Chapter 10: The Stone in the Well

Honestly probably the most favorite thing in my life is sitting in the backyard under a thick blanket at night, my ass flat on the cold ground, I'm buzzed and stoned, and I'm thinking about my connection to the universe. 

Nobody knows who I am except for the bees, and they’re sleeping now. So I’m a perfect moment slipped into time. Perhaps you are here too, but you’re only a ghost of a ghost, or a thought of a thought, so I’m entirely undisturbed. 

Backyard. 

Blanket. 

Buzzed. 

Sisyphus had a good thing going if you think about it. He had a purpose, an eternal purpose, and that’s more than most will get. 

What now? 

The best thing at times like this is to find comfort in being restrained and dig deep into the cultural metaphors because the answer is imprinted in our memories. And so long as you resign yourself to the game, you have a real shot at figuring out the truth, but it's important that you don't give up the search. Life still has meaning. 

A lot has changed. I don't know how to introduce myself, so I guess I'll do it sequentially: I'm Billy, Bill, and William. My name changed throughout my life, but from this vantage point, I realize that I am the present manifestation of all three times in my life. 

There is a young boy named Billy who's quirky and soft-spoken and a bit of an empath. Then there's Bill, who is mostly an inquisitive student; then there is William, a middle-aged English teacher, a homosexual alcoholic who later bears witness to some kind of universal truth. 

Then there's me—my name is Will—a conglomeration of all three. I am the present tense. I am the one sitting in the backyard with a gold-colored blanket over my head. I am the radio receiver who is more or less a bookmark than anything else, but I am lucky because I am in a spaceship, and I mean that quite literally. 

It's an ordinary spaceship as far as those things go, but it's constructed entirely organically. It is a byproduct of the fusion between soul and silicon, and I am part of the apparatus. Before I once again launch into my experience on this spaceship, I’d like to tell you about a concept regarding the nature of consciousness. 

In my mind, this is its infancy: before time, a flow of words moved through the multiverse as vibrations in space, frequencies searching for some detuned radio capable of reviving the transmission of consciousness. Before time, consciousness itself moved through the universe at 4 trillion times per second. It was a vibration in space, a specific frequency that spilled out into the stars, searching across every planet and across every moon for a form of life biologically equipped to receive its transmission. The consciousness was like an infinite monkey, and as infinite eventually necessitates, the vibration found its way to a detuned radio capable of receiving and transmitting. 

The great division occurred precisely in the moment when pure thought felt hunger, and he knew he was a radio, a radio capable of transmitting consciousness. As pure thought, the vibration pulsed through the vast universe and brought its message to every star, planet, and moon, always across the moons, planets, and black holes, most of which have no life. 

That being said, let me go back to what I wanted to discuss: the spaceship where I live. I’m not speaking metaphorically (which is in fact a metaphor, but go with me here). The ship itself is now about 500 square feet, and once again I am the only person here, though I'm not alone in the journey. From what I can tell, around 200 million of us began our individual journeys at the same time, but our paths will never cross directly. But we're connected. 

The holograms feed me their memories and the memories are of all the lives who ever lived, but by now the memories are recycled, and I'm starting to see certain patterns. That's not good because part of the mission is to keep your shit together until impact. I've hid in this capsule for a long, long time, and I was hoping I would be safe here, but it was inevitable that it couldn't last forever. 

I guess the most interesting aspect of the spaceship is that I have access to some pretty amazing things. When I was a kid, I could go see a movie or even rent one and watch it at home, and that same sort of technology exists now, but it's more complicated. Basically, when the code was cracked and entirely sequenced, silicon learned how to read each combination and present it to us in the form of very realistic memories. And the most amazing part is that every story is kept in our own bodies and our DNA.  Now, we don't actually live those lives. Our limited understanding of Reincarnation is plainly wrong. Yes, we experience the culmination of life's potential.... 

When they made the offer, I'm guessing that I agreed to it. I can't imagine myself agreeing to something so stupid, but I did it. With that in mind, I apologize. I hope you know that. In the Bible Eve took the apple, and I did the same thing. In my imagination, it goes something like this: they say, "William, we have discovered a way for you to encode life into a computer. We can program your experiences into a microchip. We can extend time itself, the greatest resource a man can have." 

I say, "I don't know, but in the name of God, I'll do it." 

They upload me into the mainframe, and I am temporarily whirled into a world of the most unimaginable indulgences. 

Perhaps I am a frog or a monkey or a gnat. 

I don't know, but I am transported to a different world. It is good, but they come to me again in this world when I am bored, and they say, "We can connect you to every living thing if you would like. We can encode you in past and present and future. We can make you a martyr because the others don't know the gift you have, and you can sacrifice everything and show them the way." 

I must have said yes. I agreed and they showed me that my consciousness could be uploaded into every fake memory that I thought was mine. I could exist in the code, and I felt proud and strong, and I accepted that the code was somehow the real world, though I was wrong. 

When I was in the 8th grade, I took too much LSD with Benji and I saw the tessellated curtain, and it opened to a world of infinitesimally small honey combs, and I chose one at random and sank into it and disappeared and got lost. That was the threshold between Billy and William. William was born that night. 

I like William. In fact, I wish we could be friends again. He loves things that are real and truthful, but he also knows that it's all a lie. He's in a relationship with a guy named Ricardo, and Ricardo is a good man. Ricardo loves him more than any woman would, and he is responsible and kind. He treats William as if he is important, and maybe that's true. 

Important or "not important" doesn't mean much to me. As I said, this is all a dream of sorts. The goal is to sink myself so far into fantasy that the Father is pleased. I live on one belief: God so loved his children that he sent his one begotten son. God sent a fireman to rescue those of us in the burning building. I know you think it's bullshit, but it's the key to understanding evolution. God (the One) saw life, and he made us. We scrambled around and played like we understood, but finally God sent a physical manifestation of himself. He gave us himself, and that manifested as the son. 

Or was it a daughter?

When God came into the flesh, He put a permanent marker in our DNA. Time flows backward and forward (from Billy to Bill to William). I never could have understood God without a physical manifestation. The idea is not new, but it's being perfected. There's a universal promise: God will manifest in the flesh and teach us how to live. This is the very concept that has saved me. And even if this is an illusion, even if God is a lie, I still cling to the promise. 

I wait for God in the flesh to return, and I always have my purpose and plan.

When Billy was a kid, he was drawn to the dark side. He liked scary things, but he didn't know if that meant he was really bad. He dreamed about being possessed and being evil, and it turned him on in a weird way. He wanted a father to come in and take control, and part of him wanted his head to get shaved so that a big, bold 666 would be shown and the people would fear him and leave him alone; he wanted Damien from the Omen to love him and give him Christmas presents and trick or treat with him at Halloween. He wanted to be stuffed under a bed and kissed and touched and made to feel special. 

He had no choice but to love fear, and for that reason he dredged up the most fearful imaginations. I am with him even now and I am begging him to see the beauty in the dark, but perhaps I only say this in hopes that there will be beauty in my darkness. 

Sometimes when I'm bored I invent new stories. I make up these elaborate plots and sink into them. They're different than the DNA memories. The DNA memories are on file like any film you might download. But you can't change them around. You can learn from them (and they can affect you), but they're more or less frozen coded memories. The scientists probably know this, but I'm getting closer to some type of truth. Then again, I don't know if I'm ready to leave this capsule. 

I keep getting the sense that the truth will terrify me. I'm afraid that if I embrace the truth and go crashing onto some planet, it might be filled with devils and demons and evil things that will torment me. Does it seem strange that I am still afraid of evil? I've studied evil much in the same way that the scientists studied neuroscience, and I've chosen to review lives that were steeped in it. From a scholarly perspective, I can see it as more academic than real: somebody didn't get enough love as a child, the chemical balance in the brain was off, or a person was somehow developmentally disabled.  But all of my experience can't account for a "haunted house" spooky feeling I occasionally get. I've even wondered if God was half evil, and that's what I feel... But I can't put my finger on it. Still, I sense it slithering around me not unlike a snake in the garden. 

I hear it whisper, and I am pulled back into this spaceship and only then start to freak out that I am poisoned by the scientists. I start to thrash around and gasp for breath. I feel tricked and used and sad. 

But then I'm reminded of the golden blanket pulled over me as I sit in the backyard, and I remember that the solid ground is beneath me and the familiar trinkets that I've gathered are here before me, and that I have a trillion lives to live and this is just one of them and the dream will end when I say it ends. I like to think this way when I panic and feel so alone. I don't know how long I've been hiding in this honeycomb. Sometimes I wonder if I'm still in this LSD trip and high out of my mind. I wonder if I'll break the surface and gasp for air and be flooded with the realization that this has all been a weird trip and in the moment that I grasp its magnitude, it will all recede and I will be sitting somewhere in the reality that seems more real than this one to me. 

But this is stupid to even discuss. 

I am an astronaut and I am flying somewhere in space and I have been here forever and I am going slightly insane. Sometimes when I remember that I am just a chunk of flesh and unable to interact with anything real, I panic. I hate to think of myself as so alone and isolated. Currently, technology allows us to paint pictures and speak and say words in hopes that somebody will understand our thoughts, but at the end of the day, we are isolated and alone and our thoughts belong only to us. We are each alone and trapped in a glass jar like a frozen bubble on a specimen that's been hurled out into space with no way of communication. 

I guess I'm not being completely honest about my journey through space. See, I have a lot of technology with me. I'm able to relive every life that's ever existed. The scientists cracked the DNA code, and that means I can live any life that I want to. Right now I'm living the life of William (the older “self” of Billy and Bill). In every moment of every day there is someone under a blanket in the backyard praying for a miracle. 

Maybe he’ll be the miracle? 

He's just one of the triillions of lives I live out here in space. I like William, though. He knows who I am. He's also fine with me telling him that there's only one God and that one God had one kid. Basically, I'm telling him that I am like he is. I am a bookmark in time and flying through space because I carry the seed. He won't understand what I'm saying. 

S.O.S. 

I'm Bill and I'm imagining this whole thing, but I'm you stuck in a honeycomb, but soon I will be someone else. Somewhere in this mess there is the thought that only one is the master designer, and if he is not the one, then he is made of the one. And we will swim through the honeycombs and make our way back to... To the Isle of Forgetfulness? 

By the way, if you are reading this, don't ask for eternal life, and don't weep if you are left behind. That itself is eternal, and it serves as an important point. Then again, if you are following me, you are part of the eternal and that wish is worthless. 

Today, when I awoke in the spaceship, I sat for an hour and closed my eyes. I saw real things. I saw the shape and texture of the earth. I saw the clouds and the ocean and faces. In that time, I forgot I was alone, encased in flesh and damned into forever. When I came back to myself, I smoked some pot and got lost in folds of time, but I felt myself coming to terms with space, and I saw that the trillions of stars outnumber the lonely people on the planet. 

How infinitely small I became! And then I went to find some homeless friends who I haven't seen in years.... And I rode my bike through the park and I felt alive and I kept searching for them, and when I came home Ricardo told me they'd stopped by the house, and I was in awe because that was impossible.  Jung called it synchronicity, but I saw God in it because I hadn't seen them in a year but I prayed for them and went out on my bike to look for them. Then they showed up… Or maybe I showed up to the memory. Perhaps I will go out again on my bike and looking for something. 

When you live constantly in a spaceship, you start to lose your mind. I must have volunteered for all of this, as I think I mentioned previously. Ordinarily I wouldn't have done it, but they said no matter what happened, my DNA and cells would live long after my death and eventually the spaceship would crash somewhere. They said if the place where it landed was advanced, they would study my code and somehow resurrect our civilization, and if the civilization wasn't advanced, our molecular structure would invariably be released into the atmosphere and therefore we would somehow acclimate to the new environment and somehow be pulled into the genetic evolution. 

Of course, all of this is a one in a trillion chance because if the ship somehow makes it to a planet, there's no guarantee that the environment won't be inhospitable. The scientists were desperate to save life, and that's why they sent me out here. They had me on so many medications—anti-anxiety, mood stabilizers, benzos, atypical antipsychotics—and I suspect they did this to others too. Now we're like a bunch of sperm streaming out into the vastness of infinity, and the hope is that one of us will fertilize an egg somewhere. We hope that one of us makes it to tell our story. We’re not who you think we are. 

I sometimes think that spreading out and exploring is our evolutionary purpose. We spill out into any environment and want so desperately to be the victor. I'm not interested so much, though part of me thinks it would be pretty amazing if I were the one. And they are intent on keeping me hooked, because I am always the one. I read about Carl Jung and he spoke about this thing called synchronicity. This is the psychological term to explain the unexplainable. It's like when someone is thinking of a song and a person drives by and happens to be blasting it. That's synchronicity. It's one step up from coincidence. 

I recognized a lot of synchronicity in my own life before I ended up here. I heard a lot of voices, too. It happened when I was skimming through the life of an enslaved person in 18th century America. I could hear him, and I felt his presence. His name was Kearl and he disappointed his mother… He stared into her eyes, and I understood him, and I wanted to carry him with me… That’s why I got in the car, I think. I was learning about what it meant to be enslaved and then the egg cracked and a song on the radio turned to fuzz and a buzz, and the actual voice of God spoke to me. 

The radio began to hiss and blur, and from within the buzz I could hear a scattered voice of transmission. I heard partially understood phrases, mixed with music sputtering out from the fragmented radio waves. It sounded like several programs wove together and voices from the separate programs pushed out of the static--word blending into word. From the static and the mix of voices, I heard the sound of a paternal man break through, and the voice was soothing and spoke to me like a friend. 

I stopped underneath a billboard next to the gas station shaking to think that my head was a radio capable of hearing a frequency. It was late at night, somewhere around one in the morning. The streets were mostly empty. I don’t even remember why I was driving, but when I stopped under the billboard, I wanted in that moment to jump from the car. I wanted to get out and run, to find someone who also heard the universal static. 

In my mind, I thought perhaps there was some sort of truth that existed outside of the car on the empty street in the early morning hours. I’d stopped the car but had not turned it off yet. I debated opening my car door and walking out onto the road, the voice on the radio still only partially recognizable through the bad transmission. In that moment, I heard the voice say quite clearly, "If you get out and go there into the night you will see the greatest poverty you have ever seen." It was a strange thing to hear, and in my panic, I truly believed if I stepped outside, I would see something horrible, like perhaps zombies or some sort of Demon Devil tribe waiting to snatch me away and into the dark. 

The voice repeated again, in a very paternal way, “If you go there, you will see poverty like you have never seen before." I did not leave my car but instead accelerated and drove myself to the freeway exit. I turned right and headed down the road. I felt the force of moving speed and it was as if I’d never driven in a car before. The experience proved entirely too much for my senses, and everything burned and bled into me. 

The radio continued its scramble of sound and I could pick out that the voices coming from it were narrating the event in a fragmented way. I felt like I was driving under water, and in the flooding speed, it seemed that the front part of the car was actually lifting up, as if it weren’t touching the ground at all, and I remember the feeling I was not driving, but rather it was driving itself and lifting into the air. At one point, I remember not being able to see anything around me except darkness. 

There were no signs, no lights, no road. It was just me and I had risen in the car to a place slightly above the natural world, and yet I still felt the speed of the car and heard the sounds on the radio. The car kept lifting and I was lost in something electric. I knew then that I could smash the car into the wall, but I kept driving--50, 60, 70 miles per hour. Everything raced passed me and I kept driving, and I passed my exit and then I turned around and a thought said to crash my car. 

Yes, I thought, I should drive my car into a wall! The thought came from nowhere and seemed somehow important, as if it was something I should actually do. Just then, the same paternal voice on the radio told me to drive to the hospital. He spoke in clear tones through the static, and said, "Do not drive your car into the wall, I would love you even if you did, but do not do this. Now… Go to the hospital." 

I kept driving and managed to get to the hospital. When I put the car in park, I threw open the door and dropped to my knees. I kissed the ground and I spoke to Jesus… I felt as if he had saved me from what could have been a terrible wreck… I listened to his words and everything melted away, and then I went into the hospital where they placed me on a psychiatric hold. I stayed for over a week. 

In the darkness, there’s nothing to do but relive the memories. That’s all you have. And the memories come whether you want them to or not. I’ve relived them all a billion times, and I knew them backward and forward. I even know this memory. This one right now… I saw the memories first appear on the monitor. I say “saw” but, as you know, the better word is “imagined.” 

Just like the lines around me that started to appear in a faint way, the memories started to appear that way, too. It’s funny, when you have forever in the dark: you have complete access to your life. You know, they say the brain doesn’t forget anything. Every image it sees is somehow stored away like an enormous Rolodex. My first memory was a Halloween mask. Do you remember my having mentioned it before?  I was terrified of it, and I clung to my mother’s leg while she talked on the phone. I can’t go back any further than that. But I can tell you every single detail about the scene. 

I also remember that it snowed one day. I wasn’t old enough for school, though my brother and sister were already attending. It never snowed in California accept that once--just that once--and my mother took me into the backyard, and I can see my sense of wonder and amazement. She went and got vanilla and sugar from inside—along with two cups—and she put the snow into the cups and added the ingredients, and we ate it. 

My mother took a picture of me standing out there in an oversized jacket with a big smile on my face, and I am young and happy and completely unaware that I will end up out here in space like this. But that’s the strange part, I think. Because it’s me in the memory. Mostly I’m good about being able to disappear into a memory, but always in the background, I’m aware that it’s not real. Or… Maybe that’s not the right way to put it. It is real, but it’s not real right now. 

Sometimes, I’ll reimagine my past or try and construct a new one. In one of my fantasies, I was a wealthy man living Los Angeles, but then I remembered that this was actually a movie I’d seen, and I wasn’t that man at all. And that was a sad realization for me. At first, I thought I could reconstruct my world and make it into a heaven of sorts. If my mind’s eye allowed me to see the inside of the ship in vivid multicolor… If I could essentially recreate an entire afternoon in my mind, feeling as if I’d teleported myself back, why not reimagine the whole thing? I lived a beautiful life the first time, but then I realized that every love I’d created, every exciting drama that unfolded, they were all fake. In fact, they weren’t real at all. I fell in love so hard with a character I’d imagined. But after years passed, I realized that he wasn’t real. 

How can heaven be heaven if it’s just you? Are you listening kiddo? Once you realize that you created the whole thing, it loses its charm. The same happened when I imagined myself in hell. I don’t know how that happened, but one day, the pod transformed into a murderous, torture-scene. I must have been very sick. I don’t know. I spent quite a long time in that terrible place, and the walls around me transformed into a prison and the music surrounding me turned into cacophonous growls, the stuff of nightmares. 

But one day, when they’d thrown me into solitary confinement and slammed the door shut, I felt that same terror when the lights went out, and I remembered that I wasn’t in solitary confinement. I was in a space ship, and I was flying in the dark. Initially, the thought struck me as horrific. What makes more sense: being locked in solitary confinement or being in a spaceship? I remembered the pencils, so I crawled through the darkness—whether it was a cell or a spaceship—and there they were. “The pencils,” I spoke aloud. 

Fuck. I’m not in solitary confinement. I imagined that. 

I don’t know how long I was lost in that thought. It took a good ten minutes to level my head and get my bearings. Yes, there was the monitor and the bathroom and the kitchen. This was not a cell. A cell was not this big. And that’s when I realized the dangers of thought. That’s when I realized I am not God or Jesus or any special messenger. That's when I remembered that I am waiting for the son of God to return, to break through the barriers and bring me home.  I am a single grain of sand, and you’ve come to keep me company, to walk with me and purify me, so that I might be of some service to someone else. I am the interstitial hallway, perhaps an acorn or a mustard seed, but perhaps nothing but dust and ashes.

Now I imagine the tortured pain of the dying AIDS patient--or the abused child--or the battered wife.  I breathe them into me, into my heart, and I offer to take their place and relieve them of their suffering.  In their worst of the pain, I tell them stories and bring them with me on walks through fields near flowers in the sun.  I consciously take in full lungs full of air and hold them dear, dear next to me in the darkness of the ship.