Andrew Bloom

Heyoka

Heyoka
20. Cigarettes
When Anna-Lunas Tercel pulls up with the news, the coleus beds are
still glazed with dew and River has not had any coffee. The fog above the lot
is the color of a wad of cellophane. Its thick enough to mush Anna-Lunas
features with a lick of Vaseline but stops short of dulling her eyes or the
cherry of the crinkled thin cigarette that points from her lips. River yawns at
the ground. No, this fog would not stick around. This fog would burn off by
noon and yield to clarity.
Such times as now, one can hear things: the flat-four engine whining off;
a door opening and her footsteps on gravel, sounding crunchy and lush as
good gravel ought to sound. The memory of a plant nursery where Topanga
Canyon hits PCH in almost Santa Monica and not quite Malibu but still
decidedly California. That was an Amtrak ride south of here, back home.
Want one? Anna-Luna asks. She can roll River another. Shes getting
better at it. River should consider, seriously, the offer. In a place as strewn
with talents as a college town, where the unicycles come equipped with
subwoofers, there is something heraldic about the rolling of a cigarette by
hand the finesse involved, the whirring of lacquered fingernails.
River has his own though, thanks. Brandishing the teal box, unopened
and glossy in its plastic, a bauble of late adolescence. He thumbs at its
corners, its duty-paid sticker.
Their perch is on the railing for the ADA ramp where they can glimpse
the lighted apex of Martha Mountain across the valley, across the city. The
Palace Mastodon is overhead, a crate of twilight for a few more minutes
while the sunrise accelerates. The sunrise accelerates because of simple
harmonic motion Hilbert would say although the circular transit of the
earth about the sun is constant, the phenomenon becomes one-dimensional

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when the earth is the point of reference. So the sun accelerates at sunrise and
sunset, an apparent retaliation to this robbery of a dimension. Anna-Lunas
lighter is a red Bic, red like the Tercel. Red is Hilbert would say the
largest wavelength of electromagnetism visible to humans. And Jan would
say red is the color of pain and blood and communism. Oren would say
erotic beauty.
The box of cigarettes is itself a thing of beauty: the neatness of its
magazine of cylinders; the resistance of the foil insert to Rivers yank, its
removal a concise motion evoking Snickers bars and hand grenades; and the
misplaced austerity of the Surgeon Generals advice. Warning, it reads, the
letters wearing a Helvetica clone, thirteen-point medium condensed, treading
outwards. Tobacco smoking causes birth defects. This is Rivers favorite of
the set. Mark N/A for Not Applicable.
How many rustic details had puppeteered this box into Rivers hand?
Somewhere are the crosswords of conveyor belts, the rows of never-open
doors. How many cousins had it known, back in the factories, the fulfillment
centers, the loci of distribution that had transported it from the Deep South
to San Bardo? Were some still there, packed in pallets and crates to the
ceiling? Have they all been smoked?
A TV turns on somewhere in the courtyard. Mass graves were unearthed
in Bulgaria. Most Buddhists do not condone self-immolation. Its time to
short metalloid futures, starting with Antimony. Ashes to ashes, et ceteras to
ad infinitums. But these things are not conversation.
River is supposed to take a cigarette from the box, not the one in his
mouth and which Anna-Luna is generous to ignite for him, but an extra one,
a special one, the right one he will know which one is the right one and
replace it in the box upside down. This is his lucky cigarette and it must be
smoked last of all in order to get any of the luck out of it. The ritual has its
origins in delinquent monomyth; there had once, in a goldener age, been a

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progressive-leaning tobacco enterprise that included a single marijuana

cigarette within alternating packages of regular cigarettes.
But why did people start putting them back in upside down and saving
them for last?
I dont know, Anna-Luna says. Thats just how it goes.
Rivers cigarettes had been a gift from Tom the teenage train hopper
from Baltimore. Not a gift, more than a gift the consummation of a
contractual obligation on Toms part. The terms of an accord. When Eco
and Anna-Luna brought him home three days ago it was a sagacious
circumvention of the Palace Mastodons policy on pets. They found him
soiled and disoriented in the Mission plaza and fell head over heels. It was
the eyes. No surprise there. Toms were brown like Anna-Lunas brown, like
Rivers brown, but these had gleamed with magic and intrigue and the
alchemical flecks of danger. The shine of the life of not knowing where
youre sleeping tonight. These eyes told tales of beards, betrayal, and certain
doom in corrugated lean-tos. They were courageous, unrelenting eyes.
The rest of Tom was unsightly. River had gotten him to shower not in
his and Yolos shower, in Hilberts and Spenders shower (Jesus, said
Spender) after the third day, but this had had more to do with the inherent
pathos of living with one of the anonymous Ewell children than it did with
Rivers hygienic sensibilities. The palace-mates washed his clothes, clapped
the mud off his shoes, and made room for his knapsack among the already
overcrowded, overstuffed, designed for four comfortably Palace Mastodon.
The kitchen nook had its hookah returned and the linoleum floor of the
common rooms far corner covered in the chammy in which Tom elects to
sleep. The orange of a benevolent sunset happening outside the window had
begun to claim the interior. That was when River found the knife, a flecky
thing that folded into a beech handle, the muffled clamors coming from a
university washing machine, from a load of whites. Tom had been keeping it
in a sock.
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Hed needed it for protection, being a homeless vagabond. Being

sixteen, skitching boxcars. Getting to California. The knife is, for him, a tool
of utmost survival. A dire weapon for the direst of circumstances. It is the
instrument of his self-defense, a precise edge for imprecise usage. The most
minor antidote to the paranoia of getting jumped for his lifes savings.
Hes sixteen? He always sounds like hes narrating Survivorman.
But platitudes have been the rub of Toms soliloquies, the rub, maybe, of
Tom himself. Anna-Luna is helpless to their charm, their rugged
libertarianism doing something invigorating and probably sexual to her
woodsy liberal faculties. River finds them irritating, disingenuous,
untrustworthy.
When the society abandons you, Tom had hissed through the crack of
Rivers bedroom door, abandon the society. The knife and other charms
jangling on his belt like sacred talismans.
And that was this morning already?
My wake-up call. Not fifteen minutes before you got here.
Anna-Luna must be curious to know how River finally cracked. It was
too sudden. The thinking being, surely, even the most talented and
precocious vagrant couldnt have gained his trust so quickly. Anna-Luna has
read from Rivers first-editions, twanged on the guitar made from real spruce
and Brazilian rosewood, which River needs proper documentation to even
possess because its endangered. In actuality the first editions are not quite so
rare and the guitar was purchased on a recession special, but no matter. River
is no materialist. Its more subtle than that: its something about his
acquiescence, his taking on Toms liability that threatens to upset a balance,
to tip a scale that resents his suburban upbringing. There are addling
consequences to consider. To break eye contact with the spider on your
armoire is a mistake you only make once. So what concessions had River
demanded? What supplicating act of tribute would suffice as rent?
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Shes laughing now. Dear God, youve made him your slave.
Not quite. He just has to wake me up early and fetch me a new box of
American Spirits whenever I run out. His servitude is mild by historical
standards.
And true enough, Tom had given himself over to his role with an
enthusiasm approaching Stanislavsky. When River swung open the door
Tom was there with the cigarettes on a pillow and a doily. Life in the Crystal
Palace Mastodon. The Palace Mastodon of Versailles. The Country of the
Infinite Subjunctive. If stars had been twinkling little diamonds in the sky,
River would have had to have wondered how they twinkled.
And where had Tom procured a doily in San Bardo? The resources of
the vagabond extraordinaire are always in surplus, was the answer, as his
inventories are performed with fresh eyes wherever he goes. The worldwearied eyes of the sedentary have relinquished their powers of discovery.
Only the vagabond can help himself to the invisible, discounted, or discarded
lucre of the forlorn masses. Meaning Tom had found it in the trash
somewhere. River thinks of recent conversations meditating on the virtues of
consistent showering.
But, well, hes awake, isnt he? Anna-Luna does her curly smile. And
youve got your cigarettes.
This is technically correct. River must give credit where it is due, but
really he is still exhausted from not sleeping and from the double exertion of
navigating the mirror-world purview of those who are exhausted from not
sleeping. He thinks about yawning again. It helps to stop what hes doing and
blink a few times, and then begin again with only the observable data.
Anna-Luna has gorgeous hair. When she exhales her smoke is a thick and
particulate contrail in the atmosphere, looking like expensive special effects
a more substantial conjuration than River can muster, being from a filterless
hand-rolled but there is an effect on her posture, a tipping back of the head
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and the straightening of the spine and stomach so the release of the smoke is
fluid in its offering, achieving self-expression. When this happens, her hair
likes to swath around her back, to sweep over shoulders, to challenge the
pointiness of her breasts, which have resisted admirably the orbish hegemony
of twenty-first century brassieres, with a skirring of brown, the recessive
boon of a fraction of Mexican or maybe indigenous Mayan copulation in
distant ancestry. Rivers mind, when sleep will not come, sometimes
computes the varying possibilities of Anna-Lunas makeup, the Punnett
squares shifting rows and columns until something like her nose or eyebrows
self-manifests. But the comparisons are always off. There is a saturnine
quality in her face that River cannot synthesize, a presence that dances from
the probes of what Eco calls the inner dynamo in the machinery of guts. The
place in your head where sense data and imagination play rock paper scissors
over who gets to be real for the moment. He could have cited Coleridge in
Kublai Khan but it goes all the way back to Plato. A shadows-on-the-wall
scenario. Moonlight on a blank pool.
River had put his thumb on it once, maybe, before falling back to halfsleep: Anna-Lunas face is royal, but its aura proletarian; her body
sardanapalian, and yet belonging to the people. But this discovery had come
in advance of a midterm covering Eros and Thanatos (Professor Eigenvalue:
Literally sex! Literally death!) in primary epics, and Anna-Lunas body was
perhaps fated to make an appearance.
Not that River would ever enjoy it; Anna-Lunas been screwing Hilbert
for three years. Nobody can figure it out. Opposites, its been postured, can
sometimes attract, but this isnt that. This is matter and antimatter at the
point of annihilation. The point is moot a snapped-in-half pencil during the
final exam. River has since settled on wishing for Hilbert to notice her more,
to cook her something with multiple vegetables in it, to take her on a proper
date. River has taken tangible action to implement this strategy, which
sometimes costs no more effort than magneting the Diablos showtimes to
the refrigerator. Thats what ought to be done for girls who say things like
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I think today will be a day of intense beauty.

Something uncoils inside Rivers entrails. The pleasure is professorial
rapture, quaking like the superfluous thighs of the female rows on Keats day
what spontaneity, what perception! The handcrafting of the obvious. And
how gently it was spoken. Today will be a day of intense beauty. If River had
thought of it first hed have written it down on something.
What makes you say that?
Why wouldnt it be?
And why wouldnt it be?
Anna-Luna takes a serious drag. The colors are all there, is what it boils
down to. The stage lights with their filtered lenses. The cans of paint in
precarious geometries, somewhere high up, up on a ladder, up on a hill.
Theyre waiting to fall down, and River shouldnt delude himself for a second
into thinking they wont fall down. They were put up there for a singular
purpose: to get in the way of somebodys feet or of the cleaning lady. But
sooner or later theyll spill, spill a deluge of color, a hysteric surf of color, a
foamy rage of color that surges over the coast, the pier, the highway, the
mountains. Picture all the vivid hues, their names the progeny of boardrooms
of New York and Chicago advertising firms: Gingko-Green, ArrogantDaffodil-Yellow, Red-Red-Rose-Red, Off-White, Bone-White, White Pride,
White

Guilt,

Im-Going-To-Eat-Your-Lunch-In-Front-Of-You-White

blending and unblending in the chaparral, Pollack with an electric eggbeater

from above: the acid tie-dye, the gasoline rainbows. A crate of melted
crayons. The indelible afterbirth of cool. How indiscriminately will they stain
the landscape with grace and feeling. How bravely will they resurface the
earth.
Anna-Lunas cigarette is out, and she lets it fall to the concrete. But it is
not your destiny to get blotted out! Poor River, painted by numbers. That
wouldnt do. No, youll stand on the beach with your hand out. Youll
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command the waves to stop, surpass all who came before, surpass Canute.
Youll not get your robes wet.
Thats making me sound too special. Too different.
Today is the day that was special. Today is the day that was different.
Anna-Luna does this to River. Anyone else, River sponsors a shaking to
the senses. But these are Anna-Lunas senses and always have been. AnnaLuna does not make art. Art makes Anna-Luna.
What does River make?
So whats the story on tonight? River flicks his remaining cigarette into
the planter, breaking theatrically the slumber of any snails or raccoons.
But River neednt worry. Anna-Luna has gotten out of work the
preparation of authentic and affordable Mediterranean cuisine for a drunken
clientele of fraternity brothers and sorority sisters, who with actual letterman
jackets and legs filled with antifreeze make the nightly trek, braving the fog
and the police and the perverts just for the chance to chow down on
something wrapped in a warm pita before having to turn around and crawl
back to the regulation beer pong tables, back to bed and the Tercel is back
up and running. She has supreme confidence in the alternator, oil pan and
engine belt. Less so in the brakes and tires, but shell happily drive him across
town in time for his train. And she has a dire need to see more sunrises
before next years changing of the zodiac. Ecos prescription.
So, transportation secured. The stretchy smile makes it so. River feels a
pressure lift from his entire day, even though it hasnt happened yet, its
intense beauty not yet arrived.
Come find me later and your cigarette is on me.
Anna-Luna steps in and embraces River, gently and carefully and with
hands briefly clasping behind his back before her turning and heading for the

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elevator. This is a motif by now, her way of saying youre welcome. This is
her way of making you feel like your problem was never a problem to begin
with; there was only ever your core self, your mystic being, and the seductive
ego, the chimerical whispering ego. The ego distracts your gnostic self, tricks
it into forgetting that there are no problems. This is her way of outrunning
your thinking, relieving the hamsters in the wheels, the out of control
unspooling of your Eckhart Tolle tape cassettes, the light in your head wiping
out your batteries.
You shouldnt get so hung up on rationalizing things, she says at the ends
of Rivers tirades. The brain understands more than the mind knows.
When River looks up, the rest of Madonna Mountain is illuminated, the
sun having risen completely from behind Cerro San Bardo, upon whose
alluvial plain stands the Palace Mastodon, erected sometime during the
Clinton years when there was money for student housing. Whether the
Palace Mastodon actually resembles a mastodon is anybodys guess, the
structure being so denominated during one of Ecos more emphatic sermons
for its bizarre configuration of windows Rivers and Hilberts respective
bedrooms as eyes and a bulbous emergency staircase which spirals the
length of the structure. This is typically thought of as the trunk.
Its hard for new people to see the mastodon in it, but River had gotten it
right away. Eco, colored impressed, had rolled for him a personal joint with
the special flax papers and with a sprig of sage and mugwort.
Anna-Lunas elevator has come back down to ground. River approaches
from the shadowed side, the path a sealed concrete integral in the still-night.
Grids of polluted windows press into the structure, the eyes of a giant roving
beast ensnared in a Lilliputian net. These are the fluorescent jellies the
Argos Panoptes, son of Arestor, guardian of the heifer-nymph Io the wily
conductor, by some accounts, of one hundred eyes. Eyes enough that a few
remain open while the others sleep.

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19: The Palace Mastodon

Up on the rooftop where all of San Bardo may serve the role of ashtray,
Hilbert is worried about prime numbers. He is this close, gesturing to suggest
an anatomically improbable penis, to a constructive proof of Goldbachs
Conjecture, he can smell it. He can feel it in his shins. But he worries about
the primes. Is it too early to worry about the primes?
Says River, I was awoken by a sermonizing bumchild this morning. It is
not to early to worry about the primes.
This is good because Goldbachs Conjecture in its strongest form says
something to the effect of two the thing that number theoreticians define,
embarrassingly, as the set of all things where there is one thing and also one
more thing, which could both be exactly similar things but not necessarily just
to make the description follow, which would be circular, ipso facto anyway,
two being the lowest even number that cannot be written as the sum of two
primes in at least one way. That is to say all even numbers can be expressed
as the sum of two prime numbers, which even River should know prime
numbers, in at least one way. Thats Goldbachs Conjecture.
The Conjecture is one of those chameleons of mathematics, its
propositional logic slipping into the ranks of other well-formed theorems of
Zermelo-Franklin axiomatic number theory plus C not the calculus plus C
but the Axiom of Choice, which River loosely understands as having to do
with being able to turn over as many rocks as he likes and always counting on
finding something under there, something other than arachnids and pinkorange chanterelles (cook half in olive oil and sell the other half to
restaurants, the mushrooms not the spiders) with perfect nonchalance, the
scant string of numerals occupying barely one line, its minimalism and
economy of space unnerving approaching eerie, petrifying, preternatural
and commanding of respect:
n 2( p, q P(2n = p + q)) (1. Theorem)
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Hilberts professors have said this expression gleams; undergraduates remain

too unlearned, too yet gauche in their mathematics to grok the eloquence in
this sort of expression, so its best to take their word for it and not be too
hung-over during the midterm. But the professors are all about the majesty
of the primes. Their randomness, the chaotic sublime the effortless, dutiful
spelling of all patterns River can hope to ask of them: his phone number, his
birthday, his social security number, a base-ten hashing of all the information
that has ever existed threatening always to burst out from the lid of the
carefully scripted numerals, not strictly Arabic as is sometimes thought but
actually our inheritance from the ancient Phoenicians, the most prolific and
prosperous merchants of their era.
Clay tablets encode the algorithms for agriculture and worship. The
Babel event and the scattering of tongues. Rivers C-minus in cultural
anthropology. Stop it.
The looks, now, about the rooftop are uniform, the mock solemnity
melting and dripping fast from the bemusement, the sensual mush of Ecos
banana omelets breaking fast with poise, restoring life and clean and
sustainable energy to world-wearied eyeballs. Math has here been illustrated
on napkin; here is a point to be proven, the chrysalis of debate here is an
opportunity for opinionating, the intrusion of diverse if also hopelessly
unqualified offerings the consummation of some hippie democratic
superego, the resonance of a familiar American catechism. Is it a mentality?
The intellectual climate of San Bardo can hardly be a substantial diversion
from that of the Palace Mastodon, a macrocosm of its own, and of its
inhabitants, where everyone seems to bask in the climate of unquestioning
hippie market liberalism pretending to trust everybody while always
expecting to be sold out. River dislikes being at the center of any sort of
gathering, he across from Hilbert, who smokes the cigarette River offered
first to Eco, who had accepted but was then at that moment chosen to
channel the lightening of a brilliant idea (How about, later? Gasps, all
around, at such self-restraint), when River finds himself surrounded by the
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whole sick crew, sans Steven, the consummate turd and fourth official,
documented roommate, who is still asleep downstairs, collapsed probably
around his Bitcoin rig, probably sleeping and masturbating, who can sleep
and masturbate through the whole story for all River cares.
The Rip Van Winkle of the 21st century would sleep and masturbate for
twenty years before coming, and when he finally did come hed look around
and find himself in a new republic. But if thats the case, hes probably in a
Middle Eastern subprovince right now, where new republics are something
of a hackneyed phenomenon of late. Rip Van Wankle of Arabia.
Says Eco, I have always thought the primes should be left alone. Some
things, you think hard about them, you think far too much, far too hard. You
will blow a gasket. Youll be struck with plague and fall down in your tracks.
Such is the historical defense mechanism of the noetic sciences.
Says Jay Susskind, The primes are mystery. The primes are
quintessentially weird, coming from the Frisian wyrd a mystical destiny, a
shadowy unknown that begs for the illumination of inquiry, not to banish,
not to destroy, but to conquer and assimilate. To heap up the solid ground
for us stand on. The primes are the looming cogito, the eminent challenge
for all mankind. The eradication of polio. The landing on the moon.
Says Anna-Luna, The moon got a lot more boring once we had been
there. We must not shoot down the old monoliths faster than we can set our
sights on new ones.
Says Jay Susskind, You dont mean to say?
Says Anna-Luna, Yes. The monoliths themselves are an endangered
species, an unsustainable resource. We must conserve. Are the primes no
different?
Says Yolo, What are primes?

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Says Jann, who comes from a notable lineage of cultural anthropologists,

The mystique of the primes has prevailed since antiquity. Hilbert obviously
feels the pressure of his ancestors, who with scrolls and compasses
discovered the ominous sea of primeness. There had been no distinguishing
it from magic, from the forks of fire the gods sometimes sent down to
punish the earth. It affected them to the core. It was etched into our
evolutionary memory, the fear a familiar taste, the same that exaggerated and
snowballed into our favorite horrors. Think of recessed eyes, elongated faces,
sharp teeth, and pale skin and feel your skin crawling and your sphincter
sputtering. To slay the primes is to triumph over our earliest predator.
Says Oren, I am a sexual predator.
Says Tom, Word.
Says Yolo, Word.
Says Tom again, Word.
Says Hilbert, A proof of the conjecture will be transcendent. Its ripples
will emanate through time and space. It will have the traits of arresting
beauty. It will jolt you from your reality tunnel.
This last bit amuses River. It seems to him bound to continue on this
way, the democratic discourse in relentless overdrive, its polis the sunny
rooftop, when Eco, serving everyone their portion of omelet, rolls this
Sisyphusian steaming mound into Hilberts lap: Hilbert whose nerves are
slow from an oxycodone habit, Hilbert who for an instant j u s t

stares

before a

yelp of alarm and a speaking of the name of God and the repurposing of the
illustratory napkin to remove the yellow from his trousers. But it is too late,
far too late, far too late. Call the constable, summon the fire brigades, all the
kings horses and all the queens handmaidens but it will do no good. Its
far too late. The stain will never come out.

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And Ecos face is all seriousness and knowing the look of a public
schoolteacher on the precipice of explaining the Holocaust or the Gulag, the
look of a man who for reasons privy to a scant few is about to set his own
barn on fire with the horses inside when he says, One cannot depart from
reality and return.
Oh, yes, now its Heraclitus on the armchair. Aristophanes on the couch.
Freuds Masturbatorium. Yes, its come to this scene again, a fresco fraught
with Euclidian ratios. Paint them all with strategic fig leaves. Some
Guatemalan maid would soon arrive to polish the cumsmudged inner glass
of the fourth wall. No, no, mister Da Vinci no es here.
Nevertheless, the looks now are saintly and stuffed with contemplation,
all but Hilberts, the resonance of Ecos proclamation lingering through
harmonics of countercultural sentiment. One may not, of course, step in the
same river twice, as that would contribute to a paradox that would rip apart
the universe, exploding a shower of constituent atoms into nothingness, but
more importantly for the metaphysical acknowledgement, is whats
happening here, of the self. The I that observes the me. The measurable
actually mattering of the human presence. The corking of the flagons of
nihilism and radical skepticism. The graduation from teenage wasteland.
Eco had said it is important for a conversation with the self to develop
naturally, no pushing and no nudging and no fears and no doubts. The I
must make the me feel comfortable, feel welcome and special. Exalted and
put at ease. The I must not just sit the me down on a corduroy futon and
offer chips and a soda. Exaltation, this is not. The couch must be
upholstered with Kashmir, the trappings caviar and bourbon.
Said River, Is that what youve got going on the burner? The scene had
appeared a little maximal, a little too abstract expressionistic for the more
neoplastic task of banana omelet breakfast: the electric stove supporting a
crock of stew, smelling like curry and frankincense. There were film canisters
and glass vials containing fine, white-yellow ether, a crystalline glistening
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coming out from some inner illumination. A cereal bag of shredded

brownness rested on the counter, its label turned towards the scene like
product placement: Root bark of Mimosa hostilis. The net weight was indicated
in kilograms and decimals of kilograms, the letters on the label pricked with
African-looking serifs. Scrawled recipes and printouts of encyclopedic entries
from sub-rosa corners of cyberspace occluded much remaining whitespace.
Because that had been dimethyltryptamine simmering in the kitchen
when River and Anna-Luna had come upstairs from their smoke. The
solemnity of Ecos diatribe had been thwarted somewhat by the daintiness of
his apron, something Tom had procured probably from a corporate outreach
to more feminine viewers of Nickelodeon, but he carried on regardless.
DMT is not a doorway to the spirit world, he said, but a circus howitzer with
barely enough room in the barrel for a single pilot. No helmet necessary.
DMT is the psychic lubricant to the immortal sublime Emersons not
Wordsworths that humanity had paved over with parking complexes and
hot yoga clinics, the route back into ourselves, the actual third eye we had
always sought. Had River known that the pineal gland is at dead center,
three-dimensional wise, point zero zero zero Cartesian-wise, of our brains?
Had River known that the little guy has an actual cornea? An actual fucking
lens?
River had not, but Eco did not blame him. It was the government that
deserved the blame. The government has been making good on a furtive plot
to calcify pineal glands since the nineteen fifties. It turns out that the
systematic introduction of fluoride to the public water supply has a great
more to do with calcifying pineal glands than it does with promoting dental
health: when the pineal gland becomes calcified, it cannot perform its
evolutionary function. It cannot deliver its existence-justifying secretion to
the bloodstream.
A pause had indicated that it would have been an appropriate time for
River to guess DMT. River had said nothing, but his mouth had been

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allowed to open a little and for Eco to fill the sonic void. Sonic booms are
illegal in certain midwestern states.
DMT is crucial to a humans psychic development. The pineal gland
starts to produce DMT in infancy to begin the nurturing of creativity, the
resistance to the cognitive dissonance and the obsession with minutiae bred
by modern capitalism. In times of such scarcity, it must be synthesized
chemically brewed in the cauldrons of the Palace Mastodons of America
and distributed in high volumes at a low price point. The process is arduous.
There are extractions and reductions and reactions in equilibrium and always
the possibility of combustion of not a few liters of naptha indeed the same
fuel found in Rivers cigarette lighter which alone is best suited to dissolve
the tryptamine molecules into a greasy precipitate, less dense, a gin that floats
to the top of the mixture. Just as River might baste a Chanukah turkey Eco
squeezes this substance into a Pyrex tray and puts it to bed in the freezer for
an overnight slumber. Eco had removed one for demonstration purposes.
White-yellow crystals had blossomed in fractal intervals across the surface,
the psychoactive stalagmites sprouting in arrogant small towers in their own
bergs and neighborhoods. Soon these structures would be atomized or
ingested and broken down to their holiest molecules, propelled through the
bloodstream on their pilgrimage back to the source, across the meningial
threshold and back to the brain, their round-trip fee paid back with a
travelers check of untrue light and sound. Judging by the color River could
be guaranteed, gay run teed, that these were at least ninety-five percent pure,
Eco had explained as he returned the Pyrex to the freezer. This was
something to be impressed about.
If River was of sound mind and body its called the right set and setting
Eco would scrape together a bowl, just for him. It was to be Rivers
inaugural mission as a psychonaut, his proemial harrowing the aenir of
alternate sanities. The inhalation process is typically brutal on first-timers, but
River could consent to have his wrists restrained and his nostrils
clothespinned until his instincts take the wheel, until his diaphragm can bear
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no more, until he breathes deep from one of the greater, named waterpipes
among the Palace wares among them Aldous, The Horn, The Tinman, and
the chandeliery thing known to the apartment and its neighbors as, only, The
Bong. The smoke comes in like a nacreous dragons cock and departs like a
storm of silver butterflies. River had declined.
But what, pray tell, has been the typical experience of a soul stranded in
the land of dimethyltryptamine?
Oh, how the bullet points had flown, but the thesis seemed to revolve
around exactly how difficult it is to condense the collective experience of two
millennia of dimethyltrip-the-fuck-out-amine into a cogent picture. Lights
and sounds, sure, but not like acid, not like oomies which are the
hallucinogens of the plebians. If River wants a trip just for the psychedelia he
can go lick a toad. Because theatrics of DMT are more understated, more
Aronofsky than Polanksi Air contrails through the living room, the wall
barometer blossoming with white petals and silver corollas. Astral winkings
and ambient gridlines. Users report the experience carrying a quality of
profound and unexpected familiarity: a feeling of being in dream, a float on
your back down your favorite creek, your childhood thrown on the projector
and the special moments lit up with halogens.
Palm trees in front of fireworks in front of very far off grey hurricanes.
The yellow line of scrimmage always in front of your toes. Closed-captioning
and picture-in-picture.
A quantity of trippers too numerous to be scientifically written off have
also reported encounters, River making of that what he will, with distinct
third-party entities, with ghosts or sprites or gnomes or extraterrestrials, with
godlike crystalline beings wearing robes of light, with platinum-skinned elven
matriarchs, with disembodied cartoon eyeballs that blink in and out of the
all-blackness and with roomfuls of goblin mailmen who, detecting the
voyagers presence, offer psychic totems, discrete quanta of advice, perhaps
the Covenant rendered without distortion, or sometimes just stop and stare
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and gawp at the intruder. After all, it is unreasonable to expect that all the
denizens of alternate dimensions welcome you with open arms and no
apprehension, no xenophobia how exactly would River behave if, with nary
a warning, the spectre of a twelfth-dimensional shaman crossed into his
plane, into his living room, his car, into the bath with River not knowing
whether to cover his junk or not while the apparition frenziedly demands the
meaning of meaning itself? What the point that River had needed to grasp
was, was that there is something out there, out in the weird, out in the
nebula, something in the ineffable elsewhere that intersects so capriciously with
our universe the distributions tending to align with bigfoot sightings and
those anonymous deserted igloos on the beach that River serenely yearns to
see opened but chickens out for fear of knowing too much, of discovering a
detached human head or whatever the luminous MacGuffin they kept in the
briefcase in Pulp Fiction something that transcends the creamy nougat
subjectivity of the human experience only to arrive at more subjectivity.
Platos cave as Russian dolls. People and philosophers are always talking
about truth, always doting on it in the hopes of earning its favor, of
capitalizing that T in time for the next election, the next World War.
Everyone craves personal, cosmic vindication. But truth, at the end of the
day, is just another anthropomorphism. Truth and falsehood are naught but
mere values assigned to well-formed strings of propositional logic depending
on whether the world contains a corresponding object. If there were no
humans, there would be facts, but there would be no truths.
So when it sinks in to Hilbert, ashing the borrowed cigarette in some
stray omelet and sitting himself back down to his books, that Eco really
means this bullshit, this hippie faith in the futility of real learning, of
objective put-your-foot-down knowledge, there is a substantial grinding of
gears happening and a vacuum in which he might be employed to illuminate
what, excuse him, the fuck is going on?
Did you know the National Security Agency, says Hilbert, will actually
write you a check, a real number beginning with a real dollar sign, if you
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discover a previously unknown prime number of cardinality greater than

fifteen thousand? Theres probably lots of them, but the more of them you
know, the more of an advantage you have in cryptography and in loads of
military and industrial applications. Because you are bringing into the world
something special that was not there before. You are not discovering the
number, since we know all the numbers, and you are not discovering the
specialness, since we know descriptively what the specialness is all about,
where the only complications are instantly the famous ones, the ones with
prize money like Goldbach here, but you are creating the specialness. You
are defying the informational entropy of the universe, the theorem creating
the fact itself. Its deep shit.
And Eco is supposed to show how there isnt objective value in that,
aside from getting rich, how discovering new primes, new theorems of
number theory isnt tantamount to leaving reality and coming back, to
augmenting reality, to doing society a greater service than manufacturing
schedule one drugs out of the Palace Mastodons kitchen.
But Eco has moved on to greater things. Hes dancing on the highest
railing. Tom and Jan are joining in. Yolo is making hip-hop noises with his
mouth. The movement itself is a vintage Britpop maneuver once considered
the fountainhead of twentieth-century devil worship. Soon its like there was
never an argument, and its all leaf-tossing on the heads of sleepy passerby
below, its all bum wiping with wads of clover, its all may-pole giddiness
about the implicit strangeness and wonder of being alive and awake at all.
Eco had asked, before, pointing out the show poster on the bulletin
board, the twelve by fifteen that River had tacked to cork in earnest
advertising not his band but his membership in something else, something
that was happening somewhere that wasnt here, something from the
Southern Californian lands of before and meanwhile if the five black clad
members of The Flat Earth Society contain any strangeness and wonder.
Actually, the music has been bleak in recent sessions, the responsibility for its

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careening over the proverbial cliff of despair and melancholy dispersed

proportionately among the band members as they near the foreground of the
photograph in the center of the poster. Women had played a role, and
alcohol and cannabis more the strophe and antistrophe of sequential
episodes. In the distant rear is, of course, the drummer, who is in it to get
efficiently laid and little else. (The photographers depth of field has rewarded
the unabashed hedonism in kind.) Then there is River himself, whose
instrumental repertoire is never so easily defined is it rhythm guitar, or
perhaps synthesizers? Mere noise? An interviewer, recording on a HewlettPackard TableHog 900, had once called his contribution the disgruntled
ambience of twenty-third century porn grooves and River had said that
wasnt really a question. Next in line is the dutiful bassman, glad and big, and
next the mysterious lead guitarist with his hair in a ponytail. But then there is
Yevgeniy, the vocalist in profile, his countenance striking some truce
between rabbinical scorn and lizard king wanderlust Yevgeniy the man
mothers warn daughters of, Yevgeniy who found River not so long ago in a
tide pool of silence and self-loathing. The transformation had been
profound. If that was River the Idiot, today it is River the Fool, a
distinguished graduation. Because that is Yevgeniys operation: Yevgeniy
whose major arcana is number twenty-one, the world outside, the world back
in Los Angeles where, tomorrow night, Hollywood would bear witness to the
sonic recreation of the end of the world, the return of the woozy punk-rock
tirades of The Flat Earth Society to the Sunset Boulevard club scene. General
admission had sold out, and uppity junior talent agents were expected to
infiltrate the booths in fervent anticipation of The Sound. Yevgeniy had
begged and begged. It was to be the first show since River had elected to go
to college.
And Im still not sold on going, said River to Eco. Ive nearly settled
into my groove here in San Bardo, here where I can take care of the riffraff
and watch you cook drugs.

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And Eco to River, Youre still amused by the spectacle. All of this. Its
so bookish. So magic and overacted. Its the best show on earth.
And River to Eco, I suppose. I want to stay for as long as I can handle
it. Anna-Luna just told me today will be a day of immense beauty, and I think
Im supposed to just take it all in. Why cant I learn to do that every day,
when Im here? Becoming a fixture like the barometer. The beauty comes in,
my needle moves and is read by the beauty, and the beauty reacts and
expands and evolves.
There had been a moment, the briefest cessation of Ecos cooking, the
drugs and omelets on pause while he looked over his shoulder into Rivers
face, a flick like the reading of a dial. I think you should leave tonight.
Annas driving you to the station, right? In Hilberts car. You should stick to
your plans once youve made them.
River had found Ecos conservatism peculiar.
Eco had said nothing for a long while before he turned around from his
cauldron, his expression the flatness of a Byzantine idol. Really, River.
Theres no show here. Its tempting to mistake it for one, but that sort of
thinking is doomed from the start. Its a Roman blunder. Youre not the
barometer. You are the air it measures.
Eco turned back to his pans of yellow. Bananas will be ready soon.
River had considered what just transpired while he climbed to the
rooftop. The seeds of headache had been sown. Eco has been known to
speak strangeness, yet rarely does it resound so with Rivers conscious.
Something here had been handcrafted. Something had been made deliberate.
In Lakotan mythology, there is a sort of archetypal fool, a persona
dissimilar to other historical contrarians and jesters and satirists a few solid,
intellectual yarns beyond the Hopi pueblo clowns, who were just assholes
and these fools were called Heyoka. Heyoka are thought of as being

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Heyoka

backwards, upside-down, or contrary in nature. There is seldom anything

distinctive about them outwardly, nothing corporeal to distinguish them
from other members of the tribe. Because the backwardness is in their spirit.
This spirit often manifests as doing things backwards and besides convention
or intuition. When food is scarce, the Heyoka putt around and complain
about how full they are; during a broiling heat wave, the Heyoka shiver and
cover themselves with pelts; and when a Winter storm has passed and the
soil is still a deep maroon slurpy the Heyoka would wander naked out into
the drifts, delirious with fever. The Heyoka are the envoys of the bizarre. The
holy man John Fire Lame Deer, himself a Heyoka who achieved some
notoriety performing magic for sit-ins during the nineteen-sixties, once
described a Heyoka unique and lauded among his particular people, a man
who was a Straighten-Outer: this man was known to roam the reservation
lands with a hammer, flattening or trying his best to flatten examples of
round or curvy things, broth bowls, wheat baskets, eggs and wagon wheels
and the like, thus making them straight. The roundness of things, the learned
editors of the National Geographic spread had offered, must have caused him
anxiety, an instance of obsessive-compulsive behavior in wont of diagnosis
and medication. But John Fire Lame Deer was adamant; the Heyoka act
from the spirit, and they pay no heed to psychology.
The Heyoka are strongly associated with thunder and lightning and
electrical mayhem. This is no idiosyncrasy. It comes to them in dream, the
terror of the storm exacting its toll on the nerves just as it terrifies all
tribesmen, except just as the storm must pass and leave the ground a greener
place, so does the storm-dream leave the Heyoka with a truth of vision upon
the earth, for wherever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is like a
rain. And the world is happier after the terror of the storm because the truth
comes into the world with two faces. One is sad and inconsolable for all its
suffering, and for its pangs of confusion and for its despair, and the other
face laughs and vibrates as in a dance; but it is the same face, weeping or

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laughing as lightning illuminating the dark, for it is the power of lightning

that the Heyoka have.
Jan had once explained that, by fooling around, the Heyoka perform for
their society a sacred satire. They ask the unasked nigh unaskable
questions and speak what things that others, the chieftains and their
consorts, are afraid to speak. The Lakota are not fortressed intellectuals;
when they witness the Heyokas act they do not deconstruct it to atoms and
publish criticism in the journals they rather feel it, viscerally, upon the clayred uncoiled plains of the soul. They are confronted with the strange, the
spirit thunderbird tracing the pattern of the wyrd across the surface of the
world.
Yet they are necessary minstrels, never punished or exiled, no matter how
troublesome their perversions. Its thought that the Heyoka function as both
mirror and teacher, using extreme behaviors to mirror others, thereby forcing
them to examine in their own way their own doubts and fears and
hatreds and weaknesses. The whole thing of their metaphysic. Their mu, the
cohabitation of multitudes and nothingness. Heyoka have the power to heal
emotional pain, this power coming from their own experiences of shame
they sing of the shameful events in their own lives and barter their
humiliation for food and live as clowns. They provoke laughter in times of
distress and call up fear and chaos when they sense an excess of complacency
and introversion. No one in the tribe must allow themselves to be taken too
seriously. No one must feel more powerful than they are, so the Heyoka
make sure.
Eco is such a figure, River decided on the stairs. Eco was Heyoka, that
much he could be sure of. Eco would be home among the planar tribes.
What comes from his mouth is madness, definitely, but beautiful, calculated
clouds of madness, under which are the shaded faces of the Palace
Mastodon, of the whole town and university, of the sick and the tired and the
sane and the insane. Eco could very well be a Heyoka among Heyoka, a

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Heyoka

thunder-chosen godhead, a thing called Heyoka in one place and Merlin in

another and probably Shiva or Mephistopheles in another. Touchstone.
Rasputin. The Count of Saint Germain. The builders of Stonehenge and the
moai. The omphalos of the San Bardo city-state, about which all things swoosh
and rotate, humming along to the tune of DMT and omelets and so many
minor significances.

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