ARR 1988 - Flipbook - Page 139
What about the Big Picture I had seen, goddammit? Would these
maggots ever see something like that? Their very presence in the room was
like a cancer. A tumor that was somehow sentient. That laughed and
chortled. And jumped.
As if through an unspoken agreement, we all gradually left the three
intruders out of our conversations, left them out of the trip. They were
almost entirely ignored near the end. At some point during the night our
uninvited guests decided to leave. I don't think anyone even noticed they'd
gone. The room just felt ... cleaner, somehow.
The sun was coming up now. Most of our little party had fallen asleep
on beds or floor during the hour before dawn. Edward and I were the only
ones still awake.
We stood outside and watched the sun come up, the two ofus, shivering
with the cold and the last vestiges of the LSD. The cold-morning steam of
our breath, the warmly glowing orange pouring over the Eastern horizon,
the smoke curling up from Edward's last cigarette, passing it back and forth
between us. The ride was nearly over now. I felt I had to say something in
honor of this moment, but... there was really nothing to say. So I stood and
smoked and watched the sunrise.
Afterwards, no one really talked about 202 very much. They all
seemed kind of embarrassed about it, the way you would feel after a
drunken bout that finds you stark naked with a lampshade over your head
in the morning-able to remember enough of the night before to quietly
cringe.
It seemed wrong to me, this negative reaction. I felt we had shared
something, the seven of us. Maybe it had not been a wonderful or even
terrible experience but a complicated combination of both extremes. I felt
different now, as though I might have lost an innocence of some kind but
grown from the experience.
I began to wonder: was it really as important an event as I imagined,
or simply the result of a chemical freakout, an imbalance brought on by that
strange, strange drug. Was I on to something here, or was the joke on me?
I asked Edward about it once, hoping he'd mention that incredible sunrise,
maybe put into words what I was having so much trouble with, but all he
said was, "Yeah, that was a pretty trippy night. I was frying pretty hard."
So:
I went back to the Foothills Motel, a few months later, all by myself,
no real purpose in mind. I wanted to touch it again, that other reality. I'm
not sure what I expected to feel; sad, maybe, or elated, elastic, spastic,
something. But of course, I was disappointed. There was no supernatural
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