This is a work in progress.
The Last Apparition
Some people are haunted by ghosts, but a few others pursue them and haunt them back, wrestle them to the ground and wring whatever blessings they can from the wraithlike forces that drive them from one moment to the next. Jack Daly was one of the second kind. Everything in his life that was tangible and concrete he held under his thumb, and he conducted it all in circles like the whole thing was a board game (one in which he never went to jail and passed Go more often than most). Still, a circle, no matter how perfect, turns in one itself and repeats, and the better one is at retracing its path the more boring and predictable that it becomes. So many people reach this epiphany, yet are chased back into the welcoming arms of the familiar by that mean spirit that teaches us to treat the unknown with fear and contempt. It was this particular specter that Jack followed down to a one story house by the university to buy certain drugs that came with the promise of an escape from the loop.
Jack picked Claire up the next day in the afternoon, a Saturday. He kept the mushrooms in a plain brown box that he typically reserved for the storage and transportation of items of a more dubious nature. At various points in its storied history it had stored firecrackers, spraypaint, cigarettes, condoms, black toenail polish, videotapes, and an old handgun. The pistol was a six shooter, the sort that cowboys used to use, that he had gotten at a pawn shop. He parked the car across the street from their deserted school grounds, and they chewed the shrooms carefully and held them between their gums and lower lips, like chewing tobacco, just as Bolak had taught him. “Riding the magic school bus”, he called it. It was a term that he was rather fond of despite, or perhaps because of, its childlike innocence.
They walked across the boulevard hand-in-hand, slowing oncoming traffic. They sat on the swingset where Jack, bigger than the other kids as a child, used to push the others up and up until they got too high and their path became violent and jerky. They would scream and Jack would laugh like it was a game but knowing even then that it was something more sinister. Claire would pick flowers and look on in wonder he made the kids soar and hang poised in midair for a moment that seemed to stretch on forever, looking spectacularly like writhing insects caught in a spiderweb. She mistook their frightened shrieks for peals of laughter, and even the children themselves would admit to themselves, a little uneasily, that they had enjoyed themselves. But today there would be no pushing, only sitting and waiting as they swayed back in forth steadily like the pendulum on a grandfather clock, keeping time with the breeze as they waited for the psilocybin to open their doors of perception. There was electricity in their silence that hung thickly in the air, forming dark rain clouds overhead. Jack felt with unshakable certainty that he had summoned them. He felt his higher brain tingle and kick into gear and he smiled. He knew that today the very laws of nature bent to his uncompromising will. He stretched out his arm eastward and held the mountain in the palm of his hand, and immediately he knew where to go.
* * *
Jack strode purposefully out of the bathroom with the details of own dripping features bored into his brain. It had been raining, and hard. In the desert it rains often in the spring, in furious sheets that leave you gasping for air when you open your mouth to the sky. The rain permeates deep beneath the skin and envelops every capillary and tendon in a cold, insulating cocoon. This torrent, like all of them, evaporated as quickly and with as little fanfare as it came, the only testament to its visitation being the boy who stood alone in the tram lobby, at the top of Sandia peak, shivering for more. Water streamed off of his hands and matted hair and collected in pools at his feet, though it seemed to be leaking slowly from somewhere deep inside of him. His hair, strikingly dark with saturation from the rainstorm, was plastered loosely to his forehead, and his smooth brown arms dangled at his sides. His plaid shirt hung open, buttoned halfway. Heavy with rain, it clung to him as if had grown and stretched to fit him from birth, and though the definition of his lean, angular frame was evident beneath the cotton fabric, one could hardly imagine him without it on. His appearance gave the impression of perpetually self-assured, battle-ready tranquility, the sort of pure and complete relaxation that you see so rarely in nature, like a cat in the moment before it pounces. His eyes betrayed his purpose. They were fierce sea-grey patches of intense tumult, daring you to look the way a charging bull dares you to stand in its path. Amidst the deadly calm of his musculature, his eyes stormed violently at the center, like an inverse hurricane. He was a civil war, both sides without a cause, raging silently.
If only they could see him now! His parents, his teachers, his friends, all who thought they knew him so well, all of whom would die for him if he asked it. He had a handshake and a smile unique to each of them, crafting a persona tailored to each of them whims. He could read them all so well, and control them accordingly. Yet for one afternoon he was free of them all, free of the pretty circles he ran around all of them every day without lifting a finger.
Only Claire could look into those eyes without blinking and watch the clouds roll away. She was careless and bohemian, orphaned at an early age. She lived with an aunt that she rarely saw, who worked nights, housing her and feeding her and little else. She wore black in the summer and sundresses in the winter. She loved all the commonalities and collective experiences of nature, human nature in particular. When she was small she would tear the wings off of grasshoppers and dragonflies glue them to the backs of snails and other flightless things, saying that it was not equitable for one race of insect to monopolize all of the soaring beauty of flight while another plodded along on the ground, doomed to a life of grounded drudgery. She was self-indulgent in the extreme, and Jack could neither understand nor control her in the way he could so many others, which was why he feared her. They had been dating for two years. He figured it was the closest he could come to loving someone, and he kept her close because he always suspected that she saw right through him.
“Where have you been?” Jack demanded. In his drugged up stupor, all of his emotions were ramped up, including his frustration with her incorrigibility. He noticed how untouched and unencumbered by the rain she appeared, and shivered again with longing, but this time for her.
“What does it matter to you?” Claire’s accusation came accompanied with a shimmering laughter, like breaking glass.
Jack ignored the comment, as the powerful awe he felt at his experience quickly overcame his annoyance with her disinterest. “I went out down the hill a bit, to the ski lift. The trees tightened in on either side of the slope until I was hemmed in, wrapped up under their canopy, like a cocoon. Little streams ran beside me and became rivers, and the mud underneath flowed faster than the water. The whole scene teemed with this inexplicable, chaotic beauty. Life was flowing out of every pore of the earth, all around me! Jesus, look at me! Look at all of this!” he exclaimed, the rainwater still dripping off his nose.
If anything had ever lived in Jack, it died long ago, before Claire ever knew him. He was incapable of commanding sympathy, and that is why she loved him, but still she couldn’t help blinking at him a little sadly as she watched him struggling to wring every false drop of life out of the world that he could and claim it for himself. He was pursuing some nebulous idea of greatness that existed only in his head. He was unable to recognize the mirage, and thus unable to recognize the source of his insatiable lack of peace. She smiled softly.
“That sounds lovely.” Claire paused as Jack looked at her expectantly as if demanding a kindred tale of discovery.
“I sat in here. I watched people,” was all she offered.
“How can you stand to watch them, these people. Jesus Christ! They make me sick. Herds of sheep, shuttled up and down the mountain so they can huddle in tourist shops and tell all of their friends they had a $13 basket of chicken wings at the top of a mountain. Brainwashed from birth. There are robots, living among us…did you know that Claire? How can you watch them? There’s nothing to see. There’s more life in every one of those pine needles on every one of those trees in that forest, than in this entire crowd. Show’s out there, babe.”
“Getting shuttled up and down the tram…isn’t that what we’re doing here too, Jack?”
“Don’t compare me to them! Honestly. You don’t believe we’re the same as those people?”
“More than you think, Jack. More than you’ll ever know.”
Even in the face of her quiet consternation, his brazen, arrogant passion always captivated her and took her breath away. She loved him like she had never loved anything else, despite himself. His delusions were so powerful, especially at moments like this, that they became real to everyone around him, even to her at times. He stirred her and broke the mold for her in a way that nothing real ever could. He was an exception to her belief that it was the universal aspects of man that made him great. She reveled in this and it brought her great joy to know that on some level she could relate to these common aspects of everyman, everywhere in the world across all geographic and cultural divides. Yet Jack stubbornly refused to accept this. He glorified and celebrated only the mountaintop experiences, those high and lonely aspects of his personality that separated him from everyone else. He had power over others specifically because he had worked so hard to sever every last remaining human connection that he had with them, and fill that space with some sort of airy, spiritual currency that only he could see. Whatever it was, it puffed him up with some hollow brand of pride that left him always wanting for more. As she watched him rage with so much passionate conviction against everything she held to be sacred in the world, she couldn’t help but admire his dedication to his own misery. He was the sovereign monarch of a court of one, ruler of nothing.
“Think about it Jack. We all come up here to be shaken from our routine, and all the things that imprison us down there, if only for a few hours. We all want the same things. Why can’t you see that? Why can’t you be happy with it? It’s not all so bad as you believe it to be.”
“It’s beneath me.”
“Damn it Jack! All that power that you think you have is worthless! You’re beholden to them! You’ve let them shape you twist you, drive you away from yourself! You’ve become this tragic, misshapen figure, all because of the contempt you have for the spirit that you share with everyone. They’ve forced you to deny the essence of what makes you human! They control you Jack, and you let them.”
Claire breathed heavily as all of this exploded out of her, pent up somewhere so deep inside of herself that she hadn’t even realized that she felt these things until now. But they were all true. And they both knew it.
His eyes went dead. He stared at her for a minute and then turned to go.
“I’m taking the next tram down. Don’t follow me.”
She didn’t, and somehow she knew this would be the last time she saw him.
* * *
Six months later, Claire sat on her bed and turned over the note written in Jack’s sprawling script and read it for what felt like the thousandth time:
I don’t care if it hurts.
I want to have control.
I want a perfect body.
I want a perfect soul.
On the front was scrawled “FOR CLAIRE” in big block letters. She’ll never forget the silent accusation that burned in Jack’s parents’ eyes as they walked over to her after the funeral and handed it to her.
“Maybe this means something to you.”
It did. They were the lyrics to a song by Jack’s favorite band, morphed into an ethos, a last ditch effort to tackle his Last Great Apparition. He followed it to the next life with an old cowboy pistol.
