The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [46]
THE FACE. And then one night, after several days of pure Eden, as I was trying to get to sleep, marveling at the fullness of each moment, feeling that I was living whole lifetimes within each moment, I started listening to and feeling my heart beat. Suddenly I became terribly frightened that it would stop.
And from out of nowhere came an incredibly wrinkled, iridescent face. Starting as a small point infinitely distant, it rushed forward, becoming infinitely huge. I could see nothing else. My heart had stopped. The moment stretched forever. I tried to make the face go away but it mocked me. I had somehow gained control over my heartbeat but I didn’t know how to use it. I was holding my life in my hands and was powerless to stop it from dripping through my fingers. I tried to look the face in the eyes and realized I had left all familiar ground.
When I first saw the face coming toward me I had thought, “Oh, goody.” What I had in mind was a nice reasonable conversation. I had lots of things I wanted to talk about, lots of questions it must have answers to. God, Jesus, the Bible, the Ching, mescaline, art, music, history, evolution, physics, mathematics. How they all fit together. just a nice bull session, but a bull session with a difference. A bull session with someone who knew.
My enthusiasm was short-lived. He, she, or whatever didn’t seem much interested in the sort of conversation I had in mind. It also seemed not to like me much. But the worst of it was it didn’t stop coming. It had no respect for my personal space, no inclination to maintain a conversational distance. When I could easily make out all its features; when it and I were more or less on the same scale, when I thought there was maybe a foot or two between us, it had actually been hundreds of miles away, and it kept coming and coming till I was lost somewhere in some pore in its nose and it still kept coming. I was enveloped, dwarfed. No way to get any perspective on the thing at all, and for all I really knew it was still light-years away and coming and coming and coming.
My own insignificance again? Shit, I sort of wanted to learn something new.
“So you really want to go on a trip, do you? OK, punk, now you’re really going to fly.” Or words to that effect. Not words exactly, more like thunder.
The few times I tried to fight back I was left exhausted. It took everything out of me and didn’t seem to improve matters at all. If anything they got worse. So I retreated and retreated and retreated.
I lay rigid all night listening to the sound of the stream, figuring that somehow by being aware of sounds and rhythms outside myself I could keep my own bodily rhythms going. Losing consciousness of something outside myself meant that I would die. Only by falling into step with rhythms of the outside world could I maintain my existence. I realized that this meant I could never sleep again.
A few days before, I had asked the I Ching who mescaline was. I guess maybe that was some sort of no-no. It seemed like a logical thing at the time. It seemed that the two should know each other and might have some interesting things to say about each other. I got pretty excited at the idea. I wanted to cast a horoscope of the I Ching, throw the Ching on numerology, meditate on mescaline, throw the Ching on astrology, ask mescaline about the Ching, and so on and so one, matrix and cross-reference the whole show and see what I came up with. But when this face showed up, I figured maybe I had been messing around with something I shouldn’t.
I tried to think that the face was essentially benign and that the fear I felt was due to fuck-ups in myself rather than any malignancy on the part of the vision. But it was so hideously ugly. But beauty on a physical plane is meaningless superficiality. Isn’t it? But green is such a bad color for a face. Red is a bad color for eyes, and purple glowing wartlike growths tend to detract from one’s looks. Could