I walk back down the long hallway, and into the kitchen, through the wooden door that's thick with decades of gloss paint. Then I have an odd feeling that the door is much too small or I am much too big. It feels exactly like déjà vu, as if I'm about to shrink and look up at a door that is a hundred times my size, rather than a foot or so taller than me. But it doesn't happen; it just sits there in my mind: a parallel thought; perhaps something that's happening to some other me, out there in the multiverse. The sensation reminds me of the time someone gave me mushroom tea without telling me and I spent the whole evening watching this pink and cream suburban sitting room grow and shrink around me. I remember the TV being on in the corner; some Saturday night game show where loud, happy, healthy families competed against one another to win a new car or a holiday. At one point the TV towered over me, as if I could walk inside the screen. But the image I remember most vividly is when the room shrank to the size of a sugar cube. I was looking down on it, on the room I was in, but I wasn't inside the room anymore. Afterwards I asked my friend how he thought that could have worked. Where was I if I wasn't in the room? He just smiled and said, "Inside a bad trip, man." What an idiot. I close my eyes and open them again. The door's normal. I really must have drunk too much last night.
After breakfast I consider going in to the university but instead decide to stay here. OK, so the heat costs money here, but as long as I use the gas it should be OK, at least for a day while I try to get my thoughts together. Did I throw myself at Adam last night or did he throw himself at me? I can't be in a room with him today, anyway. It's still so cold, so I switch on the oven and then sit on the sofa with my knees pulled into my body, smoking and thinking about what to do next. I could write something, but I can't. I could read something—but what do you read after Mr. Y? I could just sit here all day and wait for the curse to hit me. But there is no curse. The only curse in my life is me.
You have choice.
What was going on in my dream?
While I'm cleaning my teeth, shivering in the damp bathroom (by far the coldest room in the flat), I remember that the marker pen is in the bathroom cabinet. Of course. I bought that weird shampoo that came in an unmarked bottle and I wanted to write on it in case I bought something else from that market stall and became confused. It's the kind of thing I do when I should be working: write labels on shampoo bottles; iron jeans; think about seagulls. I don't think I really cared about the shampoo: It was just something to do. I open the cabinet and there it is, a thick black pen lying there alongside some old paracetamol and a broken hairbrush. As soon as I open the door it rolls out and I catch it before it falls in the sink. OK.
Ten minutes later I'm sitting on the sofa again, this time with a fresh cup of coffee, a cigarette, and a perfect black circle on the back of a perfect white card. I went through all the random mail from downstairs until I found a birthday card, probably about a year old, inside a pale blue envelope. Happy 20th, Tamsin, it said. We'll come and see you soon. It was signed Maggie and Bill. But that bit's in the bin now. I've got the other bit: a rectangle of card with a Victorian pastoral scene on one side, and bright white nothingness on the other. Well, now it's bright white nothingness with a small black circle in the middle of it, perfectly filled in.
I stub out my cigarette and drain the last of the coffee, turning the card over and looking at the Victorian image again. It's dated 1867, and it's called Summer Landscape, although its colors seem autumnal. It looks like such a peaceful place: red earth carpeted with thick grass and canopied with emerald and bronze trees; a path by a river where you could walk in complete silence. I turn the card over and there's the circle again. Circle. Soothing landscape. Circle. Soothing landscape. I know which one makes the best birthday card. Right. Are you supposed to wait fifteen minutes before doing this? The homoeopathy books I read yesterday all said that homoeopathic medicines should be taken on a clean mouth, fifteen minutes after eating or drinking. But that's OK. If it doesn't work then I can blame the coffee and start again later. As long as I keep doing it wrong I'll have something to do all day. Then, this evening, I can admit that my adventure is over and go back to normal life. Maybe I'll reread Erewhon. That usually cheers me up.
So I pick up the vial and give it another little shake. What the hell—I bang it hard twice on the side of the sofa. I suppose I've probably done too much succussing now, but surely that makes it more potent, not less? I think back to the homoeopathy books and remember that if I were to take a drop of this mixture and put it in some water and shake it some more, the result would be stronger than this mixture, even though scientifically speaking it would be more dilute. How does that work? Come on Ariel; stop thinking about it and just get on with it. It's just you and the liquid. OK. I drink it: a large mouthful. Then I lie down on the sofa and stare at the black circle, concentrating as hard as I can. And this time, I do not fall asleep: I watch as the black circle splits into two, and I try not to blink as it kaleidoscopes around on the sheet, lifting and turning.
And then, in an instant that feels thinner and sharper than the edge of a razor, I'm falling. I'm falling into a black tunnel, the same black tunnel that Mr. Y described in the book. But I'm not falling down, if that makes any sense: I'm falling along, forwards, horizontally. The walls of the tunnel pass by as if I were in a car, but I'm not in a car. Wherever I am it's completely silent and I have no bodily sensations at all. I'm fairly sure my body is here with me, but it has no feelings and no desires. I'm not even sure if I'm wearing clothes. Only my mind feels alive. I see—although it doesn't feel as if it's actually through my eyes—almost exactly what Mr. Y saw: black all around suddenly pinpricked by little lights that turn into wavy lines that seem to go on forever. Then a huge penis, drawn in the same style as that on the Cerne Abbas Giant, but rendered here in light. There's also a vagina, which looks less familiar, and then it's gone. Then I seem to be moving faster. I see the birds and feet and eyes that Mr. Y saw, but to me they look like Egyptian hieroglyphics, the kind of thing you learn about in primary school. Then I see many letters: Greek, Roman, and Cyrillic. I don't recognize all of them, but after a while they organize themselves into alphabets and there are several minutes where nothing seems to change in the tunnel. Could I stop this experience if I wanted to? I'm not sure I could. Can my mind even handle this experience, whatever it is? I've never much liked hallucinogens because of the lack of control you have, and the fact that you have to finish the trip; you can't just switch it off. Now I'm here and I know I can't switch this off. I could go mad. Maybe I have just gone mad. Maybe this is what it's like crossing from sanity into madness, and maybe I'll never escape. As I think, I begin to feel sick, so I try to stop thinking and instead just look at the walls of the tunnel again.
The alphabets look more familiar, and now include numerals, although in patterns I don't immediately recognize. Odd combinations of Roman numerals that I don't understand are interspersed with sequences beginning 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19 and 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. At least, I assume they are sequences, but soon they dissolve into long lines of numerals that look like cosmic telephone numbers. In places I can see equations, but they only flicker and then disappear. I'm sure I see Newton's F=MA, and, later, Einstein's E=MC2. I can see mathematical symbols that I don't understand, as well as those I do: the = and + signs, and later various pieces of set notation like I = {1, 2, 3, ... 100}. Then more series of numbers that go on for minutes and minutes. I see sequences that don't make any sense at all, such as: 1431, 1731, 1831, 2432, 2732, 2832, 3171, 3181, 3272, 3282, 11511, 31531, 31631, 32532, 32632, 33151, 33161, 33252, 33262, 114311, 117311, 118311, 124312, 127312, 128312, 214321, 217321, 218321, 224322, 227322, 228322. At first I think they must be dates, but then the numbers get too big again. Then something else happens, something not described in Lumas's version of this: The letters from the alphabet all disappear and turn into numbers, and then the numbers, apart from 1 and 0, disappear as well until I am left with millions and millions of 0s and 1s waterfalling down the walls around me.