Eat Prey Drug: The Hollow Earth [NSFW]
A quest for health, peace and morphine leads to an even stranger journey into a community that believes the Earth is hollow.
Editor’s Note: We sent Paul Kwiatkowski on assignment to Mount Shasta, California to investigate its eponymous volcano, which is claimed to be the site of Telos, a hidden city inhabited by advanced beings called Lemurians.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
I escaped the polar vortex by replacing it with another vortex: Los Angeles. I burned through winter in L.A., where — compared to the silvery winter of New York, with its edges like crumpled aluminum — it instead felt like being inside a sunny defunct fridge. The blocky pastel storefronts were all stained, and even the new things were rotting. Coming from Florida, I thrived. I liked that L.A. was all at once seedier, cleaner and dirtier than Miami.
During the final month of my stay, two earthquakes happened. The first one rattled me awake at 5 A.M. I was asleep in my apartment when a surge jolted my eyes open. Outside, the patio floor separated from the house. A crack ran down the wall from the ceiling to the tile. It was much less dramatic than I imagined a 5.4-magnitude earthquake would be. I didn’t feel the second one or the aftershocks. Back East, my friends joked that if stayed in L.A. any longer, this would be the year that the city finally broke away from California.
A day after the second earthquake, something happened. At first, the symptoms were dizziness and fatigue followed by waking dreams that lingered into chills. It was like some ancient microbe had come unhinged, sputtering out of the Earth’s crust into the atmosphere, mixing with the smog and sunshine. Entire days were spent vomiting, purging something out of my body. I was frozen in a lucid dream state I couldn’t wake from. I hallucinated clouds like opaque scales spiraling shut. I felt poisoned, altered at the atomic level. Hollywood looked no more damaged than usual, but I couldn’t phase out the white noise wheezing from the highway — all day the sound of leaf blowers, lawn mowers and construction crews blending into my subconscious.
Online, I researched my symptoms in conjunction with earthquakes. I self-diagnosed valley fever, or “quake fever” to Southern California locals. You contracted the disease by inhaling fungal spores kicked up from fault lines. Occasionally, it could be fatal. My doctor said many of his patients reported vivid nightmares, allergies and flu-like symptoms. “Earthquakes can effect our chemistry,” he said. “Our bodies are just containers for fat and water. Things could potentially get jumbled up.” The symptoms would eventually subside.
I couldn’t tell if I was having a psychotic break or if the quake had muddled my organs. I was in a fugue. I had to get the fuck out of Los Angeles.
My only income was from a writing assignment. While driving back East from California, I was supposed to immerse myself in various forms of quantum realities and investigate perceptions of consciousness. The plan was to drive north to Oregon, then cut east across the Northern states to Lily Dale Assembly — the world’s largest center for the science, philosophy and religion of spiritualism — in New York.
REDDING, CALIFORNIA
A suburb outside Mount Shasta that’s known for its lucrative plasma clinic, Redding is the last stop for drifters before they float away from Earth. Assuming your blood is clean, it’s a good place to make quick cash and feel rewarded for avoiding hepatitis. I was there to visit a friend who had recently relocated after flirting with porn in Sherman Oaks.
Aside from donating plasma for extra cash, Stacey traveled from city to city, coast to coast posing for dubious photographers through various amateur modeling sites. She also claimed to be an “energy healer,” which I assumed was code for “hand job.” Stacey rarely laughed because “smiling causes wrinkles.” She carried travel-size coconut-scented moisturizer in her back pocket. Twin humidifiers saturated her apartment in damp menthol. She was locked in battle with the arid.
Stacey gave me two bottles of liquid morphine she bought off a co-worker who had taken it from her mother after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. (Mom claimed it gave her stomachaches worse than chemo.) Stacey also offered me a jar partially filled with three types of crystal and sulfuric-tasting water “charged” with their vibrational energy. The combination of crystals are supposed to release a frequency that elevates brain levels. She claimed that because our body is made up of 70 percent water, it could easily be altered through water-absorbed crystal energy. After drinking the concoction, she told me to lay down on the living room table.
She moved her icy hands over my temples where the pain was strongest. The pressure from her palms against my forehead felt cooling. She told me about people in Mount Shasta who could communicate with an alien race inhabiting the dormant volcano. My thoughts drifted from the fever that had blighted them. Could tuning in on an alien frequency cancel out what the quake had dislodged? The drone of highway traffic ebbed to the buzz of a hummingbird feeder hanging outside the window. The headache left the front of my skull, dispersing somewhere in the center.
I couldn’t say if the transference of energy was for real or if I had psychosomatically willed it. Regardless, the break — even momentarily — was a godsend. Stacey and I treated ourselves to Taco Bell, my first solid meal in a week. After watching a marathon of Sister Wives, about unhappy Mormon polygamists trying to cohabitate, we celebrated the eventual implosion of the family by drinking morphine-laced Tecate.
