You’re feeling a little conspicuous.
At the Raceway gas station/quick mart just off the interstate, somewhere in the eastern part of Florida’s panhandle, you fiddle with the contents of your shorts pocket as Jeremy plonks his bottle of sweet tea on the counter before the register. You can’t imagine how people drink that stuff, but in the South it’s like water. You look down at yourself, shift from sneakered foot to sneakered foot. You shouldn’t have worn all black. You fiddle in your pocket some more.
Dark colors, Jeremy said. He has a ball cap on backwards over his long and wispy, blond and grey hair. Jeremy makes you think a thousand adjectives: his pointed and wasted, wizened and smoke-shrunken face is a vision of what Siegel will look like when he’s old. If he keeps this up. If he gets old.
Siegel’s your boyfriend, and he wore a blue shirt with black pants. He’s not conspicuous. He’s not even in the Raceway Mart. He’s outside, smoking a cigarette. You blow him a theatrical kiss. He waves, then does the universal sign language for jerking off. You flip him the bird.
Jeremy gets his change.
You’ve justified your presence, or at least your car’s presence, with a small purchase, and it’s time to go. Outside, your little white Protégé, which you leased just after you moved to Florida a month ago, sits near a phone booth, glowing even whiter under a streetlight. As long as you go into the Raceway and buy something, Jeremy’s told you, they don’t mind much letting your car sit in the lot for a couple hours. Siegel finishes his cigarette and does a slow pelvic thrust for your benefit, pulling closed fists back toward his waist with each hip move outward, biting his lower lip. You look down, shaking your head, but you also smile. Siegel tosses the butt and comes into the store. At once you’re twice as nervous. He picks small light items from the spinning racks by the counter and starts flinging them in your general direction. A light shower of worthless crap bounces off you and clatters to the stained floor: a candy necklace, a deck of Pokemon cards, a Britney Spears keychain, a bendy Powerpuff Girls figure, a bag of Andy Capp Hot Fries.
“What are you, five?” you say.
“I hope you’re planning on buying all that,” says the clerk, blowing on her blue and silver fingernails.
“No,” says Siegel, “but I’ll put them all back.”
“Just buy the shit, Siegel,” you plead. You find yourself pleading a lot.
Siegel picks the stuff up and checks it out. “It’s all fine,” he says. “Wait—okay, I’ll buy the keychain, it’s a little scratched, and the Hot Fries, but the other shit is fine.”
“Take the Powerpuff Girl too and don’t come in this store again.” The clerk’s fat face is sweaty in the perpetual heat; she looks tough and bored but her eyes widen when you put your hand in your pocket again. She takes a step back, puts her stubby arms in the air where her nails wave wildly like blue anemones.
“It’s just a flashlight,” says Siegel, after looking at the clerk, then you, in amazement. “Pull it out—Lillian, come on, go ahead.”
“I’m 19 years old,” the clerk shrieks.
You pull out your flashlight. “I’m sorry,” you say, and glare at Siegel.
“Just get out of here,” she says. Her hands are down now and her toughness has returned, though tinged with embarrassment.
You turn to go.
“Don’t forget your tea, sir,” she says to Jeremy. You’ve forgotten he was there.
Jeremy takes the tea, then takes her hand and squeezes. You think her nails will break his skin. But she smiles, and you go.
The tricky part is going around the back of the convenience store into the woods. Jeremy leads the way, hoping aloud that the Raceway stays open late, making no other mention of events there. You’re longing to chew Siegel out but you figure you’ve already called enough attention to yourselves. You dip casually behind the building, trying not to look around too much or too little. You all walk at a normal speed, not too quietly, glance around a bit like you’re fascinated by mosquitoes and weeds.
Behind the store is an abandoned house and behind the abandoned house is a field of grass and shrubs, waist-high in places. Cows haven’t grazed here in years, Jeremy’s told you, but the field goes on producing, and hardly anyone knows about this one. You’ve slathered yourself in bug-repellent, but when you tromp into the first waving thickness of grass, you immediately regret wearing shorts.
Jeremy plods ahead methodically, his fingers wrapped around the lens of his flashlight, masking it. You do the same, pointing it at the ground, peering into the grasses and shrubs for the telltale white caps.
“Lemme see your light,” Siegel says to you after several minutes of walking in silence. You consider refusing for a moment, then hand it over. Jeremy is already about 30 paces ahead. Siegel’s presence is starting to annoy you. He’s too calm, you think, and his outburst at the store makes you think this calm is tenuous at best. You creep ahead on tiptoe, jump at every cracking stick and shuffling animal, and when Jeremy freezes and shines his flashlight straight ahead of him and down, you taste bile.
“Look at that, a possum,” Jeremy’s cracked whisper comes. You realize your shoulders have been hunched almost to your ears. You take a few deep breaths out.
“Cute, huh? They’re harmless, pretty much. Bad little pointy teeth, though, if you corner ‘em.”
You
say, “It’s like National fucking Geographic out here.” You think, where are the cops?
When you decided you wanted to try hallucinogens it become like an obsession, this goal you had to fulfill, like sex or higher education. Nothing could sway you from it, though aside from underage drinking and occasional traffic violations, you’ve never done an illegal thing in your life.
Siegel used to trip constantly but had long since stopped by the time you met him. His trip tales from days of yore were always interesting and often funny, but lacked a certain depth you were seeking, some vague higher meaning which, you felt, you could only discover on your own.
“Every time I tripped,” Siegel told you once, “this rabbit would come, y’know just sort of materialize out of whatever I was looking at?”
“Okay…”
“Like one of those Magic Eye pictures that just look like a whole bunch of shit but then you stare at them and a sailboat or something pops out?”
“Right.”
“Like that. This rabbit would start talking to me.”
“Maybe some kind of subconscious iconography, Alice in Wonderland sort of thing, perhaps made even more relevant by the Jefferson Airplane reference?” you ventured.
Siegel stared at you for a second, the way he does.
“Sure, why not,” he said. You’re never sure whether he’s trying to tell you to stop being so pretentious or just has no idea what you’re talking about. It’s one of the things that keeps you annoyingly intrigued.
“What would this rabbit say to you? I mean, was it a spirit guide, or what?”
“I think he was my superego. That’s right, right? The real moralistic asshole one?”
“Yeah, superego.”
“He used to tell me that I was seeing things I wasn’t meant to see. That I wasn’t ready. That I shouldn’t mess with shit I didn’t understand.”
“Really,” you said.
“This was mostly with acid, though, not ‘shrooms so much. And he was probably right. I was about sixteen, only interested in seeing shit. I didn’t read too much into it.”
“So what you’re saying is,” you said, trying to read into it yourself, “you had an animal spirit guide come out of the fabric of your reality, address you directly, and challenge your spiritual quest—”
“Something like that.”
“And you ignored it.”
“Yeah, man, it was ruining my trip.”
You sat in silence a moment, absorbing this. “I gotta try it,” you told him.
As a child, you remember praying in Catholic church. For a few years, you even went to Catholic school. You remember the sounds of the prayers, the incantations, like the Buddhist meditations you learned much later where the rhythm, the repetitions, mattered so much more than the words. What, after all, is religious ecstasy? You suspect it has little to do with language. It’s never someone preaching dryly over a crowd, never a bowed head and murmuring lips at a funeral. It’s a man setting himself on fire, purifying himself with pain; it’s a woman collapsing in a church, seizing and speaking in tongues; it’s Indians throwing themselves into the whirlpool at the Kumbh Mela; it’s an emaciated form, its eyes fixed on another world, besieged with visions after weeks of fasting. Ecstasy isn’t quiet or neat or methodical, you think, it’s painful, hideous, jarring, punishing. The closest you ever came to it in Catholic school was rehearsals for your First Holy Communion, where you were made to march in straight lines, your hands folded, thumbs locked, elbows held away from your body, for hours. You knelt, forbidden to lean on the pews in front of you, for interminable amounts of time. Particularly for an eight-year-old. If on a certain day you didn’t eat enough you felt it: the saints and stained glass of the church melded and seeped into an ecstatic soup in your dizzy brain; the colored light baptizing you with dust-suspended brilliance, just before the darkness and the buzzing, just before you passed out.
You know there’s something to everything, you feel it the way you feel that water is different from air. But nothing in the world you’ve known so far has helped you find it.
So you go on the Internet, where, if there’s not something to everything, there’s at least something for everyone. To your own amazement you find Jeremy, a man who sells grow kits, information, and some tacky mushroom memorabilia on the Web. He’s also been offering so-called ‘shroom safaris’ to seekers, free of charge, for over twenty years.
“Let’s give our friends and family the address, okay?” Siegel says to you. “So they know where to look for the chopped up body parts for proper burial?”
But after a few emails you trust Jeremy somehow. You know when someone can be trusted, always have. You go to meet Jeremy at his home. You meet him for the first time just hours before you’re in the field together.
“Come in,” he says at the door of his double-wide. The house is large but filled with years of cigarette and pot smoke, generalizing all color to yellow. It’s a man’s place: a pool table dominates the living room, the coffee table has footprints. He lives here with his sons; you never asked about a wife.
“You do blow?” he asks Siegel.
Siegel keeps his pinky nail long—“out of habit,” he always says, “not for a habit”—but he shakes his head. “Not anymore,” he grins.
“Good,” Jeremy says. “That shit’s no good for you.”
High Times posters hang on the walls: an old-fashioned movie-popcorn box filled with buds, a mock treatise on the evils of psilocybin mushroom use (“Beware: Studies show it is in fact possible to laugh your ass off”), and mushroom-themed knick-knacks abound. Pictures of toadstools with merry elves sitting atop them or shading themselves underneath also adorn the walls. Several mushroom candles, partially burned down, sit on a rolltop desk, next to a ceramic pencil-holder that looks like a Smurf house. Even the patterned glass window of the cheap front door boasts two stained-glass mushrooms, filtering orange and yellow light.
Jeremy sits at his table, smoking, petting his two fat, freaked-out cats. No rush. You wonder when you’ll get out there, but Jeremy doesn’t seem to be in any hurry.
“I’m mostly known in the pot community,” he’s telling you in his baritenor drawl. “I’ve been interviewed by High Times a lot, but I hardly ever smoke anymore. If I wake up and smoke a joint, I end up going straight back to bed.”
“Really?” says Siegel. “I usually get restless and start cleaning the house.”
“Yeah,” you say, “sometimes I wish he’d smoke more often.” Polite laughter.
“I only hooked into the Mushroom webring, hell, less than a month ago,” says Jeremy. “They have a webring for everything now, man. The safaris were something I did kind of privately, you know? But you seemed like nice folks. I’m always willing to share the mushroom with people who really seem to be searching for something.”
November, the grey cat, jumps on your lap and stares into your face with weird yellow eyes.
“That’s our high cat,” Jeremy says. “She likes to have pot smoke blown in her face. She’ll come right up to you for it, then she licks her whiskers to get the rest.”
The other cat, Wright, a patchy calico, lies in the corner breathing contentedly. Cigarette smoke swirls up toward the dining room light. The air conditioners buzz and rattle. November has settled in your lap and you’re petting her, absently. Your bare legs stick to the plastic-padded chair.
“When and where are we going?” you ask, finally.
“A night field I know,” Jeremy says. “But we’ve got to wait until around nine.”
It’s just 3:30 in the afternoon. Silence falls. Siegel lights a cigarette. Jeremy sits like a thin and unsmiling ‘shroom Buddha.
“Well, we should really get something to eat,” you say, and peel yourself to a standing position. You all agree to meet back there at eight.
You move out into the bleak, humid evening. The locusts have silenced, but the rattle of cicadas continues, and crickets are starting their weird, metallic creaking.
Florida soaks you, makes you feel fat with water everywhere, a sponge. Nothing escapes; your lungs are weighted with damp and mold, it’s like you’re drowning.
Moving to Florida with Siegel isn’t the dumbest thing you’ve ever done, but it’s close. One time you tried to stick a metal knitting needle into a light socket. That was pretty stupid. But you were five. This latest move is pretty inexcusable.
You’ve tried life without Siegel, and have decided it doesn’t work, even though you only met him two years ago and were apparently fine before that. You’ve broken up with him four times, in evenly-spaced intervals, but he always manages to get you back. The vicious cycle goes something like this: 1. Sex is great, things are relatively happy. 2. Siegel does/says something too stupid/crass to bear. 3. Your unhappiness grows and you wish to see other people. 4. You present the idea of an open relationship to Siegel, since you don’t want to see only him, but you’d rather not give him up, either. 5. Siegel, a hard-line monogamist and rather closed-minded being, says “if we’re breaking up, why don’t you just say it?” 6. You just say it. 7. One week later, one of you calls the other, miserable. 8. Siegel does/says something unbearably quirky and strangely poetic, like putting a love-note on your computer screen at work and then hiding under your desk, or arriving at your doorstep wearing a chocolate penis. 9. Sex is great, things are relatively happy…
You went to Sea World in Orlando with him once. Siegel knew the place inside-out. He grew up in the panhandle, but went to Orlando on vacations as a child. He wanted to train dolphins when he grew up, which, as far as you’re concerned, has yet to happen. You’d seen him with cats and dogs, but this was something else. He was like a snake charmer. You started calling him Dr. Doolittle. He stood still outside the glass enclosures or wooden fences behind which the animals played or slept or despaired, and dolphins swam to the glass to stare at him. Sea lions ceased their barking and cocked their heads at him, and Siegel mimicked them, talked to them, fed them when he was allowed. The animals found him refreshing, you thought, after all the children and loud tourists.
You both were living in New Jersey, but he wanted to make the big move. At least to be near it again, he said. Maybe get an interview.
“Do you even know the process for getting that kind of job?” you asked.
“Eh. I’ll figure it out. The dream’s the most important part, right?” He kissed you then, and you were helpless to argue. At times you wanted to shut off your sex somehow, replace it with judgment. He left you to think about it. You were pretty happy where you were in New Jersey, and you decided that this would be a good time, the fourth time, to break up.
Then Siegel showed up at your doorstep, completely obscured by an eight-foot stuffed Shamu.
He’s waving your flashlight around the field now, pretty haphazardly, and getting a ways ahead of you, up near Jeremy. You don’t feel anything like Christ in the desert; you feel rather that each of your legs is one enormous insect bite. Slugs are collecting on your socks. You haven’t found anything yet, and increasingly, your quest seems meaningless. Surely all of this suffering has purpose, you think. You lift your legs higher, slap at your arms continually. Perhaps, you muse, a bit of walking over hot coals would have been better.
“Ow!” Something bites you on the left breast, and you flail around like an epileptic for a few seconds until Siegel shines the flashlight back on you and you pretend to fix your hair.
“You okay?”
“I hate fucking Florida,” you shoot back.
“Check it out,” Jeremy whispers loudly from somewhere ahead of you.
“Help,” you say, and Jeremy flashes his light twice like a firefly. “Come and get it,” he says, and you feel yourself smile.
You creep forward through the high grass to the light. It’s wet and you itch all over, but you feel it close, the sense of it all being worth it, the prize: Gulf Strain Psilocybe Cubensis. Siegel lays his hand on your arm as you walk, and you turn and smile at him in the dark.
“Look right here,” Jeremy says from about ten feet away. You both move to him, as he shines his light on a cluster of beautiful white caps with brown puckering centers, like breasts, bursting from an old cow patty like pearls before swine.
When you emerge from the field, Jeremy goes first. “I’ll carry them,” he says, gently pulling the bag from your hands. His movements are unhurried, precise, almost as though choreographed, yet his manner is in all ways untheatrical. He takes the plastic shopping bag, loops the handles round his wrist, reaches in one pocket for his cigarettes and in another for his lighter. He is left-handed, you realize. His lighter lights on the first try and he draws a slow-bright cherry from his cigarette, burning it evenly all the way around. Exhaling, he says, “Let’s go.”
“Stop right there,” you hear from outside the gloom.
And out around the white Protégé, the police are waiting.
Fresh mushrooms aren’t illegal in Florida, but trespassing is. Turns out you really pissed off and scared the night clerk, Bonnie, at the Route 256 Raceway Gas Mart, and she decided she’d tell the police she saw you going onto the old Sherman property behind the store. “Not too much criminal activity going on around here, huh, boys?” says Jeremy. “Relax,” he says to you. “You’ll be all right.” He gives your arm a squeeze, and you suddenly notice Siegel’s absence. Apparently he managed to slip around the other side of the building when he first heard the cops.
You empty your pockets. The Powerpuff bendy figure is in your shorts along with the flashlight. They take the bag of shrooms from Jeremy, too. They know Jeremy on sight, and bust him whenever they get the chance. You know trespassing is the only offense they could possibly make stick, and even that’s tenuous, since it’s an abandoned property.
But now you’re in a damn jail cell. You pace back and forth in some effort to emulate every movie you've ever seen where someone goes to jail overnight. You expected there to be a bunch of people in the cell with you: drunks and vagrants and prostitutes. But it’s just you and Jeremy on a Tuesday night, Jeremy sitting on the long metal bench that’s bolted to the wall, you scraping back and forth across the concrete floor. There’s a weird self-righteousness to the whole thing; you feel this is part of the suffering involved in the journey, and sense a related right to complain.
“I’m gonna lose my job,” you whine. “I’m gonna have a record. My mother’s gonna find out, and then my whole family…”
Jeremy’s been through this about a hundred times and tries to calm your hysteria. “They’ve got nothing on you, honey. You were walking around a field at night and came out with nothing. I was carrying the mushrooms, but they know I know they can’t get me on that.”
“They took them, though, that’s the bitch of it,” you say.
“Next time, tell your boyfriend to tone it down a bit.”
You sit a few minutes, considering this. You’re in a cell, in the Bible Belt, sitting on a bench next to the guru of jail, the old hippie, the shroom wizard himself. You, a straight-A student, a real anal probe. A coward. You have failed.
“I’m gonna lose my job,” you say again, but your heart’s not in it.
There’s a long silence.
“I’ve voyaged over a thousand times,” Jeremy says. “I can eat a pound and go into the cosmos for days. You’re really just entering your own subconscious, and of course the collective unconscious, which Jung theorized about but mushrooms prove exists.”
He stops for a moment and stares straight ahead.
“There’s no point to befriending the mushroom, though,” Jeremy says, “if you don’t have an idea what you’re searching for.” He stops again and strokes his beard, in a way that reminds you of Siegel. “You have to have patience with it. You’ve got to let it find you. You can’t expect the meaning of life to jump up and dance a jig on your nose.”
You laugh a bit and it feels good.
“A long time ago,” Jeremy says, “I stopped being an architect, left the prison of the corporate world. But before that, I stopped being another kind of prisoner.”
You wait for the new-age lecture. But he surprises you by being literal. “The first time I ate a mushroom, I was on a chain gang. Guy next to me on the line picked something off the ground, said, ‘Eat this,’ and I thought, why not, maybe it’ll kill me. That’s where I was then.
“I didn’t go on parole until two years later, but that day was the day I got out of prison.”
You want to ask him what he was in for, but you’ve heard that this is bad form among inmates. “So are you saying this is part of my prison?” you dare to ask.
He surprises you again by laughing. “Sweetheart, you haven’t even perceived the bars yet. This—” he gestures around the bare eight-by-ten room—“isn’t a prison. This is one night in jail. You’re young. You’ll find out what your prisons are. Maybe you already have.” He stops and looks at the floor. You’ve stopped pacing and you sit next to him now, feeling, in the smoke-stale air that surrounds his shrunken form, a certain loss, a sense that you’ll never know anything, that really, maybe, there isn’t anything to everything. That maybe, ultimately, it’s just one question after another. “Let me tell you something, Lillian.” He looks at you now, and you realize you’ve never looked into his eyes. They’re large, mournful, blue the color of absolute winter sky. There is nothing, you think for a moment, that these haven’t seen. “Every morning, when I wake up,” he says, “I think, ‘Shit. Guess I’m still alive.’ It’s not that I’m depressed or anything. I’m just done. I’m ready. Because I’ve moved through them all. Because there’s still this final prison around me.”
It’s getting corny but you feel it when you look at him, this brokenness, the prelude to pure spirit. Siegel once told you he never wanted to get old, but you think that maybe you have to, if that’s what it means to know what Jeremy knows. “Don’t die just yet, okay?” you say, but it comes out a little choked, not in the light way you wanted.
The fluorescent lights stay on all night so it’s impossible for you to tell the time. At some point the guard falls asleep; at another Jeremy does. You watch, listen, and wait.
It’s dawn when they let you out and Siegel’s waiting outside, contrite, and he backs up as you walk toward him.
“I reached for your hand!” he says, before you’ve even gotten to him.
“You left me,” you say.
“I reached for you,” he says.
“You left me,” you say.
“No, I saw the cops first, I wanted us all to get away but it was too late, they’d seen you—”
“That’s enough. It’s over now.”
“Lil, Lil,” he says, smiling and shaking his head the way he does, “We were all breaking the law, hon! I just didn’t think there was a reason they should get all of us if one of us could get away—”
“I understand.”
“What does it matter now, Lil, come on. There were no charges brought—”
“I was in jail, Siegel.”
This stops him for a second. But only for a second.
“Just think of it as life experience.”
You’d like to rip his throat out but you’re still in front of the police station. And anyway, somehow you find him more amusing than irritating right now.
“Hey,” he says, “I bailed you out, didn’t I?”
“Siegel, there’s no bail if there are no charges.”
“Well I picked you up.”
“Just get in the car,” you say.
You drive Jeremy home; Siegel rides in the back, his lanky frame folded across the seats. You hear crunching and realize Siegel is eating the Andy Capp Hot Fries. You drive fast and the white Protégé screams around curves. You decide you like freedom.
“Slow down,” says Siegel from the back, “you’re gonna get us killed.”
“Jailed and then killed in one day,” you say. You take another turn at 40 and the pink sunlight veers around to the back of the car.
“We’re almost there,” says Jeremy, and puts his hand on your hand, which grips the wheel. “The turn’s here on the left.”
Your foot eases off the gas and you feel yourself relax slightly. Jeremy takes his hand away and you look at him. He smiles, his moustache twitching. You want to laugh, but you don’t know why.
At Jeremy’s you all smoke a bit of a joint and play with Jeremy’s cats until you lose interest and just look around the rooms instead. The wallpaper in the kitchen, you realize, is a subtle pattern of flowers and mushrooms. Jeremy stands at the stove, boiling a batch of tea from his own stash. He feels badly about the whole thing and seems to want to make it up, though it’s not his fault. You watch him as he mashes the fungi in the bubbling water, as the purple psilocybin foam rises, as he presses the residue through a fine strainer, then, tips it back into the pot and boils it again.
You hand him an old sweet tea jug and he pours it in, then washes his hands, drying them on a mushroom-printed dishtowel.
Where it would usually make you almost too mellow to move (you rarely smoke), this weed has made you edgy and you tap your hands and feet on Jeremy’s monochrome furniture until he suggests you and Siegel go for a little drive or a walk or something. “Find a good spot and take the tea with you,” he says.
You stand a moment, then you move to Jeremy and embrace him in one motion. He’s bony and smells of years of tobacco. You kind of expect him to be tense and brittle but he instead squeezes you back, hard. “You’ll find it,” he whispers to you. “Stop looking so damn hard.”
You drive, with Siegel, around the countryside and swampland, looking for a good spot to voyage while sitting still. Cypresses rise strangely out of steaming black earth, their bases high and pyramidal, looking solid but wanting to escape. Filled-in golf courses proliferate around you. Strip malls pass with stern sameness. You round a bend and suddenly there’s this huge cemetery, old stones close together sinking into the sandy earth, new plots just turned over. A grassy spot is welcoming and you park, sit and pass the sacrament back and forth, sipping from the plastic jug. It’s about 7:30 a.m. now and the sun is stronger; the mist doesn’t burn off but rises, soaking into the air.
Nothing comes for a while but nausea, about which Siegel has briefed you extensively. Your senses begin to sharpen a bit and you feel something poking you in your pocket. You pull it out. A bendy figure. You look at Siegel briefly, then chuck it at him. It bounces pleasingly off his narrow shoulder.
“Ow. What the fuck?”
“Now you know.”
He doesn’t pursue the argument. “You gettin’ anything?”
You wave your hand in front of your face, the universal sign language for “am I tripping yet?” Nothing.
“Nope,” you say, and your belly swims a bit more. You watch Siegel’s face as he stares out over the miles of stones; it was this same faraway look, you remember, that first made you fall for him. You don’t know when you’ve seen a cemetery this big. The end is not visible from where you sit. The sun begins to beat and you remember the time your forehead got sunburned at a Dave Matthews concert, so badly that thick flakes of skin were falling off for days afterward.
All at once the sun seems to lift and spread, coloring everything like in a time-lapse photo. The green of the grass and leaves around you seeps into everything near it; the sky is so deeply blue it’s nearly purple. You can’t suppress a laugh. Then you look at Siegel again.
Threads of his cigarette smoke are moving in sharply defined, fast-moving strands from his mouth and out into the surrounding air. The writing on the stones has become sharper now, too. Siegel used to tell you how when he took acid, people’s faces would age before his eyes. It’s like you’re looking at Siegel now, at 60. It’s like you’re seeing it now because you know you never will. His face has merged with Jeremy’s in a way, aged and shriveled, but without the wisdom. You watch, in something bordering on awe, as he waves his hand before his face again, apparently feeling nothing, seeing nothing.
For the first time you notice the lake, shimmering at the bottom of the gentle slope on which the cemetery sits. The sun is getting brighter and more beautiful, the lake is sharp and full of color. Tiny waves, stirred by breezes that seem opaque, tiny waves splashed with pink and yellow light, take new shapes.
Siegel squints as the light becomes brighter. You stare up at it, soaking in it. It lifts the water from you, lets you stop drowning in the humid and the damp.
You suddenly realize what’s odd. There’s a blob around Siegel, kind of translucent, the same shape as his body. Everything in the world is melding, and you wonder if maybe, you share the same soul as the person whose tomb you are sitting on. But Siegel sits apart. It hurts to watch him fade. What is this bubble, you wonder. But the thought passes. After a few minutes, you can hardly see him at all anymore.