No one
had told me about the halo over your wife's head. The translucent
one that glowed milky white.
I had
expected a light show like you saw on TV when they portrayed an acid
trip. It would be fun to see all those bright psychedelic colors
sliding over surfaces and melting into each other. To watch
your nervous system being fooled by a chemical and to say, 'Hey, I'm
having an hallucination!' But this was different. This
was real. The halo wasn't something I was projecting onto an
ill-defined gleam in my visual field. It was a real halo.
And then
the world disappeared. The whole apartment was gone. Our
$65 a month, fifth-floor walk up with the shower in the kitchen in
the tenement on Grove Street in Greenwich Village, on the block where
Tom Paine had lived during the American Revolution and across the
street from Hart Crane's flat during the Roaring Twenties.
It was
all gone. The Village, New York, LBJ, the obscene war, the whole
fucking world. There were just the two of us: me and my wife
with the halo. We were floating in some undefined space outside
normal parameters.
And then
I understood the fantastic and horrible truth: We had been here forever.
We lived outside of time. My wife and I were Gods. Brother
and sister. Husband and wife. Isis and Osiris. Alone
forever. Just the two of us. We had created the world
to fill some small portion of eternity. To relieve a splinter
of our loneliness. And now I had eaten the magic square, like
some potion in a fairytale. The square that had come to the
Earth with us from Reality like an emergency exit and had now dissolved
the illusion we had created to assuage the solitude.
The dram
had been powered by belief. The 'world' had no force once you
knew it wasn't real. We had created this entire universe together
and then, a month before, my wife had dropped 'acid' for the first
time and the illusion had collapsed for her. But why hadn't
she warned me away from it? Why hadn't she hinted at the devastation
which would ensue?
I turned
toward her. She seemed to be doing well. She was not on
acid. This was my trip. She was the guide. She was
smiling mysteriously. Didn't she see what she had done?
Maybe she had been too lonely out there by herself after the world
died. When the magic tab swallowed her universe like a black
hole. Maybe she had needed me to join her. Or maybe she
just didn't see the truth of the matter.
I spoke
gently to her. 'Will we ever come back?' I was feeling like
Emily at the end of Our Town. My body in one world, my memories
in another.
'Back?'
my wife said quietly, abstractedly.
'Will
there be trees blooming in the spring and baseball and great jazz
solos? Will we ever be able to forget the truth and return to
normal life again?'
She smiled
gently. I was getting angry.
'Tell
me,' I said sadly but insistently. 'Will I come back to the
Earth and will things ever be the same as they were before?'
She thought
for a while, and then she said, very softly and slowly, 'Not really.'
'Not
really?'
She shook
her head no. 'You'll come back.' She paused. 'But
it won't ever really be the same.'
END
END END
