A correspondent for VICE gets more than she bargained for when her investigative reporting sends her on a psychedelic odyssey that transgresses the known boundaries of existence.

By Veronica Frankle

September 23, 2019, 1:40pm

There’s always that part at the beginning of the trip where you ask yourself Am I feeling it?, and you examine your perceptions, looking for evidence that your consciousness has been altered: multicolored streamers trailing out behind your fingers, flowers beckoning you with newfound sentience, a wall breathing with life. So far this acid isn’t like that. This acid—three drops of clear liquid, stirred into a glass of water and drunk down in a few swallows—is doing something to my sense of time. I’ve experienced time distortions on psychedelics before, like the four-minute song that takes an hour to play, or the vast eternity stretching out so far between the exhale and the inhale that I thought I would forget how to breathe. This acid isn’t like that either. Right now this acid is propelling me forward, to the moment in the future when I’ll be sitting at my laptop at 4:14 in the morning, staring at the white screen and tapping on the keyboard as I write these very words. I’ll take a bittersweet sip of tepid coffee, feel an air-conditioned zephyr dance across my scalp, and remember how I foresaw this moment at the outset of my trip.

Then the acid pulls me out of the future and tugs me into the past, to the moment when Natalia squeezed my arm and told me it was okay to take my sleep mask off, so I did, and as I fluffed my hair up where the elastic band had compressed it, I squinted against the dim yellow glimmering of candles and string lights and thrift-store lampshades against uneven plaster walls festooned with art prints and posters for rock shows, and I thought, well, at least this looks the way a drug dealer’s apartment on D Street is supposed to look, at least I haven’t wound up in some basement being told that it puts the lotion on its skin …

And then it pushes me further into the past, to the moment when my phone rang and it was Natalia, calling to tell me she could get me some D Street acid, but the dealer she was getting it from had three conditions: I had to go to the dealer’s apartment to get it, and I had to let Natalia drive me there, and I had to wear a blindfold the whole way until we got inside the apartment.

I said, “Jesus Christ, are you serious? Why all the secrecy? I mean, it’s fine if he doesn’t want me to know where he lives, but why can’t he just give it to you to give to me?”

“Because this is not regular acid. Your editor at Vice wanted you to find some D Street acid, right? The stuff he heard about all the way over in London? Well, that’s what this is. It’s not even LSD, chemically speaking. It’s a different drug, a different hallucinogen. The dealer told me that as far as he knows, D Street in Atlanta is the only place in the world where this particular drug even exists.”

“So?”

“So he doesn’t just distribute this stuff by courier. He seems to feel, I don’t know, a sense of responsibility or something. Like, this stuff is so heavy-duty that he wants to control who gets it.”

“Well, he can feel whatever he wants, but he’s not controlling shit. I could be anybody.”

Natalia said, “The fact that you’d be willing to go through this says something about you.”

Well, sure. What it said about me was that I would have rather done almost anything than spend another night sitting alone at home with my hair up in a bun, drinking wine and watching rom-coms on Netflix until I started crying about David again. I didn’t tell Natalia this. She knew about the breakup, but she didn’t know how pathetic I had become in the wreckage of it.

I said, “And I suppose I have to let you drive me home as well. Blindfolded. Me, not you.”

“Uh, he’s actually not worried about that part. I mean, you know, this is D Street. He’s done this before, and he says that if you were blindfolded when you were brought in, you’ll never find it later, even if you leave in broad daylight and draw a map on your way out.”

I’d been living in Atlanta long enough to have heard the urban legends about D Street, a mysterious downtown neighborhood that appeared on no map and that you couldn’t find on your own, even with GPS; somebody who’d already been there had to take you first. After that you could go back any time you wanted—unless, apparently, you were blindfolded when you were brought in (this was a new wrinkle to the legend). I’d scoured downtown looking for D Street, thinking I could get a feature story out of it; but downtown Atlanta isn’t that big, and I soon concluded that the D Street district was nowhere to be found. For a while I thought “D Street” was insider code for a designated group of people, like an exclusive club, until I met Natalia at an art gallery opening in Midtown that I was covering for Juxtapoz. She told me she owned a gallery on D Street called Marinetti’s Future, and yet she didn’t invite me to come by and see the place, which was not typical gallery owner behavior. They usually loved media attention.

She did accept my invitation to get a drink later, though, and soon we became art friends. We’d meet at a wine bar, grab some tapas, and then go to gallery openings and exhibitions together. We talked about art, and movies, and our love lives—her long-term engagement to her boyfriend, my long-term on-again/off-again situation with David—but whenever the topic of D Street itself came up, we sort of gingerly danced around it. She never did invite me to come see the gallery, and I never asked her to take me. My journalist’s instincts told me if I could be chill about it, my friendship with Natalia would eventually lead me to D Street. And now here she was, years later, volunteering to take me there—but blindfolded.

I imagined her carefully leading blindfolded me down the street, guiding me by the arm and making sure I didn’t trip or fall, and I said, “Natalia, I appreciate your help, but … are you sure you want to do this? It seems like a lot to ask.”

“Veronica, you’re not asking. I’m offering. We talked about this.”

Yes, we had. Natalia had a theory that I was more comfortable giving than receiving in any relationship, and that was why none of my romantic pairings had ultimately worked out. My theory was that I had a lot of love to give, and I had yet to meet a man who actually wanted a loving relationship. They wanted relationships, all right, but the relationship was usually just a vehicle for what they really wanted: default companionship, dependable sex, splitting rent, co-signing on a mortgage, having kids. In relationships like those, “love” was the label you slapped onto the bundle of positive feelings you had about it all. To me, love meant much more than that. To me, love was the whole point of life. So what did that say about my loveless life?

Ah, here came the tears again. I blinked them away and told myself this was not the time to focus on love. This was the time to focus on work. Be a journalist. Get the story. Remember what your name means.

“Ronnie?” is a word in a male voice from somewhere close by, and my consciousness shoots out of the past and into a room where low yellow light laps in waves up and down uneven plaster walls that undulate gently all around me, and I rouse myself and draw a deep breath that comes all the way up from the soles of my feet, and I’m still inhaling when my eyes settle on the dealer’s face as he bends over to look at me where I’m sitting on the sofa, his bloodshot blue eyes framed by magenta 80s rocker hair, lined florid cheeks stubbled with gray, not datable, this guy is definitely not datable at all, and “Ronnie? You in there?”

I exhale and exhale and exhale, pushing my ire into his face. “Don’t call me that. It’s not my name.”

He blinks and stands up straight and grins. “Sorry.” The lines cut deeper into his cheeks. “Didn’t mean to offend.” How old is he, that time has etched such deep crevasses into his smile? “What do you want me to call you?”

Bernice. Call me Bernice.

Oh, god, did I just say that out loud? Did that really happen? Or will I say it in the future? Does it even matter when I said it, when I will say it? Either way it’s too late, everything has already happened, all of time and all of space and all of the objects and events they contain already exist, the universe is already full of everything that has ever happened or is happening now or will ever happen, there’s no way to stop or fix or undo any of it, we’re all trapped like flies in the amber of spacetime, and “Hey. Here you go. Drink this.”

Somehow he has left and returned with a glass of pale yellow liquid in his hand, ice cubes swimming inside as he extends it to me, and I look up at him and cannot do anything at all, and “It’s just lemonade. Homemade from a family recipe. Nothing in it but sugar, I swear. Here. I think you could use this,” and somehow Natalia is standing next to him now, looking down at me and nodding with furrows of concern above her brow, and have the lines in her forehead always been graven that deep? I thought she was only in her late thirties? Or is it late forties? Late seventies? Dead?

“Go ahead, Veronica, it’s okay, I’m having some too,” and she’s not dead yet, not in this moment, in this moment she raises a glass of the same pale yellow liquid to her mouth and sips from it, looking at me above the rim, and the softness in her eyes reminds me of the softness of her fingers on my arm as she said, Okay, you’re doing great, just lift your feet a little higher, D Street is paved in cobblestones and I don’t want you to trip, and don’t worry about cars, it’s pedestrian-only, all right, we’re almost to his house, it’s one of those Victorians that’s split up into apartments, we have to go around the side, down this driveway, good, now up some stairs, here’s the railing, first step up …  

Her throat works as she swallows, and I imagine her sweet, tart pleasure, and the dealer proffers the glass a little closer to me, and I look into his soft, bloodshot eyes and think fuck it why am I stopping myself from accepting this, and I take the glass from his warm fingers and bring it to my mouth and drink a small sip of kind lemony light, and then a bigger sip that drenches me in golden satisfaction, and then a full gulp of sweet cool sunbeams that flow all through me.

When I finish swallowing, a surprised laugh escapes me. “Damn. It’s like I’ve never had lemonade before.”

“Well, you’ve never had my Aunt Sandy’s lemonade before, I gar-on-tee.” He smiles bigger this time, his face older and gladder. “That’s the good stuff right there. And I should know. ‘Cause of my line of work and all.”

I want to say something laudatory, to give voice to the hosannas within me, but the light floods my mind, carrying me out of this moment and into another one, when Natalia will take a sip of wine and set her glass down on the dark wood of the bar.

“So,” she’ll say. “I want to hear about your trip. I mean, obviously …” She’ll gesture at me. “You went through some stuff. Major stuff, it looks like.”

I’ll take a sip of wine too, partly to buy myself some time. How to sift through everything that happened and condense it into language? I won’t be sure I can say anything coherent about the experience, much less write a freaking feature story about it. “Yeah. The thing is, I think I’ve lost track of where we left off that night.”

“Well, we brought you that lemonade, which you seemed to love …”

“Oh, right! Aunt Sandy’s lemonade. Best thing ever.”

“And then we suggested that you go in the guest bedroom so you could just be on your own in there and do your thing.”

I’ll nod and say, “Right. So y’all got me in there on the bed, and then I think someone plugged in some string lights?”

“Yeah. You wanted candles, but we didn’t think that would be the best idea.”

I’ll laugh. “That was smart. And then y’all just left me in there.”

“Well, we made sure you were okay with us leaving the door open, so we could keep an eye on you.”

“Yeah. And then what did y’all do?”

Natalia will twirl her glass on the bar. “We just hung out and talked and listened to music and got high. He had some amazing weed.” She’ll chuckle. “Knocked me on my ass, is what it did. Maybe it was government weed, like that government acid he gave you.”

Wait—government acid? Did I hear this guy correctly? I looked at Natalia, sitting next to me on the sofa; all she did was shrug. I looked across the coffee table at the dealer and said, “Why would the federal government make acid?”

He placed his palms on the arms of his chair very deliberately before he answered me, as if he was bracing himself. “You ever hear of MK ULTRA?”

“I don’t know … isn’t that the name of a punk band?”

“Well, they’re more of a thrash band, if you ask me. But the band took their name from a real government program that ran during the Cold War. Basically, MK ULTRA was a joint operation of the CIA and the Defense Department, and its purpose was to beat the Soviets at mind control. Big topic back in those days. You know that movie The Manchurian Candidate?”

“I think so. The one with Denzel Washington?”

“Well, that’s a remake of the original, which came out in the 60s. That one was based very much on this Cold War mind-control hysteria that swept the nation. And the CIA and the Pentagon got caught up in it too. So in MK ULTRA, at first they focused on things like brainwashing and truth serum, but then they branched out from there. Sometimes way out.” He dug into the pocket of his faded orange jeans, withdrew a small vial, and held it up for me to see. “This came from one of the branches.”

I looked at the unassuming brown vial, topped by a black rubber bulb. “What’s special about it?”

He shrugged and ducked his head, as if thinking to himself, Might as well come out with it. “The person I got it from told me that in the early 1970s, a group of Army chemists collaborated with a bunch of psychics and magicians and witches to see if it was possible to infuse hallucinogens with supernatural properties. And this is what they came up with.” He set the vial down on the coffee table between us.

I huffed out a laugh. He did not. Neither did Natalia.

Well, I said I wanted D Street acid, didn’t I? And here it was, in all its blindfolded, conspiracist, supernatural glory. I knew that set and setting were crucial to constructing the drug experience, especially for hallucinogens. And he had just served up the quintessential D Street psychological set on a silver platter.

But I’d been a journalist for too long to uncomplainingly swallow all this hooey without pushing back at least a little bit. I said, “If this is true, not only are you selling drugs; the drugs you’re selling also happen to be stolen federal property.”

“Why do you think I insisted on the blindfold thing? No offense, but you’re not part of the D Street district. I don’t know if I can trust you. This way, if you decide you’re gonna rat me out, there’s no way you or the cops will ever find me.”

“Oh, so cops never come down to D Street?”

He smiled grimly. “Mostly not, and never any sheriff’s deputies or feds or state troopers, that I know of; just a few from the Atlanta PD. And they wouldn’t arrest me for something like this.”

“Why not? Are they too cool for that?”

If my barb upset him, he didn’t show it. “No, they just understand what D Street’s about. Someone brought them here—unblindfolded—and now they know the way.” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

That felt like a barb of his own. Maybe I did get under his skin a little bit. What am I really trying to do here—prove that this guy is full of shit? Or am I trying to do some D Street acid?

They say it changes your life, my editor had said to me, as his cat walked across his desk in front of his webcam.

Everyone says that about hallucinogens, I replied. I’ve done acid and shrooms before, and it never changed my life.

Brilliant. If you do this stuff and it turns out to be a bit of a dud, then that’s the angle. Debunking the myth. Excoriating those who propagate it. Shining the light of truth on falsehood. All that. He passed his hand along the cat’s brindled back. But if it turns out anything like the descriptions I’m seeing on the LSD subreddit, then we’ll get a sensational piece out of it. And Veronica, you never know—your life might change this time.

I knew there was no danger of that happening. The only force that could change your life was love, and love had just stormed out of my life again, slamming the door behind it. No drug on earth could make up for the absence of love, even if it was D Street acid.

I said, “How will this stuff affect me? What does it do to you?”

The dealer spread his hands. “It affects everyone differently. Wildly differently. Some people say they develop psychic abilities and can, like, read minds or move objects with their mental powers. Some people start seeing fairies, angels, ghosts, shit like that. Other worlds, other dimensions … you just never really know until you try it.”

Other worlds. Other dimensions. That sounded good to me. I was willing to do anything that got me off this planet of woe, at least for a little while.

“Okay,” I said. “So how much do I owe you?”

The dealer put his hands on his knees. “Well, before we talk money, there’s one more thing to discuss. The dose is three drops, taken in water. I’ve got some bottled water here, so I could put the drops in one of those bottles and send you home with it, if you wanted. Or you could do it here.”

“Do it here. You mean like, do the acid here? In your apartment?”

He nodded. “There’s a guest bedroom where you can go and be by yourself. There’s, like, string lights in there, and you can have music if you want … it’s not, like, luxurious accommodations or anything, but there’s cool art on the walls.” He smiled, a bit sheepishly.

Natalia said, “And I’d stay here with you. The whole time. We’d be out here in the living room while you’re doing your thing in there.”

I tucked my hair behind my ears, which I did when I was perplexed, and frowned at them. “Why would I do that?” I looked at the dealer and said, “Why would you even suggest that?”

He said, “I’ve given this stuff to enough people to know that if you do it anywhere on D Street, the effect is intensified. Something about this place.” He waved his hands, taking in the room, and more than just the room. “The energy, or whatever. How it interacts with the acid. Don’t ask me how it works; all I know is, it works. You’ll have a stronger trip if you do that acid somewhere on D Street. And since you don’t live here or know anyone who does, this apartment is the safest place on D Street where you could do it.”

What do you know, folks—now we have setting, too! Although I wasn’t expecting him to be so literal about it. I leaned forward on the sofa and peeked down the hallway and into the spare bedroom. The room looked normal enough, except for the art on the walls, which did indeed look somewhat cool from a distance: the work of an inspired, talented amateur.

One painting in particular draws her in, the one to the left of the bed she’s lying on, a landscape painted in thick, bold lines that sculpt bright swathes of color into shapes of rolling hills and green fields and a simple house and the sky above it, shading from roseate tangerine gold at the horizon up to deep velvet blue sprinkled with ice-chip stars at the top; and in one of those weird occurrences that always seem to happen when you’re tripping, the painting unearths a long-buried childhood memory: the hours she spent sitting cross-legged on the comforting roughness of her grandmother’s oval braided rug while reading an illustrated book about stars and constellations, their names lifting off the page like exotic destinations in a travelogue of the future: Pegasus, Cygnus, Virgo, Gemini; Rigel, Betelgeuse, Polaris, Alpha Centauri; the Pleiades, the Big Dipper, the Southern Cross, Coma Berenices; and a rose-scented atmosphere enveloped her, and a soft dry hand came from behind to pat her stubby fingers splayed out on the page atop a midnight-blue sky teeming with dragons and centaurs and princesses, and a pale wrinkled finger pointed at Coma Berenices and said That’s where your name comes from; and she gazed at the stars and the lines connecting them, the figures they made, the stories they told, and she wanted to know what it all meant and how her name played a part in it; she looked at the stars in the pictures on the page, she looks at the stars in the painting on the wall, and she wonders if she might find her answers there; and whoa this acid is good stuff, because now she feels as if her body is floating right off the bed, light as a feather but not stiff as a board, she is relaxed and buoyant as she floats toward the wall, toward the painting, and then into the painting, floating above the landscape, floating faster now into that boldly lined world, flying above those fields, green and golden farmland sliding smoothly beneath her, the ground receding as she ascends higher above the land, the fields growing indistinct beneath a scrim of atmosphere as she flies higher and higher, soaring into space; and now the world’s own curve comes into view, a pale blue rind glowing at the edge of a dark blue fruit mottled with land masses and brushed with clouds, and she is approaching the stars themselves and their many secrets, which she will now finally discover; and she dares to look up and behold the heart-wrenching splendor of countless holy flames strewn across unfathomable gulfs …

… but all she sees is a smooth black ceiling close above her, and smooth black walls close by on all four sides; and when she turns and looks down at the world, she’s dismayed to see that the entire planet has shrunk down so small that she could hold it in her arms like an extra-large beach ball; and she and the blue globe that floats beneath her are now both contained entirely inside a small black chamber, with no stars anywhere. She’s still rising, but very slowly, like a stray balloon, and she drifts backward and upward until her back bumps into the soft wall, and she slides up the wall until her head nudges the ceiling, and she comes to a stop.

She looks around despairingly at the flat black planes enclosing her and the world on all sides, and she thinks, this is it; this is reality; when you take magic drugs and look behind the veil, you don’t see the world set like a jewel amid a glorious cosmic infinitude; you don’t see the human race as participants in one small part of an immense cosmic drama; what you see is that the whole operation looks a lot more like a puppet show, with this black box of a room as the theater, and the miniature earth as the set, and her as one of the marionettes on stage, with her stiff, jointed arms flailing about, grabbing at some things, shoving others away, her jaw opening and shutting mechanically as she clack-clack-clacks her way through her days. There’s no grandeur, no mystery; it only looks that way when you’re on stage, gazing up at the klieg lights. Now that she has risen above the whole production, she can see the backdrops for what they are: painted canvas that deceives the eye. She feels cheated and foolish, like a rube who has just figured out how the carnival con man has been tricking her this whole time.

She considers flying back down to the miniature earth to live out her life among the puppets, and her heart shrivels. Isn’t that sky beautiful? Isn’t this wine delicious? Isn’t that man wonderful? No, no, no. The sky is just scenery, the wine is just a prop, and the man is just another puppet. Even David. She thinks of how his eyebrows crinkle when he laughs, how his beard scratches at her chin and cheek and neck when he kisses her, how he flips her over and tugs pleasingly on her hair from behind when they make love, how he withdraws from her afterward no matter how good it was, how his silence and distance grow so palpable it feels like she’s lying in bed with a mannequin that hates her. And now she understands that it’s all just part of the script for the current production. He’s playing a character named Emotionally Unavailable Man, and she’s playing Emotionally Needy Woman, and they’re both turning in stellar performances. She ought to be good at her role by now; she’s been playing it for many years with one costar after another. She plays other roles too: Hard-Nosed Reporter. Supportive Friend. Loyal Daughter. She’s good at them all. It’s a good show. And most of the time she has no idea what any of it means.

So why go back to it?

She looks at the miniature earth glowing beneath her, the black walls shimmering with blue all around her, and she knows that in this place, different rules apply. In this place, if she doesn’t want to return to the stage to do the evening performance, she doesn’t have to—not now, not ever. She could just wait a while. Say a year. Say a hundred thousand years. Let the show on miniature earth change so drastically that she won’t recognize it anymore. That way she’ll have to learn new lines, play a new role. Yet she fears that a hundred thousand years from now, miniature earth will be a hellscape, and all the plays will be horrific tragedies.

Where else could she go? From the little black room she can travel to any point in space and time, but the only places she knows how to go are the places she’s already been. She could travel back to her own past and revisit a moment when she had a better life. There was a time when, despite being poor, despite being alone, she glowed from within because she was lit by a sense of mission: a sacred obligation to find the truth and spread it everywhere. Whatever happened to that spark? How could she have let it die? She should go back and recapture that feeling, before she gets lost in the puppet show forever.

Let’s see now, how does this work … you lean forward over the miniature earth and spin it like a globe … or else you throw yourself into orbit around it … either way, earth and water and air whirl beneath you as roads are unpaved, fully grown forests sprout where parking lots used to be, cities grow slightly less bright at night, the atmosphere cools fractionally, and in one densely packed metropolis, two tall towers spring up next to each other, coalescing out of a cloud of dust and smoke … now fly a little south of there, to a place with fewer skyscrapers, more kudzu, less money, plenty of avarice, ambition to spare, desires of all kinds spilling out everywhere, and the dreams to match them …

In one dream, she’s standing in a bedroom at night, stationed at the foot of the bed, looking down at a sleeping young woman who has the bedclothes wrapped around and around her in a spiral. The sleeping woman whimpers once, softly, as if the spiral is tightening around her; she whimpers again, and her legs twitch; her fingers spasm against the pillow; her face winces, then goes vacant; she twitches; she moans; her head tosses; her eyes flutter open; she looks around the shadowed room until she sees a figure standing at the foot of her bed—

—and then she shrieks and sits up and scoots back away from me so fast that her head bumps into the wall, and she whispers in a breathless shout, “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m you,” I say. I don’t know how I know this, but I do. It’s one of those dream things.

The young woman keeps her eyes locked on me while she slaps at a bedside lamp until she finds the switch and turns it on. In the sudden light I can see that she looks just like I did right after I graduated from college: same haircut, a chin-length bob with regrettable bangs, left over from sophomore year; same Georgia State t-shirt, pilled and worn, repurposed as sleepwear. She’s even sleeping under the same hand-me-down comforter I inherited in high school: royal blue on top, baby blue underneath.

“You do look like me,” the young woman says, squinting at me with eyes tender from sleep. “But you’re old.”

“I’m at a different location in spacetime,” I say. I never talk this way in real life. Another one of those dream things.

She squeezes her eyes shut and scrubs at them, and she says, “Please, god, please let me wake up, please …” When she removes her hands and opens her eyes to see me standing here, she sighs and crumples a little. She says, in a small voice: “Are you a ghost?”

“We haven’t reached our final location yet,” I say.

She shakes her head—whether in confusion or disbelief, I don’t know. She says, “Then why are you here?”

“My spark went out. I wanted to remember what it felt like, so I’m here to feel yours.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Exactly,” I say. “I don’t know what any of it means anymore.”

She blinks at me and sits up a bit straighter. “What about … not even your career?”

Ah, yes; the young woman’s career is the most important thing in her life right now, and well it should be, with her freshly minted journalism degree, her rapidly growing selection of published clips, her recommendations from professors, her internships, her sizable student debt. At her location in spacetime, work is her favorite topic to discuss. At my location in spacetime, work is the very last topic I want to discuss.

“My career is just another part of the show,” I say. “The whole thing is a pantomime.” In an instant, tears are flowing down my already-wet face, as if I’ve been crying for the past ten minutes. Yet another dream thing.

The sight of my sudden tears seems to frighten her. She says, “Well, but do you—are you in love with anyone?”

Her attempt to redirect me onto a comforting topic doesn’t work. “I don’t know,” I say. I start walking slowly around the bed, toward her. She shrinks away from me. “Is it love if they only love you back sometimes? When they feel like it?” I kneel on the bed next to her and lean in close, and she scoots to the other edge of the bed. “I don’t know what love is anymore. I don’t know what the point of life is anymore.” I crawl toward her, and her eyes are round with terror as I say, “Don’t turn out like me, don’t let your spark die, remember what’s important,” and I reach out to touch her unwrinkled face, and she screams and drags the blue comforter over her head—

“You can go in now,” the clerk said. I flinched and opened my eyes. Shit! I must have fallen asleep for a minute.

“Sorry,” I said to the clerk. “Guess I dozed off.” I worried that I’d get in trouble for disrespecting the court or something like that, but the clerk looked as if this wasn’t the first time someone had fallen asleep in the judge’s waiting room, nor did she care. She merely motioned me toward the open door with a sour expression that hadn’t changed since the moment I’d arrived.

I stood up and walked into the judge’s chambers, which were smaller and darker than I thought they’d be. The only illumination was a shaded lamp on the judge’s desk, which threw a circle of light onto an unkempt assortment of folders and affidavits. The judge, an older man with distinguished salt and pepper in his close-trimmed hair, was standing behind his desk, his suit coat unbuttoned. Seeing his dark face lit from below reminded me of a dream I’d once had: something about flying up above the earth and finding myself in a small black room with the glowing world beneath me.

The judge picked up a piece of paper and looked at it as he spoke. “Good morning. So you are … Bernice Margaret Frankle.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“And you want to change your name to … Veronica Margaret Frankle.”

“Yes, sir.”

He studied my paperwork for a while before he spoke again. “I had a grandmother named Bernice.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of why I want to change it.”

His eyes flicked up at me, sharp behind his glasses, and I hurriedly said, “Not because of your grandmother. It’s just—kind of a grandma name.”

“You might be a grandma one day,” he said, gently chiding me.

Thanks for the unsolicited paternalism, Your Honor! And yet in a way I partly agreed with him. “Well, that’s sort of the point,” I said. “Who wants to marry a Bernice? Nowadays, that is. No offense to your grandmother.”

He raised his chin. “You know what Bernice means? ‘Bringer of victory.’” He peered at me to see if I fully appreciated the significance of this crucial piece of information.

“I know,” I said. “So does Veronica. It’s just the Latinized form of Bernice.”

He looked at the paper in his hand, grunted, set it on his desk, signed it, and stamped it. He must have decided he was willing to settle for a synonym.

I took my piece of official paper and got the hell out of there before he changed his mind. This was too important to let one old man fuck it up. I wasn’t doing this just because of the marriage thing, although I often thought my parents must have decided they wanted to raise a future nun when they named me Bernice, as my sparse and underwhelming dating history attested. No, I was changing my name because I was trying to be, or to become, someone who didn’t fulfill the Atlanta stereotype of putting career above everything else; who hadn’t lost sight of what it all meant; who, crucially, understood the importance of love. That nightmare from the other night was a real wake-up call (unless that was a mixed metaphor). Thank you, my subconscious, for warning me that I was on the wrong path.

I took my paper to another office in the Fulton County Courthouse to have my name change entered in the official records. The reasonably cute guy on the other side of the glass took the affidavit and said, “Veronica.” He looked at me and said, “That’s a pretty name.” He had hazel eyes.

“Thank you,” I said. I looked at the ID tag clipped to his shirt pocket. “Renard,” I read aloud. His name made me think of something flirty to say to him, and in a move that was completely out of character for me, I went ahead and said it: “Does that mean you’re a fox?”

He laughed, pleased and embarrassed, and he shook his head and smiled while he started his paperwork and tried to think of a comeback. I let him stew in it, and I thought, Welcome to the world, Veronica. This is all here for you, all these men to flirt with, and women too if you feel like it; and not just flirting, there’s dating and sex and love—remember all that? Remember Brian in sophomore year? And it might not always work out, and Brian’s a good example of that … but then again it might! You can’t win if you don’t play, and don’t you think it’s time you played a little? Think of how much you’ve missed out on with your nose stuck in a book and your hands poised above your laptop, clack-clack-clacking away at your next blockbuster story; so much time spent alone. It’s true that you haven’t felt particularly lonely, but perhaps you should have. Perhaps that’s the problem.

So you’ll enter this world of love and romance, and you’ll give it your all. You’ll start by growing your hair out, sprucing up your wardrobe, acting like you give a shit whether you ever go on another date again for the rest of your life—and they’ll notice, and the whole grand endeavor will begin. You’ll build a career, too, because you’re good at this journalism thing, and you like it, and you have to pay the bills somehow. You’ll make friends, like you always have, and you’ll stay in touch with family, like you always have. And beneath everything an enormous hunger will throb its vibrations throughout your entire life: the heroic quest to find the holy grail of true love. This is where you’ll take your biggest risks, win your greatest victories, suffer your most crushing defeats. This is where you will wage the great battle for the fate of your soul.

And you’ll lose.

Oh, you’ll have both victories and defeats along the way, to be sure, strategic withdrawals and uneasy stalemates, all the contours of a long and honorably fought campaign; but ultimately, when you’re bobbing around in the little black room like a balloon that slithered out of a child’s fist, you’ll realize you chose the wrong campaign. You sought a grail you could never find because it wasn’t the one you were called to seek. Why did you choose so wrongly? Who can say? Maybe you watched too much TV and listened to too many pop songs. Maybe you thought Sex and the City was real, or could be, or should be. Or maybe your midnight glimpse of the future terrified you so much that you did whatever you could to avoid it. And all your efforts led you straight to the puppet show.

All right, so your attempt to warn her went awry, but maybe you just didn’t go back far enough. She was a headstrong young woman, but as a child, she’ll be more suggestible. As a child, she spent hours sitting cross-legged on the comforting roughness of her grandmother’s oval braided rug, reading an illustrated book about stars and constellations, their names lifting off the page like exotic destinations in a travelogue of the future: Pegasus. Polaris. Coma Berenices. She still remembers the scent of her grandmother’s rose perfume enveloping her from the side as a knobby, spotted finger pointed at the dragons and centaurs and princesses and recited their names.

She said, My name came from that one? Co-ma Ber-nice?

Close, the grandmother said. Be-re-ni-ces. It’s named after Berenice, who was the queen of Egypt. You know about Egypt?

E-gyp is where the pyr-mids are.

That’s right.

She scrutinized the constellation—three stars joined by two lines in an open triangle—superimposed on a drawing of something wavy and flowy.

But that’s not a picture of a lady.

No, that’s a picture of her hair.

Why is her hair in the sky?

Well. One day, Berenice’s husband went off to fight in a battle. And so Berenice prayed to the goddess Aphrodite and said that if Aphrodite brought her husband home safe, she would cut off her long, beautiful hair and dedicate it to the goddess as a sacrifice.

Why?

That’s just the sort of thing people did back then. They believed that if they gave something up for the gods, the gods would give them something in return.

Why?

Well, I guess they thought that gods were like people. You do something nice for them, they’ll do something nice for you.

Even as a child she suspected that the true meaning of sacrifice had to be more complicated than that, but she didn’t have the words to say it; so she just kept frowning at the picture of Berenice’s hair.

Did her husband come back safe?

He did. And Berenice cut off all her hair and put it on an altar in the temple of Aphrodite. And the next day her hair—

Here the grandmother made a rapid flicking motion with all her fingers.

—vanished. No one knew where it went. And that night, the court astronomer pointed up at the sky and said, Look! It’s Queen Berenice’s hair! Aphrodite has placed it in the heavens to honor her sacrifice!

The grandmother leaned down closer so her hair tickled the girl’s cheek, and she said in a hushed voice, But you know what? Historians don’t know whether Berenice cut her hair off before her husband came home—or after.

She turned her unlined face and looked into the grandmother’s powdered, rouged nest of wrinkles.

You see, if she did it after he came back home, she was just keeping her promise. But if she did it before he came home, that would be different. That would be braver.

Why?

Because it would mean she was willing to make a sacrifice without knowing how it would turn out. I like to think that’s how she did it. I think that’s what a bringer of victory would do.

A shadow fell across them both. The girl looked up and said, There’s a lady.

The grandmother looked up too and said, Oh my goodness. She tried to scramble to her feet, but it was more of an awkward crabwise shuffle that resulted in her standing, hunched over and panting, saying Who are you? How did you get in here?

And for the rest of her life (another twenty-three years) the grandmother would tell the story of the one and only time she ever saw a ghost, or whatever it was—a vision of a long-haired woman wearing odd clothes and staring at her and her granddaughter with the strangest expression on her face: sadness? love? pity? The grandmother could never decide. Nor could she ever shake the niggling feeling that she recognized the long-haired woman from somewhere. But she didn’t get a good look at her, because a few seconds later the woman—whenever the grandmother told this story, here she made a rapid flicking motion with all her fingers—vanished.

The long-haired woman looks down at the miniature earth and remembers seeing the apparition that her grandmother talked about for the rest of her life. She remembers having the dream that scared her into changing her name. These memories prove that trying to change the past is a fool’s errand, even for those who’ve been granted access to the little black room. Perhaps we really are trapped like flies in the amber of spacetime.

But amber used to be a liquid, didn’t it? Eons ago? Amber, like everything else, has a past, a present, and a future. If you can’t change the past, and the future’s already laid out before you, all you can do is make choices in the present, before the amber fossilizes around you for good.

Let’s see now, how did this work … you lean forward over the miniature earth, lowering your face closer to it … or else you grab it in both hands like an extra-large beach ball and lift it up toward you … either way, you find yourself passing through a pale blue rind glowing at the edge of a dark blue fruit mottled with land masses and brushed with clouds, and you spare one thought, one pang of the heart, for the trillions of stars you’re leaving behind, and you make yourself a promise—one day I’ll return to the little black room and I’ll knock a hole in that ceiling and I’ll stick my head through and see what’s on the other side—but for now you’re going back to the miniature earth, you’re returning to the stage after all, although not to play the same old role, oh no, you’ve thought of a different part to play, a role of your own devising, although it’s not an entirely new one; it’ll be an updated version of the very first part you ever played: the one who says why. The one who wants to know what it all means. You’ll play that role or no role at all, and you’re not prepared to play no role at all just yet. You’re not ready to reach your final location.

You slide sideways above the glowing blue world, or perhaps it rotates beneath you, until you reach the nightlands, bottomless blackness of enormous oceans with dark islands the size of continents floating atop them, bedecked with fairy lights; and you find the one island whose outline you recognize the best, and you gravitate toward the biggest cluster of lights in the island’s southeast corner, and as you draw ever closer you observe how the shining center of the cluster is like a heart, with innumerable light vessels branching off from it; and the closer you get, the branches develop branches, and those branches develop more branches, and then you start to see landmarks—skyscrapers with pyramids on top: one pyramid is made of glowing girders, and another pyramid is made of illuminated steps, and another pyramid has smooth sides and rows of lights running along the seams where the faces meet.

And as you draw closer to your destination, you see from above exactly how the streets run, and how some of them don’t quite run the way they should—how they don’t fully connect the way they do on the maps; you see the faint scars where the tissue of spacetime has been incised and altered and sutured back up so that only certain types of beings can find their way to a certain neighborhood; and now, you think, as you prepare to make your entrance—now I am one of those beings.

I opened my eyes. The first thing I noticed was the string lights running along the tops of all four bedroom walls, bathing everything in a mellow radiance. The next thing I noticed was the music, faintly audible from the living room down the hall, something spacey and ambient. The next thing I noticed was the smell of weed. Natalia and the dealer must have had their own little party while they were waiting for me.

I sat up gingerly, wondering if I was too fucked up to make it to the bathroom unaided. I passed my fingers in front of my face: mild streamers, but not the full Technicolor treatment. I scanned the walls of the bedroom: faintly breathing, but they didn’t look as if they were going to flap themselves off the studs any time soon. I turned and looked at the landscape painting on the wall to the left of the bed. I vividly remembered flying into it, but now it was just an interesting painting that I’d had a very interesting experience with, vibrating in its frame a little bit and minding its own business.

I stood and took careful steps to the bedroom door, where I paused at the threshold and looked down the unlit hall to my left. In the living room, all I could see was the sofa, where Natalia was lying under a blanket, fast asleep. Aw; she really did stay this whole time. I didn’t think we were good enough friends for that. Maybe this was just the sort of thing people on D Street did for each other. Like a community. That word got tossed around a lot, but perhaps down here it really meant what it was supposed to mean.

I turned right and tiptoed down the creaky hardwood-floored hallway to the bathroom as quickly as I could. I managed to make it inside and shut the door behind me without Natalia waking up or the dealer poking his head in to ask how I was doing. I flicked on the light and looked at myself in the mirror, which they say you should never do under the influence of hallucinogens. I’d done it before and regretted it only slightly more than looking in the mirror on any other occasion. Tonight I threw caution to the winds and leaned in close, really examining myself, daring the government acid to show me something I couldn’t handle.

I was disappointed to see the same woman the mirror always showed me. Nose a little too big; unremarkable eyes; eyebrow game was on point, though, and it should have been, given how much she spent on it; nice kissable mouth, one of her better features; complexion was okay for a woman her age, but those wrinkles, they were coming on strong; and her hair. Her long, lush, mahogany hair, with a subtle assist to keep the gray at bay. The hair that turned heads, opened doors, started conversations, shimmered during dates, tossed with abandon during lovemaking, and got scrunched into a bun when the old love life was on the rocks. The hair that had decades of meaning encoded within it.

As I stared and stared at the woman in the mirror, the gestalt of her overall appearance began to seem a little too composed, too artificial; even her facial expressions seemed designed to achieve an intended effect. I began to suspect that she might not be who she appeared to be. She looked familiar, but what if that was just an elaborate disguise? Who was she really, underneath all that?

I decided to find out. I rummaged through the drawers below the dealer’s sink until I found some scissors, a diminutive pair that looked like they were made for trimming beards or nose hair. They would have to do. In the medicine cabinet I discovered shaving cream and a razor. I set these items on the edge of the sink and looked in the mirror again.

The woman langorously combed her fingers through the coils of hair writhing on her shoulders, inviting a stranger’s attention, a friend’s envy, a lover’s touch. The woman in the mirror reminded me that this hair was her herald: it announced her when she entered a room, making sure everyone knew she was a person of substance and allure. It made people want her; it made them want to love her; and love was the whole point—

“Enough,” I said. I took the scissors in one hand, grabbed a big hank of hair in the other, made three awkward sawing cuts near the scalp to free it, and threw the hair in the sink.

“There,” I said. “Committed.” I bared my teeth at the woman in the mirror, who now looked like she’d gotten her hair caught in a car door or a conveyor belt just above her forehead, near the hairline. A big medallion of white scalp showed through beneath short, dark roots.

I took a deep breath and set to work. It took a while to finish with those tiny scissors, and my forefinger and thumb became abominably sore by the time I was done, but eventually the dealer’s sink was awash in long tresses of hair, with smaller snips on top as I got closer to the scalp. I scooped the hair out of the sink and into its final resting place: not the sky, but a bathroom trashcan. It made a soft shushing sound as it fell in.

I looked at the woman in the mirror: hair sprouting in stubby, uneven tufts, with scalp showing through all over the place; eyes open wide, mouth parted in astonishment, and a nose that didn’t look so bad anymore, compared to the state of affairs up top. That woman did not look familiar. And I wasn’t done yet.

It took lashings of shaving cream and a veritable river of water, and before the end my right shoulder was remonstrating with me irritably, yet at last my hair was completely gone, my scalp completely smooth. I toweled my head off and was amazed by how cold it felt without hair. The slightest air current chilled me like an arctic breeze. I hung the towel up and looked in the mirror one last time. Even with her hair, the woman in the mirror had been no one’s idea of a great beauty; the most she could have claimed was a level of attractiveness that kept her in play. What could she claim now, with the curvature of her skull so clearly visible, indentations and ridges catching the eye like bangs and waves used to? All that white scalp, so much paler than the face below it? The face was the same, but shorn of its frame of hair, it looked flayed and naked. Was she to be cold and naked and ugly all the time? I hugged myself and wondered why the fuck I had done this.

The woman in the mirror raised her eyebrows—which, on a bald woman, made a much bigger impression than it used to—and said, You did it so you could quit your old role and start playing a new one. Now get out there. It’s curtain call. Time for your first scene.

I took another deep breath, flicked off the light, and used normal footsteps to saunter down the hallway and into the living room, like I belonged there. Natalia was still asleep on the sofa. My creaking steps coming down the hall hadn’t disturbed her one bit amid the swirling oceanic drones flowing out of the dealer’s stereo. The dealer was sitting in a comfy-looking chair near the far end of the sofa, by Natalia’s head, with reading glasses on and a tablet in his lap that illuminated his seamed face from below.

He looked up at me, and his eyes widened; and then he took off his glasses and shot to his feet. His mouth opened and closed silently. Had he forgotten my name again? Couldn’t say I blamed him this time. I was probably going to have to get used to reactions like this: people suddenly not recognizing me, not knowing who I was, as if another woman had taken my place. That was all right. I’d reintroduce myself the next time I saw him—and wouldn’t he just about shit his britches when he saw me walking down D Street all alone? I’ll say, You said it affected everyone differently, and then I’ll gesture grandly at myself like a stage magician revealing a woman stepping out of an empty box: Presto change-o! And there would be a next time, because I had some questions to ask this guy, about D Street and blindfolds and the Cold War and the CIA.

Right now, though, all I wanted was to go home and start working on my article about this trip, if I could. I hadn’t the slightest notion of how to approach it, other than the title, which I saw in crisp black letters on a white laptop screen, almost like I’d seen it before and recalled it from memory. The title wasn’t very evocative, but it did have the virtue of clarity. A clear title would give me a definite place to start in my attempt to discover—or create, if need be—some kind of meaning for the whole experience. I didn’t know if I’d be able to pull that off, or how much sense the resulting story would make, yet I had to at least try.

The reader would have to do their part too, of course. Separating fact from fiction, reality from fantasy, divining a meaning from the patterns they saw—that was their job. Most people probably wouldn’t even believe any of this was real. I didn’t care about that. All I cared about was planting a seed of truth that might one day blossom into an awareness that the world is not necessarily the world, and you are not necessarily you.