The best way to start this is with the secret of the universe. That is, how it all began.
There are a million different cosmologies you can fit us into if you try hard enough. An endless multiverse where everything that can be is, a profligation of complex amplitudes in configuration-space, the dreams of butterflies. People wonder, when they want to hurt their heads, about what was here before us.
The answer is “nothing”. We’re not a simulation, or a creation, or an illusion, or even really an accident - that would at least imply a kind of go-it-alone pride. The best word for us is “side-effect”. We’re the warning on the side of the pill bottle that only I ever seem to read.
It wasn’t a primordial-chaos Ginnungagap type of nothing, or a contemplative white void where allfathers plan out their optimal creations for infinite non-time. It was simply nothing, stretching sleepily towards forever in both directions.
And then, suddenly, there were two words.
I know. I heard them, the first time Tree took me out past the psychological tideline and blew out the parts of my mind that kept things notarized.
Don’t ask who screamed them. Some first spark of intention, a first soul, maybe the final uptick of probability in the most unlikely event possible. I choose to think it was the nothingness itself, that the void had a moment of total self-awareness.
With a woman’s voice, it screamed, “ANYTHING ELSE!”
So I want you to remember that. When you learn about the Stand, the bad trips and the worse decisions, and why my body’s lying in the back of the dirtiest car on the planet right now fighting several hours of motion sickness, just remember:
They never wished for anything high-quality.
“You in a happy space back there, Moon?” Treehugger calls, as the next song queues up. “I’m sending you some more positive vibes, sis.”
I gurgle back at her.
[Flaming Lips - Spongebob and Patrick Confront the Psychic Wall of Energy]
MOONDANCER AND TREEHUGGER’S FAR OUT TRIP
If you know Treehugger, she was basically always like that. And yes, we are actual sisters. At least, half-sisters. Dad loved nature names. Mom brought in Morning Roast from her first marriage and he brought Tree in from his. Then they had me, and Mom made sure to shelter me from ever seeing him again once he left. Morning went to college by the time I was finishing elementary school, and I only saw Tree when she came to stay during summer break, so most of the time I was essentially an only child. I liked it that way.
She went to a Sudbury school, where she could learn about whatever she wanted without anyone bothering her, so of course I hated her. I thought the stoner thing would make a nice phase to embarrass her with when she was twenty, and made sure that I never went through any phases just so she couldn’t get me back.
Unfortunately, now both of us are getting pretty close, and she’s not any different at all. I became 18 a couple weeks into Senior year. She’s about 19 and a half, but still in the same grade as me - her schooling didn’t let her pass the required tests after Dad died, and now she’s in the same boat as the rest of us. And I can tell you for certain that Crystal Prep is not the school for her.
My first smoke was less than a hundred days ago. Mom would’ve had a heart attack, if she’d known, but she set me up with own apartment as a test-drive of adulthood. And, mostly, to get me out of her house. I still didn’t have a job, or a car, or much interest in doing anything with my life, but it at least felt good to not be stuck at home.
“You need some of the human touch, sis?” she calls.
I don’t respond. Somehow she takes this as the affirmative, and turns around in the driver’s seat. Zecora takes the wheel.
Then she places a hand on my forehead, and blisses me out.
All marijuana strains are derived from two original plants, indica and sativa, and have a certain balance of the two in them. Indica is the one that makes you feel lazy and want food - the munchies aren’t hunger, by the way, only the desire to eat something, so stacking up the pizzas is only going to kill your stomach. Sativa, on the other hand, is what makes you feel floaty and occasionally have a profound idea or two.
What both of these plants have in common is that they aren’t very psychoactive. And while not all grass is pure, impurity in drugs only gets introduced by accident or to add weight. (That same principle is how you get laundry detergent cut into cocaine, by the way.) In other words, it’s never going to be cut with mushrooms or LSD or any other good surprises, unless it’s by special order or the guy selling it hates money.
So when I came out of that hallucination, I concluded, reasonably, that I must be dying.
“What... what the fuck was that?” I asked, as the green-brown fuzz in my vision cleared away.
Tree was sitting in front of me, smiling knowingly. “It really makes you feel like you’re away from it all, doesn’t it?” Then she took her own hit off of the bowl, inhaling until the fire had completely burnt out. I’d coughed until I started gagging on the first lungful, and if I knew a lot of people puke the first time, I might have started lighter, in a bathroom, after taking some anxiety meds. Then she sat perfectly still, like a dollar-store Siddhartha, eyes closed.
I became convinced she was trying to kill me. She was going to take all of my homework answers as revenge for not studying with her and sell off my Lord of the Rings annotations to some guy with more ashy glassware than common sense. I had to figure out if I’d been poisoned.
“What’m - ugh - hrgh - does that happen every time?” I stretched out my legs a little, leaning my head against my mattress.
Treehugger didn’t respond. As I stared at her, I became sure that she was avoiding me. She knew I’d figured out the plan, and she was going to suffocate herself then and there to keep from giving anything else away.
“That’s really fucked, Tree.” I said, and then leaned forward and reached for the bowl and the lighter, a rainbow-colored number. There was still a little in there, kind of blackened, and I stuck the end in my teeth as I turned it to a good angle.
Then I remembered I didn’t know how to use a lighter. That little notched wheel looked like an easy way to burn yourself, and being surrounded by my most prized possessions didn’t make me eager to try it out, but I’d come that far.
The only problem was that I had to orient the flame downwards, so it was touching the receptable bit of the pipe. And since heat rises, the fire would move upwards towards my fingers. The correct way to deal with that would’ve been to inhale very hard through the pipe, drawing the flame down until it hits its target, and then to let go of the wheel before the flame flickers up and burns you; picking up this technique is how stoners get burn scars on their forefingers.
What I actually tried was to start the light at a seventy degree angle.
Tree expunged the smoke from her lungs like a hydrothermal vent, and I had to set down the lighter to take off my glasses and rub them against my hoodie.
“I’ve been saving this. I wanted your first hits to take you to a way deeper level, y’know?” she said while I put the frames back on. “Did you get a chance to talk to him?”
“Who? I just saw…” the scream came back to me, I shook my head to dislodge it, “fuck, some really nasty shit.”
She held the lighter for me, but she lit it after I’d started inhaling. The smoke started coming in on the latter half of the breath, and I sputtered when it touched my lungs. Then I coughed involuntarily, snorting the green straight out of the pipe.
It landed in a little black heap on my carpet, still burning, and that put enough life in me that I started smacking it with a loose shirt that happened to be on the floor nearby.
Treehugger giggled. “You’ll get the hang of it, sis.”
As I pulled away the shirt, I noticed that in the ashes, there were little specks of gold.
[sir Was - In the Midst]
A few days later, I was eating lunch in my usual seat and peoplewatching. The uniforms made it hard to tell students apart, so it wasn’t very thrilling. Tree had a different lunch than me, and a different crowd, so we never really saw each other during the day.
Crystal Prep scored a lot of points for having a passable buffet, although I spent my days getting through my tomato soup and fruit salad so I could spend most of the break in the library.
I couldn’t have told you the names of more than fifteen of the students I saw. In middle school I was at least respected and feared for my ability to crush group projects underfoot, but in a school full of decently intelligent students I wasn’t very amazing.
Not to mention that I was always going to be second fiddle in the staff’s eyes, anyway. I got used to that one real quick.
I was fidgeting with my drink when it happened. We had a soda bar, usually pretty sticky and nasty, that I’d gotten a disgustingly tall glass of root beer from. I wasn’t actually going to drink it all, but when I was distracted it helped to twirl the straw around the liquid in a little frothy whirlpool. The effect was perfected with ice, but I hated watering down my drinks.
I could see a few faces that everyone knew around. Sunny Flare, strutting to sit with the rest of the popular girls. That one girl who somehow got away with wearing Beats around her neck every day. And… her, already finishing her own food to go be in her broom closet.
I let go of the straw and let it twirl around the lip of the cup.
Then it picked up speed.
I sat there and waited for it to stop, but it just kept going, and going, and...
Soda started to slosh out of the sides of the cup, and I jumped, pinching the straw between my fingers. And it kept going, as if I’d never touched it!
People were probably watching me by then, I just knew it. I have no idea why I was so worried about that, or what I thought they’d think about me, but I was terrified. Desperate to do something, anything, I wrenched the thin piece of plastic it in the other direction.
And the cup toppled, sloshing a good handful of root beer onto the center of my uniform.
Sigh.
I elected to go to the library early, and headed for the bathroom to clean up first. I don’t mind messes in my life, so long as they aren’t wet, or sticky. When I was a kid, I cried if I got jam on my fingers. By my last year of high school, I could live with just seeking out a sink as quickly as possible.
I looked in the mirror and realized I forgot to wash my hair since the weekend. I wasn’t afraid of showering or anything, but it was a hassle to schedule, and my apartment only had oversoftened water that felt like a nine-hundred-pound baby drooling on my shoulderblades. Treehugger was sympathetic to my plight, mostly because she’d developed dreads in the last few months, but I at least had the decency to attack it with dry shampoo.
“So you’re the one who took it.”
I’d never actually heard Sunny’s voice before, but I could recognize her by sight. She stood there with one hand smoothing out the side of her haircut and the other on her hip, staring me down.
I gazed back at her blankly, the front of my blouse still wet and the sink still running.
“So where’s the rest, hm?”
“The rest of what?” I asked.
She scowled. “Do you think you’ll catch me saying something incriminating on a recording, or something?”
That stunned me. “N-no...”
“Just tell me where you hid it! I can tell you already have an aura!”
I tried to sound tough and get her to stop messing with me. “Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about, really, just leave me alone okay.” Then I turned back to the mirror and washed my hands, and waited for her to leave.
Then the mirror cracked down the middle.
“You really don’t want to get on our bad side, dearie. You may think you’re hot stuff, but the Gurus don’t play nice with anyone. So I’m going to give you one last chance to tell me where it is before I destroy you and get the information from your little friend Sparkles.”
There were a lot of things I could’ve said to that. I might have asked how she broke the mirror without being anywhere near it, or what the Gurus were, or what it was that she wanted back so badly and what made her think I had it - but instead, I lost my temper.
“She’s not my friend!” I screamed, turning towards her fast enough to get whiplash.
She threw out a hand, and then I was lifted off of the ground and into the nearest wall. I hadn’t been physically thrown somewhere since elementary, and it took a few seconds of bracing to realize that I wasn’t falling.
[Black Coast - TRNDSTTR (Lucian Remix)]
“｢TRNDSTTR｣, make her talk.”
I felt the wall press against my back, and tried to kick off from it, kneeing what I now realized was some kind of invisible force. It had no effect; I just floundered there like an idiot as it held my entire abdomen in a vicegrip.
The scream came back to me, then. That wish for anything else to happen than nothing, even for girls to get choked by unseen forces in preppy bathrooms over misunderstandings. The sheer conviction of that wish, the wish Tree had never acknowledged hearing.
It wasn’t invisible. I could see it.
Something large and purple, with meaty lumberjack hands encased in equally large gauntlets. It filled the room.
I wished I could tell it whatever she wanted to know.
I don’t know whether she’d really have killed me there or not, but I felt pretty sure in the moment. And at the same time I could see that, I could feel my consciousness expanding in other ways.
“You can see it, can’t you?” she said. “Don’t try to talk, just nod.”
I nodded.
“You can see there’s no use lying to me, right? ...Good. Now, we’ll extract your ability in a minute, but first I need to know where you put the rest of what you took from us. There was a lot there, and I know you can’t have gone through it all alone. Here, ｢CHVRCHES｣.”
She waved a hand, and a pen and notepad floated up to my still-kicking but otherwise limp form.
“Just write down the location, and if I believe you, we can still make this work out.”
I had to hold the pen with my left hand, which was horrible, and then write on something floating in the air. Getting pressure onto the surface was tricky, but after a moment I managed to finish. She took back the pad and stared at it for a moment with intense, hungry interest.
E A T M E.
Then she scowled. “Oh, very funn-”
Then the pen came slicing through the air at her neck. She threw her hand out to the side and it curved, going wild and spinning end over end. Then, she let her giant interdimensional mutant-thing continue squeezing my guts out.
I hadn’t thrown it. At least, not consciously. It happened on reflex, like my body had found some way to protect itself. And when I could just about feel my eyeballs pop, I felt the pressure suddenly let up.
The pen had bounced off of the wall and smacked her in the back of the neck. The pointy end hadn’t touched her, but there was still no way it could’ve happened. She put a hand on it, trying to feel for damage.
I pressed my luck, and kicked one of my shoes right at her head. It took on the same end-over-end spinning motion, and I could tell by the jerking of her arm that she couldn’t unstick it from its medical checkup. She ducked her head forward, and it sailed right over her.
Into the cracked mirror.
Shards of glass exploded outwards, and immediately I was falling. ｢TRNDSTTR｣ was using its cartoonishly large fists to block the debris, standing directly between her and the wall while she stared at me murderously.
I took a breath, adjusted my glasses, and ran at her.
“｢TRNDSTTR｣!” she shouted, throwing out her free hand at me. But even though the glass was laid out on the floor, her hulking monster didn’t turn away or stop throwing out its hands to block incoming projectiles.
All actions form patterns eventually. It’s the dissolution of chaos into order. The power to form them on one’s own, to turn anything else into something meaningful, that power is the center of human existence.
I threw a punch at her nose, and it connected. It was a weak punch, but neither of us were weightlifters. She fell backwards a little, and then, to her own horror, fell back upwards to her original position.
With the second punch I could feel it manifesting down my arm. That infinite repetition, cycling, something.
Finally she shouted, “｢STRFKR｣!” and headbutted me.
I fell backwards, and then kept falling. Everything above me was blue, and then I hit the grass. I was just outside of the bathroom, and through the translucency of the windows I could see her stalking away back inside.
I went to the library, expecting her to show up with help along the way. I didn’t read anything, I just sat there and wondered about what had happened, and made books spin on the desk when the librarian was stacking them somewhere else.
Now I wonder if things might have been different, if I knew the history of the grass I did with my sister. I might have been able to explain things well enough that I’d have been left alone, and everyone could’ve gone their separate ways. But that wasn’t how it happened.
That was the day I discovered ｢Nostradamus｣, and became an enemy of the Friday Night Gurus.
[Can - Moonshake]
