The Zoo

There is something about sharing a moment of wonder with someone you love. Being next to them. Being able to not just witness the moment with them but through their eyes. That’s what I was thinking about, standing next to Amber in the aquarium, watching the jellyfish.

We’d been at the zoo an hour, but the elephant had stood so completely still the entire time we’d stared at it we could have just been looking at a statue, and the tiger area was closed because they’d had to euthanize it the week before, and the monkeys were all either hiding out of sight or in another enclosure. The day was feeling like a bust. We needed some wonder.

“They aren’t real,” Amber said. Kept saying. “They aren’t real, they seem made up, this is make-believe, I don’t think they’re real, they can’t be real.” Over and over and over and over.

I was sure we’d seen jellyfish together before, but maybe not. This moment of wonder and make-believe felt new. Sometimes life feels like a series of finding out I was wrong about something I was sure of. Other times, vice versa. I’ve tried not being sure of anything, so I’d never be wrong, but somehow that only made me wrong more often. That’s how life seems to go.

We moved from one jellyfish display to the next. These ones weren’t real and seemed made up and were make-believe and weren’t real too, albeit in slightly different ways.

“What even is their purpose?” Amber said, as we moved on to one more next display.

“What even is our purpose?” I asked, and laughed.

“I bet if I did a bunch of mushrooms, I would know,” Amber said. I waited for her to laugh but she didn’t.

As if a genie in a bottle or Candyman or Beetlejuice being summoned, my buddy Kevin appeared out of nowhere, suddenly right there in the aquarium with us.

*

The week before, Kevin had come to visit. We’d gone out for dinner, then barhopped until ending up at a tiki bar, sitting in some beach chairs by a water feature. It felt simultaneously like we were underwater and poolside and in an underground cave and at an all-inclusive beach resort. We were sunbathing pirate sea monster tourists. It was perfect.

As goes in situations like those, we found ourselves sharing stories about the drugs we’d each done. Not that many, all told, though we each had one that surprised the others.

“You’ve never done mushrooms??” Kevin exclaimed when both Amber and I confessed we hadn’t. A wave crashed and a whale spouted water into the air and an octopus asked if we wanted another drink.

Kevin described the different responses to microdosing and normal amounts and hero doses.

“Nothing bad happens,” he assured Amber, when she expressed hesitation. “Basically, you’ll just want to pet trees and make funny noises.” Kevin smiled. “And also you might see God.”

“What if I don’t want to see God?” she’d said.

Kevin answered, but I missed it. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it meant to not want to see God, and whether I wanted to or not. I had no idea.

*

“Come with me,” Kevin said, and led us over to a bench where we all sat. He didn’t grab and hold our hands, but it felt like his aura did.

I remembered a dream I’d had the night before of being in a parking lot with Kevin and our other buddy DT and doing drugs that Kevin kept pulling out of his armpit. I wondered if this whole zoo and aquarium visit was a dream too. Maybe the elephant actually had been a statue. A dream elephant statue!

“This isn’t a dream,” Kevin said.

I wondered if he could read my mind or if I’d said that aloud. Either way, it felt reassuring. That the zoo had had to euthanize a tiger was sad, but that was life. The reality of life sometimes being sad felt less depressing than my subconscious having dreamt it.

Kevin reached into a fanny pack I hadn’t realized he was wearing and pulled out a baggie and gave a handful of mushrooms to Amber and then another to me.

“These are hero doses,” Kevin said. “You’re going to experience ego death and feel at home in this world, maybe for the first time.”

“I just wanted to see and understand our purpose,” Amber said.

“That’ll happen too,” Kevin said. “Probably. Same thing, basically.”

“I’m still not sure if I want to see God or not,” I said.

“You don’t have to call it God,” Kevin said.

I wasn’t sure if that was reassuring or a riddle. I decided it didn’t really matter.

I ate my handful and Amber ate her handful and Kevin ate the rest of what he had in his baggie and said something about being our guide through the cosmos or our drug warrior priest or our hippie spiritual professor or something like that.

And then all the glass walls of every exhibit disappeared, and all the people other than us three were suddenly gone or had never been there in the first place, and the building filled with water and became one giant aquarium full of jellyfish and sharks and octopus and sea anemones and shrimp and stingrays and dozens, hundreds, thousands of different fish and us three swimming among them.

*

Later, when telling this story at a writing retreat that Kevin was also at, he spoke up and corrected my telling. He didn’t appear out of nowhere, he clarified; he hadn’t stalked us for days, waiting for this very moment, he said; he hadn’t never returned home, instead staying in town and calling in sick so he could follow us around as we ate out and went on walks and saw a movie and finally ended up at the zoo, he scoffed.

He kept emphasizing these phrases like they were from my telling, but they didn’t sound familiar. They didn’t sound like me at all.

He said what actually happened was he visited again a month later. He brought some mushrooms up and we went out to a park and all took small, normal amounts. We marveled at flowers and I talked to a fern for somewhere between five minutes and two hours and Amber laid down on a bed of moss and kept saying she was sleeping the best sleep of her life. Kevin said it was a beautiful clear night and we all stared up into the sky and watched the galaxy open itself up to us and show us Heaven.

I’m not so sure about that though. That sounds like how I once described to him a meteor shower I’d seen on a hiking trip with Boy Scouts when I was growing up. And we’d kept talking about him coming up to visit again, but I don’t think he ever did. And it had rained and rained and rained and rained for weeks after that night at the tiki bar; I don’t remember any nights with clear skies.

*

“But I can’t swim?” Amber said, later still, when I told her the story of telling the story at the writing retreat and Kevin’s corrections.

I always forget.

“Maybe you can when high on shrooms?” I said, after thinking about it for a bit.

“Sure, maybe,” Amber said. She nodded, smiled. “I’m not sure what it’s supposed to mean though?”

“What? It’s just the story about when we did shrooms with Kevin,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Maybe it should though,” Amber said. “Something about seeing God?”

I started getting frustrated.

“You didn’t see God though.” I said.

“Well, I didn’t call it God,” Amber said.

“And you still don’t know our purpose?”

“Sure I do,” she said. And she stared at me and I stared at her and God stared down at us and the sky opened itself up and rained and rained and rained and rained and rained and rained and rained and rained and flooded the Earth and we floated off with the current alongside a world’s worth of sharks and dolphins and whales and stingrays and every kind of fish that had ever existed since the beginning of time and all the jellyfish too, and they looked so weird and make-believe and not real, and the whole thing was maybe the most beautiful and magical moment of wonder I’d ever witnessed.