The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

him. Knowing I probably wouldn’t die, but that in all likelihood I’d be taken into care if he took me to the hospital, Dad chose instead to sit with me while I underwent hours of intense hallucinations, heightened, no doubt, by the plasticity of my unformed mind. Eventually I returned to earth, dazed but incredibly hungry, and in the aftermath, I’m told, consumed half a packet of Cocoa Pops, two bananas and most of a jar of pickles.

I have little recall of what I said or did during those drugged hours, only the one memory of Dad’s big hand holding mine, and the little blue swallow tattoo between his first finger and thumb detaching and flying free. But in the following years I experienced what I believed were flashbacks to my childhood trauma. Visions would tumble into my mind in the last, liminal stages of sleep, visions that were as vivid and as strange as dreams, but marked apart from dream by a sure sense of remembering. In the first act, when the curtain rose, there would appear before my eyes a crazed batik, feathered streams of purples and reds and indigos and greens. Then teethed feelers and furred spikes rose, and trilobite curls, baroquely alien, self-propelling. A storm of parts raged then: compound eyes and rough mouth-hollows, a close pulse of primitive wings, and then the clawed and frantic movements of countless limbs, spurred and sharp like fractured arrows. And at the demented climax of all this, at the finale, I would step abruptly into a place where the light was speckled, brown, streaked. An oatmeal sky hung low over land that glowed in a light of amber-toned antiquity, a land which flowed and circled and sighed and lifted itself with the undulant sway of a billion faded blades of grass.

Dad had told me that “sepia grass” were the only words I said, again and again, throughout my pre-pubescent trip. I must have heard that word, sepia, somewhere, so that it surfaced as I tried to tell him something of the washy hues that colored my hallucinations. But I have no original to compare, and I don’t know if my later half-waking visions truly mirrored what I thought I saw back then. I wonder if my six-year-old self could have so easily recovered from the same moments that, for me, always heralded awakening. That terrible shuddering of the air. The sudden shunt of pressure, immense and inescapable. The thing unseen, unheard, but felt.

The strange thing is, I felt only a calm acceptance during these hypnagogic states—an acceptance of what was and what was about to be—and it didn’t occur to me to talk about them, about their striking imagery and atmosphere, no more than it would occur to anyone else to talk about the untranslatable chaos that plays out in their heads. And anyway, I was prone to strange and unreadable moods which troubled those around me, and it would have been reckless to feed the growing doubts about my mental health.

My dad was always solicitous of my welfare, barring the occasional mishap beyond his control. Perhaps he saw a certain mental instability in my bouts of uncommunicativeness, and maybe he even blamed the childhood accident for that, but whatever the motives, he always tried his best to shield me from the more worrying realities of our lives. I had a fair idea who Dad sold to—no one had that many friends visiting at night—but he took great pains to conceal the workings of his illegal business, and I didn’t know where he obtained his supplies nor where he stored them, nor how much money he brought in. But, despite the suspected fragility of my psyche, my tendency towards a kind of internal freezing, he wasn’t hypocritical enough to stop me trying his wares when I became of age. Dad believed in the curative power of marijuana, a gift from the earth, and I can’t say it ever (except once) gave me a bad experience, although, unlike him, I could take it or leave it. It used to give me a hazy feeling, which I liked but didn’t crave.

Above all, Dad conducted his affairs with complete discretion, and so when one day, out of the blue, he seemed about to give away some vital information, I immediately suspected the worst.

“You’ll never believe it,” he said as he made a roll-up cigarette to round off his breakfast. “About my latest score.”

I looked up from the book I was reading—I was in the middle of exams and the last ever term of school, a good student headed for a good university. His latest score? What was going on? Was he in trouble? Were our lives about to fall apart?

“Don’t look so worried, Dan. It’s its name, that’s all. This new stuff I’m getting. Sepia grass, it’s called. You know—like you kept saying when you were little and ate that hash. Remember that, how I’ve told you about it? Sepia grass, you kept saying.” He did a little mime of what I suppose was meant to be the six-year-old me, goggle-eyed and pawing at the air. I didn’t laugh.

“Tripping off your little head, you were, but I knew you’d come through OK. That stuff was pure. Mother marijuana doesn’t hurt her friends, so long as you don’t hurt her—haven’t I always told you that? I always wondered, you know, where you’d picked up the word sepia.  TV? At school? What do you think?”

I shrugged.

“Kids pick on up things, and you’ve always been a bright kid, but I mean, it isn’t a six-year-old’s word, is it? Weird coincidence though. Bloody weird.”

It was more than weird, what Dad had just told me. I had predicted the future. Might it be that, after all, like him, I received messages from the universe?

“That’s mad,” I said. “What’s it like?”

I should explain that Dad hadn’t smoked grass since it started to be genetically engineered for extra strength. He had someone else test it for him—a sort of