88, Shrooms

“What are the chances I’m going to soil myself?”  Special agent demolitions expert Dale O’Connor was in a fairly large primitive bamboo yurt in the middle of the mountains of Colombia outside of Bogota.  The sun had set on full moon night, but the only light in the yurt came from a small fireplace in the far corner.

“Pretty low, but there’s a chance, yeah.”  The fifty five year old ex-patriot named Dirt was normally a sarcastic fucker, but currently he was being supportive and speaking with a gentle voice.  “There’s no running water here at the Yurt of Light, so we’ll have to mop you down if you shit yourself, you know.”

“Yurt of Light sounds like a good name for a punk band,” O’Connor repeated.  

“And their first record is titled Mopping Up The Shit,” Dirt joked.  “But again, your chances of filling your trousers are low.”

Both men had consumed a heroic dose of six grams worth of magic mushrooms forty five minutes earlier.  O’Connor was beginning to experience feelings inside of him that he hadn’t felt for a long time regarding his own youth and his long lost favorite pet, Harvey the hedgehog.  “I’ve never done shrooms before.  How will I know when the mushrooms are kicking in?” O’Connor asked inquisitively.

“Oh, you’ll know,” Dirt replied.  “I promise.  You’ll fucking know.”  While patiently waiting for the shrooms intoxicating effects to start to take effect he said, “I’m starting to feel a little nauseous.  That’s normal if you do too.”

O’Connor shrugged.  “I’ve pickled my insides with two decades of hard whiskey.  I won’t puke.”

“Famous last words of every gringo that steps into this holy place, amigo,” Dirt joked back.

Dirt had brought O’Connor to an incredibly beautiful spot in the mountains to meet a shaman named Cha Cha.  The Yurt of Light was her own off grid primitive residence where Cha Cha held private magic mushroom ceremonies.  O’Connor and Dirt sat across from Cha Cha with their legs in the meditation lotus position as the eighty year old woman rested comfortably on her knees with a folded up blanket for padding.  “Try to be silent and keep your mind focused on la medicina,” Cha Cha said with a kind smile though her thick Spanish accent.  Her face had laugh lines and her eyes were kind.

Both men nodded subserviently and stopped talking.  A minute later, O’Connor had a thought.  “Hey Dirt,” he whispered.

“Yeah Doc?”

The thought was powerful and O’Connor couldn’t contain it.  “Reality is… it’s like, kind of a choice, you know?  Like, we choose to participate in this reality.”

Dirt smiled.  “The shrooms are kicking in for me too, amigo.”  He smiled, then nodded at his friend.  Dirt pulled an eye covering over his eyes and slowly drifted down on his thick blanket as he said, “If you see Jimmy Hendrix on the other side, tell him that his meatball recipe he shared with me last time I saw him was spot on.”  As Dirt let his head sink into his pillow, he muttered, “Those were the best damn meatballs I’ve ever had.”

“Maybe I need to lay down too,” O’Connor said as he closed his eyes and pulled his eye covering to complete the darkness.  His head felt like it was swimming in a pool of colors and geometrical shapes.  He didn’t know what reality he was entering into, but he didn’t have the inclination to fight the sensation.  It took all of his concentration to lay back onto his own pad without feeling like he was going to fall through the floor.

Cha Cha started singing in an indigenous language that O’Connor hadn’t ever heard before.  He knew Spanish, but he did not know this strange, foreign language.  As she sang, incredible visuals came across his brain.  With every changing note in the melody, O’Connor saw a different color and geometrical image even though his eyes were closed.  “Incredible,” he muttered.  

From a different part of reality, he could hear Dirt’s voice respond, “The ride gets bumpy.”  The distant voice of his friend was right next to him but also in a different galaxy.  “Buckle up, Doc,” Dirt said with slurred words.

Who was Doc?  O’Connor knew the name but couldn’t process the info.  Time ceased to matter.  All that existed was an indescribable multi dimensional collage of colors and shapes.  It was as if O’Connor’s body was disintegrating and evaporating into the ether of some other reality composed completely of color.  O’Connor noted the sensation of no longer existing and in that moment he didn’t care if he died or not, he just wanted to not miss Harvey anymore.  Parts of his brain could hear the songs that Cha Cha was singing, but the majority of his brain had taken off into some sort of universe that felt like he was in Willy Wonka’s very colorful chocolate factory.

The Yurt of Light had peacefully coexisted next to the outer border of a cocaine cartel’s land for many years.  The cartel leader was named El Daga (The Dagger).  His bad guys were very superstitious and had always left Cha Cha alone.  Partly they never bothered the old woman because her place was below a cliff that visually blocked the view of the cartel’s operation as well as kept her operation out of their line of vision.  They also left the woman alone because her place was still a long walk away.  She kept to herself and never gave them any trouble.

Tonight, unbeknownst to El Daga and his gang, the cartel was going to have unannounced visitors.

At the bottom of the mountain, four Russian thugs were talking heatedly with each other in Russian.  Their leader was a man named Gosavich.  “We will kill every man up there and send a message to all the cartel leaders in Colombia that the Russian mafia will not tolerate their disrespect!”  Gosavich put on some high tech gloves that contained fully charged mag pulsers which he’d used to cause large amounts of destruction and death in Mexico City.  “Let’s go, comrades,” he said in Russian to his thugs.

Forty five minutes later, the four out of shape Russian thugs were sucking wind from the long hike to the cartels land.  All of them were grumpy, angry, and ready to kill cartel members after their long journey.  An angry man’s voice in the dark distance yelled out in Spanish, “Stop right there and put your hands in the air!”  The Russians could not see who was yelling at them, but they all pulled out their guns and pointed them in the direction of the voice.

Meanwhile, O’Connor was tripping balls like a mother fucker while lying flat on his back in the Yurt of Light.  In his mind, he was in a weightless dimension made up of clouds.  He came across a spirit being made of pure light which he somehow knew was a citizen of the cloud dimension.  It telepathically asked him, “Are you truly ready to see what you seek?”

O’Connor was overwhelmed with emotion.  He was terrified while simultaneously mystified that this cloud dwelling spirit of light could be real, or at least it seemed real enough.  His broken brain told him that he was ready for whatever this being was ready to show him.  In his mind, O’Connor answered calmly, “Yes.”

The cloud being nodded and lifted its hand for a high five.  In his brain, O’Connor lifted his own hand and tried to make the connection but it went right through the spirit as if waving away the fog.

Suddenly, the clouds morphed magically like colored mist into a library room that looked like it belonged in a London mansion from the late 1800’s.  O’Connor looked around and saw books of various shapes and sizes.  All of them looked worn from decades or centuries of use.  Their leather coverings displayed languages and symbols that made no sense to O’Connor, and they were all stacked neatly on tidy bookshelves that lined the walls.

A deep male voice spoke from behind O’Connor in a distinct British accent, as if the man was an Oxford professor.  “Daletun, old chap!  How my heart sings to see you, my boy!”

O’Connor looked at his arms and body and realized he was a ten year old boy again.  The man’s voice behind him had called him Daletun, a name he hadn’t been called since childhood.  O’Connor turned around and immediately recognized the source of the voice.  It was a ten foot tall hedgehog that towered over the little boy.  O’Connor just knew.

It was Harvey.

The spiny rodent was on his hind legs standing upright.  Harvey was wearing a dark purple silk smoking jacket that resembled a slip on robe that a Japanese woman might wear into a sauna, and he had a Scottish tam-o’-shanter hat on his head.  The hedgehog held a Turkish calabash tobacco pipe in one paw and the smell of its sweet smoke filled O’Connor’s tiny ten year old nostrils.  He had the other paw loosely stuffed into one of the pockets of the smoking jacket.  His eyes sparkled, and there was a monocle attached to a chain over one eye that reminded O’Connor of a magnifying glass.

O’Connor couldn’t believe his eyes.  “Jesus, Harvey, when did you become a British snob?” he asked in his mind to his old favorite pet.

The hedgehog smiled and his whiskers flared out like skinny, limp light sabers in different vibrant colors while the remainder of the room was drab brown and grey.  “Well that’s a cheeky thing to say to an old friend!” Harvey said with sarcasm in his deep English voice.  He sounded like he could be a narrator for dramatic movies.

“It’s good to see you, Harvey,” O’Connor said in his high pitched ten year old voice.

“I’m chuffed to bits to see you too, mate.”  The hedgehogs whiskers changed their appearance at random.  O’Connor marveled at the brilliant neon colors.  Harvey said, “It’s really quite lovely to see you, in fact”

“It smells like tea in here.  Do you drink tea now too?” O’Connor asked, still getting used to having the voice of a child.

“Blimey, dear boy!  I regret to inform you that the afterlife is a perfect replica of high English culture in the early 1700’s.”

O’Connor could feel his spirits drop.  “You gotta be shitting me, Harvey.”

The hedgehog had been taking a puff of tobacco through his pipe as O’Connor had said those words and smoke poured out the rodents nose as he laughed a hearty British laugh.  “Watch your tongue, old chap!”  Harvey stood up straight and said, “My boy, get used to tea and biscuits while your lungs still have breath!  It’ll be much less of a culture shock for you after you pass on.”

In his high pitched ten year old voice, O’Connor muttered, “The afterlife is English.  Dude, I didn’t see that one coming.”  In a defeated ten year old voice he said, “It fucking figures.”

“Language, please!”  Harvey chuckled and gave a reassuring smile as his whiskers grew and shrunk while changing from brilliant neon color to color.  “The shortbread biscuits are scrumptiously delightful, my boy.  Now tell me, Daletun, why have you blamed yourself for the erratic behavior of a rodent as well as the predatory nature of a raptor all of these years?”  Harvey removed his monocle and stuffed it into his pocket as he took another puff of sweet smelling tobacco from his pipe.

It felt like Harvey was looking into O’Connor’s soul.  The ten foot tall eccentric monster knew that O’Connor blamed himself for Harvey’s death and O’Connor couldn’t hide from the crushing feeling of loss that came over him.  “Why did you have to die that day?” O’Connor asked sheepishly.  The high pitch of his child voice seemed so strange to O’Connor but he didn’t care because he was too overwhelmed with twenty years of grief.

“Everything in the universe dies, Daletun.  Consciousness itself will perish someday in the distant future and all of life and the experience it has given to each sentient being will be nothing but blackness in the universe from which we once dwelt,” Harvey said with a distinguished English accent.  “It was simply my destiny to die that day at the talons of that harris hawk.  Nothing more, nothing less.”

“Nothing more, nothing less?!” ten year old O’Connor protested.

“Yes, lad.  Our destiny is unknown to us, but in the cosmic story, it is etched in a divine language which we cannot change for crown or quid.”

In reality, O’Connor was lying on his back on a pad in the middle of a yurt with an eye covering while an old woman sang.  In his mind, he was a ten year old boy, starting to cry but still keeping it together.  “But I’ve missed you, Harvey!  I’ve missed you so much!  Every time I have a drink, I miss you!”  The thought of a child drinking hard whiskey felt awkward to O’Connor, but it had been his path and he didn’t judge himself for it.

The Hedgehog spoke compassionately with his endearing English accent.  “And I’ve missed you, dear boy.”

At that moment, there was a brief knock on the library door in O’Connors’ mind, then it opened.  The face of Jimmy Hendrix popped into the room.  He too spoke with a deep voice and British accent.  “Hello dear Harvey!  I wish to inform you that we will be cooking Thai food tonight and we’ll need you to peel the potatoes later.”

The ten foot tall rodent beamed with happiness.  “Oh, jolly good, James!”

“Carry on, fine fellow!” Hendrix said as he closed the door.

Harvey looked back at the little boy with excitement.  “Oh, how I do love Thai night!”

O’Connor couldn’t process in time that he’d seen Jimmy Hendrix, let alone to thank him for a meatball recipe, not to mention seeing Harvey so happy at the strange news.  O’Connor didn’t feel any better.  “I’ve missed you every day since you’ve been gone,” O’Connor said as his eyes opened up with big tears.

“But look at the man you’ve become because of the pain you felt from my loss.”

O’Connor’s ten year old self cried harder as snot ran down his face.  “I kill bad guys, Harvey!  I’m a murderer!  I get drunk and I blow stuff up,” O’Connor said through his ten year old tears.  “It’s the only thing I’m good at!”

Out of the blue, the hedgehog started to shrink at a noticeable rate.  “Ah, now mate, that’s not the only thing you’re good at!  Yes, you’ve saved thousands of innocent people from suffering at the hands of bad men in your days, and you’ll continue to save thousands more from that same dreadful fate!”  Harvey’s British accent was still low and powerful, but he was shrinking faster now.  He was small enough to look ten year old O’Connor in the eyes.  “But you’re good at something else too.”

O’Connor’s despair was beyond his ability to handle it.  “What, Harvey?  What am I good at?”

As O’Connor had said those words, Harvey’s tam-o-shanter had disappeared off of his head along with his smoking jacket.  He had shrunk instantly to the size of a normal hedgehog and he was cuddled up in O’Connor’s small ten year old hand.  Harvey’s deep British accent resonated in the room from the small creature as he said, “You already know, mate.”

O’Connor looked at the small rodent and nodded in understanding.  “Lex.”

“That’s right, mate.  Alexi Blacktide needs you to be the man you were born to be for her.  Stop running, lad, and stop blaming yourself for my death, dear boy.”  Harvey was on all four legs on O’Connor’s palm.  He looked up at the ten year old snot nosed boy and said with his deep British voice, “You need to kill one more demon in real life before you ask her to be your wife.”

O’Connor didn’t flinch from the thought of marrying Blacktide and the realization scared him.  Was he ready to settle down?  Be a husband?  O’Connor was confused about the second part of Harvey’s message because he didn’t know what demon the rodent was referring to.  “What do you mean about the demon, Harvey?”

The hedgehog was starting to turn into mist, but his voice remained deep.  “You need to go to Russia and connect with Team Vodka.  Oconnorvich will help you take out Gosavich.”

The name made ten year old O’Connor freeze.  Demon.  Now O’Connor knew, he had to take out Gosavich, who in real life O’Connor thought was a dark wizard.  O’Connor didn’t know why, but the thought of meeting up with Oconnorvich made sense.  “Ok, Harvey.  I’ll do it.”

The hedgehog evaporated on O’Connor’s palm.  All that remained was Harvey’s voice in O’Connors mind.  “You’re free now, old friend.  Smile when you remember me, don’t weep.  And when you find Alexi, don’t fuck it up.”  Although the hedgehog was gone, he could feel that Harvey had given him a wink.

“Hey, I thought you didn’t like profanity?” O’Connor said in his high pitched voice, but the rodent’s voice did not respond.

Back in reality, O’Connor opened his eyes.  It took him several seconds to process that he was in a yurt, that he had a physical body, and that he was a fully grown twenty nine year old man tripping balls on his back.  A couple of seconds later, he could hear that Dirt was snoring next to him.  O’Connor sat up and removed his eye covering.  The whole room spun around him.  He looked at the wooden floor boards and they were wavy like water lapping up on a shore.  He stared at the old woman singing and it looked like she was an animated skeleton.  “Fuck,” he muttered to himself.  “Shrooms fuck me up way harder than whiskey.”

Cha Cha had stopped singing.  The only thing O’Connor could hear was the crackle of the fireplace over in the corner and Dirt’s light snoring.  The old woman came over to O’Connor and sat in front of him.  In Spanish, she said, “The spirits have told me that they talked to you and that you are supposed to kill several demons that come to this place.  Can you walk yet?”

In that second, the sound of gunfire could be heard from several hundred yards away.  O’Connor froze when he heard a loud explosion.  “Gosavich.”  Somehow he knew, Gosavich was responsible for the fire fight going on outside.

Cha Cha was calm.  “The demons will be here soon.”  She reached under the robe she wore and pulled out a 9mm hand gun, then dug up two more clips worth of ammo.  She handed it all to O’Connor.  “The spirits told me that this is a part of your healing.”

O’Connor had so many questions, but the sounds of gunfire were getting closer to the yurt.  He was still heavily intoxicated from the shrooms but the gunfire kept him in this realm of reality.  He didn’t sound like his voice was coming from him, but rather from beyond the veil of reality and being spoken through him.  “I’ve got this, lass,” he said with a thick British accent.  Shaking his head in disbelief, he thought, “why in the fuck did I just talk like I’m from England?” but he quickly dismissed it because the sound of bodies running through the thick underbrush outside could be heard.

Instinctively, O’Connor jumped up and ran to the door.  It swayed back and forth in front of him as if it were an illusion.  He reached for the moving door handle and somehow grasped it on the first try.  Without thought, he ran into the night.

The full moon illuminated a small clearing in front of the yurt.  As if he had night vision, he could see several bodies running in his direction.  They were lit up like they were wearing fully illuminated red suits amongst the black jungle around them.  “Demons,” O’Connor said as his head swam with the intoxication.

O’Connor lifted the hand gun and instinct took over as he emptied the clip in their direction.  Ten seconds later, he could see the red bodies all collapsed on the dark jungle floor.  One red demon remained.  Its redness burned twice as brightly as the other demons.  O’Connor saw it raise its arm.  A second later, O’Connor was falling backwards as his left arm burned in shock.  He fell flat on his back and bounced on the soft jungle floor.

He tried to sit up but the intoxication was too hard for him, so he rolled over and got to his knees.  Somehow he ejected his clip and reloaded his firearm.  His left arm was useless and hurt more than he’d ever hurt before.  “Fuck,” he thought.  “That demon shot me.”  He lifted the gun with his right hand and emptied the clip in the direction of the demon.  The demon fell backwards, then got to its feet and scrambled away.

O’Connor watched the brilliantly bright red demon disappear downhill into the jungle, then all was silent.  He looked down at his arm and even in the moonlight he could see his own blood oozing from his arm.  The bullet had ripped through the outer part of his bicep and he was losing lots of blood.  “What a way to go,” O’Connor thought to himself.  “See you soon, Harvey.  Save me some of those shortbread cookies, or biscuits, or whatever,” he muttered.  Losing his ability to stay upright, O’Connor fell forward from his knees as he passed out face first onto the soft jungle floor.

When he woke up, someone was furiously scrubbing his left arm.  It burned like hell.  He was thirsty and he needed to piss.  He opened his eyes but couldn’t see anything.  “What?…” O’Connor asked weakly, not having the strength to finish his question.

“God dammit, Doc!  Why in the fuck did you come all the way to Colombia?  Why didn’t you take your fucking phone with you!?”  The voice of Alexi Blacktide was furious as she scrubbed his arm hard with disinfectant.  His arm hurt like hell and she was clearly taking her aggression and anger out on his wound.

“Lex,” O’Connor muttered, but he was so weak.  “How?”

Dirt’s voice was behind O’Connor but he couldn’t see him.  “I texted her yesterday, amigo, and your friend Porter had her here by midnight.  She followed my instructions and hiked through the night to get to you, dummy.”

O’Connor tried to lift his right hand to find Alexi’s face but all he found was open air.

Blacktide grabbed his hand and threw it out of the way of her work as she tried to disinfect his left arm.  “You’ve got some nerve, mister!  I’ve been as good of a girlfriend to you as I can be and you pull this shit on me?  What the fuck!  What do you have to say for yourself!?”

In that moment, O’Connor regained consciousness enough to see her.  Her cheeks were grimy with dirt and mud.  She’d clearly been hiking through the woods for hours.  Her head was sweaty and her face was angry.  He could see her feminine power radiate like a light was behind her head.  Maybe it was her aura, maybe it was the sun, but he felt safe and warm.  She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.  He smiled weakly and opened his mouth, but couldn’t say anything.

“Well, asshole?!”  Blacktide yelled.

O’Connor finally found the strength.  “Lex,” he whispered weakly, “I love you.”  She gasped and her eyes got huge, then he passed out again.

In the distance, a Russian thug named Gosavich fell in and out of consciousness on a wheeled medical cot in a rural Colombian hospital with his left arm wrapped in bandages as the nurses continued to give him fluids and medicines to keep his arm from getting an infection after he’d staggered in during the middle of the night with a gunshot wound from a midnight shootout with someone whom he’d assumed was a cartel member.