“This didn’t. Just. Happen. NO!”

 He landed feet first in a classic Spanish villa’s courtyard where outbuildings and apartments were fronted by an imposing three-story Great House. To his right, a marble fountain stood tiered with graduated clam shell bowls, a Cupid dancing at the apex with an arrow aimed at the moon. Wings of the estate hemmed everything in, casitas bordered by porches shadowed beneath slatted eaves, windows shuttered like the closed eyelids of large owls. 

Breathless, Gooch turned his face to the sky, stretched his arms wide, and filled his lungs with hearty gasps of night-chilled serein. Refreshed in his moment of clarity, he allowed that totality to wash through and take him wherever the trip decided. Until landing by the marble fountain, reality and the universes where he’d bounced around shattered into seemingly infinite possibilities, raced by him and then, disappeared.

For the first time since he’d taken his last hit, he felt grounded, alive, able to apprehend his relationship to objects in the world around him. Except for the fulsome glow of an impossibly large moon looming beyond the Great House, the hacienda was dark. Moon and starlight illuminated the Spanish-gothic style of the Patron—a Moorish palace in the midst of a Krazy Kat landscape—where flat-black wings held a scrim flecked with bits of diamonds and dust. A hazy play of light suggested shadow and movement. Taking tentative steps toward the big house, slipping on clay tiles slick with the fountain’s mist, Gooch peered upward through squinted lids, saw a silhouette in the window. It appeared to be two women, one gesturing and pacing just past the glass, the other nothing more than a disembodied voice engaging the shadow that filled the window. Unable to catch the gist of the conversation, he could tell that one of the speakers was elderly but still possessed a firm, forceful voice along with the cool precision of schooled diction.

The other voice broke in, much younger, bouncy and ebullient, singing words. And then, a blast of a jovial “Ha!”

Erupting with laughter, eyes clouded with mirth, a starburst in his gut rocked his body with seismic force—his Buddha laugh, Emma called it. He saw her looking over the courtyard, smiling her light that illuminated all that inhabited the universe.

Gooch coughed and rasped into the dampness around him. “Who are you talking to, Baby Sister?” As he asked, he was immediately lifted above the desert and hacienda, upward on a tourbillion of galactic fireworks, portals reflecting moments of his trip from when Powerball had swept him up in its poly-universal-and-dimensional scramble, glistening reflections of discrete moments, incomprehensible potential worlds, the window that took him to a desert sky at night and an hacienda, the patio, the window, the essence of her. 

Then, everything he’d just experienced sucked into an eddy of diminishing light, photons stripped of all spectral description. When the trip’s speeding, screaming cacophony ceased, he returned to a lucidity close to where the trip had started, reclining on a steep slope shaded by trees and boulders, upholstered with pine needles. Beyond the mountain edge, granite had split into a trident of talons crooked over the sheer drop into the canyon—the Claw. Aware that neither had wandered far from where they’d smoked, he watched Big-Legged Emma dance and skip across the tips of the talons. Within that renewed clarity, he mused on where Powerball might take them next.

Emma stood entranced, swaying slightly, bathing her ochre skin in the summer’s light and singing with the coloratura of the canyon’s winds. He’d watched her dance on the Claw countless times, and she always played the same way—arms stretched wide and face tilted back to the sun—embracing the world, granting open and free access to her soul and bottomless well of love. Ha! echoed in his mind, his letters and numbers, the library of their history together, Emma inhabiting the best part of him. His Platonic ideal for a perfect life, elegance and excellence, a zeal for nature and nutty adventures, resided in Emma’s plush and natural Amazonian presence, her Mountain Mama perfection.   

“Adieu, mon ami! Il est temps de volet! It’s time!” Her words splashed through the pine needles then shattered on the rocks, droplets of her voice collecting on his skin with the spray from the villa’s fountain.

“Time for what?” his chuckle echoed from within the hollow tube of his buzz. Then, in a moment that lasted forever, he watched her dance and sing and then tilt toward the opposite canyon wall, arms held out to hold the world beyond, her hands open to everything as she leaned in,  fell forward, her body soaring, flying, then fall out of his sight and into the chasm below.

Reality…

“Oh no. Fuck no.”

…broke through.

“Fuck no, Emma! EMMA!”

Suddenly, the only person who’d ever really mattered to him, gave him reason to get out of whatever muck tried to suck him down, was dropped into an abyss, lost forever.

A link to his soul from the first time they’d met, she was his mirror, his anima personified, the only person he ran with who was smarter than he, more educated, took risks on boards he’d never seen anyone try, discover with him the infinite microclimates inhabiting the mountains where he’d grown up.

She’d offered up her mind freely, but he’d never explored the extent of her body. His longing was placated by the fact that her presence in his life was more than enough to sustain him. And that body was now, as his trip told him, was falling to the bottom of Vigil cnayon.

“Emma. No, no, no. Shit, fuck, NO!”

He closed his eyes, picturing her body shredded by shards of rock below. Determined to find what remained of her, he grappled with what pinioned him where he lay. Eventually making it to the edge, he peered over to see that the canyon had been filled with a river of mirrors, millions flowing past with varying sizes and depths. Fearing some dreadful Medusa effect, he averted his gaze but was immediately drawn back to myriad reflections of himself that he’d already seen—aged, adolescent, and infantile, but every mirror reflecting his horror-filled gape, all of him at that moment captured in raths of silver glass. 

“This didn’t. Just. Happen. NO!” 

He closed his eyes and considered that there was no reason to think this was not just an ugly vision, something unspeakably terrible that Powerball had planted in his mind. The idea that he could articulate those fears convinced him that certain perceptions weren’t mere hallucinations but were as he’d sensed them. Those signals and high logic indicated that language was the only thing that nailed his mind to reality. 

She had jumped.

“She’s not dead. She is. Fuck. She’s dead. She jumped. This can’t be happening. No, no, Emma, sweetie, Lil Sis, you didn’t just die. EMMA!”

Reaching the limits of his reality, grasping at her image, he continued his plea to save her from death.

“Emma!” His calls echoed through the canyon below. An excruciating realization punctured Powerball’s blinding effects, his emotions stuttered in from an amorphous core like Morse code from another dimension, dots and dashes that only made sense after being scrawled out and syntactically assembled. Rolling on the Claw, he clutched his skull, desperately trying to gather his thoughts into his hands. Hands empty, he pounded fists against rock, raging against life, against circumstance, against the world, against himself, and against whatever gods would listen to his fury. “Why did we stay here?”

It seemed like decades since he’d heard Emma’s suggestion to stay put and smoke at the Claw. “You say we might wind up in weird places? Maybe we’re better off staying close to the trailhead.”