Santana, lady of the dirt and queen of the Necropolis, arrives in her sacred chariot, dragging autumn in with her.
The chariot is a good-sized van plastered with painted flowers, a jackal skull mounted on the bumper, and ribbons of jingle bells chiming in the wind. To the junkies, they sound like an ice cream truck to kids. I don't know what hexes she weaves to stay off the cops' radar, but Santana is as unstoppable as the New Year, and her tour is never late.
Jimsonweed; Belladonna; Ayahuasca; Peyote; Devil's Breath; hallucinogenic shrooms in a myriad of colors and flavors. Santana's garden is a festival to stimulate the senses. She slides the van door open, welcoming us with teeth black as pitch, wearing a vintage dress with a wide skirt and a plunging neckline. Her product is expensive. The quality makes it worth it, Daniel says. I, a novice in the dark arts of psychedelic tripping and metaphysics, just nod and trust him.
Santana invites us in, nodding at Daniel like she's welcoming an old friend. When she speaks, she flashes the tumbled onyx stones adorning her mouth—a smile that makes the gold in her eyes pop against her sun-leathered skin. She vibrates with the beauty of a coral snake, leaving me speechless. My soulless vision doesn't stop me from craving the dark-skinned woman's fangs.
Kiss me and let your venom blacken my veins, noble lady.
Something jabs me. It's Daniel's elbow. I blinked and snapped out of it. The inside of the sacred wagon is suffocating—incense spitting out trails of purple and blue smoke, with scents that burrow under your skin and disorient your consciousness. The queen's claws manage to rip through our gray world, coloring it with blurred brushstrokes. The thought makes me shiver.
"So my last baby wasn't enough for you? Tasted half-baked, like some cheap candy out of a vending machine..."
The lady's sweet, sensual tone holds a trace of latent danger lurking between the words, like a black widow crawling up the nape of your neck, stroking your skin with its front legs. Under the dim light, the lady's features darken; the gold in her eyes loses its shine but not its intensity, turning into twin stars of sickly yellow keeping watch in the corner of some unknown galaxy.
Daniel stammers an apology and wipes the sweat from his forehead. But beneath the surfacing nerves, he's pitching a tent in his pants—something that doesn't go unnoticed by me, and obviously not by Santana either.
A writer named Lovecraft said a long time ago: The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
The unknown. Terror. A delicious feeling that pumps life into the stoniest of men's hearts. In that moment, it meant a euphoric throbbing in our chests and our crotches.
Santana silences Daniel by pressing two fingers to his lips, a delicate gesture that practically begs to be licked. Daniel restrains himself; it's too soon to damn ourselves—there's still so much left to try.
"You're forgiven. I enjoy benevolence, I find it quite picturesque," she says, as if talking about a child's crayon drawing. She moves to a metal shelf and pulls out a plastic bag with fifteen shrooms—albino caps and stems, bathed in a shimmering coating of their own excretion. "Lunar kisses. Brought here from a higher plane. Not exactly from the moon, but close enough."
Daniel takes the bag. He hands over a wad of cash along with his dead grandmother's necklace, and we say our goodbyes.
It took me a minute to realize we were running. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the shadows of jackals trying to take a bite out of my silhouette. I pointed at the first alley I saw; we ducked in, stopped, and caught our breath. The jackals ceased to exist.
I spot what looks like the entrance to a porn shop. The flickering violet light of the neon XXX sign above the door lets us know we've hit the ground—a place that's vulgar, mundane, earthly.
Welcome to the real world, please leave your divinities at the door.
We smuggled ours in.
We cracked open a bottle of whiskey, cauterizing our throats with long pulls. The liquor blurs my vision. I felt stronger, confident... But even the backing of the purest alcohol is insufficient, like a swimming pool that only reaches your thighs. We killed the bottle.
We each devour a Lunar Kiss. Eating it is like chewing on cold, half-softened fat; it leaves a slimy trail sliding down your esophagus. Done. Swallowed. Nothing left but to wait...
Drops of color splatter across space, creating shockwaves that collide with others, which in turn spawn more growing ripples, saturating everything until reality is gone and only the colors reign. I blinked and I was back in the alley. I looked at my hands; they stretched out until they hit the pavement, my fingers turning into blurry contrails carving through the air in erratic directions.
I wandered the sidewalks like a zombie. Daniel disappears, but his laughter doesn't fade. A groundhog is following me; maybe it's him. Chimneys vomit raspberry bubbles, or maybe blood. Open doors hurl blasphemies at the windows. The sun is so low it looks like just another mundane streetlamp. Pedestrians peel off their human masks to reveal cow faces with bloodshot eyes, mooing until they go blind and deaf from all the plastic, the artificial dyes, and the ever-growing TV screens. Content on their way to the slaughterhouse. Is that happiness...?
Why was something so vulgar denied to me?
It's not fair.
The building's elevator is busted. I dragged myself up the stairs all the way to the sixth floor.
Tiara, my mother, screams something incomprehensible. Scolding me, probably, aiming a kitchen knife at me. She caught my alcohol stench before I even walked through the door. As she babbles on, her head falls off her neck, sliced clean by an invisible wire, and rolls right to my feet, still talking. I let out a bark of laughter, then another, and then I couldn't stop.
"Joshua," she says my name, her face draining of color, her head back where it belongs. She looks at me like she doesn't recognize me, or like she's realizing what I truly am for the very first time.
I wandered to my bedroom, holding myself up from wall to wall, laughing so hard tears sprang from my eyes and my stomach ached. I collapsed on my back onto the bed.
Humanoid, albino, extraterrestrial shrooms dance in a portal ripped open in the ceiling, spinning and cannibalizing each other in an act more barbaric and beautiful than any ritual mankind ever invented.
My soul peels away from its fleshy vessel and floats far from the building, from the country. Escaping the speck of dust known as Planet Earth.
The red Mars with its blue inhabitants. The gaseous, bubbling Jupiter, just like its people. Let's fly beyond the solar system, to other galaxies, full of war, full of fantasy. And beyond that? I see an infinite blackness, where primordials and ancient ones have been colliding since the Universe was born. And outside the book lies the white, the void. Without time, or life, or death.
Turn around and face God. Cry to Him, sing to Him, beg Him to witness your worth, pray to Him to be happy or curse Him for your misfortunes.
It's useless. He has no ears to hear you, no mouth to answer you, nor the intelligence to understand your signs. God's countless eyes remain fixed on nowhere. They blink, with you and everything around you trapped in the bottomless wells of His pupils. You, me, the universe, the tragedies and the marvels—we are nothing but the slow, incomplete opening and closing of an eye belonging to a mindless and primitive creature.
Where is our worth, Daniel? Is it at the end of THE SEARCH? Does it even exist? They always tell you that you're worth something, that you have to get up and keep trying until the brimstone of hell turns to ice. But the truth is, nobody knows a damn thing.
The Lunar Kiss's effect threatens to wear off. It drops me back onto the bed, devoid of dancing or alien shrooms.
I chewed on the existential doubt for a couple of minutes, but the only thing that came to mind was Santana's cleavage—two fleshy, dark, perfect hills that made my mouth water. I unbuttoned my pants and reached down to my crotch, taking my sweet time to satisfy myself.
A mundane and earthly action...
It matters little how far our minds fly; that is what we are, even if we are denied the most mundane pleasures. Could there be beauty hidden inside all this filth?