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A Novel
by Jess Row
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And Dallas operated as a shaman himself, though he never used the word. It was under his guidance, as part of a study, that he and Naomi took psilocybin—just that one time. In the darkened living room of their apartment in North Beach, in January, on a cold night, an electric army heater wheezing in one corner. Candles everywhere. Lying next to each other on the kilim, covered in some kind of grass blanket Dallas had carried up six flights of stairs. He remembers the little dry knob dropped on his tongue, the sensation of Dallas's fingers, a taste of dirt and sawdust. He was mortally afraid of choking on his own vomit and had carved a special foam prop to keep himself from rolling over onto his back.
There was a sensation of flying, which was also floating; he was aware of his limbs swimming around in a medium that wasn't air or water, but some third thing. He had gills running up and down the sides of his body. He was a fetus, rotating in oil: it smelled and felt like oil, now, very clearly black petroleum. Now his ribs couldn't take the pressure, and the bubble of breathable air around his head became an oval, squeezed smaller and smaller. The oil was suffocating him. He started singing "After the Gold Rush," at the top of his lungs. That was hilarious. He was drinking the oil now; it flushed through him, it was poisoning him, but he remained alive, somehow, only covered in gray moss. He was weak and soft to the touch. He was spongy. He thought, I will come back here, to the place where I've swallowed all the poisons and survived.
He came to and Naomi was lying with her head in Dallas's lap, silently weeping. As it turned out he hadn't vomited at all. He drank some elderflower tea and sat cross-legged at Dallas's feet, or as close as he could get, and told him what he'd seen. God, it was the seventies. He'd drooled into his beard; he desperately wanted a shower.
Dallas said, "You've received an unambiguous message."
"It feels pretty damn ambiguous to me."
"You've put yourself on a path of liberation," Dallas said. "A new path. A dangerous path. You're not the person your parents ever imagined you would be."
"Get to the point."
"That is the point. You may not get much farther than where you are right now. And that's all right. One life isn't very much time."
"But I'm only twenty-four!"
"You could die right now, and it would still be meaningful."
Naomi reached out and took his hand. "My soul is trapped and may never emerge," she said. "That's what Dallas says. And it's true."
It was all true. Never was anything in their lives more true. His quest for liberation peaked at age twenty-four, and Naomi remained a trapped soul, unable (as of about 1982) even to call herself a soul. Forty-two years later, and it's all the same. He wants to laugh. Cut through the weight of their circumstances, their possessions, their accumulated griefs, as if you're slicing a cross-section through a mountain of guano, and there you have it: Sandy and Naomi in profile. In utero. In shit instead of amber. They tried so hard to free themselves, and for what?
He should have written to Dallas, should have found a way to reach him, to find out the conclusions of his study. If it was ever completed.
* * *
It's the weather, the dry wind sweeping across West Seventy-Eighth from Hackensack. The land wind, the continental drift. Climbing the last few stairs out of the subway, back into the light, he feels his corneas begin to water. Eyes always leaking now that he's cleared sixty-five. Am I moved, he asks himself, am I still congested? He should be arguing with himself now; it should be a contest, a debate, with citations on both sides. He read the halakhic literature on suicide long ago, in connection with a bizarre case involving a Lubavitcher family, a tennis academy in Rockland County, and a diamond merchant from Scottsdale; he knows the arguments around the divine spark and the offense of presumption of G-d's will. It all melts away. He craves something else, immutable and immovable, not open to dispute.
Excerpted from The New Earth by Jess Row. Copyright © 2023 by Jess Row. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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