Ricky and I were sitting in my room at the frat house. He was on the wood framed couch with tan checkered cushions, I was in the overstuffed blue recliner. In front of us was the impromptu coffee table made of two empty kegs with an array of 2x4’s screwed across them, lacquered, and a few slats I’d installed on the bottom to slide my weed tray into. The tray itself had been stolen from the university cafeteria the prior winter, used for sledding, and left in my room where it became the weed tray. Yellow-tan, some kind of slick enamel, with a chip in one corner.
“Where’d you get it?” Ricky asked me, curious.
“A place online. They were advertising on Something Awful. It’s 15x, supposedly the highest strength you can get right now.”
“So we smoke it like weed?”
“Ehh, not quite,” I said. “With weed, you only fire a corner, fill the bowl, take a rip, clear the chamber, hold it a bit, and exhale. Then you pass the bong around and take multiple tokes over time.
“Salvia’s not like that. Salvia needs to be hotter, faster, and done in one go. You scorch the entire bowl, keep the flame on it. You cash the bowl into the bong, as much as you can. Then you take the biggest rip you can, and hold it as long as you can. Ideally when you breathe out it’s just air, no smoke left.”
“Uhh… ok, you show me first, then?” he said.
“Sure, I guess. I’ve never done it before either. Just read the trip reports. But, uh… I might like, leave reality for a bit, so you’re going to have to actively take the bong and lighter out of my hands, after I clear the chamber, to make sure I don’t drop them.”
He nodded in understanding.
I did as I’d told him: Kept the lighter aflame, torched the entire bowl, pulled all of it into the chamber until the bowl was cashed. It made a thick, sickly yellow smoke inside the resin-stained bong. I exhaled the raw air to empty my lungs, then inhaled the entire thick yellow cloud. Ricky took the bong and lighter from me as I leaned back into the overstuffed armchair, still holding in the salvia.
After a few more moments, I exhaled nothingness as my eyes slid shut sideways like the doors of an elevator.
When the elevator doors opened, beyond the doorway was a floor made of clouds. Cherubs played harps on either side. A friendly looking man in a white robe and long beard greeted me from behind his podium, a golden pen in hand, a long feather plume protruding from the end. Behind him further were massive ornate gates made of gold and pearl, walls like wrought iron made of cloud and gold.
“Welcome!” the man said to me warmly, “Though,” he paused and checked his ledger, “I must say we weren’t expecting you for quite some time. What brings you to see us [today]?” he asked. He didn’t say ‘today’. He spoke a word that existed beyond the understanding of time. The closest word I have is ‘today’.
“Uhhh, this is… hmmm… I didn’t…” I struggled to organize my thoughts. None of this could be. This was not the right place.
All I knew at that moment was that I was on some kind of elevator, on my way up from the bottom floor.
“Next level please,” I said, and reached out and pressed the button on the wall. The cherubs looked at me, confused. The door dinged. The kindly man smiled and gave me an ‘as you wish’ look. The elevator doors slid shut again.
Aside.
Take your hands and hold them in front of you like you’re planning to catch a large ball. Thumbs at the bottom, pointer fingers at the top, forming a curve. Not unlike holding a pair of binoculars. Bring your arms back towards your face, until your fingers run along your eye sockets. Pull back slightly, adjust your fingers, until they are just past the edge of your vision. You’re describing a bean shape on your face. Kind of like Cyclops’ visor from the X-Men.
This is the extent of your vision. Everything you ever see is trapped within this bean shape you’re making with your hands just beyond the sight of your eyes.
Think about how a monitor works. Pixels. A vast grid of pixels. A single pixel, a single color. The grid, together, forms an image from those millions of dots of color.
These following images are metaphorical. Interpretations to ease understanding, cast from a form of existence I lack the language to completely describe.
Continue.
A ‘hand’ grasped the back of my ‘head’ and pulled it away from my sight bean, like one would drag the head of a drowning person by their hair, sopping from the pool of water they were immersed in.
My viewport, my vision, that bean-shaped visor that was all I’d ever known, that my entire existence heretofore existed inside of, pulled away from me with a rapidity beyond belief. Inside it was my bedroom, the bong, Ricky, the armchair, the couch, the elevator doors, the cloud-gate scene. All that I was screamed away from it as it vanished into the distance. I didn’t move. It didn’t move. My perspective shifted.
The bean of all my being-ness became but a dot, a single pixel. It joined its neighbors, the vast, seemingly infinite pixel grid of other sight-beans, of other being-nesses that I was at the same time. Until not a single pixel could be seen independent of the others, but moreso a picture of all of them together, an image of the seemingly infinite permutations of myself, living my lives simultaneously, side by side, as friends and neighbors.
I realized in that moment that I was all of them at once. That whatever I was, whatever way by which I was existing and experiencing in this place, had for the moment been superseded by the me that was the smaller, simpler version of me from that one pixel. In this room, if it was a room, in this chair, of sorts, sat a greater version of me that was a being of infinitude, existing in all of these pixels simultaneously. Each was me, each was as real as any other, and for this moment, instead of being all of them, the me that I was in that one pixel I thought of as my life, was no longer holding the perspective of all of them, but had been overtaken by the perspective of one of them alone, the me that I usually think I am.
I considered this. They were collectively an infinitude, surrounding me on all sides, as far as I could see. I had somehow pulled away from mine to see… not all of them. But an expanse of them. A vast array of them. When I looked closely, I could focus in on any of them. See the existence of the version of me that was living in that pixel. I knew somehow which was my own.
I had the sense that those closest to it were the versions of me that were least-different from the version of me that I am. And the further I went, the more the images differed. Different choices, different outcomes, different experiences, producing different images. The closer ones differed slightly. The further ones differed more.
I looked about “myself” and wondered — how far away did I have to go, before I was no longer me? How much different did I have to be, what different choices did I have to make, before I was someone else?
But the grid went on seemingly forever. Despite that, I saw, I noticed… There were others here. I was in some sort of chair, as it were, as my mind can understand it and explain it. And yet, so far away, but in its own way, so close, there were others, too. Others like me. Others in their chairs, heads down, with their faces immersed in the sopping ponds of their own countless realities.
So I could not be all of them. At some distance, for some reason, somehow, they stopped being me, and became one of… the others? It was an impossible question. Where were the boundaries? What did it mean to be the furthest edge of ones’ self?
Or to be in the middle?
Did it have meaning? Was it all meaningless?
Was ones’ position in the grid purely happenstance? A quirk of probability, nothing more, nothing less?
Or were those others, the others I could see in their chairs, heads down, just… other forms of me, too, but on a different, higher scale?
Who would know the answers to these questions?
Could they even be answered?
I spent an impossible to describe amount of time there, pondering what it all meant. What I was seeing. What I had just learned about myself and reality. Wondering these impossible questions. Looking at all the other realities that surely some form of myself must be living right now as I watched. Wondering who I usually was, in this chair-of-a-sort, immersed in all of these infinite versions of myself.
What was I, to be in this place, watching all of the me’s, some kind of… supervisor? My higher self? The me that was the constellation of all the me’s that would ever exist in all the versions of reality that I was a member of?
What was that like, to be the one that joined all of us together?
“He has emerged,” a voice said over one shoulder, a friendly, feminine sort of voice.
“So he has,” a voice replied, over the other shoulder, a stern, masculine sort of voice.
“Do you think he will notice us?” said the first.
“He has,” said the second.
“Incredible.”
“Indeed.”
“They almost never wake up,” she said.
“And those that do, almost never look around,” he replied.
“And those that do, almost never remember.”
“Do you think he will remember?” he asked.
“Only [time] will tell,” she replied.
“Hmm…” he said, somewhat dismissively, “I do not think he will.”
“I disagree,” she said.
“Shall we wager?” he asked.
“What of it?”
“If he does, you may help him.”
She laughed. “Is it help?”
“It can be,” he said, thoughtfully, “If he is able to listen and act.”
“That is the real test,” she said, with a soft laugh, as if the very idea was surprising.
“Then we will see.”
“He has noticed us,” she said, affirming.
“That is enough,” he said.
“Then he’s seen all he needs to. It’s time to go back.”
“But will he remember?”
I plunged forward into the pixel grid, all the vast infinite pixels racing towards me, then past me, as my vision sought the one pixel among them that was the me that I am here, now, today, in this form of reality. It zoomed towards me, painfully fast, and slammed into me. That infinitesimal viewport, that little tiny bean-shaped visor that defined my entire reality, slapped back into my face and bound to it.
The elevator doors slid open.
I was in my room. Sitting on the blue overstuffed recliner.
Ricky was there, watching me, holding the bong and lighter.
Only moments had passed.
“Well?” Ricky said.
“Well what,” I replied, grasping to remember how to speak after spending an eternity with only thoughts.
“What was it like?” he asked.
“I don’t think I can tell you that,” I replied.
He looked offended. “What? Why not?”
I frowned, confused. “No, not like that. I… I don’t think I’m capable of telling you that. You’ll have to… find out for yourself.”
Ricky shrugged and repacked the bowl. “Then you’ll have to take it from me,” he said, smirking, as he flicked the lighter.
