Amaranth - The First Ten Chapters
The following is an excerpt from “Amaranth”, a story-within-a-story-within-a-story about a drug extracted from Alien semen that permits an unsuspecting writer to see through the many spiritual worlds stacked atop each other in this one. Our main character, Nick, meets a homeless man named Kalvin Smeck, who, through sessions of taking Amaranth, he finds out is God.
Here tis:
Amaranth
1
Purple light leaked from Kalvin Smeck's eyes as reality fractured around us in my studio apartment. The homeless man who'd been crashing on my couch for the past week sat cross-legged on the floor, his weathered face illuminated by impossible geometries that bloomed in the air between us.
"You're seeing it now, aren't you Nick?" His voice echoed through multiple dimensions, each word leaving trails of light that hung in the space like cigarette smoke.
"Yeah," I managed. The Amaranth was hitting harder than usual. "I'm seeing it."
My copy of "Through the Golden Door" levitated off the coffee table, pages flipping by themselves. The book I'd found yesterday, its cover stained with what looked like coffee but smelled like ozone. I'd been reading it when Kalvin showed up with more Amaranth, the story about some hacker trying to assassinate a banker in London. Now those words were lifting off the pages, forming constellations on my ceiling.
Three months ago, I bought liquid alien semen from a guy behind a 7-Eleven, and everything about reality stopped making sense.
Let me explain.
The first thing you should know about Amaranth is that the government lies about where it comes from. They call it a synthetic psychedelic, claim it's cooked up in Chinese labs. The truth leaked out through a whistleblower on Reddit—grainy footage of military personnel in a black site facility, "extracting" purple fluid from something that definitely wasn't from Earth.
I was a data analyst for an insurance company back then. The most interesting part of my day was finding new ways to avoid my manager, Teresa. I didn't believe in anything I couldn't quantify in an Excel spreadsheet.
Then my dealer got arrested, and his replacement only had one product: a vial of purple liquid that seemed to move by itself.
"It's called Amaranth," he said, the neon 7-Eleven sign casting red shadows across his face. "Three drops under the tongue. No more, no less."
Here's the second thing you should know about Amaranth: that "no more, no less" rule is bullshit. Like most bullshit, it killed people before someone figured that out.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. You need to understand about Kalvin first. About the book. About how fiction started bleeding into reality, or maybe reality was fiction all along.
The words from "Through the Golden Door" are still floating on my ceiling. They're rearranging themselves now, spelling out a message:
YOU'RE IN THE WRONG STORY, NICK.
Kalvin reaches across the coffee table. His hand passes through layers of spacetime like shuffling cards.
"Ready to learn what's really going on?" he asks, and something ancient flickers behind his eyes.
I nod, even as reality begins to peel away like old wallpaper.
Let me tell you how I got here. About the alien semen and the man who collected shopping carts full of secrets. About the book that knew things it couldn't know. About how I learned the universe is written in purple ink, and all our stories are just drafts of a larger truth.
But first, I should tell you about the day I met Kalvin Smeck, when he was just a guy asking for change outside a gas station, before I knew what he kept hidden beneath all those layers of reality...
2
The purple liquid moved under my tongue like it was alive. Three drops, just like always. The walls of my apartment breathed in and out as I opened "Through the Golden Door," the book's pages humming with a faint electrical charge.
Kalvin was out doing whatever he did during the day—probably pushing his cart around downtown, having conversations with pigeons. It was just me and the book and the Amaranth coursing through my system.
The first page shimmered, and I began to read:
The job listing shouldn't have been there.
Zach Barris had scrolled through hundreds of programming positions on his university's career board, but this one—wedged between a junior developer role at Microsoft and an AI internship at Google—seemed to flicker on his screen like a glitch.
HACKMALIM - Seeking Reality Engineers
The description was sparse: "Programming experience required. Theatre background preferred. Capacity to perceive multiple layers of reality essential."
The words lifted off the page, hanging in the air like smoke signals. I could smell ozone and burnt silicon. My own computer screen flickered in sympathy, its display showing fragments of code I hadn't written.
I blinked, tried to focus. The story continued:
Zach read it twice, cursor hovering over the apply button. At twenty-two, with graduation looming, he'd been carpet-bombing tech companies with his resume, hoping his double major in Computer Science and Theatre would interest someone. But this... this was different.
"Dude, are you seriously still job hunting?" His roommate Marcus leaned over his shoulder, pizza slice dripping onto their worn dorm room carpet. "Shouldn't you be editing that video thing?"
My phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number: "WHAT DO YOU SEE IN THE CODE?"
The Amaranth pulsed behind my eyes. On my desk, the vial of purple liquid caught the afternoon light, and for a moment I saw something moving inside it—something with too many angles and not enough dimensions.
I forced myself back to the page:
The Hackmalim listing seemed to pulse on his screen. Theatre background preferred. How many programming jobs asked for that?
He clicked apply before he could think better of it. The application form was equally strange—no resume upload, just three questions:
1. Describe a moment when you questioned the nature of reality. 2. What role do you play in the grand simulation? 3. If you could rewrite the universe's source code, what would you change?
My fingers started typing on my keyboard without my permission, answering the same questions. Through the Amaranth haze, I watched my hands move:
The first time I saw Kalvin Smeck turn sideways and disappear.
The unreliable narrator.
I'd make the purple more purple.
Delete, delete, delete. The cursor blinked accusingly.
"Stay with the story," Kalvin's voice echoed from somewhere, though he wasn't here. "It's trying to tell you something."
I turned the page with trembling fingers as reality rippled around me...
3
I had to set aside "Through the Golden Door" when Kalvin showed up at my apartment that Thursday, already smelling of cigarettes and Popov vodka. The book could wait. Kalvin had that look in his eyes—the one that meant he had something to show me.
The Amaranth was already melting into my bloodstream when he sat down next to me, insisting he was a prophet. I grabbed my notebook as he began:
"Holy sentinel, in order to repel the common enemy,
it flexes the point of the geometrical figure (it is perhaps a triangle, but we do not see the third side which, or to starboard, as a skillful captain; and, maneuvering with wings which do not appear larger than those of a sparrow, because it is not stupid, it thus assumes another philosophical and surer path.
For it is she who has the privilege of showing the feathers of her tail to the other inferior cranes, with her vigilant cry of melancholy sentinel, to repel the common enemy, she flexibly the point of the geometrical figure (it is perhaps a triangle, but we do not see the third side which these curious birds of passage form in space).
There are some who write to seek human applause, by means of noble qualities of the heart which the imagination invents or which they may have. I have my genius serve to paint the delights of cruelty! Delights not transient, artificial; but, who have begun with man, and will end with him.
Can not genius ally itself with cruelty in the secret resolutions? Or, because one is cruel, can one not have genius? This will be proved in my words; it is up to you to listen to me, if you will. Pardon, it seemed to me that my hair had stood on my head; but it is nothing, for with my hand I have easily succeeded in restoring them to their first position.
I have seen, throughout my life, without excepting one, men, with narrow shoulders, doing stupid and numerous acts, stupefying their fellows, and perverting souls by all means. When I saw these spectacles, I wanted to laugh like the others; but this strange imitation was impossible. I took a penknife whose blade had a sharp edge, and split the flesh at the places where the lips meet.
The blood which flowed abundantly from the two wounds also made it impossible to distinguish whether it was really the laughter of the others. But after a few moments of comparison, I saw that my laughter did not resemble that of humans, that is, I did not laugh.
We must let our nails grow for a fortnight. Oh! how sweet it is to snatch a child from his bed, who has nothing on his upper lip, and, with his eyes open, pretend to pass his hand sweetly on his forehead, tilting his hands hair!
Then, suddenly, at the moment when he least expected it, to push the long nails into his soft breast, so that he did not die; for if he died, one would not later have the appearance of his miseries.
Then the blood is drunk by licking the wounds.
After speaking thus, at the same time you will have harmed a human being, and you will be loved by the same being: it is happiness greater than can be conceived. Later, you can put him in the hospital. You will be called good, and laurel wreaths and gold medals will hide your bare feet, scattered over the great tomb."
"Fuck," was all I could manage, wringing my hands.
Kalvin tried to comfort me. "Melancholic horses of passionate princes light a cigar and smoke away the bad world" was his idea of comforting words.
I sat before a cut out phrase from a book of Bukowski poetry, "And they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul."
Kalvin looked at it and laughed. I could smell the Popov Vodka on his breath.
"I'm sorting out my transmissions" I cringed as soon as I said my attempt at relating to him.
Kalvin produced a small book intended for addresses in which he had scrawled 77 sacred 'song' lyrics. I knew that because the cover said, '77 Sacred Song Lyrics'.
He shuffled through the crudely pressed pages and found one he called "And Now You See."
"And now you see what no one can revolve
Can we disturb these litmus pirouettes?
So long my friend of many stillborn nights
Moonlight bleeds from the wounds of twilight cuts
Whispers crawl through the veins of silent flies
tap dancing on the graves of former selves
Starlight weeps from the eyes of cosmic graves
Echoes drift through the bones of voiceless winds
Doors swing wide to the void of un-creation
Stairs descend to the depths of minds unstained
Galaxy bleeds from the wounds of self infliction
Leaves applaud in the theater of the breeze
Cobwebs catch dreams escaping sleepers' minds
Words dissolve in the mouths of penitent slaves
Silence hums with the songs of distant youth
Fearlight drips from the leaves of psychic wounds
Memories nest in the ducts of weeping eyes
Mushrooms sprout from the dreams of forest floors
Synapses flash morose in the dark of tombs
Echoes drift through the bones of voiceless winds
Doors swing wide to the void of un-creation
Stairs descend to the depths of minds unstained
Galaxy bleeds from the wounds of self infliction"
Do flies have veins? I wondered. Turns out they do, but just in the wings.
The book on my coffee table—"Through the Golden Door"—seemed to pulse with its own purple light, waiting for me to return to its story of hackers and bankers and reality engineers. But that would have to wait. Kalvin wasn't finished showing me what was behind the curtain of the world.
And the Amaranth? The Amaranth just kept flowing through my veins, turning everything into poetry and prophecy.
4
The Amaranth was doing something different tonight. Instead of the usual purple fractals, I was seeing the spaces between thoughts. Kalvin sat in my secondhand armchair, his unwashed army jacket somehow folding through dimensions that shouldn't exist.
"Can you talk to sleeping fruit," he began, and the fruit bowl on my kitchen counter started vibrating. The bananas were dreaming of their ancestral forms, before humans had engineered them into curved yellow smiles.
"Crowley," he continued, and I saw it then—the connection. Aleister Crowley, the occultist who claimed to channel messages from beyond. The book "Through the Golden Door" flipped open by itself, landing on a page where the character Zach was researching occult programming languages.
Kalvin's next words came out like smoke signals: "In the shapes of stars deceive / Misty maps of silent fleet / Nose deep / Through the echoes it retrieved."
The ceiling of my apartment disappeared. Above us, constellations rearranged themselves into source code. I remembered what the Reddit whistleblower had said about the military facility where they found the Amaranth—how the alien they extracted it from hadn't been three-dimensional.
"Fog you stalk the sinking street / Blow heap / mirror bend the light can grieve."
My laptop screen flickered to life without being turned on. Lines of purple code scrolled past:
CopyHACKMALIM_LOG_837: Reality breach detected in sector 7G Multiple observers achieving synchronicity Prophecy subroutines: ACTIVE
"Can you walk carnation street / flow deep / in the manner of a sheep," Kalvin intoned, and suddenly I understood. Carnation Street—that's where I'd bought my first vial of Amaranth. The dealer behind the 7-Eleven had been wearing a carnation in his lapel. Not a real one. Plastic. Artificial.
Like reality itself.
"Can you feel everything all at once," Kalvin asked, spreading his arms wide. The question wasn't rhetorical. The Amaranth was showing me how to do exactly that—how to process multiple layers of existence simultaneously. The book, the code, the alien, the prophecy... they were all the same thing viewed from different angles.
"High above nothingness was a lark."
My phone buzzed. Text from an unknown number: "REALITY ENGINEERS REQUIRED. IMMEDIATE OPENING. PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE WITH DIVINE GEOMETRY PREFERRED."
Kalvin's voice took on an urgent tone: "How can you presuppose my demise / Was it all just a show for the sun / Can shadows cast light on their own form."
The shadows in my apartment began to glow. Each one contained its own illumination, impossible darkness that somehow radiated purple light. I thought about what Kalvin had said about reality not being rendered properly.
"Who paints each inside of closed eyelids / When did the universe start breathing."
I closed my eyes. On the backs of my eyelids, I saw it: the true form of the entity they'd found in that military facility. Not an alien. Something older. Something that had been here before the universe took its first breath.
"Can you smell the fragrance of numbers / Do snowflakes recall being quite this cold."
The temperature in my apartment dropped. Numbers appeared in the air—not written, but present as scents. Pi smelled like cinnamon. The square root of negative one had the sharp scent of ozone. Binary code carried the musty perfume of old books.
"Why do mirrors show what is isn't there."
I looked at my reflection in the laptop screen. For a moment, I saw what I really was: a collection of stories trying to convince itself it was a person. Behind me, Kalvin's reflection showed his true form—a testament to what the human mind does when it glimpses infinity and tries to stay sane.
"Can you feel everything all at once / High above nothingness was a lark."
The book "Through the Golden Door" slammed shut. My phone displayed another message: "INTERVIEW PROCESS INITIATED. CANDIDATE NICK [REDACTED] SHOWING PROMISING SIGNS OF REALITY PENETRATION."
Kalvin stood up, his form wavering like bad reception. "They're noticing you now," he said, his voice suddenly clear and sharp as broken glass. "The Hackmalim. The Reality Engineers. The ones who maintain the illusion."
"What illusion?" I managed to ask.
He smiled, and his teeth were made of starlight. "That any of this is real. That reality is fixed. That stories are just stories." He gestured at the book. "Fiction is just reality that hasn't happened yet. Or happened already. Or is happening somewhere else."
"And the Amaranth?"
"A compiler," he said. "It lets you read the source code of existence. But be careful—" He glanced at the shadows, which were still glowing with their own light. "Some bugs in reality are there for a reason. Some firewalls protect us from things we're not meant to understand."
The purple light behind his eyes flared. "Time to compile," he said, and disappeared.
My phone buzzed one final time: "WELCOME TO HACKMALIM ORIENTATION. PLEASE ENSURE YOUR REALITY PERMISSIONS ARE UP TO DATE."
The Amaranth in my bloodstream hummed like a server farm coming online.
5
The Amaranth was hitting its peak when I decided to tell Kalvin a joke. Maybe it was the way the purple light bent around him, or how the shadows in my apartment seemed to bow in his direction. Something made me want to test him.
"Want to hear something funny?" I asked. The words felt thick in my mouth, like honey made of starlight.
Kalvin looked up from his address book of sacred lyrics. "Always."
"Okay, so a Holocaust survivor named Risa dies and goes to Heaven." The air in the room grew denser as I spoke. "She meets God, and God says 'Here I am, what would you like to say to me?'"
Kalvin's eyes reflected something ancient. He didn't blink.
"Risa says 'I'd like to tell you a joke.' And then she tells God this story: Hitler goes to a Jewish psychic as The Third Reich is falling. He demands to know when he will die. The psychic says 'on a Jewish holiday.'"
The Amaranth made the words float in the air between us, purple-edged and shimmering.
"Hitler slams his fist on the table and says 'for every day you do not tell me what day I will die, I will kill 100 Jews!' The psychic just keeps insisting 'on a Jewish holiday' and this enrages Hitler. He pulls out a Luger and holds it to the psychic's head. 'How do you know I will die on a Jewish Holiday?'"
Kalvin sat perfectly still. The room seemed to hold its breath.
"'Because Mr. Hitler,' the psychic replies, 'any day you die will be a Jewish Holiday.'"
I paused for effect, watching Kalvin's face.
"So God doesn't laugh. God tells Risa 'That's not funny.' And Risa says 'Do you have no sense of humor about the Holocaust?' God says 'No, the Holocaust was not funny.' And then Risa says..." I could feel the punchline building like electricity, "'I guess you had to be there!'"
The silence that followed wasn't empty. It was full of something vast and terrible and beautiful. Kalvin's eyes caught the purple light from the Amaranth vial, and for a moment they seemed to contain entire galaxies.
He started rocking back and forth, muttering something about "the joke's on you, the joke's on all of you." Then he fixed me with a stare that made my soul feel inside out.
"You know why Risa could joke about it and I couldn't?" His voice had changed, becoming both older and younger at once. "Because she was down here in the mud with all of you. Playing in my sandbox. But I..." He trailed off, giggling, then abruptly stopped. "I had to watch it all. My favorite little animals, all that free will, all those choices."
"What are you talking about?" But even as I asked, the Amaranth was showing me something in the way his form seemed to flicker and shift.
"Let me tell you about the Kabbalah," he whispered, now deadly serious, his voice resonating at frequencies that made my bones hum. "There are four worlds, four realms stacked on top of each other. Each associated with an element of astrology."
He began counting them off on fingers that seemed to multiply:
"Assiah: The world of action and physicality. Earth. Yetzirah: The world of emotion and relationship. Water. Briyah: The world of consciousness and intellect. Air. Atzilut: The world of spirit and essence. Fire."
The words formed geometric patterns in the air, each one a door to another level of existence.
"This realm," he gestured at our surroundings, "belongs to Earth. That's why the Earth signs prosper here materially. Warren Buffet. Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Bezos. They're attuned to this plane's frequency."
My heart skipped a beat. "But I'm a Libra."
"Yes. An Air sign. The fall of the sun. The most difficult path." His eyes held infinite compassion. "Those who disseminate my laws suffer the most here. Libra falls. Aquarius stands in detriment. I designed it this way at the beginning of time."
"Why?" The question burst from me like a prayer. "Why make the people who most closely follow your laws live the hardest lives? What possible reason could there be at the beginning of time to set it up like this?"
Kalvin smiled, and in his smile I saw the birth and death of universes.
"You had to be there," he said.
6
How do you file insurance claims after you've met God? The fluorescent lights at work buzzed like angry insects, each email in my inbox a reminder of how absurd it all was. Here I was, processing deductibles while knowing the creator of the universe was probably digging through dumpsters behind Walmart.
I lasted twenty minutes before walking out.
"Family emergency," I told Teresa, my manager. The lie felt small in my mouth, smaller than the truth: Sorry, can't work, I've been doing alien drugs with God and reading a book that bleeds reality.
Back in my apartment, I picked up "Through the Golden Door." The pages hummed under my fingers as I read:
The party throbbed with that particular Los Angeles energy—expensive drinks, desperate smiles, and enough ambient anxiety to power a small city. Zach stood by the poolside of some producer's Hollywood Hills mansion, still wearing the suit from his Late Night Laughs taping, feeling like an impostor in borrowed clothes.
Six months. That's all it had taken for "Campus Asylum" to transform from dorm room project to network television. Now he was writing and performing sketches for millions, his face plastered across billboards on Sunset Boulevard. Success felt like a fever dream he couldn't wake up from.
"Zachary Barris!" A voice cut through the party's ambient chatter. "The boy wonder himself."
The man approaching him was tall, impeccably dressed in a cream-colored suit that probably cost more than Zach's first car. His silver hair was perfectly styled, but it was his eyes that caught Zach's attention—pale blue and unnaturally bright, as if lit from within.
A wet, hacking cough from my doorway interrupted my reading. Kalvin stood there, looking more ethereal than usual. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, catching the afternoon light like liquid garnets.
"Your building needs better security," he said, wiping his mouth with a filthy sleeve. "Anyone could just walk in. Even a retiring God."
"You're bleeding."
"Bodies." He shuffled to my couch, leaving red droplets on my carpet. "They're such temporary things. Even this one... especially this one. Two thousand years is about all they can take."
Something in his words made me look at the drops of blood on my floor. Each one seemed to contain a different era of human history.
"Two thousand years?"
"Give or take." He gestured weakly at the night sky through my window. "Ages, Nick. Everything moves in Ages. Pisces to Aquarius. Christ to... well, whoever comes next. The cosmic clock is ticking over. That's why I'm dying now. That's why it's time."
"Time for what?"
"Time for the next God. It's 2002, Nick. Do the math. Every two millennia, the position opens up. Has to. Universe needs new management, fresh perspectives." He coughed, splattering more luminous blood on my floor. "You can't have the same God trying to understand everything forever. Look what happened to me - ended up as a homeless man just to try to remember what it feels like to be human."
My eyes drifted back to "Through the Golden Door." The pages seemed to ripple with their own inner light.
"Why me?"
"You're a Libra. Air sign. Perfect for the Age of Aquarius. Born to disseminate divine law." Another cough wracked his body. "Besides, I'm tired. So tired. Two thousand years of watching, of loving them even when they're terrible. Especially when they're terrible."
I picked up the book again, my mind reeling. In its pages, Aaron Halm was showing Zach the Forms through Amaranth, revealing layers of reality hidden behind our own. Here in my apartment, God himself was offering me his job.
"What does it involve?" My voice sounded far away.
"Everything. Nothing. Creating. Maintaining. Watching. Loving." His voice grew weaker. "The real question is, what do you want it to involve? Each Age needs its own kind of God. I needed to understand humanity, so I became homeless. Maybe you need to understand something else. Maybe that's why you found that book."
He gestured at "Through the Golden Door," and for a moment I saw something impossible - the words on its pages rearranging themselves into patterns that looked like DNA helixes, like computer code, like the architecture of reality itself.
"I..." I started, but Kalvin held up a hand.
"Don't answer yet. Read another chapter first. Understanding comes in layers, just like reality." He stood shakily. "I'll be back tomorrow. Think about it. Dream about it. Just..." he touched his chest where the blood and light were leaking, "don't take too long. Two thousand years goes by fast, but these last few days... they're the longest of all."
He shuffled out, leaving drops of crusted blood on my floor.
I picked up "Through the Golden Door" again, my hands trembling. On the page, Aaron Halm was about to show Zach something that would change everything.
7
"Let's go to the farmers market," Kalvin said the next morning. He was leaning against my building when I came down, looking more solid than yesterday, though still coughing occasionally. The morning light gave his ragged clothes a strange dignity.
I was surprised. "You want to go shopping?"
"Want to? No." He spat blood into a flower bed. "Need to show you something about markets. About why they've always terrified us."
"Us?"
"The ones who see." He started walking, his limping gait somehow purposeful. "Muhammad fled Mecca for Medina to escape the marketplace. Jesus threw the money lenders from the temple. We've always had a... complicated relationship with the Marketplace."
The Santa Monica Farmers Market spread before us like a tapestry of California abundance - organic produce, artisanal breads, overpriced kombucha. Kalvin moved through it like a ghost, flinching slightly at each transaction he witnessed.
"It's the exchange," he muttered. "The exchange of time, of life, for needs."
A couple brushed past us - him in an expensive suit with a Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm, her dripping with designer labels and studied indifference. They stopped at a booth selling hundred-dollar olive oil.
"...just like hell had come to earth," the man was saying. "Sometimes I wonder if it was God's punishment, you know? Divine wrath for our financial misgivings."
His girlfriend rolled her eyes, gesturing at Kalvin with a spoiled, manicured hand. "So I suppose you think we should all live like him?"
Kalvin's laugh was soft and terrible. "The marketplace is always wicked," he told me as we walked away. "Only the scale changes. From counting sheep to trading futures, it's all the same disease."
At checkout, I pulled out my wallet. Kalvin grabbed my wrist, turning the dollar bill I was about to hand over.
"Look at it," he said. "Really look. I suppose you think that eye is just a symbol for providence?" His cracked-tooth grin held centuries of private jokes.
Near the register, a display of old tarot cards caught his attention. The box said "Tarot de Marseilles" in faded script.
"Buy those," Kalvin said. "I'll show you something when we get back to your place. When we get home."
Home. The word felt different when he said it.
Back in my apartment, Kalvin handled the Tarot de Marseilles deck with unexpected tenderness. His dirty fingers traced the worn edges of each card like he was reading ancient scripture. When he found the Tower - La Maison Dieu - his hands trembled slightly.
"Here," he said, laying it on my coffee table. "Really look."
The card seemed to pulse with its own energy. Against a midnight blue sky, a gray tower rose like a threat to heaven. Lightning - or something that looked like lightning - struck its crown, sending two figures tumbling through the air.
But it was the details that made my breath catch: nine flames, perfectly arranged like a halo around the painted sun. Eleven sparks scattered across the stormy sky, each one precisely placed, each one seeming to wink at me with secret knowledge.
"Count them," Kalvin urged, his voice rough with meaning. "Nine flames. Eleven sparks. And look here-" his finger traced the falling figures, "Two towers, if you understand how to see it. The medieval artists knew. They always knew."
"Tisha B'Av," he continued, coughing slightly. "The ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av. When both temples fell. Two temples. History, it;s not real.. It’s written in advance, coded into cards like this, into the geometry of time. Dig that!"
He pulled a dollar bill from my wallet, spreading it next to the Tower card. The Great Seal's single eye stared up at us, nested in its triangle of divine geometry.
"Providence?" Kalvin's laugh was bitter and ancient. "The marketplace isn't just wicked - it's a temple itself. A temple to forces that..." he broke into coughing, spitting blood that seemed to form tiny pyramids on my coffee table. The rest was inferred- the twin towers that fell on 9/11 were the marketplace, the trade towers, incarate.
After he left, I sat with the news playing silently on my TV. The endless replay of the towers falling, the smoke writing messages in a September sky. The Tower card seemed to vibrate on my coffee table, its medieval imagery overlaying perfectly with modern tragedy.
I needed to understand more. I picked up "Through the Golden Door" again, its pages warm under my fingers:
The party throbbed with that particular Los Angeles energy—expensive drinks, desperate smiles, and enough ambient anxiety to power a small city. Zach stood by the poolside of some producer's Hollywood Hills mansion, still wearing the suit from his Late Night Laughs taping, feeling like an impostor in borrowed clothes.
After the first season, Zach started getting writer's block badly. Having feeling he'd exhausted all of his ideas, he called Halm with his dilemma. Halm invited him over to his mansion in Dune Hills, CA.
"Dear boy," Halm's smile widened, showing perfect teeth, "I understand far more than most." He gestured toward the house. "Come. My private bar has much better scotch than this watered-down stuff they're serving."
The interior of the mansion was quieter, the party's pulse muffled by expensive glass and thicker walls. Halm led him to a study that looked like it had been teleported from a British manor house—all leather chairs and wood paneling, with a wall of books behind a massive desk.
"You know," Halm said, pouring amber liquid into crystal glasses, "I've been watching you since before the network deal. Those early Shrine posts... there was something special there. Something that suggested you could see between the lines of things."
Each word seemed to contain hidden meanings now, like the nine flames and eleven sparks in the Tower card. I read about Halm producing the Amaranth, about Zach's first vision of the Forms. The words shimmered as reality bent around them.
Was this what being God meant? Seeing the patterns, reading the signs, understanding how everything connected to everything else? I looked at the blood drops Kalvin had left behind. In one, I saw the Towers falling. In another, ancient temples burning. In a third, a future I couldn't quite make out.
The Great Seal's eye watched me from the dollar bill as I read deeper into the night, learning about Forms and formulas.
Everything was connected in the spirit realm, and I was beginning to see the connections everywhere.
8
I found Kalvin's book of lyrics under my coffee table the morning after he showed me the Tarot card. It must have fallen from his coat - a cheap address book, its cover stained and warped, held together with yellowed tape. Across the front, in shaky handwriting: "77 Sacred Song Lyrics."
The first pages were surprisingly normal - chord progressions, verses about lost love, the kind of songs any street musician might write. Notes about gigs at coffee houses in the 1970s, phone numbers for booking agents, setlists. A younger Kalvin emerged from these pages - before he became... whatever he was now. He was handsome, but with a cracked expression, like he was in on some cosmic joke. He still had that intonation across his wrinkles.
Then came the change. Pages became crowded with cut-up newspaper clippings, fragmented poetry, mystical diagrams, graphomaniacal slop. A diary entry from 1975 caught my eye:
"Met with The Zayin today. A weird cult of college professors with a strange plan - creating false philosophies, a strategy. They’d fill these kids heads with rotten ideas of a fake religious construct, they say it will separate God's true children from those easily led astray. A bit like the.. Oh what is their name.. That old religion that thought mankind should sin as much as possible because it will bring about the end times faster. Anyways. Is deception in service of divine truth still deception? It’s boxes in boxes all the way down…"
The pages that followed documented his slow transformation. He'd taken to recording what he called "transmissions" - stream of consciousness writings that came to him during LSD trips. The first one, titled "The Moss Shearer," sprawled across three pages in purple ink, with spots of blood- he’d obviously cut himself and used the blood as a kind of signature.:
"In graveyards, rot and dwell, an ancient spell, a spiral's buried secret. Moss pushed into our throats, a bitter, meaningless taste. This world dead and hollow, murmurs in the air, jungle of vomit. Empty women, hot wax children in strange lands, lust demanded, in the tailor's broken hand..."
You could tell he started rto fixate on certain syntactical phrases. He rewrote ‘The Tailor’s Broken Hand’ probably more than 100 times.
The next pages held "The Moon Hares," where his visions began taking cosmic form: "The horse gallops, mountain's pride, Shadows dance upon her open wound, and she dreams beyond and beneath the drunken moon's soft gleam in sour days. The moon hares, in the night's embrace, bite those who've lost the dreamer's grace."
I liked Moon Hares the best. I got it.
His descent into divine madness accelerated. In "Unspeakable Names," reality itself seemed to fragment: "Unspeakable names, saliva's dripping gleam, chrome rabid dogs and a festered wet dream, persistently crying, their remains, as the boy's last pin prick circumcision writhes in red dust..."
Between transmissions, his notes grew more fevered. "The acid shows me higher worlds," he wrote. "Each realm corresponds to an element. Earth, Water, Air, Fire. The Forms reveal themselves in geometric patterns. God is a pattern. I am becoming that pattern."
The writings turned apocalyptic. "Blade of the Cosmos" read like prophecy: "Prison is free. Everything else costs eras. She scrapes the lung and finds tarantula timelines. From Lucretia's nest the seven brothers are martyred..." it kind of read like a Nostradamus quatrain.
In "Good and Evil," he began questioning morality itself: "Approaching storm, her wise old eyes gazed calmly about, Earth's first crane, displaying tail-feathers, preening no doubt, Tragedy's sorrowing sentinel, their enemy to fend, Duality born, virtue to pretend..."
Another word he really got off on was ‘Preen’. You could see he was planning a whole novel called Preen, he basically outlined it, kinda. Preen was about the ultimate sex kitten of the hippie era, a girl named Aria. Aria was created by intel organizations, her dad was an intel agent, and she was trained at a young age to be a sex slave for their secret pedo rings. But Aria started to take revenge, killing em off one by one, then morphing into a free love kind of avenging angel, going on a sex spreee across Northern California, and killing anyone who couldn’t make her cum. It was a wild and interesting story, but obviously a sexual fantasy of his- the girl with no boundaries. That kind of fantasy is what brings a man to a scraggly beard, speaking gibberish, being homeless. Nothing in this world is more potent and maddening than a woman with no boundaries.
The final entries were pure cosmic consciousness. "Viracocha Leaves" spoke of ancient gods: "Be soft please, for no one knows who eats the Viracocha leaves. My miasma sleeps beneath the cold fountain. Fill it with deceptive threads, spider of the silence..."
But it was the last entry that made my blood run cold. Dated yesterday:
"The transfer approaches. All Gods must die to be reborn. The Age turns. A Libra will inherit the divine throne, as written in the patterns. The Forms have shown me my successor. Now to teach him to read the signs..."
I closed the book, my hands shaking. On my coffee table, "Through the Golden Door" pulsed with its own inner light, waiting to show me more layers of truth. Outside my window, a pigeon watched me with eyes that glowed purple.
Was this what happened when you stared too long at the patterns? When you let yourself become a pure vessel for divine consciousness? I thought about Kalvin's offer, about the blood he'd coughed onto my floor, each drop containing a different universe.
I picked up "Through the Golden Door" again. Maybe somewhere in its pages, in the story of Zach Barris and the Forms, I'd find the answer to whether I was ready to become what Kalvin had become.
Whether I was ready to be God.
9
Kalvin's training sessions began at dawn. He'd appear at my door carrying paper bags full of obscure religious texts, reeking of cigarettes and infinite wisdom. The Amaranth would already be coursing through my veins as he taught me about religions I'd never heard of, histories that weren't in any books.
"Everyone's hung up on the ol' Jew," he said one morning, coughing blood into a McDonald's napkin. "But I got insider information. The real truth? They found it in them Dead Sea Scrolls."
Through purple haze, he explained Gnosticism - how the world we know was created by a false god, a Demiurge, who trapped divine sparks in material bodies. The real God was far above, unreachable, unknowable.
"And them aliens that make the Amaranth?" He grinned, showing teeth stained with blood. "They ain't from no other planet. They're his angels - the Demiurge's tech team, coming down to tweak things when disembodied entities need something changed."
Each session went deeper. The Amaranth showed me mandalas that contained entire cosmologies. Kalvin's words became reality itself, constructing new architectures of understanding in my mind.
But on the seventh day, something went wrong.
"Just a little more," Kalvin muttered, drawing an unusually large dose into his mouth. "Need to show you something important..."
His eyes rolled back, bloody spittle forming at the corners of his mouth. "Oh," he whispered. "Oh, I feel it now. I understand. The one they... the source... it's... it's showing me..."
He grabbed my arm with surprising strength. "The missing piece!" His eyes rolled wildly. "They found him in... in the mountains. Empty robes in a cave. Like a cicada shell, just... left behind. And now... now they keep him... keep what he became... and what comes out of him is..."
His fingers traced something in the air - mandalas, or maybe Sanskrit letters. "That's why they look like that. Not alien at all. Just... what's left after... after the flesh learns to..." Another convulsion took him. Purple-tinged spittle ran down his chin. "In my veins now. Showing me. The higher worlds. The way up..."
His body convulsed. Blood and spittle flew from his mouth.
Then came the death rattle - a wet, ugly sound. And with it, the unmistakable smell of shit as his bowels released.
I sat there, watching God soil himself as he died on my IKEA couch. The profound and the profane, all wrapped up in one final moment.
On my coffee table, "Through the Golden Door" waited. Next to it, a half-empty vial of Amaranth caught the morning light. Divine enlightenment extracted from a being that had transcended flesh, or maybe just the secretions of something we couldn't understand. Or maybe they were the same thing.
I looked at Kalvin's body - former vessel of cosmic consciousness, now just meat and soiled pants. In a few hours, rigor mortis would set in. God would become a statistic, another homeless person found dead in an apartment.
But his blood was still wet on my floor, each drop containing universes. And in my veins, the Amaranth pulsed with truths I was only beginning to understand.
The smell of shit and divinity filled my apartment as I sat with what remained of my teacher, wondering if I was ready to take his place. Wondering if anyone could ever really be ready.
10
The funeral home wanted two thousand dollars. I gave them five hundred and Kalvin's shopping cart. They cremated him in a particle board box, no service, no mourners. Just me in a run-down chapel, watching God's body burn.
Fitting, I thought. No one was there to see him become homeless. No one was there to see him die. Why should anyone be here now?
The next weeks felt like a fever dream. I tried to access my supposed divine powers - staring at coffee cups, willing them to move. Hours spent cross-legged on my apartment floor, trying to lift myself even an inch off the ground. Nothing. Just the Amaranth singing purple songs in my bloodstream.
Late at night, I'd write prophetic verses, trying to channel whatever cosmic wisdom Kalvin had accessed:
"Dead eyes see the stars fall down, As bats chase light in fear, The beast spins round and round, While ghosts smile, ever near."
The words came in purple-tinged bursts, each quatrain feeling more urgent than the last:
"Blood flags next to starships lost, The mermaid's head messed up, All peace becomes a ghost, As hands reach for the cup."
Something was trying to speak through me, but what? I wrote until my hands shook:
"Head spinning in the dark, The stars all split and fall, Cold facts leave their mark, While dead signs say it all."
I turned back to "Through The Golden Door," hoping to find guidance in its pages. The story of Zach Barris felt less like fiction now, more like a manual. When Zach saw the Forms, they showed him Elias Scrimm's true nature. When he understood what had to be done, he acted.
Then one night, flipping channels, I saw him. Not a character in a book - the real Elias Scrimm, speaking at a banking conference. The same grey beard, the same arctic eyes. The same blue rose pin on his lapel.
More verses poured out:
"Press blood and shoot the hand, The moon splits out at last, No peace in all the land, As time spins through the past."
That's when I noticed the vans. Black, windowless, always parked just far enough away to seem innocent. Men in aviator sunglasses at my local coffee shop, their earpieces barely concealed. The CIA had found me - or maybe they'd been watching since Kalvin first appeared.
"Lost parts in the shade, The third eye cannot see, All things begin to fade, No pure light left to be."
In frustration, I tore "Through The Golden Door" to shreds and swallowed enough Amaranth to kill a horse. As my consciousness exploded, I saw them - Tibetan monks in infinite regression, their robes flowing in dimensions beyond space. They spoke without words: Scrimm must die before he can trigger World War 3. This was my purpose. My divine mission.
"Keep spinning with the stars, The head falls down at night, Past broken temple bars, No peace in taking flight."
I woke up in a hospital room. Men in black suits stood over me, their faces blank as slate.
"You've been chosen," one said, placing a fresh copy of "Through The Golden Door" on my bedside table. "This isn't optional."
"Maybe just a sign, The beast comes from the deep, Press blood along the line, While cold hands start to weep."
I tried playing insane - babbling about God and aliens, screaming about cosmic conspiracies in public places. But people just nodded sadly and walked past. No salvation in madness. Only the mission remained.
Scrimm's address wasn't hard to find - a mansion deep in Yorkshire's forests. I used my last money for a plane ticket, fabricated press credentials. The Amaranth I packed carefully in contact lens solution bottles.
My final prophecy came as I waited for my flight:
"Even stars fall down, As time spins in the well, The beast takes up its crown, When peace breaks in the hell."
Before approaching his gate, I drained every drop of purple liquid I had left. Reality fractured into sacred geometry. And there was Kalvin, watching me, but different now - his form shifting between human and something else, something that had shed its flesh long ago in a Himalayan cave.
"Sometimes the good guys look like bad guys in the Earth world," he said, his voice echoing across dimensions. "Sometimes murder is just another form of prayer."
The guards barely had time to react. My finger squeezed the trigger as the Forms bloomed around me like nuclear flowers. I saw Scrimm's arctic eyes widen in recognition before his security team opened fire.
The bullets felt like keys unlocking doors in my chest. As I lay bleeding on English soil, I smiled. Somewhere in the mountain databases of the CIA, in the infinite library of what-ifs, in the cosmic record of all possible worlds, I had succeeded. Somewhere, Scrimm was dead and humanity was free.
"I can't wait," I whispered as darkness took me, "to try new worlds."
Above me, a pigeon watched with ancient eyes as another God died ingloriously in the mud.