Harlow Said

When Harlow said this stuff would unscrew your brain, he wasn't kidding. My brain was unscrewed. The skylight in my head was blown away—bang!—and the world streamed in screaming. I understood it all. The stars I couldn't see I could feel. I could feel all their orbits and apogees and zeniths. They were distant friends connected to me through prayer.

Perihelion. That's what I was experiencing. I had never been closer to the sun. Emotionally. Physically. My feet and legs were a memory that belonged to someone else. They kept going on their own. I emancipated them about an hour after swallowing my small, white disc, a galaxy you could balance on its edge. The world was packed into its machine-milled shell. Harlow said just let it go and I was just letting it go. All of it.

Driving was so subterranean. Dark and close. I bore through the air and left behind a curving, undulating tunnel shaped like my three-dimensional shadow. It was so clear now. I left traces everywhere, spawning miniature versions of myself. Geometrical clones. Fractals that kept growing as I sped by, fanned to glowing embers. They evolved and became a million future selves, each one bound to me and free to wander. Mother and child. The car stopped and parked and I seeped through the crack in the windshield. It pinched me as I was halfway through and shattered. There was a beer bottle involved.

The house was glowing with music. I had trouble walking, so I swam to the door. The music was a heavy buoying current. Each note was a distinct flavor. I bobbed outside in the current for a year or two and drank. I was so thirsty, and I drank the velvet night into me. The air was draped loosely over the world, and I held it in my lungs like a precious metal. Harlow was a magician. He was right about everything. He could predict the past. I didn't know how the blood got on my arm.