Chapter 7: Ishmael and the Whale

7

Norman spent the Academy’s winter break at the end of Two-thousand-two in Cape Elizabeth with Lee and Ben and the boys.
It had been a weird semester for him. At that time, his relationship of over two years with Karen, his co-counselor girlfriend at the Indiana Academy, was in its last throes and his romance with Imogen had just recently begun in a fiery, tequila-stained threesome with a visiting ex-girlfriend of Imogen’s who happened also to be a recent alumna of the Academy under Norman’s counsellorship (though Norman did not know Sylvia well at the time, and would not for yet some time to come).
It seemed at the time as if his entire world was falling apart, and yet rather than dispirit him this seemed only to imbue him with more life, more potency, more dope vitas. His budding relationship with Imogen was passionate and fiery, and within it he felt more awesome as a person than he ever had before. Finally the actual events of his life had the passion that he had always felt in his soul.
And the fact that this had only begun to occur since everything had changed that night in Canada and he had started astrally exploring on a regular basis did not seem to be coincidence.
Lee had not seen Norman since long before Amsterdam and was excited to see him perform what he had been attempting with difficulty to describe to her over the phone for the past few months. On the first night he was there, after she had gotten the kids into bed, she coaxed Norman into the garage for a cigarette and a surprise – weed bought from one of Ben’s co-workers during some conference down in Boston. Norman, who had not gotten high in several weeks, since he had last visited Lou in South Bend, gratefully accepted Lee’s gesture and the two of them smoked up while Ben washed the dinner dishes inside.
At that time, the makeshift living room in the garage had not yet been created from the remnants of Norman and Imogen’s previous (then, future) apartments, so smoking consisted simply of standing by the cracked-open back door of the garage.
“So, I have a present for you,” Lee said with an excited giggle, “that I can’t wait until Wednesday to give you.” She pulled a small black velvet box from inside her heavy jacket and handed it to Norman.
Inside the box was a pearly new glass eye with a thick black ohm symbol for a pupil.
Norman was speechless for a few moments, looking at it, feeling it with his fingertips.
“Badass,” he finally said, and hugged Lee tightly. “Holy shit, thank you. This is perfect. Have you cleaned it already?”
“Yeah, I cleaned it – ohh…”
Lee groaned as Norman pulled out his old glass eye and put the new one right in. He held one hand over the eye as he blinked it into place and smiled a simple apology at Lee, who he knew hated seeing him take out his eye. After a few moments, Norman removed his hand and looked at Lee.
To his surprise, Norman would have sworn he could see through the new eye. Not light, but something. There was more information, but he couldn’t have described quite what the new information was.
Lee grinned broadly. “You look so awesome,” she said. “You should look at yourself in the mirror.”
Norman hurried inside, past Ben who laughed when he saw Norman with the new eye already in. In the bathroom mirror he looked at himself and at first forgot he was looking for anything new (Norman was always looking in mirrors). Then his heart skipped a beat when he noticed it. He felt somehow like he was looking at the real Norman Newman for the first time. He felt ten times more awesome than he ever had before within his human body. Like some kind of superhero. The new eye seemed to pulse awesomeness through his whole being. He could feel it sitting there in his skull, like there was energy in it somehow. It felt like a magic item.
“What do you think?” Lee asked from the bathroom doorway.
“I think this is the coolest thing I’ve ever been given,” Norman said with tears welling in his eyes. The power of the eye overwhelmed his emotions. The tears filled his eyelids, warming the cold glass orb with gratitude.
“You know me better than anyone,” Norman declared to Lee as he hugged her. “Thank you so much.”
“Anything to help you along the way, Norman,” Lee said, tearing up at the sight of Norman’s tears. “If you are going to save the world someday, you’re going to need to be pretty damned awesome.”
They both laughed, wiping the corners of their eyes with their fingertips, and finally Norman fell against his sister and hugged her.
To Norman’s surprise, Lee held him tightly to her and began to weep.
“Are you okay, Lee?” Norman asked hesitantly, holding her tighter as she gripped her fingers into his shoulder and at the same time tried softly to push away out of embarrassment. “What’s wrong?”
Lee looked up from Norman’s shoulder, her face twisted with mysterious sadness, and she instantly covered her eyes with her hand. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” was all she could say.
Ben dashed into the room, melodramatically drying his hands with a dishrag, and asked loudly, “Lee, you okay?”
Lee looked up at him once, then looked down and shook her head, saying, “I’m sorry. I’m okay. I’m just overwhelmed.”
“Do you want me to take out the eye?” Norman asked jokingly. “Is it too badass for you?”
Lee laughed and sniffed, shook her head. “No, keep it in,” she said. “I need a cigarette. Ben, do you mind if I have another cigarette?”
“Why would he mind?” Norman asked rhetorically, putting his coat back on and heading toward the door with Lee. “I’ll have one with you.”
“Mind if I join you guys?” Ben asked.
“Of course not,” Norman said.
“No,” Lee sniffed, shyly shaking her head and already reaching for her cigarettes.
The three of them gathered by the back door of the garage and Norman lit everyone’s cigarette.
“Mm, thank you,” Ben nodded.
“So, Norman,” Lee sniffed, then weakly smiled through her sudden melancholy, “are you going to tell us about this new girl?”
“You mean Imogen?” Norman asked, idly touching his cheek with his left hand as he smoked (wishing he could see himself with the new eye in). “Well, she’s very cool. I think you’d like her a lot. She’s a painter and she plays the electric guitar. She’s lovely and black-haired and brown-eyed, maybe five-four-ish.” He shrugged. “We were really just friends at first for a while, and we ended up sharing that house off-campus that I told you about, just generally as like a studio space, and as a place to get away on our off-time and listen to records and stuff without being in the dorm, you know what I mean? But one night after I had been arguing with Vickie over those fucking bullshit new rules, she took me out to the Heorot, this bar downtown, to take my mind off it all, and – I don’t know – something bloomed. I mean, she’s amazing and she’s lovely and fascinating and cool and into music and art and philosophy – she went to Oxford to study metaphysics. I don’t know. So nothing really happened for a while but then one night an old girlfriend of hers was coming down to visit, and it turned out that old girlfriend was Sylvia Miller, an Academy student from my first year as a counselor there. Sylvia is this really hip, really lovely young girl who’s between colleges at the moment, and anyway, she and Imogen and I sort of all got together that night rather unexpectedly and yet also quite premeditatedly. I’m sure none of this makes any sense. I don’t really know quite how to describe it. It was all very otherworldly. Anyway, after Sylvia left at the end of that weekend, Imogen and I just sort of didn’t stop being lovers.”
“Does Karen know about any of this?” Ben asked.
“No. She knows that Imogen and I are friends, but not that we’re lovers. But Karen and I aren’t really together anymore.”
“You’ve said that before,” Lee noted suspiciously. “Does she know it’s over?”
“Yeah, she knows,” Norman nodded. “We broke up. We’re not together.”
“Are you still sleeping with her?” Lee asked.
Norman just raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips, because he had indeed had sex with Karen several times in the past couple of weeks, after they had broken up the most recent time. He always tried to make sure she understood that it didn’t mean they were still a couple, but she didn’t seem to care when all she wanted to do was tear his clothes off. He honestly didn’t feel like he was leading her on in any way, but it never seemed to come across that way when he had to talk about it.
“Everything changed for me, really,” Norman tried to explain, “and I know this sounds absurd and I still don’t have a clear handle on how much you’re with me when I talk about this stuff, or how much I can comfortably discuss it with others as fact, as truth, but ever since I … learned how to … leave my body … everything has been different. As I’m sure you can imagine. I mean, it’s almost like, to a certain extent, I feel like I know what it would be like to die, or at least, rather, to be non-corporeal. It’s … I’ve lost all fear, at least on a philosophical/logical level. Obviously I can still be tugged by emotional body-twitches, but given time to reflect, I feel I am now fearless and really quite staggeringly powerful, to be honest. And I’m not really sure how to interact with the rest of the world with these new wisdoms, this knew perspective.”
“Is that a gnu perspective?” Ben joked, drawing an upper-case G in the air with his finger.
Norman laughed and replied, “Actually, when I said it I was imagining it as k n e w,” sounding out the letters.
“You’re absolutely right; I think you are incredibly powerful,” Lee asserted. “You’re at a point, honestly, Norman, when you need to start considering just how you’re going to use these powers you have.”
Norman laughed. “Well it’s not like I have powers, like I’m a superhero or something…”
Lee laughed with him. “But you are! You can astrally project at will, and you can speak while you do it, right?” Norman nodded. “You can view remotely! That is amazing! I can’t wait to see you do it, actually, if you’d be willing to show us.”
Norman grinned, having been hoping Lee would ask. “Absolutely,” he said eagerly. “I’ve been wanting to get your reaction to all of this. I’ve been doing it almost every day since that first day I did it, and I haven’t really felt like I can talk to anyone about it. Do you want me to do it right now?”
“You don’t need some kind of more comfortable surroundings, or like some trance drumming or anything? You don’t need to sit down?” Lee asked.
“No,” Norman replied matter-of-factly, “I can just do it at will at this point. I can even keep talking to you. Check it out.”
In his inner space, Norman turned on the bright light of his previous enlightenments, all of which had remained in his available arsenal ever since he first experienced them (the more frequently he retrieved them, the easier they seemed to be to retrieve), and in their light the material world around Norman faded, revealing the thrumming world of spirit and energy above and below this shuddering membrane of the universe. He closed his eyes, then opened them just barely, just enough to let in a flickering awareness from between his eyelids. In his mind’s eye, this allowed him to notice the way the world was being let into the room where he was as bits of light through his eyelids, and it was as if he could stand up off the chair where he was sitting in another world, blinded, deafened and muzzled, with each of the five fingers of one hand dipped into a different flask, from the vibrations of which he discerned his five senses, and he could take off the straps with quick thoughts and step away from the whole scene metaphorically, and generally by that point the soft almost-blackness of his visual field would begin to display the subtlest of intuitive information – his astral sight.
Norman’s awareness floated up away from his face, into the space between the three, toward the gathering of smoke near the ceiling. This, of course, was delegated to only part of Norman’s awareness interface, allowing him also to see, peripherally, the sight of his eye, and leaving him access to an awkward remnant of the ability to speak.
“I’m at the top of the room,” Norman said, gazing down upon Lee. He was smitten with awe when he saw the sparkling red ruby that her soul appeared as to him. It clung fiercely to her dark body. “Oh my god, Lee. You are so beautiful.”
He heard Lee laugh sweetly. “Where are you?” she asked.
“Above us,” Norman replied, barely feeling the muscles in his face automatically smile.
He looked down to see what Ben’s soul appeared as to him, only to find that he could not find Ben wherever he looked. The space in which his disembodied soul wisped about had a very different set of information than the world of light and sound. He was sensing thought and spirit and energy, or whatever. Ben did not seem to be in the room anymore.
“Where did Ben go?” Norman asked.
Norman looked at his own body from above and found his awareness suddenly down there with it, staring himself in the face. It disconcerted him to see the way his body was slightly hunched, his shoulders contraposto, his eyes twitching like he was dreaming, and to see it from this angle while simultaneously, in his peripheral vision, gazing through its eye at the place where his soul would be but there was nothing.
“I’m right here,” came Ben’s voice from right where he had been standing before.
Norman’s hovering awareness saw his body’s face twitch in time with his mental reaction to Ben’s voice. His mouth curled a bit and one of his eyes squinted hard, and watching it from two inches away Norman noticed that these occurred a noticeable time interval after he experienced them in his mind.
He turned his awareness around, looking for Ben where it seemed his voice had come from, but he saw nothing. He could feel his head shaking slightly back and forth, and he said aloud, “I can’t see you,” his voice getting more awkward the less he thought about remaining connected to it.
“I’m hiding myself,” Ben replied with a strange tint of pride to his voice.
“Why are you hiding yourself?” Lee asked with a sudden fear or fury. “What do you have to hide?”
“I just do that,” Ben replied with nervous nonchalance.
Norman looked over to Lee, who was beginning to churn in the middle. A thick, ink-black cloud welled up from the center of her scarlet spirit, filling it with darkness and then almost completely obscuring it from his view, as if camouflaging it against the cosmic spiritual background radiation.
“Now I can’t see you, either,” Norman reluctantly said aloud, then with an instant’s thought, returned to his body and opened his eyes, finding Lee and Ben standing on either side of him, staring at each other, their two cigarettes hovering near each other over the ashtray. “Why did you guys both hide from me?” he asked, genuinely confused.
“Isn’t that a good question, Ben? I’m curious,” Lee snapped, anger seething in her eyes.
Ben shrugged slightly and tried to blow it all off with a constant smile. “I just like to see what I can do with my spirit. You know? Like, Norman does his thing, he does his experiments. I was doing an experiment of my own.”
“You disappeared too, though, right before I came back,” Norman said to Lee. He tried to look her in the eyes, but she wouldn’t turn her glare away from Ben. “What happened to you right before I opened my eyes? You filled up with black ink.”
Lee and Ben stared at each other in silence until it became too awkward for Norman, he politely excused himself, put out his cigarette and went inside the house. He watched television with the boys while raised voices turned into screaming in the garage, then died down to a few quiet weeps, then vanished.
At the time, Norman did not know to worry for Lee. He would never have imagined he would have to; she was so strong, so fully competent.
Ben and Lee came back in after several minutes as if nothing had happened. Neither said a word to Norman, but simply gathered the boys for a bedtime story and then prepared them for sleep in their normal routine.

Ishmael and the Whale

The next night, after the boys went to bed, Lee convinced Norman to attempt his first shamanic journey with her. It was something she had been shown by some local shamanic healers she had visited to help her deal with vaguely described traumas from adolescence. The experience had not helped her particularly, but she had nevertheless found it fascinating. She told Norman in depth how she had met a wolf who apologized about what he had to do before he chewed on her neck for a long time. Lee at first explained that it was much like Norman’s astral journeying, but after some explanation Norman realized that it was not quite the same thing.
“It sounds like this shamanic journeying is more like journeying inward, in to the various levels of your own self.”
“Well,” Lee countered, “it can be like that – like if you go to the Lower Realm where your power animal is, the realm of the animalistic spirits, that’s an inner realm; it’s the realm of your body, really, I think. But when you go to the Upper Realm, I think that’s the zeitgeist, like you describe. I think the Upper Realm is more like going up, like above this world to look down on it with perspective, you know – like you described?”
“Yeah,” Norman said, recognizing Lee trying to explain his system of multidimensionality. “I’m with you. Anyway, as above so below, I suppose.”
“So I don’t know. I think we should try it together.”
They did it around midnight in Lee and Ben’s living room, lit only by the softly blinking Christmas tree. Lee sat on the floor in full Buddhist meditative posture, while Norman just sat on the couch in a relaxed manner with one arm up on the back of the couch behind him and the hand of his other arm resting comfortingly on his crotch.
The drumming began suddenly, loudly. Lee had it turned all the way up, filling the house with a bass so rhythmic it became like a cloud. Norman closed his eyelids until he could feel them fluttering together softly, that point where the tiny bit of light that is allowed through becomes like the flickering of a film projector, his blank canvass.
I want to see my power animal, Norman thought aloud to his inner world.
As Lee suggested, he attempted to create an elevator in which to descend to the Lower World. He saw the doors of the elevator in his mind’s eye but, for some reason, could not approach them. Despite all willful attempts to move toward the doors, they appeared no closer. He gave up on the doors and they were gone.
Norman decided to try the ocean. He imagined that he was engulfed in the wine-dark sea and sank downward, toward the darkness. At first he was uncertain if his bare black surroundings were ocean or mere void, until he sensed the slowly more and more real presence of bubbles around him, and when he looked back up in the direction from which he had come he saw the faint light of the surface world like the last dark blue part of a black night sky just at the end of dusk. He kept thinking about finding his power animal and continued to descend, bearing those long few seconds that he had found he always had to bear in such spiritual pursuits – the long few seconds when nothing happens, when almost everyone gives up. He felt the pressure of the depths pressing around him more and more as he descended until suddenly he noticed that there was more pressure on his right side, against his arm and leg.
Beside Norman was an enormous whale, visible more as a huge dark presence at these depths than as anything with much detail. He could sense its enormous left eye just ahead of him and its huge left fin swaying behind him. His hand brushed its tough skin.
Psychically Norman asked the whale, Are you my power animal?
The whale did not respond. It slowly swam away from him, off into the dark water, becoming just a hazy shape that Norman had trouble following with his eyes, then swam back up close, letting its huge body soar over him like a star destroyer. Norman grabbed onto its belly with both hands and was pulled along with it.
So, how are you doing? Norman asked the whale, trying to be polite since he was getting a ride.
What do you care? the whale replied.
At the psychic sound of the whale’s voice, Norman felt an instant connection with it, a closeness, like suddenly recognizing an old friend. A great joy filled his heart. He hugged himself close to the whale.
It is good to see you, Norman said, his face right up against the body of the whale. He noticed that they had begun to descend. Norman’s gaze moved away from the whale, to the surrounding waters. They way he was holding onto the whale, their descent felt like going up. The barely visible particles and plant life that filled the water around Norman softly descended along him like snowflakes. Where are you taking me?
What makes you think I’m going to tell you?
Norman laughed and pushed off from the whale, floating out away from it into the open darkness. A bright orange starfish swirled past his view.
Come on, now, don’t be like that, Norman laughs to the whale. I haven’t seen you in forever.
That’s definitely true, the whale agreed, swimming a wide perimeter around Norman.
So how have you been? Don’t be so moody.
The whale continued to swim a circle around Norman for a while, then came in close again and Norman grabbed onto its side. They began their descent once more.
I’ve been alright, the whale finally admitted.
Word, Norman replied. What have you been up to?
You know. This and that.
Norman’s attention was taken away from the conversation by the sudden appearance of an enormous cyclone of colorful little fish that swam synchronously in a swirl to his left. Just as the fish disappeared, eight big, glowing starfish shot up past Norman like fireworks, and then another beautifully synchronized display came up in the background – a huge starburst of squids of different colors all lighting up like Christmas lights at the same moment. Norman watched with awe and delight.
What is all this? Norman asked the whale, but he got no response.
It was like a glorious air show of masses of sea creatures swimming around him, some shining like Lite Brites, others just making beautiful, subtle displays barely visible as dark against the darkness. Norman began to realize that they were approaching a ceiling, the ocean floor, which was somehow lit and covered with a staggeringly ornate mosaic of rows of coral and starfishes all concentrically laid out around some central circle.
The whale came to a stop and said, Check it out. It’s all for you. You haven’t gotten to see this yet.
Norman descended toward the circle at the center of the writhing sealife garden, finding that movement in this realm was very similar to his astral movements. He moved simply by willing to do so.
The circle at the center of the display was an enormous metal plaque. There were symbols, but much like the writing that Norman had read in Lou’s apartment, the symbols seemed to change from one to another, fading in and out of shapes. Somehow intuitively Norman had a clear, if quiet, impression that this was something like a medal for some previous deeds of his macroself. Something that had to do with the City of Bridges (Norman’s name for the magnificent, Rome-like city that he frequently visits in his dreams). A medal, an award, a certificate of some sort? He wasn’t sure. Nevertheless, it filled Norman with pride, and he could simultaneously feel the pride of all these sea creatures who had clearly put a great deal of effort into planning this elaborate display for him. He gazed for some time at the plaque. A single baby krill crawled along the center of it; his mother stood at the edge waving a tiny claw, at wit’s end.
After a while, Norman turned back to the whale, who was swimming above, and called him down to pick him up. The whale obliged, sending some half-muttered, half-comic psychic impression of feeling put out and underappreciated, to which Norman replied with a half-whispered psychic reminder that he really liked the whale and thought he was a good guy.
Let’s go to the surface, Norman said. I want to see more of this spirit realm than just the dark bottom of the ocean. I mean, much love to the bottom of the ocean, but I think I want to go to the Upper Realm, see what’s up there.
If you’re sure, the whale said, swimming up toward the surface very fast. The darkness of the ocean slowly paled like the coming of dawn. But you remember what happened last time you visited the Upper Realm.
Do I? Norman asked. He tried to access any newly-accessible memories that he might not have realized yet that he had, but he couldn’t find any. I don’t think I do.
Oh well, the whale sighed. Maybe you’re not as smart as they think.
Who? Norman asked, intrigued. As smart as who think? In a purely vain way, he loved the idea that people in the spirit realm talked about how smart he was.
The End of Time Crew, the whale said.
The End of Time Crew? Norman repeated back, overcome by the awesomeness of such a group name.
Here we are, the whale said, slowing to a soft stop just below the surface. Norman looked up at the bright, distorted sky. He let go of the whale’s belly and allowed himself to surface.
As he moved up past the surface of the water, Norman noticed that he did not experience a sensation he had been expecting – the sudden cool feeling of air against wet skin. It made him realize that the only tactile sensations he was getting at the moment were those of the couch against his back, the texture of the fabric on his hands, and it came close to bringing him out of his trance.
Norman surfaced near some kind of shoreline that reminded him of Alaska. There were glacial cliffs in one direction and a wooded shore that sloped up toward a massive distant mountain range. To his left, he saw the whale’s back come up above the surface and then sink back below.
Bye for now, he thought in the direction of the whale. I’m going to go see the Upper Realm.
And then he took off with ease up into the sky. At first he looked up at the blue and the clouds that were steadily getting larger, but after a while as he continued to rise he looked back down instead, at the Earth below from which he was quickly zooming out. It was mere moments before he found himself in orbit, with the curve of the Earth at his feet as if he were standing on it, the Moon hanging gently in the black, star-speckled cosmos.
Curiously, Norman found the exosphere to be quite a bustling place. Directly ahead was an enormous half-transparent bureaucratic god sitting at a giant orbiting desk, making traveling souls from Earth sign some form before they were zipped off to the Moon or parts beyond, while above, against the starfield, seemed to be something like a colossal holographic drive-in movie screen which rapidly and seemingly randomly flashed images of human faces. Norman found that on contemplation of a particular figure – he started with Achilles and Agamemnon – the image of that figure would flash onto the screen in front of the stars, half-visible.
Startlingly, a giant blue wormhole opened up yet further up in space, above the screen of faces, and without a second thought Norman decided to move forward through it, some intuitive sense that it led to the Upper Realm filling his mind.
A brief kaleidoscopic trip through the wormhole brought Norman to a position high above what appeared to be a dry African plain. He hovered in the air, just below the clouds, looking down upon the yellow grass spotted with little green trees and off-white clumps of dry shrubs.
Remembering Lee’s instructions, Norman thought about a steed and was instantly met from below by a powerful chocolate-colored horse that carried him off through the air, galloping upon the wind. He guided the horse down toward the ground until its hooves were skimming the tops of the high grass.
After a moment’s thought about seeing his guardian, a great gray rhinoceros about twice the size of Norman’s steed ran up and began galloping alongside him. Its eyes gleamed electric blue when it looked over at him, and as it ran faster and passed ahead of Norman he could see that its tail was a little shuddering curl of electricity. As if to display its power to Norman, the rhino bucked its horn up into the air as it ran past a couple of small shrubs and two thick blasts of white lightning came thundering out of the blue sky, flattening the bushes into little black circles of dissipating smoke.
Word, Norman couldn’t help but ejaculate with an accompanying thrust of his hand. That explains my apparent luck, or blessed life, I suppose, he thought, if this guy is my guardian.
Take me to my teacher, Norman declared to the two beasts, and as soon as he did, the horse took off into the air again. The rhino turned around far below and disappeared out of Norman’s awareness. Only a few moments of thought later Norman realized that below him was a pale dirt road bisecting the savannah, and not far down along the road was some sort of roadside stand. The horse headed down toward it, coming to a gentle landing in the middle of the white dirt road a few meters from what now looked to Norman almost like some kind of medieval hot-dog stand put together shoddily with planks. He approached the stand and looked inside. At first, it seemed empty.
Slowly, however, the longer, he looked, certain that he must have been brought here for a reason, he began to discern that, as if in some sort of new color that he had never seen before, some kind of entity actually was sitting there inside the cart. It shimmered with invisibility like the Predator or a Romulan bird of prey. As Norman began to see it more clearly in his mental vision, he realized that it was looking back at him, and if it had features they would have been smiling patiently (though he received this information purely psychically and not through any kind of visual clues).
I’m sorry, Norman stuttered, unsure quite how to address the being, but … how would you describe yourself, exactly? It was the best question he could come up with quickly.
The entity seemed to chuckle softly to itself, then replied very clearly in a voice startlingly unfamiliar to Norman, “Call me Ishmael.”
Norman laughed hard enough that it immediately brought him out of his trance and he was back in the living room in Cape Elizabeth.


It wasn’t until he told Lou about the experience on a visit up to South Bend several weeks later that the name Ahab was given to Norman’s whale spirit animal.
“Dude,” Lou said with a huge grin and a look of awe. He slowly reached down below the coffeetable in his apartment in the Enchanted Forest and slowly, epically raised up Ahab, the big blue whale bong that the two of them had made just a few months earlier out of two bits of plastic piping and a blue plastic whale that had originally been a toy sprinkler. Ahab had a cheery face, a big smile and happy, cartoonish eyes. As soon as Lou dramatically raised Ahab up above the table and Norman saw Ahab’s familiar smiling face, he made the same connection Lou had just made.
“Holy shit, you’re right,” Norman remarked with awe. “Ahab. He’s my power animal. My power animal is our bong. That’s funny.” He looked back up at Lou and added, “You know, I’m glad I’m getting a chance to finally talk to you about this. Your input has always sort of clarified things for me, and this was a particularly intense, bizarre experience. And yet, at the same time, you know, it all really just happened in my head, in my mind, and so… You know, it’s sort of hard to reconcile even with myself, like, the distinction between whether my mind just made it up or if it could have been some kind of somewhat more real experience, you know?”
Lou reassured him with what would eventually become a motto of Norman’s. “Hey,” he said casually while sitting down with a big sigh, “I figure whether it happened for real or in your mind, what’s the difference, right? Even if you had just made it up, I’m not sure it would be any less valid. You know?”
Norman smiled then, as Lou had already begun to pack Ahab’s bowl.