Exactly a week and a day before I was officially discharged from the U.S. Navy, Petty Officer Joseph Tinsley procured the shrooms. I recall the exact date because it was Halloween. I’d just driven down from the Naval Nuclear Power Training Command where we’d both been stationed until very recently—maybe 20 miles north of the harbor—to pick him up from the military medical center there in Charleston. To this day, I have no idea where Tinsley got the shrooms, but he already had them stashed in a JanSport backpack slung over his sizable shoulders when I pulled in front of the medical center’s glass doors to scoop him up.
As soon as I braked outside those glass doors, Tinsley opened the passenger door and plopped down in the seat beside me. He must have immediately felt cramped in my shitty little Toyota, because he yanked the backpack off his shoulders right away but waited until I’d pulled out of the medical center’s parking lot to whip out the shrooms. They were in your standard Ziplock baggie: three or four golden caps, their gnarly stems bruised black and blue and speckled with their own crumbled dust.
“How much?” I asked.
“A quarter ounce,” Tinsley said with a fierce grin. “Just enough for the two of us.”
I thought about this, and specifically whether or not Tinsley had actually calculated the separate doses based on our differences in weight. Not that I would know—having never done psilocybin mushrooms before—but I doubted it. We were the same height, after all, only I was pretty scrawny, weighing in at maybe a buck-fifty, whereas Tinsley—a serious weightlifter and bodybuilder-- was at least 75 pounds heavier. Not just his biceps, but even his triceps were bigger than my head.
“You sure this is a good idea?” I asked. I’d just been released from my day’s duties at TPA, or Transient Personnel Administration, where I’d been transferred in the last few weeks. TPA was a place where enlisted personnel at NNPTC were sent to be “de-nuked,” or—as our former peers joked—reclassified as “nuclear waste.” A few weeks earlier, Tinsley had been stationed there too—only the Powers-That-Be had transferred him to this medical center so the military psychiatrists could study him more closely. Prior to this, Tinsley had spent a couple weeks locked up in a civilian mental health center off-base. Of course, the rest of us who’d served alongside him had always known there was something, well, off about Tinsley—even if we didn’t know what it was, and even if it took our superiors a little longer to sniff it out.
“Why not?” he replied. “I figure we can take them down by the harbor, then see what happens. Our carriage won’t turn into a pumpkin again till midnight, which is plenty of time for us to sober up and you to make it back for PT in the morning.”
“But the last time you gave me drugs, I nearly died,” I said. I tried to say it in a joking voice—even though it was absolutely true. This happened the night after Tinsley was released from the mental health center, the same night before he was transferred to TPA. Somehow, I’d let him talk me into taking some of the medication that the psychiatrists had prescribed him: a host of anti-psychotics and hypnotics that included Risperdal, Trileptal, Ambien, and God- knows-what-else. He’d been crushing the pills up with a paperweight and mixing them in large, red-and-yellow capsules he’d bought at a vitamin and supplement store off-base. But all I remember of that night was how I’d grown giddy and we prank-called the Master-At-Arm’s office from the payphones in our BEQ building downstairs, then at some point stood around in my room as Tinsley shouted What we need is a wise king! Then things got bad. Time fractured. I recall very little other than sitting against the wall of my shower as Tinsley leaned down over me and occasionally slapped me in the face. Other than that, I recall lying in bed as Tinsley shook me, then me waking at 0500, or just a couple hours before I was supposed to muster for a class called Reactor Fundamentals. I was completely naked, and my BEQ room was filthy. A couple shit paddies dotted my carpeted floor, not to mention the vomit spray all across my desk and utilities uniform in a pile beside my bunk.
Horrified, I’d dressed in my bootcamp-issue sweatshirt and sweatpants and scrambled down to Tinsley’s room. There, he’d opened his door a couple inches after I’d knocked and squinted into my face redfaced and red-eyed, clearly mistaking me for a ghost or some sort of hallucination.
Khan? he’d said, opening his door another half-inch. That really you?
I’d assured him that it was, and—before I went back to deep-clean my BEQ room in fear of a static inspection—Tinsley told me how I’d looked up at him with sudden terror in my eyes and asked Who am I? before shitting my pants and vomiting everywhere. This physical response was likely brought on by my body rejecting the drugs—which taken all at once at my weight had likely been toxic. Thinking I was on the verge of death, Tinsley had fled back to his own room.
“That was different,” he said with a wave of his hand. “I ah, mixed those pills like it was grandma’s recipe, and after I was already very—ah—very deep in orbit. But this is shaman medicine, not that synthetic crap the doctors prescribe.”
“Right,” I said. “But what if they piss-test me in hopes of screwing me one last time before I get discharged next Friday?”
“Hear me out,” Tinsley said, getting more intense more quickly than usual. “You and me, we are—the two of us—in many ways, the same person. We see the same thing, only from different angles. Tonight, we shall divide and divine that difference.”
“That right?”
“That’s right,” Tinsley said, and smiled again. “Besides, a urinalysis can’t catch psilocybin—it’s just food poisoning. I’d be more worried about all that weed you smoke.”
It wasn’t long before I’d snagged a free parking spot in a lot behind King Street. From there, the two of us hoofed it to Market Street, then across Charleston’s so-called French Quarter. It was warm for a late October afternoon— altogether pleasant weather—which meant the bars that we passed were already starting to fill with chatter and laughter, music from jukeboxes and live bands, the idiotic merriment of college students and late-season tourists.
We took the shrooms together in a secluded park near the promenade alongside the Cooper River. Tinsley sat in a park-bench under a palm tree surrounded by bushes—rhododendrons or something—while I stood nervously in front of him, lighting a cigarette and glancing around. He pulled the baggie out of his jeans’ pocket and opened it, then fingered forth a couple of the intact stems and caps. He handed these to me and then—holding the open bag up to his face—dumped the rest of the baggie’s contents down his open mouth. Watching him do this—as well as the shake and shrooms pouring into his big mouth—I was reminded of Jaws, and not simply because Tinsley was pale and had a huge head, but also because of his highly ridged cheekbones. They were similar to those of your stereotypical Plains Native or Nordic raider, and—together with his small eyes, mouth, and nose all set closely together—lent his face an unmistakably sharkish quality. Me, I ate my own handful slowly, chewing the soft spongy stems and caps and swallowing them down with a wince. They tasted bitter, like dirt, but worse. If dirt could spoil—that’s what they tasted like. I felt like half of the shrooms got stuck in my teeth and so kept picking at them, trying to pry them loose with my tongue.
Before long Tinsley stood, smiled triumphantly again, and sauntered onto the promenade. I followed in his footsteps. Eventually we stood side-by-side watching as dusk fell over the river and a half-crescent moon brightened the darkening sky over the water. I had a small bag of grass in my own jacket’s inner pocket—just some shwag I’d purchased off a hookup that lived in the mobile homes off-base—and Tinsley said it would probably be best if we smoked a little now to help with the nausea to come. I didn’t feel like doing the work, so I handed him the grass and a pack of zigzags. He quickly rolled us a couple joints. As he did, I asked how long it would be before the psilocybin kicked in. He said not to worry, that we would both know soon enough. He sparked the first joint and we passed it back-and-forth, alternately smoking and coughing.
After we finished the joint, the two of us wandered over to a small CD outlet store. There was a spot inside we’d frequented together ever since we’d both been de-nuked, a nice offset space furnished with comfortable chairs and a chess table. We liked to go there afterhours and play chess and watch people on the streets through the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was a nice way to pass all the free time we suddenly found on our hands, no longer being required to spend 10+ hours a day learning how to maintain and operate a nuclear reactor on a submarine or carrier. As chess-players, we were evenly matched, but Tinsley called all the chess pieces by his own names—pawns were dogs, bishops daredevils, knights ninjas, queens assassins, et cetera. At first this had irritated me, but by this time I’d started liking it.
The two of us got up a quick game—Tinsley white, me black—and at first I’d felt confident as I leaned over the board, even hyperaware. But, by mid-game, I began to feel queasy. Far more than strange. Like something long in incubation or deep in hibernation inside me was stirring from a secret place. My fingers felt clammy as I fingered the chess pieces, and everything in the music store grew too bright under the artificial lights. So bright it was almost blurry. And my feet—they were like pools of water sloshing around in my Nikes. Tinsley too—who always bristled with a bizarre excess energy—started to weird me out with his vast head across from me; I could feel our thoughts clashing, tangling over the chessboard, our imagined moves and countermoves crackling with invisible currents. Then the grid of the board between us—with its sixty-four squares all fraught with Mexican standoffs—no longer appeared flat to me but sloped, wrinkled with hills and valleys and long stretches of empty desert; we were battling over a wasteland, an underwater desert, I thought nonsensically. The Trojans have finally succeeded in driving the Greeks into the sea. Tinsley’s knights just kept leering up at me, and the diagonal notch in all the bishops’ hats made me think my own head had been cleft in two, was oozing out all over the board. I could not stop visualizing my brain as a melting stick of butter.
“I gotta get out of here,” I said, looking up from the chessboard at Tinsley. He snorted laughter, his giant head glistening with sweat, his pupils as big and bright as dimes.
Back outside, the sky seemed bigger and darker than earlier. As if it was stretching away or slipping at an alarming rate into the depths of space. Either that or the ground—like an elevator shaft—was descending deep into the earth. But walking made me feel a little better, a little less queasy. Just moving around, feeling the cool air against my face. And, before long, we found ourselves back on the promenade. There, we smoked the second joint. I stared out at the Cooper River glistening with the reflection of stars and the occasional airplane passing overhead. Everything felt incredibly lucid, vivid and beautiful. The wobbly feeling in my stomach settled a bit, and I felt a warm expansive feeling coursing through my body. It was altogether pleasant. With unexpected joy, I watched as one of the airplanes overhead appeared to fly through Orion’s unseen bow—like an arrow fired at the star al-Dabaran, the eye of Taurus.
Bullseye, I kept thinking, then found myself whispering it out-loud, over and over, “Bullseye, bullseye, bullseye.”
Tinsley chuckled to himself while sipping on the joint, only I heard his chuckle echo back from the river. Confused, I gazed out on the water’s surface and there—in the light of the reflected stars—made out several dark rippling Vs heading south. They cut toward the place where the Cooper River ran into the Ashley River and both merged with the ocean. It was a group of porpoises, maybe three or four, and one of them announced their passage with a noise like a tiny blowhorn followed by some prankish squeaking.
“It’s manatees!” Tinsley shouted, only I replied that they weren’t manatees, but porpoises, at which point he asked how I was certain they weren’t dolphins. Of course, I wasn’t sure—in fact I didn’t have the slightest clue how to tell the species apart—and when I shrugged, Tinsley handed me the rest of the joint and said, “They’re mammals, right? Distant cousins.”
I smoked the rest of the joint to a nub while watching the porpoises—or dolphins, whatever—swim downriver. Their sinuous bodies glistened wetly as they plied the murky water. One splashed slightly above the river’s dark silky surface before barrel-rolling, its fins slicing small waves. Suddenly I heard Tinsley beside me begin to babble about one of his favorite theories—of which he had many—called Self-propelled evolution. I half-listened while thinking about how strange evolution really is, how weird and dependent on vast swathes of squandered time and energy. The more I thought about it, the more counter-intuitive it all seemed. Distant genetic cousins had, countless millenia ago, crawled from the water and—after a brief sabbatical on dry land—returned to the sea. It was as if, on second thought, they’d had some premonition it’d be better in the long run, as if they’d possessed some distant realization that greater possibilities remained down in the water, especially after the sun ballooned into a red dwarf and irradiated our atmosphere to scorch the rest of us dumb-ass surface-dwellers back into oblivion.
Me though, I already felt scorched to oblivion, and now definitely tripping. Still, I felt a hell of a lot better after smoking the second joint. A bit more grounded, even if still driven by a compulsion to keep moving. Just walking around. Tinsley obliged me, and we strolled around for some time. Once my hands were in my pockets, it seemed like it took an incredible act of willpower to take them back out. Everything is habit, I thought as we wandered, habits and the rhythms that these habits establish—pace, rhythm, habit—only once a particular rhythm is established, you might as well stand in front of a fastmoving train to try and stop it.
Eventually we found ourselves on a dark street in an old neighborhood. Ahead, a brightly lit backyard pulsed and swelled with music and laughter. The light and noise beckoned Tinsley and me like thunderstruck moths, and although a wooden fence ran the length of the backyard, there was a door in its side. I knocked, at first I worried no one would respond, but then Gandalf—in full cloak, wizard hat, and flowing beard—opened it to greet us. Leaning on a staff, he held his other hand out to beckon us forward, so we stepped past him into a grassy lawn filled with costumed revelers. Most of these others held red plastic cups, and I wandered in awe amongst them, only then remembering that it was Halloween night. Darkclad vampires with white facepaint and bloody fangs nodded over their beers, and an abundance of silky princesses curtsied each other. Ghoulish witches and sinister clowns giggled in a corner, while a trio of girls dressed like flappers from the Jazz Age huddled over a Nokia. One was crying so hard that mascara ran down her cheeks. At least half a dozen Smurfs huddled around a set of kegs—half- naked frat dudes wearing nothing but tight white shorts, white shoes, and white caps, and with their faces and bodies coated in dark blue paint. A couple of them lifted Papa Smurf by the legs to do a keg-stand, and the rest counted loudly and slowly in something approximating unison. Tinsley muscled his way among them to pour us some drinks, but when he handed me the plastic cup and I took a drink, it felt like I was pouring wet concrete down my throat, not Miller Lite. I handed the cup back to Tinsley with a grimace, who slid it into his own already emptied cup.
I was about to go inside the house to ask for a cup of water, but a sudden shouting and commotion paused me. It was the police—they must have busted someone for underage drinking out front, because a few charged in through the fence-door that Tinsley and I had just entered. Without delay, they started grabbing the costumed college kids around us and whipping out handcuffs. One of the cops went to snag a clown but only succeeded in yanking off his red wig. Several more police officers then swarmed into the backyard from the backdoor of the house, at which point the Smurfs all gathered round the keg dropped their cups, shouted “Shit!”, and spun for the fence. A few of the cops gave chase, though only one succeeded in yanking one of the Smurfs trying to scramble over the fence back down into the lawn. But this particular Smurf fell to his knees and immediately rose up to swing wildly, this haymaker connecting with one of the cop’s chins before two others tackled him to the grass.
“We gotta get out of here,” I said, but Tinsley—his exultant face shining with sweat—smiled bigger than I’d ever seen him smile before.
“Why?” he asked before finishing my beer in a single gulp. “They can’t see us.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, watching wide-eyed as a couple of the police cornered a vampire, maneuvered her against the fence, and handcuffed her.
“Fuck you, pig!” she shouted.
“Can’t you feel it?” Tinsley said. “We’re too real for them to see!”
Tinsley stood there a few moments, just drinking in the commotion. Me though—feeling panicky and overwhelmed—I slipped back out the fence. There, the neighborhood and street flashed and pulsed with the lights of police-cars parked alongside the opposite curb. Tinsley joined me after a bit and together we walked up the sidewalk toward the bars. Before long, we came upon Gandalf surrounded by cops in the middle of the street. The Grey Pilgrim spun in circles, his beard and cloak whirling in the air and his staff outstretched to keep his pursuers at bay. As he spun, the police officers around him stutter-stepped like secondary on a football field.
“Fly you fools!” the wizard called out as we passed by.
We ended up at a bar on King Street, one not too far from where I’d parked. Even though I’d only turned 20 years old earlier that month, Tinsley was of age and had presented me with a fake ID that—however dubious—was good enough for most of the bartenders in Charleston. And since it was that wonderfully palindromic year 2002, the bar’s speakers were bumping Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” ad nauseam while the TV-screens above the bar played Fox News on mute. The red chevron across the bottom of the screen warned—in all-caps—about a CIA report confirming the possibility of Weapons of Mass Fantasy in Iraq. By this point, the effects of the psilocybin were waning, though they kept washing back over me in waves—especially if I looked at or focused on anything too long. Like the wood-grained bar, for instance—the lines and patterns in the wood captivated me so strongly I had to force myself to look away.
Tinsley ordered us a couple whiskeys and Cokes. We drank them down slowly, not talking at first. At the same time, I kept thinking about the porpoises we’d seen, or the dolphins—who can say? I thought about how free they’d seemed, how unfettered by the machinations of overarching corporations and villainous politicians. And I was desirous of their freedom, even envious, because I knew—no matter what—I’d be trapped. Stuck deep inside. The system was designed to bind us back to it, I brooded. The more we resisted, the tighter the bonds would grow.
“So what are you going to do next?” Tinsley asked. It was as if the psilocybin gave him the ability to read my mind a little. “You’re a civilian again, you know, in just a week.”
I wasn’t sure, even though I was considering going back to Texas where I’d graduated from high school and had some friends who could help me land a job. I wanted to go to college too, I said. Maybe study philosophy and history. And, one day, hopefully, I wanted to become a writer. I was pretentious like that back then—if still ridiculously sincere.
“But you’re already a writer,” Tinsley said with a frown. “You write all the time.” Not just someone who scribbled their thoughts, I said with some irritation, but a published writer. An author. And not just a published author, but someone who wrote something that mattered—whatever that meant.
“Write about me then,” Tinsley said, fully assured of his future eminence.
I smiled and shook my head.
“What do you want to write about?” he persisted. “Fact or fiction?”
“What’s the difference?” I said, only I said it more nonchalantly then I meant it, because what I’d really meant to say was that the facts should’ve been fiction, or vice versa, and writing about real life didn’t appeal to me in the least—especially my own insignificant running around.
Because what I really wanted to write about was something that wasn’t fact but became fact, and through the sheer effort of me writing it.
As we talked, the bartender approached, surprising us both by setting two naked shots of whiskey down in front of us. We both looked up at the bartender, who then nodded at a table behind us. Turning, I saw two of the Smurfs from earlier nursing their own mixed drinks and shots. One had a bloody nose and swollen eye, and when he saw he had our attention, he slowly raised his glass and called out:
“Trick or treat.”
J S Khan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Burial Magazine, Bruiser Magazine, Farewell Transmission, Michigan City Review of Books, The Bulb Region, and Dodo Eraser.