While watering the basil and tidying up the apartment, I'd discovered a cute wireless Marshall speaker. I moved the record player to the living room and set it up on the coffee table.
The first sexy bass plucks of the Incesticide album filled the living room. I blew softly on my hibiscus tea and anointed my hands and feet with moisturizer. Low, reckless music. The complete antithesis, I thought, to what I felt then as the coolness made contact with my skin: uber calm, complete and like pure provocation.
During the second chorus of "Dive," it sounded like Kurt had begun to improvise:
Die, die, die, die with me!
Over and over. I knew the lyrics by heart, and this was the first time I'd ever heard the word 'die' in place of 'dive.'
I got up from the settee then, unsure of why. Oh well. I stepped onto the balcony. That first impression of the brilliant view remained in my mind; it couldn't hurt to see it again, a reminder of my new beginning.
The couple across the street were still there, and they turned at that exact moment and clocked me. I lifted my mug and smiled warmly. The woman flipped me off. For some reason, this cut deeply, like being rejected by the person you loved most in the world.
A frown creased the man's face, so severe that I immediately looked down to the congested street. A car swerved into the next lane at that precise moment. Thankfully none of the other vehicles were moving because the traffic light had turned . . . purple??
In wild animal shock I lifted my head to the sky, expecting cotton candy clouds. They resembled heralds of the apocalypse. I saw menacing figures in masks, like those the plague doctors had worn. Then a bunny whose features held abject hopelessness as the tiger sank its fangs deeper, eyes rolled back in mad lust.
The single chime of a doorbell, its decay superseded by rigorous knocking, pulled my attention down to earth.
Every bone in my body told me to run and hide. Pretend I wasn't home. But the music . . . and as waveforms undulating in time powered from the walls, and my temperature seesawed between volcanic and frosty, I knew I was fucked. So much for uber calm, complete and like pure provocation. At least I had moisturized.
Four men and two women stood waiting. They were in plain clothes but the stink of the narc, of the party pooper, of the inquisitor pig, emanated from them. It happened quickly. I had let them in, barely registering the flurry of their authoritative confidence and questions. The swarm proceeded to ransack my home, and as one of them pulled my wrists behind my back and slapped the handcuffs on, Kurt drawled out the verdict:
She should've stayed away from friends
She should've had more time to spend
She should've died when she was born
She should've worn the crown of thorns
She should've been a son
She should've been a son
She should've been a son
She should've been a son
Hours later I had been left in a stuffy lockup surrounded by noisy, sweaty men in various stages of withdrawal. In the preceding interrogation I learnt that the elite task force who showed up in the morning had acted on intel that I'd taken a heroic dose of mushrooms.
Who told you that? I asked. Never you mind, they said. It was their show.
A urine test confirmed the tip-off. On the surface, that explained the strange distortions I had seen. But I had no recollection of consuming anything beyond a few sips of tea. Even if it had been spiked, by whom? More importantly, the onset of effects couldn't have come on so quickly, or with such intensity.
"Cute little outfit you got on there, honey," said the gruff-looking man cuffed directly across from me. He had a voice like razors. "Did the cops break up your beauty sleep?" The other men hollered, and I thrice-cursed the asshole brigade for not allowing me a change of clothes, for all they put me through this morning, and for locking me in here with them.
The officers' responses to my tightlippedness about my supplier and background of consumption had been textbook. They slammed tables, alternated between shouting and being saccharine, had offered me coffee and then called me a 'cum-and-drug-guzzling plastic-tits rave slut.'
In the end, they snipped six locks of hair to send away for testing, their gloved fingers crossed that the results turned up more to charge me with. No calls, no visitors. Not that I had anyone. Somehow they seemed to know that. Revelled in that, almost, as if it gave them licence to do whatever they wanted to me.
"Where do we put this one," one of the female officers, Helen, said as she stood me up roughly, "in the ladies' holding?"
"You saw the ID. Lock that wannabe tramp with the guys," the leader of this heroic squad said, drinking in the hurt on my face as she carted me away.
The cell appeared to be lit by the cheapest bulbs they had in storage. Droplets scattered beyond the wall that isolated us from the rest of the world, but it might've just been a dripping pipe. The windows had been covered with a translucent material, like tracing paper, making it hard to be certain about anything going on outside.
The hazy filter placed over my vision had dwindled, but the heavy and suffocating quality of a nightmare still pervaded, even more so now that my future hung so precariously in the balance.
"When will they let us go?" I asked aloud.
"Forget it," a dusky man protested with a tug of his cuffs away from the bench. He looked like he'd been sleeping rough for years. "They don't got to let us go, 'cause nobody cares what happens to us. 's why we're here."
The one beside him agreed. "You'll be waiting 'til next year," he said, before facing away and nodding off. I assumed the heroin had begun to evacuate his system. Soon the desire for a blanket would be overwhelming. While the rest of us were sweating he'd be at the North Pole.
"Hey," the one across me said. "Why don't you ask the warden to sit you next to me when he brings us some food later? You got one hand free, doncha, or maybe you're thirsty for something I got? heh heh."
When you've lost volition to move, can't see past four walls, space ceases being a dimension, becomes negligible. With no clock on the wall, and not a watch between us, time also seemed more a fiction than ever. If you couldn't handle the sudden freeform nature of your reality, then you learned to rely on the steady heartbeats instead of minutes.
"Hey," the gruff man said again, heartbeats later.
I shut my eyes in a prayer for a few heartbeats' unconsciousness, some part of me so certain once I'd woken I'd be back in my perfect home.
"Hey," again, but more urgent, like he really, really, needed to confess something to me or he would die right there on the bench.
"What," I said through gritting teeth, surprised at my own tenacity.
"Nice ring. How many people you had to blow for it?"
This motherfucker. I considered bringing his mom into it, his lack of education, anything. Instead, I sniggered and continued looking at the floor. They should extend a job offer to him, he'd fit in just fine. Just breathe, I told myself calmly, just breathe.
He just wanted attention, to get a rise out of someone. I knew the type. They couldn't stand being left to their own devices, with nobody to see or hear them. A child afraid of the dark. Giving him none of my energy had immediately made me feel better; I felt as if I'd regained some semblance of power.
Wait.
I looked at the ring, twinkling like a miniature blue sun in this bleak void.
A flash of Baccha, the surge from his touch in the garden. The garden! A snapshot of the moment when I'd put on the ring and stepped into this.
"Your job is to breathe and remember."
There was more. The night at the Invisible Scorpion, back at . . . my place? Yes, but different. The basement at my parents' house. So wasted, and up to now I'd only remembered the morning after. But no, the night hadn't ended when we got to the basement.
Like a recording fed back into the tape machine, images and dialogues spooled into my mind. "To make something vanish, cast it into the fire," Baccha said, holding a candle. More flashes followed, of him demonstrating something. His disembodied voice, saying, "Failure isn't in feeling fear, but in submitting to it." Then a bird's eye view of us looking up The Gateway Experience on Youtube, and him lying next to me as I practised getting into Focus 10. Out of the body, all time is one time.
A final flash: "Our little team has confirmed that your patron deity is Hekate, in her aspect of the Triple Goddess."
"What does that mean?"
"All I can tell you, is that she won't save you in your time of need. She'll hand you the tools, or make sure that they're within reach. You might have to be as resourceful as she is–and always just as composed. When you do whatever it is that you need to do, she'll be there, watching. But in the end it'll be you who has stepped into your power. When you do, there will be no distinction between you both anyway."
I opened my eyes and took in this joke of an illusion for the last time. It became so plain that everything had been neatly arranged to create fear. Offering me the dream life, and then giving me a front-row seat to its systematic destruction. Drawing on my deep-seated fear of disappointing my parents, especially over breaking the law and substance abuse. A repeat of the greatest hits from early life: skipping school, bad grades, underaged smoking and drinking. High school never ends, eh?
Then I conjured up the humiliating names, the refusal to allow me my true expression. And this jackass across from me and his greed for attention. All of it a masterly orchestration with one aim in mind: for them to extract energy. If they can convince you that you've got something to lose, then you've already lost. True power doesn't change hands, cannot be siphoned.
All the fear in the world became beautiful, then. Laughter bubbled from the depths of my belly, rising and falling, with greater force each time. Baccha would be proud, and prouder still. How so, so beautiful it was to be afraid. The ultimate sign of being alive. Fear lets you know that your vibration isn't the highest it could be, that you're near the right track. It was only energy without awareness, power without control, like the shadow predators. On their own they lacked the means to go upwards, could only signal the way. In a moment of vulnerability lay the doorway to the bottomless potency coursing within each person, every moment.
I heard a familiar voice from down the hall. Helen.
The voice grew louder as it approached. Then her figure passed, obscured save for a panel in the corner where the tracing paper material had peeled. Our eyes met, and something flickered in her gaze–perhaps recognition. A shared, unconscious understanding of the deeper forces at play, or simply the human connection underneath the bureaucracy.
Maybe Hekate had slipped in for a moment to give me the go-ahead. The new moon still presided over the sky, a time of new intentions.
This dire situation was never the destination. Fear is the arrow pointing the way. No longer would I turn away, pretending it isn't there. I will name it, I will listen.
I relinquished control, I stopped fighting the fear. I let it all build, felt all of it within me. I braced for a shock to the system, but it flowed, natural as the wind, unhindered for the first time. Thank you, I hummed within the caves of my endless soul, thank you. The circuit was complete.
Uber calm, complete, and like pure provocation. The sapphire on my finger flashed, a sudden blue sun. My vision clarified as the walls began fuzzing, followed by a disruption of the humming lights into insectile drone.