As I said before, school was never my strong suit. It was just not my thing. There were a few teachers I liked—the hardheaded Mr. Angelo in History and the quirky Mrs. Bell in English, in particular. They opened up worlds that I never imagined, and for a couple semesters, I was invested. Enchanted even.

  But in general, sitting down and listening to jargon got a hard pass from me. Something in my brain just sort of... turns off. I guess, in the end, I’m more like my mom—a hands-on type of person. The kind who’s naturally great at sports. That kind of thing.

  No sooner had Dr. Bailie launched into a sort of rehearsed lecture on the di-whatever drug she was talking about, I began to struggle. It wasn’t for lack of interest. I’d taken a few substances before, and I enjoyed a good party, myself. But I’d never thought about recreational drugs as being anything more than just a nice high, a quick trip.

  Apparently not.

  This stuff had been around for a long time, and our body naturally created it or something—blah, blah, blah, but scientists had begun to experiment, and secret research unveiled the next frontier of exploration. Yada yada.

  I stared at Dr. Bailie and nodded where I thought I ought to nod, but in reality, I had very little understanding of the details. The gist was apparent to me though: I was going to be OK. It wouldn’t have a lasting effect. I'd experience whatever and would come back with all of my brains intact. Great.

  “You are... a psychonaut, Dr. Arbelaez,” Dr. Bailie breathed.

  This was the closest thing to a pulse that I got from the scientist. Her blue eyes glittered with excitement. I could tell that she was invested in the project than I had initially guessed.

  “Why haven’t you gone yourself?” I blurted out.

  Dr. Bailie’s shoulders slumped a little as she admitted, “I don’t take well to it, unfortunately. A poor combination of aphantasia and personality, I think.”

  Aphantasia. I had no clue about what that was, but I was a little scared to ask. I didn’t want another lecture. Instead, I shot her a sympathetic look and nodded.

  “So, I, uh, take this and then...”

  “You visit The Other Side, experience what you can, and report back.”

  “Sounds simple.”

  “In some ways, it is,” she said. “In other ways, it isn't. When you return, you may struggle to maintain memories of your experience, so we will have a table prepped with a recorder, pen, paper... whatever you need to jot whatever you can recall down.”

  Finishing up further instructions and suggestions, Dr. Bailie laid me back onto the bed, encouraged me to get comfortable, drew a blanket up over me, and then inserted the IV. Out of another black medical case, she raised a narrow metal and plastic object that looked like a half-circle.

  A metal and plastic circle... metal and plastic... It belonged in the room, intrinsically. One with the doctor and the shadows and the thick plastic hanging curtains. White and grey and blue, the room was a study in minimalism, but my eyes, for some reason, could see all of the tiniest details in sharp relief. The jagged edge of one curtain, the glint of metal along the insides of the plastic band, the tension in her fingers as she raised the half-circle and brought it over to me.

  Not just tiny details, I was starting to see the true shape of reality. The barest glimpse of a face warping in the glass of a machine nearby. The rhythm of the lights dancing across its interface. The weave of the curtains, which danced with their own geometry. All connected.

  I was connected.

  The slight pinch on my thumb didn’t bother me at all. I could stare down at the heart monitor and almost visualize its inner workings. For a moment, Dr. Bailie didn’t move. She simply stood by my side, watching me as I brushed my fingertips against the blanket.

  What had once been a blanket was now more than a blanket. It was its own being, with its own life. The patterns on it shifted into ever more intricate patterns. In fact, the whole world was now converging into various shapes. Dr. Bailie was a square and a diamond and a triangle and some other geometry shape I couldn’t even start to name.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said in awe.

  “It is,” she agreed softly. “Let go, Max.”

  With those three words, the last wave overwhelmed me. The last thing I saw was her smile as her hands rose with the half-circle in my hand. Then, I shot forward—as though I had been blasted by a cannon—and I was passing through a tunnel.

  To call it a tunnel would be underselling it, to be honest. It was something else. Blue, purple, green, yellow, red, orange, and every color in between. Pulsing. Neon. Brilliant. And also shadowed and layered. It turned about me with various jutting constructs or pieces of... material? What was it? I had no clue.

  Either way, the long narrow tunnel didn’t last long. While I was in it, though, I felt as though the world was still there, behind me somewhere. I was truly going to another place.

  What did she call it? I wondered. A psychonaut? Is that like an astronaut? Is that the idea? One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind?

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  Mankind. My thoughts wandered as I contemplated humans, planet Earth, and my life. I’d never really thought about the Big Picture before. Life was, I had thought, simply a matter of progressively difficult problems to overcome, which you would hopefully level up for. Thanks to mom’s condition, I had to confront reality now.

  Allowing my thoughts to wander, I drifted through the tunnel. Somehow, I felt like this might be the turn-around I was looking for. Perhaps I would gain more than just the $500. Maybe I’d be able to bring back something to help Mom, to help me get through her illness.

  Before I knew it, the final spiral of the tunnel unfolded before me. I was in The Other Side.

  Comprehending what I was seeing for the first time was almost impossible. My eyes darted from one thing to another, almost bug-eyed. There was a world before me. I had landed on a pier, which floated on a miasmic ocean. At the far end of its narrow length, a coastline stretched out.

  A whole new world. I stepped forward uncertainly. The brown ‘wood’ beneath my feet was not wood. It was more than wood. I tested it gingerly. Beyond moving up and down thanks to the gentle waves of the ‘ocean’ behind me, it remained solid.

  The colors of the planks were brown, lined with black and white. There was an odd pulsating glint, a flare, an inner brilliance. I stared at the planks like I’d never stared at a simple object before.

  “Crazy, isn’t it?” A guy muttered just ahead of me as he placed a hand on one of the pier’s posts.

  “Oh.”

  I stared at the guy before me. He looked close to my age, but unlike me, his hair was jet black, and his eyes were a lighter browner, almost gold like a hawk. A thin, narrow nose jutted out over lips set in a thin, firm line. This was someone who knew what they wanted, and, judging by the glint in those hawkish eyes, they knew how to get it.

  A guy. Someone else was here. In fact, as I managed to tear my gaze away from the towering city overlooking the pier, I began to realize that the pier was dotted with a handful of people. There were other ghost shapes that formed. Some materialized into other people; others disappeared.

  “I guess not everyone who tries gets in,” noted the other guy. “Narrow is the gate, I guess.”

  “...Yeah, I guess,” I said, not really getting it but trying to be friendly.

  Looking down at my broad hands, the tips of my brown work boots, the edge of my blue jeans, and then up at the graphic t-shirt I was sporting, I realized that I had fully materialized.

  “I look pretty much normal.”

  “So do I,” said the other guy, gazing down at his dark blue jeans and cream-colored sweater. “Crazy. I couldn’t believe it, but now I guess I’ve seen everything.”

  “Who knew... this existed...”

  I moved forward to stand shoulder to shoulder with him. He was a couple inches taller than me and a bit more narrow in build, less muscular, but I sensed a strength within him. It was odd—how connected I felt with the world and the people around me. If I pushed, I felt as though I could reach out to him in a more... telepathic way. If I wanted to. Which I didn’t. Making a mind connection with a guy seemed... weird.

  “Oh, hey,” the guy turned to quirk a half-smile at me, “name’s Siraj, by the way. What brings you here?”

  “Name’s Max,” I returned and then half-chuckled in embarrassment. “And the money brought me here, to be honest. $500 bucks... Kinda pathetic, huh.”

  Siraj shrugged. “Different people have different paths to walk.’

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Me?”

  “Why did you come?”

  Siraj hesitated and glanced back at the city before us. It lay flat along the coastline, but I could see some tall buildings, and there were strange things flying around it. I could also see a warp and weft in the world. It was as though it were simply a breath of air, ready to shift at any time, and yet it remained here. Substantial, yet ephemeral. Glorious in color, and yet oddly highlighted with shadow.

  “Professional curiosity,” he finally replied.

  Alright then. He didn’t want to talk about it. Fair enough. As he said, we were different people with different paths to walk. And yet...

  “I’m curious now,” I joked and nudged him. “Let’s go check it out together.”

  “Together?” Siraj raised a thin eyebrow.

  “Best go with someone. Who knows what’s in that city?”

  “Think I’m scared?”

  “Naw. But I’m a bit nervous.”

  “Nervous? About a hallucination?” asked Siraj with a chuckle.

  I shrugged and ruffled my hair sheepishly.

  “When you say it that way... but isn’t that guy—thing—creature over there giving you the heebie-jeebies?”

  Siraj looked as I pointed at a tall, inky black humanoid with large bulbous eyes and a skull that arched back like a rounded scythe. There was no hair and no mouth. Simply eyes and what looked like two slits where a nose would be. Long thin arms rose and fell. Its head bobbed up and down.

  It was... waving. I shivered. Waving and nodding. Like a conductor would as passengers approach a train, or as a teacher might when corralling their students.

  “Oh. Well... that... Alien... thing...” Siraj trailed off and then added after a moment: “Yeah. Uh. Let’s stick together for now.”

  And that was how our divergent paths converged.