Chapter 3: Amsterdam/There Is No Time

3

It can’t be denied that marijuana may have had something to do with it.

Amsterdam/There Is No Time

Weed came into Norman’s life in the summer of Two-thousand-one, in Amsterdam, on a backpacking tour of that continent with his two best friends from college, Lou Carlsen and Karl Major. Amsterdam book-ended the two month European tour – they were there for two days at the beginning of the trip, and the original plan was to return to Amsterdam after circling the continent and stay there for another two days at the end.
Norman had smoked weed a few times in college with a couple of older girlfriends, but had never really gotten high for whatever reason. Lou, with whom Norman had recently begun to collaborate on screenplays, had never even smoked a cigarette. Karl, the third part of the old triumvirate of friends who had all met back at the Indiana Academy and then gone to college together at Indiana University, had begun smoking weed when he had moved to Seattle six months earlier, and in Amsterdam this allowed him to function as the expert among them.
The first time Norman and Lou got high was in a small sidestreet coffeeshop in Amsterdam called the Blue Moon. Karl, as the experienced one, bought two joints of something called purple siensa and the three young men sat in a corner of the coffeeshop, passing the joints in a circle until both were smoked away. For a few minutes, Norman wondered if maybe he was just immune to the effects of marijuana.
Then the Massive Attack song Risingson came on on the joint’s little radio and at that same instant, everything changed about the nature of Norman’s perception. With the opening sounds of the song – a sort of eerie howling over a stuttering, swirling guitarpeggio – the bits of information in the world around him all seemed suddenly to stand up and reveal that they had in fact been a sea of individual people wearing hats with pixels of said information printed on them, all crouched together to appear as a material world, and they all suspiciously eyed Norman and then just as instantly crouched back down and became the phenomenal universe again (this, of course, is metaphor). When the beat came messianically in, the whole scene around him seemed to begin to move perfectly to it. It was as if a lens had been removed from Norman’s vision which was there to make the world appear as it normally did (to dampen its gorgeousness/fullness from the eyes of we spiritual mole-people, perhaps), and now the image of Karl was just a puppet, and Lou too was a puppet, and when Norman looked at his own hands it was more like looking at a screen with the image of his hands from his perspective. His eye was now clearly but a window. He wondered momentarily how one would get this shot for a film; the camera would have to fill his head. When he turned his head, his vision joined him jaggedly, as if time had been folded up and little pieces snipped out like from a paper snowflake. But through those metaphorical holes, some weird information-light almost seemed to come. Norman’s thoughts were swirled by the ‘weird information-light’ and seemed to bloom in previously darkened dimensions, expanding his awareness of the three-point-one-four-one-five-nine-dimensional world around him into something he could not even begin to know how to describe.
“Dude,” Norman said aloud to his comrades.
Karl laughed. “Yes, Norman?”
Norman held up a puppety finger to Karl and raised one eyebrow, attempting an incredibly serious expression with his lips. He held this for a moment, his eye darted to Lou, then he sat back and said with passionate eye contact and his finger still in the air, “Dude.”
“I think I know what he’s talking about, man,” Lou said with a knowing half-grin under a brow-furrowing blank gaze of awe.
“Hold on, oh my god, gravity is pulling me backwards,” Karl coughed, then burst out laughing and grabbed tightly onto the table in front of him.
They spent the next half hour trying to describe to each other what exactly was happening inside their heads with much wild gesturing and raucous laughter. For Norman, it was as if the aperture through which he experienced the information his brain sent his soul was usually a tight sphincter which the weed had somehow relaxed, allowing more information than just sensory input through to his awareness. It was as if all the shadowy corners of thought that Norman reached his hand into for inspiration were now lit greenly as if in night vision, and it became intuitively clear that these thoughts were not just in his head but actually part of the world.
“…so at first the extraneous information is exciting, but for Norman it’s still novelty enough to seem like a fluke, an experiential hallucination (not a hallucination of anything per se so much as a hallucinatory perspective).”
“Norman’s speaking in the third person,” Karl snickered. “Maybe he’s someone else now. Who is he? Who have we become?”
They all laughed uncontrollably. The experience was mentally intriguing, but also somehow joyously hilarious.
This jovial atmosphere was brought abruptly to an end by the mysterious fainting of a woman beside their table followed suddenly by a fight breaking out between the woman’s male companion and the coffeeshop’s proprietor, a scene from which the three baked young backpackers quickly, if awkwardly, extricated themselves.
Outside, Norman felt the sun beaming life/logos/joy down upon him. Everyone on the street appeared to glow with beauty, uniqueness, with self in a way that he had never truly grasped before. It struck him there, standing at the edge of the swarming summer streets of Amsterdam, that in some magical/paradoxical way everyone must be essentially existentially the same self.
On the shockingly-stoned tram ride back to their hotel, Lou was close to freaking out, certain they’d miss their stop and end up riding the tram eternally, but by the time they were sober the next morning at the hotel, he was the first to suggest they do it again before leaving for Hamburg.
Since the Eurail tickets they had bought allowed them a certain itinerary flexibility, the boys ended up truncating Budapest and Vienna and altogether skipping Madrid so that their time in Amsterdam at the end of the trip could last longer. By the time they got back to Holland six weeks later, they had accrued a small troupe of fellow-backpackers from assorted geographical origins, and they all shared a large, cheap apartment in Amsterdam’s Turkish neighborhood for two future-mythic weeks.
Norman was twenty years old. He had begun smoking cigarettes and gotten truly drunk on alcohol for the first time both only within the past year, having skipped that in college, being so young. He was new to the concept of altered states. His parents had always been virulently, mindlessly anti-drug, and as a young prodigy he had followed their rules. But in Amsterdam it was legal. There was no reason not to try it. He and Lou had researched it online before the trip, intrigued by Karl’s hilarious stoned phone calls/email rants. It had been but one of many various European adventures that they had been eagerly anticipating in the days leading up to the trip, but after the experience it clearly eclipsed everything else. They would often fondly recall cavorting in the Budapest bathhouse with those three British girls, being in the middle of a crowd of two million in the Circus Maximus all celebrating a Roman football win, drunkenly carousing through the streets of Barcelona singing There’s a Hole at the Bottom of the Sea, but the memories faded from immediate significance over time. Marijuana, however, had officially become a part of their lives. It was very much like waking into a wondrous dream.
Norman and Lou would never truly be the same again.


“Hey man.”
“Hey, man. How you doing?”
“Man, alright.” Pause. “I could be better, obviously.” Chuckle.
“I hear you, dog.” Knowing laughs.
When Norman and Lou returned to Indiana from Europe in the late summer of Two-thousand-one, it felt as if everything had changed. Norman returned to his big corner room in the dorm at the Indiana Academy, his co-counselor girlfriend Karen who lived a floor below him, his paintings, his photographs, his music. At first, the cover of the Tupperware container of modern American society sealed back over him smoothly and life was soon just as it had been.
But on his nights off, when he would go see Lou at Lou’s mother’s house across town, the conversation would inevitably lead back to weed.
“Man, wouldn’t it be great if we could get some weed? I miss it, man, I gotta admit.” Laughs. “I know, but, fuck – right? You know what I mean. I know you know what I mean.”
“Word.”
But Norman and Lou were not drug people. Not yet, at least. Norman was a live-in residential counselor at his pre-college boarding school alma mater, and Lou was an unemployed college graduate drifting between his mother’s house (not far from the Indiana Academy, in Muncie) and various friends’ couches across the state. Norman had known drug people in his life, been friend and even lover to them, but had never really joined in that milieu. Neither Norman nor Lou had any idea how to get marijuana in the United States. Their attempts led only to folly. They tried talking to people in weed chat rooms online, hanging out too long in head shops, even stood nervously, expectantly in a corner of the Muncie bus station for about five minutes before they realized how absurd they were and left.
Focuses changed, of course, less than a month into the semester, when American society itself was rudely awakened by the blood-caked rapiers of four very angry angels. (To be fair, there had been written warning in the halls of the zeitgeist, though this written warning had been pasted on the inside of a stall in the bathroom at the bottom of the stairs behind a door that said “Beware of the leopard,” as it were [for Americans at least].) Fear threaded through the fibers of the world, and the conservative clamps seemed to take hold everywhere, even in previously liberal institutions like the Indiana Academy. Norman began to butt heads with the administration in an effort to retain a progressive atmosphere of tolerance and liberalism there.
One afternoon, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of artistic power that remained inertly in potentia in his room, Norman gave away all of the hundreds of paintings he had created throughout his college adolescence to students and coworkers.
Another month later, Lou found a job up north at Scornell Systems, a software company in South Bend, Indiana. He rented a one bedroom apartment in a themed apartment complex called the Enchanted Forest. Norman drove three hours each direction to visit him on most weekends that he wasn’t on duty at the Academy. In the Enchanted Forest, the conversations became more specific.
“We need to go back to fuckin’ Amsterdam.”
“I hear you, dog.”
For the sake of weed, plans were made. Soon, tickets were bought. That next May, right after the end of the Academy’s school year, Norman and Lou returned to Amsterdam.
Most of the four days they were in Amsterdam the second time was spent in their hotel room. They ventured out into the city to buy more weed, or just to walk around and enjoy the beauty of the buskers and bridges and buildings and bicycles, but not often. The pretense was that the two of them were working on the screenplay for Death and the Ladies (their planned second film in the fantasy future where they are filmmakers). Mostly they sat on their beds with the television on across the room, smoking joint after joint and talking about whatever.
Whatever, however, became something miraculous. The weed seemed to open access to some sort of super-sense that demanded exploration, and the two of them were eager to do just that. Significant progress was made on the dialogue for Death and the Ladies (and an epiphany achieved in the realization that one of the characters was the Devil), but much more unexpected avenues of thought were probed as well. They discussed metaphors for what they were experiencing as the weed took hold. Their preferred metaphor was a series of rooms: the First Room being the awareness of their separation from their bodies, when the effect they dubbed ‘puppetiness’ set in; the Second Room being the space where you go when you have completely broken away from reality, when you can float in and out of your body’s awareness but also reach out into the aether of your thoughts or feelings, or of the cosmos, or whatever else might be out there (this phase appearing to an outside observer as some kind of intermittent catatonia); there was a Third Room mentioned a few times, but only hypothetically (Lou mused that as broken as he felt in the Second Room, the Third Room must be “all-four-limbs-off-the-floor-out-of-this-universe” [his words]). The two also developed a working model for what they referred to as the ‘interface’ of existence, the way we perceive and interact with the sensory input of the world and our own thoughts (using mostly computer operating system and role-playing game inspired metaphors and terminology to describe it).
All that remains written down from these conversations are two lines of tiny text at the top of an otherwise blank page in one of Norman’s sketchbooks.

Norman dual class, Artist (level 6) / Prophet (level 4)
Lou Logician (level 7)

Through this process, Norman and Lou achieved an intimidating level of efficiency of communication. It was almost as if the two young men began to act as a single mind. They could share complex thoughts with the briefest fragments of words, accompanied with their shared lexicon of cultural references, tones of voice, hand gestures and facial expressions.
Each of the three nights, Norman and Lou were awakened by a tiny mouse that noisily hopped up and down in one corner of the room, by the window, from about three to four a.m., squeaking softly each time it landed back down on the floor. The second and third nights, Norman and Lou sat up to watch the whole performance, noting that after about an hour of jumping each night the mouse would vanish from view, though a thorough search of the room the next morning revealed no mouse holes.
At one point on their last evening, during a long pause in the conversation, Norman’s thoughts came to the concept of the oneness of all things, and how that relates to compassion as a feeling, and for the briefest of moments, while he was looking at Lou and thinking these things, he felt perfection in his compassion in a manner that seemed to rush in on him suddenly, filling him with peace and joy.
Lou seemed to recognize the moment in Norman’s eyes, and he smiled and gasped a little.
“Did you see that?” Norman asked him happily.
“Yeah. You just, like, became Buddha for a second.” Lou also seemed overjoyed by the experience.
“Like, you really saw it?”
“Sort of,” Lou nodded. “Yeah. It was, like, just for a moment. But it was real. I actually saw it, for a second.”
Norman pulled a pen from his pocket and wrote on his left forearm, I just actually became Buddha. Lou saw it. It was only for a moment.
The Amsterdam experience in Two-thousand-two was pivotal. Norman and Lou had been gaining this indescribable mental connection through friendship and artistic collaboration for years, but during those few days it was as if the connection itself became self-aware. It was like an ascetic time of reflection for the greater super-self that somehow included them both. It was there and then that Norman and Lou decided to create an art group called Man-Like Machines that would be an umbrella concept for all of their creative collaborations – art, music, literature, film, philosophy, et cetera. They even came up with a tagline for it that Norman wrote in large block letters down his arm as they were riding the subway to the airport: ART / ENLIGHTENMENT / THE FUTURE.
When they were checking out of their room on their last morning they mentioned the mouse and the pretty desk clerk girl simply nodded, smiling, and said, “Yes, mouse room,” as if it was some kind of special room they had been given.
The big epiphany, at that point, however, still was yet to come.

A few days after they returned from Amsterdam, Norman and Lou picked up Karl from O’Hare and all three drove up to Magnetawan, Ontario, where Lou’s step-father owns a cabin on a lake in the middle of the woods. It was there, late that same night, after a full day of driving, that Norman and Lou “leveled up” (their words, a role-playing game reference).
After a full day and evening of driving, they all sat around the big wooden table in the middle of the cabin with a candle in the center of the table as the only light. Through the windows came the sounds of the forest at night, but only void could be seen. Despite the fact that they had just come from Amsterdam, the big excitement for Lou and Norman was that Karl had brought weed from Seattle, and they were eager to stay up and smoke some.
“I just keep it in this film canister,” Karl said as he presented the grey-topped black cylinder, “and put it in my pocket.”
“That’s balls,” Lou said, gratefully eyeing the green powder Karl was dumping out of the canister onto a white piece of paper. “What if they searched you?”
“I don’t set off the alarm.”
“But what if you accidentally did? And aren’t they doing random searches now?”
“My sister Lee gets searched every time she flies now,” Norman added.
Lou accepted the packed bowl from Karl. The three young men passed Karl’s little pipe around the table for several rounds in silence. Each time Norman received the pipe from Lou, they made pleased, knowing eye contact, and each time, he found he could read more and more from those brief moments. He began to realize that no words were passing between the two of them, and yet communication was very much occurring, and in torrents now with each glance. Their facial expressions mirrored a mutual awe and confusion. Norman could tell that Lou was sharing the experience. Through all of this, Karl silently watched them.
“Are you?” Lou stiltedly asked Norman after the bowl had passed around for the seventh time.
“Yes,” Norman agreed, somehow understanding. “It’s like I can … see more.”
“Yes,” Lou nodded, his expression serious and excited, but cautious.
“It’s almost like I am suddenly aware of an extra level of awareness, like I’m looking down on the universe from some dimension that I didn’t realize I could go up along. And this is often, I realize now, the feeling that accompanies all those great eureka moments, or moments of great communicative or creative ecstasy. It’s like … it’s like I’m peeking my head above the water into the realm of the zeitgeist, like all the pantheistic concept spirits of everything just became visible.” Norman could indeed feel the presence of each thing that had a name (the Chair, the Wall, the Night, the Silence, the Intrigue) as a greater spirit of itself, and their sudden collective presence raised the hairs on his skin, though it was at the same time very beautiful to exist within.
“I know exactly what you mean,” Lou responded in the same tone of voice that Norman had been using, “only I was going to use a Cartesian coordinate system as an example. I was thinking it’s like, like if you imagine a three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, and think about how a cube in that system would have a shadow that would be two-dimensional – a square, or a parallelogram or whatever – but this three-dimensional world, then, is the shadow of the universe of time. Each moment frozen – all that three-dimensional spatial information – is the shadow of that system in time. So all of eternity and space – what is that, then, the shadow of?”
“Shadow puppets, man – fuck yeah. It’s the allegory of the cave! It’s like … okay…” Norman grabbed a sheet of paper from the darkness to his left and began to draw diagrams. “Here’s a two-dimensional plane, right? And then, but we’re in this three-dimensional space, the universe. But really we’re in a four-dimensional space, right, because time is that fourth dimension. And … but, we can’t see time from above. You know? We can see the surfaces of the universe from any angle, but time, we can only see out from time. Sort of. You know what I mean?”
“Yes, go on, but I know where you’re going.”
“Yeah, right? Awesome! So check it out. It’s like,” and he continued drawing his series of diagrams, “like if time and space were this two-dimensional plane, like being able to see it all from above. But not time, really, almost like – identity! Like, there can’t be just one identity. And identity is totally another dimension we can’t see but out from. See what I mean?”


“Identity as a dimension?” Lou asked as he glanced down at Norman’s drawing with an uncertain purse of his lips, but then he suddenly gestured wildly with his hands and pulled the sheet of paper closer to himself. “Okay, we’ll get back to that.”
“Well, think about it. Perspective is just one dimension of the fuller consciousness.”
“Okay okay okay,” Lou said as he assessed Norman’s somewhat goofy diagrams, “so the Universe began, right, as a singularity…”
“Of infinite density. Which is absurd – I mean, it’s eternity, right? Like, how can eternity exist within a moment; how can there be infinity? It’s like nothingness; it can’t exist; it’s inert, because it’s non-distinct; there can be no information in true homogeny. Or homogeneity, rather. Is homogeny a word? Does that mean anything?”
“Wait wait wait. Okay, so either the Universe is supposed to expand, then stop, then come back in on itself and maybe do this repeatedly as some great cosmic cycle, or it will just keep expanding into a cold soup of homogenous matter…”
“But think about that for a second,” Norman interrupted. “The heat death of the universe is no less a singularity than the Big Suck or the Big Fall or whatever it would be called.”
“Big Crunch,” Lou corrected with a laugh.
“But, because, in the heat death of the universe, it peters out toward an asymptote of inertness, right, into a cold soup of electrons or whatever, like you said, but in a universe with less and less distinction, isn’t that really just like the flipside of the singularity, the infinite space holding an infinity of homogenous matter as opposed to the single point in space, you know what I mean? Does that make sense?”
“Sort of, yeah,” Lou nodded, seeming surprised that it did.
Norman was not surprised. He had never felt so strong a connection with another human being. It was as if a mind river flowed from each of their heads to a glowing pool between them in space. He could almost see it. He felt like if he took another hit of weed, he would be able to.
“I’m going to smoke more,” Norman said, and picked up the pipe.
“Word; me too.” Lou smiled eagerly, shaking his shoulders and sitting forward in his chair to be closer to Norman and the pipe. Norman handed it to him after he had taken a hit. He held the smoke there and watched with awe as the metaphorical rivers of thought he had just imagined actually appeared before him, half-real, half-visual, half-just-impression, but very present in his awareness.
“What is thought?” Norman asked the collective pool of mind that glowed between himself and Lou. “What makes me my brain, instead of anything else? Why am I me, instead of someone else? Why can’t I move around and experience things from the perspective of others? Why am I anchored to this body?”
“Are you?” Lou asked. “I mean, there is real evidence, supposedly, of things like astral travel and remote viewing and things like that. I think there must be much more to mind than just the brain – and this is something I’m really just beginning to explore, ever since, well, since Amsterdam, really. Since weed.”
“I’m with you, man,” Norman assured him. “Everything is changing. I’m seeing so much more. I don’t know that I could describe it to anyone but you just yet, really, but I have this intuitive certainty that you know what I mean.”
“I’m pretty sure I do,” Lou nodded.
“It’s like – it’s like I’m figuring out the mathematics, the physics of existence, of everything. The subtle physics, you know what I mean? It’s like – you can measure the real world, you can measure the spatial distinction between, say, me and you – we occupy this specific space. The measurement, the experiment could be duplicated, et cetera, scientific method, you’re with me; anyway. And, of course, it’s all just metaphor, really, we’re all just vibrating energy, just waves of information about where things are and how much charge each electron has or whatever. It’s like we are whatever force it is that translates all this various information into a phenomenal world, into an experience. But still, in the context of our world and our perception, this, the World, is everything that we can agree exists, and we can measure, and such.”
“Right.”
“And then, there’s time, the fourth dimension, which is really just an expression of the change of things; it’s delta, as it were, along which we seem to be traveling in a current of some sort. The current of time. Because we can’t stop and go the other direction. So this seems to be the dimension in which we’re trapped – this iceberg in time that we’re trapped in – these bodies, really. We can’t seem to assert our will at that dimension.”
“But we can, though,” Lou said excitedly. “If what you’ve said about our imagination, our mind’s eye, seeing real things is true, about how thoughts and imagination and such are just you looking at real things, real places, somewhere in the multiverse of everythingness, you know? Because all we’re seeing with our eyes and ears and all that is really just in our mind’s eye, too, they’re just the loudest conduits into it, as it were.” Lou laughed and gestured frantically. “If we go with that idea, which seems to make sense, since perception is the only engine of existence, like we’ve agreed, then thoughts must be things-perceived. If we go with that model and extrapolate from it, then we can move about in time, with memory, and imagination of the future. I mean who knows if it’s the real future you’re seeing or not, but who knows if it’s the real past or not, when you recall something. No way of knowing.”
“Except our collective agreement that it is. That’s interesting; that’s true.”
“So, our bodies can’t go back and forth through time, only forward, but we can with our minds.”
“But still, in reality,” (Norman still clung fiercely then to a stable concept of reality as a place with borders), “our bodies and everything else seem to have to travel this one direction through time. What is this gravity toward the end of time? Why is that not a physical law like spatial gravity?”
“Well what you’ve just called ‘spatial gravity’ does affect time, if you believe relativity.”
Norman laughed at the idea of not believing in relativity.
“Maybe it is a tendency to be pulled toward that which is more awesome.”
“That’s fucking interesting, man, thinking about dimensions,” Norman said, “because there are infinite dimensions, right? Presumably. I mean, there is everything; everything exists.”
“String theory demands like ten or so.”
“Right, so – what are they? I mean, they exist, they are here, but what are they?”
“Reality,” Lou posited.
“Reality, yes,” Norman agreed, “as in alternate realities. All the possible choices of every quantum in the universe, all those things they could have done probabilistically but didn’t, and that includes us complex systems and our choices as well. Ooh – tell me something: supposedly every quantum in the universe exists as basically a wave of the probability of where it could be and what characteristics it has until it is perceived, right, and so really the mind of a choice-making perceptive eye like a human being really must have some sort of power over those probabilities. That must be the control we have to make choice – because it’s like, based on what we choose to do or to see, the universe arranges itself as much as it can so that whatever needs to have happened for it to be that way then has happened. But we’re all making different choices, seeing different things, struggling back and forth with the state of the universe. And so, it’s like all of our various willful spirits are pulling the universe this way and that like the strings on a puppet. So, one could almost say, couldn’t one, that another dimension would be mind?”
“Mind as dimension? How do you mean?” Lou asked.
“Well, or perspective. Like if you consider the distinctions of space the bottom three dimensions, then there’s time, and then you rise above time and where can you go?”
“Along different timelines, different realities,” Lou suggested.
“Okay, right, but even then above that, you and I, and you and Colin Powell, and me and Koko the gorilla if she’s still alive, all share this reality, but we don’t share perspectives. By mind, I am referring to that distinction of perspective. Like if you could make a five-dimensional shape of every bit of space throughout time that I was aware of, that being my greater five-dimensional mind shape. But then, what about things I’ve forgotten? I guess, really, my existence or awareness or whatever is something more like a …”
Lou interrupted, shaking his head and laughing, “This is making my concept of the universe wrap in on itself. It’s like – so if perspective and reality are both dimensions, then one could move along between perspectives within one or many realities?”
“Perhaps.”
“What would be evidence of this?”
“Well, Quantum Leap,” Norman joked with a straight face, and then after a moment of comic pause they both laughed. He continued, “No, but seriously, like I’ve said before, perception is the whole engine of existence. The fact that we perceive it is the fundamental initial proof of anything-at-all. So thoughts, imagination, our mind’s eye, must be seeing something that is real, even if it’s not here. But what is here? It’s brought here by the mind – when you think about it, you’re there. You can’t perceive something that doesn’t exist, because all it takes for something to exist is for it to have been perceived. In the brain there is no distinction between seeing something and imagining it.”
“I know, right,” Lou nodded.
“Right, so, these thoughts which are real parts of the … the multiverse or whatever, these thoughts are evidence of our ability to perceive along that dimension of reality. We can imagine fictional events, we can dream of alternate worlds, et cetera. You know? And perspective – sure your awareness can move along the dimension of perspective. It’s called fuckin’ empathy, right?”
“Ah, interesting,” Lou nodded.
“Compassion, empathy, you know?”
“But still, you’re not actually getting it from their perspective,” Lou notes. “Just from your version of their perspective, how you imagine it must be.”
“Maybe identity is not a black and white distinction but instead is an analog change, is gradient,” Norman proposed. “Or maybe there’s some sort of thin elastic barrier keeping us inside our bodies and unable to truly coexist with others, like we just bounce off each other.”
“There is, Norman; it’s called skin,” Lou laughed, and Karl began to laugh at this idea as well, startling Norman who had lost all perspective on where he was. Lou mocked him, still laughing, “It’s like I’ve got this fleshy substance covering my bones, keeping my organs in … I, I don’t know how to describe it.”
“No, but, you know what I mean?” Norman said excitedly. “It’s like, imagine an octopus or some kind of creature with tentacles dipping its tentacles into a pool of water, and that water is this world and those tentacles are us. It’s like the roots of a tree – that explains the jati. It’s like, as you go further up, certain people who might be spiritually close somehow join in spirit, and groups join, and distinctions fade, the further up away from all of this you go, if you can somehow see it from above. You know what I mean? And everything does that, the further up you go, until you’re at the top of it all, at that impossible eternity point.”
“But eternity is just like void – it’s realistically impossible. The only way anything exists is through its relativity to everything else.”
“Exactly, which is why it must be a toroidal kind of thing, where however far toward one edge of any concept you go you come around to the other side.”
“A closed system, would that imply?” Lou rhetorically interjected.
“The singularity before the Big Bang is characteristically indistinguishable from the matte void of the heat death of the universe. It’s just a given space with an eternity of homogeneity. It’s some bullshit, is what it is. It’s inert. ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’”
“So, really,” Lou continued, “it’s that fundamental duality of everything’s illusory nature juxtaposed against the fact that all there is is illusion, and that everything is nothing, and that A both is and is not A. There’s always another dimension, along which there are infinite A’s that are just not that A.”
It was as if everything went white except that idea for Norman, and the idea hung in perfect dark focus against the whiteness of everything. The fundamental paradox of existence looked him in the eye and winked, naked, its arms spread for him to look upon it without shame. “That’s what it is,” he said as he held the quivering truth of the essential paradox in his mind. “A is both A and not A. Everything is really the same, and there’s just here and now and me, but there’s also everything else, and really everything is different, and through time everything is just getting more and more different, and yet more and more ordered, and more awesome. And yet, time is also just an illusion, and really we’re just here now, doing this.”
“A both does and does not equal A,” Lou repeated with genuine intellectual passion in his voice. He seemed to be staring at the same place where Norman was when he was looking into his mind’s eye, that spot right between them in space.
“We are the force of order, of awesomeness, we aware beings.” It sickened Norman how barely his words did justice to his thoughts, until all he could bring himself to say through the rush of epiphanies was, “Oh my god, dude.”
Norman leaned back away from Lou and watched a huge eye open in the center of Lou’s forehead, shuddering with energy. It looked slowly to each side, then directly at Norman.
“I just saw a huge eye open up on your forehead.”
As soon as Norman said it, Lou’s real eyes widened, his mouth dropped open a little, and his third eye shut and disappeared. “And it just shut,” Norman said, held motionless by his awe.
“Yes.” Lou nodded, staring at Norman. He spoke hesitantly. “I felt it. It was terrifying. I couldn’t hold it. I couldn’t take the step. As soon as I realized it was really happening, I got scared.” He gazed off into the darkness around them, a mystified look on his face. “I got right to the edge and I could … see it all.”
The last several minutes of the evening, before they all retired to bed as the sun rose, were completely silent as Lou and Norman and Karl all sat together in the wake of the epiphanies that had just been experienced, each occupied by his own thoughts.
Through it all Karl had simply watched and listened, perplexed, and afterwards he claimed to recall only gibberish. He simply frowned, shrugged or shook his head at Norman and Lou over the next few days as they, as if in religious ecstasy, dissected and discussed what had happened that night. It made Norman wonder how he and Lou could have shared such a potent experience in the presence of someone who had experienced nothing.


Nothing about life was the same after the big epiphany in Canada. The understandings Norman and Lou had come to while stoned that night remained with them thereafter; they never dissipated or became nonsense in hindsight. Internally, Norman considered himself to be an enlightened being from that point on. Though it took a while, Lou eventually admitted feeling the same way.
For several days after they returned from Canada, Lou besieged Norman’s inbox with rants and equations and matrices all attempting to describe what they had experienced (good son of a logician that he was). Norman had a similar reaction. He sat up with Karen at the Academy until the early morning the night he got back, trying futilely to explain what had happened.
His calls to Lou were frantic and excited.
By the time the new fall semester began at the Academy, Norman had not come down from his enlightenment high. He couldn’t stop himself from discussing with his students the concepts he had explored that night with Lou (carefully omitting any part played by recreational/experimental drug-use). Not to his surprise, the guys on his floor got into it and threw their own ideas into the makeshift symposia. Each would bring a different perspective, mostly scientific or mathematical (being that it was primarily a math/science academy). An unofficial club emerged that gathered in Norman’s corner room to listen to rock records on Norman’s turntable and discuss identity, metaphysics, art, enlightenment, the future. The kids (barely younger than Norman) called it the Revolution. Norman would always call Lou in the evenings (when he used to always call Karen) to talk about whatever new ideas he had come up with or discussed that night.

When the first extended weekend came around in September, Norman drove north to see Lou, bringing with him some weed that a lovely, raven-haired female co-counselor who was new that year, Imogen, had given to him. Imogen was also an alumna of the Academy; she had been in the class just behind Norman, Lou and Karl but they had not really known her back then. She and Norman had recently become good friends over a discussion about Frank Zappa records and she quickly became an unspoken but clear and present threat to Karen’s position as Norman’s girl. (Seeds were being sewn in those days that would be reaped with much drama over the next several months.)
Norman surprised Lou with the weed he had brought and they immediately began smoking it. Norman still had his jacket on when he found himself sitting on Lou’s couch, stoned beyond belief. Reality once again gave way to a clear understanding of the nature of the illusion that lay before his eyes. He could actually feel and intuitively understand the way his soul interacted with his brain. It was as if he could read the coding of the game.
Lou sat beside him on the couch, the pipe in his hand hovering somewhere between his mouth and the coffeetable.
Norman gazed out the sliding glass balcony doors. The Enchanted Forest was quiet and streetlight orange. The apartment’s water system grumbled.
“We should play a game,” Norman suggested, “or do an experiment.”
“Whoa,” Lou groaned as he slowly stood and got his bearings. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. I know. Let’s do some sort of existential experiment. Some soul exercise, you know what I mean? Cut away the brush of the unknown.”
“Okay, cool,” Lou said with a little clap of his hands. “I like this idea. What should we do?” He picked up a long wooden staff that remained from his martial arts days in college and held it on his shoulders with his arms around it.
“How about this,” Norman said in thought. “You write something on a piece of paper. Don’t show me or tell me what it is. Don’t give me any kind of clue. Then put it somewhere where I know where you’ve put it but I can’t see it or read it. Put it in your room or something. And then I’ll see if I can read it psychically.”
“I should put it in my room?” he asked, tearing a piece of a page of lined paper.
“Yeah.”
Lou thought for a few seconds, grinning at Norman who watched him from the couch. He bit his pen, then wrote on the bit of paper.
“No, actually,” Norman said with his hand in the air, “don’t put it in your room. Put it somewhere where there is light on it. Somewhere I could see it if I was over there, but where I can’t see it from here. Because I think what I’m going to try to do is go into a trance and then leave my body and see if I can find it and read it.”
“Okay, yeah, right, that’s cool,” Lou said as he walked over to his small kitchenette and placed the sheet of paper on the other side of a box of knives.
“Is the writing facing out?”
“Yeah. If you were standing here you could read it,” Lou said, standing there and looking at it.
“Okay, leave that light in the kitchen on but turn off the one over here, would you?”
“What the fuck am I, your slave?” Lou joked as he turned off the lamp next to Norman and then sat back down on the couch beside him.
“Okay, now, we should put on some good trance music. Not shitty trance, something good. Something really dark and dope.”
“Yeah, I know what you need,” Lou said excitedly as he leaned over the coffeetable and switched the CDs in the changer. He hit play, turned it way up and sat back.
Norman closed his eyes. The Underworld song Dark Train came on, and he smiled appreciatively when he recognized it. Its beat was dark and hypnotic and turned out to be at just the right tempo to put Norman almost immediately into a trance.
He imagined his soul in his body as a white cloud that clung lightly to his head, heart and crotch. He tried to move around, to pull away from the body, but didn’t seem to know what spiritual muscles to use. In the darkness of his closed eyes, everything felt cramped and immobile, heavy with flesh. He could feel that tethering fear that kept him tight against his own heart.
But the longer he sat calmly, the music thumping rhythmically through his body, the marijuana lubricating his spirit’s grip on his blood, the more he was able to gradually sigh away from his own spine and let his awareness float slowly down to his feet. He kept the sensations of his body loose at the periphery of his awareness like a flowing cloak and let the center of himself slip away, gently letting go of his body like a leaf losing its last grip on a tree in the autumn. For a few moments Norman felt like he was falling, but he held onto his calm and trusted the idea that nothing could actually hurt him in this state.
As a loose spirit, Norman experienced the world as impressions, as dream-like half notions. At first glance, it felt like there was nothing, but a gradually widening aperture revealed subtle characteristics in the nothing. Through the static of this bodiless lack of input Norman could feel – and in his state it was translated to him as a sort of sight – the room around him, the locations and basic characteristics of the furniture and walls and everything – everything that had a name. The television in front of him loomed high like a drive-in movie screen thrumming with energy even though it was not turned on. While he was inspecting it he moved up close to the screen without realizing.
Norman turned his view around to face the couch and saw his body sitting there, Lou beside him, watching him from the corner of his eye. Norman’s body was slumped a bit to one side and his arms were folded limply in his lap. He noticed that his body looked lifeless, almost broken, without him in it, and it was clear that this was unnerving Lou as well. Lou sat very still with his hands on his knees, waiting patiently. A faint wisp of white soul material seemed to cling tightly to Lou’s heart and eyes. Norman had an intuitive sense that this was Lou’s spirit.
Wondering if he could hear Lou’s thoughts in this state, he opened his imagination’s ears for such a thing.
Thought-voices came into Norman’s perception. Unfamiliar voices, almost like lines of text on a screen in his mind more than voices, and this made him realize that he and Lou were not actually alone in the room. Surrounding them were two other entities, similarly wispy and half-there, yet rather than the whitish haze of Lou’s soul these seemed to be darker, charcoal-colored conglomerations of swirling spheres, and when Norman noticed their muttering, the voices stopped and there was thought-silence for a moment.
Then, distinctly, one of the entities seemed to think to another, Wazzz!
Norman was taken aback at first by the word, until it was followed by, Does he know he’s here? Then, very clearly, Shit Ax, he can see us.
A weird nerveless trepidation gripped Norman’s spirit and he instantly found himself retreated into the bedroom, by the big bay windows that looked out across the Enchanted Forest (the view: an essentially featureless apartment complex).
The bedroom did not have any such entities as far as Norman could tell, which calmed him for a moment. He remained spiritually still while he considered how to move in this frame of reference, and then tried to do so. He found himself instantly in the bathroom, then in the shower.
Norman realized that he was moving instantly with a thought. His being, no longer constrained by simple rules of time and space, could move from point to point without actually having to move. It was as if he was just entering new information into the location field for the database of his spiritual characteristics.
Norman went to the kitchen, by the box of knives, where the piece of paper was waiting to be read. The presence of the entities that he had sensed before felt close again, and he could hear their bodiless thoughts remarking about his presence and wondering what he was up to, but he ignored the fear their nearness instilled in him, assuring himself that ‘in reality’ he was just sitting calmly on the couch in a perfectly safe situation. He focused on his goal of reading what was on that piece of paper so that he could confirm for himself at least some remnant of actuality in the whole experience.
He found the paper easily. As soon as he recalled where exactly it was, he was there, seeing it as if he were crouched right next to the kitchen counter, his face right up to the box of knives. He could see the paper and recognize that there was text on it, but for some reason the text seemed to be out of focus. He tried hard to focus his eye on it so he could read it, remembering only after a few moments that he was not seeing with that eye over on the couch.
His inability to read what was written on the paper confounded him. He had come all this way, seen so much; Norman hated the idea of coming out of it with no proof. He stared at the piece of paper leaning against the box of knives, putting all of his willpower into the attempt to read that writing.
Slowly, the out-of-focus blur became writhing symbols, then letters and even words, but the message seemed to flicker from one set of words to another, never quite stopping on one.
Norman realized that what he was able to read was somehow the idea, the intent behind the writing, the remnant of logos that Lou had left on the paper. He tried to capture a few of the notions that he got from the flashing words. It was something about time.
Norman thought once about being back in his body and was suddenly there, opening his eyes, leaning over to Lou who was sitting next to him, quite startled by Norman’s sudden revival. “Dude,” he said excitedly, “what did you write? Was it something like, timelessness, or time has gone away, or something to that effect?”
Lou got up from the couch without a word and jogged over to the kitchen, retrieved the piece of paper.
“It totally worked,” Norman recounted as he waited, his perception dizzy though he felt energetic, revived. He felt like he had just awoken from a dream. “It took a while to figure out how to move around at first, but eventually I figured out that I could move just by thinking about it, just by thought. I think what I was effectively doing was just willfully changing the position of my aware self, even though those places I wanted to go to didn’t have a brain there for any information to attach to, but somehow there is still this subtle current of information that if you trust it, if you just listen really carefully, you can see slash hear slash feel the world, the surroundings, and these subtle energies and such that exist on that level. I think we can experience them all the time, but they’re usually drowned out by all the shit going on in our brains like sight and sound and thought and such.”
Lou returned, listening and nodding, with the slip of paper. He looked at it, then looked at Norman. “What did you tell me you thought it said?” he asked.
“Well, it was weird,” Norman tried to explain. “It was like I couldn’t actually read the lines of graphite or ink or whatever on the paper, because it wasn’t actual light I was seeing, but somehow what I could read was the impression, the thought that you had left on the paper, or something like that. It was like it was flashing these various similar ideas, the way I saw it.”
“So what did you say you thought it said, though?”
“It was something about time. Something like timelessness or time has gone away, or the end of time.”
Lou handed the piece of paper to Norman. It said, in Lou’s sloppy handwriting, THERE IS NO TIME.
It had been real, sort of, Norman realized with wonder.