The Square Root

In 2016, it was Sunday, and I wanted a fun day—but more than that. I wanted to see through the veil. A week before, I’d bought powdered Acacia root bark on eBay, and after using an acid-to-base extraction with solvents, lye, and vinegar, I was left with a few grams of yellow goo in the bottom of a glass baking sheet. It looked like translucent mustard, and I shuddered. This was the key—the rocket to God—the molecular magic that would dissolve the three-dimensional gauze, and for a moment, I could behold a reality more real than my waking dream. It smelled like burnt Barbie hair.

Some psychonauts complained of not blasting off, of not properly ripping through the fabric of space and time, but I was determined to do a deep dive into the interdimensional wormhole and not dilly-dally in the foyer of hyperspace.

That Sunday afternoon, when I entered Mackenzie Park, I took three hits of LSD and an eighth of cubensis with some dark chocolate and an orange. Then I wheeled across the rust-colored floor to a little spot about twenty feet back from the cliff’s edge, near an upended root that blocked the wind and any would-be onlookers. I climbed out of my wheelchair and sat crisscross on the ironwood needle mat. The afternoon sun was still blasting off the ocean like tinfoil, but I was occasionally misted with salty spray from geysers of white water that shot into the air after a big wave. I was alternately hot and refreshed by crystalline droplets. My arms were covered in goosebumps as a smile stretched my lips taut.

The clouds began to look back at me. Around the hour mark, when little slits of black appeared to rip the clouds, I wondered if I were seeing pelicans. No—they would only appear for a few seconds at a time. And then, after a deep sigh, a central cumulus cloud resolved into a rainbow-hued Goddess with a crown.

I smiled. It was time.

In the bowl of my pipe, I’d stowed a couple of crumbles of weed coated in the yellow goo. It smelled worse than a burning tire, and with real trepidation, I touched the flame to it. The goo immediately caught on fire, so I tamped it out with my lighter. After a few attempts, I got the goo boiling and sinking into the weed, inhaling what tasted like burnt plastic.

Immediate buzzing and an almost jolting tilt of perception rocked me as I exhaled the foul cloud, but overcoming the urge to succumb to the pull of the realm, I brought the pipe to my lips again.

The second, even bigger hit was like a frying pan upside the dome, and I wasn’t able to hold it in for more than a second. As I exhaled another cloud, a wave shot up a furl of feathery water that gave me a white-glove wave, misted me properly, and I lay back and closed my eyes.

Go-time.

Nothing. Blackness. But then a flash of white light cut through the black at the top of my field. It was a spotlight, and then a red ball appeared below it and began to bounce in cadence with a male voice speaking like an MC trying to hype a crowd.

“Hey, what’s the square root of—no one gives a fuck!” said the voice as the red ball bounced.

There was the sound of uproarious applause, and in my peripheral vision I saw the legs of women doing the can-can in fishnets and heels, kicking high, before the announcer voice sounded again, the red ball bouncing along with his words.

“Look at me, Mr. Mushroomjesus, I like purple!”

Again came the applause and the kicking legs, but there was a note of cruelty in the tone. Whatever was behind the voice could see my thoughts—my misgivings and apprehension—and I could sense his contempt for me.

I sat up, and although I opened my eyes, the air where the “announcer” stood shimmered and felt as palpable as an actual person, only cloaked in Predator camouflage.

“I just punked your ass, you little bitch,” the dude said, no longer using his announcer voice.

“Interesting perspective,” I said. I tried to tune him out, but he was right there, and I felt his sneer.

Dribbling disgust, he added, “Hope you had fun with your little blast-off, Mr. I-Like-Purple, but I punked you.”

Then, as if getting up and walking away, I watched the shimmering outline recede into the park.

Five minutes later, I was back in a reality toasted with mushrooms and LSD. I climbed back into my wheelchair, fetched my ukulele from the trunk of my car, and sang about the asshole who had punked me—to a rainbow-hued cloud Goddess and the little slits of black that ripped the sky.

Then I thought again about the dude’s opening line:

“What’s the square root of—no one gives a fuck!”

What a zinger.