What You Will

Thea had so much good to say about her experience that I could barely get a word in at dinner. Even though she spoke at length about the positive impact of her experience, swearing she was a changed woman now, with a stronger sense of self, capable of facing her fears - no, excited to face her fears - and absolutely brimming with a determination and focus she had so far lacked in life, I left the restaurant a little fuzzy on what to expect detail-wise. I sent her a message: I’m looking into an appointment but the website is so vague! What should I expect? Should I bring Dan?

She responded right away: That’s a GREAT idea!! It’s different for everyone, you guys will get a lot out of it I’m sure.

The Journey Center’s website had a section for couples considering a Shared Virtual Experience, outlining the potential benefits beneath bright photos of happy couples in peaceful embraces. I read it to Dan that night in bed while he worked on his lesson plan. “It says, the pair, having committed to a shared path towards mutual purpose and fulfillment, emerges deeply bonded and more cognizant of the others innate strengths and talents - I guess that’s.. good?”

Without looking up Dan stroked his chin and made his professor face. “Mmm hmm, I agree. That is.. good? I’d do it. We had a good time on shrooms. Janie did it and she made it sound more like a video game than therapy, I think it could be fun.”

“Know thyself,” I read from the main page. “Go deeper.”

So we decided, why not?

A few weeks later we took the bridge across the Bay for our appointment. The Journey Center gleamed white from the freeway. The exit took us on a winding road into a salt marsh, then straightened out and fed directly into the Center parking lot. Surrounded by muddy flats the Center, a perfect cube in glass and glossy cladding, looked like a high-tech marshmallow about to melt into the ground. The tide was low and when I opened the door the odor of sulfur hit me like a rogue wave. We jogged up to the glass doors and inside to escape.

The interior was done up like a medical spa, vaguely clinical but lush with plants and luxe details. Everything was white and bathed in bright lights. The light was, in a hard way to describe, high-quality. I felt encompassed by it, and was sure the lighting had been designed to cast a scientifically even glow. Dan looked ten years younger. There were, I realized, looking around, no shadows.

Dan had brought a few books to review for his Hemingway course but instead of reading he teased me. I had gagged when the rotten egg smell hit; I hadn’t even realized. “It wasn’t that bad, you’re so sensitive, You know, I call you princess because you’d feel a grain of rice under a hundred mattresses. A pea, forget it.”

“Seriously? You didn’t notice when the kitchen was on fire. You just don’t care to notice anything.”

Dan uncrossed his legs and sat up straighter. “Whoa, wait. Are we fighting? I thought we were just doing this for fun, why are we fighting now?”

“No,” I said, “I guess I’m just a little nervous. Sorry, I just don’t like not knowing what to expect.” I reached over and grabbed his hand.

“The kitchen wasn’t on fire.”

“I know,” I lied. By my calculations, once the flames from the toaster lit the curtains, it counted as setting the kitchen on fire, but this wasn’t the time. It was an accident.

A nurse appeared with a clipboard. “Helen? Dan? We’re ready for you.”

The first step, she explained, was to calibrate the system to our unique feedback patterns. She led us down the hallway to a large treatment room decorated in the same quasi-medical fashion as the reception area but lit with candles and dim lamps. Adjoining the treatment room were two small, glass-walled offices - I was led to one, and a second nurse appeared to walk Dan to the other.

The nurse asked me to sit and put up my hair, and set to attaching several bean-shaped sensors to my forehead and around my hairline. They were light; as soon as she’d put one in place I stopped sensing it completely. If it weren’t for the reflection in the glass I’d have sworn there was nothing on my head at all. The nurse pulled a chair up in front of me and flipped through the pages on her clipboard. “Are you comfortable?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Great. Calibration is pretty quick and easy. Helen, the first thing I’m going to ask you to do is tell me your name.”

I already felt a little silly. “Helen Rockmore.”

The nurse smiled. “Great. Can I ask you to say, my name is Helen Rockmore?”

I repeated after her.

“Perfect,” the nurse said. “Now, can you tell me what you had for breakfast this morning?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “I had oatmeal with blueberries.”

The nurse nodded and smiled as if she were waiting for me to go on.

“Uh. I made the oatmeal on the stove with nutmeg and cinnamon, and I added butter and maple syrup at the end. And coffee, I had coffee. Two cups.”

“That’s perfect, Helen, you’re doing great. Now for the next part, I’ll say a word and all you have to do is repeat after me. Okay? There are about twelve on the list.”

So I repeated after her. Stop, banana, family, umbrella, agree, shame.

Dan was ready before me and was waiting in the treatment room with his visor on, grinning. He always wanted to try the newest thing. The nurse exited the room and was replaced by a short older man with wire-framed glasses in a thick wool sweater who introduced himself as Dr. Wilkes. He looked over our intake forms and led us through a series of questions about topics those forms had mostly covered. He checked several things on his tablet, made a few slight adjustments to our sensors, and finally asked us if we were ready to get started.

Once my visor went on, the room dropped away into darkness. “As you know,” Dr. Wilkes began, “our augmented reality technology was designed to approximate a psychedelic experience, without the uncomfortable side-effects of ingesting a neurotoxin - nausea, vomiting, increased blood pressure, tachycardia, hyperhidrosis, dehydration, disorientation. In a few moments the darkness around you will fade. What you see next is up to you - the virtual environment will generate elements based on the feedback it receives from your brain activity. A Shared Experience like you’re undertaking transcends the traditional psychedelic experience by allowing you to directly communicate the extraordinary visions and insights that would ordinarily remain bound to the individual perspective. That said, each journey is unique, and though the virtual environment is shared, you should feel the freedom to move through the experience as an individual. Duos will find their paths diverge, and you may find yourself engaging in something like parallel play. That’s okay. Keep a loose hold. Allow your attention to wander in the direction it desires. Move and interact with the environment as you see fit; the system won’t put you in danger. If at any point you feel uncomfortable or overwhelmed, all you need to do is speak up and we’ll help you refocus.”

The darkness lifted and an image shifted into place; I had the sensation of sitting in the optometrist’s exam chair watching the hot air balloon move in and out of focus. I was facing Dan in a long, grassy meadow. A stunning meadow, really - dew dappled clover beneath a clear bright sky. It seemed like the more I looked, the more there was to be noticed. The scene did not transform, it simply was more, as if it had always been what it plainly had not been the moment before. The meadow was rimmed with dark fir trees ascending steep, rocky mountains topped with snow; a broad, green river lined with reeds ran the length of the meadow; birdsong echoed across the expanse and my surprise at the suddenly rich wall of alpine sounds was a shimmering gold and green firework display somehow undimmed by the sun. Poppies, snowdrops, and forget-me-nots swayed at my feet but the air felt still.

Dan looked almost right, a little less like himself than like a picture of himself. I suppose I looked the same way, but otherwise the effect was utterly convincing. I was in a meadow. I turned around to take it in from all angles. A wave of satisfaction and the smell of fresh laundry washed over me. I remembered a moment from my final year of college: sitting on the lawn extremely stoned on a Sunday afternoon, contemplating the distance between myself and the sprawling Kwanzan cherry tree, I had seen that the tree, the air, and myself were one and the same. For ten or twenty seconds I had known myself to be a gathering of indestructible particles and in reducing myself to the indivisible I had understood my immortality. The moment passed, of course, and over the years the emotional impact faded and left me with nothing but a loony sounding story I was too embarrassed to tell. Remembering that moment had the effect of putting me back into it: the space between me and the fir trees thickened like jelly and I was sure I could will the particles of my body to float out and bridge the distance. I felt like the moment would never end, until I heard a low snorting that snapped me back to myself.

Behind me, Dan stood before a hulking black bull. Before this moment time had seemed to slow down; once I saw the bull time entered a series of contractions. He was shiny and monstrously muscled, misshapen and hard like a lump of coal on legs, but his eyes were placid. Dan raised a sword over his head.

“Wait,” I said. “Wait.” My words hung a dark cloud in the air.

Dan’s back was to me, I don’t know if he heard. He drove the point of the sword between the shoulders of the bull and a slick plume of blood shot slow motion in a high arc across the sky. The blood kept spurting like a casino fountain show. Each arc and spatter stayed suspended in the air, bleeding a color out the edges that gave the vision a sunset glow. The blood came in waves lapping at my feet; the blood soaked my clothes; the meadow was a lava field and the river flowed with fire. I said no to the blood at my feet and the blood was a glittering ocean of rubies and garnets. I looked away and the meadow glowed soft and green again. I turned toward Dan and he was clean and dry. I turned back toward the jagged mountains and the riverside. I looked back at Dan and he had the bull by its horns, wrenching its head from side to side to hasten the flow of blood as its knees gave out beneath it.

I pulled my visor off. Dan with his arms bent in front of him looked like he was holding something precious. “Helen,” he said, “Helen, is something wrong?"