I hear voices in my head.
I don’t think I’m crazy. Or maybe this is crazy, I just haven’t caught up yet. Or it’s the universe that has just gone crazy and it hasn’t caught up yet.
This is just crazy thinking. I am not imagining this. In fact, I think, deep down, I always knew it would come to this. All those years, the séances, the UFO-sighting trips to the Negev, the telepathy tests, the tarot readings, the meditation, the Tantric yoga, reading Von Daniken, the LSD (but only twice), reading Castaneda (but only once), the mind-group thing we tried in the commune, the nudism, the veganism, the Ouija boards, the Rorschach tests — all that was like basic training in the army, readying me — for this:
The voices are like the babble of water rising from deep under the sea. The voices are like oozing black lava, dripping upwards from underwater vents, burning in the water. Somewhere is another voice, shouting my name. Somewhere far away, in another life, shouting an alien name. Dganit. Dganit. But I am the great nameless. I am a cloud of darkness, a thing which has no name, can have no name, a thing ancient beyond humanity, beyond worlds, a thing not of the world and yet within it. I am naked before it. I spread my arms and twirl with its power, and I speak to it.
It sees me.
All around me they die, humans, tiny things, petals of a rose blowing in the rising storm. Danny and Misha and Mike, screaming but like a weak, soft, final movement of a melody on violin. Violin. Violence. Violated. I feel it through me, like tentacles caressing my body, touching my skin, touching me inside, soft, slippery, sensuous. And yet I know that to it, too, I am nothing, another petal blowing in the wind, and yet —
It sees me.
There is a terrible darkness and I am a fading star suspended in the dome of a crumbling sky. I try to whisper I love you and my words go into that horrible, awesome nothingness, but it isn’t nothing: it is alive, it knows, it hungers. Words are simply not enough. But they are all I have.
Let me paint you a picture, then, with the words I still have left: Gilly’s house broken like a doll’s house, as if a giant child had been punching holes in the roof, in the walls, with its tiny giant fists. Gilly nowhere to be seen. Outside, the pavement red and slippery. A 1978 white Toyota lying on its side, the front window smashed, a doll — or perhaps it is a child? — dangling from the rolled-down window of the back seat. Rain falls, and the car is no longer white. Columns of white light, pulsating, growing stronger, swirling like dervishes, their batons people. Someone laughs. I hear the siren of a fire truck. I hear the sound of gunfire. Strange. To hear gunfire. To hear fire. There is fire all around me, alive, a seeing, feeling fire, a cold, indifferent flame awakened from a million years of slumber. Take me! Don’t leave me here!
And a part of me, the part that did the degree, and the Masters, the part that was writing a PhD for Professor Amir, the slimy cock with the wandering hands, the cold analytical part of me is thinking:
Some sort of invisible force field, yes. Self-sustainable motion. Resembling a localized tornado. No signs of a biological mind, intelligence might exist on the molecular level, a quantum matrix of probability computing —
And the other part of me knows that these are the gods, the angels, the demons, the monsters of a thousand and one religions made manifest, craving the flesh; and an eye sees me and I see myself in it: an eye the size of a galaxy, with star clouds swirling in its blackest depths, and I, a speck of dust across a universe where I am insignificant, an accident crawling out of a molecular soup, fins becoming hands, a tail growing, falling off, only its bone remaining, a speck of dust daring to stand erect, beginning to think, discovering fire, mathematics, gunpowder, a thinking animal that thinks, mainly, about fucking and, when not fucking, about killing other animals like it. Can you see me? I cry. I scream. I stand on the edge of the road and the road is empty. Take me with you! And it passes me by, and the red rain falls, and the eye withdraws from me, blinks for aeons, turns away, having seen nothing of any significance. Please! I run after the maelstrom. I hear voices in my head, and they crowd everything else away, all thought, all feeling, love or hate or fear, voices alien beyond knowing, voices filling my head to the brim until I scream and scream and scream.