The Falling Man

Revelation, chaos, surrender, upheaval, new perspectives, release

The decision to leap to certain death is no less terrifying if the building happens to be burning. The difference is the presence of a greater danger - that of burning to death - which makes the plummet the comparatively peaceful option; the sensation of heat from the flames as one looks out at the horizon also brings to mind the peacefulness of the freefall, suspended animation, feeling weightless and unburdened: When facing one’s own looming mortality, there is no vague and formless fear of the potential future to prevent one from experiencing and embracing the ecstatic and beautiful terror of the present. As The Seeker blunders past the boundaries of self-imposed darkness and steps off the edge, he sheds the illusions created by his own mind and embraces the opportunity to use this last weightless moment to relax and reflect, knowing that the past itself is but another illusion, and death is just amnesia and the redistribution of matter.

By then, William and I were pretty consumed by our ill-defined quest; we felt like we were on the cusp of discovering some kind of crack in the fabric of reality, and we could both sense its proximity and were convinced that we were zeroing in on it. Given that we were actually a pair of drug-addled teenagers, this usually manifested in such transcendently intellectual ideas as crossing a busy main road by approaching it as if it were a zebra crossing, and feeling like Moses parting the sea when the traffic slammed on their brakes to avoid running over the two crackheads who wandered onto the road. Tommy was carefree enough to follow us across the road as long as we went first. But our theory that we had developed a death tolerance from surviving a datura trip got a hard 'no' from him.

It was still broad daylight when we reached the house with the cactus in the outer suburbs. The street was pretty quiet, and we were obscured somewhat from the road by trees, and from the house by a fence. We watched the house for a while through the gaps in the fence posts, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Occasionally, we saw people move past the windows, one of which was only a few feet from the cactus. After about ten minutes waiting for someone to close the curtains or leave the house, William said 'Fuck it,' and told Tommy and I to hold his feet while he dangled his torso over the fence and wrenched both cactus from the ground, handing them back to me and Tommy. We hastily hacked them into small segments and filled our bags before heading back to Vicky's.

The house was empty when we got back, and we got started peeling the cactus. Vicky arrived a few hours later. She burst into tears when she saw what we were doing, and basically told us to get the fuck out of her house. Tommy and William were annoyed that I didn't tell them we weren't allowed to boil the cactus there. The apathy that had followed me since my datura trip still lingered, and my mind had already moved on to possible locations to finish the job while I coldly watched my best friend cry.

Nodus Tollens part three

Mescaline

Now effectively homeless, me and William moved our mescaline operation to Tommy's house, where he lived with his parents. Tommy lived in a sleep-out that was disconnected from the rest of the house, which William and I treated as our new home, at least until we'd boiled the cactus. At first, the three of us slept during the day, then waited for the lights to switch off in the main house, before taking the barbeque into Tommy's room to boil mescaline and play video games through the night. After a few days, we started taking party pills, staying up until morning boiling mescaline, occasionally taking breaks to skate around the city in the wee hours. Tommy's parents were clearly unsettled by our presence and worried about their increasingly distant and perpetually stoned son. A couple of times, Tommy's Dad, a lawyer, came into Tommy's room before work to find William and I wide awake playing video games while Tommy slept. Tommy's mum caught us smoking weed another night, and told us that if we got caught again we'd have to leave.

Even though it had been almost two weeks, the after-effects of our datura trip still lingered for me, and, to a lesser extent, William. These were mostly apparent when we smoked weed, but there was a general background to our thought processes that was clearly a byproduct of our trip. More and more, the events of the external world seemed to be merely symptomatic of what went on in the internal world. Inspired by the books about shamanism, William and I decided to fast for a few days before our trip - more or less making a virtue out of necessity, since we were both broke and living off Tommy's money, and his parents weren't keen to feed two wasters that they didn't even want in their house in the first place.

It ended up taking almost a week to prepare the mescaline. During that time, the rest of the wealthy stoner group had set off to university, leaving us three aimless creatures with somewhere between ten and fifteen doses. The day before we dosed, me and William decided to supplement our fast with sleep deprivation, so we took party pills and stayed up all night playing video games and boiling mescaline. We boiled it down to a thick, viscous sludge, which we choked down in the late afternoon, leaving half for the following night. About half an hour after dosing, we could all feel a rising need to purge, so we headed down to the lower section of Tommy's yard to do so away from the prying eyes of his parents. Though we were obscured from his parents' view, we were still visible to some of the other neighbours. Contemplating what they must have seen was my first taste of mescaline-induced self-consciousness that set the tone for the rest of the trip: Three teenagers standing around talking in the backyard, occasionally excusing themself to throw up violently, before returning to the conversation as if nothing had happened.

The mescaline kicked in fast. At first, its effects were very subtle. We tried to put on music and play video games, but seemed to have lost our ability to use technology - which we naturally concluded was our enhanced brain waves messing with the circuitry. After an hour or so, the three of us simultaneously felt a sudden chill, and layered up in whatever clothes were lying on Tommy's floor. William started talking about some party he wanted to go to in the city, but Tommy and I were keen to trip out in his room for a bit longer, so we had a few bongs each to ramp up the trip. Within minutes, visuals started manifesting: Colours were brighter and textures were more detailed. We also noticed that the boundary between our peripheral vision and focal points had diminished, giving us a kind of 20-20 vision. I found Tommy's digital camera and took a bunch of photos of interesting angles and patterns around the room. I never saw how the photos turned out, but I can pretty safely assume that they were just pictures of walls and furniture.

We were having so much fun tripping in Tommy's room that we forgot all about the party. We probably would have been happy to stay there for hours. But then Tommy's mum decided to check on us. At first, she started telling us off about the weed she could smell; but, her anger turned to a look of almost horror as she took in the scene before her: The three of us were dressed in mismatched layers of Tommy's clothes, with grins plastered on our faces and dinner plate pupils. She asked us what drugs we were on, and Tommy told her we were drunk and we immediately cracked up laughing at the absurdity of the claim, the sobriety of his monotone voice: 'THERE IS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT MOTHER. WE HAVE CONSUMED ALCOHOL.' Tommy got into an argument with his mum, eventually telling her to fuck off because we're leaving anyway. His mum told William and I that we weren't welcome back, leaving us once again homeless, and we set off into the night.

William wanted to skate, but me and Tommy were keen to walk, so we left our boards behind. The change of environment made us realise how much we were tripping. It was already stronger than any trip I'd had besides datura. Tommy and William were talkative and giddy, but I was fairly quiet. I was feeling a powerful, growing euphoria that seemed to be entwined with the physical movement, and the streetlights gave the city an ultra crisp, vibrant glow. I wished we could just walk around the city all night, but either Tommy or William had arranged to meet up with some of our friends on the way to the party, so I was forced to just roll with it.

The hour-long walk to the party was disappointingly short for me. We met up with a ragtag bunch of our friends on the way - a bunch of the surfer stoners with a couple of the psychos - who were all drunk and rowdy. The party was packed with drunk teenagers, and our friends Stu and Ty almost got into a fight before we even got inside. My social anxiety kicked in pretty quickly, but there was something weirdly comforting about it - maybe just the fact that I was actually feeling again, a forgotten familiarity. Everything I focused on seemed to be expanding and contracting at the same time. I told Tommy and William, and they both said they were seeing the same thing, and we called the phenomenon 'Fourth Dimensioning'.

Some people tried to talk to me, but I was comfortably awkward, and enjoyed the invisibility of being tripped-out around loud drunks, and mostly just talked to William and Tommy. William and I ended up trying to explain Fourth Dimensioning to some people; someone handed me a piece of paper and told me to draw it, and I drew a representation of a geometrical object I later found out is called a tesseract, which was sort of an extension of Professor Frink's line-drawing of a cube on an episode of The Simpsons we'd watched some time that week. Someone told me that there was cardboard pasted up on the walls of the garage that people were writing and drawing on and we went out there to draw. Though I usually liked drawing fantastical creatures and landscapes, I found myself doing perspective drawings of buildings and streets, trying to teach myself the two-point and three-point perspective techniques that I never had any interest in prior to that. It felt like tracing - my visuals projected themselves onto the cardboard, and I just followed the lines, at times even forgetting that I wasn't actually tracing. I started trying to draw a four dimensional street perspective, and ended up with a small group of people gathered around watching me. I enjoyed that version of socialising where I didn't have to talk.

Suddenly, there was a whole lot of yelling in the garage and my peace was shattered. The mother of whoever's party it was had burst into the garage, screaming about someone walking in on her and her man fucking in her bedroom. She seemed like she was on meth or something, yelling deranged shit about how she should be able to fuck her man in her house without any of us little cunts walking in, and that her son gets to fuck any girl at this party, over and over again. Tommy, William, and I spotted each other through the crowd at other ends of the garage, and started miming bizarre jokes to each other about what was happening. This came to a head when Tommy found a broom and started casually sweeping the garage behind the screaming lady - a joke that would be impossible to explain now, but was the funniest thing ever at the time - and the three of us started laughing hysterically, resulting in all the kids getting kicked out of the party.

The mescaline had probably reached its peak by then. The driveway to the street was long and almost pitch black, which my vision filled with a network of neon wireframes. A herd of about thirty teenagers stumbled through the darkness, all bumping into each other and stumbling into the gardens. Or at least that's what us three trippers thought. Our friends told us later that it was actually relatively well-lit, and it was actually just us three causing a scene by crashing into all the other kids who were otherwise fine. I can't say for sure, but this was probably about five hours after dosing.

We ended up going to Kura Park, a garden park on the outskirts of the city near Tommy's house, with our friends to carry on drinking and smoking weed. Someone knocked Tommy's weed tin over in the dark, and William, Tommy, and I got lost looking for weed in the grass for a long time. What felt like hours later, we suddenly realised everyone else was gone, and we'd filled the tin with a bunch of stones and random bits of plants.

The silence and darkness that followed this realisation had a surreal and mystical quality, like a silent echo. The leaves of the tree that dangled over our heads were cartoonishly large. William and Tommy talked about feeling small under the leaves. I said that we are small, unsure exactly what I meant. Whatever the case, this small exchange seemed to cast a spell, putting us in a more contemplative mood for the second half of the trip.

We decided to climb Mt Ratu, an eight-or-nine storey rock on the north coast, and made our way to the beach. William and Tommy collected interesting stones, carrying them on a flat, tray-like rock they found, having conversations I didn't pay attention to. I trailed them silently, indulging in a form of self-consciousness I'd never experienced before: Who are we? The general public sees jocks, tradesmen, punks, office workers, etc. What do they see when they look at three tripped-out, oddly dressed teenagers combing the beach at four in the morning? I voiced this question, and William said that they probably think we're retards. And that was that matter settled.

For the duration of the walk, I contemplated the disastrous state of my life, though from a perspective of calm introspection. I was homeless, jobless, and my two best friends were a couple of dudes I'd only known for a few months, and who I was only really connected to through drugs. Peripheral tangents started to bloom about my guilt for abandoning my suffering parents, old friends, and Vicky. But there was no sense of urgency: The moment possessed an endless quality - the beach stretched on infinitely, and the trip would last forever. I felt like I could move sideways in time, pausing the moment by entertaining multiple trails of thought at once. I was completely connected to my senses and surroundings, and let my thoughts wander independently, as if I was a nucleus around which they orbited.

We carried the tray of rocks carefully as we climbed Ratu. At the top, we smoked a joint and watched the sunrise overlooking the ocean. A family with a few kids arrived at the peak a little later. We watched in horror as the kids found the tray of rocks - which, to be fair, were probably just ordinary rocks - and started throwing them off the peak toward the ocean. Those kids will never know what they did that morning.

With the sun fully up, we climbed back down, and headed back toward Tommy's through the city. Tommy was ready to sleep, but me and William weren't allowed back there, so we went to Kura Park to try and sleep in the bushes instead.

Even though I wasn't exactly tripping anymore, I could still feel some lingering effects of the mescaline. We found a secluded spot in the trees to rest. I told William I was going to sleep, but instead used the time to continue my ruminations about my life in private. At first, I agonised over the damage I'd done to those around me - my parents and Vicky in particular. But, gradually, I found myself thinking about my life from a wholly new perspective: I wasn't bad; I was a fucked up kid going through shit. The pain and confusion of a childhood that revolved around my terminally ill brother - as well as the collateral emotional damage to my parents - had left me emotionally numb. When he died, I finally got the support and understanding that I needed growing up invisible. But, by then, I felt no sadness or grief, having lost the capacity to feel my own emotions to some degree. Friends and family expected and projected a certain sadness onto me that I didn't feel, resulting in further guilt and alienation, to which I responded by withdrawing further, something that was interpreted as a form of mourning. Since then, I'd had several mind-shattering drug experiences, all while trying to navigate the transition from childhood to adulthood. I was thinking about myself from a completely outside perspective, like I was another person, viewing my own life and personality with the same kind of sympathy I would someone else's.

By then, I was tired enough to go to sleep if I closed my eyes; but this endless stream of epiphanies was so fascinating that I kept my eyes open as long as I could to keep the ride going. Regardless of the emotional tone, my thoughts were so viscerally satisfying and insightful that I sometimes found myself audibly appreciating them as one would a fine meal or a blowjob. Over those hours, I absolved myself of a whole lot of guilt I didn't even realise I had.

I assume I finally dozed off at some point that day, as William shook me awake sometime in the early evening. Tommy had messaged him saying he's ready to take the rest of the mescaline. I just wanted to eat some food and get some proper sleep - I was exhausted and starving, my body was achy and freezing, and I'd already gotten more out of the first night of mescaline than I could have asked for. But, there was no food or place to sleep, and we'd already made the plan to keep going, so I stepped out into the world once more.

Tommy turned up with the rest of the mescaline and we chugged it down. I felt an intense wave of hunger and nauseous exhaustion as soon as it hit my empty stomach. I vomited almost instantly, and felt the effects soon after; the sun was dwindling, and the trees were doing shadow puppetry in the wind. I felt anxious, knowing that my growing need for food and rest would not be fulfilled for at least another twelve hours - and probably longer, given the uncertainty of my life.