psychedelic author, cannabis enthusiast
all material © Roy G. Bivlowski 2024-25
excerpts
The town of Fairfield huddles on the plain, only from the bluffs across the river seen as much of anything. This small Midwest ville, sparsely peopled, is rarely developed above two stories. From sundry quaint buildings, signs of life emerge, barely. The easy pace of complacence ordains that change comes subliminally, if at all. A ghosted sorrow haunts three wanderers’ return to the tranquilly boring sprawl.
To the east, centered for use by tributary towns on a low, parenthetical plateau, is a tiny bus depot. It stuns new and old arrivals alike with its view – three hundred sixty horizon degrees of the flattest hypno-monotony. A road and corn and nothin’.
In a respite from the dusty work in the musty barn, Kevin spots, from his perch in the hayloft, a dark line curving around one of the few hills off the river bluffs. It’s a funerary convoy going to the cemetery. The departed’s car is already in the gates and the others trail it to the graveyard’s heart. As the vehicles release their mourners, the dripping mist ripens to a gentle rain.
Not far from the burial, Brent snoops on the ceremony. Under a tree for discretion more than dryness, he hasn’t put on his windbreaker. The girl from the depot is there, and he thinks, ‘What was her name again? Allison.’
The bereaved are tight together. Allison’s so insensible to the rain’s recommence that two women, one clearly her mother, lean their umbrellas to cover her. Then a man, he guesses her father, steps up to speak. Through the shower, inexact words reach his ear.
‘Confusions follow delusion’s end, the only thing that’s clear is the fog. Into the misery, into the mystery, tracks in the snow that falls. Do you remember when you didn’t know anything about anything and were free?’
At the beach again, passing the eroding colonial fort of Panamá Viejo. The ruins of time and combat, testament to inhumanity. Insanity? Insanity is trying to stop it.
Wait. How is it the threads are together again?
A native Guna woman sews mola textiles, patching and reinventing from pieces of other cloths. I’m in Panama City with Dad.
Out into the jungle, to the hamlet of El Piro. We visit a specific family for no obvious reason. Dad holds up a beautiful baby. There’s a unique tenderness when he looks at the young grandmother of this infant.
Tangled in images and feelings, Allison’s mind reels at the dissolution of her family identity. Who she was, who she came from – lies. Everyone she trusted had lied to her. Her father didn’t love her enough to tell her. But he couldn’t tell her because he loved her!
So much confusion and humiliation. She aches, trapped by questions. ‘Do I confront Mom? I can’t pretend … like it matters! Everything’s a lie. How can I face my family after this?’
And most revolting, it doesn’t make a difference what she does with these emotions. It won’t change the facts. And she knew, she knew! Her subconscious or that ghost or both had told her.
“Thanks for coming for me, Nance, and keeping this under your hat.”
“Just text me next time so I know where you are.”
Allison pledges, “I will.”
“You’re lucky there’s no damage on the rental.”
“Tell me about it.”
“And that tow truck driver let you off cheap. Ten bucks to pull you out of the ditch?” Nancy clowns, “He had the hots for youuu.”
Behind them, the rental car honks. “Nancy, come on!” Jason moans, “Let’s at least go the speed limit.”
Nancy opens her window, yelling with finality, “The speed limit is for ideal conditions!”
Allison’s phone rings. “What, Jason?”
Brent and Kevin hike near the edge of the park, the cornfields farther west scarcely visible through occasional gaps in the trees. One is jubilant and intrepid, the other restrained and skeptical.
Still holding the leaf, Brent shares, “It all makes sense to me, like God is spelling it out with footnotes.”
Kevin, with a wrinkled stare, is questioning how much of this optimism is speed-fueled deduction and how much is speed-fueled delusion, both being likely. “It’s too easy to go from the pit of faithless despair to the mountaintop of divine insight.”
Laughing, his eyes their wide wildest, “Easy?!”
“With the speed. Got no reason, your mind knows the false power it’s being fed. But with any purpose, speed makes whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re believing, the greatest thing ever.”
Brent considers this for a split-second. “I see what you’re saying, but I’m onto something more than my high.”
“A leaf?”
Leaves tumble in the breeze, both overfoot and from the trees, in autumnal flower. Brent jogs down the path where he last saw Kevin, but there’s no sign of him. A howl pierces the air, off to the southwest. He moves toward it, leaving the trail, thinking in his mania that Kevin is playing a game.
He feels the rhapsody of running again and speeds up a notch, hoping to outmaneuver his friend. The baying reverberates from the west, closer. Brent answers with his own yowl. There it is again, even closer, and he answers again, imitating it more precisely.
Abruptly, we’re here.
In a small clearing, under tall birches and maples, Kevin arrives from the northwest, perplexed. “Were you howling?”
Brent, lathered in a dirty sweat, wipes his face with his shirt. “Not as good as you.”
Firm with foreboding, “But I wasn’t.”
“Sure you weren’t,” Brent laughs at the apparent put-on.
“I swear I wasn’t.”
“I was following it to you.”
“My dad had a crush on her himself – this tough, fearless lady from Texas – but that assured him that she was right for his father. And Pops’ saxophone was out of storage. Whatever got him playing his horn again, it was worth it. Plus my dad was still young, not quite out of his teens, and even though he was closer to the Rider’s age than Pops, there was no denying the value of experience, as she was clearly taken with the older man.”
“Did she have a name, a real name?”
“I don’t like to say it, especially if she’s hanging around, but …” He whispers in her ear, “Sophia Rose.”
Reflecting on the name for a deeper connection, Allison doesn’t make one.
“She left to catch up with the carnival for their fall schedule, but would come back whenever she could, from the end of that summer through the next.
“So you’re not new to the reefer?” Kevin pries.
Impartially, “I’ve smoked before, but it gets me headachy the next day if I have too much.”
With a hose of the loaded hookah in his grip, “But I thought you couldn’t smoke too much pot,” Brent fends.
Allison, leveling, “You can smoke too much.”
“Are you kidding, Brent?” Kevin, with a stunted laugh, “Did you see Larry?”
“He’s okay. Kinda out there.”
“He is fantastically functional given all the weed he smokes, but he’s chronically forgetful, it can desensitize him to compassion, and, uh, sometimes he’s bananas.”
Brent’s fear is renewed. “Then it is a dangerous drug.”
“No more dangerous than your coffee.”
“That’s what logic does. It breaks things down.”
“We can talk to each other anywhere in the world because we put comm satellites in space. That’s not breaking things down.”
“And yet we still can’t talk to ghosts,” Kevin rags.
“Science brought us all of our technology, all of our conveniences – industrialization, automobiles, the computer age.”
“Are you telling me those are strictly good things?”
“Are you telling me they’re bad things?”
“We’re isolated from the order of nature, we have toxic pollution and climate catastrophes, and we add millions of tons of un-biodegradable plastics to the landfills and oceans every year. Outside of that, no.”
Brent’s unhappy with Kevin’s trenchant comeback.
“Shit, given the damage cars alone have done … maybe the invention of the wheel wasn’t so great after all.”