Lifting the Veil
With the serum, you can feel as if you’ve climbed Everest, even if that were impossible. That was the claim. The most intimate of acts, to share the serum. This was Austin’s reasoning when he proposed it to Jackie.
“We’re not gonna get sick,” he says, “I just want to get a little closer. Get to know you better. See what makes you tick.”
They’d been friends for three months when he made the suggestion.
“Just a little blood is all it takes,” he’d said.
And she agreed. Sharing your memories with another was the most intimate thing she could imagine. She swooned at the idea that you could enter each other’s minds or, at least, a reproduction. Who wouldn’t? she thought. Finding a guy who didn’t just want sex, but wanted to know you. The method didn’t really matter.
So, here they sit: in the middle of his studio apartment on an overused twin mattress; a room scattered with clutter overflowing from the kitchenette; the empty syringe lay discarded near a wastebasket by the bathroom door, its black contents streaming through the veins of the young couple. Jackie, with her back propping herself against the wall, looks as if she’s dreaming as her eyes dart behind closed lids. They sift through the temporarily shared memories of their lives. There is no “I” with the serum, only a fleeting sense of “we.”
There is a beehive in a gargantuan oak near the South Georgia home of Austin’s childhood. There is a familiarity to the place as if Jackie is returning after some long vacation—this place that she can map in her mind without really knowing why. The color of the façade, the gravel paths, and the air with its sickly humidity that seems to form a layer on the skin. The ever-present buzz of insects. Caught too close to the hive, a squirrel struggles violently—shrouded by bees. The scene is at once familiar and alien, like looking into a fogged mirror. Jackie cannot conjure the sadness that she might normally feel for the suffering of the innocent creature. The squirrel releases its grip on the oak. It falls to the ground next to several dead bees, and there is a calmness to the air.
In another time and place, she is looking upon herself. Jackie struts down the street ahead of Austin, and, though the aggressive confidence in her walk is attractive, it cannot overcome her rather plain features—her form, thin but lacking any real shape. The judgmental gaze she casts upon herself is foreign but feels justified.
The memories wisp into each other, none lasting more than a few moments. Before long, Jackie finds herself again in the dingy apartment, arms wrapped around herself. She looks across the bed to Austin, unresponsive, and struggles to imagine what he must be seeing. He seems almost imperceptibly further away as if the bed has somehow increased in length. When Austin comes around he leans forward and kisses Jackie on the forehead.
“And that was only a small dose,” he says, “How’d it feel?”
“I… I don’t know. Why didn’t you try to help that squirrel?”
“What are you talking about? What’d you see?”
“A squirrel, and some bees. I, you were little... Just watched it,” she says.
“I don’t remember that. Huh.” He swings off the bed and fills a glass of water in the sink. “You were cute back in high school, though. All nervous about everything. Couple years haven’t changed you much.”
While in the memories it is impossible to sift through who’s emotions are who’s, it’s frustrating to have zero access now, in the real world. Not to be able to see how he’s really feeling. What he’s thinking.
| | | | |
She hasn’t figured out how to sleep and decides to leave the apartment. The halls are silent except where she stops to listen near a door and hears hushed voices, laughing, or music. What could they be thinking, in these moments, in the dead of night? Outside, it’s cold, and snow still lingers on the edges of the sidewalk and in the alleys between buildings. She waits at the corner of an intersection for a car to pass so she can cross but seems to misjudge its distance— it’s moving too slowly. She stands alone at the corner and watches it approach, but it simply pulls over on the street. She watches the driver as he enters the adjacent building.
She continues toward a 24/7 diner a few blocks from her apartment. She takes a seat inside, and an elderly waitress pours coffee without asking.
“Your server’ll be out in a minute,” says the waitress. She looks as if she’s been awake for days, like working the night shift is her life. She’s got a boyfriend at home, Jackie imagines. He’s not physically abusive. No, but he collects her tips to bolster a large collection of women’s wigs. He wears them when he thinks she isn’t looking but claims he wants to open a small museum someday. A freak, as is she for putting up with it. She can’t leave him because she’ll never support herself on her own. The pair at the booth across the room has dreams of opening a cake shop together. He has the experience but knows his wife won’t have the stomach for the years without a salary. She’ll leave him for another man from a coastal city. Why wouldn’t she? They smile as the waitress brings them a plate of pancakes to share. The man glances across the room at Jackie and notices her stare. He must feel nothing but pity for the 19-year-old. What could she possibly be doing here alone? Likely a runaway. Nowhere to go but down. But he’s got problems of his own and can’t be concerned, and so he returns to the plate in front of him while his wife spreads too much butter across the cakes.
There is a man smoking in the corner, but no one cares enough to stop him, and he isn’t the type to give a shit on his own. He once gave a beggar a fake five-dollar bill, a beggar who would later have it stolen by another man with a knife. The thief would later be thrown out of a gas station for attempting to spend the counterfeit bill. Jackie writhes in her seat, unable to get comfortable, and sips at the coffee with nothing to do but envision the lives of these midnight diners. The waitress asks what she’s having, and Jackie says she’ll stick with water, that everything sounds bland.
And, the waitress is thinking the same of her. Envisioning how this pale girl arrived in the diner, alone on a January night. Back from winter break, at a fallback school. A safety. Where she’d study psychology, or something, attempting to draw attention to herself despite her general disdain for the inevitable small talk that would ensue. She’d never been a particularly good student, nor an athlete, and would lead the average life of us all.
By the time she finishes her water, the coffee she hasn’t touched is cool, and Jackie finds herself alone in the diner—though smoke still hangs in the air waiting to form its yellow layer on the walls. How much time has passed? She’s missing her phone, left it in the apartment. When did she arrive? She leaves two dollars on the table and rushes down the street. There are no cars, no pedestrians, just the yellow glare of street lamps that reflects off patches of black ice on the road. To the left of her stoop, just off the sidewalk, leaning in the alley is a gaunt figure, presumably a woman. There is no reaction as Jackie rushes past. Jackie cannot conjure a story for its presence. A blank slate. Refreshing and unnerving.
It must be two in the morning. Three even. Back inside, Jackie lies restlessly in bed, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. She gets herself up and spends the rest of the night cleaning. decluttering, scrubbing away, unsure of how to define the problem. This feeling. It’s more than insomnia and has only gotten worse as the night has drawn on. The room is too long as if everything is farther away than it should be. Holding her arms forward, her fingertips extend further into the dark than she’s ever noticed before.
She searches the nearby closet for a tape measure. She begins to measure the dimensions of the room. Crawling on all fours, she maps the apartment. She calculates 755 square feet. Can that be right? Yes, she checks the lease. 54” windows. The ceilings: nine feet exactly. Why do they seem so tall? Everything appears stretched, too thin, and yet the measurements are accurate. She double checks the floors, measures the cabinets, the refrigerator, the bookshelves. What time is it? Only three. Surely it should be dawn by now. But there is no glow from the Eastern horizon, just the wind through nearby trees and the occasional sound of a car on the street below.
She moves through the apartment and extinguishes every source of light— the microwave, clocks, the tiny bead of green light from the smoke detector. Tearing through her closet, Jackie retrieves extra sheets, towels, blankets, and proceeds to secure them over her windows until, finally, the room is cast in a rich black through which her eyes struggle to reach even inches. She rolls herself into her comforter, tight like a swaddled infant, and lapses into sleep, now hidden from the terrible sense of smallness.
This process becomes routine over the next several days. Jackie attends to her business: class, work, the occasional call home where she explains how well her second semester is going. But, she returns at night to the apartment. And, though the sensation of smallness has faded, she is still irked by the strangeness of it all and cannot help but to sleep in pitch black, wrapped in a cocoon.
“Austin, I want to try it again,” she says after a week. The imaginings aren’t holding her attention. The lives of those around her, on the street, in class, in the diner, are lacking…authenticity. She apologizes for her comments about the bees, for thinking him odd not to react. He assures her that he hasn’t thought about it and hardly remembers the incident in the first place. She never mentions his gaze on the sidewalk, how she felt about herself through the eyes of another, and how she can’t be sure whose feelings were whose.
“You sure? You sort of hurried out of there last time.” He appears genuinely concerned, but, of course, he always seems concerned. Especially this past week: banging on the door with no response and pleading that he was sorry. For what, Jackie wasn’t exactly sure, but there was little that would pull her out of bed once all the light was sealed. And, she couldn’t be sure that the sounds at the door were real anyway.
“Yes, I’m sure. In fact, know anyone else who’s into it? What about Jacob?” she says.
“Yeah, I mean I can ask. You want more than just us?” he says.
“I’m thinking maybe four. Can we do four? Will the needle hold enough blood for four?”
“It should work I think. I’ve never tried it, but I know people do it. I heard about a guy that runs groups of, like, 15 or more, even. Crazy shit, really.”
“Could you call Jacob, and set it up?”
“Can I ask why? I’ve barely been able to talk to you for a week, and now you’re all gung-ho about going again. And, look at this place,” he says, tearing the blanket off the wall to reveal sunshine streaming through the window.
“I just don’t want to know who I’m seeing through. Can you just take care of it, and let me know? We can do it here, even. Bit cleaner than your place.” She smiles and kisses him.
“Ok, sure. Could be cool.”
| | | | |
Jacob and a girl Jackie has never met sit across the coffee table. They’ve decided sitting on the floor was fine—better not to fall out of one of the cheap folding chairs Jackie keeps for guests. She’s sitting with Austin on the couch and stares as he fills the syringe with his blood, mixing with the blood of the others already inside the glass tube. He hands the syringe to Jacob who pierces the lid of the glass vial containing the deep black serum. It seems to crawl toward the needle even before he pulls back the plunger. Jacob pulls the serum into the syringe and, with a life of its own, it corrupts the red liquid. After mere seconds, looking at the syringe is like starring into the night sky.
Jacob injects a quarter of the contents into each of their left arms, and, one by one, the group lies back, eyes closed, searching for an image to latch onto.
As they fade into the slew of memories, Jackie attempts to assert control, guiding herself through the experiences by focusing first on the beehive, but the collective memories of four individuals is impossible to control. Shifting from experience to experience, it’s difficult to tell where the memories originate. Falling from halfway up an old maple and breaking an ankle. Cutting inner thighs in the bathtub. Cutting class in high school to walk in a park. Trying blood orange sorbet for the first time—the rich crimson chunks of fruit isolated against the rest of the scene. It’s chaotic, faster this time, but, somehow, the memories are comforting—filling up Jackie’s mind, a soft pressure, a closeness that she’s come to crave.
Jackie searches for a scene where she is present but cannot find one. She cannot judge herself through the eyes of another. The serum has taken a life of its own in her veins, guiding her to a variety of experiences more sensual, and she finds it difficult to cast judgment. There is a community to this feeling, a sense of oneness.
When she opens her eyes, she is alone. The others are around her, already awake, but the sense of distance has returned. Other senses, too, seem disrupted. The sound of their voices are muted, and the energetic lime walls are faded to mint. Jackie rubs her eyes and sees Austin shake Jacob’s hand and escort him out the door. They wave across the room and she half-heartedly responds in kind.
Austin approaches the couch. “You alright? I think I need to go too,” he says. Jackie matches the words to the movements of his mouth. She nods and leans forward for a kiss before he leaves the room.
| | | | |
The cycle is renewed but now with a creeping loneliness. She knows there are others on the opposite sides of her walls, but it feels as if she is the only person for miles. The lengthening perception of space, the dulled color, and muted sound can be accommodated for. No matter how dark she can make the room, it is impossible to hide this feeling in shadow. Jackie is alone in a building, on a campus, in a city filled with people.
She waits until night, then drives West. West until the roads lose their names and become numbers—until the glow from the city fades in the East. She exits the highway in search of gravel roads, driving until there is nothing but cool air sweeping over open fields, shaking the branches of the bare, late-winter trees. She parks the car in a field and builds a nest from blankets stuffed into the trunk. Laying in the open, with only the trees on the edge of the meadow and moonless sky for company, the aloneness is more palpable, less unnatural. Just before she drifts to sleep, Jackie makes out the outline of a human figure, barely distinguishable from the treeline. Too far for detail, it seems almost more black than the surrounding brush.
The feeling sticks for longer this time, and for a month she makes the hour-and-a-half trip out of the city each night to sleep. Though color never returns to normal, but the chilling isolation fades away. It is replaced by a craving to experience what she will never see or feel.
| | | | |
Austin is at the dining hall on campus when Jackie spots him from across the room. It’s fairly well populated for three o’clock on a Monday, but, where she’d expect a dull roar of voices, there is little more than a muted chorus. He waves her over.
“You need some more sleep,” he says. “Your eyes are all black.”
“Pretty hard these days.”
“Maybe if you weren’t holed up in your room so much. You should come out sometime.”
She steals one of his French fries. “There’s just a lot going on. And, I don’t know, just seems kinda pointless don’t you think? All of this.”
“I mean, gen eds kinda suck.” He dumps a few fries on a napkin and passes it over.
“No, I mean, everything is just so boring,” she says.
“It’s really not so bad. I’m having a few people over tonight. Why don’t you come hang out?” She’s not sure if what he’s saying is even real or just an image of what she imagines he’d say. The disconnect, while bearable, just seems obvious. Her withdrawal is justified.
“You said you knew someone who’d done up to 15?” she says, ignoring his offer.
“What? Oh. You mean serum. I don’t know it wasn’t feeling the best after our last go of it. I think I’m done with the stuff, honestly. But no, I said I heard about it. I think you should stay away though, Jackie. Not that I’ve known you for long or anything, but I don’t remember you like this.”
“All I want to do is remember,” she says.
“Well, come hang out with us. Seriously. Have a few drinks. All we do is tell stories.”
“Maybe I’ll just ask around.”
“Jackie, come on.” But, she’s done talking. She stares down at the fries and absent mindedly picks at them. After a while Austin mentions that he hopes to see her later. She nods as he leaves the cafeteria.
| | | | |
“Jackie, it was just a rumor,” says Jacob. They’re sitting in the diner and Jacob is sipping at his second cup of coffee.
“You were one of the first to even try the stuff. You must’ve heard something,” says Jackie.
“Part of the reason I’d never try something like that.”
“Didn’t say you had to try it. I’m just looking for info. You’re not curious? Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it too.”
“Go forward too fast and you lose your grip on reality, Jackie.”
“No. No, no, no it’s revealing reality. We enter this world of human experience, and then it’s stripped away and we’re left with… with how things really are. The strangeness of our lives is nothing compared to the feeling of empty space. Can you imagine it?”
“Death? Is that what you’re talking about? Because it sure sounds like it,” he says.
“Maybe it’s just another way of looking at the world. You said they make it out of trees, right? Maybe this is how they see it.”
“Jackie, I’m not going to be responsible for this. You need some help.”
“Maybe it’s like a window or even a doorway,” she trails off, looking down the pool of condensation collecting under her glass.
“I’ll give you a ride. We can go to the counseling center on campus. Free for students, right?”
Jackie swats at the glass, splashing it across Jacob’s chest and dripping off the edge of the table onto his legs.
“Jesus Christ, Jackie.” He stands and brushes off as much water as possible before it soaks in. Ice cubes sit on the faux-leather booth, melting into the crevices. “You know I’m just trying to help. I didn’t even want to meet you, the way you’ve been lately. It’s Austin that convinced me to come here.”
When she doesn’t respond, he scoffs and walks out the door. Into her view, a hand slides across the table, too-long fingers push a small jar of honey towards her.
“Try some of this next time. Maybe it’ll soothe that attitude of yours.” It’s the woman from the alley. Her features are sharp, youthful, but her complexion makes it difficult to tell an approximate age. It’s fair, but with a few wrinkles around her eyes.
“Why have you been following me?” says Jackie.
“I’m not following you,” says the woman, “I’m just… around.”
It’s business as usual in the diner. The waitress pours coffee for a small assortment of customers scattered around the room. The woman reaches for a napkin on the seat and passes it across the table. There’s a street address written in ink.
“Go here Saturday evening around midnight. Just climb the stairs behind the door in the alley. Bring some money, you should have enough. A few hundred will do if you want to see what the mind is truly capable of.”
| | | | |
The address is across town. Jackie parks on the street and walks into the alley. She approaches the nondescript wooden door and knocks. There’s a camera near a light off to the side. There’s a click, and the door swings open a few inches. She pulls it open revealing an immediate staircase. It’s steep, and there are no railings, but narrow walls offer support. At the top is a square room with a door on the far side. In a circle are twenty or so steel chairs—nearly every one occupied.
There is a man with a shaved head, shirtless, revealing skin that seems stretched over his ribs; a woman who could be mistaken for a housewife, in a purple dress; an obese man whose body spills over the edges of his chair. Another appears almost genderless, shaved eyebrows, sunken cheeks, and frail arms. There are a host of others, all variety of shapes, colors, ages, affect, and each is sitting still with a tube fixed to one arm that extends to the center of the room toward an IV bag already filled with nearly a quart of blood.
A large, well-built man walks toward Jackie. “You’ve got the cash?” he says. Half the room turns to face her, some look her up and down before turning back to the bag and closing their eyes. She pulls a handful of twenties from her jacket pocket and hands them over. “You can have a seat here,” he says, gesturing to one of the empty chairs. She sits down next to a woman with platinum blonde hair with gray showing at the roots. The man approaches from her right and swabs her arm with alcohol before tying her off and piercing a vein with a few swift motions.
“Is everyone ready? I think we can begin,” he says.
A few in the circle nod their heads. He carries a jar of the black serum to the middle of the room. A few ounces. Using a larger syringe than Jackie has ever seen, he transfers the serum into the blood bag. It rushes voraciously through the bag and it takes only moments before it is fully corrupted. The contents now a living, almost breathing ink. The man turns a plastic knob and the liquid begins to trickle through the series of tubes and into the veins of each person in the circle.
It is slow at first, but soon there is a cacophony of memory—ceaseless. The jungle, Vietnam. Bullets crack the air, near misses. A soldier fifteen yards to the left suddenly detonates, little remains of his body. Soon after, another is shot, a round removing the upper left side of his face. There is a car accident. A small child is thrown from a window on the interstate and is quickly run down by a pick-up. Several cars pile up and one flips over the median into oncoming traffic. A $400 assortment of nigiri is placed before her. Bluefin tuna, octopus, eel, salmon—a rainbow display of fish, seaweed, rice, and roe. The memories begin to blend, sex from every imaginable perspective: rape, a virgin wedding night, an elderly couple in a hospital bed behind thin curtains, the cold steel of a morgue table, Egyptian cotton. Dark satisfaction, violation, unmatched love. A child kicks a red ball over a fence, another finds her first success without training wheels. Hugs from countless loved ones, family, friends, the last kiss to a recently deceased grandfather. The summit of Everest, a Syrian bazaar, a life raft marooned off the coast of Chile. Ruined castles in Northern Europe.
It is impossible to control the flow of hundreds of years of memory. There is no sense of time, just a relentless deluge of experience. Jackie opens her eyes, there is an intense numbness in her limbs. Head slumped, she stumbles to the staircase in the corner of the room. The needle slips out of her arm and blood streams from the torn skin. She tumbles down the stairs. Her left arm snaps. Bone pierces the mangled limb. Her ankle cracks on the bottom step before she crashes through the door into the alley outside.
It must be night still, but it is impossible to tell if the darkness is merely a new revelation, the world as it truly is. She crawls, braced on the brick wall of the alley, for maybe twenty feet and collapses into the concrete.
There are the faint sounds of voices around her. Austin perhaps. He will lament her passing, grieve that he brought this upon her. He will sit among crowds, searching for some sort of feeling that can no longer exist. He will withdraw from the world, seeking respite. And, then, nothing.
