Qz He dreamed he was helpless, entanglement was all around, engulfing him. There was no escape. Every action he did to resist begot more pain and intenser counter reactions. How he wished he were not embroiled in the mass of conflagration called humanity. It made a swim in cool water seem like heaven in comparison. Then he woke up and the alarm clock rang one second after he opened his eyes. His arm moved fast to shut off the disturbing buzz. 'God, another day,' he thought wearily. He felt too weak to go on, getting out of bed seemed like an impossibility. He wanted to tell his dream to someone, but he lived alone and no one he knew at work would understand. They would chalk it up to his craziness and would try to not listen to him. He did not need them thinking he was any crazier than they already did. Such was his life, the frustrating game that would drag on until it stopped at his death. He was tired of the dysphoria that everyone else seemed to want to live in but he felt that he might as well resign himself to it. He wanted to be in ecstasy but everyone treated his manic moods as undesirable. He got up to get ready to go to work. He glanced at the clock and realized he would be late for work if he did not start moving. He drove to work, the heavy traffic conspired to lower his spirits even further. He thought that his life could not get any worse. As he entered the Cove Sights military hospital near Seattle, the homeless religious fanatic, who was always standing outside, tried to sell him a newspaper as an excuse to panhandle. He waved the man off as usual and then the fellow said, "God loves you more than you'll ever know." The crazy had been telling him the same thing every morning for days and he had begun to wonder what it really meant but he guessed the poor fellow was just overcome by religious fervor. He walked through the metal detector and past the guard, they barely looked at each other. He signed in on the time sheet and argued in his mind weather he should touch the drug or not. It was worrying him, he had built up a bit of a habit and yet did not want to stop taking the drug. His drug use had started simply enough, dropping the occasional pill onto the floor during work he had put them in his white nurse coat pocket meaning to destroy them later and had accidentally taken them home instead. He had subsequently built up a little reserve of pills for all occasions. Then he had some emotional problems when he separated from his girlfriend and he took a few of the pills occasionally to dull the pain. During his shift he got into the drug closet using his key. He was getting the medicine together for his floor rounds but his eye kept landing on the bottle of medicinal Cocaine, he found it difficult to resist. He tried to ignore the impulse today but he had given in so many times and no one had ever noticed before. He opened the jar and touched the tip of his finger into the white powder and stuck it in his mouth, he did not want to leave any traces of white powder under his nose. The familiar numbing sensation rested on the back of his mouth and over his throat like an old friend. His eyes opened a little at the exhilaration of the drug. As he put the cap back on he heard deliberate footsteps in the hall coming his way. He hurriedly put the bottle back on the shelf and shut the cabinet as the door opened. Two men in suits entered the room. A chill ran down his spine, he realized that they had been waiting for him. "Do you use cocaine often when you're at work?" one of them asked coldly. "Why no, I don’t. I was just getting the meds together for my shift," he tried to bluff. "Who are you?" he asked forcefully. They informed him that they were government agents and showed him a badge and his heart sank. One of them authoritatively took his hand and finger printed him. They dusted the cocaine bottle and compared the prints then they took a swab of his gums and tested it. They had caught him with his mouth full of evidence and they dragged him off to jail. He sat in the cold iron cell that night and wished that he had not ruined his life for a cheap high. He guessed the hospital would fire him, he would lose his apartment and no one would hire him as a nurse again. It seemed like much too high price to pay for the little he had gotten out of it. The next morning the two guys who busted him showed up and said they wanted to make a deal. He could either stay in jail or 'volunteer' for a government drug experiment and they would drop the charges. 'God loves you more than you'll ever know,' he thought to himself ruefully as he agreed to volunteer. They took him to a local military base and explained that they needed someone intelligent to test a chemical that had been produced as part of the war effort. It was a mystery drug called QZ, designed to remove psychic blocks, it could suppresses consciousness and reveal the unconscious. They did not tell him that QZ worked something like yage, sometimes called Telepathine and was the opposite of BZ an incapaciting drug. Qz was not an incapacitating drug but more of a psychedelic. It opened up the psychic channels in the mind that were usually suppressed. They said that they needed someone coherent who could tell them what the results of taking the experimental drug were. He had taken the occasional ecstasy tablet, he figured he could handle it. They took him up to a medically equipped room. He began to get worried when they tied him down to a gurney. They shot him up and the drug hit him and instantly catapulted his mind into all the dimensions of space and time at once. He could see through people, he could read their minds. He realized that they had tested this drug before and it had caused insanity and mental problems in many subjects. He realized they had done it to him as much for punishment than as research. Punishment a thousand times worse then he would have received had he not agreed to their sadistic trick. He thought the drug could liberate the world, the truth of reality could be revealed to anyone but they kept it hidden from the public and had no intention of using if for enlightenment and only used it for evil purposes. The national emergency had given them powers to misuse. They wheeled chair his gurney to a metal jail cell and left him. He lay there trying to gauge a reference between reality and the drug. He sat up reeling, his eyes could barely see. He noticed the straps were still tied on the gurney and wondered how he had gotten out of them. In his mind he saw visions of exploding energy waves like lightening bolts. He sat on the gurney feeling dizzy and then found himself on the floor. He felt very insubstantial as if his atoms were flying apart in his body. He tried meditation to stabilize himself. He wanted water and reached for the sink. His arm seemed to pass through the sink. He leaned against the wall and went half way through it. He found that he was able to walk through walls by making the frequency of his atoms higher and concentrating on his belief. He did not want to stop in the middle of the wall and loose faith so he gathered up his courage and walked through the wall and escaped the cell. All of him but the heel of his left foot had cleared the wall. He was reeling, the sight in front of him seemed to recede and then approach him. He was disoriented, he tried to pull away but his heal was stuck in the wall. He had to focus but he pulled his foot and left some skin in the wall. His heel hurt and bled a little but he mentally stopped the blood and healed it to the point of a minor scrape. He walked through the building feeling totally psychic and aware of everything in his environment. His pants felt too tight at the waist. The soles of his shoes worked up a small static electricity charge. He lifted each foot to move forward. His pants chaffed at the thighs and flapped a little by his feet. Radio and TV waves tore through the building and his body constantly. He saw the institutional puce color of the walls and noted how much he hated the radiation of that color. His shirt pulled a little at his chest with each step forward. A loose hair fell from his scalp and landed on his shoulder along with a small piece of dandruff. A dust mite on his shoulder greedily went for the dandruff. Paper dust, recycled germs and expelled breath from everyone in the building filled the air. A mold in the air duct was producing some nasty particles that were making some of the weaker people in the building quite sick. He could feel the people in their offices and hear their thoughts as if they were broadcasting radio signals to him. No one had noticed that he was missing yet. He saw ghosts and what was worse they saw him. He wondered if he was still alive but he knew he wasn’t dead yet. The hallway looked dim and long to him, the walk seemed to take to much time. The florescent lighting radiated the flickering light of excited atoms. The light made his eyes hurt and made his skin look bad. His left ankle hurt from walking. The floor gave slightly under his feet as did the soles on his shoes which gave him a little bounce as he walked except when the waves in the floor boards crested and cancelled out the down step of his foot, making his feet hit flat and hard. The souls of his feet were squashing red blood cells in his capillaries sending dead cells into his blood stream. He had a slight cognizance that he was eight floors off the ground and he could feel the earth spin and turning in orbit around the sun. He felt that he was in an unreal position and he found it very peculiar. He could see his consciousness increase. He was encapsulated in his own ego world and he knew everyone else was moving off on their own mental tangents. The world was a fantasy, a mental construct; it was whatever you believed it to be. So many thought it was such a hard place. They guided their lives as if they were soldiers hardened by the war of survival. He wanted to live in a happier lighter place but harsh consciousness controlled physical reality. He wasn't sure if he was walking or floating. He walked past cameras when he knew no one was watching. He stood at the elevator bank and picked the next elevator he could ride alone in. In the elevator he could feel the energy pulling him toward the roof. It made a kind of sense, he was far from the hospital and his car and his home. He would be spotted right away on the street in his condition. The elevator stopped at the top floor, he got out and found the door to the roof. He went right thru the door and climbed the stairs to the roof. He was moving but he did not seem to be walking, he looked down and saw that he was floating above the ground. The stars were shifting, ever moving in front of him. He saw millions of year's pass in no time. Empires that were unknown came into being and collapsed before him, peoples of unknown number and nations died with them. Though he could not see, he knew and though he could not think, he could contemplate the everlasting mysteries. He was lost but he did not mind for there was no place to go, he had come from nowhere and it was too only there that he could return. He survived in a point of being, he was not in one place but every where at once and he fell in all directions reaching for the untouchable infinite horizons of unimaginable space. Not a physical or mental being, but an ageless soul unsatisfied because it had nothing yet he encompassed all that he hated and loved. The universe was but a sphere to him, a plane that was boundless and stretched past imagination, but he lived not only in that sphere but in countless others, all of which called him their own. He could see the earth was as fragile as a soap bubble and he understood the meaning of those people who said, "God loves you more than you'll ever know." The world was only held together by the grace of god but the people of the earth seemed to be loosing god’s grace. He visioned a fireball, massive as the earth spinning and hurtling through space, turmoil inside and out, bursting with heat and intensity erupting in an explosion of hate and energy, it symbolized human action. The emotions of people forced action to happen through conflict and desire. He found himself covered with the sweat of the toil that was on the shoulders of the countless millions that he loved because he had created them and he refused to destroy them even though his creation was a monster. He spiraled downward in no certain direction searching for love and finding pain because he was forsaken in joy and worshipped in pity. He looked for a being, one like himself, but much superior, that was just beyond reach and just within sight, a being he could worship and pray for and find love in and be relieved of his sorrow. He longed to die, but death was beyond his grasp for he was in a limbo of his own making. He was a living eternity and death would be but another eternity, one without love and that he could not take for once dead he would have no where to go, it would be final. He was so tired, the visions were wearing on him. He slept and dreamed. He found himself in the body of a man walking down a sunny street. There were others who occupied the body, it was the body of mankind and he was a small part of it. He did not know where he was but gradually he realized that there were others walking down the street, other civilizations and cultures embodied in a similar giant form like he was, walking down a street in a new world ready to begin a new culture and civilization. He passed another like him and said, “God loves you more than you’ll ever know.” “You know it brother,” came the answer.
Copyright © 2007 Michael Potter |