Descended from Kings

An excerpt from What the Voices Say. Our protagonist is in her late 20’s, in her addiction. She has a bad drug experience that happens to reunite her with a very important figure from her past. It also brings her to confront the lamentable state of her life and her true purpose moving forward. Can our girl rise to the occasion?

As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels looks like torment and insanity, I collected some of their proverbs, thinking that as the sayings of a nation mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell show the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments. 

-William Blake

Our bodies hit with a thud against the laminate-wrapped particle board as we piled into the booths of the 24-hour diner. At this hour of the morning, after at least 48 hours awake, none of us had much muscle control left. Anywhere else we would have stood out, but this spot was home for our kind in the middle of the city, like the food scraps that rats scurry to in an abandoned building. You would think as grungy as I was, unbathed, unslept for several days now, that I wouldn’t have noticed or cared about the state of the diner. In fact, I was revolted by how everything I touched was sticky: the table, the seat, the napkin dispenser. The fluorescent lighting blinking and buzzing from the ceiling was killing me. I lacked the affect to display my disgust, but it writhed inside of my stiff and exhausted body nonetheless. We grabbed an open booth as soon as we came in, but we would still have to get up and stand in line to order food, guided by the metal railings winding to and fro up to the cashier. I cringed at the leaning bodies between the banisters that shuffled like cattle across the killing floor toward the feeding trough, dead eyes gazing softly downward, in dread of my inevitable turn. Whether we ate the food or not, we would have to order some if we wanted to stay. And for a few long, uncomfortable hours, we had nowhere else to go. We were waiting on a call to meet someone who had what we wanted. Those days, I was always waiting on that call.

I knew I had to get up, but every fiber of muscle in my body sagged in protest. I checked my pocket for a repurposed Altoids tin I carried faithfully that stored my goodies. Not wanting to show what I was holding and then have to share it with my counterparts, people I had only started to score and use with about a month before, I popped the small tin open inside my pocket and felt for the tiny baggie inside. Sure enough, it had a bulge in it just big enough for a little pick-me-up. Certainly only enough for me, so I quietly snapped the tin shut and announced that I had to pee. The guy I was now sleeping with for drugs, whose name I kept spacing, sat between me and my way out of this awful moment. I nudged him with my shoulder in a signal to get up and let me slide out of the booth. There’s this cycle to using. At the end of a good high, which we were coming off of, there’s this depression, this bone-melting fatigue. For a while, you think, nothing can move you. Then there’s the realization you need more. Trying to score triggered a deep anxiety for me but it called me to attention. Still my muscles wouldn’t fire just for the thought, ‘I need to score.’ The drugs had to be real, within arms’ reach. Then every muscle in my body would hop right to. Once I felt the bump in my pocket, suddenly I was off to the bathroom with what one might even describe as sober composure.

I had a tinge not of guilt for hogging the last bit of powder, but of thinking I should feel guilty. Or of fear maybe. The guy, the nameless guy, had given me most of what was in my pocket. And I knew he was expecting something for it. I knew, too, that I probably wouldn’t give him what he wanted. The lust had drained out of me. All I was focused on now was getting somewhere far, far away. None of the drugs we’d done the last few days had gotten me quite to oblivion and the shorter I fell of it, the more desperately I craved it. I wasn’t sure what would happen to me if I stopped sharing with or fucking this guy, maybe nothing. And mostly, I couldn’t muster the concern. As I entered, I saw a sink and two dirty stalls, but I locked the door to the bathroom anyway.

The light was dim, a dying fluorescent bulb, but even in the low, flickering light I could see that the tiles and walls were grimy. There were muddied puddles on the floor and sink. Everything was cast in a green pallor, like the laminate around the sink and on the tiles was meant to be a cheery mint color. But against the endless tide of junkies and tweakers and drunks that frequented this bathroom, the establishment let it succumb to this sickly, dark green. I remember caring and not caring at the same time. Sure, I wished it weren’t disgusting in there, but I’d gotten kicked out of the fancy bathrooms for doing drugs in them months ago. Years maybe. I reached into my pocket and opened the tin. It had a little baggie filled with maybe an eighth of a gram of white powder. In the tin I also had a folded dollar bill, a small smooth rock, and about an inch of a straw I had cut diagonally. A few days ago, I had some pills, some Ritalin. The nameless guy had given me a few Oxys, to take the edge off. But all the pills were crushed now, mixed in the bag in an indiscernible ratio. I didn’t usually do opiates. I think I was allergic to the Oxys. I could never predict the reaction. Sometimes I just felt itchy. Other times like puking. From any quantity or manner of stimulants, however, my brain had a very dependable response, even if somewhat unpleasant. This particular cocktail I held in my hands I knew was a total crapshoot. In that moment, I didn’t give the tiniest fuck. I stuck the straw tip into the baggie, scooped as much as I could balance without spilling even the most miniscule grain, and brought it carefully to my nostril. Then I sniffed hard and fast. 

My mouth and cheeks went instantly cold, then started to tingle and go numb. I looked in the mirror and wondered if my skin really was that gray or if it was just the lighting. My gums were cool. I opened and closed my jaw a few times, trying to sense how well I’d done with just one bump. It was good, but another would be better. Obviously, the smart thing is to save a bump for later, but the last of it will get me right where I need to be. 

But with the next hard sniff, the room started to spin and before I could brace myself, my body went heavy and limp and my vision went black.

I don’t know how long I was out for, but I was awakened by this blinding light and God-awful sound. It took me a second to focus and realize that the sound was actually lovely music, but it was loud and felt offensive. The light, too, was actually soft and enveloping, but it made me feel disgusting, ashamed. There was something exposing about this place. It seemed designed to soothe, but it made me recoil in anger. I tried to speak but a voice boomed at me just as I gasped to take a breath. I couldn’t see who was talking, though. I couldn’t focus my eyes. I squinted into the light and tried to concentrate on the words. Eventually something of a figure came into focus and my ears trained on the words more clearly.

…What’s the matter with you, huh? Is failing to be perfect really worth all this punishment? Do you understand that you cannot atone for your sins by dashing yourself against the rocks? 

‘I can’t be perfect! I’m not even going to try!’ I can’t tell if my mouth is moving or if I’m just screaming in my mind. I know who this figure is; he has come to me before, but not for many, many years.

I’m in my room when I was young, 8 or 9. I’m kneeling on the floor in the dark in front of a small cardboard box, turned upside down, covered in a nice, white linen from my mom’s wedding chest, embroidered with flowers. On the linen rests an old, softcover Bible, New King James version, one of my father’s that he gave me, which I read by an old metal desk lamp, the adjustable kind that hinges on a joint that my mom brought home from work. In Bible school, they told us to have devotional at home, quiet time in prayer and meditation. They gave us passages to read, to contemplate. In the next room, my mother sits on the couch watching TV, sipping greedily on a 7-n-7, getting shit-faced drunk. I hide in my bedroom and try to scour my soul. I love the Psalms. I’m reading 139:

Lord, you have probed me, you know me:

you know when I sit and stand;

you understand my thoughts from afar.

You sift through my travels and my rest;

with all my ways you are familiar.

I read the words in my mind. And the figure is there in the room with me. As if his hand is on my shoulder. He means well for me; he wants to support me, but his presence is terrifying. I don’t move or make a sound. My heartbeat pounds in my ears and my ragged breath fills my head as I struggle to listen. 

Even before a word is on my tongue…

Why do you run, child? Why do you hide? he asks me. I don’t want what I wanted; I don’t want what I chose, I tell him. I remember agreeing to come to Earth as a prophet, wanting to be special and know things others don’t. I remember agreeing to lead people to salvation, which is the price of this arcane knowledge. But when I close my eyes I see people screaming in the streets, running in panic, tearing through each other. I am on a large rock shouting admonitions while cracks open up in the Earth all around me and lava spews forth. He seems to chuckle at this, as if I’m being dramatic.

Behind and before you encircle me

and rest your hand upon me.

You can’t hide from this, little one, he threatens. It lives inside you. You can’t run from this. That itch to get away is this very calling, this sacred mission, gnawing at you from deep within. If you try to bury it, it will suffocate you. It will claw itself out and leave your shredded husk behind on the dusty earth. I was afraid he would say that, but I already suspected it was true. My chin drops and shoulders sink in a pitiful defeat. 

You are just like Jonah, he says in an attempt to comfort me. I continue reading:

Where can I go from your spirit?

From your presence, where can I flee?

This is what you chose when you came to Earth. God compels this of no one. I know, I sneer to myself silently. Your joy will be your anguish unless you are brave. But I sat there cold as stone, my heart a swollen lump in my throat, scared right out of my mind.

If I say, surely darkness will hide me,

and night shall be my light…

Darkness is not dark for you,

and night shines as the day.

Darkness and light are but one. It is when you hide that Creator sees you most clearly. It is what you don’t say that rings in His ears. He gives my shoulder one last squeeze and vanishes. Without him saying it, I know he is my ancestor, part of my spiritual DNA. I know whenever I read any of these texts, words out of the mouths of other prophets, my brethren, I will be transported right back here, to this place outside of reality. I will know what they know, see what they saw, feel what they felt. I will glimpse the Truth.

Then I was back in this white void and I heard his voice again, much less pleasant than when I was a child. I told you it would eat you up inside. The longer you deny it, fight against it, the more you come apart. I blinked myself away from that space again.  

Now I’m about 11 years old and sitting next to my grandmother in a stiff pew upholstered very tightly in an itchy, maroon fabric. We’re listening to the pastor give a sermon about disobedience. He is reading from the second Psalms. I feel uneasy, but I love the Psalms:

Then he speaks to them in his anger,

In his wrath he terrifies them…

I look up at my grandmother whose eyes are transfixed on the preacher, but still, she senses my glance and gives my leg a pat. 

I have installed my king on Zion, my holy mount.

You are my son. Today I have begotten you.

I look at her again and swallow. So, she mercifully turns her head and gives me a nod. It’s not a nod of sympathy, however. It’s a nod of urgency, to turn my attention back to the pastor. For my soul’s sake. 

I will give you the nations as your inheritance,

And, as your possessions, the ends of the earth.

I try to turn back to the stage and look directly at the preacher. What I see, though, are beings all around him, and kaleidoscopic pictures pouring out of them that somehow I know are the memories and messages of those beings, and so I can only hang my gaze around his legs, the gray pants of his suit, his shiny black wingtip shoes. It’s not just the presence of these beings that scares me, but the difference between their message and that of the pastor’s. The pastor proselytizes with a fiery conviction. A literal belief in the word of God. The beings are desperate for me to look upon them, to heed the warning they are trying to give, to notice the nuance and the metaphor in the messages of transcendence of which the pastor speaks. But I understand well enough.

With an iron rod you will shepherd them

 like a potter’s vessel you will shatter them.

Indeed, I scoff. The pastor has his way of escaping the Truth, the responsibility. I have mine. I delude myself into thinking my way hurts fewer people. 

There was nothing else you wanted to do. You were unstoppable, comes an answer. And just like that, there’s the figure sitting beside me. I can’t look upon him either. I want to see him, but part of my brain says he’s not really there. The other part says that to look directly upon him will melt my eyeballs. It takes all my strength to cock my head slightly to the right, still turned downward, and sure enough, it was just my uncle’s thigh, slack and oblivious. I can hear him chewing gum in church, like a cow. Must be nice to be that relaxed. But when I look forward again, the sense of this presence immediately returns, like a hushed conversation with a fellow spy in a busy, public square where we both know not to be too conspicuous, and my heart pounds, worried that we might get caught. That I might get caught, talking to myself and imagining things. Grandiose, audacious things.

He has the same solid and sure feeling as my grandmother’s presence to the left of me, but without that signature impatience for me my grandmother always emanated. Can you hear my thoughts? I ask him.

Of course, he answers quickly. It’s no relief. But at least we can communicate with more than just words - he knows how I feel and can see what is in my mind, as I can him. It’s not as they make it seem, he says to comfort me, referring to the ‘fire and brimstone’ sermon going on at the pulpit. The nations he speaks of, the inheritance… and I see flashing before me all of creation, everything man can imagine and more. I feel a glory and a plenty beyond understanding. I know, I whisper. Men will use these scriptures to entitle them to land, to resources, to others’ bodies. They are limited in understanding by their own fear. You are all our children. Even the grown ones. 

Am I supposed to be comforted that I can’t trust any of the grown ups responsible for my care? Am I supposed to feel responsible to stop them from perpetrating evil in His name? I asked defeatedly. 

I won’t pretend that I can provide you with a sense of security. Grappling with the feeling of insecurity of human existence, of responsibility for the world’s salvation, will be an indefatigable constant of your journey. 

I sit there quietly chewing on his words. I appreciate his honesty. Don’t you pretend to have it either, he continued, referring to a false sense of security. Embrace the uncertainty. Maintain humility. It’s their pretending to have answers they don’t have, know things that they don’t, that make them so untrustworthy. And he gave an ethereal nod toward the stage. They aren’t any better at dealing with that feeling of insecurity than you. Worse even because they’ve grown to project that illusion of control and influence onto as many as they can.

The rod is the Truth? The unrelenting truth. That shattering is of those illusions? That’s right, he nodded, proud. I remembered back to another dimension, when all I had in the way of a body was a mass of particles held together by my own consciousness. I remembered giddily shouting at Creator, I want to feel it all! I want to feel exquisite joy, and unbearable pain, and fullness, and sleepy, and unbelievably sad. I want to feel it all!

I want you to feel it, too, Creator said. It is by you feeling it that I feel it.

We are the arms and legs of the Creator, the mind and the body. Yes, David answered. Creator doesn’t actually call on any of you to do anything. Your souls call on Them for permission to experience this or that, to do this or that. And They always answer…

‘Of course, my love,’ we say together. This one I said out loud and it kind of brings me to. My cheeks get bright red and hot and very shyly I look around without moving my head too much to see if anyone heard me or noticed. No one seems to. And I tune back into the words of the preacher again. He’s reading from Psalm 16 now. 

You show me the path to life,

abounding joy in your presence,

the delights at your right hand forever.

I return to my guide. I know exactly who he is, even though he never says his name. His presence is always invoked by the crying out for answers deep in my soul. I know it seems messed up, but Creator really does delight in all of it and calls none of it wrong. If men want to feel fear and sow discord, then let it be so according to their will. There’s a place for all of it. 

Creating so much control with a message of freedom. It’s worse than ironic, right? I put the question to him in all my budding disillusionment and angst. But it’s almost as if I know how he would answer. I see the fractals of energy surrounding the earth in my mind’s eye, morphing over the epochs; I can see consciousness developing. I don’t know if he’s projecting these pictures into my mind or if I can simply access them as he can. He explains, In order to fully experience freedom, it needs to be bound up fully in an experience of control. Every corner and inch of control must be felt and understood, until the idea of freedom seems expunged altogether. Then it rebounds in complete knowing, and pure delight and appreciation. Like an—

‘Epiphany,’ we say together again. Yep, that’s just the math of it, kid. The physics of human…being. I blush with burning cheeks again, from the embarrassment of speaking to myself in some hallucinatory fever in a crowded church, but also because of the intensity of this visceral understanding within every cell of my body, synchronous and transcendent. It’s all in divine order. Anything any of you do is in Her favor, even the most heinous. The only wrong that any of you can do is forget that you can never be out of Her favor, that all is in Divine order. That the experience of insecurity is an illusion, a necessary feature of the ride, like a rollercoaster. In fact, all the wrong in the world is sown from that one rotten forgetting. And even that is inevitable and blessed. 

God bless this mess, I think sarcastically, picturing the needlepoint wall hanging that said the very same in my grandmother’s kitchen. He chuckles and replies, More like, this mess is all blessed. I understand but I’m already in so much pain, having already been vulnerable to so much evil. I see the auras coming off the preacher, my grandmother, most of the room. Such conviction, such fury, so much fear, so much control. All deluding themselves. Bathing in evil and calling it God. 

I hate it, I mutter under my breath. He seems to pat my leg as my grandma did. Well, that’s honest. And wherever there is truth God is close by. That’s half the keys to the Kingdom, kid. 

What’s the other half? I asked. 

Love, he said, and vanished. 

Then just like that I was back in that grungy bathroom with him in the present. Well, not in the bathroom, exactly, but rather looking upon myself on the floor. It was as if my spirit was floating above, not quite as high as David was, but somewhere near that plane as if we were trying to reach each other through an intermediary dimension. 

There’s nowhere you can run from an agreement you have made. An agreement you have made with yourself no less. Why do you cower in a dirty bathroom? For the sake of what are you destroying yourself? 

I don’t want what I wanted. I can’t do it. 

You are royalty. Born of a sacred spiritual line of seers and prophets and truth-tellers. You can do nothing else. If you defy your mission, your misery will be your only friend. Get up.

I am a crazy tweaker on a public restroom floor indulging in a fanciful delusion of grandeur to compensate for the very fact of it.

Sadly, you are both of those things. Of course the shell is cracked. That’s how the light gets in.

My eyes clamp shut in burning hot tears. The relief and the joy and the shame and the madness of it all overwhelm me. I remember the naïve, shouting spirit that I was before I took a body and remember that this is one of the very moments that I was fantasizing about. This rapturous sickening beauty, this dense richness of being. The horror and the wonder of it. 

I’m not worthy. I’m not capable, I sobbed, spitting into my own hands, trying to manage the liquid that was now pouring from my own face. Please forgive me, I whimpered. 

You remember that part about the epiphany? The full experience of What Is Not rebounding naturally into the full experience of What Is? I nodded as I wiped my cheeks. Well, I think you might not have appreciated the part about the natural rebound back to the light. You saw the fractals and the spirals of the evolution of consciousness. But you didn’t count them. Huh? I thought. Counting them hadn’t even occurred to me. The deck is stacked, child. What seems like wild indifference on the part of the Creator is only certainty. Creation cannot fail. Love is that Love is. All experiences to the contrary are illusory and finite. There’s no worry or doubt about this in Heaven. And in a flash of understanding I saw that all the wars between Heaven and Hell in our mythologies are just humans coming to terms with existence. Exactly, he consoled me. There is no being, no experience, without Separation. 

And there is no separation without war, I whispered on the floor of a grimy public restroom, my pants’ seat damp with dingy water. 

There was a banging on the door behind me. The light got overwhelmingly bright for a brief second as I was thrust back into my body, dizzy and sick. I pulled myself up from the floor by the sink. I looked in the mirror and the sobbing was at least real, if none of the rest of it was. My nose was red and raw, my lips were chapped, my eyes were bloodshot, my skin was gray. 

You are beautiful because you are fearfully and wonderfully made…

“Just a second!” I splashed some water on my face and unlocked the door. I raised my arms at the light when I left the bathroom to hide my eyes. I struggled to find my booth because I sincerely could not recognize the people I was with. A few of them had gone up to order; nameless guy was sitting where I left him. I wondered how long I had been gone for; it seemed like a lifetime. I hesitated when I greeted him before I sat back down in wait for his reaction, but he was unfazed. 

“I ordered already,” he said, and nudged the table number in my direction without so much as making eye contact. I peered squinty-eyed at the table of indifferent strangers who hadn’t seemed to notice my absence. Yeah, I thought to myself, I should fucking eat something.