Post by Kaez on Nov 21, 2010 4:35:38 GMT -5
"Well?" I asked over the phone.
Her voice was silent for a good, long moment. "It changed my life. I watched someone die.”
She paused. “Or I didn't. It doesn't even matter — I saw it, whether it happened or not. It's was a place where real and fake don't really mean anything. What you see is what happened. What you experienced was what you experienced, factuality aside. I can't even remember it without a fog of surrealness around it."
I stared blankly at the wall, my eyes wide.
***
We sat there, on two parallel benches. Mike and Ross had laptops open — Mike's emitting the obnoxious sounds of youtubed videos of cats falling from high places, Ross typing with the fury of the whole liberal media. He was without a doubt in the process of another of his epic debates with various conservative bloggers, frantically using terms like ‘neo-anarchy’ and ‘hate agenda’.
Alyssa and I sat side by side, nibbling Subway sandwiches whilst reading books, myself with a copy of Sun Tzu's "Art of War", studying up on military tactics I'd never have any need for besides waging the fictional battles that so often unfolded in my head, Alyssa with a fresh copy of the latest Twilight novel, her intentions to prove once and for all that the book was technically, verifiably, and scientifically an inferior piece of literature to its contemporary urban fantasies.
I must admit, I was in full support of her endeavor and frequently she asked me questions about word choice and dialogue realism. Even when I saw little to no problem, I was sure to bullshit my way into reassuring her that it was absolute trash. She didn't deserve to be tortured by the thought that all literature appreciation was subjective. Not with Twilight. God, no.
The sun was warm overhead, a more-or-less sunny day for October. A variety of insects swarmed about the grass and the flowers that surrounded us and a leaf or two tumbled helplessly from the tree overhead. Fall was slowly making its presence known and the breeze sometimes brought with it that reminding chill that school was once again in full effect and that there was much work to be done. The thought nagged me — I was reading, dammit, this was not the time to remember that reality and work existed.
16. But when the army is restless and distrustful, trouble is sure to come from the other feudal princes. This is simply bringing anarchy into the army, and flinging victory away.
My interest faded, thoughts of schoolwork encroaching on my creativity and shoving it to the back of my skull until I might find myself less inclined toward the real obligations again. Alyssa highlighted a bit of sentence and scribbled furious footnotes. Ross grimaced angrily as he typed. Mark had a big, stupid smile plastered across his face. The day was young and pretty and I took another bite of my sandwich.
"Hey, kids," Sadie said, waltzing over with a cool stride.
"Yo," Alyssa and I said simultaneously. Mark mumbled a ‘hi’ between quiet giggles.
"What's our loyal band of ragtag adventurers up to today?" Sadie said, taking a seat across from us.
"Today," I said, bookmarking and closing Sun Tzu's text, "we find our epic heroes in a conquest against the nasty republican bloggers." I took another bite and continued a bit muffled. "We're armed with only the deliciousness of our sandwiches and our utter dedication to ridding the world of all conflicting beliefs. Can we possibly defeat Glenn Beck's Army dot com once and for all?” I asked in a dramatic tone. “Is there a hair in Alyssa's sandwich? Is Ross hearing a single word I'm saying? Stay tuned."
Sadie smiled widely at me and turned to Ross. He heard nothing. Shrugging she turned back to Alyssa and stifled a giggle as she scanned her sandwich for an invasive hair.
"How about you?" I asked.
Sadie took in a long breath and sat back. "Enjoying the lovely day. Procrastinating. Ignoring a plethora of text messages from a desperate, desperate little man. The usual."
"Lovely," I said. "Who is it this time?"
"Carter. Same ol’.”
"Aw, really? He seems nice. Maybe a little... energetic, but nice." I couldn't claim to have really gotten a good chance to meet the fellow, but from our few encounters, he seemed reasonable enough. Far more decent than most of the people Sadie associated herself with outside of our Band of Adventurers.
"He's..." her mouth opened and closed a few times, searching for the right wording.” He's just really, really into the whole club scene and all. Raves and all that, y'know?"
I popped the final bite into my mouth and crinkled the paper up. "I thought you were into all that, now?"
"I am! Was! Am! Kind of," she sloppily confirmed. "It's just, he's really into it. I mean, it's his life. And I'm not sure I can take it. It's... overwhelming. It's easy to get lost there. It drags you in."
“Drags you in,” I repeated with a slight sarcasm.
“It does!” she snarled. “These people… they’re living a life we can’t even imagine. It’s nothing like anything… here, at all. It’s really easy to think: yeah, fuck it, I’m going to live my life this way. But you obviously can’t let yourself.” Her expression turned a little worrisome, as though something inside her knotted up uncomfortably.
I half-smiled. "You know," I said. "The descriptions of this whole culture are always so... spiritual. You describe it like a drug in and of itself. Like there's some whole world unfolding outside of our world that operates in some mysterious way. I know you probably don't mean to, but you make it seem so magnificently foreign."
She stared for a bit, like she didn't entirely understand what I meant, squinting her blue eyes, showing off a thick, dark eyeshadow. "Well, I mean, it is foreign. It's nothing like college and restaurants and the park. It's an entirely different universe. I mean, I only went to a few of these things and got out pretty quickly when I did... but it's just... it's different. It's weird. And I can't really describe it. And not just because I was wasted.”
I was intrigued in it all in the same way that I was intrigued about what it might feel like to kill someone. It was a dangerous thought — just thinking it was risky — but it was something I couldn't help but be interested by. It was so peculiar, so outside of everything I understood, the sort of thing you told yourself that if you were going to die tomorrow, you'd have to see. But of course, I wasn't going to die tomorrow.
I leaned back. "Part of me thinks that it's just a bunch of completely wasted and sweat-covered teenagers who took too much ecstasy. Part of me is actually intrigued at this… sort of subcultural existence you describe. Part of me is bothered by the part of me that's interested." I frequently gave the benefit of the doubt to the subjectivity of description. After all, if it weren’t for the otherworldly descriptions of the scenarios, my interest would be minimal at best.
She smiled. "Always the sociologist! Going to go in there thinking that it's a field study for some exotic tribal culture. Take a notebook with you and analyze the customs. Bring in a film crew and narrate the whole thing afterwards Attenborough-style." She seemed extremely amused by the entire prospect. At least she didn’t look put off anymore.
"Well!" I said somewhat defensively. "It interests me! I won't pretend it doesn't. I can't, for the life of me, see myself at such a place... but I'd like to, you know, send in a little controllable robot to videotape the entire affair. To communicate with the various people who find themselves attending such a thing. That'd be something."
Her palm and forehead collided. "Jesus, Pete."
"What?" I whined. "I'd just... it's weird. And it's different. And I'd like to see what it's all about, from a, yes, largely scientific standpoint.”
"This is the third time you've said this,” she reminded me.
"I know."
"And I'm going to say the same thing for a third time."
"I know!"
"You can come to one if you want to."
"I know, I know!”
Ever since Sadie and Carter got together, ever since she’d started this – and a few other friends, too – these stories came in. Bizarre, fantastical stories about the experiences as these things. I sure as hell wasn’t getting myself on any drugs or dancing or working myself into some crazy orgy of strangers, but… theoretically? Culturally? Every time it caught me up with an unmistakable wave of intrigue.
“I know,” I said again. “But, I don't think I do want to. I'm just saying, the idea isn't entirely unappetizing. And…" I decidedly stopped myself.
“And what?”
“And… I could probably even squeeze an essay or two out of the experience. First-hand journalism, that.”
At this, Alyssa found the time to remark on it as an excellent idea between her frantic scribbles.
She now seemed entirely entertained by this entire situation. "Look, I wasn't really planning on doing this much anymore, because Carter's being a douche about the whole thing, but... I mean, if I do, why not? Every time I mention the whole underground culture you get all perky about it. What have you got to lose?" She had a look of anxiousness all about her and it unsettled me some.
"It's a dangerous situation," I said. "All sorts of people, drugs – lots of drugs... it's just, it's risky. One doesn't go into it entirely unprepared. Let's not pretend there's nothing to lose."
She sighed at this, rolling her eyes. "Nobody ends up dead after a night out with these people. Have a few regrets? Yeah, maybe,” she admitted, shrugging her shoulders. “Assuming they remember enough to regret anything. But nobody ever ODs or anything. It's... basically safe. It's entirely out of the Pete Comfort Zone, I'll grant you that, but it's pretty safe, really."
I sighed. I wasn't entirely pleased with the validity of her argument. These sorts of things weren't safe, and they really, really weren't legal. She just said herself that she thought it was too easy to get dragged into the whole lifestyle that some of those people have. I imagined most of her newfound enthusiasm came solely from the fact that she would have really enjoyed seeing me amongst these people, just watching everything I hold dear – every decency of civilized society, ever necessary taboo, every legality – unravel before me.
But there was inarguably the sound point that every time she brought this up, I said the same thing. It interested me in the same way that everything interested me: I was curious about it from a nice, safe distance. Except that when we were dealing with this, it was an actual experience. A supposedly near-religious one at that, the effects of immersing oneself in a culture that thrived beneath modern society and functioned primarily highly drugged was like stepping into a foreign country and a consciousness-altering world at the same time. It was not something that could really be appreciated from a distance.
It presented a situation that had no choice but to tickle my curiosity. Take any good American cubicle-worker and present him with the ability to, with a one-hundred percent guarantee of safety and anonymity, participate in such a culture for just one day? The vast majority of them will take you up on the offer. It was the anonymity and safety that sealed the deal.
Sure, Sadie went to these things pretty regularly. Her semi-boyfriend, doubly so. But they had the sort of reputations and personalities where that's what you'd expect from them. They were known as being exactly who they were, and they weren't the kind of people particularly concerned with 'safety'. I, conversely, kept a low but scholarly profile and had every concern about a healthy wellbeing that one person might possibly have. And yet, here I sat, deeply searching the well of my thoughts in hopes to find a very good excuse not to accept the offer outside of ‘but something bad might happen!’.
"Look," she said. "Maybe this weekend, I don't really know. As long as it’s not going to be a full night affair — one of those rave-to-rave-to-party-to-makeshift-rave-to-party things, I'll let you know. You're always welcome to come if you want, babe, you know that. But I won't get all pissy about it."
"Well," I said. "Thanks. I mean, I appreciate the offer. But... that's not the sort of thing I can possibly accept on a whim, yeah?"
She nodded. "Of course not, Sir Peter, esquire. One must keep things proper." I bet she knew it sounded stupid, but the mocking basically functioned as well as it needed to.
I played it off with a smirk. I was half-way through responding with the word 'Indeededly', pleased with the slightly lightened mood, when Ross exploded with a huffed, "Hah!" We both turned our heads and he glanced up at us.
"You tell the bastard," Sadie smiled.
"Oh, I did! I goddamn right well sure di— what? No! Oh god, no. God."
"What?" I said.
He began to reply before I even finished the word. "Some fucking... ass! Shitting Texan of a bitch!"
My phone buzzed and Sadie's chimed at the same time.
NEW TEXT MESSAGE
FROM Mark
— This message comes to you from the newest conservative commenter on Ross's blog. LOL
We both laughed damn hard.
***
Bzzzzzz.
Bzzzzzz.
Bzzzzzz.
Sunshine through my window. The light of the waking world upon me and the warmth and darkness of my blankets reminding me of that opportunity to lock it all away and return to the world of the dreaming.
Bzzzzzz.
Bzzzzzz.
My phone, I realized.
Bzzzzzz.
I reached up a desperate, lanky arm to the computer desk and grabbed my phone from it and quickly pressed the main button to stop it from vibrating. I groaned at the light of the phone screen.
NEW TEXT MESSAGE
FROM Sadie
— Hey. Apparently some thing downtown tonight. Come on, don't be a pussy, come with us?
It was too early to be presented with such a prospect. The night seemed ages away, of course it was reasonable to my sluggish morning brain. But in a few hours, I was not going to be interested in this idea one bit. I exited out of the text and dropped the phone onto my bed and stuffed my head into the pillows.
No, thought had come to me too thoroughly now. The dream state had faded. I was awake for the day. I sighed and sat up in bed. My room looked a mess, I had two classes today, and I was awfully hungry. I had plenty to take care of before I had to even worry about responding to that. And I knew myself damn well enough — come the evening, I was going to be entirely convinced that it was an awful idea. No worries, I thought to myself, and went off to face the day.
2:33 PM, in class.
NEW TEXT MESSAGE
FROM Sadie
— Talk to me, damn it.
Attached was a picture of her making an angry face and pointing at the phone's camera lens. I smirked.
COMPOSE TEXT
TO Sadie
— We'll talk later.
I went through class and got a late lunch around three, then stumbled back to the apartment. Ross was there, on the desktop. Mark was in the living room, watching some sort of real life murder mystery television show.
"Salutations and a warm welcome to you, enterer of this abode," Mark said fancifully, not looking back to see who it was.
"Yo," I said, setting down my laptop on the counter and walking to the fridge for a drink.
Bzzzzzz.
Bzzzzzz.
INCOMING CALL – Sadie
I hesitated a moment, then decided to answer. I regretted it before she said a word. I imagined I would have felt the same way if I chose not to answer.
"It's later," she said.
"Your perception of the fluidity of time never ceases to bewilder me. What's your secret?"
"Women's intuition," she responded flatly. "Come on, you gonna come? We'll leave at like, seven or eight."
"Eurrrrrrgh," I whined in a guttural, vomiting sort of noise.
She huffed. "Come on, ya' douche! It's not even going to be a big deal tonight, just sort of a little thing. Well, relatively. We'll be home before two, probably. Definitely not an all night affair, I promise. This is, like, the perfect friggin' opportunity for you to tag along."
"Raahhh," I said with less vigor than the last time. She yet again had a valid point — damn her for it.
"That's a yes, right? You're coming?"
I glanced over to Mark, who sat slouched unenthusaistically. The house was empty and boring. I had plenty of things I could and should do, but nothing seemed to jump out at me as a great excuse. “You’ve asked me this before,” I said. “I’ve had plenty of chances and I’ve never gone. Why would now be different?”
"Please!" she said in a sort of adorable tone. "You'll have fun, I promise. You can even bring a notebook, journalist-boy!"
It might have been my innate desire to respond to that notebook line in a witty and sarcastic way that made me say what I then said — whatever it was, it even caught me off guard. "I can? I can bring a notebook? My very own? Well, in that case, of course!" My tone was laced with enough sarcasm to not be necessarily taken seriously, but a lump formed in my throat as soon as I uttered it.
"Dude! Yes! Hell yes!" she said, ignoring any possible sarcastic implications like the foulest plague. "Seven thirty, we'll pick you up! Ahh!” she squealed. “Awesome!"
And the phone clicked dead.
Son of a bitch, I thought. Son of a bitch.
Mark slowly turned his head at me, his brow raised, his eyes wide. "I'm just gonna take a shot in the dark here... but did you by any chance just—"
"Yeah," I said in a dull, flat voice, staring blankly at my phone's home screen as the 'CALL ENDED' bubble dissolved. "I'm pretty sure I just did. She'll be here at seven thirty...”
"Dude."
"I know."
"Don't take any pills. Keep at ten foot radius from all naked people. Always have your towel handy."
I nodded firmly, still a bit too bewildered to smile. "Sound advice, chief."
He grinned at me in a menacing sort of way. "I'm gonna bet you'll have a great time, too. You're gonna come home all, 'fuck yeah, that was sweet'. Just watch." He entertained himself with a few more things I might say upon returning, thrilled and shocked by the world I’d been missing.
I took a bottle of water out of the fridge and sat down on the opposite side of the couch. "There are numerous possibilities, here," I said. "But me finding it seriously enjoyable is barely one of them. At the least, I might not be repulsed by the affair,” I said, offering it as much as I could. “But I absolutely expect to be underwhelmed. All of the accounts I've heard have come from people who were on a lot of drugs. Spin a laser pointer around and they'd think they were beholding Jesus in the flesh, yeah?"
He nodded firmly in agreement. "Oh, don't get me wrong, they're some crazy fuckers. But they're crazy fuckers who have a good time. If Kristi wasn't so against that sort of thing, I'd probably go. Just to see what the whole mess is about."
"That's the only reason I'm going," I declared. "To see what the mess is about. To maybe report about the affair. To… really, to just be rid of this constant and nagging curiosity that comes up every time they mention it."
He gave me a knowing smirk. "Right. Well, be sure to let me know how that works out for you, not being curious anymore. I’m sure you’ll have a lot of luck with that.”
And I sat there for good hour completely ignoring the television and casual chit-chatty remarks Mark made, my thoughts constructing the various unlikely and fictional possibilities of the night ahead. I developed full scenarios in my head, complete with the dialogue and the interactions I'd encounter, my reactions to the sights and sounds of the world ahead of me — my possible disappointment with the facade of it all, my possible indulgence in a world completely foreign to anything I'd ever encountered before.
The possibilities were endless and my entertaining of them in my head was, I knew, silly. And once I'd accepted this fact, my mind stopped wandering so much and just settled on calming myself and keeping my expectations as neutral as possible. As Sadie rightly said, the biggest risk I was taking was stepping out of the 'Pete Comfort Zone' here, and there was absolutely no denying that I was doing such a thing. But what options were there? I'd said yes. I was going. My mind fell back on the various accounts Sadie and a handful of other friends had given me about this sort of thing.
The raves, the parties, the make-shift gatherings in the middle of nowhere, the themed gatherings — all obscure, intriguing, and yet repulsive. There was, without question, an underground world here. People who had no jobs, no lives, no family, who stumbled from party to party and slept from house to house, only to wake up and do it all again. People unrecorded by society. People living in a foreign world right under our noses. The very thought churned something inside of me. I found it horrible and wonderful. This is what the National Geographic reporters must have thought before going off to film cannibalism in India.
Some of it sounded shallow. Bright flashing lights, lots of new-fashioned chemical drugs and loud techno. Typical rave nonsense. But the stories fell into accounts of parties at the houses of drug dealers, massive amounts of all sorts of mind-altering substances, a regular buffet of illegality. Places straight out of Trainspotting — no running water, just old mattresses on the floor, sex and dirt all about. Children, sometimes, running through. Old men sitting in the corners that nobody talks with. A bizarre, strange world where morality crumbled into only the most primitive desires and often it seemed that the accounts were laced with what could only be hallucinations or false memories in the most fantastical urban settings one could fathom might actually exist.
Sadie described an account once not long before she decided she was doing this sort of thing much less than she had been. She'd been completely ill after a night of it all, sick to her stomach and dizzy and seeing static wherever she looked. A gloomy, foggy world around her. And she was taken in a van to somewhere deep in the woods — a massive bonfire lit there. The crowds of naked people dancing around it. And she could swear, just before she asked to leave, that someone willingly leapt into the flames and lay there, never coming out. Just turned and dove in. And everyone around cheered. The smoothness, the unflinching resolve, scratched at something in the very core of her.
She got choked up just telling me the story. She hoped it was a bad trip. She didn't want to think it was real. But the very fact that it might have been bothered her deeply. It was, without a doubt in my mind, a contributing factor to her decision not to get too hooked in this whole lifestyle. Carter, her boyfriend, was DJ and an avid member of the entire culture — maybe a little too much for her taste even. Still, he seemed capable of pulling himself out of it. He wasn't one of the people who lived in the world.
I was afraid. There was no arguing that I was afraid. But ultimately, if even Carter wasn't addicted to the lifestyle, I wasn't going to be. But it was the unknown. I had little idea of what to expect — so many bizarrely different accounts, some good, some bad. Sadie wouldn't let me get in too much shit. And ultimately, it was just one night. A few hours. Not so much could happen in just a few hours, I decided.
After all, she said it was a small thing, and downtown. Probably flashy lights and loud music. Probably nothing at all. But would that really suffocate my curiosity? Would that be enough? Seven thirty rolled around like the tolling of the executioner’s bell and, a few minutes later, Sadie knocked excitedly on my door. The questions in my head were unanswerable for now, and that was how it was. Just stay calm, I thought.
***
"Carter."
"Hey, man! What's happening?"
I've always hated that question. Responding is so awkward. "Er, not much. Going to this... with you guys."
"Gonna be great. The perfect sort of thing for a beginner, this one. Not too flashy, but not too mellow. You'll get a good feel of things."
I hesitantly replied. "Yeah."
Sadie started the car, the soft vibration of the turning engine.
"So," I said after a few moments of silence as we pulled onto the main road. "What, uh, exactly is this?" I realized an instant later that it probably wasn't a very clear inquiry and elaborated. "You know, what's the terminology for it? Is it a 'rave' per-se? Or what?"
Carter scratched his stubbly face. "Oh, yeah yeah," he said. "This is definitely a rave. You have to write that down or something?" His tone lacked any rudeness or sarcasm at all. As though Sadie had explained to him very genuinely that I was a journalism major and that this was a matter of academia.
"No," I sighed. "I'm not writing anything down. I'm just interested in... you know. What exactly this is going to be."
He nodded rhythmically. "Yeah, just relax, man. It'll be cool, you'll see."
Relaxing was not on my agenda. I shook my legs up and down in the back seat and scratched my fingers along my jeans as my eyes traced the streetlights far out of the window. Darkness was just starting to creep over the horizon and the night felt cold and long and that we were just at the very start of it all. I felt very awake and agile, but not noticeably uncomfortable. Calmed, but yet by no means relaxed. I was tense without consciously being tensed, and Carter seemed to sense it.
"Just breathe and let it happen," he said after a few minutes of silence. I didn't feel a need to respond.
Within a few minutes, the city lights began to glow ahead like the distant glimmer of a Christmas tree nestled in the evening. The city's great buildings loomed over us, their artificial light flooding the city with a slight, fuzzy glow. I wondered where, in the midst of the office buildings, the banks, and the museums, might be buried some building that could possibly contain within it anything like what I had been described so many times. I anticipated bright lights — blazing blues and greens and lasers swarming about. And far too much noise. And nothing but that. This would be the industrial sort. The urban teenage aspect of the scene. The exact aspect about which I had the very least interest.
We parked on the third deck of a parking garage, took the elevator down, and walked another four blocks down the street, passing every sort of unsavory night dweller of downtown. Across the traffic, I saw a distinct sign — brightly glowing neon letters: UP HOUSE
Carter pointed to it.
"Up House?" I followed them across traffic, feeling slightly awkward always trailing behind the two.
"Yeah," Sadie stated simply and gave a brief wave to a man in a black collared shirt that stood outside. He nodded to her, keeping a formal and uncomfortable looking stance. We showed him our IDs, he nodded and spoke softly, 'go on' to each of us. They waited just inside for me. Already, from the moment we opened the first door, I felt the bass. The entire building had a pulse running through it. Both of them looked suddenly perky and lit up by the whole affair. I remained tensely, calmly uncomfortable.
As we walked down a peculiarly angled hallway, the music grew gradually louder and, at the end, where yet another black-shirted and broad-chested man stood, a rainbow of lights cast shadows over him.
Turning through the doorway was like facing the sun at first glance. The darkness of the interior and the night outside contrasted horribly with the massive lights — pivoting, bright green strobes with foot-wide bulbs lined the ceiling. Reds and blues were on the far wall. A plethora of white, foggy looking lamps shot from behind us. And between them all, an ocean of people, packed shoulder-to-shoulder in a huge, trapezoid-shaped dance floor, with slightly raised panels on either side where only a few tables sat — largely unoccupied, at least, relative to the crowd below.
It reeked of some combination of the pseudo-fog, cigarettes, pot, and sweat. The music was just barely not loud enough to hurt my ears, but easily loud enough to make any reasonable vocal communication a serious chore as I soon found out, Sadie mouthing completely incomprehensible words to me. I just shook my head and shouted as loudly as I comfortably could, "I can't hear you! I can't hear you!" until she gave up. Soon enough, following their lead, we stood at the tapering edge of the massive pool of people.
A girl ran past me, her face thick with make-up, her hair a bright violet. She dragged behind her another girl, slightly smaller and thinner, who wore nothing but a very small pair of golden shorts, tall high heels, and two pieces of duct tape over her breasts. Before my brain had a fair chance to process the sights and sounds, Sadie grabbed me by the forearm and plunged me into the belly of the beast.
Within an instant, I was in contact with dozens of people, at any time the sweat of at least three strangers rubbing against me. Half of the crowd was half-naked and half of the dressed-half were wearing what could only be called 'costumes'. Skin-tight pink jumpsuits. Entire outfits illuminated by hundreds of glowsticks. One man just wore a diaper. Immediately I felt very hot — the body heat of every individual in the building condensing into this cramped area. Breathing was laborious. Traversing the corridor we carved through the crowd, I struggled to keep up, Sadie's grip on my arm slipping from time to time.
Finally, we appeared to have arrived at wherever it was we had been going to in the first place. The music was even louder here, not just the bass penetrating, but every second of the incredibly repetitive electronic noise just seeming louder than the last. It could only be described as 'very uncomfortable' — but at least the crowd wasn't quite as dense here on the outskirts of the mass.
Carter appeared to be talking to somebody who stood leaned against the wall, wearing of all things, a very large and fluffy winter hat. I couldn't make out a single word — for all I knew, they weren't audibly projecting any sounds at all. Even their lips were difficult to read in the smoky rainbow haze that settled over the world. Sadie stood watching them talk as though she understood them. I was baffled. I was overwhelmed and yet condensed. I didn't feel like I was exploding, I felt like I was imploding. I felt not restless, but exhausted. Two minutes into the building and I was nearing my tolerance threshold.
Carter said something to the man, then turned to me. They both stared at me, as though awaiting a response to a question that was never asked.
"What?!" I shouted.
Carter mouthed something at me, but in doing so turned back for an instant. By his mouth, it looked like he said something that started with a 'buh' or 'puh' sound. But who knew. It was entirely lost.
"I can't hear you!" I whined, pointing to my ears and shaking my head.
Looking somewhat disgruntled, he walked over to me and leaned in to my ear. At the sound of his voice, I jumped back. I don't think he understood the concept of sound very well, because he overwhelmed the volume so terribly that my left ear rang with a sharp, long note. He tried again. I made out something vaguely, but still had to shout 'what?'
This went on four times before finally it was adequately explained that the man with whom Carter was talking thought I might want something to take the edge off, sensing my discomfort. Politely responding with a 'no, thanks' in this situation seemed almost entirely impossible. I'd already wasted the poor man's time in my horrible struggle to even understand what was being said, and there was no way that loudly shouted 'thanks' would get through after the 'no'. I felt rude and out of place.
"No," I just said. "Sorry but I don't think I should."
"What?"
"I don't think I should!"
"What?"
"I don't think! That I should!"
"You should?" Bizarrely, he seemed to have as much trouble understanding me as I had understanding him, and yet he had no trouble speaking with the other man.
"No!" I just said. "No!" And there was the unintentional rudeness.
He didn't look put off, thankfully. He just hit me on the shoulder and smirked. He turned back to the man in the hat and handed over some money and got handed something in return, though I didn't see exactly what. A few seconds later, the man in the hat, looking somewhat paranoid, slipped away. Carter shoved the whatever-it-was into his pocket and, fiddling around inside it with his hand, pulled out something small and bright yellow and slipped it into his mouth.
Sadie looked at me, somewhat nervously, though I couldn't be entirely sure why. Did she think I should take one? Did she think I would disapprove? She just looked at me with this odd expression on her face. Then Carter nudged her and handed her one and she put it in her mouth.
And he just tilted his head at me. I didn't even think about it, really. I just shook my head and he shrugged.
Sadie leaned in close to my ear. "Relax," she said, her breath hot and damp. "Dance. I won't go far."
Perhaps for the first time, it really hit me that I had no idea what it was I had planned to do here. And I was startled at just how startled I was. I knew I wanted to come, that the culture described interested me. But even in imagining myself at these places, I didn't really imagine myself at them, just around. Now that I was there, what the hell was I going to do? Dance? Take whatever it was they just took? Go stand in the corner and be miserable? Frankly, that sounded the most appealing by a long shot.
By the time I looked back to her, they were gone. Given the density of the crowd, the lights, the smoke... there was no finding them. Won't go far? I thought. Am I supposed to just stay here? There's no way she can see me if I can't see her. How does she know where far is?
I reminded myself just how damn hot I was, a glaze of perspiration over my whole face. I thought back on the triangular platforms above the dance floor on either side and tried to look over the heads of the crowd to see how I might get to those. I shuffled uncomfortably past some people, hopelessly shouting 'excuse me's.
Coming here was a bad idea. There was no way this was not a bad idea.
Stairs. Thank fuck.
I shoved my way around three barely dressed men who appeared less to be dancing and more to be excitedly humping each other. The stairs were a narrow ten steps or so, but it distinguished the area as considerably less densely populated than the dance floor. Another black-shirt stood on top of the stairs and I just nodded at him and walked right past.
The raised area was about a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide and six or seven tables sat within it — two of them occupied, one overoccupied. The back corner, where the triangle tapered to a narrow point, was the most open area in the building, and I beelined. It was strangely comfortable there, relatively at least. I was twenty feet from any person on my level and those below me were noticeably separated. From here, I had a good angle of the place. The music was still as loud as ever, but the lights didn't seem quite so bad. And it was definitely less hot.
I took in a long breath and returned my thoughts to how stupidly I overlooked the entire fact of what I was going to do once I got here. In my earlier considerations of what one of the more rave-like places might be, it was at least a place where I could communicate. I imagined speaking to people there. Being able to hear or see something. This was just a dense clusterfuck of a mess. It wasn't a place designed for what anyone could describe as communication or development or connection. It was a place for people to get together and be hot and sweaty and drugged.
And I knew it would be. Of course I knew it would be. But a small part of me was disappointed nonetheless. A small part of me expected the unexpected — saw the idea of something that possibly lived up to the interesting stories. Then again, the interesting stories were almost never of these places. The interesting stories were in the woods. The interesting stories were the parties in the middle of nowhere. For that matter, why did I even say 'yes' to a downtown rave? This was no sort of place for me. This was no sort of place for me at all.
I should have known. I really should have known. Me. Here. It just doesn’t even make sense at the most fundamental level.
I sat down on one of the plastic chairs for a while. The music bored me — it was horribly repetitive and sounded choppy. I couldn't even revert to sociologist mode and observe behaviors: everyone was a single mess. A glob of human beings all individually doing nothing unique at all. For a brief instant, I allowed myself to think maybe I should have taken whatever it was I was offered — but that thought passed quickly. Who the hell knows where that would have had me end up. Here, at least, I was in control over myself.
As usual. Nothing new. Just a lot louder and more disappointing version of being home.
I sat for about ten minutes, in thought. Turning to the crowd, then away. Noticing the rare and subtle tweaks in that same pulsing beat. Noticing my toe tapping — not enjoying the music, just responding to the only substantial stimulation my mind had. For brief instants I'd get hot again, wipe the perspiration away, and return back to semi-comfort.
I stumbled up after a while and looked around the small divisions that made up this top layer. Hallways out, stairs down, a small section that cut off to the side. Bathrooms would be there. Maybe a bathroom would be a little quieter. Even calmer. It struck me that I was basically just looking for the environment here that was least like actually being here, but I didn't much care anymore. I came, I saw, I was done now. Time to pack up the bags and go home.
Down the end of a wide hallway were two white glowing signs against either wall. As I assumed, one read 'WOMEN' and the other 'MEN'. The music was softer back here, as I'd hoped. I stepped into the men's room, greeted by that characteristic bright, fluorescent glow, the slight smell of urine and the echo of footsteps against the tile walls. Walking around the small turn, a fairly large, empty room sprawled out before me. A single, sharp shade of white, eight urinals, three stalls, some sinks, and a woman sitting against the far wall.
I stared at her for a minute. She was half-hunched and wearing what looked to be a homemade outfit — bits of all different clothing that didn't necessarily go together very well all thrown together: a frilly skirt, a leather bustier, a black long-sleeve shirt, a rainbow fabric belt, and army boots. I wasn't about to just walk over and piss right in from of her. I leaned my head down a bit to get a good look, to see if she was conscious or not. When I did, she looked up at me.
"Er," I stuttered, not really having any words to say but sure that I needed to say something.
"Hey hey," she smiled. Her voice was calm and welcoming.
"Hi," I said. "Uhm… in the... men's... bathroom?"
Her voice was again casual and relaxed. Not crazy-person relaxed either. Genuinely calm. "Yeah," she said. "They told me to come in here here here."
What? Was the women's bathroom closed? It didn't look like it. Did her friends abandon her or something obnoxious like that? If so, she wouldn't be so calm. She did repeat the word ‘here’ three times. Maybe she was retarded.
"Who told you to? Why? It's... the men's room."
She waved at me to come closer. I hesitated but I wasn't sure why. It felt bizarre and I still hadn't made sense of what she said and the haze from my earlier confusion was still lingering. As though I'd walk over to her and suddenly she'd pull a gun and rob me, I just couldn’t bring myself to move.
"Why?" I said.
"I want want you to see see see it," she said.
I only paused for a moment. "You're completely high, aren't you?"
She nodded her head and, from behind the small of her back, pulled out a delicate-looking purple bag with golden trim. "Come come come, see see see," she said. "I might have seen, I might have seen."
I decided there was no harm in entertaining this, her likely as far from sober as possible and me without a single other thing to do. And I was decidedly not going to piss now. I sighed and walked over, perhaps a little paranoid. I looked down at the girl. She was very pretty — she didn't seem to be wearing any make-up at all, but she just looked good. Damn good. Maybe it was the lighting. She looked up at me with deep, brown eyes. "Here," she said, and raised the bag to the extent her arms would reach.
I took it and look it over. 'Crown Royal' it read. It felt like there was something in it, but nothing very heavy at all. I put my finger in the seam and pushed it open. The lighting faintly showed a reflective surface inside and, deciding it was nothing dangerous, I reached in and pulled it out.
It was a tiny small glass bottle with a dropper built into the cap. Almost entirely empty, save perhaps an eighth of a teaspoon of a thin, bright green liquid at the bottom. It was completely unmarked.
"What, uh, is it?" I asked.
She held out her hands in front of her, as though suggesting I sit down.
When the thought came upon me that I heard almost no music and felt much calmer than before, I didn't have to really consider. In here, with the fucked up chick laying on the men's bathroom, was the only place in this building I had any interest in being.
"Open open up your mouth," she said.
"Am I supposed to drink that?" I asked, not going to have myself force-fed anything.
"A single drop for you, for you," she said excitedly. "Open."
Very slowly, I separated my lips about a half an inch. What was I doing? As I did so, she had prepared a single drop of the bright green liquid in the dropper. She reached out with her left hand and, with her thumb and forefinger, pried my mouth open much fuller. She was gentle about it though, and calm. Each time my mind leaned toward considering, 'what the fuck are you letting her give you', it felt comfortable with it. I trusted her.
I trusted the stranger on the bathroom floor.
Whatever this girl was, she was less crazy than the people out there. She was calm, she was sensible. She was a little out of her mind, but she carried with her an aura of contentedness. And if I was going to take any drug — and apparently I was — it was going to be the kind that made me like the girl on the floor.
With my mouth sufficiently open, she tried to grab the tip of my tongue, but I instinctively retracted it into the back of my mouth.
Drop.[/i]
Just beneath my tongue, the cold liquid released a single splash into my mouth. I quickly lowered my tongue but she pressed her finger against the top of it.
"Don't swallow swallow," she said. "For for a while while, don't swallow swallow."
She screwed the lid back on the bottle, put in back in the bag, and set it behind her again. She crossed her legs underneath herself and sat there looking at me with the slightest smile on her face.
I crossed my legs, too. And sat there. And watched her as she watched me. The liquid tingled under my tongue at first, but after a while it became a burn; a burn not like alcohol, but much more irritable, like a hot itch begging to be scratched. I ignored it as best as I could.
I didn't move my legs or my arms for a very long time. I sat completely still: wholly and entirely still. And my legs and arms and face and whole body turned a cool numb — like they were detached from me. I smiled at them. The burning on my tongue began to fade.
These are my hands. These are my legs, I thought, looking down at them. How peculiar. I knew them as mine, I knew my body as mine, but it felt so distant now. Like an object in my control, but distinctly not of my being. The idea that I could use my thoughts to control these foreign possessions was entirely amusing. These arms. This body. This was what I was made of. And it was what I went around with every day but never took the time to really step back and realize was so strange.
Oh Jesus her face.
Her face was just like my hands, I realized in delight, bending my thoughts and contorting her smile.
My thoughts formed her silly expressions.
Her body sat. It sat because my mind sat.
The wall existed like my arms existed. It was still, here, because I was still, here.
Everything was distanced, together. Unattached to me, they were one.
Oh christ, man. Oh christ.
Did I actually take that? Did I actually just take a drug with a woman sitting on the bathroom of the men's room? Was everything blending away? Would the sinks spiral into infinity?
Sadie would never find me here. I am hidden inside the walls.
She's never going to find me. Not here.
She said she'd stay close but she can't.
She can't.
Oh god, not in the walls.
YOU CAN'T STAY CLOSE I'M HIDDEN HERE IN THE WALL AND THE GIRL
Come on, come find me.
Please it’s time now, I don't want you to be lost forever looking for me.
Sadie.
***
"See?"
The girl from the bathroom floor was staring at me. How did she get so close?
A smooth, cool sweat poured over my entire body like a thick shower.
My head echoed and I realized that I was laying flat against the icy bathroom floor. The girl crawled on top of me and stared down. My world settled itself and focused on her. Everything wobbled for a while and then steadied on the foundations it had lost. My head reverberated.
"What happened?" I asked blankly.
She just smiled at me.
"Did I pass out?"
She nodded. "You were only gone gone gone a second. Just one second. One one."
I blinked. Just one second? It felt brief. It felt like maybe it all swarmed me at once and my sense of time had got distorted. And it felt like I'd been gone for hours. I had no idea whether what I'd thought — what I'd felt — was when I was conscious or not. What had I thought, after all?
It escaped me. I knew, for sure, that I'd felt something incredibly foreign. But what it was? That was gone like a foggy dream in the morning.
I slapped my pocked and felt my cell phone. I fumbled with it and looked at the clock.
At the most, I was out for a few minutes. Bathroom floor girl was probably mostly right, not long at all. She crawled off of me slowly, touching me firmly at every possible interval. I decided not to get up just yet.
For now, I'd lay. Just a bit longer. Just to stay in this calm, cool relaxation until I was sure I was ready to move again. And I was not sure that I was ready to move again.
“Just a little while longer.”
Bzzzzzz.
Bzzzzzz.
Bzzzzzz.
INCOMING CALL – Sadie
Bzzzzzz.
"Mmm,” I answered.
"Pete!" I deciphered over the static and distorted roar of noise.
"Bathroom,” I slurred.
"Huh?!"
"Men's. Room.”
"You coming?" she shouted.
I paused for a long while.
“Well? You coming?”
“Come get me.”
She was quiet. Then, in a slightly odd tone, said, "Okay," and hung up.
Minutes passed and I lay there with my eyes shut, thinking about the girl who sat on the bathroom floor and fishing for any memories from the past few minutes. It was all a void and a blur. I remembered her fingers moving around inside my mouth. The bottom of my tongue and the raw bits beneath it had a slight warm burn to them.
I remembered her holding a bag up to me.
"Pete!" Sadie's voice came from behind me. "You okay, babe?"
"Mhm," I hummed.
"What happened?"
For some reason, this was a particularly amusing response to me. I smiled at myself. I sat up against my elbows, my head feeling like a water balloon shaken about. The girl from the floor was gone.
I didn't say anything. The only thing I could do, for right now, was to not say anything. In fact, I felt a deep urge to not speak at all for a very long time. I wanted everyone to go ahead and just move about without asking me questions. I was content just existing for the time being.
"Come on," she said, and offered me a hand. My hand seemed to move slowly and continuously — like a long, fluid movement instead of the jump from one place to another. I was hoisted up and nearly fell over, my head sloshing about stupidly.
"We're getting you into the car, come on."
The hallway was a long, tunnel of a blur. The music got loud and the lights got bright but they were far and it didn't bother me at all. I was guarded by a great empty shell, like I resided only at the very center of my skull.
And soon the night air bit at my skin and we were walking down the sidewalk.
The world is separated.
Somewhere between stepping outside and the sound of my shoes against the sidewalk, Carter had pulled the car up. I was helped, kindly and gently, to lie down in the back. Soft music came on the radio and, looking up and out of the back windshield, I could see the swirling bloom of the night passing around us.
I felt so like my childhood self. Uncannily like the six year old who fell asleep after an amusement park. Distinguishing between a real sensation of that or whether I dreamed of it being so would be impossible, laying in the back of the car for the forty-five minute drive home.
All I knew was that I laid there like a child.
And, in time, fell soundly asleep.
Her voice was silent for a good, long moment. "It changed my life. I watched someone die.”
She paused. “Or I didn't. It doesn't even matter — I saw it, whether it happened or not. It's was a place where real and fake don't really mean anything. What you see is what happened. What you experienced was what you experienced, factuality aside. I can't even remember it without a fog of surrealness around it."
I stared blankly at the wall, my eyes wide.
"I am never, ever, ever going to that place again," she said.
***
We sat there, on two parallel benches. Mike and Ross had laptops open — Mike's emitting the obnoxious sounds of youtubed videos of cats falling from high places, Ross typing with the fury of the whole liberal media. He was without a doubt in the process of another of his epic debates with various conservative bloggers, frantically using terms like ‘neo-anarchy’ and ‘hate agenda’.
Alyssa and I sat side by side, nibbling Subway sandwiches whilst reading books, myself with a copy of Sun Tzu's "Art of War", studying up on military tactics I'd never have any need for besides waging the fictional battles that so often unfolded in my head, Alyssa with a fresh copy of the latest Twilight novel, her intentions to prove once and for all that the book was technically, verifiably, and scientifically an inferior piece of literature to its contemporary urban fantasies.
I must admit, I was in full support of her endeavor and frequently she asked me questions about word choice and dialogue realism. Even when I saw little to no problem, I was sure to bullshit my way into reassuring her that it was absolute trash. She didn't deserve to be tortured by the thought that all literature appreciation was subjective. Not with Twilight. God, no.
The sun was warm overhead, a more-or-less sunny day for October. A variety of insects swarmed about the grass and the flowers that surrounded us and a leaf or two tumbled helplessly from the tree overhead. Fall was slowly making its presence known and the breeze sometimes brought with it that reminding chill that school was once again in full effect and that there was much work to be done. The thought nagged me — I was reading, dammit, this was not the time to remember that reality and work existed.
16. But when the army is restless and distrustful, trouble is sure to come from the other feudal princes. This is simply bringing anarchy into the army, and flinging victory away.
My interest faded, thoughts of schoolwork encroaching on my creativity and shoving it to the back of my skull until I might find myself less inclined toward the real obligations again. Alyssa highlighted a bit of sentence and scribbled furious footnotes. Ross grimaced angrily as he typed. Mark had a big, stupid smile plastered across his face. The day was young and pretty and I took another bite of my sandwich.
"Hey, kids," Sadie said, waltzing over with a cool stride.
"Yo," Alyssa and I said simultaneously. Mark mumbled a ‘hi’ between quiet giggles.
"What's our loyal band of ragtag adventurers up to today?" Sadie said, taking a seat across from us.
"Today," I said, bookmarking and closing Sun Tzu's text, "we find our epic heroes in a conquest against the nasty republican bloggers." I took another bite and continued a bit muffled. "We're armed with only the deliciousness of our sandwiches and our utter dedication to ridding the world of all conflicting beliefs. Can we possibly defeat Glenn Beck's Army dot com once and for all?” I asked in a dramatic tone. “Is there a hair in Alyssa's sandwich? Is Ross hearing a single word I'm saying? Stay tuned."
Sadie smiled widely at me and turned to Ross. He heard nothing. Shrugging she turned back to Alyssa and stifled a giggle as she scanned her sandwich for an invasive hair.
"How about you?" I asked.
Sadie took in a long breath and sat back. "Enjoying the lovely day. Procrastinating. Ignoring a plethora of text messages from a desperate, desperate little man. The usual."
"Lovely," I said. "Who is it this time?"
"Carter. Same ol’.”
"Aw, really? He seems nice. Maybe a little... energetic, but nice." I couldn't claim to have really gotten a good chance to meet the fellow, but from our few encounters, he seemed reasonable enough. Far more decent than most of the people Sadie associated herself with outside of our Band of Adventurers.
"He's..." her mouth opened and closed a few times, searching for the right wording.” He's just really, really into the whole club scene and all. Raves and all that, y'know?"
I popped the final bite into my mouth and crinkled the paper up. "I thought you were into all that, now?"
"I am! Was! Am! Kind of," she sloppily confirmed. "It's just, he's really into it. I mean, it's his life. And I'm not sure I can take it. It's... overwhelming. It's easy to get lost there. It drags you in."
“Drags you in,” I repeated with a slight sarcasm.
“It does!” she snarled. “These people… they’re living a life we can’t even imagine. It’s nothing like anything… here, at all. It’s really easy to think: yeah, fuck it, I’m going to live my life this way. But you obviously can’t let yourself.” Her expression turned a little worrisome, as though something inside her knotted up uncomfortably.
I half-smiled. "You know," I said. "The descriptions of this whole culture are always so... spiritual. You describe it like a drug in and of itself. Like there's some whole world unfolding outside of our world that operates in some mysterious way. I know you probably don't mean to, but you make it seem so magnificently foreign."
She stared for a bit, like she didn't entirely understand what I meant, squinting her blue eyes, showing off a thick, dark eyeshadow. "Well, I mean, it is foreign. It's nothing like college and restaurants and the park. It's an entirely different universe. I mean, I only went to a few of these things and got out pretty quickly when I did... but it's just... it's different. It's weird. And I can't really describe it. And not just because I was wasted.”
I was intrigued in it all in the same way that I was intrigued about what it might feel like to kill someone. It was a dangerous thought — just thinking it was risky — but it was something I couldn't help but be interested by. It was so peculiar, so outside of everything I understood, the sort of thing you told yourself that if you were going to die tomorrow, you'd have to see. But of course, I wasn't going to die tomorrow.
I leaned back. "Part of me thinks that it's just a bunch of completely wasted and sweat-covered teenagers who took too much ecstasy. Part of me is actually intrigued at this… sort of subcultural existence you describe. Part of me is bothered by the part of me that's interested." I frequently gave the benefit of the doubt to the subjectivity of description. After all, if it weren’t for the otherworldly descriptions of the scenarios, my interest would be minimal at best.
She smiled. "Always the sociologist! Going to go in there thinking that it's a field study for some exotic tribal culture. Take a notebook with you and analyze the customs. Bring in a film crew and narrate the whole thing afterwards Attenborough-style." She seemed extremely amused by the entire prospect. At least she didn’t look put off anymore.
"Well!" I said somewhat defensively. "It interests me! I won't pretend it doesn't. I can't, for the life of me, see myself at such a place... but I'd like to, you know, send in a little controllable robot to videotape the entire affair. To communicate with the various people who find themselves attending such a thing. That'd be something."
Her palm and forehead collided. "Jesus, Pete."
"What?" I whined. "I'd just... it's weird. And it's different. And I'd like to see what it's all about, from a, yes, largely scientific standpoint.”
"This is the third time you've said this,” she reminded me.
"I know."
"And I'm going to say the same thing for a third time."
"I know!"
"You can come to one if you want to."
"I know, I know!”
Ever since Sadie and Carter got together, ever since she’d started this – and a few other friends, too – these stories came in. Bizarre, fantastical stories about the experiences as these things. I sure as hell wasn’t getting myself on any drugs or dancing or working myself into some crazy orgy of strangers, but… theoretically? Culturally? Every time it caught me up with an unmistakable wave of intrigue.
“I know,” I said again. “But, I don't think I do want to. I'm just saying, the idea isn't entirely unappetizing. And…" I decidedly stopped myself.
“And what?”
“And… I could probably even squeeze an essay or two out of the experience. First-hand journalism, that.”
At this, Alyssa found the time to remark on it as an excellent idea between her frantic scribbles.
She now seemed entirely entertained by this entire situation. "Look, I wasn't really planning on doing this much anymore, because Carter's being a douche about the whole thing, but... I mean, if I do, why not? Every time I mention the whole underground culture you get all perky about it. What have you got to lose?" She had a look of anxiousness all about her and it unsettled me some.
"It's a dangerous situation," I said. "All sorts of people, drugs – lots of drugs... it's just, it's risky. One doesn't go into it entirely unprepared. Let's not pretend there's nothing to lose."
She sighed at this, rolling her eyes. "Nobody ends up dead after a night out with these people. Have a few regrets? Yeah, maybe,” she admitted, shrugging her shoulders. “Assuming they remember enough to regret anything. But nobody ever ODs or anything. It's... basically safe. It's entirely out of the Pete Comfort Zone, I'll grant you that, but it's pretty safe, really."
I sighed. I wasn't entirely pleased with the validity of her argument. These sorts of things weren't safe, and they really, really weren't legal. She just said herself that she thought it was too easy to get dragged into the whole lifestyle that some of those people have. I imagined most of her newfound enthusiasm came solely from the fact that she would have really enjoyed seeing me amongst these people, just watching everything I hold dear – every decency of civilized society, ever necessary taboo, every legality – unravel before me.
But there was inarguably the sound point that every time she brought this up, I said the same thing. It interested me in the same way that everything interested me: I was curious about it from a nice, safe distance. Except that when we were dealing with this, it was an actual experience. A supposedly near-religious one at that, the effects of immersing oneself in a culture that thrived beneath modern society and functioned primarily highly drugged was like stepping into a foreign country and a consciousness-altering world at the same time. It was not something that could really be appreciated from a distance.
It presented a situation that had no choice but to tickle my curiosity. Take any good American cubicle-worker and present him with the ability to, with a one-hundred percent guarantee of safety and anonymity, participate in such a culture for just one day? The vast majority of them will take you up on the offer. It was the anonymity and safety that sealed the deal.
Sure, Sadie went to these things pretty regularly. Her semi-boyfriend, doubly so. But they had the sort of reputations and personalities where that's what you'd expect from them. They were known as being exactly who they were, and they weren't the kind of people particularly concerned with 'safety'. I, conversely, kept a low but scholarly profile and had every concern about a healthy wellbeing that one person might possibly have. And yet, here I sat, deeply searching the well of my thoughts in hopes to find a very good excuse not to accept the offer outside of ‘but something bad might happen!’.
"Look," she said. "Maybe this weekend, I don't really know. As long as it’s not going to be a full night affair — one of those rave-to-rave-to-party-to-makeshift-rave-to-party things, I'll let you know. You're always welcome to come if you want, babe, you know that. But I won't get all pissy about it."
"Well," I said. "Thanks. I mean, I appreciate the offer. But... that's not the sort of thing I can possibly accept on a whim, yeah?"
She nodded. "Of course not, Sir Peter, esquire. One must keep things proper." I bet she knew it sounded stupid, but the mocking basically functioned as well as it needed to.
I played it off with a smirk. I was half-way through responding with the word 'Indeededly', pleased with the slightly lightened mood, when Ross exploded with a huffed, "Hah!" We both turned our heads and he glanced up at us.
"You tell the bastard," Sadie smiled.
"Oh, I did! I goddamn right well sure di— what? No! Oh god, no. God."
"What?" I said.
He began to reply before I even finished the word. "Some fucking... ass! Shitting Texan of a bitch!"
My phone buzzed and Sadie's chimed at the same time.
NEW TEXT MESSAGE
FROM Mark
— This message comes to you from the newest conservative commenter on Ross's blog. LOL
We both laughed damn hard.
***
Bzzzzzz.
Bzzzzzz.
Bzzzzzz.
Sunshine through my window. The light of the waking world upon me and the warmth and darkness of my blankets reminding me of that opportunity to lock it all away and return to the world of the dreaming.
Bzzzzzz.
Bzzzzzz.
My phone, I realized.
Bzzzzzz.
I reached up a desperate, lanky arm to the computer desk and grabbed my phone from it and quickly pressed the main button to stop it from vibrating. I groaned at the light of the phone screen.
NEW TEXT MESSAGE
FROM Sadie
— Hey. Apparently some thing downtown tonight. Come on, don't be a pussy, come with us?
It was too early to be presented with such a prospect. The night seemed ages away, of course it was reasonable to my sluggish morning brain. But in a few hours, I was not going to be interested in this idea one bit. I exited out of the text and dropped the phone onto my bed and stuffed my head into the pillows.
No, thought had come to me too thoroughly now. The dream state had faded. I was awake for the day. I sighed and sat up in bed. My room looked a mess, I had two classes today, and I was awfully hungry. I had plenty to take care of before I had to even worry about responding to that. And I knew myself damn well enough — come the evening, I was going to be entirely convinced that it was an awful idea. No worries, I thought to myself, and went off to face the day.
2:33 PM, in class.
NEW TEXT MESSAGE
FROM Sadie
— Talk to me, damn it.
Attached was a picture of her making an angry face and pointing at the phone's camera lens. I smirked.
COMPOSE TEXT
TO Sadie
— We'll talk later.
I went through class and got a late lunch around three, then stumbled back to the apartment. Ross was there, on the desktop. Mark was in the living room, watching some sort of real life murder mystery television show.
"Salutations and a warm welcome to you, enterer of this abode," Mark said fancifully, not looking back to see who it was.
"Yo," I said, setting down my laptop on the counter and walking to the fridge for a drink.
Bzzzzzz.
Bzzzzzz.
INCOMING CALL – Sadie
I hesitated a moment, then decided to answer. I regretted it before she said a word. I imagined I would have felt the same way if I chose not to answer.
"It's later," she said.
"Your perception of the fluidity of time never ceases to bewilder me. What's your secret?"
"Women's intuition," she responded flatly. "Come on, you gonna come? We'll leave at like, seven or eight."
"Eurrrrrrgh," I whined in a guttural, vomiting sort of noise.
She huffed. "Come on, ya' douche! It's not even going to be a big deal tonight, just sort of a little thing. Well, relatively. We'll be home before two, probably. Definitely not an all night affair, I promise. This is, like, the perfect friggin' opportunity for you to tag along."
"Raahhh," I said with less vigor than the last time. She yet again had a valid point — damn her for it.
"That's a yes, right? You're coming?"
I glanced over to Mark, who sat slouched unenthusaistically. The house was empty and boring. I had plenty of things I could and should do, but nothing seemed to jump out at me as a great excuse. “You’ve asked me this before,” I said. “I’ve had plenty of chances and I’ve never gone. Why would now be different?”
"Please!" she said in a sort of adorable tone. "You'll have fun, I promise. You can even bring a notebook, journalist-boy!"
It might have been my innate desire to respond to that notebook line in a witty and sarcastic way that made me say what I then said — whatever it was, it even caught me off guard. "I can? I can bring a notebook? My very own? Well, in that case, of course!" My tone was laced with enough sarcasm to not be necessarily taken seriously, but a lump formed in my throat as soon as I uttered it.
"Dude! Yes! Hell yes!" she said, ignoring any possible sarcastic implications like the foulest plague. "Seven thirty, we'll pick you up! Ahh!” she squealed. “Awesome!"
And the phone clicked dead.
Son of a bitch, I thought. Son of a bitch.
Mark slowly turned his head at me, his brow raised, his eyes wide. "I'm just gonna take a shot in the dark here... but did you by any chance just—"
"Yeah," I said in a dull, flat voice, staring blankly at my phone's home screen as the 'CALL ENDED' bubble dissolved. "I'm pretty sure I just did. She'll be here at seven thirty...”
"Dude."
"I know."
"Don't take any pills. Keep at ten foot radius from all naked people. Always have your towel handy."
I nodded firmly, still a bit too bewildered to smile. "Sound advice, chief."
He grinned at me in a menacing sort of way. "I'm gonna bet you'll have a great time, too. You're gonna come home all, 'fuck yeah, that was sweet'. Just watch." He entertained himself with a few more things I might say upon returning, thrilled and shocked by the world I’d been missing.
I took a bottle of water out of the fridge and sat down on the opposite side of the couch. "There are numerous possibilities, here," I said. "But me finding it seriously enjoyable is barely one of them. At the least, I might not be repulsed by the affair,” I said, offering it as much as I could. “But I absolutely expect to be underwhelmed. All of the accounts I've heard have come from people who were on a lot of drugs. Spin a laser pointer around and they'd think they were beholding Jesus in the flesh, yeah?"
He nodded firmly in agreement. "Oh, don't get me wrong, they're some crazy fuckers. But they're crazy fuckers who have a good time. If Kristi wasn't so against that sort of thing, I'd probably go. Just to see what the whole mess is about."
"That's the only reason I'm going," I declared. "To see what the mess is about. To maybe report about the affair. To… really, to just be rid of this constant and nagging curiosity that comes up every time they mention it."
He gave me a knowing smirk. "Right. Well, be sure to let me know how that works out for you, not being curious anymore. I’m sure you’ll have a lot of luck with that.”
And I sat there for good hour completely ignoring the television and casual chit-chatty remarks Mark made, my thoughts constructing the various unlikely and fictional possibilities of the night ahead. I developed full scenarios in my head, complete with the dialogue and the interactions I'd encounter, my reactions to the sights and sounds of the world ahead of me — my possible disappointment with the facade of it all, my possible indulgence in a world completely foreign to anything I'd ever encountered before.
The possibilities were endless and my entertaining of them in my head was, I knew, silly. And once I'd accepted this fact, my mind stopped wandering so much and just settled on calming myself and keeping my expectations as neutral as possible. As Sadie rightly said, the biggest risk I was taking was stepping out of the 'Pete Comfort Zone' here, and there was absolutely no denying that I was doing such a thing. But what options were there? I'd said yes. I was going. My mind fell back on the various accounts Sadie and a handful of other friends had given me about this sort of thing.
The raves, the parties, the make-shift gatherings in the middle of nowhere, the themed gatherings — all obscure, intriguing, and yet repulsive. There was, without question, an underground world here. People who had no jobs, no lives, no family, who stumbled from party to party and slept from house to house, only to wake up and do it all again. People unrecorded by society. People living in a foreign world right under our noses. The very thought churned something inside of me. I found it horrible and wonderful. This is what the National Geographic reporters must have thought before going off to film cannibalism in India.
Some of it sounded shallow. Bright flashing lights, lots of new-fashioned chemical drugs and loud techno. Typical rave nonsense. But the stories fell into accounts of parties at the houses of drug dealers, massive amounts of all sorts of mind-altering substances, a regular buffet of illegality. Places straight out of Trainspotting — no running water, just old mattresses on the floor, sex and dirt all about. Children, sometimes, running through. Old men sitting in the corners that nobody talks with. A bizarre, strange world where morality crumbled into only the most primitive desires and often it seemed that the accounts were laced with what could only be hallucinations or false memories in the most fantastical urban settings one could fathom might actually exist.
Sadie described an account once not long before she decided she was doing this sort of thing much less than she had been. She'd been completely ill after a night of it all, sick to her stomach and dizzy and seeing static wherever she looked. A gloomy, foggy world around her. And she was taken in a van to somewhere deep in the woods — a massive bonfire lit there. The crowds of naked people dancing around it. And she could swear, just before she asked to leave, that someone willingly leapt into the flames and lay there, never coming out. Just turned and dove in. And everyone around cheered. The smoothness, the unflinching resolve, scratched at something in the very core of her.
She got choked up just telling me the story. She hoped it was a bad trip. She didn't want to think it was real. But the very fact that it might have been bothered her deeply. It was, without a doubt in my mind, a contributing factor to her decision not to get too hooked in this whole lifestyle. Carter, her boyfriend, was DJ and an avid member of the entire culture — maybe a little too much for her taste even. Still, he seemed capable of pulling himself out of it. He wasn't one of the people who lived in the world.
I was afraid. There was no arguing that I was afraid. But ultimately, if even Carter wasn't addicted to the lifestyle, I wasn't going to be. But it was the unknown. I had little idea of what to expect — so many bizarrely different accounts, some good, some bad. Sadie wouldn't let me get in too much shit. And ultimately, it was just one night. A few hours. Not so much could happen in just a few hours, I decided.
After all, she said it was a small thing, and downtown. Probably flashy lights and loud music. Probably nothing at all. But would that really suffocate my curiosity? Would that be enough? Seven thirty rolled around like the tolling of the executioner’s bell and, a few minutes later, Sadie knocked excitedly on my door. The questions in my head were unanswerable for now, and that was how it was. Just stay calm, I thought.
***
"Carter."
"Hey, man! What's happening?"
I've always hated that question. Responding is so awkward. "Er, not much. Going to this... with you guys."
"Gonna be great. The perfect sort of thing for a beginner, this one. Not too flashy, but not too mellow. You'll get a good feel of things."
I hesitantly replied. "Yeah."
Sadie started the car, the soft vibration of the turning engine.
"So," I said after a few moments of silence as we pulled onto the main road. "What, uh, exactly is this?" I realized an instant later that it probably wasn't a very clear inquiry and elaborated. "You know, what's the terminology for it? Is it a 'rave' per-se? Or what?"
Carter scratched his stubbly face. "Oh, yeah yeah," he said. "This is definitely a rave. You have to write that down or something?" His tone lacked any rudeness or sarcasm at all. As though Sadie had explained to him very genuinely that I was a journalism major and that this was a matter of academia.
"No," I sighed. "I'm not writing anything down. I'm just interested in... you know. What exactly this is going to be."
He nodded rhythmically. "Yeah, just relax, man. It'll be cool, you'll see."
Relaxing was not on my agenda. I shook my legs up and down in the back seat and scratched my fingers along my jeans as my eyes traced the streetlights far out of the window. Darkness was just starting to creep over the horizon and the night felt cold and long and that we were just at the very start of it all. I felt very awake and agile, but not noticeably uncomfortable. Calmed, but yet by no means relaxed. I was tense without consciously being tensed, and Carter seemed to sense it.
"Just breathe and let it happen," he said after a few minutes of silence. I didn't feel a need to respond.
Within a few minutes, the city lights began to glow ahead like the distant glimmer of a Christmas tree nestled in the evening. The city's great buildings loomed over us, their artificial light flooding the city with a slight, fuzzy glow. I wondered where, in the midst of the office buildings, the banks, and the museums, might be buried some building that could possibly contain within it anything like what I had been described so many times. I anticipated bright lights — blazing blues and greens and lasers swarming about. And far too much noise. And nothing but that. This would be the industrial sort. The urban teenage aspect of the scene. The exact aspect about which I had the very least interest.
We parked on the third deck of a parking garage, took the elevator down, and walked another four blocks down the street, passing every sort of unsavory night dweller of downtown. Across the traffic, I saw a distinct sign — brightly glowing neon letters: UP HOUSE
Carter pointed to it.
"Up House?" I followed them across traffic, feeling slightly awkward always trailing behind the two.
"Yeah," Sadie stated simply and gave a brief wave to a man in a black collared shirt that stood outside. He nodded to her, keeping a formal and uncomfortable looking stance. We showed him our IDs, he nodded and spoke softly, 'go on' to each of us. They waited just inside for me. Already, from the moment we opened the first door, I felt the bass. The entire building had a pulse running through it. Both of them looked suddenly perky and lit up by the whole affair. I remained tensely, calmly uncomfortable.
As we walked down a peculiarly angled hallway, the music grew gradually louder and, at the end, where yet another black-shirted and broad-chested man stood, a rainbow of lights cast shadows over him.
Turning through the doorway was like facing the sun at first glance. The darkness of the interior and the night outside contrasted horribly with the massive lights — pivoting, bright green strobes with foot-wide bulbs lined the ceiling. Reds and blues were on the far wall. A plethora of white, foggy looking lamps shot from behind us. And between them all, an ocean of people, packed shoulder-to-shoulder in a huge, trapezoid-shaped dance floor, with slightly raised panels on either side where only a few tables sat — largely unoccupied, at least, relative to the crowd below.
It reeked of some combination of the pseudo-fog, cigarettes, pot, and sweat. The music was just barely not loud enough to hurt my ears, but easily loud enough to make any reasonable vocal communication a serious chore as I soon found out, Sadie mouthing completely incomprehensible words to me. I just shook my head and shouted as loudly as I comfortably could, "I can't hear you! I can't hear you!" until she gave up. Soon enough, following their lead, we stood at the tapering edge of the massive pool of people.
A girl ran past me, her face thick with make-up, her hair a bright violet. She dragged behind her another girl, slightly smaller and thinner, who wore nothing but a very small pair of golden shorts, tall high heels, and two pieces of duct tape over her breasts. Before my brain had a fair chance to process the sights and sounds, Sadie grabbed me by the forearm and plunged me into the belly of the beast.
Within an instant, I was in contact with dozens of people, at any time the sweat of at least three strangers rubbing against me. Half of the crowd was half-naked and half of the dressed-half were wearing what could only be called 'costumes'. Skin-tight pink jumpsuits. Entire outfits illuminated by hundreds of glowsticks. One man just wore a diaper. Immediately I felt very hot — the body heat of every individual in the building condensing into this cramped area. Breathing was laborious. Traversing the corridor we carved through the crowd, I struggled to keep up, Sadie's grip on my arm slipping from time to time.
Finally, we appeared to have arrived at wherever it was we had been going to in the first place. The music was even louder here, not just the bass penetrating, but every second of the incredibly repetitive electronic noise just seeming louder than the last. It could only be described as 'very uncomfortable' — but at least the crowd wasn't quite as dense here on the outskirts of the mass.
Carter appeared to be talking to somebody who stood leaned against the wall, wearing of all things, a very large and fluffy winter hat. I couldn't make out a single word — for all I knew, they weren't audibly projecting any sounds at all. Even their lips were difficult to read in the smoky rainbow haze that settled over the world. Sadie stood watching them talk as though she understood them. I was baffled. I was overwhelmed and yet condensed. I didn't feel like I was exploding, I felt like I was imploding. I felt not restless, but exhausted. Two minutes into the building and I was nearing my tolerance threshold.
Carter said something to the man, then turned to me. They both stared at me, as though awaiting a response to a question that was never asked.
"What?!" I shouted.
Carter mouthed something at me, but in doing so turned back for an instant. By his mouth, it looked like he said something that started with a 'buh' or 'puh' sound. But who knew. It was entirely lost.
"I can't hear you!" I whined, pointing to my ears and shaking my head.
Looking somewhat disgruntled, he walked over to me and leaned in to my ear. At the sound of his voice, I jumped back. I don't think he understood the concept of sound very well, because he overwhelmed the volume so terribly that my left ear rang with a sharp, long note. He tried again. I made out something vaguely, but still had to shout 'what?'
This went on four times before finally it was adequately explained that the man with whom Carter was talking thought I might want something to take the edge off, sensing my discomfort. Politely responding with a 'no, thanks' in this situation seemed almost entirely impossible. I'd already wasted the poor man's time in my horrible struggle to even understand what was being said, and there was no way that loudly shouted 'thanks' would get through after the 'no'. I felt rude and out of place.
"No," I just said. "Sorry but I don't think I should."
"What?"
"I don't think I should!"
"What?"
"I don't think! That I should!"
"You should?" Bizarrely, he seemed to have as much trouble understanding me as I had understanding him, and yet he had no trouble speaking with the other man.
"No!" I just said. "No!" And there was the unintentional rudeness.
He didn't look put off, thankfully. He just hit me on the shoulder and smirked. He turned back to the man in the hat and handed over some money and got handed something in return, though I didn't see exactly what. A few seconds later, the man in the hat, looking somewhat paranoid, slipped away. Carter shoved the whatever-it-was into his pocket and, fiddling around inside it with his hand, pulled out something small and bright yellow and slipped it into his mouth.
Sadie looked at me, somewhat nervously, though I couldn't be entirely sure why. Did she think I should take one? Did she think I would disapprove? She just looked at me with this odd expression on her face. Then Carter nudged her and handed her one and she put it in her mouth.
And he just tilted his head at me. I didn't even think about it, really. I just shook my head and he shrugged.
Sadie leaned in close to my ear. "Relax," she said, her breath hot and damp. "Dance. I won't go far."
Perhaps for the first time, it really hit me that I had no idea what it was I had planned to do here. And I was startled at just how startled I was. I knew I wanted to come, that the culture described interested me. But even in imagining myself at these places, I didn't really imagine myself at them, just around. Now that I was there, what the hell was I going to do? Dance? Take whatever it was they just took? Go stand in the corner and be miserable? Frankly, that sounded the most appealing by a long shot.
By the time I looked back to her, they were gone. Given the density of the crowd, the lights, the smoke... there was no finding them. Won't go far? I thought. Am I supposed to just stay here? There's no way she can see me if I can't see her. How does she know where far is?
I reminded myself just how damn hot I was, a glaze of perspiration over my whole face. I thought back on the triangular platforms above the dance floor on either side and tried to look over the heads of the crowd to see how I might get to those. I shuffled uncomfortably past some people, hopelessly shouting 'excuse me's.
Coming here was a bad idea. There was no way this was not a bad idea.
Stairs. Thank fuck.
I shoved my way around three barely dressed men who appeared less to be dancing and more to be excitedly humping each other. The stairs were a narrow ten steps or so, but it distinguished the area as considerably less densely populated than the dance floor. Another black-shirt stood on top of the stairs and I just nodded at him and walked right past.
The raised area was about a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide and six or seven tables sat within it — two of them occupied, one overoccupied. The back corner, where the triangle tapered to a narrow point, was the most open area in the building, and I beelined. It was strangely comfortable there, relatively at least. I was twenty feet from any person on my level and those below me were noticeably separated. From here, I had a good angle of the place. The music was still as loud as ever, but the lights didn't seem quite so bad. And it was definitely less hot.
I took in a long breath and returned my thoughts to how stupidly I overlooked the entire fact of what I was going to do once I got here. In my earlier considerations of what one of the more rave-like places might be, it was at least a place where I could communicate. I imagined speaking to people there. Being able to hear or see something. This was just a dense clusterfuck of a mess. It wasn't a place designed for what anyone could describe as communication or development or connection. It was a place for people to get together and be hot and sweaty and drugged.
And I knew it would be. Of course I knew it would be. But a small part of me was disappointed nonetheless. A small part of me expected the unexpected — saw the idea of something that possibly lived up to the interesting stories. Then again, the interesting stories were almost never of these places. The interesting stories were in the woods. The interesting stories were the parties in the middle of nowhere. For that matter, why did I even say 'yes' to a downtown rave? This was no sort of place for me. This was no sort of place for me at all.
I should have known. I really should have known. Me. Here. It just doesn’t even make sense at the most fundamental level.
I sat down on one of the plastic chairs for a while. The music bored me — it was horribly repetitive and sounded choppy. I couldn't even revert to sociologist mode and observe behaviors: everyone was a single mess. A glob of human beings all individually doing nothing unique at all. For a brief instant, I allowed myself to think maybe I should have taken whatever it was I was offered — but that thought passed quickly. Who the hell knows where that would have had me end up. Here, at least, I was in control over myself.
As usual. Nothing new. Just a lot louder and more disappointing version of being home.
I sat for about ten minutes, in thought. Turning to the crowd, then away. Noticing the rare and subtle tweaks in that same pulsing beat. Noticing my toe tapping — not enjoying the music, just responding to the only substantial stimulation my mind had. For brief instants I'd get hot again, wipe the perspiration away, and return back to semi-comfort.
I stumbled up after a while and looked around the small divisions that made up this top layer. Hallways out, stairs down, a small section that cut off to the side. Bathrooms would be there. Maybe a bathroom would be a little quieter. Even calmer. It struck me that I was basically just looking for the environment here that was least like actually being here, but I didn't much care anymore. I came, I saw, I was done now. Time to pack up the bags and go home.
Down the end of a wide hallway were two white glowing signs against either wall. As I assumed, one read 'WOMEN' and the other 'MEN'. The music was softer back here, as I'd hoped. I stepped into the men's room, greeted by that characteristic bright, fluorescent glow, the slight smell of urine and the echo of footsteps against the tile walls. Walking around the small turn, a fairly large, empty room sprawled out before me. A single, sharp shade of white, eight urinals, three stalls, some sinks, and a woman sitting against the far wall.
I stared at her for a minute. She was half-hunched and wearing what looked to be a homemade outfit — bits of all different clothing that didn't necessarily go together very well all thrown together: a frilly skirt, a leather bustier, a black long-sleeve shirt, a rainbow fabric belt, and army boots. I wasn't about to just walk over and piss right in from of her. I leaned my head down a bit to get a good look, to see if she was conscious or not. When I did, she looked up at me.
"Er," I stuttered, not really having any words to say but sure that I needed to say something.
"Hey hey," she smiled. Her voice was calm and welcoming.
"Hi," I said. "Uhm… in the... men's... bathroom?"
Her voice was again casual and relaxed. Not crazy-person relaxed either. Genuinely calm. "Yeah," she said. "They told me to come in here here here."
What? Was the women's bathroom closed? It didn't look like it. Did her friends abandon her or something obnoxious like that? If so, she wouldn't be so calm. She did repeat the word ‘here’ three times. Maybe she was retarded.
"Who told you to? Why? It's... the men's room."
She waved at me to come closer. I hesitated but I wasn't sure why. It felt bizarre and I still hadn't made sense of what she said and the haze from my earlier confusion was still lingering. As though I'd walk over to her and suddenly she'd pull a gun and rob me, I just couldn’t bring myself to move.
"Why?" I said.
"I want want you to see see see it," she said.
I only paused for a moment. "You're completely high, aren't you?"
She nodded her head and, from behind the small of her back, pulled out a delicate-looking purple bag with golden trim. "Come come come, see see see," she said. "I might have seen, I might have seen."
I decided there was no harm in entertaining this, her likely as far from sober as possible and me without a single other thing to do. And I was decidedly not going to piss now. I sighed and walked over, perhaps a little paranoid. I looked down at the girl. She was very pretty — she didn't seem to be wearing any make-up at all, but she just looked good. Damn good. Maybe it was the lighting. She looked up at me with deep, brown eyes. "Here," she said, and raised the bag to the extent her arms would reach.
I took it and look it over. 'Crown Royal' it read. It felt like there was something in it, but nothing very heavy at all. I put my finger in the seam and pushed it open. The lighting faintly showed a reflective surface inside and, deciding it was nothing dangerous, I reached in and pulled it out.
It was a tiny small glass bottle with a dropper built into the cap. Almost entirely empty, save perhaps an eighth of a teaspoon of a thin, bright green liquid at the bottom. It was completely unmarked.
"What, uh, is it?" I asked.
She held out her hands in front of her, as though suggesting I sit down.
When the thought came upon me that I heard almost no music and felt much calmer than before, I didn't have to really consider. In here, with the fucked up chick laying on the men's bathroom, was the only place in this building I had any interest in being.
"Open open up your mouth," she said.
"Am I supposed to drink that?" I asked, not going to have myself force-fed anything.
"A single drop for you, for you," she said excitedly. "Open."
Very slowly, I separated my lips about a half an inch. What was I doing? As I did so, she had prepared a single drop of the bright green liquid in the dropper. She reached out with her left hand and, with her thumb and forefinger, pried my mouth open much fuller. She was gentle about it though, and calm. Each time my mind leaned toward considering, 'what the fuck are you letting her give you', it felt comfortable with it. I trusted her.
I trusted the stranger on the bathroom floor.
Whatever this girl was, she was less crazy than the people out there. She was calm, she was sensible. She was a little out of her mind, but she carried with her an aura of contentedness. And if I was going to take any drug — and apparently I was — it was going to be the kind that made me like the girl on the floor.
With my mouth sufficiently open, she tried to grab the tip of my tongue, but I instinctively retracted it into the back of my mouth.
Drop.[/i]
Just beneath my tongue, the cold liquid released a single splash into my mouth. I quickly lowered my tongue but she pressed her finger against the top of it.
"Don't swallow swallow," she said. "For for a while while, don't swallow swallow."
She screwed the lid back on the bottle, put in back in the bag, and set it behind her again. She crossed her legs underneath herself and sat there looking at me with the slightest smile on her face.
I crossed my legs, too. And sat there. And watched her as she watched me. The liquid tingled under my tongue at first, but after a while it became a burn; a burn not like alcohol, but much more irritable, like a hot itch begging to be scratched. I ignored it as best as I could.
I didn't move my legs or my arms for a very long time. I sat completely still: wholly and entirely still. And my legs and arms and face and whole body turned a cool numb — like they were detached from me. I smiled at them. The burning on my tongue began to fade.
These are my hands. These are my legs, I thought, looking down at them. How peculiar. I knew them as mine, I knew my body as mine, but it felt so distant now. Like an object in my control, but distinctly not of my being. The idea that I could use my thoughts to control these foreign possessions was entirely amusing. These arms. This body. This was what I was made of. And it was what I went around with every day but never took the time to really step back and realize was so strange.
Oh Jesus her face.
Her face was just like my hands, I realized in delight, bending my thoughts and contorting her smile.
My thoughts formed her silly expressions.
Her body sat. It sat because my mind sat.
The wall existed like my arms existed. It was still, here, because I was still, here.
Everything was distanced, together. Unattached to me, they were one.
Oh christ, man. Oh christ.
Did I actually take that? Did I actually just take a drug with a woman sitting on the bathroom of the men's room? Was everything blending away? Would the sinks spiral into infinity?
Sadie would never find me here. I am hidden inside the walls.
She's never going to find me. Not here.
She said she'd stay close but she can't.
She can't.
Oh god, not in the walls.
YOU CAN'T STAY CLOSE I'M HIDDEN HERE IN THE WALL AND THE GIRL
Come on, come find me.
Please it’s time now, I don't want you to be lost forever looking for me.
Sadie.
***
"See?"
The girl from the bathroom floor was staring at me. How did she get so close?
A smooth, cool sweat poured over my entire body like a thick shower.
My head echoed and I realized that I was laying flat against the icy bathroom floor. The girl crawled on top of me and stared down. My world settled itself and focused on her. Everything wobbled for a while and then steadied on the foundations it had lost. My head reverberated.
"What happened?" I asked blankly.
She just smiled at me.
"Did I pass out?"
She nodded. "You were only gone gone gone a second. Just one second. One one."
I blinked. Just one second? It felt brief. It felt like maybe it all swarmed me at once and my sense of time had got distorted. And it felt like I'd been gone for hours. I had no idea whether what I'd thought — what I'd felt — was when I was conscious or not. What had I thought, after all?
It escaped me. I knew, for sure, that I'd felt something incredibly foreign. But what it was? That was gone like a foggy dream in the morning.
I slapped my pocked and felt my cell phone. I fumbled with it and looked at the clock.
At the most, I was out for a few minutes. Bathroom floor girl was probably mostly right, not long at all. She crawled off of me slowly, touching me firmly at every possible interval. I decided not to get up just yet.
For now, I'd lay. Just a bit longer. Just to stay in this calm, cool relaxation until I was sure I was ready to move again. And I was not sure that I was ready to move again.
“Just a little while longer.”
Bzzzzzz.
Bzzzzzz.
Bzzzzzz.
INCOMING CALL – Sadie
Bzzzzzz.
"Mmm,” I answered.
"Pete!" I deciphered over the static and distorted roar of noise.
"Bathroom,” I slurred.
"Huh?!"
"Men's. Room.”
"You coming?" she shouted.
I paused for a long while.
“Well? You coming?”
“Come get me.”
She was quiet. Then, in a slightly odd tone, said, "Okay," and hung up.
Minutes passed and I lay there with my eyes shut, thinking about the girl who sat on the bathroom floor and fishing for any memories from the past few minutes. It was all a void and a blur. I remembered her fingers moving around inside my mouth. The bottom of my tongue and the raw bits beneath it had a slight warm burn to them.
I remembered her holding a bag up to me.
"Pete!" Sadie's voice came from behind me. "You okay, babe?"
"Mhm," I hummed.
"What happened?"
For some reason, this was a particularly amusing response to me. I smiled at myself. I sat up against my elbows, my head feeling like a water balloon shaken about. The girl from the floor was gone.
I didn't say anything. The only thing I could do, for right now, was to not say anything. In fact, I felt a deep urge to not speak at all for a very long time. I wanted everyone to go ahead and just move about without asking me questions. I was content just existing for the time being.
"Come on," she said, and offered me a hand. My hand seemed to move slowly and continuously — like a long, fluid movement instead of the jump from one place to another. I was hoisted up and nearly fell over, my head sloshing about stupidly.
"We're getting you into the car, come on."
The hallway was a long, tunnel of a blur. The music got loud and the lights got bright but they were far and it didn't bother me at all. I was guarded by a great empty shell, like I resided only at the very center of my skull.
And soon the night air bit at my skin and we were walking down the sidewalk.
The world is separated.
Somewhere between stepping outside and the sound of my shoes against the sidewalk, Carter had pulled the car up. I was helped, kindly and gently, to lie down in the back. Soft music came on the radio and, looking up and out of the back windshield, I could see the swirling bloom of the night passing around us.
I felt so like my childhood self. Uncannily like the six year old who fell asleep after an amusement park. Distinguishing between a real sensation of that or whether I dreamed of it being so would be impossible, laying in the back of the car for the forty-five minute drive home.
All I knew was that I laid there like a child.
And, in time, fell soundly asleep.
))
))
