Ketamine | Keir Newlands (ex_dissociat230) wrote in forgotten_gods, @ 2010-08-28 03:47:00 |
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Entry tags: | ketamine |
Who: Ketamine [Narrative]
What: An isolation tank and exploring the quantum mind.
When: Afternoon of August 26th/morning of August 27th.
Where: Maui, Hawaii
Warning: Trippiness?
His first night in Maui was devoted to catching up with old family, dinner on the beach and curling up in a bed that smelled like long-lost memories and people he could never forget. He slept more soundly that night than he had in ages. It was actual sleep, not the sort of sleep that was interrupted by dreams he couldn't remember or waking up to the feeling of something heavy settling on his chest - red behind the eyes, the room not black enough for his liking. It was nothing like that here. It was quiet but for the sound of the water and smelled like sea air, warm sand and something comforting - like home. So he slept like a baby that night and woke to pop his pills before the ache of being confined to a human form settled down on him.
The next morning he explored the house, how things had changed in the ten years since he'd been there. His last trip was just before John died, before they moved back to California, before he moved back to Michigan and then hitchhiked to New York. He found a notebook stuffed between two scientific manuels on deep-sea coral with Allen's handwriting scrawled through the pages, one of which he ripped out to take home with him. It contained the words:
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
If anyone went looking for the notebook, the missing page would become a wonderful mystery that would lead to tales about how they searched everywhere for it and couldn't find a trace of it until some boy from the mainland produced it like magic from a ratty black backpack amid black volcanic sand and marbles that seemed to hold the universe inside of them. Ketamine smiled as he thought of it.
Breakfast on the beach with all the children of adopted children, like him, and their children as well. They said he looked exactly like he did when he was fourteen - only his eyes seemed older and he had definitely gotten a haircut or two between them. Ketamine remembered what he'd looked like in the nineties when he lived here with John and his wife and their children, with Uncle Timothy visiting every other month. He'd had hair down past his shoulders, a dark tan and could actually keep up with the other boys when the surf was right; when his desire wasn't to slip inside the old metal tank and slip inside the psyche of one of his fathers, his madmen, his geniuses. They loved him, but he loved them more. Then again, that was always the case.
No one could feel the infinite as strongly as Ketamine did. But they could speak to him in ways he understood - about the quantum mind and the way no one was either here or there but at all places at all times and how within that seventy percent of the brain that most people didn't regularly use was the ability to connect the internal reality with everything else; thus finding God somewhere within. They poured over Tibetan texts to find proof of their arguments, conducted experiments on themselves to chart the progress of their research, and he felt himself in their veins, in their minds, with them in their trips constantly.
It was a lonely feeling now that they had all transcended. He was always trying to find some way back to them - some proof that all the things they theorized about were true and that, if he only tried hard enough, he could really go home again. He would try again here, because their residual energy felt the strongest here. And he'd try with everything that was in him. He went down to the beach again to watch the surfers during lunch, spending a few hours alone in the sun before walking back up to the house, showering and making his way to the quiet back room where the isolation tank always sat.
It had been there for as long as he could remember - a giant, unattractive metal hulk of a thing, but as ugly and obtrusive as the outside was, that was how beautiful the inside was to him. He left his towels and jewelry outside the tank, hauling open the door and climbing in with no hesitation at all. The darkness and the claustrophobia bothered some people, but Ketamine always felt like this was as close to actual peace as he could get. While he was still settling down in the water, he called up the chemicals in his body to fascilitate the transition. Then after a moment of directionless vertigo, he'd settled, floating, on the water. He hadn't been laying there long - five minutes or so - when his body melted away from him completely and his eyes adjusted to the total darkness and lack of sound. It took no time at all, after that, for the process to begin.
It was as though someone had started to slowly open the hatch on the tank, but instead of a sliver of light it was a pinhole of bright white, slowly growing larger, expanding. Ketamine knew the tunnel as well as he knew anything else; it was the experience of leaving the body he felt confined him - to a form, when he was a formless thing, to this place, when he belonged to all places at once - and letting the spark that was his being glide into the in-between. He couldn't feel his limbs anymore; not in the sense that they were numb, but in the sense that they simply were not there. There wasn't even the odd sensation of phantom limbs or a ghostly tingle that might signal he still had a body clinging onto him. No. It was the feeling of being completely without a body again. At this moment, when the light had only grown from a pinhole to a dime-sized dot in front of his eyes, he could latch himself onto the mind of any one of his users and experience their trip with them. But that wasn't what he wanted.
He concentrated on the light, watched it grow almost imperceptibly larger in a way that he didn't even realize it had grown at all until he realized it had grown substantially. The dot became a portal. The edges of the it slowly flattened out and stretched long until the portal became a doorway - bright white and stark against formless black walls around it. The earlier experience of vertigo seemed to right itself, somehow, and he felt himself moving through the void and towards the light. The sensation of all his other users around him was like a warm blanket, leaving him feeling sure and secure. He could hear them, some of them, through the empty white-noise that surrounded him. Their voices were hazy and they seemed to speak some language long-forgotten by humanity, they were innumerable, a mass of voices that all come together to form one apparent whole.
As the white washed over him, engulfing everything in a vibrant energy - swooshing, crackling, pounding - he could sense that his own being had something of a form again, squeezing into a shape that his strangely human brain could understand as he came out on the other side. Then suddenly the light faded, contrast slowly dialing down before Ketamine found himself standing on a washed-out plane of white sky and pale sand. He still couldn't feel that there was any form to him, but he sensed there was a fluctuating something-or-other than gave his lack of form an ironic definition. And there was a light - not white, warmer, not red, less threatening. It was the color of something familiar, something that could wrap around you when the world went cold and noise and storms raged.
"Six?" he heard somewhere around him, like an echo, a woman's voice full of reasurrance. "Six, it's been a very long time..."
"I know," he thought in return, hearing his own voice outside the space he recognized as his being. "I got lost."
"You always find your way home," she said. "Hurry, they'll be pleased to know you've returned."
"Hurry?" Ketamine replied, perplexed. "Why are we rushing?"
"Things have changed..."
He didn't spend much time considering her words, just followed her across warm sand to a place where doors stuck out like strange installation art across the horizon, each with numbers stamped in black Roman numerals on the mirrored glass doors. He saw what he was made of now in the reflections of each of those doors - a glittering orb of cosmos, like a nebula trapped inside a glass bead, moving constantly. He could see what had changed; there were fewer doors where there once were many and more where once none had stood at all. It was the additions that interested him more than the absences.
"What of Twelve?" he asked. His only answer was a static crackle as Seventy disappeared from next to him.
Answers were his to find, then, and he moved slowly in the direction of where Twelve's door used to be. It was gone, but one had cropped up next to it - one with a III hanging crooked on the door. Glancing to the left, on the other side of where Twelve's door used to be, he could see one marked VI and contemplated spending his time here at home, trying to find what he had left here. But behind that door was an utter mess and he knew it - things long forgotten, things he never wanted to see again. This wasn't the trip that he wanted to muddle through it in.
Without knocking (how did you knock on a door when you had no hands?), he slipped through the glass and into a startlingly white room, the crisp smell of eucalyptis, lemon and mint washing over him at first. He could feel a presence there, one that felt like it was hiding from him, huddled in the corner of a room that seemed to have no boundaries; unlimited space inside of unlimited space. There was nothing but a glowing glass table made of stars and a box sitting on top of it that seemed to suck the light from the table into itself... or maybe it was pouring the light out onto the table. A box with a lock. Ketamine had the thought of lifting his hand to his neck, heard a disruption in the distance and smelled something like sea air waft past him, but the only key he had was left on the other side of the tunnel.
But while he was hovering there staring at the box he couldn't open, he could instead be looking for Three, wherever he was in there. He could feel the presence somewhere in the empty white void, but there was no direction, no sense of where, just a pull towards the general spark that must have been the other form. Time moved strangely here - it seemed like it took him an eternity and yet a mere handful of seconds to reach a place where formless seemed to have formed a wall, a corner, a passageway into another space. He turned and heard what sounded like footsteps in the distance, but honestly paid the sound no mind, distracted by the clean, crisp smell from earlier growing stronger.
An open doorway led him into another washed-out white room where, on a white couch in white linen pants and a shirt sat a man who was familiar, but one he felt like he had never seen before. Ketamine moved, the footsteps sounding again as he did. It took him a moment to look down and notice his own feet again, bare against a white floor - tanned skin standing out starkly in contrast.
"Three?" he asked, taking another couple of steps into the room. The man glanced up at him, a barely-there smile flickering across his lips as he raised his hand and uncurled his clenched fingers, a silver fish swimming in circles around his palm, light from an unknown source glinting off its scales. He continued to move forward, until he was sitting on the bed next to him, noticing his own clothes now - the same manner of white linen as the other man's.
"Who are you?" Ketamine asked.
The man looked over at him, dropping his hand away as the fish started swimming idly around the room. "You know that already," he replied very matter-of-factly.
"Three," he said again. "Are you a doctor?"
The barely-there expression, the hidden upward curl of his lips, twitched into some ghost of a smile - one that none the less made his eyes glitter with approval.
Ketamine couldn't help himself, he leaned forward and pressed his lips gently to the other man's for a kiss. The touch was more of a collision, like a supernova exploding the white into black and glitter of infinite distance and innumerable galaxies around him. His vision faltered, faded and eventually failed completely, casting the world into black again.
A metallic tap sounded in the distance - tap tap tap, tap tap tap - then a sliver of light at the edge of the door.
"Kieli?" came a woman's voice.
Ketamine inhaled, tasting iron and stale blood in the back of his throat. "Yeah?" he replied.
"We couldn't find you."
"I got lost," he muttered as she pulled the door open the rest of the way, casting light on the inside of the tank. It gave him just enough illumination to see the blood on his fingertips, blood coming from his nose. Ketamine muttered something under his breath and pressed his hand to his nostrils to stop the flow.
"You alright, Kieli?"
He nodded, his palm still pressed to his nose. "I just need a tissue."
She disappeared for a moment and came back with a tissue in hand, passing it off to him before helping him out of the tank so he wouldn't slip on the metal or the tile of the room beyond. "Have you been in there all night?"
"Must've been," he murmured, tipping his head back as he sat down with a thud on the cold tile step.
He was handed a towel a moment later, a second wrapped around him as she slid her fingers through his wet hair. "Do you need to sleep?"
"No," he shook his head. "Why?"
"Just wanted to know if you wanted to go to work at the dolphin park with us today."
Ketamine wiped his nose, sniffing and not tasting blood trickle down the back of his throat. "Yeah," he answered. "I'm just going to shower and warm up first, okay?"
"Take your time," she smiled, tucking the towel a little tighter around him. "There's breakfast out there when you're ready."
As she left him alone in the room, he tugged the fluffy brown towels tighter around him and tried to remember any piece of the trip he could. Twelve was gone, but not gone. Twelve had become Three and Three was his Eli. He remembered that from his panicked kitchen napkin proof the night it had all spilled out between them - fears and darkness, arms and warmth alike. There was a locked box still and a key that he hadn't brought in with him because he didn't want the salt in the water to eat at it. Next time maybe he would risk it. He wanted to know what was inside the box. But perhaps before that, he wanted to figure out what Nine's doorway held for him.