Rivers of the Mind Episode 5 Southern Hospitality

The farmer, Gerry, led me down the hallway, stuck in an uncomfortable lurch as his arthritic joints sent shoots of pain up the sides of his legs. He couldn't believe he was doing this—it seemed insane. But I seemed like a nice boy, and also a psychic. Plus I'd spoken to the mushrooms in the field on his behalf in order to save him from an ancient curse. Strange, but no unbelievable. He'd seem some crazy stuff in his time. He recalled a time that his old best friend jumped an old pickup truck over Farmer Dales house and landed it in the hay loft of the barn. Once, he'd left church, and he'd seen an angel come from the sky and stop a car from hitting an old lady at a crosswalk. At the age of 32, he was sure he'd seen a Flying Saucer while he was out fishing with his buddies. He'd witnessed racial integration, men walking on the moon, and the advent of the internet. Heck, he'd been to a Grateful Dead concert. The psychic voices, images and feelings he'd felt in his head, the existence of some kind of sentient fungus trying to insist he spend more time with his cows, even if possibly the effects of dementia, were just another oddity in a long series of strange things that had happened to him in his life. Gerry supposed it was the Christian thing to do to give me a room, and beyond that, he needed to adhere to the basic principles of Southern Hospitality. Something those God-forsaken California Yuppies out in Austin would never understand.

Hand trembling and aching, he gently turned the handle of the door to a room at the end of the hall, one with log-cabin style décor, a queen-sized bed that had been neatly made with a red, Western style blanket. “Home Sweet Home”, read a sign above the bed, and another across the room read, “9MM Beats 9-1-1 Every Time.” Pictures of his kids rested on either nightstand. An elegant wood chest sat underneath the window. Looking into Gerry's memories, I knew that, every once in a while, his kids would clean the room. He liked to keep it nice in case any of them wanted to stay there, he explained. Internally, he felt like they were ungrateful for this, and would have loved to see the look on his daughter-in-laws face when she saw me staying there. I set down my backpack. “Couple rules”, he looked off, not having thought of any rules, “Keep her clean and don't do nothing you wouldn't do at your momma's house. You wanna smoke, you can take it outside, but I don't take too kindly to marijuana or anything like that. Bathroom's across the hall. Feel free to wash up”, he said, though I could tell he meant it more as a command than an offer, “I'm heading to bed myself. I can make you some breakfast in the morning. I suppose it'd be best if you get on your way wherever you're going”, he said, trying to communicate for me to not take his hospitality for granted, and wondering if I could read his mind still. He wanted me to stay—I wasn't sure if I would. I felt like I wanted to, but also imagined that staying rooted in one place for too long out of the blue might be too sudden of an adjustment for me to make.

Taking a shower felt unreal—the burning hot water, the steam rising up into my sinuses—I hadn't had one for three months. Back in Austin, I washed myself off in a river, and after that took advantage of a creek I'd come across somewhere just before I got to the hill country. By the time I was here my skin was covered in dirt and dust and sweat. The water poured down over my skin and brought with it a flood of dense brown slime down the drain. It filled my senses, the steam rising around me in colorful swirls. Shutting my eyes, I felt myself standing on the edge of a chasm, one which stretched between the world I lived in and the world I remembered; the person I'd become and the person I'd been. My lungs filled with searing, dense humidity as my psyche flooded with noise and palpitation, clogged like the gutters of my parents house in the fall-time. I'd taken a trip, and I would never come back. It was beginning to hit me. The awful force of this strange adventure. I'd almost begun to...to normalize it. My eyes shot open, darting around the shower, staring at the room around me, the flies trapped in the ceiling light, the mildew growing around the edges of the curtain rod and the walls, the half-faded scenes of contrived marine life on the flower mat. I clutched my head, overwhelmed—it was all wrong. The color white, on the shower wall—it wasn't white. At least not like I remembered it. The blues weren't the right blues, the reds weren't the right reds. Everything was off. But somehow, it'd become normal. So normal I'd almost begun to accept it. Accept it, that was it. This wasn't normal. The breathing around me, pressing against me like a blood pressure cufflet. The seasickness that I felt on dry land, making me feel like I was forever walking a tightrope to stay on my feet. The untethered buoyancy of my ego over my subconscious, a riotous and cavernous calamity loomed beneath me like an open jaw, my own sensibilities and comprehensions staring into that which lied beneath unknowingly, unthinkingly.

If it weren't for the madness of it—I'd imagine I'd gone mad—but instead I felt like a totally sane bystander to my own insanity. Watching the my mind and my body struggle as I remained deep inside, helpless. Dispossessed of my own autonomy at the mercy of—it—inside of that great river in which I'd seen myself floating earlier. I was only atoms lost in a stream, lost in a space inside of space. Burning as a finite quantity caught for a mere second in the raging flow of infinity. I shook, almost convulsed as I can to my knees. The air around me was pierced with a shrieking, an uneven pounding against my ear canals. A scream, rising from the depths of the cosmos, echoing across the canyons and mountains inside of my mind. I turned...it shifted. The sound did. The sound shifted. The noises from the...I turned it again. The shower head. I shifted my feet backwards, and tightened it. Much better.

The sound was gone.

And so was the sound from before, the distant humming I heard over the ocean of dreams the last time I fell asleep—I was in the same ocean, but the noise was much different. I pondered why. The mushrooms must have been making it, I supposed. They extended into this domain, whereever it was, and made their noise, likely some kind of after effect of the field which they project around the field to defend the cows. They'd called this place the Brick Abomination, I remembered. But I imagined perhaps their aura doesn't penetrate into here because it blocks them out. It probably only seems like an abomination from the outside—horrific because they've never been inside. They've never completely understood the inside of the Brick Abomination, they only ever understood that it was different. Different than a field where someone grows as a mushroom, or a blade of grass or a branch of mesquite. And being different, and it's qualities unknowable, they must assume it is the opposite of them in all respects, they themselves are good, or hopefully; the other is opposite, and so bad, since that's the way it is. Why differ from the flow of the hive mind? They know all of what they can know, the mushrooms, but don't know what they can't. And that was where I was. No humming. Barely anything. Only staring at the stars on the back of my eyelids, tripping my eyeballs out of their sockets until the moment I die.

In order to really do what you're doing sometimes, I think you need to not know what it is your doing. Take me for instance. I've had no idea. Imagine for a moment that you're me. You took acid. It was your birthday five days ago, and you thought you deserved it. So you did it. You were in Texas, and you were terrified you'd get arrested, and you wanted to see aliens, but you did it. You took the acid, and you swore you'd just stared into the center of the universe and watched souls be sucked into the gates of hell. Then you come off of it, and it feels almost normal. Almost. But you're still tripping. And you're tripping and you're tripping and you're here. In an old man's house, flying away from the sun inside of an infinite dream. Waking up inside of the head of a girl you've never met before.

She'd seen me once, and I knew I'd seen her twice, so I'm sure I'm lying when I say I've never met her. But I'd only met her since I could read her mind and I knew what she was thinking, so it doesn't count. She didn't know my name. Just my face, and the crystal that was now hanging from her rear view mirror. It was Meagan. I'd seen her the day before, and I knew that I was dreaming and so was she. Everything looked so normal, I swear it was the strangest thing I'd ever seen in my life. She passed by me on the street, she asked me if she could get me anything. She walked with me down to the Walmart, where she worked. Their manager, wearing tissue boxes on his feet and with horns growing out of his head, ran up to us. I found myself playing the part in her ballet of some type of hero, staring the villain down across a tile floor. I don't recognize myself when she dreams about me; I'm just a part of her dream. The strangest feeling--but I love it. Because I wouldn't be here if inertia wasn't doing it's work. I'd dreamed about her first. Before I'd even seen her, when she was just a thought I'd had, I'd know her, and I'd wanted to dream of her. Aware of the strangeness of this new power I found possessing me, I felt that it must have been wrong, to use it to visit her in her sleep. I'd never met someone who seemed so honest. Into whose soul I could stare and trust without another word. Of course, I'd never had psychic powers before. But neither had she. And we were there. I was floating through her dreams.

I could have floated forever, I felt like, but our dreamscapes quickly drifted out of phase. I wandered intactably through the minds through which I'd flown, unharmed and untouched by them, weaving between their memories and my own almost unconsciously until a crisp warm light snuck through the skin of my eyelids, lighting up the trembling veins within them. The sound and smell of crackling meat floated from outside the door. Where was I? I felt so hot. I heard sizzling all around me...it hit me...I was in an oven. I was one hundred and fifty seven percent sure, almost exactly. I jumped up, screaming something awful. I was melting! My body was being cooked. I must have been wrapped in something---I felt like something was on top of me, dragging me dow...n...n......What in the...I threw the blankets off me and dove for the floor, tearing off the nightclothes that Gerry had given me frantically. “You okay in there son?”

I was sure I was, I was just tripping. Except that it was real. Oh no. It was all real, I realized. Except the oven. Although I supposed that was a reasonable way to describe a house in Texas with no air conditioning.

Reluctantly putting on clothes (clothes are stupid, one is prone to thinking when they have taken lsd), I slowly maneuvered out of the room, readjusting to being awake with a stiffness in my muscles, like when you've just stepped off a treadmill and you start walking. The light flooding in seared my dilated pupils and gave them the tint, almost, of an old sepia photograph, a comparison to which my imagination found itself immediately latched—time drifted with the heaviness and force of a glacier—the old man's stern and stoic face, ringed with an angelic white halo of frayed out hair, looked not unlike it was posed for a photograph, the antique kind that took hours to develop, which meant he couldn't smile. He looked up at me, impassively.

“I suppose you really are psychic. I was just about to wake you up.”, he joked, between half to three-quarters serious. My face twitched, unsure if I should laugh or frown. Caught in the middle, I only nodded, and gulped, afraid to admit that I hadn't heard his thoughts. It was weird that he thought I did, though, I chuckled slightly. Actually I'd been woken up by the sun. I almost always am. I'd had to get used to the sun, tying my rhythms to it. I would usually wake up before rose, and then walk until it was at the top of the sky, at which point I'd rest and try to stay hydrated. When it started to cool off, just around nighttime, I would start moving again, and walk until I got tired. Hitch a ride if I could. Human brick and mortar may offend the mushrooms but it sure helped me sleep last night. “That smells real good.”, I said, still hazy. How long had I been out there? How long had I been in here? It already felt like home. Like this had happened a thousand times already, even if I was still having trouble believing it was happening. The thought of staying in one place for a week already felt disarming. But I bit back against it. I knew it was what he was thinking, but was embarrassed at readying myself for his invitation. “Thanks”, I said, almost accidentally. My eyes grew wide with embarrassment before I realized what I said was just as reasonable a thing to say for what he was doing for me at that exact moment as it was for what he was planning on doing after he showed me the cows. “Sure. My son always brings me these eggs when he goes shopping, but my doctor says I need to watch my cholesterol. Gotta get rid of them some how”, he scooped them up with a spatula and spread them on a little orange plate. Then the steak, three or four strips. “I suppose you aren't some kind of vegetarian or something like that, otherwise you'd have told me five times over how I was going to hell eating for steak, pointing a shotgun at you and voting for Trump.”

He set the plate in front of me. On the edges, it said, “Gavin.” The old man looked at me tensely, trying to dismiss any of his own thoughts that he might be giving me that particular plate since it belonged to his son. That son Gavin hadn't called in years, and he hadn't the slightest idea if he was still alive. Gerry supposed that it was only his fault, though. Gerry had a fresh peeled orange and a couple pieces of steak on his plate, a clean and plain white one with a little chip in the side. “Well. I suppose I'll say grace.”, he said, since he hadn't asked if I was from California or Washington DC yet to see if it'd offend me for him to ask me if I could lead the prayer, “Dear father, who art in heaven--”, I watched with awe as his words flew from his mouth in labyrinthine puzzles made of light and bubbled up towards the ceiling, passing through row upon row of clean transparent squares as they climbed into a radiant light up above our heads, the Ultimate. Again. I knelt my head in reverence, and prayed along, adding on towards the end, a muffled, “Yeah.”, which I sent up to the Ultimate in a word that looked like a weird, lopsided triangle. I didn't ever see what happened to it. For all I knew, I only saw it because I imagined it was probably real to begin with. And I probably saw nothing but light because that was as far as I felt like I could get, even if that was not for lack of trying. Gerry chuckled under his breath. Apparently Millenials talked to God like they did to their Grandpa when he asks them if they're doing well in school.

He took a bite of the steak, trying to keep it from flopping out of his mouth as he chewed laboriously slow. He'd been afraid of two things his whole life. Death, and having food fall out of his mouth. Now that he'd shaken the first of those—he often felt he faced death itself every time he opened up his web browser and glanced even for a moment at the latest headline about some Syrian kid blowing himself up in Europe or chopping some poor fellas head clean off—he still chewed with excruciating caution. The fear had only gotten worse with age. Nothing had fallen out of his mouth since he was seven or eight and his mom had boxed him on the back of the ear for dropping his corn dog on a boardwalk and watching it get carried off by a rat. Eight decades, 12 presidents and God knows how many meals afterwards, he was less terrified of the actual dreadful act itself than he was of going down at the expense of a near century long winning streak. As the meat made its way from his dentures down to his stomach, he pointed at a portrait of the ranch hung across the room, bobbing his fork up and down like he was getting ready to say something.

He was going to tell me about his daughter Miranda. Miranda went to Art school, much to her fathers chagrin, and she'd become an artist. Thirty eight years old now, and she was successful for it. I studied her painting. I could feel the energy coming off of it, the traces of a soul resonating from each brush stroke on the canvas like a thousand record needles running across a floor covered in shattered vinyl LPs. Illustrious, painstaking work—I knew fifteen years ago when she'd painted it, she'd been crying. She wished she could go back to the farm. She was so sad to know her dad was sitting there, waiting to hear about the test results the family doctor had ordered for her mother, and that she'd finished it just as they knew the dreadful news those results entailed—it was the part of the painting where the sky got just a little more blue—she hated New York, she kept thinking. The ranch was always on her mind, and so she hadn't needed any reference photos to paint this. It made her feel stupid, though, making this painting. he had her first gallery showing since art school in a week and she was using the last of her art supplies painting a picture that would never sell among the snobby rich people she imagined would be coming to see her and buy her work. But as an artist, she'd never connected with the trite, post-modern collages she'd used to earn this showing, and had only made four or five. She finished the painting the day after the show, having sold none of her fifteen others more drunk than she'd ever been in her life, and was ready to burn it in the dump before she, hungover and despondent, decided to mail it to her dad.

“My daughter painted that.”, he said, smiling faintly. Miranda hadn't come for Christmas in two years. She'd taken Gavin's side in what Gerry remembered only as, “that whole debacle”, pushing it far out of his memory. Gavin didn't call either. He'd come out to his dad—he'd had a partner for seven years that his father never met. The rest of the family all knew, they were just afraid to tell him. Gerry didn't take it well. He spent the rest of the summer not returning anyone but Mick's calls. Mick came out from San Antonio to help with the cows. In September, he called Gavin to vent his frustrations and split the wedge even further. Miranda called and argued with him for hours. Now only Mick, and from time to time Daniel, ever came to visit the farm, and Daniel never brought his wife, only his three kids. When it came down to it, Gerry didn't know how to apologize to them. Even though he wanted to, he wasn't even sure if he should.

“She lives out in New York. Sells a lot of paintings.”

He had kept and preserved every one of the fliers for Miranda's showings, keeping them in a photo album he'd maintained since her first third grade art class. When she stopped sending them to him, he started printing them off online, writing in big letters so he could read them in the form of a brief executive summary—Miranda leads workshop in Estonia—Miranda's show in Connecticut—Miranda's show in Los Angeles. As for Gavin, his dad had all of his stuff in a box. His report cards. The letters from the dean's list in business school. Some old emails and photos the two had exchanged were printed out in a big binder, also with big-lettered captions. Gavin gets his new job in Denver at the cannabis factory—Gavin meets the Governor of Colorado—Gavin speaks at big marijuana conference. He'd stopped hanging them on the wall, though, when he'd found out, but still couldn't bear to part with them.

“She just had a show somewhere in Spain.”

I acknowledged him blankly, slurping down a piece of scrambled egg that I had neatly impaled on my fork.

“Sure looks like it's gonna be a nice day outside.”

Gerry bit down on another piece of steak and the two of us watched the other masticate with unease.

“Hard to have a conversation, I guess, when you just read folks minds.”

I nodded. It was.

“I'm sorry about your kids.”

Inwardly, he grimaced, but on the outside, his face remained still.

“I'm proud of them.”

I bit another piece of egg. It was weird to eat food. Especially when, if you think about it, you're eating a fried, unborn fetus that your species just randomly decided you had the right to steal from its mother and devour at your leisure. My eyes went wide as I looked at the food on my plate. Suddenly, I could visualize it's entire lifecycle. All of it seemed to pulse with life, as I contemplated the life it had left behind, thinking of the cows outside, and how unknowing they must be of the slaughterhouse, how powerless the mushrooms really are to defend them against the true dangers, how naive they were to think they had done themselves a service maintaining the ranchers presence. How sad it was to be a chicken inside of a box, growing against hard steel walls and laying eggs for the tall bald monkeys to consume. How horrible it was to feel it all. To realize I could feel it all. How the cows and their fungal guardians ought to have begged me to kill the farmer. To kill Gerry. To kill—I looked into his eyes. With mild stability, he munched down on a piece of steak. He had killed them. In the scope of life, everything, he was a carnivore. In the scope of consciousness, perhaps it would be better that—way--

I shut my eyes and ate the eggs, although they tasted like cold metal. The taste, and the thought of the chicken suffering made me imagine myself as a chicken in a factory farm, in vivid and gruesome detail. Internally, I tried to right the course, feeling my soul teeter into a darkness, an anger, as my own sense of compassion pulled me back towards the light. I could feel the love Gerry felt for those cows, last night. He was grateful for them. He cared for them, he nurtured them. Every day he opened his freezer and took out the steak it had been a creature he'd cared for. He remembered it. And one day, he hoped to give his body to them. He wanted to be buried in their field. He supposed it was the order of things. Just as the grass supposed it was the order of the cows to eat them. Soon he would. Soon he would give back to them. But not through me. Genuinely, the cows loved him. The mushrooms, in their odd and haughty way, loved him. I loved him.

“I love you.”, I said, finding myself staring at the plate. Gerry had started eating his orange, slice by slice. He liked to bite them in thirds, biting first the top end, then spinning around, and biting the other, taking out the seeds with his fingernails before he swallowed the middle part. Gerry looked puzzled. My eyes moved up to him, slowly and cautiously. “I--”, I stopped myself from saying it, making eye contact with him. I'd gotten carried away. The cows were only slaughtered when they got so old that Gerry could bear to see them suffer no longer. Meanwhile, the eggs were from his neighbor Jill, who lived over the hill from here, and who Gerry thought looked mighty fine for a young lady in her sixties. “You must've not had steak for a while.”, Gerry laughed. It was something he'd also said to his wife every once in a while, in a particular scenario I wished I had never seen come through someones memories. I shook my head, withdrawing from his thoughts. “No. I love you.”, I poked a bit of steak and stared at it, “Steak. Steak, I love you.”, I ate it, stoically, suddenly tense from how awkward that moment had been. “So, did you have any questions?”, I asked him. I figured it would be easier if I let him know he could ask me the questions he'd been thinking of.

“You ain't from California or anywhere like that?”, he wanted to ask. I winced in anticipation, preparing a lie. “Where are you from?”, he asked me instead, softening the question. “Not California. North Dakota.”, I said. Understanding that I was reading his mind, he tried another approach. “What do you want to tell me, how about? And I'll ask you about it again when we go out and tend the cows.”

“Well my name is John. I can read your mind because I took acid next to a place where the government punched a hole in the universe. But I don't do a lot of drugs. Only every so often. I don't drink, at least. Never heroin, or anything bad. I'm hitchhiking to a music festival in New Mexico that starts in a month, so I can sell some healing crystals, like the one I gave you that you were keeping in your nightstand. I used to be a geologist at an oil field but I quit. My favorite color is the sun, and I like looking at my feet while it rains.”, I didn't want to tell him that, but for some reason, I'd had a profound need to say it, “I'm homeless. I'm homeless on purpose though. My old company thinks I'm dead. Last Christmas, I called my mom from a payphone and told her I was fine. She was mad I wasted my education, and my dad says I'm a disappointment.”

He nodded, slowly, “Guess that's the sort of thing the government does these days, punches holes in the universe, huh”, he bit another piece of steak, and stared at me solemnly as he did, wondering about my family. Figuring that I was from North Dakota, he imagined they were fine, respectable, redblooded Americans, and tried to picture himself in their shoes, “My family is good. They're all good people. I want to visit them. I'm gonna call my mom for her birthday, it's in April. I call my dad too. His is in May. I have three sisters, and a pet cat named Rufus, unless Rufus is dead, which is possible, since he had feline aids and a weird bladder condition. It's weird being here. Usually, I'm a normal person, but I guess I'm not now. I'm going to get some juice. Don't tell me where it is. I know.”, I stood up, breathing deeply as I inched towards the cupboard to fetch a cup. I wanted to be careful to use his least favorite mug, one that had a pair of little rabbit children who always gave him the heebie-jeebies, but gave up on excavating it from behind the other mugs after I'd already taken six or seven out and set them top down on the counter. I settled on a neutral looking one, with a picture of a windmill. You could tell it was painted by a machine, since when I looked at the image, it didn't have a soul. No soul at all. I watched the windmill in stupefaction. How could a painting have so little soul--

“That LSD, sure a hell of a drug.”, he sighed. He vaguely remembered hearing the stories of teenagers burning their eyes out on LSD by staring at the sun, or thinking they could fly, and jumping off buildings. Heroin was one thing. If the kids were doing LSD now, that was something even worse. Who knew what could be next? They'd even legalized marijuana in some places. He'd heard of it doing some strange things. But never giving someone psychic powers. He supposed it was the devils work. I'd probably sold my soul to the devil, even if it was without knowing it. He hoped he could help me.

I poured orange juice into the mug slowly until-- Dammit. It was a mug. What was I thinking? People don't drink orange juice out of mugs. They drink it out of cups. I threw the orange juice down, almost tearing out my hair out of frustration. “I'm so stupid!”, I shouted, before laughing, “I thought this was a glass, but it's a mug.” That's what Satan will do to you, the old man supposed, Sad. Seems like a nice kid. Gerry finished his orange, licking his fingers as he pondered whether or not he'd allowed me to curse his house with demons, by welcoming me in. I felt horrified. What if he was right? What if there was something dark inside of me? What if this was---I calmed myself down. My hands were shaking. I was losing control. It was all of this human interaction—this strange house. I couldn't smoke weed around most of my friends, let alone trip on acid with a total stranger. I tried strained myself to use these powers to somehow act normal, but it was forced. I couldn't do it. I breathed deeply, and thought about the most normal person I'd ever met. Her name was Janet. I tried to become Janet.

It worked for long enough for me to finish my orange juice, before I realized that Janet had never spent ten minutes wondering what it was like to be six fluid ounces of orange juice in a mug. She was a sociology major I fell in love with in college and once made out with in the back of a pickup truck. I looked over my shoulder, to watch Gerry floss, and took another sip without looking. It tasted strangely sweet, tangy—delicious. I looked down at it, and realized it was because, up until now, I'd been preoccupied with the fact that it was in a mug. Through a colossal force of psychic willpower, I put this thought behind me, and made the orange juice taste normal. Mmm. Such normal orange juice I am drinking, I imagined Janet saying. “I don't suppose you play guitar?”, Gerry asked. He was asking me since he thought I sold my soul to the devil, and, obviously, that's the first question any person in their right mind would ask to someone who'd done such a thing. “A little bit.”, I said. I played a long time ago. I knew four or five songs.

Gerry knew a lot of songs. He'd been playing the mandolin for 79 years and, when he watched me try to strum a few chords on his old guitar, he decided that I'd gotten a raw deal out of my satanic bargainings. I played G, C, and D for about fifteen minutes--enough for most country, Gerry said-- before Gerry taught me some other chords. If you're a musician, I imagine that psychedelics probably help you be really creative. But for me, my neverending acid trip had left my sense of rhythm confused and uncoordinated. Gerry was annoyed at first, but later grew to like it, as teaching me to play guitar was almost like having Gavin back again. We played and sang an old Neil Young song, to which the mushrooms and cows in the pasture responded to with joy. For a few hours after that, Gerry walked me around the field, introducing me to the cows, including two cows named Sheila and four cows named T-Bone. After I'd met 53 of his 27 cows, I suggested to Gerry that we head inside.

Commentary
The incident in the shower is based on actual events where I realized that the sound of a squeaking showerhead was putting me in a weird mood, and everything actually did get better once it was tightened. There are a lot of other little things I could point out, but basically, this episode is here for characterization and to set up some important plot points later on in the series.

Streaming Links
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVmTciJiDjE
https://riversofthemind.libsyn.com/southern-hospitality
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/rivers-of-the-mind/id1278391177
https://play.google.com/music/m/I5obttfukzok6ggklvb5umo2mgq?t=Rivers_of_the_Mind

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

Rivers of the Mind Episodes 6 and 7 Love Affair and The Visit

Episode 6 (and 7): Love Affair/The Visit

When your feet fall in love with walking, standing still feels like heartbreak. But I'd developed a love affair, one which intervened between myself and my unending sojourn. I couldn't leave Gerry. The old man was too gentle, the thought of abandoning him to this lonely ranch felt wrong. His son—the one who came to visit every weekend—never did much to help his father here, and almost seemed to resent the task of caring for his father. Meanwhile, Gerry had started to see me as a kind of son, and I'd started to see him, almost, like a dad. I had learned, over the last three days, how to stop myself from anticipating his words long enough to have a conversation, and I would sit, and listen to him tell stories about his life. As I did, I could watch the images unfold in his mind as I heard the words and strange hill country idioms he ascribed to things, and I perceived that the conversations aided his memory. Every morning, he'd make breakfast, and we'd tend to the cows. I'd help him with chores—a zenlike task for me: cleaning the mildew off of the shower, folding laundry, and sweeping off the porch. I could I save the outdoor chores for later on in the day when I knew Meagan was driving to work. Her car would barrel down the highway, with the sounds of classical music blaring from the sides, and I would listen in on what ever thought was running through her head for the few seconds I could hear her. Yesterday, she was worrying about her grandmother. Today, she was worrying about her brother. It'd only been three nights that I'd slept in the same bed. My fingernails were trimmed. My beard had been groomed. My hair was clean. I looked in the mirror, and I was startled by how different I still looked from the person I was before.

Meagan dreamed about me every night. But not always in the way that I would have liked. I woke up the night before last inside of a dream where she left all her belongings behind and hitchhiked with me to San Antonio. That was nice, even if she had a fairly unrealistic idea of what it was like, and even if I found myself unable to do anything other than what she imagined me doing in her dream, I could read her thoughts. She thought of it as an escape. Running away. The pressures at home and at work were bearing down on her. She was a twenty one year old woman and her closest friends were already almost done with college. She had a year and half under her belt, she'd gotten straight A's, and felt certain she was capable of more. Her manager treated her, flagrantly, like she was almost less than a full person. Her grandmother was getting worse. Hanging on, but only barely. The next night, she dreamed about me again, only this time, I was a drug dealer, selling heroin to her brother. Her brother worked two jobs. Between the two of them, they were the primary breadwinners for the family, and fought often. She could hardly blame him for his belligerence; he worked at least 60 hours every week, between three jobs, and sometimes went days without sleep. A year ago, he'd started drinking, then smoking pot, and now smoking meth, and Meagan was afraid he'd go further, and start with heroin. It was when she burst down the door, a shotgun in her hands, that I realized that I could, with some effort, control my own body inside of the dream. I broke out of the mold that I'd been placed in within the dream, shattering the skin of my imagined body and stepping out as my inner form, my soul. I held up my hand, pleading for her to stop. Tears streaming down her face, she screamed for me to stay away from her brother, and pulled the trigger. The terror of having killed me quickly woke her up, and I was ripped out of the dream.

I was shaken by it the rest of the day. I woke up feeling deeply heartbroken, and went through my day visibly disturbed. Gerry looked on with concern, but was unsure how to address my sadness. He supposed I wanted to leave. He supposed I'd gotten bored with him, and wanted to move on with my life. Politely, he tried to ask me over dinner if I was planning on hitting the road any time soon. In a couple days, I said. I couldn't stay forever, and he knew that. I wanted to meet his son Mick, though. I told him. He thought I was trying to be kind to him, but I just really wanted to understand Mick. Something about him and his family seemed off from what Gerry had said, thought and dreamed about them. I wanted to be sure that Gerry was in good hands with his son. I would already miss it here. I'd forgotten, for a moment, that all of this, the fragile nature of reality around me, the porous nature of consciousness, the way I felt, all of it was strange. I felt normal, and feared I'd lose that feeling if I left. Cowardly as it was, I now dreaded walking into a strange city, and hearing the thoughts of murderers, rapists, thieves, bankers, prostitutes, and drug addicts all around me, wanting to help them, wanting to save everyone I met from themselves or whatever ailed them, being seen again as an anonymous and homeless alien instead of a human.

I went to sleep that night and found Meagan right away, walking alongside her at work, and observing what she did. She seemed so lonely, her face seemed to be holding back so much. She did her best, I could tell, to do her job perfectly and to help those around her. But customers screamed at her, her manager, who seemed to not have benefited from having his consciousness probed by me, harassed her, and her coworkers seemed distant and uninterested in talking with her. I watched her restock the vitamins, and stop for a second at vitamin B-12, smirking faintly before moving onto the rest of the vitamins. She thought of me for a second. I doubted I was much more than a strange thing that had happened recently, but unconsciously, I could tell she wished she could live like me, I'd become a symbol—her dreams debated back and forth whether it was a life worth choosing, and I was but a fixture in that debate. In a way, that was what she meant to me too. A lifestyle. A state of fixation that I contemplated unendingly. And so I dreamed of her. And she dreamed of me.

I returned to my body when she got home and waited for her to start dreaming. I'd been thinking about it all day, what I'd do when I did. But for a while, I stayed and I floated, and she hadn't thought of me. Saddened for a moment, I wondered if it might be better that way. For her to forget she'd ever seen me, and for me to forget I'd ever seen her. To leave it at that, keep things the way they are, run from it, unattached and untethered. I'd be a homeless guy wandering through Texas hunting gems on acid, and she'd be a stoned Walmart employee working long hours at night and caring for her grandmother by day. Gerry would be an old man alone in his house, staring longingly at his cows munching grass in a sprawling, mushroom filled pasture. For a moment, the nothingness of it had an appeal. To simply let my thoughts stay as thoughts and remain a passive observer to them, doing nothing to help and nothing to hurt anyone. Standing still.

I felt myself drift downwards, into a dream. Meagan. She was stocking the vitamins again, and I was behind her. She gasped when she saw me. I could tell she was thinking about the dream last night, when she'd shot me, and looking through her mind in that moment, I knew that she was ashamed of having thought of me that way. I shook from the image she imagined I looked like, and let it crumble behind me. “Why do you keep dreaming about me?”, I asked. She gulped, wincing, her stomach filling with serotonin and her eyes racing over me. “I wish I would have gotten to talk with you.”, she answered. I shook, unsteady. Suddenly, I could not read her mind—rather, I only felt it against me, warm and shivering—I knew that it was there, but I was deaf to it. “You seemed like you had a story. And when you talked, you sounded younger than you looked. I wanted to talk to you. Know more about you.”

“My name is John.”, I said, gulping. It all felt real, suddenly. Like we were in the real world. I could barely tell I was dreaming, and neither could she. For all intents and purposes, it was reality. I couldn't tell what was happening, but it felt uniquely psychedelic. Everything looked not only real, but hyper real. Detailed, all of the senses felt so entirely normal that I felt completely out of place. “And I'm Meagan.”, she said. “I thought you were one of the nicest people I'd ever met when I heard your mind coming around the corner. And when I saw you, you had really soft eyes. You didn't pity me, or judge me. You just helped me find vitamins, and wondered about where I came from.”

“Where did you find that crystal?”

“The tourmaline? New Hampshire. Last summer. I sell them. Or don't really sell them, I give them to people. Sometimes they give me money. But only sometimes. I never ask for it. They're healing crystals.”

“Do they work?”

“How's yours working?”

She sighed, looking off. “Well I feel a little braver.”

“Then I guess they do.”

“But it's just a placebo effect, right?”

“Sometimes that's all it takes.”

“Don't you feel bad, convincing people they're magic?”

I shook my head, having wondered about it myself. “They need hope, so I give it to them. They have everything inside themselves they need to heal themselves, they just need hope. Whether that's in a healing crystal, or a friend or—that old lady who came in earlier tonight. You helped her lift her bags into her cart, even though she was rude to you. I saw her last time, when I was walking in. I know her, a little bit, and I could tell when I was watching her that she felt like you were a younger version of herself, so she acted rude, but you helped her with her bags, and acted so sweet to her, I knew it made her day just a little bit better. That's hope. It's not worthless. Even if they're just crystals, the placebo is magic enough.”

She thought about it for a moment. “But what does that change? I can have all the hope in the world, but it doesn't make a difference. What if I had a terminal disease? Or cancer? What good does it do for me to hope I get better?”

“Your grandmother's neurologist.”

“What about her?”

“She's kind of mean. But she's competent.”

“Yeah.”

“And you know your grandmother doesn't like her, but you both know she knows what she's doing. She's helping her get better, as best as she can. So what good would it do, anyway, for her to try to be less of a bit---less of a negative person.”, she turned her head, understanding what I was saying, “You'll be better at it than she is. Because you're kind. And strong enough, and good enough, to help people when they need you. You know how to talk your mom out of a panic attack, help your brother get out of bed in the morning, and keep your grandma's spirit fighting. That's what good it does.”

“I just feel like I'm gonna explode.”, she said. She clutched her forehead, and I leaned into embrace her. I didn't know what to say. The two of us just hugged each other, for a little bit. When I pulled away she was crying.

“You said you can read minds.”, she said, “Can you read mine?”

“Not right now.”

“No, I mean, can you tell I'm dreaming?”

I almost forgot where we were, that she was a stranger, and we were only, for a time, simply inhabiting the same dream. I winced. “Yes. I can. I guess I must be--”, I almost said inside you, before I stopped myself, “--reading your mind right now. I'm asleep too, though, in real life.”

“What did you do to my manager?”

“It was an accident. I took acid out in this field and I guess that my consciousness got sucked into a hole in the universe. I was trying to come down from the trip, and when he came up to me and tried to take my crystals, I guess I accidentally sucked his soul into my mind, and then he sucked mine into his and--” She laughed. “What?”, I asked. “He sucked yours into his?”, she cackled, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I need to grow up.” I smiled with her. I forgot what it felt like to hear a joke that wasn't about ranching, and that I didn't know the punchline to beforehand after watching my conversation partner carefully trying to remember it for fifteen minutes. “So you took LSD, and now you've got superpowers.”

“That's exactly what happened.”

Looking at me strangely, she nodded. A wave of panic came over me. My stomach sank, and I felt myself drawing inward. The walls took on an austere grey, and vitamins shook, slipping off their shelves one by one. I shut my eyes, wanting to pull away from her dream, but unable to. The shelves in the pharmacy fell over, splitting apart from us. She looked different—her eyes melted away, and I heard the laughs of someone else tearing apart the air between us. She ran up to me, and grabbed me. The husks of the spoiled dream lapsed away, and we found ourselves in an astral world. She gazed upon it with awe—to her, it must have felt like we were tripping on DMT—for all intents and purposes, I supposed we were, but as one. Faint purple lines of energy swirled around us. Our bodies were not bodies, but energies. We were conscious of each other as one, without the tethers of vision, like two friends walking down a street in a pair of rubber masks, hearing each others voices but unable to see the other. In that moment, I felt myself become completely known by her, and she became known by me, both of us at once unable to speak, only to fire a thousand thoughts and ideas and questions and replies between each other all at once, in what felt like a hurricane.

We rose upwards, and upwards, until we came out over the ocean, seeing each other rise into a starlit sky. She was holding on to me as we did, looking down at the water underneath us, mystified, her mouth open in awe. The dream had split apart and we were standing there above it. Another dimension. An ocean in the sky. We looked down upon it with awe. “This can't be real.”, she said, overwhelmed by how vivid and psychedelic her dream had become. “That's what I said.”, I gulped. She shut her eyes, feeling that the REM sleep was beginning to dissipate. “If it is, if you can really hear me somehow, and this is all real, find me when you wake up. Tell me...tell me...” I nodded, having had the same idea, “You'll drive by me when you leave to visit your grandma in the hospital. I'm in house number 5400. The old ranch. I'll be standing out front. Stop for a moment, and I'll say something to you.” She started to wake up, although her body remained paralyzed. The waters of the ocean flooded into her room. She felt like she was drowning, and desperately tried to make her limbs move so she could escape. I stood next to her bed, and wished I could help before I, and the hallucinogenic seawater, slowly faded away.

When I woke up that morning, I rolled out of bed and tried to lock the memory in my mind...when she drives by, she'll stop. Say something to her. Even if only with your mind. Try to wave, so she knows she's not crazy. I ran over it again and again in my head, as I paged through the millions and millions of ways it could go wrong, all at once, worrying up a frenzy. I was shaking. I could barely put on my pants or remember what I had to do. The order I had to do it in. I felt tensely unready to see her, and desperate to keep my thoughts on balance. I walked, accidentally, into the door, and fell almost flat on my back. My vision dizzy for a moment, I layed there on the ground for a time, staring at the ceiling and trying to prepare myself for the coming encounter. I controlled my breath, gently, feeling my heart pound heavily in my ears, almost making me imagine there was someone stomping on the roof. I got up, my limbs feeling clumsy and wirey, and stumbled towards the door again, before clutching the handle, and opening it. A bright red SUV waited out front, a cloud of dust behind it. A stern looking woman sat in the passenger seat, a pair of buglike sunglasses on her head and a white sunhat covering up her straightened blond hair. She got out, wearing a nice pair of high heels, a clean black skirt and a white tank top. From the other side, Mick, a bald, authoritarian looking man with small eyes and a nice collared shirt. The two of them got out as one, and Mick finished a text while his wife opened the backseat to help their youngest daughter out of the car. Around the wife's head, I could see a pale grey aura, tinged with what looked like rust along the edges. Mick, meanwhile, had no aura. No color. His face was contorted in a firm and impassive shape when people weren't looking, before shifting into a smile whenever someone did.

Mick saw me after looking up from his phone. He lifted his head and almost sniffed the air like a lion. I was unnerved by him. On edge, I walked into the kitchen, where Gerry had cooked up extra helpings of steak for his son and his kids. “Mick's coming today.”, Gerry told me, not having noticed his car pull up. He was hoping that Mick had remembered to buy him something good for his heart, and that Mick's disrespectful son Gerald Jr. hadn't brought his stupid iPad. He brought it. His eyes were glued to it as he exited the vehicle. Mick pulled two big handfuls of groceries from the back of the car, and lurched forward, his eyes sweeping across the family, the car, the house, his father, with a penetrating hostility. I inched closer to him, hearing his thoughts creep towards me. He saw me, and was immediately suspicious. I looked like I was on coke, he tried to comprehend what I was doing here. Entering the house, and setting the groceries down on the kitchen table, Mick glared at me, saying with fake ambivalence, “Howdy dad! Who's your friend?”

“This is John.”, Gerry said, mixing around the eggs with a spatula, “He's just been staying over for a couple nights.”

The wife, who's name was Cassandra May Louis Parker, shepherded in her children, while glaring at me with suspicion. I looked like a drug addict. She imagined me as some kind of degenerate, her mind studying me with a dark and piercing fear. Mick came towards me, looking me over, recognizing that I was wearing his dad's clothes, which didn't fit quite right, and catching the sight of my eyes, dilated and unsteady. He extended a hand. I looked down at the strange, bulbous appendage. Somehow, Mick's mind, when I tried to understand it, was blank. His impressions were empty. I gazed into him, feeling my consciousness press up against his. He felt almost annoyed, but that was it. I backed away, shaking. He wondered if I was mentally ill. I cautiously grabbed his hand, and shook it slowly, making eye contact. Cassandra raised her eyebrows in silent condescension. Poor people, drug users, hippies, criminals, all of them deserved whatever punishment they got in life. If ever I had suffered, she was sure I'd deserved it. She and Mick had money. They had it because they were good people. She imagined the devil was working in my life, and prayed silently that I did not attack or corrupt her children. “My name is John”, I said, shaking, “I—I--”, I tried to think of a normal person, so that I could act like one, “How do you do, Mick?” Startled since he hadn't told me his name yet, Mick supposed his dad must have warned me he was coming over. “I'm alright, Johnny. I'm alright.” I nodded, quickly, and brushed by him to shake Cassandra's hand. She recoiled in disgust, but politely accepted, and shared a knowing look with her husband. “Cassandra. Gerry has told me about you, so I know your name. I'm--”,

I looked into her terrified, disgusted eyes and for a moment peered into her inner world. Cassandra didn't really care for Mick. She didn't really care for men, actually, and she'd hated herself for it. She'd gone to bible studies, and youth groups, and women's retreats trying to cure herself of it, she'd married and had children to try to get rid of her sinful ideas, but every so often, since she was a teenager, she'd find herself fantasizing about women. Back then, she'd cut herself for it, but she'd gone to college, she'd married Mick, and since then she'd stopped. It was hard to surpress it. Terrifically hard to rationalize. It filled her psyche with a longing tension. Beneath a hateful and upper-middle class exterior rested a raging, and wounded subconscious. Neither Mick, nor anyone else in her life, knew the person that was underneath that exterior, and even she was barely aware of it. It only surfaced from time to time. Gavin's coming out to his father filled her with such rage, but only to conceal her deep-seated jealousy, and her fear that somehow, Mick had the same genes, and that they'd pass them onto their children. Accordingly, her daughter was dressed in exceedingly effeminate clothes and encouraged to spurn anything masculine, and her boys were dressed the same, taught to deny any trace of femininity. Both were reminded, really pleaded with, to not be gay.

Mick didn't care about any of that. He thought church was stupid, and that the pastor was an annoying, pretentious little beta, who he'd like to see drown in a baptismal font filled with his own excrement. He was certain that women were little more intelligent than baboons, and openly did not believe they deserved respect unless it could get him what he wanted. So he respected his wife. He thought his wife was hot, and had married her because she was compliant, and fucked him whenever he wanted. He had an intern at his office, and had had sex with her at least twice a week, too. Both of them could be easily strung along with silly, bullshit compliments. Mick tried to fuck most women, if only because he could, and if Cassandra ever found out, he'd tell her it was because she'd gotten fat since the baby, something he'd actually expected to be able to use an excuse to divorce her after the second kid, to no avail. It wouldn't hold weight, because Cassandra still looked good enough to fuck when he needed it. Mick liked working at the bank, because he made a lot of money, and he could destroy people whenever he wanted. Once, he passed by a homeless person in San Antonio—bored, Mick made them sing and dance for a fifty dollar bill. Another time, he'd found out that a driver who cut him off in traffic had an account with his bank, and froze his credit cards. He was hoping his father would die soon, so he could sell the property, but in the meantime was hoping to have him stuck in a nursing home. Mick liked two things: sex, and money. He couldn't give two shits about anything else.

Awkwardly, I let go of Cassandra's hand, having held onto it for upwards of thirty seconds. Everyone in the room was staring at me, except for Gerry, who smirked as he realized I was reading everyone's minds. He hoped I could hypnotize the kids to get off that stupid little iPad, and maybe take an interest in the cows. When Gerry looked at Cassandra, she reminded him of his sunday school teacher: grim, serious, and prissy. She didn't seem like the type of girl he'd hoped Mick would marry. Meanwhile, he wasn't sure what had happened with Mick. Mick always seemed a little rowdy when he was a young boy, like the kind of boy who'd want to grow up to be a cowboy. Instead, he'd gone off to college and become a banker. Now, it was difficult to talk to his son. He almost didn't want listen to his dad. Gerry felt neglected by Mick, suspicious that he took a cut from his social security check, and annoyed that Mick never bought him the food he asked for. Mick was thinking that I wanted to fuck his wife, and steal from his dad. Almost all the possessions in the house were to be split between him and Dan. Mick knew there were some valuable antiques here, and didn't want me to take them before he could.

Mick helped Gerry spread out the table and set it for the kids, while Cassandra helped in the kitchen. I gave her the creeps. Stuck by the counter and unsure of what I could do to help, I stood still. I tried to avoid Mick's head. His thoughts disturbed me, his utter lack of emotion or redemption made me feel terribly afraid for Gerry and everyone around him. Cassandra didn't know. She thought Mick was a perfect husband, and hated herself for not being satisfied with him. She hadn't enjoyed any of the time they spent with each other. She tried as hard as she could to be a good woman, but she felt like she couldn't. She tried to cook and clean and raise her kids right, but she knew deep in her heart that she was corrupted. Our consciousnesses met, and I could feel the sadness and anger pressing up against my own intrusive mind. I turned around, seemingly to look at the stove, but really to look at her. She froze, dissociating momentarily from what she was doing. I studied the contents of her mind, preparing to try in some way to help her resolve the anger she had driven against herself, to possibly let her come to peace with who she was. But it was all so precarious—I remembered the police officer—trying to only turn a memory into a dream released a chemical cocktail which put him in a strange, psychedelic state—who knew what it would mean for me to toy with so restless and complicated a system? And in front of her family? With all of these people watching, I felt certain that the wrong move could be disastrous. I withdrew.

Cassandra, feeling herself regain control over her body, cringed in discomfort. The momentary dissociation she'd felt seemed almost demonic. Perhaps her sinful mind had cleared the way for whatever satanic power I had to take hold over her. She set the spatula down, and, panicking, leaned back against the counter, putting her hand over her forehead. “Are you okay, baby?”, Mick asked with forced sympathy. “I--”, she didn't want to say, looking back at me. My terrifying, piercing grey eyes looked like big flying saucers, dilated like some kind of drug addict—definitely mentally ill. Even if I'd cleaned up, she could tell I was homeless, she thought. I was taking advantage of this old man. Looking to rob him. Maybe kill him. And I was looking at her with such interest she worried I'd attack her, in some way. Mick could tell she was afraid, but was preoccupied with extending the table. He figured if I tried something, he'd punch me in the face. He was, as was Cassandra, already considering calling the police. I reached out to her mind again, and saw it flurrying in a state of anxiety, rushing back and forth in a mess of unconscious conflict. She could feel our consciousnesses meet, and it created even more terror in her heart. I latched onto the emotion, the anxiety, and could feel an intuitive kind of empathy overtake me. I mimicked her, internally, and I could feel what she was going through. Slowly, I tried to talk myself down, and in doing so, clear both of our minds, now that they faced cognate fears. She shut her eyes, and focused only on the shapes in front of her—I softly directed any thoughts, or thinking out of her brain—making it clear that both of us would be only present in the exact moment. Her anxiety began to subside—although I did not let go, as I knew that the specific method of coping I was trying to lead her through was difficult to perfect. Feeling her relax somewhat, I planted a suggestion in her mind. “Have compassion.”, I said, pulling on a bible verse she only barely remembered with the same basic message—I implied, as I said that, a love for herself, and a love for others. A wash of peace came over her. I withdrew, and watched her calmly open her eyes. Paranoid, I turned away quickly.

“Where are you from, John?”, she asked, taking a cue from the idea of compassion. “I'm from North Dakota.”, I told her.

“And what do you do?”

Mick glared with hostility at the two of us, uncertain of why his wife was talking to me all of the sudden. “I collect healing crystals.”, I told her. Gerry looked up, offering a translation, “John's a traveling rockhound, I guess you could say.”

“So I don't suppose you're Christian?”, she gulped—her notion of compassion, by necessity, required she ask. Gerry cut her off before I could reply. “He was sleeping outside in the thicket, and I heard the cows getting a little noisy, so I went out, and there he was. Nearly shot the poor fella's head clean off. Nice boy, though. Wouldn't even hurt a fly. Pretty smart too.”, Gerry wanted to tell them that I was psychic, but wisely decided not to. “I don't really know, to answer your question.”, I said, looking back at Cassandra. She frowned, sighing, and trying to imagine how she could minister to me. “How long have you been homeless?”, she asked. “Since July 2014, or so.”, I said. “That whole time, just selling crystals?”, asked Mick, dubious. He didn't think I could have made it only selling crystals on the road, and tried to figure out what kind of drugs I could sell, before he put two and two together and figured I was probably there for the mushrooms. He'd taken them when he was a kid, but found them boring. But he sold a few of them to some of his classmates who were going to a party. “No. Well, I give them to people. They pay me if they want to.” Mick raised his eyebrows at his wife, who seemed irritated with him being rude. She was trying to be compassionate. “What'd you do before that?”, she asked. “I worked at an oil field. I was a geologist.” Mick scoffed, cognizant of the pay I'd have to have left behind to come all the way here, and tried to challenge what he saw as an obvious lie. “Oh yeah? That's a pretty nice job to give up for selling healing crystals.”

“I didn't believe in it. Not when I got up close. I felt kind of disgusted with myself, you know?”

I knew he didn't know what that felt like, since I could read his mind. He understood only winning, or losing. All came to be defined as progress between one of these two poles. “But I bet the money was pretty nice.”

“77,000 dollars a year, plus benefits.”, I told him.

“You worked up in that, you probably wouldn't be out here, sleeping in the bushes out in the middle of nowhere.”

“I like this better.”

He rolled his eyes.

After we had eaten breakfast, Mick had devised a plot to get me out of his dad's house. He casually suggested to his grandfather that he put on a movie with the kids, and Cassandra agreed, out of obligation. Meanwhile, we'd go out on a walk, and he'd show me around. As I listened to him formulate the plan, I made myself ready, eager for the chance to be alone with Mick. I was fully rested, and beyond that, I'd just eaten. The anger I felt bubbling up for Mick was nearly overwhelming, making the walls melt and the dancing shadows on the floor take the form of knife fights and wrestling matches. He was a sadistic and almost unfeeling human being. I watched his eyes with disgust. Mick was certain he knew what I wanted, certain that he could talk me into leaving. I spent the time at breakfast, in between moments where I was expected to speak, mapping out his mind, finding his insecurities and weaknesses. He patted me on the back as we left the house, and I looked, knowingly at Gerry. But not even Gerry understood what I was truly capable of.

“Look”, Mick said as soon as we were about a quarter mile from the house, “I see through your whole deal here.”, he told me, “You and I both know you don't know two shits about geology, and I'm sure whatever your on, you aren't paying for it with the money from your healing crystals, hmm? I'm sure its expensive. You saw this big old field, with all these nice mushrooms, and you decided you could make a few bucks selling them off, am I right?”

“No, you're not.”, I said, pausing to stare him the eyes. My power welling up, I reached towards his consciousness. He looked at me with confusion, and moderate annoyance. “Come on, buddy. How much money will it take to get you out of here? 500, 1000, 2000 dollars? What'll it be?” I pressed further and further against his skull with my consciousness, feeling it spill over the edges of his mind. I could see in, but not enter. “I don't want any money.”, I said. His face seemed to gain size, and loom over me, as he laughed. “Of course you want money.”, the sky turned black, as his voice seemed to come at me from all sides. The world in which I found myself had a bleak, glowing field, with simplified red images of the built structures around us. I jumped backwards, pulling myself away. “Come on. 5000, 10000 dollars? Think of how much coke you could buy with that, hmm? You could probably get a motel room and a couple hookers. Maybe a vacation to the Bahamas.” I felt myself becoming paralyzed, and shrink down. He towered over me, looking like a giant statue of a man, his eyes glowing red. I couldn't speak. “Okay. 20,000. How about that?” I drew within myself, feeling myself drop into level upon level of reality. Somehow, I'd entered his brain without realizing it, and now, I was trapped, unable to speak.

CommentaryI took a suggestion from Sophie and cut this episode in half, but originally, this was all one episode, just called Love Affair. The simplified landscape that John describes reflects the way that Mick understands the world--he imagines in a very sweeping and monochromatic way--the bright red barn and house are all red because they are significant assets that are being threatened. Everything else is either black or white.

Streaming links
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQSR2TSff-o and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IEyCIGxpfU
https://riversofthemind.libsyn.com/love-affair and https://riversofthemind.libsyn.com/the-visit
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/rivers-of-the-mind/id1278391177
https://play.google.com/music/m/I5obttfukzok6ggklvb5umo2mgq?t=Rivers_of_the_Mind

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

Rivers of the Mind Episode 8: A Different Mind

Episode 8: A Different Mind

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

“My name is John.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why? Are you after his money?”

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

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

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

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

“Hey Mick. This is Miranda.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“H—h—how?”

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

“N—no--no this can't be--”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you hurt yourself?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Streaming Links

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

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