Novella: III

Pages 6 - 8

Going a little deeper

The month was December; I cannot pinpoint exactly the date. You’ll recall I was crying on the beach in Cape Jarvis with Tiffany, about an hour and a half into the LSD trip. I had seen too much, I was a little psychically exhausted. But I hadn’t seen this. A figure approached us on the beach: a cowboy.

“Alright there, partners?” he said twiddling his left moustache with one hand and tipping his felt hat with the other. He had to hold the hat constantly to his head since it was too windy. I let out a small laugh, and Tiffany replied,

“We’re tripping, partner. What brings a traveller like you to these parts?”

I was rubbing my nose and eyes, giggling slightly at this strange occurrence.

“I’ve come down from Goolwa. I’m moving further South over the next few days. Been trudging along the shore-line for God knows how long. Beach people keep looking at me funny, like I’m trouble. But I keep shouting to them, ‘I’m a cowboy in search for a Billabong in the Milky Way,’ but it doesn’t seem to help my case. I got my tent on my back.”

“Ahh, we were travelling up towards Robe along the coast as well, an adventure. Perhaps you’d like to hitchhike with us” said Tiffany, trying to remove her windswept hair from her face. “Would you like some Apple Pie LSD, Mr Sir?”

The cowboy stood for a moment looking rather confused. He was avoiding looking towards my tear-stained face, though it seemed he was too polite to stare at Tiffany for too long. He piled up all of his camping gear beside him and sat down beside me shoulder to shoulder, adjusting his moleskin jacket in a way that was appropriate.

“It seems you’ve been troubled…” he said. “I would say ‘cheer up cowboy’ but maybe that would sound a little dismissive of your feelings and all.”

“I had been entrusted with time immemorial, and I darned dropped the ball. Was trying to write the document that would save my older brother Marty… I was approaching the Sistine nebula in a spaceship asking for a truce with God,” I replied with a small smile. He took off his cowboy hat exposing his shiny brown head. The late afternoon light reflected off his weather-worn skin with an almost purple incandescence.

“You say, you’re from Goolwa?” I asked. Tiffany, who was finding the tab from her pockets asked, “and your name, sir? This is my genius Arthur, and I’m Tiffany, anything but boring, he-he.”

“Name’s Rigby. Well originally from the top end, Darwin. I must have fallen eighty percent the way down the country. But I discovered things down South way. I’ve been searching for something in the Milky Way too. You two seem clever, perhaps you can help me find it?”

“Yes, well here’s your first entry point,” said Tiffany pointing her smiley square finger to Rigby, “Lick it off my finger, cowboy.”

“Ha! No thank you,” said Rigby. “I’m already with you two on that level.” Tiffany laughed gently, surprised. “I’m not in need of any of that sort of thing,” he said now looking at me. “Besides, brother here needs to get on next level to where I’m at. And maybe he will dream of frilly mermaids and help me find the Billabong somewhere in the Milky Way.”

“It is ’74 after all,” I recall saying to Rigby and Tiffany, who remained a part of my consciousness from that day in December 1974 onwards. We were all laughing by now, and Tiffany had two tabs on her fingers. One for her and one for me.

My second dose was more eventful than the first. By then it was 5:45 PM, and the sun was like halfway underneath the edge of the world. It was the biggest sun you’d ever seen, the biggest sun the Universe seemed to have managed to put in the Theatre of the Earth. Rigby had great eyes which were green and they had orange flecks from the late afternoon sunshine. Tiffany was dancing like a Spanish Aficionado again, pushing her feet down hard into the sand and flinging her arms around all the while smiling with her hair covering her eyes.

I was dancing by 6:30 PM, and moving felt positive and constructive. I could see the rubber and three-quarter moon hanging in the sky cartoonish and amusing. I found it so funny that the sun, which was just about to disappear beyond the horizon, could be up in the sky at the same time as the Moon. It was now like the aurora was dancing in the sky: full of blue and green-purple, full of the eyes of all the souls of the universe. Rigby was line dancing with Tiffany on the spraying sand, as cowboys in bygone days sometimes did. I started to have these profound insights into the nature of love and time, but from my lodgings (in the future, from whence I’m writing this recollection) I cannot remember exactly the content of these insights…

Rigby was humming a song under his breath, barely audible: “Elephants, memory, love and life, love and loss. Elephants remember everything…” I said, “Oh man. You’re like Jimi Hendrix, man. Rigby Hendrix.” Rigby replied, “I see that resemblance.” By this stage Tiffany must have found a red acoustic guitar. The wind, which had settled down, allowed Rigby to put his felt hat back on and Tiffany gave him the red guitar. Rigby laughed charismatically, “I got a little something perhaps…”

By then, my mind which was breaking up into all forms of parallel hallucinations, was briefly held at a unity by Rigby’s surprisingly beautiful voice and his excellence with the guitar. He gave a rendition of the George Harrison’s 1970 song, My Sweet Lord, with the most warm, unique voice. I could have sworn it sounded better than the original, which seems impossible to me, now looking back. But many impossible things happened on the night in December.

“Thank you, thank you…” said Rigby, and we were in the Milky Way at last.

It was not like the world was integrating a vision of space travel, it was that we had just travelled to Earth for a brief moment in all of cosmological time, set to leave shortly before 8 PM: so naturally there was a spaceship which looked, as one would expect, like a huge musical record, a colourful discus that Odysseus or some classical Greek hero might propel into the night sky… The flying saucer landed on the beach and the stairs came down with a woosh of steam. Tiffany was very excited to go into the Milky Way in our flying saucer.

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Isaac