Psychedelic Martial Arts Novel 2.1
Amanita Trip Narrative
Reclining on the blankets, I cleared my mind by recalling the classic late period Steven Seagal movie Out For a Kill. Or rather, by recalling a more accurate translation of lines from The Platform Sutra which Seagal quotes to his Sifu in that movie for reasons which probably even the 6th Patriarch Hui Neng would have difficulty fathoming:
The Body is the Wisdom Tree, The Mind like a Bright Mirror stand. Always strive to keep it clean making sure that no dust lands.
My right shoulder twitched violently, and my legs stiffened. I realized I should’ve taken more water with a dose this size but didn’t trust myself on the stairs down to the kitchen. There was nothing to do but relax and let what was coming pass through me.
Smiling intentionally to release endorphins, I recalled the other half of the couplet.
Wisdom has never been a tree, the bright mirror has no stand. Since there has never been anything, where can dust land?
I paused for a moment to check, and found that I was still not “enlightened.” The room was filling with Amanita’s trademark fog, a grey mist which would form into faces and the shapes of strange animals if I permitted my eyes to focus on it. My ears compensated for the visual obstruction, I could hear the rats stomping around in the walls. The big ones were dragging their testicles behind them like sacks of the yard waste. Saliva refilled my mouth continuously and the swallowing was so loud it startled me every time.
I ignored the symptoms as much as I could, I wasn’t going to survive the night if I let such paltry metabolic changes impress me. The stuff had barely kicked in. I began my usual half hour of Zazen, or Dazuo if you prefer to use the Taoist terminology. Having a blank mind between the hours of 9:30 and 10:30 night after night has proven health benefits which (fundamental reality or unreality of human experience aside) I have enjoyed since high school. The twitching knocked me over a few times, which was distracting. The floor, ceiling, and walls were now dry ice. My brain was a fog machine inside my skull, and it had turned the room into a fog machine around me. I was inside my mind, inside the fog, inside a room, inside myself, surrounded by fog. When I tried to assign a hierarchy to the various layers, it made me nauseous. It wasn’t a meaningful question.
I lay down on the improvised bed I maintain on the floor (another habit I have adhered to since early adulthood) and spread my arms into a crucifix position. This was my way of signaling the demons to go ahead and take me. I was an electric kettle, blood boiling with voltaic excitement. What kind of monster would descend out of the mist to challenge my sanity? Would there be tentacles? Feathers? Claws? Perhaps the face of an owl and the antlers of a deer? It didn’t matter because I’d already cut out all the weak parts of my soul and burned them down to the root. No horror could provide me more than a tiny jolt of emotion. I was looking forward to a pleasant thrill and generic reassurance that I was still alive.
“Hello! Hello! Gina! This is your mother!”
When I heard this, my brain yelled “Fuck!” as loudly as anything can scream without making a sound.
My apartment complex has over forty units. One of these units is home to a middle-aged woman whose daughter apparently lives in another time zone. When she calls her daughter, she usually does most of the talking, and she speaks with thunderous volubility that would drown out a bull elephant seal doing his best to get laid. Even a visitor from another planet unfamiliar with human biology would recognize such a voice as the throaty baritone of a humorless and extremely ill woman who will nonetheless live to be at least 120 years old. This woman’s conversation was going to be a central setpiece in what was already a very dangerous trip. She didn’t know me, but we were going on a journey together. Just like that Korean flight attendant I met on Tinder one time, except instead of going to Nashville, we were going to hell.
My eyes were looking in different directions and possibly closed. The back of my neck was wet with drool. I still saw the mist though, swirling all around me. With these words, the atmosphere took shape and congealed into a blurry image of this woman’s face, red-purple and veiny. It filled up my entire field of vision and floated 5 inches above me. Despite my best efforts to break it up, it would not go away. My mind was locked in, and she wasn’t about to shut up.
Her voice was like a magnetic field made, although highly repellent it infused all sensible materials with an attractive force. I had to hear.
As the regret sank in a mocking voice from inside my head shrieked a poem at me.
Taking a trip in a bad mood is like locking yourself in the stocks.
You never know what the townsfolk will throw, could be eggs, spoiled tomatoes, or rocks!
Mocking-Demon Me was right. I could no longer stand. Relocating to a hotel or murdering this woman was out of the question in my condition. I could listen to her talk to her daughter, or call myself an ambulance. The cost-benefit analysis tragically weighed in favor of waiting her out. This meant resigning myself to at least an hour of lying bathed in waves of pure sickness divorced from death.
My neighbor was discussing her ongoing medical treatment with her daughter. She was one of those women who grow disinterested in life and decides to live for others. Those others tend to be members of the medical profession: doctors, dentists, and so forth. These fortunate products of protracted professional educations are able to educate their children and finance elaborate vacations thanks to the generosity and self-sacrifice of people like my neighbor.
“Gina, I’m trying to find out if my insurance covers getting my upper teeth removed. I’m getting them all taken out over the next six months… Yeah, because of the vomiting. I’m going to treat it aggressively by taking them all out and getting dental prosthetics”
The floating face began to dribble stomach acid from the corners of its mouth. My mind produced the smell of stomach acid and cigarette smoke more powerfully than it ever had with the assistance of my nose. Ask a surgeon, maxillofacial or otherwise, what life would be like if he limited himself to medical procedures that were strictly “necessary” and you’ll get the same look of horror you get from Mr. Heinz, if you ask him to contemplate a world in which his profits were limited to sales of ketchup actually ingested by consumers rather than the portion left congealing on plates.
“I have a rare autoimmune disease that mimics Crohn’s disease. The doctor says I’m just going to keep throwing up and the acid is wearing my teeth down, so I’m just gonna take ’em out… No, the vomiting is here to stay. It’s like the diarrhea, apparently. It’s autoimmune, you see… Well I’m trying to get it covered under the medical insurance because the vomiting is just a symptom of the blood disorder. They may try to cover it under dental, but it’s not a dental problem, it’s a blood problem!”
By this time I’d forgotten I was drugged. I couldn’t even remember my own name. I was only aware of a powerful desire to sleep thwarted by this woman’s intrusion into my room. The woman droned on, eroding my seven hours of sleep like her gastric juices eroded her teeth.
At one point, I made a frantic attempt to find the floor as a preliminary to going downstairs and telling her to shut up. Failing, I lay there waiting her out, trying my best to take vicarious pleasure in the windfall the dentist was getting.
“It’s going to be pretty expensive because I need the full anesthesia. Novocaine doesn’t work on me. The trouble is I have to go to the bathroom every two hours so I miss a lot of appointments and I can’t be under for too long… Yeah… Yeah, that’s why we’re doing it over six to nine months. We’ll just be doing them one or two at a time.”
The sheer madness of the plan passed description. Removing healthy teeth prophylactically, the massive expense associated with general anesthesia, the sheer scale of the project! It was all I could do to keep from grinding my own teeth until they actually required the procedure this woman was about to undergo recreationally.
“I received an inheritance recently, as you know; that’s why I’m finally able to do this no matter what the insurance company says. Since I’m basically chained to a toilet for the rest of my life, I can’t use it to travel, so I might as well take care of these dental problems… Yeah… Yeah, that’s what I said: I might as well be comfortable!”
How offensive that the version of morality in use on this planet admonishes the innocuous act of bludgeoning this inconsiderate, incontinent, hypochondriac-harpy to death! All her problems could be solved with one dose of however many cc’s of steel are in a ball-pein hammer. Never mind that it’s the only feasible way for the silent majority to get enough sleep! Never mind that it would allow this woman’s long-suffering offspring to expand her horizons with travel and provide for her own children’s future! No. Bludgeoning old women to death is “wrong.” Nobody can explain it. It’s just another rule that subjects of the Leviathan have to memorize.
I lay there strenuously suppressing my violent urges, as the woman’s unthinkably abrasive voice rasped in and out of my consciousness like sand in mashed potatoes I was eating against my will. Around 1 AM I briefly forgot I couldn’t move and gave her the customary 15 minutes to pack it in before I reached into my mental filing cabinet and pulled out a folder labeled “Perfect Crimes.” Then, I realized I couldn’t tell if she was still talking because I had spent a subjectively infinite amount of time trapped in the pure sensation of hating her. The more I tried to tell if any of this had been real the more confused I got. With all my concentration I moved my arms in angelic arcs to my left and right, trying to find my phone. After two passes I felt something that might have been a phone case but got tired trying to lift it to my face and gave up.
As soon as I gave up, I felt euphoric. My energy level went from zero to 100 and I sat up easily. My pupils were so dilated I could see through the pitch blackness and found my phone at a glance. It was 2 am and I laughed at myself, for thinking the woman was real. If she’d been talking at all she’d probably gone to bed an hour ago. Maybe taking the drugs was just a nightmare too. It could all have been a dream within a dream with some sleep paralysis thrown in. The mind’s grasp on reality is tenuous because the mind can never grasp itself. I had a strong sense that the universe was a projection of my mind and marveled at the arrogance of hating another human being when it’s impossible to confirm that other people even exist.
“Good night, love you!” she rasped. I heard her screen door slam as she went inside, presumably to sit on her toilet. She had been real after all. I got angry and dizzy all over again and the room started to fill with fog. A few deep breaths swept the murderous impulses into the corner of my mind, and I used my regained self-mastery to guide my brain into a dreamless sleep.
For three hours and ten minutes.
