Tony

Of all my Marxist friends in college, Tony was by far the most interesting. Having been accepted on a football scholarship, he had traveled all the way from the industrial wastelands of northern England to our little Christian Science college on the bluffs of the Mississippi River. With huge muscles, a shaved head, and a tough Manchester accent, he was unlike any Christian Scientist I had ever seen. On one shoulder he sported a large tattoo of El Che’s iconic portrait, beneath which was inscribed in bold letters the legendary socialist slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” An amateur phytotherapist, Tony kept several medicinal plants in the greenhouse attached to the science building. I remember spending one evening with him in my dorm room scraping out the green entrails of a strange Mexican cactus with a pair of see-though plastic butter knives. After we had piled the mushy offal on a paper plate, we gobbled it down to see what pharmacological effect, if any, it would have on us—but, alas, there was none: we sat through the entire 95 minutes of Pink Floyd’s The Wall without experiencing any symptoms except for the occasional yawn and stretch from boredom.

???????????Several months later, Tony bought some Hawaiian seeds off the internet. He said the Polynesians once used them to enter the spirit world. Since I rarely got the chance to leave campus, having neither a car nor any friends with a car, this seemed like a good way to escape. And, besides, the spirit world sounded like a pretty cool place—at least more interesting than Taco Bell or the mall or anywhere else that a mere car could go. So Tony and I decided to leave the world for a while: we each ate a handful of seeds, said our farewells, and went our separate ways.

???????????That night, as I sat in bed, I relived my entire life—every single second from my birth to the present moment in that dorm room on a Wednesday night on the border of Illinois and Missouri. I saw things I had forgotten: the pink Led Zeppelin shirt that my dad wore on the day I was born, the 1984 Summer Olympics playing on the TV in my parent’s room while my dad lay bedridden from a broken back, the heaps of mowed grass fermenting behind the garage at our first house on Niles Street. I thought what I was thinking at 4:34 PM on July 17, 1987, did what I was doing at 5:46 AM on March 15, 1983, and felt what I was feeling at 1:23 PM on September 20, 1994. I relived everything—all 630,000,000 seconds of my life—and saw that it was good.

???????????The next day I returned to the world of the living. Spring Carnival had just begun, and a few friends dragged me along. The whole affair seemed alien to me. At the buffet table smiling volunteers were serving fruit punch and vegetarian cuisine. By the folded-up bleachers a handful of humus-filled students were busy ricocheting off the walls of a pink Bounce House. As I stood there pondering the swirl of a young man’s tie-dye shirt, I noticed Tony lumbering around in the shadows behind the buffet table. He moved like a zombie, and I began to worry. When I approached him, he looked at me with inhuman eyes. Gone were the blue retinas—now there were only two huge pupils as dark as black holes. I asked him what had happened to him the night before. He gazed through me for a few uncomfortable seconds, and then with a lifeless voice, said, “I looked at my alarm clock, and it was 2:30 in the morning … for five years.”