The Poles invited us to see a Polish DJ. It was in a club on the city-centre fringes of the northside that I’d never been to before called McDargle’s.
In the club I felt invincible. Strobe lights pulsed; hard techno tracks broke down in the middle, then built up to prolonged, obliterating climaxes. We swallowed more pills. Scag was kissing a girl, a punky, blonde Pole who was like a boy. Then he was at my side, screaming into my ear that there was a guy who had microdots, did I have a tenner and we’d trip our bollocks off. I passed him my last note and danced some more. There was a different DJ now, or maybe not. Then Scag was dragging me into the hallway leading to the toilets, his face a cackling devil-mask. ‘Let’s drop this fuckin acid!’ he yelled.
‘Are ye sure it’s a good idea, with all this other stuff we’ve been takin?’
‘Relax, man. It’ll be fuckin cool.’
‘I’m a bit nervous. I’ve never done acid before.’
‘Don’t worry, it’s deadly. Remember I’m here — if you’re gettin paro or it seems a bit full on, talk to me. I’ve been takin acid for decades. I was takin it when you were in nappies. I was takin it when I was in fuckin nappies. There’s nothin about it that can faze me, man.’
‘Okay, thanks.’
We put the tabs under our tongues and let them dissolve.
The walls were spilling with the colours of music, and there he was, Matthew, standing in the middle of the dance floor, knowing what was to come, moving without moving, zooming through the cosmos while his body stayed very still, and all the surfaces bled together.
After the club we went back to a house on a dark, narrow street near Christ Church with the Poles, where the party continued. The acid was incredible; it must have been six hours after taking it and I was still tripping hard. The DJ from the club had come back to the house. At one point the techno got more intense and there was this Polish girl dancing in front of me. I could see that there was something wrong with her face. I peered at her through the smoke and noise — and then it was little Becky’s face and it caved in on itself, spurting out gore and crushed bones as the one eye peered at me from hell. I screamed and leapt back, falling to my knees and covering my head with my arms. Scag had seen what happened and took me by the shoulder and guided me to my feet. I was shaking and babbling as he pulled me aside, away from staring revellers. ‘Relax, Matthew, it’s only the acid. Don’t fight it, nothin ye see can hurt ye, it’s only Samsara, don’t fight it.’ I smoked a cigarette and tried to calm down. I started to cry. I turned my face to the window so no one could see. Later I wrote Jen a text that scrolled on for three pages, but I deleted it.
The techno thumped all night. Even the Poles dropped out before we did. Some time after dawn most of them had retired to the bedrooms to sleep, or have sex; or come down in more intimate groups, or gone home; or laid out on the floor of the sitting room, front room and kitchen to pass out.
Scag was sitting on an armchair, peaceful-looking, a roll-up dangling easy from his left hand. He was gazing out the window, emanating thoughtfulness even as the veins in his temples bulged to the point of rupture. I sat down on the carpeted floor at his feet — there were no empty seats — and listened to the ambient waves of soothing, vaporous silver that dissolved around us, the DJ’s gentle-comedown set. I felt sleepy and my head dropped forward a few times, eventually coming to rest against Scag’s leg. I closed my eyes and let darkness flood over me, thinking as I blacked out that dying would not be unpleasant at all.
‘I reckon it’s time to split, Matthew,’ Scag said after a while. I stood up and rubbed my eyes.
We took four cans of lager from the heaps of unconsumed alcohol that lay scattered around the various rooms, and left.
‘Fuckin hell,’ I said when we were out on the grey, early-morning street. ‘I’m still trippin.’
We let our legs carry us, hiding the cans in our pockets between swigs, in case the police were around. We walked down Dame Street and crossed the Liffey, then followed the river past the long, imposing hulk of the Custom House, which now seemed to have a face and a real personality — it struck me that the building only looked so stern and intimidating because it was insecure about who it really was. It was all a front. The thought triggered another fit of giggles.
Town was silent and still like the land before time. We followed the river, past the spindly, sinister figures of the Famine Memorial and the docked yachts, to the port. There, we turned north into the city and kept walking, drinking, tripping, smoking, eventually re-meeting the coast out at Fairview. We walked along the Clontarf Road, by the sea that churned grey foam in a perpetually descending hiss, the sound of the world collapsing in on itself.
Out past the city centre, where the edges frayed into coastal suburb, we climbed over the low wall separating the road from the sea. We clambered down the rocks until we reached a meagre strip of grey, stony beach. Towers and chimneys of industry fumed in the distance along the coast, while cargo ships hulked in and out of Dublin Port. I looked behind us and couldn’t see over the wall, couldn’t see the road or the cars.
Scag sat down on the pebbles and rolled a joint with a bit of grass we’d been given at the party. When we smoked it, it seemed to rekindle the acid in my system so that once again I was tripping at full intensity.
For a while we stared out at the murky sea under a heavy, dismal sky, saying nothing. The foamy low tide hissed at our feet.
Then Scag pointed forward — at the grey sea and the grey sky that were coupled, almost one thing, one void — and said, ‘That’s the abyss, Matthew. That’s the abyss at the edge of the world.’
And when he said it, something astonishing happened: out on the horizon, behind the sullen murk of the sky, I began to make out the shifting, restless contours of a great void that was opening up, as wide as the horizon itself. I became terrified, I couldn’t look away.
‘Do ye see it?’ I heard him whisper, urgent and reverential.
The abyss was expanding, a great heaving vortex, spreading out across the sky like the Aurora Borealis, wider than the city. And then I could see that the light, the sea, the dead sun and the cargo ships, the seagulls and the city itself — all of it was being sucked in, slowly and inexorably, lurching forward to be swallowed up in the great void.
‘Do ye see it?’ he whispered.
I fell backwards on the ground, shielding my face with my arms and elbows in a useless instinct of self-protection. I screamed. Then Scag rose to his feet. He started to speak in a thundering voice: ‘How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire fuckin horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Where is it movin now? Where are we movin now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually fallin? Backward, sideward, forward, in all fuckin directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not strayin as through an infinite nothin? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night comin on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the mornin?’
As he spoke these words, Scag tore the clothes from his body so that by the end he stood completely naked, his shaded skin like the bark of a tree sprouting from the grey shingle. Black tattoos snaked up the lines of his body. He stepped forward and plunged into the grey sea. After he went under, I watched the surface undulating in its vast indifference, thinking he would never come up again. I felt a desolating loneliness, deeper and colder than anything I had ever experienced.