Alan Heathcock

C H A P T E R 7 Alan Heathcock

Then I knew I had to be out of that room, away from people. I was sweating. People were looking at me. I had to think, to clear my head. Something was shifting darkly inside me, my mind not right. Was the psilocybin from the mushrooms just now lacing into my cells? Olivia asked what was wrong, and I said I wasn’t feeling well. I said I’d go to the bathroom, splash some water on my face. She looked disappointed. I was always disappointing her. I didn’t want to disappoint anyone or make anything worse, and pushed down the back hallway and past the bathroom and found the exit and left out into the night.

A few people stood smoking in the manicured lawn where the light from the reception hall met the night. They were shadows, lares of ire at their lips. I walked past them and maybe someone said something to me, asking if I needed anything. But what could I tell them? That I needed everything? That I wanted the stars to come inside me as they once had as a teen loating in a lake? That I wanted to be starlight and not at all a man? The darkness became darker under the canopy of the woods. Now there was no sky. Now there was no judgement. I stumbled, feeling my head swell upon its thin fragile neck. My feet were like hooves as I tripped and staggered down through the black boles. The hillside dropped away, the slope steep. The square blocks of my feet slipped from under me and I was sliding down and down. When I stood again, my hands and elbows barked from the fall, I stood in water. A pond, small enough I could see the opposite shore washed in starlight. I waded deeper, feeling the cold pass up my legs and then my crotch and I needed to be under, to cool my head. I swam with my eyes shut, only moving my arms and considering each breath, my lung soon heaving, my arms tiring. I could feel the tug of the pond’s bottom, but I kicked and lailed and then there was mud beneath me and I stood again and fell hufing and gasping upon the shore.

It started as a sound, a hum like electrical wires. I knew this must be the sound of my thoughts. That I was electricity. I peered back across the pond and could see the lights from the reception hall atop a hill in the distance. I felt separate from those lights, and knew this was the center of my pain. That I was always separate. Even those who thought they knew me, those who’d said they’d loved me—Caitlyn, Olivia—were hopelessly outside, and I was inside, in the husk of my own private quarantine.

The pond water stirred and I linched into a crouch. A head emerged from the water, then a body. A man rose from the dark water, dripping and approaching. I told myself this was not real. This was the hallucination of my tripped and weary mind. It stood before me, just a shadow. “You’ve been looking for me?” it said. “No.” “I’m Samuel Ortega Lawrence. You can call me Sammy.” Does one speak to their own mind? “Hey, Sammy.” “Possession,” he said. “That’s what you want. That’s what we all want. People call them demons, but a demon is just grief, just lonesomeness, and the despair of separation is what makes them cling to us and us to them. Accept them, and you’ll never be alone.” “No, not that.” His smile was light. “That’s what the serpent wanted for Eve in the garden. To know she’d always be alone. Adam, too, and all of us to follow. But there’s other knowledge the serpent couldn’t touch. Sitting in my prison cell, I ate the fruit of the tree and knew I had a world of love inside my mind that was its own Eden. Claim your Eden, friend.”