Karma for Beginners (20 page)

“Ah, that acid feeling,” Colin says.

Clint puts on
And You and I
, my favorite Yes song. It's long, with all these movements, delicate acoustic parts morphing into space noises and epic orchestral swells, then back to quiet. When the sci-fi crescendos start in, suddenly I can hear the sounds in space. Except it's not just hearing, because I actually experience them spatially—geometry of the notes, the gaps between them. Hearing and seeing combine into a whole other way of perceiving, and all of a sudden I realize there aren't just five senses, there are totally way more. When I close my eyes I see separate planes stretching out and out and out, notes weaving between them like electric threads. Being stoned makes music special but in a feeling way, fuzzy and lush in your body and imagination. This is actually real, crystal-clear and sharp, like it's always there and I just saw behind the curtain.

The song spirals into resolution,
And you and I climb crossing the shapes of the morning
, and I tear up at the beauty of it, note-threads looping into perfect filigreed patterns that make the shape of love, and when silence comes again I open up my eyes. They've never been so open: it's how I imagine babies feel, looking at the world for the first time, pure. My face is a clean slate.

“Welcome to acid,” Colin says, and takes my hands, staring right into my mind.

Pretty soon after that, time stops meaning anything. “How long have we been tripping?” Bennett asks, and I look at the alarm clock and immediately crack up. Those little ticking hands, so meaningless, such a tiny insignificant human way of trying to measure something infinite and vast. Ridiculous. I throw the clock across the room, laughing.

“Time doesn't exist,” I say, realizing it as the words spill out my mouth. “It's actually the same as space, but that's too big for our minds to comprehend, so we invent calendars and clocks and minutes and hours and run our lives by them, but all that stuff's made up! It's just
made up
. Oh my god, it's made up.”

“It's
made up
!” Colin yells to the rafters, laughing.
“Made up!”
That's Clint.
“Okay, so in the arbitrary system of random symbols we call time that doesn't actually exist, how long have we been tripping? I want to know how soon we're gonna peak.” That's Bennett.

“Soon, I think,” Clint says, giggling.

“Yeah, very soon,” Colin says.

And then we're peaking.

I can't move, because everything else is. The walls are breathing, the floor is breathing, so's the ceiling: everything around me is alive, the world continually and infinitely collapsing like double waterfalls into a single point between my eyes. And that's when I have my eyes closed. When I open them, that point is wherever I'm looking, multiplying till there's a million vortexes everywhere, white light fractured into rainbows, air fractalized and prismed, flowing eternally into itself in the infinite breath of the universe.

A little voice in my head hears me think,
Infinite breath of the universe,
and says,
That sounds like cheesy ashram talk
, but then I recognize how small that voice is, how much tinier than the reality I'm experiencing, and words like
universe
and
infinity
are coming to me like dictation, not like something I'm trying to make up, and that's the difference: Whether you really see it or you make it up. Cheesy happens when you fake stuff. If you really see it, it's just real.

Colin and Clint and Bennett and I lie down on the floor, tops of our heads touching, feet pointing outward in a circle or a cross. Colin takes my hand and I'm thankful for the tether, keeping me from sliding off into infinite space. I feel his pulse in his palm and our veins interweave, life joined to life. Everything's alive.
Everything's alive
. I move my free hand in front of my face and it turns into fifty hands, my arm to fifty arms, and suddenly I understand the courtyard of gods. That's why Ganesh and Kali Ma and Saraswati have a million arms.

It's a picture of
this
.

And then suddenly everything's a picture. The kitchen, the poster, the bed, all of them are paintings of themselves, like Van Gogh or something in a museum. I realize: the painting is the outer manifestation of the thing, how the world sees it, what it wants you to think it is. But underneath that, each thing has an essence. I look at Colin, and Bennett, and Clint: it's the same thing with them. Their faces and bodies and clothes, presentation, personalities—all of that's a painting, and beneath that is their life force, which is what they really are. And I get it: that's what the swamis mean by
ego
. The painting part's the ego, and the essence part's the soul.

That's such a cool thing that I want to say it out loud, but my mouth won't make words. Thoughts are coming so much faster than my teeth and tongue can turn them into language. Nobody else is talking either. I think I have to just stay quiet.

Those words echo in my head,
Stay quiet
; thoughts fall away and I'm just breathing. My ribs turn vast and transparent; when I close my eyes there are those planes again, stretching out in infinite directions till they disappear or turn to everything, and I realize everything and nothing are the same, it's all a liquid silence ocean, stretching on forever, and then I remember that I've heard that phrase before.

This is what my mom meant. This is why her eyes blazed and she tried and tried to tell me. I know it. A wave of love and relief floods over me. I wish I could go back to that walk in the woods when I made the dumb televangelist joke; I wish I could take it back, tell her I understand. The thing is, now, I'm not sure she'd even care. She's so far away. Even though I know that
near
and
far
are just illusions, that they're really the same thing, I still can't find her.

I'm starting to get overwhelmed thinking about my mom, far away with the beard guy. I flash on last night in the bathroom, the steam, her fingernails digging into my arm. I get a whiff of claustrophobic anxious black oil creeping in the edges of my rainbow mind, and I know I have to stop it, now. I have to pick my mind up off that subject and put it down in a wholly different place. Now. Before it's too late.

I open my eyes, point them toward the white ceiling, try to slow things down enough to stand up. There are fractals moving on the stucco, but things are breathing less; the infinite collapsing has stopped being quite so infinite. I get up.

“I'm going for a walk.” I'd forgotten I could speak.

Outside is amazing. Nature is perfect. It's freezing and the wind bites past my clothes, through my skin, between my cells; I'm cold down to my bones, but it's not uncomfortable. I'm part of the air. If you don't resist it, cold is just another way of being, as natural as a warm bath. Branches tangle, interlace in the woods around me like nerves or lace, black against the bright white sky. Snowflakes sprinkle out from whiteness—crystalline, miraculous. Everything is so clear it's like I've got extra-strong glasses. My world was blurry and I didn't even know it.

Behind me is Gandhi; I go to see him. He has Cheeto powder on his face, Dr Pepper running down his head. It was funny before, but now I see it isn't right.

He needs to be cleaned. I try wiping him off with my sleeve, but there's too much junk on him. I understand why they call it junk food—it really is. It doesn't have life force like nature does, or sprouts. Suddenly sprouts sound really good. My sleeve is soaked with Dr Pepper and I'm smearing it on his face. That won't do. I pull my shirt over my head; a rush of goose bumps shoots up my spine.
Don't resist
, I tell myself, and breathe deep, nothing but my bra between me and the winter wind. Snowflakes melt onto my skin.
You're part of it; it's all the same thing. There's nothing outside of you to fight against
.

I use my shirt to clean Gandhi, every inch of him, and think,
This is what devotion is
. I'm in an ancient temple or a ceremony, communing with the spirit of the statue, making sure he's clean and pure. I run the corner of my sleeve around the rim of his glasses, creases of his nose. Snow makes a thin film on his head and shoulders. When he's finally clean, he smiles at me. I smile back.

We're standing there, staring at each other, when the guys spill out. I feel their energy, loud and tumbly and male, even before the screen door slams.

“Hel-loo,” Colin calls out.

“I'm here with Gandhi,” I say, still reverent from the cleaning. They come over.

“What do you think?” I show them my handiwork. They nod, solemn. It's an improvement.

“That really is a beautiful statue,” Bennett says, looking at Gandhi.

“Yes, indeed it is,” Clint says, looking at me.

Colin comes up behind me, wraps his arms around my naked torso. I wasn't fighting the cold, but the warm feels amazing. I lean back into him, soak up the heat of his chest with my back. He grabs my hips, turns me around and kisses me.

It's insane kissing on acid: weirdly more and less than sober or stoned. We fall into each other's mouths, energy circling between us in an endless figure eight, like an infinity sign, and again I understand: that symbol's not just a drawing, it's a picture of something real, a picture of
this
. At the same time, the actual kissing part feels weirdly hollow, almost silly—just muscles, tongues swimming around each other. Bodies are just bodies. We give them all this importance, but they're really so rudimentary, empty vessels. He opens my mouth deeper and I don't feel the sex of it, just the energy.

Meanwhile Bennett has found a tree trunk to stare at. “Man, look at this
bark
,” he says. “It's like
moving
. I should totally take this home and put it on my wall like art.”

Colin stops kissing me for a second, laughing. “In eight hours it isn't gonna look like that anymore, man. You can't take it with you.” Then he comes back to my mouth.

“Aw, dude, you're
right
,” Bennett says. “Wow. Perception is wild, huh?”

“Wild, man,” Clint says. My eyes are closed but I can hear he's near me.

Electricity runs through me, strong, and I realize that I'm shuddering. My whole body's shivering hard; it's funny, I don't really feel cold. I stop kissing and look down at myself. Colin does too. “Wow,” he says. “Why didn't you tell me you were cold?”

“I didn't feel it,” I say, and look into his spinning eyes.

“C'mon,” he says. “Let's go inside and get you a shirt.”

His flannel feels like the essence of hot cocoa. The bed is the essence of bed. He puts on water to boil, and part of my brain says,
Hot stove = fire
, but then I start watching the walls and forget. When the teakettle whistles, he remembers to turn it off, which is good because I wouldn't have. He brings me a Garfield mug full of mint tea. It says, “Give Me Coffee and No One Gets Hurt.” Garfield is out of control. I stare at his face for a minute and then it's too much; I have to stop. I cover him up with my hands.

“You good?” Colin asks me.

“Mmm,” I say. I am.

“Cool, then I'm gonna go outside and run around a little.” He smiles into my eyes. I smile back. That was nice, how he took care of me, brought me in and put a flannel on me. That's what people are supposed to do with each other. That's what love is, I realize: just looking out for the people around you, thinking about what they might need, and giving it to them. So simple. He's my ally.

“Thanks,” I say.

I lie back on the bed and close my eyes for what seems like hours. Grids of vibrating electric light stretch out in all directions, farther than my mind can even see; I track them back and back and back till suddenly they disappear and everything turns to space, like in
Star Wars
or cartoons, but vast, and real. Twinkling in the emptiness are a million tiny jewels, and when I stay with them, I see they're all connected by delicate threads, gossamer thin, and the net that they make is the universe.

In the distance I hear the door open and swing shut, far off, all the way across space. Then a voice snaps me back into the room.

“Hey, Tessa,” Clint says.

I rub my eyes, disoriented, not sure which reality I'm in or if it's both at once. Transcending dualities is confusing. It's dark outside.

He sits backward in a kitchen chair. “Trippin' out, huh?” His weasel eyes are blazing.

I smile. “Yeah.”

“Didn't know all that stuff existed, did you.”

“No. Well, sort of. But not like this.” It's hard to talk. “You know.”

“Yeah, I do. You want something to eat?”

Eat. Whoa. My body is not sure how it feels about that. “I don't know.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. But try this.” He brings an orange from the kitchen, digs his thumbs into the peel. It sprays, pungent. “Smells good, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait'll you taste it.”
He finishes peeling, splits it in half. It's incredible just to see. It's like the mandalas at the ashram, perfect patterned circles, except this one's made by nature. I swear, nature is amazing. He pulls a segment off.

“Open wide,” he says, just like when he put the acid on my tongue. The thought,
Why does he keep feeding me?
flashes through my mind, but then it flits away. I open my mouth; he slides the orange in. It's amazing. So intense I can feel it in my whole head, and also in my blood. Suddenly I understand food. This was made by nature to sustain me, who is also part of nature. I feel the interconnectedness of everything as I chew.

“Wow,” I say into his eyes.

“Toldja,” he says.

He feeds me another piece. Then he hands the orange over to me. “You don't want any?” I ask.

“Course I do.” He grins. “Now it's your turn.”