O Nobly Born, Let Not Thy Mind Be Distracted

This story was included in the Askance publication Positional Vertigo a couple of years ago.  It it an imagining of the end of life experience of Aldous Huxley, and possible happenings beyond as a result of his request for intravenous LSD

 
An aging body lies in a wrinkled bed. A slow blink and the ghost of a sigh. A tree sways outside the window, parts with a leaf. A scrawled note in a shaky hand. Are you sure Aldous? Another slow blink. The sheet is pulled back revealing a wrinkled arm, the arm that wrote the books that would outlive him. The arm that fed him throughout his life could now barely move.
The plan had been in his mind for a while. A high dose of lysergic acid was to be administered on his deathbed to secure his transition into a higher state of consciousness and aid his passage into the next life. The experiences he had on mescaline had already shown Aldous transcendent beauty in this life and he was eager to open that door one last time, to breathe in the ineffable truth of the Logos as he breathed out his last lungful of oxygen. To meet finally the sea of mind that the separation from which had pained and taunted him. At last an end to the decay and hurt of the physical body. At last an end to this dimness, the limits of the corporeal. At last the freedom of oneness.
Laura firmly holds the needle and it slips into her father’s arm muscle. The narcotic liquid flows in, a small air bubble with it. No matter. He is definitely dying. Any longer and it might be too late. The doctor was fussing across the room but this was the right thing. This is what he wanted. He knows what he’s doing. It will help him. Crossed fingers, gritted teeth. The drug can take several hours to kick in fully and Aldous had asked that he would be in the peak of his trip as his brain shut down. He stressed that this was important, and that he must not be disturbed when making his final journey. It was time. Words rose softly in his mind, “O nobly born, let not my mind be distracted.” He wasn’t sure if that was quite right. Laura’s voice again. Can you hear me? He squeezed her hand, warm but unfamiliar. He couldn’t even remember what the line was from. A furrowing of the brow. Are you feeling any effects? A gentle shake of the head. Other questions had been asked. He nodded without comprehending them. The face of his daughter seemed alien, her worrying irritated him. The incessant concern. Could a chap not die in peace?
The doctor and the rest of the household were watching the television. Chattering voices and flickering. He drifts away from them towards an inner sanctuary. The glimmer of a golden light fills the room, the crocuses on the windowsill hum and glow. Laura’s whispers. Light and free. Aldous looked back at the flowers. Towards the light. They seem to sing a soft fanfare of muted trumpets. Forwards and up. A single moth flaps against the window and his eyes meet the beating wings. It passes through the glass and the faces around him look sunken and glow green and pallid in the dawn light. All night he could not face them.
The bed is in the middle of the room. A Persian rug sits under it and above a lightbulb swings dimly. Into complete love. The space around him expands. Edges sharpen. A whisper of a thought coalesces into a cloud of associations and images and fades again. His eye is caught by the lightbulb. The circles around it hum red to violet. Seven circles surround a ruined bridge in a gasping hole in the ceiling. The moth emerges from the circle and echoes ripple from slowly beating wings that propel it in lilting circles towards the bookshelf. It settles on the spine of a leather bound volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, A-E. Upon those letters a string of muffled facts assert themselves. The origins of algebra. Ancient Greek philosophy. The atrial wall of the heart. Ballistics. Belgian folklore. Chemistry. Dialectics. Evolution.
Something triggered a memory of an absence. The absence had a name. It’s name, her name, was Maria. Oh Maria I have missed you. Maria shall I see you? Aldous’ life starts to pass in scratchy vignettes of seaside strolls and forest fumbles, the sound of the cities he lived in and their smells. Communions with typewriters. The dimming light of blindness and the loneliness he felt drifts through his waning consciousness.
That moth, in the room. Silk faced with beating wings. A curl of smoke gasps across. The darkness presses.
Fragile glass eye blind window pane
hurt death
why help my eyes blood grip the way out of here
fire and snakes
in circles
grief in the air choke the lapsing of trust in him
who
what terror
where
nowhere
hide whoever take want you drag me leave out away mine her me.

Lightening. A tree divided. The thunder rumbles six seconds later. He counts the ticks from the grandfather clock. Large reddish mahogany, an heirloom. An empty chair. Waves of nausea. With it a memory. Drunk and lost a man asks him for the time. He looks at his watch and is struck on the head. The hair grew back grey. He can see the hammer coming down. A flash of jury duty. He remembers the accused stepping down from the stand to swirling chatter and sound. Her legs tanned and long. He saw legs like that once. Traced them with his hand. He remembers his fingers grazing her mound, touching her lips and the moist beads of arousal. Slipping his fingers inside that young woman. He could climb inside those lips. Kissing them apart with his probing tongue. Hollow. A dark tunnel. He stepped through the curtains. Silence and his shadow ahead of him. He follows it in, pacing further. Birds flutter around his head, whispering warnings, secrets. He walks deeper, a sloping path red walled and endless curving round and down in a spiral. Time flies and settles around his feet. He looks down and baby rats crack under his feet. A gag doubles him over and a river shows his face uplit and slathering his bulging eyes goggle in the black pool and a plastic face cackles back at him ageless and hungry. Gaping mouthed he drinks the water and the ripples knock against a boat captained by a hooded man. A long finger beckons him. He steps in. The boat glides into the dark and bones litter the riverbank. He feels for his body to try and control it. His feet walk out of his accord. His knees knock against each other. The ground is uneven. There is nothing here. This is in his mind. Perhaps this is the first trial. I’m not stuck anywhere. I imagined this place. I can leave. Focus, this is transient, a shadow, listen to the breath. In, out.
He coughs. There is something in his throat. Again, a cough but it won’t move. It is lodged and is making him gag, doubled over retching still staggering towards the necropolis that juts into the hollow depths, battered feet skidding on brittle femurs and opalescent coal. The taste of blood. The first smell he notices is rotten sex unwashed and unclean. His teeth feel stained. A large retch now, almost a scream, heaving ripples gurgle from the diaphragm up and an eyeball slops on the ground and bursts still suspended on the knotted nerves that he draws from his throat and somehow seem attached inside his head and with each tug a pulling higher up on his face inside the eye socket the flaccid eyeball on the floor blue like his father’s, like his. He sees himself at once from two points and the ground cracks and splits, tilting and sending him feeble into the abyss where dry soil scatters with meat fibres and severed hands grasp his naked body. Further now where pulleys tear screaming souls apart and insects feed on piles of foreskins and roughly torn womb puddles sweat boils and sickness yellowing goatmeat crawling with green maggots hangs dripping from a central spiked sphere that swings out of reach of the dismembered bodies that stretch and groan on sheets of cracked skin and matted hair.
Further and the light dims. All is weight and void. The air is like syrup. The ground is like tar. Walls oppress yet are absent. An endless formless desert populated by vacant souls, who wander hungry among the graves of stars, carrying the weight of nothing for all eternity. This is the very centre of hell. All gravity crushing towards the middle. A battered moth flies past and up and he tries to catch it in his hand but it floats away. In his palm is a crooked line ending in a black wart that leaks and speaks to him. He replies but all that emerges is crumbling teeth. Aldous tries to think back, to take himself away from this path. Oblivion grabs him, a vine of entrails binds his feet and pulls him down. Do not struggle. Relax. The vine eases. An intense pressure inside his skull now, the sound of splintering bone. A paroxysm of fear rises up like green bile coating his teeth and spitting out of his nose. Water. He is thirsty. The fear is flames on the surface. He puts his face to it. In the flames is a tunnel. A clear light emerges among the dancing figures that chant in the fire. He kneels and rolls in. Underwater now a current drags him but he does not struggle. Relaxing his body sucks him under, deeper. Blue black and endless space. He breathes slowly and the water enters his lungs. Slowly out and it leaves in a brace of bubbles. The water is so cool. A whirlpool of voices shimmers on an emerging surface, ripples distort faces whose mouths cry and contort. The circles sit on the surface skin. His body floats but it is not his body. It is a picture. Thought unhooks itself and the body sinks and dissolves spiralling uselessly below. He feels lighter. In the distance a familiar bridge. The day dawns blue through the coloured film above and he rises from his own lifeless abdomen that is surrounded by a sphere of light and on all sides piercing stars that glitter. The bridge is renewed and transfigured as the wind draws him to it. Above his body now a rainbow and a trail towards the centre of his being that is at once all being and nowhere but in this room familiar faces huddle around a bed, a Persian rug intricately woven with the colours of a sunset turning into night and Arabic characters that swirl around the edge. A single thread from the side waves as a gust of air rushes in the window and he is above the house and floating up and rolling in as fields fan out like a patchwork being folded a cloud of birds soar and shimmer and clouds roll the whole planet passing by the sun shrinking and darkening to a point in a grain of sand, facets glowing in his own palm, diamonds of endless complexity, the ethereal body of Aldous Huxley walking without effort through rippled lines and forms that fuse and grow into crystalline cities populated by throngs of figures who glide open armed and Aldous among them rises weightless along a glass staircase and in the night of all a grand silence that contains him and is unbounded and a prayer whispers from and outside himself and echoes to the passing stars and everything between like arms held out he joins a sea of souls that sing with an angel choir of its own imagining and the curtains close and the past falls away into the shadows as another dawn touches a face somewhere that smiles with her hands clasped around a precious bump that will call her mother.