Bucket

by Christopher Nicastro

For years Anthony had been subject to agonizing bouts of derealization, brought on by nothing but the recognition of existence, the awareness of having a body. His hands looked too real, his fingers too long. His perspective was always vignetted, as if inside of a pinhole camera. The only things that are real, his therapist once told him in a wasted effort to conquer these episodes, are our observable perceptions. Anthony proposed scenarios where this line of reframing thoughts might not work. Always the caveat. Always the Well But Uh.

‘What if I’ve accidentally taken some kind of hallucinogen?’

‘Accidentally?’

‘Yeah, accidentally. Say some line cook at a restaurant plans to drop acid after his shift. Careless, he’s got a tab in his apron pocket. He’s cooking my ravioli. He reaches for a pen to write down some ingredients he needs for a new recipe, but when he pulls the pen from his apron pocket he accidentally pops the tab out along with it which falls into my ravioli. I eat said ravioli. Forty-five minutes later my friends at dinner aren’t my friends anymore but the ghosts of four different religious prophets who warn me of the coming apocalypse. What if one of them tells me to kill him, and it’s the only way to survive armageddon, right? So I stab my buddy with the fork, he bleeds out in the ambulance, and when I come down I’m short a best friend. Was the religious mania real?’

‘Are you frequently paranoid?’ His therapist asked.

‘I’m just asking, is it real? If I observed him as a prophet, and if reality is what I can observe, is it real?’

‘This implies you’d perceive the comedown.’

‘How can I trust the comedown?’

‘You observed it.’ ‘

Are my dreams real?’

‘You observed waking up from them, so no.’

‘You’re good, doc, you know that?’

Anthony didn’t think he was paranoid. Paranoid was the sense that someone was out to get you. The inalienable notion that you’re being chased. Watched. Anthony’s phobia of accidental drug ingestion instead stemmed from an innate mistrust of others. Not that they were after him, and not that they wished for his downfall, but that they were idiots, that someone would be stupid enough to keep an acid tab in their kitchen apron, or a sheet of the stuff inside the dust jacket of a used book. He tried to remind himself there was no observable reason to believe this was a possibility. It wasn’t as if he’d ever found a real-life tab in his dinner or an acid sheet bookmark in the library. He just figured it was a potential outcome.

His therapist often asked if there was any pathology behind these fears. Fears, as he always told Anthony, and our responses to fears don’t exist in vacuums. They help us. They try to offer a solution to the issues we’ve faced. These responses to our fears served us once, but they might not continue serving us if we use them in situations that don’t call for them. Anthony knew why he was afraid, of course. It was simple. He had a bad trip in high school but not off a tab of acid or shrooms. That would be too easy. Too obvious a link to these unreasonable trains of thought. No, Anthony had once fallen victim to everyone’s favorite gas station brain-cooker of the mid-aughts: Salvia divinorum.

Anthony melted his head on a single hit of the stuff near the end of his senior year and, in retrospect, found he was never the same since. Salvia, for anyone who wasn’t a high schooler between 2005 and 2012, is a plant in the sage family that grows natively in the Sierra Mazateca region of Oaxaca, Mexico, and whose psychoactive properties are swift and intense. The Mazatec people consider the plant and its psychedelic qualities to have healing properties. For thousands of years, shamans have utilized the plant as a spiritual medicine. In its native land, the plant is viewed with the utmost respect. And like everything else the world has produced, America got its hands on it and cranked it up to the max.

The Mazatecs consume salvia orally, either by chewing the leaf, or grinding the plant down with a mortar and pestle, and drinking it as a tea. These methods of ingestion have been described as something like a full-body acid trip, altering consciousness, and communing with the spiritual world over the course of many hours before a slow, peaceful comedown. Smoking the substance, however, Anthony was told by the stoners on the back of the bus, takes one to another dimension. Beyond space. Beyond time. In those days it was somewhat difficult to score weed if you were a huge dork, as Anthony was. You had to know somebody who sold it who was always either a jock, or on the other end of the spectrum, a wasteoid. Anthony and his friends swam in a social limbo in regards to weed. Not cool enough to get it off the former, too socially adjusted to buy it off the latter. Salvia, meanwhile, was five bucks at the gas station. He bought a hit of the stuff on a whim in between packs of chewing gum and a bottle of Gatorade during his senior year.

Six months prior to that purchase, Anthony had gone to Fano on an Italian exchange and learned within the first few hours overseas that his exchange student, Rudi, was little more than a strung-out drug fiend. They spent the first night in Italy trading snorts of coke and ecstasy in the bathroom of a club called Miu Disco, before stumbling out at sunrise, both in a trance. Rudi insisted his drug habits were very American, very chic, but the people whom Anthony could place as actually partaking in that stuff back home were all either in rehab or a trailer park. When Rudi came stateside, Anthony felt he couldn’t let the kid down. He walked out of the gas station, hit of salvia in his jeans pocket, and sat down in Alyssa DiScalzano’s crumbling 1999 Honda Civic, waving it aloft for Rudi, who sat in the backseat with one of his fellow exchange students. Rudi asked what it was in broken English and, in broken Italian, Anthony did his best to explain.

‘Acid?’ Rudi asked, incredulous as he was reluctant to be out of sorts for the next ten or so hours.

‘No,’ Anthony told him, ‘This stuff lasts only a few minutes. Cinque minuti, Rudi. Niente.’ He offered it up for free to anyone who wanted it. They could park behind a strip mall somewhere, take the hit, and be back from a trip in time for dinner. Alyssa insisted she had done salvia before, that it was indeed fun, and that she was terribly excited to do it again right now. She insisted she wasn’t afraid to smoke it in the slightest, but that Anthony should take the first hit, y’know, since it was his first time. He asked her if it lived up to what people say about it, or if it’s anything like those YouTube videos of people absolutely losing their minds, stumbling through and shattering windows, their real selves unaware, lost elsewhere in the astral plane. She stuttered through her reply, ‘Uh, yes, I think so.’ She said it was like being stoned, and threw the phrase ‘trip balls’ somewhere into the mix. Anthony began to doubt she’d ever done salvia, or acid, or weed or any of the drugs she claimed a weakness for. She had a touch of phoniness about her. Bob Marley t-shirt, Sublime mix CDs always playing on rotation in her car, frequent discussions about trying to dreadlock her hair. No matter to him. He spent the money. He wanted to try it. He wasn’t afraid. He’d take the hit.

So there he sat, in the front seat of Alyssa DiScalzano’s piece of shit 1999 Honda Civic, parked behind Stephen’s Auto Mall on Route 6 next to the Home Depot, ripping a bowl of the stuff. Rudi asked how he felt. He wasn’t sure. ‘Funny,’ he said. Something in the rearview mirror caught his eye. Something, he wasn’t sure what, if anything. Most likely, this phantom sighting was the rush of chemicals flooding his brain, preparing him to sail away to new lands. Anthony giggled in a way nearly unfamiliar to him. A small laugh at first, then a little more, then all-out tears-streaming laughter. Everyone asked what was so funny. He pointed at the mirror, cackling beyond speech, trying to explain himself. He couldn’t. How could he possibly explain a voyage across time? All at once, it came for him, whisking him elsewhere. He collapsed in the seat, feeling like he was falling backward into a portal, a black hole, exiting his body. Everything went black, then, a bright light, like first sight from the birth canal, enveloped his field of vision.

He’d entered a new plane. A new timeline. A new world. A new life. A new body. He’d left the trappings of flesh to that prior dimension, taking on what appeared to be the form of beechwood, sliced, buckled together with iron rings, and filled with water. Anthony wasn’t human, if he could even recall ever having been one. No. He was a bucket of water in Ming Dynasty China, sitting undisturbed in a patch of grass on a hill’s crest beside the Great Wall. He spent a few days there. He liked it. Was soothed by his existence as the bucket, having no knowledge of his own past life in the front seat of Alyssa DiScalzano’s piece of shit Civic. As far as he could tell, he’d always been this bucket of water in Ming Dynasty China. He’d never been anything else, never was bothered with homework or school exchanges, never paid rent on an apartment he hated, never frittered away daily hours writing copy for fast food chains as he would someday in the future. He lived the humble life of the Bucket, basking in the rays of the morning sun and pleasant scents from nearby sumac bushes and crisp wild lettuce heads. He felt he had a purpose in this existence. Peasants, soldiers, footmen, they all took pleasure in hoisting him up and splashing some of his contents onto their faces. The Bucket felt great joy in seeing these people refreshed, in pleasing them. One day, however, after a few months had passed, a soldier decided the Bucket had been muddied by the hands of one too many peasants. A fresh bucket was needed. The soldier grabbed the vessel by the handle and tossed the water onto the Great Wall, at which point Anthony realized his body was not that of the bucket at all, but of the water itself. He splashed onto the limestone wall, his aqueous body dripping into and between the grit, rammed earth, and cracks of shale. Yet no matter how heavy the sun’s ray’s attacked the limestone wall, the Water didn’t evaporate. He was stuck.

Days turned to weeks, turned to months, turned to years, turned to centuries, to a millennium. Dynasties fell. Rose. Fell again. Like steamrollers blitzing cheap suburban developments, generations built legacies and they collapsed in the same instant. Time felt infinite for the Water. Nuclear holocaust. Nuclear winter. Tribes building in the desert. The sumac bushes and lettuce, dead, long gone with the passing of organized civilization and volcanic ages and ice ages. A new species of desert raiders built their own dynasties and still the wall remained. Still, the Water remained. The cycle seemed as if it would never end. The Water wanted out.

‘Death, please, allow me the only release I can know,’ it shouted, only able to muster the whistle of water vapors. After hundreds of thousands of years lived in real time, the sun mercifully burned into a supernova. The earth rumbled violently, as solar flares enveloped its entirety like a marble tossed into a campfire. The water became mist, dancing off of the wall, steaming into the void, and his consciousness faded, giving way to an old, familiar world.

He was back (if he had ever really been gone in the first place, that is). Anthony rubbed his eyes, his contacts dry, stuck to his corneas. Stale tears were still streaming down his cheeks. He looked at the clock on the dashboard. It had been six minutes since he took the hit.

After watching Anthony writhe in the passenger seat for a few minutes, tongue out, thrashing, muttering that he had to get out, everyone else in the car found themselves too chickenshit to take a hit. Alyssa, now driving around town in a panic, told Anthony she couldn’t bring him and his exchange student home in this condition. In the drive-thru of a McDonald’s a few towns over, ordering him a McChicken and a Sprite, hoping it would cool him off, she asked over and over what happened. All he could muster was ‘Bucket.’ Repeatedly. Bucket, Bucket, Bucket. Water. He stared at his hands. His fingers seemed too long, their skin more wrinkled than he recalled. The lines which crossed his palms appeared more intricate than he’d ever remembered them being. It didn’t feel correct, as though he hadn’t returned from the trip at all, but had been transplanted to a similar dimension. One where he was still in the shitty 1999 Civic, still trying to get home in time for dinner, still hearing Rudi ask if everything was okay—but the minutiae of all things had been twisted.

The frame rate of the universe had been ramped up, things moved as in a television with its settings on motion-smoothing. A soap opera. A screen. A glass pane between Anthony and what he could only perceive as his probable reality. It was the first time this had ever happened. Until this point, all had gone unquestioned. The solipsism problem had never presented itself, digging into the mind, begging the question: Are you but a dream? For seventeen years, he had felt the bliss known to wild animals who eat, shit, sleep, and die without ever passing a glance at the transient nature of self, at consciousness, about those petty ideas that have weighed man down for thousands of years. He had crossed a threshold from which he could never return. No longer beyond thought. No longer existing on instinct. There were higher planes. Unseen lands. No future. No past. Only an infinite stream of present. His hands never looked right again.

Some years later he looked up what Alyssa DiScalzano was doing with her life. According to her LinkedIn, she was a hostess at a Buffalo Wild Wings in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Before snapping his laptop shut, he paused, stuck on a thought, The hell do you need a LinkedIn for that?

BIO: Christopher Nicastro is a writer and filmmaker in Brooklyn, NY.