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1.12

Post-Encounter Deposition

Zephyr Andrew Calimeris, MFA

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The Abrahamic religions include Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Bahá’í, and (controversially) Satanism. Ecclesiasts can argue that one if they feel like it; that’s my list, because these are literary and spiritual traditions that have a death grip on global culture, even in countries where they’re not officially practiced. And, significantly, the families who read in these traditions are taught a little bit about sacrifice. Burning a goat, or tying your son to an altar until God tells you it’s okay, he was just testing. Sacrifice is in Abraham’s DNA itself, going all the way back to Eden, from which the beautiful Lilith was offered up to the angels, carnally, for the sin of speaking her mind. (Adam’s second wife, and younger, got a lighter sentence for the same crime, or perhaps a harsher one, as she got to bring her loving husband with her into exile.)

The Beings? I’ll get to them in a moment, reader. The point I’m trying to make is that sacrifice is no stranger to the People of the Book.

However: to understand the concept really, you need to look to the many jealous gods of Ancient Greece. There, the shipwright knew he’d better throw his prized axe into the sea as a gift to Poseidon, or lose the whole boat he had built with it. If he was also a farmer (as most men were), then when grain was harvested, he would burn a bit of it for Demeter. He would pour out some wine for Bacchus, and some more for Zeus, and a bit more for all his homies called down early to the fields of Asphodel, the afterlife of ordinary men and women.

The Olympians, having overthrown and murdered the Titans who made them, knew well what carnage could be wrought by hubris, and so they punished it with a severity reserved for no other crime. Humility they rewarded with benign neglect, which was really the best you could get from them, for the favor of one god invited the envy of others.

Ask Jason or Odysseus: the gods will have their pound of flesh either way, and will charge usurious interest if you make them wait, and double if you force them to come down and extract it in person.

It’s the same with entropy. If thermodynamics is a game, then it’s one you can’t win and can’t draw, and from which you can’t retire. The house emerges ever victorious, and the gods will have their due, and only fools are surprised when it happens.

There is a thing called the Carnot Cycle, which dictates how much heat an internal combustion engine has to waste at each step of its rotation. Has to, for such engines can operate in no other way. But then clever engineers stole the secret of harnessing that wasted heat with thermoelectric junctions, until finally the engine was half electric, and then they dispensed with combustion altogether, drawing energy directly from bright Helios as he traversed the daytime heavens in his fiery chariot. Allowing the drilled and brutalized Earth a moment to breathe.

A generous god by Olympian standards, or at least aloof, Helios himself did not object. But Poseidon and Demeter did, for the surface area of the photovoltaic network was borrowed partly from them. Crop yields and fish stocks shrank accordingly; there’s no free lunch and never was.

(Yes, reader, I speak of the Titan Helios and not the Olympian Apollo, because Apollo was not just the sun god, but also the god of nearly everything not nailed down by Zeus. Music, art, literature, and knowledge—all the sissy stuff that lightning bolts and fucking could not accomplish. But also archery! Also medicine! No, I think a busy guy like that would leave Helios alive to drive the stupid chariot for him.)

But listen: the sorry truth is, the gods were only ever caretakers of the taxes they charged. They, too, must bow and scrape before the might of implacable Entropy, who sleepless waits for the least and greatest among us, claiming all in the end. Even the gods, yes. We could call her Hunger, the insatiable, because we know she’ll expand until nothing else remains, and the universe must begin afresh. Or not.

Anyway, back on Earth, other gods noticed the humans’ pilferage from Helios and Poseidon and Demeter, and it frankly pissed them off. If these gods could be stolen from, then what god was safe? And so, they reached vengeful fingers downward from Heaven. Storms wracked the coastlines, and drought ravaged the inland spaces. Wars sprang up as Ares entered the fray, until finally, fed up with it, humans started leaving the Earth entirely.

Take that, Olympus.

In space, we naked apes were welcomed by new gods, who sang and lectured and danced and dreamed and beckoned. And we answered the call! Shipwrights built a boat to carry us still farther from the noise. We made the climb, far, far above the chariot of Helios, only to find that even these new gods, these Beings, must make their obeisance to Entropy. Really, her slightest whim is of great importance to them, or so it seemed when they spoke to me, in the darkness of interstellar space.

Like the Oracle at Delphi, they speak messages that are cryptic and yet, when untangled with the aid of hindsight, appallingly obvious. And so the irony for mankind, and its self-appointed champion Igbal Renz, is that this perilous journey yields a lesson we already knew: that nothing comes without effort, that all efforts are taxed, and that while oblivion is our only escape, even that will not wholly erase our misdeeds from the cosmic record.

To commune with these gods, one has to partake of the Wine of Death, for DMT is released in our own brains at that final moment, when all debts are due and the mortal coil is finally shuffled off. Ketamine is a dissociative to reduce fear, and MDMA is a stimulant and euphoriant to bring you down gently. This mixture—this Vinomuerta—dissolves you into a fog and then transports you to a timeless place and a placeless time where such communion is possible, where colors have shape, where nothing is solid, where everything is everything and thus all things can be asked and answered, if you can only remember for a moment that you exist at all.

But this, too, comes at a price—how could it not?—because pushing these drugs into a human body does not simply turn it into a walkie-talkie for speaking to aliens. First and foremost, the Vinomuerta will bend your mind like taffy. It’ll squash your judgment, and make you feel every molecule of your skin. Bacchus is the god of Spring Break and Mardi Gras and the Pride Parade, and with far milder drink he can bid us dance nude ’round the bonfire while his flutes are playing. And so we did, reader. And so we did.

Our orgy is widely denied, of course. Hairless apes are shy creatures in the end, embarrassed of our animal physicality, embarrassed of having needs that we either act on or don’t. Most of us deny we even saw that mass embrace, though we were all in one big inflatable donut together, with the six-meter-wide needle of the ship at the center, blocking only a small portion of the view. Were there really dozens of shy abstainers hanging out in that thin wedge of obstruction? In my admittedly vague recollection, there were only a few people on the sidelines—chief among them Brother Michael, who hovered in his robes with the most annoying look of amused condescension, as if he wasn’t also twisted out of his gourd.

But embrace we did, with rare urgency, rarer ecstasy, and a blurring of the physical boundaries that normally hold one flesh separate from another. I don’t know how long I copulated, or with whom, or how many. Will you believe it doesn’t matter? We then chattered as the Molly wore off, all hundred of us, plucking random underwear from the sweaty air, and sharing words about experiences that words could not convey. And then we embraced again, more cautiously, by nameless twos and threes, and finally slunk off to the freezer coffins that were our only private space, to contemplate things that become only blurrier with contemplation.

Certain experiences divide one’s life into Before and After, and I’m here to say, communing with the Beings is very definitely one of those. I wish I could tell you more, but (and here is something I don’t say very often) words fail.


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