Tim gave him a long look. He controlled the sacrament, though he was more than liberal about it—if people wanted to trip, that was their right, the right to internal freedom—but he was the impresario, the ringleader, the dealer, and he held that power over everybody in the house. All you had to do was ask, but still, it was all in the asking, wasn’t it? “It’s kind of late,” he said finally. “I was planning on finishing this,” he said, gesturing to the notebook. He glanced across the room, as if there were an audience waiting in the wings. He gave it a beat, then one more. “But all things in time, right?”

“I don’t know,” Fitz said, “I just—I think I’m getting close. The last time, or no, two times ago, I saw the white light, the First Light, I mean—just at the end. It was like all the color went out of the world and there were no dimensions to anything, just light.”

Tim was nodding. Sipping his drink and nodding. “I hear you. People who’ve died and been brought back to life report seeing that same light—in every case, absolutely. Though of course you’ve got your neuroscientists and their lab rats telling you it’s no different than a light bulb flaring at the moment the power goes out.”

“But they’re wrong, aren’t they?”

Tim shrugged. “I don’t know, Fitz.”

“I want to see the Second Light, I want to see God—or whatever passes for God when your mind peels back all the layers and there’s nothing between you and the universe. You’ve been there, I know you have—”

Tim had the pill bottle out now, right there in his hand, the Delysid, LSD-25, with its preposterous warning label—POISON—when in fact the substance inside it was the only known antidote for the poison of the world, of consciousness, of non-God and non-knowledge and the pitiable grasp of humankind on the drawstrings of nature and the dead black reaches of space that swallowed everything like an insatiable mouth.

“Tell me you have. Tell me you’ve been there. Tell me you’ve seen God.”

Tim uncapped the bottle, shook six pills out into the palm of his hand, three each, a supernal dose, a dose worthy of all the gods there ever were. He winked. Grinned. Leaned forward over the cradle of his knees and stretched out his hand.

“Fuck God,” he said, “let’s get high.”

About the Author

About the Author