Chasing Stars: Chapter 15

  Markus just stood there with a haunted look in his eyes.  He started crying as he turned around to head back to the sky pod.  He wasn’t ready to come back, not finished punishing himself.  Molly called after him, but he ignored her and shut the door behind him after he got in.   She banged on the glass with her fists, imploring him to come back out and work this out with her, but he could barely hear her through the acoustic insulation of the pod.  He got the gist of what she was saying enough to know he didn’t care and lifted the pod up into the sky.

  “I want you to take me to the drug den with the worst over serving safety record in the city.”

  Markus sought the comfort of oblivion after being taken apart like that.  He knew he had to face what he’d done, but that felt like a tomorrow problem.  For now he just sought comfort, reassured that he at least really understood now that things had to change.  He knew he was prone to procrastination, but this night just felt like a lost cause already.   Maybe he just wanted the comfort of remaining a loser for one last night.

  There were limits to how much any place would overserve, just as there were varying motivations.  Some were just greedy, others specialized in making high doses of things as safe as possible.  Markus was seeking the former.

  It was a painful trip back into the city.  Growing could be so hard sometimes.  Old injuries heal over but aren’t cured.  Poorly set bones need to be rebroken and reset so they can heal as they’re meant to.   Minds are like that sometimes.   He’d spent a lifetime rationalizing bad choices, learning how to live around a grievous psychic injury which had never properly healed.  Sadhika had rebroken the bone for him, but for now it just hurt and he only sought anesthetic for it.

  The Hip Joint was happy to oblige once he arrived.  He immediately asked for one rather large joint and when the server brought it he asked for 15 half gram magic mushroom pills.

  “You sure honey?” the server sweetly asked.  “That’s quite a lot for one person to be taking at once.”

  “It’s what I want,” he answered curtly.  He felt bad about it after saying it, but not badly enough to apologize.

  The most pills he’d ever taken was ten and it had scared him away from trying any more.   At ten pills he found he almost completely dissociated, almost completely forgot who he was and what he was doing.  He enjoyed coming up to that boundary from time to time, but was appropriately scared to cross the line, but now crossing that line was all he wanted.  The pain of existence was too much to bear and he sought a temporary suicide.

  The server brought him his pills and he swallowed them one by one until they were all gone.  He moved off of the stool and found the most secluded booth he could and propped up his scroll to watch a comedy he’d been in the middle of.  He wasn’t able to laugh, but it was at least somewhat distracting.  It got more and more engrossing until he realized he was utterly peaking.  His eyes started watering as he saw shimmering around the characters on the screen and when he looked away the rest of the room was wavy and melty.

  The server came around to ask him if he was okay and if he’d like anything.  “S… D…. T.” He managed to answer slowly and carefully.

  The server nodded her understanding and left for an amount of time which was impossible for Markus to gauge in his current state.

  She returned eventually with two men he could vaguely remember to be part of the security staff.  They helped him to his feet, and slowly led him into the back towards the rows of sensory deprivation tanks which most drug dens like this had.  They helped make sure he didn’t hurt himself as he took off all of his clothes and carefully climbed into the tank.  Once he was in, they closed the lid and knocked on it twice to indicate he was all good.

  He had done this before, but never on so high a dose.  Magic mushrooms have a way of tearing down the walls of perception.   They impair your brain’s ability to make sense of the world, leaving you to experience the sensory data streaming into your brain on more of a raw feed instead of your brain’s well packaged interpretation of reality.  You experience everything all at once, but more importantly, your thoughts and feelings become untethered and untainted by the subconscious filtering and ego preserving interpretations people normally engage in.  The truth offered by the senses and our initial reactions is purest before we start manipulating it to fit our narratives.

  And what did he feel once his rationalizations and psychic self defence mechanisms had dissolved?  Shame.   Regret.  Anger at a lifetime spent keeping opportunities at arm’s length.   Shame at having had so many privileges only to have wound up here.  Regret over all of the different people he could have turned out to be, only to have wound up being this loser.  It was embarrassing.  How horribly embarrassing it was to have had so much which so many others wanted, and to have done absolutely nothing with it.  

  He wondered what someone like Sadhika could have done with his privilege if she’d been born with it.  A voice from the ether suggested that if she had, she wouldn’t have been the woman she was, that she wouldn’t have had the drive which her origins engendered, that she’d be like him.  He then found himself wondering how he would have turned out if he’d lived Sadhika’s life.   Did he have more in him?  How wide was his potential?  Would he have been driven to greatness like her, or just fallen the wayside like all the poor souls she had to step over to get where she was from where she started.  Could he have been a master of the universe like her if his starting conditions had been different?

  Now too gone to really think in language, he began to just experience flashbacks one after another of moments in his life when things went one way when they could have gone another.  Moments when he had an opportunity but denied it.   Things he could have fought for but were too afraid to fail over.  A million little moments where he chose to fail instead of choosing to try.  A potential friend he swatted away over here, a getting high instead of studying over there, a turning down a job opportunity out of fear of failing here, a disdain of hard work there.

  He’d spent his life using his parent’s death as an excuse to fail, to be a loser.  But now he could see that while of course that originating event was devastating, it was not what led him here.  It was all those little moments, all those little failures.  He wasn’t a victim, he was just a loser.  That’s what a loser was, someone who never failed to sabotage themselves when an opportunity presented itself, someone who had so little internal fortitude that they shied away from any test of their strength, someone who was shattered inside, and was never put back together properly.  Someone who’s broken bones had long ago set and healed over while still misaligned.

  His most precious illusion was that he was a victim, his most precious defence against his innate knowledge of what a loser he was.  But he wasn’t a true victim.  He suffered one tragedy when he was young.  Many people do.  Many suffer far more.  Brakus did, Sadhika did, hell from a certain point of view Molly did too.  What was different about him was that he perpetuated his victimhood, wrapped his identity up in it, used it as a shield against any accusation that he could do any better, that he could be better, that he should dare to try.

  He could see it all in such terrifying clarity.  

  He saw one version where they never died and he had grown up feeling safe and nurtured.   He’d become a musician.  Not famous, but appreciated.  The music made him happy and he fell in love with someone who appreciated his song.  They had several beautiful children together.  He had little interest in drugs and was just another somewhat clueless but content wealthy person.

  He saw another version where he’d become Sadhika, either taken over the Bowland company or excitedly founded some other new startup company to take over the world.   He found a likeminded woman and they bonded for life, partners in world domination.

  He saw another version where he was still a pretty shitty self-indulgent person, but was self-aware enough to not pretense to anything else.  He was happily the idle rich, married to an equally vapid but gorgeous woman, jet setting to all the spots across the world an idly wealthy family might.  

  He experienced multiple timelines in which he found himself infatuated with one subject or another and discovered the joy of discovery.  In one he was an archaeologist, in another he was an astrophysicist.  He spent what felt like a lot of time enjoying the one in which he was a big game veterinarian.  There was even one in which he one of the mission founders instead of Sasha, that he had selected Haven for their mission, that he had been the one to sacrifice himself to save Orbital One alongside his brother.

  All these different things he could have been, all these possible worlds, and he chose to live in the one in which he’d just chosen to do nothing at all.  How pathetic.

  As the trip went on, he started having darker visions.  He also saw the timelines darker than his own.  He thought about how the smallest gravitational interactions centuries ago meant the difference between an asteroid impacting earth and harmlessly floating by.  He saw the version of his life where a little tug in this direction or that as a child made him angry instead of depressed.  He saw the one where he started with just killing animals.  

  He saw the version where it hits him just a bit harder and he kills himself before 20, the one where he’s victimized as a child and becomes a sexual predator himself.   He sees the version where the black hole at his core leaves him trying to fill it up with drugs and he dies of overdose, or trying to fill it up with fame and winding up like Maggie King.  He saw the versions where he became politically radicalized, both the one where he went into politics, and the one where he became a terrorist.

  When you can do and be anything, picking one thing to do and be can be terrifying.   For some people passion finds them, and their one thing is obvious.  But when your interests are a panoply and your talents generalized what do you pick to do?  When you know your pattern is to become highly interested in something until you learn enough about it and lose interest to the next thing, how can you pick the one thing you’re going to dedicate your life to and not get bored with it?

  Markus realized he didn’t get here by choice as much as by paralysis.  He had seen so many possible worlds in which he’d decided on one thing and dedicated himself to it almost arbitrarily, and he’d been happy with it.  It became apparent that the thing was not as important as the dedication to it, that time committed to something counted more than passion for it at any one time.   

  He was too afraid to fail, to try to succeed.

   

  He was blinded by the lid of the tank opening.  After a while the fire in his eyes died down and adjusted enough for him to see Ana standing over him.  Her expression revealed very little.  She wasn’t disappointed, not even concerned, just a little sad.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.  “How long have I been here?”

  “You know how this industry works, everybody tells everybody everything.  I used to work with the door guy.  He recognized you and called to tell me how much you’d taken and how long you’d been in the tank.”

  “Yea but why do you care,” he muttered as he sat up in the tank.  He was naked but it was nothing she hadn’t seen before.

  “I don’t know that I do,” she answered dispassionately.  “They asked me to come, so I did.  Are you alright?”

  Still a little fuzzy, Markus carefully got out of the tank.  He toweled off and started putting his clothes back on.

  “No…   No, I don’t think I ever have been.   Alright, that is.”

  Ana rolled her eyes and turned to leave.

  “Wait,” he asked, and she stopped with her hand on the door handle.  “But I also get it now.”

  “Get what?” she asked without turning around.

  “I get why you’re angry at me,” he paused for what felt like a long time.  “…and I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For wasting what I have, for not being any of the people I could have been with what I was given, for you never even having the chance.”

  Ana turned around and came back over to sit beside him.  “I had a chance,” she confessed.  “We all have some chance, some a lot, some a little… I get angry with you because your wasted potential is so glaring, that it makes me see my own too clearly for comfort.  It wasn’t just that I couldn’t afford it, I… wasn’t good enough.  I mean I could have been, if I’d tried harder, sacrificed a little more, then maybe…  I didn’t give it everything I had, and I’ll always regret that.  And I’ll always see it when I look at you.”

  Silence hung in the air for a few moments.

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Ana said.  “Everyone tries, everybody fails.”

  “Fails what?”

  “Living up to their potential I guess.  Being a good person… but you’ve got to remember that the only judge that matters is you.  You’re the only one keeping score.  There is no absolute standard you’re being graded against and nobody gets graded the same.”  She stood up again and started moving towards the door.  “There is no correct way to be human, Markus.”

  “Would you ever want to live someone else’s life?”

  “No,” she answered without hesitation as she opened the door.

  “Why?”

  “Because it would mean wishing away the life I have now, and that would be too much a little suicide.”

  “Goodbye Ana.   I hope you find your peace.”

  She looked him up and down for the last time.  “You too, Markus.”

  The door closed behind her, and Markus was left in the quiet echo-y soft light blue florescent light.

  Markus sat down on the tile floor with his arms around his knees staring into space.   The only sounds in the insulated room were the periodic drips from the lid of the tank into the pool of water below.   He was broken.  Sadhika had cut him apart and the tank had stomped on the pieces.  He flipped through his mind but could not find one positive thought.  He was embarrassed to face anyone he knew again.   Whether or not they knew how he’d just debased himself, he would know himself.  He’d see his own failures reflected in their eyes.

  And then there’s the people who did know, what heart he had left sunk away when he thought about having to face Molly again, to tell Donna no, to hold his dying brother’s hand knowing what he and she had planned.  He got sick at the idea of facing Sadhika again, then got even sicker when he remembered that he wouldn’t have the chance to.  She was done with him.

  Slowly, he finished pulling his clothes on and made his way out to the street to hail a road pod.  He exited the bar, attempting and succeeding at not being noticed by anyone who would care.   He slumped into the road pod and commanded it take him to the nearest other bar.  The pod drove half a block down and opened the door for him.  The digital face smiled its appreciation at his patronage and he wished he could shoot it.

  He dragged himself into the bar and found an out of the way booth.  Sliding into it, he mustered what neurotransmitters he could to order a strong alcohol drink, then just stared into space.  His brain had little capacity left for meaningful thought; he was in the realm of feelings alone.  It came over him in waves.  Shame, disappointment, humiliation, sorrow, resentment, embarrassment, self-loathing; shame, disappointment, humiliation, sorrow, resentments, embarrassment, self-loathing…

  When the server came with his drink, he looked Markus up and down and clearly had some concerns, but ultimately shrugged them off and said ‘enjoy’ as he placed the drink down for him.  Markus drank without taking his eyes off of the distant nagging void somewhere in front of him.  Then he drank some more and finished the glass.  

  Then he ordered another.

  And another.

   

  Some time later, he woke up and pulled his face off of his forearms on the table to see who was trying to wake him up.  When he saw that it was Molly, he felt even more sick to his stomach than he already did, and he put his face back down.

  “Hey…” she said as she gently pushed and pulled at his arm.  “It’s time to go, come on, get up.”

  “I can’t go back…” he weakly said.

  Molly rubbed his back with her left hand and held his hand with her right.  “No one ever can…” she answered distantly.  “But life isn’t about going back, is it?” she asked.   “It’s about going forward, right?”

  “I can’t…”

  Molly gave him a light smack on his face, not enough to hurt him, but hard enough to be sure to get his attention and wake him up a bit.

  “Markus, do you want to die?” she asked.

  He thought about it for a good long while before finally answering: “No.”

  “Then you’re going to have to find some way to live.  You can’t change the past.  The mistakes you’ve made, you’ve made.  But the rest of your life you can change.”

  He put his head back down and she put her arm around him across his back.  “We’re going to get you back to the cabin.  You’re going to have a great long sleep and recharge.   Tomorrow you’re going to say goodbye to your brother, and then get started figuring out how to clean up the mess you’ve made of your life.”

   

***   ***    ***

   

  Markus woke up in his bedroom at the cabin.  Molly was sat up on the other side of the bed reading one of the books from the library on the main level.  She closed it and put it on the bedside table when she saw he was awake.

  “Well good morning,” she said.  Her tone seemed sympathetic, but with a touch of disdain.  “Welcome back to the world of the living.  You had quite a night.  Well, day really.”

  “What happened?” he groggily asked.

  “What happened?” she asked with clearly amused surprise.  “You went out of your mind on a bender, that’s what happened!  I don’t know what else you got up to, but I found you at a bar on Broadway after they contacted your brother.  You had him listed as your emergency contact.  We agreed I would go to… retrieve you.”

  Markus felt sick.  “So everyone knows everything…”

  “Yup,” she acknowledged with little sympathy.  “I got you into a skypod and brought you back here where you crashed hard.   That was twelve hours ago.”

  There was a silence that held for a long time before Markus inhaled and let out a deep, slow sigh.  “Well.   I guess I have some work to do.”

  Molly nodded and pulled him into a hug.  “Yeah…”