Treehouse

A Psychedelic Novel

This story is being published in order. If you’re new, start here:

Chapter 1

“There aren’t words for what I need to tell you, but fuck it. Here goes.“ - Mahatma Gandhi

(Just kidding, he didn’t say that)

At 33, I found myself working as a pizza delivery driver. My co-workers were 20-somethings from around the west Los Angeles area who generally had a better attitude about the job than I did. Most of them got very high in their cars during their breaks.

Pizza and weed are pretty fun when you’re 23. 10 years later and the same situation feels like a shameful failure. The worst kind of shameful failure. A boring one. At least most shameful failures involve some intrigue. “I fucked my boss and his kid caught us.” Stuff like that. Not like, “I didn’t really focus in community college, so here I am.”

The pizza place, Slice O’ Pie, had a giant, 500 degree oven behind the register that seemed like it was designed to burn forearms. We kept the unfolded pizza boxes underneath the oven.

Each time we had to grab a small stack of flattened boxes to fold, we had to reach under the oven. It was like playing Operation if the game board was on fire.

One afternoon, I was returning from delivering two large pizzas (Pepperoni and “Blanco”) to a backyard pool party full of attractive inhabitants of West Los Angeles. Several of them were on the edge of an infinity pool, propped up on their elbows looking out over Topanga canyon.

I was especially embarrassed by the Slice O’ Pie hat I had to wear.

It’s not that the guy who handed me the money disliked me. I just wasn’t nearly important enough to have an opinion on.

“Fuck off, Derek!” he laughed and shouted over the pool as he absentmindedly signed the receipt. Derek gave his friend the finger and cannonballed into the pool.

I was still thinking about Derek as I was hurrying to get back to Slice ‘O Pie to close my register and get the fuck home. I made a hasty left against a yellow light and got t-boned by a black Tercel. My head bounced off of the driver’s side window. Everything went black.

Bizarrely, I was not unconscious. Not exactly. I was still aware. I experienced a thing that’s rare, but not unheard of, I found out later: I had a short-term kind of brain damage that destroyed my ability to think in language. The part of my brain that processes words shut down.

I felt total fucking ecstasy. Sensations were neither good nor bad. Without the clouding effect of words as labels they just were.

I only was, the world of objects and images floated before me, each with an unnameable wonder. All things were bright and dancing, sunbursts of light moved in front of me, and then through me.

Then next morning I woke up in a hospital bed, an ambulance having brought me to the ER. I had a headache, but other than that I was fine. Words had returned and the world seeming normal and boring again.

There was a pen and a pad next to my bed. I picked it up and wrote two names: Markon Singh and Eleanor Rective. I’d never heard either of them before.

For the next few weeks at work, my thoughts were peppered with them. Someone would ask me how I was doing and I’d say, “Good.” and then my inner monologue would immediately follow with, “Markon and Eleanor.”

The more I thought about the names, the more I felt compelled to track them down. “Just do a cursory search. They’re probably not even people,” I’d tell myself.

I’d never had much drive before, and the compulsion to find these two strangers was a surprising sensation. It had the same effect of a magnet on a paper clip. I didn’t feel like I had any choice.