Last week I flew for the first time in four years. I never loved it before, and I certainly don’t enjoy it now, but I needed to fly out for my little sister’s college graduation, and after hanging out with her and her friends for a few days, I admit to some measure of relief at returning to the airport for my flight back home.
My problem with flying isn’t the flying itself. It’s the people. The forced proximity to strangers, the mixture of agreed upon politeness and detached friendliness that was probably meant to lubricate these kinds of awkward situations, but always wound up making me feel claustrophobic and anxious. That’s why, on most uses of mass transit, I find a wall to prop against and pretend that I’m asleep.
That had been my plan on the flight back home too, but at soon as someone sat down in the seat next to mine, I could feel their eyes on me. The idea irritated me. I couldn’t look to be sure they were staring in my direction—if I did, they’d know I wasn’t asleep. But I could still tell. Why were they doing it? Were they just that bored or rude?
“You do a bad job of faking being asleep, you know.” The voice was that of an older man, pitched soft and low as though he was sharing a secret with a co-conspirator. “Your breaths aren’t slow enough. Or deep enough. And your hands are tensed.”
Feeling a flush of embarrassment, I cracked an eye open to look at the man beside me. He was a heavyset man with a grey handlebar mustache and a black leather vest that I guessed wasn’t being worn ironically. When I met his gaze, his amused smile broke into a grin.
“There you are.” He raised his hand. “And hey, no judgment. These plane trips can be nightmares. If you want peace and quiet, I’ll keep my yap shut.”
I shifted in my seat as I let out a small laugh. “Nah, it’s cool. My name’s Jordan.”
He nodded, tapping his forehead as though doffing an invisible cap. “Mine’s Breckin. Good to meet you.” He gestured toward the passing stewardess. “I’m going to get a beer when we take off. You want anything? It’s on me.”
I shrugged. “Just a water is fine with me.”
Breckin nodded. “So where you headed?”
“Home. My sis graduated, so I flew out for the week.” I fell silent for a moment before feeling compelled to add, “What about you?”
He grinned. “It’s good you did that. Family is important.” Chuckling, he rolled his eyes. “Me, I’m heading out to a conference. I work for a large pharmaceutical outfit, and part of my job is going to speak at these nerd herds a couple of times a year.” Breckin grimaced. “I hate it, so back a few years ago I decided to adopt a persona when I go to one. It’s like a cartoon version of myself that dresses like an urban cowboy and tells weird jokes and uncomfortable stories to people he corners at the conference or the hotel bar.” He snickered. “At first, it was just a way to get over nerves and make things more entertaining. Now I look forward to it.” He looked up at the stream of air coming through the vent above him and moved to adjust it. “Hell, I’ve just had to come to terms with the fact that I like fucking with people from time to time.”
I surprised myself by laughing loudly once everything he was saying sunk in. “So you go to the things, see a lot of the same people year after year, and none of them know the real you? Just this made-up cartoon character you play on trips?”
Breckin nodded. “Yep. The way I look at it, it’s not even lying. What’s the ‘real’ me or you anyway?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
We sat in companionable silence for a few minutes until the flight had taken off and the seatbelt sign darkened. Gesturing to the aisle, I said, “Well whoever I am, I have to piss. Be right back.” Breckin laughed and moved his knees in as I scooted by. When I got back, he was sipping on a beer and my bottle of water was waiting for me.
Sitting back down, I pointed at his outfit. “It is funny though. I never would have pegged you for a chemist.” Opening my water, I took a deep swig before thinking better of what I’d said. “No offense, you just don’t look like what I’d picture. But then I don’t think know any other chemists either.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Well, no offense taken. I see myself as more than just a chemist anyway, though that’s what I get paid for. I’m more of a shaman.”
I snorted water and sat the bottle back down. “A shaman? Like a priest or something?”
Breckin shook his head. “No, like a guide. Someone that can open the way.” When I looked confused, he waved his hand in the air like he was erasing a board. “Let me start over. Try to sound like less of a hippie or religious nut.” He opened one hand and tapped his palm. “What connects you to this world around us?”
I frowned and gave a shrug. “Um, the internet?”
He rolled his eyes as he muttered under his breath. “For fuckin…no, I mean the actual world, not that crap. Your body. Your body lets you see and hear and feel and all that, right?”
Blushing, I nodded. “Um, yeah.”
“Okay, well your body is connecting your brain to the world, too right? I mean, without your body, your brain couldn’t see or hear or feel on its own.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.”
“And your brain connects to who you really are—call it your soul or your essence or whatever you want, but fair to say that whatever is the real you, you wouldn’t be able to use your body to interact with the world without a brain.”
I nodded agreement, but Breckin was already speaking again.
“And what connects all of these things? Chemicals. Beautiful, wonderful electrochemical reactions that lets your eyes see the world, your brain understand it, and that central core that is you experience that which we call existence.” He spread his hands out like he was opening a large book or map before giving me a wink.
“I mean, yeah, that makes sense. It’s kind of cool when you think about it like that.”
He raised a finger. “It is cool. But it’s also more than a little bit of a lie. Because unfortunately, we are bound to this…” The man slapped his arm loud enough to make me jump slightly. “…this meat. And the meat lies to us. It tells us that this is what we are. Our soul is calcified by illusions of will and phantasms of personality. We become so caught up in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, the fears and aspirations of the meat, that our true being, our true purpose, is obscured, even from ourselves. And so many of us wind up living in service of this false self, never seeing things as they truly are.”
Wiping my mouth, I sat down my bottle. “Okay…so what do you think our true purpose is?” I was genuinely interested, which kind of surprised me given my normal skepticism and avoidance of anything that sounded too religious or new-agey. I was also feeling weird though—I wondered if it was the altitude, or just needing to eat something. When was she going to bring by the sna…
“That’s not for me to say. You need to experience it for yourself.”
I frowned at him, disappointed. “What…you want me to go to a sweat lodge or something?” I giggled a little. “Not trying to be shitty, it’s just…I don’t really go in for that kind of string. Thing. That kind of thing.”
He grinned at me. “No worries. And no need. You don’t need to do anything. Because you’ve already done it.”
I stared confusedly at him. My head was feeling warm and tight all of a sudden, and it was hard to see Breckin now, like he was far away. “I have? What have I…done?”
Patting my leg, he nodded at the empty water bottle. “You drank 50ccs of my special recipe. It shares some of the same characteristics as DMT and ahyusca, but the base formula of this stuff is radically more potent. And what you just drank? It’s not the base formula I make for the company. It’s a private blend just for me and my good friends.” He leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “No worries. You’ll be falling away soon.”
Squinting at him, I tried to swallow, but I couldn’t. “Special recipe? You drugged me?”
He cut his eyes toward me with a frown. “I just gave you a gift. I call it DOTS. It’s short for Dissolution of the Self.” Breckin broke into a grin. “Ah, there you g…”
The smiling man was gone. So was the plane. I wasn’t blind or unconscious, and I had no idea of being asleep or in a dream.
The world around me was flat and grey, mounds of dust rising and falling in the distance, as though kicked up by some momentary gust of wind or an animal burrowing into the ground. As I watched, I realized I could see shapes in the dust clouds—people, places, perhaps even a person named Jordan sitting on a plane somewhere. The thought of how I was seeing at all in this land of grey dust and black sky never occurred to me. But then I wasn’t concerned about my lack of fear, either.
I didn’t know it at the time, but it was because I wasn’t thinking about me as I usually do. I wasn’t scared of dying or making a mistake. Wasn’t concerned with how other people viewed me or how I was going to succeed or fail in that physical world I was usually trapped in.
It’s not that I was a blank—just the opposite. In many ways I felt more real and more powerful than I had ever felt before. It’s just that all the extras had been stripped away—all the distractions, the rabbits I would normally chase, the holes I would step in, they were all gone. And looking at the shifting grey shapes all around me, stretching out forever to mimic an infinite variety in that place I’d come from, I felt like I was seeing the truth behind the world. It was all dust and shadow, dancing to distract you from the real.
The dark lands were suddenly lit by a flash of purple lightning in the distance, except this lightning didn’t fork to the ground and fade away. It leapt along the ground, growing closer with every bound, and soon joined with more arcs from other directions. I was transfixed for a moment, both by their beauty and their effects on the undulating columns of dust—the grey twitched and shudder, growing more solid and more violent as the light grew closer.
And as the lightning drew near, I began to make out shapes in it. Terrible things that I could see in this form, but could never truly understand. I would have screamed if I’d had a voice, or closed my eyes if I had a body. But I had nothing but the core of my pure self, a being that could perceive and understand much, but lacked any cushion or buffer for the sharper edges of the truth.
And the truth was, these things racing toward me were on the hunt. They could see me because I could see them, and in some indefinable way I knew they were filled with a rage and a hunger and a violence so profound it defied any definition or analogue in the world I’d been born in. I wasn’t thinking of that world or my birth or my body at the moment though.
I was thinking about the lightning about to strike me, with all those golden teeth buried deep inside.
I was pondering what this sensation was, this raw emptiness, like a wound in the center of the perfection of my pure self, and then I recognized it. Understood it.
Apparently even in this place, without time or deception or the trappings of the meat, I could feel fear.
I jerked awake with a gasp, the world of the plane and my body in the seat overwhelming me for a moment. “Ahhhh…Gahhhh….I…” I huffed heavily, my forehead against the seat in front of me as I slowly became aware of the sweat running down my chest and a dull ache in my right leg. When a heavy hand began to pat me on the back, I flinched before looking over to see…who? A man. He was beside me. His name was…
“Breckin…What did you do…to me…”
He smiled, but his eyes weren’t as bright as I was starting to remember they’d been before. “I pulled you back out. It would happen naturally in a few hours, but we’re about to land and I didn’t want to risk them getting too close.” Breckin shrugged. “Time doesn’t really work there, but things still somehow happen if you stay too long.” His lips thinned slightly. “Did you see them?”
I didn’t have to ask what he meant. There were parts of my time in that other place, that other, maybe truer version, of this place, that were already fading away. Fading or changing so they made sense to me over on this side of the curtain. But the things in the lightning…I couldn’t picture them entirely, but I remembered them coming for me. That and their burning, golden teeth.
“What are they?”
He shook his head slightly. “I still don’t know. Not exactly. One of the lifeforms on that level of existence? I’ve seen them since I started using my formula five years ago. For a long time they were just flashes far away. But then something triggered them. Maybe I went over too much, or I did something they didn’t like. Since then, they follow me around, even when I’m not over there.”
Squinting against an encroaching headache, I leaned against the cabin wall so I could see Breckin better. “Why did you do that to me?” I heard a raw, plaintive fear in my voice I couldn’t fully understand even as I said the words. “They saw me. They were coming for me.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that’s the idea. They have a real hard-on for me, but they’re not that hard to distract. I know it sucks, but you’ve probably bought me a few days or weeks of peace from them hunting me, depending on how long you last. And I really do appreciate it.”
I stared at him in disbelief. “You’re using me as bait? As some kind of sacrifice to throw them off the trail?” When he just stared at me, I leaned forward, my jaw clenched as I tried to keep myself from attacking him. “Well fuck you. Because I’m never going back. And if I ever seen you again, I’ll fucking kill you.”
Breckin snorted and shrugged. “That’s fair. But you don’t get it. You didn’t go to some other place. You just saw what’s really here. What’s really everywhere around us. Those things that are after you? They can’t kill your physical body, no. But when you slip back across the veil, most likely they’ll be waiting. And you better figure out fast how to get away or get back, or they’re going to…well, I don’t know exactly what they’ll do if they catch you, but my advice is to not find out.” He chuckled. “It’s advice that has served me well over the years.”
“Didn’t you hear me? I’m not going back or ‘across the veil’ again or whatever. I’m done. And if you ever try to find me and dose me again, I’m not joking. I will kill you.”
The man leaned back in his chair with a disappointed sigh. “You know why you’re not yelling for a stewardess right now? Calling for a cop or an air marshal? Because you know I’m telling you the truth, and you know there’s nothing you can do about it. Even if you could convince them I did something to your water or injected you in the leg to wake you up, it wouldn’t help you. Because what you experienced was real.” His eyes were almost seemed sad as he glanced back in my direction. “I bet you know another truth too. I bet you can feel it the same way I did after my first time.”
I leaned back, my lips trembling. “I don’t need another dose, do I?”
He shook his head. “Nope. It was a refinement of my private brew I didn’t foresee. When I fell away the first time, it changed me forever, and for months I took it as a blessing that I would sometimes find myself back in that strange and wonderful place, the world behind the world, I call it. I even got where I can control it sometimes, but only to fall away when I want.” Breckin rubbed his face. “I haven’t found a way to stop it from happening at other times, and when I go now, those things are always after me.” He gestured to me. “Unless, of course, they’re off running down another rabbit.”
There was no question. He was right, it did change you in some ways. And there was no question that he was telling me the truth, horrible as it was, as some part of me already knew it before he said it. There was a doom circling me now, looking out at me from behind the world, waiting for me to come back within its grasp.
“You motherfucker.”
Breckin shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I know, I know. And I am sorry. You seem like a good kid. But I’ve been having to do this periodically for over three years, and I’ve learned I can’t be picky on who I dose. Targets of opportunity and all that.”
“I’ll kill you.”
The man shrugged. “You could, but I think you know it won’t help with your problem. Our problem. If anything, you’d just be getting rid of another rabbit for them to chase.” He rubbed his chin. “I don’t know what happens when we die, but I’m pretty sure we don’t stay here. On this side or the other.”
Slumping into my seat, every breath felt like an effort. It was probably my imagination, but it was almost like I could feel those things close by, watching us hungrily. “What am I supposed to do?”
Breckin shrugged again. “Live your life. Practice moving when you’re over there. It’s different, not physical, but you can move around if you can understand how. It’s hard to explain. But it’s also helped me stay alive a few times when they got too close.”
I glared at him. “Maybe they’ll just go after your ass again now. Or split up to get both of us.”
He smiled thinly. “Always a chance, but they seem to like fresh meat. It excites them. They never forget about me, but they don’t tend to turn down a run on a new rabbit.” Breckin glanced up toward the stewardess at the front of the aisle. “Well, looks like we’re finally getting off.” He stood up and grabbed a small bag from the pouch on the back of the seat in front of him. Pausing, he looked back down at where I was staring at him bleakly from my seat. “It really was nice meeting you, Jordan. And I am sorry.” He sighed. “For all my big talk, I’m still scared. Scared of dying on this side. Scared of what they might do to me on the other.”
When I just looked at him, he went on awkwardly. “Stay hydrated and take Vitamin D supplements. Both of those can reduce the frequency of falling away, don’t ask me why. And don’t give up. I’ve survived it for this long, and for the first few months it was just by getting away from them. And who know, you may be better at it than I am.”
I felt my cheek jump slightly. “Why’d you stop?”
Breckin frowned. “Stop what?”
“Stop just…running from them when you went over. If you’re so sorry for fucking over other people by using them as bait or distractions or whatever, why didn’t you just keep running away from them instead?”
His cheeks turned red as he glanced away, stepping forward a bit as another passenger moved past him. “I…I could tell they were getting smarter. Or better at knowing what I was going to do. Where I was going to go. I kept having to go farther and farther, faster and longer each time, and even over there it takes a toll on you. And no matter where you go over there, you still come back over here to wherever you left your body. The farther away you were, the harder it is here too. The last time I ran far…the last time before I started using other people as distractions, I was in a coma for nearly a week.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t take that chance again.”
I wanted to ask more, but he was already edging back into the aisle. He met my eyes one last time. “Sorry again, Jordan. Sorry for…well, for waking you.”
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