I have never considered myself particularly scared of death. I used to contemplate dying, just like anything that is alive, but the thought of my conscious life ending has never been at the forefront of my mind. Death was something that met other people, for most of my life there were more important things to consider; work, love, pleasure. But then I peeked behind the curtain of the abyss and I will never be the same.
As I write this I lie in a hospital bed. The tips of my fingers are bloody from digging into my palms, my jaw has been clenched so tight I can feel my individual teeth; I will never be the same again. What I have felt, what I have heard; there are no words in the lexicon of language to describe it. Yet I will try. I hope that by sharing my story I can stop you from making the same mistakes I have. I know that my effort, however, is hopeless because death will meet us all, regardless of how much we try to slow its arrival. We will all hear the music. We will all be invited to the Cosmic Dunk.
Everyone’s early twenties are a battle with some sort of self-destruction. There’s just something about entering the world of adulthood that makes us want to wreck a part of ourselves. Some smash into toxic relationships that suck away at their very core of self, others work themselves into heart palpitations by the time they can rent a car, there’s entire industries built off of the time wasted by people squandering away their youth in lieu of looking at a screen. My vice for the millennial self-destruction derby was considerably more harmful. My vice was heroin.
Addiction sneaks up at you. It begins as a curiosity, then a hobby, then a part time-gig, then a full time job and next thing you know you’re looking at a life-long career of being a junky. By 27 I had taken every thread of opportunity that I had in life and used it to shoot up. My family was gone, my friends were gone, my steadily dwindling housing arrangements hit rock bottom at the train station. I was a homeless youth living purely for horse, waiting until I would nod off in the wrong place and end up in lock up or dead.
Luckily for me, and countless others like me, there are people in this world who actively want to help, who don’t want to see an entire part of society fester and rot in public view. The people from the Mesiarik University Addictology Department would regularly send bright-eyed students out to the train station to persuade addicts like me to go get treatment at their clinic. It took weeks of convincing but after seeing enough of those hopeful freshmen I finally went. It made all the difference.
The Mesiarik University Clinic helped me get clean and regain control of my life. I still craved it, but the life that the clinic helped me build was worth the self-denial. I was sober, there were regular meetings that I looked forward to and I managed to find a decent apartment in the Soviet era housing projects at the edge of town.
I was working behind the counter at a laser tag center. It was not the most intellectually stimulating jobs, but I wasn’t looking for anything cerebral. I simply wanted to pay rent. Spending time around children helped with my sobriety, it felt absurd to be thinking about horse with so many innocent souls running around. In the laser filled lobby I found another support mechanism.
It took endless work and unbearable effort but I had finally caught up with the rest of the world. I self-medicated myself out of society but with enough willpower I clawed my way back. I was starting to think about the future. Then the world shook at its axis.
It all happened so quickly. One day there was a news story about people getting really sick in Wuhan and the next thing I knew the society that I had slaved away to become a part of started to shut down. The laser tag place was the first to go, then the meetings went and finally my sobriety drifted away as well. At first I told myself I was going over to the train station to just think back on old times, then I told myself I was just curious about whether prices had changed, then I told myself I was just getting a baggie in case society breaks down. In my heart of hearts though, I knew. I knew I was going to shoot up that night.
The walls in the housing project that I live in are paper-thin. You can hear grumpy mornings turn into heated afternoons, construction from three floors away, every musician here has an unwilling audience. When I came home with the horse there was a ruckus. A dozen musicians spread throughout the complex seemed to all have taken to their instruments to deal with the looming crisis. A couple trumpets, a lot of guitars, a pair or two of drums, a smattering of pianos; all of them played with utter horror. Listening to my neighbor practice on their instrument was a nice way to pass the time in the past, but these people weren’t practicing, these people were making noise to deafen their internal monologue.
We’re getting locked down you could hear the music sing, Economic collapse, Global catastrophe, Pandemic Pandemic Pandemic. I tried to ignore my own worries, but in that moment being sober seemed ridiculous. Sober people were going crazy in their apartments. There was something in my jacket pocket that could make me sane. Amid the chaos I shot up.
The relief was instant. Within seconds my old love was floating through my veins. It felt like lying down in a warm bath, slowly sinking lower and lower into bliss. The music started to wean itself from being complete noise into being controlled chaos. I laid down on the floor and listened, letting the fuzzy feeling of the horse spread through my being.
Something else started to spread too. It started off as a sort of unplaceable itch but the feeling soon advanced all throughout my body. Something was wrong. My blood felt like it was filled with rust. I crawled off the floor and tried to make my way towards the front door. There was no time to call an ambulance. I needed immediate help. I needed someone to know I had overdosed.
I managed to crawl out of my apartment, but that’s as far as I got. By the time I got past my greeting mat my arms gave out. My head cracked against the floor and then all the lights went out. For a split second I could still hear the rumble of the instruments but even that went away.
There were two truths that I felt with certainty. The first was the dizziness. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, I had no idea whether I was lying down or standing or floating, but I knew I was dizzy. It was the same feeling you get when you spin around on a computer chair for too long, that strange pull of inertia that makes your body want to keep on spinning. But this leftover force had no direction; it felt as if my being was to split up into a thousand pieces, each demanding to go a different way.
The second truth that I knew for certain was that I was dead. It was a knowledge that came from my absent gut, a hunch, a something is wrong here feeling but skewed towards something more certain. I was dead. That bewildering darkness was the afterlife.
My mind was diminished. I couldn’t get past the thought of ‘This is what death feels like.’ A thick mental fog covered anything else, the only two things I knew was that I was dizzy and dead. Then I heard the music.
I was not alone. As the tune grew louder I realized that there was a crowd around me. I could not see them, smell them or feel their physical presence in any way but I could hear the high-pitched rumble of a thousand souls wailing.
A female voice sang out of the ether, there was limitless passion behind her vocal chords. She demanded we all get up and get ready for the Cosmic Dunk. The crowd grew restless, their screams grew louder.
She delivered her message, it echoed through the shapeless darkness and then the music properly started. An infectious base line slithered into existence; its energy surged through the abyss as it endlessly droned. I started to forget what life was like without that series of notes endlessly replaying. Just as the weak thought of the eternal nature of the baseline started to wrap around my soul a man’s voice emerged.
His voice was brimming with the same passion as the female singer, but his words lacked sense. He raved at the audience, demanding that they move, demanding that they take part in this cryptic Cosmic Dunk. His words gave no indication as to what this mysterious event was, but the drums which emerged to back his message beat with an angry mechanical vigor. Whatever the Cosmic Dunk was it was the power behind it was unstoppable.
As soon as he finished his sermon he asked the crowd whether they were ready for the Cosmic Dunk. They roared with senseless energy. He then demanded to hear the passion of the crowd on a basis of gender. He ordered the men to scream, then he ordered the women to scream, then he ordered the men to scream, then he ordered the women to scream. It was utter pandemonium. He demanded the music be played louder, whatever force controlled the tune obeyed. The base line became deafening, the crowd followed suit.
To the backing of the wails of the crowd a third truth emerged in my nonexistent gut; it was going to be like this forever. The music stretched beyond the fabric of time, it played with breakneck speed and dragged on into eternity. The sudden panic that seized me was worse than anything I could ever imagine. I wanted to run away from the cacophony, but I had no legs. I wanted to weep for my soul but I had no eyes. I wanted to scream but I had no mouth.
Suddenly I saw. Above me rested the young face of an angel. She stared into my eyes and yelled something at someone who sat by my feet. Reality was a blur, but a blur that could be felt. There was an odor of a hospital emanating from the device I had placed over my mouth, lights flashed above me as people in face guards and scrubs attended to me. I was in the back of an ambulance.
“Sir, you had an overdose,” the angel said, “You’re going to be fine. We are taking you to the Mesiarik University hospital. Do you-“ then her voice faded away, I was sliding back into unconsciousness. I prayed I wouldn’t hear the music again as I saw those young blue eyes fade away.
Later on I would piece together the situation. The horse that I bought was loaded with something dirty, I was lucky that my neighbor, the one that played the saxophone with such fear, was going around the apartment complex handing out homemade facemasks. Once again I was saved by the people who wanted to spread kindness in the world. Had he not found me at my doorstep I would be dead. I would be dead and still listening to that eldritch tune.
When I came back to, I was lying in a hospital bed with the angel by my side. Even behind the mask and visor I could tell that she was young, she must have been one of the students fast-tracked into stopping the medical system from collapsing.
She talked to me the same way that the students who visited me at the train station talked to me. She told me that my addiction was a disease, that there was a programme that would help me, that I could beat my disease is I received proper treatment. Her hopeful eyes dimmed when I told her that I had been to the clinic and ended up breaking my sobriety regardless. I assured her, however, that I would never do drugs again because of what I heard when I was dead.
I needed to tell someone, I needed to talk about what I had heard. Yet as I spoke to the angel her eyes steadily faded into disbelief, I could see pity brewing within her. In mere minutes I went from someone who could be saved to a hopeless case. Talking about the dizziness, the crowd, the music, it all made me seem like a madman. She excused herself and left me alone with the memory of the Cosmic Dunk.
So I came here, to this Internet campfire to tell you all what I heard. I lie here in horror knowing that regardless of how I live my life, how careful I am, I will hear that music again and when I hear it again there will be no angels to save me.
Live your lives well strangers, for what comes after is more torturous than what you could imagine. What comes after is a never-ending invitation to the Cosmic Dunk.