After watering the basil and tidying up, I'd discovered a cute wireless Marshall speaker. I moved the record player out to the living room and set it up on the coffee table.
I blew softly on my hibiscus tea and then began to anoint my hands and feet with moisturizer. The first sexy bass plucks of Incesticide album filled the room. This was low, reckless music, the complete antithesis, I thought, to what I felt then: uber calm, complete and like pure provocation.
During the second chorus of "Dive," I thought Kurt was improvising:
Die, die, die, die with me!
Over and over, I heard it. I knew the lyrics by heart, and this was the first time I had ever heard them sung as 'die' instead of 'dive.'
Something moved me up and on to the balcony. The couple across the street were still there, and both of them turned at that exact moment and clocked me. I lifted my mug and smiled warmly. The woman flipped me off. For some reason, this cut me deeply. It was like being rejected by the person you loved most in the world.
The man was frowning so severely I immediately looked down to the street. The road was congested. A car suddenly swerved into the next lane. Thankfully none of the other vehicles were moving because the traffic light was . . . purple??
In wild animal shock I looked at the sky, expecting cotton candy clouds. They looked more like heralds of the apocalypse. Menacing figures in masks like those worn by the plague doctors. A tiger mauling a defensively bunny, its face abject hopelessness as the beast dug in, its eyes rolling back, lost in its bloodlust.
Then I heard the single chime of the doorbell, it was followed by rigorous knocking.
Every bone in my body told me to run and hide. Pretend I wasn't home. But the music . . . and as waves began to leak out of the walls, and my temperature dived in and out of heat and cool, I knew I was fucked. So, uber calm, complete and like pure provocation. At least I had moisturized.
Four men and two women stood at my gate. They were in plain clothes but the stink of the narc, of the party pooper, of the inquisitor, was all over them. I didn't even register the back and forth of their authoritative confidence and questions, and my blank, quiet submission.
As they pulled my wrists behind my back and slapped the handcuffs on, Kurt sang a verdict:
She should've stayed away from friends
She should've had more time to spend
She should've died when she was born
She should've worn the crown of thorns
She should've been a son
She should've been a son
She should've been a son
She should've been a son
Hours later I found myself in a stuffy lockup surrounded by noisy, sweaty men. In the preceding interrogation I learnt that the narcs who showed up in the morning had acted on intel that I'd taken a heroic dose of mushrooms.
Who told you that? I asked. Never you mind, they said.
A urine test confirmed the tip-off. On the surface, that explained the distorted and strange hallucinations. But I had no recollection of consuming anything except precious sips of the delicious tea. There was also no way the onset of effects could've come up that quickly, and that powerfully.
The officers in charge of my case responded to my tightlippedness on the identities of my dealers and background of consumption as one might have expected. They slammed tables, alternated between shouting and being saccharine, offered me coffee and then called me a "cum-and-drug-guzzling plastic-tits rave slut."
In the end, they snipped six locks of hair to send away for testing, just to find out if they could charge me with anything else. No calls, no visitors. Not that I had anyone. Somehow they seemed to know that. Revelled in that, almost, as if it gave them licence to do whatever they wanted to me.
"Where do we put this one," one of the female officers, Helen, said as she stood me up roughly, "in the ladies' holding?"
"You saw the ID. Lock that wannabe tramp with the guys," the leader of this heroic squad said, drinking in the hurt on my face as I was carted away.
The cell appeared to be lit by the cheapest bulbs they had in storage. Droplets scattered beyond the wall isolating us from the outside world, but it might've just been a dripping pipe. The windows had been covered with a translucent material, like tracing paper.
"Cute little outfit you got on there, honey," said the gruff-looking man cuffed directly across from me. He had a voice like razors. "Did the cops break up your beauty sleep?" The other men hollered, and I thrice-cursed the asshole brigade for not allowing me a change of clothes, for all they put me through this morning, and for locking me in here.
The hazy filter placed over my vision had dwindled, but the heavy and suffocating quality of a nightmare still pervaded, even more so now that my future hung so precariously in the balance.
"When will they let us go?" I asked.
"Forget it," a dusky man said, tugging his cuffs away from the bench in protest. He looked like he'd been sleeping rough for years. "They don't got to let us go, 'cause no one cares what happens to us. 's why we're here."
The one beside him agreed. "You'll be waiting 'til next year," he said, before facing away and nodding off. I assumed the heroin had begun to evacuate his system. Soon the desire for a blanket would be overwhelming. All of us, carrying our specialised hurt right down to the core of our bones.
"Hey," the one across me said. "Why don't you ask the warden to sit you next to me when he brings us some food later? You got one hand free, doncha?"
When you can't move, can't see beyond four walls, space ceases to become a dimension, or at the very least seems negligible. With no clock on the wall, and not a watch between us, time also seemed more a fiction than ever. If you couldn't handle the sudden freeform nature of your reality, then you learned to count the heartbeats instead of minutes.
"Hey," the gruff man said again.
I shut my eyes in a prayer for a few moments' unconsciousness, some part of me so certain once I'd woken I'd be back in my perfect home.
"Hey," again, more urgent.
"What," I said through gritting teeth, surprised at my own tenacity.
"Nice ring. How many people you had to blow for it?"
This motherfucker. I considered bringing his mom into it, his lack of education, anything. Instead, I sniggered and continued looking at the floor. Just breathe, I told myself calmly, just breathe.
He just wanted attention, to get a rise out of someone. I knew the type. What they feared most was being alone. Nobody to see or hear them. Like children acting out. Giving him none of my energy had immediately made me feel better; I felt as if I'd regained some semblance of power.
Wait.
I looked at the ring, twinkling like a miniature blue sun in this bleak void.
I remembered. A flash of Baccha, a surge from his touch in the garden. The garden! It was there that I'd put on the ring and stepped into this.
"Your job is to breathe and remember."
There was more. The night at the Invisible Scorpion, back at . . . my place? Yes, but different. The basement at my parents' house. I'd been terribly drunk, and before I'd only remembered the morning after. But no, the night hadn't ended when we got to the basement.
Like a recording feeding back into a tape machine, images and dialogues spooled into my mind. "To make something vanish, cast it into the fire," Baccha said, holding a candle. A flash followed, of him demonstrating something. Another, of us looking up The Gateway Experience, and him putting me under.
"Our little team has confirmed that your patron deity is Hekate, in her aspect of the Triple Goddess."
"What does that mean?"
"All I can tell you, is that she won't save you in your time of need. She'll hand you the tools, or make sure that they're within reach. You might have to be as resourceful as she is–and always just as composed. When you do whatever it is that you need to do, she'll be there, watching. But in the end it'll be you who has stepped into your power."
I opened my eyes and took in this joke of an illusion for the last time. It became so plain that everything had been neatly arranged to create fear. Offering me the dream life, and then giving me a front-row seat to its systematic destruction. Drawing on my deep-seated fear of disappointing my parents, especially over breaking the law and substance abuse. A repeat of the greatest hits.
Then I thought back to the narc who sought to humiliate me with names and by refusing to recognise my true gender. And this jackass across from me and his greed for attention. All of it a masterly orchestration with one aim in mind: for them to extract power. Power that remained mine unless I said or acted otherwise.
All my fear became beautiful, then. In my belly rising and falling, greater each time, laughter bubbled up. Baccha would be proud, and prouder still. How so, so beautiful it was to be afraid. The ultimate sign of being alive. All it wanted to do was let you know that you were on the right track, that your vibration wasn't the highest it could be. It was only energy without awareness, like the shadow predators. On their own they lacked the means to go upwards, could only signal the way. In a moment of vulnerability lay the doorway to feeling all the power that courses within each person, every moment.
Just then I heard a familiar voice from down the hall. Helen.
The voice grew louder as it approached. Then her figure passed, obscured for a panel which had peeled in the corner. Our eyes met, and there was something in her gaze–perhaps a flicker of recognition. A shared, unconscious understanding of the deeper forces at play, or simply the human connection underneath the bureaucracy.
Maybe it was Hekate herself, giving me the go-ahead. It was still a new moon, the time of new intentions. My intention right now was to break free.
This dire situation was never the destination. I relinquished control, I stopped fighting the fear. I let it all build. I felt all of it within me. It flowed, natural as the wind, unhindered for the first time. Thank you.
The sapphire on my finger flashed, a sudden blue sun. My vision clarified as the walls began fuzzing, the hum of the dim lights feeding back into insectile drone.