Lucy

If you can imagine blackness - sheer blackness - like that of an empty cell phone screen or the gloss black that every shiny novelty is embossed with in the digital age, then you have the backdrop of the trip Lucy awaited as she drew in a deep breath from the translucent tube and exhaled.

A wisp of white left her lips, blazing in a slow slow rhythm, and time began to crawl through molasses as the trails of smoke stretched outward. Suddenly the air pulled out a cloud of white puffiness from her lips, a cloud so tangible it seemed like she could just reach out touch it and swallow it and feel it’s dry cotton burns run down her throat and char her lungs. She felt a numb spell as the cylindrical micro-tendrils of the smoke wove together in fractal forms and decorated the room with Eastern devotion. And as the cloud expanded to encompass her face she felt she was a scanning tunneling artistic visionary microscope that was infinitely zooming through levels of vision to the infinitesimal hidden dimensions of spacetime unseen by anyone since Jesus, and even He himself would not know where he was in this universe he created.

A fluorescent light switched on, flowering into a visceral pedal rainbow of flavor-colored prism extracts. She saw kaleidoscopic light pass through space-time in slow-time, and as the particle waves hit her eyes they trickled like liquid eye drops and wettened her irises with the enlightenment of tender awareness. Her pupils began to pulsate in response to the sub-bass booms of the room.

A click turned on a record and started it spinning, and a rush of sonar energy arose throughout her body, sending it shriveling, feeling as if the grooves of the record reached out sinew spider tentacles that grabbed every atom in the room and spun them in a coordinated dance with the turntable. The room diluted into a dystopian carnival of enchanted fake scary dark energy. It was a spaceship rocketing in oblivion that only spun so that life could have a little bit of gravity, but truly the only force that dominated the room was hecticity and multidimensional abstraction. Pablo Picasso himself stood in the corner and cubified every space and object as he stared at himself through the mirror canvasses of his art. The space was made of special state of matter, perhaps reflecting only information, perhaps verifying the truth that the whole universe is just some holograph of a two-dimensional shell. Perhaps Lucy was truly Lucifer for thinking she was ever real, or perhaps there is something to say for those meth-head crack addict schizophrenic bat-head artists who think the world isn’t real and that everyone not on the astral plane is a delusional, penny-chasing goon.

Image: Detail from Floor of House of Leigh McCloskey, Leigh McCloskey. 2000s.