Sure. Here.
Like this, then.
The inner surface of the cylinder was lined with vast forests, plains, deserts, bodies of water, all rotating around a central axis, a filament that provided light and energy, like a fluorescent tube running down the middle of a larger cylinder. Erika kept using the words “painfully alive” when talking about this realm. Painfully alive, painfully alive. A naked, dark-skinned girl of about ten approached cautiously. In her hair were vines and tendrils that curled and sprouted leaves and bloomed flowers as Erika watched. The girl held out her hand and spoke something in a language Erika didn’t recognize. Taking her hand, Erika let the girl lead her down a path into a wooded area, beneath trees unlike any she’d ever seen. The trees were more like pillars of gorgeous, multicolored feathers—reds, greens, blues, purples—about thirty or forty feet tall. Cosmic totem poles. It was all Erika could do to refrain from bursting into tears of wonderment. They came to a rocky hill. Erika sensed that this was where the ruler of this realm lived. The girl motioned for her to sit on the cool moss in front of a cave, then scampered off into the woods. After a moment a figure emerged from the cave, a tall, lurching thing in a long red robe with a hood that obscured its face. Its hands were long, bony, and shockingly white. Erika wondered briefly if she should be afraid but was soon flooded with the absolute rightness of this encounter, like she’d been waiting for it her whole life.
The figure spoke. “I hear you’ve got a nasty case of writer’s block.”
Erika nodded. She instantly recognized the voice but couldn’t place it. It was neither adult nor child, neither man nor woman. She asked the figure who he was.
“I’m Michael,” he said. “Come, I will heal you.”
She followed Michael through the forest to a stream over which an old tree bent its branches. From the branches grew fruits like she’d never seen, furry purple ovals. Before her eyes the tree blossomed and grew its fruit, which dropped continually into the stream, which bore the fruit, bobbing, away. Michael instructed her to catch one of the fruits and eat it quickly. She did as instructed, pulling apart the purple peel to eat the sweet, pink flesh inside. She said it tasted like nothing she could even begin to describe. When she finished, Michael took her hand and said that when she returned to San Francisco she’d be able to write again. She grew frantic. She had so many questions she wanted to ask him. She wanted to know if she had really been visited by extraterrestrials as a child. Michael said yes, this was so, and there had been contact between these visitors and earth for tens of thousands of years. For many centuries these extraterrestrials had been working to reprogram the human subconscious, preparing it for eventual inter–life form communion. The science fiction genre, Michael explained, was a means by which humans were coming to internalize, through myth, knowledge of the existence of other sentient life forms. By the time this communion occurred, humans would be psychologically prepared to embark on an interplanetary collaboration to spread life through the universe.
The sexual reproduction of life between interplanetary species.
Yes, exactly.
Oh, come on.
What?
I just find this incredibly implausible. Whatever. It was a psychedelic trip.
Disbelieve all you want. What do I care?
Continue.
You asked for my story, didn’t you?
I did. Carry on.
I really don’t feel like continuing.
You have no choice.
I may not have a choice, but you—you can’t fuck with me like this. You can’t—
Are you threatening me?
No. No, I’m—
Good, because—
I need some water.
Here you go. Yes, yes, go on.
Sorry. Okay. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Okay, so let me—okay, so that’s the moment Erika gasped and returned to the patio behind the house and threw up on me. Then later, after she told us what had happened in the cylinder, she went upstairs and resumed work on the novel she’d stopped midsentence some months before. The old boxing match with her keyboard started up again. I had these vomited-on clothes that needed washing so I put them in a garbage bag and dumped them in the sink in the laundry room. As I was rinsing out my clothes, something caught my eye amid the chunks of potato and scrambled eggs. A little key, like the kind used for safety deposit boxes.
What did Erika think it was?
Well…
You never told her?
I would have. Just—let me back up. I didn’t tell you about the Chinese herbalist. I’d had this rash on my right ankle, a sort of psoriasis thing. I had an MD I went to who gave me some steroid ointment but that didn’t do any good. So Wyatt suggested I see his Chinese doctor. He’d cleared up this wicked sinus infection Wyatt came down with one time. So I went—this was weeks before the meeting with Chewbacca—and it was this cramped little place in Chinatown, drying herbs hanging from the rafters, a couple of ninety-year-old Chinese women sitting at a little table in the front drinking tea. Dr. Wu was the doctor, middle-aged man, glasses. He parted some curtains and had me come back to the exam room and show him my tongue. Anyway, whatever, he sent me home with some herbs that were supposed to be infused into a tea. And by herbs, I’m not talking about basil and oregano. These looked like twigs and bark and stuff dug up from the floor of a forest. Horrific-tasting shit. But the rash started to disappear. So it happened that on the day Erika took her trip, I had to go back to get more herbs. By this time it was afternoon, she was upstairs, banging away on her keyboard, and Wyatt was doing yoga or something, so I thought I might as well go do my errand. On my way through North Beach I started to feel like maybe I was being followed, like I was in a movie. There was a big black woman with a kid in a stroller, an old man listening to an iPod, some teenage girls talking loudly on their phones. Then about half a block behind me there was this skinny homeless-looking dude, huge beard, sunglasses, floppy hat. If anyone was following me, it had to be that guy. Sure enough, he stayed behind me for several blocks. I stopped a couple times pretending to look at window displays and he did the same. Then I’d continue on and he’d follow. Whoever he was, he wasn’t trained to follow people. I started to wonder if this was Squid, but Squid had spoken in an African American guy’s voice, and my stalker was white or Asian as far as I could tell. I made it to Dr. Wu’s and got my refill of herbs. When I came out of the shop there he was, standing a few storefronts away, gazing at red-glazed Peking ducks hanging like violins in the window. That’s when I did something out of character. I walked up to him. When I was a few feet away he saw me and sort of jumped, then turned to walk away. I lunged and grabbed his shoulder and yanked him around. He fell to the sidewalk. I yelled at him, demanded to know why he was following me. He took off his sunglasses and said my name. It was Nick.