grandmother and there's a—a man in the place they took me to—who wants to kill me. But no one can see him.”
    “Perhaps you were taken to the right place then. Perhaps this is where you needed to go. I remember the first time I came here—I was ten years old. I'd not yet been initiated. I'd been having terrible nightmares every night—a spirit came to me and told me of this place. It told me that I would come here to save my town. I caught only a glimpse. Just a glimpse. But I remembered, and I have been here many times since then. It's always scary, the first time you reach this plane. Most people never make it past the fifth. Not many are taken here as young as I was, either. [pause] I should add—you cannot tell anyone of this place.
        “Why not?”
    “It is sacred. <<long pause>> And strange.”
        “Hmmm.”
    “Not to mention, tourists ruin everything.”
        <chuckles slightly>
A sudden burst of energy shot through the astral plane, rocketing through the sky. The purple figure leaned back, looking annoyed, or as annoyed as a purple being made of light with only vaguely tangible facial features could look. “What was that?”
    “The Arrogant Mint, no doubt. They're the only ones who go past seven Z. I've heard they've reached 527 dimensions beyond this one. They've used up the whole sorting system.”
        “The arrogant mint? I've heard that name, somewhere.”
    “From the keepers of language?”
        “The mushrooms? Yes, I think so--”
    “They've felt a certain animosity to the Arrogant Mint for quite sometime. Or a rivalry might be a better word.”
        “Why?”
    “Who can say? The keepers of language can sometimes get caught on something for quite sometime. There's a nest of them in some mountains near where I live who have been thinking about strawberries since before humans discovered clay. Somehow, the topic of strawberries has challenged them so profoundly that they have just...not been able to stop for who knows how many years. Communing with these mushrooms actually inspired a song by the Beatles, I believe. And the Arrogant Mint likely did the same sort of thing—offending their sense of order.”
        “Huh.”
The arrogant mint, in the form of a burst of energy, slammed back into the astral plain from high above, crashing through the sky and then into the ground again. Hysteric laughter echoed across the world in which we found ourself—as though in its journey to the higher plane it had heard some tremendous joke about existence—perhaps even that the level in which we found ourselves was some kind of grandiose cosmic joke—honestly, the mushroom part of my mind did sort of think it was kind of asshole, like that friend everyone has who always posts about how smart they are and likes to humble brag about how high their IQ is.
    “They don't grow where I'm at. Only in--”, they froze, as a booming psychic voice that only they could hear entered their mind, “Sorry, I've got to go. Good luck. And don't be nervous.”
    “Thanks. Have fun!”
   
    A great wind swirled around them, and they took the form of an owl, flying off into the infinite. I waited patiently, allowing myself to become mesmerized by the visual hold music. New words and ideas fluttered about my brain. A “hall of venerated ancestors.” An arrogant mint who'd traveled to 527 dimensions. A field of mushrooms thinking about strawberries. A—Another form materialized, this one a lighter shade of purple than the last one. “Oh my...oh my god...”, they mumbled, “Wow--”
    “Hey, what's up?”
    “Holy shit—is this real?”
    “I mean, I guess, it's--”

Another shape, this one red and white, appeared beside me, looking at the two of us with moderate annoyance.
    “Wow! Oh my God! Oh my God! It's so...beautiful”
The red and white figure rolled its eyes, or what I think were its eyes, at least. “Tourists, am I right?”, it mumbled under its breath. I ignored him, hoping I could help welcome the new lavender figure.
    “How did you get here?”, I asked them.
        “I finally understand! I understand!”
“Don't bother asking”, said the red and white figure, “Just leave him alone and don't be surprised if you show up in somebody's trip report.” The three of us sat in a line, not speaking to each other, until I heard the voice return to my ears. “Hello! Thank you for holding. We will now connect you with your venerated ancestor.”
    A whirlwind rose up around me and swallowed me, bending my arms and legs and bones so that I became a brilliant red macaw—my feathers looked like trillions of shards of glass, bending and rippling with the wind—my eyes sparkled like gemstones plucked from underneath a river—and my mind bubbled with language, echoing back distant pieces of the universe, the shadows of faraway, and transcendental wonders materializing themselves deep in my mind. The wind rushed, and I felt myself propelled onward towards a field of melting, ever multiplying colors, winding through an invisible labyrinth, guided only by the wind. I felt myself die, and resurrect, and die, again and again until I crested through the deep turquoise of an alien sky, flapping my wings over an old forest, in the midst of which I saw a village, sitting atop of a tall hill.
    I landed on a tree branch outside of the village. A crystal clear stream filled with fat yellow koi-fish trickled down underneath the shade of the tree, a knotted and solemn willow tree. The village, with its quartz-tiled rooves and zinc-and-sandstone houses, was shaded by tall trees growing through out its streets, streets which wound in patterns and geometries that my English brain could make no sense of. Up above, the sky had been covered by a thick sheet of ice. The more I tried to make sense of it the more I realized that…suddenly…I had no gift of language here. I was only left with the barest qualities of my spirit and my mind, in a world which I knew nothing about. I thought back to the fear I’d once had of meeting my ancestor and I realized that it masked a barely contained excitement, a wonder, not unlike a tourist who has just stumbled across some dusty backstreet café in some country where they do not speak the language, where every single sight and glimpse into the ordinary things around them takes on the timbre of the exotic—I realized that I was a tourist here. I had no place here. My ancestor, whoever she was, probably had…at the very least…better things to do with her time than to service my wide-eyed sightseeing.
    Unperching myself from the branch, I metamorphosized, almost unintentionally, from a macaw into a human and landed uncomfortably on the dusty stone path to the mysterious old city. I didn’t know where I was going—I really didn’t. By the looks of it, we were under a massive glacier, but for all I knew, that was just…I don’t know. A metaphor for something. And suddenly, I was captivated by the question of who awaited me in that city, who my ancestor would be, what they would expect for me to know. My mom always told our family story this way. Her grandmother’s grandmother came from Veracruz—she always insisted she was pure Spanish, but her daughter remained convinced she had at least some “Native American blood.” So maybe that was where I was, but I couldn’t be too certain.
    There’s also the story, which my great-grandmother’s husband liked to counter with when she talked about Native American blood, that my mysterious, ambiguously brown ancestor had been Moorish—I wondered if this place was really some kind of ancient city in the Sahara desert—something lost to time—but on second thought, it was covered by ice, and this seemed unlikely. Still, trying to reassemble in the back of my mind the hundreds and hundreds of family stories about migrations from this place to that—from Ireland, from England, from France, from Italy, from Mexico, from North Africa—left me with only speculation—I could comfortably fit the sights I was seeing into any of the narratives I’d been handed. I saw a woman with a thick wooden mask waiting for me, holding a staff covered in beads and gemstones.
    She extended a hand for me and led me forward into the village, which was filled with empty houses with hazy, dreamlike edges. As I took her hand, she began to speak. “Iz’unza’en utaria eman zaisu ziur nagoela ule’zen tusula. I’usiko zaitustet uhune’ik eta lagundu zaiskizun tresna.” (“You have been given the gift of language so I am sure you understand me. I have watched you from afar and have been given the tools to help you.” In modified Basque). Her voice was soft, yet forceful, with a cadence that sounded like poetry, even though I couldn’t understand a word she said. Somehow, this person was my grandmother, my great-times-a-thousand-trillion grandmother. I felt at once like I’d come home and like I’d entered a strange and foreign world with which I had no connection. I saw…I saw a dagger in a belt around her waist and I wondered if she…if she’d ever used it. If my ancestors—even before the Germans and the English and the Irish—had always killed each other. I wondered if the world I now entered was a world I should be glad no longer existed, or if I should cry for it, if I should want to regain it. Seeing that I could not understand her, my grandmother sighed—disappointed? Angry? Sad? Relieved?—and she looked off, trying to discern what to do.
    Eventually, she clutched my hand again and, again speaking her strange, pseudopoetic words, she led me into a house that was empty save a single, green tinged copper bowl filled with a silvery liquid metal. Taking off her mask, she hung it on the wall and revealed a somewhat tanned, wrinkled face, covered in tattoos. She pointed to herself with her middle finger, and then to her eyes, and then down to the bowl. I looked confused. She crouched down so she could mime more dramatically that she had, I guess, seen me in the bowl. “Oh, okay, cool.”, I said, awkwardly, not entirely sure how to explain. She laughed at the sound of my voice. “I mean…”, I held a thumbs up. She clutched her hand in her face and looked appalled—offended? Amused? Disgraced?-- but also like she was holding back a lot of laughter. Regaining her composure, she fetched a pair of small mushrooms from a pouch on her dress. She pointed at them, and then at me, before making a scissor symbol with her right hand to imitate the sound of a chattering mouth. I nodded. She pulled me by the arm out of the house, and walked with me back down the long, winding road.
Eventually, we came to the center of the town, where a tall and austere looking forest sat surrounded by great wooden and stone sculptures of women holding weapons and strange looking tools. Between each of the towering sculptures—or monuments? Idols? Effigies?—between each of them lay rows of seven brightly flowered trees which suppored a thick, hemp rope. She took the dagger from her side and pressed it against her hand, making it flow with blood, which she pressed against the surface of a tall wooden elk-woman. She then took my hand, cut it open, and pushed it against the surface of the same tall being. Satisfied, she took the mushrooms again from the pouch, and dipped them in the blood, before telling me to close my eyes so she could gently dash each eyelid with blood. I felt—honored? Disturbed? Un…comfortable?—and then she leaned my head back to squeeze the juice from my mushrooms into my nostrils, before doing the same to herself.
The grove of trees around us shimmered with a uniform and austere gold, almost like a school of fish drifting in the current. Up above, the ceiling of ice resonated with a light refracted through a thousand prisms, coming from a distant, powerful, and almost alien sun. Was she…was…was I? An......alien??? What the fuck. What the…or…is the place my ancestor came from just so far away from where I am that the past feels like its on a different planet? She led me down a path, continuing to mutter her poetic and unintelligible words—to herself? To me? To the trees?—until we came to a great crater, a pit with perfectly straight, obsidian walls, into which extended a bridge made of narrow oak planks leading to a garden. She took a mushroom from her pouch, crushed it under her feet, and with a sorrowful look in her eyes, dropped it into the pit. Down beneath, I could see that, at the very bottom, the pit was full of murky lavender aether, inside of which I could see distant dragons and noneuclidean cities. She lifted a brass cord from beside the plank and, miming with her hands, instructed me to hold onto it while I walked across the bridge. She followed me, doing the same.
The plank creaked and moaned as I inched over the immense, mysterious void. My legs and feet trembled, and my heart filled with fire and noise. The woman looked concerned for my safety—or—concerned about bringing me here at all, maybe. I had to stop myself from gawking at the adventure of it all—the majestic forest, the mysterious obsidian walls of the pit, the adrenaline rush of stepping out onto the oak plank and walking towards the garden. When I finally reached the garden, I fell down to my knees. My body almost didn’t want me to stand. Slowly, though, I managed to talk myself into it and I rose to my feet. The garden seemed much larger than it had on the outside, and upon reaching it, the obsidian pit now only looked about ten feet wide. My grandmother, moving slowly and tediuous across the pit, shut her eyes and hummed a song. I looked off towards the garden. A tall wooden mask stood on a post—its expression was hazy, its eyes half squinted, its mouth open in an o-shape.
Reaching the garden, my grandmother motioned towards the mask. “Uhami”, she said. “Uhami?”, I repeated. She laughed hysterically. “Uhami”, she clarified, making sure that I knew the right tones. Winking, she took my by the arm gently, and guided my hand to the nose of the mask. “Uhami”, I repeated, softly. “Baye.”, she nodded, and then touched her own hand to the mask. “Vasa’en vehatzailea hantia, ni’e alaba ekahiko tu. Lu behian gaizkia’en auhean tago. Vehiz e’e ilun ma’inak e’aikitzeko ikasi tue’. Vidal ezasu vere pasar’ea, nahiz eta ez zun hitz e’ite.”, she intoned softly, and then took a fist full of dirt to smear on the mask’s surface. (In “Basque” this means: Great watcher of the forest, I bring you my daughter. She is faced with great evil on the new earth. Again they have learned to build the dark machines. Bid her passage though she does not speak our tongue.)
Satisfied that the mask would permit her to speak with me, or to take me further into the garden, she led me forward to a bush with white flowers. “E’oke’ia’eni loya. (insanity flower)”, she said, making a face that looked…constipated? Upset? Inspired?...I recognized it—she must have known about what was going on—she must have been watching me, somehow, from afar. She plucked one leaf from the flower and pointed at it, then gestured to show that she sometimes crushed it into a powder, and smoked it in a pipe, if her…stomach hurt? Or if she was, nauseous, or drunk…and then she took another leave, to gesture that she might drink the powdered leaves in a tea…then…shut her eyes? And go to talk to spirits. Or trees. Or tree spirits. Possibly spirit trees. I was not sure what that gesture meant or how to interpret it. She then took a handful of leaves, and gestured that it would make your heart pound, your mouth…flutter? And your eyes water, until you died. She then made another series of gestures, shouts, and percussive sounds to demonstrate that the flower was very dangerous, or…clever? “Johm.”, she said, pointing. “John?”, I asked. “Baye, Johm.” “Baye, John, John.”
    “Tcinti orchitu be’a duzu Johm gorte a’al isate.”
    Realizing that I did not understand yet, she flung two fingers outwards, she then pointed to another plant, which had leaves that were similar to the bush she’d just shown me, but it had clusters of small yellow flowers in long circles, almost like cannons. “Tcinti.”, she said, before making a circle with her hands and putting her face into it. “Orchitu.”, she emphasized. “Orchitu…find?”, I asked, trying my hand at miming. “Fine. Tcinti fine. Johm. Baye, baye. Pona, pona.” To illustrate Tcinti, she made a rolling motion with her hands and puffed on something like a cigarette. “Tobacco?”, I asked her. She squinted at me. Had I said a bad word by mistake? She pressed her thumb and index finger gently against my eyelids and looked through my memories. “Cigret.”, she tried to say, “Cigret. Hmmm. Ez…ez…” Exasperated, she tore two leaves from the plant with the white flowers and crushed them into a powder, before sprinkling it on my head. I grew drowsy—I started to melt down in my heels, and fell backwards through the ground into an endless darkness. I fell, and I fell, until eventually, I forgot that I was falling, and soon enough, I was in a dream, a world I recognized distinctly as a dream designed to relay a message to me.
    I stood in front of my old high school, a brick building with a windowed rotunda in front and a pipework sign with the name of the town. I waited in front of it, clutching a pair of stone tablets. The parking lot, and the entire building was completely empty, but the sound of movement pervaded from every direction, like, on all sides I could hear people being dropped off, or waiting for their parents, or talking about the last nights football game. The sky was grey and cloudy, trembling with irridescent red thunder. I looked to the left, almost turned against my own will be some kind of powerful force. My friend Amber, who I recognized by her purple highlights and gaudy dream catcher earings, walked towards me, her hands clasped together. She crouched down, and knelt her head, before standing and retrieving a cigarette from her back pocket. “Companion. It is I, your foolish companion Amber. I present you with a cigarette. Come partake in its knowledge with me beside the sacrificial altar in the high temple to prepare for the coming battle.”
Amber had, actually, offered me a cigarette in high school, but I said no, because I didn’t want cancer. This was a scene I recognized, at least vaguely. I turned, involuntarily to the right. My friend Lindsey. I recognized her by the fact that she was my only black friend and also the fact that I distinctly remembered her wearing that exact shirt when we helped a cat give birth. She also bowed, politely, before reaching into her back pocket and pulling out a handful of leaves. “Companion. It is I, your wise companion Lindsey. You are facing a great evil which requires the help of real tobacco, tcinti, a strong and powerful plant, nothing like the paper tubes offered to you by the foolish Amber.”
    “Lindsey has made an appropriately wise statement, for she is appropriately wise. Forgive me, companion, for the cigarette I have offered you. You do indeed need real tobacco.”
The principal of the school, wearing a long silk robe, came to me, and stood in front of the school. “Yes. You need real tobacco.”
Behind me, the bus driver I remembered once handing me five dollars I’d dropped while getting onto the bus agreed. “Yes, Meagan. Find real tobacco.”
All four of them chanted in unison. “Real tobacco. Real tobacco.”
My heart pounded, overwhelmed by the creeping crescendo of chanting voices all around me. I plummeted through dimensions back into my sleeping body. My eyes still shut, I lay there for a moment, feeling rested, but even more on edge than I had been before I went to sleep. I had to move, I kept telling myself, but I couldn't. I couldn't force myself out of bed—I kept going back over it. Tobacco. But real tobacco. I had to find...real tobacco. My eyes shot open, and I stared up at the ceiling, watching patterns appear between the dots on the roof tiles like hidden constellations. I searched for the clock. It was three thirty in the morning. I sprang out of bed, hurrying to the door. On either side, a seemingly endless, forboding darkness filled the hallways. I needed to find my way out. I needed to escape.