Dillon found his paramour right where she said she would be, standing in-between the eaves of a nondescript green bookshop whose large avant-garde titles loitered behind big lead windows like bankrupt uncles.
         A thousand butterflies took relief.

         The flower-sellers and curio–peddlers of Montmartre continued with their quarrelsome business; their indifference to the romance of the city an incurable part of it. 

         “You are late,” she said, hair tied into an auburn fountain on top of her head, body adored by a white cotton dress; smile sincere enough to bend the course of a life.

         “I wasn’t sure you would be here.”

         “And where else would I be, huh? Ce n'est pas le nombre de personnes vers qui on saute, c'est à qui il attend.” She casually discarded a sunflower recently given to her by a fellow devotee. “Well, are you coming inside?” Into Bibliotheque Piere Lefebvre, where she claimed to have elegantly wasted all of her lost days. 

        She had already set aside a dog–eared copy of Don Quixote for him; inscribed on the inner jacket in tempestuous scrawl were the words:

 

        Pour Dillon, avec amour

        Ceux qui errent ne sont jamais perdus, si vous trouvez cela, passez-le.

        x Zofia

​

        “Tolkien.” She stood by his shoulder. A sign above the old cash register lamented the sorry fate of forgotten books consigned to sit on shelves forever; dust swirled in a mindless light.

        “Something to remember me by, alo, if you find Monsieur Quixote worthy, don’t let him rot in antiquity, pass him and his ass on, no?” she smiled.  

         Moved beyond words all he could think to think was that one day he would put them down in song.

         “À propos, are you going to introduce me to these mysterious friends?”

         My God, he thought, I hope you’re ready. 

​

         They found his scruffy entourage lounging under a conifer tree by Buttes Chaumont. Lucie and her new friend Lou - a scampy backup vocalist with knobbly knees - had decided to tag along. The Metro gurgled like a giant devouring the earth as they made their introductions. In the distance golden church bells, globular and deliberate. At the bells insistence a parade of topless women came marching down Rue de Abbesses. The march followed in short succession by a congo of crazy teens tailing the women like baboons falling out of trees. (Zo politely refused to translate what the teenagers said – held a fierce patriotism, despite its youth, for the French.)

        Both encounters were quickly forgotten as they entered the flourishing gardens. Parc des Buttes’ illustrious lawns rolled out in front of them in an advent of wild splendour. Spontaneity of bloom mocked the monolithic outcrop, which had taken so much longer than the gay blossoms to get there, but whose granite indifference was determined to last forever. An oblong pool of glass reflected a heron’s silvery coat in the watercolours above, willows drank, chestnuts burgeoned, bountiful canopies of sentient green whispered through ancient neural networks; the gardens a testament to worlds far older than men. For how long had the sun lent itself to the yearning earth, allowed its stellar resplendence to be sucked-up by thirsty chloroplasts and conserved, sparingly, for millennia — watched the fruits of Eden fall one-by-one, become carbonised and repurposed — and waited for the day a civilisation of gardeners would bring their unholy fires to send their flaming exultations back to the blazing heavens saying too much, too much — now send us the flood.  

           

         They sat in an alcove of forgotten oaks; made their intentions known.

         “There are actual mushrooms in here,” remarked Dill, amazed.

         “Mush’ooms are an incredible thing, no?” Zo, brushing pollen out her eyelashes, “maybe they taste delicious on pizza, maybe the fungi kills you alo – or maybe they take you to the world in between,” she smiled mischievously, “to see the faeries.”

         Lucy nibbled the corner of a truffle, made a predictable face, as if she had just bitten into a chocolate chip cookie only to be deceived, yet again, by the dastard existence of raisins. “Tastes like actual mushrooms.”

         “You sure these aren’t dangerous?” asked Denver dubiously.

         “You did get them from a man in an actual shop, correct?”

         Denver nodded.

         “Then I doubt he was an assassin,” said Zac.

     “I always thought mushrooms were a name for something else,” remarked Lou.

         “Like,”

         “What I mean,” continued Denver, “is it going to turn me into a pamplemousse?” One had to be careful with this stuff. (He’d heard a story about a guy on acid who had cut pieces of his face off with a broken mirror and fed them to his dog. In the intergalactic search for answers, the cluster of galaxies in his brain had rearranged and sent a message back telling him that all he needed to know was that his search was too vain. The ego, oh, it had to go.)

         “Crazy how?”

         “I just like to be in control, that's all.”

         “But you get drunk all the time…”

         “Yeah, but that’s not the same.”

         “Isn’t it? Are you in control when you drunken drive–”

         “Or fall asleep at night.”

         “Everything I ever done that I regret in life I was drunk,” said Johnny.

         “Only one way to find out,” said Zach. 

         “You ’ave to surrender Denever,” smiled Zo, “you’ll see.”

         “I’ll do one,” Denver capitulated, “if everyone else does?” Ever since Eve, has it been.

 

         Zo made them sit in a circle, blessed them with Palo Santo and said an ancient Arabic verse; called upon the old gods for protection, the new for divine intervention. Dillon played a Nihls Frahm overture through his Onyx while they waited, reverently, like a family of genial bears in the forest, for the effects of their golden elixir to come on.

         “You feeling anything yet,” whispered Zac to Dillon after what felt like an abnormally long time.

         “I don’t know – you?”

         “Nah.”

         “I am,” said Denver, staring at his hands, deeply concerned about what he’d just done.  

         “Don’t look for it, it will find you mon chou” – Zo swaying, fountain of hair whispering to the wind, eyelashes praying.

Zac got up. “I’m going to find a bathroom.”

         Johnny yawned in earnest as the edges began to refine themselves according to the rules that govern less. The songs of birds started to make sense. Smells curdled.

         “Is anyone else seeing in HD?” asked Lucie.

         “H’yup.”

         She had entered – it seemed – into a hyper realistic version of reality. Looking through a lattice of a ginkgo bilboa branches toward the lake to the left, a tear fell unexpectedly down her face. The garden was the most astonishing thing she’d ever seen.

         Floating over the bushes from the south came the unmistakable chorus of a pod of overweight American ladies being taken on a tour of the park in a golf cart . The word gorgeous separated itself like a cadenza from their choral and embedded its frequency into the echoic chamber of Dillon’s auditory cortex so fundamentally that the undulations of the word gor-ge-ous – the length of trough and fall of peak – became so appreciably proud of the artificial sense he had hitched to its resonance, the dissonance so great, that it felt as if the she had said the word a thousand times at once and all that was left of it now was the geometrical fundamentality of shape. “Are those ladies freaking anybody else out?”

         Johnny sitting next to him replied from far away, “Nahhh, I’m just observing all this purple. Have you seen all this purple man? Look there” he said, pointing at a frilly agapanthus, “and there, and there. Purple everywhere.”

         “You are too much in your head patat – look out, not in.”

         “I can feel the ground breathing beneath me,” said Denver, panicking. 

         “Those trees are clearly in cahoots,” giggled Lucie, “they’ve been whispering dirty secrets to one another ever since we got here.”

         “It’s like the whole world is communicating.”

         “Can anyone else hear that buzzing noise?” Denver now holding on tight.

         “Surrender mon chou.”

         Johnny saw Zo’s soul. Lucy caught a contagious case of the giggles. Lou held up a flake of mushroom agate and stared at it. “It's so beautiful. I've never noticed how beautiful mushrooms are before.” 

         “You know what is ’appening, Louuu?” instructed Zo.

         “What?”

         “The mushroom is appreciating itself.”

         “Whaaaaat?.” A massive grin articulated across her face.

         Zac was back, looking pale. “Whatever you do, do not go into the bathrooms.”

​

         The more Dillon looked into the vast abyss of his mind the more shredded he became by the complexity of his existence.

         “I feel so present.” Lucie was saying to him from a distance, pulsating. “You know what’s so crazy? Your right now is different to my right now is different to that kid over there’s right now is different to some Geisha in the past’s right now – and – it's all happening right now.” But Dillon had already left, gone to a place beyond time.

         His whole body began to vibrate at an impossibly high frequency as the physical laws that anchored him to reality continued unravelling.  

        He watched —

        As earth rose and sky melted.

        As fractals feinted and semantics shattered.

        Felt his mind fall further and further away from him, through countless different dimensions; universes flickered in and out of existence, debated their own supersymmetry. An irrational integer tried to undivide itself. The very seat of his being oscillated with absurd familiarity. "Woahhh" – the word vibrated through multiple dimensions across the crystalline air.

       Someone began to laugh.

       “Are you serious…”

       They and they and we and you, laughing too, morphed faces distorted into childish retinues.

       The birds and the bushes and the blades of grass all in cahoots.     

       Einstein and Bohr and Aristotle and Jesus, laughing too. 

       It was all so comically beyond the best of them.

       Breathe, just breathe…

       A brief reprieve then like a tidal wave crashing it came again and he was gone – through the portal of his subconscious, flirting with the vitreous madness that substituted the gap between oblivion and infinite knowledge; could feel himself being fundamentally changed, sublimated, pulled under in infinitesimally complex subatomic ways. He was an ant standing upon the superhighway of life. He was Mother earth, Father Time. Oblivion and Creation pulsated before him indifferent to the experience; watched, was no longer a witness, was the smallest possible expression of the most complex equation, was it – the sap that flowered the plants, the turbines that powered the Gods. He was the unquestioning universe trying to understand – laughing at himself, saying what?

       “Dillon, are you okay?”

        How to tell of the untellable? “The universe is in my brain but my brain is in the universe,” – was all he could say. He was exploding – into parts of himself, going – quite literally, insane; could hear each individual chord of his DNA; felt the strings of his cellular orchestra playing.

“Where am I? How did I get here,” demanded Denver, urgently – as if the very ideation of his existence had only struck him now.

       “Denver are you okay?”

       “We’re in the park”

       “Oh, thank God –”

       “You don’t know where I’ve been. I went down this tunnel. I lived entire lifetimes.”

       Johnny’s voice floated across the expanse. “That's why they call it a trip, man.”

       “You don’t understand. Actual lifetimes. I was born. I lived. I died. Many, many times –”

       “How long have we been here?”

       “Not long, but enough.”

       Dillon put a disembodied hand out, it was all he could do to say to him: I understand, only me, only you.

         “Let’s go for a walk,” suggested Zo dreamily. She pulled Dillon and Denver to their feet like lovable zombies – “trust me.”  

 

         She took them deep into the forest, white kaftan wrapped around her like a bridal gown as they followed her like a flock of faithfully disorientated nuns. “Alo, we go to the grotto to find the faeries, but first, we stop to appreciate the trees, non?”

         Zac encountered a Giant Sequoia, decided to sound the wild, magnificent bastard out.

         A swirl of sentient succulents burst forth with witchy wisdom, sucked the girls in. A menagerie of birds, sensing a deeper connection, were about to begin. Hearing them, Dillon and Denver climbed into the amorphous bows of a giant almond tree, her fibrous limbs spread about her like the womb of a wild mother buried beneath the weight of her own existence only to rise again in the form of new children. Ancient arteries collapsed to make homes for smaller plants, woodland critters and tiny mammals furrowed and frolicked in wholesome hollows, above a diaphanous gossamer. He rubbed his hands over her smooth stratified bark, felt the shape of things to come, sensed that they had all been beautiful once; climbed higher, stuck his head out the canopy like a curious owl, said “ooooooo,” said “wow.”

         Denver’s head popped out next to his, then Zo’s. Three little monkeys in a stem of broccoli. 

         “Much better in here, non?” Her eyes smiled with mystical understanding.  

         “I can’t even begin to explain to you what’s going on in my head.”

“Then don’t, mon ami.”

         He had defragmented his entire history. Sitting up in that tree, it didn’t seem like such a far-fetched thing to him that psychedelics might have liberated monkeys; lost himself again, became the white part of the horizon where sight runs out of length, pricked the murderous moment between wakefulness and death.

         In the distance, Lucie and Lou were shrieking down a hill, chastising a wild goose. 

         A temporal shift and he was back in the tree. 

         How could he have dismissed this so flippantly? The Shamans in the Amazon, the Egyptian high priests, the bushmen, the goddamn hippies – he finally understood that of all the epistemological divides of man, this was the only one that truly mattered: the inscrutable difference between those who have taken a significant amount of psychedelics (if only once) and those still living in the golden birdcage of their brain.

         “Is acid like this?” he asked. 

         “More like walking through a dream next to Salvador Dali.”

         A butterfly named Denver landed on Denver’s forehead. “I think I’ve been reincarnated,” he finally said.

        Johnny, meditating in an azalea, had long ago stopped trying to use worthless words to describe the complexity of his world.

 

        Them wild cosmonauts spent aeons in the forest chasing spectral things, climbing trees, before coming back down to their agrarian thicket to feast: fresh figs, unleavened bread, crudités, a panoply of stinky cheeses oozing viridian, blood red cherries, fleshy and brilliant. 

       Having passed its zenith, the tide of Dillon’s inception began to slowly weaken against his bow. Everyone felt the evanescence, all were joyous and light. Zac’s ego had been pushed through a colander and could no longer recognize the person who had come out the other side. Johnny had finally been able to let go of what he had done to Talia. Zo assured      Denver that having lived once and, having borne such an inconceivability – the idea that it might have happened before or might again – in an exaltation of different ways, in a myriad of different forms (she only had to look at the garden around her to evidence the thought) was a far lesser absurdity than having his complexity arise out of the vagaries of absence and dust, and to do so only once.

       “La former vient de l’esprit, et non l’inverse. La grande question de Camus est muette,” whispered Zo. 

        They broke bread. They banged djembes, rattled shakers and enticed fellow French revellers of bohemia in. The girls harmonised to lyrics Zac made up on the spot, Johnny thrummed a mringdum hypnotically. Denver troubled the soul of a tambourine for answers deep within him. Dillon sat silent for once, his inner sound turned right down, completely spellbound by the hitherto unrealized depths of his existence – and her, her – swirling in the middle of it, pulling him deeper and deeper into the synecdoche of his love; realisation expounding out of him like quantum ripples cascading into all possible iterations at once.

 

       At sunset they clamoured up the crag to the Temple de la Sybille, crossed the bridge that Eiffel built, stood in a floating cúpula and gazed across the city of Paris; watched her glimmer to life, recalcitrant and slightly worn out getting dressed-up for the vaudeville, knowing from centuries of debonair inquisition that the show must go on. To the east the towers of Sacré-Cœur winked at them from equally privileged heights; a flock of mallards cut across Dillon’s vision, pulled his attention back into the pressing present where he lent it devotionally to fading hues of plum and pewt, pine, the City of Is reflected in the waters of Île du Belvédère below, ocherous rusts, golden browns, the burnt umbers of Artemis’ hunt, shades of green more numinous in the dying light than all the leaves beholden to the sun. Oh, how many broken hearts had the tower of Babylonia beckoned, only to have them leap longingly towards its gardens to be crushed by the very earth that had birthed them? For all his wisdom and belonging, how foolish was man to think that he could live in towers of steel and ivory and forget so easily to worship the earth from which he rose and to which he must return; the stars and their dust, separated by far more than Horatio’s heaven, Milton’s hell.

       A stampede began to thunder in him then, the footsteps of his ancestors bursting through the gap, their lives roaring with unforgotten significance— try as he might he could not prevent the guilt from rising up, felt the resistance slip within him– the urge to jump— to be swallowed and swept up so effortlessly by the massive tide of mankind— whose past was not passed, whose mantle was the heritage he rode upon, who called to him in the small voice of a little girl sitting at home wondering where he was? How had he wandered so far from what mattered most? 

         Zo put her arms around him, didn’t ask. As the fading light became more brilliant, more true, more profound – knowing it to be enhanced by the drug making its enhancement no less profound, no less true – he felt prodigiously connected to every being that had ever lived; the only question that presented itself to ask was where did this newfound profundity come from – out there, amongst the whims and whorl of the world, or had it been inside, unobserved all along?

         An incredulous expanse of breath and colour moving as one; its beauty all for him if only he could learn to choose this world from amongst all the other ones.

​

– excerpt taken from Absurdity, a novel