Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
mosis I'd declined to pay attention to in biology but at that moment comprehended as if . . . as
if sound waves were nice but not necessary, because this was meaning conjoining with being
and yes, I was off.
And so it is, as few moments achieve.
Before you could say downward spiraling vortex, I was way off then more off and offer
and offer, till Kenny Visser offered a cross check from a far corner of the room, the town, the
Universe, giggling and calling out from his perch on the edge of the double helix of that etern-
al moment. Nose pressed to Marcia's goldfish bowl, he grinned. Our viewpoints intersected
much as two trekkers pass on wilderness trails on either side of an abyss high in the Himalay-
as. Eight feet and eons away, on his knees, he called across the canyon, “What ho?”
“Ho?”
In mellifluous inquiry he asked, “Is life so short that you have no time to snuggle with a
snail?”
It hadn't seemed so short, and he wasn't actually snuggling with a snail. He was wiping
nose grease on the fishbowl, and this exchange seemed longer than life to date, what with third
stage boosters kicking in, just as those big fucking canisters from the second stage fizzled out
and fell away slo-mo with the fundamental stabilizers fibrillating on all seams.
Oh, things were cracking up.
I lay back on the sofa to fasten the figurative seatbelt, because seasoned acidnauts knew
that blasting through the nowheresphere will test a system's integrity every time, and that
gyroscopic fortitude requires the vortex to spiral upward and not downward at all costs—or
nearly all costs. I mean, be real. If you compound the challenges of quantum physics with the
fundamental absence of a viable steering mechanism in deep space and no viable coordinates,
like left, right, up and down, then navigation will default to spirit, to mood, to raw outlook,
which must not look down. Not down. But up. Up, up, up.
Wait a minute. You said no up or down.
Yes! I didn't mean
that
up and down, you simp! I meant the ultimate up or down, the one
emanating from the core.
Well, the core seemed accessible enough . . .
Fuck me! She suggested two hits!
But then the sofa needed nailing to the floor and the last fucking thing in the world I was
up for was finding a hammer and nails. And straps, because we'd need some fucking straps,
me and the sofa. And the hammer. And nails. Kenny Visser called over his shoulder, “You
gotta try this, man.”
But I couldn't very well try anything with everything trying me—at once. In two shakes I
was miraculously back up at the door and re-rigged. Did I say two? Make that one, or maybe
a half, or a quarter. Eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second, sixty-fourth, one-twenty-eighth.
