Chapter 2 - BEKKS

I wasn’t sure if it was steam, or smoke, clouding the room in my Drug Scape. It moisturized my face, like mist refusing to turn into rain on a cloudy day. I held my hand up in an attempt to catch the drift, but the wet air slithered through my fingers. I stared at my skeletal hand. My knuckles had become swollen for some reason. A purple rash had spread from my elbow to the insides of my fingers, like a choking vine, and it was beginning to scab and flake. But I was still alive in this Scape, despite the ghastly appearance of my exposed skin. And this Scape was familiar, like a home. Other users were sprawled out on the grimy couches, like different versions of me. I wasn’t sure if these personifications of my thoughts would flee away, or did they come and go as friends? They didn’t speak much. And when they did, the words came out disjointed, but emphatic, like sleep talking. I don’t mind random words. Words are more honest this way, when they have no structured order. Like poetry, words challenged me to put together a puzzle worthy of a meaningful moment.

Which is why I Scaped here often. This Drug Scape would eventually lead me by chance to The Rabbit Hole. I know I can find it in an Alice in Wonderland place like this. Where people became caricatures by ingestion, or injection, or inhaling. Whatever the drug, I now understand how the end could justify the means. The Rabbit Hole. Instead of sliding into another fantasy, or a popular Dreamscape, I will one day slide back into a true reality. The real reality. My origin lifetime. It is possible, like time travel. I just know it.

“You’re not tripping enough, are you Bekks?”

This question came from the adjacent couch, from an unseen atmosphere of dust. It was better when I couldn’t see the source of any advice. It allowed me to think without discrimination.

“You can’t even see me, man.”

“I can see you, Bekks. You are shining like an angel in the mist.”

This sounded so insincere, like a pick up line. His voice was uncomfortably sensitive in tone, like he was humming while he spoke.

“I’m no angel, man.”

“My name is Juve.”

“I’m no angel, Juve.”

“No, Bekks. You’re a self-proclaimed artist?”

Juve fake cackled. He knew me some way. Invisible behind the clouds of steam, or was it really smoke, he had found a way to speak from the inside of my mind. I had never created art in this Drug Scape, at least not the visual kind. It was just genetic, my artistic mind set. The Scape must have adjusted to my genetic mental matter, which seemed to code this Dreamscape. I decided to play along anyways.

“Yes, I am a self-proclaimed artist.”

“A painter?”

“Yes.”

“Obsolete, painted art that is, isn’t it?”

I agreed with him. I had harboured similar doubts prior to the emergence of Dreamscape Domination, even before The Final Collapse. Why would anyone pay me to create, when they could employ an artificially intelligent simulator with the touch of a finger? What value, or perspective could I create in another person’s eyes? It was a lie. Art, my art, was a lie, creating illusions, smoke without mirrors, et cetera, et cetera. It was just a means to gain someone else’s attention, now that I think about, or maybe someone’s obsession, which was far more interesting.

“We are living art, no?” I responded.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

I played philosophical, an artist’s defence. It’s easy. All you have to do is use abstract words to buy enough time to defend your art. It’s easy to play philosophical when you are high, too. But I was thinking too clearly, so I must have been sobering up. There is nothing worse than being the sober one in a Drug Scape.

Another moving body behind the mist grabbed my ankle aggressively. It wasn’t the deep, masculine voice I was speaking to. Juve was across from me. This strong hand grabbed my ankle like he was about to break the bone in two. I didn’t fight it. No need to struggle. He wasn’t trying to hurt me by injecting a needle point into a vein on the top of my foot. I felt it point in and find a blood vein. It made me sigh.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” Juve offered commentary from the other side of the room.

My sitting posture melted into a supine position on the couch. Hardened, crusty holes in it, formed from cigarette ash or some heated liquid spilled from a shaking spoon, scratched the skin on my back. I realized I was naked from the waist up. I felt the fabric below my belt line. Pajama bottoms. No socks. A warmth travelled from that injected foot to my ears, heating them with a flash of fire.

“I can help you find it, Bekks.”

“Find what, Juve?”

“The Rabbit Hole.”

“Are you the rabbit, Juve?”

“Very funny.”

I was getting itchy on the couch. Why was my skin reacting this way, percolating with imagined boils, as if ignited by an allergy?

“You won’t find that Rabbit Hole until you let go. Of everything. You fight it well, the high. And then you settle in the middle, not floating away for good, not plummeting down for ever. You can’t recreate the past this way, without sacrificing your place in the present.”

Juve’s cryptic words were my words, or at least those translated from my subconscious, which informed this Drug Scape. I saw myself in his words because they became a mirror for me, just like every other Dreamscape. They were mirrors, all of them, the Scapes, just ones reflecting disfigured realities.

“I don’t want to recreate the past. I want to recreate pure existence. And I will find where it once was.”

“You don’t have a time machine, Bekks. Why not visit the Nostalgia Nuance, or the Memory Holes? You can revisit your memories there.”

I had visited those Scapes before, of course I had. But the memories weren’t as pure in the context of a Scape. It was like art imitating life, but not life becoming art. This voice, although speaking on behalf of my own thoughts, was too ignorant to the concept of context.

I remembered my obsessions with photo albums when I was a little child, in the origin reality. They would spark memories, but in the context of the album, they remained still. They were not moving and other, interpretive memories from virtual perspectives were not happening at the same time. The pictures were just a snapshot, a limited view of a moment, but not the entire moment I was looking to immerse myself in. I wanted every sensory application at my disposal. Only reality can make me feel again.

My body began trembling into a virtual convulsion. My teeth chattered and shivers scaled my skin like an army of insects following the feeder.

The thick hand that had previously grabbed my ankle was holding down one leg, while another hand held down another. From some mysterious place above me, other hands held down my arms, while one pressed upon my neck. The hands were thick and the grips heavy as stone, tight as vices. While they held my limbs down, whatever it was traversing my bloodlines funnelled to my head, shattering the light bulb, creating an explosion of luminescence. I closed my eyes and I was inside a coffin, at the brink of it locking. I recognized the interior right away, and laughed out loud.

“This is a funny trick. I’m not afraid to be buried alive, Juve.”

When the coffin closed, the dry air entered my mouth and I was thirsty. I couldn’t stop laughing.

“There are so many Drug Scapes to Scape to. One at every corner of my mind,” I threatened to whoever was listening, prolonging the joke.

When the trick was over and the coffin opened, I was floating in the middle of a familiar setting, a northern lake. The coffin became a little fishing riff. Other coffins floated in the lake. A cemetery floating on the water.

I paddled with my hands, from coffin to coffin, past recognizable faces from my past, my origin life. My little sister, golden haired with pink lips and freckles on her nose smiled with big bold teeth.

Had I painted this impression before? Was my current high an escape into that part of my brain responsible for juxtaposing images on a canvas?

A voice was singing from across the lake, and the sounds bounced off the surface of the water, creating a wind, ruffling the water. Champagne water, or so the permanent residents described it for its golden brown colour under the illusion of blue. Champagne water, as I scooped it into my hands, but blue to my eye. The hypocrisy of the illusion.

As I peered into the lake innocently, searching for the possibility of fish or a snapping turtle, I saw the face they could never find in my origin lifetime, letting me know he was there.