Pale Fragments

the burning bush wasn't Yahweh, it was an ayahuasca plant

The Goddess was the greatest surfer who had ever lived or will live on our planet, a minor deity called "Tsunami-Tamer" in the religious dictionary of a small island tribe that lasted a few hundred years after the first boats were built. In doing so, she gave those people the idea of surfing which was passed from friend to friend, refined over the years, until we now have modern surfing. These big-wave surfers who search for the hundred-foot wave can only aspire to dream to achieve the waves caught by the Robot.

She was the one who showed ayahuasca to Moses. And she was also the one who I first smoked marijuana with seriously. I should have been more intimidated, but I was too happy to be with her to notice. It's easy to see your own arrogance in hindsight. She knew I would see it, and she rarely corrected me directly. The wisest does not sacrifice another's happiness in order to prove their own wisdom; instead, they trust that the same god who showed them the way is available to the most ignorant.

(There's some irony for ya, straight from the mouth of an unreliable narrator who hates all prophets and yet writes herself as though she were one. The market for impressionable minds is competitive and shrinking these days, you have no idea.)

The Goddess and I were high as fuck one night (as we usually were when she visited me). I hadn't taken half as much as she had. She always smoked a lot more than me, even when I learned how to catch up. Everything she did was with the attitude of a father urging his son to come into the lake, promising that the cold was only bothersome for a moment.

We weren't talking about anything in particular, kinda just meandering from one dead-end philosophical topic to another (as we usually did). I knew that she was humoring me; I knew she knew the answers.

That's not true. I didn't know, then, that she was communicating to me at my level. "At my level"; if the volume of my awareness were a grape, her's would be the entire knowable universe. Even if you were to suppose the volume of my awareness were the size of a human mind, her's would still be all the infinitely greater in comparison. She spoke to me in the same way a human might somehow be totally fluent with a praying-mantis—and yet I felt so wise next to her, raising points in a way that I thought was poetic, and which charged my blood by speaking. She did not ignore weakness, and in doing so allowed the potential there to be the justifier of the respect she felt and communicated.

She hadn't yet told me then that she would soon die. I didn't know why she had come to me, and she hid her urgency well. She did not burden me with her responsibility until she had told me all the stories she had to tell. My guess, though it's impossible to tell with any certainty why the Goddess did what she did, is that this was so I wouldn't be nervous in listening to her. She only wanted me to observe and absorb as myself. I think she saw me as a filter for her stories; but one that gives some of its essence to the tea.

Remembering, I can see the impatience in her ancient eyes. She was a master of metamorphoses; she could be whoever she wanted to be. But not even she with her body completely remade every hundred years could erase the signs of age. They did not take the shape of wrinkles on her perfect skin, not problems with memory nor egoism. To watch her eyes was like looking at a mountain from far away; she looked away in these moments, but I knew Sometimes, a rarity, she would stop in her questioning of me and my world-saving thoughts to go on a tirade that seemed to have very little to do with anything. As the time we spent together magnified, I realized that this was sometimes the way she would begin a story. That was a clue to me that she never had to be has high as she seemed; she was always in full control of her intention.

Then we were speaking about Xadrin.

"I never revealed myself to him," Grace said. Her voice broke. She had a dimple, only on the right side of her face, and it appeared then as her face screwed itself up from misery with godly courage.

"I knew I couldn't ever do it, come clean to him about who I really am. I became...interested in Anders when he was very young. I knew I could be myself with who he would grow to be." She looked away, an ember of self-hatred twinkling in her eyes looking through misty lenses out into Everything all at once. Then her face softened and she said, "But I know, now, that I am not a gardener.

"At first, Xadrin was nothing to me except another member of Anders' family. It was...clear to me that Xadrin was not the one I was looking for. I didn't know why.

"It was through happenstance that I became acquainted with him. I was investigating the Church of the River personally; not in this form, but another body. Xadrin was at a party one of those acquaintances held. I recognized him; of course he would have no idea who I was, no idea that he would fall in love with his little brother's imaginary angel friend."

"That's fucked up," I said.

"It's worse, because I came to love him, too. I didn't tell Anders, until...we'll get there, I won't reveal too much at once.

"I began to observe him, invisibly," and she began to tell a story, her sentences expanding as paint on wet paper, her eyes closed and soul far away, face expressing what she felt, her single dimple playing the characters across her perfect face, voice trembling and quietening and laughing...