Transcendental Carnation

There was definite amusement in Rofocale's eye cluster as he turned to look at me. His twin mouths were curved in wry smiles.

"Are you quite sure you want to do this?", he asked.

"Quite totally", I replied.

He said nothing, just went on smiling. A feeling of unease crept over me. Rofocale had a stubborn habit of making me feel like that. Time and time again, his behaviour could be more than a bit alien. And the cellular bubble he lived in certainly didn't help. It was filled with disturbing details which never revealed themselves until specifically looked for, but nonetheless filled the room with unnerving ambience of which you inevitably came aware, anxiety crawling all over you.

I shrugged. This was the time of renewal. I was shedding my skin. The symbolism was perfect and timing absolutely right, and one eccentric with his distorted doodles certainly wouldn't scare me off.

"And you think you're ready now?", he said suddenly.

"Yeah. I suppose I am."

His smiles sharpened into sneers.

"No, you're certainly not. Nobody ever is. I told you that you're going to experience a total transformation of what you consider reality. Things you are going to see will be far beyond your conception as it is. You cannot begin to prepare for what you cannot even begin to understand."

A moment's silence.

"So I ask you again. Do you think you're ready?"

"No", I said. I was a bit amused, but hid it well. Rofocale's rhetoric could be impressively bombastic, but it seemed to me that he spouted it mostly for his own amusement.

"That's my boy."

Rofocale whistled sharply, and a slimy fist-sized slug-creature oozed its way out from beneath his bed. Its two little tentacles, sprouting from its head, were curled around a small glass pipe. It wriggled up his front leg, leaving a foul trail behind, and finished its odyssey on his lap. Rofocale promptly picked up the pipe and popped the little slug into his mouth. "Crunch", went the teeth. I sat there, picking absent-mindedly at my now rather loose skin. He spit the remains of that little thing into a small cup he had procured from one of his skin folds, and started adding different reagents which seemed to come in all colours of a mutant rainbow. Finally he blew a little gout of flame into it from his mouth.

"Showing off your dragon genes, old pal?", I inquired in a light tone of voice. He sniffed in a way which was propably meant to be arrogant, but failed miserably.

"Showing off is a sign of infantile dependency on sources of approval outside your own self, and I'm so obviously above that", he lectured while scraping the dried-up mixture into the pipe. "Now... you going to smoke up, or just joke around?"

"Give me that pipe."

In a smooth arc, his tentacle brought the instrument of intoxication next to my face, and I plucked it into my claws. For a moment, I gazed upon it, lost in thoughtless contemplation and sudden welling of fear. Then I gathered my determination, torching the bowl and breathing in deeply. The acrid smoke tore at my throat, but I held it in as I was told, then exhaled slowly.

...the billowing smoke exploding with infinite possibilities, each wisp a reality of its own, torn and reborn and fused into the parallel worlds in vast neverending procession...

...sudden realization that all my existence was nothing but tendrils of smoke twisting in the air, and within this one eternal moment, a mighty storm was rapidly gathering force...

I finished exhaling. And then the drug hit me like God's personal sledgehammer. I had time to realize that I was about to die, but not enough to start caring. In the briefest moment, the room lost its boundaries, melting into a mass of undifferentiated sensation. For another fleeting fraction, the bubbling chaos froze into a purest crystal structure around the teeth of snickering Rofocale; then it exploded with soul-shattering force, tearing my individual self apart in a flash of blinding torment.

Timeless, all-enveloping void.

There was a sound that shimmered in the emptiness, a tinkle of divine windchime with utmost sad beauty. Then there were more, and forms were born of their melody, bright pulses of propability wandering in that pregnant non-space. Each time they met, they let out that wondrous, graceful chime. And now there were billions of them, no, a number beyond numbers. They had merged into an ocean of light that pulsed with vast cosmic harmonies. It spoke to itself in that music, a raw godlike intelligence devoid of words or comprehension, of anything but sheer infantile joy at the act of babbling itself.

This primal perfection was broken by the dynamics of harmony. While at the edges of this Godhead, the particles of light were converting ever more non-existence into being, inside it the pulses were creating dense nuclei of radiance. New sounds: cathartic scream of release, a hum of alchemical synthesis giving birth to new elements of speech. Around these cores, a gradual waning of music into ever more silent whispering.

A star, now. Floating in the darkness, screaming its ecstatic torment in storms blowing into silent depths. Smaller orbs circled around it for loops after loops, some freezing and some aflame. The third one came to be neither; happily nestled in its zone of comfort, it came to find an equilibrium between ice and inferno. Something alien was born in its murky waters, a complex sentence of such sophisticated persuasiveness that it was able to convert other particle conglomerates into copies of itself through this bewildering process of absorption, processing and division. Soon it had conquered all the planet's seas, but already, it had diversified into myriad of forms. Within each creature, there burned a singleminded, molecular dedication to feed and replicate, almost frightening in its intensity.

The broth of life fermented and boiled, crawling onto barren shores and covering them in a skin of green. The primal cells still permeated every niche, but other beings lumbered above them, vastly greater in both scale and complexity. Within them, the united consciousness of first beings had been broken into myriads of fragments, but some of those shone and sang with radiant expertise never seen before. The biological web itself, with its countless light-drinkers, parasites and predators of sedentaries and mobiles both, was now a vast symphony playing against the background of screaming sun. Many times it was wracked by terrible agonies as the web collapsed in a gargantuan orgy of death, but every time, it rebuilt itself in ever greater glory.

There was a further narrowing of experience. A troupe of scrawny, battered apes emerged from the cover of tropical forest into a plain covered by long grass. The leader was in pain from a gash in his stomach, but even at his moment of defeat, knew better than to show signs of weakness. A stronger band had invaded their territory and driven them from the safety of dark green canopies and dim diffused daylight. The nameless leader, without thoughts as such, still knew the terror that his surviving underlings now felt, for it froze his blood as well. Yet in him it was tempered by something else, a steely determination with a strangely familiar feel. For a moment, the leader rose on his hindlegs and gazed above the surface of swaying grass. Determination...

Another, larger ape, a young male in his prime, stood in a great formation with thousands of his kin on the plains of Telamon. He had words and concepts swarming in his mind, superb capacity to interpret his inner world with symbolic models of that model. Yet right now they only fed his fear. He knew that the barbarian horde had been trapped between two consular armies and was therefore in vastly disadvantaged position, but the stupid Gauls showed no sign of understanding that they were going to lose, waving their weapons and howling warcries with supreme self-confidence. And he was right there in the front rank of his maniple, among the first to face their inevitable screaming charge. It wasn't his own death that he feared so much, it was that he had been married just six months earlier and he knew how terribly his death would hurt her. She had put up such a brave front when he had left, but had not been able to disguise her eyes. For a moment the desire to be anywhere but here became almost overwhelming. Only then, near his breaking point, it came upon him. Man cannot choose whether to die or not, only how to face his death. I know who I am. I am Roman, and will face my death like one. She will do the same. When the orders came for maniples to advance, he marched forwards in grim silence.

The experience detached from the individual consciousness another time, but now, a question remained. He knew who he was, but who am I? I felt shocked at the realization that I existed, but had not realized it until now. The questions crowded into my head one after another. Where am I? Why am I here, wherever that is? Just what is happening anyway? Overwhelming confusion. There were swarms of alien colours swimming all around me in this shapeless space, and ethereal sounds echoing some distant melodies, but they provided me with no clues. I remembered there had been fear, then determination and some act, but what was it?

I turned my perception to a body that had come to my attention -- it belonged to me, I realized it now. Apparently I was lying on some soft surface, breathing in and out. Then, almost as soon as I became aware of my breath, I recalled the answer. I was here because I had breathed in something. A drug. Some vastly powerful drug. Terror surfaced. How is it possible to come down if I'm this high? But another part of me knew very well that I was doing just that right now. The rioting colours were gradually dimming, and I remembered even more. For example, I had eyes to see with. Promptly, I opened them.

Lucy's weirdly adorned bedroom was crawling with brightly glowing serpents of crimson and gold. The dark-haired angel herself was sitting on the nearby sofa, watching me with eyes filled with brilliant light and a wry smile on her lips. I turned my eyes away and looked at the ceiling, undulating and pulsing with unknown rhythyms.

"Oh Christ", I breathed. "Jesus motherfucking Christ. What the hell..."

Lucy giggled merrily.

"I told you that you weren't ready for it, didn't I?"

For a moment I didn't have strength to a respond.

"It was... it was..." I struggled desperately for words.
"The word you're looking for, doesn't exist. I think you already put it about as well as anybody can."

I shot her an affectionate look. As usual, she was right. Wasting no more energy on useless attempts at verbalization, I laid there on her bed watching the serpents slowly slither into hiding, exhausted but happy in the post-orgasmic chill after my coitus with universe. A shadow of memory flickered in the back of my mind, of some twin-mouthed grinning demon I had apparently seen at some point during my hallucinatory reverie. For some reason this memory made me feel odd unease for a second, but then, it vanished like a wisp of smoke into wind.

Daath
October 2006
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