Belowdecks the heat is thick and punishing—moving through it is like pushing through a headwind—and it has a strangely lifeless odor. It’s just plastic, chemical, unstained mahogany, textile. Nowhere is there a trace of anything biological. The odor is humanless, which makes it a little soulless, unreal even, as if the boat is waiting for someone to make it real by occupancy. Simply by being alive in it. This should be a comforting smell—it is so full of potential—but instead it just makes me lonelier. True, I’m here now, but I don’t count. Not really. The boat doesn’t belong to me.

I’ve paid for it, God knows, but it still isn’t mine.

When I pry open my bag a new fragrance is introduced: pharmacy. That comforts me some. I upend the bottle over the table and a multicolored swarm of pills covers the white plastic. I swirl them around, admiring the kaleidoscope, then wash them all down with bourbon. After a long time, the cabin starts shifting. It becomes faint and umbral, a tunnel of darkness constricting around it. It keeps getting tighter and darker until I am floating in a neutral black plasma.

When I wake up it’s a different world. Before I passed out the river hardly said anything. Its mouth was clogged with trash and staleness. It mumbled. But now it has voice. The cabin is also rich with the scent of fish, capers, spinach, sultanas. And the world is on funhouse tilt. It pitches, it rolls, it heels over. I try to stand but the floor is not where it has been located historically by long-standing agreement with my feet. I make a move on it, whiff entirely, and next thing I know I’m turtling on my back. The vertigo tries to pull me under again but I am revived by someone rubbing a wet, warm, abrasive towel on my face. When I open my eyes I see that I am on the receiving end of an elongated pink tongue, scrolling and unscrolling with abandon.

I blink at the puppy, bewildered. The puppy blinks at me, adulant. Then it urinates unashamedly.

I think: I didn’t take that many hallucinogens, did I?