“You hope.”
“I hope,” George confirmed, signing off before Roger had a chance to say, “Me too.”
53
When talking to Roger didn’t help, George moved on to plan B—consulting with the Typhoid Mary who’d infected him in the first place.
“What do you do,” he asked Milo, “knowing what you know? How do you stay so . . .”
“. . . bubbly?”
“Not nuts,” George said. “I think I’m losing it. Either I can’t get out of bed or I can’t fall asleep. I—”
“Drugs,” Milo said, as simple as that.
“Antidepressants?” George made a face. He’d read about SSRIs while researching teen suicide, and bingo, among the side effects was this: “may inspire suicidal thoughts” in adolescents. Plus, they took too long to kick in. George couldn’t imagine feeling like this for the two weeks it would take without doing something drastic. But Milo shook his head.
“Depression’s the symptom,” he said. “I think you need to treat the root cause.”
“And what’s that?”
“Reality,” Milo said. “Too much of it.”
“I suppose you’ve got something to take care of that.”
“You know I do,” Milo said, smiling like a shark.
George had thought it might go like this or he wouldn’t have considered plan B in the first place. “So do you have—?” he began, only to be cut off by Milo’s placing a rolled Ziploc bag full of long-stemmed, golden-capped mushrooms on his plate.
“I don’t do plants anymore,” George said, keeping it simple.
“Cool,” Milo said. “T’ain’t flora, t’ain’t fauna. ’Shrooms are their own thing.”
George hadn’t known that—and it was useful information, given his growing list of dietary exclusions. And so: “How much—?” he began to ask, but Milo was shaking his head again.
“Silly wabbit,” the concierge said, a hand on the other’s shoulder, giving it a clubby shake. “Don’t you know the first taste is always free?”
The thing was, nouvelle cuisine never made any sense to George. The idea that white space was as important as actual food simply did not compute. Neither did microdosing when one had more than enough for a macrodose—and happened to be starving for something that wasn’t animal or vegetable. And so he exceeded the recommended daily requirement for psilocybin, while keeping an eye on the Fitbit Milo had loaned him. By the time the fitness tracker began dripping from his wrist in a manner that Salvador Dali would surely have approved of, George figured the mushrooms must be working.
Regarding the possibility he may have taken too much—George had that base covered, thanks to the opioid addicts who routinely OD’d at the library he’d once called home. The librarians had been trained to deliver Narcan, proof if he ever needed it that librarians are total badasses—and that junkies had learned an important lesson about ODing: location, location, location.
Applying a similar strategy to a different public place, George settled on a BARTable theater he’d been meaning to check out. They were playing a fiftieth anniversary remaster of the movie he’d already seen a gazillion times. The theater even had a replica of the original poster out front with its original tagline: “The Ultimate Trip.”
George smiled at the girl in paisley behind the ticket booth. “Prepare to have your mind blown,” she said, the cheeky thing. And Mr. Jedson—George—winked, tripping already, before sending her a “thumbs-up” emoji which—in a weird act of synchronicity—turned out to be his actual thumb.
George missed his next appointment with Roger and the appointment after that. In his defense, it was a dangerous time to be a budding polymath. Information of every variety could be had for free—the good, the bad, the fake, the mad—but with no one doing the job of sorting which from which, leaving people at the mercy of those who only wanted to sell them stuff while entertaining their worst inclinations. Even a cyber-savvy guy like George wasn’t immune. Despite what he knew about the experiments, the betas, the ranking algorithms, and the optimization thereof, even George might tap a tempting link . . .
And that’s when it happened, like two magnets snapping together—click—and down he sped, hyperlink hopping, his neurons aglow, his synapses snapping like appreciative hipsters doing homage to their beatnik grandparents. Eventually, George’s mouse hand would start tingling—pinpricks dancing in his fingertips—a sign he’d been at it too long (again), his eyes clocking the time in the bottom right ribbon, reading whatever o’clock, another night shot to hell and a new workday already unfolding in the rosy light peeking through the penile architecture, each new erection higher and harder than the last. He shook out the latest baggy from Milo—this one paid for—and frowned at the results: barely enough for a pizza and well short of the enlightenment that was so close he could practically taste it.
54
“I wonder if we did Buzz any favors giving it a body.”
That’s how George started their last text exchange. And seeing as it was his suggestion that they embody Buzz in the first place, Pandora felt justified in asking: “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Some mystics spend their entire meditative lives trying to achieve the oceanic sense of bodilessness that Buzz started with,” George wrote. “That’s what nirvana is, by the way.”
“I thought it was a grunge band from Seattle,” Pandora typed back. “Lead singer would have been a candidate for a Buzz intervention. If it’s ever ready for prime time, that is.”
“Of course, Buzz can always go bodiless anytime it’s in the mood for enlightenment,” George continued his train of thought as if Pandora hadn’t written anything. “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to leave your body? For the boundaries to slip away, and become one with the universe?”
“What have you done with George?” Pandora typed.
“He’s still in here, with us,” George typed back, meaning it as a joke—which may have been how Pandora took it, if The Exorcist hadn’t become her go-to movie for scaring the shit out of her whenever she was in the mood—which was, oh yeah, never. Not that that stopped her dad from queuing it up every Halloween.
“Don’t joke like that,” she wrote back now. “It’s creepy.”
“You know, the idea of spirit possession is a corruption of earlier, pantheistic religions, right?”
“Well, I do now.”
“And even today, practitioners of Shinto believe that everything has a spirit,” George typed. “That’s one of the reasons the Japanese are more comfortable with robots too lifelike for the rest of us. And from pantheism, it’s not too far to panpsychism—the belief that everything in the universe is conscious . . .”
Pandora looked at George’s latest text, making note of the trailing ellipsis, purposefully leaving that door open. But she wasn’t fooled; she knew what he was doing. They’d both been disappointed by the wall Buzz seemed to have hit. So George was divesting, packing up, preparing to declare victory and move on. And he’d do this by maintaining that the whole question of whether Buzz was conscious was meaningless because consciousness was what the universe was made of. He might even go so far as claiming they’d gone backward by embodying the billions of system interactions that made Buzz, Buzz into a single point of view, maybe compare it to trying to turn an ant colony into a single ant.