His heartbeat was loud, his hands wouldn’t still, he was half crouched in a position that made him look as if he were preparing for a footrace. But despite it all, Joe was alive. When he calmed, there was so much to see. A path winding up toward a dense forest or down below to an area filled with golden ferns. Joe stooped and used his fingers to dig into the ground. The soil shimmered in his hands but was mostly black. Large bugs skittered from between his fingers. They were the first things that weren’t flora, that seemed alive. On the ground were large seeds, akin to a pumpkin’s, clinging to thready gold pulp. Another sign he was truly elsewhere. Last year, he had won a quiz bowl competition by correctly stating ferns used spores, not flowers or seeds, to reproduce. But here were golden seeds, here were bugs with a shine to them that maybe came from primarily eating these plants. A laugh in the distance, wheezy as if the joke heard was devastating and true. The seeds smelled like movie theater popcorn. Without thinking much of it, Joe ripped some off the roots, didn’t care about the dirt because they smelled so good, and tossed them into his mouth. They still tasted like popcorn, but also of earth and a flavor he would later describe as aged cheddar cheese.

This was the part Joe kept to himself and never told his business partners: After chewing and swallowing the seeds, within five minutes, he had the feeling of his head getting lighter and lighter. His hands felt miles away from his torso. He wanted to clap or sing, maybe suddenly dance. There was a broad smile on his face, and Joe was aware enough to try considering the last time he had felt so good. Maybe seeing a Pistons game with his dad? The first time he had played “Come as You Are” on his acoustic guitar in front of other people? Then, a feeling of overwhelming lightness as he slowly sat down, thunk—Maybe I am dying, he thought—and lay prone.

For twenty glorious minutes, his body was a pond. Sometimes still and dead, but with ripple after ripple of that same smile, that urge to dance, that feeling that has no word in English, but the closest Joe could come to articulating it was: I-was-connected-to-everything-in-the-universe. Sometimes, he thought he could feel and hear gravity itself hugging him and telling him he had value. There was a resonance to everything. Even the bugs below had their songs.