A Dick in the Snow

by Odious

This is Chapter 19 of King of Spain, the serialized text art that is being channeled to me by a future version of myself called HeirMax98. It's a story about four strangers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who discover that they are trapped in some sort of simulation haunted by a strange entity they call, "The Curator".

In Chapter 19, Nada describes what happens after she gets high off Casper's stash in an attempt to utilize her powers and figure out a way to escape The Grid.

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Paid subscribers can read Chapter 1 here and Chapter 2 here , Chapter 3 here, Chapter 4 here, Chapter 5 here, Chapter 6 here , Chapter 7 here , Chapter 8 here, Chapter 9 here, Chapter 10 here , Chapter 11 here , Chapter 12, here , Chapter 13 here , Chapter 14 is here, Chapter 15 is here, Chapter 16 is here, Chapter 17 is here and Chapter 18 is here.

[Nada]

“I’ve been remembering something I read or heard about parallel worlds…”

(in each one everyone and everything moves to the same infinite beat)

I did it. Casp let me smoke that shit. After having the conversation I don’t know how many times–or was it only once?--it finally worked. He’s really going to go and believes I can help. Awww what a sweetheart. Him leaving equals total destruction. Whether he makes it or not it’s the end of The Last, which means this is my one and only chance to shoot the skill shot that wins the game and gets me back to my beloved. Of course there’s some discomfort. The weed stink’s thick on my teeth and my heart’s beating so hard my ear drums wanna pop. I feel The Fear, how could I not? But there’s no time for second guessing. It’s not getting high, it’s work. I have to cut through everything I am and find the shortcut. The path only blown out yogis and rastas know. I’m a Bitchy Witch, a girl Boss Hog. But will I remember how it goes? Can I make everything turn-turn-turn, even out here on The Grid, pockmarked as it with black holes?

This is it. It’s been so long, but this is the feeling. Or is it? My head hurts. It feels like my insides are being redistributed, so that there’s simultaneously more and less of me. My tongue is gigantic. I run it over my lips and find that they are coated with something wet and sticky.  Lipstick? Blood? I want to find out but I can’t because my hands are frozen and far away. Easy, easy, Casper says, the crook of his arm around my neck. I was already on my wobbly knees. Weights and pulleys are some fine old tech: a gentle, gentleman machine, I settle down at last, I come to rest on the fake green grass still damp with morning dew. I squint my eyes and see sparkles, souvenirs of a delicate night. It looks real, it looks real enough to me. 

But is it really there? Can I see through it if I stare? Beyond the green blades the sky appears white like a movie screen. From the start The Last assumed we are captives of an illusion–a shared hallucination. They refer to clues that supposedly make this obvious–such as the way the clouds and stars move in loops, as do the NPC’s, though this is harder to notice because they do so in subsets that restart at different frequencies: a soccer game goes on for days, before suddenly jerking back to the beginning, while the same bikes pass by our grassy perimeter every few minutes. But is this actually happening? Or does it just seem like everything’s the same again and again, the way every day seems the same but is actually a little different?

For a while we thought the moon was a part of it, moving and changing on a set trajectory that took several weeks to complete, before we realized that this was what the moon always did and we’d forgotten.

What if The Grid and the Fake Fantasy River are real worlds, somewhere in space, and it’s a ruse that they are not?  

I couldn’t explain it, but something about this seemed right. “You’ve got to fake it so real, you’re beyond fake,” I used to say to Sterling. At least I think I did. (Even without a clear memory I know I never would have mentioned that these words were not my own).

What I need is for my consciousness to rise up through all these questioning layers to the place of pure feeling where the answers will be downloaded directly into my body. I wait for the clearing, the meadow shimmering gold through the tangle of trees. But the thoughts don’t go away, on the contrary I notice them even more. Chill, chill. Let the thoughts be and try not to pay too much attention. Don’t freak out and risk falling and getting stuck. By the time I made it back out Casper might be gone and who knows what havoc poor old Dean will wreck in his wake. I can’t lose this chance. 

The ADITS office team were not only intelligent (we looked for depth and breadth not flash) and highly technical, but they had the emotional stability and expanded worldview brought on by two years minimum of Jungian analysis, a prerequisite for consideration as a Dick. Despite our litany of psychic and energetic feelers, there were always those who were not schizo enough to fit into the culture. They fronted like they grokked the non-linear playbook and spiritual underpinnings of negative PR but ended up questioning the process. It was usually my expertise that was scrutinized–they wanted to understand the practical benefit and ROI of their boss lying on the floor for hours with a bucket, clenching a small gray wolf carved out of marble in one hand while writing like crazy with the other (there were never a shortage of different colored Japanese pens and notebooks, wirebound of course). It got so that I forbade the use of words like high or tripping because of the immediate connotations in people’s heads. I couldn’t have team members wasting valuable energy self-censoring and waging internal debates about what I do. This was not goofing off or getting wasted. This was what it took for me to simultaneously amplify and buffer my above average intelligence and psychic ability. I tapped into a place past the noise and blah blah blah of the everyday. There I saw a myriad of forking paths and possible outcomes. The words and images of the client ran on a loop in my mind, eventually giving off a white noise that was at once soothing and terrible: the inner buzz of the content pool/drool–the drone of concepts and desires that came before ideas. The crystalline matter that I could play with like play-doh.

But it’s not working this time. I’m too distracted. I feel like there are things nearby, things that are neither The Last or NPC’s. Is that why Casper looks so upset? The grass is moving, there’s something inside but when I look it’s gone.

Dean said to me that there are two kinds of entities, those who watch and those who feed. If that’s the case, then what variety is with us here?  A multiplicity signified by the Curator, with his vision sockets hidden behind hipster shades– his eyes conveniently laid over someone else's? Was it time to find him? To understand who he is and why something about him seems so familiar?