I finally learn my green-eyed dance partner's name: Lenny. I tell Nakomi I'm ditching her to go with him, and she, still clinging to silver-man Zeus, barely even protests—just, "Are you sure you want to go?"

"Yes, I'm sure." My voice exudes adamance.

She looks him up and down. "Well, I'm pleased you're taking my advice. But are you sure he's not dangerous? I mean, going to his place, and without backup? Is that a good idea?"

"He's not dangerous," I insist, slightly embarrassed that she would insinuate this when he's standing only a couple of feet away, pretending not to listen to us (but he's listening).

"Why don't you bring him back to my apartment?"

My eyes narrow at her. "We're going to his apartment."

A sigh is loosed from her pretty mouth, and she smiles at me, ever so subtly, to let me know I've won. Then her gaze flits back to Lenny. "Lenny?" she calls to him sweetly, and he approaches. "Let me get a picture of your ID, Lenny, so that I can show the police if my best friend goes missing."

He obliges. Now more embarrassed, I decide to ask the same of her date, because I figure the only reason Nakomi isn't protesting my abandonment is because she was already intending to take an exit with her dance partner.

"Ohmygosh," Nakomi says. "Simon works at the cafe by my house, we figured out."

Simon. He should have stuck with Zeus. "Doesn't mean he's not a murderer," I say tartly, and he laughs, holding up a picture of his ID and letting me capture its image on my pocket computer. I notice his ID picture looks much different than the three-eyed man I see now—much more plain, I mean.

"Well, now that we've got that sorted out, can we go, Lenny?" I ask.

He looks relieved. "Sure thing."

I feel glad Lenny hasn't let the true nature of our decision to leave slip, as I don't need Nakomi lecturing me about my choice to do Vivecta™ again. Taking his hand, I hurriedly lead him out of the building, away from the rose-scented, hard-alcohol-infused body odor.

After taking a Voom! self-driving car back to his place, we head up one of the elevators to his apartment, a nice, small albeit clean place in one of the modern stackable apartment buildings. Once inside, he gets to work fetching his illegal stash of Vivectica™, seemingly more anxious to leave this world than I am. I wait at his coffee table, my bottom having found its place on the gray shag carpet decorating his living room, where I take in the rest of his home. His apartment houses a blue sectional velvet couch. Metal art on the wall. Succulent plants on the window sill. A stainless steel refrigerator. A blue coffee pot, still half full with old coffee. The kitchen and the living room aren't separated in any meaningful way with the exception of the floor, which turns to tile a few feet from the single kitchen counter.

Lenny sets a baggie of some substance on the table, and I quit taking stock of his material possessions and apartment layout so I can instead examine the baggie's contents, which look crystalline. "This is Vivectica™?" I ask.

He sits across from me, on the other side of the coffee table, a box in his hand. "It is."

"It doesn't look like what they used at the clinic."

"At the clinics, they dissolve it into liquid so they can inject it. We won't do that. We won't do such a low dose, either."

"Oh, I don't think my dose was very low."

"Trust me, it was. And if you just did it the other day, you'll want a higher dose. You'd be amazed at how quickly your body can form a tolerance."

Hiding my reluctance, I nod. After all of my worry about going crazy, it seems absurd that I'm doing this again, and I wonder, for a moment, how much those two galactic cocktails have impaired my judgment.

But I decide learning what the crocodile/lizard man wants to share with me will provide me with some closure, and I can leave him behind once and for all. Maybe I'll finally accept him as nothing more than a figment of my imagination. Maybe I'll finally determine what my mind is trying to tell me, since my mind is supposedly the thing responsible for him, and since I don't feel satisfied with Nakomi and Winston's theory. I don't feel like my mind wants me to share my curiosity through teaching. I would never be a teacher.

Lenny smiles, and brings out his equipment out of the box he's been holding. "We have to smoke it using my vaporizer. Have you ever used a vaporizer?" The vaporizer he brings out is small but complicated looking, and he fills it with some sort of liquid.

I shake my head no (I'd never even used a pipe), and he gives me some brief instructions, letting me know that the contraption is a "cold-start rig" (whatever that means), so it won't "overheat" the Vivectica™. We'll load the substance, quickly heat it, and let the device turn the Vivectica™ crystals into vapor that we can inhale. "Why don't you go first?" he asks. "You know, so I can help you, and so you don't drop my six-hundred-dollar vaporizer as you're leaving this world?" He smiles here like he's joking, but I'm sure he really doesn't want me to break his prized equipment, so I shake my head yes.

Combatting my nerves, I use his instructions to take what will be my first and only hit, marveling, from the outside, that I'm doing this again, only I'm doing it illegally. Which is worse. Here I go.

I've heated the crystals, the solids have turned to vapor, and I've inhaled the vapor. I've taken a hit...the hit that will take me out

Eyes see. Branches grow. Veins pump. Gears turn. Everything runs together.

Up, down. Good, evil. Everything runs together.

Be. Exist. Flow. Unfold. Refold. Undulate. Forever. Up down in out grow shrink expand contract.

Tessellations, fractals, recursive movement. Slightly changing, always returning to some former point, ever growing, ever shrinking, ever evolving.

Breathe. Breathe.

Everything breathes. Everything's alive! Everything exists.

Everything's a paradox. Everything's a paradox. Arctic aluminum lemon. Everything's a paradox. The words form a song, a continuous song, one whose notes keep going up, up, up, a song that never ends it never ends it goes forever go forever go forever being, existing, flowing, unfolding, undulating, breathing

I'm breathing.

Me. I am breathing.

I'm falling.

I fall down—well, not quite downward, more like radially inward—through curved planes of existence.

Wait...I? That word. The word feels...distant in my mind. My? That word feels equally distant. The words aren't quite unfamiliar; it's just like they've been momentarily forgotten. Even though I swear that just moments ago, it was like those words never existed. Not just the words: the concepts. The concept of I.

Yes, I'm an I. I remember now. I'm a me. A...person. A human.

I've stopped falling. I'm on a bed made of some sort of metal. I see a projection of myself, and there's no doubt anymore...I'm an I, a human with legs, and arms, and a head, and a stomach throbbing with red.

You're back. The voice is gentle but somehow still intense.

More familiarity hits me, this time with overwhelming force. Because I suddenly remember not only am I a me, one human amongst several humans; I am also a human amongst lizard people. The humanoid lizards I traveled here for. As I look up, I realize I've found them, again. I came here to learn they didn't actually exist, but here they are...existing.

I look around, seeing everything I saw before: hyper-technological equipment. A sky(?) dotted with glowing purplish spherical things, things that feel ever-so cosmic.

Crocodile/Lizard Man hovers over me, looking at me curiously with those slit-pupil eyes. In the background, others of his kind bustle about their business, paying me no attention. Did you come down from above? From the place of no egos? he asks.

"Yes. How did you know?"

You have the look of someone who has just lost and found so much all at once.

"An eloquent way to put it." Time is running out; I become suddenly aware of this, though I'm not sure of the foundation of my certainty. "You were...going to give me something, the last time I came. What was it?"

I was going to give you a taste of the meaning of life. But...he looks around here at the other humanoid crocodilian creatures, as though he is about to do something he'd rather they not see. They still aren't even looking at us.

Plucking a scale off of his body with one hand, he pulls a red strand from my stomach with the other, then loops the strand around the scale and knots it. After he knots the strand, it—along with the scale it now holds—disappears back into my body.

I look at him curiously. A scale?

Now I can find yo—

I'm pulled down. Plucked from the space station. I fall downward, or radially inward, whatever, back to my body.

The sensation is familiar. Being stuffed back inside. Discomfort. Confusion.

I hate these feelings.

Lenny is on the ground next to me, laughing. Where he is, I can't be sure, but I don't think he's back yet.

I lay, twitching, waiting for these feelings to pass over me, trying, once more, to make sense of what I saw. I wish I could muster up the energy to type down my memories on my pocket computer, but such a task seems monumental. All I can manage is sitting up, looking around. I see the blue sectional velvet couch next to me. The gray shag carpet beneath. The gleaming metal art. The green plants. The shiny refrigerator. The blue coffee pot.

Everything runs together.

I get the creepy sense that everything is one, that we're all part of the same organism, or the same machine, or the same cyborg thing. That everything is breathing, and living, and existing. That everything is conscious. That even the coffee pot on the counter can think, that it can sense my confusion, yet it invites me to remember that we are one.

I am one with a coffee pot. The idea, while absurd, seems so profound.

After a while, Lenny says, "Izzy?" He must be back.

"I'm back," I tell him. "Are you?"

"I am. I was in a nursery, with an infant mobile. There were mechanical clowns watching over me. I was a baby raccoon." His voice oozes with a sort of youthful pleasure.

A period of silence extends between us, and although I can tell he is as uncomfortable in his own body as I am in mine by the way he is twitching, he continues to smile fondly at his memory. Is his memory slipping away from him, as mine is from me?

I must remember, so I lay back down next to him and verbalize my memories aloud: "I saw a crocodilian lizard man. For the second time. But before that...I forgot who I was."

"Were you an animal? Or an immaterial object? I've been a lamp before."

"No. I forgot what I was too. I was nothing. And anything. And everything. There was no me."

He turns over to face me, like a lover after lovemaking. "Awww, you experienced the ever-elusive ego death. A supremely desired experience amongst psychonauts."

"Psychonauts?"

"Psychedelic explorers. People like us, Izzy." He touches my cheek fondly.

Yes, I think. People like us.

I close my eyes, as my memory of the experience threatens to slip beyond my reach even more than it already has. Acceptance comes; I'm prepared to forget so much of what I just experienced, knowing that only confusion will remain.

subchapter | ego dissolution

Ego dissolution, also popularly known as ego loss or ego death, is a state of mind occurring when a human loses all sense of self. The word "I" no longer exists in this state of mind. No personal pronouns—we, you, they—exist in this state of mind. Everything is one.

Some who experience the dissolution of the self feel that they have merged with what has been termed the "universal consciousness" or the "godly consciousness" or the "cosmic consciousness" (it goes by many names). It is important to note that this is different from a loss of consciousness. An example of a loss of consciousness is when someone undergoes anesthesia in the middle of saying "rice pudding—" and they wake up hours later to finish their sentence: "—is my favorite snack." Someone who undergoes ego dissolution is still conscious, as they are still experiencing the world (some form of the world); they just no longer experience the world as an individual person with selfhood. They no longer perceive the world through an ego. Selfhood no longer exists. Separateness from others no longer exists, because others no longer exist. Everything just...is. Everything is one.

Some people, after experiencing this, wonder if the ego (along with the ideas of separation it spawns) is an illusion. What if the true nature of reality is that we are all one, and our experience of the world through our individual egos is nothing more than a phantasm? What if the cosmos in its entirety is a grand, divine creature, and we are all manifestations of it, fooled every day into thinking we are separate, different, alone?