(Read: ~9 minutes)
Connie hosted a reception in Letitia’s honor at Mulligan’s after the ceremony, which the whole neighborhood seemingly attended, including plenty who skipped the church service. The bar took on a festive atmosphere, and for several hours La Bohème greeted and talked with well-wishers with fond memories of her mom. A colleague from work described how she first met Letitia, who comforted the woman after she broke down crying in the ladies’ room over a breakup. Letitia came over to hug and comfort the complete stranger. One of Letitia’s nurses described how Letitia always asked about her young boy’s baseball games. Despite being in pain at the end of her life, Letitia smiled and listened intently to the nurse’s story about the boy picking out his first catcher’s mitt. Over the course of the day, many more people told stories about Letitia’s kindness, strength and courage.
Clem struggled to process his emotions surrounding her death and started drinking upon arrival at Mulligan’s. By the time La Bohème wanted to leave a few hours later, he was already drunk. People who saw the couple tell how La Bohème cried and pleaded with Clem to come home with her, but he refused. Already distraught from her mother’s funeral, she left with friends while Clem kept drinking at the bar.
According to witnesses, around 10:00 that night, three drunk male college students came into Mulligan’s. The bartender refused to serve the men any alcohol, which sent them into a rage resulting in a slew of profanity and a couple overturned tables. One of the men got into a shoving match with the bar’s only bouncer, who finally got the brawler by the scruff of his neck and out the front door with a shove in his back. His boozy companions trailed behind and talked shit. Clem followed the group outside to the parking lot. The most widely accepted explanation is the men were the group of hecklers at the first open mic night, who Clem never liked.
According to the District Attorney’s report, what happened next isn’t exactly clear due to a lack of video evidence and conflicting eyewitness accounts. Several onlookers say Clem simply ran his mouth, jawing with the three drunk men, never getting physical. The men say Clem stepped to the beefiest one in the group to start a fight. In a flash, Clem lay on the asphalt, crumpled and unconscious after smacking his head. Whether he tripped or was pushed is unknown. The three men ran off without checking his condition.
Paramedics failed to revive Clem on-scene or on the way to the university’s hospital. Over the next several hours, despite the emergency staff’s best efforts to stabilize him, his brain continued to swell and bleed. The attending physician pronounced Jason Clementine dead from blunt force trauma at 3:14 am the morning after Letitia’s funeral, several weeks after his twenty-second birthday.
After the coroner released his body, Clem’s family buried him back in his hometown. Connie and La Bohème drove there together and attended his funeral.
Ultimately, the District Attorney made no determination about the cause of Clem’s fall. One of the students’ wealthy parents covered the legal bills for all three men. Their expensive attorney worked out a sweet deal with the DA who settled on misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct, to which the men eagerly pleaded guilty, served a few weeks community service, and moved on with their lives.
A dark cloud descended over the strip mall and the apartment building across the street and no one moved on in the neighborhood. Connie reeled in shock after the string of tragedies. She felt responsible for Clem’s death. After she returned from his funeral, she closed Mulligan’s, selling off the bar equipment and furniture, then left the space vacant.
La Bohème stopped making any public appearances, including readings. Most of the time, she sat alone in her dark bedroom and cried. La Bohème failed to shake her depression and her friends worried. Rumors about her condition swirled around the neighborhood. In one account, for example, La Bohème lost all access to the memories of her past and future selves. A different rumor circling at the same time claimed she totally lost track of the present while lost in a maze of past and future selves. The funk stretched into months, with no end in sight. Finally, one day, La Bohème called Connie and asked for a favor. Contact Dr. Gaston in Mexico. Tell him what’s happened. Ask him to come back home.
Gaston disappeared from Charlottesville for years after DOPS fired him. In fact, he left the country after an informant caught in a DEA sting told agents about Gaston and his LSD operation. Fortunately, before the feds mustered the resources to go after Gaston, a sympathetic tipster warned him the feds were moving in, giving him enough time to slip away to Mexico. South of the border, Gaston produced enough to supply his own research needs and ship the rest back into the U.S., funding a comfortable lifestyle on the Mexican Riviera.
Ultimately, due to sloppy police work throughout the case, prosecutors dropped charges against the rat who fingered Gaston. The agent in charge was reassigned across the country and no one else ever came looking for Gaston. He decided to stay in Mexico and over the next few years, built a legitimate operation manufacturing generic pharmaceuticals, which he legally exported to the United States. The local chamber of commerce, unaware of his LSD side gig, featured his company in business development presentations to attract additional American investments. In a short video posted on the chamber’s website, Gaston stands in front of his factory while talking about the beneficial tax and regulatory climate in Mexico and the country’s talented workforce. At the end of the clip, he’s given a civic plaque by a man with wavy hair and a thick mustache.
When Connie conveyed the request from La Bohème, Gaston dropped business and returned to Charlottesville despite the risk. He probably owed the young mystic at leat one favor, most people assume she was the one who warned him about the DEA’s informant years before, enabling him to avoid arrest by heading to Mexico. Subsequently, almost no one heard when Gaston returned to town and started working with La Bohème again. The people closest to her, Connie and Madame Rouge, just hoped his presence and influence would help get the young woman back on her feet.
Before long, he and La Bohème began one-on-one sessions, resuming an investigation started years before. Dr. Gaston proposed the same goal, find the sources and causes of the programs in her human biocomputer. She agreed. If a source of meaning existed within her own programming, she resolved to find it. With Dr. Gaston guiding her and monitoring safety, she explored moments across her lifetime in a quest to answer Why am I?
This time, teacher and student approached their experiments with an expanded selection of tools at their disposal to study her past life experiences and psychic abilities. To this day, when speaking in public or writing about his investigations of the human mind, Gaston never talks about LSD directly. Instead, he refers to enhancements, used in conjunction with highly regimented therapies meant to force minds into unexplored territory, and in the case of La Bohème, out of her funk. Gaston stresses the value of any enhancement comes from its use in exploration, not a salve meant to elicit an emotional response, high or low. The focus is how enhancements enable the brain to function, not how the brain feels on them. La Bohème took acid to figure out how to feel better and in this sense, taking LSD required a journey of exploration with the goal of understanding and improving the biocomputer.
In addition to LSD, Gaston introduced a float tank into his research with La Bohème. Connie selected one resembling an egg with a lid hiding a bath-tub sized pool of warm salt water. When closed, the tank turns pitch black and silent inside, free from external distractions, including light and noise. The sounds of your breathing and splashing water fill the void of isolation. From outside the tank, Dr. Gaston could manipulate environmental factors inside it, including sensory stimuli ranging from images and sounds to variations in lighting and temperature. Most of the time, La Bohème preferred to detect, analyze and reprogram aspects of herself and her connections in dark isolation.
Plenty of people use float pods just for the therapeutic feeling of salt water, many floaters enjoy adding ambient lights and relaxing music, perhaps even aroma therapy, inside the pod. The solitude provides calm sanctuary in their day. While most folks don’t drop acid while floating, if they did, the average person needs anywhere from one hundred to four hundred micrograms of LSD in order to hallucinate, an amount easily absorbed by a piece of blotter paper smaller than your pinky fingernail.
Details of these sessions, later dubbed The Dolphin Floats, remained clouded in rumor and speculation for years. Gaston never wrote specifically about DOPS. He talked about the experiences here and there, leading to rumor, hearsay and innuendo. Since reuniting with La Bohème, Dr. Gaston has been prolific writing about his forays into programming the human biocomputer. Popular titles published by one of Connie’s companies include Metaprogramming away Migraines, Reprogramming Positive Body Image, Family Interlock, Community Connections. He tends to hide his juiciest observations behind technical lingo meant to dissuade lazy critics and casual observers. Those who persevere will find plenty of insights gathered in his years exploring his mind and applying various enhancements.
Before each float, Gaston devised a proposition meant to incorporate and test a biocomputer programming theory, then kept his guidance to La Bohème succinct. Before one particular dolphin float, La Bohème administered her dose and Gaston posited a theory by Dr. Lilly about the connection between selfmetaprograms and external reality metaprograms. Quoting from Lilly’s landmark book by memory, he said: New areas of conscious awareness can be developed, beyond the current conscious comprehension of the self. With courage, fortitude, and perseverance the previously experienced boundaries can be crossed into new territories of subjective awareness and experience.
“When we first met, we spoke about connections,” Dr. Gaston explained the rationale for the day’s investigation while she entered the tank. “Seek the edges of your existence and find how far your boundaries extend,” he finished right before she closed the pod’s lid.
Several hours later, the cover popped open and La Bohème raised herself with wrinkled hands into a sitting position.
Gaston smiled at her. “Feeling OK?” he asked while sitting in a chair next to the tank.
La Bohème nodded.
“Ready to talk?”
She took a deep breath, then began to describe her experience in the float tank. “Another life force took my consciousness to the pinnacle of existence.”
“Why?” Gaston asked, beginning to scribble notes on a yellow pad with blue stripes.
“To witness the creations and destructions of the Universe,” La Bohème replied. Gaston tilted his head with a confused look on his face. La Bohème answered his question before he asked.
“Yes, the process of birth and death is continuous at every scale. She began to dry her hair with a thick spa towel, and continued illuminating her most recent experience for Dr. Gaston. “After thinking about your instruction to explore limits, my mind started to disconnect from my body. Leaving my hardware to float inside the pod, my mind hovered above the strip mall, high enough to see the whole city, then the mountains loomed on one side and the ocean on the other. My consciousness kept rising, through the atmosphere, and the vacuum of space enveloped my senses in a bubble of awareness, while moving past the moon, the planets, beyond the Milky Way. Finally, I hovered so high the entire universe dangled below my feet. Then beings appeared next to me.”
“Describe them to me,” Gaston pressed for details.
“Living, thinking units of energy,” she replied, stepping out of the tank and putting on a robe.
“Sounds better than hungry carnivores,” he joked, recalling a prior float involving a menacing gang of chattering soul jackals jumped La Bohème, intending to devour her delectable human qualities, starting with kindness before moving onto empathy. In a turn of events, La Bohème had the pack eating from her palms and rolling over for belly rubs.
“The beings brought me there to share their view of all existence. Yet, even from far away, the Earth shone bright enough to see my body still floating in the pod with you sitting next to it. Then, the universe started to spin below us and entire galaxies swept by our vantage point. There in the middle remained a point of light, Earth. Time there moved backwards, playing my life in reverse. Mom was alive, and Clem, too, moving further back to high school and then when we first met, my first trip to the museum and disturbingly enough, the moment of my conception. The universe kept spinning, reversing my lives, sending us all the way back to our time as primordial ooze, floating in a pool of warm salt water.”
“Déjà vu,” Gaston quipped, pointing at the float tank full of warm salt water. La Bohème laughed and continued, “Eventually, the universe spun itself up so tight it disappeared, the Earth included, and a silent, dead tomb took its place. Then, out of the tomb, the universe spun back into existence while spinning the opposite way. This time, my pieces rejoined with pieces of many recombined beings, over and over again, stretching forward through the universe, across billions of years of time, until finally the present arrived again.”
“You stopped traveling then?” Dr. Gaston asked.
“No, the rest of my life stretched out in front of me until…” she paused.
“Until what?”
“I asked to come back home.”
“Why do you think these energy beings showed you this vision today?” Gaston asked.
“How human perception affects our sensation of time,” she responded. “Here on Earth, circling the Sun, time appears to move in one direction only, forward. Yet, the basic building blocks of the Universe function without any reference to the notion of time. The sequence of events we see, the past, present and future, results from our speed and direction hurtling through the vacuum of space. No matter what we see happen, the event looks different from another point of view.”
“These beings sound godlike, free from time,” Dr. Gaston said. His comment dug at the root of the human condition, a core understanding humans share, we will die. Which begs the question, is La Boheme super human because of her abilities? Gaston probed to find her answer. “Did you feel godlike with the beings?” he asked her.
“No, in their presence, I’ve never felt more human.”
Gaston scribbled notes furiously while La Bohème explained. “Being vastly different from the beings on my trip makes me feel closer to the people around me. My programming is incomplete without people, created with me, formed with a mix of my pieces and theirs, connected and entangled across time, whenever and forever.”
Gaston noted how the concepts of spirit and soul sprung from the roots of human consciousness, pointing to a necessity within us to ask questions about life and death, even if the answers remain elusive. He asked La Bohème how the beings she saw fit in Lilly’s model of existence.
“Did you create the beings in your mind or do you think they really exist,”
“I haven’t found any empirical difference,” La Bohème replied.
After each session, Gaston turned her comments into data and conceptual logs filled with metaprogramming jargon.
Biocomputer explorative prompt: LIMITS
programmatic system responses to contact (start/stop/alert/move)
new/changing (++), stimulated positive region (PR), human spirit
old/stable (-+), transmit to negative motor (NM), god mind
others, unknown (–), “awareness-avoidance”, death
On another occasion, Gaston introduced the day’s agenda by saying, “You once took a trip to the pinnacle of existence exploring how far your limits extended. The emotional difficulty will be enhanced today.”
La Bohème took her dose, slipped a shower cap over her hair and adjusted the straps on her swimsuit. She answered Gaston, climbing into the pod. “I’ve prepared mental treats just in case the coyotes visit again.”
“Feeling in order?” Gaston asked while she settled in.
La Bohème nodded.
Gaston continued. “Dr. Lilly wrote our directive today in his book … The evasions constructed by the biocomputer itself must be found, recognized, and reprogrammed.” He then closed the pod lid, surrounding her with complete darkness.
Then a light turned on in the distance, fluorescent and flickering coldly. She saw doctors leaning over Clem until stepping away, taking off their surgical gloves, masks, caps and scrubs, piece by piece, until their forms disappeared like a finished puzzle.
La Bohème moved forward towards Clem’s lifeless body, splayed on a metal table, tubes down his throat and wired sensors stuck to points all over his naked frame. She reached out and brushed the hair from over his closed eyes, and with the back of her hand, she gently touched his cheek.
“Did I let you die?” she sobbed and tears rolled down her face and onto his lifeless figure.
Suddenly, Clem came up from behind and put his arms around her waist.
“Don’t feel guilty,” he whispered in her ear. She held onto his warm arms and hands as he pressed up against her back.
“If you knew, would you have left with me?” La Bohème asked.
“No,” Clem answered, squeezing tight. “I never listen. Plus, I always figured I’d die young and handsome. All the greatest do,” he replied, while looking over her shoulder at his body. “Sorry the timing sucked.”
Music began to play in the background, the sound of Clem singing on open mic night.
“Remember?” Clem asked, turning her around and looking into her eyes. Clem’s cold body was disappeared on the hospital gurney by orderlies, and the couple stood amongst the crowd in the middle of Mulligan’s.
“You appeared in a vision,” La Bohème said.
“I only wanted to impress you,” Clem charmed.
“You did, more than anyone.”
“This is where I’ll always be, for you, when you come back,” he said. “Heaven is a memory we never want to lose.”
“Let’s both stay now,” La Bohème whispered.
Clem shook his head. “You’re already gone,” he answered and let go of her. He walked backwards towards the bar, looking at her, then turned to greet friendly memories La Bohème didn’t want to leave behind. But Clem’s body faded into a black hole, absorbing the scene around him, people, booze, furniture and finally the stage lights, until La Bohème found herself back in the pod, listening to her own breathing, alone in total darkness.
Arlo Gust 